Better Language Models and Their Implications - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/ <comment><USER3> This kind of "blocking-and-tackling" work is important.

The authors take a well-known architecture, the Transformer[a], configure it with a progressively larger number of parameter, train it to predict the next word conditioned on previous text, using a large dataset consisting of 40GB of text scraped from the Web, and test each trained model on a range of zero-shot transfer-learning tasks.

Remarkably, the performance of a Transformer in the tested tasks improves _log-linearly_ with the number of parameters, suggesting that even the largest model tested, with 1.5B parameters, still _underfits_ 40GB of text.

This is _compelling evidence_ that we do NOT need new architectures, NOR new kinds of training objectives, NOR new theories, for better language modeling! We can get better language modeling simply by increasing model capacity (i.e., by adding more parameters to existing models), which becomes easier and simpler to do as hardware continues to improve over time.

Great work.

PS. In case it's not clear: I'm not saying we should suddenly stop searching for new, better ideas and architectures. That would be silly. Please don't attack a straw-man :-)

[a] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762)

<comment><USER4> Agreed that "simply" scaling up with more compute will result in progress and useful systems, and work in that direction is interesting and valuable. But, while we may not need new architectures or training objectives to make progress, we do need them to approach human level sample complexity. Humans don't need to read through 40 GB of text multiple times to learn to write.

<comment><USER3> _> Agreed that "simply" scaling up with more compute will result in progress and useful systems, and work in that direction is interesting and valuable. But, while we may not need new architectures or training objectives to make progress, we do need them to approach human level sample complexity._

Yes, agreed. Nothing I said above contradicts that! :-)

> Humans don't need to read through 40 GB of text multiple times to learn to > write.

Yes, that's true... but to keep the comparison fair, note that we _do_ need many years of schooling to learn to read, say, at a high-school or college level. And before learning to read, we first must learn to speak, which surely helps. And we also get to inhabit bodies that see, smell, touch, and interact with the physical objects that we read and speak about during our formative years, which also helps. The more one thinks about it, 40GB of data is actually a _tiny_ figure in comparison to the amount of training data that flows continuously to our brain from all senses. I think I read once that our brains process on the order of _10 to 100 GB of training data per second_.

<comment><USER5> Conscious processes are estimated to work on the order of 10^2 bits. Vision, at the retina, is estimated at 10^7 bits/sec. It drops another order of magnitude by V1. Also note that long as they're not isolated, a deaf and blind person has no trouble getting to full human reasoning ability despite being vastly more impoverished in available data compared to the average person.

A human will also be learning vision, hearing, walking, physics, causal reasoning, and much more. This comparison just isn't well grounded. Task specific is how much training does a young brain require to learn to produce language? If the brain comes with innate advantages then rather than be resort to inefficiency and excusing our models, we should try to see if they can be bettered.

<comment><USER6> I'm not well versed at all in signal theory, so I'm genuinely curious how these bitrate estimates are made, and would love to see the source of these specific numbers.

How do you estimate the effective (digital) bitrate of an inherently analogue system?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While censoring the full data set seems in some way to support the rationale of the OpenAI charter, it also means that only state actors and very well- funded entities will be able to use the work to create models of the size necessary to do the impressive stuff in the write up.

Based on the concerns, it would seem that restricting the capabilities only to state actors would have the opposite of the intended effect. Why not let thousands of amateur researchers, undergrads, etc., use the model to detect instances where the model was used to generate text, etc.?

<comment><USER8> I would guess this reduces the risk. Why would you say it does the opposite?

My argument: state actors might misuse this tech, but letting any script kiddie do whatever they want almost guarantees someone will misuse it.

<comment><USER9> Which is exactly what happens whenever there's a leak of NSA or other foreign government 'hacking' tools. As soon as they're public, ransomware authors and other shitty actors all deploy them to steal as much as possible before systems are patched.

Case-in-point:

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

NotPetya: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petya_(malware)#2017_cyberatta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petya_\(malware\)#2017_cyberattack)

<comment><USER7> I think it's a bit different because the attacks are not entirely clear. The power of many of the attacks would be for them to fly under the radar because nobody was expecting it.

So having lots of script kiddie attacks (which would be sloppier and easier to notice) would lead to a more rapid adoption of safeguards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sure, not releasing the full trained model probably delays it, but sooner or later a bad actor will do their own scraping and train their own model and share it around and the genie will be out of the bottle. Then what?

I think we need to be conducting AI research (and building software generally) under the assumption that all of it will eventually be repurposed by bad actors. How would our practices be different if we consistently and cautiously did this?

Here's a thought experiment: how would the Manhattan project have been different if it were carried out in the open and its products were instantaneously and infinitely reproducible? What is the MAD equilibrium of AI research? I think the impact potential is similar even before AGI.

<comment> a-dub wasn't that the point of this whole openai thing? they didn't like the idea of there being a club with just google in it that had access to resources and funding to collect and train on massive datasets so they were going to be the "bad actors" who would do their own scraping, train their own models and share them around?

isn't it supposed to be called OPENai?

they don't want to share the data because they don't want to throw away the edge they've gained by collecting it. :)

computer programs that generate human like text aren't dangerous, the internet is full of human like text that is mostly bullshit anyway.

<comment><USER11> I have had the same impression regarding their work on dota. They got a lot of publicity with it but their work is not open at all. They have released neither their code which runs the bots on dota2 nor their training code nor the final model. All we have is video recordings of a few games against humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > ... some believe that perhaps the creatures were created when a human and a > unicorn met each other in a time before human civilization. According to > Pérez, "In South America, such incidents seem to be quite common."

Man, the auto-generated text is hilarious. And uncannily good. Though I have to wonder if it's total random fluke or there's one among their 1.5 billion parameters that predict "likelihood of mythical bestiality in South America".

<comment><USER13> Considering that it memorized Gettysburg Address verbatim and knows Charles Darwin wrote Origin of Species, it probably knows about both South America and unicorns more than me...

Unicorn story does demonstrate that it knows South America has to do with Argentina, Andes Mountains, and University of La Paz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was honestly surprised by the quality of the generated text. While I can't say I've been following the state of the art in the last months, this seems like a pretty important step forward. Furthermore, at the end of the post they note that the samples are somewhat representative of their results. Maybe they should consider releasing a text file with some more (not hand-chosen) samples? Whatever the case, fantastic work, my congratulations to the authors.

<comment><USER15> Thank you! We've released 500 random unconditional samples from GPT-2 at [https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/gpt2-samples.txt](https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/gpt2-samples.txt)

<comment><USER16> Wow, some of these really go off the rails but those that only kinda go off the rails are absolutely hilarious and/or bizarre.

A few summaries of ones that I looked at which appeared to be more or less staying on a single topic:

Sample 1: An Austin nonvegetarian vegetarian restaurant encounters a series of difficulties in opening, as its nonexistent but extensive menu depicts a wide range of food options and the restaurant opening is delayed by financial and food-safety concerns. The nonvegetarian restaurant has also annoyed vegetarian clientele with its plans to be a vegetarian restaurant. Food reviewers nonetheless manage to eat at the new restaurant and post their reviews; the establishment also becomes "the first Austin restaurant to ride a ride-sharing service in Austin since the 'Bike-Share — Share the Ride' controversy erupted".

Sample 3: Denise Schroeder encounters perhaps the most complex and confusing legal trial in American history as she gets murdered, is accused of murder, comes under investigation for liquor law violations, becomes an abuse victim, prompts others around her to commit suicide, is arrested, and ultimately wins the right to marry her same-sex partner.

Sample 6: Cooking rice and beans by steaming a roast in a wok is easy! Just follow these 40 simple steps to update your XBox firmware, and you'll end up with a nice fried soup.

Sample 8: A protest march against drought in South Asia attracts very broad support, but its radical nationalist message is simultaneous endorsed and feared by virtually everyone in the region.

Sample 13: The global bicycle industry, although very large, is perhaps unsurprisingly extraordinarily unpopular and economically irrelevant following a very complex cycling accident involving an area woman.

Sample 14: Indian restaurant owners in Canada have to contend with an _amazing_ array of economic, technological, and environmental challenges as the infrastructure of their society seems to collapse around them -- but they do all right in the end.

Sample 26: The previously untold history of Blackwater USA, in which founder Erik Prince is capable of meeting Bill Clinton on a day in January that was actually in March, and results in Blackwater and Prince having shady dealings with all sorts of celebrities -- though the organization "may not like to admit what a true dick the injustice has wrought".

Sample 29: What does the KKK believe? Apparently, lots of complicated conspiracy theories about black history. Also, if you find their theories traumatic, you can find "several biblical [...] references that can be used to up your level of moral competency in your longterm relationship with Mr. Soros."

Sample 30: Wikileaks reports harshly on speculations of Linux adoption by rural tribal mobile device users.

Sample 37: faint praise for soccer champion who apparently keeps winning games through poor performance.

Sample 49 (following the end of the reviews section): world traveler and masterful hotel architect Frederick Beckey remains unperturbed by racist gatherings at his hotel.

Sample 50: comedians fear the looming resolution of a long-running comedian feud. Also, Soviet spectators at the Munich Olympics cheer Yuri Gagarin, who, although escorted by Russian soldiers, uses rockets and airplanes in his Olympic performances to win multiple medals. The crowd of Soviet spectators, "[l]argely composed of high school students in tight-fitting vacant uniforms [...] walked away believing that Gagarin was the next North America's greatest athlete".

<comment><USER17> I'm looking forward to computers generating short clips from these stories. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them get viral (especially if A/B testing would be incorporated by looking at when the users stop watching the videos).

<comment><USER16> Compare _Sunspring_ (2016).

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this- movi...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movie-and- its-strangely-moving/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just as many pesticides mimic the hormonal and chemical signals of pests to drive certain behaviors that lead to eradication, this work mimics the linguistic signals of humans. I think viewing it metaphorically as the most sophisticated humanicide discovered to date is probably appropriate.

Consider that conventional munitions make an effective pesticide but are not used due to their side effects. Instead, chemicals are used to destroy or mimic the perception and production of various signals so that populations of unwanted critters effectively self-destruct.

Imagine a war fought with a weapon like this that left entire cities perfectly intact!

# end hyperbole

<comment><USER18> This is exactly the line of thinking that this article inspired in me... AI scouring the internet, figuring out what makes us tick and generating perfectly persuasive stories to convince us to to... what? I kept thinking about the story "Sort by controversial" by Scott Alexander: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by- controversial/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is anyone else troubled by them not releasing the source model/dataset/parameters here? Yes, the technology can be used for malicious means - but would argue that "DeepFaking" language is FAR less of a problem than "DeepFaking" video/photo/audio... which already occurs. Seems like they went back on their charter to share AI developments broadly ("not concentrate power") under the excuse of "safety."

(These results look fire btw)

Note: copied my comment from dupe thread

<comment><USER20> I agree with this. OpenAI isn't particularly 'open', compared to other AI research organizations (Notable ones that open source almost all their work are AllenAI and FAIR, but I'm sure there are others).

Wonder what their excuse is for not releasing the source model or code for their DoTA bot. Surely there's no safety issues there?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This tech can easily be used to flood humanity's shared brain with auto- generated propaganda. Schizophrenia of the internet in a way. There is plenty of incentive with Google algorithms favoring number of words and relevant keywords in content for rankings - you could have NLP bots lifting junk sites to top results.

To step ahead in that chess game, a detection tool for fake would be just training grounds for better GAN. Instead we may see a certifying authority that labels content as human generated, certified fact maybe? Wikipedia and reddit are not safe without fast automatic moderation either.

Do you have a brainstorm or idea/prototype submission site where people can submit approaches to countering bad ai actors? An white/grey hat ai bounty program of sorts?

<comment><USER22> Web of trust. Your results and how much you trust given text is based on who gave it to you. You assign trust to people you know, then it's a small world effect and recursive trust calculation based on who they trust.

Centralization won't work. Whether something is good or bad or fake must be subjective and based on your personal network / your beliefs. Otherwise, long term, I don't see how you could avoid dystopia.

<comment><USER23> This has a dangerous implication that we've seen recently with the newsfeed "bubble."

If dissenting opinions are never allowed into your sphere of influence then we may continue to see an accelerating polarization of our society towards extremes.

<comment><USER22> Bubble that's dangerous for society is when everybody believes the same thing, not when everybody has different set of beliefs.

I know the more popular bubble is information one and you make a fair point, but I believe it's powered more by recommendation systems than the things that you trust.

I got distracted lately and I wanted to clean it up before putting it out there but if somebody is bored: [http://comboy.pl/wot.html](http://comboy.pl/wot.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's becoming ever more certain that the transformer architecture is one of the largest contributions to AI (not merely machine learning, but AI), often beating LSTMs despite LSTMs being expressive enough to capture Turing Equivalence (at least in theory). Its main ideas are three: shorter paths help gradient flow, the training setup and the final key aspect, unhelpfully called self-attention. Self-attention is better thought of as a form of similarity gated key-value soft memory on which learning operations allows Transformers to learn non-trivial programs with contextual weights look-ups.

I also notice reported tries, suggesting some level of curation. While this level of generation is undoubtedly impressive and a sign of non-trivial levels of understanding, the ability to project along arbitrary dimensions of similarity at a fine-grained level and to learn from text instruction is more useful than text generation. Although the unicorn story was a really fun read, better than many humans already, I doubt it could have gone on for much longer. It maintains a theme but not coherently or fluently (see especially the Kennedy nanotech and recycling examples, _comparing the dis-fluency there versus the excellence of the Civil War report suggest at least some over- fitting_ ). These relatively minor caveats aside, this is unambiguously an outstanding result.

Winograd Schemas are the single metric to track if interested in understanding how language understanding is truly improving. OpenAI reports 71% and _wrongly_ report the previous record as 63%. The current record here is at 65% [https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard](https://gluebenchmark.com/leaderboard) though not fully comparable. Will OpenAI be submitting? Note that you can get to 60% using about 1-2 orders of magnitude less data and compute.

It concerns me that results here are so far dependent on such large data and computation. However, based on several papers I've read, I do not believe this to be inherent even in transformers. I plan to do some experiments on this when I free up some bandwidth.

If everyone is pulled in by the glamour of working for a well funded, prestigious operation then it should be no surprise that they do not consider paths which operate on several orders of magnitude less data and computational resources.

We all should consider bringing about a group of researchers who swear to an austere computational life of a single GPU, no more than 4-8x average RAM and CPUs that do not cross 90 Watts. _The Bicameral Order_ would be a good name for such a group.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, there are definitely still places the samples fall short! Keep in mind we're still using very naive sampling techniques.

RE Winograd: WNLI is different, see [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.07461.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.07461.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Amazing results, how excited are you? :)

You're right, I noted too that the comparison isn't direct but then, I wasn't justified in calling out the gap claim as wrong, so sorry for that. I think it'd be nice however, to have it undergo an external or more neutral test of performance. I say this without at all doubting the quality of the results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Started a Google colab with the interactive text generation script. [https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1da54684tFMjPbR5idbv...](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1da54684tFMjPbR5idbvoCyjOoEGwIVwV)

<comment><USER25> to be clear, this is the "politically innocuous" open sourced model. the results are not impressive.

<comment><USER26> Yeah the results aren't amazing on their own, but if you treat them similarly to how they do over at Botnik -- with some human curation involved-- you can find some interesting sentences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> These samples are _freaky_ good. We're approaching some threshold very, very fast. I'm not sure what that threshold is, and whether or not crossing it is a good thing, but soon we'll be there.

<comment><USER28> I like how it effortlessly switches into "git diff" mode at the end of sample 112. Sadly it doesn't do whitespace.

> Showing 1 changed file with 4 additions and 19 deletions. +4 −19 > png_source/colors/pointer.py Show comments View 8 > png_source/colors/pointer.py @@ -35,6 +35,7 @@ def > _draw_hull_class_level(self): repr(Shape[td_get_framepanel_pcs(dc) for dc in > xrange(dc.cols)]), self.doublesize.values) \ } def _draw_hull_class_level > [etc.]

It also inserted a helpful reference link to [http://wiki.openarcade.com/wiki/List_of_Programmer_Constants](http://wiki.openarcade.com/wiki/List_of_Programmer_Constants) (I've had to check: no, there is no openarcade wiki.)

Also, sample 217 is some mediocre Java, with comments and all. Impressive how a single model can handle this all at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is very impressive. The decision to not release the model is questionable imho. There are labs, companies and state agents which have way more compute than OpenAI and therefore can do even better.

Perhaps we need some kind of competition for detecting machine generated vs human generated content?

<comment><USER30> That's a GAN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The generated text sounds _too_ good; is it possible that the model overfit the source material (especially since the n-previous-tokens value is infinite, while other approaches like char-rnns/textgenrnn use a fixed window length)? It's something I've encountered many times while working with text generation.

<comment><USER32> It _is_ uncanny.

I would expect a language model to pull up different person names for each time that one was called for. For a person name to be consistently used through several paragraphs it is not enough to rely on word co-occurrence.

If I had to produce a text like this I would simply take an existing text and replace randomly chosen words with other similar words (as hinted by amvalo). Similar as in - words that tend to occur in similar contexts. So John->Bob throughout entire text. But that would not be a language model product anymore, and where is fun in that?

I should set aside some time to read this paper.

<comment><USER33> That's because the transformer model used has memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Seems like in the near future the idea of "turing test" and the one of "not fake news" will eventually coincide...

</comment><comment><USER35> This is so crazy good, someone needs to do a Turing test by sending it to some unsuspecting publishers.

I get the feeling that debatepocolypse is not far away. Every forum can now be spammed with reasonable sounding gibberish that humans will have to slog through.

<comment><USER36> That's not a Turing test. A Turing test is an ongoing dialog, not a one-shot filter.

<comment><USER37> Add some bias to create dialogues when sampling based on movie subtitles and I could see it passing proper Turing test.

<comment><USER36> A proper Turing test allows you to ask questions whose answers must indicate novel introspection, learning, and social awareness. It's absurd to think any computer system today would pass such a test.

<comment><USER35> This thing does exactly that. You can see in the text it generates, it sounds like someone who's thought about things and keeps a consistent tone about the subject.

<comment><USER36> That is not what it needs to do to pass a Turing test. It needs to sustain _ongoing_ dialog and thought, while maintaining a consistent awareness of another human's perspective in real time. It needs to do _what a human does_ while having a conversation. And humans don't just spit out responses to questions. They get bored. They get distracted. They display tonal inconsistencies in response to emotions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This was only a matter of time.

For the DEFCON AI Village in August I talked about the implications of this sort of tech, and how that impacts how we release "exploit" code / think about "cognitive vulnerabilities": [https://medium.com/@aviv/what-does-a-world-with- automated-so...](https://medium.com/@aviv/what-does-a-world-with-automated- social-engineering-look-like-79cd09b5a7b1).

If you are doing work in this space, either in ML research or related security, you _need_ to be thinking about implications (also see e.g. [https://maliciousaireport.com](https://maliciousaireport.com)).

<comment><USER39> I mean, the ideas are there. The scope of the project is probably too big to reproduce for now, but eventually it will be accessible to your average spammer / scammer. We _will_ get there. We _won 't_ be able to get these tools locked, make them exclusive for a certain type of responsible AI specialists. Someone will spill the beans, the models. People with bad intentions will reproduce these results. To me, the real deal is how we will manage these outbursts when they happen.

I assume discriminative models will solve the problem for a while, but as with Generative adversarial networks, you will be able to train models that are harder to discriminate against. I posit we're in for a big societal change (maybe more a content crisis) sometime in the next 10 years. Pretty sure we won't be able to keep it from falling in bad hands.

<comment><USER40> "Spam-filters, actually. Once they became selfmodifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which could act more human, and since their failures invoked a human judgement about whether their material were convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests from which they could learn. From there came the first machineintelligence algorithms, and then my kind."

I Row-Boat, Cory Doctorow, 2005: [https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_- _Overclocke...](https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_- _Overclocked_-_I_Row-Boat-A4.pdf)

<comment><USER41> [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is this comparable to Google BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) ? Benchmarks are different. Can I use any of this models for other tasks no mentioned in the papers, something more than the "fine tuning"?

</comment><comment><USER43> In 10 years, content written by actual humans will be a premium niche, like tailored suits - reserved for the elites.

The rest of us will be force-fed with machine-generated garbage.

<comment><USER44> That doesn't makes sense, text can be distributed at marginal cost, tailored suits are expensive because there's not a lot of supply.

<comment><USER43> Tailored suits used to be cheap too, but taylors went out of business due to mass production.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The generated Unicorn story has about the writing quality (in both senses: standard and feel) of fanfic

</comment><comment><USER46> I'd love to see what it would produce if you fed it the first sentence of your average Nigerian Prince scam. Fully-automated phishing- you could even automatically toss in a couple details about the recipient and let the AI riff on that for a bit.

</comment><comment><USER47> Anyone who's done large scale model training like this, an you shed light on following questions:

What is the process like? Do you prototype locally? How do you confidence that the only limitation to good results is more compute power and NOT the model architecture or applicability of deep learning to a particular task? At what point do you decide that shelling many tens of thousands is OK? How often do you do large scale training only to find non-impressive results and hence the money wasted?

<comment><USER48> There's a natural way to parallelize these models so that using 128 GPUs is the same as a 128x batch size. You can similarly simulate 128x batch size by accumulated gradients before backpropping. So you can test on just one or a few GPUs before you run the full thing.

By that point you know it's going to work, it's just a matter of how well and whether you could've done nominally better with different tuning.

There's been enough research leading up to this paper to suspect that just scaling larger would play out.

<comment><USER47> Thanks.

>By that point you know it's going to work, it's just a matter of how well and whether you could've done nominally better with different tuning.

This can't be true in all cases, right? I'm assuming that for many initially promising results on less-compute when they scale it, the results aren't impressive. I'm very curious to know what is the trials-to-success rate of publishable results when big-compute is thrown in the mix.

<comment><USER48> It's indeed a very high trials to success ratio. Again though, there's enough papers preceding this one that you could have good confidence in the effort. Another thing that helps is orgs like OpenAI have their own servers, rather than renting ec2 instances.

You also don't just launch that many things and them ignore it. You monitor it to make sure nothing is going terribly wrong.

But yeah there's also the fact that if you're Google, throwing $2m worth of compute at something becomes worth it for some reason (eg Starcraft)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think this would be extremely useful when we can do the inverse. Basically - can we detect if someone's writing is nonsensical or not? Can we detect if someone that is producing many well written essays is adhering to reality or not? Are they subtly re-defining terms, using flawed examples, etc?

The generated example of the biologists discovering a unicorn herd is too convincing on its own. It's only because it's so outlandish that we get the sense it's fictional.

<comment><USER39> Our models have reviewed your submission, and deemed it to be 87% incoherent, 52% redundant, and 24% fake. We therefore reject your submission. Sincerely, the Chief Bot Editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's beautiful that the reduced model itself is only 175 lines of Python code, thanks to TensorFlow : [https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py](https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py)

</comment><comment><USER51> this will definitely be reverse engineered and open-sourced.[0]

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

</comment><comment><USER52> It's pretty interesting that their training set consists of "outbound links from Reddit which received at least 3 karma". There are definitely large subreddits which are flooded by highly voted fake news which you don't want to emulate (unless that's the goal).

It also reminds me of a short fictional story which explores what would happen if an AI learn how to maximize reddit's sort by controversial score instead: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by- controversial/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/)

Maybe that dystopian story is closer to reality than we thought?

</comment><comment><USER53> The best part is "Scroll down for video" from [https://blog.openai.com/better- language-models/#sample3](https://blog.openai.com/better-language- models/#sample3) :)

</comment><comment><USER54> I wonder how this would do on the Hutter Prize (I doubt it would beat the current record but I'm curious what the result would be)

[http://prize.hutter1.net](http://prize.hutter1.net)

<comment><USER55> They include the enwik8 BPC estimates. It may not be strictly comparable - <USER2> most obvious issue is that since the HP takes the compression paradigm of intelligence, the compressor size is part of the total, and those 1.5b parameters certainly are not cheap.

(This is one reason I think the HP is outdated. The corpus is not big enough to allow the superior asymptotics of approaches like RNNs or Transformers to compensate for their far larger binary size. HP is not measuring progress on an intelligence metric we care about, it's sort of measuring a 'demo scene' metric of intelligence.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'm most impressed by its ability to answer questions about the text. Why can't someone built something like this on top of Wikipedia? That would be amazing to ask Wikipedia any question you can think of.

<comment><USER57> Google has already built this, but it definitely isn't perfect.

[http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/10/google-fact-questions- ent...](http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/10/google-fact-questions-entity- references-unstructured-data/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Not releasing the model? These people aren't scientists.

edit: toned down a bit.

<comment><USER16> Somehow, some part of me really wants to see what this model would generate with that as a prompt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This reminds me of Dürrenmatt's "Die Physiker "([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physicists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physicists)).

While this has indeed very scary implications, one should be aware that if it's thinkable, eventually it will be thought (I'm paraphrasing here).

</comment><comment><USER60> Wonderful results. I Don't think I will experiment with the smaller available model, at least right now. I am still happy with BERT, especially for basically solving anaphora resolution (coreference of pronouns, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER61> Seems like magic! I wish I could do something similar with our chat support questions and answers. It would be nice to have something like this built-in.

</comment><comment><USER62> Nobody has asked about the animated text on the left at the top -- how is that done? That is more interesting to me!

<comment><USER63> It's an mp4 video. But then the next question is: how did they make that video? And the answer to that is... I have no idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Plot twist: all the comments on this thread were auto-generated.

</comment><comment><USER56> Can anyone do an eli5 of how this works?</comment>


Recommendation for good VCs in Canada? - <AUTHOR>

Could you recommend me good VCs in Canada.  Also are the procedures for VCs in the US same as in Canada.  Do they become shareholder, board members etc? <comment><USER2> Your best bet is probably to speak to VC funded startups in your city, both because they can advise you better and also because they can make the introductions you need.

Some of the processes might be different in Canada due to legal and tax differences, but generally speaking VCs will almost always become shareholders and take a board seat regardless of where you are in the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Golden Venture Partners are a cut above many Canadian VCs. See [http://goldenvp.com/](http://goldenvp.com/)

Mark MacLeod may be a good person to speak to as well: [http://www.startupcfo.ca/](http://www.startupcfo.ca/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Do they provide 100% funds?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.cvca.ca/member_search.aspx](http://www.cvca.ca/member_search.aspx)</comment>


Clojure's mini languages - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogus.me/2010/03/23/clojures-mini-languages/

<comment><USER2> I don't really understand how the Clojure syntax-quote somehow prevents name- capturing any more than that of Common Lisp does(except for the foo# gensym shortcut). The Common Lisp backquote automatically qualifies symbols in the current package. In fact, the Common Lisp reader does that for all symbols used without a qualified namespace. It would be terribly painful to write in any language with a mandatory package system which could not infer the package to which a symbol belongs in this way.

What makes Clojure's backquote so much more resilient against variable capture than Common Lisp's?

<comment><USER3> I've often wondered this. Last week rich hickey mentioned this at clojure NYC, and they only things he mentioned were the fully qualifying namespaces (which resolves to the original package it was defined in) and the auto gensyms. I assume this is enough in most cases and the auto gensyms take care of the rest. I don't think I'd trust namespace rewriting by itself though.

<comment><USER4> Right, and one without the other doesn't do the trick. You need both auto- gensyms and namespace resolution to ensure hygiene in Clojure macros (cleanly at least). On the other hand as lg mentioned you can intentionally capture using the pattern described. So you get the best of both worlds with the stipulation that the case of intentional capture is a bit more cumbersome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice. I bought a MEAP of Fogus' Clojure book: I assume that all of his mini- articles will be in the book.

<comment><USER4> I'm trying not to recycle the blog posts, but in some ways it's impossible. This specific post will not make it in, but all of the topics will be covered where applicable. Thanks for buying the MEAP; I hope you like it so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> His site has a console mode...and its pretty awesome. I've never really heard great things about "The Joy of X" books but if the books are as excellent as his blog posts I may have to chip in.

<comment><USER7> I feel a bit sorry to ask but : how does one access a site in "console mode" ?

<comment><USER6> In the head of the site look for this "Run This Blog In Mobile Or Console Mode..." click Console mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey, pretty cool. I had no idea about the (-> ... ... ) macro. I loved how F# (and Haskell) made that same thing really easy, but it turns out Clojure did too. Heh.

Now if only I could get it working on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER9> I realize this has nothing to do with the content of your post, but your blog has the best title of all time.

</comment><comment><USER10> It starts with

> _one of the strengths of Clojure is that it is comprised of many little > mini-languages_

and ends with (in the comments)

> _I hope you do not judge the whole of Clojure by this blog post_

So which is it? Is this syntactic soup an achievement to be proud of or a misfeature to ignore and avoid?

<comment><USER11> > _So which is it? Is this syntactic soup an achievement to be proud of or a > misfeature to ignore and avoid?_

Most of those things listed are neither, rather they are pragmatic and intended to _improve_ readability.

      * List comprehensions need no justification.
      * Literal regex support also needs no justification.
      * Syntax quote needs no justification.
      * Literal numerics need no justification.

Stuff you might not use:

      * pre/post conditions
      * gen-class

I hardly consider ns a mini-language any more than I consider any language's import syntax a mini-language but that's me.

So we're left with #() and ->, ->>.

#() is often abused. It's really meant for things like this:

      (map #(* % 3) (range 100))
      ; vs.
      (map (fn [x] (* x 3)) (range 100))

It's intended to improve readability when used properly.

This the purpose of -> and ->> as well. People often complain that Lisp code needs to be read inside out.

      (+ (* (/ x 2) 3) 5))
      ; vs.
      (-> x (/ 2) (* 3) (+ 5))

Again a readability win, not loss.

<comment><USER10> > _Most of those things listed are neither, rather they are pragmatic and > intended to improve readability._

The road to damnation is paved with good intentions. In C++, (which I use a lot for many practical reasons), _separately_ every single feature solves or improves something, but _together_ the improvements could have been made more consistently at a lesser cost in language elegance.

<comment><USER11> _separately every single feature solves or improves something, but together the improvements could have been made more consistently at a lesser cost in language elegance._

The problem with C++ is that those "improvements" are _grafted_ onto the language. You can't do a _damn thing_ about it.

In Clojure half these "mini-languages" are just macros. You don't have to use any of it. If you see a better way to do things build your own macros from the primitive forms.

Good luck fixing C++ :D

<comment><USER10> > _The problem with C++ is that those "improvements" are grafted onto the > language. You can't do a damn thing about it._

You don't have to use the features you don't like. Its main design principle is "you don't pay for what you don't use".

The problem with C++ is that too many people who don't know it, talk about it :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 500 error :(

<comment><USER4> I was playing on the server at the time... should be fine now.</comment></comment>


Adobe Posts Its First Billion-Dollar Quarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/technology/21adobe.html?src=busln

<comment> rm-rf And with that kind of money, they can finally afford to implement secure software development, code review, fuzzing, & vulnerability testing.

We'll all be better off when they do.

<comment><USER2> Or maybe the 64 bit version of flash can get out of extreme beta.

<comment><USER3> Or maybe they can make Flash work properly on Linux?

<comment><USER4> There's hope - at least if you use nvidia.

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=adobe...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=adobe_linux_vdpau&num=1)

According to that, hardware acceleration seems to work well in the current beta.

<comment><USER5> I would just like a decent installer for at least one of their products to start with.

<comment><USER4> If you're on debian this

      grep -q 'www.debian-multimediaa.org' /etc/apt/sources.list || (echo 'deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main non-free' >> /etc/apt/sources.list; apt-get update)

      apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla
      apt-get install acroread

works well. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like all the people who grew up using copied versions of the Adobe suite are finally buying it.

<comment><USER7> I'm one of them. I started toying with programming when I was ~14 using ActionScript and my pirated copy of Flash 4.

Ah, those were the times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not a very informative article. They left out tons of information, such as that the growth is coming from their _business_ products like LiveCycle (the article doesn't even recognize that side of their business). Also Adobe is spinning the Creative Suite story as "sales for the latest release are higher than they were at this point in time for the previous release" but my understanding from the sketchy articles out there, is that, overall, Creative Suite revenues are down a bit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Are they thanking (loving) "Apple" in their release anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER10> CS4 was widely panned and coupled with the poor economy, many companies skipped it. Adobe took a loss this quarter last year. The article doesn't state it but many CS3 owners have upgraded to CS5 because of the improving economy, some new features and not wanting to be too far behind software revisions.

</comment><comment><USER11> Where does it make all this money on? The article just mentions that they make Photoshop, Acrobat and Flash..and the Adobe press release doesn't provide any additional information.

<comment><USER12> CS, PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier, Flash, Dreamweaver, Scene 7, Macromedia Studio, After Effects, Go Live: 542.1 mill

Acrobat, LiveCycle, ColdFusion, Flex: 274.1 mill

Omniture: 98.4 mill

PostScript, FrameMaker, PageMaker, Macromedia Contribute, Macromedia Captivate, Macromedia FreeHand: 47.3 mill

PDF & Flash Platform Revenue: 46.1 mill

<comment><USER13> I look at this list and I am thrilled that I don't have to use a single one of these. I'm not even friends with anyone that does, except a couple of photographers.

I'd love to know how much of the 46.1 million of the "PDF & Flash Platform Revenue" and the 274.1 million of the "Acrobat, LiveCycle, ColdFusion, Flex" is purely PDF related. How many people are buying Adobe Acrobat just to edit PDFs, documents that should be source code but aren't?

I just hate it when digital things become analog (or virtually analog, like PDF) and I doubly hate it that tools get built for editing the now analog digital document. Like OCR for Faxes, UGH!

<comment><USER14> Newest piece from The Onion: "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Use Adobe Products"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe they can now start on some of these: <http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/>

</comment><comment><USER16> Any news on a possible Flash export-to-html5 feature?

</comment><comment><USER17> Too bad, hope Adobe dies forever soon. All of their stuff has become bloated and horrible (Flash the worst among them), and unless there is a serious internal restructuring, I have little hope that decency will return.

<comment><USER18> I really hope flash goes away too, but I don't see software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, etc going away anytime soon.

<comment><USER17> The nice thing about desktop software is that it doesn't vanish with its authors. If Adobe crumbles or restructures, Photoshop et al will be there just the same as they were, and people can continue to use them. Meanwhile, if people thought they could get a serious hold where Photoshop once stood (because Photoshop became unmaintained, which I doubt would happen, even if Adobe dies; Photoshop is a huge asset and I'm sure the ashes of Adobe could get a pretty good price based on that alone), the gap would be filled relatively quickly.

<comment><USER5> Nearly all current Adobe products require activation. The only one I'm familiar with that doesn't is Acrobat.

<comment><USER17> While this is annoying, it's not impossible to get around...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Moving On - <AUTHOR> http://al3x.net/2012/07/25/moving-on.html <comment><USER2> Alex is one of the most thoughtful students of programming languages I know. I know he's spent time learning countless languages, he literally wrote the book on Scala, and for three years now he's organized the Emerging Languages conference (<http://emerginglangs.com/>). The conference features talks about interesting programming languages, no matter how obscure, predominantly from the creators and designers of those languages. So far as I know, it is the only conference of its kind, and is a huge service to the programming language ecosystem.

(As an aside, said ecosystem is going through something of a renaissance. The quickly growing need for server-side software (where choice of tools need not impact the end user), the increased availability of low-level infrastructure such as the JVM and LLVM, and the ever-more-important challenges of concurrent and distributed programming have all contributed to this renewed interest in new programming languages.)

If Alex is going to spend his time working on things related to programming languages and developer tools, then I, for one, can't wait.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, but Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon and Bill Venners wrote _the_ book on Scala: _Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide, 2nd Edition_ [1]

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Comprehensive- Step-S...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Comprehensive-Step- Step/dp/0981531644/)

<comment><USER4> Never let a sense of humor get in the way of a good opportunity for pedantry & parochialism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure Al3x will find success wherever he ends up. This is worrisome for Simple though.

I signed up a little over 2 years ago as when Al3x announced he was joining as a cofounder <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355292>, it seemed like a great product, and I couldn't wait.

Now, 2 years later they have begun to roll out invites to what amounts to a MVP. No way to deposit cash, no simple way to deposit checks (specifically the deposit via mobile app functionality), no goals or budgeting aspects, no joint accounts or lines of credit, no android app, just a nice looking card tied to an account you have to wire money into.

Don't get me wrong, simple is doing great things, and it could be huge. Two years of dev time for a product that is completely redesigning one of the biggest industries in the world is completely reasonable. I'm just worried the hype will run out or turn negative before they can ship something with enough value to convert the non early adapters. Having a cofounder leave doesn't help their image, regardless of the reasons for the departure.

<comment><USER6> I think somebody read your post.

Just got my invite an hour or so ago...Simple has a big section on "what's in the pipeline" for them.

• Android: click the link above and fill out your info through the "device" step. We'll reinvite you as soon as it's ready! • Joint accounts: Sign up with Simple now and add your partner when we're ready! • Mobile check deposit: Coming soon–sign up now and you'll have it as soon as it's ready! • So much more!

Interesting coincidence.

<comment><USER7> That was there a week or so ago when I accepted the beta invite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I worked for a similar company (affiliated banking) that was trying to put a fresh perspective on personal banking. For hardcore technologist, I think the finance industry is extremely frustrating industry to work in. The amount of legislation (necessary or otherwise) seems to create an atmosphere of bureaucracy; not to dissimilar from you local government office. It's like the keepers of all-things-compliclated in finance, likes to keep it that way and compounds the problem of progressing positive ideas and methodologies. On the flip side, the amount of risk and fraud that faces these companies is mindblowing. We've lost tens of thousands of dollars to fraud in the blink of an eye. It's a tough world, and people don't get excited about "change" because it brings uncertainty to an industry that needs to be pretty damn certain. You can't make like Facebook, "ship fast and break things."

I have a ton of respect for what Simple is trying to accomplish. When I joined a competitive service about 2 years ago, BankSimple was the benchmark for comparing the "new guard" vs. the "old guard". Unfortunately, the old guard progressed faster due to established relationship of 10+ years. But, what really turned me away were falling market caps for major prepaid providers as more and more big banks returned to their core product offering (personal banking, not high risk investment banking) and explored alternative vehicles like GPR cards.

In any event, Simple is something the consumer market needs and hat-tip to Al3x.

</comment><comment><USER9> Having Alex move to Portland was something that really bolstered our startup community. It was a validation of sorts. And I can't thank him enough for what he did -- for Simple and so many other things -- while he was here.

</comment><comment><USER10> I hate to be that guy but why is this Hacker News-worthy? (genuinely curious)

<comment><USER11> Alex was an early Twitter employee, Twitter API lead at a time that many HN readers were writing Twitter apps, and wrote Programming Scala. There're a number of folks here that follow his writings with interest.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the info. I'm sure I wasn't the only one wondering despite the down votes.

<comment><USER12> It's a totally fair gripe. One thing HN's format is piss-poor at is providing context for stories, other than the headline (and that's had its own set of issues with rewrites).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've only been following Alex since he left Twitter, but [Bank]Simple always struck me as exactly the kind of dream company I'd want to be at (never really considered myself good enough to pursue it though).

Given his previous posts regarding how much he likes Portland compared to San Francisco, I'm a little bit surprised to see him moving back to the Bay Area. Regardless, I'm excited to see what he does next and I wish him the best of luck.

<comment><USER14> Why do you consider yourself not good enough to work there? I don't know you, but I find that most developers that say that do just fine.

Oh yeah, we're hiring too: <https://cloudability.com/jobs/>

<comment><USER15> I agree - quite a few of our current employees told me that they thought the same before they were hired at Simple. You should check out our open jobs at <https://www.simple.com/careers/>.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> He's pissed because he hasn't gotten an invite yet, either.

</comment><comment><USER17> Are there misconceptions with what a CTO actually entails? I've not heard of a CTO that does any physical programming with respect to their job. This might be different in a small startup but my understanding of a CTO's role is to guide architectural and development goals of the company as a whole - and to hire great people to implement that vision. It sucks he would have to leave but part of me wonders why he thought the CTO role involved a fair amount of programming and why he wouldn't just move into a lead developer role as opposed to leaving entirely?

<comment><USER18> This depends on the company and stage it is in.

At HelloWallet, our CTO does indeed do _some_ programming some of the time. Since we are still somewhat a bootstrapped startup, everyone that has the ability to help out does at some point. Is it the overwhelming amount of time? Well, no, but still...

In regard to architectural and developmental goals, that job is the responsibility of our Chief Architect...who also does a very substantial amount of programming as well.

TLDR; Titles are not always one-to-one with roles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So I've got to ask Alex.. is it coincidence that you decided to leave after 2 years when you were most likely fully vested or was it a strategic move? Did you retain your shares :-P

<comment><USER20> Its unlikely he's fully vested. Its damn near standard to have 4 year vesting, with month-by-month vesting after the first year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At any point in your career, it is important to think about the future. It is crucial to know where you want to be in the future and how to get there, whether it is your career, family or both. Whether you leave a job by choice or not by choice, your career is long and there are usually several paths to get to where you want to be.

I have worked in investment banking and private equity for a number of years and decided to make a switch to corporate development for a company (ie - doing acquisitions for them), so that I could spend a bit more time creating side projects such as <http://drivingtests101.com/>, a free driving test prep website for 11 countries, with apps in 4 countries and rapidly expanding. I was very fortunate for my driving test app in Canada to be #2 ranked education, #19 in Australia and rapidly catching up in the US and UK.

Life is short. Do what you want to do as soon as you can so you can enjoy what you do. It's that simple.

</comment><comment><USER22> Couldn't he have taken on the lead role of R&D? Of an experimental dev arm etc...

There are lots of opps he could have taken.

Sure, It might not have been a good role, but sounds like there were relationship issues as well. I wouldn't imagine his cut and run solely on "I cant program enough" -- He had to be either under performing or frustrated with the others' lack of leadership/performance/flexibility/ability to listen/you-name-it

There are too many reasons to leave a company, but who knows the truth....

Haven't looked at simple since we speculated over their biz model ~12 months ago on HN... and frankly, as i still perceive them as a simple proxy to Big Evil banks (TM) - I'll still never trust them....

Though that is not related to the story... I still have nothing to convince me to think they are not just trying to find a way to cash in on the most despicable industry in existence... banking.

<comment><USER23> > Couldn't he have taken on the lead role of R&D? Of an experimental dev arm > etc...

A startup generally _is_ an experimental dev company. Startups execute their roadmap. If they don't have focus, especially when they're tackling something as big as banking, they die.

> There are lots of opps he could have taken.

Sure. But it's hard/impossible to move down the food chain once you've been at the top.

> Sure, It might not have been a good role, but sounds like there were > relationship issues as well.

I didn't get that from Alex's post. I got "not doing enough programming, wife and I miss San Francisco"

> I wouldn't imagine his cut and run solely on "I cant program enough" -- He > had to be either under performing or frustrated with the others' lack of > leadership/performance/flexibility/ability to listen/you-name-it

You got all that from "personal reasons"? :)

<comment><USER24> consider also that in the last month, their director of security also "moved on": <http://www.linkedin.com/in/s7ephen?_mSplash=1>

<comment><USER25> Stephen Ridley is a friend and a former teammate. He "moved on" from Matasano as well, to BankSimple. He "moved on" from Simple to full-time security research. Because he's a security researcher. Since he left Simple, he's been doing research and teaching classes on ARM exploitation. Because that's what he likes doing. How much opportunity do you think there was for developing ARM exploitation classes at Simple?

This happens _all the time_ with very senior security roles at startups. People take them because they fit a career arc, but then realize that the day- to-day of those very senior roles just isn't as fun as research work. Since security research work pays like f'ing crazy right now, people bounce out of demanding corp roles pretty quickly: even in a very strong outcome at a startup, you might not give up too much money opting for "funemployment".

(Alex and Stephen are also good friends, from long before Simple).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's great that he decided not to jump immediately to another job. Unless you are in a financially tight situation, you really need some time to decompress your mind, and clear it of any company-dynamics residue.

</comment><comment><USER27> I guess this means BankSimple is in trouble, or not growing as fast as projected.</comment>


Microsoft DreamSpark:  Free Dev licenses for students - <AUTHOR> http://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx

<comment><USER3> Haven't they always provided free licenses for students but this single hub site is new? Or was the earlier offer the student pricing only? Can't remember. But it doesn't matter really.

What is interesting is that over the year I've begun to repeatedly see signs of that Microsoft is no more. This is just another one of those.

While I've been passively against Microsoft ever since 80's I've always considered them a credible opposing force to other stacks of software, such as FOSS or GNU, or Unix, or Macs. Eventhough I wasn't a Windows user I always knew what was new on the MS front, and what new features they would soon be selling.

However, these days I hardly bother to raise my eyebrow anytime Microsoft announces something. I think it started with, or at around the time of, the anticipation of Vista.

Vista was a bit everything and then quite much nothing: it didn't feel like a success and, indeed, now it seems that it never became a success either. This is not only because XP was deemed "good enough" but, to me, because Microsoft really hadn't figured out anything relevant to add to XP. They would have implemented it in Vista but it seems that since XP a Windows-like operating system had already reached a saturation point, both feature-wise and UI-wise. This means they must have stopped thinking about -- or run out of -- any juicy practical improvements in around 2000 or so: they still had something to be implemented in XP but then nothing much. People could run XP for a decade and they wouldn't miss anything important as long as they could install new versions of their browser.

Unlike Vista, Windows 7 will probably break the XP dam and flood over to everywhere around the world. However, this doesn't mean there's much substance to it except the sheer brute force ramming the foundations of the 8-or-9-year- old XP. It will take a few years to change (merely the name of) the de facto Windows operating system but as XP will begin to suffer from fundamental aging problems such as lack of drivers the transition will punch through. However, unless Windows 7 is a total blunder there will be absolutely nothing from Microsoft that would replace it for the following ten years or even longer. Microsoft has had a hard time with XP already and they now have one chance to do one more force-update and then they're stuck. I don't think it would be unimaginable for Windows 7 to be the last major operating system from Microsoft.

Similarly with IE: IE8 is better in many ways and delivers features that people have been waiting for since IE6. However, I didn't see people rejoicing together, queueing at stores, or slashdotting Microsoft's download site. IE8 is not a key player in the web browser market: it's just catching up. There's no disruptive energy behind IE8; people who have been fed up with IE6/IE7 have been using Firefox for years. IE8 doesn't make the difference anymore. IE7 and IE8 could just as well have been IE6.1 and IE6.2.

Now, the student licenses! Even no more than five years ago I would have got a grumpy face from thinking about the horde of freshmen that would get Microsoft stuff for free and learn to think of the world of computing as equal to MS Windows, MS Visual Studio, MS languages, and MS tools. Now I'm not worried at all, for some reason. I don't feel their student licenses changing anything in the world even if they offered them for negative price. The smart guys have been using Linux/BSD or OS X for years already, and everything important is cross-platform or on the web these days so that there's no single Microsoft solution that would be the de facto environment for most tasks. Perhaps I just exclusively know and read people who I consider smart and are in the non-MS camp, or I'm missing some other reality check here, but I'm not worrying about this DreamSpark thing. It will take off because Microsoft is huge and a like a tanker it takes miles to come to a full stop. But as for the bleeding edge where new things are tried, Microsoft isn't and won't be a major player. Rather, the DreamSpark thing feels like a one last stretch to level the playing field to their favor, and those kind of stunts are bound to fail per definition.

To exaggerate, Microsoft is effectively in the position as if they hadn't done or released anything after Windows XP. Not good. (For them, I mean. :))

<comment><USER4> People have been predicting Microsoft's demise for 15 years, and it hasn't happened, and I'd even argue that Microsoft have got better in that time: IIS has gone from being a joke to being a worthy Apache competitor, .NET is a great technology and should be seen as a huge step forward, the security and stability in their OSes have improved with each release (despite taking some flack for 'overprotective' security measures for it in Vista), and they have been making many positive usability improvements (e.g. Office 2007 and the Vista Start Menu), DirectX has taken the crown from OpenGL for consumers and managed to avoid standards hell, Visual Studio is extremely well regarded, they got rid of their worst products despite it being controversial (e.g. Visual Basic and Frontpage), and SQL Server still blows away MySQL in most regards.

If Windows 7 is the last major operating system, then what will replace it?

Mac OS X? Apple's cheapest desktop computer is £499 excluding monitor. Good luck selling them to the business users who traditionally buy Dells at half the price, especially as most are using Office and Exchange Server, plus all the custom software in their niche which is written for Windows.

Linux distributions? They're getting better, but the community is still incredibly fractured and the infrastructure with commercial software is still far from ideal. Dropping Adobe's products or Office for their open-source equivalents just isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future. Perhaps when Wine reaches parity with Windows (and I can see that time coming), but even if that particular hurdle is overcome, from a usability perspective it's going to take a big effort for GNOME to reach parity with Windows, let alone manage to make enough commercial impact to overcome the familiarity that the average Windows user has. Hell, even in terms of system administration, managing a set of Windows machines is supposed to be much easier than a set of Linux machines. Perhaps the difference is we're going to have a time where people choose Windows instead of having Windows as the only choice, and that's a positive step forward.

Oh, and while Microsoft would rather have people paying for Vista licenses, XP licenses still means money in their pocket as well. We're still at a time when they're primarily competing with themselves. If people use Windows 7 for a decade, they're still getting the license fees on basically every PC unit sold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All part of the lock in scheme - students have far more {interesting} opportunities to tinker with open source, imo.

<comment><USER6> Excuse me, but how does this "lock in" students? Once they become part of this program they always have to use MS products?

Students should try to expose themselves to as many possible technologies as possible. Open source, Microsoft, Apple, etc. These sorts of programs help students do that.

<comment><USER7> Spoken like a man who has never written code...

You get locked in because after 2-3 years of churning out work you have both comfort with one technology, and a base of libraries and routines that took you 2-3 years to write, and know.

Once your down that rabbit hole, switching becomes much harder as you have to abandon the mind share you created in the languages you used. And in the case of .NET since so much of what you do there is unique to MS alone, and mostly due to the "LOCK IN" to their OS, walking away from it is not FREE or EASY.

Worse yet stay with it long enough and watch your world crumble to nothing when MS seeking revenue enhancement decides it needs to release the next great language, and obsolete years of your work, with an upgrade. Don't think so? Ask the VB 6.0 crowd and the thousands of COM component vendors whose industry disappeared overnight when MS pulled the plug on them and forced .NET as the standard.

I don't agree that students should expose themselves to as many technologies as possible, if among their choices one technology could cause them harm...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's a similar program for startups called BizSpark. <http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/>

<comment><USER9> Whilst we are talking about this type of thing, Sun do free software and heavily discounted servers etc. on the Startup essentials program <http://www.sun.com/emrkt/startupessentials/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just on a sidenote, ACM and IEEE Computer Society student members get access to a _ton_ of free Microsoft software through MSDNAA, the same program lots of schools participate in for low cost/free MS software, including a lot of what is offered through DreamSpark. Something I've found out most people didn't even know existed, but I think it's a fairly new offering. I didn't even know some of the products available for download through there even existed.

Not condoning Microsoft or anything, but perhaps someone needs it. :)

<comment><USER11> >> Not condoning Microsoft or anything, but perhaps someone needs it. :)

I really don't get why people are afraid of "condoning" Microsoft. They're one choice in a sea of thousands; to each his own. That mentality really bothers me.

<comment><USER10> Well I saw the sea of dead posts about this topic here before I commented - <USER2> wasn't afraid of condoning the use of Microsoft software as much as one of those people would then maybe comment and start off something like that for a small comment I left in hopes that there might be someone else on HN that might find it useful. (And now I notice that more of the comments not-dead on this link are about Microsoft than the DreamSpark program itself...) I personally don't care what I use as long as I can use it for the task at hand, and I also don't care what others choose to use. I think that these tools that are normally fairly expensive now free for academic use to be a nice little touch, but then again I also appreciate that most commercial software is also available at low/no cost to students and educators.

What does bother me is kneejerk reactions to being against Microsoft for no good reason. So I use Mac OS X mainly, and *bsd or Linux for servers, and I contribute to an open source project. I still find a use for Server 2008 and Windows Mobile and more..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Being knee-jerk anti-Microsoft is so 80's....</comment>


Google Domains Launches to All in U.S - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/13/google-domains-launches-to-all-in-u-s-with-support-for-blogger-integration-templates-and-more-domain-endings/?ncid=rss <comment><USER4> None of Google Domain's features are novel. In fact the article spent most of its time talking about an up-sell. Which isn't to say Google Domain isn't a good product, just that we now should look at price because nothing else seems interesting...

~ Google Domains charges $12/year for .COM, .NET, .ORG.

~ NameCheap charges $10.69/year for .COM, $11.98/year for .NET, and $11.48/year for .ORG. Sometimes with an 18c/year fee tacked on.

~ GoDaddy charges $12.99-13.99 for a .COM but that might increase randomly because they're scumbags.

So my point is that this article claims that everyone is "rushing" to this new product, and while this product doesn't seem "bad" it also isn't exactly market changing. The prices are well within 10% of the market (sometimes higher, sometimes lower) and the features are pretty generic also.

Can someone explain why Google Domains is compelling and not a "me too!" product?

<comment><USER5> Private registration usually costs extra, but not with Google domains. That is a compelling reason to me. I also like the clean interface, some of the other vendors have horrible interfaces.

<comment><USER6> What is private registration?

<comment><USER7> Registration without revealing your private information in the whois database. Providers usually put their own details there and forward emails to the end user.

Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules for some tlds.

<comment><USER8> > Depending on the registry, it's unavailable or at least against the rules > for some tlds.

And yet other TLD registries are sensible enough to make privacy the _default_ for private individuals. .EU isn't bad in this regard, and others like .SE even go so far as to hide your name (most only hide your postal, email, telephone)

Frankly I don't know why anyone who can avoid it would want to touch Verisign TLDs with a barge pole... they have the continued gall to keep putting their prices _up_ despite more competition than ever, and fail to raise the bar on basics like whois protection. Even .UK domains can be had for $5/year with registry level whois protection for heavens sake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Knowing first hand google support I will stick to namecheap ...

<comment><USER10> I like everything about namecheap, except the name. I hate having to mention their company name to a customer who I'm managing the domain for. It sounds like I'm using a discount service from the bottom of the barrel when that's really not how the company operates.

It would be nice if I could refer to a parent company with a more appealing name.

<comment><USER11> When I bought Namecheap domains in 2006, domains were close in price to ~$70. Namecheap's name was intended to show that you'd buy it for less.

The brand grew from there. That's why Namecheap is still called Namecheap.

Disclosure: Namecheap employee/personal experience

<comment><USER12> Domains were nowhere near ~$70 in 2006. Maybe in 2000.

<comment><USER13> Neh. Not even Network Solutions was charging $70 in 2000. Only half that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> $12/yr - not bad at all. I might recommend this next time a friend asks how to buy a domain.

Namecheap takes great care of me at $10/year though, so I'm not very compelled to switch.

<comment><USER15> I started moving all of my domains back to NameCheap from Badger after they raised their prices to what Hover charges.

The domain renewal with whois privacy/guard at NameCheap ends up being a little more than Google Domains.

I keep hoping NameCheap will overhaul their control panel design like they did with their main site.

I will probably end up moving to AWS Route53 or Google Domains or to use their DNS and a clean/modern interface and simpler pricing (include whois privacy).

<comment><USER16> The dealbreaker for us with NameCheap/eNom is simple: _still_ no DNSSEC.

It's been how many years now? And all they say is "we're working on it" and have no ETA. So we moved most things to Gandi.

Feels good having no GoDaddy, however.

<comment><USER17> Seriously? I'm surprised to see you of all people write that. No DNSSEC is a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER18> Care to elaborate on DNSSEC? I've been interested in seeing wider adoption of DNSSEC for things like DANE.

<comment><USER17> DANE is a replacement for the CA system that effectively cedes cryptographic control of most of the Internet to world governments.

<comment><USER19> No... DANE doesn't cede control to world governments.

<insert-standard-many-hundred-line-exchange-between-you-and-I-that-has- happened-in-other-HN-threads-here>

DANE can work perfectly fine with the existing CA system to provide another way of verifying that the correct TLS certificate (or CA) is being used. Or... it can be used with a completely different trust anchor or TLS certificate that you control. Your choice.

But you and I will just have to disagree on this topic. Your dislike of DNSSEC is well-known, as is my support for it.

<comment><USER17> The USG controls .com, .net, and .org. The government of Libya controls .ly. DNSSEC puts cryptographic key material under the influence of the DNS. "No it doesn't" isn't a rebuttal to that.

<comment><USER19> But Thomas ... I still don't understand the attack that you say can be made against DNSSEC-signed domains. Here's what I see, if I have a .COM domain:

1\. I sign my domains and generate a DS record.

2\. I upload the DS record to my registrar who passes the DS record up to the .COM registry.

Now, when someone does DNSSEC validation on my DNS records, they wind up doing this process:

1\. Going through the DNS process to get my DNS records as well as the DNSKEY and RRSIGs.

2\. Following the chain of DS records up to the .COM registry and on up to the root of DNS... being able to validate along the way the integrity of the records.

Where do world governments get to interfere here?

If a govt were able to manipulate the TLD registry the best they could do would be to point my domain to some other name servers that weren't mine... is THAT the attack you see? I seriously would like to understand.

<comment><USER17> Your "1\. Going through the DNS process" starts with records the USG controls! Yes, "the best they could do" would be to defeat the entire system. What do you think happens in a TLS MITM? They USG isn't trying to sign _your_ keys and publish _your_ addresses!

This is not, of course, the only problem with DNSSEC. It's also an archaic 1990s cryptosystem built around 1024-bit PKCS1v15 RSA, which by default makes every DNS record in the system public, trivially dramatically amplifies DNS traffic, and does all this _without actually securing DNS lookups from browsers_ , which still run the old insecure DNS protocol to talk to DNSSEC- enabled caches.

It's a silly system, has been since the USG paid TIS to design it in the 1990s, is nearing _two decades_ delayed, and isn't going to happen. Look at what Chris Palmer from Google has to say about it. Whatever the opposite of "betting on it" is, that's what Chromium is doing with DNSSEC. We should get to work designing a modern alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The last thing I trust Google with is my domains. They can outright ban or disable you just like with any of their products and not offer support or explanation.

</comment><comment><USER21> So when somebody steals your domain, do you actually get to talk to a person at Google to help resolve the matter, or is it like every other customer service experience they offer?

<comment><USER22> That's just it - it's impossible to social engineer a takeover of your domain, since nobody can reach a human!

<comment><USER23> Actually, I've gotten pretty fast response times on normal business days with Google Domains.

<comment> SG- I'm assuming before it launched?

<comment><USER23> Yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> SG- I have no idea why this is US only other than Google just being extremely lazy. Previously I've always understood why companies couldn't release products internationally or at least in their own continent when it came to rights for content, however I really don't see any reason for this one.

If it's an issue of not wanting to deal with certain country top-levels then so be it and simply offer the ones you've implemented already and add in more top levels in the future.

</comment><comment><USER24> Don't waste your time on this service. I registered for it years ago while it was still in beta, and it's been nothing but a trainwreck.

The latest debacle: I can't renew my domain. They started sending me notifications a few months ago that my domain was expiring because my credit card is out of date. I can't sign in because of a redirect bug. There's no support to reach out to, and requests for help on forums have gone unanswered.

Alternatively, dnsimple has been nothing but charming to work with.

<comment><USER25> The Google Domains page has a claim of "chat, phone and email support" which links to: [https://domains.google.com/registrar#contactus&chp=contactus](https://domains.google.com/registrar#contactus&chp=contactus)

I haven't actually tried following through with it, since I don't have any support queries myself, but that certainly /looks/ like a way to directly talk to support.

<comment><USER26> I can confirm that the contact us does connect you to support; usually Google provides at least adequate support options for paid services (e.g., Domains). I spoke with someone over Chat that was surprisingly knowledgeable, and even gave me the heads up that the new features would be rolling out soon (this was a couple weeks ago)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been using Google Domains for several months now. I like the simplicity of their user interface and I trust Google to be good at DNS. My biggest complaint is that they don't support very many TLD's. I'd prefer to have all my domains in one place, but they don't support .co yet.

<comment> da-bacon .co is now supported and the full list of supported TLDs is here [https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6010092?hl=en](https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6010092?hl=en)

<comment><USER27> That's great news. That wasn't the case last I checked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was a beta tester for Google Domains for a long time. Here are reasons I'm very satisfied:

\- Unlike other domain sellers, Google Domains is NOT trying to sell me anything other than domains.

\- Canceling is easy! I don't have to wait in calls with 1&1!

\- Customer support was great. They get back to me after an hour if I email and if I call, responses are very fast.

\- User interface is clean and clear.

<comment><USER29> I was a beta tester as well. All the reasons you listed apply. Even before they opened for the masses I have moved all my domains in. Some extra reasons:

\- Simple integration if you are on Google apps (I am grandfathered, using their, old, standard, free Gapps.

\- Customer support was superb and instant, via chat, and it was great. The person knew what he was doing.

Definitely a keeper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Many people miss the point of this product:

Easily buy a domain, have it automatically hooked into the Google Apps suite of products, and easily hook it up with a select number of third party vendors like Wix or Shopify.

That's what this is about. The ability to create something cool, run a business, without having to worry as much about the technical bullshit.

Great product, and for the ease of use it is well worth $12/year. And yea, I know, $2 more a year than namecheap... but $2/year is well worth the time it takes to setup a domain (even if it is only a 2 minute ordeal).

<comment><USER11> I believe you'll love the new Namecheap backend when it launched. :) (Disclosure: Namecheap employee)

<comment><USER31> finally ditching eNom, eh? kudos

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Google: please provide free and easy to setup SSL with every domain. :)

<comment><USER33> It's more of a request to your hosting provider albeit Google likely will be happy to selling you SSL certificate :)

Agree though - clear instructions are missing.

<comment><USER34> Apparently their certificates are only SHA1. Ugh. What happened to the whole SHA2 promoting thing?

[https://twitter.com/geeknik/status/555150703090364416](https://twitter.com/geeknik/status/555150703090364416)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can't wait to ditch enom. This looks like a good suitor.

No Canadian support yet.

Soon, eh!

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think google should be in this space. They don't need your $12/year.

The world needs to resist ceeding every last bit Internet governance to these people.

Centralization is death!

</comment><comment><USER37> Does anyone know if the DNS servers you get with this are the same as the google cloud DNS[1] product?

If so, buying your domain here could be worth it for the DNS alone, as they are anycast, DNSSEC enabled, and fairly fast[2].

1: [https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs](https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs)

2: [http://www.solvedns.com/dns- comparison/2014/12](http://www.solvedns.com/dns-comparison/2014/12)

<comment><USER38> My domain, navarr.me is on google domains.

The nameservers are ns-cloud-d$.googledomains.com (1-4) resolving to 216.239.3$.109 (32, 34, 36, 38)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've been using this for a few months now and it's been great. The cool thing is that they allow you to solve the problem of having domain emails pointing to your personal emails so for example firstname.lastname@example.com -> email@example.com. The only challenge with this is that I use Cloudflare as my CDN and Google's email redirects work if you use Google's nameservers.

<comment><USER40> > The cool thing is that they allow you to solve the problem of having domain > emails pointing to your personal emails so for example email@example.com > -> email@example.com

Am I missing something...? I didn't realise this was a problem - I've never used a domain provider that doesn't let you do this. I currently use Namecheap, which certainly do.

<comment><USER39> Ah I've been using iwantmyname as my domain provider and they didn't do this. Your domain provider clearly offers more features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wish I could somehow post this in really large fonts here that a domain name is a service where you actually need support, "real support". When your account (which is linked to dozens of other services and the reason can be an algorithmic false alert in context of any of those services) is disabled you again need support.

And customer support is something Google doesn't believe in.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd _never_ in a lifetime want to depend for something as critical as domain registrations on a company that can't be bothered to answer its customers. Google has an absolutely horrible record when it comes to end user support and if there is one thing you want from your registrar then it is that they actually answer their phones and email.

</comment><comment><USER43> That's very good news. BIG threat to GoDaddy :D

</comment><comment><USER44> I'll stick with internetbs [1], $8.49-8.99/year for .com and free private registration.

1: [https://internetbs.net/domain_names_usd.html](https://internetbs.net/domain_names_usd.html)

<comment><USER45> A domain host that is pushing .bs & with a cliche web 2.0 logo & .net. That alone worries me. How long have you been with them.

<comment><USER46> They have been around for years. Their deisgn is pretty standard for a domain name seller, if you want to talk about web2.0 and cliche have a look at the Google Domain website. Also, .net is the correct tld to use in this situation....

Who shat in your cocopops?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The best feature is that it's not GoDaddy, or NameCheap. Having registered hundreds of domains, dealt with all kinds of customer service and had to perform numerous operations for my domains the user experience matters and though Google hasn't has the best track record with UX they certainly do invest in it more heavily than GoDaddy & NameCheap.

<comment><USER11> Hey, Tamar from Namecheap here. Would love to hear about your user experience so I can pass it on. thanks.

<comment><USER48> For one, why can't we delete a domain directly from within the control panel? That's just tactics. Nooh, we have to let it expire.

On the marketplace, your display name is the same as the username. What a security risk.

And most of all: why charge at all for the domain name privacy option? As if this is such a costly tech thing to accomplish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I keep thinking of Peter Theil's analysis of monopolies trying to say they're just a competitor in a larger market. There doesn't seem to be anything special here in this offering from google. As a google developer I wonder if the difference will be in more integration and better API access compared to someone like godaddy.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think integration with other Google products is the main reason they are venturing here. It can offer one click integration to google apps, app engine, cloud compute and blogger. If they offer free google apps for personal use, I think it can be a major selling point.

<comment><USER38> I doubt they'll go down that road again (I' ma free Gapps user - <USER2> in). It's also the most terrible experience these days. I still don't have Inbox by Gmail or the ability to view my orders in Google Wallet.

So much for being an early adopter :|

<comment><USER51> > I' ma free Gapps user - grandfathered in ... So much for being an early > adopter :|

You, like me, was an early adopter which provided the platform with traction when it was new.

Now the platform is proven, established and popular.

From an economic point of view we're now merely free-loading leeches, and I honestly don't find it reasonable to expect that we should be given the best treatment at the expense of others.

Google now has a shitload of paying customers, and they are getting prioritized. And I'm completely fine with that. Our reward is that unlike others, we're allowed to go free-loading!

I've noticed too that I'm not getting features and upgrades paying customers get. That's Google trying to give me an incentive to convert to a paid account, because obviously Google wants to convert us free-loaders to paying customers too. And I'm fine with that as well.

Just don't act entitled because you were the first one to sign up for a free product. You don't deserve anything in return for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone know if they support dynamic DNS on subdomains and is it RFC2136 compliant? For example, I have mydomain.com pointing to a standard server, but home.mydomain.com updated from pfSense to point to my dyn IP on namecheap.

As usual with Google, technical details are scant.

<comment><USER53> The help center page has a lot of info. It does support sub domain support. I don't use it so I'm not sure it follows the spec you mentioned or not but it seems to have a fairly simple protocol.

[https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6147083?authuser=1](https://support.google.com/domains/answer/6147083?authuser=1)

<comment><USER54> > _Google Domains uses the dyndns2 protocol_

So, not RFC 2136. No standard protocol for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Takes you to manage domains page without login, if you click on "Manage my domains" \- [http://ajean.net/google-domains-launches-u-s- u-s/](http://ajean.net/google-domains-launches-u-s-u-s/)

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm surprised that so far nobody has mentioned DNSimple in this conversation. They seem the closest to what Google Domains functionality is - <USER3> registration and then easy integration with external services.

Also, fwiw they're fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER57> Not seeing any mention of SSL certificates. Might they get into the CA game as well?

<comment><USER56> They're are already a certificate authority (they issue their own certs for google.com, etc.) and do lots of interesting "tricks" like only issuing them for 3 months at a time so they can roll them over faster as things like SHA1 get deprecated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> >We include 10 million resolutions per year for each domain you register with Google Domains.

Hmm, what does that mean for an average website?

100 readers * 365 days * ~273 (html+css+js+gif/png/jpg) ?

I guess some browsers cache the DNS requests too..

<comment><USER59> DNS gets cached at multiple levels (browser, OS, router, upstream DNS servers). The higher you set your TTL the longer it'll be cached.

<comment><USER58> You're correct. I was wondering what we could deduce from that 10m number since Google felt it necessary to mention it on the landing page. It would tell us who they intend to market this to. It is a bit weird to restrict DNS requests like that. Or maybe they don't want people to abuse their service to create URL forwarders or some such. I suppose unlike startups, for a company like Google, anti-abuse mechanisms need to be baked into the design/feature set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Dethroning Godaddy is a noble act of course, but other than that I don't see any show stoppers from Google in managing domains space.

Adding support for more .bullshit TLD's that no one cares about?

Connecting to Blogger?

Yawn...

</comment><comment><USER60> Funny, I had just switched over my last GoDaddy domain yesterday to start using a different nameserver and finally move it off their system entirely. Might have to give this a try.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm just glad Godaddy has some real competition! Get ready for Godaddy to bring back discounts for annual renewals. hell, you might get a call from Danika personally?

</comment><comment><USER62> The only factor on what registrar you use for buying a domain should be their renewal rank on [http://domcomp.com](http://domcomp.com).

</comment><comment><USER63> Still no .io support :(

</comment><comment><USER64> Ive had beta access for a while now and havent had any problems yet. The main reason why I switched my domain to google was how seamless it works with gmail.

</comment><comment><USER65> Does anyone know anything about migrating a domain to Google Domains if that domain was originally published through Blogger, then migrated to Google Apps?

</comment><comment><USER33> Adding Route 53-like feature would be a killer addon that only large company like Google can (if they want to) properly handle.

<comment><USER66> [https://cloud.google.com/networking/#DNS](https://cloud.google.com/networking/#DNS)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> It looks like CrunchBase may have gotten hacked. Their URL for Google points to a spam domain.

<comment><USER68> It's not doing that for me -- at least, it isn't right now, anyway. You might want to check your computer for malware.

<comment><USER67> I don't think so, I see it on both my work and home computers, both of which are running OS X. Also to clarify I'm talking about the CrunchBase widget on this TechCrunch article, not the entry on the actual Crunchbase website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I've been using name.com for a while. Been ok so far (and way better than godaddy).

</comment><comment><USER70> If the email integration is seamless then it's worth looking into for me.

</comment><comment><USER71> Don't use it Google is known for not having great customer support. They like to build big and make you support it. Just like the Google Play store. Notice there is no phone number on the site? Not good if you are doing real business and need to get something fixed ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER72> Would be nice if they had an API like Namecheap, or supporte the new TLDs.

</comment><comment><USER73> I prefer Gandi.net No bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER74> Can I pay with bitcoin? or paypal?

</comment><comment><USER75> This is a welcome news. I've had it with name.com and it's horrible webmail. Unable to send email for weeks, support replying with unhelpful answers every 48 hours. Have to pay for whois privacy and bunch of other stuff most registrars give you for free.

</comment><comment><USER76> haha of course it's "in beta testing" grow some balls Google

</comment><comment><USER77> They're clearly heading for worldDOMAINation.

</comment><comment><USER78> I don't think I would ever rely on Google to host an application critical to my business.

</comment><comment><USER79> It is now complete. With Google Fiber, Big Brother Google will looking over you every step of the way.

</comment><comment><USER80> The coolest domain name search tool is probably [https://domainr.com/](https://domainr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER81> ....in before "Google has decided to end support for this product; your 10-year-registered domains that last longer than next month will be moved to GoDaddy."

(edit: actually, they'd never voluntarily transfer your domain; they'd force you to transfer it, at some kind of discount. suffice to say i am less than confident)</comment>


Amazing Javascript Interface: Amiga Workbench - <AUTHOR> http://www.chiptune.com/

<comment><USER2> I haven't seen a desktop like that since Dan Quayle was vice president.

</comment><comment><USER3> I counted 451 variables, which is pretty impressive given how smoothly it runs in Firefox along with it's levy for memory leaks. :O

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, and I thought I was fancy by using jQuery for AJAX form validation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, I used to have an Amiga and even I can't get this to work.

</comment><comment><USER6> Best part are the 'games' on the lower left of the desktop.

</comment><comment><USER7> Broken on my iPhone, but I guess that's to be expected...

</comment><comment><USER8> Talk about nostalgic! Well done!

</comment><comment><USER9> Found Easter Egg!!! Drag the title bar "Chiptunes release ...." downwards, and you'll find a another _cool_ javascript app.

<comment><USER10> Also, try right-clicking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't work in Google Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER12> insane.

</comment><comment><USER13> fucking shit!

</comment><comment><USER14> Someone has _way_ too much sparetime. But that was cool :D

</comment><comment><USER15> It's clever, but I don't understood why somebody would spend so much time on a novelty.</comment>


What should or should not be built? - <AUTHOR>

For at least the next 10-20 years there will be a shortage of developers who are able to build the future. How should the developer community determine what projects are worth building and which ones are not? <comment><USER2> Great question! Although I don't think we'll get the answer in this thread, I do think that we are deciding what to do and what not to do on a daily basis in communities like Hacker News.

Communities have the power to create a popular culture which can guide the loosely connected membership. My answer isn't a complete cop out :)

That said, I think the future is in making our access of the web more invisible. We need to focus on finding simpler ways to access the internet and open protocols between devices that allow them to communicate and authenticate us seamlessly.</comment>