The Machine of Tomorrow Today: Quantum Computing on the Verge - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-14/the-machine-of-tomorrow-today-quantum-computing-on-the-verge <comment><USER2> Since questions about crypto came up, here's a summary paper by Daniel Bernstein about it:

[https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/314.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/314.pdf)

Symmetric cryptography would be safe even with quantum computers (they just half the effective bit length of the cypher with Grover's algorithm, which can be compensated for by increasing the key length). Classical asymmetric cryptography would be in danger, but there are alternative systems for which no quantum based attacks are known. They can be a bit unwieldy to use and have much larger key sizes than what we currently use - but methods that are hopefully quantum-proof may exist. The Lamport signature scheme is probably one of the methods that is the easiest to understand.

Not all hope is lost for cryptography even with quantum computers.

<comment><USER3> As someone who works in the field of quantum computation, it's actually a little unpleasant that crypto always comes up.

Crypto is interesting and quantum computers do have a part in it, but it's one of the least interesting things to talk about when it comes to what quantum computers can do.

It's like at the advent of the regular computer, and the application everyone talks about is how it will be able to do accounting. It's right, but there are so many other interesting things it can do.

To offer some fodder for further discussion, how about molecular and atomic simulation? Wouldn't it be nice if we could just simulate the behavior of a molecule to predict what useful properties it has? One could imagine just exhaustively searching for molecules of interest on a quantum computer.

Or how about using a quantum computer to bootstrap itself? Using a QC to build a better QC is in the realm of its utility.

Or how about solving some of these nasty computer science problems that crop their heads up everywhere, like graph coloring (or any of its equivalent incarnations)?

Factoring integers and searching boxes are really interesting developments in the theory of quantum computation, but the above stuff, to me, sounds a lot cooler.

<comment><USER4> I enjoyed your post but I have a disagreement. Graph Coloring is np-complete or np-hard depending on what question you're asking. Grover's algorithm for unstructured search only provides a quadratic boost. If you're pulling from the papers on adiabatic evolution, these are simulated small instances with acceptance probabilities that would likely not be economical in real world scenarios.

For quantum computers to solve np-complete problems in polynomial time would be highly surprising and seems just too good of an outcome. Especially considering the work showing exponential slowdowns for simple problems that defeat local search algorithms like QA.

That said, there'll likely be many practical problems for which quantum annealing provides speed ups which vastly outstrip classical computers.

<comment><USER5> Can we use QC for deep learning?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Besides scientists, I don't really see quantum computers as being useful computationally. There's breaking cryptography, but then you're spending billions to inconvenience people into moving to a different quantum-resistant algorithm.

What about creating cryptography? Wikipedia has a few interesting applications:

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

I'm not a cryptographer - are security people excited about building all sorts of weird quantum protocols?

> "Then you let the computer check all possible solutions essentially—or a > very large combination of them—and come back with an answer," he says. In a > quantum computer, there's no mathematician cracking the problem, he says. > "The laws of physics crack the problem for you."

That sounds more like an NTM than a quantum computer. An NTM would turn its owner into a God.

> Superposition is the mind-bending observation that a particle can be in two > states at the same time. Bring out your ruler to get a measurement, however, > and the particle will collapse into one state or the other. And you won't > know which until you try, except in terms of probabilities.

It's not probabilities because people think of those as real numbers. The coefficients are complex numbers. There's a probability monad, for example, but no quantum monad:

[http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post5485_what-isnt-a- monad](http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post5485_what-isnt-a-monad)

The article sort of mentions it later on when they quote Scott Aaronson, but I suspect the author didn't understand and mentally reverted back to a probability model.

<comment><USER7> > I'm not a cryptographer - are security people excited about building all > sorts of weird quantum protocols?

No.

In reality so-called quantum cryptography is completely impractical. Imagine an Internet where you can't send messages to people more than a few hundred kilometers away, with no wifi and no mobile Internet and which only works if you have pre-shared keys. That's the Quantum Internet (which apparently the EU just decided to fund with billions).

<comment><USER8> >> > I'm not a cryptographer - are security people excited about building all sorts of weird quantum protocols?

> No. In reality so-called quantum cryptography is completely impractical

What about building quantum _safe_ protocols? Is that as a field any more interesting and/or viable?

<comment><USER9> That's called _post-quantum_ cryptography, not quantum cryptography.

<comment><USER8> >> What about building quantum safe protocols?

> That's called post-quantum cryptography, not quantum cryptography.

As I understand it, "quantum safe" and "post-quantum" describe the same thing.

I never used the term 'quantum cryptography'

<comment><USER9> I think I meant to respond to the parent comment, not yours. But that was hours ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anybody know of any good links / blog posts that explain the actual inner workings of a quantum computer in more detail?

<comment><USER11> Sure. Here are a few resources; they vary in technical complexity and depth of coverage, but they're all rigorous:

Scott Aaronson has a good introductory article in Scientific American[1], and he also wrote a short, accessible article aimed at high school students in 2002[2].

Then there's Berkeley's CS 191 _Qubits, Quantum Mechanics and Computers_ syllabus and lectures[3].

Tel Aviv University has lecture notes for the 1997 _Quantum Information Processing_ course online[4]. These are old, but the information is still fundamentally accurate if what you're looking for is a breadth-wise introduction to the topic.

There's the paper, _From Cbits to Qbits: Teaching Computer Scientists Quantum Mechanics_ on arXiv[5].

I assume you have a computer science background; if that's the case, you might want to start with for light reading on the meta between classical and quantum computing, then dive into one of the lecture notes series. The first two resources are much more digestible; if you're looking for something to read in 10 minutes or so and come away with a basic understanding of the field, those are what you want to read. _________

1\. [http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Com...](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/The_Limits_of_Quantum_Computers.pdf)

2\. [http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/highschool.html](http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/highschool.html)

3\. [http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs191/sp05/](http://www- inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs191/sp05/)

4\. [http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsirel/Courses/QuantInf/syllabus.html](http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsirel/Courses/QuantInf/syllabus.html)

5\. [https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0207118](https://arxiv.org/abs/quant- ph/0207118)

<comment><USER12> Note that all of these links appear to concentrate on abstract computation principles analogous to learning about computation in a CS course. I don't think they actually describe the physical inner workings of a quantum computer.

<comment><USER11> That's a good point, I wasn't thinking of physical systems details. In that case, better resources would be ACM Communications' _A Blueprint for Building a Quantum Computer_ [1] or D-Wave's _Introduction to D-Wave Quantum Hardware_ article[2].

(I don't have a stance on D-Wave's legitimacy, but the article is illustrative either way).

_______

1\. [https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/10/168172-a-blueprint- fo...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/10/168172-a-blueprint-for-building- a-quantum-computer/fulltext)

2\. [https://www.dwavesys.com/tutorials/background-reading- series...](https://www.dwavesys.com/tutorials/background-reading- series/introduction-d-wave-quantum-hardware)

<comment><USER13> I don't think the D-Wave article is very good. To pick one choice line, "The term 'Interference' refers to the electrons - which behave as waves inside a quantum waves, interference patterns which give rise to the quantum effects." If someone didn't know what interference was, that sentence certainly wouldn't help them! D-Wave's article also doesn't give a sense of how unsettled this field is, and how many plausible options there are for every element of a quantum computer. I detect the influence of marketing.

The ACM article is much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Every article I read focusses on how quantum computing differ from classical at a high level. I know these are probably asinine questions, but how are these computers actually used? How are these experiments instructed to the machine? Do these machines have I/O? Does the state of the qubits have to be measured with separate equipment?

<comment><USER15> This is a solid question and it's worth an answer. There's kind of four things I want to get to: 1. the hardware is highly varied; 2. there are some fundamental operations which any hardware is going to have to be a quantum computer; 3. the actual "programs" consist of some precisely timed electrical signals turning on or off some of those fundamental operations in order, followed by (and occasionally interleaved with) these destructive "blasts" which actually tell you what's going on inside; 4. it helps to maybe revisit 2 and 1 once you know that with some specific examples.

1\. You know how there's a lot of different hardware implementations for computers? There's Babbage engines, there's the silicon that we use every day, once upon a time there were vacuum tubes and such... we get a lot of freedom because the definition of computation, e.g. the definition of a Turing machine, just involves a sort of abstract manipulation of symbols but does not say anything about how those symbols are embodied in reality. The same bits that are high/low voltages in your CPU or copper cable can be flashes of light in a fiber-optic cable or aligned spin-domains in your spinning hard-drive or whether current can flow through a channel in your flash SSD. The oldest trick in the book is to represent one set of "logical" bits as a different pattern of "physical bits" (which then get represented their _own_ way downstream) in order to correct errors or transmit heavily biased signals without net voltage bias or whatever.

Same with quantum computers. We don't know which hardware is going to scale so we've got spin qubits and superconducting flux qubits and cavities with super- high-quality mirrors pointing inward which trap photons, and all sorts of other qubits. But you can think of these as small little isolation chambers which must be shielded from each other and the rest of the world, maybe microscopic, perhaps all in a row. We have many candidates for what goes in the box and how the following operations are done.

There are some possibilities for alternative designs for "quantum computers" that are not the conventional quantum computer design, for example D-Wave is trying to do the quantum annealing thing, have lots of these things all connected. But researchers like the following approach because it is very concrete and has separable concerns which can be separately addressed.

2\. There are some fundamental operations which these little rooms need to be able to do.

First off, we have the entanglement operations. These need to be able to shove these rooms together so that they affect each other. When shoved together, what matters is a set of 4 energy levels, E00, E01, E10, E11, of how much interaction energy there would be if both bits were forced to 0, if one bit was forced to 0 and the other was forced to 1, etc -- and the absolute value of these energies (not just their differences) also matters relative to the baseline energy B that all the other qubits experience while this happens.

The shoving operation is actually allowed to be pretty much anything that generates a "nontrivial" set of E00, E01, E10, E11, because it's the hardest thing to get right and yet only one little property of it ("quantum entanglement") is really needed.

The next operations are the room-phasing operations. These apply to any room by itself, and come in two forms: you can either raise the energy of the room relative to all of the other rooms (which only affects things if this room is entangled with the other rooms), or you might create an energy difference between the 0 state and the 1 state, or so. It turns out that you can think of all of these as a rotation of a sphere[1], so a very common model is to have "pulses" of light or magnetism or whatever in two different physical directions, with very precise control over how long that pulse lasts, to give full ability to twist these spheres that way.

The final operation is the readout operation, which requires "blasting" the qubit somehow into some really big system which can report and process the measurement. The nice thing about blasts that there is a nice chunk of theory which says that readouts don't actually have to happen before any particular time, though you might need them to happen after some entanglement step or so. There are quantum versions of all of the logical gates which can be implemented on this thing if it is too hard to blast away the room to get a bit of classical information, and then connect that to all of these lasers or whatever that are manipulating this system from these different directions.

The "blasts" are certainly different from the "pulses", the "pulses" need to basically have no real input or output, they just need to change the local environment a little bit. The "blasts" need to hit the specific device slightly harder in some way. The technical difference is that examining the outcome of a pulse you should not have _any_ idea whether the qubit is more 0 or more 1 or anything else about it; after the blast, you should have _total knowledge_ about whether the qubit is 0 or 1. So usually these two need to exploit some sort of very different physics.

3\. So, how the computers are actually used is, we get four or more of these boxes together and try to figure out a routine to start out the first four rooms in the |0000> state, move it to the |1111> state representing the number 15, and then we try to figure out whether we can run the quantum factoring algorithm to find out that fifteen is three times five. So there is some fussing around with the thing as it's brought to ultra-cold temperatures, then there are some time-controlled pulses from which do these bit rotations, some lower-finesse entanglement steps where the particles are somehow connected for some set times, then there is maybe some other schedule of more pulses... and then finally your readout lasers blast the thing, and get 4 bits out of it, and we write down what binary number we saw. We repeat a lot and we find out, woah, 40% of the time this was 3, and 40% of the time this was 5, and 20% of the time it was something else. We then daydream of the day when this 20% becomes low enough that we can run a quantum error-correcting-code on top of this thing so that we can use three times as many qubits but the error will drop rather than increase.

4\. Just to get some ideas of what the hardware might look like inside this room, let me give two examples.

In flux qubits, which are maybe coming up on 20 years old or so, there is a little superconducting loop which holds the qubit as a superposition of currents going clockwise and counterclockwise around it, the single-qubit pulses are accomplished by firing microwaves at the thing, while the actual readout is done by another superconducting loop that is in close proximity called a SQUID, this thing is sensitive to electromagnetic induction, which. You measure your ability to fire a bunch of electrons through the SQUID in order to figure out whether the current in the flux qubit is going clockwise or counterclockwise. By contrast this "bringing the rooms together" operation really needs to bring these two micrometer-sized devices into inductive contact so that they start influencing each other. And of course nothing is superconducting at room temperature so this all is happening in some big refrigerator.

Another promising thing in recent years has been the "NV qubits," which consist of a nitrogen atom sitting in one of the carbon locations of a diamond's crystal lattice, a "defect" in the otherwise perfect lattice. These can be made to 'fluoresce' or flash, so you can just see where they are and then deposit some structures on top of wherever they turned out, and the key is that you get a nice spin state in the qubit which has a nicely long lifetime even at room temperature, so you don't need the elaborate cooling setup that you need for superconductors -- and it interacts nicely with microwave pulses to do the single-qubit manipulation. There are some tricky problems with readout just because diamond has a very high index of refraction, which means light moves very slowly in it and gets bent a lot, but the bigger problems occur with trying to get these things to interact with each other since you basically just have this diamond lattice and it has some nitrogens in it and you can't really move them relative to each other or insert some sort of spin-wires into the lattice that will connect the two spins or anything like that. So it's missing this most-important property of the entangling operation. My guess is that if one of these looked like a computer it would have to have these little diamond qubits doing this process via some elaborate setup existing above the chip, some constant source of short-lived microwave photons which could be entangled with these qubits and then with each other, then immediately measured and the measurement used to tweak the NV qubits, leaving only the residual entanglement between the NV qubits. But you would see the same pattern of a computer program as some timing of pulses that are fired at these systems, combined with some timing of these entanglements-by-photons or so.

[1] [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/204090/understan...](https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/204090/understanding- the-bloch-sphere)

<comment><USER16> > nitrogen atom sitting in one of the carbon locations of a diamond's crystal > lattice

This reminds me of an experiment I saw on Sixty Symbols in which they had encased a single H20 atom inside a carbon molecule's "shell", and pelted it with radiation to see how it behaved. Aparrently the water molecule thinks it's all by itself and isn't affected by things on the "outside" of the carbon molecule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it possible that protecting superposition and entanglement will be a fundamental problem for scaling quantum computing? I could imagine that beyond some point, each time you add an extra qubit the cost of shielding the computation goes up by a multiplicative factor.

Say the observable universe has something like 10^100 subatomic particles total. I believe that by current estimates, this is an upper bound.

A quantum computer with 350 qubits would have 2^350 states, or more states than the total number of subatomic particles in the universe. A single "NOT" operation on one of those qubits would, in constant time, change half of those states. I.e., the quantum computer would do way more work than there are particles in the observable universe. For every single one of its operations.

I just don't see how the universe will let nerds on some tiny little out-of- the-way planet get away with that.

QC demonstrably works for small numbers of qubits. I just wonder if it will ever scale to the point that large problems can be tackled with QC in a cost- effective manner.

<comment><USER18> Number of states in a superposition and number of particles in the universe aren't really related measurements at all (except in the most trivial way) -- at least so far as I can see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Quantum Computing Might Be Here Sooner Than You Think"

Haven't these stories had this same headline for at least 10 years now?

<comment><USER3> Exponential progress is still exponential progress. The quality of quantum devices has increased exponentially in a variety of ways over the past couple of decades.

<comment><USER20> Is that similar to the exponential progress in flying cars since the 50s?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's going to be fun working in cryptography soon.

<comment><USER11> It already is! There are a huge number of research opportunities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if and when we have working quantum computers bitcoin and crypto will be able to adapt or die. I mean, breaking secret keys with quantum should be easy.

<comment><USER23> Existing crypto would be broken, but quantum computation also seems provide much stronger encryption possibilities by leveraging entanglement states. [1]

1: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography)

<comment><USER11> Not all existing crypto would be broken. Symmetric encryption algorithms like AES will be fine. Asymmetric encryption (public-key) algorithms like RSA/DSA will be in trouble due to Shor's algorithm, but other public-key systems will be fine. Hash functions like SHA-2 and SHA-3 will be mostly fine, because Grover's algorithm is at best sub-exponential, not quadratic.

Also, quantum cryptography mostly provides superior key establishment/management capabilities, not superior confidentiality guarantees. It's a misnomer to state that we can achieve "stronger encryption" by "leveraging entanglement states"; most of quantum computing is useful for cryptanalytic attacks right now, not cryptographic construction.

<comment><USER23> Thanks, that's very enlightening!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'll believe in a quantum computer when I see one.

<comment><USER25> That's what I say about Turing machines! </sarcasm></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the ideal contract worker agreement? - <AUTHOR>

I am moving from being a full-time employee doing web dev to a remote contractor with my former employer. My hourly wage will be about twice what it was previously, so I feel like that part is sorted out. I was wondering what other stipulations I should add, though. My goal is to only work maybe 10-15 hours a week, and to have as much schedule flexibility as possible (to work on my own projects).
Should I require 24 hours between receiving tasks and completing them (so that I'm not expected to be "on call")?
Should I specify that I'm only available to do work certain days of the week?
Should I try to tell them I won't do external client phone meetings (since this ruins my schedule flexibility)?
Are these unreasonable stipulations for me to add? Are there other conditions I should try to negotiate in that I'm not thinking of? <comment><USER3> As a full time contractor for the last 15 years

\- You should expect to be on call and service the client heavily - <USER2> sure you bill for everything with detailed time sheets and descriptions. your timesheets are you first line of defense and your time MUST be defensible.

\- Basically you want to give the client the impression that you are always on and it's up to you to try and manage your work life. Eg. sign into skype from your phone when your out and if your like in a movie then msg them back IMMEDIATELY and say be back to my OFFICE in 90 mins or what ever. \- What is an external client phone meeting?

Basically as a contractor your main goal is to service the client to the max while taking your time and enjoying your work, taking advantage of the time the best you can.

Some people I know sit at there computer all day and service many clients at once giving them all the impression they are the only client. Your best bet is to show as much continuous service as possible while padding in other work like getting more clients, updating your skills etc.

Your not an employee congratulations - don't be confused that you have to defend your time. The best contractors give the client everything they want and bill for all of it while taking advantage of being at home and padding in other work.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue I have is that I don't especially want this gig and don't need it. It's just nice to have for extra cash on the side and the work is easy so it's hard to justify turning it down. Is it really unreasonable to not want to be on call? Because if that's the case, I wouldn't really want to do it at all. I feel like 24 hour turn around on tasks seems reasonable but still being generally reachable and answering emails during business hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When you're a contractor, it's about solving the client's problems. Finding out what they need and figuring out what it will cost them to get it is the name of the game. If you can't deliver what they want at a price they want, they should find someone else and you should be ok with that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. The reason I ask is because I would be solving the clients problems regardless of other stipulations. The reason for my uncertainty of what to ask for is because I've never really done freelance and I am not sure what would be considered normal.

<comment><USER4> The norm is to have normal business terms and to be reasonably available during normal business hours. Once you become a consultant, you're running a business.

That said, the way you learn consulting is by making mistakes. Next time, discuss what the client wants before deciding on a price. Then you can have client meetings at 2x the base rate and set other expectations into the agreement.

On the other hand if you have to point to your contract, there's a bigger client relation problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pricing and details aren't negotiated yet - they offered a price that was 1.75x my wage, and I'm going to counter with slightly higher than that and whatever other stipulations I decide on. 2x for base rate for client meetings might be overly complicated, since it's going to be less than 5% of my time. You make a good point about business hours though, and I will tell them I will be reasonably available during business hours.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Typesetting and paste-up, 1970 style - <AUTHOR> http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/woverbeck/dtr5.htm <comment><USER2> That's so much easier than CSS

</comment><comment><USER3> A similar video is: _Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production_.

Trailer et al: [https://vimeo.com/user11373350](https://vimeo.com/user11373350) ; [http://www.graphicmeans.com/](http://www.graphicmeans.com/) ; old kickstarter: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/graphicmeans/graphic- me...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/graphicmeans/graphic-means-a- history-of-graphic-design-producti) .

I enjoyed the MIT screening. It looks like non-institutional purchase isn't available yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> My dad use to run an offset printing short in the 80s. (like shown the second page but smaller.) By that time technology was starting to improve but still mostly manual. He used to get a lot of business making video game manuals for a company that was nearby. They had one christmas given us a ton of their video game cartridges to play with. It was a small shop so we used to help our dad out in the weekend so along with helping him out, would read through all the books and publications that were being printed, particularly computer related. This was all the seed of my interest in computers. Sadly not much later he died of leukemia and I've always suspected that is was due to the all the inks and solvents he worked with on those machines.

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess this is one generation before my own experience, I worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s with CompuGraphic 7500 machines[1].

This is an integrated unit that accepts the keyboard input, shows the marked- up input on the display (not WSYWIG, of course, but you can see the layout commands and check the spelling), can save and load files onto 8-inch floppies (to the left of the screen), and uses the same photo-typesetting scheme that's described in the article to produce the actual output, the big box to the left of the screen/keyboard contains a drum with filmstrips on it, and has the strobe system that flashes the letters one at a time onto photosensitive paper that gets fed into a light-tight cassette that you pull out of the little door there and then run through a developer/fixer machine.

The CG 7500 could load two font families at a time (one on each of two filmstrips), and could mix and match font sizes, also, which sounds like it's also an advance over the 2961 unit in the article.

This was in a graphic-arts company mostly focused on advertising, although we also did a bit of legal work from time to time. We occasionally had rush orders, but we didn't have the constant relentless deadline pressure that newspapers have.

[1] [http://www.forgottenartsupplies.com/?what=artifacts&image_id...](http://www.forgottenartsupplies.com/?what=artifacts&image_id=828)

<comment><USER6> I grew up in a family printing business and remember machines much more like the CompuGraphic 7500 in their production process than what's here. By that point they loaded off of 5.25" floppies (two drives IIR) and had two screens, a green command screen and a vertical preview screen that could render a font or two and some text before committing it to photographic paper printout. They kept it until well into the late 90s even though they had generally moved on to a PC-based workflow in prepress much earlier. Doing odd typesetting jobs when their department guy was out was how I got my start in computers.

The next page on the site showing the platemaking process is also incredibly familiar: [http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/woverbeck/dtr6.htm](http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/woverbeck/dtr6.htm)

I can still smell and feel the industrial soap they used to get to wash up after prepping the plates.

There's a lot of work that's gone into preserving early printing, but I think that this era really deserves some more love as well. So many creative ideas went into the process that gave us cheap consumer ready mass printing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _" The typist must type "blind:" there is no video display."_

Seems odd since displays existed. Even tty machines would use paper as the "display" so you had some visual feedback for typos, etc.

<comment><USER8> I don't think school newspapers typically have access to the most high end equipment.

<comment><USER7> I worked at Sears credit in the same time period. The tty machines would echo your keystrokes onto tractor fed paper for feedback. The blind entry just seems odd to me. It's an obvious impediment to quality, and avoidible without great expense at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked for a small town newspaper in the early 90's. We used Macs and a laser printer to print out the main articles in column format. We had a headline printer like the one they describe. We would then wax up the articles and headlines, and cut and paste them onto the layout board. The layout board was then photographed and turned into a 1:1 photo negative. We left room for photos, which were processed separately and taped into place on the negatives. The completed negatives were combined into two-page sheets and used to expose printing plates.

We would start the compositing process around 10AM on press days, and newspapers would be coming off the presses by around 2:00.

<comment><USER10> Hah! I worked for a small town newspaper in NH at the same time and we did the same exact thing. My college newspaper as well. The laser printers at the time just weren't good enough for photos (probably the scanners and storage as well), so those were processed by a different machine and stuck on at the last minute. These were the days of QuarkXPress and having souped up Mac LEs plugged into massive black and white monitors for layout. A single change in a classified ad could take a minute or two to repaginate.

<comment><USER9> The main difference being that we didn't use Quark for layout, we used MacWrite, I think, and would literally size our articles to 1-, 2- or 3-column width and then print them as one continuous column. We did all of our layout by hand instead of in the computer, so we'd cut up the paper and flow the columns into the layout on the board.

Quark definitely existed by then (I had used PageMaker at my high school newspaper to do the same task in years before). I think the paper stayed with manual layout because it would let a group of us collaborate on laying out the 5-10 editorial pages over a period of an hour or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat related - there's a good documentary about the last edition of the New York Times published using the linotype process called "Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu" [1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU)

<comment><USER10> The end of the video - from 1978 - shows a bunch of people tapping away at CRT terminals. If you think about the fact that the first terminal like that was launched in 1969, and the first integrated microprocessor just a few years later, it took less than a decade for those monster linotype machines to go from the standard for printing, to so-much scrap metal. It's a pretty rapid change, which got even faster just 6 years later with the introduction of the Mac and "Desktop Publishing". I studied this stuff in 1990 and I might as well have learned all about making wooden horse cart wheels as the Web took over soon after. Crazy pace of change...

<comment><USER12> I was two cohorts later and Quark just got killed by PageMaker then Freehand which got killed by InDesign and Illustrator. But I also learnt Authorware that got killed by Director that got killed by Flash. Then I learnt Hotdog, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, ColdFusion, ASP, PHP...

Can we just settle on a standard already? (Now learning Sketch and ReactJS and Clojure)

<comment><USER13> TeX is still TeX!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html

<comment><USER2> I remember when this came out. I looked at the code for Binary Search & Merge Sort that I had written for a Data Structures and Algorithms class I was teaching at the time. Neither of these had the bug.

The reason was that I was using C++ iterators.

      template<typename RAIter>
      void mergeSort(RAIter first, RAiter last);

So I could not do

      RAIter middle = (first + last) / 2;

because the there is no operator+ on iterators in general. Instead, I did

      size_t size = last - first;
      RAIter middle = first + size/2;

and that is correct. The efficiency concerns in the article are a little pointless, at least in the context of my code, since I needed to compute the size anyway.

      // BASE CASE
      if (size <= 1) return;

I'm not exactly sure what the lesson is here. Although certainly types with restrictions on the operations available can be a Good Thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since this had a significant discussion less than a year ago ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799336)), we're going to bury this as a dupe. Please check HN Search for the title of a story before posting. It doesn't work for everything, but it found this one.</comment>


Design for a developer? - <AUTHOR>

Here's my problem.
I'm basically a developer and math type of person (if you read any of abstract algebra posts), and I'm trying to learn design.
I can do UI design pretty well, it turns out to be quite usable and friendly and people can get around it, but, I can't get myself to design something that looks good.
Something that looks, you know, out of the ordinary.
I try colors and shades, and gradients but they all come out looking weird and I can never get them to work well together like some of these pages:
http://captaindash.com/ http://mailchimp.com/ http://joshsullivan.me/
Where can I learn to do this? I'm not saying how I can learn to make AWESOME websites, but, where can I learn to make websites can people can classify as looking "good"? <comment><USER2> For website design, I'd recommend two books: Mark Boulton's "Designing for the Web" and Jason Beaird's "Principles of Beautiful Web Design".

It really comes down to practice. You could try imitating the websites you like (implement but not release). It's good practice and will actively show you what tiny details go into each website such as layout, typography, gradients, shades, texture, colors, and so much more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try out this book: [http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering- Bea...](http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering- Beauty/dp/1119998956)

I went to one his book tour events and it was quite insightful!

</comment><comment><USER4> Regarding colors, shades, gradients, and noise, try spending some time on bjango. This guy has a lot of bang for a small amount of reading: <http://bjango.com/articles/noise/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Practice recreating site designs that you consider to be good, then practice creating your own.

You'll have to devote a lot of time to this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I also wanted to mention, I don't have Photoshop, and that makes learning even harder.

<comment><USER6> There are lots of cheaper alternatives and some open source solutions. Just depends on what OS you're running.

<comment><AUTHOR> Windows. Which makes everything a bit worse.

<comment><USER7> Not that I'm a designer or know what I'm talking about, but a few years ago I switched from doing all of my graphics work in The Gimp to all scalable vector graphics in Inkscape, and couldn't be happier.

It's a different method altogether, and skills from one don't pass to the other, but once you get the SVG tricks down you can do a lot of tremendously complicated designs with little effort, and the master copy is a breeze to work with. Modifications and post-processing manipulations become cheap operations.

It's a little unstable outside of Linux, but does run on OS X and Windows. On OS X, it crashes pretty often but recovers cleanly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Style – Similar to Prisma for Mac/Win - <AUTHOR> http://macdaddy.io/Style/ <comment><USER2> Previous post from a short while ago, where I mentioned massive memory usage: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12364316](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12364316)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's been fixed

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> does it still have the memory usage issue?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it has been fixed</comment></comment>


When Users Hate Change - <AUTHOR> http://knightknetwork.com/2008/02/19/when-users-hate-change/

<comment><AUTHOR> Inspired by yesterday's question "Users don't like creative founders, right?" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=118174></comment>


Ask HN: Advice on leaving a company - <AUTHOR> Hi guys. I'm a Venezuelan guy who's working for a company in the UK. This company pays me 150 dollars per month for doing stuff for them using PHP, Javascript and frameworks like AngularJS and also correcting SQL Server scripts.
Unfortunately there many things I strongly dislike about the company; among which are:
- Lack of clear objectives: There is more than one manager for every project and there are conflicting orders among managers
- Working extra hours without pay; this is something that happens a lot with urgent tasks however, I would expect a least a pay for this.
- Bureaucracy... A lot of it; decisions can take a long time to be enforced, even though there are like 25 people working there.
- I sometimes have to work in 5 projects at the same time; and all with deadlines for the same day.
- Low pay... Like I said, 150 dollars.
I haven't left yet because:
- Fear of failure, this is something I admit; I might have impostor syndrome because many times I really don't feel qualified for job openings; I applied to this one although I didn't feel qualified either.
- Situation of my country; since I don't have savings because I spend most of my salary buying food and the inflation here is massive so normally when leaving a job you'd need to have at least what's necessary to live for 3 months.
- I have had suicidal thoughts recently; I know this is personal, but it's good to put it because I need you guys to have the whole context of the situation. I'm looking for professional help on this though
What I'm thinking of is maybe using a freelancer page like Upwork or Freelancer, however I see many clients wanting websites to be done in one day or things like that and I'm worried this is the trend.
What do you guys suggest me to do?
I really hope I don't sound like a whiny person. Thank you so much in advance for your replies <comment><USER2> Hi, do whatever you have to do. Like quit your job. Borrow some money to stay a float for a few months while looking for another job. I need help with my webpage - diiner.com. You know Spree Commerce or Rails?</comment>


Tesla launches space stunt in world's most expensive car promotion - <AUTHOR> https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/tesla-launches-space-stunt-worlds-expensive-car-promotion/1456485 <comment><USER2> Actually it's the cheapest promotion that received this kind of feedback, ever. Their alternative was to use some leftover scrap for the test. The only cost was the car itself - and if Tesla/SpaceX manages to catch it in the future, it's definitely going to be the most expensive car ever.</comment>


Google Glass to Explorers: "Thanks for Exploring with Us" (email) - <AUTHOR>

Hi there,
It's been an exciting ride. Since we first met, interest in wearables has exploded and today it's one of the most exciting areas in technology. We asked you to be pioneers, and you took Glass further than we ever expected. We've learned a ton, we've "graduated" from Google[x] labs, and now we're hard at work and you'll see future versions of Glass when they're ready.
Since we're focusing all our efforts on the future, we'll be closing the Explorer Program on January 19. We realize you might have questions about what this means for you. New feature development on the Explorer Edition will stop while we work on the next version of Glass, but you can still call or email us anytime with questions, thoughts or feedback.
In the meantime, we've created Glass Vol 001 to honor you, our Explorers. It's a collection of photos and stories from the early days of Glass.
Download Vol 001
The Explorer Program was started to get Glass into the hands of early pioneers who would forge the way. You've taken Glass to the edges of the world, from the streets of New York to the tundras of Antarctica. You've captured miracles every day, from your wedding vows and your child's first steps to new ways to save lives. You've humbled us by taking what we started and doing more than we ever could have dreamed. Let's celebrate your bold and brave steps into an uncharted world.
Thank you for being part of the story. We'll see you in the next chapter.
The Glass Team
Pic: http://imgur.com/a/Hm4du <comment><USER2> They sent out a different email to Explorers that returned Glass (I did) --

Hi there,

It's been an exciting ride. We learned A LOT and now we're hard at work building the future of Glass. You gave Glass a chance-even if it wasn't right for you right now, you were still part of the story. That means a lot to us, so we wanted to share this collection of photos and stories from the early days of Glass.

Download Vol 001

Shots from the Glass yearbook

You'll start to see new versions of Glass when they're ready, and they're built on what we heard from Explorers like you. We'll be eager to hear what you think.

Best wishes, The Glass Team

</comment><comment><USER3> I have google glass... sad to see it sunsetting but look at the bright side... this announcement makes the current version of google glass collectible and limited edition... :)

cheers, Nash, [http://joday.com](http://joday.com)</comment>


UIUX Design (A Global Community of Top Designers) - <AUTHOR> http://www.uiux.community

<comment><AUTHOR> A community for ui ux designers from all over the globe! Discuss all the latest trends and tools!</comment>


Is it hard for women to find VC moneys? Is it their own fault? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/janine-popick/2010/04/women-in-tech.html

<comment><AUTHOR> two interesting bits:

"38.5 percent of women-owned firms relied on personal equity, and 41.1 percent relied on outsider debt to start their businesses. In contrast, 31.6 percent of male-owned firms relied on personal equity, 29.9 percent on outsider debt, and 26.1 percent were provided outside equity. The percentage of outside equity given to women-owned businesses was so negligible it wasn't even published."

and is it their fault?

"Are women to blame for getting in their own way? Sometimes. According to a study from the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management, women managers are three times more likely to underrate their bosses' opinions of themselves. Men slightly overestimated how their bosses viewed them, and women underestimated others' positive opinions. Maybe this is a reason why it's tough for women to get funding."</comment>


6 things I learned from riding in a Google self-driving car - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/28162/6_things_I_learned_from_riding_in_a_Google_self-driving_car

<comment><AUTHOR> I would have linked to the article itself[1], but the submission wouldn't work...

[1] [http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car](http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car)</comment>


Developers: stop re-AOLizing the web! - <AUTHOR> http://technicalfault.net/2014/07/03/developers-stop-re-aolizing-the-web/ <comment><USER3> Technically email isn't the web.

That's not to say the web isn't being AOL-ized. How many firms do you see these days advertising their presence on Facebook or Twitter over their own website (over which they have full control), in the same way we used to see companies everywhere advertising their "aol keyword"?

The reality of "the cloud" is we're squeezing things back into a few giant silos.

<comment><USER4> >Technically email isn't the web.

I see this very same things on the web. Heaven forbid you use internet explorer as your browser or are a version behind. The amount of smarmy, "Use a real browser" messages I've gotten when testing things in IE is unacceptable. I have no love for IE, but lots of people use it, and I need to support it at work. Just because its difficult to write html for for certain use cases doesn't mean its useless. I understand when using something IE doesnt support yet, but that didn't seem to be the case with these websites. Often these sites are run by 20-somethings straight out of school with some kind of 'stick it to the man' identity politics. Yeah if you're a middle class person who went to college, have healthcare, have a non back-breaking computer job, etc guess what, you're the man.

I feel like we've never transcended the proprietary mindset and popularity still rules. This email client may be an extreme example, but the web is pretty unfriendly if you're not using firefox or a webkit based browser. Oh, the opposite was true in the past? So what. That doesn't make the current status quo acceptable. I love how we justify the various ways we refuse to learn from history.

On mobile its even worse. We're not even shoving things into silos. We're saying, "Look, this featureset which could be trivially be put into a HTML5 webpage is now a local app proprietary to this platform. Install it, deal with its constant updates, its crappy UI, etc." Does every newspaper in the world and forum really think I want to install their app? I'd have hundreds of apps on my phone if I did.

I really think we're regressing a bit. The cloud-ification and foolproofing of things just leads to a handful of megacorps providing near-mandatory services and applying their own policies and politics onto those services. We keep losing ground to them on things like privacy, stability, ownership, etc for convenience. Not sure where this is going to lead to in the end, but it won't be anything like we're used to. I doubt it'll be for the better. MSN and AOL tried to build a walled web garden in the 90s and were laughed at by the tech- savvy. Now the tech-savvy are the ones sporting ipads and android phones and willingly entering these new walled gardens.

<comment><USER5> Your rant about IE is strange given that IE, a for a long time, was nonstandard. Think about it, you are asking developers to support a non- standard set of browsers to reach a "large" use base. How is that any different from the guys at mailbox supporting a non-standard API to reach a large user base?

The web looks fine in standard supporting browsers, and as of now that is Gecko and Webkit browsers (which by the way make up 99% of OSS browsers, like Midori and IceCat). Most of the other non-Gecko/Webkit browsers are Trident based, closed source, and only support Windows.

Using the web is a bad example for showing that there is a "proprietary mindset", when in fact all the standards about the web are completely open.

<comment><USER6> There's an important distinction that needs to be drawn here.

It's perfectly okay to say 'we support modern standards, older versions of IE don't comply with modern standards so if you use IE, you need to upgrade to a recent version'.

It's not okay to say 'you can't use even recent versions of IE because we don't like the brand name'.

(I think it is the former rather than the latter that people are generally doing, but it's worth clarifying the distinction.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They do this for good reason -- dealing with the various dysfunctional IMAP implementations out there makes your product look lousy and costs alot of time & treasure to support. When some squeaky wheel blogger with a screwed up IMAP server writes a ten page rant about why you suck, nobody gets the other side of the story.

I had a relative who ran a business that only served customers in Manhattan. Brooklyn? Jersey? Not interested.

Why? His competitive edge was understanding his customer base cold. He knew what companies were in what buildings, and all of the trivia about different neighborhoods and streets that let him win bids and save time.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. As soon as I read "open, well-documented and well-understood platform like email" I laughed, but only because what I really wanted to do was cry. I assume that the author had never had the misfortune of trying to build a MUA or MTA that had to be widely compatible with other implementations.

If you have the option of talking _only_ to Gmail and still being successful? Yes.

<comment><USER9> Exactly -- I worked on IMAP related nonsense for about 18 months -- it is a special, broken type of hell.

<comment><USER8> Then, god forbid it works well enough to get a message from the server. Now you have to deal with trash like quoted printable, which is neither.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know why the developer of Mailbox decided to only support Gmail and Apple iCloud. But I do know that making an IMAP client is extremely painful. I once had to, and I can't remember having to deal with a more confusing or frustrating interface.

<comment> yoz-y I do not have the numbers but significant amount of iOS users have Gmail or iCloud mail accounts. Mailbox was originally only for iOS and Gmail, later they have added iCloud, later they have added Android. Maybe in some time IMAP will be added as well. But it is sure as hell more viable to start with something that covers enough users to keep the lights going before trying to do everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A few points that seem to make the author's argument stronger:

AOL is, unfortunately, far from dead. There are still plenty of AOL email addresses out there. This is a problem. I've run my own email server for a decade or so, with very few problems. AOL is one of the problems. Every now and then AOL bounces one of my emails with an error code that signifies that my IP has been associated with spam or something of the sort. I know this is bogus. No spam, newsletters, or any form of email marketing comes from that IP. In the past I used to go through the steps to get my IP off their list, and they would always do so immediately. I don't bother anymore. If you use AOL you may not get all your email. If you don't like that, get a real email address. (The bans tend to last only a day or so.)

Google claims to be operating SMTP and IMAP servers, and they almost are. But they make slight adjustments to the protocols that tend to enhance their control.[0] They mostly follow the RFPs that specify how an SMTP server is supposed to behave, but violate them when they feel like it, while still advertising themselves as an SMTP server. You just need to experiment to discover what their servers will actually do with your email.

[0] [http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/](http://lee- phillips.org/gmailRewriting/)

<comment><USER12> What sort of IP do you have? If it is some residential IP where the PTR does not match the mailserver's advertised hostname or the PTR does not resolve to the IP, I can fully understand blocking that IP (and do so myself).

On the other hand, I don't quite see how a fixed IP could get detected as spammy by AOL without there being any spam sent from it.

<comment><USER13> AOL employs the sort of bad administration that blocks entire IP ranges. They've tried to make their blacklist tools smarter than they are capable of supporting. This is just one of many ways AOL's email service has been subpar, stretching back to day one.

<comment><USER12> Ah, that's indeed a silly thing to do; thanks for the warning! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Building a tool to enhance the experience of another service isn't the same as building or supporting a walled garden.

That's like saying "developing for iOS||Android||Windows Phone||Symbian is supporting a walled garden!" or "making a petrol||diesel||electric car is supporting a walled garden!"

No - it's like making something that improves something else, for a demographic that you've decided has _some kind of_ benefit to you or your interests longer term.

<comment><USER15> > Building a tool to enhance the experience of another service isn't the same > as building or supporting a walled garden.

Building a tool that enhances a walled garden is supporting a walled garden.

> That's like saying "developing for iOS||Android||Windows Phone||Symbian is > supporting a walled garden!" or "making a petrol||diesel||electric car is > supporting a walled garden!"

Where an operating system only allows you to run programs that the makers of that OS approve, then it is a walled garden, and writing software for it certainly is supporting a walled garden.

> "making a petrol||diesel||electric car is supporting a walled garden!"

Bad analogy, since none of these things are monopolies of one company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As the developer of a similar iPhone app which was GMail only (EmptyInbox), let me just say: IMAP is really, really hard to get right. Each different mail provider is different and nobody is keeping all the rules. Even Google had a few hacky differences to the "official" IMAP way of doing things.

I can completely understand why Mailbox only supports GMail and iCloud...so actually, we need to be getting on Google and Apple's case rather than app developers. Not that I'm biased or anything...

</comment><comment><USER17> So, let me get this straight. You're upset, because a proprietary software application that supports proprietary protocols from proprietary service providers, is not using open standards? If only there was a solution...

<comment><USER18> Proprietary software and proprietary standards are not the same thing.

<comment><USER19> They tend to go hand-in-hand, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Google (and to a lesser extent) Apple, Facebook and Twitter, have little > interest in allowing their products to inter-operate in a meaningful way.

Having had to deal with Google's somewhat non-compliant implementation of IMAP recently, I'm not going to say that they're big on having their products interoperate.

However, I would be hard-pressed to make a case that Google is _less_ interested than Apple, Facebook, and Twitter in having their products inter- operate, either with their own or with other companies'.

Google's entire business model requires a far more open web than the other three properties, in order to function. They still don't favor a truly open web, but they're far less siloed than Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, whose business models all require[0] siloes in order to function (though for completely different reasons, hence why Apple and Facebook aren't competitive the way Google/Apple or Google/Facebook are).

[0] Twitter is arguably the only exception here.

</comment><comment><USER21> Minimal Viable Feature Set. Support those well, decide later if it makes business sense to support others.

<comment><USER22> The elephant in the room here is that openness doesn't make business sense given the current state of the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> AOL was successful for a reason: It made this complex stuff simple. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you want users to be free from silos then you're going to have to find a way to make it _easier_ for them rather than to tell them they should abandon these services and accept the complexity. Integrated services can offer a level of simplicity to their users that is very hard to achieve in a decentralized manner.

<comment><USER24> When I introduced ny grandmother to the Internet, I gave her AOL because it was supposed to be "easy." She hated it, and switched to a regular ISP with Netscape for mail and browsing. This was a woman who struggled to even use a mouse, though she was very smart.

Never underestimate how much worse an "easy" silo can actually be. The marketing doesn't always match reality. The garden walls may yet be removed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's perfectly logical for this cycle to be occurring.

It's nothing more than technology inflection points in action. It will continue to repeat and there is nothing that can stop that.

Seeking to stop the so-called AOL'izing is like asking nature to stop making wild fires. These things happen for a reason, it's not a fluke, it's not bad. It will cycle. Prepare for the next cycle shift, don't lament today, build tomorrow, it's that simple.

It's no different than being upset about Android becoming the latest operating system monopoly, replicating what Windows accomplished 20 years prior. Stop operating system monopolies! Well, it's perfectly natural and will continue to happen. If someone has been around tech for more than a few years and hasn't figured out how these cycles and networks function, they must really not be paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER26> Perhaps the author fails to see that introducing more functionality is additional support. A developer or team has to now support and bugfix more then just Gmail and iCloud which already hits 80% of the market share for this use case. Just my $0.02.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not 100% sure but I thought Mailbox needed access to certain things that are outside IMAP to do what it does. For instance, it makes its own folder in Gmail that it interacts with, and I'm not 100% sure if "Archive" is a standard IMAP function.

I'm not an IMAP dev so I'm open to hearing differently from someone who knows better, but it was my understanding a network-neutral IMAP solution wasn't tenable.

<comment><USER28> K-9 mail on Android uses IMAP and it creates new folders, as well as archive my email to my "Archive" folder without a problem. There should be absolutely no reason a mail application couldn't use IMAP to communicate with mail servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Doesn't directly address the original author's concern, but he ought to try Boxer--similar application, _does_ support IMAP.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not sure what the author's gripe is. First, if you don't like walled gardens then simply don't use them. Second, if you're adamant they shouldn't exist, then why not roll your open source alternative? Good luck with trying to get "dumb" users to adopt your solution.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't see Mailbox AOL-izing the web. I do see ISP attempting to do this.

If they can lock down the content that you see based on what they're getting paid to show to you, that's effectively what AOL was doing in the 90's and early 00's.

They're creating that walled garden around content.

</comment><comment><USER32> Same thing goes about instant messengers. I wish developers would stop producing junk like Whatsapp which AOL-izes the Web and would use standard, interoperable and federated protocols.

<comment><USER22> VCs invest in monopolies, not (actual) openness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Point about IMAP is right on. All else is utter nonsense. Author mistakenly assumes that user experience plus features carries on to IMAP which is..wrong.

</comment><comment><USER34> Users are a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are highly technical users who spend all day not minding spending all day dealing with hostile and spiteful interfaces to get trivial tasks done - there are very few of these people in the world. As you progressively work your way down the pyramid users become progressively less inclined to tolerate this nonsense and the number of people in that segment grows.

At the very bottom, the largest population of possible users, are people who's toleration of any sort of confusion of nonsense from their computer device things is at zero.

As a company, you have to decide how far down this pyramid you want to target your products. The lower down the pyramid, the more work you have to put into your product on the usability side, you may even decide to ignore higher tiers on the pyramid because you can only put so much effort into a product, and the upper bits of the pyramid represent an astonishingly small fraction of the market space.

AOL did one thing really well, they decided early on to target the absolute bottom tier of the pyramid that they could recognize. This is pre-Internet days where practically everything you ever wanted to do with a computer was user-hostile. They didn't give two shits about users who knew all of the Hayes command set by heart, because those users were 1% of the entire possible market and supporting them was as much effort as supporting the 99% they were trying to get money out of.

The Internet didn't even immediately kill AOL, as in their own controlled user interface. It really was easier to start "your AOL" wait a minute for the funny sounds to stop and type in "gardening" to get more than enough information about that subject. You could even guess at keywords, "cars" or "cooking" probably took you someplace as well.

The Internet started at the absolute top-most part of the pyramid and we've spent decades trying to get it to work where all the money is, the bottom bits. It hasn't helped that there were all sorts of unexplainable (to the common user) hanger ons and hatefulness that users have had to deal with along the way. But every time we improve the experience a little, high fives everywhere and the bottom lines jumps another million dollars.

Anybody remember the old ways to setup an email client? Remember all the little bits and pieces of information you needed, POP3 or IMAP mail server, SMTP server, authentication, encryption methods, different user/pass for sending and receiving, opening firewalls, setting spam filters, etc?

Then it got better. The last time I set up Thunderbird I supplied it with approximately two pieces of information, my email address and my password.

Do you remember how an AOL user set up their mail? They didn't.

Why is this important? Because that other stuff is hateful to the user. It's also pointless. It never should have gotten to the point where I needed all that stuff just to get my email. But that's what happens when you design software for the top of the pyramid. You can make it as obtuse, undocumented/poorly documented and hostile as you want, and there will still be a small population at the top of that pyramid who won't mind dealing with it.

I was pondering the other day the vast reduction in websites (and other internet services) that I typically visit and use in a day from 10-20 years ago. Pretty much I use, HN, Reddit, Facebook, gmail and youtube for fun and my corporate equivalents for work. I felt sad for a moment because the internet used to seem so much more chaotic and vibrant.

I'm pretty sure that 10-20 years ago I'd have spent time on USENET, telnetted into something, fought with my mail client, hit as many ftp servers as web sites, probably at least 1 gopher site and more. I'd have probably searched for any search term on multiple search engines to make sure I wasn't missing any results and more. 20 years ago I would have even supplemented my time on the Internet with time on local BBS's, each with different interfaces and services.

But today what's the point? I didn't like calling into all those BBSs, or going to all those sites. One site with all those services is much less user- friction to deal with. I didn't like mucking around in some command-line ftp client, why shouldn't I just have a link on a webpage someplace to download something? Why should I telnet into some message board to talk about the Amiga when some meta-message board service lets me just go to /r/amiga? What's the point of gopher when the web works so much better? Why USENET when I can find better, less spammy conversation on HN or reddit?

And guess what? It's even better than that! I can shop on-line, I don't have to drive anywhere, deal with parking, deal with people, deal with the heat. From my toilet, on my phone, I can buy just about anything I'd ever want to buy and have it delivered to my front door within 48 hours.

It's not just that the world today is more convenient, in some notional tradeoff of power vs. convenience, it really is actually better. We're not quite at AOL levels of simplicity. I still have to waste time explaining to my mom why she needs to type "[https://www."](https://www.") when all she wants to do is type the name of her bank and have it go there.

More importantly, there's absolutely nothing preventing anybody from doing any of the old things. Want to run a gopher site? Set up a gopher server and do it! Want to run your own private message board behind an obscure domain name? do it! You can still target that top of the pyramid user if you want to, but understand that if you want to make money from it...well...good luck.

<comment><USER6> I don't think this comment deserved downvotes, because it makes an important point. If we want to preserve open standards - and I definitely do - <USER2> using them has to be straightforward. Think about it: how many of us grow our own food, generator own electricity, dig our own wells? Damn few. We subscribe to the big central services for the things we consume, because life is short. We cannot expect other professions to grant us special consideration that we don't grant to others.

<comment><USER34> Right. If the standard that we apply to computing were applied everywhere else, we'd all be sitting at home spinning fabric from the wool we just sheered from our goats that we raised with the crops we just harvested.

Nobody does that because it's not a good way to do things.

One of the problems that tech people have is they get mired down in the details, seeing each step as some kind of accomplishment, when each step is just a necessary part of the whole. Raising a crop from seed to harvest isn't easy, but the goal is to have clothes -- yet tech people will spend an impossibly enormous amount of time on tweaking the harvesting process when it's all just going to end up as wool underpants in the end.

And of course, downvotes because I'm supplying uncomfortable facts about population distributions that every marketer on the planet knows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> IMAP was created in 1986.

You'll have to excuse app authors for not turning a blind eye towards the modern APIs that vendors expose.

To have a great standard, you need to have a non-standard predecessor that sets the tone, approach and philosophy and has proven itself out in the wild without the crutch of a standards body mandating its use. In this way "closed" and "open" work hand in hand to form a healthy ecosystem.

Good standards can't materialize in vacuum. "Non-standard" APIs are the fertile soil they grow in. Most of HTML5 was proprietary extensions before they were standardized. In fact, most of HTML has been "vendor specific" before it was standardized (including the <img> tag).

What is the alternative anyway? To "stop re-AOLizing the web" means to stop progress and stick with a horrible email protocol that has seen little improvement since it was created _30 years ago_.

EDIT: All right, people are angry because I'm not acknowledging the current version, IMAP4, which was coined in 1993. Sorry, sorry. That makes it a very modern standard. It _completely_ changes everything I said.

<comment><USER36> Progress for the sake of progress is not progress.

The question that should be asked is if not using IMAP gives for this app any edge over not using it? It seems that the answer is no.

<comment><USER5> >The question that should be asked is if not using IMAP gives for this app any edge over not using it? It seems that the answer is no.

This isn't true and it seems you have never used the app, so you don't know if an IMAP implementation doesn't actually have an edge over it.

IIRC, Mailbox actually had the ability to _read_ your emails - some of the features they provided meant their servers had to have access to your inbox. Now, for this to work on IMAP, that meant giving Mailbox your email and password, and for Mailbox to store that in more-or-less plaintext.

Now as an enduser using Gmail, would you prefer that Mailbox stored your password somewhere in us-east-1, or an easily revokable oauth token?

<comment><USER37> This doesn't make sense.

Mailbox only works with Gmail and iCloud Mail. Gmail supports OAuth2.0 [0] while iCloud does not [1,2]. On the other hand, Outlook supports OAuth2.0 [3] and is not supported by Mailbox.

Thus, even if the choice of the authors of Mailbox gave them some edge, it is surely not the one you described.

[0] [https://developers.google.com/gmail/xoauth2_protocol](https://developers.google.com/gmail/xoauth2_protocol) [1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18649352/is-there-an- iclo...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18649352/is-there-an-icloud-web- api) [2] [http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/01/apps-ask-icloud- password-...](http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/01/apps-ask-icloud-password- privacy-threat.html) [3] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dn440163](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn440163)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> critics: stop telling me what to build. make it yourself if you feel so strongly

<comment><USER39> Don't put a bad restaurant review on yelp if you don't know how to cook. I understand that the difference here is that the reviewer is also a dev, but it does not change much since he put this up as a user.

<comment><USER40> It's the difference of saying that a restaurant makes bad food when you're a bad cook, versus saying a restaurant shouldn't be vegan-only because as a crappy cook, you want people to be omnivores. It wasn't a critique of Mailbox as an app (which the author actually seems to like), but a critique of the choices Mailbox made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Mailbox is a product made by Gmail users targeting other Gmail users who want a specifically improved experience. They weren't targeting just generic "email" users. This isn't a flaw in their design any more than it's a flaw in the design of a Porsche 911 that it can't haul your new dining room set in the back.

As far as the popularity of Gmail email addresses vs. the influx of AOL email addresses in the 90s; it's apples and oranges. The flood of AOL email addresses was bad because it heralded many clueless people into the Internet who were disruptive to the established culture.

It's not inherently bad many people share an email domain. That's silly.

<comment><USER42> _The flood of AOL email addresses was bad because it heralded many clueless people into the Internet who were disruptive to the established culture._

Firstly, that's just plain elitist. The notion that the internet would be somehow better if clueless people weren't able to use it is ridiculous. Arguably the fact that AOL (and others) lowered the intellectual barriers to entry by taking an exceptionally complicated system and making it easy to understand was just a forerunner to today's UX revolution - taking complex, and consequently expensive, products and services and making them trivially easy to use is the USP of many, many start-ups. We don't say that Dropbox users are clueless when they choose not to manually configure file replication across their computers.

Secondly, as someone who was writing web software in the late 1990s, I can absolutely assure you that there were clueless people on every ISP. AOL was the biggest but the fact that someone had a non-AOL email account was not an indicator they were any smarter.

<comment><USER41> > Secondly, as someone who was writing web software in the late 1990s,

That's well after the great AOL flood happened. Which was mostly on Usenet and mailing lists.

If you weren't there of course it sounds just like a bunch of jerks being jerks, but really it was pretty horrible. Once AOL gave out Internet access to all of its users, the signal to noise ratio on Usenet and many mailing lists went to crap. Usenet never really recovered and became mostly a place for binary distributions of questionable legality, rather than discussions.

In the long run of course more people on the Internet made the web what it is today, and for a short while it heralded cheap, high performance home internet (which then stagnated at least in the US.)

Look, the whole AOL thing is old news and I pretty much never bring it up unprompted. But the author brought it up. And he misunderstood why the flood of AOL addresses on the Internet in the mid 90s was a bad thing. It wasn't just because aol.com was ubiquitous. It was that the aol.com email address usually signified an ignorance of Internet norms, technology, etc.

Pre-AOL, most people on the Internet were either there because they were at a college (student or faculty), or because they purposely sought out a provider which usually wasn't advertised or widely known.

Really AOL is to blame for giving their users access to this new place without telling them any of the etiquette of that place. It's like WalMart buying country club membership for all of its customers without letting them know they need to step up their normal attire.

<comment><USER43> Usenet didn't die because of signal to noise, it died because over the history of the internet people have been moving from communication to broadcast. (Mail -> Usenet -> Web Forums -> Facebook -> Twitter).

Each step becomes more like "One to Many" broadcasts.

<comment><USER41> Err, no. Your analogy sounds great but doesn't hold up at all.

In fact, the percentage of people you'd reach in a given Usenet forum far eclipsed what you'd reach on most any web forum when people first started switching. And most people on Twitter don't have many followers.

It's not about reaching more people, it's about where the people you want to associate with are.

Yes, people did abandon Usenet because of the signal to noise ratio, and people abandoned web forums for the same reason nd will eventually abandon Facebook and Twitter for the same reasons.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Diamond-TheWorstMistakeInTheHistoryOfTheHumanRace.pdf <comment><USER2> Evidence-based dive into the idea that agriculture wasn't necessarily good for the people who adopted it -- worked more for fewer and less-diverse calories, and there are signs their health suffered for it.

I first encountered this argument in Sapiens. Interesting that Jared Diamond made it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just more Jared Diamond</comment>


Amazon Wants To Give A Free Kindle To All Amazon Prime Subscribers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/12/amazon-wants-to-give-a-free-kindle-to-all-amazon-prime-subscribers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> I'm a Prime customer, and I love it. I buy way more on Amazon than I used to, and I find it very convenient. It pays for itself on Christmas shopping alone.

This could be a smart move. I've often thought about a Kindle, but never really wanted one bad enough to shell out for it (although I'm pretty sure I'll get the iPad). Dropping one in my lap, knowing that I spend a lot of money on Amazon, could be a very smart move for Amazon to make. Maybe I'll love the Kindle, use it a ton, buy a ton of books, and show all my friends.

<comment><USER3> Prime really does pay for itself. I ordered enough on Amazon before getting prime that it was a no brainer. Amazon is also very generous about letting you share your prime subscription with family members.

I already read quite a few books on my iPhone(Kindle app, and Stanza) so I would probably end up paying for a Kindle in book purchases over the life of the device. Seems like a win-win.

<comment><USER4> "Amazon is also very generous about letting you share your prime subscription with family members."

Yes. I invented three step-brothers with whom I share my membership. Effective cost is $20/household/year.

<comment><USER5> Do the family members have to live in the same household as you for this to work (disregarding the ToS)?

<comment><USER6> No, I have my account with 4 other people at 3 different addresses, it works just fine. Keep in mind all of these people are in the same city, though...

[edit] Note for other post: you don't have to share actual accounts - you can invite people to share prime membership; they will use their own account to do their own shopping but still get the same perks.

<comment><USER7> Mine are spread out all over the country. Different last names too. They don't seem to care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazon Prime is a great service on its face. If you buy from Amazon regularly, it pays for itself, if not in dollars than in convenience.

I've been on the fence about readers for a while now. I'm a programmer, but I have a degree in American literature. Most of the books I own were written over a century ago. Unfortunately, these books simply don't come in a Kindle edition often enough to justify the purchase of the reader. But if Amazon gave me the reader, it probably would lead me to buy more new titles and magazine subscriptions. And, of course, eventually the titles I want will be available in Kindle editions.

I guess the real question is how many additional sales would Amazon gain from someone like me + my likelihood of upgrading to the next version of the Kindle vs. the production cost of the Kindle. I bet the math makes sense over the long haul. It's not that different a calculus than I use when I buy Amazon Prime every year.

<comment><USER9> A lot of books that are out of copyright are available online for free in open formats that are readable on the Kindle. Project Gutenberg is full of classics that you can (and I do) read on the Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It was fairly clear to me that after it's "breaking news: Jason Calacanis has an iPad" stories and this nonsense that TechCrunch just makes stuff up to get views. Arrington is to Early Adopters what Ann Coulter is to conservatives. He figures out just what it is that you want it to hear-- truth or not-- and tells it to you.

<comment><USER11> So Arrington is the neo-con of tech reporters?

<comment><USER10> Saying that Ann Coulter is a neo-con is like saying Bozo the Clown is an acclaimed stage performer. While her message is conservative themed, her tactic isn't to espouse conservatism, but rather to get people to read her column.

The same's to be said for Arrington. It's a problem that all journalism has: the facts and what's popular usually don't mix.

<comment><USER12> Actually, I believe that Bozo the Clown is a fellow alum of my alma mater.

<comment><USER13> Singular _alumnus_ (masculine) or _alumna_ (feminine), often abbreviated "alum" to avoid having to remember any of that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an Amazon Prime user, I really hope this happens.

        Free Kindle -> eBay/Craigslist -> cheaper iPad

<comment><USER15> Not to mention that just by giving it away, they are increasing the likelihood of price drops for the iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh nice! If so, then I'm glad I signed up for Amazon Prime. I'm still getting an iPad, though :D

</comment><comment><USER17> I see from other comments that this may not be true, but if it isn't, I'd advise that Amazon should start doing it as soon as they can. It would be an application of the "Gilette model" of sales -- sell the razor, or the printer, or the video-game console cheap, and make your money back on selling blades, cartridges, or cartridges respectively.

For a book-delivery platform like the Kindle, this strikes me as a natural model -- a user is likely to buy a large number of books over his lifetime, and the margin of profit on a $10 e-book makes the margin of profit on a music CD look humble.

There's also the point that the Kindle is not an obviously useful sort of device. Making it widely available will overcome customer reluctance to try it out it, ensuring that it either proves its worth and spreads quickly, or proves its worthlessness and fails quickly, and minimizes the amount of time that Amazon spends in new-product limbo either way.

<comment><USER18> The problem with the Gilette model is, Amazon is also losing money on the razor blades, it seems: [http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=talkBackCom...](http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=talkBackCommentsFull&articleid=CA6657272&talk_back_header_id=6599602)

I guess their strategy must be more like Microsoft's: establish market power early and milk it for the big bux0rz later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kindle and Prime are both things I already kinda want, but haven't pulled the trigger on. I'd go for this in an instant.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was sort of on the edge about renewing my Prime subscription AND about getting a Kindle, but if they gave me a free Kindle I'd be back on Prime (and ordering from Amazon again) in a second.

</comment><comment><USER21> So, uh, I'm an Amazon Prime customer that has already bought a Kindle. What do I get?

Edit: also, why the pic of the old Kindle? Are they giving away leftovers of the first edition?

<comment><USER22> I will give you 50% of market value for your Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just bought one but I wouldn't mind getting another one for free since I'm a prime subscriber. Then my wife and I wouldn't have to fight over the one we have.

This would be a good move by Amazon. The only way they are going to keep the iPad as the 2nd place e-reader is to either give away the kindle or at least drop the price to $99. Then when they release their color touch screen kindle they could charge $199 while still giving away the older model.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting idea. I've had prime for a few years, and I'd probably buy a kindle if they gave me $100 off of one.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great. I just need them to send me 2 or 3 so we don't all fight over it.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's a brilliant rumour.

</comment><comment><USER26> Considering that kindle customers do not own the books they buy, Amazon's kindle will be Free as free first dose of cocaine.

<comment><USER27> Just like with libraries?

I buy books for a few hours of enjoyment. After I've read them, they just sit on a shelf and collect dust. Because most people are like this, the Kindle is not a poor value proposition. Even if you were only allowed to read the book exactly once, it would still be a better value (in terms of hours of time spent per dollar spent) than many things, like seeing a movie.

Everyone hates DRM, but everyone knows that DRM only lasts a few years for a given industry. Eventually the publishers realize that DRM is being used to lock _them_ into a distributor, and they hate that more than "piracy". It happened with music, and it's starting to happen to books.

When people start getting arrested for sharing books with their lovers, then you can link to "The Right To Read" and say "I told you so". In the mean time, consider DRM as a bootstrap that will eventually go away.

<comment><USER28> I mostly agree with you, but with one exception: I'm a bit of a history buff, and I'm not altogether looking forward to a future where all of the history texts are alterable, and nobody owns previous copies.

<comment><USER29> I wonder if this will increase the number of people that sha1 the books to see if it has been tampered. maybe have a distributed system that votes for the correct hash. Or you could have a canonical repository like the library of congress.

<comment><USER30> Or you could have a canonical repository like _the Ministry of Truth._

Fixed that for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> That's nice of them but will anyone still be using this when the iPad drops??

<comment><USER32> I'd certainly use a free Kindle over a $500 iPad.

<comment><USER27> I'd use a $200 Kindle over a free iPad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> All Amazon is doing is making people buy the iPad 2.0 or 3.0.

<comment><USER34> More like hoping they lock in to their platform and feel a need to stick with it after having invested in several eBooks.

<comment><USER35> People can still read on the iPad with the Kindle app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> How many MacBook Airs did this "story" cost?

Sorry, it was too easy.</comment>


T-Mobile CEO Legere Says AT&T And Verizon Are 'F<comment>' That Are 'Raping You' - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/john-legere-profanity-2014-6

</comment><comment><USER2> Seriously: they are just trying to make money. If Verizon is so bad then why are they the biggest carrier? It is because they have the best network. I don't want to pay Verizon 10% of my take home pay, but I also want to have a signal on my phone in Inlet, NY. I welcome some good competition, but until then the options are limited if you want the best coverage.

BTW: I am a happy Republic Wireless customer right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is that quote really extreme? He's right.</comment>