The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2017/07/25/the-end-of-arduino-101-intel-leaves-maker-market/ <comment><USER3> I work on IoT projects professionally, and we see a large gap between makers- grade hardware and production-quality systems. Every week we talk with startups and enterprise customers who start off on something like an Arduino, only to hit a wall because there is no good way to take it to production.

IMHO, the market is ripe for a hardware/software platform that bridges the ease of Arduino with a path to production. A bunch of the silicon vendors are in this space, but they offer weak solutions, and things like AWS IoT are really bad on the hardware side.

<comment><USER4> IMO, the biggest problem is software startups unwillingness to hire other types of engineers.

It's easy to bridge from Arduino to Atmel AVR IF you know how to do board layout. Startups need to either grow their knowledge of electronics or hire some electrical engineers.

The AVR documentation is excellent, you could easily design your own board if you have anything beyond rudimentary electronics skills.

A lot of IoT startups are dependent on attachment "blades" for interfaces. They get burned because a lot of their value proposition and profit is tied up in some other guy's blade they don't know how to build.

<comment><USER5> IMO hardware manufacturers should get their shit together.

It is unbelievable that they are not able to provide a decent hardware development platform that can match Arduino in ease of use & documentation, that use decent production-grade components, that's supported for sale for > 10 years and that has a clear path to switch from dev board to own IC.

<comment><USER6> I think that's what AVR is; there is a clear (and reasonably straightforward) path from Arduino to production on a custom board. I'm a total hack/n00b and my first AVR PCB worked.

I suspect that STM and TI are of similar difficulty, but I've only seriously played with Atmel because of the Arduino dev board (and related ecosystem).

10 year guaranteed availability of the exact same part is not guaranteed, but there's a clear enough lifecycle policy and paying any attention, you'll have a chance to a make a final "lifetime" buy. (If have the luxury problem that you're selling so much product that a lifetime buy is impractical, the NRE for a redesign is probably manageable for your business.)

<comment><USER7> The documentation for STM and TI is far, far below the standard of Atmel's, both officially and unofficially. It's more difficult to find information, there's a much smaller development community for beginners and the boards _start_ in TQFP.

That last part alone stops most people from playing with ARM, because you're almost forced to get boards made. At least with AVR/PIC you can prototype most of the Atmegas on a breadboard. Obviously there's a limit to what you can do with an AVR, but you can do a lot with 20MHz.

This may be an ARM thing though. I found it much more difficult to find development documentation for Atmel's XMega platform, I didn't even look at the SAM chips.

TI's website is a rabbit hole though. Sometimes the datasheet is enough, other times you have to go to their weird Wiki which looks unfinished. Sometimes it's available for free, other times you have to log in to get the information. STM isn't much better.

It's a crying shame. ARM is more capable and often cheaper and lower power than going the 8-bit route, but it's a pain in the arse to get started.

In terms of layout though, there isn't much in it. There are datasheets from ST that tell you what the mandatory hookups/passives are. Everything else is more or less identical to any other microcontroller, though you may need to worry about speed.

<comment><USER8> You can always get MSP430 Launchpads at $9.99 which comes with a MSP430G2x in a DIP. You can breadboard it if you want or you can run it on the board itself. The individual MSP430G2x are also pretty cheap. So if you blow one up you can always replace the chip.

The documentation for STM and TI is far, far below the standard of Atmel's, both officially and unofficially. It's more difficult to find information, there's a much smaller development community for beginners and the boards start in TQFP.

> _That last part alone stops most people from playing with ARM, because you > 're almost forced to get boards made. At least with AVR/PIC you can > prototype most of the Atmegas on a breadboard. Obviously there's a limit to > what you can do with an AVR, but you can do a lot with 20MHz._

Isn't it why we have development/prototyping boards right? You can always develop/experiment your code in it and also develop your PCB in parallel. In this way when there are problems with your custom board you can always be sure of your code.

In my experience TI documentation is excellent but their software sometimes is over engineered especially TI-RTOS.

Personally I have worked on the STM32F series and I found the documentation good. Also if you want to read through the internals of the ARM architecture you will have to refer to the ARM manuals from ARM website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who spent a bit of time trying to start a project based on the Edison, the most frustrating thing was the amount of bugs and the lack of documentation to be able to do anything about it myself, leaving me hopelessly waiting for them to release fixes.

For example, after several months of terribly slow and buggy SPI and no fix over multiple releases, I finally switched to ARM and am very glad I did. Intel did finally fix the SPI issue about 9 months after it was first reported.

With ARM, I had plenty of issues and challenges, but had the documentation and resources I needed to be able to fix things, as well as a better support community.

One of the key issues in the Intel support communities was a growing lack of trust, now confirmed by Intel dropping out. It takes a big commitment to really understand a system, and the nice thing about ARM is that the community goes beyond a single company, so a company dropping out is not as significant as in this case with Intel.

<comment><USER10> > lack of documentation

For what it's worth, I think it's an intel trademark to have bad or lacking documentation. Even projects that should have stellar documentation like intel TBB or MKL have fairly cryptic docs

<comment><USER11> They somehow think "Intel Inside" marketing strategy worked (not that Wintel monopoly happened) and they think that they can just "Intel Inside" their way into any market, and somehow make Wintel-like margins even in b2b markets that are fully commoditized, not need to put out competitive parts or reduce adoption costs with things like documentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Was Intel ever seriously in the maker market? As a maker, I feel that it was kind of an afterthought for them. The Edison looked great on paper, but the price was wrong, the tooling was inadequate, and the whole attempt felt like an enterprise was just trying to cargo-cult its way into some marketshare.

<comment><USER13> It never made sense for Intel to enter this market to begin with. Opportunities that move the needle for a company like Intel come in sizes of 100s of millions $ or more. The maker market is just not that big. "IoT" however is - from industrial to home automation and everything in between where sensors, controllers and networks get added to traditionally analog or un-networked technology.

If you look at what Intel was selling, _that 's_ the market that Intel's products were _actually_ geared toward. Look at the price, specs and form factor of the Edison. Now imagine that Intel was really trying to push into the IoT space, it is a good play considering they failed to break into mobile. These products were really competing against companies like Phytec, Variscite, Compulab, Toradex, Myir and Olimex who make ARM-based modules for embedded networked products.

Why they pushed so hard to market to the maker community instead of commercial IoT is sort of beyond me. Marketing to makers helps gain mindshare and familiarity with your product (but x86 is already ubiquitous.) For comparison, I wonder how much Atmel's bottom line has been affected by Arduino, or RPi for Broadcom. Why Intel couldn't get their act together to make a well-supported compelling product for commercial IoT applications is baffling. That's where they really failed.

<comment><USER14> I feel like Atmel and Broadcom will see more of an uptick in sales as makers finish college and get jobs doing actual engineering. If you've been building things using Atmel chips in your spare time they'll be familiar, you'll probably reach for them first when designing something for a job, and one product using a chip can lead to millions sold. Even if only a small handful of engineers converted to using their stuff instead of PIC/STM/TI/etc due to the Maker movement it's still potentially a huge payout. And considering that they didn't even pay to create Arduino it's even better!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Because no one looks at an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi and says, "I would pay top dollar for a version of this thing that has x86 instructions."

<comment><USER16> It probably would have got further if they actually managed that properly.

eg, [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=738575](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=738575)

Once you make your 'x86' incompatible enough that it won't actually run glibc fully, you've negated the whole point of having x86 in the first place.

Intel's "strategy" with Quark etc has been to to sell you on the idea of a ubiquitous platform, and then provide a niche platform that looks "mostly similar" to the ubiquity you were promised.

<comment><USER17> And also failing on the Arduino bit (Galileo's IO timing was too slow to use with many commonplace sensors)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Intels addiction to high margin products might prove to be their undoing as they get disrupted from below.

<comment><USER19> History repeats itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Everything you need to know about joke of an Intel IoT/maker offering is right there in hackaday comments:

"Chinese companies, even with a language barrier, are __BETTER THAN INTEL __at documentation "

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not very surprised with this. Quite a long time ago I came across their Galileo boards but for the price point it just did not seem worth it - 2 - <USER2> times the price of a RasperryPi or Uno.

The appeal/benefit of having x86 was just never there for me or the agency I was at. I could see how it might be useful if you are writing a lot of assembly and low level at that but this seemed too much of a niche with the way they were marketed. If it had networking and I could use it with Python I was happy.

<comment><USER22> x86 has two things going for it: Microsoft Windows x86/AMD64 compatibility, and highest possible performance (not performance per watt; absolute attainable performance). If you don't need either, it is expensive in cost, power or both. And in the IoT/Maker world, one rarely needs computing power on the device itself (and Galileo doesn't really provide a lot of computing power), or wants to pay for a windows license per device (and deal with activation, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Intel really seems to be stuck in their commodity PC / Server mentality. The number of customizations that are done these days in mobile and I suspect as things become cheaper IoT is pretty impressive. Intel hates customization since that means other people make money (see the whole NVidia Ion chipset saga). I just cannot see them making any headway with their current "must be high volume commodity product" attitude.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think Intel realized that the 'maker market' is the craft/toy/hobby market not the embedded systems market. Intel is also dealing with threats to its core businesses so better to pull back from a marginal market that can't even support what were the two leading chip companies in the space (Atmel & Microchip) and focus on not losing market share to ARM in other areas.

<comment><USER25> Microchip recently acquired Atmel I believe

<comment><USER24> Exactly, the market could not support both. Generally that is a sign of a weak market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Intel attempting to make a play in the maker market with their x86 cores seem attractive to many software developers. Partnering with arduino was a good move for usability but the boards that they were competing with were players like Beagle board and Raspberry Pi. Realistically they could try to be in third place but to unseat ARM boards proved to be too difficult.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's quite unfortunate as they were a convenient middle ground between amateur and "we'll sell to you only if you order 500+ units" boards, and the brand was famous enough in less technical circles to help prototypes being taken seriously (given the technical side is rarely what kills off a project).

</comment><comment><USER28> Not the first time. Intel got into mobile devices circa 2000-2001 or so. Then suddenly they abandoned this area.

I worked on a secure (authenticated, encrypted) port forwarding proxy for mobile devices at that time. Our company partnered with Intel to bring the software to their new mobile devices. We were quite far along, with working demos and all. Then one fine day, word came down from the higher levels in Intel that they are pulling out of that.

The Intel team we collaborated with were split up and sent in different ways within Intel and that was that.

It was bad for us because we put resources into it and were counting on some cash which never materialized, plus the dot com bust was in full downward swing.

</comment><comment><USER29> I saw it coming when they discontinued Joule and Galileo.

I actually liked the Curie chip, plenty of goodies in one die. From bluetooth LE to battery charger to accelerometer and gyro plus hardware acceleration for k nearest neighbor (cool for gesture recognition). All that on small form factor low energy die.

Plus, I _feel_ safer using a curie for IoT than just using a raspberry pi and never updating a linux distro.

[https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule- gal...](https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-galileo-and- edison-product-lines/)

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if all those declarations by Intel are just a game: Declare something big/interesting with tons of media etc - stock picks up by x%, than a few years afterwards, cancel it without a fanfare, stock goes down by much less than x%. Intel wins. For those knowledgeable about the stock market, could it be the case ?

Because that would be a good explain why did Intel enter this field, which is is a very poor fit for it - unless they come with some breakthrough.

<comment><USER31> The stock price is driven by what investors think the company is worth. For what you describe to work, investors would need to calculate that the investment Intel made here was profitable (via the sales made, for example), thus adding value to the company. At which point you couldn't really see it as a "game", but a good investment that was now ended.

<comment><USER30> That's only one parts of what deteremines the stocks' worth. There's also predictions of future growth.

<comment><USER31> But it's hard to see cancelling a product as a cause of growth.

<comment><USER32> Canceling an unsuccessful project can trigger a growth in profits.

<comment><USER31> Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees: OP's scenario is a strategy in which the project's start (with investment) causes a raise in valuation, and its premature cancellation a smaller decrease in valuation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of a saying that one of my startup mentors has said many times. "A great way to make a small fortune in home automation is to start with a large fortune." Seems that Intel is taking their step back rather than doubling down on the long game.

</comment><comment><USER34> Intel could make tons of money by licensing their IP so 5-10 USD SoC could flood the IoT market.

<comment><USER35> intel IP just doesn't even offer anything in that space. who cares about x86-compatibility when you're doing new firmware? it's a horrorshow compared to what ARM provides.

i don't need AVX extensions or whatever, i need sane and plentiful interrupts, a reasonable memory model, simple IO, etc.

<comment><USER36> So, an Intel 8051.

<comment><USER35> lacks "sane and plentiful interrupts" and "reasonable memory model".

so, no.

<comment><USER36> Okay, but could the 8051 have made a decent foundation for a small, _cheap_ 8/16 bit core? Intel could have literally given the parts away.

The obvious answer is that Intel couldn't monetize it like the x86, so there we go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to get hold of an intel gallileo at launch as a gift from intel.

Unfortuantely the experience of using it was mediocre and am not the least bit surprised about this news.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sounds like to me this is because the market for developing novel IOT devices is not as disruptive as previously thought.

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow, that was fast.

</comment><comment><USER40> Good riddance!

</comment><comment><USER41> One could argue the never actually entered the maker market. I can't name one prominent project that used any Intel maker oriented device. That's a monumental marketing/product development failure: offer overpriced products that don't really do much (if anything) new, then completely fail to get people interested in them. No one cares about your instruction set here, so you can't ride on that alone.

</comment><comment><USER42> Well, that took a surprisingly long time to happen.

The maker community represents a trivial (at best) contribution to Intel's bottom line. Intel's bread has always been buttered by delivering high- performance, server-grade chips to the people willing to pay for the cutting edge of performance. And every year, at that! That's pretty much the opposite of the maker market - people who are building electronics for fun, and not exactly flush with cash to spend on it. I'd wager that the net profit of any one of Intel's enterprise customers vastly outstrips the entirety of what they made on their _entire_ maker line of chips and boards.

Why would they bother diluting their production focus and stretching their support engineers thin, to help court and address the concerns of a bunch of spendthrift HW hackers and garage IoT operations?

<comment><USER43> IBM used to make all of it's money from Mainframes, but then over the years commodity computers have gotten good enough to replace mainframes in most businesses. There are still some customers who need them, but the lion's share of the market is now dominated by commodity x86 servers.

Now x86 is in the process of being disrupted. Look at ARM for example. Currently, most ARM chipsets are focused on mobile applications where low power is necessary. They are not powerful enough to compete with x86 on the server (yes I know there are ARM server parts, but it's still early days), but soon they will be for most customers. And at that point, the power/cost advantage will cause customers to switch over. This is already happening in laptops, with both Apple and Microsoft moving to ARM for their desktop OS. So I think it makes a lot of sense for Intel to try and address this concern, and competing with ARM/MIPS head on for the IoT market is one way to do this.

IMO the mistake Intel made is trying to take their x86 process, which has a value chain designed to serve high margin server markets, and shoehorn it into the IoT market which is dominated by low margin, ultra cheap parts (think ESP8266).

Take a look at this book for more info: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)

<comment><USER42> > ...most ARM chipsets are focused on mobile applications where low power is > necessary. They are not powerful enough to compete with x86 on the server... > but soon they will be for most customers... I think it makes a lot of sense > for Intel to try and address this concern, and competing with ARM/MIPS head > on for the IoT market is one way to do this.

I agree with most of your reasoning - it's the strategic choice to go after the embedded market that I think was unwise. The makerspace move was Intel trying to compete in a whole different sector than their core competency (embedded devices vs server chips). A more sensible strategic move, in my opinion, would have been trying to optimize the power consumption of their previous generation server grade chips. That allows them to sell through their existing channels (which they're very good at), but segment based on those customers that care about power consumption. It's all of the advantages of ARM, but eliminates a lot of risk to the customer by being x86, and legacy compatible. Plus, it gives the sales guys the option to say "Well, if you _don 't_ care about power, and _do_ want maximum performance, we can always discuss our cutting edge line of server cores..."

<comment><USER43> > it's the strategic choice to go after the embedded market that I think was > unwise

I think the way they entered the market was unwise, not the decision itself. For example, Intel could have created an independent org within itself that could use Intel's resources but wasn't tied to legacy processes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you want to be employed only 3 days a week while starting a startup? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN. The fastest way to fund a startup may always be to fund it yourself. To be employed during the day, and work on the startup on nights and weekends.
One of the early bottlenecks with this is lack of time. You don't have as much time as you'd need to work on the startup. Which means if there was a way to quickly exchange money for time that would be something founders want.
Does anyone on HN want this?
Do you want to be employed only 3 days a week at a day job while starting your startup on the remaining 4 days?
Or are there enough signs that starting a startup takes over your life, and that the only conclusion from these signs is that you need to jump in fully every week, which means being employed only 3 days a week wouldn't be enough anyway?
If there is something here I'm missing I'd like to know it sooner than later. Thanks. <comment><USER2> My co-founder and I, have been spending 4/5 days a week on our startup, and 1(-2 days max) a week on paid-for programming work.

It is really hard to find that sort of part-time paying work, especially on a long term retainer. (If anyone thinks it is easy to find such - please share!)

We've done it this way, because this allows us to self-fund, and carry on much longer with our idea which we always new is one that would take a longer time than most other startups to gain a breakthrough.

We are building stuff that would allow non-technical business users to draw their own systems into existance without programming.

This is a hard problem, not something to attack with the typical MVP mindset, at least not at the outset.

We also want the maximum time to pivot to different ways of marketing it, and applying it in different ways to try to get it to a solid financial outcome.

Being pressured to make money of a startup can with some technologies, lead you to make short term smart decisions that are limiting you in the longer term.

For those interested in what we are building:

[https://taskputty.com](https://taskputty.com)

For now, we just have a CRM product, but you can alter any aspect of the system by changing process diagrams and using drag and drop editors.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working full-time while pursuing passion projects in hopes of eventually starting a company. You've hit the right pain point with time being the challenge. I have frequently found myself wanting to dedicate more time to my company. However, with a family and other financial responsibilities, it's a challenge for sure. That said, I'm not prepared to give up on my dream no matter what the circumstance is. And in all honesty, working full-time does also help me to learn new things and develop skills that I need for my startup so there is a point to being employed first as opposed to just going all in.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have been trying this out the past year. More like, get a contract gig for a 3-6 week period working on the startup stuff at night and then taking 4-8 weeks off to work on it full-time. It's a tough balancing act. I know personally for me the context switching with shorter time periods is difficult. There are so many times I want to complete a piece of functionality or fully fix a defect and not leave it in mid-stream to go work on something completely different.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to have a part-time full-time job so I had time to work on various passion projects.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've done this a lot, usually as a consultant. Works great. I haven't found that I wanted more time for the startups - in fact, the consulting work has been a good counter balance to the startup work.</comment>


Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak rips into own company, poo-poos Siri - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-rips-into-own-company-poo-poos-siri/story-e6frfro0-1226399005967

<comment><USER2> I have to completely dis-agree with Woz here. The scenarios he is bringing up are things that a typical user of an Apple product would never ask. 95% of the people just want to look up contacts, addresses, movie times, sports info, schedules. Everyday things. Apple is optimizing for that. They day when most people are asking prime numbers greater then 87, I am sure Siri will be optimized for that.

And remember, Siri in its previous versions would send all recorded text to a server for processing, and a result would shoot back. In current implementation, Siri is doing all voice process on the device and handling queries directly in realtime -- optimization have to be made and limits do have to be imposed.

There is a difference between making an application to show technical prowess, and an application that is actually going to be used by consumers to solve everyday problems. And they are very different kinds of products.

Apple understands this.</comment>


Ask HN: Who is using postgres on GCP Cloud SQL? - <AUTHOR> It's still not out of beta. Is there any risk in using it? <comment><USER2> I used it for a few month and it was fantastic. It works great. You have zero reason not use it if fit for your usage and budget</comment>


React is not the new JQuery - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dmitrigrabov/react-is-not-the-new-jquery-e42a19f165f4 <comment><USER2> Completely agree. jQuery gave us a level playing field when manipulating DOM and even CSS from one browser to another was different: jQuery was effectively a DOM abstraction that allowed us to UI manipulation code once. Between that time and now the browser vendors have been hard at work actually making their rendering engines compliant with standards like HTML5, CSS3, and ECMAScript.now which is a huge boon to writers of libraries for making user interfaces, of which React is one.

My hope for the future is that web components will reach a point where the same component can be dropped into any front-end framework (Angular, Aurelia, Ember, React, Vue, etc) such that UI composition and layout libraries, components, and client-side application logic are self-contained and the libraries in which they are implemented can be swapped out with minimal effort.</comment>


You Know Twitter's "Favorite" Button? It Could Have Been Called "Thanks." - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20121022/you-know-twitters-favorite-button-it-could-have-been-called-thanks/

<comment><USER2> Maybe I use the favorite button differently/wrong but I always use it as kind of like a "read it later" button.

I store tweets there that contain links/comments for me to refer back to later - I've never considered it being used as a "Like" button.

<comment><USER3> This. The word "favourite" was usually used interchangeably as "bookmark" in browsers. A concept of something you want to save and read later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Favourite is one of those weird features on twitter I rarely use. I suppose the idea is to use it like a "like" or "+1" button but I find that "favourite" is too strong a word. There's been plenty of tweets I've seen where I think "this is a good tweet but I don't like it enough to RT it". I mean I liked the tweet but I'd never say it's amongst my favourite tweets.

<comment><USER5> Now I'm curious, does Twitter use the British spelling of the word over there?

<comment><USER6> They do not. There's only one "English" language option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We will never really know what the button reflects. I use it to save tweets, and I shudder at what people might think of me, were I to run for political office, since there are tweets from all over the political spectrum.

Some think it's a +1/agree button, others a thank-you button, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER8> There be treasure in Favorites, but nobody explores.

I favorite funny.</comment>


Apple New AirPods Pro Best-Selling Headphones with Active Noise Cancellation - <AUTHOR> https://reportagram.net/gadgets/1285-apple-announces-new-airpods-pro-best-selling-headphones-with-active-noise-cancellation.html <comment><AUTHOR> The Apple's H1 chip allows you to play audio with minimal delay. Using the pressure sensor on the case, you can easily control music and calls, as well as switch from Active Noise Cancellation to Transparency mode or vice versa. The Announce Messages with Siri feature allows you to listen to text messages through AirPods. And thanks to the Audio Sharing function, you can listen to music, podcasts and any other audio together with the other through two pairs of AirPods. Play, watch movies and listen to songs together.

<comment> cde-v You should copy and paste more from the article.</comment></comment>


Why are libraries destroying books? (2002) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/mar/22/museums.referenceandlanguages <comment><USER3> One of my local libraries recently threw out a dumpster full of books. There was a minor public outcry at the desecration of literature. The books in the dumpster had all been on sale for the last year, priced at 10p (13 cents) each. Most of them hadn't been checked out for over a decade and some hadn't been checked out since the 1970s.

Sending books to be pulped is always sad, but the truth is that there are just too many books. A researcher doesn't gain a great deal of benefit from seeing an original paper copy; in most cases, they'd prefer a digital copy. Preserving paper is inherently more expensive than preserving microfiche or digital scans. Librarians love books, that's why they became librarians, but sometimes it's just not possible to justify the shelf space for something that nobody is ever likely to read.

<comment><USER4> > Sending books to be pulped is always sad, but the truth is that there are > just too many books.

Often it's not obsolete books that are destroyed, where there might be 1,000 other copies out there, but one-of-a-kind archival records:

>> The core of the book recounts Baker's attempt, in 1999, to persuade the British Library not to junk more than 2,000 bound volumes of American newspapers - the last remaining copies in the world - including a complete run of the Chicago Tribune from 1888 to 1958 and hundreds of editions of Joseph Pulitzer's ground-breaking colour broadsheet of the 1890s, the New York World.

> A researcher doesn't gain a great deal of benefit from seeing an original > paper copy; in most cases, they'd prefer a digital copy. Preserving paper is > inherently more expensive than preserving microfiche or digital scans.

Maybe now, but preservation isn't about now, it's about the distant future. Paper is one of the few storage mediums that has proven longevity and also requires no special reading hardware. Microfiche is probably OK (there was an article recently that stated it could lat 500 years), but I'd dispute _strongly_ that "preserving paper is inherently more expensive than preserving ... digital scans." Digital data requires massive amounts of infrastructure to be usable (hardware, software, storage media, and reading hardware), and the rapid pace of change of that infrastructure means that _enormous, continuous efforts_ must be made to keep it readable in the future. Seal a newspaper up in a wall and it'll still be readable in 100 years. If you stop your digital preservation efforts for that long, you've lost everything.

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

<comment><USER5> To what degree is preservation the responsibility of a local lending library? (As opposed to an archive; a museum; the Library of Congress; county courthouses; etc?)

<comment><USER4> > To what degree is preservation the responsibility of a local lending > library? (As opposed to an archive; a museum; the Library of Congress; > county courthouses; etc?)

Personally, I would say even local lending libraries have a part to play in preservation. They may have copies of local periodicals that exist nowhere else. They should at least do some due diligence with other, more common, items to make sure they don't discard anything that's potentially _now_ unique or rare (e.g. a collection of unfashionable midcentury children's books that all libraries decided to purge around the same time). Stuff like that should be kept in an out of the way warehouse or something.

A local lending library shouldn't have to keep seldom used books in easily accessible circulation, but I feel there should be other options besides that, pulping, and digitization.

<comment><USER5> Still not sure the local library should be responsible for the actual preservation, but I like your idea on principle -- maybe having a more central organization or archive handle the preservation and coordinate determining what needs preserving (e.g. how is that local library to know that every other library in the country pulped that particular children's book 10 years ago?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems to be hoarding by proxy.

I understand the value of storing the information, but the paper medium itself doesn't typically hold value to me. Is there value in preserving an idiosyncratic style of bound book? Absolutely. Preserving a literal ton of regular old newspapers? Not so much. Let's digitize em and give the libraries room to further modernize so that they can stay relevant.

<comment><USER7> Very rational people here.

The moment you tap on libraries, every employee at the library goes on facebook and calls moms to revolt.

Its emotion driven, and as a result a political tool.

<comment><USER8> Every librarian worth their salt knows that weeding is just as important as selection and acquisition. The most emotional people in regards to weeding are often people that read too little, but idolize the object of the book.

<comment><USER7> See this topic where even tech nerds are idolizing books...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Libraries throw away tons of books and stuff. If a man-made object is degraded to the point where it's garbage, why not? Sure, some of these tomes may have been recoverable, but if they aren't historically valuable for some reason, why save it? Same thing with any "historical" object, do you imagine that we'll want to save a copy of "Getting done in my butt by my butt" when it's old and yellowing just because it's old?

Of course, that's not the point of the article, the article's point is that they recorded it on microfilm and now that's going bad, too. The headline here is awful, as any library worker will tell you libraries destroy books all the time for really good reasons.

<comment><USER10> >If a man-made object is degraded to the point where it's garbage, why not? Sure, some of these tomes may have been recoverable

Or hasn't been checked out in years, or is grossly outdated then why waste physical space to preserve it. Sure, some patrons might find novelty in there being a book that mentions all 48 states of the U.S. bbbbuutttt there's 50 now. Or 'hey we've got 12 copies of The Da Vinci Code, no one has checked it out in 3 months... perhaps we should get rid of 11 of them'.

In a private collection, sure. In a library, ehhhhh a public library's mission isn't to preserve a given work in perpetuity.

Also in my experience libraries will attempt to sell the books first at fairly regular sales (I used to horde allowance and paper route money to go buy tons of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks when I was a kid for 10-50 cents a pop, it's how I discovered Stephen R. Donaldson and the Thomas Covenant books, I thought the paperback cover of Lord Foul's Bane looked evil and creepy. How I discovered Heinlein too) then only throw away what is truly damaged or didn't sell to make space for newer texts.

<comment><USER11> Not all books that are read are checked out. I think that some kinds of books should have a sheet or something so each person who reads it in the library can leave a mark. I'm still angry about the Dirac library moving a beautiful 1890's book on steam engineering to storage because "no one was checking it out". Of course no one was checking it out, it was a reference work!

<comment><USER12> Some libraries do run reshelving carts through circ to note internal circulation. Even if only occasionally (sampling).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I serve on the board of an incorporated library and until just recently was the board president.

We have a book sale room that is about 250 square feet of well lit, clean dry space in our basement with an exterior entrance. We make a few hundred bucks a year from selling books from the sale room. A volunteer staffs the book sale room and organizes, shelves and prices the books. Even with the book sale room, which is open anytime the library is open, we have to throw out hundreds of books a year. It's not worth it to give them away. The local thrift shops and good wills mostly don't want more books.

The space would better serve the community if it were made into a maker space or turned into a classroom for special programs. We could make the entire year of book sale revenue with one by donation 4 week class.

One of the biggest tasks our librarians have is culling books. We are small and it does not serve our community if we keep books on the shelves that haven't been checked out in 15 years.

</comment><comment><USER14> The University of Toronto has a 'cull and sell' procedure and culled books are placed in the weekly Wednesday noon swap shop where anyone can buy all they can carry for a $1 donation. At the last swap for the season in May there were 15 large wheeled boxes of about 1 cubic yard each filled to the brim and another 20 trash totes a little bigger in the yard. Few sell. There is a steady crowd of people picking at them. I suspect their fate is pulp after they have been well picked. There used to be huge numbers of old computers etc. in the swap shop, but after a number of people cut themselves on sharp steel edges, they now accumulate and allow department employees only to scan and fill out a card so their department gets the asset if it has any enduring value - if not taken = scrapped by a recycling company approved for proper recycling of computers etc. Another complication was the development of the sulfite pulping process in the 1800's. This leaves residues of SO2 in the paper, which combined with H2O makes H2SO3 - sulfurous acid. This is a weak acid, but in time it cuts up cellulose and the paper is weakened and friable - eventually it turns to dust. Old linen paper or paper that has been washed and treated/sized to eliminate the SO2 (archival paper) can last a lot longer

</comment><comment><USER15> The University of Texas at Austin seems to put a lot in storage instead of throwing it out. But they have thrown things I am interested in out before. I recall checking the catalog for a well known journal which has been entirely digitized. Unfortunately a plot that had data I wanted was illegible, so I went to scan the plot. Apparently they had just thrown out the journal a day or so before I arrived and had not updated the catalog to reflect that yet. I was very confused as there was nothing at all where the journal should have been. Fortunately a librarian was able to figure out what happened. I can recall them saying "I knew something like this would happen..." I eventually got a scan via interlibrary loan.

</comment><comment><USER16> Recently donated some new philosophy books to my public library (A.C. Grayling Philosophy 1 & 2) but even in mint condition, and the library having almost no philosophy section, it still went to the 'bargain / to be sold cart'. I was told that all the books are managed by a private company, and the library doesn't really control what comes or goes - the company does. So any / all donations go straight to the cart, no matter what they are.

</comment><comment><USER17> I let the used bookstore throw away my books. There are lots of categories they say they won't accept (like computers) but I bring them all. I tell them to just give me a total price. They don't give me back any books. I really do not like throwing away books.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's interesting that one of the ideas this article criticizes is _a harebrained combination of closed-circuit television and a "pneumatic page turner", intended to allow readers to study a book in a library many miles away so that only one copy would need to be kept._

Yet, I think this basic idea was implemented in the _digital_ realm by iTunes (or someone else) in recent years so that each person would not individually need their own copy of some music file. Instead, they would just stream it from an iTunes server.

<comment><USER19> Ironically, out of these two, it's _iTunes_ that's more harebrained. Considering that digital storage is almost free, and it's wasteful to transfer bits across half the planet each time you want to listen to a particular song again, streaming is a... pretty suboptimal solution. Especially that you essentially relinquish ownership of your own media, being instead at the mercy of a service provider. Alas, this was the way to work around the huge mess that is IP laws.

<comment><USER20> > Alas, this was the way to work around the huge mess that is IP laws.

Or, and I realize this is a long shot, we could come to the realization that "intellectual property" is an oxymoron.

Small hope, I know.

<comment><USER21> I'd love to hear more about why intellectual property is an oxymoron - <USER2> have piqued my interest :D

<comment><USER12> "Copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to knowledge". Copyright scholar Pamela Samuelson.

[http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz- Opening-a...](http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Opening- access-to-knowledge-4224697.php)

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.

[http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...](http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf)

What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A lot of this discussion revolves around lending libraries getting rid of junk nobody wants to read and which is likely available elsewhere, but the article largely concerns destroying the world's only copies of newspaper runs, which seems different in kind to me.

Also, with digital stuff perhaps the calculus is different (although long-term preservation of that seems like a potential challenge), but they're on to something when they say microfiche copies are inferior.

</comment><comment><USER23> The crux of the library in 2018 is exemplified here. It is important to have public input to the weeding process (thats what it is called in the US), because libraries are inherently hierarchical government bureaucracies, but funded by taxpayers, so taxpayers should have a say. Those books are essentially taxpayer property.

It is also true that the information inside those books is also taxpayer property, but right now the taxpayers can't access it because the Library industry, including it's professional organizations and professional educational programs, is technologically illiterate, but also lost sight of it's mission.

This fellow is called a crank, but he is cranking up the wrong tree. While he is complaining about a small number of important paper journals, and hoarders decry weeding, Alexandra Elbakyan is being threatened with prison for giving away taxpayer funded information - to the taxpayers. And Aaron Swartz... well. Rest in peace man. They just straight up killed him.

There is a saying that for books to survive, what they need is for an enormous amount of people to copy them. That is what allowed the ancient Roman works to survive, long after the Roman libraries were burnt down, and all the Roman bureaucracies in charge of maintaining important works had disappeared. That's why we can read old copies of the Bible or the Koran or the I Ching. That's why we have civilization, because people shared ideas instead of fighting about who, in the long run, far after useful value has been passed to the creator, actually owns them.

It's the modern way in which copyright is enforced, as though violators were terrorists, whether through the military or legal system or NDAs or intimidation, that's a much bigger threat to information surviving the long run, than librarians maintaining their stacks improperly.

</comment><comment><USER24> Library books should definitely destroy shelf litter, like your 900 page "Java: The Complete Reference [2001]" type stuff.

[Edit: When I wrote the above comment, had no idea whether or not this is a real book; I made up the title and the [2001] just to exemplify that sort of junk.]

<comment><USER25> In 100 years time this book will become of great interest to historians that are studying the dot com boom and wanting insight beyond the newspaper headlines of the era. What was it that powered this dot com thing?

Why was so much money speculated into it?

How hard was it to write code for the early web?

Where is the seminal classic concerning how to program in the language of the era?

Why did 'kazinator' say 'burn that book?'(!)

All this future historian might have to go on could be the review on Amazon, as preserved by the Wayback Machine:

For a supposedly easy-to-use language Java has generated a range of enormous books. The ever excellent Schildt continues the tradition--even allowing for the added coverage of Java 1.3--in this 1,000+ word tome.

Schildt divides the book into four parts. The first third is a solid tutorial on Java programming with neat code examples showing how various features work. Nearly half is taken up with a detailed view of the Java Library followed by 150 pages on Java software development. The last section dissects four Java applets.

Although described as a reference, Java 2: The Complete Reference is a lot more than a list of facts. There's advice, demonstrations of best practice, asides for those using languages such as C and C++ and a pleasant absence of the justifications for various Java design decisions which clog so many books on the subject. Schildt takes the line that Java is the future for Net and networked programs. Coming from perhaps the best-selling writer on C and C++ this is more than interesting. It's a pity Microsoft didn't read it. Perhaps it would have changed its mind about supporting Java.

One oddity is the way Schildt gives more coverage to the largely superseded AWT, the Abstract Window Toolkit, than to its easier and more flexible replacement, Swing. However, both are big areas; perhaps Schildt thinks you should be reading books dealing specifically with these subjects. He'll probably write one. --Steve Patient

Review

First developed in 1991, Java is an excellent first language for the aspiring programmer because of its growing popularity in the development community; seasoned pros will find it easy to learn. Primary among this revised edition's offerings is information on the recently released Java 1.3, known as the 2.0 in the techie world becuase it represents such a major upgrade. Schildt, a renowned programming author, skillfully combines code, theory, and reference matter. Libraries that already own the third edition (1999) should purchase, as Java 1.3 is the only version that Sun Microsystems now supports.

<comment><USER24> My comment isn't actually about this specific book; I made the title up impromptu, and so it refers to a category of book in my imagination. (See comment edit.) Of course, that specific book constitutes an example of what I'm talking about.

I recognize the author as a well-known butcher of the C language. Future historians wanting to completely understand the term "bullschildt" will benefit from access to his books.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I also have an emotional reaction to seeing books destroyed but the bottom line is that many products in this world see demand reduce precipitously, rendering them obsolete. There simply aren't many ways to use a computer monitor from 1985 or a book about the immune system from 1937.

</comment><comment><USER27> I would be interesting if there was some type of public disclosure requirement before this type of thing happened. It seems like a perfect setup to allow the general public to collect them.

<comment><USER28> Libraries will often hold used book sales where they try to unload books they no longer want.

<comment><USER22> Sounds like the OP envisions something more systematic

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Since libraries in any town I frequent have tended to turn into internet cafes and homeless shelters, they might as well dump the books to make space for a few more computers.

</comment><comment><USER30> They should've been donating the books to less fortunate libraries or education institutions.

<comment><USER31> This post is literally from yesterday.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17634079)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/micro...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/07/microfilm- lasts-half-a-millennium/565643/?single_page=true)

"Microfilm machines haven't been mined for their decontextualized parts, and they are not yet truly obsolete. The devices are still in widespread use, and their mechanical simplicity could help them last longer than any of the current electronic technologies."

<comment><USER32> I like the bit in one of Asimov's _Foundation_ novels, where they find a derelict planet, essentially dead for several millenia, yet quickly find the library and repair the microfilm machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Most public libraries would be better off without books. All of the books in the average public library exist in digital form.

However, go to a college library, and you'll find tens of thousands of books which are not only not available in digital form, they may be the only remaining copies in existence.

Every time I go to the local college library I'm blown away by the number of obscure books on programming and computer science that simply don't exist in ebook form, and likely never will (thanks copyright laws!)

<comment><USER7> I am in complete agreement.

Physical books are outdated technology that are bad for the environment and outdated the moment they are printed.

Its a very emotional thing to support the library, I'm not sure why it invokes such strong feelings with children/moms, but I dont think its a smart decision to continue wasting space and resources on physical books.

Note: Nothing is black and white. There should be a strong middle-ground here.

<comment><USER34> > "outdated the moment they are printed"

Maybe (some) technical books, but novels are never outdated.</comment></comment></comment>


Sell to the Laggards - <AUTHOR> http://codeandiron.com/2014/01/sell-to-the-laggards/

<comment><USER2> This doesn't seem quite right to me. In order to successfully sell to laggards (out side of a fly by night type of operation) a well vetted & supported product needs to exist. In order to profitably get to a well vetted & supported product one would have to go through the entire product cycle before selling to the laggards. Laggards would probably look to others for validation before buying a product, so if you attempt to sell directly to laggards you already need to have a validated, well vetted, & well supported product. I'm probably being a bit verbose here, but I don't think selling to laggards is the best strategy for selling tech products/services.</comment>


Best Paper Awards in Computer Science Since 1996 - <AUTHOR> http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html## <comment><USER2> At the bottom of the list is a summary of the number of "best papers" by institution. Interestingly, Microsoft Research is at the top of the list:

        Microsoft Research                     32.4
        Stanford University                    26.8
        Massachusetts Institute of Technology  24.6
        University of Washington               24.1
        Carnegie Mellon University             22.9
        University of California Berkeley      19.5
        ...

<comment><USER3> MSR is very well-regarded, rather autonomous from Microsoft's product division, and likely larger than any university's CS department. It's not much easier to get a principal researcher there than a professorship at a great university.

They're not as broad as most universities, but they pretty reliably have the most papers in top systems conferences like OSDI and SOSP.

<comment><USER4> I understand what are you trying to say. But this is a not a reasonable comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just a small caveat: There is some evidence that best paper awards do not really correlate with great influence of those papers, as measured by the number of citations a paper receives afterwards [1].

[1] [http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalys...](http://www.bartneck.de/publications/2009/scientometricAnalysisOfTheCHI/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Too bad SIGGRAPH doesn't give such an award; I was curious to look at the top graphics papers.

<comment><USER7> Not top papers, but you can read many of the accepted papers by following the author links here: [http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2013.html](http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2013.html)

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I was interested in seeing the list of "best papers" just to see what the most interesting or innovative research over the years has been, but this is all good stuff too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know this topic has been done to death but it still blows my mind that most of those papers are not freely available. It would be nice if the freely available ones were marked as such in the list.

<comment><USER9> It still blows my mind that people claim this is true. Almost all CS papers are on the author's website, eprint, arxiv, etc. Google scholar even links to them.

Don't get be wrong, closed publications are a travesty. But they are a travesty because institutions pay out of government grant money (indirectly via overhead) to pay for subscriptions and because it's government funded research. They are not, at least in anything approaching the average case, a travesty because researchers cannot access results.

<comment><USER8> Really? I just clicked 10 random link and all Google Scholar searches redirected to a [http://dl.acm.org/](http://dl.acm.org/) paywall. Maybe I'm missing something?

edit: Ah, I just noticed some searches have a direct link to the PDF next to the main search result "[PDF] from _domain_ ".

<comment><USER9> The primary link is almost always to the canonical version which is usually the pay walled one(even if it's not the most in depth version the author wrote). Did you check for the links on the right hand side? Those are the pdf's that google found. Of a pseudo random set I clicked on, all had links.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a lot of these links, I am not able to find the pdf as they are behind signups or paywall. sad state of affairs

</comment><comment><USER11> Interestingly, "The Anatomy of a Search Engine" was not on this list.

[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> An interesting list. I'd enjoy seeing this in other fields besides CS.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure how far afield from CS you actually want to go, but the list for music theory is at [http://societymusictheory.org/archive/publications](http://societymusictheory.org/archive/publications).

<comment><USER12> I would be interested in physical/chemical sciences MRS, APS and ACS come to mind as examples of things with annual meetings which might have best paper awards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a biologist, where we emphasize publication over conferences, I am really curious as to what "best" means? Innovative? Most data to back hypothesis?

<comment><USER15> In support of barik's comment, I want to add that conference papers in computer science are peer reviewed, and the top conferences have an acceptance rate that is usually less than 15%. Simply, conference papers, rather than journal articles, is where most innovative computer science work goes. This is very true for systems, languages, software engineering, databases and HCI, but less so for the more theoretical areas.

This topic comes up when talking with researchers outside of computer science so often that the Computer Science Research Association wrote up a memo explaining it: [http://cra.org/resources/bp- view/evaluating_computer_scienti...](http://cra.org/resources/bp- view/evaluating_computer_scientists_and_engineers_for_promotion_and_tenure/)

<comment><USER16> Peer review doesn't necessarily mean anything objective unless it is totally doubly-blinded, which, ironically, is not used by many top system conferences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's the best tablet upon which to actually read all these papers?

</comment><comment><USER18> An excellent list! Love it. Did you compile it manually?

</comment><comment><USER19> Reposting a worthy comment from user chimmy, who has been hellbanned for 1.5 years for no apparent reason:

> This is a great list but I would rather look at the most cited papers from > that conference (say 10 years later). As an example, MapReduce did not win > the best paper in OSDI 2004. However, it has impacted the industry like no > other paper in that conference.

<comment><USER20> What impacts industry 10 years later is more a measure of marketing and brand association than academic excellence.

Google could fart now and the internet will still cry roses.

The same research/algorithms/software produced by an independent individual or lab would simply die in obscurity.

<comment><USER21> That's because, unlike physical science and engineering disciplines, the application of discoveries in computer science (i.e. software engineering) is done in the context of an ultra-competitive popularity-contest culture, mixed with a strong strain of loner-nerd-hacking-the-gibson worship.

I came to software development from the physical sciences (university level academic and theoretical as well as applied/engineering). To me the differences were abundant and, frankly, shocking. For a discipline that fancies itself one of the more intellectual, there seems to be an awful lot of petty one-upsmanship and "john galt genius" idiocy at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hmm... TL;DR?

<comment><USER6> Huh? It's a list of best papers. What kind of summary can you give of hundreds of CS papers in different fields? "There sure is a lot of stuff you can do with computers!"

greenyoda already included the first few lines of the summary of institutions which contributed most to this list, which is about as close to a TL;DR as you can get for this link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6992714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6992714)

But really, what were you expecting a TL;DR to be? There's no way you can summarize nearly two decades worth of computer science research in a single TL;DR.

<comment><USER22> _cough_ Irony _cough_

<comment><USER22> Wooowee, did I ever strike a nerve :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fiwit – The single tool to manage your internal IT - <AUTHOR> https://www.fiwit.io <comment><USER2> Trying to add an asset and it throws an error page up

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you try again?</comment></comment>


Thoughts On Transparent Compensation Policies - <AUTHOR> http://thedevstop.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/thoughts-on-transparent-compensation-policies/

<comment><AUTHOR> When people's feelings are involved, honesty is the best policy.</comment>


INTERNATIONAL CAPSLOCK DAY, TODAY - <AUTHOR> http://capslockday.com/

<comment><USER2> Everyday is capslock day somewere on the internet, sadly.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> WHO ELSE BESIDES ME ARE/WILL HONOR IT?

<comment><USER3> i had to type while holding shift key</comment></comment>


Path for iOS 7 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.path.com/post/76264291404/path-for-ios-7 <comment><USER2> What a waste of time. Their employees and exec team should really pivot into whatever field they want and with that UX and know how they wil nail it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Besides looking nice (though everything is just too small to read), what else does Path offer? A Facebook without the user base? Sure. But I fail to see the advantage in that. It feels like "it's a custom-designed, one-of-a-kind bespoke app Morin had built for his assistant and him to communicate and collaborate through" ([http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/46539276780/...](http://jesuschristsiliconvalley.tumblr.com/post/46539276780/a-cunt- and-his-iphone))

<comment><USER4> I always thought that custom app sounded kind of cool

<comment><USER3> Man, it's not just custom. It's freakin' BESPOKE!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought Path was dead already?

<comment><USER6> I think they just duped some indonesian vcs into giving them $25 last month* ... so, they'll at least be around until they burn through that

*[http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/11/with-indonesias-leading-ro...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/11/with-indonesias-leading-round-path-raises-25m-for-private-social-network/)

<comment><USER7> The way it was perceived in Indonesia, is that Path had been bought by the Bakrie group.

I think in the bigger scheme of things, the $25M is a 'marketing' money well spent. Reason being, Aburizal Bakrie looks to run for the presidential election and this investment provided him with a very positive image.

<comment><USER3> A positive image to invest in Bay Area companies with products that are going nowhere, rather than investing in his own people in his own country???

<comment><USER7> Yes, believe it or not.

Path's brand image is still relatively intact in Indonesia, as compared to USA (where the privacy concerns has tarnished it).

It's all to do with one's status, and Indonesian election is more or less a popularity contest. Of course, you'd get more points in investing in a household name (i.e. Path), especially being a 'Western' company.

The effect is similar to Erick Thohir's [1] stake in Intermilan, D.C. United, and 76ers. He's probably more popular than the President right now ;)

[1] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erick_Thohir](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erick_Thohir)

<comment><USER3> Wow. Really interesting. And really sad, if you think about it. But okay...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a beautiful app, too bad its userbase is non-existant (at least among my friends).

<comment><USER9> So, the privacy concerns, contact stealing and phone spamming rumours were all, well, rumours?

I mean there's a reason behind their non-existent user base. I stopped using it when all my friends got an email from them. All! Even my professors, and company managers, my MD. Then they received those emails all over again.

<comment><USER8> Really? I guess I dodged that bullet then!

<comment><USER9> > FTC fines maker of Path app $800,000 for privacy violations

First result on goolging "path privacy"

<comment> k-mcgrady Wasn't this also the time that it became clear lots of apps (including Twitter and Foursquare) were doing the same thing - Path was the only one to get in trouble for it though and the others silently removed those 'features' from their apps.

<comment><USER9> No that was not the time and it was certainly not the _same thing_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They had pretty major controversies. They were burning through an enormous amount of money on marketing and then silently inviting friends on Facebook controversy.

Wonder where they will go from here.

</comment><comment> saiko-chriskun Really wish I had more friends on here.

</comment><comment><USER11> The team should just be hired by another company in a similar space! Their app looks nice, functions well, but... is used by no-one. It's a shame, but after the privacy issues you can easily see why.

</comment><comment><USER12> A lot of people wonder who is using Path, or if it is even being used. Most of these people live in Western societies. If you go into places where young women are not so keen on expressing themselves in public -- where, for example, it might not even be allowed -- Path is doing exceptionally well. These aren't exactly places in the world where people don't have money, either.

Now, based on the sort of completely ignorant comments I have seen on Hacker News as of late regarding people in non-Western societies, and regarding women, I would expect most of you to know nothing about these things. Do yourselves a favor and please _shut the fuck up_ when you don't actually know anything about a particular subject, and base all of your supposed "knowledge" on sensationalist tech journalism and gossip sites.

Sorry kids, just because you made an account on a social network site and know how to code an app does NOT mean you understand ANYTHING about how the social network space works. And none of you know anything about Dave Morin, so you should really avoid making fools of yourselves by talking about him. There's a lot that bothers me about Dave, such as his high number of douchey friends (and I tell him this everytime I see him), but he is far from incompetent and stupid. Most of you newcomers to our industry don't even know that Dave was responsible for Facebook's Groups feature, which he designed as a means for getting his employer at the time (a little company called Apple) on board as Facebook's first advertiser. He isn't a wannabe who made a social network to be trendy.

I wish reading HN comments these days didn't make me so angry. Ugh. Sorry for those of you who sense my negativity.

<comment><USER13> Hey Numair, I agree with you on the negativity. It's not good for anyone. Path is exquisitely designed and the product team are top notch.

That being said, websites like App Annie provide reasonably detailed metrics on downloads and popularity in iOS and Android stores and what you've just said doesn't really tie out. Besides Indonesia, it's really not doing well.

Important interactions can happen on almost any social network, Path isn't inherently bad, but that doesn't justify it being valued or hyped like it is. There is A LOT of money at play here - and a large portion of that money comes from things like retirement funds, pension funds, etc.

I think that annoys a lot of technologists who work hard and get overlooked - you know, those who believe that meritocracy rules in SV instead of connections.

<comment><USER12> Hey Dmitri -- I agree with you, the stats don't add up... But my own (completely external, third-party) study of the social dynamics of the usage of the app paint a different picture. I should note that I had written off the app myself until very recently, when this interesting trend started to kick off. Although I don't have access to any inside data, and the charts don't seem to show what's going on, I was one of the first 5 people on Path, and I have one of the only usernames on the service (n), so my account tends to feel the effects of usage patterns before they become macro-patterns. What I'm seeing doesn't paint a picture of a dead network, just one that doesn't seem to have any usage in any Western countries.

Once again, I'll note that this is different from what I saw 18 months ago. If you had talked to me at that time, I would have said Dave was screwed. And if he wastes his time focusing in the Western market (such as is evidenced by screenshots of users based in San Francisco), it might still be the case. Path is no longer a Western network, and that's totally okay -- it was never a Western network anyway. I didn't even use the product during the whole spam debacle, which I would blame on Dave's poor judgement in hiring douchey employees in decision-making roles (I think there's a Mother Jones article somewhere that might allude to what I'm talking about). I'm guessing a lot of the new users of Path didn't even know about the app during that time (again, keep in mind that the demographic waves for smartphone usage mean that there are entirely new groups of users who have zero knowledge of what went on a few years ago).

Edit: Also, there is nothing non-meritocratic about Path/Dave raising money. He was in the game when most of you thought it was a joke. And unlike a lot of people who have made money, he actually did something for it. If you're bitter about this, the issues are your own.

<comment><USER13> Interesting. We'll have to see how it plays out.

I know you are deeply interested in social apps, and have invaluable insight into their workings from early days at Facebook and personal in-depth research. I'm pretty sure you were username n on an app I built too...

But in my experience, despite having very active and passionate users, the lowest form of interaction always wins out on a free social service. Lack of interactions means user churn - no matter how good or important the interactions that take place actually are.

In that sense, social apps themselves are just vessels for human interaction - and great human interaction happens all over the place whether an app exists or not. Your goal as a venture backed social app is to focus those interactions and try to monetize them.

Is Path going to be one of those handful of "lucky" networks where those interactions happen in large enough numbers to make it viable financially? Personally I wouldn't bet on it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommendations on a mover - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
  Does anyone know of a reliable mover that they typically use? I am moving from SF to NYC. I don't necessarily want to deal with moving my things on my own. <comment><USER2> Check out Moveline. You take a video of your stuff and they get quotes for you: [https://www.moveline.com/](https://www.moveline.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Would PODS or UPack fit your needs? They are economical and let you pick and choose what service you need.

My company used National Van Lines, which can be very full service.

<comment><AUTHOR> What did you think of National Van Lines? Was it reliable? The other issue is that I can't find reviews on these things on Yelp. Not sure if I should be using an alternate review service.</comment></comment>


Why Zuckerberg ignores the press (from yesterday's Facebook / YC event) - <AUTHOR> http://pktck.posterous.com/trip-to-facebook-hq

<comment><USER2> Referred passage :

\\\ The Q&A was followed by a barbecue on their lawn. At one point I found myself chatting in a group with Zuckerberg. Someone asked him if he was planning to see the Facebook movie. He said he wasn't sure -- he was there when Facebook was created and it wasn't all that exciting; mostly a lot of coding and Red Bull.

He also said that he makes it a personal policy not to read press about Facebook -- something like, "Sometimes the press will be saying great things about you while you know you're making mistakes, and other times they'll be saying bad things when you aren't really doing anything differently. It just goes in cycles. We have to trust our internal compass for what we should be doing, and make sure to always listen to our users." //

imho very wise of him (to ignore the press) tough I would definitely watch the movie

<comment><USER3> I couldn't imagine having a movie made about me and not watching it. Even if I didn't approve of it, my curiosity would get to me eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > One option he proposed is for companies to come work at the Facebook office > for a few days next to the API team so they could get help and give input > during development.

All things considered, that's pretty awesome. That shows a complete good-faith approach to doing business. As much as people say Zuck is a dick, this is a really cool idea. Everybody wins.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. Everybody wins only if the API team fixes everything that leads to a request for help, and documents everything they find themselves giving input on. An open forum is the only guaranteed way to be sure everybody wins.

And I respect their API team a lot, especially for the changes made since the FriendFeed acquisition.

<comment><USER4> I see what you mean. There are always things that could go wrong. The API team not fixing the requests isn't really Zuck's fault (maybe a hiring problem or a vision problem). But it doesn't seem like he's inviting them in to steal their ideas or anything of that nature.

He just wants good, honest collaboration that helps both parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The movie would probably be a good laugh for the people close to Facebooks creation given how overdone it seems to be in comparison to the responses the people involved have given.

</comment><comment><USER7> I couldn't agree more. One company I was involved with veered into the public space, and there's nothing the press loves to rip apart more than anything associated with state government (never mind that that the product hadn't launched yet, nor had anyone writing about it actually used it). It was a learning experience.</comment>


Global Warming Vs. Street Crime - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/global-warming-vs-street-crime/

<comment><USER2> I was born, raised in and have retired to Joplin, Missouri. I assure you we don't have a " _global-warming conscience_ "; we're about a Red State as you can get ^_^.

If you go on to read the Journal's article, I'd note that the Chicago Police Department is so notoriously dysfunctional I'd throw its results out on that basis.

Whereas we're really serious about crime and punishment, e.g. we passed a special sales tax which not only funded the street light program but also hired quite a few police officers and so on. And our justice and penal systems preform more than adequately (e.g. sentences are serious and we maintain enough prison space that we don't have to release ahead of time due to overcrowding).

Bottom line: you have to do the whole package, street lights alone are not a silver bullet. Which is a point argued by some in the WSJ article.

While I don't know if this has had any effect in these respective cities for _street_ crime, it bears mentioning that Missouri is a shall issue concealed carry state since 2003 or so while Illinois along with Wisconsin are unique in absolutely banning it for civilians.

In Chicago prior to _Miller_ (or rather its future enforcement years from now) simple handgun ownership by normal civilians was effectively outlawed and permits for long guns were not easy to get, so that deterrence to a subset of "property crimes" that can become violent crimes if it turns out there's someone in a house being burglarized is absent. As well as anything based on "hue and cry", if you hear someone being assaulted outdoors you can't legally go help them while being effectively armed.</comment>


Did the "Man with No Name" Feel Insecure? - <AUTHOR> http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2014/10/did-man-with-no-name-feel-insecure.html

<comment><USER2> Not really related, but I reported a kernel-level bug to Microsoft over a year ago. It seems like it could be exploitable (it's easy enough to trigger from user-mode, but I'm not sure how easy it is to exploit for malicious uses other than DoS attacks). I received a reply that they would look into it, and that in the meantime I shouldn't disseminate it. However I'm fairly sure it hasn't been fixed, and it may never be. Should I make it public? Why or why not?

<comment><USER3> If you've confirmed an exploit, what I normally prefer is to send a followup message stating that you intend to publish in a month and request a comment. That gives them time to say "Oops, did we forget to tell you it's not exploitable?" or "It was quietly fixed two months ago".

<comment><USER2> I don't have a confirmed exploit (other than a DoS, but I don't think that's very interesting). I think it may be exploitable but I haven't looked into the "how" and don't really intend to. I just know it's a hole.

<comment><USER3> In that case I'd probably vote for just giving them another email. If you're not certain, it's probably not worth the effort of a full advisory.

<comment><USER2> Ok thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unnamed objects are not normally used for sharing. Naming an object is generally only done so that it can be accessed from other processes. The Windows idiom is to use a name when sharing, and don't use a name when not sharing.

I would have named these shared memory objects as a matter of course, knowing their design and purpose. That unnamed ones don't support a DACL is an interesting bit of trivia, but not much more than that. It seems more a case of non-idiomatic code.

(PS: I should be more clear here. Without using DuplicateHandle, you can't open an unnamed object, because you can't address it. It's secured by the guy who calls DuplicateHandle being in control of who he hands it off to.)</comment>


Google Voice open for everyone (In the US) - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/google-voice-for-everyone.html

<comment><USER2> Getting everyone to use my GV number is really paying off these days.

I don't pay any carrier anything for SMS service. I use Google Voice, generally via my gmail inbox, for all SMS>

Then my iPad is running a soft phone, configured with Gizmo5 SIP credentials. So at home, calls to my Google Voice number ring both my iPad and iPhone. I'm using the jailbreak `backgrounder` app now, but iOS4 will offer a sanctioned solution.

This is my mashup for shitty AT&T cell service, fast cable modem, no land- line, and nice and shiny but power efficient Apple hardware.

<comment><USER3> When you write "generally via my gmail inbox, for all SMS" do you mean it's all email based, or is there a magical Google Voice/Gmail integration I'm not aware of?

<comment><USER4> although you can reply to a sms from gmail, there is still no way to initiate a sms converstaion directly from gmail.

<comment><USER2> There is, I have plenty of saved Joe Schmoe (SMS) email addresses in my address book now. Writing a fresh email to this address sends a txt.

<comment><USER4> again, that person had to have text-ed you for you to be able to reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The combination of a Nexus One <-> SIPDroid <-> PBXes.org <-> SipSorcery <-> Gizmo5 <-> Google Voice is a complex one but pretty damn amazing. As long as I have a half decent wifi or 3g (or sometimes GPRS) connection, I can make and receive calls for free to and from the US wherever I'm at, worldwide. Pretty sweet.

<comment><USER6> You could cut out the middle pieces and use Guava: <http://gizmo5.com/guava.html?loc=guava>

<comment><USER5> Guava looks cool, but seems to ( _) cost you outgoing call fees in Gizmo5. SipSorcery allows you to configure the routings back through Google Voice so your outbound is free in the domestic US as well as inbound.

_ [http://androinica.com/2009/07/24/android-google-voice- guava-...](http://androinica.com/2009/07/24/android-google-voice-guava-sim- free-calling-options/)

<comment><USER7> I read that Guava is a fork or a simple copy of Sipdroid, which probably explains why Gizmo was ashamed to market it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hate not being included in "everyone".

(Google Voice is not available in your country.)

<comment><USER9> I'm in France and was able to sign up. You just need access to a US phone number for a few minutes, and there are many ways you can get one. One is to signup for 3jam for one month, another is to get a SkypeIn number. It's probably possible with Twilio as well.

That having been said, you don't get as much use out of it as if you lived in the US. But I use it for free unlimited SMS (incoming and outgoing) to my friends in the US, and for voicemail with an American number .

<comment><USER10> How do you jump the enter-digit verification via 3jam? Tried linking 3jam to my Skype account, to no avail; do you forward it to your mobile phone?

<comment><USER9> Yes. With 3jam you can forward to your (European) mobile, although there's a per-minute charge (Of course if all you're using it for is GV signup, then it shouldn't be much - 1 or 2 minutes of talk time).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish they supported number porting - that's the only thing preventing me from completely switching to it.

<comment><USER12> They do, but not for all features:

[http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-voice- wit...](http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/google-voice-with-your- existing-number.html)

<comment><USER5> That's not true number porting, just auto-forwarding. It's like changing the email header on your email to say it originates elsewhere (and changing the reply-to). In the end, dialing in directly to your old PSTN number and having it go straight to Google isn't supported (yet).

<comment><USER13> Apparently Michael Arrington was able to have his number ported, it's probably just a PITA to automate currently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best thing about Google Voice is Gizmo SIP support. It makes Google Voice almost useful. I say "almost" because Google Voice carefully limits the user's ability to make pure VoIP calls (to protect the wireless carriers). For example, the Google Voice app for Android requires a cell signal to place calls.

<comment><USER5> Hence SIPSorcery and the related stack, which do let you take advantage to call over 3G/GPRS or Wifi

<comment><USER7> SIPSorcery looks useful, based on what i've pieced together so far. The web site could use a little less (or more) emphasis on the Silverlight UI (depending on the vision for the project). edit: i need to read the sipsorcery docs. it's not clear to me how sipsorcery helps in placing the call from a wifi-only android device, for example.

<comment><USER14> I just played around with this last night, and it seems like SipSorcery, through the Ruby dial plans, have hacked up a way to make the sip call appear to come from your GV number.

It works for me (though I used Sipgate since you can't sign up for gizmo5 anymore). The only problem I had was that when people call my GV number, the Caller ID when sipdroid rings says that it's from my own Sipgate number, which the original number displayed in brackets. (And perhaps that when you have both a sim number and the sipdroid one, both the normal phone app and sipdroid rings at the same time, so you have to make sure you answer the right way...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be nice if they would release an api now. It is one of the only products that doesn't have one.

<comment><USER16> There sort of is one, it's just not documented and not as complete as it should be. But besides for that it's great :)

Here's a python library <http://code.google.com/p/pygooglevoice/>

And here's a post by the buy who wrote the Google Voice Firefox extension somewhat documenting it: <http://posttopic.com/topic/google-voice-add-on- development> (it's the first comment in that thread)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Same here (from Canada) : Thanks for visiting Google Voice. We're not yet open for users outside the US.

Guess they should specify it in their communication.

</comment><comment><USER18> I know that the availability as a free service more or less depends on free local calls, which is probably why it's not available outside the US.

Still. Voicemail and call routing alone would be something i'm willing to pay for. If I had a wish, it would be for-pay google voice in Switzerland :-)

</comment><comment><USER19> * everyone = US users

<comment><USER20> is there a list of numbers somewhere that is still blocked by Google Voice?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everyone in the United States only :(

</comment><comment><USER21> Since using Google Voice to create a phone number to track call responses or do some A/B testing for call response on a specific campaign is tough to pull off (You can only forward calls from a single Google voice number per line) What would be a suitable alternative?

<comment><USER22> Twilio (I work there)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> When I sent an SMS to a GV number, and it was forwarded to their iPhone, they saw a number other than mine as the sender. Is this an inherent limitation of the service?

<comment><USER24> Yes, but it's not a limitation. The "from" number is re-written so that the reply will go back through the Google Voice infrastructure. In this manner, text messages are free, at least for the Google Voice user who is receiving the message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've used google voice for over 3 months, and have switched away from it.

My main goal was to replace my voicemail. I never check it (currently have 10 messages). Most of them are hang-up messages from my mom or family member, so I mostly ignore them. I almost never get useful voicemail. So. Google voice to the rescue.

First apparent problem (not so bad). The speach to text is horrible. Maybe 40% of the voicemail was correctly transcribed. maybe less. But never really useful. Ever. I only got the gist of if I should or should not listen to the voicemail, which really is good enough for me because it solved my voicemail problem.

Second hidden problem (maaaaaaaajor, the reason I quit): Calls are not instantly forwarded. This might sound like I am picky, but check this out: If for 3 out of 4 rings the call is being forwarded, I only realize someone is calling when they hang up. (this feature was necessary so that people calling my regular cell would immediately get my google voice voicemail vs my regular voicemail). Actually often the forwarding would be so slow that the person already got to voicemail by the time my cellphone rang. People mostly thought my cell was off.

So overall until their speeds SIGNIFICANTLY increase I can't use gv. And I am not even doing this as a business. So their little graph of how google voice revolutionizes telephony is kinda bs. Wait 5 years and the pudding will tell.

What is nice is if I DONT use my gv number, then I can switch away from it without problem. If people start only calling my gv phone number I will be trapped in the crappiness of google voice. I am glad they let me use my regular phone number vs gv phone number.

<comment><USER26> Google Voice transcription is a (really bad) toy. If you hate checking voice mail but want transcription that's immediate and even better than deciphering audio yourself, try <http://www.phonetag.com/>

PhoneTag is more accurate than our most human receptionists.

Agreed on the lag. I had to change cell phone voice mail to delay 30 seconds before answering or calls were going to GV voicemail for "no answer" before I could get to the cell phone. To the caller it had rung 5 times, to me, once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Who cares about the rest of the world? Everyone = the USA in the eyes of Google.

<comment><USER28> I was going to say that...or I was going to say that it's probably just simpler to open to one market where all issues are resolved then open it to other markets as issues in those markets become resolved.

Can't decide which one sounds more logical. Were Gmail, Picasa, Buzz, Wave, and Google Docs available only in the US first when they were first released?

<comment><USER29> No, but none of these require dealing with telcos and probably governments.

<comment><USER30> That's the key point. It's hard enough dealing with one regulatory environment, and one set of threatened incumbents.

<comment><USER31> Skype was available Worldwide since launch, my dear US friends!

<comment><USER30> But, unless I am mistaken, Skype does not represent the same threat that GV does. Skype does not offer services like voicemail and personal hunt-groups that potentially undermine telco value-added services.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>