We Need More Alternatives to Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604082/we-need-more-alternatives-to-facebook/?set=607909 <comment><USER2> This touches on so many issues at once I don't even know where to start (private versus public, social medial popularity cycles, distributed versus centralized services...)

I think it's not just an alternative to Facebook we need, it's a distributed paradigm, with a distributed network, with distributed services.

The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents).

The success of things like Facebook and Twitter has never seemed like that much of a mystery to me: they basically allow people to have a web page without needing to make one. There was MySpace that did that, and then people wanted to add on privacy and discussions, etc. to their webpage, so Facebook supplied that; Twitter was basically providing a way for people to post rss/Atom feeds, etc. But then you cede control to these large providers.

I don't think that model completely applies anymore, with messaging, photo sharing, and what not becoming so integrated, but I think the fundamental issues are the same, in that that the internet was developed with a greater ratio of providers:users in mind than is the case now. I think there was a much more federated model in mind when the internet was developed than is the case today.

<comment><USER3> >The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services. Solving that problem seems key to me--have people act as servers without realizing it (maybe something like with torrents).

We already have a model for this: email.

You and I can use whoever we want as email providers, including hosting our own, and if you don't think I'm a trustworthy provider, you can drop my messages.

The system isn't without it's corner cases, but it's certainly proven to be a robust model over the last ~30 years.

The only thing it requires is standards. We already have one for facebook messenger: XMPP. Facebook and Google used to support it, but they both shut it down because they wanted to lock their users in harder. We have CalDav for events, but again, none of the big players want to know about it.

We could have a "social status" standard, allowing you to send a robustly versioned life update to other servers from whatever social service manager you'd prefer, but you and I know that no amount of user outcry could persuade any of the major players to adopt it. Network effects, peer pressure and social expectation (e.g. please submit a snapchat along with your job interview) power their meteoric growth.

What we need is a "Regulating the Gauge of Railways Act 1846" for the digital age. We need international bodies to review software that has become mandatory to the modern world, distill it down to a set of living specifications, and then ram it down the throats of software vendors.

<comment><USER4> Email is insecure and was overwhelmed by spam, driving people to use systems (such as Gmail) that are good at filtering spam.

Any distributed system will need to figure out how to deal with spam and abuse. That's hard to do without there being a dedicated team to deal with flagged messages.

<comment><USER5> Eh, if you set up your social email client like Twitter, you only get messages from those people you follow. Done.

<comment><USER6> Then you miss out on the social discovery aspect which is a key part of social networking. You're just avoiding the problem of where to go by cutting off your own legs.

<comment><USER7> Seems contextual whether that's good or bad: one theory of sleep is that we lose consciousness so that we don't go out and get ourselves killed in low visibility conditions.

<comment><USER6> Social discovery is obviously something people want or they wouldn't use social media services in the first place. Pointing to the existence of other contexts where that doesn't matter is neither relevant nor insightful.

It's like saying 'why worry about these problems, just don't don't use the the internet at all.' I still like paper books and other things and usually spend a day a week off the internet but that doesn't help anyone who's trying to solve an internet problem, does it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every time I see a sentence that starts with "we need..." I automatically think "shut up and build it, or you're just complaining."

If it's a real need, then building it is a good idea, and will probably make you money. But 99.9% of the time, it's just a turn of phrase way to bitch about the way the world and human kind actually works. Yeah, if we had another Facebook the world would be better. And if I had wheels I'd be a cart. What's your point?

We don't have another Facebook, and we aren't likely to get one, because we don't actually "need" that enough to pay tens or hundreds of people to build it. You just want to wish it into existence.

TL;DR: shut up and build it, or stop complaining.

<comment><USER9> I've actually spent quite a bit of time working on a design document for an open source version of the Facebook platform. I got a fair bit of the architecture and requirements down for what I believed would make the project successful. Then I came to the slow realization that the world had categorically no use for a Facebook alternative.

The features of Facebook are largely meaningless. What matters is the absolute stranglehold Facebook has and will maintain via acquisitions of users. It's not a question of simply getting the user to register for another site. Many Facebook users will have as many as five or more Facebook products on their mobile. They'll also be logged into a half dozen other properties on the internet with Facebook's OAuth scheme.

Icing on the cake? Tinder. Every college aged person I've spoken to has little interest in Facebook. But they've all reinstalled it in order to use Tinder.

You cannot get a mass migration to occur unless their is an absolute PR Apocalypse at Facebook or if you can offer absolute parity to the slow dopamine drip provided by constant notifications and social validations coming from all their products. At once.

<comment><USER10> I think there is space for an alternative - keep in mind that that doesn't mean that they have to be hugely popular.

For example, some online communities I am a part of subsist mainly in chat rooms, or forums. Those communities are so tightly knit in many ways. While a lot of us are also friends on FB, our ties in these communities are still very strong.

<comment><USER6> I'm in some such communities too, but efforts to get anything going on other sites outside fb come to nothing because you just end up with more social media to keep track of for no real benefit - you can't _do_ anything sufficiently interesting that you can't already do on FB, and you've lost all the network effects for content discovery, rapid dissemination of news or sufficiently entertaining content etc.

OK you gain privacy but that's really a negative freedom. I assume everything I do online is visible to spies and corporations anyway unless I go to the bother of running Tor (and probably even then), so moving some of my social activity off FB isn't much more effective than virtually waving a fist in Mark Zuckerberg's direction.

Let's be realistic here, small specialist forums are simply not going to overcome large-scale network effects absent massive functional advantages.

<comment><USER11> > I assume everything I do online is visible to spies and corporations anyway > unless I go to the bother of running Tor

Not quite sure what's your point here but most subject specific forums on the web have a huge bunch of users with nicknames and not their real names. With the same reasoning you could also say: no need to close the door to WC when you go there to do your needs since people outside know what you're doing there anyway! If you use VPN and a lot less of your personal information will be sold to advertisers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The alternative increasingly is to simple delete facebook and live a more offline life. Starting to see it become more and more trendy nowadays, especially among teenagers. It's considered retro and hip to just schedule social time and disconnect completely

<comment><USER13> Here's one bit of anecdata in response. I've tried to disconnect from social media and get out in the real world. I took an improv class in NYC with about 15 other people, a range of ages & backgrounds. On the last day of the class, a number of the students were asking around for Facebook profiles to keep in touch. When asked, I replied that I didn't have a Facebook account anymore and it was...awkward, to say the least. Like, giving someone an email or a phone number seems much more formal and/or like more of a commitment, I think. Anyway, I came out of it feeling a little disillusioned about the viability of an offline social life. Though this was a group of mid-20 to 40-something people, without the teens you mention.

<comment><USER14> I have had similar experiences, more than once, but it wasn't awkward. Most of the time, people just say OK, and go on with their life. A couple times, we talked about it, and they commented that they wouldn't be able to get in touch with me again. We talked about whether being connected on Facebook vs. never talking again really would amount to much of a difference in the long run, and agreed that it really would not.

At the end of the day, a Facebook connection from someone that you otherwise don't communicate with, or run into in the real world isn't important. So those conversations are only awkward if you make them so.

<comment><USER15> Well said, similar experiences myself. If someone is worth being a friend then I get their email or phone number. If it's at a professional level then LinkedIn is more than enough.

I think Facebook is sad, very sad, and the majority of people waste their lives away on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From my perspective, problems with facebook:

1) Anti-privacy, megalomaniacal nature of network.

2) Social cost of having removed the normal ways we moderate each other's behavior. E.g. when someone is a narcissistic bore, you talk to them less and less at the barbecues and eventually events start happening they're not invited to. Facebook takes the people most willing to ignore social boundaries and customs and puts them center stage.

3) Opportunity costs of not having mechanisms to form more naturally-moderated social groups, but with a wider pool of potential people than are in your physical social graph. This has always been the dream of the social internet.

4) "Fake news", specifically the moral hazard of providing an environment that plays to the "worst" tendencies of media consumption. This is obviously dependent on our values, and how patronizing we're willing to be. But the hazard is a real issue especially when your network attracts people under one pretense--hang out with your friends/kids/grandkids--and then has this non- advertised effect of sticking you in a media echo chamber. This unlike when people choose to go out and fight their echo chamber in a way that's fairly important.

5) Like 3) but now for "good" media consumption, or a Healthy Democratic Civil Discourse, or whatever. I'm glib because this is on the razor's edge of smuggling in whatever values we daydream about imposing on the world.

A lot of us can come up with the David-and-Goliath dream of a distributed network, but I think it's interesting that this is probably neutral-at-best for 4), which is the issue du jour. One could easily see things getting worse and articles being published with the thesis that people need to be de- balkanized for the sake of civic discourse.

Also, the REAL contrarian take here is that things are close to optimal. People are succeeding at 3) and by extension 2), just in niche special interest groups that aren't salient to us in the steady state. The "problem" is that many of us lack the conviction or self-direction to quit media behaviors we don't like. Meanwhile 4) and 5) are really about the bankruptcy of modern ideologies, etc. etc.

<comment><USER6> I don't get your 2) because I have no problem ignoring people I don't like. But I agree that bad behavior is rewarded and that this is a problem on social networking in general (jackassery on YT, Twitter trolls, things like Infowars)

I'd add to your list the imposition of censorship with no feedback mechanism - Facebook's 'community standards' are wholly arbitrary, and I find it extremely disturbing that you can share almost any kind of violent content there with no problem, but anything too sexual risks a date with the banhammer. It's perpetuating standards of social control and sexism that actively hurt people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [http://scuttlebot.io/](http://scuttlebot.io/) is a distributed log file meant to be an application platform. It has some nice design choices and is worth looking at in the context of making a new social network.

<comment><USER18> Didn't know about that. Thank you – it looks like a well-put together project

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems to me that a social network is one of those natural monopolies. It works so well because so many people use it. Remember the big reason many social network alternatives failed, no one else was on them.

There are some things (very few in fact) that just work better as monopolies. But that just means you need to regulate it differently. And there's an interesting discussion, how best to regulate natural monopolies.

<comment><USER20> The big reason many other networks failed, is because no one else was on them? Prove that as the cause, as opposed to them sucking as the reason. MySpace & Friendster were already very substantial when Facebook came along and destroyed them, because they were horrible services.

The better question is, why would you need or want to regulate it as a natural monopoly? Specifically: to accomplish what?

Let me give you some examples.

1) To force FB to open up, allowing other social networks to openly ride on its network / social data (the broadband one pipe lots of delivery companies premise). Ok, now you're begging for a radical increase in abuse of personal data. And you're going to need some new (or expanded existing) bureaucracy agency to manage it all, which will open up new government abuses without a doubt (happens every time; and said agency will radically slow down innovation, which also happens every single time). Some obnoxious SNEA - Social Network Enforcement Agency - will get created, and that'll be the end of any innovation in social media; if you give the Feds an inch of new power, they'll take a thousand miles.

Besides, you can already replicate your social network onto other platforms by allowing FB apps to access your list of friends. Most people don't care because there simply are not that many highly compelling social concepts to explore that are worth the effort to maintain/use. There will never be large numbers of compelling social offerings; there inherently can't be as people have finite time, the hurdle to acquire it is very high. It's work/effort to maintain these networks for the end user, they do not want to have to upkeep it all.

2) To enforce higher standards on privacy. Well, we can already pass legislation to do that comprehensively across all media platforms, if it makes sense. It'd be ridiculous to regulate one platform for that purpose.

3) To limit various corporate abuses by FB (Instagram/Snapchat, ala Internet Explorer/Netscape). Well, we already have anti-trust laws for that and thousands of other laws & regulations and numerous giant three letter enforcement agencies.

Meanwhile, while the argument is being made for regulating Facebook as a natural monopoly, the next technology paradigm is being born somewhere to make them far less relevant. That process has been repeating itself for 60 years or so now, requiring very little actual regulation by the government.

<comment><USER21> >Meanwhile, while the argument is being made for regulating Facebook as a natural monopoly, the next technology paradigm is being born somewhere to make them far less relevant. That process has been repeating itself for 60 years or so now, requiring very little actual regulation by the government.

^^ Just world fallacy

In reality, the DoJ deal with Microsoft is probably partly what led to the second internet startup renaissance. MS were still bullies and they still inhibited innovation by squashing smaller competitors but it would have been a _whole_ lot worse if Microsoft were not defanged by that deal.

Unfortunately anti-trust enforcement seems to have gone out of vogue these days (starting with Bush, but Obama was worse than useless in that respect as well).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Many people miss the fact that Facebook as a product is not about the website and related services. It's _your social connections_ that are the product for you (and for Facebook itself). The technology is just a wrapper and is secondary in this case. In order to create a viable alternative to Facebook one should find a way to create a new kind of social good attractive to many (which is much harder when Facebook already exists). So it's more about social good engineering rather than coding.

</comment><comment><USER23> No, we don't need More Alternatives to Facebook. We need Less Alternatives to Facebook. That is, Zero Alternatives to Facebook AND Zero Facebook.

Stop wasting your time!

<comment><USER24> Why is keeping in touch with friends in one place online wasting time?

<comment><USER11> More like waisting your freedom, integrity, privacy etc...

<comment><USER24> Can you give me an example of how my freedom, integrity or privacy have been wasted? They're not taking anything I haven't willingly given them.

<comment><USER11> How do you know, if the latest reports is to go by they are buying personal information from third parties in order to construct better dossiers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what traits will define the Facebook transcender like the Windows transcender [1] mentioned in PG's essay.

You can argue that since that essay (2005) the iPhone/iPad and Android and then eventually "all meaningful apps becoming web enabled" has mostly made Windows the last choice amongst the candidates rather than the first when it comes to selecting personal computing devices. Right now, people who use Windows see it in the same way people see crusty old government bureaucracies - it is just one of those things you deal with because you have to, and move away from ASAP.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html](http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> We actually have alternatives. G+, Twitter, Gnu Social, Slack, Wechat. The question is what's your flavour and how do you convince your friends to switch with you.

</comment><comment><USER27> My perfect Facebook would be crosspollinating Facebook and the structure of a RSS reader. I want to be able to skim through EVERY update on EVERY page and person I follow, star/flag the ones I'm interested in, and then read the ones I'm interested in. Because of its popularity, Facebook has all the content I'm interested in within its walled garden -- but its browsing experience sucks. IMO.

</comment><comment><USER28> Shameless plug, but very relevant since it is literally built to be an alternative to the current mainstream social networks: I'm hacking on [https://postbelt.com](https://postbelt.com) \- a privacy-first, ad-free, text-only, discussion-focused social network.

Check it out if it sounds interesting :-)

</comment><comment><USER29> What we need are (as much as possible) unbiased sources of news, or news feeds. Right now, there's so much bias in the media, and in news outlets to the point where it's hard to distinguish fact from fiction, or see news that might otherwise make things "difficult" for those organizations.

The profit above all else direction the large media news outlets have taken may serve their profit motives, but do little to actually further human knowledge of current or pressing events.

<comment><USER30> There obviously are bad news that no one should consume (i.e. "fake news") but I'd argue there is no such thing as good news in the sense that every one should read them to become informed.

To enable the public to make informed decisions every individual should come to face with a random selection of sources on a daily basis so that echo chambers get reduced and a problem-solving mentality can come into being.

The problem - as you've stated - is indeed that all news websites want to maximize views/profits. This, for one thing, leads to market segmentation (echo chambers). For another thing, Hotelling's law is at work within each segment so that the news from your preferred sources are very similar. If CNN writes about Trump's tweet instead of mass starvation then chances are very high that it's the same with CBS.

<comment><USER31> I liked the old term for "fake news." Before 2016 we just called it "news."

What seems like a free press in the US and the world is heavily controlled by less than a dozen conglomerates. They often game the system, mixing propaganda with news to create a narrative. Just look at all the pro-Monsanto comments on Hackernews and the recent court revelations that Monsanto had a big marketing program to post pro-company commends on tons of major/minor social networks.

<comment><USER29> There's a big difference between not being anti-gmo, and being pro- monstanto... I'm pretty biased against larger corporations and want a serious reversion of IP legislation and practice (though feel some of it has a place, we've just gone too far).

It really depends on the specifics. There's plenty of things in nature than can kill you. Most people are allergic to something. That said, it really depends, and most of what's done to GMO products aren't _that_ different than the selective breeding that has gone on for millennia, and the stuff that actually occurs in nature.

Just because there's always been some manipulation of news/media, doesn't mean we should or have to accept that moving forward. I wish I had the time and could cover the expense of coming up with something better, at least a place to start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Google tried and failed. There are alternatives in other countries.. V Kontakte and odnoklassniki for Russia, WeChat and Qzone for China, though other countries other than those two are using what Americans use. There are a few other things like Snapchat and Kik that teenagers are using.

Basically, if you think about the time you were a teenager: your parents are old. If they are using Facebook, than Facebook must not be cool. If your parents aren't using it, than it must be cool. In Facebook's defense: adults are more valuable as users than teenagers are, as they are clicking on ads and buying things. So there wouldn't be any reason for Facebook to even try to be that "cool" place where teenagers go.

So for someone to capture that niche the way Facebook had done would be very hard to do. I'm around Zuckerberg's age and at first, Facebook never appealed to me, until they removed the .edu cap. So that was an important step of getting Facebook to the entire world. It made everything so easy to connect with people and "keep in touch" via messages, wall posts, and photos. The "Like" button seemed to be something the world had never really seen as well and made it even easier to "show" you acknowledged it, rather than having to respond.

I'm sure if Google Plus attempted to be a compliment, rather than be a replacement, it would've had more success. And the next big social media network that is an alternative to Facebook will need to focus on that. People don't really like "change". However, they are willing to learn and switch to things that are more useful and helpful. For the older generation, which on Facebook -- 25+ is probably the most prominent users -- they really don't care to switch because their friends and families aren't using anything else. This is where Facebook has great strength.

Where Facebook and Google tend to fail is: they want to be everyone's everything. They seem to want to dominate all aspects of our lives. And while it sounds great and it has worked in China (with WeChat), it is not appealing to everyone that uses their products. However, when you have so many products within your already-huge enterprise: those products get lost or belittled. How many features does Google and Facebook have that many people don't even know exists? Facebook is social media and Google is search. Both have a little bit of extra pull with the open source and developer community, BUT.. they need to stay focused on what they are best at doing.

As a web app developer, I keep an eye on those failed or lesser known products from Facebook and Google, and make my own and charge for them. It is likely that they are free on Facebook and Google, but people might not know they actually exist because again: Google is for search, Facebook is for social communication. Anything more than that... is lost.

<comment><USER33> > As a web app developer, I keep an eye on those failed or lesser known > products from Facebook and Google

Could you provide an example or two? I wonder if you mean something like Buzz and Reader or something completely different.

<comment><USER32> Another thing that I think is becoming more apparent is the fact that despite the "privacy policies" of Facebook and Google, they will hand over information because they record it. With security and privacy a concern, more companies that advocate their stance and clearly state that they either do not keep the information or they do not share it is important and a big selling point, and will be in the future.

Look at ProtonMail. Secure email service. It is booming in business because people are seeking alternative to Gmail, Yahoo (notorious for data breaches), and Live mail.

So there is likely a huge market for this as more and more people become aware of just how much data about them is being sold to third-parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Agreed; distributed, free and secure group communications is a much needed, missing piece of the puzzle. If only I could figure out how to make it pay the rent. A couple of extra brains/hands wouldn't hurt either...

[https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis](https://github.com/andreas- gone-wild/snackis)

</comment><comment><USER35> To me, the alternative to Facebook has been around for a long time: email.

The people I keep in touch with online all have email accounts. Sending email to one, a few, or all of them is easy.

<comment><USER36> Email mostly works for me, particularly for friends and family. The problem is that many people prioritise Facebook over email and frequently forget to reply, or don't send email in the first place as they assume that everyone has seen their Facebook post. So, outside friends and family, not having a Facebook account tends to mean not getting information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's lots of alternatives to Facebook. Facebook is for people who don't care about alternatives.

<comment><USER6> No it isn't. I've had accounts on numerous alternative social networks and none of them are much good as general platforms because there aren't enough other people using them, or using them often enough.

Stop pretending network effects don't exist or that your social media usage habits must be true for everyone else.

<comment><USER37> replacement != alternative. Not using Facebook is a proper alternative to Facebook. What Facebook provides isn't necessary, and what's bad about Facebook is probably intrinsic to the entire social media model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How on earth has Facebook become the arbiter of our collective morality?

</comment><comment><USER39> There are plenty of alternatives already, you just need to use them.

</comment><comment><USER40> We just need a modern version of Geocities.

</comment><comment><USER41> ... and Reddit!

</comment><comment><USER42> I've developed a sort of 'core technology' that can be used to build out what can hopefully become another option in the social media arena. It's open source. It's supports a fully threaded 'tree' of content, rather than just a linear stream like Facebook and Twitter. You create SubNodes, rather than 'tweets' for example. Technology stack is Java, TypeScript, Google Polymer, Jackrabbit JCR, MongoDb, SpringBoot.

Demonstration site is: [http://sbnode.com](http://sbnode.com)

</comment><comment><USER43> Email and something like Google Groups does 80% of what Facebook does.</comment>


Ask HNs: How you disable the new Google search results page - <AUTHOR> Google has this new results page with white boxes on grey. I tried googling, but how do you go back to the old screens? <comment><USER2> Set DuckDuckGo as your search provider. </s>

I'm not seeing any obvious changes to the Google Web search page. Perhaps a screenshot or set of screenshots highlighting the differences you're seeing might help here?

Desktop or Mobile?

Google have been known to push odd changes out, or show different page designs to different users. Changing the Search page would be a rather large change.

<comment><USER3> > Set DuckDuckGo as your search provider. </s>

Why is that a _sarcastic_ suggestion?

<comment><USER2> You've misread my </sincere> tag!

(I've been using DDG for search for years now. Prefer it. Strongly.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When they did this with maps there was a way to go to classic mode. With this version I see no such option.

</comment><comment><USER4> For those interested in what it looks like now:

[https://twitter.com/jay7yagi/status/733905382981009408/photo...](https://twitter.com/jay7yagi/status/733905382981009408/photo/1)</comment>


HTML5 Link Prefetching (or "The Most Dangerous Tag") - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2010/06/03/html5-link-prefetching-or-the-most-dangerous-tag/

<comment><USER2> Saying this will hurt users is like saying gasoline will hurt a car since it could ignite. Obviously take care of it, and it will obviously improve your users experience.

<comment><USER3> Of course. It's a useful feature. My point was that a simple misunderstanding by a front end person "Oh, this will make our site load faster" could actually take down a site.

I hope that it makes front-end and back-end people more aware of how they're connected.

But you are right. Often, "dangerous" things, when used responsibly, can be good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read through the spec a little[0], the thing with this attribute that I'm worried about is if the page is rendered or of scripts are executed. If they are (mainly scripts) then you could see a legitimate website become attacked and have these placed in without anyone knowing or detecting for possibly several days.

         [0]: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like something new to check for on your DB heavy pages. You could ignore requests with that header if your servers can't handle the additional traffic.

<comment><USER3> That's a very good idea. I'm going to edit the article, hat tip to you.

Edit: done [http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2010/06/03/html5-link- prefetc...](http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2010/06/03/html5-link-prefetching- or-the-most-dangerous-tag/)</comment></comment>


DEMO Presenting Company Contract vs. LAUNCH Presenting Company Conference  - <AUTHOR> http://jc.is/foFc1I
I think this speaks for itself.
$19,495 vs. $0.00.

Any feedback? <comment><USER2> Gotta say one thing you always did right with TC50 and now LAUNCH is being entrepreneur friendly. Run by X for X is usually the best way to do anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> Word up.

The conference is going to be in the black thanks to the support of Sequoia, Google, SecondMarket, MailChimp, Trada, Yammer, Zelkova, Mark Suster and a couple of more sponsors/partners we haven't announced yet.

Any money we make I'm going to invest in the startups personally as an angel.

This conference is just a huge celebration of entrepreneurship.... and we're dropping $100,000 on 250Mbits up/down from two different providers.... so that internet at the event should kick ASS!!!! :-)

If any YC companies want to present let me know! email@example.com! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> any feedback on this Google Doc? I'm editing right now. :-)</comment>


Tornado Without a GIL on PyPy STM - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2014/11/tornado-without-gil-on-pypy-stm.html

<comment><USER3> I recently read this paper about Julia ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1607](http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1607)). Now when I hear about PyPy I can't help but think about this quote from that paper:

        New users also want a quick explanation as to why
        Julia is fast, and whether somehow the same "magic
        dust" could also be sprinkled on their traditional
        scientific computing language. [...]  Julia is
        fast because we, the designers, developed it that
        way for us, the users. Performance is fragile,
        like accuracy, one arithmetic error can ruin an
        entire otherwise correct computation. We do not
        believe that a language can be designed for the
        human, and retrofitted for the computer. Rather a
        language must be designed from the start for the
        human and the computer.

To me, Python and Ruby are both perfect examples of languages that were designed for the human, and ever since have seen extensive effort to retrofit them for fast execution by computers.

I respect the work of the PyPy team, particularly given the raving reviews I've seen lately of how RPython is a boon to language designers who can use it to prototype their languages and get a decently-performing VM in not very much time: [http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast...](http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/fast_enough_vms_in_fast_enough_time)

But I can't help but think that languages like Python and Ruby will start to fall to languages like Swift, Julia, Go, etc. that were designed with performance in mind. I'm not saying this will happen soon, but these languages are showing that you can have your cake and eat it too.

I'm not sure how JavaScript and Lua fit into this analysis. They weren't specifically designed for performance, but have been very successfully optimized. Lua is a very simple language and Mike Pall is a genius, so LuaJIT has been very successful at speeding up Lua. JavaScript is a little more complicated, but has received an immense amount of resources into optimizing it, and has also been quite successful at getting fast.

<comment><USER4> All languages other than pure machine code were designed for the humans first.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's quite true. A lot of languages are a mix of designed-for- humans and designed-for-machine. They do aim to be higher-level than machine code, but it's quite common to have design decisions at least partly driven by considerations from the compiler side as well. Not necessarily only designing for efficient execution (though that is one); other design-for-machine considerations can include ease of parsing and ease of compiler implementation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I reading this correctly? Looking at the benchmark code, Why not do a comparison versus the default Tornado setup, which is to fork one process per core? So STM Tornado is allowed to use multiple cores in this benchmark, but vanilla Tornado is not allowed to?

            http_server = HTTPServer(Application(),
                                     xheaders=True,
                                     )
            http_server.bind(port)
            http_server.start(0) # Forks one sub-process per core

[1] [https://bitbucket.org/kostialopuhin/tornado-stm- bench/src/65...](https://bitbucket.org/kostialopuhin/tornado-stm- bench/src/65144cda7a1f8e56db6d3d9057d7d39a1652e622/utils.py?at=default)

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with multiple processes is the "share nothing" model. It works for some problems, but it blatantly fails for a whole variety of other problems. STM tries to address those problems where "share nothing" does not work, e.g. because there is interesting data to be shared (albeit with few conflicts) or the memory overhead of N processes is just too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have found personally A* is particularly difficult to scale across cores because it's never a shared-nothing problem. For two reasons. One, each core has to know about the other cores' search space and avoid it (to avoid duplicating effort) so you will contend on some sort of 'visited node' cache. Two, the graph your building itself must be shared, obvs.

Are most of the interesting problems to solve always limited by Amdahl's Law? Will we never see the gains of single-core speed we saw in the last century again?

<comment><USER7> _One, each core has to know about the other cores ' search space and avoid it (to avoid duplicating effort) so you will contend on some sort of 'visited node' cache._

Just make the visited node cache public and immutable.

 _Two, the graph your building itself must be shared, obvs._

If the graph is immutable then there's zero problem with it being shared.

<comment><USER8> You can't make the cache immutable because then it will be empty at start and stays that way ;)

The cache has to mutate and be shared as that's the work completed list. As each thread completes a bit of work (visits a node) it needs to communicate it with the other threads.

<comment><USER7> In Scala, its:

        var cache = Seq(1,2,3)
        cache :+= 4

The cache is immutable and freely shareable. Any other thread and come in and read it and be guaranteed that its current state is valid.

<comment><USER8> :+= Returns A copy of this sequence with an element appended.

Meaning the cache is no longer shared as all threads end up having a thread local cache. You can't update shared changing state and have immutability at the same time.

Immutability is great when one can have it but sometimes its not possible. Shared changing state is something to be avoid as much as possible but sometimes we need it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Note: If anyone was wondering what STM was, it stands for Software Transactional Memory. The read the docs page gives a good overview[1] of what pypy-stm is.

1-[http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/stm.html](http://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/stm.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> While we're here, please donate to PyPy STM, it's purely a crowdfunded effort [http://pypy.org/tmdonate2.html](http://pypy.org/tmdonate2.html)

<comment><USER10> Please create a PyPy team on Gratipay.

<comment><AUTHOR> here is mine - [https://gratipay.com/fijal/](https://gratipay.com/fijal/) \- not exactly killing it

<comment><USER10> Better it be the team account, to avoid having donors try decide "who contributes how much"... let the team decide. Also, please offer it as an alternative to PayPal on the project website.

<comment><AUTHOR> We can't really be creating accounts everywhere for minor donations. I support your sentiment, but the official PyPy bookkeeping has to be done in a proper way via the Software Freedom Conservancy, so going through all those services for a few $$$ is simply not worth it.

<comment><USER10> Why doubt the amount that can be received from Gratipay? What do you need to see to consider using it for PyPy funding? Would a promise of, say $500/week, be enough to make it worth a bother?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is some great progress!

But I should say that there is still too much overhead in using STM; you will still be able to very easily (and by a large margin) outperform STM-4 by running 4 instances of Tornado with HAProxy or some other lightweight router ontop. A comparison graph for this should have been the benchmark.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like that they instrumented the STM code enough that you can debug slowdowns when writing your code. Never understimate the power of well instrumented languages.

</comment><comment><USER13> Maybe one day, PyPy will eventually become the canonical implementation of Python.

<comment><USER14> Python's Little Tin God wouldn't like it.

Python's feature set is basically what's easy to do in a naive interpreter. Everything is a dictionary. Anything can be changed from anywhere. With "getattr", you can patch one thread from another. It's elegant, and very difficult to speed up. Google tried, with von Rossum on board. Their "Unladen Swallow" JIT compiler project crashed and burned.

The PyPy group has made a fast Python compiler/interpreter/JIT system. It's really hard. The initial funding from the European Union got them started, but wasn't enough. They really try to handle all the hard cases. This requires two interpreters and a JIT. They have to handle "oh no, someone patched object A from thread R, invalidating code that's running in thread S". There's a "backup interpreter" that kicks in for hard cases, and once control is out of the area in trouble, the JIT can recompile it. (This is an old and oversimplified description.)

This transactional memory thing is very clever. It has to separate things at run time that probably should have been separated at compile time, of course. It's impressive that they can get it to work. It's a lot like how a superscalar CPU works, including transaction commit and backup at the retirement unit.

Python gets into this mess because, like C and C++, the language doesn't really know about concurrency. (Threads came late to UNIX, and C predates threads. So C has an excuse for backing into concurrency.) Python has the C model of concurrency; at the user level, it's treated as a library issue. Internally, though, it needs a lot of locking, because there's so much mutable state in the interpreter.

It would be a lot easier if the language were restricted a little. But then It Wouldn't Be Python(tm). The price of this is huge complexity layered on a simple model, and probably years of obscure bugs in PyPy.

<comment><USER13> > C predates threads

There were other OS with threads and co-routines being explored as design while UNIX was being developed at AT&T.

As for the rest I agree with you.

Personally I don't have any use for Python besides the occasional shell script, but as a user of applications written in Python I would like them to perform fast.

<comment><USER14> Yes, and UNIVAC 1108 Exec 8 had threads in 1967. But it wasn't on UNIX until the 1980s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm wondering, how does PyPy compare to nodejs?

<comment><USER16> Like apples compare to oranges :)

Cheeky comment aside, PyPy is an alternative interpreter for Python and, more broadly, a meta-frame work to make writing tracing JIT for the language of your choice easy.

It's much faster than regular Python. The only downside (which, admittedly, is very, very big) is that the PyPy developers released their own FFI library for interfacing with C-code (which works brilliantly), but using c-types and the c-python c-api is very kludgy. This means that a lot of very important python libraries which are basically thin wrappers around c/fortran code (SciPy, NumPy, etc) are not really working.

There is some effort around reimplementing NumPy in PyPy, but it's going very slowly.

Edit: PyPy is also a heroic effort by a small team of developers who receive some donations. JS is probably the language that received the most amount of money and attention into making it run fast from Google/Mozilla, etc - <USER2> terms of results/money, PyPy is incredible.

<comment><USER17> > but using c-types and the c-python c-api is very kludgy

It's easy enough to use CPython extension modules via cpyext, but it's really slow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sometimes I forget the number of great contributions / projects that Bret Taylor keystroked. It's a motivating reminder to build.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your comment is moderately off-topic. This is __really __not about tornado at all, rather than you can take medium-sized program and get STM in PyPy not to crash</comment></comment>


Things Routers Do: Network Address Translation - <AUTHOR> http://www.somerandomidiot.com/blog/2015/04/05/things-routers-do-network-address-translation/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this. There are lots of things like this--foundational, simple, background knowledge that I never fully grokked, and this took me through it in a much more straightforward and practical way than I would get from, e.g., Wikipedia, and in a more discrete, digestible chunk than if I tried digging through college textbooks.</comment>


How lazy programming burnt my ass. Literally. - <AUTHOR> http://gelform.com/blog/2010/12/how-lazy-programming-burnt-my-ass-literally/

<comment><USER2> More pipe and more turns in the pipe leads to more maintenance trouble. Plumbing failures are expensive to correct and often cause expensive damage to the wall, which is why buildings tend to be built to have a minimum number of "wetwalls" (walls with plumbing in them).

Furthermore, can you imagine trying to get the temperature right when you have to go from one side of the shower, to adjust the knobs, to the other, to test the water from the faucet?

So his "solution" is more costly to implement, has substantial lifecycle costs, and is bad UI to boot.

This happens a lot in programming too. A user has a problem, and thinks up a solution themself. They then file a bug saying "product is missing feature/behavior X". A good programmer then knows to figure out why the user _thinks_ they want that behavior, so he can determine what the real problem is.

In this case, the real problem is that water temperature in his building wasn't stable. The real solution would have been better compartmentalization of his water supply so his neighbor's water usage didn't disrupt his hot/cold balance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha! Great point. My next post will have to be about digging deeper into the real problem.

I don't picture the controls on the other side of a big, tub, just somewhere that they can always be reached. Is there a "better" shower design out there? Voice controlled temp? :-)

<comment><USER3> Many designs of thermostatic shower mixers will throttle back the hot water, rather than allow the occupant to get burnt.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could've used that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article has nothing to do with programming. It makes a general point about usability though: you should have it in mind when building a system.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, Kleiba - it's not specifically related to programming. I was just trying to relate a lesson I've learned in a funny, catchy way, so people will remember it.

<comment><USER5> I thought it was great; very applicable to programming (though jordanb made a good point as well). :-) Sorry to hear about your head though, hope it wasn't too serious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And as design and usability becomes the deciding factor in what people want, all the decisions that others make to their benefit are going to get called into question. Let the plumber dance around getting their feet burned!

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally. No matter what your role, I think you can share the vision of the company, which should be to deliver the best experience to the customer. What's the story? A janitor at NASA was asked why he worked so hard. He replied, "Because I'm working to put a man on the moon".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a situation where adjustable showerheads come in handy. Just aim it at an angle that gives you some room to reach in...

<comment><AUTHOR> Now I always have the hand-held shower heads, both for this and for cleaning pets. :-)</comment></comment>


Diax's Rake - <AUTHOR> http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com/2009/11/diaxs-rake.html

<comment><USER2> To anyone who hasn't read Neal Stephenson's work: Go and do it! It's science fiction written by a man who is a hacker at heart.

Start with Cryptonomicon, a tale of WWII codebreakers, cryptography, and modern-day data freedom. How can you _not_ love the sound of that that?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've listened to the audio edition of Anathem at least 15 times. Heck, I'm listening to it again as I'm writing this. I can say that a lot of my perspective of the world in the last year has switched to a mathic viewpoint of the world. It's very rare that a work of fiction has affected my worldview as much as this book has.</comment>


Let your presentations do the talking (literally) - <AUTHOR> http://www.taodyne.com/shop/en/blog/81-let-your-presentations-do-the-talking

<comment><USER2> Does it talk in other language than english ?</comment>


And Nobody Noticed It Was a Fake Cake - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/fashion/weddings/and-nobody-noticed-it-was-a-fake-cake.html <comment><USER4> Yes, non-edible cakes made of light, cheap materials like styrofoam are routinely displayed at weddings and other ceremonies. One of the layers might be soft, allowing for fake-cake cutting.

The hosts know the cake is fake. Many of the guests know the cake is fake. After cake-cutting, the fake cake often remains on display while everyone eats slices of real cake brought in from a kitchen.

No effort is made to pretend that the cake on display is real. It has come to be understood, accepted, and expected by society that there should be a _cheap sculpture of a cake_ on display and that everyone should act as if this cheap sculpture is a real cake during the ceremony.

How did we, as a society, arrive here?

<comment><USER5> The same reason people live in cheap houses with crappy aluminum siding on 3 sides, and fake brick material on the front. The same reason people wear knock-offs of designer clothing. The same reason cars play fake engine noise over their stereo system. The same reason people rent Ferraris for the day. The same reason people go on "vacations" where they spend 5 minutes at each destination taking selfies.

People care more about the image of something rather than the actual thing. Authenticity is now something to be faked and posted to Instagram.

<comment><USER6> Do some cars really play fake engine noises on the speakers?

<comment><USER7> Yep. It's pretty much industry standard on mid-range performance cars and trucks. Many manufacturers are moving to smaller I4 and V6 turbocharged engines on models that traditionally had big V8s. These smaller engines provide great efficiency and good performance, but they're much quieter and blander-sounding than the old V8s. Subtle digital augmentation of the engine note restores some of the feeling of performance at trivial cost.

[https://www.caranddriver.com/features/faking-it-engine- sound...](https://www.caranddriver.com/features/faking-it-engine-sound- enhancement-explained-tech-dept)

[https://www.ford-trucks.com/articles/f-150s-fake-engine- nois...](https://www.ford-trucks.com/articles/f-150s-fake-engine-noise- bother/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Last year I got married in Taiwan, I got to pick between Cake Cutting, or a giant pyramid of glasses. I picked cake thinking I get cake.

So come wedding day we have this giant cake next to the stage, we do the cake cutting and we leave.

My best friend at the wedding was shocked I had such a large cake, he was telling people at the table it was huge, my group of friends informed him it was fake, he didn't believe them.

So he got up in front of everyone, nervously walked across the room to inspect the cake, touched it and realised there was dust on the lower pieces and it was hard, then he went to see my father in law to confirm if it was fake or not.

Well it turned out the only real bit was the top bit which was super cheap and not edible, just show for cutting. He was disappointed he wasn't getting cake, after the wedding my wife informed me I wasn't getting cake and I was sad. :(

Apparently this is the norm in Asia.

<comment><USER9> Got married in Taiwan > Norm in Asia.

That's a huge jump mate.

<comment><USER10> People forget that about 2.5B Asians live in the Indian sub-continent and Middle-East

There are no cakes at Indian weddings

<comment><USER8> Ok so I asked my co-workers.

Muslims = 'no there is no such custom'

Hindu = 'we have, its 100% cake, no fake'

Christian = 'we have cake'

<comment><USER10> Cakes at actual Hindu weddings is almost never a thing. You might have them before the wedding - at the engagement for instance. But weddings are almost always filled with Indian sweets

<comment><USER8> Are you sure? I literally just googled and the first thing that came up was:

> [http://thebigfatindianwedding.com/2014/the-essential- > guide-t...](http://thebigfatindianwedding.com/2014/the-essential-guide-to- > hindu-weddings-food-and-desserts)

> Many modern Hindu weddings will also have a giant, tiered cake at the > reception that the couple cut and do that whole cake-face-smear thing. This > is an obvious Western influence, but you can keep it in the right cricket- > field at least by doing something like a mehndi or chai-infused cake. Just a > suggestion.

<comment><USER11> Living in India for 30+ years. I am hearing this for the first time. In my state in South India, I am 100% sure there is no cake at any stage of the wedding for Hindus or Muslims.

<comment><USER12> Does Indian cuisine (and I realize that I'm sweeping a lot of complexity under the rug) include cake?

<comment><USER11> As far as I know, cake is not part of Indian cuisine. I am from the state of Kerala (South India). All the bakeries here sell a few types of cakes.

Your question made me curious and I started searching for history of cake in Kerala and came across this: [https://www.thebetterindia.com/125658/kerala- mambally-bapu-t...](https://www.thebetterindia.com/125658/kerala-mambally- bapu-thalasserry-india-christmas-cake/)

[https://m.facebook.com/tellydiary/posts/600462363372968](https://m.facebook.com/tellydiary/posts/600462363372968)

Looks like it started in 1880s.

I am big fan of plum cakes that we get in Kerala.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In high school I worked banquets for a major hotel chain - mainly setting up for weddings receptions and conferences. I only saw a handful of real tiered cakes in the hundred or so I worked.

What was more normal to see was a real and very well made top tier. This was for the cake cutting pictures and for the bride and groom. The remaining 5-6 tiers were identically decorated styrofoam.

After the cake ceremony, we wheeled the rest into the back, tossed it in a closet for the caterer to pick up, and served sheet cake.

<comment><USER14> My mother has been a florist for 40 years and this is totally normal and has been for generations. I don't understand why this article exists. Everything old is new again?

<comment><USER15> It's sort of a profile of a local business.

<comment><USER16> [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> About ten years ago my then-girlfriend asked my mother (a retired baker) and me to make a cake for her cousin's wedding. We proposed some recipes to the bride and groom, they chose one, told us how many guests they were expecting. They accepted our quote so we went ahead with the whole hog, three tiers, chocolate leaves and everything; I show up a couple hours before the reception to stack the tiers in place and add the decorations, gold dust and all the rest. But I get to the table and there's another cake! We'd never considered the possibility that we weren't making a "wedding cake", but the bride's family was under the impression we were just making a "cake for the wedding" and they were responsible for buying a "wedding cake" (in this case real, but flavour not a priority).

<comment><USER18> That must have been awkward. It sounds like you have them a good price if they didn't question your price.

<comment><USER17> I'm sure I charged very little on top of the ingredient cost since I was an amateur (my mother just provided some guidance, really) and they were family.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if this is a US-only phenomenon. I've been to a number of weddings in Poland.

The cake is real!

They don't wheel it back to the kitchen for cutting. It's served right there in the middle of the reception hall. I guess it is less elegant than a stream of plated cake slices flowing out of the kitchen. However, you know what you are eating.

Can anyone share their experience?

<comment><USER20> I got married in the US but had the traditional French cake: the "Pièce Montée", a tower of cream puffs that are glued together with caramel. It satisfies both the flashy tower requirement, and is relatively easy to dish out since it's just a matter of pulling it apart, serving 2-3 cream puffs per person.

And it tastes way better than the US cakes which are glorified pound cakes with tasteless super-sweet icing.

[http://img.over-blog- kiwi.com/1/29/25/37/20150328/ob_d45696_...](http://img.over-blog- kiwi.com/1/29/25/37/20150328/ob_d45696_piece-montee-traditionnelle-pour- mar.jpg)

<comment><USER21> FWIW a pièce montée refers to any large/"architectual" pastry, so a tiered cake would be considered a pièce montée.

The specific dessert you're talking about is the croquembouche. Delicious, but the caramel ones are so damn sticky.

FWIW an other common option for pièces montées is to use multiple cakes on supports, which avoids the structural issues and limited edibility of a tiered cake, and offers more flexibility (e.g. depending on layout you may be able to use cakes with pretty different looks and ingredients, or you can create pretty cool-looking scenes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wedding cakes are such an unnecessary expense - I'm not going to say a rip-off because the impressive looking ones clearly take a ton of time to make - <USER2> if you don't care about them looking like "amazing one of a kind" cakes a regular bakery can make super tasty non-sheet cakes for a reasonable amount.

We used the sadly defunct sweet inspiration in SF (sf rent prices happened afaik) and it was I think 35-40/each for three cakes which was fine.

Venue was still the biggest expense - I think all up we were somewhere in the 5-10k range which was apparently "cheap" o_O

<comment><USER23> Yes. Weddings are such a ridiculous waste of money that it boggles the mind.

In my region, it is customary for the guests to give an envelope to the newlyweds, with the sum of money somewhat approximating the marginal costs of the guests' presence on the event. That is, if all the guests were nice and following the custom, the newlyweds would have recouped a big part of their expenses. In other words, a modern wedding is basically a process of transferring significant amounts of money from the guests to the caterers, photographers and venue owners.

Capitalism at its best.

<comment><USER24> How are the guests supposed to have any sort of idea what the wedding budget and number of attendees is?

<comment><USER25> No, you only need to have an idea of the ballpark figure for a seat at a table. Then you bump it up by 20% to 50% and apply a multiple related to your own circumstances and level of personal connection to the guest. Then you buy a gift worth around that or just give them money in an envelope. (Some couples make their preferences known in this regard, but generally speaking I would say that giving a well-chosen gift is nicer than just giving money.)

It is not quite the algorithmic process I have described, though. It is a matter of custom and manners and therefore people arrive at the appropriate behaviour mostly unconsciously.

I assure you that if you personally do not have any idea about this, your +1 does.

<comment><USER23> > _generally speaking I would say that giving a well-chosen gift is nicer than > just giving money_

I feel this is sort of a thing that's false, but you're required to believe it. Looking at it from the receiving end, money is worth more than gift, because a gift will likely be useless, or duplicate, or at best it will lock down the couple's ability to get the equivalent they want (I give you a good toaster you don't like; you'll be inclined to keep it, even though you'd prefer to buy a different one yourself). Money is the best gift, because it's no-strings-attached.

I definitely noticed that the shift of preference from gifts to money is happening in the cultural sphere I live in. Of course things may be different elsewhere.

<comment><USER25> That's the thing. A bad gift is worse than money, but a good gift - <USER3> that the couple actually wants and would buy - is better because it (a) shows consideration and thoughtfulness and (b) saves the couple the time it would take to go out and buy the item. This is the principle behind wedding registries, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Making cheaper wedding cakes is definitely a good idea. I prefer flavour over kitsch. But I think guests would probably notice if the cake doesn't actually get cut, but a cupcake gets substituted instead.

Instead, I think that only baking a top layer and cutting that would satisfy the photographers. Then wheel the fake cake away to the kitchen, and bring out slices of sheet cake to satisfy everyone's stomachs.

<comment><USER27> Ours was the opposite: a three-layer cake where the top two layers were fake.

This was because we didn't have enough guests for a three layer cake (according to the bakery), but for a larger wedding, I suppose you could supplement that with sheet cake?

<comment><USER28> >we didn't have enough guests for a three layer cake (according to the bakery)

Are you implying that you did, or that your guests really like cake?

<comment><USER29> I read it as "We told the bakery we had 20 guests and wanted a three-tier cake; they told us their three-tier cake feeds 40 people and recommended fewer tiers to save money"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is there a word for this: when the tradition is maintained in form but not in function?

<comment><USER31> The word I think of is "skeumorphic", though that's not 100% the same thing here.

<comment><USER30> I believe this is the word that best fits.

skeuomorphic - Pertaining to skeuomorphs, obsolete design elements which are retained for familiarity or out of tradition, even though they no longer serve any functional purpose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> We had wedding pie. It was great. Pie > cake

<comment><USER33> Oh you pie people. You make me laugh. Cake will always be superior to pie. Yes, I'm sorry. For one very simple reason. FROSTING! Ya'll forgot about frosting!

\- Paul F Tompkins.

<comment><USER34> But the icing is always the worst part!

<comment><USER21> Preach! Icing is marketing, the entire point is to make a shitty cake look less shitty by completely hiding it. Heavy icing is usually deceptive, hiding the emptiness of the actual cake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So now instead of the expense of one cake, you have the expense of two cakes, _and_ you have a cake-shaped hunk of styrofoam in a one-bedroom apartment in NYC of all places.

Maddeningly absurd.

<comment><USER36> The price of a fancy wedding cake is the absurd part.

Even better would be ditching this fake cake thing altogether, but if you're going for the traditional playbook, this is pragmatic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I thought everyone knew that giant fancy cakes are usually props?

Anyway, I wanted a fancy single-layer cake at my wedding, but my wife nixed it. Our caterer ended up making delicious cupcakes!

</comment><comment><USER38> Nothing todo with the cake, but i would like to see, that the people who prepare my cake are taking all the right steps, beginning with a hair net when its over 50cms long.

</comment><comment><USER39> What happens if the bride and groom don't know and try and do that stupid "smooshing the cake in each other's faces" thing and it's not real?

</comment><comment><USER40> _That meant $1,000 to $2,400 worth of cake for a party of 160 or so, even though the menu at the wedding location we had chosen came with dessert._

Well, good for her on saving some dough, but 160 guests makes this sound like not only a _First World Problem_ but a rather _upper class_ first world problem at that.

<comment><USER41> We had over 100 people at our wedding. Our total budget was $2,000 and we went slightly over that. You can save as much money as you want if you're willing to give up having the flashiest high-status stuff. Several guests told me later it was one of the best weddings they'd been to because it wasn't all high-strung and demanding.

<comment><USER40> For her second wedding, my sister had a fairly big wedding. She was also part of a two career couple and had lived a long time in the same state. She knew a lot of people.

In contrast, I have moved a lot as an adult and nearly 6 years of homelessness taught me that poverty is very hard on your social life. I would have trouble coming up with, say, six people to invite to a hypothetical second wedding for me. I just do not have a big social network of that sort.

Congrats on getting a wedding for very little money. But I strongly suspect that knowing 200 people well enough to even invite them to your wedding makes you more upper class than you likely realize.

I eloped at age 19. Including rings (bought on sale), dinner and a movie, marriage license, blood testing and cab fair, it was under $300. So you sound like you did amazingly well.

Your testimony doesn't change my opinion that a mock cake for 160 guests is a rather upper class first world problem.

<comment><USER41> Oh yeah, gotta adjust for the fact that the article was about NYC/Washington DC and mine was rural New Hampshire.

<comment><USER40> Edit:

Redacted.

I'm tired and maybe misreading your comment.

I'm outta here folks. Talk at you good people some other time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Related:

"The cake is a lie" is a famous line that happened to become an internet meme (935k google hits when used in quotes)

It's also really funny if you happened to play Portal 1 which you should because

\- it's really funny (might have said that already),

\- educative,

\- addictive,

\- less than 24hs to play through (more like 6 to 12 IIRC),

\- teaches you how to interactively teach concepts without saying a word (there was a great blog post on this topic but I couldn't find it).</comment>


Ask HN: An average developer's work seems meaningless? - <AUTHOR>

I have been wondering what people need. Most people would love to have a better house, furniture, food, etc. They barely need a better software.
I was a developer for 8 years. I worked in some corporation and some startup, and it's the same issue all around. The product is not really been needed nor used.
I can see that companies like Google had a good impact on the world but they have a good supply of good engineers. They don't need me.
It seems that I would be happier saying making good wood furnitures. But hey that's hard to find a woodworker's job and I guess the paying is a lot less.
I'm somehow lost. Did you ever had the same feeling? What change did you do? <comment><USER2> Not all programming is fun, in fact the vast majority is boring, and the software that gets produced is boring, but it is still important.

Just because you aren't a part of Google or some other ubiquitous, well known company, doesn't mean a product that you're a part of producing isn't important. You may not see the implications of all of the software you develop, and some software that has the biggest impact, no one even knows about.

There is always a good reason to program, and considering the current disparity of good engineers, you don't need to be amazing to make a difference, just be good.

</comment><comment><USER3> Software isn't usually about making a big impact in people's lives(military, flight control, medical are exceptions). It's about making whole lot of people's lives a little bit better.</comment>


Show HN: Convert strings (phone numbers, color hex, etc.) into memorable phrases - <AUTHOR> https://www.huffgram.com/ <comment><USER2> Really fun to play with, but I'm not sure if it's really solving the problem you are aiming to solve.

#FFFFFF becomes 'sort respecting whom did not made no importance yay'. I think if you could enforce some grammar rules onto the resulting string, that would make them a lot easier to remember - it's tough to remember the seemingly random words it pulls back.</comment>


HealPay - <AUTHOR> http://healpay.com/ Collections in the cloud. <comment><USER2> I've been waiting to give this a test spin, I am going to evaluate it against our current solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> great idea, i am horrible at following up with my clients and many of them would love a simple payment plan. great job cant wait to try it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> dont feel bad :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finally get a chance to check this boy out!

</comment><comment><USER5> Can't wait for this to be public! :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thx for all the upvotes - this was my 1st post on ycomb

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> sign up for beta :)</comment>


Ask HN: How much should I sell my Windows Store App for? - <AUTHOR>

Since the Windows Store is in its infancy, I'm finding it hard to choose the right price point that people are willing to pay. Are Windows users more or less frugal with their money? I know the the vast majority of apps are free but they come with ads and since my app is a password manager I don't think I will get enough "eye" time to justify putting ads. I started off at $1.49 and had a few sales (1-4/day) then I pushed it up to $1.99 and I am seeing roughly the same number of sales. With such low volume, would it be wise to increase my price or should I just wait it out?<p>Link: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/lockit/665aa3ab-159b-4bc9-b59c-af5f7f22e974 <comment><USER2> I increased the price of two of my Mac App Store apps:

Reddit Notifier [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit- notifier/id468366517?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit- notifier/id468366517?mt=12)

$1.99 -> $2.99

EdgeCase <https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/edgecase/id513826860?mt=12>

$4.99 -> $7.99

Sales numbers for both have remained close enough to constant so these price increases have lead to a nice little bump in revenue. I would say to aim for the high end of the price "range" you're targeting. If someone will pay $2, they'll probably also buy at $3 but perhaps not at $6. Your app looks like a vital part of a person's workflow... try $9.99.

<comment><AUTHOR> I changed it to $9.99, I feel like I'm being a bit greedy but I'll give it a week to see what the results are!

<comment><USER3> I agree with raising the price up a bit for this app - a security app that sells for a lower price gives off the impression that it's not very secure (imho)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I did some price experimentation with my app (Blu Graphing Calculator). I ranged from 1.49 to 3.99. I kept every price up for around a week. Here are some of my findings:

\- Blu was selling the most at $1.99 but the revenue was the most at 3.99 (sold on average more than half of what I sold at 1.99).

\- Interestingly enough, it sold much more at 1.99 than at 1.49

I chose to push back to 1.99 for the time-being to increase the # of users.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really interesting to know, your app looks awesome. May I ask how long that took you and did you make this in JS? I'll try raising the price of mine for a week and see what the results are thanks.

Link to Blu Graing Calc: [http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/blu- graphing-calc...](http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/blu-graphing- calculator/764cce31-8f93-48a6-b4fc-008eb78e50d4)

<comment><USER4> Thanks :). This was around 7 months of mornings and weekends while I had a full-time job. (I quit a month ago to start my own thing).

I built this with JS/HTML/CSS but the MathEngine component I built using C# (.winmd) and called into it from the Javascript.

If you have any specific questions about how different parts are implemented, let me know :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Same I left MSFT in March to do my own thing! Not just this Windows App tho, it was just a side project while I failed at a startup earlier this year.

I was just thinking that with the state of the how APIs were last year this would have been very tough to do, so I was wondering if you went the JS route since it was in better shape than XAML.

<comment><USER4> Nice, I used to work for MS too :).

I actually went the JS route because of my skillset. I was was web-dev before I joined MS and never got into XAML much.

The JS platform was pretty stable from the initial public release, I guess that's because it is built on top of IE which has been around much before Win8 came along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I paid $15 for an iOS version (1Password Pro) so I'd imagine you can try at a higher price point. Worse case scenario, you can drop prices later. Much harder to keep increasing prices if there are a lot of users that take notice later. Try something like $4.99 and see how that does.

If traffic falls, but overall profit is up, thats still okay. You got to do a bit of testing to see what will work best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sheesh $15 thats pretty steep for a password manager, then again "Keeper" is a top grossing app on IOS and makes $9.99/year off of its customers. Thanks for the advice I'm going to try the $4.99 price point.

<comment><USER5> Yeah it is. Its universal for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch but still pretty expensive. The I think the main reason being it syncs with the Desktop version (paid separately). I still think its overpriced (yet I paid anyway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks very nice. Good job! I think 1.99 is a good price for the app as it allows you to drop it to 0.99 when you want to boost the sales.</comment>


Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://nlpwp.org/book/ <comment><USER2> Reads more like a Haskell tutorial with some random nuggets of NLP stuff thrown in for fun, unfortunately.</comment>


An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments - <AUTHOR> https://bookofbadarguments.com/ <comment><USER2> (2013)

Original submit, 300+ points, 100+ comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963288)</comment>


The Present and The Future (continued) - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/12/the-present-and-the-future-continued.html

<comment><USER2> A P/E of 12 does not necessarily mean that investors think RIM will have steady profits. It seems more likely to me that's the balance point between the bulls and the bears.

The author pointed out the bear story for RIM. The bullish story for RIM is straightforward too: they're obviously working on a QNX-based rewrite of their OS. The blackberry platform has enough advantages, devoted followers and hasn't lost too much momentum, so they just need a solid offering with slight advantages and disadvantages compared to Android & iOS to do well. Considering how well they're doing even given how crappy BBOS is, if they can close that gap, they'll be fine. And basing it on QNX is a darn good start.

</comment><comment><USER3> I imagine after the Kik incident any startup that had social mobile apps has probably already written RIM off as a platform worth developing for. If RIM's strategy is to "scare developers" into building apps for their platform then they have already lost.

</comment><comment><USER4> _As myspace has shown, when platforms stagnate they can easily fall apart and the decline can be fast and devastating_

This gave me an image of a large mass of pack ice floating on polar seas -- it occupies a vast area, you don't want to mess with it, but when conditions turn, the whole thing can very quickly break apart and dissolve. (<http://www.igsoc.org/annals/44/a44a057.pdf>)</comment>


How Americans Are Killing the English Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170904-how-americanisms-are-killing-the-english-language <comment><USER3> Did americans kill english? Or did the brits fail to evolve their own? The article is a lot of hand wringing over 'American' becoming the worlds default 'English' without much attention to why. It is global communication, and americans do a whole lot more of it (in the last century).

</comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting article, one rhetorical question popped up for me: So - <USER2> gets to 'own' English?

By the numbers of speakers, it would be the Chinese

By cultural popularity (in the west), it would be the Americans

By originality/creators, it would be the English

I personally lean towards the English owning it since it's the __ENGLISH__ language. Even as an American it is not a great feeling to see the original language modified so flippantly. I guess I'd prefer to be speaking the "American flavor of English" and have true Standard English be defined by the UK.

I get that languages change over time and the true owners of a language are the speakers, diluted times the number of speakers of that language, but still it's something I like to think about.</comment>


Engineering offices - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/coffee-break/engineering-offices-f931b77c57bd#.5ktsvzirc <comment><USER2> I work in an open office plan as well. I've also worked in a private office, and I prefer my current arrangement. But, I know that many do not. Has anyone had any experience with a hybrid setup with private rooms available when needed?</comment>


The Internet of Coffee: Our Experience Building a Wifi Coffee Maker - <AUTHOR> http://blog.socialcops.com/engineering/our-experience-building-wifi-coffee-maker <comment><USER2> Really cool</comment>


Death of Foodstagram? Restaurants Ban Customers From Taking Food Pics - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/01/24/death-of-foodstagram/

<comment><USER2> If you are buying the food are you not entitled to photograph it? It does make sense in the "Chef's Table" and I understand the flash ban in most cases but how does photographing your own food in your own table affect other customers?</comment>


How to Choose Best Payment Gateway for Ecommerce - <AUTHOR> https://theappsolutions.com/blog/development/best-payment-gateway-step-by-step-guide/ <comment><USER2> In my opinion, it's best to choose a payment gateway for ecommerce simply by testing. Only then can you really see if this tool is for you! For example, g2a pay has such a trial period, you can register and check how they work</comment>


Ask HN: Have you tried cold calling prospects before building a product? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to know if anyone has actually tried cold calling potential customers before building a product?
If you have what is a good number of prospects to call before making a decision?
I just came out of a 100-calls session selling an existing product (that is not tech related by the way). Zero sales later, it was quite a challenge. <comment><USER2> I'm doing this right now. We do have a product to display but it's not the minimum viable product yet - we hope to release that in about a month.

My approach has been to explain what we've got at the moment, what we're building and what we're capable of. The conversation is less about making a sale and more about getting an expression of interest. When we release this will you buy it? Why or why not?

Feedback has been invaluable so far and looking forward to following up with all of these warm prospects at the end of October. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> When my business partner and I were looking for idea of what to build we came up with the idea of building an online candidate tracking app for recruitment firms. It was going to be aimed at small 1 - 5 person agencies and would have a cut down feature set compared to the big, and expensive, desktop packages available.

I cold called around ten small recruitment agencies who I would expect to be our target audience and explained how the system would work to them. Of the ten, only one thought it was an excellent idea, whilst most of the others told me that the features we were planning to leave out of our app would be needed if the app were to be of any use.

With this advice ringing in our ears we dropped the idea and continued on to other projects. The good thing about the cold calls was that we got valuable feedback on the app without writing a single line of code. This saved us a few months of coding to get to the same conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER4> I haven't done cold calling before building a product but it sounds like a good idea. It's never too early to get some feedback and to make prospects aware that you exist. Having them involved from day one could help you end up with a better product and an initial group of customers who feel a real sense of ownership of the product they helped create.

That said, cold calling is really tough work so I don't hold it against anyone for not wanting to do it. I've done it. It's difficult unpleasant work.

</comment><comment><USER5> I tried cold calling when I was 17 and starting a web design business, I swore never to do it again.

I think there are probably much better ways to find your potential customers. Find our where they go (in real life or online) and go be a sponge. Listen to their problems, add value where you can, and then when the time is right talk about what you are thinking about building and get feedback. (like during the networking portion of a meeting)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've never sold anything without a product at all, but find that once you have a product to show, you can get a lot more info on how customers or potential customers would use the product and what they would like to see.

Occasionally, you get something a request which is completely off base for what your business is. Don't ignore these, as they can possibly be a more important direction for your business.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking in lines of the customer development model (Steve Blank) that promotes talking to your potential market before building a product. If customers are not open to even look into something that exist, it maybe very challenging to get them to look into a concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure there's a right number but you do have to make sure that you contact the right people (ie those who have the power and interest in buying). If the need is sufficiently great, you may only need a sample size of one to start - especially if they're willing to bankroll the development. I've had a few fortunate friends who have built a business that way.</comment>


Verizon Workers Strike on East Coast After Deadline Passes - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/business/verizon-workers-strike.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 <comment><USER2> Good. If only tech workers had the spine to do the same after finding out their CEOs had conspired to suppress their wages and targeted those who wanted to leave...

<comment><USER3> It's very hard to complain about wages when you make $200k+ on flexible 40 hrs/week with free food. From the outside, tech workers would look entitled.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't stop CEO's or beter known Actors does it and they earn a lot more than $200k.

You may earn $200k but your still a worker and most do a lot of unpaid OT

<comment><USER5> You need to weigh this perspective with the alternative point of view, that the US tech industry wouldn't have developed as quickly or be as world leading as it is if it wasn't for what has been accomplished because of the long hours. I don't disagree with you entirely, but I think we ended up in a good enough spot that it's much more productive to focus on the future than dwell on the past.

What gets me is the dichotomy between "big tech" and everyone else employing programmers/designers/UXers doing exactly the same kind of work but for 1/3-1/2 the pay. But hey, when those companies have quarterly EPS above $5, they might start paying better, too.

<comment><USER6> Did the U.S. tech industry actually have long hours during the period when it became world-leading? The U.S. was dominant in technology by the 1970s, and as far as I understand the '50s-'70s tech work culture, it was more of a professional engineering culture. 9-to-5 jobs, everyone wore a tie, etc.

<comment><USER7> As it is known now, there sort of wasn't a "tech work culture." People just topped out at fairly low salaries relative to now. People were mostly "lifers". There was very little hope of a replacement job. I had relatives caught up in the early 1970s aerospace bust and they were out of work for a while and had to retool.

As a view into it, see "Moon Machines" \- that's what it looked like as a child to me.

A lot of the "work long hours" thing is cargo culting / social signalling to project the image of "high performance." The first step is admitting you're not John Carmack. I have tendencies that way; I'll get caught up in something at home on the weekends and completely lose track of time.

But it must be managed. I know better than to do that at work. You have to let the work breathe ( a metaphor for letting all your cognitive processes catch up after a burst ).

It's fun to do... beer/coffee-fueled sprints far into the night but it's not very responsible nor sustainable. I learned this looking carefully at what I'd done in those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did I read the 2014 annual report correctly and they had $20+ billion in profit? I think they can afford to keep the pension plan the way it is.

<comment><USER9> Pensions are outdated and are bad for both workers and employers. The idea that you get a guaranteed payout (defined benefit) creates conflicts when today's managers have to make decisions that affect the entire company over the next few decades. Considering that few managers believe that they will be in charge at the time the pension benefit are due, they are incentivized to push costs into the future through bloated pensions.The employee is then stuck holding the credit risk of their employer from long ago.

A much better system is a defined contribution, in which the employer makes a contribution to a retirement fund for the employee. The employee then has sole proprietorship of the funds, regardless what happens to the company.

<comment><USER10> If I'm understanding you correctly, it seems like those conflicts could be mitigated by better regulations around company pension contributions. Plus, you could probably align the c-level manager's incentives by regulating that their pensions have less priority than those of regular employees, so if pension cuts have to be made, they'll feel the hit harder and faster. Power should come with responsibility.

Defined contribution is not "a much better system" for employees. It just moves risk from the company onto them. IIRC, there's not actually much "employer credit risk" to employees because pensions have to participate in a mandatory government insurance program.

<comment><USER11> Defined contribution plans are better positioned for today's employment reality in which people switch jobs much more frequently. Pensions give employers more power to keep employees when it would otherwise be beneficial for them to leave for better pay.

<comment><USER12> It should really be up to the workers whether they enjoy how golden the handcuffs are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Verizon officials have assured wireline customers that they will suffer no > service disruption during the strike, saying the company has spent months > training unaffected workers, primarily supervisors, to take over the duties > of their unionized colleagues.

> "On Day 1 our first priority is to maintain the customer base we have — > answer the phones, surveil the network, work repairs — and we're fully > staffed to do that,".....

So I guess today is a great day to call tech support with your problems, you'll get a manager!

<comment><USER14> I'm really curious as to what long term effect this will have on managers' perception of their employees, now that they will have actual experience with what it's like to be one of their subordinates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's no coincidence that Verizon announced FiOS expansion in Boston today.

[http://stopthecap.com/2016/04/12/breaking-news-waiting- forev...](http://stopthecap.com/2016/04/12/breaking-news-waiting-forever- boston-finally-getting-verizon-fios/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Ah yes, the ills of working collectively for the generally anti-union HN crowd to see.

<comment><USER17> White collar unions are quite common outside the US, too. The thought never even seems to cross the minds of professionals in the US, though.

<comment><USER18> US white collar culture works better with associations than unions. Arguably, its a better solution as union corruption is a big problem, especially in the public sector, and associations solve this by being less powerful entities while still being effective for their member's goals.

Many other countries either have associations or simply join US associations and re-distribute their certification materials locally and promote their research and policies locally. I think its pretty obvious that unions solve a specific problem that is more in tune with the earlier industrial era than today.

The rise of associations in the past 40-50 years isn't a coincidence. Unions simply do not work well outside of very specific industries. This trend works internationally too. Associations aren't a US thing anymore.

<comment><USER17> Union, association, enterprise agreement ... it doesn't matter to me what it's called, but I think there should be collective bargaining and written agreements. I don't want an adversarial approach that sucks the life out of the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Honestly I have very little sympathy for them. They did this in 2012 of the same issues, and they're doing it again. I think they've got a really good job and a great compensation package. There are many others in the technology industry that can't even get a fraction of that.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't look to technology workers for a lesson in how to demand more of the profits your work generates

[http://www.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue- pe...](http://www.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per- employee-2015-10)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Excellent! Strikes are the only way to punish intransigent, anti-worker management practices. Solidarity forever!

</comment><comment><USER21> If more technical workers were exposed to the risk of electrocution, ladder death and poison gas in cramped spaces, I'm sure they would unionize too.

Doesn't make much sense otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER22> 1\. Impose tax on corporate revenues, not profits

2\. Regulate market capitalization of corporations

</comment><comment><USER23> _" The unions also procured a letter from 14 mayors that criticized the company for not making its fiber optic network available to enough of their residents, and from 20 United States senators urging Verizon to act as a "responsible corporate citizen" and negotiate fairly with its workers."_

Interesting; so the union's going on strike not only to maintain their pension levels, but also to help underserved communities. Noble of them. But it would be nobler still if they offered concessions of pay and benefit cuts in exchange for Verizon making its fiber available to more neighborhoods.

Obviously it's just a ploy to get the voters on their side, but they're omitting the detail that the voters are going to end up paying higher for their phone and data service as a result.

<comment><USER24> You can't pass on 100% of worker wage increase to customers without losing net revenue. So, a lot of this money comes from management and stock owners.

PS: It's a question of price / demand curves. Raising prices costs customers which reduces profits.

<comment><USER23> But by the same logic, you can't pass on 100% of profit to the workers without losing spending flexibility and the ability to reinvest in the company's infrastructure and future prosperity.

No one complains that Google Fiber doesn't serve every neighborhood in the cities where it is established. Google negotiated that deal with the cities, and if a city refuses to let them target only specific, profitable neighborhoods, they simply take that city off the list.

In my opinion, this whole situation is emblematic of why American digital infrastructure is slow and behind the times, because of antiquated and senseless rules.

I don't think Verizon is some kind of nice company; they're reprehensible at times and frankly I feel sorry for the people working there and I kind of understand their anger. But, business is business.

<comment><USER25> A failure to serve poor neighborhoods actually is a criticism people have of Google Fiber (search for "google fiber digital divide" for examples), and it's something they attempt to combat by providing free service to libraries, community centers, and low-income housing in some places.

I do think that trying to shame or regulate companies into serving unprofitable areas is the wrong way to go about it. If it's that important, then subsidize service in those areas so it's actually profitable. But Americans seem to hate obvious subsidies, and prefer to make them weird and convoluted instead.

<comment><USER24> The problem is it is generally profitable, just _less_ profitable. Worse we are subsidizing them, but if they finish the subsides end _and_ none of the subsides where directly tied to actually deploying new fiber to every home.

PS: You get a lot of very different numbers out there. But remember at 10 acres per house you get 64 houses per square mile and people tend to clump near roads and in towns. [http://blog.performantnetworks.com/2012/11/how-much- does-rur...](http://blog.performantnetworks.com/2012/11/how-much-does-rural- fiber-really-cost.html) Sure, there are a few places where it's still unprofitable, but we can debate the last 1/2th of a percent of homes when you get close to 99%.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Linus, His Apology, and Why We Should Support Him - <AUTHOR> https://www.jonobacon.com/2018/09/16/linus-his-apology-and-why-we-should-support-him/ <comment><USER2> So he wants to change his assholes rejection process. Fine... As long as he stays razor-sharp with his idiotic-commits rejection process.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems hugged to death to me

[http://web.archive.org/web/20180916230012/https://www.jonoba...](http://web.archive.org/web/20180916230012/https://www.jonobacon.com/2018/09/16/linus- his-apology-and-why-we-should-support-him/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious to see how this plays out but happy it's happening.

</comment><comment><USER2> Did his email account get hacked?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. This is real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> yet another article telling me "why i should do x"

<comment><USER6> Isn't that most of opinion journalism, period, since forever?</comment></comment>