The Sad State of Logging Bugs for Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2019/03/the-sad-state-of-logging-bugs-for-apple/ <comment><USER2> Disclaimer, I worked with Corbin for a decade, and have tons of respect for him. I agree with the diagnosis here, and I have one additional treatment suggestion:

The single easiest and most effective thing Apple could do to improve its SWE org is to invest in Radar.

Radar's importance within Apple cannot be overstated. It subsumes what would be multiple tools in other orgs. As an Apple SWE you spend a massive amount of time in it. And yet Apple treats Radar as a cost center, developed by an outsourced offshore team. It's slow to search, supports only plain text, is hard to script, and is missing obvious features, e.g. automatic duplicate finding.

Hire five good SWEs, give them a mandate to serve the needs of the org, and you will massively increase the effectiveness of every other engineer.

(My experience is now rather stale and I hope they've already formed such a team!)

<comment><USER3> > developed by an outsourced offshore team

I thought there were some engineers who worked on Radar, but then I heard that they had moved development offshore. Is this a new thing?

> is missing obvious features, e.g. automatic duplicate finding

Last I heard, I think someone was working on this in their free time. I don't think anyone has tried to add this as an official feature, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anecdotally, I didn't find the situation internally to be much better. Many bugs internally go unanswered because there is not enough time allocated to fixing core systems and designing better replacements. The truth is, I know personally of several teams that aren't able to get through the queue of internally filed and scheduled bugs.

To me, it feels like Apple hasn't resourced core pieces of infrastructure and engineering teams in line with upper management's plans for growth. While many teams are relatively sequestered, once you start talking to folks elsewhere in the company it becomes clear that many teams are struggling to stay above water. More still, everyone shrugs about it because it's not clear exactly what is wrong. The best description I've heard is in many cases engineers are willing to offer hacks as a solution to meet management's demands, and management is either willing to accept those hacks or doesn't know better. That is far from a full picture, and its an example drawn from a small slice of an enormous company. But it seems telling to me. I find it completely reasonable to imagine that most teams in a place to deal with customer facing bugs don't have adequate time to do so. Not to their satisfaction, never mind customers.

At the same time, I think it can be hard to appreciate the ways in which Apple is ahead of the curve as far as the categories of software projects it tackles. So I don't mean to imply that anyone is really to blame per se. And it's also a shame because Radar was the greatest bug tracker I have ever used. It is unclear to me if Apple doesn't prioritize menial things like handling external bug reports, or if problems like that are not visible to / perceived by those in the company who could do something about it.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if it's as simple as this: a company that's making so much money just has no incentive to improve. After all, if the end goal of a company like Apple is to make money, they're already doing it.

<comment><USER6> Improving processes and hiring new people shouldn't be a big dent to their massive revenues though.

<comment><USER7> probably not, but from my anecdotal experience with upper managers (i don't work at apple), every little bit counts towards "hitting the targets"...it seems unfortunately almost nowhere is immune to this pathological way of thinking...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was on the team that wrote the requirements for the original version of Radar, in 1988. At that time each department was using it's own flat file database for bugs. Also at that time, there was a very large testing group. All testers at Apple were together: more than 400 testers. We had a strong culture of testing. We had pride in ourselves and our company. This was pretty much thrown away when the group was disbanded in 1989. Professional testing culture was replaced with the attitude that only developers mattered. Hurray for "Total Quality Management" and later Agile, I imagine. I was gone by '91.

We originally designed Radar so that bugs would be verified as closed by the person with most interest in seeing this happen: the tester assigned to that part of that project. Then management swooped in with an edict that bugs must be verified as closed by whomever originally reported them. This is a stupid idea, because it creates the perverse incentive that no one should report a problem if they are outside the team (because then you are committing to verify the fix, which just means more work for you that has nothing to do with any of your main responsibilities).

When I pointed out that the system would now discourage people on different teams from helping each other, the sponsoring director said "that's what pink slips are for." Direct quote. Soon after that I resigned from the design team.

Without reasonably skilled and principled leadership, you just don't get quality software. And "quality is everyone's job" is just an empty and childish slogan. Excellence is not transmitted through slogans and wishful thinking. You have to assign responsibility, provide resources and time (which means lowering velocity of new development), and follow-up.

The fundamental reason why it doesn't happen is the technology market is not efficient. Quality is, in fact, not as important as career testers wish it were. You can get away with doing terrible work and not lose your job. The fact that Apple pays no significant penalties for having buggy products insulates it from our slings and arrows.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. The person who wrote the bug is in the best position to decide whether the problem was actually fixed.

<comment><USER10> I could easily see it go either way; it really depends on the bug. Some obvious issue, like "this button should do X but it does Y" can be verified by almost anyone. But some issues need the attention of the original author to really verify the bug. Maybe what needs to be done is someone in QA needs to attempt to verify the bug, or "pre-verify", and then it goes back to the originator for final verification, who can also verify it, or simply close it if they feel like QA did a good job.

<comment><USER9> That sounds like a good idea. As long as the originator has the option of having the last word, internal attempts to verify can only help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When a process is annoying and you do nothing, people eventually _do_ give up and leave. When it reaches that point, _they're not coming back_ even if you finally wake up and fix what bugged them.

Apple software quality is in serious danger precisely because of this type of community and infrastructure rot. They are not encouraging developers to help them, and a not-surprising number of serious issues have shown up in released products in recent years.

I am one of those people who gave up on BugReporter. Lots has been written on how tedious it can be but even its "rewritten" version a few years ago is frustrating (basically you could be reporting a damned spelling error and they would still want a "sysdiagnose"). Bugs stay open _for years_ and still can somehow be Duplicate. Meanwhile, very obvious broken features make it into new versions.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is extremely frustrating to me as a macOS developer.

I put a lot of effort into my app. I spend about 50% of my time on triaging / fixing / preventing bugs. We check every crash report that is logged, and we attempt to reproduce every issue reported by customers as quickly as possible.

By now, a significant fraction of bugs are bugs in Apple's frameworks. We try to report them to Apple, but they are ignored, or simply closed because they are related to deprecated APIs.

Of course, customers don't complain that Apple frameworks are buggy -- they complain that our app crashes! So Apple has no incentive to fix it. (If the bug affects Apple apps, it has a higher chance of being fixed. If a framework isn't used a lot by Apple, it will be full of bugs)

So we have dozens of workarounds in our code, and have stopped using some frameworks altogether (if possible).

But I can confirm that Corbin was quick to review bugs -- NSTableView related bugs were the only ones were I got fast feedback.

<comment><USER13> customers don't complain that Apple frameworks are buggy -- they complain that our app crashes -> if you try to mention this on apple's developer forum you will get banned. Apple doesn't like damaging their brand. As you have said customer blames us, developers.

</comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner It's buried in the article:

 _When I worked at Apple I practiced what I am now preaching. I would screen all my bugs within a day or so. I would verify bugs within a week or so. I would poke around at code and attempt to make theoretical fixes for bugs I couldn't reproduce. I felt like it was part of my job, and I just did these things as a daily task._

From Corbin's about page [https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/about/](https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/about/) :

 _For 13 years I worked at Apple on Cocoa, mostly doing UI implementation in AppKit, such as NSTableView, NSWindow, NSVisualEffectView. I also did quite a bit of work in UIKit – mainly on the early iPhone releases, but also helping with the first few versions of the public SDK after that. I wrote and worked on the base classes, such as UILabel and UITableView. You may recall seeing me at WWDC in the labs, or up on stage giving a talk. Before Apple, I worked at Borland, primarily on Delphi._

</comment><comment><USER14> The entire value of WWDC is going to the Labs, giving an Apple engineer your Radar number, and having them read you or paraphrase the internal-only notes attached to the ticket. Half the time the question/bug will be clearly resolved internally or a workaround posted. But no updates are added to the public ticket, and it will remain open and unchanged for years.

</comment><comment><USER15> I gave up reporting bugs because they were ignored and not even acknowledged let alone fixed - for years. There is no evidence they haven't gone to /dev/null. I won't bother in future.

With Free software, I just do the work myself and include a patch. But beyond the tongue-in-cheek possibility of scripting things to submit every bug thousands of times to make it 'popular', it sounds like there's no workaround to make an Apple bug report worth the time taken to submit it.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I also gave up more or less. I recently had a problem with AppKit, created a small example to reproduce, and used one of my Developer Incidents. I got an acknowledgement from them, was asked to open a radar, and provide the ticket number back. I did that but from that point on on there was silence. It may be possible that it will be fixed for 10.15, but the experience from my point of view is lousy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Logged a bug in Xcode that was breaking our CI. This was never fixed.

It was frustratingly easy to reproduce. Clear the process is broken internally (as source article says) as well as externally. I guess when you sit on the highest volume pipe of money coming out of wallets for consumer tech, there is no reason to change?

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I used to report those to Blackberry, but when they owned the entire mobile field, noone gave a shit that you can't you get 'your code' on their platform.

<comment><USER19> Oh yeah, I can remember when trying to deal with Blackberry over a decade ago, when they were still relevant.

Ultimately, we just gave up and didn't release our app on their platform at all.

<comment><USER18> When their BB10 platform rolled out, the first thing they did was to make the code deployment process simpler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this how bugs are handled in most software companies? I have never seen anyone ever fix a bug that I report as a user. I have been asked for plenty of irrelevant diagnostics logs, seen bug tickets get relegated to low priority or won't fix, or closed because the ticket wasn't updated, though. (User perspective: I shouldn't have to nag. Dev perspective: Maybe it fixed itself or the user doesn't care anymore.) Plenty of that. And I'm on the other end of that at work. I'm a developer who must handle issue tickets, and there are tickets that have been sitting there for months, and might sit there forever unless my boss nags me to deal with them, because there are always more pressing issues to deal with, not to mention tasks that are far more rewarding to work on. I think there are limits to how much you can torture or bore a developer before they just up and quit.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that's pretty much how bugs seem to be handled at most large software companies/projects, though they all do it a bit differently. Google is famous for making it next to impossible to speak to a human, instead sending obtuse automated replies. Apple does "radar to /dev/null." Linux? I wouldn't even consider wading into the cesspit of toxicity and petty dictatorship that is LKML.

On a positive note, I have had some great experiences interacting with the maintainers of smaller projects, and even some larger ones like Emacs. But massive companies and projects? Not worth the effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Or, they just won't want to install the latest OS because it doesn't have > anything they want or need (that's me, I run 10.13).

(Context is Apple asking bug originators to verify whether or not the bug still occurs in the latest OS.)

This seems contradictory to the entire article. The point of logging a bug at all is to get it fixed. The fix would be coming in a future release. If you don't want to take the latest updates that's fine, but how are you going to get bug fixes?

<comment><USER5> I wonder if the author mean that he's stuck on OS X 10.13.n, and would be willing to install OS X 10.13.(n+1), just not 10.14?

<comment><USER23> Apple doesn't do point upgrades for previous releases unless there's a critical security bug in them though, so that wouldn't happen. If you want the problem fixed you have to jump to the next major release because that's what 90% of the active install base is on, since it's free and easy to install.

<comment><USER24> > Apple doesn't do point upgrades for previous releases unless there's a > critical security bug in them

This is not true. Minor updates to Mac OS X pretty much always contain a handful of non-security bug fixes.

<comment><USER3> I have never seen Apple push an update to a previous version of macOS unless there was some critical bug or security vulnerability in it.

<comment><USER24> Many minor macOS updates add features. 10.6.6 added the App Store. 10.7.2 added iCloud. More recently, 10.14.3 [0] added things as small as "a menu item to News for opening a story in Safari". (As an arguably even more trivial example, 10.14.1 added new emoji.)

Most minor updates also fix small, non-critical bugs, like 10.13.4 [1], which "fixes an issue that may prevent web link previews from appearing in Messages".

Do all of these updates fix security bugs too? Yes, because a company as big as Apple is probably always fixing security bugs. That doesn't mean they ONLY do minor updates for security bugs though.

[0] [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT209149#macos10143](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209149#macos10143)

[1] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208533](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT208533)

<comment><USER3> None of those were released when the operating system they applied to was a "previous" version of macOS.

<comment><USER24> Oh ok, I misunderstood you... sorry

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My "favourite" macOS bug is 14 years old and I have reported it countless times, including in email exchanges with Federighi. The OS doesn't respect an app's input language and changes it when switching apps. Default input, English, gets overwritten on app switch. There is an option, it doesn't really work. This is my only serious problem with the macOS I love and it's sad we get new bugs galore while old ones are ignored.

<comment><USER26> I've been bitten by the Spotlight key combination and the input switching key combination being similar, but this is a PEBKAC rather than a bug.

I've since disabled the input switching key combination because it conflicts with Emacs' set-mark-command.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > It's okay to log bugs that are missing information; developers can ask for > specifics of what they need. In general, for AppKit related bugs, I would > find that a "sysdiagnose" rarely would provide any useful information. I > would hate it when people (usually QA, and not the engineers who worked on > the code) would ask me for a sysdiagnose, when I know it wouldn't help them > figure anything out.

Yeah, except Bug Reporter nags you _multiple times_ for a sysdiagnose if you don't attach one (they have been slowing adding these, I've noticed), and if you ignore these screening is going to send it back to you a week later, without reading the bug, asking for you add one. Sometimes if you _do_ have the sysdiagnose they'll ask for something equally stupid (system profile, usually).

<comment><USER10> The sysdiagnose does contain useful information that is useful for certain bugs. If an app crashes, then the crash report is essential. The log file is also (sometimes) useful. It is easier to ask for a sysdiagnose that gathers the kitchen sink instead of the developer just providing the piece needed (ie: the leaky faucet). -corbin

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I know that, but the screeners will often ask for a sysdiagnose in cases where it's clearly not useful (for example, visual bugs that exist on an out- of-box installation). So it's pretty clear they're either not reading the bug, or going through some sort of checklist that one of the engineers gave them (don't bother me with a bug without a sysdiagnose!)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it is stupid. I used to see this all the time.

<comment><USER27> The other day I reported a bug in Safari's regex engine and they asked for a sysdiagnose.

I just don't have the energy to perform pointless tasks, so their browser can stay broken.

(In case Apple is reading: /.*?x/u.exec('ふx') should match but doesn't.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> At an Agile presentation several years ago, they suggested the following approach:

a) Bugs get broken down into manageable tasks of roughly the same size (eg. about 1 day to fix).

b) You measure the average velocity that your team fixes these triaged bugs.

c) When the number of bug reports exceeds the teams velocity, you know that number of bugs will never be fixed.

d) Be brutal, and flag that number of the lowest priroty bugs that will never be fixed as WONTFIX.

Now you have a manageable queue of bugs, say as many as your team can fix in two months. And the submitters know the score and know waiting isn't going to help. Lots of productivity and efficiency bonuses all around.

But nobody does this or any of the similar variations, because people rather leave bugs that everyone knows will never be fixed in the system 'because they might be' or because they don't want to listen to the butt hurt submitters complain because they place a higher priority on fixing the bug than the people they are trying to convince to fix it.

And yes, this approach might seriously piss customers off enough that it is a PR nightmare, so I'd be interested in anecdotes of this sort of approach being applied and how it worked out (even just internally).

<comment><USER29> Or just have a zero tolerance for bugs.

<comment><USER30> That's effectively having a zero tolerance for functionality too.

<comment><USER29> No it isn't, in fact you could argue a better quality code base supports faster development.

<comment><USER30> You have some examples of bug-free software that does useful work?

<comment><USER29> That's not what I was suggesting and I think you know that.

<comment><USER30> What are you suggesting? I truly don't know what "zero tolerance for bugs" could mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Management needs to allow engineers to have more time to do this, which is > at the expense of working on features or fixing already screened bugs.

IMO, this sentence is the key. For Apple to improve its software quality, it needs to stop trying to do many other things. We don't need new versions of Mac OS X and iOS every year anymore, each with incremental feature additions and new bugs.

</comment><comment><USER31> Anecdote: Yeah I was a bit surprised that a kernel/filesystem bug I logged back in November complete with a reproducer didn't even get acknowledged. I hope they'll eventually get to it, as it causes spurious build farm failures for PostgreSQL. My hypothesis was that the lack of appropriate category might have doomed my report to the random/other/who-cares pile.

[http://www.openradar.me/radar?id=4970461708419072](http://www.openradar.me/radar?id=4970461708419072)

<comment><USER32> It's prioritized and in the queue...

<comment><USER31> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > This is terrible because many engineers will not look at bugs with a low > priority.

So taking inspiration from the React scheduling work, would it make sense to give bugs a timeout based on priority to keep them from sitting around forever? Say you have a low priority bug, it sits around forever while more important stuff gets fixed, but if it's been sitting idle for 6 months it gets an automatic priority bump?

</comment><comment><USER34> They can't even fix external display issues with their laptop. I would say bugs in their issue tracker that aren't even that high profile are hopeless.

</comment><comment><USER35> Does this help explain Apple's bizarre inaction after learning about the FaceTime bug?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19029573](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19029573)

</comment><comment><USER36> Filed a bug with Apple 6 months ago. Haven't heard anything and the bug is still there.

How to reproduce the bug on iPhone/iPad:

\- start playing some music

\- open control center and swipe down on the volume to mute it

\- turn up the volume one click on the physical buttons

\- swipe down on the volume in control center

\- repeat turning up the volume with the buttons and muting in the control center until the control center volume stops affecting the actual volume

<comment><USER16> Yes, I could reproduce this easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I haven't had an empty backlog since 2011.

<comment><USER4> It seems that Radar queues can only grow.

<comment><USER38> When I first joined my team, my manager told me to take a screenshot of my queue, because that was the only time it would ever be empty...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "Feedback" on public betas seems to be an even lower priority.

I've reported that each iOS beta gnaws away system storage since they started the program.

My phone is currently giving up 176GB to system storage and seems to have no end in sight.

So many enthusiast users I know are so frustrated they want to give up.

<comment><USER3> Feedback on public betas is probably lower priority than radars, unless a lot of people are reporting something. I'm sure the quality of the bug reports is much lower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > I would poke around at code and attempt to make theoretical fixes for bugs I > couldn't reproduce.

This sounds like a great way to accrete unnecessary code, some of which will create even more bugs.

<comment><USER10> Code to fix problems, even in theory, isn't unnecessary. Statistically, changes I did were very unlikely to produce bugs. I wrote about this in my post about why you shouldn't do code reviews: [https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2018/01/code- reviews-p...](https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2018/01/code-reviews- part-1-dont-do-them/?cat_id=86&order=DESC)

<comment><USER24> Interesting article!

I worked for 5 years on a team who had just started using code reviews. What we found was that code reviews didn't often find bugs in the changes themselves, but they were very effective at preventing bad decisions that would cause bugs in the future.

There are lots of ways to make a change that gets the job done, and might even fix a bug, but can mean twice as much work to deal with in the future. These range from intentional but shortsighted hacks to simple mistakes by experienced engineers working in a large project.

You also mention style nits. I admit even I get annoyed by these. But bad style can make it harder for new hires to learn the codebase, which slows the team down. In rare cases, they can even result in bugs of their own like the infamous Apple "goto fail" bug.

Every team is different, but I can't imagine working on one without code reviews now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> And this is the foundation they want to build their little new "services" empire on. Good to be a fat cat… until it isn't.

</comment><comment><USER41> Encountered a pretty major macOS bug recently where some new OS update made it impossible to enable a root user via the regular route. Made it impossible to set up a local/pseudo-distributed hadoop cluster since the main hadoop "start" command requires "sudo su" to work. Doesn't surprise me their bug reporting system sucks considering I couldn't figure out the right place to submit my bug nor could I find a new way to do this

<comment><USER3> What was wrong, exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Apple have a real quality problem. I would say it is worse than Microsoft Connect.

<comment> Ono-Sendai MS connect was deleted, breaking all old bug links: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/collaborate/connect- redirec...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/collaborate/connect-redirect)

<comment><USER42> Sorry - worse than it was. And yes, that decision was sheer idiocy.</comment></comment></comment>


Questioning the value of sports is seen as blasphemy - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/stadiums-and-other-sacred-cows <comment><USER2> That's so over, as NBC just discovered the hard way. Millennials aren't watching the Olympics in large numbers.[1] In the 18-to-49-year-old age group, the audience has been 25% smaller than the London Olympics four years ago.

NBC CEO Steve Burke described his "nightmare" before the Olympics: "We wake up someday and the ratings are down 20 percent. If that happens, my prediction would be that millennials had been in a Facebook bubble or a Snapchat bubble and the Olympics have come, and they didn't know it." That almost happened. Ratings were down 17%. NBC/Comcast has prepaid for the Olympics through 2032. That looks like a bad deal now.

This is happening for other major sports. The average age over the past decade of National Football League and Major League Baseball viewers has increased by four and seven years, respectively, to 47 and 53. Baseball is a dying industry.

Of the top 100 high schools in the US, 67% do NOT have a football team.[2] In 1998, the top 10 had only one school without a football team. This year's top 10 has seven.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/nbc-s-12-b...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-19/nbc-s-12-billion- olympics-bet-stumbles-thanks-to-millennials) [2] [http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/americas-most- ch...](http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/americas-most-challenging- high-schools-top-100/915/)

<comment><USER3> One of the problems with the Olympics is it is dominated by the sports that nobody cares about the other 47 months of the four years. Track and field, swimming, gymnastics, rowing, etc, etc, are not money sports; they aren't something that people dial into, even for their world championships.

And for the money sports, the Olympics have become a side-show. It is, economically speaking, idiotic for a professional athlete to put their career, and millions and millions of dollars in earnings, at risk for nationalism. So in many cases, the best in the world don't bother to show up.

Also, the NBC coverage is just awful. No wonder nobody wants to watch when it is wall-to-wall puff pieces, talking heads, and a few chopped and spliced highlights of the actual events.

<comment><USER4> Well, it sure doesn't help that the website is horrific when a huge part of your younger demographic _only uses the internet instead of TV_. I wanted to see highlights of the judo stuff. The landing page for "olympic judo" better have links to video _RIGHT AWAY_. Instead, you have to hit the landing, hit the headline, hit the video, wait for some silly player to zoom it's way in, wait through an _ad_ , and ...

Never mind, YouTube or Facebook will have it. And, I'm on a desktop computer with a fast connection. I presume that the experience on mobile without an ad blocker borders on glacial.

Holy spaghetti monster, Batman. Make your website _STICKY_. Feed me more until I'm ready to explode. You have the most amazing athletes in the world on video, _MAKE USE OF IT_. Top 10 judo takedowns. Best soccer highlights. Worst wipeouts. And _THEN_ give me the ability to drill into longer and longer videos.

It's not that hard to make me want to click things on your website _when I already came there_. But, this is what happens when it's about the _ad revenue_ instead of _sports coverage_.

NBC has only themselves to blame.

As for the sports themselves, the other perennial problem is subjective vs objective judging. One thing that MMA has over boxing, for example, is an objective measure of victory. A lot of the olympic sports that have "busyness and spectacle" also have judging and we see in boxing what happened. Gymnastics has similar issues.

<comment><USER5> Although I agree with you mostly, MMA has had some WTF results here and there, nowhere near as bad as boxing overall though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That's your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all."

― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

</comment><comment><USER7> Growing up in a very small rural school in Texas, I've seen, and been a victim of, the attitudes surrounding sports. In my school, if you didn't play football or basketball, you weren't a man (track didn't really count - it was just pre-pre-season for football). I played basketball (badly) and did UIL competitions (well), but no one really gave a damn about the scholastic stuff - you couldn't letter in it. Game night would come around and there was literally nothing else to do in town (also, you didn't call anyone during Monday Night Football unless you wanted an earful of colorful invective). The coach was the highest paid, yet least qualified, teacher out of any of our instructors (he usually taught the Health class - we actually got more sex ed in the Ag class (don't laugh)).

Of the colleges I've attended, they spend more money on the sports programs than any two or three other programs collectively, even though very few players would be able to move on to a higher level than college football or basketball.

It's maddening and frustrating to be surrounded by that culture and unable to convince anyone that a little bit more emphasis on academics would pay far greater dividends. I'm not against sports for the health benefits, but beyond that, it's mostly luck and I just don't buy that it's worth it.

<comment><USER8> I once visited Lubbock, Texas, home of Texas Tech, a big football school. And there, the stadium just towered above the rest of town. The good burghers of Lubbock didn't build themselves a sports arena. They built a damn cathedral.

<comment><USER9> This is the reason questioning sports is blasphemy: sport is religion. Stadiums are places of worship. Coaches are bishops.

Fortunately the mechanism of feeding pro sports (TV advertising) is fading somewhat, as people's attention is drawn to other activities. But I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook bought the rights to e.g. basketball.

<comment><USER10> Sports-worship is an accepted sect of American Civic Religion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get the joy that so many smart people get in looking down on sports. Sports are no more inherently better or worse than other forms of entertainment. I don't see how sitting down and reading a book is somehow more noble than watching and cheering for someone like Usain Bolt to prove that he is the fastest person in human history. You could rewrite half that article subbing in other forms of entertainment and it would be laughed off the front page. But since it is criticizing sports, you will get a comment section where everyone posts their favorite anti-sports quote.

<comment><USER12> This has nothing to do with looking down on sports themselves, but the institutions that manage them. The article mentions the Olympics practice of costing host cities huge amounts of money and other problems. There are also football stadium that get very unfair subsidies. Taxpayers subsidize high school and college athletics and the benefits may not be worth it. There are now serious concerns about serious brain damage being caused by some sports.

The article also mentions youth athletics which is the worst. Parents are overly harsh on their kids. The events are overly competitive when it's just 9 year olds playing what should be for fun. The games aren't designed very well for small uncoordinated kids, and many kids get excluded.

So there are many things to criticize sports over. The main point the article was making was not that sports suck. Just that they aren't allowed to be criticized in our society. Suggest that you should change youth sports, or that the football team doesn't need a brand new million dollar stadium, and people will give you a funny look and ignore you.

<comment><USER11> Like I said in my other post, a lot of that is directly caused by sports with the exception of the brain injury concerns. I think that is a serious issue that should cause extensive rule changes in youth sports like football and soccer.

The other issues are just normal human problems that happen to occur in sports. Yes, subsidies are an issue, but as I addressed in my other reply you shouldn't blame sports for that, blame the politician that uses sports to placate the masses. Yes, some sports parents are too harsh on their kids, but I have seen just as many parents have a similar attitude towards their kids when it comes to other pursuits like music.

I also don't by that sports "aren't allowed to be criticized in our society." None of these issues should be news to anyone. One of the US's recent Olympic bids was squashed by public outcry over the cost it would take to fund it. The architect of the most recent deal to give public money to build a new stadium was just voted out at the first chance the public got. For the first time in my memory an NFL team just moved to a new city and is building a new stadium without any public money. The reason these things are happening is because we are starting to wake up to these issues exactly because people have been criticizing them for a decade plus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given that we all have different interests, hobbies, religions, and political beliefs, yet we all need to cooperate so that business and society actually can work, we have invented sports so that we have something common to talk about.

Literally. Without commercial sports, people who need to connect to other people for a variety of reasons, couldn't.

I find it annoying and wasteful, but I understand the societal need, especially among those who aren't engineers. (Sales, BD, etc.) Engineers can typically connect over their specialty, but that doesn't work when talking to other specialties.

<comment><USER14> Really? There are so many things to talk about. Weather, news, common experiences, the things you see around you. Even though I do enjoy sports (soccer, F1 racing), I seldomly connect to other people because of it.

And if sports are wasteful, all forms of entertainment are. Why do you think like that? The thoughts in my mind are not so precious to the world that it shouldn't be distracted by 'useless' entertainment, and I guess neither is yours.

<comment><USER13> I think you're not in sales, then?

Yes, of course there are a few other things to talk about, but even "news and weather" is dangerous, because some think Louisiana is currently showing us the future of global warming, and others think it shows that people who choose not to insure their property should not be rewarded with a bail out, lest there be moral hazard.

Sports is the safe bet.

<comment><USER14> Personally I would never skip a subject just because someone might disagree. Are sales people really trained to be as superficial as possible?

<comment><USER15> No, but sales can often be based upon personal relationships, at least to an extent. So you see why a salesperson may be accustomed to treading lightly around contentious topics. If you stake out a strong position on a controversial topic, you risk alienating your conversation partners.

Of course friends can discuss whatever they want. But in less familiar company, one may want to avoid topics that can lead to disagreements. Politics and religion being the classic examples.

Or, as the Professor told Eliza: "Stick to the weather, and everybody's health".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting that this college obsession for sports isn't just at the big state / football schools, but has trickled down to top tier universities and liberal arts schools. Many students continually get admitted in the area I grew up in for things like field hockey / crew / lacrosse / volleyball etc., while students qualified far more academically get rejected.

Glad that whole process is long behind me, and I wonder if sports are continually going to be prized as time goes on.

</comment><comment><USER17> The article definitely resonates with me.

An intelligent friend of mine told me that she figures that I don't enjoy watching baseball because I was just a nerd in school and don't realize the value of sports.

I was captain of my swim team in junior high and lettered every year in high school in swimming. I also pole vaulted in high school (not very well). In college I did one year on the swim team and one year on the gymnastics team (I wasn't very good). I did Judo for around 20 years and competed in the state championships in my 30's (not very well). I qualified and ran in the Boston marathon in my 50's. In most races i was in the top 15% of my age cohort.

I was never a great athlete in any sport, but overall more active than most; however, _because I don 't want to drink beer and yell for players that I have no connection to other than that they live in the same city_ she thinks that I'm too nerdy to appreciate the value of sports.

</comment><comment><USER18> "When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports." -Noam Chomsky

<comment><USER19> That's a very nice quote. I feel the same way when other people that have my nationality win a sport event or do something that's not common, and I'm supposed to be proud because of it, and he put the name of the country in altitude. I'm like wut? I don't know him, and never will. I seriously don't understand nationalism.

<comment><USER8> If you want others to give a shit about you, you need to show you give a shit about them. If you want the service of institutions that large groups of people have built and run and pay for, you need to show you are part of them. They did not build these institutions for others, they built these institutions for themselves.

Things like national sporting events are put on in part to showcase the accomplishments of the group and to encourage affiliation to it. They are ritual. They are like church services. They are like parades.

If you go out of your way to denigrate them, you are showing disrespect not just for the event itself, but for the group that put them on. And if you persist in these acts of disaffiliation, don't be surprised if that group increasingly excludes you in ways large and small. You want to see what it's like to be an outsider in your own country, someone who really truly is considered one of THEM rather than one of US? Try asking an African-American, particularly an old one. It isn't pretty.

You are not so strong and wise you can build a good life for yourself, alone. All through your life, you need to lean on what your family, your town, your people, and your state have built and are willing to share with you. So try to be civil and show a bit of respect when they are celebrating.

<comment><USER19> Ok. That escalated quickly. But I think you're mixing pears and apples here. We don't live in a tribe anymore. We live in cities with millions of people, with the average humans having what? 10 friends? Most people don't give a shit about others already. Just go to into a train, they don't even look at each other. Also, I don't understand how I must cheer others of my country in order to live in society? It seems you're implying that you have to care about others in order to use public services? I pay my taxes! That's all there is to it. And on a side note I do care about other people, but people with special circumstances and without flags.

<comment><USER20> Some people want to pretend we still live in villages and fiefs where we can actually know and care about the people who provide for us.

I can't even number how many people touched the parts of this laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> John Oliver on sports stadiums: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcwJt4bcnXs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcwJt4bcnXs)

<comment><USER22> I always thought cities funded these stadiums to improve their brand, attract investments, jobs ect.

<comment><USER23> They do.

The promises don't materialize.

Nowadays it looks like Olympics and its ilk (Pam am games) are just fraud by global construction contractors on the masses.

<comment><USER24> This is why most of the european countries would love to host the olympics, but in a model where it's split over multiple countries. Because hosting it by yourself is purely a prestige project that politicians try to put on their CV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I (like, I imagine, many people here) have never been interested in sports but managed to get very interested in eSports - itself a blasphemy to sports- culture - for a little while a few years ago, which has made me more sympathetic to sports fandom. The special charm of eSports was that the entire scene felt like it was _ours_ \- like it belonged to the generation of gamers who grew up playing the precursors of the popular games (RPGs & RTSs that were the progenitors of MOBAs, and of course Nintendo-land). This tribal feeling was foreign to me, but I imagine it's the same sense of allegiance that functions in normal-sports culture.

</comment><comment><USER26> For what it's worth, if I understand correctly, Gurdjieff held that sports were a null activity of no worth and pernicious influence. (A cursory search turns up no references, sorry.)

</comment><comment><USER27> it's much better to have millions of people exercising, rather than a huge stadium and 20 people doing sport

entertainment vs real sport for everyone</comment>


Show HN: Visual Code Editor for UX and Interaction Designers - ux-app

Hi, I've been developing UX-App for a few years as a side project. I'd be keen to hear your feedback in relation to the visual code editor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtCcJIFZmFs
Cheers, Eli <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Eli,

Wow, looks very full featured for a side project. Must have taken a lot of effort to get it to this stage.

I'm an Axure user (also use pixate and framer), so I gave your tool a quick whirl (using Chrome).

I think some of the workflow bits could be improved, for example, here is what I did:

1) Placed a tab container on the screen (iPhone template)

2) Went into edit mode and placed a header on tab 1

3) Copied header from tab 1 and went to tab 2 and pasted it there.

What I expected was that it would place it in the same location as it was on tab 1, but instead it placed it somewhere randomly, so I had to move it to the same location, which takes extra time. I know, it might seem picky, but these little things do matter to me, as it speeds up my work.

Haven't tried the 'scratch' like code editor yet. Will give it a go.

What would you say makes your app better than Axure for example?

Anyway, congrats on launching and wish you all the success with it!

<comment> ux-app Thanks for the kind words :)

Thanks for the heads up about copy/paste, looks like a bug has crept in with regard to the this functionality. I'll fix this in the next day or two.

 _> What would you say makes your app better than Axure for example?_

1) I think the library of functional components is pretty cool. Also the workflow with respect to nesting components is quite powerful and mimics actual GUI toolkits which makes it quick/easy to build up complex UI designs.

Here's a video that quickly covers some of the key features: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiQDAvltyXY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiQDAvltyXY)

2) To my knowledge there is no other prototyping tool that has a code editor like UX-App. As you mention it is modeled after Scratch which I have found to be an awesome way to get novice programmers quickly up to speed (I'm a high school IT teacher).

Here's a video that demonstrates the code editor in more detail: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbs1jeBNsyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbs1jeBNsyU)

3) The device preview is very powerful and seamless. You can connect any number of devices and UX-App will push updates directly to all devices. UX-App will automatically deal with touch/gesture events so that everything works across mobile and desktop seamlessly.

Here's a quick video that demonstrates this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2mNRCmkQfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2mNRCmkQfo)

Thanks for your comments and questions :)

</comment></comment><comment> ux-app Some clickable links:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtCcJIFZmFs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtCcJIFZmFs)

and UX-App [https://www.ux-app.com](https://www.ux-app.com)</comment>


Giant 'Great Valley' Found on Mercury - <AUTHOR> http://thescienceexplorer.com/universe/giant-great-valley-found-mercury <comment><USER3> _> "This is a huge valley. There is no evidence of any geological formation on Earth that matches this scale," said Laurent Montesi.... The valley is about 250 miles wide and 600 miles long, with steep sides that dip as much as 2 miles below the surrounding terrain. To put this in perspective: if Mercury's "great valley" existed on Earth, it would be almost twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and reach from Washington, D.C. to New York City, and as far west as Detroit._

Although they were formed by a different process, this does sounds kind of like Earth's oceans. Do they not qualify as a geological formation?

<comment><USER4> I believe Earth's oceans are generally thought of as the baseline, with the continents being relatively higher "plateaus" above them (rather than the continents being the baseline with ocean floors being "valleys" in between).

<comment><USER5> Either way, the Mariana Trench seems to dwarf the valley that's described in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Take that silicon valley ;)

In all seriousness, this is very interesting and sounds kinda similar to glaciers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Reading this type of stuff makes me feel very small and insignificant - <USER2> of like the total perspective vortex. It makes me truly sad to think that I will be long gone by the time humans are exploring these things.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's the temperature down there?

<comment><USER9> Probably very similar to the temperatures anywhere else on Mercury's surface - with no atmosphere, temperature doesn't vary much with altitude. So, somewhere around 500-700K during the (3-4-month-long) daytime, and around 100K at night.

<comment><USER8> "Because the crater is deep, and the Sun never gets very high off the horizon at the pole, there are parts of the crater floor that are permanently in shadow; they literally are never illuminated by the Sun. Those spots can be very cold; well below the freezing point of water" from this article [http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/11/29/_mercury...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/11/29/_mercury_has_ice_buried_beneath_its_surface_in_craters_at_its_north_pole.html)

<comment><USER9> That's only for polar craters, which this is not. The poles are in any case quite cold by Earth standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Littlefoot!</comment>


Box's HHVM Migration - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1607907626123431/under-the-hood-box-s-hhvm-migration/ <comment><USER2> Nice. The 2-3x improvement is about the same that I've seen in preliminary tests with HHVM on a JSON API in ZF2. There are still many extensions that are not ported at all, something Box didn't run into but I have. These are lesser known extensions, but they can throw a wrench in the migration works. I would definitely check the status of all extensions and as the article mentions, test their code most extensively.

My biggest problem still is getting xDebug working with HHVM, something that after a few days of trying I have given up on once again (as of a couple of months ago). Unfortunately, a procedural or OOP language without a proper debugger (hphpd doesn't count) is pretty useless for real-word development. I know the HHVM team is constantly working on improving the ecosystem, so hopefully at some point, we'll have a real debugger that runs without crashing. Once that happens, I can definitely see rewriting the sections of the app that use extensions not yet ported to get the app ready for deployment on HHVM. Right now, the only reason we haven't done so is that we do want to compare both HHVM and PHP7 to see which one will yield the best performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish Twitter had pulled a HHVM with Ruby on Rails. I really do cause HHVM's benefits for PHP-based code bases looks appealing.

<comment><USER4> Hasn't Twitter switched to Scala?

<comment><USER3> They have for at least parts of their infrastructure but there was a time where they were heavily invested in Ruby on Rails just like Facebook and PHP. They could have chosen to work on the framework and Ruby itself to make things better, they chose to move on to greener pastures instead. As a Ruby developer I regret that didn't "pull a HHVM", would have made my life easier, just HHVM and the whole FB/HHVM/Hack ecosystem is making PHP devs' life easier.

<comment><USER5> Are you just after a faster Ruby? We're working on an implementation of Ruby that is often an order of magnitude faster than anything else out there [http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/](http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/).

Or is it the typing and other infrastructure you wanted?

<comment><USER3> In the general sense I am absolutely after a faster Ruby. I am also after a Ruby with better tooling, better error handling and all bells and whistles. I'm following your development on Ruby Truffle with a lot of excitement, but like most Ruby / Ruby on Rails developers, the only thing that I wish is that I can just switch the Ruby and have it work exactly the same, except faster/better/stronger.

From what I understand JRuby/Truffle is closing the gaps at a nice pace (your recent tweets on constant folding is even showing that you're aiming not only for feature parity but for feature parity AND MOAR and that's awesome), but with existing applications and associated gems and all the implication of having to switch my Ruby to another slightly more exotic one, the thought is currently a source of anguish (because a lot of the existing ecosystem is extremely tied and tailored to MRI for better of for worse). I'm simply waiting for the time where I can just replace a line in my Gemfile and reap the benefits.

That being said, I would like to thank you for all the efforts you're putting in this, the blog entries, the Ruby Bibliography and all its promising research on making the Ruby ecosystem better, the benchmarks and overall collaboration with the folks at JRuby and I hope we get to see lots of good things in the future from your end.

<comment><USER5> Yeah we're going for being indistinguishable from MRI (unless you want to use the extra features). We even have a simple statically linked build that does not require a JVM, so that you're just running a simple binary like in MRI. That coupled with our support for MRI's C extensions is our strategy for MRI compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI, PHP 7 (which is in beta status) is close to HHVM now, speed-wise (using Drupal, Wordpress, Symfony, etc.)[1][2], and it also includes many of the features HHVM + Hack added onto PHP in the first place.

Not 1:1 feature parity, of course, but a lot of people who were testing/considering a move to HHVM/Hack have reconsidered now that PHP 7 fixes many of the language's pain points.

Competition is good!

[1] [http://kazanir.github.io/profiling/](http://kazanir.github.io/profiling/)

[2] [http://hhvm.com/blog/9293/lockdown-results-and-hhvm- performa...](http://hhvm.com/blog/9293/lockdown-results-and-hhvm-performance)

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting you're considering Hack. Does Hack fix all the weird warts PHP has carried into this century?

<comment><USER8> Some of Hack's features such as return type declarations and scalar type hints will be in PHP 7 due to be released later this year.

PHP 7 also includes some serious performance improvements, contextual parsing, anonymous classes, combined comparison operator, null coalese operator and tens of other new features.

<comment><USER9> Indeed.

Also, preliminary reports indicate that PHP7 is near parity in speed/memory usage with HHVM (and in some cases exceeding it).</comment></comment></comment>


Do I need a technical co-founder or should I hire? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
How technical do you have to be to be considered as a technical person? People talk about how we need a tech co-founder. However, based on my profile below, can I just hire a smart whiz? I don't feel like giving up equity I built and lose control over key decisions.
Here is my profile:
-age 23
-business degree
-built my first PC at 10
-won a local web designer comp in grade 5 (back then, it was easy to code a simple web page and wow anybody in 1999)
-built a solo tech startup in 2011 and grossing $30,000 a month and growing fast (not my first startup but it is one that makes most money so far).
What I don't have:
-CS degree or formal programming education
-I can code easy stuff like procedural but cannot do OOP - the opportunity cost to learn it now is too high
-Never learned how to code until 2009. I stopped my computer passion due to middle/high school peer/parental pressure. I made some money off ebay though by selling things.
What I can do:
-Confident to grasp any IT concept if given time to research about it. I learned all the knowledge required for my current startup from Google.
-Code any simple procedural scripts in PHP/mysql/bash/perl/lua
-hack through existing scripts and modify them to my need
What I need right now and future:
-A true technical person who can relieve me in the technical development. I literally hack through my startup. While the codes are not pretty and might break from time to time, they are working well enough to 5000 paying members.
-Save capital for a $100mil+ startup idea <comment><USER2> Don't ask how technical we consider you; ask whether you are technical enough for what your business needs. It sounds like the answer is no, so you need to get someone more technical than yourself onboard one way or another.

Anyone who joins your startup is going to be taking on a risk: you could go bankrupt very easily, and if so they're out of a job. It's perfectly reasonable for them to want equity to balance this.

This doesn't necessarily mean a cofounder. Obviously if you're doing / have done most of the work then you take most of the equity; put a number on your startup's current value, and issue them shares monthly at that valuation as part of their compensation. (Or offer them to contribute a similar amount in cash upfront, if they want to be an equal cofounder). But unless you've got a demonstrably stable business and can pay a market salary to the person you hire, you should expect to include a decent chunk of equity.

If it's really a $100mil+ idea (which I highly doubt) then why are you so worried about exactly how you slice it up? $50mil is already plenty to retire on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi lmm,

The current startup is not a $100mil idea. I built it to generate CF to fund other projects which I'll probably have $100k surplus by Christmas. I plan to bootstrap the new idea until it is viable for VC money.

Giving up equity is the last thing you should do - this is the lesson I learned from many books by people who made over $100 mil+.

I guess my real question should be "Can I pay market rate and hire a development team + 1-2% equity for each member?" .

<comment><USER2> Hmm. Obviously you'll need to give your technical person control over technical choices, but I assume you're talking about overall business direction.

I don't think it's unreasonable for you to keep control (and at a technical/legal level you will as long as you have >50% of shares, right?), but you will need to be able to prove your own abilities to whoever you find - you're asking them to entrust a decent chunk of their career to your sole judgement. Particularly with your youth and business degree that's going to be a hard sell. I'd want to see plenty of evidence that you can steer a business in the right direction; that $30000/month is probably your best argument for this.

If you're treating this as a way to generate money for a new idea, what's your exit plan for the current one? It seems a bit odd to be insisting you need complete control over this if it's not even going to be your primary focus.

And of course, be very upfront about what you expect to have sole control over and what will be their responsibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Lmm,

Thanks. There is no exit plan for the current business. The goal is to have someone to run the operation which a salary + bonus based on business performance.

I don't think it is odd to insist on complete control on a proven established business growing 30% month by month.

If I can built a MVP and proven it, do I still need technical co-founder? What do most people do at this stage? I can't imagine people like Paul Allen or Bill Gates were doing all the coding when Microsoft is grossing $1.3 million with 13 employees in 1978.

<comment><USER2> >The goal is to have someone to run the operation which a salary + bonus based on business performance. I don't think it is odd to insist on complete control on a proven established business growing 30% month by month.

Ok, so the business is already established and you want an employee rather than a cofounder? Fair enough, but in that case you've got to ask what you're offering over a bigger company (Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc.), because you're almost certainly a higher risk to work for - and the larger that perceived risk, the larger those advantages will have to be. You presumably can't compete on salary; you can offer the chance of a big payout with equity, and you can offer the ability to build their own system with a lot more control over it than they'd have at a big company, both of which will appeal to a certain extent to certain people. Just put yourself in their shoes, and ask why someone with the level of ability you need, and only the most superficial knowledge of your abilities, would come and work for you.

>If I can built a MVP and proven it, do I still need technical co-founder?

Pretty much by definition no. If you're running a viable business without them then you don't need them. I'm inclined to assume your business just isn't that technical? If you're building a product for programmers then I'd be surprised, but if it's just a business idea that happens to be implemented as a website then it's fine.

>I can't imagine people like Paul Allen or Bill Gates were doing all the coding when Microsoft is grossing $1.3 million with 13 employees in 1978.

Allen and Gates were about as technical as it was possible to get back then, no?

A two-founder company is inherently a lot more trustworthy/easier to hire for than a sole founder (unless the two are married or similar), because it proves at least one other person was convinced by the idea; two founders who retain control, followed by employees who get successively smaller chunks of the equity is the "normal" way to build up a company, in so far as such a thing exists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the informative answer. A consumer app is pretty easy to build. I imagine the MVP for facebook is not quite difficult compare to the MVP of Google which requires sophisticated algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Based on the info in the thread I would say no, you don't need a technical co- founder but you are going to have to give up some equity and pay market rate to the main technical guy you bring in. I would say 5 percent vested over some time with another 5% to vest to the core team that s/he brings in. So 10% total to put together a core team, should you plan be to grow past a single technical person.</comment>


New studies suggest no long-term immunity from Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.heraldlive.co.za/news/2020-06-19-immunity-against-covid-19-not-looking-good-suggest-two-new-studies/ <comment><USER2> I'm on mobile so won't give this comment the substance it should, but I want to nip this ridiculous notion in the bud.

The key concept here is immunological memory. Maintaining antibodies for years for non-severe diseases (how SARS-2 presents for the vast majority of people) is not a good thing.

Rather, there are memory b cells, memory t cells, and other forms of immunological memory. These cells lie dormant and when exposed tk the antigens corresponding to the previously fought-off pathogen (SARS-CoV-2 in this place) they "activate" and start cranking out antibodies exponentially. In other words, after you no longer have any active circulating antibodies, you still have these memory cells that persist for DECADES.

TL;DR: it is not a problem that antibodies only last a few months. That is how the vast majority of diseases work. It would only be a problem if we had evidence that there was no immunological memory to SARS-2, but on the contrary we have tons of evidence of that, even if it's not fully characterized

Please don't fall for this narrative that has went around for months. I truly believe that there is a faction of irrational doom-sayers who are collectively losing their shit over this in a way that they would never do for other serious diseases like Influenza. I won't speculate on their motivations for doing so, I have a few theories but I truly do not know why there is so much of this craziness going around.

Sorry for the lack of citations but immunological memory is a robust and well- studied phenomenon and I encourage anyone concerned about COVID-19 to read some papers about it in a general sense

<comment><USER3> Yep. Article does not understand it's immunology.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/hbzm1d/antibodies_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/hbzm1d/antibodies_to_the_new_coronavirus_may_last_only/)</comment></comment>


Goodbye, MacBook Pro. The New MacBook Air Is That Good. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/13-inch-macbook-air-review/ <comment><USER4> Does this mean the price of getting an article on TC just went up ;) ?

Joking aside, it's a very nice little machine, but I could not imagine developing software on it without hooking it up to a full sized keyboard and screen which would defeat most of the purpose of owning one in the first place.

The mac Air series is so thin that when I saw one the first time I couldn't believe it was a real functional computer until they turned it on for me!

<comment><USER5> I believe the Air is supposed to have a full sized keyboard and trackpad.

<comment><USER4> Full size to me means separate cursor block, numpad and a key travel of more than a few mm. I am probably more partial to the keyboard I'm using than to any other aspect of my computer.

<comment><USER6> Then you're not going to get fullsized on anything smaller than a 17". And not even the 17" MBP. Though there was this great deal going on a while back. Back when you got the free iPod Touch with the MBP, you could just get the numpad app for the iPod and use the most expensive external numpad ever!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Be sure to check this HN thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1824563> (Ask HN: anyone using the new MacBook Air as your main development machine?)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've spent a bit of time with the 11" Air and, lemme tell you guys: this thing runs simple apps really well. Safari's icon bounces once, then Safari is open. iPhoto is pretty quick. Even bloated iTunes doesn't take a million years to back up an iPhone or scroll through iTMS.

Here's the problem, though: Siegler and I can't talk about intense applications. I don't know if it can't handle RAW file editing in Lightroom/PS, Starcraft II on high settings, or developing in Xcode. The benchmarks Siegler quotes show the Air is worse than the 13" Pro at handling these intense apps (Handbrake, PS, VM software). [1]

Someone cracked about how Siegler's activities consist of "blogging and scrolling through Twitter." For anyone who does that (i.e. your average college student), this thing will be great for years.

For more intense apps? I have my doubts. And the Air might be fine right now, but what about upgrading two years from now? What if system or available memory become an issue?

[1] [http://www.macworld.com/article/154596/2010/10/macbookair_be...](http://www.macworld.com/article/154596/2010/10/macbookair_benchmarks.html)

<comment><USER9> Photo-editing machine? For low end photo editing it's probably fine. For high end - why would you be doing that on a laptop?

Gaming? Why would you be doing that on a laptop?

Development machine? What are you developing? I think it could handle the average web developer's work load just fine. If you're writing something intensive enough that hardware is a real issue - why are you doing that on a laptop?

<comment><USER8> Because, if you're like me, you can only afford one machine? And you don't want to be chained to one desk when using it?

EDIT: sorry, you didn't downvote me.

<comment><USER9> If you can only afford one machine, what makes you think you can afford a laptop with the specs to handle something like high end photo editing? For the same money you could buy a low end laptop for portability, and a decent mid- end PC for more intensive applications. This objection doesn't make much sense. Laptops have never been intended for high end intensive applications.

<comment><USER8> I dunno! What's up with looking for portability and power at a decent price?!

Seriously, I value portability. A lot. I don't like being chained to a desk any more than necessary.

I don't edit photos, but there are other people like me who want a powerful machine on the go. See this HN thread for about 100 examples:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1824563>

<comment><USER9> Sure, I get jittery easily, don't like sitting in front of a desk either. I'd love a small, really powerful machine as well. I'd also love to sail around hawaii with an entourage of super models, but that's not going to happen. If you want a really powerful laptop - on par with a strong desktop machine - <USER2> need to be prepared to drop some serious bank. That's just how it is. Otherwise, leave desktop tasks to desktop machines and use laptops for what they where intended for - non-intensive tasks on the go.

<comment><USER8> Well I value portability over price and I also don't replace my laptop often (every 4-5 years). So I'm willing to spend a bit more this time.

And if you _ever_ get the chance to sail around Hawaii with those models, well, you couldn't take your desktop with you. That is, if you actually planned on working...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I will refer to my earlier comment on these machines, they are only worth it if you have to be, or want to be, in OS X land. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1812730>

Outside of Apple PCs you can get a far better quality machine, and for my purposes a far better operating system in the form of Ubuntu. Quicksilver/Gnome-do, Safari/Chrome, Flash/Flash, nice fonts/nice fonts it's all even or Ubuntu with a slight edge until you get to apt-get which just slaughters OS X. Then there is freedom to tinker, the price difference and matching deployment/server OS. The reason apt-get is so far ahead of OS X is that OS X only has a tiny community, and for good reason considering how they have often treated it and that many of them are more focused on "striking gold" with an iPhone app. Nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it's a sub- standard system with loads of tinkering instead of the "just works" experience of Linux. Good luck finding blogs/documentation/help when something goes wrong with OS X too. Perhaps Textmate/Ruby-on-Rails has first class support as a stack, but in so many other areas it's a wasteland.

I suppose I am saying that yes fair enough it's a good machine, but just because you haven't used an SSD before and/or are attached to OS X for money don't try to imply, as is usually done, that Apple is lightyears ahead. It's behind in many areas and hardly worth the hype that is attached to the release.

<comment><USER11> With the current Ubuntu & your Air-like better quality machine (what's that by the way?), is it possible to have:

      1) Sleep/suspend/resume
      2) Hardware-accelerated OpenGL
      3) Compiz/fusion or whatever it's called nowadays
      4) Support for external monitor
      5) No random crashes once per week with 1-4 enabled
      6) Hardware-multiplexed sound output in all programs
      7) No two months of tinkering to get 1-6 working

I'm honestly asking this. Between 1998 and 2006, when I used various Linux laptops as my primary machine, I never had all the above issues solved. Maybe things have changed?

<comment><USER12> I have 10.10 installed on my MacBook Pro, and I can confirm the 1-5 are no longer an issue :) (resuming from sleep takes at least 2-3 times longer for me than on OS X though). I don't know enough to confirm 6, but if that is also covered then 7 should be as well.

<comment><USER13> Does Linux still consumes more battery power than MacOSX?

I had this issue in the past on my MacBook. It was very notable: on Linux the total battery time was about 60-70% of what I had with MacOSX.

I did some debugging and while the kernel itself also consumed slightly more than MacOSX, the biggest problem where the applications, esp. the window manager (tested both Gnome and KDE). They do a lot of stuff and mostly prevent the CPU from going into low-power mode or wake it up all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think before I get an Air, I definitely need to improve my social life and/or my coffee intake. Right now, I don't have a personal need for an ultraportable. I switch desks (home, office, abroad), but for that scenario, my current MBP 17" is a pretty ideal solution. Considering that I have (or could have) external monitors at each desk, the Mac Mini probably sounds like a better solution than the MB Air.

If I ever have to attend a lot of meetings/conferences/presentations or finally find the time and money to travel the world, this looks pretty neat. Gives the Thinkpad X Series a run for its money.

<comment><USER15> I actually don't travel that much but the weight of lugging my current MacBook around on the occasions I do is what has sold the new MacBook Air to me.

I'm not a frequent traveller - maybe once a month - but by the time I add a laptop to all the other stuff I tend to have in a shoulder bag (not to mention the fact that I'd possibly be carrying my 16 month old daughter) and it's pushing what's practical to carry it for any sort of extended period.

When I was looking at the possibility of replacing my current 4 year old MacBook I asked myself what had irritated me about the current machine that I would change. The performance is still basically fine (I code a bit, edit a bit of video and the odd photo but nothing where the performance is really getting to me) and I came to the conclusion it was weight and start up time which means that the MacBook Air rather than a new MacBook or MacBook Pro was the logical choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hate the fact that tech companies and observers gloss over the technical details of products. On Apple's site, even in the sections labeled "Tech Specs" you cannot find the model of CPU, chipset or hard drive that goes into any of their product (except for Mac Pro, and there you don't have much choice even though I guess it should be expected with the desktop computer of such class). And the reviewers often times make no effort to find that out too! What kind of "technical" is this?

It seems to me they use Core 2 Duo SL9400 (1.87 GHz, 1066 FSB)([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2_microproce...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_2_microprocessors#.22Penryn.22_.28low- voltage.2C_45_nm.2C_Small_Form_Factor.29)). Not exactly record-setting for low power, judging by 17W TDP, but when everyone is measuring battery life at mostly idle CPU, and with process enhancements over the years (I heard that later Core 2's of the same model consume less power than rated) I think they might show close to their rated battery life. I think Apple must have worked hard squeezing the unnecessary volume and weight with the new design to give place for more battery too.

<comment><USER17> _I hate the fact that tech companies and observers gloss over the technical details of products._

It's hard to expect much of tech journalism when so little of it is actually journalism. We've collectively ceded the territory formerly occupied by professional journalists to fanboys and bloggers, many of us celebrating the fact along the way.

Having said that, it's only right that Apple's marketing downplays specs, part numbers, and benchmarks (with some notable exceptions). Macs are great computers for the people who like them because of a combination of clever industrial design, polished software, and good hardware. Specs and benchmarks don't begin to tell you _what it's like_ to use a Mac. Think qualia, not quantity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Right now this device's lack of RAM is a killer (I regularly run out of 8GB on my MBP). Buuuut... when OSX 10.7 comes out with app resume functionality, opening and closing apps will be fast (thanks to the OS and the rapid drive these things carry)... so more than 4GB will not be needed for me.

So I'm thinking that iOS's desktop legacy might be a bit bigger than just weird scroll bars and a cool app launcher.

<comment><USER19> Am I crazy for still only running 2GB on my desktop?

<comment><USER20> ha! I'm running Snow Leopard here on a 4.5 year old 32 bit (pre Core 2 Duo) iMac with 512Mb ram (double the original amount)

I'd like to get a new machine, but this one's as good as new apart from the drive which I replaced with a 1Tb one earlier this year

<comment><USER21> You should try popping in a recent Ubuntu disk. Older (circa 2008) distributions had trouble with the hardware, but I have a 2006 MacBook Pro that "just works" with 32-bit Ubuntu 10.04. I even Bootcamped the hard disk and dual boot Snow Leopard and Lucid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hate my cynicism, I wanted to be impressed and yet when I opened the article it forced me to look at the author and the rest was history.

<comment><USER23> I got a bit further to be fair. Infact to here:

"My i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM takes something like 2 minutes. My i7 MacBook Pro takes at least 30-45 seconds, and it has an SSD drive."

and then realised that anything further on was a waste of my time.

Summary: man who spends more on upgrading to latest macs than I can afford to spend on IT equipment in 10 years think the Air is awesome.

<comment><USER24> A guy who's clearly into the latest and greatest hardware, and can give a good comparison against the fastest other machines out there is a waste of your time when reading a laptop review? That makes no sense. Hopefully this isn't a "he's rich so I don't care what he says" thing?

<comment><USER22> Not at all, let's just say if you have read any of his prior articles it isn't difficult to see a pronounced bias on everything apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> i have a newer 17mbp. can't say i've used the optical, but i like having it there. i would probably move towards a 15" mba if it had their 1680x1050 screen and more battery life. the 8GB ram thing doesn't really get to me tho. i do all my dev work in vim.

the thing i can't stand is how people are perceiving the dump of the optical drive as something revolutionary. a) the old macbook air didn't have one (a gripe for many) and b) neither do netbooks.

a little off-topic but one thing that really kills me about apple is how they're seemingly refusing to add a blu-ray option even though the standard is well-established. i would really like to have one in my mbp17. not just because i have a res (1920x1200) on the lappy that supports it, but because i also have a 27" panel that i hook my laptop into.

and this move towards "no optical drives" (likely so they can sell more HD content) is only going to solidify that among their lines in my assessment.

hmmmph.

<comment><USER26> I thoroughly dislike optical drives, regardless of the platform, and see their demise as a good thing. In laptops, they add weight and draw excessive power. Elsewhere, only commercial manufacturing provides reliable storage, but even this is extremely vulnerable to wear and tear from heavy use. At the consumer level, I've had better luck archiving data on floppy disks than any optical media (I've yet to see a CD-RW allow reuse without data corruption). As far as I'm concerned, USB ports make built-in optical drives obsolete.

<comment><USER25> the problem is that some movies can't be easily [legally] downloaded/distributed. take "tears of the black tiger" for example. one of the best films ever made, but nearly impossible to get from blockbuster, netflix (only recently could one watch online), or apple movie store in any other medium than DVD. how many more movies are there like this? my wife and i pick up japanese films from tokyo all the time that we can't get elsewhere.

i would wager there are plenty more films available on DVD than on downloadable format. sure the reasons for this may be stupid ... but they're reasons nonetheless [for now].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The next move in Jobs' chess board is to bring the plastic macbook down to $699, in five delicious colors, as thin as the macbook air.

The perfect netbook for the masses.

<comment><USER27> Oh, and the mac mini 'soapbar', a 3x2x1" computer as powerful as any pc desktop, for just $199.

Total world domination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised he cares about startup and shutdown times.

One of the lovely things about the Mac laptops is that you never have to turn them off. Close them and they go to sleep in a few seconds. Open them up and you're ready to work immediately.

The uptime on my _laptops_ tends to be a few months.

<comment><USER9> Business frequent flyers would tend to care about this metric - <USER3> yourself going through multiple iterations of "please turn off all electronics at this time" could easily get annoyed in a hurry by an overly long boot sequence.

<comment><USER29> Does anybody _actually_ turn electronics off? It seems the majority of people simply leave them on sleep/locked/airplane mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _"But for pretty much everything I've done this past week — basically, my regular work and play habits"_

browsing Twitter and writing blog posts?

<comment><USER9> As opposed to what, rotating particle accelerator dumps through N-space to correlate them against standard model predictions?

What, exactly, do you think people use laptops for? If you're doing something remarkably intensive like encoding video or writing massively scalable ETL code, and you're doing it on a laptop, you have failed at computers.

<comment><USER31> I actually do video and After Effects on my Macbook Pro, as well as all of my Photoshop work with huge multi-layered files, and it flies. I have a more powerful Quad-Core tower at work, but it's only a slight improvement in speed, and being mobile with my Macbook far outweights that. In fact, there are tons of people that do video editing on the fly with Macbooks. I wouldn't dare try it with a Macbook Air.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not particularly an Apple guy (if anything a bit against them), but these Airs are exactly what I think a laptop should be.

I want my laptop to be small, lightweight and have a long (3-4 hour) battery life, with performance as a low priority. Netbooks are a good compromise but their limited screen size/smaller keyboard are a bit of a hassle.

They're still too pricey for my blood though. The previous Air I saw was listed at ~$1800 (USD), and even though $999 is significantly better, I can't see myself spending that much on (what would be for me) a secondary machine.

That being said - tax season is coming up. =) Is it a pain to get linux running on these things?

</comment><comment><USER33> I'd like to know what application he is running. Yes, I'd imagine that Chrome would be faster on a fresh out of the box mac, but let's see him try to process RAW photos.

</comment><comment><USER34> I personally want an optical drive. Am I old fashioned? I don't trust these movie and music download stuff and prefer hardware in my drawer.

For my last business trip, I quickly copied my iTunes library to my business Macbook (in a hurry, the evening before). On the remote site I switched on the audio book that I recently started and got the message: this computer is not authorized ...

Get my point?

<comment><USER35> Right, but are you carrying the media with you all the time? If not then a small external drive is a decent compromise - if you think you'll need it you can chuck it in the bag as well and you can at least not take it if you think you won't.

<comment><USER34> Well, in terms of movies: you break the law, if you extract them to the harddrive.

For the rest, you are right, it is possible to carry a drive. But then we are back to the clutter on the desk that we had in the 80s and 90s and just got rid of. This is progress? Without an optical drive works only properly, if you download the data or get them on non optical media.

I would be fine though, if I could download movies and music to an external storage and the DRM would be on that storage, not on a computer. A storage with at least the same possibilities that we have with CDs and DVDs today (import to iTunes without DRM!). As long as that is not possible, the Macbook Air remains a pretty good second computer IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> They should measure temperature and noise when testing new laptops. In addition to disk speed and processing power, it's the most important features for me.

My 2 year old MacBookPro gets boiling hot after an hour.

<comment><USER37> I went to the local Apple store to investigate that for myself.

They had an older MBA sitting in a corner, which was hot enough on the bottom that I nearly dropped it.

The newer ones, which people had been using all day, were no warmer than my iPad gets (and significantly cooler than the iPhone tends to get).

Hard to tell about the noise. The store was too loud.

<comment><USER37> Just to follow up on the noise, if anyone's interested (or happen to notice this followup comment at all), noise is not an issue. I received my 13" about 24 hours ago, and only heard the fan briefly while it was syncing my entire Dropbox. Otherwise, it has been absolutely silent (and not even warm).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Once again, MG is blinded by his fanaticism.

My favorite line:

"This thing boots up in less than 15 seconds, ready to go. My i7 iMac with 8 GB of RAM takes something like 2 minutes."

As if RAM had anything to do with boot time.

And my Core 2 Duo boots up in less than 2 minutes, so I'm not really sure what his problem is. (If he wants fast, maybe he should try Linux.)

<comment><USER39> My 2 years old unibody macbook 13" boots (rarely) in about 1 minute, with its old 160 GB hard drive. Maybe he shouldn't have bought a shitty SSD :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I briefly considered selling my 13" MBP for an air, but quickly realized I could upgrade my machine to 8GB of RAM and swap in an SSD for cheap, on top of the processor being much faster than any of the Airs'. Also, I have an iPad and an 11" Air would be a bit redundant for me.

</comment><comment><USER41> For all this talk of SSDs, it's worth pointing out that you can pick up the 2.5" 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid SSD/platter drive for $130 on Amazon. Best upgrade I made to my Thinkpad, and one that is not available for the Air...

<comment><USER42> I am (as I type this on a different system) in the midst of upgrading my MBP with one of these babies. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What sort of performance do people see on the macbook air solid state storage? What sort of hardware interface does it use? I'm not seeing any non-puff reviews of this thing anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER7> So I've read a couple of comments the Air would be a good secondary computer. So how do you guys hook it up to lets say your iMac at home?

</comment><comment><USER44> The article is either extreme fanboyism or trolling taken to a new level. Either way why, oh why, do we keep giving this guy clicks?

</comment><comment><USER45> What exactly is that picture at the bottom of the article?

<comment><USER46> Appears to be the smaller MBA on top of the Pro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> MG might or might not run into trouble once his SSD drive burns in / fills up, as it no doubt has on the other laptops he talks about. His comparison might be somewhat apples to oranges..

</comment><comment><USER48> PT;MG _(probably trolling;MG Siegler)_

 _"Thanks largely to Apple themselves, we live in a world where we have digital music, photos, movies, and TV shows that take up dozens, if not hundreds of gigabytes of storage."_

Ah nope. Fawning, not trolling.

He forgot to add indoor plumbing, the internal combustion engine, modern medicine, etc, to the list.

<comment><USER49> Jesus, that article was ridiculous. I grew suspicious when he talked about speed being partly due to the processor, when we've all known since we got SSDs that the processor has nothing to do with UI latency (when was the last time you saw CPU usage spiking to 100% just by launching programs)?

The disk has always been the bottleneck, Apple was smart enough to put a fast disk in the Air, and now this guy praises it.

This computer loads faster than the MBP because you've spent the past 6 months loading it with programs, guy. Format the MacBook Pro and it will be just as fast... Sure, the Air might be a great little computer, but for a $999 pricetag, I could get 3 netbooks instead.

<comment><USER50> Add to the fact that no one is actually buying the $999 version. Every positive review I have read goes like this:

"The new MacBook Air is amazing. It starts at $999 and I have been using the top-of-the-line 13" for a week! (of course not mentioning that it costs $1,599)"

I would love to see a tech person use the $999 version and see their review. The price-point, when actually comparing the usable one, is ridiculous!

<comment><USER51> The vast majority of the hands-on actual-usage reviews I've read (nearly all of which have been extremely positive) have been of the 11" with more people running the 2GB than the 4GB.

<comment><USER52> The 2GB 11" is the model Apple handed out to people at the event announcing it, so that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Apple have a damned good track record on their portable strategy; very few boneheaded moves have been made. If the new Air is THAT good, you can bet your b-hind that the new MB Pro incarnation will be THAT THAT good.

</comment><comment><USER54> god, disqus is so unreliable. are the comments not loading for anyone else?

<comment><USER55> same here, I was excited to see the extra amount of anti Apple folks drinking haterade but, Disqus is robbing me at the very moment.

<comment><USER54> i just wanted to comment and offer to buy the dude's laptop</comment></comment></comment>


BitCoin - all time high (MtGox) - $49.64USD per BTC - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinity.org/markets?currency=USD&exchange=mtgox Looks like the online currency has hit an all time high on MtGox just a few minutes ago... <comment><USER2> The Euro is an experimental currency. Don't invest time or money in it that you can't afford to lose. Hackers can break into your account and steal your Euros in the middle of the night if you don't secure your wallet so never store your Euros with a third party.

<comment><AUTHOR> I take it you're a bitcoin supporter :)

<comment><USER2> ; )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Almost up to the $50USD per BTC mark.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Crossed the $50 mark.</comment>


Ending Our Advertising Relationship With BigDeal - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/17/ending-our-advertising-relationship-with-bigdeal/

<comment><USER2> I clicked on an ad that led to this site once and was immediately displeased to find myself immersed in what seemed like a 90s web scam.

I clicked the ad because it seemed to be advertising a handheld GPS for pennies on the dollar, but when I clicked through the auction for that item had ended and some (probably fake I decided) person had won the item.

It's smart of Arrington not to associate with these guys. They are very intentionally misleading, and I think Arrington cuts them and their VC backers way too much slack . Everyone involved in this venture should be ashamed of themselves, or at least of how the business is being run.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, there are a lot of people who care more about making money than creating value.

<comment><USER4> I'm glad you said that because for a short time only I can sell you a guaranteed value-making proposition for 3 low charges of $19.95* Act now because you seem to be the sort of person who values value above all else.

* actual charge may be $29.95 plus corkage

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> BigDeal is a Swoopo clone. It's basically gambling dressed up as an auction.

<comment><USER3> That's cruel to gambling.

The first (and only) item I checked was a Kindle that had 1066 bids placed on it, before selling for $159.90. At $0.75/bid, that means BigDeal received $959.40 for a $259 item.

Even a sucker bet at the casino is far, far better value than that. (And more transparent as well.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This should be required reading for everyone:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction></comment>


There are good reasons to be anti-net neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://scroll.in/article/721352/There-are-good-reasons-to-be-anti-net-neutrality-%E2%80%93-but-you-need-to-really-trust-telecom-companies

<comment><USER2> The reason you need net neutrality is that the phone/cable companies have a monopoly for last-mile wire access to your home.

If they want to get rid of net neutrality, then they should also lose their last-mile monopoly.</comment>


Firefox and Thunderbird: A Fork in the Road - <AUTHOR> https://marksurman.commons.ca/2016/04/25/firefox-and-thunderbird-a-fork-in-the-road/ <comment><USER2> This makes sense. They are two different customer bases. Thunderbird is also the leader in its field. I hope they can do even better after the split up.

It runs on six versions of Windows, Mac and Linux. Its the perfect choice for business.</comment>


Ask HN: What third-party Docker registry do you use? Why? - <AUTHOR> I've been exploring some of the different Docker registries and can't really settle on what's better and why. They all seem pretty similar.
Do you have any good/bad experiences why any particular registry? Any features you've seen in one of these that turned out to be particularly useful? Which payment model seems better: repository or storage? Anything else I should consider when picking one?
Seems to me like the options are: Docker Hub, Quay, ECR, and Google Container Registry. Any other important ones out there? <comment><USER2> Sup Jorge! You named the big ones. There are a bunch of others, as well. IMO, try to get your comparison down to just two. That's a reasonable set to dive deep on.

For a lighter overview, I think the big features are: team workflow, security, and CI/CD pipeline.

Team workflow is just how easy it is to get going / share with your team. IMO, ECR or GCR will have a natural edge here if you're already on their cloud. Tagging is important too, but I think everyone supports that.

Security is both the details of transport (SSL, etc), and whether your containers are getting scanned. Quay.io and Docker Hub both do security scanning for private repos. Quay has a slight edge in that public repos also get scanned thanks to Clair. I believe GCR and ECR lag behind here.

CI/CD pipeline is important because your registry becomes a big chunk of your build. This is what's going to really take time to investigate and dig into. You want to make sure it's easy to add hooks to git or w/e, and troubleshoot build issues (good logging, auditing, etc).

Full disclosure I work at CoreOS and with the Quay folks. That said, I also think they're constantly probing into cool frontiers. I think Clair changed registry security. The team's also started doing cool stuff for k8s users [1].

Lastly, I'm not totally sure on this last bit, but I think Docker Hub has a slight usability edge if you're on Docker EE (swarm).

Summarizing: I think big cloud vendors will naturally always lag a little behind. They'll make up for it with convenience if you're already on their cloud. Registries whose main purpose is to be a registry (like Quay) will naturally innovate a little faster.

[1] [https://coreos.com/blog/quay-application-registry-for- kubern...](https://coreos.com/blog/quay-application-registry-for- kubernetes.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome answers. Honestly, Quay seems like the way to go right now.</comment></comment>


Fiscal Chaos Aside, Start-Ups Bloom in Argentina - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/business/worldbusiness/26peso.html?ref=business&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I consider the ease with which one can start a business in the US to be one of the pillars of its wealth creation engine.

The US, and the Valley in particular, have a culture which embraces the quick turnaround that can happen in the entrepreneurial world.

So it's good to see an unlikely contender like Argentina getting in on the game. I hope that it leads to serious wealth creation (and I hope that the Argentine government will keep things unregulated enough), since it should convince at least one or two other countries to open up more.

The wild entrepreneurial spirit might just be the US's best export.

EDIT: I'm a South African, with no American ties. I just can't help admiring this aspect of the US's business world.

</comment><comment><USER3> This shows the difference that outstanding individuals can make. By all objective measures, Argentina is less attractive for a startup hub than a country with a more stable economy, like Chile. But entrepreneurial-minded Argentinans have persevered through adversity and created a nascent startup scene. Cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, Argentina suddenly popping up here a lot, see:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408190>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407853>

</comment><comment><USER5> inspiring for other cities in the world which are not traditionally considered as top tech centers</comment>