What happens when Google says "we aren't going to pay your fines"? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ben_longstaff/what-happens-when-google-says-we-arent-going-to-pay-your-fines-f35f752253c0 <comment><USER3> If people's GMail and Android phones stop working, they may get angry at the French government, but outside France a lot of people would also want to move away from Google services like GMail, Android, etc, because Google would show your access to them can't be trusted. Google would lose a lot more users than just France.

Yes, it would cause chaos in France, but it would also really hurt Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> if Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft formed a union of sorts it would be hard to move away from

<comment><USER4> In places like EU, this may be illegal cartel behaviour.

In Australia, the Big Four banks applied to the consumer watchdog for permission to team together and negotiate as a block - form a cartel - <USER2> Apple over Apple Pay and NFC access. The banks were denied, and just last month the biggest bank added Apple Pay support (after a number of the 'smaller' ones added it).

<comment><USER5> And what would they do? Force them to do business in their country? By presumably what means?

<comment><USER6> \- Detaining any executives of the company found within borders or in regions where extradition is possible.

\- Seizing all company assets, offices, source code, etc.

\- Breaking the company up and promoting in-borders employees into management positions, etc.

<comment> wav-part Its not like Corporations can pay someone else, say US or China, to protect their assets and people. US totally wont f __k EUs shit up for few hundreds of billions. No sir, countries can seize and kidnap without consequences, because muh sovereignty.

<comment><USER7> > No sir, countries can seize and kidnap without consequences, because muh > sovereignty.

The Jamal Khashoggi tragedy is a very recent example that this has been the sentiment for some time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People forget this has already happened, more or less. In 2011 Google blackholed Belgium's newspapers when they got uppity. Pretty sure it happened a few times before that as well.

[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/16/0028255/belgian- new...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/16/0028255/belgian-newspapers- delisted-on-google)

Also, many years ago, Google ghosted CNET because they didn't like their reporting. They didn't blacklist them from results, but it was an option.

[https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/](https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/)

<comment><USER9> Another example is that Google News ended service in Spain after a link tax was passed[0].

[0] [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/enrique-dans/google-news- leav...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/enrique-dans/google-news-leaving- spain_b_6325244.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Google is a business, it has a responsibility to make money for > shareholders. This is its sole responsibility.

Uh, where'd you get that from? The company has an obligation to act in the the interest of shareholders, but "interest" doesn't necessarily mean "money." Moreover, that's not its _only_ obligation. This guy seems to agree:

[https://www.cultofmac.com/268413/tim-cook-tells-profit- obses...](https://www.cultofmac.com/268413/tim-cook-tells-profit-obsessed- investors-sell-stock/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, it should say "act in the interest of" rather than "make money".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's one silly power fantasy.

But what if they really tried to do it? Well, the most likely outcome would be the US government declaring Google a risk to national security, and taking direct control. After all if this could happen to France, it could happen to the US, and governments of sovereign states really really hate non-state competitors that could potentially meddle with the operation of the state.

After that, whatever remains of Google would probably be auctioned off to cover the costs of the backlash (and probable legal action) from Google's corporate clients.

<comment><USER12> You're saying that Google would be nationalized if they backed out of France? Notwithstanding that it would be illegal, how is choosing which countries to transact business in a breach of national security?

<comment><USER11> No. What the article details is not an ordinary exit from the French market, but an overnight attempt to pressure France into a change of government, which would involve disabling critical infrastructure and not fulfilling contractual and legal obligations in an attempt to make the French state unable to perform its functions.

And yes, having a company with the power and will to "digitally coup" world powers would be an immediate threat to national security, no question about that.

I don't know where you got the nationalization part from: U.S. courts and law enforcement are perfectly capable of taking temporary control of companies' resources in an effort to stop or prevent criminal activity, and none of that involves nationalizing anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 2.2 billion would not be worth the money to alienate an entire nation and cause major lashback around the world who hears of the news. Those are all potential customers. They would do better to just pay up.

Now the question is, when will it be worth it for an all-powerful multinational corporation like Google to say fuck it and use their power to influence government policy on a global level? How much money or what would have to be at stake for them to turn their back on "Don't be evil"?

<comment><USER14> I would guess an exodus from the other side too. Even though I'm not French, if Google blocks France...it affects me.

I'd have to quit hosting my things on Google's cloud, app engine, Google drive, analytics, etc, if I expected people in France to be able to see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That would be the best thing that could ever happen.

Refusal of service?

I don't know anything that would make people run to another service faster.

<comment><AUTHOR> for consumers maybe, but if you don't have access to your data its problematic. for business and government departments it could be crippling

<comment><AUTHOR> I did a few migration projects when I worked at the Discovery Channel and they took months of planning to ensure continuation of services.

<comment><USER16> So is Google promising continuation of services before turning them off?

<comment><AUTHOR> in the hypothetical scenario where France tries to enforce a huge fine and Google says no thanks, France pushes and then Google turns off service it would be crippling. Google has a lot of power in that sort of negotiation.

Which is why I think it was only a token 0.05% of global revenue for the fine rather than 4%

<comment><USER16> I'd expect law signatories to raise an eyebrow. The purpose of the law is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Given that Google execs were having another crack at entering China (and all the "compliance" that comes with that) last year, my guess is that Google has a pretty high pain threshold for compliance.

</comment><comment><USER18> Then the Googlers go to jail or they bomb Google's headquarters. Google is not a nation state and wouldn't last long in a fight. More seriously, check out Huawei to see how a huge company pissing off a large country is doing.

</comment><comment><USER16> > At some point, compliance becomes bad business.

It's not even funny. If compliance is bad business for you, well, your other choice is to not have business.

Wonder what shareholders would say, but not too much. Not one of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> So I think that is why the fine is 0.05% of global revenue instead of the full 4% that can be enforced under GDPR. Both the government and Google can spin it as a win.

But say instead France asks for 4% of global revenue, and there are rumblings from Spain, Italy, Germany, UK, Sweden, Poland, Romania, Denmark and Greece that if France is successful they will do the same.

Suddenly the potential fines are 40% of global revenue, but Europe doesn't generate 40% of global revenue.

<comment><USER16> The goal of GDPR is to discourage bad business practices. It's expected that fines should be prohibitive for predatory business models. Until Google will comply - or go out of business - the fines will grow.

I mean, if somehow Google would manage to pay biggest possible fine without changing practices, I'd expect the law updated to bigger fines.

<comment><USER19> > I mean, if somehow Google would manage to pay biggest possible fine without > changing practices, I'd expect the law updated to bigger fines.

And if they refused to pay, I imagine new laws would be passed to force compliance...such as criminal penalties against corporate executives and board members who choose to leave the fines unpaid.

Sundar Pichai's going to have Google pay up if the alternative is that he could end up in a French jail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The countries start seizing your assets, which for Google would be their Datacenters in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER21> The average person doesn't care about privacy (they have nothing interesting to share anyway), and better-targeted ads makes capitalism more efficient. Plus, the services that ads enable are very widely used and popular.

All that the EU has served to accomplish is to kill tech in Europe, place popups and opt-in buttons onto every website (accept cookies?), and to extort a few billions out of American tech companies.

Europe can't do tech because its taxes on labour are too high and the whole continent speaks 30 different languages. There, I said it.

<comment><USER22> You forget that 'murica can't do tech either these days, hihi. With all the outsourcing these days hardly any tech is there to make anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the big tech companies are just fine with increasing regulation. They are in position to manage them, and benefit from the fact that the regulatory environment makes it that much more difficult for new companies to enter the market.

</comment><comment><USER22> I cannot wait for this to happen. I dare, I double dare GAFA/FAANG or whatever acronym you want for them to make such move. I want them to flex their muscles to see who wins. My guess? DuckDuckGo, Linux and the likes. Maps? OpenMaps. Social network? I don't give a flying fly, definitely another in a year will rise. As for costs for not paying? Like all those companies don't have distributed offices to make local caches in each country? Rally them all up and auction baby. Get some money against those fines. I bet in 2 years all those companies will either disappear like Kodak when refused to change with times or they will comply with GDPR big time. I have news for Ben Longstaff, the article's author, GDPR is new times; your "My guess? Not long." is shortsighted.

</comment><comment><USER24> Spoken like a true american...

</comment><comment><USER25> "There are no nations. There are no peoples... There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars... It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And [France] has meddled with the primal forces of nature, and [France] will atone!"

This is the dystopia we have built. We have allowed corporations to have to much leverage and control.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the extent of that leverage is not well understood.

It's like AMI trying to blackmail Jeff Bezos, but having all of their sites hosted with AWS ....

What happens when it makes business sense for Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook to start charging nation states a license fee for offering their services into their country and all the government services rely on their cloud offerings?

<comment><USER26> Presumably that nation state puts someone in jail.

<comment><AUTHOR> On what grounds? They would just be changing their business model

<comment><USER19> > On what grounds?

Because you thumb your nose at nation-states at your peril.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this phrase a lot :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Simply childish.</comment>


I think my BBQ just offered to be my default browser? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kaydo/status/1259747848502960130 <comment><USER2> I used to visit the iGrill website every couple of days and stress test my product there during development.

I worked for Ai Squared on an app named Sitecues, which was a SaaS product that companies would add to their website to improve their accessibility for low vision users. We ran into a vast number of edge cases when trying to make our JavaScript library compatible with all of our customers' websites, many of whom had awful coding that we needed to handle gracefully (hacky CSS, old versions of Prototype JS that override Object.prototype, and far, far worse). One day I stumbled upon the iGrill website and found out that it exposed practically every problem that we had seen scattered across various other sites. It was so convenient that their website was so poorly coded that I could stress test our app on their site and if it worked, well, "ship it!"

Looks like their site has had a few updates since then, but those were good times.

<comment><USER3> How'd the company turned out? I'm pretty interested in accessible web dev and have toyed with the idea of working on profiling tools, or maybe something to show abled users just how shitty their site is to use with various access tools.

<comment><USER2> Ai Squared was great and that was my favorite job. The company had been around for a while, with a rich history, and they made good products. Particularly Sitecues, the division I worked in, had a good culture and product, which was designed to modernize the company. We took our time to get the implementation right and management supported us. Unfortunately, Sitecues had been burning through the rest of the company's revenue. Right as we were starting to scale and get customers left and right, some of the financial backers decided to sell to a private equity firm. A few months later, days before Christmas, they laid off everyone at Sitecues except for me and effectively shut it down. I was kept on just to keep the servers running for a few more months, probably to fulfill some contractual obligations. It was a disaster. Other parts of the company were outsourced or merged into other companies, including Freedom Scientific, which had long been "the enemy". They renamed the combined organization to VFO, and later renamed again to Vispero. Now they focus on profiting off of accessibility related lawsuits, which Sitecues had aimed to prevent. It's disgusting. I would avoid doing business with Vispero or any of their subsidiaries. The Sitecues source code is public on GitHub now, though, since someone stopped paying the bills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those curious about the technical details here, here's a dump of the iGrill Android manifest (it's not XML because Android APKs contain a binary manifest): [https://pastebin.com/fwbJ9TjD](https://pastebin.com/fwbJ9TjD)

It looks like this is the culprit:

        E: activity (line=48)
            A: android:theme(0x01010000)=@0x7f110149
            A: android:name(0x01010003)="com.weber.igrill.pages.splash.SplashActivity" (Raw: "com.weber.igrill.pages.splash.SplashActivity")
            A: android:screenOrientation(0x0101001e)=(type 0x10)0x1
            E: intent-filter (line=52)
              E: action (line=53)
                A: android:name(0x01010003)="android.intent.action.VIEW" (Raw: "android.intent.action.VIEW")
              E: category (line=55)
                A: android:name(0x01010003)="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" (Raw: "android.intent.category.BROWSABLE")
              E: data (line=57)
                A: android:scheme(0x01010027)="http" (Raw: "http")

This registers an intent filter for all HTTP (but not HTTPS) URLs. I would expect it to require a DEFAULT category though, not sure what happens when that's left out.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone else feel that editing these manifest files is like filling out tax forms?

I personally can't blame them for getting this wrong if the development tools don't provide adequate feedback.

<comment><USER6> It would be nicer if the tooling was better, but at the same time:

1\. Everyone else can apparently do it properly. 2\. They could have caught this problem in testing.

It's just a case of a non-software company adding on an app as an afterthought.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't be surprised if they just outsourced the app development to the lowest bidder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Android is such a drag sometimes. Between mystery quirks like this, where I'm sure someone who has been making Android apps for 6 years will be able to explain it, and things like the absolute inability to override the order of items in the sharing panel[1], such that Android will routinely topline sharing to a contact you got one text message from three years ago.

"F.U., that's why" is the simplest conclusion I can draw. "Unpaid concept testing" is the next simplest.

1\. [https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp- content/uploads/2019/0...](https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp- content/uploads/2019/09/android-10-sharing-menu-edit.jpg)

<comment><USER9> > the absolute inability to override the order of items in the sharing panel

As an extra F.U., it also _changes_ the list of contacts after a second. So I try to tap on my wife, only to have it substituted with the plumber who came once half a year ago... and this of course gets logged by the AI, ensuring the plumber continues to hold pride of place in my contacts.

<comment><USER10> Is there an agreed upon name for this, where a website or app loads elements piecemeal so we click the wrong thing by mistake?

I know it exists as an intentional dark pattern (so we just _think_ that's what happened). But it also seems so common now across computing and it pisses me off every time.

<comment><USER11> In my opinion, Windows search is the absolute most infuriating example of this, compounded by how slow it is. Let's name it so we can shame it

<comment><USER10> Just yesterday I tried to type "Network and sharing center". Apparently it does not exist in the index which is quite annoying, I have to click through the control panel (after accidentally ending up on a web search). Windows 10 is an odd beast with multiple generations of UIs all nestled away.

<comment><USER12> Trying to get to the network devies page is equally infuriating- it's under network adapters and options in Control Panel, and may or may not actually be accessible from the new Settings app- I don't remember.

<comment><USER13> Even better, try setting the dead zones on an XInput game pad. Off the top of my head, it goes something like: "Settings" > "Bluetooth and other devices" > "Printers and other devices" > Right click your game pad > "Gamepad Settings" > select your gamepad > "Ok" > "Deadzones"

<comment><USER14> The really sad thing is that Windows has multiple accessibility layers for every visual control (e.g. Active Accessibility).

So there is literally already a textual, and usually interpretable, path to _any window_.

Apparently tying search into that made too much sense though, and so instead we get a reinvented (slightly square) wheel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With all the sites with CPU intensive Javascript, my phone gets hot enough that sometimes I feel my browser wants to be my default BBQ.

<comment><USER16> I'm getting this on CNN: [https://twitter.com/asplake/status/1263907373825081344?s=21](https://twitter.com/asplake/status/1263907373825081344?s=21)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What a crock of shit that grills are now IoT devices. The less of my life that's accessible on the Internet, the better.

<comment><USER18> I saw from another thread that this is actually for the temperature of a meat thermometer, that you can constantly monitor and without having to open the grill (which is undesirable).

So actually not a crock of shit, and pretty useful if you're grilling/smoking over long periods of time before/during a big party or something. Not all grilling is quick searing.

Sometimes new features aren't just gimmicks, you know?

<comment><USER19> a guage. On the bbq lid. No, i can't check it while i sit inside, this is true, there is, however a very good argument that says, maybe i shouldn't actually be inside while the bbq is on though.

<comment><USER20> There's a barbecue recipe guy I like, big proponent of leave-in thermometers (the kind with leads that snake outside the barbecue). He likes to say that the in-lid thermometers are just fine, provided you're planning to eat the lid.

I still probably wouldn't use an IoT one, though.

<comment><USER19> i'm gonna level with you here, i've never eaten meat in my life, so am out of my comfort zone here, but i can't help but feel from reading this that the HN crowd have a propensity for over-engineering that is coming to the fore here.

Fire, knives and an apron with a pithy slogan - c'mon, how hard can it be?

<comment><USER21> A business built to sell grill gadgets to the HN crowd sounds like a guaranteed recipe for failure.

Anyhow, folks who are serious about preparing smoked brisket, ribs, etc., are very particular about the temperature of both the air/smoke and the food. Two thermometers and maybe a computer-controlled fan or damper are not far outside the norm.

<comment><USER22> > A business built to sell grill gadgets to the HN crowd sounds like a > guaranteed recipe for failure.

Haha, gadget as in IoT crap, maybe, but we're for-sure the market for: aeropress, sous-vide devices (yes some do them DIY but...), dedicated pizza ovens, and so on. You got a gadget to prepare food or drinks that already have other ways to prepare them, HN's not a crazy place to market it. Bonus if it's "sciency" or can be described as more "authentic".

But of course we're not like the stupid plebs falling for those silly devices we _don 't_ like.

(mind, I'm far from immune to this, so I'm not just casting stones at others—oh I _am_ getting one of those pizza ovens at some point. That's happening.)

<comment><USER21> Heh. I mean only that HN'ers are too fussy to sell to. People do indeed love gadgets and other vehicles to try to fill the void. Why is why I intend to build a domed brick and clay bread/pizza oven in the backyard when time and knowledge permit...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Okay, so an IoT BBQ is a useful thing.

How are we going to prevent every single useful thing from coming up with its own crappy, poorly-maintained application? Because obviously having open standards is not enough.

So far the solution we've come up with seems to be "wait until one or a few companies dominate the market, come up with their own solution, and hope it's an open one and/or others adopt it."

This particular app might not be crappy, but I think my question still stands.

<comment><USER24> Is that necessarily something we want to prevent?

In the context of the early Web, should we have prevented any company from making their own website? Enforced some standard for how your website UX should work in the name of security and usability? Obviously not, as that diversity has led to more, better choices over time, and in the end the better UXs usually win out anyway.

Perhaps in a similar way, as Weber and other grill brands continue to sell into the IoT space, competition will drive them to differentiate in UX on their apps in addition to their hardware. Albeit at a slower pace given that their hook is their hardware unlike a digital product where the website is also usually the first impression.

<comment><USER25> > In the context of the early Web, should we have prevented any company from > making their own website?

Well, websites are now a bundle of arbitrary remote code execution called javascript, we didn't allow that, so by today's standards, ya we did.

> Enforced some standard for how your website UX should work in the name of > security and usability?

Well, html, so ya, again, ya we did. And we could again. A lot of the functionality of apps simply don't justify requiring you to run a program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some good replies:

"Comes with a built in firewall"

"*Default Braiser?"

"Still better than Internet Explorer!"

<comment><USER27> It's the hottest new browser on the market.

I'm here all week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why does Weber have their own browser? Or is this one of those embedded browsers in an app? If the latter, why do they need an embedded browser in their app?

<comment><USER29> Have you ever used the kind of application that would be produced by a barbeque grill manufacturer? I am not surprised it has an embedded web browser and this type of misconfiguration in the bundle.

<comment><USER28> No, I usually don't install apps for things like grills, refrigerators, trashcans or other domestic objects since I can't imagine they'd offer me anything obviously beneficial. I'm sure that's why I haven't enjoyed experiences like this.

<comment><USER30> This. Sure, we can question why these kinds of apps get bundled with "internet of things" devices, but it won't stop until we realise collectively we aren't in fact better off with things listening to every word, reacting to every move, recording everyone passing our house, etc.

<comment><USER31> Just makes me think of that Futurama episode where the robotic wash bucket switches bodies with Amy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am truly curious what happens if you hit yes

</comment><comment><USER33> I'll give you a heads up when my react project goes live. I can't help but feel like it's going to be useful to you in that role.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think the iGrill lets you see the readings on the temperature probes. Probably broadcasts it to your phone in the vicinity.

</comment><comment><USER35> [https://mightyapp.com/](https://mightyapp.com/)

I think it would be incredibly cool if this tweet especially was turned into reality:

[https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1253781213363363840](https://twitter.com/Suhail/status/1253781213363363840)

</comment><comment><USER36> Ever since Weber took it over the app is a piece of shit.

</comment><comment><USER37> LOL - Just be glad it wasn't a keyboard device!

</comment><comment><USER38> Holly shit, this is a friend of mine! Small world.

</comment><comment><USER39> Your BBQ has an android app?

</comment><comment><USER40> Url changed from [https://twitter.com/caseorganic/status/1259858946917097473](https://twitter.com/caseorganic/status/1259858946917097473), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER41> No way this isn't an ad.

<comment><USER42> By collecting scorn on HN? This would be a terrible way to market a product

<comment><USER41> Not really, engineers don't actually care about security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> ... and it's not the worst browser of the three.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is prime [https://twitter.com/internetofshit](https://twitter.com/internetofshit) material

<comment><USER45> Frankly so is 98% of my interaction with technology on a daily basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd be SOOO happy if my grill was _able_ to do this on iOS. Then I'd destroy the grill.

</comment><comment><USER47> I trust my BBQ more than any browser nowadays, so I would probably pick that.

<comment><USER48> If I have to choose between BBQ and the Web, I'll take BBQ.

<comment><USER49> At least this is a "Web"-er Grill. Makes sense.

<comment><USER48> Take your upvote and get out.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One size doesn't fit all - <AUTHOR> http://bijansabet.com/post/50813084559/one-size-doesnt-fit-all <comment> qu4z-2 I love the site design. (aside from some issues with the rendering of bold text)</comment>


Will java ever play in the browser again? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/globalmaxima/status/908089963752808448 <comment><AUTHOR> Cross posted here in the hope of getting an answer and starting a conversation about this.</comment>


Gameroom - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/gameroom/ <comment><USER2> You guys are not understanding this at all. Flash and Unity webplayer plugins are being blocked by browsers now. Flash still works for the most part, but Unity doesn't. Facebook is losing game players because of this, and new games are being built in Unity and not Flash, so it's harder for them to launch on Facebook.

This solves that problem by letting you compile your game for Facebook Gameroom straight from the Unity editor, and supports the Unity in app purchase plugin. So now that mobile game that you just built can easily launch on Facebook too with very little effort.

[https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2016/11/01/unity-e...](https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2016/11/01/unity- editor-beta/)

Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players. Until web assembly is live and has good adoption, this Facebook Gameroom thing is going to be the best bet for launching your Unity game on Facebook.

Big studios can afford to develop Flash versions of their Unity mobile games just for Facebook, but small studios can't. So this is also great for that, to level the playing field a bit.

Edit: I'm actually fairly excited about this. We have a bunch of Unity mobile games out there but have launched none of them on Facebook because of the bullshit with the webplayer plugin and how terrible the WebGL stuff is right now. Now we can finally launch on Facebook! This is awesome for small Unity studios. Very very awesome.

I can also say with good confidence that not many people commenting are the target market here. You already have steam installed and you play games through that? Probably not the target market. If you play a ton of freemium games on your phone and/or you used to play freemium Flash games on Facebook - _you_ are the demographic for Gameroom.

<comment><USER3> >Html5 / WebGL is not an option. It's super super slow and doesn't even work for half your players.

Any sources for this ? I know that WebGL adds overhead but for the simplistic kind of games (your run of the mill Unity games) you should have no trouble staying above 30 FPS, especially if you're smart about it and optimize to reduce draw calls. I would assume that most PCs out there have WebGL support by now (at least over 70%) considering how low the requirements are

>Until web assembly is live and has good adoption

I don't see how WebAssembly helps much - it primarily reduces the load time and download size with the binary encoding - but you can get similar levels of perf with ASM.JS and you still need to go trough same WebGL API as the DOM.

<comment> vertex-four I've never been able to play a Unity/Unreal game compiled to HTML5, on a fairly beefy laptop which generally runs desktop games alright. Pure HTML5 games tend to work for me, but there's no real "game engine" for them along the same lines as Unity/Unreal, which many current mobile game developers use.

<comment><USER4> >"but there's no real "game engine" for them along the same lines as Unity/Unreal"

[https://playcanvas.com/](https://playcanvas.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think Facebook ever grokked the concept of multiple personas - LinkedIn is for my work persona, Steam (and Origin, Twitch etc) is for my gaming persona, and on Twitter I can have different accounts for each.

As long as Facebook requires a single account with real identity, it will never be anything more than for my family & acquaintances persona. Most gamers I know feel the same... maybe we're in the minority, but maybe not. Be interesting to know how many Steam accounts are linked with Facebook as an indication of how this might play out (aside from the potential for exclusive titles etc).

<comment><USER6> I don't think you are a minority. the average gamer on a given popular game is usually going on about how fat your mom is in between rounds or on chat or whatever (it's worse than this, of course, i'm being nice).

Somehow, i don't think they are going to be up for tying that to their real identity.

There are two possibilities. This either massively improves the discourse on games like COD and the equivalent of every xbox live game ever. Or, people don't use it, because they don't want that. I"m going to go with the second.

Put another way: can you imagine the average gamer in COD wanting to tie their character "XXXAyeCarambeHarambeXXX420 to their real identity?

<comment><USER7> These rude 'average gamers' you speak of are the vocal minority in my experience... Most of us are normal people.

<comment><USER6> In what game, precisely? Seriously, these platforms are all known for it. I've pretty most major triple-a multiplayer titles in the past 15 years, and they are _all_ like this.

Do normal people exist? Sure. Are they the majority? Uh, no. :) It's not even a close contest.

This is even pretty easy to see. Pick 100 random top youtube videos of these games. Count the amount of racism, what have you going on in voice chat, team chat, whatever.

I say 100 just so one doesn't say "well, it's just these guys". It's everyone.

<comment><USER8> Do you actually play games or are you making things up from ill conceived stereotypes?

<comment><USER6> Yes. I play games enough that i have youtube videos of me and friends playing games that have millions of views, in fact.

Is this good enough for whatever bar you are trying to set?

(i'll note you didn't provide a retort to what i suggested, you instead just went to ad-hominem. So i'm going to assume you in fact, have no data that i'm wrong)

<comment><USER8> I've been almost exclusively playing Overwatch and Rocket League now for a good several months. The amount of offensive content isn't really any more than any other online community. It's rare. You get people who brag maybe, but no one has claimed to have sex with my mother in my entire time I have played that game. I've seen maybe a handful of racist terms dropped here and there, but those people are either chastised or ignored.

Idk, I just don't see what you see. What do you play?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How infuriatingly presumptious. The page has a single screenshot, a meaningless blurb, and an an "install now" button - as if I'm going to automatically download and install every single thing Facebook announces.

How about even a bare-minimum attempt at explaining what this is all about? (I mean, yes, I know how to google and figure it out, but should I have to?)

<comment><USER10> Is it just me or is the "Install Now" button broken? I'm on a Mac but I would've assumed I could download the .exe file.

<comment><USER11> It literally says "Available for Windows 7 and above" with an unmistakable Windows logo :).

<comment><USER12> Maybe they meant that it would still just download the EXE even if it was on a non-compatible system.

<comment><USER10> That's exactly what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They rebranded!

This was previously 'Facebook Games Arcade Beta' [1], then officially unnamed, but occasionally referred to as 'Facebook Arcade' [2].

At the time TechCruch wrote about this in August [3], it was less clear what their gaming portal ambitions were, and I lamented why they'd push this product with the Facebook brand so strongly instead of de-emphasizing it in favor of a different brand [4]. Since then, they had a partial change of heart -- the URL for this site is still through Facebook, but on the splash page, the only mention of Facebook is the [f] in the 'Gameroom' logo.

[1] [http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/facebook-games-arcade- beta...](http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/facebook-games-arcade-beta/639432) [2] [https://www.facebook.com/arcade](https://www.facebook.com/arcade) [3] [https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/facebook-desktop-game- plat...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/facebook-desktop-game-platform/) [4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12313908#12314672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12313908#12314672)

<comment><USER14> I disagree, I still very much feel the Facebook brand through this product.

The URL, plus the title of the tab, plus the recognizable FB logo next to the primary title of the product, and then it's still called the 'Facebook Gameroom' in the tab of the application. [http://imgur.com/a/XIZVX](http://imgur.com/a/XIZVX)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks like a glorified browser for games that are already playable on browser. It doesn't seem to be optimized for gaming at all (it even feels laggier). Is the purpose of it just to increase discoverability of Facebook games?

This is disappointing. When I read Facebook bought Gameroom.com a couple weeks ago, I expected something related to their VR platform. Not this.

<comment><USER16> It's even weirder that they've launched this platform completely separate from the Oculus platform. I understand the marketing reasons for this. Oculus has to not require a Facebook login, while Gameroom does, Oculus is VR only, etc. But you'd think maybe Gameroom could have Oculus support without too much blow back from Reddit?

Facebook seems to be following the time honored big tech company tradition of having different business units completely reinvent the wheel working on the same set of features in parallel for no good reason.

<comment><USER17> Who would want to tarnish the Oculus brand with Facebook's "social" slot games?

<comment><USER18> And besides, Oclulus have done enough to tarnish the brand themselves anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > From shooters to strategy, builders to bingo, find your game in Gameroom, > designed for PC gaming.

I just can't see this competing with Steam and Origin. It took years for Origin to get as much acceptance as it has in the PC market, and it started with AAA games people wanted - not "Oz: Broken Kingdom" and "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory Slots". Origin _still_ gets crap because it isn't Steam.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is this the PC equivalent of Messenger, designed to give Facebook total access to your system?

<comment><USER20> Facebook messanger gives Facebook total access to your computer?

<comment><USER21> I guess the parent comment means that messenger takes a lot of permissions on mobile.

<comment><USER20> The android version? I've only used the Windows 10 and iOS versions, so I am not aware of what permissions it asks for.

<comment><USER22> For Android (and for Windows Phone) it requires permissions to pretty much everything. It's pretty evil in that regard.

<comment><USER23> Every last permission it requests is associated with a reasonable functional requirement. It may never make use of the components it requests permission to (eg: sending and receiving SMS, which many users don't want to do with Messenger) and in newer Android versions, you can grant (or not) permissions on an ad hoc basis. Nothing 'evil' about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm really getting tired of Facebook et. al trying to insert themselves into every facet of my existence.

I'll keep using Steam and Gog. Steam is pretty bleh, but it does the job and I don't have to put up with Facebook.

<comment><USER25> Personally I think Steam is one of the best game platform (for a lack of a better word). It is fast, easy to use, nice sales/cheap in general, downloads are quick. While on the other side Playstation store is the exact oposite of what I just wrote.

<comment><USER24> > It is fast

my main complaint is that I find it pretty clunky and slow.

edit: The UI, not downloads. Browsing the store is usually not that pleasant, switching tabs, etc... Downloads usually cap out around 40MB/sec on my connection. Which is fine.

<comment><USER26> Some of it is highly dependant on your internet connection. But the games library seems to be snappy with 300 games. I find that updates can run extremely slow though, 1-2MB patch taking 5 minutes to download!

I remember when Steam WAS really horrible. The green client ran so poorly and was extremely slow at updating anything,

<comment><USER27> I'd argue steam has never stopped sucking, but it's always been reliable. I'll take reliability over usability any day when money's involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This feels and loads games like my moms Pogo games. Not a good start.

<comment><USER29> It's made for your mom. Sounds like a good start to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Origin, steam, battle net, uplay...

And now gameroom.

Is steam so profitable this makes sense? What possible motive does FB, one of the largest companies in the world, have to compete? The revenues should be paltry.

<comment><USER31> >>Is steam so profitable this makes sense?

We don't have the numbers obviously, but Steam must be so profitable that Valve is primarily a software distributor these days. Over the past six years, they've released only two titles (Portal 2 in 2011 and Dota 2 in 2013), and Half-Life 3, a game that is guaranteed to sell millions upon millions of copies, isn't even on the horizon.

<comment><USER32> I don't think they really care about earning money from their original games. They give out team fortress 2 for free, and has been actively maintaining it all these 9 years. They sell all value game as a bundle for like $20 last year.

On the other hand. Others like battle.net, origin, uplay are just other game companys trying not to give away 30% cut of their new hot game by selling at valve's platform. They will probably lose more from the 30% cut, than the potential customer they would lose selling only on their platform. I totally understand them, I just couldn't be bother to buy them (except blizzard)

Nevertheless, it's just PC games, not a big market. Nowhere compare to apple's iphone games or facebook's web games.

<comment><USER33> This is just called Free to Play. Look up how much money TF2 made on hats.

<comment><USER34> Yeap. I know many kids who rather spend their allowances and gifts on TF2 items than on new games. Hats, weapons, taunts, all in different combinations for maximum profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My problem is that I opened the website, read the description, and I still don't know what this does. Is it a launcher for my PC games? Why the hell would I want another one?

</comment><comment><USER36> Haha, finally I can have a desktop version of FarmVille.

Really tho, this is emblematic of the endemic problem with tech monoliths misunderstanding their audience. It somehow reminds me of a planning deck I once saw for supporting "party planning" mode where the actual use case was "porn mode" but the bizdev had to make it pc.

</comment><comment><USER37> Didn't Yahoo do this more than 10 years ago? I remember playing a lot of checkers as a lab monitor in college.

</comment><comment><USER38> Facebook could do something so powerful and fun by seamlessly combining their social platform and games... But this is what they've come up with?

<comment><USER39> This kinda happened in 2007... hence Words With Friends, FarmVille, etc. In retrospect it seems bizarre that random developers were able to publish updates with our own icons to the main Newsfeed.

<comment><USER38> I suppose I am speaking of a far more integrated portal for friends to play casual games together. More realtime than the newsfeed volley of 2007. If Facebook could create a really nice lobby platform and then have a handful of casual games, board games, card games etc. It would be very locked down and focused on friendly gaming, not the spamcity that was/is "Facebook games".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In case anyone else is curious, you can't actually play any games unless you have the Facebook Apps Platform enabled, and you can't play any games unless you share public profile info.

What I can't figure out is who these game developers are and what they do with that info (beyond displaying my name in multiplayer games). Can it be used to build remarketing lists, etc?

<comment><USER29> My game is there, and we don't have the Facebook stuff enabled so it doesn't ask for permission when it launches.

But of course, instead we ask you to make a custom account for our game so you can log in and out on different platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> * No feature list * No game list * Confusing as to what this has to do with "rooms" * Demands I download a web app!?!??!!?

Go home FB. You're drunk.

</comment><comment><USER42> PC only. is this 2004?

<comment><USER43> more specifically, Windows only.

<comment><USER44> So... 2001

<comment><USER45> or 2020, when mac is left abandoned in the trash heap in favor of iJackets

<comment><USER29> "Its says windows 7 or better", so I assumed all macOS versions are supported. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Windows only? Also no way to see what games exist without downloading?

<comment><USER47> Taking a client on windows approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I wonder if this has Unity webplayer & Flash runtimes built into it so it will work even though browsers block those plugins now.

Edit: yes! [https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2016/11/01/unity-e...](https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2016/11/01/unity- editor-beta/)

</comment><comment><USER48> > _It can tie users deeper into the Facebook identity layer, making it harder > for them to ditch the social network_

It's all about ecosystem lock-in for these tech giants. Their agenda-driven ways are not compatible with what gamers expect from a good platform.

It's why so much hate is directed towards services such as Origin and even worse, Uplay - which needs to run in addition to the Steam client. Or any service requiring its own "launcher". To its credit, Planet Coaster recently ditched its own launcher (Frontier Launchpad) and took the game to Steam. Frontier Launcher can now be uninstalled. Awesome. Planet Coaster is awesome btw.

Unless this "Gameroom" service allows sign-up via email address and avatar/handle/nickname identity, I'll be giving it a miss. And even if does offer third party authentication, I'll still likely give it a miss.

</comment><comment><USER49> A board game room is a better place to play.

</comment><comment><USER50> Seems like the comments here are slamming Facebook for this, but I think sometimes you have to take a step back and realize you might not be the target audience, and that products/services typically launch before getting the proposition spot on.

The landing page is certainly light on text, looks like it's got nothing to do with Oculus, and it's Windows-only, but perhaps Facebook are approaching this as a start-up would? I am certain Facebook will test variants of that landing page, get installs from other parts of their platform, and if going beyond an MVP, add Oculus stuff and other platforms.

I'm not about to install it either, but I bet they get tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of installs before the end of 2016. From a start-up perspective, I find this type of launch more fascinating because I can watch them iterate.

</comment><comment><USER51> Hacker news, where having a brand name means all products you released have to be fully featured, documented, well marketed, omni-platform and take full advantage of the "obvious" synergy with your existing products. Otherwise, it's clearly total rubbish.

Maybe ah… this was built and released by a small team who may or may not go on to iterate on the implementation pending collection and evaluation of usage data. Perhaps you would like to comment on this as if it's an early iteration? Maybe you could take the painful step of recognizing that the people who built it are people; individual human lives with limited time and resources and therefore attempted to strike a balance with respect to resources spent in an effort to release something, limited for sure but compelling.

<comment><USER52>
      > Maybe you could take the painful step of recognizing that the people who built it are people; individual human lives with limited time and resources [...]

Except it's made by Facebook (not a small team of indie developers pouring their heart and soul), and it's not new or even in demand, since we have steam, origin and gog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Is Facebook GameRoom the new Yahoo Games?

<comment><USER54> Exactly what I felt. As always - history repeats itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hey, what do you know. My new game Blight of the Immortals is already up and running in Gameroom. I didn't have to do anything!

(Previously had the game inside one of those Facebook canvases. )

</comment><comment><USER55> Why is this Windows-compatible only?

<comment><USER12> If it's targeting PC gamers, there's almost no reason to release for anything but Windows.

<comment><USER56> That's unfair I think. It's a perfectly fine idea that has been executed poorly multiple times.

<comment><USER12> It's not failed for a lack of stores on Linux. Both Steam and GOG sell Linux games, The gaming ecosystem on Linux just doesn't compare to that on Windows. Driver support isn't there, AAA/AA game support isn't there, backwards compatibility isn't there. It is much better in recent years than ever but I think this is a knock on effect from the general resurgence of PC gaming as a whole.

Trust me, I'd love it if this weren't the case but Linux gaming has been pushed as least as long as the Linux desktop, and I don't see either getting much more traction. It's a chicken and egg problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is not going to end nicely. Forget about the fact that Steam is pretty much insurmountable for a second, but this a space Facebook doesn't belong in.

<comment><USER29> They havn't put a lot of work into it I dont think. Its just a re-skin of Facebook itself in something like Electron.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is obviously a strong play by Facebook taken from the WeChat playbook. Furthermore, it helps connect the dots with their Oculus purchase. Believe it or not, any company... even Facebook, can brand themselves as a gaming/entertainment company over time. It was not too long ago that Facebook was the de-facto platform for games such as Farmville.

</comment><comment><USER59> Looks like they changed the name from facebook arcade. The help in my language refers to it as arcade.

</comment><comment><USER60> Great. A furthering of the attempted fragmentation of my gaming license management software.

For the same reason that I don't buy things on UPlay and Origin, I won't be buying things on Gameroom.

</comment><comment><USER61> I think PC gamer hate Facebook, or barely find it relevant? True?

<comment><USER12> I don't think the ratio of Facebook hater to Facebook user is significantly different among PC gamers than it is among any other technical crowd (HN, for example).

I am a PC gamer, and I use Facebook for some things and don't think they're inherently evil. I also don't think this product is meant for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Your aunt and mother will soon be chatting over messanger while they compete in a candy crush tournament, all with a browser on chromebooks. They're not here for you hardcore gamers. They will come for you later,once they have dominated... oh wait, Windows only? Haha haha, never mind.

</comment><comment><USER63> No thanks.

<comment><USER64> Agreed. I hope it won't end up with another platform I don't want to own/be part of thet gets exclusives. It probably will.

<comment><USER65> Considering the demographic, I bet they are trying to be steam for casual gamers, rather hoping to enter an entrenched market with a 400 lb gorilla of a leader.

Though maybe this is an oculus play.

<comment><USER64> Oh I didn't think of Oculus. That makes quite a bit of sense, actually. That would give them a chance to roll their own policy for ads in games, among other things. In combination with VR it will be interesting to see what will come out of that, despite not being part of the target audience myself.

<comment><USER48> The problem is that Oculus is not hugely popular and faces stiff competition from other VR hardware. It would be silly to "need Oculus" for a Facebook game. Wouldn't that be a turning point in gaming.. requiring Facebook hardware before you can enter a building in a VR world. I guess that's where it's headed, and would be very sad to have that fragmentation in VR.

<comment><USER64> It wouldn't surprise me if that is how it starts, before consolidating and becoming a more homogenous industry down the road. I agree, it would be sad. I can imagine the majority of people on HN would probably prefer open and less locked in alternatives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New AI Feature Helps Microsoft Word Users Improve Writing - <AUTHOR> https://digit.fyi/microsoft-word-ai-feature-ideas/ <comment><USER2> Writing is lowering the barrier entry one notch. I think this will result in large volumes of more trash books, look at the music today, a lot is autogenerated, autotuned, auto-this-n-that and theres so much garbage out there that it's made harder to find the decent one.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just think how this could have improved the writing of e.e. cummings or James Joyce.</comment>


Compiler Warnings - <AUTHOR> https://fastcompression.blogspot.com/2019/01/compiler-warnings.html <comment><USER2> > If a warning message is considered not fixable, or not desirable to fix, > it's preferable to remove the associated flag from the build chain.

I like to use diagnostic pragmas ([https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Diagnostic- Pragmas.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Diagnostic-Pragmas.html)) in the vanishingly rare cases where I can't fix the cause of a warning.

<comment><USER3> This unfortunately gets messy when you're targeting multiple compilers, and in some cases multiple versions of the same compiler.

<comment><USER2> At least clang has it covered: [https://clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersManual.html#pragma-gcc- diag...](https://clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersManual.html#pragma-gcc-diagnostic)

Don't know what the situation is on MS's and Intel's compilers.

<comment><USER4> The same functionality is available: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/cpp/preprocessor/warning?vi...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/cpp/preprocessor/warning?view=vs-2017)

<comment><USER5> And you can use _Pragma / __pragma to hide them inside (conditional) macros without #ifdefing up every call site.

There are still edge cases where you can't sanely scope them relating to when templates are evaluated, being unable to use the pragmas at arbitrary points of an expression, warnings that don't respect the warning flags properly, etc. - but it works most of the time.

That said, for warnings with high false positives and low value true positives, I'll just globally suppress the warning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some context: the author is Yann Collet, the principal author of zstd, lz4, and xxHash. In my experience he is an extremely talented and friendly engineer.

</comment><comment><USER7> > _-Wdeclaration-after-statement : this flag is useful for C90 compatibility._

This option is rather for developers who want to avoid declarations after statements in C dialects that support them.

If you want to enforce actual C90 compatibility use -ansi or -std=c90. Otherwise you just have partial compatibility which is actually incompatibility.

</comment><comment><USER8> All of this seems fine, except for the floating point but.

Floating point is completely deterministic, and has a very clearly defined set of behaviours.

<comment><USER9> I don't know much about the C standard, but the article states that implementation details are platform-specific. If that's the case, it's a very sensible suggestion.

Sure, if the same system runs the same operation twice, the two values will be equal. But what if you're comparing to a stored value generated on a different system?

<comment><USER10> It doesn't even need to be a different system. Different compilations of the same program on the same system can result in different floating point results (either because of internal high-precision floating point registers being utilized differently, or the compiler making algebraically valid re- arrangements that change the floating point result).

Additionally, many usages of == assume basic algebraic properties of numbers to hold.

It is possible to use equality with floats, but require far more care than is typically worth it.

<comment><USER8> If the optimization level changes the behaviour the compiler is broken. "Optimizing" by assuming commutivity or associativity of floating point is no less incorrect than optimizing by assuming string addition was commutativeand associative.

<comment><USER10> There is no requirement that optimization does not change behaviour. The only requirement is that the optimized behavior remains consistent with the standards. The point of the point on floating point equality is that the standards give enough room for variance that you should not use literal equality unless you know exactly what you are doing and have a good reason for doing it.

As an aside, if your concern is that the standards impose too much restrictions, another popular option is the ffast-math option.

We see this come up with strings fairly often in higher level languages where, sometimes, logical equal strings will happen to be equal because the runtime's interning system made them point to the same location, but there is no guarantee this would happen and the implementation is free to change it at any point. I believe I have also seen this behaviour come up with interning on some Integer wrapper types.

<comment><USER6> > I believe I have also seen this behaviour come up with interning on some > Integer wrapper types.

Python, for example:

      >>> 8 is 8
      True
      >>> 8**1000 is 8**1000
      False

<comment><USER8> Because python is broken in this respect -- JS engines do exactly the same object optimisations and get comparisons correct.

<comment><USER6> Meh. They're different languages with different expectations. "is" is distinct from "==" in both, and Python gets "==" right (obviously). Javascript doesn't really have any high ground here[0]. (In contrast, Python:)

      >>> [] == False
      False
      >>> object() == False
      False
      >>> "" == False
      False
      >>> {} == False
      False

They're just different.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8xNAc2ic8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8xNAc2ic8)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How SQLite Is Tested - <AUTHOR> https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

<comment><USER2> That pops up about once a year. See [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=How%20SQLite%20Is%20Tested&sor...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=How%20SQLite%20Is%20Tested&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story) for previous submissions.

An amazing thing about the fuzz tester American Fuzzy Lop is that even with all of the SQLite tests, it managed to find bugs. See [http://lcamtuf.blogspot.se/2015/04/finding-bugs-in-sqlite- ea...](http://lcamtuf.blogspot.se/2015/04/finding-bugs-in-sqlite-easy- way.html) , and HN comments at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9376391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9376391) .</comment>


Lawyers are trying to get HeavyInk.com to suppress a comic book - <AUTHOR> http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1/topics/1528

<comment><USER2> TJIC, just curious what others in the industry are getting, if anything. The whole thing is rather comical, no pun intended. I wonder if any other sites that have access to advanced solicitations are getting letters.</comment>


Scala Center - <AUTHOR> http://scala.epfl.ch/ <comment><USER2> Awesome -- I'm super glad to see there's going to be some leadership by the folks from the "Scala, a language for making nice software" contingent to balance out the echo chamber of the "Scala, where if you don't have a graduate degree you're going to feel like a moron" contingent.

Edit: To clarify what I mean -- [http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/06/10/an- introduction-t...](http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/06/10/an-introduction- to-cats.html) exemplifies, to me, what is wrong in Scala-land. If Abstract Algebra is prerequisite knowledge for tools I 'really should be using', something has gone horribly wrong.

<comment><USER3> That's... actually simple stuff. Have you had a look at Scalaz? Or Shapeless? The whole point of Cats is to solve the overkill of Scalaz, where you sometimes _do_ need algebra, by making abstractions simpler and safer to use. Remember, nobody is forcing you to use this wizardry in Scala. You can write it in a simple, matter-of-fact better Java style; or you can leverage the power of abstractions to create something advanced. You don't have to indulge in applicative functors and coproducts just because. Use them wisely, if at all!

<comment><USER2>
        That's... actually simple stuff.

If you have the prerequisite knowledge. Most people don't. And then somehow it always manages to lead to codebases that look like `a \~=>>> b`.

        nobody is forcing you to use this wizardry in Scala

Except that sorting out things in open source code absolutely does entail dealing with this. With JS, Python, or Java, I can dive into just about any open-source codebase, and at least get some clue as to what's going on. I think a large part of why Scala's open-source situation is pretty awful is that so many Scala codebases are a bunch of dudes waving their [censored]s around, using libraries that consist of inscrutable squiggles and meaningless terms, just to demonstrate how smart they are.

        You can write it in a simple, matter-of-fact better Java style; or you can leverage the power of abstractions to create something advanced.

This is a false dichotomy. When I look at code written by Martin Odersky, I don't see people trying to brag about their grad degrees through their code. And the reason this project makes me so happy is that it really feels like "the good people" of Scala reclaiming the community from the LambdaBros.

<comment><USER4> If it's something a sophomore with no background beyond calculus can handle, it is simple stuff. It's ridiculous that treating software engineers as though they have a bachelor's degree in STEM makes you a "LambdaBro."

<comment><USER2> It's disingenuous to say that this is included in a "bachelor's degree in STEM" \-- it's part of a specific course of study.

Part of the reason this issue pisses me off so much is that I have a degree from one of the top CS programs in the world. I was definitely more of a theory than a systems person. And yet it still feels like a pile of unnecessary ego-stroking gibberish.

I feel comfortable saying most people who make software are less-experienced in this area than I am. When I run into this, I can at least say: "This is bullshit", and not feel the imposter syndrome of "It's just me -- I'm not smart enough for this" that I imagine most people feel.

Beyond that, functional programming is, by and large, easier than imperative programming. I love writing Scala -- It's honest about side effects, honest about concurrency, and has one of the better type checkers around. And I'm sick of seeing people try to "fence off the riffraff" by raising the barrier of entry to the Scala community.

<comment><USER5>
      Beyond that, functional programming is, by and large, easier than imperative programming.

You say this but dislike even a bit of abstract algebra? I see a conflict here; anyone that likes FP, moreso, typed FP, should be familiar with simple concepts like monoids, functors, and monads. Honestly, I don't understand how someone can write in a functional language and _not_ know these concepts.... they're literally Haskell 101. That doesn't even scratch the surface of what FP can do...

<comment><USER2> To me, functional programming's advantage comes from avoiding reasoning about state. Everything else is gravy.

Beyond that, it's very easy to go down a rabbit hole of terminology. Javascript programmers write functors all the time, but I don't know if I've ever seen the word "functor" written in a JS context by anyone other than raganwald. They're just functions, and the fact that they return functions is damn useful.

<comment><USER5> Yup I've never seen functors mentioned in anything JS-related. I bet there's more Haskellers writing Scala than JavaScript though.

Being pedantic: functors don't return functions, functors let you map over structures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the blog post about it: [http://www.scala- lang.org/blog/2016/03/14/announcing-the-sca...](http://www.scala- lang.org/blog/2016/03/14/announcing-the-scala-center.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> What with the recent TypeSafe news, this is quite reassuring. I love Scala and would have been devastated if it ended up going into financial backing limbo.

<comment><USER8> Typesafe/Lightbend continues to back Scala as it always did, no change there. Scala Center is a great additional move to get additional people / resources to work on Scala :-) So while "the recent typesafe news" are nothing to worry about, the scala center news are very awesome for the entire Scala community :-) (disclaimer: Akka team here)

<comment><USER7> Great to hear! I have yet to use Akka seriously, but I'm planning to soon. Keep up the awesome work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> ok, this is a sincere question

i've read a lot of negative opinions on scala, that it's becoming too big and too complex

and honestly, i was kinda sorta, waiting for it to fail or fall out of favor

this doesnt seem to be happening, on the contrary, scala seem to be getting more popular, compared to language which i favored (like clojure or f#)

are the negative opinions wrong, overblown, or is scala really heading for failure, what am i missing, what did i see wrong

<comment><USER10> The negative opinions were overblown. A lot of them were complaining that something that's impossible in other languages is hard or difficult to learn in Scala, or real but superficial problems. The language has plenty of warts and there are some bad libraries and tools out there, but all these things are superficial and transitory; the core is sound and I expect all successful future languages to have a very similar design.

To give an equally sincere response: dynamic languages are dead, and languages without higher-kinded types are dying - they're too useful to do without, and Scala shows they're practical. We're still discovering more things you can do with Scala.

I think the language we'll be using in ten or twenty years' time won't be Scala - or it will be a Scala that's changed unrecognizably from the Scala we know today. But I think that whatever language it is will have a strong type system with type inference and higher kinds and some kind of typeclass functionality and probably also traditional-OO subtyping (failing that at least Go-style delegation), will allow method calls without brackets and concise lambdas with something like "_", will have a culture of not using C libraries via FFI, and will be strictly evaluated. If you wrote a clean new version of Scala today there's a lot you'd leave out (you might end up with something that looked rather like Ceylon), but I think those things are here for good. Maybe it'll be Idris, maybe something else.

<comment><USER11>
        the core is sound

I agree completely. It might be interesting to spell out what that this core is: it is the _successful_ marriage of ML-style functional languages with class-based OO.

The core idea of ML is this: strongly typed with parametric polymorphism and full sum and product types, type-inference, first-class functions, first-class state, (almost) first-class modules. Exceptions as first-class non-local control mechanism.

The key innovation Scala have over its predecessors Ocaml and F# which also attempted this merger is that Scala recovers ML-style functional programming as a special case of OO programming, while the predecessors when the other way, which didn't work so well.

<comment><USER12> Much of Scalas complexity comes from trying to encode ML features using subtyping and class-based OO. So I think the jury is still out on whether Scala represents a successful marriage. There are other ways to add first- class modules (objects) to ML, the most interesting is probably the new "1ML" paper. Personally I would rather have OOP encoded in a functional language and not the other way around. This would avoid many of Scala's warts such as a nominal core (e.g. Function1-22), methods not first-class, pattern matches that runtime cast etc.

<comment><USER11> Depends on the criteria of success. Maybe OO and typed FP can be merged successfully in more than one way.

I agree that that 1ML is interesting. Some of the warts come from JVM/Java compatibility. In what sense would you argue that OOP _can_ be successfully encoded on top of a typed lambda-calculus? Finally, the relative simplicity of DOT [1] indicates that Scala's core is not that complicated.

[1] N. Amin et al., The Essence of Dependent Object Types. [http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/215280/files/paper.pdf](http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/215280/files/paper.pdf)

<comment><USER12> The criteria of success for me is simplicity and generality. The part of OOP I am interested in is first-class modules, being able to package up types and functions acting on those types into records. Dotty is not the core of the current version of Scala. It does look interesting, but personally I would prefer an approach that does not use subtyping. My point is only that Scala does not represent the last word in FP+OOP.

<comment><USER13> Interestingly though, Scala's model is basically Javascript, with a sound type system. As much as classes have been discredited as _the_ fundamental structure of a system's architecture, they still prove their usefulness in Java and all the dynamic languages, and now a new crop of languages, like Swift, Rust, and Kotlin. So, I'd suggest that the Scala route may well be the path forward, especially post-DOT.

<comment><USER10> Huh? Scala has nothing remotely resembling Javascript's weird prototype thing.

<comment><USER13> True, there's nothing in Scala that's like the dynamic inheritance/delegation of JS. But I'd say that in practice, people use Javascript's prototype functionality to implement static class- or mixin-based OOP.

<comment><USER10> Well sure, but I'd say Scala's model is more similar to any of Java, Python, Ruby or C++ than it is to Javascript. So I don't see that it's a "Javascript model".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fallen in love with Scala in the last 3 months. Happy to see more support.

<comment><USER15> May I ask which language are you mainly using other than scala?

<comment><USER14> Other than Scala I write Node.js and Python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Spectacular news! Really excited to see the Coursera MOOCs being offered again as well.

<comment><USER17> I'm curious if users can get free certificates like in the past, or if they will have to pay for them.

<comment><USER16> You'll get a completion certificate for free. What you won't get is an accredited certificate that you can show off on LinkedIn, to potential employers/investors etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great news! Nevertheless, some people will still manage to spin this announcement into some proof that Scala is dying!!! (this time for real!)

<comment><USER19> One of the few languages that, when dying, appears to increase in use.

<comment><USER20> The thing is that most of the things that people don't like with scala will actually disappear without doing anything.

One of the greatest problem is compilation time, however since computers get better this will be reduced. And still the team is working to bring more Scala <-> Java interop and a newer compiler which will bring compilation times down, too.

<comment><USER21> Single thread performance is not getting better anymore. Addition of new cores does not cut compilation time (at least for Scala compiler).

<comment><USER18> See also

        Improved incremental compilation of #scala in the
        making yields 10-40x compilation speedups:
        https://github.com/sbt/sbt/issues/1104#issuecomment-188529825

and

        After turning on the java8 backend in Scala, our
        bytecode size decreased by 50% and compile times
        decreased by 75%. Amazeballs!

by some Scala devs.

<comment><USER20> Actually after I truned java8 backend on I got a reduced compile time. (after changing code). Actually we use Scala as a Improved Java, so we likely don't use so much "heavy" things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been working with scala for the last 2 months and I like it. The things i don't love are: the long compile times (lots of time wasted here), the lack of a community accepted/official coding practices - if sbt by default would run scalastyle on packaging/testing, that might help on enforcing a consistent set of good common practices on community code.

<comment><USER23> I'm following this project closely: [http://olafurpg.github.io/scalafmt/](http://olafurpg.github.io/scalafmt/)

It's just been released, but I like the idea of adopting a tool in the likes of gofmt. Coding style discussions are such a bike-shedding magnet, it's good if you can just not think about it (and are able to follow it anyway, regardless of IDE).

<comment><USER24> I'm the author of scalafmt, happy to hear there's interest in the project! Scala has a very rich syntax. I remember first coding in Scala being unsure where to put newlines or how far to indent. My hope is to make that problem go away.

Scalafmt is indeed new, just released 0.1.0 last week. However, it's already become useful for me with the IntelliJ plugin. Scalafmt is practically my full-time job for 2 more months so you can expect it to get more mature soon. Feature requests and bug reports are very welcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sounds good, have tried scala before, that was great experience.

</comment><comment><USER20> What would be also great, would be a way to announce Scala Jobs regionally. Actually we are still looking for a good way to find job canidates, but since we are a small company it's really hard to find people especially scala developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would guess that your problem is more geographical. Mildly amusing anecdote - a friend of mine went to an interview for a dev position (without doing proper due diligence) at a company just outside of London, but the location was quite isolated - he ended up on a farm complex where this company had their office. He said he could hear actual farm animal noises next door during the interview and these people were desperate to offer him the job, but for obvious reasons he declined.

<comment><USER26> What are the obvious reasons? Is a farm a disreputable place to work in the UK? Mostly it's confusing, not concerning. I would imagine a farm is harder to keep afloat than a startup.

<comment><USER27> If I understood correctly, the company wasn't a farm, they just had their office there, and the interviewee found that environment unpleasant.

<comment><USER26> Ahh, makes sense.

Many engineers I know would love to work near a farm, heck I'd even consider that a perk of the job. "Sick of twitter? Go look at some livestock."

This is subjective, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm a happy Haskeller with no JVM in my environment. Should I learn Scala?

<comment><USER11> I think you will find Scala relatively easy to learn since most Haskell concepts have Scala equivalents.

If you want something much more Haskell-like on the JVM, check out Frege [https://github.com/Frege/frege](https://github.com/Frege/frege)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Provide scaffolding to help the community develop, publish, find, and > evaluate Scala libraries.

This sounds little odd. Has there similar efforts for other languages?

<comment><USER30> Some other languages have a central repository where everyone publishes their packages like [https://hackage.haskell.org/](https://hackage.haskell.org/), [https://crates.io/](https://crates.io/) or the venerable [http://www.cpan.org/](http://www.cpan.org/). Scala has no such things: people publish to various repositories like [http://bintray.com/](http://bintray.com/) or [https://oss.sonatype.org/](https://oss.sonatype.org/), so a central place to get information about existing libraries would be very useful.

<comment><USER10> Doesn't everything go into maven central? I can't remember ever not finding a library there.

<comment><USER31> That doesn't seem to cover the "develop" and "evaluate" parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Awesome news! Great initiative EPFL! :)</comment>


Hugo Barra is joining Facebook to lead virtual reality - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10103456684228891&set=a.529237706231.2034669.4&type=3&theater <comment><USER4> It's interesting that he's joining Facebook, not Oculus. Oculus is just a "team" now.

<comment><USER5> So what if they're "just" a team now?

<comment><USER6> Working on progressing VR is far more interesting than working on progressing Facebook (via VR).

And before anyone points out Facebook is interesting to work on because of the sheer size of the userbase the same argument could be said for working on McDonalds, Pepsi or any other low grade mass consumption product that's bad for you.

<comment><USER7> _> low grade mass consumption product that's bad for you_

Millions of people use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family. It's the platform that has powered _trillions_ of meaningful social connections over the years. It's not junk food or sugar water.

<comment><USER8> Yes it is! It replaced hundreds of billios of meaningful social connections with trillions of shallow connections that most people would be better off keeping at arms length. Not that there's anything wrong with staying in touch with your highschool buddies, but seriously, do you need to laugh at every joke and fawn at every selfie they post?

There's a good reason why friendships would either grow stronger or grow appart over the years. It is called Dumbar Number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> " I look forward to building the future of immersive technology with Mark Zuckerberg, Brendan Trexler Iribe, Mike Schroepfer, and the visionaries in the Oculus team". Ouch!

<comment><USER10> I wouldn't take Palmer for a guy that's hurt by this. He became richer than his wildest dreams and doesn't have to take shit from anybody.

He's probably too busy trying to develop a healthy lifestyle that helps him keep the friends he wants to care for some corporate politics like this to register. Let them take the attention, he'll find another venue for his engineering itches.

<comment><USER11> > ...he'll find another venue for his engineering itches.

Will he?

I followed Palmer for a couple of years (on MTSB3D forums) before the kickstarter; it was his passion and dedication for hacking old/vintage HMDs that got me interested, and ultimately led me to supporting the KS.

He showed the kind of interest and dedication in DIY VR that I hadn't seen since the mid-1990s (and I only knew of one other individual at that time with the same kind of interest - DIY VR, heck VR in general outside of a few niche areas - was really dead).

DIY VR -was- his "engineering itch".

Sure - he got rich beyond his wildest dreams, but I don't think (or maybe I don't want to believe?) that was his endgame. From what I could see then, the endgame was to make VR something again - to make it "take off", to get it back to where it was (the hype?) in the 1990s. I'm not even sure if he wanted it commercialized - just more popular, and more people hacking on it. I think - or want to believe, maybe - that had the only thing that came out of the KS had been the DK1, that Palmer would be happy to have done only that. I don't think he ever intended it to become what it has, but I don't know him - <USER2> he did. From my perspective, which is skewed for a number of reasons (most of all because I don't know him personally), he never intended for it to explode like it has.

Personally, it surprised me greatly that it did. What I couldn't understand then (nor even now) is why there was an apparent pent-up demand for an HMD for the PC and gaming, yet virtually no one (outside of Palmer and one or two others) was hacking on HMDs? In the 1990s, there was a fairly vibrant DIY VR culture - a few well known books, an unfortunately short-lived magazine (PCVR) - but there were more than a handful of people hacking their own systems together, sharing stuff on the nascent internet and BBS's.

...then, it died off. But apparently there was still demand for it, but it seemed like nobody wanted to DIY their own systems, until after the Rift was announced. It isn't like there wasn't any information on the internet to get people started, plus the whole "maker movement" was strong. The software was all available to play with (game engines, 3d tools, etc). Yet - there wasn't any DIY movement. Until the Rift.

Strangely, though, the DIY VR movement is still fairly small; bigger than it was in 2012 and before, certainly - but it still seems like a lot of people don't want to DIY their own VR rig - most seems to only want to be consumers of the devices, not hackers/innovators - which is a bit strange to me.

Total tangent there - my apologies. As far as Palmer is concerned - well, I hope he continues with hacking VR - but I worry that the FB acquisition and the Oculus brand may dash that. I worry that he may have inadvertently killed the one thing he cared most about - hacking VR as his personal hobby - <USER3> making it big. I hope not, but I do wonder.

I'm not Palmer, but I know if I had the stark choice of choosing between being super-wealthy vs being able to freely work on and happily pursue my hobbies, I think I would ultimately kick myself if I chose the former.

<comment><USER10> If he can keep his emotions under control, he could just go on working on DIY HMDs, just having kicked off a whole chain of economy of scale improvements while having the ressources to buy what ever he desires to make it better. He doesn't have to think about BOM for his personal headset. 2 4K Screens? Sure, just get the ones from Sony's Xperia 5 Premium. Display Drivers?

He can pay for the right chips & people...

I just wonder where his non-compete clause starts and ends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Smart hire - Barra is a great hardware evangelist, quite technical and was a great personality for Xiaomi that wasn't a typical "technical" person so could appeal to the masses. Oculus/FB really needs that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone provide some context as to who this is and why it's newsworthy?

<comment><USER14> Hugo Barra was previously a VP of product development in Google's Android division. He moved to Xiaomi a few years ago, and oversaw their international expansion. That was seen as a pretty big move, since it was probably the most significant poaching of a non-Chinese executive from US tech company by a Chinese tech company.

His resignation from Xiaomi was announced a few days ago - presumably in order to move to this role.

<comment><USER13> I see, so is there something significant about this move to Facebook? Or is it just more about the fact that he left Xiaomi?

<comment><USER15> Both. It's not often that a former VP of Google ends up at Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sooo... I'm guessing this fits into what Brendan Iribe was talking about in his recent blog post, when he mentioned that the company wanted to "accelerate [their] roadmap"? From what others have mentioned it sounds like Hugo Barra is good at rapidly growing software and hardware platforms. That could potentially work well for Oculus and VR as a whole.

Hopefully for us ground-level users it means even more resources put into content development. Possibly new hardware revisions releasing earlier than had previously been planned as well?

I must admit I'm also hoping that any knowledge he has of the Chinese manufacturing industry contributes to smoother supply chains for Oculus products. No more parts shortages or shipping delays, pretty please. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> So much for "hard work was affecting my health".

<comment><USER18> More like Beijing air pollution was affecting his health. That was my reason as well, moving from Microsoft in Beijing to YC Research in LA.

<comment><USER19> And Chinese idiosyncrasies, and Chinese food, and the emotional stress of being far from family and friends

(I'm not saying the pollution is not a factor, but it's probably not the main one)

<comment><USER20> What's wrong with Chinese food?

<comment><USER13> It's not the food he grew up with? Most immigrants want the food they are used to from home when it comes to day-to-day eating/dining.

<comment><USER18> Not many foreigners have problems with Chinese food (the opposite isn't true, Chinese don't like western food as much). Beijing also does well on western- style for when you want it. Cooking is more annoying, you have to be extra careful when grocery shopping due to food quality issues, but variety isn't much of a problem (well, no western style sausage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That was quick. He just left Xiaomi several days ago. Good luck to Hugo.

<comment><USER22> Most probably he had already signed with Facebook by the time he left Xiaomi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Hugo+barra](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Hugo+barra)

<comment><USER13> I'm on this site a lot and don't know who this is. It would help if someone actually provided context in a comment so readers can understand why this made it to the front page.

Your response to Google it is juvenile and doesn't add to the discussion.

<comment><USER24> I'm on this site a lot, I know who it is and I understand why it made to the front page. It would help everyone (you included) if you try Google first whenever someone (or something) you don't know is mentioned in a discussion. Even if you search for previous mentions of Hugo Barra on Hacker News, you'd learn that stories mentioning his leaving Xiaomi have made the frontpage in the last few days [1]. As a person who is on this site a lot, I'm surprised that you aren't familiar with him.

Let's not even get into what is (or isn't) juvenile at this point.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13461387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13461387)

<comment><USER13> A LMGTFY link is juvenile, full stop. It's not appropriate in any response. Condescension (which is what links to that site are) does not make a substantive comment.

If you Google his name, you get an article that he was a VP at Google. Put bluntly, who cares if a VP at Google and VP at Xiami moved to Facebook? Explain why this is relevant and not the equivalent of the magazines in grocery stores discussion who the latest celebrities are sleeping with.

<comment><USER25> > Condescension (which is what links to that site are) does not make a > substantive comment.

Neither does asking a question which is trivially answered by Googling. Why are you reserving your rage for the person trying to support community norms, and not for the person helplessly demanding that others explain to him what he could trivially discover on his own?

> A LMGTFY link is juvenile, full stop. It's not appropriate in any response.

It makes an important point that someone has asked a question beneath the threshold of questions which contribute positively to the community, and as such I'm happy that it exists, and happy when it's used. lmgtfy links are an act of community self-regulation, whether you think they're "douchey" or not, I'd rather have those links than your pointless screeds in opposition to them.

If you must rage, rage against the person whose time is apparently so much more valuable than the other members of this site that he demands his information be spoonfed to him by humans. Rage against the question "Can someone provide some context as to who this is and why it's newsworthy?" when substituted for the search query "who is hugo barra", which provides more information faster.

<comment><USER13> >Neither does asking a question which is trivially answered by Googling.

see my response to owebmaster.

>Why are you reserving your rage for the person trying to support community norms

It is not a community norm to condescend with instructions on how to use Google. The downvotes should make that clear.

>when substituted for the search query "who is hugo barra"

see my response to owebmaster.

I'm sorry if you have some personal connection with the guy or there was a cult of personality thing going with him at your job, but a VP of a company moving to a different company just isn't really normally newsworthy. That's why I asked in case I missed something about him changing the entire Facebook VR direction or something.

<comment><USER25> > It is not a community norm to condescend with instructions on how to use > Google. The downvotes should make that clear.

It isn't now, and that's sad. But there was a time when this community valued straightforward, direct communication. If that time has passed, it's a loss for the community, and for you, whether you understand that or not.

<comment><USER26> There used to be a thing on usenet, when usenet was still a thing, of people saying "RTFM" or "RTFF" (the last "F" being FAQ). You still see it a bit on the web, but not nearly as much. Of course it was rude and condescending and incredibly unfriendly to newbies, and many people objected to it, but there were always some people who insisted on doing it, and defending it, because it was "straightforward, direct communication" (to use your phrase). In real life, of course, you'd never be so rude to someone - not a friend, not a stranger, not a customer, not a colleague - but for some reason basic politeness gets a bit muddled up on the Internet sometimes.

<comment><USER25> > There used to be a thing on usenet, when usenet was still a thing, of people > saying "RTFM" or "RTFF" (the last "F" being FAQ).

I know. And two decades ago, in my youthful inexperience, I was objecting against it myself ([https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.hp48/f_mPLWMO7Bo/nI...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.hp48/f_mPLWMO7Bo/nI- OLxjUOLYJ)).

> You still see it a bit on the web, but not nearly as much. Of course it was > rude and condescending and incredibly unfriendly to newbies

And it's also the reason I got to where I am today. It was only by being told directly to "RTFM" that I learned how to _teach myself_ the things I needed to know, instead of relying on others to spoonfeed me information. I'm not defending it because it's something I _want_ to do--I'm actually a very nice person--I'm defending it because it's something that _benefits_ both the recipient _and_ the community.

> you'd never be so rude to someone - not a friend, not a stranger, not a > customer, not a colleague - but for some reason basic politeness gets a bit > muddled up on the Internet sometimes.

My coworkers ask me frequently, "Does X do Y?" and I explain to them, "The easiest way to answer that question is to read the code, it's here." Or they ask me how something works and I say, "I don't know, but here's where I'd look to get that information." LMGTFY links are the online equivalent of those replies.

Invariably I've found that the people who object to LMGTFY links or "RTFM" responses or "Look it up" replies or "Try it and see" answers are fundamentally ruder than the ones who give those replies, because they feel entitled to a specific kind of remedial assistance and are too lazy to do the requisite research themselves. I know that's a broad net to cast, and I know that it catches my younger self far more often than I'd like to admit, but it's been my experience and I have no data to contradict it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "É nóis mano !"</comment>