Recovery-Oriented Computing - <AUTHOR> http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu/roc_overview.html <comment><USER2> Recovery-Oriented Computing has hit HN before. Instead of surfing the overview page, check out the toplevel with links to a LOT of fantastic and accessible papers and presentations:

<http://roc.cs.berkeley.edu/>

Then, move on to James Hamilton[1]'s "On Designing and Deploying Internet- Scale Services" which is a 10 minute read that's HOWTO on putting Recovery- Oriented Computing into practice:

[http://static.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamil...](http://static.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton/hamilton_html/)

That paper changed the entire way I design and evolve systems. And I keep seeing the lessons from it come up in less-distilled forms in other places. For example, Zach Holman of Github's recent and great "How To Build A Github"

<http://zachholman.com/talk/how-to-build-a-github>

[1] Vice President and Distinguished Engineer on the Amazon Web Services team where he is focused on infrastructure efficiency, reliability, and scaling. <http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/work/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a forthcoming blog post about the development of double entry accounting systems in the late Middle Ages and the way in which these are recovery-oriented systems with an eye on error detection and recovery. Of course these were on paper instead of digitally, but I think some of the same perspectives apply.

Double entry accounting always balances because it takes the viewpoint of a business with no intrinsic value, where debt owed to business and assets owned by the business (debits, lit. "thing owed") equals debts owed by the business (credits, "thing entrusted to someone else", either to creditors or to stockholders). Because everything is recorded from the counterparty's perspective and the business has no perspective, the system is robust. I further wonder if this isn't a natural development from medieval tally sticks to track debt.

But one thing that occurred to me is that it is hard to engineer this sort of system. Double entry accounting systems were probably an organic development based on the opening up of literacy outside the Church in the later Middle Ages. Pacioli only wrote about a system already in use. He did not invent it. It seems to me that over the next hundred years or so we can expect to see our approaches to computing evolve in a similar manner. The big challenge is that unlike building on tally sticks, we don;t have clear examples of how to do this with the computing problems of today.

<comment><USER4> Sounds cool, post it on HN when you're done.

Along the same lines, Pat Helland's paper "Building on Quicksand" says we should take inspiration from the paperwork used in business processes (like carbon copies, etc.):

[http://masterthefundamentals.rstata.org/2011/10/10/building-...](http://masterthefundamentals.rstata.org/2011/10/10/building- on-quicksand/)

Real life doesn't have distributed transactions! I'm sort of convinced that in 10 years, distributed transactions will be viewed as naive in the way that RPC is (or is starting to be). Both are trying to make distributed computing look like single-machine computing. But they're just inherently different.

Oh also there is "starbucks doesn't used 2 phase commit": <http://www.eaipatterns.com/ramblings/18_starbucks.html>

EDIT: Regarding your last point, I don't think it's inherently difficult to come up with these kinds of systems. Programmers just have to let go of the idea that there's a single truth and they control it all. That the program knows all. They have to have "empathy" with individual actors in the system. Each actor is dealing with participants it doesn't necessarily trust. The programmer has to put himself in the position of each actor when writing that code.

<comment><USER3> By engineering, of course, I mean engineering from scratch.

On that last point though (splitting this off), I think there are two difficulties in engineering it. First these are fundamentally more complex systems. The more complex a system is the harder it is to spot all points of failure. Additionally more complexity fundamentally means that that failure cases are more complex.

Instead I think that the way most of these systems develop is through progressive, evolutionary invention. Ok, I have tally sticks. I can write about them in a journal and use arithmetic to track the totals. I will write the stock on the left, referring to the thing owed (Latin "Debit") and the smaller foil on the right, referring to what is loaned to me (Latin "Credit").

Ok, now I need to categorize these. So I will start putting a code by each one. Now I have a chart of accounts! Now I need to total each of my accounts so I transcribe into another book and now I have a ledger. Do the books balance? Let me add them up and find out. Let's call this a trial balance. And so forth. The utility arises largely from a large number of different people working with real issues to find other uses for the system.

We see this with the evolution of SQL over a period of time as well. SQL today may not have changed in its outlines since it was developed but the standards have evolved a lot to meet needs.

So the challenge is for something like a disconnected POS. Again a system like the real world invoice and cash voucher system might work best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I was going over some of their goals I immediately started thinking about erlang.

* Isolation and Redundancy: Processes are isolated. If some component crases it won't affect the rest of the system.

* Design for high modularity, measurability, and restartability: You write erlang otp apps which you then combine (modularity). You can easily get a live shell to any erlang system so you can measure various parameters (measurability). Using erlang/otp libraries you implement supervisors such that when a component of your system crashes you can just restart it without any interference with the rest of the system. (restartability)

I'm not even close to being proficient in erlang but weren't these some of the issues erlang was designed to solve in the first place?

<comment><USER6> Yes, the key to grokking Erlang is understanding that all of the good design decisions come from reliability, not concurrency. Concurrency is to serve reliability, not the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Similar to crash-oriented computing - design your app to be crash ready, automatic recovery at the next startup.

Undo is nice and all that but some operations cannot be undone, e.g. emails sent. Compensation transaction is as important as roll back transaction.

<comment><USER8> Yeah i have to agree. Crash oriented or crash-only design is to my mind more useful than 'only' recovery oriented - it's also realistically achievable. I've taken to implementing my middleware this way since I've started working against Cassandra back-ends (also crash only design).</comment></comment>


Show HN: A simple, tiny template system. Stop repeating yourself - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/franciscop/htemplate <comment><USER2> Can this be integrated with jQuery to replace the "this.querySelector('img')" part?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the only thing you have to be careful is to give it the right context with 'this' (the current template), like this: "$('img', this)"</comment></comment>


$1 million reward to anyone who can recover former IRS directors lost emails - <AUTHOR> http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-Texas/2014/06/26/Texas-Congressmen-Introduce-Bill-Offering-1-M-for-IRS-Emails

<comment><USER2> What was in those emails ?

<comment><USER3> (Possible) Evidence that the IRS specifically targeted groups affiliated with the tea party movement.</comment></comment>


Engage by Mixpanel - <AUTHOR> https://mixpanel.com/engage/ <comment><USER2> This looks pretty great, just one thing I wanted to share is that advanced segmentation and re-marketing in the enterprise email world has been the norm for more than a few years. I used to work at Bronto (one of many enterprise email marketing software companies) and one of our key features was an advanced segmentation/workflow engine to let customers easily set up things like this:

1) Automatically send a 10% off coupon to people 5 days after they put an item in their shopping cart but didn't buy it

2) If they convert from that coupon and buy what they initially planned to buy 5 days ago we add them to a list of "win-back buyers"

3) If they convert from that coupon and add additional items we add them to a list of "win-back buyers plus"

4) Wait 3 days and then kick-off a multi-month custom email marketing campaign with various deals, offers and products tailored to what they've bought in the past, their average purchase price, geographic location, sex, age and any of dozens of other metrics we'd have for that user

5) Ask if they want to opt-in to coupons via SMS, send those coupons out the next time they log into the e-commerce website, browsing around before purchase

...and it just goes on from there. This type of long-term marketing/re- marketing, segmentation and advanced campaign management is precisely what email marketers do every day. Most people running email marketing campaigns for ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retailers have been doing customer lifecycle management across various channels (email, direct mail, online advertising, social and more) for awhile and they're very good at it. When you get an email in your inbox from a big retailer you've shopped at before, you may not know why you got the email but there's a good chance you were targeted via specific segmentation and targeting engines across over a dozen datapoints about your past behavior.

And one scary thing most people may not be aware of is that at the very high- end of enterprise email marketing systems, they have "data augmentation" features so that if you only know someone's email address you can pay other companies to give you the rest of their marketing profile, like name, address, age, ethnicity, purchasing behavior (like when you scan VIP cards at supermarkets or use gift cards), and even your full credit profile including credit scores, credit card types, previous addresses, loans you have, what type of car you drive, how big your mortgage is, etc. In fact, CheetahMail, which is the Rolls Royce of email marketing software used by all the largest companies in the world, is actually _owned by Experian_ the company that has all your credit information. <http://www.experian.com/cheetahmail/index.html>

<comment><USER3> A friend of mine founded a company that does email augmentation. Went from zero to acquisition in a year. Data is valuable.

<comment><USER4> What are they called?

I'm only aware of FullContact but would love to learn about some more companies that do this.

Searching for it on Google doesn't really seem to work well...

<comment><USER3> [http://www.adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/datalogix-buys- con...](http://www.adexchanger.com/data-exchanges/datalogix-buys-connection- engine-offline-to-online-data-platform/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off-topic, but a heads up to the Mixpanel team: your announcement email _sucked_. A single big image containing all text? Come on. You guys can do better than that.

</comment><comment><USER6> Intercom is a company specifically focused on user visualization, communication, and engagement. Worth noting for anyone interested in this product who isn't a current Mixpanel user.

<https://www.intercom.io/>

<comment><USER7> We use intercom and have been very happy with it. I must admit though being able to combine those features with the power of mixpanel is intriguing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love this. In fact, I love everything Mixpanel recently did. They introduced Flow which made Google Analytics obsolete for us. Then they introduced People tracking which replaced our admin dashboard with various tables and graphs about

They also did something that wasn't really announced: you can now drill down into every single event a user has ever triggered and look at all the properties. It always baffled me that this wasn't possible in the stream view or when segmenting down to individual events. I use mixpanel not only for reporting but also as a first aid resource when something breaks for a user. It's great to be able to see what they did when exactly and under what circumstances.

I think it's brilliant that Mixpanel lets you measure the impact of email campaigns without having to track opens and send them to mixpanel as events. If there was a way to send emails in response to certain events (such as purchased item X) and then to refer back to those events from within the email, I'd remove all lifecycle emails from my code and just use Mixpanel for that. Can we get that, Suhail? Please? :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Very nice - I've been following Mixpanel closely for a few months and like what they have done so far. While mobile analytics, customer engagement and retention calculation is very hot nowadays, technology is in its infancy (as opposed to web analytics).

FYI - Countly (<http://count.ly>) is a real-time mobile analytics platform which is open source, which makes it possible to install it on your servers. It can track events (eg ARPU, revenues, levels passed etc), together with any data that can be collected from iOS & Android devices.

I'm pretty sure we have many things to learn from each other, and come up with a standard definition of how to track mobile devices and a consistent terminology - which is something lacking. There are also unsolved issues like how to import and export data, to migrate from one provider to another.

Wish you best of luck! :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Using push notifications for marketing purposes or to send unsolicited promotional information is a violation of the App Store guidelines.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow... this is EXACTLY(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4177548>) the thing I have been planning to work on in the last 4/5 months... Time to think of something else... I hope they will make a good job, I like Mixpanel.

<comment><USER12> A new entrant to the market is not actually a bad thing. It validates the usefulness of the offering, and draws attention to the market. There is lots of room for segmentation and specialization in this space. Find something that the competitors are doing poorly and beat them on that. For a certain subset of the market, that feature is vital, and you are the only one doing it right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey HN, you can watch this video to see it in action right here:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RaFex- Kr4UQ)

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool. Immediately I can think of flexible customer service, user research and message testing applications. It's something a product team can do without spinning up a server side engineering task, which is great.

What I don't quite understand is some of the messaging on the page suggesting you might use this to power your auction application. If you're building that app, you're going to need a whole backend good at this kind of thing. Engage is more like duct-tape... a way to try a new message timing, new wording, or maybe even cover for a broken system somewhere.

I bring this up in case someone at mixpanel is listening. I suggest you make the price for low message rates high, so you can properly monetize the above cases in proportion to the value created.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's good to see Mixpanel building out its people analytics offering, but more broadly good to see momentum in the trend towards measuring the impact of email and other communications on customer behavior. To this point in time, to many companies send emails in a spray and pray fashion - not knowing if they really impacted customer behavior on feature usage, purchases, etc.

We're working on the some similar problems at Klaviyo (customer lifecycle management / targeting customers and measuring the impact). One of the most interesting related things we've seen is that measuring the impact of emails goes along way towards eliminating debate about email frequency or whether to send campaigns - because you can always just send the campaign to a subset and actually know if it works.

</comment><comment><USER16> Been wondering if something like this existed. Looks like they found a new customer if it works like I think it does. :) Now.. they'll get my fees once I hit 10K users. :)</comment>


OpenID worth implementing? - <AUTHOR>

A few users (very few) are asking us to implement OpenID on our website.  It seems just a little while ago everybody was talking about it.  Now I never see anything about it except for the occasional login.
We don't want to know if its 'cool' to implement it, easy to implement, or if its still the latest hotness.  We're curious about actual stats.  Do people actually use it, or is it just a few evangelist who would just a soon use a regular login if they had to?
Be honest, is it just the hacker crowd that uses OpenID? People that will abandon you in a second if your competition suddenly offered an iphone app with voice recognition, or got on techcrunch because somebody was throwing money at them.
As many of you know, its not a matter of how difficult it is to implement.  Its a question of having to keep supporting it far into the future. Once you give users something they get irate if you take it away, even if they don't use it.  And switching back to regular accounts will probably be awkward.  So if we go forward with this, we're probably stuck with this ball of code forever. <comment><USER2> I probably wouldn't implement it. I like OpenID, but I rarely use it these days. The only time I use it is for setting up quick admin only interfaces on my own sites.

First, you're only getting a few requests for it - you'd probably be better off working on other issues and features that affect a broader audience.

Second, it's also not going to draw many new users into the site. Lack of OpenID isn't a barrier for most people; instead, keep your registration simple and work to increase conversion in other ways.

I do think the OpenID ship has sailed, and with only a few people on board. It's a cool technology, but lets face it, no one but the tech community 'got it'.

</comment><comment><USER3> I prefer the idea of simplifying, or removing registration altogether. The only times registration will stop me from using a site is if I don't trust them with my email/password, and if that's the case, then the site probably sucks anyway.

Make a site worth coming back to, and I don't think people mind having to login (if you have a good "remember me" feature).

</comment><comment><USER4> OpenID seems to have more traction with the non-hacker populace if expressed in terms of "Log in using your Google/Yahoo/etc account."

Suits me fine personally. I love OpenID.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've never like the idea of OpenID. I recognize the problems it attempts to solve, but by allowing OpenID, I'm outsourcing my security to other people. What if the password to the OpenID account is compromised? That in turn could compromise all of their accounts. And how much do you trust a 3rd party OpenID provider?

I think a better solution is to just enforce a good password policy.</comment>


When do you become a developer? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephsmith.io/when-do-you-become-a-developer/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN. After teaching myself to code over the last year and launching multiple products, I thought I would at some point "feel" more like a developer.

For whatever reason that feeling hasn't changed, so I decided to run a poll to see when others thought the inflection point really happened. When does someone really "become" a developer?

I thought the responses to the poll (N=300+) were really interesting and perhaps the lack of alignment in the responses led me to discover that maybe there wasn't a defining point.

Do you agree? Interested to hear thoughts on this.</comment>


Will we learn anything from Hurricane Irene? - <AUTHOR> http://gregmeyer.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/how-to-prepare-for-a-customer-service-hurricane/

<comment><USER2> yes. Hurricanes are bad.</comment>


How I rebuilt "Flying Toasters" using only CSS animations - <AUTHOR> http://bryanbraun.com/2014/03/15/how-i-rebuilt-flying-toasters-using-only-css-animations <comment><USER2> Look: this is very impressive. And not to be a dick about it but – I have to point out that the original "flying toasters" did not overlap; they were all on the same isometric-looking z-index, as it were. Instead of overlapping, a faster-moving toaster would slide straight down slowly behind a slow-moving toaster or toast ahead of it. Really I am sorry for even pointing this out but half the reason I clicked this link was to see how this specific object- detection aspect of "flying toasters" might be done in CSS.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't quite following, so I sought out a video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cm7tv5cM8g](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cm7tv5cM8g)

Seems like the toasters don't overlap each other, but they do overlap the toast (eg, at 0:08).

Anyway, very cool CSS creation.

<comment><USER4> fish2000 probably remembers an earlier version [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gD- JnD1DCo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gD-JnD1DCo)

<comment><USER2> That is it totally – I first ran After Dark on my family's Mac LC II, maybe about 23 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I loved this screensaver. A couple of years ago it was rebuilt in WebGL too: [http://apps.playcanvas.com/will/arthacksf/toasters](http://apps.playcanvas.com/will/arthacksf/toasters)

<comment><USER6> Interesting that neither this, nor the CSS version, have the tricky bits of juggling toast, or bread going in and toast coming out. That was what I liked about the screen saver, the toasters were _toasting_ while they flew, which only added to the ultimate absurdity of it all.

<comment><USER4> The version I remember (from the Mac Classic) didn't do any of that [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWV- que3tRU#t=99](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWV-que3tRU#t=99)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would be really impressed if people queued up in droves to pay hard currency for this, like they did back in the day! Incredible to think of it now.

One thing that could be done with this is to make an Android 'daydream' screensaver. That would be 'useful'!

</comment><comment><USER8> >The toasters fly from the top-right to the bottom left, and we could choose to animate this by changing the value of z-index or of a newer function called translate().

How would animating the z-index cause the sprite to move from the top right to the bottom left? Z-index controls what draws in front of what, not spatial position.

</comment><comment><USER9> The inevitable link everyone will look for next: [https://github.com/tlrobinson/WebSaver](https://github.com/tlrobinson/WebSaver)

<comment><USER10> is there a way to do this for desktop image?

<comment><USER11> And now we come full circle to IE's ActiveDesktop?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This brings back memories. Whatever happened to screensavers? It seems like nobody uses them anymore. My favorite was always johnny castaway though.

<comment><USER13> We realized it's more sensible to sent display devices to standby when the user is afk. And we got screens that didn't need saving (from burn in), though I figure that was true of almost all monitors connected to computers running After Dark >3, anyway. And I guess the novelty effect wore off, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I welcome CSS recreation posts always, but I especially like the "how I did it" break down. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's awesome. I had the After Dark pack on my very first computers, a Powerbook 100 and a IIsi.

</comment><comment><USER16> Huh, on Android Browser, the toast flies but the the toasters just animate in place.

</comment><comment><USER17> My dad used to love that screen saver. And then I worked in the building that was formerly occupied by Berkeley Systems (the company behind the flying toasters...)

</comment><comment><USER18> Now do Daredevil Dan

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha ha. Some of my favorites (like Marbles or Confetti Factory from After Dark 2.0) would be pretty tricky with only CSS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't work very well on Android Stock Browser.

<comment><USER20> That is true of many things...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> man, brings back memories from the os9 days

</comment><comment><USER22> Love it

</comment><comment><USER23> Love it!

</comment><comment><USER24> =D

</comment><comment><USER25> Fucking rad.</comment>


How to disable IPv6 on Ubuntu 18.04 - <AUTHOR> http://www.admintome.com/blog/disable-ipv6-on-ubuntu-18-04/ <comment><USER2> in /etc/default/grub

add: ipv6.disable=1 to both GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX</comment>


WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/wsj-ends-google-users-free-ride-then-fades-in-search-results <comment><USER2> Makes sense from Google's point of view.

You are no longer providing value to our users. You will be quickly replaced with something that provides more value to our users.

<comment><USER3> But what if you are the kind of person that _wants_ to pay for good journalism? Will Google figure this out from your history, and rank WSJ higher?

<comment><USER4> Then go to that source, not to Google. If you go to Google, expect to find content that provides Google users value.

<comment><USER5> As a Google user, I value it because it finds things. Some of those things cost me money. To make this visceral: what differentiates Google finding me an expensive camera that I can buy from B&H that matches my search criteria and helps me get my work done of Google finding me an expensive article from the Wall Street Journal that matches my search criteria and helps me get my work done? If Google wants to optimize for "lowest price" then it should make that a _non-default_ criterion as otherwise they are just helping me find cheap, low quality crap: if that is providing you value you probably have a broken definition of "value" :/.

<comment><USER6> Comparing the economics of a pure bit-based product (media) with a pure atom- based product (camera) is not the most convincing way to make an argument in my opinion.

You can get most of what WSJ writes somewhere else for free. You'll probably say that's not true because the value you get from WSJ is not news but their commentary, but even in this case that particular "value" is very subjective and for most people it's not valuable enough.

I for one don't care about whatever elite content they write. And I definitely don't care for a mere website wasting my time by making me click through just to find out I can't read it, over and over again.

<comment><USER7> So, because your product is easy to copy, that makes it not valuable. A rejection of the concept of IP with different words.

<comment><USER6> I don't know if you have heard of "strawman fallacy" but you and the other guy below saying "So you believe that there is such thing as a news report without commentary?" have fallen into that trap.

It's not even funny how you go from my argument to "This makes it not valuable" to "A rejection of the concept of IP with different words".

Here, let me spell it out for you by copy and pasting the same comment:

> You can get most of what WSJ writes somewhere else for free. You'll probably > say that's not true because the value you get from WSJ is not news but their > commentary, but even in this case that particular "value" is very subjective > and for most people it's not valuable enough.

\- It is fact that you can get most of what WSJ writes somewhere else for free.

\- And I said the "value" is very subjective. and it's not "valuable enough" for most people. Yet you go on and say I said "it's not valuable". Then somehow go from that to accusing me of rejecting the concept of IP. I don't even know where to start.

<comment><USER7> The strawman fallacy is when you misattribute a position to someone.

"Strawman" not a catchall for "I don't see all the steps in your argument for how my position X implied Y." I'd be glad to spell those out more explicitly.

>...It is fact that you can get most of what WSJ writes somewhere else for free.

It is a fact _because people copy it_. Therefore, you're saying it's not valuable because people can get it elsewhere because it was copied. So, the copy-ability made it valueless, exactly as I inferred from your argument (rather than misattributing it).

(late edit: Also, the fact that you insist on "atom-based" and "bit-based" being incomparable doesn't help your case that you're not rejecting IP: "Comparing the economics of a pure bit-based product (media) with a pure atom- based product (camera)".)

Okay, perhaps that is not what you meant and therefore it was a strawman -- but that's the only self-consistent, plausible reading I saw.

The only other meaning is that,

"You can get all the interesting facts contained in this story from different sources, without just copy-pasting."

Is that what you meant? If so, it's implausible on its face: why are people trying to circumvent the paywall if they didn't want the WSJ's article specifically? Why can't they just go somewhere else? Why do they load HN discussion with complaints about a paywall rather than "here's the free, independent version that's just as good"?

>And I said the "value" is very subjective. and it's not "valuable enough" for most people. Yet you go on and say I said "it's not valuable". Then somehow go from that to accusing me of rejecting the concept of IP. I don't even know where to start.

I said that because you dismissed the value on the grounds of it being "subjective", which was close enough in this context to saying "oh, I can't quite put a hard value on it, so I don't have to care about this journalism going away". As above, why don't people just find another non-copied source? Because they _non_ -subjectively _do_ want to look at this specific source.

With that said, I do agree that it may not be _obvious_ how your position is tantamount to rejecting IP. But I was deriving that as an implication, not misattributing anything to you. Whether or not you recognize this position as implicitly rejecting of all IP, there is certainly a clear logical chain for how it has such an implication.

Edit: I know we're not supposed to talk about downvotes, could they at least wait the 60 seconds necessary to read this?

<comment><USER8> > why are people trying to circumvent the paywall if they didn't want the > WSJ's article specifically? Why can't they just go somewhere else? Why do > they load HN discussion with complaints about a paywall rather than "here's > the free, independent version that's just as good"?

Because people come to HN, click on a link, see it's paywalled and leave a comment complaining about it, then move on to a different post. Most people who complain about the paywall likely aren't invested enough in the headline to find another source for the same information.

Personally I mostly skim HN for news. If an article is paywalled and isn't profoundly interesting to me, I can spend the time it would cost me to look up alternate sources for the same story just reading something else instead. I don't read WSJ articles because they're better, I read them because they're _there_. In fact, I actually prefer other news outlets.

You're misattributing motives to what boils down to mere laziness. And even in doing that you don't actually have a case because many news stories have alternative sources in the HN comments, especially when they're paywalled or too superficial.

So, yes, you're misattributing motives, which is literally how you just defined strawmen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you click a search result and end up seeing something completely different than what you expected based on the search result snippet, it shouldn't matter if you're the WSJ or a scam site trying to hack your Google rank. It's deceiving the user and inflating your search ranking at the expense of more deserving listings.

<comment><USER10> This. I installed the personal blacklist extension for Chrome just to blacklist Quora results because of this. I wish Google would actually punish them more. I click through on something which looks relevant, and the result is a useless login screen. LinkedIn is the same.

<comment><USER3> Pinterest too.

<comment><USER11> Google images feel like it's nothing but Pinterest now.

<comment><USER12> Frankly I'd love Google to turn Google Images into much more of a true Pinterest competitor. Image search volume is pretty large, and they are already testing monetizing it. Now they just need to add in features that let you store and organize that information (and build a better profile of you in the process while also crowdsourcing tagging).

Pinterest needs more competition.

<comment><USER13> > X needs more competition.

In the context of Google being the alternative, this is sad and funny at the same time.

Hacker News in the abstract: The web needs more decentralization.

Hacker News IRL: Let Google own every vertical.

<comment><USER12> I certainly recognize the irony of suggesting that Google might help improve competition.

That said, there aren't many players in a position to provide actual competition to Pinterest like Google can. The obvious concern is where you draw the line at anti-competitive if Google tried to do the equivalent of what they did with Yelp ratings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Note that the Twitter workaround still works:

[https://t.co/2t073JIAWe](https://t.co/2t073JIAWe)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/british-police-identify- london-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/british-police-identify-london- attackers-as-may-calls-for-crackdown-on-extremists-1496663010)

Just append site:twitter.com to your Google search, click through, and voila.

<comment><USER15> WSJ also still serves articles to folks coming from Facebook. There's a Chrome extension to redirect all WSJ URLs through Facebook to bypass the paywall, works for now.

<comment><USER16> I made a bookmarklet for it in chrome:

javascript:(()=>{window.location = "[https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u="](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=") \+ window.location})();

Clicking the bookmarklet when you're on a WSJ article will shunt the url through Facebook's redirect service, which will allow you to view the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Watching this very closely, I pay for a WSJ subscription because I think their content is better than most, and also because I get sent alot of links to their content. Something about this later point feels like the argument people make about using Office because people still send them Excel and Word docs.

Similar to how software companies release free software to augment what makes them money, Bloomberg is able to spend a lot of money on producing content that is sponsored by their terminal subscriptions.

The WSJ might be in a unique situation where their primary audience will pay, often due to companies footing the bill for employee's, so perhaps they can be one of the few news producing companies that doesn't have to depend on Google for traffic in that their primary audience loads up their front page multiple times a day just to see what's there.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did a deal with Bloomberg to provide their content on terminals to further strengthen their ties to their core audience.

<comment><USER18> That's a really good point. Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it with a company that makes money, to support the journalism. Then again I feel like that's how we got CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, etc. Maybe not a great idea. I really like Blomberg and to some extent WSJ. I hope they can maintain their integrity.

<comment><USER19> The future of news survival is independent journalists being funded by people who care to have an unbiased investigative news media.

No idea how we get there, though. You basically need to persuade those who understand how critical journalism is to freedom to care to fund it, and to have a centralized platform to fund journalism that itself is not corruptible by monied interests trying to push propaganda.

<comment><USER20> > have a centralized platform to fund journalism that itself is not > corruptible by monied interests trying to push propaganda

Why is a centralized platform necessary? Why isn't, e.g. Patreon, for individual journalists or individual teams of journalists sufficient?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> _> The Journal decided to stop letting people read articles free from Google after discovering nearly 1 million people each month were abusing the three- article limit. They would copy and paste Journal headlines into Google and read the articles for free, then clear their cookies to reset the meter and read more, Watford said._

After the harder paywall, what's the best guess of the percentage of those google-copy-pasters will convert[1] to subscribers paying $278 or $296.94 or $308.91 per year? My guess is less than 1/10th of 1%. I assume the vast majority of the 1 million are casual readers who don't have $300 discretionary income to splurge on a subscription. If they can't read for free with a workaround, they'll do without it.

In related trivia, I just read that The Economist's strategy is to allow the google-copy-pasters.

I'm not judging either company as right. It's interesting they go about it differently.

[1] 1 year costs must include full rate to the teaser introductory rates: [https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/](https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/)

<comment><USER22> The hardship for publishers won't end until two things happen, in my opinion: 1) they are willing to charge a reasonable price per article (no $300/year subscription) and 2) they are _able_ to charge per article, in a cost- effective manner (i.e. "micropayments").

<comment><USER23> Why doesn't this exist yet? It seems so obvious, so many people get news from Facebook, twitter, Reddit, (and to a lesser extent HN) on an article by article basis. But all news sites delude themselves into thinking they can make these people loyal customers of their content, to the tune of paying $10-30 per month. I would happily pay $0.50 or something per article (maybe price adjusted by word count, within reason) to be able to get news from a wide variety of sources and engage with comments on the social/aggregator sites.

Is it just too big of a chicken and egg problem to coordinate a single broker for this across many sites? Unfortunately a broker is needed because I don't think there exists an external payment method with fees reasonable enough to make a lot of sub-1$ payments. That used to be touted as a use for Btc a few years ago but now btc fees are higher than credit card fees at something like $1-$3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is the tradeoff WSJ opted for, and it really doesn't make sense for it to work both ways. Web crawlers can't index content behind a paywall, end of story.

Where WSJ has a big advantage is that they already have brand name recognition. From the stats in the article it appears that this was a profitable choice for them, however, a lesser know content publisher seeking to monetize using paywalls is bound to have a much more significant challenge attracting users without decent search result rankings.

<comment><USER25> They feel google is treating their paywalled content unfairly compared to sites that offer content for free. They want their cake and to eat it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I reluctantly recognize that in order to have an unbiased press, we need news readers to pay the costs of operating a newspaper. I'm happy to pay for my news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda.

Maybe the moral of the story is that Google News isn't the best source of news -- just the cheapest.

Though I do think it would make sense for historical articles (i.e. articles older than some arbitrary time period) should be removed from the paywall so as to be searchable and able to be referenced.

<comment><USER27> I have to disagree. People who are passionate about a subject will report on it whether they're paid to or not. I would argue that being motivated by profit only makes you _more_ susceptible to bias.

<comment><USER28> I don't see why reporting the news is different from other jobs that people have a passion for and provide value to society. Should scientists not be paid because there are people who are curious about that natural world who would do it for free?

<comment><USER27> > Should scientists not be paid because there are people who are curious about > that natural world who would do it for free?

I guess I'll come to the rescue of that strawman you're torching... Scientists are free to work for money or passion, as people are free to fund research or not. Whatever the balance of pay vs passion, science will continue to happen.

<comment><USER28> I might have been too hasty. The first couple times I read it, I thought your original comment was saying that paying for news wasn't worth it because journalists who are willing to work for free are less biased. Rereading it, it sounds like your point was more along the lines of paying for news in of itself doesn't lead to less biased coverage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > restricting the rest to its 2.2 million subscribers _or people who arrive > via social media._

So they're fine with people from "social media" getting a 'free ride' ?

<comment><USER30> yep, hence why everyone switched to facebook.com/l.php

<comment><USER31> _The Journal's ad revenue wasn't affected by its recent drop in Google traffic because social media visits grew 34 percent in that time, keeping overall web traffic flat, Watford said._

Their numbers agree with your hypothesis: people simply switched from using the (now closed) Google "payhole" to the social media "payhole."

<comment><USER32> ... which must hurt Google. Well played, WSJ, well played. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Forbes tried something similar a while ago, by preventing ad blocker users to access their articles. How did that work for them?

<comment><USER34> I guess it worked ok for them, given that they are still doing it. I can never open a Forbes link. Not in a 'disable ad blocker pop-up' sort of way, but it just redirects to the home page. Sometimes it would work after a couple of tries. The upshot is that I never open Forbes links any more.

<comment><USER35> Have you tried uBlock Protector? [https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/](https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/)

<comment><USER34> No, but I use the anti-adblock killer. Is this better ? While it's a good exercise academically, in the long run, I just don't visit sites that block ad-blockers.

<comment><USER35> The userscript that accompanies it catches a bunch of things that AAK misses. Ctrl-Fing through the script, I see there's a section specifically for "forbes.com".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is free market capitalism that Rupert Murdoch's company Fox News promotes.

Google News fundamentally improved the online content publication system by making it cheaper to its consumers.

Earlier, there were too many news companies whose content didn't necessarily have an edge over some other news agency's and they charged money (which worked in an age where no internet existed), and google has fundamentally squeezed some of them including WSJ.

If the differentiating quality was present, more people might have been willing to pay for WSJ.

When Harrison Ford made cars, lots of businesses who built business around the inefficient means of transport (i.e the horse) like providing fodder for horses, and blacksmiths who were building horse shoes or the ones building horse carts got squeezed.

Same here. Internet and google has removed an inefficiency in the news system. They need to adapt and provide a differentiating quality, else they will perish - The principle of free market capitalism.

If WSJ needs google to behave a certain way so that it can make more money, that is not free market capitalism.

<comment><USER37> I think you meant Henry Ford

<comment><USER36> Yes, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is great, for a while it seemed 80% of the top 5's were WSJ, I got really tired of clicking to read a headline and getting the pop up saying something like "Wow, you clicks us a lot, you must like us, how about you pay?", Well no, actually you are just over ranked on so many topics...

<comment><USER39> I was annoyed too ... in my case I subscribed.

<comment><USER38> Interested, why? For any headline there are several sources, are you willing to pay just to click on the top link?

<comment><USER39> Not all sources are equal in terms of quality and information provided in the linked to article.

IMO, in certain areas (financial industry, investigative journalism, international business issues, etc.) WSJ consistently has better coverage than most other sources - so I'm willing to pay for it now that they've made it much harder for me to get to it.

I regularly read other sources, and if at some point I feel I'm not getting enough value from WSJ, I'll cancel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This submission's headline left out the other part of the opening sentence

        After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal's subscription business soared

So their views of free folks fell while paid subscriptions rose. I would think those subscriptions would be worth it, but as the article mentions "...argue that Google's policy is unfairly punishing them"

Personally, I would think that the subscribers would make it more worth it. Afterall, I ended up adding components on to my NYTimes subscription and often forget that I pay monthly for it because it isn't that expensive compared to, say, home Internet and such.

</comment><comment><USER41> Online Adverts are a form of micropayment. It's currently the only way to charge sub-cent amounts from users. It requires the third party of an advertiser, which is a very expensive middle man.

If we can figure out how to do micropayments without users needing an account somewhere (like PayPal), we can get rid of ads. That is the ultimate solution to this long-winding conflict between users, advertisers and content creators.

<comment><USER20> > how to do micropayments without users needing an account somewhere

That doesn't seem possible. What does even a hand-wavy sketch of this look like to you? I'd guess it's possible without, e.g. a unique row in a single (tho perhaps distributed) database table for each user, but I can't imagine it really being different than an 'account' either, e.g. a Bitcoin 'wallet'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is going to sound cold, but we need to have an honest chat here.

I would like a way never to see another WSJ or Forbes article on the internet.

I understand their need for profit, and I applaud them trying various things. They might be the best thing since sliced bread. I applaud a free press. They have a solid reputation, and I wish them the best.

However, I'm never going to pay. Ever. So I don't need to see their ads, I don't need to follow-through on Google clicks. I just need them to disappear from my internet experience completely. If you're going to run a paywall, I would like to never be exposed to your brand name or the fact you have content online. There are simply too many of you and too little minutes of concentration that I have to offer.

If one day I see a physical copy of one of these publications and decide to subscribe? That might be a lot of fun. But for now, don't waste any of my brain cells showing me stuff I'm never going to consume. Worse yet, leading me down some garden path only to be ambushed at the end with a paywall. Life's short. Your publications are not an important part of mine. I think part of the problem here was conflating the fact that X number of people clicked through with the _assumption_ that somehow these were paying customers just freeloading (see the title of the article).

That was never the case.

<comment><USER43> Dnsmasq on your local router, or (with an appropriately capable system) localhost does just this.

address=/wsj.com/0.0.0.0

Will null-route all of the Wall Street Journal.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/b2ungqjvmlflvinrtp4cug](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/b2ungqjvmlflvinrtp4cug)

I've got an extended blockset now that includes a number of whole domains, mostly hardwired in. Including all of outbrain at taboola.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Good. These articles should be discriminated against by Google and ranked on the second page at best. They _are worthless_. Without the subscription, the whole site is worthless. Google is just reflecting that. WSJ has no right to complain. If they don't like it, they should make their content not be worthless. Pretty damn simple solution but it seems they prefer to whine instead. If these idiots haven't yet understood the market for online content, it's pretty hopeless anyway. People don't want to pay money for content online, they will only pay with their privacy and personal data. There is enough content to fill up millions, maybe billions of lifetimes. What part of the supply / demand equation does the WSJ not get? Google is a search engine for finding information on the Internet, not their personal ad agency. When people search for news, they want to find news, not some paywall. How is it Google's duty to hurt their own business so they can show what are essentially foreign ads it makes no money on (nothing more, nothing less) to its users?

<comment><USER45> Yep, this is the same sort of bullshit that Sexpertsexchange (experts- exchange.com) used to to do. They performed "cloaking" that let the searching index the entire page of content and then when regular users visited the site, they threw up the paywall. WSJ (and of course expecting to continue to rank well behind a paywall) is really just more of the same thing.

<comment><USER46> Quickly stopped going to that site shortly after all that. I assume they lost tons of traffic that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I wonder if Google will be very helpful toward WSJ after they convinced a lot of companies to stop advertising on YouTube.

<comment><USER48> I also thought this was pretty rich. First broadly attack Google's income, then complain about discrimination when Google ranks your paywalled content lower.

Though I trust Google to make a decision based on user satisfaction, not unrelated meta-politics like this: Any website with a paywall should (and probably is) painted with the same brush. WSJ would benefit from pushing the angle that "Google punished us for doing critical journalism".

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I wish there was some kind of "account sharing" with the media companies. I have a Globe and Mail and a New York Times subscription because I want to support journalism.

But then there is The Guardian, The Toronto Star, WSJ, ...

I'd happily pay $200 for a mega-subscription that went to a bunch of them.

<comment><USER20> $200 a month? Because an annual WSJ subscription is ~$300 alone.

<comment><USER49> Yes, an month. Both NYT and G&M are monthly subs.

i.e. I'm willing to pay $2400 a year for journalism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> "You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site."

That's not discrimination.

<comment><USER51> It is discrimination, but not all discrimination is bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Maybe there's an opportunity for a coalition of sources (WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg, WP, et cetera), to get together with a SE like DuckDuckGo and allow deeper search integration in some type of paid membership plan.

</comment><comment><USER53> Thank goodness there's one good use for AMP pages then, right?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389986)

</comment><comment><USER54> WSJ is discriminating against Google's user-base by blocking content that Google presumed the user would have access to. Yet WSJ thinks they're the ones being discriminated against. As WSJ is finding, Google will not even bother attempting to index, sort and recommend content that is unavailable to 99.999% of its user base. It's nice that they're supposedly better off, or at least the same off, without high Google results. Though I doubt this will stop them from endlessly attempting to game the system.

</comment><comment><USER55> I loved this at the end of the article:

> "Tech companies are always going to do what's in the interest of their > business,"

As opposed to what businesses? Jeez, talk about a sense of _priviledge_.

</comment><comment><USER56> So if I understood this correctly their paid subscriptions increased 30% and their overall online traffic hasn't really been affected because people can still get the content through social media. If my understanding is correct then it seems this was a smart business move by the WSJ who is able to stand on their own reputation instead of relying on people finding their content through a third party.

</comment><comment><USER57> I read often WSJ articles for free on internet. This gives me a good opinion of their articles. When I travel in train or plane, I often buy a physical newspaper. I may favour WSJ because of this good opinion.

IMHO, blocking "free" readers will not increase paying customers on the long run and may arm also their physical newspaper.

Reputation is something that takes long to earn and that can be lost very quickly. RIP WSJ

</comment><comment><USER58> This sounds a lot like the Net Neutrality argument: All content should be treated as equal, whether it's pay or not, whether it's powered or supplied by the search engine/ISP or not.

Is there harm in ranking good content appropriately high (if relevant to the search) if it's clear that there is a cost to access it? Could Google just sigil "paid content" with a $ or € or whatnot?

<comment><USER59> It depends on what you mean by 'content'. If content is what non subscribers see, then the content would be low quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> As a user, if I search for something, I want to get the information I was searching for, not an offer to buy that information. A link to a page where I can buy your product is not a search result; it's an ad. And it's totally fair (and possible) for WSJ to be required to pay for their ads on Googles result page, just like everybody else is doing.

(Disclaimer: Working for Google)

<comment><USER61> As a user, if I search for something, I want to be told where it can be found. How to retrieve it once I know its location is a separate and independent problem.

A search engine that excludes sources that will require pay to get the information is a much less useful search engine to me, because it has no idea if the information is important enough to me that I will pay to get it if no free source is available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> @damn - Could you followup on your comment that you might disallow WSJ if they ever did this?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620821)

</comment><comment><USER63> It allows to read with FB referrers. On desktop Chrome, use Referrer control extension with facebook.com [http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to- get-around-th...](http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around- the-wsj-paywall/)

On mobile, make a private FB post visible only to yourself.

</comment><comment><USER64> I wonder how careful they were to distinguish between someone who cleared their cookies, and two people behind a nat. It's possible that the number of people abusing their system was smaller than they think.

</comment><comment><USER65> Why would I pay for their articles when they are no better than the free alternatives? This is the same as Quora vs StackOverflow. Not only the latter is vastly superior it is also free.

<comment><USER66> Quora is free as well. It just requires you to create an account to view all answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Missing: links from Facebook increased significantly. (I imagine)

<comment><USER68> Actually, it's not missing. From the article:

 _The Journal's ad revenue wasn't affected by its recent drop in Google traffic because social media visits grew 34 percent in that time, keeping overall web traffic flat, Watford said. The Journal lets readers get some articles for free via social media like Twitter and Facebook, which the paper views as a marketing tool._

<comment><USER69> I think that 0003 meant that people circumventing the blocking by appending l.facebook.com/l.php?url= increased in number.

<comment><USER67> Yes - thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Its is not fair to charge for your content and get ranked high up in SERP, especially for those who survives on AdSense and other ad networks.

</comment><comment><USER71> About a year ago I made myself a little browser plug-in to remove all links to sites I never want to visit again, wsj.com was the first one I added.

<comment><USER72> Could you post the list (and if you're really feeling kind the plug in)?

I'd love to add this to my filtering layer. Between Quora and ExpertSexChange I really could do with some more blacklisting of sites that keep baiting me to click.

<comment><USER43> Best local method is to simply add sites to your local blocklist as you encounter them.

For domain-wide blocks:

[https://pastebin.com/V5fyv3BT](https://pastebin.com/V5fyv3BT)

I also use a set of blocklists for advertising servers:

[http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt](http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt) hosts1

[http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt](http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt) hosts2

[http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt](http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt) hosts3

[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts) hosts4

<comment><USER71> This doesn't keep you from wasting time clicking links you didn't realize go to a site you've already decided never to visit again.

<comment><USER43> Agreed, though that takes more work.

It _does_ keep me from wasting time on the sites themselves, however, and in time tends to train me to ignore the links.

I'm working on a system which might address your concern more directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I just stopped reading WSJ... I tend to close any page that opens up to something other than what I was expecting to see.

</comment><comment><USER74> I find that the WSJ abstracts are usually enough - I'm just clicking to find out what was behind the bait.

</comment><comment><USER75> A time machine is the only solution. As a web developer for a family-owned newspaper who recently removed our failure of a metered-paywall, the only solution I've been able to come up with is a time machine that sends a killer robot back to 1995/1996 and remove the incompetents industry wide who decided to give away their expensive to produce content for free.

</comment><comment><USER76> There's gotta be a way around this method...maybe letting bots view the whole article.

<comment><USER77> As far as I know showing different content to different visitors (google bot vs. users) is penalizable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How about sites with paywalls signal this, including subscription price, in a HTTP header (or whatever) to crawler bots?

Then Google users would be able to filter by "free results only" or "paid results, less than $ _x_ /month". Seems like a relevant search criterion, especially for industry-specific articles (like finance).

</comment><comment><USER78> Not a lot of support here for information. This stuff isn't free.

</comment><comment><USER79> This "discrimination" is by design, they should quit crying

</comment><comment><USER80> I think WSJ is wrong in saying that they are being punished by Google for their paywalled articles appearing last in search results.

Google has algorithms that would need to actually crawl the entire content, to ensure that it will provide the most relevant result. If it is unable to crawl the entire content, then it becomes just as hard to rank the same in the result.

Changing the algorithms to rank simply on the title and the first few (free introductory) paragraphs of articles behind paid subscription can lead to more bogus results. Google knows that invalid search results in turn disengages their users from perusing their search engine.

</comment><comment><USER81> Aptly demonstrates the effects of Trump think. A complete ignorance of network effects, the belief effect in decision making.

</comment><comment><USER82> My startup is about to launch a partnership with the Wall Street Journal that will give our users free, un-paywalled access to the WSJ site.

If you want to join our beta, which is ongoing, sign up at www.ReadAcrossTheAisle.com. The beta is free, and our app is free as well. Hopefully this is relevant/useful for folks in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER83> As it should.

Paywalls present a worse user experience than say Bloomberg.com which shows its content for free.

<comment><USER84> Bloomberg News is subsidized by the terminal business. It's free and public so terminal users can send non-payers links. I guess if you want your news funded entirely by a small group of people in the financial sector, that's fine. But for those of us grateful for the work the _Wall Street Journal_ did to uncover _e.g._ the Theranos scandal, paying for good journalism is the way to go.

<comment><USER83> This isn't an assessment of content quality, it's of a user's experience.

All Google needs to do is optimize for things like time on page, CTRs, etc to see users abandoning those with paywalls and not those without to decide one is a better experience overall than another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 The decided to put their content behind a paywall, which makes the data needed to sort it accurately in the search results unavailable.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, WSJ.

</comment><comment><USER85> Sounds like something that can be solved using special metadata for paywall sites, along with a process to approve those who claim to be paywall sites.

</comment><comment><USER86> this is why some sites (foreignpolicy.com) use client side paywalls. most users don't know how to disable them, but google will rank you highly.

</comment><comment><USER87> I'm not sure if this will hurt the paid subscription model. I pay for WSJ. People who want to rely on "free" news deserve the news they get.

While their google traffic may decrease, they may end up getting more paid subscribers.

</comment><comment><USER88> "You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site." Jesus fucking christ, what a sentence. 'Google-bot can't index our pay-walled articles... DISCRIMINATION!!!' fuck wsj, seriously

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google touts itself as a company that wants to catalog all the knowledge. How is it possible that WSJ content ranking falls after the introduction of the pay wall? Google has the ability to crawl behind the wall content, and yet it downgrades the WSJ content. In my opinion, this is an abuse of its search dominance position.

<comment><USER89> > Google touts itself as a company that wants to catalog all the knowledge. > How is it possible that WSJ content ranking falls after the introduction of > the pay wall?

Because ranking is about utility to search users, and content not accessible to general search users isn't useful to them. The knowledge (both the content itself and the meta-data regarding it's inaccessible status) is still cataloged, this is just making effective use of the meta-data for the purposes of search UX.

<comment><USER39> But what if you do subscribe? Shouldn't those results filter up again? Google knows I subscribe (the information is in my gmail account).

<comment> GuB-42 It is a difficult problem.

Google may know you are subscribed but it doesn't know what the page looks like to you. It only knows its own version of the page.

What Google sees is that many people go to WSJ because their search query matches the content of the googlebot version of the page, and then bounce back as they hit the paywall. Google may not even know about the paywall. It just sees that because many users bounce back, they must be unsatisfied, and derank accordingly.

Now, it still has a workaround. If you are logged in, it tracks your personal habits. And if it sees you are staying on WSJ, it may uprank it specifically for you. Again, it is just a matter of staying on the site or not, google doesn't really care about your subscription.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Groovy, the Python of Java - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2011/04/09/groovy-the-python-of-java <comment><USER2> Although I understand the point, I think it's more accurate to describe Groovy as the "Ruby" of Java rather than Python. Groovy's philosophy and syntax are all very Ruby-like, while many things about it are completely orthogonal to the same in Python.

Where Python is usually trying to have just "one way" to do things, Groovy offers you a million. Python actually share's much of Java's annoying desire to keep the default namespace clean and hence make you import modules to do just about anything useful. While Python puts simplicity and cleanliness on a pedestal, Groovy is unashamedly pragmatic, letting you do any dirty thing you feel like or need to do to get your job done.

In complete contradiction to Python's direction of eliminating it (eg: forcing brackets on print() statements) Groovy gives you incredible amounts of optional syntax - add semicolons? if you want ... or not ... except sometimes the syntax gets ambiguous they are required. Use brackets on your function calls? If you want ... or not ... except sometimes the syntax gets ambiguous, so they are required. The author didn't even mention optional static typing which not only enforces type correctness on parts of the code you apply it too, but dramatically speeds them up. So much freedom makes it easy for Groovy code to end up messy and unstructured compared to Python.

I'm currently in a situation where I switch between Groovy and Python coding on alternate days. I definitely prefer different things about each. Groovy definitely seems more powerful when I just need to get a simple job done. It is incredible what you can cram into a single line.

I hope Groovy continues to prosper, but I worry it's getting lost among the hype around more "sexy" languages. I think it's by far the best language for many jobs.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's about sexiness -- Python has brought many associations to mind over the years, but _sexy_ has never been one of them -- just that there are only so many languages that can compete in the same ecological feeding space that (Python,Perl,Ruby,Groovy) are all pretty much butting heads against each other over.

If anything, Python seems to be dominating in large part because of its unabashed _lack_ of sexiness (or what passes for it in modern programming circles: cleverness, and cuteness).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't James Strachan, the creator of Groovy, basically say that if he could do it over again, he'd create Scala?

(a little Googling later...)

"Though my tip though for the long term replacement of javac is Scala. I'm very impressed with it! I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy." [1]

[1] [http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term- repl...](http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement- for.html)

Edit: I should add that I'm considering using Groovy with a micro-framework called Ratpack ([http://www.ratpack.io/](http://www.ratpack.io/)), so I'm only bringing this up as a part of the conversation if someone's trying to figure out what they want to learn next.

</comment><comment><USER5> Clojure is the thing that fills the flexible, expressive language niche on the JVM for me. This is to say nothing about Groovy, I've never touched or looked at it.

<comment><USER6> I think Clojure is great. I even wrote -- a year or so after writing this post -- that it might be a great language as a mind expander[1].

But Clojure is so dramatically different from both Java (the language) and dynamic languages more broadly (e.g. Python/Ruby), that it's a bit of a leap for workaday programmers; it's certainly no clean-up man.

[1] [http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/06/13/clojure](http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/06/13/clojure)

<comment><USER7> > and dynamic languages more broadly (e.g. Python/Ruby)

[sigh]

It's a sign of the times when HN posters say "dynamic languages" and manage to ignore the Elder Language, the language from whence all dynamic languages sprung. And that language is...

<comment><USER8> The Land of Lisp [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HM1...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HM1Zb3xmvMc#t=62)

(but I'd argue it wasn't until InterLISP and Smalltalk that all the pieces were there)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As I was pointing in some other post, I am always looking for some thing better than Java. My problem is Very Very Good IDE. Without that I won't work with any language no matter how much great it is. (Because my programmers not not smart). They live and think in Java and Eclipse. Can someone let me know where does Groovy Stand with when compared to Java + Eclipse?

<comment><USER10> Groovy works extremely well with Intellij Idea. I often mix Java and Groovy in projects and for the most part it's seamless. I'll start something in Java and as soon as I run into something that should be done with a closure or functional idioms that would require 100 lines of java instead of 2 lines of groovy, I just change the file extension from .java to .groovy, write it as it should be and move on.

<comment><USER11> This is Groovy's biggest advantage, but it is often left out of discussions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How about JRuby?

...why do we have both a Ruby-like language and a Ruby implementation running atop the JVM? Sounds like a lot of fragmentation and wasted resources.

<comment><USER13> They are two totally different use cases.

Edit: I guess I should explain this a little:

Groovy: A superset* of the Java language, you can (generally) rename a .java file to get a valid .groovy file. Groovy uses the Java libraries -- a Groovy string is a Java string. A Groovy object can subclass a Java object and vice versa.

Groovy is perfect for Java developers who want a gentle learning curve for new language features and want fine-grained interaction with other existing Java (and JVM) libraries and components.

JRuby: A full* implementation of JRuby and libraries that runs on the JVM. A Ruby string is not a Java string. JRuby can call Java and vice versa, but there's some impedance mismatch because of differences in the object libraries.

JRuby is great for Ruby developers and/or people who need to run Ruby-based technologies in the JVM environment (e.g. Rails, Asciidoctor, etc.)

Most people knowledgable of both technologies would not view this as (unnecessary) fragmentation. There has also been some work on the JVM that has benefitted both languages -- most notable the InvokeDynamic byte code additions to better support dynamic languages (benefiting Groovy, JRuby, JavaScript, and others.)

* There are some corner-cases where valid Java is not valid Groovy. Similarly, there are some C-language extensions in Ruby that aren't' available in JRuby. But in both cases the exceptions are rare enough to be relegated to a footnote.

<comment><USER14> Java 8 will make Groovy completely irrelevant: the lambdas will make Groovy closures redundant, and the bundled Nashorn Javascript will take away Groovy's use case for quick & dirty testing scripts.

<comment><USER15> I think it'll make them more efficient, and therefore more relevant. Groovy has many, many other improvements over Java than just closures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > It is also the world's first programming language that was written to target > an existing community of programmers.

That is not true. Java was written to target C++ programmers.

</comment><comment><USER16> There was a time when I would have wanted this - I was a python guy for years. But I've found I can be just as dynamic in scala (perhaps even more so, given implicits), without having to give up type safety. E.g. his example looks almost identical in scala:

        List("Rob", "Christopher", "Joe", "John").filter{
          _.size <= 4
        }.foreach {
          println _
        }

<comment><USER17> Or even more concise:

        List("Rob", "Christopher", "Joe", "John").filter(_.size < 5).foreach(println)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always though that Groovy was inspired by Ruby.

<comment><USER19> It was, and it looks/behaves almost like Ruby as well. It also shares Ruby's/Perl's TMTOWTDI, sort of the antithesis of Python.

Not to mention the name is a homophone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought Jython was the Python of Java?

<comment><USER21> Jython is Python _on_ Java, _in_ Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> uh groovy is a clusterfuck for cats who learn about closures on the corner, hanging out with brendan eich or somesuch. gradle does seem like a nice buold system. regardless, java is some sort of cosmonaut condom, worth using mostly for the big software written in it behind a firewall of jvm free physical hardware.</comment>


Finch Robot - A robot to aid Computer Science Education - <AUTHOR> http://www.finchrobot.com/

<comment><USER2> I ordered one! For a robot that can run around and talk $100 isn't bad at all. Only thing that weirds me out is the constant tethered power source. But I'm sure that can be hacked around if it hasn't been already.</comment>


Judge dismisses Yelp class action suit for good - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20126167-93/judge-dismisses-yelp-class-action-suit-for-good/

<comment><USER2> Good. Here's a thought, spend less time suing yelp and more time invested in solving the problems your customer base has illuminated. The Yelps of the world aren't going anywhere and ultimately, the power they wield isn't theirs, it's the consumers.</comment>