Friedman: Invent, Invent, Invent - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28friedman.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER3> He's nuts and education researcher Roger Schank would agree. You don't need a high school degree and you don't even need math to drive a taxicab.

All this yak about raising the education standard in the USA, when we've got Ph.D.'s in unemployment lines is disheartening. Retraining is the greatest joke. If you're an unemployed IT worker, what is the "next tier up" on the ladder to success? Material physics, which requires 5 years study to get online?

Economics and economists have some credibility in microeconomics, but outside that limited subject they are herd-oriented and usually wrong, wrong, wrong. Ask Nicholas Taleb what he thinks about the economics profession. Hell, look out the window and remember what economists have told you about the economy over the last 20 years. Were their predictions ever better than a crapshoot?

<comment><USER4> I don't think pure academic advancement is the answer as a means to invent and thereby dig ourselves out of the recession. More kids graduating high school really doesn't imply that they'll find better jobs or rather even be better off because of it. I would argue it's even the same metaphor for college. Most people go to get better jobs, but in reality, the risk is just as high to not find one, especially in this economy. Honestly I think we're still at the point where people are too prideful to get work just for work. I know plenty of college grads who are "above" working at Starbucks or restaurants of the like. The problem is that there's a definite devaluing of infrastructure type jobs that keep the country running. I think Mike Rowe (my hero) summed it up best: [http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...](http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html) Maybe it's just another crapshoot, but I think it's another way to rethink our education system.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the link; that talk was brilliant and excellent food for thought to make us think about the "follow your passions" common wisdom around here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a foreigner in the US about to finish a MS degree in IT and travel back home, I find Friedman's words apropos. The limitation on H-1B visas does more harm than good. I've met many young, intelligent knowledge workers about to get their advanced degrees who, unfortunately, find themselves unable to stay in this country because of visa restrictions. Sending those brains back home is a mistake. A new approach is required if the US veritably wants to foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Barrett argues that we should also use this crisis to: 1) require every state to benchmark their education standards against the best in the world, not the state next door"

This would help a lot. I find I can reliably challenge most advanced math students in the United States just by serving them problems from grade-level standard curriculum textbooks from Singapore. For my best students, I have to turn to problems adapted from "key" school textbooks from China.

<comment><USER8> > I find I can reliably challenge most advanced math students in the United > States just by serving them problems from grade-level standard curriculum > textbooks from Singapore.

If it's not asking too much, can you give some examples? Are these contest- style problems, or computational problems?

<comment><USER7> These Singapore Primary Mathematics series placement tests

<http://www.singaporemath.com/Placement_Test_s/86.htm>

give some idea of problem types at different grade levels. They are not exhaustive, of course, as the distributor of the books doesn't want to give away all their content for free online.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, those are great.

"A bell rings every 25 minutes while another bell rings every 40 minutes. Suppose they rang together at 6 a.m., when will they ring together again?"

Very cute. Do you find that students prefer such problems to the normal "plug and chug" type? (Also, when you say "advanced math students", what age are you talking about?)

<comment><USER9> Really? I wasn't that impressed with them: they were mostly arithmetic - <USER2> actual math.

Most of the questions I saw were just annoyances dealing with fractional/decimal arithmetic. There were some interesting word/figure problems, but the difficulty in those usually lay in doing the arithmetic by hand.

<comment><USER7> _I wasn't that impressed with them: they were mostly arithmetic - not actual math._

Same request as the friendly request above to which I responded: what resources would you suggest for examples of "actual math" appropriate for elementary-age students.

I use a great variety of problem sources, published in both English and Chinese, to teach various learners of elementary math supplementary lessons, which is my current occupation. But one can never have too many sources of problems, so what sources do you suggest? There's no "ceiling" of difficulty level, because I have early-elementary-age students who are already well along in secondary-level math, so I have to keep looking for more challenging material all the time for my most advanced students.

<comment><USER10> See the following for general pointers. They may not be the exact material you want though.

<http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/>

[http://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Problem- Solving/dp/047113571...](http://www.amazon.com/Art-Craft-Problem- Solving/dp/0471135712)

I wish I had access to people who were _really good_ at problem solving when I was in my pre-university days. The intention is not to really become an ace problem solver, but to give the brain a real good workout.

<comment><USER7> I concur with the recommendation of the Art of Problem Solving website for all ages of problem-solvers. That's where I first took up the screen name I also use here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Other suggestions:

\- All SBA loans should come with free lifetime supplies of Provigil

\- We should send our kids to Singapore to learn math and physics

\- Earlier specialization

<comment><USER12> I just graduated from a high school in Singapore and I'm heading to Stanford this fall. And I think the Singapore education system is _extremely_ overrated. I felt like I learned nothing in high school. Of course, the math problems might be tough and Singaporean kids might do well in international competitions. But really, do you know a single great company that was founded in Singapore? There's a complete lack of creativity and critical thought here.

<comment><USER11> Sometimes it seems that _Singapore_ is a single great company that was founded in Singapore. To address your point though - I'm surprised that you lump creativity and critical thought into the same bag?

Also, judging from the admissions behavior of top PhD programs in quantitative subjects (and assuming they know what they're doing), high performance in math competitions _is_ a good indicator of _both_ critical thought _and_ creativity.

(Also, I hope it was clear that my list was being a bit ironic...)

<comment><USER12> High performance in math competitions is simply a result of a lot of training. There are only so many different kinds of problems and only so many different techniques that can be employed to solve such problems (the kind that come out in olympiads, etc). I'm not saying there's no creativity in math (absolutely, there is) but coming up with a new theorem is very different from simply knowing which theorem to apply where.

I didn't really say critical thought and creativity are the same thing but yeah, I shouldn't have lumped them together. From my experience, critical thought is much more common here than creativity but even that is not applied to anything outside quantitative subjects, such as politics or philosophy.

P.S. There are many creative, smart people here but they are creative because they are creative not _because_ of the school system. What happens to these people later in life? Why don't they found companies? I suspect the answer here is because of the Singaporean mentality where entrepreneurship isn't valued as much as a stable job. But even more that, it's because these people are often given scholarships to study overseas. These scholarships have bonds where you have to work for the company (in most cases, the government) for 5/6 years. By the time they get out of their bond, there are already ~30 or older, have a family and can't bothered to switch/start companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Inventing something is the easy part. If you don't do it, someone else will. Making it into a business is what's hard and that alone is what makes your invention special.

<comment><USER14> I agree, "Adopt, Adopt, Adtop" is much more important. Michael Schrage has made this point many times: "innovation is not what inventors develop, it's what customers adopt." It would be more useful for Friedman to encourage experimentation by business, especially to look at practices in adjacent industries that could be incorporated into their own business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> SarbOx has something to do with starting up small businesses? I'm glad to see someone's (Craig Barrett, in this case) parochial interests being so poorly disguised as a prescription for American economic woes.

<comment><USER16> ISTR pg has an essay on this somewhere, but anything you do to make the top- end payout for a business starter worse has a disproportionate effect on their willingness to incur the risks of starting a business. If SarbOx makes it harder to take a company public, which is one way to get a payout, it can have that effect. Economics isn't just about first-order effects.

In fact, it is sufficient for it to be _perceived_ that it limits your top-end gain, even if it doesn't, and I think that I confidently say that such a perception exists in many people's minds, even though I could not say a word about SarbOx's true effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Russian companies that actually made things that the world wanted were virtually nonexistent"

Hmm, make something people want. I heard that somewhere else too.

</comment><comment><USER18> He talks about Russia and China, but not Europe. Why?

</comment><comment><USER19> He had me until

3) lower the corporate tax rate

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone out there actually believe getting a high school diploma does anything to increase an individual's productivity? I thought it pretty clear by now that people advance through the educational system to their abilities. You can fiddle with methodologies and testing all you want, but the raw material is what it is.

Government funding of scientific research _is_ the problem. About two thirds of scientists make their living off the government, directly or indirectly. We need less of that, not more. Scientists need to stop making ultimately useless death machines for the DOD and other government agencies and they need to start working on technologies for the free market. Eliminating DARPA and throwing all the scientists who depend on it out of work would be a good start. They'd be forced to come up with business ideas.

The problem with health care in America isn't that too many aren't "covered," it's that too many can't afford medicines and procedures because they're too expensive. Costs and prices need to be driven down. That would happen right away if you eliminated the tax deductibility of health care benefits. (Maybe give an offsetting tax credit to make it political palatable.) Millions of people would opt out of their employer provided plans and go comparison shopping for much cheaper high deductible plans so they could pocket the savings. This consumer driven pressure would force insurance prices down dramatically. The high deductibles of these cheap plans would have people comparison shopping for the cheapest medical services, which they basically don't do now. This would drive down prices dramatically.

<comment><USER21> Eliminate DARPA? The majority of what they fund is really cool, useful technology that just happens to be a little too risky or costly for businesses to fund (especially with capital harder to come by today). Look over their list of projects; you'll find a shortage of "ultimately useless death machines" and an abundance of worthwhile science and engineering. I doubt you could have made a convincing business case for building the ARPANet -- too expensive, and how are you going to earn money from it? -- but it turned out to have been worth doing anyway. Likewise for most of the DARPA projects I've been seeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "how America should get out of its current economic crisis."

Put the bankers in check, put the media conglomerates in check, put the politicians in jail and put everybody else to work.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is another problem with Open Source. Americans need to create something of value to the rest of the world that the rest of the world is willing to pay for. If we continue building open source software, then the rest of the world never has to pay us for our innovation. They just compile it themselves and leave us in the dust.

<comment><USER24> So you mean to say only Americans build FOSS?</comment></comment>


ON Semiconductor to Acquire Fairchild Semiconductor for $2.4B in Cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/newsItem.do?article=3452 <comment><USER2> It's an interesting combination. ON would become the predominant manufacturer of discretes. There's still competition at IR, Vishay and Infineon (and ST if you can get past their horrible datasheets). But it doesn't really add to their portfolio, just takes away a competitor.

I haven't done the math but it doesn't seem like a great deal or a good plan.

<comment><USER3> Doesn't Vishay own IR (and everybody else)? What about the Japanese (Hitachi, Toshiba, Sanyo, Panasonic) are they in the game?

<comment><USER4> Infineon owns IR.

<comment><USER3> My mistake. The SKUs I used to order from IRF are now sold by Vishay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First, National Semiconductor buys Fairchild Semiconductor, then spits then out before they are acquired by TI, now On Semiconductor wants to work them over. These mergers and acquisitions tell me that the epoch of non-linear growth is over in the semiconductor industry.

<comment><USER6> It's a couple of things.

First, cell phones ate _EVERYTHING_. So, the only volume is in cell phones. Cell phones only need a few different _types_ of chips but they need them in _massive_ quantities.

Second, the cost of creating a chip is too high. The "maker" culture relies on the fact that creating a PCB is _cheap_. Between the cost for EDA VLSI tools and the NRE for creating a mask set, you blow $100K before you even get started making a chip. I suspect that we probably have the ability to digitally image 1.0um or larger features so we don't have to cut a mask set, but it's a chicken/egg problem. Since nobody wants 1.0um+ processes anymore, nobody will develop the technology for them, so nobody will design for them, so nobody will want 1.0um+ processes.

Third, modern fab capacity is _ridiculous_. A _single_ 300mm wafer can produce _70,000_ 1mm^2 chips or 700 1cm^2 (a big chip nowadays). How many customers can consume those kinds of volumes?

<comment><USER7> > First, cell phones ate EVERYTHING. So, the only volume is in cell phones.

Not sure where your getting this. The MCU market dwarfs the cellular market, last time I looked it was on the order of 25B MCUs sold per year and the majority are still 8bit MCU. There are only ~1B cell phones produced per year. I don't think the discrete market is really all that driven by cell phones.

<comment><USER6> The problem with you argument is that 8-bit MCU's are a _rounding error_.

The Cortex A series cores are around 2mmx2mm. The Cortex M series are something like .2mmx.2mm. It looks like my 10mmx10mm comment was way off.

So, let's assume that the 8-bit MCU's are .1mmx.1mm. That's probably _WAY_ too big, but let's start somewhere. That means that you can fit 7,000,000 on a wafer. For roughly 3,500 wafers for the entire, worldwide capacity of embedded MCU's.

The entire, worldwide, _annual_ market for MCU's is _3,500_ silicon wafers per year. That's the same number of wafer starts that a big fab has _IN A WEEK_.

And that was 2008. [http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1169357](http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1169357)

Modern fabs can pump out a million a week: electroiq.com/blog/2014/01/tsmc- samsung-and-micron-top-list-of-ic-industry-capacity-leaders/

This is why everybody wants to produce bigger chips like SOC's and why Intel will never switch to ARM until it's about to go under. If your chip is too small, you can't move enough to fill your fab _even if you give them away free_.

<comment><USER8> What will be the impact of this on jobs? I see a lot of layoffs in the semiconductor industry. I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer. I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else.

<comment><USER6> > I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer.

Moore's Law slowing down is _good_ for firmware people. Optimizing, by hand, for 10% matters when you can't just get a factor of 2 automatically every 18 months.

> I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks > like more of a hype than anything else.

The embedded space is power and cost constrained. Power constrained because of batteries and their inability to deal with RF. Cost constrained because memory now makes up 75% plus of chip area which defines the cost.

IoT _is_ a lot of hype. The problem is that IoT is _LOW VOLUME_ , and nobody wants to deal with that. So, everybody wants you to adopt their "highly scalable" (har har) backend and extract rent from the people doing the real work who are creating and marketing the application device. And, everybody decent at producing devices is also smart enough to realize that the money is in the backend so they refuse to play along.

The company that is willing to slog through the swamp of low volume will be the one who stumbles into the high volume application. Think Qualcomm getting started by tracking trucks and stumbling into cellular phones.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Login or Logout or Sign in or Sign out - <AUTHOR> http://0xtc.com/2009/06/25/login-logout-vs-sign-in-sign-out-vs-log-in-sign-out-a-short-roundup.xhtml <comment><USER2> Lesson learned: Diagonal stripes, low contrast text, and angry fruit salad colors give me a headache.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a 3rd element that goes hand-in-hand with these:

Create an Account

Sign Up

Join

Become a Member

</comment><comment><USER4> Sign in/out makes more sense to me because it focuses on user activities. Logs are back-end functions that users shouldn't have to think about.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think it really matters much one way or the other, though I do like the list of sites and they way they have chosen. The only one I do not like how it does it is twitter, login/sign out... though with the recent redesign they have changed it to sign in/sign out.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to see some actual data on the relative usability. Maybe Nielson could take care of it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Whatever happened to log _off_ anyways?

</comment><comment><USER8> What a lame post :(</comment>


Show HN: Banky.cc- the easiest way to get paid online - <AUTHOR> https://banky.cc <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I just launched banky.cc.

banky.cc is a tool that lets anybody accept online credit card payments with a minimal amount of configuration and effort.

banky.cc uses Stripe to manage credit card payments securely

This is still an early stage project with very simple functionality for now. I'm just trying to get some initial feedback and interest in the product

Thanks for looking,

Chris

<comment><USER2> It's not clear to me what it offers compared to just using Stripe.</comment></comment>


Amazon Web Services' growth unrelenting - <AUTHOR> http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/05/20/amazon-web-services-growth-unrelenting.html <comment><USER2> This doesn't even account for sites that are using AWS but fronting with a CDN (like reddit, for example).

<comment><USER3> I wonder what percentage of AWS traffic is from Netflix. Single digits?

<comment><USER2> A lot less than you would think. The majority of Netflix outbound traffic (the movie bits) comes from the CDN -- AWS is only the control plane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> AWS has gained huge popularity I think on two counts: one is where GoDaddy suffered quite a backlash in the media. And two, it has launched fantastic services for a whole host of entrepreneurs who get the service at no cost for the first year.

That could potentially have fueled the use of the service, but lower revenues.

It may make sense to see the revenues a year post these number to actually assess the contribution of AWS to Amazon's overall revenues.

<comment><USER5> I tend to doubt folks who were using GoDaddy's hosting went to AWS.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I think AWS tapped into an untapped market - full blown virtual machines (servers) at low and pay-by-the-hour cost.

There will always be a market for shared hosting - GoDaddy likely lost out to the growing numbers of shared hosting providers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would have guessed that a slightly larger percentage of Amazon's revenue is from AWS (according to the article, it's about 5%).

<comment><USER8> Amazon makes big revenue as a retailer, even though it's low margin. AWS is all margin, though. That ~5% is worth 3.8bn in 2013 and will hit 7% ($8.8bn) in 2015.

[http://www.zdnet.com/amazons-aws-3-8-billion-revenue- in-2013...](http://www.zdnet.com/amazons-aws-3-8-billion-revenue-in-2013-says- analyst-7000009461/)</comment></comment>


What happens when AI genders people, and what does this mean for trans people? - <AUTHOR> http://neutrois.me/2016/03/25/fv-through-ai-eye#bVc6 <comment> jack-r-abbit > _This could become a safety issue in the future if a robot misgenders a > trans person publicly..._

This bit confused me. First off, how is that a safety issue? And second, how is that any worse than if it misgenders a non-trans person? I can understand it being annoying (as I am often mistaken for a woman when on the phone or in the drive-thru) but how is that a safety issue or strictly a trans issue?

<comment><USER2> Think of trans people in red states, or places like Russia or the middle east.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Google already misgenders me and that's a good thing. I'm not trans. Google also doesn't bracket me in the correct age group.

I am cool with it because, I don't like being pigeonholed and advertised to. The more incorrect data points Google has, the better.

<comment><USER2> But that just means you've been put in the wrong pigeon hole. :)

<comment><USER3> Yes, and that's better than being in the right one.

Please Google, advertise more Russian brides and male belly fat solutions to me. I can't get enough.

<comment><USER2> If that's your pigeonhole, I can see why you wouldn't want to be tracked :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think they're all pretty bad tbh. They aren't very good at guessing age, and guessing gender is harder especially if you're young or have rounded features.

</comment><comment><USER5> The truth has value in itself.</comment>


GitHub Says 'No Thanks' to Bots — Even if They're Nice  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/github-bots/ <comment><USER2> I'm quoted in the article and I wanted to clear one thing up that was missing from it.

When bots get reported to us by people using GitHub our support folks reach out to the bot account owner and encourage them to build a GitHub service[1] instead. As a service, the same functionality would still be available to everyone using GitHub, but it would be opt-in instead.

A few months ago we heard from some developers of service integrations that beyond the existing API features, it would be handy to be able to provide a form of "status" for commits. We added the commit status API [2] in September to accommodate that. We're always open to feedback on how the API and service integrations can improve.

The point is, GitHub services are a much better way to build integrations on GitHub.

[1] <https://github.com/github/github-services> [2] <https://github.com/blog/1227-commit-status-api>

<comment><USER3> Well, devs are always going to create bots. They're a fact of life.

Why not establish an opt-out convention similar to robots.txt? The idea is that people who want to opt-out would create a ".robots" file in their repo, with "none" in it. Any bot that doesn't respect the .robots file is hellbanned.

The problem with opt-in is that people won't use it unless they (a) know it's available, (b) know how to get it, and (c) actually go get it. So people don't really do that. But establishing an opt-out convention like this solves the problem entirely, and it's simple.

<comment><USER4> Opt-out sucks because you are forced to deal with it. Opt-in makes the most sense because there are no hurdles to jump in order to _not_ be bothered.

If no one finds or wants to use your service without it being forced on them, it can not be that great of a service.

<comment><USER5> you could have a single opt-in to bots-as-a-whole (as a github account setting rather than per-repo), and then blacklist individual bots if they end up being spammy. that seems like a nice balance between "do nothing by default" and frictionless adoption of the feature.

<comment><USER4> While this is a fine idea, why can't that be "opt-out to bots -as-a-whole (as a github account setting rather than per-repo), and then whitelist individual bots if you want to find out if they provide some utility"? That seems like the proper balance between "do nothing by default" and the lest friction required to use bots without requiring those who don't want to be involved at all needing to do anything?

If it's about discovery of bots, then come up with some meaningful way to make them discoverable (presumably better than the Apple App Store _zing_ ) without people needing to be exposed to them by default.

<comment><USER5> white listing individual bots is not low-friction. ideally i want the bots to discover me, not vice versa.

<comment><USER4> You do, but no one else does.

How about a header in email that the sender can include that forces the email to the top of your inbox and makes it undeleteable? You can opt-out by having an email address of firstname.lastname@example.com all the time.

<comment><USER3> _You do, but no one else does._

How small-minded. There are many of us who want to be discovered by bots. We just keep quiet because people like you have such strong opinions and aren't afraid to be mean about them.

Wouldn't it be ironic if your opinion was in the minority?

<comment><USER4> The people who want opt-in are not the bad guys here, and neither are the people who want opt-out. The bad guys are those who poisoned the well, tragedy of the commons, by abusing the system. Unfortunately, there is a greater chance of abuse than there is utility, and it's more difficult for everyone to manage opt-out on an individual occurrence basis than it is to manage opt-in centrally by _trying_ to ban bots across the board. And neither are that actually that successful, despite there having been individual successes in some communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We got a lot of angry feedback about the whitespace bot that was roaming GitHub for a while. We tried to sit back and let people deal with it themselves (e.g. send feedback/patches to the bot owner).

We're not opposed to bots or services. We encourage it, and use one ourselves. The key is making it opt-in so it doesn't bother people that don't want it.

Travis CI is a popular addon, but they don't have a bot that runs tests and tries to get you to setup their service. They just focus on providing a bad ass service that you _want_ to setup.

Edit: You 'opt' in to a bot one of two ways:

1\. You add their GitHub Service to your repository (see the Service Hooks tab of your Repository Settings). This is how Travis CI started out.

2\. You setup an OAuth token with the service. Travis does this now, and provides a single button to enable CI builds for one of my repositories.

<comment><USER7> I distinctly remember a Travis bot sending me like 4 pull requests that added a `.travis.yml` file...

<comment><USER8> That was a troll bot someone not affiliated with travis wrote, as I recall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > But here was a pull request from a GitBot. Bots don't debate. "It's like the > first time you see a self-driving car on the road," Michaels-Ober says.

Good thing he likened it to something we can all relate to.

</comment><comment><USER10> In case any github people are reading this: you also have an annoying approach to web crawling "robots". Your /robots.txt is based on a white-list of user agents with a human readable comment telling the robot where to request to be whitelisted. Using robots.txt to guide whitelisted robots (like Google and Bing) is against the spirit of the convention. This practice encourages robot authors to ignore the robots.txt and will eventually reduce the utility of the whole convention. Please stop doing this!

<comment><USER11> Robots.txt is a suicide note.

<http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt>

My personal server returns a 410 to robots.txt requests.

<comment><USER12> I have no clue as to why the author of that shit is as angry as he is, but I have zero interest in his opinion until such time as he learns to show me the issues, and not just blindly assume that anybody who is not as enlightened as him is a blind idiot.

<comment><USER11> Okay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Git bots may not be that impressive right now. But imagine a future where an incredibly knowledgeable "programmer" is working with you on every project, doing lots of the busy work, and even code reviewing every commit _you_ push. Except that programmer is a bot. This future is possible - but we need to encourage it, and not shut down the precursor at the first "sign of life".

If someone has a good track record of useful pull requests, would you mind if they contributed to your project? Would you care if it was really easy for them to write that helpful code because they've crafted the ultimate development environment that practically writes the code for them? So why do you care if the editor actually writes _all_ the code for them?

That's essentially what's happening when someone writes a bot and it makes a pull request.

Sure, it sucks if there are unhelpful bots or _people_ spamming up a storm of pull requests. But the solution to this problem is not to ban all bots or all people - it's to develop a system that filters the helpful "entities" from the unhelpful ones. This might be hard in some fields like politics and education, but in software development this is tractable, right now.

I sincerely hope that this is what actually happens. This is one of the first steps towards a world where common vulnerabilities are a thing of the past because whenever one is committed, it is noticed and fixed by the "army of robots". When an API is deprecated, projects can be automatically transitioned to the new version by a helpful bot. Where slow code can be automatically analyzed and replaced.

There are details to be figured out, an ecosystem to be constructed, perhaps more granular rating systems to be made for code producing entities (human or bot). Because it's "easier" for a bot to send a pull request, the standard of helpfulness could perhaps be higher. Communication channels need to be built between coding entities, and spam detection will become more important. But simple blocking and a cumbersome opt-in system is not a good solution.

This might be a stopgap until better systems are built, but it is not something we should be content with.

<comment><USER14> You need to _clearly make the difference between_ :

1\. real people (they can make regular pull requests)

2\. bots advertising you a code/assets improvement service (this _should never be in the form of pull requests_ you should see this as _adds_ and you should have the opportunity to disable them and github could try to get some revenue by taxing the guys advertising through this)

3\. smart "code bots" that could actually do what you say: maybe at first start by doing code reviews, then static code analysis, then even start refactoring your code or writing new code, who knows... but _you would have these in a different tab, like "robots pull requests"_ , at least until we have human level general AI :) ...for the same reason that you have different play/work-spaces for adults and children and animals (you don't want your son and your neighbors' pets running around your office or bumping into you in the smoking lounge of a strip-club!).

EDIT+: What the bot owner did in this case was to advertise without paying the guy on whose land he placed the billboard (and on whose land he himself stays without paying rent), except that it's much more intrusive than a regular billboard you can ignore!

<comment><USER15> Those categories are artificial. What about a bot finding patches to send but with a human review? And an army of humans sending spam PRs like they create fake accounts on Facebook?

The gp solution seem more adaptive and open to the unknown.

<comment><USER14> (3) is artificial, at least for now. But I will always want to see the difference between:

1\. Pull request or issues file by real human being for non-advertising purposes (using the equivalent of a "spam filter" for them)

2\. Any other stuff! - I want this labeled as "something else", regardless if it useful or spammy real bots or "human-bots" sending me adds.

It's a great future what the gp suggests, and I want it, but for now I want a clear distinction between "ham" and "spam", and for now it's probably better to separate "really human made content that's not advertising" and call everything else "possibly spam". If the need appears, they can start filtering the real spam. For now I just want everything that doesn't directly come from a human labeled as "bot pull requests" or "bot issues" or anything else, but labeled!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A bot which does lossless compression on images in open source projects and only submits a pull request (with all the relevant details) if there was a > X percent filesize savings? That's not spam, that's just helpful...

<comment><USER17> Potentially, yes, but what if the idea catches on and you have swarms of overlapping bots submitting pull requests? And what about bots that are well- intended, but dubiously helpful?

You might log in one day and find that your repo has pull requests from fifteen image optimizing bots, thirty-eight prettifying bots for different languages, four .gitignore patching bots, seven <!DOCTYPE inserting bots, eight JS semicolon removers, nine JS semicolon inserters, twenty-four subtly broken MySQL query sanitizers, and seventy-nine bots fighting over the character encoding of the readme file.

<comment><USER18> What about the well-intentioned but dubiously helpful PR from someone who just doesn't know what they're doing? What if that were to catch on and you have swarms of overlapping non-programmers submitting PRs?

These slippery slope arguments are a bit silly. If you're running an open- source project, you can either accept PRs or not, and if you're accepting them, you can review the code and approve it or not approve it. A PR from a bot is the same as a PR from anyone else, it's either helpful or not helpful. It's not currently a problem, and it's too early to speculate about worst-case future scenarios.

<comment><USER17> >What if that were to catch on and you have swarms of overlapping non- programmers submitting PRs?

Humans can easily look at the existing pull requests and see if their work is redundant. Bots can't. And as hackinthebochs said, human-submitted pull requests involve effort which limits them.

It's not really a slippery slope argument. It's more an application of what we can see having happened with bots in the past. Email spam for legitimate offers is, after all, just about as annoying as email spam for scams.

<comment><USER19> Why can't bots look at existing pull requests?

<comment><USER17> They _can_ , but it's unrealistic to think that they will do so one percent as intelligently as a human contributor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to optimise my images. (The images on my website.) I looked at <https://github.com/imageoptimiser> but didn't see which tool would do that, or any way to contact the author. Is there an image optimisation tool in there somewhere?

<comment><USER21> If you're on a Mac, ImageOptim is the perfect tool that combines a bunch of open projects to crush down images. I use it daily, it's an incredible (free) tool.

<http://imageoptim.com/>

If you're not on a Mac, the individual tools are still quite usable. Here's some of them.

<http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm> (pngOUT)

<http://optipng.sourceforge.net/>

<http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/>

<https://github.com/kud/jpegrescan>

<http://freecode.com/projects/jpegoptim>

<http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/>

<comment><USER22> Wouldn't that project also benefit from jpegtran?

<comment><USER21> ImageOptim includes it, I just couldn't remember the full name at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wouldn't mind bots that fix spelling mistakes in comments or even actual bugs in code. But why not let github projects be configured to allow certain kinds of bots?

<comment><USER24> Consider bots as "plugins" that you activate on a per-repo basis. I like this idea!

<comment><USER25> Isn't that exactly what Service Hooks or OAuth-authed systems provide?

<comment><USER26> I think that's what jevinskie was implying, as in this is a non issue since service hooks are already established so there is no reason bots should be allowed, they should plug into the correct API.

<comment><USER25> > I think that's what jevinskie was implying

I'm not sure he'd have written that he "likes the idea" and would have failed to mention Service Hooks if he did.

<comment><USER26> I read his comment as either sarcasm or passive aggressiveness.

"Wouldn't it be a great idea if there was a 'hook' mechanism you could opt into that provides a way to add additional functionality to their site from third parties?"

Or maybe not. I don't know, text doesn't convey emotion and body language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Right now they can be an annoyance, but this is something that could easily become a great feature of github, the same way that @tweets and #hashtags innovations came from the twitter community.

I would love for github to make bots something that you can subscribe to on a "bot subscription page". I think they can be incredibly useful so long as they aren't promiscuous, unwelcome and frequent enough to be seen as spam. You should be able to handle these the same way you handle permissions for third- party apps on Facebook or Twitter. The subscription page could also provide bot ratings and suggest bots that are likely to be useful for your project.

This approach would also create a way where these apps could be useful for private repos as well.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sounds like a debate between opt-in and opt-out. Why not both? Do an AB test of a Bot vs. a Service. In some cases, opt-in is good (see: organ donors), in other cases it's bad (see: Internet Explorer).

What if there was a community-vote that turned a bot and a particular version of said bot from Opt-Out (app style) to Opt-In (bot style)?

I, for one, welcome our bot-coding overlords that clean up my code and optimize it on each commit. Might save me a lot of time and a lot of power and thought... if it's peer reviewed, like all open source software.

<comment><USER29> > opt-in is good (see: organ donors)

I prefer when people have to specifically say 'yes, I want my dead body to go to waste instead of saving lives'.

<comment><USER12> Hey, when you put in price-controls don't complain about a lack of supply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I personally would use gists a lot more if they were indexed by google. As it is I feel like I'm putting code down a black hole when I create a gist.

<comment><USER31> Good idea; but maybe only the ones with a title and description; to index the ones that have a clear purpose and not some random code without any idea how to use it or what is for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Question to the Github team:

Nuuton is currently crawling the web. The plans include crawling Github (actually, Github has a specific and exclisive crawler built for it). Is that permitted? If so, what are the rules? If not, to whom may I speak regarding it? I know DuckDuckGo does it, but I don't know if they are crawlin gyour site or just using what the Bing index currently has.

<comment><USER33> Not connected to github, but look at <https://github.com/robots.txt>, specifically the first 2 lines.

<comment><USER12> So yes, but only if you change your bot name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I do think bots can be a great part of software development. I love the likes of travisci and codeclimate integrating with GitHub - GitHub just need to build a better app to deal with them. I assume private repos don't have bots bothering them, but maybe they want to allow some? Checkboxes for types of bot services you would like to allow per project?

<comment><USER6> We have GitHub Services: <https://github.com/github/github-services>. Anyone can submit one. We'll probably accept it as long as the code is decent, is tested and documented, and is for a stable service. If you're running some custom build on a personal hosting account, use the web hooks. You can attach web hooks or services to any of these events: <http://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/types/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've been annoyed by GitHub bots and enjoyed their contributions. IMO, GitHub could/should have taken this opportunity to solve a problem and (once again!) change how people code for the better through collaboration.

Perhaps now that they've taken money, they aren't as interested in tackling new problems. Perhaps that's reasonable, since they'll need a lot of that money to hire and keep operations folks who can keep the site up.

</comment><comment><USER36> I heard that Google is a "bot".

Do they say "No Thanks" to themselves?

Maybe the title should read: Google Says "No Thanks" to Other Bots

<comment><USER37> The title has nothing to do with Google.</comment></comment>


Putin signs law making Russian apps mandatory on smartphones, computers - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-internet-software-idUSKBN1Y61Z4 <comment><USER2> How do they enforce this?

I mean, can Microsoft, Google, and Apple reasonably just say "Uhh, no" and keep shipping products without these applications installed? Does that then put the burden on Russian retailers to open/tamper with the devices themselves before resale?

How can Russia reasonably force foreign manufacturers to comply with this? Are they in a position to say "No more importing Microsoft PC's!" Are they going to then require the use of a Russian linux distro? It would seem to me that our manufacturers are in the perfect position to band together and inform oppressive regimes that it's time to either design their own prison-stack or stop placing demands on companies based in free, democratic nations.

What if I am a Russian linux user? Will the government come to my house and inspect my system to ensure it is running the required level of spyware?

<comment><USER3> SORM

<comment><USER4> had to bring this comment back from the dead. more context on SORM: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM)

 _> SORM (Russian: Система оперативно-разыскных мероприятий, lit. 'System for Operative Investigative Activities') is the technical specification for lawful interception interfaces of telecommunications and telephone networks operating in Russia. The current form of the specification enables the targeted surveillance of both telephone and Internet communications. Initially implemented in 1995 to allow access to surveillance data for the FSB, in subsequent years the access has been widened to other law enforcement agencies."_</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft strong-arming Valley startups? - <AUTHOR> http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/01/18/the-hard-side-of-mister-softie/

<comment><USER2> _Naturally-- and no one is complaining this is unfair--Microsoft also demands reciprocity of contacts. They say, in effect, we'll show you our Hotmail contacts, but you have to let your users share theirs when they sign up for Microsoft's Windows Live services.

...

"Microsoft is the anti-data-portability company."_

Seems to be the opposite to me.

<comment><USER3> I think the complaint is about everything other than this detail, such as forcing startups to use Messenger exclusively and give MS first shot at search deals.</comment></comment>


How to Inflate Your Stats - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/CFmRV <comment><AUTHOR> Source: [http://www.businessinsider.com/what-income-makes-you- middle-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/what-income-makes-you-middle-class- in-silicon-valley-2018-2)

I expected better from BI</comment>


How and Why We Designed Lucida (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2014/10/how-and-why-we-designed-lucida.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting to see just how finely tuned it was to practicality and technological constraints rather than an artistic aesthetic. Those constraints have relaxed enough that we are more free to explore beautiful typography now.

<comment><USER3> I've been using Lucida Console as coding font for the past 15 years, due to its great readability at 9 pt (i.e. 12 pixels line height, though nowadays I add two additional pixels of line spacing). Still haven't found a better replacement.

<comment><USER4> I like Lucida Console, but I usually use Lucida Sans Typewriter[1] as my editor font. It's a bit taller and skinnier than Lucida Console, and works well with a line-height of about 1.2.

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font- list/lucida...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/lucida- sans-typewriter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the forever useable font family. Despite being quite so old and yet modern till date. Alot of the designs created by us utilizes lucida as well as fonts inspired by lucida. Over the decade, we've experienced wide acceptance of lucida font family by our subscribers.</comment>


If Feynman were accused of sexual harassment, would we have lost his insights? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> And in the other timeline, they're saying "Phew! Can you imagine what would have happened if we hadn't taken discrimination, bias, and harassment seriously back in the 1960s and 1970s? We would never have had the brilliance of Ricarda Feynmann or Jamal Watson."

Seriously though, I think Feynmann would have figured it out and adapted. Some say he was notably nonsexist when it came to teaching or talking physics, but horribly sexist when it came to everything else. Maybe he could just move some of that from one column to another.

Interventions should be appropriate. People are complicated. There are some high profile cases (usually involving "Twitter activism") that collapse all that complexity, which may be good for awareness or motivating institutions, but it's often bad for justice.

</comment><comment><USER3> If the STEM disciplines weren't rife with sexual harassment, would we have lost the insights of countless women?

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you considered that sexual harassment has caused the loss of insights from plenty of brilliant women?

</comment><comment><USER5> Hopefully not.

In the heat of the moment certain people would have thought it necessary to disregard everything he said, but over time cooler heads would remember that a person is not a monolith. We can appreciate the good and dislike the bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can we? It's not looking likely that Kevin Spacey may work again, despite his clear talents as an actor. I wouldn't call Spacey's work life-changing, but it does bring a level of satisfaction and happiness to a number of people. And yet we'll now be deprived of that satisfaction. I'm saying that horrible people can make meaningful, positive contributions, but in the current politically charged environment we seem to be acting before we consider that.

<comment><USER6> >Can we? It's not looking likely that Kevin Spacey may work again, despite his clear talents as an actor.

You seem to be surprised that a person in the business of selling his public image can't sell it successfully once that image has been irreparably tarnished. (You are aware that popular actors are celebrities, and what they do off screen matters, right?)

> I'm saying that horrible people can make meaningful, positive contributions, > but in the current politically charged environment we seem to be acting > before we consider that.

Where's the evidence for that? It's always a business decision. Spacey has been discarded because it is profitable to do so.

What a surprise, pissing off a <population group> that contains <the majority of the population> has a negative impact on your career as a public person. Who would have thunk?

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't agree "profitable to do so." Where are your statistics to back up that claim?

These aren't arguments; they're hypotheses. "Pissing off" huh? Because a few jerkoffs Tweet they're upset doesn't mean most of America cares. That's the problem.

<comment><USER6> >Don't agree "profitable to do so." Where are your statistics to back up that claim?

"Profitable to do so" in the eyes of his employees. Do you really think these decisions are made to appease Twitter commenters?

Even successful, loved series end up being canceled.

> Because a few jerkoffs Tweet they're upset doesn't mean most of America > cares.

Because a few jerkoffs don't care doesn't mean that a lot of people (enough to affect profit margins and public image of the employer) don't :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It depends on when in his life this hypothetical is supposed to have happened. Given the era he did his important work it'd have to be rape that he was accused of to have had a major impact on his employment as a professor. Sexual harassment was rampant back then. Fortunately times have changed.

What is the purpose of the question? Is there some broader point you are trying to make? The only thing that I can guess is that you are trying to point out that people can make great contributions to human knowledge and also be crappy people in certain respects. I don't think anyone denies this as being true.

EDIT: If it happened at the beginning of his career then he possibly wouldn't have become a professor and thus not have made his discoveries. If it happened at the end of his career then the discoveries would have already been made and hence nothing lost.

<comment><USER5> I think the point they are trying to make is that we should be careful to not completely erase someone because of crimes they may commit, sexual or otherwise.

<comment><USER7> It's an odd way of trying to make that point. Wouldn't it be better to just directly say that? It doesn't seem controversial. A better scenario to contemplate would be the Nazi medical experiments. Absolutely horrific in every way. Suppose they were beneficial to our understanding of some major disease. Should we use the results?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd also say we should absolutely use the results in that case. But that's not the hypothetical. I was asking whether to blacklist someone who might make future contributions to humanity based on an accusation is really a reasonable sacrifice.

<comment><USER8> In an era when there were few women scientists around for someone to harrass, there is little risk employing the harrasser. Now that there are enough women in the field, the harrasser will cause more damage to the scientific output of the organization than he can contribute.

In this more enlightened age, people should call the harrasser out on their behavior before it becomes a big problem, and the harrasser should have enough awareness to stop the damaging behavior, which is not necessary for their work.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook's old web design will disappear in September - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/21/21395079/facebook-new-design-default-september-classic-interface-disappearing <comment><USER2> The new design isn't bad per se but I have two complaints: why can't I switch off chat or disable/hide it? (Perhaps I can but I didn't look hard enough) and secondly: performance seems to suffer badly when you are reading through long discussion threads or simply scrolling down in a group to go back e.g a couple of months. They are obviously lazy loading this into the DOM and storing it inefficiently as it's equally slow in both Chrome, Safari etc. This can easily be solved by just being able to load that content more statically with page selection e.g. click on page 30 at the bottom of the screen instead of having infinite scrolling which nobody actually needs.

</comment><comment> andrew-dc I still don't even have the option to switch. Not sure why. Maybe Facebook noticed my epic unfollowing of nearly everyone and everything to clean up the feed... haha.</comment>


Kevin Mitnick gives his thoughts on Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8aXx3K_lKY

<comment><USER2> Wow, he is a legend.

I don't understand, though, why he portrays "hackers" as guys doing the wrong stuff. He seems to condone the media's misunderstanding of "hackers" vs. "crackers" by calling himself only a hacker and not a cracker.

</comment><comment><USER3> That by all measures, was a shit interview.</comment>


Two dead, many injured, after car plows into crowd at SXSW festival - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/13/breaking-two-dead-many-injured-after-car-plows-into-crowd-at-south-by-southwest-festival/ <comment><USER2> I come to Hacker News to get away from depressing news like this. Can we, as a community, please stop upvoting content that isn't intellectually stimulating?

It's already really difficult for me to believe any one of the many front page submissions about MH370 could "gratify one's intellectual curiosity". However, I just ignore them and assume some us must really love aviation. This article is just too far though. I can think of no possible way anybody could find this intellectually interesting.

<comment><USER3> In this case, I think it's more "lots of people from HN community are at SXSW", vs. any intellectual stimulation from "car crashes into a crowd of people".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awful. Was down there just after it happened, apparently, but didn't realize.

Here's a video of the aftermath: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtOAdOFYtnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtOAdOFYtnA)</comment>


Personalized Nutrition by Prediction of Glycemic Responses (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://fermatslibrary.com/s/personalized-nutrition-by-prediction-of-glycemic-responses <comment><USER2> I recently switched doctors because I told her I wanted to do blood sugar tests after each meal and throughout the day to see how my food intake (or lack thereof, since I do IF) would impact my blood sugar. She literally sent me a screed about how I was an idiot and the mortality rate for people who do this type of thing is much higher.

(I realize I can just go to CVS and buy the tools to do it, but I do find all the options overwhelming and haven't had time to do the research.)

I'm glad to see this happening.

<comment><USER3> > She literally sent me a screed about how I was an idiot and the mortality > rate for people who do this type of thing is much higher.

What was her evidence?

<comment><USER2> She claimed "studies" showed this. Honestly, I called Kaiser immediately and requested a new PCP and didn't really care to delve into it. I wasn't doing it because I'm a hypochondriac, I had a genuine interest in minimizing (in a healthy way) my blood sugar (she completely ignore that part of my request).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quickly skimming, am I correct in assuming they are _only_ looking at meals that contain a high carbohydrate load? Considering that a popular theory for avoiding bad post-prandial glycemic responses is to avoid eating a lot of carbs, this seems...curious.

Or did I misunderstand?

(E.g. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzcOz38FjaU&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzcOz38FjaU&t=2s))

</comment><comment><USER5> I was reading that insulin response is more important than glycemic for storing fat. And surprisingly they're not that correlated.

<comment><USER6> To clarify, glycemic and insulinemic response are correlated _over time_ (i.e. a glycemic response is highly predictive of a corresponding insulinemic response), but the relative scale between the responses varies between individuals. Higher insulin response for a given level of blood glucose can be a sign of insulin resistance, which is associated with fat storing — and a long list of other very nasty metabolic outcomes.

<comment><USER5> What I meant is that "certain foods (e.g., lean meats and proteins) cause an insulin response despite there being no carbohydrates present, and some foods cause a disproportionate insulin response relative to their carbohydrate load."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Programmatic Googling to Recreate xkcd results - <AUTHOR>

I am trying to access Google search results programmatically.
For example, let's say I wanted to recreate xkcd's X Girls Y Cup results.
http://xkcd.com/467/
AFAIK, Randall entered these results manually "X Girls Y Cup" into Google search.
Is there any way to do this programmatically? Does Google have an API that I can use to return the number of search results for a given search string? Is there any way to hack it by abusing the Google URI?
Any ideas for how to access Google's search results would be really helpful.
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> It seems like my options are the Custom Search API from Google (with severe limitations) or the Duck Duck Go API (which I'm not sure if it provides the total number of results).

Any other ideas?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to read RSS feeds (other than Google Reader)? - <AUTHOR>

I used Bloglines forever because their mobile version worked great on my Sidekick, but then they had stability issues.
I switched to Newsgator Online because they had a good iPhone web version and the full web reader was comparable to Bloglines. Now it's being discontinued (http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/07/hearty-welcome-to-newsgator-users.html).
I don't want to use Google Reader because 1) it's tied to my Google account and I log in and out of Google accounts multiple times a day and I want to be able to check RSS without logging in all the time 2) the iPhone version is horrible.
Any alternatives out there I don't know about? I'd prefer to keep it all web-based (iPhone apps are too slow and I spend a lot of time on multiple computers and I don't like waiting for desktop syncing). <comment><USER2> I use Google Reader for low-volume feeds that I care about (i.e., I want to read every post).

I set up a Planet Venus[1] page for high-volume feeds where I don't care if I miss some posts. It shows only the 100 most recent items, so if I don't check it for a few days they don't pile up. A cron job updates it every 6 hours, so I don't keep checking it for new items all the time. It's a static web page, and I included a simple version with no stylesheet for reading on my phone.

1\. <http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to use RSSBandig (<http://rssbandit.org/>) before switching over completely to Google Reader. Of course, it's desktop based, so doesn't fit your requirements. It does have a nice sync option with web-based readers - [http://rssbandit.org/features/synchronizing-feeds-with- googl...](http://rssbandit.org/features/synchronizing-feeds-with-google- reader-and-newsgator-online/)</comment>


AMD reveals Steamroller CPU architecture details - <AUTHOR> http://techreport.com/articles.x/23485 At the Hot Chips conference today, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster revealed details about the company's next-gen Steamroller CPU architecture.  Steamroller promises to address Bulldozer's shortcomings, and AMD expects a 30% increase in instructions per clock. <comment><USER2> I'd really like to know what happened at AMD between the great success of the original Athlon [1] and their recent struggles [2].

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon#Athlon_.22Classic.22>

2: [http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/why-did-bulldozer- underwh...](http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/why-did-bulldozer-underwhelm/)

<comment><USER3> A lot of it is down to the Pentium 4 turning out to be a dead end. Intel designed it to scale to 10ghz, with a massively long pipeline. That turned out not to be possible, so all the design sacrifices that were made (primarily a ridiculously long pipeline) turned out to be bad bets.

When Intel introduced Core 2 Duo, performance per clock in many cases _doubled_ , on the _same socket and process node_. I'm unaware of a precedent for that, at least in recent history.

Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since.

If Intel's chips were half the performance today, AMD would be winning; though not by quite as much.

Core 2 Duo review (compare it to the Pentium D, which is dual core): <http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/11>

i7 3770k review (the FX 8150 is AMD's flagship 8 core Bulldozer CPU): [http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge- core...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge- core-i7-3770k-review/6)

<comment><USER4> >Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since.

Before intel essentially copied HT from AMD with their QPI, (I believe that Nehalems were the first QPI xeons) AMD servers nearly always came in dramatically lower power than the FBDIMM using Xeon-based servers.

Also note, in the early days of hyperthreading, it was a great way to run your two active processes on one core, while your second was idle. My understanding is that even now, in the best case, it's not a particularly huge boost.

I mean,yeah; between the release of the QPI xeons and now, for most things, intel has had the superior chip. But before QPI? man, if you paid for your own power, AMD was dramatically superior for high-ram applications.

<comment><USER5> Hyperthreading is better now. They even had to add another instruction to fix some of the issues. Plus a lot of work on the scheduler. Not worth disabling now!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like too little too late. If Steamroller is still a year or more out, that will put it in competition with Haswell (DDR4 in the server part, AVX2 with FMA ops, etc.). Considering how much Ivy Bridge is already dominating and those kinds of memory bandwidth and FP throughput increases, Haswell looks like it will be a monster.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't follow AMD's stuff much beyond knowing that Bulldozer was not very competitive beyond the $100-120 price point. Is Steamroller set to change that or is AMD dying a long, slow death?

Also, is AMD going to do anything in mobile or is that all ARM moving forward?

<comment><USER8> ARM is introducing 64 bit chipsets in less than a year or so. The power savings will be worth the switch for cloud hosts. Most devices sold already run ARM.

<comment><USER6> Why do you assume ARM-based processors will necessarily have a higher perf/W than x86? This has been a common claim (usually because of the perceived size of the x86 instruction decoder), but Medfield has proven that to be false:

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review- the...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first- intel-medfield-phone/)

<comment><USER9> Benchmarks and lies, yada yada. Atom wins on some things (in particular it tends to kick the A9's butt on Javascript benchmarks, which rely on single threaded dispatch and high clock speeds) and loses on others (it's a single core with hyperthreading, where most ARM SoCs are dual core).

Actually depending on the benchmark, the low-clocked Ivy Bridge CPUs tend to do quite well in "performance per watt" vs. ARM SoCs too. They lose big in idle power, but under load those enormous L3 caches and the uOp cache can give them 2-3x the performance per clock of the in-order A9 (and they run about 2x as fast, and draw about 4-10x as much power at peak, so it actually comes out very (!) roughly even).

ARM has a long way to go before they are legitimately competitive in the server space. But Intel still isn't anything more than "broadly competetive with 2-year-old devices" in the mobile world. Over time I'd expect the architectures to converge from both directions, but I don't feel lucky enough to guess at which one will "win".

<comment><USER10> A9 is out-of-order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It doesn't matter much if they can keep making incremental improvements at this point. They really need to increase their iteration speed. This update should have been out last year.</comment>


I acted as a man to get work – until I was accused of rape - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39705424 <comment><AUTHOR> currently, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14340871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14340871)</comment>


New Humble Bundle Geared Towards Game Making - <AUTHOR> https://www.humblebundle.com/#Gamemaking

<comment><USER2> What I really don't like about the bundle is following: "All purchases are for your personal use only." This is written in small size beneath the steam keys. Nothing mentioned about that on the main page though.</comment>


Is 25 the new cut-off point for adulthood? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24173194 <comment><USER2> _" "The solution to not having useless 25 [and] 30-year-olds living at home is not sending them out of the home, it's making them do their own washing, pay their own way, pay towards the rent, pay towards the bills, to take responsibility for cleaning up their bedroom and not waiting on them hand and foot," says Beeny."_

Two great conflicts in parenthood, wanting the best for your child, and being responsible for their pain. My wife had my kids doing their own laundry by 11. Its pretty simple to do, there are Sharpie (permanent ink) marks on the washer and drier for the 'normal' settings, we made sure they only got clothes that could be washed on normal settings until they were 14. Sure they wear smelly stuff some days, but nobody likes to smell bad, even kids. They figure it out.

Lots of times explaining what we weren't going to do for them because they were now old enough to do for themselves. For a while everyone cooked dinner for the whole family one night a week, we rotated nights. Wife would shop for the ingredients, they did the cooking. Everyone else would work on cleanup. Some nights we had sandwiches :-). Lots of "easy" recipes were learned, mac-n- cheese, pasta and marinara sauce, any vegetable boiled, or cooked in a skillet. And some not so easy things, like pot pies, rolls, spinach souffle.

I know this won't work for everyone, it was reasonably successful in our peers but there are always individuals who need direct attention. The challenge is trying to guess when to flip from letting them suffer the consequences and jumping in to help.

<comment><USER3> I never had to do laundry until I moved out at 18. And when I finally did have to do my laundry, it wasn't exactly a painful struggle. It probably took 5 minutes to learn.

I may even be able to argue that since my parents did my laundry, washed my dishes, and never gave me chores, I had extra free time to explore on the computer and teach myself how to program.

<comment><USER4> Laundry is of course easy to learn, but the issue at hand here is the question of empowering youth to feel capable. I have no fears about tackling the unknown and learning how to cook and do laundry, and presumably neither do you. Some young adults however do, and the theory here is that teaching them these basic life skills will help them get over the fear of striking out alone.

<comment><USER3> Yea but I feel that is a lack of pushing or pressure, rather than lack of long-term development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got married at 21 to a girl I'd been dating for 6 years. We moved off to our own rented place a year before that when we started college. At that point we were supposed to be adults but a lot of the time it just felt like we were playing house. We constantly had bills coming due that we couldn't pay, we struggled to eat, and I even sold my own vehicle at a $9,000 loss once to pay half of our over-due rent.

It was a nightmare that lasted about...4 years...but things slowly got better.

We each graduated with our B.A.s (barely) and went on to complete Master's degrees with high marks (her a 4. 0 and me a 3.9) and each with glowing recommendations from our professors and colleagues.

Along the way we have made horrible mistakes, learned tons of really hard lessons, and become better people for it.

I don't know if I can pinpoint any specific time that we "became adults." But I know that we are each closer now than we were when we first got married. But from conversations with our families, our story isn't all that different from my parents or hers, or our grandparents. The main difference is that our families had the ability to help us through the darkest times, where as their families did not. And I think that is one reason that it may seem like the "age of adulthood" has become extended: people usually adapt pretty well to their situations. So, when my grandfather was married at 19 and he had to feed his family he didn't have anyone to count on for help. I knew I could always ask for help if I needed to (although it made me hate myself when I did). So, it took longer to become independent because I wasn't forced to do so by my situation.

Not sure if that is normal for most people, but it's how it was for us.

</comment><comment><USER6> The cut-off keeps getting later and later.

And that's because the cut-off is not biological, it's social. If you give people adult responsibilities they act like adults. Except people want to wait till they are already adults to do that, leading to a Catch-22.

You can't act like an adult till you are one, but you won't become one till you act like one.

So the age keeps getting later and later. In my opinion by 15 or 16 people should already be expected to act like adults. And don't tell me about the 15 year olds you know who act like babies - that's simply because that's how they are treated.

<comment><USER7> > And that's because the cut-off is not biological, it's social.

I disagree. There is a wealth of biological evidence to show that a human's brain doesn't finish maturing until (approx.) age 25. By that standard you could make the argument that 25 is when people reach adulthood.

Of course, what we're really talking about here is expectations of responsibility, so even though "by 15 or 16 people should already be expected to act like adults" these young people still have maturing to do.

It's not surprising that in our rich modern society the age of 'adulthood' has risen to 25, especially considering we live so much longer than we used to.

<comment><USER6> Why is the definition of adulthood "finish maturing"? If anything that should be middle age, i.e. in the middle of adulthood, not the start of it.

By your definition as soon as someone becomes an adult they start degrading in mental ability. The peak of mental ability should match the middle of the productive years.

But in any case the maturity of the brain is not just biologically controlled - it's environmentally controlled. The brain of someone treated like an adult will be more mature than that of someone teated like a child.

The brain responds to stimulus, it doesn't really have a pre-programmed makeup. It has basic abilities, but that ones that are expressed are the ones that it needs/uses.

<comment><USER7> All fair points, but I never defined adulthood, only disagreed with the parent which stated "the cut-off is not biological, it's social". Of course there are social factors as well as biological. I'm sure I'm not qualified to form such a definition, though if I tried it would have to include many factors.

I, for example, moved out of my parents' house at 18, but I wouldn't say I became an 'adult' until at least my early 30's. Even now I feel like a kid most of the time, in spite of my many responsibilities - even with a kid of my own!

I don't think we ever finish maturing, and I think we never stop learning, even though our 'peak' mental ability may come and go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori _I 'm going to sound like an old codger here, which is a strange experience for a 28 year old, let me tell you. Bear with me, I'm not going to tell anyone to get off my lawn..._

No, biologically people are adults at puberty. That marks a sea change where, among all sorts of other changes, people stop maturing based on time and so, from then on, primarily mature based on experience.

What we're seeing here is the steady march of a feedback loop that began when the terms 'teenager' and 'adolescent' appeared. Those terms represent a meme that has changed where the dividing line between someone being a 'child' and an 'adult' lies. Before, people aged 11-19 were adults. Young, inexperienced adults, but adults nonetheless.

Then teenager-hood was invented as a phase of life and the line began creeping upwards. They were no longer adults; now they were old children: not yet responsible for themselves and their actions.

The feedback loop comes from removing opportunities to gain life experience: treating someone aged X like a child means that they will gain less experience and therefore mature less by age X+1. If this happens to a whole cohort, it means that people aged X+1 will start looking more like children, which will cause older generations to treat them as children. Then the cycle repeats at age X+2 in a new cohort.

Apparently today, we're seeing the line creep into the early 20s.

<comment><USER8> There are definitely neurological and biological changes that are time-driven after puberty.

<comment><USER9> As is forgetfulness and senility as we get older. Doesn't mean we dumb down the definition of adulthood and continue to infantilize people so they can live in their parent's basement til age 30.

<comment><USER8> Yes, clearly my correction of a factual claim means I support the opposing side to an absurd degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only one who is instinctively skeptical about any discussion of "adulthood", "responsibility", and "maturity"? Although some aspects of adulthood are obviously good (paying your bills on time), these words often seem to also mean "willingness to conform".

I recently moved from San Francisco to South Carolina. San Francisco is often derided as a city of eternal adolescence, whose residents still live with multiple roommates, party at odd hours, switch jobs often, don't think too much about the distant future, and disvalue stability. In contrast, traditional adulthood is alive and well in South Carolina. There's a counterculture, but overall SC is much closer to Leave It To Beaver.

SC has some merits, but personally I'd take SF over SC any day of the week. It is more fun, and it's also contributing much more to technological and cultural advancement, the creation of wealth, and the economy overall.

<comment><USER11> The lifestyle you describe in San Francisco is unsustainable over the long run for most people. This is one reason why that lifestyle is considered to be more adolescent: it is not realistic for the average middle class person to maintain that lifestyle while having a family and eventually retiring comfortably.

San Francisco the city is eternally adolescent, but the people there are not. There are few long-term residents, and most people who move into the city will eventually move out because it is outrageously expensive (and it's not a great environment for kids: it's very dirty, not particularly safe, the public schools are generally terrible, etc.). That six figure salary is not doing you much good when your small and cramped house is well over $1M, you're paying $1500/month in daycare, you eventually are paying $25k+/year for private schools (not college), and you're hit by high income taxes before you even start making all those payments.

South Carolina is a place where people are less constrained financially. If you want to settle down with a family and a house, you can probably afford to do so if you're middle class and up. You could also probably afford to party all the time. What's interesting to me is that in the presence of choice we see people tend towards the former rather than the latter.

<comment><USER4> _What 's interesting to me is that in the presence of choice we see people tend towards the former rather than the latter._

Partying all the time sounds awesome when you are 19, after which it begins to slowly lose its luster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When people domesticate animals to be pets infantile traits become prevalent in mature specimens. It's possible that this might be happening to humans as well. We consistently are becoming less violent [http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html)

Infantile traits such as imaginativeness and playfulness become selected for in environment changing faster than ever.

Cut-off point to adulthood is completely arbitrary and cultural. Attempting to motivate it with science is bizarre. So what if brain and body changes from 18 to 25? It also changes from 25 to 35 and so on.

I think it's bit of a myth that you take some time (18 years or so) to reach your final form that then gradually deteriorates. I believe it's a continuous process and there's no final form (unless you mean it to be gray haired, wrinkled corpse in a casket).

</comment><comment><USER13> My parents gave me total freedom at 14, and thanks to that I created my first company at age 15, traveled around the world, start paying my own bills and now that I'm 17 I am totally independent living on my own rented apartment. So it all depends on the freedom you give to your sons to actually start building their own way.

</comment><comment><USER14> Complicated.

While I understand the whole social push of "be more mature", I think there's something to be said of having a healthy carefree childhood & young-adult- funtime. I think 18 is fine if only because society supports this cutoff. Since you can get in trouble with the law like an "adult" at 18, you better understand consequences by then. Personally, I think there's plenty of time to figure out adulthood(barring horrible life-changing mistakes) but losing out on your childhood & young-adult years is a greater loss than not being "mature" by 25. But that's just my viewpoint, to put some context around it I think the people who condemn shows like the jersey shore are (sub)consciously jealous they couldn't live life that way or somehow lost out on their childhood/young-adult-funtime and think their speedy rise to "maturity" is something everyone should strive for. I told my wife that if I ever won the lottery, like the powerbowl's 400 million, I'd travel all over the world following all the Hed Kandi parties. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyJ7He58rcE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyJ7He58rcE) . Is partying all day & night "mature"? I don't know, but it's fun!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, brain scans seem to show that development of the frontal lobe (planning, foresight, organization) continues through the mid-20s, especially in males. On the other, people throughout history seem to have been perfectly capable of handling themselves by their late teen years. Are our brains developing more slowly now? Is our world now so complex that it takes a fully-developed brain to make sense of it? Or are we just big whiners?

<comment><USER16> Could be that we're just going through biological changes because of a different diet. Seems to change the age of puberty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The modern world is more complicated and difficult to navigate. It is also increasingly abstract and we don't (collectively) do a great job with helping our youth really understand the connection between those abstractions and reality.

My father got paid in cash for many years while in the Army. Today, a lot of employers require you to have a bank account and only pay by direct deposit. My oldest son likely has dyscalculia. Kind of like a dyslexic doesn't deal well with reading, he doesn't deal well with numbers. I gave him cash and made him do the household grocery shopping for a while. It helped him wrap his brain around budgeting.

Now he can cope with a debit card but that would have been a disaster if we had skipped that first step of helping understand in very concrete terms the relationship between money and material quality of life. I think a lot of young people get a bank account, get their paycheck deposited and just cannot relate these abstract numbers to the need to eat all month, among other things.

</comment><comment><USER18> "TV sitcoms are littered with such comic stereotypes of juvenile adults, such as Smithy from Gavin and Stacey or Private Pike in Dad's Army."

As a non-Brit, I enjoy the completely opaque cultural references in BBC news articles. Although thanks to Netflix I have seen Gavin & Stacey.

<comment><USER19> Well, it's not like American news sources don't assume everybody has an American pop culture either...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll believe 25 is the new 18 when we raise the minimum age for military service from 18 to 25.

<comment><USER21> ...on the other hand, if you're in the US you can't buy alcohol until you're 21.

<comment><USER22> This is interesting to factor in, too:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy_laws_in_the_Un...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy_laws_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They mention car accidents as a statistic that drops off after the age of 25 (I only briefly skimmed the article).

I have thought for a long time: leave it to the insurance companies/number crunchers to best predict when "maturity" sets in (at least for the average young adult). The fact that you can't rent cars until the age 25 always suggested to me that the insurance companies had run the numbers and pin pointed this age as when it is "safe" to trust someone with their assets.

When there are legitimate business interests at stake (read: $$$$) they tend to get this stuff right.

<comment><USER24> You can in fact rent cars before the age of 25, but they charge a hefty premium. Source: I rented a car 2 weeks shy of 25 years old. There was an additional $80 fee per day.

<comment><USER23> That premium is there to cover the additional risk they have identified is associated with renting to people under the age of 25.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this leading towards an upwards adjustment of the legal age of majority? I think Tolkien had it right with the hobbits' "tweenies", but the last thing we need to do is set it as law.

It takes awhile, once you're finally allowed behind the wheel, to develop a sure hand and a discerning eye for steering the course of your own life. _That 's going to be true no matter where they set the age below which you're not allowed to drive yourself._ Better it be when the brain still has the described plasticity so the needed life-lessons are learned well.

</comment><comment><USER26> So if 25 is the new cutoff for adulthood, and 30 is the new BS cutoff for an employable programmer, that leaves 5 years to learn everything?

<comment><USER27> People who aren't adults can learn things. Indeed, that's a pretty important function of the non-adult portion of life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I know people in their early 30's who shouldn't be considered adults. They're perpetual students, have never held a real job (meaning, one that would actually support their lifestyle), have rich parents who bail them out of everything. Basically, they are overgrown teenagers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does being an adult just mean being old? There are 24 year olds with more responsibility, money, skill, influence, and intelligence than people older than that. Of course they're adults.

</comment><comment><USER30> I was gonna write something longer, but I decided against it. What I wanted to say is: I'm in my 16th year of school, so to speak. Going to some kind of learning institution for such a long time might seem like a continuation of childhood, but I don't know: since I started university I've had no one but myself to blame for any of my academic achievements. When it comes down to it, all I'm left with is my brains, an exam paper and the cold student identification number written on that exam paper. I guess at least in some ways, I would say that I've learnt some self discipline.</comment>


Lightning strikes produce free neutrons, and we're not sure how - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/nuclear-lightening.ars <comment><USER2> Ok folks, this is pretty cool stuff and something that you might want to note in your notebook.

Neutrons come from nuclear events, not chemical events. We know that lightning can produce Anti-matter so now we have a hint that it fissions atoms as well.

It really does feel like we're on the cusp of some new deeper understandings of how particles hold together, and can be ripped apart. This understanding will drive a lot of change, especially if it opens up new options for energy production. Sadly not all of those will be good changes but in general it should be a net benefit.</comment>


What does it feel like to be the CEO of a start-up? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-the-CEO-of-a-start-up/answer/Paul-DeJoe-2?srid=u4r

<comment><USER2> I've always wanted to start my own business...be the CEO...work towards my passion. But within the last year I've begun to question whether or not I'm really ready for the commitment.

I've worked at one startup and we ended up getting acquired by a big tech company that recently IPO'd...I've seen firsthand how much work really goes into building a successful business, and the more I think about leaving and founding my own company, the more I am unsure if that's what I really want. The commitment is just so huge and I know it's going to require every waking hour of my time. I guess I'm just scared to give up my comfortable pace of life right now. Does anyone else around here have similar feelings?

</comment><comment><USER3> As a founder of a self funded start-up this piece felt a bit like ESP.</comment>


In Retail, Data Elbows Aside Chief Merchants - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/retails-merchant-princes-lose-sway-1442746801 <comment><USER2> Does anyone have the text of this or a summary?</comment>


TurboTax Maker Linked to 'Grassroots' Campaign Against Free, Simple Tax Filing - <AUTHOR> http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-grassroots-campaign-against-free-simple-tax-filing <comment><USER2> Even if this is the case, the only reason the government wants simple tax filing is because many people are lazy and will just opt for the simplicity.

The result will be people paying more taxes than than they should (because specific deductions will not be used) and an instant pay raise in the form of taxes for the government. This is actually bad for the average person.

As a regular employee, I'm not sure how much simpler taxes can get. I've been doing my own taxes since I was 15 and it's pretty much a simple form to fill out. It gets complicated once you are self-employed, but this is expected.</comment>


Google removes authorship from search results - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/HZf3KDP1Dm8 <comment><USER5> It seems to me that Google's motivation for starting author snippets in search was to drive more people to sign up for Google Plus. Now that they've discovered it's either (1) not working, or (2) enough people have already signed up for G+, it makes sense to keep search uncluttered from the UX standpoint. You can see this steady move away from authorship snippets starting from when they first removed profile pictures.[1]

[1] [https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j](https://plus.google.com/+JohnMueller/posts/PDkPdPtjL6j)

<comment><USER6> Google's love of metro-ifying everything and removing useful features clashes with google's love of foisting google+ onto unwilling users. Civil war, anyone?

<comment><USER7> Fortunately, G+ has been losing lately.

<comment><USER6> Whoever wins, we lose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was a very useless "enhancement" to the search page and its sole purpose was to get more people signed up for G+ so they names and photos can be shown in search.

For most users, a picture and name dont mean anything unless they are super famous or is an author the user follows closely. if the user loves that author, the user already knows which website is credible because authors typically are on one site they publish. some cross publish but in most cases, there is a primary site. so the user intrinsically knows what is a trustworthy result.

even if we were to assign some weight to the author, as a user I dont need to know who wrote it. I trust Google to present me with trustworthy articles instead of wasting space and distracting my attention from the results.

this was a very horrible move on Google's part along with a bunch of other useless "enhancements"

<comment><USER9> I disagree. You are blurring 2 concepts here, and are throwing out the baby with the bath water. Decouple the "social network" junk of Google+ from the concept of validated authorship.

Authorship is valuable. Show me everything that Jane Example wrote. Yes, on her personal blog, but also in her column for Wired. And didn't she used to write for the WSJ, or the Guardian? Those too.

Cite systems like this have existed in academia for over a decade. Google's entire existence, as well as PageRank, grew from Larry and Sergey's Backrub project at Stanford which, you guessed it, ranked academic papers and authors based on which other papers/authors cited them, and in turn how those papers/authors ranked.

Authorship at the index/search level is more powerful and comprehensive that other approaches. Yes, Jane could keep a website with links to all her articles. How up-to-date is that? What happens when the WSJ redesigns and those links 404, even though her content still exists, just in a new location? The model shouldn't be "I am Jane, and I wrote this thing that's located over there." Authorship needs to be coupled to the content.

I have not liked Google+ at all. But is a step backward to abandon the concept of authorship entirely.

<comment><USER8> I'm taking specifically about linking authorship and Google+ and including photos in search results with names. Google can still make it possible to search by author without needing up search results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This stuff is really bothersome because they didn't ask nicely - they forced all google users to use G+. In doing so, they screwed up a bunch of perfectly fine services.

Now they're trying to un-screw-up what they spent the last 3 years doing and pretend like it's not a big deal.

I mean, I get it - Google can do what Google wants, but it doesn't do much for their brand loyalty.

<comment><USER11> In some of the products there's not need to worry as there's not competence. Well, it's basically search the service it doesn't really matter what they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google- authorship-201975](http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google- authorship-201975) is a good piece covering the history of this feature.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder why he says it's a difficult decision? What was the upside to users or authors? If the data shows this is an improved experience for users it should be a given and not difficult or something to apologize for.

<comment><USER14> Because not everyone has the same use cases. A positive change for _most_ users can be a negative for a few, and you don't ever want to be perceived as saying "We're super excited to be screwing you, 'cause we don't care about your needs!"

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I'm most curious about who is negatively affected by this.

<comment><USER15> I am. My sites traffic went way up after adding authorship to my posts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What was the last Google product that was successful without heavy bundling? In this case, bundling couldn't overcome Facebook's network effects.

<comment><USER17> I guess that would depend on your definitions of "product", "successful" and "heavy". Realistically if they are in a position to leverage any bundling - why wouldn't they?

But here goes, in no particular order...

Google Public DNS - Dec 2009

Chromecast - July 2013

Chromebook - June 2011

Chrome Browser - Sept 2008

ChromeOS - May 2012

Nexus 4,5,7,10 - various starting Jan 2010

Golang - <USER4>

Dart - <USER3>

AngularJS - <USER4>

app engine - April 2008

<comment><USER7> Would anyone really consider AppEngine successful? I hear so many support horror stories, only one poorly supported open source project to try to move off to without recoding to different APIs, and the price is ridiculous compared to other cloud providers...

<comment><USER18> At the very least, it's successful for _Google_ , since they appear to be making some money from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does google still recognize authorship? Many people in the SEO/marketing community were really invested in the idea of AuthorRank and saw it as a natural next step after PageRank.

<comment><USER20> That's an excellent question. I mean, after all, social is the future of search, right?

"Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance."

[http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate- intelligence/2013/02/01/the-f...](http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate- intelligence/2013/02/01/the-future-according-to-eric-7-points/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So first Google+ drops its real name policy [0] and now it's removing forced integration with Search results? Great to see the forced integration of Google+ with other Google properties being rolled back after Vic Gundotra's departure. Nice work, Googlers! What's next?

[0] [https://plus.google.com/u/0/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy](https://plus.google.com/u/0/+googleplus/posts/V5XkYQYYJqy)

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if this is to get in front of anti-trust actions. They where clearly using their search duopoly (US) and monopoly (EU) to juice google+.

<comment><USER20> I seriously doubt that, it should have been pretty easy to integrate other services besides G+. The truth is probably that authorship info sucks for many users, and this isn't news either [https://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google- authorship-decrea...](https://www.jitbit.com/news/183-how-google-authorship- decreased-our-traffic-by-90/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23>
        It's also worth mentioning that Search
        users will still see Google+ posts from
        friends and pages when they're relevant
        to the query — both in the main results,
        and on the right-hand side. Today's
        authorship change doesn't impact these
        social features.

I don't think I've ever seen any of this before... Probably a testament to how little I and my friends use G+. Has anyone else ever seen one of these? What do they look like?

<comment><USER24> > Has anyone else ever seen one of these? What do they look like?

Just did a test search and got some. [http://mayoyo.tokyo/jyL.jpg](http://mayoyo.tokyo/jyL.jpg)

First result is organic, next two are G+ users I have in my circles. They don't show up if I log out and perform the same search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did authorship truly help anyone from an ROI or branding perspective? The entire thing seemed like a huge failed experiment. I am sure it was just removed because it took too much attention away from AdWords.

<comment><USER26> I've seen noticeable CTR on numerous campaigns with authorship as a great picture would grab more attention. Maybe a 3-8% swing which is noticeable on keywords with search volume >1000

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I must confess I skipped the results that had photos in them. I hate photos.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm pretty glad that's over with. Authorship was a pain in the ass</comment>