I Love MDN, or the cult of the free in action - <AUTHOR> https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/i_love_mdn_or_t.html <comment><USER4> One thing which really resonated:

"But will you do the boring but necessary browser testing to figure out if what you're describing is always true, or just most of the time? And will you repeat that testing once new versions have come out? Will you go through related pages..."

This. A thousand times this. The problem for me isn't the quantity of information any more, it's the quality. 10-15 years ago if you hit an even slightly esoteric problem you'd bottom out a search pretty quickly and be on your own. Now, you'll find dozens of blog articles, community answers, Reddit threads... and unless you're very lucky they will all be wrong, from subtle "works on my machine"-isms up to "just commit a god-rights CI token to your repository, it'll be fine" \- the telltale sign often being nobody can tell you _why_ this is the solution, merely that they bashed other random solutions to related problems together until a particular combination happened to work.

Authoritative sources like MDN are vital in this context, having something you can refer to that tells you how things _actually_ work so you can verify whether the suggestion you or a co-worker found on a blog is a sensible solution or the kind of horrible mess you'd expect to find alongside world- writable S3 buckets and services that regularly time out due to being OOM killed.

<comment><USER5> This is tangential to your point, but it's funny how sometimes the amount of information on a topic can ultimately be a detriment due to the dilution of truth over time.

I've been spending my free time working with an experimental library. Google stops returning relevant results for searches on this topic around the 10th result. While this is often infuriating and leads to countless hours deep in indecipherable library code, it is equally likely to stumble upon an in depth discussion among users about pros and cons of various solutions. This context is rarely captured for mainstream tools, and when it is, those authors are lauded for their ability to contextualize the problem.

What is most disappointing to me is how often we document "what" but not "why" when most of us NEED the context of "why" to make comparisons across different tools or approaches for our use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rather sad the two proposals here are either "giant browser vendors should pay for it" or "independent web developers should pay for it." It's one thing for developers to pay for things that will develop their independent careers, but MDN is a _reference_ as much as it is a learning resource; it's something developers constantly use at their jobs. Their _employers_ , big or small, should be the ones paying for it.

Of course, we all know that asking startups to actually fund open source (whether code, documentation, or learning resources) is like pulling teeth. I'd say maybe the collapse of some larger open source project(s) could convince companies to start actually giving a shit about whether or not the maintainers of the technology their entire businesses rely on have enough money to continue developing said technology, but it's more likely the companies would just say "well, let's put 10 engineers on this problem for a month to replace this dead open source technology with something new and shiny" and not recognize how much more they've had to spend. Or, y'know, they'll go with paid support of a Microsoft product or something.

<comment><USER7> >MDN is a reference as much as it is a learning resource..

>Their employers, big or small, should be the ones paying for it.

Your argument is counter intuitive, if it is truly a reference, then surely the developers themselves should pay for it.

A company hires a developer with the expectation that they know their field (including the standards etc.). It is the developers' own concern if they (understandably) need a reference to help them execute what they were hired for.

<comment><USER8> Also bring your own chair and desk while we're at it. Oh and you definitely want to buy some toilet paper. Felix always keeps a stock on those but he never shares.

<comment> munk-a Don't forget to bring a bucket of water from the well every morning - <USER2> we've got working plumbing but that costs money and your developer salaries are unreasonable!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _> Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat?_

Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups.

 _> Create an independent entity like Fronteers, but then international, get members to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year, and use that money to fund MDN or its successor._

Sounds like a decent idea, but a Patreon-style funding with different tiers will probably yield even better results.

<comment><USER10> > Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually > paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, > degenerate activism or doomed web startups.

Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems.

A lot of people are willing to give, so long as _they_ get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no idea what it actually takes to run a charity; they have no idea what on-the-ground problems need to be solved day-to-day; they have absolutely zero understanding of the organizational supports needed to make any organization function. They're basically in the worst possible position to decide how best to use those funds.

But they still want to decide how they're used.

This despite the fact that they're ostensibly donating to a charitable organization specifically because that organization possesses all that expertise; expertise that costs real money to attract and retain, since they're ultimately competing against the private sector.

It's one of the reasons why, when I donate to a charity, I _never_ specify how I want those funds to be used; I recognize that the charity is in a far better position to make that decision than I am.

I feel like there's a connection to Dunning-Kreuger in here somewhere...

<comment><USER11> It is not a matter of expertise, but a matter of setting priorities and valuing projects. I value MDN and Firefox. I am fine with every other aspect of Mozilla dying to save those two.

How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole.

<comment><USER12> _How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole._

Seems like you want control over the project, not to just be donating? At that point it appears one of your main solution would be to start a project like MDN that you can have such control over.

<comment><USER13> OP is not saying he wants decide _how_ Firefox and MDN are run per se, He is saying we want to not be funding projects like pocket. We don't want or know how to run MDN or firefox, but we are grateful users who would like those to succeed and willing to contribute those projects specifically.

The concern of about management salary is very important in Mozilla important than in a for profit entity.

Shareholders / board will react fast enough over market challenges or poor performance in for profit companies . Many, many companies have cut _base_ salaries for management this year due look at Airbnb for example, All Mozilla is saying variable pay will be impacted.

Given the ownership and revenue structure of Mozilla _nobody_ is in a position to keep management of Mozilla Corporation accountable, the donors to Mozilla Foundation donate miniscule amounts compared to what the Corporation makes in the single search deal with Google to have any real leverage.

The deal with Google just got _renewed_ well before the lay-off's, despite the empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on their revenue ( or Google's for that matter).

<comment><USER14> >The deal with Google just got renewed well before the lay-off's, despite the empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on their revenue ( or Google's for that matter).

I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure that "our revenues stayed the same between 2018-2023" would be seen as a failure in most companies. Not only do costs rise every year, employment decisions are made assuming it will lead to increased revenue.

<comment><USER13> Mozilla is not any company.

For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level for 5 years would be considered good performance.

Even in most aggressive startups maintaining revenues at $400-500 Million level is likely to cause first _management change_ and rarely lay-offs of _25%_ of the workforce.

Even if that was the reason, clearly mangement have been unable and unlikely to that kind of growth. Firing quarter of your highly skilled workforce is not the right approach.

Had they killed 25% of the projects and retained the best of talent from those projects and repositioned them in other projects it would have made sense. While as you say such highly skilled workforce has salary growth expectations, hiring from the market is _always_ costlier in terms of absolute salary, training, on-boarding, performance risk and finally attrition before RoI is achieved .

<comment><USER14> >For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level for 5 years would be considered good performance

Donations are barely a factor here, it is not a meaningful part of their revenue.

As you say, one year of steady revenue would cause a significant shakeup in a company. By year three, things would look fairly dire. Mozilla has already tried a number of other options, and are in the middle of a management change. Eventually this becomes the only choice

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google seems to be paying technical writers to build the free (growing) alternative to MDN, [https://web.dev](https://web.dev). It's not a generalized web resource yet like MDN, but just wait. Of course, you'll have to accept that the documentation here will likely have a Chrome-centric view of web development, further establishing the Chrome-only version of the web.

The loss of MDN will just result in Firefox becoming less relevant. MDN was not just a free resource, it anchored Firefox's relevancy in the web development world. I believe the layoffs of the MDN team is a fairly significant strategic mistake for Mozilla.

<comment><USER16> (I'm a googler who works closely with the web.dev team).

Google also pays technical writers to contribute to MDN which we consider to be THE destination for reference documentation. Both Google and Microsoft have employed multiple fulltime techwriters to contribute to MDN for the last ~7 years, I believe.

We don't consider web.dev to be an alternative to MDN. web.dev doesn't do reference documentation, but rather guides, tutorials, and news. web.dev is developed by the Web DevRel team and you can be sure that everyone working on Web DevRel and Chrome knows the fundamental importance of a diverse browser ecosystem. If there's anything we can do to make web.dev more inclusive, we'd love to hear it.

<comment><USER15> I have my doubts that MDN will be able to keep receiving the same level of updates with these layoffs. I'd hope they would, but that doesn't seem logical unless either contributions increase from outisde somehow (e.g. Google and Microsoft decides to add more writers for MDN), or GPT-3 starts generating those docs.

Now if MDN starts becoming outdated, someone else will fill that void. W3Schools maybe (nobody wants this), but it seems like a better opportunity for Google to swoop in and lead, to further solidify their domination in the browser space. Cynical sounding to you I'm sure, but that seems logical to me from a homo economicus business stance. I'd be happy to hear I'm missing something or wrong in some way so this doesn't happen, since after all, competition is great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > I Love MDN hinges on the expectation on the part of web developers that this > sort of information ought to come for free — the expectation we're entitled > to this sort of free ride.

I think people _should_ be entitled to a free ride.

Important infrastructure can, paradoxically, be both free and expensive. We've committed, for instance, to spending a whole lot of money on maintaining all of our roads, but access to the street is still free for everyday pedestrians.

Not everyone can afford to pay to use the road. If you want to get a job, often you'll need to drive to and from work for a good while before you'll have enough cash built up to meaningfully contribute to the road through your taxes. Of course, wealthy people wind up paying more, but often times they wouldn't have ever become wealthy if roads hadn't originally been available to them for free. Important infrastructure can be free for individuals when our society makes a commitment to collectively paying for it.

MDN is an extremely important resource to beginner devs -- the exact people who would have trouble paying to support it. But supporting beginner devs is good for both the industry and the economy. Important public or open-source infrastructure such as MDN and Wikipedia should receive public grant money. We already do this with research grants for science, because there's a strong understanding that making research available for free makes society better. Informational infrastructure deserves the same consideration.

<comment><USER18> >street is still free for everyday pedestrians

No it's not. Taxes pay for this. Business taxes, property taxes, local taxes, gas tax, etc. It is decisively not free for pedestrians or commuters.

<comment><USER19> The three words you stripped out before that part of the quote address this: "access to the street". With those, you are just echoing the poster's point that we use taxes to pay for common goods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think I understand the sentiment behind this post. But a few things give me pause:

> Are you willing to pay 50-100 euros/dollars per year to keep MDN afloat?

I've seen some open-source authors/contributors successfully raise enough money, after they'd pledged to work on their project full-time. So the problem might not necessarily be to raise. But money has this uncanny ability to shift a project's focus. What happens when you raise more money than you actually need for the next 3 years (considering the scope of the project)? Will the project just mention that it doesn't need to raise more and just proceed to do what it's supposed to do? All the while spending and raising sensibly? Or will it find novel and creative ways to spend all this extra cash?

> The problem with expecting volunteers to do this sort of work is that they > burn out.

Should we assume that once someone gets a salary they're somehow more resilient to burnout? I'd think that the burnout would be due to a volunteer biting much more than they should. So couldn't this also be an issue of work management and allocation?

> The passionate community has nothing to do with anything, unless they're > willing to pay. A profoundly unscientific poll indicates that only about > two-thirds of my responding followers are willing to do so.

Is paying the only way to have helpful resources? I mean, we have the Wikipedia and StackExchange models that seem to provide decent value, even if not on par with MDN's standard. Would it be possible to have a model for MDN that meets somewhere in the middle, such as community contributed contents, moderated, reviewed, and edited by both community and full-time, knowledgeable, and paid staff? Unless I'm mistaken, I think the Linux kernel also follows something similar.

</comment><comment><USER21> Should roads be free to drive on? Clean water, primary education, or firefighting be free for public use?

I don't think there are black or white answers to these questions. There are toll roads and freeways, for-profit but regulated water utilities, "free" education and firefighting funded through taxes. But all of these, like MDN, are public goods [1] where some pooling of resources makes sense. It's not so much wanting them to be free as it is wanting shared low cost options.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_\(economics\))

</comment><comment><USER22> "The co-signers unthinkingly assume they are entitled to free content."

Oh sweetie, no.

I feel entitled to Mozilla's management being competent and not killing the company.

Appealing to developers is a precondition for that.

MDN does that.

But there are free alternatives. So charging for it would be counter- productive.

If Mozilla had shown even trace amounts of competence at business development, rather than acting like a freshly-minted MBA parachuted into a university's administration, I might be more sympathetic.

As it is I've formed a partnership with a violin manufacturer. Mozilla won't see any money from it but we're going to play them a very profitable-sounding sad tune as soon as we recover our initial investment.

</comment><comment><USER23> In my head the question is: can a wikipedia-style MDN exist? If the answer is yes than I think op opinion is only on one type of model of organizing and funding a documentation site.

Will a wikipedia-style MDN be successful if there are (in addition of volunteers) paid writers who cover the majority of the work need? Maybe not. Maybe that's what the existing MDN proves.

<comment><USER24> It already is a wiki. You can contribute right now if you wanted..

<comment><USER23> Wikipedia model goes beyond being a wiki. Wikipedia does not pay for content on itself. So they have no direct vested interest in the content.

That is not the model of MDN, it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > It reminds me of breaking into spontaneous applause for our courageous > health workers instead of funding them properly so they can do their jobs.

> If not, this is all about making you feel better,...

These 2 statements here reflect this weird behavior I have seen in certain countries like the UK where everyone will say things like "we <3 the NHS" or "protect the NHS" during the pandemic, but on the other end either the government or the proletariat or both will be unhappy to expand funding of the NHS.

At times this behavior feels a bit cult-like and I also think that the dopamine-effects are meant more for those giving the applause.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't think shitting on others' praise for MDN makes anything about this better.

Yes, it's an initiative that needs money. Maybe this will enthuse somebody up high to reconsider, or somebody else to take the torch and run with it.

But even if it doesn't, a bit of recognition is _nice_. These are humans and even though it doesn't pay the bills, it might help somebody not feel they're as worthless as Mozilla imply.

Stop dumping on these projects because you're all sourpuss about "free". You're only adding to the hurt.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Cult of the free

This is poorly chosen language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom versus monetization.

I think most users of free software know it's 'free as in freedom' and they are not being duped.

I think most users of free services are duped into thinking it is actually free and are unaware their data is being sold and monetized and are paying for the service with their data. Lately more people are waking up to that fact though. I don't mean services like MDN, just things like Facebook, Google etc

<comment><USER28> I don't think the value in MDN is developers data so much as it's about controlling the defacto standards of Web Development.

<comment><USER27> I was referring to the phrase 'cult of the free' which is poorly chosen language as it doesn't distinguish between freedom versus monetization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1\. The idea that these standards need third-party write-ups for basic reference (not tutorial) use boggles my mind. Why is the main standard so unusable that we can't rely on _it_ to explain what a form element is. The web "standards" have a history of this. It's a self-caused problem -- fix the problem, don't paper over it.

2\. A lot of this complaint seems to be about needing to repeat manual browser testing regularly. Why is it manual?

3\. The web is a bloated, overcomplex, platform with hundreds of talented people full time employed to make it more complex every day. Since it seems HTML+CSS+Javascript cannot be contained inside any line drawn, can we figure out something like a WASM + son-of-DOM simpler reboot that throws out as much of this complexity as possible? As in, stop using the existing HTML tags and default CSS, let the app define new ones along the lines of WebComponents, and make the DOM be just a rendering engine to get things like universal text selection and copy-paste (as opposed to everything just blitting to a canvas and reimplementing that). Of course I'm oversimplifying -- but I really think the world needs an old school "hourglass figure architecture" here to limit this feature creep.

</comment><comment><USER30> Says the man that forced its students to buy his book, if you didn't he would fail your class while not using the book at all in class

<comment><USER31> Strong claim. Do you have a source for it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> >But will we be well served by that in the long run?

Mozilla brought in $3.25 BILLION in revenue over the last 10 years. If they'd saved/invested a majority of it then they could go for decades without any further revenue. The business model was sound if they didn't decide to waste money.

<comment> munk-a Wasn't their business model mostly "We hope that Google keeps subsidizing us for no apparent reason?"

<comment><USER33> The payouts are neither "subsidizing" nor "for no apparent reason". Do you think the Mozilla–Yahoo deal was also an act of charity? It's baffling that people think that the arrangement between Mozilla and Google is unique. Google is paying royalties to Mozilla for driving attention to Google properties, just like they do with their other partners who aren't named "Mozilla".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> ArchWiki[1] is a counterexample to the notion that the community cannot write good technical documentation. It is actually much better written and more thorough than MDN, but it's also concerning a topic that attracts many hobbyists. To be fair, web dev is not something many people do without being paid, as opposed to tinkering with Linux, so the talent pool may be smaller.

Also, the W3C and ECMA standards documents are all free and are more authoritative references than any wiki. It would be interesting to see if a language model e.g. GPT-3 could translate the standardese into something more readable to laymen.

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/](https://wiki.archlinux.org/)

<comment><USER35> ArchWiki is a good counterexample (so is Wikipedia I guess), but the W3C and ECMA specs are not: they document what ought to happen and are geared towards implementation, not what actually happens in practice or how to build a mental model about what happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think a good parallel is OWASP for web app security. The content is free and open for the internet. OWASP doesn't directly focus on curating the content and it is left up to the community. The content grows old and stale, errors do not get corrected, and the writing is often what I would call draft quality even when its published.

There are always a lot more consumers than creators of content on any platform. Most people going to use a resource are not the same who can write about it, not everyone on YouTube has something to share or make a video. And why give it away for free when you can make a paid course, give a talk, charge consulting fees, sell a solution to a problem?

You need to align incentives. Again, why contribute to something and possibly deal with the pain of moderation for free (costs instead of gain). Should we blindly trust the wisdom of the crowds? The other cost of free, is that the community may not be capable or not interested in sufficient moderation - <USER3> leads to low quality content which chases people away, even if there is good content right next to it.

OWASP's incentives and objectives have never been 100% clear to me. There are some big security players involved, but it seems more interested in research, community, grants, etc versus content. When you look at MDN, Mozilla has a clear incentive to document these things so developers build more "standard" vs "Chrome-focused" web apps, which helps keep users on FireFox since all of their favorite sites are less likely to break without FireFox simply copying decision made by Chrome. By documenting expected action and quirks, it forces Google et al. to try to move back towards agreed upon standards.

In security, I am generally more reliant upon vendor write ups and content from people with a reputation. Security has a much smaller population than web dev. Also, for web dev a lot of people pick it up and feel comfortable writing publicly even when they are just starting out (See Dev.To). I am not sure if companies pump millions of dollars into commercial web tools beyond graphics and CMS type stuff, so I wonder if a more decentralized collection of guidance is practical for the web, not to mention that there is a lot of nuance between browsers and even recent versions.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think the fundamental problem is that the web has no clear organizational structure. Although the internet itself is decentralized, it has a fairly clear organization structure, where each part of the internet has ownership, and there are explicit relationships, and expectations, and modes of cooperation between the various parties.

In the past, the W3C was at least nominally "in charge" of the web. They were the natural providers of documentation. But then 2 big things happened: (1) vehement disagreement between the W3C and the browser vendors over the successor to HTML4, and (2) the "mobile revolution", which changed the landscape of the whole tech industry.

To a significant extent, W3C has been sidelined by WHATWG. So now, WHATWG would be the natural providers of documentation for the web. However, WHATWG is dominated by Google/Apple/Microsoft, and nobody really trusts those BigCos to run the web, even if they do actually run the web by virtue of their market share dominance. And each of those BigCos has their own agenda which is not necessarily beneficial for the open web.

Thus, we're left with a leadership vacuum. We can try to "crowdsource" documentation, but that ultimately seems doomed to failure IMO, as most crowdsourcing efforts are. (The well known "tragedy of the commons".) I don't have a solution to these problems myself, to be sure. Sorry! I do agree that the solution needs to be permanent organizational funding of professional writers, but I don't know who that organization should be.

<comment><USER38> > think the fundamental problem is that the web has no clear organizational > structure.

think the fundamental problem is that the _Universe_ has no clear organizational structure.

We have to make it up as we go a long. Even a national government was simply made up by some people and enforced by the use of force, the only law of nature.

<comment><USER37> Sure, but that only works if a critical mass of people rally behind specific leadership. Millions of individuals acting independently is just chaos. So the question is, which web organization should we rally behind? WHATWG? Well, ok, but... ugh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > I find I Love MDN demeaning to technical writers. It reminds me of breaking > into spontaneous applause for our courageous health workers instead of > funding them properly so they can do their jobs.

Not surprising this is prevalent. This sort of 'artificial positive feedback and positive thinking helps solves problems' was rampant in schools.

Not to mention social media significantly selects for performative behaviour over tangible and measurable support.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'd pay $50/year to keep MDN afloat and current, though would prefer $24 ($2 per month). I think Patreon is an excellent idea.

Perhaps a combination: Patreon for continuous funding and development; kickstarter for specific big features/releases (e.g., resurrecting Places and implementing it in Servo).

Also, has anyone archived MDN, in case they pull the plug on it unexpectedly now the team is gone?

</comment><comment><USER41> I'd suggest that successful monetization strategy has already been accomplished at w3schools. Is it pretty? No. How about Stackoverflow? Prettier and that seems to work ok too.

Looks like MDN was on mediawiki at some point. It worked fine then too.

Who pays for Wikipedia? Who pays for NPR? People do use fundraisers from time to time.

Where are all the Universities in this? Should they have a roll in any of this? Seems like all the Ivy League places could donate? Maybe they already do.

I suggest that if the management team at Mozilla were actually good at their jobs maybe MDN would already me profitable. I'd also suggest that it's in browser manufacturer's interest to provide documentation. If MDN disappears something will fill that void. Maybe it's time for a change.

If all else fails, just slap everything into a man page.

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting. So the browser-compatibility section is not crowd-sourceable. I never read it, though. It does appear that there is no incentive for a browser engine to report that they are incompatible with something, only that they are compatible with something, but perhaps doing the latter implicitly implies through omission those for whom they are incompatible so that degenerates to "browser vendors will not report compatibility".

So be it. I think the rest is standards translation plus examples.

For this sort of thing, content isn't king, content is pawn. Back to w3schools or whatever, I suppose. Not the end of the world.

I think if it came to it, this could be BountySourced (or whatever the acceptable solution is now) and just suck up the fact that we won't have compatibility. With Evergreen browsers that's a moving target anyway.

</comment><comment><USER43> I feel like this also speaks to the wider trend in OSS. Businesses in many (the majority of?) and their programmers have come to expect free compilers, developer tools, libraries, security patches... and documentation and all that entails.

"Open source," projects that are well funded appear "free," which seems to distort perceptions and opinions.

Maintaining good documentation, like maintaining libraries, and good compilers takes a lot of on going effort. This creates value and deserves compensation.

If not corporate sponsors, if not a patreon style model, what else can we do? Does everyone on the web contribute a little bit through volume collective licensing when you buy a domain or host a server or from profits of commercial entities on the web platform?

<comment><USER44> The EU could probably spare a dime on Firefox and MDN, the US and other big nations too. I find public infrastructure of the internet is something I wouldn't mind my taxes being spent on.

Of course this opens another bag of problems of how to decide on which projects to finance how much or unwanted govermental influence on the projects. But I would still say it is a realistic alternative to corporate sponsors and patreon style funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The wider community taking over maintaining MDN _ought_ to be at least more feasible compared to say forking Firefox and keeping up with Chrome, which is a non-starter.

I don't think we can rely on Google or Microsoft caring for MDN in the future. They may do so for a while, but will inevitably let it languish or turn it into something that heavily promotes their own visions.

At the very least given the high traffic it ought to be getting, the current maintainers can try monetising it with non-invasive and contextual ads.

</comment><comment><USER27> It would be cool if MDN had a Stack Overflow question-and-answer style format alongside the main offering. Then Mozilla could take advantage of the gamification model where users earn badges and awards for their efforts.

Jeff Atwood said it once: `If you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try everything to increase that number`. Also: it would look good on CVs and would be a good heuristic to determine if a person's really fit for a position.

<comment><USER46> > If you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try > everything to increase that number

Damn true!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > If you deny these skills exist by pretending anyone can do it, you're > demeaning the people who have actually taken the time and trouble to build > up those skills.

See also: programming.

</comment><comment><USER48> MDN = Mozilla Developer Network. Most people wouldn't know what this is about. Tell them at the beginning of every web page.

</comment><comment><USER13> I find the premise technical writing is under appreciated or is only a professional skill little odd.

Wikipedia and StackOverflow have proved that technical writing can be done by community and crowd sourced effectively with active _moderation_.

This model has and can work, even independent sites like caniuse.com have been able to good quality content and are used widely.

<comment><USER49> The community can do an okay job but not a great one. The writing on Wikipedia is shoddy and inconsistent, and there are many many missing sources even if the article is accurate. I'm a huge fan though!

Similarly, many stack overflow questions are out of date, and good luck getting them updated to reflect current best practices. And if you do ask the same question again trying to resurface a newer, better way to do something it will almost certainly be closed as a duplicate. Huge fan of the resource though.

Ultimately, experienced professionals who are paid full time to be both writers and technologists can do a better job, especially over a long period of time.

<comment><USER13> I am not sure dedicated full time employees can do better job as _whole_ , on a single person level a professional developer, encyclopedist or writer will outperform even the best amateurs sure, but as a community many open source projects ( documentation or applications) have outperformed professional ones many times.

PostgreSQL is a good example, it fantastic documentation and runs on mostly volunteer work the documentation is on par (IMHO better) to say Oracle/ MSSQL/ DB2 documentation which have paid professional writers behind it for example

Quality is more a function of editorial oversight rather than nature of contributions itself.

SO and wikipedia has both been effective partly because of stricter review process ( reason their brands are trusted) and also have been criticized for it, getting the balance right is not easy.

Sub-reddits are good way to study this, there are ones which emphasize on participation over quality and vice versa, i.e. optimize for the reader or the writer.

There are no perfect solution, and communities must keep changing, early on contributions are more important i.e. quantity, as the site and brand grows large quality is more important (SO and wiki both went through this lifecycle).

MDN has very different starting point - strong brand and content quality but no contributing community. They will have to come with something that fits their unique needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I would pay for MDN. Their docs are really well done. I've used css-type package, which is autogenerated from the mdn json docs. It makes the development wonderful, no AI can match that. How do I put my money into the MDN fund, so it doesn't go to that a-hole CEO who gets million dollars of salary?

</comment><comment><USER51> Developers and Employers who are not ready to pay for these sites like MDN are part of the problem. No Argument here.

<comment><USER52> Would you care to argument your case anyway? Your statement seems very black & white. Not every developer has cash to spare, especially those just starting out who might need resources like this the most. Same goes for companies that are just getting started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is probably somewhat outside of the scope of the Core Infrastructure Initiative [1], but maybe that just means we need an organization of a similar nature for projects like this?

[1] [https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/](https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/)

</comment><comment><USER53> It sounds like MDN could benefit from being the work of a 501(c)(6) business league, which is how the Linux Foundation's work is funded. Money could initially come from the big existing browser vendors. It is in everyone's interest to see it continue.

</comment><comment><USER51> What you mean by donation or contributing to the projects you are using. This site says that well.

[https://sigil-ebook.com/donate/](https://sigil-ebook.com/donate/)

</comment><comment><USER54> I'd happily pay a yearly fee to continue employing technical writers, engineers, and anyone else needed to keep MDN the reliable, source-of-truth, ad-free resource that it is today.

</comment><comment><USER55> Could you slap some ads on MDN and fund it that way?

</comment><comment><USER56> What's exactly difficult in running the MDN? It's just a bunch of makrdown files contributed to by folks on payroll from Google and co. The content can be hosted on github and served via github pages. This looks like a $25/year operation to me (total, not from each MDN user). The real value comes from those folks on payroll who update MDN, but the big tech is already willing to pay for that.

</comment><comment><USER57> Whatever are you talking about? Cult of the free? Are you kidding me?

I did pay for MDN. Google monetized my personal data and gave some of that money to Mozilla.

I paid for MDN. Not with money, but same difference. Mozilla got money.

Now if you want to complain about Mozilla not spending that money on MDN but relying on crowdsourcing, then be my guest. I don't have enough insight into who go paid what at Mozilla to comment on that.

But please stop the "cult of the free" b/s. Just because there is no paywall in front of it does not mean it wasn't paid for.

</comment><comment><USER58> Defunding MDN seems like an enormous strategic blunder on Mozilla's part. Its existence and popularity help ensure that developers are writing to the standard, and not just Chrome's implementation of the standard.

This is good for everybody, but _in particular_ for Mozilla because it reduces the chance that people will write things that work on Chrome but not Firefox and then just call it a day.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think there may be interesting alternatives. If you want everyone to pay their share then you're basically proposing a paywalled site. But is it necessary? A much smaller community with some combination of volunteers and funding could make a site for everyone. (One person is too small, obviously, since they'll burn out.)

But I do think this article hits on something important, which is the difference between activism devoted towards demanding things of others, versus activism devoted to creating an organization to actually do some work.

It seems like it would be quite possible (though there is a lot of work involved) for someone to create an independent organization that just works on MDN? You don't anyone else's permission. There are various volunteer groups that decide to fix various things on Wikipedia, without having any intention of running Wikipedia.

But someone needs to lead. Who will bell the cat? [1]

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

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm surprised the article doesn't mention W3Schools, because that's another model that has existed in parallel with, and may actually predate MDN.

It has incredible Google juice, seems to be as resilient as an army of cockroaches, and is about as pretty.

Still, it's another path this could take.

<comment><USER27> [https://www.w3fools.com/](https://www.w3fools.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I wonder how many web developers in this thread, many who are quite certain how things should be run, have ever actually contributed articles to MDN...

Everyone is an armchair director, very few actually contribute to such projects.

<comment><USER13> I would bet that most people on this thread have answered few stack overflow questions freely. Plenty of people contribute to Wikipedia , If I see simple mistakes in a project wiki or readme people submit the pull request because github makes it easy to do.

It is matter of UX and openness towards contribution. MDN never felt like it needed my contribution, not once I thought that a) I could actually add value b) my contributions were welcome. Until a couple of days back I and many others did not know even that MDN took wiki style contributions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> > You're part of the problem, not the solution.

I hate this faulty line of reasoning. It's a false dichotomy. You cannot simultaneously be either part of all the world's problems and/or solutions.

</comment><comment><USER63> MDM = Mozilla Developer Network

</comment><comment><USER64> There's a third option, which is Taboo in the US.

<comment><USER65> You're not being terribly clear. Do you mean to fund things like this from taxes, like (say) CERN or NASA?</comment></comment>


2nd Docker Birthday, the London Way - <AUTHOR> http://ivan.pedrazas.me/?p=414

<comment><USER2> Author of the post here,

The blog post it's about last night and what I call CDT - call for Docker Tutorial.

One of the ideas we had last night was to do an open request for the Docker tutorial you would like to see.</comment>


Chicago 'cloud tax' to add cost to Netflix, other streaming services - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-chicago-cloud-tax-bsi-20150701-story.html <comment><USER2> I wish Netflix would man up when these kinds of extortions show up.

Just imagine telling "Fine, we're out. Enjoy telling your city why they can no longer have Netflix".

<comment><USER3> How is this "extortion"? You pay sales tax when you buy a DVD or go to a movie, why should Netflix be tax free? I mean you can have a philosophical opposition to consumption taxes, but that's different.

<comment><USER2> > city's amusement tax

How in the world is that not extortion? This is literally a cash grab by Chicago.

<comment><USER4> Help us understand the difference. How is sales tax on DVDs not literally a cash grab by Chicago?

<comment><USER5> Local businesses operating physically inside the city consume resources to some extent. They use the roads, sidewalks, buildings, cause people to walk/drive to certain places, etc. They pay for rent and other expenses, but also use/benefit from city resources that they aren't directly charged for.

But netflix obviously doesn't have any physical presence in chicago.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't matter. Chicago residents now subsidize Chicago services some other way. (Via this Netflix tax.) End of (that) story.

Is it good that Chicago is subsidizing services by taxing some other activity, mainly those that are not really utilizing those services, and taxing residents that might not even use or benefit (directly) from those services? Well, maybe not. But since it only provides a very small selection pressure it's unlikely that residents will move out, or speak out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm always curious how taxes like this are enforced, presumably the City of Chicago can just sue companies like Netflix and Spotify if they think they're not getting their share. If I have my own small-time video streaming business does that mean I have to worry potentially about any municipality coming after me for unpaid taxes? That could get a little nuts if there are thousands of cities that could potentially have ordinances like this. How do I keep up? Am I just not understanding the scope of this?

<comment><USER8> IANAL... Within the US, you are only responsible for paying taxes in the jurisdictions you reside in. It's pretty simple to cover those cases and ignore the rest.

For example, a business with offices in California and Nevada must collect sales tax when selling mail-order stuff to California and Nevada addresses, but are not required to collect sales tax for selling mail-order stuff to the other 48 states.

<comment><USER9> That's wrong.

You are responsible for paying taxes in any jurisdiction in which you have sufficient nexus to justify taxation. For individuals, residence is the generally accepted means for establishing residence, but some states also use employment as a nexus (such as New Jersey). For businesses, nexus is much broader, and generally includes any state in which the business is incorporated or registered to do business, any state in which it has facilities or employees, and (for sales and GST taxes) generally any state in which a customer is located.

The Chicago tax would be most similar to a sales/GST tax. Under well- established state and local tax principles Netflix, et al, could generally be required to collect the Chicago tax on sales/services to Chicago customers.

<comment><USER10> > You are responsible for paying taxes in any jurisdiction in which you have > sufficient nexus to justify taxation.

...

Yup.

> For businesses, nexus is much broader, and generally includes any state in > which the business is incorporated or registered to do business,

Yup.

> any state in which it has facilities or employees,

Yup.

> and (for sales and GST taxes) generally any state in which a customer is > located.

Nope. That may be a sufficient nexus to satisfy due process, but it is not a sufficient nexus for the dormant commerce clause. See Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992).

It will become sufficient if Congress ever passes and the President signs the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2015 or something similar, but that bill is a _long_ way from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They're pretending Chicago's 2015 budget shortfall is $300 million instead of $850 million because they're ignoring the $550 million they owe to police and fireman pensions; putting that off until October.

The expected-to-raise $12 million "cloud tax" will cover 4% instead of 1.4%. So that's good news...

[http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20140801/NEWS02/14073...](http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20140801/NEWS02/140739943/emanuels-2015-budget- puts-off-pension-crisis-for-now)

<comment><USER12> After selling parking meter collection rights, and trying to sell Midway, surely they still have some other public infrastructure cash flows left they can sell off and then squander the proceeds when the check clears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does Netflix even have a physical presence in Chicago? How would the city be able to compel Netflix to pay otherwise? I'm thinking about how I paid no sales tax for Amazon purchases until Amazon opened a warehouse in my state.

<comment><USER14> Shhhhh... Don't broadcast your flouting of your state's Use Tax like that!

<comment><USER13> I said I paid no sales tax. That is accurate and legal. I mentioned nothing about use tax! =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If used widely, wouldn't this basically kill every software startup? A new startup with, say, 10,000 users can't possibly afford to file hundreds of pages of tax paperwork in each of 2,000 separate local jurisdictions.

<comment><USER16> That just lets companies like Avalara sell a cloud based Ted solution

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nothing spurs local businesses and high-tech innovation like absurd taxes and regulation.

Chicago just got nixed from my "potential non-SV startup locales" list.

</comment><comment><USER18> With Chicago's famous history as a bastion of innovation in corruption, this doesn't really surprise me at all. Those pockets need filling, people, and who better to squeeze for cash than those silly Internet businesses? They aren't even real!

<comment><USER19> Yes exactly, I can only presume the funds will go to building additional black sites so they can torure and murder people.

The solution is not to pay, Chicago has no legitimate authority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if this violates the Commerce Clause.

</comment><comment><USER21> itd be interesting to have info on how such things can be voted (?) or established</comment>


Why it's OK to leave a tech job at 5 p.m. - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/16/tech/web/cashmore-facebook-sandberg/index.html?hpt=hp_c1 <comment><USER2> This country rapidly needs to regain its sanity when it comes to work/life balance. While some of us employed in tech may have the luxury of giving the middle finger to stigma, many employees in other sectors are not able to do so.

What do you do when a 11-12 hour workday is expected upon penalty of being marginalized and eventually let go? In particular, what do you do when you don't have extremely in-demand skills, and cannot readily take the gamble on being back in the market for a new job? This is a situation many of our peers are in, and it deserves attention - if for no other reason than it 1) applies to many tech jobs already and 2) will only become more of an issue if/when the current tech job market contracts.

If this unfortunate workaholic-glamorization trend continues, we are setting ourselves up for very unpleasant professional careers down the line.

<comment><USER3> I honestly don't get it. I am almost skipping to my car after my day job so I can go home and work on my personal projects. Why would anyone want to stick around later to make someone else more money?

<comment><USER4> Because you don't want to be the asshole that did not put enough hour, and did drive the project in a wall. Not that it was going anywhere else...

<comment><USER3> If a project's success is hinging on its developers' willingness to lose valuable personal time for it, those companies better start coughing up equity.

<comment><USER5> Or even better, they better start coughing up more $$$. As in substantially more. I think software companies should hire full time but pay by the hour. Overtime will disappear or be required rarely. Employees will be happier.

Of course, bad managers, to make themselves look good will assign 1 weeks worth of work for every hour at first. Till they all lose their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm kind of suspicious whenever I hear the phrase "work/life balance". It strikes me as something that seeks to reinforce the industrial-revolution-era idea that my (week)days should be broken into thirds: working (not fun but pays bills), playing (fun but costs money), and sleeping.

Sure, that's definitely better than working 12 hour days, but is that really the goal? It seems that most of the fun-loving and happy people I know, regardless of their financial situation, don't operate in such a world.

A good friend and startup founder (who you might think would tend towards free-market/libertarianism, since he works very hard and surely wants to be compensated for it) asks me: we can feed and clothe and house everyone, so why don't we? Why isn't work optional? People who work hard to make a dent in the universe will anyway, and people who just mess around don't really get much done at work anyway, so why keep up the charade? How many great ideas (or works of art) are stuck in somebody's brain simply because they don't know how to make that idea pay the rent?

I'm a programmer -- or at least, of all the things I've done in my life, that's the one I've been paid the most money for. But personally, I hate that it's always indoors and sedentary. It's unfortunate that society places so much value on an activity that is arguably bad for my physical and mental health. So why are virtually all programming jobs (ostensibly) full-time, i.e., 40 hours? A programmer's salary is great, but why can't I work 20 hours as a programmer, and 20 hours as a tree-planter, or teaching rock climbing to high school kids, for maybe 55% of a programmer's salary? Out of all the possible ways of dividing up my time, spending all daylight hours indoors writing code is perhaps the worst I can imagine.

I know I don't have all the answers, but I think that after a decade of work, I'm starting to know what questions to ask. If I find myself asking about "work/life balance", I've already lost, because it means I'm admitting that the "work" is something I know I won't love doing. Certainly some people have no problem breaking their day up like this, but I can't, and I suspect I'm not alone.

<comment><USER7> _People who work hard to make a dent in the universe will anyway, and people who just mess around don't really get much done at work anyway, so why keep up the charade?_

This is typical libertarian claptrap, from the Skilled White Male litany. The only thing of value appears to be making a dent with your special skills, and no consideration is given to the huge numbers of unskilled jobs required to keep 'the universe' running.

The point is that society supports far more shitty retail jobs than universe- denting programming jobs. Those shitty jobs need to be done, and it's hard to excel in them. What kind of dent can a convenience store clerk make? They're still necessary though - and for people in those jobs, work is not particularly fun.

In terms of your hand-wringing about full-time programming work, there are all sorts of ways you can work part-time in programming and part-time in something else. That you can't see this shows you haven't really thought about the problem seriously.

Hell, if you really are a 'denter' and have skills that are in demand, you have a good chance of simply going up to your boss and saying that you only want to work part-time now. Frequently they'll still want to keep you on for your dentable skills.

<comment><USER6> > This is typical libertarian claptrap, from the Skilled White Male litany.

Perhaps I was understanding or explaining it poorly, but my understanding is that it's close to the _opposite_ of the "typical libertarian claptrap", which I take to mean something close to "we need the concept of money (and a free market) to _get_ people to work" (and consequently, if you don't work, you get no money, and therefore none of the stuff you need). The position I was talking about is very explicitly that, whether or not you work at all, you deserve food/shelter/healthcare/education/etc.

The point was not _whether_ you can change the world with your work (I think that'd more accurately be the "G. H. Hardy claptrap"!), but _why_ you do what you do, or not, e.g., I know someone who works in a bookstore who would be there even if salaries did not exist.

> shitty jobs need to be done

This statement has been the case for all of human history, and yet the mechanism by which these jobs manage to get done has changed rather drastically many times. Even assuming the current set of "shitty jobs" isn't changing, I see no reason the mechanism couldn't change again.

> In terms of your hand-wringing about full-time programming work, there are > all sorts of ways you can work part-time in programming and part-time in > something else. That you can't see this shows you haven't really thought > about the problem seriously.

You are welcome to accuse me of being stupid, or to point out that these opportunities are incompatible with my other (unstated) requirements, but it's not fair to claim that I've not thought about the problem seriously.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry but this is BS. You don't deserve food/shelter/healthcare/education etc. You only deserve what you go out of your cave, kill, and bring back home.

Food, shelter, healthcare, and education are all things that require someone else to do something to provide. Why should I have to go to work to pay for your X that you think is a right so that you can sit on your couch or plant trees and be happy. That's absurd. That bread you find at Kroger, somebody had to work to make it appear in your cart.

<comment><USER9> > That bread you find at Kroger, somebody had to work to make it appear in > your cart.

In any community there is likely to be someone with a passion for something. Whether that something is making bread, helping the sick, or teaching children.

It's true that there are some jobs which people aren't naturally inclined to do, but in the society being described I think that communities would become smaller, and more cohesive. Some the of the jobs required to maintain a large city no longer need to be done, and those that do still need doing become less of a strain and can be distributed amongst people.

<comment><USER8> we've tried utopian societies before. they have never worked. we've tried socialism and it mostly doesn't work that well. communism looks great on paper and it has been a failure. why do people still continue to believe this is the way things should be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's funny - to me - is that I'm sitting here asking myself "why is this even a story?" I do not work more than 8 hours a day, when working any sort of $DAYJOB. I just don't... there's no good reason to, and I'm not going to do it. My time belongs to me (or, more appropriately, to my startup) and the opportunity cost of spending extra hours at "the office" is just way too high.

Now, if I were working for someone else's startup, or working on my startup full-time, and had significant equity and working long hours had a direct correlation between my chances of becoming independently wealthy, then sure. In fact, I already work 60 or 70 (or more) hours a week, since I'm spending almost all of my night and weekend hours on Fogbeam Labs as it is.

But, yeah... unless there's a compelling reason to work long days at a job that is basically "just a salary", I refuse to do it. I don't really give a shit what my coworkers, boss, or anyone else thinks about it.

<comment><USER11> It is news to where I work. When I interviewed I was told 40 to 45 hours a week. I get here and was doing 40 hours and then told they need "more hours out of us" and "it would be different if there wasn't a backup of work" (which as far as I could tell there wasn't any, just one of the devs constantly changing stuff).

There are 3 devs (including me) and the other two keep putting in much more than 40 hours whereas I strive for just 40. When I first started I tried for more but then I realized that it didn't matter. There was no incentive for me. It actually made me hate the job more and more.

<comment><USER10> _I get here and was doing 40 hours and then told they need "more hours out of us" and "it would be different if there wasn't a backup of work" (which as far as I could tell there wasn't any, just one of the devs constantly changing stuff)._

Call me radical (and more than a little bit reckless) but I find the appropriate response to that to be some combination of:

"Then hire more people"

and/or

"I quit"

Of course, I am single with no wife/kids/etc., and not a lot of responsibilities except to myself, so I can afford to be a bit cavalier. I understand that not everybody can, but in that case, I would use the situation as motivation to go with the adage "If I can't _find_ the job I want, I'll _create_ the job I want" and start a startup. Yeah, you wind up working even more hours then, but - at least for me - it's justified because the goal is to create a better situation for yourself in the end.

But again, I acknowledge that my path isn't for everybody and that everyone's story and constraints are different. So please don't take this response as being judgmental or anything. Just offering another perspective...

<comment><USER11> I agree with that and definitely want(ed) to do that but my situation wasn't the best for that doing that: \- no CS degree and no professional dev experience \- saving for a wedding that is happening this October \- quit a job that paid decent (for an Economics major ;) ) to do this.

I'm planning to leave around my 1 year mark so I can find a better place to work (oh did I mention they offer 0 days off for the first year, turns out it is a much bigger deal than I thought it would be for me). So in my free time I work on my blog, post some code and keep on taking my MS classes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I believe strongly in a sustainable pace. Software development isn't like brick-laying - you can't work more hours, past the breaking point, and expect to get marginal returns. Sure, you'll get some sloppiness and "bugs" in bricklaying, but likely nothing that can fundamentally ruin the project.

Software developers working too much lead to negative returns as they add more bugs than they fix (or add features). And sleep-deprived coding has lead to more architectural "bite us in the ass" problems than any slightly faster feature output.

That's why I have a cap at ~40 hrs/week. Don't work any more or I'll get mad.

And I believe in the "Results Only Work Environment" (<http://www.gorowe.com>) - there is no clock; folks "working late" or "coming in early" have nowhere to hide. Only the people working at a sustainable pace and consistently delivering high-quality, working software are rewarded.

And we're hiring: <http://fundinggates.com/jobs>

<comment><USER13> _you can't work more hours, past the breaking point, and expect to get marginal returns_

I find it a little depressing how difficult it can be to convince folk of this though - both employers _and_ employees.

Once team I was brought in to help was working silly hours, and I could very quickly see that it was having a terribly effect on productivity. You could just look at the stories that were being worked on at 9pm on a Friday night and guarantee that you'd be seeing them again the next week with a bug report attached.

I managed to persuade everybody to start working more sensible hours. We collected stone cold _facts_ from the history of the number of bug reports and complaints + stories done that this was _more_ productive on every scale. And yet..... push back from management (who were very invested in the "startup's work 60 hours a week" mindset) _and_ some of the developers (who had become locked into "hero developer" mode).

Even ignoring the ethical argument (not saying that you should) it's just more _productive_ to work that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> i used to be the one who would ask, "where is everyone we're a startup and it's only 7:30pm?" I used to _freak out_ if I saw a line of code that was _stupidly_ duplicated or just plain wrong.

It's been 3 startups, and 2 kids later that I realize just how wrong I was... so far no great success - but moderate success, many lessons learned and certainly people i've pushed away for truly silly reasons like perceived hours spent behind the desk or strange lines of code written... reality is I now spend fewer hours behind the desk although admittedly probably still far too many to be sane... and definitely used to (and still do) write crazy lines of code... I think it's a matter of perspective, age, prospects and who knows probably other factors that'll influence our feelings about how many hours we need to put in... after all, is it one critical bug fixed or 100s of lines of new code written which matters more - is a mater of perspective, that one bug fixed could make the difference between winning the big client or losing'em... I think "hours spent behind the desk" is a silly measure of ones productivity... a well rested mind after all makes far better decisions - that's not to say we should be lazy, but that we need balance - plan and simple.

<comment><USER15> How far you've come. I'm proud to see you write this.

<comment><USER14> haha, i'm still freakin crazy dude!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _"But, let's forget about having family or being married for a minute. 5:30 as an on average time for going home should be acceptable for everyone -- single or not single ... family or no family -- assuming you don't come into the office everyday at 11 a.m."_

Frankly, though, a lot of us _do_ come into the office at 11 a.m. (or sometimes even later), and are happy with working later hours in exchange.

<comment><USER17> At which point the article becomes more about working your 8 hour day and leaving. I doubt your happy to work until 11pm or midnight for the privilege of showing up at 11am.

<comment><USER18> One advantage is that getting in at 11am usually means it's more difficult to bully you into staying past when you should be leaving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For an orthogonal perspective, see grellas (writing on another article):

 _Work-life balance is very important as well, a point the author emphasizes. He seems to have made that choice later in life (as did I) and I commend him for it. But, while I can exhort others too to strive for such balance, I will not begrudge them the choice to work exceedingly hard (especially as they are first developing in their careers) to achieve other "unbalanced" goals. People do accomplish insanely great things by working insanely hard. If they choose to do this in their work as employees, that is their privilege and, as long as they are highly-skilled and highly compensated, I say more power to them if they do it without the benefit of protective labor laws._

Complete comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3642433>.

<comment><USER20> I think that this is the operative statement:

      as long as they are highly-skilled and highly compensated

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I do this, and occasionally I catch flak for it. I put in 8 hours, and that 8 hours happens to be fantastic -- regardless of how busy I look, what I work on, or who I work with. The problem is that casual observers don't see that. They only see the present.

Thankfully, my efforts were noticed despite my lack of unpaid overtime. I've been promoted twice in the past three years, added to special panels and events, and even been given assignments that just rock.

There is this stigma around working 40 hours a week, and only 40 hours, that I will never understand. If you don't need more 40 (or even less) to do your job, what does it matter? The employer is getting what they asked for, and often times more, and you're getting a paycheck. Its called ROWE: results oriented work environment. Just a shame it hasn't caught on in the US.

<comment><USER22> > _"They only see the present."_

That's a symptom of bad management. If they assume presence == productivity, it will be just one of many flawed assumptions and bad practices that will result in a pretty lousy workplace for knowledge workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did no one read the part of her interview where she said she started work (sending emails so people would notice) at 5.30 _am_? And then would send emails from home at like 9pm? Ie. she was working way more than 12 hours a day, she just happened to leave the office at 5.30 when other bosses might be scheduling meetings.

The 'story' is completely not what it's being made out to be.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've worked those longer hours on one startup, 10-11 hour days for several weeks putting out fires. Never once did I get paid more or even a congrats for the work. It was expected and quite frankly, I enjoyed it as a new hire. It helped me get up to speed, built up some comradeship with the other devs/mgrs there, and I had nothing better to do at home. But as the fires died down and I became well-known for my work ethic, WHEN IT WAS NEEDED, I pulled back to 8 hour days on average. So as in many things in life, it's ok in moderation to work longer hours, but I try not to make a habit of it.

Nowadays, I'm at a large enterprisey business and I may work 7 hours during off times. But there was a point (oddly enough right when I started) where I was putting in 10 hour days for a couple weeks. Now that I have kids, I really do want to get home before they go to bed. Also helps that I have a 7 minute commute.

</comment><comment><USER25> One of the joys of being a contractor is the complete lack of shame at leaving at 5pm, and being happy when asked to work later (aka get more money).

As a salaried worker I was easily pulled into working late hours as it was the status quo. In essence when you are salaried, you are owned, and will be frequently asked to work late, work weekends, and work from home at night. As a contractor, you will still get asked, but only when the reward for the company is worth the cost. As a salaried worker, the only cost for the extra time is your happiness, which isn't worth as much to them as you think.

The best jobs are ones where there is no expectation of hours though. This is where you have a significant stake in the outcome, such as an early employee or as an independent project. Where you are no longer getting paid for your time, but only for results.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit My commute is no less than 1hr, so if I'm to be home for dinner with my family I need to leave at 5 (5:30 tops). My boss is very understanding of that... in the sense that he agreed to let me come in at 7am so I could leave at 5. Did I mention my 1hr commute? You do the math. I'm gone 12hrs a day. And I still feel like I need to sneak out as everyone else is likely to be there until 6 or 7. I hate that this seems "normal" and that I feel guilty for leaving at 5. I do enjoy the couple hours of quiet time in the morning though.

</comment><comment><USER26> I used to work at a developer job where it was taboo to leave before 5:30 (even if you came in at 8:30). Management often scheduled meetings (that lasted at least an hour, sometimes more) at 5:30 on a Friday. If you wanted a personal life there, you had to fight for it. And I did - I left the job :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Work/Life balance. It's not supposed to be a bullet point to hire people with that is forgotten the moment they start working.

</comment><comment><USER27> When I was working for a company, I would get it an 8:15 and left at 17:00 on the dot. When asked if I could stay to do something which I felt could wait until the morning, I would say no and leave. I didn't get fired, instead I had a life. Working is not everything, there are much more important things in life.

</comment><comment><USER28> Completely unrelated, but why do stories having anything to do with Pete Cashmore always include a photo of him looking seductively into the camera? This one seems to be in some cool night club. As if knowing that the author happens to be a rare attractive tech reporter adds some credibility to his stories.

I do agree with the tenets of the story though. Working until 5pm should be plenty long to call it a productive day if you don't spend your time yanking off at the water cooler or gossiping with coworkers or even worse sitting in pointless meetings.

I felt so adamantly about this at one point that I wrote a series of op-eds to the New York Times trying to make the case that the single greatest way to alleviate our dependence on foreign oil, lower pollution, mitigate the need for mass-transit, and increase productivity was to give tax incentives to employers who allow employees to work from home 1-2 days per week. Seems surprising to me that more focus hasn't been put on this recently. Anyhow, the stories were never run and now I'm really off topic.

</comment><comment><USER29> I leave at 4pm.. but I get in at 7am. Generally I get a good 3-4 hours of quiet work done before everyone else shows up.

</comment><comment><USER30> It might be OK in the company policy, but where it counts is co-worker and manager opinion. I personally have found that coming into work at 7am and working til 4pm just doesn't fly with other co-workers. They get the opinion that I didn't have to work as much as everyone else. Productivity can be hard to judge, so it's easy to revert back to time in the office.

I believe there was a study at Google that had similar results as what I experienced as well.

</comment><comment><USER31> I sell my skills for money. It is all I have, my skilled time. I exchange that time for money. If my pay ends at 5.30, so does my time. No employer has ever given me free money, so Im not about to give them my time for free.

The day the free cash is handed out is the day I dish out some free time.

<comment><USER32> there are bonuses and promotions. Or another words 'discretionary' compensation. Your formula above does not work in unless you work for a 0 discretionary compensation place.

Promotion paths are also important -- a position or title that is externally recognized as 'achievement'. Is akin to a 'vetting/classification' that was done for your talents. VCs look at that as well as anybody else.

So to summarise,discretionary compensation and promosition creates competitive environment. That drives the stress, long hours,and success or failure within a corporate career path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I work till 5pm. Have done for about 2 years now. Whats happened?

1) I haven't burned out 2) I have retained good relationships with my family and friends 3) I enjoy evenings out

Previously I worked all hours. If my partner had let me I would have brought the computer to bed and typed into the night. I burned out and jeopardised my relationship.

I get that there are times when you need to work longer. When you have a deadline or something really needs to be done. However.. if this is every day for a long period of time then you are probably doing something wrong.

</comment><comment><USER34> I hear people repeatedly saying "work-life balance". Work and Life are not different things. Everything is life. If you don't have life, you can't work. It's as simple as that.

</comment><comment><USER35> You need to watch this:

<http://thewebivore.com/go-the-fuck-home-my-ignite-talk>

</comment><comment><USER36> Been a software engineer for 15 years now. I've always worked 40 hour weeks, about once a year I work a 60 hour week. I've probably made more money than my peers on average, plus I've had a life outside of work. I've always been baffled why employees put up with 50+ hour work weeks.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think everyone is complaining a bit too much. I'm trying to find an internship, (read "begging companies to let me work over 40 hours a week for them free of charge.") and have had absolutely no luck.

You're making a living, right? So what's a few extra hours per day?

<comment><USER38> That's time I don't spend seeing my partner. That's time my health deteriorates because working excessive hours is unhealthy. That's time I slowly lose friends because I never see them.

There's no point in making a living without having a life.

<comment><USER37> Well, that ultimately comes down to preference. I would rather have a job than extra time to spend in my personal life.

<comment><USER38> Well, yes. Having a job definitely takes precedence over time off from a job. But working grueling hours will only work so long for you - trust me on that. Been there, done that, got the entire t-shirt collection.

What I regret most about being willing to do this though is that I made life difficult for fellow engineers. Everybody who unquestioningly puts in long days makes it harder for somebody else to actually keep decent hours. (And you'll want to go there at some point - see above)

There are plenty of places that have good work hours, and most places that don't have crappy engineering practices on top of everything else. So if you want to do your future self a huge favor, don't sell yourself via "I can work insane amounts of time". What you'll get for that - if you'll get anything - is a crappy job at most likely a crappy place that you'll quickly come to hate.

Sell your skills instead. Or, if you actually love working 16-hour days, strike out on your own. At least then you're not working to line somebody else's pocket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "Let them eat cake," she said.

<comment><USER40> cake is a lie

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is why it's important to have a secondary source of income (most likely a business) and money in the bank. If I'm required to work past 5 for too long (once in awhile, it's fine), I find work elsewhere.

It's worked pretty well so far.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, the balance aspect is pretty key on both sides. I generally put in 7-8 hours in the office, plus perhaps an hour or so in the morning before the rest of my family is awake (though I may not always work this hour). I've been with the same employer for over five years, and there have been times that I've been asked to work a bit extra (though, typically, I've been able to leave at 5, and work later in the evening, after the kids are in bed). And, of course, there have been times I've been given a great deal of flexibility in my work schedule to accommodate emergencies.

Of course, this isn't typical, perhaps even in tech, and I feel rather fortunate to have this situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I leave at 4.30 pm. I get in at 8.00 am, so I figure eight hours is enough -- any longer than that is pointless because I'm too tired. I have a three/four hour commute on top of this and have to be up at 5.15 am. I get back home around 6.45-7-45 pm, so, fuck it, my day is long enough.

I've got a life, my own internal dialogue and other interests. Life's short enough as it is.

<comment><USER44> Why on earth do you commute so long? Is that really the best option for you?

<comment><USER45> I had a point early in my career where I accepted a 5 hour daily commute (round trip) in order to accomplish the more important goal of finding meaningful work in my field in the region I wanted to live in. Definitely sub- optimal, locally, but things worked out for the best in the end. I _did_ gain 25 lbs or so in 10 months of doing this. Luckily, it sounds like the poster is only doing this temporarily.</comment></comment></comment>


Is this the world's weirdest instrument?    - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/27/tech/innovation/artiphon-instrument-1-iphone/

<comment><USER2> "...how does it sound? According to Butera, the instrument "can sound like anything you want." So if you are in the market for a harp that plays like a violin and looks like a space-age guitar, Artiphon's new Instrument 1 may be the one instrument for you."

AK-47000? Release 2.0 with meo, leap motion would appear a nice and nautural marriage.</comment>


What If the Government Just Prints Money? (2009) - oneshot-a4yukdk http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2009/11/what-if-government-just-prints-money.html <comment><AUTHOR> I trust common sense and history. The existance of this article is more important than its arguments. See here for another version of this thinking.

[https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/the-federal- government-s...](https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/the-federal-government- should-default-on-its-debt)</comment>


Ask PG: Getting started on HN? - <AUTHOR>

I'm new and want to contributed but don't really understand the community dynamics and product.
I realize the basics around voting and the fact you shouldn't ask for or compel people to vote for content.
1.) Looks like all ASK posts don't have a link, is that a community agreed requirement
2.) When do people downvote?
3.) Are there moderators and who are they?
4.) Is sharing your own work viewed negatively?
5.) Linking vs re-posting text to HN. What do you prefer?
If people would share what they know, I'd be happy to summarize it and re-share.
Thanks! Sorry for being a noob =) But I've been waiting for someone else to ask these and haven't seen it. <comment><USER2> Read the FAQ: <http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

Read the guidelines: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

Hang around for a while and read the comments and see what the style is here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really helpful stuff. Realizing, I never saw those footer links!

Thanks @jgrahamc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1) I wouldn't say community agreed so much as set by PG. But yes, it's a requirement.

2) They exercise their own judgement. The capability becomes available once you pass a deliberately non-public karma threshold that I honestly couldn't remember if I wanted to.

3) There are. I don't believe their identities are public.

4) No. At least not in general. Sharing non-interesting posts is viewed negatively.

5) For anything that exists on its own page or is longer than a paragraph or two, definitely link. I guess you can make a case for inline quoting when you just want a very short excerpt that can only be found on a long webpage.

<comment><USER4> Regarding your point 2, the min. Karma threshold is 500 to be able to downvote.

<comment><USER5> This is just supposition, but I believe that it is also periodically increased. It was around 200 at one point, I think.

<comment><USER6> I believe I read once that the threshold increases as membership does.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you post your site/app to get USERS? - <AUTHOR>

I'm talking about CNET and similar sites, where they review your product and post an artice on their magazine/website/etc.<p>Also - which ones brought you the most users ? <comment><USER2> I'd be interested to find this out too.

Most of what I've read is to take a scatter-gun approach and then use A/B testing or similar.</comment>


STLport: An Interview with A. Stepanov - <AUTHOR> http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't see a date on this article when I posted it but I suspect by the references to Java that it is fairly old. However, I still thought it was an interesting read.</comment>


The NoSQL Hype Curve is Bending - <AUTHOR> http://phparch.com/2010/12/29/the-nosql-hype-curve-is-bending/ <comment><USER2> Some NoSQL solutions are general purpose, and some aren't. I think the analysis is accurate for those which aren't (Cassandra), but way off for those which are.

The advantage of NoSQL for the average folk isn't their speed, but rather it's their dynamism. This is especially true if you're coding in a static language. You also gain from the shift to map-reduce vs group by.

There seem to be two other points to the argument. First, someone made a funny Youtube video (and it was funny!). Second some people failed with NoSQL. Not especially good arguments.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author is an SQL language and MySQL database consultant, and he writes an article questioning NoSQL. Fair enough, and I agree with his point that different NoSQL datastores have different strengths and weaknesses and it can be difficult on a new project to know up front which CAP tradeoffs may be OK to make (e.g., HBase may have better tuning for faster consistency but Cassandra is likely easier to set up across different data centers; MongoDB is very easy to use in simple master slave or replica sets setups if no sharding is required; etc.)

Personally, I use PostgreSQL and MongoDB for most of my work but make a real effort keep up to speed on CouchDB (actually, BigCouch is more interesting), HBase, Cassandra and a few RDF datastores.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've had a pretty good run at cleaning up after botched database jobs, so caveat emptor...

Two things:

1\. Most day-to-day problems involve relationships among entities. It's not stodgy or wrong to use a good RDBMS when that's the problem you're dealing with.

2\. Many NoSQL adopters wind up building a relational database on top of something else. That's a fun job, but not everyone can afford to ditch 40 years of R&D and pretend they've invented something. I think a lot of the allure in implementing these solutions comes the hype, promise of a silver bullet-like solution, and the opportunity to dabble the intricacies of creating a database.

<comment><USER5> You could also arge that adopters 'sql style RDBMS' end up building a NoSQL datastore.

If you find you are using a lot of EAV, polymorphic associations, multicolumn attributes, trees, graphs it might be a better option to go down one the on of the many NoSQL routes. Key/Value, Column Stores, Document and Graph databases. Sometimes you can make huge gains in design simplicity because you persistance and/or queries map far more cleanly.

An interesting example of "NoSQL" on top of an "RDBMS" is Salesforce [1].

A huge upside to RDBMS in my view is that they are 'well understood' in production, and operations know how to deal with them.

It is a big design space out there, and you can make a lot of tradeoffs :)

[1] [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/SalesForce-Multi- Tenant-A...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/SalesForce-Multi-Tenant- Architecture-Craig-Weissman)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does attention and interest == hype?

I've seen many articles about NoSQL, but few that insisted it was the shit and the True Path for all development.

Mostly the articles explained what this or that DB was, or how this or that company solved a problem using some NoSQL tool.

It's new (for many people), interesting, and worth talking about.

If anything seems over-inflated to the point of hype, it's the idea that there's all this hype about NoSQL.

<comment><USER7> to answer your question: true

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the biggest costs of a NoSQL solution in an early-stage startup: what's hot today may be abandoned by everyone else by the time you're a real company, leaving lots of effort inventing clever solutions to novel problems created entirely by your data.

It's much more feasible to start with a solid database and add caching for hot data than it is to try to build a company and a brand new database technology at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER9> I took me 3 months or so to finally grok CouchDB map/reduce queries. Now that I've seen the light, I'm not sure I'll go back to an RDBMS any time soon -- at least not for bread and butter webdev.

"...You must know what will be the questions that you will be asking upfront."

Even in SQL land you need to know your queries in advance. Sure you can do table scans on unindexed fields, but you're going to crush i/o.

With Couch you can always deploy new views during a maintenance window for queries you didn't anticipate. Same thing with adding indexes in an RDBMS to handle unanticipated/slow queries.

At least with Couch I know that my queries are more-or-less pre-computed in B-trees. I know I'm not scanning the same tables over and over.

Moreover, if you know what you're doing wrapping conflict handling around Couch's MVCC is straightforward.. and you get all the benefits of offline replication.

In my case, I've built a service that calculates utility-style usage based off Couch range queries that are reduced into a cost calculation. Given any date range I can reduce a utility fee an order of magnitude faster than I could in SQL land.

YMMV, etc.. but I'd say this is a case of "haters gonna hate".

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems contradictory, since startups thrive on making radical departures from the status quo, but I think there's a strong case to be made to build your foundation (the stuff nobody sees, but plugs along silently in the background) on tried and true technologies, as opposed to the hot new thing.

Of course, in 5-10 years, some NoSQL solutions will be the tried and true tech, and we'll be arguing whether DoublePluSQL is really worth all the hype it's been getting.

<comment><USER11> > startups thrive on making radical departures from the status quo

Meanwhile, Pinboard.in quietly sucks up the Delicious community, using technology that's as dishwater-dull as possible.

Delicious itself is floundering, due to (among many other things) a problematic migration to a framework that was internally marketed as the sexy new thing. That framework wasn't NoSQL at all (quite the opposite) but the point stands that the cost of new frameworks can be dear.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any reference for this ? Delicious' problems as far as I've read anywhere are due to Yahoo's cutbacks, plus having to integrate with Yahoo services, making it hard to break off and sell to another company. However I've not heard about any specific technical issues with Delicious itself.

<comment><USER11> I worked one floor away and have friends who worked on Delicious. Generally they haven't talked about this, so I don't think I should. Plus I'm getting a bit tired of all the TC "scoops" that come out of all of this bitching in public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a terrible article. His three main points:

1\. "You find yourself writing lots of code to reinvent the wheels that SQL gives you for free, and before long you've unwittingly reinvented the relational database."

NoSQL came about because people were sharding their data and managing relationships outside of the data layer in custom code anyway, and they were well-served by putting some of that complexity back into the data layer. This wasn't a trend because people don't understand the mathematical beauty of normal forms. This was a trend because altering the schema of a heavily accessed MySQL table will bring your website down.

2\. Digg

A Digg engineer on Quora recently said, "The whole 'Cassandra to blame' thing is 100% a result of folks clinging on to the NoSQL vs SQL thing. It's a red herring." ([http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for- Digg-v4s-tech...](http://www.quora.com/Is-Cassandra-to-blame-for- Digg-v4s-technical-failures)). Yup.

3\. The MongoDB is Web Scale video

...really?

</comment><comment><USER14> The irony is that most of the arguments for NoSQL have nothing to do with SQL itself and everything to do with the underlying storage mechanism and ACID semantics. A more accurate acronym would be NoB-tree or NoACID.

<comment><USER15> Would you care to elaborate on that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is actually the first time I came across <http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033/>

I have always seen the relational-databases-VS-nosql-databases as a false dichotomy. I think these systems serve different purposes. I use MySQL+memcache for a site now, but I'd have no hesitation to use CouchDB for another site if that's more suited for it. I'd even use them both if that's beneficial for the webapp.

<comment><USER16> And the followup: "MySQL is not ACID-compliant", <http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7091415/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> NoSQL is a terrible name for a technology. Why define it by what it isn't, instead of what it is?

I've pretty much ignored NoSQL because of this, and because I haven't had any data storage problems that aren't easily solved with either a relational database or LDAP.

</comment><comment><USER18> A chap named Brooks wrote an article a long time ago that went by the name "No Silver Bullet".

Sorta sad how the world keeps looking for the silver bullet to slay the vampires of software. You'd think by now we'd know...

</comment><comment><USER19> Yep... I never quite bought the NoSQL hype.

The only valid point was to relax some of the guarantees (like consistency) in order to achieve better scalability.

In the end once cannot escape the CAP theorem ([http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap- theor...](http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem))

<comment><USER20> Is there a NoSQL database that claims that? I don't know of one. Rather, they attempt to implement different facets of CAP. Also, the CAP theorem, as it stands, is showing its age, Brewer himself has said it needs to be updated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm one of those who dove head first into NoSQL primarily because of hype. I've learned better. Relational is now my default, and I identify specific cases, specific tables that I know for sure won't need complex querying, and move those to NoSQL.

Though the end effect is that NoSQL still stores 60+% of my data.</comment>


Why Found a Server Chip Company When There's No Room in CPU Market? One Answer - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/02/11/throwing-down-the-gauntlet-to-cpu-incumbents/ <comment><USER2> Again, hackability, or friendliness to programmer, is nowhere in the list of priorities. :(</comment>


RIA == Platform Play - <AUTHOR> http://memeagora.blogspot.com/2008/05/ria-platform-play.html <comment><USER2> _If you were writing software in the mid-90's, you were writing it to the Win32 API._

Not everyone was.</comment>


The Redirect [Commentary on Nathan Myhrvold interview] - <AUTHOR> http://brooksreview.net/2012/08/redirect/?utm_source=loopinsight.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+loopinsight%2FKqJb+%28The+Loop%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Playing devil's advocate here, but in his defense, he DOES usually answer the questions in the first sentence or two but then goes on to support his point of view as a whole in the next paragraph or two.

(Keep in mind I do not support Patent Trolling, or most software patents at all, for that matter.)

From what I can see, Myhrvold views himself as a 21st century Robin Hood. He's stealing from the rich tech industry and giving to... well.. preparing to give to the poor.

In his answer on why he doesn't become more transparent with his patents he answer partly with: "The truth of the matter is that big technology companies use patents as a strategic tool." I think that is the whole answer to the question. For his company, patents are used to strategically used to acquire funds for "God's work".

Of course, this begs the question, is Myhrvold really focused on "the good of the world" or personal gain?</comment>


Lease Premium Domain Names Traffic for Local Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/04/27/root-orange/ <comment><USER2> This really is a phenomenal way to monetize generic domains. The best part is that the leases are so short so that I could still sell my domains if the right end-user happened to come along (a rare thing these days).

"Root Orange is a game-changer for domainers. At Root Orange, we agree the best way to monetize a generic domain name is often to sell it to an end-user. Businesses that offer the product or service described by the generic domain name can almost always get more value from the domain than the owner of a parked or developed website that depends on direct navigation traffic and PPC revenue.

Sales to strategic end-users have long been the dream of domain owners and investors, but there have always been two catches:

1) Once your name is sold, the recurring revenue stream is gone.

2) If your name does not describe a product or service offered by a major, national company the potential sale price is not very attractive.

Root Orange solves both problems. We lease every domain to multiple end-users, each in unique metropolitan markets. Instead of one sale, we can generate over 200 leases for each name in the U.S. alone."</comment>


Python linting at Venmo - <AUTHOR> http://blog.venmo.com/2015/8/26/python-linting-at-venmo

<comment><USER2> Linters are indeed excellent tools.

A "what's wrong" which the linters don't find is that for/else is one of the more confusing aspects of the Python language, and should be avoided when there are equally clear alternatives.

That is, I believe that

        for entry in entries:
            if entry == key:
                break
        else:
            raise NotFoundError

is better written as:

        if not any(entry == key for entry in entries):
            raise NotFoundError

</comment><comment><USER3> Why everybody's doing their on hooks instead of using a framework such as pre- commit [0] or Overcommit [1]?

[0] [http://pre-commit.com/](http://pre-commit.com/)

[1] [https://github.com/brigade/overcommit](https://github.com/brigade/overcommit)</comment>


Android app usage metrics - <AUTHOR> http://www.ithinki.me/

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not affiliated with the site, just came across and thought it was a good fit for posting here...</comment>


The Extent and Consequences of P-Hacking in Science - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002106

<comment><USER2> What is the long term solution to this? In my opinion we should put more emphasis on the data itself, instead of the result.

So you do an experiment set to publish _data_ , regardless of outcome: the conclusion comes as a sideline, or even in a separate publication altogether (and the exact p-value made just a note). The outcome should be a rebalancing in the bias.</comment>


Show HN: Assembly riddles - <AUTHOR> http://xchg.xorpd.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. I made a collection of interesting bit tricks and techniques that I found over the last years. I put them into 0x40 assembly riddles, each one should teach you about one thing.

You could also get the hard copy for those snippets, though all of them are on the website.

How to use it? Get an assembler (Yasm or Nasm is recommended), and obtain the x86_64 instruction set. Then for every snippet, try to understand what it does. Try to run it with different inputs if you don't understand it in the beginning. Look up for instructions you don't fully know in the Instruction Sets PDF. Start from the beginning. The order has some meaning.

Enjoy, and send me your feedback.</comment>