The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times - <AUTHOR> https://www.chappatte.com/en/the-end-of-political-cartoons-at-the-new-york-times/ <comment><USER2> "We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in."

This is a significant problem, not just for newsrooms, but for companies and individuals.

Nuance is not permitted in 2019 - this is simply the latest flavor of puritanical outrage that grips humanity. From the Salem witch trials to the Red Scare to the Harry Potter book burnings of the early 2000s, we are now privy to the latest incarnation of something as old as homo sapiens themselves.

The issue now is that the puritanical outrage stretches past the pulpit and Letters to the Editor and directly into your notifications, your DMs, your timeline; broadcast across the world and sending newsrooms and corporations scrambling with half-arsed apologies.

<comment><USER3> It does confuse me that these mobs have such power on decision makers at companies and media outlets like this. The interesting thing about Twitter "mobs" is that if you look away from the computer screen or hit the button on the side of your phone, they are suddenly silent and may as well not exist. You can, in fact, log out of Twitter and never log back in again. Most of the time doing so will have zero long term negative impact, since the mob is fickle, trapped in their filter bubbles, and will move onto the next outrage in days if not hours.

The mobs that cause doxing or have credible threats of harm upon on individuals (like job loss or even violence) do in fact wield incredible, terrifying power though.

<comment><USER4> > It does confuse me that these mobs have such power on decision makers at > companies and media outlets like this. The interesting thing about Twitter > "mobs" is that if you look away from the computer screen or hit the button > on the side of your phone, they are suddenly silent and may as well not > exist.

If you are a company then bad stories on Twitter could cause a significant drop in business. So if you just choose to ignore Twitter, that does not mean that it may as well not exist.

<comment><USER5> The angry vocal minority on twitter (people who may not even be customers, perhaps likely are not) really has such an effect on a company's sales? Got any examples?

<comment><USER6> Well, there is the Uriah's Heating and Cooling case in Ohio last year.

[https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180729/theodore-decker- colum...](https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180729/theodore-decker-column- racist-words-blow-back-on-man-family-and-business)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of visual political culture is a self-absorbed joke. Visual political memes have become a massive and persistent grassroots social phenomenon with far more influence and engagement than too-clever-by-half political cartoons... not to mention certain animated shows with extremely sharp political and social satire. I don't think the author really regrets loss of political discourse. I think he regrets no longer being considered part of the political chattering- class establishment, even as that establishment loses its influence in a world of democratized information flow and opinion-sharing.

<comment><USER8> >>A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh or think deeply in years.

This probably says more about you than about political cartoons as a medium.

Is it possible that you have become so used to over-the-top memes and shallow animated shows with instant-gratification "satire" that you have lost the ability (and/or patience) to pause and ponder the subtler, many-layered messages underneath traditional cartoons?

<comment><USER9> Could you post one of these alleged subtle and multi-layered political cartoons, with a short analysis?

<comment><USER10> I learned last month that there's a Pulitzer price in Editorial Cartooning. This is the winner of 2019 (and the runner ups), so I'd say that's as good as it gets: [https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darrin-bell- freelancer](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/darrin-bell-freelancer)

<comment><USER11> Political cartoonists really like Trump's long ties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of the famous Muhammad drawings in 2005 in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (JP). Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East. Had it happened again today, the Puritan twittersphere would have been all over it and JP would likely have had to follow same route as NYT. Very sad.

<comment><USER13> > Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic > rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East

Was this an universal viewpoint in the West? As a non-Muslim teen in India I saw it as mocking Islam (I get that others' mileage varies).

<comment><USER14> In the case of Charlie Hebdo the intention was clearly to mock Islam indeed. But I am mystified that we are questioning in 2019 the right to blasphemy in a modern, western, free, secular society.

<comment><USER15> If publishing a cartoon causes your death I think the mockery may well have been legitimate.

<comment><USER16> Was there some Vatican-equivalent Islamic body that commissioned a hit on the CH offices? No, it was a terrorist cell that wanted to attain both easy publicity and make life worse for European Muslims.

"Legitimate" mockery would have exposed the absurdity of terrorist groups recruiting petty criminals and elevating them to a noble "jihadi" status because, well, nobody else had as little to lose.

But that wouldn't get any media coverage, nor would it get props for "upholding free speech", in a country that outlaws Holocaust denial.

<comment><USER15> I can personally attest that making fun of terrorists specifically in the manner you describe is a common topic in the French cartoon world, and especially common in CH. So it indeed wouldn't get any sort of media coverage because it's not a novel event in any way.

I don't deny that there was a lot of hypocrisy and fair weather friends surrounding CH after they were targeted, but the point about the Holocaust laws misses the mark. It's not illegal in France to make crass jokes about the Holocaust, as CH makes them in droves. In fact, they make crass jokes about almost anything related to France in some way and their first love always was the opposition to the traditional gaullist catholic establishment. You can be as crass as you want and won't get in trouble for it as long as you don't incite violence directly.

The problem highlighted by CH is that there currently is only one ideology that gives artists, filmmakers, cartoonists, etc. pause in the West when drawing up jokes or material, and that is Islam. There are few other topics in the West where there is a chance that criticism or commentary on your part will cause you great personal adversity or harm. In fact, I can't think of any off the top of my head but I'd be happy to hear some examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. The caricature that inflate the size of ears and chins and lips and noses is not dignifying and doesn't add any value to whatever argument is being made, and can sometimes even be racist. There's no rebuttal to a political cartoon, there's no dialogue. They're cheap and easy to make and easy to consume and are just as easy to forget.

I don't care if they exist or not, either way I don't read them, but standing up for political cartoons as being a thing worth defending, I don't think it is. I think they hurt more than they help.

Go look at political cartoons from the sides of opinions you disagree with and see how they make you feel. Are they convincing you of anything or are they just making you mad?

<comment><USER18> Standing up for free speech is a great thing to do; to reframe what you are saying we are dealing with one of the mildest outlets for anger that a demographic could possibly express. We want people to do that rather than escalating to, eg, yelling at people in person.

People get angry all the time and a lot of them don't know how to deal with it. A political cartoon may not be a shining example of debate but it is a great way to let people see that their feelings are understood and broadly communicated.

If it doesn't cover expressing an unpopular, offensive and unimportant opinion as an image, what does free speech mean to you? Are we only to have free speech on topics are declared important by popular survey?

Just to make it clear why that is a ridiculous idea, the principle of free speech is ultimately not for majorities, it is for minorities. You don't really need a concept of free speech to talk about things that are widely recognised as important and worthwhile by everyone. It is top protect things that are generally believed to be better left unsaid. Things like purposefully upsetting people with a cartoon.

<comment><USER17> A newspaper not publishing political cartoons is not a free speech issue. If the government were banning political cartoons, then it would be. A newspaper can print or not print whatever it wants.

<comment><USER19> It may not be an issue of Free Speech (however you define it), but it's still an issue of freedom to speak.

(My point is that you're trying to dismiss an issue by claiming to not fit an arbitrary category, but you haven't argued why not being into that category makes it a non-issue.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > "We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise > like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires > immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or > meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most > outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows > in."

It's strange, and perhaps unfortunate, that having pinned the blame on "Twitter Mobs", the examples he chooses to give are where cartoonists have been silenced by autocratic regimes (Turkey, Venezuela, Russia). The solution in these cases is to push back and defend press freedom, not to cave in and blame faceless social media mobs.

And when it comes to 'social media' mobs, is anyone really going to come into bat for the NYT and claim that the below is not _really_ anti-semitic or homophobic? If you need to lean on anti-Semitic or homophobic tropes let me suggest you're not as funny, incisive or subversive as you think you are. Comparing yourself to CH in such circumstances is to claim a martrydom you don't really deserve [1] [2]

[1] [https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times- antisemi...](https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic- cartoon-roundly-condemned/)

[2] [https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times- trump...](https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin- cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811)

<comment><USER21> >[https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times- antisemi...](https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemitic- cartoon-roundly-condemned/)

Criticising Israel and pro-Israel policy != antisemitism

>[https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times- trump...](https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump-putin- cartoon-criticized-homophobic-n891811)

I don't see how it's homophobic. The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people.

If the cartoon were portraying e.g. Merkel and Putin, in similar roles, would you call it "heterophobic" (is that a word?), or would it be perfectly acceptable?

<comment><USER22> > The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their > alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people.

It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close", its "they're so close they're gay".

That makes "being gay" an active of derision or humour, which is an attack on gay people.

<comment><USER21> >It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close", its "they're so close they're gay".

No, the punchline of the joke is "they're so close it's almost like they're in a relationship". Of course it has to be a gay relationship, because they're both men.

As I said before, the joke would work just as well if the cartoon depicted a woman and a man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The decision to no longer have political cartoons reminds me of something from earlier days. Someone at the multinational I worked at did a prod a deployment and it went pretty badly. There was downtime of about 15-20 minutes. So immediately an edict comes from up high - we shall never have deployment during hours of x to y. Just massive CYA.

The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at someone he didn't like.

<comment><USER24> > The guy isn't wrong about twitter mobs mowing down everything in their path > and that's stupid. But he is speaking about it now, when it affected him. He > had a great podium - should have said something when it was directed at > someone he didn't like.

Seems like he did. From the post:

> Over the last years, with the Cartooning for Peace Foundation we established > with French cartoonist Plantu and the late Kofi Annan - a great defender of > cartoons - or on the board of the Association of American Editorial > Cartoonists, I have consistently warned about the dangers of those sudden > (and often organized) backlashes that carry everything in their path.

<comment><USER23> Ahhh, you are right. My bad. Good catch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yes, this.

Politically correct mobs are changing the world for the worst. In today's world, Eddie Murphy wouldn't make it out the door. And we would be worse off for it.

The great irony is that the very comedians who are being retroactively condemned were cutting-edge for breaking barriers in their day. John Cleese is a glaring example.

I have high hopes the pendulum will some day swing back the other way, and we will all be able to laugh at today's overzealous critics.

<comment><USER26> It it not just irony, it is on purpose. The PC party has largely captured the media, the academy and the polite society. There are still some local resistance here and there, but in a large measure they won this round of cultural war. So they do not need any troublemakers anymore, they don't want people that constantly test and push the boundaries of acceptable and reveal the absurdity of power and the nakedness of the kings. They are setting the boundaries now, they are the power and they are the kings - why would they tolerate some jackasses questioning what they have struggled so long to achieve? They done their part in the revolution, now to the re-education camps with them! If you read the history of any recent revolution, you'd see this pattern repeated over and over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The actual cartoon, in case anyone (like me) is missing context:

[https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for- anti...](https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti-semitic- cartoon-of-netanyahu-and-trump/)

<comment><USER28> Thanks!

Overall, this seems fairly tame to me. What am I missing? I'm honestly at a loss here.

<comment><USER29> it reminds people of this [https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/11222905077141...](https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/1122290507714113538)

<comment><USER30> The first pic has a stereotypical Jew up front the second the prime minister of a country that is highly influential of US foreign policy. I think the comparison is stretch.

It seems that any cartoon on Israel will simply be marked 'anti-Semitic' by opponents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mAEStro-paNDa Here's an article over the cartoon mentioned here that sparked outrage in April which led to this:

[https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned- for-a...](https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-anti- semitic-netanyahu-trump-cartoon/)

<comment><USER31> Can someone explain how the cartoon is antisemetic? Calling it such doesn't make it so. If I blend Putin into a Cassowary crossed with a Peacock would it not be apropos? Cartoons are supposed to be edgy and uncomfortable.

It looks like like the NYT succumbed to the mob whipped up by the Trump administration, it meerly doesn't want the criticism.

<comment><USER32> Showing a non-Jewish world leader in a yarmulke put it a bit over the top for me. I think the star of David was fair game because it's a symbol of Israel as a country, but depicting Trump as some sort of crypto-Jew felt like imagery you'd see in Nazi propaganda or an illustrated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

<comment><USER33> The idea is that Trump is working for Israel. What in the world is a crypto- Jew? Does it use a blockchain?

<comment><USER34> > What in the world is a crypto-Jew?

LMGTFY:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto- Judaism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism)

Staying out of sight to stay alive, basically.

<comment><USER33> Oh...I don't think anyone relevant seriously thinks he's a crypto-Jew. People just think he's spineless and is easily manipulatable by Putin/Kim/Netanyahu.

<comment><USER35> Do you think it is strange how he is so easily manipulated but yet Shumer and Pelosi and his own staff and many others fail to manipulate him?

This seems like such an odd, easily disproved statement that I am surprised when so many repeat it.

I'm not a fan, but it seems more like his regular failure than some manipulation trait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wayback Machine cache: [http://web.archive.org/web/20190610203116/https://www.chappa...](http://web.archive.org/web/20190610203116/https://www.chappatte.com/en/the- end-of-political-cartoons-at-the-new-york-times/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Relevant tweet that links to this same article and has a self-referential political cartoon: [https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280](https://twitter.com/PatChappatte/status/1138145415604449280)

The linked article is currently down for me, as is the Google cache; does anyone have a mirror? I presume the article explains the Netanyahu cartoon that the tweet references.

My hot take without (being able to be) reading the article: No more political humor because of an internet mob seems like quite the shame.

</comment><comment><USER38> To be clear, the NYT never did a lot of cartoons nor was it known for them.

I really don't think this is a big deal.

If The New Yorker or sone other publication did, then maybe.

<comment><USER39> My issue isn't that they no longer have political cartoons, it's why they made the decision to remove them. And to be fair, we don't know yet. I haven't found an official statement from the NYT on this; I've only seen tweets and this guy's piece on it.

<comment><USER38> There is no 'official' Statement because this isn't a big deal. This is in the realm of deciding what freelances to go with given budgets and other factors.

To this guy, this decision is clearly significant. For someone at NYT it was just another Tuesday.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A few weeks before that event, he was on Swiss TV (he lives in Geneva) saying that he never felt pressure and did not care... Sad...

</comment><comment><USER41> The article raises a very important point but unless I'm missing something, the comments here are identical to the twitter mob being talked about.

Are not statements quickly ripped of in a heat of emotion and consisting solely of impressions, rumors, opinions, hyperbole and intentional bias exactly the problem?

</comment><comment><USER42> > This is the era of images. In a world of short attention span, their power > has never been so big.

Given the reach of social media with respect to images, cartoons, memes, etc, do we need newspapers to be the distributors of political cartoons? Does it simply add legitimacy to some cartoons to separate them from the huge amount of low quality social media content?

</comment><comment><USER43> The New York Times is the best paper in the world? Sounds like an absolute without any parameters or qualifiers...

</comment><comment><USER44> Non political comic about political comics that I think about sums up the value of political comics (language warning, I guess)

[http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2008-07-02](http://smbc- comics.com/comic/2008-07-02)

</comment><comment><USER45> This seems less like a case the "oh, the PC Police want to do away with political humor!" and more just shifting tides in media - i.e. that the conventional newspaper political cartoon is a form trending towards obsolescence. Political comedy is very much alive, at least in terms of its popularity and range across the political spectrum, attracting from the far left (e.g. Chapo Trap House) to liberals (e.g. most late night hosts) to all your various forms of conservatives (e.g. Crowder). To me the "political cartoon" as we once knew it seems like a dated formula, one that might be argued has already been replaced by the format of internet memes which can serve similar political function.

(Also personally I have never really cared for political cartoons, they've always seemed unfunny and too reductionist. Although I suppose the Stan Kelly Cartoons from The Onion might be an exception.)

</comment><comment><USER46> I am mildly curious if the recent publication of Mark Levin's "Unfreedom of the Press" has any bearing on the changes happening at NYT.

</comment><comment><USER47> So the Times was like "Hey everybody we found the problem: It's _the fact that we have political cartoons_?"

</comment><comment><USER48> This is what you get when you let the mob rule.

</comment><comment><USER49> Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred way before Jack Dorsey was a twinkle in his father's eye.

The problem is the structural flaws built into our brains.

Consider vision. If I showed you a wall of visual noise with a human face somewhere in the middle, you'd likely pick out the face in an instant. That's because we have physical structures in our visual cortex that specifically filter the information coming down the optic nerve for human faces.

What's funny is that higher judgement seems to work the same way. For most of the history of homo sapiens, we've lived in relatively small groups, and only interacted with comparatively limited amounts of information (compared to the typical internet feed). Think about all the things represented by scrolling down instagram: products and their place in your life, hundreds of people you've met over many years, trends and fads and memes which are themselves complex multi-layered ideas requiring lots of insider knowledge to grasp.

All of this is way more information than what a typical person had to deal with until about 100 years ago at the earliest.

So what's a brain to do? Our minds filter the incoming information until it's distilled down to the simplest possible version, the one with little nuance and zero subtlety. That's the idea that catches, because we lack the machinery to process 10,000 minor details for every little thing we do all the time.

Apply this to political discourse and you'll see why major political candidates spend precious minutes arguing over whether "socialism is bad," or "capitalism is bad." I'm sure many here understand it's way more complicated than that, but if you tried to get a real discussion going about nit-picky policy stuff, it'd go nowhere.

I'm not about to decry "attention spans these days" or anything, because frankly I don't think people are any different than they were 500 years ago, not really. And that's the problem. The only thing that's changed is what amounts to "common knowledge" these days, which is usually also an oversimplification of scientific reality.

The problem is that the world is just too big and too complex for our ill- adapted chimp brains to fully grasp, at least at the population scale, and Twitter and the like amplify this effect.

I don't have any solutions. But I know that we should keep doing the one thing humans are good at: building better tools. We can't exactly make society _less_ complex, but we can probably make tools to understand it without losing (as much) nuance.

That's the only option I can see for fixing this sort of thing in the near- future, because even if these social media problems created selection pressure on humans (which I doubt), it'd be a long long time before we were cranking out baby Homo Interneticus.

</comment><comment><USER50> I thought they had to close because they ripped off a Ziggy.

</comment><comment><USER51> How depressing.

</comment><comment><USER52> Was there an announcement by the New York Times to do this? I am not calling him into question; I just wonder with what silence and shame they have made this decision.

Should they next ban their op-eds for their sometimes offensive ideas expressed?

</comment><comment><USER53> The drastic step of eliminating all political cartoons carries a very specific and misleading implication, if one assumes that the NYT is impartial. Which they are not: [https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the- ne...](https://nypost.com/2019/04/30/anti-semitic-scandal-at-the-new-york- times-isnt-surprising/)

With that in mind, ceasing publication of all political cartoons evidences extremely poor editorial discretion at the NYT. What, they are incapable of excluding Palestinian propaganda? Apparently: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christma...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/middleeast/christmas- lebanon.html)

<comment><USER53> To elaborate on my comment, by eliminating all cartoons, the NYT invites one to think that politically correct over-sensitivity is the cause. Otherwise, why would they not simply avoid publishing anti-Semitic cartoons? Indeed, the author of the blog post suggests that "Twitter mobs" are at fault. But the NYT has an extensive, dark history of profoundly harmful anti-Semitism, including the editorial stance that the Holocaust was not occurring, as it occurred. This is extensively detailed in Buried by the Times, and is supported by that book's absolutely mammoth bibliography: [https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times- Holocaust-Important-News...](https://www.amazon.com/Buried-Times-Holocaust- Important-Newspaper/dp/0521607825)</comment></comment>


The Future of Games on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://12devsofxmas.co.uk/post/2012-12-26-day-1-the-future-of-games-on-the-web <comment><USER2> This is the third holiday season in a row I've seen blog posts about the future of games on the web on HN that effectively ignore flash. Each year, flash portals such as Kongregate.com have grown into even larger juggernauts, even growing on a percentage basis on Alexa (<http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/touchgallery#/contrejour>). And each year, I've seen various examples of "incredible" html5 games put forward that would have difficulties even getting 3.5 stars out of 5 on kong or newgrounds.

This is beginning to feel like a ritual HN ceremony!

That isn't to say, JS-based games aren't progressing. They are for sure. Most notably on a platform the article didn't mention-- facebook.

<comment><USER3> We recently launched a HTML5 port of a console/pc game (<http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/606067>) on Newgrounds and it was interesting to compare/contrast with the experiences my friends have had launching their Flash games.

There's a huge amount of inertia to overcome - lots of people with old browsers unwilling to upgrade, old computers that simply can't run games, and incredibly broken configurations (whether due to bad browsers, bad plugins or bad drivers) where simple HTML5 audio/rendering can crash the browser or reboot the machine. When we first put it up we got lots of complaints and our average review was closer to 3 stars, despite doing tons of testing up-front; eventually by sorting through the issues one by one we got it to the 4 stars you see now. Despite this, Flash games of comparable quality get higher scores, more views, and more revenue (nobody is willing to pay to show ads in HTML5 games; for Flash games there are entire ad networks).

So I guess what I'm saying is that you're mostly right.

On the other hand, a few people I know who make a living off flash games have said that sponsorships are fewer and further between now, and that ad revenue is decreasing. I don't know whether this represents an overall decrease in the value of in-game ads, or whether Flash's reach is diminishing.

<comment><USER2> The big money is definitely in in-game consumables and virtual goods now. I'd say add revenue has probably been declining every year since at least 2007, but a top 100 game earns far more now than in the past.

This talk was pretty enlightening: <http://youtu.be/Ekz466sDprg>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the issue (as touched on in the article) is that devs don't want to make "browser games" so much as they want to make games. The main advantage of being able to render within a browser window would be to provide a quick playable demo. When you play an imersive game you want the whole screen because it is taking your full attention.

When it comes to games I'd prefer just to manage everything within Steam or via desktop shortcuts, whether it is written in C++ , C# or JS is an irrelevant implementation detail for the player.

Of course by providing an installer for popular OSs that just fires up chrome in fullscreen mode could easily solve this problem.

Another (possible) issue is that most game devs like to keep their source private and include DRM. JS doesn't lend itself so well to that type of approach.

<comment><USER5> It's very easy to create a game that runs on the JVM, and because of the library maturity, after a very early point it becomes easier to continue in the JVM.

<comment><USER4> I would guess that JS runs on more platforms than the JVM, especially including WinRT and iOS.

<comment><USER5> Well, yes. It's very likely that my TV's menu system is some variant of JavaScript.

But the important things support the JVM.

<comment><USER4> I don't think you have support for the JVM on ipads , Xbox360 or Windows RT (so surface etc).

JS in theory at least should be supported on anything with a relatively modern browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author forgot one of the greatest and multiplatform frameworks: Cocos2D for HTML5[1] and Cocos2D with Javascript bindings [2]

[1] <http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/t/js-tests/tests/>

[2] <https://github.com/zynga/jsbindings#readme>

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the concept of user generated content. I haven't been that into games in a very long time at this point, but from what I remember of playing the few MMORPG's that I did play, they always seemed to fall down when it came to making the game world truly respond to user input. What I mean by this is, what if the game world's state was as responsive to your input as say... a forum, or blog comments section, or even a social website?

Well, anyways... I checked out the first game in the article's list of "great" HTML5 games (Contre Jour: <http://www.contrejour.ie/#fbid=N0F1LHvfzzM>). It was pretty good. Seemed to have relatively unique, interesting game mechanics, nice visuals, and I liked the music.

<comment><USER8> There are quite a few people working on the user-generated web game content - me included! :) I'm putting together something of a rogue-like mmorpg with players being the prime movers of the game world.

Article rang true for me, since it's exactly what I'm doing! Hyperlinks to areas of the game world, RESTful API for directly accessing the game world, client support from Android, etc. I also know of a few others doing similar work, so I think web gaming has a pretty bright future.

<comment><USER9> The idea of hyperlinks for games is pretty cool because it opens up possibilities not previously (or at least often) considered.

One of my favorite real examples is Scott Schiller's use of hyperlinks in his Survivor C64 game. He used hyperlinks to encode the entire level so you could then tweet the levels you create via short URLs and others could take that level, modify it and retweet it.

I'm curious if hyperlinks could even be used to create meta games. i.e. everyone makes different versions (equivalent to add-on packs) for a base game, where the hyperlink encodes the state of the current player and passes that state along to another level of the game created by another player.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great article Rob! We're trying to help games on the web progress towards a few of those points you mentioned with Clay.io [1].

Using URLs to link to in-game content is an interesting idea, something I'll play around with in the next few days and see about getting that as another feature of our API.

Persistent data on all devices is fantastic - of course, we need more HTML5 games that work well on each device. The two main issues I've seen developers run into with getting their games on mobile are 1) the performance in mobile web browsers (the latest Safari is pretty good, but most games still have a tough time) and 2) handling user input - developers are able to take full advantage of a keyboard on desktops and limiting to touch is a big change (though it seems a lot of devs forget about the accelerometer). If the developer has tackled those issues, we're here with the data storage feature of our API to allow for easy implementation of that idea. [2]

As for interacting with the DOM, it's funny you mention that, just yesterday we updated our homepage to have a mini-game in it (calling it a game is a bit of a stretch though) that interacts with the DOM [1].

[1] <http://clay.io/home> [2] <http://clay.io/docs/data>

</comment><comment><USER11> As someone who has been working for the better part of 2 years on a browser- based game, I hope your predictions come true. In particular I've found the blending of what's expected in typical web-apps and how games function to bo some of the more interesting benefits of approaching development from this angle.

The ability to seamlessly persist game state across devices is a powerful construct that really enables you to play everywhere. While being a simply useful mechanism, it also really helps users stay mentally engaged in the game experience if they can access it at any time. This fact builds upon itself if they can do so in small bite-sized chunks.

Additionally, the ease of acquisition of such games (we're using a DOM based approach, however, Canvas also applies here) is also a big win. We've seen our game gain tremendous traction in various offices where people wouldn't normally play games as you a) don't need to install anything and b) can play in 30 second intervals.

These two unique factors combined gives you a devious means to provide compelling game experiences regardless of where you and what type of computer you have access to.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm really interested in how you can protect your game assets, in a HTML5 game, to be stollen by a competitor ?

A second question will be how can you make money from a game that can be easily copied ?

<comment><USER3> You can't. The necessary security measures (obscene DRM, essentially) would never make it into a web standard, and there are way too many side channels to secure.

To deal with your game being easily copied you basically do what flash game devs do: basic rehosting protections (stops the laziest pirates), partnerships with advertisers, in app purchases/required server connections, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> no. the future is cloud gaming, like Gaikai.

<comment><USER14> "The Future of Games on the Web"

Not

"The Future of Games is the Web"

*And from his article, I interpret Web as Web Browser.

<comment><USER13> Gaikai is in browser cloud gaming. it's certainly the future of games on the web!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> js/html games are a pain to develop. I can develop a game much faster with , flash yes , flash and i'm going to stick with that.

Assets are handled , sounds are handled and i dont need to test it on 4+ browsers to see if it works. I get a dynamic strong typed langage, a drawing soft and an animation soft , which is all i need to develop complex games.

\- Do i care about mobile ? i can release my game as an native iOs app or air packaged app for android, i get exposure through app stores and can use native device capabilites to enhance user experience.

So yep , it's proprietary , but i chose ease of dev , deployement and fast dev cycles over theorical open-ness and awesomeness.

<comment><USER16> It's a matter of tooling. Flash is a mature technology for game development, whereas JavaScript is quite new in that area.

However, I firmly believe that things are improving. Adobe are buying companies that build HTML5 and JavaScript tools.

Web browser compatibility is an issue; however it remains a development issue. Building separate applications for each platform brings in other issues, such as app store rules and visibility. Granted, this is a trade-off.

<comment><USER15> > Adobe are buying companies that build HTML5 and JavaScript tools.

which ones? you're talking about appstore rules but phonegap purpose is for a js app to be deployed like a native app,out of the browser.

> visibility :

an app on the app store is more visible than any app on a web site on mobile. I have no exemple of any profitable html5 game , on the other hand there are plenty ( machinarium )exemples sucessfull of unity or flash games.

Things may be different in 5/10 years , but i code for now and with stable technologies.</comment></comment></comment>


Your Grandparents Spent More of Their Money on Food Than You Do - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/your-grandparents-spent-more-of-their-money-on-food-than-you-do <comment><USER2> Interesting to see that this article does not, a single time, mention quality of the food.

Yes the French and the Japanese spend more, how much healthier are they?</comment>


Windows Server 2019 will feature Linux and Kubernetes support - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/03/20/windows-server-2019-will-feature-linux-and-kubernetes-support/ <comment><USER2> From the article, it sounds like Kubernetes support will just be OS enhancements rather than actually including it as a feature like WSL, OpenSSH, or bsdtar and curl.</comment>


Ask HN: Tool(s) for Organizing Project Ideas - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm interested to know what are the tool(s) you would recommend for collecting information for new project ideas?
I have a wage software project idea, and I would like to collect everything I write down or find online in one semi-organized space. This involves saving bookmarks to related projects/tools/articles, writing down notes that are displayed in semi-organized shape/form (maybe mindmaps?).
The project is still in idea phase so I don't want to use project management or kanban boards for tasks.
It can be an offline tool, but could be also a SaaS application with multi-platform support.
Looking forward to see what HN community is using. <comment><USER2> Suspect Roam Research [0] might work nicely for what you're doing. It's a very loosely structured tool that basically lets you build your own graph between different wiki-ish pages.

0: [https://roamresearch.com/](https://roamresearch.com/)</comment>


Backblaze turns 5 – a startup grows up - <AUTHOR> http://blog.backblaze.com/2012/04/20/backblaze-turns-5-a-startup-grows-up/

<comment><AUTHOR> A fantastic timeline of how to build a company, one step at a time. Just keep pushing forward and suddenly, five years later, you have a thriving, successful, and profitable company.

Congrats, Backblaze! And thank you for sharing.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! It's been extremely fun this time around partly because we decided not to take any VC funding. (We were all part of a previous startup that took VC funding and it causes some complications we wanted to avoid this time.)

<comment><USER3> Wow, congratulations!

Are you still all in one datacenter? Have you considered replication?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great Story, even better product. I recently signed up for my 3rd year of service with BackBlaze.

</comment><comment><USER5> Whats the deal with the guy in horsehead costume?

<comment><USER2> In the Backblaze spirit of building it ourselves to save money, instead of any traditional security system, we have little web cams that monitor the office for motion and page us with pictures of the activity when there is unexpected motion too early before anybody is supposed to be in the office.

I wanted to test if anybody was paying attention to the alerts, so I bought a horse head mask and walked around the office super early. The robe was a random afterthought to help disguise my clothing that might be recognized.

I'm happy to report the experiment worked. Motion detected, emails sent out within a few minutes. I also had a good laugh. :-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What advanced office jukebox would you use? - <AUTHOR>

Assuming an office of 20+ people with varying tastes, varying adoption of last.fm and spotify, and a small mp3 archive, what would you use to make sure -the music doesn't stop -it reflects the people who are in the room's taste. -perhaps allowing for veto's. Maybe an equal number per employee? -maybe it could be prioritised with a random element, i.e. vote up like HN with the occasional random song from outside the top 20 that hasn't been played today.<p>Any thoughts? There's quite a few basic solutions out there, but must be something more advanced? <comment><USER2> I believe that Apple's iPhone Remote app and iTunes already have something similar to this. You can vote for songs from ipad/iphone devices connected to a central itunes library that plays the music. <http://www.apple.com/itunes/remote/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice idea, but it's a mix of ubuntu/mac/windows, so something web based would be ideal :)

Having a look through these:

[http://superuser.com/questions/61404/what-is-a-good- office-m...](http://superuser.com/questions/61404/what-is-a-good-office- mp3-jukebox)

<http://en.jinzora.com/>

<http://xbmc.org/>

<http://exit66jukebox.berlios.de/>

Everything seems fairly basic on the collaborative/veto/encorporating others taste front at the mo though....

I maybe being blind?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it necessary to operate from the USA to succeed? - <AUTHOR>

I built Zephyr in Glasgow, Scotland. But on many an occasion I have been advised "you need to go to London for realistic investment, but Stateside would be better".
Investment rates in the UK and Europe are lower and even the preferred investment sectors are different, while the USA market and customers within tend to take a punt much earlier on ideas as has been seen with hyper growth for Slack...but ask somebody here about Slack and 9/10 haven't heard of it.
I would love for Scotland to grasp the nettle here, we have considerable talent in our universities and engineers with great ideas, our gaming industry is strong too but if the advice given is to leave the country to succeed, what chance is there to develop things locally?
What are your thoughts, can companies make it happen where they are or should we build to emigrate, with our sights set on Silicon Valley? <comment><USER2> Outside investors are not a requirement to start or operate a successful business. The only things you need to create "Scotland's Slack" are a computer, an internet connection and a $5 VPS.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends how you define success. Can't beat Silicon Valley for investment opportunity, but by the same token as others have said its not all about getting funded as fast and highly as possible. If you can reach your customers from where you are then you can grow from where you are. Take for eg: Aus/NZ (where I'm operating), certainly not renowned for VC activity, yet has it's share of very successful startups (Xero, Canva, Atlassian, etc.)

<comment><USER4> On a personal level, how do you maintain your business here in Sydney given the costs associated. Compared to other places like London and San Francisco, Australia is expensive, the internet is slow, the government is not particularly technologically minded, i'm not really seeing any reason to stay?

<comment><USER3> Well on a personal level, I really love living in Australia (in melbourne btw), so I stay. But to answer the other points - in a straight comparison to SF yes it's expensive, but wages are also good so it tends to even out. Internet speeds are a joke, but most commercial buildings and all co-working spaces have 100mb cable, so it's a non-issue for work. As for the government, well, "not particularly technologically minded" is about the kindest thing you could say about the current party, but it's not a factor in my day-to-day work, and not enough reason for me to pack up and leave the country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Customers matter more than investors. Some people forget business is about creating things that create value for customers, and not about trying to raise capital from investors.

1\. There is a ton of capital in Europe. It's just harder to access for the average 20 year old, and investors tend to be a bit more conservative. It's all about building relationships and about your network. Europe has many family offices that invest directly into the top US venture funds (i.e. Sequoia)

2\. If you're doing something in FinTech, go to London or NYC. If you're doing something in fashion, London/Paris/NYC/Milan. Oil & Gas? The UAE, Texas, etc. Anyway, you get the point. Go where the customer is.

Flipping an app however, is harder. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Moving to another country ain't easy.

I decided to move from Sydney to Berlin when I decided to do a start-up. I did it because I like it here, cost of living is lower, there's a scene, and it will be much easier to hire for reasonable prices than it would be in Sydney.

But...It's been a pretty massive saga, full of uncertainties.

Does the US even offer a visa category that applies to you? Immigration uncertainty is really bad to have hanging over you. At the end of the day, the company resides where the M.D. resides...So if you have to leave the U.S., I believe exit taxes will becomes due. My understanding is that means you'll owe 20-30% of the value of the company, without necessarily any liquidity associated.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great advice folks. I suspect it will be a case of staging things. Prove the viability of the model, minimal seed fund for push to market and scale as our traction increases.

If the combined talents of the tech workforce here can drag Scotland along the path and turn it into a Silicon Glen then that's definitely a bonus. Just takes one big name to start the snowball rolling ☺

</comment><comment><USER7> 1\. You definitely do not have to be in Silicon Valley to create a hugely successful startup.

2\. Silicon Valley startups have a number of unique advantages that are sometimes critically important.

<comment><USER8> What are the unique advantages of Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER7> It depends on the startup, but most of the unique advantages derive from having a huge portion of the world's greatest technical people and smartest investors gathered together in one area, tacitly working together as one industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is the same difference from starting a Soccer team in Spain or in Japan. In Spain you have the whole ecosystem in place, the same happens in Silicon Valley. That is why most of the world's best Soccer professionals are in Spain.

It is not impossible for a Japanese team to win the world's soccer championship, but to this day, only teams from Europe or South America won.

</comment><comment><USER10> focus on the business and customers more than the investors or your lack of being in a hub

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course, Yes. Venture capital industry has more growth in the USA and they have many Tech Investors.

more preferable place is NYC or SF where many tech companies out there. SV is expansive place to living in i guess.

but i strongly recommended if you clone slack for your country even if you live in USA Good luck!</comment>


I couldn't wait for the new Mac Pro - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/2013/08/31/i-couldnt-wait-for-the-new-mac-pro/ <comment><USER3> I used Hackintosh machines in the past. The problem with those is that after you've invested lots of time and effort, you end up with a machine that doesn't work, but performs that task extremely fast and is relatively cheap.

This article is actually great, because it paints a very realisting picture of the experience. Most hackintosh fans fail to mention that your machine might not wake up from sleep, so you either run it 24/7 or shut down fully and wait ages for it to boot afterwards. Or that you'll get weird networking problems. Or that your video card driver will crash every once in a while, taking your whole machine down with it. Or that you can't click "update" next to an OS update and usually need to manually go through the process of waiting, then reading the forums scanning for people's experiences, then moving various kexts out of the way and patching them back in after the upgrade.

Yes, I realize there are many people with a nearly flawless experience. But not everyone can get one.

In my case, I decided it definitely wasn't worth it and bought a real Mac Pro. Couldn't be happier, especially as 3 years ago it wasn't easy to build a machine with 32GB of RAM. Net result: yes, it was expensive, but it _works_.

<comment><USER4> Building a hackintosh is all about selective hardware (similar to the Apple experience). Generally if you use one of the tested builds like the ones listed here [http://www.tonymacx86.com/375-building-customac-buyer-s- guid...](http://www.tonymacx86.com/375-building-customac-buyer-s-guide- august-2013.html) you should have a pleasurable apple like experience with the cost savings and fun of building it yourself.

<comment><USER5> > Building a hackintosh is all about selective hardware

Exactly. I bought hardware based on one of these lists and had no issues with my Hackintosh since building it (almost 1 year ago). Also, the build took about the same time as any computer would. I think I had to install one driver post-install, but that's all the 'hassle' I've experienced.

And researching what hardware works well with OS X doesn't take more than 5 minutes since people compile lists and/or entire build guides for every version of the OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Building a hackintosh will give you a deep appreciation for how well Windows manages to work on such a dizzying array of hardware profiles.

Macs work so well because Apple controls the hardware pipeline from top to bottom - the fact that Windows manages to work so well without controlling any of the hardware pipeline is actually pretty incredible (and, it gives you a lot of appreciation for the work that Linux developers have done to provide a similar experience, as well as illuminating why some things still don't "Just work" like they do in Windows or OS X environments).

<comment><USER7> First, Windows doesn't "manage" a dizzying array of hardware profiles, try to install a vanilla windows-copy. Literally nothing works. The display is 640x480. USB is out, network is out. I had to burn a CD rom with the network driver to download the rest of the drivers. The vendor manages the hardware profiles and puts them on the installer CD.

If manually managing drivers teaches you to "appreciate" anything, do yourself a favour and install Ubuntu, if should cure you from such folly. Even if you'll never use it a day in your life, it will show you that "managing a dizzying array of hardware profiles" might well be difficult, but it's NOT a discipline either Windows or MacOS even competes in.

EDITED to respond:

Yes, this was XP. But even back then, Windows was marketed (and had been for a decade) as the "just works" OS, hardware wise. I'm glad they've improved, but it took them long enough.

<comment><USER6> Have you ever tried building a hackintosh? If you don't have _just_ the right hardware, the whole thing hard-crashes. It doesn't even boot with fallback drivers. It just says "nope, not what I expected, goodbye." Additionally, it only works on non-Apple hardware due to the efforts of a homebrew community - out-of-the-box OS X just plain won't run.

The fact that Windows XP would boot into an at least marginally-usable state on random hardware puts it lightyears ahead of OS X in that regard.

I've been running various flavors of Linux machines for 15 years now, as well. I'm quite intimately familiar with the driver woes there (wireless drivers _still_ basically never work out of the box on $LINUX_DISTRO), but again, it's so far ahead of OS X in that regard, it's not even funny.

<comment><USER7> You're setting the bar extremely low. MacOS is explicitly not supposed to run on any other hardware configurations than exactly those sold by Apple. It was never it's intended behaviour. There is nothing to be ahead of, MacOS didn't even bother to get out of bed on race day.

<comment><USER6> That's my entire point. We frequently assume that most hardware "just works" because it follows some specification or another. It's not until you run into a system that just flat out blows up when it runs into unexpected hardware that the work that Windows and Linux developers do becomes apparent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I actually use a hackintosh system since 2010 and I would not overstate enough how much it is a pain in the ass, I've had all kind of issues although I've always carefully chosen my components, moreover you cannot easily test previews of OS X, if you're a developer it can be a problem. And because generally xcode requires the last version of the system and also often the last version of iTunes which in turn requires to be up to date you are then forced to make every update and each update is a new risk to break something.

In short at one point or another I've had issues with the graphic card or the integrated gpu, with USB 3, with the audio, with the screen resolutions on my two displays, various kernel freezes, networking... And to this day some of these issues are still unresolved.

Moreover you generally should always buy a Gigabyte motherboard for maximum compatibility but with the new Z87 chipset if I were to buy a MB I'd like to buy an Asus I prefer their current lineup. So in the end you don't even buy what you really want to buy. And also if your mb have something fancy, forget it you'll likely have troubles make it work.

After 3 years, my conclusion is it's not worth the energy I'm waiting the new mac pro to ditch my current setup, I can't take it anymore.

<comment><USER9> Can you install the version of Mac OS, iTunes and XCode that go together with each other and stick with it?

I'm thinking of getting a Hackintosh on my laptop to get started with iOS development, but I'm not ready o get a new laptop just for that (and I don't really like Mac OS).

<comment><USER8> As I explained, yes you can but only for a limited time. For instance xcode 5 is only compatible OS X 10.8 and upward so it is likely that next year in june the new xcode will drop compatibility on OS X 10.8. Moreover to target new devices, new iOS versions you must use the latest xcode version thus at one point you'll need to make an update.

I also don't want to scary you either because it is doable, this is what I do since 2010 and I use it as my main system (I have a mac mini and a macbook pro but I prefer a _big_ machine for my developments) and chances are that if your system works well with a given version of OS X it will likely work well with the next version. But it will always take some time to check the forums to resolve a particular issue or to check what people have experienced before making an update and breaking anything big. What I want to say is it's not straighforward because you are somehow always forced to update if you use it for developing apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Handy ROI calculator: Trading four days of otherwise billable work to save $1,000 makes sense if you value your time at $31.25/hr or less.

Given that the tradeoff isn't even "end up with an equivalent thing at the end of the day", I'd like to take the chance to thank the author for taking the bullet for us on this one and being honest about how much work really goes in to one of these builds.

I bet he'll save a lot of people a lot of pain and money.

<comment><USER11> What is the ROI of the time you invested in your comment? ;)

<comment><USER12> Two cents. :V

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I spent a lot of time getting OS X running on a Dell Mini 9 netbook.

At that time, I think it was regarded as the most compatible OS X netbook, and (IIRC) absolutely all the hardware worked 100% correctly. Wifi, sound, sleep/wake, external monitor, etc.

I used it extensively for 3 years as my main machine, and it never once crashed or had a single problem.

The more I used it, the more I was absolutely certain of one thing. My next machine will be a genuine Apple.

I bought a 2012 MBA 13inch for ~3 times the price of the mini 9 and am extremely happy. Apple hardware is spectacular.

<comment><USER14> > Apple hardware

What exactly is that?

<comment><USER15> It's a single block of metal laser cut to fit all the components within a solid yet light fixture. It's a power plug that if tugged will not drop your laptop to the ground. It's a backlit keyboard that feels great on the fingers. It's a beautiful screen that you can't get anywhere else. It's a large sized trackpad that answers to your fingers without noticeable lag. It's a keyboard that has all the keys on the top row to do all the things we do on a regular basis. In short it's a super well integrated machine that wakes up from sleep in an instant, has great battery life and is well suited for a worry free computing experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The author wanted a Mac Pro, but couldn't wait a few months for it to be released. He could've bought an iMac and then sold it when the Mac Pro was available, that would've cost him $300 at the most.

Instead, he chose to spend 4 full working days to build a computer that doesn't work as well as a Mac and can stop working altogether any day with no recourse. A computer that is worth zero in the resale market. A computer that Apple will not service.

By the sound of it, this is the author's only computer, which he is dependent on to make his living, and it seems he isn't planning to buy another Mac (even though he is a professional iOS developer).

This is a cautionary tale, an extreme example of being penny wise and pound foolish.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I stated in the post I also have a MacBook Air that still functions perfectly for development work. I would never recommend a Hackintosh as a developers sole computer. I also mention that I pursued this route because my gaming pc needs a refresh cpu/mb wise and this can be easily converted by dropping in my existing high end GFX card.

You are right about one thing though, it is a cautionary tale. I wrote it because I didn't see enough showing the pain involved.

<comment><USER16> In the article, you wrote you gave your MacBook Air to your girlfriend. I guess she doesn't use it often and you have made separate user accounts?

As for the part about you wanting a gaming PC anyways, I had somehow missed that. (I have to admit I zone out whenever video games are mentioned.)

> seeing as my gaming PC was due for a refresh I figured I could give it a go > and if it all went to hell, I'd suffer through the pain then move it to that > role when the Mac Pro was ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Mac Pro is a beast - I am still running a first gen MacPro1,1 - it's got an IDE drive installed in the second optical bay, four 3.5 SATA drives in the main bays and 2 2.5 SATA drives connected to the extra SATA connectors hidden under the front fan. At various times it has a hardware RAID card, extra FW+USB card, extra video card, video capture card, etc. I'm just about to grab a pair of 4 core xeons, extra ram, a Radeon hd5770 and some SSD drives - <USER2> it to a MacPro2,1 and I can run Mavericks on it, with a Geekbench of about 10k. US$400 for the upgrades not including the SSDs.

I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro - it is like the Cube, it looks cool but the Mac Pro is not a machine that requires form over function - people buy them to upgrade them, swap things in and out, stick them in racks, etc. Thunderbolt is not a replacement for pro use expandability - it just means a lot more cost + a lot more (very expensive) cables + a performance hit.

A good excuse for Apple to discontinue the Pro line eventually though - "hey we made this great new machine, but nobody bought it, so sorry"

<comment><USER18> > I think Apple has really dropped the ball with the new Mac Pro

Guy English made some great points about potential for the new Mac Pro:

"The CPU is a front end to a couple of very capable massively parallel processors at the end of a relatively fast bus. One of those GPUs isn't even hooked up to do graphics. I think that's a serious tell. If you leverage your massively parallel GPU to run a computation that runs even one second and in that time you can't update your screen, that's a problem. Have one GPU dedicated to rendering and a second available for serious computation and you've got an architecture that'll feel incredible to work with."

[http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/349](http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/349)

<comment><USER19> Guy says it's not about benchmarks but the innards seem to be entirely designed around generating a ridiculous Cinebench score for a keynote demo.

Right now it's trendy to criticize the new Mac Pro for boxes it doesn't check that the current version does; mainly a lack of enclosure space. That's something Apple can easily address with their in store setups. But when the thing releases all anyone will be able to talk about is how much Apple is charging for the high end version with the E5 2697 and 2 W9000 Firepro cards.

<comment><USER18> > Guy says it's not about benchmarks

I think what he meant was that the current benchmarks are unable to quantify the benefit to users of having a GPU for computational power while the other is driving the displays. The new Pro configuration suggests you'll be working in real-time when doing graphically intensive tasks rather than waiting for something to render. Animators & video editors will benefit from this in ways that are difficult to slap a technical benchmark on.

These machines are probably aiming to scoop up some high-margin high-end workstation business, hence the demo by Pixar at the last WWDC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Slightly off-topic: Does anyone run Mac OS X under VirtualBox on Linux (or tried to)?

I have a 2011 MacBook Pro (8 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA, 15") that I used almost exclusively (and occasionally used a Windows 7 VM on) until this past May when I bought a beefed up Thinkpad W530 (32 GB RAM, 480 GB SSD + 500 GB SATA, 1920x1080) and installed Linux on it

I've barely touched the MBP since then and only occasionally miss it, but I did notice that OS X is apparently supported on recent versions of VirtualBox. Like the Windows 7 VM that I keep around, it might be useful to have an OS X VM that I can fire up if the need arises.

<comment><USER21> No experience with VirtualBox, but I use OS X in ESXI and VMware Fusion and both of those work for me. Initial installation of OS X can be a challenge - you may need to disable some virtualization features e.g. interrupt remapping and you can have some driver challenges depending on your specific hardware (e.g. recent mac mini needs a network driver).

Officially, VMware only supports mac pro (1). Unofficially, minis also work. Haven't tried a macbook pro.

1: [http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?dev...](http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=server&partner=269)

<comment><USER20> Thanks, I appreciate the reply. It's looking like I won't bother actually attempting this, though. If it were real easy I might do it but from all of the replies it sounds like way more trouble than I want to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel this would have been more comparable with a Xeon, otherwise it's effectively a decked out iMac.

Also: I toyed with the idea of building a Hackintosh to replace my 2011 iMac, instead of waiting for the 2013 model (Haswell, 780MX GPU). By the time I'd specced a comparable machine-i7, 16GB RAM, GTX 770, 3TB HDD, SSD, and a 27" Dell UltraSharp (to match the iMac panel), I really wasn't that far off the iMac's price with only a larger (256GB vs. 128GB) SSD to show for it. About < AUD$400 off, which if you consider the time to order, build, etc, isn't as significant as many make it out to be.

The actual Hackintosh process seems to be relatively "smooth" if you use compatible parts and set a day aside (and a couple to research similar builds), but I dread any warranty issues (and therefore dealing with > 6 manufacturers).

I'm still open to the idea, and maybe it makes more financial sense in US (there's about a 20% markup on parts here in Australia), but the price different wasn't substantial enough to offset the added effort/risk.

<comment><USER23> >About < AUD$400 off, which if you consider the time to order, build, etc, isn't as significant as many make it out to be.

Not only does it make financial sense - the upgrade-ability and repairability of a custom build in unparalleled by the iMac - esp. the newer one. You would at least need the $169 AppleCare to allow for the possibility of free repairs on the iMac for 3 years. That still leaves out upgrades. Whereas for the custom build it's just a matter of yanking out the failed part and putting in a new one at cost.

<comment><USER24> Only if your time has no value. With at least one day to setup (according to the poster) and issues popping up from time to time (not to mention OS upgrades), the difference is not that big.

We are not even factoring the resale value after a couple years, of an iMac vs a generic hackintosh.

<comment><USER23> Well the resale argument doesn't really apply to a hackintosh - I wouldn't need to sell it - not at least in 5 years or so - I can just keep upgrading. And a 5 yr old iMac will fetch you roughly $200 from Gazelle.

About time - I suspect more than a handful of people will find spending a day here and there worthwhile if it saves them $400 + $169. (Also if in best case Apple keeps your iMac for 2-3 days in repair - that's time lost as well. You could do the Hackintosh repair faster yourself.)

The OS upgrades however - yeah they will be a pain. I can see that as a significant deterrent.

<comment><USER25> My greatest deterrent is the OS upgrade. I've been mulling over whether to just buy a Mac, or to build a Hackintosh. I would like the upgrade ability, but I would also prefer to not have to worry about accidentally upgrading my OS and having a few hour downtime every so often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think all the negativity is a bit unfair. I built a Hackintosh last year, I'm very satisfied with it, and I think it was worth it also economically. The PC includes a Core i5 2500K, Radeon HD6870, 8GB RAM, SSD, nice screen of my choice, etc.. I started by installing Windows 7, but very soon I tried to install OS X (I bought the components with that option in mind).

The benefit of OS X for me is that on the one hand it can run all my consumer software (especially games, MS office). On the other hand it is also a pretty nice Unix, so I can run all my work stuff (mostly scientific computing, and stuff that is distributed as source code). It took me a few evenings, but eventually I got everything working (including sound, network, and standby mode). Now its probably the most stable system I've ever had.

The thing is, I was fully expecting to put in some hours of work. That is the price you pay for building your own computer, whether you install Windows, OS X, or something else. Installing OS X was only slightly more complicated than installing e.g. Linux. If you include the time needed for choosing components, assembling everything, installing applications, the difference is very small. Especially considering how hard it is to get UNIX stuff under Windows (cygwin, mingw32, and so on), or games and big proprietary applications on Linux (using Wine).

Now, may people say you should just pay a bit more, and get a solid Mac that you know works fine, and has a warranty. The problem is, I couldn't afford a new Mac with the specs I needed. And you are never as flexible with a prebuilt computer as with one you build yourself.

I guess my bottom line is that it is unfair to compare buying a Mac with building a Hackintosh. The alternative to a self-built Hackintosh is not a Mac Pro, but a self-built Windows PC. The Mac Pro is the alternative to an assembled Dell, HP, etc..

</comment><comment><USER27> On the Retina MacBook Pro

"Scrolling and animation tasks are jerky or just plain slow. I can't deal with that in a new machine. Maybe in a year or two when it can drive its screen and a large external retina smoothly."

What? Has the author used one recently? These problems were fixed within a month of original release. I've been using one for over a year and love it.

<comment><USER28> They are not completely fixed.

They did fix some of the issues (and continue to), but I just don't think the hardware has the capacity to make it right. There are all kinds of graphical lagging, jerking, and stuttering in my completely-maxed-out-with-all-upgrades latest model Retina MacBook Pro, when using it with 30" external monitors.

Like using Exposé with a couple dozen apps open is like:

        - Hit button
        - Wait... thinking... thinking...
        - Still thinking... wait for it...
        - OK, here is the Exposé mini-window view, sans animation

EDIT: AND, I should add, my monitors are the old stone-age 2560x1600 type of 30-inch, not the awesome modern high-res type ( [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DJ4BIKA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DJ4BIKA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00DJ4BIKA&linkCode=as2&tag=mamaco-20) ). I don't believe the current MBP can even drive an external 4K display, which is what I think the OP was referring to.

EDIT2: _woah_ , I realized at that price, I _really_ should be using an affiliate link where I get a kickback if anybody buys it. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think it would have been better to compare this build to the iMac or the Mini. While I definitely applaud osx86 builds, I don't really find this build comparable to a Mac Pro of any recent generation. I think a much better comparison build would have been to upgrade an older Mac Pro 3.1 or 4.1 (EFI64 being the key) to 12 core with maximum ram and video card upgrades. I think right now the 4.1 is the sweet spot (considering memory prices). But even if someone maxed out the build, I don't think it would come close to the new 2013 Mac Pro. Another thing to think about here, especially for developers, is the software aspect of hacked/upgraded osx builds. When Apple releases a new OS version, or a new Xcode version, it might not work or it might be buggy / unstable. This is what happened with my old Mac Pro 1.1 and OSX 10.8 (flashed to 2.1 and upgraded 8 core 3.0ghz w/ 32gb). I was able to get up to 10.7 but 10.8 is messed up and the new 10.9 look like a no go. Which is why my old Mac Pro is now an ESXi Server (working on getting v5u1 working so I can run osx 10.8 virtualized)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't disagree, I'm not comparing the build I did with an actual Mac Pro. I just didn't have time to wait for it (I did this build months ago). As I mentioned at the end of the post if I had seen the tiny mac mini-esque build I linked to before I bought the case I did, I would have built something like that instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Luckily for me, I don't do anything particularly CPU-intensive.

I just bought the current Mac Pro. Sure, I'd like the shiny new one. But I also needed a faster Mac that could accept a bit of expansion that I could get before the end of last financial year.

The hardest part about being an Apple tragic is separating my need for the _zomg new shiny_ from simple business decisions like "is it worth getting something better _now_ or limping along until some indeterminate future time?"

<comment><USER31> Curious to the reasons you didn't go with the iMac? Did you need a ton of cores, didn't want to deal with external disks...?

<comment><USER30> Two reasons.

First: I have 2x30" screens. I don't want to go down.

Second: I can't put multiple HDDs and SSDs in an iMac.

The new system replaces a 24" iMac I bought in 2008. It made it for 5 years; the only upgrades were extra RAM when new and swapping the HDD for an SSD about 2.5 years into its lifetime.

I don't know how long I'll keep this one. Under Australia's small business equipment rules, it's already fully depreciated. So there's no accounting purpose to hold onto it if I don't want to.

<comment><USER32> With the iMac you would have 1x27" and 1x30" — that's not too bad is it? (That's my current setup and I find it quite good.)

<comment><USER30> I dunno why, but the inconsistency is grating to me.

<comment><USER33> I'm the same. I even put my monitor on a book to make it perfectly in line with my imac.

<comment><USER30> I did this too, when I had the iMac. I have a nice hutch arrangement now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As an ex-hackintosher im always thrilled to see people pull great stories like this off! I gave up on rolling my own due to the small irritations (system error when my logic mouse's USB dongle was removed) and the upgrade-paralysis; Every new rev of OS X would met w trepidation as a carved out a weekend "just in case". Either way, I hit a point where investing in an MBA was more economical... Now I can get by with a MBA; if we're talking about a MacPro then the value trade off might still be there :)

</comment><comment><USER35> I built a very similar system using the "confirmed working" parts listed in the buyer's guide at [http://tonymacx86.com](http://tonymacx86.com)

To those poo-pooing the hackintosh, my experience was quite different this time around from when I had OS X running on a netbook a few years back.

I already had a monitor, PSU, video card and ram, so the money investment for me was fairly small when compared to builing a system from scratch.

It took one evening to put everything together and install the OS, I followed the instructions there and have done several system updates without new problems coming up. I had to mess around a bit with kernel extensions to get my Radeon card put out 2560x1440 properly, but my problems were solved in under an hour. I've had strange problems connecting to my wireless printer, but I solved them by plugging it in and forgetting about it.

I've used it as a development machine w/ xcode and have not had any problems there.

All that said, I would NEVER use this as my only mac. I'm careful about keeping work backed up and off the machine in the event that something strange comes up, so there is that added overhead, but for any data/files you care about this should be done anyway.

</comment><comment><USER36> I couldn't wait for the new Mac Pro as well, so I bought an 27" iMac a few days ago.

Building a Hackintosh is something I considered as well, but based on my previous experiments in that area I absolutely have to concur with the others here who say it's not worth the hassle and at the end the machine never works quite right.

The biggest issue for me is multi-screen support, it was the main reason I bought my old Mac Pro. But it's a loud machine and it eats _a lot_ of power, even when idle. And let's face it, most computers spend most of their time in idle. The new iMac supports two external displays, so that was my minimum requirement met right there (possibly by accident on Apple's part). I thought I'd miss the Pro's raw computing power but when rendering or gaming the iMac doesn't seem to be significantly slower to be honest. The entire setup consumes less than half the wattage of the Pro, it's relatively cheap (around € 2k), and most importantly it's very very quiet.

</comment><comment><USER37> I tried a Hackintosh a while back, it was mildly interesting, sucked more time than I really felt happy with and I abandoned it.

Part of the reason I moved to Apple hardware (and OS X) was to avoid spending time digging around with graphics cards, and RAM and making sure I have the correct drivers. I'm sure plenty of people enjoy it, but I don't, and it's just diverting time from things I do enjoy. There was also lots of other side issues, updates could cause it to break and require a revert back to a known good point, and hope it still worked okay, or having some slight system instability.

The Hackintosh project is pretty useful, but I currently don't need Mac Pro level of power, and if I did then I'd prefer to pay the premium to avoid spending time working on it. 4-5 full work days doesn't cover the cost of one, but it's certainly a non-trivial amount of it.

</comment><comment><USER38> It would be a good exercise when I were in college, not enough money, more than enough time. Tinkering and optimizing a rig was what i liked to do. Fast forward to now, still a hacker at heart, but the extra time I would rather to go out for a walk, do some workout, or talk to friends. Just the priorities have changed

<comment><USER39> I didn't build my desktop to be a Hackintosh, but it took me about two and a half hours my first time. The second (and last), it took me an hour and fifteen minutes. It's really not that rough.

<comment><USER20> The one time I tried to make a Hackintosh, it ran wonderfully for weeks (after spending tens of hours getting it going in the first place). Then an OS X update came out, I installed it, and it never recovered. Nowadays, I don't have the time or desire to have to screw with it every time a major update drops and it messes up (or even has the potential to).

One of the greatest things about Apple's combination of software and hardware, IMO, is that It Just Works(TM). A Hackintosh doesn't.

<comment><USER39> _> One of the greatest things about Apple's combination of software and hardware, IMO, is that It Just Works(TM). A Hackintosh doesn't._

For sure, and my primary machine is a rMBP 15", but my Hackintosh is also about $2K less than an equivalent Mac Pro would be (if they even fielded Sandy Bridge ones). Personally, I can be a point release or two behind as the kinks in the updates get worked out for two grand in my pocket.

<comment><USER20> Totally understand. I paid just under $2300 for my MBP in June 2011 and a few dollars more for this Thinkpad in May. Five or six years I probably would've put a serious effort towards the Hackintosh but nowadays I'd rather not have to spend much time maintaining or fixing it if/when it broke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been using one since about 2011. It's true that there can be some issues depending on the hardware you have. I've only had issues with waking up my PC, and sound, and only had to download a DSDT for my motherboard.

To be honest, if you already have a desktop which is somewhat compatible, then this makes total sense. The fact that you can continue upgrading hardware, add SSDs, change graphics card is fantastic. I did this as an experiment, and it worked so well that I never switched back. You no longer have to buy the latest Macs to get the latest hardware.

That said, I don't think buying new hardware for making a hackintosh is necessarily the best idea. You _will_ run into problems that can vary, and these aren't necessarily things you expect when buying a new desktop.

The problems mentioned in the article were harder to solve than the ones I had. But a hackintosh's return over investment is HUGE, if it works!

</comment><comment><USER41> I would have gone with a 15" rMBP; I assume he was only considering a 13" rMBP.

I bought a Mac Mini 2.6 GHz i7 a month or so ago, and added a 240GB M500 SSD, 16GB RAM, and 4 x 4TB external HDDs. Pretty happy with it performance-wise, even for Final Cut. I'd probably get an Areca ARC-8050 8-drive Thunderbolt RAID ([http://www.areca.us/products/thunderbolt.htm](http://www.areca.us/products/thunderbolt.htm)) if I needed faster storage beyond 100GB, though. It's mostly a Plex server, VMware server (although I just use Fusion at home), and testing some proxy/etc. stuff, and is connected only to a 1080p projector and 5.1 HT system. I figure not much will get upgraded on the Mini in the next 6 months -- maybe no upgrade at all, or if it is upgraded, only some pretty irrelevant- to-me stuff.

<comment><USER20> > ... and added a 240GB M500 SSD ...

This is a long shot but would you happen to know anything about the built-in encryption on this drive?

I bought the 480 GB version a few months ago to put in a new laptop and the primary reason I chose the M500 is because it is a "Self-Encrypting Drive". IIUC, third-party software is required to actually benefit from that -- but I'm not sure that I _do_ understand correctly.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, it is standard Opal, but I just use FileVault 2. I find AES-NI supported FileVault performance to be more than adequate. I don't know of anything but Wave which does Opal key management for OSX, particularly for boot drives.

I use Fusion Drive with the 1TB drive I already had, too, so SED on just one of those drives wouldn't help.

<comment><USER20> A very similar situation here, although I'm running Linux on this machine and not OS X. I feel that the SED stuff (while technically true) is misleading -- I specifically chose this drive over cheaper and better drives because of this feature. Lesson learned, though.

The only thing I could ever find for Linux that supported Opal was "SecureDoc for Linux" which, apparently, is impossible to get ahold of unless you're an enterprise with a fat bank account. Fortunately, like with FileVault, dm-crypt (which also leverages AES-NI) is more than sufficient for my needs.

Thanks for the reply.

<comment><USER41> It shouldn't be too hard to do a SED control utility fundamentally. It is maybe a licensing or TCG membership issue though. I thought it was just some extra drive commands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Am I the only one that is irked by the first paragraph: "Macbook Air hard crashed rendering in Final Cut Pro [...] I had been asking too much of the little 11" wonder."

I'm used to things taking forever when I ask too much from a computer, not it outright crashing. Is this "normal" on Macs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely not normal. I covered this in much greater detail in another post [http://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/2013/07/22/ios-app- prom...](http://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/2013/07/22/ios-app-promo-video- on-a-budget/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've never had a "real" reason to use OS X over anything else, only convenience (numerical programming in Python, works pretty much everywhere, slightly easier on Linux in fact) - Thus, if I were in this situation I'd hack together a cheap Linux box (of which I have...three lying around the flat now, including old laptops) and work on that for a few months while waiting for a new release (more likely, saving up for the new release.)

That said, if I _had_ to work on OS X, hackintosh would probably have appealed to me (if I was spending my own money on the hardware and _needed_ a good GPU.) Thanks for thoroughly disabusing me of this preference!

</comment><comment><USER44> A hackintosh is only an option when you don't mind breaking your word. In fact, this is why I bought a Mac mini instead of built a Hackintosh; I even wrote Tim Cook about a "system builder" license being something I'd dream of. The license explicitly states that you agree to install OSX on only Apple- approved/sold hardware (paraphrased).

I'm aware of most the arguments why EULAs are unenforceable, why/how to bypass them, etc, but is any of that honest?

</comment><comment><USER45> I guess I must be in the minority. I've had 3 Hackintosh machines in the past, all with different hardware. They have all worked almost perfectly.

Each one did require some post-install setting up. For example, dual monitors, sound card issues, graphics etc. But the set up never took longer than a few hours, and I get a machine that is 1/4 the price of a retail Mac.

I also think I can count the number of the times they've crashed on one hand.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wouldn't it be great if you could just build a Mac Mini stack? Like a Mac Mini, on top of a Mac Mini, on top of a Mac Mini, with some sort of a daisy chained thunderbolt connection that also shares CPU/RAM/Graphic resources. That would make for a perfect Mac Pro set up and also for servers. If you would ever need extra resources, just buy a new Mac Mini and put it on top.

</comment><comment><USER47> Hackintosh is fine as secondary/backup computer. I built one after I had to send my Air for repairs.

But there will always be little issues. For example you can't install OS X Mavericks just yet. Being a developer this bugs me very much because I would very much like to try the new APIs.

</comment><comment><USER48> Seems to me that this is something between OS X and Linux. Beautiful and will work with most apps on OS X (the OS X part), but not that easy to set up and may require some tinkering (the Linux part and I'm not saying that it's a bad thing or that Tux is not beautiful).

</comment><comment><USER49> 2 of OPs biggest gripes were onboard WIFI and BT not working, these could have been fixed with a 40 buck TP-Link card which requires _no_ kexts and is recognized as an Airport card and a 10 buck Belkin USB Bluetooth dongle which again requires no install or configuration.

</comment><comment><USER50> Ive used OSX on relatively old (2009) Intel hardware a couple of times in the past and generally only had minor problems. Certainly less than when going with Ubuntu or other Linux distros. If youve got the money a real mac is still the way to go though!

</comment><comment><USER51> Aaron couldn't wait either, but...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wShNx6cdk_8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wShNx6cdk_8)

</comment><comment><USER52> I would love to do this too, but the licensing situation bothers me. Even if you owned an OSX disc, you aren't in the clear, right?

<comment><USER6> IIRC, OS X is only licensed to run on official Apple hardware, so yes, it's a violation of the license to run a hackintosh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Am I the only one who thought (per the photo) that the author was saying he needed a Mac Pro because he makes fancy toilets?

</comment><comment><USER54> AFAIK the Apple Mac OSX licensing doesn't allow you to do so. Here's an article about different involved aspects: [http://www.lockergnome.com/osx/2012/02/24/are-hackintosh- com...](http://www.lockergnome.com/osx/2012/02/24/are-hackintosh-computers- legal/)

<comment><USER55> That's irrelevant in many countries. The EULA is non-binding in many countries.

<comment><USER54> Interesting, I didn't know. Can you tell me some examples of these countries?

<comment><USER55> Germany [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/73768](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/73768)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Seems ridiculous, if not snobby that the author will only run OS X.

<comment><USER39> Why? His video software is on OS X. Learning a completely new workflow that will provide no benefits in the long run? Money is cheap. Time is not.

As a programmer, I won't use a non-OS X machine as my main computer. I have a desktop with Windows 7, but that's basically for games. I need Unix to feel comfortable (Cygwin doesn't cut it) and I need a desktop environment that doesn't feel hostile to just-pick-up-and-use (and that knocks out every Linux DE out there). It is the only choice that really fits my needs.

<comment><USER6> I run Win 7 basically as a thin terminal + Steam machine, and do all my actual development (web stuff) on a LAN-connected Fedora machine via Samba and SSH. It works great, and it also means that I can pick up my Macbook or Chromebook (or just find a machine with an SSH client) and have my entire development environment immediately available.

<comment><USER39> I've done that before for web stuff, but I quit when I found IntelliJ; I'd rather develop locally and not have to screw around with sbt (I use Play) because sbt is a tire fire. And there's no thin-client solution for game development (Xcode and as little MSVC as I'm forced into using), so I'm sort of stuck there too.

But for me the OS matters, too. I have a strong aversion to how Windows handles...well, Windows, and Linux isn't much better there either. Mission Control is good enough to be a "nope, won't go back" for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


On Twitter, a Battle Among Political Bots - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/on-twitter-a-battle-among-political-bots.html <comment><USER2> This portends some very incredible things for the future of social media and politics.

Astroturfing of various forms is in its infancy as a technology. Yet, it's so successful even in its crude form that every successful advertiser, media company and political party participates in it. Given that paid protestors, astroturfed comments, and brigading are seen as dubious tactics each of these parties uses their brigading, astroturfing and bots to accuse their opponents and competition of using brigading, astroturfing and bots.

Therein, the situation is a manifestation of what economists call a "tragedy of the commons" where each actors' best response to collective negative behavior on account of their opponent is to participate in it better themselves.

There are few ways out of a "tragedy of the commons" situation, with regulation itself having a quite spotty record. The best way out of the situation is for the incentive structures and technologies that encourage the behavior to move toward a more healthy 'market' structure that raise the costs of the behavior and lower the effectiveness.

Any attempt to 'solve' automatically and provide the user with access to what they 'really need to know' is an escalation of this trend, and will be gamified, copied and duplicated in an automatic fashion, making the situation worse - not better.

The only solution is a critically thinking public with the tools themselves to determine what is fake and what is real.

Platforms promising to introduce fake information and advertisements as a critical and crucial feature of their network are not able to achieve both a skeptical, critically thinking user base at the same time that it encourages gullible social participation.</comment>