Caution on Twitter urged as Britons barred from US - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16810312

<comment><USER2> There are a lot of comments here about the importance of free speech. I value free speech very highly, so I will practice some here. I will see if an attempt to write a possibly disagreeing opinion here will be responded to by thoughtful comments, as I expect, and urge HN participants to consider some other points of view besides those expressed by the majority here.

As I noted in my last comment on this incident, in another HN thread,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3529500>

"a foreign national kidding around about a trip in which he or she will 'destroy America' shouldn't be surprised to be questioned about that by law enforcement officers." It is routine national policy in every country of the world to give border officers full discretion to deny entry to any foreign person, even if the foreign person has a visa issued by the host country's overseas diplomatic officials, and even if the foreign person comes from a country with a visa-free entry treaty with the host country (as the United Kingdom has with the United States). A general policy of visa-free entry or routine issuance of visas to visitors who meet defined criteria does not remove an immigration officer's general discretion to deny entry to any foreign visitor, without further legal recourse.

I encourage Hacker News participants to check the law of the country where they live, whatever country that is. Very likely you will find that immigration officials have exactly this kind of discretion, unreviewable discretion, in your country. A foreign visitor who kids around about engaging in any kind of illegal or bothersome activity, even the kind of activity that many loyal citizens of the host country engage in, is at risk of being denied entry in pretty much every country in the world. The way to test how often this kind of rare edge case occurs in other countries is to try the experiment --tweet about the fun you desire to have in the next country you plan to visit, in the same terms, and see what happens. Probably most British visitors to the United States who previously have tweeted similar messages have been allowed entry to the United States, without anyone taking notice of the tweets. And probably on some future occasion someone else may tweet the same kinds of statements, and not be detected. But try it yourself if you wonder what other countries might do. In general, each country of the world gives its immigration officers unreviewable discretion to deny entry to foreign persons for any reason or no reason at all.

On the broader issue of whether or not this lone incident is a sign that the United States no longer cherishes freedom of speech, no of course not. Here we all are talking about this incident, with many criticisms of the United States being openly expressed. I daily exercise my right as an American to criticize government officials at all levels in the United States. I will keep right on doing that no matter what I hear about practices by immigration officers at United States borders.

Moreover, the United States continues to enjoy substantial net immigration and a large number of asylum claims by people from other countries who expect to enjoy more freedom once they start living in the United States than they did in the countries of their birth. Here in the United States, I can disagree with you, and you can disagree with me, and we can be civil about that, and not be afraid of secret police or private militia hit squads coming after us if we express a controversial opinion. Other countries also provide the benefit of free speech, and people who are concerned about recent trends in United States law are correct to be wary about granting the government intrusive authority to monitor the private conversations of people in the United States. But the reported incident, while perhaps an excessive response based on the facts reported so far, does not suggest that the United States has lost free speech, nor indeed does it even suggest that the border response to such a tweet is a response that would not be found at other national borders.

The continued interest here on HN in founder's visas and in other efforts to loosen immigration requirements is evidence that there are still plenty of people around the world of high levels of education who would be happy to settle in the United States and pursue their careers there. There are still people who advocate that all of the tens of thousands of university students from dozens of countries who attend undergraduate or graduate classes in the United States should gain residence visas when they gain their degrees. There is plenty of demand to reside in the United States, to visit the United States for tourism or for business, and to invest in the United States. That is not going away any time soon.

Believing in free speech, I welcome your kind comments to this comment, and will read them with care to see if I can improve my thinking on this issue.

<comment><USER3> I am sensitive, having insensitively used the term "The Republic" to refer to Ireland when speaking to a British customs agent, to your argument regarding sovereignty and the necessary discretion of government officials. I simply didn't know the implications. Similarly, a stated intent, not a joke, to engage in an activity that, while indiscreet and boorish in some circles, is not reviled as in our Puritanical society should not serve to permanently discredit a visitor to the US. It is a pernicious scale to employ. And it isn't just visitors to the US who need to find concern in this story. Am I to expect that all of my public statements from now on, guided by whatever level of maturity, sobriety, or proclivity, are to be recorded, permanently and used to determine which airspaces I may traverse? Should my intended audience include every customs official I may ever encounter? Puritanical, indeed. Jesus _and_ the border patrol are watching! You trumpet our political freedoms, casting aspersions on the domestic political establishment. Talk trash about the Her Majesty and then go to England. Speak about religion or sexuality without offending anybody, and expect to travel the other way around the globe to reach your destination. A panopticon such as this equates every iota of common speech with taunting an official.

The argument that we're still a popular place to visit rings hollow. Greece is a popular place to visit, but that shouldn't server as an endorsement of their horribly broken bureaucracy.

<comment><USER4> Say what?! It is the _UK_ Ireland Act (1949) that recognises "Republic of Ireland" as a name for the Irish state. Under Irish Law, "Republic of Ireland" is only a description, and the official name (in English) is Ireland. The only insensitivity (and ignorance) in this instance is that of the the UK border agent.

I cannot disagree with your main argument however.

<comment><USER3> As I was later to understand, "The Republic" is slang that indicates a sympathy for Republicans, Irish Catholics, some of whom rather notoriously caused "trouble" for the Crown and it's subjects. The offences were mutual. Open hostility relatively rare now, but there is still a lot of animosity and caution reserved for suspected troublemakers of any stripe. As an American, I am certain I was treated deferentially. I had, in effect, just given the agent the finger.

<comment><USER4> Leaving aside your rather ill-informed history lesson - indicates to whom?

As a British born non-catholic who has lived and worked in both Ireland and the UK, I can assure you are over-stating its meaning, except perhaps to practicing loyalists in Northern Ireland. The accepted vernacular there as a matter of practical sensitivity to the majority is "Southern Ireland" or "The South" and "GB" for the part of the UK that excludes NI.

To suggest that it is generally offensive (as in "giving the finger") is, well, offensive.

Edit: To wit - "UK Border Agency | If you are travelling to or from the Republic of Ireland [...]" [http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/customs- travel/Enteringthe...](http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/customs- travel/Enteringtheuk/arrivingatukborder/travellingtocommontravelarea/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From other news reports it appears that this pair came to the attention of the border folks in the US because of a tip off.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/31/call- to-l...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/01/31/call-to-lax- tipline-flagged-u-k-tourists-tweets/)

"Based on information provided by the LAX Port Authority Infoline – a suspicious activity tipline – CBP conducted a secondary interview of two subjects presenting for entry into the United States"

So, the question comes down to... was this a random US citizen who likes to monitor Twitter for threats who decided to make the tip off, or is there something else going on here that we are not seeing? In all the news reports that I've seen I've only seen the first page of the document given to the guy; the page that mentions Twitter. I wonder if there's something else on the other pages.

<comment><USER6> A tip off could have come from anywhere, that is why it is such a good PR explanation for them:

* A random concerned citizen (so it wasn't them looking, they just acted on behalf of someone genuinely concerned, this makes the thing a bit more noble).

* A scorned lover/an enemy ("oh you think are going to go on a vacation? remember what you did to me, I know exactly how to get back... what is that FBI tip-off number again...?")

* A secret (or not so secret govt.) web searching and filtering program. They don't want to reveal which one it is, but it could potentially just be made to generate "tip-offs" so that it looks like a person noticed, but in fact everything is automated. High profile tip-offs can be filtered through human agents as well.

Some of us who lived repressive regimes know how this works. If the govt. is afraid of X, and sets up an anonymous tip-off line to report X. Then is known to go ahead and blindly act on that tip. It creates an awesome/terrifying tool for everyone to use. X can be anything you like: terrorism, communism, whatever the du jour "War on ..." is waged.

In the Soviet Union we had neighbors denouncing each other for anti-communist activities because they couldn't agree on the color of the fence. This stuff will happen. The crazier and irrational the govt. gets the more potential for abuse it creates. With a bit of work and ingenuity, during certain decades, you could have made your whole neighbor's family disappear into Siberia practically overnight.

<comment><USER7> Yes, its a nice veil they can hide behind.

But what boggles my mind the most is, why did FBI have to deport them? Are they really so irrational that they could not discern genuine threats vs someone who jokingly meant it (and in this case its a brit slang!). This is where I think administration is falling apart. You read those stories about TSA horror stories and all of them indicate a lack of common sense on the administrative side.

<comment><USER8> I believe that we're seeing the result of an extreme cover-your-ass mentality.

There is a chance, even though incredibly small, that the person in question really will commit some act of terrorism. What are the payoffs _to the individual making this decision_ of all the possible options?

Not a terrorist, deport him: no cost.

Not a terrorist, let him in: no cost.

Terrorist, deport him: no cost.

Terrorist, let him in: lose your job, your career, get to testify before a hostile Congress, become a national scapegoat, etc. etc.

As far as I know, there are no consequences for deporting someone in a situation like this. Thus, even if the chances that he's a real terrorist are incredibly small, the fact that they're nonzero, and the fact that knowledge of this tweet would inevitably result in massive fingerpointing in that remote event, means that deportation is the obvious best choice. There's no benefit to letting him in, and some benefit to deporting him.

You see this sort of thing pop up in any large bureaucracy. There are rarely penalties for "better safe than sorry", even when taken to an absurd degree, but there are huge penalties for a failing to take that approach in the event that you miss something.

My wife just finished a thorough government background check, including an in- person interview about all of her international travel activity for the last X years, several calls for followup questions about relatives and their jobs and potential ties to foreign governments, etc. The job they're checking her for? Web designer at the Smithsonian. Not exactly a repository of national secrets here.

That background check makes no sense from a cost-benefit analysis, but makes tons of sense from a cover-your-ass bureaucratic analysis. Looks to me like the exact same thing happened with this tweet.

<comment><USER7> Well put. It is unfortunate that there is no way to have these folks accountable for their actions. I agree the public sentiments will be with them in this case though, but its one step closer to the Orwellian society.

Note: I am not a USA citizen or reside in USA - just so that my perspectives are understood as an outsider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Caution on Twitter. The ultimate goal of censoring is exactly this: self- censoring. At some point, the government barely needs to censor at all, because the people censor themselves. In this fight, at least, the TSA/DHS/etc is succeeding in spades.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, this quote scared me:

> Abta, which represents travel companies in the UK, said holidaymakers need > to learn to be ultra-cautious when it comes to talking about forthcoming > trips

no, we shouldn't 'need to learn to be ultra-cautious', we should be able to say whatever we want without living in fear.

edit: yes, _whatever_ we want. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. It's actions that we need to stop, not speech.

<comment><USER11> By all means, say whatever you want. Just don't expect to be allowed into the USA as a right.

The irrationality and absurdity of TSA is something that most Americans are aware of. But we have a President and Congress who think it's all just fine. The only solution to this problem is to elect lawmakers who will abolish TSA. Last time I checked, there's only one candidate for President who has included that as part of his platform.

<comment><USER12> single-issue voting is no less stupid when groups other than fundies do it.

<comment><USER11> Erm, actually it's not "single-issue voting." There is a whole host of bad legislation that is very invasive of personal liberty in the US, not just TSA. A good example would also be the recent SOPA/PIPA legislation. All those things need to be voted down, not just one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Our tax dollars are being well spent, so now we can catch the next Al Qaeda bomber as he is preparing to destroy America and inadvertently tweets his intention. The jokes on you Al-Qaeda bomber, the US is way ahead of you man. Sounds like a prewritten Colbert segment.

<comment><USER14> You say that, but multiple people with intent to commit a school shooting/bombing have been caught because they revealed their intentions online.

Monitoring doesn't have to be done to catch the stereotypical "terrorist", but can also catch people with psychological issues that are disgruntled.

Now, is it worth it and does it work? I don't know, but there is precedent for people to post their intentions online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does this mean, for every person traveling, the feds can identify your social network activity and detect thought-crime? I'm interested in how they already knew which accounts belonged to who -- and how they automatically detected them as 'threats'.

<comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)>

Carnivore, now DSC1000, scrapes the web and inspects packets for keywords and flags potential threats. I'm pretty sure "destroy" and "America" would raise a flag in it's system.

Furthermore, finding out who accounts on twitter belong to is often fairly trivial since a good deal of people use their actual names and if not that use pseudonyms that are easily linked.

<comment><USER15> Because their name is linked on Twitter? What's to stop someone from making an account under my name?

<comment><USER17> > What's to stop someone from making an account under my name?

Absolutely nothing! But, if you got nothing to fear, you got nothing to hide ... er, ... or something to that effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let me play devil's advocate here and note that twitter has been used as a communication platform by what the US Gov't consider (again, I take no position on the merits) terrorist organizations,[1] and that monitoring such a public forum is at least somewhat legitimate.

The offending party probably shouldn't have been deported, but that's another matter.

[1]: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/28/al-shabaab- twitter_...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/28/al-shabaab- twitter_n_1172442.html)

<comment><USER19> Sure.

It's still absurd to deny them entry. Rude white kids from England aren't exactly a threat, and a cursory glance at their background would probably confirm that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."

\-- Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, 2001-09-26

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/nation/specials/attacke...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/fleischertext_092601.html)

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell If they were a credible terrorist threat, they would have been picked up in the UK before even setting off.

<comment><USER21> And they certainly should not have been put _back_ onto an _airplane_.

Isn't the job of these people to keep terrorists _off_ of airplanes? Then they "catch" some and the first thing they do is put them on one...

Whoever made that call should be arrested. When they admit that the two did not actually pose a threat, they should be released then promptly re-arrested.

<comment><USER22> You're confused.

It's the job of the TSA (or security guards at foreign airports) to search and clear you and your possessions for flying. They are preventing short-term threats, this is the last line of defense.

This story is about US Customs and Border Patrol, who are responsible for a lot of things at airports as well as border crossings, including:

1) Making sure you are permitted to enter the country (checking or issuing visas).

2) Making sure you are not bringing anything illegal into the country.

3) Making sure you are not a "threat" to the US. You're a criminal, or associated with activist/terroris organizations which are hostile to the US, or are likely to commit a crime during your stay.

Customs wasn't worried that this guy was going to blow up the next plane he got on. They were (stupidly) worried that he would (probably) cause trouble after he entered based on something somebody (might have) told them. So they played it safe and denied him entry.

The evidence they used was dumb, but at the border there is something between "we have evidence that you're a criminal and we're arresting you" and "you seem like trouble so we're not letting you be our guest".

<comment><USER21> Oh no, I get all of that. But DHS is DHS as far as I care.

If they sincerely thought that these people were a threat they would have been detained. They were not worried in the slightest however, and nobody "seemed like trouble". The agents were just being assholes.

You see, the extent to which they posed a threat to the country they also posed a threat to the aircraft. (Not in the slightest, and everybody involved knew it.)

<comment><USER22> Counter-example:

Normal guy, going to a conference, history of overstayed visas.

He can get on the plane from Paris to New York, but he's not getting in (rightly so). TSA is not CBP, nor should they be.

I'd much rather that all that money go toward (better) background checks by CBP instead of perfume-stealing by the TSA.

<comment><USER21> I think it is pretty clear that in this case the rational of the CBP is that the two were 'dangerous', not that they messed up paperwork or violated visas.

De-fund them all, they have proven that even they don't take themselves seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did the guy who said he was going to "destroy America" have a public twitter feed? I'm wondering if making your tweets protected is enough to keep the FBI from reading them.

<comment><USER24> Uhh...

I think you are underestimating the reach of the FBI and DHS.

They know EXACTLY whose IP address is posting every comment, they just never go through them unless your spouse's body turns up somewhere. Then they go through everything.

What is surprising to me is that they went through the e-communications of these two simply because they were traveling to the US. That's new info to me...I didn't think they did that.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure you understand the question. It's not a matter of IP addresses. Protected tweets are not publicly accessible, so it's not a given that intelligence agencies have access to them unless Twitter is providing it to them, or they've hacked into them.

<comment><USER26> Twitter's privacy policy doesn't actually require a warrant to give up your "private" info (including your protected tweets).

 _Law and Harm: We may preserve or disclose your information if we believe that it is reasonably necessary to comply with a law, regulation or legal request; to protect the safety of any person; to address fraud, security or technical issues; or to protect Twitter's rights or property._

<https://twitter.com/privacy>

<comment><USER27> Yes, but that's a moot point unless one of the following is true:

1) Twitter monitors all tweets _itself_ for any "subversive" content, and then takes the initiative to report that to the appropriate authorities.

2) Twitter gives full access to _all_ tweets to the FBI, regardless of their content, so that the FBI can sift through the data themselves.

1 isn't such a big deal, but 2 certainly is.

<comment><USER26> I doubt Twitter gives them _everything_ since it's a difficult engineering problem to handle that much data. But I could easily believe the FBI has a list of terms or phrases that Twitter self-monitors for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can I offer some thoughts that seem to go against the majority opinion so far?

1) Should authorities take reasonable steps to prevent the commission of a crime, or wait until after it's occurred? What if a well-known soccer hooligan has posted that he's looking forward to running amuck? 2) Are threats against an individual allowed as part of free speech? What about against a family? Small business? A neighbourhood? A country? Where do you draw the line? 3) Do you differentiate between personal criminal behaviour and organized criminal behaviour? Or, between explosive threats vs non-explosive threats, like a small bomb vs significant vandalism to public property done for Youtube? 4) How would a third party know the tweeter is joking? (Most people who get called out for saying rude or racist remarks say "oh I was just kidding" afterwards). Do you prefer that all remarks should be ignored completely, or (somehow) checked for credibility? (And I have no idea how one would approach that, btw)

Looking for direct answers to all 4 questions, please. Would like to sample where people stand.

<comment><USER29> Yes. No. Yes. Due to lack of real proof. If we reacted this way to every aggressive speech, we'd have majority of population in prison for saying they're going to kill someone. (as in - "What did he do? I'm going to kill him!")

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This might be a case of what Schneier calls "cover your ass" security: No-one want's to be held responsible if something happens.[1]

If you are an organization, or even just a random guard, the real priority might not to stop something bad from happening. It could just as well be to avoid blame. So it's much better to be extremely cautious.

You're in a world of hurt if someone tipped you off to a "suspicious" tweet, you let them through, and (beyond belief) they actually carried out an attack. Much better to deny them entry, even if it's obvious the "threat" is false.

Since everyone has to be _at least_ as careful as the next guy, probably even more so, I I see this ending badly.

[1] [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/cya_security_1...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/cya_security_1.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> The salient point here is that the offending tweet was apparently made some weeks ago. This public act was done deliberately to send a warning signal that Big Brother is everywhere and sees everything. It might have caused some unpleasantness if they had made an example of Americans so they chose a foreign national.

But then again it is just security theatre. They've made people aware they monitor Twitter and (EDIT I would guess) can mine it for historic comments so people will now take more care when using Twitter thus diminishing the value of the monitoring. This was a PR stunt for a purpose we may never understand.

</comment><comment><USER28> Did DHS specifically say they were banned for their tweets or is it just a newsworthy assumption? Did the two have any kind of criminal history, or was the denial due to their responses?

This could be like the guy who reportedly entered the US because he showed an iPad photo of his passport. Made news for a few days until US customs said "uh, no, we have our own methods and discretion, the ipad pic didn't matter". Big story became a non-story.

</comment><comment><USER32> Maybe it's time to go back to IRC?

<comment><USER33> Better: let's revive the finger protocol.

<comment><USER34> Most terrorists I know keep a .plan

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can I just point out that according to the article he's Irish and therefore not a Briton. An Irish passport might be slightly higher on the 'be careful' list?

</comment><comment><USER28> Did DHS specifically say they were banned for their tweets or is it just a newsworthy assumption? Did the two have any kind of criminal history? Were they denied This could be like the guy who reportedly entered the US because he showed an iPad photo of his passport. Made news for a few days until US customs said "uh, no, we have our own methods and discretion, the ipad pic didn't matter". Big story became a non-story.

</comment><comment><USER36> Reinforces what should be a lesson for everyone: the flipside of freedom and free speech is responsibility, judgment and facing the consequences. Just because you can do a thing does not mean you should. Win a battle but lose a war. You have the ability and right to yell fire when alone in a room at home. But do it in public theatre and there may be consequences both physical (stampede) and legal.

</comment><comment><USER37> Some takeaways.

        The US government absolutely does monitor twitter.
        Not having your real name on-line still matters greatly.
        The US is willing to waste gobs of money just to make you feel bad.

</comment><comment><USER38> What if they were american citizens? Shouldn't the FBI or something arrest them under terrorist charges?

They came from the UK and were sent back, but if they were from the US, would they be imprisoned?

<comment><USER39> Or more to the point: how many checks exist (if any) between such a 'tip' identifying someone as a possible threat, and their being identified as a 'terrorist' by the executive branch and essentially stripped of their rights as a citizen?

This is why people don't trust the administration's argument of: "we'll only use it on real terrorists, we promise". Not only is that still a terrible affront to liberty, but our country's track record of identifying "real" terrorists has been laughable. The very concept of any practical "trust" in their ability to operate in this space is made laughable by situations like the deportations in question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone know how they went from a tweet to real names and travel dates? And how do they stop some third party abusing twitter to prevent someone else from travelling to the us?

</comment><comment><USER41> Perhaps we need a humor flag on web pages, Twitter. By setting the humor bit you could remove all ambiguity as to whether you're making a joke or a threat.

[this.humor := true]

<comment><USER30> I wonder if an emoticon would have saved them..

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I really hope US anti-terrorist work isn't so ethnocentric as to focus on "destroy" and "America". Next they'll be searching on, "hate our freedom".

</comment><comment><USER43> Let one little patriot act pass through Congress and we get plagued with the retard bregade known as the tsa for 100 years.

</comment><comment><USER44> CAUTION, DHS does not understand Queens English, Farsi, basically anything other than DHS speak..so oh why not have DHS stop scanning twitter..

<comment><USER45> "The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language." George Bernard Shaw (apparently).

The original tweet(s) were immature as well as culturally insensitive. If you are going to use language that's cliquey in a public broadcast medium, and words that in their plain well-understood meaning convey threats or danger, then you have no grounds to complain if persons of authority take measures against such perceived threats.

Granted, these people probably didn't realise the repercussions of their locale-specific slang, but ignorance is no excuse. They should at least be aware of the environment they are travelling to.

It's the golden rule of international travel: Don't be an idiot. International travel is a privilege, not a right. Foreign countries don't have to let you in, even if you are British.

Being British myself, I'm actually unaccustomed to the use of the word destroy in that context, and never heard this digging up Marylin Monroe quip. I found both tweets tasteless and needlessly incendiary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> US, guardians of free speech around the world, indeed..

"You're free to say what we tell you to say.."

<comment><USER47> As much of a farce as DHS is, I'm pretty sure they have all the authority in the world to regulate who gets into the country and who doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This shows you that security agencies don't have command of english language (they simply don't understand it). I can't understand this otherwise.

<comment><USER49> I think this shows you security agencies are just plain stupid, maybe it's a bureaucratic problem but time and again common sense is thrown out the window with "homeland" security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> How many more incidents of this variety before foreigners (and foreign investment and foreign inventors and foreign entrepreneurs) stop coming to the US? After reading this and listening to the latest episode of "This American Life" ([http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/456/r...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/456/reap-what-you-sow?act=1)), I can't help but wonder if the right in the US will "reap what they sow" and end up with an impoverished shell of an empire that no one _wants_ to illegally enter.

 _Edit_ : Based on the down votes this comment is receiving, I assume some people disagree. I'd be curious if the source of that disagreement is a feeling that this incident will not have any impact on the likelihood of other foreigners visiting?</comment>


Rails meets Docker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gemnasium.com/post/65599561888/rails-meets-docker

<comment><USER2> Awesome guide, this is a pretty good guide to docker+rails! Just read through it and it's answered a couple of my questions even about why someone would bother to use docker for development</comment>


Craftsmanship–The Alternative to the 4 Hour Work Week - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/the-alternative-to-the-four-hour-work-week-mindset/ <comment><USER2> > _To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and > accumulation of expertise. This assumes that for any given undertaking you > either provide expertise or you are just a bystander. It's the experts that > are the drivers — an expertise that is gained from a curiosity, and a > mindset of treating one's craft very seriously._</comment>


Amazon's Shrinking Profit Sets Off a Seismic Shock to Its Shares - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/business/amazons-shrinking-profit-sets-off-a-seismic-shock-to-its-shares.html?hp <comment><USER2> The stock is down from when it was up, but it's still up from when it was down!!

In all seriousness, 8-10% is a big move, but definitely not "seismic", especially after an earnings release. Apple went up that much yesterday. Today YELP fell 8% and TWTR fell over 7%.

<comment><USER3> It's not the move per-se, just that AMZN has previously been impervious to (or even benefited from) unprofitable quarters and missed wall st. estimates.

Unless there's another reason for this sell-off, it means perhaps Amazon's teflon-coating when it comes to it's profit-aversion might be wearing a bit thin.

That's a shift.

<comment><USER4> Earnings don't miss estimates; estimates miss earnings.

<comment><USER5> Possibly the most ignored fact in finance and management.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The funny thing for me is that everyone has always said that Amazon's share price is justified because eventually "they'll turn on the profit tap" and up their margins once the market is captive.

Yet, how do you tell when Amazon are about to do that? I would've thought they'd do it when revenue growth starts slowing. ie. When the strategy of spending money to make money starts being less effective, as there is steadily harder gains to be got from it. _That 's_ when I'd turn on the tap.

So just as Amazon are about to do this (potentially anyway), that's when people sell? I'd say this is by far the best time to buy...

<comment><USER7> > Yet, how do you tell when Amazon are about to do that?

Amazon will never do that, because it can't. It's in retail. Retail is and always will be a low margin business.

Is there an example of a large retailer that doesn't manufacture its own goods that has profits in the double digits?

<comment><USER8> "We believe in the long term, but the long term also has to come," says Bezos, explaining that periodically Amazon wants to "check in" with its ability to make money. Thus, in 2007, Amazon more than doubled its profit, to $476 million, on a 38% increase in sales to almost $15 billion.

[http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/11/16/jeff-bezos- amaz...](http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/11/16/jeff-bezos-amazon/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seismic is 40 or 50% loss. Catastrophic is 70 or 80%. Complete sell off is 90%.

8% is one major mutual fund that needs its stocks to have certain ratios and profit margins had to do a sell off and technical traders went with the falling knife.

<comment><USER10> Amazon has lost 30% of its value between the last 2 earnings reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a general rule, I think that stock fluxuation news should stay off of HN. However, in this case, we're currently looking at a 9.88% decrease in AMZN. That's roughly a $14Billion change in the company that nearly every startup uses as some kind of hosting provider. To put it in perspective, that's very close to the size of the Whatsapp deal. I think this is relevant to startups in this special case.

<comment><USER12> >that's very close to the size of the Whatsapp deal.

it's very close the MarketCap of LinkedIn \-- more reason why $19 billion for an App that generates $20million in revenue is/was ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a Sales Director, I would often tell my guys, a six-month old can capture the market., if you would eliminate your profit. But that is not what you are hired for. or in our local phrase 'neither we will play nor we let any'. I love Amazon as a consumer, but as a sales person myself I know, what they are. They offer 40% wholesale margin to a retail customer for books. How many wholesalers and retailers they brought to death? but the even more tragic part is, they didn't earn any money themselves. They obviously succeeded in capturing the entire market, but so could my six month old too.

My experience tells me which is no brainer, death (exit) of such a company is only matter of time, and when such a vendor dies, rest of the market lives on as they were living before this episode.

<comment><USER14> >but the even more tragic part is, they didn't earn any money themselves.

I don't really follow your logic. The point isn't to 'earn money' now. It is to build the economies of scale, over time, so that no one else can hope to compete with them on price in the future. That is when the money will really be earned.

As for Amazon not being profitable, it is a illusion. From what I understand, they have pretty high plowback. If mgmt observes great opportunities for investment, shouldn't they do that instead of paying out dividends?

>My experience tells me which is no brainer, death (exit) of such a company is only matter of time, and when such a vendor dies, rest of the market lives on as they were living before this episode.

Maybe if they were competing on price alone for a single product. This isn't one CRM product vs another. They are competitive on EVERY product. Few online retailers can compete with them on pricing/shipping/experience.

<comment><USER15> > I don't really follow your logic. The point isn't to 'earn money' now. It is > to build the economies of scale, over time, so that no one else can hope to > compete with them on price in the future. That is when the money will really > be earned.

Amazon has had this mythical idiom of "when the market want us to give them profits, we will turn on the spigots". In other words, they can just scale back their future investments, and the money will start rolling in.

However, they have been running losses in general for 20 years. For a few quarters in their history, they made some small profits, but in general, even with all the dramatic scaling and efficiencies, they still regularly run losses. Investors have stuck with them for this long, but unless they really can start raking in the profits, I don't see how their stock can sustain such a high price.

If you look at the financials and business model, Amazon is basically the Walmart of the internet. They are in a low margin business, with high capital costs. However, their stock is still priced as if they are a software company with high gross margins (ie software costs zero to produce each additional copy). Walmart understands the model and is able to produce nice profits, and Amazon either has to follow or hopefully the market will finally figure them out and price them accordingly.

<comment><USER14> > Walmart understands the model and is able to produce nice profits, and > Amazon either has to follow or hopefully the market will finally figure them > out and price them accordingly.

Apples and oranges. Check AMZN revenue growth in the past 5 years vs. WMT. WMT is (somewhat) mature, AMZN doubles revenue roughly every 2.5 years.

Why show a profit if you don't have to? Management is obviously finding pretty good, revenue-growing investments.

<comment><USER15> Amazon is mature as well; maybe not as mature, but 20 years is an old company. And Walmart has been making profits for decades, while their revenue has grown dramatically, and while they have been building extremely expensive stores and warehouses and supply chains.

> Why show a profit if you don't have to? Management is obviously finding > pretty good, revenue-growing investments.

This is the nonsensical mentality that has blown up Amazon's stock price for more than the past decade. In the short term, absolutely, ramp up revenue and take losses getting there. In the long run, businesses exist to make the shareholders money.

<comment><USER14> >but 20 years is an old company

Umm, Google is a ~16 year old company. In 4 years, will they be an 'old company'? Please...

>This is the nonsensical mentality

This is how huge, borderline monopoly business are built. I am not sure you grasp their strategy. It sounds like you may be more comfortable investing in a stable, dividend paying, old line business that you understand.

<comment><USER15> Google made more profits last year than Amazon has made in its history. They have scaled well and are in a high margin business, and Amazon is not. It's just that simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One implication of this that I think is worth mentioning: if Amazon's stock price falls too much, if I remember correctly, their compensation plan has them grant additional RSUs to employees to make up the difference.

<comment><USER17> As a former AMZN'er I find that hard to believe.

The company is cheap - it's in the bones. There is no way the company would ever agree to give more of it's loot over to employees if it wasn't forced to via regulation.

Now, Google's "GSU" programme does have an adjustment that is based on company, personal and stock performance via a magical formula that only HR/management knows.

<comment><USER16> See my response to the other responder for further specification.

I'm an extremely questionable source. Amazon's "Frugal" was certainly everywhere, which is why I remember being surprised by seeing those terms in the performance bonuses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't think the analysts have any idea how to predict what AMZN is going to do.

<comment><USER19> You could have ended your sentence after predict.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Maybe Amazon is just a massive float machine for Bezos. Sorta like insurance companies for Buffet.

<comment><USER21> My thought too except I can't see what he is doing or might do with the float except fund promotion to leverage growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So revenue is growing but they have an operating loss because of a lot of investments. Isn't this a good thing that should cause people to want to buy more Amazon stock?

<comment><USER23> Investments get booked as assets, so they have no impact on profits. This mistake gets made frequently with respect to Amazon.

<comment><USER24> Many assets have a useful life and must be depreciated, which certainly does reduce accounting profits.

<comment><USER23> Sure, but I don't think that's what most people are thinking about here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If we're going to be talking about "Seismic Stock moves" as being 8%, then AAPL, on the same day, had an 8.5% bump (525 to 570). Do we consider that a Seismic Shock as well?

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems like a bump in the road, but it's something Bezos has to stay on top of to not be too long term to lose investor interest.

FedEx/UPS + Amazon merger would still be a good move and lock up last-mile distribution that only WalMart would be able to touch, but then WM would have to pay a premium for whichever chair would be left.

<comment><USER5> Nah. They're building their own distribution network. FedEx is great at being FedEx, but Amazon wants to be able to do same-day delivery with multiple time- slots per day. They also want local warehouses, which minimizes wasteful shipping.

<comment><USER26> Amazon is missing the entire last-mile delivery pipeline apart from some shared boxes and jokes about quadcopter delivery.

Also, Google Express is way ahead given the number of trucks and cars going about from Costco and other local merchants, which is coming at Amazon from the other side.

Building it would effectively be starting from scratch and competing with FedEx, UPS, DHL and everyone else. And if it doesn't work, they'll be stuck with capital tied up in it.

Further, it's going to take a long time and a LOT of capital, and it still might not work AND still not be any better/cheaper, whereas FedEx is a known quantity that works. FedEx has a lot more experience than just delivery: it does lot of logistics and emergency logistics outsourcing for a lot of companies... and it would still be viable revenue if Amazon controlled them.

<comment><USER5> I take it your city doesn't have Amazon Fresh vans all over the place yet?

<comment><USER26> Mountain View (for obvious reasons I guess): Google Express.

But really, what difference is there over just extracting the functionality of local courier into a stand-alone global service with an web presence, API, support, backoffice fleet management/dispatching and so forth? All FedEx and UPS have to do to compete with this is send drivers into stores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm guessing that the lowered income projection is due in part to Amazon dropping its cloud prices. Surprised the article didn't mention that.

</comment><comment><USER28> And if amazon starts hemorrhaging cash like mad, will people scramble to get off AWS?</comment>


Show HN: TripExpert – Professional Hotel Reviews - <AUTHOR> http://tripexpert.com/

<comment><USER2> Really well done, beautiful and useful site. Out of curiosity, how long did this take you to build? What stack are you using?

A couple of things I noticed:

1\. After updating a search, the back button doesn't work the way I would expect it to. If I choose to look at a property and then back out it takes me to the pre-updated search whereas I would expect it to take me back to my search with filters in tact. If I don't look at a property and press the back button it takes me out of search altogether where I would expect it to take me to the pre-filtered search.

2\. On the search results page, the stars confuse me. I don't know what they represent.

3\. It would be nice to be able to see hotels that score below 60 (perhaps as a filter option). Budget conscious shoppers might find they are lacking options otherwise in certain cities. Sometimes you're just looking for the best of the cheapest, even if it's not a 60+ hotel.

4\. From the blog page, I think the TripExpert logo should take you to the main TripExpert home page, not the TripExpert blog home page. I see the Visit TripExpert link but considering that is (probably) the primary action you're probably hoping for, I think it shouldn't be hidden in the nav like that.

5\. I was also initially confused when I added a filter and the search results didn't automatically update. I think that's become such a standard UX that you might want to adopt it too.

Overall though, this is really impressive. Great job. I think you have a wonderfully bright future ahead of you.

EDIT: Added 4th suggestion

EDIT 2: Added 5th suggestion

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback! Very glad to hear that you like the site so much. I agree with a lot of your suggestions, and some of them (like the filters automatically updating) we're going to be implementing soon. To answer your questions, it took about 9 months to build the site (RoR), although the majority of that time was spent developing a back-end that we use to manage all of the hotel and review data.

<comment><USER2> Awesome. So what do the stars represent? Is that a different sort of rating for each hotel?

<comment><USER3> It is actually just the "standard" 5-star hotel rating scale. (I put standard in quotation marks because there isn't actually a worldwide common standard for what constitutes e.g. a 4-star hotel.) We've been wondering about whether it is confusing for people to display this alongside our own TripExpert Score. Sounds like you think it is?

<comment><USER2> Yeah I really had no idea what it was. I think the TripExpert number score is enough. That's the number that matters. At least that's what you're telling me, so why muddle that with another number.

The main reason to include the 5 star rating would be if your score was relative to that. For example, an 80 at a 5 star hotel was much better than an 80 at a 3 star hotel. But I don't think that's the case, is it?

<comment><USER3> I agree. We're probably going to delete it. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very cool. As someone who travels a lot, this is a welcomed resource. I find it very hard to get trustworthy reviews of hotels from Yelp. Generally people have posting bias (negative experience) and often it's specific to a certain suite type or pre-construction of a certain wing of the hotel. Professional in depth reviews will go a long way to help fix this.

Valuable things in a review would also be a listing of some travel essentials like availability of cost and speed of internet, microwave, fridge, room service hours, free shuttle availability, quality of concierge during night shifts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> Out of curiosity how do these websites work? (e.g. like booking.com) They build an API and the HOTEL connects it's system this API and then info about rooms/scheduling/prices/pictures are available?

The financial goes by % I guess. You get a % for every booking through your website. But what happens on the technical side?!

<comment><USER6> TripExpert is using expedia's affiliate program. You can signup as an affiliate in a few minutes. They give you a link that takes your users to expedia's site to complete the booking. You get a small percentage of the bookings made via your link.

Hotel.com which is owned by expedia connects to hotels via a Global Distribution System (GDS) like Sabre or Pegasus. All reasonable sized hotel's connect to one of the GDS's (there are 3-4) and travel agents and OTA's like expedia and priceline also connect to them. Getting access to one of the GDS systems takes time and costs a lot. The GDS's speak XML using the Open Travel Alliance's spec. Travel agents typically make a 10% commission on books they make. Hotels pay the commission to the TA and usually a couple of dollars per booking to the GDS. Expedia and the other big OTA's do it differently, making deals with each hotel company and charge much higher commissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like this.

The biggest problem with TripAdvisor hotel reviews (besides fake reviews) is that varied background of the individual reviewer.

Witness how a Holiday Inn can wind up rated higher than a Park Hyatt, simply because of the background of the majority of TA reviewers.

I've largely given up on TA for reviews. For chain hotels, I find FlyerTalk's convention of a dedicated thread per hotel or locality _far_ more valuable, especially because those reviews are specifically from the perspective of frequent travelers rather than once-a-year flyers heading to Disneyland.

For example, 2100+ posts on every possible minute detail of the Conrad Hong Kong: [http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hilton-hilton- hhonors/124932-...](http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hilton-hilton- hhonors/124932-conrad-hong-kong.html)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I agree; in my experience, high-end hotels often get unfairly rated on TA, in large part because they often get a lot of negative reviews from people who thought that they were too expensive or offered poor value for money. They often end up ranking far too low.

FlyerTalk is a great resource, although you do have to spend a lot of time reading a lot of reviews. The advantage of an aggregator like TripExpert, with snippets from various sources all on one page, is that you can get a much better sense much more quickly of what a place is like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's like Rotten Tomatoes for Hotels.

The main problem with a site like this is that the reviews in most of the guidebooks write something based on TripAdvisor or the like.

Most guidebooks these days are written by compilers who gather information from the internet.

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks great: it's a well-designed site and solves a lot of the problems in TA. The idea that people will rate hotels higher based on "marginal experiences" is very well put, and probably true. Will definitely use in the future.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice site. A few thoughts:

\- The city search doesn't work if you specify the state (San Antonio, TX for example). I didn't wait for the autocomplete to load and just pressed enter and it returned no results.

\- It would be nice if the results automatically updated when changing filters, instead of having to click an "Update Results" button. Also, usually filters are above or to the left of results, not on the right.

\- I expected clicking on the small map on the list view to take me to the map view, instead of having to click on the link below. The map is too small in the list view to really be usable as an interactive map.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool site.

One nitpick: It looks like the automated scraper is bad at "de-duplicating" syndicated (or stolen?) content.

Example: [http://www.tripexpert.com/saint-paul/hotels/le-meridien- cham...](http://www.tripexpert.com/saint-paul/hotels/le-meridien-chambers- minneapolis)

Note the identical review text. That would immediately turn me off to the site as "obvious marketing spam" if it wasn't first posted here.

Pretty neat though, I can see how this would be useful in companion with some of the user generated review sites.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty cool. It seems like the search doesn't work that well for me, though. I first typed in "San Diego, CA" and got "no results matched." Only then did I realize that if I type "San Diego" and wait a few seconds (it took about 5 seconds), the autocomplete would populate. But it seems like the matching should be a little bit looser. I tried to find results for Maui, Hawaii, but couldn't figure out how (I entered "Maui" and waited and nothing popped up in the autocomplete, and then searched simply on that term and got no results).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We're definitely still working on perfecting the search, so this is helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a great site and idea; much needed. Do you have an API? I work at a "sort of" OTA "start-up" (200+ mm visitors a year) and it would be nice to explore including these reviews on our site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, we've got an API. Shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting... my corporate firewall flags your site with an adult-and- pornography filter. Did you recently purchase the domain from someone who may have been running a different type of site? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's so weird! We've heard that from a few people. We're currently looking into it. Neither of us can find any history of the domain being used for anything adult or porn related. So strange.

<comment><USER15> It looks like the domain had three eras. It was parked for a while, then it was taken over by domainauctionhouse.com, and now you guys.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20040601000000*/http://tripexpert...](http://web.archive.org/web/20040601000000*/http://tripexpert.com)

The domainauctionhouse page had a link to domains for sale, which had an Adult section. Maybe the links to domains with bad words in them caused it to end up on filters.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20050205024618/http://www.domaina...](http://web.archive.org/web/20050205024618/http://www.domainauctionhouse.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to note that this is where TripAdvisor initially started. It turned out its really hard to scale this 1) globally and 2) efficiently and thats where UGC came into play.

Question on the trust factor: Why should a user trust "professional" reviews over the collective opinion of the crowds? Professionals can never experience everything, so will be working from a smaller knowledge base to start and are probably more corruptible than 150 MM people or wherever TripAdvisor is these days.

<comment><USER2> I think they give a pretty good answer to this question in their 'about' section: [http://www.tripexpert.com/about](http://www.tripexpert.com/about)

1) up to 40% of user hotel reviews are fake, 2) users rarely visit more than 1 hotel per city so have no basis for comparison, whereas experts (presumably) visit multiple hotels in each city, 3) users tend to post reviews after having a 'marginal experience' that isn't really all that applicable to other users.

I think they should consider putting these 3 points on the main page as it was the first question I had when I visited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great site!

So how do you come up with the TripExpert score? Do you read every review, map it manually to a number, then get the average? Or is it more like Rotten Tomatoes where each review only gets a shot at a thumps up or thumps down, and then you average those?

Btw: Slight coding error: On city pages, hotel names are overlaid over the preview icon, which makes them very hard to read on Safari 5.1.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the bug report.

We have an algorithm that looks at a large number of factors (number of reviews, each reviewer's unique denotation system, number of hotels in a destination, sentiment, etc) and calculates the number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a great looking site but for me it illustrates the problem with "expert" sites versus "crowd" sites. Yeah, you have a ton of hotels in NYC, LA, etc. but I'm going on vacation to Connecticut and Maine this summer and there's nothing for either state in your search. I'd love to use it but there's going to need to be a lot more experts.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be growing, don't worry. Today is day two. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Outstanding execution could be smoother in terms of getting to the booking.

have you considered an I'm feeling lucky function?

Do you have an API that other developers or designers can extend?

Have you considered other verticals such as cruises and tours?

Hope it goes well guys love to hear from you what the conversion rate from users.

hutch

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the positive feedback! Yes, we're building an API that will let other travel sites pull our scores, rankings and review extracts. If you or anyone you know might want to make use of it, tell them to get in touch! And, yes, we're considering other verticals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't see a way to search for a hotel by name once a city has been selected. This is the first thing I tried to do.

The rank is supposed to be how well it does in its class. But I looked a few cities and the best hotel was always expensive (over $300). Never a good for the value midrange hotel. So it seems best isn't best in class.

</comment><comment><USER21> Beautifully designed and very useful. I hope this is a big success! What's your background, how did you start this site?

<comment><AUTHOR> My co-founder and I actually met at a hackathon a few years ago and worked on an early version of the site. It's very exciting to finally launch!

My co-founder Andrew is a lawyer-turned-developer. I'm a former tech journalist (Laptop Mag, The Verge).

<comment><USER21> Who did the design? Also, a little usability tip: When a user clicks on "Price" to sort, I think most users expect to see the lowest price first. You have it sorted by highest price first. I would reverse that.

Also, I noticed the lowest price hotels often don't have a great score (around 60-70). Do you only list hotels that hit a certain score threshold (meaning, as a user, can I trust that no matter what hotel shows up in your listings, it means I can expect a good stay?) - or do I still need to be wary of the scores and avoid ones with low points?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our designer was someone that my co-founder had worked with before. And thanks for the tip about price sorting.

We don't list any hotels with a score lower than 60, which means every hotel is a quality hotel.

<comment><USER22> Do you mind sharing a link to your designer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Looks good.

       "Not every place in the world is on TripExpert... yet. We currently feature over 500 destinations, from major cities to Caribbean beach towns, and we're adding more all the time."

Isn't 500 too less?

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> this is very nice. im literally in the middle of booking a few weeks in greece with my girlfriend. trying to figure out the hotels on the different islands is a pain in the ass. will give you more feedback after using it a bit more.

</comment><comment><USER25> It looks good. My suggestion for the "Explore"-Page would be a map or at least a way to sort alphabeticly. I guess the list is now sorted by the ammount of recommended hotels.

</comment><comment><USER26> Have you considered a 'hint' feature where people can kind of recommend hotels that are not yet in your database and could be considered personal tips?

</comment><comment><USER27> "Finally, hotel reviews you can trust."

I thought the beauty of TripADvisor and the like is that it does away with the old travel guides. Guides are written by people with even more questionable motive and are quickly outdated. Not sure how many times I have been saved from bad experience by reading a recent reviews saying "BEWARE Hotel is under construction for next month..." or something current like that.

Maybe there value in both... not for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> I like the irony of AirBnB styling for the hotel industry.</comment>


Origamijs: HTML5 Canvas Based on CSS or React Style - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/raphamorim/origami.js <comment><USER2> Really cool project. This project simplify the canvas programming. Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER3> Great project! Now I can play with canvas :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great idea for a project.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great project!</comment>


Ask HN: how to develop deep and broad knowledge? - <AUTHOR> I quit my job to do some self study on various topics. I started timing how long different things take me. Textbook, book, excersises etc. some textbooks for example might easily take upwards of 100 hours. Just learning elastic search, playing around with it and reading most of the definitive guide took me like 30 hours. I just can't see how this can be done along with a 40 hour work week, and now I'm wondering how much other people really know? Having been in a job and seeing my friends at these jobs. I would say less than 1 percent of the people might be putting in an extra 10 hours a week even.and there are so many new developments out there, ai, crypto currencies etc I'm partly resetting my expectations on how much I can learn in my career, what's the right way to think about this if one is I interested in having broad and deep knowledge. <comment><USER2> Once you've got an "in" into knowledge work (particularly finance or engineering), you can use large portions of your day job for learning things. Basically 100% of my job (startup founder) consists of learning new things, as did about 80% of my previous job (Google search engineer), as did nearly 100% of the job before that (startup founder). I did have to do some grunt work at my first couple of junior software engineering positions, but still managed to save 40-50% of my time on the job for learning new stuff.

I learned ElasticSearch for my current startup, for example, but I didn't deliberately set out to learn ElasticSearch. Rather, I set out to index all the forum sites on the Internet, and it was the best tool available for that, so I just learned enough of it to go build my index. How much time did it take? Probably a lot more than 30 hours, and I still wouldn't say I really "know" ElasticSearch, but I know enough that I can run load a big corpus in, run search queries, and get useful data back out. That's pretty much all you can expect given that ElasticSearch is a moving target - hell, 5.0 had barely come out when I started learning it and it's on 6.5 now.

There are 2000 hours in a typical work-year, and 8760 in a calendar year. That's a lot of time. 30 hours is a drop in the bucket for it - 10 hours over 3 weeks will get you there. I'd just give up on learning _everything_ (you will never succeed in that, new knowledge is being generated faster than you can learn it) and focus on _continually learning_ within domains that you care about.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your definition of broad and of deep need to be reasonable. Once they are, you can study meta learning, then tackle the things you're interested in or need to know. I'm assuming you're a software engineer, in which case it's uncommon to do more than 6 hours a day of quality work. Use the other two in a way that lets your mind relax and yet still learn. Balance study and life outside work. Beyond this advice there is nothing else to reasonably do. Sure you can experiment with polyphasic sleep schedules but that's completely unreasonable for almost everyone almost always.</comment>


Ask YC: Number of votes on news/links on the front page declining? - <AUTHOR>

There seem to be less and less upmods on the news items on the front page, even those which stay for days.
Personally, I almost never even bother to upmod, and I only log in when I want to leave a comment, yet I used to upmod stories all the time.
Is this a trend? <comment><USER2> It certainly isn't b/c of my habits. I use Firefox+GreaseMonkey with the YCFix script that hides your upmodded items. Every time I visit HN, I upmod every single item so that I don't see it again lol.

<http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/8242>

</comment><comment><USER3> Personally, my ratio of upmodding comments to original submissions is probably 20:1. I'm always more interested in conversation and the value individuals here bring to it. Maybe others are developing similar habits?

</comment><comment><USER4> I've noticed that too.</comment>


Web vs. iOS. Choppy vs. smooth. Free vs. paying. - <AUTHOR>

I'm just annoyed at the quality of the web, the accepted standard is all choppy
and not smooth. Most of the web would be completely unacceptable by iOS standards.
Yet we continue with a remarkably similar state to our past.
"Well if the web is soo choppy, point out some examples"
Sure. Off the top of my head...
Github: We love reloading pages.
Linode: "Unleash your inner geek" ..
...and find yourself complaining on HN about the <img> tags with no width and height attributes! (http://www.linode.com/tour/)
Design principal: Humans are very sensitive to movement,
so please make sure your pages don't twitch when the user loads them. Let's up the standards of the web.
The fact that iOS is soo much smoother than the web doesn't contribute much to why iOS is soo much more profitable,
but you can the fact most of the web is choppy doesn't help when we want users to pay for our web apps. <comment><USER2> GitHub is a poor example, since it has an excellent usage of history.pushState and slide transitions for navigating repos.

If anything, blame Apple for cripping web apps when you add them to your homescreen.

<comment><USER3> GitHub's usage of history.pushState with a simultaneous lack of on-page DOM caching causes back/forward sequences to be painfully and epically slow as it destroys the browser's page cache (note: I don't mean the request cache); this is painfully evident if you go to a page like Homebrew's formula list[1], click to another page, and attempt go to back: everything locks up for a few seconds as the webpage painfully attempts to re-compose and re-render the massive document that a normal Web 1.0 era website would have been able to re- render _nigh unto instantaneously_ as it would have been in the page cache.

[1] <https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/master/Library/Formula>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love Apple too!

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow. Just wow.

</comment><comment><USER6> are you 12?</comment>


Ask HN: Where to see the Vegas Tech scene - <AUTHOR>

Hey,
I'm going to be in Vegas next week and was wondering where to go to check out the Vegas startup and Tech scenes?
Any startups cater to visitors? An events between the 20th and 24th worth going to? <comment><USER2> Vegas Jelly on Thursday nights at the Beat Coffeehouse</comment>


How People End Up with Boring Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.thecashflow.info/2018/05/how-people-end-up-with-boring-jobs.html <comment><USER2> They're jobs that need doing. Someone's going to end up with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's true, but you shouldn't be one of those people that will end up with them of you don't want to. There is always another way.</comment></comment>


Software Engineering Proverbs - <AUTHOR> http://www.multicians.org/thvv/proverbs.html <comment><USER2> "Abraham Lincoln reportedly said that, given eight hours to chop down a tree, he'd spend six sharpening his axe."

I always thought that I was wasting time until I read this one a few years ago.

<comment><USER3> The danger is that if I were hired to chop down the tree, I would make the mistake of only billing for 2 hours.

And if I billed for 8 hours, the client would make the mistake of finding someone who would bill for only 2.

<comment><USER2> "the client would make the mistake of finding someone who would bill for only 2"

Sounds like a self correcting problem. You'd let "someone" have the clients you don't want and end up with only those worth keeping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some good stuff here, and some dreck dressed up as profundity, I think. Of course depending on one's position in the software foodchain, what's dreck and what's wisdom might vary.

Tom van Vleck's software quality / Black Death analogy makes all the sense in the world to me while I'm nose-down in the code. To my clients and my managers it's probably worse than gibberish. Conversely, "Deming's 14 points" strike me as meaningless word salad.

And if I could mention one I love that's not on that list: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." (Donald Knuth)

<comment><USER2> +1 for the use of the word "dreck" to describe something technical

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A couple of thoughts -

> Don't patch bugs out, rewrite them out.

I like this one. But it's only really possible to do that with a fully unit tested application. And when rewriting it out, you'll need a test in place to reproduce the error before actually fixing it.

> If something is worth doing once, it's worth building a tool to do it.

People I work with find me odd for doing little tools that automate things. I find this to be an excellent indicator of how good a developer is and how much I can trust them to develop something for me.

> It is not enough to do your best: you must know what to do, and THEN do your > best.

Sage advice. Never thought of it like that, but very insightful.

> when the cart stops > do you whip the cart > or whip the ox?

Don't get it. To place in coding analog, does this mean that people would whip the code rather than the developers of said code? If so, then that doesn't make sense. developers will tend to bear the brunt of any failures of the code they produce. Don't they?

<comment><USER6> > Don't get it.

Are you working the problem, or simply the most visible symptom?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to add my own: Software can be developed - it can't be engineered (in the manner of bridges, tunnels, and chemical plants)</comment>


Facebook Marketplace - Facebook to Launch Classifieds - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/10/facebook-to-offer-classifieds/ <comment><USER2> not too surprising, but very smart move. they have such a strong position that competing with facebook is just as unfun competing with google.</comment>


"To be able to work 996 is a bliss" – Jack Ma, China's richest man - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1116767543669219328 <comment><AUTHOR> Duped: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19644152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19644152)

Sorry.</comment>


Internet Kills the Video Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/business/media/internet-kills-the-video-store.html?ref=technology&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Internet didn't kill the video store, Blockbuster killed itself at the dawn of DVD. When DVD was coming out as a new format, Blockbuster got greedy and when the movie industry wanted the same profit sharing deal, Blockbuster was the #1 revenue source for Hollywood, so Blockbuster wanted a better deal.

Major movie studios decided to then make better wholesale deals with Wal-Mart driving the price of movies down from $20+ to $5-15. At the same time renting a movie from Blockbuster was in the $3-5 range and Blockbuster famously made a ton of money with late fees. Within a few years Wal-Mart was Hollywood's #1 revenue source.

Basically, Blockbuster had a near monopoly and used it to piss off both their suppliers and customers. Over time, Netflix, Redbox, and others have taken business from Blockbuster, but most of that was Blockbuster pissing it away more than it is the internet "disrupting" Blockbuster.

Blockbuster is a case of self-sabotage.

<comment><USER3> That just sounds _a lot_ less plausible to me, like an explanation given if someone had asked for a devil's advocate position. I find it hard to believe that opting not to pursue a more lucrative deal for themselves with Hollywood studios in the DVD era would have significantly impacted Blockbuster's trajectory.

Wal-Mart would have likely negotiated very similar deals they ultimately got regardless of Blockbuster's actions (it's not as if Wal-Mart didn't sell movies up to that point anyway, or squeeze suppliers for great deals). Blockbuster's money-maker was always new releases (and fees on them), the price of which stayed around $20+ to buy on release anyway. Did they piss away their "near monopoly"? Most certainly, but I think it was by not adapting with the times rather than a commitment to late fees and driving Hollywood to Wal- Mart.

Blockbuster made sense in a non-automated DVD world, Wal-Mart or not. They didn't make sense in a digital (Netflix) or automated (Netflix, Redbox) world.

Just an armchair observer though. I could be wrong. But the "obvious" explanation in this case really does seem a lot more plausible.

<comment><USER2> Yes, except that before DVD's, tapes were routinely $20+ and DVD's dropped below $15 surprisingly fast and when you figure for inflation, that they are still around $15 means they are selling the same product for considerably cheaper than VHS did (and for a while in higher volumes).

I totally agree that digital hurt Blockbuster, but Blockbuster was in a terrible place before the world went digital streaming. Netflix DVD mailers basically stole millions of customers on the promise of "no late fees", which was clearly a huge customer complaint with Blockbuster.

Blockbuster's decline started before streaming was big and Blockbuster did a reasonable job to try and keep up with Netflix in terms of building up their own mailing business, digital rental business, kiosk business, etc. but the fundamental problem with Blockbuster's business is they needed to rent things for $5 a pop to pay for the revenue sharing and rent.

Redbox and Netflix built their business without paying as much or anything in revenue sharing and a completely different operational cost structure. The only way Blockbuster could have stayed afloat is to keep happy customers, but they pissed too many people off too many times by being too expensive and ripping people off with late fees. Happy repeat customers who are willing to pay a premium for awesome service will keep many businesses alive, but Blockbuster lost happy customers and didn't have awesome service.

Internet played a part, but let's not throw away the business fundamentals with the bathwater.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'll miss Blockbuster. They were a staple of my childhood and I have many fond memories of them and the film nerds who used to work at their stores. I think they could have held on longer. I've never really liked Netflix mail service, given the few days of delay. And their streaming selection is still limited. Plus, I don't have cable/satellite TV, so it's sad to me that I think there's still an unserved segment of customers out there. But with current new DVD prices ($4 - $12) I don't see a compelling reason to rent them, and places like Target and Walmart will probably enjoy selling them for quite some time, like how BestBuy sold a good selection of reasonably priced CDs for years in the face of Napster and new online distribution, while competing CD stores all went out of business.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried Amazon? If you're prime there's a big selection of videos for free, but for those not free there's almost always a streaming rental available for an average of $2. I've found myself using the service quite a bit recently when I want to watch a specific video (as opposed to netflix when i just want to find something to turn on)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> " _Dish... said it still sees value in the brand name and will use it in limited ways._ "

I can only imagine that means licensing the logo for use in movies set in the 90's.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is redbox a national thing? Interesting how the article blamed solely the internet and not redbox. Some parts of the city, I think there are more redbox machines than soda machines.

<comment><USER8> Redbox in McDonalds and Walmarts are probably the bigger reason for Blockbuster's demise. Its amazing how busy those kiosks are.

<comment><USER9> I'm a bit amazed they work.

In a Blockbuster, you can have a few dozen people looking around at once for the right movie to watch. On Friday and Saturday nights, they were often packed. But a kiosk, you have to wait for the other person to finish browsing and purchasing. Seems like they work precisely because the demand is just low enough that there is not too much contention for any one kiosk.

<comment><USER8> The folks at RedBox seem to understand that and have made it very quick to get what you want and leave. Plus, it takes very little time to go over the available movies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scarecrow Video in Seattle hasn't shown any sign of slowing down. Almost any movie ever made, rented to you by someone who's probably watched it.

It's the Powell's Books of movies. I'm impressed every time I walk in and every time I talk with someone who works there.

[http://www.scarecrow.com](http://www.scarecrow.com)

<comment><USER11> Scarecrow recently posted a letter saying they are in danger of closing:

[https://www.scarecrow.com/40/9681/scarecrow-video-needs- your...](https://www.scarecrow.com/40/9681/scarecrow-video-needs-your- help.html)

<comment><USER12> Sounds like the kind of thing that some giant arts endowment should be supporting, if paying customers can't keep up with costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I blame Blockbuster's management. It's funny as all the other video stores have died off, Family Video continues to add stores and is doing fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, haven't seen one of those in awhile, but what you say is true:

[http://www.sj-r.com/top-stories/x766862973/Family-Video- pres...](http://www.sj-r.com/top-stories/x766862973/Family-Video-president- sees-continued-growth)

They have been growing at a rate of 3 per month, and have presences in both large and midsole regions. One of their successful strategies apparently is to sell pizza at their locations

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Was anyone else expecting a (2007) after the article title? I mean, did this even need to be written?

<comment><USER15> A lot of people on Hacker News forget that they're on the forefront of technology. DVDs remain widely used, even now. I doubt they'll last too much longer, but your experience as a adopter of new tech is not universal.

I've shocked some people in my social circle when I mention my macbook air has no DVD drive. They still use them. And my Dad goes to the local video store to watch movies on his TV. It will be a long while before he switches to an option that lets him watch Netflix on his TV screen, and he won't watch movies on a computer.

<comment><USER16> I'm a self-described cinemaphile, so I tend to purchase Blu-rays and DVDs of movies rather than streaming them. I've yet to see a streaming service that offers commentary tracks, alternate audio tracks (e.g., original mono mixes), "Making Of" featurettes, etc.

Do you know of any?

<comment><USER17> Not the parent comment, but thought I'd answer any ways. Despite lots of looking around, I too haven't been able to find a streaming offering that comes close to competing with a well constructed Blu-Ray release.

My collection is built largely thanks to Barnes and Nobles' 50% off Criterion sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Old-fashioned video stores cater to markets that streaming services don't.

There's the low-income who don't have a device that can stream. There are those who don't have internet access for whatever reason. People who don't have a credit card to sign up for Netflix. The same kind of people who stand in line to pay their cable and phone bills in person. Then you have people who just don't embrace technology.

<comment><USER16> What about cinemaphiles who embrace special features that often aren't included with streaming services, such as commentary tracks and "Making Of" featurettes?

<comment><USER18> Eventually, that sort of thing will move to the digital versions too. It already is on some blockbuster titles. A month before Iron Man 3 hit store shelves on DVD/BR, it was available for download online, and _only_ as the $20+ version with the bonus content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is something that should have happened around 2005.

<comment><USER20> > This is something that should have happened around 2005.

what is "something" ? people losing there job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Every city benefits from a video store with a deep catalogue spanning all genres - including videos that are simply not available to rent/stream/purchase anywhere online because of licensing issues or copyright owner greed. I understand the Top 100 video stores closing. They are dinosaurs. But the long-tail of online content is not yet long enough to kill the video store completely. Yet.

</comment><comment><USER22> Newsflash: Medicine kills disease. Seriously medicine killed a lot of professions associated with health. For example nobody needs leaches anymore, all those people that were growing, distributing, and selling them.

What happened is Blockbuster failed to take advantage of the economic opportunity internet presented and got left in the dust.

</comment><comment><USER23> NCR sold off the blockbuster kiosk business (NCR had licensed the name for Blockbuster Express) to redbox a year or so ago. I remember the last time I went to a blockbuster (maybe 2008) and the employees were CLEARLY not happy to be working there.

</comment><comment><USER24> Good riddance. I'm normally fairly sentimental when it comes to technology (still have the turntable of my long-gone teenage years) but I've always hated everything about going to video stores.

</comment><comment><USER25> I look forward to the day when the same thing happens to Music Labels, and with any luck eventually Movie Studios.

</comment><comment><USER26> Someone should make an updated song to "Video killed the radio star"

<comment><USER12> It almost seems like nobody got the reference. So, not only did Internet kill the video store, it also killed the radio-star-killing video song.</comment></comment>


Founder Institute - anyone attended? - <AUTHOR>

Hope this is not sacrilegious to ask to rate the service of a competitor - but has anyone attended Founder Institute? (link below). How do you rate their service? They are also some sort of incubator, though little diff from YC. (if you do, I would like to learn more, pls send me an email from my profile). <comment><USER2> The Summer 2009 semester is the first session. They have lined up an impressive set of mentors for the program.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> link: <http://www.founderinstitute.com/></comment>


How  to Speed Up Your Wireless Network - <AUTHOR> http://techpp.com/2010/09/03/5-ways-to-speed-up-your-wireless-network/

<comment><USER2> All this does is reiterate a few voodoo "tips": move your router, update firmware, blah blah blah.

It does _nothing_ to promote understanding of any problems, nor does it propose systematic troubleshooting.

<comment><USER3> the article is aimed at non-geeks and non-techies who doesn't want to hear about the reasons and explanations, rather know the solutions for the problems</comment></comment>


1984: The masterpiece that killed George Orwell - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell <comment><USER2> 1984 again? I wonder if there should be a "recurring" page? Maybe call it a "classics" page? This might be good for reddit, since it has the semi-random box at the top. Such links of proven interest could be randomly shown there. This would be a great tool for catching the eye of new users, with proven great content. It could then be turned off by veteran users. This would give the best of both worlds. New users could be introduced to great links they missed, and veteran users wouldn't have to deal with "dupes."

<comment><USER3> The regulars who wring their hands over HN or whatever other site going down hill really should just go find somewhere else to read.

<comment><USER4> It's not the real regulars who wring their hands over this-- more the users who've been here 5 months or so. It seems to be a phase people go through.

<comment><USER5> Those that complain and mean it leave. Those that complain and don't will have stopped complaining about it.

<comment><USER4> The people who stick around aren't so much the ones who didn't _mean_ it when they said, after a bad day, that HN was going to the dogs. I think more often they simply noticed that the next day everything was fine again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read Yevgeny Zamyatin's _We_ recently, and recommend. It has a more lighthearted style generally but the ending is still fairly devestating. There's just been a new translation released and it hides most of the cultural problems well and is just honest about the one it couldn't (character using a polite version of a pronoun).

<comment><USER7> I feel 1984 is the weakest of the classic distopia triumvirate (We, BNW, 1984). We and BNW are both scarier because they are plausible. Many people read BNW in particular and say "that doesn't seem so bad".

<comment><USER8> Wait, are you saying that 1984 is implausible?

We actually have newspeak, constant surveillance, the bumbling inept bureaucracy and crumbling infrastructure he predicts.

It's a pretty accurate vision as far as I see it and the Department of Homeland Security/CIA/NSA are merely a step removed from the Ministry of Truth.

Long live Oceania!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I personally think that personal computing, computing in general and the Internet/Web has moved us far far away from Orwell's nightmare world.

For even a tiny example, logistics software allowing transport costs to plummet and more products deliverable.

And yes, I've read 1984 and various books on Stalin and the Soviets.

<comment><USER10> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=585153>

Cereal Killer respectfully disagrees.

<comment><USER9> "I used to work for a _company_ "

Note highlights... Company, not government.

That's data protection, not politics.

<comment><USER7> the government is a corporation. it's just a corporation with a monopoly on protection and really good marketing (how many people will die for apple?)

<comment><USER8> "(how many people will die for apple?)"

On certain message boards....all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Animal Farm is much more to the point today. And it's not Big Brother, but Big Mother, that has taken over.</comment>


Ask HN: Trademark violation - <AUTHOR>

Take for example the verisign seal, is it a trademark violation to have a "image" such as this one (http://www.ci.san-ramon.ca.us/parks/images/verisign.jpg) showing on your sites checkout page. I didn't actually purchase the verisign seal, because it's too expensive and I can't afford it. Can they sue me for doing this? <comment><USER2> It would certainly be a trademark violation, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was fraud too.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that is what I was thinking, you are beyond trademark violation on that one. You are in willful deception territory. If is fraud black and white.</comment></comment>


Video Game Helps Math Students Vanquish an Archfiend -  Algebra  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/nyregion/08video.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin <comment><USER2> At this age, many students in India are learning calculus. And they are not learning the product rule or integration by parts with a video game.

I wonder if you could motivate Johnny and Jane by showing them what Pradeep and Rajit, their future job competition, are up to.

<comment><USER3> _I wonder if you could motivate Johnny and Jane by showing them what Pradeep and Rajit, their future job competition, are up to._

Probably not. I remember being scared of the Japanese because _everything I bought_ was made in Japan. I think the main Indian exports like IT services are so much less visible to kids that age. Most 'tweens probably just think of Indians as the people with the red dot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why can't they make some kind of role playing game where have to actually use math to progress in the game, for example calculate, slope, gravity etc for targetting, build a machine to up and incline, but you need to know the slope, etc.

<comment><USER5> The pace of such games is too low to be interesting or effective.

Also, students of this age will be more inclined to guess if you include any sort of graphical cues at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure how I feel about this. It does get kids to learn the material and makes it fun for them by adding competition and entertainment but I'm not sure this is good for the long term.

This is just addressing the wrong problem. These kids won't be interested in math for math's sake but are just doing to play a game - isn't it much better to get them interested in math without a need for games?

<comment><USER7> _isn't it much better to get them interested in math without a need for games?_

The problem is: a lot of mathematics at this level _is_ actually pretty boring but needs to be mastered anyway. The fun stuff doesn't come until late high school at the earliest, and mostly happens at the university level.

<comment><USER6> That's true but I think the issue lies in how slowly mathematics is taught: when you spend all of elementary and middle schools repeating the same material over and over. During elementary school I used to change all the minuses to pluses on the homeworks since I didn't like subtract but I was doing basic algebra (basic polynomials) before I entered elementary school. At that point I was reading interesting math books for fun. I was able to find some math puzzle books and was slowly making my way through those.

<comment><USER7> Your experiences aren't really typical, then, and neither are my own. It's probably a mistake to extrapolate from our own childhoods to try and figure out what will work best for the vast majority of people.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Interactive Go source to assembly - <AUTHOR> http://go.godbolt.org/

<comment><USER2> This seems to support only gccgo, not the standard gc compiler. Also, I don't see what benefit this has over go tool 6g -S; actually the output from 6g -S is much more readable since it has better symbol names.

Not to deride on author's work, but I just don't see the point of this website at all.

<comment><USER3> It's useful for sharing snippets and the associated disassembly with others, much like you'd use pastebin. I use it on IRC all the time (for C++). It's also useful to be able to see the codegen for compilers you don't have in front of you, like MSVC or different versions of GCC.

<comment><USER2> But there's only one compiler supported and that's for a single particular version of gccgo.

<comment><USER4> Hi!

Site author here. As you probably noticed, this viewer is based on "GCC explorer". Most compilers for most languages (rust, d, c++) have GCC-like modes where their command-line settings and outputs are GCC-like enough that only small modifications are needed to work in GCC Explorer.

6g is very different and its output is decidedly non-GCC-ey. I didn't add 6g for this reason, though I have a hacky patch to try and get something vaguely working that I'll deploy shortly!

Let me know how you get on!

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the explanation!

<comment><USER4> No worries. The 6g version is now live but I suspect it doesn't do the code generator justice. It seems 6l also does some kind of optimisation and my hacks version o just running 6g -S isn't showing that up.

<comment><USER2> Previously, 6l did some pretty significant changes to the code generated by 6g, e.g. the stack split prologue was generated in 6l. Back then, you could use 6l -a to see the final version. More recently (since 1.3) the code generation part of the linker was refactored into a library, liblink, and the compiler links with this library. Now 6g -S is pretty close to the final code, although there still are some things done by 6l. Unfortunately, the -a flag was lost. We have new disassemblers however; go tool objdump will dissasemble Go binaries and will show you the final version of the code. Unlike GNU objdump, the Go objdump understands Go binaries better and can print in normal Plan 9 assembly syntax (well normal for Go, anyway).

<comment><USER4> Cool! I will give that a go. The rest of the site is pretty geared around annotated assembler from the compiler but I've been meaning to add objdump like support for a while (if only to see things like opcode lengths for I-cache observations). This may be the excuse to support that for both GNU and Plan 9 output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's not interactive at all. Going by the definition used we can say every compiler is interactive since you can just dump the object code after compiling the source code.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely: in fact the original "version" of GCC Explorer was inspired by me having a window with 'watch "g++ -O2 -S foo.cpp"' running next to the vi editor I was tweaking code with.

I reckon that's pretty interactive: you make a change and see the result (almost) straight away.

<comment><USER5> We have different definitions of interactive then. Smalltalk is interactive. Dr. Racket is interactive. This is just a pipeline.</comment></comment></comment>


Safire - An iPhone Web Application Framework - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/safire/

<comment><USER2> What an interesting blue, gem logo.. I've seen something like that before, but I just can't put my finger on it..

Looks like a neat framework though.

<comment><USER3> The logo looks like the "Facets of Ruby" logo, for one:

[http://a1055.g.akamai.net/f/1055/1401/5h/images.barnesandnob...](http://a1055.g.akamai.net/f/1055/1401/5h/images.barnesandnoble.com/images/11010000/11019122.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not really so sure what makes this an iPhone specific "framework". Its just a safari browser with javascript, except you can only capture click events.

All you really need in order to make a website iPhone "friendly" is keep buttons > 40x40 px and use:

        <meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;">

Beyond that, any other traditional web framework out there works just fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> jsjenkins, in software a framework is usually defined as (From Wikipedia):

       "...a re-usable design for a software system"

This "framework" encapsulates a lot of iPhone-ish style attributes (like buttons, toolbars, lists, sliding/animation & icons) as well as a good number of webkit's(and mobile safari's) new css / js functions.

Additionally we plan to support:

Gesture Events (this should be iPhone specific enough for you)

& Mobile Safari's Offline Database API

<comment><USER4> Sorry, was just a bit confused when I saw iPhone web application framework because I usually think of involving server-side when I see that term, and from that perspective there is little difference between the iPhone browser and others.

Being able to easily stylize your pages to achieve iPhone-like appearance is definitely very useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, I probably didn't pick the best description for it anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only person who wondered how an aging NYT columnist managed to write an iPhone application framework?

<comment><AUTHOR> What? lol

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Safire>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice Framework, Easy, Comfortable, No Fuss... Thanks, This makes life much easier...

</comment><comment><USER7> Freaking Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER8> Impressive

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice logo.

</comment><comment><USER10> this is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER11> That logo is so slick it must be a great framework!</comment>