Nasa Rover on Mars Detects Puff of Gas That Hints at Possibility of Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/science/nasa-mars-rover-life.html <comment><USER2> As we accumulate small additional likelihoods of Martian life, I wonder if humans will 1) put more resources into manned missions for intensive and flexible study to get to the bottom of these mysteries, or 2) defer plans for manned missions for reasons of environmental preservation/protection (or even fear) and stick to robotic or other light-touch/sterile explorations for a while. Just a passing thought.

<comment><USER3> They do sterilize spacecraft before sending them to mars, that's a real thing. I believe we'd very carefully sterilize humans spacesuits and ships before sending them. I think the likely outcome of this is blind indifference to the importance of discovering life on another plan. No increase in Nasa budgets or plans for discovery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _" Rovers scheduled for launch next year -- one by NASA, one by a Russian- European collaboration -- will carry instruments designed to search for the building blocks of life, although neither is designed to answer the question of whether there is life on Mars today."_

I don't get it. You'd think that whether there's life on Mars today is the most interesting and important question to answer. Why aren't any of these rovers designed to answer it?

<comment><USER5> Because you get public support, and hence funding, as long as you _search_ for life. Not sure that anyone at those organizations cares about that question, it looks more like an obsession of the public and the media.

<comment><USER6> Why is it that some people think that scientists are all lying about their motives for money? Scientists tend, on the whole, to be fairly bright. Hightly technical people who have money as their objective, are generally not working at the sharp end of highly speculative research. I know one of the UK experts on glide characteristics of hypersonic vehicles, he refuses to work military but sometimes gets consulted by NASA on aerodynamic assisted slingshot concepts. He makes a living as a driving instructor.

<comment><USER5> You might want to point as to where in my previous comment I said that someone in those orgs is not bright.

And then to suggest how, being bright as a thousand suns, you would obtain fancy space rovers if you say "I want to check out moon chemistry" and the public goes "pffft."

<comment><USER6> You have this somewhat arse about tit. There's a lot more money available for looking at the moon's chemistry than there is for looking for life on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> News on findings such as these assert my belief that the UFO sightings on Earth incl. the recent F18 videos have nothing to do with Aliens, because if it were; why spend Billions to get excited on 'Puff of Gas' on the neighbor planet.

<comment><USER8> No one seriously believes the recent UFO nonsense is actually aliens, except for a clueless representative in congress that keeps pushing for these reports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The dreadful consequence of finding life on Mars would be that we could never go back to seeing Mars as just another innocent rock floating around the neighbourhood.

It would forever become a harbinger, reminder that life can come and go on any planet.

<comment><USER10> Curious why that would be "dreadful" and I thought most assumed there is most likely water and life on mars (microbial that is), but just under the surface and with the unimaginable number of planets assuming we are the only planet with life would probably be similar to the early thinking the sun resolves around the earth.

<comment><USER11> 1) it would be a visceral demonstration of the fragility of life on Earth

2) overnight, it would shift our estimate of the likelihood of life forming into "terrifyingly likely". Terrifying, because if life forms on any planet even roughly like Earth, the idea of aliens showing up one day and killing us all is suddenly horribly plausible.

<comment><USER12> Although, life on Mars could have a common origin with life on earth. There are after all meteorites on Earth that are believed to be of Martian origin. If microbes from Mars seeded Earth or vice versa, then finding life in both places doesn't mean the odds of it arising are higher than we thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't it a foregone conclusion that we'll bring some microbes over sooner or later? Don't we have lots that can thrive in that atmosphere, there's sunlight, etc. It just takes a few cells, why should we assume there will be 0 cells in all of Mars, even as we constantly send stuff there?

<comment><USER14> The surface of Mars is very hostile to life.

<comment><USER15> Is it though? Isn't our scientists' classification of life limited to what we have on Earth? What if there is even tinnier or other form of life on Mars? I am mostly asking because we already know of extremely small bacteria being able to survive after 32,000 years in ice on Earth. So what if something similar is there on Mars too?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The center of Mars is most likely hot that might release Methane produced by bacteria.

"The core of mars is actually molten. The pressure there is 40 gigapascal. hat is 400,000 times the pressure of earth's surface. The core is about 1500 degrees Kelvin, or 1230 Celsius."

There is bound to be an equilibrium between 1230C and the surface temperature

Surface temperature of Mars Celsius −143 °C[12] −63 °C 35 °C

" 6° C per km" [https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/14875/what- is-...](https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/14875/what-is-the- temperature-55-km-beneath-the-surface-of-mars)

6C*6km = 36C degrees Celsius at 6km depth which would be a favourable temperature for bacteria.

We have drilled a 12km on Earth in Russia Kola peninsula so we should be able to build a robotic oil drill platform send it To Mars and drill deep into the Mars core. The drill will have temperature monitoring sensors. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Continental_Deep_Drilli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Continental_Deep_Drilling_Programme)

"Methanogens have been found in several extreme environments on Earth – buried under kilometres of ice in Greenland and living in hot, dry desert soil. They are known to be the most common archaebacteria in deep subterranean habitats. Live microbes making methane were found in a glacial ice core sample retrieved from about three kilometres under Greenland by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley. They also found a constant metabolism able to repair macromolecular damage, at temperatures of 145C to –40C °" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanogen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanogen)

<comment><USER17> Mass of Mars robot, 500 kg?

Mass of Kola drill platform? 100 000 tons?

<comment><USER18> If you took the back seat out, that'd save—what?—80lbs. Seems like we're on a roll, here; next idea, step up!</comment></comment></comment>


Reuters Editor Indicted for Helping Anonymous Hack Fox - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416637,00.asp

<comment><USER2> Submitter is a spam account by Ziff Davis (geek.com / extremetech.com / pcmag.com / etc), one of many they use to spam HN.</comment>


Tapster's robots are built to poke touchscreens - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/31/tapsters-robots-are-built-to-poke-touchscreens <comment><USER2> Looks like a fun project, of course I wonder how much it would cost for 10 to 15 robots so that you could build your own little mobile ad click fraud farm.

<comment><USER3> I guess 100$ for Prusa Mendel 3D printer frame with steppers and controller and 100$ for some no-name tablet. Is this clicking thing profitable?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, that's why most people use the robots instead for quality control / testing of the products they make.

<comment><USER3> A company near by uses big industrial robots for credit card reader testing. I am just curious what grey applications are possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just out of curiosity, since the creator seems to be on this thread, I have a question:

I'm sure there's an optimal "taps per second" number, where once you go over that threshold, the screens are unable to recognize the distinction. Can you share those numbers if you have one? Super interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> (Tapster creator here) I've gotten my bots up to 800/taps per minute. I haven't seen / gotten to a higher upper limit, yet, where it is unable to recognize the distinction. However, what I have seen on iOS is after a few hundred taps, the taps stopped being recognized in that spot on the screen. Don't know if that's a bug or a feature of iOS to ignore touches at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the context of automation (and click farms) if you are not testing the touch screen obviously, I think better approach can be by man in the middle attack with touchscreen and board. Or even emulate screen interface totally. I dont know if has anyone tried that before

<comment><USER6> The point is, sometimes you do want to test the full environment including the touch screen. For example, you may want to check if the touchscreen locks up after a number of taps, if your OS/input parsing layer can cope with the jitter (a finger, in contrast to MITM-injected events, will almost never hit the same x/y coordinates in a row), or you want to check against real production hardware/software and not against something that's been modified for testing in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I always wanted to build a Lego robot to do UI automation on our Windows apps and embedded devices. Point a camera at the screen, recognize screen elements and then let the robot do the clicking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> These are rather fun. Our company has a more expensive oneoff solution, a traditional six-axis robot which we use for testing chip-and-pin integration by pressing the buttons on the pinpad.

</comment><comment><USER9> Neat! I always wondered how hard it would be to build a machine to play those reaction-based ticket and prize redemption games.

<comment><USER10> Are they actually reaction-based or do they work like carnival / fair games where they're actually completely rigged and only pretend to involve reaction timing as a lure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ugggggggghhhgh. The repercussions of this, I don't want to think about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tapster creator here. Which repercussions?

<comment><USER12> The first thing I thought about was click-fraud.

<comment><USER13> Click fraud on desktop is obviously much easier than on mobile.

Even on mobile, ideally (for the fraudster) it would be done in an emulator. There are probably tricks that can be done to detect emulators though. I would consider those flaws in the emulator that should be fixed.

<comment><USER14> Click farms are often a room full of phones on racks with cheap labor:

[https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-11/look-inside- chines...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-11/look-inside-chinese- click-farm-fake-followers-fake-likes-fake-reviews)

I don't think they're primarily doing "click fraud" for ads so much as account creation (for spam), captcha defeats, and social media manipulation.

Maybe that's all click (tap?) fraud though.

Also... I'm not sure how Tapster compares to click farms on pricing. Aces them on legitimacy though. So... I don't think a Fortune 500 company is going to send their in development app over to Russian mobs for final bug testing. So they might be same thing but very very different market segments.

<comment><USER13> I think the cat and mouse game of finding an emulator aberration vs fixing the emulator aberration is waited toward the finding side. Especially for complex systems like current mobile devices, and when they are often heavily locked down like iOS.

At some point the effort to develop a good enough emulator is more expensive than just buying the physical devices.

But another option beyond emulator vs physical devices is physical devices with physical tapping (Tapster) vs physical devices with emulated tapping. That last option seems to be what is used in your video. It might be too expensive to build an emulator, but it is cheaper to (jailbreak? and) emulate touch inputs than to pay a person or a robot to put in real touch inputs.

<comment><USER14> Ha, and now it hits me that I used the video without any actual humans... Maybe the cheap humans are falling by the wayside.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Videobox: How AI can help you understand the contents of your videos - <AUTHOR> https://blog.machinebox.io/introducing-videobox-how-ai-can-help-you-understand-the-contents-of-your-videos-dd77f17444e2 <comment><USER2> I tried setting up a tagbox, image gets pulled fine, it starts fine and says 'box ready' but when i go to localhost:8080 - it doesn't load.

Running latest docker 17.12.0-ce on windows 10.

</comment><comment><USER3> i just tried googling videobox. that was interesting</comment>


Nodejs is a toy. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bearstech.com/2012/07/nodejs-is-a-toy.html

<comment><USER2> Linkbait title.

Every piece of software starts at v0.0.1, clearly we are very early in the stage of node.js's life, I'd much rather they make these breaking changes now and get the design right rather than focusing exclusively on maintaining backwards compatibility. This is new software, of course things are going to change as it matures, of course some libraries are missing or incomplete, these things will change and most people who're actually using node in production KNOW that they are building on an immature platform and have made the technical decision that the risk of breaking changes is outweighed by the benefits of using it now.

</comment><comment><USER3> > you write linear text wich is translated to async actions

Stopped taking this seriously there.

> Regularly, nodejs breaks its API. I saw the drama when 0.4 became 0.6 and > now 0.8.

0.*? You mean a beta release broke backwards compatibility?!? Those assholes!

> use real languages like Erlang, scala or even golang.

You've got to be kidding me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hm. I read the first couple paragraphs and was pretty convinced it was a parody of a breathless async fanboy.

Sadly, it turns out he was serious.

<comment><USER5> Haha I thought the exact same thing. I thought it was going to be a parody. What a disappointing article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I actually am using node.js through the Noxe lib in Haxe and I don't see it like a toy at all. It works great to push initial files to mobile clients and setup clients in a fast way. Does a great job at it and I have seen much more complicated things being done with it. Having things shuffled once in a while on the API is to be expected when at such young age, everything is new and shiny and sometimes it doesn't live through a revision. Happens.

I don't like the snark about proper languages on the article, it is the sort of troll bait that encourages memes like; node is for web dev js noobs, flash is for clueless devs, etc. Think a serious dev should show respect for whatever a good implementation is achieved in and not let own preference enforce bias, that just makes people look like fools.

</comment><comment><USER7> So, you recommend not using a language that's less than a 1.0 because stuff breaks in new releases? Really? :|

You can solve lots of real problems with Node, and I'd argue you should do that because even when the APIs break, if your code is well written you should be able to bring it in line fairly quickly by only updating the impacted modules. So, that's not a big deal.

In re: libraries, if you're not willing to occasionally fork and upgrade other peopele's libraries, or better yet write your own, then perhaps the problem isn't Node. Not every Software Engineer is cut out to work on the bleeding edge. I would suggest that perhaps you're not one of those engineers, but that doesn't mean that I can't solve real problems with Node.js and love it.

I know the title is flamebait, but I've seen that point of view from people who weren't trying to start a flame war, so I figured now was a good time to put in my two cents. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Technically it is a toy because of how new it is... But so was Python, Ruby, and any other popular language before it became version 1 and even higher.

<comment><USER9> Technically it's also a toy because it tries to do async without the right primitives built into the language. Hence the async spaghetti (the 2010's GOTO), and other limitations.

It might prevail in a "worse is better" way, because of popularity, but technologically it should be replaced by a better language/framework combo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The gist of the article seems to suggest that you don't go all in with beta software. That advice applies to webservers, languages, operating systems, cellphones, tshirts and cars.

Saying 'Nodejs is a toy' seems flamebaitish.

</comment><comment><USER11> My favorite assertion is "Javascript has the flattest learning curve of any language." I wonder if the author can explain prototypal inheritance, or function hoisting.

</comment><comment><USER12> How can anyone take this article seriously when the author calls Scala a real language? Haha</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a great open source crawler? - <AUTHOR>

I want to crawl a site, like foxnews.com and find all the URLs that match a pattern.
A pattern like:
http://www.foxnews.com/\w+/\d+/\d+/\d+/.*/<p>That would find all URLs like:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/06/02/report-natalee-holloway-suspect-sought-murder-peru/
I know I could do this myself. I also know it's a seemingly easy problem, that is actually quite hairy.
I'm hoping there's an open source crawler that I can point to a start page and say "Find all the URLs that match this pattern.".
I know there are dozens of crawlers out there. I just don't know if there's one or two that are really great. I'm really hoping there's a modern/simple/fast one that would be good for this purpose.
Does such a thing exist? If not, are there any great documents detailing the common problems and how to solve them?
Thank you. <comment><USER2> Scrapy (<http://scrapy.org/>) matches your description pretty well. You can specify which urls to crawl with regular expressions and then provide a bit of code to do some data extraction.

</comment><comment><USER3> None of the ones I know are that simple - but Check out Heritrix at <http://crawler.archive.org> and Nutch at <http://nutch.apache.org> Also worth checking out is <http://80legs.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Nutch has a full on web crawler, a lot of features, and it scales pretty well. You can white list or black list URLs as you see fit, and filter out unwanted content.

</comment><comment><USER5> There a quite a few open source web crawlers, in Java, PHP, etc.. Based on what you mentioned, Nutch is alright... But not sure how are you going to get all those unstructured information out and make it structured.

</comment><comment><USER6> Tooting my own horn, but this takes all of 1 minute in 80legs if you've got the right regex.

<comment><AUTHOR> I considered 80legs. The problem is that I don't want to do this for just one site. I may have dozens. I can run this off my own servers/bandwidth (which I already pay for) for much cheaper than using 80legs.

If 80legs was purely usage based and cheaper I probably would have used it.

<comment><USER6> Understood. We do work with folks on custom per-use plans, but we just need to figure out what your requirements are so that we can see if there's some way for us to help.</comment></comment></comment>


Ignition: V8 Interpreter - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/11T2CRex9hXxoJwbYqVQ32yIPMh0uouUZLdyrtmMoL44/edit?pli=1#heading=h.6jz9dj3bnr8t

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/andywingo/status/630705153922838528](https://twitter.com/andywingo/status/630705153922838528)

<comment><USER2> The tweet says "V8 is replacing its baseline JIT with an interpreter, not unlike JSC and SpiderMonkey".

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an 80 char limit on subject!!! so had to cut short.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> See this: [http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/94/1520/CS- TR-9...](http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/94/1520/CS- TR-94-1520.pdf) (ADAPTIVE OPTIMIZATION FOR SELF: RECONCILING HIGH PERFORMANCE WITH EXPLORATORY PROGRAMING)

Esp. section 5.3+ starting on physical pdf page 56.

<comment><USER4> For others who consider if it's worth clicking: the paper is by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle) and it's written in 1994.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone summarize what this move will mean for performance on the average web app?

Will they be giving up some speed to claw back some memory?

<comment><USER6> The TL;DR: is that non-hot code will run slower (it looks like about 1.5 to 2 times slower) with the benefit of reducing the code-space to about 25% of it's current size. (saving any memory usage that would have been used by that)

"Hot" or optimizable code will still be optimized and run just as fast.

<comment><USER7> What portion of a "standard" web site (say, Google search) is hot vs non-hot ?

<comment><USER6> The specifics of this are a bit outside my knowledge area, so take this with a few major grains of salt.

But basically V8 has tools built in that will decide when the cost of compiling is worth the possible benefit.

So the AJAX submission javascript will probably never hit the optimizing compiler, but your function inside 3 nested loops will probably be hit ASAP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This might be about RAM-constrained phones; the design doc refers to '\--optimize-for-size devices', suggesting it won't (initially?) be on for everyone. Android and Chrome OS already enable Linux zram to get more out of low-memory gadgets. Incidentally, Google announced a (to me very ambitious- sounding) push for $50 Android phones today ([http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/10/google-revamps-android- on...](http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/10/google-revamps-android-one-india/)) that better low-RAM support could mesh nicely with, though of course it's just a coincidence the dates lined up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting decision.

The architecture sounds a little unusual:

"The interpreter itself consists of a set of bytecode handler code snippets, each of which handles a specific bytecode and dispatches to the handler for the next bytecode. These bytecode handlers are written in a high level, machine architecture agnostic form of assembly code, as implemented by the RawMachineAssembler class and compiled by Turbofan"

It also seems as if all calls are mediated by code generated by the compiler, which has the advantage of avoiding the awkwardness of different calling conventions between native and bytecode functions (possibly at some cost to performance?).

Fascinating reading. Thanks V8 people for allowing such documents to be public!

<comment><USER10> Not that unusual. In fact the planned architecture sounds _exactly_ like HotSpot: a fast assembly based interpreter that profiles the code, with tiered fast/slow compilers producing machine code for hot spots, with deoptimization support to allow more speculative optimisations.

It actually seems a bit of a shame that V8 and Nashorn are competing despite heading towards very similar architectures.

<comment><USER9> Having TurboFan compile the interpreter from machine-independent templates is what struck me as unusual.

The rest is familiar enough, true.

<comment><USER10> The HotSpot interpreter is done the same way, I believe. It's also a template based interpreter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the way Google projects seem to use Google Docs for this sort of thing. I've noticed in the past docs come up for projects like Angular and Go. I'd like to hear more about some of these documentation policies if anyone knows anything.

<comment><USER12> I no longer work at Google, things could have changed, but there was a strong culture to use Google Docs for project requirements gathering and design documents. There were some internal templates you could copy if you didn't want to think of the headers yourself.

While it's great this is part of the culture, discoverability/versioning were still problems, i.e. had to be done yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would it be useful a <hot-code> tag for the purpose of indicating that optimizations are required for the code?

in Lisp we have compiler options (declare (optimize ...))

</comment><comment><USER14> Does this make implementation of other language compiled for V8 easier?

</comment><comment><USER15> So V8 will be moving from a two tier to a three tier architecture.

Spidermonkey is three tier and JSC is four.

<comment><USER16> Are they adding an extra tier, or replacing the lowest? I thought they were replacing the lowest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The link to optimizing an ANSI C interpreter is broken, it's missing a colon after the protocol. I dunno if there's anyone here that can fix that, just thought I'd say it anyway.

Actually it's not the colon, there are two protocols:

        http://http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=199526
        ^^^^^^^

My bad.

</comment><comment><USER18> by my deeds I will honor him, V8

<comment><USER18> source for the uninitiated: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egSwfPKOX1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egSwfPKOX1c)</comment></comment>


Firefox 4 Mobile Faster than IE8 on a PC - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomsguide.com/us/firefox-4-internet-explorer-ie8-ie9,news-10658.html

<comment><USER2> "... However, if you are using Firefox 4 Mobile, keep in mind that the browser has some disadvantages as well: Compared to the standard Android browser, Firefox 4 Mobile does not support Flash."

Isn't that a feature?</comment>


Deploying a Haskell Web Service with Nix - <AUTHOR> http://jezenthomas.com/deploying-a-haskell-web-service-with-nix/ <comment><USER2> NixOS (or Guix) seems like an ideal platform for building service-based architectures. I don't understand why it's not more popular. CoreOS seems to be extremely popular in that space, despite working against a somewhat crappy package manager (portage from Gentoo) and with all of the declarative stuff slapped on top in a quite heavy-handed way. With CoreOS, you roll entirely new images whenever you have a change to deploy. So, the goals are the same, but the mechanisms are so very different as to make them look like they're solving different problems. I'm pretty sure I prefer the way NixOS is going about it.

That said, I've not used either in production. But, Nix was the first time I've looked at a new package manager and thought, "OK, someone finally improved on RPM/yum or deb/apt." Most of the time, I look at new package managers and just find myself running down a list of all of the ways they've failed to even replicate the power/flexibility/reliability of those now- ancient package managers, and usually without any really good reason. It's a cool side effect of a superior package manager that so much other stuff comes easily or automatically.

Anyway, this is a really cool idea, and something I want to look into more. You get so much of the "declarative and predictable" elements you want in a service-based architecture for free with Nix, while so many other solutions are bolted on clumsily.

<comment><USER3> We're using Nix in production. It has some polish issues but even in its unpolished state Nix is adding a lot of value for us.

I meet people that have all kinds of familiar issues with puppet, chef etc. We used to have those problems and we just don't have any more.

<comment><USER2> That's exactly what I think is so neat about it. puppet, chef, ansible, are all really cool, and they manage to bolt a declarative and atomic looking facade onto something that is decidedly not declarative or atomic (a regular old operating system). But, NixOS hits the problem in the gut. It seems like everything that is hard about the problem disappears when your entire OS is built from the ground up to be declarative and atomic.

It's pretty neat, and once I get my current projects squared away, I want to spend some time with NixOS, and maybe even get involved. It's just such a nice idea, and doesn't make me feel queasy the way so many of the bolted on solutions do.

<comment><USER4> A minor correction as a courtesy to other readers: puppet, chef, etc are not atomic. They can usually be considered thread safe across processes, if for some reason you run two simultaneously, but that is not a guarantee. Their changes are visible while they are executing on the system, so to other unrelated processes, they are not atomic.

Nix is atomic.

<comment><USER2> Not so much a correction...I think saying it is "a declarative and atomic looking facade" implies it is not actually that, even though it might look like it, doesn't it? But, perhaps it is a worthwhile clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >[...] taking care to change ~/.zshrc to reflect the "run commands" file of your shell if necessary

Huh, I've been wondering what the rc part of config files actually meant. The only thing I could come up with previously was "resource" file, which didn't make much sense but I never looked it up so whenever I deal with rc files, I think of them as resource files. Now I know what it actually means and can begin thinking of them as such.

</comment><comment><USER6> Link seems to be dead. 404.

Oddly, it works without the final '/'.

[http://jezenthomas.com/deploying-a-haskell-web-service- with-...](http://jezenthomas.com/deploying-a-haskell-web-service-with-nix)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the downtime. I noticed GitHub have bumped the Jekyll version on GH Pages, so now all my links are broken from the outside. I've fixed this one; now to handle all the others!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a Haskell contractor who currently works with a tech stack that looks like PostgreSQL, Haskell (backend), Haskell (frontend), and Nix. Stuff gets deployed to AWS.

things i hate about nix:

1\. The nix language isn't haskell. It's a very spartan functional programming language. errors can be unhelpful and it is difficult to find thorough documentation. There's not much sugar and it has few abstraction facilities beyond higher order functions (like ML modules or Haskell type classes). In order to grok nix, I recommend reading the nix manual[1] thoroughly and this series of blog posts [2]. Honestly though nix would be much more powerful if it were embedded in a full fledged functional language instead of trying to focus on just package description. i am many orders of magnitude less efficient at writing nix as i am haskell. guix looks interesting but i haven't tried it seriously: check it out too.

2\. the caching system is a little boned. if a cache goes down, the builder will wait forever to get the metadata from the server instead of ignoring it. there is a timeout setting but it only applies to downloading the actual binaries, not the .narinfo files. the workaround is to disable binary caches for that invocation. it is an annoyance since i often work on projects with flaky cache servers.

things i like about nix:

1\. i haven't fucked up my computer with NixOS yet. upgrading everything Just Works. If it doesn't Just Work, reverting Just Works. You have to go rather far out of your way to put a NixOS system in an inconsistent state. I might be a somewhat reckless user, but i used to put my Ubuntu installations in inconsistent states regularly.

2\. i can create a good sandboxed environment for any project with relatively little effort. it doesn't matter how many languages or arcane dependencies there are. there are no subtle bugs caused by interfering components: if there's interference it's a build error; if there isn't, you're good.

3\. if you've used a build system in anger and you can only come up with two complaints and neither of them are "it has trouble building the thing", then you've found a good build system. i've never had to worry about dependencies, reproducible builds, sharing binaries with colleagues or anything. in spite of all the warts of the language and the byzantine user experience, by god it works.

[1] [http://nixos.org/nix/manual/](http://nixos.org/nix/manual/) [2] [http://lethalman.blogspot.com/2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you- sho...](http://lethalman.blogspot.com/2014/07/nix-pill-1-why-you-should-give- it-try.html)

AMA

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, how do you handle deployment of databases on nixOS? I'm curious how others run stateful services on nix

<comment><USER8> I can't speak for NixOS specifically, but in GuixSD (a closely related project) this is handled at the service layer, an I imagine the same must be true for NixOS. The OS declaration specifies that, for example, the PostgreSQL daemon should be running with a specific configuration and the init system will run it when the system is instantiated. Your database runs as normal, and you would back up your state as normal. Functional configuration management provides an extremely clean separation of stateless from the stateful.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing #EdgeBug: File web platform bugs with a Tweet - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/08/11/edgebug-twitter/ <comment><USER2> Hopefully they've also gotten better people triaging the bugs than in the past.

Too many times I've opened one-liner JS bugs with references to the specification that get closed because they need a public website to repro. I've even had bugs which link to the failing W3C spec test get closed as 'not repro'.

I used to work at MS and was often thanked for the quality of the bugs I opened (frequently IE bugs!). They must have different people triaging the publicly submitted bugs because I'm pretty sure they don't know how to even open the dev tools.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like Microsoft.

<comment><USER4> The Edge platform team will be triaging them, I am one of them that has been triaging them. One suggestion is to ensure that it is truly a reduction, we built this for webdevs that have reductions and just don't want to file them and we don't want to miss out on those.

On your statement though regarding them being closed out. How long ago was that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this would be a nice thing to offer up as a product/service. As others mentioned it's susceptible to noise, but they've found ways to reduce that. As a person forced to use HP Quality Center for bug reporting, I'd be happy to send a tweet with a link to JSFiddle instead.

</comment><comment><USER6> How will they deal with Twitter spambots that include random hashtags?

<comment><USER7> The article says how.

<comment><USER8> Namely, there's a set of sites like codepen, jsfiddle, etc. they'll take bugs from. If a link to one of those isn't present, their bot ignores it. This is how all the Microsoft people can use the hashtag to announce this without invoking the bot.

I have an Edge bug right now waiting for debug, but sadly, this hashtag can't help me, because it doesn't involve code or rendering, it's a browser UI flaw.

<comment><USER7> You can use the normal issue tracker for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> get free software testing now, just ask Microsoft how! ;)</comment>


The problems of Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://www.lambdassociates.org/Blog/the_problems_of_open_source.htm

<comment><USER2> I usually don't do this, but this articles contains so much unbacked claims that I stopped reading halfways.</comment>


Microsoft: Language Server Protocol - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol <comment><USER2> > The first version of the protocol is based on experiences we gained while > integrating OmniSharp and the TypeScript Server into VS Code.

Omnisharp is an amazing project which is helping making the dotnet ecosystem a pleasant to use across your platform or IDE of choice.Their work on the extensions for Atom,VIM,Brackets, VS code etc for csharp is amazing. [https://github.com/OmniSharp](https://github.com/OmniSharp)

With this protocol being open and support from Redhat , eclipse and many SDKs already available, it would be quite easy to extend this to add support for any languages to any IDE.</comment>


Detailed audit of Voatz' voting app confirms security flaws - <AUTHOR> https://www.govtech.com/biz/Detailed-Audit-of-Voatz-Voting-App-Confirms-Security-Flaws.html <comment><USER2> Oh, hi.

I'm Mike Specter, lead author on the MIT report [1], and have been involved in other voting-related research projects [2,3].

LMK if you all have any questions!

1\. [https://internetpolicy.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2020/02/Se...](https://internetpolicy.mit.edu/wp- content/uploads/2020/02/SecurityAnalysisOfVoatz_Public.pdf)

2\. [http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf](http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf)

3\. [https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publi...](https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/files/publication/StateLocalPlaybook%201.1.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I understand that current solutions to electronic voting are unsatisfactory, but I am fairly baffled by:

> It remains unclear if any electronic-only mobile or Internet voting system > can practically overcome the stringent security requirements on election > systems

Like, we can adequately secure banking software. With proper considerations and processes for the problem domain (i.e. user follow up / validation, alerts on suspicious vote changes) I don't see why securely implementing electronic voting is considered near-impossible, and has so few advocates.

<comment><USER2> To put this in short-hand: "We bank online, we buy all sorts of stuff online, why not vote?"

The biggest reason is that banking and other financial transactions have a very different threat model from voting.

In particular, voting requires a _secret ballot_. In addition to preventing an adversary from learning how you voted, a secret ballot requires you to be unable to prove how you voted, to prevent vote selling and coercion.

So, unlike financial transactions, how you do validation / remediation of failures is very unclear. Ben Adida has a blog post with further thoughts here ([https://benlog.com/2007/03/02/on-voting-banking-and-bad- anal...](https://benlog.com/2007/03/02/on-voting-banking-and-bad-analogies/)).

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I hadn't fully grokked the facet of the problem domain. I guess you could give users a spoofing mode, that allowed them to fake any ballot / action. Or possibly, if there was a window of time in which they could change their ballot freely.

Maybe making such features both secure and accessible would be nearly impossible though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The biggest problem with Voatz is that it's selling silicon snake oil to people who can't evaluate claims.

It starts with the premise that somehow Blockchain does something magical. That is enables special security.

Claims like this are a load of crap.

What Bitcoin did, and what hucksters like Voatz are trying to cash in on, was to make it provably difficult to write a public record. In doing so, Bitcoin created provable digital scarcity (subject to certain well-known assumptions) for the first time in human history.

Voatz picks out the cryptographic part as if it were somehow separable from the proof of work part. The two are not separable. Voatz, and the fools who are using it, have much bigger problems than "improper use of cryptographic algorithms."

<comment><USER5> I mean, the crypto part that isn't PoW is mostly just PKC, which actually does make sense for voting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I'm halfway through the report, it's a very beautiful document, great work from the team that wrote, and if I understood correctly, a VOTING application:

\- Uses ad-hoc cryptography as the main cryptography

\- Does not use the recommended security facilities on the target platforms (iOS and Android)

\- Is deployed manually, with hardcoded secrets (AWS account with name "admin" had its credentials hardcoded in a scala file named "AmazonOtpUtility.scala")

\- Has provably de-anonimizablity as a property (All is needed is apparently access to the databases, and might I remind you of the Twitter / UAE/Saudi Arabia recent story)

\- (And this is the biggest, most annoying thing) Is not end-to-end verifiable.

\- The actual threat model is almost childish, as showed by the testing team.

I do apologize for the wording in the following paragraphs, but this a fucking dumpster fire of a project for a voting platform.

Who the fuck authorized this to go forward as a voting platform for any state in the United States ? Who the fuck is selling this as a "secure" platform ? Can they sleep well at night ? When will the government intervene and stop people from compromising democracy with stunts like these ?

<comment><USER7> The people who authorized this are probably clueless. The people who created this dumpster fire are clueless _and_ evil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Copying comment from previous thread:

Systemic issues:

* Creds scattered throughout source code, including DB / AWS creds, "fixed" by removing but still present in git history

* Numerous crypto vulns: nonces / AES-ECB

* What's even the point of blockchain, it just makes everything worse

Selected quotes:

"Trail of Bits was only provided a backend for live testing on the second-to- last scheduled day of the assessment"

"The system is unusually complex, with an order-of-magnitude more custom code than similar mobile voting systems we have assessed."

"Voatz's voting processes are error prone and manual, relying on manual verification of voter identity and long-term storage of this identity on Voatz's premises"

"E2E-V systems allow voters to cast encrypted ballots such that ballot counts are verifiable to anyone, but individual voters' preferences are not revealed. ... Voatz is not E2E-V."

"Storing voting data on a blockchain maintains an auditable record to prevent fraud, but this comes at the expense of both privacy and increased attack surface. Clients do not connect directly to the blockchain themselves, and are therefore unable to independently verify that their votes were properly recorded. Anyone with administrative access to the Voatz backend servers will have enough information to fully reconstruct the entire election, deanonymize votes, deny votes, alter votes, and invalidate audit trails."

</comment><comment><USER7> I briefly commented on Voatz in my thesis[1] last year:

 _Voatz is another blockchain-related voting project. They claim to have been involved in a real world mobile voting experiment in West Virginia with real votes cast through their mobile application. However, their source code and voting protocol are not available for review.

Voatz is a great example of how commercial vendors can fill the letter of the law without filling the spirit: what they refer to as a "paper audit trail" is literally a physical print of their digital records. If the digital records are corrupted before printing, the paper records will be likewise corrupted.

Based on the descriptions on the FAQ page, Voatz servers are all running the same software, and the voter needs their vote to be recorded on all of them in order to receive confirmation that their vote has been recorded. This seems like the worst of both worlds: a single misbehaving authority can prevent the election from proceeding, and at the same time, the "verifiable blockchain" benefits are undermined by running the same closed-source unverifiable software on all of the servers and the same closed-source unverifiable software on all of the clients. The replication of servers provides security benefits only against physical tampering of the machines – since the same software is running on all of them, an accidental or intentional flaw in the software can be exploited to manipulate votes on all servers simultaneously._

1\. [https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/](https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/)

</comment><comment><USER9> > The summary goes on to list several technical flaws, such as a lack of test > coverage and documentation, infrastructure provisioned manually without the > aid of infrastructure-as-code tools, vestigial features that have yet to be > deleted, and nonstandard cryptographic protocols.

I'm not a security engineer, so what's the benefit of using a nonstandard cryptographic protocol? That decision makes no sense to me.

<comment><USER10> The only reason to use nonstandard crypto is that you think you are smarter than the entire crypto industry. ProTip: you are never smarter than the entire crypto industry.

<comment><USER11> You forgot the other reason: backdoors

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Should we change the link to point directly to ToB's blog post?

[https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/03/13/our-full-report- on-t...](https://blog.trailofbits.com/2020/03/13/our-full-report-on-the-voatz- mobile-voting-platform/)

It seems a lot more information rich.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The clients do not interact with the blockchain directly, so there is no > blockchain verification code in the client.

Fun. So, why even use a blockchain? Why not at least have light-clients with merkle verification? Does Fabric not have support for light clients (I haven't looked at it in a while)?

<comment><USER14> "Why even use a blockchain" is the first question that should be asked of any company that advertises they use one. Most of the time it's also the last question you'll need to ask...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Every time this company comes up, some part of me just shudders in horror at the thought of outsourcing the crucial act of voting to a company called _Voatz_.

Y'all the entire nation to put their trust in you and yet you have named yourself with a "cute" misspelling of one of the things you are involved in? Really?

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish it could be safe, but real electronic voting fraud may be far more common in practice:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsNXnAv131g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsNXnAv131g) Computer Programmer testifies that Tom Feeney (Speaker of the Houe of Florida at the time, currently US Representative representing MY district ) tried to pay him to rig election vote counts.

Usually they can be detected when exit polls differ from the voting results. But that seems common nowadays. So that is why I think that voting fraud may be common.

But back to the whistleblower.. How many have accepted the money? And how many of them are able do some underhand programming? Sometimes just to leave small security holes.

I don't think that MIT can detect them that easily. For a long time we did not even know the NSA encryption was compromised by NSA themselves.

</comment><comment><USER17> As a first impression, simply the name "Voatz" does not inspire a lot of confidence.

</comment><comment><USER18> Have my vote printed to a roll of paper, like a cashier's counter roll. Make sure that it shows through an opening in the case, so I can verify, and then rolls further (beyond the opening) so I cannot see it anymore. This is a way to store the votes "write only". The rolls are both human readable and machine readable (OCR is nothing new).

The only problem with this compared to voting forms is that form fall into the bin unordered, so it is harder to link a vote to a person.

Just an idea.

I would not trust ANY system that stores my vote on a re-writable storage medium. I know there are some crypto/blockchain tricks that may help, but that's so hard to audit for lay people that I prefer the paper roll any day.

<comment><USER19> > The only problem with this compared to voting forms is that form fall into > the bin unordered, so it is harder to link a vote to a person.

Uh, that's a _good_ thing, you don't want to be able to link a vote to a person at all!

<comment><USER20> That's why he said it was a problem.

<comment><USER19> Ah, I misunderstood what he was saying! I read it the other way around. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone confirm to me why we need voting "apps" or why voting needs to be electronic at all?

Vote in person by pen & paper or vote via mail remotely. Tabulation also should be done locally and in-person with representatives of all parties present.

Anything else seems ... like a way to more easily steal elections.

<comment><USER22> >> The promises of mobile voting are attractive—better accessibility for differently abled people, streamlined absentee voting, and speed and convenience for all voters. If a mobile platform could guarantee secure voting, it would revolutionize the process. It's a fantastic goal—but there's still work to do.

<comment><USER19> > If a mobile platform could guarantee secure voting

First, that's a mighty big if, and second, it's not enough!

Voting is a process where unlike online banking or online shopping there is no way for a human to go in and fix errors, there's no way to audit a vote and go "Oh, Bob meant to vote for A and Cindy meant to vote for B, so the machine did it wrong". It's not enough that an electronic voting system is correct, every single voter has to be able to trust the system, and for that it needs to be simple to understand.

You can't look at the electrons inside a silicon chip to determine they're doing the right thing. But with pen and paper and envelopes and urns and observers and counters, you _can_ determine that the system is doing the right thing. Involving lots and lots of citizens in the voting system is not a bad thing, quite the opposite! You _want_ as many eyes as possible on the entire process to ensure there's nothing shady going on, that there's no mistakes.

But if all the votes go into a black box that spits out the results, all of that goes away, all of that trust, all of that ability to verify that the results are correct.

<comment><USER7> Well, they use a lot of pen & paper in Russia, but somehow Putin can get 107% of votes in some areas. So perhaps your confidence in paper voting is a bit too high.

<comment><USER19> Yes, if election workers are corrupt, your election results will be corrupted as well. No voting system can defend against it. That's what revolutions are for.

<comment><USER7> So you no longer stand by your original statement where you said "But with pen and paper and envelopes and urns and observers and counters, you can determine that the system is doing the right thing"?

Somehow you have gone from one extreme (implying that a traditional paper voting system is always trustworthy) to another extreme (saying that all voting systems can be corrupted), which, by the way, is not true either. For example, the results of a voting system where all votes are public, can not be manipulated. This tiny example shows that clearly some voting systems can defend against corruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My personal audit went like this: "It's called Voatz, with a _Z_."

<comment><USER24> It's got what plants crave!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Electronic voting is difficult because it's politically undesirable to many people who benefit from dead tree voting, not for any technical reason. So yeah, of course people claiming to solve a political problem with technical buzzwords are almost certainly selling snake oil.

<comment><USER26> > it's politically undesirable to many people who benefit from dead tree > voting

Who supposedly benefits?</comment></comment>


Why Dropbox is dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=36157&replies=12#post-309095

<comment><USER2> Reading this thread somehow pissed me off. The concerns of this guy are legitimate, I think that some Delphic employee should be there to answer such enquiries even with a simple kindly excuse. Letting your users respond help but I feel like this guy will simply cancel his account and advice all his friends to not use it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if running dropbox as a user with read access but no write permissions would solve this guy's problem. I also wonder whether it would work at all. :-)</comment>


Novel grassroots technology meetup group in New York needs Your help  - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN
I am the organizer of a technology meetup group in New York that focuses on GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technologies for supercomputing with 'big data' and 'big compute'. The group started with just one member (me!) on the 11th January 2011 and now numbers 338 people. We're all practitioners in GPU ... all experts ... and that's the problem!
Few people in my group understand the economics and business aspects of GPU as an emerging technology. I think, as practitioners, we should understand the market and business we are in. We don't. Basic facts such as market size, growth rate, areas of application, the companies involved ... just aren't at our fingertips, and they should be.
Moreover, there is a huge amount of talent in the meetup group. Gosh, we have people with algorithms named after them! But I fear that much of that talent is underutilized.
For these reasons, I have organized a special meetup on "The Business of GPUs" that brings together practitioners, GPU companies, analysts, VCs, Angel Investors, and talent scouts -- just to see what happens by putting all these people together in one room. I think the results will be interesting! I hope you think so too as I would like to invite any HN member who can make it along (and if you can't come, that you will send a friend or colleague instead).
You can find out more details and register to attend (if you want to come) by following this link: http://www.meetup.com/HPC-GPU-Supercomputing-Group-of-New-York/events/36237782/
Incidentally, if you are unfamiliar with GPU technology it may help to know that massively parallel processing -- specifically using GPUs -- is finding much wider application in many areas: finance, media, scientific, biomedical, defense, 'big data', 'big compute', Cloud computing and many others. GPUs spectacularly speed up many applications -- by x10, x100 ... even x1000 in exceptional cases -- and by doing so they are changing the rules of the business game. GPUs are a great technology for both 'big data' and 'big compute'; two challenges that these days most often go together. We are entering a golden age of computational discovery in which we will be able to ask -- and get answers -- to questions we never thought possible; GPU technology is helping bring that golden age about.
All the best, Shep <comment><USER2> You might want to also post something on reddit, in the r/nyc and r/brooklyn subreddits.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Will do!</comment></comment>


Improve the usability of a Sign-in process - <AUTHOR> http://blog.userecho.com/topic/57680-improved-usability-of-sign-in-process/ <comment><USER2> how about register button next to sign in button? so I don't have to go to other page?

<comment><USER3> But this can mislead users with where to do data entry for registration.</comment></comment>


Non-US Privacy Email Alternatives for Lavabit Refugees - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestvpnforyou.com/non-us-privacy-email-alternatives-for-lavabit-refugees/

<comment><USER2> encryptedmail.ch is our 'coming soon' offering. public beta by xmas. Need beta testers</comment>


Ask HN: Any cool ways to record TV? - <AUTHOR>

I recently got cable because I have no other way to watch certain shows but I didn't feel like paying an extra $13/month to be able to record shows was worth it.  Does anyone know any cheap ways to record your shows to watch later? <comment><USER2> Use USB TV card. One from pinnacle seems to be the best.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mythtv</comment>


Show HN: liffect — CSS3 animation effects for lists - <AUTHOR> http://ademilter.com/lab/liffect/ <comment><USER2> Agreed pretty cool effects. Star Wars shifts the page slightly during the effect on both Chrome and Firefox on Windows. Also no love for IE or my Nook webkit browser but did fine on my Android ICS phone.

<comment><USER3> The page shift can be fixed by using:

html { overflow-y: scroll; }

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bookmarked, can we see a jquery plugin on github?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, it does not really exist right now. Maybe I can do something later on. Thanks for the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very nice: tasteful and performs great (GPU-accelerated in Gecko and others) due to the use of CSS transforms.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone else notice that the "Bounce In" effect is horribly pixellated in Chrome Canary? It's almost as if the scale effect is working with a much smaller resolution original photo. Seems to work just fine in vanilla Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's good to see something like this have favorable response instead of the usual whiners that don't like anything that slows down their image consumption.

Great work and very neatly demo'd

</comment><comment><USER8> The various zoom and bounce in effects seem to leave the image blurry in Chrome 24.0.1312.2 dev OS X

</comment><comment><USER9> Great work! Serves as an excellent reference implementation for me to learn CSS transformations.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is an awesome work! Maybe a good substitute / improvement for the overused image carousels.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very cool project! nice work, keep it up. more effects!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, up votes and tweets are appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Star Wars one is the best :) Bookmarked!

<comment><USER13> I loved the default one, it seems like Windows 8 metro dashboard icons' loading animation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great work! Love the transition effects.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is really cool. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER16> A good reference worth bookmarking.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great job Adem, well done indeed.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very nice! Fun!

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, up votes and tweets are appreciated. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome!</comment>


New Twitter Is About 50 Percent Rolled Out. Where's The Facebook-Style Backlash? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/30/new-twitter-lack-of-backlash/

<comment><USER2> New Twitter feels like Old Twitter, except it's faster and puts more of the stuff I want to see in front of me.

Facebook has many, many more features than Twitter does, and the features it has are not as easy for users to understand or use. When they reorganize the UI or change fundamental site behavior, users struggle to relearn how to use the site. It is a necessarily evil side effect of iterating on complex application features.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I feel like I am a backlash of one person. Twitter's selling points used to be simplicity and encouraging developers / encouraging a platform. With the change they are moving away from that simplicity and also taking something away from the developers (no more app attribution). So it seems like a step backwards to me on two fronts.

I think that this is really a symptom of Twitter's growth in employees. If you have all of these front end developers / Product Managers they'll make products even if they are the wrong thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would guess Twitter's users are on average more tech savvy than Facebook users so change isn't as terrifying to them. Another factor is this weird Internet indie/hipster mentality that anything big is worthy of scorn and in all cases an alternative must be anointed as the _cool alternative_ which shall not be criticized. As long as Facebook is gigantic Twitter gets to be the _cool alternative_ for now. When your Mom joins though -- forget it. It's going to be lame and if they dare modify a single pixel or font face then expect an Internet riot.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems a good way to prevent backlash is to deploy over a period of weeks. Before I got newtwitter I mostly ignored what other people were saying about it. Now if I complain it's old news.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think most of the reason why there is no facebook-style backlash is because the majority of users on twitter (those who actually post stuff) use separate clients to do so.

I personally use twirssi [1] as my twitter client. YMMV.

[1] <http://twirssi.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> it's not much of a backlash I suppose, but a small one: <http://twitter.com/paulg/status/25998745559>

</comment><comment><USER8> The reason there isn't a backlash is because Twitter isn't used at the same level of intensity as Facebook. When there are only 2-3 features that are interesting on a web application, there isn't going to be a huge disconnect from version to version.

</comment><comment><USER9> I only just realized that the new stuff obscures most of my lovingly chosen background picture :-(

Other than that, I didn't care much yet, because I use a client to access Twitter anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> What backlash?

It's better than the old interface.

Most of Facebook's design choices have left many users in the lurch.</comment>


Water found to be an ideal lubricant for nanomachines - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2013-08-ideal-lubricant-nanomachines.html <comment><USER2> Which is why 'nanotechnology' of the future will be (and of the past was) done with proteins & nucleic acids packed by lipids. Want to build a nanobot? Build it out of organic material. The rocks we build iPhones out of do not maintain their useful properties at the nanometer scale.

<comment><USER3> The computers of the future will just be blobs of flesh.

<comment><USER4> Most of the computers of the present are.

<comment><USER5> The number of electronic computers in the world probably exceeded human population around 1992--3, and currently has a 'birthrate' of 10^10 per year, counting μcontrollers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > '...the researchers noticed that the molecular motors moved with slightly > different speeds, dependent on the bottle of solvent used in the > experiment.'

This is why reproducibility is crucial in science. _Always look for confounding factors._

</comment><comment><USER6> Cells found to be ideal nanomachines and field gets renamed to biology.

<comment><USER7> Cells are probably just as ideal nanomachines as birds are ideal flying machines. Yes, quite nicely optimized to do what they do, but for our purposes 787s, F-22s and S-92s are much more useful.

<comment><USER8> >787s, F-22s and S-92s are much more useful.

Well, we can say that _we 're using them_. Whether systems that consume thousands of years of fossilized sunlight remain beneficial to society in the long term remains to be seen. Personally I think our systems should be steady- state instead of depletionary.

Just because we're doing it doesn't mean it's ideal.

<comment><USER9> Considering how much fighters cost we could renewably synthesize fuel for them just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only one that is irritated by the way the molecule is displayed in the image? The 'nanomachine' is displayed at a vastly larger scale than the water.</comment>


Ask HN: How to get a job after a failed startup? - <AUTHOR> I worked it for 8 months. I've now completely exhausted my savings. Our product is live but the growth is super slow. There is no way I can see it reaching product market fit. Investors are not interested with such low numbers.
I am a product guy with moderate level tech skills.
Should I keep the startup on my resume (with reason for shutting down + lessons)? Or should I leave it out from my resume and instead add the product we built as a 'project'?
I'm looking at product management jobs or software engineering jobs. <comment><USER2> I am trying to reconcile your question, with the one you just posted recently (16 days ago)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21041836)

>" ... Interests & life goals: Product Management, starting his own startup (or a profit making lifestyle business), reaching financial independence Recently graduated from an Indian college with computer science degree.

Don't have too much savings but have strong experience under belt from working on several side-projects (with users) during college years.

What career advice would you give? Also, would you suggest he look into moving and working in the West, (Germany or Canada) or stay in India?

…"

I may be totally misreading this, but it seems like are you are posting your resume + availability, under AskHN umbrella.

With regards to your direct question on if a failed startup needs to be mentioned.

I would say if you have things to show (eg a website/app link), and you feel comfortable describing your contribution there -- it should be mentioned.

May be under 'other projects' section.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your advice.

No, I have no intentions of posting my resume on HN. I respect the HN community's advice more than any other software communities. So, it is natural for me to want to ask advice here. And I can't ask for advice without posting atleast some information about where I'm at. Also, I don't have any contact details on my HN profile.

Moderators, if you feel the thread does not belong here, you may remove it. I can't see an option to delete the original post.

<comment><USER3> Can you link to the startup?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My side projects were usually the biggest positives when I went for interviews. Nobody is going to ask you how much money they made because it's not important for software engineering jobs - you've shown you can use your own initiative and finish projects by yourself. Not sure what you're nervous about.

</comment><comment><USER5> Put it on your resume if it's something you're proud of, even if it failed. The fact that you were willing to give it a shot is typically a positive signal. Be prepared to talk about it - a lot of interviewers will find that more interesting than working at yet another startup, so if you can talk intelligently about what you learned and the progress you made, it'll definitely score you points in an interview.

</comment><comment><USER6> Focus on what went _right._ You designed, built, and launched a product.

Also curious, how slow is "slow" growth in percentages? Maybe it's not as bad as you think...

</comment><comment><USER7> You still had "wins" and hurdles you had to overcome. I'd leave it there. If asked, focus on those wins. If I were building a drone company in 2006, I could say I overcame engineering hurdles to design the product but failed to reach market due to government restrictions, aka FAA. That way it looks like anyone would have lost that game but you still have talent.

</comment><comment><USER8> > I'm looking at product management jobs or software engineering jobs.

Suggest looking instead for the person you can best help. Think Founders/COO's of early-stage firms.

Try to connect with that individual. Linkedin is good for this. They'll likely relate to your story.

</comment><comment><USER9> Everything is marketing. You can spin failures into successes if you do it right.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Should I keep the startup on my resume (with reason for shutting down + > lessons)?

yes, experience is what matters, not success or failure.

</comment><comment><USER11> how do you use a failed startup to pivot into a new industry (i.e. not tech)?

</comment><comment><USER12> Try to create your own.</comment>


How a Genius Is Different from a Really Smart Person - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/how-a-genius-is-different-from-a-really-smart-person <comment><USER2> There's no such thing as an idle genius. An idle genius is an oxymoron.

I like to think of genius in terms of perspective and thus measure it by how rare and valuable a perspective is. Genius is the extreme form of insight. It's really not a measure of IQ, although a high IQ helps.

Getting to a rare perspective is usually a product of building up a mental framework and then seeing patterns in- and making associations or connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena. True genius is seeing associations among things previously unseen.

A high IQ gives you more ability to build the mental framework needed to see these associations, and a genius has actually applied it.

</comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr an interview with five mensa members about how they perceive genius and their hi IQ peers. They mostly associate genius with accomplishment or creativity that expands a frontier.

<comment><USER4> I would also like to add that they saw their intelligence as a very specific one well tuned to doing IQ tests/logic puzzles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Genius is a dynamic thing rendered via the lens of social value.

If scientific progress is our goal, then I would argue that forming cliques around a clique-governed definition of "most likely to elicit genius" is not only wrong, but dangerous. Heuristics can be ugly things.

Also, MENSA reminds me of church. Church is boring.</comment>


Glu Mobile lays off dozens - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-08-25-glu-mobile-lays-off-dozens <comment><AUTHOR> As always, happy to help good SF people who were affected and are now job- searching via [https://www.layoff-aid.com](https://www.layoff-aid.com)</comment>


Amazon's Alexa heard her name on TV and ordered up a ton of dollhouses - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/880541/amazons-amzn-alexa-accidentally-ordered-a-ton-of-dollhouses-across-san-diego/ <comment><USER2> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13342483)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious without any snark, what is the reason people want an Alexa device? I can't find any reason in my life to want one, and see many reasons why I wouldn't

<comment><USER4> I like my Alexa devices. But only because I write my own apps for it to allow it to do exactly what I want it to. I use it at least three times a day instead of taking out my phone.

My favorite (which is built in and I did not write) is "Alexa, play children's songs" while in my daughter's play room.</comment></comment>


Yesterday, we launched a screenshot tool on HN - Top funny shots we received - <AUTHOR> http://www.jotform.com/blog/41-Top-10-Funny-Screenshots-We-Received-on-Wishbox-Launch

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you Hacker News for the feedback and the audience. This is such a great community. I hope you will like these. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Where to host a personal blog? - <AUTHOR>

I want to host a personal blog/resume/portfolio. Is the built in readership of blogging platforms like tumblr/medium/quora worth sacrificing some control over your blog? I have some web development experience so making and self hosting a blog isn't a problem, but I have no idea how hard it is to promote a self hosted blog. Does anyone have any experience with discovery/engagement of their self hosted blogs compared to blogs hosted on these platforms? (Perhaps someone who posts to both) <comment><USER2> Why not gh-pages ? It's free and you can customize everything you want. [https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/) I use it to store my blog (made using jekyll)

<comment><USER3> That could work. And lack of immediate post/design previews can be taken care of with a simple Vagrant configuration to spin up a local Github Pages server directly from the repo. Like so: [https://github.com/kappataumu/vagrant-up- github-pages](https://github.com/kappataumu/vagrant-up-github-pages)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am setting one up right now for fun through digital ocean using following this tutorial[1] using node JS

[http://howtonode.org/express-mongodb](http://howtonode.org/express-mongodb)

</comment><comment><USER5> I just use wordpress but if I wanted to get fancy and have something for the public, rather than just my self and close friends I'd say github pages.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bluehost is a really great host that isn't too expensive. It does all the wordpress setup for you. I find it extremely convenient.

</comment><comment><USER7> I use jekyll and github pages, it's a pretty simple/quick way to set up a personal blog.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd opt (well, I have...) for the cheapest Digital Ocean VPS running Ghost. Works great.

<comment><USER9> I've done the same, it's very smooth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I enjoy jekyll on github pages.</comment>


How EU and US Consumers' Data Is Treated by Amazon, Netflix and Spotify - <AUTHOR> https://tacd.org/tacd-and-heinrich-boll-stiftung-brussels-publish-research-highlighting-failings-in-privacy-protection-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic/ <comment><USER2> I have solved this in my way, minimized all the data I give to the companies to bare minimum.

You would like registration - here is my mail firstname.lastname@example.com. For each registration in last 10 years. You would like gmail? Facebook? There our bussiness ends.

So, you care so much about security of my account that you cant provide me TOTP authentication and would rather have my phone number. I'll pass. You insist? There our bussiness ends.

100% self hosted.

Fingerprinting blocked (oh dear aliexpress you have a very special place in my heart for that), mostly in ff private tabs, searching goes over my private searx instance, which is also generating fake searches. Surfing over squid (with heavy filtering, even mozilla beacons are blocked) over vpn moving randomly around exit nodes.

Android, home built rom, no google, every app is having its own rules, blocked network traffic by default (netguard). Xposed + xprivacy lua faking all informations, if app doesnt like that, it is uninstalled. If I cant live without it, like online banking, which I am paying for and has decided to block my way of using MY phone, it was reversed, removed safety net, removed rootbeer calls, removed checks for gms.

This is the price to have some privacy. I really hope that US will get its privacy laws and that EU starts charging everyone. This has gone to far, there is a whole branch of industry that needs a seriously large stick. And some slap on wrists for managers.</comment>


Shiva – More than a RESTful API to your music collection - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/03/shiva-more-than-a-restful-api-to-your-music-collection/

<comment><USER2> This sounds a LOT like zmusic (which I use currently) by Jason Donenfeld: <http://git.zx2c4.com/zmusic-ng/about/>

(..which is also powered by Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Backbone.js etc.)

</comment><comment><USER3> So... why not Subsonic? It's open source as well, seems a lot more mature, has a rest api, tons of apps, and a spiffy new HTML5 player that's quite good.

* Subsonic.org seems to be down, try <http://sourceforge.net/projects/subsonic/> instead.

<comment><USER4> Can I use it as an alternative to Google Music? I.e. can I set it to download a playlist to my phone when I come home?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I don't quite get it. The web player has support for playlists and dynamic streams, so I guess it depends on whether the app available for your phone uses the correct API. The one I use, for example, maintains a 10gb MRU cache of my stuff (with lookahead) and that works out quite nicely for me. YMMV, but it definitely surpassed google music for me in both usability and quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OT: As per the Hindu calendar, yesterday was Shiva's birthday - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_Shivaratri>

Great timing!

<comment><USER6> Shivratri is not the birthday of Lord Shiva. It is a day celebrated in reverence of Lord Shiva.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems incredible. I've been wanting something like this for a while, and figured I'd have to make it myself.

I'll definitely be checking this out.

<comment><USER8> Ha, actually did spend time making something like this for myself. I prefer to organize music by folder though, so that's how Tailgate does it:

<https://github.com/davidguttman/tailgate>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A Subsonic-compatible wrapper for the API would instantly add compatibility with a large number of clients. Same for DLNA (spit).

I'm a big Subsonic fan for a couple of reasons:

1\. Remote control - I can make the server play the track remotely

2\. Configurable offline cache on my phone - I set a large cache size (say 20gb) and use the player normally. Next time I'm offline I've still got access to the last 20gb of music I played.

I'm looking for a Subsonic alternative though as I'd like to use an Android TV stick as my server/media center and getting Java running on that will be a pain and probably involve running a full Linux side-by-side. And I'm not even sure if it's going to be possible to run Subsonic server alongside Android effectively.

A closing thought. Why are these things needed when we have DLNA/UPnP? Mainly because DLNA apps are uniformally slow and lack essential features. It's stunning how much time and money large companies have spent on DLNA and produced something so horrible.

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice! I've also been thinking about something like this for my photos. I have a ton of photos littered in a pics folder. Would love an API would I could query on EXIF data.

<comment><USER11> I've also been thinking the same thing recently. I have iPhoto but it sucks for a) big collections and b) sharing. For example, locally you can browse a collection on another local machine but it sends full res photos across the wire so it's completely unusable.

<comment><USER12> Image support is planned actually (just noticed that is not in the wish list, will add it) but has some big prerequisites. With photos you have to be a little more careful regarding permissions, which means that users and roles should be supported first.

But it will be implemented at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to try and install this on my nas4free installation. If anyone has tried and wants to chime in…

</comment><comment><USER14> My next project will be `Jesus`.

<comment><USER15> You are late: <https://rubygems.org/gems/jesus>

"A web interface for god to speak with mankind"

<https://rubygems.org/gems/god>

<comment><USER16> That has to be the most clever name for a project I've ever seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The REST API looks like its halfway to being an OData one. Why reinvent the wheel and not go the whole hog?

</comment><comment><USER18> Interestingly it was Shivratri yesterday for Indians - for Shiva, the destroyer God of Hinduism.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sounds good. Would like to try.

</comment><comment><USER20> that would be me .. i mean thats my name :P</comment>


The Hacker 4Chan Is at It Again - <AUTHOR> http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/52680526 <comment><USER2> _> Show HN: webapp that does something desktop programs did in 1996 while turning your laptop fan into a jet engine. Only works in Chrome nightly._

 _> We left X framework and rewrote our app on Y and saw a 0.0005% increase in performance and why you should too. (blogspam.com) 324 points | 120 comments_

 _> Why the bubble doesn't exists because my startup delivers sandwiches on aws (medium.com)_

Definitely having a good laugh here.

I've always wondered how big the overlap between HN and /g/ is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fairly accurate but missing the is it a bubble is it not a bubble merry go round.

</comment><comment><USER4> > _The new hip language that solves all concurrent bigdata: RustScript on > Rails._

> _I posted this last week and no one gave a fuck._

> _Why I quit my job, shot my dog, and left my wife for JavaScript._

</comment><comment><USER5> A Photo Lib I Made That Happens to Use Photos of Emma Watson and How Oversensitive is Everyone and Now I'm a Sexist Chauvinistic Pig. ( 200 points | 404 comments )

</comment><comment><USER6> hackernews on 4chan on hackernews... navel gazing at its finest

</comment><comment><USER7> Had a chuckle

</comment><comment><USER8> Haha, I love it. They nailed it.</comment>


SpaceX: Starlink satellte production now 120 per month - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/10/spacex-starlink-satellte-production-now-120-per-month.html <comment><USER2> How sparse is LEO? 12,000 satellites sounds like a lot and what if we come to a point where we can't safely launch rockets with passengers to Mars?

<comment><USER3> I assume that all satellites are tracked, but surely the safety calculations are not trivial. However, if you estimate the orbits at 200 miles and equal distribution across the surface of the sphere, it translates to 20,000 sq miles per satellite.

<comment><USER4> 20,000 square miles is only ~141 miles square. Which is to say, flying through that layer, one of the satellites is probably closer than the ground.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Freemium usability testing for your startup - <AUTHOR>

I have been fine tuning a competitor to usertesting.com. I am specifically focusing on getting real user feedback for startup's websites.
Website owners ask the testers what to focus on and our testers record between 8-15 minutes of feedback while navigating the website.
I am crowd sourcing the feedback and delivering the video in as fast as 1-2 hours. I would like to show it to you and see if I can maintain a quick delivery rate.
http://betapunch.com. If you have a website and are looking for some honest feedback, give it a try and I would love to know what you think!
Thanks, -Ross <comment><USER2> Hi Ross, I am on the same boat as richo here. Not really a start up but just an app I put together and wanted some user feedback. The site looks easy enough to use and navigate through. For now I just went with one free test. Depending the quality of the feedback from that one tester, I might buy 5 more tests next.

Cheers and congrats! I definitely see myself using your site over usertesting.com

</comment><comment><USER3> I signed up out of curiosity, but it doesn't look like there's an option to not test yet.

I'm building a product, not a startup exactly and so I need to organise some useful data to be in the test environment before they use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> All you have to do is set your "Screen Recording Link" to "Disabled" from your control panel page and that will make it so you do not receive a test yet until you are ready. When you are ready to receive feedback, just make it say "enabled."

I already switched it to "disabled" for you when I saw the message you posted in your description.

I guess I have to make this feature on my site more clear.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We have just under 400 sites tested and a database of more than 1400 user testers.

<comment><USER4> Hi ross,

I just used the service to test my website. I really liked it. In my case, downloading the videos would be somewhat important.

Thanks a lot, I'll definitely be purchasing tests.

Somehow I managed to get two tests when only one should be free.

<comment><AUTHOR> You were the 400th startup so we gave you 2 :) It was a promotion I mentioned on twitter - you just happened to be lucky and signed up at the right time.

We do provide you with a direct URL to view your videos so you can share it with whoever you'd like to. I am still working on a solution for our customers to be able to download their videos.

Thanks for trying it out and I am glad you had a positive experience.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can Node.js Replace Mozilla Rhino? - <AUTHOR>

I was reading through John Resig's blogs about testing out different data structures for storing and searching an english dictionary using Javascript. It struck me that he uses Node.js instead of Mozilla Rhino to test and analyze these structures and algorithms, despite the fact that he works for Mozilla. Now I know that Mozilla and John are enlightened enough not to let project sponsorship or ownership get in the way of using the best tool, but I'm curious? How does Node compare to Rhino?
Is Rhino dying? Steve Yegge never released Rhino on Rails. Now, also, I know that Node is vastly different, as a platform from Rhino because, in Node, you write entire web applications using chains of callbacks, and Rhino is just a JS interpreter written in Java. But, what are the applications where Node can replace Rhino, either because third party libraries aren't necessary or because the libraries are implemented for Node?
I'd like to hear from HN users who've started using Node where they were using Rhino before and also from users who have JS code which will only run on Rhino.
I'll start off with a SVG/PDF print server I have written in Rhino which uses Apache FOP and Velocity. I can't imagine Node has libraries to let me do the same thing. <comment><USER2> Comparing Rhino with NodeJS is not exactly fair since NodeJS is a server-side JavaScript engine while Rhino is just a JS engine.

You should compare V8 with Rhino, or NodeJS with RingoJS (one example for the later: <http://www.erbix.com/documentation/overview/nodejs/> ).

</comment><comment><USER3> As vladd pointed out, one should be comparing Rhino with V8, especially since there are other server side JavaScript platforms running on V8 like <http://www.akshell.com>

Apparently the new Dynamic Invoke feature in Java 7 has resulted in significant performance improvements in the latest patches of Rhino, but it still lags behind V8: <http://twitter.com/hannesw/status/39677300169515008>

That being said, performance isn't the only factor, since Rhino offers the ability to utilize the wealth of well designed and production ready Java libraries, a much better garbage collector and ability to use more than 2GB of heap. However, these advantages that Rhino has over V8 will be eroded with time as more and more of these libraries are reimplemented in pure JavaScript.

A much more interesting question is whether asynchronous I/O will trump synchronous I/O for web app development. At Akshell we believe that the concrete advantages that synchronous I/O offers in terms of ease of development outweigh the potential benefits of increased performance offered by asynchronous I/O.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have written command line data preprocessing scripts using Rhino and later ported them to Node. They became significantly faster. Haven't touched Rhino since that day.

<comment><AUTHOR> My print server, written in Rhino, ramps from 65MB up to 130+MB of memory after a few jobs, which isn't surprising, since it's Java and using a some heavy libraries.

How much memory does Node use by itself?

<comment><USER5> The RSIZ for an instance of `node' running on OS X 10.6 after banging at the keyboard for a while, but doing nothing of note, is about 12M. The RSHRD is about 4M.

The numbers are nearly identical for a small-but-not-trivial Node.js-based web server I wrote that accepts requests and talks talks with Redis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rhino is fine if you have to use the JVM. If you have a choice then I would avoid it. It performs like a pig. The re-throws everything as a RuntimeException. It uses statics all over the place so having more than one instance can cause all sorts of weird problems. The documentation is a little out of date and there are some gotchas that you are left to figure out on your own. Still, it's the only thing available on the JVM and it actually works so it's not all bad. I would love to have alternatives to look at, but it's not to the point where I want to start writing my own. FYI, I'm using it for DOM scripting in a custom spider.

Also, like someone else said, Rhino is an analog for V8 while RingoJS is an analog for NodeJS.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think they overlap too much. Rhino's primary use case is Java scripting, and it's (alleged) low performance probably doesn't matter a lot since it's just the glue that binds together heavier Java libraries. I know a handful of apps that use rhino that way: Mirth, Orion Rhapsody, Pentaho's Kettle...

</comment><comment><USER8> I heard of Rhino a few years ago, but never got too into it. Node caught my attention recently because of the copious amounts of plugins that have come around. Kind of like JQuery; the community is so good that it makes sense that it's getting much more visibility than rhino. imo.</comment>


Triggering MS14-066 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.beyondtrust.com/triggering-ms14-066

<comment><USER2> OK, so I admittedly don't have the time to fully analyze this, but it looks like the bug is in the code that processes client certificates. The default setting in IIS is to ignore client certificates so does that mean that by default you can't trigger this exploit against an out of the box IIS setup?</comment>


Emulation und Decompilation of the Arcade Hit "OutRun" - <AUTHOR> http://reassembler.blogspot.de/2012/03/vroom-vroom.html

<comment><USER2> This is not "emulation", he's re-writing the engine in C++ using the original ROMs' data as input. Of course, by reverse-engineering the machine code to the required level of detail, plenty of bugs in the original game are found. Very impressive.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rewriting games and applications based on a disassembly is an impressive feat, considering the amount of hacks which end up in production code.

Similar projects i can think of off the top of my head:

OpenDune, OpenTTD, ScummVM, OpenTyrian

</comment><comment><USER4> Best thing about Outrun? The music.</comment>


Lawful spying docs: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, et. al. - <AUTHOR> http://cryptome.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Also included is Yahoo's attempt to have documents removed under DMCA:

<http://cryptome.org/0001/yahoo-cryptome.htm></comment>


John Gruber Explains Why Free Software Has Poor Usability - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/08/02/mpt-free-software-usability <comment><USER2> This is mostly cheap shot journalism. Sure, there's lots of free software out there with awful interfaces. But there's equally a ton of commercial software that's bad, and for many of the same reasons. Take a look at the crapware installed on any new Dell box, for example.

It's true that at the very high end, the "polish" of commercial software is better. There's no free equivalent to, say, Apple's release and UI artwork processes. But that's not strictly a "usability" critique. There's plenty of beautiful-but-clunky software out there.

<comment><USER3> To be expected from the Gruber-bot.

Don't you know? Apple is awesome, and those who criticize them "just don't get it".

I am writing this on a Apple MBP, so it's not like I have total disdain for Apple products, but Apple fanboys can be infuriating…

<comment><USER4> He doesn't even really mention apple once in his article. He clearly loves most things apple, but he wouldn't hesitate to criticize apple if they do silly things.

Its much more convincing to criticize his argument than just him. He makes a strong point - Software interfaces only are as good as the head guy in charge cares about. So if the head guy doesn't care much about the interface, the interface will suck even if there are great designers working on the project.

I'd say that open source software often has medium to poor interface quality is that making software look good takes a lot of time and has to be done by someone with design talent. This isn't usually the case - usually the lead programmer decided how it would look from the beginning, or just copied some other software.

If anything, open source software is usually decent because they most often just copy some commercial piece of software - which is usually decent. In the few cases where they get creative with the interface (like the gimp) it can come out half-baked because they don't spend enough time evaluating the usability of the design. (not that the gimp interface is half-baked).

<comment><USER3> But he's no Mark Pilgrim!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-t You know, I just don't see it. Maybe it's because I'm a developer, but I just don't see that many usability problems in open source projects, and these articles are going out of their way to avoid giving concrete examples. I'm marking this (the MPT article) down as Microsoft propaganda until the "interface design experts" start pointing things out.

It's not like it would be hard. Configuring Xorg makes me cry, and CUPS was still no walk in the park last time I checked.

<comment><USER5> I don't see many problems either, probably because I am a full-time GNU/Linux user, but another application that is often pointed out as difficult to use is The GIMP. I actually disagree with the premise that GIMP is hard to use, and find it quite intuitive for basic operations; most critiques actually complain that it doesn't have the Photoshop look&feel.

It often boils down to the difficult task of discerning usability, intuitiveness, efficiency, and familiarity.

<comment> mark-t Actually, I do have trouble with Gimp, too. I have to google how to make a straight line every time. Choosing brushes and changing the color are a pain, too. But I don't use it often, and about half the time I'm using it where I would have used MS Paint when I used Windows. There's probably a toy program somewhere that fills that gap, and I just haven't bothered looking. Maybe I should pick up Xfig.

<comment><USER6> As I recall, Photoshop doesn't have a line tool, either; you make lines with the brush tool and the shift key, just like in GIMP -- or you use the vector tools.

For people accustomed to basic painting applications that provide all manner of circles, lines, and squares, it comes as a surprise that such tools are so buried in Photoshop or GIMP. But it turns out that drawing lines is simply not that important for most Photoshop users, since lines aren't that important for photo touchup, creating web graphics, or digital painting. For line-heavy art, there are better tools like Illustrator.

The problem is that GIMP is tasked with replacing both Photoshop and MS Paint on the Linux desktop. The hidden assumption is that since Photoshop is more "powerful", its feature set is adequate for typical MS Paint tasks... which is akin to assuming that Linux doesn't need a word processor because TeX is more powerful.

<comment><USER7> Photoshop has a line tool, and circles, lines, squares, etc. are very important for many applications of Photoshop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if the recent resurgence of Apple will have a positive effect on the usability of the entire software industry. With so many geeks using macbook pros, it's only a matter of time before that aesthetic finds its way into more open source projects.

</comment><comment><USER9> Plenty of commercial software has poor usability. In general, it's hard to find people who can condense behavior into an intuitive workflow.

</comment><comment><USER10> Gruber does not deserve to be linked here... 99% of his blog is just him trying to keep up the price of his Apple stock...</comment>