Ask HN: Your hobbies? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious what everyone's hobbies are?
I'm trying to understand the perspective of other commenters on HN and the best way I guess would be to learn a little about others by what their interests are - maybe also add in what it is about your chosen hobby that you find enjoyable?
So please share. <comment><USER2> Am I the only one who wants to call "bullshit" on some of these claims of having a hobby?

A hobby is something you can actually get better at. Watching TV is not a hobby.

A hobby is something to which you give sustained effort. Some people claim to be into cooking and have dinner parties, but if you do that less than twice a month I don't think that counts. I realize that many of us have been ruined by modern convenience living and the programmer lifestyle, so it is an effort to get a meal for four or more together. But cooking for other people is supposed to be normal; it's not hobby material.

And photography: _everybody_ has a digital camera now. Get real. Unless you have gotten in a vehicle with equipment specifically for the purpose of photographing something and no other reason, you're not really a photographer.

I hesitate to call MMOs a hobby. They do meet the definition, but the physical experience -- sitting in front of a computer , collaborating with others in virtual spaces -- is very close to the sort of work most of us do for eight or more hours a day already. I think if you garden or do bicycle couriering, you're allowed to claim that MMOs are your hobby, but otherwise no.

Please understand that I'm not condemning anyone, but I think a lot of us are deluding ourselves. We don't want to admit how narrow we are, and how we really spend our leisure time. I'm willing to bet that programmed entertainments, like TV, movies, games, or pornography top the list of actual hours spent. It's sad, because at the age of 80, I don't think anyone's going to look back on their lives and say "DAMN! If only I had gotten through all my Galactica DVDs...." Maybe RescueTime should do something about this.

As for me: I used to have hobbies, but now I don't. It's a serious problem and I think it contributes to an ongoing low-level depression. I do read an enormous amount, but as stated above, this is not a hobby. It's a really bad situation. I think my hobby is dreaming up startups which, for visa and other reasons, I can't do much about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, what a negative attitude - at the risk of getting modded down to hell, I figured I'd address some of your points. Please understand that while this might be a confrontational retort, it is in no way meant to be a flame.

 _A hobby is something you can actually get better at. Watching TV is not a hobby._

Actually, a hobby is defined as "an activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation", so TV can be a hobby for some people. Also, people can get "better" at watching TV, by putting in more hours, watching multiple channels at once, larger screens etc...

 _A hobby is something to which you give sustained effort._

I dont believe that to be true, for example - I have one tabletop wargame on average every week, I'm a member of a club and it would take up maybe 3 hours of my total week? On the grand scale of things, its not an effort at all, yet in all sense of the word, is a hobby.

 _And photography: everybody has a digital camera now. Get real._

So? It doesn't mean that just because something is popular doesn't make it a hobby? By that reasoning, I would suggest that sport of all major forms are not hobbies, which we all know not to be the case. For the record, I don't own a camera either.

 _Please understand that I'm not condemning anyone, but I think a lot of us are deluding ourselves._

I actually think you're essentially condemning a lot of people in this thread, people are sharing parts of themselves so that others can learn a little about them, what their interests are - its an exercise in social networking of some kind.

You've essentially called a lot of people liars, which is never cool.

<comment><USER2> No, not liars, but sometimes inattentive to this aspect of their lives? Wishful thinking?

If it's just me, I'll be happy to be wrong. But the irony here is that my day job involves helping people schedule their leisure activity. I've seen research on what people actually do with their time and it's freaking dismal. After college people fall into a rut of work/sleep/TV.

People say things like "dinner parties" because that's the last thing they remember doing, but if you probe a bit further, this event is usually months in the past.

By "sustained effort" I wanted to distinguish a hobby from mere pass-times like television watching. I think 3 hrs/week is plenty. And tabletop wargaming is an activity that at least exercises the imagination, so I wasn't really talking about people like yourself.

It could be argued that the idea of having a hobby is some outmoded bourgeois affectation, an imitation of the Victorian idle rich. So, neither do I want to impose the necessity of having a hobby on anyone else. But I do feel the lack of one in my own life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Hacker News

2\. Bridge (I wonder why more hackers don't play; it's the perfect game for us.)

3\. Foosball

4\. Boggle

5\. Eating, drinking, & traveling with friends & family

6\. The Pittsburgh Steelers

7\. Drinking beer, preferably along with one of the 6 above

8\. Fitness/diet (when I'm not doing #7 above)

<comment><USER4> _2\. Bridge_

Replace with Poker for the younger hackers.

I know a lot of hackers that play Poker. I imagine it's dependent on age. It's en vogue for the 20 somethings to be a respectable poker player. I just don't know anyone in their teens - 30s that plays bridge. I'd love to give it a try.

<comment><USER3> _I imagine it's dependent on age._

I don't think so.

Poker is _very_ popular now among all age groups.

Bridge is not very popular among anyone except maybe senior citizens.

I've played a lot of both and there is no comparison - 2 completely different games. I think bridge is much more consistent with hacker-like thinking. (Maybe I'll say why in another post some day.)

 _I'd love to give it a try._

Then do it!

If you have a hacker mind, i.e., you like puzzles, logic, and problem solving, and even want to take it a step higher by building your own "framework" to attack those problems, you'll probably love it. But beware, you may end up like me, a bridge fanatic without a partner because no one else plays much these days.

If you ever want to give it a try, contact me off-line and maybe we can play on-line sometime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aside from programming and start-ups, right?

\- Listening to college lectures on my i-Pod (variety of topics)

\- Photography (especially HDR and low-light stuff)

\- Muisc (keyboard, MIDI, synth)

\- Blogging

\- Traveling

\- Reading

\- Watching and participating in political discussions

\- Hiking

<comment><USER6> Are the college lectures available for the public? If so, where do you get them?

<comment><USER5> There are two. The first is an older series - can't seem to remember it off- hand. I'll repost when I get home this weekend.

The one I use all the time is the Teaching Company <http://www.teach12.com>

I bet I've gone through at least 15 of their courses so far. Maybe more. Great stuff -- in all kinds of topics. Right now I'm listening to a 36-hour philosophy of science course for my morning workouts and a 18-hour history of the reformation in Europe course for when I'm on airplanes.

I did their "Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 3rd Edition" last summer and had a blast. [http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=470&...](http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=470&pc=Philosophy%20and%20Intellectual%20History)

But fair warning -- it takes an acquired taste. I found the first set difficult to listen to, since I had gotten so used to history channel/MTV type science. I like the lecture format much better now that I've grown accustomed to it.

Also -- I have the history of languages lecture DVDs which is in my to-do list. As you can see, I'm a fan.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never realised that stuff like this was available, thanks for the link.

I have just ordered some stuff to give it a try while I'm on my exercise bike in the mornings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> \- I play a bit of tabletop miniatures wargaming, I enjoy it more than chess as the games are generally less serious, yet more social

\- I like to read - most often you can find me reading non-fiction books, currently reading "Dont Make Me Think" by Steve Krug

\- I enjoy to BBQ and having friends over for a good meal.

\- I code, I'm working on something currently that I'm considering applying to YC with (I'm unsure though) thats being built utilising the Django framework.

\- I used to play mmo's a lot (generally the Everquest series) until I figured out how much time I spent on those games on average.... I no longer play mmos as a result.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hmmn, photography seems to be popular. I do food/travel photography:

<http://joshwand.com/food/> (though I actually make some money on this, so don't know if it qualifies as a hobby)

Flight Simulation (X-Plane)

Cooking (I've taken up real BBQ lately)

Eating (see: <http://lunchmapr.com> (due for a big refactor))

Gardening

Learning Mandarin

<comment><USER8> Dude, your site just made me so hungry.

<comment><USER7> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Photography, mainly landscape (large format) and macro (digital) -- <http://pbase.com/Tamerlin> (I do aspire to professional status as a fine art photographer)

Hiking -- goes well with the photography

Martial arts

Film making, specifically in special effects

As for the reasons, all of them give me more opportunity for intellectual challenge and creativity, and hiking and martial arts are also good for physical health.

Martial arts is also good for stress relief ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> Reading and Photography. I'm nowhere near cool enough to be a painter so I have to let the camera take care of the painting for me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Unicycling, juggling: Very geeky and still impresses 'normal' people. In contrast to math - another hobby of mine.

Board games are nice as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> 1) hacking. i have a fulltime job that lets me play with projects on the side. both hardware and software stuff.

2) fencing. sport/olympic fencing. great sport, i like it, and i'm a national and occasional international level competitor.

3) martial arts. not the same as fencing. used to teach for a living, still like to learn.

4) gaming. i've enjoyed a MMORPG or FPS in my time.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a startup (with the little little amount of time):

1) Brewing Beer 2) Watching Arrested Development (or Battlestar Galactica) during dinner 3) Playing Rock Band, or sometimes jamming on musical instruments

Personally:

1) Any physical activity- something with achievement or competition is always nice, MMA is nice 2) Meeting new people 3) Reading about politics 4) Rarely blogging

</comment><comment><USER14> Posting here

<comment><USER3> Reading rms's posts

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Music: guitar, singing, beatboxing. Foreign languages. Origami.

</comment><comment><USER16> 1\. Programming 2\. Playing computer games 3\. Bowling 4\. Playing Piano 5\. French! 6\. Cycling 7\. Travel 8\. Exercise 9\. Watching Movies - they have to be good though

</comment><comment><USER17> i play badminton twice a week at my local badminton club. it's awesome. remember playing badminton in gym class? fun, right? go to your local club and watch a high level game. ask for some beginning pointers, how to hold the racket, etc. and give it a shot. you'll have fun i bet.

</comment><comment><USER18> -Mountain Biking -following the Startup Scene -following the Cleveland Browns -Going to the Beach

</comment><comment><USER19> Swing dancing (lindy hop), Playing the piano/keyboard, Reading libertarian articles.

</comment><comment><USER20> 1\. Programming

2\. Leaning new (human) languages

3\. Hiking

4\. Philosophy and politics

5\. Extended conversations with good friends about 1, 2 or 4

6\. Gardening (a bit)

</comment><comment><USER21> 1\. Coding (it's a hobby too!)

2\. Music (piano/keyboard/vocal)

3\. Arguing (politics/economics)

4\. Reading (to support #3)

</comment><comment><USER22> 1\. Travel & Photography

2\. Astronomy (I have a small telescope)

3\. Birdwatching

</comment><comment><USER23> Reading, traveling, zazen, going out and sports

</comment><comment><USER24> Board games, computer games, sci-fi.

Geek stuff :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> fulltime: medical student, husband, dad

parttime:

\- learning the deep magic

\- the community projects where I practice what little neophyte magic I know

\- cycling

\- photography

</comment><comment><USER26> 1\. Cycling 2\. Tennis 3\. Chess

</comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Miniature Wargaming

2\. Reading

3\. Playing the Piano

4\. Traveling

5\. Trekking</comment>


Firefox sticks it to Microsoft, redirects Bing searches in Cortana to Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2969381/browsers/firefox-sticks-it-to-microsoft-redirects-cortana-searches-in-windows-10.html <comment><USER2> So, an application on the system tells the default browser on the system to open a link, the browser sees that the request is to a search engine and then strips out the search term and then feeds it to a different search engine that pays it for doing that.

Am I getting this right?

<comment><USER3> It looks like Microsoft was the one intercepting searches, this just fixes the problem.

<comment><USER4> No, Cortana just uses Bing for search. They're not intercepting anything, just not letting you change Cortana's search engine. They're not doing anything to searches made from other apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Um. Isn't Yahoo powered by Bing anyway?

<comment><USER4> It uses whatever your Firefox search engine is set to, which is Yahoo by default. If you've set Firefox to use Google, it'll redirect you to Google.</comment></comment>


A crowd-sourced social media swarm that is betting Tesla will crash - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-short-sellers-musk-20190408-story.html <comment><USER2> I'm am conflicted over the whole tesla thing. The model S is a truly great car but I can't stand Elon's hype about self driving cars etc, etc. The model 3 got off to a rocky start but it sounds like the quality issues are improving. On the one hand I want them to succeed as they have been real innovators but by the same token when musk goes around hyping things up to create interest and bump up the stock price I would be happy to see them crash and burn.

<comment><USER3> The question no-one asked.

How difficult is it for BYD to clone his autopilot chip and will that stop the Chinese from exporting knockoffs because I'm certain they can close the data and software gap instantly by swapping out a harddrive or 10.

I think he's got 10 years before the chinese chip fabs catch up.

Musk's question how did Tesla build the best AI chip for driving in the world without being a chip designer was the far more interesting yet overlooked question.

Musk has a talent for framing problems appropriately so that optimum solutions emerge with a minimum deployment of capital. And he's not secretive about it, he applies his training in physics and phenomenal knowledge to make good bets and eventually identifies and acknowledges his mistakes.

Tesla doesn't have an advertising budget. Musk couldn't care less about it's shareprice but I think he will be a bit perturbed if identical technology emerges faster than he foresaw as was Apple when the Android ecosystem emerged.

As it stands with his chip and data it is game set and match for autonomous driving which is a software game and the leader takes all the data and a fully autonomous vehicle is worth significantly more than non-autonomous vehicle and if you are data scientist you probably want to work for the company with the best data-set and highest remuneration.

The data is the gold and Tesla owns it and no-one can steal it and use it for at least 10 years by which point battery vehicles will be cheaper than petrol vehicles which is the major problem with the model 3. It is currently uneconomic against a toyota corolla but gains ground with every piece of battery and energy storage research that musk does not pay for.

<comment><USER4> 1) It isn't the best AI chip in the world. And Tesla doesn't have the most advanced self driving program around.

2) I can't remember a CEO who has complained more about the stock price in particular those shorting the stock. And worst of all then go on to illegally manipulate the market to target them.

3) You have that completely backwards. Musk is the worst at solving problems with the least capital. Look at the way his manufacturing processes work or the decision to build out the Supercharger network/Gigafactory. There are definitely cheaper ways to do those. Better probably not. Cheaper yes.

4) I have worked with more Data Scientists than most and I assure you that they are just like everyone else. They care most about: company reputation, work environment, money, challenging problems etc. It's not just whether there is a great dataset or not.

<comment><USER5> Can you name a better AI chip, especially in terms of TFLOPs per Watt?

<comment><USER4> You're moving the goalposts.

It was about the best AI chip in general not based on some arbitrary efficiency number.

<comment><USER6> TOPS per Watt is a highly meaningful metric that matters a lot in the real world. It's a valid definition of "best".

No one cares how many TOPS your 500watt non-redundant monster can run, because it's not being put in an EV.

<comment><USER4> It does matter how the best AI chip performs irrespective of efficiency.

Because self driving cars are a multi-year journey and those platforms will likely become more efficient.

<comment><USER6> Not really, because the problem is embarrassingly parallelizable, so "best" can always be obtained by stacking additional chips with greater total power draw.

Remember we're talking about systems made of multiple chips. It's like asking "what's the best Bitcoin mining rig?" The question is one of hashrate per joule. If someone asked if you should buy a 1000watt box that did 10TH/s versus a 200watt box that did 5TH/s, which is better?

They maxed out their available power envelope (~70 watts) and the resulting performance is about 20x what they were getting from their prior nVidia platform. In other words, they will always make the chip big enough to pull ~70 watts, at the highest efficiency possible.

My limited understanding of the hardware design is that once you have figured out the specific architecture you can scale up and down the power consumption almost linearly with the die size. Obviously plus or minus various hard limits (e.g. oversizing compute for the available memory bandwidth)

Tesla has already been working on their next chip for over a year. This chip they just started shipping finished design 1.5 years ago. This will not be the last AP hardware they ever ship.

I fully expect that as we delve further into "FSD" there will be functionality on the fringes that will need even more horsepower.

It's easy to think in the present that there's a logical "end" where development will be "complete" but that's almost never actually the case. So there will be a Gen4/5/6, specifically what features they will unlock is very hard for me to predict. I think this is actually the type of thing Elon sees right through like it's obvious.

Like how he sees a path to colonizing Mars which includes launching a global satellite internet company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the general tone about Tesla on HN is a bit strange. On the one hand, Musk is certainly guilty of creating "hype" around Tesla. He has a showman's aesthetic, and deploys it to great effect generating interest in his products. His timelines are always ambitious (or insane), and I never take them at face value. He boasts about capabilities that are presently out of reach and sound impossible.

On the other hand, what other company has yet brought such compelling EVs to market? Would Porsche have invested in the Taycan as soon/at all if not for Tesla? I think the years ahead will be filled with fantastic EVs, but Tesla should be given credit for showing what was possible. It's not like they've stop innovating, either. They just upped the range on the Model S to 370 miles.

A lot of the hand wringing on HN these days has to do with Tesla's self driving efforts and Musk's controversial statements about timeline and technology. I think it remains to be seen if he is correct that (1) Lidar is not required and (2) if his timeline is even remotely reasonable. On the other hand, which other car company is shipping a product as capable as the current 'navigate-on-autopilot' feature? Google is doing pretty limited testing in Arizona, Uber is doing so in Pittsburgh. GM has their cruise division. But none of these offerings are in customer hands. I really doubt there will be L4 self driving in a Tesla by the end of this year, but sometime next year? I don't think that is out of the question.

<comment><USER8> I don't like the narrative that they are responsible for what other companies are doing. My grandpa had an electric car back in the 90s. A toyota, I think, so it's not small no-name companies. People have been working on this since before tesla, and are still working on it outside tesla. But the time is right for the technology to take off now, so it is. Attributing that to tesla seems like a misguided belief in "great man theory" where it's usually just that the environment was finally right for an idea. If tesla hadn't, someone else would.

I get frustrated by instances of great man theory in general, though. It's not unique to tesla.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's unfortunate that the crowd sourced mobs can be unleashed the way they are being unleashed. Internet appears to be commoditizing takedowns and toxicity.

While Tesla deserves criticism, instead they are currently being bombarded with hate and FUD. It's hard to tell who these people are and what are their motives.

FWIW - I recently bought a Model 3. And one thing you realize living with it is that it's like living in the future. Some people don't like the interior. That's fine. I personally love the lack of all the buttons. FSD is another controversial topic. But it's worth noting that people are getting real value out of Auto Pilot and NOA TODAY. It's a very iterative delivery approach, which I find is quite practical vs the Big Bang delivery of 100% working FSD.

Lastly, you can tell that Tesla is no fraud simply by looking at Model 3 hardware and software. Yes there are some rough edges, but those are minor. You can tell it's being executed by extremely capable people and at extreme speed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I dont have any shares, but if I had the money I would purchase a boat load of them.

1) He has a fleet of cars which is giving him a lot of data and edge cases. Of which is growing with every new car purchased and on the road.

2) He has a team developing the software, refining it with each new release and it's just getting better and better with more data.

3) He has a team developing the hardware, on the investor day he said that another chip will come out in 2 years and be 3x more capable. Going from memory on that one, so feel free to correct. But this point still stands. They aren't standing still. I do believe that vision trumps lidar and they'll get to level 5 automation with much more precision than waymo and get there a hell of a lot faster than uber.

4) It seems with every car that rolls off the assembly line, they are consistently making modifications and improving the battery tech and drive train. Again, they have the data to keep on improving their cars.

5) With the maxwell purchase I'm sure they'll start to develop their own batteries and get even better performance due to optimising the whole car.

So, Tesla owns the:

1) Data

2) Self Driving Software

3) Self Driving Hardware

4) Drive Train

5) Battery Tech

6) Power Grid Network

Also don't forget that the grid and charging stations keep improving over time. Imagine if we get to 5 minute charging, faster than the current paradigm? Game changer.

Can anyone suggest another vendor getting close to this? Once Telsa put out the robo-taxis it really is game set and match. They own the whole stack, end to end.

He even mentioned that the price could go down. Can you imagine a $25k robo- taxi and does 1k miles? The other car makers should be very afraid of this prospect.

<comment><USER11> This is assuming that level 5 automation is possible any time soon, while a growing number of people believe it isn't. If it turns out that we need another 2-3 decades to get there, Tesla will run out of money long before then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's always a ton of sentiment analysis to be done on "crowds" i.e. on twitter towards companies. If they worked well we'd see 10x numbers from the funds that figured out the methods, but we don't. The crowd means little beyond technical analysis.

Tesla is the most shorted company in the world, of course people are going to try to use whatever they can as evidence to prove it sucks; They have a vested interest in doing so, and Tesla rightly fights back against these kinds of claims, because it's in their shareholders interests.

This article provides some examples of people talking about speculative evidence that Tesla isn't doing well, but you can find that for almost any company. That's what a lot of investment articles are, actually. So it seems like mostly fluff to me.

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://archive.is/4b42M](http://archive.is/4b42M)

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems like they are a few moves away from checkmate on the car market. Electric SUV, with better self driving than the competition could do really well.

</comment><comment><USER15> With enough money could you short a profitable company into bankruptcy?

<comment><USER16> No for two reasons.

1\. Share price has nothing to do with bankruptcy. Bankruptcy happens when a company can't meet its obligations and debts. If a company is profitable, then by definition, it met its obligations and debts so it cannot go into bankruptcy. You go to bankruptcy protection to ward off creditors. If you are profitable, you paid off your creditors and made money on top of that so there is nothing to protect you from.

2\. Shorting involves borrowing shares. There are a finite number of shares that you can borrow. So you could have an infinite supply of money but your broker only allows X amount of shares available to short.

Shorting doesn't cause bankruptcy. It's a method of profiting when companies veer towards bankruptcy of their own accord.

Think of it as surfing. The surfer doesn't cause the wave, he just rides the wave.

<comment><USER17> Depending on how their debt is structured if it's linked to stock price then it's possible to force a liquidity event on outstanding debt through depleting the share price.

I think the recent $960MM debt payment was actually linked to not hitting specific share price hurdles.

Given the massive amount of debt they have outstanding versus capital on hand you could technically do that. However shares have to be available for shorting in order to achieve that.

<comment><USER18> > However shares have to be available for shorting in order to achieve that.

Is this a real barrier? Lending shares to short sellers at interest is basically free money to anyone who would be holding them regardless.

<comment><USER19> The last time I looked, I thought setting up a margin account made shares available for borrowing, but I've never received interest from borrowed shares. The interest goes to the broker?

<comment><USER20> Yes. However better brokers will give you a cut of the interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was originally very pro Tesla, until about 18 months ago when a friend who works in finance gave me the heads up on TSLAQ,

Here's a few datapoints on what's convincing me that this is not a healthy company:

• Musk is constantly promising things that don't happen (full self driving, robotaxis, Model Y, Tesla Semi truck, Tesla Roadster, car with a rocket motor, 10k/wk production). This week it's an electric leafblower. Seems like everytime there's bad news, there's a distraction ready to go.

• The entire cult of Musk working 100 hours a week yet he shitposts more than I do.

• Funding secured, followed by funding not secured is a bit of a joke, but also, if the CEO of General Electric, or Chevron tried that, they'd be fired.

• The reports of people waiting months and months to get simple repairs done. If Vinod Khosla (1) can't have his car repaired quickly, where does that leave the average joe on the street?

• Enormous price decreases. The price of a Model S decreased $12k a few weeks ago, and the Model X decreased by $18k. This is horrific for your margins, especially if you're short on cash.

• Batteries exploding (2), and people dying in car accidents that they should have walked away in - the example here is someone who couldn't get out because the door handles didn't work (3).

• Enormous Health & Safety violations at the Freemont factory (4). Before we even get into the nonsense that was the factory operation (compare to say the efficiencies and tight tolerances of the Nissan operations in the UK).

• Simple errors meaning the Tesla factory is enormously inefficient by North American standards (the consensus being that Tesla made the same mistakes other American firms made in the 1980s)

• Panasonic freezing investment in Nevada and China (6)

But finally, the biggest thing that makes me skeptical is that none of what I've said matters. Because this isn't about facts, it's about faith. And I think Tesla is a fraud and that Elon Musk could give Elizabeth Homes a run for her money, which is a real shame because the Model S is a nice enough car, and electric cars are clearly something we'll have in the future. You can fudge the numbers a bit if you're a VC backed startup. You can't do that if you run a publicly traded company.

1: [https://twitter.com/vkhosla/status/1085931446542290944?s=20](https://twitter.com/vkhosla/status/1085931446542290944?s=20)

2: [https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/teslas-china- inroa...](https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/teslas-china-inroads-hit- by-car-explosion/)

3: [https://futurism.com/tesla-driver-killed-burning- model-s](https://futurism.com/tesla-driver-killed-burning-model-s)

4: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla- sa...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2019/03/01/tesla-safety- violations-dwarf-big-us-auto-plants-in-aftermath-of-musks- model-3-push/#1e941ac354ce)

5: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla- has-r...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-repeated- car-industry-mistakes-from-the-1980s/)

6: [https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Tesla-and- Panason...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/Tesla-and-Panasonic- freeze-spending-on-4.5bn-Gigafactory)

<comment><USER22> Totally agree, especially on production and servicing. All German manufacturers, I personally would never buy a car from by the way, are relying a lot on the corporate leasing business. In that market customers don't wait months to get a car repaired. Even more so if the customer is not just leasing them for employees but operating a business with these cars, e.g. Taxis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If there are indeed many unsold Teslas on desolate parking lots, what would be a legitimate reason for this?

<comment><USER24> If you think of the perspective of these people wanting to short Tesla they probably have no experience of how much inventory you need to sell stuff. Stuff being anything.

Think of a typical bicycle shop and how many hundreds of bicycles they have given the actual store footfall. They will also have a warehouse or stockroom with a similar or larger quantity of stock. Plus a lot of sales will be special order from the supplier. None of that inventory will be a year old and the product is far simpler than a car. Yet there is a mountain of it. Sure bicycles come in 3-4 sizes and that adds to the inventory requirements but colours, trim levels and options certainly add to the inventory requirements Tesla has.

You could look at your typical bicycle store and decide to 'short' them somehow. If you had no idea of the practicalities of how sales works you could assume the warehouse was full of the broken ones or the ones returned from customers. You could also look around the showroom and find that quite a few were dusty and not setup correctly. There would be no confirmed buyer for any of them.

You could go back a week later and still see pretty much the same. Yet if you didn't work there you would not realise a huge amount had made it to customers. This is the problem of the information these Tesla short people are working with, they don't understand how the business really works and they jump to conclusions.

<comment><USER25> I recently had this realization experience with large TVs at Bestbuy. I went to purchase a 65" tv after Christmas hoping to score a great deal. I tried haggling with a few 'important looking' staffers, and they basically said 'ok let me know which one you want, and we will grab it for you.' No give on price. I asked if they had a certain tv in stock, and the young man walked to the back of house area, and I peaked inside. Huge shelves totally full of TVs. I had the 'Tesla Short' thought process of, oh wow, they have a ton of TVs to unload. Moreover, I thought I should be able to strike a deep discount.

When the rep returned, I asked if they were backed up with TVs, to which he replied, "no, this is pretty typical, we will move most of those in a week." I gave up my haggle (after an hour of grilling the sales guys on difference and tv trends and crap). they didnt budge. While I was waiting in line to pay and get someone to load my tv into my car, I watched TV after TV roll out the front door.

A huge stockpile of vehicle inventory could mean a major sales collapse. It could also mean $45mm ready to flow into the Tesla bank account in the next week. The stockpile information by itself doesn't tell you much beyond that there are loads of cars sitting at the dock.

EDIT: I mean, just look at the staggering number of vehicles at Hyundai's Georgia Plant (MOBIS). They even have cars parked in the grass! Tesla's Fremont plant doesn't really have finished product storage at this scale.

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/MOBIS+Alabama,+LLC+-+Georg...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/MOBIS+Alabama,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-85.1294347,2019m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x888ca615b1e9d277:0x5849b0bcf49a3410!8m2!3d32.9142448!4d-85.1241106)

<comment><USER26> I think you could test this hypothesis by comparing Tesla's inventory dollar amount per average units sold to other car manufacturers. You would need to adjust for the higher price of Tesla models. Maybe dividing total inventory dollars by average model price then dividing that by average units sold would get us there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I can throw my additional anecdote into the mix: I live in the boston area and have noticed a ton more Tesla cars on the street. I remember previously thinking it was cool Tesla car every now and then, but now I see multiple a day.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how many people the established auto industry pays to write negative Tesla opinions. I can't help but think my kids will look on this like I do Tuckers' efforts.

</comment><comment><USER29> Call me when any of this stuff works in snow.</comment>


Nativefier: CLI tool to create a desktop application for any site - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> You can also add the parameter "-app" followed by the website URL in a chrome shortcut and it will open as an app.

<comment><USER3> What's a chrome shortcut?

<comment><USER2> Or a "launcher" in order to launch it like a desktop native application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't tried most recent versions, but ~two months ago WhatsApp couldn't be "nativefied" (wanted it for Linux) because Nativefier's electron version was old and whatsapp was complaining, but I really love this project. :-)</comment>


Are you Mensa smart? Take the quiz - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/mind-soul/education/2010-10-11-mensa11_VA1_N.htm

<comment><USER2> As an existing member of Mensa, I can probably answer "yes". However, I generally do not like to mention the information because every time I break down and attend a local Mensa meeting, it always strikes me as just a group of self-righteous bastards who revel in being able to say "I'm smarter than you". The perks of membership, including the sometimes interesting bulletins and magazines, ntm discounts at various retailers and travel vendors, are interesting and enough to keep me paying the fees.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I'm in (at one point anyway) the original British & Irish Mensa. It seems that out of all the bright people who are in Mensa, only the pompous arrogant ones tend to turn up and organize meetings so they can hear themselves talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems like 2 is improperly specified:

>2\. Jane went to visit Jill. Jill is Jane's only husband's mother-in-law's only husband's only daughter's only daughter. What relation is Jill to Jane?

Here's the reasoning I think they want:

Jane's only husband's mother-in-law is Jane's mother.

Jane's mother's only husband is Jane's father.

Jane's father's only daughter is Jane.

Jane's only daughter is Jane's daughter.

But wait! Just because Jane's mother has only been married once doesn't make Jane's mother's husband Jane's father! Children can be born out of wedlock. So Jane's mother's husband could have had a daughter who _isn't_ Jane. What does that make Jane and that person's daughter? Absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER5> If and only if you make the obvious assumptions, there is a really nice answer, easy to explain in a newspaper article. Otherwise, you'd need to spend three pages clarifying a three sentence question.

Some people have two wives. Sometimes it's legal, and sometimes it's not; either way, it happens. Maybe Jane's only husband divorced her and remarried, and his new mother-in-law is in the same boat with respect to her husband. Also, one or more of the daughters may have been adopted. Also, there are multiple definitions of "relation" and of "husband" that you might use. And, it all depends on what the definition of "is" is.

<comment><USER4> Ha, when first formulating the argument, I realized that the husband could have been married multiple times, but forgot that when I wrote my post. Excellent point.

But it seems to me that if the whole reason for your group existing is that you're smarter than most people, you shouldn't have flaws in your exam like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love me a good arithmetic/algebra review -- but in the end, I am not qualified to rub elbows with the geniuses of Mensa, as I lack the essential requisite domain-specific kitten/mitten training.

References aside, I certifiably lack enough legit brains to step to Mensa's gatekeepers. But now I'm curious -- has anyone got any anecdotes of Mensa gatherings that defied stereotypes? Such as for example those alluded to in Mr. Onstad's synopsis of Mensa here: <http://achewood.com/index.php?date=03222005>

<comment><USER7> In the poem, the kittens find their mittens, so shouldn't the answer be 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to know if this is an accurate representation of how difficult Mesna tests are.

I've always fancied joining but assumed that I would never qualify and to be honest, having sat a few IQ tests in my time I would consider that to be an example of a pretty easy quiz.

<comment><USER9> From an old comment of mine: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=735499>

_The admission test itself is surprisingly simple. There are actually two of them and you only need to pass one. The first test is the Wonderlic and the second is a test designed by Mensa. If you fail both you don't get to reapply. You never learn your score. You're only told whether you passed or failed.

The tests contain nothing like those ridiculous Mensa brain teaser books. They're the types of questions that most reasonably intelligent people can answer fairly easily. They're not unlike the questions you see on the online Mensa practice test or one of those tickle.com IQ tests. What makes it difficult is that you've got insane time constraints. You end up with about 12-15 seconds per question. One test is fill in the blank and the other is multiple guess scantron. You basically have to be writing your answer while reading and solving the next problem. The person who proctored my exam said that there's about a 60% failure rate. It probably says more about the people applying than the actual test, but I thought it was interesting._

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it just me or is the one about word similarity extremely arbitrary? There's any number of reasons you could come up with for any answer.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I thought MORE is an adjective while the other three are names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "1. What is the four-digit number in which the first digit is one-fifth the last, and the second and third digits are the last digit multiplied by 3? (Hint: The sum of all digits is 12.)"

I don't understand how they got the answer to this one; it makes no sense to me at all.

<comment><USER13> The only digit that can be 1/5 the last would be 1 if the last were 5 (because 2/10 doesn't work, 10 isn't a single digit and they need to be whole).

From there, digits 2 and 3 are the last (5) multiplied by 3. So: 1155. Add those up: 1 + 1 + 5 + 5 = 12.

I think. :)

<comment><USER12> I get it now. Was trying to multiply them individually, which doesn't work at all. Thanks. =D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No.</comment>


Windows-Like ReactOS Is Getting ReiserFS Support (in Add. To Ext2\3\4 and Btrfs) - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ReiserFS-For-ReactOS <comment><USER2> Good news. ReactOS is really moving as alternative to Windows.</comment>


Writing a FUSE file system in Go - <AUTHOR> http://bazil.org/talks/2013-06-10-la-gophers/#1 <comment><USER3> Yes I thought the kernel API did not look too hard to use; FUSE support is no the TODO list for ljsyscall[1] which is a LuaJIT implementation of the Linux (and partially OSX, NetBSD) kernel API. Implementing against native kernel APIs in a scripting language with an ffi is manageable although the interfaces are large; Go seems to be about the only language that has a real effort to do this, other than my project (do have longer term plans to port to Ruby, Pypy one day once it is abstracted out more).

[1] [https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall](https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall)

</comment><comment><USER4> FUSE is somewhere on the top of my "cool tools I wish I had a use for some day", together with Go, so thanks for posting this!

BTW does anyone know if there is something similar to FUSE, but for block- devices? I've written a rudimentary NBD server to read my old OS X sparsebundles on Linux, but NBD seems a bit over-general for that purpose.

<comment><USER5> > BTW does anyone know if there is something similar to FUSE, but for block- > devices?

[https://github.com/acozzette/BUSE](https://github.com/acozzette/BUSE)

The disclaimer says it's experimental, though.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I see it wraps NBD, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The content of the slides is good/informative.. but the UI for the slides is terrible. I didn't know where to click, I tried clicking on the slide next to it... tried dragging the slide over, and selected a bunch of text. Clicked a few other parts of the screen.. Then it occurred to me to try the arrows. If I hadn't thought of that, I would have just left.

Why would you design something like that? At least give people instructions.

<comment><USER7> Clicking on the next slide works fine for me, and it was the first thing I tried.

<comment><USER8> You have to click on the left third of the next slide, or the right third of the current slide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems to me with Linux's dominance, FUSE is becoming an attractive way to export APIs, since by operating at the filesystem layer full access is guaranteed to all programs regardless of creed... without having to write a C library, or a corresponding library for every language. This is particularly useful for shell scripts. It's still a tradeoff though, and *BSD'ers won't be super pleased if it becomes too popular.

<comment><USER10> Linux discovering Plan 9 ideas, only 20 years later.

<comment><USER11> Linux is mostly about re-implementing old stuff, sadly I am yet to see many new ideas being explored, besides what commercial UNIXes and Mainframes offer.

<comment><USER12> It's open source, you can go and implement this "novel stuff" yourself.

<comment><USER10> No, you really can't. Plan 9 wasn't a modification of the Research Unix they used at the Labs, it was a new operating system because Unix couldn't implement the required abstractions in an orthogonal way. Plan 9 replaces the abstractions offered by Unix with different new ones; you can't just add new abstractions on top of old ones. It's a completely different world, different process and security models which are incompatible with the old models. Linux wouldn't be Linux anymore. One reason why you would want Linux with Plan 9 semantics instead of Plan 9 is because Linux has a lot of drivers. Unfortunately, the I/O model is a consequence on how Plan 9 does things, and if you want Plan 9 semantics in Linux you'd have to modify all the drivers. Every driver that uses IOCTLs would have to be modified, which is pretty much every one of them.

Plus, whatever you did, there's the small matter of Linux people accepting you changes. A Linux fork is useless; if it's not in mainline, it doesn't exist. Historically the Linux folks haven't been very happy with these kind of changes...

<comment><USER12> Linux has been implementing Plan 9 features piecemeal for ages. For example: /proc fs, several system calls, utf-8, etc.

But I wasn't talking about that stuff specifically (which might or might not be incompatible with core Linux). Parent lamented of Linux generally not trying out new research ideas. Well, why doesn't he have a go at it?

<comment><USER11> It is funny how the typical Linux zealots answer is go and implement the stuff one complains about.

Everyone needs to be a kernel developer, a XWindows developer, a GNOME developer, a KDE developer, ... or just shut up.

And even when something is done that goes out of the usual copying existing ideas, there is the uphill battle to get it eventually integrated and accepted, if ever.

I have been coding before Linus could even think about doing Linux, and have better things to do with my free time.

<comment><USER12> > _It is funny how the typical Linux zealots answer is go and implement the > stuff one complains about._

I use OS X. Could not care less about Linux except on a server. Have started with Sun OS and HPUX back in the day.

> _Everyone needs to be a kernel developer, a XWindows developer, a GNOME > developer, a KDE developer, ... or just shut up._

Pretty much sums it.

> _And even when something is done that goes out of the usual copying existing > ideas, there is the uphill battle to get it eventually integrated and > accepted, if ever._

And why would it be "integrated and accepted" if the people don't like it? Because it's "novel" and "out of the usual"? I'd say, "we actually want it in our kernel" is a far more compelling argument than "It's novel".

> _I have been coding before Linus could even think about doing Linux, and > have better things to do with my free time._

So, you "have better things to do with my free time" but the people doing Linux kernel work should implement novel things for your amusement? How exactly do you justify that?

(As for "coding before Linus could even think about doing Linux", should we be impressed by the timespan alone? Tons of dabblers and mediocrities have also done that).

<comment><USER11> > So, you "have better things to do with my free time" but the people doing > Linux kernel work should implement novel things for your amusement?

Why should it be for my amusement?! I was only stating a fact.

> (As for "coding before Linus could even think about doing Linux", should we > be impressed by the timespan alone? Tons of dabblers and mediocrities have > also done that).

No, it just means I use GNU/Linux like any other OS and I don't care about OS religious wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Wikipedia page has a list of interesting projects based on FUSE: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace#Example...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace#Example_Uses)

</comment><comment><USER14> Very informative for slides. I'm used to worse.

Quick UI feedback, I had to use the keyboard to get to the next slide, it seems not possible with purely the mouse. Might want to change that.

<comment><USER15> That's a sizing problem. I couldn't work out how to switch slides until I'd maximized my browser, allowing the neighboring slides to sneak into view (and thus visible to click).

It's a pity the presentation isn't more responsive / dynamic to the browser's viewable area, but at least the content is there and at least this is an interesting topic which is worth my time scrolling through the slides - <USER2> is the most important thing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Somebody should port GlusterFS to Go!

</comment><comment><USER17> oh, wow - I always thought FUSE was a c-library - didn't realize it was this "smart". I guess I'll have to go look more closely at the various FUSE projects :-)</comment>


Redesigning Hospital Signs - <AUTHOR> http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.aspx?id=11897

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a slide show at: <http://www.uc.edu/slideshow/signage></comment>


HP to certify Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for Proliant servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/126563-hp-certify-ubuntu-12-04-for-its-proliant-servers <comment><USER2> At the end of the article ExtremeTech fails to list one of the key beneficiaries of certification:

Sysadmins without 'buying power' who are already running Linux on corporate infrastructure and who are taking flak from PHB management.

(Coming from someone who stood aghast at the purchase of $5k per unit of vulnerable-by-default Windows Server based SSH servers when two Pentium IIIs from 1998 running Ubuntu LTS would have worked better - to handle 100MB of data three times/day on a 10Mbit synchronous cxn.)

</comment><comment><USER3> >it simply means that by installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on their current (or future) ProLiant hardware that they won't nullify any kind of hardware warranty.

Would it have before? Warranty claims being denied because a server runs Ubuntu would cause quite a shit storm. Unlike consumers, people purchasing servers are generally sophisticated (whitepapers nonwithstanding), and Ubuntu is a huge slice of the server market. About 45% of all EC2 images are Ubuntu based.

This smells like a non story to me.

Edit: Updated the market share; It's actually 45% now: <http://thecloudmarket.com/stats#/totals>

<comment><USER4> Well I don't think they ever had the gall to do it to their pro market but they did void the warranty for some of their consumers when they installed linux. [http://linux.slashdot.org/story/07/03/27/1753218/hp- dishonor...](http://linux.slashdot.org/story/07/03/27/1753218/hp-dishonors- warranty-if-you-load-linux)

As did other companies : [http://linux.slashdot.org/story/07/09/12/0011209/retailer- re...](http://linux.slashdot.org/story/07/09/12/0011209/retailer-refuses- hardware-repair-due-to-linux)

<comment> guard-of-terra That's not the reason. The reason is that they can bullshit you and get away with it.

I sometimes wonder why isn't there a huge fine specifically for corporations trying to avoid their responsibilities by bullshiting customers. It should be in hundreds of thousands per incident. Because they do that and they feel free to do that and you can't punish them much for doing that. The worst case for them, they actually do their job.

<comment><USER5> In the US, if you know the law, there are penalties for a company disregarding consumer protection laws. I forget the name of the law, but I actually ended up filing a suit against Alltel before us Alltel customers were moved to AT&T following the buyout. Alltel settled as soon as my lawyer sent the papers. It's colloquially known as the "lemon law" (though that's a term generally reserved for used car sales). If they can't fix a defective, in-warranty product in a reasonable time, the contract you have with them is void and they have to refund the price.

In my case, Alltel kept sending me broken phones for my warranty claims, then the third time I sent the phone back they said the warranty was void because I had installed a registry browser on Windows Mobile (and that was apparently the cause of them sending me a phone that was missing a loudspeaker).

At any rate, I don't remember the name of the law or the exact words anymore, but look into it so you know what you can expect when this happens to you. The FTC doesn't take kindly to it, and in some cases will actually pay a lawyer to fight it for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't really understand Canonical's stated direction, unless it's changed recently. They've stated that they intend their desktops for casual users, and that if you're a power user, there are other distros for you... yet they're also trying to push their server market. It seems that they don't intend to provide a desktop for the admins of their servers to use...

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure about that, but they've said the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will get support for 5 years, and that's probably true for future LTS versions, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> HP has (and has had) various operating systems certified on ProLiant servers over the years, including Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), VMware, Canonical Ubuntu, Citrix, NetWare/OES, and probably a few other software giblets.

HP have also had supported hardware emulators that have been running yet other operating systems atop one of these operating systems on ProLiant, as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately, certifications for Ubuntu carry little value unless server vendors begin publishing usable official package repositories for device drivers, BIOS/firmware updates, and systems management/diagnostics software. Merely being able to run Ubuntu without a kernel panic is not enough.

Until this happens, RHEL will remain a better option for most people running their own hardware.

<comment><USER10> If the focus is on the word "usable", I'm still waiting on them to do that for RHEL.</comment></comment>


How You Can Hit #1 in the US App Store (with an app you built over the weekend) - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/how-you-can-hit-1-in-the-u-s-app-store-with-an-app-you-built-over-the-weekend-317d467d8596 <comment><USER2> > Second — despite this sudden, unexpected flood of users, our servers at > Voxeet stayed up and running! Our backend devs performed a few modifications > to hand our huge new user base, but otherwise this unexpected stress test > proved our just how solid our devs and architecture actually are.

Really impressed by this part to be honest. Good job on having built such a stable backend service, speaks for your product, too.</comment>


A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/ <comment><USER2> FWIW, I wrote a Julia Set explorer in HolyC for TempleOS a couple years back. It was definitely an interesting experience!

[https://github.com/pcorey/julia-templeos](https://github.com/pcorey/julia- templeos)

<comment><USER3> Wow, that's tight. Really just gets to the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been dabbling in learning TempleOS programming for a bit, did a host- guest driver giving VMware Tools-like functionality, minimal web browser, Mega Man game engine & DOS demoscene style intro, Github stuff is here if anyone's interested:

[https://github.com/tramplersheikhs](https://github.com/tramplersheikhs)

<comment><USER5> Amazing website too ;-) [https://sheikhs.space/](https://sheikhs.space/)

</comment></comment><comment> brian-armstrong The argument put forth in this article is not being entirely fair.

Although there are many people who are instantly dismissive of Davis, I've seen others give him a fair engagement on his ideas. They bend over backwards to give him some credibility. How does Davis respond to this? He stubbornly refuses any and all crticism, no matter how leveled it is.

I've watched him go in circles for pages in forums where people modestly suggest easy improvements to his design. As always, it's a little hard to separate out the mental illness from the person. But to say people don't attempt to engage Davis fairly is flatly disingenuous, and I think the author ought to try it before making that claim.

<comment><USER6> I'm not trying to rise any polemics about.. just for the sake of the debate...but is there any social skills difference to Linus? I mean, I just admire both of them.. there are very few people that can drive complex projects like Linux and templeOS.. and mental stability is something that doesn't really help much here. What I want to say is: people are like they are... we just need to love them, give them a chance to be heard.. in the end we all go back to ashes and our ideas stay flying freely... I've been running a team of about 70 people and it amazes me how different personalities create a dynamic organism... made of just tiny little imperfect pieces..

<comment><USER7> I feel as if perhaps if you can compare linus and Terry then you perhaps haven't thought the matter all the way through.

In the first place mental and social stability are not only helpful but absolutely essential in any endeavor requiring sustained effort and cooperation from more than one party. A multitude are involved either directly in linux or in projects that depend on same whereas TempleOS is a one man show not just in terms of development but even in terms of usage since if I recall correctly it doesn't do networking. Every user is figuratively an island.

Further it ought to be obvious that there is a substantial difference between Linus sometimes being an asshole and a mental disorder which often leaves the sufferer incapable of meaningfully connecting to reality or the rest of humanity let alone contributing.

Look at Terry he obviously possesses intelligence but it mainly serves to provide a diversion while he wastes his life away between racist paranoid rants on the internet.

If anything his existence is an example of a waste, a waste of everyone else's time and especially a waste of terry who of all people can't get away from himself nor effect his own cure. We do need better ways in the future to help people like terry but we do not need silly equivocation.

<comment><USER6> Of course, there maybe quite some differences between them. One is obviously the scale (Can anyone imagine the world without Linux ?). My point was about their personalities.. and I'm not really doing any value analysis.. again for the sake of the debate..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Especially HyperText/DolDoc is something that seems like a very nice feature to have. Perhaps one day someone might port something similar for Linux shells?

It seems like that is what the Linux 'text only' input/output should have been. Instead of parsing ASCII which will bring about the incompatibilities that we see today, it would have been better to have all tools input/output HTML/XML and translate it into human readable text in the shell for when output is redirected to the terminal.

<comment><USER9> Something like an inline HTML & XML markup (like iXBRL[0]) would be appropriate for this - both machine and human readable, and formatted.

[0] iXBRL is a markup language used for company accounts (I think it might be a requirement for submitting company accounts in the UK). Details: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL) Example: [http://www.xbrl.org.uk/techguidance/bbbbb- ltd.html](http://www.xbrl.org.uk/techguidance/bbbbb-ltd.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In other words templeos is a unikernel with a jit compiler. The name is odd, the author is strange, do you judge a movie by private life of the authors? The illness of van gogh, Gödel didn't affect their creations. missing graphical interface is a defect. An unikernal is a strange beast, sound crazy, but got some advantages: is simpler, could be understood completely by a human (and not only by a genius), there are no penality for system calls, and there is no cpu time wasted on context switch. Because the machine are getting cheaper is common to have only one user, so all these security became useless, so on the long run the unikernels will be mainstream. Kudos to him. a relevant discussion about unikernel here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10362897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10362897)

<comment><USER11> The advantage of multiple "users" isn't just blocking one person's access to another person's stuff. It's also a valuable tool for sandboxing system processes which need to run parallel on the same host system.

I'm addition to that, a monolithic unikernel (as unikernels usually are) would have the issue of a higher tendency for kernel panics.

So i really can't see unikernels becoming mainstream. If anything the reverse trend is true with more complex kernel designs like micro kernels becoming more favourable as computing hardware gets cheaper.

The real growth area for unikernels is virtualized appliances, eg running a single purpose service as a Xen unikernel. But even that is awfully niche and often better served (particularly in terms of developer and sysadmin productivity) with containers these days.

<comment><USER12> In that case, you need process isolation and permissions not user privileges. Prior models for mandatory, access control and capability-based security can already do what you're describing. KeyKOS did it in production on mainframes decades ago with extra benefit of persistence for app data. System/38 did one of those models, too, at CPU level. Later became AS/400 and IBM i. AS/400's run and run and run.

So, if you want POLA and damage containment, one option is imitating old designs that pulled that off. Patents expired, too. ;)

<comment><USER11> Oh I'm fully aware there are a thousand different ways to accomplish similar results. Further to your point, you can also support multiple physical users without actually running a multi-user system as well (eg Windows 95).

However you have to bare in mind that this tangent did start off as an exercise in generalisations so I was following on from that by pointing out that many current multi-user systems also use user accounts as a tool for reducing the exposure a process has. While you'd obviously agree that it's a long way from being the most secure method of hardening a OS, it is still a pretty typical way for many desktop systems to operate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A friend of mine made a timeline of TempleOS: [https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_TempleOS](https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_TempleOS)

<comment><USER14> I have been creating monthly archives of his website(s) and videos since 2012, hoping someone in the future will find them useful. I wonder where they can be stored online.

<comment><USER15> His fans on /g/ would be very interested. You ought to create a torrent and post it on the TOS /g/ threads. Maybe separate out his topical tutorial videos from the livestreams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Its a shame he hasn't hopped onto the OSS fad and taken advantage of GitHub to collect contributions. Maybe it others could this a neat project for their master/thesis?

<comment><AUTHOR> From the TempleOS homepage:

> No police state. Nothing is different from 1990 except we don't have any > enemies. The World has gadgets to amuse itself. Eliminate fat-ass government > jobs. Eliminate CIA, NSA and TSA. Don't fucken touch my computer, CIA > </comment></comment><comment>. Githib is to register and control dangerous people and code. No > cloud.

One needs the context. It's very stream-of-consciousness-y.

</comment><comment><USER17> Has anyone ever looked at making a more "mainstream" fork? It feels like there's a lot of cool technology in TempleOS, in amongst the less cool stuff.

<comment><USER18> Someone was working on one for a little bit, but seems to have stopped: [https://github.com/minexew/Shrine](https://github.com/minexew/Shrine)

May be a good starting point for anyone else interested.

<comment><USER17> Last commit was half an hour ago. Apart from the notice it seems to be relatively active.

They've added networking, a package manager and a unix-like shell. That's really cool. You could put it in a container and use it as an emacs alternative.

<comment><USER19> > use it as an emacs alternative.

That's inspiring. I almost want to do this, just for the "nerd cred". It would be a pretty workable environment, and probably faster than emacs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In some ways, TempleOS looks like an enhanced MS-DOS, where everything runs in ring 0, all tasks shares the memory space, and everything has access to all files.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have the impression that this project gets so much attention _because_ of its author's idiosyncrasy, not _despite_ of it.

Was it created by a non-racist, mentally-healthy, socially apt individual wouldn't it be regarded as a neat but not extra-ordinary hobby project?

I believe it would not be so frequently a topic at HN front page. But I would like to hear others opinions on this.

<comment><USER22> Back when the author took his medication more regularly, the project was called "LoseTheOS" and it was similarly popular for its interesting features.

Terry's online behavior has grown increasingly odd, but he project's fame pre- dates the odd behavior

<comment><USER17> He seems to stream himself a lot recently (he's even on now - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEwmiplwGLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEwmiplwGLI) ). He just browses the internet and he sent some viewers money. It's pretty surreal.

<comment><USER23> Well that took quite a number of "New Tor circuit for this site"! (You'll see what I mean.)

Canada works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >This combination of TempleOS's amateurish approach and Terry's unfortunate outbursts have resulted in TempleOS being often regarded as something to be mocked, ignored, or forgotten.

I've only ever heard positives things said about TempleOS.</comment>


Winston: Take Back Control of Your Online Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winstonprivacy/winston-the-worlds-most-advanced-online-privacy-device <comment><USER2> No open source firmware, network stack, details on encryption, or any protocols used in the product? Should I trust it?</comment>


An anti-NDA email might come in handy - <AUTHOR> http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/09/an-anti-nda-email-might-come-in-handy/

<comment><USER2> Couldn't you just put that in your signature along with a slew of other disclaimers?

I've been told that NDAs are mostly just a scare tactic and often don't have teeth in court, at least in-general, and in some U.S. states. I understand that contracts are important for business, and NDAs are an important tool in business, but I believe that NDAs leave a lot of leeway. Is that not accurate?

<comment><AUTHOR> > I've been told that NDAs are mostly just a scare tactic and often don't have > teeth in court, at least in-general, and in some U.S. states

Far from it -- NDAs can have _big_ teeth. As just one example, consider _Celeritas Technologies, Ltd. v. Rockwell Int'l Corp._ [1]. The appeals court affirmed judgment on a jury verdict awarding Celeritas almost $58 million for breaching an NDA by using wireless-modem technology disclosed to it by Celeritas. (Disclosure: I was co-counsel at trial for Rockwell.)

[1] [http://openjurist.org/150/f3d/1354/celeritas-technologies- lt...](http://openjurist.org/150/f3d/1354/celeritas-technologies-ltd-v- rockwell-international-corporation)

<comment><USER2> Great counterpoint example, however are there any stats on court decisions related to NDA agreements vs. other types of contract-related cases to show how often an NDA is useful enough in court to merit the attention they tend to get in business?</comment></comment></comment>


Test New Features and Iterate Quickly with Cloudflare Workers - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/iterate-quickly-with-cloudflare-workers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Searched for _A /B testing with Cloudflare_ on Google and found this blog post that was posted by Cloudflare just yesterday.

They have another piece of code example about A/B testing with Cloudflare Workers that I also found right next to this blog post in the search results. Said code example is located at [https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/recipes/a-b- testin...](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/recipes/a-b-testing/) and is more concretely like what I was looking for, but the blog post gives information that lets us do A/B testing per actual user instead of per device.

The code example mentioned in the paragraph above ties user grouping to a cookie and makes A/B testing quite simple. However, at the same time it also means that one user with multiple devices could land in different groups on different devices, so they will see a different version of your site on one device than they do on another. Which may or may not matter depending on what you are testing and what they are doing. For example you might be A/B-testing changes to your landing page, where you are targeting people that have not yet signed up and so have no account, and then you would still use cookies of course.

In the article they show how to cache user permissions at Cloudflare edge servers and they subsequently show how they limit access to features meant for one group when people from the other group try to access them. Likewise we can use the cached user permissions instead of cookies when we decide to show one version of the site or the other.</comment>


Philips reverses decision to close the Hue Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.developers.meethue.com/content/friends-hue-program-update <comment><USER2> A point brought up in the replies to their forum post warrants repeating: They claim that they were concerned about the quality of their brand being eroded by third-party bulbs that didn't reproduce the same quality experience that first-party/certified bulbs did.

They had the solution available to them from day one. Since they can clearly identify third-party bulbs, they could have simply presented a warning along the lines of "We've detected you're using bulbs that are not certified by Philips. For best results, we recommend using only certified bulbs (link to purchase here) and cannot guarantee a quality experience with the bulbs you've purchased. Click "OK" to continue."

<comment><USER3> I don't think this would accomplish anything vis-a-vis brand protection, since consumers have been conditioned to just click "OK" at every dialog box that doesn't look like it will explode a mine. Six months down the line, nobody would remember the warning -- they'd still get mad at Philips when a third- party bulb breaks.

<comment><USER4> > _they 'd still get mad at Philips when a third-party bulb breaks._

Would they? Wouldn't they blame their bulb first? It's like complaining to your PC manufacturer that a program you downloaded doesn't work. Most people would blame the program and look for another one. I'm sure there are some who have it backwards, and they probably will be calling support, but I can't imagine there's enough of them for a company to actually care about damage to the brand those people may be doing.

<comment><USER5> I've worked in tech support for many years, and the vast majority of people _would_ blame the PC manufacturer or the operating system for the problems. I spent many years on the Genius Bar (back in the PowerPC and early Intel days) and, in almost, every interaction, the device was to blame - as far as the customer was concerned. In some cases, they were right, in others it was due to outdated software, buggy third-party drivers or just something they bought that was not Mac compatible. But as far as the customer was concerned, it didn't work so therefore it was a problem with their computer.

What has to be remembered is that the types of people who read Hacker News would understand, in more detail, what might be causing the issue and know troubleshooting is all part of the process. I bet printer companies get many calls a day from people who bought third-party cartridges (sometimes without realising) and complaining that their stupid printer isn't working and that it must be the printer's fault.

The vast majority of consumers who would walk into an Apple Store or Best Buy to purchase something like this, they just think of it as one big ecosystem. If it doesn't work with a bulb they bought off the internet, they will simply assume the product, as a whole, is terrible.

<comment><USER6> On the printer point, I once bought a 3rd-party cartridge for a Dell laser printer that not only didn't work but actually broke the printer (it stopped recognising all cartridges in that slot).

The first question they asked on the phone was whether I'd used a 3rd-party cartridge. I said yes.

The second question was where I'd like the free replacement printer delivered (now with added WiFi, and a full set of cartridges). Painful for Dell, but I'll buy from them again.

<comment><USER7> Your post makes we wonder if the printer broke on purpose with that 3rd party cartridge, and that's why they sent you a new one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I'm glad to see they've reversed the decision. It was the only reasonable choice they had with such an immature market that could have them dethroned as the leader very quickly. Their reasons for lock-in made no sense. For a product like this _compatibility is a feature_ and many people chose the Philips products because of the ecosystem of compatible products available, the ZigBee protocol and third-party light bulbs.

I'm sure that third-party products were causing problems, however, wholesale blocking of them via software update is a terrible solution. They, literally, turned out the lights on their customers. Meanwhile, I'd be willing to bet support costs _immediately_ spiked -- people call support when things don't work and they just pushed out a solution that _increased_ rather than decreased that.

Unfortunately, I think they've bruised their reputation quite a bit with this move. It's now delayed my purchase of such a product until I am convinced that they have a solid third-party certification program in place (with very low licensing fees) or (even better) a guarantee with the product that they won't try this again when the market is more mature and they have the option of ignoring complaining customers.

Their competitors could see a rise in sales by taking advantage of this blunder and committing to open protocols. I haven't looked at the landscape in this category, yet, and had just assumed I'd be buying the Philips Hue eventually, but they've motivated me to do more research.

<comment><USER8> Their move concerned me, because now I don't know if this is "we won't close our ecosystem" or "we won't close our ecosystem YET". I don't feel like waking up and discovering that they've decided that they now have enough market share to be abusive and controlling. Most of my existing ZigBee stuff isn't as slick as the Hue stuff, but I know it won't get turned off.

I get that people make mistakes, but their original move showed that Philips has essentially NO understanding of their market, and that they are willing to casually engage in extraordinary hostility towards their customers. This isn't a winning combination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. Most companies are deaf to user outrage. The original decision wasn't fantastic, but I understand the whole "Friends of..." certification route.

At least in the future they'll be able to stick to "if it's not certified by us..." for customer support, which was likely the original impetus (along with a desire to cut off cheap alternatives to their devices).

I'm not mad at this at all.

<comment><USER10> _I 'm not mad at this at all. _

I am. Because it is a way to extort money out of other ZigBee participants.

<comment><USER11> It's not extorting. It's making sure your house doesn't burn down because you bought the el cheapo bulb from knockoff brand C.

<comment><USER12> Pray tell how does a LED Lamp can burn your house down

Oh wait it can't (if it can because your wiring is crap and the protection devices are not working you have much bigger problems)

<comment><USER4> A LED bulb converts your 230V AC (or 110V in the US) power source into 12V DC (in case of Hue itself). This converter part can, if poorly made, create a fire hazard. And a bulb is usually mounted inside a lamp, many of which are flammable and have the shape that will accumulate heat inside instead of dissipating it.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but that applies to china mobile chargers and a lot of other devices that nobody worries about (and also to CFDs and any led lamp that might be today in your house)

And of course it's not a software issue

<comment><USER13> > And of course it's not a software issue

Funny thing though, but that AC/DC converter is manipulated by firmware activated by a wifi protocol. If the fire only starts when the converter is activated into its highest conversion rate in a particular sequence by certain commands sent across that wifi protocol and those commands are being chosen by a user of an app on a mobile device two rooms away, is that a software issue? It's certainly a gray area.

<comment><USER12> If your DC/DC converter has a duty-cycle of 100% most likely the controlling FET will burn out and stop working

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Compare this with Ethernet. You plug it in - and it just works. No 3com/Realtek/Intel certification required. As a user I may be shielded, but I believe there are no interoperability issues between Cisco/Juniper/Brocade switchgear either.

With this as the background, it's surprising to see a large crowd defending the equivalent of Ford-branded gasoline.

<comment><USER15> Apples and oranges.

Pure hardware is a lot easier to make compatible consistently than hardware+software.

<comment><USER16> Huh? There's a _lot_ of software involved in wired networking. Way more than for lightbulbs, I'd suspect. And yet they all interoperate via open standards, and any vendor that tried to sell equipment that only worked with their own equipment would be laughed at of the market.

<comment><USER15> An ethernet cable does not contain any software. A smart lightbulb does.

<comment><USER16> But now you've drawn an irrelevant comparison. The power line and socket that the smart lightbulb is connected to don't contain any software. _Those_ are the parts that are analogous to a simple Ethernet wire (which is really just eight separate leads instead of three). The smart lightbulb itself is analogous to a router.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The thing is, to me, the fact that they ever decided to do this in the first place means I will never buy Philips smart home products ever.

They have proven they can't be trusted with this sort of power, and that is a one way trip. You don't come back from that, you don't get back off my list.

<comment><USER11> Either A) You don't trust any large, publically traded company. B) You don't understand how large, publically traded companies work.

This decision was made by someone in marketing. Phillips engineers (in this division) were ambivalent because it meant less verification and testing (yea!) but also means they have a less capable product. It got approved because someone (likely a director somewhere) put together a market strategy that showed they could make x dollars in the next 2 years doing this.

Public backlash was bigger than expected. VP gets involved. Decision is changed.

<comment><USER18> The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the engineering division themselves. Marketing probably had a shit-fit because losing a marketable feature is a giant regression to your general user.

People in Marketing and Product tend to be way more in-tune with customers and don't make boneheaded decisions like this. Another easy tell: the company was shocked by the reaction of users. That meant the company wasn't aware of user impressions of the decision. That also meant Product/Marketing teams weren't involved in the decision.

When the "what does it cost us to test this compatibility" calculus comes out as more expensive than "what is the cost of the backlash to our company," you realize that Engineering divisions without enough resources are driving this type of decision, 99 times out of 100.

<comment><USER16> > The decision to only support Philips products came most likely from the > engineering division themselves.

I disagree. I don't see engineers coming up with or getting on-board with such a clearly anti-open-standards decision. Much more likely, what I think happened is that this decision was forced on engineering from above, morale hit all-time lows, there was much grumbling and consternation as they implemented this anti-feature that they clearly didn't believe in, then they rejoiced at the huge public outcry when the change was pushed, and are now celebrating that those assholes up in management had to reverse course with a heavy dose of "I told you so".

Source: I am an engineer at a big company and have seen this scenario play out many times internally.

<comment><USER19> Read the comments here, many engineering types are falling all over each other to excuse phillips. There is a massive anti-sentiment towards open platforms there days it seems, likely driven by apple's success and the startup "industry".

<comment><USER20> Because a practicing engineer and an anonymous person on the internet that seems like the "engineering type" is the same thing?

There is zero reason for an engineer to have "anti-sentiment" to an open platform because it's moot. Most likely, an engineer would be completely indifferent to a decision like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They can still control it and reverse the reversal in the future. You are at their whim. It is not user-friendly unless it is free software (and hardware). Amazon can still remotely remove books and no one bats an eye. This is just an issue because at the moment these kinds of home automation are per-dominantly "nerd" territory while e-book readers are already mainstream.

<comment><USER15> Where is this magical place where I can find free hardware?

<comment><USER22> To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech," not as in "free beer".

<comment><USER23> GP's point still stands. Open hardware is very rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I won't be so quick to "roll-back" my decision to boycott their products.

<comment><USER25> Hey, give them some credit. They listened to their customers and responded very quickly.

<comment><USER26> Exactly this. Their management / decision makers aren't familiar with the hacker mindset, but they responded to public criticism quickly by acquiescing to the demands. I don't so anything bad about this.

They mad a public about face, admitting that their decision was not the right one for their audience, and changed it. That's not easy to do for most people, let alone companies.

<comment><USER27> They didnt really admit the decision was bad for the audience. They said "well, we were just looking out for you, and highly recommend you doing what we want, but I guess you can do that too, but you shouldnt."

The tone is very much "we did nothing wrong." I don't expect more, but I was hoping for it.

<comment><USER20> I disagree. The tone was more akin to "This really doesn't impact _a lot_ of our customers, but the customers it did impact caused a significant (unexpected) response."

That's perfectly valid. They felt that it was a minority doing it (which is probably true) so this would be a non-issue. It wasn't, so they reversed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I really respect philips for having the humility to come back on a decision like this. As someone who already owns hue and has bought into the ecosystem, this makes me want to promote their brand further, and I will.

Hat down to whoever made this happen over there! The world is better when things are open.

</comment><comment><USER29> "We underestimated the impact this would have upon the small number of our customers"

Do they really believe it is a small number of customers that use non-Philips light bulbs? I mean, good for them in reversing the decision, but the damage is already done (check out Amazon reviews for one) and it should have been easily foreseen.

<comment><USER30> Translation: "we'll do this to shut up the pro users that are generating all this bad P/R, and it really doesn't matter since 99.9% of our customers won't care about this anyway."

Can't say I disagree with the idea. Everyone wants a system like this to be open on principle, but in reality it won't really get used that much. This stuff is still too hard for the average consumer.

<comment><USER31> I dunno. I bought a Hue starter kit (hub+3 bulbs) and three more bulbs when I moved into my new house. I wanted something cool and "gadgety" to set up in the new place. They've generally been OK but I haven't bought any more bulbs since that first setup two years ago.

This is mainly because the Hue bulbs are quite pricey and I've had a couple of them semi-fail (some colors in the spectrum stop working due to the blue LEDs crapping out). I've been keeping an eye out for compatible bulbs that are a bit more affordable since Hue prices haven't dropped at all and I'm more likely to drop $20-30 on a fancy bulb than another $60 when they can still fail.

Granted, I've already got the hub so they have my money. Their risk is that I only buy third party bulbs instead of Hue bulbs from now on. Still, the next time I go to buy more lamps to expand my setup, if there are less expensive options that are reasonably equivalent, I'll buy them instead anyway. If Hue lamps become more affordable, I'll stick to first-party by default. But if Hues are still $60 each and some other platform starts selling good RGB LED bulbs for $15-25 each (and Hue has locked out third party bulbs), I'll just drop Hue in general and cut my losses.

<comment> jon-wood I got a couple of the OSRAM RGB bulbs a while back, and while they're not quite as good as the Hue ones at half the price they were definitely the right choice. The only really issue I have is that their colours don't match the Hue ones, so it can be a bit hit and miss getting what you're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The funny part is that they claim to have broken their customers' previously working functionality in good faith.

Who writes these things, and why do their supervisors allow them to keep working there?!?

<comment><USER33> It could be worse: "Some customers were involved in a darkness-related incident."

<comment> Brian-Puccio I'm not sure if this is a specific reference to something like McSweeney's Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar [0], to something else, or just a comment in general. (But I agree.)

[0] [http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide- to-a...](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-ambiguous- grammar)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if this had anything to do with the flood of negative comments to their Amazon product pages?

3/5 stars: [http://www.amazon.com/Philips-455303-White-Starter- Generatio...](http://www.amazon.com/Philips-455303-White-Starter- Generation/dp/B014H2OZAC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1450292147&sr=8-2&keywords=philips+hue+hub)

4/5 stars (previously 4.5/5): [http://www.amazon.com/Philips-456210-Ambiance- Starter-Genera...](http://www.amazon.com/Philips-456210-Ambiance-Starter- Generation/dp/B014H2P4KW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1450292147&sr=8-3&keywords=philips+hue+hub)

</comment><comment><USER35> Not sure why people are screaming "boycott". Philips never advertised their system as being compatible with third-party lights. The fact that they use an open protocol to communicate with their own lights doesn't change this.

It's like connecting to your office chat with an IRC client because you figured out that's what they are using under the hood. Why would you scream bloody murder when one day your IRC client stops being compatible with it? They never advertised this to begin with!

You can't exactly demand functionality that you were never sold.

<comment><USER36> Not bothering to test and actively support devices from other vendors would be reasonable, but customers have the expectation that a product does a decent effort to respect the standard; whitelisting a subset of Philips lightbulbs and deliberately refusing to work with anything else means giving users a bad product for the sake of anticompetitive business practices. This kind of deliberate, obviously harmful abuse is worse than merely reckless behaviour like the Superfish scandal or the Windows 10 update that uninstalls user software.

<comment><USER35> Except I don't think Philips advertised that they are using an open standard. It's just what they used for the implementation.

They are free to mutilate that standard as they see fit for their own product, and since they didn't make it into a selling point, there is no reason for them to expect compatibility.

<comment><USER36> In the world of customers who prefer trustworthy vendors, there's a substantial difference between not wanting to spend money to respect a standard any more than advertised, and deliberately spending money (firmware updates aren't free) to worsen the product and screw customers.

Likewise, "mutilating" a standard to leverage standard technology in a not- really-standard product isn't the same as deliberate artificial incompatibility for purely commercial reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> A lot of the people are talking about how important integration and interoperability is. I agree with it, however, a lot of work has to be done to achieve it.

In order to do it properly, there should be standards that major providers agree upon making integration much easier and predictable. That takes plenty of time.

Then you probably need some walled garden to control the experience. Approved apps, approved 3rd party providers, etc. If some crappy app is released, regular users won't blame the developer but the platform, as it was discussed in great details in other threads. We need to get out of the HN bubble. Seriously. We forget that a computer is a device to watch porn and browse facebook and that's about it for A LOT of people. Chances are, it will cause a wave of anger in communities such as this one (where there's a strong sentiment for open systems).

This work has to be done be a number of large providers (read: long processes) and followed by startups popping up and disappearing now and then. This stuff always takes time.

</comment><comment><USER38> Second large company this week to rollback a change after public outcry, with Valve rolling back a change in CS:GO. I hope their marketing people take a lesson out of this.

<comment><USER39> if only valve would listen more often and faster. Im not demanding fixes the next day, but it would be nice to at least get some message saying "We know about this issue, we're looking into it"

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Sounds exactly like the FTDI FT232 "serial killer" saga all over again.

They got many people very pissed off and probably never buying or building products with their chips again.

</comment><comment><USER41> How many developers does it take to change Philips lightbulb?

</comment><comment><USER42> Any recommendations for third-party lights?

<comment><USER43> the GE Link bulbs are pretty nice. they have a great hue (pun actually not intended).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> "We fucked up, but we don't want to admit it."</comment>