Why Google Did Android - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/02/09/Why-Android <comment><USER2> Was at Google in 2007 when the launch(es) were happening. The commenter at the bottom of the article is correct, the existential threat Google faced wasn't from Apple, it was from US mobile carriers. Google wanted leverage over the carriers to bring Google products to feature phones more easily. They had no intention of actually releasing Android at the time, and it wasn't close to being ready for release anyway. Apple then released iPhone and beat Google to the punch, and I remember us all thinking "oh shit this is WAY better than the janky, blackberry-esque prototypes we have in development"[1]. So everyone at Google scrambled to get something out the door in response, and the compromise was the HTC G1/Dream on the cheapest carrier at the time (T-mobile). I was using a Nokia N95 at the time, and while the Dream was laughably bad, I did appreciate the bits of the Dream which compared favorably, like mobile web browsing and application development. I still feel Android is mostly a reactive product with many clumsy holdovers from v1, but I digress.

[1] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/HT...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/HTC_HT722G700375_20080211.jpg/200px- HTC_HT722G700375_20080211.jpg)

<comment><USER3> > laughably bad

While not Dream-bad, the first iPhone was really bad, but with a better interface than every other phone. It didn't have an app store, so the interesting things were maps and a web browser, but with only 2.5G internet, they were mostly unusable.

<comment><USER4> I know someone who is still using an iPhone 1 and seems happy with it.

<comment><USER5> My parents still watched DVDs over composite cables on their 4K TV until this past Christmas when I got them a Bluray player, but that doesn't inherently say anything positive about the quality of that setup.

<comment><USER6> I disagree, it means they prefer the content way more than the resolution. Like most people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not entirely convinced that Apple would own the mobile space without Android. There were lot of mobile handset incumbents when IPhone came out. It was the one-two punch of IPhone AND Android that destroyed the handset dominance of the likes of Nokia and Blackberry.

Had there not been an Android, I'm pretty sure one of those incumbents would have come up with something.

Nokia, for example, had lots of nice Linux handheld devices before IPhone. They were encumbered by a degraded engineering culture and Symbian.

People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water. Until then they had had a fairly good portion of the market, but that single statement just killed it. People who did not like IPhone moved from Nokia phones to Android after that.

Now, without Android, there might have not been such an obvious migration path, and Nokia might have kept some of it's customers. Nokia managed to get some great handsets out after that, but they had already lost market momentum.

Nokia was never a big competitor in the US market mainly because they refused to play the game by the operators rules, hence the operators did not really endorse them.

Without Android, once again, I think there might have been openings for Nokia to get into the handset market state side.

Or Blackberry or Ericsson might have come up with something.

The thing that commoditized handset market was not actually Android, but the availability of cheap radio circuits from Asia. Until then the radio technology had been the secret sauce of the encumbents, not software. When the radio stack became commoditized, the playing field changed fairly rapidly.

I'm pretty sure there would have been competing Linux enabled smart devices in one way or another without Android. Android just got there first.

<comment><USER8> NOKIA had N9, the only phone that was well-received by US reviewers, quite few calling it better than iPhone, yet Elop killed it off by not allowing it to sell in major markets (e.g. Germans had to buy it in Switzerland).

NOKIA was used by Microsoft's investors as a way to get MS back into mobile game, unsuccessfully. It was an internal coup. With the revenue and world-wide market share they had, they could have survived for a few years, finally going full speed ahead with MeeGo, at the cost of never making it in the US, but continuing their dominance in the rest of the world.

There seems to be some foul play involved in ruining NOKIA as Elop had a bonus for the sale of a company in his initial contract and the chairman of the board publicly distrusted his own engineers as unable to compete with Silicon Valley.

Finnish economy is still in shambles from NOKIA's downfall and only Google/US profited from taking over the fastest growing market segment at that time from NOKIA. EU lost its only competitive tech company.

<comment><USER9> If there was foul play involved, you'd have to pull back a few more curtains to find it. Information that transpired after it was all over was that the Nokia board hired Elop with the assignment to sell to Microsoft.

The N9 is a really sad story. I had one, it was great. It did get some "better than iPhone" reviews. It was in development for too long, and when it was released and it was great, Nokia was too cowardly to bet on it.

<comment><USER8> I am wondering if the surveillance capitalism we have now would have been impeded if NOKIA was still around in full force. I miss time when my phone didn't track everything I did. The only alternative I own now is running on SailfishOS, from MeeGo team members.

<comment><USER10> It's not just your phone that spies on you, it's mostly the _apps_ on it that do. With no Android to push it so hard and fast, perhaps surveillance capitalism would be a bit less developed by now, but I doubt the difference would be all that big. The allure of corrupt money is just too high, and the pressure is industry-wide.

<comment><USER11> But it's the OS that allows apps to spy on you.

<comment><USER10> There's only so much an OS can do about it. Every feature that can be used for tracking has also legitimate user-beneficial uses.

<comment><USER11> Not true, Symbian was highly locked down. You needed permission for pretty much anything, and some of them required you to ask Nokia for permission. It's probably part of the reason why it didn't take off in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you go back to articles written closer to the Android launch, the company Google was worried about at the time was Microsoft.

>Google was building a secret mobile product to fend off chief rival Microsoft. Then Apple announced the iPhone, and everything changed.

Chris DeSalvo's reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. "As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought 'We're going to have to start over.'"

"What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties," DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are obvious when you see it."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the- day-google-had-to-start-over-on-android/282479/)

When Apple introduced the iPhone, the incumbent market leaders dismissed it.

Google immediately tossed out the UI of their Blackberry clone and copied the iPhone's UI instead.

<comment><USER13> Steve Ballmer's reaction(s) to the iPhone are the most hylarious. An example here [0]

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U)

<comment><USER14> Well, it's obviously very funny in retrospect, but you have to put yourself in his shoes. Hardware is under-powered from what it seems, to make a general computing device that is small enough, has long enough battery life and doesn't cost a ton of money. Also people are very price sensitive about devices they only use for limited communication (phone calls, SMS, maybe some emails). They are far less price sensitive when that device becomes a general purpose computer and media machine and does basically everything they need related to getting information and entertainment, on the go at that!

He didn't know about the software keyboard innovations that Apple had created (for example the predictive keyboards, the haptic feedback, etc.) and Microsoft wasn't making the whole product so they couldn't optimize the experience as much in order to have reasonable performance and battery life with a small device.

Though I'll grant you that Ballmer was the king of over the top reactions ("Developers!" :-D ).

<comment><USER15> I think the most illuminating thing about Ballmer here is the way he speaks about features of Microsoft devices, and it shows why the company lost a decade of innovation under him: "it will 'do' Web, or will 'do' email".

These are feature check boxes to him. It's not a question of whether the feature is GOOD, whether browsing the web is a delightful experience that the users actually want to do on the device. Nope - it'll do web. That's it. No more questions.

<comment><USER16> This is very much the enterprise mindset where purchasers often don't have to actually use the software, so you can sell them impressive checklists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The timeline doesn't seem correct. According to [https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Tim), the author joined Google in 2010. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_\(operating_system\)#History) says "Android Inc. was founded ... 2003" and "In July 2005 ... Google acquired Android Inc". The iPhone launched in 2007.

Google knew about it earlier since they were partnering for Maps & YouTube, but it's incorrect to state that Google was doing Android in response to the iPhone.

The Android acquisition was initially a response to the horribly fragmented and underpowered mobile phone ecosystem that Google was trying to get its software onto. Android & the Open Handset Alliance unified it and gave Google an easier way to develop for billions of devices. Android had to be redesigned after the iPhone launched to switch to the new stylus-free & button-free paradigm, but it initially wasn't a response to the iPhone.

<comment><USER18> > it's incorrect to state that Google was doing Android in response to the > iPhone.

Yeah sure, but pre-iPhone Android phones looked and worked very differently from modern Android phones. Google knew it needed to get into mobile phones; it's just that at that time it thought its competitor was Microsoft with its Windows CE phones, or BlackBerry. Google had a major pivot in Android development in 2007. Take a look at what Android phones looked like before the iPhone: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HTC_HT722G700375_20080211...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HTC_HT722G700375_20080211.jpg) This was the "Sooner" phone built in 2006–7.

<comment> the-rc Vic was not at Google in 2005, when the Android acquisition happened, and he might have thrown in some hindsight to retrofit the reality of 2007-2010 onto the original decision. Fifteen years ago, Google knew too well about the Microsoft monopoly on the desktop, even after the antitrust lawsuit, and didn't want to be at their mercy. Back then, that was a much more tangible and plausible threat than Apple, to the point that they referred to MS using codenames. It's funny how, despite Ballmer promising to kill Google, a few years later Jobs ended up escalating a thermonuclear patent and PR war that was just as incendiary.

<comment><USER19> And MS, in its turn, was almost certainly not in both smartphones and consoles simply because it had too much money and was looking for something to do. MS' top management was famously familiar with _The Innovator 's Dilemma_, and smartphones and the console were (along with the Web browser) very clearly Windows' vulnerable flanks. It was only devastating incompetence on Sony's part which prevented the PlayStation series from ever becoming a significant (non-gaming) app and Web-browser platform (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288221](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288221) ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> And then a second, similar situation played out again after Google created Android.

Just like Google knew it would be left out of it didn't do something, the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive at first, and Verizon was afraid they'd be left out of the smartphone thing and lose subscribers. So they bankrolled an enormous marketing campaign, which is why one fall/winter (IIRC) everyone in the US was bombarded with endless Motorola Droid ads.

The AT&T exclusive ended, of course, but it's quite possible Android might not have gotten off the ground if Verizon hadn't felt a threat too. There's definitely no guarantee Google would have spent on marketing. Back then, Google didn't really believe in advertising itself through traditional channels like TV. When Google was a younger company, word of mouth was always enough marketing for its earlier products like web search and Gmail. It's only pretty recently in the grand scheme of things (after Android's rise to popularity) that Google got into that kind of marketing.

So that's one way in which hindsight shows that the AT&T exclusive might have been a bad move for Apple. If they hadn't done that, it might have been harder for Android to make inroads with carriers (through business deals) and with customers (through advertising).

<comment><USER21> How a carrier has any say in what phone is used on their network (other than banning dangerous devices) sounds absolutely absurd.

I bet the US situation is also repsonsible for the carrier vetting of all(?) OS upgrades. Doesn't make any sense either.

<comment><USER22> > I bet the US situation is also repsonsible for the carrier vetting of all(?) > OS upgrades. Doesn't make any sense either.

I doubt carriers vetting os upgrades is something that they do just for fun. One, users often hold the carrier directly responsible when things don't work correctly on their network or device. Besides that, I'm sure there are other concerns or factors we may not be aware of.

<comment><USER23> If you try hard enough you can always imagine "factors we may not be aware of" to explain differences from the rest of the world that are in fact just caused by US policy. You'll see that with gun deaths, healthcare costs, a host of problems.

The carriers "vetting" upgrades weren't doing any actual work, it's just a shakedown. Nice phone OS you have there, shame if critical updates were... delayed.

<comment><USER22> > The carriers "vetting" upgrades weren't doing any actual work, it's just a > shakedown. Nice phone OS you have there, shame if critical updates were... > delayed.

The carriers do in fact test the releases prior to them being released. I'm not sure if the carriers have to pay the manufactures to provide the release but I would not be surprised if that is the case.

> If you try hard enough you can always imagine "factors we may not be aware > of" to explain differences from the rest of the world that are in fact just > caused by US policy.

It is not clear to me that this has anything to do with US policy as many manufacturers IIRC provide different carriers with different updates and at different times, not just in the us, but around the world.

I really don't think either you or myself are qualified to say one way or the other...unless that is you have experience on the business side of running one of these large mobile networks. Having said that, I don't think one has to think very hard to see a reason for requiring testing..one reason might just be liability.

<comment><USER24> You don't need to run a large mobile network to observe that being cut out of the loop results in fewer profits. Carriers were in position to get a cut of all "app" and ringtone sales and whatnot. Being a gatekeeper offered tremendous profit potential that Apple took away.

Nobody wants to be a dumb commoditized data pipe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was at Stanford during the time when the iPhone launched in the late summer of 2007. In the subsequent fall quarter, I took a class that was taught by Eric Schmid. When the topic in one of the classes came to Android, Eric admitted straight out that Google has one primary goal: to get more people onto the Internet. Because more people on the Internet would mean more people would search for content, generating more revenue for Google. Making Android available for free was lowering the cost for mobile phones.

There were other devices out there that qualified as smartphones and enabled users to browse the Internet (just think of the terrible HTC Touch, powered by Windows Pocket PC). Hence the threat wasn't just Apple.

</comment><comment><USER26> Fundamentally, Google protects its search by owning all entry points to it (or paying massive fees for competition-prohibitive distribution deals.

The strategy can be seen at play with the Chrome browser, Android and its licensing model for hardware manufacturers, paying Firefox and Apple for placing search as default in their respective platforms. They know that once distribution barriers for search fall, their existence is threatened, explaining even moves like Google Fiber.

We wrote at length about this issue in our blog [https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is- just-...](https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-22/google-competition-is-just-one- click-and-27-billion-us-dollars-away.html)

<comment><USER27> Google is not a search company, it is an ad company.

An ad company needs data about you. A search company needs data about web sites.

Owning Andriod assures that they get the data about you.

The rest is irrelevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Vic wasn't involved in the decision to build Android and what it's going to look like and how. The decision to buy Andy Rubin's team happened years earlier.

</comment><comment><USER29> It is deeply frustrating that we have 2.5 mobile ecosystems: Apple, Google, and Amazon. I find that all three excel at something other than consumer software, and the iPhone-imitating phablet landscape is far more homogeneous than we were promised.

I wish that Android had been a push for standard APIs and drivers instead of a full OS, allowing us to have some choice. Google clearly didn't need Android that much, as they still do well on iPhones without the massive investment that Android required.

<comment><USER30> They pay Apple like $12 billion a year to stay the default search engine in Safari. Not exactly free. If they didn't have Android they wouldn't have any leverage at all in the mobile space.

<comment><USER29> > _If they didn't have Android they wouldn't have any leverage at all in the > mobile space._

I disagree. Most iPhone users seem to be Gmail users at least. Google Maps and Waze are far better than Apple Maps.

I think Google itself originally pursued Android hoping for their own exclusive ecosystem and then changed their strategy to just build apps for iOS that are better than Apple's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Owning a compute platform is an extremely powerful asset, that all tech giants are fighting for. Especially as computing became something that average Joe does, compared to a geeky hobby.

With mobile platforms, it allows you to control what competitors apps can do and exclude your apps from same limits (like full control over notifications), you can charge border line extortion prices for purchases on your platform (30% is margin to kill for in any business), gives you all the analytics about what people are doing (no need to spyware or sketchy vpns - you get sources data about all downloads, purchases, even running apps to some extent), and many, many more.

I don't know will be the next big computing platform, but I'm 100% sure tech giants will be fighting super hard and dirty to dominate it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I remember the argument- heard a long time ago, much before mobile phones became a thing- that progress and incumbent replacement in the computer industry has always happened when new, smaller generations of machines replaced the previous ones: from mainframes, to minicomputers, to microcomputers. That is surely how Microsoft became the dominant player in the 80s and 90s.

I guess the current mobile phones could be called nanocomputers, and the opportunity to displace Microsoft's dominance in the OS market was too good to miss.

</comment><comment><USER33> Can I just say I really enjoyed the format of this blog post?

Short and to the point. He could've dragged this out for pages like most do, but he got a lot economy in a 20 sec read.

I wish they were all like this.

<comment><USER34> Agreed, just like most business books could be 5-7 short blog posts. But I understand the need to put in filler there to justify the price, but still would prefer an almost executive summary at the start of each book that gives you all of the essentials and leaves it open to the reader to dig in deeper at a later time if necessary.

I have a friend who just started a new role at Mongo and I'm giving him a bunch of books to read, but now he has to go through 2,000-3,000 pages of text, instead of getting the exec summary in 25-40 pages and having a good grasp of the subject and then diving in to the details where necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was working with Nokia phones 2007-2009, and then later with Meego/Windows Phone/Android and there are few turning points I remember.

* Nokia App-Store stopped working. \- I had published my own stuff there, which I could not buy. The store was simply broken, and it seemed no one cared. \- There was no business in Nokia store to be done = no interested developers

* We got an Apple device as soon as it was possible. \- It was obvious that it was very simple to compared to what we were building in Nokia. \- That was the first turning point for me understanding the user experience vs number of features competition. \- Probably something people felt holding clam shell phones at the time, but much more powerful. \- The huge 'magical' difference was the capacitive screen. \- Everything was like 'yeah we have this already', but it's just so much cooler with this magical interface where you actually don't even have to touch

* 'Tube' was announced Nokia-internally \- There was auditorium full of people in the session I was in \- Only question asked was by the 2000 people or so was: 'is it resistant or capacitive?' \- Everyone who knew the difference realized we lost at least another year

* Still, there was a momentum of excitement \- I was thinking it the way like 'lets rework the UI, we will be ahead in stuff like phone call quality, and having stuff like GPS' \- They probably have the capacitive in the next model after Tube or so? \- I saw lot of great stuff been built, and talented people worked with stuff that would become Meego

* Sinking the Symbian \- I was no longer working with Nokia, instead doing own stuff. \- This was like 'WTF', instead of existing code base living for next five years, we would have to abandon it immediately \- This was the second time abandoning developers

* Announcing Windows Phone \- This was like 'ok, I can work with this' \- The problem was, it took too long to come to market \- Only options were in this time window to work with iPhone or Android \- This was no longer 'abandoning developers', it was simply no longer possible \- There were other early Windows Phones, but for reason or another, no serious commitment at any point

* Nokia Windows Phone entering the market \- Market had already been split by Android and iPhone \- It was already a challenger at that point \- I think everyone who tried it saw the potential, but it lost because of app stores in Android and iPhone already were full of stuff - and it was clear at this point already \- I was surprised that Microsoft bought Nokia phones, because it was so obvious what would happen, maybe it was something like 'were sorry about Elop, here's money for the doctor'

</comment><comment><USER36> I've always heard the explanation as: it's a strategy to commoditize complementary products and a complement to search is browsers (Chrome) and a compliment to browsers are devices (Android). By getting to the devices and browsers first, they saved themselves millions in fees to seed chrome and google as defaults.

Maybe this explanation is more hindsight than foresight.

</comment><comment><USER37> Google did Android because a few reasons, lets point out the obvious ones:

1\. Like article mentioned, avoid monopoly by Apple. 2\. A phone is the best device to collect your data, not just the browser level but it's operating system level. When you drive, no matter if you are using google map or not, they will send your GPS data to their server, whether it is anonymous or not.

<comment><USER38> There was never going to be a monopoly by Apple. The average price of an iPhone is $700-$800. The average price of an Android is $250. Apple would have never priced its phone low enough to appeal to the mass market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> They publicly said in interviews when Android was initially bought, that they were doing mobile so that people could do Google searches literally everywhere, so they could have ad revenue when people were away from their computers. They were very open about it at the time. "Google search in your pocket".

</comment><comment><USER40> Vic's argument can be applied to almost everything Google has for. Google+ turned out far less successful though.

<comment><USER28> And that is a project Vic ACTUALLY ran.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This attitude explains why Android TV isn't that good. Feel a little burned by buying one TBH.

<comment><USER2> Most Android-based devices are disposable products for which Google has no intention of supporting long-term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "For the same reason we do everything, Pinky - to try to take over... THE WORLD!"

</comment><comment><USER43> As described in the article, I believe it's more on the advertising side than beating the monopoly for a great cause.

</comment><comment><USER44> Can you figure out why they're doing what they're doing _to_ Android right now?

</comment><comment><USER45> Cloud is an existential threat to Google. Amazon got there first. Microsoft got there 2nd.

<comment><USER46> I disagree, Amazon's or Microsoft's cloud services dominance doesn't impact how Google makes nearly all of its money: advertising.

<comment><USER47> Cloud isn't just cloud.

Google's infrastructure is a cloud, the only thing a competitor needs is the software / services to replace Google. And a lot of them are already there, being recreated.

That's why they want in, because Google & co. could easily become the next television.. Its still there, but most people don't care about it any more because of a shift in technology and the way people use the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This might be a silly question but does google already sell browser activity? Ads through doubleclick/analytics is one thing but are they already selling just straight the-user-opened-their-browser-and-went-to-these-5-sites-today type data?

<comment><USER49> Google says they don't sell personal information [1], and I've never heard a credible source say that they bought any. It doesn't stop people from making all sorts of claims, though.

[1] [https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and- data/](https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/)

<comment><USER12> If Google uses cookie based ad tracking, how do they prevent others from reading the cookies?

TechCrunch certainly implied that Google's approach shared information in a way that Apple's former iAd platform did not back in the day.

>what [iAd] reveals to its advertising partner is next to nil; rather than offering a cookie-based ad-tracking and targeting mechanism, it essentially requires partners to tell it what kind of audience it needs to reach, and then trust that Apple will handle the rest, AdAge says. And it's well worth noting that Apple prioritizes customer privacy here over a big potential upside in ad revenue.

...what it doesn't do is hand over the keys to all that data and let advertisers plug into it directly with their own data-mining and targeting software. That's not standard for the ad industry and that's likely the reason a few Madison Avenue feathers are ruffled over their approach.

[https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/advertisers-not- thrilled-w...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/advertisers-not-thrilled- with-apples-practice-of-protecting-its-users-data/)

Has their approach changed?

<comment><USER50> > If Google uses cookie based ad tracking, how do they prevent others from > reading the cookies?

For security reasons, your browser won't send the cookie to other domains.

<comment><USER51> Cookies can now be kept on a public server. Which can be shared with anyone (who pays).

In this case it's not the browser 'cookie' mechanism. But its still user- identification data available for web pages to customize the experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> In other words, the same reason that Amazon did the Kindle.

</comment><comment><USER53> Anyone got a "Why Apple Did iOS" article handy?

</comment><comment><USER54> it did it because its the same business plan as everything else they do; become the infrastructure then slowly exploit it

</comment><comment><USER55> Smit performed the largest peice of industrial espionage in history.

</comment><comment><USER56> Sorry, but Android has nothing to do with iPhone.

It was a clone of the blackberry OS

<comment><USER57> The title of the original article is perhaps poorly phrased - it is not 'Why Google Did Android' but 'Why Google was Funding Android in 2010'. My recollection is as follows:

Originally, Android started as a response to feature phones with poor (sometimes WAP-only) browsers, where the internet was started on the mobile provider's portal page and was hardly ever worth visiting. Google purchased the project that eventually became Android, and it started out looking mostly like a Blackberry clone.

Google felt like they had to pay Apple for a place on the phone - which they still do via their contract to make Google the default search provider. Previous smart phone experiences (such as blackberry) were quickly obsolete, and Google (along with several other manufacturers) started targeting that new experience.

The lead that iPhone had (as pretty much the only consumer-targeted phone with a high-quality internet experience) and Google's risk that someone like Yahoo or Bing (launched in 2009) would outbid their place as the default search provider made iPhone the existential threat. Even without the search risk, Android still deserved to be funded to target all of the markets that Apple purposely would not try to hit.

There was of course the overlap of Eric Schmidt on the board of Apple over two years after the iPhone was publicly announced. The point that Schmidt felt it was too big of a conflict of interest to remain was late 2009.

If suspect if Android hadn't come along, we'd be perhaps 6-18 months farther back on technology, with 1/3 of the world on iPhones, 1/3 on Windows Phone, and 1/3 on assorted crap phones. Nokia may have lasted long enough to have a viable competitor as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> > I wonder if Vic was right about what would've happened if they hadn't done > Android?

We'd have Windows Phone phones. Something like Windows 10 would have come around 2010/2012\. Which would be good because we'd have 3 players instead of Google controlling everything end to end.

</comment><comment><USER59> I heard a statement once - Every product that Google makes is one more attempt to convince the world that it is not a monopoly.

It was given in a closed door talk, so i shan't attribute it.

<comment><USER60> Smells like a Peter Thiel quote to me.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Resources for CSS templates for DDD (Deverloper with Design Deficiency) - <AUTHOR>

Title pretty much says it all, and given my web app is boot-strapped, free resources would be great. Googling for "free css templates" comes up with a lot of junk and I'm wondering what resources other developers have used.
I have a simple web app with the backend functionality 80% done. I'm using a template right now but just not very happy with it (it's got some hardcoded images to match the colour scheme so changing colours on the header/footer means redoing images too).
I'm looking for a simple and uncluttered design that I can tinker with...one page with simple header, footer with a "Web 2.0" feel to it. Nothing fancy and I can tinker with the CSS to make it work, but i need the basic scaffolding setup.
Any ideas? It's a long weekend in Ontario, Canada and I'd like to use the time firming up the front-end. Thanks! <comment><USER2> <http://leandesigns.com> offers you the ability to customize one design, export to HTML/CSS, and they provide 8-10 templates to start from. It's $9/month, and I'd encourage you to give it a try and drop the $9 for at least one month if you find it useful.

</comment><comment><USER3> In a similar boat I was initially using a free template from templateworld.com which I hacked into what I wanted.

I recently ditched that and switched to using blueprint (<http://www.blueprintcss.org/>) as a framework. There isn't an overall finished look out of the box, but it is a much better foundation.

A very simple grid comes off looking remarkably clean, I now understand everything in the layout and feel like I am in control of the design rather than changing template stuff until it magically looks more or less right!

</comment><comment><USER4> We all seem to have this problem. <http://themeforest.net> is a good resource for templates, not free, but just a few bucks. Some of them are pretty heavy, view the source of the demos and pick something that's easy to customize.</comment>


Walkies could become the law for German dog owners - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53839286 <comment><USER2> I'm all for making sure dogs get the attention and exercise they need but this is just silly. Walking your dog for an hour every day doesn't somehow make you a responsible pet parent. And not walking your dog for at least an hour doesn't make you irresponsible.

Me forcing my dog to go on a walk in the rain or cold would be tantamount to torturing him. They have a mind and personality of their own that deserves to be taken into account.

Overly prescriptive one-size-fits-all laws like this are bad laws.</comment>


Apple will buy Tesla – rumor - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/16/rumor-says-apple-will-buy-tesla/

<comment><USER2> I've always thought that if Steve Jobs would've been alive, he'd build an electric "iCar" by the year 2020.

But Musk is never going to sell Tesla, unless Tesla is in deep financial trouble, to the point of bankruptcy, and he'd still want it to succeed, since his hope isn't really to become wealthy off Tesla, but to bring electric cars to the mainstream. So that would be compatible with that goal - but only if he thinks he can't do it himself anymore.

The fact that this rumor is almost a year old is probably a hint that the deal failed. A meeting means nothing. Of course he would've done the meeting either way.</comment>


Bringing Node.js to Windows 10 IoT Core...or swapping out V8 for Chakra - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/05/12/bringing-node-js-to-windows-10-iot-core/ <comment><USER2> _We decided to fill this gap by allowing Node.js to take advantage of running with the Chakra JavaScript engine_

Bloody called it.

EDIT:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/node](https://github.com/Microsoft/node)

jajajajajajaja

Maybe they could throw some developers at making gyp native javascript?

EDIT2:

Oh wow, the docs are waaaaaay more useful to embedders than V8: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dn249536%28v=vs.94%...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/dn249536%28v=vs.94%29.aspx)

MSDN continues to be a good friend to developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> yea...this is big news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know that Windows 10 IoT core already has Chakra, but in terms of getting node working, I'd suspect there are a lot of binary modules in play... so I would think the question becomes, why not just get node proper (V8 and all) working, and signed?

And for that matter, how will this work in tandem with the number of existing IoT libraries already in use from npm.

</comment><comment><USER4> and I'm sure there are no incompatibilities when one swaps out v8. and I'm sure this core works under Mac and Linux as well. You know, because the web is supposed to be a ubiquitous platform?

otherwise, how is this not just more Embrace/Extend/Extinguish?</comment>


Essence of Calculus (by 3Blue1Brown) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUvTyaaNkzM <comment><USER2> This is just wonderful. I watched his essence of linear algebra series, and that just opened up a whole new universe I never knew existed. I was yearning something like this for calculus. I am salivating at the thought of watching these. Better finish my work.</comment>


Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/14/delawares-odd-beautiful-conten <comment><USER2> While I might not want to live _in Arden_ , I love the experimental approach to self-organization.

I feel like a dozen of similar experimental communities allowed to succeed or fail, and they might bubble up some useful heuristics for how cities/towns organize themselves.

I feel like the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves much to be desired.

<comment><USER3> > I feel like the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves much > to be desired.

What is that dominant model?

I've lived in Massachusetts and California. In both states what's common is that the town decides (pretty much "has decided" at this point, esp in Mass) to organize itself, writes a local charter, and has local folks run a council. Town hall meetings are open to everyone. The council members are amateurs. School districts and utility self govern and are rarely completely coextensional with towns.

This can go wrong, of course, for example in Palo Alto the city managers weren't given enough oversight and overstaffed with middle managers; also real estate interests can take over the council for a while. But by an large it's not that different in principle.

In California, in fact, most of the state isn't part of organized towns; most "towns" are just vaguely defined areas under the county rules; various groups do things like run a water utility, manage the local park, etc. In fact barely a quarter of the _counties_ have charters; most themselves run under default state rules. So that's much closer to the Arden idea.

<comment><USER2> While I'm not too familiar with "the dominant model", I guess I should have clarified:

> The _results_ of the dominant model of town organization in the USA leaves > much to be desired

Way over-priced homes, auto-oriented urban/rural design, an excessive love for parking lots, houses all look the same...

Towns across the US share way too much in common for it to be something that spontaneously arose out of millions of tiny decisions.

The developed parts of California cannot be anywhere close to the Arden idea - there's endless rules, zoning restrictions, boards and commissions to try to sway, etc.

<comment><USER4> The dominant model in the US has downright cheap homes. Partly because of the parking lots and auto-oriented organization (if you can keep building out, you have a lot less upwards pressure on price). CA/NY is not representative of home prices in most of the country.

It's not perfect, but neither is the NY model, the London model, the Tokyo model, the Beijing model...

<comment><USER5> Just to clarify: most of NY _state_ has inexpensive housing (at least compared to NYC). Also, much of it is turn-of-the-century houses, not necessarily the 50s+ auto-oriented suburban tract houses, although it does have its share of those, also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "The idea that children could be out without a parent hovering was just > completely unknown to them," Macklem recalls. "And the fact that the kids > talked to someone who they obviously knew but who was not a parent."

I didn´t know the situation in the US was quite so dystopical that kids on their own was any surprise...

<comment> crooked-v [http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/living/feat-md-free-range- pare...](http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/living/feat-md-free-range-parents- under-attack/index.html)

[http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested- so...](http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-son- park/index.html)

[http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/07/mom-arrested-for- letting-k...](http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/07/mom-arrested-for-letting-kids- walk-to-mc)

<comment><USER7> Wow. This is not a single police weirdo. This is three different states. Ok, it is not normal otherwise it would not be in the news. Still, moving to the US became scarier to me (and Silicon Valley is tempting).

For a contrast, I'm in Germany. My oldest son will go to school next year. It is considered normal to train him now to go to and from kindergarten alone. The biggest perceived danger is crossing roads.

The kid of an acquaintance uses the tram for a few stops on the way to school. The first week in first grade the mother escorted her. Then she was on her own. Not alone though. The tram is packed with kids and they look out for each other (more or less, they are still kids).

Still, we also see that congestion at schools is increasingly a problem. More and more parents seem to drop of their kids at school.

<comment><USER8> As with most things in the US, urban/rural/suburban and class divides matter much more than regional or state ones.

In the urban metro areas I've lived as an adult, seeing kids take transit to school alone or in groups is totally normal - admittedly from a slightly older age than your example in Germany, but definitely still grade-school kids.

In the suburbs where I grew up, it was typical for kids to ride bikes to school. There wasn't any transit other than the school district's buses, and many kids were dropped off by their parents in cars, but some degree of independence was still there. This was a middle-class suburban area outside of a major city in FL where most parents worked in two-income families.

The horror stories you hear about "helicopter parenting" in the US mostly come from wealthier exurbs where, for lack of better way to put it, there aren't any real problems... so bored homemakers micro-manage every aspect of their community and worry themselves senseless about silly things. These are often master-planned communities, often built in isolated semi-rural areas, where it is difficult to go _anywhere_ without a car, and transit aside from buses to/from school is nonexistent, so the very idea of a child even having somewhere to go or something to do without a parent escorting them there in a car is seemingly insane. It contributes a lot to the perception that kids shouldn't be alone without an adult until they turn 16, can operate a car, and then can travel safely from the confines of a vehicle. Its horrible for a whole bunch of reasons.

If you want to move to the US, there are definitely still plenty of areas where kids can a normal, independent young life - but especially in the SF Bay area, I'd be very careful about picking a town/neighborhood where such a thing is accepted. It won't be universal.

<comment><USER9> >The horror stories you hear about "helicopter parenting" in the US mostly come from wealthier exurbs where, for lack of better way to put it, there aren't any real problems... so bored homemakers micro-manage every aspect of their community and worry themselves senseless about silly things.

I think this is true, and I'll add the media keeps turning the crank on neurotic parents by making them think there's a child molester or serial killer waiting around every corner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Delawarean here. Growing up, I had the impression that Arden was just a place for aged hippies, history buffs, and the overeducated idle class to have space to live out their utopian fantasies without bothering the rest of us.

I mean, if you think about the town meetings in "Gilmore Girls," where you have these people who are _really into town meetings_ , you probably know that they're meant to be an exaggerated parody of the handful of people who show up at town meetings and are really, uh, passionate about their viewpoints. Only in "Gilmore Girls," the whole town is like that.

Well, I would much rather have them all in Arden, duking it out, than spread out more generally in North Wilmington and northern New Castle County, causing eye rolls everywhere.

That said, Arden is not nearly as much of an insulated place anymore. I think, for the majority of residents, it's just an address and not a philosophy.

<comment><USER11> Why is civic participation so eyeroll-inducing to you?

My sense is that the groups you're rolling your eyes at have taken over the top levels of national government and are now working backwards to states and cities, largely thanks to reviving the lost act of participating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a part time resident, and a passionate Georgist, I love the Ardens. The three villages function separately for governance, but socially they're one, and there is a lot going on. The history is fascinating. (If you have access to newspapers.com, read it chronologically. I'm still working through it.) If you're in the area in early September, don't miss the Arden Fair.

<comment><USER13> Did you move for your passion, or did you learn your passion from living there?

If you have the inclination, please add references to the relevant Wikipedia articles as you read old news! Thank you. :)

<comment><USER12> I moved there because it was lovely, and was consistent with something I have long felt strongly about. My late grandparents were lifelong Georgists, and never mentioned the Ardens to me. (I'm a late-bloomer -- I shared their perception of the problems, but kept thinking there had to be another way to solve them; when I failed to find it, I looked more closely at what Henry George had to say, and found it very persuasive.) For a recent article, look at Michael Kinsley's, in the September Vanity Fair. But people from across many spectra embrace George's analysis and George's remedy; it is a third way, coming out of the traditions of classical economics, not the neo-classical economics that is widely taught today.

George's most famous book was entitled "Progress and Poverty" ... it was dedicated, "to those who, seeing the vice and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state and would strive for its attainment." Its subtitle is a mouthful:"an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth ... The Remedy."

The book is quite analytical, a logical analysis. If you want to see where it is going, jump to the final "book" before you read the rest.

Or you might start with a collection of essays entitled "Social Problems." They still read well today, and, among other things, show why a Constitution written in the 18th century simply can't be frozen in time, and needs to be reconsidered in light of 21st century realities. Some of my favorite quotes are from "Social Problems."

Both books are online and at Amazon or schalkenbach.org; there is also a fine modern abridgment of P&P, and audio is available at hgchicago.org.

<comment><USER13> I've read Progress and Poverty and much more by still living Georgists (eg Polly Cleveland and Mason Gaffney). I'm pro-LVT.

Your response however typifies one reason I'd never call myself a Georgist -- people who call themselves such come off as believing they've discovered the single truth that obtains social salvation, ie religious nuts -- who need to dump that single truth on people they encounter at the first opportunity. Seriously, if you want to be effective, and I want you to be, please tone it down.

Thank you very much for sharing your experience in the fist 3 sentences of your comment. That's what I was hoping to learn!

<comment><USER14> > _Your response however typifies one reason I 'd never call myself a Georgist > -- people who call themselves such come off as believing they've discovered > the single truth that obtains social salvation, ie religious nuts -- who > need to dump that single truth on people they encounter at the first > opportunity. Seriously, if you want to be effective, and I want you to be, > please tone it down._

What? Of places to share one's enthusiasm for Georgism, there are few more appropriate than in an internet thread about a Georgist town they're a resident of, after explcitly being asked for references.

<comment><USER13> Citing Progress and Poverty when asked about adding references to Wikipedia about the history of a Georgist town strikes me as like citing the Bible when asked about adding referenes to Wikipedia about the history of a Christian town -- and it's available on audiotape! Of no use other than identifying oneself as a true believer.

<comment><USER15> It's likely that they weren't responding to your question about Wikipedia.

Your other question, "Did you move for your passion, or did you learn your passion from living there?", suggests unfamiliarity yet genuine interest in the topic. So, their response makes total sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well that was odd. Tried to read page two on my Android Oreo device, had "virus" like alerts springing up. Sorry, this is off topic, but I think there's reason to suspect that web page.

<comment><USER17> Lots of reasonably decent sites seem to participate in ad networks that apparently allow malicious ads that hijack browsers... It's not clear to me why this is still an unsolved problem after so many years... :-/

<comment><USER18> Because the profits from serving the malware are concentrated while the harm is diffuse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure how I feel about LVT. It seems like the most fair form of taxation, but physical land is decreasingly tied to productivity and wealth, so it seems to make less sense than in the past.

<comment><USER20> Why are most "high-productivity" software and knowledge jobs in cities where land costs are high? I would argue that it's because that land _is_ productive! At least LVT would incentivize people to move to areas with cheaper land, or to increase density.

<comment><USER4> It's interesting to look at how that distribution of jobs has changed over the last 40 to 50 years, though, and whether or not seeking to reverse the centralization could be useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >After the prisoners' sentences were completed, the town celebrated with a circus. The performance included an arrest of its own: A clown dressed as a cop entered the audience, grabbed a surprised Sinclair, and marched him away from the show.

Surely the author meant to write a cop dressed as a clown?

<comment><USER22> Wat? No, a cown dressed like a cop. Pretty explicit. A cop dressed as a clown would not be recognized for anything else than a clown. A clown dressed as a cop will be seen as a clown dressed as a cop. Or maybe I'm crazy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This version is formatted for printing:

[http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/14/delawares-odd- beautifu...](http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/14/delawares-odd-beautiful- conten/print)

</comment><comment><USER24> Henry George is said to be the inspiration behind the game Monopoly

</comment><comment><USER25> I knew about Freehope, which is another single-tax community. But not this one.

<comment><USER26> Fairhope! (grew up there)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What prominent and high profile companies use TDD? - <AUTHOR> When adopting a practice I think it is important to look at experiences with it. So far I have found a paper (https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/TDDpaperv8.pdf)[An Initial Investigation of Test Driven Development in Industry]
From abstract:
> In our research, we ran a set of structured experiments with 24 professional pair programmers. One group developed code using TDD while the other a waterfall-like approach. Both groups developed a small Java program. We found that the TDD developers produced higher quality code, which passed 18% more functional black box test cases. However, TDD developer pairs took 16% more time for development.
Referring to this as "industry" seems a bit contrived and wrong.
What I am looking for is some details of companies/teams/organizations (not individual developers at companies) that use TDD with some significant consistency for production software with real users. That means > 50% of the time, said entities use TDD for some code base. And I would like this to be somewhat verifiable and well documented - not just some person on Quora saying "Some How Yes !!! All major products are following TDD, And if few are not following then they are probably busy to create unit cases/integration tests for existing code and want to  adapt TDD in near future as soon as possible !"
With TDD I mean:
- From Kent Beck: Never write a single line of code unless you have a failing automated test. Eliminate duplication.
- From Wikipedia: 1. Add a test, 2. Run all tests and see if the new test fails, 3. Write the code, 4. Run tests, 5. Refactor code, Repeat
What TDD is not:
- Existence of automated tests
- Existence of test coverage metric mandates <comment><USER2> I think any place that mandates TDD will have a lot of "normalization of deviance".

Often the unknowns in software development aren't the kind of things you can test in a unit test.

As for Kent Beck, he's like Tony Robbins. Kent Beck might have been a software developer but now his business is giving talks.

My experience is that "TDD" works best in a "plan it all ahead of time" scenario. For instance if you wanted to write a C compiler you know what the syntax and behavior is ahead of time and you can start with an extensive test suite.

</comment><comment><USER3> I try to encourage TDD within my group, but in a world of short deadlines you get a non ideal result.

I think it is important to understand the concept and to strive to have a good test suite that helps you enhance and maintain projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure you are not conflating TDD with the presence of automated test suite?

<comment><USER3> Yes, you can go the dogmatic route with TDD or you can sometimes still write the tests just after you finished a function and achieve similar results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At ThoughtWorks, TDD is the default way of starting things. Only if there are good reasons do devs deviate from it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I buy this. Quote from Martin Fowler:

[https://youtu.be/z9quxZsLcfo?t=1447](https://youtu.be/z9quxZsLcfo?t=1447)

> I share with with David and Kent, there are problems where TDD doesn't work > terribly well, and sadly most of the programming I do these days is not > conducive to TDD and I miss it because actually I really like the TDD flow > that really works for me just as it works the Kent.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommend an app to organize design inspirations. - <AUTHOR>

I want to store and organize inspirational designs I encounter while browsing web, preferably on my desktop with a backup on cloud. It should have features such as categorization, tags, search etc.
Is there any good app(web app,linux desktop app,browser extension) for this?
P.S. : I wish evernote was available on linux. <comment><USER2> I know it's not ideal, but Evernote does have a chrome extension for saving images in the browser ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pioclpoplcdbaefiha...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pioclpoplcdbaefihamjohnefbikjilc))

If you were on a mac, I'd recommend you check out Sparkbox ( <http://www.icyblaze.com/sparkbox/> )

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is what Pinterest's goal is, or at least one of them. To help you organize; try <http://www.pinterest.com></comment>


Creator of Oculus VR answers questions about the FB Acquisition on Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/21dvlz/palmer_i_will_continue_to_support_oculus_but/

<comment><USER2> The key comment from him would be this:

"We have not gotten into all the details yet, but a lot of the news is coming. The key points: 1) We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon. 2) We can afford to hire everyone we need, the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects. 3) We can make huge investments in content. More news soon."</comment>


Game Workers Unite - <AUTHOR> https://www.gameworkersunite.org/ <comment><USER2> I am so glad to see this happening!

There are a lot of reasons why game workers need to organize, but it doesn't have to stop there. Tech workers in general can make the lives of their teammates a lot better by banding together.

We can also fight for the rights of others, why couldn't Amazon employees fight for the rights of Amazon's warehouse workers?

Also, things like discrimination and abuse are combated by organized workforces faster than they are by HR departments, especially when such abuse comes from managers. No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal footing. It requires an organization of labor to do that.

<comment><USER3> > _No individual worker is going to negotiate with a company on equal > footing._

Equal footing how? If the "worker" and the company could be on truly equal footing, then there would be no point in having companies at all. The whole point of a company is for the company to have more resources than any one person is entitled to or capable of retaining. If you mean equal footing _relative other employees_ , why would they have equal footing if every employee is inherently different from the next?

<comment><USER4> Every person under capitalism has to sell their labor in order to survive. This means that the employee and employer are not on equal footing - I cannot reasonably refuse to work and live a comfortable lifestyle, which means I have to make certain sacrifices (ie, working 40 hours a week in order to survive). This is all fine if I feel like I am treated well and compensated fairly, but if I feel like I am not, as an individual I have very little power. I can quit, but if I feel like most workers in my industry are not treated fairly, there's nowhere to go. However, if I organize with other workers, I have the bargaining power to make certain demands: suddenly employers realize if they want to employ people who have my skills, they have to meet certain reasonably requirements with regards to hours, compensation, etc.

Things like the 40 hour workweek aren't just a result of market forces. Market forces by themselves literally worked people to death - life expectancy in Liverpool during the industrial revolution was 15. It was through organization and struggle that workers achieved the rights they have today.

<comment><USER5> This comment seems to ignore the large portion of people that operate as small businesses. They make money by selling products they create or services they provide, not raw labor to customers.

You certainly can choose not to work for any given company (or even industry). You just might take a pay cut or might have to take on some personal financial risks to start your own business, which isn't palatable to some people.

<comment><USER6> > isn't palatable to some people

And doesn't seem to be economically viable for _everyone_ to do, or we'd already be doing it.

The main financial risk for people is that cashflow problems can lead pretty rapidly to homelessness or health deterioration.

<comment><USER7> See Coase's Theory of the Firm. Technology is changing the equation by removing transaction costs, and you see more freelancers and self-employed and Uber drivers.

I agree that the current framework makes freelancers and self-employed more vulnerable to cashflow problems, and it's an issue.

I've seen some interesting ways to mitigate it, even in my own country (with affordable health services for small business owners but they have salary caps that exclude IT workers)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of my relatives works for a large well known game developer; same employer for years. Because they decide to classify many of their devs as contract workers, they are denied rights afforded to 'full-time' employees - when she is laid off for months at a time (to prevent being called a full-time) she can't collect unemployment. No health care, no benefits whatsoever. And due to contracts, can't work for a rival either during this time. Its forced unemployment.

None of the employees are happy with this situation, but job scared that they'll simply be replaced by those who won't complain, and blacklisted.

<comment><USER9> I'm amazed that this is legal in a first world country- it would be illegal to do this in a couple of third-world countries I'm personally familiar with: the laws state that if you're a on contract for more than a certain number of months, you automatically become a permanent employee. Firing and rehiring for the same position as a contractor is straight-up illegal.

<comment><USER10> For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter- actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break.

The competitiveness and desire to work there is what drives these insane working conditions.

The big difference is this: If you have the skills to work in the gaming industry, you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately.

Nobody needs to work 100 hours a week on salary for at a AAA studio who will discard you.

The key message is this:

AAA productions are losing touch with their audiences and spending unholy amounts of money on garbage games. (this is accelerating just like Hollywood).

Unlike the poor actor/actress who has to suck Spacey/Wienstein's dick, YOU have options. Go work a boring 9-5 webapp job with benefits and then hack on a game with a few passionate friends with a vision of something AWESOME.

The Internet levels the playing field for us. Minecraft is an excellent example of this.

<comment><USER9> > For decades gaming has been the programmer equivalent of the waiter- > actor/waitress-actress in Hollywood trying for their big break

The game industry is not made up entirely of programmers! There are lots of other roles that do not map to the software industry such as animators, modelers and artists. They can't just switch to making enterprise CRUD apps. Even the programmers might have difficulty meeting the requirement of having 2-4 years experience on framework that got its first stable release in 2017.

<comment><USER10> And again I will claim that:

"you also have the skills to work in another software industry that will compensate you appropriately"

If you are capable of learning how to use the apps necessary to be a animator/modeler you DO have the skills to work in another industry! Nobody is entitled to work whatever job they want wherever they want, and nobody forced you to take out loans to get a degree in Art/3d modelling or animation.

For example, I'd love to be a beer taste tester for 150k per year and live in downtown SF, but the demand isn't there. How would a Union of beer taster's improve the lot of people who want the job? They would establish rules to exclude up and comers with more talent who are willing to work for less.

The sad truth is a union will help people in the gaming industry just as much as a union would help the NBA. No matter what there will always be a shortage of jobs compared to the number of people who wish to work there. But the union will exclude a significant portion of people who are willing to work for less from competing at all.

Hint:(Similar to minimum wage, this is where unpaid internships came from)

So either you compete on price/working conditions, Or you end up with a Union cabal who set artificial standards of entry and keep out talented newcomers who are willing to work for less.

You have choice. Make good decisions.

<comment><USER11> Actually, in Europe many countries do have unions for sport players as well.

Here is the Portuguese web site for football (soccer) just as an example, not going to list everything here.

[http://sjogadores.pt/](http://sjogadores.pt/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why only game workers? Why not software workers/codewriters in general?

I'd prefer something closer to SAG than the auto workers union personally.

<comment><USER13> Why do "software workers/codewriters" need a union? It's an employee's market.

<comment><USER14> In NYC you expected to be at work at most companies for 9-10 hours a day, you are expected to go to all their social events, and you are expected to act like a logic lording startup bro (even when the company is far past the startup stage). Sure, they give you free treats, sure it's not hard to come by a job, but you are still ultimately expected to give up your autonomy to become a startup stooge.

<comment><USER13> That would give a hiring advantage to companies that don't demand that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see no problem with game workers unionizing, but when I want to release my indie game on itch or steam and I am stopped because I have to pay dues to the union, we'll have a very real and unfriendly discussion.

<comment><USER16> Many unions don't demand dues from other people just to work in the same industry.

A lot of people here (not you particularly; just that I might as well say it somewhere) have a very stereotyped view of what a union does, seeing it as some kind of compulsory enforcer that ties its members hands and goes around stopping outsiders working. I can't speak for everywhere, but my experience of unions in the UK is very different. Maybe this union could be modeled on that kind of approach. There's also the German Betriebsräte style which looks really interesting.

For an industry full of people that spout about disruption and how things are different and what new technology can do to empower people, there seems to be this picture of "unions" stuck inside people's heads that involves Jimmy Hoffa sending some thugs round to smash up your workshop because you sold product without going through the union, and large mafioso "encouraging" workers to join. At risk of massively generalising, that picture seems strongest inside the heads of our US colleagues; is the anti-union propaganda particularly effective there, or are the unions particularly stuck in that stereotypical Jimmy Hoffa style?

<comment><USER17> To be fair the UK had to introduce law to stop "closed shop" unions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_Kingdom)

> All forms of closed shops in the UK are illegal following the introduction > of the Employment Act 1990. They were further curtailed under section > 137(1)(a) of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 > (c. 52)[7] passed by the Conservative government at the time. The Labour > Party, then in opposition, had supported closed shops until December 1989, > when it abandoned the policy in accordance with European legislation.[8] > However, Labour shadow arts minister Thangam Debbonaire announced to an > Equity conference in May 2016 that she favoured the introduction of a > "limited" closed shop for actors, as part of Jeremy Corbyn's pledge to > strengthen and introduce a new package of employment rights beneficial to > employees.[9] Equity was one of the last trade unions in the United Kingdom > to offer a pre-entry closed shop until the 1990 act.[9]

<comment><USER16> Indeed; that's certainly how it was, but now we can have something better. That's the old way, which I certainly agree had to go, although even that didn't stop someone else working in the same industry.

1990 is well before my experience, but soon enough I expect to be telling people how I was there for the crash of September 2000, before they were born.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone who went to school for game design but hasn't actually been blessed yet with getting a job in games, this seems like an interesting idea. I know from my personal experience at the software companies I have worked that the culture is what drove the work to personal life ratio. My first job out of school was a start up and when the product the team I was a part of was nearing it's set-in-stone deadline, for about 3 months I was working 6 days a week and about 12ish hours a day. We weren't a game studio but we still had a taste of that crunch time that the game industry is infamous for.

</comment><comment><USER19> A union will solve nothing other than leeching off some money from the workers (yay!). If you want to solve the problem you have to educate the credible little children who think working in gamedev is a privilege and are willing to work for free because "games!". Currently and for decades there has been an infinite supply of these, hence all the junior and mid roles pay less than half than any other industry.

<comment><USER20> You gotta love the uncaring, cynical dev with more interest in his own pocket than the effects of automation and the well-being of his technical and non- technical co-workers. Apparently, he only believes that innovation is possible everywhere else besides unions and collective bargaining. Be positive my friend, I'm sure we're capable of creating a new type of union in 2018.

<comment><USER21> > You gotta love the uncaring, cynical dev with more interest in his own > pocket than the effects of automation and the well-being of his technical > and non-technical co-workers.

As someone who eats, sleeps and breathes automation projects you (probably) won't find somebody more worried about the human costs of automation than me. 90% of our job as an internal development team is to reduce labor costs by automating various tasks, and while we continue to grow staffing because we have continued to grow our list of contracted facilities there will be a day (even if it's a decade or more away) that REDUCTION in workforce is a possibility - I fear that day, and I can only hope by that time our civilization is prepared for it.

> Be positive my friend, I'm sure we're capable of creating a new type of > union in 2018.

We've always been capable, unions people complain about are almost always a direct result of poor participation by members - if you want things to change make your voice heard and vote on union issues, it's no different from politics in that fashion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I see a lot of people arguing about how unions protect workers, and in some cases that is true, but in my experience many have been corrupted. You only have to look at the coal workers, steel workers, and several other unions, that's leadership has been corrupted, and serve their own interest at the expense of everyone else.

Additionally, things like agency fees, where even if you work somewhere with a Union, and you are denied membership, and member only benifits you can still be required to pay the union, for their "collective bargaining benifits."

There are also the nightmares of union fiefdom, if a light bulb burns out in your office and you want it changed, you can wait till a union employee comes to do it, or you can pay the union the minimum call out fee (usually a couple of hours) after doing it yourself.

Unions have completely failed at protecting retirement plans, and preventing age discrimination across the country.

I can't understand how anyone can honestly evaluate the performance of unions in the last several decades and think that implementing one would in anyway make for a better work life situation.

<comment><USER23> Yeah but the United Mine Workers Association (a coal union) got us the eight hour workday - before that, they just exploited the shit out of you.

"Back when the government first tracked workers' hours in 1890, full-time manufacturing employees worked a backbreaking 100 hours each week. Years of pressure from laborer organizers, along with changes from companies like Ford Motor, reformed working conditions in the U.S. and protected workers from schedules that endangered their health and safety."

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday- chang...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/03/how-the-8-hour-workday-changed-how- americans-work.html)

<comment><USER24> People are forgetting how life was when the capitalists got their way without any legal worker protections. Read about the conditions in british coal mines or in carnegie's steel mills. We should not go back to these days and unions are an important part of preventing that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "We are a currently-forming anonymous and horizontal organization" \- what does that mean in English?

<comment><USER25> They don't publish the names of their members and they don't have a tiered structure of who does what. Everyone presumably reports to a small group of leaders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Great to see some movement here!

</comment><comment><USER27> I have read the whole website and failed to see one concrete example of action that the union could take to make game-industry employees' life better

       Game Workers Unite is a broad-reaching organization
       that seeks to connect pro-union activists,
       exploited workers, and allies across borders
       and across ideologies in the name of
       building a unionized game industry.

Even compatible with the libertarian ideology :p ?

<comment><USER25> Libertarians should, in principle, be okay with people exercising their personal freedom to form a union.

<comment><USER28> The issue is that people not in the union are not free to pursue their own negotiations.

<comment><USER29> Libertarians usually say that everyone should be free to form contracts without government restriction. Why shouldn't unions get the same freedom to form binding contracts that everyone else gets?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been working in game development as a software engineer for going on seven years and am happy to see this initiative. Unions nothwithstanding there is plenty of variation in the working conditions throughout the industry. The best empirical reflection of that is the annual IGDA surveys: [https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/resmgr/2017_...](https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/resmgr/2017_DSS_/!IGDA_DSS_2017_SummaryReport.pdf).

If you find yourself at a studio with poor working conditions, know that there are plenty of studios that better respect you and your time. Hopefully unionization, or at least the threat of it, will raise the floor on the conditions and compensation for the employees most often exploited: contractors generally and QA specifically.

</comment><comment><USER31> Supply and demand. Turns out a lot of people want to develop games and are willing to be underpaid compared to other developers.

Either an overwhelmingly high amount of developers join a game developer union and raise salaries, or a company will simply hire someone else.

<comment><USER32> Workers in the game industry are not only devs. There are also artists, testers, IT techs, marketers. I'm not sure the biggest issue is about the salary, but the (unpaid) overtime, precarity, sudden lay-offs, etc.

<comment><USER33> Okay, let's call it compensation. That is a good umbrella term that includes salary, overtime and benefits.

The compensation for game workers sucks compared to their counterparts in other software fields. This is probably because it is sexier to be a game dev than, say, working at Salesforce.

It is a good idea for game industry workers to form a union or guild.

<comment><USER27>
       it is sexier to be a game dev than, say, working at Salesforce.

So what should we do, besides educate people about the reality of working in this industry (which is not really the point of an union) ?

<comment><USER33> When the industry is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor, some type of a union apparatus is the most affective way to ensure fair compensation.

Yes, we can educate others who want to enter the industry, but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt, you'll accept the poor working conditions for long enough and the cycle will continue to perpetuate.

The best protection against predation is for the prey to act together. Predators will always divide and conquer and go after the weak, and so the weak must be protected. The other way is increased competition - but our environment is becoming more and more anti-competitive.

<comment><USER27>
       is highly lucrative on the backs of overworked labor

You need to think about WHY this situation happens. I'm willing to believe grouped negotiations can bring value to a class of workers but it's a partial remedy to a bad situation.

      but when you're graduating out of university with a fat debt

Paying expensive university could be a really bad decision, especially in markets like game industry / software dev, which doesn't require by law that you pass some exams. Funnily, once you create huge syndicates / unions for the game industry or software dev, maybe you'll see these kind of "protection" to emerge

<comment><USER33> That's a good point about unions requiring minimum education levels for membership. I suppose this is where apprenticeships come in. There will still be non-union developers, just as there are non union plumbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I see a lot of comments talking about employees butting heads with managers and somehow a union will protect them. I don't really see what role a union has in that particular case.

I just want those poor bastards in QA to get overtime or full time benefits.

</comment><comment><USER35> Consider some of the negative affects of unions when working alongside low and high performers in technology:

\- Protection for under performers alongside high performers. Difficult or darn near impossible to terminate employment. Ability to enforce performance evaluation and plans could be killed by the union. Common in teacher unions.

\- Without being able to measure performance, pay may be solely based on tenure, not skill.

<comment><USER36> That, sir, is just FUD. The dangerous type.

Unions protect workers from being exploited and abused. If you're not happy with how some employee performs, you can still fire him in place. But be ready to prove it. No more firing people on a whim just because.

If game industry isn't sustainable without exploitation, then we need it to adapt, and not the other way around.

<comment><USER37> > But be ready to prove it.

How do you prove that an employee took two weeks to find a bug that should have taken one day to find?

How do you prove that writing a domain-specific language was a bad decision compared to defining a complex XML schema?

How do you prove that an engineer is bad at explaining technical concepts?

<comment><USER38> Which side are you on?

<comment><USER39> I don't think the grandparent's point is an issue of sides. It's more of a problem of gathering a useful heuristic of an engineer's performance. Given a variety of every day engineering tasks, how can you know exactly the difficultly of a person's work short of having done it yourself? I believe that experience is the answer in some cases, but others it is not. As another poster stated, it could also be done by working with the engineer through it all.

<comment><USER37> That's basically my take. A lot of evaluation is properly subjective and qualitative. Both bosses staring at deadlines and union negotiators clamoring for paper trails and predefined metrics are going to be bad for the industry and therefore workers, at least in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Anonymous unions... Now _that 's_ a concept I'm very interested in. Where does the negotiating power come from?

</comment><comment><USER41> I think partly this has to do with "the struggle" factor.

Once, I had this guy who owns a big gaming company and I asked him the same question, why do you treat these employees, unlike other software companies?

He said, there was a time when he no one would apply for open job listings at his company because they had less money or they were not very hot. And that he understands, he can push the people around as he has earned it. So, it seems there is some revenge and ability to justify worse at work here.

What can you do? There aren't that many successful companies and the even if there are, they aren't growing as fast as your SV startup, so they do not need increasing supply of labor.

</comment><comment><USER42> I've seen first hand how terrible dev environments such as EA are compared to startups and tech giants in SV. But that said.. in an industry where the barrier of entry for new games companies is so low, why is this even necessary? Any group of disgruntled employees with some ideas for games can say enough is enough and go start their own games company where they treat people better and subsequently attract talent (whilst raising the bar for everyone else).

<comment><USER14> The idea that it's simple to build, design, audio engineer, graphic design, run a company, market the product, do accounting/taxes, figure out your legal stuff, etc is patently absurd

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I thought game workers were going to be gamers that work in the game to mine or product products or similar.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is the best news I've seen on this site for years.

</comment><comment><USER45> Solidarity!

</comment><comment><USER46> So what does this do exactly?</comment>


DropBox lost my files for good - <AUTHOR> http://omarabid.com/dropbox-lost-my-files-for-good/

<comment><USER2> Takeaway lesson: sync isn't backup. If you care about your files, back them up at least weekly.</comment>


Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags  - <AUTHOR> http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

<comment><USER2> A criticism of Shirky's essay, which IIRC was fair: <http://www.peterme.com/archives/000558.html>

I'm fascinated with tagging, ontology and organizing information, and consider current methods badly flawed; so much so that I tried to make a startup out of my ideas (turned out to be too complex/ambitious).

My conclusion was that improving on existing systems is possible, but will require an awful lot of effort. The way forward, IMHO, is a kind of probabalistic ontology, based on mining lots of data combined with careful use of human intelligence.

Unfortunately that's as far as I got with the idea, though I hope someone else can make more progress than I did. Improving the ability to organize information seems to me to be a crucial problem that gets far too little attention, probably because it is a very hard problem. I will be surprised and disappointed if the best we can do 10 years from now is just search, categorisation and tagging.

<comment><USER3> The criticism is indeed fair, but I don't think it really sinks Shirky's key arguments. Shirky may have shortchanged professional ontologies and glossed over some details, but at the end of the day professional onotologies are expensive to create and maintain. With the explosion of content on the web, there's clearly a huge gap between free-text search and professional categorization.

The interesting part of the article for me (4 years later) is that it points to the promise of data mining tags, which we've only just begun to scratch the surface of.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that there's merit to his criticism of purely hierarchial classification, he just completely fails to acknowledge that to cataloging professionals _this is old news_.

(The "gee whiz, tags solve everything" hype has been sufficiently deflated elsewhere, IMHO.)

<comment><USER3> That's true, he does aim some low blows there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The thing that strikes me the most is how dated this is already. Tagging -- the novel concept it introduces at great length -- won, and all the motivating arguments for it just seem obvious now.

Obviously, that's not a criticism of the piece itself, which is very good. It's just so (... quickly look up date ...) 2005.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, but I think it has interesting parallels to problems that crop up in sufficiently complicated OO class hierarchy designs, and I'm not sure that discussion surrounding "design patterns" has fully acknowledged such issues.

People in some other niches (librarians, for one) have spent a lot of time thinking about these problems. They're generally struggling with managing a different kind of complexity than programmers are, but I'd love to see more cross-pollination of ideas.

I'm just trying to generate discussion.

<comment><USER4> That's true, a lot of the fundamental problems are the same. I suppose OO design patterns are workarounds for some of them.

Some time ago I read a collection of articles by Michael Jackson (the computing one) and it turns out he was making similar arguments against this kind of ontology in the 70s.

Incidentally, I always thought "ontology" meant "philosophy of being", not cataloguing systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Classic article by Shirky - I still see data-centric programmers making this fundamental underlying mistake all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely! I found the article doubly interesting because 1) I worked in a library through college* and remember finding such skews in organization rather odd, and 2) while he doesn't have any programming-specific examples, it also shows why trying to fit everything into a hierarchy of classes tends to involve a lot of awkward workarounds in any sufficiently complicated (i.e., real) system.

I don't have a CS degree (history, actually), but I wonder if, when cliche examples such as e.g. Animal -> Mammal -> Dog/Cat/etc. was presented ("See! You can fit things into a tree. OO simulates the real world!"), somebody had the foresight to ask how things like monotremes are represented. (Hopefully without being smug about it - it's an important question, far too important to just be a chance for _That Guy_ to be a smart-ass.)

Library and information science professionals (e.g. catalogers) understand the enormity of the issue better than most programmers, in my experience. There's a lot of room for cross-pollination of ideas there.

* Which was a _great_ combination, btw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My company's site, HubPages.Com just pushed out categories this week (April 2, 2009)

This essay has led a lot of people to think that categories are no longer useful.

This is a highly engaging article which I believe has been too successful in its attack on categories.

If you are interested why we are very excited about adding categories in addition to tags, you can check out my blog post here: [http://blog.hubpages.com/2009/04/categories-add-value-a- resp...](http://blog.hubpages.com/2009/04/categories-add-value-a-response-to- clay-shirkys-classic-essay/)

</comment><comment><USER7> thank you! to get posting rights on Y Combinator, you should have to answer a quiz, and there should be questions about this Shirky post on it. this and the one about micropayments. I can't believe some idiot got on the Daily Show and the front cover of Time without reading Shirky.</comment>


"Crypto" Is Being Redefined as Cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/12/crypto_is_being.html <comment><USER2> I don't like it either.

I also don't like that "literally" now means "figuratively", or using the plural "their" to mean "him or her".

But we don't get to dictate how language is used.

How language is used dictates what is acceptable.

So get over it, Schneier, language is alive.

</comment><comment><USER3> And to a non-native speaker maybe the English terms 'butt dial' and 'booty call' should have been better chosen. Language evolution knows no obvious master, and getting angry over that evolution as if a particular domain of study has ownership of a subset of words is ridiculous.

<comment><USER4> But neither of those composite terms is clobbering a preexisting meaning. Whilst their meanings may not be clear at first encounter they can be quickly and unambiguously determined using a dictionary.

In fact I had to look up booty call just now and understand immediately the difference.

Whereas "Switzerland should become crypto capital" can mean different things to different people simultaneously. That's the problem. If I look up crypto in a notional 2018 dictionary and it has two definitions, which do I choose?

<comment><USER5> If someone said "crypto capital" I would immediately think "hidden capital" ala "crypto-Jews" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto- Judaism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-Judaism)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first definition of "hacker" in my dictionary is "a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data". So there's that...

</comment><comment><USER7> Cryptographers have invited this by using "crypto" to mean "cryptography/cryptographic" in the first place. Without this meaning, "cryptocurrency" couldn't have formed and been shortened to "crypto".

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe it is a stupid name, but the prefix 'crypto' and its usage are not the exclusive domain of cryptographers. Perhaps thinking of crypto-currencies as mimics of real currencies is appropriate ;)

</comment><comment><USER9> Similar to what happened to "meme," the original meaning of which is way more interesting than the current most popular meaning.

</comment><comment><USER10> right, so we call them ??????. there isn't a better name

<comment><USER11> Cryptocurrencies or cryptocoins.

<comment><USER10> both are shortened to 'crypto'. not good choices

<comment><USER12> They're only shortened if you don't know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER10> most people into cryptocoins don't know what they 're talking about</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Open-source online speech recognition - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/theblackcat102/Online-Speech-Recognition <comment><USER2> How does it compare to Kaldi?

<comment><AUTHOR> Online decoding in Kaldi uses GMM (or NN+GMM hybrid) where this repo focus in end to end approach using deep LSTM (similar to Google Pixel's offline speech to text [1]).

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.06621.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.06621.pdf)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which IDE handles very large projects the best? - <AUTHOR> Most IDEs I use get really slow when working with a large amount of files. Which IDE have you used that handles this problem the best ? <comment><USER2> Visual Studio

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The Solution Explorer is extremely easy to navigate and the search function is my new best friend (Ctrl + ;). My only grip is that the icons were a lot easier to tell apart in 2010, but I've gotten over that in time.

Additionally, I've had no problems with 30+ large projects in a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious regarding which IDE's and how many files.

</comment><comment><USER5> Split code into a number of subproject.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not an IDE, but vim with ctags is an excellent combination.</comment>