Video reveals NYC subway ride 108 years ago from Union Square to Grand Central - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/video-reveals-108-year-old-subway-ride-article-1.1412802 <comment><USER2> As a (former) regular rider of the NYC subway, the thing that strikes me the most is just how _short_ the platforms all are!

Anyone who's ever had to turn an MVP into something that can serve millions of requests will appreciate some of the history of the MTA. At almost every station along the old IRT lines, you can pick out the boundaries of the "old" stations and where the platforms were later extended. As the article mentions, this was also the reason for the closing of some of the stations. For example the 91st St. station was closed because 96th St. was extended exclusively to the south, adding a new entrance between 92nd and 93rd St. (not much sense in having two station entrances one block apart).

Another related fun bit of trivia... If you've ever wondered why some NYC subway lines have numbers and some have letters, the numbers are the old IRT lines while the letters are the old BMT/IND lines. Both sets of lines use the same gauge (width of the actual rails), but the BMT/IND lines had wider cars. Since the stations had to be built to the width of the cars and not the gauge of the track, even today you can't run the letters on the numbers or vice versa.

<comment><USER3> You can actually run the IRT cars on BMT/IND tracks, it would just be awkward for passengers. Maintenance trains (e.g. the garbage collector train, the trains used for trackwork, etc.) often use retired IRT cars for things like motive power or transporting equipment for that very reason: they can go on any line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In this vein, one of the grandest bits of NYC train porn are pictures of Penn Station before they demolished it and built the soggy basement that is called Penn Station today: [http://www.nypap.org/sites/default/files/penn_station.jpg](http://www.nypap.org/sites/default/files/penn_station.jpg)

<comment><USER5> In a similar train of thought, Central Station was about to be demolished, too, and got saved literally the last minute:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Terminal#Proposa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Terminal#Proposals_for_demolition_and_towers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of this video: [http://www.wimp.com/sanfrancisco/](http://www.wimp.com/sanfrancisco/) \-- uninterrupted San Francisco footage from 1905. Very surreal, extremely captivating.

<comment><USER7> Wow this is amazing.. they used to have emergent / "chaotic" traffic patterns back then in the west, the likes of which you only find in (much of) Asia, Africa or India these days.

And how agile, vivid and alert most everyone is in the streets! Quite remarkable -- truly people were a different breed back then, for better or worse.

<comment><USER8> Notice no traffic lights, stop signs! Also note the conspicuous absence of women in this video and also car steering wheels on the right! In fact, I'm surprised there are so many cars on the road in 1905!

<comment><USER9> There are women in the video, although not as many as there are men. For example, you can see two women at the 35 second mark at the right side of the screen, and another near the left side of the screen at the 1:35 mark. There are more, but these are just two that show them clearly in the foreground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me more of the London tube stations than any of the NYC subway stations of today, likely due to a combination of respect and lack of bodily waste/trash.

I ride the NYC subway every day and am always surprised at how poorly the stations are treated. People throw wrappers on the tracks so calmly and confidently as if they were designated to collect waste. Puddles of urine are not uncommonly found. It baffles me. I don't know where that attitude comes from.

<comment><USER11> New York in general is just dirty. It's a place to visit, not to live in.

<comment><USER12> Reality is dirty. I love it here in NYC.

<comment><USER11> No, reality in NYC is dirty. The rest of the country isn't. It's always amazed me how New Yorkers think their city of 8 million defines a country of 330 million.

<comment><USER12> It doesn't at all define america, but the rest of the country is literally built on dirt. May as well embrace it. Maybe it's because I grew up in the country but living on a garbage pile doesn't really phase me after poking at animal carcasses in my childhood.

<comment><USER11> There's a whole lot of difference between soil and trash, even if both can also be referred to as "dirt".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In Buenos Aires (Argentina) we used the same wood railcars for 99 years in the first subway line of the city "Subte A". We changed all of them this January and the last day was a big event.

Some trains in use: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot1Lzgiy13s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot1Lzgiy13s)

Professional edited video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEoFmGMkRlY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEoFmGMkRlY)

Inside the train in the last travel: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L_G6WTL2nQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L_G6WTL2nQ)

</comment><comment><USER14> What really struck me was the lack of those those safety bumps and lights on the ground near the edge of the platform. It's such a basic part of what I think of as a subway platform but clearly took a while before they showed up.

<comment><USER15> No yellow safety line! The madness of it all

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You know what strikes me most about that video? The tunnels and supports are so clean! Very cool.

<comment><USER17> The subway was only months old at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is that some sort of lighting rig on a parallel track? Is there any more information about how this film was made? Seems like a pretty big achievement for the time.

<comment><USER19> It looks like it was shot from another train that was following the pictured one. There may have been additional lighting, but the train could have just been illuminated by the headlights of the train behind it.

<comment><USER20> There is a third train running parallel to the train that is ahead of the camera train, throughout the entire trip. It almost looks like it has an array of fluorescent tubes or mercury vapor lamps.

Sometimes the train with the lighting rig gets a little bit ahead of its subject, which is why the train being filmed gets dark from time to time, but you can see this rig clearly at the beginning, and towards the end, the camera train pulls close enough that you can see the staff on the lighting rig train walking about its platform.

<comment><USER21> You can clearly see the third train providing lighting at 3:10. Very interesting.

<comment><USER19> It looks like the third train is pulling some kind of open car behind it that has the lights mounted on it. At about 3:50, you can see a guy step from this rig into the back door of the train that's pulling it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A good view of people on the platform starts at about 4:20.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure if its an artifact of the camera, a result of their clothes or something cultural but its fascinating to watch them walk.

The men especially all _walk differently_ than people today. Their posture and demeanor is almost alien. Its almost like they're all walking down an invisible incline.

<comment><USER23> I could believe that gait/pace/posture vary by culture, region, and era... as with say diction and relative prevalence of different facial expressions. Even if you removed the cues of dress and surroundings, you might be able to watch video of walkers from different cities and tell New Yorkers from others, or at least large cities vs. small towns, etc. And just seeing how much more formally dressed city dwellers once were, in public - different clothes require a different style of motion and imply a different intended presentation to others.

But, I suspect artifacts of the filming and conversion to modern formats are larger factors. Slight differences in replay speed, or cyclical variations caused by either the original machinery or compromises of framerate conversion, could also lead to the kind of 'alien-ness' we perceive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Given that they did not have "video" back then (in the sense of electronically captured image data, whether digital or analog), isn't this really "footage"?

</comment><comment><USER25> It looks pretty clean and delicately built. I wish we behaved it good.

</comment><comment><USER26> What strikes me the most is how similar they are to us.

</comment><comment><USER27> I envy the time when everyone is wearing a suite and a tophat with an awesome mustasche, aswell as acting like a true gentlemen.

<comment><USER28> looking at all those people, thinking how each is busy with their day, their plans, their hopes - then realizing all of them had already lived their lives and died, including the odd child also in the video... Nothing deep to say - this can be said about every old media showing people - just for some reason, perhaps the portrayed routine, this made me reflect on that fact

<comment><USER29> I've thought about that watching old movies from even as late as the '30s - that every single person I'm watching (scenes with 10s if not hundreds of people) are long dead.

<comment><USER30> Every time I watch old films or start pondering mortality I then think of life longevity augmentation which is probably going to happen in the next 40-50 years (if not sooner) and then wonder if a. I'll live that long, and b. what a shame it is all those people are dead.

Then I start thinking of all the differences we'll have when longevity comes about, such as being able to travel intergalactic distances, declining birth rates, and placing a higher price on the human life. It's an interesting thought exercise.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linux Command-Line Editors Vulnerable to High-Severity Bug - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/linux-command-line-editors-high-severity-bug/145569/ <comment><USER2> Kudos to Threatpost for putting "Linux" in the headline! This keeps Mac and Windows people from developing panic about this problem.

I know I would appreciate it if a severe Windows bug was announced with a headline like "Windows mail servers vulnerable to high-severity bug", because then I would know to not bother looking at it.</comment>


Try MongoDB (online) - <AUTHOR> http://mongo.kylebanker.com/ <comment><USER2> Very very very cool.

Example 4 is missing a closing brace.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this a js emulation? Nice!</comment>


Do You Really Want to Be CTO? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/do-you-really-want-to-be-cto-ff24d0884683 <comment><USER2> Though, as, say, Chief Scientist, how much equity can one expect?

<comment><AUTHOR> And there's the rub. Less responsibility, but less ownership (I imagine). You can't have everything.</comment></comment>


5 golden rules of startups - <AUTHOR> http://svenduplic.com/post/11141324974/5-golden-rules-of-startups Do or die. <comment><USER2> Warning, this shit link will froze your ipads safari and then crash it, nothing to read while frozen.

<comment><AUTHOR> damn, sorry, didnt realise that. works just fine on chrome :(</comment></comment>


On Bloom's two sigma problem: A systematic review - <AUTHOR> https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/ <comment><USER2> This article seems to have the common failing that it never really gets past page 2 of Bloom's paper.

Bloom's paper is mostly cited in the intelligent tutoring systems world for it's title and first page (the identification of the problem, which was summarising two of his students' results), but the majority of the paper is spent analysing other interventions, such as improving instructional materials, home environment and peer group, enhancing cues and participation, etc to see how close they can get to matching tutoring.

The bigger issue with trying to use the numbers from Bloom's paper today is that "effect size" assumes the control groups are similar. Bloom's studies were in US high schools in the early 1980s. Most ITS papers are on university students or interventions that are also supported with extra staff time and training. They're often on different subjects, with different levels of support in the base class, differently motivated students, different home environments, different teaching styles, etc, but we expect the results between studies to be comparable. I doubt even modern US high schools are like US high schools of the 1970s and 1980s. The control group for Bloom's studies no longer exists.

To give an extreme example of this problem - that control groups in education are not at all similar - when I was doing my PhD on AI in education, I was doing it at a university that gives "supervisions" (small group tutoring) to all its students. So if I were to have tried an "effect size" study on anything I built, my _control group_ would have been equivalent to Bloom's _intervention group_ (in that they _did_ receive small group tutoring) not his control group.

When I was doing my PhD, I had a little informal tea-time quip which was that the flip side of effect size analysis is everything control groups "don't do" if they're to be comparable. Bloom finds classroom morale has a 0.6 sigma effect, so should we take it that the base is that our studies should take place in classes with bad morale? Assigning homework has a 0.3 sigma effect, so presumably control groups don't do that (let alone mark it because that has a 0.8 sigma effect)?

</comment><comment><USER3> The 2-sigma challenge refers to Bloom's research finding that one on one tutoring using mastery learning lead to a 2 sigma improvement in student performance. The article is in part a discussion of whether this conclusion is justified. I love this quote from the article, perhaps because it suggests that things could get a _lot_ better at our schools without miraculous or infeasibly expensive interventions by focusing on reliable smaller effects.

 _The 2-sigma challenge (or 1-sigma claim) is misleading out of context and potentially damaging to educational research both within and outside of the mastery learning tradition, as it may lead researchers to belittle true, replicable, and generalizable achievement effects in the more realistic range of 20-50% of an individual-level standard deviation. For example, an educational intervention that produced a reliable gain of .33 each year could, if applied to lower class schools, wipe out the typical achievement gap between lower and middle-class children in 3 years—no small accomplishment. Yet the claims for huge effects made by Bloom and others could lead researchers who find effect sizes of "only" .33 to question the value of their methods._

</comment><comment><USER4> A quote in the Alfie Kohn article linked in TFA is, although anecdotal, particularly damning of DI:

> Reporters for the New York Times and Education Week visited Direct > Instruction (DI) classrooms — in North Carolina and Texas, respectively — > and coincidentally published their accounts in the same month, June 1998. > The Education Week reporter found that sixth-grade students, successfully > trained to do well on the main standardized test used in Texas, couldn't > explain what was going on in the book they were reading or even what the > title meant. Apparently, she concluded, "mastering reading skills does not > guarantee comprehension." The Times reporter had been told by the for-profit > company running a DI-style school that all of their kindergartners had been > trained to read. "All you have to remember" as a teacher, he was told, "is > that you can't go off the script." But when the reporter showed the children > "something basic they'd never seen," they couldn't make heads or tails of > it. A regimented drill-and-skill approach had trained them to "read" only > what had been on the teachers' script.[7]

</comment><comment><USER5> I keep getting distracted by the bad line wrapping in links, where it just breaks mid-word with no hyphen or anything.

The offending CSS rule is

      main .about p > a,
      main .post p > a {
        word-break: break-all;
      }

This should just be removed, it's unambiguously wrong. I'd have said it should be using `overflow-wrap: break-word` instead, but the containing paragraph having `word-break: break-word` makes that unnecessary.

The word-break and overflow-wrap properties are fairly nuanced, and I honestly suspect that _most_ times I've seen them used they've been used incorrectly.

Another change that should be made to the page's styles is reverting to left- alignment inside tables, and probably turning off hyphenation there as well. Left justification with hyphenation works well enough on regular body text (it's a stylistic choice, shall we say), but inside tables with narrow columns it's destructive. I'd add this:

      main .about table,
      main .post table {
        text-align: left;
        hyphens: none;
      }

</comment><comment><USER6> Finding little evidence of learning transfer feels like a massive blow to many methodologies.

Of course, I think I'm just bemoaning that my industry seems so opposed to situational training.

</comment><comment><USER7> So, is there software that facilitates Mastery Learning, say, under Linux? I'm not sure I understand what is involved.

<comment><USER8> It seems to be based on avoiding cargo cult learning, so you need to learn everything from "first principles" (hi N-GATE!).

So Linux would probably require computer organization and operating system theory mastery, and from thence you get to Linux's specific implementation(s).

Learning is clearing a fairly complex DAG, and it would be nice to have a good understanding of theoretical mastery prerequisites and the next concepts a mastery step enables at a good granularity, but basically wikipedia links between articles seems to be as good an (open source) map that I've seen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This might have gotten more attention here if the link tet didn't contain educational research jargon. Seems like a serious literature review, though, at a glance.

<comment><USER10> Plenty of YN posts contain domain specific jargon from physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and various computing sub disciplines. I don't see that educational jargon in a paper intended for practitioners in that field should be any different.

<comment><USER11> Nintil.com author here. I'm no education researcher, but I think the post is relatively jargon free, other than the jargon I deliberately introduce after explaining what it is I think.</comment></comment></comment>


WSJ summary of climate research center data breach - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125883405294859215.html

<comment><USER2> "In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public."

That's all the more reason for all reputable journals to be united in requiring that authors publishing in their journal be required to make their data sets available to independent researchers, so only disreputable journals publish articles by authors who engage in such research-slowing tactics.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems important because WSJ reporting on it, which will give the story exposure to all the talk radio stations and fox news who will probably cause some political ruckus over the next week, especially given the upcoming copenhagen conference.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seriously, how many posts about this do we _really_ need?

<comment><USER5> I'm loving it, but I do get your point. This particular posting, however, is especially relevant to me, as I had been noting with dismay, the silence of the mainstream media on this. To have the WSJ acknowledging the event (which I didn't know before this post) is reassuring.

<comment><USER4> Well, frankly, I think it's obnoxious.

I wouldn't mind if it had anything to do with actual _science_ , but this is just political fluff to make people feel good about their preconceived notions. HN's front page got spammed with it because it appeals to the political groupthink here, and the scientifically-illiterate mainstream media talking it up is only going to create more drama and less insight.

But I guess being more interested in science than ideology puts me in the minority around here, so whatever. Time to collect more downvotes, I suppose.

<comment><USER5> I would be interested in discussing, offline (email in my profile) your actual knowledge of this issue.

The men and women that post and comment here are, in my opinion, among the best and the brightest. To dismiss the opinions of some significant proportion of them as "political groupthink" seems strange. Anyway, email me if you wish, so as not to pollute your 97 day experience with HN by continuing this subject here.

<comment><USER4> _Anyway, email me if you wish, so as not to pollute your 97 day experience with HN by continuing this subject here._

Your condescension is duly noted. Regretfully, I think I must decline your offer of a "discussion".

<comment><USER6> _...I guess being more interested in science than ideology puts me in the minority around here..._

When engaged and offered to take the conversation offline, replied with: _...Your condescension is duly noted..._

The best way to try to cover up your tracks when you're doing X? Point it out in other people. That always works!

If you're going to make generalizations about the entire board, people are kinda stuck having to downmod you because it's obvious you've already made your mind up and don't have a lot to offer to the conversation. It's an ad hominem on anybody who might want to talk to you.

Not such a good move.

<comment><USER4> Okay, you're right.

No matter how annoyed I am with the discussion the least I can do is not make things worse. My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't it a _bit_ strange that this comes just weeks before COP15 in Copenhagen, the same summit the United States and China will not take seriously?

Lobbyist already working on it, as I see.

<comment><USER8> Seriously? Let's assume that it was timed for maximum exposure and maximum impact. Let's also ignore the fact that many oil lobbyists are now for a climate pact so that they can make billions off the trade of carbon credits. Don't you see an issue with the underlying substance of the emails if they turn out to be true?

I find it remarkable that there are so many people here who would argue against accountability - especially when public funding and the public interest is involved (per your previous comment, accountability and transparency isn't just for banks). If these emails turn out to be true, if anything this shows that these scientists are not disinterested empiricists but have activist agendas. But this also doesn't mean that they aren't right. The issue could be solved by publishing their data sets and code for their models for public scrutiny and yet they do not - despite being largely publicly funded. Do you not see a problem with this?</comment></comment>


Show HN: So Imagely – Images you can customise easily for blogs or social media - <AUTHOR> http://www.soimagely.com <comment><AUTHOR> Author here (Nick): We've worked on a side project to help authors of blogs or social media to create images for their content. After noticing it can be difficult to find something suitable when writing our own blog posts. Hope to get some feedback from the HN community. I've been a long time reader of HN, but always in the passive form, so now is the time I'm getting active :) Hope to hear from you guys and girls!</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the Feud Over Killer Robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/technology/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-artificial-intelligence.html <comment><USER2> _During a recent Tesla earnings call, Mr. Musk, who has struggled with questions about his company's financial losses and concerns about the quality of its vehicles, chastised the news media for not focusing on the deaths that autonomous technology could prevent — a remarkable stance from someone who has repeated warned the world that A.I. is a danger to humanity._

The reporter is being pretty disingenuous with the opinion they are injecting here. There is a huge gap between a general (super intelligent) AI, and a self-driving car, which is more-or-less a bunch of narrow AI's strung together. Self-driving cars do have the potential to save an enormous number of lives by being far less likely to get into a car accident than your average human driver. In 2916, 37,500 Americans died in car accidents (that's not including the accidents that led to maiming or less severe injuries). If the autonomous cars are only 10% safer than the average American, they could save about 3,000 people per year [0].

[0] [https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-rand- report/](https://www.wired.com/story/self-driving-cars-rand-report/)

<comment><USER3> Or indeed over 30,000 people a year given that non Americans are, technically speaking people too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This doesn't exactly sound like a fued. More like "Mark and Elon had a meeting one time, and also, they occasionally mention each other in tweets."</comment>


Ask HN: Platform options for quick intra-office coding questions? - <AUTHOR>

Quick questions such as "How can I search history in bash?" or "How do I copy to system clipboard in Vim?"
What are the platform options for this very fast question and answer service? Not something like StackExchange. More along the lines of IRC. I've also considered Yammer, Socialcast and Campfire. <comment><USER2> I telecommute for a company that uses Skype for everything - we have a company-wide group chat, and separate group chats for developers, marketing, etc. This makes it easy to throw out a quick question or see who's online at any given moment.

Are you strictly looking for web-based software?

<comment><USER3> I would second Skype, they have clients for most platforms and the group video conferencing makes quick developer meetings nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My last job hosted an XMPP server, and we also had a locally hosted pastebin. On the XMPP server we hosted chatrooms, so the IT people would hang out in one, and the software devs in another.

What I use right now is Microsoft Lync (aka Communicator), since we're on the MS stack for infrastructure. The nice thing about that is you can click the "Share Desktop" button if you needed to show something you have. I don't know if it supports predefined chatrooms, but you can get multi-user chats by dragging people into IM conversations.

</comment><comment><USER5> XMPP is the way to go. We use AIM at my current workplace, so the hosting isn't even a problem for us.</comment>


Porting THREES to Luxe, Part One - <AUTHOR> http://snowkit.org/2016/04/19/threes-port-part-one/ <comment><USER2> Threes seems to be a game like 2048, but changing how tile sliding and combination works.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was the other way round. If you see the bottom of the 2048 page ([https://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/](https://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/)), it is mentioned that "Created by Gabriele Cirulli. Based on 1024 by Veewo Studio and conceptually similar to Threes by Asher Vollmer."

2048 was created over a weekend and is actually a very poorly designed game but went viral, arguably because of HN. The 2048 craze prompted the creators of Threes to publish this incredibly detailed and lengthy writeup on the creative process of Threes: [http://asherv.com/threes/threemails](http://asherv.com/threes/threemails). Threes, on the other hand, is truly a very well-executed piece of art and magnificently designed.

The developer of 2048 wrote a post about his viral success here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7704800) (couldn't find the article as it has since been removed). Kudos to him for giving credit.

At the end of the day, both games left their mark on the games industry and is an excellent example on the effect of cloning and virality.</comment></comment>


YouTube was launched as a dating site - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20050428014715/http://www.youtube.com/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-started-as-an-online- datin...](https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-started-as-an-online-dating-site/)

Here's a little more info. They changed it to a general purpose video site after 5 days after nobody uploaded any videos although they offered 20 USD to each woman for uploading a self-introduction video.

<comment><USER3> This wayback machine is from April 28, 2005. Me at the Zoo[1] is from April 23, 2005.

So technically speaking, someone did upload something. And 5 days is actually really 5 days...

Which brings the question - what is the second oldest YouTube video still on the site? Who is the "also ran"?

[1] [https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw](https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw)

<comment><USER4> One of the comments on that video claims that the guy makes $5.9k-$93.7k per year on that one 18-second video. Does that sound plausible and consistent with what YouTube pays? Is there any way to check if he has actually monetized his video?

<comment><USER5> $1-10 per 1k views.

73m views / 15 years = 5.2m views/year

=$5.2k/year - $52k/year.

Turn off Adblock and see if an ad plays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I didn't realize The Wayback Machine had so much YouTube content from the early days. Really interesting going back and seeing what was on the front page on some random day in 2006.

Looking at what people were uploading and what people were watching leaves me feeling a bit wistful. It seems like it was a more authentic place before the money caught up with it.

<comment><USER7> _It seems like it was a more authentic place before the money caught up with it._

Isn't that the way it always goes? I wish there were some way of permanently locking Wall Street out of the picture so we could actually have some nice things.

<comment><USER8> That's the non-profit, free software world. It exists, gnu.org compiles a lot of free software if you're interested, or there's other organizations that compile stuff like free blueprints for farm equipment, free music, sprites, etc.

It's out there, but a lot of people generally consider the free/libre stuff "lower quality," which is often a fair accusation.

<comment><USER7> Oh, yes! - I use free software almost exclusively. It may not always be as polished as the commercial competition, but it feels better to be part of a sharing community. I feel especially fortunate that my current job allows me to make a good living developing free software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reading the original Terms of Use & Privacy Policy linked in the capture gave me a chuckle. It seems someone tried to find + replace div tags with p tags as the documents repeatedly refer to "inpiduals."

<comment><USER10> OT: in Emacs, you could prevent this from happening by using _C-u M-%_ (replace-word): in that case, only those instances of "div" that are separate words (not parts of other words) will be replaced.

How would you avoid "inpiduals" (and similar mistakes) in other editors?

<comment><USER11> In vim: :%s/\<div\>/p/g (add C at the end if you want to confirm each change)

<comment><USER12> TIL what \< means. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another video service built on dating? Comcast's video-on-demand service.

Back when Comcast was promoting itself as having "The most on demand video! More than _insert market competitor here_!" it included in that "most" count each of the three-minute profile clips from its horribly lame video dating service.

Distilled, AT&T (for example) would offer six full-length movies on demand, while Comcast had 12 three-minute dating video clips, allowing it to claim "twice as much" on-demand content.

<comment><USER14> Back when I had Comcast that was some of the most entertaining stuff to be found on their on-demand service. I had totally forgotten about that thanks for the trip down memory lane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> And Hulu was originally launched as someone's personal homepage.

[https://web.archive.org/web/19991023065011/https://www.hulu....](https://web.archive.org/web/19991023065011/https://www.hulu.com/)

Wonder how much they sold the domain for.

<comment><USER16> And steam.com still refuses to sell the domain even if they haven't had a server for years now:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104434/http://www.steam....](https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104434/http://www.steam.com/)

<comment><USER17> I recently came across [https://gail.com/](https://gail.com/)

<comment><USER16> At least, that was a birthday present and it's her first name. The whole gmail typo stuff is hilarious though, that's for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> About Us [0] on webarchive from the same date is still relevant:

> YouTube is the first online community site that allows members to post and > share personal videos.

[0] [https://web.archive.org/web/20050428171556/http://www.youtub...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050428171556/http://www.youtube.com/about.php)

</comment><comment><USER19> I never knew this. It gives a little more meaning to the domain name, but even in it's current form, the domain name still works, just less literally.

</comment><comment><USER20> The tabs and some other ui elements have round corners, as it was customary in that days.

Everyone wanted and insisted to have this, despite it was very inconvenient to build with pieces of images and tables.

<comment><USER21> And now it's trivial to do with CSS but largely out of fashion. Sigh.

<comment><USER20> BTW, for human eye it's _probably_ more harmonious, I don't mind seeing it today when it's trivial technically. But indeed, out of fashion, which is another demonstration of the lack of free thought in that area.

Sigh indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It was supposed to be "Hot or Not" with videos.

<comment><USER23> I HAVE AN IDEA: TINDER BUT WITH VIDEOS

<comment><USER24> Tinder already lets you upload short gifs of yourself

<comment><USER25> yeah, but sound

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I remember some of these super early launches of websites. At the time YouTube launched I was using Google Video and I thought it was superior. I think I visited the Youtube site once while it had it's dating drop down but left because there was no content to watch. The next 18 months were insane as YouTube grew then got bought by Google.

</comment><comment><USER27> It also launched during a time when most people watched video on a tube, hence the name. This may not be immediately obvious to people born after ~2005.

<comment><USER28> Even in 2005 people were chucking out their Cathode Ray Tube televisions in favour of flatscreens.

<comment><USER29> Unless they played Smash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think one of the biggest bobbles of modern (social-centric) tech history was Google not morphing YT into a more social platform. They had the name recognition. They had the users. All they lacked was some basic functionality to compete for social attention.

Instead they went for G+. The rest, as they say, is history.

<comment><USER31> They basically tried this with the google + integration . But that was its own mess also

<comment><USER32> If they had not disrupted any users with the integration and turn people off of G+ they could have pulled it off. I guess they'll try again in 15 years.

<comment><USER33> I'm starting to suspect social may have burned over. At least in pesent incarnations.

<comment><USER34> "Burned over" in the sense of zero growth - everyone who wants a FaceSnapGram account has one.

Not burned out in terms of profit opportunities though - FB has $60bn revenue, capturing even 10% of that pie can justify an investment of thousands of person-years...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's very interesting to scrub through the history of the first year, you can see how they changed so much in that time

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting. By the time I looked at it while I was an EIR at Accel it was definitely not a dating site and that was early 2005. My assessment was more of a soft-porn / piracy site :)

<comment><USER37> I had a video site in the same era ([https://web.archive.org/web/20050701082257/http://www.vobbo....](https://web.archive.org/web/20050701082257/http://www.vobbo.com/)) and it was 100% soft porn and piracy, so much so that I shut it down because I couldn't justify the time spent moderating content (and I was a one man show, didn't want to get sued).

Should have tried to get funding, but had no idea what I was doing.

But yea, I totally believe YouTube spent a few years as soft porn and piracy (which they clearly tolerated for eyeballs).

<comment><USER38> They have a lot of softcore porn and piracy now. Indeed I've seen some things on YouTube recently that look like pretty blatant porn, and weren't behind the age-wall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It was also made possible entirely by Macromedia Flash. (Purchased by Adobe the same year).

</comment><comment><USER40> You may want to check out this 2006 talk by Jawed Karim. [https://youtu.be/7oJdD2oUHXc](https://youtu.be/7oJdD2oUHXc) This was shortly after Google acquired them.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was great. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> 1) Did anyone here use it? I'm curious what the UX was... Browse short video profiles of people and then message the ones you like?

2) Does anyone know what caused the shift from Video Dating to just Video?

<comment><USER28> To me it looks like some generic "PHP Script" dating site. I.e. you buy a licence for I dunno $30 and install it on your shared hosting, ... , profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> this is still a great idea... even with clips, dating apps are so static. body language, tonality.

<comment><USER43> I think there would be a market for a "verified weight / height / photo" dating site. Maybe have kiosks set up where people can go get a photo taken, on a scale, with a height gauge behind them from standard angles (front / side) -- to avoid the infamous "myspace angles" that people use.

<comment><USER24> If the first action in a relationship is one of distrust, it doesn't feel right...

<comment><USER44> Interactions on dating sites happen _prior_ to a relationship.

Also, I think dating sites are a bit "a market for lemons".

<comment><USER45> I don't think that's necessarily true. To be a market for lemons, in the original sense, it's required that goods are objectively better or worse to all buyers, and it's required that sellers know the value of their goods to buyers.

Put more concretely, because different people have different dating preferences, one person's lemon can be another person's peach.

In addition, a market for lemons usually requires a seller to be able to determine the value of goods while the buyer can't. On dating sites, both the user and the site itself are trying to "sell" that person to prospective matches. Neither of those parties has all that much better of a way to determine a person's match-ability, so there's not all that much asymmetry. I suppose the site does know a little more based on history, but I don't think that's necessarily enough.

I do think dating sites are pretty garbage, but I don't think it's due to the phenomenon described by "a market for lemons", but rather due to multiple other factors.

<comment> J-dawg > one person's lemon can be another person's peach

That's a nice way of looking at the world, and of course it's true sometimes.

But...hasn't all the data coming out of dating sites kind of proved the opposite? Especially for men, something like the top 10-20% are getting basically _all_ the matches and messages.

<comment><USER46> At least to some extent, dating sites have _made_ the opposite. The more people know about each other, the greater the variance in their assessments of each others' attractiveness. ISTR a study that showed that the less people know each other before starting dating, the more likely people are to end up with partners who are about as physically attractive as themselves.

<comment> J-dawg This is a good point. I guess it's important to remember that dating sites do actually change people's behaviour, rather than being a representation of how everyone behaves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Interesting - I think the world was not ready for a video dating site back then. This could probably work quite well now (thanks to the change in peoples' attitude towards creating online video content, brought about by YouTube itself)!

</comment><comment><USER48> > I like the way the world looks from a bicycle.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLtOjENz-Q&start=123](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLtOjENz-Q&start=123)

</comment><comment><USER49> It's amazing how so many people don't know this! I actually met my third wife on the original site, it was a different time.

<comment><USER50> Where did you meet your fourth wife?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Some YouTubers went on to try launching dating sites again after the Google acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER52> One of the comments says the video makes around $5.9k-93.7k per year. Fact or fiction?

</comment><comment><USER53> they changed their minds after 5 days? I guess it worked out for them in long run, but they couldn't really expect much after that short of a time.

</comment><comment><USER54> The name was also supposed to be "YourTube"

</comment><comment><USER55> Wait... what is it now?

Oh no, I have to go take down a few videos...

</comment><comment><USER56> > [http://www.youtube.com/index.php](http://www.youtube.com/index.php)

I didn't know youtube's first version was written in php.

<comment><USER38> Interesting to see major sites with CSS issues like that, with the country code ("GB" for me, in the UK) added the width on the logo box isn't wide enough.

#yt-masthead #logo-container { margin-right: 20px; }

is a hacky fix.

They appear to be using position:absolute to get cheap vertical alignment to put the GB at the top, but it removes from the flow and so gets overlaid. "vertical-align:top" works, it seems, so I'm curious why they've not used that instead?

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> And it still works!

</comment><comment><USER58> news to me:)</comment>


C++ Employment Future.... - <AUTHOR>

Other than high speed trading and gaming, is there a broad future in C++ programming or will it mostly settle around these special uses? It seems like most employment postings list C++ as a transition to Java. <comment><USER2> Some people are arguing that C++ will be the future of embedded development. (Others think they're nuts; I don't have enough visibility in the embedded world to have an opinion.)

</comment><comment><USER3> mobile gaming is not future of C++

on the other hand, does traditional gaming have any future?

<comment><USER4> Of course traditional gaming has a future. The casual market may be bigger, but the video game industry was very lucrative even before gaming went mainstream. This combined with the fact that the best mobile game so far is pretty much an evolved version of a demo game from Basic, makes me wonder why anyone doubts the longevity of traditional gaming. Casual and mobile games are time killers. Very few of them have much depth and half of the games that do have depth also have horrible controls. As of now, no one has figured out a way to implement decent controls on a touchscreen unless the genre just happens to be particularly suited for tapping and swiping.

From a business standpoint, casual games are very profitable. But from a gamers perspective, they almost always disappoint.</comment></comment>


Online Survey and Form Builder Typeform Raises €1.2M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/23/typeform-raises/ <comment><USER2> Hi, a few question i hope HN people can answer. I don't want to offend anybody and think that typeform forms are really beautifuls but if i think of all the "lean startups principles" i find hard to give a positive answer to the question "does this product really meet an unsatisfied need?" Did you tried idea validation? Have you built a prelaunch landing page and gathered hundreds of emails from people really interested in your product? Mine is really curiosity so i hope not hurt nobody!

</comment><comment><USER3> How does Typeform compare to FormStack, Wufoo or even Google Forms?

<comment><AUTHOR> Disclaimer, I work at Typeform.

It's like comparing a beautiful swan to ugly ducks. Just by having a look at Typeform, you'll see that Typeform is on a whole different level when it comes to UX and UI, compared to any other form creator.

We have a lot of people loving Typeform. I bet you'll have a hard time finding anyone even liking Google Forms, most people use Google Forms because they have to and don't know any alternatives.

<comment><USER4> Incumbents could easily copy your UX, if it proved to be a competitive advantage

<comment><USER5> If it were as simple as that, we'd all be running cloned iPhones.

<comment><USER4> An iPhone is a lot harder to knock off than a _form_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Arm unveils 7nm Cortex-A76 CPU - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/12785/arm-cortex-a76-cpu-unveiled-7nm-powerhouse <comment><USER2> I'm not a hardware knowledgable guy, but would love to read/hear an intro about what chip design is all about (at a lay person's level I guess).

I understand that ARM sells core designs, and that each company assembles them / designs them in the way suits their performance needs, and then gets them manufactured?

But what does that really mean? What is the "user" doing? Are they arranging them like kids' Lego blocks on a die surface? Dragging and dropping blocks of code? Are they tweaking the voltage settings? Are they combining them in ways that do sequential operations special to them? What's the added step here? Like, why doesn't ARM just create the chips that the end OEMs want?

Is it like cooking or chemistry? What's the closest analogy? I would love to get a more intuitive feel about what chip design is all about.

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> You've got the right general idea already :)

> I understand that ARM sells core designs, and that each company assembles > them / designs them in the way suits their performance needs, and then gets > them manufactured?

Most consumers of ARM cores are simply interested in integrating them into a larger design; usually an SoC. Not so much in tweaking performance, though certainly they'll choose whether to prioritize performance or power in their application.

> But what does that really mean? What is the "user" doing? Are they arranging > them like kids' Lego blocks on a die surface? Dragging and dropping blocks > of code?

Pretty much like Lego blocks. Most shops just want an SoC that does X, Y, and Z with Foo requirements. So they grab an ARM core, an HDMI 2.0 RX core, and H.265 core, and glue them together.

Depending on what tools they're using this "gluing" is specified in different ways. You can design it somewhat abstract in a block diagram, where you specify all the cores you want, specify what (virtual) pins from each core connect to what others, and maybe tweak a few parameters on some of the cores. It looks kinda like this: [https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera- www/global/en_US/i...](https://www.altera.com/content/dam/altera- www/global/en_US/images/support/examples/quartus/images/altpll_fig2.gif)

Or there are even higher level tools that let you specify and hook these things together in a GUI specifically designed for building designs like this. They look like this: [https://i.stack.imgur.com/yud23.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/yud23.png)

But those and other higher level tools all basically just have a compiler that converts specifications into code (Verilog or VHDL).

That is then handed to another compiler which creates a netlist. Think of this like assembly code but for hardware. It specifies the whole design at the level of logical operations. 2-bit AND here, 4-bit Full Adder there, etc. Finally that netlist is thrown through _another_ compiler which does final place and route. Place and route is where the netlist is converted into the transistors and wires for the actual die, and then rendered out into all the layer masks that will be sent to the fab. (I'm glossing over a few details here. E.g. place and route is actually working from a library of transistor designs for each possible logical gate, pre-designed by the silicon fab that your going to send your masks to.). It sounds simple, but until place and route your design is just an abstract spaghetti of logical operations and connections between. Place and route has to solve an NP-Complete optimization to figure out where, on the physical die, all the transistors are going to go, given a set of constraints (transistors need to be close enough to their neighbors to achieve the performance requirements).

Anyway, stepping back, the design phase is where you specify various parameters for the cores. These parameters typically change things like enabling/disabling features of the core. For example on an ARM core you might disable the math co-processor to save space/power if you don't need it; make the pipelines smaller, etc. These are configuration options; you aren't editing the ARM core's code. The core itself specifies how its code changes depending on configuration options.

The place and router phase is where you have some control over power/performance. You can tell the tools to focus on power if your design needs to be low power. It'll then design the transistors in such a way that it'll use less power but also lose some performance. Or the opposite.

Of course how the cores themselves are designed is important to power versus performance, and ARM cores probably have some configuration options that affect their behavior in that regard.

And then the silicon you target is of the utmost importance for design trade offs. Targeting 7nm fabs versus something larger will usually mean a more power efficient and performant design, but will have _much_ higher up-front costs (the physical masks you deliver to the fab cost tens of millions of dollars or more).

To be clear, this is the level at which _most_ consumers of ARM cores are working at. They're just putting Lego blocks together. The ARM core is just a black box in that regard. ARM delivers the core's "code" to you as a pre- processed netlist. You can't see its real code (you just see a chaotic spaghetti of logical operations). But some companies have more special needs and want to tweak the core in specific ways (e.g. Apple). They'll have special deals with ARM that give them access to the core's source code where they can make custom tweaks. But this is rare.

Some companies have their own IP which they might integrate into a design. Their own cores, coded from scratch. These are coded in Verilog or VHDL, for the most part.

> Like, why doesn't ARM just create the chips that the end OEMs want?

ARM cores get used in TONS of custom silicon. Wifi routers, drones, cell phone chips, cell phone coprocessor chips, etc. So part of it is that ARM just couldn't possibly design and build all these different kinds of chips.

It's also that ARM does what ARM does best: design ARM cores. That's a job that takes an entire company all to itself to accomplish. Anything else is just beyond the scope of their company (for now).

<comment><USER3> Addendum:

I suppose one way to think about this is to imagine old-school computers. I'm talking about the ones built from TTL logic chips; pre-6502/8080/etc.

ARM is basically selling a virtual "board" with their CPU implemented using those logic chips. You, as the designer, can then connect their board up to other boards to have other functionality you want. A graphics board, a sound board, etc.

The difference between those days and today is that these are all virtual. So after you've plugged the boards together a compiler can come through and optimize everything into a final single "board". Which is actually a set of masks used to fab chips on a single piece of silicon.

And these boards are somewhat abstractly specified, letting you enable and disable whole portions of it and have the design adapt accordingly (disabling instructions/functionality/etc).

This analogy isn't far from the truth, since a netlist is really just a list of logical operations, aka just like TTL logic chips, and their connections.

Modern chip development is simply an evolved form of these primordial design techniques. We've replaced manual place and route with "compilers" and optimization algorithms (the original 6502's masks were _hand drawn_. Engineers crawling over a giant plastic sheets making cuts to draw all the transistors and wires). We've replaced manually specifying netlists with higher level languages like Verilog and VHDL. We replaced TTL level CPUs with integrated CPUs. And then eventually replaced whole boards with SoCs.

So if you want to learn chip design; start from the beginning; history is very illuminating. Transistors -> TTL logic chips -> 6502/Z80 designs -> SoCs.

<comment><USER2> Oh a brief followup question if you have interest -- How does one know when it's time to design your own chip? Versus take something off the shelf? At what level of company or product maturity is this realization even likely to be discovered?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do find these articles frustrating. They continue to rave about ARM (or Qualcomm) improvements, while casually mentioning that they're at least 2 years behind Apple. Being 2-3 years behind Apple should be front and centre of the article. It's a big deal! Unfortunately, as an Android user, I don't have a choice, and I suspect my next phone will have an SD845.

You didn't see that kind of leniency when AMD was releasing slow/inefficient CPUs pre Zen.

<comment><USER5> The difference is that Apple's chips are only in Apple devices and not on the market for anyone to build a system around - So the other chips are all we have.

<comment><USER6> It's more likely that Apple doesn't release a lot of technical information about their chips that sites like Anandtech can rework into some kind of article.

"Apple releases new X series chip, 40% faster, internal details unknown" is not really a compelling story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wanna see a realistic benchmark that compares it against intel's x86 i"X" (6th, 7th, 8th gen) to decide if it can be called a laptop class processor in first place... BTW, it's interesting to see how good apple is in designing their custom Arm processors.

<comment><AUTHOR> > it's interesting to see how good apple is in designing their custom Arm > processors.

ooh, probably because apple acquired a company called pa-semi (300m iirc) which had a bunch of cpu dudes doing power-efficient chips for quite a while...

<comment><USER7> Looking online about this company. Apple has acquired pa-semi for $278m in 2008 which translated in having the fasted arm processor by a wide margin a decade later, definitely paid out very well.

<comment><USER8> It took a lot less than a decade, they were already ahead when the A7 launched in 2013. So they took the lead in 5 years, and now have held it for another 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder whether attempting to move into a laptop form factor will translate to more emphasis to get these reference SoC's fully on the mainline kernel. You'd have thought it would make it a lot easier for any non-Windows products to be launched if that was in place.

</comment><comment><USER10> So the newest Cortex will roughly match the 2016 Apple A10 CPU? No wonder so many android tablets are painfully slow...

<comment><USER11> You need to compare few things other than raw performance. Latest Apple chips are humongous for ARM based SoCs.

This is in big part due to them having bigger caches than some server CPUs.

<comment><USER12> I was curious about this claim so I looked some numbers up. The latest A11 chip has 8MiB of L2 cache. I could only find a small handful of xeon models with 6MiB of cache while almost all of them contain equal or greater amounts of L2 cache. The chip does not have L3 cache so there is nothing to compare here. The A10 has total package cache less than 8MiB (split into L2 and L3). So I'm not sure this is a good explanation of the performance or size difference.

From what I can tell, while cache is still a large portion of the area, GPU die space is quite large now. The CPU performance seems to be due to expanded execution ports leading to more dispatched instructions per cycle, which is generally a good idea as long as one can keep the execution ports fed with a good amount of speculation in other stages of the pipeline.

<comment><USER11> You also have to add SRAM on the GPU, decoders, and etc that adds to 13mb

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any idea if it would be affected by Spectre?

<comment><USER14> It's no longer vulnerable to variant 2 and 3.[1]

[1] [https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security- updates/specu...](https://developer.arm.com/support/arm-security- updates/speculative-processor-vulnerability)</comment></comment>


Apple bumps Google as most valuable brand - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20061004-17.html?tag=topTechContentWrap;editorPicks <comment><USER2> Proof that hipsters are taking over the world.</comment>


C vs. Assembly (The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dspguide.com/ch28/5.htm

<comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=The+Scientist+and+Engineer%27s+Gui...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=The+Scientist+and+Engineer%27s+Guide+to+Digital+Signal+Processing#!/story/forever/0/The%20Scientist%20and%20Engineer's%20Guide%20to%20Digital%20Signal%20Processing)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to semantically analyze code for design patterns? - <AUTHOR>

I have been recently introduced to the importance of writing clean, maintainable code.
Even though I have studied Design Patterns and have read books on how to go about it, I find it difficult to recognize patterns in code.
I have been told that this skill improves over time of reading and writing more code. The question is can code be semantically analyzed on the fly to
1) Detect duplicate code
2) Detect design patterns
3) or taking it one step further: Suggest how to go about refactoring
Are there any tools which already do this? <comment><USER2> You may want to look at some static code analysis tools for 1 and 2:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis)

From my very limited understanding, the powerful ones are seemingly only in reach for large enterprises [1].

With regard to number 3, In C# and Java, resharper/IntelliJ has partially automated refactoring tools. I'm sure similar tools exist for other languages.

However, I think going down this route is substantially more work unless you are inheriting a code base. I would aim to learn some of the design patterns basics[2], perhaps read "The Algorithm Design Manual" [3], and aim to have a clear idea of how to design your latest algorithm from the offset.

[1] - <http://semmle.com/solutions/what-we-do/index.html>

[2] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns>

[3] - [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven- Skien...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven- Skiena/dp/1848000693)

</comment><comment><USER3> Check this: <https://github.com/facebook/pfff>

I don't think you can easily detect design patterns... you'll end up thinking about a "high level language where you can design just by dragging and dropping some blocks" which kinda doesn't work IRL.</comment>


Chase Bank forgiving all debt owed by its Canadian credit card customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/chase-bank-amazon-visa-marriott-credit-card-debt-1.5239411 <comment><USER2> In the USA this has tax implications for those who are on the receiving end of a forgiven debt:

[https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/what-if-my-debt-is- forgiven](https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/what-if-my-debt-is-forgiven)

Is it the same in Canada?

<comment><USER3> I don't have a link for you, but in Canada, if the personal debt was connected to a commercial transaction (ie: you bought something using your personal credit intended to benefit an incorporated business) then it is a taxable benefit to that business. The person owes nothing, but the corporation does. In this case, it is of interest to the corporation to give the money back to the individual before tax season, otherwise it is income. The person could always treat it as an investment as well, but there are additional rules to that which of course then affect the individual's taxes. Every penny of it that stays in the corporation is taxable.

If the debt was personal only, it is no different than if someone gave you money as a gift. Likewise, we don't tax lottery winnings. But we do tax gifts that come from corporations you own or are employed by, or a board member, etc, as income (taxable benefit). The tax connection, in each case, is because of money going into or out of a corporation you have a financial connection to. That's why you'll never get a lottery ticket as a gift from your boss, paid for by the company.

If that ticket won big money, it's a whole world of hurt for the corporation.</comment></comment>


Why does modern Perl avoid UTF-8 by default? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6162484/why-does-modern-perl-avoid-utf-8-by-default

<comment><USER2> I think we've seen that working string support requires a substantial rewrite for most languages (perhaps ironically, Java is the one that has managed to avoid it). Ruby 1.9 was pretty big; Python 3 was more so.

Perl 6 was the Perl equivalent. Unfortunately we know how that turned out.

<comment><USER3> Getting Unicode right is more than "working string support". It requires programmer knowledge upgrades. No amount of boilerplate you put in your programs--or in the language itself--will fix a programmer's lack of knowledge.</comment></comment>


Is Firefox Doomed? - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_firefox_doomed.php#.TtqVTl2ZdU4.hackernews <comment><USER2> I'm a developer that switched back to Firefox, after I gave up on it during the 3.5 days. Firefox almost died in its transition to version 4, however now it is back on track.

I prefer it over Chrome because Firefox is a platform, not a product that treats me like a dumb user.

I use it on my Android too. It's a little sluggish and still uses too much memory, however it has a killer feature - it syncs everything with my desktop. It syncs my bookmarks and my saved login data for various websites I use. Saves me from a lot of manual typing and it is so addictive I can't give it up. Plus I'm seeing progress and they've promised a native interface that will be more efficient.

The desktop version is pretty stable these days too - I'm on the Beta channel (version 9) and I don't have problems. Even the versioning problems for the plugins I use have been sorted out.

I still recommend it to people, I would recommend it even to my hypothetical grandma.

If people from Mozilla are reading this - thanks for all your hard work.

<comment><USER3> > not a product that treats me like a dumb user

I use both Chrome and FF, and I never felt like a browser was "treating me" like anything. They're both tools.

Maybe because I _AM_ a dumb user? ... Oh god.

<comment><USER4> Plus, Chrome basically comes with Firebug by default.

I feel that Chrome is similar to Apple products in that it feels restrictive when you first use it (especially with regards to its extension system), but that eventually you realize that you didn't really need those features in the first place. For me those were tree style tabs, as well as the "Awesome bar". The only truly killer feature that Chrome lacks is a reliable Adblock plus.

Of course, YMMV, etc.

<comment><USER5> Chrome has its own version of Adblock plus: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkda...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb)

Is it missing something that's in the Firefox version?

<comment><USER4> Yes, it does poorly on many Flash videos, especially twitch.tv and other streaming sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > So far, Bott's inquries to Mozilla about whether or not the Google deal has > been renewed haven't yielded a straight answer. It's entirely possible that > Google won't renew the deal, which would put about $100 million of Firefox's > revenue at stake. [..] Google doesn't need Firefox anywhere near as much as > Firefox needs Google.

This is completely mistaken.

What Google mainly cares about is search market share. Even 0.1% there is crucial, and worth a lot of money. Google would be willing to throw almost any amount of money at anything that would increase its share in search or keep it at its current height. The same is true of Microsoft with Bing.

Consider what happens if Google drops the deal with Firefox. Google will no longer be the default search engine in Firefox, and a lot of goodwill towards Google from Firefox users will be lost. Those two factors can easily account for far more than %0.1 of search. Worse, it is very likely that Microsoft would step in and pay the same amount to Firefox, so Google would be helping its main competitor in search.

$100M in that context is a laughably tiny amount.

<comment><USER7> > $100M in that context is a laughably tiny amount.

Considering that Google spent $2.11B on traffic acquisition last quarter[0] it seems even less.

[0] [http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings....](http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No, it's clearly not doomed.

Google wants people to use their services, and to use browsers that are up to scratch to do so. They also want to influence web standards so that they can build better products. This is why they built Chrome.

Firefox helps them to achieve these goals by being another alternative to IE, and having similar views about evolving web standards.

</comment><comment><USER9> Firefox isn't doomed. Not only is it still a good web browser that many (myself included) continue to use daily, inertia will keep it installed on millions of PCs.

As far as I know, Mozilla and Google maintain good relations. Even if the deal that provides money from Google to Mozilla isn't renewed, I doubt they will entirely disentangle themselves from each other.

<comment><USER10> Firefox is doomed because its lost its developer foot hold, anecdotally most devs I know refer to it as a joke and use Chrome instead. Its a browser that relies on recommendation to exist, and it no longer is getting recommendation.

On a technical note each version isn't really getting any better, historical problems have never been addressed, version fragmentation is occurring, on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.

The UI is polarising (its the major complaint I actually here next to 'laggy behavior'), the options to change it rely on 3rd party modules which are often bugging and not supported between versions. It's never nailed OSX, it just doesn't 'feel' the same as the rest of the operating system and is slightly jarring at times.

Personally if you take a base install of Opera 11 it is exactly how I want FF to be set up, everything works smoothly, fast, and 'clicky'. I'd recommend any FF user to try the new version of Opera for a few days, then go back to FF and see just how different it feels even though they are aesthetically quite similar.

<comment><USER11> Most of your post is emotion and opinion, so I thought I'd address the part that is factually incorrect:

> On a technical note each version isn't really getting any better

That's simply not true. To take a single example, the type inference engine added to the JS engine in FF9 significantly improved performance. With the new high frequency release strategy, it's not guaranteed that there will be huge new features or improvements in any given release, but the features and improvements are coming as fast as ever.

> historical problems have never been addressed

You can find ancient pet bugs for any project that either take a long time to get fixed or are never fixed. Do you have something specific in mind?

> version fragmentation is occurring

That's more-or-less false. There's some adjustment going on due to the switch to the high frequency release schedule, but the fact is the vast majority of Firefox users are on a small number of versions, almost all that have been offered an upgrade are on the latest stable release.

> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other > major players.

Can you point to anything specific to back up your claim? If you pick and choose specs, this is true for all browsers. Nobody implements everything completely and correctly. The specs are being developed as fast as ever, and it's common for one browser to be ahead in certain areas. It's also common for competing implementations to differ as the standard develops. This is not confined to Firefox.

<comment><USER12> You're not addressing his key point, I'm recommending Chrome to anyone I speak to, many other developers I know are too. Firefox is slow, sluggish to use and confusing compared to Chrome.

The edge it had over IE was that it was a better user experience. It's not compared to Chrome anymore. Even IE is better than FF apart from the weird crash like blank screen glitch when opening a new tab that IE has.

<comment><USER13> I don't have a problem with you recommending Chrome (and I work at Mozilla). However, it's not fair to say Firefox is sluggish. With a new profile, it's just as fast as Chrome. Try it.

Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons and browser history and cookies.

Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years.

Try vacuuming your Firefox database [1], syncing everything [2] and/or create a new profile [3] with only the extensions you actually use.

Oh, and be careful of Firebug. That's why most developers laugh at Firefox for being so slow; they use Firebug, which slows Firefox down to a grinding halt. We're working on our own dev tools, which are slowly coming together. They're not a Firebug replacement yet, but they're getting there. [4]

1 [http://mozillalinks.org/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases- for...](http://mozillalinks.org/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-for-better- performance-now-with-no-restart/) 2 <http://www.mozilla.org/en- US/mobile/sync/> 3 <http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles> 4 [http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/developer-tools-in- firefox-...](http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/developer-tools-in-firefox- aurora-10/)

<comment><USER14> "Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons"

You'd have a point here if Firefox hadn't started blithely breaking everyone's add-ons by bumping the version number about 5 times per week. Okay, that's hyperbole -- I know it wasn't that often, but the point is that a "rapid release schedule" comes with real costs.

If you have 500MM users, and the mean user time to adapt to a trivial new release is 5 minutes (a gross underestimate if add-ons have broken), you've just wasted 16 million hours of user time. Just because that cost doesn't appear as a line item in the Mozilla Foundation's budget doesn't mean it isn't real.

I used Firefox for years because of the rich add-on community. When it started being more trouble than it was worth to update the add-ons (or find/write new ones, if the old one hadn't been updated), I switched to Chrome. It's unlikely that I'll be back.

<comment><USER15> If the cost of frequent updates is breaking add ons that aren't actively maintained, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. The majority of the slowness criticisms that ff receives seem to be caused by add ons.

<comment><USER14> It's not unreasonable to expect an add-on to work for more than six weeks, especially when there hasn't actually been any real, significant change in the base software. I'd bet the (unpaid) add-on authors are getting pretty tired of this as well -- they're the ones who have to deal with the emails from unhappy users.

<comment><USER16> It's currently fixed in the Nightly and Aurora channels, and will make it to mainstream Firefox very soon: [http://theunfocused.net/2011/11/19/solving- firefoxs-add-on-c...](http://theunfocused.net/2011/11/19/solving-firefoxs-add- on-compatibility-problem/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope not. Currently nothing beats Firefox with Pentadactyl, Adblock Plus, Firebug, Tabmix plus combination. For real VIM geeks this is an insanely fast way to navigate the web and do online research.

<comment><USER18> Same here. I'm using all of those extensions, plus a number that help increase web privacy/security, such as BetterPrivacy, Ghostery, HTTPS-Everywhere, LastPass, and OptimizeGoogle.

There's no way to replicate that level of customization in Chrome. In fact, it's much worse because of all the tracking functionality Google's included.

<comment><USER19> > In fact, it's much worse because of all the tracking functionality Google's > included.

[citation needed], because as far as I'm aware of there's no such "tracking functionality" anywhere in Chrome.

"In fact," claims like this without proof are pretty shitty.

<comment><USER20> Everything you type into the address bar is sent to Google's servers as a search query.

<comment><USER21> Only if you turn that on (and by default it is not). See [http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=18...](http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=180655&hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Google benefits from being the default search engine in Firefox. They wouldn't pay $100 million per year to Mozilla if there wasn't some reasonable return on that investment. I imagine that the search traffic generated by Firefox will remain valuable to Google until FF's market share drops into the single digits.

The article implies that Google is charitably allowing Firefox to exist ("Google doesn't need Firefox anywhere near as much as Firefox needs Google."). I'd like to the think the Google-Mozilla relationship is mutually beneficial.

Firefox may become a viable alternative to Android's built-in browser once the native UI version is complete.

<comment><USER23> _Google doesn't need Firefox anywhere near as much as Firefox needs Google_

Even if true, that doesn't mean Google doesn't need Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Opera made $50M last year in search revenue from Google, Bing, Yandex, Amazon, and a few others. They did that with about 53M users -- 2-3% usage share according to StatCounter and Net Applications <http://grab.by/blcC>

(screenshot from this Opera report PDF [http://media.opera.com/media/finance/2011/3Q11_presentation....](http://media.opera.com/media/finance/2011/3Q11_presentation.pdf) )

</comment><comment><USER25> Google isn't giving money to Mozilla just because they're nice and they like Firefox. Google often makes money when someone uses Firefox's search box to do a Google search: the search results page may have ads and if the searcher clicks on one of those ads, Google makes money, which they share with the referrer. The referrer in this case is Firefox but Google has a similar arrangement with tons of other referrers (through their "AdSense for Search" program).

I suspect Google's deal with Mozilla hasn't been renewed simply because renewal time hasn't arrived yet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Chrome is too closely linked to Google, so Firefox will always be a good alternative for people who care about privacy.

</comment><comment><USER27> I would be surprised if Google didn't renew their contract. There are still a TON of Firefox users out there, and I'm sure they would love to market to them.

It's the same reason they still make iOS apps. They don't care about what software you use, just that you're searching with Google.

</comment><comment><USER28> If Microsoft can be sued (and lose) for making IE the only/default/integrated browser on millions of copies of Windows - why does not the same apply to Chrome/Safari on Android/Iphone?

<comment><USER29> Because neither Apple or Google have a monopoly on the browser market anywhere near what Microsoft had. Also, Microsoft was sued for actively thwarting competition[1] in order to maintain it's position.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft>

<comment><USER30> While your first point is valid, the fact that Apple completely refuse to allow any 3rd party browsers on iPhone/iPad/etc... puts them in a worse position competition-thwarting-wise than MS with IE.

<comment><USER31> Not true. You can get Opera for iOS: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/opera- mini-web-browser/id3637...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/opera-mini-web- browser/id363729560?mt=8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Firefox wins on only two feature, but important ones: privacy and advertising addons. It is the only reason I tolerate the rest of Firefox's slowness and memory hogging. 95+% of the market doesn't care about privacy and half don't care about ads though.

</comment><comment><USER33> Mozilla is a non-profit foundation. It isn't out to be the best at everything in every market, it's out to encourage competition and provide a solid FOSS solution to a difficult problem. As far as they're concerned, they've already won.

<comment><USER34> That's a bit of an oversimplification. Non-profits are interested in "providing a solution to a difficult problem", but they are also interested in self preservation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's not doomed but it's not doing to well. The last versions have not been different enough to warrant new version numbers and Firefox 8, while being decidedly quicker for some tasks, has been incredibly slow for my mundane tasks.

I'm a hardcore Firefox guy, I've been using it and Mozilla since M6 but I changed to Chrome yesterday and, while it's not flexible and customizable as Firefox, it's Good Enough.

I hope it gets better - perhaps focusing on the browser instead of higher version numbers and striving to look like IE or Chrome. Until then, I'm a Chrome guy.

<comment><USER13> Don't worry about the version number -- a higher number doesn't mean there's a ton of new features; it merely means 6 weeks has passed. Pretty soon, upgrade dialogs will be completely suppressed and it won't matter what version you're on (much like Chrome). I like the rapid release; it means as a developer I can play with new features much sooner.

Firefox is as fast or faster than any other browser (assuming you don't load it up with add-ons). [1] So it's not like everyone at Mozilla stopped programming and started focusing all their energy on merely incrementing the version number from 7 to 8.

I don't know why you're so worried -- version is just a number.

[1] [http://lifehacker.com/5844150/browser-speed-tests- firefox-7-...](http://lifehacker.com/5844150/browser-speed-tests- firefox-7-chrome-14-internet-explorer-9-and-more)

<comment><USER36> Version number does matter because they can't seem to create a stable add-on API, and therefore version increment == add-on breakage.

<comment><USER37> Actually there is a stable API that works much like Chrome's, it's called Jetpack [1], the problem is that most addons don't use it, in part because also like Chrome's, it's much more limited - the default JS API basically gives the addon access to the whole Firefox internals.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetpack_(Firefox_project)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Is Firefox Doomed!? FIND OUT MORE AT 10!"

</comment><comment><USER39> Becoming the #3 browser doesn't make Firefox anywhere near "doomed". It's just back where it was a few years ago, as far as market share is concerned. The desktop and laptop userbase isn't going to disappear anytime soon, either.

I don't know much about the search engine partnership issue, but it seems that the author suggested his answer to that. No search service can afford to ignore a browser with over 20% market share.

<comment><USER40> I think the issue here is that Mozilla can't afford to still exist without that 100 million from Google a year. But yeah, I don't see why someone else wouldn't come in and swoop on that.

<comment><USER41> Last I checked, the statement I read looked like Mozilla had a pile of cash in the bank. Enough to go on for many years if they're not dumb with it.

Would be interesting to see if they've put out an updated statement since then.

<comment><USER40> The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, right? So they should have public documents out there somewhere, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It actually does seem pretty likely that someone else--Yahoo, Microsoft, who knows--and use Firefox to their advantage in some way. But yeah, I don't see Google renewing the deal.

</comment><comment><USER42> it's doomed since Google withdrew its support [1] to Mozilla foundation, and decided to focus on its own browser instead. Firefox was Google's skunk works project in its competition against IE until 2008.

1\. [http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/google-makes- up-88-percent-...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/google-makes- up-88-percent-of-mozillas-revenues-threatens-its-non-profit-status/)

<comment><USER22> That article explains that Google renewed its contract with Mozilla in 2008 for three years. The current discussion relates to the future of that contract. There is no evidence that Google has permanently withdrawn support for Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> last year ff started to make changes that are becoming visible only now. they lost a lot of users, but are getting better all the time. i've been using chrome exclusively for the past year and now i've got both chrome and ff open.

i guess the biggest feature ff now lacks compared to chrome is the silent autoupdater. it can be optional, just stop asking me for admin rights every time it wants to update.

</comment><comment><USER34> _It's entirely possible that Google won't renew the deal, which would put about $100 million of Firefox's revenue at stake._

It would make no sense for Google to renew this agreement... if Mozilla suddenly changed Firefox's default SE that would not go over well with the users. It seems much more likely that they would form a new deal with less revenue going to Mozilla.

Of course that doesn't mean Firefox is done. That is highly dependent on Mozilla's innovation in the next few years.

<comment><USER44> I am sure someone else would pick up the slack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Less than a week after Chrome passes Firefox and we get the "is firefox doomed?!" articles. Good old Internet blog pundits...

</comment><comment><USER46> What does Mozilla do with their cash?

<comment><USER8> They publish their audited financial statements online:

<http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/>

[http://static.mozilla.com/moco/en- US/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundatio...](http://static.mozilla.com/moco/en- US/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundation%20and%20Subsidiaries%202010%20Audited%20Financial%20Statement.pdf)

As of December 31, 2010, they have assets of $168MM, of which $35MM is in cash and $105MM in investments. In the 12 months they spent $62MM on software development, $10MM on branding and marketing, and $12MM on 'General and administrative'.

There's more granular detail if you're interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> No. It is not doomed. Google would not let ~350 million potential users go to waste.

<comment><USER48> Most users would probably just set Google as the default search engine themselves if it wasn't default.

<comment><USER49> Most users never touch defaults. I'd bet you $100 million a year that AltaVista would stay default in the majority of Firefox installs, if it were released that way.

<comment><USER37> A decent number of them would:

1\. Type "Google" on the search bar 2\. Click on the first result 3\. Use Google

I've seen that over and over again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Google isn't exactly about the browser, they're all about search. Not renewing wouldn't make sense. Microsoft would benefit greatly by partnering with Mozilla and Google shouldn't let that happen from a business standpoint.

I think that despite Chroke's dominance Firefox isn't going anywhere. The article kind of made it sound like Mozilla was on the ropes which it's pretty far from. There will always be a market for those who want a browser from a company that is on their side and that's Mozilla. Chrome is aweso,e but there are going to be people concerned about the data collection that goes on. Chrome is out there to enrich Google. IE is infamous for being behind the times and just a crappy browser all around for standards, weird toolbars that install the,selves, etc. Then there's Mozilla. What ulterior motives do they have? From all I've ever learned they're just out there trying to build a kick ass browser and move the web forward. No search engine to support, no billion dollar software company to promote, just a humble browser maker in it for the users.

Chrome may overtake them in market share but I don't see Mozilla straying too far behind Google for the foreseeable future. IE share will keep tanking and Safari, while a great browser, will still be kind of a trailing behind cult classic.

</comment><comment><USER51> I guessed so. google was the major financial source for it, and it's going away. IE for Bing, Chrome for Google, Firefox for?

<comment><USER52> Firefox for Bing <http://www.firefoxwithbing.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Google's developing Chrome as part of their 'headless' browser, which now powers their crawler. If I had to guess, they'll keep Firefox around as a partner to cover all their bets. Between that and Chrome, they have a nice chunk of market share to compete against Internet Elephant.</comment>