Miles per Gallon versus Liters per 100 Kilometers - <AUTHOR> http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/05/24/mpg-vs-l100km/

<comment><USER2> A poorly written post on a subject that is surprisingly intriguing when better elucidated. A study published in _Science_ [0] several years ago makes for good discussion. That study found a systematic misinterpretation of the miles- per-gallon metric in the sense that participants consistently overvalued vehicles with high MPG ratings. They assigned values linear in MPG rather than linear in its inverse.

The study's authors told participants to "assume you drive 10,000 miles per year for work, and this total amount cannot be changed." The participants were then asked to come up with values for vehicles of varying fuel-efficiencies. That is indeed the sort of optimization problem people face when choosing which car to buy, and clearly a fuel-efficiency metric that puts the amount of fuel in the numerator makes the problem easier to solve [1] because expenditure is proportional to amount of fuel if distance driven is taken as given.

But in reading the article, I was struck by the lack of attention paid to the "miles" part of the equation. I don't fault the authors, but taking distance driven as fixed is surely an enormous detriment to the goal of reducing carbon emissions in America. Yes, reordering your daily life to drive fewer miles is more disruptive than simply buying a more car that goes farther on a gallon of gas. And, granted, once you've chosen your lifestyle, minimizing the amount of gas you burn as you go about your daily routine is the thing to do. All the same, it's ludicrous to ignore the basic inefficiency of the suburban style of life that dominates in this country while we wait for automotive engineers to come up with clever solutions to pricey gas and carbon emissions that are twice as high per capita as in many similarly wealthy countries. Surely living closer to where you work, using mass transit, biking, and walking more must be part of the solution as well.

Maybe houses and apartments should come with a "miles per day" multiplier denoting how far you'd typically travel getting to and from shops, restaurants, entertainment venues, and your place of work each day you live there. ...

0\. <http://nsm.uh.edu/~dgraur/niv/theMPGIllusion.pdf> [PDF]

1\. Apparently taking reciprocals is beyond the capabilities of most people. Or at least of the Duke undergrads who participated in the study.

<comment><USER3> The solution to global warming and pollution does not lie with persuading people to change, but making technological breakthroughs which allow us to carry on enjoying our lifestyles for a much lower cost to our enviroment.

<comment><USER4> More than that, the key point of contention is the fact that several countries with a total population of billions of people (China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, and others) are going to transition into developed "first world" economies in the 21st century. Currently there is no known technology that would allow them to avoid heavy reliance on carbon based energy sources while that transformation occurs. It's easy to sit on our 1st world thrones and imagine that if only we drove our cars a bit less everything will be fine, in reality the issue is about holding back people who are living in poverty, who don't have access to modern medicine, who don't all have access to clean water, etc. It puts into perspective the putative hazards of global warming to weigh against the cost of holding half the population of Earth in poverty.

<comment><USER5> You make a very good point. Taking Brazil in perspective, middle class is growing rapidly and with better credit the automobile industry is heavily targeting these potential car owners. Makes good sense economically and the state has been granting tax isemptions periodically which boosts sales significantly.

However, car models are still pretty much inneficient fuel consumption wise. That I know of, there exists only one hybrid model avaiable and it's very expensive. Ethanol's price also turned it into a non-option for flex fuel models.

Also, collective transportation is decades lagging pretty much everywhere that it's needed. This leads anyone that can afford it to purchase either a car or motorcicle in order to have decent mobility. It also makes it a class distinction thing, as in public transportation is a lower class problem.

On the long run, IMO things look bleak for Brazil in terms of urban mobility and greenhouse emissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand the hate for this post. If you're shopping for a car, you're trying to balance factors like comfort, carrying capacity, impressing coworkers, purchase cost, resale value, maintenance costs, and of course, fuel costs.

Using a MPG measure would lead one to think that 20 mpg and 30 mpg are equidistant from 25 mpg, when in fact, going from 20 mpg to 25 mpg saves you $4,000 over 100,000 miles at $4/gal, while going from 25 mpg to 30 mpg only saves you an additional $3,667.

This has political implications as well, since CAFE standards are based on this non-linear value, a car company with a barbell of an extremely inefficient car and an extremely efficient car can have a better average than a company with a moderately efficient car even though the barbell uses more gas and pollutes more. (We'll ignore the irrational averaging by models rather than by sales -- that's another issue.)

I recently started looking at whether it would be worth it to replace my current gas guzzler and this was part of the calculation. You can see my numbers here: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkSgUqAZJOp- dEJ...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkSgUqAZJOp- dEJENjFUYXpqRHNBMkk2c0RPbXp6eGc)

<comment><USER7> In computing CAFE numbers, the inverse of mpg is used in the average. They are also weighted by sales, so both your points are specious.

<comment><USER8> Correct. Indeed, they are taking the average of the mpg directly, just the harmonic average (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_mean>) rather than the arithmetic one we are more familiar with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What an incredibly poorly reasoned post. First of all, the complaint has _nothing whatsoever_ to do with the metric vs non-metric issue---we could as easily report gallons per hundred miles if it mattered that much.

More importantly, though, this business about the scale being "linear" is at best a red herring: linear with respect to what? And who cares if you save "one gallon" on a hundred mile trip? It's much more relevant how much you save relative to your overall gas budget, and saving one gallon out of three is much better than saving one gallon out of every seven.

And, surprise surprise, either system will tell us that just fine. Going from 14 mpg to 17 mpg may save about a gallon on a 100 mile trip (slightly more, actually), but it cuts your gas budget to 14/17 of its former amount, a savings of about 18%. And going from 33 mpg to 50 mpg may save a gallon on a 100 mile trip, but it cuts your gas budget to 33/50 of its former amount, a savings of about 33%. So, just as our intuitions would indicate, that's a much better improvement!

<comment><USER10> _First of all, the complaint has nothing whatsoever to do with the metric vs non-metric issue---we could as easily report gallons per hundred miles if it mattered that much._

Exactly.

The measurement of gallons per 100 miles shows a much clearer picture of gas usage:

      MPG = gallons per 100 miles (100/MPG)
      14 = 7.1
      17 = 5.9
      33 = 3.0
      50 = 2.0

      MPG = Cost of gasoline to drive 15,000 miles at $4/gal (15000/MPG*$4)
      14 = $4285.71
      17 = $3529.41
      33 = $1818.18
      50 = $1200.00

<comment><USER11> That's one question ,but another one is:

How far can I drive per $100?

When looking at the car in part for discretionary uses, that's a valid question.....

<comment><USER12> > That's one question ,but another one is:

That is a question I've never seen anybody ask in my whole life. There are precious few people who drive for the sake of driving, for the _vast_ majority driving is utility to go from point A to point B.

Therefore, why optimize for the significantly less common (almost irrelevant, even) case of "I've got money burning my pocket, how far can I drive?"

<comment><USER13> "how far can I drive for this amount of $" is a question I've only heard a few times. But I do often hear "how far can I drive on a tank" or "how far can I drive on my remaining amount of fuel".

Perhaps the disconnect we see in this comment thread is between people who do almost entirely city driving and people who drive long distances. If you only ever drive a few miles at a time, you don't really care what sort of distance you can manage on a tank, you just care how much it's going to cost you to go to work every day (you'll probably convert the fuel/distance ratio into a money/time ratio.) If you spend a lot of time driving across central Kansas, _how often you have to stop for gas_ becomes a more significant consideration (you'll probably convert distance/fuel into stops/time.)

<comment><USER14> How often you stop for gas is surely better covered by a "range" measurement for the car? Maybe it's different in the states, but all the cars I've ever been in show your remaining fuel as a fraction of a tank. In that case, volume of fuel is completely irrelevant, so MPG vs liters/100km has not place. e.g. My tank takes me 400 miles => I have half a tank left => I can go another 200 miles ...is exactly equivalent to... My tank takes me 600 km => I have half a tank left => I can go another 300 km

(For the purposes of this post, 1 mile = 1500m. If the size of a gallon changes with locale, why not a mile? :-p )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _When we talk about a car's fuel economy, what we want to know is how much fuel does it use, not how far does it go_

I've never understood this phenomenon. I realize he's talking about car economy here, but for me a car is a vehicle to take me from point A to point B, which means my most important metric is _how far it goes_ , not how much fuel it consumes. Once I'm home and can (or want to) run calculations on my costs, then I'd like to know how much fuel it consumes.

<comment><USER16> I think that's his point. Usually you know how far you want to go and the question is, how much gas will it take. For example, I know my car gets 8 L/100km. If I want to go 400kms, I can quickly figure out that's 32L, or about 2/3s of my 48L tank. Doing this calculation with mpg requires division.

<comment><USER17> I don't see the big deal.

If I know my car gets 40 miles per gallons and I need to go 120 miles, I can quickly figure out that I'll need 3 gallons of fuel.

I can't imagine either measurement being hard to use for anybody who's made it to high school.

They're two ways of measuring the exact same thing and neither one has an advantage over the other. Although it would be nice if we used kilometers per liters instead.

<comment><USER18> Equivalent unit systems absolutely can have advantages over one another for particular contexts. I don't know which of these systems is most convenient (and most immediately useful) for most people, but I find it reasonable that there would be an objective winner by that measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't understand what people are moaning about - it's well written and has valid points. To me MPG is like Kg/£ price labels - not that intuative at all.

</comment><comment><USER20> Measuring fuel economy in miles per gallon is like setting up a budget in months per thousand dollars.

Big improvements to inconsequential expenses would result in huge mpkd improvements, but they wouldn't save you a lot of money.

<comment><USER13> > _"setting up a budget in months per thousand dollars"_

A lot of people actually do that: given the amount of money they have saved up, they figure out how many months they could get by without a paycheck.

Big improvements to inconsequential expenses aren't going to help you save a lot more money if you're gainfully employed, but they can help you last a lot longer if you're unemployed. Huge mpkd improvements matter in that situation.

Similarly, with the MPG or GP100M question, use the measurement that's most convenient for answering the question at hand. If you want to know how much fuel/money it'll take to go to Chicago, use GP100M. If you want to know what destinations are within reach for a certain amount of fuel/money, use MPG.

<comment><USER21> _Similarly, with the MPG or GP100M question, use the measurement that's most convenient for answering the question at hand. If you want to know how much fuel/money it'll take to go to Chicago, use GP100M. If you want to know what destinations are within reach for a certain amount of fuel/money, use MPG._

Right, and the first is way more common.

<comment><USER13> > _"the first is way more common."_

Is it?

Figuring out total fuel costs is the sort of calculation I run once in a while. When I buy a new vehicle, or when I'm planning a long trip, I figure out how much I can expect to spend in fuel. I'm almost always at a computer when I make this sort of plan, though.

But when I'm actually driving and having to do calculations in my head, the range calculation is far more useful. Am I going to have to stop for gas between here and there? Should I fill up today or can I wait until tomorrow? Can I make it to Colby or should I fill up in Goodland? This subject comes up every time I take a medium length trip, and several times on a long trip, as compared to the other calculation which comes up only rarely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This probably doesn't impact that many people, but on a motorcycle with no fuel gauge, you use the odometer as your fuel gauge. You need to know how many miles to reserve, and how many miles to empty. So I regularly monitor how many miles to go from a full tank to reserve. While quantity per distance may be an easier metric at purchase time, that only happens once every few years. Distance per quantity is a calculation I do in my head several times a week to ensure that my vehicle maintains a good state of tune.

<comment><USER14> If you're using the odometer as a fuel gauge, surely volume becomes irrelevant for judging your range (excluding the tuning purposes)? e.g. My tank lasts 200 miles => I've gone 100 miles => I can go another 100 (top) before refilling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Marginally related at best, but I only recently realized that a Quart is a quart-er of a Gallon. And a Liter is also a quarter of a Gallon (approximately). So basically a Liter is a Quart.

</comment><comment><USER24> In the US, the dealer stickers are standardized by the EPA and DOT and contain annual fuel costs (either electricity or gas) based on 15,000 miles/year so you can make an easier comparison.

It also contains gallons per 100 mile ratings for gas cars and KwH per 100 miles for electric. I know it is shocking it can be done in imperial units, but somehow we managed.

<comment><USER25> That's only at the dealership though, not in most marketing and conversations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The biggest problem with miles per gallon as advertised is that it is inaccurate. Having every vehicle be required to provide that information without having to buy a separate device should be required by law.

And every vehicle should keep track of the cost required for the gas added to it, and then both provide stats on gas usage in volume/day, mpg (or similar), and show an average of how much it is costing you per day to use it, perhaps pointing out things you are doing that waste gas, like you ran the air conditioner with the windows down, your tires are underinflated, you need a tune-up, etc.

The U.S. says it wants to curb unnecessary energy usage, but instead of making laws that would actually help its citizens in this regard, it wastes money refunding money spent on ridiculously overpriced cars and bails out auto companies that were destined to fail. There are good reasons why it does this, but it's crappy nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER27> Usually I care about how far I can go in my car before I need to refuel. This is exactly what MPG tells me.

The only time the inverse is useful is when buying cars on the basis of fuel efficiency. That's a much rare occasion since I drive every day but only buy cars every ~5 years.

<comment><USER28> But that is mostly a function of the size of your gas tank and not so much about fuel efficiency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "When we talk about a car's fuel economy, what we want to know is how much fuel does it use, not how far does it go."

Not sure about that. For Internet speed would you prefer to know how many seconds it takes to download 100MB as opposed to Mbps?

<comment><USER25> Depends if you have a fixed MB demand or a fixed time budget, doesn't it? Which is better when you are downloading a 4.6G ISO?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> _When we talk about a car's fuel economy, what we want to know is how much fuel does it use, not how far does it go._

Now I grew up with the metric system and I would not generally agree with that statement. The function of a car is to transport me, so its output is distance. Measuring the output I get, rather than how much a standard unit of output would cost, makes sense to me.

<comment><USER25> Do you drive as far as you can on a hundred euro note, or do drive to your destinations and then refill your spent petrol? Unless you enjoy cruising in your car with no time limits, it's the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One more thing: there are multiple definitions of "gallon". A lot of Canadians live near the USA border, and many cross the border to buy low-tax gasoline. The volume of a "gallon" differs by nearly 20% between the two countries.

</comment><comment><USER32> for the Americans who might wonder : 100km -> 1h of driving on the highway (limit is 120km/h or 130km/h, remove urban part on start and finish and you're at 100km/h average).

<comment><USER33> >> 100km -> 1h of driving on the highway (limit is 120km/h or 130km/h, remove urban part on start and finish and you're at 100km/h average).

I find that to be a bit of a pointless observation. The speed limit that's on the sign on the highway is already a pretty decent indicator of how far you'll get in an hour, whether you're using metric or imperial.

<comment><USER25> Cool, but I don't read HN on the highway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Actually, in Brazil at least, everyone thinks about fuel usage in km/liter (normally with two measures for city and roads).

</comment><comment><USER35> First, gas in the U.S. has been ridiculously cheap for decades. Housing, healthcare, and education costs are utterly teabagged, but gas is cheap, even now at $4. People who whine about gas prices are either (a) typical Boomer Republicans throwing their sense of entitlement around-- you know, the assholes who thought it was okay to go to war over "price gouging" in oil but clapped their fat hands together when their house prices octupled in one generation and young families got robbed (by them)-- or (b) people who live too ungodly far from where they work and are paying far more in lost time than in gas. Commuting (although less so by subway and not at all by bike) is corrosive and it has nothing to do with fuel costs.

Because gas is so cheap, people don't usually think in terms of, "how much gas will I use to get there?" Instead, it's "How far can I drive until I have to fill up?" That's a question that's easier to answer with a miles-per-gallon number.

Still, I agree that it would be better to see the inverse posted. Maybe people would think twice about driving those enormities. Probably not, but one can hope.

<comment><USER36> Aside from the ad hominem attacks, I think you're factually wrong. The reason people get upset about jumps in gas prices is because it directly affects the bottom line for a majority of Americans, whether they're Republicans or Democrats.

The median family income at the end of 2011 was about $50k. Take home would probably be around $3k/month. If you have a single earner driving 15K miles annually, in a car getting 25mpg, that's going to require 50 gallons of gas a month. So when gas jumps from $3 to $4, that's $50/month of take home pay that vanishes. For a two earner family, $100. Boom, there goes over 3% of take home pay.

For people with incomes below this, the percentage only rises. And they're not likely to have the latest Prius to minimize the impact.

In short, not everyone upset about higher fuel prices is a warmongering, fat- handed asshole who made out like a bandit during the housing bubble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> yes, the relationships are inverted, but it doesn't make the relationship any less linear. also, the graph in the article is useless

</comment><comment><USER38> Perhaps there's something here I'm missing, but this doesn't make sense to me at all: "Going from a 14 mpg car to a 17 saves exactly as much fuel (and carbon) as going from a 33 to a 50."

As the driver of a car, I want to go more miles on less gas.

If the car uses 1 gallon of gas to go 50 miles, and another uses 1 gallon to go 30, then it seems obvious that the first car is much more gas efficient. More miles on less fuel.

If car A gets 17 miles to the gallon, then it will take ~2.94 gallons to make 50 miles.

If car B gets 50 miles to the gallon, then it takes 1 gallon of gas to drive the same distance.

So comparing 13mpg to 17mpg and saying that its the same as the difference between 33mpg and 50mpg just doesn't make any sense at all.

<comment><USER39> Try doing the rest of the math.

33mpg -> ~1.52 gallons 50mpg -> 1 gallon for a 50 mile trip

So going from 33mpg to 50mpg saves half a gallon.

13mpg -> 3.84 gallons for a 50 mile trip 17mpg -> 2.94 gallons for a 50 mile trip

.9 gallons saved. So in your scenario, going from 13mpg to 17 saves more gas than switching from 33 to 50.

<comment><USER38> If you're just comparing percentages, then yes 0.9 > 0.5.

However, overall the comparison doesn't stand up. 1 gallon for 50 miles vs 2.94 gallons, the 50 mpg is what is saving more gas, therefore it wins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> MPG is actually much better for humans to use, as the end result is "bigger is better", which is how humans naturally think. It is unnatural to think "the smaller numbers are better". If you want it metric, it should be kilometers per liter.

<comment><USER25> The people at the grocery store must love you! Bigger price? Sounds like Better price!</comment></comment>


Introducing Resque - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/blog/542-introducing-resque

<comment><USER2> I wrote DJ. This looks amazing for high volume sites. At Shopify DJ is barely able to keep up these days.

My biggest regret with DJ is actually that I added numerical priorities instead of choosing the same tag based approach that Resque implemented. I'll likely release a DJ2 at some point which backports some of the ideas.

<comment><USER3> FWIW the author of DJ posted in more detail on this subject in this Google Group:

[http://groups.google.com/group/delayed_job/msg/9e2987caa177b...](http://groups.google.com/group/delayed_job/msg/9e2987caa177ba2d)

<comment><USER4> FWIW, xal (who you replied to) == the author of DJ.

<http://github.com/tobi/delayed_job>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Resque code aside --- and I want to switch to Resque, like, tomorrow --- this is the best article on Ruby job queues I've ever read. It's Github's review of pretty much every mainstream job queue out there. Excellent.

</comment><comment><USER6> Redis is almost perfect for a queue because of it's lists and atomic operations. And, most of all, because it's persistent. It's amazing how many queues aren't persistent.

I'm glad someone finally did this, it could be a great solution. I'm looking forward to digging into this.

<comment><AUTHOR> _And, most of all, because it's persistent._

Just a slight caution, since Redis stores it's data in memory and asynchronously writes out to disk it is possible to lose small amounts of data in a crash. In most cases this is an acceptable trade off for the speed of an in-memory database though.

There is also plenty of good info on the project page - <http://code.google.com/p/redis/>

<comment><USER7> Since Redis 1.1 (currently in beta - don't use it in production for now) there is a new append-only journal storage system alternative to the main one (that is, snapshotting), so starting from 1.1 Resque will be more reliable as well if needed, because in this new (optional) configuration Redis can't lose data. It's also possible to configure if it should fsync() never, everysec, or after every write. It's up to you to select the tradeoff between speed and safety :)

<comment><USER8> Fantastic. Redis can go in both my ephemeral and critical systems.

You're a whirlwind of activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice. We built a mysql-backed queue with nearly identical properties but it's not especially efficient. It does 10+ jobs per second per worker, but with locking this starts to cause InnoDB concurrency problems. Not insurmountable, but moving to a Redis-backed approach seems like a great option when our current queue can no longer keep up. Really glad to have this approach proven by GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER10> Really looking forward to trying this - I've given backgroundrb, BJ, DJ, and workling a go and there's always been something that's frustrated me.

It's amazing the number of different things I'm considering using Redis for as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've also been through a lot of different background processing libraries for Rails, and so far, if you have simple needs, I'm finding that Spawn is really awesome. <http://github.com/tra/spawn/>

I think something like Resque will be very helpful to us over the long term, but if you're looking for something quick that just works to send a big batch of emails, import stuff via a web service, whatever, check out Spawn. Not at all appropriate for a site like Github, but works well for our vastly smaller websites.

</comment><comment><USER12> Also see VertexDB (<http://github.com/stevedekorte/vertexdb>).

It is a high performance persistent graph database with filesystem like semantics (will soon support FUSED). It presents an API for an atomic queue pop operation, which allows for synchronization of jobs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Slightly off-topic, but is there any stable background job queue available for PHP (and perhaps MySQL)? I have been using custom hacked solution on top of tokyo tyrant but I will prefer if someone has a mature library.

</comment><comment><USER14> Jeeze, I just started migrating from BJ to DJ ... what should I do now?</comment>


Larry Tesler Has Died - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocate-has-passed-1841787408 Larry Tesler has died.  Larry was in the middle of many of the most influential of Silicon Valley projects and an insightful contributor.  See his Wikipedia biography for a snapshot.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler <comment><USER2> I knew Larry Tesler as a colleague, friend, member of my research group, manager, etc. for more than 50 years, almost as long as I knew Bert Sutherland.

There is an excellent obit for Larry at: [https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler- modeless-computing-advocat...](https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless- computing-advocate-has-passed-1841787408)

... and I expect another one from John Markoff -- who was a friend of his -- in the NYTimes.

In many ways, Larry did too many interesting things and had so much influence in too many areas for there to be any chance to characterize him technically. In short, he was a superb wide-spectrum(real) computer scientist who was also a very talented and skilled programmer.

His passing was sudden and unexpected, and I may return later to this note to add more details of his rich career.

For now, I remember him as great to work with in all aspects of his life. He was a great guy, and perhaps that sums him up as best as can be.

<comment><USER3> Is anyone from Parc still involved in research these days? Or is everyone retired or just chugging along at regular corporate jobs?

<comment><USER2> Most of the people who were at Parc who are still alive are still doing research.

Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Several were more or less forced into becoming rich. Money has its own dynamics and none of these folks wound up doing further research.

But Butler Lampson (the "Oppenheimer" of Parc) is still going strong, as am I and many others.

It was a calling, never a job.

<comment><USER4> When I was 17-18, I read 'Dealers of Lightning' it clued me into the foundations laid for modern computing in the 60-70's in the Bay Area (between SRI, CSAIL and PARC), and markedly changed my own approach to information and computing.

I've always wondered how those who were featured in the book felt about it?

<comment><USER2> The best book about the ARPA/Parc research community (Parc sprouted from ARPA) is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop: it is both the most complete and most accurate.

"Dealers of Lightning" is at the next level but far from the bottom. Its flaws are too much "Heroes' Journey" and a very complex and confused jumping around timeline (I had trouble myself orienting in some of the spots). But it also has a lot of good stories, of which a reasonable number are "true enough".

"Fumbling The Future" is extremely inaccurate.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I'll add that one onto my reading queue.

I actually didn't have too much trouble following Dealers, because it (more or less) mostly followed each project separately, which while creating an interspersed timeline in the book, was mostly coherent within each section.

I did read at least part of Fumbling, but I found it a hard book to thread the needle on, and it was in such stark factual disagreement with what else I'd read that I don't recall finishing it.

I know too many who draw the same conclusions from the Alto and related technologies that fumbling does, so I try to get people to read more about PARC, because I'll hope that once they know more they'll draw much the same conclusions I have - My frustration with much of the traditional criticism of Xerox in failing to commercialize the PARC innovations is it completely ignores both the high cost of the technology (it was literally the technology of the future) and the sales culture of technology at the time.

I don't think any large technology company (which Xerox was broadly) could have made something wondrous out of the innovations PARC created because the people who could recognize the value (and use) of this kind of technology were not the people being sold to, or for that matter doing the buying - nor did they have the budgets to buy a Alto, as was later seen with the Star when it came out.

It took direct to consumer sales (allowing department managers to buy stuff), and lower cost products to allow personal computing to penetrate into the home and corporate america - also the traditional criticism completely ignores that the 9700 (and follow on products) paid for the money spent at PARC several times over.

(incidentally, I believe that this sales culture issue is a prime reason why DEC no longer exists as a company because they failed to see that their market was shifting and could no longer be sold thru the same mechanisms they always had been)

In the end, basic research and the undirected applied science that flows from it is important, even if it has no direct tie to your line of business, because it's the innovation that drives a company forward, and frankly drives _humanity_ forward. I wish more people knew that modern interconnected the world we live in was built on billions spent with no firm idea of what would result from them, and how much of a debt we owe to PARC, Bell Labs and others.

Also, thank you for taking the time to respond to my question!

<comment><USER2> Yes, the separate timelines of "Dealers" quite missed the cross fertilization and synergies of Parc (which were its main unusual features), so to me, this is a real drawback to this book. On the other hand, "systems" don't parse well into sequences, and Parc was a system, and thus needs something more like a 2D or 3D or 4D chart to do a decent explanation.

There are at least two big issues regarding cost that many people miss: (a) the first is the difference between what should be spent on "prototypes for learning and vetting" and what can be done when designing for manufacturing, and (b) the second is the the difficulty most people had with valuing what personal computing might be for them.

In the first public paper I wrote about the Dynabook I pointed out that Moore's Law meant that powerful tablet sized personal computers would likely wind up costing what a color TV set would cost (they would have pretty similar components, and most of the cost in electronics is in packaging).

But we also had another analogy that we though could work via education: that of the personal automobile in the US. People value cars enough to be willing to pay quite a bit more for them than for most consumer devices. This was very interesting because the ARPA dream of an interactive personal computer connected to a world-wide network was a kind of "information and intelligence vehicle".

If people could see this, then they might be willing to pay what they would pay for a car. Certainly most computer people and most scientists and engineers would be able to assign value in this way. We thought most knowledge workers would eventually be able to see this also, and that there would be an intermediate phase before getting to the TV set kind of technologies.

An analysis of what happened to eventually quash this idea is beyond the scope of this note. (But, to make a point in talks, I've tried to get people to think about what "a car's worth" of personal computer could be like (the average car in the US a few years ago was a Toyota Avalon at $28K, so about 10 times what most personal computers go for).

This is a different slant than the problem that DEC and similar companies had (which was to not be able to understand personal computing in any reasonable form).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Larry kindly traded letters with me when I was a young man attempting to learn programming via Object Pascal. Eventually, my mom made me write him a check for all the postage he had spent. In addition to sending me at least two letters a week for just around a decade, he shipped me dozens of books and manuals. One year for the holidays, someone sent me 4 large FedEx boxes filled with networking gear I desperately needed for a "M"MORPG game I was building. The return label read "53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50". In the game, players were elves scrambling to defeat a corrupted workshop. The final boss was S̶a̶t̶a̶n̶ Santa himself.

It was only when I was older that I appreciated that he had probably sent me thousands of dollars worth of gear (and not in 2020 dollars!) in addition to the invaluable advice he provided, sometimes (frankly, often) unsolicited but always direct and always thought provoking.

While I never did become an extremely competent commercial developer, to this day I enjoy programming for programming's own sake. Larry's push for me to fix my own headaches, rather than simply giving me a metaphorical aspirin, resulted in my development of solutions for small hobby problems that it appeared often only myself and perhaps a few others shared.

As it turns out, in spite of (or thanks to) my niche interests, my curiosity and the method of targeted problem solving Larry fostered set me on a path I remain on today. Frankly, his contributions helped mold me as a man more than those of any other mentor of mine; that is absolutely meant as a compliment to his prescient pedagogy, rather than a slight at my life's many other wonderful influences.

I've sold a few businesses thanks to Larry's problem solving approach. The rest I founded are running profitably - and somehow I've never lost an investor money. My customers have always, above all else, been happy because they had their problems fixed. (Or, perhaps thanks to his influence, their happiness stemmed from my teams simply providing them with the tools they needed to solve their own problems!)

And because I followed Larry's personal advice, I have been able to spend every day for nearly two decades doing what he encouraged and what has consistently engaged me: finding, isolating and destroying problems.

Thank you for everything.

<comment><USER6> Cute... 53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50 = SANTA AND HIS WORKSHOP

<comment><USER7> Ha, I was wondering how you managed to reverse the hash and then had a facepalm moment.

<comment><USER8> I still don't get it.

<comment><USER9> i use this one alot, it has various decryption tools and you can apply "recipes" : [https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=From_Hex('Auto')&in...](https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=From_Hex\('Auto'\)&input=NTM0MTRlNTQ0MTIwNDE0ZTQ0MjA0ODQ5NTMyMDU3NGY1MjRiNTM0ODRmNTA)

<comment><USER10> nice!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I met Larry in about 1992 when I went to work on the Newton project. I had seen him around Apple before, and I knew who he was and what he was known for, but I didn't actually meet him until I joined the Newton team. I found him friendly, modest, smart, shrewd, compassionate, full of interesting knowledge and ideas, and interested in other people and their ideas.

I got to know him better when John Sculley ordered him to have the Newton team ditch its Lisp OS and write one in C++. Larry approached me and a couple of other Lisp hackers and asked us to make a fresh start with Lisp and see what we could do on Newton. We wrote an experimental OS that Matt Maclaurin named "bauhaus".

Larry had a sabbatical coming up right about then. He took it with us. He crammed into a conference room with three or four of us and hacked Lisp code for six weeks. He was a solid Lisp hacker. He stayed up late with us and wrote AI infrastructure for the experimental OS, then handed it off to me when he had to, as he put it, "put his executive hat back on." He hung around with us brainstorming and arguing about ideas. He had us out to his house for dinner.

A little later, when things were hectic and pressure was high on Newton, one of our colleagues killed himself. Larry roamed the halls stopping to talk to people about how they were doing. I was at my desk when he came by, next to another colleague that I considered a friend. Larry stopped by to check on us. My friend had also been a good friend of the fellow who had died, and he lost his composure. Larry grabbed a chair, pulled it up close and sat with him, an arm around him, patting him gently while his grief ran its course.

After Newton was released, Larry moved on to other projects. I worked on the shipped product for a while, but I was pretty burned out. Steve Jobs persuaded me to go to work for NeXT for a little while.

Steve is infamous for being, let's say, not as pleasant as Larry. In fact, he sat in my office once trashing Larry for about half an hour, for no good reason, as far as I can see. I politely disagreed with a number of his points. Larry made important contributions to the development of personal computing, and he didn't have to be a jerk to do it.

Larry was extremely smart, but I never knew him to play I'm-smarter-than-you games. I saw him encourage other people to pursue, develop, and share their ideas. I found him eager to learn new things, and more interested in what good we could do than in who got the credit for it.

We weren't close friends, except maybe when we were crammed in a conference room together for six weeks. I didn't see him much after Newton, though we exchanged the occasional friendly email over the years.

I was just thinking lately that it was about time to say hello to him again. Oops.

Larry Tesler was one of the best people I met in Silicon Valley. He was one of the best people I've met, period. I'll miss him.

<comment><USER12> (I'm having trouble with this seeming to be a feel-good anecdote about a high- pressure working environment in which people are burning out and killing themselves.)

<comment><USER11> I suppose that, in part, it's exactly what you say it is.

If it's a feel-good story, I think that must be because I feel good to have had the opportunity to meet and work with Larry Tesler. He impressed me with his intelligence, his generosity, and his compassion. I feel that I'm better for having known him, and I suppose that comes through in my account.

You're right: Newton was a pressure cooker. Larry didn't put that pressure on us, though. We put it on ourselves. We got the idea that there was an outside chance of making something great, and we pursued that dream as hard as we could. Some of us--I include myself--were intemperate in that pursuit, and it cost us.

Now, the pursuit of greatness is a species of vanity, and vanity is a cruel and fickle master. But in Newton's case, at least, I think those of us who were seduced by that vanity have only ourselves to blame.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the context!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This breaks my heart. I used to work next to Larry—literally sat next to him—on Yahoo's central design team. We were in frequent meetings together, but didn't talk one-on-one often. One evening commuting from work, during one of many Caltrain failures, he noticed me as I waited outside the train and offered me a ride home. I remember sitting nervously in the car, a bit awestruck, and I finally got up the courage to ask him "Did you really invent copy and paste?!"

"Yes."

From then on the ice was broken and we chatted more freely: fun discussions about the (then) up-and-coming voice recognition UIs (I compared them to CLIs which he liked), wearables, design, and cycling.

I consider him a friend. Didn't expect us to lose him so soon.

<comment><USER13> To clarify, as the dialogue could be construed otherwise, Larry was actually very humble. While he was not as famous as he should have been, he had so much influence on the industry, it could easily go to your head. He was very approachable and helpful, and overall a generous and kind person. Will be sorely missed.

<comment><USER14> It's ok, I think anyone would realise that the fact he gave you a lift meant he was a pretty nice guy. I really enjoyed reading your story. I'm sorry you lost a friend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh my, Larry was only 74? That is far too young.

We were friends, off and on. Perhaps somewhat "off" after I stole his girlfriend. (In my defense, it was her idea!) But that was 35 years ago, and all was forgiven (and hopefully forgotten) in more recent years.

Here is Larry's Smalltalk article from the August 1981 BYTE, complete with a photo of the famous T-shirt that a mutual friend made for him:

       DON'T
      MODE ME
        IN

[https://archive.org/details/byte- magazine-1981-08/page/n103/...](https://archive.org/details/byte- magazine-1981-08/page/n103/mode/1up)

A couple of other good articles:

[https://gizmodo.com/1841787408](https://gizmodo.com/1841787408)

[https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry- tesler-1945-2020-b91...](https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry- tesler-1945-2020-b910429f12eb)

</comment><comment><USER16> He gave us so much more than cut, copy, paste. It's clear from all the design history books that I've read that he's a legend.[1]

NO MODES!

[https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes...](https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes.jpg)

[1] One of the more rare sources for Larry Tesler's contributions is his interview for Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions ([http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler](http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler))

<comment><USER17> The Wikipedia article for Cut, Copy, and Paste[1] seems to have this bit that's cited to that book:

> Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a move or copy > operation into two steps—between which the user could invoke a preparatory > action such as navigation—Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) proposed the > names "cut" and "copy" for the first step and "paste" for the second step. > Beginning in 1974, he and colleagues at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research > Center (PARC) implemented several text editors that used cut/copy-and-paste > commands to move/copy text.

I imagine those "early line and character editors" refers to vi's delete, yank, and put, and emacs's kill, copy/"save as if killed", and yank. I wonder what other editors had back then, before the names he came up with became standardized.

I also wonder how the idea of the operations developed before Larry Tesler contributed to it.

Looking at POSIX[2], it seems ex has delete, yank, and put, but I can't see similar functionality in standard ed (GNU's ed does have yank, but I guess it's an extension).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Populariz...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Popularization)

[2] [https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/)

<comment><USER18> TECO from the 1960's had more than cut and paste, multiple storage slots called "q registers" (they were named with letters) into which you could put text from the main buffer, and from which you could retrieve it back. Text regions in the buffer were referred to by numeric ranges, some number of characters forward or back relative to the current cursor position, with additional notions such as "here to beginning/end of line" or "n lines back/forward from cursor"

TECO commands were typed in as code, essentially, and that code could also be saved and run as macros.

it was extremely powerful, such that emacs was originally written as TECO Edit MACros.

<comment><USER19> Ah! That's why vi's letter-named registers are written to with the q command.

<comment><USER20> I was confused by the 'q' command in vi, so I did quick testing (in nvi(1)) and scanned vim cheat sheets. I still don't know what 'q' does in the named buffer context - help?

<comment><USER21> Recording macros, I think.

<comment><USER20> Looks like you're correct![0]

In nvi, I just key my commands on a scratch line (testing occasionally), then:

       "xyy

to load the whole line (yy) into buffer 'x' ("x). Execution (@x) thereafter looks ~same.

[0] [https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Macros](https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Macros)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Larry was a great thinker. I got to discuss "vi vs. emacs" at one of the Fellows induction ceremonies held at the Computer History Museum. He could easily articulate counter cases and keep the discussion both productive and quite civil!

I first met him while I was visiting my wife at her office in Xerox Business Systems (XBS). He came over to discuss some suggestions to improve the protocol she was working on. I thought he was one of her co-workers because the discussion was very peer to peer as opposed to top down. She corrected me to point out he was one of the movers and shakers at PARC. That left a very positive impression on me.

He was also "the other Larry" at Xerox. Larry Garlick, who was also "Larry" to most people, was also at XBS (as was Eric Schmidt) and later followed Eric over to Sun.

<comment><USER23> Which side of the debate was he on personally?

<comment><USER22> He was very much in favor of modeless design, which emacs is much closer to than vi is. My argument was that emacs still has modes, operationally. You can make it a debugger, a mail reader, or a text editor by invoking code that puts it in that "mode." So the discussion quickly becomes what is meant by 'mode' and how are operational modes different than semantic modes which are different than presentation modes. If you haven't guessed it was pretty memorable for me, it helped me see some insights into the difference between design and engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was just eating lunch across the street from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino when I read the news.

The John Sculley era of Apple has received a lot of criticism. With that being said, one of the aspects of this era that I'm most impressed with is the work that came out of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. During this time period Apple was serious about advancing the state of research in the areas of programming languages, systems software, and human-computer interaction. There were many great people that were part of this group, including Larry Tesler and Don Norman. I completely understand why Steve Jobs shut down this group in 1997; times were rough for Apple, and the company couldn't afford to do research when its core business was in dire straits. But I wish Apple revived this group when its fortunes changed, and I also wish Apple still had the focus on usability and improving the personal computing experience that it had in the 1980s and 1990s.

<comment><USER11> Larry was influential in the development and the missions of both ATG and the Human Interface Group, both of which are now gone now. He believed in conducting practical experiments with users and collecting objective measurements of how well UI worked. He wanted to find general principles that could be used to make all software better for everyone.

Steve Jobs killed both ATG and HIG. I think your point about times being rough and money being tight are valid, but three years earlier Steve Jobs sat in my office at NeXT and told me that if it was up to him, Apple would kill ATG and HIG--not because they were expensive, but because, in his words, they had too much influence.

Sure enough, when he took over Apple again, he wasted no time in killing them and replacing them with himself.

You're probably right that cutting those expenses was important to Apple's recovery. I think your other point is right, too, though: we'd be better off if Apple--or somebody--reconstituted something like HIG to show the industry what's possible if you take user experience and human-computer interaction seriously.

Unfortunately, Larry can't help us with it this time.

<comment><USER25> "he wasted no time in killing them and replacing them with himself."

ooh ouch that's a sharp, and understated, line!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In the late 1960s/early 1970s, before he went to Xerox PARC and Apple, Larry Tesler wrote an early document system (page formatter) called PUB, for use by other computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). He has put up the old manual online at [http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html](http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html) with some modern annotations. This PUB was influential in at least two ways:

\- It was Donald Knuth's first introduction to computer typesetting, and he used to use this program as a convenient way to prepare errata for _The Art of Computer Programming_ on a computer, and hand out the resulting printouts. (At that time he was thinking of computer tools as something like typewriters and in no way related to "real book printing", until he saw the result of a "real" digital typesetter in 1977, which inspired him to write TeX.) In 2012 when he learned of this manual he wrote in TUGboat strongly recommending it to others: [https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf](https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf)

\- Another of its users was Brian Reid, who went on to develop Scribe, which itself was influential in two ways: (1) It was a strong influence on Leslie Lamport's LaTeX (in fact LaTeX can be viewed as bringing Scribe syntax/ideas to TeX), and (2) It seems to have been influential in the development of markup languages in general, e.g. from GML to SGML (this part I'm not sure of and there are conflicting accounts), which eventually led to HTML and XML. In fact it would have been better than XML according to Douglas Crockford here: [https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/...](https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/scribe)

Here's an 8-minute video of him accepting an award at a SAIL reunion (I think) for his work on PUB: [https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949](https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949) (with some audience comments by John McCarthy and a joke by Knuth).

</comment><comment><USER27> I am sorry to hear that. I once had lunch with him and John Koza (pioneer in genetic programming) around the 1994 time period.

Larry had the first book I wrote (Common Lisp book for Springer Verlag) and in a good natured way was trying to talk me into writing a book on Dylan. We kept in touch but I didn't write a Dylan book. Talking with him and John for an hour was like getting a year's worth of good ideas tossed at you, all at once.

</comment><comment><USER28> Two tech legends left us this week: Larry Tesler and Bert Sutherland. Both played key roles at PARC, the research center Xerox started that sparked large chunks of what we use today.

Regarding Tesler: I sat next to him when I flew back from interviewing at Microsoft. He was in the last row on the plane. I saw his Blackberry, assumed he was a nerd. He had just left Apple, was on the committee that hired Steve Jobs. He had his fingers in so much of the tech that we use today from object oriented programming to the Newton that set the stage for the iPhone.

Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer, the tech of microprocessors, the Smalltalk and Java programming languages, and much more.

Huge losses for our industry.

<comment><USER29> Also Peter Montgomery.

Legend in cryptography who created many algorithms for fast and secure elliptic curve cryptography.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_(mathematicia...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_\(mathematician\))

<comment><USER30> Yes. I discovered Montgomery Multiplication from the book Hacker's Delight. Potentially very useful for me.

Yesterday I looked at the wiki page for that, followed the link to Peter Montgomery's wiki page, and thought I'd send him a little thank-you just for that (I had no idea of his crypto work, none at all). Then I noticed he had died that very day, yesterday, Feb 18th 2020, age 72. I wish I'd just been able to send him that little thank-you. I missed that window by a few hours.

<comment> jose-cl Keep studying for him, cheers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Rest in peace. It's incredible how young computing is, many of his contributions are so fundamental.

From a guest lecture Larry Tesler gave at CMU in 2014 [1]:

 _Click to select an insertion point. Double click to select a word. Click and drag to select a passage. All of those were new. Type to replace the selection by new text [...] I think that was not unprecedented, but it wasn't common. Cut to move the selection to a buffer, Pentti Kanurva had done it, tvedit. Paste to replace the selection by the buffer. Again, Pentti had done that [...] Control B to bold the selection, I and U and so on [...] All of these things were introduced in Gypsy, 1975._

Gypsy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_\(software\))

[1] [https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e6adfb43-be90-46b3-9009-23cd98b7a898)

</comment><comment><USER32> A career in full from his own CV:

"Board director for a FTSE 250 company, vp in three Fortune 500 corporations, president of two small software firms. 32 years building and managing teams of software and hardware engineers, designers, researchers, scientists, product managers and marketers to deliver innovative customer-centered products."

[http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf](http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf)

<comment><USER33> Honest but overly modest summary. I picture hiring managers or AI throwing his resumé away because he didn't have enough experience and was "out of date."

The Apple and Xerox segments are nothing short of astonishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I remember his mention in Bret Victor's talk, Inventing on Principle. He is known for cut copy paste, but he did far more than that. He introduced a single 'mode' for working for docs, as opposed to having typing, editing, formatting modes. He lived his entire life by the 'nomodes' ethos; that's his twitter handle to boot. I really respect that.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm bad at names, so I didn't know the name, but followed the Wikipedia link and saw he was the "modeless" advocate, and I learned about that from this awesome Bret Victor talk: [https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366). Someone has commented to forward to 38 minutes to hear it.

That Bret Victor talk still influences me today, so please watch it I think it'll help you if you haven't watched it already.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow _serious_ Baader-Meinhof effect!

I recently downloaded all the PDFs from [http://worrydream.com/refs/](http://worrydream.com/refs/), and was reading Larry Tesler's _A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut-Copy- Paste_ on my flight Monday.

It's a good paper, you can find it at the link above if you're in the mood to read it _in memoriam_.

</comment><comment><USER37> I was in college, and attended a career fair for Amazon back in 2002. I was not in my last year so I really went just for free food. It was quite sparse, and after a while one guy with a friendly smile just walked up to me and said "Hi, I'm Larry". We talked a little bit about my background, about Amazon and opportunities there. I felt like I was a hotshot at the time, and quite frankly didn't. Only after I went back to my dorm and looked him up did I realize who I was talking to.

He was super humble, super nice. I acted like a jerk, thinking I was hot stuff and everybody was there to court me and was there just for free pizza. Despite being infinitely more accomplished than I could ever be, he was nice, engaging and never treated me in kind.

Every so often I think back to that time and kick myself at the lost opportunity to have a conversation with one of the legends of Silicon Valley.

Thank you Larry.

</comment><comment><USER38> A reminder that our industry is very young still, and many who laid its foundations are still with us today, but won't be forever.

There is no better time than now for collecting oral history, interviewing people, asking them about their stories, etc. All of this knowledge and stories can get lost very very fast.

<comment><USER39> And, pretty basic, but _thank them for their contribution_. Plenty of the stuff we take for granted should not be taken for granted at all, it took a lot of dedicated people working on machines that were severely limited to give us the luxuries we have today and believe that it has always been so. It wasn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Larry Tesler was really convinced of the merits of modeless interfaces. He even got "NOMODES" on his license plate.

[https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing- intera...](https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing-interactions- review-part-1/)

<comment><USER41> Was at 23andME when he was there, too. We (engineering) had no idea who he was initially but I did notice his license plate "NO MODES." Only after we looked him up and found that he had invented copy-paste did we realize he was a living legend. Sad to see he's passed on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Very sad, Larry Tesler was brilliant and an inspiration.

Smalltalk, copy-and-paste, the Apple Lisa/Macintosh and Newton, Object Pascal (predecessor of Delphi), Stagecast Creator... NO MODES. ;-)

Pretty sure there isn't any bit of personal computing that Larry Tesler couldn't (or didn't) help make better somehow.

</comment><comment><USER42> Sad news; total legend. folklore.org has a lot of stories featuring Larry — short stories on an era of computing that has faded around the edges. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER43> This posting and Larry's obit take me back to the math applications class we took at Bronx Science our senior year. Writing a program for the IBM 640 (yes, the 640), coding the IBN cards ourselves and then the fateful experience of loading the program cards into the reader for the 640 was a scary experience. Larry's program apparently did primes while mine did the Fibonacci series. Then the 640, the size of a modern SUV, chugged away all night and the next day it generated voluminous print-out's, lots and lots of paper. What fun!

After graduation he went off to Stamford to continue math - and programming - and I went elsewhere for liberal arts. But no matter, I couldn't have done what Larry did or create what he created.

I remember him as a great guy, very mellow, and if memory serves he was on the track team as well. Perfect for Stanford. Apparently he affected those he worked with the same way he affected me - an easy-going guy, friendly, positive, ready to smile. I know he'll be missed greatly.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm very sorry to hear this. He was the instigator of Dylan and it's not wrong to say there would be no Clozure Common Lisp (my preferred development platform) today if not for Larry Tesler.

</comment><comment><USER45> RIP Larry Tesler, I ran into him a few times at meetup events in Bay Area, few people knew who he was as he kept a very low profile.

<comment><USER46> I met him at a meetup I went to out in SF while traveling for work. I didn't know anyone there, just going to kill time. I had no idea who he was just someone willing to chat with me for an hour or so. I started asking him what he did, and it was clear he wasn't there to talk about himself. Just struck me as a really cool, really humble, really approachable guy. With a lot of good ideas, and a passion for spreading curiosity. World needs more people like this, not less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> A very nice remembrance by John Markoff in the NYTimes: [https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9u...](https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9uOwZooDufhaU?reason=invalid_cred)

<comment><USER47> That link doesn't work for me, but these do:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence- tesle...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler- dead.html)

[http://archive.md/J7bOw](http://archive.md/J7bOw)

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> One of the strangest moments in my career was Larry asking me for career advice when we were both at Yahoo; I think because I had been an IC for really long time and had figured out how to leverage that into strategic positions. Great man with incredible accomplishments.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've been meaning to watch one of his presentations for a while: "Origins of the Apple Human Interface"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW- atKrg0T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Obits in the national press:

NYT: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence- tesle...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler- dead.html)

WAPO: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry- tesler...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-tesler- inventor-of-copy-and-paste-computer-functions-dies- at-74/2020/02/20/e5699f6e-541c-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER50> Wow reading the comments sounds like actually a great human being. Help me realize being a jerk is an anti pattern, even though I am sometimes tempted to think otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER51> Surprised I have not heard of him. He seems quite significant.

</comment><comment><USER52> Also here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558)

</comment><comment><USER53> RIP Larry Tesler. I rather feel a worm for not being aware of him till today. Nevertheless, hearing the many personal stories here on HN of his work, humility and graciousness, make me thankful for him and his tribe that have made the software profession so much more richer.

</comment><comment><USER54> Wow. I didn't realize how influential the Bronx High School of Science was:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_Science_alumni)

</comment><comment><USER55> From his resume:

1962-1964 Stanford University Departments of Genetics and Computer Science programmer

</comment><comment><USER56> I didn't know of Larry Tesler, but reading the comments makes me want to lead like he did. Looking forward to learning more about his life. My condolences to his friends here.

</comment><comment><USER57> So long our dear friend Larry. You have been such an inspiration. Amongst other achievements, the Newton is still such an incredible machine (and love Dylan)

</comment><comment><USER58> There's one thing on his wikipedia page which I think is probably wrong: I don't think Wirth had any involvement with Object Pascal.

<comment><USER59> I think he did, as a consultant. The main reference I found was an article in MacTech, written by an Apple employee:

"Object Pascal is an extension to the Pascal language that was developed at Apple in consultation with Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal."

[http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/Ob...](http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/ObjectPascal/index.html)

<comment><USER60> I was (distantly) there, and I recall Wirth being there and visiting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP.

</comment><comment><USER62> I loved Larry Tesler's work. No modes!

</comment><comment><USER63> Is it possible for the HN staff to put a rollover on the black bar or link it to threads like this. I see an uptick in the "why is there a black bar?" threads every time it goes up and it would be nice to acknowledge the people that have contributed to technology and spread awareness of what they've done for people that might not know.

</comment><comment><USER64> Don't mode me bro.

</comment><comment><USER65> Never heard about him here in EU

</comment><comment><USER66> Larry Tesler has died (gizmodo.com)

1179 points by drallison 23 hours ago | flag | hide | past | web | favorite | 131 comments

</comment><comment><USER67> What

</comment><comment><USER68> rest in peace

</comment><comment><USER69> Thank you, Larry.

</comment><comment><USER70> :(

</comment><comment><USER71> Tangentially related question: is this why HN currently has a black bar above the navigation? To commemorate his death?

<comment><USER72> Yes, HN does this when people who were impactful to the technology world have died to commemorate them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I couldn't find any corroboration of this. What happened?

<comment><USER74> [https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler- who-...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler-who-showed- steve-jobs-around-xerox-parc-dies-aged-74)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Tesler spent 17 years at Apple, rising to chief scientist.

He went on to establish an education startup and do stints in user-experience technology at Amazon and Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER76> [https://imgur.com/KX9IJEV.png](https://imgur.com/KX9IJEV.png)

</comment><comment><USER77> Does anyone else find it strange that there's rarely any mention of cause of death in Wikipedia? Is it uncouth to ask how someone passed away?

<comment><USER78> Markoff's obituary [1] in the New York Times says, "The cause was not known, his wife, Colleen Barton, said, but in recent years he had suffered the effects of an earlier bicycle accident."

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence- tesle...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler- dead.html)</comment></comment>


FTC launching antitrust probe over Google search, ad businesses - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/ftc-launching-antitrust-probe-over-google-search-ad-businesses.ars

<comment><USER2> Interesting timing in light of the recent AdMeld acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like Microsoft has been busy behind the scenes.</comment>


Ask HN: Review our Landing Page - <AUTHOR>

We're a (pretty good) group of developers who have been working on improving our design skills. We'd love it if you could give your feedback on our design, layout and prose. www.musicmind.co Thanks. <comment><USER2> Few questions not necessarily about design so feel free to not upvote. I'm wondering why you're creating this. Who has asked for it? Really, myspace is largely considered a failure and they are actually quite huge in this arena. They have a ton of bands still using their service and they make money. You can aspire to be as big as they are, but remember, they're largely considered a failure.

Also, what's up with the gigantic team? You're building a bloated, slow company from the ground up. If you're going after the social networks of the world, you need a nimble team that can execute an idea within hours of realizing it is necessary and a team this size will very quickly become unmanageable. You already have 8 people and you're looking for two more! A team this size makes me think you're planning to build this entire application in a vacuum (devoid of any user input) and you think you need a lot of devs to get it done quickly.

That's the end of my flame.

As for the design, I actually really like it. I like the general layout quite a lot. Few recommendations: It's hard to read because of the text and you need to clean up your english a bit. For example, "building relationships between fans, musicians, all while allowing anyone to build a personal online library of music." isn't a list of similar things. That's two similar things and something completely different. Doesn't feel right when you read it. There are a few examples of this.

Whether you're asking for advice on my first two paragraphs or not, I would really appreciate you answering them as I am really curious. You can email me if you don't want to answer on here. Email in the profile.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is something that I'd like – but it's very hard to figure out from the landing page copy. It's unclear who the site is actually for... only try to sell to one person at a time.

The text is incredibly difficult to read, largely due to the text shadow being set at -2px (try just 1px), but also because of the font.

The shadow of the text also isn't consistent with the shadow of the header bar.

The icons look like they were picked from different iconsets, and also pixelated in some cases.

The positioning of the icons isn't ideal to me, nor is only showing the description text on hover. It actually took me awhile to realize that information was there.

The footer links on hover also have an entirely different shadow not consistent with the header or text.

Your site is focused on one of the coolest verticals, and yet the design is sort of boring.

Hope this helps!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I really appreciate this. The icons were a particular challenge. Do you have any favorite icon sets?

<comment><USER3> I prefer minimal glyphs like <http://iconsweets2.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Who is this for - fans, bands, administrators? I can't tell if it's an end- user service or a framework. If the former, how does it integrate with iTunes or any of the myriad other music services? If the latter, how will this help me build traffic over a competitor's offering?

Also, I hate the gray color. It looks like concrete with blue plastic tape.

On the positive side, I like the idea of social discovery via music and music discovery via social networking, particularly the former. One way to highlight this would be to let me search for an artist or genre and then offer contacts with people who are already fans of that and can recommend other music in the same genre.

Lots of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, great constructive feedback. A point by point: It's for both fans, and bans. The interactions will be fan to fan and band to fan.

Its a social network, not currently a framework.

It will help you build traffic because currently the only way to interact with fans is either through face to face, or another network like facebook, which is an imperfect medium because: a: It's not designed around music and therefore is hard/impossible to share your playlist, or to have more interactions with a band than simply posting on their wall.

b: Spotify is a stopgap service, which is doing kind of well on the social front but not the artist front. For example, Lady Gaga recently took her music off spotify after earning a grand total of: $100 dollars through streaming.

On the design, okay, I definitively see that. Do you have any colors/patterns you'd recommend?

Thank you so much.

<comment><USER4> That sounds positive, and I hope you'll keep posting progress! On the design side, you need a pro - but I feel like start with photos and bolder fonts, brand yourself more assertively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 0\. I really like your background.

1\. I think all your icons should have the same color shade. I thought the + sign was something special at first glance(functionally).

2\. The layout could be closer to how the page is traversed visually. to view the benefits,i have to look at all four corners first. a sample ex:

< all your icons in one line with names below>

< pitch text>

<signup/call to action>

3\. I agree with dwynings that the text is hard to read due to shadow/font choice

4\. Don't know which call to action is better: build a library or connect with artists. having both dilutes the value proposition. Maybe some A/B testing would be in order.

</comment><comment><USER6> Honestly, the default LaunchRock page would appeal more to me than what you guys currently have.

<http://launchrock.com/>

Music is about passion, and this design doesn't convey any emotions at all.

Also, why are you building yet another social network for music? MySpace failed. Apple's Ping failed miserably. Both of those have huge backers. What makes this different? Did bands actually ask for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that's an interesting take. I'll assure you that we do have passion, though maybe not much design sense.

<comment><USER6> I know coders gotta code, but I would seriously evaluate the need for such a service before diving head first into it. You may be better off creating a service that allows artists to embed music on the new Facebook Timeline and charging artists for running that iFrame or something.

People really, and I mean REALLY do not want to join another social network when there are already so many to manage. Google+ is learning this the hard way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank all of you for your comments. One questions. All of the commenters have mentioned individual design things, which have been very helpful. But does anyone like/dislike the basic layout of the page?

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks for the feedback. We really are trying to design a great launch page. This is not the application but we are definitely trying to attract artists, users, and potential team members.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://www.musicmind.co></comment>


Advanced Tools and Scripting with PowerShell 3.0 Jump Start - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/advanced-tools-scripting-with-powershell-3-0-jump-start

<comment><AUTHOR> For a more basic introduction:

[https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/en-US/training- cours...](https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/en-US/training- courses/getting-started-with-powershell-3-0-jump-start-8276)</comment>


Streamus Turns Chrome Into A Fast, Free, YouTube-Powered Spotify Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/24/streamus-turns-chrome-into-a-fast-free-youtube-powered-spotify-alternative/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! I made this! I've spent the last 16 months working nights/weekends on it and I think it has come a long ways.

If anyone has any questions about the development process, how anything about it works, or even some constructive criticism... please don't hesitate to share! Thanks!</comment>


MailerJS: Send email with client-side JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.mailerjs.com/

<comment><USER4> Flagging for an incredibly misleading topic / tagline. This isn't actually "sending email with client-side javascript;" it's simply a script that allows you to send a message to a service that will generate an email for you. Seriously, it's basically a scripted email form--how this at all interesting?

<comment><USER5> You can also ask how HTML forms are interesting? (Answer is WuFoo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting idea. This could be useful for signup and contact forms from a static website.

It's amusing to me that the contact link is just a mailto. Why not use MailerJS?

<comment><USER7> > _It's amusing to me that the contact link is just a mailto. Why not use > MailerJS?_

In case someone wants to complain that MailerJS doesn't work in their browser, I guess?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see any pricing info on their site. If this is intended to be free for life, then I guess it's pretty nifty. But it would take about 30 minutes for any web developer to duplicate this functionality, so I hope they don't plan on charging for it.

<comment><USER9> It's hidden until you sign up: \- Free - 5 emails/day \- Basic ($5/month) - <USER2> emails/day \- Big ($29/month) - 500 emails/day \- Huge ($99/month) - <USER3> emails/day

<comment><USER10> That is pretty steep taking into account that even Postmark, which many consider expensive, charges only $1.50 per thousand emails. The basic plan is $3.33 for thousand and you're limited to specific daily limits... I usually don't complain about pricing but this just feels too much. Of course these two services are different but I chose Postmark as it's from the expensive end of email sending services. And one can replicate MailerJS in just one evening (when writing this there might already be a open source clone).

Enough with the whining... The main reason why I'm not a fan is that the pricing is hidden behind sign up and the site gives the impression that the service is free.

<comment><USER8> I don't see why you'd need to use a third party at all for this type of thing. Postmark is designed to increase email deliverability, but if you're only sending emails to yourself, that shouldn't really be an issue. It seems like good ol' sendmail would do the trick.

Agreed on the pricing though. Doesn't seem very honest.

<comment><USER11> Sendmail doesn't work if you're serving up your site statically from S3. Then again, their pricing is so ridiculous, its cheaper to just POST the email message via REST to a service to send the mail (Postmark, Sendgrid, AWS SES).

I'm not sure what this solution solves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _You need to tell Mailer.js about your API key_

What exactly stops me from stealing someone else's API key and using it to send spam? You can't trust the client.

<comment><USER6> That was my first thought, however, from the docs:

 _MailerJS will send mail to the address you enter on your account page. You can't specify the receiver dynamically, as client-side JavaScript is publicly accessible by definition, and we want to protect you from spammers._

Why steal someone's api key just so you can send them email?

<comment><USER13> (not something I would do, but someone else would) To put them over their account limit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is terrible. Overpriced web service that sends emails to a single address, 20-lines script calling the API using jQuery $.ajax (why the dependency ?!) and sends the request with GET instead of PUT or POST...

<comment><USER15> Indeed. Why would you pay for, and be dependent on, a service like this when you could quite easily make something like this? Running on your own server where you have full control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is great but ridiculously overpriced that 1 months delivery is how much I would tack onto a clients bill for building a customer form or implementing this service.

This is just bad value for money

</comment><comment><USER17> Cool. I can think of many reasons it would be bad to have a mailer on the client side, but a big pro w/ this is that you can send mail easily when you only have file access to say, a client's website.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh, collect email in an html form ?

</comment><comment><USER19> Why email? It seems like an inefficient method to deal with bug reports. Not to mention it seems like this would be really open to abuse.

<comment><USER20> I agree, it's overpriced. I would rather just put a snippet in that tracked javascript errors somehow, and also grabbed all of the user's browser information etc. And bonus points if it takes a screenshot (doable with HTML5) and copies over everything from console.log. Would really help with debugging.

P.S. They should have put the pricing information on the home page. Didn't realize they were a YC company either.

<comment><USER21> _I would rather just put a snippet in that tracked javascript errors somehow, and also grabbed all of the user's browser information etc._

That's a worse user experience, though. And you have no opportunity to ask follow-up questions, or even say "hey, it's fixed!". That kind of customer service goes a long way.

<comment><USER20> _That's a worse user experience, though._

How? Worse than what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Open source it. I know, I know, but just do it. Charge for support or something.</comment>


Ask HN: Paid email hosting, with custom domains - <AUTHOR> I'm a one-person operation with email addresses on 8 domains. I'm currently paying for Fastmail (Standard and Professional) and I'm broadly happy with the service and price.
My contract comes up for renewal in early summer and I'd like to compare some of the other reputable players in the email space. I've been with Fastmail 3 years and I suspect the email hosting landscape has evolved since.
I looked at Google Apps for Work, but with 8x domains I don't want to pay for 8x accounts on the non-email apps when 1x is enough.
I looked at Outlook 365, and I'm sort of neutral about the whole thing price- and performance-wise.
I had shortlisted, and almost decided on, ProtonMail until I heard about the DDoS and the ransom payment.
I'd like to pay for a service that offers:
* IMAP over SSL * a good track record of security * a good track record of reliability * wildcard email (i.e., @example.com drops into firstname.lastname@example.com)  some reassurance that they won't instantly cave if/when the feds come knocking * minimal extra fluff that I likely won't use
I prefer to keep domains, web hosting and email at different places, so Gandi and self-hosting with Digital Ocean is out. I have no interest in running my own server. I've done that before, and it was a bag of hurt.
I'm still leaning toward ProtonMail. Whether that's a good or bad idea is up for debate.
I am interested and grateful for your feedback on:
* what you use - would you recommend it? * is ProtonMail worth pursuing?
Thank you in advance. <comment><USER2> _I looked at Google Apps for Work, but with 8x domains I don 't want to pay for 8x accounts on the non-email apps when 1x is enough._

You can have a single GAfW account, with one primary domain, and N secondary domains that you can receive and send email from. I did this for years prior to needing to split the account into one GAfW account per domain. That process was _a disastrous timesuck_ and I do not recommend it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Patrick. You've hit on something that I had overlooked in my OP: modularity is attractive. The domains I have are business-related and may be retired at a given point. Unpicking one from a lump of connected domains is something I'd rather avoid. I've had the multiple-emails-from-one-Google- account and it wasn't for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) is the leader in this niche, with over 200K paying customers, yet nobody on HN seems to be aware they even exist. This is what they do. With a 100% availability SLA. And 24/7/365 phone/chat/email support. For just $2/mailbox.

<comment><USER4> Problem is, you need to buy at least 10 mailboxes. So minimum monthly price is $20.

<comment><USER5> It's 5 these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google Apps for Work -- why not buy a grandfathered GAfW account?

I have done this successfully three times using [http://www.gappsdomain.com](http://www.gappsdomain.com) but there are plenty of other people selling these. Ask Mr. Google and he will lead you to them.

For a one-time cost, you now have a free GAfW account forever.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're happy with the price and service of Fastmail, why switch? Seems like a lot of time and hassle for not a lot of benefit.

<comment><USER8> This. That and FastMail itself has improved significantly over the years IMO.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. A provider that's already very good that has a demonstrably good track record of improving constantly over time seems like a win/win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >> _won 't instantly cave if/when the feds come knocking_

I have never used ProtonMail for business and only have a private account with them. I quite like them mainly because as you say they probably won't cave in when the feds come knocking. Since they aren't based in the US (nor the EU which is equally important). The DDoS was unfortunate as they are a very young company so a bit unfair to be tested like that. But I think it shows that they didn't cave in to the ransom - which I respect and support more than them "fixing it" by paying up.

<comment><USER10> They did pay. "The first attack was tied to a ransom of 15 bitcoins (roughly US$6,000) which ProtonMail eventually paid due to pressure from ISPs and other companies affected by the attack." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail#2015_DDoS_attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail#2015_DDoS_attacks)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use asmallorange shared hosting when I need cheap easy email for custom domains. Standard management through cpanel, multiple webmail options, IMAP over SSL, great customer service and security track record. It's kind of an old school choice these days but it's quick and it always works.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't think Protonmail supports IMAP.

[https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/imap-smtp- and-...](https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/imap-smtp-and- pop3-setup/)

I love Fastmail but my situation is less complex than yours.

<comment><AUTHOR> >I don't think Protonmail supports IMAP.

I had wrongly assumed they did - thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey - ZOHO Mail comes up pretty good in this survey: [http://www.smallbusinesswebdesigns.co.nz/business-email- host...](http://www.smallbusinesswebdesigns.co.nz/business-email-hosting.html) \- I think it's probably your best option as it's free but also has IMAP and up to 25 accounts.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just curious why deliverability is not on your list. For me this is requirement number 1 as one lost sale due to my email going into spam is far more costly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid question, and it's not something I've encountered before. In the past 10 years I've run with Media Temple (VPS hosting), then Fastmail. I've never had reason to question delivery rates, come to think of it. I guess in that respect that's another point to stay with Fastmail.

<comment><USER14> I used to run my own mail server and had no trouble with deliverability for about 15 years. In the last 12 months it became so bad with certainly email providers (I am looking at you Microsoft and Yahoo) that I was forced to change over to a dedicated email service (I went with luxsci).

It would appear that some of the large email companies have effectively outsource spam filtering to the email service providers (email from one of the known service provider == good - everyone else == drop 1 in 20 emails randomly). This means that in practice it is impossible to run your own email server anymore if you care about deliverability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Have a look at [http://www.tuffmail.com](http://www.tuffmail.com).

</comment><comment><USER16> Perhaps not a good answer for the OP, but for the greater HN community: I've been using Pobox.com fo a couple of years now, and been pretty happy with their services.

They recently joined up with FastMail, but bring a silently different feature set.

</comment><comment><USER17> Have you considered mxroute.com?

</comment><comment><USER18> Soho Mail [https://www.zoho.com/mail/](https://www.zoho.com/mail/) is another option. I have not used them.

<comment><USER9> I am one of their customers. Often buggy (webmail) and issues with availability. Suffered a prolonged DDoS attack last year which left me a whole weekend without email. Upgrades seem to often cause outages. Some issues in Operational security. Also it is unclear if data at rest is encrypted. They use SSO with all their other apps (makes sense) but then support asks you to give them your password so they can verify any issues. (and they don't comprehend and treat you like an idiot if you say this isn't possible). Support issues generally take ages to solve and you have to mention the CEO in your tweets to get any response. Also even you have a premium subscription there is a limit on the number of mails you can send per day from your account. This might be an issue for companies with marketing or newsletter accounts and wish to build campaigns for this.

I'm seriously questioning their technical competence not just from support but also from development. When I subscribed to Zoho first thing I noticed (in 2011) that sending emails with multi-part alternative MIME types results in an empty plain-text part so anyone reading the mail in a plain-text MUA would see just an empty email (and it took them ages to get this basic feature fixed).

here some of my recent arguments with them: [https://twitter.com/search?q=%40valbonneconsult%20zoho&src=t...](https://twitter.com/search?q=%40valbonneconsult%20zoho&src=typd)

On the upside they are pretty easy to set up with IMAP and TLS in more exotic environments (e.g. offlineimap, postfix, mutt etc). If you go with them don't expect to scale your business because it's going to end in tears. OK for private use IMO.

I still use Zoho until now because of integration with some other apps (once I migrate those I will turn my back on them and never look back).

<comment><USER19> _I 'm seriously questioning their technical competence not just from support but also from development._

Have to agree with you there. I tried their online office apps a few times over the years (also recently) and was surprised how limited and kind of janky the software is. They don't seem to be improving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use mailbox.org

It works very well and seem to fulfill your requirements if you can live with all 8 domains going into a single email account.

Proton do unfortunately not support imap or anything like it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would recommend highly o365 exchange online accounts. I have been using this for my personal email for the past year and I recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER22> FastMail has been doing this since 1999

</comment><comment><USER23> pobox.com? (although it's now owned by fastmail, the service is still separate, I think).

</comment><comment><USER24> Mark</comment>


"It was working yesterday, I swear" - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/104900/27757

<comment><USER2> My favorite example of this was some code that would always fail in production, but test out fine for devs.

Turned out the developer had used static variables to communicate between runs of dynamically loaded modules, which sadly, you get different sets of when you are loaded onto multiple processors in the _production_ environment, versus single instance testing by the dev concerned.

</comment><comment><USER3> sometimes you get this illusion, but

the case is always the same - it wasn't working properly yesterday ;p</comment>


Product videos matter: Amazon breaks into online video top 10 - <AUTHOR> http://siliconfilter.com/amazon-breaks-into-online-video-top-10/

<comment><USER2> I haven't seen any product videos on Amazon other than the Kindle ones. Any examples?</comment>


What software are far more complex to make than non-technical people realize? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-kinds-of-software-are-far-more-complex-to-develop-than-people-who-arent-software-engineers-realize?share=1 <comment><USER2> How about binary search and fizzbuzz, both of which are difficult for technical people (aka programmers) to get right? Non-technical people are not the only ones to misjudge complexity.</comment>