Tools of the trade, 2012 edition - <AUTHOR>

I would be interested in a 2012 verison of joshu's post I came across recently.
Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2010 edition  by joshu 804 days ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1769910
We host some of our services and use third-party services for others.  I am curious what new additions to the list are commonly used in the Saas world. <comment><USER5> Intercom (<http://intercom.io>) - CRM and user messaging

Chartbeat (<http://chartbeat.com>) - Realtime analytics

Sendgrid (<http://sendgrid.com>) - Sending email from an app

Dropbox (<http://dropbox.com>) - File sharing/storage

CouchDB (<http://couchdb.apache.org>) - Flexible database

<comment><AUTHOR> Intercom looks pretty cool - is it intuitive for business users to use?

<comment><USER5> Yeah we love it for two reasons:

1\. Our users can send messages to us from inside the app. They end us using this to communicate with us more than email.

2\. The dashboard for site owners is awesome. It shows you overall user count, who is logged in right now, each user's social networks (pulled automatically using <http://www.fullcontact.com>), and gives you a whole bunch of ways to filter the information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Trello (<https://trello.com/>) - task management

Statsd (<https://npmjs.org/package/statsd>) + Graphite (<http://graphite.wikidot.com/>) - monitoring & graphing

Kippt (<http://kippt.com>) - link and article saving/sharing

Zapier (<https://zapier.com/>) - like ifttt for business

Heroku's Hosted Postgres (<http://postgres.heroku.com>) - DB as a service

Also definitely agree with Intercom, Dropbox & New Relic, all great services.

</comment><comment><USER7> We use a lot of services at DNSimple. Here are some of them:

Chargify (<http://chargify.com/>) - recurring billing

Stripe (<http://stripe.com/>) - payment processing

Librato (<https://metrics.librato.com/>) - <USER2>

Mailgun (<http://mailgun.com/>) - email service

Boundary (<http://boundary.com/>) - network analysis

Papertrail (<http://papertrailapp.com/>) - consolidated logging

PagerDuty (<http://pagerduty.com/>) - <USER3>

TravisCI Pro (<http://travisci.com/>) - continuous integration

CodeClimate (<http://codeclimate.com>) - static code analysis

BugSnag (<https://bugsnag.com>) - exception tracking

Also, other services that have already been mentioned (like Github, Intercom, Trello, Dropbox, Sendgrid, NewRelic, etc)

</comment><comment><USER8> BrowserStack (<http://www.browserstack.com/>) - Test Websites on different os and browser setups, in your browser.

</comment><comment><USER9> Recurly (<http://recurly.com>) — Recurring billing managment

Intercom (<http://www.intercom.io>) — User management/intelligence

Postmark (<http://www.postmarkapp.com>) — Transactional email

Trello (<http://www.trello.com>) — Productivity tool

</comment><comment><USER10> Sentry (<http://getsentry.com>) - Exception tracking

Postmark (<http://postmarkapp.com/>) - Email service

Intercom (<http://intercom.io/>) - <USER4>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> New Relic (<http://newrelic.com>) - Application monitoring

MongoLab (<http://mongolab.com>) - MongoDB-as-a-Service

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm assuming it's already on the old list, but I haven't seen Github (<http://github.com>) listed -- for us, Github is _the_ application we use.

I also haven't seen Mixpanel (<http://mixpanel.com>), but I see a lot of Intercom. Now that Mixpanel has "Engage" (which seems like an Intercom-like thing), is there a compelling reason to use Intercom alongside Mixpanel, or are they mostly overlap?

Another platform I see missing is dotcloud (<http://dotcloud.com>), which I don't use for everything, but definitely enjoy one-click, hot standby, fault tolerant (well, as tolerant as it can be) MySQL databases.

Last thing we use that I haven't seen listed is Amazon SES (email). I _love_ the no-commitment pricing and paying for what we actually use instead of having to pay a minimum fee and all that.

Also shoutouts for Stripe and Trello.</comment>


AffluentConfidante.com – Anonymous public statements by the wealthy to everyone - <AUTHOR> http://affluentconfidante.com/ <comment><USER2> Anonymous and you only accept CC payments and no cryptos like Bitcoin or Zcash?

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked into supporting Bitcoin through Stripe and it didn't look straightforward. I do plan to add it this week though if it's possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> lol, good luck. I guess if they can find people to pay them $1/character to host 7 tweets, they will have removed the burden of money from some people who have too much of it.</comment>


Discourse.org (and hosted sites) are down - <AUTHOR> https://discourse.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Our hosted site (discourse.getdbt.com) appears to be down, and Cloudflare returns a 521 at discourse.org. Anyone else seeing the same thing?

<comment><USER2> Seems to be up again. I am making this comment 20 minutes after the OP and 19 minutes after your comment.</comment></comment>


Why Pizza failed at McDonalds - <AUTHOR> http://www.speakhuman.com/ch09_Focus_and_Differentiation

<comment><USER2> I worked at McDonalds as a teenager and in college. Our store owner seemed to be enjoy being a test-bed for new products or concepts that actually made it out of the labs.

Some things our store did while I was there:

* Fried Chicken. Yup, McDonalds fried chicken. We installed this huge vat in the back of the store and boxed up greasy fried chicken. And it sold pretty well.

* Home delivery. I'm not kidding, we actually implemented a home delivery concept where the customer would call in an order to some call center, and out popped an order on a special printer in the store. Someone would box up the order, and drive it over to the customers house. It was a pain in the butt from a resource scheduling perspective, but a wonderful thing for the hamburger-flippers (tips, and 15 minutes away from the store in the car)

<comment><USER3> When you look at it through the lens of McDonalds having tens of thousands of testbeds to expiriment with, the conclusion you draw might be _exactly the opposite_ of the one the article makes. It's not that McDonalds should stick to its knitting. It's that they have billions of dollars and one of the 5 best retail infrastructures in the world to develop and test concepts with.

 _Of course_ they're going to try lots of things that don't work out. That doesn't mean "stick with the burgers"; it means, "stick with the things that are scalable and compatible with McDonalds". Pizza happens not to be one of them. Coffee, on the other hand? Appears to have made it out of the testbed.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Marketing anecdotes are always fun to read, but it seems like nearly every marketing expert that comes through these pages is suffering from a serious case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc with a side effect of confirmation bias. The nature of business competition is such that this author, or Malcom Gladwell, or whoever happens to be trying to find a thread of causality that they can build a strategy out of, is nearly always going to be able to find a dozen examples that bear out a given strategy, and a dozen that clearly argue for its opposite. But 'differentiate yourself early with a product that fits the needs of the market and low overhead, grow steadily, and once you become big enough to sustain multiple operations, devote some resources to experimentation in order to keep your brand vital without diluting your core message; also, make friends with governmental agencies' doesn't roll off the tongue, and doesn't seem to the be cutting insight we're looking for.

The only one-sentence business strategy I've heard of seems to be 'Work hard, even if you don't see any immediate payoff, and get a little lucky.'

Of course then again the fact is that most business authors are not as good as the people actually working at MacDonalds and their ilk. The author sees the way things are and can only conclude it's because they're following a natural and immutable law: MacDonald's pizza failed because it didn't conform to their natural state. But as you point out, Coffee (and biscuits) are just as unnatural if you assume that your 'one thing' is what you are right now, which is a burger stand. The reason that nearly all businesses succeed is because they have been shrewd—or lucky—enough to decide on their own form. Paring down to your core competency—which is tacitly assumed to be the thing you're best at RIGHT NOW—is sometimes a part of this process, as is experimenting with new shapes, as is finding previously-undetected connections between the two.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love for you to read the rest of the book (several chapters are already online for free). I'd be interested in seeing how you feel about it after doing so.

We've worked with a number of small organizations in helping them find their stories and tell them. Largely, what we've come back to is similar to what you're stating here: there are very few immutable rules. You just have to figure out what you're doing, try things out, and make the best choices you can.

The challenge for the marketer (or writer in this case) is to try to find patterns and distill meaning from them. The truth is, marketing--and business success--is hard to pin down, or repeat. Nevertheless, owners of small companies often seem to think (erroneously) that the big guys have it all worked out, and that it's easy for them.

What I worked to do with this book, was outline a set of good, solid suggestions, peppered with anecdotes relating to those who seem to have been successful, as well as those efforts that haven't. It's imperfect, but I believe there are useful suggestions in there; it's up to the reader to determine what might work for them.

For the record, I like the strategy: "Work hard, even if you don't see any immediate payoff, and get a little lucky." The tough part is that there are a number of other questions that such a suggestion won't help answer. At those times, we have to dig deeper and get into the more gray areas. It's harder to make clear and irrefutable statements about those, but no less important to try to find some plausible arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _They didn't accept that their pizza simply wasn't as good as that of established pizzerias._

I actually remember this incident. In blind taste tests, McDonalds pizza was judged as BETTER than competitors like Dominos. It certainly was not worse.

However if you repeated the taste test and told people where the pizza was from, McDonalds lost. It turns out that branding strongly affects our perceptions of taste.

Which underscores the challenges of trying to swim upstream against your brand identity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you: branding does affect our perceptions of taste.

As for the statement, "their pizza simply wasn't as good as that of established pizzerias" I should note that Domino's wasn't the company I had in mind. I was referencing the little pizzerias where the pizza is almost always better than the fast food equivalent.

Heck, even Domino's admits that theirs isn't so great: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH5R56jILag>

<comment><USER6> _"their pizza simply wasn't as good as that of established pizzerias"_

Really, the same could be said about their burgers. In just about any city you care to mention, you'll find small independent places serving far superior burgers to what McDonalds offers, and that doesn't seem to have harmed them in the slightest. I'm sure there are plenty of good reasons they got rid of the pizzas, but I have a hard time believing it was because they weren't good, since I distinctly recall them being at least much better than their burgers.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you re-read the passage, you might note that quality was only one of the points raised. (And, in my opinion, not the key point of the argument.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> McDonalds has many different offerings overseas. In fact McDs does have fried chicken in Thailand and I recall my days in Malaysia that they had a McRendang (rendang is a curry) as well as a teriyaki sauced based burger. They also had blueberry pie filling which I thought was way better than apple. My point here is that they also adapt to different markets.

KFC in Malaysia had a spicy chicken which was actually spicy. It's not limited to just McDonalds, but lots of franchises have to adapt and test out what's going to work with their environment.

</comment><comment><USER8> I worked for McDonald's for years and went through many of their "experiments". It took us workers about 12 minutes to figure out how well something would work out. We often wondered who thought up this stuff up and why didn't they ask us first.

Some of the losers:

\- A hard ice cream cone that was supposed to "soften" while the customer ate their food. But no matter how much we pushed them, no one ordered them with their meal. They came back for them, but they were too hard to bite into, so people just stopped buying them.

\- Hamburgers with tomatoes. There just wasn't an easy enough way to handle tomatoes at the volumes McDonald's does.

\- Grilled cheese. No one wanted them.

\- Plastic trays. They were supposed to reduce paper costs. But people just left them on their tables, so we had to hire an additional dining room cleaner, offsetting any savings. (Once they changed the garbage cans to have tray receptacles on top, people got the hint and started using them again.)

On the other hand, there were some real winners:

\- The Egg McMuffin. duh. All that store capacity had been wasted on coffee and donuts.

\- The Quarter Pounder. Hard to believe McDonald's was so successful with those tiny burgers for so many years before.

\- And of course, the Big Mac, which was invented by my boss's boss in order to compete with Eat N Park's Big Boy:

<http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_383369.html>

(The most amazing fact was that he lived to be an old man even though he ate at McDonald's every day.)

<comment><USER9> _Hamburgers with tomatoes. There just wasn't an easy enough way to handle tomatoes at the volumes McDonald's does._

Interesting. My primary reason for always eating at Wendy's over McDonalds is the tomatoes (well that, and Wendy's has a much better meat to bun ratio). I wonder why Wendy's can handle the tomatoes, but not McDonald's? Is the volume a problem at the individual store level, or at the corporate, bulk purchasing and distribution level?

<comment><USER8> _Is the volume a problem at the individual store level, or at the corporate, bulk purchasing and distribution level?_

The volume is not the problem. It's the solution.

At the time I worked there (long ago), McDonald's did from 300% to 1000% the per store volume of any of its competitors. It was built for volume. That's why the food is cooked before you get there, with default condiments. Tomatoes and volume just don't mix well, too much labor and too much food cost.

Not sure if the volume ratios are still like that, but I wouldn't be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remember the McDonald's pizzas and seem to recall them being the best thing they served. I was really sad to see them go. Sure they couldn't compete with the best pizza places, but they could compete with everything else McDonald's and their competitors sold.

<comment><USER10> Second that. I loved their pizzas, and was disappointed when they disappeared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The advise to "stick with one thing" goes against the advise of "iterate until you hit a market fit".

Still it's a good set of marketing stories.

<comment><USER12> I don't think so. The advice is, don't try to be everything. Iterating until finding market fit isn't about trying to be everything; it's about finding that one thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Number two just seems foolish; boring marketing is about as sensible as ordering flavorless food._

It makes sense for pregnant women. The substances with a distinct taste and smell often arose as plant defenses, which aren't necessarily good for developing babies. Don't know if that does anything for the analogy, though.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an interesting article. However, most of it has nothing to do with pizza or McDonald's.

</comment><comment><USER15> Aside from the Maccas bit, the article was pretty interesting, although this as well as others seem to only focus on successful "be different" companies. Or maybe it's the pessimist in me that thinks if I tried it, it'd fail miserably.</comment>


Leo Beranek, an engineer who helped build Arpanet, has died - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/18/business/leo-beranek-dead.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0 <comment><USER2> I worked at BBN (Bolt, Beranek and Newman) from 2006-2008 and was fortunate enough to have a one-on-one phone call with Leo while I worked there. At that time he was in his early 90s, and was still amazingly sharp and full of energy. Even in a brief phone call his curiosity and kindness left a long lasting impact.

BBN was (and presumably still is, though now part of Raytheon) an amazing company to work for even 50 years after its heyday as one of the original contractors on the ARPANET project. I remember getting to meet Ray Tomlinson (who sadly passed this March) and a wide range of others who were instrumental in the early days of the internet. Seeing what was happening in CS research at the time was pivotal for me changing my career towards computer science.

One of my favorite anecdotes about the early years of the company: As mentioned in another comment, BBN started as an acoustics firm. While JCR Licklider was there briefly in the early 60s he got the company to purchase a computer. This was expensive and somewhat out of the scope of the company, when asked why purchase such the thing the response was "this company is full of smart people, they'll figure something out". A few years later Licklider was a PM at ARPA in charge of the ARPANET project which BBN would soon become the lead contractor on.

Leo definitely lived to a ripe old age, but he will be missed nonetheless.

<comment><USER3> Beranek wrote about that anecdote in his first chapter of the excellent book _A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN_ :

[http://history.computer.org/pubs/bbn- print2.pdf](http://history.computer.org/pubs/bbn-print2.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Thank you very much for sharing this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad this made it to HN. While he was the founder of BBN which we all know was involved in ARPANET, you won't find the Internet in his Wikipedia entry. It started as an acoustical consulting firm--the one whose employees started many firms across the US and describe in their lineage from BBN.

He was one of the fathers of architectural acoustics, noise control and vibration isolation, and remained active until the end, traveling to conferences, publishing papers and such. I met him in Seattle in 2011 at the spring Acoustical Society of America conference. Genuinely warm of a guy, always interested in others' research.

<comment><USER6> Second that. I had no idea of his involvement in CS, though, and I'm happy to see this here.

I did my master's in Acoustics (Am an M.E.), and his books were some of my go- to for "foundation" concepts in Acoustics. As a professional nowadays I still reach out to them from time to time. Like you said, he was still fairly active on conferences. He left an amazing legacy and is sure to be missed in the Acoustics community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Beranek and BBN both make an appearance in Mitch Waldrop's excellent book "The Dream Machine," which is in theory a biography of J.C.R. Licklider (who was mentioned in the obit), but in practice a history of computing from the 1930s onward. It has been out of print for some time, but a Kindle edition just came out this summer[1]. It's a great book and worth many times the $3.99 Amazon is charging for it.

[1]. [https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01FIPHEXM](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01FIPHEXM)

<comment><USER8> I'd like to second that, and mention that it's excellent to combine with "What the Dormouse Said" (John Markoff) and "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" (Steven Levy).

Very loosely, while there is lots of overlap between the three, Markoff covers the West Coast more thoroughly, with more material around his idea that a lot of the development there owes a great deal to LSD...

Levy covers the East Coast more thoroughly, going into a lot of detail about MIT, and the environment around the MIT AI Lab.

While Waldrop both goes further back, and takes a higher level view of the politics and DARPA itself.

There are of course plenty of other pieces to branch off into once you get to the rise of home computing in particular, but the above three books combine to give an even more fascinating picture of the early days of computing than they do separately. And BBN of course still stands out as one of the highly important pieces.

BBN is one of those companies that are fascinating to me, because like e.g. DEC, when I first got online in '93, they were the type of legendary that you when you are young take note of the status of, but don't really know the significance of, until you get a bit older and start being interested in the history of what you've built your career on...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the little signs you have made an impact: When the NY Times interviews you for your own obituary:

'"As president, I decided to take B.B.N. into the field of man-machine systems because I felt acoustics was a limited field and no one seemed to be offering consulting services in that area," Dr. Beranek said in a 2012 interview for this obituary.'

</comment><comment><USER9> This brings back memories of being connected to the ARPANET through a BBN IMP[1] in 1982. Here's a photo of BBN's iconic refrigerator-sized network interface box:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5114191251/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5114191251/)

Some years later, our CS department's IMP was replaced by a _much_ smaller Cisco router (and our .ARPA e-mail addresses with .EDU addresses).

I had always associated BBN with internet engineering, so it was interesting to read that they started out in a completely different business.

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

<comment><USER10> Sometime around 1979 or 1980 someone gave me a slip of paper with a phone number and said "Dial this with a modem."

I did, it answered "Pentagon TIP," and before too long I was roving around the ARPANET. If memory serves me right the main command was "C" for connect. You simply typed "C" and a small number, and then logged in as "guest"/"guest" (the world was smaller and more innocent back then). I'm fairly certain that I logged in to a system at UC Berkeley.

<comment><USER11> nice. that was also a time when every geeky kid kinda secretly feared (or hoped) you might stumble into a system which, after login, would prompt you with:

"Welcome! Would you like to play a game of global thermonuclear war?"

and then you really would be worried you were connected to the Pentagon

<comment><USER12> I did sort of the opposite back in the very early nineties - I had my MicroVAX ID as a Norwegian DoD machine when anyone dialed it.

That netted me a few laughs as friends got confused - and a summons to see the local police a few weeks later; apparently, someone had thought it WAS indeed a DoD box, reported the security breach and the next thing my local PD knew, the security services called and asked them to tell me it was quite funny and all that - but STOP DOING IT!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Worked at BBN from 1983-1990, at the tail end of the NCP->IP/TCP "transition." Terrifically interesting stuff to work on, with loads of terrifically smart people to learn from. One of the legendary recruiters there (rest his soul) referred to the place as a "halfway house for failed MIT & Harvard PhDs." A magical place, and I feel lucky to have fooled that recruiter into letting me get hired.

</comment><comment><USER14> A great account of the building of the IMP: "where wizards stay up late".

<comment><USER15> agreed. one of the two best history of computing books I've read, "dealers of lightning" being the other

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the really cool things that I saw when I was in the USAF was a BBN-made IMP get installed. It was 3 or 4 large white cabinets and was way in the back of the communications center at McClellan AFB. I had no idea that it would become so influential.

</comment><comment><USER17> _In other words, can you write a specification saying that if you're going to have an office, the noise should not be any greater than so much? What are acceptable noise standards in a home, in a factory, in a concert hall? I wrote those._

I like this guy. In a London open plan office in 2010 I measured background noise and it was above _legal_ limits for a workplace. I mentioned it to management, nobody cared. However, I think the whole notion of 'offices should be quiet' \- although valid - is now almost an anachronism.

</comment><comment><USER18> ifdown eth0 ; sleep 60 ; ifup eth0

</comment><comment><USER19> I worked at BBN in the late 90s, started a month before the GTE purchase was announced.

One of my favorite memories was their warehouse of old equipment. Walking through that was like visiting a computing museum, including the only IMP I've ever seen. (Grabbed a 1GB Xyratex hard drive for an experiment; weighed 40-50lbs, IIRC. Huge.)

<comment><USER19> Another less-than-fond memory was our LAN. (20 year old memories, so take all of this with a grain of salt.)

At the time, all of the R&D teams (the company was effectively two halves, R&D and ISP) were on a single physical network.

Roughly 2000 computers, all on a 10-base-2 network.

If you've never had the misfortune of working with 10-base-2, lucky you. I'd never seen it before, and never since. Didn't take much to bring it down.

Whenever I'd lose contact with our NFS server (NFS, sigh) I'd check my transceiver; if the yellow light was pegged, that typically meant someone in a nearby data closet had bumped the Appletalk repeater and we could count on several minutes of misery.

It seemed remarkable that the company largely responsible for building the Arpanet, who as an ISP was responsible for how many thousands of users I had no idea, had such a rickety network for its own employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I always find it wierd, the phrase "Dies at xxx" like that defines something. "Born at 0" is odd.. Can't we focus on what they did? rather than the lenght of life?

<comment><USER21> It's interesting. I appreciate it. It does define something. Think of Aaron Schwartz or something for contrast.

<comment><USER22> James Grimmelmann follows this style when writing obituaries; here's his obituary for Aaron.

[http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_...](http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_26)</comment></comment></comment>


McKinsey Advised Johnson and Johnson on Increasing Opioid Sales - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/business/mckinsey-johnson-and-johnson-opioids.html <comment><USER2> The marketing of medicine in inherently unethical because it seeks to override doctors and consumers information-based evaluations, and instead make a choice based on emotional propaganda.

The harm caused by any given medical advertisement is directly proportional to its effectiveness. Every pharmaceutical sales rep is an immoral cancer on our society.

<comment><USER3> This may come as a shock to you, but marketing pharmaceuticals is really no different than marketing other products. It really comes down to educating consumers about your product.

Doctors as decision makers are not some monolithic block of individuals who are super educated about every product on the market and every piece of data. Just developing awareness of new drugs is a huge job. I'd say less than 5% of doctors are cutting edge enough that they require no additional education on new drugs.

The best story I can tell was from a friend who worked at a drug company that sold a hepatitis C drug. Once Gilead's drug came out, this company basically decided to discontinue their drug. Incredibly, there were doctors out there still ordering the old drug. The company had to send reps out to these doctors to _tell them to stop ordering it_. Continuing to use it made zero sense at all.

<comment><USER4> The problem here is that pharmaceutical companies' marketing departments have a deep conflict of interest. They're incentivized to encourage doctors to use the drug that makes their company the most profit, not the drug that is best for the patient.

And there is plenty of research demonstrating that this is exactly what they do, and that doctors are indeed swayed by it, because, as you say, they don't have the time to do keep up with it all on their own.

And yes, there is a fundamental difference to consider here: My doctor has a fiduciary responsibility to do what's best for my health, to the best of their ability, and drug marketing compromises that. By contrast, nobody has any fiduciary responsibilities related to which brand of toilet paper I use.

<comment><USER3> My counter to your comment, and my own personal experience, is that doctors are fully aware of the manufacturers conflict of interest. They know that the drug companies will present everything in the best possible light.

Other things that exist to counter this bias are competitors, who will provide a different perspective and most importantly, the FDA that regulates all pharmaceutical promotion for accuracy and will quite swiftly drop the hammer on a company that bends the rules.[1]

[1][https://www.fda.gov/drugs/warning-letters-and-notice- violati...](https://www.fda.gov/drugs/warning-letters-and-notice-violation- letters-pharmaceutical-companies/warning-letters-2019#OPDP)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but this starts to break down when the pharmaceutical representatives can give laundered incentives(fancy "educational" dinners, "educational" yacht parties, etc.) to prescribe their product. In the US, pharma reps can see the prescription amounts of doctors to verify that they are actually prescribing their product(last I heard from a pharma CRM company in 2016). This seems deeply and fundamentally unethical.

Then you bundle all that up with the various studies that show that doctors(as with all professions) do a poor job with continuing education so that they are further inclined to take the recommendation from the pharma reps(which can be seen in the roots of the opioid crisis), I don't think we're in a very good place from a regulatory standpoint.

<comment><USER3> The practice of greasing the skids with lavish events ended a while back. Drug companies can't even give free pens to their doctors now.[1]

[1][http://phrma- docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/phrma_ma...](http://phrma- docs.phrma.org/sites/default/files/pdf/phrma_marketing_code_2008.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For better or for worse, consulting companies exist to:

1) Enrich their partners

2) Lend credibility to their clients

Consulting firms are hired based on an "appeal to authority" fallacy. Companies don't want to make hard/unpopular decisions, so they outsource them to consultants. Data point: management consulting is one of the industries that is hit hardest by a recession. [0] If consultants truly provided value, this is _exactly when they would be most needed_.

The people actually doing the work on these deals are 22-25 year olds. They are highly incentivized to make their firm look good (thus enriching the firm's partners). Anything else is gravy. Anecdotally, I have many friends who worked in the industry, and when asked if they would hire consultants for their own hypothetical businesses, the answer was always "No".

I highly recommend this article on McKinsey's work restructuring Puerto Rico's debt - it pulls back the curtain on the industry: [http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/mckinsey-in-puerto- ri...](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/mckinsey-in-puerto-rico.html)

[0] [https://www.ft.com/content/1a229d54-4548-11de-b6c8-00144feab...](https://www.ft.com/content/1a229d54-4548-11de-b6c8-00144feabdc0)

<comment><USER7> Overly cynical.

 _All_ companies exist to provide profits to their owners.

Your argument about the datapoint can also be argued for lending: credit disappears when it's most needed. It must be completely and utterly useless, then.

Or perhaps when a crisis strikes, if you want to minimize spending, you first eliminate consultant bills, instead of, idk, firing internal employees?

Part of the value of a consultant is that they are more mobile than an employee, so they get to see the same problem in different companies, and get expertise on that issue more quickly that if you stay on the first company in which you solved that issue. I've dealt with the same very-specific software on about 20 different banks, for example (disclaimer: I'm a consultant :) ); I have people under 25 on the team that are real experts on very specific things, and run cicles around people with 2x - 5x their experience if you count it in days and not problems solved.

And then of course consultants are sometimes hired for the wrong reasons and asked to do obvious recommendations. Politics were there before the consultants arrived.

<comment><USER8> >All companies exist to provide profits to their owners.

Management consultants nearly always have a conflict of interest though (i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" rather than "help the client make money") due to the nature of their work and their short-term contact-based engagements mean they rarely have to stick around and deal with the messes that they create.

Large management consulting firms IME tend to hire (or develop maybe) people who are smart and ambitious but highly conformist and reluctant to challenge authority. Combined with nature of the work I described above (and ofc existing to make owners /partners rich), this is sort of a perfect storm for lots of "semi-unintentional" unethical behavior and sometimes fully intentional unethical behavior.

Fwiw, from what I observed this dynamic actually makes the consulting work environment terribly exploitative and miserable for non-partner consultants but consultants tend not be the personality types who would leave consulting (and the prestige/"potential to become a partner") over it --unsurprisingly, else the industry wouldn't exist as it does now.

<comment><USER7> > Management consultants nearly always have a conflict of interest though > (i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" > rather than "help the client make money") due to the nature of their work > and their short-term contact-based engagements mean they rarely have to > stick around and deal with the messes that they create.

Not my experience at all. If you show value to the client and you build a trust relationship then you enter into a relational mode that is fruitful for both sides, and you skip/streamline all the tedious commercial topics (RFPs, competitors, beauty contests, the purchasing department demanding a 3% discount...). On the other hand, if you want to milk the cow dry then you end up on a very transactional relationship and you need to start cold selling from scratch after every project, which takes a lot of effort, time and energy.

In any case, again, the conflict of helping the client vs. overselling is hardly a consultant-specific topic; I'd say the smaller the shop, and the closer the ownership to the sales team, the more pressure there will be, in general. Case in point: the actual doctors that overprescribe opioids!

<comment><USER8> >If you show value to the client and you build a trust relationship then you enter into a relational mode that is fruitful for both sides, and you skip/streamline all the tedious commercial topics (RFPs, competitors, beauty contests, the purchasing department demanding a 3% discount...). On the other hand, if you want to milk the cow dry then you end up on a very transactional relationship and you need to start cold selling from scratch after every project, which takes a lot of effort, time and energy.

This is greatly at empirical odds with the near ubiquitous distrust for consultants among almost everyone who has worked with them.

And there is certainly no shortage of willingness to repeatedly cold sell in order to advance one's own career in consulting.

<comment><USER7> > near ubiquitous distrust for consultants among almost everyone who has > worked with them

Perhaps this empirical observation doesn't have enough unbiased samples. Consulting in general, more in particular management consulting, and even more in particular strategy consulting (where MMB, McKinsey, Boston, Bain are leaders; and the kind that sparkled this discussion), are 3 different, huge, mature, global industries. So there are empirical odds enough to say that people trust them enough to pay them, which is at odds with that universal distrust you state.

Perhaps that "ubiquitous distrust" is just more prevalent in HN or in the IT industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if it's just McKinsey is the bad apple in the mgmt consulting industry or if NYT just has more inside sources there than at other firms.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey- china...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china- russia.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/business/mckinsey- hedge-f...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/business/mckinsey-hedge- fund.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/world/mckinsey-bribes- boe...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/world/mckinsey-bribes-boeing- firtash-extradition.html)

<comment><USER10> \--- table via google ---

Firm Employees (Year) Revenue (Year)

McKinsey & Company 21,000 (2017) $10.0 B (2017)

Boston Consulting Group 18,500 (2018) $7.50 B (2018)

Bain & Company 8,000 (2017) $3.8 B (2017 est.)

\--- end table ---

BCG is the only one that should have as much headlines provided they are similar in nature to McKinsey. If they are, then your hypothesis might be correct that the NYT has a lot of McKinsey sources. But how could you rule out that newspapers simply like to bash the #1 instead of the #2 or #3 if the industry leading companies are behaving in a similar fashion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "It's almost like these people were addicted to this stuff. Oh wait, they are!"

Was an actual quote from distributors...

</comment><comment><USER12> As someone currently dealing with chronic pain, suits like this are highly aggravating. It's just another front of the failed drug war.

People who need pain relief get screwed as doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies treat every single patient like they're a drug addict waiting to happen. The real drug addicts will continue to get their pills, while the upstanding members of society writhe in pain.

<comment><USER13> I see comments like this on every single opioid news thread.

I'm sure that you are being honest about feeling that you need to take opioids every day, but I'm sure that you understand the addictive nature of the pills and why we should avoid making more people addicted.

I have had a total of two opioid pills in my life and I could feel exactly how it could take over.

<comment><USER14> The attitude towards prohibition that your parent comment described is _exactly_ what set the stage for the recent opioid epidemic.

We were just coming out of another era where opioids were restricted to the inhumane point where people with serious problems were left in debilitating pain - to the point where Purdue's lies were accepted because doctors felt genuine sympathy towards the suffering they saw.

There is a happy middle ground. There are people who benefit from opioid medications.

It was bad moral choices by this generation's pharmaceutical companies that caused this outbreak. That is where the fault lies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Management Consultants: A bunch of 20 sth year olds with fancy degrees and zero experience in growing a business helping huge companies grow by whatever means possible. I always found this hugely ironic.

<comment><USER16> And yet these consultants created a plan so successful NYT is writing about it.

<comment><USER17> 20-year-olds are also quite good at selling addictive drugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm like, isn't this old news? But no, that was Purdue:

[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/report- mckinsey...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/01/report-mckinsey- consulting-purdue-pharma-opioid-crisis/)

</comment><comment><USER19> "How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time"

</comment><comment><USER20> I cant imagine how much Johnson&Johnson regrets their decision to take this to court. This is gonna hurt their reputation for decades. Its basically the second opium wars, except they went to war against their own country

</comment><comment><USER21> Cha-ching. (Sound of analog cash register closing.)

[http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/states-want-their- cu...](http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/states-want-their-cut-of- australias-growing-opium-poppy-industry/story-fnda1bsz-1226880076728)

"There is an enormous need in developing countries who don't have access to pain relief, _it 's a human right_ to have access to pain relief."

Are we supposed to believe demand was being fueled by "developing countries"?

</comment><comment><USER22> there are a lot of comments on this thread about the moral hazard of pharmaceutical advertising. i think the arguments against such advertising largely hold water, but i'm curious; what are the arguments for it?

can anyone substantiate an argument for why consumer advertising for prescription medications is good for patient outcomes?

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of the tosh.o episode where he interview parents of kid actors

</comment><comment><USER23> Sure, sell more of a product that _kind of_ sells itself without proper advising. Some of these allegations seem predatory. How does this affect the reputation of McKinsey and its future business? Would there actually be any impact? They are good at their job. Is McKinsey attracting the same talent it historically has or are other kinds of companies getting what would be their talent?

""" McKinsey recommended "targeting and influencing" doctors who specifically treat back pain in the elderly and those in long-term care. The consultants also advised the company to move physicians who were "stuck" in prescribing less potent opioids into prescribing stronger formulations. """</comment>


Living and Dying on Airbnb - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/matter/living-and-dying-on-airbnb-6bff8d600c04 <comment><USER2> (November 2015)</comment>


Scribd's HTML5 is a mess - <AUTHOR> http://loud.anotherquietday.com/post/598121586/scribds-html5-is-a-mess

<comment><USER2> Well, sure - what's he expecting? PDF is a low-level, mostly unstructured display format. Converting that to fully semantic markup that recognizes all aspects of high-level document structure is probably an AI-complete problem.

For those of you not familiar with the gory details of PDF, it basically uses absolute positioning for each character. If we converted that directly into HTML it would be a disaster. So, we actually extract quite a bit of structure on top of that, recognizing spaces, lines, columns, and paragraphs, which enables us to write much cleaner HTML. Scribd (and most PDF readers) does this with heuristic algorithms that make reasonable guesses.

In the future, we'd like to push those algorithms further, and extract ever more semantic markup. But this is a "nice to have" for us - mostly, people just want the documents to display correctly and load quickly. And, anyway, expecting the output of an automated converter to match what a human would write shows a basic ignorance of the state of computers and AI.

<comment><USER3> In my opinion, web based documents should have certain level of semantic purity. Of course there will be technical difficulties to achieve it, but that is what hackers are for. Right?

While you have the right to justify the lack of semantic markup in Scribd html docs, he has the right to expect a non-messy markup underneath.

Calling someone's expectation "ignorance" isnt very fair.

<comment><USER4> The author of the article _is_ being ignorant by not understanding the basic differences between PDF and HTML before going off on a rant about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Web applications are not the same as web pages. A web page is a document, which ought to have simple clean markup. A web application on the other hand is a tool that can edit said documents. It's more "meta."

To expect the tool to have the same sort of semantic purity as the documents it interacts with is overly idealistic. It doesn't matter as much what we can systematically infer about an application, it is more important that the content be accessible in some sort of standard format.

Similarly, Scribd's HTML5 viewer, is just that, a viewer. Not a full fledged PDF to HTML converter. It's primary purpose is to allow a user to experience a document in its entirety in the browser. In a world of trade-offs, and priorities, the markup of the viewer itself is near the bottom.

<comment><USER6> Would you really consider facebook to be a "web app"? I think facebook is, or at least should be a pretty normal web page.

<comment><USER7> Far from it, amazing complexity in how certain parts of the page load and certain page changes are coming through ajax. Very much a web app, probably as complex as any web app out there.

<comment><USER6> There's no reason for so much complexity. I'm talking of course about the core of facebook, not the third-party apps. Sure, asynchronous loads of certain content is nice, but it hardly qualifies it as a "web app"? Which parts of facebook are you referring to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reads like self-parody. The author doesn't like the way their <P> tags are positioned. Could there be a more ridiculous criticism?

From where I stand, Scribd's HTML5 implementation (if it turns out as good as the demo) is one of the biggest leaps forward I've seen on the web in a while, as well as one of the most impressive pivots I've seen a startup make to turn a negative into a positive. It's a huge technical challenge to do what they're doing and get it right; one of those things that seems hard to people who haven't worked on it and turns out to be far harder than it seems.

There's also the minor detail that they're producing this output for an enormous class of inputs, so to nitpick the generated HTML as if it were written by hand is to miss the point colossally.

Edit: on another note, it's probably a positive sign if people with this mentality don't like your work.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think this dude needs to read the first part of Coders at Work with Jamie Zawinski (in reference to Netscape). A version 1 system RUSHED to the public that actually works and has few bugs is amazing. The fact that it's difficult to read and hard to follow can be fixed just as bugs can in due time. I think the concept of "get it done and fix it later" is better than "take forever to work on it and someone already produced." I guess that's an age-old question we all ponder though.

<comment><USER10> He seems to be more peeved that it was promoted with the term "HTML 5." He has a point on that, if so. Do we want to see the term diluted to mean almost anything with a valid DOCTYPE, as Web 2.0 and AJAX were? Half the things on Delicious that are tagged AJAX are just basic Javascript..

<comment><USER11> I think the problem is having the specification named "HTML5", if it has been named (as it was originally intended) "Web Applications 1.0" all this misunderstandings will go away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When people start whinging about the HTML markup for your thing, you know you're on to something. Early on, we got a guy complaining loudly about how Twiddla sucked because we had put a DIV into the HEAD tag to display a loading message. Not sure exactly how it affected his user experience, but there you go.

If the best criticism that people can come up with is about a piece that nobody can ever see or be affected by, you're probably doing something right.

</comment><comment><USER13> And if it were proper, semantic HTML5, what problem would that solve? I'm failing to see what benefit that has to the user. They don't need to see the markup; it just has to work.

</comment><comment><USER14> A good rule of thumb: if you think a product is absolutely great until you hit "view source", you're probably missing the point.

</comment><comment><USER15> If the author can't be bothered to even pick out a couple of snippets to support his claim, I can't be bothered to pay his post any mind.

</comment><comment><USER16> "every major HTML5 _app_ today is built using un read able _markup_ "

Ignoring Scribd specifically for a moment, why do people insist that _applications_ be built using technologies and best practices designed for _documents_? These are two very different things. For many applications it makes little sense to try to shoehorn the user interface into semantically "correct" markup.

However it often absolutely does make sense to render the _documents_ created with these applications in clean markup.

That said, Scribd is fundamentally an application centered around displaying documents, so it would be nice if they were able to render documents in clean way. But given the nature of PDF, as the author alludes to, this is difficult if not impossible, so you can't really fault Scribd for that. Despite this (which is no worse and arguably much better than the Flash equivalent), there are other benefits to using HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER17> The real lesson here? There are no awards for correctness. If the biggest and best webapps use pig-ugly HTML, the rest of us can probably stop worrying. Build it, launch it, bodge it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Well, the best part about this article is that it got me to check out Scribd. I'd been ignoring it, although I saw previous commentary about them moving from Flash to plugin-free. I'm impressed with the HTML render - it looks smooth. No such thing as bad publicity, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's like 2004 all over again. Back then, some people were complaining that "links" on Gmail where not really links, but underlined blue paragraphs with onclick events.

Remember that? This was the most advanced web application ever made, it had 100x the storage capacity of every mail provider at the time, awesome search capabilities, and the first mainstream use of asynchronous loading of data.

And yet, this people were mad because the links were not real anchor elements.

Go get some perspective kids.

</comment><comment><USER10> OK, this guy is ragging on what is a good tech demo, but "HTML 5" seems to be the 2010 equivalent of saying "Web 2.0" or "AJAX" when it comes to getting early adopters to check out your stuff, and Scribd threw around the term without it being, hmm.. authentic.. (that is, HTML 5 as a concept means more than merely producing a document that would pass validation)

</comment><comment><USER19> Don't give me problems, give me solutions. And by me I mean scribd, not me.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this article a joke? Scribd's new HTML based PDF renderer is working fine.

I think the author missed something.

</comment><comment><USER21> He's kinda right, a file format meant for printing fixed size pages will inevitably suffer from some impedance mismatch when automatically converting it to a relatively simple document format meant for screens.

But I disagree with the claim that it isn't HTML. It sure isn't pretty but a if you define HTML as the input that the HTML parser of today's browsers can handle (rather than the HTML spec) it is perfectly fine.</comment>


Reasons Not to Use Google (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://stallman.org/google.html <comment><USER3> At some point I realized I have more than enough local disk space to maintain and run my own local search engine.

So I have been saving and indexing every page of my browsing history and bookmarks for the past 3-4 years. I have a local copy of wikipedia/stackoverflow and offline docs via Zeal. The only time I need google these days is for casual map location/distance queries. I am too lazy to type out the details of my setup but it works quite well.

I point people at this link and the associated search project for similar ideas - [http://aurelieherbelot.net/how-small-is-the-world-wide- web-r...](http://aurelieherbelot.net/how-small-is-the-world-wide-web-really/)

Initially the only thing that I missed out on and struggled with was news (cause at the time google news had been my default homepage for a while). After trying all kinds of url/keyword blocking at various levels (browser/host file/router) I am finally down to 2 hours of internet a day.

Why am I doing all this - cause the web today (including hacker news) is just wasting my time. Tim Wu makes the case much better than I could here - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xm-1CoAuw8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xm-1CoAuw8)

<comment><USER4> Is there a chance you could reconsider and try sharing some of the details of your setup? I never imagined one could try doing something like that, and even now that you triggered my imagination (and after reading the link), I have hard time picturing how to even start building such a setup, not to mention a _practically usable_ one???

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I get where Richard Stallman is coming from.

But, practicality aside, and sometimes childish tone aside (e.g. derogatory names for companies) here's what really bothers me: the framing of this as a moral issue.

I can get behind the idea that non-free code might be a problem, sometimes. I can get behind the idea that we should, in some situations, strive to have non-free code. But why is this a _moral_ issue at all? Why can't reasonable people get together and decide that proprietary code makes sense for some situations, and that doesn't make them or the people using the code _morally wrong_?

I have a hard time with people whose shtick is mostly "appeal to emotions".

<comment><USER6> Perhaps those reasonable people are making a moral judgement when they decide to use proprietary code in a certain circumstance: they're deciding it's morally acceptable.

And maybe it isn't morally acceptable in some circumstances. Like when transparency is required in order to facilitate accountability and peace of mind.

It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines. But is it immoral to rely on closed-source search algorithms? The answer to that is less obvious. Either way, moral issues affect code all the time.

<comment><USER7> > It's immoral to have closed-source voting machines.

Bullshit. The problem is voting machines in general. They are too complex and you cannot observe how they work. This opens up elections to get manipulated regardless if open source is used or not. This is also not a moral problem, but a technological problem. The moral problem is in setting the requirements, the technological problem is in solving them.

What I do not understand in regards to voting computers, is why you need the computer part anyway. If you want fast counting, punch cards suffice.

<comment><USER8> Why even have a punch card? Just a paper and pen/pencil should suffice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obvious privacy issues aside, Stallman has always come off - to me - <USER2> someone who doesn't really see the bigger picture. I thank him for taking a stance against corruption, but there is a line between practical and impractical.

I don't know him personally, but his being top wheel of the FSF has skewed his reality. I cannot remember where I heard it, but I believe he is quoted (heavily paraphrasing here) along the lines of, "I may be fighting a losing fight, but it's all I can do, and I won't stop until I'm dead."

Practicality is the ultimate deciding factor at its core. Practicality decides whether you use a GPL-based license or the Apache license. Practicality decides whether you choose to avoid a website because of non-free Javascript. Practicality decides whether you can eat that muffin and switch gears on the road, and so on. It is a bit like using secure services and utilizing OpSec. Where do _you_ draw the line between convenience and security? Where does it stop being practical and where does it matter to stick to a principle?

Maybe he is just aging, and his brain is in an infinite loop. As I said, I do not know the man myself. But not having a clear focus of how life is for a majority of people can be a huge factor.

<comment><USER10> No need to be polite. Extremist weirdos are behind essentially all important, groundbreaking, awesome things.

A well mannered "normal" person would have never written the GPL and would have tolerated software that didn't match their politics.

The fringe provides a mandatory function in steering the cultural ship.

Early advocates for things like minimum wages or child labor laws were Molotov cocktail throwing anarchists. Early women suffragists were equally way out there - even by quite permissive modern standards.

Subversives are necessary in order to subvert and often make the world a better place.

<comment> semi-extrinsic "The reasonable man adapts to the world, while the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

<comment><USER11> really, do reasonable people do absolutely nothing to adapt the world to themselves? The reasonable person isn't able to think well that is messed up and I would like it to change, or hmm, I think this could be improved a bit. The history of small innovations in things (as opposed to the more impressive big and rare innovations) would indicate that yes, reasonable people do try to adapt the world to themselves to some extent. Because to never attempt to adapt the world to oneself would mean not just that one was unreasonable, but maybe also that one was not even human.

<comment><USER12> Judging by the experiments in both far-left and far-right governments in the 20th Century, we can be quite grateful that for the most part we have had leaders who are grateful to tinker at the edges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I prefer DuckDuckGo. Privacy issues aside they just strive to be the better search engine for software developers. And they have an open source platform for displaying a selected tool or result to a software request query called DuckDuckHack.

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

<comment><USER14> I've been using DDG exclusively for almost two years now. I honestly forget that I'm using it most of the time. I can "Google" things and I always get what I'm after. It perfectly replaces Google 100% for me.

<comment><USER15> I think that it's far worse than google. Don't get me wrong, it's still my main search engine, but I find I have to revert to google to find what I want between 30% and 50% of the time.

<comment><USER16> Agree. I'm in the same position. I find it particularly poor and combining multiple search terms, where it seems to favour the most popular of the terms and ignore the important narrowing keywords important to the search.

<comment><USER17> Another agree. Also, it is way behind with localized searches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is it a problem for him that Google serves you non-GPL Javascript, but not that they host all your files and can remove them at will? Or that they can remove all the backend services whenever they please? I find it really hard to follow his line of thoughts at times, but he's usually some sort of internally consistent, so what am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER19> His reasoning that it uses "non-free JavaScript" seems a bit redundant these days (given that almost every site does).

I always value Stallman's commitment, but it's often impractical to maintain while being a productive member of society.

Keeps me considering the possibility of freer alternatives though, and I find it valuable for that reason alone.

<comment><USER20> Just because everybody does it, doesn't make it right.

<comment><USER21> Just because it's right, doesn't make it practical.

It can be occupy protesters who own iPhones to coordinate or open source purists who use Slack to join projects they love or environmentalists filling their gas tank. In the end, there has to be a more practical strategy that enables a person to fight for the world they want while living in the world that exists.

<comment><USER22> > open source purists who use Slack

That is inexcusable, though.

There are more alternatives than you can count, if you use Matrix, Mattermost, some webirc system with included bouncer, or whatever.

<comment><USER21> You misunderstand. It was not the open source purist that chose Slack, it was the wave of popular projects all on Slack the open source purist could no longer resist joining. The alternative to Slack in their case isn't IRC, it's doing another line of work as all the projects within their chosen area of expertise are on Slack. Same is true of my other examples, there's a tipping point where your principled stance forces you to be an outlier, completely irrelevant to the world.

edit- In this case, the open source purist has to join Slack if only to beg people to go to IRC, a move that is at that point more energy than the community will think worth the purists principled gain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I agree with Stallman, he sounds like radical but he always has been.

We should consider that maybe the Internet really has become a mass surveillance tool, a privacy issue, a billboard and maybe even a distraction from the real issues humans face today.

We might have to except the fact that Google is now, just another major corporation trying to grow infinitely and is less concerned about what it takes to stay at the top, they're walking an ethical tight rope of their own making, especially with regards to supporting the TPP.

I use alternatives frequently now and I feel better for it. DuckDuckGo, TOR, Diconnect.me etc.

We as tech focused people could be doing more to protect users online privacy and I applaud Stallman for having the courage to speak out about these issues, they are important.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've been using DuckDuckGo instead of Google for the past 2 years and I'm happy with it. I love the bangs feature [https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

</comment><comment><USER25> Nothing inherently wrong in companies, profit, or even proprietary software. It is abuse and misuse of their power and capacity that we should raises of voices (and choices against). For example I consciously avoid Google Chrome because I object to how it is bundled with literally every Android phone, bundled with a lot of unrelated software and you cannot browse through any Google web property without being nagged to use/install Chrome from time to time, even after I dismiss those prompts. I see this as incipient abuse of power that could grow a lot worse if we keep turning a blind eye. But not all Google products/effors need to be tarred with a broad brush. Everything depends...

</comment><comment><USER26> It's already been brought up in this thread, but I'm concerned that RMS is undermining his own points by distancing himself from reality, allowing him to exaggerate them to the point where nobody takes him seriously anymore.

Nobody on Earth* will restrict themselves to using only websites, operating systems, and software and hardware packages which are fully free and open source. That would be insanely restrictive, and generally speaking -- at the risk of being blunt -- you'd be resorting to consistently using lower-quality, less-supported software a lot of the time†.

I'm sure he's got some valid points, but his approach to modern technology based on them essentially involves reverting back to the days of the extremely early internet, where the actual person-to-person networking was restricted to mailing lists and IRC; two formats which the majority of internet users today likely wouldn't be crazy about compared to the alternatives.

        * who wants to be a normal and productive member of modern society

        † not that there isn't great F/OSS software out there -- Linux and BSD are absolute wonders compared to Windows, but a lot of the time it's like comparing the GIMP to Photoshop -- there's just more refinement in a piece of software developed by thousands of paid, dedicated, full-time developers over two or so decades.

<comment><USER27> Even when RMS started the GNU project his approach to (then) modern technology was at an extreme. There were no free compilers, editors, or even trivial userland tools like grep. Instead of being pragmatic, he (and others) worked to create what was missing.

I wouldn't be surprised to find a decades old USENET post that hits all the same points about RMS that you (and others in this thread) bring up. RMS's distance from reality and staunch commitment to principles has been a feature, not a bug.

Don't get me wrong, I also believe that the idealized free-software world is a utopia that we're very unlikely to see. However, RMS's efforts have resulted in (and will continue to produce) a tremendously positive impact for humanity.

<comment><USER28> i don't even believe a free-software world is desirable without a new way to structure our society. I don't know if i want that. I am also very critical of RMS and his "propaganda"-style of writing.

But this doesn't mean that what he is doing is bad for society or not important. I respect his work and what he has achieved, i just don't share the vision. It's often important to be somewhat crazy to achieve greatness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Google supports the TPP because of three mostly-evil provisions that would > benefit Google

According to the link he gave to Google's statement on TPP, here are the three provisions as described by Google:

#1> The Internet has revolutionized how people can share and access information, and the TPP promotes the free flow of information in ways that are unprecedented for a binding international agreement. The TPP requires the 12 participating countries to allow cross-border transfers of information and prohibits them from requiring local storage of data. These provisions will support the Internet's open architecture and make it more difficult for TPP countries to block Internet sites -- so that users have access to a web that is global, not just local.

#2> The TPP provides strong copyright protections, while also requiring fair and reasonable copyright exceptions and limitations that protect the Internet. It balances the interests of copyright holders with the public's interest in the wider distribution and use of creative works -- enabling innovations like search engines, social networks, video recording, the iPod, cloud computing, and machine learning. The endorsement of balanced copyright is unprecedented for a trade agreement. The TPP similarly requires the kinds of copyright safe harbors that have been critical to the Internet's success, with allowances for some variation to account for different legal systems.

#3> The TPP advances other important Internet policy goals. It prohibits discrimination against foreign Internet services, limits governments' ability to demand access to encryption keys or other cryptographic methods, requires pro-innovation telecom access policies, prohibits customs duties on digital products, requires proportionality in intellectual property remedies, and advances other key digital goals.

#1 and #3 sound like things that Stallman would like. Anyone happen to know what he dislikes about them?

<comment><USER23> I believe it doesn't sound so bad because that's Google interpretation of why the TPP is good for Google. But the TPP is a huge deal and there are many different aspects to it. I think the point Stallman is making here, is they're lobbying for something that would be harmful for the future of mankind, out of self-interest.

I believed in Google because I believe in "don't be evil", but we're passed that now, regrettably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Stallman is right. However, people, myself included, use Google services (search/email/groups/docs/maps/youtube/etc.) because it is easy, cheap, and good.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm using google less and less, and it's not because of any of this. I find the results just not as relevant as before. The web viewed through google's lens seem to be just about content marketing and outdated stuff.

</comment><comment><USER32> People can hardly choose use / don't use Google anymore. If there should be a protest against Google and other big companies, I expect it to be lead by governments and regulations.

I don't mind companies use non-free software, but I do mind if they do whatever they want with their users on a legal basis.

Not to mention government services, built with .NET, which yeah - you are obliged to use.

<comment><USER33> There are reasons for avoiding Google, but I found Stallman's list a bit odd. Why do I care if the javascript I use to sign up on Google+ is not free?

Now if you don't like being tracked at all time 1: enable privacy options for your Google account 2: avoid using Google Play and 3: start using duckduckgo

<comment><USER34> Ultimately all RMS's issues come down to "who do you trust?"

If you enable all your Google account privacy options - can you be sure that they do what they say they are doing? How do you know that? Can you be sure your information isn't being intercepted along the way?

If you trust Google then fine.

But if there is even the slightest amount of doubt then someone you trust (preferably you yourself) needs to audit the code and every pathway the data travels along before you can be absolutely sure.

<comment><USER33> I don't think what you say really applies in this particular context.

Sure you may 100% trust someones open code, but if you don't have any insight in their backend once again it comes down to who you trust the most.

<comment><USER34> Which is why you need to audit every pathway the data travels along.

And why RMS only uses computers with free software firmware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > "A nonfree program submits the users to the power of the program's > developer."

That's true but it's not evil to offer nonfree programs. It's my choice to run it or not.

</comment><comment><USER36> tl;dr: because non-free JavaScript. Also tracking.

Okay, thanks for your opinion RMS.</comment>


Photoshop vs CSS - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/html5web/pen/puGal <comment><USER2> A while back a hackernews dude posted a rendering of the Mona Lisa in pure CSS. I thought it was cool until I realized that if you scale your divs down to 1x1 pixels, you can literally create anything you want with CSS, perfect to the pixel. At that point the novelty wore off. Yeah, if your image is based upon flat surfaces and minimal design, you can probably make a CSS version of it with a smaller file size than a png, but it's certainly going to take you a lot longer, and considering all the people with older browsers wont even be able to see it (they'll be looking at a nightmare of jagged corners and missing drop shadows), is it even worth the milliseconds you're going to save by shaving off a few kilobytes?

I think "____________ in pure CSS" posts should be banned from hackernews as uninteresting novelty.

<comment><USER3> That pixel by pixel approach is just an 'abuse' of 'pure css'. Of course you can have 1x1 px elements and colour them and get a proper image.

I admit, at some point I did that too, it only takes ~15 lines of Python. Until I realised it becomes a lot bigger than the equivalent image file.

However I'm still a fan of proper 'X in pure CSS' where the thing is built with circles and rectangles and shadows, etc... to make the shape which actually ends up being much much smaller than the equivalent image and renders a lot faster.

Things like iPhone in pure css, or Macbook in pure css, etc...

<comment><USER4> > I admit, at some point I did that too, it only takes ~15 lines of Python. > Until I realised it becomes a lot bigger than the equivalent image file.

I find it amusing that you realised that only _after_ you wrote the script :-)

(not intended to mock you btw)

I have to disagree that 'X in pure CSS' renders faster, though. As soon as you use a couple of shadows with sufficient blur radius, a bitmap is much faster (once it's downloaded). I especially notice this when scrolling the page, if there's a lot of shadowed elements on it, it goes clunky. That's NOT saying that you should flatten all CSS trickery to bitmaps, of course, it's still _very_ useful, just that one should take care not to go overboard and keep an eye on performance, especially checking low-powered netbooks and a few different browser/OS combos.

<comment><USER3> > I find it amusing that you realised that only after you wrote the script :-)

At first I thought I'm really up to something and going to invent the image format of the future :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That this only renders properly in Webkit is a result of pure laziness.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but also on the part of non Webkit web browser vendors...

<comment><USER5> So when a user types '-webkit-', and doesn't type '-ms-,-o-,-moz', when they all work, that's laziness on the vendor's part? Or better yet, when the syntax 'linear-gradient' works and you don't need a prefix at all, and you don't bother because you can't be bothered, that's laziness on the browser vendor's part? The vendors have bent over backwards to be fully compatible on gradients, animations, transition, border radii, box shadows, keyframes, and boat loads more every day. Every vendor makes compromises, the prefixes get removed and the whole web moves forward as one unified. But you'd never know it because hack developers can't be arsed to at least open one other browser to see whether it even worked. But yes, the vendors are lazy.

<comment><USER7> While the w3c likes to think the univrse revolves around it, html5 has several competitors and given that the syntax for a particular css property doesn't matter much, they should have just standalized it the first time a browser added that feature.

Beside, why use a non-webkit browser?

<comment><USER8> It's not CSS, but the <canvas> tag was invented by Apple for Safari, and was originally just a thin wrapper around the OS X drawing API, which was (thanks to OS X's heritage) basically just the PostScript drawing API, including all the various Porter-Duff software compositing methods (because they were all naturally supported by the API, so why not).

It turns out, a decade later, that most platforms don't want to render PostScript-compatible graphics in software, they want to render graphics with hardware designed for APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D, which don't support all those compositing modes. In particular, I think IE deliberately does not implement most of the <canvas> compositing modes because they can't be hardware accelerated by Direct2D. So "just standardizing the first browser to add a feature" can lead directly to brittle, incompatible implementations, and that hurts the Web for everyone. Sure, you don't want people to wait decades for some feature or other to become widely implemented, but putting a little thought in before standardizing things helps a lot.

> Beside, why use a non-webkit browser?

Man, when you put it like that, why did we ever leave IE6? You could write your HTML just once and be sure it would work _everywhere_!

<comment><USER6> > _Man, when you put it like that, why did we ever leave IE6? You could write > your HTML just once and be sure it would work everywhere!_

We left it because a) it stagnated and b) it didn't work on all platforms.

Surely not because of some zeal to support multiple independent implementations.

Since Webkit has neither problems, seeing that:

a) it's open source portable to all platforms with ports existing for all major platforms and tons of minor ones.

b) it's an engine, not a browser, and as such supports several widely varying browser GUIs, from Safari to Chrome to mobile browsers to command line tools.

c) It moves at a fast pace with lots of companies contributing to it, from Apple, to Google, to Nokia, to Adobe, to Samsung, to RIM to ensure that.

It doesn't make much sense to use anything else.

You could achieve all the dreams Mozilla has AND use Webkit at the same time. Just add your other stuff on top of it, instead of in a completely different implementation.

I'm not even against experimenting with new engine ideas. If you need to create a completely different engine do it, but only because there is an important difference and reason to do so.

Today we just have different engines not because of some special differentiating factor or novel way, but just because a few companies hold to their old engines from the early days of the Web (namely Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera). Almost everybody else that came after Webkit has adopted it.

Some things just make sense to have one single and common base. The same way most of us use, say, OpenSSH, and don't think much about it.

<comment><USER8> No software is infinitely malleable; no matter how much flexibility or portability you design into a code-base, it'll still only really work in situations that at least resemble the ones in which it was originally designed. Currently, the situations Webkit was designed for are a really good match for the situations we have (desktops, laptops, tablets, phones), and it's very difficult to find a situation where Webkit isn't a great choice. However, if there's one thing to learn from history, it's that situations change and usually in unpredictable ways. I have no idea what possible up-set to the computing landscape could arrive and make Webkit unfeasible, but I'm pretty sure something will change eventually, and wouldn't it be nice if we had a backup plan?

Also, consider what might happen if Webkit _were_ the only browser engine. Sure, Webkit moves at a fast pace now, when it has competition from both other browsers and native apps, but consider that the two biggest supporters of Webkit both benefit directly from people using native apps over web-apps. Sure, they benefit from web-apps too, but Apple in particular gets actual revenue directly from native apps, so if they didn't have other browsers to compete with, maybe Webkit wouldn't be as shiny and cutting-edge as it is. I mean, it already renders existing websites, and anything that needs abilities the current web-platform doesn't support can just be implemented as a native app, right?

 _> If you need to create a completely different engine do it, but only because there is an important difference and reason to do so._

The thing is, if Webkit were the only browser-engine, even if you did come up with some completely different engine, your idea would be useless. You wouldn't be able to achieve compatibility with existing sites without mimicking all the weird bugs and corner-cases of Webkit, which would not be feasible, and if your idea is so completely different you can't just fork the Webkit code and add your idea on top.

 _> You could achieve all the dreams Mozilla has AND use Webkit at the same time._

"all the dreams Mozilla has" is pretty much "make sure there are always multiple independent, interoperable implementations of the Web technology stack", so no, that wouldn't really be possible. :)

<comment><USER6> > _However, if there's one thing to learn from history, it's that situations > change and usually in unpredictable ways. I have no idea what possible up- > set to the computing landscape could arrive and make Webkit unfeasible, but > I'm pretty sure something will change eventually, and wouldn't it be nice if > we had a backup plan?_

Sure, but that "backup plan" wouldn't be another similar engine codebase, like Trident or Gecko. I can't fathom any future technical case where those would do but Webkit would not.

But I think I covered that in my comment concerning alternative engines. Make one if you have a real need to implement something different to cover a new situation or provide something not there today. Not merely to keep your own mostly same implementation that introduces slight incompatibilities and standards lag. Current alternative engines do the latter.

> _Also, consider what might happen if Webkit were the only browser engine. > Sure, Webkit moves at a fast pace now, when it has competition from both > other browsers and native apps, but consider that the two biggest supporters > of Webkit both benefit directly from people using native apps over web-apps. > Sure, they benefit from web-apps too, but Apple in particular gets actual > revenue directly from native apps, so if they didn't have other browsers to > compete with, maybe Webkit wouldn't be as shiny and cutting-edge as it is._

I don't think this is true. For Google is isn't true at all: it makes more money from people using the web than from people using native apps. As for Apple, well, they started the whole webkit project, and they don't make much from native apps anyway. They make their money from devices (which are used to browse the web also, so need a top notch engine) and laughably less from selling native apps (it's just a side business for them). Plus, all this time with native apps and the like, they have enhanced Webkit and mobile Safari the same.

But, let's say that what you say is true: if some companies indeed favored native apps instead of web apps, wouldn't that make even more important that all other companies that care about the web flock to maintain ONE and only engine, instead of working each in it's own engine?

That way they could make it as good as it can be, remove compatibility issues and generally make the web attractive and achieve progress and new features faster.

> _The thing is, if Webkit were the only browser-engine, even if you did come > up with some completely different engine, your idea would be useless. You > wouldn't be able to achieve compatibility with existing sites without > mimicking all the weird bugs and corner-cases of Webkit, which would not be > feasible, and if your idea is so completely different you can't just fork > the Webkit code and add your idea on top._

The thing you describe as bad is actually BETTER than what you have to do today.

Because today, if you come up with some "completely different engine", in order to "achieve compatibility with existing sites" you would not just have to "mimic all the weird bugs and corner-cases of Webkit" but also those of the other major engines.

Better to have just ONE engine to mimic, no?

<comment><USER8> _> Sure, but that "backup plan" wouldn't be another similar engine codebase, like Trident or Gecko. I can't fathom any future technical case where those would do but Webkit would not._

Certainly, any situation that made Webkit unviable would probably affect Trident or Gecko or Presto the same way. It's not that we specifically need to preserve some other code-base so that we can bust it out if something happens to Webkit, it's that we need to make sure that it's possible for new rendering engines to spring up and keep applying the pressure of competition.

 _> Because today, if you come up with some "completely different engine", in order to "achieve compatibility with existing sites" you would not just have to "mimic all the weird bugs and corner-cases of Webkit" but also those of the other major engines._

If the majority of sites each only worked in one major browser, or if they served completely independent markup to each browser, then yes, you'd have to reverse-engineer them all to obtain decent compatibility. However, that's not the case these days - the vast majority of sites stick to the parts of the Web platform that are reliably, consistently, interoperably implemented across the major browsers.

If something has been implemented correctly four times, even if it took a while to reach that milestone, it's much, much, much more likely that it can be implemented a fifth time, than some feature that has exactly one implementation and it's not clear which behaviours are intentional, which behaviours are accidents, and whether the accidents must be preserved for compatibility reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice work. I also like the minimal jquery code to make the elt draggable without, um, dragging in the full jquery ui plugin to make it happen, so to speak.

</comment><comment><USER10> It looks far from pixel perfect to me: <http://d.pr/i/U13O> (Chrome/Mac)

</comment><comment><USER11> And this is why images get used rather than CSS.

</comment><comment><USER12> At least with photoshop i'm pretty sure the "nintendo" will render the same way everywhere ...</comment>