What the Heck is Happening to Windows? - <AUTHOR> http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/what-heck-happening-windows <comment><USER3> "Windows was designed by a committee. The Mac, by contrast, often feels like it was designed by a single person."

The Mac was apparently designed by a person I can't freakin' stand. I recently spent a year with an OSX laptop, and it was a merciful relief when I was finally able to get the hell out of iLand. My first love is KDE because it _bows_ to my will like nothing else, as a good window-manager/OS _should_. Win8 is also pretty malleable, even though it's not so good for those lacking the chops to bend it to their will. OSX, by comparison, is a constant freakin' PITA if you don't happen to be the "single person" it was designed by and for.

This might be a bit of a rant but I'm sick of people ragging on Windows for its default settings. Windows is eminently _customizable_. If you aren't a complete n00b you can bend Windows to suit yourself far more easily than OSX. KDE absolutely spanks them both, but still... I would wholeheartedly recommend OSX or iOS to my grandmother, because she's not so good at customizing things. This blog is aimed at people who probably aren't running their OS on 99% default settings. Customizability matters, and Windows _fucking_ _owns_ OSX in that respect.

<comment><USER4> Developers live in Terminal and text editors, and regular people don't care about customization? There's a reason why Linux on the desktop didn't pan out. People don't want choice. They want to be told what to do and get on with their life.

<comment><USER5> > They want to be told what to do.

Why degrade people like that? You sound like those hard-core Android fanbois that never misses a chance to tell you they think iPhone users are sheep. :-(

No, they want the software and options to be thought through before released.

Why have 20 options for 100% of the users, when 16 good defaults and 4 options is the better way for 90+% of the users? In OS X, I bet most of those 16 options can be changed using a terminal command.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately some of the defaults do not seem to have been thought through and cannot be changed from the terminal. For instance, fat-fingering the button right above backspace will pause your music and make you log back in to keep doing whatever you were doing, and full screening YouTube videos will sometimes trigger a soul-crushungly long transition to the needless removal of all the contents of your other monitors.

<comment><USER7> Ok, the lack of power button options is silly, as is the location for the said button. But there is a "fix" for it: [http://binchewer.org/blog/index.php?id=1](http://binchewer.org/blog/index.php?id=1)

Live patching if not the best thing in the world, but it works.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for pointing this out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem with windows 8 is that from the start it wasn't designed to solve anyone's problems except Microsoft's. Windows 7 appeal was obvious: a modern version of windows that doesn't suck (ie: not vista). Windows 8 is supposed to fuse desktop and mobile, but, that is a problem for Microsoft, not their customers, outside of Redmond nobody needs that

<comment><USER9> Indeed, Microsoft seems to have this belief that we must have the same look and feel across our PCs, laptops, tablets, and phones. That is obviously the answer because, hey, it worked for Apple, right?

There's only a handful of people I've spoken to that _like_ Windows 8 and hardly anyone seems to share Microsoft's belief (above).

Meanwhile, Canonical has came along and pretty much came to the same conclusion as Microsoft -- that a common experience across all of one's devices is the way forward. And, just like Microsoft, they apparently fail to realize that nobody wants this but them.

<comment><USER7> > That is obviously the answer because, hey, it worked for Apple, right?

The fact is, it really didn't work for Apple. Short of a few common design choices, iOS and OSX are very different, and for a good reason. I am not sure why it's not obvious to people. Mouse or keyboard driven UI can be much smaller and tighter, with a lot less chrome, to allow more room for data. Touch UI has to be chunkier by default. The simple truth is Metro UI works amazing on a touch device, I love it. Windows 7 works just fine on PC. What Microsoft really needed is 2 separate operating systems, just like apple. The Windows line could have been updated with a fresh skin, more stability improvements, and some core new features here and there. The Metro OS could have been a separate OS for the Phone, Tablet, and TV markets. Instead Microsoft now has 4 incompatible OS lines which all function very different, but look identical, only adding to the confusion:

1\. Windows 8 - For PCs, Tablets, and God knows what else,

2\. Windows RT - For Tablets which are not as nice as the Windows 8 tablets but can run some of the same software, but not all of it, and some apps which work on the RT actually do not run on Windows 8 tablets, and, so ..... yeah.

3\. Windows Phone 8 - Exclusively for phones. For convenience, incompatible with Windows Phone 7 and 7.5.

4\. XBox OS - Runs only on XBox, looks like Windows 8, but works very different.

So, instead of 2 visually distinct operating systems, Microsoft now has 4 visually similar operating systems. I can see their logic, they wanted to leverage their huge PC instal base to drag some users to their Tablet and Phone products. Much like Apple is using iPods to sell people on iPhones and iPads, and perhaps later, Macs. But the problem is, they are not really achieving that goal, while pissing of their core PC customers.

<comment><USER10> Or Microsoft could have the same Operating System but different GUIs.

Remember that Operating System != GUI.

<comment><AUTHOR> But that's what didn't work with Windows 8. For majority of consumers UI _is_ operating system. Hence the confusion with difference between Windows RT and Windows 8. Hence the perception that Windows 8 has two isolated operating systems in it.

<comment><USER7> I think what he means is more like iOS and OSX. Both run a very similar operating system but completely different UI. The best approach would be to have a common core with Windows and Metro interfaces, but separate them. Desktops and Laptops run Windows UI. Cellphones, Tablets, and TVs run Metro UI. This way you can maintain backwards compatibility on Windows side but allow the Metro side to be all new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Windows 8 is everything wrong with Microsoft Corporation as an organization and how they go about developing product. I blame it on personas. When you have designers, PMs and devs creating products for imaginary people instead making something they'd be proud to use themselves, you're going to have problems. It's fine to develop products and features based on market research, user studies and metrics, but at the end of the day it should pass the "will I use it at home" test. Otherwise you'll have a company full of people that go home and use iPhones, Macs and Google Chrome.

The only group at MS I see right now making products for real people is Azure. They're actually developing features to remove friction and make its customer more productive and happier—even if it means supporting Linux, Git and Ruby.

<comment><USER11> Dog fooding is heavily encouraged within Microsoft and heavily practiced (source: Microsoft employee). Whatever you think is wrong or went wrong, its not because none of us used it. The criticism in the article, if I understand it correctly, is that Microsoft is trying to please too many people.

<comment><USER12> I currently work with Microsoft and what you're doing isn't really "dog fooding" as I understand it. Dog fooding should mean that people are making a product that they themselves would _want_ to use, to scratch an itch they actually feel.

What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is poisoning oneself. Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't good.

<comment><USER13> > Microsofties carry Windows phones around... and hate it. Openly. This isn't > good.

Switched from my Android to WP, loving 95% of it, have a few gripes, but far less than on Android.

For one thing, my phone no longer leaks memory. My start screen doesn't randomly take 10+ seconds to load up. My dialer doesn't occasionally decide to just screw it and not appear.

(I had those same problems across 2 different android handsets, a 2.3 model from Motorola, and a 4.2 model from Samsung)

Couple features are annoying. Too many steps to turn off GPS is one, I liked having a quick pull down drawer. But that is a minor nitpick. Compared to swearing at my phone every single day for being a bloody POS like I was doing with Android? WP is a great experience!

> What Microsoft does is "dog fooding at gunpoint" even if the result is > poisoning oneself.

I also disagree with this, my group uses a variety of handsets, WP, iOS and Android.

<comment><USER14> _Switched from my Android to WP_

If only there were a third mobile OS for you to try, one that's actually well- designed, one that even many Google employees use ...

<comment><USER13> > one that's actually well-designed

Have you tried Windows Phone? I'm a bit biased, I spent 3 years working on it, but I'll say that of the current crop of mobile OSs out there, it is by far the best designed.

From the underlying infrastructure used by the development team (one of the few teams at Microsoft I've ever been on that really believes every daily build should be stable and reliable, and has the test infrastructure to ensure it[0]) to the lovely UI to the outstanding performance requirements the team places on themselves.

Back when I was on the WP team, a list of user frustration levels with wait times was widely disseminated. It was something like " 50ms unnoticeable to user, 100ms+, somewhat noticeable pause or skip, 250ms, interface begins to feel slow, 500ms+, user satisfaction begins to drop, 5s+, users become overly irritated" with a lot more detail and gradations of course.

The team's internal requirements was that all UI elements in the OS respond in less than 1 second, and even then, you'd better have a damn good excuse as to why what you were doing took a whole second!

The UI flies. Animations are smooth and beautiful. Anything that does not please or delight the user _does not get into the code base_.

The bar in Windows Phone is not "do we have this feature", the bar is "does this feature make the user happy?"

All of this is of course not spoken as an MS employee. I'm just a lowly dev, albeit one now in charge of a UI dev team, and I can tell you that our product will sure as hell meet the same bar of smooth beautiful performance that Windows Phone does. It is damn well going to be a matter of pride if nothing else, and the entire management chain here is behind me on that!

[0] The Windows Phone division has over 4000 people in it, although I am not sure how many of them are devs. Let's say 500 or so devs total (likely an underestimate!) checking in code to what is a _huge_ code base. Now imagine every single day, you can take the code that is committed and, without worry, put it on your phone and expect it to _work_. Daily's aren't always 100% stable, but they are dog-foodable and usable. One thing I miss about working there is coming in every morning and flashing the latest code to my phone and seeing the incremental progress that the team made on a daily basis.

Of course this ignores that many teams work off of branches which are then tested and integrated. The overall engineering effort to keep that platform moving is huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those thinking "oh, another piece of Microsoft bashing from some Apple / Google / Linux fan" (my own initial thought), look at the byline.

Paul Thurrott's been covering Microsoft, almost always positively, for most of (if not more than) two decades. He's been labeled one of the "notorious Microsoft shills" by Daniel Eran Dilger ([http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/01/18/dan-lyons-paul- thur...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/01/18/dan-lyons-paul-thurrott-the- fake-and-the-phony/)) -- and that's not far from my own impressions of Thurrott based on some of his earlier Linux commentary.

So -- yeah, the rats are, if not fleeing the ship, talking loudly about its soundness.

<comment><USER16> Thurrott has been bizarrely bipolar about Microsoft for a very long time. He is pro-MS "on average" but will careen wildly between unwarranted hyperbolic praise and unwarranted hyperbolic invective. Sometimes about the exact same things within the span of a week or two.

<comment><USER17> It's even in this article. The first sentence is largely at odds with the tone of the rest of the article: "I defended windows 8 from the outset" then "it's been a massive cockup from the outset". There seems to be little self- reflection that _all the other_ commentators were right, and Thurrot was wrong.

The advice in the final paragraphs is just plain wrong as well. It should be "Don't use one OS GUI for two different user paradigms", not "abandon an entire market segment". Windows needs to go back to a traditional desktop, and Windows Mobile should continue on as is.

<comment><USER18> Given the rise of Nadella, I'm sure the new lockdown/home platform of Microsoft is going to be their cloud services.

Following the Google/Apple model of having cloud profiles maintain/inform/manage (depending on home/gaming/work platforms) all the Microsoft devices seems the best approach.

It's also what people want - they want unified logins (note: plural, Google!) so that they can get on with their work/personal/gaming needs and ensure that new devices that are platform compliant "just work" with minimal/no config.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Microsoft is in the same place with Windows 8.x that it was with Windows 2.x: trying to migrate its userbase onto a new computing paradigm (GUI/mobile touch apps) while still showing support for the old paradigm (DOS/traditional GUI). Yes, it's going to be a force fit. In part because the paradigms are so different, and in part because it's Microsoft and they don't know how to do anything with any grace, at least at first.

But eventually they'll get it kinda-sorta right. And when they do, they'll crush the competition. Especially when tablets and convertibles start to supplant traditional laptops as daily driver devices. Apple probably hasn't much to fear. The real loser here is Android. A light, cheap, powerful device that can run full Windows like the Dell Venue 8 Pro has insane added value above the equivalent Android device.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps the problem is that the new paradigm is not so clearly superior to the old one. GUIs have huge advantages over text based computers for productivity. Does touch actually have that many advantages over a mouse and keyboard for someone sitting at a desk? I'd probably choose a touchscreen over a laptop touchpad, but I'd definitely choose a mouse over a touchscreen for most of the actual work I do.

<comment><USER21> > GUIs have huge advantages over text based computers for productivity.

Then why prefer many programmers to work using the command line for many tasks? ;-)

<comment><USER20> I think if you're doing the same task a lot then a command line based workflow can be very productive. However, the big advantages GUIs have is that they allow the discovery of new functions. Reading the man page for a command line application is complex and often quite confusing, while a well designed GUI will often allow you to easily find the functionality you want with a tiny bit of trial and error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just don't understand what the fuss is about.

I'm primarily a Windows user (but I run Linux on some of my devices as well). I'm also tend to be quite particular about my UIs getting things right. Saying all that, I've felt next to zero impact in moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 feels a bit snappier. Some options have been moved around a bit. That's about it.

I just don't understand all the polemicising. Especially with statements like: "The specifics of what's wrong in Windows 8 don't really matter". They matter to me, because after reading all these articles about how terrible Windows 8 is, I still can't figure out what those specifics are! I would love to be enlightened about what I've been missing (or how I've been using Windows 8 wrong).

<comment><USER23> Want one example? Fine. It's Fuck Ugly. There. There's your reason.

You said yourself you are fickle about your UI of choice. And yet you can't see how many people would be just like you but unlike you they can't stand Win8 UI? It's just like a car, the design matters about as much as the performance of the vehicle. Sure, some people look at cars as tools and don't care what they look like as long as they have 4 wheels and can get them from a to b.

But for many people, the car they buy has to have a great design. It is about as much about lifestyle as function. And the same goes for a desktop OS.

And I for one find the Metro Tile fest that is Windows 8 to be just that. Fuck Ugly. No other way to sugar coat it. And that isn't just the Metro side. Nope, also the desktop with its sharp 90 degree corners and flat 8 Bit color pallet window blinds looks horrible. Like a complete step backwards looking at how the desktop used to look under Win7. And on Win7 you could even change the themes if you wanted to something more to your liking. Good luck trying to do that on Win8.

So, add that to the fact that Win7 filled a need the consumers had and Win8 just filled a need that Microsoft had and you have ample reasons why Win8 is where it is today. Even if there are people like you who apparently can't imagine other people might have a different take on what a great UI should look like.

<comment><USER22> Sounds like you're really fishing for a reason to hate it if that's all you can come up with. Swearing for dramatic effect doesn't sure up an argument as much as you think it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Quote from the linked comments.

"The problem is that Microsoft is like a broken record. No matter what the question is their answer is always the same. Windows.

Need a phone OS? - Windows Need a Tablet OS? - Windows Need a Desktop OS? - Windows Need a Server OS? - <USER2>

Windows, Windows, Windows. It's supposed to be all things to all people. And it just doesn't work anymore. You're right, on the desktop nothing beats Windows. Even on the Server Windows is fine. But when they try to force Windows on to phones and tablets everything starts to fall apart. It isn't suited for mobile devices. It's too big, to bloated for mobile. And it's interface is terrible for mobile, but great for the desktop. So they come out with a new interface that's fine for phones but sucks on a desktop.

JUST STOP THE INSANITY.

You are exactly right. Focus Windows on productivity and the corporate market. If Microsoft feels that they have to get into mobile fine, come out with a mobile OS. But don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Leave the damn desktop alone."

In short, Windows 8 solved no real pressing problems for users - it solved - or was supposed to solve problems for Microsoft - which is to say a lack of penetration in what all the kids these days (and pundits) say is the environment of the future - mobile.

Microsoft has, and will have the enterprise and most of the desktop market locked up for the near future - for all the apps out there for whichever mobile platform, they pale in software for PC and the overall power and usability of the traditional desktop/laptop computer paradigm - and likely will for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER25> I actually like Windows 8 more than any other version. I'll never use it full time (Linux user, right now SUSE with Gnome Shell) for reasons that have nothing to do with its design, but I really like the Metro interface.

Most of the naysayers are simply unwilling to accept change, the same naysayers that whine about modern Linux DEs.

<comment><USER26> Instead of relying in random comments, It would be great to see in an actual poll, how many people hate the new Windows 8 UI. In my personal opinion, the new UI is mostly fantastic. Perhaps I find it so, because I have strong visual memory, and usually adapt to new UIs in minutes. If it were available for Linux, I would consider it for my day to day use.

It is unfortunate, how it seems that so many people resist to UI advances. Even more so, on a place like HN. This kind of stubborn rejection seems pulled from something like a geeksquad forum. Another example is Ubuntu, which has collected massive hate, on considerable less groundbreaking UI changes.

<comment><USER25> Yup. Never understood the Ubuntu Unity hate either. While I prefer Gnome Shell, Unity is still an improvement on Gnome 2, and has some very interesting features of its own (like lenses and the HUD).

<comment><USER27> I hate the new Gnome, but am more or less pleased with Win8 Metro.

Its the technicals of Win8 Metro that I can't stand however (sideloading licenses, the locked-down nature, etc. etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> While I agree that the Windows team needs a singular vision about what they want their product to be, the advice given by the author is starkly reminiscent of the strategy adopted by Blackberry when they realised consumers weren't interested in using their products any more.

For Microsoft to abandon the consumer market and solely focus on a sub-section of 'doers' would be to set in motion an unstoppable slide into obscurity, as it did with Blackberry. Increasingly people only have one device and they're not going to choose a product which is only good for 50% of what they want. This mythical group of people who only care about using products for business just doesn't exist.

What they need to do is to make the product better so that people in general like using it again. It's that simple.

<comment><USER4> Even Jobs himself used the car/truck analogy to compare OS X to iOS. I think he's right. These are separate products. One is for work, the other one is more general purpose. There will always be more cars than trucks, but there will always be a need for trucks. You're not going to be hauling manure or towing a boat in a car.

The question for MS is will they be OK with selling trucks in a car world? Will they be satisfied with how much money they would make selling only trucks to farmers and construction companies?

I say MS needs to make cars and trucks. They need to make the best trucks out there without compromises. The best cars without compromises. Not this weird car/truck hybrid.

<comment><USER28> I agree. As with most bad products and failing companies, the problem here is focus.

Microsoft need to have a vision about what products they want to create and go about making them with a singular focus on producing something which customers will love. It's not about abandoning consumer software or business software, it's about making something great, regardless of it's purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If you look at the evolution of OS X, the changes from version to version are minimal. In give or take 13 years it _changed_ relatively little. It matured over 13 years to become a (love it or hate it) polished OS. However each Windows version has been completely different from the last version. Each release XP->Vista->7->8 Microsoft demands a lot of adapting from both their power users and their 'casual' users.

I've always felt that if they would have kept polishing XP or W7, diligently building on each version, they would've had a strong OS with a strong following. Maybe they should stop trying to do a "revolutionary redesign" every new release and just stick with one approach for a couple of years?

<comment><USER7> Totally agree. Between XP and W7 they moved a ton of settings around for absolutely no reason what so ever. Now they have done it all over again. There is no reason why "Add Remove Programs" should have been renamed to "Programs and Features." I am not saying that one name is batter then the other, just saying they should pick one damn name and stick with it, and polish the rest of the OS.

<comment><USER30> The change makes sense, considering no one actually adds programs from there anymore. To be honest, I don't remember a time one actually did. Still, I do miss it, even today it kinda trips me up not being able to look at the top left hand corner of the control panel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Problem #1, where everything is starting to break down: Microsoft trying to put "Windows on everything". That may not be a huge problem if it was only the core base (although needing 16GB of space, something that's still the default for "high-end mobile devices" today, just for Windows alone, still sucks), but it gets much worse when they also want to have the "same UI on everything", which just doesn't work and never has. Even on the web, we still get to talk about "responsive design", because the same UI doesn't work on mobile devices, and it needs to be adapted for that form factor.

Problem #2: Having basically 2 operating systems in one, and _forcing_ the user to switch from one to the other, by nagging him with all sorts of bad UX elements (charms on the desktop has always been a terrible idea to me, for example, and the UI looks completely out of place, too).

Problem #3: Price. I don't know if they're "feeling" this yet or not, but I think they are. If Windows for tablets cost $90 to license, then Windows tablets are simply not competitive from the get go. Yes, you may see some $300 Windows tablet, but it usually has much worse specs and quality than a $300 Android tablet. As I said, not competitive. This may be the reason why Microsoft may exist the consumer market eventually (3-5 years from now), and focus on enterprise, where they have much more lock-in and it's a lot more profitable/unit.

<comment><USER19> I recently bought a Windows 8.1 tablet for about $250. Specs-wise it's a lot _better_ than my 2013 Nexus 7. 2 GiB RAM, a quad-core Atom, and 64 GiB of onboard storage.

And it runs full Windows.

Hell, I put VS on it and started writing C# apps with it. It's pretty nice. The two different GUIS are pretty jarring if you're running a desktop PC, but they make perfect sense with a touchscreen laptop or tablet.

The tablet game is about to change. Android may find itself crowded out of the mobile computer space.

<comment><USER31> Did it have a 1080p high-quality IPS screen, too? As I said, either the specs or the _quality_ of the specs/materials suffer, to account for the Windows license.

<comment><USER19> It has a 1280x800 high-quality IPS screen.

<comment><USER32> _Specs-wise it 's a lot better than my 2013 Nexus 7. 2 GiB RAM, a quad-core Atom, and 64 GiB of onboard storage._

Followed by

 _It has a 1280x800 high-quality IPS screen._

So spec-wise, it has more storage, but apart from that, it has the same amount of RAM, and a display completely inferior to the 2013 Nexus 7.

I don't know about you, but I would trade storage for display anytime. You can always download/stream content from the cloud, but it's hard to stream a better display.

<comment><USER19> More storage and a more powerful CPU. Those actually count for a lot. I don't actually notice the low resolution of the display unless I look hard.

<comment><USER33> I think this clearly shows that different people have different needs, and that perhaps Microsoft needs to pick a crowd.

Most 'regular' users I know care a great deal more about a great display than storage. My mom would pay a premium for the former (although perhaps she specifically would actually not care and just want an intuitive interface so she can get to her games and email).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A crazy misfeature of windows 8.1 is that the Skype user is tied to the Windows user account.

You want to use Skype on someone else's PC?

No problem, just create a new Windows user (and watch Windows crash twice in the process while the person you're supposed to call is waiting).

<comment><USER35> Or you can just install Skype for Windows Desktop. Metro makes perfect sense when you consider a tablet formfactor like Surface, it just shouldn't be used for regular computers, which is where they screwed ujp.

<comment><USER34> Thanks, I didn't know that there were several versions.

I'll install it.

Metro and explorer are completely different worlds. There are even two configurations systems and I've yet to find how to reach the standard control panel without using search.

<comment><USER36> Win+X, P

or open Explorer at "Computer". There is a big "Open Control Panel" button in the ribbon (reachable via Alt+C, C).

That being said, search brings me exactly where I want, while the control panel is not my end goal, so I didn't have to open it in quite a while (both on Win 8 and Win 7).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I thought that it was pretty well established that Windows is in an alternating cycle of good and bad versions. Everyone freaks out during the bad part of that cycle, as Microsoft takes a bunch of bold risks, many of which don't really work out, and then a few years later they prune many of the bad decisions and release something reasonably solid.

(Man, it feels weird leaving this comment as a Linux user and reformed Mac zealot)

<comment><USER4> I think this doctor has run out of regenerations. Not the same world as before.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Windows 9 (or whatever it's going to be called) will be a complete pull back into the classic desktop. By the time it ships there will be Modern UI only OS hybrid built with Office for the Modern UI finally caught up. They can all have the same underlying base OS (whatever it's going to be called) with different shells on top. But, I'm not sure how programming model is going to look like, unless they allow classic desktop Windows to run apps built for Modern UI in windowed mode (which seems to be the direction they are heading towards).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does Windows 8.1 still suck with the Classic Shell enhancement?

[http://classicshell.net/](http://classicshell.net/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Posting this with a throwaway as I don't want it to be associated with my named account.

Thurrott is full of shit. I call for him to step down and shut down winsupersite and to generally shut up. He's not a windows user -- merely a critic. This is about spinning hits than a valid critique of windows. All he is doing is damaging the company and the industry by recycling this shit over and over again.

There are those of us who use windows both for our own personal use and business use. It suits us well simply because there is nothing else with the broad scope that Microsoft offer. Windows 8, whilst not a great success, is exactly what people asked for. The tech news sites spewed how the future was tablets and closed ecosystems powered by app models ao they dived into the consumer market with exactly what people expected. Unfortunately they discovered that the consumer market (which didn't really exist) is just a bunch of fashionista journos' wet dreams and fanboys.

Now I'm a Unix guy who saw exactly the same thing happen in the 1990s when Microsoft kicked in the Unix vendors. However they did it through actually providing products people wanted and providing long support lifecycles rater than disposable trinkets and rapid change.

Give them a break and look at your 2 year life throwaway trinket phone and tell me that's what you want for the future? That's what you asked for, that's what you got.

<comment><USER40> Thurrott is one of the biggest fanboys on the internet behind the crackberry forums. For him to backpedal like this maybe says theres something seriously wrong with the execution of Windows 8?

<comment><USER41> If you don't trust his opinions on MS because his is obviously not rational when it comes to them (often biased in Microsoft's favor), why would you trust it when he abruptly changes them?

That's the problem with fanboys and people obsessed with these things, they tend to obsess with other things as well.

I usually read them with my filters set on maximum level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> _"...That's mostly business users, but even when you look at the consumers who will use Windows, that usage is almost entirely productivity related. Windows should focus on that. On getting work done. On an audience of doers. Job one should be productivity."_

Won't that imply support for legacy applications (which Windows is good at) going back some years? Hence maintenance of features required by those applications?

</comment><comment><USER38> Microsoft should start from scratch and make Windows2 Desktop, Windows2 Mobile and an OpenBSD-based Windows2 Server.

Cram thousands of users into a hall using all sorts of versions and customizations of Windows along with A/B testing, heat maps etc. to figure out the fastest and easiest way to get a thing done. This way users won't have to spend hours trying to customize their Windows (read: disable all the new stuff).

Also maybe throw a world-wide design contest to find the best suited man / woman to be responsible for a new Windows2 design.

Like they say, "perfection is achieved, not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away".

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting and apt use of Steve Jobs's truck vs. car analogy at the end:

"Maybe Windows needs to be more like GMC, the part of GM that only makes trucks (and truck-based SUVs). After all, while many people choose to use a truck for basic transportation, they're really designed and optimized for work. You know, as should be Windows."

<comment><USER4> Don't forget that Apple makes cars and trucks, _and_ they keep them separate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Microsoft should take Windows and split it in two: Desktop and Tablet. Because it's just too weird right now.

Windows 7 is a great OS and they could refine it to be even better.

On the Tablet side they should just pick the good pieces of Windows 8 and go from there.

Do one thing at a time and do it well Microsoft!

</comment><comment><USER45> At least he's not late to the party. /s

</comment><comment><USER46> It's not just Windows. Microsoft has a virus design team. Look what they did to visual studio. The new visual studio flat design (from 2012) is really awful. All caps in menu. No color in icons. Everybody hates those changes.

Don't know what they are thinking!

<comment><USER47> Well at least the VS desgin team has to listen when there's enough complaining: Visual Studio 2013 has been available for a while and it fixes all problems you list by undoing those changes.

<comment><USER32> _Visual Studio 2013 has been available for a while and it fixes all problems you list by undoing those changes._

That's not entirely true. Some things fixed, while others are not.

(CAPSY MENUS, I'm looking at you)

<comment><USER48> Of course, everything in a Microsoft product can be customised by changing or adding a registry key somewhere. The all-caps menus in Visual Studio are no exception.

<comment><USER41> [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17413001/disable-all- caps...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17413001/disable-all-caps-menu- items-in-visual-studio-2013)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Some hilarious Windows apologists on the comments over there.</comment>


Add scrolling direction observing for UIScrollView - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lightory/UIScrollView-Direction

<comment><USER2> You could also observe the scrollView's panGestureRecognizer which has a velocity property. Might make it cleaner since it already computes the direction for you.</comment>


Ask HN: What besides Craigslist is a good way to find an apartment in the Bay Area? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking on Craigslist and a few other sites Google dredged up, but can't help feeling there's a better way to go about doing this. Anybody? <comment><USER2> Yeah, bay area apartment searching is a bitch. CL is by far the best tool though, you just have to learn how to do it right.

The biggest tip is to post a 'room wanted' ad - most people will only post a room if they don't find a fit there. Make your post stand out - don't give the same boring life story that everyone does - it's not relevant for a house. Post your phone number and the times you're available. When you inspect, make sure you're prepared to write a check on the spot (and say that you can in your post).

It's easy to get desperate and take anything that is offered, but don't let desperation convince you to settle for something that will piss you off in a months time. Short term hotels are a good solution while looking for a place - you can get a small dorm-style room for around $500 per month, month-to-month rent.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you kindly, that's just the sort of tip I was hoping for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I want to know too -- I'm moving there in January.

I've been looking on housingmaps.com and using earthify.org w/ Google Maps, trying to find a place that looks like it would be a feasible commute.

I can't decided if I'd be content to just rent a room from someone with an apartment (like I've always done in Boston), or if it's better to go for a full-fledged apartment of my own.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depending on the city, look for local management companies that own multiple complexes. I'm in Palo Alto and Vittoria Management has like 10 buildings (vrent.com). They will post them on their website before posting them on Craigslist. Things go so fast on CL that's it's not even worth it.

<comment><USER5> For what it's worth, I live in a Vittoria Management apartment in Palo Alto, and I've been satisfied with their management.

<comment><USER4> Same here, except they yelled at me once for doing laundry after 10pm :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> CL is pretty definitive, although walking around and looking for signs or working your network can yield results. If you have a smart HR department they're often helpful as well.

Especially in San Francisco it's going to be brutal and pretty much a full- time job. Keep a rental resume (metrorent app, credit report, letter of reference, etc) handy and try offering to pay the move-in cost on the spot if you fall in love with a place.

It's significantly easier to find a place if you're (a) willing to share an apt (there are tons of professional people around splitting fairly nice apartments) or (b) willing to live in a professionally-managed apartment complex/tower/whatever. If you go with an apt complex in SF, avoid Skyline/CitiApartments.

</comment><comment><USER7> I used <http://www.apartmentratings.com> when I first moved here.

And based on the reviews of the apartment complexes I decided to go with something private. The best way to find that was Craigslist. I live in a cottage behind someone's house in the middle of Mountain View. The rent is reasonable, I get along great with my landlord, and it's a very comfortable situation.

It's a shame things aren't set up more like Australia. Most apartments there are all privately owned, generally between 8-40 per complex, and a far nicer overall experience.

</comment><comment><USER8> Slightly OT, but can we expand this question to the Seattle area as well?

<comment><USER9> I just moved to Seattle using Craigslist. That's how I found Stanford (<http://www.stanfordatuw.com/>). Pretty cheap and in an awesome location in the U-district. Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wrote a blog post about moving to the city a couple months back, it might be helpful to some people: <http://is.gd/9sPS>

</comment><comment><USER11> I got a copy of the Apartments For Rent magazine from a friend (I believe you can get it from ForRent.com) and found a lot of places that weren't there on Craigslist or Rent.com. It's useful to just call up the apartments directly to find out if they have anything.

</comment><comment><USER12> Kind of old school but find a local real estate agent that lists rentals or manages properties. They can give you a list of apartments that fit you needs and you won't have to spend so much time dealing with flakes on CL. Worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not living in the bay but HotPads.com seems like it would be useful anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER14> When I had to find a place, I wrote a script to alert me to new worthwhile postings.

<comment><USER15> I find an RSS reader is pretty good at this too.

<comment><USER14> I don't believe craigslist has RSS for apartment listing searches, FYI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have an apartment in SF with a room opening up in January. Email is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER17> Walk around the neighborhoods you like, look for 'for rent' signs.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I do when I'm already living in the area. In this case, it's harder - I'm in Canada - but may take a trip down just for this purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Facebook Marketplace</comment>


Cuter scooter defined by electricity, portability - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/scooter-1127.html It's energy efficient, it's clean, compact and simple, and, above all, it's very cool. <comment><USER2> The business model of inexpensive one-way rental is the really interesting part for me. Reminds me of the point-to-point "air taxi" service startup in Florida.

Apparently this has worked in Paris with bicycles? I'd love to see this with scooters or segways in NYC. It'd have to be cheaper than a cab ride, though.

<comment><USER3> We have these bicycles in my city, too, but I doubt that they are such a huge success. Might be more of a prestige/advertising thing (sponsored by the german train company). Part of the problem is that it is difficult to sign up for one, though (registration through phone). Perhaps other models are better conceived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> they actually looks pretty cool. If they can make em cheap then I would get one.

</comment><comment><USER5> I want one.</comment>


Guido van Rossum resigns as Python leader - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/759654/ <comment><USER2> Primary discussion (over 200 comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17515492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17515492)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Python creator and Benevolent Leader for Life Guido van Rossum has decided, in the wake of the difficult PEP 572 discussion, to step down from his leadership of the project. "Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be available to mentor people -- possibly more available. But I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own."

</comment><comment><USER3> Please don't editorialize titles.

</comment><comment><USER4> o.O</comment>


Dispelling the hate against PHP - <AUTHOR> http://blog.someguy123.com/dispelling-the-hate-against-php/ <comment><USER3> It took me some time using PHP to realize it wasn't as bad as its bad rep had lead me to believe.

It's old, it has been through a lot of changes, most of them great improvements (although leaving some ambiguities behind, I admit) and it's so wildly popular on the web that the amount of disastrous coding and outdated information spread is a mess to deal with and discourages a lot of people who take software development seriously.

Personal Home Pages has its original purpose stated on its name and it used to be something you wouldn't want to be endorsing on a multi billion USD web service with millions of users.

Yet, PHP has become much more than a language for adding some cool web forms, a guest book and some other dynamic content on amateur home pages uploaded to shared hosting services.

We still have a hard time taking seriously any programmer who starts saying (s)he codes on PHP. Many of them can run in circles around me and any other developer any time with their skills, and I don't think their language of choice should have any impact on the judgment we do on their abilities or the quality of the software they build.

I still prefer many other languages over PHP but now I see them as just preferences (sometimes more or less appropriate, depending on the context), not better or worse choices.

Let the kids fight over which language is the coolest, I just want to get the work done.

</comment><comment><USER4> Putting aside all the horrible choices the language designers made (hellishly inconsistent naming, no proper exception usage by the standard library functions, functions are not first-class citizens, etc etc etc), the one thing that truly makes PHP revolting are the majority of people who write PHP code. And by the way, if PHP is the only language you know, chances are -- you're one of those developers. The community is so uniquely bad, I ofter wonder if PHP's language design actually has something to do with it.

Python/Ruby community is much different.

<comment><USER5> Elitism and an unwillingness to consider the benefits of other languages or the rationale of those who use them is a problem present in many communities. Only knowing PHP is much different than refusing to know anything but PHP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You don't hate PHP because it doesn't have sexy peripheral utilities like other contemporary language hipsters do. You hate it because it's a badly designed language/runtime/standard library. And it's not getting any better although it had had ample time to do that.

</comment><comment><USER7> This has been my go-to link when trying to explain what's wrong with PHP: [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

<comment><USER8> And we would all like to thank you for your continued " I have opinion x and don't change it when confronted with new information" contribution of showing issues with the programmer and instead of the language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's something to hate in all programming languages but hate can almost be seen as a popularity metric.

<comment><USER3> You are absolutely right:

[https://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks](https://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's insecure by the language design, not from the framework itself.

When I pen test PHP custom-built sites, I almost always find a dozen high- severity security defects.

Many of the popular PHP-MySql tutorials on the web have sql injection bugs, not a good way to learn a new language.

<comment><USER5> Although, any decent framework should take care of most of those issues. It wouldn't for instance, be using the mysql functions at all, or something like md5 for hashing passwords, or not escaping user data by default (three common issues I can think of off the top of my head..)

Not saying PHP is secure by any means, but it can be implemented securely - <USER2> just isn't very often.

That said, if there is an argument to be made _for_ PHP, i'm afraid to say, I don't think the linked article does a good job of making it. While I think its suggestion that PHP has evolved beyond some of the common criticisms against it might have merit, it doesn't address that the bulk of PHP code in the wild most definitely has not.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's definitely unfortunate that PHP code in various websites across the web is designed horridly, it's also sad that we're unable to fix most things in PHP e.g. the needle-haystack problem, without destroying compatibility. HHVM has done a decent job at cleaning it up with Hacklang, but some of these legacy issues we're going to be dealing with for a long time.

PHP is evolving, many sites on the web are too. But legacy codebases are here to stay, I mean look at how many sites are still on classic ASP.

PHP was one of my first programming languages so I will defend it, the ecosystem is much cleaner than it was a few years ago, and it's still the easiest to deploy language IMO.</comment></comment></comment>


Best community websites built with Discourse - <AUTHOR>

Hi! I am about to launch a new community and I was wondering what are the best communities (no specific niche) built with Discourse? I would like to see more of the good ones so I will be able to implement on my own one.
Here are the best I know: https://meta.discourse.org www.growthtalk.co twittercommunity.com http://bbs.boingboing.net/
What others do you know and use?
THANKS <comment><USER2> Because its a good piece of software but for starting a free community you have to pay minimal 100 bugs for this software maybe this a (to hard step in) when you make ex. a gaming community with your private money.

For companys it maybe not. Why not use slack instead ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Can I really use Slack to build an actual community? How can that be done? Not sure what you meant by that. Please explain, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> See Sitepoint's community at [http://community.sitepoint.com/](http://community.sitepoint.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The last one I noticed was [http://www.Growthtalk.co](http://www.Growthtalk.co) \- which you already know..</comment>


Fish are eating lots of plastic - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-bad-news-is-that-fish-are-eating-lots-of-plastic-even-worse-they-may-like-it/2017/09/01/54159ee8-8cc6-11e7-91d5-ab4e4bb76a3a_story.html <comment><USER2> I really wish plastics were recycled/reused a lot more, because they are such ideal materials --- being rather unreactive, flexible, resilient, and (in the case of thermoplastics, which make up the bulk of this waste) easily reprocessed. Although the throwaway culture and low cost means that a lot of it doesn't, I wonder if in the future, if the prices go up in following petroleum trends, "mining" for plastics would start becoming profitable and recycling increase significantly.

I also see some parallels with CFCs --- another substance with some great properties, but which became so common and cheap that we started to use them too carelessly and caused a lot of environmental damage in the process. Hopefully, this time we'll collectively realise, and plastics won't get banned like that.

<comment><USER3> I'm sort of banking on that. I expect our landfills will be mined by junkers. There is a lot of rare earth elements, metals, and plastics that won't biodegrade very quickly. Little snake bots tunneling through could pick them all up. It's all a matter of need, we'll deplete the finite resources soon.

<comment><USER4> > I'm sort of banking on that. I expect our landfills will be mined by > junkers.

I'm sorry, but all you're doing in reality (whether you realize it or not) is finding some vague resemblance of a justification for our irresponsible culture. I would either try to do something to address the problem or just avoid trying to keep up hopes like this. It only makes people feel better about not helping without actually solving anything.

<comment><USER5> Yep that culture of "let's create more problems so we can sell more solutions" is despicable...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We buy lots of cheap plastic made of carbon oil co2 emissions. Then we throw the plastic waste into the oceans. Plastic has weak estrogen hormone disturbance in them from BPA. Then we humans eat the fish and thus gets the estrogen from BPA. This is bound to have human reproduction issues down the line.

[http://www.breastcancer.org/risk/factors/plastic](http://www.breastcancer.org/risk/factors/plastic) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A)

<comment><USER7> Children of Men/Fish

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bioaccumulation is a serious thing. I suspect increase of plastic in fish might be related to the reduction in sperm count in men.[0][1]

 _[0][https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-semen- quality...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-semen-quality/) _

_[1][http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/10/a-story-about-fish- plasti...](http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/10/a-story-about-fish-plastic- debris-and-sex/) _

<comment><USER9> Eating lower in the food chain is a practical and accessible solution.

<comment><USER10> yeah. that's certainly been the approach for reducing exposure to mercury.

but, with plastics, i wonder how significant the exposure reduction is for, say, consuming sardines, given that _the plastic particles themselves_ may be mistaken for plankton.

in other words, what percentage of a low food chain fish's or mollusk's diet is _pure plastic?_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish they would have provide a quantitative measure of something about how much fish and how much plastic has been found to have been eaten by marine life. Maybe it's in the link they give to "enormous quantities of plastic trash", but it would be nice to have a scale to the problem.

<comment><USER12> Here is some research: [https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/bitstreams/11700/retrieve](https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/bitstreams/11700/retrieve)

Page 93 has some specifics on recorded incidence of plastic ingestion among certain species.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hardly a word about reducing production and consumption.

There's no mystery where the plastic is coming from -- us. We can live without it, certainly with a lot less of it.

While we wait for legislation, at least on a personal level we can take responsibility for our externalities and reduce our personal consumption.

</comment><comment><USER14> The submission title makes the article appear less exciting than it actually is.

It's not news that fish are eating plastics. The news is that now we know they do it because apparently plastics smells good.

Can we add "Even worse, they may like it" to the submission title?

</comment><comment><USER15> How much plastic in fish flesh compared to say leaching into a bottle of water or dust from plastic clothing? Which fish are worst, where is tuna on this list? By what mechanism is fish liver function effected and will this translate to humans?

It goes without saying we should avoid dumping plastic in the sea, but we have no information how harmful fish twice per week is really.

</comment><comment><USER16> I recently began bodybuilding and have been relying on canned tuna for protein. I eat other sources, but eat at least 1 to 2 cans daily.

Is the plastic worse than the mercury?

What would be a healthy, affordable, and easy to prepare (this is very important) alternative?

Also, is canned tuna a US thing? How often do you consume canned tuna?

<comment><USER17> Consider the humble sardine: rich in protein, omega-3s, and (with bones) calcium. They're much lower in the food chain than tuna, so there's less bioaccumulation of mercury, etc. And they taste good. I like the ones in harissa (pepper) paste.

[http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+can+sardines](http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+can+sardines)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Two relevant articles - one about the amount of plastic in the Ocean, and the other about plastic-eating caterpillars (seems like they don't eat that much to be of use).

1- [https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily-...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily- chart-6)

2- [https://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/217213...](https://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21721328-escape-shopping-bag-triggers-idea-plastic-eating- caterpillars-could)

</comment><comment><USER19> The irony of the first ad I'm shown being a coffee machine with unrecyclable pods to fill it makes me both amused and sad. Sort of sums up the whole problem really.

<comment><USER20> If it's Nespresso (or a compatible system) that you were shown an ad for, the "unrecyclable" line that seems to often get repeated is actually false.

The pods _are_ recyclable, but whether they actually _get_ recycled is a legitimate concern. In Switzerland and Germany, currently about 50% of used pods are recycled, and this is growing rapidly.

Additionally, Nestle claims that the proportion of recycled aluminium (from all sources, not just used pods) in all manufactured pods now approaches 80%.

<comment><USER21> Approaching 80% of recycled aluminum is great, but remember that aluminum recycling rates in general are very good (~70%)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > This article was originally published on > [theconversation.com.]([https://theconversation.com/bait-and-switch- > anchovies-eat-pl...](https://theconversation.com/bait-and-switch-anchovies- > eat-plastic-because-it-smells-like-prey-81607))

</comment><comment><USER23> With only the info available in the article, It seems that there are some serious flaws with the design of this study. I didn't read the original article and I could be wrong but at this moment is not conclusive to me.

<comment><USER23> Ok, I found the link to the study. This is one of the things that I was looking for:

 _these behavioural responses were absent in clean plastic and control treatments_.

Much better then. Some questions remaining still.

Anchovies are preys. Is aggregation a signal of food or are they just afraid of a strange odour?.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's wrong with fish these days, They didn't do that when I was a kid.

<comment><USER25> That's because there wasn't as much plastic in the water for them to consume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have a plan, but it's taking me a bit longer than I'd hoped: [http://phoenixbureau.github.io/ReGPGP/](http://phoenixbureau.github.io/ReGPGP/)

> The only way to clean up such a huge mess is to create a system that mimics > the way life would do it. Really, if something could eat plastic there > wouldn't be quite such a bad problem. It is because no living creature can > digest plastic that it stays around and accumulates. So the solution is to > create a kind of artificial life that can eat the plastic. Robots that > replicate themselves, with a little bit of manual assistance, and collect > and convert the trash into forms that can be used by living creatures.

A little help?

<comment><USER27> That's called a bacterium.

Why not create an actual bacterium to break plastic down like everything else in the environment? It's not really that hard--high school students have done it before.

[http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-plastic- eati...](http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-plastic-eating- bacteria-20161116-story.html)

Bonus points if you can make the bacterium specific to particular kinds of plastic.

<comment><USER28> Yes.

One possible problem: if the bacteria also eat plastic in our useful devices, not yet garbadge.

<comment><USER27> You do realize that "plastic" encompasses a _lot_ of very chemically different compounds?

Breaking down a "plastic" is going to be a very specific thing because it takes a _LOT_ of energy to do so (plastics are really stable--that's why we use them).

In addition, if it's so evolutionarily advantageous to eat plastic, something would have evolved already. It's really not--plastic is very stable, and doesn't really give you anything useful when you break it down.

So, even if you created a plastic-eating grey goo, it will evolve to eat something that takes less energy very quickly.

<comment><USER28> Hm, interesting, thanks.

In this case we feed them in reward for collecting plastic. As flowers feed bees for spreading their pollen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just proves how dumb they are. Plastic doesn't have any calories or hedonistic value at all really.

</comment><comment><USER23> And also cetaceans, sea-birds and turtles.

<comment><USER30> I was watching a documentary, that proposed Humans do as well, since we end up consuming some of the fish that eat that stuff.

<comment><USER31> That's exactly what article is talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Prediction: evolution will solve what humans are incapable of. That means species of fish evolving that specializes in eating plastic. Kinda makes sense. While plastic isn't bio-degradeable in the normal sense, perhaps the digestive system of a specialized fish will succeed. After all there is an abundance.

<comment><USER33> The evolutionary pressure to cause a mutated, plastic-eating fish to outcompete non-plastic-eating fish would suggest that there would be areas where plastic was more abundant that the other things (plankton, mostly) that fish normally feed on, i.e. other fish would be at a disadvantage because they couldn't process plastic. That's a pretty dire scenario for humans.

<comment><USER34> Not necessarily. A lot of the flora and fauna in the New World developed somewhat independently from that in the old one. So we might have these new species evolve in regions of the oceans where the plastic is more abundant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Maybe toxic fish could curb overfishing.

<comment><USER36> I've never felt better about having a lifelong dislike of fish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Let's be honest about the plastic in the oceans: It is not first world countries causing most of the problem. Ships do drop their trash in the ocean, that needs to stop, and we're all guilty to some degree, but if you want to stop the worst of the pollution you have to go to the Far East, Latin America, and Africa.

<comment><USER38> Actually that's not correct. The first world consumer society demands and consumes a lot of products - products made with plastic, packed in plastic, handed out in plastic bags, bottled in plastic, etc.

We buy, then toss (trash bin, recycle bin, or on the ground) the packaging and even old/broken bits we no longer need.

Certainly the developing world needs some education and behavior changes to limit their impact, but we have much responsibility ourselves.

And our trash/recycling is often shipped to their lands - then stored, dumped, or otherwise "recycled" poorly. Weather events or just poor planning allow some of that waste to end up in water systems.</comment></comment>


Readable Lisp S-expressions Project - <AUTHOR> http://readable.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> This is the response anybody who tries to make s-expressions "more readable" will get from lispers: don't bother. It didn't work in the 60's, _why_ would it work now?

Parens aren't unreadable, not like a sigil and punctuation heavy language, and on top of actually being reasonably readable, they are also extremely easy to edit with something like paredit in emacs and vim. So reasonable readability _and_ extremely easy editing are working against you, also making the code easy to parse gives you not one, but three reasons not to waste time on such ideas.

Now, let's look at the reasoning this page gives _for_ this endeavor(from <http://sourceforge.net/p/readable/wiki/Problem/>):

"Many people find Lisp's s-expressions hard to read as a programming notation, and thus reject them both."

And many find them perfectly readable.

"As noted below, even Lisp luminary Paul Graham agrees that Lisp notations have readability problems!"

The page lists several quotes from various people. Interestingly, the two quotes from PG aren't good very good support. The first one talks about mathematical expressions, but I tend not to write many of those in my code, so it is a minor problem at best. And there are macros that let you write infix math in Common Lisp, surely there exist equivalents for scheme and clojure.

The second doesn't even talk about lisp, but about code readability in general:

"When you program, you spend more time reading code than writing it... a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to a sculptor."

Although I do agree with this quote, I don't believe it applies to lisp, all of the readability problems I have with lisp code have to do with bad naming, bad indentation(something parens actually _help_ with, because the editor can indent your code automatically, since it is easy to parse) and really, nothing unique to lisp.

"I have more faith that you could convince the world to use esperanto than [to use] prefix notation." By Paul Prescod

function(argument1,argument2) is not prefix? Sure Object.method(args) is infix, but in general, programmers use prefix all the time. Command lines are prefix, nobody writes "filename copyfile /destination/directory" in the shell. Bullshit argument.

"Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in." A Larry Wall quote in an argument about readability, this one might actually work in my favor :)

"After 13 years of doing Lisp and 3 or 4 years of Python, I agree: I prefer writing Lisp, but Python is easier to read." By John Wiseman

I agree, Python is easier to read. This is not an argument for lisp being hard to read, it's an argument for python being easier.

"LISP: ... mythically from 'Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses' " Jargon File

HaHa, actually none of the parens are superfluous, unlike in C like languages, where they are, if only you can remember all the damn operator precedence rules, if you can't, they aren't superfluous there either, and you need them to actually make the code more readable. HaHa indeed :)

"... and don't ask me about the extraneous parenthesis. I bet some LISP programmer felt alone and decided to make it a bit more homey." Linus Torvalds

I don't know the context of this, but I'm willing to bet he was talking about C code.

"[If only] we could find characters or signs suited for expressing all our thoughts as clearly and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers" Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

WTF? I'm pretty sure Leibniz was slamming Newton and not Lisp :)

"A language should be designed in terms of an abstract syntax and it should have perhaps, several forms of concrete syntax: one which is easy to write and maybe quite abbreviated; another which is good to look at and maybe quite fancy... and another, which is easy to make computers manipulate... all should be based on the same abstract syntax... the abstract syntax is what the theoreticians will use and one or more of the concrete syntaxes is what the practitioners will use." John McCarthy

This is a bit difficult to refute, since on the one hand, it sounds reasonable, but on the other hand history didn't work out that way. Some of this is here today, Common Lisp has reader macros, and in Racket you can insert the Greek symbol lambda, instead of typing it out in English. But at least with reader macros, being as conservative about adding them is a good idea, since ultimately they make the code harder to read if overused. I think McCarthy was just throwing ideas out there, and didn't have the decades of hindsight we have today, people have been writing and reading Lisp code for 50 years with little difficulty, and only introducing new people has been a problem, and only because these people have been introduced to alternative notations earlier. Start small children on Lisp, and they would think 5 + 3 * 4 is unreadable, and (+ 5 (* 3 4)) is easy to read.

The page continues to say:

"Indeed, Lisp notation has changed over time; the quote operator ' was not in the original Lisps, and was added because that construct was so common that it was worth creating an abbreviation. We're just working to add new abbreviations."

As I mentioned, that can actually make code less readable if overused. Common Lisp has many such abbreviations: #' for function, #() for vectors, #P"" for pathnames, etc. And the mechanism is extensible, so you can go crazy if you want, adding #{} for hash tables is only a few lines of code.

I'd like to conclude with this great essay I came across yesterday: <http://www.storytotell.org/essays/good-for-whom.html></comment>


'Private' social network Everyme (YC S11) takes on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2012/05/private-social-network-everyme-takes-on-facebook/1

<comment><USER2> Oh man this brings back a lot of memories. Let me explain:

A few years back, we made a bet private sharing was going to be a very big thing. I'm talking maybe 4.5 years back.

So we went and designed a product called Sharekoo.com which basically allowed users to create private contexts where they could share any type of media. These contexts were by invitation only.

Developing it took a lot of time because this baby was/is very complex and it scales beyond belief. In the process we made an abstraction of the concept and created a sharing engine so that we could use it for any product we could develop in the future.

Sharekoo as product never saw the light of day (so many reasons that don't matter for this post) but we had our engine so we hooked it up to an existing PIM product and applied to Techcrunch50. We were invited to present in SF but for personal reasons we couldn't make it.

Here's the demo: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0hx6L3ldWs&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0hx6L3ldWs&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

After this, using the same engine we created Twitalbums.com which was private sharing via Twitter. I actually did a review our startup here in HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051311>

Here's a review RWW did for us: [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitalbums_private_coll...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitalbums_private_collaborative_content_sharing_v.php)

If you read the HN thread you can see how the conversation and the arguments for Twitalbums (and previousy Sharekoo) private sharing and the selling arguments of Everyme are basically the same.

We ended up putting the projects in stby, taking another direction but we kept the technology and made it better over time.

This is a lesson in having idea and being way ahead of time (I have learned a few more lessons and recognize lots of error along the way to) and being patient.

Maybe now is time to dust off the old projects, paint a pretty face on them and see what happens now :)

Exciting times ahead indeed!

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the value proposition of being private by default.

With a kid on the way, I expect to share lot of pics and videos to close family members and I am in search of a proper (and private) solution to this.

However, before I commit to any service these days, I always verify what is the company's policy and offering for user's private data. Do they allow you to easily export/download your personal data?

Unfortunately, with Everyme, they have not mentioned anything about this on their site.

<comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I work at Facebook. I share photos and videos of my kid in a secret FB group where I have to approve membership. It has worked pretty well, I'd encourage you to try it!

<https://www.facebook.com/addgroup>

Alternatively you could create a list of all the people you want to see this content and restrict visibility to that list when you post.

<comment><USER5> Everyme is an app that works REALLY well on all platforms for your purposes, not just pretty well. I would encourage you to give it a try. You might like it better.

<comment><USER6> I've used the Facebook secret groups feature and found it sufficient. Could you elaborate on what non-trivial benefits you offer over those? As far as privacy from the provider, it seems like I would have to trust you instead of Facebook, which from my point of view isn't a huge net gain.

<comment><USER5> Where to begin - first, our apps perform at least 30x better. Facebook mobile apps sometimes lag for 30 seconds or more loading new content, ours is instantaneous. Our app was natively built for all platforms. Second, we are backwards compatible with email and text. I think FB might handle email replies as well but text is huge on mobile and is a big deal for our users. Third, we can build your groups automatically for you with Magic Circles. Fourth, we are hooked into all major social networks and are constantly scanning for interesting events occurring in your life. When we find those events, we post them to your Circles for you (if you have the setting turned on) - this takes the effort out of sharing. There's more but I encourage you to try the app and see for yourself how much better it is.

<comment><USER7> Do you actually use the Push service? If you do, I would err with the side of caution since it shakes up the battery pretty bad.

<comment><USER5> We use APNS and C2DM, but you can turn them off if you're concerned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google+ has the grand hypothesis that the simplistic and transparent approach Facebook takes to sharing is not what the market wants. Instead, they say, human nature is to have different personas when you interact with different social groups. That you have different identities depending on who you are interacting with.

This certainly is how it feels to me and those older than me. But to the next generation, growing up with Facebook has forced them to have more singular identities. Their Facebook identity and their person are one-to-one.

Google+ is doing the hard and expensive work of disproving this hypothesis for you. Take advantage.

<comment><USER9> I believe there are a considerable number of these "older people" who'd appreciate support for multiple identities. I think Posterous's "spaces" idea is better aligned with the "multiple identities" concept than Google+ "circles" anyway. "Spaces" or "Facets" let me participate in the tech life of a colleague without having to encounter the "I had X for lunch/dinner" posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting how "private" is in quotes.

Maybe tech journalists, perhaps even their readers, are getting smarter.

So with this app you are letting one company, Everyme, collect and archive all of your private data (to be shared with whom, and used for what purpose?) instead of another, Facebook?

Well, getting away from Facebook is a start. Maybe your data won't be scraped by non-advertisers. But it's still going to shared with third parties who will try to profit from it. Why is this necessary?

We still have a long way to go.

Peer to peer.

No third party.

Cut out the middleman.

That is the easiest, most efficient and most sensible way to exchange photos and have privacy. It's old, reliable technology that underlies the internet itself. And it's ready and waiting until people's privacy gets abused enough that they start demanding direct links to their friends, instead of always involving third parties, whose motives and deceptive tactics are becoming increasingly better known.

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems to hit a sweet spot between Path (share alike to a small group), and Pair (share with significant other).

If I could import from Path (which must be possible, since there's a third party Path "app" for Mac desktops), I'd switch.

<comment><USER12> I wonder how Path is doing overall.

I have intentionally not invited anyone to Path because the value in it for me is a tiny tiny circle, and I don't really want to add anyone to it.

But I also check my Facebook and contact lists to see who has joined Path, and beyond the usual list of very early adopters, there's been no one new in months and months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The web app looks great and I love how smooth the interface is (yet to try the iPhone app).

I found, however, that it wasn't immediately obvious how to add friends to a circle _after_ creating one. On the other hand, it didn't take long to discover I had to click through to Manage Circles and then click on the circle I'd like to add people too. The process took a maximum of 30 seconds but this could be a lot quicker.

I have an idea though. What about having a button to edit the circle I'm currently in? I think that'd make it much, much easier. Another idea would be a small edit button when you hover over a circle when switching between them? This seems like it would be a little easier to fit in with the interface but would make it less obvious and could make that portion of the interface less usable.

I've put together a quick 'n dirty example of the first idea for you:

<http://www.jameswdunne.com/example.jpg>

I'm not really a designer though so I reckon something better could be done with more thought and skill (and source files rather than photochopping PNGs!)

<comment><USER5> You're right, that is annoying. Thanks for the suggestion. Here's what we're going to do. On hover on the Circles list, we'll swap out the member count for an Edit link:

[https://img.skitch.com/20120517-gg1dd9n3ecy5882gd8335tap44.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20120517-gg1dd9n3ecy5882gd8335tap44.jpg)

<comment><USER13> Oh wow, that's great! I'm currently trying to get some of my friends on board so we can use this. I think they'd appreciate the interface and the privacy - which they all find quite jarring about Google+ and Facebook respectively!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like privacy regarding other users is a solved problem; it's privacy with service providers that bothers me.

</comment><comment><USER15> The app looks very good right now, but there are also no ads. Are you planning for premium features or to introduce ads at some point in the future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! No plans right now, we're just working on making Everyme a comfortable place for people to share privately.

<comment><USER15> At some point, though, you'll have to monetize. If that's with ads, it's going to make the usability of your app go down across the board.

<comment><AUTHOR> We agree, completely! Traditional ads are not a good solution on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would love to switch from Facebook to something like this. However, I would probably be my only acquaintance on this new network :(

I already lost a ton of credibility when I convinced many of my friends and family to try Google+.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the great thing about Everyme! Not everyone needs to be using the app for them to receive your stories, because it's integrated with the address book.

For example, most of my family don't use any social networks, but they all use email. So I created a Circle with everyone's emails inside, and when I share a story, they get a beautiful email with my photo inside. They can reply to the email directly to comment on the story, and all keep in touch. We've made email a first class citizen.

<comment><USER17> If I remember correctly, you were going to reinvent the Address book on iPhone. If I may ask, what was the reason behind pivoting from that idea to a private social network.? Curios to know the reasons behind abandoning the idea of building a better address book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out this article, does a good job explaining our evolution: [http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/12/the-story-of- everym...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/04/12/the-story-of-everyme-the- app-that-has-magically-packed-200k-people-into-17k-circles/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You would be well-advised to read this company's Privacy Policy, especially sections 6-9. It is a wonder they can use the term "Complete privacy" in their website copy without any fear of liability.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why would I pick this over Google plus, or in addition to Google plus?

<comment><AUTHOR> Everyme Circles are completely private, and everyone knows exactly who they're sharing with, whereas Google+ Circles are a confusing concept.

Everyme also uses your address book to do some amazing things, like magically create Circles such as family, co-workers, college friends, sweetheart etc., and then keep in touch with them using the address book (this means not everyone needs the app!).

<comment><USER19> What if I want some of my circles to be public and some to be private?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't offer public circles, since we're focusing on nailing private sharing. We want people to feel comfortable, so having a public option adds complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a way to directly message a person I have in a circle without creating a circle with only 1 person in it? This would be a very useful feature I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not right now, we're focused on nailing the circle experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure if i'm social networked out or not. I'm desperately ready to leave facebook because of the privacy dangers it poses (I got burned by that once pretty bad). I also thought G+ would be a good alternative.

I might try something like this, as it's a novel method of social networking -- JUST on your phone (where facebook has failed to come up with anything worth using).

I'd say it has potential, but I'm also a little reluctant to try any new social networks. All in all though, i'd say it looks promising.

edit: aw i just tried DLing it and it's only iOS 5. That's a shame. Any plans to expand it to older generation OSes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Great to hear.

We understand the frustration of trying new social networks, but we hope you'll give Everyme a try. We added "Export Your Data" today, which means you can request an archive of everything you've shared on Everyme whenever you like.</comment></comment>