Analyzing the constitutional foundation for U.S. patents and copyrights - <AUTHOR> http://ipwatchdog.com/2011/05/04/patents-copyrights-and-the-constitution-perfect-together/id=16769/

<comment><USER2> Warning: article is essentially legalese by Gene Quinn, a lawyer who's what you might want to call an "Intellectual Property Maximalist".

Quinn bases his arguments on a totally legal view of things, divorced from empirical or moral or ethical concerns. Naturally, he comes to some odd conclusions.</comment>


Streaming Similarity Search over one Billion Tweets (2013) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://istc-bigdata.org/plsh/docs/plsh_paper.pdf

<comment><USER2> ta;dr (Too Academic; Didn't Read) Here's a slightly better explanation of LSH [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12952729/how-to- understan...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12952729/how-to-understand- locality-sensitive-hashing)

<comment><USER3> That looks like a helpful link. Thanks!

(But please don't use gimmicky abbreviations or anti-intellectualisms here; this comment would be better if one deleted everything before "Here's".)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: 84 cents per month? - <AUTHOR> If your favorite free app started to charge you $.84 a month would you get rid of it? <comment><USER2> Not necessarily get rid of. But I would wonder how they could afford the transaction fees on 84c monthly transactions instead of fewer larger transactions.

<comment><AUTHOR> probably something like paypal micro-payments

<comment><USER2> Interesting had not heard of that.</comment></comment></comment>


Pseudo-Epidemics: Why COVID-19 is guaranteed to never end - <AUTHOR> https://blog.plan99.net/pseudo-epidemics-7603b2da839 <comment><USER2> Of all the things I thought I'd see on hackernews tonight, "Covid is fake" wasn't one of them.

The linchpin of this article is that the Germany death numbers are not substantially different: that is, Germany has not had excess deaths due to the virus when compared to death numbers from last year. Unfortunately, this is the worst possible conclusion you could draw from that graph. Germany _went into lockdown_ , and had people _stay home_ and _social distance_. Consider, for example, that Germany's traffic deaths are the _lowest they have been in 100 years_ [1]. Influenze has spread less extensively, people have died less from violent crimes, and other, similar phenomena have all occurred as a result of their lockdown. In spite of all of that, Germany has still hit their average death number.

What could _possibly_ explain this? Maybe, I dunno, _the pandemic_?!

1\. [https://www.dw.com/en/germany-traffic-deaths-fall-to- lowest-...](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-traffic-deaths-fall-to-lowest-point- since-reunification/a-53556709)

<comment><USER3> That isn't the lynchpin of the article. Did you actually read it to the end? That graph is a throwaway at the top which it explicitly says immediately after, isn't the focus of the article.

The article is about false positive rates on the PCR test.

Germany went into a form of lockdown, but so did the UK, and the UK saw relatively high excess deaths. There has been a lot of analysis of the data on this, and lockdown duration/start/severity doesn't correlate with outcomes in any obvious way.

<comment><USER2> I know the article is about false-positive rates. I did read it. But the claim is:

1\. There is not a significant uptick in deaths in Germany.

2\. The test is not 100% accurate, and indicates some false positives.

3\. From #1 and #2, we can conclude that the "pandemic" we saw there was the result of false positives, and not people actually getting sick.

If #1 isn't reliable, then neither is the conclusion. As hospitalizations and death climb in the US, writing a think-piece article pointing at how Spain is mis-accounting for false positives is irresponsible and dangerous. It pushes a "reopening is fine" narrative, when the people most-likely to read the article are living in places where that is patently false.

<comment><USER3> I don't believe (3) appears anywhere in the article. That's your inference, not the authors.

As for (1), the graph clearly shows there is no uptick in deaths in Germany. So I'm not sure what you mean by, if (1) is not reliable. The graph is right there.

As for your final point, you seem to be assuming the article was written by an American for a US audience. What's your evidence for that? COVID is bigger than the USA, you know.

<comment><USER2> Here is where (3) is heavily implied in the conclusion of the article:

       ...if something causes test numbers to rise then so will case numbers, which in turn will cause a further increase in testing, causing the rise to continue, triggering local lockdowns and pointless evidence free rituals, until people get depressed and stop trying to do things causing numbers being tested to fall again...

        Health is run by people who suffer no consequences from policy over-reactions. Lockdown induced job losses won't affect them, as they work for the government. A larger-scale case of "one rule for them and another for us" can't be imagined. It's thus no surprise when we read things like Public Health England defining a COVID death as anyone who has ever tested positive and then died, for any reason, at any time i.e. the UK being supposedly "one of the worst hit countries in the world" is a statistical fantasy. PHE officials defined it this way because they didn't want to be accused of being a nasty libertarians who were underplaying the problem just to help capitalist workers. The idea that they'd create other, bigger problems simply didn't occur to them — or worse, it did but they didn't care.

This is, indeed, a bit of speculation on my part, but I do not know how else to interpret this beyond "the pandemic wasn't anywhere near as severe as the tests suggests, the majority of cases we saw are false positives, and lockdowns are much worse than the actual risk." What do _you_ think I should take away fro this conclusion, instead?

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

My top comment in this thread explains why (1) is not reliable. The graph is a trick of the eyes, due to a lack of consideration for externalities. Over the entire time period, ~10,000 people died in Germany of Covid. Amortized over a 10-week outbreak period, that's 1k / week, on a graph with a scale an order of magnitude higher. Combined with the citation I provided for fewer traffic deaths, plus additional drops in violent crimes, seasonal flu, etc., it is not unimaginable that "everyone staying home" saved a thousand lives a week, or more, during that same time period.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

My final point is that the assumed audience is members of the UK, and given the author's concluding thoughts are mostly concerned with their degradation in respect for the UK health establishment, I think that's sort of a fair assumption to make.

</comment><comment><USER4> The most insightful chart in this article is the % of positive cases per number of tests. Surprised that this statistic isn't more readily available to the public. As we increase testing capabilities in the US, if is inevitable that the number of detected cases will also rise - parsing out the difference between a higher detection rate, and a higher infection rate, is something that can easily provide clarification on the current situation.

<comment><USER5> > _As we increase testing capabilities in the US, it is inevitable that the > number of detected cases will also rise_

Most people miss that aspect and just look at overall case count.

Personally, I'm more and more encouraged every day that the case count grows dramatically and the resulting deaths don't. That means it's far far less deadly than we thought in March.

<comment><USER6> Except the death count has followed cases count nearly exactly with about one month of delay. (R > 0.9 for dumb linear fit, better for other kinds.)

Unless you're alleging that testing people or quarantining them kills them, which would be laughable. Or some grand scale conspiracy theory to make it look like a pandemic worldwide.

<comment><USER3> In which countries?

In the USA the case graph and death graph looks quite different. Just use the Google charts to quickly see:

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=usa%20covid%20deaths](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=usa%20covid%20deaths)

In Spain the death graph lagged the cases graph by only a few days in the first wave. In the second wave of cases (positive tests) they're now experiencing, deaths haven't gone up at all, as apparently the patients are now younger and recover quicker.

Can you show some graphs and working for this claim that death graphs are basically just lagged versions of the case graph? Also why would deaths follow cases by a month when infection-to-death is supposedly about 18 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be interested in whether false positives are statistically independent when you run the test multiple times on the same patient.

If they are, this suggests that at some point you ought to simply re-test everyone who tests positive the first time.

"At some point" likely only comes once the disease is well under control, maybe down to 3% of current active cases, just as a wild guess? When that happens, the prior of actually having COVID-19 gets _really_ low. Such that even with a positive COVID-19 test the posterior probability is still somewhat low.

This all falls apart if multiple tests on the same patient aren't statistically independent in false positives. For example, I'm no biologist, but I'd guess it's possible there are a few people out there whose human genetics by chance have a short sequence in common with the viral genetics of COVID-19. If that's the case, that part of the patient's own genetic code might invariably get picked up and amplified by the PCR test. So these unlucky folks will _always_ test positive for COVID regardless of whether they have it or not.

<comment><USER6> They would also need to have the antibodies tested for in the non-PCR tests. (ELISA specifically.) Which reduces the likelihood of exactly this error to incredibly low.

Cross-testing some similar coronavirus as positive is much more plausible mechanism of failure. However, different tests check different subsequences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's no point in testing, retesting if the test isn't precise. Are there any reliable tests available? Statistics points that tests aren't reliable.

Excess deaths aren't reliable either, because it can happen independent of any new disease.

The fact that strikes me most is that people have the same flu symptoms, but no "new" symptoms different from the diseases we already know.

<comment><USER9> Generally speaking ... If the false positive rate is low enough and the costs of performing the test aren't prohibitive... running the test multiple times makes sense regardless of how precise or sensitive it is.

an example with math... if false negative is 75%, but false positive is 0%, then you just run the test multiple times to increase confidence in the results.

<comment><USER8> But if the results are wrong or misleading, there's no point in trusting in them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this flagged?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently, discussing Covid test reliability means "Covid is fake" according to the top-rated commenter on this thread.

<comment><USER2> The article is only tangentially about Covid test reliability. It's actually a "reopen the UK" thinkpiece with some poorly-drawn conclusions to support that stance. While it points out the obvious insights you get with testing unreliabily (which anyone who knows anything about statistics will nod along with), it mistakenly uses it to reach this conclusion:

        ...if something causes test numbers to rise then so will case numbers, which in turn will cause a further increase in testing, causing the rise to continue, triggering local lockdowns and pointless evidence free rituals, until people get depressed and stop trying to do things causing numbers being tested to fall again...

        Health is run by people who suffer no consequences from policy over-reactions. Lockdown induced job losses won't affect them, as they work for the government. A larger-scale case of "one rule for them and another for us" can't be imagined. It's thus no surprise when we read things like Public Health England defining a COVID death as anyone who has ever tested positive and then died, for any reason, at any time i.e. the UK being supposedly "one of the worst hit countries in the world" is a statistical fantasy. PHE officials defined it this way because they didn't want to be accused of being a nasty libertarians who were underplaying the problem just to help capitalist workers. The idea that they'd create other, bigger problems simply didn't occur to them — or worse, it did but they didn't care.

The key to this is the over-estimation of deaths. If cases are up, but deaths are not, the author argues, we should _reopen everything_ and _stop large- spread testing_ , because those cases are false positives. And that's a reasonable stand, in the abstract, and the discussion of false positives is worthwhile. Unfortunately, the author uses this in combination with the _possible_ (and unsubstantiated) over-counting of deaths (and some weird libertarian persecution complex) as a way to justify reopening the country and stopping testing. That starts to sound like a claim toward "Covid is not a big deal" _at best_ (and "Covid is fake" at worst).

<comment><USER10> You might not like or agree with article, but I actually found it very well reasoned and provide alternative point of view to a very important discussion.

Thus I'm really puzzled why this community would flag it, it is disappointing frankly.

<comment><USER2> I think an article about false positive rates, and signal to noise, is indeed interesting. Discussing how most of the tests we have float around 1%-2%, and leaning on that to argue that reopening may be safe when tests are steady around those levels, may actually be worthwhile.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't do that. Instead, it:

\- Calls into question the legitimacy of coronavirus death impact, consulting a flat death without considering the externalities of reduced risks that lockdowns bring about.

\- Links to the article suggests healthy people shouldn't be wearing masks, even though many people are contagious well before showing symptoms.

\- Calls into question Spain's second wave as false, the result of over- testing, even though [it isn't, the case count is rising far above any expected false-positive rate, and people are dying there]([https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/)).

\- Puts forth the sentiment: "The idea that [lockdowns] create other, bigger problems simply didn't occur to [Public Health England] — or worse, it did but they didn't care."

If the article addressed this head-on and used that metric to determine which lockdowns might be necessary, that'd be one thing. These conclusions, however, are a bit inexcusable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


From nasty to nice: how adblockers are trying to pivot - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/12/adblockers-trying-pivot-nasty-nice <comment><AUTHOR> The article is heavily biased, of course, because the Guardian gets revenue from advertising. But it still raises some interesting issues about the future of ad-blocking and earning money online.

I was a keen user of readability back in the day. I'm all in favour of a mechanism that allows me to make micropayments to content providers i wish to reward, regardless of how advertising gets involved.</comment>


Ask HN: Does using Linux actually help you learn about how Linux works? - <AUTHOR>

Or does it just teach your how to troubleshoot via Google and the docs?<p>Which distros are better for learning how Linux/Unix actually functions under the hood? <comment><USER2> Depends.

If you install Ubuntu, for example, and do nothing but be an end user, no. If you install Debian or Slackware or Fedora, or CentOS and actually learn how the internals work by installing software, setting up networks, firewalls, proxy server, Web servers, then yes.

I started with Linux back in 1998 and it's still my primary desktop flavour (Debian). I prefer BSDs for servers being they are arguably more stable and nothing beats ZFS, the BSD notion of jails, and the TCP/IP stack.

Gentoo is a good learning experience, but only if you have a full weekend to start it. Last time I ran a stage 1 Gentoo tarball, it took 12 hours to bootstrap. Never again.

Slackware or CRUX Linux are great learning flavours. As is Debian if you do the expert install and make mistakes.

Go to a Linux Users Group when they have installfests. Have an experienced Linux sysadmin "break" your installation and try to fix it. This is how I learned. Going to my LUG and getting jobs where Linux and UNIX were prevalent. I'm making inroads with bosses where I work now to displace Windows. Slowly but surely. They see the savings and they see the stability. Win.

</comment><comment><USER3> These days, it's more 'install and go' than previously. That's not to say there is nothing at all to do to customise your system, but it's probably at about the same level as customising your Windows system.

Several years ago, things were different. And it used to be that Slackware was the most hands-on distro for learning and using Linux. I believe that is still the case.</comment>


Uber's air taxi vision isn't amazing it's dystopian - <AUTHOR> https://www.theage.com.au/national/uber-s-air-taxi-vision-isn-t-amazing-it-s-dystopian-20190612-p51wze.html <comment><USER2> And the first computer ads were showing a dystopian world where the rich can converse on expensive computers about how poor everyone else is who doesn't have one and can have unlimited access to information while the poor live in isolation.

New things tend to be expensive—it's pretty rare for any new technology or standard of living to become universally available from day one. This is true of tvs, radios, computers, fridges, air conditioners. I can't see why helicopters are any more dystopian when they become more available.

</comment><comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I work for Uber.

> Michael Kaine is national secretary of the Transport Workers' Union.

When the author has such a strong conflict of interest, the byline really should be at the top of the article and the conflict of interest be spelled out loud and clear for the reader before they start reading. Anything else is journalistic malpractice.</comment>


About the OS X Yosemite v10.10.1 Update - <AUTHOR> http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT6572 <comment><USER2> Really hope they fix the multiple display issues where menu bar icons are redrawn every time you switch displays causing flickering in your peripheral vision. Very annoying. According to the link below, this is "by design" but it clearly seems like a bug to me.

[http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152038/prevent- redr...](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152038/prevent-redraw-of- menu-bar-icons-yosemite)

<comment><USER3> It is baffling to me how poorly apple, and their OS, has supported multiple monitors.

I heard anecdotes that it was passable on Mavericks, but prior to that there were all manner of basic usage problems.

It makes me think that there must be some kind of "apple way" resistance to multiple monitors ? Is it considered a "wrong" use-case ? Do people at apple not use multiple screens in their own work ? (how could they, with the issues that have plagued it since snow leopard...)

What's the deal ?

<comment><USER4> I am not sure what you mean. Are you sure what you mean?

OSX (and I think even earlier MacOS) have supported multiple monitors for quite a long time, historically better than most other OSs. Many of us use multiple monitors on OSX with no problems. One neat thing OSX/MacOS have always done with multiple monitors is allow you drag windows from one to the other as if they were one big workspace -- even having a window partially on one monitor and partially on another, with it working fine.

What has happened recently is that the combination of the OSX UI, multiple monitors, and new features to support a 'full screen' mode (which seems to some people like a sort of convergence with iOS) -- have been problematic. Apple has had trouble deciding what _should_ happen with multiple monitors in this situation, and has had trouble making it work reliably.

Until the most recent OSX release, you could only do 'full screen' mode on your 'main' monitor, the other monitors would all go dark. Which was pretty annoying for those who wanted to use this newish feature. But other than that, multiple monitors had no real problems.

In the most recent OSX, they've tried to do some things to take care of this, so you can use 'full screen' mode on all your monitors (one 'full screen' workspace on each monitor). (Sadly, these things also get rid of the ability to have a window half on one monitor and half on another).

The solution they tried appears to have some technical problems. Which yes, is frustrating for people with multiple monitors, who want to use the 'full screen' feature, with the new improvements (which you can turn off if you want, to back to only being able to use one monitor in full screen mode).

I think many people do have a sense that Apple QA isn't quite as good as it used to be. And they do seem to be having trouble getting the new-ish 'full screen mode' (which people seem to like) to work reasonably with multiple monitors. But I don't think it accurately represents the history to suggest that OSX has historically poorly supported multiple monitors. I am not familiar with what you are referring to when you say "prior to [Mavericks] there were all manner of basic usage problems," that has not been my experience and I have not previously heard of such experience.

<comment><USER5> "historically better than most other OSs"

Such as? And how?

"even having a window partially on one monitor and partially on another, with it working fine."

Huh? In Safari, on 10.10 - dragging a window from my iMac to half on my TB display results in the window being partially visible on the iMac, and not at all visible on the TB. When you drag further to the TB display (so your mouse, but not the entire window is on the TB), then it snaps to the TB display. Both inconsistent and not at all what you describe. I don't have any windows so far I can get to sit across monitor boundaries.

Which I read later is related to 10.10?

So handling of multiple monitors is broken from one extreme (full screen pre Mavericks) to the other "Well, full screen works now, but your screens are effectively fenced off (Yosemite). Not sure how this is "better than most" support for multiple monitors.

"(which you can turn off if you want, to back to only being able to use one monitor in full screen mode)."

That's a horrible hack that with everyone's insistent claim on Apple's attention to detail and quality should never have made it passed QA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish I hadn't upgraded in the first place, the UI looks terrible, even with transparency dialed down it's definitely a step back from mavericks.

[http://uxcritique.tumblr.com](http://uxcritique.tumblr.com)

Low transparency mode has this weird bug where the corner of rounded rectangles are black rather than fully transparent. Try enabling it in accessibility and then changing the volume.

Edit: I wonder why I am being downvoted. UI/UX bugs are bugs as well and need to be addressed!

<comment><USER7> I would think the downvoting is from your "UI looks terrible" comment rather than the possible bug you mention.

<comment><USER6> The UI does look terrible and, as the link I provided shows, many things people complain about are not a matter of personal taste, but actual reductions of usability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Improves Wi-Fi reliability

Here's hoping it fixes the issue I've been having since upgrading. My wifi doesn't drop, but my internet access stops working every 10 minutes or so. Cycling my wifi connected brings it back.

<comment><USER9> In particular, I was experiencing the issue reported here: [http://markmaunder.com/2014/11/13/os-x-10-10-yosemite- wifi-p...](http://markmaunder.com/2014/11/13/os-x-10-10-yosemite-wifi- problems-analyzed/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it just me or do the last iOS and OSX updates look really bad? I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 8 and somehow calls started dopping (even after 8.1 and resetting the entire device twice!). The Apple help desk actually asked me to install each app one-by-one to see if that finds a rogue app! Luckily, I was within a year of warranty and they replaced my iPhone.

I have not upgraded to OSX Yosemite yet. I am afraid that there will be a performance hit. Even the new iPhone 5S I got replaced faces some lags that weren't present in iOS 7.

What are your views about upgrading to Yosemite, esp. related to dev environments?

Edit: I have faced similar lags after updates on my iPad Air too. Hence, the dismay.

<comment><USER11> OS X updates have been virtually flawless for me in the past. Yosemite is the first one with big problems:

\- No longer able to connect to any 5GHz wifi routers.

\- Wifi drops suddenly and won't reconnect automatically even though the network is present.

\- Very slow wifi generally.

\- Unable to restore from sleep, machine reboots.

\- External display doesn't come up during login after sleep, need to open MacBook and login there.

\- Random hangs/kernel panics. (Could be explained by faulty RAM, but starting to happen just after Yosemite upgrade? Doubt it.)

\- Laggy UI.

The last point is the worst. "Reduce transparency" does nothing for me. WindowServer is occasionally using 20-30% when the system is doing almost no redrawing. Safari is sluggish, and often hangs for several seconds — especially on opening new blank tabs, loading a new site, trying to load an embedded YouTube video ("HTML5" mode) — before becoming responsive again. Overall, it feels like my machine (early 2013 MBP, quad-core 2.7GHz i7, 16GB, SSD) just rolled back two hardware generations.

Hopefully this update should fix the wifi issues. But the lagginess isn't mentioned in the release notes. Has anyone gotten any performance improvements by reinstalling the OS from scratch?

<comment><USER11> Forgot these:

\- Random graphics glitches, especially in Safari. Random garbage/empty areas being painted.

\- FileVault's encryption process doesn't finish. "Connect power adapter to resume encryption". It _is_ connected. Has been doing this since I upgraded.

\- If you enable "Reduced transparency", you get certain graphics artifacts. For example, the rounded corners on screen overlays such as the brightness and volume settings are painted in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My rMBP updated just fine to 10.10.1 but when I went to update my sister's MBP with a 840 SSD and Trim Enabled I ran into the grey forbidden screen and safe mode yielded the 'Waiting for root device' error. This can be fixed by going into recovery mode (Command+R) on boot and running the following commands:

        rm -rf /Volumes/<10.10 Partition>/System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext
        cp -r /System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext/Volumes/<10.10 Partition>/System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext
        touch /Volumes/<10.10 Partition>/System/Library/Extensions
        kextcache -u /Volumes/<10.10 Partition>

The update installed just fine after that, the commands disable TRIM and restore the original OSX kext which was replaced by TRIM Enabler

Commands Source: [http://www.cindori.org/forums/topic/heads-up- osx-10-10-beta-...](http://www.cindori.org/forums/topic/heads-up- osx-10-10-beta-no-go/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I have the same SSD (Samsung 840 PRO) and had no issues at all. I highly recommend this script to enable TRIM: [https://gist.github.com/return1/4058659](https://gist.github.com/return1/4058659)

<comment><USER13> Be aware this script (and Trim Enabler) require you to turn off kext signature validation. This feature was added in 10.9 but it only raised warnings on missing or invalid signatures. It didn't actually prevent the kext loading. 10.10 now raises an exception whenever you load an unsigned or invalidly signed kext.

Disabling this check returns you to 10.9-level security and removes barrier to malware installing its own kernel modules.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, unfortunately there is no way to enable TRIM without turning off signature validation _completely_. Apple calls the feature kext developer mode. It would be nice to see them providing more fine grained control over which kexts are supposed to run in dev mode — or just enable TRIM for non- Apple SSDs in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-rat Disappointed that the update doesn't seem to mention graphics fixes. Many people (myself and my colleague included) are having issues with the dual gpu mbp retina. Graphics corruption, forced logouts, big black blocks - seems to happen while switching from intel to nvidia.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ah, too bad there aren't any fixes listed for Bluetooth. I've been having all kinds of issues with device pairing and, once paired, connections dropping. I also suspect Bluetooth (or rather, searches for nonexistent BT input devices) to be the cause of very long delays when resuming from hibernation.

<comment><USER15> This is indeed a huge bummer, now that I've upgraded to yosemite I've got 1-2 full seconds of lag streaming audio to my blue tooth receiver.

<comment><USER16> same here. hope they fix it soon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sigh. It took Apple a month to release a relatively small and minor incremental update to an OS they launched over a month ago riddled with bugs and UI inconsistencies and issues.

This update is meant to address the wifi issues of intermittent connections, weak connections, constant dropouts and lost packets. Installing the update has not fixed the wifi issues and some Googling/Apple forums proves this. I have resorted to using my Dell laptop more than my Mac because the wifi issues have been too much to bear.

Apple used to be about quality. Mavericks was a fantastic operating system I had no such issues with. What are Apple doing over there? This is what happens when you put an industrial designer in charge of your software.

</comment><comment><USER18> They mention improved Wi-Fi reliability. Hope this solves the disconnection I've been having on Yosemite.

</comment><comment><USER19> Have they fixed cifs slowness in Yosemite? That would be my only reason for upgrading. I actually use a vm Windows for browsing network shares on my Mac it's so bad..

<comment><USER20> Perhaps you should switch up from cifs to smbfs? I used to use cifs in Maverick but now appear to get slightly better stability and performance using smbfs with my Window 2012 server and 10.10.

Jury is still out on 10.10.1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > You should back up your system before installation. To do this you can use > Time Machine.

Except that Yosemite stopped recognizing my Time Machine drive because it was plugged in through a powered USB 3.0 hub.

It doesn't look like I'm the only one with this problem - if someone from Apple were to PM me, I could reply with the USB vendor & product ID to help get this solved.

</comment><comment><USER22> I see nothing about it, but I've noticed an issue with headphones (and maybe multiple monitors). If you plug in headphones while your laptop is asleep, then wake it up, it seems to crash with a "sleep wake failure". Once I found the issue I was able to help a lot of people stop their macs from crashing on wake as well. Really hope that one is fixed in this update.

</comment><comment><USER23> Update in progress, I hope it solves some PDF file crashes on preview for which I submitted some crash reports :)

<comment><USER23> And... it didn't

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There doesn't appear to be any fixes for FileVault, which is rather disappointing. Under certain circumstances, particularly with new installs, FileVault can get into an inconsistent state and the only known cure (so far) is to erase the disk and reinstall.

Edit: Nope, FileVault is still broken after the patch.

</comment><comment><USER25> No mention about fixes to the WindowServer using all available CPU either... When there's animation on the dock it happily uses ties up a core for as long as it can.

</comment><comment><USER26> Would be nice if it fixed computer names on a local network incrementing randomly: hostname (1), hostname (2), ..., hostname (n)

<comment><USER5> Disable Wake for Network Activity. Worked for me, but I don't like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm still on 10.9. If I don't have an iPhone, what is my reason to upgrade right now? All I've seen so far is the continuity stuff.</comment>


Millennials Who Are Thriving Financially Have One Thing in Common: Rich Parents - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/millennials-with-rich-parents/398501/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> I'd wager that if you look at Millenials who are thriving financially, you'd find a bigger correlation: those who majored in STEM and ended up with jobs in technical professions. Take a look at the math in the article:

"Imagine an individual who earns $50,000 and is shopping for a $200,000 home (the median U.S. income and house price). This person would like to put 20 percent down. If he or she follows the popular financial advice to save 10 percent of his or her annual pay, it'll take him or her about eight years to have that down payment ready to go. If that same person has $26,000 of student debt, which means monthly payments of $280 based on a 10-year repayment plan, it'll take this person closer to nine years."

Now imagine that the individual makes $80K instead of $50K, a not unreasonable technical wage even outside of SF or NYC. Even after taxes, he can save the down payment in _2 years_.

The financial outcomes of my friends & acquaintances have largely followed their facility with technology. The best hackers are now billionaires; the good ones made a million or two, even if they took the safe path of working at a big company. Even ones who just know how to use Facebook, Word, and Excel do fine in digital marketing specialties. The English majors are struggling hard, often in service jobs.

<comment><USER3> _The best hackers are now billionaires_

[citation needed]

This is a lie. Hell, even Torvalds is worth less than half a billion. Stallman is basically broke. Carmack is worth less than a hundred million.

Meanwhile, sociopaths and kids with Ivy connections seem to be the ones raking in the money you mention.

<comment><USER2> Drew Houston and a couple early Googlers. I was talking personal acquaintances in the post, not the people generally lionized by the hacker community. There's this phenomena with a lot of hackers where once you make a lot of money, you're no longer cool, mainly _because_ you've made a lot of money. Your day job also tends to shift to managing people, but I can assure you that many of the founders of the big unicorns today are wicked smart technically in addition to being savvy businesspeople.

<comment><USER4> If you make millions by selling out against the hacker ethics or selling out your users, that would be pretty selfish and uncool.

<comment><USER2> There's a degree of Hacker Ethic in-between Stallman and Zuckerburg (who, BTW, is quite a skilled hacker even if he does take advantage of basically everyone he comes in contact with). Most people don't believe it's unethical to get paid for the fruits of your labor, nor to enter into deals with mutually- consenting adults. If you do, that's fine, but realize that's not going to stop other people from doing it, and if you live by that, _somebody else_ will get paid for the fruits of your labor. The thread is about how to be financially successful as a Millenial: the best way to be financially successful, in any generation, is to work hard at things that other people value and insist that you're compensated appropriately for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I dont get their definition of rich. My parents helped me with college, yet I still graduated with the average debt of $29,000 from school, I make less then 40,000, yet I was able to pay off all my loans and debt, while saving more then 30% income towards retirement every year, AND save 8k for a future down payment. However my parents certainly are not rich, unless you define under 70k(pretax)/year combined in income with 2 kids rich..

<comment><USER6> Where do you live? You can't be paying much rent.

<comment><USER5> in Michigan, I pay about $950/m for rent and all utilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this any different than it used to be?

<comment><USER6> Wages have been stagnant for the past 30 years (inflation adjusted), but education and housing costs have been skyrocketing.

Rent control laws are set up to benefit long term residents, so new workers or people who move to a new city get screwed.

So it's much worse than it used to be. Depending on how far back you go with "used to be".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The system works!!</comment>


Ask HN: Would you work for Equifax (or the likes?) - <AUTHOR> The Equifax hack(s) have resulted in impassioned discussions on security, patching and due diligence in general. Many CISOs and security stalwarts have had a lot to say on the matter and yet we don't see any security leaders actually wanting to work at companies like Equifax.<p>So I am curious to learn what would it take for the security champions to be enticed into working for Equifax et al. <comment><USER2> Glassdoor says that a Senior Security Enginner salary is $110k at Equifax. The reviews say things like "Bad Reputation, Business emphasizes revenue over quality" and "Most work is performed offshore, Poor strategy from Management".

Equifax failed at security because Equifax's leadership doesn't care. They will only be convinced by seeing revenue drop or incurring larger penalties from the government. Revenue will not drop because the affected people are not paying customers. Penalties will not increase because the current political climate is "All regulations are bad" when it should be "Bad regulations are bad; Good regulations are good."

<comment><USER3> I'm a Security Engineer and there's no way in heck I would work for Equifax for $110k. Not after their disaster.

The problem at a lot of businesses is security has no tangible ROI. You're not going to make a million bucks because you implemented a new SIEM.

The value of security is hidden. It prevents you from having loss. It's hard to quantify the value when your job is, essentially, preventing bad things from happening.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if there would be value in preventing bad things happening to people and institutions which are trying to decide if they should give credit to someone. As in, if a certain individual is credit-worthy. Maybe a score could be calculated by an entity which has access to the outcome of every person's relationship with credit in the past.

But it would be beyond ironic if such an institution, selling a sense of security as their main product, could not see the value in protecting the security of their own assets.

It would be also sad that in a myopic attempt to squeeze every single penny in profit, such a company would underpay the very people who run the machinery it is built on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Probably something akin to "as a CISO, if I'm hired here, I expect all levels, onshore and off, including executives to follow these new security policies and plans, putting features on hold to do security review, audit, and rewrites - and anyone actively refusing to participate or trying to put bullshit first will be terminated immediately; teams are expected to cooperate in this regard or else same" in addition to an absurd sack of liability money.

</comment><comment><USER6> I imagine getting any security best practices (as defined by the employee) implemented to be as much as a political challenge as it is technical.

With that said, most technical people don't want to be politicians.</comment>


Good resumes are short & informative. Great ones are recursive. - <AUTHOR> http://cv.piwai.info

<comment><USER2> IMHO, it is relatively important that resumes can be read on mobile. If you and I met at an event and you pointed me to your online resume there is a 98% chance that it gets loaded on my phone (nexus 1 latest OS). If I'm impressed then, and only then, will I go home and read it.

Yours doesn't permit navigation as you advise, though the links at the top work. The pages do not scale to fit my screen, so content is truncated. Also I can't back out of the site.

Obviously all my own opinion, though that is the opinion of someone actively trying to hire great people.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think good resumes are accessible. This one barely fits my screen, and navigation is non-intuitive.</comment>


I moved my kids out of America. It was the best parenting decision Ive ever made - <AUTHOR> http://theweek.com/articles/703660/moved-kids-america-best-parenting-decision-ive-ever-made <comment><USER2> Is it just me? I visited the site and within seconds my CPU fan was pegged at max, the screen was dipping into grey, and response times were laughably.

So I read it in lynx.

To make this genuinely appropriate to the HN audience, do you think carefully about the performance of your site? I now have deliberately avoided "theweek.com" and all its ads, etc, for the text only browsing experience, where I could read the article cleanly and simply. I'm sure that's not what their site developers intended.

Then again, maybe it's just me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's my bad. I browse with several blockers so sometimes don't notice I've posted a crap website. I'll avoid this one in the future.</comment></comment>


OneWeb files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/28/21189404/oneweb-chapter-11-bankruptcy-space <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what this means, they launched a set of satellite last Saturday and then they file for bankruptcy? Is it because SoftBank is pulling out due to the pandemic? Is the overall project going yo survive in some shape or form?

A rather sad outcome, I hope Amazon Kuiper will materialize so that there's some competition for SpaceX's Starlink. I think having more than one player in this space has been important in ensuring that _any_ of these constellation will come to fruition.

<comment><USER2> They need ~600 satellites in orbit to start offering service but they have only launched 74 so far. It sounds like a very risky business model to start launching before they had all the capital, but there are rumors that Softbank withdrew some pledged capital.</comment></comment>


What's the best online BS in Computer Science program? - <AUTHOR> After twenty years working as a hardware/software engineer in various fields I am thinking about completing a degree.  I never finished mine.  I originally went for a EE.  Took most of the science, math, physics and a couple of programming courses.  Got bored.
By the time I was done with my second semester in college I had designed and built my own robots (as in: machine the parts and assemble, no kits) and all of the computers and electronics to drive them.  I implemented all of the low-level code in FORTH (which I wrote from scratch) and wrote the high level operating software to run on a PC.  This project became the subject of a paper I presented at an international conference on the subject.  Again, school was like being in a slow-motion scene in a movie.  I had to move faster.
I was designing and programming my own computers from scratch.  By that I mean, wire-wrapping chips and writing the BIOS in assembler, implementing FORTH from scratch, designing my own floppy disk controllers from scratch and implementing drivers, etc.  School felt very slow and painful, I was learning at a much faster pace on my own.
Later-on I got in to FPGA's and went on to design boards to do real-time image processing in hardware.  Again, I did the hardware, all the firmware and real-time OS for an embedded micro that ran the whole thing.
In all I accumulated experience programming in Assembler (various), C, C++, Forth, Lisp, Visual Basic, Objective-C, PHP, Javascript/jQuery, Verilog and probably a few more languages.
Now, years later, I am thinking about the idea of completing a bachelors in CS degree online.  The motivations are many.  From personal accomplishment to the idea of going further and opening the doors to get into research in a field I love, robotics.  I am fascinated by humanoid robotics and want to contribute, but, despite my accomplishments, the lack of degrees stands in the way of participating in that field.
I'm wondering what HN members think about the various programs now available.  I've looked at University of Illinois and a few others.  Not sure how they all rank.
I am also very interested in the possibility of receiving credit for some of what I've done over the years.  I mean, I could probably teach some of these courses with some prep.  I wonder if these programs allow one to take a test and bypass the class altogether.
BTW, I posted a much shorter version of this from my phone last night but it didn't show-up.  My apologies if it ends-up double-posted. <comment><USER2> Well, its not the "best" in terms of academics but I have found Thomas Edison State College to be the best in terms of catering to transfer students who are in similar situations to you as they are rather liberal in accepting transfer credits and actually applying them towards a degree and they also allow testing out of classes and do provide some sort of credit for work experience. I am in a somewhat similar situation, although haven't been working nearly as long, but I basically have a whole pile of credits from a bunch of different colleges and have recently enrolled her to finish my degree online. Its a state college that caters to students nationally and has reasonable tuition rates. I've just enrolled now and start my classses soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll check them out. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> depaul is decent, but expensive.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there spaghetti code in e.g. iOS? - <AUTHOR> Whenever I work on software, I find that it usually has some parts that shine and others that smell.
This makes me wonder if there's also code smells in "big" software like iOS or Gmail that should be rewritten?
Any experience? <comment><USER2> I haven't touched Apple code in a few years, but in the past while doing development on their platforms, I've often downloaded code from opensource.apple.com or the darwin project, and I've usually encountered very high quality code (at least for the low level stuff I was looking at - primarily audio subsystems and objc language).

You can actually learn quite a bit looking at these codebases, and I'm glad they opened up as much as they did.

<comment><USER3> Did they have a choice to open up as much as they did?

<comment><USER2> The instant questioning of motives has always bothered me. Starting from a position of distrust makes for poor cooperation, and lower productivity.

<comment><USER4> It seems your questioning his motives as starting from a position of distrust, rather than curiosity :^)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure about spaghetti, but they sure as hell has shit tons of bug in iOS , [https://openradar.appspot.com/](https://openradar.appspot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently working working with another publicly traded SF company that you've heard of, and yes. They have really big, old, codebases, and yes parts of them are nearly incomprehensible.

The thing is, they recognize the bad parts and work to fix them when it makes sense. Companies with bad technical leadership will ignore the bad parts- like wallpapering over a crumbling wall.</comment>


Why Google is making an operating system  - <AUTHOR> http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/07/why-google-is-making-operating-system.html <comment><USER2> FTA: _Google won the browser war, with the help of Mozilla. The important point here is that Google doesn't care what browser you use. They don't make money on browsers, they make money on online offerings and apps so all they care about is that your browser is fast and supports the newest technologies._

1) Chrome's market share is minute

2) Google makes over 95% of their money on advertising

I'm not entirely certain how much thought went into this article, but I'm certain that the Google OS hype machine has gone into overdrive as I'm seeing too many articles like this that make absolutely no sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Chrome's market share is minute_

Well, that's kind of the point I was trying to make - Google make their money on advertising and webapps, not on browsers. It doesn't matter for their bottomline which browser people use. All that matters to them is that people use google's products, and the fewer roadblocks there are the more money google makes.

Chrome doesn't need to have more than a minute marketshare to drive the competition to make better browsers and more internet capable OS'es, which will ultimately be good for Google. For Google it's not about marketshare in the OS or browser business, it's about driving innovation so that users will move on to the web.

<comment><USER2> Ok this is interesting. I agree with you about the roadblock argument to a point. I think where it breaks down is that the browser itself is the choke point for any internet based strategy as it is the gateway to the web for 99.9% of the users out there.

To evolve the browser into something that is closer to the server would eliminate the roadblock of which you speak. I don't think you need to create an OS to do that. IE has a decided advantage for Microsoft as it comes pre- installed and is prominently showcased within the OS itself. The fact that you have to download and then install either Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera presents a roadblock for users. Switching operating systems is an even bigger roadblock.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that maybe I've put my arguments forward in a bad way. I'll try from a different angle.

In business strategy there's a concept called complementary products. A complementary product is one that is one that makes your product more valuable the cheaper it is. Cars and gasoline is an example of this. Servers and software is another. The cheaper gasoline is, the more valuable a car is. The good strategy is to commoditize your complements, thus driving down price. This will put more value into your product. For instance, if you run Google you make software. Your interest is to comoditize servers, thus driving the price down. This makes your business more valuable because your complement has been commoditized. Indeed, this is exactly what Google is doing when they use standard boxes in large arrays instead of buying Sun servers.

My argument in the blogpost is similar. If Google can remove as many obstacles as possible, and commoditize their complementary products they will win. This is exactly what they are doing with this move. They are forcing their competitors into making a product that will make Google money. Google doesn't care (financially at least) about browsers and operating systems. They make their money on online apps and marketing. Their strategy is to make it as easy as possible to get online and use their services. The argument is underpinned by the fact that both are open sourced. They won't make Google any money directly, but they'll help tremendously in commoditizing OS'es and browsers.

Joel Spolsky has a post about omplementary products that explains the concept much better than I can ever hope to do: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html>

<comment><USER2> Ok well stated. I think I got sidelined by the quote I threw up in the original posting (especially the browser war statement).

But the theoretical strategy that you state (the commoditization of the operating system) seems a bit "round about" for Google. In other words, I think it would be better for Google to really make their web browser into a new kind of web browser instead of creating an entirely new kind of operating system. Better yet, a web browser that enhances an existing operating system might be a better way to commoditize the OS.

It is possible that they have figured out a killer app for their new OS, but I suppose that's fuel for a separate discussion.

<comment><USER3> _I think I got sidelined by the quote I threw up in the original posting_

If you had RTFA before your first comment, you would not have gotten sidelined.

The author (mixmax) of TFA graciously conceded in his reply that his "Google won the browser wars" was probably not the best choice of words, but the context made it immediately clear to me what he meant by that choice of words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I ask you : Is it good for us ? I feel a certain joy in the air when IT guys talk about how google is doing well and microsoft doing bad. Like if it is good for the rest of us. It´s not. We cant have just one company owning the market, specially the internet market. It´s bad for the users, we need more googles, mor companys winning the internet war. If the Microsoft still being the number one enemy of google, so we already lost as users.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is very interesting. And very important.

Any big company will eventually "turn to the dark side", not because they want to but because that seems to be the dynamic of large corporations. After all they only have to answer to shareholders, and shareholders demand profits no matter what the cost.

Google has done a good job of resisting this with their _Don't be evil_ motto and trying to retain control of the boardroom. But I fear that it's an oncoming tide that not even Larry and Sergey can stem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My Dad uses bing.com, because that's the default. My Dad often clicks on ads. I think the Google OS is just a way to make google.com the default for people like my Dad.</comment>


Big pharma, big data: Drug companies fear the effects of transparency - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c8b024b0-9b82-11e2-a820-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2PR8hajau <comment><USER2> Paywall -- it's not a link, it's spam.

<comment><AUTHOR> Page loads with no paywall for me, sorry to hear that. Since when is the FT spam? Is the NYT and WSJ spam too?

<comment><USER2> > Page loads with no paywall for me, sorry to hear that. Since when is the FT > spam?

Since this: <http://i.imgur.com/RwnA4kW.png>

> Is the NYT and WSJ spam too?

Easy to answer -- do they demand payment up front, before showing any articles at all, as FT does?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a shame you can't access it, it is a good article</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stockholm expected to reach herd immunity in May, Swedish ambassador says - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/04/26/845211085/stockholm-expected-to-reach-herd-immunity-in-may-swedish-ambassador-says <comment><USER2> Just a few other recent Sweden coronavirus discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22982885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22982885)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919074)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22944891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22944891)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908103)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sweden only has 18K reported cases which is obviously nowhere near 30% of Stockholm, and there doesn't seem to be any public data indicating otherwise, please include a reference to data points if there's anything out there to substantiate the claims by the Ambassador.

<comment><USER4> Great points. I'd love to hear counterpoints from those who downvoted.

<comment><USER5> Antibody studies have proven that the headline numbers in pretty much every country are extreme underestimates.

<comment><USER6> For Stockholm to reach herd immunity they'd need about 580,000 - 600,000 people to have had the infection and recovered. This is about 60% of the population.

They haven't got anywhere near that. And none of the flawed antibody studies show anything like this level of infection.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I've been in this loop before, where I provide exhaustive evidence for the proposition and then people show up to ask what agenda I'm pursuing since everyone knows that already. I'm just not up for another round right now.

<comment><USER7> Surely, if you've been putting up exhaustive evidence many times before, you could take a second to link to one of these studies you mention? Otherwise your comment carries much less weight, and you should expect the sort of response you just got.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thank you Sweden for running a giant, country wide experiment to see if immunity is actually conferred after Covid infection. We all appreciate you using your citizens as Guinea pigs to see if we can try and collect evidence that shows whether herd immunity will occur or whether reinfection is likely. May the odds be in your favor, for your own sake.

"No evidence" that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected: WHO: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who- id...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who- idUSKCN2270FB)

<comment><USER9> The cognitive dissonance I'm seeing in the tech community on this issue is interesting.

None of us had data in the beginning, and our leaders chose different paths, some erring more on the side of caution. I agreed with these efforts personally, because the little data we did have at the time supported these actions of "locking down."

More time has passed, more data has come in. Increasingly, I'm starting to be convinced that I was incorrect in my original assessment, and that the lockdown wasn't necessary in the broader United States and Europe, outside of dense urban areas. (It should be noted that if you remove NYC from the equation, the US really has had no issues with hospitals being remotely close to capacity.)

Sweden ran an experiment, and so did the rest of the world. It could have gone either way.

My oldest brother owns a small business, as a professional dog trainer for high-end clients. He had just expanded into a new facility with much more capacity, hiring employees and taking on a lot of debt. His new facility is idle now, and his business is in trouble. He is personally distraught. The lockdowns were an experiment on what would happen to a society if you shut down most commerce, except for the lucky few like HN readers who get to work from a laptop.

I'm pretty appalled at the unwillingness of HN readers to, like me, admit that maybe, just maybe, we all made decisions with little data, and that the increasing data and time elapsed is showing that most of us, myself included, were incorrect. That's ok, because it's really not anything people should be blamed for. However, it is a very bad thing to be unwilling to change one's mind after new data comes in.

This is where the politicization of the issue is problematic. Leaders feel like they are betraying their "tribe" if they change their mind. At this point, continuing the lockdowns without acknowledging nations that didn't lockdown and are doing well is a form of generational warfare: wealthier people, often older and at higher risk and with little to lose economically, against poorer, younger people in the midst of their prime working years.

We, the HN readers, are in the managerial/professional class elites who don't get hurt the same way other people our age are getting hurt. But don't worry, if we keep this up, it's going to get all of us as well.

<comment><USER10> We don't know what would have happened in the US if we hadn't locked down. Considering the human cost so far _with_ a lockdown, I think 20/20 hindsight indicates that we made the right choice. We can't just assume that things would have remained the same without a lockdown.

And if things had become worse than now, how would that have impacted the economy?

<comment><USER9> Actually, your kind of wrong.

The USA didn't lock down. Individual states locked down, at different rates. Some didn't lock down at all.

Take a look at the data and see if you can find a difference between the early and late lockdown states, particularly the ones that border each other.

I'm amazed at how blind people on HN are to the fact that the entire nation didn't take a homogenous approach to this at all. We have 50 different strategies that we're deployed.

<comment><USER10> You can be pedantic all you want, but there was a lockdown. It wasn't Federally initiated, and each state locked down to differing degrees, at different times, but they locked down. No one said it was homogenous; it's amazing how blind people on HN are to strawman arguments.

Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is free.

<comment><USER9> I'm not being pedantic. In this case, a relevant factor that you consider irrelevant out of convenience is being ignored. Call it pedantic all you want. It matters.

Not all states locked down, at all. That matters. Travel between states, for the most part, fell to record low rates. This happened voluntarily, before legally mandated lockdowns were triggered.

You asked "what would have happened if we hadn't locked down."

I pointed out that not all places locked down, and many locked down later.

"Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is free"

It's not hard to look at the Johns Hopkins data set, which contains data at the county level for the US. Not much "teasing out" to do there. It's right there. If we use admitted cases as a benchmark for actual infections, assuming it's proportional at a relatively constant level, it's not hard to do.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook has always sold data to advertisers, and it probably always will - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/opinion/facebook-data-privacy-advertising.html <comment><USER2> I disagree with the premise. The accusation only holds if your definition of "selling data" includes any transaction where data is leaked as part of a transaction. Importantly, in the ad model the information leakage is an unintended (but unavoidable) side effect. If Facebook could sell ad slots without revealing information about you they would. In fact over the years they've tightened their constraints around targetting to ensure that individuals cannot be targetted and data about individuals can't be derived by targetting hacks.

If you asked an average person what "selling data" means, they would describe a much more straightforward exchange: you pay me, and I tell you the names of woman interested in skiing.

Consider a real world comparison. You run a ski class for woman. I pay you $100 to distribute vouchers for a range of ski equipment at my store. If a customer shows up with a voucher then I know that they're taking your lessons. I can infer their skill level and that they can afford to pay for private lessons. Was that an instance of you selling your customer's data?

<comment><USER3> You're entirely right and I quite agree.

Except that I'm not sure I do, now that computers are involved and can pick up every scrap of maybe-data and correlate sets of maybes into probable identities. Twenty years ago walking into a shop with a voucher wasn't an identifying action, now it may be. Twenty years ago what the shop owner got from the voucher distributor wasn't a list of names, now it may be.

If the shop owner gets a list of names at the end of the day, then arguably that list is what Facebook sold. Maybe Facebook sold it with plausible deniability, maybe Facebook would prefer not to sell it, but the shop owner paid money and got something in return.

<comment><USER4> Companies exist solely to gather and de-anonimize this data to the fullest extent possible. As an example of what you can do, in Google Adwords, you can download multiple aggregated click/cost reports across many dimensions (age range, zip code etc), set up and solve a mixed integer linear programming problem, and get detailed information about every click. Not sure if Google ever caught on or cared enough to fuzz the data.

<comment><USER5> Would you mind naming some players in this space?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This essay is just wrong.

Just because a person ends up on an advertiser's site after clicking on an add targeted to [whatever] doesn't mean the advertiser has the data. It doesn't know the identity of the person that clicked on the ad.

<comment><USER7> Of course it does. That is the whole point of the article. By clicking on a targeted ad, the info used to target you can be and also is very much transferred. Just imagine a string attached to the ad URL containing the characteristics of the targeted group:

        &woman=1&age=24&location=Seattle&sexor=bi&interested=[cars,skiing,succulents]&relstatus=single&...

<comment><USER6> "It doesn't know the identity of the person that clicked on the ad."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You probably could use this type of granular targeting described, and infer personal data from Facebook users using UTM codes on your campaigns.

But it doesn't tell you who this information is about. You'd have to trick the user to reveal their identity on the attacker website.

I guess this could happen if the victim had previously visited the attacker website and identified themselves using say their email. Store a cookie of this user. Then when the click the information leaking ad they identify themselves on the attacking website with this cookie. Now you can link the information leaking targeting with the user and potentially leak data.

It's misleading to say that Facebook is selling data to advertisers. Rather they might leak personal data through covert channels.

</comment><comment><USER9> A lot of comments are missing the fact that there are data sources other than Facebook that can turn a click into an identity, or near enough. Facebook can't claim ignorance of all of those.

See [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/) for one conceptual demo.

As an innocuous example, have you ever noticed that Maps seems to show the right neighborhood when you connect a non-GPS laptop to a friend's wifi?

<comment><USER10> > As an innocuous example, have you ever noticed that Maps seems to show the > right neighborhood when you connect a non-GPS laptop to a friend's wifi?

Isn't that just matching the IP to the correct town? Using a database like maxmind's.

<comment><USER9> There are databases with much higher accuracy. I once had a pizza delivery website I had never before used pre-populate the complete address for my location (on a desktop PC with no GPS). They don't do that anymore though, so I can't take a screenshot.

Retailers buy and sell customer data as part of "data cleanup" efforts, that data can be correlated with geo-IP and third-party cookies, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Real question: Should opinion editors be judged by the practice of the journal that publishes them?

The NYTimes does admittedly worst than Facebook on that front (the key aspects for me: I can't see the targeting for their ads before clicking on it, refuse some ads on their website, I can't access, edit or delete what their partners know about me; I can do all that on Facebook). That makes the claims of that editor seem very disingenuous.

Should we judge him based on that? Or is he a user of NYTimes and a victim of their disputable privacy practice, like he is a user of Facebook and an avowed victim of the Mark & Boz's decisions?

</comment><comment><USER12> Its not only advertisers buying your data. I had a boss who paid a subscription to a service that monitors as much of your internet activity as possible. He got alerts everytime i and other colleages did anything public. He bought it cause he was paranoid, or a voyer. Stuff that you do that is public, is more than just a facebook post, it is slso a google+, steam, wordpress, gravatar, linkedin, discuss, readdit, and loads more. The more you can link up a particular person, the more you can track across domains, the more its worth, even to the person being tracked. Think credit scoring companies who sell there tracking back to you and also to banks. Your governments pay billions to security contractors to collect your data. Newsagencies that suggest your data is only valuable to adveriserz are engaging in distraction.

<comment><USER13> One of the many benefits of a full-time job doing open source development: it has absolutely flooded out everything else about me on the Internet. My Dad used to have a service like this alerting him about anything I did. He turned it off because he got sick of all the notifications about my work. If you Google my name now, it takes until like page 10 before you find anything remotely personal.

<comment><USER12> Yes, i had a similar perspective, ive also posted a lot of open source and i thought if you are still inclined to be following me with your draw dropped in awe, then youd need to be getting yourself a life. Surely im not that important. But actually, my data and activity genrates enough money amongst those who sell security to the government, that it would contribute a significant part to my weekly wage. If only we knew how much our data was really worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is tricky. I sort of agree with the author and sort of don't.

It boils down to: if you own an algorithm f: H->R^n and show m number of (k, v) pairings such that f(k) = v, does it follow that you have revealed all or part of the algorithm? (Where user data is folded into f.)

This would necessarily have to do with how big m is and whether it is enough to infer a f with reasonable accuracy. Not sure what are good metrics for "reasonable accuracy" though.

</comment><comment><USER15> How is ad matching performed exactly? Is a users data profile basically matched against some set of ad network defined properties and then served to the end user?

</comment><comment><USER16> I agree with this article, thanks for sharing. With the advent of big data and capabilities to draw conclusions from what seems like an anonymous information Mr. Zuck sill goes for the simplified explanation "but we're not giving it directly..." The violence case in Myanmar showed that Facebook has much broader consequences without directly doing anything. The same goes for third party involvement, they can deny it and it makes me question do they themselves understand the scope of the problem and manipulation.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is so on point that even Congress should be able to understand it.

<comment><USER18> Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

<comment><USER19> That's a nice quote, but I don't think it applies here in that way. I don't think any Congressman's salary actually depends on not understanding Facebook's business model.

<comment><USER20> Facebook doesn't individually contribute much but it did contribute a total of 7 million over 12 years. If they were smarter they would kick in more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a culture, we all signed up to participate in a business model funded by collecting our data and selling it. The natural outcome is that people with money would use that money to influence public opinion. We walked straight into this trap.

</comment><comment><USER22>
      >Please disable your ad blocker
      >
      >Advertising helps fund Times journalism.

No I don't think so - uBlock Origin all the way.

Internet advertising fuels the Facebook problem.

The smaller we can make internet advertising, the smaller the Facebook problem becomes.

<comment><USER23> Pay for a subscription, then. Journalism isn't cheap.

<comment><USER24> Or just not bother reading the thousands of syndicated bits of crap and opinion pieces which is what "journalism" is mostly these days.

<comment><USER25> Thanks to the big tech companies and ad blockers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_advertising) is included in [https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update](https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update)

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't know why we pick on FB for this practice, just because they're better at it than existing marketing data out there that's been accumulating for the past 40 years on people. Companies like Axciom, Experian, etc. have been doing this far longer than FB...</comment>


You're doing mixed reality wrong - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@blinkpop/youre-doing-mixed-reality-wrong-d32aa54ae8af <comment><AUTHOR> More detail on the "Office of the Future" [http://elevr.com/the-office-of-the- future/](http://elevr.com/the-office-of-the-future/)

More examples of the Studio paradigm [http://elevr.com/studio-metaphor-an- embodied-software-paradi...](http://elevr.com/studio-metaphor-an-embodied- software-paradigm/)

And a lot more theory on the three scales [http://elevr.com/the-three- scales/](http://elevr.com/the-three-scales/)</comment>


It's finally here... The Revolutionary New Cloud9 IDE - <AUTHOR> http://c9.io/site/code-smarter-code-together/ <comment><USER2> Gotta say, that's one of the slickest damn launch videos I've seen in a while.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's not much to say... This is pretty damm awesome =)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seriously, amazing video!</comment>


Ask HN: How to decide if someone is a right partner? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys, I'm a technical person. Last year I helped out a friend (business guy) to co-found a startup. After 7 months of painstaking efforts, I learned it the hard way that our business perspective and visions were just too different for the partnership to work out, and so I left.
A year has passed and I'm thinking of partnering with another two business guys. These guys came to me and explained their idea. I'm pretty impressed with it, but not yet sure if they'd make great partners.
What do you guys think I should do to "try out" the partnership? I'm thinking the following: 1. Offer him my software development skill as a paid (discounted) professional service. As this goes on, hopefully I'll figure out if we're aligned. 2. If through (1) I get along well with them, convert the professional service into partnership.
Do you guys think my plan is reasonable? If so, how do you think (2) should go? As a technical co-founder, what model should I take? Is it getting paid along with equity? Any readings on common-practice for this?
Thanks in advance! :) <comment><USER2> Let me give you three examples from 3 companies I started as the technical founder:

Company 1: Started by myself, partnered with a sales guy 50/50 after a few months. Company took off after the sales guy because he was able to close large contracts.

Company 2: Started with two other people I knew well (doctors) who were in the field but non-technical. I ended up leaving company after 3 years. This was in part because they couldn't put in the same amount of work (never partner unless they can contribute full time).

Company 3: Started by myself, raised money by myself.

Moral of the story: Partner with a sales guy if you have something to sell, and make sure they have a proven sales track record. If you're building a product that won't be ready for a long time, work on it alone and test the markets as soon as you can, then partner. There is no right answer, but don't partner with somebody simply because they are on the business side. It's also much easier to pitch with a sales guy. And don't partner simply because the business guy has an idea.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, this is how I expect things to shake out. A tech company when partnering with non-tech people needs to be the right set of circumstances to make work.

Say if one of those doctors quit and did this full time for you pushing sales to other doctors, maybe it would have worked. But trying to build a product with people not at the same commitment level is hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've gone through the process many times. Most partnerships were failures. The only startup that succeeded was with this guy who added me on Facebook after I bought his book.

But by far, I find that the strongest indicator of a good partner is whether you're adding them on Facebook.

For one thing, partners that avoid you on social media are a little dodgy. Some would even see you as an adversary - this guy they negotiate against, that they're going to leave when business is over, that we're splitting equity with.

And often there's some subconscious disgust to people you're not willing to add to your friends list. The reason for this disgust often becomes clear in about 3 months. But we have years of experience with people - if something is off about them, we'll know.

The best partners to work with are the ones who you want to get closer to. The ones who match with you on an ideological level. The ones you feel that you can learn a lot from. And more importantly, the ones who you consider a real friend, or truly want to be friends with, and are willing to go to long extents to help.

If you feel the need to test this person just because they have a nice business model, I'd suggest that they've already failed the test.

</comment><comment><USER5> > A year has passed and I'm thinking of partnering with another two business > guys. These guys came to me and explained their idea. I'm pretty impressed > with it, but not yet sure if they'd make great partners.

The 2 business guys thing is something to be wary of. I can't think of any tech startups that had 2 business founders.

The biggest problem is that it's tough for you to judge their output initially, since there is no product to sell. If they can get customers lined up without a product, that would be a good sign.

If they can raise funding on their own, and THE MONEY IS IN THE BANK, that's a good sign.

The worst ones are those who have "connections" and will sell only when the product is fully fleshed out. They just keep asking for feature after feature while sitting there, twiddling their thumbs.

If they are cagey about paperwork or details, it's a bad sign.

It's hard. I have been burnt once already. Sales is hard. REALLY hard. If you do decide to try it out, make sure they too have targets to hit.

<comment><USER4> It's fine if it's not a tech startup. Something like e-commerce comes to mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would avoid the business guy trap. Find another tech guy or go solo and make a startup.

Ideas are cheap, tech is the hard part. Why waste 66% if your equity on two guys with an idea? If their idea is good they can hire developers or raise VC to makd their MVP.

Have been on both sides of this. In most cases i dont think the random business guy is worth hooking up with.

</comment><comment><USER6> The only way you're truly going to know if these guys are worth partnering with (aside from some huge red flags you didn't mention) is by partnering with them.

If they can't develop product and they can't sell, they're useless to a startup. That won't take long to suss out.

Go all out, full marriage, full honeymoon. Have meetings as necessary. Work at it. The biggest problem with business guys is failure to close- either they don't put the time in or just can't sell.

Give it three months, and either pat yourself on the back or throw in the towel. Repeat until you find a successful venture or have to get a job.

One other warning about "two business guys". They tend to turn on each other more often than they turn on the tech guy. It's often sudden and unpredictable. Make sure you have that contingency covered in your formation documents.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea of 1.

As a non-tech sole founder I hired two developers in this mode. I called "freelancer as a test to CTO/co-founder". They both were interested in building a new web app from scratch using the stack they wanted so this allowed them to charge a discounted price.

I paid them by the hour totally trusting them on how many hours they had worked each week.

The startup ended up failing, but this arrangement was great for both parts.

If the startup had been a success, I believe the arrangement would be around the lines of some below market salary with large equity (but not co-founder level). Probably from 20% to 30% before any funding

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a big, big fan of equity in the broadest sense. All co-founders get equal equity, pay, etc. The effort required to succeed is substantial, so you need everyone to be all in. It'll ebb and flow, but that's the way it should even out.

Today, being a technical co-founder gives you an advantage. However, that advantage is really a broader pool of people and ideas that you can work with. When you get a match -- that's it -- you're now all in this together. Choose wisely, then commit strongly. Personally I'd be uncomfortable with a situation where I was getting paid and my co-founders weren't.

If it's early days, or you've just met, stress test the partnership. What sort of exits are you after? Ask some hard questions. What if we couldn't fundraise? What if we need to to layoffs? What is we get a generous, but not massive, offer in the first couple of years? Some of those questions will feel churlish when you've not even got any runs on the board (and they are), but they're essential to finding out if this is a work dynamic that will make you successful.

Really push it. You should (must) have some really uncomfortable conversations early on. You'll have them eventually, so better to know who you are together before investing too much more time.

The good thing about the above is that you can do that pretty quickly. Start with an afternoon, a weekend, a few working days. Then go from there.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're unwilling to introduce the person you're dating at appropriate junctures to the most important people in your life, that's usually a bright, flapping red flag.

In general, if you have a good thing going, you can't wait for him or her to meet your friends, siblings, parents, the guy at the deli, and you wouldn't have any qualms about presenting this person to professional acquaintances, people you knew in college, family friends, even your ex.

</comment><comment><USER10> Get paid now. Build a prototype. Test the viability of the product and the business partnership at the same time. If you're excited to double down on it all after initial experiments, then talk about a partnership / equity. (The conversation should start at split equally)

If you make a deal with some small portion of equity now, you set your price too soon. Making it harder to get equal partnership. Better to explore the relationship first with a easy and fair exchange of value (work for $).

</comment><comment><USER11> Requirement : do you literally admire your potentiel partners ?

Step 1 : go cross the atlantic on a boat just the 3 of you. Step 2 : you didn't wanted to kill eachothers ? Good. Now give them all your credit card numbers and keys to your house. Step 3 : You trust them enough ? Alright you're good to go.

</comment><comment><USER12> We are a team and building our side project now.

I think the most advantage, that my partner impress me is he is really initiative, includes (not only) use our product, find bugs, fix UI, marketing, and everything.

I'm glad to work with him, and proud of our work. We got friendships first. I think i got my answer.</comment>