Bitcoin + Lightning = win? - <AUTHOR> There are 137 operating Lightning network nodes (stats: https://lnmainnet.gaben.win). Soon there will be much more active nodes. Bitcoin will become faster and cheaper thus more useful. The scalability of Bitcoin will increase.<p>Does that mean that Bitcoin + LN will kill many altcoins such as Bcash, Litecoin? What will be the altcoins' next arguments to dominate their main competitor - Bitcoin? <comment><USER2> > Bcash

It's always easy to spot a Blockstream shill by the way they refer to Bitcoin Cash in the pejorative.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Bitcoin community has been working on regulations, wall street adoption and security. How about alt coins? Well, they only talk about 2 things: "cheaper" and "faster" transactions. Technology is cool, but if you want to make it you need to seriously work on the real problems.

So, to answer your question - YES. As soon as the lightning network becomes part of bitcoin, I think there won't be a need for alt coins anymore. Unless it's something totally unrelated to digital money.

<comment><USER4> "won't be a need for alt coins" fails to see that some alt coins have specific purposes and aren't just "cheaper" and "faster". Privacy (Zcash, etc), useful mining (Primecoin), funny (Useless Ethereum Token), and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think some coins main difference is the ease to work with in creating applications and contracts. Plus in some cases coins like Neo that are build around China's regulations are likely to stay and improve in new ways.

Also less energy consumption and ease of use are big points. Many alt coins will eventually fail I think, but at this moment they seem mostly linked to how well Bitcoin is doing, so if Bitcoin goes up or down, so will many alt coins at first.

</comment><comment><USER6> LN is not a Bitcoin-specific technology; it would allow any cryptocurrency to integrate with it. In fact, atomic swaps have been performed between Bitcoin and Litecoin.

A more likely scenario is that Bitcoin remains a store of value and people exchange Bitcoin for some other cryptocurrency like Litecoin which they'll use for their everyday purchases.

</comment><comment><USER7> Low transaction fees and fast transaction time was never a sustainable competitive advantage.

Yes, coins like these will need to innovate somehow or their utility will drastically decrease.

</comment><comment><USER8> I do think so yes, if the only thing a cryptocurrency solves is to be "a little faster and cheaper" than bitcoin it has zero use case.</comment>


Reasons To Bootstrap Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.zoomshift.com/21-reasons-to-bootstrap-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> These are some great quotes and perspectives on the benefits of bootstrapping a company.

I especially like Dharmesh Shah's and Jason Cohen's quotes.

Jason said: "People get caught up in the dream of massive outcomes, like being worth $1B or causing 1B photos to shuffle about on AWS. But you spend 0.001% of your life living "the outcome," and the rest building up to the outcome. True happiness and fulfillment is realizing that the journey is the important thing. Bootstrapping is the clearest, safest, simplest, least-risky way to that fulfillment."

This definitely resonates with me. Someone can achieve their goals without raising a ton of VC money. Even if the goal is a lifestyle business. I say, excellent! Go for it!

<comment><AUTHOR> I love Jason's quote. It's easy to get caught up with the outcomes instead of enjoying the journey.</comment></comment>


Pretty PuTTY – Better PuTTY Settings - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jacktrocinski/pretty-putty <comment><USER2> Putty definitely requires you to edit its default settings, but I was in general really surprised at the level of control you have (on a Windows application).

Side note: Am I in the minority for disliking how Solarized looks? It's so damn popular but I really can't seem to find its appeal.

<comment><USER3> Voice for Solarized: I use it everywhere, because it's popular, consistent, and not horrible to look at. This means I can have essentially the same color scheme everywhere, which is nice, plus the light/dark themes are very easy to make (which, conveniently, reduces the amount of syntax highlighting CSS on my website quite a bit: the only thing I need to have "dark mode" is changing the background color). I'm not completely sold on the "algorithmically perfected, better for your eyes, etc." stuff but I do think it's not horrible, which is not a guarantee I can make about $DEFAULT_COLOR_SCHEME_FOR_RANDOM_EDITOR.

<comment><USER4> I think it's great too, but a lot of the community implementations somehow mess up the color codes in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I spent some time recently cleaning up my Putty sessions. My goal was to control all colors in the Putty settings and have everything look good with tmux, bash, and emacs out of the box. The result was basically what the OP arrived at. It works well as long as the Putty and tmux terminal types match (e.g. putty-256color and tmux-256color, respectively) with the exception of emacs isearch highlighting, which has bad contrasting defaults that also obscure the foreground text of the current match (why do we even bother with cyan and magenta?).

Here's a Ruby script that may be of use to paint over existing sessions using various color schemes gathered from around github and translated to Ruby data. [https://gist.github.com/shoover/40a35c07a32de16af9b2f79ca933...](https://gist.github.com/shoover/40a35c07a32de16af9b2f79ca933f4ac)

</comment><comment><USER6> I really don't use Windows all that often but when I do I now really prefer to use WSL and a proper OpenSSH or mosh. Even running in the default Terminal it's still nicer than PuTTY, if I have the choice though (and when the next version fixes input of AltGr (does not apply to US keyboards)) I prefer to use the Windows version of alacritty.

<comment><USER7> The latest Windows update (last week) broke the ssh-agent in WSL. The ssh client will bluescreen your PC if you make a connection with a key loaded into the agent.

<comment><USER8> Is it broken in the latest stable release (1809) or preview release (1903)? Anecdotally, I'm running the latest preview release and ssh within WSL is functioning. My ssh-agent does load a key when starting WSL and asks for a password for the key.

<comment><USER7> According to [https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/b0o6...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/b0o6v6/after_update_ssh_to_remote_hosts_cause_blue_screen/) it's caused by KB4489868.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I also wrote an article with my Putty settings: [http://g14n.info/2014/06/my- putty-settings/](http://g14n.info/2014/06/my-putty-settings/)

</comment><comment><USER10> TIL that Putty's settings are stored in the Registry…

<comment><USER11> I discovered that when I customized my settings and wanted to port my colors to another system

<comment><USER12> You guys should try this:

[http://www.9bis.net/kitty/](http://www.9bis.net/kitty/)

it's a fork of PuTTY with a portable mode which stores everything inside a .ini file. It's amazingly easy to move/backup/etc.

<comment><USER13> But it has not the newest security fixes for putty :(

<comment><USER14> PuTTY was only updated 6 days ago...so I don't find that terribly worrying for a fork. The update history for KiTTY seems to imply it would get updated soon.[0] e.g. the .69 and .70 updates were merged within a few weeks the last time...

[0][http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?action=news&zone=en](http://www.9bis.net/kitty/?action=news&zone=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If Ubuntu on WSL would have paste by right/middle click and copy on select (or better if Windows had this in general!) I wouldn't use putty anymore.

Still a nice terminal is very welcome, a good dropdown terminal (with bash/wsl, not powershell) would be really really great.

<comment><USER16> I've been using this and seems to have all the functionality you'd want.

[https://github.com/mintty/wsltty](https://github.com/mintty/wsltty)

<comment><USER4> Yes! The same can be said for git-bash which uses mintty and doesn't require you to install a new operating system (almost).

<comment><USER15> Yes git-bash is really surprisingly good for a "by product".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Putty was great in 2005, but Windows now includes OpenSSH as part of the OS. Combine that with Fluent Terminal, Hyper 3 Canary or Terminus (or maybe alacritty if you have a tabbed WM) and you can have a much better terminal than what Putty provides.

</comment><comment><USER18> My preference for Windows SSH moved from PuTTY to MobaXterm [https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/](https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/).

It's got a load of useful features, like tabbing, embedded X Servers, which makes things easier.

<comment><USER19> Oh wow. Great find. Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I found that the `putty-256color` terminal does not really work well with utilities using more advanced TUIs such as ncurses.

<comment><USER21> The `putty-256color` terminal description (like most terminal descriptions) is hand-made by the ncurses maintainer, for maximum compatibility with ncurses. What problems have you encountered?

<comment><USER20> When i use the `ncdu` utility for example it does not highlight selected entries when using `putty-256color`. Example: [https://i.imgur.com/ZibnkOm.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZibnkOm.png) (left `putty-256color`, right `xterm`). Maybe this is a shortcoming of the `ncdu` utility or an issue with some of my other putty settings. I never tried to pinpoint it as it doesn't really affect most of the terminal work I do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone tell me what are the advantages of putty over ssh (from gitbash or openssh wsl)?

<comment><USER23> Putty is a standard Windows application with good GUI and proper integrations. I prefer good GUI apps whenever possible. Not sure of any particular advantage, but terminal is definitely better with putty.

<comment><USER24> PuTTY definitely works well but calling the GUI "good" might be a stretch. It's pretty unintuitive. As a quick example, I'm always feel like clicking "save" is going to save over the highlighted session settings instead of inserting the new session name I've typed in the box.

Also in general changing settings is clunky enough that this post is about a tool that edits the registry directly so that you don't have to change settings through the GUI.

<comment><USER23> I agree but that's pretty small issue and it's easy to use once you understood it. Another issue is that I always forgetting where default username is located (it's in Connection\Data). But overall it's usable and it's much faster to navigate in GUI rather than reading ssh manual, especially when you need that option once in a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The font in those screenshots still seems pretty terrible to me. Does putty let you choose your own font? I know I've seen some fine font-rendering in some Windows apps, is there any reason certain apps would not render as smooth glyphs as the best?

<comment><USER26> Just change "Font"="Consolas" to what you feel like in the .reg file?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Seconds between keepalives set to 59

Why not 60?

</comment><comment><USER28> Ugh. Bigger font design trends.</comment>


Compilers and More: Is Amdahl's Law Still Relevant? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpcwire.com/2015/01/22/compilers-amdahls-law-still-relevant/

<comment><USER2> I find the author's insistence on his thesis - that we must retire Ahmdal's Law - very strange. I don't even think of Ahmdal's Law as being necessarily about parallelism; it's also useful when reasoning about improving the performance of a sequential program.

The reason I find his insistence strange is that the rest of the article is a good explanation of what has changed in the decades since Ahmdal published his paper. But I disagree that all of those matters change the fundamental lesson: your ability to improve overall performance will be limited by the parts that you are unable to improve.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, this feels like arguing for the abolishment of Big-O notation, because it doesn't address constant factors.

This is, of course, true. But largely not the point of the notation or the law? If anything, it seems that the lessons need further underlining so that their actual uses are understood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pretty much any GPU workload will quickly collide with Amdahl's Law w/r to spreading the work across multiple GPUs in short order. That's because 13 GB/s interconnect (P2P transfers) can only take one so far w/r to a problem that is O(n log n) or less unless the constant factor is _huge_. And that's why NVIDIA itself is now developing its own internal networking protocol:

[http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/14/what-is- nvlink/](http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/11/14/what-is-nvlink/)

As a concrete example, it's why in his NIPS 2014 talk, Jeffrey Dean goes on and on and on about the different ways to parallelize the different sorts of layers of a deep neural network across multiple processors because the convolution layers are O(n^2)ish* (a convolution across ~n examples and ~n feature detectors) and and the fully connected layers are O(n^3)ish* (a matrix matrix product)...

And that's just one problem domain. There are many more...

*Totally abusing the terminology

</comment><comment><USER5> A review of concurrency vs parallelism[1] maybe useful when reviewing this link.

[1] [http://joearms.github.io/2013/04/05/concurrent-and- parallel-...](http://joearms.github.io/2013/04/05/concurrent-and-parallel- programming.html)

<comment><USER2> That's good, but does not quite capture the relationship in how I define it. From what I have said several times on HN now:

Concurrency is a statement about a _duration_ of time. Parallelism is a statement about a _moment_ in time.

During a one second window, did both of the tasks execute? If yes, then they are concurrent. If no, then they are not concurrent in that window.

Was there any moment in time when both tasks were executing simultaneously? If yes, then they executed in parallel. If no, then they did not execute in parallel. From this, it's easy to see that if something is parallel, it must also be concurrent - in order for two tasks to execute during the same moment in time, they must also both have executed during a window of time.

Concurrency without parallelism happens on machines with a single core. Processes and threads must time-share the only core. Frequently, some of these processes will have multiple threads, so the threads need to synchronize with each other, even though they don't execute at the same time.

<comment><USER6> I don't think either definition really defines what concurrency and parallelism are really. Concurrency is the study of how processes _interact_ (i.e. communication, locking etc) while parallelism is studying how to physically perform more things at once.

In this way, concurrency and parallelism (almost) form two axes within which you can judge programs: You can have highly concurrent, but serial program (e.g. a browser, with different threads for networking, UI, etc), and highly parallel, but non-concurrent (or with little concurrency), like image processing, or other "embarrassingly parallel" problems.

<comment><USER2> What you call concurrency, I call _concurrency control_. But more often, I just call it _synchronization_. I am unaware of any widespread acceptance of your definition.

<comment><USER6> I hate doing this, but both the wikipedia articles for concurrency and parallelism agree with me:

Concurrency > In computer science, concurrency is a property of systems in which several computations are executing simultaneously, and potentially interacting with each other.

Parallelism > Parallel computing is a form of computation in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved concurrently ("in parallel").

In my opinion there's really not that much more to concurrency that's hard, apart from safely organising the communication between concurrent processes/threads. It's then the opposite problem with parallelism; the difficulty is finding and implementing the physically separate execution of different threads of execution in a program, while (generally) the communication is seen as a concurrency problem.

<comment><USER2> I don't think that definition of concurrency agrees with either of us. You defined concurrency as interaction itself, while Wikipedia defines it in terms of time and execution. I would agree with the Wikipedia definition if it changed "simultaneously" with "concurrently".

<comment><USER6> Hmm, that's a fair point. Thinking about it a bit more, I think my definitions fit closer with the idea of concurrent or parallel _programs_ rather than the abstract ideas of concurrency or parallelism themselves.

In any case, I completely disagree with your idea that parallel systems must be concurrent. Concurrency arises completely due to the interactions between separate threads of execution, whether they be executing at the same time on separate processors, or scheduled one after the other on a single processor. This is why we have various process calculii (csp, pi-calculus etc), and things such as session types, in order to try and reason about it and manage it. Parallelism assumes nothing about the interactions between processes, only that they are assumed to be running on separate hardware.

As another poster mentioned, this fits fairly well with what the Haskell, Go, and general programming language research community considers to be the definitions of concurrency and parallelism. Look at any paper that focusses on concurrency, and you'll see it's about managing and making safe communication between separate processes. Look at a paper on parallelism, and it'll be on accelerating a parallelisable program on multicore or distributed hardware.

<comment><USER2> As someone who works in parallel and distributed systems (which means I write and read papers on parallelism), I find your distinction an empty one. Actually getting good performance from parallelism requires careful consideration of the synchronization between the parallel parts - and in my work, the "careful consideration" is usually done by me. My goal is often to make abstractions so that users don't have to implement or even reason about such synchronization themselves, but it's still a central part of the work.

I also disagree with your assertion that the programming language research community disagrees with my definitions - I'm more of a systems person, but I do end up in their playground sometimes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A first peek behind the scenes of Hillary Clinton's technology operation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/git-out-the-vote/a-first-peek-behind-the-scenes-of-hillary-clinton-s-technology-operation-d4536079be4e#.oxbw4fdme <comment><USER2> Failed to mention the real-time analysis and participation in (reddit et al) forums in order to control the conversation in a Hillary-favorable manner.

<comment><USER3> Haven't been on reddit much lately, have you? If that's an example of controlling the conversation in a Hillary-favorable manner, their operation is... astoundingly incompetent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does everyone get their own email server?</comment>


The New Retina Display MacBook Pro: A downgrade from my current MacBook Pro - <AUTHOR> http://alexobenauer.com/blog/2012/06/11/the-new-retina-display-macbook-pro-a-downgrade-from-my-current-macbook-pro/ <comment><USER2> According to the technical specs, the new MBP will support both 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 as "scaled" resolutions. Usually "scaled" meant you'd get blurrovision but with such a high DPI screen, scaling up to 2880x1800 might be bearable? I'm intrigued to see how it looks because 1920x1200 at 15" would be ideal.

UPDATE: 2880 / 1920 = 1.5 and the iPad 3's Retina display (at least) is a very precise linear RGBRGBRGBRGB arrangement - [http://www.extremetech.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/ipad-3...](http://www.extremetech.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/03/ipad-3-vs-ipad-2-ips-screens-640x353.jpg) \- so running 1920 wide on 2880 would essentially result in "pixels" of RGBR BRGB RGBR BRGB and so on with an extra "shared" green across two pixels. I'm NOT a display or color expert and really hope someone who _is_ will respond but that _seems_ to me like it could render rather nicely with some fringing between sharply contrasting colors (e.g. yellow and blue or green and magenta).

<comment><USER3> > I'm certainly very intrigued to see how it looks because 1920x1200 at 15" > would be ideal.

Ditto. My concern is the same as the author's. Any antialiasing while looking at code drives me nuts, so I use a pixel-perfect bitmap font and turn antialiasing off. I'll have to play with a machine at the Apple store to see if it'll be noticeable when using a "scaled" resolution.

<comment><USER4> I like bitmap fonts, but I prefer them not to be so tiny that my nose touches the screen.

<comment><USER5> If people are finding them too small, making a new bitmap font which is big enough to use on a Retina display is not an issue in the slightest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is absurd. Spend five minutes comparing an iPad 1 to an iPad 3 and you will quickly notice that a retina-quality display allows you to comfortably read much smaller font sizes, thus providing an increase in effective screen real-estate. Sure, the new retina MacBook has a logical screen size of 1440x900 -- but why would I care if I can now set my Terminal font four points smaller and see just as much as I do on my clunky 17" MacBook with a 1920x1200 screen.

<comment><USER7> You clearly don't understand the idea of screen real estate and how this display will be used on the MBP. They don't intend to use smaller fonts for instance. They are simply going to scale the fonts to the same life-size as a 1440x900 screen. They'll just be crisper.

<comment><USER8> Man this discussion would have been so much better had the phrase "You clearly don't understand" not been uttered.

<comment><USER9> The Japanese have it right - "You" sucks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anyone else feels this way, please ping me and I'll be happy to sell you my current MacBook Pro at the same price as the new MacBook Pro.

</comment><comment><USER11> Scaling will be configurable: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the- retina-display-ma...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina- display-macbook-pro-handles-scaling)

</comment><comment><USER12> OMG the physical size of the title bar might be taller than the skinny nonsense it currently is? EATING ALONE CRYING INTO MY FOOD DOES NOT CONVEY MY DISAPPOINTMENT

Does anyone remember 9" 72 DPI screens? The title bar was 20px high on a screen that was 333px tall. That's 6% of the screen for those of you without a calculator. The current menubar is 22px, or 2.4% of my 15" screen, and 2.1% of the author's. When pixel doubled, the retina menubar will be 2.4% of the screen, or basically what I have been subsisting on for years. Except that between the bottom of the menu bar and the bottom of the screen will be TWICE AS MANY PIXELS AS BEFORE. And you can use those however you like.

To be fair, the author's menubar will have bloated 10%. Personally, I think that this is an acceptable tradeoff in this situation, but not everyone will have the same opinion. So, if you don't, just... could you just give it a second? It's going to space.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the people who _can't get anything done_ at less than 1920x1200 amuse me. I guess they didn't use laptops at all ten years ago.

<comment><USER14> Actually, we had 1600x1200 laptops ten years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With a higher dpi screen, he can lower his font size and still get a functional increase in screen real estate, potentially.

<comment><USER16> The main issue seems to be with application dialogues; those will be bounded by the 1440x900 resolution.

<comment><USER15> I don't own a mac, are there no system-wide font settings like there are in Windows?

<comment><USER17> I didn't see anything on my MacBook. A quick google search and it looks like there isn't. I do know that some/most apps allow you to resize type on a per app basis though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> After taking a look at Xcode in an Air Display window on a new iPad (2048x1536 across 10"), I don't think I'd even want to use the MBP retina display at native res - I was having trouble reading the text at > 12" away.

</comment><comment><USER19> To me, 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB of RAM on a super thin, light, laptop is a pretty big upgrade. I used to be on a maxed out 17", happily switched to a maxed out 11", and am now beyond psyched to get my maxed 15".

<comment><USER2> Not to contradict your general point, but the i5/i7 MBPs from early 2011 onwards support 16GB total - it was just not a config Apple sold for some reason.

<comment><USER20> Of course, it is probably too early to be sure, but this model might very well take 32 gigs while Apple just doesn't sell that config for some reason.

<comment><USER21> It's soldered on :(

<comment><USER22> Wait, the RAM on a $2200 professional model laptop is fucking __soldered on __???

Apple continues to disappoint. This kills any desire I had to buy one of these. If I can't keep upgrading it over the next few years as I need it, what is the point of buying this over an Air?

<comment><USER23> I had the same concerns so i researched it a bit more. While the processors used in these new macbook pros can address up to 32gb of RAM on the system, the DDR3 standard accomodates for up to 8gb per chip. With 2 chip slots, you are already maxed out, regardless of whether the chips are soldered on or not, so it makes no difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Since the OS and apps will be in HiDPI mode"

I'm pretty sure not only will many popular apps be updated but you can turn HiDPI off.

With updated apps I believe you'd have to be using ~43% of your screen on chrome and UI elements to lose real estate when moving to the retina MBP.

</comment><comment><USER21> If you get 4x the clarity, then you can reduce the size of various things, font size, window size etc. So while the concept of resolution as you know it may not have changed, you can easily put more 'stuff' on the screen – more real estate.

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2078/Screen%20Shot%202...](http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2078/Screen%20Shot%202012-06-11%20at%204.36.07%20PM.png)

It appears that the "Scaled" as "More Space" setting merely renders everything in HiDPI mode (2x widget size) with a canvas render resolution of 3840x2400 and then scales it down on the 2880x1800 display.

Just download the image linked above and display at as "Full Screen" and "Zoom to Fit" under Preview on an existing 15" MBP—it'll give ya an idea of what the "More Space" setting scales visual elements as.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think the increase in resolution wins out for the 15" HD vs. the HiDPI.

However, the 17" 1920x1200 is probably still superior (due to physical size) in the "luggable" mode. If you for some reason can't rely on an external monitor, the 17" could easily be better for some uses, even compared to 1920x1200 scaled. IPS vs. PVA might be enough to tip the balance for the new one (one of the main advantages of a 17" would be sharing a screen with someone else, but the wider viewing angle of the IPS screen would win for that).

<comment><USER27> It looks like the 17" model has been discontinued however. This makes me feel better about replacing my 2007 17" model in April with the late 2011 variant.

<comment><USER28> I really hope this is not the case. The upgrades to the 15" and 17" Macbook Pro's were really incremental. I don't think it would be surprising to see an updated 17" at some point in the future.

<comment><USER29> The 17" MBP no longer shows up on the apple website.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4096509>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow I have no idea who this author is, but jeez get over yourself. An article comparing resolution sizes could have easily been written without coming off as an entitled brat. No one is holding a gun to your head saying that you must upgrade your 2 year old laptop, so stop whining that it's not the pony you were dreaming of.

</comment><comment><USER31> Apple is forcing app and web designers to make 2 versions of a desktop app or website (discounting mobile and tablet versions).

One for normal resolution, the other for Retinal displays, with @2x images and ability to reduce icon sizes on toolbars, etc for more real estate.

<comment><USER32> Seems like a properly coded website should be able to handle a very wide variety of screen resolutions. Seems silly to have a desktop site serve different templates based on something as wildly varying as a screen resolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've seen several comments like this, the pixels are there so it seems reasonable that with some software you should be able to select really really tiny icons if you wanted too.

<comment><USER34> Should be able to and "will" be able to are different things, though.

Technically, you could just choose a 9pt font or something for text display, but everything else is going to look huge by comparison (window decorations, toolbars and whatnot).

<comment><USER35> I'm sure you could manage between CandyBar (<http://panic.com/candybar/>) and whatever else is out there

EDIT: CandyBar doesn't seem to help much; however there are already many fonts and icons that can be scaled through preferences. I don't have an answer yet for toolbars, etc. I wonder if there's something that can be changed in the terminal (com.apple.?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> So does that mean that claims of OS X being resolution independent are incorrect? If OS X is truly resolution independent, couldn't an individual user choose the "effective" resolution at which they want the UI to be rendered in?

How does this affect machines in Bootcamp mode? Maybe this will easily sway me back to the even-more-portable Air. Sorry for the naive questions.

<comment><USER13> Apple and Microsoft worked on arbitrary resolution independence for years. It's nearly impossible to make it work right because things look blurry unless you redo _everything_ as vector graphics and even that isn't perfect. [1] (Appropriate hardware wasn't available, so their failure kinda didn't matter.) Then Apple decided to just double everything in iOS, which made things tractable enough. OS X is mostly following the same approach, although there is a compromise mode where the screen is rendered at 2x resolution and then scaled down to fit the LCD.

[1] See <http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting></comment></comment>


Yellow-Light Crusader Fined for Doing Math Without a License - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/business/traffic-light-fine.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur <comment><USER2> While I can understand requiring licensing for practicing as a professional engineer (PE) commenting on traffic light timing as a citizen is your right regardless of what you call yourself. If he called himself a PE then yes he would be wrong; using the generic term engineer is not the same. Otherwise the entire programming industry should be fined. I don't call myself a software engineer but my employer calls me that and most have over more than 3 decades of programming. PE != e

<comment><USER3> He called himself a "EE' -> 'excellent engineer'.

That being said I could see how having these boards who define the standards could make a berror preventing people from some backgrounds from being able to get a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do I understand correctly that the body which depends on fees and fines for sustenance is taking care of levying fees and fines?

</comment><comment><USER5> Paging Justice Don Willett, for a new iteration of Patel.</comment>


Tell HN: Touch typing on a touch screen - piano? - <AUTHOR>

Yesterday a friend showed me his iPad. He said something like "You can't touch type, of course." That seemed wrong at the moment, but I didn't want to argue.
This morning I awoke with a thought: Assuming the device can't provide tactile feedback, what about auditory? What if the device acted like a piano?
Feel free to expand/implement this idea and/or tell me it's been tried before and why it won't work. <comment><USER2> The iPad keyboard can make "click" sounds as you type (though this can be turned off, or the device may be muted). I do find the extra sound to be helpful.</comment>


Young, healthy people are getting sick from Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/opinion/coronavirus-young-people.html <comment><USER2> Anecdotal evidence does not a trend make.

How about saying "Young, healthy people die of the flu every year"?

You have to look at trends. And it's been clear for a while that young, healthy people have a risk fo dying from covid trending towards zero in most (all?) countries.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://archive.is/ev78u](http://archive.is/ev78u)

</comment><comment><USER4> Did people think young healthy people can't get viral pneumonia?

Why does she say this is no flu? Pneumonia is a known side effect of flu.

Covid-19 has no vaccine so more people will catch it, which is of course very bad. But the disease is still flu. People just forget what the risks of flu are, thanks to herd immunity.</comment>


Why We Disagree with The New York Times - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/why-we-disagree-with-the-nyt/ <comment><USER2> Facebook's response seems perfectly reasonable to me.

\- Obviously in order to integrate FB functionality into a Mobile OS UI requires an API to render the data being displayed.

\- If your phone has a home screen widget which shows friend data, obviously that friend data came from a Facebook API call.

\- If you type your Facebook username and password into a settings dialog in order to enable that home screen widget to function, that's pretty obviously consenting to enable the functionality.

\- There once was a day when we _demanded_ our social media platforms to provide these "open access" APIs to specifically allow for accessing our own social feeds on our own devices.

We trust our user agents to render our private information on our devices. Sometimes we even trust our user agents to leverage network services to improve the on-device performance (i.e. Amazon Silk)

If and when user agents exfiltrate our personal data off device for data mining purposes (i.e. Chrome Omnibar) it should be disclosed and opt-in.

It sounds like Facebook provided an API to device manufacturers to allow them to deeply integrate social features on device. This has historically been considered a Good Thing. It sounds like they put together a legal agreement that required these device manufacturers to take due care in implementing these features to protect user data. Also seems like historically this is what we would call a Good Thing.

When you enter your username and password in order to view your Facebook feed — that's called a "user agent" and that's something _appreciably_ different than a third party quiz app sucking in friend feed data.

However, Chrome Omnibar aside, user agents are not expected to exfiltrate data in any way, and if that occurred, that would indeed be a story I'd like to read, and my ire in that case most certainly wouldn't be directed against _Facebook_.

<comment><USER3> My email client has full access to the contents of my email but the author of said client has none. Although my client has credentials these are stored locally and like my email never communicated to the creator of my client.

If the device makers applications merely fetched data on behalf of users and displayed it on their machine it would be no more of a problem than my email client.

In the first place it looks the apis provided access to data the users had opted not to share in the second place the times article seems to state that partners partook of that data themselves rather than merely acting as a client example

"Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users' data — including friends' data — on their own servers. A Facebook official said that regardless of where the data was kept, it was governed by strict agreements between the companies."

Before deciding if facebook's response was reasonable did you even bother reading the times article?

<comment><USER4> > "Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users' data — including > friends' data — on their own servers."

This statement from the article is meaningless, as many legit things might mean "third party storing data" as: 1.) Storing and editing contact imports, if user wants. This is technically friends data, but it's my contact list. 2.) Proxy-ing and caching: we are talking about shitty phones mostly before android and ios were mainstream, so "store on their servers" could be as simple as an artefact of implementation of non-html facebook client app on that shitty phone. Example of such artefacts: custom notifications channels, caching, downscaling of images. I think that blackberry did proxy all of their communications through their servers (not 100% sure), so if Facebook was available, they probably also had to store something on their servers.

The journalist didn't even attempted to distinguish between "my device is calling this api" and "company is doing requests" and resort to conflating those two and ambiguous "some partners did store users". This is example of journalist trying to create a story instead of getting to truth. If they would dig deeper, and try to figure out which companies stored data, what type of data (was it contact import, caching, or did they download full graph?), and what was purpose, it would be valuable article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had a Windows phone that used these API's. When Windows Phone 7 came out, Facebook didn't create the Facebook App for that OS, Microsoft did. It looked like what you expected Facebook to have built and it worked like the Facebook App that other platforms had. The whole purpose of the API agreement with Microsoft was to guarantee that the Facebook App they wrote would still work years down the road. Microsoft did not have access to my data. They were allowed to write an app that allowed ME to access my data.

The NY Times article makes it sound like Microsoft was allowed access to my data. They were not. They were allowed to create an app that had access to an API so I could access my data from the Windows Phone device.

<comment><USER6> The NYT article says that Facebook told them that some partners stored that data on their servers. Do you have a good citation that this does not refer to these device integrations, given you so strongly claim it doesn't? (It's very well possible that it's a misleading quote by the NYT, or a misunderstanding, but I don't see a clear answer in any of what we know) That's from my perspective the critical point here.

<comment><USER7> Surely that applies to every API in existence, for example, on the HTTP API I'm using right now to post this comment, I know that Mozilla stores some of my data on their servers (through FF Sync), and HN know that's possible, but it's not up to HN to ensure Mozilla aren't taking that data and selling it elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> HN didn't design the commenting API specifically for FF Sync to use though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I unexpectedly agree with FB here.

If NYT are correct then we can kiss goodbye to APIs that are used by any services that are not explicitly written and signed by the service provider. In the extreme that means you won't be able to log in to facebook on the web, only via a facebook app, because there's no guarantee that a 3rd party web browser isn't stealing data. That goes for any and every service dealing with personal data, and we pretty much lose the open web.

I want to protect user's data as much as anyone, but if a user deliberately installs a 3rd party app and enters their credentials into it, then they are consenting to that having access to their data under that app's privacy policy/terms. This should be obvious to all users, especially where GDPR advice has been implemented.

<comment><USER9> > In the extreme that means you won't be able to log in to facebook on the > web, only via a facebook app

Taking that even further, if you really want to avoid the need to trust anyone, you'd need to run an operating system created by Facebook running on hardware created by Facebook. Otherwise, the OS and hardware vendors of course have access to your personal data. I guess it's all a spectrum, and certain hardware/software vendors you just need to trust (or at least assign blame to them, not Facebook, if they maliciously steal your data).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The limited responses so far in this thread only reinforce many companies decisions to pull support for public apis. How many years have developers been complaining that twitter and facebook have been restricting access to apis for 3rd parties, but now all of a sudden they're evil for ever offering apis to begin with?

<comment><USER11> There's nothing wrong with offering a public API. There's everything wrong with offering a secret, non-public API where you give a third party I didn't consent to full access to all of my data.

See how that's a bit different? One of them is offering public information (say, stock quotes), publicly. One of them is offering private information (my sexual orientation and date of birth) to tons of third parties I didn't consent to having that information shared with.

<comment><USER12> Surely it is only giving blackberry the information if you type in your login credentials on a blackberry right?

I don't see how the situation is actually different now: if you run the official Facebook app on your Galaxh phone then Samsung could scrape and exfiltrate the data anytime it wants. It is Samsung's fault if they do it not Facebook's.

<comment><USER13> According to the New York Times article [1] the third parties were able to obtain information about you if a friend signs in on their phone, no consent from you required:

 _> Facebook's view that the device makers are not outsiders lets the partners go even further, The Times found: They can obtain data about a user's Facebook friends, even those who have denied Facebook permission to share information with any third parties._

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/fa...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/facebook- device-partners-users-friends-data.html)

<comment><USER14> Not siding with FB here, but their response appears to address this:

> Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends' information, like photos, > was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their > information with those friends.

Maybe the confusion is that FB isn't treating these integrations as "third parties" since they're supposed to be pseudo-official FB apps?

 __Edit: __Thinking about it further, this is the crux of the matter, isn 't it? Whether or not an FB-approved "mobile experience" counts as an official FB app or a third-party app?

<comment><USER15> Sharing with friends is not the same as with data mining third party apps such friends install

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm no huge Facebook fan - hardly use it these days, but...

These apps are just alternative Facebook clients. Don't we _want_ a system where you can use different clients to access your own data?

If the problem is not trusting the client, well, that'll be a problem for any such system, even some utopian fully open, distributed and federated social network - until you build an open source client yourself.

<comment><USER17> I think the problem is Facebook's lack of transparency here. As a user, suppose I have some information that I've marked as "not available to third- party apps". Then I might be surprised to find out that Blackberry's servers have access to that data via a secret API, even if it is to implement a "Facebook experience".

<comment><USER18> Would you also be surprised to find out that Mozilla (Firefox), Google (Chrome), Samsung (Android Browser), Microsoft, etc. all have access to that data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Crazy that everyone in here is defending Facebook.

\- How on earth does Facebook justify giving direct API access to information that users have, in every setting possible, marked as private?

\- How on earth does Facebook justify offering deep API access on users who have literally disabled API access to their data?

It's ridiculous, and it's more ridiculous that users here are conflating "basic API access with a sane permissions system to give you control" with "deep API access with no privacy controls whatsoever that openly defy existing privacy controls".

It's not acceptable, and frankly, this is EXACTLY why government regulation of data online isn't a possibility, it's an inevitability. Because when the penalty for ignoring the user's selection of "DO NOT MAKE MY DATA AVAILABLE OVER THE API" and "DO NOT MAKE MY DATA AVAILABLE TO FRIENDS OF MY FRIENDS" etc is now billions of dollars in damages and potentially criminal charges for executives, _magically_ , these violations will stop occuring.

Until then, everything in this document is either a lie or sufficiently legalese'd that it's worthless, just like the lies that they told to Congress, just like Zuckerberg's lies to E.U. as well.

I cannot wait until it is a crime to share private user data against their will. We live in a wild west and the past 10-15 years are proving just how much sheer damage we have caused in society by not criminalizing disrespect of digital privacy.

<comment><USER20> "How on earth does Facebook justify offering deep API access on users who have literally disabled API access to their data?"

Here how it seems really non-crazy to me as a programmer. Let's say I make phone with a Linux OS. I want to make an app to let users check Facebook on my weird OS. I ask Facebook, they say no. I then build an app to call their API and let users do stuff.

All my app does is call the API and show it to the user. In order for the app to function it has to use private data. But the data are not retained or analyzed, just used to operate the app.

This is how all 3rd party apps work. The APIs were not for the general public, but only to trusted third parties. The alternative is that only Facebook can build and show apps.

So this is pretty much how APIs have worked forever and why you only install apps and log into apps you trust.

It would be like complaining that Adobe Reader can read private files from your laptop via Windows/Mac APIs. Of course it can, this is good. It's bad of Adobe were to misuse the data.

<comment><USER21> Private means that I (the user of my own FB client) can see my private data. That's obvious. What must not happen is that I can also see data that my friends, or their friends, marked as private. This doesn't happen in the official FB client and must not happen with any API.

<comment><USER20> And it didn't happen with FB's API. Your friends could see their private data. You could see yours. The apps were not able to show your private data to friends and vice versa without breaking their contract with FB.

It would be like being concerned because both you friends both use Chrome to access your individual, private bank accounts. Google accesses your private information, with your permission, to display data on your screen. It's only bad if they misuse that data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is the same they said about Cambridge Analytica initially... but you can't just blindly trust others (in this case apparently 60 companies got priviliged access). If it's technically possible, then someone will do it. When your data is gone, its gone.

How naive is Facebook really?

<comment><USER23> They're not naive at all. When it's not in your business interest to manipulate reality, you manipulate perception.

<comment><USER24> I think it's a more complex picture. I did my own deep dive after years of reflecting on this:

 __Inside the Bubble at Facebook __

" Management will laud what employees do, show them selective facts that justify their views, and hire/promote those who behave similarly to them. Employees in isolated teams with training in a single function may not realize the broad, unintended effects of their company's work. They'll assume the best of their coworkers that they've developed friendships with from working in the trenches, without inquiring into the larger effects they're having."

[https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html](https://www.nemil.com/tdf/part1-employees.html)

Would love feedback.

<comment><USER25> Sounds like nuclear weapons research in Tennessee during World War 2: only inform employees enough so that they can carry on the work without jeopardizing the mission (building nukes vs building a platform which owns people's information).

<comment><USER26> Telling people "just enough" was more of a security thing than a psychology thing.

X vs the Manhattan project isn't really a good test for the ethic of working on X.

You don't need to work hard to motivate people to start creating the atomic bomb when the Nazis are doing the same thing and a good chunk of your team fled the Nazis.

You don't need to work hard to motivate people to keep working on an atomic bomb when the alternative is a few million people being killed in the invasion of a bunch of islands that the inhabitants have pledged to defend to the death and thus far made good on their promise.

The Manhattan project is much less morally ambiguous than recent tech scandals (the words "recent" and "scandal" relative to the general population, people who follow tech have seen this stuff coming a mile away) because the cost of inaction in 1945 was so much higher than today. It's not like anyone was working hard to make Facebook IPO happen because they thought it would slightly reduce the chances of their relatives dying half way around the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Facebook's making the distinction between allowing a device to offer Facebook- like services (which require Facebook functionality) and third-party apps that suck up all your friend data.

On the one hand, Facebook's got a point, that if you want to be able to use Facebook on a device without going through the Facebook app or the website the device needs to be able to authenticate onto some sort of API.

On the other hand, the NYT article makes the claim that the makers of the devices got access to the Facebook data, writing "Facebook acknowledged that some partners did store users' data — including friends' data — on their own servers". However, Facebook never followed up on that in their article, just pointing out that if you are logged into Facebook on a BlackBerry that the BlackBerry can make the same requests you could if you were logged into Facebook through the web browser.

The question that matters which neither side addresses well is how much of that data makes it to device maker servers (for a while, the NYT homepage was claiming 'dozens' but they removed that and it doesn't appear to be substantiated in the article).

There are related worries with the device having access to the Facebook data itself, but at that point you need to start worrying about malicious activity by device makers in general. E.g. will my phone start sending my web history back to its maker as well? my bank account numbers?

<comment><USER28> The fact that "data made it to device maker servers" is a stupid, meaningless point. Of course it hit their servers. And it should hit their servers. It's idiots who don't know what they're writing about causing hysteria among idiot's who don't know what they're reading in order to sell advertising dollars.

And the whole time they're pointing at facebook as the corrupt ones.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure it's meaningless. It seems to me that there is a distinction between [device manufacturer X is building their own copy of Facebook's graph by acquiring friend data] vs [device manufacturer X allows a user to login to Facebook and access friend data on their device without having to use the web browser].

<comment><USER28> Nobody was doing either of those things. Theres a whole plethora of innovation and social network competition and integration that happened in the 2000s. Google Friendfeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It seems they don't really disagree but are simply saying, its not as bad as you think. Is there anything factually incorrect in the New York Times reporting?

<comment><USER30> It's one of those articles that's technically true-ish so long as you redefine words to mean something very different from what people would expect them to, but is written in a way designed to misinform basically everyone who reads it.

For example, when they say "Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends", they mean Facebook let them write software that could be run by their users and give those users access to information their friends had shared. There's nothing technically untrue about this, but it gives a false impression about what information Facebook made available to who. It makes it sound like Facebook gave a big fat chunk of user data to device makers as a bribe to include Facebook on their devices, when in reality we're talking about giving their software the access it needs in order to actually provide access to Facebook in the first place.

I've seen a lot of very confused comments here and on Twitter as a result.

<comment><USER31> > It makes it sound like Facebook gave a big fat chunk of user data to device > makers as a bribe to include Facebook on their devices, when in reality > we're talking about giving their software the access it needs in order to > actually provide access to Facebook in the first place.

These two things are not mutually exclusive. They effectively did both, even if the intention is unclear. You must have forgotten how bundled apps on OEM Windows worked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> NYT says: 'Some device makers could retrieve personal information even from users' friends who believed they had barred any sharing, The New York Times found.'

FB says: 'Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends' information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends.'

This is the only disagreement as I can see.

<comment><USER33> Well, this is a huge difference.

If FB is correct here, then the whole thing is a non-issue. Some API giving access to the data otherwise available through a _web browser_ is a _good thing_.

On the other hand, if an API provides access to information that isn't accessible through a web browser (and doesn't show in the official FB app), then it's reasonable to loudly complain.

<comment><USER34> NYT said _relationship status, religion, political leaning and upcoming events, among other data_ were shared.

FB saying "we didn't share photos" is trying to say "well, we didn't give away everything"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Incredible, they are using the current controversy to represent their locking down of the API in a good light. Facebook didn't restrict their API because they were privacy-conscious. They restricted it so you could not build experiences they did not want:

\- You cannot sync your address book contacts with facebook in order to get profile pictures (you used to be able to do this)

\- You cannot write an alternative Facebook client (with a better timeline, no ads, ...)

\- You cannot write a complete bridge to another social network (e.g. implement Federation)

\- You cannot build a P2P (serverless) application over Facebook. E.g. a chat, or something to send a file to a friend on Facebook, or to initiate a TeamViewer-like session.

All of these are either explicity forbidden by policy, or have been closed by specific changed to their API.

To be honest, I don't care too much that people were able to scrape data I put up voluntarily. The German Facebook clone was called StudiVZ - Student's Directory. This sounds a lot like a telephone book, and that was the mindset and expectation I had when signing up to Facebook. Create and curate a profile for friends and friends-of-friends to see, and I didn't care much if others saw anything, because it was irrelevant to them. I mostly cared about meeting people - being found, and finding other people. In this light, I'm more concerned about data freedom than data protection. While the latter is important of course, it's unfortunate that the former is always forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER36> A lot of people are missing the point, debating whether this was reasonable or not.

Mark got away with telling Congress ~"we don't share with third parties" and now they're saying Blackberry's not a third party.

If it's all okay, why didn't Mark come clean? and tell his Congressmen? He had a chance to explain this arguably-harmless behavior, but he chose to sidestep it. Why? Did he not understand the question?

It's fine that this data-sharing is maybe reasonable. It's not fine that Mark withheld this from Senators. This is _exactly_ what they were asking about, and given the chance to _explain_ , he chooses silence. He gets to avoid the public debate while the techies argue amongst themselves.

<comment><USER37> It seems like Mark would always have to answer 'yes' to that question, since accessing Facebook via the web means you share your data with Google(Chrome), Mozilla(Firefox), Microsoft(IE), etc..

(Also any OS/kernel manufacturers who get access to your data through your usage of the OS or TCP/IP stack).

Facebook is sharing your data with Blackberry in the same manner.

I don't even see a consent difference, since you need to explicitly consent to sharing your data by entering your Facebook user/password into the Blackberry UI app. Similar to how you write your user and password into Chrome, thus "sharing your data" with Google. It also doesn't seem like there's any evidence that the UI apps were _intended_ to _secretly_ collect and store data(Was "The Hub" an unknown feature?)

I don't believe the evidence presented here invalidates Mark's answer. His answer would have been meaningless if he had taken the definition of "third party" put forward in the NYT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> In this specific instance, the Times article might be overblown.

They specifically mention that they were able to use BlackBerry Hub with a reporter's account to query Facebook data. The article never states whether BB Hub connects to Facebook directly, or whether it receives data from a BlackBerry-operated service.

The latter case is clearly user-hostile. If BlackBerry (the company) can read user data and Facebook claims not to allow 3rd-party access, then that is bad, and it should be treated as a breach of the user's trust.

The former case is more complex. As a user, I care a great deal that I can access Facebook using my choice of browser, whether that's Chrome, Firefox or Edge. I shouldn't be limited to the top three either. Some users may prefer a browser that works with their screen readers, others may prefer the built-in browser in their smart TV, and others yet might prefer a unified messaging app, like BB Hub.

The distinction between what happens locally or in the cloud is often unclear, and it's not getting any better. Chrome on Android wants to accelerate mobile connections by routing them through a compressing proxy. I can get an extra- secure version of chrome from authentic8 to protect against malware, with the caveat that it runs in their datacenter.

I feel that the tech industry in general, and Facebook in particular are struggling to tell users what happens with their data. Sometimes it's because things actually are complicated, and sometimes just to hide obvious overreach. The obvious blowback: complaints, strict regulation and mistrust. As the people who build and run systems, we should strive to do better. Regain the trust lost by past mistakes, and get back to the point where one could realistically apply hanlon's razor to reports of user surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER39> The author does not provide a link to the NYT article to which this is a response. Maybe it was just an oversight.

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/fa...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/facebook- device-partners-users-friends-data.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a really interesting moment and is worth some introspection.

On one hand, Facebook is clearly correct: If FB makes an API, and a user gives an application (written by a third party and run on a fourth party's device) their username and password, then FB cannot be blamed for the application using the username, password, and API to retrieve private data. Indeed, that's the point.

On the other hand, appearances make it look like Facebook is hiding some things: why is this not a public API? What trust are you putting in these third parties, what are you giving them that not everyone would be trusted with?

But most of all, people are waking up to the vulnerability of their private data. They are realizing that some things they've been taking for granted for years are dangerously insecure. So we have users, such as reporters, suddenly realizing that their device has access to all the data you view on it. Any third party app you give your FB uname/pwd to has access to everything on your Facebook, and the only limitation is whatever their terms of service are. (So does any software that app runs on top of.) Coming to this realization, we see backlash not always correctly directed. It would make at least as much sense to call out those third parties rather than FB, and ask them to prove they do nothing nefarious with this trust.

Is it too optimistic to hope this will stir mainstream interest in free and open source software?

</comment><comment><USER41> In this FB response, they seem not to disagree with any of what the NYTimes had to say. This is called justification, not disagreement.

</comment><comment><USER42> Your real data has already been mishandled by anyone from banks to healthcare providers to governments. This mass hysteria about FB is just silly nuisance constantly getting blown out of proportions by turf wars between FB and traditional media Oh and this particular case FB is calling the nyt fake news

<comment><USER43> With all that inside knowledge you probably should blow the whistle.

<comment><USER42> whistle whistle

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The fact that you can't read messages (without switching to 'desktop mode') on their mobile web app is such horse shit. Yuck.

<comment><USER45> That's what the Messenger app is used for.

<comment><USER46> Well no... there's nothing technically stopping them from supporting messages on mobile.

This is what they do on mobile:

* Lie to you about how many messages you have

* Ask you to install an app to see those messages

* Upon installing the app, give them permission to mine your data

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> >These partners signed agreements that prevented people's Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences.

Two people you don't know made a deal about how to use your information without telling you. There is no reason to think they are going to keep that deal, no reason to think anyone is actually checking up on your information, and no reason to think either of them cares... and no way to know if anyone actually keeps the deal... and probabbly no recourse even if you did know someone broke the deal.

</comment><comment><USER48> As a non-user of Facebook, I completely take their side with all of this.

1) If people don't want to read the fine print, whose fault is that? 2) How have we gotten to a point where we are abdicating our choice voluntary, and then acting begrudgingly toward the new owners when they misuse it?

I must apologize for my cynicism here, but we've been going around this mountain for a very long time now (circa 2013 IINM?). I'm getting tired of hearing how people are feeling violated due to their own actions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that this all comes down to one basic question:

Does a Facebook-approved "mobile experience" count as an official FB app or a third-party app? It seems to me that the FB post is trying to frame it as the former, and everyone who's upset is trying to frame it as the latter.

Is that what this entire disagreement is about? Because if it is, maybe it would help if we just focused on that question.

<comment><USER31> Did you consent to anything that Facebook approves when you consented to using Facebook? Did you consent to the transitive property?

How does Facebook approving of some obvious third party make the third party not a third party? Approval and third party status are orthogonal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I didn't read/ watch the testimony before Congress. Did they flatly claim that "we no longer share private information with third parties"? Because if so, this post seems to confirm that that was a lie, even they give (arguably) good justifications here for why they share private information with some third parties.

</comment><comment><USER50> This is the article that this article responds on: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/fa...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/03/technology/facebook- device-partners-users-friends-data.html)

<comment><USER51> This should be the top comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Perhaps Zuck isn't as bright as we all think? This reply is far too tech- heavy, and jargon-littered to be taken seriously as a reply to something as mainstream as the NYT.

Their PR problems aren't rooted in SV, yet that's who this is targeted to. It doesn't make (good brand) sense.

<comment><USER53> > _Their PR problems aren 't rooted in SV_

Silicon Valley is the last place I'm consistently hearing full-throated defenses of Facebook. It makes sense to keep one's base in order.

<comment><USER52> That might be sure. But it's still not their bigger / biggest PR problem.

<comment><USER53> > * it's still not their bigger / biggest PR problem*

It's the only one that could matter to them. Congress flopped when Zuckerberg testified. They are clearly no present threat. And we haven't seen a wave of action from states' attorneys general. We have no evidence users are decamping. And by extension, the advertisers are staying.

The only weak point is in (a) recruitment and (b) political support from the tech community. The first can be solved with money. Fortunately, Facebook has pots of that stuff. The second relies on keeping the armies of defenders, who call every Congressional office on their own accord on a strikingly-regular basis, working.

For an example of what happens when one loses their base, look at Uber. It went from teflon to pariah virtually overnight.

<comment><USER52> > We have no evidence users are decamping.

Last I saw (on HN) was teens usage is down.

As for Congress...do you trust them not to loop around again?

The fact that FB believes SV is all they have to focus on is what created this mess in the first place, yes? Nuff said.

<comment><USER54> > _Last I saw (on HN) was teens usage is down._

Teen usage has been dropping for a while, though, with corresponding rises in Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Are there numbers saying teen usage reacted to these stories at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Security related issues need some time to investigate and to produce a proper report. This post seems like a knee jerk reaction. Actually, while this sounds like more PR fluff in a poor attempt to stem more scrutiny, I'm confident that there will be more reports from other sources providing a stronger case against Facebook's claim on this topic. This post makes it clear that Facebook is clueless if there are any weaknesses or breaches (despite shutting down 22 partnerships).

</comment><comment><USER56> The New York Times should be ashamed of itself. Facebook let companies like Apple integrate with their platform.

To do so, these companies sent the same sequence of bytes from your mobile phone to the Facebook server, as the Facebook app does, or as any person can do. I can write my own Facebook app today, and there is nothing that Facebook can do about it, except sue me.

THAT IS A GOOD THING. LITERALLY FIVE MINUTES AGO THE COMMUNITY WAS FIGHTING IN THE COURTS FOR PACKAGES SENT OVER THE INTERNET TO NOT BE CRIMINALIZED.

Remember the whole thing about violating the terms of services of a company which forbids scraping making you a criminal hacker?

The only thing Facebook said to Apple is: Let's make a deal, we will not sue you, you put our logo into your phone, also we promise not to break your app.

No data was given to anyone! This is literally my iPhone/Samsung/Blackberry running an app that gives ME access to MY Facebook data.

It doesn't even go to Blackberry's server! The nerve of people to pretend as if the data ON MY PHONE is someone in the hands of a third party, as if my phone really belongs to the manufacturer. Again, we used to be fighting for the idea that these devices should belong be unlocked, should be under our control. Now you guys pretend that data my phone downloads from Facebook is somehow a violation because I decided to use an app that someone else wrote.

There is no possible universe in which that is bad. Think about the ramifications of these new ethics that people suggest here.

<comment><USER6> The NYT article says that Facebook told them that some partners stored that data on their servers. I note that this Facebook rebuttal does not refute that point in regard to the device partners. (Which could be a possible confusion or misleading quote in the NYT article, conflating all partners with the device integration partners, so I'd like it to be clarified somehow)

<comment><USER56> Sure. I still think that is fair enough, in particular since there are actual contracts involved here.

However, as you say, it is not clear at all. If that is the problem, the New York Times should write an article about that, not 5000 words of all kinds of insinuations, with the goal, it would seem, to generate the maximum amount of confusion, least amount of education, and thus the most amount of outrage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> " _Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends' information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends._ "

Hasn't FB had a history of assuming the decision was positive if the user didn't opt out, through a difficult procedure?

</comment><comment><USER58> Oh I am so sad, Facebook is "victim" of lies and poor reporting, let me get my tiny violin.

Facebook lies every possible time, it's built into their perverse business model. Even if the article was actually wrong, it's only fair that they get a taste of their own medicine every once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER59> It is, of course, useful to remember that "These partners signed agreements that prevented people's Facebook information from being used for any other purpose" was ostensibly the back-stop against the mass-harvesting undertaken by Cambridge Analytica, also.

</comment><comment><USER60> I feel the response is similar to Apple's antenna-gate. Using competitors along to prove their point. Could have communicated better. Good that they took steps couple of months ago to close their legacy APIs. That's the only key takeaway from the post.

</comment><comment><USER61> > It's hard to remember now but back then there were no app stores.

Bunch of nonsense. Of course there were.

<comment><USER62> Yep - I recall that the first iOS version that pre-integrated FB I recall specifically writing an email to a friend of mine that worked at Apple to blast Apple for including it - when there was a perfectly viable option for them to use the app-store. They didn't reply to that email, but we remained friends. That was about 8 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> A bit off-topic, but it bugs me how the picture in the article shows a Blackberry Bold running the BB10 OS, which never supported such device. I wonder why they showed a (probably) photoshopped device instead of a real one.

</comment><comment><USER64> > All these partnerships were built on a common interest — the desire for > people to be able to use Facebook whatever their device or operating system.

Facebooks best interest, not 'common interest'

<comment><USER65> No, the user's interest. Users were logging into these devices, presumably. They wanted to access their Facebook account on them, Facebook and the device manufacturer figured out how to do it. It sounds like everything is working as intended, there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> > These partners signed agreements that prevented people's Facebook > information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook- > like experiences.

That is a big door and a pretty open use case. I am not buying into "and this is actually good for the users" story.

To me, FB must clearly choose how to handle this: (A) "we made a mistake, sorry; we will fix it" or (B) "this is working as designed; if you do not like it, go away". They could probably justify either case both internally and externally (better ethics vs better revenue), but trying to stand in the middle as they have often done in the past will likely backfire. Buy more popcorn. My 2c.

</comment><comment><USER67> Who in their right mind would trust Facebook over the New York Times? Try again Facebook. I'm kind of glad they are doing this, I think it will speed up their decline in the end.

</comment><comment><USER68> "We Disagree": the last refuge of a company's defense when they have absolutely nothing else to counter or rebuke their opponent's argument.

</comment><comment><USER69> It seems like a lot of Facebook employees are commenting on this thread. I wonder if they have tools to influence the public argument similar to the Russians.

</comment><comment><USER70> I wouldn't be worried about BlackBerry, it's Samsung. I will never use their phones again with their fingers over every part of the Android pie.

</comment><comment><USER71> I don't have high expectations for a company that says they take privacy seriously while constantly invading it and playing dumb.

</comment><comment><USER72> People don't read terms of service. In using your phone who knows what you agreed to let your phone company do with your FB data.

</comment><comment><USER73> So will Facebook take legal action against these companies who violated their service agreement?

</comment><comment><USER74> Imagine if this same thing happened with Microsoft and imagike people's reactions.

</comment><comment><USER75> lol where are these people back then when Facebook released the APIs? I bet even if they were asked to give consent, they would not be able to foresee what's happening today.

</comment><comment><USER46> Their argument here is basically like being accused of murder and using "since murder is illegal, we did not murder someone" as a defense.

</comment><comment><USER76> > This took a lot of time — and _Facebook was not able to get to everyone._

Spoken like the true Anti-Privacy Overlords they are. :(

</comment><comment><USER77> writing this was a mistake. this is clearly a deceptive pr spin fluff that is entirely non-responsive to the specific concerns raised in the new york times article.

</comment><comment><USER78> It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. There is no new information here; Facebook says legal contracts actually protect your data so it can't go anywhere, "just trust us", etc.

> These partners signed agreements that prevented people's Facebook > information from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook- > like experiences.

That sentence does not make any sense. Signed agreements _do not prevent_ your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally.

> Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends' information, like photos, > was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their > information with those friends.

In the past, Facebook Legal has stated that once a Facebook user has signed up, they consent to having psychological experiments performed on them with no further notice or direct consent. Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it. The sentence quoted above _actually_ means "friends' information, like photos, was only accessible [whenever and however we wanted to]" as Facebook considers those people to have _already_ "made a decision to share their information with those friends" when they signed up.

<comment><USER79> >Signed agreements do not prevent your information from being used in other ways. That's insane, literally.

The real insanity is with the users. FB did the most obvious thing. The user- base somehow magically thought they were providing all those free services because they were nice guys.

It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for private data trading. How else could the model remotely work?

<comment><USER80> > It was obvious to anyone since the beginning that FB was a clearinghouse for > private data trading.

I tire of this argument that users should _obviously_ know they are trading their personal information in return for access to a service. They don't know this. It's obvious in a conversation with any (even lightly) tech-illiterate person that nothing about how the modern internet economy works is obvious.

Think back to the emergence of the web as a truly popular medium. There was no Google Analytics, no FB tracking buttons that follow you around on every web site you visit (that one is particularly egregious - FB users are tracked even when they aren't on facebook.com, and we expect users to just know this?), just advertisers buying a banner ad slot from the owner of a web site. Back then social networking was, what, AIM? That was free and they didn't harvest user info for it. The change has been gradual, and the idea that users should have kept up with every development that led us to where we are today is preposterous.

When this has happened in the past the answer has been clear: knowledgable people come together to pass laws that benefit individual citizens who have neither the knowledge nor time to learn.

<comment><USER81> Sure, but do we just absolve people of all individual responsibility to think even a little bit and make educated choices? I think there is more evidence that people just don't really care about this issue. After all of this came out, FB use didn't really go down.

<comment><USER82> I think it's absurdly unrealistic to expect people to do in-depth due diligence on all of the services they use. Modern society requires us to trust innumerable service providers and _their_ dependencies to enable so much of the convenience we take for granted. What little knowledge we do have about abuse comes from the accountability of these companies to regulators like the FTC and FCC.

Realistically, I think we have three choices:

\- We can't have nice things.

\- Rampant exploitation of individuals, due to vast asymmetry of information.

\- Regulation, with its costs and inefficiencies.

But I think there's very little precedent of real accountability deriving from collective consumer action, even in cases of overt abuse (think Wells Fargo).

<comment><USER81> I disagree completely, honestly. If you are signing up for a service like Facebook and they are asking you to click a bunch of boxes, it's not unrealistic to expect you to

a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it

what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.

<comment><USER80> But surely all the evidence suggests that it _is_ unrealistic, given that reality shows us over and over that people don't read these boxes before checking?

Do you read the entirety of every twenty page EULA before using a new app?

<comment><USER83> Actually, I do(almost always). But, that leads to it's own set of issues. My banking session timed out before I finished reading it. Another service I've been using for over 10 years just added new legal that I don't agree to... now what? That service has a network effect... so, I have to leave? drat! Truth is, most online services ask for more than I am willing to concede. That is an issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> "Because we're paid to" \- FB PR team

</comment><comment><USER85> Funny they don't like fake news when it's about them.

<comment><USER86> It seems to me that the NYT allegations are not exactly fake news...

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> In every situation, people from Facebook would probably be better off if they didn't talk.

This article is really just skeezy. Reads like "we were just doing all the stuff you accused us of, but it's ok because we are huge creeps too." It's so cringe-worthy.

<comment><USER88> FBs reputation reminds me of AOL....

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> The one thing I really miss since leaving fb in March, are the groups. Things like playing in local sports pickup games are easier because everyone has fb so the groups were more active. I now use my wife's account for this, but I really wish another option had some traction, then I could leave fb forever.

<comment><USER88> I dont think there is anything wrong with using FB for things you want.

I dont scroll anymore. I check it for events and messages.

Thats it.

Do that 1-2 times a month, all my facebook needs are met.

<comment><USER90> I don't even read anyone else's posts. I just post pictures of my amazing life. I use it like a diary. Or a time-series multimedia database.</comment></comment></comment>


A Letter to a Young Programmer Considering a Startup (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://al3x.net/2013/05/23/letter-to-a-young-programmer.html <comment><USER2> I don't like this kind of article that presumes that their readers have a choice in this matter. Reminds me of a friend of mine who once naively advised me to only take a job at a company that I would invest my own money in. I said are you kidding me? I've been grinding for months and failing interviews left and right just to get this job and you're telling me don't do it because it's not Google or something?

A huge portion of humans don't have the luxury to say "hmmmm, this startup is ok but myyyeehhh, I kinda like this one better, err idk maybe i'll just go to GiantCorp". I took jobs because they paid me to write code. The story is probably the same for 90% of humans who are doing the best they can in their own situations.

Oh yeah, and the crappy companies I wrote code for years ago? Those are the places that gave me a foundation for a successful career as a programmer. I absolutely could not have done it without them because they were actually willing to invest a little bit in me-- which (in my experience) might not have happened, even at megacorps or unicorn startups.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree. My first job was exactly as you describe. I graduated in 2009, in the teeth of the recession, and every company I applied to had a hiring freeze... except for one, which was known to be a miserable place to work, and known for chewing up programmers and spitting them out after six months to a year of grinding labor. I signed on anyway, because, at the time, I needed a job, any job on my resume. So I took the job, but I was cognizant of the fact that it was a "gig", not a career, and I spent time burnishing my portfolio outside of work, and kept looking. The moment the job market started to thaw, I jumped ship for a modest improvement in pay and a massive improvement in working conditions.

That said, I think you're underestimating how good the job market is for programmers right now. Yes, your _first_ job might suck. But if it does, try to recognize that fact early and make plans to switch companies at the earliest possible moment. Look in other cities (or even other countries) if you must. This is, after all, advice for _young_ programmers, so they're not likely to have houses, family, etc. tying them down to a single location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As controversial as his points are, I feel like Michael O. Church really nails this hypothesis. Startup CEOs are not CEOs in any meaningful sense. Startup CEOs are our equivalent of what division vice-presidents were in the '50s and '60s. They're executives with a certain level of autonomy, to be sure, but they're hardly the independent mavericks that the rhetoric around startups would have you believe. Just like VPs in the old corporate conglomerates were ultimately answerable to the CEO, now our startup "CEOs" are answerable to the VC-appointed boards of directors.

In fact, if you squint your eyes a little, a modern Silicon Valley VC firm looks an awful lot like a corporate conglomerate from the '60s (e.g. 3M).

<comment><USER4> I find this analysis pretty baffling and wildly differing from my own experience. In my experience, startup CEOs are exactly what CEOs usually are -- not totally independent, but beholden to investors/shareholders who want to see their money grow.

I've never heard of a company so tightly managed by its VCs that you could liken them to upper management. Sure, they might make some final decisions, but most VCs just don't have time to scrutinize their portfolio companies that closely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the author raises some important and valuable advice that applies to anyone/everyone. It certainly has me wondering about my motives for building a company.

But, equally I feel the author is speaking of the go-big-or-go-home model of "startups", not the slow-growth or lifestyle approaches that one could alternatively take. When you don't have to impress investors, you can approach things differently. Deadlines are more up to you, and customers are more supportive as long as you're taking care of them.

Customers want a product that solves their problems and requires as little thought as possible to use(at least in Software). VC's want a significant return on their investment. Both have money, but only one of them will continually give you money. Which would you rather aim for?

Anyway, I think its worth reflecting on how the startup will fit into your life, and what kinda time you will put into it. It doesn't HAVE to be 80 hours a week. Doesn't even need to be 40. Success is up to you to define; unless you're playing with someone else's money.

Personally, my goal is rent. If I can build something that can earn me enough money to always cover my monthly rent, that's success for me. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake.

<comment><USER3> >But, equally I feel the author is speaking of the go-big-or-go-home model of "startups"

I think startups, as far as Hacker News is concerned, are "go big or go home" businesses. Quoth Paul Graham:

        A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not
        in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on
        technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only
        essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows
        from growth.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)

<comment><USER5> I'm glad you bring this up.

That's according to Paul Graham, and I respectfully (and strongly) disagree with that definition; nor do i believe it to be the hacker news definition, as that is subject to the collective opinion despite whatever official stances may be taken.

But I recognize that ycombinator is certainly focused on that type of startup, and that they obviously have influence on HN.

But it is silly, and unhealthy, to solely focus on this narrow definition; which is why i often find myself highlighting it when it presents itself in a HN link.

<comment><USER6> > But it is silly, and unhealthy, to solely focus on this narrow definition

So what defines this "startup" thing? How "startup" is different from a "small company"? Because, you know, not everyone opening a business needs to be "startup", and that's OK.

<comment><USER7> Quite often 'small companies' hit a vein that suddenly causes them to scale beyond their wildest dreams (I know this happens, because it happened to me).

Paul is super smart and wildly successful (as is YC) but he doesn't have a monopoly on what certain words in the English language mean. Defining a start- up in such a way that it benefits the YC narrative should be seen as a marketing ploy rather than a statement of fact or an extremely insightful realization.

It's not as if the word 'start-up' originated with Ycombinator, or with Paul Graham.

By other definitions a start-up is a company that is more potential than realization of that potential, an idea packaged in a company that might one day be successful or it might not.

The success element is often still up for grabs long before a start-up fits the PG description of what a start-up is. It's a useful definition within a certain context but don't be surprised if outside of the 'YC bubble' (or more properly the SV bubble) the word has subtly or even widely different interpretations that are just as valid.

I note this trend to creative redefinition or claiming ownership of terms a lot with successful SV entities. It's a 'partial reality distortion field' and I'm sure it is useful to them otherwise it wouldn't be such an often repeating pattern but you should be aware of the fact that the world is a lot bigger than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _There was no mention of what his hypothetical company would do, what problem it would solve for people. His goal was business for the sake of business._

I think it's perfectly valid to want to get into business for its own sake, and not because you have a 'passion' for a specific area. It worked for Richard Branson.

The 'find what you love/do what you love' mantra is an invention of our time.

</comment><comment><USER9> If a startup insists that it will play by existing rules, it usually does not stand much of a chance, even though there are a few notable exceptions. So, the way to go about things, is to do something that clearly breaks the rules, but that is also virtually impossible to shut down. Something like Napster well done. Young people should even be more willing to do that. Furthermore, there are 200+ countries, most of which are powerless to do anything at all. If nobody is going to be pissed off with your startup, it will probably not be a home run.

</comment><comment><USER10> I still believe that for recent graduates looking to begin their career, there is no better option than to join an early-stage startup. Admittedly, it's like buying a lottery ticket, but if you win you can win very big and give your career a massive boost. On the other hand, if you lose you have still gained valuable career experience equal to or greater than what you could have gained at "GiantCorp". More importantly, early stage startups offer employees a broad but shallow understanding of businesses, versus GiantCorp's narrow but deep understanding. This is important for young employees who may not be 100% sure what they would like to specialize in yet.

<comment><USER11> Why is the career experience more valuable than that you'd get at a big company?

If we're taking about developers here, then the experience a recent graduate needs is how to become a better, more capable developer.

In a big company, they'll have multiple senior colleagues, established processes, numerous large and varied codebases to study, and a large body of institutional experience to learn from.

In a startup, they'll have what? A frazzled technical founder with little more experience than them and no time for them, a few equally inexperienced colleagues, and a crummy Rails codebase.

<comment><USER12> You're absolutely correct, but the main benefit of working in a startup, from my personal experience, is you have your hands in the product from end-to-end, and have to wear many hats in the process of getting the product to market, and probably even have discussions and input on both design and business decisions going into the product.

You will probably not get significantly better at process and architecture design in a startup, but you will learn how to get the damn thing to work no matter what, at every stage of the process, instead of being responsible for one little feature here and there and working on tech that is likely 5-10 years old and in maintenance, bug-fixing mode.

I think working in both environments is valuable, as you probably won't see the value of unit testing, code reviews, continuous integration, and senior mentors in a startup environment, but being able to see the entire lifecycle gives you a perspective that other programmers that stay with big companies aren't as likely to see as well.

Also, I've worked in corporate environments with much worse development practices than startups, as well, mainly companies where software is not their main business. It goes both ways.</comment></comment></comment>


Steam machines are pointless and SteamOS might be irrelevant soon - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2014/01/24/steam-machines-are-pointless-and-valve-is-struggling-to-keep-steamos-relevant/

<comment><USER2> Think less of it being a PC plugged into your television and more of an alternate console platform based on an open ecosystem instead of a walled garden, compared to existing consoles.

</comment><comment><USER3> So all the advantages the "steamboxes" have over consoles are actually disadvantages.

> The logic of buying a 'games machine' where the games selection will always > be more limited than on a standard PC or Mac makes little sense.

Yet people buy consoles. And "standard PC"? Who decided that giving microsoft your money is a "standard"?

</comment><comment><USER4> The only interesting point there is: Will people playing with the Steam pad be turned off the gaming experience because they are playing against the more accurate mouse/keyboard users?

</comment><comment><USER5> Clickbait much?</comment>


Practical Project Cost Management - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twproject.com/2013/06/03/practical-project-cost-management-with-teamwork/

<comment><USER2> "20 days subtask"

Blimey, I don't trust anyone to effectively estimate their time over any period greater than 5 days. And I tell them to add 20%...

<comment><USER3> Someone else even likes to schedule 2h tasks.... and the planning never stops!

<comment><USER4> I've been taught to estimate in logarithmic units, i.e. 1 h, 2 h, 4 h, 8 h (i.e. 1 d), 2 d, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe too simplified but effective

</comment><comment><USER6> How'd this advertisement wind up on the front page?

My main problems are that the author has failed to distinguish between estimates and plans. They are not the same, or rather, they should be treated differently.

When you consider plans and estimates as identical, two things happen.

First, your estimates start becoming subject to political pressure. After all, the only reason anyone starts a project is to meet some goal or goals. And those goals tend to come with certain constraints. If you work backwards from the goal, you get a plan and then suddenly, if the plan disagrees with the estimate, guess where the pressure goes?

Likewise, if you simply take your estimate and transform it into the plan, you've failed to plan adequately. An estimate is a probablistic statement about some future outcome. By itself it fulfills one and _only_ one of the required features of a plan:

* Job sizing: How big is this job, and how long do you expect it to take?

* Job structure: How are you going to do the work? What will you do first, second and so on?

* Job status: How do you know where you are? Are you going to finish on time and are the costs under control?

* Assessment: How good was your plan? Did you make any obvious errors, what mistakes should you avoid in future, and how can you do a better job next time?

If the estimates _were actual estimates_ , expressed in terms of uncertainty, then the "overflow" statement is a nonsense. In fact all such approaches are a nonsense, as they require hundreds of people to miraculously become expert forecasters in what are often novel tasks. Given how many ways people can fall into the "planning fallacy", that's unfair. Estimation deserves at least a structured process of its own -- whether by parametric model, points poker or PERT 3-point estimation.

Disclaimer: I'm a bit of a wingnut about estimation and I've been working on a tool to make it easier and better.</comment>


Twilio Announces 1st Developer Conference - <AUTHOR> http://www.twilio.com/blog/2011/07/announcing-the-1st-annual-twilio-developer-conference.html

<comment><USER2> This is going to be awesome. I can't think of a more developer-friendly platform than Twilio!</comment>