Why Your Excellent Conference Talk Was Rejected - <AUTHOR> https://www.promptworks.com/blog/why-your-excellent-talk-was-rejected <comment><USER2> A lot of the comments here are complaining about the last point in the article (the n00b), asking how on earth you get started if you have to have presented before in order to present. The article is telling you exactly how to do that:

\- Speak at local user group meetings. Most of my local meet ups are constantly calling for speakers, and it's an excellent way to get practice at presenting in a lower stress environment. It's not always small audiences either, I've seen and given talks with 50 or more attendees at a local meet up. As for getting accepted, organizers are always in need of talks, and organizers are not getting 6 submissions per month, they're usually lucky if they can fill every month with a talk, so you're much more likely to be accepted.

\- Maintain a blog. Writing articles on your blog is practice for writing a talk, and gives you a steady stream of ideas that can be turned into a presentation fairly easily.

I'm going to add a couple more:

\- Give a lightning talk at conferences you attend. As well as giving you practice, you are also visible to all the attendees, including people who will be selecting talks at future conferences you submit to.

\- Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a better chance of being accepted.

These steps aren't going to make it so that you're immediately accepted at large conferences, but they give you the start the article is claiming you need. And finally, if you're rejected, don't give up. Conferences do take chances on new speakers (although probably not all new speakers who submit a talk), and being rejected doesn't mean your talk is bad, or that your skills are bad, just that you didn't get it this time.

<comment><USER3> > Submit to smaller, more focused or more local conferences. You can't expect > to be accepted at huge popular conferences speaking in front of hundreds of > people on your first try. Submitting to more focused conferences gives you a > better chance of being accepted.

And also it lets you make a fool of yourself with a smaller audience.

Very few people are good at something the first time they try it. Why do you imagine you're a great presenter the first time out? As with anything else, make your mistakes in small domains.

<comment><USER4> If you are interested in public speaking, but don't have too much practice in speaking, I highly recommend checking out a local open mic and trying out some stand up.

Easier to look a fool telling jokes than look a fool making a valid point.

edit: or Toastmasters

<comment><USER5> +1 for Toastmasters.

Among other things, Toastmasters will cure you of what ails many accomplished speakers. That is, the verbal or non-verbal tic (umm, ahh, so, like, wild gestures, hands in pocket).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a possible ugly 5th heartbreaker: "we love your topic and experience but you look too old and unhip for our hip frontend conference".

I've been rejected for conferences where every speaker that was accepted looked well under 30. At the least, no one had grey hair.

It's frustrating to me because the very same conferences are highly vocal about seeking diversity, and do usually end up with some gender diversity (although non-Asian/non-White speakers are almost always poorly represented). But there's no age diversity: everyone on stage is between 20-30, or else goes to a plastic surgeon and dresses to look that age.

<comment><USER7> Totally agree. I've noticed something else similarly disturbing. The people who advocate the loudest for demographic diversity aren't really interested in diversity of ideas. They want to see men and women of all shapes and colors saying similar things. If you want thought provoking talks, diversity of ideas is far more important than having a group of speakers that looks like captain planet and the planeteers.

I want to see talks where presentors have radically different approaches to problems. I want to see Zed Shaw and Douglas Crockford have a passionate explitive laden argument about the merits of Ruby vs server side JS only to see Ken Thompson or Rob Pike blow their minds with a talk about go. So what if they all happen to be white guys. What matters is they have interesting things to say and vastly different perspectives coming from long careers in the industry honing their craft.

<comment><USER8> I don't see these two goals as being mutually exclusive. Even if they are, it'd be good to aim for a balance, rather than just choosing one entirely over the other. They're both good goals for a conference.

<comment><USER7> Many people don't agree with me and that's OK. I literally couldn't care less about demographic checkboxes when listening to a talk about technology. The number one priority should be having thought provoking, relevant, and high impact talks about technology at a technology conference. Seeing these talks and engaging in conversations about the technology should be the number one priority for attendees.

Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers. If someone doesn't want to go to a conference on concurrency and distributed algorithms because a demographic de-jour isn't speaking then that person isn't passionate about the subject of the conference and the conference is better off without them there.

That may seem harsh but I'm just throwing my opinion out there for the sake of diversity of ideas ;)

<comment><USER9> _I literally couldn 't care less about demographic checkboxes_

Then you are not the audience those "demographic checkboxes" are there for. (Neither am I.)

I'm a white male engineer, and I've never had the experience of going to a tech conference and wondering whether I'm supposed to be there because I don't see anyone else who looks like me. That experience is common for engineers who are women, POC, or in various other demographics.

For all I know you might be a member of one of those demographics, but if you "couldn't care less" then I assume you haven't had that experience either. That doesn't affect your right to an opinion, but it does mean you are not fully considering at least one reason that demographic diversity is important.

 _Ideas are what matter to hackers and engineers._

I haven't met a single hacker or engineer who wasn't also a _person_ , and other things that matter to _people_ include feeling welcome and accepted.

If you're accustomed to feeling welcome and accepted at technical conferences, it's easy to say that feeling welcome and accepted doesn't matter to you at such conferences. If most conferences _didn 't_ make you feel that way, it might matter to you more to find one that did.

One way to make people feel welcome and accepted is to reduce the extent to which they feel like the "odd one out", in as many senses as possible.

As autarch points out above, this isn't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that _replaced_ quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have _more than one_ criterion to optimise for. Multi-objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal.

<comment><USER10> A warm, diverse, welcoming, and accepting technical conference that contains no interesting technical content is less a technical conference and more a purely social gathering. There's really nothing wrong with that, but at that point it's no longer meaningfully a technical conference.

Perhaps there's a desirable balance to be struck here.

<comment><USER9> That was the point I attempted to convey with my last paragraph:

 _this isn 't an argument for accepting any old talk so long as it fills some demographic quota. It would be a strange conference that replaced quality of ideas with demographic diversity in their talk selection criteria. Rather, it just means conferences have more than one criterion to optimise for. Multi- objective optimisation is complicated and involves tradeoffs, but "all or nothing" is unlikely to be optimal._

Hopefully we can agree that a conference which had interesting technical content _and_ was welcoming to a broad range of people would be better than a conference that had only one or the other.

<comment><USER7> I think we mostly agree. The difference is I believe what makes people comfortable at a technology conference isnt superficial hangups about race and gender, it's the ability to talk shop about that technology and have meaningful discussions surrounding that topic.

The jist of my opinion is this: The subject technology should always be the highest priority at a technology conference.

<comment><USER11> > The difference is I believe what makes people comfortable at a technology > conference isnt superficial hangups about race and gender

If you consider the feeling of being, say, the only person of color at a conference to be a "superficial hangup", then perhaps your beliefs about what makes people comfortable have not been closely examined. It sounds like a statement about what makes _you_ comfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems like a lot of people don't understand the noob part. Let me explain:

Imagine you pay a lot of money to attend a conference. And I'm not even talking about flight+food+hotel as some conferences' cover are pretty high (blackhat). Now you go in a talk and discover that the speaker is just horrible. The topic might be interesting but you get nothing out of it because the speaker is just bad.

Now this is a problem because as an attendant you're no happy, and this is the responsibility of the judges of the CFP. They need to work to protect you from these kind of talks.

I'd much tolerate beginners at smaller conferences, or meetups. This is where you can get experience before going to a bigger one. A one that might even give you money and pay for your travel+accommodation.

By the way, I think most of you people have no idea how bad talks can be. In more academic conferences, foreign speakers make a big chunk of the talks and some of them can't speak english at all. It's painful for everyone to sit through that kind of talk. (Note that I'm a foreigner myself, just saying that some of us are EXTREMELY BAD AT ENGLISH (not going to point fingers).)

<comment><USER13> Many attendees don't care, the trip is paid for by the company. It is a nice trip to an attractive location (sunny Florida in winter, etc).

At most conferences I attended, there were scores of presenters who, frankly, sucked, or the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service pitch.

<comment><USER12> > Many attendees don't care, the trip is paid for by the company

And many still care even though their company pays for them.

> the supposedly "technical" topic turned out to be unabashed product/service > pitch.

That's another issue though, bad content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Honestly, applying to speak at industry conferences is a very frustrating experience. I have given lots of talks at my university, I have spoken at local meetups, and at one local free conference where the organizers knew me. Students and other attendees at my talks often tell me that my talks are good. However, trying to break into the "conference" circuit has been difficult as I have never gotten any direct feedback from anywhere I have submitted to and often wonder if they read my proposal at all. They sometimes even forget to inform you that your talk has not been accepted! It is a bit ridiculous.

In contrast, while I don't want to paint a rosy picture of academic conferences, you always get detailed feedback on your paper/talk that you submit. It may be biased, it may be frustrating, but at least you can tell that someone at least looked at your paper/talk and gave you some feedback. Industry conferences never do this.

</comment><comment><USER15> Heartbreaker #6 - The Your Company Did Not Sponsor This Conference Topic

Heartbreaker #7 - The You Don't Have Any Personal Contacts on The Conference Circuit And Aren't Particularly Attractive Or Personable Topic

Heartbreaker #8 – The intercooler.js You Are All Doing It Wrong And You Should Feel Bad Topic

<comment><USER16> DevOpsdays actually have very well written article about how sponsorship works in their context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Have done reviews for IEEE, APEC, and ACM stuff. There can be many reasons that a presentation is not accepted. Some rejects are a simple instance of subject matter not matching the scope of the symposium. Or there can be some problems with the math and other technical issues. Another unfortunate and not uncomman issue is where the English syntax and/or grammar is so poor that the meaning of the proposal is lost. And there can be the occasional submittal that is a bit before its time - it has happened to myself. Example is the IEEE (PSES and other societies) is probably at least 15 years behind the ACM on matters of software safety and test methodology. Members of the ISPCE tech committiee recently approached me about a session on software safety analysis for the 2017 symposium; yet my submittals for similar presentations were rejected at least twice during last 10 years, by this same group of people.

So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarly been a poor idea. Please do not take rejections personnaly.

<comment><USER18> > So a rejected presentation proposal may not have necessarily been a poor > idea. Please do not take rejections personally.

There's also the case of having too many good talks and simply having to tailor the conference around a specific track of talks that might make the most sense for a given audience or for a given industry focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is a big elephant in the room here:

Most conferences have been converted to strictly money-making entities.

Here is how it works:

\- a RFP is published

\- you submit

\- you get a response: "Unfortunately, your proposal did not get accepted, however, we have a limited number of time slots for sponsors. If you become a silver sponsor..." In other words, you can submit any crap, as long as you provide "sponsorship".

This may or may not apply to DevOps Days, I don't know enough about it. Also, the above does not invalidate some good points made by the author regarding selecting the right angle of the presentation, etc.

<comment><USER19> I've never seen that. Has anyone else?

I've had talks rejected from places even where we were sponsoring.

<comment><USER20> I have seen talks rejected from places where we were silver sponsor. But that being said, most conferences I go to the platinum/gold sponsors are all over the tracks. Even if they don't know a lick about the topics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can't argue much with these criteria. Yet why "previous presenter experience"? If you are afraid of inexperienced speakers to deliver a boring talk, why Not just give them a 10-15 minute slot?

Them, I am reminded that many speakers tour many events with the same talk. I rather like the idea of having fresh speakers on stage over the 4th instance of the very same old talk.

<comment><USER22> I think of it as a ladder that you progress through as a speaker. This reduces risk for the organizers, but it's also good for your growth as a speaker. If you think you can just hop right into a conference talk with no warmup, then the earlier steps should be a breeze.

\- Short meetup talk (10-20 minutes).

\- Long meetup talk (20-40 minutes)

\- Conference talk.

The only gotcha is that most meetups are not recorded. That makes it difficult to apply for conferences outside of your hometown.

<comment><USER23> Most meetups would not have an issue with you bringing a friend who would record the talk for you on their phone or with a camera. As with all these things, make sure to ask the organizers first, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Like many here, I totally and vehemently disagree with the fourth reason for rejection (the "n00b"): if someone has a proposal that is worthy of presentation, they should be given the opportunity to present -- regardless of their age or experience. There are many reasons for this, including the most obvious one that if every conference insists on experience, no one will be able to get that experience. But the reasons for not depending on prior presentations run much deeper: if you are going to evaluate a proposal based on the speaker's prior presentations, you are tautologically unblinded in your review process. Having an unblinded review process is a grievous mistake: when conferences aren't blind in their reviews, they end up confirming their own biases more than selecting the best possible work. (I have always felt this way, but my feelings on this were galvanized by my own experiences inside the sausage factory[1] -- and for the conference that I am currently organizing[2], we are emphatically double blind.)

I understand the problem of creating engaging presentations as well as compelling content, but there are ways to achieve this other than being prejudicial. For example, if you want to create an invited talk or two for those whose presentations the program committee particularly likes, great. And if you want to provide presentation coaching for those who you accept who haven't presented before, even better. (I have provided this coaching informally in the past, and have found that a little coaching can go a long way.) But a blinded review process must be viewed as a constraint on the problem: to do any less is to deprive ourselves of the new ideas and presenters that provide us our collective vitality!

[1] [https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical- sessions/p...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical- sessions/presentation/cantrill)

[2] [http://systemswe.love/](http://systemswe.love/)

<comment><USER23> "if someone has a proposal that is worthy of presentation, they should be given the opportunity to present -- regardless of their age or experience"

At the same time, it sounds like they had many, many submissions that were worthy of presentation, and this was a bigger conference. There are smaller conferences which are not as inundated with presentations to which newer speakers can apply, and from there apply to the bigger ones.

It's just like everything else in life, where you have to prove yourself on a smaller scale before being allowed on bigger things.

<comment><USER24> Sorry if my wording was confusing: I mean that they should pick the most qualified based on the proposal -- not that they should expand the scope of the conference to accommodate every plausible submission.

As an aside, I do not understand why my comment is being voted down; is a double blind review process that controversial?!

<comment><USER23> Part of the proposal is the presentation, and thus the person's ability to present.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've never been to a conference that didn't have a high percentage of first time speakers. In many ways that is what provides the value of a good conference. One of the largest ACM conferences is SIGGRAPH, in which graduate students generally present.

As long as there's content, and the speakers receive some communication about being prepared, practicing, and ensuring they will meet the time limit, how is there so much worry that it's preferable to reject good abstracts than take the risk??

On top of that, it seems like risky presenters with good abstracts could easily be given the opportunity to send in a video of them speaking or have a phone call with a conference organizer.

Given these things, it's seems sad to trivially reject based on inexperience, it hurts the conference more than the applicants, and of course gives the impression the conference cares more about style than substance. I realize that's a rash decision making wild generalizations based on a small amount of text... OTOH that is probably how some of those less experienced applicants feel.

</comment><comment><USER26> Pretty harsh with the noob, we have all been there in a very distant past, aren't we? Just accept the most promising noobs and pack them all into the same session with a navigate chair and a senior speaker ready to rescue every single talk.

<comment><USER27> I think it's more "a paid / sponsored conference isn't the best place to get presentation experience". Especially when you have a plethora of experienced presenters to choose from.

<comment><USER28> The experienced presenters tend to talk about the same things, over and over, at conference after conference. Selecting for "noobs" injects diversity into what is otherwise a well-worn conference circuit by many of the non-noobs.

<comment><USER27> On the other side of the coin, people tend to ask about the same things, over and over again -- so a professional presenter will hit more of the points that people are interested in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> How has no one mentioned the gears in the background on this page yet? It's a touch distracting, but there is some smart stuff going on to make them line up.

Sadly the CSS is optimized, which makes understanding its implementation a little tough, but i suspect it'd make for fun reading!

<comment><USER30> The background is a canvas element - the gear turning is implemented with javascript.

<comment><USER29> Thanks, I should have said CSS/JS, it too is impossible to read due to the optimization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b

> [...]

> This presentation would have been accepted if we had seen speaker talked at > local meetup groups, had a recorded presentation we could view, or > maintained a blog so that we could foresee of how he would present his ideas > and build an argument.

Perhaps we were outliers, but @buu700 and I were accepted to BlackHat and DEF CON with no prior speaking experience outside from a dry run of the talk to a single meet-up.

One delivery -- and the talk as delivered in both conferences ended up being far different from that specific instance. Now if the article suggests that just doing it once is fine, cool, but if it's suggesting a track record of past smaller conferences, I'm inclined to disagree, as are the reviewers for the largest conferences.

It _helps,_ but being bereft of it certainly doesn't disqualify you.

<comment><USER22> Had you presented to the meetup before applying or only after you knew that you were accepted in the conference? Even having done a talk once is far better than most applications.

<comment><USER18> Delivered it deliberately _in preparation_ for a submission (i.e. before we even submitted the talks but knowing full well that that would be the end goal). Both the talk and delivery were engineered with those audiences in mind, so we restricted recording and distribution of the talk at the prior OWASP meetup until after it was published at BH/DC.

It didn't go all that smoothly at DEF CON (which I'll freely attribute to us both being conference noobs), but it went pretty well overall, all things considered.

Don't know if we'll have anything interesting to talk about next year, but I'm looking forward to potentially doing it again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "We found every submission to be of high quality. We will now explain why your talks are actually garden-variety by using landscaping metaphores"

Jokes aside. The issues raised are very good, but I can't help but think biased to a certain intended crowd. How does the panel(?) stay objective? Are the different views on topics and how to formulate the synopsis (exaggeration) perhaps relevant to a certain type of conference attendee and so deserving of a separate conference track?

</comment><comment><USER32> From the viewpoint of a self-supporting individual (not having someone else foot the bill) who would only be interested in learning about new topics in a field, does anyone here think it is worth hundreds to thousands in cost to attend a conference, and why? Is there anything there one would definitely miss about advances in the field if not attending? Or is it more about (essentially) self-promotion?

</comment><comment><USER33> To add a personal anecdote, I was accepted to speak at a large regional conference as my first speaking gig. I explicitly stated I did not have any previous conference experience. I attribute this partially to having a relatively niche topic.

I was lucky enough to give the talk twice at a local user group prior to the conference, which helped with the actual conference talk, I am sure.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just to reinforce the last point regarding blogging and presenting locally, they are 100% correct. I've never actually submitted a talk for a conference but I've been speaking to local programming groups fairly regularly as well as blogging for the last 3-4 years. Regularly is a couple of times per year or slightly more often.

I don't get paid to do any of it, I just really enjoy talking about this stuff. Through these talks and blogging I've been recruited by 3 different companies to contribute to their company tech blogs and I was invited to speak at a rather large and exclusive conference where I was the only speaker not from a HUGE company on the docket.

It happened because I was giving the talk locally, somebody affiliated with the conference drove in from about an hour away to hear it and then stuck around to invite me to speak. I never considered that conferences would recruit but apparently they do.

</comment><comment><USER35> If you're very new to public speaking but dying to give it a shot try submitting an entry to KCDC. It's one of the biggest dev conferences in the Midwest and they do accept rookies with very little to no experience from all over the globe. A good friend of mine had his first talk at KCDC a couple of years ago. No blog. No github account. Just a very good topic and a willingness to push limits and share his passion. It's also opened up a ton of other opportunities for him.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Heartbreaker #4 – The N00b

Everyone is a n00b at some time. But being a conference n00b doesn't mean you're not an expert on the subject of your talk, that your content is not original, that you're not an excellent speaker, or that your talk would not be excellent. All it means is that you're a n00b to public conferences. The wholesale discounting of candidate talks based on such narrow criteria is foolish.

</comment><comment><USER36> So many of these articles never cover what 'good' looks like, only bad. What does their perfect pitch look like? Which abstracts blew them away? What topic surprised them most (in a good way)?

Both good and bad examples are important, but articles like this that include only the rejected outlines just feels quite discouraging.

</comment><comment><USER37> Try to improve your talk by presenting it first in a meetup, get some feedback, and most importantly find the right levels of detail for each part of the presentation.

The topics need to also be aligned consistently around a larger theme, that is closed by a concrete conclusion that people can ideally apply in their life.

</comment><comment><USER38> It can be difficult to get "hard data" about a topic, as most of us certainly don't have that available in our day to day work. The best you can hope for is to find somebody else's academic research, and then riff on it in an understandable, enjoyable, manner, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER39> We ran 2 large conferences and 2 large meetups and about 90% of CFPs get rejected for a simple reason:

Everyone are submitting to talk about the exact same subject.

"Whats new in Angular2", "Using Redux", etc.

</comment><comment><USER40> > We had several great pitches from people who have never given a talk before; > we asked about presentation experience as part of submitting a talk and we > did a little googling too. It's crummy to turn away such a good > presentation, but it's also risky to entrust your conference audience to > someone who has never presented before

I don't care about how a presenter presents their information at a _technical_ conference. If this was a conference for public speaking and entertainment I'd think it's important then.

</comment><comment><USER41> I was expecting the noob to be rejected for not knowing how to spell the word 'amateur' correctly.

</comment><comment><USER42> So, in order to be a presenter, I must have already been a presenter?

<comment><USER43> It looks like a blog would also suffice. Although I had the same initial reaction: it feels like a rather overzealous exclusion.

<comment><USER44> You don't just drop someone without presentation experience onto a stage in front of hundreds or thousands with a laptop and a projector. That's a great way to get negative reviews for the conference from the attendees.

Much like you don't hire someone with no experience writing software to come in a write you a brand new point-of-sale system for your chain of a thousand stores just because they're enthusiastic.

<comment><USER43> I think you're making an assumption that I disagree with the conclusion of the article when in reality, I don't. My _initial reaction_ was that it was overly exclusive and in a way, it is. They don't give a chance to those with no experience doing this kind of thing, which makes the bar for someone with no experience that much higher.

However, I don't think this is wrong, especially for such a large conference. If this were a smaller conference then I think it would actually be overzealous, but that is not what I think in this case, which is why I said it was only my initial reaction.

I would also like to add that the example summary given shows more than just enthusiasm, it shows knowledge of topic as well as the ability to convey that information in a concise and reasonable way. So, a more apt comparison would be not hiring said person to build your brand new POS system just because their academics were good and make a nice resume (just without job experience).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I like the spinning cogs in the background.

<comment><USER46> It was a lovely design idea, but I found it distracting as I was reading. A bit like how a running video elsewhere on the page draws the eye, the cogs moving as I scrolled distracted from the text.

If they just were behind the title and opening paragraph, they would scroll out of view relatively quickly. You'd get the nice effect, but stop being distracted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Before any of the rest of this, I want to say that this is a useful article for people as conferences actually do think like this, but my comment is then to point out that not all conferences do, and that I generally prefer attending ones which don't.

> The premise is good, but the abstract is so short we have no idea where this > is going to go. Even if the speaker were experienced and a known conference > superstar, it is hard to give the presenter a speaking slot without more > detail.

When you go to a performance by a standup comedian, you don't read an abstract first: if there is even a title it is probably arbitrary or a gag.

When I go to a conference and am choosing to bother going to see a talk, I select talks based on who is speaking, not based on their abstract.

In my experience, a good speaker is interesting no matter what they are talking about, and otherwise the talk ends up being disappointing no matter how on point the abstract is to my interests.

You might then ask: "but surely the good speaker is capable of making a good abstract?", but the best talks are also coordinated and topical and _deep_.

The person whose talks I _most enjoy and now never miss_ is essentially incapable of making an abstract ahead of time, as his talk is based on his thoughts and passions at that moment, and are about topics so compelling that after the talk I would have a hard time summarizing it other than "you really should have been there".

You might then ask "but is the speaker actually good if the audience member can't summarize the talk?", and I will claim the exact opposite: if you can replace the talk with a summary of the content and (maybe) the slides, you should not be wasting anyone's time with a talk.

This is something both many conferences and many attendees fundamentally seem to not "get": they ask for peoples' slides, as if they have meaning. One may as well ask for a photograph of the empty sets for a play they missed instead of a video of the performance, that is how much content you can recover from the slides and abstract of a good talk.

> It's crummy to turn away such a good presentation, but it's also risky to > entrust your conference audience to someone who has never presented before.

But this is also how you get extremely loyal speakers who will speak at your conference for free while refusing to even bother speaking at other venues. It is also how you manage to show your audience "something new" instead of "the same old people that every conference gets to speak as they are the safe bet / known quantity".

The absolute best regular conference I go to, by _far_ , gets all of this: the couple that runs 360|iDev works with new speakers to hone ideas (many speakers I have talked to are incredibly grateful to this conference for giving them "their break"), but doesn't even bother with an approval process for _known good_ speakers, and they then aren't afraid to have sessions at their conference with neither a title nor an abstract, just a name, a bio, and a "placeholder" title and abstract that are devoid of content. It is seriously the only conference where I really find myself interested to bother attending any of the talks past "I guess I absolutely need to try to see this so I can talk about it with other people tonight _sigh_ ".

Expanding into the category of atypical conferences, XOXO takes the cake, but it is half-festival, was never sure if it was anything more than a temporary concept, and doesn't really have a "topic" that is easy to describe. But, the Andy's hand-nurture first-time speakers based on core attendees and prior speakers "nominating" people they really want to see give talks, many of whom are artists or bloggers who might even "perform" in various ways but have never given a talk. The schedule has names and bios, but not a single title or abstract.

</comment><comment><USER48> >submissions were uniformly good

><list of different reasons some submissions were not good [and in one case, _you_ would have been picked if not for this not good quality]>

please.

What are the chances this submission was brigaded to the top^ spot?

^[http://hnrankings.info/12725337/](http://hnrankings.info/12725337/)

<comment><USER48> Just ate it up, eh?</comment></comment>


Global Initiative Mines Retired Hard Disk Drives for Materials and Magnets - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/environment/making-new-hard-disk-drives-from-recycled-magnets <comment><USER2> > _In Tennessee, the leftover waste slag from metal recovery facilities, which > contains rare earth elements including gold, platinum, and "all that good > stuff," is used as filler material for paving roads..._

in some other places they use broken toilets instead

</comment><comment><USER3> Demagnetised by heat.. but can be demagnetised?

<comment><USER4> Heat the thing above its Curie temperature, and it loses its magical powers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare- earth_magnet#Magnetic_pro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare- earth_magnet#Magnetic_properties)

<comment><USER3> Then why reclaim by heating?

<comment><USER5> You don't keep them that hot forever...

<comment><USER3> de-magnetised _while hot_ is not the same as _demagnetised by_ .. misunderstood what was being said. I thought it was a permanent de- magnetisation</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Major Advance in Artificial Photosynthesis Poses Win/Win for the Environment - <AUTHOR> http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/04/16/major-advance-in-artificial-photosynthesis/

<comment><USER3> It's an interesting diversion, and useful beyond just carbon sequestration - <USER2> _love_ how this is a combination of machine/organic lifeforms: _" nanowires harvest solar energy and deliver electrons to bacteria, where carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of a variety of targeted, value-added chemical products.""_ \- (Bacterial Cyborgs?) - but the sooner we transition to a solar based energy economy, the sooner we can stop doing inane things like burning coal for energy.

Note also, they have a long, long way to go before this becomes even remotely commercially viable. _" With this approach, the Berkeley team achieved a solar energy conversion efficiency of up to 0.38-percent for about 200 hours under simulated sunlight, which is about the same as that of a leaf."_

So, they are about 40 years behind where Solar energy is today.

Still cool though.

<comment><USER4> Keep in mind that converting solar energy to chemical energy (what plants do, and what these researchers have done) is a much harder problem than converting solar energy to electrical energy directly.

Also, the main result of this work seems to be not energetic efficiency, but the production of flexible precursor chemicals.

<comment><USER5> But plants already convert solar energy to chemical storage at efficiencies of 1-3%. Up to 10% for algae (higher per-hectare yields are based on added energy). It turns out that existing artificial proceses might already get close to this via electrolysis, carbon separation from seawater,and Fischer- Tropsch synthesis. But for raw efficiency, it's really hard to beat plants.

The other problem is that humans are already appropriating 20-40% of all primary production. So while plants are good at what they do, we're already leaning on them really hard.

Unless humans can come up with methods which are 1) complimentary to existing plant activity (e.g., they don't compete for the same space, water, and/or minerals), and that's 2) roughly as efficient or better, we look kind of stuck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These guys in Israel have been developing something very similar for a while now: [http://www.newco2fuels.co.il/](http://www.newco2fuels.co.il/)

"NewCO2Fuels innovative technology converts CO2 and H2O into syngas and from it synthetic transportation fuels or chemicals using present available technologies. The end products are competitive with current market prices with no incentives thanks to the very high efficiency rate of the NCF system."

I stumbled on them while Googling just last week.

Great to see this kind of R&D being done. I'd love to read a comparison of the various CO2 sequestration technologies out there.

<comment><USER7> Minus the photosynthesis part.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone know of commentary beyond this lab press release?

<comment><USER9> Yes, please! Someone with more knowledge on the subject please enlighten us! It looks really cool to me, but I don't know enough to start a conversation, heh!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting work. I wonder how much input energy is required to mine, refine, and build the required silicon and titanium oxide nanowires? If it's less than 1 to 1 with the lifetime output, then the tech will need more work to be a real solution. Hopefully it scales.</comment>


Failing to Raise Funding - <AUTHOR> How should startups handle failure to raise funding? <comment><USER2> Be resilient, make something that sells, and then go sell it. You can never reach sustainability via investment. You always have to create something people will pay you money for, so that if you to investment, you can pay them back.

Try bootstrapping</comment>


Open API Bluetooth remote - <AUTHOR>

A few of my friends are trying to get a device called Blumoo produced en masse via an Indiegogo campaign. They have several highly functional prototypes, and they want to open it up for anyone else to develop applications/functionality. They can already control their entire A/V systems with their phones. One guy's wife is an Android developer. Half of them either still or used to work for Garmin. "Silicon Prairie" startup.<p>Is this kind of thing even interesting to people? I love my PS3 remote that will control it from wherever without pointing it at the console...I imagine this doing the same. <comment><AUTHOR> Campaign is here, if you want to see it: [http://igg.me/at/blumoo/x/2131638](http://igg.me/at/blumoo/x/2131638)</comment>


Ask HN: How Hard Is Learning to Build Electron Apps? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm a student and I'm thinking about contributing to some open source apps like Boostnote or Notable which use Electron (Javascript/Typescript).
How much time/effort does it require to learn the necessary skills/tools?
So far I'm comfortable with Python, C++ and Java and I'm mainly working on topics like machine learning and computer vision. So learning Electron will probably not be directly useful for my first job.
Would you say it's nonetheless a good use of my time or should I rather focus on my "more career relevant stack"? <comment><USER2> Electron is fundamentally a packaging system, not a programming environment. It let's you write a web app in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS and deploy it as a desktop app on all three OS platforms.

So, to learn Electron, you just need to learn web programming, which is useful for nearly all programmers. One super cool thing about Electron is that you can package up any frameworks or other dependencies inside your same desktop app, giving you the whole world of web development tools and techniques without making your end user install any of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try following some hello world tutorial and see how difficult it feels?</comment>


Fritz in Full: Review of "Frederick the Great: King of Prussia" by Tim Blanning - <AUTHOR> http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Fritz-in-full-8390 <comment><USER2> paywall

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, there was no paywall when I posted it yesterday, must have been temporarily waived or something. Frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why is this here, it's not free and is a nontechnical book review anyway?

<comment><USER4> Nontechnical material is more than welcome on Hacker News. It just needs to be interesting. But of course it's better if the content is actually readable (perhaps with a workaround of some sort).</comment></comment>


Mark Lynas, environmentalist who opposed GMOs, admits he was wrong. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/01/03/mark_lynas_environmentalist_who_opposed_gmos_admits_he_was_wrong.html <comment><USER2> His views are insubstantial. His main argument is that his previous ad hominem positions were not sufficient to condemn GMOs (correct) and that GMOs haven't caused any problems yet.

He has not presented evidence that GMO's are safe. He has two main arguments:

1\. Trial and error crossbreeding affects entire genes. 2\. Viruses sometimes spread genes from one organism to another.

First, trial and error crossbreeding isn't likely to produce anything catastrophic. We've been interbreeding plants for milennia. Current techniques may be more risky, but generally speaking it should be hard for plants to produce a horrid mutation based on natural interbreeding mechanisms.

Second, just becauses cross species gene transfers do occur doesn't mean that it's safe when we do it. If such transfers have occurred in nature for a long, long time, then it's safe to say that nature has created pathways that are safe. Our pathways are new.

I'm making a Talebian argument here. Nature is a VERY complex system. When we mess with it, we make incremental visible gains, and run the risk of large, invisible losses.

It means nothing to say that GMOs haven't caused harm yet. All it would take would be ONE catastrophic GMO plant to cause large amounts of damage. By definition, we won't be able to foresee this until it happens.

HN is a very tech positive community, and also a community that's very aware of the complexity of large system, and their fragility when meddled with. When considering GMOs, many forget complexity due to a pro-technology attitude.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious what sort of realistic disaster scenario you think might occur due to cross-species gene transfer (and for that matter, purely synthetic genes) in GMOs, and how the existing safeguards are inadequate against it. Normally I'm against FUD, but please, go nuts, so long as there's a reasonable chance of it occurring (i.e. we're not talking about a mad scientist who wants to create man-eating plants)

<comment><USER4> Weed-killer resistance transfers to a weed, helping boost it to invasive species?

Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?

A huge multinational wants to include "TERMINATOR GENES" in their crops to make sure the cropped seed cannot grow; environmentalists freak out at the name and oppose that; the multinational doesn't include that gene but now inspect the fields of people on the route of seed delivery and if they find any gene-manipulated crop (which is probable from wind-blown seed) they sue the farmer into oblivion.

<comment><USER5> > Some mutation makes crop more vulnerable to a particular plant virus, > destroying 80% of that crop in EU or US?

This is already a risk because industrial agriculture is optimized for monocrops.

<comment><USER2> This is like arguing that it's ok to build houses that won't resist hurricanes, because they're already vulnerable to fire.

GMO risks present an additional risk over already problematic agricultural practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Plant breeding has always been tinkering with the genome, why aren't people scared of it? Read the Wikipedia page on the various ways plants are bombarded with radiation, mutagenic chemicals, have nuclei fuzed with electricity, et al in "non-GMO 'organic'" plant breeding.

Why is the more error prone process, in which we are ignorant of the mechanism, presumed safer?

If we invented a machine which randomly bred plants, sampled their DNA, and tested for the modification of a single gene, or infected plants with naturally occuring bacteria or virii and waited for an inter-species transfer, would you find this less scary than a process which uses a petri dish and a pipette?

There's a continuous gradient between the way people bred, modified, and selected plants thousands of years ago up until today. Our precision and our knowledge has gotten a lot better.

The only reason at all to trust maize, or other human domestic modifications, is simply because they've been around for a long long time and so you can infer safer because if there was something dangerous, it would have shown up already.

Or, are we simply ignoring dangers that have already existed but become desensitized to them, like gluten issues, or lactose intolerance. Our diet has changed radically since the invention of agriculture, and in a way, much of man's early experiments at domestication of plants, our first "GMO" so to speak, may have had unforseen circumstances.

But we brush it all off, yet people are hypersensitive to any minute theoretical issue that could happen with GMO, real or imagined.

This boils down a lot I think to human emotion, and our notions of disgust with respect to food. We like what is common and fear the unknown.

<comment><USER7> Take the International Rice Organisation's IR8. It was supposed to be a miracle rice that yielded double the rice of existing strains. Introducing this rice meant farmers had to use pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers which had not previously been part of their practices. The herbicides and pesticides killed the local ecosystems including secondary crops which used to grow alongside the rice in paddies.

The IR8 was certainly higher yield when fed properly, but under-performed without that industrial support. That industrial support costs money: so the farmer has to produce more rice to pay for the materials required to produce more rice, in what is essentially a net loss situation.

What price to you put on the sound of frogs singing in the rice field? What value is there in being able to drink or swim in the water downstream without fear of poisoning?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that the real problem is the false dichotomy between 'all GMOs are bad' and 'all GMOs are good'. There is clearly a middle path - 'some GMOs are safe, and some aren't, and whether release is acceptable depends on the organisms, the genes, the methods used, and the level of testing done'.

I don't think putting herbicide resistance genes into plant species that don't already have them is a very good idea, because it is a short term solution (selective pressure on weeds will eventually create the same thing anyway), has other environmental costs (the evidence last time I checked is that while glyphosate breaks down quickly, if it gets into waterways in the short period before it has broken down, it can cause considerable damage), and even without any form of gene transfer can end up as a weed (the definition of a weed is a plant growing somewhere where it is unwanted - GMO corn in a GMO soy field is a weed).

Even worse applications can be imagined - for example, imagine a cultivar of corn with genes for a drug, where the corn is toxic because of high levels of the drug - would you want that growing in the next field over from where the corn you are going to eat grows?

I think that it is right for reasonable precautionary measures to be in place whenever substantial genetic engineering of plants is going on, whether it is through transgenic methods, through mutagenically exposed plants, or even through selective breeding combined with sequencing, because there are still high risks.

It is the extreme positions of absolute prohibition or absolute acceptance of all GMOs which are irrational.

<comment><USER9> The unconditional opposition to GM food takes scrutiny away from selective breeding, which may itself be harmful in some instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If he's changed his mind based on facts, then I'm happy for him. However, the implications of Monsanto's Terminator seed technology (DRM for plants) is so sweeping and, frankly, frightening that whatever time society wasted due to the anti-GMO activism was worth it.

Does anyone really think that if we didn't make a stink about GMO that they wouldn't have gone full steam ahead?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology) wherein we learn that Monsanto acquired the company that did the initial R&D.

<comment><USER11> > the implications of Monsanto's Terminator seed technology (DRM for plants)

what do intellectual property laws have to do with being pro or con GMOs?

<comment><USER10> It's an analogy to help people familiar with DRM understand what Monsanto's tech is without having to read the wikipedia entry: DRM _is to_ digital content _as_ Terminator seed technology _is to_ plants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm always surprised and intrigued when people switch from being vehemently on one side of a debate to the other. I'm reminded of televangelist Pat Robertson claiming that the Earth is way more than 6,000 years old: [http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/29/pat-robertson- chall...](http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/29/pat-robertson-challenges- creationism/)

<comment><USER5> One of my favorite conversation prompts is to ask people, "what have you read recently that changed your mind about some issue?" People happily reinforce their own cognitive dissonance with internet "news bubbles" and echo chamber forums. Letting your mental guard down to fairly reevaluate your own beliefs is an unfortunately rare event.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A superficial reading of the news would lead one to believe that Monsanto == GMO, and I believe a lot of people are swayed to be in the anti-GMO camp by the bullying tactics of Monsanto.

</comment><comment><USER14> Never heard of this guy.

Along the line of the argument, "John Smith, leading health care reform advocate, admits health care reform is unnecessary." And "Renowned atheist, on deathbed, admits atheism was a mistake." At least with the atheist guy I had heard of him.

So it is an 'appeal to authority' argument, but it's not even an authority who many people have heard of, and fewer still have ever thought of as an authority on the topic, and in fact who it looks like the side he is now aligned did not consider to be an authority until he said he now agreed with them.

Also the article's suggestion that this guy created GMO criticism and without him no one would have asked questions about GMO safety is absurd. Lots of people have reasonably been asking those questions. It's absolutely not something that one person created out of nothing and became the undisputed world leader as if he is some kind of pope. The article reads a lot like propaganda trying to create a straw man leader and then watch as the straw man commits suicide.

Another problem is the conflating of criticism with attacks/vilification, and the ad-hominem use of claiming critics are anti-science: "To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as climate-change deniers". This is the opposite of reality. It is very science oriented to ask about risks and be as interested in long term safety trials as we are with pharmaceuticals.

(To be clear, I am not getting to pros or cons of the argument, just noting this article makes a poor argument.)

<comment><USER15> Just because you never heard of him doesn't mean the kings in Africa who banned GMOs have not.

<comment><USER14> What evidence is there that they have? This person is not the cult leader he claims to be.

These kings in Africa you mention generically with no specifics, perhaps they read journals? Even if it is established these scores of kings each met with this fellow personally, went elephant or cheetah hunting together and had some laughs, it indicates little about the motivations of these supposed and possibly fictional kings in passing their dictates, edicts and proclamations.

Vazquez et al. Intragastric and Intraperitoneal Administration of Cry1Ac protoxin from Bacillus thuringiensis induces systemic and mucosal antibody responses in mice. Life Sci. 64, no. 21 (1999): 1897–1912.

Vazquez et al. Characterization of the mucosal and systemic immune response induced by Cry1Ac protein from Bacillus thuringiensis HD 73 in mice. Brazilian J. of Med. and Biol. Research 33 (2000): 147–155.

Vazquez et al. Bacillus thuringiensis Cry1Ac protoxin is a potent systemic and mucosal adjuvant. Scandanavian J. of Immunology 49 (1999): 578–584.

Burns, J.M. 13-week dietary subchronic comparison study with MON 863 corn in rats preceded by a 1-week baseline food consumption determination with PMI certified rodent diet #5002. (Monsanto Co. report, Dec 17, 2002).

Assessment of additional scientific information concerning StarLink corn (FIFRA scientific advisory panel report, No. 2001–09, Jul 2001).

Seralini, G., Cellier, D., & Spiroux de Vendomois, J. New analysis of a rat feeding study with a genetically modified maize reveals signs of hepatorenal toxicity. J. archives of Env. Contam. and Toxicology (Springer, New York).

Malatesta, M. et al. Ultrastructural morphometrical and immunocytochemical analyses of hepatocyte nuclei from mice fed on genetically modified soybean. Cell Struct. Funct. 27 (2002): 173–180.

Vecchio, L. et al. Ultrastructural analysis of testes from mice fed on genetically modified soybean. Eur. J. of Histochem. 48, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 2004):449–454.

Oliveri et al. Temporary depression of transcription in mouse pre-implantion embryos from mice fed on genetically modified soybean. (48th Symposium of the Society for Histochemistry, Lake Maggiore, Italy, Sept 7–10, 2006).

Ermakova, I. Genetically modified soy leads to the decrease of weight and high mortality of rat pups of the first generation. Preliminary studies. Ecosinform 1 (2006): 4–9.

<comment><USER15> Are you saying that the pressures from people like this aren't causing California counties to ban GMOs? I think it's a great thing that someone who has been focusing on this stuff for 16 years is finally coming to terms with the consequences of his writings and actions. The fact that one person turned around is a good sign, IMO.

Yes, much ink has been spilled about the dangers of GM soy and soy in general. The issue that the article suggests is that people not only form opinions on food based off of no evidence, but even go so far as to expound their influence in matters that are not trivial. It's easy for Americans to pass up food, but a kid who is starving in Africa and eating Cow dung isn't given this option, and starving these children based on belief and no science is just morally wrong.

I'm looking up some of those articles as well. The one point of interest, for those who are only looking at the titles and seeing "danger," this is from the abstract from Burns, J.M.:

 _The results of the 13-week subchronic feeding study show that rats fed diets containing corn event MON 863 grain responded similarly to rats fed diets containing the nontransgenic control LH82 x A634 grain and diets containing grain from reference control nontransgenic commercial corn varieties. There were no test article-related changes based on the evaluation of survival, clinical signs, body weights, body weight changes, food consumption, clinical pathology, organ weights, and macroscopic and microscopic pathology._

So, thank you for showing some balance in your suggested readings. This stuff is really complicated and I hope people like you lead the charge in the future of all of the world's food choices. Unfortunately, I don't think this will happen and we'll be fed BS by make-believers and lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who is totally dependent on a gluten-free diet to avoid constant sickness, the idea of people tinkering with food proteins is horrifying. If it's employed for very particular, controlled reasons then so be it. But there is the potential for immense hubris here. Note that when I went to the doctor some years ago and told them I was sure bread was making me sick they told me I was wrong because I tested negative for Celiac disease.

</comment><comment><USER16> Site is down due to overload. Here's the paper:

[http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture- ox...](http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture-oxford- farming-conference.pdf)

Here's the video:

[http://www.ofc.org.uk/videos/2013/mark-lynas-changing- perspe...](http://www.ofc.org.uk/videos/2013/mark-lynas-changing-perspective)

</comment><comment><USER17> So was this guy also involved in hosing food irradiation? The insane campaign against food irradiation -- thanks to which we continue to eat all kinds of unnecessary preservatives -- was what led me to abandon Greenpeace.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you can separate GMOs from the more evil commercial activities revolving around them (patents, seed control, ...), then I don't get it.

I'm not saying that's an easy separation to make, but science and technology will continue to move forward. If it brings about our end, so be it. You can say the same about a lot of different technologies. It just happens to be the dangerous phase we are in (transitioning from a Type 0 to a Type 1 civilization on the Kardashev scale).

</comment><comment><USER2> Google Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HiRysAG...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HiRysAG22wAJ:www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture- to-oxford-farming-conference-3-january-2013/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk)

I'll post my comment separately once I've looked at it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I was fascinated by reading Marc's 'Six Degrees' and would still recommend it. Now I wonder how far he is away from saying climate change isn't happening at all.

<comment><USER20> I take it you didn't actually _read_ his paper.

"What you don't have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once."

[http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture- ox...](http://www.ofc.org.uk/files/ofc/papers/mark-lynas-lecture-oxford- farming-conference.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Clearly GMO advocates have never seen Jurassic Park.

<comment><USER22> because movies are a great way to make policy decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Original Speech <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5007853>

</comment><comment><USER7> Feral Roundup Ready™ crops are all the argument I need. GMOs are bad, mostly due to the unintended consequences.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand why people distrust GMOs. GMOs make food production more efficient; what's bad about that?

</comment><comment><USER25> A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I know enough to know that we don't know enough. Too many times we've done things that in hindsight should never have been done had we had more information. I fear this may be one of those times.

<comment><USER26> How do we get that information if people are running around burning these crops to the ground?</comment></comment>


WordPress 3.1.3 (and WordPress 3.2 Beta 2) - <AUTHOR> http://wordpress.org/news/2011/05/wordpress-3-1-3/

<comment><USER2> Before clicking on the link, I already knew that it's security-related release.

</comment><comment><USER3> How about a more descriptive title?

ie.

 _"WordPress adds a shedload of security fixes and hardening in 3.1.3 release"_

Nothing in the guidelines here say titles have to be so plain vanilla.</comment>


Airendipity - Get it off your chest, or discover something new - <AUTHOR> http://airendipity.com/ This app was made by my classmate from college.  I think it is a great idea that is well designed and introduces a whole new concept of communication and social media.  What do you guys think? <comment><USER2> Reminds me of grouphug.us, a site I spent hours on years ago.

Edit: it must have been 8 years ago at this point, and I still remember _exactly_ what the site looked like and how the UI felt.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A classmate from college built this app. I think it's a great idea and very well designed app and introduces a new concept of communication and social media. What do you all think?

<comment><USER3> I think it's a good first shot. I'm wondering what's going to happen to a completely anonymous forum as it grows. Will it devolved into /b-like behavior or will it find a way to rise above.

<comment><USER4> I'm hoping that the theme, some new features, and me keeping an eye on spammy content will make it rise above. I'm wondering just as much as you, though!

<comment><USER3> I am having fun with it, and it doesn't seem to be devolving.

Side note: I _really_ want an iPad version. The interface doesn't even need to change at all, with the possible exception of making the airplanes a little bigger. I run it in 2x mode, but font rendering is massively ugly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wanted to try it out in my browser, but couldn't, so I hit the back button. (This comment is intended as friendly, constructive feedback on your process for getting new users, and definitely not as an insult.)

<comment><USER4> Hi, I made Airendipity. Long-time lurker, first-time poster, etc.

One day I want to introduce a web UI, but since iOS is what I know and I'm just one guy working nights, I went with iPhone-only. I feel pretty strongly that it's the API/community and not the device-specific UI that's important here, so... one day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was going to be stern about the unnecessary use of a GeoIP database on your website, but then I did a little snooping and realized that you're probably based somewhere near me. Hello local person!

<comment><USER4> Hello!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really fantastic! One of my favorite apps of 2012.

</comment><comment><USER8> nice simple concept, and I have to show some (comment) love for DC/NoVa/MD :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Heads up - iOS only.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, as I mentioned above that's all I know at the moment. Plan on learning/contracting out android/web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool concept.

</comment><comment><USER11> So-called confession sites have existed since the late 90s.

Here comes a copycat with a novel (painfully forced) metaphor to make the old seem new again..</comment>


Sounds.gd, edit and export video sound tracks in-browser (link to demo) - <AUTHOR> http://sounds.gd/movies/1451/edit#/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not related in any way to the creators, I just found it and thought it was cool.</comment>


How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs, Revamp iPhone Software - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-12/how-apple-plans-to-root-out-bugs-revamp-iphone-software <comment><USER2> This comment from a former employee on the iOS team provides some more context around the software quality issues.

I think this is the more interesting point around which we should have this discussion.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7x0eif/how_apple_pla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/7x0eif/how_apple_plans_to_root_out_bugs_and_revamp/du4z6bx/)

<comment><USER3> I have a slightly different perspective (I worked on iOS 7 - 11). One of the things about Apple that's different to many of the other tech conglomerates is that engineering teams are given huge freedom to work the way they want (for better and for worse). Because engineering is so fragmented you should always take what one person says about the process with a pinch of salt.

So that means there are hundreds of source repos, patch review systems, and the like. When I was there I saw teams using Phabricator, GitLab, GitHub, plain e-mailed diffs, and more. In the same way EPMs and project process varies massively across teams, so what that employee experienced is by no means the norm. Certainly I didn't find this to be true at all:

> Nothing could be worked on if it wasn't in Radar with a priority number > attached and signed off by the teams' EPM. No room for a side project or > time away from your daily duties because there were always P1s to fix.

In fact, I worked on a major feature that was keynoted one year that came out purely because of my side project work. If anything it was a frustration to enter the "real world" where PMs had so much more power and influence than they did when I was at Apple (where PMs didn't really exist, and EPMs existed only to manage project timelines and drive features that HI / ID came up with).

<comment><USER4> Based on your experience there what would you say is the cause of the recent slip in software quality in both iOS and macOS? As an outsider it looks to me like they're just pushing too hard to keep up with a yearly release schedule but that's based on no inside knowledge at all.

<comment><USER5> > Based on your experience there what would you say is the cause of the recent > slip in software quality in both iOS and macOS?

It's not clear because there have been absolute shit-show releases going back to the early days of OSX. Even the fondest-remembered releases were only so after a ton of polish, and that was with releases slipping significantly (you might see 3 years pass between major updates, and the new version would still be completely unstable).

I'm sure yearly releases don't help, especially if there isn't a postgres-type culture of "we ship what's ready", but software engineering issues at Apple go back a long time.

<comment><USER6> What has definitely changed is the pace with which people are expected to upgrade. When OS X Snow Leopard came out, you had to visit a store to buy the DVD. Nobody would look down on you for running a "legacy OS" if you only upgraded when .3 was out.

The ways in which this has changed affect both tech-savvy and casual users:

1\. Older versions of iOS (which didn't exist back then) don't receive security fixes, so the only way to stay safe is to upgrade within days of the initial release (ideally before Apple publishes its security KB article).

2\. Older versions of macOS often lag behind when it comes to security fixes. There is no clear policy on whether it is safe to stay on release n-1. Apple needs to be nudged to even document macOS security issues[1]. If you are moderately paranoid about security, you have to install all updates on day one (as on iOS).

3\. iOS and macOS automatically download OS upgrades and nag you to install them.

4\. There is a narrative on community sites that Apple's products are only good because Apple relentlessly kills legacy code and features (I don't even agree with the latter part). Dropping support for anything older than a year is considered a badge of honor because it means there will be "progress". The more paying customers you inconvenience, the edgier you are.

5\. Apple feeds into this "old software is bad" meme by publicly LOLing at Android's adoption curve every year.

6\. Emoji. I wish I was kidding, but only seeing squares when other people go out of their way to express their emotions is actually annoying.

7\. If you are already on an OS that is buggy, you are more likely take the plunge and update to a brand-new OS in the hope that _this_ time, things will be better.

[1] [https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/953416156802703360](https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/953416156802703360)

<comment><USER7> When Snow Leopard 10.6 came out in August 2009, it only supported Intel Macs, which were at earliest from January 2006, about three and a half years earlier. Typical Mac OS X releases up to El Capitan (september 2015) supported 10 years of Macintosh computers. Sierra/High Sierra still do, essentially.

<comment><USER8> The support for older machines depends on multiple factors, like the multi- year transition from 32 bit to 64 bit for the OS, including 32 bit EFI, 64 bit EFI, etc. Some older machines were not supported by newer releases (not talking about security patches) for longer than five years, IIRC. That's a long period of time, but still quite short when compared to Windows support of older machines during that time (this is not a great comparison because of differences in annoyances and quality in the OSes, but more about the companies' work).

<comment><USER6> Right. If Apple really switches to ARM Macs, I doubt they'll support existing Intel Macs for anything close to 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Steven Sinofsky has a good Twitter thread about this [1]. He's one of the few people actually qualified to talk about managing platforms and operating systems at Apple's scale.

[1] [https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/963142502604779520](https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/963142502604779520)

<comment><USER10> Given what he pushed for with Windows 8, and killing WP 7 alongside XNA, I am not so sure.

<comment><USER11> Steven Sinofsky wasn't in charge of Windows Phone when that division decided to have no device upgrade path from WP7 to WP8 (or, for that matter, no upgrade path _or_ application compatibility from WP6.5 to WP7.0).

The person in charge of Windows Phone then was Terry Myerson, who had an entirely different reporting chain to Steve Ballmer from Sinofsky's. Myerson was later promoted to run R&D for all Microsoft operating systems in early 2014. (Yes, that means he was also the person responsible for killing Windows on phones most recently, at least for now.)

The death of XNA also didn't happen under Sinofsky's watch. XNA came out of the Xbox division and was abandoned by the same division, before it was combined with Windows under Myerson. If anything, Myerson kept XNA alive longer by making sure it was still supported on WP8.0 and WP8.1 when he ran Windows Phone, and by ensuring that Windows continued to fund MonoGame as an open-source successor/replacement for XNA.

<comment><USER12> The death of XNA is pretty disappointing, if they'd invested more in that then Microsoft could have basically made Unity.

<comment><USER13> The problem isn't in the tech but devs these days are reluctant to write for MSFT platforms, can't blame them though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is sorely needed. Every iOS update has introduced bugs and UX gremlins that have been dragging Apple's software quality through the mud.

Chief among them is Apple Music, since it is a huge part of Apple's service initiative.

\- Their latest update now wastes space to tell me it isn't playing anything!

\- Often times just refuses to work. No error, no graceful recover. Just silence. [https://imgur.com/a/VrO1Y](https://imgur.com/a/VrO1Y)

\- Airdrop seems to only work if I have a cable near me. When I really need it, it fails miserably and I end up using dropbox or even emailing things to myself.

<comment><USER15> I don't encounter many bugs, but I'm considering getting android because Apple's feature/UX choices are beyond insane today. There are two features they're missing, that I feel should have been one of the first few added.

1\. You can't view a list of chapters in iTunes, like in Audiobooks from say, Audible. Awful. I mean, I hate to be unkind, but are they seriously this inept to not include a chapter list that you can view and jump to? 2\. You can't keep the screen on while on a call, like say a conference call, where you might want to remain muted until you want to speak. Awful x100,000,000.

My next phone I'll take a long look at Android.

<comment><USER16> The problem here is that the "top 2 features that should have been in place from day 1 and represent an insane usability gap" are different for every user. So if they try and add all the weird corner case niche features, it'll be the standard unopinionated bloatware that most software is.

FWIW, I've never played an audiobook in iTunes (Audible), and I hadn't ever noticed the screen locking during calls thing. TouchID is so fast that it never bothers me, I guess.

<comment><USER17> >So if they try and add all the weird corner case niche features, it'll be the standard unopinionated bloatware that most software is.

While I agree with the sentiment behind the argument, these days the pendulum is swinging _far_ too much in the other direction.

Sure, this choice is _always_ a tradeoff.

But today, so many applications and websites are being optimized for _the one single most important_ use case at _total_ expense for everything else. Making the software a true lowest common denominator, but seriously reducing actual usefulness.

Just look at the example: I don't have hard numbers, but I'd wager that "Show table of contents for an audiobook" is only a "weird corner case niche feature" for a _very_ wide definition of the phrase (i.e. "everything below my main feature").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good. Let's hope that other companies follow (MS, Google, Adobe, etc...).

What I want for Christmas is to swap phones with Tim Cook for a week. I think it would be eye-opening for him to have to use an iPhone that isn't fresh out of the box for once.

</comment><comment><USER19> >The company will continue to update its software annually, but internally engineers will have more discretion to push back features that aren't as polished to the following year.

Let's hope Microsoft follows suit. I would much rather have a product that works the same way every time over one that can do 1000 things half the time.

Hopefully this will also give them time to reconsider some of the more ill- conceived UX choices they've made in recent years. If they'd spent more than 6 months using the iPhone X I doubt it would've been released as is.

<comment><USER20> I don't think Microsoft has a code quality problem at all. On the contrary I'm hard pressed to point at any recent Microsoft software and say it's bug ridden or low quality or badly designed. From iOS to Android to Windows, Microsoft software is excellent.

<comment><USER21> The constant nagging for updates could be considered a flaw in design. I think Microsoft has always had the reputation of producing buggy software with usability issues. I think they have gotten a lot better at all that.

<comment><USER22> > The constant nagging for updates could be considered a flaw in design.

That's not a code quality problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I Just opened the website on my phone and was greeted with some auto playing video. How much of my monthly data that costs? No idea, but it is probably more than I cared for. How much of it did I watch and hear? Nothing seeing as I am on the bus. Not so strange as I am on a _mobile_ phone. I wouldn't even watch it on desktop let alone now. Bad practice

</comment><comment><USER24> This is happening almost exactly three years after many of us came to the conclusion that "Apple has lost the functional high ground".

Relieving to learn that Apple tries to get back into shape again!

Marco was right:

[https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high- grou...](https://marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734)

</comment><comment><USER25> This rumor has been around past few months, hoping it's true. Though while us technies in the minority would rather bug fixes than new features that don't apply for us, the general public would be very upset if iOS12 changes are all under the hood, as they would say Apple has fallen behind and people will insert common statements every years like they are finally considering switching etc. So while I hope the do fix long standing small bugs, I think the average user would lose their mind if they do. I imagine it will be a mix, some new features and some fixes.

<comment><USER26> The Mac has had an optimization-centric release following a feature release many times (all the Snow releases, El Capitan). I don't remember mass complaints.

(By its name, High Sierra ought to be an optimization of Sierra also, but its bugginess suggests otherwise.)

<comment><USER27> There wouldn't be mass complaints. My family are absolute non-techies, while I am something like a techie, and none of us would complain if Apple did a few pure bug-fix releases. Non-techies don't completely understand the current situation where developers care far more about themselves than their users, but they have learned that software "upgrades" will usually waste their time and make their lives worse. Apple can actually fight this, since their users are their customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I just hope they can make Spotlight work. I can drag down from the home menu, type the full name of an app on the phone, and only get random other results (or the App Store link to the app.)

e.g.: [https://imgur.com/a/jYE9M](https://imgur.com/a/jYE9M) (reminders is a built-in app but apparently Spotlight's never heard of it)

<comment><USER29> You can manually select which apps can be found with Spotlight in the settings app. I had the same problem finding 1Password until I went into settings and explicitly added it. This is terrible UX, but that's how to fix it on your device until Apple sorts it out.

<comment><USER28> Thank you for this! I had no idea, but about half the apps on my phone were randomly set as "do not show in search". I definitely never had seen these settings before, so am boggled as to why Apple just randomly decided to ship an ineffective search.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'll hold my praises until I see how this actually works out. Xcode behaves more like a roulette wheel with every update and by now, even Terminal crashes on me every time I use it. It has gotten to the point where I consciously avoid using Apple apps because It Just Doesn't Work. Thank the gods of FOSS for iTerm2.

<comment><USER31> After one of the recent updates, if I use a keyboard shortcut to switch to a tab while the mouse is over the Terminal window, it starts to rapidly cycle between tabs and will not stop until I move the mouse away. You can try to reproduce this by opening two tabs in Terminal, moving the mouse over it, then pressing Cmd+Shift+] for more than a few tens of ms.

This has interrupted my workflow enough that I started to look for alternatives to Terminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is a very common problem in large software companies that I can relate to. There is always pressure of the next big release and as a result bugs get punted, code starts to get out of order but there is not time to refactor and pause as the next release is just behind waiting for more features and limited bug fixes. Software Engineers and Management need to re-think of a better strategy to deal with these issues.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wish they would put focus on macOS. The recent bugs have been laughable. I am seriously considering switching for the first time in about 16 years. The lure of better more affordable dev hardware is almost to much.

<comment><USER34> The options are not strong elsewhere though. I went with a precision because I assumed linux support would be top notch, and it was. But I widely suspect other similarly classed devices are not. (see also; the comparatively buggy XPS series also from Dell)

<comment><USER21> XPS is amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I tried to upgrade OSX the other day and the upgrade hung half way, leaving me to restore my hard disk from backup.

More quality assurance and testing would be welcomed.

</comment><comment><USER36> Please enable per-app VPNs via Apple Configurator, i.e. without an enterprise MDM. This will allow separation of work and personal VPNs.

Please allow auto-connect VPN profiles to be associated with a whitelist of SSIDs, so that insecure networks (e.g. coffee shop) will auto-connect to a VPN.

Finally, please add a Control Center button to reconnect the default VPN profile.

<comment><USER37> Agreed on all of those. Additionally make re-connecting an iPad to an iPhone sharing a connection automatic (optionally) if no known wifi networks are available.

<comment><USER38> For those of us with personal data limits, that could be annoying. I did that once, forgot to disconnect and it used like 2gb (of monthly 8gb) performing sync "over WiFi". And Apple cares about this problem you can tell because the WiFi off button now only lasts 24hr before automatically turning back on (to avoid data waste).

<comment><USER39> Doesn't iPad recognise tethered connections as mobile connections (like Android tablets do)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I hope they don't only focus on some minor app bugs, but also address the big giant elephant in the room : speed has been going down in a dramatric fashion release after release since ios 7.

There's one word i wish i'd seen and haven't so far : refactoring.

</comment><comment><USER41> If they just added the ability to jump to a given date in text messages, I'd be happy. That's a long overdue simple feature.

<comment><USER42> That seems a lot less useful than a functional search for messages. I hate the fact that I can only search for 1 instance of my search within a conversation. There's no way to go to a previous or next instance from the instance that the search feature already found. That sucks.

<comment><USER43> This! The Mac Messages app has the same UI for search and its possible to jump between the found messages using a keyboard shortcut. Makes me wonder if the functionality exists in iOS too but someone forgot to build it into the UI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The smartphone market isn't fiercely contested anymore IMO.

The features that Android and iOS offer are very similar. I am still very annoyed that I can't make my iPhone X automatically increase ringer volume when it gets out of range of my home WiFi (read: when I get out) while I can do that on my Android (with automation apps) but truthfully, such complaints are 3-4 at the most and I barely even notice the annoyance (at least not often).

So the fierce competition is a moot point nowadays. I applaud Apple for recognizing they need to focus on quality and I hope the results will come soon.

</comment><comment><USER45> As boring at it sounds, this is probably more important that most people think. The "just works" mentality of iOS/Apple products is the key factor for keeping it in our family ecosystem.

Just last night, I tried my damnedest to print an IRS PDF form online. Printer's on, wifi is the same as my Thinkpad, printer is visible to laptop, etc. Nothing worked. Print was "offline" for the print queue. Just pulled out my phone, searched for the form name, opened the pdf and hit "Print" from the share screen. It's always worked, and did perfectly again. That's the greatest thing about it.

I didn't want to debug. I do enough of that shit at work.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder if the mixed reviews of iOS 11 have led them to do such major overhaul. Say if iOS was responsibility of one software dev team, and they recently hired a new project manager to overlook iOS 11 development and release then I would definitely transfer that PM somewhere else in the corp along with QA guys.

For example that bug "typing the letter 'I' autocorrects to an 'A; with a unicode [?] symbol instead" might not be that big of a deal, but as we all noticed how such minute change had drastic ripple effect in entire Apple's ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER47> That's what I expect from Apple and that's why I'm buying their stuff - I want it to work not to have all unnecessary whistles and bells.

</comment><comment><USER48> Another step toward "OS as a service" like many games and softwares.

I hope they will not fall in that pattern.

</comment><comment><USER49> Being customer obsessed is what this implies in my mind. "The renewed focus on quality is designed to make sure the company can fulfill promises made each summer at the annual developers conference and that new features work reliably and as advertised..."

</comment><comment><USER50> This totally off subject but how bout a charger cable with a 2-year lifespan. So give me my negative points.

</comment><comment><USER51> At last

</comment><comment><USER52> They should start by getting rid of Swift and all their proprietary APIs. Xcode is a never ending exercise in frustration. Their storyboard UI builder is even worse. And API's are constantly being deprecated and "best development practices" constantly changing.

<comment><USER53> > They should start by getting rid of Swift and all their proprietary APIs.

Swift is open source, and parts of Foundation are as well. As for their UI design toolkit, you can't possibly expect them to match that of their competitors, right?

> API's are constantly being deprecated and "best development practices" > constantly changing.

Believe it or not, but writing apps in a 32-bit C API (Carbon) may not be the best way to do it. Modernization is crucial to making your platform better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I thought Apple cut their QA department a few, maybe 5 years ago.

<comment><USER55> [deleted]

<comment><USER56> Yeah, but you get releases where I could hard lock the OS by plugging/unplugging an HDMI monitor approx 20 times (7 MBPs bought over the course of 3 months in late 2014; 3 different brands of HDMI monitor) and that's the only way you can make sense of someone letting a bug like that out the door.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Autoplay video, just what i wanted.

</comment><comment><USER58> What originally made the iPhone unique and powerful was that it included a full blown web browser, in the form of the Safari app. Steve Jobs announced the iPhone as a "Phone," "iPod," and "Internet Communicator."

The name "Internet Communicator" indicates how different it is from the other two apps. The Phone and iPod functionality are really a subset of the Internet Communicator.

And because the future is open web technologies, not propriety platforms like iOS, Apple should move towards that world by making advanced PWA (Progressive Web Apps) the future of all apps on iOS.

It will make installing apps on your phone as safe and easy as bookmarking a web site. It will be much closer to an optimal experience for users and developers. It's the future and Apple should be first.

<comment><USER53> Interestingly, Steve Jobs's vision for apps on iOS _was_ essentially PWAs. He was forced to back down after developer found their way around these restrictions (i.e. jailbroke) and realized they could write much higher quality, faster, and more efficient apps natively.

<comment><USER58> That's an imprecise version of the history but what does it have to do with modern iPhones?

Many people said GUIs were too inefficient to be worthwhile on early PCs. Then PCs got more powerful and no one says that any longer.

The iPhone 8 is orders of magnitude more powerful than early versions. The world has changed and those old arguments no longer make sense.

<comment><USER53> Your argument doesn't really make sense: GUIs made a lot of software accessible to the average user, while web apps does nothing of the sort. To the end user, there are almost _no_ benefits to using a web app; they're slower (yes, computers have gotten faster. That doesn't mean that the gap between web apps and native ones doesn't exist), they less accessible, they look worse, and they can't do half the things because they need to run in a web browser. The only benefits are for the developer since they don't have to spend time figuring out how to write native code for a handful of platforms and can now just write software for the lowest common denominator.

<comment><USER58> The success of the GUI shows why computing is not driven by concerns over efficiency. PWAs being less efficient than native apps is completely irrelevant. What matters is functionality.

Most apps do nothing that requires being native at all. The fact that PWAs have been implemented badly so far does not mean that there's anything inherently ugly, slow, or less accessible.

Apple could go as far as they want in making PWAs and native apps feel completely identical. They could even go as far as enforcing style, performance, and accessibility rules for PWAs.

The benefit of moving to PWAs are many and the downsides are all solvable.

<comment><USER59> > Apple could go as far as they want in making PWAs and native apps feel > completely identical. They could even go as far as enforcing style, > performance, and accessibility rules for PWAs.

But they _have_ gone as far as they want, you should be happy then, or do you mean as far as _you_ want? And isn't one of the points of web apps to not be enforceable by any single entity?

> The benefit of moving to PWAs are many and the downsides are all solvable.

Solvable only with hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and many many years of development. On second thought, they've had all that and are still not even close.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>