Fuchsia: Google's modular, capability-based, non-Unix operating system - <AUTHOR> https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/HEAD/book.md <comment><USER2> This seems good and bad. The prospect of a new, modern operating system is exciting. The system call interface is sensible and it follows modern security best practices (eg. deny-by-default.)

One practical disadvantage compared to Linux is that it's not GPL, so if Google uses it to make a mainstream mobile phone operating system, other vendors won't be compelled to release their kernel sources like they are with Android today, which means a Fuchsia equivalent to LineageOS might not support as many devices.

Also, capability-based security is fine as long as there's some way for the owner of the device to acquire all capabilities. If there is not, it's fundamentally anti-user, since it's treating the user as an adversary. Since most Android devices require aftermarket modifications to get root access, I'm not too hopeful about Fuchsia. If these bullet points are anything to go by and DRM and verified boot are first-class features, it's likely that Fuchsia will have built-in mechanisms that prevent the user from copying protected video content, so it's unlikely that the average Fuchsia powered device would grant the user full privileges.

<comment><USER3> > it's fundamentally anti-user

I don't get this sentiment at all. The vast majority of users don't know what root access is, let alone care about it.

<comment><USER4> Its as simple as imagining any scenario where your interests are at odds with the oem, the government, or literally any interested party with money and time.

If Verizon wants to sell you a device with GPS but rent you the feature for 10 bucks a month.

If the government wants the privilege of censorship unobstructed by the inherent technical impossibility of controlling every aspect of user owned devices.

If you want to avoid planned obsolescence and use your device longer than 18 months.

If you are a keirig owner if you want to buy the coffee of your choosing.

If you want to refill your ink cartridges.

Any obnoxious thing that people would trivially bypass if they had full control of their own stuff.

The fact that you an otherwise intelligent individual could ask such a staggeringly ridiculous question is why the free market is a worthless answer to any of the above.

There is a reason standards are developed by knowledgable parties rather than hoping that buyers will navigate the quagmire of complicated topics to demand sanity from merchants.

<comment><USER5> _"...the free market is a worthless answer to any of the above..."_

Nit: it's not a free market if the buyer doesn't understand the transaction.

What we've seen, especially in the latter half of the 20th century and afterwards, is companies using the complexity of the law to create transactions in which the buyer thinks they're getting a good deal, but in fact they're getting screwed over by lawyers. That's not a free market. That's using government complexity as a club to beat senseless consumers when they don't do things the way you expect them to. It's a form of rent-seeking using the regulatory state.

It's important to understand what it is, otherwise you aren't able to propose any reasonable solutions. For example, throwing even more complexity at the problem in an effort to protect consumers would just make matters worse.

I'm in favor of your approach, just wanted to point out that 1) it's incomplete, and 2) without an understanding of root causes we'll still be in the same spot 20 years from now

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Each time this comes across my feed, there's a brief period of excitement - "oh yeah, we're getting a new not-Unix microkernel backed by a major company!" A few moments later I remember that it's being written in C++ and is basically the evolution of Chrome OS and the mood dampens. I'm still be waiting for the next truly innovative OS to show up and poise itself to become ubiquitous. Unfortunately I don't have much faith in Fuschia, especially after poking around in Chromium.

In the spirit of HN though this comment basically guarantees its success, right?

<comment><USER7> What language would satisfy you?

<comment><USER6> Just C. Rust has a lot of problems for serious low level work imo and suffers from a lot of the same classes of problems C++ does, and there aren't many other candidates. A simple microkernel should be fairly straightforward to write in C without any big security concerns, especially in the hands of a multi-billion dollar company. You offload most of the security work to the architecture.

<comment><USER8> > Rust has a lot of problems for serious low level work

Could expand on where it suffers? I've been playing around with Rust in the embedded space (nothing serious at all); I find it to be as elegant in a nonstd situation as it is in standard high level app development.

> and suffers from a lot of the same classes of problems C++ does,

What are those classes of problems? C++ never offered a safe alternative to C, but did offer some eases of use and stronger typing over C.

Rust on the other hand has a _huge_ amount to offer over C. At no point in my Rust work do I ever wish I was working with C, quite the contrary. But I like strongly typed languages, Rust is definitely not for those that dislike types.

<comment><USER6> >Could expand on where it suffers? I've been playing around with Rust in the embedded space (nothing serious at all); I find it to be as elegant in a nonstd situation as it is in standard high level app development.

By "the embedded space" do you mean "devices running Linux with Rust in userspace?" Because that's much higher level than what I'm talking about, and has very different design concerns from those of a general purpose operating system.

My main beef with Rust for low level development is that Rust is _way_ more complicated than it should be. IMO for serious low level programming Rust should have 1/10th the featureset. It also has issues dealing with the weird data structures that tend to come up in low level contexts in my experience. Rust also has the shiny fad status working _against_ it IMO. If, say, 5% of C hackers understand low level programming and/or kernel hacking, then maybe 0.5% of Rust hackers do (if that).

>What are those classes of problems? C++ never offered a safe alternative to C, but did offer some eases of use and stronger typing over C.

It comes back to complexity and typing. There's nothing wrong with strongly typed languages (of which C is a member), but I strongly dislike _object oriented_ languages and paradigms. Especially in low level contexts it's like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Other features C++ brings to the table like operator overloading and templates are antifeatures, doubly so in a kernel hacking context. Many of the same patterns of unnecessary complexity introduced by C++ are also present in Rust.

C is boring, but it's also transparent and straightforward. Ergonomics takes a backseat to simplicity in C, which is a compromise I'd take any day.

<comment><USER8> > By "the embedded space" do you mean "devices running Linux with Rust in > userspace?"

No, I mean TockOS with the Hail dev board: [https://www.tockos.org/blog/2017/introducing- hail/](https://www.tockos.org/blog/2017/introducing-hail/)

> Rust is way more complicated than it should be

People often make this statement, but I don't know exactly what it means. The type system is great for writing finite state machines, which I'm finding to be a nice quality for the toy programs I've written on Tock.

> Rust also has the shiny fad status working against it IMO.

Rust is 2 years into it's stable life. It's young, will it ever exceed the number of lines written than C or C++, almost definitely not, but I wouldn't dismiss it off-hand because people like it, there might be a good reason for that.

> If, say, 5% of C hackers understand low level programming and/or kernel > hacking, then maybe 0.5% of Rust hackers do (if that).

I wonder about this statement. I've noticed quite a large number of people in the community working with Rust in the embedded space. According to the people who responded to the Rust survey this year, [https://blog.rust- lang.org/2017/09/05/Rust-2017-Survey-Resul...](https://blog.rust- lang.org/2017/09/05/Rust-2017-Survey-Results.html), it was nearly 17%.

> C is boring

I've met more undefined behavior that makes me not agree.

> and straightforward.

:/

<comment><USER9> > > Rust is way more complicated than it should be

> People often make this statement, but I don't know exactly what it means.

I can't speak for op, but you're right: people often make this statement. I'll try to explain what _I_ might mean:

C is way more complicated than it should be.

The things we want in a language are tools that allow us to tell the computer what to do, but because people are bad at that, language design is taking us in the direction of telling the computer _what we mean_ so it can tell us whether we're talking gibberish or not.

I don't need a type system. I don't need "warnings" about converting floats to chars: I know what I'm doing and why. I have a good idea what kind of machine code the compiler is producing, and yes: I often objdump to make sure.

If I need a FSM, I'll use erlang. If I need any kind of data processing, I'll probably use K/Q where I can. I can write some fast stuff in C where I need it. If I just need to bosh some stuff together I have perl. Maybe I want to fantasize about a DSL? It'll probably be a lisp or a forth. If I wanted a strong type system for units I want to get from some model nerds, I'll use OCaml.

I don't see the point in Rust when doing these things takes more code and runs slower, and worse:

> Rust is 2 years into it's stable life. It's young.

I got burned by Python when it was" two years into its stable life" sometime around 1.5 and again around 2.2, and so I hesitate even looking at rust unless in a decade it can still run and compile rust programs written today.

This whole "let's rewrite everything in rust" is good practice. I'm watching you guys do it, and I know afterwards you'll try to beat the performance I'm getting in other languages.

Once you're writing programs that are smaller and faster than me, then we'll probably talk.

> C: I've met more undefined behavior that makes me not agree.

I don't write C like most people, so perhaps I don't have trouble with it like most people. My C programs don't leak memory or crash, and I tend to use a belt+braces approach to security that is very difficult in languages without good multiprocess support.

<comment><USER10> > I don't need a type system. I don't need "warnings" about converting floats > to chars: I know what I'm doing and why.

No, you don't.

Regardless of your skills and seniority (I'm guessing pretty junior with this kind of hubris), there will come a time where you will make mistakes that can be caught by a good compiler. You want this compiler at your side, and the more statically typed your language is, the more robust your code will be.

> Once you're writing programs that are smaller and faster than me, then we'll > probably talk

What a strange metric. Assembly language would probably meet these requirements but surely, you would not consider it.

<comment><USER11> > I'm guessing pretty junior with this kind of hubris

If you check their profile their site suggests that have ~15 years of experience.

<comment><USER9> That's just management experience.

I've been programming professionally for almost thirty years at this point.

That's admittedly long enough to get some peculiar ideas about programming, but there's a certain kind of person that thinks "statically typing" is a panacea for programming mistakes -- or even that there's a single solution for anything at all...

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't trust anyone who thinks a solution is a panacea in the software field, but having type annotations demonstrably leads to not just more correct code but also code that can be understood better by its surrounding tooling, thereby enabling automatic refactorings, auto completion, smart browsing, optimizations, etc...

Static typing is not perfect but it's better in all respects than dynamic typing.

<comment><USER9> > I wouldn't trust anyone who thinks a solution is a panacea in the software > field

... unless of course that solution is static typing.

> Static typing is not perfect but it's better in all respects than dynamic > typing.

Except performance, of course: A dynamically-typed language is at the top of the STAC-M3 benchmarks for time series data processing.

Oh and defect count: Qmail has the lowest defect count of any source-available software in the last twenty years and it's written in C.

So I guess static typing is better unless you want correct code that runs quickly, which unfortunately is important to me.

<comment><USER10> Can you point to these Stac-M3 results and maybe at least mention that language? I wasn't able to find it.

Static languages are universally recognized and demonstrated as faster than dynamically typed languages, even if you claim to have found one rare exception. This is not just an opinion, it's scientific and objective fact.

But please share with us that code that runs more quickly on a dynamic language than a static language for you, I am genuinely curious (and equally curious to find out if you just made this up).

<comment><USER9> > Can you point to these Stac-M3 results and maybe at least mention that > language? I wasn't able to find it.

That makes sense, since your background isn't in high performance computing and you can't use google:

[https://stacresearch.com/m3](https://stacresearch.com/m3)

The first item on the list is written in an interpreted language.

> This is not just an opinion, it's scientific and objective fact.

I've just demonstrated two counterexamples, so it's clearly not "scientific and objective fact". Indeed I've never met anyone who even _thought_ Rust would outperform an experienced C programmer in programmer speed, program runtime, _and_ low program size.

<comment><USER12> >The first item on the list is written in an interpreted language.

Could I see the code? Because I'm pretty sure you can't write a fast numeric code without the knowledge of which type you will get on input. That's why fortran still rocks and we do nat have anything beyond fortran, c and c++ in the field of computation.

<comment><USER9> > Because I'm pretty sure you can't write a fast numeric code without the > knowledge of which type you will get on input. That's why fortran still > rocks and we do nat have anything beyond fortran, c and c++ in the field of > computation.

You're not far off.

The first trick is that even though `x` can have any type, `x[4]` and `x[5]` must have the _same_ type. This kind of array whilst uncommon in Python is extremely common in array languages. Array languages tend to have a lot of vector operators (and so therefore are very competitive users of the AVS512 instruction set) which tend to be very fast. Programmers of array languages also tend to avoid things like loops and branches -- indeed you might enjoy [http://nsl.com/](http://nsl.com/) if you want to expand your mind a bit on that point.

The second trick is that an interpreter can be made very small. If you can get your entire program and the interpreter into L1 then you do not stall the CPU while your program fetches various parts of itself from memory. This is a trick languages like Fortran and C and C++ don't miss per-se, a very experienced programmer can usually identify the hotspots and optimise the hotpath for these things, but it is very time consuming to do this when your entire program is the hotpath!

<comment><USER9> That should have been AVX512. I blame autocomplete for the typo and myself for missing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm pretty excited about Fuchsia. Just the fact that, if successful, it will be the first true production-quality general-purpose microkernel-based OS in the mainstream. (QNX and Minix are of course also successful microkernels, but both are pretty niche at the moment; are there any others?)

The design also seems extremely sensible and modern: Everything is namespaced and sandboxed (there's no default "/"), everything is an "object" (sounds similar to Plan 9's file descriptors), capabilities from the ground up, standard RPC between OS components (FIDL, similar to COM or XPC), built-in package management (looks like apps aren't globally installed by unpacking archives, but rather they're run directly from packages, and the process gets the archive file system mounted in its namespace), etc.

While Google seems to be aiming for phones, I wouldn't surprised if this ends up as an option on Google Cloud Platform in a few years' time.

<comment><USER14> > everything is an "object" (sounds similar to Plan 9's file descriptors)

The nice thing about Plan 9's everything-is-a-file setup is that everything has the same file-like interface. Saying everything is an object does nothing to convey any sort of standard interface.

<comment><USER15> Which is good in theory but fails flat when we put graphics and the required performance into it, as Carmack argued about.

[https://marc.info/?a=111558719100068&r=1&w=4](https://marc.info/?a=111558719100068&r=1&w=4)

[http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html](http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html)

<comment><USER16> I can't really find the failures you mention in the links you provided, can you point me to a more definitive source?

Rob Pike replies here[1] that direct framebuffer access and networking are easy to get as new devices, although they need to be made available by the kernel. The "everything is a file" mantra doesn't fail, why would it?

In the second link, Carmack just notices that plan9 is pretty dead, and we all know it is :)

[1] [https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558695515846&w=4](https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558695515846&w=4)

<comment><USER15> It fails because it doesn't match the performance that other approaches are able to achieve.

Everything is a file is how X Windows over network kind of works.

For real graphics performance that can match other systems, xshm and DRM had to be developed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Definitely suggest reading through their docs, it's fascinating. One of the features I'm most excited about is storage management.

From "What is ledger?" [0]:

> Each data store is transparently synchronized across devices of its user > through a [cloud provider]. Any data operations are made offline-first with > no coordination with the cloud. If concurrent modifications result in a data > conflict, the conflict is resolved using an app-configurable merge policy.

I'll note that although they use Firebase as the sync provider, it should be fully possible to host your own if you wish to avoid the cloud.

Keeping stuff in sync can be a huge pain sometimes, especially when you're just dealing with scattered files. I like having this functionality as part of the core system, and getting developers to handle our multi-device world.

The Ledger design docs are worth reading, they're short and approachable. Architecture [1] explains how it's implemented, and Conflict Resolution [2] covers how to handle when things go wrong.

[0] [https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/#what-is- ledger](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/#what-is-ledger)

[1] [https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/+/HEAD/docs/architec...](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/+/HEAD/docs/architecture.md)

[2] [https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/+/HEAD/docs/conflict...](https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/ledger/+/HEAD/docs/conflict_resolution.md)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious to hear about the design principles going into Fuchsia... ie Unix tried out X, but that inturn runs into issues Y and Z down the line.

i.e the "why" behind the design they've chosen.

<comment><USER19> _Unix tried out X_

For a moment there I thought you meant the _X_ Windowing system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If anyone was going to reinvent an OS I'd like google to do it. They're capable and have the cash to do it. I do think have this in conjunction with buying HTC (rumored) could be them trying to iPhone and their lineup by owning both the software (via fuschia) and the hardware.

<comment><USER21> Google can't get Gmail to sort mail properly. Amongst a thousand of small grievances I have.

That may seem quite irrelevant, but if I'd like someone to reinvent the OS, I'd like it to be people that have taken a stance in favour of stable, simple, straightforward software (the people behind Pinboard, Tarsnap; djb... just to name a few).

<comment><USER22> I've never had any issues sorting mail in gmail. I'm curious what specific action causes mis-sorting.

<comment><USER21> Basically, in some views the sorting is by the first message in the thread, while in other views it is by the last message (that last one makes more sense to me).

Even more surprisingly, Inbox (by Google) sorts everything by last message (last time I checked, which was a long time ago).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Their main problem is not the kernel. It's their application APIs. What a clusterfuck that is in Android. And now with tens of billions of LOCs written for it they're stuck with it forever.

<comment><USER24> i mostly agree. as a mere mortal android app programmer, i feel a significant amount of pain when i build apps using the android SDK and the standard set of tools. there's a lot of weirdness, confusion, unexpected behavior, anemic documentation and irregularity. (it's getting better, but not fast.)

i guess Google's Fuchsia push is motivated by some other, internal concerns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The "Web runtime" is under the header "Backwards compatibility".

</comment><comment><USER26> Why everytime a "new OS" comes around it uses the good old fashioned command line with the GNU stack ?

<comment><USER27> Not every new OS does. The ones that do are using the GNU stack, at least initially because they are there and it saves time. Even then down the road some purge GNU from their OS in favor of better utils, more liberal licensed code, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems cool that you can pass "handles" to resources like network connections between processes. That could definitely make some server software easier to architect.

<comment><USER29> Yup, everything old is new again. This was part of one of the first capability operating systems in widespread operation back in the 70s: KeyKOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> why does the wikipedia page have Go, Rust, Python and Kotlin in the languages list Fuchsia is written in?

<comment><USER31> That seems like a stretch.

When you look at the Fuchsia OS repositories in Github and select these by language the overwhelming bulk are C++. Regarding the languages you cite: there are some non-trivial parts in Go; the Fuchsia package manager, for instance. There are several bindings to certain key parts of the OS provided for Rust, but no actual Rust components that I can see. Python is used for some build and packaging utility type stuff. Kotlin is provided with one binding library with four whole commits.

Regarding two others mentioned in wikipedia; Dart is actually more prominent than Go, Python, Rust and Kotlin combined. C has lots of binding libraries, but only a pair of boot loaders appear to be core components, plus a fortune stub.

<comment><USER32> The Fuchsia OS network stack is built in Go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> They renamed the kernel(Magenta) to Zircon.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is it Linux?

</comment><comment><USER35> Why?

<comment><USER36> > Why?

Not having to deal with Linux's refusal of maintaining a stable driver API and ABI for a start. The number one reason that stops Android from getting updates on smartphones is that hardware manufacturers don't want the burden of constantly making small changes to their proprietary drivers to follow new linux kernel changes, something that they don't have to worry about when they make drivers for, say, Windows PCs.

Even Google's own phones, like the Nexus and Pixel, are stuck because of this. They receive updates faster than non-Google phones, but they do not receive more than 2 years of feature updates (with an additional year of security updates courtesy of Google backporting fixes from newer android builds to the older kernel).

Fuchsia is not going to be burdened by Linux kernel dev policies of constantly breaking APIs and their requirement for driver developers to open source their stuff, obey the kernel coding preferences (like when they rejected AMD's driver because of the HAL) to get them mainlined so that they can finally be kept in a maintained state.

<comment><USER37> >Fuchsia is not going to be burdened by Linux kernel dev policies of constantly breaking APIs and their requirement for driver developers to open source their stuff, obey the kernel coding preferences (like when they rejected AMD's driver because of the HAL) to get them mainlined so that they can finally be kept in a maintained state.

And as a result, its drivers will be far lower quality and much less stable, and the system as a whole will pay the complexity cost of working around the awful code that hardware vendors churn out.

<comment><USER38> > And as a result, its drivers will be far lower quality and much less stable

I don't buy it. Windows provides stable driver ABIs and works just fine. A lot of the changes to the Linux driver API are gratuitous, and isolating driver development from the whims of the core won't actually hurt.

If anything, a stable ABI will _help_ , since a smaller, well-defined boundary between the kernel core and drivers allows for things like Vulkan-like validation layers, better debugging, better sandboxing, and even transparent thunking to userspace.

Will some drivers be shitty? Of course. But many drivers won't be, and drivers will be less shitty overall when they can spend more time on being good drivers and less time dealing with GFP_FOOBAR becoming GFP_BARFOO.

Conventional wisdom is that backward binary compatibility i some huge unreasonable burden. This conventional wisdom is wrong; if anything, maintaining a stable ABI imposes some discipline that focuses development effort and that forces you to modularize your system.

<comment><USER39> I've seen a larger amount of instability in Windows than in Linux. Having a stable ABI doesn't help much.

<comment><USER36> I've personally never had any problem stemming from the lower levels of the system ever since Windows 7. Whenever I've seen major bugs on Windows, it was on user space stuff like the profile corruption that breaks the start menu and metro/UAP apps in Windows 10 after the major updates which can be fixed by deleting the user and creating a new one.

Windows also has a more robust architecture where it matters, like the fact that a GPU driver crash doesn't kill the user session (windows can reload that subsystem while keeping the user session running since Vista), whereas it can either kill Xorg or just outright freeze the system on linux. A very useful way to architect the OS, although I've only experienced it on Vista and had more stable GPU drivers from 7 onward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It is not GPL, therefore it is bad.

If their main point was to get rid of GPL in kernel, and low level userspace, their main point is bad.

</comment><comment><USER41> first they created google, then they created gmail. then orkut. then android.

when will google toilet arrive ?

trust them for everything

<comment><USER42> Android will be running on this OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Judging from google's track record with android, chrome, and youtube, I'm not very excited for this project. As much as I would love some innovation in the OS world, I find myself hoping that this system does not catch on.

Google has not proven themselves to be a developer/enthusiast friendly company. It feels like they look down on the rest of the world while locking systems behind restrictive(cumbersome) APIs to protect the unenlightened from themselves. Maybe that design philosophy is okay for services/apps but it has no place at the system level IMO.

Who knows maybe the fuchsia team doesn't share that philosophy, but I doubt it.</comment>


Show HN: Flipt – an open-source feature flag solution - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/markphelps/flipt <comment><USER2> I'm amazed by how much you've achieved with this project! I thought it was 2 months worth of work until I looked at your blog, but even to have managed this in spare time over a couple of years is amazing.

The only thing I can think to suggest by way of improvement is some fairly prominent examples of the kinds of segmentation you can do with Flipt.

Do you see this being used for A/B testing as part of a pro version?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Yeah I rebased my git commits to clean things up and get rid of some silly mistakes.. although now I kind of wish I hadn't so the commit history told the full story.

I agree I need some better examples/documentation on how to do A/B/n segmentation. Will work on that ASAP.

Thanks again for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow! I was just working on something very similar, (go+riotjs) after frustration with LaunchDarkly. Encourage you to offer paid SaaS

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I have heard the feedback from others as well. I think that will be the next thing I do with Flipt, as well as support more traditional RDBMS'.

May I ask what specifically you found frustration with LaunchDarkly?

<comment><USER3> The one I was working on used PG for storage, redis for caching.

I paid for some tier, didn't like off-prem, v1 didn't have vairant (was bool only), upgrade to v2 was bumpy, their php-client did some odd stuff (background shell_exec) the support didn't even know about.

CEO was nice enough, refunded some of my money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks nice, very easy to setup/run and the documentation is clean and detailed. Tweek ([https://git.io/tweek](https://git.io/tweek)), our own open source feature manager shares many of the concepts and architecture.

</comment><comment><USER5> The solution seems very polished! Nice work!

\-- offtopic: I'm working on something similar as well, but Toggles/Feature flags is "one of the parts" of the solution ( it's more a full blown development tool for handling settings, centralized services (eg. e-mail) and much more -> Eg. a support tool with forms which can be prepared by devs)

It's currently only dotnet ( and MVC) based though, but it's working.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the service. I've seen that you are going to ofer paid version. How are you going to keep two repositories (open source and pro) in sync?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a very good question and something I have been struggling with. Do you have any ideas?

I know that it has been done (ex: Sidekiq has OSS, Pro and Enterprise versions).

My thought was to maintain a private fork for the pro version and continuously merge in changes from the OSS version, as well as add back any features into the OSS version that could be beneficial to everyone from the pro version.

But this does sound messy.. would love to know how others have done this in the past.

<comment><USER7> Not sure how well that'd work in your situation, but maybe you could license the pro parts with one of the licensezero ( [https://licensezero.com](https://licensezero.com) ) licenses. That would disallow use of your software (or the parts of it you choose) with either closed source software, or in a commercial setting (depending on the license you pick).

It would mean more work spelling all that out to your users, but you would make up for it by not having to hide/separate code as much. You'd have to be comfortable with 'showing all your code though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting.. I've never heard of licensezero. Will check it out this weekend. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We also recently open sourced our internal feature flag tool Bullet Train: [https://github.com/SolidStateGroup/bullet-train- api](https://github.com/SolidStateGroup/bullet-train-api)

Would welcome any feedback.

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks awesome. Thank you, great work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


How healthy is the internet? - <AUTHOR> https://internethealthreport.org/2019/ <comment><USER2> A opinionated, non-technological, political, negative and very social justice- ish compilation of:

\- Is it safe? The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.

\- How open is it? The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate. But openness is not guaranteed – it's always under attack.

\- Who is welcome? It's not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us.

\- Who can succeed? Getting online isn't enough on its own. Everyone needs skills to read, write and participate in the digital world.

\- Who controls it? A few large players dominate much of the online world, but the internet is healthier when it is controlled by many.

<comment><USER3> Also hypocritical. Mozilla should take responsibility for its part in centralization of the online world, being one of those players with control and pushing even more of centralization into its browser.

<comment><USER4> Could you elaborate on what you mean? Firefox has become ~5% browser i don't understand what "pushing even more centralisation on Firefox" means. It looks to me that currently more firefox users = decentralisation more than centralisation. Do you mean the past when it was major browser?

<comment><USER5> It's really weird. Firefox has such a tiny marketshare now where WebKit based browsers dictate what happens.

Also whenever there's any positive news about the browser people always like to bring up pocket, that ARG misstep or how their CEO is a victim (Use brave!!!)

<comment><USER6> Is it? Pretty much every Android device has a WebKit (Chrome) based browser installed by default.

<comment><USER7> Chrome is Blink, not WebKit. They are historically connected, but forked due to major differences in vision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's some absurd irony here in that the report about the health of the Internet is an omnishambles of the absolute worst practices on the modern internet.

I could not grok the web version. I got headers and those took me to tiles and those took me to blog posts? I was lost. In the end, I downloaded the PDF to read this.

And that's a lie. To start with I had to tell NoScript to allow their third party domain scripts because the content did not work without javascript.

They make some interesting points, but the standard scientific paper format _vastly_ outperforms Web 4.0 routers and widgets for conveying it.

<comment><USER9> The real being reported is complex and subjective. The presentation isn't up to the task. That said, the "README" helps at least to frame the project:

[https://internethealthreport.org/2019/about/](https://internethealthreport.org/2019/about/)

And OMFG the 2018 report. Ow my balls!

[https://internethealthreport.org/2018/](https://internethealthreport.org/2018/)

2017 is the best of the bunch: [https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/](https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it ironic to be holding an absolutist free speech view on a website that automatically deletes opinions the community doesn't like.

</comment><comment><USER11> Are we ready for something like the Doomsday Clock [0]?

Something as simple as [https://status.dropbox.com/](https://status.dropbox.com/), but for all of the Internet.

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

<comment> GuB-42 The Doomsday Clock is a joke now. It made sense during the cold war when the threat was clearly identified: a nuclear war between the USA and USSR. It is now a game of finding new unrelated threats to make sure the clock doesn't tick backwards.

We could make the same useless "clock" for the internet, advancing it every time a website is blocked or a new backdoor is discovered. Making sure new threat categories are added when things get better. "Oh, it looks like https is becoming the norm, that's good, make sure to add fake news in the mix to make it look like things are getting worse..."

By comparison, the Dropbox status page provides useful technical information.

A similar page for all of the internet would include things like the states of root DNS servers, tier 1 networks, etc... That could be useful.

<comment><USER12> I think it would be possible to make a clock that does not rely on judgments as inputs (although has judgements as rules)

You mention a couple

\- Status of root DNSServers

But we could come up with more (I suspect around 50 metrics would be comprehensive)

\- Ratio of servers reachable by http vs https \- Ratio of servers hosted in countries with mature legal frameworks (needs work) \- Ratio of devices able to reach "representative servers" (ie can your device in beijing reach bbc news and WeChat and Russian newspaper)

\- Ratio of devices in areas with "24 hour" electricity supply

\- ratio of servers that do not have basic security holes plugged

\- ratio of devices that have uptodate security patches

\- current volume of DDOS attacks

\- Number of successful ransomware attacks per day

\- number of networks only reachable through N pipes (ie resilience to network failure)

I would be interested in any thoughts / extras / improvements

<comment><USER13> "Ratio of servers hosted in countries with mature legal frameworks (needs work)" is one that's pretty hard to measure and has huge capacity to misinform.

The US, UK, Russia, 5 Eyes countries, China, the EU; everyone has a stance on whether they're safe or not.

I think it better to just measure "location diversity", and give a heatmap of server locations (indicating replication and mirrors) so the user can decide for themselves.

<comment><USER14> > The US, UK, Russia, 5 Eyes countries, China, the EU; everyone has a stance > on whether they're safe or not.

It might just be me, but I think it's reasonably clear that some of these places have mature legal frameworks where the rule of law exists (US, UK, EU) and some generally do not (Russia, China, Venezuela). But perhaps I'm mistaken and simply do not understand what a mature legal system is.

<comment><USER15> >mature legal frameworks where the rule of law exists (US-

whaaaaaa

How is 'recording everything, decrypting everything, targeting persons of interest without warrant or record, extensive networks of informants and agents in all branches of politics, art, and business while bombing people based on their cell phone ping location globally without oversight or any attempt at legal justification'

The United States is 0 privacy, 0 honesty about the actual laws in place, 'fusion centers' completely removing any sane separation of national and regional power or separation of police from military, and 50 TLA's arguing over how best to harass political activists or run criminal gangs themselves. And an entire other spy agency of a different country on the other side of the world allowed to do basically whatever they want in our borders and harvest every ounce of the data of our lives.

That's not a 'mature framework', that is reverting 'civilization' to before the magna carta, much less the geneva conventions.

And since in no case where it was revealed how the government is breaking its own laws and using technology to make an illegal monstrosity out of the internet has the government ever meaningfully been held to account of actually changed, behold what rules you.

Stop pretending something is worth your trust just because there are flags and rotundas and people in suits on the news 24 hours a day and a cultish military junta hasn't completely taken completely over yet, visibly. edit: ...in the united states.

<comment><USER14> I knew this kind of objection was coming. It was very predictable. Your objection to the massive infringement of _basic human rights_ is morally and ethically completely and absolutely correct in every single possible way.

It's also, for the moment and strictly for the purposes of this particular conversation at hand, irrelevant.

Though I understand if some might choose to believe otherwise for political reasons. The discussion at hand is about overarching legal systems, their general reliability, and how much bearing laws have on what actually happens.

Similarly, one could probably point at some by-the-book handling of a parking ticket in China as proof that it is a nation with rule of law. It would be similarly possessed of opportunity to come into greater alignment with relevance.

<comment><USER15> I knew someone was going to say I was off topic, what a coincicence.

If human rights are not relevant to the article and thread, then the article and thread are for robots and someone should clearly post that.

If the article does not discuss rights, which to me appear to have completely disappeared and any semblence of them we only have is due to a lot of this generation of TLA officeres not being total monsters

Now we just have to hope Kushner doesn't use his global admin rights to do anything mean. /s

That is the state of the internet, this silent well-born manchild who has chummed with madmen since he was a child has clearance and hooks into everything the nsa scoops up, which is nearly the entire internet, and the entire pollyanna internet.

Is that in TFA?

Then why are they writing about 1995?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> By health of the Internet, the numbers that I look for is how "stressed" is it when it comes to resource management. Like bandwidth or dns.

And how much "free" is it, still?

<comment><USER17> free as in beer, free as in freedom (libre), free as in DRM free, free as in freemium... ?

<comment><USER16> Free as in speech. What are permitted and what not. How much of the net is banned or blocked in which regions of the world.

DRM isn't a problem as long as non-DRM isn't forcefully eliminated by it.

<comment><USER18> DRM and non-DRM are effectively polar opposites of each other.

DRM is a problem for free speech.

<comment><USER19> DRM is more about free listening than free speech.

The existence of DRM does not limit your speech. It does limit what speech you can consume but the author (presumably) wants to be limited in their speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm amazed that it's 2019, and we still haven't figured out a good way to share interesting content.

The portals worked for a while, then came google and Facebook, and now we have nothing. I mean, if HN stopped how would you find anything interesting on the internet?

<comment><USER21> Another thing that has failed: journalists. They get sent press releases and do the filtering. Something like 80% of 'news' is PR. But they don't want you leaving their news website. That would be bad for revenue, allegedly.

Imagine a 'newsworthy' story about a budgerigar that can dance to jazz music. The source could be on a website that has all kinds of fascinating stuff about budgerigars. But this you would never know, perhaps you might get a link to the original tweet but that would be it, no link to the website that gave rise to the one thing that went 'viral'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As unclear and uncommunicative as the 2019 report is, it's at least not the 2018 version: [https://internethealthreport.org/2018/](https://internethealthreport.org/2018/)

I've sugested to Mozilla that unclear labels, vague stock photos, and acres of whitespace are a poor choice of media for conveying a complex, and yes, truly important, story.

But at least it's not animated floating balls.

The page wants more clear relevant text.

The first iteration remains the best to date:

[https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/](https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't see how much of the Internet is fake?

If over 60 percent and increasing that's very detrimental to the Internet as we know it today.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wake me up when it's dead and we can start working on what comes next.

</comment><comment><USER24> I fundamentally disagree with Mozillas notion of "openness". The internet always was open to LGBTQI+ people. The internet does not discriminate. Get an account named X. Done.

Problems only arise when professional activists try to change existing communities. E.g. the new linux kernel code of conduct and it's, let's say "questionable", author.

<comment><USER25> > The internet does not discriminate. Get an account named X.

We don't discriminate against you, but you have to hide every aspect of who you are otherwise we're going to threaten to rape you to death.

<comment><USER26> Non-discrimination and acceptance isn't the same thing. You can't force people to like you, and you shouldn't.

<comment><USER27> Do you really believe explicit, credible death and/or rape threats for being a woman with opinions on Marvel movies or games or being LGBQ are examples of a non-discriminatory environment?

<comment><USER28> A _true_ non-discriminatory environment is also an environment of no mercy. _All_ opinions are permitted, even ones you will find incredibly vile and threatening.

So think carefully when you ask for this kind of environment. I think what some people are actually asking for when they say "non-discriminatory" is an environment where people who do not accept minority members or opinions are not welcomed.

<comment><USER27> Ejecting people for making rape and death threats to other members of the community is not the same as ejecting members of the community for being PoC, LGBTQ, Nazis or Republicans.

These are not the same thing.

<comment><USER29> Yeah but it is a "anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human" thing. It says nothing of worthiness and everything about possibilities because worthiness is ultimately a matter of opinion.

It is like asking for bullets which only hurt guilty people whom it would be necessary to shoot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The internet is not healthy.

edit: _____self censoring myself even I 'm afraid to say that here_ __ __ __

someone is trying to erase the entire history of the events of Tianmnen Square involving Tank Man.

The United States, defending freedom and multicultuarlism supposedly, is recording basically all internet traffic and sharing it with the most racist country in the world while they create hordes of refugees due to their never- allowed-to-be-spoken plans for aggressive expansion in violation of the very United Nations that created them.

Processors will be made in this country and shipped all over the world. Routers, microwaves, all phones, plagued with endemic backdoors. Auditing capacity is overwhelmed and results seldom in any changes, see iratemonk seagate events.

Social media has basically given TPTB the easy capability to harass and interfere with all of the next generation of anything, while placing their agents in 'key positions' all over the place.

It's a bad situation, the real internet is not the public one anymore. Power exists, and the physical structure of power is, as always, hard at work trying to regulate the ideological structures.

Make us forget Tiananmen, and who knows what else we'll forget.

Wasn't there something that happened in Las Vegas a few monthyears ago? hmmmmmmmmm

The internet is being used, successfully, to attack the human mind on a global scale and the people with the most money are doing it while a bunch of really bright people think they are just solving math problems and making good money.

The situation is bad, I don't need algorighms and network maps to tell me that. The internet has lost China and Russia, and is running away from The United States of America.

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp- content/uploads/sit...](https://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp- content/uploads/sites/7/2019/03/Liz-Fong-Jones--1600x1080.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER31> I yearn for a day when Mozilla approached tractable problems with practical solutions, like improving their web browser, or integrating new fancy technology like RSS, or making people feel welcome the old fashioned way on the bug tracker and the IRC.

It's no wonder that Brendan Eich's new browser is Chromium based. ;- )</comment>


Twitter starts testing 'Fleets,' its version of Stories - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/04/twitter-starts-testing-its-own-version-of-stories-called-fleets-which-disappear-after-24-hours/ <comment><USER2> This will be popular, and might even replace regular usage, as Stories have in Instagram. It'll enable people to be more authentic, transparent, and casual. It will help counter Twitter getting increasingly LinkedIn-like.

I made an app called Blink that did exactly this a few years ago: [https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/blink](https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/blink). Build it and they will come, not :)

<comment><USER3> I honestly couldn't disagree more with this assessment of "stories".

Stories are great for the platform. They drive user engagement, and, hence, advertising.

As far as I can tell, they're terrible for the users. You have to constantly be active to not miss something, you can't just check back in after a few days. For some reason, comments are private only, which is almost never what I want -- as a poster, as a commenter, or as an observer. Contrast that with (say) a "normal" IG/FB post of a picture from the beach, where comments are public and a community of people and comment on it and reply to each other in a social way. Stories are basically broadcast-only. They're also MUCH more time-consuming to create.

I've only done a few stories, always when traveling solo, so I have time to kill and it was useful to learn something new the first time. The only positive thing I can say about them is that, because they're ephemeral, I feel less bad about posting some stupid snapshot of something unimportant/trivial.

That this is coming to Twitter is even more concerning, because it's already the most shouty, least-community driven social network, with the largest multiplier on saying trolling/annoying/controversial/stupid things in the pursuit of clicks and likes and retweets.

<comment><USER4> I find that Instagram stories, being ephemeral (they disappear after 24 hours) have done a lot do reduce the impact of "instagram perfection". You get to see a bit more of people's real, everyday lives.

You're right that you miss things if you don't check it at the right time, but that's ok, you don't have to see everything.

<comment><USER5> I've stopped using Instagram to post pictures; I only use stories. I post a lot of trash/ephemera/jokes on stories. It's much more fun that having to figure out what to post. It's not permanent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, will be interesting how they are received and utilised. Whilst they don't allow reshares, it is common for people to screenshot a tweet and share that screenshot - this won't prevent that and wonder how Twitter will police that.

Also wonder if they will allow customisable expiration (up to a point), say 36 hours etc. Or allow shorter duration posts, say an hour for spot promotions - which would be a great use for this.

<comment><USER7> You cannot prevent that and it cannot be policed.

<comment><USER6> I concur about preventing, though T&C's could enable policing. Also a nice (c) notice would enable self-policing upon such infractions to some extent.

But certainly it will not be a fluid process currently. Let's see if they update T&C's to accommodate that aspect.

<comment><USER8> Copyrighting tweets? I love the idea as a demonstration of the absurd extent of copyright, but I'd expect virtually no tweets to be considered copyrightable.

<comment><USER9> This idea has been looked at - [https://copyrightalliance.org/ca_faq_post/tweet-protected- co...](https://copyrightalliance.org/ca_faq_post/tweet-protected-copyright/) Seems that if you posted an original joke it should be copyrightable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder why social media in general enforces everything to be ephemeral. Sure, Stories are specific about it, but even regular old posts in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are very hard to track and consume. They are there, you can search if you are looking for something specific, a Facebook resurface some old memory for you when an algorithm decides it should. But they are not made to be a memory repository for users. Why is that?

I wonder this because I am building a social-network-y site ([https://www.quidsentio.com](https://www.quidsentio.com)) that's pretty much memory-focused, I even position it as a journal. I wonder if I am missing some obvious connection between hiding users memories and being a successful social network site.

<comment><USER11> I've thought a lot about this recently. A large portion of people _hate_ social artifacts.

They don't want to have their picture taken. They don't want to be recorded on audio or video. They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record. They want comfort and low stakes.

A performance can be evaluated in the moment. An artifact (a recording of that performance) can be scrutinized forever, even by people who weren't actually there. It's why I love public speaking but I hate being on video.

Our whole society is increasingly becoming Mirandized, where "anything you say can _and will_ be used against you in the court of [public opinion]." Ephemerality mitigates that, providing the expression and connection of social media without the stakes.

<comment><USER12> > They don't want their daily utterances to be a matter of record.

Experience being stalked and harassed online for years and you'll hate it as well. Imagine in your 30s having your job threatened because you made a dumb post when you were a teenager, and no one will ever let it go or accept that people change.

Many people are uninteresting, and never have this experience. Celebrities have large support networks and agents. For anyone caught between the two extremes, this can really break people who have no one to turn to and no support when they end up targeted.

> Ephemerality mitigates that, providing the expression and connection of > social media without the stakes.

It's also a lie and setting people up for disaster. Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even just taking screenshots. Nothing you put online is ephemeral, unless it's too uninteresting to be worth saving. Stalkers will write bots to scrape your Twitter stories, your Discord deleted messages and on and on, and then peruse the results at their leisure for juicy content to twist and distort.

Google currently OCRs text in screenshots posted to stalking websites to tie back to you in search results. And those websites rank like you wouldn't believe. Once Google gets their hands on it, forget it. You'll never outlive it.

<comment><USER13> > Nothing will stop stalkers from crawling stories with archive.is or even > just taking screenshots.

That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing.

You're right in that anything CAN be saved if its online and someone is motivated enough, but the added resistance ephemerality adds protects most people. You're talking a very narrow use case, and in that case it should be obvious your internet world is public realm. All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking.

For the vast majority of people and the vast majority of their posts, ephemeral content actually does disappear. Especially on mobile platforms that aren't really archived like the web is. Ephemerality doesn't save you from crossing lines (plenty of teens have gotten in trouble over Snapchat messages in various forms), but the generally mundane harmless stuff goes away and can never be later used to misconstrue or define who you are.

<comment><USER12> > That assumes many things, the first being that someone thinks you're > important enough to archive, and that you were important enough to archive > long ago. This is exceedingly rare for that middle ground you're discussing.

What is to stop someone from writing a crawler that goes around and captures Twitter stories for every user into a permanent archive that they make available online in a few years or sell to stalkers? That would be an extremely valuable pool of content.

Just think of how much money you could make if you had 2020 dirt on a major political candidate in 2040. Maybe you know their secret fetish, their racist tirade, their thoughts on a controverisal subject, something the media would devour.

> All of these points you're making rely on extreme stalking already > happening. Not only stalking, but archiving of that stalking.

It's a lot more common than you think, and nowadays they have Cloudflare to protect them so they're incredibly resilient. I was blinded to it as well.

The problem with this line of thinking is that you're only an uninteresting target until suddenly you're not. It just takes one crazy person coming across you to radically change your life. That new app or service you developed may take off overnight before you know it. Or it may happen so slowly that you don't realize that the rules have changed _for you_ and you need to start being much more discreet.

The way these sites work is they build up dossiers _before_ they go public with them. You'll think you are not being targeted for months, and then all of a sudden you get it all dumped on the web at once.

These kinds of ephemerality promises are dangerous, even if you are lucky enough to never be targeted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems like all the major social media sites are slowly turning into the same homogenous app.

<comment><USER15> > It seems like all the major social media sites are slowly turning into the > same homogenous app.

While it's absolutely terrible, it kinda makes sense in the metric-driven world we live in right now.

What had me completely surprised was when this was added to _fucking YouTube_. I do _not_ want stories in my Youtube feed. God damnit!

It's a video-streaming site, not a social media platform. And please don't try to make it into a social media platform either!

<comment><USER16> It _was_ more of a social media platform. Remember video replies?

Then it turned into a video-streaming website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Unannounced, somebody somewhere is building a caching service to preserve these "fleets" to sell them to whom ever is interested

</comment><comment><USER18> what I would to see from twitter is something for "blog" tweets - a "single" tweet spread across 3-30 individual tweets. the structure of individual tweets makes them terribly hard to read, but I feel like I've seen enough of them to say it's something in their interest to support

<comment><USER19> Even series-tweets are more information dense than your average blog post. I think that's their main appeal really. Putting a blogging function on twitter which then ends up as long posts appearing between regular tweets might make it much less possible to quickly 'parse' Twitter for a dopamine hit.

I'm sure there are ways to counter my concern, but honestly why do it of things work well for them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Those 'guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers' redirects on TechCrunch articles when you have an ad-blocker really make me go ballistic.

Is this only for EU users? I can't believe that this would be happening for long if it wasn't... [https://i.imgur.com/uQp1yVD.png](https://i.imgur.com/uQp1yVD.png)

<comment><USER21> There are several pages that does this, another one is huffington post. I just don't visit them as I assume what they're doing is hostile to the users.

I'm in the EEA (almost EU) for reference. GDPR is valid here as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder how much research went into the name "Fleets". To a lot of people, the first thing that comes to mind after "Fleets" is "enema" as in "Fleets enema".

I am not sure Twitter wants to evoke that image.

Then again, maybe this is Twitter acknowledging the toxic nature of Tweets and why they should be flushed out of the system quickly.

<comment><USER23> I've studied in the US, binged every Sorkin series, scored a 700 on the verbal SAT, and work almost exclusively in an English-language environment. And yet I've never heard of Fleets enema". It's strange what cultural blind spots remain.

That being said, "Fleets" strikes my non-native ears as an above-average naming choice with its double entendre of "Group of something" as well as "fleeting".

(It's also an ongoing pet peeve of mine how risk-averse people are in regards to naming. "CockroachDB" or "Plan B" (the morning-after pill) strike me as hilarious and instant classics of the genre, both evoking a rich set of emotions that fit pretty well with their respective products. I guess it's Keynesian-Beauty-Contest sort of fallacy, where everyone believes all the others are into Playboy models, even though they themselves prefer the Girl- next-door type)

<comment><USER24> Native (US) English speaker here. Semi-old, too. Never heard of a "fleets enema".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I always see Stories as an engagement ploy. Come back every day... or else FOMO.

<comment><USER26> For companies - sure but for people it's great. People don't usually put important stuff there and it's just fun to catch up with what they are up to.

That was initial idea behind microblogging and twitter but people started to write actual blogs there and started having long discussion on a platform that is fundamentally incompatible with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really don't get it. Twitter has five thousand full-time employees. I have to assume at least 20% of them are in product development in some capacity. What exactly are these people doing all day? I can't point to a single notable product innovation they've had in years. And they continue to ignore the drumbeat of user asking for an edit button, and are completely unable to come up with any kind of reasonable solution to the abuse or bot problems.

I don't know Kayvon personally, but what exactly is wrong with Twitter that it's so bad and slow at product development? This should be #5000 on their list of things to do.

<comment><USER28> They've done quite a bit on the product front, although it's fair to question the utility to average users:

\- Increased tweet length to 280 chars

\- Tweet threads

\- GIF integration

\- Multiple UI revisions of desktop and mobile apps

There's also been a fair amount of work on ads and security, although these changes will be less apparent to most users.

<comment><USER29> But is any of this really stuff that _should_ take 1000 engineers to build? Tweet length? GIFs?

I don't question that those engineers are working hard. I'm sure they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I don't question that there aren't some genuinely hard, complicated problems to solve at Twitter, particularly around scaling and security. But from a structural perspective, I do still kind of wonder if companies the size of Twitter and Facebook aren't just an extended, very public example of Brooks's Law.

Anecdotally, I've been in large teams and small teams and I work equally hard in both environments. But even with the same amount of work, somehow, more stuff gets done and more products get shipped from the smaller teams.

<comment><USER30> There's a ton of infrastructure to build and maintain at Twitter. Yesterday's solutions don't scale and need replacing. Yesterday's "just get it done, we'll worry about cost (or quality, or operational burden) later" have happened and it's time to fix. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This post should give you an idea of scale at Twitter. When I worked there, I spent about 2 months focused just on creating software to help automate the Clos migration mentioned. And there are just tons of things like this that are constantly being worked on.

[https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the- infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Did snapchat not patent stories? It seems like they should be suing the pants off everyone!

<comment><USER11> I know you meant the technical feature, but I couldn't help but laugh at the idea of patenting _stories_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I started using Instagram stories quite heavily a couple weeks ago. For reference, I have ~32k followers on Twitter and ~700 on Instagram.

Way more people have come up to me in real life and talked about a story of mine in the last month than people have ever come up to me to talk about a tweet.

YMMV of course but I am bullish on the format and cannot wait for Fleets!

<comment><USER33> I've noticed something similar between Instagram and Facebook. However, I get much more engagement on Instagram stories (300 followers) than Facebook stories (1.8k followers). Like, consistency 10x more views and engagement. So there's more to it than just the format, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> That's a great name for them.

<comment><USER35> 'Farts' seems more appropriate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why wouldnt they just name it flocks

<comment> kyle-rb Fleet == fleeting

<comment><USER37> fleet === fleeting tweet

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I just hope this voyeuristic culture dies so I don't get stupid suggestions from Twitter

</comment><comment><USER39> tl;dr: Twitter doesn't give a flying f..k about their users.

Users: Twitter, ban the Nazis please, and let us edit tweets.

Twitter: Here, we take the stars and replace them with hearts.

Users: Twitter, please ban the Nazis, and let us edit tweets.

Twitter: Here's a totally messed up "redesign" filled with bugs that is mandatory except if you pretend to be an older browser (hint: extension GoodTwitter does that).

Users: Seriously, just please ban the Nazis and give us an edit option

Twitter: Hey, we're introducing AI to penalize sex workers, and giving the Nazis a tool to report tweets that has no real recourse for you, and if you appeal a ban you can't do anything, not even DM, for _weeks_ until we may or may not look at the "offending" tweet because we are understaffed and our moderation slaves only speak your language roughly and don't get cultural context!

Usrrs: ... WTF man

Twitter: Hey, we're rolling out a feature we saw on Snapchat first and then was copied by Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram and it mostly utterly sucks there!

Seriously, how utterly detached is their product development team from the user base? And when are they finally going to offer a real API again?

</comment><comment><USER40> Why Techcrunch can get away with such obvious GDPR violation. First, by default I am opt-in to being tracked, secondly I don't even have a way to opt- out. I can only say ok or "manage" my permissions, and managing throws me inside endless loop of screens that does not have opt-out button anyway...

</comment><comment><USER41> Fleets? Not Flocks?

</comment><comment><USER42> Twit large.

</comment><comment><USER43> This sounds almost like they're trying to replicate "Stories" from other social networks.

\- Shows up at the top of one's feed, more prominent.

\- Expires after a certain time.

<comment><USER44> Well that is the first line of the article... But yes, I wonder how it will fit into the Twitter ecosystem. The two most successful implementations of this are Snapchat and Instagram: Snapchat was only a communication platform before stories, and Instagram profiles tend to be very deliberate and curated. Neither of these really apply to Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I think the modern stock market has a structural problem with unrealistic pursuit of growth, which essentially forces public organizations into scope creep, intimately leading to the decline of product quality across the board as successful products make unnecessary changes.

</comment><comment><USER46> Well, since Snapchat is a glorified nude-sharing app, it makes sense for the use case.

<comment><USER47> Just because it is used for that does not by any stretch mean that it is used _primarily_ for that.

<comment><USER46> Speak for yourself. :P

<comment><USER48> Physician, heal thyself?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wonder how this is going to change the tweet prediction markets. I've spent a significant amount of time on my tweet count models and have finally reached the point of 5% weekly returns and it would be a real shame if this fleets thing becomes popular among certain people (rdt, aoc, etc)! You spend months making a model and then when it finally starts generating real stable cash flows, you get sent back to square one. Such is the nature of zero-sum games though..

</comment><comment><USER50> This seems very likely to be an emergency reaction to the activist investors that have just started making noises[1]. Over the last 5 years facebook is up 150% in value and twitter is down 22% and that's a pretty consistent trend. Dorsey isn't even full time at Twitter, their development track record has been trash and Dorsey's planning on going to Africa for 3 months. This looks very much like a defensive move, but given how lame this feature is I think this is going to be way too little too late. The time to release this feature was July 9th 2011 - the day after Snapchat launched. Not a decade later.

[1][https://www.marketwatch.com/story/twitters-jack-dorsey- faces...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/twitters-jack-dorsey-faces- another-crisis-this-time-from-an-activist-investor-2020-03-02)</comment>


Secure the Network Part #1 – OpenVPN and DNSCrypt - <AUTHOR> https://snehesh.me/blog/secure-the-network-part-1-openvpn-and-dnscrypt <comment><USER2> When I needed a vpn, I chose to use tinc VPN. Openvpn was too complicated for me.</comment>