Our Approach to Privacy - fjk
https://www.apple.com/privacy/approach-to-privacy/
======
wyc
Apple sells hardware differentiated by integrated software for premium
pricing. They want to build better and more expensive products through
superior design and quality control. Collecting and analyzing personal data
isn't the most important thing for their business. They might see more benefit
by eschewing personal data collection and marketing a privacy-focused message,
which they seem to be doing.

In contrast, Google and Facebook are companies that sell advertising. The
value they can offer to publishers and advertisers completely relies on how
well they know their users. Their competitive moat involves collection of
proprietary data to continuously improve their products. These are clear
incentives to be sticky and greedy with your information, but also to keep it
private and proprietary for their own sake.

With these incentives in mind, I more readily trust Apple when it says that it
will not collect my data compared to data conglomerates, and Apple hasn't done
anything to aggressively betray that idea in its history (to my knowledge).
Combined with the technical security advantages of iOS, I'm inclined to
believe Apple products to be the least-bad option for the security-minded
today.

~~~
mirimir
I do like Apple's approach to privacy. A lot. And I love their phones. While
their PC hardware is still pretty, it's getting more-and-more outdated and
overpriced. But that's no longer their focus, so hey.

And indeed, Apple seems to handle privacy well, in practice. I've managed to
create pseudonymous accounts at Apple's online store, and fund them with
anonymized Bitcoin. And I've managed to make digital purchases.

However, I haven't tested buying physical devices, for pickup in meatspace. I
wonder if they'd require official ID, or just proof of purchase. Anyone know?

~~~
lxmcneill
The last time I went to pick up a product (AirPods) it required government
issued photo ID (Australian driver's license), even though I had the Apple
Store app which made the purchase installed on my phone.

~~~
movedx
That's an issue with Australian law, not Apple. You can also buy such devices
overseas.

~~~
mirimir
Ah, thanks. What sorts of purchases in Australia require ID?

~~~
adambrenecki
Anything over 10,000 AUD (about 8,000 USD) purchased with cash. AirPods are
expensive but not _that_ expensive.

My guess is that they paid online for in-store pickup, and Apple asked for ID
to confirm they're the one that made the purchase. In which case that's an
Apple thing, not a government thing.

~~~
movedx
Bought my AirPods from Apple in the UK: no ID required.

Bought my iPhone 6S from Apple in Ausralia: ID required under Australian law.

Very likely the person also bought a phone with a sim/service, hence being
asked for ID (under Australian law.)

------
greggman
I'm happy Apple is at least trying hard to deal with privacy but honestly I
don't think they are doing enough, at least for me.

For example, I don't really want to give most apps constant access to my
photos, my camera, or my mic but I really don't have a whole lot of choice if
I still want to use popular apps and services like Facebook, Instagram,
Messenger, Hangouts, Line, WhatsApp etc..

I really wish that every time they wanted a photo they had to get it through
some OS level UX and they only got to see the photos I selected. As it is they
get to see all my photos the moment I want to give them a single photo.
Similarly if I take a photo in one of them they require permission to read all
my photos when all I want them to be able to do is save the photo.

As for the Camera I don't give any of those apps access to the camera because
I don't trust them not to spy on me in some way (I assume camera = mic access
so they could be doing the subsonic listening for ads things etc...). Instead
I take the picture with the built in app then access that picture from the app
I want to use the picture in. Of course that leads to the problem above.

Mic access is more problematic. I don't want any of them to have mic access
when I'm not using the mic function directly but I can't talk to my friends
who use all those services to call me if I don't give the apps mic access.

I feel like if Apple was more serious about privacy they'd handle these issues
in some way. The photo one seems mostly straight forward for most use cases.
Don't let the app access them at all, only the OS. The camera one is less
straight forward. I get that there are innovative things apps can do with the
cameras by using them directly. On the other hand most of the current use
cases could be handled by letting the OS access the camera only, not the app,
and then just giving the result to the app.

~~~
guyfawkes303
I think you mis-understand how iOS privacy controls work. An app doesn't get
to 'see all your photos' just because you grant photo access, you still have
to select which photos to put in the app. Same goes for camera, that just
let's the app pull up the camera interface, not be able to access it 24/7 for
whatever purpose they want. Same with the mic.

~~~
LeoPanthera
I don't think this is correct. The Facebook app regularly shows me all the
photos I have taken today and asks if I want to post any of them.

~~~
odammit
I can't tell you how many times I've definitely had a photo show up in the "do
you want to post this" preview that I most certainly would never want to post.

I feel like I'm having a heart attack every time thinking I posted it already.
That feature sucks.

~~~
mixmastamyk
_uninstalls app and uses website_

------
jacksmith21006
Apple chose to let the China government into their China data center and
Google chose to leave the country instead. So not so simple on who you trust.
Personally I trust Google more as they are just a lot better at keeping things
secure, imo. Plus governments getting into data is a bigger deal to me than a
targeted ad. But it is a personal decision.

"A Local Chinese Government Will Oversee Apple’s New iCloud Data Center"

[http://fortune.com/2017/08/14/apple-china-icloud-data-
center...](http://fortune.com/2017/08/14/apple-china-icloud-data-center/)

~~~
et-al
Why was this downvoted? It's a relevant point to the discussion.

------
maxpert
At least one company is "trying" keep my photos private. The other day Google
Photo told my wife it had prepared an album for our trip to SFO. We were
surprised because she already disabled Geo-tagging but whataya know... Google
still figured it out!

~~~
petepete
If you have location enabled on your phone, Google appears to cross reference
your location with your photo timestamps to work out where you were. I know
this because when I import my DSLR images to Google Photos it estimates the
location, usually _very_ accurately.

~~~
ben1040
I've also seen it geotag things based upon the content of the image alone.

I went to the photo store not long ago and had dozens of rolls of negatives
scanned, from a vacation to Europe 20 years ago. I uploaded them into Google
Photos and it geotagged many of them automatically.

They have a public API that does the same, it detects landmarks in images and
can give you a lat/long position for it as well as a confidence score.

[https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/detecting-
landmarks](https://cloud.google.com/vision/docs/detecting-landmarks)

~~~
mit65
apple cloud did release a lot of celeb pics over the internet...let's not
forget that

~~~
gbear605
That was a phishing attack, nothing to do with Apple other than that the
people attacked by it were iPhone users.

------
gallerdude
Privacy is one of those things I can't tangibly describe why I like it, but it
just feels good to know that nothing is being saved, even in contrast to just
targeting you for ads and nothing else.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
We have a track record of things going south, fast, for societies that
sacrifice privacy. It makes sense to tread warily with it.

~~~
zachlatta
Can you give a few examples?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Pretty much every authoritarian overthrow that became genocidal relied on a
previous bureaucracy's meticulous record keeping.

~~~
zachlatta
Can you please give a few examples?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
The classic ones are Pol Pot and Hitler. With the latter, the Danish example
is useful.

~~~
zachlatta
In your original comment, you were implying that societies that lose privacy
go south very quickly. As in that loss of privacy is causal.

I can't speak for Pol Pot, since I'm not very familiar with his regime, but
with Hitler and the Danish, my understanding is that record keeping aided in
the German occupation. Not that the Denmark went downhill after it started
doing meticulous data gathering.

Can you give causal examples?

------
newscracker
A few things have struck me really strong on Apple's stand and implementation
on protecting users' privacy:

1\. Though it's understandable that Apple earns money primarily by selling
hardware, it's sort of amusing and alarming at the same time that a
proprietary almost-closed-source software company is focusing on protecting
and preserving privacy whereas partially open source platforms competing with
Apple seem to be nowhere close on this aspect. Do any of the Android forks try
to do as much as Apple does for privacy right out of the box (something a non-
technical lay person could get)?

2\. It's abundantly clear that a lot of thought has gone into the foundations
of a design focused on protecting privacy and in creating silos of information
in/with different SDKs and features.

3\. It's a bit unclear to me as to why Health data is stored encrypted in
iCloud whereas messages aren't. Is there a distinction here between iCloud
sync and iCloud backups? The documentation on messages suggests turning off
iCloud backup as a protective measure.

4\. To me, the weakest link in the ecosystem seems to be third party apps,
where Apple relies more on them adhering to the developer guidelines and on
publishing a privacy policy.

~~~
wyc
Regarding your first point, it's difficult to implement some security schemes
at the operating system level alone. With full vertical control of the
product, you can have nice things like secure enclaves and de-facto hardware
cryptography acceleration.

See here for details:
[https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf](https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf)

A lot of the features would be very difficult to implement in Android without
cooperating hardware, and hardware is notoriously expensive to get right and
scale up. Projects like neo900 and Purism regularly encounter delays,
unexpected costs, and pricing issues. It's really tough.

On a broader note, people are spending more and more time in data-hungry apps
anyway, which can send almost anything they want to the network. This is sure
to chip at any device-level security, pushing it towards irrelevance. I wish I
had a log entry every time an app used the location service on my phone along
with a database containing a history of Internet-transacted data.

~~~
newscracker
Thanks for the explanation on the Android side. It still seems weird that
nobody wants to take this up as a USP for their devices (referring to non-
Google entities).

> On a broader note, people are spending more and more time in data-hungry
> apps anyway, which can send almost anything they want to the network. This
> is sure to chip at any device-level security, pushing it towards
> irrelevance. I wish I had a log entry every time an app used the location
> service on my phone along with a database containing a history of Internet-
> transacted data.

I've long wished for network access permission on iOS, allowing the user to
decide which apps can never connect to any networks. To reduce the total
attack surface, I'd want to keep many apps (especially games) running only
within their sandboxes and having access to only the data they create/generate
on-device and no other external resource/server.

AFAIK, Android has had this even in the days of permission requests at app
install time. I don't know if granular control is available on this from
Android 6 onwards.

~~~
wyc
I know that Samsung is trying to push its Knox product to enterprises. I'm
unsure about their technical or financial success. I don't know of anyone
trying this in the consumer space either, but I'd definitely love to see more
activity in this long-neglected sector.

Knox: [https://www.samsungknox.com/en](https://www.samsungknox.com/en)

------
whathaschanged
Apple's approach to privacy also includes being a partner in PRISM, a fact
which they chose to vigorously deny as false allegations until it was proven
to be true.

Every story about Apple and privacy chooses to omit thus huge piece of info.

Why should anybody trust them now? What has changed to make anybody believe
they aren't still lying about privacy?

~~~
dclowd9901
If their technology is built such that even they themselves cannot peer into
the inner workings of your content, what good is their association with PRISM?

~~~
userbinator
How do you know Apple is telling the truth?

One thing we're certain of, however, is that Apple has the signing keys. They
also encrypt their firmware and even other apps to hide how they work.

~~~
dclowd9901
I believe if they weren't telling the truth, _somebody_ would've caught on by
now. We have lots of people in sec watching court cases involving police
trying to break into iPhones. If somehow a department was able to access a
phone without a user complying and no known backdoor was exposed, I'm sure we
would've heard of it by now.

I hope you're not expecting them to open source the secure enclave.

------
spsful
I wish the EFF still made those "Who has your back" infographics, they were
really helpful if you wanted to find out which companies respected your data
both online and in the courts. But IMO Apple is the only large multinational
corporation that is actually taking steps to protect my privacy so I'm way
more inclined to trust them with my personal information. Can't say the same
for Google or others.

------
titanomachy
How much of this can be independently verified? I suppose we just need to take
their word for it?

~~~
Shank
It all boils down to what you see in the public. The FBI was trying to get
Apple to create an iOS variant to extract data from a device, to the point
where Tim Cook wrote a letter refusing to do so and was willing to fight it in
court. In a similar fashion, Apple has given talks and white papers on iOS
security. In tandem with these well documented white papers and talks
discussing the internal functions of iOS, we haven't seen any well known or
trivial exploits appear to surface that demonstrate flaws in them.

In the case of the FBI fiasco, for example, we know that the FBI later paid
Cellebrite for an exploit that allowed them to unlock the device. We don't
know the details of how that happened, but the FBI had to reach out to an
independent company and exploit an older device to do it.

To be clear: if they were lying about the lengths they go to with encryption,
on device security, and user trust, this story would have been different. The
FBI would have already had a backdoor or been able to trivially break the
device, or they would have complied and created an iOS variant to break in.
All we know is what they stood their ground on, and the effort that was
required for the FBI to get in.

iOS 10 security white paper:
[https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf](https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf)

Talk about iOS security at Black Hat:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U)

~~~
lern_too_spel
We know that they lied to customers claiming they couldn't help law
enforcement get data off customers' devices.

"Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore
cannot access this data. So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to
government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their
possession running iOS 8."[1]

After it became clear that it _is_ technically feasible for Apple to assist
with those data requests, they quietly removed that claim from their
website.[2]

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/apple-expands-
data-e...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/09/apple-expands-data-
encryption-under-ios-8-making-handover-to-cops-moot/)

[2] [https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-
request...](https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-requests/)

~~~
millstone
By "technically feasible" are you referring to Apple's ability to build a
software update that allows for quicker brute-forcing of the passcode?

~~~
lern_too_spel
Yes. Brute forcing pin codes can be done very quickly. Apple realized it was
technically feasible too, which is why they no longer make that claim. That
they didn't apologize to their users and offer refunds demonstrates the
disdain they have for their customers.

------
jvican
After reading this, I have two questions:

1\. Are there any statistics showing the ratio of security issues between
Android and iOS?

2\. What's the most common phone among security researchers?

To be honest, I'm wary of believing this, but I own a Nexus and if I had to
give the benefit of the doubt to either Google or Apple, it would most
certainly be Apple because they don't make business out of my data (or, not as
much as Google, at least).

~~~
pcurve
I'm an Android user, but I feel the same way.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if I were to create a new Google identity
and start fresh. Would they try to re-establish my old email's profile and
data to the new one without my consent?

~~~
arunmib
I tried this as an exercise when they were pushing Google+. Created a new
account, was very cognizant to read through all settings and ensured that
nothing from my old account can be traced back to this new one. I'm not joking
when I say nothing from my old account and tracking: 1\. I timed my move (to
different city inside bayarea) 2\. Changing ISP to wave from comcast 3\.
Bought new computer 4\. Closed my old phone account and only started using
work phone. Never used hotspot in my work phone 5\. Even changed my coffee
drinking habit + free wifi access locations from Starbucks to Peets. Only
thing I couldn't change was my name + SSN. Serious paranoid level of things
for my online life, but they still populated my digital life with same info
and recommendations. After about 10-15 days of doing all this, I enabled
Google+ (because at that time to use youtube account, I had to enable it). You
know who the first contact recommendation that was there for me under my
family - my brother who is living in a different country. I just gave up at
that point. Probably I did something wrong during the setup (or) slipped and
used the accounts for some period of time on same computer or browser (or) the
data companies which sell my offline data have really rich data about me.
Whatever the goof-up was, it was just disheartening to learn that after all
that work my online privacy just lasted at the max 15days. I really wish there
were better ways. Considering the number of security/data breaches (e.g.
recent equifax one) I feel like, I have little to no control on things.

~~~
pcurve
That is pretty frightening.... thanks for sharing your story.

------
mtgx
> While we do back up iMessage and SMS messages for your convenience using
> iCloud Backup, you can turn it off whenever you want.

Wouldn't they be able to hold that privacy promise much better if they
actually allowed people to keep iCloud backup on let's say for pictures, but
still be able to disable iMessage messages? I think many people would like to
use iCloud but without it backing up personal conversations, too.

Also, iMessage's end-to-end encryption was rather flawed last Matthew Green
checked, compared to other end-to-end messaging apps.

[https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-o...](https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/03/21/attack-
of-week-apple-imessage/)

As for their use of differential privacy, when they introduced that it was
essentially a hidden way of gather _more_ of your data than before, not less,
but while still being able to say "hey, we may gather more data than ever on
you starting with the new iOS, but it's _pretty_ private, so it's cool, don't
worry about it".

All of that said, I know Apple is still miles ahead of Google on privacy. If
anything, over the last 1-2 years, Google has become increasingly bolder and
more shameless about tracking users without them realizing (except in the EU,
where they are _forced_ to make it a little easier for users to understand how
they are being tracked, and even that happened because of the anti-trust
lawsuit).

Here's just one example of Google's increasingly privacy-hostile behavior:

[https://www.extremetech.com/internet/238093-google-
quietly-c...](https://www.extremetech.com/internet/238093-google-quietly-
changed-its-privacy-policy-no-longer-promises-to-anonymize-your-personal-
information-when-selling-ads)

~~~
Accacin
I agree it's not perfect. I kind of get around it by disabling iCloud backup
(which includes iMessage, etc.). I just use iCloud to back up photos, and I
back up my phone locally.

------
imron
> Apple has no way to decrypt iMessage and FaceTime data _when it’s in transit
> between devices_

What about when it's _not_ in transit between devices?

~~~
alex_g
Well they decrypt it on your behalf when it's on your device. The point is
that couldn't do that without your device/account.

~~~
jw1224
They then go on to say:

> While we do back up iMessage and SMS messages for your convenience using
> iCloud Backup, you can turn it off whenever you want.

Sure, I can stop backing my data up - but presuming I don't (like the vast
majority of people), does that mean if they got a wiretap order they could
just read the data straight from their backup servers?

I'm not sure if this was just phrased poorly, or if backing up your iMessages
effectively undoes any protection your messages once had.

~~~
DavideNL
"The iCloud Loophole" (article from March-2016):
[https://www.macrumors.com/2016/03/02/icloud-backups-less-
sec...](https://www.macrumors.com/2016/03/02/icloud-backups-less-secure-for-
restoring-data/)

Although in a link in this HN article Apple says backups _are_ encrypted:
[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT202303)

So, a little confusing...

EDIT

bah, found this:

"Right now, although iCloud backups are encrypted, the keys for the encryption
are also stored with Apple. "

[https://9to5mac.com/2016/02/25/apple-working-on-stronger-
icl...](https://9to5mac.com/2016/02/25/apple-working-on-stronger-icloud-
backup-encryption-and-iphone-security-to-counter-fbi-unlock-requests/)

------
bgrohman
On the subject of privacy, I'm interested in migrating away from Google
services, but I have years' worth of data tied up there (email, photos, music,
movies, etc). I know Google offers ways to download your data, so it's
technically possible to migrate, but it would be tedious and time consuming,
to say the least.

Does anyone have suggestions for making that process easier?

------
quadrangle
Apple does so many things well, actually. I would return to them for some
things and even recommend them (versus exclusively GNU/Linux and LineageOS) if
they'd only change the stupid iOS terms that prohibit GPL software.

~~~
nnutter
Isn't the issue that the App Store doesn't have a mechanism to redistribute
the source in a way that is compliant with the GPL? Is it fair to say Apple
prohibits the GPL? Anyway that tried to sell GPL licensed software on the App
Store is "breaking the law" so Apple prohibits it? Or is there more to it?

~~~
sheetjs
[http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-
store-...](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-
enforcement) goes into more detail, but the summary is:

> Apple's Terms of Service impose restrictive limits on use and distribution
> for any software distributed through the App Store, and the GPL doesn't
> allow that.

------
cyphunk
Wake me up when they let one sync contacts without giving icloud cleartext
access in the process

~~~
mercutio2
Can you say more about why this is important to you?

I mean, more stuff encrypted without provider escrow keys is a generally good
thing, but are your contacts specifically more important than, say, you
calendar events?

What threat model are you worried about with your personal, curated contacts?

~~~
cyphunk
all data is important, indeed. contacts are just an easy to access example.
I'm worried about countries creating laws, secret and public, that force Apple
to hand over my data. Specifically those governments that I spend time in and
that I also spend time criticising or protesting within as an activist. I'm
worried about regime changes. I'm worried about 3rd party data breaches. I'm
not worried about how my data exposure would effect me now but how it would
effect me in the future when mining and correlating data to use against
activists will be much easier.

------
aub3bhat
On Android you can Sideload VPN apps, iOS on the otherhand banned them in
China. Apple mounted the most successful attack on General Computing with it's
walled garden. The whole Apple is good for privacy is marketing.

~~~
disconnected
Android and its community are sorta schizophrenic towards security.

On one hand, users are told that they should never ever, ever install
applications from untrusted sources. They should always use the play store
because applications are scanned for vulnerabilities and whatnot.

On the other hand, we have people telling us that one of the great advantages
of Android is that you can sideload apps - bypassing the store security model
completely.

On one hand, a VPN needs root access for transparent proxying (or at least TOR
does). Changing the hosts file needs root access. Changing gps.conf requires
root. Lots of useful operations need root access, so if you are concerned
about privacy and security, or just want more control, you probably want root.

On the other hand, root is stupidly hard to obtain, and users are strongly
discouraged from doing it anyway because it opens all sorts of attack vectors.
Unless the manufacturer provides a legitimate method to do it, the operation
of obtaining root itself, like on iOS, often relies on an unpatched local
privilege escalation vulnerability. Note that any application can exploit
this, not just the rooting app.

I don't support Apple's walled garden approach, but we can't argue that they
have a much clearer picture with regards to security, and the results speak
for themselves. Malware in the Apple devices is rare, whereas in Android it is
rapidly becoming routine. Unfortunately, you sacrifice flexibility for
enhanced security.

~~~
nnutter
My perception is also that malware ends up in the Google Play Store with much
higher frequency than the App Store. Just do a news search for "Google Play
Store malware" and "App Store malware" and compare.

Also, one can sideload apps, if you have a Mac, onto iOS. Obviously, that's
not anywhere as integrated but maybe that's a good thing. Heck, maybe Apple
even added that so people in China could sideload VPNs. Maybe iOS VPNs are
good enough (no root, no TOR?)?

~~~
lern_too_spel
Add up all the malicious app installs on Google Play Store, and it doesn't
even come close to the 500 million[1] (conservative estimate) users affected
by XCodeGhost. It looks worse when you consider that the 500 million is on an
order of magnitude smaller total iOS userbase vs. Play Store userbase and when
you consider that Google allows third party security researchers to
investigate and publish research on the Play Store while Apple does not, so
XCodeGhost is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.[2]

[1]
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xc...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-
chinese-malware-faq/amp/)

[2]
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cultofmac.com/128577/apple-...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cultofmac.com/128577/apple-
kicks-security-researcher-out-of-app-store-and-developer-program-after-ios-
vulnerability-demonstration/amp/)

~~~
evgen
LOL, let's start with StageFright (1 billion+ pwned with just a text message),
move on to StageFright2 (because patching is hard...), and then just keep
running down the list of malware in the Play store that is still there months
after being discovered. XCodeGhost OTOH, seemed to have hit around 40 apps so
that would probably not even get it into the top-100 list of Google Play
malware families. Malware families. The Play store is such a shitshow that you
can actually have different strains of malware running around in fake apps,
like some sort of digital syphillus spreading through the brothel that Google
forces everyone to visit if they want the shiny apps...

~~~
lern_too_spel
The number of people actually affected by StageFright malware from Google Play
Store (which is what we were discussing) is very likely to be zero. It simply
blocks the payload. We know for a fact that 500 million+ were actually
affected by XCodeGhost, an order of magnitude more than the sum total from all
malware seen in the Play Store.

Don't conflate unpatched Linux systems with the Play Store. Anybody who uses
Android and cares about the security of their device (like anybody who uses a
Linux-based router and cares about the security of their network) uses vendors
who deploy timely security updates.

------
icomefromreddit
I don't trust Apple. It's a matter of trust, so I have nothing else to say,
just I can't trust Apple.

------
shmerl
I wouldn't trust on issues of privacy to the likes of Apple. Who can audit
their software? It's not FOSS.

~~~
achamayou
You can still contemplate their incentives, their business model, and their
reputation/track record.

It's not as good as auditing the code (and making sure the code you see is
what actually runs), but it's a lot less effort, and depending on the extent
to which you are ready to dedicate resources to improving your privacy, may be
an acceptable tradeoff.

------
phoe-krk
So a cop can put your phone in front of your face while you're tied up and
unable to do a thing. Boom, phone unlocked.

Marvelous.

~~~
R4nger
AFAIK if you keep your eyes closed, it doesn't unlock.

Also, its still an improvement from when cops borrow your thumb. At least this
way, you have less chance of getting hurt.

~~~
megous
I'd rather lose my finger than my head, thank you.

------
williamle8300
All the anti-constitutionalist people at the NSA are getting heartburn as we
speak.


Luis von Ahn: Outsourcing My Research Group - Rod
http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2010/06/outsourcing-my-research-group.html

======
thisisnotmyname
There probably ought to be fewer phd students around, and more research tech
jobs. But, I was under the impression that the current glut of grad students
was because they were so much cheaper than techs?

~~~
Rod
It depends on the schools. A graduate student at a UC school is way cheaper
than a graduate student at Stanford or Caltech. It also depends on the PhD
program, or more to the point, on the course requirements. If a PhD student
already has a MSc when he enters the program, he can start doing research
right away, and his advisor get a return on his grant money way faster.

------
pvdm
I suppose I am too naive to think Ph.D advisors would not treat advisees like
a piece of meat.

~~~
Rod
There's a reason I used to love reading _PhD Comics_... until I started my own
PhD. It used to be fiction, now it's non-fiction (sigh)

------
kunjaan
The next advisor meeting with him is going to be pretty awkward.


Kanban – The Secret Engineer Killer - bdehaaff
http://blog.aha.io/index.php/kanban-the-secret-engineer-killer/
======
raisinbread
If you just read the subtitles, I'd almost think your article was a piece in
_favor_ of Kanban.

Engineers aren't assembly workers: so why do other methodologies seem to be so
prescriptive on what can be accomplished in a given time frame? New problems
arise, priorities shift, and unexpected news arrives. I appreciate the
flexibility of a pull-type system because it lets me transparently show what
I'm working on.

I've really hated telling people no or watching a manager struggle to change
up something we really need just because it doesn't fit in the right shape
time box or might affect the current sprint's plans.

You can't trust yourself: I always ended up hating sprint planning meetings
where "points" are a constant source of conflict between stakeholders and
estimates are fantastical. These sort of meetings just allow the quality knob
to turn down while scope and schedule remain fixed. Having an entire team
minimizes estimates problems, but for the effort involved I'm not sure the
gains are worth it.

Also, I think you may have inadvertently taken Anderson's quote out of context
as well—Kanban isn't a way to run software. It's merely a way to expose your
current process so you can improve it. Kanban is something that sits on top
and allows you to identify bottlenecks, be realistic about results (instead of
estimates) and provide immediate transparency into what you're working on. It
doesn't specifically prescribe what the steps are.

~~~
bdehaaff
Thanks for the quality comments. I want to pick up the last one in particular
and respond. I think that while you appreciate that Kanban is not a "way to
run software" the folks who I have spoken with do not understand that. They
consider it to be a leaner and more pure form of "agile." So, they do not use
it to improve an existing dev methodology, rather they think it is one -- and
there is the crux of the problem.

~~~
raisinbread
I should say I totally agree with one sentiment from the original post: _don
't blindly pick up Kanban as a magical solution for your problems!_

If your underlying process (or lack of process) sucks, then you'll still be in
trouble. Fix your process first.

------
bhattisatish
I am a fan of Kanban, so whatever I say will be through the rose tinted
glasses of a fan. There maybe various reasons why Kanban has failed for many
companies. I haven't worked in those teams so I have no way to say is it
because of Kanban or is it because of management misunderstanding kanban.

From your article, the main reason touted is that the Marketing loses it's
way. Which to me sounds strange! In fact I have seen it the otherways. We
effectively delink marketing cadence from engineering cadence! Thus resulting
in derisking the whole big bang releases.

For e.g. Marketing decides that they are going to make a big marketing push on
a conference or a tradeshow. So the PM come up with a list of features they
will showcase for the given event. (say 10 features are decided upon). The
engineering team works on these features as a que. Releasing each of these as
and when they are done. But do note an engineering release to production does
not mean a marketing release. This allows the PM to experiment on features,
build up case studies, etc ... for these features.

And as the marketing releases dates come closer, everybody knows that we
always have a working copy with only the pending items in the que. This
results in a high confidence level within the marketing / engineering on what
is being touted about. There are no last minute scramble to get a working
system. etc ... The most valuable feature was heavily tested and used by
everyone before the big bang marketing release.

It also allows the PM to make A/B experiments before the actual marketing
push. Thus adding another confidence layer to the whole process.

In a worst case scenario the least valuable features never get released for
the marketing push.

I see this as an effective way to derisk the whole marketing push and reduce
their dependency on the engineering team to deliver stuff when they said they
would.

~~~
snorkel
Unfortunately not all of us are blessed to work with well organized
stakeholders who are able to plan ahead rather than wait until the last minute
to request whatever they need from engineering. Agile only works when the
entire organization abides by its rules, sure engineering teams can train
their stakeholders to some degree but upper management can just overule the
process and insist engineering should be like a service desk that responds to
whatever is needed today. Sucks, but it's a reality in many workplaces.

~~~
bhattisatish
I agree. That's the reason I love Kanban. It allows us to capture metrics on
what is being done, how long it took and where are we spending most of our
time. This numbers in turn allow us to push the story to management on what
they are doing wrong.

For e.g. We worked on a team where Sales made a feature request (1 day, PM and
design team worked on it and released it to engineering (5 weeks) and
engineering released it to sandbox (2 weeks), qa tested it and released it to
production (1 week).

Guess where the bottleneck is? The whole cadence for the feature was 8 weeks.
Obviously Sales where jumping on us for not getting it done on time. This way
of looking at the whole board, allowed us to identify a bottleneck and push
for changes on how the whole company operates. If you kanban a board only for
engineering then you lose the big picture, How is the system as a whole
operating.

------
jacques_chester
The 95%-of-diets-fail number comes from a single study in an obesity clinic
performed in 1959. Followup studies, also at obesity clinics, found comparably
high rates of recidivism.

But when you take the most pathological cases of obesity in a time before
obesity was the norm, unsurprisingly those cases are ... _pathological_. There
is a _pathology_.

These aren't normal people who grew overweight under conditions of stunning
caloric abundance.

So let's stop quoting this statistic because the sample bias is kindly
_stupidly important_ to its interpretation.

~~~
bdehaaff
Thanks for the comment. I actually spent a considerably amount of time looking
for a meaningful reference. I found the Popkess-Vawter 1998 reference, but
could not find the original text. Do you have a better number for "failure" or
reference that I could use? I would be happy to update the post.

~~~
jacques_chester
Hard to say. Either you rely on clinical studies, which give you
pathologically-skewed sample bias, or you use the National Weight Control
Registry, which will be skewed to people wanting to report successful weight
control.

~~~
bdehaaff
Thanks. I am not an expert in this area (diet success data) and was simply
trying to use an analogy. I guess I will leave it as is. I am not sure what
else to do -- it seems that leaving it with no reference would be worse.

~~~
jacques_chester
Well at least you can join the noble ranks of folk whose writing was
tangentially nitpicked in the very first HN comment.

~~~
bdehaaff
Happens every time. I have learned to expect it. It does make me spend a
little more time though thinking through the counter arguments that are likely
to be fired like spears.

~~~
jacques_chester
Comments like mine are why I always answer "please no" in those hypotheticals
about meeting yourself.

------
bernardom
As an industrial engineer, this is the equivalent of a developer walking into
a factory and hearing about how "the mythical man-month" is a terrible
book/idea because it allows for waste.

Right. The Mythical Man-Month is a great book/concept for creative/engineering
projects. Kanban is a wonderful way of implementing a Just-In-Time
manufacturing system.

Props to the OP for explaining the origin of kanban. May this post help fix
the co-opting of an IE term for something totally different.

~~~
bdehaaff
I appreciate that. I really do. It's rare to receive an ounce of props on HN.
I must admit that I was totally surprised to learn that it was not designed
for software development and that the author of the Lean Methodology has been
trying to convince folks to stop using it.

~~~
agileramblings
What do you mean the author of the Lean Methodology has been trying to stop
folks from using it? Are you suggesting David Anderson wants us to stop using
Kanban for Knowledge Work?

~~~
bernardom
From TFA:

      David Anderson, the creator of The Kanban Method   (discussed above) wrote the following in late 2010.

      “Kanban is NOT a software development life cycle or project management
      methodology! It is not a way of making software or  running projects that make software!”

~~~
agileramblings
Unfortunately, the tendency to overload terms with multiple meanings is
confusing the situation. It is very common for the word kanban to be used
incorrectly because there are three commonly confused meanings for the word.

kanban - visual signal, signboard kanban system - pull-based, wip limited flow
management system Kanban Method - an approach to incremental, evolutionary
process and systems change for organizations

So yes, the Kanban Method is not an SDLC method. It is a meta-method that will
allow for the emergence of an appropriate SDLC within an organization. That
SDLC may be Agile (very good things in Agile mindset), may be waterfall, may
be Scrum or Scrumban-ish, but it should be appropriate for then context.

Please refer to this wikipedia entry:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_(development)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_\(development\))

You don't see any SDLC specific tactics or guidance in there. That is true.
You don't see any Agile language in there. It doesn't provide any specific
Agile guidance.

Does the Agile Manifesto have any specific SDLC tactics? Please refer to
[http://www.agilemanifesto.org](http://www.agilemanifesto.org)

You won't find any specific tactics for software development in the Agile
Manifesto either. But out of the mindset comes specific SDLCs that are aligned
to the manifesto like Scrum or XP or any of the million "custom" Agile
methodologies that have no name but are used by IT organizations everywhere.

David Anderson absolutely wants the Kanban Method to be used (as appropriate)
in organizations that do knowledge work (software development is knowledge
work) to help those organizations develop the best workflow and capability for
a given context and to create a culture of learning, growth, and continuous
improvement. I've talked to him many times about these very topics! Many of
the case studies that we quote in our work are from software development
organizations.

The quote used above has been taken out of context, isolated, and used to
create fear, uncertainty and doubt about The Kanban Method and I find that
kind of behaviour negligent at best.

------
arkades
What the heck do kanban have to do with project management? Speaking -as- a
Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (still can't type that with a straight face) in the
healthcare sector, I can't even imagine how someone would set out using a
kanban to run a company.

That's just so wildly divorced from what it is or what it's for that that
article made no sense to me.

~~~
bdehaaff
This is somewhat the point. Engineering managers have started to reach for
Kanban -- and it does not fit.

------
throwawaykf02
I'm loath to take this on faith without better description of the dataset. 150
companies sounds impressive, but, where are they based? What areas do they
work in? How long have they been doing it? Have other factors, such as the
health of these companies, been considered?

Still, many of these points resonated with me.

I started recently on a team that follows kanban-ish practices. Fortunately
nobody here is that process-focused that we follow it exactly. Also, there is
nothing that says you have to work on only one thing at a time, and we
typically don't. In fact, I work part-time on _another_ team, and the other
one does not do kanban.

But I don't much like the kanban system: Give me a satisfyingly large
component, and let me work on it entirely.

So for kanban in general, here's another facet to consider, and one that
probably explains why engineers are "leaving in droves": As TFA says, you end
up working on many small pieces of a larger whole. The good part is, you could
end up becoming aware of all parts of the system that you touch.

But! When you interview elsewhere, or heck, even when you're updating your
resume, and it comes to answering the inevitable question, "What did you work
on in this project", the honest answer is, "Uhh, many parts but nothing
_overarching_ as such..."

And right then, even to yourself, that sounds like such a weasel-wordy answer.
You could go on and explain, "Well, I wrote method A of component X, and
feature B of webpage Y and an implementation C of interface Z for cases where
Q is R." But to an interviewer, I'd guess it all sounds like "I worked on
nothing worthwhile."

On the other hand, since you have better awareness of the project as a whole,
you could say you worked on _all of it_ , and make up more impressive-sounding
responsibilities as you go along.

But I find it much easier if I just do something impressive and be
straightforward during interviews.

~~~
bdehaaff
Thanks for the comments. The companies have been distributed across the
country (with a few outside of the US as well). They have been of different
shapes and sizes, but I did not do a good job tracking all of their
characteristics. The purpose of the calls was to discuss Aha! -- not different
engineering methodologies. A few trends jumped out at me and this was one of
them, so I decided to write about it and try to be fair that the ideas are
based on qualitative research (discussions). I appreciate your thoughts and
the idea that engineers should own large components of a project or entire
projects resonates with us. We think it creates real pride of ownership and
interest in customer success and it has been how we have organized our
engineering teams at three different companies now. It's clearly better for
individuals (as you mentioned) and the companies they work for.

------
mdehaaff
Really interesting piece. It is amazing that a technique used to optimize shop
floors has been applied to the engineering field which I believe to be so
creative versus "industrial."

~~~
bdehaaff
That surprised me as well. I think engineering managers are willing to try
just about anything to regain some control and deliver software more
predictably. My sense from talking to many companies is that it is
unfortunately having the opposite effect.

------
parasubvert
This is a confusing argument.

Kanban/lean is a pretty simple idea (not always easy to execute): eliminate
waste in your work by smoothing the flow of requirements/changes. This treats
your end-to-end delivery capability as a syatem and one that should not be
overburdened.

The clearest sign of being overburdened is when you have a lot of work in
progress but nothing to show for it. So instead of a genius PM/business
analyst/product owner handling out a tome of requirwments from on high with a
thud, you break the work down into a minimally useful / marketable chunks,
minimize work in progress, deliver according to some priority, and iterate and
learn from the results.

This is the philsophical foundation of lean Startups (customer development),
lean development, and much of the work on Devops.

So the article rails against Kanban ... And almost seems like its advocating
for the same thing with its goal-driven approach to delivery (?).

Any methodology or process framework is subject to misinterpretation or abuse.
This is why "agile" and "scrum" are dirty words to many - it's hard to tell
what you're getting, as the term has been twisted to suit vested interests. It
looks like it is Lean and Kanban's turn to be trashed due to ersatz versions
being forced on teams.

But articles like this aren't helpful unless they explain what they mean
Kanban, and what aspects are ineffective - clichés like "software is
different" don't illuminate.

~~~
bdehaaff
I tried to clearly define Kanban as a "Kanban (meaning signboard or billboard)
is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time production. It’s a system to
control the logistical chain from a production point of view. Kanban was
developed by Taiichi Ohno, at Toyota, to find a system to improve and maintain
a high level of production. The Kanban Method was later added to as an
approach to incremental, evolutionary process improvement for organizations."

The point is that it is a mistake to take a methodology that was created for
incremental process enhancement along a manufacturing line and apply it to
software development.

~~~
parasubvert
So, I've had the opposite experience: lean-type incremental process
enhancement has had dramatic improvements on the end-to-end results of more
than one company I've been involved with.

I look at a book like The Phoenix Project, written by some fairly respected
software industry folks like Gene Kim, and they also recommend the opposite:
that software development and IT operations actually are a lot like an
industrial shop floor and benefit from being organized in an end-to-end pull
flow like Kanban.

I look at Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, or Lean Startup by Eric
Ries, while they aren't specifically dictating a Kanban board in their work,
they're clearly philosophically in the camp of a pull-based approach to
organizing work and limiting work-in-progress.

So, what I haven't determined from your article is, what specifically is
flawed with these authors views and my experiences? Am I being over-broad in
their inclusion? My interprtation of your article this far is a well-meaning
but under-argued philosophical aversion to being lumped in with other
industrial engineering practices.

Edit: clarity

~~~
bdehaaff
From my experience and from what I am hearing it (meaning Kanban) does not
work for most folks or companies. That's it. It might work well for you and
that's great too. I don't think Kanban and Agile philosophies are the same
though - but that's at least another long blog post.

~~~
parasubvert
Fair ball. I'd say if its being latched onto as a panacea, almost all
approaches to process will fail if you lack the basics: a good market, an
insightful product owner/manager, good engineers, and at least an adequate
morale in the company.

I've seen companies/projects with all of those things still fail because of a
poor process. This is where something like Kanban can help, IMO. Not trivial
to implement though.

------
mczepiel_
As others have noted the definition of kanban comes too late in your article.
Also, I think a citation to wikipedia is in order if you're going to copy it
and simply expand the initialisms.

Regardless, it's not a particularly helpful definition for anybody that's
never heard of kanban, and certainly doesn't help anybody familiar with kanban
to know what specifically you're evaluating; you need to get everybody on the
same page from the outset.

Given lack of concrete examples and your previous posting history I would
consider this more of an advertisement for your product, to which I've now
applied for an invitation, but you seem to be genuinely responding to comments
here and nobody else has complained. I suppose either way, well played.

I have other comments but I'll hold them until I find out exactly what you
mean by kanban, because I've been admittedly self-identifying the process I'm
using as kanban and maybe it's not.

I will say this much though, the practices of kanban (visualization, limited
work-in-progress, managed flow, feedback loops, etc.) are all valuable in my
opinion and I wonder which of these you see leading to, or how you see them
leading to, the problems you've cited. Also, I wouldn't mind some more
concrete metrics to back up such an inflammatory title.

------
forloop5150
Pick the right tool for the right job. For a product team Kanban does not make
much sense. I agree with your comments in general. But for a PS or Custom
Development team, where most projects are integration type projects or custom
reports and tend to take 2-3 days to complete, it is a good way to go.

------
jasonlittle
Summary of this article: Kanban sucks, use our tool to make roadmaps! To me,
this is clearly a case of trying to stir up controversy to get people to sign-
up for his tool.

------
tantalor
Why wait until the sixth paragraph to define the term?

~~~
bdehaaff
Fair point. I was not certain where to add it. My belief, based on my
conversations was that many have heard about it -- so I did not want to bore
those in the know.

------
rparet
tl;dr: author of the article is laboring under many false assumptions about
Kanban (and lean software development in general) likely due to a combination
of inexperience using such methods personally and unfamiliarity with the
available literature. The following is a rather long attempt to correct the
base misunderstandings in the article, with pointers to relevant source
material. Enjoy!

First, an operational definition: Kanban as it's used in lean software
development is 1. visual representation of the work that's in the system and
what state it is in and 2. an opportunity to limit the amount of work that can
be in each state.

That's it.

Almost every organization that writes software uses something to keep track of
the work, and what state it is in - by this logic the title of the article
could be "spreadsheets - the secret engineer killer", or "JIRA - the secret
engineer killer".

According to the article though, Kanban is ruining engineering teams in
"nearly every company" that has adopted Kanban out of the 150 companies the
author talked to in the last 60 days. (Some numbers on how many of them are
using Kanban, and for how long, would have been nice facts to include, btw.)

So, let's unpack some reasons why this is:

"Engineers are not assembly line workers" \- Implying Kanban and pull-based
systems only work for "widget producers" and forces engineers to focus on the
individual trees, not the forest. I think this sort of highlights the author's
misunderstanding of Kanban (and to an extent any pull-based system) and what
role it serves in an organization. Kanban isn't magic - it not an
organizational design, it's not a product development strategy, and it's
definitely not a substitute for leadership. It's a chart on a wall that shows
what the work of the product development organization looks like, right now.

For an example of an overall software product development strategy that
incorporates pull-based systems as one component, I recommend checking out
"Principles of Product Development Flow" by Don Reinertsen.

"It teaches you that you and your engineers cannot be trusted to estimate work
or handle complex multi-faceted projects." \- How does it do this? Nothing
about Kanban implies no estimates. In fact if you use Kanban and measure cycle
time, you will be doing evidence-based scheduling which will allow you to make
_better_ estimates. As for "complex multi-faceted projects" \- I don't know
what the author is talking about. Please read "Scaling Lean & Agile
Development" by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde for some actual evidence and
lessons learned on lean / agile approaches being used on huge software
projects. Also "Scaling Agile at Spotify" by Henrik Kniberg is worth a read,
as Kanban features there (by team choice!) as one small component in a lean
software development org design / product development strategy.

"Kanban forces a 'one work item at a time' mentality and resists milestones."
This is simply not true and such a basic misunderstanding I have to wonder if
the author of the article has taken the time to read any of the introductory
literature. If not, I suggest the aptly titled "Kanban" by David J. Anderson.
Kanban wants you to limit work in progress, which is one of the basic goals of
any product development system. It doesn't say how much it should be limited,
or where it should be limited. Every system, everywhere, already has limited-
WIP in the form of bottlenecks. The hopeful goal of pull-based systems in
general and lean software development specifically is that you'll use these
simple tools to look at your process and eliminate wasteful activities and
streamline those bottlenecks that must exist to deliver maximum value to your
customers. In this sense, you can use Kanban as a tool to maximize the whole
of the product development process which is certainly a macro (org level) goal
and outcome that stands in stark contrast to the claims in the article that
Kanban in general promotes micro optimizations and misses the big picture.

For more general reading on why limiting work in progress is a good idea, I
suggest "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt or more recently "The Phoenix Project" by
Gene Kim. As far as milestones go, nothing in a pull-based system is
incompatible with milestones of fixed date or fixed scope. If your idea of
milestones is chucking arbitrary dates on a calendar based on an estimate
before work begins and then stubbornly refusing to adapt those milestones when
the situation on the ground changes (i.e. milestones of fixed date and fixed
scope), then I could see the potential nature for conflict, but surely you're
not out there doing that in real life, right? (Right???) If you are, and
that's the issue - Kanban isn't the problem, the problem is the assumptions
you are operating on are faulty - nothing will work for you. Smarter folks
than me have written about the perils of fixed date and fixed scope
development, I suggest googling for Neil Killick's thoughts on the matter.

"High performance individuals and companies are goal and date driven."
Citation needed. I know many people really, really believe this but you should
really verify. Also, see Fred Brooks "Mythical Man Month".

"Kanban was never intended for software development" \- What? Again, the guy
you quote actually wrote a book on using Kanban with software development
teams. You should read it, as it would probably correct 90% of the
misunderstandings in your article.

Those are the key arguments in the article about why Kanban is "the secret
engineer killer". Hopefully by now it's clear that these arguments aren't very
good and it certainly wasn't any trouble for me to refute them along with a
bibliography for further reading. That doesn't mean Kanban or lean are perfect
though - there still is no silver bullet. Hopefully this inspires some folks
to launch a more throughly-researched critique of lean, kanban, or pull-based
systems in the future as I think that kind of discussion can be really
beneficial.

~~~
curiouscats
Well said. I find it is very common to use the straw-man criticism technique
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)
about bad management practices. The quality of management is often bad. The
quality of management, even of good practices, is often bad.

Criticizing those implementation of the practice is perfectly fine. But
claiming that the practice is suppose to be something different than it is, is
not fine. I agree with you here, that is the biggest problem. If you
understand how kanban for software is suppose to be done, the criticisms don't
make sense.

------
kneu
I agree. It doesn't allow the engineer to really own a project from start to
finish. Thanks for a great post.

~~~
bdehaaff
Thanks. I appreciate the thought. It's rare on HN to have someone write
something nice.

------
fleitz
Like 'fad diets' most of the reasons that kanban fails is because the
organization was sick to begin with and kanban would have helped if not for
the structure of the organization in the first place.

Fad diets mostly fail because people go back to eating the same shitty way
they did before, just as when a team adopts kanban marketing and product go
back to the same stupid way of doing things they did before.

The sad part is that in the vast majority of organization engineering actually
knows more about the product than product or marketing.

The core of it is that most engineers don't want to work on the stupid fucking
ideas that product and marketing come up with instead preferring to make the
product 'good' instead of creating feature parity with some competitor.

If product and marketing were actually good at their jobs they should at least
be able to convince the engineers in their own fucking company that what they
are thinking is a good idea. Right now I'm picturing the eye-rolls at Porsche
when product and marketing announced the idea for the Panamara.

[http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/09/of-course-we-
need...](http://blogs.cars.com/kickingtires/2012/09/of-course-we-need-a-
porsche-station-wagon.html)

~~~
bdehaaff
I agree with your thoughts around dysfunction as it relates to fad diets and
poor habits. I also think that many engineers think they know best, but in a
well functioning org PM actually knows the customers and market and has a
collaborative relationship with engineering. Do you think that PM has no role
or that in most cases they just don't do it well?

~~~
bhattisatish
On the contrary in the Kanban process, PM is the pivotal role. They control
the que, the cadence of feature releases, etc ... Without an effective PM, the
whole thing will fall as a pack of cards.

~~~
bdehaaff
True. But PM needs to pick its head up and think more broadly. A "one in one
out" queue is contrary to delivering winning product.

~~~
bhattisatish
As I have said below
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6119175](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6119175))
You need to delink engineering releases from marketing releases. Where is it
written that when the engineering releases a feature you need to make a
marketing push? When you have a collection of features ready which as a whole
makes sense for marketing, then you make a marketing release with all the
related PR, hype cycle, etc ...


Ask HN: Good forum for hobbyish ARM(industrial) design discussions and advice? - trotsky

Have some embedded, board level integration experience, nothing really - getting simple boards masked for low density shit. Broadly interested in learning about the next level in ARM board level design (call it cubbie board esque). But I've zero luck finding such a place - it's either raspi/arduino folks (not a diss), folks mostly repurposing android mobile or net tops for software, or the people who are really on the supply side - either they are talking about building the newest open mobile designs with the cheapest bom in chinese i can only half follow, or they are the real deal talking about modular soc components and electronic interface issues with off soc component count vs oem ability to implement. And high cost IP.
I am hoping to for something in english (ha! I'll survive) or just anything that might be suitable.  An HN sorta thing where people often have a clue would rock, but the big missing piece is picking soc->minimal reference board revisions->build or source some custom stuff to give the arm some supervoisor like qualities on the x86.
To balance a zero content post, I provide my rough plan to amuse to reader. Basicially I want to combine a SFF server (think HP microserver or so slash less for mini. Most are essentially low end x76 roll your own nas that make do with 150w and 4 sata bays, 2 dimms and 1 eth.
I want to see what I can do if I meld that kind of platform together with a few low poer arm linux servers all in one case. I imagine the arm sections being able to utilize some kind of pci/pci or similar bridge as well as monitoring, reset, ipkvm etc that could leave them as super programmable debuggers more or less, that could always easily act as low power satndins for much of the traffic that wakes up your typical low use server - ntp, ping, mild file serving, ldap, etc. Anything harder and they could provide a superior holding pattern as the main box woke up from deep sleep.
======
mschuster91
Actually, the idea of coupling together a ARM SoC, a Ethernet switch, a USB
audio interface and a bit of power-monitoring circuitry (and some relais) to
make a dead-cheap desktop remote management solution has hit me too. Maybe
even add a battery to provide a buffer against +5VSB outages (due to "real"
power out); after all, a tiny ARM doesn't suck really much power.

But I'm a software guy, not a hardware developer - I can get a basic circuit
board done, but no BGA or SMD mounted stuff...

I think the market for such a card - especially if built in half-height to fit
into existing servers - is very very great. Wake on LAN just isn't enough for
managing thousands of desktop computers, and "true" IPKVM systems come at a
hundreds-of-$ price tag, and they're an external box nonetheless.

~~~
trotsky
Hey, glad to hear from a like minded soul. It's true they'd likely make quite
good ipkvms as long as you're OK with having CVE's pop on your ipkvm gear. I
guess they probably already do.

I think even just embracing it as an ipkvm++ opens up a lot of potential
additions to the current approach. There's no reason why you wouldn't want to
build in remote power and triggers to go into S3/S4 powersave. There are still
plenty of shops that prevent sleep to make maintenance easier. And It'd be
super easy to hook a usb port up as a usb client and software fake whatever
dvdrom you happened to want to boot.

If you ever feel like shooting the shit, i'd be down to hear what parts of it
does it for you or whatever else was on your mind. I have the same nick on
github.

~~~
mschuster91
Actually all of the bigger SoC families bring USB gadget support with them...
the Linux kernel has at least support for USB mass storage and networking (of
course, networking is useless, because of low speed) - so it should be
possible indeed to internally connect the USB jumpers to the ipkvm board to
provide HID and storage.

The only thing is now to get a cheap way to adapt VGA (or better yet, DVI) to
an SoC. Video encode is supplied with the chips, the real difficulty will be
getting the signals to the CPU, though.

------
ippisl
Maybe there are some guys at reddir: /r/electronics or /r/ece that do high
density pcb's and arm.

~~~
trotsky
Thanks for the tip! I really appreciate the response. While they're probably
not the spot, I'm pretty sure it's a way batter place to ask the same
question. Cheers,


Creating a low-latency high-availability network for voice calls - moxie
http://www.whispersystems.org/blog/low-latency-switching/
======
Scramblejams
Not enough detail here, but I'm surprised when I see the terms "voice" and
"TCP" together. Do they use TCP to set up the call, then UDP to handle the
audio?

Edit: Yep, they use UDP for the audio:
[https://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhone/wiki/Signaling-
Pr...](https://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhone/wiki/Signaling-Protocol)

~~~
bradleyland
With the traditional VoIP stacks, yes. There are two components to making
phone calls: messaging and media. The messaging part sets up and tears down
calls. The media part passes the audio.

I'd imagine they're doing the same.

~~~
dkhenry
but typically you use something that can have at least some intelegent
behaviour like RTP not UDP. Why did they choose that when literally every
other pure VoIP service uses RTP ?

~~~
moxie
We use RTP (actually SRTP and ZRTP), but the transport is still UDP.

------
jpollock
The next problem will be when they get to having large numbers of servers in a
region.

Then two problems will manifest themselves.

1) The client will take long enough to work through the list of servers that
the wrong server is chosen simply because the connection is initiated first.

2) This design has all servers seeing all calls. The load represented by all
the TCP connections hitting all of the servers will consume more and more of a
server.

Neither is a problem you can solve by adding more servers. In fact, they are
made worse by adding servers!

However, if you're charging per call, that's what they call a "good problem to
have".

Nifty solution to the problem though.

~~~
moxie
Agreed. We haven't run into this yet (and aren't charging at all, this is an
OSS project), but I think that would be the point where you have to do one of
two things:

1) Architect your DNS response to include a small sample of the total result
set for the region, where the sample includes at least one switch from each
micro-region.

2) Break down and introduce load balancers, so that there's on load balancer
per micro-region, which fronts all of the switches within that micro-region.

Fortunately an individual switch doesn't really do much (just shovel packets
around), so the number of simultaneous calls a switch can handle is high
enough that redundancy is more about availability than load.

~~~
JshWright
I don't see how the license the software is released under is related to how
much you charge to use the service...?

~~~
moxie
Fair enough, I should have been more specific.

I was trying to imply that this is not a for-profit project, but you're
correct, that's not what a software license communicates.

------
gz5
The server architecture is nice but my favorite part is the simple signaling
protocol, as opposed to SIP or any other overly complex (for this use case)
telephony signaling protocol. Nice work.

------
andrewcooke
i'm confused (which is not too surprising as i am no expert on this). why
can't they hole-punch through nats? then they would avoid the extra bounce-
through-server latency and would hugely reduce the load on servers. i thought
that was how skype worked, for example.

(i realise this doesn't stop their "fastest first" idea being useful - i got
kind of sidetracked by the explanation of how servers are used near the start
of the post).

[ah, ok. thanks for the explanation.]

~~~
moxie
Your NAT traversal strategy is limited by the type of NAT being employed.
Traditionally, the worst case scenario for NAT traversal is "symmetric NAT."

Symmetric NAT means that each tuple of (source_ip, source_port,
destination_ip, _destination_port) gets its own unique (external_ip,
external_port) tuple. This is bad because it means that STUN is ineffective:
your STUN server will see a different external port than what your actual
destination would see.

Mobile data networks are actually _worse_ than symmetric NAT. Not only will
your external port change based on your target, but your external IP likely
will as well.

This makes NAT traversal, AFAIK, basically impossible.

~~~
vy8vWJlco
And there's no real reason to do it either given the availability of global
IPv6 addresses and any of the free tunnel brokers/teredo/etc, other than the
simple lack of adoption/momentum. Most ISPs will need a push, but from an
infrastructure perspective it just boils down to a new gateway router or a
firmware upgrade. It doesn't even need replacing the end-user equipment if
ISPs simply set up a tunnel server for their own customers as a transitional
measure.

------
mtrimpe
So it's basically a very pragmatic tradeoff for getting 80% of the value of
geo-based DNS with only 20% of the effort.

Nice work ...


United will offer up to $10,000 to bumped passengers - smaili
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-united-airlines-dragged-passenger-bumping-changes-0427-biz-20170426-story.html
======
mariuolo
Keyword being "up to".


Co-founder or no co-founder? - sum_itsin
http://www.roundbreak.com/2012/06/05/co-founder-or-no-co-founder/

======
pedalpete
Completely agree, but I think PG assumes that anybody who is smart/good enough
to get into YC is going to have a solid co-founder.

I wonder how many YC companies have failed due to a co-founder break-up.

Outside of YC, I hear a co-founder break up is one of the top reasons a
company fails.

~~~
sum_itsin
That's true. But I am somewhat skeptical about the fact that a smart person
necessarily is the one with good networking skills or the one capable of
forging sound relationships. There are times when a truly smart person, either
due to his own eccentricity or the environment, doesn't get to have a chance
of having a good co-founder unless he relocates himself which is hardly
possible in many cases.


Pandoc Markdown and ReST Compared (2013) - hidden-markov
http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/doc-notes/markdown-and-rest-compared.html
======
egh
The really nice thing about ReST is that it has provided generic syntax for
extensions, one for inline text: :foo:`hello world` and for blocks:

.. extension:: hello world

In markdown, on the other hand, you have multiple, incompatible versions which
have entirely different syntax because there is no generic extension
mechanism.

ReST feels more well thought-out, generally.

That said, I've pretty much given up advocating it, because markdown seems to
have won and has so much more tool support.

~~~
BruceM
I like ReST as well. With Sphinx, it is great for producing documentation. A
project that I work with has converted hundreds of pages of books of technical
documentation over to Sphinx and a custom Sphinx extension.

~~~
fprintf
I like ReST as well.

It's more powerful and looks much cleaner

// e.g. how do you write footnotes in markdown? And how do you do this in
markdown?

      +------------+------------+-----------+
      | Header 1   | Header 2   | Header 3  |
      +============+============+===========+
      | body row 1 | column 2   | column 3  |
      +------------+------------+-----------+
      | body row 2 | Cells may span columns.|
      +------------+------------+-----------+
      | body row 3 | Cells may  | - Cells   |
      +------------+ span rows. | - contain |
      | body row 4 |            | - blocks. |
      +------------+------------+-----------+

~~~
mercurial
Since basic Markdown is so basic, multiple incompatible flavours of Markdown
have cropped up, including Pandoc-Markdown, which can do footnotes.

------
biscarch
Pandoc is actually a really powerful tool for converting between different
formats. As an example, I recently wrote a book using Markdown (Pandoc's
version) and was easily able to export .html, .pdf and .epub from my markdown
files. The addition of footnotes and built-in syntax highlighting (with
optional line numbers, etc) was also very useful.

Pandoc can be as simple as `pandoc input.md output.pdf` but can also handle
things like a Table of Contents, different highlighting styles, latex engines
and fonts:

        pandoc --toc --variable version=0.0.1 -N --highlight-style=tango --latex-engine=xelatex --variable mainfont=Helvetica --variable monofont="Meslo LG L DZ" --chapters $(ls -d -1 `pwd`/_input/*.*) -o _output/book.pdf

I tend to set the more complicated command as a build file or alias and I've
been considering using local markdown files and then using pandoc to convert
them to .html for my WordPress-based blog.

------
frou_dh
The Markdown ecosystem reminds me of shell scripts in a bad way. There are a
bunch of subtly and not so subtly different dialects and environments out
there, and not many people have a strong awareness of these while writing, so
if something seems okay "on my computer" or in Markdown's case "on my preview"
then off it goes.

------
teleclimber
Am I the only one who feels like they were teleported back to the early 1990s
upon seeing these text files with code intermingled everywhere?

I am not bashing markdown and friends, as I understand there is a use for
these tools in some cases, but I am surprised they are so widely embraced and
loved.

To me they just evoke the days of typing an essay on dad's 386 with Word
Perfect 5.1 installed, and having to hit "reveal codes" to figure out what is
going on. MS Word won against WP when they completely did away with these
codes.[1]

Now it's 2014 and we're loving building tables by hand-crafting ASCII art.

Am I the only who thinks we can do better?

[1]
[http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm](http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm)

~~~
gkya
Most the tools we have for WYSIWYG document creation lacks _determinism_ and
_portability_. For the latter, one could argue that there are open formats,
but still, there should be a program that can interpret the format; whereas
with plain text, such a need is void, as it is possible to view the document
on any decent system. For the former, the argument might be that the modern
word processors provide the facilities to deterministically lay out a document
through the user interfaces they sport, but then because the formats they save
are either are endemic to themselves or badly supported in other software*
this feature is not of much use.

I can open a Markdown/ReST/Textile/... file with any text editor, including
Notepad, Vim, Emacs etc., and also view it through _more_ or _less_ programs,
or just _cat_ them. I can pass them through _head_ or _tail_ ; search them
with common utilities and even edit them with some others. I am not bound to
any programs in order to edit my program. If, on a computer I have to use,
there is no Word, or Writer or Pages, I can still edit/read the document. I
can read it online, via a browser. I can use programs that are decades old,
and I also will be able to read the file decades later. When I send the file
to someone else, I can be sure that they will be able to read it. Any usable
operating system has a text editor bundled. This level of portability is just
a dream for WYSIWYG editors. For these advantaged, I happily trade editing
convenience off.

* Last summer, my cousins needed to use my computer for editing a _docx_ document that was important for their undergraduate education. I was running Ubuntu OS at the time, so I told them to use the LibreOffice's word processor. The experience was bad; the document did not render properly, editing was problematic. This is the only case I can provide as an example to support my argument, as it has been multiple years since I used a word processor program.

~~~
teleclimber
I agree with what you said. I understand the advantages of markdown and why it
is adopted (particularly in dev environments).

But you seem to agree with me that the markdown editing experience leaves a
little to be desired ("...I happily trade editing convenience off").

What I don't get is why that editing experience doesn't annoy people more.
There are tons of markdown-powered blogging platforms, editors, commenting
forms coming out every day, but you almost never see projects that try to
solve the original problem.

~~~
gkya
Desirability of the editing experience is a function of the kind of editing
one does: I mostly write text-heavy stuff, blog posts, README's and similar
stuff. For these stuff, I am quite happy with markdown, vim and the general
workflow of mine around these tools; and I like that workflow. I do not need a
piece of text to be red, or be centred, or wrapped around an image. Still, me
and alike are the minority; _normal_ people want these kinds of stuff.

For instance, I've deployed (!) a couple WordPress blogs and a PhpBB forum for
a friend (yes, I'd touch none of these for my projects). When it was time to
test-post in the forum, I started explaining him the markup for PhpBB. His
reaction was this: "But in vBulletin, there is a text editor. I think I'll pay
them $400 for that." He wants to centre the text, and emphasise phrases via
colouring them red. Because he can. He is a normal person.

While I like my workflow, with markdown, vim, and a static site generator; I
do not find markdown and alike useful for any major inscription, e.g. papers
and books and alike. I'd rather use a suitable tool that takes away the burden
of manually writing the markup, and allow me to focus on content for such
work. iA Writer makes me _horny_ , but unfortunately I do not own a Mac. I
admit that I'd go nuts should I need to write a book in, say, LaTeX (or
however it is spelled). Yet, the problem of portability of files is a superior
problem than lack of convenience while editing. If I write my book with iA,
and if it goes next year, what'll I do?

~~~
teleclimber
Thank-you for the thoughtful response.

Yes, clearly the markdown thing is natural for developers. After all devs
spend all their time in cryptic text files that get transformed into something
more useful and beautiful That's their (our) thing.

And since developers are the ones who create forum software, blogging
platforms, one can only expect that their personal preferences would bleed
over into these projects.

But it's unfortunate because in the meantime we're not really advancing the
art of editing content, which is something the "normals" would appreciate.
(And I think even a number of developer-types would appreciate writing content
without markdown if you gave them something that actually worked and worked
with static site generators.)

Regarding IA, I don't have it but it says that it saves files as plain text?

~~~
bowerbird
let me try again.

if you have _specifics_ on "the art of editing content", and the interface you
want, i would like to hear them...

-bowerbird

------
specialist
Those ReST examples reminds me of the ASCII docs I'd write for my shareware
software. Fairly typical for the time.

Not so different from the IEFT Document Conventions. [http://www.rfc-
editor.org/rfc/rfc3.txt](http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3.txt)

Or the RFC guidelines. [https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-style-guide/rfc-
style](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc-style-guide/rfc-style)

I wrote a markdown renderer for my web dev stack. And I've been "cross
compiling" to markdown, screen scrapping docs and persisting it to markdown.

Now I realize choosing markdown was rather arbitrary (personal preference,
familiarity). Any document structure would suffice.

Nice comparison, thanks.

------
beagle3
Markdown has always looked limited and incomplete to me.

But I can't decide between ReST(+Sphinx) and AsciiDoc(+?) - ReST seems to me
like it was better thought out, but somehow my AsciiDoc documents turn out
looking better, even though I like ReST more.

~~~
lambda
Note that this article compares Pandoc Markdown to ReST; Pandoc adds a lot of
features that vanilla Markdown lacks.

Of course, this is one of the big problems with Markdown; there are a bunch of
different implementations, each of which adds its own extensions. Actually, if
you take a look at the Pandoc homepage, you'll see that it implements 5
different Markdown flavors:
[http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)

------
joaomsa
For me Markdown wins just because I'm used to dealing with it daily on GitHub.

Sidenote: Wish Github Flavored Markdown would adopt some nice things from
Pandoc, like multiline tables.

------
balladeer
Pandoc and ReST are extensive, flexible, and simply complete. They are great.
I have never understood the fetish behind Markdown and the cult-like fan-
boyish approach to it. It was not needed. It would have been rather good to
standardised an existing markup (or a combination of them) than copy the
existing one and pretty much release it with a different name.

~~~
Turing_Machine
" I have never understood the fetish behind Markdown"

For one, there are multiple (and good) implementations of Markdown in
Javascript, so it's trivial to embed Markdown in web pages and do all the
processing client-side -> faster and better user experience + much lower
server load.

Pandoc a) only runs locally/server-side and b) requires a 200 MB Haskell
install before it will work.

------
nsomaru
Always wondered how Pandoc MD, ReST compare when my document type is slightly
more complex, for example: a question and answer session?

I ended up entering notes from such sessions into handwritten XML, which I am
reconsidering. What is a good format to store one's notes? I am transcribing
from handwritten text.

------
bowerbird
i am in the process of releasing "zen markup language".

it's "lighter" than all the other light-markup languages.

it's more _powerful_ than the others, including asciidoc.

it's also far more agile, and much easier to understand.

and i won't allow it to be fragmented, like markdown is.

i've coded converters in javascript and other languages.

the javascript minimizes well for inclusion in web-pages.

i have cross-plat apps, and a web-app converter with a.p.i.

output formats include .html, .epub, .mobi, .pdf, and more.

if there's anything i haven't thought of, do please tell me.

you can reach me at my e-mail address given in my profile.

-bowerbird

~~~
prairiedock
I Looked at the site for z.m.l
([http://www.z-m-l.com/](http://www.z-m-l.com/)). It doesn't seem to do math,
so it's a nonstarter.

BTW, Pandoc (which does do LaTeX math) really needs no improvement, only more
widespread implementation (e.g., an online site, and/or a chrome extension
coded in javascript.) I suppose its being written in Haskell has been an
impediment.


Show HN: JsonBatch Playground – A site to play with JsonBatch Engine - rey5137
https://jsonbatch-playground.herokuapp.com/sample1
======
rey5137
Hi. I'm the author of JsonBatch library - an Engine to run batch request with
JSON based REST APIs. I have setup a small site so you can test out
JsonBatch's feature.