Why I Dropped Out of College to Start a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://jm90403.com/2011/10/04/sexy-startups-why-i-dropped-out-of-princeton-university/

<comment><USER2> I think it's ok to drop out of college to grow a startup. But it's a terrible idea to drop out of college to start a startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> I won't argue with people who think I am crazy. That's a completely understandable deduction. What frustrates me are people who think I did it for the wrong reasons (i.e. $$$).

<comment><USER2> I wasn't really trying to convince you, just making an observation. Entrepreneurs are almost by definition hard-headed.

But if I were an investor I would seriously question your decision making ability based on the fact that you dropped out of Princeton your senior year with about 8 months to go.

If you want to take a somewhat data driven approach, I'd also ask how many successful startups STARTED after dropping out. I can't think of any off the top of my head. (Hint: Microsoft and Facebook don't fit this criterion).

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear ya. I got inspired, I am working with an amazing team – a relentless backend engineer and ridiculously talented designer – and worst comes to worst I go back to school in a couple of years. I would always wonder "what could have been" if I passed this opportunity up, but if I fail at least I can say I learned a lot and gave it my best effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I found the article linked in the blog to be just as interesting: why i got a job at mcdonald's <http://www.heiferman.com/mcd/>

<comment><USER4> I actually might consider getting a job at Mcdonalds if I was working on a startup (if I could make enough money to survive).

I could zone out and not waste any of my creative energy during the day and work on my own stuff when I got home.

<comment><USER5> Slinging fries takes way more energy than it looks, and pays next to nothing. I took a cleaning job in college with similar thoughts and it gave me a lot of respect for people who work those jobs, and happiness that I have the option not to.

Even in the socialist paradise of California where you'll get a whopping $8/hr that's about $50 after tax for a full day of mind-numbing, spirit crushing drudgery.

You won't get home and find your creative instinct has been kept safe the entire day and it's time to unleash it for 8 hours of coding - you'll be aching, burned and numb. It'll be time to put on the TV to watch something that's not too taxing and crack open a few cold ones.

tl;dr - service industry is grueling work, will sap your soul

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TODO: write a follow up to this... "why i dropped out of college years ago to grow a startup, made a nice chunk of money, and then eventually went back to college".

<comment><USER7> Agreed. I'll never clap for anyone leaving/quitting/jumping to do a startup. However, I will clap like hell when they're still making a go of it 2 years later. Sprinting out of the gate is easy, but running the whole marathon is pretty damn hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Beer on you in two years then!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> kudos for you taking the leap but it would have been much more prudent if you changed the "to start" to "while starting".

A lot of the people you hear that quit their education (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, etc) to go on and build their own start-up mostly did it AFTER their ideas took off and started gaining traction[1]. They don't just blindly quit their education just for the sake of starting something. Many times it was due to a really good compelling reason such as Angel/VC funding was approved, taking a lot of their time, huge sudden interest, exponential customer acquisition, etc. Also, for every 1 successful person you hear that quit their college, there are another 100 others who have failed.

Anyway, who am I to tell you what to do. Again, like I said at the start, kudos for you for actually even doing something which puts you ahead of many others who are still at the "thinking stage". But I think in this situation, it is apt to say: look before you leap.

Good luck and all the best! Do prove me wrong and drop me an email when you're all successful. ;)

 _[1] I recommend "Founders At Work"_

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm with you-The last quarter was my last. I've had a few startups and businesses, only now to focus my energy upon them to grow. I find that anything that intrigues you, can be self taught and learned through enjoying your curiosity. Schools are lame, the education system is slow, and you pay for a piece of paper. If you notice School is in the way of your real education, then its about time to drop that.

<comment><USER10>
      >I find that anything that intrigues you, can be self
      >taught and learned through enjoying your curiosity.

I sometimes wonder if that's a reversal of cause and effect. I've known many autodidacts, myself included, who've become interested in a topic and quickly hit a wall. The difficulty causes frustration and the autodidact loses interest and moves on to a new, easier subject. That there are so many self- taught learners in technology might not be an indication of our brilliance or natural inclination, but just this subject being the low hanging fruit we all grab onto.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am actually on a leave of absence from my prestigious East Coast University and I am debating never going back. Putting in the 9 months time to get the degree seems logical, but I am in a place where it is the US circa 1995, i.e. things are getting hot and I am in the ground floor. Nothing in life waits for you and 9 months out of the game could end it for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> I know it's not exactly the main point of the post, but I'm curious about the diet.

Eggs for breakfast every morning -- just eggs? Tuna for lunch every day -- just tuna? How much of each? How do you cook the eggs? Does your body eventually adapt to the lack of variety, or do you get up in the morning with a stomach demanding waffles?

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope you didn't formally drop out. Dropouts hurt a school's USNWR ranking, so they will almost always let students take 'temporary' leaves of absence. If the startup fails you'll be able to go back without penalty.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what I did :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi Josh, which DogPatch Lab are you working out of? The NY one?

<comment><AUTHOR> yah, you here? i'm wearing the Princeton shirt today haha

<comment><USER14> Ha, I wish!

Currently working at an ad agency and learning how to program/ building my own project during nights and weekends.

Was wondering if you'd want to grab coffee or drinks in the upcoming weeks - would love to learn more about Roundtable and your experience thus far.

<comment><AUTHOR> sure man. shoot me an email: email@example.com</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the Internet Ruined San Francisco (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/1999/10/28/internet_2/ <comment><USER2> I grew up in the Silicon Valley. One of the riches places in the world. The tech hub. Engineers. Soccer moms. Workaholic dads. The sound of leafblowers 24/7\. No parties, no night life. Work work work. Money money money. Get a 2400 on your SAT. Get straight A's and go to UC Berkeley, and if you don't go there you're a failure. Go to the gym every day at 7AM. Eat healthy organic fruits. Everything you could ever possibly want to do can be accomplished with computers. Go to hackathons. Work until you die.

I feel like I was deprived of a childhood.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like the Trainspotting quote -- "Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. [...] Choose rotting away at the end of it all, [...] more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life." I guess if Trainspotting took place in the Valley it would have all the things you listed.

<comment><USER4> I always liked this version of it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-V8ZWyNMs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K-V8ZWyNMs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't want to sound callous but ... market forces shape and reshape cities all the time. When the facets of city-life in San Francisco that initially drew people fade away, people will flock somewhere else and the rents will stagnate or reverse. And if San Francisco is losing its allure as an artist's hub, perhaps other places (such as downtown Detroit) are compensating?

I live in a reasonably affluent smaller city and the problem of affordable housing for the "working poor" is about the same here ... but I still haven't seen what I think is a viable solution (developers were compensated for building low-income housing and maintaining low rent for 10 years, but now the rent for those houses exceeds my monthly mortgage).

<comment><USER6> > I still haven't seen what I think is a viable solution

What about cooperative ownership? When an asset is communally owned, it reduces the temptation for people to destroy it for a payout.

<comment><USER7> My biggest concern about communal ownership (ignoring tragedy of the commons) is that such an arrangement is simply undesirable for most people. There is something fundamentally unappealing about buying into a communal arrangement, and I can see why - I can easily think of a few past roommates to whom I'm very glad I was not financially bound in a long-term arrangement.

For example, TICs are declining in numbers in SF, not increasing. If communal ownership were a viable option, we should see the number of TICs increasing.

<comment><USER6> Yes, there are certainly a lot of unsolved problems in communal ownership. I'm optimistic that solutions are out there.

>If communal ownership were a viable option, we should see the number of TICs increasing.

I don't understand how that follows. All that indicates is that some particular operating structures (the specific TICs in place in SF) are not viable on one specific market (SF) in one particular moment in history.

I was just suggesting that in theory communal ownership could solve the problem. How to actually get that to work, in practice, is a problem that entrepreneurs have been working on for decades, and it will take many decades more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A better-written counterpoint, also Salon, also 1999:

[http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/sf/](http://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/sf/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! It just seems with all this talk of the new boom that there's a bit of plus ca change, plus que c'est le meme chose. Look forward to any other historical articles out there too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Living in a desirable place has always been popular. And its popularity fluctuates. Those who rent rather than buy are most exposed to those fluctuations. Those who buy are most likely to profit.

That's how it works. Nothing new about it and there's no way to change it, except perhaps stopping the Federal Reserve from creating bubbles with cheap money.

<comment><USER10> Strikes me that a lot of renters want the advantages of property ownership but none of the responsibilities.

<comment><USER11> Maybe most of them couldn't dream of actually owning property.

<comment><USER10> I can't afford property in central London either even a 1 bed flat is getting on for $1,000,000.

<comment><USER9> Sometimes its a lot cheaper to rent something than it is to rent the money to own it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Median rent for a two bedroom apartment is $2,000 per month." Oh how I yearn for the good old days!

<comment><USER13> Not much different from Stockholm....

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Am I the only one who gets a 403 Forbidden when clicking on the link?

<comment><USER15> no

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> coming here to work for a startup has been awesome but i couldn't imagine growing up around here or even settling down here. i am here for the experience and then im outta here</comment>


Ask HN: What SaaS are you currently paying for? - <AUTHOR>

What subscription software services are good enough to fork over your hard earned money each month? <comment><USER9> GitHub - Code repositories

Springloops - <USER2>

Pivotal Tracker - Agile planning tool

Podio - Get work done

New Relic - Server/Application performance monitoring

Pingdom - Uptime monitoring

Blame Stella - Speed monitoring

Sendgrid - Email delivery

CloudFront - <USER3>

 __Free services: __

Groove - Support tickets & chat (groovehq.com)

Trello - <USER4>

Stripe - <USER5>

<comment><USER10> What's your app?

<comment><USER9> It's not yet live, though it will be at the end of this month or early January.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Almost all of these are directly related to running my business, but here we go: Shopify, Zendesk, Mailchimp, Highrise, KISSmetrics, Recurly.

Other "stuff" I pay for that's not quite SaaS: Linode, Twilio, ThemeForest.

</comment><comment><USER12> Github - Code repo

Skype - phone calls

Pivotal Tracker - Agile - Yo baby!

Raven Tools - SEO and reporting

Freshbooks - <USER6>

Quickbooks online - "accounting"

Balsamiq Online - Collaborative Mockups

and I think my new SaaS that I will be announcing in about 5 days will be well worth the money :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> Uservoice- Feedback/Support

Github

Pivotal Tracker

Airbrake- Error Reporting

S3 if it counts

</comment><comment><USER14> New Relic - App Metrics, Postmark - Email, Beanstalk - Git Repos/Deployments, CheddarGetter - Billing API, Flow - Tasks, Use Case backlog, Zoho Creator - Awesome for quick internal apps, Recess Mobile - SMS API, great company/owner, Highrise, Basecamp

</comment><comment><USER15> Helpjuice.com uses

Helpjuice, for the knowledge base, of course

Github

Skype

Dropbox

Olark

VisualWebsiteOptimizer

Stripe - <USER7>

Sendgrid

Linode (switched from Rackspace)

Balsamiq

</comment><comment><USER16> github

hipchat

xero

skype

dropbox

isocket

shopify

rysync.net

</comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone actually developed his own ERP on the cloud? I did, as I evaluated many SaaS accounting software and find none of them suit my needs, and NetSuite, SAP, etc. are too expensive for me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Google Apps

Salesforce

Amazon Web Services

Dropbox

Bill.com

Jobvite

Github

Pingdom

Cloudkick

Passpack

Meraki

MS Intune

</comment><comment><USER19> Freshbooks

Unfuddle

Evernote

Skype

Skitch (before it joined Evernote)

S3 & Linode (but that's hosting)

</comment><comment><USER20> Olark, among others. I'm surprised no one has mentioned them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Harvest for time tracking, skype, last.fm.

</comment><comment><USER21> Postmarkapp, Nametoolkit (on Mashape)

</comment><comment><USER22> Github, Spotify, EVE Online

</comment><comment><USER23> spotify

dropbox

sendgrid

skype

(app engine)

</comment><comment><USER24> newrelic google apps (email) github cotendo (cdn)

</comment><comment><USER25> rsync.net - <USER8>

</comment><comment><USER26> fogbugz, dropbox, cloudapp</comment>


Show HN: All videos posted to HN – ranked, indexed, and displayed with comments - <AUTHOR> https://yahnd.com/theater/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

This is a project I've been working on that extracts references to talks and videos in the stories and comments of Hacker News. I've extracted about 207,000 references to 95,000 unique(ish) videos. The videos are then scored using aggregations on story points and comment popularity and sentiment. Rankings are produced for the last week, month, year, and all time. This is all being updated fairly continuously using the Hacker News Firebase API.

All 95,000 videos are full-text indexed on their titles and descriptions. Matching search results are ranked by their all-time score.

Also, email digests are available to subscribe to the regularly updated rankings.

Enjoy — feedback welcomed.</comment>


Fermi's Paradox [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/617/fermis-paradox <comment><USER3> One of the professors in my department when I was a grad student in astronomy was a vegetarian because of the Fermi Paradox. His reasoning was that intelligent life probably doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe and so a chicken is one of the most intelligent life forms in the universe. And given ~100 million years of evolution it could even become as intelligent as a human. Another professor I knew thought that the Fermi Paradox implied that interstellar space travel was probably too difficult an engineering problem to ever be solved.

I got the sense that a lot of astronomers (though probably not a majority) have strong opinions about the Fermi Paradox, but they only rarely discuss them. It's one of those weird problems where there's _some_ data --- enough to reason out some conjectures --- but not enough to really make any definitive conclusions. But because the answer you end up with has such profound consequences you feel obligated to at least try to make the most of the little data you have. I guess in Bayesian terms, it's one of those situations where the priors you put in basically determine the answer you get out --- if you disagree about the priors, you'll disagree about the conclusions.

<comment><USER4> > And given ~100 million years of evolution it could even become as > intelligent as a human.

Birds we're around long before humans, apes or even primates. They had their chance and they blew it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find the pair of videos by Kurzgesagt on YouTube to be much more appealing for me. Link for people interested:

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc)

2\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fQkVqno- uI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fQkVqno-uI)

<comment><USER6> I really enjoy Isaac Arthur's videos on the subject (he has a playlist with several hours of content exploring different possible solutions). The rest of his channel is great too; he posts a new 30-60 minute video every Thursday.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDPj5zI66LA)

Edit: The entire playlist: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU)

<comment><USER7> Issac Arthur has his stuff together. His videos are for the most part well researched and contain a lot of interesting hard sci-fi ideas. The only time I've seen him fall down is his video about quantum computing, but to be fair, a lot of people get caught by the same mistake. It's _not_ the case that a quantum computer is trying out all of the bit-strings that are possible answers in a kind of quantum-superposed parallel computing. That's not exactly what is happening.

One of the key insights: Qubits store complex numbers!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrbJYsep45E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrbJYsep45E)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those who want the less emotional/philosophical version, I prefer WBW article on Fermi's Paradox: [http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi- paradox.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)

<comment><USER9> I'm actually kind of partial to the Wikipedia entry:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a two comments to share about this paradox.

1\. The assumption that there are many advanced ET civilizations in the universe is based on the idea that life emergence is a natural and random process. This has not yet be proven to be valid. I share this opinion, but it is important to be aware of the underlying hypothesis because this is what can invalidate the claims.

2\. The other point is the "we don't see them". There is also an underlying hypothesis that ET manifestation would be ostensible. Many people deduce from this that they are not on earth and start to speculate on different reason for that.

The hypothesis that ET do not visit us is really not so sure. The first reason is that this visit and exploration may not be in the form we expect (e.g. colonization, diplomatic) and not directly visible to us (e.g. Spying, non- interfering scientifc study). The other reason is that they might have been visible for decenies as UFOs and third type contact encounter. But this possibility is rejected, and had been rejected by Enrico Fermi. To me this is the only paradox in the Fermi Paradox.

However, I do agree that if UFOs are visible ET manifestion on earth, this manifestation has puzzling and unexpected properties. The strongest one being that they apparently seem to leave us alone. There is currently no way for us to know why and deduce anything from this, like for instance rejecting the UFO phenomenon as possible ET manifestavtion because their behavior doesn't match our expectation.

<comment><USER11> > if UFOs are visible ET manifestion on earth, this manifestation has puzzling > and unexpected properties

The weirdest property being that they stopped visiting us as cell phone cams became ubiquitous. Camera shy little buggers.

<comment><USER10> To be more accurate, the report of UFO sightings dropped significantly after the eighties. The other weird property is an increase in UFO sighting after the second world war. Jean Jacques Velasco (GEPAN) suggested that it was correlated with nuclear explosions on earth. This is nonetheless suprizing because it would imply that they can make interstellar travels at a very high speed. We currently don't know how this is possible.

Anyway, we have to be careful to not consider a behavior not matching our expectation as a reason to invalidate the phenomenon because it is our expectations that may be invalid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My gut instinct tells me we're not special enough to be the only intelligent life out there. We humans have reliability had our egos crushed over and over again as we learned that we are not the center of the solar system, nor the only galaxy, etc, etc.

I think it's way more likely the universe is teeming with intelligent life, but in dimensions that we're not evolved enough to comprehend or sense, and the thought that we are alone is laughable from the point of view of the "aliens".

Hell, we don't even have the faintest idea of how our own brains work, why we need to sleep, and all kinds of other things. To even believe for an instant that we are so special that we're actually alone in the entire universe or even the galaxy is a bit ridiculous.

<comment><USER13> The fact that it's ridiculous is precisely why it's a paradox. Some aliens may be evolving on different levels as you say, but _all_ of them? Your resolution is they are there but we can't see _any_ of them or their effects.

<comment><USER12> It could well be that the exponential advancement in technology makes it so there is only about a 100 or 200 year gap where civilizations send out radio waves, or whatever our current technology is capable of receiving - <USER2> hitting these other dimensions.

But even so, there would still be a chance to detect this kind of stuff. I mean, I totally see your point - I just don't think we're that special though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics._

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/are-we-alone-in- the-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/are-we-alone-in-the- universe/2011/12/29/gIQA2wSOPP_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> We have contact all the time --on the fringes.

It's obvious that humanity could collective lose its mind if contact were widely and publicly acknowledged, so no one does.

Literally the moment we grow up there will be aliens (anthropologists) all over this planet. ;-)

<comment><USER16> Dare I ask... source?

:|</comment></comment>


Bluetooth Low Energy on Android - <AUTHOR> http://binary-studio.com/2014/08/29/bluetooth-low-energy-for-android-part-1/

<comment><USER2> Although not heavily emphasized in this article, nor in the documentation, the serial nature of this library is very important. The android BLE library is asynchronous in its callback nature, but it does not contain any sort of automatic queuing mechanism for requests. If you call to start a scan, for example, and during that scan make a connection attempt, due to the synchronous nature, the connect request can abort the scan without providing a scan error callback. This can catch you the other way too, if you initiate a scan while a connection is pending, the connection request will silently abort. An addition complexity to be wary of is that a failed connection request may not call back consistently, so setting up your own queuing is not always straightforward. If you are developing a new application for android that uses bluetooth, be very careful in setting up this queuing mechanism ahead of time, as it can be functionally difficult to implement later on. If you are going to connect to multiple devices, you are even more likely to run into these sorts of issues. The way I have my application setup for device scan and pairing, as an example, is to scan for some period of time (roughly 5-10 seconds), after which I end the scan, and then process any pending connections. Once the connections have been completed (in a serial fashion), I then restart the scan. This behavior may have been updated in android 5.x, but is definitely an issue to be wary of in android version 4.x</comment>


The 7 steps of planning high converting landing pages - <AUTHOR> http://roy.roypovarchik.com/2014/07/7-steps-planning-high-converting-landing-pages/

<comment><USER2> excellent and insightful</comment>


The day Apple won the Flash fight - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/apple/the-day-apple-won-the-flash-fight/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

<comment><USER2> Fluff article, really despise these immature "wars" and biased blogs. I own an Android phone, iPad, Touchpad, and a Windows laptop. I use the best technology I can and let results decide my decisions rather than brand loyalty.

The new Media Server is for video content only - your iOS device will still be missing Flash content. Competent websites have already solved this problem. I'm all for HTML5 taking over as long as browser compatibility is maintained and developer tools improve for both designers and developers. For now, Flash wins in the performance, cross-browser compatibility, and developer tools.

<http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/>

</comment><comment><USER3> People seems to forget that Adobe is a company that makes tools. For Adobe, it has never been Flash versus HTML5. It's about giving tools that people are willing to buy or upgrade to. Even if the iPhone had never existed, Adobe would still be adding HTML5 and mobile support for their products.

<comment><USER4> I think it was Adobe that forgot it was a company that makes tools. They did make it Flash versus HTML5, and are now realizing that they should have been agnostic as a toolmaker.

<comment><USER2> Flash existed long before HTML5, there was no platform for the tools. They revolutionized the web and HTML5 is catching up

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this a little ironic as today Apple also chose to highlight a Flash app as its iPad Game of The Week: <http://yfrog.com/nxvz8p>

Machinarium is a popular flash game that runs on iPad through Adobe AIR for mobile. My guess is we'll see a lot more native Flash games on the app store as processor speed increases, and even more impressive work when Flash 11 ships its Stage3D GPU acceleration for mobile (part of the Molehill project).

</comment><comment><USER6> > Basically, Adobe is acknowledging Apple has won when it comes to Flash.

Why does this article have to have a "vs." narrative? Is it possible that Adobe just wants to succeed and will do what it takes to gain profits?

And I'm not so sure Apple has _won_ just yet. If a device were to gain the traction necessary to gain enough marketshare (you saw a bit of this with HP's TouchPad), _we support Flash_ is a pretty decent incentive for the average consumer who isn't caught up in the HTML5 vs. Flash war (read: every average person).

<comment><USER7> Uh, I'm pretty sure the average person doesn't know (or care) what Flash is.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, my mom still doesn't understand why her "Smilebox" doesn't work on her iPad (video slideshow software).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From an ActionScript developer's point of view it still takes too long to develop anything interactive in html5. So for the sake of time cost/income, I'll continue to push interactive content out in flash, while using html5 for linear stuff.

With the recent news of unity for flash, the whole thing is about to embark on a new adventure.

</comment><comment><USER9> Apple did not win anything, Adobe just decided to support a device which has a large enough user base to be 'worth it'.

If Apple had sold a few hundred thousand of these then this would have never happened.

<comment><USER10> Isn't that the point of the article? Apple sold enough devices to get Adobe to change their content delivery strategy?

<comment><USER2> This is just for video, most websites already support non-Flash video using one of the hundreds of Javascript frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is written very childishly and is completely devoid of anything non opinion. This person is obviously neither a market strategist, nor a competent reporter.

</comment><comment><USER12> Before the iPhone it seemed like everyone agreed that Flash sucked, but after iOS that was taken to be some kind of Apple fanboy position. Which is to say, plenty of people with no particular allegiance to Apple have been unhappy with Flash for a long time, so there is no need to paint this as some kind of unilateral war on Apple's part. Flash is crappy and it's finally, slowly dying, that's all.

<comment><USER13> I've been racking my brain to try and make sense of why som many people seem to have forgotten just what Flash did to the web, and that's it. Pro-Flash is the polite face of Anti-Apple.

<comment><USER14> I don't know what you mean about what Flash did to the web. A lot of restaurants and small businesses had bad flash web sites built. Before flash a lot of people made websites with tons of animated gifs, but that didn't cause me to hate animated gifs.

<comment><USER15> Animated GIFs have never crashed my browser or cause it to perform horribly though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's been more than a year after Jobs' post disparaging Flash and promising that HTML5 can fill much of the gap.

While it has improved, HTML5 on iOS still lags behind a lot. Apple wins the Flash fight when Angry Birds can run on HTML5. Maybe that is what they're afraid of.

<comment><USER5> Angry Birds already runs on HTML5. <http://chrome.angrybirds.com/>

<comment><USER16> But does it work on Safari on iOS?

<comment><USER5> No, because HTML5's canvas performance on mobile browsers is comparable to Flash's performance on mobile browsers.

<comment><USER5> Incidentally, Flash still outperforms HTML5's Canvas on both desktop and browsers.

[http://www.blackcj.com/blog/2010/09/17/flash-outperforms- htm...](http://www.blackcj.com/blog/2010/09/17/flash-outperforms-html5-on- mobile-devices/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MIT's Deb Roy: Let's gather around the "digital hearth" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/tmd-part-2-46d72774f205 <comment><USER2> I see this approach as a part of a larger community/family site. In this day of lockdown (covid-19) and the need of many to connect with others, I picture a multi-layered presentation that allows a "family" (which could be members by choice not necessarily by blood). This might be measured by a Dunbar group size of 2 to 15. At this level there could be the communications of a more personal nature (lots of caveats here and extreme privacy would be essential. Another layer of community with the Dunbar relationship number between 5 and 150, where intimacy, privacy, and self restraint would require the communications and passage of information at a more restricted level. I guess the final level could be labeled the FaceBook level where you choose how to share your privacy data with the wide world. I don't know, right now, how to create what I'm trying to describe, but because the electronic world that can alternately be described as much too intimate and also open to bullying and to extreme personal and anonymous attacks there is some lack of boundaries being set that members can depend on. At the different layers different security techniques would be called on, such as: 1\. Proof that the sender is properly identified, And/or 2\. Proof that the receiver or receiver group is properly identified, 3\. Proof that the message was received identically to what was sent, Even 4\. Restraints that allow for anonymous messages clearly marked as such. Of course these are all achievable with cryptography. An interesting application of some of these needs shows up in app Keybase. The article, 'Let's gather around the "digital hearth"' adds another layer to this scenario that I see as a possibly web-driven application. Many Web apps take on a part of this but none allows for a more complete family, community, wide world structure.</comment>


SeaMonkey 2.53.1 Beta 1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/seamonkey2.53.1/ <comment><USER2> I use Seamonkey at work and my coworkers make fun of me whenever I have to screenshare. I originally switched because some years ago, Chrome was being a memory hog, and I remembered using Seamonkey years before that.

I still use it every day, and was recently wondering when the next update would happen. Thanks to all the devs out there fighting the good fight!

<comment><USER3> OMG. I could have written this very comment. The chortles and sneers I get are numerous.

One other reason to use SeaMonkey is it works the best with the -D (socks5) feature of ssh, even better than Firefox's implementation. If you have to traverse into networks via SSH and browse, SeaMonkey is your best friend.

<comment><USER4> Curious what/how it does better with socks5. I'd assume it's the same code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do they plan to maintain the code for HTML WYSIWYG composer, IRC chat client, when current and future releases are based on modern Gecko and Firefox? Will composer in particular be dropped sometime in future? It is (in my opinion) one of the selling points of SeaMonkey as its a really easy to use HTML editor for creating quick pages.

<comment><USER6> I can't answer your question (I don't use that part of Seamonkey), but I have the feeling they are unfortunately following the same steps as the main Mozilla product, just with some (appreciable) delay: they dropped GTK2 support in last version, and they are dropping ALSA support soon (I thought in this release, but I don't see it written in this page), both things I need on my Linux setup. Another user said he was happy to see this new release for his XP laptop; well, they are supposed to drop XP in this release too :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Probably not a popular sentiment, but for someone continuing to use and maintain a Win XP Thinkpad T60, this is really cool news.

<comment><USER8> Are you aware of any other web browsers for Windows XP, which are still updated, besides MyPal and this one (SeaMonkey)?

<comment><USER9> Maxthon

XP is still huge in China [https://www.maxthon.com](https://www.maxthon.com)

I use that on my XP VM

You can find all here [http://www.xpbrowsers.com](http://www.xpbrowsers.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> "Bug that grants admin rights to malware found in Maxthon, China's favorite browser"

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/bug-that-grants-admin- rights-t...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/bug-that-grants-admin-rights-to- malware-found-in-maxthon-chinas-favorite-browser/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Living a bit under a rock here. Can somebody help me understand the utility of SeaMonkey in comparison to FF?

<comment><USER11> This is the open source version of Netscape Communicator circa 1997. It is mozilla.org's first and oldest open source browser client. That client was eventually split in to Firefox (browser) and Thunderbird (the rest).

It has all the features of Firefox, plus built-in support for your favorite social media newsgroups, email, and contacts.

<comment><USER12> Neither this comment nor my sibling mentioning Netscape 5 are correct. SeaMonkey's lineage is Netscape 6. Netscape 6 is from the early 2000s, not the late 90s. This is significant because they are different codebases, and there was a substantial gap between the latest mass market release in the 90s and the first release prepared from the new (nglayout, now known as Gecko) codebase. The code that was first released in the 90s was the then-in-progress state of the never-finished Netscape 5. The decision to scrap Netscape 5 is the source of the "never do a rewrite" meme that came out of Spolsky's article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> a pleasure to see the old gui :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Killed by Mozilla...

</comment><comment><USER15> I was always surprised that Mongo used SeaMonkey for running scripts. Why didn't they pick V8?

<comment><USER16> Believe you're thinking about SpiderMonkey. SeaMonkey is an application suite with email, browser, IRC, etc.

<comment><USER15> Hahaha, yes. Oops.</comment></comment></comment>


My work at GCHQ and the surveillance myths that need busting - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/nov/04/gchq-officer-my-work-surveillance-myths-need-busting <comment><USER2> The best response to this article is a quote from the movie True Romance:

"Now, what we got here is a little game of show and tell. You don't wanna show me nothing but you're telling me everything."

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if the author can prove that what he's writing is actually the case.

What we have here are statements. How much those statements are based on truth remains to be seen. Until then we should take them with a grain of salt, in the wake of recent developments.

</comment><comment><USER4> blablabla, everything is fine, blablabla. blabla terror blablabla...

i wonder if this guy ever questions the stuff he is told and puts some critical thinking to sunshine. Guess from what he wrote: no.

<comment><USER5> It's notoriously difficult to leave US intelligence agencies. We often see ex-[NC][SI]A people, like John Schindler ([http://gawker.com/nsa-spook-turned- twitter-pundit-goes-dark-...](http://gawker.com/nsa-spook-turned-twitter- pundit-goes-dark-after-dick-pi-1594848048)) or Stewart Baker ([https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=stewart+baker](https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=stewart+baker)) apparently acting as proxies for the NSA. Maybe he's still connected.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.intelexit.org/](https://www.intelexit.org/)

"Exit Now!"

Endorsed by both Bruce Schneier and Thomas Drake.</comment></comment></comment>


Enormous global embedded device botnet built - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/337270,enormous-global-embedded-device-botnet-built.aspx

<comment><USER2> So 420,000 "Swartz level" crimes? The US DOJ just vibrated briefly at a large, imperceptible frequency and then evaporated in a puff of irony.</comment>


The Screenreader Experience Part One: What Twitter.com Sounds Like - <AUTHOR> http://www.napcsweb.com/blog/2010/10/15/web-accessibility-the-screenreader-experience-part-one/

<comment><USER2> I once worked for a company who had to maintain 508 compliance (accessible to people with disabilities) for their flagship product as many of the clients were government agencies or agencies with government grants. Unfortunately this is exactly what our product was like with a screen reader, probably worse. Basically everything just needed to be accessible correctly, couldn't use a clickable div/span for whatever crazy reason just anchor tags. It's sad that the blind have to live with crappy software, I always felt bad for them when hearing from our managers to check for compliance a few times a week.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are there any screenreader software packages that can output a transcript of what they're reading aloud?

That'd make it infinitely easier for web developers to test pages...

<comment><USER4> There's a Firefox extension called Fangs that I use, but it's not that great. I plan to have some posts soon that talk about tools.

JAWS for Windows gives you a 45 minute trial. All you need to do to restart the trial is to reboot your machine.

But like I said in the article - it's not gonna be a checklist that gets the job done, it's gonna be about testing it in real screenreaders. I haven't seen any emulators that behave like the real ones.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Pardon me if this is an arrogantly undisabled thing to say but.. perhaps rather than making sites better, we could be making better screenreaders? Interpreting the truly important information on a page programatically isn't the easiest task but it's hardly a freakishly crazy AI problem either.. Any startups in this field? :)

<comment><USER4> I don't know how I can answer this. I suppose I could make a comment about how we don't even have browsers for the sighted that can understand the code that some developers throw up on pages.

Or I could say "Find 10 pages, and quickly determine, from only the HTML markup, what the main content is." and then do that for the top 1000 pages on the net. See how hard the problem is. If you solve it, you'd be a hero.

On the other hand, you could use accessibility patterns like UJS, alternative text, skip links, ARIA roles, better semantic markup, and make your site about 80% more usable in about an hour :)

<comment><AUTHOR> _On the other hand, you could use accessibility patterns like UJS, alternative text, skip links, ARIA roles, better semantic markup, and make your site about 80% more usable in about an hour :)_

I agree, but sadly it remains easier to solve even hard technical challenges than seemingly easy social ones where, if you're lucky, perhaps 20% of developers will cooperate.

As a developer I find accessibility _interesting_ , which is why I submitted it, but unless I'm being forced to implement it by law or context (e.g. a site with a high demographic of people using screen readers) I haven't the inclination or motivation to _focus_ on it (though skip links, alternative text, etc, are good ideas _anyway_ ). It's a bit like dealing with IE5 or WebTV in that regard.

There are lots of ways in which we could make the world better for disabled people, I'm sure, but typically we've built technology to make life easier for them instead of changing the way the world already operates (with the notable exception of building codes enforcing the installation of ramps and disabled access systems). I'm not saying that's always a good thing but people are notoriously slow to change en masse (y'seen the average quality of HTML out there?).

It shouldn't be too far fetched to significantly improve the usability of screen readers even on the hairiest of pages - most _regular_ browsers do a stellar job at interpreting horrendous markup. Half of the stuff that your recording comes out with isn't even _visible_ on the screen.. do screen readers pay full attention to CSS and states enforced and controlled by JavaScript? If not, that's probably step one to making things better.

I suspect the problem is that there's little money, fame, and too few people looking at the technological aspects of this problem, whereas inventing a new "standard" and sitting on some W3 fancy board looks great on the old résumé.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was part of a small team contracted to build the screenreader for Vista (Narrator). It's a tough thing to get right. Once we had a working version I tried finding and starting Visual Studio and building a simple Winforms app all with the monitor off. I didn't get very far.

<comment><USER6> I imagine you wouldn't get very far drawing a picture in MS Paint, either. Some tasks are inherently visual (like laying out controls in a 2D plane.) Do you think you could have managed to build a CLI app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure if this exists, is feasible, or even possible, but: What about some sort of framework or markup for converting a webpage to speech?

Edit: <http://www.webtospeech.com> is free btw.

<comment><USER8> You mean (WAI-)ARIA?

HTML / browsers are entirely capable of handling websites easily for blind people / other needs. The problem is that nobody builds their pages to use the tools already in existence - even _really_ high profile pages are generally atrocious.

Similarly, take a peek around the web (or at most applications) and consider if you couldn't tell the difference between red/green or yellow/blue. Most people just don't consider it if it isn't shown to be a problem, and yes, it does take more time to develop for those edge cases.

<comment><USER9> Speaking as a colorblind browser, as long as I don't try to play Flash games I really never have a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is just fantastic - I've never heard what a screen reader sounds like. I think I wouldn't make it five minutes trying to get sense out of that.

<comment><USER10> Maybe I'd get used to it, but the computer voice really bugs me and feels hard to understand, making it hard to even get enough sense out of it to get to the point of being confused by the content. Is this what typical screenreaders sound like? To my ears, the vocal synthesis in espeak is considerably more pleasant (<http://espeak.sourceforge.net/>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can I ask what plugin is being used on the page? Every time I click it my Chrome tab crashes.

<comment><USER4> That's unfortunate. It's using videojs, from <http://videojs.com>

Can I ask what OS you're working with?

The full video is at [http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenrea...](http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenreader.mp4) or [http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenrea...](http://napcsweb.com/files/video/01_screenreader/01_screenreader.webm) if you want to watch it.

<comment><USER12> I'm experiencing the same issue with Chrome 7.0.517.41 beta on Ubuntu.

<comment><USER3> Worksforme on Chome 8.0.552.0 dev on Ubuntu

(edit: It worked for me even before the vimeo switch)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As posted by a commenter on the original article, this website may help: <http://www.AccessibleTwitter.com/>

<comment><USER4> The point of the article was not to pick on Twitter. While using a tool like AccessibleTwitter is great for that particular example, it's not fixing the real problem - people will run into problems with modern websites, and simple things can make that experience better.

I hope I didn't make a mistake by pointing at Twitter.</comment></comment>


How to access a PayPal business account from any country - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/e-residency-blog/how-to-access-a-paypal-business-account-from-any-country-f5360419fed8 <comment><USER2> The point of the article is about how to access anything _from Estonia_ , after having accessed Estonia "from any country".

TL;DR:

Once you become an Estonian e-resident, and have registered a company in Estonia, you can use Paypal but also forget about it and choose instead any different payment provider such as "this" (but mentioning Paypal business account in the title gets more views/reads than mentioning "this").

</comment><comment><USER3> PayPal are notorious for semi-randomly closing accounts, especially when the usage deviates a little bit from the norm. I wouldn't go the route described in the article if I depended on this income, even if it seems innocent.</comment>


Ubuntu 'reaping Linux dividend' - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7358483.stm

<comment><USER2> Pretty standard puff/PR piece but the "install under Windows" thing is pretty cool.

<comment><USER3> True, but it is good to see the mainstream media talking about Linux on the desktop. Vista is the best thing that ever happened to Linux :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is great that more ordinary customers are starting to use Ubuntu. It is a great platform and if people are smart enough, it (Linux) will become the top used platform system anywhere.</comment>