Earlier this year, we spoke with a large brand in the early stages of launching a new customer community.
They projected they would recruit 140k members in their first year and 800k within 3 years.
It seemed logical to them. They had almost 20m website visitors each year and a mailing list of 1.5m. If they persuaded a small percentage of each group to join, they could hit their target.
The approval for the project was based upon these projections – projections supported by the platform vendor.
We tried to warn against these projections, supplied data, and provided countless examples. In the end, they decided we were being too pessimistic and the platform vendors knew best (they went ahead without us).
In the few months since the launch, they’ve attracted less than 10k registered members and have only a dwindling handful of active participants.
It’s not looking good.
If you need a high number to get approval for a project, someone will certainly figure out a formula to come up with one. This doesn’t make the formula valid (nor going ahead any smarter).
And any projections based upon the quantity of members or overall level of activity is classic engagement trap thinking. You’re going to be chasing numbers instead of weaving a small, powerful, community first.
Don’t become the next victim.
(Also be aware platform vendors have a natural bias to overestimate projections. If they estimate 100m visits a year and you only get 30m..you still pay for the 100m for the duration of the contract. The huge churn at most vendors in the past two years has accelerated this trend. Remember you can always go up to higher tiers, but it’s almost impossible to move down).
“To reify” means “to make real”. It’s an old concept from philosophy. When you name a concept, you can start talking about it. We do something similar in programming. When you take a concept and make it first class, you can begin to manipulate it with the normal programming constructs.
Transcript
Eric Normand: What do we mean when we say, “To reify”? Hi, my name is Eric Normand. These are my thoughts on functional programming.
I use the term a lot. I think we tend to use it quite a bit in Clojure and in other functional programming communities.
The term is to reify. We say, “Well, let’s reify this concept.” It’s one of those terms that comes from philosophy. It’s an old term. Programmers didn’t make it up but we did borrow it and kind of adapt it to our uses. You can look it up on Wikipedia. They used it in linguistics and philosophy. Other branches of science have taken it from philosophy.
In philosophy, it basically meant define a term for the thing. Now you can talk about the thing as if it were real. To reify means to make real. “Re,” like reality, and “ify,” meaning to make real.
In computer programming, it doesn’t have a very complex definition. It just means that you represent a thing as part of your data model.
An example is your program might send emails. Let’s say you wrote a script that piped the send command to the mail program. It piped the from, and the to, and the subject, and the body. Then it sent an end-of-stream character. Then that happened to send your email. Notice it’s this imperative step-by-step view of how to send an email, but it’s never represented in the data model.
It’s never like a thing you can manipulate. The only thing you do is change what you send to this output stream that is going to eventually send an email. One thing that you could do is to create a new type or new class, whatever your language allows, that represents that email set.
Now you have a collection of them. You can iterate over that collection. You can count the emails before you send them and you can do other kinds of analysis on them. This is reification. This is turning this thing — basically just an action that would happen — into something that you can analyze and use in your programming language.
Just like in a procedural language, you can use an integer, and pass it around, and manipulate it, and analyze it, now, because it’s part of your data model, you can take that email send and make it part of the semantics of your program.
This is one of those things that is the secret to languages like Lisp and Smalltalk. This is what they do is they give you a way to reify things. Smalltalk did it really well.
Its main advantage over other languages was, instead of things being like drawing routines for putting stuff onto the screen, you would actually represent the thing, and had a draw method. You could manipulate the thing — change its shape, change its dimensions, things like that. Change its color.
It’s much easier to think in that way. This is the whole idea of object-oriented programming being more intuitive. It’s that instead of having to somehow change the program so that it now output something different, you just pass in a different thing and it will draw that different thing.
Similarly, in Smalltalk, the methods, the code itself, was manipulable. It had been reified. It’s like in Lisp — the code itself is something you can manipulate with the language. That is another form of reification. In Smalltalk, they just went all the way. Everything was reified. Even the class that held the code for the methods, that also was an object that you could manipulate.
Even the inheritance hierarchy was something that you could just manipulate in code. Smalltalk also went a step further and made it so that you could manipulate it with the GUI. That’s another story. They wanted programming and drag-and-drop, basically — it’s like the items in the menu — to be all the same. You can do it both ways.
Reification, it just means take something and bring it into your data model so that you can get a handle on it. You can use it. Usually, it means it becomes first class. You can run algorithms over it, do analysis, that kind of thing.
My name is Eric Normand. Thanks for listening. Please subscribe and you’ll get notified when new episodes come out.
You can also get in touch with me on Twitter. I’m @ericnormand, or you can email me, eric@lispcast.com. This question actually came from an email. Thanks, RJ, for the great question. Yes, I’ll see you next time. Bye.
September-October are always transitional months, where travel and projects with inner rhythm give space to the weekly structure of externals clubs, sports and lessons (see previous winter seasons). This year there are also more online group lessons that kids do in Russian (marked “R”). There are also more shorted courses that might be replaced by something else later in the season. So this is how our “external schedule” looks so far:
Monday
(Oct-Dec) History of life online (R), Alexander and Anna
(Oct-Jan) Proefrondje Muziek, girls
swimming, girls
(Sep-Nov) History of inventionthes online (R), Alexander
Tuesday
choir, all kids at three different levels (Alexander and Anna do two levels each)
Wednesday
math online (R), Alexander
judo, girls
swimming, Alexander
Thursday
homeschooling meetings
Friday
judo, Alexander
Making choices for the external activities to follow is always a tough process. External activities add a lot of value, providing a structured guided experience in social settings, often in the fields where we can’t do it good enough (sports, music) or with other “extras”, such as concerts and social life of the choir or Russian in online lessons. But having a fixed external structure eats into the time that could be more flexibly used for our own projects and travel. It also asks for a time and energy spent on the logistics (preparing and processing content-wise, packing, travel, communication), although that part became much easier for me since in the last two years Alexander gradually switched into travelling to all of his local activities by himself and he sometimes also helps with the girls. And, of course, money is also an issue.
With the sports and other activities, my preference usually goes into those in the beginning or end of the day, so that the kids can have a few uninterrupted hours to study in own rhythm, to do a project, to meet people or to go a field/musea/garden trip. We also have a strong preference for keeping the weekends as free as possible from fixed external events to travel further away, do things together as a family and to have a social life. And I have learnt to keep short school holidays (where Dutch regular activities stop) as free as possible from the homeschooling group activities, so we have more time to spend with family friends with school-going kids, travel, picking things from a wide array of interesting holiday activities for the kids or just live structureless, which I personally always appreciate.
With Mojave, Apple introduced a user-selectable Dark Mode. Although Dark Mode is implemented throughout Mojave and Apple’s system apps, it’s not automatic. Third-party developers have to update their apps to adopt the feature. Many developers have already added Dark Mode support, but when you run across one that hasn’t, it can be jarring.
Safari has a similar problem. Although the browser incorporates Mojave’s Dark Mode, which makes the app’s chrome dark, websites have no way to detect if a Mac is running in Light or Dark Mode. As a result, even if a site has light and dark themes like MacStories does, the theme has to be switched manually.
Safari Technology Preview 68 changes this by adding support for the prefers-color-scheme media query. Websites that implement the feature will be able to detect if a user’s system is set to Light or Dark Mode and apply a light or dark theme to match the user’s preference. Similar to apps, website owners still need to implement a dark theme for their sites, but if they do, the new feature will switch themes automatically.
Safari has a relatively small piece of the overall browser market, so broad adoption of dark themes is by no means an inevitability. However, I’m glad to see the feature coming to Safari soon because if you use Dark Mode on a Mac, bright white webpages clash with the rest of the UI.
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Two of the questions I get asked most often not only by my own students but by other scholars on Twitter as well are: “how do I write good topic sentences?” and “how do I write good paragraphs?“. These two techniques are important for many reasons, but the one I think about the most is the topic sentence, because I believe good topic sentences often can lead to robust, well-written paragraphs.
This is one reason why I am (like Dr. Eve Ewing in a tweet I quote below), a fan of the 5 paragraph essay (a type of essay that is often taught at the college/university level). In my view, well-crafted topic sentences set the stage for coherent and robust paragraphs which then produce sound, cogent, articulate essays. While sometimes unpopular, the Intro, Body, Evidence, Discussion, Conclusions model (the 5 paragraphs essay) is replicated in scholarly writing beyond undergraduate writing (see the IMRAD model of scholarly paper). I thus concur with Dr. Eve Ewing here in that the 5 paragraph essay IS actually a smart way of introducing undergraduates to scholarly writing.
unpopular opinion: the 5-paragraph essay actually does mirror the basic principles of good essay writing (intro, evidence, conclusion; a clear sense of structure and signposting) and is a fine way to teach students the beginning stages of prose writing https://t.co/CFJhukdta6
— wikipedia “seasonal halloween name” brown (@eveewing) May 19, 2018
This paper on infrastructure privatization helps me showcase something that @jessicacalarco has talked about in earlier threads on writing abstracts and introductions. Notice where I marked *TS [ ... ] this is a topic sentence, repeated from abstract in the introduction. pic.twitter.com/cuGMeFKZfc
Unfortunately, some of the journal articles, book chapters and books I read skip the basic structure of a paragraph as described by Dr. Patrick Dunleavy in his blog post on constructing paragraphs. This is problematic because if the topic sentence is not the first one that you find in a paragraph, it is harder to discern which one is the most important and therefore, readers may find it challenging to evaluate the content to determine the most important and valuable idea within.
The usual structure of a paragraph is (and I borrow from the Dunleavy model here, though I apply my own codes):
Topic Sentence
Body
Tokens (Supporting Evidence(
Wrap (Closing)
Professor Dunleavy doesn’t agree that the Wrap sentence (what I call the Closing Sentence) should link to the next paragraph. But frankly, I do like doing this, and my writing reflects this. I believe that the Closing Sentence should allow me to follow the flow (the Throughlineor Red Thread) of the entire paper.
How do I know whether a Topic Sentence is well constructed? This is a question I often get asked. One test I usually ask my students to apply is to highlight in yellow (see my colour-coded highlighting and scribbling scheme here) the first sentence of every paragraph of an entire paper or book chapter. If they are able to understand what the paper or book chapter is about through only the topic sentences, then the author chose the right ones. This method for quick reading (skimming) only works if authors follow the model where you start a new paragraph with the topic sentence.
I concur with Dr. Jessica Calarco (Indiana University – Bloomington) here where she says that a robust essay should have solid topic sentences and well-written paragraphs.
Agreed. When I assign essays to my undergrads, I give them suggested outlines. Those outlines follow the 5-paragraph model. And they help students learn to frame a clear argument and support that argument with claims (topic sentences) and evidence (examples and analysis). https://t.co/p0kzDQG3o7
This introduction to D'Angelo's analysis of The Topic Sentence is brilliant, as it offers a full paragraph that contains the main idea AS a topic sentence, and also synthesizes the entire paper in the first paragraph. Personally, I like this rhetorical strategy. pic.twitter.com/pXAMhyfSof
If you read this article, D’Angelo goes back to the intellectual history of what a topic sentence and a paragraph look like. What D’Angelo and the authors he cites indicate is that a paragraph is a set of sentences that are coherent, cohesive and provide an entire idea in a self-contained unit. Therefore, a topic sentence establishes the TOPIC (or the theme, the main idea) of a paragraph.
Baby steps work really well for me. Break down the work into tiny pieces: a paragraph, say. Then break the paragraph into components: Topic sentence, example, closing sentence. Focusing on writing a tiny piece at a time and celebrating that really helps me build confidence.
The topic sentence must, therefore, ensure that if we read it (and only that particular sentence) we can have a broad, bird’s eye view of the full paragraph, even if we add supporting material and a closing sentence afterwards. A paper with good topic sentences should therefore easily be skimmed by reading only the first sentence of each paragraph. Although as I mentioned above, there are a number of academic writers who do not follow this model, unfortunately, because they feel it is formulaic. Nevertheless, I strongly believe in following strategies and formulas and THEN use slight variations and deviate from the model.
Once you’ve crafted your entire paper/essay, you can then run a Reverse Outlines (Paragraph Replanning) analysis like the one posited by Dr. Rachael Caeley here. By drafting an outline and seeing how it looks like, you can see if you need to replan specific paragraphs.
This corner was first developed with the Badminton Hotel, developed in 1889 and designed by William Blackmore as the Manor House Hotel. By 1936 when this picture was taken the hotel had been replaced by a building quite a bit smaller, and much less ornate than the hotel. Through the early 1930s the hotel building was still standing, but had been converted to apartments, almost all of them occupied by women. In 1936 it appears as ‘new building being erected’, (as it was in this picture) and in 1937 the new occupants are revealed: The Vancouver Mortgage Corporation were on the corner in 601, H G Willard sold lamps and decorations next door, and J Sewell sold men’s furnishings in the third store. They had already added their ‘Men’s Shop’ sign above their doorway.
George A Martin was President and managing Director of the Mortgage Corporation. Mr. Martin was Vancouver mayor and sometimes Liberal MP Gerry McGeer’s financial adviser,and a member of the Liberal executive. He was on the executive of a newly formed political party, the NPA.
These days the site is home to the Standard Life Building, a relatively modest 14 storey office tower built in 1977 and (we think) designed by McCarter Nairne and Partners
Most people interested in visualization have made a chart with Microsoft Excel. For your basic charts, it's really easy, and it works well for what it was intended for. The process of visualizing data with methods beyond the standard chart types can be more challenging at times. Read More
This Tree of Life diagram is based primarily on the evolutionary relationships so wonderfully related in Dr. Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, and timetree.org. The smallest branches are purely illustrative. They are intended to suggest the effect of mass extinctions on diversity, and changes in diversity through time. This diagram is NOT intended to be a scholarly reference tool! It is intended to be an easy-to-understand illustration of the core evolution principle; we are related not only to every living thing, but also to everything that has ever lived on Earth.
Design-wise, there are many things that could’ve made the graphic more readable, but something about it makes me like it just the way it is.
This has been a good week for keynotes about privacy and human rights, and a bad week for companies who make the bulk of their revenue by collecting and exploiting user data.
First, on Monday, October 22nd, Purism’s CEO Todd Weaver spoke at All Things Open on “The Future of Computing and Why You Should Care” where he highlighted how the drive for greater profits in big tech companies has led to a present where people’s rights are ignored while their data is captured and exploited. In this talk Todd introduced the idea of five fundamental digital rights critical to protect the future of computing:
Right to Change Providers: If a person wants to change a service provider, they can easily move to another (Decentralized Services).
Right to Protect Personal Data: A person owns and controls their own master keys to encrypt all data and communication, nobody else (User-controlled Encryption).
Right to Verify: Society has the freedom to inspect the source of all software used, and can run it as they wish, for any purpose (Software Freedom).
Right to be Forgotten: A service provider only stores the minimal personal data necessary to provide the service. Once the data is no longer required, it is deleted (Minimal Data Retention).
Right to Access: A person must not be discriminated against nor forced to agree to any terms and conditions before accessing a service (Personal Liberty).
Then on Wednesday, October 24th, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook spoke at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners and spoke out in favor of GDPR legislation and privacy as a human right and against what he termed the “data industrial complex.” In the talk he laid out four principles of his own:
Companies should challenge themselves to de-identify customer data or not collect that data in the first place.
Users should always know what data is being collected from them and what it’s being collected for. This is the only way to empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn’t. Anything less is a sham.
Companies should recognize that data belongs to users and we should make it easy for people to get a copy of their personal data, as well as correct and delete it.
Everyone has a right to the security of their data. Security is at the heart of all data privacy and privacy rights.
Apple is Right about Privacy
First, we’d like to applaud Apple for joining Purism and other companies in speaking out in favor of user privacy and against the unethical data collection practices that fund so many tech companies. Having a high-profile company speak about privacy as a human right helps bring further awareness of these issues and puts even more pressure on big tech companies to change their practices. As more people become aware these issues, they hopefully will feel empowered to make decisions about what companies they want to support and what technology they want to use based on who best respects their rights.
The advent of the Internet as a universal medium for sharing information combined with an always-on and connected computer everyone carries with them and the prevalence of voice-operated computers in every home means that the steady stream of data every individual sends to big tech companies is enormous and hard to wrap your head around. It’s even harder for the average person to figure out just how that data is being used and abused. Yet when you look at the revenues for these big tech companies you can see one thing–this data is valuable. The data is so valuable in fact, there’s no real incentive for these companies to change their practices on their own.
If you look at the four principles Tim Cook laid out, the first three largely can be summarized by Todd’s “Right to be Forgotten” digital right. Indeed, the way that the tech industry operates today means that people are not in control of their own data. Big tech companies capture as much data as they can and are continually coming up with new ways to capture more in the name of providing you more targeted advertising.
Apple is Wrong about Freedom
It’s in Tim Cook’s fourth principle where on the surface it seems Purism and Apple seem eye to eye (and on the surface we do) but when you dig into the principle our paths starts to diverge. Compare these two statements:
Purism: Right to Protect Personal Data: A person owns and controls their own master keys to encrypt all data and communication, nobody else (User-controlled Encryption).
Apple: Everyone has a right to the security of their data. Security is at the heart of all data privacy and privacy rights.
We agree with Apple that security is at the heart of all data privacy and privacy rights. Where we disagree is in who holds the keys. Your data isn’t truly private or secure, if someone else holds the keys. It’s true that Apple goes to great lengths to lock down their devices from attackers, but like with Google and other proprietary vendors, those locks also lock you out. These devices tightly restrict what applications can run on them in the name of security, but that restriction conveniently also means that everyone has to get the vendor’s permission to install their software.
More importantly, these locks mean that you don’t have freedom or control. In fact, some device vendors are paid to install applications by default that you aren’t allowed to remove. You only have to look at the underground market of sketchy software that promises to “root” your phone to see the lengths that people have to go to so they can try to wrench control of their hardware back from vendors.
This isn’t just a hypothetical argument about freedom. Apple’s decision to hold all the keys to their hardware has real world impacts on freedom and human rights. Alex Stamos (Stanford professor, previously Chief Security Officer at Facebook) gives a great example of the real world impacts these locks can have:
I agree with almost everything Tim Cook said in his privacy speech today, which is why it is so sad to see the media credulously covering his statements without the context of Apple’s actions in China. The missing context? Apple uses hardware-rooted DRM to deny Chinese users the ability to install the VPN and E2E messaging apps that would allow them to avoid pervasive censorship and surveillance. Apple moved iCloud data into a PRC-controlled joint venture with unclear impacts.
Real Privacy Depends on Freedom
We agree that privacy is a human right, but you shouldn’t have to exchange your freedom for your privacy. We believe that freedom is essential to security and privacy and any solution that aims to secure your privacy must also protect your freedom. This means avoiding software solutions that restrict what you can do with your own devices and building security solutions that ensure that you hold the keys. Removing the freedom to control your own hardware and software, even if it’s in the name of security, (but more likely for vendor lock-in) is not enough to protect your rights.
It has been three years since Google introduced a feature called “Nearby Notifications”, which made it possible for Android users to find “apps and content” based on their current location.
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Yesterday I wrote about the bad out-of-the-box experience with a machine that is not on a current Windows version. Too many updates, too many reboots. And if you try to do anything while it's installing updates, you may end up with a broken installation. Terrible.
But there is good news: I have been running Windows 10 on Microsoft Surface Pro (2017) since last December without any issues whatsoever. Updates happen in the background, reboots during the night when I am sleeping. Windows keeps itself clean, it checks for virusses and other threats, it maintains a firewall, Edge checks for malicious links, downloads are screened and it is alerting me if there are any performance and health issues. The only thing that ever got reported was a driver that needed to be updated.
Best of all, there is a feature called "Fresh start" for all you tinkerers out there who not only read "How to improve your Windows 10" but then also apply all those tweaks recommended there. With all those quality issues Microsoft is having with the current update, things are moving in the right direction.
High dynamic range (HDR) is the latest must-have feature on new 4K TVs, and when done right, it can create some impressive images by showing brighter highlights and a punchier, more lifelike picture. HDR was originally available only on high-end TVs, but now you’ll find it advertised on many budget TVs too. But just because a TV claims to have HDR doesn’t mean that it really delivers all the performance benefits the technology has to offer.
Unfortunately, there are no industry rules to determine what is, or isn’t, an HDR TV. Even scrutinizing a TV’s specs might not tell the whole story. Without seeing TVs in person or reading a reputable review, it’s difficult to know which ones offer the punchy, vibrant performance of real HDR and which ones are just bland, underperforming impostors.
We’ll always evaluate HDR performance on the TVs we test for our best TV guides and let you know which ones make the grade. But it’s impossible to test every TV out there, so we wanted to talk about the technologies and features you can look for to figure out whether a certain TV is the real deal.
What is HDR?
HDR is a feature designed to show a greater range between the brightest and darkest parts of the image. It requires both specially formatted content and TVs that can properly play that content. When HDR is done correctly, bright highlights, in particular, can be much brighter and more detailed than they are in standard dynamic range. For example, on a “normal” SDR TV, you might have clouds in a bright sky that look like amorphous white blobs. With HDR, those white blobs have a fluffy, cloudlike texture, and they can look brighter, creating a more punchy and lifelike image. Imagine the glint of sunlight off a piece of chrome. With HDR, that highlight is noticeably brighter, closer to what you see in real life.
It’s impossible to show the difference between HDR and non-HDR TVs on a non-HDR screen (such as the one you’re likely viewing this image on), but this dramatized mock-up should give you an idea of what to expect. Illustration: Ryan Hines
HDR is usually (but not always) paired with wide color gamut (WCG) technology in today’s 4K TVs. WCG allows the TV to create a broader palette of colors, for more vibrant greens, reds, blues, and every shade in between. It’s not just exaggerated color, as you can see on some SDR TVs. Rather, it’s the ability to display a larger color palette to correctly reproduce all the additional color in specially mastered 4K UHD content.
A TV needs to deliver a certain level of performance (which we’ll discuss below) to properly display HDR content. Faux-HDR TVs may accept an HDR signal and play back the content, but the video won’t look any different or better than non-HDR content. In some cases it might even look worse, washing out details in highlights and possibly even creating posterization.
Which TVs have the best HDR?
LG’s C8 is an example of an excellent high-contrast OLED TV. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald
To be capable of real HDR playback, a TV must have, first and foremost, an outstanding contrast ratio—and the two types of TVs that deliver the best contrast ratio are OLED TVs and LCD TVs that use local dimming technology.
OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TVs are sold by LG and Sony in the US. We’ve historically picked such models as the best TV due to their impressive black levels and contrast ratio. An OLED TV can adjust the brightness of each pixel individually, which is what allows for those wonderfully deep blacks and bright highlights (though the highlights aren’t as bright as what you get with an LCD TV). All current 4K OLED TVs are HDR compatible and capable of displaying a true HDR picture. Not every TV that’s manufactured by LG and Sony is an OLED, however, so it’s best to double-check.
Currently, the only other TV technology available is LCD. You can find these TVs marketed as LED TVs or QLED TVs, and by several other names, but the underlying technology is the same. If it’s not OLED, it’s LCD. (Other display types are on the horizon, but they’re years away.)
This GIF shows the same LCD TV with local dimming turned off and on. Photos: Chris Heinonen
For an LCD TV, by any name, to be able to produce HDR images, it needs to use a technology called local dimming. Behind, or along the edges, of every current LCD TV are tiny LED lights. These create the light you see, while a layer of liquid crystal in front of them manipulates the light so that it looks like an image and not a bunch of tiny flashlights. As the name suggests, local dimming allows the TV to dim sections of the image by making specific LEDs darker. In an LCD TV without local dimming, all the LEDs must be the same brightness level at the same time. The ability to make specific areas (or zones) of LEDs darker (no LCD model has control over each LED individually) helps the TV create an image with both inky blacks and bright highlights. Without local dimming, you can get inky blacks or bright highlights, but not both at the same time; the resulting image looks washed out and flat in comparison with that of an LCD TV that has local dimming.
With few exceptions, if a 4K LCD TV has local dimming, it’s probably HDR compatible and most likely able to display a true HDR image. If an LCD TV doesn’t have local dimming, it doesn’t have the contrast ratio necessary for HDR—and it’s therefore an HDR TV in name only.
What else distinguishes a great HDR-capable TV?
Vizio’s P-Series F1 is an LCD TV that features excellent local dimming. Photo: Rozette Rago
Even among higher-performance OLED TVs and LCD TVs with local dimming, not all models deliver the same HDR performance. Some definitely handle HDR content better than others.
The fundamental brightness capability of each TV makes a difference. A brighter TV (measured in nits) simply has more “wow” factor than a dimmer one, but especially with HDR content that’s mastered to have brighter highlights. In the case of LCD, the more zones of local dimming the TV has, the more punch is possible in bright areas, with fewer oddities such as halos (or a glow) around bright objects. Even though OLED TVs aren’t typically as bright as most LCDs, their much darker black levels allow for a greater contrast between the bright and dark elements, which usually results in even better-looking images with more pop.
The other potential difference occurs within the TV’s software. Because HDR content is created with a specific physical brightness level in mind, any TV that can’t create that level of brightness has to modify the content to work within the confines of what it can do. The process of adjusting the content to suit the television is called tone mapping, and every TV maker does it differently.
You can think of HDR and tone mapping as being like a complex and challenging song—“Bohemian Rhapsody,” for example. Sung by legendary vocalist Freddie Mercury, it sounds unquestionably epic. Someone less skilled, a cover band’s singer perhaps, would still create something undeniably “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but the thunderbolts and lightning would be much less frightening. This would be like the difference between the best HDR TV and a merely adequate HDR TV. At the other end of the scale, faux-HDR TVs would be like senior staff writer Chris Heinonen singing “Bohemian Rhapsody”—sure, you can identify the song, but no one’s clamoring for an encore. (No Chrises were harmed in the making of this article. One eye roll was noted.)
Just as every singer covering “Bohemian Rhapsody” would have their own take to make the song their own, there’s no single correct way to tone-map an HDR image. On one TV you might see lots of details in the highlights, but the overall image is a little dim. On a different TV you may not see any of the highlights, but the rest of the image is brighter. You should see more consistency between Dolby Vision–compatible TVs, but only when you’re playing Dolby Vision content. Ultimately, how natural the tone mapping looks is what separates a great TV from a good one.
Can my TV do HDR?
If you have an older TV, or one that wasn’t specifically labeled HDR-compatible when you bought it, it’s unlikely to be able to display HDR. Check for any firmware updates on your TV manufacturer’s website, but don’t get your hopes up. Such an upgrade is very rare.
If you’re curious as to whether your TV that claims to do HDR actually doesHDR, that’s a bit harder to tell. If you watch a show or movie that’s presented in HDR and it doesn’t look any different from the non-HDR version, that’s a possible indication. The only definitive way to tell if a certain TV is truly HDR capable—without using specialized test gear—is to compare it side by side with a good HDR-capable TV.
When you view two TVs side by side in a real-world viewing environment, the differences in contrast, color, and peak brightness can be immediately noticeable. However, this test is all but impossible for most people to do because the floor-model TVs featured in store displays are optimized for maximum visual impact in a bright showroom setting, which washes out a lot of the potential benefits of HDR. Also, it’s rare for all the TVs in a showroom to be running the same HDR content. And as we discussed, you need HDR content for HDR TVs to look their best. Short of ordering several TVs and returning the ones you don’t like (with return shipping at your own expense), the only way to ensure you get a TV that is truly capable of HDR is to read reviews conducted with the aid of specialized test instruments.
This is where we come in. For our TV reviews, we use an X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrometer and a Klein K10-A colorimeter to measure the objective performance of each TV. How accurate is the color? How bright are the highlights? We can’t answer those questions by looking at a spec sheet. We also look extensively at test patterns and real content to judge how well a TV handles HDR content and non-HDR content. For any TV we haven’t seen in person, we try to find links to reviewers we trust who use testing methods similar to ours—all to make sure you get the best TV performance for your money.
Vancouver-based national telecom service provider Telus has announced that its LTE-M network is officially live across Canada.
Subscribers in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic Canada and “major centres in Manitoba” will be able to connect to the carrier’s low-power LTE network for internet of things (IoT) devices.
Long Term Evolution Category M1 — or LTE-M — is a category of 4G network technology specifically designed for use by IoT devices, including agricultural sensors and even smartwatches.
Not only is LTE-M faster than 2G and 3G, but it also enables low-power devices to operate for lengthy periods of time without needlessly draining battery.
“Telus is committed to empowering the IoT ecosystem in Canada, from providing connectivity with a world-class LTE-M network to supporting the companies and developers that will create the innovative IoT solutions of the future,” said Michael Cihra, Telus vice president of IoT, in an October 25th, 2018 media release.
“Telus’s network provides the most comprehensive LTE-M coverage in Canada, allowing for endless possibilities for IoT applications.”
According to the same October 25th media release, Telus’s LTE-M network is designed to be compatible with as-of-yet-unannounced 5G technologies.
Telus is selling an LTE-M starter kit that the carrier says “will enable developers and tech companies to rapidly prototype cellular connected IoT devices utilizing Telus’s LTE-M network.”
The starter kit provides developers with the base technology they need to collect data, connect to Telus’s LTE-M network and use Microsoft Azure to manage and analyze collected data.
The carrier is also selling a ready-made LTE-M asset monitor that can collect location, motion and temperature ready.
There is no shortage of choices when it comes to credit cards in Canada. Every major bank and retail outlet offers various perks to entice you to sign up.
I’m currently a fan of the Cineplex credit card as it offers the chance to see a potentially see a flick for free. That said, if you’re prone to dropping your phone, or even worse, losing it, CIBC has revealed that it is now offering mobile device insurance.
Of course, carriers and third-party sellers offer device insurance. Now, however, it looks like CIBC is jumping into the game.
The CIBC Aventura card now offers up to $1,000 CAD for lost, stolen or accidentally damaged mobile devices — which includes a smartphone, tablet or smartwatch — that is connected to a Canadian wireless service provider. This works at home or while traveling abroad.
There is fine print, however, as you may have already expected.
First, the CIBC Aventura card costs $120 per year, though the first year is rebated. Also, the device must be purchased with a CIBC credit card by the primary cardholder, and the cardholder can make one claim every 12 months and two claims every 48 months.
To claim, you’ll have to pay your monthly wireless bill with your CIBC Aventura Card.
Google is reportedly mandating two years of security updates in a revised Android device manufacturer contract.
The lack of consistent, regular Android updates has long been a pain point for users. While some devices and manufacturers have proved more reliable — Google’s Pixel line, Essential and OnePlus to name a few — now all regularly push out updates.
In an age of increasing need for digital security, a lack of consistent security patches is a significant gap that needs filling. Google’s Android team already pushes out monthly security updates for the operating system.
Now, the company is reportedly making other manufacturers do the same.
According to a contract obtained by The Verge, Android manufacturers will be required to provide updates for popular phones for at least two years.
Furthermore, the contract stipulates device makers must release a minimum of four security updates within the first year of a device’s launch. The agreement also mandates security updates in the second year, but there isn’t a minimum number of releases required.
Additionally, the contract terms apply to any device launched after January 31st, 2018 that has been activated by more than 100,000 users. On July 31st, Google implemented the requirements on 75 percent of a manufacturer’s “security mandatory models.”
Finally, on January 31st, 2019, all security mandatory devices will be subject to the conditions.
Patches for flaws older than 90 days must come every month
On top of all this, Google now mandates manufacturers to patch security flaws identified by the search giant within a specific timeframe. At the end of every month, manufacturers must protect devices against all vulnerabilities recognized more than 90 days ago.
Additionally, when a manufacturer launches a device, it must have all flaws older than 90 days patched.
Google could withhold approval of future phones, potentially preventing their release, if manufacturers fail to keep devices updated.
The Verge also confirmed that the stipulations are part of the new licensing agreement Google drafted for the E.U. However, it was unable to verify if the requirements appeared in the company’s global licensing terms. Likely the conditions are similar, considering how Google is pushing the importance of updates.
For example, Google rebuilt the update structure in Oreo to make updates simpler and faster to build. Additionally, the company uses its Enterprise Recommended program to highlight secure phones for large buyers, rewarding companies that keep phones up to date.
Hopefully, these new measures lead to a more secure Android as manufacturers keep devices updated. Unfortunately, this could have a negative impact too, especially if manufacturers rush the release of updates in order to meet deadlines.
"Bina48 co-taught two sessions of an introduction to ethics philosophy course — which covers ethical reasoning, just-war theory and the use of artificial intelligence in society. In the classroom were almost 100 students, along with Barry and Maj. Scott Parsons, an assistant professor at West Point." I think "taught" is a very generous statement of what probably actually happened. It looks to me like it means "a robot gave an audio lecture", for which it actually doesn't need any moving parts at all. Last year it 'participated in a debate', which if you watch the video you will see means 'presented an audio lecture'.
It appears that Google may bring multi-room audio support to second-gen Chromecasts and Chromecast Ultra devices.
The newest Chromecast has this feature, which allows users to easily synchronize audio between Chromecast Audio, Cast-enabled speakers and Google Home devices.
Some users were upset that Chromecast didn’t support the feature. While Google assuaged those users with the new Chromecast, older Chromecast users didn’t have a solution.
According to a support email Google sent to a user (and shared via Reddit), multi-room audio is coming. Second-gen Chromecasts and Chromecast Ultras should get it by the “end of the year.”
Despite the great news, you should take it with a grain of salt. Support emails aren’t always the most reliable when it comes to future updates.
The first comment on the Reddit post is from a user who also spoke with support and was told the feature would only come to the third-gen Chromecast.
Catherine Winters@CatherineOmega
BC needs proportional representation. I favour mixed-member proportional (MMP), the voting system that led to stabl… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
George Le Masurier has been sympathetic to my dad (ultimately not endorsing him, though), and has a measured review of his campaign. His vote on 3L looks prescient, but only with hindsight.
The anti-tax wave turned into a progressive tsunami in Courtenay; Long undercuts Jangula; 48% of Cumberland voters cast a ballot and a woman of color will contribute her world view to the regional district
This article was updated to correct the vote totals on the Cumberland referendum
As the Comox Valley awoke this morning, stumbled into the kitchen and stared vacantly out the window at a spectacular sunny late October day, were people thinking about the whirlwind six-week election campaign that ended last night?
Or were they still stoned from too much Legalization Day celebrations? Hung over from too much Election Night joy? Or, just seeing a yard full of maple leaves begging to be raked up?
Well, over here on Nob Hill, at the international headquarters of the Decafnation, we were thinking about what voters were thinking. What the election results mean, and what they don’t mean.
We did notice that of the 22 mayors, councillors and regional directors elected yesterday, Decafnation recommended 18 of them.
But in our own decaffeinated stupor this fine morning, these random thoughts passed through …
— Did Harold Long split the non-progressive vote and derail incumbent Larry Jangula’s bid for re-election? Jangula finished second to mayor-elect Bob Wells by 438 votes. Harold Long got 1,165 votes.
Long and Jangula feuded over a pact that Long says the pair made four years ago. Long would support Jangula in 2014 if Jangula supported Long in 2018. Long says Jangula reneged on the deal and Long ran anyway.
— The Comox Valley Taxpayers Alliance tried to rally the fiscal conservative vote, but did it actually show up? The CVTA endorsed six candidates for council and Jangula for mayor. Mano Theos was their only candidate to make the cut.
But looking at the mayor’s race, Jangula and Long captured 3,677 votes, more than Wells and Erik Eriksson, who received 3,597. A mere 80-vote differential.
On the other hand, Courtenay voters — where the CVTA exclusively focused their “taxes are too high!” message — elected a nearly unanimous progressive council. Theos is going to feel a little lonely for the next four years.
So, what to conclude? Jangula probably had individual popular support. Long cost him the election. But overall the efforts of the CVTA, despite all the money they spent on full-page advertising, didn’t make a difference. It may even have triggered a counterproductive effect by rallying progressive voters.
— We were surprised that Cumberland Mayor Leslie Baird’s opponent got even 229 votes.
— It’s a cliche, we know, but every vote does count. Incumbent Roger Kishi missed re-election by 2 votes. And the Comox Valley lost an important voice of diversity.
— We don’t think there’s a provision for recounts in municipal elections. Why not?
— Which community had the highest voter turnout and which was the worst? It was no contest. Cumberland had a 48.0 percent turnout the highest in the region. The Comox Valley’s worst was the rural electoral areas at 28.7 percent.
Courtenay had a 37.1 percent turnout and Comox had 40.4 percent. Campbell River did the worst of all at 25.4 percent. Qualicum was the best regionally with 58.9 percent. Parksville had 43.5 percent and Nanaimo did well at 40.3 percent.
— How did mayors fare compared to their elected councillors? Cumberland Mayor Leslie Baird got 83.25 percent of the vote, the highest of any Comox Valley candidate. No village councillors got a higher percentage, but Vickey Brown topped the polls with 63.6 percent.
Mayor-Elect Bob Wells got 40.56 percent of the vote, and five councillors grabbed a higher percentage of the vote. Will Cole-Hamilton topped the city polls with 48.6 percent.
Comox Mayor-Elect Russ Arnott received 61.8 percent of the vote. Two of his council members got more, including Alex Bissinger who topped the polls with 63.9 percent.
— In a move that will benefit the entire Comox Valley, Cumberland voters gave their Village Council approval to borrow up to $4.4 million to upgrade its wastewater treatment plant by a substantial margin: 1,011 to 316.
Voters really had no choice because the village has to upgrade its operations for face potential fines from the Ministry of Environment for being out of compliance with provincial standards. But the strong “yes” vote gives the village extra leverage in obtaining grant external funding and lowering the amount it has to borrow.
— Courtenay voters also approved a non-binding request for City Council to undertake a study of Valley-wide governance reforms all the way up to amalgamation. It will be interesting how this study evolves, if at all, because Cumberland and Comox haven’t expressed interest. The vote was 4,734 yes to 1,494 no.
— Vickey Brown, who stepped down as a school trustee to run in the Cumberland municipal election, topped the polls, besting re-elected incumbent Jesse Ketler by 44 votes. Brown previously sought a council seat in the 1990s and lost by just 10 votes.
— Erik Eriksson was the first Comox Valley candidate to announce his campaign. Just over a year ago, incumbent councillor Eriksson said he was running for mayor, a move criticized by some as starting the campaign too early. But it did force other mayoral hopefuls David Frisch — who later dropped out to re-run for council — and Bob Wells to announce their intentions just four months later.
Eriksson finished last in the four-way race for mayor. Was it because he announced so early? Did he ruffle too many feathers with his council colleagues by refusing to abide the chamber convention of referring to each other as “Councillor Hillian,” etc., and using just their first names?
Or did he lose progressive supporters by voting with Jangula, Theos and Ken Grant on 3L Developments proposed amendment to the Regional Growth Strategy? While the optics of Eriksson’s action may have cost him support from anti-amendment voters, he did it to continue the consultation process, including a public hearing.
Eriksson’s fears materialized when 3L filed a multi-faceted lawsuit just three days before the Oct. 20 election, essentially alleging that the Comox Valley Regional District didn’t give their proposal fair consideration.
— It’s interesting that voters convincingly supported Edwin Grieve in Area C, despite being banned from 3L discussions at the CVRD board table because a human rights tribunal found he made ethnically insensitive remarks about a 3L executive. Voters apparently believe Grieve has learned from his mistake and subsequent discipline and were willing to give him another chance.
— For the first time, a woman of color will represent a CVRD rural electoral area. Arzeena Hamir, who defeated incumbent Rod Nichol in Area B, was born in Tanzania, East Africa, moved to BC in 1973, served as a CUSO volunteer in Thailand, where she’s fluent in the language, and spent time in India doing field research for a Masters degree in sustainable agriculture that she earned from the University of London, England.
— Finally, more than half of the Comox Valley school district board of trustees were elected by acclimation (four out of seven). Why is there so little interest in the school board? (Full disclosure, Decafnation did not profile school trustee candidates or survey them on education issues. Nor were we able to profile every mayoral and council candidate.)
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer:
We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow.
As of last month, it’s been 10 years since Joel Spolsky and I started Stack Overflow. I currently do other stuff now, and I have since 2012, but if I will be known for anything when I’m dead, clearly it is going to be good old Stack Overflow.
Here’s where I’d normally segue into a bunch of rah-rah stuff about how great Stack Overflow is, and thus how implicitly great I am by association for being a founder, and all.
I do not care about any of that.
What I do care about, though, is whether Stack Overflow is useful to working programmers. Let’s check in with one of my idols, John Carmack. How useful is Stack Overflow, from the perspective of what I consider to be one of the greatest living programmers?
I won’t lie, September 17th, 2013 was a pretty good day. I literally got chills when I read that, and not just because I always read the word “billions” in Carl Sagan’s voice. It was also pleasantly the opposite of pretty much every other day I’m on Twitter, scrolling through an oppressive, endless litany of shared human suffering and people screaming at each other. Which reminds me, I should check my Twitter and see who else is wrong on the Internet today.
I am honored and humbled by the public utility that Stack Overflow has unlocked for a whole generation of programmers. But I didn’t do that.
You did, when you contributed a well researched question to Stack Overflow.
You did, when you contributed a succinct and clear answer to Stack Overflow.
You did, when you edited a question or answer on Stack Overflow to make it better.
All those “fun size” units of Q&A collectively contributed by working programmers from all around the world ended up building a Creative Commons resource that truly rivals Wikipedia within our field. That’s... incredible, actually.
But success stories are boring. The world is filled with people that basically got lucky, and subsequently can’t stop telling people how it was all of their hard work and moxie that made it happen. I find failure much more instructive, and when building a business and planning for the future, I take on the role of Abyss Domain Expert™ and begin a staring contest. It’s just a little something I like to do, you know... for me.
Thus, what I’d like to do right now is peer into that glorious abyss for a bit and introspect about the challenges I see facing Stack Overflow for the next 10 years. Before I begin, I do want to be absolutely crystal clear about a few things:
I have not worked at Stack Overflow in any capacity whatsoever since February 2012 and I’ve had zero day-to-day operational input since that date, more or less by choice. Do I have opinions about how things should be done? Uh, have you met me? Do I email people every now and then about said opinions? I might, but I honestly do try to keep it to an absolute minimum, and I think my email archive track record here is reasonable.
The people working at Stack are amazing and most of them (including much of the Stack Overflow community, while I’m at it) could articulate the mission better — and perhaps a tad less crankily — than I could by the time I left. Would I trust them with my life? No. But I’d trust them with Joel’s life!
The whole point of the Stack Overflow exercise is that it’s not beholden to me, or Joel, or any other Great Person. Stack Overflow works because it empowers regular everyday programmers all over the world, just like you, just like me. I guess in my mind it’s akin to being a parent. The goal is for your children to eventually grow up to be sane, practicing adults who don’t need (or, really, want) you to hang around any more.
Understand that you’re reading the weak opinions strongly held the strong opinions weakly held of a co-founder who spent prodigious amounts of time working with the community in the first four years of Stack Overflow’s life to shape the rules and norms of the site to fit their needs. These are merely my opinions. I like to think they are informed opinions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I can predict the future, or that I am even qualified to try. But I’ve never let being “qualified” stop me from doing anything, and I ain’t about to start tonight.
Stack Overflow is a wiki first
Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time. I tried as hard as I could to emphasize this relationship from launch day in 2008. Note who has top billing in this Venn diagram.
Stack Overflow later added a super neat feature to highlight this core value in user profiles, where it shows how many other people you have potentially helped with your contributed questions and answers so far.
The most common complaints I see about Stack Overflow are usually the result of this fundamental misunderstanding about who the questions and answers on the site are ultimately for, and why there’s so much strictness involved in the whole process.
I’m continually amazed at the number of people, even on Hacker News today, who don’t realize that every single question and answer is editable on Stack Overflow, even as a completely anonymous user who isn’t logged in. Which makes sense, right, because Stack Overflow is a wiki, and that’s how wikis work. Anyone can edit them. Go ahead, try it right now if you don’t believe me – press the “improve this answer” or “improve this question” button on anything that can be improved, and make it so.
The responsibility for this misunderstanding is all on Stack Overflow (and by that I also mean myself, at least up until 2012). I guess the logic is that “every programmer has surely seen, used, and understands Stack Overflow by now, 10 years in” but... I think that’s a risky assumption. New programmers are minted every second of every day. Complicating matters further, there are three tiers of usage at Stack Overflow, from biggest to smallest, in inverted pyramid style:
I passively search for programming answers. Passively searching and reading highly ranked Stack Overflow answers as they appear in web search results is arguably the primary goal of Stack Overflow. If Stack Overflow is working like it’s supposed to, 98% of programmers should get all the answers they need from reading search result pages and wouldn’t need to ask or answer a single question in their entire careers. This is a good thing! Great, even!
I participate on Stack Overflow when I get stuck on a really hairy problem and searching isn’t helping. Participating only at those times when you are extra stuck is completely valid. However, I feel this level is where most people tend to run into difficulty on Stack Overflow, because it involves someone who may not be new to Stack Overflow per se, but is new to asking questions, and also at the precise time of stress and tension for them where they must get an answer due to a problem they’re facing… and they don’t have the time or inclination to deal with Stack Overflow’s strict wiki type requirements for research effort, formatting, showing previous work, and referencing what they found in prior searches.
I participate on Stack Overflow for professional development. At this level you’re talking about experienced Stack Overflow users who have contributed many answers and thus have a pretty good idea of what makes a great question, the kind they’d want to answer themselves. As a result, they don’t tend to ask many questions because they self-medicate through exhaustive searching and research, but when they do ask one, their questions are exemplary.
(There’s technically a fourth tier here, for people who want to selflessly contribute creative commons questions and answers to move the entire field of software development forward for the next generation of software developers. But who has time for saints 😇, y’all make the rest of us look bad, so knock it off already, Skeet.)
It wouldn’t shock me at all if people spent years happily at tier 1 and then got a big unpleasant surprise when reaching tier 2. The primary place to deal with this, in my opinion, is a massively revamped and improved ask page. It’s also fair to note that maybe people don’t understand that they’re signing up for a sizable chunk of work by implicitly committing to the wiki standard of “try to make sure it’s useful to more people than just yourself” when asking a question on Stack Overflow, and are then put off by the negative reaction to what others view as an insufficiently researched question.
Stack Overflow absorbs so much tension from its adoption of wiki standards for content. Even if you know about that requirement up front, it is not always clear what “useful” means, in the same way it’s not always clear what topics, people, and places are deserving of a Wikipedia page. Henrietta Lacks, absolutely, but what about your cousin Dave in Omaha with his weirdo PHP 5.6 issue?
Over time, duplicates become vast landmine fields
Here’s one thing I really, really saw coming and to be honest with you I was kinda glad I left in 2012 before I had to deal with it because of the incredible technical difficulty involved: duplicates. Of all the complaints I hear about Stack Overflow, this is the one I am most sympathetic to by far.
If you accept that Stack Overflow is a wiki type system, then for the same reasons that you obviously can’t have five different articles about Italy on Wikipedia, Stack Overflow can’t allow duplicate questions on the exact same programming problem. While there is a fair amount of code to do pre-emptive searches as people type in questions, plus many exhortations to search before you ask, with an inviting search field and button right there on the mandatory page you see before asking your first question...
...locating and identifying duplicate content is an insanely difficult problem even for a company like Google that’s done nothing but specialize in this exact problem for, what, 20 years now, with a veritable army of the world’s most talented engineers.
When you’re asking a question on a site that doesn’t allow duplicate questions, the problem space of a site with 1 million existing questions is rather different from a site with 10 million existing questions... or 100 million. Asking a single unique question goes from mildly difficult to mission almost impossible, because your question needs to thread a narrow path through this vast, enormous field of prior art questions without stepping on any of the vaguely similar looking landmines in the process.
But wait! It gets harder!
Some variance in similar-ish questions is OK, because 10 different people will ask a nearly identical question using 10 different sets of completely unrelated words with no overlap. I know, it sounds crazy, but trust me: humans are amazing at this. We want all those duplicates to exist so they can point to the primary question they are a duplicate of, while still being valid search targets for people who ask questions with unusual or rare word choices.
It can be legitimately difficult to determine if your question is a true duplicate. How much overlap is enough before one programming question is a duplicate of another? And by whose definition? Opinions vary. This is subject to human interpretation, and humans are.. unreliable. Nobody will ever be completely happy with this system, pretty much by design. That tension is baked in permanently and forever.
I don’t have any real answers on the duplicate problem, which only gets worse over time. But I will point out that there is plenty of precedent on the Stack Exchange network for splitting sites into “expert” and “beginner” areas with slightly different rulesets. We’ve seen this for Math vs. MathOverflow, English vs. English Learners, Unix vs. Ubuntu... perhaps it’s time for a more beginner focused Stack Overflow where duplicates are less frowned upon, and conversational rules are a bit more lenient?
Stack Overflow is a competitive system of peer review
Stack Overflow was indeed built to be a fairly explicitly competitive system, with the caveat that “there’s always more than one way to do it.” This design choice was based on my perennial observation that the best way to motivate any programmer... is to subtly insinuate that another programmer could have maybe done it better.
This is manifested in the public reputation system on Stack Overflow, the incredible power of a number printed next to someone’s name, writ large. All reputation in Stack Overflow comes from the recognition of your peers, never the “system.”
Once your question is asked, or your answer is posted, it can then be poked, prodded, edited, flagged, closed, opened, upvoted, downvoted, folded and spindled by your peers. The intent is for Stack Overflow to be a system of peer review and friendly competition, like a code review from a coworker you’ve never met at a different division of the company. It’s also completely fair for a fellow programmer to question the premise of your question, as long as it’s done in a nice way. For example, do you really want to use that regular expression to match HTML?
I fully acknowledge that competitive peer review systems aren’t for everyone, and thus the overall process of having peers review your question may not always feel great, depending on your circumstances and background in the field – particularly when combined with the substantial tensions around utility and duplicates Stack Overflow already absorbed from its wiki elements. Kind of a double whammy there.
I’ve heard people describe the process of asking a question on Stack Overflow as anxiety inducing. To me, posting on Stack Overflow is supposed to involve a healthy kind of minor “let me be sure to show off my best work” anxiety:
the anxiety of giving a presentation to your fellow peers
the anxiety of doing well on a test
the anxiety of showing up to a new job with talented coworkers you admire
the anxiety of attending your first day at school with other students at your level
I imagine systems where there is zero anxiety involved and I can only think of jobs where I had long since stopped caring about the work and thus had no anxiety about whether I even showed for work on any given day. How can that be good? Let’s just say I’m not a fan of zero-anxiety systems.
Maybe competition just isn’t your jam. Could there be a less competitive Q&A system, a system without downvotes, a system without close votes, where there was never any anxiety about posting anything, just a network of super supportive folks who believe in you and want you to succeed no matter what? Absolutely! I think many alternative sites should exist on the internet so people can choose an experience that matches their personal preferences and goals. Should Stack build that alternative? Has it already been built? It’s an open question; feel free to point out examples in the comments.
Stack Overflow is designed for practicing programmers
Another point of confusion that comes up a fair bit is who the intended audience for Stack Overflow actually is. That one is straightforward, and it’s been the same from day one:
Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers. By that we mean:
People who either already have a job as a programmer, or could potentially be hired as a programmer today if they wanted to be.
Yes, in case you’re wondering, part of this was an overt business decision. To make money you must have an audience of people already on a programmer’s salary, or in the job hunt to be a programmer. The entire Stack Overflow network may be Creative Commons licensed, but it was never a non-profit play. It was planned as a sustainable business from the outset, and that’s why we launched Stack Overflow Careers only one year after Stack Overflow itself... to be honest far sooner than we should have, in retrospect. Careers has since been smartly subsumed into Stack Overflow proper at stackoverflow.com/jobs for a more integrated and most assuredly way-better-than-2009 experience.
The choice of audience wasn’t meant to be an exclusionary decision in any way, but Stack Overflow was definitely designed as a fairly strict system of peer review, which is great (IMNSHO, obviously) for already practicing professionals, but pretty much everything you would not want as a student or beginner. This is why I cringe so hard I practically turn myself inside out when people on Twitter mention that they have pointed their students at Stack Overflow. What you’d want for a beginner or a student in the field of programming is almost the exact opposite of what Stack Overflow does at every turn:
one-on-one mentoring
real time collaborative screen sharing
live chat
theory and background courses
starter tasks and exercises
playgrounds to experiment in
These are all very fine and good things, but Stack Overflow does NONE of them, by design.
Can you use Stack Overflow to learn how to program from first principles? Well, technically you can do anything with any software. You could try to have actual conversations on Reddit, if you’re a masochist. But the answer is yes. You could learn how to program on Stack Overflow, in theory, if you are a prodigy who is comfortable with the light competitive aspects (reputation, closing, downvoting) and also perfectly willing to define all your contributions to the site in terms of utility to others, not just yourself as a student attempting to learn things. But I suuuuuuper would not recommend it. There are far better websites and systems out there for learning to be a programmer. Could Stack Overflow build beginner and student friendly systems like this? I don’t know, and it’s certainly not my call to make. 🤔
And that’s it. We can now resume our normal non-abyss gazing. Or whatever it is that passes for normal in these times.
I hope all of this doesn’t come across as negative. Overall I’d say the state of the Stack is strong. But does it even matter what I think? As it was in 2008, so it is in 2018.
Stack Overflow is you.
This is the scary part, the great leap of faith that Stack Overflow is predicated on: trusting your fellow programmers. The programmers who choose to participate in Stack Overflow are the “secret sauce” that makes it work. You are the reason I continue to believe in developer community as the greatest source of learning and growth. You are the reason I continue to get so many positive emails and testimonials about Stack Overflow. I can’t take credit for that. But you can.
I learned the collective power of my fellow programmers long ago writing on Coding Horror. The community is far, far smarter than I will ever be. All I can ask — all any of us can ask — is to help each other along the path.
And if your fellow programmers decide to recognize you for that, then I say you’ve well and truly earned it.
The strength of Stack Overflow begins, and ends, with the community of programmers that power the site. What should Stack Overflow be when it grows up? Whatever we make it, together.
By October 2015, Quick Base’s advocacy community was clearly a failure.
Surveys showed Quick Base’s customers had remarkably NPS (net promoter scores), but those customers weren’t doing any promoting (a common problem).
If you’ve bought a software product recently (especially a premium one), there is a strong chance the reviews on comparison sites like G2Crowd, TrustRadius, or IT Central Station played a huge role.
The purpose of the Quick Base community was to get members to share good reviews on these sites. But, so far, they had less than 20 reviews…and even those reviews weren’t great. They often miscategorized Quick Base and failed to highlight what makes the company different.
So they took a different approach, they began inviting members with high NPS scores into a private group. They learned more about their members, built a stronger sense of community, and provided the right kind of information to create reviews.
Today Quick Base is the leader in its category with over 150 reviews. This is an incredible influence on someone’s decision to buy.
Three important aspects of this story:
1) You don’t need a big community to have a huge impact. Just a few hundred highly committed members will have a far bigger impact than a community for all your customers. Too often we try to build a community for all our customers instead of just our best customers.
2) NPS scores are a great way to find your most committed customers. NPS is a terrible gage of measuring the value of a community, but a fantastic tool to find your most likely top members. Invite the top into a unique group and ask them for more.
3) Ask members directly for behaviors you want. Sometimes you do need to provide incentives, but often members simply want to help. If they’re happy customers, they’re going to be keen to help because they want to help.
Final thought, if you are specific enough in the impact you’re seeing, just a tiny number of the right behaviors have incredible leverage.
p.s. How many reviews would it take for you to be the top product in your sector?
When brother Johnny left for the west he left his vacuum cleaner with us. After a few years of solid service, it’s stopped sucking in things to the extent that it’s no longer helpful to our family (that it also weights a ton also doesn’t help in this regard). But it may still be useful to someone else, especially someone else who’s handy. So after the rain stopped this afternoon I put it out on the front sidewalk with hopes that it will find a new home.
After testing 16 new models, we think the OSD Audio AP650 is the best outdoor speaker for people who want an affordable, weather-resistant speaker that delivers clear, backyard-filling sound and is impervious to water, dust, and bugs. It mounts easily, and its relatively high sensitivity means that it plays loudly even when connected to a small, low-powered amplifier.
On the one hand you risk crashing into the rocks of late delivery, and on the other you risk drowning in a whirlpool of broken software and technical debt.
And if you end up working long hours—if your only solution is crunch time—you risk both burnout and technical debt at the same time.
Metaphorically, you risk drowning in a whirlpool full of fire-breathing rocks.
Given too much work and not enough time, you need to say “no” to your boss and negotiate a better set of deliverables—but what exactly should you be aiming for?
You could argue for maintainable, well-tested code, and deadlines be damned.
But what if the deadline is important?
Or you could argue for meeting the deadline no matter what, even if that means shipping untested or buggy code.
But doesn’t the code need to work?
This dilemma is a false dichotomy.
Quality is situation-specific and feature-specific, and rote answers aren’t enough to decide on an implementation strategy.
The real answer is to prioritize the work that really matters in your particular situation, and jettison the rest until after the deadline.
And that means saying “no”: saying no to your boss, saying no to your customer, and saying no to yourself.
No, all the code can’t be perfect (but this part needs to be rock solid).
No, that feature isn’t important for addressing our goals.
No, we can’t just add one small thing.
But yes, we will do what really matters.
Let’s consider two examples: the same task, but very different goals and implementations.
Deadline #1: Raise money or lose your job
I once worked at a startup that was starting to run out of money: our existing business was not working.
Luckily, the co-founders had come up with a plan.
We would pivot to a trendy new area—Docker was just gaining traction—where we could build something no one else could do at the time.
Now, this meant were going to be building a distributed system, a notoriously difficult and complex task.
And we had a deadline we had to meet: we were going to do a press campaign for our initial release, and that requires a few weeks of lead time.
And of course on a broader level we needed to make enough of an impression that we could get funding before our current money ran out.
How do you build a complex, sophisticated piece of software with a short deadline?
You start with your goals.
Start with your goals
Our goal was to demonstrate the key feature that only our software could do.
We decided to do that by having users walk through a tutorial that demonstrated our value proposition.
If the user was impressed with our tutorial then we’d succeeded; we explicitly told users that the software was not yet usable in the real world.
Based on this operational goal we were able to make a whole slew of simplifications:
A production system would need to support parallel operation, but our tutorial only needed to be used by a single user.
So we implemented the distributed system by having a CLI that SSHed into a machine and ran another CLI.
A production system would need to handle errors, but our tutorial could run in a controlled environment.
We created a Vagrant config that started two virtual machines, and didn’t bother writing error handling for lost connections, inaccessible machines, and so on.
A production system would need to be upgradeable and maintainable, but our tutorial would only be run once.
So we didn’t bother writing unit tests for most of it, and focused instead on manually running through the tutorial.
Now, you might be thinking “but you’re choosing to abandon quality”.
But again, none of the things we dropped were relevant to our goal at that time.
Spending time on “best practices” that aren’t relevant to your particular situation is a waste of time.
We were very clear in all our documentation and marketing efforts that this was a demonstration only, and that we would be following up later with a production-ready release.
Prioritize features by goals
Even with these simplifications, we ended up dropping features to meet the deadline.
How did we decide which futures to drop?
We started by implementing the minimal features needed to demonstrate our core value, and so when we ran out of time we dropped the remaining, less critical features.
We stopped coding before the drop date (a week or a few days, I believe), and focused just on testing and polishing our documentation.
Dropping features was quite alright: the idea was good enough, the tutorial was compelling enough, and our VP of Marketing was skilled enough, that we were able to raise a $12 million Series A based off that unscalable, unmaintainable piece of software.
And after the initial release and publicity push we had time to implement those later features to keep up our momentum.
Deadline #2: Production-ready software
Once we had VC funding we rebuilt the product with the same set of features, but a very different goal: a production-ready product.
That meant we needed a good architecture, an installer, error handling, good test coverage, and so on.
It took much longer, and required a much bigger team, but that was OK: we had a different goal, and enough funding to allow for a longer deadline (again, based on publicity needs).
Even so, we made sure to choose and prioritize our work based on our goal: getting users and customers for our product.
Our initial prototype had involved a peer-to-peer storage transfer mechanism, and making that production ready would have been a large R&D exercise.
So in the short term we focused on cloud storage, a much simpler problem.
And we made sure to drop less important features as deadlines approached.
We certainly didn’t do a perfect job, e.g. we dropped one feature that was half-implemented.
We would have done better not starting it at all, since it was less important.
But, we succeeded: the code was maintainable, people started using it, and we didn’t have to rely on crunch time to deliver.
Beyond universal solutions
There is no universal solution that will work everywhere, no easy answers.
All you can do is ask “why”: why are we doing this, and why does this matter?
Once you know your goals, you can try and prioritize—and negotiate for—a solution that achieves your goals, meets the deadline, and doesn’t involve long hours:
Drop features that don’t further your goals, and start with the most important features, in case you run out of time for the rest.
Write high-quality code in the places where it matters, and drop “quality” where it doesn’t (what Havoc Pennington calls “professional corner-cutting”, emphasis on professional.)
And if you still have too much work, it’s time to have a discussion with your boss or customer about what tradeoffs they actually want.
There’s always too much work to do: too many features to implement, too many bugs to fix—and working evenings and weekends won’t help.
If three new iPhones and a brand new Apple Watch weren’t enough for you, don’t worry because Apple is hosting yet another hardware event on October 30th.
The keynote is set to take place in New York at 10am ET/1pm PT in New York City at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Howard Gilman Opera House, rather than the company’s Cupertino, California Steve Jobs Theatre venue.
There are a few products we will almost certainly catch a glimpse of at the event, including a new iPad Pro with minimized bezels and Face ID authentication, as well as an updated Mac Mini and possibly even a new version of the iPad Mini.
There are other devices the tech giant might reveal too, including Apple’s frequently-delayed AirPower charging pad and the often-rumoured 2nd-generation version of its wireless Bluetooth AirPods.
I’ll be on the ground at Apple’s event bringing you all the news directly from the show floor, but until Tuesday, here’s everything we expect to see at the tech giant’s ‘There’s more in the making,’ fall hardware event.
Note: As more rumours appear over the next couple days leading up to Apple’s event, this story will be updated.
iPad Pro (2018)
Apple’s new iPad Pro is expected to feature minimized bezels and possibly a display notch depending on what rumours you believe. The iPhone X’s and iPhone XS’ Face ID authentication functionality will likely make its way to the 2018 iPad Pro, and as a result, the tablet is also rumoured to ditch Touch ID.
Further, Face ID is tipped to work in any orientation, regardless of whether the 2018 iPad Pro is held in portrait or landscape mode. Face ID will reportedly even operate when the new iPad Pro is attached to Apple’s Smart Keyboard, which is also likely set to be slightly revamped.
Other changes include an updated version of the Apple Pencil, the tech giant’s (2018) 9.7-inch iPad and iPad Pro stylus. It’s currently unclear what will be changed in this new Apple Pencil iteration, though extended battery life and a more efficient charging method are likely upgrades.
Finally and most interestingly, Apple is tipped to ditch its proprietary Lighting port for USB-C when it comes to the 2018 iPad Pro. This will allow the iPad Pro to connect to an external display, according to reports.
MacBook Air
Apple laptop users have been asking for a new MacBook Air for years. With the iconic device now being the oldest MacBook currently sold by Apple, as well as the tech giant’s lowest-cost option, the Air is long overdue for an update.
While rumours of an updated MacBook Air have appeared many times over the last few months, it looks like Apple’s fall hardware event will finally give us our first look at the device.
The new MacBook Air is expected to feature a Retina Display, USB-C and Intel’s 8th-generation processor. The laptop’s bezels will also be slimmed down significantly as well, according to various reports.
Regarding price, it’s likely the Air will start at somewhere in the $1,300 to $1,400 CAD range, given that it will be position as the entry-level device in Apple’s laptop lineup.
iPad Mini (2018)
While most likely assumed that Apple’s 4th-generation iPad Mini, released way back in 2015, was the last in the company’s popular smaller tablet line, it looks like that might not be the case.
The new iPad Mini is expected to feature an improved processor, a lower cost display panel and possibly a subtly updated design. Kuo says that while the 2018 iPad Mini will be announced at Apple’s October 30th event, the device likely won’t be released until a later date.
Mac Mini
Similar to the MacBook Air, Apple’s pint-sized Mac Mini desktop computer hasn’t been updated for years. In fact, the last new version of the Mac Mini was released back in 2014, the same year Apple launched the iPhone 6.
The new Mac Mini will reportedly feature an Intel’s 8th-generation processor, modern ports, which, of course, will include USB-C and possibly a shift to faster SSD storage.
AirPods 2
I’ve frequently contended Apple’s Bluetooth-powered wireless AirPods are one of the best products the company has released in recent memory. The AirPods may not feature the best sound quality, but they’re the only Bluetooth headphones I’ve used that operate flawlessly when it comes to connecting to devices thanks to Apple’s proprietary W1 chip.
There are a variety of rumours circulating about the new AirPods, including noise-cancelling and water resistance, but one feature the new version of the earbuds will almost certainly get is wireless charging given that Apple first revealed the earbuds’ new wireless charging case last year.
Integrated ‘Hey Siri’ functionality is also rumoured to be coming to the AirPods 2.
AirPower
Apple first revealed its AirPower charger last year when the company showed off the iPhone X’s wireless charging feature. Since then though, we haven’t heard much about the charging pad, with rumours circulating that Apple’s engineers have experienced significant manufacturing difficulties related to heat management and connectivity.
Unlike similar multi-device charging pads, the AirPower is capable of charging Apple’s AirPods, Qi-compatible iPhones and the Apple Watch, from any location on the mat.
The AirPower is reportedly still on the way through according to reports, especially given that the accessory was featured in the iPhone XS and iPhone XS’ in-box marketing material.
Rumours indicate that the AirPower will reportedly either launch before the end of 2018 or in the first quarter of 2019.
An APK of the version of Google’s Camera app that features the Pixel 3’s new ‘Night Sight’ feature recently became available for download.
While it’s fair to be concerned about sideloading an APK, I’ve taken it upon myself to download the app and use it on one of MobileSyrup’s Pixel 3 XL smartphones.
All of the below photos were shot at around 9pm. The pictures turned out considerably noisy, even with Night Sight turned on. That said, the images are also a lot brighter and clearer than I expected.
The pictures on the left had HDR+ enabled, while the pictures on the right featured Night Sight.
Redmond computing giant Microsoft announced its first quarter 2019 earnings results on October 24th, 2018.
The company reported a quarterly revenue of $29.1 billion USD (roughly $37.95 billion CAD), as well as an operating income of $10.0 billion USD (roughly $13.04 billion CAD).
Microsoft’s revenue increased by 19 percent compared to Q1 2018, while the company’s operating income increased by 29 percent compared to Q1 2018.
“We are off to a great start in fiscal 2019, a result of our innovation and the trust customers are placing in us to power their digital transformation,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, in an October 24th, 2018 media release.
“We’re excited to help our customers build the digital capability they need to thrive and grow, with a business model that is fundamentally aligned to their success.”
Interesting to note is that Windows OEM revenue reportedly increased by three percent compared to Q1 2018, while Surface revenue specifically increased by 14 percent.
Microsoft’s gaming division increased revenue by 44 percent.
Microsoft stock closed the day’s trading at $102.32 USD (roughly $133.48 CAD).
U.S.-based electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla used its third quarter 2018 earnings report to reveal that the company shipped 56,065 Model 3 vehicles during Q3 2018.
The company also revealed that it produced approximately 5,300 Model 3 vehicles during the last week of Q3 2018 — continuing to achieve CEO and co-founder Elon Musk’s goal of producing 5,000 Model 3s per week.
According to an October 24th, 2018 media release, the Model 3 was the best-selling car in the U.S. based on revenue and was the fifth best-selling car in terms of volume.
The same media release revealed that Tesla produced an average of 4,300 Model 3 units per week during Q3 2018.
It’s worth noting that Tesla sold 27,710 Model S and Model X vehicles.
Tesla plans on bringing portions of the Model 3’s production to China sometime in 2019, in order to “significantly increase the affordability of Model 3.”
It’s worth noting that Chinese production will specifically be designated for local customers.
Tesla said that its target to ship 100,000 Model S and Model X vehicles “remains unchanged.”
The company reported a nt income of $312 million USD (roughly $407.17 million CAD).
Tesla stock closed at $288.50 USD (roughly $376.71 CAD) at the end of the day’s trading.
Google has added a little Easter egg to Android 9 Pie.
While earlier this year we thought the only Android P Easter egg was the P logo with crazy colours, it was uncovered the company has added a little drawing interface to the mix.
The new Easter Egg can be found by going to ‘System’ > ‘About phone’ > ‘Android version’ > and tapping the nine multiple times, then the old P Easter egg will appear on a Pixel 3. If you keep taping the ‘P’ a few more times, the drawing UI appears.
The drawing UI doesn’t really include anything special. It features a variety of colours, you can change the thickness, go back to previous colours with the eye droppers, and erase with using the ‘white colour.’
According to Android Police, the first publication to report on the feature, it also has a fake pressure sensor that’s capable of detecting how hard you’re pressing by measuring the surface area that your finger covers.
It seems that this feature is only available on the Pixel 3 and 3 XL, as we’ve checked older Pixel devices and they don’t have it.
Vancouver Mortgage Corporation were on the corner in 601, H G Willard sold lamps and decorations next door, and J Sewell sold men’s furnishings in the third store. They had already added their ‘Men’s Shop’ sign above their doorway.
It has been three years since Google introduced a feature called “Nearby Notifications”, which made it possible for Android users to find “apps and content” based on their current location.
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