Ativ Book 9 Plus, 3200x1800, Haswell, "12 hours" battery - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/laptops/samsung-ativ-book-9/4505-3121_7-35796875.html

<comment><USER2> These high end products just make me hope so much that Lenovo launches a great new set of ThinkPads this year. Something with the specs of a W530 in a 12" or 13" or so frame. Sadly, none of Lenovo current offers have a high-resolution screen.

<comment><USER3> Sadly really awesome screens havent been one of Lenovos strengths lately but i agree, something like this with full Linux support would be awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Al nice and dandy...

But where Is my 15" 1920x1200 Thinkpad?

The fuck is this guys? Currently I am using Asus Zenbook UX32VD and it is pretty nice (the nicest computer on the market that is), BUT it has no trackpoint.

I really wish that Lenovo would get their shit together and start offering sensible displays.

Besides what is the point of these mega high resoltuion displays on 13" notebooks when either Windows or Linux support is just horrible?

I mean my current machine has 13" with 1920 x 1080 and while it is fine for me. 3/4 of people just cannot use that kind of resolution.

<comment><USER5> What do you mean by 3/4 can't use that banal resolution?

on your other point, i used a sgi 24" crt with all the resolutions mentioned in this thread summed and UNIX/Linux/windows were just fine. And that was the 90s

<comment><USER4> I mean, they cannot see fonts at that banal resolution.

My eyesight is better and I like it a lot. Thats why I could run a 2560 native resolution on a 15" display.

The screens work fine if you are willing to look at non native resolution screens.

Also CRTS do not look like crap when on a non native resolution. DPI scaling in windows and linux just sucks. That much is a fact.

<comment><USER6> what is the native res of a CRT ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The product itself looks very interesting, but Samsung is _horrible_ at product launches. I've just bought the new Haswell Macbook Air and am interested in possibly returning it and getting the Ativ Book 9 Plus. I thought that samsung.com would have availability information and more detailed specs, but it's not even mentioned anywhere. In fact, such information isn't available anywhere.

<comment><USER8> This is (very sadly) par for the course for pretty much everyone but Apple. The same thing happens with any sort of smartphone, any new ultrabooks, etc. I'm guessing this also comes without a price tag or launch date. "Cool story Samsung".

<comment><USER9> Yep. Over the past couple of months I got my mom a new All-In-One Windows machine, and while I was shopping a Lenovo A520 was by far the front runner. Listed on Amazon (out of stock), listed on multiple product pages on the Lenovo website (Lenovo phone sales: "Keep checking back"), and a month or so later it just disappeared without so much as a wimper. It was launched in October 2012. Dell deserved my money in the way a hobo who deserves my change is the one not threatening to hurt me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's also a Fujitsu Lifebook UH90 with the same resolution in a slightly more appropriate 14" screen size: [http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/fujitsu- intros-lifebook-u...](http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/fujitsu-intros- lifebook-uh90-ultrabook/)

.. but so far only announced availability in Japan.

<comment><USER11> What's insane to me is that your options are a 3200x1800 screen or 1366x768. I have a 14" with a 1600x900 panel, and that's at the bare minimum of passable for me.

The ubiquity of 1366 panels -- even in 15.6 notebooks! -- is beyond frustrating to me.

<comment><USER12> Have you noticed that display resolution is often not even listed in tech specs anymore?

<comment><USER13> A pet peeve is not listing the actual resolution but rather some acronym. Lenovo used to be very guilty of this providing no decoders for HD, FHD, SVGA and similar nonsense. Now at least they give numbers and say things like "HD (1366 x 768)" although where I come from 1920x1080 is HD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty impressive specs and battery life, but every time I see the power connector for a non-Apple notebook, it makes me kind of mad, MagSafe is really exceptional and Apple's power adapters are generally tiny and unobtrusive, pretty important since you use one at least once a day.

<comment><USER15> Even though 'MagSafe' wasn't necessarily an Apple invention (things like deep fryers had magnetic 'break-away' cords), I believe that Apple patented the 'magnetic power connector' \+ computer combination.

<comment><USER16> All Microsoft Surface tablets have a magnetic power connector.

<comment><USER17> Both companies cross licence all patents iirc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One unfortunate trend that I hadn't previously associated with Windows' focus on touch is the default inclusion of touchscreens on PC laptops.

It doesn't seem to be causing much of an issue with the battery life, size, or resolution in this case but as a Linux user I don't need or want the touchscreen especially if it costs more as a consequence.

<comment><USER19> Not just a trend, it's a requirement for anything marketed as an Ultrabook™.

<comment><USER20> I believe the marketing guidelines only require the touch screen if your design uses 4th generation core processors. You can still market new designs for Ultrabooks using 3rd generation parts if you really want

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Honestly, those specs, especially the resolution, are useless if the screen is glossy and has no matte option.

<comment><USER22> I came here to say just that. I'm a retina MBP owner. I'd dump it in a heartbeat for something powerful with long battery life, high DPI _matte_ screen, and decent enough Ubuntu support. Are manufacturers missing out, or are we just a really tiny market?

<comment><USER23> Seconded. If any manufacturer intends to give a "developer notebook" a go, a matte screen would be the first thing on my wish list.

<comment><USER24> System76 just launched a Linux friendly Ultrabook with 1080p IPS matte display, 16 GB ram, 2 hard drives, quad core cpu (8 hyperthreads) and Intel Iris Pro gfx (> Intel HD 5000).

[https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1](https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/galu1)

<comment><USER22> I see this is your first comment. You're getting off to a great start, because I can't tell you how awesomely helpful that link is. Back in December I went on a quest to find the perfect laptop. I often do embedded stuff that takes me outside. That, and sometimes I just look outside and say "wait, why am I in here again? Park!"

I wanted something with good Linux support that could run a VM or two, have a long battery life, and be readable outdoors. I spent an embarrassing number of hours looking. In the end it came down to the Samsung Series 9 or the 13" rMBP. The rMBP despite its glossiness is mostly readable outdoors on full brightness, and I liked its ergonomics better.

Do you by any chance work for system76? If not, do you at least own one of their laptops? Can you speak to build quality, battery life, sunlight readability, or keyboard ergonomics?

<comment><USER25> I ordered one of these things the other day, after quite a bit of research.

Basically, the "catch" with these laptops is an abysmal 3-4 hour battery life. If you're never more than 4 hours away from an outlet, it's perfect for development.

<comment><USER22> Have you verified that yet? What setup did you choose?

<comment><USER25> I got the galago pro ultrabook. Had a back-and-forth with a guy on their engineering team and he said approximately "a solid 3 hours, generally 3-3.5 hours. But dealing with pre-release machines, not the ones that will be actually shipped out. Hopefully this will be higher with the actual ones." The one I ordered has a 240 GB intel SSD and 16 GB of RAM, but I don't think that really matters. It's the power-hungry Iris and the really nice display that kill it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This thread makes me regret to be a code money. Would love to be more business savvy and start a highend notebook startup.

It's not like you require much investment. You can buy pieces from everywhere.

<comment><USER15> Sure you can source parts, but this isn't a lego set. If you're looking to build and sell and Ultrabook, then you have to do a bunch of design (case, motherboard, etc), and manufacturing as well.

<comment><USER5> motherboards are all standard nowadays.

70% of the devices out there are using intel's reference designs. they just route somethings differently. But after you fine one with the routing you want, i bet you can order them from acer or whoever and just add the better components and be done with.

the only thing you'd really have to customize is the power circuitry. but that's easy and cheap. And then the case, of course. but that's also easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have a 15" Samsung Series 9 i7 for work. This machine looks amazing but the i5 is saddening, i7 + SSD makes compile times etc amazing and I can't give than up for a nicer screen :(

<comment><USER27> So this is somewhat OT, but: how much compiling do you actually _do_ in-situ on your laptop?

I mostly look, these days, for the best possible portable pane-of-glass I can get that allows me to do all my work on "real" computers -- in the cloud and in our office lab. I'd much rather have epic battery life for my web browser and terminals than have more cores in the thing I carry around.

<comment><USER28> If you're running a linux distro that requires compiling packages from source (Gentoo comes to mind), then you could conceivably be compiling a lot of things often.

<comment><USER29> Eh, that sort of thing was already reasonable a few years ago and open source software hasn't really gotten much bigger since then. Some projects have actually gotten smaller. (Browsers are the glaring exception. I don't envy anyone building their own firefox or chromium these days..)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anyone wants to test how well it runs Linux?

<comment><USER31> Barring any UEFI issues the hardware should run most unix-like systems without much trouble, but the article doesn't really list any set of hardware specifications.

I'm sure that the CPU will run unix-like systems, but I have no idea about the graphics & networking, so you probably want to note which adapters work with your preferred OS.

My Atheros WiFi card runs well on everything I've tried, with the exception of OpenBSD 5.3 - it boots but no WiFi - what good is a netbook without WiFi?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The version that runs Android is actually more interesting than this to me. A dual Android / Windows notebook could be an Android developer's dream if the setup works right. Not to mention, seamlessly flipping to Android when on the go, but still with all my Windows files available sounds pretty nice.

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems like theres all these amazing laptops now for all kinds of developers _except_ those that need GPU power (game devs) :(

There's no such thing as a laptop with a good GPU that isn't ugly and bulky, and that doesn't have a nice hi-res IPS screen, and have a good keyboard and touchpad.

<comment><USER34> What about the Razer Edge? [http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer- blade](http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade)

<comment><USER33> I've looked at that, and it's probably the closest thing there is. I just wish it had a higher res screen (1080p isn't that impressive for a 17" screen), and I wish it had room for another HDD (I've got a lot of music production software which takes up hundreds of gigs). Also, I'd prefer a top of the line GPU, like a 780M; the 765M falls a little short. Lastly, I definitely need more than 8GB of ram, but I'm sure I could add that in myself (I hope).

But the great thing is they have that indie developer discount! I think I can get one for like $1000.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It sounds like the reviewer had, what, less than a minute with the machine?

<comment><USER35> That's what you call a first look, not a review.

<comment><USER9> It's what I call a press release with hints that they got to touch it, and that touching it resulted in no additional information.

<comment><USER35> What do you expect? The product is only just being announced, once review units are shipped out you'll get a review, this is just an early look at what's to come.

<comment><USER9> The title says, "hands on."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is the screen IGZO?

</comment><comment><USER37> I wouldn't expect to actually _use_ that resolution, and Windows most likely doesn't support it very well either. The way it's used is probably just like the Macbook Retina. The effective resolution will be 1600x900, but the screen will be much sharper.

<comment><USER38> What do you mean windows doesn't support it?

<comment><USER39> Windows 8 does support high resolution screens, but unfortunately it has poor DPI scaling features. This means that instead of crisper text and contours, you get smaller text and touch/click targets. While this does give you a nice, big workspace, it can be hard to see things.

When you do increase the DPI through Windows settings, applications start to have issues rendering text appropriately, and often UI targets don't scale with the text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Samsung has put out some very appealing hardware in recent times. I won't be surprised if they pressurize other PC makers just like they did in case of android

<comment><USER11> They've put out a lot of hardware that's sold well, but I've been pretty underwhelmed by the build quality of the Galaxy line, personally.

I really had high hopes for Vizio breaking into the PC market. I've had one of their thin and lights for about a year now, and have been very, very happy with it, but I'm not sure they've sold well enough to have an actual impact on the market.

It's easily the best-built PC I've ever owned; in fact, in terms of build quality, I'd rank it above the pre-unibody Macbook Pro I used to have. Only knock I have against it is the mediocre touchpad they used in the first run of machines, but it's my understanding that they're using Synaptic now.</comment></comment>


Tesla CEO Elon Musk: Fuel cells are 'so bullshit' - <AUTHOR> http://green.autoblog.com/2013/10/22/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-fuel-cells-are-so-bullshit/

<comment><USER2> I was laughing out loud after reading this bit:

In respect for the Supercharge Stations: "Consisting of between 40 and 50 stations, these stations will allow the entire German population to be within reach of a quick-charge and not have to drive more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) to get to the next."

Sorry, but does this guy know anything about the German population? Does he know how far the average drive goes? I believe nobody, let me say this again: Nobody will ever drive 124 miles just to "supercharge" his Tesla.

This would mean 2h drive to the Supercharge Station and 2 hours driving back.

Nobody would even travel 20 miles to do that.

I really have a ton of respect for his engineering work. Really I do, but he should just invest in some market research first, before stating that much bullshit.

If Germans really shall think about supercharging, there has to be a station within 5 miles, be it in a city, or be it in a more rural area. Or every about 50 miles, on a "autobahn" (highway).

[edit: Typo]

<comment><USER3> If you have an electric car then the nearest charger will generally be at your house at which you can top up every night.

So the "superchargers" are only needed for long journeys that take you out of the car's normal range and so require a quick recharge at some point.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I know this. But being underway and having to plan my long trip in such a way, that I have to reach a Supercharger every some hours would be a little bit too much hassle for the average German cardriver.

Therefore I stated, that every 50 miles on a highway would be ok, as this is something, that would work for long trips within Germany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Question: Doesn't it take more energy to produce a solar panel than that panel will ever produce in its serviceable life?

Elon: The idea that a photovoltaic (PV) solar panel cannot pay back its energy investment is flat out wrong by a huge margin, but I've heard it repeated by many otherwise intelligent people.

Martin: This reminds me of otherwise intelligent people who think of hydrogen as a fuel – who don't realize that it takes lots more energy to create hydrogen gas and pressurize it than you could ever get out of it with a fuel cell (or any other way).

Elon: Right. The analysis for photovoltaics is straightforward and has been done by disparate researchers around the world, with the payback results in recent studies varying only by a year or two.

[http://www.teslamotors.com/de_CH/node/3925](http://www.teslamotors.com/de_CH/node/3925)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hydrogen can be safely stored without using high pressures.

For example: "Hydrides chosen for storage applications provide low reactivity (high safety) and high hydrogen storage densities." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Chemical_stor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Chemical_storage).

It almost seems like Elon doesn't like fuel cells because of his battery investments.</comment>


So Good They Can't Ignore You Book Notes - <AUTHOR> http://contentfiesta.com/book-notes/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you/ <comment><AUTHOR> I checked out a bunch of summaries/notes on this book, and this is the best one I've come across. Also great: this mindmap [https://alexvermeer.com/wp- content/uploads/So-Good-They-Cant...](https://alexvermeer.com/wp- content/uploads/So-Good-They-Cant-Ignore-You-183x1024.jpeg)

<comment><USER2> You linked to a thumbnail preview. If you remove the dimensions, you get an image that's readable: [https://alexvermeer.com/wp-content/uploads/So-Good- They-Cant...](https://alexvermeer.com/wp-content/uploads/So-Good-They-Cant- Ignore-You.jpeg)

Though it might be better to link to the whole post: [https://alexvermeer.com/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you-by- cal-...](https://alexvermeer.com/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you-by-cal-newport- review-and-summary/)</comment></comment>


Great interview with Erlang developer: Importance of being Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://www.builderau.com.au/program/soa/Interview-The-importance-of-being-Erlang/0,339024614,339282123,00.htm

<comment><USER2> I've heard that each Mnesia table is limited to 4GB. That sounds like a pretty serious limitation now-a-days. Not sure if there are any ways to work around that.

<comment><USER3> That is a limitation of the 32-bit OS ... If you are using a 64-Bit OS that is no longer a problem.

I have a 64-bit Xeon with 8GB of RAM and I have created tables lareger the 4GB as a test ... to make completely sure ...

<comment><USER2> Does that apply to DETS storage as well?

It says on this page (<http://erlang.stacken.kth.se/faq/x1197.html>) that "Dets uses 32 bit integers for file offsets" and "In practice your machine will slow to a crawl way before you reach this limit."

<comment><USER3> As far as I know it does ... the 32bit limitations in Erlang are more about the OS then anything else.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learn C The Hard Way -- the online course - <AUTHOR> https://www.inculcate.me/school/courses/4/ <comment><USER2> I like this link better.

[http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/](http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/)

<comment><USER3> Nice!</comment></comment>


Ask HN:Do we need another blogging engine? - <AUTHOR>

I just needed to ask this question since I'm researching for a blog engine that suits me well :) Here is my requirements ,
* Simple to create blog post
* Need to be speed when saving posts and loading
* I love to use Markdown, HTML, images, videos and that needs to be simplified
* Simple nice looking themes
* Adding multiple pages for the blog post
In order to show this, I just created this and you can try using: http://dokeeno.com/login Some of the written blogs can be found here: http://dokeeno.com/u/blog
Would love to here from you? <comment><USER2> Personally, I liked it because of the refreshing UI. I think a lot of blogs are very hard to navigate (especially when the blog posts are listed by month on the side, or have previous/next buttons, but theres no easy way to just view a complete list at once or search through posts), this wasn't. The idea of multiple pages in a single blog post was awesome! I didn't try creating a blog myself, but if you can make it as easy to create blogs as it is on other sites while providing the UI/multiple pages, I think you have an advantage.

That said, it's also a very easy idea to replicate. Perhaps you need to identify the people who would be willing to use this a little better and offer a few more advanced features targeted towards them. I see this product as filling a nice somewhere between a full-blown CMS like Joomla and a simple blogging engine, and understanding what the users of that niche want will help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestions. I hope looking for a niche is the good thing and this is easy to replicate.

I'm looking for the niche of create Online Documentations for the products. This suits well for them. And If I would be able to create a online dashboard of blogs by categories. This will be awesome product for create Documentations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd suggest you try to imagine what your /u/blog page(s) look like 1-2 years from now. I think that, with only four blog posts, that page looks nice and clean. In a year, how many posts will you have though? How will users who are brand new to you/your blog accept it if it's just a scrolling/paginated page of 150 links? How will you handle tags/categories/timelines?

Sparse implementation/design is a nice thing but you don't want to be at the two year mark and think, "This sucks. My blog has become everything that I didn't want it to be" all because you tried for clean and nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, what you are correct. It's not good to scroll and see 150 pages.

I still haven't look at handling tags/categories/timelines. These are some pretty standard so I think I should also need to follow this. With this I can add filtering in the /u/blog.

currently /u/blog is the only delivery point. But I would like to add more delivery points where people can easily transform this into a HelpDesk, Tutorial Section ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks cool. One thing you might want to fix: most of the links on the upper right of login page (FAQ, Contact, etc.) are not clickable. If you don't have that content yet, I'd just remove the placeholders.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. That should be. I've removed that. Thank you.</comment></comment>


The Work-from-Home Shift Shocked Companies–Now They're Learning Its Lessons - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-work-from-home-shift-shocked-companiesnow-theyre-learning-its-lessons-11595649628 <comment><AUTHOR> Lesson 1: Use the tech you have

Lesson 2: People crave contact

Lesson 3: The workday is changing

Lesson 4: To attract talent, you might need some new perks

Lesson 5: Take it slow</comment>


Google shuts down its blog management tool just 10 months after launch - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/07/13/google-blog-compass-shutdown/ <comment><USER2> "it was limited to India for its entire life."

Limited launch provided proof that it was a bad market fit and so they 'failed quickly' and shut it down. Isn't this supposed to be how it's done?

<comment><USER3> Agreed ; but the fact that people notice the pattern and are either amused or disappointed by it, to me is telling that maybe they're doing something wrong about it.

Google isn't a startup and tends to shutdown services that are popular but on which they can't find a correct business model (e.g. Reader or Inbox) without much warning, actual replacement options, or open sourcing solutions for self hosting.

Since they're so large, that creates a discrepancy between the stability you would expect from an established company, and the "kill your babies" culture they clearly have.

Past behaviour predicts future behaviour, and so people start to notice that and lose trust, which is a problem when you start asking for significant investments from your customers (e.g. Stadia or Nest).

<comment><USER4> > Since they're so large, that creates a discrepancy between the stability you > would expect from an established company, and the "kill your babies" culture > they clearly have.

Curious why they don't spin some of these out, or sell to, independent businesses. Reader looks like it could have at least been profitable.

<comment><USER5> > Curious why they don't spin some of these out, or sell to, independent > businesses. Reader looks like it could have at least been profitable.

Probably because of self-competition and proprietary shared dependencies; Reader, IIRC, was killed partially because it was incompatible with the way some of it's internal infrastructure dependencies were being evolved to support other services with more promising business prospects; it couldn't practically be sold off as is (and even if the infrastructure was forked, the people _maintaining_ it wouldn't go with it, since they were being retasked.)

And lots of Google products that are killed are killed in favor of other Google products with overlapping markets, so selling them off would mean Google would be fueling competition to the services it wanted to focus on.

In many cases, I suspect _both_ factors apply to individual products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the reason I'm sceptical of signing up for Google Stadia. People are heavily betting it would fail, and Google being Google will be quick to shutdown when it sees that.

<comment><USER7> Google would need to solve speed of light problems for Stadia to be successful. It's not that people are betting against Google, they are betting on their understanding of physics.

Stadia is going to be the luke warm product that OnLive was and then Google will shutter it. AT&T also tried to do this kind of service in limited markets with fiber optics to the home, servers near the last mile, and a partnership with nvidia for rapid decode/encode. Didn't stick. Why will Google be successful?

<comment><USER8> Light travels 186 miles per ms and a company like Google can put machines all over the place. The speed of light is really not an issue compared to other network overheads which can be improved.

<comment><USER7> Again, AT&T tried this and there was still noticeable lag.

<comment><USER9> Nvidia's current service (in beta) does really well. Google's project stream demo went really well for many people. But obviously, one's experience will be contingent upon internet providers, ultimately.

So... Stadia, along with all other current and future streaming services, are going to really suck for a lot of people.

But... they are going to be really amazing for a lot of people too.

Best-case latency should be as low or lower than the latency many play with on their consoles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I saw this at a the Google booth at trade show right around launch. There was a big panel with information and a 1/3 page take-away with the same information. I tried talking to people at the booth about it but they could only help with with AdWords and didn't know much about the other product apart that there was a flyer I could take.

Filed it away as "interesting if it actually gains momentum" and promptly forgot about it until a couple of months ago when a co-worker saw the same booth at another tradeshow and said we should look into it. Saw no further information online than what was at the booth, but made a ticket on Trello to try to contact someone.

Guess I can take that ticket off now.

</comment><comment><USER11> At this point, using any service from Google makes no sense, really. On top of many other reasons, zero trust in the service surviving ( or just reaching ! ) a two year period at least.

Obligatory : [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant- pro...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant-product- shutdowns-are-damaging-its-brand/)

</comment><comment><USER12> At some point Google needs to realize that releasing products then killing them like this makes people worry about using them for other projects. Simply going on number of users / revenue per user doesn't seem to be a a great long term strategy.

<comment><USER13> It seems to have worked for many years now with Google reporting record revenue pretty much every year until now.

Why do you think switching to a model where Google bleeds money on unprofitable products will help anything?

<comment><USER14> That's a false dichotomy. Just because a system is profitable doesn't mean it will be moving forward or that there aren't more effective operating models out there. Long-term success of a company relies on its ability to adapt. IMO this kind of development cycle has worked up till now, but moving forward, I'd hope they're much more thoughtful and methodical about what they choose to launch and how as it is in fact hurting their brand.

<comment><USER13> And yet your post (and downvotes) still don't really answer the question: What kind of basis/proof/data is the idea that Google should change it's massively profitable strategy based on? Which metrics besides "gut feeling" or "I don't like it"?

<comment><USER14> It's a good question, but one I could think of is something relating to success of new products. Ideally you never launch an outright flop, Apple's had maybe 2 or 3. You can take their strategy and "be right most of the time" or you can reinforce the importance of product market fit and understanding instead of spaghetti model. There's always an opportunity for research and understanding prior to development, and hiring people who have launched similar successful products. That doesn't require a pivot just a bit more investment early on and the return can be tracked as a function of success of new products.

<comment><USER15> The only major flop that I can think that Apple has had in the last decade is the trash can Mac Pro and that market is so small for Apple it didn't really affect revenue that much. I think the HomePod may be a flop.

But the difference is that the products that flopped aren't platforms that people came to depend on.

<comment><USER14> The iPod Hi-Fi was another, and lest we forget Ping, RIP.

<comment><USER15> I did say in the last decade. The iPod Hifi was discontinued September 2007. I can list many failures before then - the MacTV, the 20th anniversary Mac, the entire Performa line, the Pippin, the Mac clone program, the Apple III, eWorld, Newton, Cube, System 7 Pro, OpenDoc (and CyberDog),....

<comment><USER14> You're definitely right that the Hi-Fi was earlier, I considered it in the iPod era but you are nonetheless correct. Ping expired September 2012 ^_^

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Also killed by Google [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, one of it's blog management tools: this one was an India-limited beta tool that connected to Blogger or WordPress, but Google also seems to have blog management tools with some overlap built in with Blogger, and with Site Kit by Google for WordPress.

</comment><comment><USER17> They're also shutting down Google Trip replacing it with a website (google.com/travel) which is less capable (e.g. you cannot add reservations) and there isn't at the moment any mobile app replacement.

<comment><USER18> Never used Trip and don't know how it works, but [https://www.kayak.com/](https://www.kayak.com/) lets you store flight/hotel reservations and sends you notifications about them. Also has mobile apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Every time I see a new Google product I think "Oh good. Another Google manager got promoted. Won't hurt me at all as long as I avoid that product."

</comment><comment><USER20> Blogger and Feedburner will probably be the last Google services to shut down. Despite perennial portents of doom for them, they're used heavily on Google's own blogs and get major updates every 1-2 years.

<comment><USER21> Googlers were amongst public Google+'s most prolific users, and Google+ commenting was the way comments were handled on all of these Google blogs right up until the shut down. Internal use does not protected Google products from their fall.

<comment><USER22> Agree with your point but google+ wasn't shutdown, just isn't free now. You can still use it with your organization if you pay for gsuite.</comment></comment></comment>


You Don't Need a DevOps Team - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@101/you-don-t-need-a-devops-team-78a89165fc5b#.b7yeg2i4l <comment><USER2> Isn't the whole point of a devops individual/team to reduce friction to "... break down barriers, increase automation, bring collaboration and iterate."?

I understand that there should be company buy-in and individuals could handle this themselves but if there's no clear start/end point there could (will) be a huge waste of man hours and potentially $$.

So maybe a subtitle for this article could be "But it may help."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply!

Yes, my point was about the goal. And it should be set properly (e.g. our goal is our product and happy customers, not "Hey, now we have the best process as other guys").

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "You Don't Need a DevOps Team. What you really need is a holistic approach to software development. Yes. it's not an easy route. It takes a long time for teams to get good at these things and it will affect the way in which you organize your company, not just your development or operations functions. You'll be surprised at the end — your organisation'll get to the high ground of effective process. The one that best fits your needs. So break down barriers, increase automation, bring collaboration and iterate."

So all of your developers are going to have operational experience? And be on call 24/7?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, you should have a good Operation (!) engineer, not DevOps.

<comment><USER3> The startup I'm at rolls the two roles together. I do operations, as well as "devops" tasks (everything between the repo and the deploy).

I'd love feedback on how other teams or orgs are handling this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, you have a pretty challenging job, but also an opportunity to improve the situation. Startups are very interesting place because both business and culture is still growing.

One good (but general) advice - think how to make a process efficient (e.g. more automation for tasks and less complexity in a state of integration and problem solving).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You also don't need more than one employee. But the marginal value of hiring more employees (including DevOps) might be good enough to justify it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it depends on a company size. But when you have a growing business, usually it's better to hire a good developer or a good operation engineer and focus on communications.</comment></comment>


No long-term future for BBC licence fee say MPs - chestnut-tree http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31623659

<comment><AUTHOR> The BBC's between a rock and a hard place, and attacked from all quarters: conservatives hate it because it's bloated and full of left wingers. Left wingers hate it because it's supposedly the voice of the establishment. It's done itself no favours by competing on ratings and pop culture, and it is definitely losing its position as lighthouse of Britishness. Despite everything, it's scary that one of the most successful public broadcasters in the world may see its funding gutted out.

</comment><comment><USER2> So it looks like they are replacing a licensing fee that not everyone has to pay (if you don't have a TV) to a levy, which will be required by all citizens.</comment>


Dissecting an SSL Certificate (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/01/31/whats-tls/ <comment><USER2> > We do not have time to explain public key cryptography right now, but this > is basically the encryption key we're going to use to talk secretly.

If there's one misunderstanding that it'd be valuable to clean up about protocols like TLS in 2020 this would be it.

It is _technically_ possible to do this. It's how PGP worked for example, and it was how SSL was originally conceived, but it is not now commonly used and is unsupported entirely in TLS 1.3

Let's take my connection to send this message to Hacker News. It's not TLS 1.3, but the previous version TLS 1.2 instead, and it has a 2048-bit RSA public key in the certificate. Is this key used "to talk secretly" ? No!

Instead my browser and HN's server use a variant of the Ephemeral Diffie- Hellman protocol with Elliptic Curves to pick a completely random key and _that_ key is used "to talk secretly". The public RSA key's role is only to prove that I am communicating with Hacker News and not somebody else pretending to be them. That's _all_ it is for on modern sites talking to modern browsers.

This is what Forward Secrecy is all about. Since the keys used to secure messages were _not_ based on that fixed long term RSA key, but instead a random key both parties soon forgot about, we achieve Forward Secrecy as neither of us can (whether by mistake or on purpose) later reveal how to decrypt the messages.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h That depends on your cipher selection, IIRC. At a previous job, we had an appliance that got a mirror port of our uplink and could record HTTP sessions between customers and our webapps; it was given a copy of the private key, and it worked great, right up until newer HTTPS standards pushed PFS and broke it.

<comment><USER2> It is still technically possible to do RSA key exchange. About 2% of sites surveyed for SSL Labs "Pulse" don't offer anything better. Current browsers will (reluctantly) accept that you only speak RSA.

But it's a terrible idea. If your employer purchased that appliance believing it was anything other than a temporary stopgap they were incompetent and/or the appliance was mis-sold.

The right way to build such an appliance records the session keys. The growing pile of keys is a constant reminder (in a way that a copy of one RSA private key is not) that this is valuable/ dangerous private information which you should have a habit of routinely destroying once it's not operationally vital.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Yeah the appliance was old and painful to work with at the best of times. We actually managed to remove it when it broke and we couldn't figure out to fix it:) Ended up replacing it with gathering stats on the actual application servers, which was so much better (better even than recording keys, because the app sees traffic without any encryption in the way).

EDIT: I guess my original point was that, while it's not a good idea, at least as of early 2019 it was _possible_ to do the old-style encryption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're a developer looking to understand TLS/mTLS I recently wrote about this and had several people tell me it was very helpful.

The first part is a primer on asymmetric encryption. If you aren't comfortable with symmteric/asymmetric encryption read this one first: [https://medium.com/@FreedomBen/what-is-asymmetric- encryption...](https://medium.com/@FreedomBen/what-is-asymmetric- encryption-64c74b2a0a82?source=friends_link&sk=765f85e2624941234035e3cc9bae7505)

Then read the main post: [https://medium.com/@FreedomBen/what-is-mtls-and-how- does-it-...](https://medium.com/@FreedomBen/what-is-mtls-and-how-does-it- work-9dcdbf6c1e41?source=friends_link&sk=45af139ec181252e711590b6ca73dc2f)

<comment><USER4> Also if you're looking to program with certificates I strongly recommend Go's crypto/x509 for approachability over anything OpenSSL related.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A question I'm facing with SSL that wasn't satisfied by the article:

What SSL vendor has the shortest certificate chain?

I'm looking to optimize SSL handshakes and outbound traffic in general from Cronitor's telemetry API and shrinking that certificate chain will make a big impact, but I couldn't find a comparison between vendors. I did some sampling, downloading cert chains, but it was far from exhaustive.

<comment><USER6> Down to the byte level, I'm not sure, but if you can get an all ECC chain (or as much ECC as you can get, gorkish points out below that all ECC isn't practical), those certs are gobs shorter than RSA certs, because the public keys are shorter.

Otherwise, any CA that's been around for long enough should be able to give you a cert signed by an intermediate signed by their trusted root; so you would just send clients your cert and the single intermediate cert.

You should only have a chain longer than two certs if you need to cross chain to another root; but so many of the older clients that needed really old CAs were forced off of PKI because they don't support SHA256 signatures.

<comment><USER7> Would you explain what you mean by "cross chain to another root"?

<comment><USER6> So, just because I'm more familiar with DigiCert, and it's more clear with specific names.

Let's say you had a certificate for CN=example.org, issued by DigiCert ECC Secure Server CA, the certificate of which is itself is issued by DigiCert Global Root CA

Most clients have that CA in their chain, so you can send the example.org cert, and the DigiCert ECC Secure Server CA cert, and have very good compatibility. DigiCert Global Root CA was created November 2006, and maybe your client has a CA bundle from before then, or anyway doesn't have that CA. Not to worry, DigiCert has a cross signed copy of DigiCert GLobal Root CA, issued by Baltimore CyberTrust Root. Baltimore CyberTrust Root was created in May 2000, and most people like them.

So, to support that small fraction of users which have Baltimore CyberTrust Root and not Digicert Global Root CA, you can send

CN=example.org, the normal DigiCert ECC Secure Server CA, and the cross signed Digicert Global Root CA, issued by Baltimore CyberTrust Root.

Now, DigiCert happens to own the CA key for Baltimore CyberTrust Root, so they also can issue certs from a new intermediate they generated signed by it, but they were using their cross-signed Root as an option for compatibility with legacy clients before they purchased the CA. Sending the three certs should also work for well behaved clients that have the DigiCert Global Root CA, but not Baltimore CyberTrust Root; although not all clients will properly validate when they trust a CA in the chain, but not the last CA in the chain.

I'm not affiliated with DigiCert, I was worked for a customer, and was in charge of selecting the CA while we supported a lot of ancient phones, each with their own mess of CA bundles, very few of which were documented. :(

DigiCert helpfully links their cross signed certs here [https://www.digicert.com/digicert-root- certificates.htm#cros...](https://www.digicert.com/digicert-root- certificates.htm#cross-signed)

<comment><USER7> Great explanation, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice post, good for a certain degree of "dissecting".

I assumed however that we'd be going all the way down to the bytes. I spent quite a long time with "A Layman's Guide to a Subset of ASN.1, BER, and DER" as a close companion, though it looks like letsencrypt has created a friendlier intro: [https://letsencrypt.org/docs/a-warm-welcome-to-asn1-and- der/](https://letsencrypt.org/docs/a-warm-welcome-to-asn1-and-der/)

While it's relatively rare that you'll have to understand the encoding, it can be a lifesaver to have that skill if you're looking at some raw dump of of a cert (or other BER/DER encoded data).

I had a co-worker once who was famed for having a BER/DER decoder in his head. He'd look at a hex dump and point to a spot somewhere in the middle and declare something like "there's your problem: the cert signing bit isn't set in your key usage extension".

</comment><comment><USER9> Are those certificate logs indexed? It'd be super handy to know where they are and how to use them

<comment><USER10> [https://crt.sh](https://crt.sh) is a popular search engine for them, and there are other tools (like Censys) that also expose this data.

<comment><USER11> Setting up a wildcard search for your domains with crt.sh's rss feeds into slack is a great way to stay alerted on certificates issued on your domains.

<comment><USER12> I built an alerting service to do exactly that for you.

[https://ctadvisor.lolware.net/](https://ctadvisor.lolware.net/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Warren Buffett Is A Punk - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/12/warren-buffett-is-a-punk/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

<comment><USER2> The author of this article expects us to believe that he moved away from NYC after 9/11 because Warren Buffet predicted that there would be a nuclear attack on US soil in the next 50 years. He then explains this prediction as a conspiracy theory to sell more insurance. The rest of the article continues this way.

I'm not sure if this is satire or just a really bad article. Since it's on TechCrunch, I'm guessing it's the second one. Flagged.

</comment><comment><USER3> > My main point is: always look at agendas. Try to understand the real reasons > behind someone's "good reasons".

I would think anyone's who worked in corporate IT for enough years has changed from starry-eyed programmer to being suspicious of anything done and said.

Could be one reason why ageism is so rampant: the older ones who made it up the ladder want young F.O.B. workers they can lead up the garden path and eventually screw.

"Agility Consultants" seem to be the current IT version of Warren Buffett and co.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, TechCrunch is attacking Buffett on his stance on taxes, and by extension attacking one of the cornerstones of the Obama campaign, the Buffett Rule.

I guess everyone has a breaking point before realizing the policies of this President and his rich friends are a disaster for the US. Obama believes in capitalism alright, fake crony capitalism. Who needs a nuclear event when we have a bunch like this in power?</comment>


I'm a Javascript developer, i'm seeking for some freelance work. - <AUTHOR> http://jules.boussekeyt.org/hire.html

<comment><USER2> Seriously, your English is quite good, but there are a few grammar nits in your writeup, so it would pay to invest in a bit of proofreading (from a native speaker, if possible).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, i'm aware of that, there's a smart person from bittorrent who sent me a PR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Symfony2 and Backbone are both great frameworks. Props to you for getting this up on HN!</comment>


When 15th Is Better Than 8th: The Math Shows the Bracket Is Backward - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/when-15th-is-better-than-8th-the-math-shows-the-bracket-is-backward/

<comment><USER2> The lowest seed to win the NCAA championship: 8th. Yes I do realize that it was pre shot clock era.</comment>


The Little Coder's Predicament - <AUTHOR> http://whytheluckystiff.net/articles/theLittleCodersPredicament.html <comment><USER2> Truth. I got my start in programming with BASIC via DOS. Today, I find that the biggest mental block to learning a new language is the difficulty of setting up a development environment.

It's at least a little bit surprising that platform developers don't put more of an effort into making coding for their platforms more accessible. One might assume that Microsoft would have a lot to gain from a generation of young programmers learning to develop for Windows.

<comment><USER3> Someone at MS cares:

MS Small Basic <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx>

<comment><USER4> We care on the XNA team as well! It's not bundled, but you can develop for your Xbox 360!

<http://creators.xna.com/>

C# Express, Game Studio, and XNA Framework are free for personal and commercial use on Windows. Deploying to your Xbox 360 costs $99/year which includes the rights to sell your games on Xbox Live.

The download includes a simple Platformer game "starter kit" (written by yours truly) which is perfect for game development newbies with just a tiny bit of programming experience. There are loads more samples at <http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/catalog/>

<comment><USER5> Why isn't it free to deploy to your Xbox and then $99 for the ability to sell your game?

<comment><USER6> I'd love the ability to deploy my little learning-iPhone-SDK apps to my iPhone (to get the 'oh wow' feeling that I built something) but that's going to require $99 and getting a provisioning certificate from Apple. And in fact, I may pay the $99, just to be able to do this (not necessarily to sell apps).

I believe that Apple and MSFT did this licensing fee program to stop any sort of homebrew movement (e.g. people sharing games outside of the approved ecosystem). They came from Homebrew but that's in the Cambrian age for them.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club>

<comment><USER7> With Android, there are no barriers at all to setting up the SDK, creating an application, and installing the application on your own phone via USB. You can even go so far as to build and distribute the .apk packages to let anyone in the world install your application on their own Android phone. In fact, if you don't care about the Market at all, you can simply release, distribute, or even sell your application on your own to customers, and they have the ability to get your app onto their phone as easily as downloading it through their Android Browser.

The only barrier comes when you want to start putting your apps on the Android Market, at which point you must become a registered Android Developer, for the cost of a whopping $25, which then allows you the ability to publish apps to the Market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What _why describes is half the problem. (Maybe a bit more than half.) In the Good Old Days, you could take your Spectrum/Amiga/BBCmicro/C64/whatever, and (1) write a program that (2) did something comparable to the games you could buy. (Less polished, sure, but not a million miles off.)

Nowadays, #1 is harder because there's no programming language bundled with the system, because it doesn't drop you into a REPL when you boot it up, and because the programming languages you can easily get hold of don't have nice easy facilities for graphics and suchlike. That's _why's point.

But of course #2 is harder too, because modern PCs are capable of all sorts of astonishing 3d moving graphics and stuff, and the games you can get for them exploit that. But that stuff is really difficult for a novice, and poorly supported by learner-friendly programming languages, and really difficult to do _well_ even for experts.

So, for most people, the amount of gratification you get from writing your own code is less _relative to what you get from just using other people's software_ , even if we solve #1 comprehensively. So the motivation to learn to program is less.

(Of course, there's a small minority who fall in love immediately with the very idea of programming. But it _is_ a small minority.)

<comment><USER9> Exactly, lack of motivation is a big deal. Games these days have crazy production values (GTA IV took 3.5 years, 1000 people and $100 million budget).

I know, there are also some very good indie games, but you have to be very creative to be able to compensate for a lack of production values. Not everybody is so multitalented.

One possible solution is to get into programming by modding existing games (instead of starting from scratch). Many cool games have very good scripting engines (for example Unreal, Civilization or Half-Life).

If you mod an existing game, your work is incremental, you can play with all these expensively produced assets. There is an instant gratification when you see some change in the game world made by you. Additionally, your results are immediately understandable to your gaming buddies.

<comment><USER10> I know one of the developers on GTA IV. He says it cost $5 million.

<comment><USER9> Leslie Benzies, producer of GTA IV estimated costs to be $100 million.

[http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article382...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article3821838.ece)

Maybe your friend was doing just a port on one of the platforms? That could be in the ballpark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The one thing that seems to be missing is the idea of including a programming tutorial with the pc or console. What if your XBox came with a manual called "Programming the XBox - a tutorial introduction"? When I got my Apple II+ it came with a programming manual on Apple BASIC presumably because that was part of the reason for the machine's existence - as an easily accessible platform for people to learn to program on. Nowadays, the idea that the common person would actually _want_ to program their computer seems to have been lost.

<comment><USER12> That's because the Apple II+ was produced in an age where the inventors of computers envisioned everyone learning to program computers...as opposed to using them as really expensive fancy typewriters, which is essentially what most people use computers for today.

<comment><USER13> The only person who has ever had that vision, consistently, is Alan Kay.

The Apple was programmable because it was made by hackers for hackers. There were a few firms that would do software consulting for corporations and institutions, but the notion of consumer software barely existed.

Apple didn't mind it if a few people wrote third-party software and sold it. But I think in the beginning they expected to provide all the important software themselves, just like every computer manufacturer of the era.

<comment><USER13> And, I speak as somebody who used to hand-compile SHAPE files on the Apple II. These were a sort of vector graphics which you had to first painstakingly draw on graph paper, unspool as a series of draw/turn commands, and then translate into bitmasks according to a lookup table, and then cut those up at seven-bit intervals, and convert those into decimal numbers. This is not something that anyone ever conceived of as a children's toy. Even though some kids (like myself) persevered.

Hm, I wonder if pg's concept of Languages For Smart People applies. Is it possible that kids just don't like kids' languages, like Logo and so on? I have to say that I certainly didn't, although I was exposed to it much later than Alan Kay would have preferred.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What about LÖVE? <http://love2d.org/>

It's _really_ easy to program for; Lua is a language you can pick up without much effort. It's reasonably fast and built upon a few fairly ubiquitous libraries. Game distribution is easy (zip and change the extension to ".love").

Obviously it doesn't come pre-installed anywhere, but it's not hard to get. It would probably take a little work to make it run on game consoles, though, depending on how many of the libraries it depends on are already ported.

<comment><USER15> _why on löve: _A+_ <http://hackety.org/2009/01/29/loveInTwoDimensions.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _why's made significant inroads in this area since this posting, though. Sure, there's definitely a ways to go, but Shoes is one of the best toolkits I've seen period, regardless of being aimed at children.

On the subject of game consoles and development, the PS2 did have a version of Linux where you could use it to run various things (games, scripts, programs, etc). Granted I never got to use it myself, but I recall reading that the reason Sony didn't push it too hard is that there was little to no interest in it, at least compared to the overall market.

I actually reviewed a couple different programming environments for kids about a month or two ago, over on Linux.com (<http://www.linux.com/feature/155203>). Bit of a shameless plug, but I figure it's somewhat relevant to the discussion at hand. _shrug_

</comment><comment><USER17> I get his point, but can't get away from the idea that he's describing the web... and php. New distribution system, larger audience, same idea.

<comment><USER18> (as a web programming novice) I think the problem with the web in this context is there are still some significant hurdles to getting set up, e.g. getting a server to host your webpages (unless you only want your friends to be able to see it when your PC is on). If you could get rid of these barriers...

I think if someone could provide a browser-based all-in-one solution with language+IDE+hosting+tutorials, then that would fulfill most of his criteria. You could type a few lines, instantly view the page and then send a link to your friends (who can view it at any time).

<comment><USER19> It's been a while since I've developed PHP on Windows, but way back in the day there was a popular package that would install PHP, MySQL, and a smattering of other things (like a GUI DB manager) in a single click. It got me started on PHP very, very quickly, and in a lot of ways I owe a lot of my coding experience to it.

Macs also now ship with PHP and Ruby, though they are sometimes broken.

<comment><USER20> I believe you're talking about XAMPP: <http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The BASIC of today is HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

Then there are things such as <http://tryruby.hobix.com/> and processing.

<comment><USER22> Both "Try Ruby" and "The little coder predicament" have been written byt the same person, namely why the lucky stiff or _why.

His main programming progress for the last two years has been Hackety Hack, a programming environment for kids, based on Ruby.

The first iteration of HH was built on top of Mozilla, but abandonned because of cross platform issues.

The next version, due this march, runs on Shoes, a GUI toolkit he developed with HH in mind.

<http://hacketyhack.net/> <http://shoooes.net/>

<comment><USER22> I can't edit my post anymore, sorry for the typos. BTW, s/progress/effort/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yeah, that would be great, but I don't see it happening. In 1982, little geeks like me wanted to spend time playing with their computers, but there was almost nothing you could do with them, so you /had/ to become a hacker to have any fun. And the hardware was more accessible. We wrote code in real mode with no protections, and the peripherals were simpler. I wrote my own banner printer when I learned I could control the pins of my dot matrix printer individually. Now you have to learn postscript or something comparable just print "Hello World," or you have to write a kernel driver to talk to the thing directly.

The bar to get the machine to do interesting things is too high, and the distractions are too many. You can spend weeks with your computer without running out of websites to explore.

P.S. If anyone does figure this out, please be sure not to implant damage that must be undone later. The mental leap from line-numbered BASIC to structured programming was a big one.

</comment><comment><USER24> I learned to program on my TI-83. Over the past few decades, computers have built more and more walls between typical users and programming, whereas on my calculator, it was right there... on a whim, I could, say, make a program to calculate the area of a trapezoid. At the time, if you asked me to do the same thing on a desktop computer, you'd be getting a blank stare.

Graphing calculators today are essentially the new programmer's playground that all computers were 20ish years ago.

Why seems to be making great progress toward reversing this change with Shoes and Hackety Hack, but I think the ultimate solution right now would be some sort of programming environment built into iPod Touches. (EDIT: Heh, I stopped reading before the end. I guess that was his idea too.)

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I learned on my TI-89. Ironically, made a DnD character stat generator and a function to calculate the first 6 elements of an infinite series... (calc class was quite boring).

I abused the GOTO statement, though... hey, it wasn't like you were going to care about elegant code design at age 14 on a TI...

<comment><USER26> Same here, I made some pretty complicated games on the TI-85, tetris for example with all of the blocks drawn with "0"s, that was a HUGE mess of gotos and especially when you can only see like 8 lines of code on the screen at a time gotos to far away can get _very_ confusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Another vote for <http://www.processing.org/>. It's superb; if you haven't tried it and you, like me, spent your childhood writing programs on your spectrum, you should check it out.

</comment><comment><USER12> While this is rather old, it's also rather timely: [http://hackety.org/2009/02/05/theFundamentalLittleHackersSum...](http://hackety.org/2009/02/05/theFundamentalLittleHackersSummit.html)

...oh, and personally, I can relate. If it weren't for the Apple IIe in my middle-school math teacher's class room, I wouldn't be a programmer today.

<comment><USER28> it's also relevant.

mac's come with sqlite3, python, a terminal, a decent developing environment (extra cd). it's probably not a big deal for windows folks to download languages and developing environments, too, to say nothing of ubuntu.

the web is a trove of treasure tutorials. open source and the web are thriving, the community is more inclusive and inviting than ever. more and more i run into artists, non-video game players, females, mechanical or electrical engineers and young folks discovering the joy of programming (arduino, processing, openframeworks, scratch and python are examples from recent interactions i've had).

video game consoles might be less programmer-inviting than they used to be, but they're also catering to a more varied and more expecting audience than they used to.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but I think _why's point is less about availability and more about approachability. As a 10 year old playing with BASIC, it took me all of a day or two to begin writing my first text adventure game. A few weeks after that, and I was writing graphical interfaces.

Available tools are worth nothing if it's not painfully obvious how to make them do something interesting...and you have to remember that _interesting_ is different today than it was when I started programming. I doubt today's 10 year old would be impressed by a text adventure...unfortunately...

<comment><USER28> today's 10 year old is probably writing a twitter script in python in 2 days.

as a non-video-game-playing female i didn't find programming approachable then, but i have found it approachable in the past 2 years. i can't speak for 10 year olds, though.

there are _numerous_ improvements in the approachability aspect (scratch, alice, processing, arduino on the educational front). i suspect approachability had little to do with you success as a 10 year old. your argument is simply that BASIC was _available_ when you were 10 and now you can't think of modern fun tools and fun tasks. letsmakerobots and instructables come to mind as good starting places.

<comment> tsetse-fly I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and _instantly_ have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language.

The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter scripts. It requires a significant amount of understanding and time to do so. You need to pick a programming language, install it, figure out how to write your program and how to execute it. The barrier is _a lot_ higher than writing a program for your calculator during math class.

It'd be much easier for you to find people who wrote trivial programs on their Commodore when they were 10 than it would be to find 10 year olds who are writing python.

<comment><USER29> " I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language."

I agree. If Commodores or Amigas were available today, I'd buy one for my 5 year old nephew so that he could fiddle around with it, play some simple games, write some small programs and so on.

Maybe there is a market for a small computing device that has the "instantly have something running, but is completely hackable" characteristic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I miss how difficult it is to get into graphics programming nowadays. DirectX and OpenGL have somewhat high learning curves for new programmers (especially kids). Even the "simplified" graphics libraries are usually OOPified and take some learning.

I miss the days of mode 13h!

<comment><USER28> try scratch or alice for kids programming try processing or openframeworks for graphics

<comment><USER31> Since you're the only one who's mentioned it, I second Alice. ( <http://www.alice.org/> ) I learned about it from Randy Pausch and his "Last Lecture" (it's also mentioned in his following lecture). It's a way to simply drag and drop java until you want to drop it and type on your own. You control animations. From their site.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a teaching tool for introductory computing. It uses 3D graphics and a drag-and-drop interface to facilitate a more engaging, less frustrating first programming experience.

They've even gotten EA on board to allow use of their Sims 2 characters. Good stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I owe alot to the Pre-computer 1000 : <http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/324>

As a 7 year old I just loved the feeling of making the computer do what I want. The instant feed back of print/ input/ run cycle also played a big part in it.

After playing with C++, Pascal and learning Java I didn't get the same feeling until I started learning Python - Really captured that moment again :)

I've enjoyed learning Clojure too - the LISP syntax is so different to what I've learnt that it brings the same feeling :)

Great article!

</comment><comment><USER25> I think this is a great idea, and there's a lot of weight behind it. In trying to teach my little cousin how to code one of the biggest blocks I faced was that there was nothing right at his fingertips to play with. I had to spend an hour or so getting him to install stuff, and by that time, he was disinterested.

What got me started was that in 10 minutes, I could have a program running on my TI 89 that did something cool, even if I never looked at it again. We need something like that for this generation that uses this generation's portable technology.

</comment><comment><USER33> Unfortunately Handykey (makers of the Twiddler) are out of business for the time being. Fortunately, there is some work in our lab along with Chris George, founder of Handykey, to build a Bluetooth version of the Twiddler that follows the Bluetooth HCID Profile.

[http://wiki.cc.gatech.edu/ccg/classes/7470/7470-f06/bluetoot...](http://wiki.cc.gatech.edu/ccg/classes/7470/7470-f06/bluetooth_twiddler)

</comment><comment><USER13> Ok, who else here has

       HGR: HCOLOR=3:

burned into their corneas?

</comment><comment><USER34> I remember as a kid going into the local computer shops, getting onto a speccy or commodore and typing the immortal lines:

10 print "hello" 20 goto 10

Felt great to watch that mother scrolling!

But the first thing that kids of today will do when they get hold of a new pc, is get on internet to search for pron.

</comment><comment><USER35> The closest modern equivalent is myspace. Myspace users are encouraged to modify their profiles with custom html/css. There's existing layouts to copy and modify. Any changes are instantly visible. It's easy to share layout code with friends.

</comment><comment><USER36> The predicament presented is not new since there has always (in my geek lifetime at least) been a division between "computing" devices and "gaming" devices.

Yes, I too learned programming on my TI99/4A and Aquarius and Laser 128 but then I also played games on my Intellivision without a way of trying my code there.

I always saw hacking on my computer as a "gateway" (no pun intended) to creating more advanced programs in much the same way as playing backyard football was a "gateway" to playing professional football (if I was good enough).

Finally, it seems to me that the ultra-portable laptop revolution will be the driver of getting more "computing" devices into the hands of future generations.

</comment><comment><USER37> Learning to program now is easier than ever before.

Last week my partner was in Spanish class and the teacher told her that the most important languages to know in the future will be English, Spanish, and a programming language. Programming is the new literacy. She decided she wanted to learn to program. We opened up Terminal on her Mac laptop, typed "python", and used Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python as a guide. Done.

With a PC you at least have access to JavaScript (and Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent JavaScript tutorial) which is more than suitable for a first language.

</comment><comment><USER38> As _why alludes to, I think the best work being done in this area is by Alan Kay and his work with Squeak in the squeakland project: <http://www.squeakland.org/>

I think it could easily be ported to a variety of platforms.

And _why's totally right. My 8-bit sprite of a jumping cow for Logo was the sweetest (yes, C64's in Texas, that explains a lot about the jumping cow).

</comment><comment><USER39> the fundamentals haven't changed; the gateway drugs are just different :)

php and rails tutorials, html, flash, even custom myspace profiles (for example) are the BASIC for today's kids. then you get your facebook apps, iphone apps, etc as you move up the food chain to more sophisticated languages.

</comment><comment><USER40> As a general note, _consumers_ are not _supposed_ to fiddle with the _product_ , since customizations are supposed to be sold as _services_ related to the mass market item. Exploration and learning should be restricted as much as possible (see Digital Restrictions Management, and the Right to Read). But then again, dumbing down consumers does fire back in the end...

So when users do finally get to program, the supported way of doing it is: [http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...](http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html)

<comment><USER41> I know you're being flippant, but there really is a critical underlying problem with making everyday technology intentionally arcane.

If people are unable to easily learn how something works, they will, for all intents and purposes, treat things as black boxes or "magic" and learn to distrust them (and those who do understand them) when things go wrong. This problem isn't unique to computing. My father grew up in an era where automobiles could still be serviced by end users, and learned to appreciate doing things like changing the oil or replacing parts himself. As such, he knew the limitations of the machine and could be more helpful to mechanics when bringing in a vehicle that was too broken for him to fix. Even more importantly, he knew when a mechanic was trying to snowball him with bogus repair suggestions.

The distance most people have from our food production processes is another example. A century ago, vegetarianism, when it was rarely practiced, was usually a religious choice and not regarded as a threat by meat eaters, or vice versa. Nowadays, its a full blown political movement which I suspect is in no small part due to the shock some people have growing up when they first learn where meat comes from late in their life (and in conditions most people feel have to be hidden.) I've seen kids who vehemently deny that meat comes from animals. When they grow older and finally learn/accept the truth, the impact would be much more shocking that a child who sees farm animals from a very young age.

Back to the original topic, even if most end users don't bother to learn to program, the _perception_ that it is easy to get into is very important, in that it insures that they might know somebody who does.

I wish I could write more, but the gist I'm trying to get at is very hard to put into simple words. Hopefully, somebody else here will understand my underlying point and enunciate it better than I can.

<comment><USER40> It has been well articulated (with some of the consequences) in James Burkes' Connection series during the "good old days" of the beeb.

Would people know why is it cold inside the fridge, while it is hot outside? Or what makes the cold stay inside the box? Nevertheless, almost everybody relies on a fridge ...and almost nobody knows what actually it is. Tricky situation indeed on the long run...

Somebody has made the series available on:

<http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=JamesBurkeFan>

but the account has been closed. There are some traces on:

<http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesBurkeWeb>

You might like it: it is worth every minute.

<comment><USER41> Late response, but...

I really enjoyed the Connections2 series that was available on American cable TV a few years back, but I know of few people who have. I think my country has developed a real hostility to learning the history of _anything_ , technologically or otherwise. I've never watched it, but I've had similarly minded co-worker point out how much the movie _Idiocracy_ rang true as a premise. I weep for the future...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think javascript can be a possible solution - if only making Firefox extensions were more accessible to kids (remember - short attention span; they wouldn't want to read much to do it).

</comment><comment><USER43> OS X includes Perl, Python, Ruby and AppleScript. More tools are available when Xcode (free) is installed.

</comment><comment><USER44> I learned on a TI99-4a, too.

My wife got me another on off Ebay a few years ago.</comment>


First month sales of USD5k, how do we keep growing? - <AUTHOR>

My wife and I recently launched a home decor website where we sell unique, hand crafted home design products, such as tables, rugs, throws, ceramics and so on, sourced from traditional craft makers in Morocco, Kashmir and more.
We have 11 customers in our first month, sales of over USD5k, and 30% of customers came back to make second purchases. In short: those who saw our products really liked us; those who bought them liked them even more and came back for seconds. We have some good insights into why people like us as well -- 1) our taste (vibrant colours; useful stuff; high quality materials; fits with modern decor); 2) our trust factor (we check everything ourselves, get them from source, and founders are highly credible - IVY league, etc., and 3) stories- our products each have unique stories, invoking a strong emotional reaction.
The way we got these 11 customers is an exhibition we threw at our place, and some random/chance meetings with customers at friends' parties.
The problem/challenge -- how do we keep growing?? we know what is special about us - our products and us (people like dealing with us and trust us) - the challenge is not enough people are seeing our products. how do we change that?? Feedback would be greatly appreciated.
PS we live in  London and our website is: www.relovedapp.co.uk <comment><USER2> Definitely look into expanding your online visibility. SEO, social media, get on Pinterest! Pinterest will be crucial for your business. Your products are beautiful, and I think there's major potential here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats! You need reach and retention - that is, new customers and keeping repeat ones coming back.

For reach, I like susonnahg's suggestions. Typically these are low-converting channels so try to maximize the number of eyeballs.

For retention, email email email EMAIL. Start newsletters with highlighted products as soon as you can.

</comment><comment><USER4> This isn't growth related really, but one thing that is a "minor" detail that you could fix is linking your domain to Shopify so that your customers stay on www.relovedapp.co.uk instead of being redirected to relovedapp.myshopify.com.

</comment><comment><USER5> To use startup speak, is your approach to marketing scalable?

Seems to work great, but can you figure out a way to obtain customers without personal involvement, that is delegate the responsibilities?

</comment><comment><USER6> look into adwords, SEO, content based marketing, drip emails</comment>


How to be a successful iPhone developer - <AUTHOR> http://www.47hats.com/2010/07/how-to-be-a-successful-iphone-developer/

<comment><USER2> Better, more realistic indie story:

[http://macblips.dailyradar.com/video/featured-ignite-show- vi...](http://macblips.dailyradar.com/video/featured-ignite-show-video- iphoning-my-way-to/)

<comment><USER3> The audience sounds like a fake laugh track. Nice presentation about the value of persistence and giving customers what they want, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This sounds like good advice for any endeavor:

"I find the reason some developers succeed beyond their wildest dreams more interesting:

        * They passionately believe in not doing what is commonly expected.

        * They are willing to take a risk.

        * They work hard at getting their execution right."</comment>


Calls for ibuprofen sale restrictions after study finds cardiac arrest risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/15/ibuprofen-sale-restrictions-study-increased-cardiac-arrest-risk <comment><USER2> _If you can buy these drugs in a convenience store then you probably think: 'They must be safe for me.'_

Convenience stores also sell cigarettes, but people don't think they're safe because there is ample labeling and awareness campaigns about the dangers of smoking. Adding a barrier to the purchase of a product intended for quick relief negates the main benefit.</comment>


NPM staff fired after trying to unionize – complaints - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/22/npm_fired_staff_union_complaints/# <comment><USER2> All of the drama around the npm firings has sparked an interesting discussion in the JS community: does it even make sense to trust a for-profit corporation with the world's supply of JS?

One of the creators of unpkg.com is considering a fork of the registry: [https://twitter.com/mjackson/status/1119355707055165441](https://twitter.com/mjackson/status/1119355707055165441)

Meanwhile, yarn (a popular alternative to the npm client), uses a proxy to NPM so they can change the default registry of all yarn clients, if they choose to.

As it stands, npm is the centralized source of truth for all our JS packages, and historical versions. We have no guarantees about the future of npm. Aside from a relatively clean history, we have no reason to trust them. For every dollar of VC money that they have taken, we have a reason to believe the registry won't last in its current form. This is scary.

<comment><USER3> >does it even make sense to trust a for-profit corporation with the world's supply of JS?

No. Javascript, despite its flaws, was already one of the freest, easily accessible and deployable programming languages in existence. It flourished throughout the web without any gatekeepers or centralized authority, and it never _needed_ the ecosystem of overwrought complexity and BS that it has.

Not only does it not make sense for NPM to have de facto control over that language through a single, proprietary registry and a single package manager, it further makes no sense that in the intervening years, with all of the issues NPM has had, no serious attempt at competition or re-decentralization of the JS community has even been attempted.

Unfortunately, I feel like the baby has long ago been thrown out with the bathwater, and NPM's ubiquity and network effect has made it "too big to fail," despite failing constantly. Maybe we can just start over once NPM has finally burned to the ground and taken the web with it.

<comment><USER4> I feel this is proved false by history, if npm wasn't needed because everything was fine, it wouldn't have flourished.

<comment><USER3> You seem to assume that all successful projects succeed on their own merit in a fair market, but that's not always the case. NPM's success is due in large part to enterprise investment and hype. Part of the reason for enterprise investment is controlling costs by not having to train or recruit developers for another language besides Javascript, which was already commonplace.

And even if NPM did solve a needed problem, better solutions cannot be considered due to those entrenched business interests and the extreme centralization of the javascript community, not because NPM is already the best possible solution to whatever problems it claims to solve.

JQuery was revolutionary in its own time, but you didn't see a JQuery Foundation serving all JQuery plugins from a closed repository through a buggy package manager that everyone was expected to use. It is possible to innovate and not monopolize, but what NPM has done, at best, is monopolize innovation and stop it dead in its tracks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> NPM Inc. last raised a Series A round in April 2015. Now, 4 years later, they still have no business model, no revenue and no more funding. Even in their very limited space there are competitors that perform better (Yarn).

At this point it's clear that a union isn't going to save NPM. The company is really in no position to guarantee anyone anything.

<comment><USER6> It's noteworthy though that they were able to operate for 4 years with a small 8 million series A round.

Since NPM is so essential to the Javascript ecosystem, it's interesting to consider a hypothetical bankruptcy. I'm sure someone big would buy them, or they could pivot to a non profit with a crowd funding/donation based model.

<comment><USER5> The ideal scenario would be NPM existing as a foundation rather than a for- profit company. The more likely one is them folding and Facebook taking over as the source of truth for JS packages, which is bad for everyone.

<comment><USER7> It would be darkly hilarious if NPM gets bought out by a state actor, although Facebook would be nearly as bad.

<comment><USER8> Doubly hilarious if that state actor wasn't the US or one of its close allies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was doing some research recently on various private NPM registry implementations. My company wanted a way to share internal libraries and frontend apps in their local network. I was surprised to find out how poor most of the options were. I ended up settling on Azure DevOps (self-hosted) but an open-source fork of NPM wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. If the infrastructure went down tomorrow I'm sure most people could switch to Yarn without too much trouble.

<comment><USER10> >If the infrastructure went down tomorrow I'm sure most people could switch to Yarn without too much trouble.

Generally true, except in the case of private scoped NPM packages. AFAIK if you want to switch to the yarn registry then you need to add exceptions that map your scoped package names to repositories that you host elsewhere.

<comment><USER11> There's no such thing as a yarn registry. The uri is just a CNAME to npm Inc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, the Nodejitsu vs NPM, Inc drama[0] was nothing compared to this. Why isn't the Node.js foundation managing the registry?

[0][https://gist.github.com/mikeal/9242748](https://gist.github.com/mikeal/9242748)

</comment><comment><USER13> I think Microsoft will step in and buy NPM Inc.

It's such an obvious ecosystem complement to Github and the Atom+VSCode editors they already own.

They're probably just waiting for a better price when the VCs on NPM's board get impatient.

</comment><comment><USER14> i know running a registry isn't easy. i was wondering can github handle this kind of thing as backbone of a registry?

<comment><USER15> I think CocoaPods used GitHub as their backbone.

2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's pretty shoddy journalism for the title of the article to assert this as fact even though it's just an allegation that hasn't even been investigated yet.

<comment><USER17> But they did investigate. They interviewed sources who confirmed that unionizing was planned before people were fired, which is the title. And they read the lawsuit and talked to the lawyers, who obviously said the same thing.

<comment><USER16> The title allows the reader to infer a causation that hasn't been proven or investigated. Given that the people making the allegation are bitter ex- employees who have a financial incentive for it to be true, it's an allegation that should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism.

You probably don't see the bias in the article because you support unionization. If the article was instead titled "Sexual harassment complaints double after NPM staff unionize," you'd probably be complaining about bias the same as I am.

<comment><USER18> > You probably don't see the bias in the article because you support > unionization.

Erm, yeah, I'm not sure where to begin with this other than a "people in glass houses" style comment.

I don't support unionization, for at least a couple of reasons[1], yet I still can't see where you're coming from with these assertions.

 _[1] I don 't think either is relevant to this discussion._</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sqoop - ETL for Hadoop - <AUTHOR> http://www.oceantara.com/etl-for-hadoop-sqoop/

<comment><AUTHOR> A link to the project page for Sqoop - <http://sqoop.apache.org/index.html>

A link to an overview of Sqoop from Cloudera <http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2011/10/apache-sqoop-overview/></comment>


CALMM – Functional, advanced, yet practical way to build web apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJsimUzffneHgNmFEAlrdsbha8uiU3N9q <comment><AUTHOR> Just found out that my colleague has been secretly working on a new way to manage state and build apps in JavaScript. [https://github.com/calmm- js/](https://github.com/calmm-js/)</comment>


Letter to the FSF - <AUTHOR> http://newartisans.com/2011/04/letter-to-the-fsf/ <comment><USER2> Stallman isn't thinking about you or anyone else who reads this forum. He is thinking about the 4 billion disconnected individuals who haven't even entered the net.

Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user. That is not equivalence, and it is sad to continually see developers heed simply because they know where their paycheck comes from.

There is more to this world than us enlightened ones.

<comment><USER3> For things that should be free, let them be truly free. Do not wall off software from adoption because the GPL prohibits certain kinds of use. Don't discourage people from producing free software by making demands about how and with whom they share their creations.

There is a certain kind of software that _needs_ to be free, that shouldn't belong to anyone in particular. This is not all software, and arguably it is not even the majority of it, but it is an important subset.

Stallman seems to treat free software as if it were something that was a scarce resource that needs to be protected. This is absurd considering the limitless number of copies of software that can be made.

The act of sharing software has benefits to the individual who is sharing. This much has become obvious and will continue to be made clear to others.

If licenses like the GPL acted as a catalyst to promote this discovery then they have surved their purpose. That is not to insist they must be refined, become more restrictive, or further hardened against hypothetical aggressors.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. The older I get the more I like the BSD licenses.

<comment><USER5> I am not certain why you bring that up; the obvious context is that one might "grow out of" GPL or some such. To provide an alternative (and equally useless) anecdote, the older I get, the more I prefer GPL licenses (to the extent that I used to be adamant about "freedoms" and such, licensing all of my code as BSD, and then I ran through series of life situations dealing with, as far as I can tell, similar issues to those I hear Stallman had, and now I license everything I do under GPL3: for similar reasons I have come to understand the role of governments, why insurance works the way it does, and in general have become less libertarian); this is a pattern I have seen in others as well: I might argue that the GPL is something you come to later, after you've seen a glimpse of the world of software without it.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's a matter of growing out of it. Rather when I was younger I tended to uncritically accept the rhetoric surrounding the GPL vs BSD licenses. As I have watched the way many BSD-licensed projects work on the ground, that's changed.

Two major realizations have occurred to me:

1) the GPL generally provides a shield to those projects which have a slow pace of development or are immature. They prevent things like Informix or Solaris from developing from PostgreSQL or BSD.

2) On the other hand, as projects mature, there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors. As a result companies like EnterpriseDB or Green Plum which offer proprietary versions of PostgreSQL have both contributed a _lot_ of their code back. They don't contribute everything back but they contribute everything back the project wants to accept. This leaves EDB with some Oracle compatibility code and GreenPlum with a node coordinator and a few other things.

The quid quo pro is relatively simple. if the pace of development and quality of code is high, then you really want cost-effective access to new work. The more you keep to yourself the more it costs you to access that work, so you give things back so they become standard, and reduce your own efforts to integrate what is left.

<comment><USER5> I typed a much longer response, but I realized that the internal contradiction in this argument can be summed up in many fewer words: "...there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors..." <\- that is, in fact, a description of the behavior the GPL _requires_... claiming that it doesn't exist with the GPL thereby is confusing at best. The reason people attempt to avoid the GPL is specifically because they either currently intend to not play "quid pro quo" or because they want to reserve the right to do so in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I dunno about the letter. I use the GPL v2 for most of my work and Stallman is a major reason I am opposed to moving to the GPL v3 (that and the license is long enough to be difficult to understand, while the GPL v2's difficulties come from simplicity).

Part of the thing though is that I am not convinced the GPL has the reach that Stallman likes to pretend it does. At least in the US (and presumably even fruits-of-labor countries) copyright is not supposed to be a way to monopolize secondary markets for practical tools. See the concurrance in Lexmark v. Static Control and also the opinion of the court in Sony v. Connectix. Note that no court in the US has ever allowed secondary markets for practical tools to be controlled through copyright of a work in the primary market, and I am not aware of any country which has held otherwise.

In general, copyright is supposed to protect artistic contributions, and protect and author from having his/her work distributed without compensation. How that work is used in a practical way (i.e. other than as a work of art) is beyond the scope of copyright law at least in the US, and presumably in other places as well. Indeed, steps required to use a piece of software, even where it involves literal copying and even distribution of literal copies, have been held to be fair use under 17 USC 102(b). See Sony v. Connectix, Lexmark v. Static Control, and Oracle v. Google.

So I think that copyright only gets you so far. The sort of control that Stallman wants to see the GPL have can only be possible through software patents and we know how he feels about that topic. The GPL cannot reach cases where interoperability is sought and where the original work is not distributed. Anything else is wishful thinking.

So I don't see the GPL as any great menace, but a lot of that is because I don't think it reaches as far as Stallman likes to think (or at least pretend) that it does.

IANAL, TINLA, and if you are looking for legal advice here you are a fool for trying to get it on HN ;-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Shorter johnw: I heart Ayn Rand.

In particular, I'm pretty sure Stallman (like most Americans) is in favor of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, so trying to persuade him that free software is a bad idea because it's like that seems pretty clueless.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is too long and will not change his mind.</comment>


Honestly, how the hell does Andreessen raise $40M while writing consistently superb blog posts? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Part of how he raised $40M is by writing good blog posts ;)

While Ning is a great platform, and a lot of his success is attributable to earlier success (Netscape/etc), an important part of the whole process is having people know your stuff, know you're thinking intelligently, and be impressed with you.

VC's are human too. If they're reading your blog posts and finding genuine insight, hearing about your material on the radio, and like you, that'll play a factor in valuation. [1]

-Colin

[1] I don't have a source for this handy, but I've read several VCs talking about this process. Basically, it comes down to being Noteworthy. See: Seth Godin.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's probably because he's a good writer and the concepts for the posts themselves were developed long before he started the blog that became the new black.

</comment><comment><USER4> He doesn't actually run Ning. That's the secret ;).

</comment><comment><USER5> Maybe he uses GTD? :)</comment>


Show HN: Colleagues.io - <AUTHOR> http://colleagues.io

<comment><USER2> Intro blog post: [http://bits.usablebytes.com/?p=72](http://bits.usablebytes.com/?p=72)

<comment><USER3> Neat looking tool!

The front page of [https://colleagues.io/](https://colleagues.io/) might benefit from some of the screenshots in this blog post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We'll do that soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice idea. But initially there should be a trial provision.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are putting up a fully functional demo to try out the whole product. It should up and running in a day. Will post the link here. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The design and message reminds me of zappos.com.

</comment><comment><USER6> cool</comment>


"How the Brain Is Inspiring AI" from Forbes 30 Under 30 Event - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/theAlexLavin/status/1077941162743189504 <comment><AUTHOR> Event page with speaker (Alexander Lavin) bio: [https://www.forbes.com/forbes- live/event/a-i-machine-learnin...](https://www.forbes.com/forbes- live/event/a-i-machine-learning/#speakers-6)</comment>