Further ties of NSA to Equation Group hackers - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/03/new-smoking-gun-further-ties-nsa-to-omnipotent-equation-group-hackers/ <comment><USER2> The reason it's a big deal is because as more power accumulates in the hands on the "adults in the room", the more likely those adults are to become creepy, overbearing assholes -- There are many examples, the most prominent one in my mind being that the FBI/Hoover tried to convince MLK to kill himself, fully backed by the government.

As the NSA et al get more [unchecked] power it will become more corrupt, isn't this like, the law of nature?

People say "This is exactly what I want the NSA to do -- foreign espionage, just like always" \-- Sure, there's past precedent for this being a good idea.

How far are you willing to take this? How much power should one [or small group] employee at the NSA have?

Right now, Right this very minute, I bet if [Employee X] wanted you silenced, it would happen, and no one would bat an eye. Is that the world you want to live in? What road are we taking?

No, we shouldn't stop all foreign espionage [anytime soon].

No, I don't want Employee X doing queries on oil activists for the purposes of muffling them.

My solution? Take them to court, and establish clear oversights. This is what keeps getting said.

EDIT: CIA changed to FBI/Hoover

<comment><USER3> Yes, power corrupts, and the US government is exceptionally powerful and exceptionally corrupt. The NSA is included in this, of course.

We already know the NSA's power has been extensively abused with "SEXINT" (stealing people's private photos for personal enjoyment and likely blackmail), JTRIG (discrediting people not accused or suspected of any crime), PRISM (monitoring every communication via to/from data and other private data), not to mention others.

None of these things relate to foreign espionage or generalized signals intelligence. Snowden said it himself: the NSA is only about SIGINT in their press releases. Really, their purpose is social control and consolidation of power. Their spying does not stop at members of the public or foreign publics; whistleblower Russ Tice said long before Snowden that the NSA had a tap on Barack Obama as early as 2004.

<comment><USER4> Nice to see someone else remember what Russ Tice said. He wasn't even a Senator yet when Russ said the papers came across his desk. That means that they are targeting any potential political candidate of any note.

I would just like to remind everyone that surveillance is about control, not security. Some may claim it's security through control, but that's not the social contract I was taught to understand my country worked under.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands From the article:

 _" saying only that the operation had to have been sponsored by a nation- state with nearly unlimited resources to dedicate to the project."_

Hmmmmmm, you mean like Russia or China?

 _" malware developers endeavor to scrub usernames, computer IDs, and other text clues from the code they produce. While the presence of the "BACKSNARF" artifact isn't conclusive proof it was part of the NSA project by that name, the chances that there were two unrelated projects with nation-state funding seems infinitesimally small."_

Ironic considering this is almost the same scenario people were using in the Sony hack. Saying the code was similar in other attacks used by North Korea while most of the Info Sec community was saying it didn't believe their findings since malware can be reused, shared and distributed - but apparently all that goes out the window in this case?

I'm starting to have NSA fatigue for this stuff.

Kaspersky seems to be the only player actively trying to tie EVERYTHING they find to the NSA. While most of the stuff (flame, stuxnet) have been confirmed by other companies, I'm starting to wonder if Kaspersky has an axe to grind here as well - his ties to the FSB and the Russian government are well documented.

I'm not dismissing this out of hand, but I'm starting to take a lot of their claims with a few grains of salt.

<comment><USER5> Nothing in your post is in line with reality. You've cherry picked statements out of context to imply that they are not exclusive to the NSA, ignoring the smoking guns that were presented and failing to link them. There is simply no question that this is USG malware, and you'll notice that Kaspersky, who, no, does not have extensive ties to the FSB and Russian government, actually stops short of attribution, unlike pretty much everyone else.

[http://eugene.kaspersky.com/2012/07/25/what-wired-is-not- tel...](http://eugene.kaspersky.com/2012/07/25/what-wired-is-not-telling-you- a-response-to-noah-shachtmans-article-in-wired-magazine/)

<comment> at-fates-hands >>> Nothing in your post is in line with reality.

Except that part about Kaspersky. Or do you not believe the Wired article from 2012?

[http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/](http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/)

 _" Kaspersky's rise is particularly notable—and to some, downright troubling—given his KGB-sponsored training, his tenure as a Soviet intelligence officer, his alliance with Vladimir Putin's regime, and his deep and ongoing relationship with Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB. Of course, none of this history is ever mentioned in Cancun."_

I'm also glad you actually read my entire post before gang banging your keyboard with your response. I said I don't dismiss this outright, but I've become somewhat skeptical of Kaspersky. He's done a good job exposing NSA activities while seemingly turning a blind eye to Russian state hacking activities. I think its fair to ask why he's catching all these NSA sponsored groups, but was totally silent about a Russian group of hackers who have had access to our critical infrastructure since 2011:

[http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/6/russian- hacke...](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/6/russian-hackers- trojan-horse-malware-inside-us-cri/)

Or maybe the JPMorgan Chase hack?

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/10/04/jpmo...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/10/04/jpmorgan- chase-cyberattack-russians/16717499/)

Again, like I said in my post (which you clearly didn't read) I'm getting NSA fatigue. If other Info Sec companies came out and said they had found these, in my eyes, they would have more credibility than Kaspersky. It just seems like the only stuff he finds are NSA tools and I have to consider his background before I jump up and say this is a smoking gun. Similarities? Yes. Like I said in my post, this is the same thing other Info Sec people dismissed about the Sony Hack, why can't I use the same argument here?

You want a smoking gun? Get the president to admit it like he did with Stuxnet:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-cyberattacks-us- israeli...](http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-cyberattacks-us-israeli- against-iran-2012-6)

 _" Administration officials revealed to Sanger that the Stuxnet virus was developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Israel's Unit 8200 (i.e. Israel's secretive cyber arm) to "become the attacker from within" Iran's nuclear facilities."_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It should be extremely clear: the NSA should be expected - and I don't know of anyone outside of anarchist circles who doesn't expect - to have extremely sophisticated targeting operations for espionage.

While I fully support limiting the mass surveillance, stopping the NSL practice, and indiscriminate data collection being performed (along with other Star Chamber-esque behaviors), it is pure folly to expect targeted spying to be limited technically or not take place. It's simply too valuable to be able to monitor $espionage_target's computations.

<comment><USER7> Simply put, I don't want the NSA to exist at all. Does that ensure that I run in "anarchist circles" in your mind? I don't think my view is far from the mainstream on this matter - many reasonable people are for abolition.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, yes, I would say that abolishing State espionage departments is right along anarchist thinking. It's been well known for centuries that gentlemen in the government business read each others mail as a matter of course.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. In some important ways, I probably am an anarchist. I don't believe in smashing the state, but I do believe that the internet will inevitably provide peaceful replacements for the various components of state, and that this will be a joyous motion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this really a big deal?

They were doing exactly what NSA was supposed to do. We moved from NSA should not spy on everyone to NSA should be toothless ...

<comment><USER9> The scope of these activities, especially when combined with the NSA's (and GCHQ's) indiscriminate "hack everything" attitude. When the NSA attacks so much infrastructure - including standards they are _supposed_ to be supporting - at some point they start creating a _reasonable doubt_ about the true actors behind _any_ network attack.

This could have various consequences, but one obvious one is how it affects a jury. It would probably be a lot easier to conclude there is a _reasonable doubt_ the accused did _not_ commit some type of computer or network crime when the NSA is attacking so much infrastructure. If the NSA was known to be targeting legitimate targets with _limited, targeted_ activities that did not affect everybody else, the doubt that any random computer crime could have been the NSA's responsibility would not be reasonable.

<comment><USER10> It's unlikely that someone who knows about this would serve on a jury in a computer crime case, or that evidence of NSA activities would be admitted in trial.

<comment><USER9> Juries don't know about a lot of topics. In an adversarial system, it is the responsibility of the each party to _inform_ the judge and jury what is relevant to the case.

<comment><USER10> Hence the second half of my comment:

> or that evidence of NSA activities would be admitted in trial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Governments spy on their own and other countries citizens.

If you want your data secure and private, use and develop systems to allow that (pgp for start)

</comment><comment><USER12> I found the use of the term "nation-states" to be interesting. They use it in contrast to cybercriminals, but I would imagine that there's a large gap between (relatively) paltry cybercriminal activity and full on nation-states.

<comment><USER13> Blah blah Hobbes. Blah blah you puny humans would otherwise be "in a state of nature." Accept your illusion of freedom and shut up. Signed, Levi A. Than.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would have no problem with the NSA creating crazy intrusive hacking tools if public citizens were allowed to do the same.

If a regular person created tools such as what the NSA made they would get in a heap of trouble, even if they did nothing with them.

If the NSA does it; it's ok? This is the kind of logic that leads to abuses of power. Government are just people, and they are just as likely if not more likely than the average person to abuse their power.

</comment><comment><USER15> It would be interesting to shift the discussion a bit.

What does the government need to protect users and corporations from that sort of hacking ? Is the government's role only to attack or in what levels can it help safeguard our online activities ?

Once the NSA global spying was revealed I was hoping to see more reports of governments finding and shutting down the monitoring probes that surely need to be installed.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not an astroturfer or an apologist here. I've never had any employment connection with NSA or any other intelligence agency of any government. I'm a United States citizen who has spent six years of my adult life living outside the United States. I'll agree with a previous lower-level comment here that it is possible to publicly protest NSA abuses (as I did, with my whole family, in view of news media cameras and police officers in downtown Minneapolis on the Restore the Fourth protest evening in 2013) while still thinking that the United States must, in an imperfect world, have a national signals intelligence agency with powerful tools. Individual computer users--all over the world--ought to have access to powerful tools to ensure private communications and to prevent black-hat hacking of their data or their computers, but I'm also happy for governments to be informed (within strict legal limits) about what's going on in the rest of the world, because that kind of background knowledge actually builds trust and realistic levels of doubt, and helps prevent hasty decisions to go to war or to promote state- sponsored terrorism. The world system has been more stable and less lethal to the common people of the world with strong national intelligence agencies (especially strong national intelligence agencies operated by democratic governments) than it was with weak intelligence capabilities that let countries surprise their adversaries more often.

Anticipating a comment that comes up in threads like this most of the time on Hacker News, I will mention why I am not overly afraid of NSA controlling the whole country by blackmailing politicians. I don't believe NSA blackmail can or will happen in general, for reasons I have mentioned before here on HN. One of the most common kinds of comments here on Hacker News about issues like this is a comment that ASSUMES that if government leaders are under pervasive surveillance they are all afraid of blackmail. But I don't believe that, because some government leaders and some political candidates are essentially shameless. Even after they are caught (by old-fashioned journalism, or by a jilted lover or some unrelated criminal investigation) doing something unsavory, they are still willing to run for office, and SOME ARE REELECTED. United States Senator David Vitter was reelected in 2010 even after a scandal involving behavior that I would consider shameful,[1] and the antics of former DC mayor Marion Barry[2] are probably still notorious enough that they don't need further discussion here. In short, I call baloney on the idea that NSA can keep politicians on its leash simply by knowing their secrets. Some politicians have PUBLIC lives full of dirt, and still get elected and influence policy anyway.

The other reason I don't believe this HN hivemind theory of politics is that I by no means assume that everyone in politics lacks personal integrity. Some politicians, I am quite sure, could have all their secrets revealed only to have voters think "Why is that person such a straight-arrow? Why not have some fun once in a while?" The simple fact is that there is value system diversity in the United States electorate, and there is personal conduct probity variance among United States politicians, and there isn't any universal way to unduly influence politicians merely through even the most diligent efforts to discover personal secrets. If politicians think that NSA is going too far (as evidently several politicians from more than one party do think), then they will receive plenty of support from the general public to rein in the surveillance. (Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I am a lawyer, who as a judicial clerk for my state's Supreme Court used to review case files on attorney misconduct, and, yes, some of my law school classmates are elected officials, including one member of Congress. I am absolutely certain that there are enough politicians ready to mobilize to roll back NSA surveillance programs if they really think the programs are excessive in their scope.)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter#D.C._Madam_scanda...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter#D.C._Madam_scandal)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry#1990_arrest_and_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry#1990_arrest_and_drug_conviction)

<comment><USER17> "I am absolutely certain that there are enough politicians ready to mobilize to roll back NSA surveillance programs if they really think the programs are excessive in their scope."

This seems a very paternalistic view of politics that assumes politicians inherently know better than the public and that the people here are overblowing the dangers of NSA surveillance. I can imagine an alternate universe where there was no one like Snowden to make public the breadth of surveillance and the system was allowed to run unchecked. Isn't it a worrying sign that the system of checks and balances required a whistleblower? Before that, the government was writing laws that were eroding privacy without the knowledge and input of the public. That's not how things are meant to work in a democracy.

<comment><USER18> We lived in that universe for a long time before the leaks, and many people still live in that universe today, either out of ignorance or apathy. How are they worse off for it?</comment></comment></comment>


Embryo-inspired bandage is 17 times stickier than a Band-Aid - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/embryo-inspired-bandage-17-times-stickier-band-aid <comment><USER2> What a terrible headline. It completely misses the point, which is stated in the first sentence of the article:

"Inspired by the superfast wound closing process in human embryos, a new, Jell-O–like wound dressing can contract in response to the skin's heat, drawing the edges of wounds together for quicker, safer healing."

It's not the stickiness, is the contracting action in response to heat that matters. If stickiness were what mattered you could solve that with super glue. And in fact super glue can be and often is used to close wounds:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/health/04real.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/health/04real.html)

<comment><USER3> I was more bothered by the primary claim in the article: "Wounds closed halfway in less than 5 days versus a week or more for untreated wounds, the team reports today in Science Advances." There's a number of issues here.

The first --- which isn't unclear in the article but bears repeating --- is that the study was only done with mice. The new dressing helps artificial wounds in mice heal faster than when the wounds are untreated. The effect on humans (or maybe it's for veterinary use?) is implied, but untested.

Next, what's with the "less than 5 days" versus "a week or more" part? If the goal was accuracy rather than advertising, wouldn't it be better to compare a range against a range, or an average against an average, rather than an average against a worst case?

Finally, why is a comparison against an untreated control even mentioned? Presumably no one thinks that "no treatment" is the best treatment, so why not compare against something real, preferably the state of the art?

On the bright side, the actual paper (which to their credit is linked from the article) actually does this, and the apparent benefit gets smaller. Eyeing up the relevant chart in the paper ([https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw396...](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/7/eaaw3963/F6.large.jpg)), it looks like 50% wound closure is obtained in 4 days with the fancy dressing instead of 6 days with a version without the special ingredient. This is a perfectly respectable increase, which makes it even more disappointing that the article uses the "a week or more" phrasing.

Seemingly less reasonable is that the same chart also shows a chitosan treatment that has an even shorter time. There are some caveats that the measurements were done differently (no splint to retard skin contraction), and there are probably lots of reasons this might be better than something derived from shellfish, but the lack of mention of this in the article makes me conclude that it's an advertising fluff piece rather than a genuine attempt at accurate communication.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. The other interesting bit was how it could cost 1/1000 as much as the existing state of the art (pennies per bandage instead of $100s), which is pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would like to see the healing time compared with that of hydrocolloid[0] bandages. Anecdotally, I have found them to be very effective at speeding healing and minimizing scarring.

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

<comment><USER6> I've also found these pretty effective. I'm not sure if the hydrocolloid itself is that helpful, but the fact that the bandage seals and blocks moisture better definitely helps a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If interested there's a piece titled "A dressing that pulls wounds shut", which offers a deeper context, here: [https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/07/skin- dressing](https://harvardmagazine.com/2019/07/skin-dressing).

</comment><comment><USER4> Because bandaids aren't already painful enough to remove?

<comment><USER7> There could be some solvent that you use with it. Would be remarkably easy, too.

</comment></comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow Good luck getting it out...</comment>


HTML5 - Etiqueta Footer - <AUTHOR> http://codecriticon.com/html5-footer/ <comment><USER2> tl;dr - the footer tag can describe the footer of the document and/or the footer of a section.</comment>


Facebook Now Shares Phone Number & Address With Third-Party Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_now_shares_phone_number_address_with_thir.php

<comment><USER2> This article is already on the front page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2109972></comment>


A cry for help from a worrier?  - <AUTHOR> http://sorryiamtheuntitled.tumblr.com/post/66870102813/worry <comment><USER2> _Worrying is the interest paid on a debt that you may never owe._

After taking cognitive behavioural therapy, it really helped me to stop worrying. Preparation and organisation is a good way to combat excessive worrying.

<comment><USER3> Couldn't agree more, I posted this in another reply:

"Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere"

― Erma Bombeck [Also - Van Wilder - Party Liason]

</comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen You have two options!

1) Self Help Industry, multi-billion dollar industry preying on un-diagnosed mental health issues! Do you still bad? You're not trying hard enough!

2) Go see your doctor and look at treatment options. It sounds like an anxiety disorder. If you are losing sleep you need to seek help. Seek therapy and medication in combination ideally. Anxiety disorders can be treated with modern generation SSRIs like escitalopram that (generally) have mild side effects and ACTUALLY FUCKING HELP.

3) Listen to survival-biased startup founders who say you just gotta work harder to achieve your dreams. Hustle baby! Don't knock the hustle! You should worry about that shirt your wearing tomorrow it could cost you 100M in funding!

\---

OK, so point 2 is the only serious one I'm making, the other two are the facetious bullshit that people will recommend to you because they have never suffered mental illness and think they can talk you out of it. It's the most in-compassionate thing they could do. But hey, self righteousness feels great so you can't blame them more than you can blame a cocaine addict.

The best part of this whole situation is you are self-aware of your anxiety. It took me nearly 10 years to notice how it affected me.

At least in Australia we have state funded rebates on all this shit, and we can seek help and meds without it costing as much as a supercharged ford mustang would be on bad credit repayments, but the cost of not sorting it out can be significant, especially if you're working in tech.

I'm not going in to details of what it cost me, but it's in the realm of millions if I had been in a right mind and had the right advice in my 20s.

<comment><USER4> > The best part of this whole situation is you are self-aware of your anxiety. > It took me nearly 10 years to notice how it affected me.

I'd be interested in reading more about how you managed the whole thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One way to combat worrying is to realize what you're doing almost literally doesn't matter at all, in the grand scheme. So you may as well enjoy it.

Another technique that's very useful: Try everything. A friend calls this the "shotgun approach." You start by assuming there exists a way to eliminate your problem. Therefore, the more things you try, the more likely you are to hit on the thing that works for you. So the most optimal strategy for fixing your issue is to just keep trying a bunch of different ways to eliminate it till you've found your answer.

Just remember that this requires a completely open mind, since you can't fool yourself. Also keep in mind the most important fact, which is that everyone is different, so just because X worked for someone else doesn't mean it will work for you (even if it's a doctor's treatment). So don't get discouraged, just keep trying things. You're bound to find something that works.

<comment><USER6> It's important to have some way of distinguishing "problems" from things you have no control over, also. Some things you have to accept, which sometimes boils down to locating an incorrect assumption that you have about the world and invalidating it to yourself. You get to choose what you spend energy on, though.

<comment><USER7>
        accept the things I cannot change,
        the courage to change the things I can,
        and wisdom to know the difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm also a big worrier. Talk to the people around you; talk to a doctor. chrisacky mentioned cognitive behavioral therapy; it's really quite effective. Dialectical behavioral therapy was formulated for people with borderline personality disorder but is effective and useful for many people, if not everyone. Make sure you eat! Blood sugar is necessary to have a calm, collected mind.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anxiety as illustrated by this sort of plea is usually a symptom of an underlying mental health issue. And, like pretty much all health issues, it's eminently treatable. Talking therapies, counselling, journalling, and drugs all help. Talk to a doctor.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anxiety disorders affect over 40 million Americans. You are not alone.

Yet fewer than 10% will find adequate treatment. Simply speaking out is the first step to combating the symptoms. Treat this like any bacterial infection or virus. It requires dedicated strategies and medical professionals can help. So too can simply writing your feelings down, talking to friends and family, and good sleep and proper nutrition. Again, consider this a cold or flu whose time will pass with proper treatment.

The challenge is determining the triggers and actively combating them. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is terrible branding but it is as effective at treating excessive anxiety as well as prescription medications. Therapy can mean talking to friends and family - some of the best people in our lives are there for times like these.

Please keep speaking about your concerns. The more you do so, the more you will face and conquer them.

</comment><comment><USER11> See a Doctor. There are drugs for that. I also found "The Tao of Pooh" and "The Power of Now" to be exceptionally helpful books.

<comment><USER3> Please don't see a doctor who will prescribe drugs. Cut out the middle man and see a Councillor that actually wants to solve your [perceived] problem in a cognitive way.

The problem is a state of mind and can be solved without drugs.

"Worry is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere"

― Erma Bombeck

<comment><USER12> A lot of mental health problems can be managed without pharmaceuticals, but since all we know about this person is that they worry a lot, it's extremely presumptuous to diagnose based on that. If the underlying problem is severe depression or bipolar disorder or crippling OCD, then a drug intervention is most likely prudent, at least temporarily. But that's a decision for a licensed professional to make.

<comment><USER3> Reading back my reply may come across as flippant [hence the down votes] - that wasn't my intention. having been through depression myself; I was given the option of drugs to 'help me sleep' and 'help me relax' \- this was far from what I needed.

As you say - we have no idea if there is an underlying 'problem' and as such HN is not really the place to seek this type of advice.

<comment><USER12> > HN is not really the place to seek this type of advice.

Well, a cry for help isn't really a request for advice, it's just an alarm. There's good and bad advice in the thread, so hopefully some of the good made it to this person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yep, see a therapist and talk about this. Any therapist. The important thing is to mention this to someone in real life and get the ball rolling.

</comment><comment><USER14> This sounds a lot like you are suffering from social anxiety. It's a common and widespread mental disease and is usually treated with CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) and/or antidepressants. Some studies show that regular endurance exercise like running also helps. Do not wait for it to go away, that rarely happens, usually the anxiety gets worse over time.

</comment><comment><USER15> I used to be the very same but what really changed me, and it genuinely did, was thinking about the insignificance of the world, of everything in our lives and everyone in them. We are on a tiny little rock, orbiting one of billions of stars in the galaxy, which is itself one of millions and billions of galaxies. And we're all playing this silly little game. So next time you're worried about going to an interview say, or meeting someone you've never met before just think utterly meaningless it all is. It sounds overly simplistic, but really the attitude to have is: who gives a shit? (Note: This most certainly does not to apply to everyone and if you have chronic anxiety, it's often a lot more complex than this and you ought to see a Dr.)

<comment><USER16> > who gives a shit?

The problem with this line of thinking is, that you might ask yourself: why should I give a shit about life at all?

What is than the point of life?

I'm not saying, that the "universal" perspective can't help sometimes, but you have to be careful how you apply it.

<comment><USER17> Also if you didn't worry at all, you would have a different mental issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quite honestly, this sounds like a classic case of OCD. I'm not going to be the idiot who tries to diagnose you, but I've dealt with mild anxiety issues, and my sister has OCD.

It will help you to understand yourself. Take the time and the money, and go see a psychologist, or at the very least go see a doctor. I didn't need medicine to overcome my anxiety, but my sister did.

The behavior you describe of needing to get your things ready for the next day is particularly similar to mild OCD behavior. Something is causing you to obsess, and you respond with a compulsion to fix the obsession (so your worry is relieved).

It is not only common to experience these things - about 18% of American adults suffer with some kind of anxiety disorder [0] - it is also very well documented and studied. Other people who have dealt with similar issues will be the first to tell you that there is a bright end of a tunnel.

A few things that helped me when I dealt with it:

\- Exercise, every day. Often, this was really the most effective means of relieving the tension, and it actually helped me avoid the onset in the first place. \- Invest your time into doing something meaningful. When I say meaningful, I mean something that helps another human. This helped me reduce my introspective obsession, and instead focus on other people and how I can help make the world better. \- Go outside. Staying inside will limit the stimulation to your mind, and your mind won't have the imperative of processing new and exciting information; instead, it will take shortcuts (you likely know everything about your own living space) and the energy you have will be easily focused back on the worrying aspects of your life. \- See a doctor.

Once again, take everything I have to say with a grain of salt; I am not qualified to give you advice or definitive statements beyond my own experiences.

[http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/anxiety- disorder...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/anxiety- disorders/index.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER19> You _are_ not _a worrier_ , you are a person who worries. Disconnect your behavior from your essence and it will be easier to change a problematic behavior without the much more scary proposition of "changing yourself".

</comment><comment><USER20> It helps to learn techniques to calm the mind and at times, completely shut it off. I'd recommend a good book on meditation. This might sound like a cliche. But, it doesn't hurt to spend half an hour for a few days finishing this book and see if that changes anything for you. [http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness- practical-guide-peace-fran...](http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-practical- guide-peace-frantic-ebook/dp/B005NJ2T1G/). Or you could browse around for books on similar topic and find one that appeals you.

It is helping me reduce my stress levels.

</comment><comment><USER21> I second some of the other comments who suggest seeing a doctor. I'm assuming the author is a student, since a degree is specifically mentioned, and in that case, most campuses have a central service for health issues and/or psychological issues. Many also have "helplines", which can be called anonymously and might be able to give further advice depending on the locality.

Worrying (or, more generally, anxiety), panic attacks etc. are not uncommon in universities, so many places are equipped (and used) to offer help. Make use of the facilities available!

</comment><comment><USER22> Are there two levels of worry?

One is within the usual bounds of brain chemistry, and can be beaten by preparation and perspective.

The other is outside usual bounds, and is really a mental health issue.

It seems like saying, "We're just a small piece of the universe" to someone with a mental health issue is similar to saying "Just cheer up" to someone chronically depressed. It may help in case 1 but not case 2.

I'm not an expert, but I've seen people with true mental health problems, and solutions that work for the masses don't work for them.

I'm concerned about the author of the article.

<comment><USER23> The multiple levels is a good comment but I'd suggest a inside/outside analysis.

I did almost the same stuff the author did last night, getting everything ready. Its just my way, "be prepared" and all that. The outside actions don't matter.

The inside is the problem. I felt awesome last night putting my keys where they belong and thinking about lunch today. Wednesday is gonna be a great day, and so far, so good. However, author did the same external stuff and felt terrible. And that's the problem. Not that he couldn't sleep till he got his fairly reasonable preps done; I can't sleep either, but I feel fine about it.

"I'm concerned about the author of the article."

HN isn't gonna fix it, so superficially this is useless on HN other than a human interest story.

"I live in constant fear of failing."

Author needs to crash hard, dust off, and keep going. Worried about failure? Give it a try, its not so bad. And this is the HN and/or startup lesson for the story, which does make the story relevant to HN. Being scared to fail means you'll probably never succeed. Go ahead, do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> writings that help me (to limited degrees):

Desiderata by Max Ehrmann [http://mwkworks.com/desiderata.html](http://mwkworks.com/desiderata.html) Marcus Aurelius: Meditations [http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.1.one.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.1.one.html)

A couple of important thoughts:

-You're not the first to go through this feeling; great, successful people feel (or have felt) this way. Worrying is badly executed caring about yourself, and it's better that than to not care at all. Don't beat yourself up about it. You've already decided you want to change, don't beat yourself up about needing time to do that.

\- Life will go on with or without you feeling okay about it. Every moment you spend thinking about some way you want the world to be different is a moment you didn't spend doing whatever it is you want to do with your life. Your life is your own, and whether it feels like it or not, you are choosing to worry, and you can choose not to. There are a great many things you cannot change in this world, and it's unfair to yourself to worry about them. You CAN change your thoughts and behaviors, so change them to however you think a great person would think and behave. There is nothing that is more worth doing with your time.

-be easy on yourself; laugh about it. it'll pass into "what the hell was my problem with that" much quicker.

</comment><comment><USER25> Was typing this out on Tumblr and the "Ask" text box ran out of characters:

Found your "Worry" post on Hacker News. I am also a chronic worrier. I blow things out of proportion in my head and get paranoid of people's perspectives of me, my progress, growing up, etc. What helped me was something my cognitive behavioral therapist suggested, which was to always ask myself, "Okay, [worse case scenario] happens. Then what? And then what? And _then_ what?" At the time I was going through a lot of anxiety and panic from just graduating. My thinking went along these lines:

"What if I just fuck up at work and totally mess up my first opportunity straight out of college and then start back at zero-- no, I'd start in the red because now I have no experience AND I have a termination under my belt. I'd be fucked." "And then what'll happen?" "I'll have to continue living at my mom's, go through the hell of depression and job hunting." "And then what'll happen?" "And then I just get stuck in a stagnant job hunt just like last time that'll take forever." "And then what?" "Hm ... I guess I'll just keep job hunting and maybe get a few interviews here and there .. but augh, I'd probably fuck that up too. I hate rejection." "And then what?" "Well, I guess I could start working on some projects that have been on my mind while I keep hunting high and low..."

After a long throng of this, I eventually concluded that I would:

1\. EVENTUALLY land a job SOMEWHERE, even if it's not ideal, thus ending my unemployment. I figured I could start there and build up experience so I could launch my career forward using what I've got.

2\. I could get at least a couple of back burner projects done and checked off-- that would give me a sense of accomplishment, I would learn a lot form the experience, and maybe even turn the projects into something.

3\. Hell, maybe if I picked myself up at work, I could reverse myself and do better at my current job and not even have to face this ordeal.

The outcomes can go in so many directions. The point of the exercise is to mentally go through these "horrible scenarios" to the end-- what we USUALLY do is imagine ourselves in the midst of the chaos and panic ... but we never take it to the very END, where we eventually get over it, find some solution, or forget all about it. This is applicable even in extreme cases. After all, people do suffer abuse and loss and eventually get through it. You can too. Good luck to you in your journey.

</comment><comment><USER12> Like everybody's saying, talk to a professional about this. You're going through something extreme but still relatively common, and you need not suffer in silence.

Your school probably has counseling available, they'll be able to get you started on fixing yourself. Failing that, talk to a doctor. Failing that, there's probably a mental health hotline you can call to get started.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER26> When I find myself worrying too much, I take a walk. I find that being _away_ from my worries helps me work through them more easily.

</comment><comment><USER27> Exercise until you can't do anything but sleep

<comment><USER28> This wouldn't actually solve the problem. At best it's one way to hack around one of its symptoms - and a much harder one than just packing lunch and laying out the clothes. Not to mention that right after a lot of exercise is a terrible time to sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I had panic disorder, which eventually led to me not ever leaving the house out of fear and worry, and many sleepless nights. I tried many things (e.g. medication, etc..), but the one thing that finally truly helped was meditation, specifically a 10-day vipassana meditation retreat: [http://dhamma.org](http://dhamma.org)

</comment><comment><USER30> This _free_ e-book 'The Flinch' might help to put things in perspective. "What are you afraid of? Here's how to find out."

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Flinch-Julien-Smith- ebook/dp/B0062...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Flinch-Julien-Smith- ebook/dp/B0062Q7S3S)

</comment><comment><USER31> Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself. Could a sense of dignity help you feel right in your place and at peace with your circumstances? What do you need to say no to?

</comment><comment><USER32> 1\. There's nowhere NEAR enough information in the text to start diagnosing, so beware of wrong assumptions and bad advice.

2\. There's an opaqueness around the post that doesn't inspire trust.

</comment><comment><USER33> When I'm not rested, my mind can play tricks on me. The annoying thing is that being anxious can prevent you from sleeping, which can sometimes be all that is needed to park anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm sorta the same. What helped me was my partner.

</comment><comment><USER35> You should post this on 4chan. They'll tell you what people on this site are actually thinking.

</comment><comment><USER36> What is your diet like? Sounds like you might have low serotonin levels. In your diet do you get enough tryptophan? Consider supplementing it. I also second the suggestion for meditation.</comment>


How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on? - <AUTHOR> https://lemire.me/blog/2017/11/24/how-often-do-superior-alternatives-fail-to-catch-on/ <comment><USER2> Multiple dimensions.

The common theme why people get confused about "superior" products not winning boils down to ignoring the _multiple dimensions_ of quality. A product's _overall_ "superiority" is a single score that compresses multiple scores of the various attributes of the product. If one is ignorant (or discounts the value) of the other dimensions, he will be perplexed why the supposedly "inferior" solution won.

E.g. I never understood why bicycles didn't beat out cars. Bicycles are obviously superior because:

\+ narrow profile can squeeze through tight alleys or even heavily treed forests that cars can reach

\+ requires no fossil fuel that emits pollution

\+ costs less than 1/100th the price of a car

\+ easily repaired by homeowners in the garage because no computers

\+ etc, etc

That fixation on those attributes causes the confused person to totally miss the _other positive attributes_ of the car:

\+ travel faster than 25 mph with minimum physical exertion

\+ typical size car can carry 5 adults which is ~1000 pounds of weight

\+ carry entire week's worth of groceries (~10 bags)

\+ occupants don't get wet when when it rains

If one doesn't understand the _all the multidimensions_ of qualities and weigh them in an objective manner that's detached from personal preferences, he'll always be confused why "superior" USENET lost to "inferior" Reddit, or why "superior" Lisp lost the popularity contest to "inferior" C++/Java/Python/Go/etc, or why Mac OS 9 lost to Windows NT.

Likewise, there were multidimensional factors to Betamax vs VHS and "picture quality" was only one of them.

<comment><USER3> I agree with everything you said, but you can also go too far in that direction of analysis. If you let the empirical gain in traction to sneak in as a factor in your analysis, you effectively have a tautology, and you lose all predictive power, similar to the misuse of the phrase "survival of the fittest," where you conclude that variant A was "clearly" more "fit" than variant B because A survived and B didn't.

It's still important to recognize that a variant might "win" because of factors completely unrelated to its "fitness," like an organization using its market power in an unrelated sector to promote its variant, or even just good old fashioned dumb luck.

<comment><USER4> So how do we decide if qwerty or dvorak is fitter?

<comment><USER5> I've often wondered why alphabetical order isn't the default on phones. Given that most of the population that uses phones didn't learn to type.

It really bothers me actually.

<comment><USER6> People know the alphabet as a one-dimensional object. Unless your keyboard has 26 keys all in order, the multiple rows don't correspond to an existing mental model. At that point, you can either choose qwerty, which pleases anyone who already knows it, or you can make a sort-of alphabetical layout, which pleases nobody.

I'd be curious about your statement the most people who use phones didn't learn to type. Is that for a particular age group? Alternatively, for the developing world, where phones are more common than computers? I'm having difficulty seeing the justification for the statement.

<comment><USER5> If you know the alphabet you can easily guess where the keys will be. (In a alphabetically ordered keyboard)

Do you believe that most people who use phones know how to type?

<comment><USER6> If the keys are laid out in a 1x26 keyboard, yes. If the keys are laid out in a more usable way, then no. If I can see the key 'j', I cannot guess whether 'm' will be to the right or left of it, without knowing the length of the row, and considering it at all times.

I would describe today's society as one in which typing is necessary for any basic tasks, and is universal, and so I don't see why smartphone users would be different from the norm in terms of typing ability. Are you using "typing" to refer only to "touch typing"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a drug used to treat a form of eye disease that causes blindness. The product, eylea, has dominated the market despite (until recently) having no evidence that it improves vision vs the competition, provides no significant improvement on other relevant clinical endpoints, had no major safety benefit, and it is priced at a comparable or higher level than all competitors

A development stage product had shown better potential for vision improvement without major safety concerns, but when I interviewed physicians to ask whether they'd still prescribe eylea if this "better" drug was approved. They unanimously, without hesitation, said they'd prescribe eylea

Why would doctors treat eye disease with a product that does a worse job of treating eye disease? Why would patients accept a treatment that does not optimally restore their vision? There was nothing in the clinical literature to suggest this made sense. This must be a case of a large, established pharma company playing dirty, maybe bribing doctors or brainwashing patients with tv ads

The reality is that eylea required fewer doses than the competing products. For this drug, dosage means injection in the eye with a big needle. Further, physicians don't get paid more for doing an additional dose, so for them it's lost revenue. Turns out the incremental vision improvement does not offset the benefits of less frequent dosing

Getting this insight is not a feat of data analysis or scientific brilliance, but simply talking to customers. And getting this right, in this case, means winning a $4-5 billion market

</comment><comment><USER8> As people have said already, you need to define what criteria you are using when you say something is "superior". On HN, there seems to be a divide between engineers who measure a product by its engineering quality vs. business folk who define product quality by its market success. They are not always the same thing. The reason "inferior" products succeed is because they may have some killer features desired by the market, or better tech support, or better sales and marketing -- in other words, the business quality beats out technical problems. Ideally, you'd have high quality in both areas, but that isn't reality in most organizations.

<comment><USER3> But you're dangerously close there to having no predictive power. Business folk may rightly judge a product by its market success, but some business folk need to decide where to invest resources in building _new_ products. Hindsight is 20/20, and of course products that are widely viewed as having poor engineering quality can succeed and even dominate a market, for a variety of reasons.

But that doesn't provide much evidence to support the claim that, when developing a new product, engineering quality doesn't matter. Sure, we can take the fatalistic view that new product development is an unguided process like biological evolution, where we will only know which random mutations were successful when we observe their prominence many generations down the line. But clearly most people act as if they believe they can do better than uniform random (i.e. investors generally don't invest the exact same amount in every new company or product they can find).

<comment><USER7> You typically don't try to "predict", you just learn about customers' wants and needs and solve for those. Why try to guess what attributes are important in a product when you can just ask / test

<comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, product development is still guided, at the bare minimum by the ability of humans to predict other humans' preferences based on an assumption of similarities between humans' minds. I'm not aware of any product development that is intentional truly random, other than perhaps some details like the color of a button.

<comment><USER8> Are you saying that talking to your customers, and solving for their needs is "random"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People usually do confuse popularity with merit. They are in fact, two completely different, and often fairly unrelated, characteristics. The keyboard that happens to have the most market share is the most popular one. It is not the superior one.

Start with the example of the top ten most popular pieces of music at the time. Do we generally conclude that these are the most meritorious musical compositions of the moment? Or are they popular because they happen to be catchy, or just raunchy enough to play on our base desires but not enough to be censored, or because the distributor has a deal to continuously play the song on the radio?

QWERTY is still popular mainly just because of momentum. At the time it came out many decades ago, it had some nice utility. But clearly the core idea of slowing down typing became outdated long ago. But when it comes down to it, learning a new keyboard is not easy.

To switch to a new way of doing things does not depend on having a better way. I believe it depends on some type of social networking effects and chance. For example, if several celebrities suddenly decide to create a Twitter campaign about the evils of QWERTY and incredible qualities of DVORAK, then it for some reason came standard in a new hot electronic device that happened to be trendy among teenagers, perhaps we would see a significant market switch.

This is one thing that I have noticed about some posts on HN. People will come on and say that their startup failed, and then come up with a list of rationalizations blaming various material qualities of their product or service. In most cases I believe this is quite an incorrect interpretation of events. They usually have a perfectly good or often superior product, which simply did not catch on. So I think that things like marketing are quite key to becoming popular, but again, being popular or not doesn't substantiate or unsubstantiate the quality of the product.

<comment><USER10> The quantifiable improvement and cost benefit is also important. Dvorak shows on average a 1-2% benefit to typing speed, which is basically not worth the time and effort lost to learning a new layout.

<comment><USER3> I don't even think that learning a new layout is the dealbreaker. I think the dealbreaker is that, no matter how you work, you will occasionally need to use a computer with a standard keyboard layout. It may not be very often at all (the last time I used a random computer was an on-site programming interview with the company's PC, and that was a text editing disaster despite my familiarity with QWERTY, though I still got an offer), but it's probably often enough that it's not worth the small potential gains of another keyboard layout.

Of course, now that I present that argument, I realize it could be applied to text editors shortcuts and plugins, which I have customized extensively on all my main development machines. That said, I almost never do any significant coding on random machines, so the cost/benefit analysis might work out in my favor (I certainly behave as if it does). I also remap all my Caps Lock physical keys to Control/Command, which is pretty common among programmers but very rare among non-programmers. That's another case where my gut says that the small rare inconveniences of using random computers are outweighed by my regular productivity increases.

However, I don't have any actual data on this, so it turns out my argument in the first paragraph of this comment is really just a guess. I do intuitively feel like QWERTY to Dvorak is a much more significant alteration than Caps Lock to Ctrl or some customized hotkeys in my text editor of choice.

<comment><USER11> People can also cope with switching from different setups if trained well enough in both, which should not be too surprising. Eg: shortcuts in vim vs native editor shortcuts, scroll direction, one key swap.. It's even possible for full blown keyboard layouts. I type using QWERTY and Colemak both on a regular basis, although I've not tested how long I can go without a layout to retain it, but forgetting is harder than relearning in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It depends what you mean by superior.

If you mean superior in a technical sense (which unfortunately seems to be all a lot of startups and engineers focus on), then obviously there are tons of instances where 'superior' alternatives fail to catch on, simply because the 'superior' alternatives lack the non technical benefits of the older products or services.

Like how a new social network might be more decentralised and censorship resiliant than Facebook, but lack the community/userbase that makes Facebook valuable to begin with. Or how a CMS system might be better coded than WordPress, but have a UI that people find more awkward to use (or an install process that's overly tedious/annoying for non technical folk).

In that sense, a lot of superior alternatives fail to catch on simply because for all the 'objective' improvements they make, they just don't do what people need them to actually do. A community site or social network doesn't need the best codebase possible, a long laundry list of features or a censorship resistent setup, it needs a big enough community/userbase to get people invested in it.

Of course, even when all factors do line up... well, that doesn't exactly guarantee the alternative with succeed either. People aren't robots, and don't choose every action to be as rational as possible. The difference between two competitors can just as easily come down to pure luck, some perceived emotional connection, timing or anything else, not necessarily the quality of the product or organisation behind it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Often, because in the calculation of the provider, one factor never appears. Training-time, if a superior tool comes along, making it necessary to retrain to do the same work, its not superior, its inferior until the gain is so big that the productivity loss is visible to the customer.

That is why even with superior software it is necessary to add a "Legacy"-user interface, that allows for a easy switch from old software, while at the same time retraining people to use the new interface. This changes the transition costs.

</comment><comment><USER14> There are lots of examples. For example a base 12 number system is superior to a base 10 one. Esperanto is strictly easier to learn than English and so would make for a better lingua franca than English does.

What doesn't happen very often is that the market chooses a worse technology when we each can individually benefit from picking the better one.

But the definition of "better" has to be right. Often things that are worse on one axis are better on another. See [https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is- better.html](https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) for a famous essay about the difference between what makes software good versus readily adopted.

<comment><USER15> Is Esperanto really easier to learn than English? I'm basing on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Grammar)

English uses 26 un-accented letters, which is easily the lowest common denominator for typewriters and computer text systems. Esperanto has 28 letters with one type of diacritic.

Esperanto has word inflections for case (e.g. subject vs. object) and more verb tenses than English. Are inflections really easier to use than having auxiliary words or relying on word order?

I think English became a lingua franca for a reason, because it has far fewer grammatical and orthographic features than other European languages like French, German, etc. I think Esperanto has more complex features of European languages than English.

<comment><USER14> For years the lingua franca was French. (In fact lingua franca is an Italian phrase meaning "French language".) And based on experience, I believe that French is easier to learn.

The transition to English only happened after the British Empire became economically and politically dominant. It retained its importance because as England declined, the USA became one of the two world superpowers.

The big win of English is not that it is easy to learn. We often have parallel words for the same thing (eg earth vs dirt). Words that would be related in any other language aren't (eg cow vs beef). Attempt to read [http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html](http://www.i18nguy.com/chaos.html) aloud if you need further convincing.

The big win is that the people you most want to talk to already speak it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A related thought based on my recent experience.

One of my teams is currently using a mesh colorization system for our game, which we developed in-house. E.g. we have a game level where each mesh is assigned some color ID, such as "primary accent" or "background1" (but not an actual RGB color); and there are color schemes which we can apply to the level according to these color IDs to get different looks.

The first version of the color scheme system was "clearly superior": it offered a lot more possibilities for assigning color schemes to meshes, but it needed about 80 color values for each color scheme.

The second version of the same system was "clearly inferior" \-- just 28 color values, and much less creative control over the resulting look of the level.

Guess which system was adopted? Right, the second, simple one. Despite offering less creative possibilities, the second system was smaller and thus could fit more easily into artists's heads, which produced better-looking results overall.

To sum up, "superior" is multidimensional. Dvorak can offer better typing speed, but it offers much less "habit compatibility" with existing keyboards in the real world, and thus is a worse time investment. Or, Haskell offers much better maintainability, refactorability and reliability, but dynamic languages offer faster time-to-market and easier-to-hire coders.

<comment><USER17> If you're a touch typist physical keyboard layout doesn't matter too much. Beyond ergonomics, at least.

On that note, I'm loving the increasing number of games that read the OS keyboard layout and display appropriate key mappings instead of assuming every gamer uses QWERTY (some games do even worse and don't use the key code but the mapped character forcing me to rebind keys or switch layouts).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For programmers, QWERTY is actually superior to DVORAK in my opinion. The US keyboard variant more specifically as most language designs have been influenced by how reachable each punctuation is to that specific layout. And with auto-complete, the alphabet placement is not that important.

Actually if we were to rethink the keyboard based on the frequency of usage, it might make sense to place all the punctuation a bit closer to the home row for programmer keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER19> When there's a new, far superior way of doing things, it _always_ catches on.

But usually there are several different versions of this new way, with slightly different properties, trade-offs and non-product features (like marketing, support, compatibility, price etc) - which of these wins out is a crap-shoot. That's why some companies, investors and customers back different versions... and the pragmatic ones wait for a market leader to emerge.

</comment><comment><USER20> To add a bit of insight to the conversation, beyond "it's a matter of more dimensions than one", which people have already commented on. This whole situation could also be seen from an economics perspective. Demand for a product, let's say a can of soda, is called "elastic" when customers will switch from one vendor to another purely based on price. If one vendor has a lower price than another, all customers, in this idealized model, will head directly to that place to buy their soda, leaving the more expensive one in the dust. In this situation, however, demand for the thing, keyboard layouts, is "inelastic". That means that the factor that we'd think would be the only property of keyboards to matter for customers, is not in fact all that matters. Another thing that affects whether they will switch is how long it will take to learn the new layout.

TLDR; demand for quality in keyboard layouts is inelastic. There are other variables in play. One of them is the fact that there is a lot of friction (in terms of setup, having to learn a new layout, etc) for customers to switch from one layout to another.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's true that there isn't necessarily much difference in typing speed between QWERTY and Dvorak layouts, for trained typists (even the same typist). However, we might say that we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we claim that Dvorak is technically not superior because weak studies showed little to no marginal improvement in a few particular metrics.

Modern work is a marathon of text entry, and in light of this I believe that what is technically important about a keyboard in the long run is not speed or even accuracy, but ergonomics. I won't make any general claims, because it seems like it's never been possible to study, but as an anecdote I can offer my own experience. I used to type on QWERTY until I had to stop due to repetitive strain. In the fifteen years since I switched to Dvorak I have never had a single day when I finished work feeling any pain in my hands, whereas this was almost an every-day occurrence with QWERTY. I can type for hours without stopping, without pain. The design of the keyboard makes it pleasurable to type in English. Words roll off the fingers of both hands in relaxing patterns. My hands move very little. It's nice, and I would suggest it as an option to anyone who types or programs a lot and is having trouble with their hands, not because I have any financial or personal stake in it, but because it really helped me and I care about the health of my fellow tech workers. I have seen a lot of people taken down by their hands, and I have also seen many people try some crazy gimmicks.

In the same space, not considering the placement of the letters on the keyboard, there is an even more absurd technical anachronism embedded in almost every single keyboard on the market, including virtual ones on our phones. The keys are positioned not in clean vertical rows, but offset as if they have mechanical arms behind them. This is pure path dependence, and there is no conceivable reason why we are stuck with it thirty years after mechanical typewriters fell out of use except that those who learned on a mechanical typewriter couldn't even imagine to design or test a different positioning of the keys. It's not just the weird zig-zag pattern of the position of the keys that is anachronistic. Why should the backspace and delete keys (which are so essential when we are typing in the flexible medium of digital text) be relegated to the far corner of the keyboard? (TypeMatrix presents an example of a modern reconceptualization of the layout. I'm not affiliated but I do enjoy their products.)

To summarize, I think that this article presents a rather limited (and even ad hominem) attack on the keyboard issue, with acknowledgment but little appreciation of the degree of path dependency in tech development. How can Dvorak be better if the research was flawed? This is not a complete answer.

Of course we are going to end up in suboptimal equilibriums, and together we should appreciate this if we ever want to get out of them.

<comment><USER22> Reason.com is a presenting a political argument more than a scientific one. Their goal is to promote free markets, not to accurately decide the best keyboard. Of course they'll cherry-pick data to avoid the appearance of market failure.

<comment><USER23> _> Why is the keyboard story receiving so much attention from such a variety of sources? The answer is that it is the centerpiece of a theory that argues that market winners will only by the sheerest of coincidences be the best of the available alternatives_

 _> Because first on the scene is not necessarily the best, a logical conclusion would seem to be that market choices aren't necessarily good ones_

By the way, the reason.com article also goes into an explanation of path dependence, which the grandparent mentions extensively.

<comment><USER24> The reason.com article inflates the significance of the QWERTY myth, and then claims that debunking it debunks path dependence, which, of course, it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While i agree with the sentiment that the supposedly superior product isn't actually that superior all the time, the given examples are a bit cherrypicking-ish. For example the BetaMax vs VHS comparison is about image quality, not length (and FWIW BetaMax could record 2 hours, but it is true that VHS thanks to its size could record more than that). Similarly the mammals vs birds comparison feels a bit stretchy - like calling a tomato salad a "fruit salad" because tomato is technically a fruit.

</comment><comment><USER26> I remember OS/2 was allegedly superior To Windows 95. But it failed because there were far fewer applications for it. IBM had to to pay Netscape to finally port their browser to it.

I used to say OS/2 was HALF an OS, as it was missing a very important half of the equation; all those annoying applications.

Plus I could never get it to stay installed on an IBM PC. I did it once, but never could do it a second time. So that third half of the equation was pretty weak too.

</comment><comment><USER27> I recommend that people take a look at "Diffusion of Innovations" Rodgers 1962 and all of the subsequent work since. It doesn't directly address usability and design, which I believe are also important, but it addresses it indirectly.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations)

</comment><comment><USER28> Why? Because context matters.

That is, for example, just because BetaMax had a superior Feature X doesn't mean that Feature X matters to enough people. That feature exists in a broader expectations + wants + needs "eco-system." That momentum can be very difficult to redirect once it gets rolling.

Yes, a unique / superior feature _might_ be what wins you the market but it's not always that simple.

</comment><comment><USER29> Whether it's a computer or a bar of soap, most things have so many aspects that even the experts can't agree, so A) All the damn time.

</comment><comment><USER30> I do think that superior alternatives will catch up eventually if they stay in the game long enough... The problem is that sometimes the window of opportunity can be suppressed for very long periods of time; sometimes several generations... Maybe even several centuries.

Great one-time success can create a protective buffer which allows inferior traits to persist through long periods of time.

</comment><comment><USER31> > It is often said that birds have far superior lungs than mammals. So mammals > are failures compared to birds…

I've never heard this argument once in my life, and Google doesn't come up with too much discussion on it beyond a few articles discussing the differences. This point struck me as a bit of a stretch, and the blog post itself is probably stronger without it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Microsoft became Microsoft because they were better at marketing/business in the technology industry, not because they were better at building and shipping technology.

Amiga workstations and Macs in the late 80s were way ahead of DOS's UX with its 640k RAM limits and poor CGA graphics capabilities. But they became the standard and caught up with the graphics and multimedia capabilities of the other two platforms 20 years later once they could invest into removing their technical debt.

In contrast, Amiga died a slow and painful death because of mismanagement and owner squabbles, even though they were used for much more than home gaming (real time TV station visuals) even into the early naughties. They were just much better than the alternatives. And ahead of its time as a technical platform and home PC.

<comment><USER24> The importance of the selection of Microsoft to provide the operating system for the IBM PC cannot be overemphasized. It was not the only thing that made Microsoft what it became (the decision to make Windows for PC-compatible computers, and to make decent business applications for it, were critical), but without the first step, it probably would not have been in a position to do what followed.

There is also path-dependence in IBM's decision to make the PC architecture open (as an attempt to grow it quickly despite being late to the party), which is what made Windows possible.

<comment><USER33> You touch on something that's a very important point: path dependence. There are a ton of both de jure and de facto technology standards that we are locked into at some level because they gained dominance at one point because of some combination of tech, marketing, industry dynamics, and more. Once Ethernet, USB, x86, or whatever gets established it's hard to kick it out for something else that is locally better.

This has become increasingly the case in much of the tech sector because of the increased importance of interoperability , ecosystems, and network effects. Conversely, you do see fairly rapid switching aware from online properties that aren't sticky because something new and shiny has come along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I agree

"Superior" has to be followed by: "superior to whom?" and "superior in what aspect?"

"X is better than Y" but X does not do what Y does then it's not superior if it won't solve a problem.

</comment><comment><USER35> UI has the big problem of power vs casual/noob user and everyone stars as a noob. There are good compromises, usually the power-user tool is hard to get in to and more efficient.

Similar for switching away from QWERTZ.

</comment><comment><USER36> Someone once told me that the porn industry played a part in the VHS/Betamax and Blu-Ray/HD DVD battles. While Betamax and HD DVD were technologically superior, utility drove adoption.

<comment><USER37> In what way was HD DVD _technologically_ superior? Unlike BetaMax, there's literally not a tech spec that it has a clear pronounced advantage with[0]. HD DVD couldn't even really be seen as the VHS of the 2000s, while it had price and some basic utility advantages (cheaper to produce), it didn't ever have the adoption (by the movie industry or by hardware manufacturers).

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definitio...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high_definition_optical_disc_formats)

<comment><USER38> Agreed, HD DVD was the cheaper and technologically inferior option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Important topic but strawman examples in many ways.

In most of the important cases, you will have never heard of what could have been.

Also, often the problem is that better ideas weren't developed as much as they could have been. That is, we look back and compare the inferior but dominant product that was revised and revised because of it's problems and dominance, and the superior but abandoned product in it's unimproved state, which is some sort of survivorship bias.

The OP has a point but it's exaggerated.

</comment><comment><USER40> The tipping point by Malcom Gladwell might have an extensive answer on this matter and is similar effect to epidemics.

</comment><comment><USER41> Professionality?

You can basically ship crap if you do it professionally.

</comment><comment><USER42> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better)

</comment><comment><USER43> Excellent post. It's short and doesn't waffle. It has a coherent idea and at least I learned something new.

<comment><USER44> Personally, if I may be crude, found the post to be too short and unsubstantiated. I can honestly not imagine this is a "serious" post by a professor (!). It's so short-sighted I don't even know where to begin.

My personal opinion is that "superior" often means "cheap as shit and I'm willing to compromise a lot of stuff".

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I believe that the 90-90 rule [1] proves that many superior alternatives will fail to catch on. If something is not revolutionary better, and has the potential to compete with a product, but has not been developed to the point of actual competitiveness, it will lose out.

Combine this with network effects, and it seems that it would be impossible for superior techs not to fail.

Take email headers as an example. They are objectively inefficient and hard to parse. Everyone agrees on that. But we still use them despite the obvious possibility of a better format. Why? Obvious network effect.

The 90-90 examples will be less obvious. You cannot easily tell which tech is better, until you have invested the same amount of effort developing all of them. Superior products will be more likely to eventually succeed in markets where such parallel development is justified. Currently, most speakers are made by gluing a permanent magnet to a piece of plastic or paper, and using an electromagnet to pull on the permanent one. Through parallel development, we now know, that we can make much much better speakers by making the membrane magnetic, by gluing copper traces onto it, or statically charging it. We can make objectively better sound with these lighter membranes which don't have a heavy permanent magnet glued to them. Slowly, expensive speakers and headphones are using the new tech, but most speakers sold sill use the inferior tech. The superior tech was developed parallel to the inferior one, only because speakers are such a large market, that this parallel development could be justified financially.

Now take braille displays. A much smaller market. We think that the current tech used in Braille displays is worse than a set of other techs. There isn't enough money for the parallel development, so despite the fact that alternative, probably superior, technologies exist, we haven't developed them to the point of competitiveness.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety- ninety_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule)

</comment><comment><USER46> Most of the time. Take a look at developer tools for instance:

jenkins,nagios,graphite,jmeter,mysql,postgresql,puppet,vagrant,virtualbox,mongodb,npm,docker,openvpn.

What all these software have in common. They are the most popular despite being poor products and often having notably superior competitors.

<comment><USER47> Your list makes no sense to me. PostgreSQL is a poor product with noticeably superior competitors? This is - how should I put it? - a niche opinion.

And besides, popularity is its own quality sometimes. NPM might not be the "best" but everything's on it so it's the most useful. A lot of devops people already know docker. If you need to hire, there's a deep pool to draw from. That counts for a lot.

<comment><USER48> I'm guessing he's referring to Oracle as the competitor.

<comment><USER47> Well that's unexpected! I'm aware that Oracle has a few features pg doesn't, and replication is supposed to be easier, but at extraordinary cost and with the added bonus of supporting one of the worst companies in tech.

I don't really think you can even compare them as they serve totally different markets. If I was the CTO at a Fortune 500 and needed a DB for my new global logistics system, fine, Oracle would be in the running. Since this is HN though, I was thinking in terms of startups - and a startup choosing Oracle would be pure insanity unless they had an _amazingly_ good reason.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Decypher this jazz... - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/114059127847876307199/posts/Yjax3FPyHME

<comment><USER2> Looks like Klingon. I can't translate it though.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this on the front page?

</comment><comment><USER4> There seems to be a URL in it. Looks like klingon to me. ^^; Can't really be bothered to test the idea though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wild stab in the dark, something from the Voyager 1 probably.</comment>


Basic CSS Terms - <AUTHOR> http://martinwolf.org/2015/05/18/basic-css-terms/

<comment><USER2> This is nice. I would add "Declaration block" for everything in (and including) the curlies. I would also add "Declaration" for the combination of a declaration property with its declaration rule.</comment>


Apple releases guidelines for law enforcement data requests - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-releases-guidelines-for-law-enforcement-data-requests/ <comment><USER2> Seems pretty clear how they do this -- booting the device off an Apple-signed image which just extracts unencrypted data and exports it. (I suppose it's possible there's some weird signed-apple-driver way to do this on a running phone, too.) Only Apple can do it because only Apple can sign an evil bootloader like this.

There is a lot of room to improve the iOS security model against Apple/USG threats, but otherwise, it's still pretty good.

A non-Apple-friendly intelligence agency would still probably be better off attacking the actual security element; DPA, physical attacks, etc. should be able to pull the key. I'd estimate this capability would cost $10mm to develop and maybe $10k per device to attack, which would be great if you knew your adversaries used iPhones.

The biggest ongoing risk I see is that Apple could push an "evil" OS update to specific users if it wanted; if it can get the users to install it, all the hardware protections are irrelevant; you just get the user to enter the passcode, decrypt, exfiltrate. Solving that problem is really difficult without somehow having your own organization handle all OS updates.

<comment><USER3> _Seems pretty clear how they do this -- booting the device off an Apple-signed image which just extracts unencrypted data and exports it. (I suppose it 's possible there's some weird signed-apple-driver way to do this on a running phone, too.) Only Apple can do it because only Apple can sign an evil bootloader like this._

That would seem correct. However, given that some of the data on the device is also encrypted by a derivation of the passcode, this limits the scope of data which could be retrieved.

 _A non-Apple-friendly intelligence agency would still probably be better off attacking the actual security element; DPA, physical attacks, etc. should be able to pull the key. I 'd estimate this capability would cost $10mm to develop and maybe $10k per device to attack, which would be great if you knew your adversaries used iPhones._

I expect you'd need physical access, and indeed that you'd probably need to uncap the AES chip to retrieve the UID - barring any unknown vulnerabilities. Possible, but destructive and not cheap

 _The biggest ongoing risk I see is that Apple could push an "evil" OS update to specific users if it wanted; if it can get the users to install it, all the hardware protections are irrelevant; you just get the user to enter the passcode, decrypt, exfiltrate. Solving that problem is really difficult without somehow having your own organization handle all OS updates._

That's the problem. The secure boot chain gives Apple ultimate control over the software on the device, and that requires trust.

<comment><USER2> On #2, if you were Ministry of State Security, you could also use 0-day code execution to gain the same data the Apple process retrieves. I guess existence-of-0-days is pretty reasonable, but I'd rather build the repeatable physical attack, as I could then pull a lot more than just Dkey, and do it forever.

(I'm more interested in the "built an enterprise-root-of-trust mobile platform", but "build an awesome, repeatable attack against everything" is also pretty tempting, if only to sell the former.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't believe iMessage or Facetime are safe. All this announcement says is that if you weren't a target then Apple can't retroactively gain access to previous sessions. Since the user can't see which keys are used Apple can simply add itself to any conversation. And since Apple can do it the FBI could secretly order them to do so.

I also think it's only a matter of time until companies like Apple are compelled to use their remote update capabilities to trojan target devices.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you change the passcode from simple to complex and then set a 4-digit passcode it doesn't automatically try after you enter the 4th digit. It asks you to press OK. This means you could enter 4 digits but not know whether the passcode string length is 1 or 100 characters (includes all alphanumeric characters. Also, I'm just using an absurdly high number. I don't know what the max passcode length is.) before attempting to brute force it.

<comment><USER2> If you have an all-numeric passcode which isn't a "simple passcode", it doesn't display length, but _does_ show only the numeric keypad, indicating to an attacker it's only numeric.

I personally would rather enter a 12 digit numeric to an 8 character alphanumeric. (Also included 80 character full upper/lower with numbers and symbols, but this is unrealistic given how many keypresses are required for modifiers.)

<PRE> 10^12 = 1000000000000 36^8 = 2821109907456 80^6 = 262144000000 80^7 = 20971520000000

At 10 Hz, the first two options get you 3000 to 10000 years.

A reasonable lower bound, given 10Hz on the tries, is 10^9 = 100000000 36^6 = 60466176 80^5 = 40960000

47-90 days.

</PRE>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Specifically, Apple says it can extract active user-generated data from native apps on passcode-locked iOS such as SMS, photos, videos, contacts, audio recording, and call history.

Are they talking remotely or with device in hand?

<comment><USER7> According to

[http://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/law- enforcement/](http://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/law-enforcement/)

 _> The data extraction process can only be performed at Apple's Cupertino, CA headquarters for devices that are in good working order._

this can't be done remotely. Still. Why do they go through all the trouble with their encryption when they leave themselves a backdoor.

Once a backdoor is in there, it'll be abused. Either by disgruntled employees or by everybody when it leaks.

<comment><USER8> > Why do they go through all the trouble with their encryption when they leave > themselves a backdoor.

I am no means an expert on this, so someone else please correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember reading that it's not so much a backdoor as much as there are only 9999 possible 4-digit passcodes (and most people only use 4-digit passcodes). The iPhone hardware rate-limits attempts to prevent you from brute-forcing it, but Apple can reflash the firmware to get around this, thus allowing them to be able to bruteforce the PIN. Whether this counts as a "backdoor" or not, I'm not sure.

If that is true, then I imagine there'd be nothing they could do if you used a longer (random) password instead of a simple PIN.

<comment><USER9> > Specifically, the user generated active files on an iOS device that are > contained in Apple's native apps and for which the data is not encrypted > using the passcode ("user generated active files"), can be extracted and > provided to law enforcement on external media.

The keywords are "data [which] is not encrypted using the passcode".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How I determined this ambiguous PR/ carefully crafted legal language to read is:

1.) Apple can only extract your data from [remotely, using a tool that only resides and can only be used at] their Cupertino HQ.

2.) Devices must be in good working order.

Meaning = device doesn't have to be present to WIN

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr:

* You'll be notified unless they are prohibited from doing so

* The passcode lock means nothing.

* Apple can tap your email and information from native applications (so call history, photos, SMS, etc), excluding iMessage and Facetime (Apple can't even access those).

* They can't access information from third party applications

* iOS4 or later only

<comment><USER12> "Apple can tap your email and information from native applications (so call history, photos, SMS, etc), excluding iMessage and Facetime (Apple can't even access those)."

Misleading - Apple can _extract_ that data from an iPhone _at it 's Cupertino Headquarters_. Not tap.

Significant difference in that for this LE would have to obtain/confiscate the from you, this isn't remote data extraction.</comment></comment>


New Mac Pro Available for Online Orders - <AUTHOR> http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/mac-pro?

<comment><USER2> Dunno why, but I've always felt Apple (and others too) seem to chintz out on the 'upsell' portion. I just configured a new Mac Pro for $13k, and I still need to tack on another $69 for a trackpad. WTH? Couldn't they say - "hey, you're buying a machine for over $5k - would you like a complimentary mouse or trackpad with this?"

EDIT: yes, I do know why. It feels stingy. That's why.

<comment><USER3> If you're prepared/have $13k to spend on a Mac Pro, what's $69?

<comment><USER4> This reminds me of: If you are paying 20k for a car whats 500 extra for the CD-changer? What about the heated rear view mirrors? These things add up. Just saying be careful with that thinking in general. :)

<comment><USER2> Agreed, except these are even smaller. Well.. maybe not on a $3500 computer - a keyboard/mouse extra is 3% of the sales price. but... When you configure it to be $6k, or $10k... dinging someone for an extra $100 just feels cheap/stingy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady They're offering a Sharp 4K monitor as an add-on in the configuration. Costs £3,499.

<comment><USER5> Well, there goes my decision to wait. Apparently the updated Cinema Display is not coming any time soon - certainly not before February. Seems like today would have been the perfect day to announce it.

So Apple's high end display option is still a Thunderbolt Display that requires a Magsafe - Magsafe 2 adapter, only supports TB1, and only has a USB2 hub...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get it. Who is the market for these, and why?

<comment><USER7> You ever tried to edit 4K video? Real time editing is very important to post- production studios and when you are adding effects, rendering etc in a time sensitive environment - and you are a Final Cut person - then this is a great tool.

This is not for your average dev or photo person, this is legitimately a 'Pro' machine aimed at very small a subset of Apple customers who actually mean quite a bit to the company. It is a quality perception game, when Hollywood is using your stuff you gain a certain mystique.

<comment><USER8> But then, wouldn't you want a beefier machine? 64Gb of RAM seems a bit on the low side for such tasks.

I would also think having multiple disks would be a pretty important feature (so you can stripe them for speed...) A single SSD? Really?

<comment><USER7> For video editing, proc and gpu are actually the important parts once you hit a certain point with ram and disk. Think about it, 4K videos in raw form are about 15gb per minute so you need a threshold of swapping and loading with ram and disk that allows you to move data in and out fast enough so the editing can be done in ram but you experience no lag as the user.

With disk in PCIe and a good controller you are getting around 1gb per second disk action so you have more than enough headroom.

<comment><USER8> Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for your explanation :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish this would be half the price tag... I'd buy it right away.

Quoting from the page: "What's in the box - Mac Pro, Power Cord, Keyboard and Mouse sold separately".

Funny that one of the three items really doesn't belong on that list.

<comment><USER10> No oxford comma: 'keyboard and mouse' are one entry in the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Add $3000 for the 12 core. Really?

Edit: actually , all together it still comes to what was projected. I just didn't expect so much of it to be in the CPU.

<comment><USER12> This is more Intel not Apple.

[http://ark.intel.com/products/75283/](http://ark.intel.com/products/75283/)

Retail price for that CPU is 2.7k... you are paying maybe a $500 markup?

<comment><USER13> Closer to $1000, but that's not surprising really.

I believe the "3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache" chip is this one [http://ark.intel.com/products/75780](http://ark.intel.com/products/75780) which has an RRP of $583.

The difference in retail prices for those two chips is $2031 (2614-583) but you're paying Apple $3000 for that upgrade.

<comment><USER12> That seems reasonable.

Order a Dell and upgrade the ram. I bet you pay > 33% markup.

Or go order a car and get the premium Boise sound system. I bet you also pay > 33% markup

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> "Available to ship: February"

<comment><USER14> There was "December 30" when I looked 3-5 hours ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ten thousand fuckin' bucks.

They'll sell dozens!

</comment><comment><USER16> Another release of pro hardware from Apple. Another slew of comments everywhere from laptop peasants who don't understand the pro market, and can barely comprehend the competition.</comment>


Screw simplicity. - <AUTHOR> http://sahillavingia.com/blog/2011/01/03/screw-simplicity/ <comment><USER2> A stick is a simple tool. It's also a very useful and versatile tool that can be used in complex ways. Complicated in software would be like taking a stick, then adding an options panel, then putting a spade at one end, then a rake at the other, and 10 status indicators running the middle.

<comment><USER3> I think the UNIX philosophy goes a long way here. FP is also close to this. But it's not so simple... har har har.

Certain UNIX tools are fairly stick-like in their _basic_ usage. Things like cat, grep, sed, sort, cut, paste, tee, less... they are all at least immediately useful with a basic command even if they have huge sets of options.

The UNIX grep vs. Windows Grep (see <http://www.wingrep.com/resources/images/mainwindow1.png>) is a great illustration, because the basic use case of grep is as simple as possible (`grep foo' for instance, operating on stdin). With the complex Windows Grep you get the whole UI (and more, with things like wizards and prompts) all the time, no matter what you need. You could never learn anything more about UNIX grep than `grep foo' and it would never get in your way, but with Windows Grep and other complex apps you get everything all of the time.

But, in the end, UNIX grep and Windows Grep can both basically do the same things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would argue that KISS is actually a utilitarian choice. I have always interpreted KISS as how do I go from idea to product in the simplest manner, and keep both development, and the users interaction with the product simple.

If you look at new twitter, it is actually simpler than the old one, because now every tweet displayed only has one initial option, click to open, instead of the five per tweet that were displayed. They are giving us the user less initial options.

Also, you're site is pretty simple, and I would like to say that is a good thing, because all the user can do is read, they can't even attack you in a nice comments section. ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> The point is that Twitter started out with simplicity. My guess is if they started with their current design then there would be far less adoption because of the steep learning curve.

</comment><comment><USER6> His logic doesn't quite track for me. Take the Twitter example. He uses that as an example of why you shouldn't focus on simplicity because it makes twitter busier with inline media. But to me that's an example of simplicity because it makes sharing media much simpler.

Any new feature is going to add some complexity. The point of a K.I.S.S. philosophy is trying to lessen that complexity as much as possible and that's example what Twitter did.

</comment><comment><USER7> The argument that there is a tradeoff between simple/useful is something I don't agree with. An app or website can and should still remain simple to use whilst having many features if the UI is designed well. Simplicity should always be the end goal but this should not be at the expense of features!! There seems to be a certain mindset where people believe that minimal, or simple interface design is the 'easy' option. It is not, it's often the opposite. Good design ensures an end result always feels AND looks simple to use for the end user. The features added to a service should never be considered, or be resolved in a way where they could be described as 'clutter', as you label it. I'd consider that a fail if I looked at a new feature that way. If the features are implemented well by a good UX/UI designer, the products perceived 'simplicity' will not be compromised, in fact it would probably be enhanced if it were providing added flexibility.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Sometimes I think a pretty good business model would be to copy the applications that 37signals makes, but make them more complex. More features, more promises—generally, just more complicated."

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/08/19.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> Says the guy with a simple website.

</comment><comment><USER10> Before anything you should define what constitutes simplicity for the purposes of _your post_.

 _New Twitter is much more complicated than the old one._

You are confusing simplicity in the user experience with simplicity in the back-end. I'd argue the new Twitter is _simpler_. But its back-end is more complicated.

Great front-end simplicity often requires a lot of back-end complexity.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's just a new wave. Saying what we used to believe are wrong.</comment>


Ask HN: Can a New Zealand corp be sued over patents? - <AUTHOR>

I was considering incorporating in New Zealand. And I have data/servers in Switzerland. I'm in the US but might move to New Zealand. Do I ever need to worry about software patent lawsuits (excluding embedded software)? <comment><USER2> New Zealand doesn't recognise software patents. If I were you, I'd call a lawyer in New Zealand for advice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, exactly. I was wondering if somehow it's possible for a US/EU company to establish jurisdiction against a New Zealand company (in some patent-enforcing jurisdiction) to still sue them. Anyhow, I am consulting attorneys. Cheers.</comment></comment>