With no brand license, Blackberry Mobile fades to black - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/with-no-brand-license-blackberry-mobile-fades-to-black/ <comment><USER2> I was playing around with an old BlackBerry Bold the other day. Things I miss, compared to the iPhone:

\- Long-press a key to capitalize a letter.

\- Text auto-correction that's customizable, predicable, deterministic, and easily undoable/re-doable.

\- A dedicated widget for moving the cursor around and selecting text, without having to resort to complicated and unreliable gestures.

\- Forward delete.

\- The many keyboard commands/shortcuts for power users.

<comment><USER3> God, the cursor usage in iOS is horrible. I hate using it.

<comment><USER4> Just in case you haven't found it yet - long-press/firm press the spacebar and the whole keyboard fades away and becomes a trackpad allowing precise placement of the cursor.

<comment><USER5> Is this even documented in a user manual somewhere or is it just supposed to be spread by word of mouth?

My iphone has so many features that I didn't know existed until someone showed me how to swipe (last one I learned, 3 finger swipe for 'undo', useful when I accidentally delete some text)

<comment><USER6> Yes, it's documented. But I'm not defending Apple on this, found the link on Apple forums when googled for solution to why it's nearly impossible to edit URLs in Safari. Btw, very similar trick works on Android's Gboard keyboard too, though on Android you touch the space bar and need to move the finger immediately, as opposed to IOS where you touch, hold for a second and only then move the finger.

[https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-and-edit-text- ip...](https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-and-edit-text- iph3c50f96e/ios)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had a Blackberry Pearl candybar back in the day, and it remains one of my favorite phones ever.

The half-qwerty thing was fantastic, and the little trackball was nice too. The magnetic case was super cool. I could type way faster on it than I've ever been able to do on any soft keyboard. The full multicolor notification LED was cool too.

When that phone was current, it was easily at feature parity with anything else on the market (except maybe in screen size). Everything about it was just as polished as hell. I always thought it was a shame that Blackberry could never really figure out how to keep their lead. Apple and Google ate their lunch bigtime.

I think where Apple really beat Blackberry was iTunes and the web-browser. Back in the iPhone classic days, it didn't have any kind of app-store or anything. But the web-browser and iTunes were big draws onto the platform. And once iOS had enough users to support an app-store ecosystem, it was all over for Blackberry. Google came along for the ride too of course, but IMO Android wouldn't be where it is if Apple hadn't figured out how to market smartphones.

Of course - the last real nail in Blackberry's coffin was Outlook support on iOS and Android. That basically broke Blackberry's stranglehold on corporate devices, and it turned out that the platform wasn't strong enough to stand without that.

Also it was stupid as hell that Blackberry forced its users onto specialized phone plans with a Blackberry addon feature.

<comment><USER8> I absolutely loved my blackberry pearl too. In these days I would consider it a feature phone, but durability aside, its probably one of the best.

I've gone back and forth with smartphones but I never really enjoyed them. It's not a requirement for work so it just turns into an unproductive timesink.

I was using it as my daily phone a couple years ago and the only things i missed was a flashlight and maps. I'm thinking about going back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's a shame. I've been using the KeyOne and now the Key2 for the last several years, and I've really liked them. Typing on glass has always been an exercise in frustration; turning off all the helpful autocorrect features and simply typing out exactly what I mean on the keyboard is a relief that allows me to actually enjoy using a phone.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a real shame. I used both the Blackberry/TCL KeyOne and Key2 LE phones and aside from a bunch of preloaded crapware they were terrific. Somewhat surprisingly they even did a good job of pushing monthly security updates, although we've been stuck on Android 8.1.

</comment><comment><USER11> Blackberry should've focused on the high end segment only, I'd love to get a well build Qwerty keyboard phone.

What killed the brand was the huge discount they put on the 8 __* models that ended up in the hands of teenagers, remember that BlackBerry messenger was the one behind the London Riots.

<comment><USER12> That's really hard to do in computing: both hardware and software have massive scaling effects which make it hard to survive in a low-volume business.

The physical keyboard was really nice but the rest of the phones just weren't. If they'd shipped a WebKit browser earlier it might have helped but they really hit a hubris-assisted low point floundering for years right when Apple and even Google started executing very well.

The best case might have been a Microsoft acquisition and doubling down on enterprise integration and features like the really nice one they added for locking down your work account from your personal data on the phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's not a single point of failure when looking at RIM. Rather it's a series of strategic mistakes and a lack of vision that ultimately caused the company to fail.

I still remember the BlackBerry Storm, the first all touchscreen device from RIM. It was years behind the iPhone. The UI felt rushed and clunky, the keyboard was unusable and there wasn't any app support. It didn't even support WiFi, something the original iPhone did, and it tanked performances. It was an exercise in cargo cult at best and really showed that they didn't understand the technical aspect at all since they allowed their competitor to have 2 years of advance on them.

They were wrong on Moore's law (So was Microsoft who moved Phones to WindowsNT too late) and very wrong on ergonomics (Physical keyboards are NOT essential).

I think RIM focused way too much on its existing userbase and on pleasing carriers rather than looking at were the market was going to be in 3-5 years. Even back in 2008-2009 I remember execs showing off their iPhones and as soon as the BlackBerry users saw one most of them wanted in. And these were the buyers of the flagship models RIM shipped at the time, not the cheaper phones aimed at teenagers.

Finally, they failed to attract talent. The type of folks who interned at RIM generally didn't end up working there.

Apple (and Google with Android) both shipped platforms. RIM kept shipping a tool.

</comment><comment><USER14> It was interesting to watch the fall of Blackberry. My take was that they released a product that in a lot of people's eyes was inferior to the iPhone, so they had to come up with a differentiator. There wasn't really any area that mattered that they were really better in, so they made something up, a lie; "Business people need real keyboards". This got them some mileage, but I don't think was ever really true. Sure, some people prefer the physical keyboard, but the huge screen with graphical OS was massively versatile. I remember hearing stories about "business" people who had their corporate blackberry, but had personally bought an iPhone aswell because they greatly preferred it.

I don't know if Blackberry bought their own lie, or if they thought it would get them a bit further than it did, but as far as I can tell they never really came up with something that really was better than the iPhone. The lie was a debt they never paid back.

Anyway, that was my take, looking in from the outside.

<comment><USER15> The real story is more complicated, and covered very well in a book called "Losing the Signal", written by journalists at the Globe & Mail.

RIM had an engineering-first culture that was attuned to the needs of enterprise customers and wireless carriers first and foremost. Those customers prioritized email delivery over bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. RIM made big money off of Blackberry Enterprise Services (BES), which included dedicated servers to handle push email and compress web traffic for improved speed.

When the engineer CEO Mike Lazaridis saw the iPhone, he thought it'd fail because AT&T's 2G and 3G networks would collapse trying to load desktop websites and online video.

Which they did. The biggest complaint about the early iPhone in the US was that it dropped calls, and that websites loaded slowly (this was before responsive websites, srcset, CDN caching etc were common).

Ultimately it didn't matter, because consumers and businesspeople wanted the iPhone and accepted the tradeoffs.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately for Mr Lazaridis at least one thing was workable on an OG iPhone with EDGE; Email.

<comment><USER15> I think they still had an advantage, as Blackberries had push email even on the standard BIS (not BES) service. I remember early Androids and iPhones needing to poll the email server occasionally to notify you about new emails. Switching poll frequency to every 60 seconds killed the battery, but it was the closest thing to BB's push implementation.

<comment><USER17> iOS had support for ActiveSync in 2008. A year after the iPhone was introduced.

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537517/apple-adds- exc...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537517/apple-adds-exchange- support-to-iphone--unveils-sdk.html)

<comment><USER15> Ah, I see. So corporate users who likely get email from an Exchange server would have had pretty much the same real-time email access as most Blackberry subscribers.

<comment><USER17> Yep. In fact, I get an email notification from my phone/watch a second or two before I get one from my computer running Outlook. That has been basically the case since day one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I gotta admit that I did like typing on the Passport. It was actually a pretty good UI. I really wish someone would do a phone UI that is a lot more text focused.

<comment><USER15> I liked the Passport, but the 3 rows of keys made individual keys a pain to type on, as they weren't spaced apart enough IMO.

I still miss my Bold 9000 and Bold 9700, which had by far the best ever keyboards. I remember typing entire college assignment papers on those while on the bus or train. Their Docs app exported to .docx, so I'd email a copy to myself and open it on my desktop to pick up where I left off.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, they did screw up with the three rows. It would have been interesting to get the better keyboards hooked up to the new UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> RIP.

Started my enterprise career supporting these things. Won't miss BES one bit.</comment>


React Router is dead. Long live rrtr - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@taion/react-router-is-dead-long-live-rrtr-d229ca30e318# <comment><USER2> Tech needs a The Onion to make this more bearable.

<comment><USER3> I recommend @iamdevloper, and the newer Donald JavaScript T

On today's events: [https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldJS/status/7196219165464...](https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldJS/status/719621916546490369)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like picking the simpler option precisely because it was simpler was the sensible choice. I've had no issues with react-simple-router: it routes, it works with react, what else do you really need?

</comment><comment><USER3> So glad I was able to get out of web development. So, so so glad.

<comment><USER5> Why? What did you switch to?

<comment><USER3> Trying to find _dependable_ modules in the front end world felt like a rat race. We used react-router when everyone was still writing React.createClass and 'function', and even then it was shedding APIs like a dog in spring.

Switched to mobile, still in the honeymoon phase but fuck if it isn't nice having some semblance of stability in the air. I can even google stuff without filtering results from before 2015!</comment></comment></comment>


A Survey of the First 20 Years of Research on Semantic Web and Linked Data [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01935898/document <comment><USER2> RSS/Atom is being slowly killed. XHTML was replaced by a pile or junk that can only be parsed by a single parser. HTML in general became a rendering layer for executable JavaScript. After years of doing integrations, I've seen one(!) HATEAOS web service and it's being replaced by GraphQL right now.

I like the idea of having semantic content, but it is suffocating under the weight of all the overcomplicated designed-by-committee abstractions and formats. In fact, the real web that we're using is becoming less and less semantic every year.

I wish someone re-standardized XML without all the complicated edge case garbage and with better handling of namespaces. So it would actually get used for documents again. JSON is not a good document format, and it seems everyone is busy re-inventing XML in JSON right now.

Let's say I want to define my own concept and put it on a web page. Is there even an "official" way to do it right now, without namespaces in HTML5? Theoretical example:

        <html>
        <head>
        <concept tag="computer-game" guid="c1a3e0cb-5872-4e5a-8dce-b8afc00772db" />
        <concept attribute="year-published" guid="ba073188-8bd6-47a7-9065-eb55c4a8b908" />
        </head>

        <body>
            <computer-game year-published="1993">Doom</computer-game>
        </body>
        </html>

Simple, isn't it? I'm not aware of anything of this sort.

<comment><USER3> > Let's say I want to define my own concept and put it on a web page. Is there > even an "official" way to do it right now

What's wrong with Microdata? As in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_(HTML)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_\(HTML\)) It can interoperate with RDF and JSON-LD.

<comment><USER2> First time I hear about it. Let's see.

It seems to aim at roughly the same problem, but god, they've managed to design something even uglier and more verbose than XML namespaces. Still requires to use valid URLs instead of GUIds. Still forces you to use external names in your markup. Sigh.

One hard limitation I see is that unlike namespaces it doesn't deal with HTML attributes, so you can't just annotate the same tag with unrelated semantics.

It also makes assumptions about document structure (item properties are nested inside an item). Semantics and structure should not be complected. This will create innumerable issues when doing logic in code or writing CSS queries.

Why does this have to be so ugly and complicated? All we really need is a way to associate data with globally unique identifiers. This gives us semantics. A single layer of indirection (mapping GUIDs to local names of your choice) would allow us to be concise and descriptive in our markup, while avoiding naming conflicts.

No matter how much W3C hates it, people _are_ extending HTML with custom tags and attributes. (ng-whatever, for example.) Having no support for providing semantics for such things is pretty ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> > Still requires to use valid URLs instead of GUIds.

Not sure why you would _want_ to do this, but AIUI you can use any URI for a namespace (not just URL), including a UUID via the `urn:uuid:c1a3e0cb-5872-4e5a-8dce-b8afc00772db` syntax.

<comment><USER4> You can but most of the time, especially with Linked Data, an URL is required. And sometime even a dereferencable one. So you have this weird situation where you never really know if an URL is "semantic" (just a string actually) or can be accessed. Also having a dependency on the DNS system is a bad idea in my opinion. It's really clear when you read 2 years old semantic web paper and every link is broken.

I agree with gambler that GUID + local names is a better solution, and I use that in my research.

<comment><USER5> I'm thinking IPLD is looking like a great fix for that particular issue.

[https://ipld.io](https://ipld.io)

<comment><USER3> It seems rather overengineered to me. IETF and W3C standards do support the general content-addressing, "naming things with hashes" use case via the existing ni:// (Named Information) URI schema (RFC6920).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the viewpoint of an application creator what I find missing from here is that very similar goals have been pursued by the OMG and other organizations. Similarly RDF data works with F-Logic, XSB Prolog and a wide range of non- SPARQL tools. There has also been a proliferation of document and graph databases that compete w/ SPARQL databases. (Many sebweb refugees use Couchbase or ArangoDB)

I'd like to see that side-by-side with RDF because then you'd see we've made more progress than most people think.

<comment><USER7> I don't really see much connection with what OMG have done. Yes, they did do a little work on an Ontology Definition Metamodel, but I wouldn't take that too seriously. I don't think they understood what they were doing.

Similarly, I don't think graph databases have that much in common with RDF. Yes, both are graphs, but they're quite different, really.

<comment><USER6> What I've seen with OMG-promulgated standards is that the people involved know what they are doing but (1) they do a bad job communicating it, (2) people do a bad job of understanding it, (3) as with the W3C compromise in the standards process leads the specification to miss the last 20% that you need to make something that really works, and (4) some adopters of the standard see filling that last 20% as what differentiates them from competitors, so the standard is not so standard.

There are many homologies between W3C and OMG standards, one of them is that there is a mapping between the semantics of documents and the semantics of API calls, object definitions, etc. linking all the way back to the CORBA standards. Another is between the XSLT/XPath functions and the "Object Constraint Language". The OMG and W3C maintain a largely overlapping list of primitive data types, for instance.

Neo4J and similar products tend to support the "property graph" model which can be modeled with RDF _/ SPARQL_.

As for document databases, that gets to the magic about RDF which is most obscure: a document full of facts is an RDF "graph". You can take the union of all of the facts in two documents and that is also a graph. You can take the union of all the facts in two million graphs and run SPARQL queries on it _without_ doing any data transformation or import!

This is a necessary condition for a "universal solvent" for combining data from multiple sources but RDF standards haven't been sufficient. Serious semwebbers know about techniques like "smushing" that go a long way towards finishing the job, but oddly these are not incorporated into standards or widely known among beginners.

<comment><USER7> These mappings is exactly what I'm talking about. I advised the OMG on one of the mappings in the ODM and I don't think they understood what they were mapping. To model OWL with UML gives you very little. To then map Topic Maps into the same level as OWL is ... just misguided.

Semantics means something very different to the OMG from what it does to the RDF/OWL community. That's the root of the problem. To the RDF/OWL folks it means "mathematically based logical inference of new statements", whereas to the OMG it seems to mean "human-readable text".

Yes, you can map a property graph into RDF, but to make it work well you usually have to add a lot of information that's not in the original data.

Thanks, I know how RDF and SPARQL work.

<comment><USER6> UML is not the only standard pushed by the OMG.

CORBA and related standards have well-defined semantics. So does BPML.

Human-readable definitions are important. One thing I see missing in both the OMG and W3C worlds is a realistic approach to model visualization. For instance if you try to draw a large OWL ontology or a large UML diagram you might need to blow it up to a full wall just to see everything, never mind understand it.

Really you need to be able to paint on graphical elements to a graph to show what nodes and relationships are relevant to a particular situation or use case.

Many people don't understand OWL because it doesn't actually "make sense". That is, without mechanisms for data validation, you don't know that inference is going to proceed in a correct way, rather you get a "garbage in garbage out" situation where you get new bad facts. Given that the official explanation doesn't make sense, it is natural that people fall back on something they understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I worked at a company that got sold on Semantic Web and made an initial investment in tools and training. While I found the concepts intriguing, the teams tasked with making it work gave up after about six months of trying to make it work with the use case they had. I understand that it can be a powerful set of concepts for certain kinds of use cases but it feels like the level of dedication and care needed to make it work is probably beyond many organizations' ability to execute.

The impression I got was that it was like deciding to use a Kibble Balance [0] to weigh yourself in the morning. You have to match the use case to the tool and for many organizations this simply will not be the right tool.

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

<comment><USER9> I worked for a semantic web startup, back when it was the next big thing.

We had a tool (UI & backend) purportedly for managing ontologies, taxonomies, vocabularies.

Our customers were begging for real world solutions. Would have paid any price.

Our leadership (CTO) was mesmerized by metametametadata. Not kidding. And had zero interest in customer's real needs.

Such a missed opportunity.

The two lessons I took away...

1/ Most real world modeling problems are some narrowed use case of knowledge representation. Our customers didn't want a general purpose tool. They wanted something tailored (customizable) for their immediate use cases. As a UI designer, I guess I should have realized this quicker. My only defense is initial lack of customer interaction.

2/ At the time, for general purpose graph splunking, there was no UI solution for the "focus+context" problem. Human sized ways to query, represent, and navigate large graphs, all in one.

I did come up with a novel UI/UX that I felt would solve "focus+context", but we ran out of runway before I could get past the lo-fi prototypes.

On my to do list is to take another run at the problem, leveraging Neo4j's (awesome) Cypher query language. I may discover that Neo4j's UI may have already solved the "focus+context" problem.

<comment><USER5> Would love to see examples of useful ux. Do you have anything to share?

I have this hobby project where I'm thinking of using some kind of knowledge graph to represent beliefs about scientific facts and urban myths. An attempt to crowd source peer review of the pop-sci cited in online fora of various kinds.

My prototype app being a nutrition planner based on dietary recommendation sources from the graph in question.

Not being a ux-designer, I'm a bit stuck on how to approach it.

<comment><USER9> Very belated reply, but I feel I owe you a response...

Were I to implement my UI today, it'd most look like a query builder for Cypher.

I mocked up my UI in the early 2000s. There was nothing comparable to Neo4j's Cypher query language. Sadly, I was't clever enough to invent it myself. It's so obvious once you see it. To the best of my knowledge, it's the only graph query language that explicitly models both the nodes and edges.

In sum, my UI would be more useful for developers, enthusiasts and less useful for any specific use cases.

Happy hunting!

<comment><USER5> Much appreciated, Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Semantic Web is dead. It was never really something. Even the regular decentralized Web has mostly died. It was replaced by mega corporations' walled gardens. 95% of content is in there; in Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Netflix, Reddit, Twitch, Medium and a few small others. The rest is a skeleton barely being touched. The Semantic Web isn't even necessary or useful anymore, even if its technology were good.

<comment><USER11> except for wikipedia, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The irony of this paper kicking off with three word clouds reminded me of everything that happened with the semantic web community and movement.

</comment><comment><USER13> The semantic web is only useful if you believe syllogisms are the way to understand the world.

[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_s...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_syllogism.html)

<comment><USER7> Clay Shirky unfortunately has no idea what he's talking about. You can interpret a CSV file as a set of syllogisms, too, if you want. RDF is data, just like CSV, except the shape is different. CSV is good for some things. RDF is good for other things.

RDF is a fantastic way to aggregate data from many different sources, for example. CSV sucks at that.

The problem is that RDF has been marketed so poorly, which has totally confused people like Shirky.

<comment><USER13> Can you point to an example or two where RDF is a "fantastic way to aggregate data..."? My sense is that things like microformats, which are more flexible and narrowly defined than RDF, are useful for this, too, but it hardly constitutes a "semantic web". It's just obvious connections between things. Something like a custom type of hyperlink is all. Not that this "all" is bad, it's just not going to revolutionize the world or anything more than the existing web already has.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The semantic web is alive in a different form with the microblogging community using micro formats.

See Indieweb.org and microformats.org, micropub, microsub, websub

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the main reason why the semantic web has not become popular is a) Chicken and the egg problem. There are no search engines or aggregate sites that make use of it. So we do not bother marking up our data. b) XML is very alien to most people, we need to implement the semantic web into graphical user interfaces! c) It's hard to sell the concept as it's hard to imagine the use cases. We somehow need to bootstrap by creating data and example services, people will want it once they see it.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems the Semantic Web is truly taking off with MIT/Inrupt.com's SOLID effort - where all communication between decentralized machines is via rdf triples. We are about to launch this commercially.

<comment><USER17> It may alarm you, but I cannot tell if you are joking or not.

Cisco was running Tuple Spaces data stores, in 2001. The queries/unifications were pretty simple, I can't recall their use case. But they were using a system internally and very happy with performance.

I never heard about it again, after a couple of conference papers.

I could imagine that the project died because it was impossible to sell. Semantic Web researchers find nothing odd in the discovery that a networking company has some understanding of applications of graph theory. But convincing upper management, or customers, that they can compete with Google and Oracle at the same time... no.

I hope your project breaks through.

<comment><USER18> Tuple space projects were pretty popular commercially.

There was a pretty decent implementation in Java[1] and very scalable distributed implementations.

The problem is that they are stuck in the space between the flexibility and developer friendliness of databases, and the KISS approach of a simple cache.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space#JavaSpaces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuple_space#JavaSpaces)</comment></comment></comment>


Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers - <AUTHOR> https://armin.dev/blog/2019/08/supporting-browser-extension-developers/ <comment><USER5> > _It is a regular occurrence to hear about open source developers selling > their browser extensions, only for their users to be exploited later on by > the new owners. ... We are witnessing the failure of browser vendors to > recognize the value of our labor and the important role it plays in a > healthy browser ecosystem._

So this is an interesting philosophical question - the market value of the extension is the value of "monetizing" it by stuffing ads, or worse, monitoring/tracking/exfiltration, into the extension. It's the market value of the trust of the extension's userbase. Is that the value of the extension developer's labor?

I would argue not really. The value of a bank, for instance, is _not_ the amount of money in all of the vaults. That money is held in trust for customers, and it is not for the owner of the bank to dispose of. Therefore, nobody who makes a _fair_ offer for the bank should expect those resources in the transaction, so a fair market price for the bank is much less - such as the present value of the interest earned by the bank minus the interest returned to customers.

In particular, the only reason the bank has customers is they expect to get their money back, generally with interest, at some point in the future. If they didn't, they'd put their money elsewhere. So if a bank is willing to sell the contents of the customer accounts, that indicates incomplete information in the market - customers didn't know the bank wasn't trustworthy. The true market value of the bank, in a perfect-information market, would be close to zero.

It seems like the problem here is that we know two ways of compensating browser extension developers: "don't" and "breach your users' trust." Those point to wildly undervalued _and wildly overvalued_ estimates of the fair market value of the developers' work. And we should come up with some fairer way to value their work (or, more fundamentally, to compensate them; we may not need to monetize the extension, necessarily) first, and I'm not totally sure it's the fault of browsers for not having had such a clever idea - <USER2> seems like we collectively need to figure that out.

<comment><USER6> As an extension developer who recently got one of these offers, your analysis is a good verbalization of my gut feeling on the matter. I turned it down, of course.

While users may feel bad about extension developers not being compensated, I feel like the larger story here is that:

\- Companies are buying extensions for nefarious purposes, which presents a huge security risk.

\- Evidently, app stores are sufficiently bad at detecting this that it remains profitable.

<comment><USER5> Yes, agree - detecting extensions that have changed hands into someone who wants to "monetize" it and preventing those updates from getting to users definitely seems like a thing that the browser manufacturers should be doing (even if - and perhaps _especially_ if - it lowers the apparent market value of extensions) and that the onus is on browser manufacturers / extension store operators to do so.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure how one would automatically detect such a thing as a browser extension changing hands. If you require signing extensions to make a release, there's nothing stopping a developer from selling their keys. And even without changing hands, the threat to users remains the same if the company just goes from "we'll give you $10k for your extension" to "we'll give you $10k to link this library into your extension and not ask what it does" (one might counter that an ethical developer could accept the former option while rejecting the latter, but it's hard to believe any developer willing to sell their extension in the first place isn't fully aware of what that means for the future of their users).

<comment><USER8> Just never allow such a transfer force a new user to create a new name. Ensure this is part of the terms of service. Prosecute violators that is to say buyer and dev under cfaa and ensure a hefty fine is levied with prison time. Nefarious parties will find few sellers thereafter.

<comment><USER9> You forgot to mention a small detail: force every other country in the world to enforce your ridiculous laws.

<comment><USER10> Thanks to the movie industry, this is mostly a solved problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> NoCoin author here. With approx 700k users across 3 browsers, I have obviously received many emails for purchasing my extension. I have never accepted to sell my project, even when I had some low financial moments, because my intent was never to make money with it. And it being an open source project, it belongs to the community. I would also feel like I am breaching the trust of my users if I decide to hand it over to an unknown party. I always look up at the exemplar integrity of VLC maintainer @jbk [0].

Regarding the monetization of NoCoin, I advertise the fact that I am accepting donations in the description of the extension and have links on the GitHub page. There is also a button to donate directly on the Firefox add-ons page. Almost all donations came from the Firefox Add-ons store. I guess if Google would do the same on the Chrome store, developers would get more donations?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15372048)

<comment><USER12> If I'm not too intrusive, what's the average offer an extension like yours receives for selling it?

<comment><USER13> I'm the author of JSON Formatter [1] with 989,000 users.

I probably get a couple of offers a year for it. Of those that have offered specific sums, they ranged from from $10-20k. I always reject them, because it's pretty obvious they want to turn it into malware.

I've had a couple of cases where I felt they went to some effort to schmooze me first, presenting themselves as having benign intentions, almost like a carefully crafted con. But as far as I can tell, there is no legitimate, ethical reason to want to acquire it, and I won't sell out my users like that.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json- formatter/bcj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json- formatter/bcjindcccaagfpapjjmafapmmgkkhgoa?hl=en)

<comment><USER14> $20k seems like a pretty lowball offer? Close to 1M users (plus potential for further growth) and you have me expecting at least $400k... Or, am I expecting too much?

<comment><USER15> There isn't potential for further growth if it gets bought. They just want to serve malware to the existing userbase.

<comment><USER16> That is still $0.02 per user. Not a bad deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On the one hand, this seems like a real missed opportunity by Mozilla. As Chrome reigns in extensions that conflict with Google's business model, this is a reason to use Firefox.

BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better- performing/faster (I've been guilty of this myself in the past). Mozilla needs to make sure Firefox is keeping pace with Chrome, which they've presumably decided means de-emphasizing extensions.

That said, not sure why Mozilla needs to de-emphasize donation buttons.

<comment><USER18> > BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox > experience

I doubt that this is true. Some extensions like Adblockers even make browsing faster.

<comment><USER19> For a demonstration install Dark Reader on an ageing or budget machine. It can render Chrome sluggish and frustrating and Firefox almost unusable.

There's a fair few others that can upset Firefox but never seem to be the same extent of annoyance for Chrome.

<comment><USER20> I had a similar problem with Owl, it's because they typically use CSS filters to achieve dark mode. It's frustrating because it's a very bad solution but it's easy to not realize that the extension is causing the problem (especially because browsers work hard to hide it)

<comment><USER19> That does show up one area that Chrome still eclipses Firefox - the Shift Esc task manager that will usually reveal which tab or extension is cratering things. Firefox is much more opaque about memory and especially CPU use, making it far harder to pin down.

<comment><USER21> Do you know about about:performance?

<comment><USER22> Firefox has a task manager now. They should improve on this to compete with Googles. Nobody wants to type a URL when they can hit an easy shortcut.

<comment><USER23> I have a hope of remembering about:performance. I can bookmark it, and it's there in autocomplete. You can make a link to it in your webpage or in a nice plugin (which, once it gets a couple thousand users, you can sell to an honest businessman for tens of thousands).

Shift-Escape? what? I'm supposed to just randomly press every key combination till something happens?

<comment><USER24> If you can remember the hotkey for Windows task manager, sure. It's Ctrl+Shift+ESC. If not, you can access it through the menu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >The Chrome Web Store and the Microsoft Store do not offer features for supporting extension developers.

That doesn't seem right - doesn't Google let developers monetize extensions in the chrome web store?

         You can publish Hosted Apps, Chrome Apps, Chrome
         Extensions, and Themes in the Chrome Web Store.
         Collectively these are called simply "Items". You have
         many choices when it comes to making money from items
         that you publish in the Chrome Web Store. This page
         covers just a few ways to monetize your store item:

         - In-app payments
         - One-time charge
         - <USER3>
         - Offering a limited trial version of your item

[https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/money](https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/money)

The issue of developers selling out their chrome extensions to 3P (that the author references) probably has more to do with the fact that bad actors get better money for harvesting user PII than the developer would if they maintained the extension as it was originally meant to be. This is a real privacy issue, but it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting what is shared with the extension.

<comment><USER26> > it's also why Chrome cracked down on extension APIs recently by restricting > what is shared with the extension

It'd be nice if they had 'trusted devs' or similar. Even if they provided a paid meatbag extension review service, I'd pay to get the plugins I use reviewed!

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h That's an interesting idea. I, too, would happily contribute to a funding pool to have a competent human analyze the extensions that I'm using. One would expect this to (loosely) allocate money to checking the extensions that are most used, so the ecosystem would benefit even for people who weren't contributing.

<comment><USER27> And corporations would pay a lot to have extensions security reviewed if they had a business use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author here. Certain software may bring greater value for society when it is freely accessible for everyone, without compromising on user privacy, while being partially subsidized by users who can afford to sponsor such projects.

It would benefit us all if browser vendors would enable users to easily support extensions, and do so from a unified user interface, like an extension store.

It sends a different signal for the user when a browser vendor encourages and handles contributions for extensions, instead of leaving developers on their own to build makeshift donation prompts and expect users to give out credit card data or sign up to third-party services just to donate.

Sponsoring your favourite extensions right from your Google or Firefox account would help projects receive more funding, be more user-centered, and further enrich the browser extension ecosystem, while encouraging new developers to publish their own extensions and support user needs.

</comment><comment><USER28> Redesign reducing visibility of donation button, and no real support for selling / monetizing your extensions in the stores: totally agreed, they can and likely should do better there. I'd be curious to see if the change had any effect tho, and how much. Above-the-fold is valuable real-estate, it's possible that it's better-utilized after the change, just along a different set of priorities.

Direct payment from browser vendor to useful devs: not sure where that money would come from.

Alexa can probably support it since more use of an Alexa likely has a strong correlation with increased purchases through Amazon - they essentially directly profit off popular extensions, in a measurable way because they track everything, since it keeps people using Amazon in general.

I'm not sure Mozilla gets much money from e.g. adblock. Or other popular extensions. Plus they're a non-profit, so their cash-in-hand isn't too likely to change dramatically, unless we can convince more companies to donate (which could allow donating to extension devs).

<comment><USER29> _Direct payment from browser vendor to useful devs: not sure where that money would come from._

Web browsers are insanely profitable thanks to search referrals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Chrome and Google not caring or supporting these kind of things I get but Firefox's recent efforts seem to be either gross negligence or targeted moved to destroy their addon ecosystem.

I thought Firefox was going to get better with their redesign but it seems like it just resulted in lost functionality. Their misguided quest to get more market share has been a completely failure and pushed anyone who valued their customizable experience away.

<comment><USER31> Been trending that way for years now. Making a browser that does what you want it to do is way easier than making a browser that does what your users want it to do. Sometimes I wonder if the "iterate version integers every six weeks so our e-peen looks bigger" approach is to blame.

<comment><USER32> That's an interesting thought. It's almost like Chrome and Firefox have been in a "browser cold war" for years now, trying to outdo each other's version numbers, trying to entice users with greener grass rather than the stronger "attacks" of the IE-Firefox "browser wars" of the past, and one side trying to imitate the other.

Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated. Users may have gained some rapid iteration, but in the long term, I think we lost the ability to understand how the browsers are changing (of course, some of that is a matter of the inherent complexity explosion in the Web).

And once you change to the constantly-incremented version numbering scheme, how can you ever go back to something more meaningful? Who's would blink first?

Happily, Pale Moon, for example, retains more modest version numbers. I hope their developers continue doing well. Imagine if it (or a similar project) were the next Phoenix, the way Firefox rose from Netscape's ashes.

<comment><USER33> _Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated._

Personal anecdote, but of all the non-technical people I know (which I define as those who may barely know what a browser is, and only use the computer for browsing a tiny fraction of the Internet), _none_ of them like the constant change, especially when it breaks their workflow, and those who do pay attention to version numbers think the rapid "version explosion" (to quote one) is completely silly. Like a lot of other things in life, they just put up with it because they're powerless.

I really wonder who the browser makers are targeting with the "move fast and break things constantly" attitude, because it's definitely neither the technical nor non-technical users I know.

<comment><USER31> Certainly isn't me. I'm still salty about Firefox 2 removing the "close current tab" button and putting an X on every tab instead. It was nice having that muscle memory instead of having to hunt down whichever tab you're currently focused on.

<comment><USER33> I've never used Firefox 1.x so haven't used that UI, but it sounds like something they could've made configurable but didn't want to, for whatever reason.

However, in all the tabbed browsers I've used, Ctrl+F4 closes the current tab.

<comment><USER34> Ctrl+W also does that, and is much easier on the fingers (unless your hands are huge).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> That's not their core business. It's redolent of the complaints when Twitter etc limit their API/number of tokens per app etc. They're doing it because it no longer serves a purpose. Perhaps Mozilla is slightly different but Google would only benefit from ad/tracker blockers going away.

<comment><USER36> > Google would only benefit from ad/tracker blockers going away.

In the long run, this might sadly be true, but I disagree for now. No way Google is doing this because of the goodness of their hearts.

They do it because they haven't completely squeezed out all competitors yet.

Removing or utterly crippling addons now would force users to realize what Chrome is while there still are options, meaning a huge chunk of the users would go to other browsers.

Look to Chrome mobile, the one that they can force ram down the throat of > 50% of mobile users. Chrome mobile doesn't have addons because it doesn't compete.

Sorry to all Googlers here for being so blunt, and feel free to point out one or more examples from the last few years where Google has prioritized their users above quarterly / yearly profits.

I used to be a huge fan but Google has massively disappointed me over the last 5-10 years.

<comment><USER37> I work for Google, opinions are my own.

> Sorry to all Googlers here for being so blunt, and feel free to point out > one or more examples from the last few years where Google has prioritized > their users above quarterly / yearly profits.

No need to apologize =]

An example that comes to mind is the current focus on accessibility. I think from an objective financial/engineering perspective, it's much preferable to just ignore accessibility because it adds complexity and isn't used by the vast majority of users. However, providing access to everyone is the right thing to do.

Another example is crisis tools ([https://crisisresponse.google/](https://crisisresponse.google/)). I don't think we make money from these apps.

Of course, I'm sure people will say this is just for marketing or something but in the end, how can one get around that?

I don't think Google is flawless. Far from it! But it's a huge company with way too many products so it's only natural there will be bad decisions and good ones, just as there are bad people as well as good people.

> Look to Chrome mobile, the one that they can force ram down the throat of > > 50% of mobile users. Chrome mobile doesn't have addons because it doesn't > compete.

I'm not sure I understand.. are you saying that Chrome mobile takes up a lot of RAM? Because if so I would agree with that, but isn't that precisely why extensions shouldn't be allowed? Implementing extensions would add an even greater burden and poorly written extensions would provide a bad user experience.

If anything I really wish we could strip Chrome down. I think people adopted Chrome early on because it was really light and personally I really feel like we let everyone down by letting it get so bloated.

<comment><USER38> I'm curious. What specifically would you like to see removed from Chrome?

<comment><USER37> To be honest I don't know too much about what's been added but I can only assume new functionality must account for the increased bloat.

I imagine it's support for things like "Chrome Apps" or more generally the desire to get websites to be able to do the same things as native apps. I suspect there's also the fact that Chrome has to support Chrome OS as well.

But I am new to Chrome OS so admittedly I am not too familiar on the history or background =]

<comment><USER38> Chrome OS was my thought as well. I'm not sure how much of that is included in Chrome itself, and how much is bundled separately as part of the OS though.

For some reason I thought Chrome Apps were deprecated. PWAs can do most of the same things today.

<comment><USER37> Ah I think you might be right! But to be totally honest, I really don't care for PWAs either.. Maybe I am just too old fashioned but I don't care for my web apps having offline functionality.

That being said, I am not familiar with the technology so this is very much an uninformed opinion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> They're also failing users. The Chrome Web Store is a cesspool of malware and other abusive extensions - Mozilla is doing better though.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't think devs should be shamed into not selling their software. That's some questionable 'white-knight' ethics. If you sell something, great. if you don't, also great. if you use ads to monetize or sell data, also great. If you use a freemium model which serves ads to the plebs and asks money from the elite, even better.

For that matter I don't think open browser producers can be expected to foot the bill for it either. their browsers do not cost a thing, after all and browser extensions only impact a very small part of their userbase.

Please remember that not everyone has a problem with ads, 'privacy invasion' and targetting. Some people do and think that everyone should think the same. I find this mentality rather stifling.

<comment><USER22> > Some people do and think that everyone should think the same. I find this > mentality rather stifling.

I feel like people should be more informed over the implications. If they still don't care once I explain the issues, that's their prerogative to not care. I feel like most people don't understand why the "I have nothing to hide" mentality will cost us plenty of freedoms we still have.

I agree with you though, most people aren't like the majority of HN users, they just don't care or don't understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Despite having a smaller extension ecosystem, Apple seems to have the right idea: Safari extensions (and soon even system extensions) are discovered and delivered via the App Store like any other app, and their developers can charge for them like any other app.

</comment><comment><USER31> Personally I think this is sort of missing the forest for the trees. The big picture is, Mozilla and Google don't like extensions or extension developers. They don't like people customizing their browsers. We see feature after feature drop from being a button in the menu, to being an option in the about:config, to requiring an extension, to requiring manual modification of files, to being entirely disabled.

Look at something as simple as putting the tabs below the address bar. If Mozilla respected their users, it would be as simple as hitting the Customize button and then dragging the tab bar to the bottom. Then they stuck it in an about:config option. Then they required you to make a custom userChrome.css. Now guess what, in the newest version userChrome.css loading is disabled by default and you have to manually turn it back on. How long it will take before it's entirely disabled? I have no idea, but the message from Mozilla is clear: "You can use it the way we want you to or you can go to hell".

</comment><comment><USER42> This speaks for itself: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQi3OH0AE53rgDO1...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQi3OH0AE53rgDO1DSSRqLdH0h7790hPKiIHGlayLfhDGyEZWZLmxBQVNuSE4JFR3uj3fjRGY2lOK2J/pub)

"Last updated: 3/12/2018"

</comment><comment><USER43> I know this is tangential-- I would like to write a FF extension -- can anyone point out some good resources for that? Beyond what's on Moz's official site of course.

<comment><USER44> I just started working on an extension recently with no experience and have found it to be pleasantly unchallenging. If you are familiar with web development already, it's actually a pretty easy transition. Primarily you have the option of injecting some JS into every page, and also running a page in the background. So you just need to design your extension to work that way. Then you have access to some extension-specific APIs for stuff like the little icon in the toolbar or reading cookies.

I think if you already know web dev, you probably don't need a specific resource to figure it out - just dive right into it and look up which parts of API you need for certain things.

If you don't already know web dev, perhaps it would be better to learn that first and then look at extensions.

<comment><USER43> Thank you! I'm not a web dev precisely, but I think I can muddle through that :-)

<comment><USER45> It's essentially the same as a Chrome extension now. Tutorials and documentation for either should work fine.

<comment><USER46> Extensions written for one should work in the other as well after some minor repackaging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I make an extension for a living.

Use Stripe and bake billing/account management into your app.

Same experience across browsers.

<comment><USER48> I'm curious, is it just an extension or do you have other contact points with customers?

I feel like it's hard to justify paying for an extension so I'd love to know how you convince people to pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wrote browser extensions in pastime. They are mainly for my needs and happen to be useful for others. I'm lucky that I don't need to write extensions for financial reason, and don't ever plan to sell out. On the other hand, I can understand why some developers choose to do so. People get a family to feed. It would certainly helpful for Google and Mozilla to have greater support for the extension developers financially.

</comment><comment><USER50> Idea:

1\. The browser introduces a flat monthly subscription, e.g., $5 per month.

2\. If the user signs up, the browser would distribute the money between the extensions that the user has installed, by default.

3\. The user would also have the option to direct the money to specific extensions and/or to exclude specific extensions from this payment.

4\. This system would be completely optional, but the browser cold in return provide an advanced extensions UI with extra privacy and security options.

<comment><USER51> A flat monthly subscription for what exactly? Advanced extensions with UI and extra privacy/security options? There is a reason why this doesn't exist, and people already pay extra money for Windows and Mac OS. If people are already paying for an OS, they shouldn't then be required to pay for a premier browsing experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The basic issue is people do not want to pay for software if a 'good enough' free replacement is available. Hence Mozilla having to source money from whomever is willing to give them, and hence the race to the bottom. This has been particularly true in browser space. We usually pay for using programs of similar complexity like PS or AutoCAD etc., but we have always taken it for granted that browsers should be free and/or bundled. This works to the advantage of big players who can sink in the millions involved, which Mozilla is only alive today because of former momentum (user base). Forget about a browser startup or a community-maintained alternative. It has become too huge and complex an undertaking for anyone to bother as long as Chrome/Edge/Safari/Firefox will be available, no matter if they turn into user-hostile mess.

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of extensions are made because people need them for themselves, not to live of extension development. And this is something that can exist as a nice open source ecosystem with some oversight, like packages on a typical linux distro. All the development stuff can go into something like AUR on Archlinux, where users have to explicitly participate and accept more risk. And this is something not very evil browser vendor might be willing and be able to do. But creating incentives for extension developers is definitely the opposite of their plans, they'd rather kill extensions altogether.

</comment><comment><USER53> They're also failing to support users, as hinted by the article. The fact that developers are able to simply hand over control of extensions to a third party, who are going to do god knows what with it, without the user being informed at all, is ridiculous.

I have a few extensions with 10-100,000 users and have received many emails from people asking to buy one. The numbers in the article seem accurate - <USER4> you have 100,000 users you could be looking at offers for tens of thousands of dollars. So, it's no surprise that developers cave in and compromise their users' security.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've experienced slowness / crashes with FF extensions, as some people have described here, annoyingly the problem doesn't seem to be reproducible. I'd optimally like to have 4-5 plugins maximum - key-driven browsing, adblock, CSS overrides and JavaScript injection.

What's the best way to blame / troubleshoot a bad plugin? Because as soon as I add them all I experience 1-2 page crashes/infinity loops per hour

<comment><USER54> > What's the best way to blame / troubleshoot a bad plugin?

You don't do that if the plugin is provided for free, you can just say "thanks" or "no thanks", just don't use it / develop your own.

<comment><USER26> I meant respectfully blame, fwiw. If your plugin crashes my browser and I like the plugin, I'll fix it / send a bug report. If I don't like it, or it's beyond repair, I'll uninstall it.

I have way bigger stones I can grind my axe on, if I ever feel the need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I don't use browser extensions (as much as I'd like to) because I've seen too many being sold for nefarious purposes.

</comment><comment><USER56> Why don't developers of addons like gorhill and piro accept donations and hand them out to other addon developers they consider worthy, or some other developers users consider worthy?

It will help addon developers or even bring new developers to support addons whose original developers want to move on to other things.

</comment><comment><USER57> If you aren't buying the product, then you are the product. Maybe the problem is that extensions stores aren't as monitized as the IOS and Android App stores?

</comment><comment><USER58> No way anyone google or Mozilla can compete with a potential sale of 30 cents a user. So if that's truly they case they might was well expect the sales to happen and start to limit the power of extensions or put them behind expert- only gates, like Chrome flags.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously none of us expect to be paid the black market value of extensions. The point is for browser vendors to offer better tools for sponsoring developers, because it benefits everyone.

And no, the reaction to security issues should not be to further limit the extension API and declare war on the concept of general computing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> If it's open source then anyone can fork, right? So sell the extension, fork it, publish a new non-shitty version, and let users know via some non-official means. The only losers are the ignorant people who don't switch and the people you sold it to.

<comment><USER34> Those ignorant people are your users too, and you're still being a dick by selling them out, no matter how you try to rationalize around it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Between every release making we worry what functionality I'm going to lose and which extensions will stop working, or having all my containers wiped out permanently, Mozilla is failing extension users.

</comment><comment><USER61> Maybe it is me, but I seldom see the value of using an extension versus little utilities.

It is not as if every mainstream language doesn't have libraries to handle networking requests.

<comment><USER9> I wrote a security focused javascript, ad and annoyance blocking extension for myself, which is essentially a CSP, script and style injector with keyboard shortcuts. I don't see how utilities can help here.

<comment><USER61> It would have been done via proxy configuration.

<comment><USER9> Sure, it's technically possible, but it's an order of magnitude more work.

<comment><USER61> Which prevents any extension author free reign on my browser data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I think what a lot of comments are missing is that the value of a browser is directly boosted by the value provided by its extensions.

I wouldn't have switched to Firefox from Chrome if most of the extensions I was using wouldn't have had readily available equivalents or workarounds. I would have held off on test-driving the new Edge as my daily workhorse browser if I hadn't noticed an extension for my password manager in the Microsoft Store and found that I can install most extensions from the Chrome Web Store too.

Netscape and Opera prove that the paid browser business model is dead, sure, but that doesn't mean browsers (especially browsers developed by companies with lots of related paid services) don't represent value for the companies developing them -- and that those companies don't profit from that value.

Google especially benefits massively from Chrome's marketshare -- even to the extent that their own web services can get away with treating competitor browsers as second-class citizens. Extension developers contribute to the value driving that marketshare and open source extension developers do so with practically no return on investment.

This is just another example of the true sharing economy of open source clashing with capitalism (which is inherently based on extracting surplus value as profit, not sharing it back). Which would be fine, really, if the people participating in the sharing economy wouldn't also exist in capitalism and have to rely on their success under capitalism to ensure basic subsistence like food, shelter and the means of extension development.

Extension developers using ads, tracking, malware or selling their extensions to malicious entities are just trying to find ways within the system to capitalise at least on some of the value they've provided. That's undesirable and developers shouldn't be in such dire circumstances to be willing to give in, but this is a systemic problem.

Luckily unlike with most systems, this system is almost entirely in the hands of browser vendors. Browser vendors could emphasize donation options -- just look at how big open source projects like some Linux distros push donations while still allowing for freeloading. But browser vendors currently have no direct incentive to do so -- in fact, doing so might actually harm their metrics.

</comment><comment><USER63> Sometime I think that Google is controlling the decisions at Mozilla for Firefox...

</comment><comment><USER64> Hey man, thanks for Buster. I donated. You deserve it.</comment>


Shaman, Sacrificed Pigs, and Other Startup Stories Living Amongst a Hilltribe - <AUTHOR> http://ianborders.com/hilltribe-startup-stories-1

<comment><USER2> Poor little piggy. In my village the ritual is a little less demanding. Just have to endure 20 minutes of chanting, then strip down and get doused with a bucket of water. Not convinced this has a statistically significant impact on revenues (more split testing required); but it's quite refreshing, and makes my wife happy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Altar. You pray at an altar, you get your clothing altered. This should help you to remember: "A bachelor is an unaltared male."

<comment><USER4> Clever, and fixed.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. I find that my fingers type in the style of what I've been reading for the past week or three unless I give a correction. This is but one of the reasons I stay away from microblogging services, of course…</comment></comment></comment>


Devices being remotely wiped in police custody - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29464889 <comment><USER2> "If we can't get to the scene within an hour, we tell the client to pop it in a microwave oven"

Why not just tell the client to put it into flight safe mode ?</comment>


Xkcd 1313: Regex Golf (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb?create=1

<comment><USER2> Maybe add [2014] to the title? It's pretty cool, though, not that often that one can read the way Peter Norvig is thinking.

Also, instead of "matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents", would it be clearer to express "matches the last names of presidential candidates who got elected at some point, but not those who never became presidents" \- or along these lines (sorry for the grammar). This is then a mutually exclusive list, and no interpretation problem.</comment>


HomerLogistics Is Taking a Bite Out of the Food Delivery Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleywatch.com/2016/03/a-startup-taking-a-bite-out-of-the-food-delivery-business/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's amazing how crowded is the food delivery industry in this space and still entrepreneurs find a way to innovate on this space.</comment>


Chicken odour repels malaria mosquitoes, research in Ethiopia finds - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-36854781 <comment><USER2> As I understand it, the issue is that, while it might repel them to begin with, mosquitos evolve quite rapidly, and sooner or later they will learn to ignore the repellent, and it will be ineffective. There are tons of substances that mosquitos and insects find repelling. We have mapped the receptor in mosquitos which, when activated, make them shy away from a substance. But if it doesn't kill the mosquitos, or damage them, they will eventually learn that it's unharmful, and it will no longer be effective.

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7472/full/nature1...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7472/full/nature12594.html)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthranilate- based_insect_re...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthranilate- based_insect_repellents)

<comment><USER2> While looking for a different paper, which shows that mosquitos can adapt to certain repellents, I discovered that the paper from above has been retracted: [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18613.html)

I will post a link to the other paper if I find it.

<comment><USER2> Here's the paper.

Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes Exhibit Decreased Repellency by DEET following Previous Exposure: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0054438)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Poppycock. It is widely known that miasmas such as chicken odour are the source of disease, not a cure. In fact even the name "malaria" means "bad air" for this reason.

""" For when the morning breezes blow toward the town at sunrise, if they bring with them mist from marshes and, mingled with the mist, the poisonous breath of creatures of the marshes to be wafted into the bodies of the inhabitants, they will make the site unhealthy. """

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

<comment><USER4> I actually really love miasma theory- as fundamentally incorrect as it is, it gets a lot right.

<comment><USER5> That and Lamarckian evolution. They're actually pretty good examples of early science--they fit a lot of the facts as they were known at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bill Gates fights against malaria ([http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We- Do/Global-Health/Mala...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global- Health/Malaria)), then he says that he would raise chickens ([https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Why-I-Would-Raise- Chi...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Why-I-Would-Raise- Chickens))...he knew!

<comment><USER7> ... that chickens are the only medicine strong enough to save humanity

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Are chickens a significant predator of mosquitoes or mosquito larvae? That would make a lot of sense. Or maybe some other bird that chickens happen to have a smell in common with.

</comment><comment><USER9> > the compounds from the smell of the chicken can be extracted and could work > as a repellent

Might actually work as long as only a statistically insignificant minority of ppl is using it. After that point, it's Darwin all over again.

<comment><USER10> Only if "not being repelled by chicken smells" conferred a large enough selective advantage over "being repelled by chicken smells". Mosquitoes have plenty of other animals to bite besides humans, so it's not immediately apparent that it would change selection pressures at all, much less to the degree needed to push the population genotype in one direction or the other.

<comment><USER11> The most dangerous malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, does selectively target humans. See:

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.0269-283x.2002....](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.0269-283x.2002.00345.x/full)

<comment><USER12> We just need to breed a bunch if genetically modified chickens that produce L-lactic then, and we'll be set (if we use chicken odor as a repellant).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Missing a comma perhaps? I first misread it as chicken odor prevented researchers from doing their job since it smelled so bad.

</comment><comment><USER14> With all due respect to the 'use the existing headline' convention, a minor edit to this Yoda-style instance would dramatically decrease misunderstanding of the article topic.

(While I enjoy hearing British English most of the time this commaless reversing tends to drive me a little nuts.)

</comment><comment><USER11> A better title would be "repels malaria mosquitoes".

<comment><USER15> Every once in a while somebody aces the ever-popular genre of title complaint by suggesting a better one. Thanks!

The rest of you may have a comma as well. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mosquitoes would only avoid something if being near it made them less likely to reproduce successfully. Seeing that, we've decided to surround ourselves with those things.

This concerns me a little.

<comment><USER17> Chickens are not known for their predation of humans...

<comment><USER18> That's what the chickens want you to think</comment></comment></comment>


80% of your culture is your founder - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/80-of-Your-Culture-is-Your-Founder

<comment><USER2> CEO tips from an employee... OK.</comment>


'Phones Cause Teens to Grow Horns' Is a Dumb Tech Moral Panic - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evy8kw/phones-cause-teens-to-grow-horns-is-dumb-tech-moral-panic <comment><USER2> It's not a panic. But vice, and everyone talking about it and making something out of nothing, are manufacturing a 'moral panic'

Start calling it by their right name "bone spurs" (or technically enthesophytes). But I guess putting that in their title wouldn't create the 'panic'.

I mean, media are outraged by the, well, it's not even, the 'outrage' they manufacture.

<comment><USER3> Why would Vice, in critiquing the media, refer to "bone spurs", when the selling point of the bogus story is that kids are growing "horns"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_occipital_protuberanc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_occipital_protuberance)

</comment><comment><USER5> _> Dumb Moral Panic_

You nailed it.

But... it's still damn funny.

There's a place in society for Weekly World News sorts of stories. Alas it's come to be the major news outlets. But still.

<comment><USER6> its not funny.

Humans should not be _that stupid_ in this day and age...

I mean... look at the show "Good Omens...

Over 20,000 people have petitioned Netflix to cancel "Good Omens." "christians"... asking netflix to cancel a show produced and exclusively shown on amazon prime....

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Such a pity this isn't a bigger thing. I was hoping that this was the start of humans growing spikes on the back of our necks to protect us from predators when we're vulnerable while looking down at our phones.

</comment><comment><USER8> Teens do not use phones to call, so any radiation based damage should be in their fingers instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't either, I prefer all other options to calls.

I'm wondering how much longer they'll still be called "smartphones" and what term will replace it.

<comment><USER9> I like the term "mobile". It can be a mobile phone or a mobile computer or both.</comment></comment></comment>


Reusable SpaceX rockets gain backing by launch insurers - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattletimes.com/business/reusable-spacex-rockets-gain-backing-by-launch-insurers/ <comment><AUTHOR> This may seem like a minor point, but launch insurance is oddly important, at least to those of us not familiar with the putting-stuff-in-space system: [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/02/space_stasis.html)</comment>


The US Economic Growth Is Over. (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Interactives/2014/thinktank20/chapters/tt20%20united%20states%20economic%20growth%20gordon.pdf <comment><USER4> NO ONE - can accurately predict the economic future in the short term - <USER2> chaotic like the weather.

But the biggest indicator of economic health is demographics - and the US wins in this category hands down compared to other developed countries.

While Japan, Germany and other countries are rapidly aging - the united states continues to be culturally very open and meritocratic.

Britain tried being "open" but it backfired in a big way.

The United States will continue to dominate - its biggest rivals are of'course China and India. China is facing a huge demographic cliff while India even though it has the demographic advantage does not have the energy reserves nor is able to fully get rid of structural corruption ( US too has corruption but everything is relative )

At the end of the day - growth is just an anomaly - the longest state of the universe is decay.

<comment><USER5> Demographics don't matter if those people don't have income and wealth.

<comment><USER4> Income and wealth can be created out of thin air with a willing, determined and optimistic set of people.

The people who first came to the new world had no wealth or income - <USER3> built it themselves.

It's not something that is static, it can be created anywhere. There is nothing special about american soil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Growth is not over:

[https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDPC1](https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDPC1)

Edit: To elaborate, the rantings of one economist who has been wrong many times over does not make for a compelling work.

<comment><USER7> No, but the rate of growth is slower than it was before.

<comment><USER8> That's still a far cry from "growth is over."

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but headlines/titles are almost always exaggerations. The paper basically says "slower" not "over".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is good news. Economic growth has an inverse relationship with sustainability.

In the natural world we see ecosystems that exist in balanced cycles of equilibrium because the ecosystems that consume unsustainably have destroyed themselves. Natural selection selects that which is stable over that which is fit.

Modern civilization is an unsustainable ecosystem. It will not last and it will eventually be selected for self termination.

What will be left in the end are societies that do not grow but remain in equilibrium with the natural world. Keep in mind that we as modern humans living in a modern civilization are use to continuos compounding economic growth. The reality of the world is that growth is actually a temporary and very unnatural anomaly. The true state of the world is one of zero growth and total equilibrium.

The final question is, are we living in a sustainable society today? Or at least will the society we live in today be able to transform itself into a sustainable civilization before it inevitably self terminates as a result of uncontrollable growth?

<comment><USER10> s/equilibrium/steady state/g

Equilibrium and steady state are two very different things. Strictly, the path we eventually want to tread is not even steady state, since internal variables can change dramatically (e.g. switching from fossil fuels to nuclear/solar/wind). Only the large-scale metrics need to be steady state.

To give an analogy, the earth's climate is far from equilibrium (same temperature everywhere), but it is fairly close to steady state (same average temperature over long periods of time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Today the Q4 2015 GDP number came in at 0.69% only, so for the short term this may actually be coming true!

<comment><USER12> I personally derive great pleasure from the Cassandra-like voice of the prophet Scott Sumner crying in the wilderness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is funny ( and I'm the poster child for this ) but we have massive defense engineering disasters and corporate IT is one bloody trench battle after another, yet we seem to have no other ideas for "fixing" things.

And then we overmeasure the wrong things and make it worse.

</comment><comment><USER7> As interesting as this is, it isn't really news.

The US is going to be stuck in stagnation unless it can solve its structural problems and the solution to that will take decades plus political sanity. Political sanity is something we are very much lacking. :/

<comment><USER13> "Political sanity is something we are very much lacking"

You got Trump going for president though!

<comment><USER14> Honest question: Do people think that Trump believes the ignorant (and racist) rhetoric he spouts? Isn't it clear that he's just doing what it takes to get elected?

<comment><USER15> Do you think he believes it will get him elected?

<comment><USER16> The odds makers are giving him a fair shot at it next best after Hillary. If you disagree that he has a shot against her you can make some cash from it.

[http://www.paddypower.com/bet/politics/other-politics/us- pol...](http://www.paddypower.com/bet/politics/other-politics/us- politics?ev_oc_grp_ids=791149)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The leading "The" and the trailing period need to be edited out of the title. Neither is appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Britain tried being "open" but it backfired in a big way.

Care to elaborate?

> the united states continues to be culturally very open and meritocratic.

Hmm... tell that to Trump, the frontrunner for one of your two parties.

<comment><USER19> Trump is in no way representative of the country as a whole. He exists as a phenomenon because a relatively small minority really likes him, and because the Republicans have not managed to find any candidate even slightly worthwhile.

When you see that Trump is polling at 31% or whatever, keep in mind that 31% of early Republican primary voters is a pretty small number of people. With a more normal candidate you might take that as being in some way representative of the wider population, but Trump is probably not going to gain much more support than he already has, since he's so extremely polarizing.

<comment><USER20> It's been said a couple of times by people smarter than myself in this area - Trump has a high floor [of votes], but a very low ceiling.

<comment><USER19> Yep, that's exactly what I'm trying to say with a larger quantity of less intelligible words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> With the federal reserve pumping out money like nobodies business, the resulting inflation is a major brake on the economy. It also results in less profits for companies, less income growth for employees etc.

The only people it really benefits are wall street and other politically well connected entities (solyndra et. al.)

The government is basically sucking up all of the value from advances in technology ,and redirecting it to the political class who then profit from the carry trade of investing it in the stock market and the like.

Ironically, of course, none of the mainstream candidates for president will fight this, though many of them are trying to get elected on the backs of the outrage over "income inequality"... and this comment is likely to be buried because it points out a crime committed under both Bush and Obama and nobody wants to admit their guy is a bad guy.

<comment><USER22> Inflation rates were very low in 2015 (sometimes even slightly negative) [0], and historically have been relatively constant at around 1-5% (even during the economic crisis of 2008).

Aside from extraneous years of course where it hit high teens.

So, yea, if there is a break on the US economy, it doesn't appear to be stemming from inflation.

The United States has an extremely diversified economy, plenty of natural resources, an abundance of talent, a relatively low population, incredible military strength, technological dominance in many areas, a healthy population (unlike, as pointed out, some countries which are declining in population, or about to hit cliffs where the majority of the population is above the working age), and huge geographical buffers.

Some economists say the dollar might be _too_ strong for short term gains for the American worker, and the Fed is having trouble hitting inflation targets between 1-3%.

The private sector benefits primarily from government funding of research.

So I'm just not sure where you're basing your analysis from?

[0] - [http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical- in...](http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation- rates/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Please Review My Mobile Web App Development IDE - Basic/JavaScript - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for feedback on my new development tool. Many of you know a lot about the underlying technologies and will be able to spot ways we can make it better.
Here's how it works: The IDE has a drag and drop design screen for your widgets. It is integrated with a code editor. The code can be in JavaScript or a (large) subset of Visual Basic, which case it is translated to JavaScript.
It creates an HTML page which can be loaded and saved on iPhones, iPads and Android devices. The apps can be saved to the home screen and will run without any internet connection. Apps can be distributed without going through the App Store.
Underlying technologies are HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.  The apps are optimized for WebKit.
All comments are welcome.
Here's the link: http://www.nsbasic.com/blog/?p=187 <comment><USER2> I have a lot of respect for the NS Basic family of products - I remember using the NS Palm Basic maybe 10 years ago and then later reviewing the offerings for windows CE for a UK computer magazine.

Having just had a first go at using PhoneGap to package an HTML5/CSS/JavaScript app for the Android platform I would be interested in trying anything that could cut out some of the software layers in that stack or simplified the process (although I suppose I might get used to it).

<edit> I jumped in a bit too quickly there - and I have now watched the demo videos. You don't end up with (say) a .apk package for Android but you do end up with a web App that can be presented in full screen mode - neat.

Any plans to go the next step and create "native apps"?

<comment><AUTHOR> So far, the best way is to feed the result of App Studio to PhoneGap, which can then create an apk (for Android) or an app that can be submitted to the App Store. Both of those solutions require that you download and configure the SDKs for their platforms. In the case of iOS, you'll also need to deal with the App Store.

OTOH, many apps work nicely as web apps, and it's improving all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://www.nsbasic.com/blog/?p=187></comment>


Three billion North American birds have vanished since 1970 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/three-billion-north-american-birds-have-vanished-1970-surveys-show <comment><USER2> Discussed extensively last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21019995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21019995)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018916](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21018916)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, sorry I missed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > _Since the 1970s, the continent has lost 3 billion birds, nearly 30% of the > total, and even common birds such as sparrows and blackbirds are in decline, > U.S. and Canadian researchers report this week online in Science_

So, at 1970s we had 9 billion birds, and we know have 6 billion birds?

I've seen articles that say: "Cats that live in the wild or indoor pets allowed to roam outdoors kill from 1.4 billion to as many as 3.7 billion birds in the continental U.S. each year, says a new study that escalates a decades- old debate over the feline threat to native animals".

Compared to that, a drop of 3 billion birds "since the 70s" seem a tiny number, no?

<comment><USER4> That doesn't follow.

Birds are generally prey and have a typical prey strategy; they lay lots of eggs and expect few chicks to reach adulthood, while the large majority become food for someone. Sparrows lay about four eggs per year and become >10 years old, for example.

You should expect lots of sparrows to be eaten. Otherwise, the number of sparrows would grow by >100% per year. What this study says is that the number of chicks to reach adulthood is below two per hen, sustained for 50 years.</comment></comment>


Tesla semi truck announced - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/elon-musk-teases-electric-tesla-semi-truck-for-september/ <comment><USER2> The title of the article is "Elon Musk releases teaser image of Tesla semi truck", please change the current click-bait title to the actual title.

<comment><USER3> How is it click bait?

<comment><USER4> Because nothing got officially announced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very interested to see details. I have a hard time believing it will be purely battery based and able to do "long haul".

Typical semis carry 300 gallons of diesel and have a 2000 mile range. You would probably need to a 4 to 5 megawatt-hour battery to equal that. At today's price your looking at a million+ dollar battery that weighs 50,000 lbs and would take 40 hours to recharge on a super charger. Just makes no sense.

Lets say by "long haul" they mean 500 miles, still at least a megawatt hour battery that cost 300k, weighs 10k and takes 10 hours to charge. What trucker would buy that?

Perhaps it will be targeted at urban delivery with a even smaller battery.

<comment><USER6> Well, a class 8 trucks has a gross weight of over 33,000 pounds. Let's pretend that Musk gets that 1MWh by slapping some Powerwall 2 units on a truck frame.

The Powerwall 2 has a capacity of 200 kWh, costs $5,500 and weighs ~3,500 pounds. So we're looking at 17,500 pounds and $27,500 for that 1 MWh of batteries.

That's about half the minimum gross weight of the truck at a fairly reasonable price compared to the vehicle cost as a whole.

I'm sure there would some significant weight savings using a electric drive versus the large diesel engine + drivetrain. How much savings? I have no idea, but it should significantly cut into the battery weight penalty.

Edit: Looks like a typical heavy duty engine (Cummings ISX15) is only about 3,000 pounds, dry weight. The Model S electric motors are only 70 pounds, so let's say at least one Powerwall is "free" weight-wise.

Also, the ISX15 looks to be >$20,000 for rebuilt engine, so the battery costs look approximately comparable to a traditional engine price.

<comment><USER5> Powerwall 2 is only 14kwh at 270lbs for $5500, or about $400 per kwh. You must mean the power pack 2 which cost 80k.

Musk wants $100/kwh cost from the Gigafactory, but market is currently above $300.

Semi tractors only weigh 15-20k lbs your talking a battery that weighs as much as the tractor. 300 gallons of diesel is 2000 lbs and the engine and transmission is about 3000 lbs. it would be at least 10k heavier which reduce carrying capacity since gross is capped at 88,000 lbs total not to mention space.

<comment><USER7> Now throw in the autonomous factor. Subtract driver labor costs and throw in near 24/7 operation (vs. human drivers which are required to stop for rest breaks).

<comment><USER5> Semi doesn't have be electric to be autonomous, Frieghtliner is already showing diesel autonomous prototypes.

<comment><USER7> True, and to those add the cost of externalities like mining on natural ecosystems and pollution on climate warming and our health.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So in the comments I see all this blah blah about it being unfeasible. But I can see this working well if you covered the truck in the highest end/best technology solar panels out there. You'd pretty much always be able to start the truck & drive around a few miles till you can charge it, at least.</comment>