God Save Thomas Edison - <AUTHOR>

Tesla was amazing, I get it. I always got it. But a lot of people didn't. For a lot of people, Tesla is the name of some car that you have to pull out your iphone and take a pic when you see it.
The Oatmeal raised Tesla up, and pummeled Edison into the ground. Here's an ever-changing Twitter search that will surely prove my point: https://twitter.com/#!/search/edison%20tesla
Edison was a great inventor, and an incredibly hard worker. He was a persistant and effective business man when it came to spreading the adoption of world-changing things like the lightbulb.
 He may not have invented it, but he built and marketed the first one that was actually practical.
The point: Every geek in the world needs a little Thomas Edison in him. <comment><USER2> Edison has a National Historical Park, and his winter home in Fort Myers, Florida also has a museum.

<http://www.nps.gov/edis/index.htm>

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

<comment><AUTHOR> He definitely got more recognition — sometimes for stuff he didn't even invent (light bulb). But I think the business quality of him was awesome too, and something most geeks could actually use some of.</comment></comment>


Female genital mutilation: Report shows 68,000 victims in Germany - <AUTHOR> https://m.dw.com/en/female-genital-mutilation-report-shows-68000-victims-in-germany/a-53937735 <comment><USER2> As a pro-life Christian I see parallels between FGM and abortion. In each case, how is society to protect the child from his or her own parents?</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite non-programming related use of Git? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Using GitHub as a versioned file storage. I know it's not the best option, not even good, but it's usually so easy if your files are less than 100mb.

If they're bigger, you can abuse their "release" logic to upload files up to like 2gb.

Yeah there's S3 and stuff but the GIT CLI client makes it much easier to tape some shit together in a pinch. Bonus for raw.github serving for files over vanilla http

</comment><comment><USER3> While maybe akin to programming, prior to using Overleaf I would use TeX to collaboratively typeset homework via git.

</comment><comment><USER4> gitbook, books automatically generated from git.</comment>


Getting started with Clojure/Emacs/Slime  - <AUTHOR> http://nklein.com/2010/05/getting-started-with-clojureemacsslime/ <comment><USER2> Here is what I did -

1\. Started with emacs-starter-kit - <http://github.com/technomancy/emacs- starter-kit>

2\. Install clojure-mode, slime, slime-repl and swank-clojure using ELPA (M-x package-list-packages)

3\. Install <http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen> (again technomancy)

Starting a new project is the following -

1\. lein new <project_name>

2\. Tweak the project.clj to pull in the dependencies I need (Using the project.clj that leiningen is a good starting point [http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/blob/master/project....](http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/blob/master/project.clj) )

3\. Fire up emacs - M-x swank-clojure-project and point to the root of the newly created leiningen project.

I understand that those new to Java-land, the concept of the classpath, jars, maven all can be a little daunting, but that is the nature of Java as it stands today.

Hope this helped

[Edited for formatting]

<comment><USER3> As the maintainer of the clojure emacs support, I should point out that this comment shows the best way to get started. The linked article shows a method that works for old-time emacs vets but is much much more complicated than necessary. Unfortunately this gives the impression that it takes hours to get started with Emacs, but this is only true if you ignore the instructions in the readme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is of course the difficult way to get started with Clojure. If you want something that works and that works quickly so that you can focus immediately on Clojure, NetBeans+Enclojure or Eclipse+Counterclockwise are the way to go. Up to date instructions for both and others (Vim, Idea, et al) here: <http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/clojure/Getting_Started>

(I'm an Emacs/Swank/SLIME person myself)

<comment><USER5> NetBeans+Enclojure is really nice. It has some features even Emacs doesn't. I'm an Emacs user, too (thanks to Clojure) but I still kind of resent having to spend half my time configuring and learning crazy key-chords to get things done.</comment></comment>


Sodom, LLC: The Marquis de Sade and the office novel - <AUTHOR> http://laphamsquarterly.org/flesh/sodom-llc <comment><USER2> Well, she's not wrong that _120 Days of Sodom_ is unbelievably dull. Other than that, though, I think Chuck Palahniuk put it quite a bit better.

<comment><USER3> Where?

And, well..., I don't know for translations but, read in French, Sade's books are never boring. They are extremely attractive from a stylistic point of view, but the theme and the story are utterly repulsive. It's just the work of a lunatic genious. He was obsessed by debunking one particular lie, which is that virtue is always rewarded, eventually. To me Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu is his only book I was able to read to the end.

<comment><USER4> People always miss the point that the extremely vile debauchers represent the upper society: the aristocracy, church, the rich, and whatever was the fourth main character.

Then, they do all the horible things to the poor in their isolated castle with the help of hired gunmen.

The style is absolutely fantastic (I do not know about English translation)!

<comment><USER2> It's been a while, but I recall the English translation's prose as being rather dry and stiff; it wasn't an obstacle to the reader, but neither was it rewarding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Indeed, according to Sade, sex can never be too orderly or too public. It > is this valence of his thought that seems overwhelmingly applicable to the > contemporary office, if not to contemporary social life overall._

An interesting feature of the modern world is that transparency isn't about freedom but about control; we need to see the actions of others at all times not because we are genuinely interested in them or their actions, but because we need to make sure they conform to established models of morality.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't really understand why people treat de Sade's writing as different than any other run-of-the-mill elaborate fetish fiction. I suppose because, at the time, nobody else was publishing their elaborate fetish fiction, and so it was easy to pretend that de Sade was the only person in history who'd ever had a fetish.

But guys, really, we've had the internet for 20 years now. There's nothing remotely interesting or unique or special about somebody else's boring, self- absorbed wankfic.

<comment><USER7> I think there's a certain mystique to de Sade because so few people actually ever bother to read him - I suspect he's one of the better known writers for whom most people cannot name anything he's written, and certainly haven't read any of it, but do of course know the general theme. (I count myself in this group - despite having a degree in literature, I have never been anywhere near any of his writing; though I have seen the film _Quills_ , which I enjoyed.)

(I'm writing this from a strictly English perspective - I don't know whether the situation is different in his native France: perhaps all French schoolchildren are forced to read de Sade!)

Also, not many people get their name turned into a lowercase noun in English!</comment></comment>


UN to pursue further inquiry into death of Dag Hammarskjöld - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/03/un-to-pursue-further-inquiry-into-death-of-dag-hammarskjold <comment><USER2> Numerous countries that were part of the 'western' bloc are turning fascist, Russia is developing a taste for military adventurism, and China is testing the international consensus over the extent of its maritime territory.

Now we're told it's vital that we come together to investigate a 55 year old unsolved mystery in an undeveloped country (not that it matters less because it took place there, but the chances of finding any meaningful forensic information after so long are virtually nil).

Ban Ki Moon has been a terrible disappointment as UN secretary general. No doubt he's a competent administrator and his heart is in the right place, but he has shown little or no moral leadership and under his tenure the UN's relevance has taken a nosedive. It's a bit late in the day - Moon's term of office expires at the end of this month - to reopen old cases that have symbolic value for the world order. One thing is for sure: nobody is likely to make an attempt on the life of Ban Ki Moon because he's studiously avoided pissing anyone off. So the post-war liberal consensus dies, not with a bang but with a whimpered echo of a previous nadir.</comment>


Larry Wall announces that Perl6 is ready for production - <AUTHOR> https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/an-unexpectedly-long-expected-party/ <comment><USER2> I expect that the reaction from most of the HN community will be somewhat similar to "why use perl these days when there are so many other more modern choices," but reading the spec there are a lot of nice things in perl6, including the static type system, macro support, and improved patter matching. The syntax still feels a little antiquated, but there is an awful lot to like in this new release, and i expect that so very expressive, not overly opaque code will be written using this.

<comment><USER3> Note that Perl 6 now is really a brand new language. The old Perl continues to chug along in the form of Perl 5 (with yearly releases and feature additions). As such, Perl 6 _is_ a modern language, with all that you can expect to have in one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think he's saying that it is ready for production just yet. I don't want to piss on this parade, it's certainly a milestone, but there are problems too.

<comment><USER5> The compiler release that is happening today has not been vetted for stability, performance, etc beyond the regular - it's as 'production-ready' as any other of the monthly releases.

However, the language definition has been frozen, and Perl6 programs you write after today are supposed to keep working.

Basically, it's a promise by the developers to stop breaking stuff willy- nilly.

<comment><USER4> So I gathered. It's an invitation of sorts, for people to start using it, but let's not get ahead of ourselves with this 'production-ready' idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10786423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10786423) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10787764) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10788786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10788786) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789464)

Please look and see if there's already a recent thread, everyone. Also, this wasn't the production-readiness announcement, this is an essay on the end of the long Advent, and hopes for the future.

That said: yeah, it's happening today.

<comment><USER7> None of those posts had a significant discussion, so they don't count as dupes on HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm excited by this, although I feel that the announcement a couple months back about it being released this Christmas carried all the release hype with it haha. I'm glad 6.Christmas is packaged and shipped. Have fun and happy holidays everyone.

<comment><USER5> _I 'm glad 6.Christmas is packaged and shipped._

It isn't (yet). Stay tuned.

<comment><USER9> Do you know where an announcement will be posted when it is?

<comment><USER5> [https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/christmas-is- he...](https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/christmas-is-here/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations Larry. It is a big effort.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was writing some perl 6 just as I saw this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Perl6 seems like a fantastic language, but one of the things I'm most interested to see how turn out is the way it is being branded for tweenage girls.

NOTE TO DOWNVOTERS: This is not a joke. E.g., [http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2015/10/06/the-night-larry- wall-...](http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2015/10/06/the-night-larry-wall- unveiled-perl-6/) "the new butterfly logo for Perl 6 'is specifically designed, among other things, to appeal to 7-year-old girls. The Python community has done a much better job appealing to kids with fun stuff.'"

<comment><USER4> > This is not a joke.

> is specifically designed, among other things, to appeal to 7-year-old girls

but this is

<comment><USER3> But why? Most of tech confs are sausage fests. It's time we start addressing the sex inequality issue in our trade.

<comment><USER13> Maybe because smart people are usually interested in equal opportunity, not equal representation.

<comment><USER5> Culture matters. It's not enough to have equal opportunity in theory, you also have to make people realize that they have this option as well as make them feel welcome.

<comment><USER13> But just certain people for certain jobs, right? We don't need to make women feel welcome in the mining community or men in the nursing one, do we?

<comment><USER14> Every single time sexism in tech is mentioned someone will crawl out and say "but what about women in mining?" or "what about men in nursing?"

What's happening? Are people too stupid to put "women in mining" into a search engine? Too lazy? Too dishonest?

WIM (Women in mining)

[http://www.womeninmining.org.uk/](http://www.womeninmining.org.uk/)

Male Nursing

[http://www.nurselookup.com/index.html](http://www.nurselookup.com/index.html)

[http://www.aamn.org/](http://www.aamn.org/)

<comment><USER13> > someone will crawl out

From a mine shaft, I hope. Please encourage your daughter to follow the dream she doesn't know she has, yet, and go take her rightful place in the mine with colleagues that mirror perfectly the composition of the general population. She'll thank you later.

<comment><USER15> Your previous point extolled opportunity over representation, but this comment seems to suggest that opportunity itself can sometimes be inappropriate, and hence harmful. Or have I misunderstood?

<comment><USER13> What I was lampooning is not simple opportunity, but downright manipulation, as benevolent as it may seem. That's the difference between allowing a child and encouraging/cajoling them to do something.

When you mount a huge campaign to get girls to code, even if they are not interested, are you doing the former or the latter? What about when you do the same for hiring more women in certain areas? Or for getting more women presenters in certain technical conferences?

And if we as a community decided that we should feel bad for being interested in things that overwhelmingly attract males, why not extrapolate the proposed solution? Maybe it gets absurd enough that we realize it's been wrong all this time.

<comment><USER16> > downright manipulation ... huge campaign ... get girls to code, even if they > are not interested ... decided that we should feel bad ... things that > overwhelmingly attract males ... why not extrapolate

That's an impressive amount of speculating.

> Maybe it gets absurd enough that we realize

Indeed.

<comment><USER13> > That's an impressive amount of speculating.

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

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

[https://www.womentechmakers.com/](https://www.womentechmakers.com/)

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct- facebook-...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-facebook- techprep-bsi-20151020-story.html)

[https://hackbrightacademy.com/about/](https://hackbrightacademy.com/about/)

[https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/women](https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/women)

<comment><USER16> My apologies. I had assumed that what you were talking about had something to do with either Perl 6 or Camelia.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


America's Up and Coming Tech Boom Cities - <AUTHOR> http://infinigeek.com/up-and-coming-tech-boom-cities-in-america/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR: Seattle, Austin, Denver ("high-tech startup density"), and Kansas City ("has just begun to emerge as a tech hub that offers a plethora of job opportunities"\--but no specifics).</comment>


Guys, REST APIs Are Not Databases - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@marinithiago/guys-rest-apis-are-not-databases-60db4e1120e4 <comment><USER2> I think TFA mixes up the API style with tightly coupling interface to implementation.

The problems described are those of directly exposing an implementation as the API.

The interesting part of REST in this context is, IMHO, that you can have a database-y or filesystem-y _interface_ that you can implement any way you like.

So yes: if you provide an API, think of the API in terms of the interface it should provide to the user. If that interface is CRUD-y/REST-y (and a lot are), by all means expose a REST API. Please still decouple it from the implementation, or at least make sure that you _can_ decouple it when things start to drift.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agreed. But if lot of developers are using REST for CRUD, then it definitely means that most of the developers desire a CRUD way of server interaction.

Any solution?</comment>


The Internet Just Made Microsoft Kill a Car for a Faster Horse - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/a849a9d4d530 <comment><USER3> Try hard as they might, it's impossible to make those "features" sound good.

This one is especially amazing: "You could re-sell your physical disc game to Gamestop or any participating outlet that opted into Microsoft's revenue sharing system." Gee, thanks, Microsoft! It's not like those outlets will pass the cost right onto the consumer or anything (oh wait, they will). It's incredible how the Xbox team thought, "Look at that money over there. Let's take it!" What's next, Wal-Mart charging Ralph Lauren every time a customer comes in wearing a Polo shirt (because why should other clothing companies get free advertising in their store)?

The other issue? For the author to be completely honest, every "benefit" mentioned in the article should have "for a fee" added to the end of it. It's not very fun or innovative to get nickeled and dimed every step of the way. The fact that the public received 3 different messages about digital sharing costs (the three being no cost, a small fee, and the full price of the game) didn't help matters, either.

Another issue I had with the digital system is with the games themselves. Most critics of physical media on Xbox One mention the iOS model, but fail to note how Xbox One is different from it. If I download an app on my iPad, it instantly shows up on my iPhone and my iPad mini, ready for use. I don't have to pay any extra usage fees for multiple devices. The apps themselves are in the $0-$10 range. Most importantly, most apps run in the 5-50MB range, so downloads are quick and my apps are ready to go in minutes. Compare that with Xbox One, where games are likely to be in the 10-20GB range and $60.00 (formerly with fees for sharing and resale). If you consider sharing to be going over to a friend's house, entering your password, then waiting 3.5 hours for a download to finish to be in some way innovative or interesting, then you are clearly not the target market for this device. Gamers want instant gratification, not waiting around for downloads and jumping through hoops.

The last point I want to make is this: the author, Jason Chen, is a fool if he thinks that replacing one black box in front of a TV for another is _in any way_ comparable to upgrading from a horse and buggy to a car. The DRM-laden, no-money-left-behind nature of Xbox One in the context of tech in 2013 (a jungle of price fixing, nickeling/diming, credit card storing, and "convenient" subscription modeling) is precisely the status quo that consumers are _finally_ revolting against.

<comment><USER4> >It's incredible how the Xbox team thought, "Look at that money over there. Let's take it!" What's next, Wal-Mart charging Ralph Lauren every time a customer comes in wearing a Polo shirt (because why should other clothing companies get free advertising in their store)?

Could you explain this analogy because it makes zero sense to me.

>The other issue? For the author to be completely honest, every "benefit" mentioned in the article should have "for a fee" added to the end of it. It's not very fun or innovative to get nickeled and dimed every step of the way. The fact that the public received 3 different messages about digital sharing costs (the three being no cost, a small fee, and the full price of the game) didn't help matters, either.

Could you link to the three different sharing cost messages?

>Compare that with Xbox One, where games are likely to be in the 10-20GB range and $60.00 (formerly with fees for sharing and resale). If you consider sharing to be going over to a friend's house, entering your password, then waiting 3.5 hours for a download to finish to be in some way innovative or interesting, then you are clearly not the target market for this device. Gamers want instant gratification, not waiting around for downloads and jumping through hoops.

I would imagine they would allow you to play parts of the game without needing to install the whole game, similar to Steam.

>The DRM-laden, no-money-left-behind nature of Xbox One in the context of tech in 2013 (a jungle of price fixing, nickeling/diming, credit card storing, and "convenient" subscription modeling) is precisely the status quo that consumers are finally revolting against.

How is it different than Steam, other than speculating that Microsoft would never aggressively discount games as much as Steam does now (even though it took them several years for their store to be well-liked by gamers)?

<comment><USER5> It's interesting, because in this whole thing I've noticed that there's a reason that I am ok with Steam on my PC when I'm not ok with digital downloads for a console.

Primarily, it's because of the kinds of games that are released and played on them. On PC, I have games that are inherently ALL about the online experience, games like TF2, DOTA 2, League of Legends, Starcraft 2, Counter Strike, ARMA, and many more. These games (from what I've seen) make up the biggest contingency of PC games, and they all "fit" within Steam and it's business model very well.

However, on console you have an entirely different type of game: the game as a story. These kinds of games make up the bulk of the console market, games like Uncharted (1, 2, and 3), the Bioshock series, the Mass Effect trilogy, the Far Cry series, the God of War games, etc. Even just the way you label them (series, trilogy, etc) shows the difference: these are static creations.

Ultimately, on a platform that most people use to consume STATIC pieces of content, why do we need to be chained to some other service? Why must I have an internet connection to enjoy a great single-player experience?

<comment><USER6> That might be correct for you, but it's not really for most gamers.

Each year the annual COD release on consoles is huge on consoles (bigger than on PC). FIFA is similarly huge in Europe. Halo, one of the biggest console exclusives, is praised at least 50/50 for it's single/multiplayer content. Online gaming is a big part of console games, even if it isn't for you.

At the same time, most of the games you mentioned as single player experiences are available on PC. Plus many (I'd say most, even) PC-exclusive titles are heavily single-player focused.

Obviously, this doesn't affect your personal reasoning, but I don't think it's shared by many people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This really just looks like sour grapes from Microsoft to me.

There's no reason they couldn't have both...

Buy a physical disk? Trade use it like you always have, but you don't get to make use of all the fancy cloud features.

Buy your game online? You'll need to phone home every once in a while (24 hours was a bit harsh, maybe more like 1 week), and you can't trade it like physical media, but you get the fancy new lending features.

Decide you like the new way better? Convert your physical copies into 'cloud' copies and throw out the disks.

Problem solved.

<comment><USER8> The problem with convert to cloud is that it would require every Xbox to go online in order to check with the mothership before running the game, even from a disk. Otherwise you'd be able to share the disk with offline users who could continue using the physical copy.

They had two choices:

Require an internet connection before running a game. (the 24 hour check)

or

The disk must be present at all times.

<comment><USER9> You're thinking a bit closed minded. There are other ways to tackle the problem depending on how user friendly or user unfriendly you want the console to be. For example:

1\. Converting to cloud could require users to trade in the physical disk at a local store for a digital CD key. A pain for users but by making this a known requirement up front, users won't be able to complain about it and it may convince users who are on the fence to just get the digital copy from the start.

2\. Require all games to have a CD Key (acts as the same key for converting to cloud) and a small footprint installable component. Tell users that you don't need an internet connection to validate but if you do connect to the internet, the Xbox One will periodically "phone home" and check to see if your CD keys are legitimate. It won't stop sharing the physical copy after converting to cloud, but it would make it much more of a hassle and prevent multiplayer games from being shared easily. Bonus for users who are converting - <USER2> digital version of the game can be installed via the disk so they don't have to wait to download the game to convert it to the cloud. This would also make reinstalling much faster so long as users keep the physical copy.

There are many other possibilities that have been mentioned already so I'll stop here. Just note that this isn't an either or situation. There is a lot of flexibility here.

<comment><USER10> You're still thinking inside the box a little. Gamecube used a variety of patented format cds and encryption keys stored in a small area of the cd for their copy protection. [1]

Or, you know, just turn off the always-online or check-in-each-24h requirement and just lock down the hardware from sideloading games onto it. Even without that, something tells me people would still buy games.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_optical_disc#Nintendo_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_optical_disc#Nintendo_GameCube_Game_Disc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a terrible article.

First, the analogy is completely wrong.

Second, Microsoft is realizing people are getting seriously tired of the bullshit "always on" concept. It's hard to justify and is widely rejected as a valid technical limitation on platforms where you expect to always have an internet connection (and is only accepted when the gameplay itself REQUIRES a connection, unlike the late SimCity). It's completely unacceptable in a device that historically has been played without an internet connection, and in the best case, that scenario becomes like the PC, in that it's only acceptable when the user wants to play some form of internet-based multiplayer.

There is no valid technical justification for "it has to either be all physical CDs or you have to have to connect to our servers every 24 hours". With a properly secured console, it should be fairly trivial to support shared digital games without requiring a ping.

I, surely less intelligent than the entirety of the xbox team, came up with this in about 10 seconds:

Person A informs server of intent to share game G with person B.

Server sends a message to person A: "game G disabled for period X hours". This message is signed for authenticity, with public key crypto, verifiable by a public key stored in secured memory on the console.

Server sends a message to person B: "game G activated and enabled for period X hours". This message signed identically to #2.

Person B starts game G, console verifies signed access card, if valid, downloads game. Once download/install is complete, console again verifies access card. If valid, runs it. Periodically, every 30 minutes, console checks running processes against associated access cards. If an access card becomes invalid, the process is terminated gracefully (save progress, notify user why).

Person A tries to start game G. Console verifies signed access card, if valid. Access is restricted, so console informs user G is temporarily unavailable due to being shard with Person B.

Surely this isn't that difficult to implement? And now you don't have to be online except to download the digital game.

I seriously HATE it when companies try to impose nonsensical, unjustifiable, technically wrong "limitations" on me just because it suits them. Stop it.

<comment><USER12> In general, making up security schemes off the top of your head doesn't go so well.

Case in point: You forgot to ensure that Console A actually finds out that a particular game has been disabled.

<comment><USER11> Not really, I just didn't include obvious details for brevity. Of course you verify cryptographically that the transferring console has received the disable notification and has marked the game as disabled before continuing the process. We can simplify this and call it sending the console a message that it needs to disable the game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think the OP here is giving MS more credit than they are due. I don't believe they were trying to build a car, and I don't believe they had a messaging problem. I think they were trying to pull a bait and switch. Pitch a car and sell a faster horse. They got caught, and the Internet won.

You can easily get to that conclusion by gauging the HD storage shipping with each unit. Add to that the average speed of Internet in the US, and you have a poor situation for over the net gaming.

We're just not there yet.

<comment><USER14> > Add to that the average speed of Internet in the US, and you have a poor > situation for over the net gaming.

Now maybe. The article mentions that it's a device designed for the next 7 or 8 years.

<comment><USER13> I don't think this generation of consoles will survive without a refresh in the next 7 or 8 years. Tech is moving too fast.

<comment><USER15> It hasn't for the last seven years? Other than the arrival of SSDs, the consoles were running on a half-decade old tech and still doing fine. If anything, tech seems to be moving slower lately, with less increase of processor powers and less notable increases in graphics capability.

<comment><USER13> The last 7 were far different IMO. Coming out of the bubble, and very little progress in software, not much needed to change. But now, I think the fact that software, not hardware, is changing rapidly, a 7-8 year cycle isn't going to work.

Sure, they can bolt-on new firmware updates and operating systems, but I think the way we use consoles will change quite a bit in the next 3-4 years alone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some internet pundits don't understand the value of a game machine that works _without ever connecting to the internet_.

MS wants to sell _precisely one_ license but support both never-connected machines and cloud lending, but this was too hard for them to figure out and they're dropping the cloud part.

The cloud lending facility required expiring leases (think DHCP) to guard against the possibility of a purchaser intentionally stranding their license at a friend's house (or on a dead xbox, or one that loses internet connectivity), where that friend would play happily for weeks without connecting to the network.

If you believe in the effectiveness of copy-proof-disc DRM, then a single token permitting ongoing play can certainly just reside on the disc.

How about this:

1\. disc alone doesn't suffice to play a game on an unconnected xbox (so never-connected users are out of luck)

2\. net connected xbox alone can acquire the right-to-play token as long as the previous holder of the token is online. (physical disc from store would need insertion only on first use to create the initial on-net token).

3\. an unconnected xbox that was the last one to use the net token may continue to play indefinitely without net access, provided the disc can be validated. this does allow simultaneous play of at most one online and one disc, but only as long as the xbox stays intentionally unconnected (this limits the number of extra licenses to at most 1, unlike a more lenient cloud- lending policy that allows continued play without check-ins).

I believe the renew-lease-every-24hr model already allowed simultaneous play in case of the last token holder being offline (if the game didn't require a connection to play, that is).

If absolutely prohibiting simultaneous play from a single purchase is a must (and I don't see why it should be; an average concurrency of strictly less than 2 sounds fine), then you just need to require explicit lease releases (and the disc becomes irrelevant again), which has an obvious customer service overhead when people can't release for whatever reason.

Alternatively they could implement a physical 'disc destroyer' that can move a game (one-way) to the cloud phone-home mode. Or just require an xbox to phone home before permitting a new disc (giving up on never-connected xboxes), in which case no physical destruction is necessary.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. Also, in the ever increasing world of globalization, I don't believe in region locking.

Currently I own a Korean Xbox 360, as I bought it in Seoul while living there years ago. Since moving back to the US I have not bothered buying any new games mainly b/c I don't want to deal with having to worry about region locking.

It will be interesting to see how ownership and digital files interact in the future. Do I even own any of my digital files?

<comment><USER18> _I don 't believe in region locking_

It looks like Microsoft doesn't anymore, either. The "no region locking" announcement today was an unexpected surprise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The gaming industry as a whole has gone backward.

The idea that a game would ship which allowed users to set up their own networks and play their buds seems alien. Instead, many franchises shut down their subscription service after a couple of years - e.g. to force the upgrade from FIFA 12 to FIFA 14.

I remember Quake - the free demo, and fragging my coworkers over the Novell after hours to the point that my wife would call the office...this was before cell phones...just to make sure I wasn't _really_ out drinking and perhaps chasing skirts.

<comment><USER20> Quake wasn't made by a marketing team. Also, here on the PC side, things still seem fine as ever, maybe even better when you consider the fact that we have fully drm-free options these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is frustrating and it's a false choice. "The Internet" is otherwise known as the people who were most likely to purchase an XBox 1 before hearing about the draconian DRM policies. If the XBox 360 were a horrible product, MS would have heard very very little from "The Internet".

Who they heard from was a fan base who very much still enjoy their XBox 360s and were truly looking forward to an improved product with some sick innovations that only companies like Microsoft can deliver. They heard from this collection of people because in addition to the excellent innovations, they tacked on completely unreasonable restrictions that make the product all but completely useless if you CHOSE not to connect it to the network or have the spying eye watching your every move, and then twisted themselves into a pretzel trying to either make these sound like a feature instead of handcuffs or failing to explain that you could turn off the advanced features of the Kinect.

In response to hearing from "The Internet", instead of actually listening to what was being said and making some reasonable changes to the restrictions, they stopped dead in their tracks, turned 180 degrees, then killed many of the innovations that could have been modified while still providing consumers with an actual choice.

I'm sooooo tired of being told I'm too stupid to understand something. By my government, and by big companies who once commanded my respect.

</comment><comment><USER22> > "Most people aren't Richard Branson and most people have enough of a > connection, however intermittent, to authenticate once a day."

Military Personnel nonwithstanding...

> "Who knows, maybe Microsoft will change the policy again and have people opt > in to the online check so that they can share their libraries with their > friends. Maybe they will have another tier where people opt in to these > benefits. I hope so."

And that was the crux of the matter. WE WERE NOT GIVEN A CHOICE, I am all in favour of letting people choose which is more important to them but MS initially shafted a load of people with their "This is how it is going to be" without any options spiel.

[EDIT] I suppose I should put as a disclaimer that I have never owned any of the x-boxes nor plan to. I am merely commenting from the point of view of a consumer in general.

<comment><USER23> > WE WERE NOT GIVEN A CHOICE

As consumers, we are rarely given a choice.

<comment><USER5> Well, we're always given a choice in the end: buy it or don't buy it.

It's what I've done in the past, and it's what I'll do now. I'll just not buy it. Because if you complain, but buy it anyway, you're really saying that it's still worth while to you.

<comment><USER24> _Well, we 're always given a choice in the end: buy it or don't buy it._

That works with grocery, baked goods, music, perhaps even computers (if you opt not to look at the CPU inside), but game consoles? You can hardly say "fuck Sony, I'm going to buy Final Fantasy for Wii". This only works on a free market, which is a rare sight these days.

<comment><USER12> You still have a choice! "Can play Game X" is a feature of the platform just as much as as its hard-drive space or lack of DRM or whatever. Luxuries always have an element of consumer choice involved.

It's only, in fact when you start talking about essentials such as food, housing and basic services where you can claim you're forced to buy something. And I'm not even sure where you were trying to go with that music comparison (It's not like I can buy an album but choose to give the money to a different record company).

<comment><USER24> Why not apply it to the life itself? I mean, people who can't afford food are free to die, aren't they? It's not like anyone is forcing them to live or something. Using this kind of logic, anything can be turned into a choice.

<comment><USER5> Except choosing to consume a commodity piece of art is very much a _choice_ not a need like food or sleep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The main issue is how badly Microsoft marketed the XBOX One. They completely failed to get their message across. As a result they were getting shit on by Sony.

Facebook and reddit have seen a huge number of anti-XBOX posts.. I don't know what pre-orders were looking like but I would imagine they aren't great because of all the bad publicity.

I wonder how things would have looked if Microsoft had a decent marketing team.

"We are going to revolutionize how you enjoy games. When you buy a game you can share it with up to 10 friends. When you sign in to any console anywhere your games library will be available. Here's a first. You can transfer digital games to another person!"

They could then talk about the caveats.

"To make these features possible and promote the development of awesome games we have introduced a developer revenue sharing plan for used games. This means you can only trade in games with registered partners. We have already signed up Gamestop, blah, blah and blah. We are adding more every day. On average an American will only be x miles from a vendor."

"The XBOX One allows you to play games online and offline. Just like any other console. However, to make use of game sharing and portable games library both XBOX's will need to be connected to the Internet so they can regularly check in."

"We believe the XBOX One will allow you to experience more games. We are the first vendor to let you share digital games. You will never need to walk around with your disc's again. The games will be right with you. This is the XBOX One"

OK.. I added in offline play. I think it is ridiculous that they didn't allow this. I would have got behind this. The problem is that Microsoft hadn't worked out what they were doing before their launch event. Everyone was confused. Then there was the death trickle of hit and miss information from MS and XBOX support. Meanwhile deafening rumors drowned out everything else.

The Internet didn't make Microsoft kill anything. They did all this themselves with some of the worst information delivery and brand management I have ever seen.

"The Internet" made it clear offline gaming and the ability to freely trade and share games were important to them. I am happy that a lot of people sent a strong message in an attempt to defend this right. It is a shame that Microsoft couldn't get across that what they were providing was in fact not at odds with this.

<comment><USER26> You can only spin the "DRM is good for you" message so much. Most people are smarter than to fall for it.

<comment><USER27> Gamers seem to love Steam.

<comment><USER28> Steam's DRM stays out of my way, in the same way iTunes' used to. Microsoft's DRM forced me to play in a way they saw fit.

<comment><USER27> Which is the point. DRM isn't the boogeyman. It is how DRM is presented.

<comment><USER29> No, the relevant issue is how the DRM is designed and executed. The substantive differences between MS's scheme and how Steam does things are too big to simply gloss over. The marketing could have been as slick as you please but they would still have been trying to sell a shit sandwich. It's no surprise that gamers sniffed them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> On the flipside, their no self-publish policy and required publisher agreements (which need to be able to publish 4 titles a year on the device) is pushing a horse (old market) over going to a car (new market).

They would have been better off just applying discounts to titles that can't be resold or shared (who wouldn't buy the same game for 20% off that way?). Change people with the market and benefits, don't try to change them with bad PR decisions. Apple's customers always liked the virtual keyboard due to the benefits of more screen.

A big fail on the always on 'feature' was for many soliders overseas, they wouldn't be able to play in many cases: [http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JayJohnson/20130611/194155/The_Xb...](http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JayJohnson/20130611/194155/The_Xbox_One_from_a_service_members_perspective_Conversations_Ive_had_and_heard_on_my_last_deployment.php)

<comment><USER31> > They would have been better off just applying discounts to titles that can't > be resold or shared (who wouldn't buy the same game for 20% off that way?).

Yes. I feel that MS's Xbox division has forgotten, when they chose to focus on the publishers instead of the consumer and developer, that price is what makes DRM stores like Audible ($15 or less for audiobooks that normally cost $25-$50) or iOS (most games are 0.99 or FREE compared to 19.99-29.99 for mobile games on other platforms) successful. Price is also what keeps people coming back to Steam.

> On the flipside, their no self-publish policy and required publisher > agreements

This is something else I don't understand. It's easy to see that self- publishing is what made Apple, Google, and Valve app stores so successful. MS even has a Win 8 app store. I don't understand how they couldn't see that this should apply to Xbox as well when both Sony and Nintendo already realize this. Why cater to large video game publishers when their days are numbered due to the app stores?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Don't worry. Valve will come out with a nice car (SteamBox) and will craft their message more carefully to make sure all of the horse lovers don't get spooked before they fall in love with the ride.

<comment><USER33> Valve doesn't have to do anything about messaging because _Steam already works like the XBox One was going to_.

<comment><USER14> Really? Did you read the article? Can you sell the games you own on Steam? Lend them to your friends?

<comment><USER34> The point is that many of us who were relatively happy users of Steam were annoyed at the changes in the Xbone. However, Steam took a decade before I let it on my computer. I literally didn't realize I'd be buying into it when I bought a retail copy of Bioshock Ultimate.

Whereas Microsoft went to the biggest built-up launch event in all of gaming and told all the gamers waiting on the edge of their seat and gave the impression that they cared more about the set-top box market instead and the Xbone was going to lock you out of even disc games that you buy unless you give it a 24/7 phone-home kill switch. Oh and if the cloud thought that your IP address looked like it came from the wrong region you were DoA too.

To be out-consumer-friendlied by Sony of all companies, ouch that stings.

Disclosure: MS employee, not in Xbox, my own opinion only

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _Maybe sharing their libraries with their friends wasn't something they were looking forward to. Maybe they liked having to bring all their physical discs along wherever they went. Maybe they didn't care about having the ability to sell their digital games after they're done playing. I don't know._

I really despise conversations that take this turn, to wit: "maybe the people I'm treating like idiots really are massochistic morons out to hurt themselves any way possible and don't want anything to improve." It shows no interest in the possibility that there is a very real valid concern they're having trouble expressing to someone who doesn't want to hear it.

<comment><USER36> Along with this, everyone praising the supposed benefits of digital lending forget that they had no actual idea of how it would work. There are no details. Microsoft never defined what "family" meant, and nobody has any idea of how the system would be implemented. People were praising a feature that literally didn't exist.

 _[Phil] Spencer: We don 't have a lending solution today.

Kotaku: You might have one?

Spencer: We don't have a path... I don't want to make a commitment to somebody without a plan of record on how that lands. I could over-promise, under- deliver on the features. I don't want to do that. I want to make sure. I understand how gifting is going to work. I understand how the secondary market is going to work._

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The problem is that Microsoft put a saddle on the car by offering physical discs. I really didn't see the point of it if it was always online, given that MS has their music and movie stores.

Moreover it didn't really give consumers the main benefit of always on DRM: lower prices for games. This is why consumers don't care about the DRM on iOS or even Android.

Another major problem is that for all the features offered for Xbox One that apologists like to keep repeating (family sharing, trade-ins, lending, selling), there was a really big caveat: publishers have to approve that feature for their respective games. Even if they did approve it, I can imagine all the restrictions they would have imposed (trade-in approved stores, minimum time & publisher set prices for trade-ins, and so on)

<comment><USER37> physical discs are useful for people with always-on-but-still-painfully-slow internet, and it also was a way for MS to compromise and not piss off all the physical disc retailers, who happen to be the same people who will retail the console itself.

<comment><USER38> Yeah, but they could have sold their console with online retail only, a la Amazon. That would have been really innovative.

<comment><USER4> >That would have been really innovative.

And a great way to lose out on billions of sales.

<comment><USER38> Ask Amazon how it turned out for them with the Kindle. Sold only online. No retailers. They crushed all the other physical ebook-readers re-sellers.

<comment><USER39> Ask Australia if they'd like to download one game a month and max out the allowed data on their internet connection. Data caps are still common, and for every marketplace that has them, a digital-only marketplace is DOA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This article has about one good paragraph (the first one), then descends into mindless internet-hating drivel. The internet didn't make Microsoft do anything - Microsoft, for better or worse, capitulated to popular demand.

Maybe Microsoft's problem was a marketing problem. It's not the fault of the general public that a multi-billion dollar organisation can't communicate its vision. As the article states, Apple managed to push its vision of the iPhone and iPad through in spite of the vocal opposition.

</comment><comment><USER41> One of the things that I learned from studying Lean Manufacturing was to see a company's primary goal as generating customer value. Extracting enough cash to be sustainable is important, but value comes first.

In this case, I look at the 24-hour thing, and MS's apparent horror of somebody playing for a few days on a friend's license. And I say: _that is value being created_. Somebody had fun. That's the whole fucking point of the enterprise. They should be happy.

Now they do want to capture reasonable amounts of revenue, so I get why they don't want to sell exactly one copy of a game that gets shared around an entire city. But if some rule creates only a modest increase in revenue while destroying a lot of value (or creating a lot of customer headache), then it strikes me as dumb. And when they do something that may get them no extra revenue at all, or might even drive away paying customers, then it's shockingly dumb. It's being willing to make a pie smaller, as long as you get a bigger fraction of what's left.

There's a financial saying that I think applies: bulls make money and bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered.

</comment><comment><USER42> > For example, if Apple had listened to prevailing wisdom in 2007, the iPhone > would have had a physical keyboard.

For example, if Apple had gone with their initial plans we wouldn't have Apps.

</comment><comment><USER43> Gizmodo coincidently published a similar "the internet dun goofed" post [http://gizmodo.com/the-xbox-one-just-got-way-worse-and- its-o...](http://gizmodo.com/the-xbox-one-just-got-way-worse-and-its-our- fault-514411905)

<comment><USER44> What's the old saying? You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time?

<comment><USER45> I think the saying here is, "here's money, now write a pro-Microsoft piece."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Shitty article. They weren't trying to build a car, they were trying to get the horse to pull a car. They were still selling physical media, just hamstringing it so it would be less useful than it is today. Want to build a "Steam for XBox", go right ahead. Want to make buying from "Steam for XBox" the only way to get games, go right ahead. But that's not what they did. They Said, buy games like today, oh, and here are a bunch of extra value-reducing "features" that go with it.

</comment><comment><USER47> Microsoft remembered it sells (mostly) console, not (mostly) games.

pleasing the pirates sells wonders.

If you only lived your teenager years in the US or Japan, then you will not understand. But Sony et al sold millions of consoles to other countries where the market probably bought 1 game per 10 consoles sold (numbers vaguely remembered from a playstation1 analysis i read a long time ago)

<comment><USER48> "market probably bought 1 game per 10 consoles sold"

You seem to have reciprocated your fraction there: [http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie- Ratio/G...](http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/Tie- Ratio/Global/)

Globally, the PS1 sold about 9 games per console. I don't necessarily fully trust that site or that number, but it's probably at least within a factor of two, which still leaves it a great distance from your number.

<comment><USER47> Never said global numbers. I meant specifically the emerging countries.

<comment><USER48> My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Looking forward to the iTV or SteamBox. I live in 2013 in the U.S., and I am willing to buy a device that requires I have Internet access in my living room, and leverages that fact to let me buy and share games in an innovative way. I guess I'm a rare bird!

</comment><comment><USER50> Every time i see a post from medium.com on hacker news it always has some dramatic headline. But then the content tends to be poorly thought out, and more contrarian than insightful. Dear hacker news gods, please don't feed into tabloid techno-journalism.

</comment><comment><USER51> > I'll most likely only buy 2 or 3 used games in the entire 7 year console > life, and my internet very rarely goes out.

Well, that makes one of us. I'm relieved that Microsoft backed down on this, despite the cost in new features. Personally, I'm less interested in buying used games as I am passing them along to friends or selling them, but I would be pissed if they unilaterally removed this option for me.

</comment><comment><USER52> Uh, the internet did no such thing. The internet revolted because Microsoft is incapable of making a "sharing" system for the 1 that isn't ridiculously anti- customer garbage.

</comment><comment><USER53> _For example, if Apple had listened to prevailing wisdom in 2007, the iPhone would have had a physical keyboard._

If. Fucking. Only.

</comment><comment><USER54> > _You could install all your games onto your hard drive and not have to get > up all the time to swap discs_

Holy crap, that's lazy. Who wrote this, Eric Cartman? [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRjjVtvxRMs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRjjVtvxRMs)

<comment><USER14> You could say the same thing about having your entire music library at your fingertips digitally and having to get up to swap a CD.

<comment><USER54> You can play music while doing other things. With video games, it is the thing that you are doing. If getting out of a chair to swap a disc is a big issue for someone, that's really not a healthy sign.

<comment><USER14> Good point. Still, it's (and I loath to use this phrase) the future. Movies then. Makes more sense on a HTPC than having to swap out discs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Not really - Microsoft did this to themselves, the Internet is not responsible. Microsoft could have done something else here: Think. Yes, all these people could have used their brains to _add_ all these "new" (or rather: old) mechanisms without killing of the scenarios defined as forward looking by Microsoft. They could have been forward looking AND caring for the status quo. But in typical sore looser fashion it is far easier to go back to only the old way and whine around "And our new ideas are out now! You did not want them! And now you do not get them! You evil people!"

But at least it is better than the first iteration.

</comment><comment><USER56> I don't really see how the features they removed are incompatible with not requiring online checkins every 24h and certainly not with the used game policy. I don't see why they couldn't have made the online checkins optional, but required to do any of the game sharing, and if you don't check in within 24h it just disables games that aren't yours and doesn't let other people play yours.

Sure, that could be gotten around but people are going to figure out how to pirate anyway.

<comment><USER57> I think the problem happens when Person A buys a game disc and lends a digital copy to Person B. Person A then disconnects from the Internet and plays using the game disc and Person B plays with the 24H online check in. Now you have two people playing the same game at the same time with only one copy of the game bought.

<comment><USER58> How does that not happen with their old system? You buy a disc, install it, remove the disc (doesn't need to go back in) and then give it to someone else?

<comment><USER4> You need the disc in the tray to play games installed to the hard drive (that weren't digital downloads).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Bullshit. If Microsoft had any guts, they woulda done this but only for non- physical copies. Then the consumer would have a choice on whether they liked the direction things were going or not and there would have actually been some benefit from the status quo for the consumer.

You know what the difference between the console based DRM schemes and Steam is? A worse situation was already emerging on PC. Publishers were starting to employ draconian DRM policies that eliminated any chance of resale or sharing, but also didn't work properly and made pirated games a significantly better choice than buying a game from a store.

Steam gave you a better experience with the same limitations as the sell-side of the market was starting to demand and enforce.

If you think Microsoft made a bad move, you are plainly ignoring the history of PC gaming and trying to imagine that the status quo was how it always existed.

Oh, hey, you know what else MS could have done if they had guts? They could have made it an option to add a disc game to your permanent library, allowing a consumer to voluntarily give up their right of resale for permanent digital access.

Of course they're cowards, smart cowards, but cowards.

</comment><comment><USER60> Comparing marginal utility gains for small numbers of people with the difference between mechanised transport and horses is just such ... well, the horses used to leave it behind them:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

 _• If you purchased a physical disc game, your game was tied to your account and you could go to any other Xbox One and be able to have access to your entire library without carrying physical discs around_

Who cares? The device would sit in front of the TV.

 _• You could re-sell your physical disc game to Gamestop or any participating outlet that opted into Microsoft's revenue sharing system_

Second hand console games. A never before heard of thing.

 _• You could buy a used physical disc game from a participating retailer and play it like a new game_

Yeah, a never heard of before thing...

 _• You could install all your games onto your hard drive and not have to get up all the time to swap discs_

Oh, the hardship!

 _• You could buy a digital copy and sell it or gift it to a friend (a previously unheard-of policy in digital games)_

This is just an outright lie. You can do that on Steam today.

 _• You could potentially share your entire library with 10 friends /family members, with the only limitation being that you couldn't play the same game at once_

So, just like with the disks.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

</comment><comment><USER61> The problem was that the "car" they launched with wasn't going to work. It's like they pushed a car with no doors or seat belts.

I like the MS vision for a future of pure digital content that's associated with an account so that you can log in from anywhere and get access to it.

The problem with their vision and the Xbox One is that they didn't fully commit. They made a half-step that didn't take us all the way to their vision but still put some, frankly, poorly thought out requirements on the user.

A half-step is fine if you have the ability to iterate quickly and get the rest of the way there in a week or a month. But consoles do not iterate quickly. It would be YEARS before they could take us the rest of the way to their digital wonderland. That's just too long when you're stuck with some awkward intermediate step.

Their vision is still a good one, and it's still one they can build. They just need to be sure that when they launch the next Xbox (after the One), that they take the full step and commit to their vision completely.

</comment><comment><USER62> " For example, if Apple had listened to prevailing wisdom in 2007, the iPhone would have had a physical keyboard."

Wow, then it would be usable!

</comment><comment><USER63> I believe some or all of these features that were removed will be included eventually. People have a hard time changing so quickly. Processes can become confusing and people may have a hard time transitioning to all digital at first. PSN and Xbox Live allow for downloaded versions of almost all games now. A persistent push away from physical discs to digital games is something that can clearly still be implemented.

So I do not believe they have abandoned their new features but instead put them on hold and saved them for a later date. Eventually, we will all be on digital media and it will be for the better.

</comment><comment><USER64> Wow. the Pro-Microsoft astroturfers are are full force, spinning a win for privacy into a loss for gaming's future. Very slick angle to take, guys. now, fill up HN with your sockpuppets, like expected.

<comment><USER65> Please don't poison the well by arguing that anyone who might disagree with you on any particular point is an astroturfing sockpuppet. If you have evidence or a hunch about a specific trend of postings, that's one thing. Assuming universal bad faith is another entirely, and something HN is better off without. Unless we're talking about SEO hucksters[1].

[1](a joke. mostly.)

<comment><USER64> Very nice. accusing me of a logical fallacy, while playing the strawman fallacy.

I notice you didn't say my previous statement was in any way incorrect. to reiterate, I am accusing Microsoft of creating sockpuppets (now and in the past) on HN. If you would like some evidence, look at the posting histories of some of the loudest voices during the larger Windows 8 threads on HN; you'll find some awfully short (and focused) comment histories.

<comment><USER65> If it wasn't your intent to make a general accusation, you could have made a more specific one. Even so, rabid tribalism does not require a particular job title or direct corporate sponsorship.

Whatever grassroots effort they may have had going on in the first place wasn't successful in turning the tide of public opinion. It would be rather strange of them to undermine their own subsequent reversal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Not the real issue. If Microsoft would have come out and said piracy and the 2nd hand market costs us 11 bajillion dollars in lost revenue. Which is why you the consumer have to pay 59.99 for a game. Then if the xbox one close to the same price as the ps4 with games being significantly cheaper. MS would win.. even with an unpopular strategy because people would think with there pockets. But I wager anything they actually wanted their cake and eat it. There must be some upside. And however you spin it with their initial offering there was none.

</comment><comment><USER67> As I've already said a couple of times, the dependency on the cloud is troublesome for lots of reasons. I don't want to "wait for authentication" every time I go play offline single player games, I just want to play the game! Why should I care if it authenticated.

And Microsoft could have made the whole program opt-in. Then some would have their digital future, and I wouldn't. In that case everyone wins.

DRM always presents a problem for a paying user. When you pirate games, you have 0 problems and excellent, if not better, experience than regular, paying users.

</comment><comment><USER68> "If Apple had listened to customer feedback, the iPhone would have had a physical keyboard. "

If the iPhone got a physical keyboard, I'd totally swap my Android phone for it. I absolutely love Android, but my Nokia E75's physical keyboard just beats any touchscreen by a long way. Also I really miss physical buttons for music control beyond volume. I say this after owning a Galaxy Note 2 for half a year and absolutely loving it. It's just the touchscreen that every modern phone has that is so sucky.

</comment><comment><USER69> "Most people aren't Richard Branson and most people have enough of a connection, however intermittent, to authenticate once a day."

Oh for...

It's not about having an internet connection, it's about only being able to play the games as long as Microsoft has the servers turned on and working. Maintenance can stop you playing, which is annoying. More importantly, they're probably not going to keep them on for 20-30 years, so everything you buy has a limited lifespan.

</comment><comment><USER70> It's because people don't trust Microsoft, and they don't necessarily subscribe to this guy's generous assessment of Microsoft's intent.

</comment><comment><USER71> I think the reality is they will slowly reintroduce the features they've now taken away. Or perhaps none of those features have been taken away, and they're just adding new ones that allow for play w/o an internet connection.

In any case, I think when the dust settles, most everyone will be content with the options given. This was just a PR disaster, not a poorly engineered game console.

</comment><comment><USER72> Good news, but remember there is nothing stopping a 'patch update' to turn it back on at a later time when the heat dissipates.

</comment><comment><USER73> They could have had the best of both worlds:

1) keep the legacy physical media system

2) enable the new system for digital purchases

would have been a huge win and truly groundbreaking

</comment><comment><USER74> Blame EA for this. The Sim City debacle soured a lot of people on the requirement for Internet connectivity for games that they have purchased.

Also that fast Internet speed is still widely available to many people in India, China, Indonesia and Vietnam. That's a big chunk of game console market.

</comment><comment><USER75> I have no idea how MS backpedaled so fast. Suddenly no region restrictions? Can't sell downloaded games? All the licensing deals with publishers & GameStop reneged? How the heck did they pivot to a _completely different business model_ in just a few days?

<comment><USER76> I'd guess that it's from the, allegedly, very low amount of preorders compared to the PS4. Seems like the people complaining actually backed it up with voting with their wallets, which is pretty rare in the gaming community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> This is a terrible article, and most of the features the author is bemoaning the loss of are perfectly possible to have while allowing resale. The internet didn't 'make' MS do this, this is a panicked decision made by people without a clear vision.

</comment><comment><USER78> Why does this have to be framed as people being ignorant? Could it be they don't want to have to give up the limited rights they still have left?

Microsoft wasn't forced to do anything here. They overestimated the value of their product, plain and simple.

</comment><comment><USER79> The article makes an interesting point.

If Microsoft had said that this is a completely digital system where you can download the games, or if preferred pick-up on physical media would the response have been any different.

Or are there too many people who fear change

</comment><comment><USER80> disagree on this:

• You could install all your games onto your hard drive and not have to get up all the time to swap discs

just allow the user to do it if the user agrees to have the 24h online check.

</comment><comment><USER81> Those weren't features. They were bugs.

</comment><comment><USER82> Yeah, try to download a dvd over a standard broadband and you and your friend will be playing maybe tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER83> > You could buy a digital copy and sell it or gift it to a friend (a > previously unheard-of policy in digital games)

Steam??

<comment><USER84> That was my first thought... But remember, this is in the console arena where everything seems to lag behind PCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Someone told me that is a mis-quote, Henry ford never said that. But it is a perfect mis-quote.

</comment><comment><USER86> They didn't kill a car for a better horse. They killed a bus for a better car.

</comment><comment><USER87> How naive can this guy possibly be?

</comment><comment><USER88> Oh come on now, those "features" are terrible and were just a bit of ketchup on a shit sandwich. Speaking as someone who moved house and had to wait a month for a phone company and ISP to get their internet up and running. If I'd had a XBone I would have just be sitting there with an expensive brick for a month.

</comment><comment><USER89> Honest question: who gives a fuck?</comment>


Subway Implements New Security System That Sprays DNA on Robbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.eater.com/2015/5/11/8588307/subway-implements-new-security-system-that-sprays-dna-on-robbers

<comment><USER2> > _That person is then marked, like Hester Prynne_

Seems like kind of a niche reference; are enough people familiar enough with the novel to remember the protagonist's name?</comment>


Netflix to Use StackStorm for IT Automation Under Cassandra - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/09/24/netflix-to-use-stackstorm-for-it-automation-under-cassandra/ <comment><USER2> So much of the software world is turning opensource... and that's a good thing</comment>


Screwed up incentives in higher education - <AUTHOR> http://www.tophatmonocle.com/blog/2010/11/27/screwed-incentives-education/

<comment><USER2> _"The system is broken in the sense that teaching is at best a low priority, and that universities have essentially become testing centres. Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque. That's about it from the student's perspectives on the academic side of it."_

Spoken like a person who has never actually taught a college course. There's a _tremendous_ amount of work involved, from both students and faculty. Most students go to class, and most professors give lectures that aren't directly taken from the book. So can we please stop elevating the cartoon, straw-man portrayals of the incompetent lecturer and the lazy student? Please?

If this blog post weren't written by the CEO of a company that's trying to sell enhancement software to universities, I'd dismiss it as anti-intellectual trolling. I'm also trying hard not to dismiss it as the griping of a guy who's finding resistance selling his product to a somewhat conservative clientele (university staff), and interpreting their reluctance as the behavior of dinosaurs (rather than a sensible reaction to the generations of educational snake-oil salesmen who have come before).

Instead, I'll give the benefit of the doubt: there are certainly lazy, incompetent professors. There are also lazy students that have no business being in college. But if your only contact with the university system comes from when you're trying to sell or beta-test your products in the classroom...well, you don't have a very representative sample from which to draw conclusions.

<comment><USER3> Where does the article accuse professors of being lazy or incompetent? where does it say (or imply) that teaching a course isn't a huge amount of work?

So I take it you disagree with the central thesis that tuition is absurdly high for the value that students get?

Edit: from the article "There are many phenomenal teachers at universities. We at Top Hat Monocle have had the privilege to work with some of them. They should be treated like rock stars and paid accordingly - they generate literally millions in revenue for the universities and don't get nearly the recognition they deserve. They do their work out of benevolence and dedication to a job they love, mostly in spite of the system they operate in."

<comment><USER2> _"Where does the article accuse professors of being lazy or incompetent?"_

About five paragraphs in, by my count:

 _"what do students actually get for their money? They get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck. The classroom environment hasn't changed in nearly a century. If you brought someone from 1940 into today's classroom they'd hardly notice a difference, except perhaps for the fancier projector and massively increased class size. This is not due to lack of technology or lack of tools being available."_

You're calling out the system for being outdated and broken. Just because you don't _explicitly say_ that _"most professors are lazy and incompetent (except for the ones I like)"_ doesn't mean that you can fling these sorts of casual, rhetorical stones without having to embrace the conclusion.

<comment><USER4> > You're calling out the system for being outdated and broken. Just because > you don't explicitly say that "most professors are lazy and incompetent > (except for the ones I like)"

The system can be broken without attaching any blame to the workers in the system.

The real problem is of course the high-up administrators and board. The purpose of a university is not education. The purpose is to funnel money via inflated salaries and unneeded construction jobs to those that are politically well-connected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who recently graduated with a bachelor's at a large state university, I find that this article exaggerates most of its points.

"Now, what do students get for their money? they[sic] get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck."

This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the university was required to take. Above the sophomore level, all classes were, at an absolute maximum, 35 people. Even the large lecture classes were closer to half what the author states.

"Students spend 2 weeks a term cramming for exams (or writing term papers,) get their sticker at the end of 4 years, and the university cashes a fat cheque."

Anyone doing this has little reason to be in school. Admittedly, some classes are easy and sufficiently unrelated to your career goals that they can be safely ignored. Once you get past those courses, though, if you can still cram and come out with a respectable grade, you've made a terrible choice for you degree program and university. Cramming just doesn't cut it when you're in a senior level math course and supposed to derive the heat and wave equation on an exam by justifying the simplifications necessary to get a clean mathematical model. You won't even get that far if you crammed in your Calculus 3 course and have no idea how to deal with multivariable derivatives and integrals. Nor will you have any idea about how such an equation is supposed to work if you failed to learn anything in your differential equations course.

The picture of the university described in the article is flawed for all but the lowest performing students. If people want to actually learn something, they can. If they don't, that's unfortunate; they probably won't and can, instead, attempt to game the system (i.e. cram for tests) to maintain their GPA. Giving these people better teachers won't help them because they don't care about learning.

The real issue seems to be that too many people are going to college for the wrong reasons. If you have no aspirations of learning what a college attempts to teach, then don't go. There should be no expectation that merely attending college will cause you to learn something.

<comment><USER6> > This happened only in the entry level courses that everyone at the > university was required to take.

Why does this change the conclusion?

One could argue that students new to a topic need more one-on-one instruction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _If higher education didn't exist in it's current form..._

"Its" not "it's." If you want academics to read your writing, it had better not have grammar or punctuation errors. This is not rocket surgery.

<comment><USER7> Also, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between "too" and "to." I like his thesis, but the grammar needs work.

P.S. I've got the karma to burn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article suggested decoupling research and teaching. That might be worth doing, but it's already done. There are plenty of schools that don't do research, and don't have graduate programs. I think the more radical and effective thing to do would be to decouple teaching from certification.

</comment><comment><USER8> There is one issue no one ever seems to talk about. The one thing that really really screws up incentives at universities is the money the students have to pay. If students have to pay for individual courses, they will try to minimize the amount of courses they have to take. They will try to get in cheap courses. They will try to get in cheap universities. They will optimize their education for Bang For The Buck. They will optimize for bad teaching.

Look at European universities. For students, they are free. Or ridiculously cheap (like $500 per semester). Actually, last year, students in Germany were fed up with the bad quality if teaching. Guess what they did? They went on strike! They blocked rooms and prevented courses from happening. Without students, universities can't exist. So, professors and management had to act. And teaching improved.

I think you will agree that something like this is completely and utterly impossible in the US. If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the money he had put in that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against bad teaching. If students pay huge amounts of money for each course and semester, they will try to get cheap education at a big-name place. I guess in the choice between cheap, big-name and good, you can pick any two. Hence, there is little incentive to get good education.

Furthermore, if courses are free, students can freely choose which courses to take. Hence they try to get the best teaching they can get. If that means they take a few extra semesters, so be it. If that means that they actually change universities or even curriculums, no problem. You see, by not paying (much) for universities, students optimize for quality.

<comment><USER9> >If a student was going to strike, he would waste all the money he had put in that semester. Hence, there is no way to protest against bad teaching.

Too true.

There's a pretty big strike movement growing in the California school system. Strikes aren't continuous, but there has been a few rather large actions.

It doesn't seem to be working - tuition has increased at UCs 42.56% over the last year alone. (Last ~Nov, a 32% increase in tuition was approved by the UC Regents; this year, another 8% this month.) Despite the massive tuition increases, classes and professors - and in some cases entire departments - continue to face the chopping block.

Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a plurality of student support - most students I've talked with are against the protests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This problem is caused by government funding of education. If students and/or parents were paying the tab or at least everything over the bare minimum , there'd be a laser focus on value. But with other people picking up everything over a certain amount, there's no need to scrimp on amenities or prestige instead of getting the most education for the money.

Perverse incentives? Absolutely. But thats what government does best. It perverts incentives. It hides the costs and makes a big show of benefits, even ones that don't truly matter.

<comment><USER11> Government funding per student has been decreasing and the amenities have been increasing.

<comment><USER10> damn. all things are supposed to happen properly in sequence. what could possibly have gone wrong. maybe you can share your data and we'll figure it out

<comment><USER11> My theory is that increases in tuition aren't immediately felt by students because we've come to a point where everyone is comfortable getting a student loan. Since you don't start paying on the loan right away the effect of the borrowing isn't immediately felt. This makes students more amenable to a frame of mind of just accepting tuition increases.

<comment><USER10> It could also be that it takes years to build new athletic centers and research centers and less time for bubbles to pop and tax bases to evaporate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Haha, oh top-hat. Going off topic here a bit (the points in the post itself are more or less sound).

Top-hat monocle is a web-based quiz/online tutorial system. You can put flash based demos, and random quizzes on it, and students can answer on their laptops, or text in the answers from their phones.

We got use to top-hat monocle for one of our courses last term. It was a joke (took forever for the demos to load... flash...). Beyond the usual 'a tool can only make a poor user screw up even with ever greater speed', we had to pay to get our license... to what was then beta software. They admitted to us that 'they weren't done testing' and that we were going to be the last group to 'get to try' the system before it went into wide release.

I won't argue about the effectiveness of the system (it is a tool, whose effectiveness depends on its user), but paying to be part of the final set of testers definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

<comment><USER13> I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle.

Were you in the UW System Design course last term? We had a couple of courses that had issues with monocleCAT, and we learnt a lot from them.

One of the biggest issues that caught us by surprise was the effect a room full of connected students can have on a lower-quality access point. We learnt from that, and totally rewrote our synchronization code to be much more robust and efficient with bandwidth (something I'd love to write a post about some time in the future).

We used to be hosted on Google App Engine, and we suffered greatly from dowtime issues that plagued every App Engine site all throughout the term. We learned from that and switched to Amazon EC2, where we've built a backend that automatically scales up to thousands of simulatanous connections.

We discovered that while most users have laptops or netbooks, few users like lugging them to every class. We learned from that and introduced iPhone and Android applications, as well as enhancing our SMS submission system to send back confirmation messages (with an easy opt-out process) for students on legacy phones.

We discovered that some professors had teaching styles that didn't take advantage of our software, so we've started being more agressive in our professor approval process, as well as introduced training sessions to help professors get a feel for how to incorproate the system in their lectures.

The biggest lesson we've learned is to find early adopters that are willing to work with you to improve your product, and to build strong relationships with them. Our product has improved monumentally in the last few months thanks to their support.

We've signed on a number of new professors in the Engineering department at the University of Waterloo, so it's quite likely you'll be using monocleCAT again next term. In recognition of the issues some students experienced last term, we'll be giving vouchers for a free term to students in the courses that had serious issues (you'll probably be seeing yours in the mail in a few weeks).

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

EDIT: when I say we had a couple bad courses... the System Design course was the one that really had issues (hence my guess).

<comment><USER12> Yes I was in that class. Thank you for responding.

I understand the the need for early adopters and feedback. I have nothing against your project in principle, and I wish you the best. And I appreciate all the effort you've put into improving the product.

Honestly, I would have no problem with putting up with many of the problems we ran into, just that we paid for it. Part of the problem was that it wasn't explicitly made clear that it was 'beta' software until most of the class had purchased their licenses. Seriously, it completely coloured the way we saw any short comings in Top Hat. A lot of us felt that we were tricked/cheated out and generated a lot of unnecessary ill will. You probably heard through the grapevines some of the rumblings from the class regarding possible financial transactions between your company and our professor.

It wasn't pretty.

On the side, one of the implementation problems that we ran into a lot in tutorials when we ran quizzes was that since we all had laptops, we all had msn open. Which meant that for ~60% of the class, it was just a matter of getting added to an msn convo, and grabbing the answer. I don't really believe there's much of a technical solution that you can implement. In fact, for my class, more than half of the class who actually showed up to tutorial had their laptops there (part of this had to do with our class schedules).

I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place.

And much appreciation for the voucher. After reading this, I'll definitely try to look at Top Hat with fresh eyes (and enjoying demos that load on time!). Thanks!

<comment><USER14> _I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place._

That's a good point. I occasionally get texts that my GF sent eight to twelve hours earlier... literally enough time to have come from Voyager 2. Confirmation messages are absolutely mandatory in any text-messaging application that matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So the article talks about undergrads getting screwed out of a good education. What about grad students. Whereas undergrads are coached to write tests we're coached to publish. Am I learning yet?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but the point of grad school is to do research. I understand why grad school tuition may go towards paying for research labs and publishing papers.

Also, grad students have funding - so tuition is more like an overhead fee on the funding provided by grants and private research partners. Grad courses are also typically seminars, with no more than 10-15 students per course where you get to work one-on-one with the professor. Not to mention that profs tend to actually like teaching grad courses.

Grad school makes sense to me, conceptually at least. Undergrad tuition and the whole system is just insane. It's all basically diploma mills.

<comment><USER4> > Also, grad students have funding

In the hard sciences, yes. Much less so in other fields.

<comment><USER16> Tell me about it. My boyfriend is in hospitality management, I'm in mathematics. Whereas I pull in enough to live comfortably in a single bedroom apartment downtown, he's on financial aid and living with two roommates on the outskirts.

It blew my mind when I found out.

<comment><USER17> What use would the government have funding market research for hotels? It's blatantly vocational, with even fewer pretenses to academics than MBA programs.

At least english majors don't have a profit motive!

<comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitality_management_studies>

Without getting into specifics, my bf's research deals with epidemiology and things related to improving public health in the hospitality/tourism industry. Sure, at the undergrad level it's mostly vocational, but it's not like there's no public benefit to full-fledged academic research in this area.

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that his work will probably have a greater positive net effect on society than mine will. But since math is a "real science", I make the "big bucks" (relative to graduate students, i.e., two steps above ramen-profitable).

<comment><USER17> What's keeping him from working primarily in Public Health and getting NSF grants? Does he need access to industry for his research?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _> They get herded in like cattle into 500 person classrooms to have someone read the textbook to them with the help of a powerpoint slide deck._

How does leasing them tools to herd more efficiently do anything but amplify the screwed up incentives further?

You could aspire to be the Temple Grandin of higher ed reform, but that doesn't do anything to fix the underlying problem — it only makes it easier to ignore.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm 10 years out of state school (in Calif.) and only recall a handful of classes with over 100 students, with the max being around 300 (general psych I think).

Has there really been an increase in large classes as the author states?

<comment><USER16> I've been at a state school in Indiana for the past two years, and our largest class (in the math department) is around 150 students.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 250 hours of education in 500 person classrooms? I get 1000+ hours of _lectures_ in 10-20 person classrooms.

<comment><USER20> That's 250 hours per term (4 months).

I'm fairly certain you don't spend 1000+ hours in lectures out of the ~2880 hours in four months.

<comment><USER19> Oh, right I thought per year. I checked and I have about 300 hours of lectures per term, in 10-20 (say 20) person classes. This costs the government and me combined about €10000 per year. That's about

        300/180*500/20*24000/10000 = 100x

better value for money than what he's sketching in his blog post.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 2048 Game of Thrones Edition - <AUTHOR> http://lukeweil.github.io/game-of-thrones-2048/

<comment><USER2> ahah very funny!! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I was bored, waiting for the new episode to come out, so I decided to make this.</comment></comment>


Improved commenting with Markdown - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2097-improved-commenting-with-markdown <comment><USER3> Seems that Github is recognizing that more and more non-dev types are interacting with Github in various ways and are providing tools to help them out.

I suppose it's fine, and certainly easier than teaching newbies Github- flavored markdown.

One complaint: Using the aA icon to hide the different headers menu. Headers are not just "bigger text" as the icon indicates. They should use a different icon that indicates its for headers and has nothing directly to do with font- size.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is this why GitHub unicorned for a bit yesterday? I'm looking forward to the engineering blog post talking about what went wrong and how they fixed it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Disappointed that Github still haven't responded to the issues raised in the open letter a few weeks ago.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's pure arrogance! Time to reconsider GitLab or Bitbucket!

<comment><USER7> Not responding to group shaming isn't arrogance.

<comment><USER6> It wasn't shaming, it was a voice of desperation! GitHub is an arrogant bunch. And I'm not saying this only because of the "Dear GitHub"!

<comment><USER8> Writing a public letter to a business (of which you are not a customer) as if your problems are theirs to fix, is one of the most textbook example of "exaggerated sense of one's own importance" that I could possibly imagine. Those people were, and are, clearly not very important to Github at all.

<comment><USER6> Well, those people _are_ very important. If GitHub was a platform only of paid customers without the plethora of open-source projects by non-payings customers (which are important customers still even if they don't directly contribute to the bottom line), it wouldn't have a commercial success in this magnitude either.

Anyway, it's an observation, I don't have data to back it up, but I see a lot of new projects actually starting with Bitbucket these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Power users can remove it by putting this in their user style:

        .toolbar-commenting{display:none !important;}

Use with e.g. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe)

<comment><USER10> Power users? how is disabling few icons empowering anyone? The space is still there, blank and wasted. Do you scratch all the button/knob markings off in your car because you are a power driver?

<comment><USER11> Power users, power buttons, power driving, power washing, power living. To each their own. If he wants to remove buttons, so be it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Have feedback on this post? Let @github know on Twitter.

This probably isn't new, but I just noticed it. For shame.

</comment><comment><USER13> Using github regularly was what got me to learn markdown and I'm very grateful as I've found it useful in lots of different places. I'm not convinced this change was really worth doing, especially if it was at the expense of features people have been asking for.

<comment><USER14> I don't think that the belief that feature X was created at the expense of feature Y is a reasonable assumption. Who knows how this feature came about? It could have been a Githubber's 20% project, or weekend hack project, or largely down to a 3rd party library.

<comment><USER13> I didn't assume it was, I hoped it wasn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems much harder to implement than a comment rating system so we don't see +1 spam.

<comment><USER16> I doubt that. This update is entirely client-side, while a rating system requires data management server-side in addition to the user interface elements.

That doesn't mean ratings are difficult, just more difficult than this.

Besides, the developers in place to build this update may not overlap at all with the developers in place to implement new rating functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know a similar component/library to do something like this on your own website. Most I've seen try to build a full Word-like editor, without the markdown aspect?

<comment><USER18> I've not used it myself (yet), but Prose Mirror ([http://prosemirror.net/](http://prosemirror.net/)) is the one I have bookmarked and has been featured here on HN in the past and seems to be very full featured and from the demos it seems flexible everything from the full WYSIWYG-style editor that some users may want to this sort of simple toolbar over a Markdown field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fugly and distracting!

<comment><USER6> Why the downvotes?! Okay, I use some strong language, because while Bitbucket is introducing Projects [0], GitHub is working on bells and whistles! In the time of Medium.com, we know there are better ways to allow formatting controls!

I understand GitHub is in desperation to go beyond programmers, but this is a ridiculous expansion goal!

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10950730)

<comment><USER19> > Why the downvotes?!

Probably because of the needless profanity and lack of an explanation for your statement (my best guess, I did not downvote you).

> bells and whistles

These kind of features are completely unnecessary for developers, but are useful for the less tech-savvy team members. The markup is not hidden, so it provides a way to learn some basic MarkDown (good!). That in turn improves communication, which improves your product.

Beware of the fallacy of believing that because someone finds the time to polish their product or add seemingly simple features, they don't invest resources in more complex features or research and development. These are not mutually exclusive goals, even though resources are by definition limited.

<comment><USER6> It's a pipe dream - only technical people use GitHub and this is just a distraction. Instead of trying to keep their core audience in a world with a growing number of alternatives, they are trying to do the impossible - <USER2> this a Google Drive. That's why I on purpose used "fugly", because I'm tired of relying so much on unreliable people. But this will change.

<comment><USER20> Many technical companies use GitHub, and many employees of same are not particularly technical.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

<comment><USER6> Any data to back your bold statement with?

<comment><USER21> Where was your data to back up when you said "only technical people" use GitHub?

<comment><USER6> Where's your data to back your unpopular statement? Mine is the obvious conclusion based on wide observation since the early days of GitHub till now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>