Gates says billionaires should pay 'significantly' more taxes - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-02-gates-billionaires-significantly-taxes.html <comment><USER2> People talk about a 'flat tax', where everyone pays the same rate, as being fair. But is mathematical equality really fair?

* If we want a truly flat tax, everyone would pay the exact same amount. In the U.S., that would be roughly $14,000 from each adult to cover all funding. Obviously, that's absurd.

* Or we could use the 'flat tax' (or 'equal rate') described above, where everyone pays the same rate. In the U.S., that would be very roughly a 17% tax on all income, corporate or individual.

But I don't think the 'equal rate' tax above is really equal. If you make $10,000 in a year, $1,700 is a much larger blow than $1.7 million is if you make $10 million.

* What is fair, IMHO, is equal sacrifice. It's harder to quantify, but the taxes paid by people making $10 million, or $100,000 or $10,000 should cause roughly equivalent pain. It depends on the individual's situation and we'd never do it perfectly, but maybe there is an economic theory of utility or quality of life that could be used as a proxy; maybe we should subtract necessities and calculate it based on discretionary income.

<comment><USER3> I'd be stronger and say flat taxes are nonsense.

All the people that go on about incentive and the open market amaze me when they claim that it's a disincentive for people to work when you lose say, 50% over some high amount.

Once you have a ton of wealth, it just becomes relatively worthless to you. People with a ton of wealth don't add (significant) value except by providing that wealth to others, which then nets them even more.

We should be trying to limit the ability to just continually accrue wealth. At some point it stops serving society for an individual to have more. The incentive is gone - no one is not going to try because if they are so successful they earn over $10m say, they will not get any more.

<comment><USER4> >>People with a ton of wealth don't add (significant) value except by providing that wealth to others, which then nets them even more.

Investments that produce positive returns are the primary mechanism by which productivity increases. Productivity gains explain almost all of the rise in standard of living experienced throughout human existence.

<comment><USER5> But we don't need a rich person to hold onto the money, decide where to invest, or spend lavishly on enormous mansions/yachts, we can build institutions to focus on benefiting humanity as a whole first or even automate rich people out of their jobs.

<comment><USER4> Letting good investors keep their returns is how we encourage the volume of good investments to increase. It both provides better investors with more capital to invest with, and incentivizes them to invest.

Centrally planned economies don't make these considerations and languish in productivity as a result.

The wealth generated should go to the investor who earned it.

>>or even automate rich people out of their jobs.

Go right ahead. Any automated tool you create that can effectively identify investment opportunities would be a enormous boon to humanity.

What you'll find as you grow more familiar with how an economy works is that investment is a dynamic, ever-changing process, and individual initiative and enterprise is always necessary to make it happen.

Many people make the mistake you're making now, of taking for granted the process of managing and allocating capital, because they don't understand how enormously complex the task is.

<comment><USER5> I think you've overstating the efficiency in this investments economy, along with overlooking the negative externalities. How much was thrown away? 6 empty houses per homeless person. Why instead of updating AIM/ICQ for Android/iOS and business usage, they were abandoned and new investors replaced them with several Electron based permanent MVPs? There's entire industries dedicated to creating fake demand for high margin items, then there is also people buying things just on speculation that it could be worth more later. Its incredibly inefficient and wasteful. Who pays for the smog from coal? Our lungs do.

<comment><USER4> First of all, pollution has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It is an act of public property damage that ought to be punished. If it's not punished, we get negative externalities.

As for efficiency, you're overestimating how efficient political establishments can be in comparison. Just because a plan calls for the government to act efficiently, in the interest of the public, doesn't mean that this is what actually happens.

All of the tendencies toward waste and corruption seen in the market are manifested in politically appointed institutions as well. Private sector investment has been demonstrated to be the best way to increase productivity, and to be far more effective than politically directed management of economic assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd like to see a change in society* where we talk about remuneration in terms of buying power and fair comparisons rather than focusing on what we now perceive as being _taken_. If I earn minimum wage at say $10 an hour, that's $500 a week ($26k salary) at 40 hours a week. If I pay 10% tax, I get $450 a week in the hand. If I earn $50 an hour ($100k salary) and am taxed at 30% I get $1400 a week in the hand.

So the minimum wage worker as 70% less buying power than me: making it fair that I contribute more. We look at taxes of our salary like "you can't take 30% of my pay! I work hard!" instead of "I'm going to make a contribution to the society I live in by a fair percentage". If we saw our tax bills and payslips this way, and talked about it to our kids and in the media like this, we'd all feel a lot kinder towards what we would consider as giving.

Maybe technology will allow future transparent societies to be governed with full transparency and this will come to pass.

* (This presumes a fair society without corruption, which I'm aware many of us do not live in)

<comment><USER7> > So the minimum wage worker as 70% less buying power than me: making it fair > that I contribute more.

I don't think you can assume that it's fair based only on the income. Maybe their job is useless or even harmful to society while yours is useful and helpful.

> we'd all feel a lot kinder towards what we would consider as giving.

Giving implies that it's voluntary. It's not.

<comment><USER6> >Maybe their job is useless or even harmful to society while yours is useful and helpful.

I think it's completely correct that income reflects this.

>Giving implies that it's voluntary. It's not.

A transparent society can show that sharing a fair portion of your income has a greater benefit to you than keeping it to yourself.

The point of my original comment is that it would be something I hope to see, where society moves in the direction of seeing sharing a portion of income with your community/country as giving, rather than as a tax to be taken. Your statement confirms that taxes are currently completely unwanted.

<comment><USER7> > I think it's completely correct that income reflects this.

Not at all. Many (non-criminal) scammers probably make more than the two of us combined, and their value to society is most likely negative. It's actually pretty easy to come up with examples of professions that are harmful to society but still have very good incomes due to one or more of the following:

\- Their societal costs are externalities \- They abuse political power to get unfairly rewarded \- They make their income by taking money in small slices from other people in a way that people don't care much (lots of payment providers/intermediaries do this) or by scamming people.

> Your statement confirms that taxes are currently completely unwanted.

I didn't comment on whether it is wanted, only on whether it is voluntary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not distinguishing between additive and multiplicative "more" makes this an unclear message. People constantly mix up rates (*) with absolutes (+), and reinterpret statements made referring to one as referring to the other.

"More people use the internet in China than in the US" \- whether that's true depends on the interpretation of "more". This is intolerable and everyone with a mathematical background should strive to be clear on which "more" they are using.

<comment><USER9> If you're not joking, this one: >

He is arguing for a relative _more_ , the starting point at which is specified as the current state.

<comment><USER8> I don't feel that he has guaranteed that all readers of the article will come to the conclusion you have reached. Here is how I could interpret his brief quote:

1\. more in absolute terms (which they already pay due to higher income) 2\. more in relative terms (progressive taxes) 3\. more than now (what you claim).

I don't that it's clear what he means in in the story, though. It could easily be taken to mean "yes, we pay more, and we should pay more (than others) so I don't support the republican plan!". Your interpretation is also valid - "the rich should pay more (than we do now)".

<comment><USER10> Here's the original:

[https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/18/politics/bill-gates-taxes- cnn...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/18/politics/bill-gates-taxes- cnntv/index.html)

 _" I need to pay higher taxes," Gates, who is worth over $90 billion, said in an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday. "I've paid more taxes, over $10 billion, than anyone else, but the government should require the people in my position to pay significantly higher taxes," he said._

That first sentence sort of simplifies the interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This would pretty much be disastrous in the US because so much if the identities are based around a heroes journey. Unlike many Asian countries that more easily accept socialist narratives, the fundamental driving force in the US is that we are NOT equal and NOT the same.

It is about equal opportunity and a certain type of freedom yes. But all this is to serve the purpose of individuals proving to the world, others, and themselves that they are better and so deserve more.

The pursuit of happiness is the freedom to be better. And better cannot exist when all is equal. Heroes require villains. Light creates dark.

The self actualization narrative then is too tightly bound to the domination narrative. And domination always requires domination of humans. Attempts to humanize it by dominating instead some aspect of the world fail because we can do easily dehumanize others.

It's not that this narrative is good or bad, it just is. And it is also losing resonance with the wider world. It only works when the self-actualized has some sort of moral high ground or other advantage.

The taxes described here attack the resulting pattern of a run amock narrative but don't actually weaken it. It may actually strengthen it as it provokes a reflex response.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder the opposite question; why there is not a legal limit to the number of "milk" that the government can suck from one human. Is a mystery to me. Maybe people that had paid many billions in taxes, supposedly in benefit of the entire country, should be thanked, granted an "untaxable status" from now on, and left alone to live the rest of their lives. If somebody could pay in advance the taxes for the next ten years in just one take, this could help the government to attract extra money in scarce times, when they need it most. And of course the first country doing such bold movement would attract lots of rich people.

<comment><USER13> I'd personally prefer if we ameliorated your paid tax so that the rate applied over your entire lifetime earnings. That way you could use the same progressive rate but windfall years aren't a special case and lean years are an example of failing to optimise your taxes. You could even have the government refund tax if the windfall event was a once off.

Extra bonus you can get rid of many loophole taxes (like Capital Gains and Inheritance taxes) since these feel unfair to take on a single year basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Income in excess of 5 million a year taxed at 90%.

</comment><comment><USER15> that way it is harder for anyone to catch up to him

<comment><USER2> > that way it is harder for anyone to catch up to him

It's the opposite; it would be easier for people to catch up. By providing more funding for health, housing, and education, more people would have the opportunity to become wealthy themselves, and to do great things for society. How many potentially great developers are lost in awful educational systems, for example? The U.S. is supposed to be land of opportunity, where the belief is that anyone can thrive given liberty and opportunity, and that talent does not depend on the wealth of your parents. Right now, college education is determined, more than anything else, by parental wealth or income.

If you mean that it's harder for other billionaires to catch him, it's kind to consider their welfare. But as Gates would pay more tax than the other billionaires, they would catch up to him.

<comment><USER16> >The U.S. is supposed to be land of opportunity, where the belief is that anyone can thrive given liberty and opportunity, and that talent does not depend on the wealth of your parent

To offer an alternative interpretation, I've always seen the "American Dream" as opportunity to improve your position in life, rather than creating an entirely-level playing field for all. The latter experiment has been attempted many times in the 20th century in many nations, and the results have not been encouraging, to say the least.

Besides wealth-of-money, many kids benefit from parents with wealth of character, intelligence, wisdom, and even love; the importance of these cannot be understated.

I agree, of course, that wealth has never been more important in determining one's ability to receive a good education, and that is a major problem. One solution could be to increase funding for public schools... but I am rapidly losing faith in the results they deliver. The most disadvantaged people are priced-out of the market for private schools, and the same can be said for many in the middle-class.

There is also a fundamental problem at play: those not suited for academia, but have much value to offer society, are always going to slip through the cracks under the "must-be-college-educated" paradigm. I want plenty of low- skilled jobs with a reasonable wage available for those who just want an income, while they tinker away at their genius invention in the evening, for example.

<comment><USER17> Something like 60% of Americans have less than $1000 in the bank. 69% live paycheck to paycheck.

I don't see how not having at least a modicum of financial safety net could possibly be considered 'living the American dream'..

The American dream is just that - for most people it's just a dream, something to hope for but never achieve.

<comment><USER16> >a modicum of financial safety net

This is why I'm generally in favour of policies that create jobs, as the welfare system has utterly failed in creating upward-mobility for those in need and their progeny. (Edit: it's worth nothing that many charitable organisations do incredible work, with more cents of the dollars donated reaching those in need that gov. programs).

This is based on my presupposition that those people could, and would, thrive in an environment with more opportunities for work.

Edit: the downvote heat for non-socialist perspectives on HN is unreal. Simply unreal.

<comment><USER18> hahaha. 'non-socialist perspectives'. So..you have the impression the norm here is 'socialist perspectives'. Maybe you're right. That's just amazing to me though. My impression is Rand-type/libertarian/free market perspectives are the norm. (Or even more, not caring about politics, just wanting to get rich, which maybe comes to the same thing. Rand is certainly by far the most frequently-mentioned writer on here with any political..dimension, I think) I've never read anything I considered more than very slightly to the left on here, let alone 'socialist', which just makes me laugh when people from the US (which I presume you are, sorry if wrong) use. In the US 'socialism' seems nowadays to usually be used to mean both 'I don't like it' and 'anywhere to the left of far-right'.

Well, I was just reading the wise words of chairman dang yesterday, that _everyone_ on here feels they're in a minority in every way. It's always surprising to read comments such as yours are for me; they reveal similar feelings in everyone.

Maybe the downvoting wasn't, as you assumed, for the 'non-socialist perspective'-ness of what you said, but the way you said it, or something else? I've noticed people are often wrong, or seem to be, about what caused the downvoting, when they reveal what they assume the reason is. Well, maybe they're not 2 separate things - the veiled assumptions coming out in the prose, and the assumptions coming out in the voting complaints.

<comment><USER16> My observation is that polite, decently-articulated comments are generally well-received at HN, and snarky, mocking comments are not tolerated. Stating an incorrect opinion as fact is not tolerated, but opinions are generally welcome.

This rule does not apply to political discussion, however.

If someone is incorrect, or there is a disagreement, the community will usually offer a correction, or open the topic for discussion. They will directly offer a rebuttal to what has been said in a manner that it beneficial. This, I believe, is what makes HN the great place that it is.

Again, this rule does not appear apply to political discussion.

I agree that the HN community runs the gamut of political views. I made no claim to the contrary. My observation is that I consistently see comments that meet the "HN Standard" of reasonable discourse being down-voted, and this practice appears to apply overwhelmingly to criticism of central-planning by the federal government.

I find your comment to be needlessly mocking, and I cannot make sense of your attempt to fudge the definition of "socialism" as "things I don't like".

<comment><USER18> Ok thanks very much.

I guess one example of what I was talking about is your phrase: "your attempt to fudge the definition of "socialism"".

That's a rather inaccurate, poisonous misrepresentation of what I said and was doing, it seems to me. Yet you say it like it's the plainest fact, and maybe you believe it is. It's snarky. It's not assuming good faith. It's pure downvote material.

I was describing how it seems to me the word is used in the US nowadays. Or as I said, even more carefully, how it "seems nowadays to usually be used". I don't hear much news at all, less from the US, but a fair bit of that (before Trump anyway) has been hysteria about purported socialism, and e.g. any policy or intention Obama had that the far-right didn't like, described as such. It's laughable—at best, The Worst Argument In The World[0].

I likewise can't make any sense of how you thought I was trying to 'fudge the definition' of a word, if I understand what you meant by that. And I can't see which part of what I wrote was 'mocking', at all. The 'hahaha' at the beginning, if you were referring to that, was me laughing - I actually physically laughed like that, it was a record of that.

But I really appreciate the effort put into the rest of what you wrote, thanks.

[0][http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html](http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At the risk of sounding glib, I can offer Mr. Gates >220 trillion reasons why increased taxes won't necessarily improve the fiscal solvency of the United States, in and of itself.

Debt and un-funded liabilities are staggering, and it's politically unviable to implement plans to reduce that (although lip-service is paid), IMO.

I'd like to hear more about how those taxes would be spent.

<comment><USER19> I personally feel that taxation shouldn't even be that debatable in the legislature.

How it should be is just covering the cost of a moving-average window for the previous x amount of years of spending mapping according to a integration across income.

It's nonsensically inefficient to debate on taxation without consideration of spending, and vice versa.

<comment><USER20> > How it should be is just covering the cost of a moving-average window for > the previous x amount of years of spending mapping according to a > integration across income.

No, it shouldn't. If you wanted to target a balanced budget that wouldn't work, and I don't know why you would want to target perpetual deficits as a locked-in rule.

> It's nonsensically inefficient to debate on taxation without consideration > of spending, and vice versa.

Whether or not a bill included mandates on both sides, IME, it's very rare for either spending it taxed to be debated without consideration (even if the quality is poor) of the other.

<comment><USER19> You can explicitly budget in a surplus target.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: XT.js – a DOM construction/templating nano-library, 323 bytes minified - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/plugnburn/07c383da5f151a54d0b2 <comment><USER2> Ahh close I once made a complete template library under 325 bytes :D

[https://gist.github.com/maxpert/989159](https://gist.github.com/maxpert/989159)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one too. The concept of mine is entirely different though: to never deal with raw HTML strings, just logical blocks such as arrays and objects describing elements and their attributes and contents. With XT, I never need to escape content or attribute values manually because they are passed through appropriate DOM API, not inserted in raw state.

That was one of the goals but I'm writing a complete article on XT.js and XS.js right now, so I'll cover these aspects in it. But thanks for sharing your efforts! Starred on GitHub.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some explanations:

1\. Yes, I'm aware of Microjungle but still don't get why does it weigh twice bigger and above. 323 bytes of XT.js is NOT gzipped size.

2\. This library is VERY strict to the syntax. Any mistake - flow ruined.

3\. You know how to deal with DocumentFragments, right?

4\. No serverside planned, sorry.

5\. Yes, it's already used in production.</comment>


Killer idea: play the split testing game with your boss and colleagues - <AUTHOR> http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/split-testing-game/

<comment><USER2> I thought this article was going to be about acting differently with your boss and colleagues to see which gets you the most money/respect/whatever you're chasing.

Needless to say, I was very disappointed.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good idea too but unless you have a twin brother working at the same office I don't see how it is going to be easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone have experience with Visual Website Optimizer and its influence on loading time and user experience? With all these Javascript A/B testing services, I'm worried about content flashes and long loading times. E.g. for the JS redirect, the browser would first load the page, THEN execute a redirect, then load another full page. Or the content might change after DOM completion, delaying rendering, or after rendering, causing flashes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have seen one of our large customers (can't name them) do this and it is indeed very interesting. What they do is this: they name one variation of the test each for all the team members in the design and analytics team and then make them live in a split test (irrespective of whether they all agree to specific changes/ideas or not). I observed that they consistently get great results for their split tests.

EDIT: typos and clarity

<comment><USER4> So, this is multivariate testing, not A/B testing, right?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, this is A/B testing. Why do you think it is A/B testing?

<comment><USER4> Ok, maybe I don't understand the difference. Aren't you suggesting testing many different versions of a page, rather than just two?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, in split testing you can test as many different versions as you like. Multivariate testing is different. You can read about the difference in the recent post I wrote: [http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing- blog/differe...](http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing- blog/difference-ab-testing-multivariate-testing/)

<comment><USER4> From your post:

 _In A/B testing you split traffic amongst two or more completely different versions of a webpage (landing page, home page, etc.) The variations of your original page can differ in any manner. You can either just change the headline; or you can even change entire design, layout, offer and what not in the variations._

 _In multivariate test, you identify a few key areas/sections of a page and then create variations for those sections specifically (as opposed to creating variations of whole page in an A/B split test)._

I thought multivariate testing was testing lots of different variables (as the name suggests) at once, while A/B testing is just testing two variations of one variable at a time.

 _Edited after eru's comment below: Multivariate testing is an extreme form of A/B testing._

<comment><USER5> I guess you should go with the general definition of multivariate testing (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_testing>) as it is used in statistics.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I got it mixed up.

 _In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous A/B tests performed on one page at the same time. A/B tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations, multivariate testing can theoretically test the effectiveness of limitless combinations._</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My GitHub pull request was not merged and closed - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wolfeidau/ofuda/pull/5 I found a node.js hmac lib on github.  Yay.
I noticed an open issue requesting express/connect support.  I was using express.  Perfect, I'll add it.  Yay.
Submitted a pull request. Yay.
My PR was closed without merge.  =[
The reason included this perl of wisdom along with some others:
"Don't leave commented code in a pull request it looks untidy and rushed"
Am I crazy? <comment><USER2> So? This happens all the time.

"I feel like I have to defend my honor here."

That's a source of the problem. There's no attack, nor nothing to defend. I see a difference in coding styles. I see that cmawhorter react in a way which does nothing to help the process.

If I understand, one of the points of the exchange is that cmawhorter has a peeve against the use of 's === t' while wolfeidau prefers that style. Douglas Crockford, of course, suggests using '===', and it's perfectly acceptable for wolfeidau to require that of any contributed code. That cmawhorter reacts so strongly to others who don't share this peeve disagree suggests that cmawhorter may not be an appropriate collaborator for wolfeidau.

"working with me into making this something you find acceptable"

It is not a reasonable to assume that others are obliged to work with a pull request submitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> The defense of honor was a kindof tongue-in-cheek response.

The reason I posted this here is that I think it speaks more to a systemic problem with open source.

The great thing about OSS is that it's always possible to fork, but then you're fragmenting communities and investments in time.

I really wish github (and OSS in general) was more democratized.

Every popular repo out there has half a dozen PRs sitting open -- some of them good, a lot of them bad -- but code rot is alive and well in the node.js community and there is no reason for it.

> It is not a reasonable to assume that others are > obliged to work with a > pull request submitter.

I do disagree with this. If you're going to release software publicly, then it's your responsibility to make it the best software it can be, and if you can't, you need to hand over the reins.

<comment><USER2> Your statement certainly did not come across as tongue-in-cheek. Gerald Weinberg developed the concept of "egoless programming" as a counter to people who feel that criticism of their work corresponds to criticism of them personally. I suggest you read <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EgolessProgramming> .

I can't even begin to figure out what a "more democratized" system would look like, and you didn't describe how the principles of democracy apply here. It sounds like you have confused a mandatory consensus requirement with democracy. Democracy does not require unanimous consensus.

Your one and only right, in the context of free software, is that you can take on the code development and yourself. Github even gives you the ability to do all of that yourself. You don't need someone to "hand over the reigns", you can take it up yourself. If you do a better job of development, maintenance, community relations, and so on, than the original group then go for it. No one is stopping you.

You worry about fragmentation. That's a false worry. Most programers fork, make a couple of changes, and stop. Because continued development of a given project on ones own is hard. But if you want to take on the challenge, again, go for it. Don't complain about how people have offended your honor.

As to your last statement. You are just wrong. I have no obligations. Zero. None. Nada. To insist on such shows a complete lack of understanding of the reasons for why some people release software. To insist that an obligation exists will lead to problems.

I've gone on holiday, or otherwise not worked on a project for several months. Do I have an obligation to check for pull requests during that time? What if I take a year off? When does the obligation kick in? If I switch carriers, go to jail, or die, am I obligated to "hand over the reigns"?

The answer to all of these is "no." Now, if I wanted to do community building, then that's a different question and a different answer.

I've released software which was a week-long experimental project. I used it to explore an idea then released it so that others might use it as a stepping stone. I have no obligation to make that be the "best software" it can be, especially if the best solution is to write a totally new system using the lessons learned.

How do you even know what "best" will be? Developing software is a journey, and as you saw, wolfeidau even said that your changes "don't match what I want to do with this module." What you've said is that you want the best Caribbean holiday that can be, while wolfeidau wants to go to the South Pacific. You can't both have the same best holiday with the same boat at the same time.</comment></comment></comment>


AWS Storage Gateway - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/ <comment><USER2> More details at Werner's post

[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS- Storage-...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS-Storage- Gateway.html)

<comment><USER3> And even more details in mine:

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/01/the-aws-storage- gateway-i...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/01/the-aws-storage-gateway- integrate-your-existing-on-premises-applications-with-aws-cloud-storage.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have a personal need for this right now, but the fact that it stores the data as EBS volumes is pretty cool. I could imagine having local servers automatically mirrored so that they could be failed over to instances on ec2. Very powerful stuff indeed.

<comment><USER5> Note that the mirroring is asynchronous -- if your local server fails you can replace it with an EC2 instance, but you lose anything since the last snapshot.

<comment><USER6> Not since the last snapshot. It syncs as close to real-time as possible without the latency and network speeds affecting the performance locally.

This solution isn't designed to replace fault-tolerance on local hardware. It is for close to realtime offsite replication and backup.

Data in S3 is stored in at least three geographically separate locations and snapshots are very fast and very efficient on storage space.

The final major advantage you get through a solution such as this is that if you do have your primary site go down (floods, tornados, etc), you can bring up all your existing images via EC2 without having to have a bunch of redundant hardware sitting around waiting for disaster to strike.

And what do you pay for this? $125/month plus a per GB storage cost CHEAPER than enterprise storage generally is.

<comment><USER7> Let's say I need 50TB of usable space. I can purchase an Equallogic PS6100E (a mid-level "enterprise" storage device) with twenty-four 3TB drives and 5 years of support for $85,000. Rack space and power isn't free, so let's say the total cost of equipment and facilities over 5 years is $100,000.

In contrast, storing 50TB for 5 years on S3's reduced redundancy storage would cost $250,000. If I ever need to transfer any of that data back to my data center, there'll be a hefty bill for that as well.

<comment><USER8> With Amazon you could facilitate a DR onto their other platforms. With your Equallogic example you would need to mirror that data to another device with recovery targets in another location.

<comment><USER9> At the scales he's talking about, 10gbps uplinks are easily available. That said, the killer isn't the equipment costs, it's the people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So you are basically paying 125$+ to have S3 cached locally and get an iSCSI interface ?

<comment><USER11> Which is worth it.

The price of enterprise backup solutions is crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This should make EMC sit up and take notice. Amazon is doing great. I would have expected dropbox to do this after icloud was released. They should atleast mimic this now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone give a brief explanation of what this service is good for?

<comment><USER14> It sounds to me like enterprisey dropbox: It backs up your files from your local file server to the aws cloud, and if your server dies, bung in a new one and all your files will reappear. Great idea, although maybe something you could already do with dropbox?

<comment><USER15> As far as I understood the product page and Werner Vogels' blog post[1] it does not run on file level, but on filesystem level. So you won't be able to access single files from within S3, but rather have whole disk images stored in Amazon S3, ready to be restored back to your local datacenter or to be mounted on EC2 servers.

1: [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS- Storage-...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/The-AWS-Storage- Gateway.html)

<comment><USER16> Actually even lower level than that. iSCSI just makes a block device available over a TCP/IP network. You can use that block device however you like, write random data to it, partition it in to multiple volumes, use it as part of a volume group or disk pool, etc. The individual block device doesn't need to have a filesystem on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From my brief reading of Werner's blog post, it seems that this is very similar to what Nasuni have been selling.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is really cool. Having just done a large and complicated S3 integration into a legacy soup of 20 year old filesystem based document management kludge, this would have made life much easier (and considerably cheaper!).

Not only that, it solves a lot of problems such as dangerously storing backup snapshots on-site, archival and easy deployment and access to S3's CDN functionality.

Sold as far as I am concerned!

(Yes I know it's expensive, but it's cheaper than buying something in-house and employing another hairless monkey to manage it).

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds like a great idea. I can't wait until they release Gateway-Cached Volumes myself as it better suits my use-case.

<comment><USER19> the volumes are cached... from reading the post, you write synchronously to the iSCSI device, which is Asynchronously sent to S3

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure if that's what kondro meant but what I would like to see is a virtually unlimited size ("elastic") volume where the local disk acts only as the cache.

This would make a wide range of big-storage use-cases ridiculously trivial - those where only ~10% of the data-set is frequently accessed.

I.e. one could lazily scale the expensive local storage with throughput- demand, while the S3 backing store takes care of the long-tail (which can easily be many terabytes long when you're dealing with media files).

<comment><USER7> Let's say you expect to grow to 20TB of data. Storing that for one month on S3 costs $2,560 (standard) or $1700 (reduced redundancy). In contrast, a Dell R515 with twelve 2TB drives costs $7,000. In a year that's one-third to one- quarter the price of using S3.

Implementing a tiered storage system yourself is pretty complex. Using this S3 gateway might be simpler, but it's not trivial (e.g. you'll need VMware ESXi just to get started).

<comment><USER20> Well, I only glanced at their current offering, missed the VMware part. My request was mostly wishful thinking.

I.e. instead of VMware it'd be more useful for us to hook in with a FUSE-layer or a patched variant of a filesystem such as GlusterFS.

You're of course correct about the pricing. Their current prices cover some middle-ground but would need to be discounted to make it feasible for larger deployments. However, at the low-end (your 20T figure) the price seems already justifiable when you factor in staff and infrastructure costs (rack+power alone make up for half of the difference).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Here they are talking about you, and you can't know about what. - <AUTHOR> https://www.karmagod.com

<comment><USER2> If Gossip Girls had an app, this would be the one</comment>


Types for an Untyped World: Bracha vs. Felleisen [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmIQIZPaHY

<comment><USER3> Off the cuff comment, just before I go to watch the video: Here's something that Smalltalkers didn't like to talk about during the height of the Java vs. Smalltalk flamewars of the late 90's/early 2000's -- To be a good production Smalltalk programmer, you had to be very mindful of "types." (Reason for quotes!)

Exactly what do I mean by this? The good Smalltalkers would code in a such a way, that people could rapidly and completely figure out what "type" was in every variable, and reliably keep track of all implicit "Interfaces."

So of what value was Smalltalk, if you had to do all that manual work? The fact that what would be "types" in other languages were handled as conventions. This made exploratory coding very rapid.

This is also why I appreciate Go's pragmatic language design around this issue: The compiler keeps track of these things for you, but doesn't require nearly as much bookkeeping from the programmer to have that happen.

Now to see what Mr. Bracha has to say.

(Note: Conventional Smalltalk is actually strongly typed. It's just that everything is typed "Object" and exceptions are more or less just normal program execution with one VM built-in to get it started. This is why what other languages would consider "types" are really just conventions.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Feels like a "Live at the Apollo for Computer Scientists"

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a boring, uninteresting debate on an interesting topic.

I'm sure HN has much more to say in much less time about it.

Types help document code such that I'd prefer an optional typed languages wherein libraries and large code bases are expected to be typed but the glue on top doesn't need to be.

Javascript in particular is not very self documenting but I find typescript much easier to read. It's a real shame it's not often adopted if only to provide IDE hints.

<comment><USER6> Currently looking in to groovy for android dev precisely based on this observation - it has optional static typing (and it gets compiled to equivalent Java bytecode if you provide it not striped out like Dart) but it's dynamically typed and seems to be expressive enough to make the glue code succint. I figured since we need to learn it for the build system why not see if we can reuse it - looks promising so far.

I feel like whenever you have complex data hierarchies static typing just makes the whole thing manageable (recently wrote 2k loc python exporter for blender and prototype to consume it in C# - the C# is much more managable for this kind of thing, c++ is still kind of tedious because of shitty tools, build/module system and it's fairly verbose due to low level nature)

<comment><USER7> > Currently looking in to groovy for android dev precisely based on this > observation

You should look at Kotlin, I can't imagine any good reason to use Groovy on Android with Kotlin around.

<comment><USER6> I've seen Kotlin - few issues :

* it isn't 1.0 yet (guaranteed to have breaking changes)

* I don't see it as a dynamic/prototyping language - I see it more as a C# than as Python, frankly for the front end code that I want to write the python style of development is much faster and Groovy seems to have an answer if the performance of dynamic typing ends up being an issue. Most of the complex datastractures are in C++ anyway and will have a simple/clean interface to the front end

* it's an extra language to learn - not only me but by my coworkers as well. We already took on Groovy with Grails and we have a decent amount of build automation in it (and will have more)

I've learned a lot of languages so far (C++, Python, C#, Java, Clojure, JavaScript and I've played with Rust, F#, TypeScript, Objective C) - <USER2> the value of having as few languages as possible to share the actual code/tools/knowledge between different areas is huge and in order to introduce a new language to the mix it better have a significant benefit over the ones already used.

<comment><USER7> That's fair.

There are a few pros, though, one of which being that JetBrains is fully behind Android, and as a consequence, the Kotlin runtime is very small. Do you know how many methods Groovy's is?

I think you will also find out that Groovy's performance is going to be a problem on Android, but maybe it will be fast enough for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are reasonable actions to take with COVID-19? - <AUTHOR> Given the information we have, what are reasonable actions to take either personally or for your business if you're not currently in a high risk region? <comment><USER2> Personally, I've purchased water, canned food & bags of beans, supplements, medication, an air purifier and cleaning supplies. I'll be working from home if the virus hits where I live. I think I'm not prepared in the sense of what I would like if the virus truly hits where I live. I'm guessing you would want to isolate yourself from everyone. I can only theorize but I assume 6 months would be how long the disaster could last. An ideal situation would be living in the middle of nowhere with 6 months of supplies. Lastly, invest in things to keep your psych positive.

</comment><comment><USER3> The same best practices always apply whether there is an outbreak or not. Prevent the spread of germs by washing your hands thoroughly and often, keep high traffic surfaces clean. For the current novel corona virus, avoid travel to the affected region and avoid contact with people who have recently traveled to the affected region. So far all cases have been people who have traveled to Wuhan or have had prolonged direct contact with someone who has (e.g. a spouse).</comment>


If It Prints, It Ships:  3D Printing and the Postal Service [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library-files/2014/rarc-wp-14-011_if_it_prints_it_ships_3d_printing_and_the_postal_service.pdf

<comment><USER2> This is a really excellent paper, full of forward-thinking ideas. One that jumped out at me was 'USPS facilities could server as 3d printing hubs.'

However, I can also see other businesses lobbying against such innovation on the grounds that it would crowd out private sector offerings, which seems to be a common objection to allowing the USPS to offer more services at post offices. In Europe and Japan, post offices don't just deal with mail but serve as a one-stop shop for many interactions with government, from welfare payments to savings accounts. The legal status of the USPS is complicated the Constitution's postal mandate, ably discussed here if you like legal technicality: [http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-1/39-post- offi...](http://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-1/39-post-office.html)

<comment><USER3> I would approve any business advancement by the USPS if, and only if, it meant less bullshit advertisements in my mailbox every afternoon.

<comment><USER4> It's actually the postal worker unions that are to blame for the piles of adverts you get each day. There have been a couple bills to end junk mail, but the unions fight them tooth and nail on the grounds that junk mail counts as free speech. Of course, much (some might say most) of the mail you get is crap. Without that crap there's less mail to move, and consequently less workers to do the moving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i'm mostly impressed that the USPS has the analytical resources to produce this. did they put this much thought into email, before revenues started cratering? what was their intelligent plan to manage runaway employee pensions? do we still need so many people physically shuffling around junk mail? (apologies to newman). seems like they have plenty of issues to grapple with that are closer to the present than the impact of 3d printing.

<comment><USER6> USPS can be quite profitable if they can set the price of their products. They can't. Congress sets the price. They are mandated to run at break-even. They lose money when Congress reacts too slowly to market condition to set new price.

<comment><USER7> They constantly lose money. By the time they convince Congress to up the postal rate, inflation and market conditions have already exceeded the rate increase. All they can do is lessen their losses.

They can't add new products without Congress. They are also looking at money services, like basic check cashing, to help the 10+ million US households without regular access to a bank. It could be a great help to many impoverished Americans and, at the same time, boost USPS profits – but it relies on Congress to act. One or two Senators with heavy contributions from check cashing companies could derail, stall, or kill the effort – a net loss to society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only way this is a win for the USPS is if the quality difference between commercial and personal 3D printers remains high. I don't think it will for long for most goods, but if it does local printers you drive to will be the winners.

Expect the 3D equivalent of Kinkos and a resurgence of big box brick and mortal retail, albeit in a radically different form.

<comment><USER9> +1 - 3D printers serve two markets: production of prototype quantities and the immediate gratification of "having this part now". The larger of those two goals pretty much precludes adding shipping time to the process, and the increasing ubiquity of 3D printers is making shipping unnecessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article suggests the postal service 3D printing from their own facility. Is there is precedent of the post office even printing ink on paper and shipping it on behalf of others?

<comment><USER11> The only one I can think of was when people could write letters to soldiers in WWII by having them scanned onto microfilm, flown to a closer post office, then printed and delivered. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-mail)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The postal service should be worried about 3D printing. Once mainstream home usage becomes commonplace, you would think shipping volume could drop substantially as people begin to buy things online that then instantly print without a need for shipping at all.

<comment><USER2> I had the same thought, but I suspect quality > speed for most people, and they don't print often enough to justify personal investment in a high-end printing hardware. For example, my wife and I like photography and most of the pictures on our walls are ones we've taken, printed on canvas or high quality photo paper. But we don't own a high-end photo printer, nor do we want to do the work of mounting canvas on frames. I've worked with such devices, they're not that expensive, but I just don't see myself buying a wide-format printer any time soon. I'd rather pay someone else to do so a few times a year. By contrast, I have been thinking about getting a new laser printer for everyday use and reading long documents - I don't enjoy reading everything on a screen.

I suspect that many people may end up owning a cheapie 3d printer for small things, but they'll outsource to a local hub when they want more than basic quality. I'm very into the idea of 3d printing, but the simpler, cheaper units are very limited - as evidenced by people at Maker Faires wearing plastic hats that they printed themselves. Home printing doesn't cut it for a lot of things; for example I use quite a few plastic implements in the ktichen but I would be quite hesitant to use home-printed kitchen implements of any kind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well... duh. Nothing here suggests any real change by the USPS, of course they would ship 3D printed material, it's the same stuff they already ship, it's not like it's different. The "could" dedicate space to it? That's exactly what they'd do with anything with increased popularity and deals. Like... Amazon shipping.

Even a "company" with a monopoly can't avoid going bankrupt every 5 years and these buzzword ads won't help them. Give my letters (and 3D printed items) to someone who actually loses when they do a crap job, thanks.

<comment><USER14> How does USPS have a monopoly on shipping package goods?

<comment><USER15> Via government mandate/fiat.

<comment><USER16> Except that that's false, as the USPS doesn't have any government mandated monopoly on package delivery (it has a monopoly on _letters_ only, and even that has exceptions.)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They may not have intended this to be public; the link no longer works

<comment><USER17> Still available from [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document- library-files/2014/rarc- wp-14-011_if_it_prints_it_ships_3d_printing_and_the_postal_service.pdf&ion=1&espv=2) as long as it lasts</comment></comment>


Practicing the Coding Challenges - <AUTHOR> https://inessential.com/2020/04/26/practicing_the_coding_challenges <comment><USER2> > What they want — at least in the experience I've had so far — is for you to > have some kind of insight into the problem that allows you to solve it in a > more efficient way.

On top of that they want you to come up with the optimal solution on the first try, which is unrealistic and a poor judgement of programmer competency. Why? Because the answers can found anywhere on the internet.

Even if you succeed with just memorising and having some understanding of these solutions, the interviewers will still accuse you of cheating. To be frank, these challenges are best suited for coding competitions and using them for interviews is pointless. It can be the most efficient solution created in less than a minute but if its unreadable to the team, then its a 'write-only magic solution' which is useless to everyone.

Instead, a showcase of selected open-source projects or a link to some contributions is more of a realistic way of hiring potential candidates and will give a better sense of some choices on design patterns, code quality, code review comments etc, which any 'developer' can do. For example, the author is the creator of NetNewsWire [0] which is open source and can be freely reviewed on GitHub. I have no doubt that showing that alone is a reason to bypass 'coding challenges' to go straight into the onsite interview. You can't cheat with this if either you're not on the AUTHORS file or your name/email isn't in commits or file header in the original repository.

So, these coding challenges are hardly useful for assessing code quality in a team but only serve as a filter for competitive programmers who risk sending unreadable excellent solutions that only they can read but would be difficult to refactor for others; hence write-only code.

[0] [https://github.com/Ranchero- Software/NetNewsWire/blob/master...](https://github.com/Ranchero- Software/NetNewsWire/blob/master/LICENSE)</comment>


Want to vote in 2020? Do it early - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2020/8/27/21369269/vote-early-guide-mail-postal-service-ballots <comment><USER2> Title should have "(US)" added to the end of it, since HN is international and this article is US-specific.

<comment><USER3> It's good advice for any country though.

<comment><USER4> Is post by mail common in other countries? I have the polling station like 5 block away from my home, the election day is on Sunday so I'm free that day, I can choose to go from 8am to 6pm but if I go at 3pm there is probably only one or two persons in the queue. [Hi from Argentina!]

<comment><USER5> Some countries have vote by mail. Many US states do as well.

In the US our voting is on a work day, which is not given off by law. State politicians also control where polling locations are placed and how they are staffed, which leads to significant waiting times for people at polling places (hours and hours in many situations).

The introduction of electronic voting machines has created additional bottlenecks, as you can't scale out those machines horizontally the same way with paper ballots. You'll often end up with just a couple of e machines in place of a location that would typically have 20 or 30 booths for paper voting.

Did a bunch of research on this before our midterms in 2018:

[https://medium.com/@eagerlabs/if-voter-turnout-spikes-our- vo...](https://medium.com/@eagerlabs/if-voter-turnout-spikes-our-voting- infrastructure-wont-hold-up-dc782672b914)

<comment><USER4> > _In the US our voting is on a work day, which is not given off by law. State > politicians also control where polling locations are placed and how they are > staffed, which leads to significant waiting times for people at polling > places (hours and hours in many situations)._

I know. I know. I just wonder why if we in Argentina (that is not the most organized country in the world) can make a reasonable election, it is so difficult there. [The elections are not perfect here anyway If you have some popcorn I can add a few anecdotes.]

> _The introduction of electronic voting machines has created additional > bottlenecks, as you can't scale out those machines horizontally the same way > with paper ballots._

It is weird because we once tried here with mixed voting machines. (You choose whom to vote in the machine, the machine gives you a paper version, and you put it in the urn.) And it was faster than the manual version. You just need more machines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > All this is eroding faith in the exercise of democracy this November — and, > potentially, in the election results themselves.

Anecdotally, in my circles not a single person has expressed lost faith or that their faith has eroded. If anything, the current climate has emboldened my peers' belief that it's important and effective. From my perspective, the media is doing more to try to convince people that democracy in this country is in decline than any other force, and I suspect it's financially motivated more than anything else.

<comment><USER7> > If anything, the current climate has emboldened my peers' belief that it's > important and effective.

This feels true to me now as well.

In 2014 there was a report[1] released that concluded that the US was an Oligarchy and that our vote did not count. Personally that seemed to align with how my friends and I felt, where corporate campaign donations and lobbying influenced our politicians decisions more than the every-person voter. Back then I had a more bleak view on the effectiveness of our democracy and I'm sure others felt that way as well. I still voted though, I have always voted since I turned 18.

But ever since the 2016 election (and the 2018 mid-term elections) we've seen just how important voting is. If every eligible voter in the US got out and was able to vote, we'd have a much different government right now.

1\. [https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs- echochambers-27074746](https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746)

<comment><USER6> > If every eligible voter in the US got out and was able to vote, we'd have a > much different government right now.

That's a dicey assertion to make, because we don't know how those who stayed home would have leaned. All of the conventional widsom in 2016 pointed to someone else in the White House, and yet here we are. It's just impossible to gauge how those who stay silent truly think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good advice for any voting year: get a checklist and check things off in advance so that voting is extremely convenient when polling time comes.</comment>


Dictionary Attacks 101 - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001206.html

<comment><USER2> You should also remember to throttle login attempts for accounts that _don't_ exist.

It's important not to create new attack vectors that don't already exist when implementing security features.

If you don't throttle accounts that don't exist then a brute force attempt can be used to determine which logins are valid for a given service. This information can then be combined with targeted phishing attacks, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've found 1Password (<http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password>) to be a great solution to this. It automatically generates passwords for you and saves logins on an encrypted file. The only problem I've found with it is that when you go to use a friend's computer or a public computer you don't always know your passwords. A web service version of it would be convenient, but the security implications are obvious..

<comment><USER4> For the sake of a working solution I also just store passwords in encrypted files (using encfs, though) and stop worrying about accessing everything from my non-main computers.

Script for new passwords follows, for the fun of it. I have stuff added afterwards to save the username, website, and password to encrypted files.

      #!/usr/bin/env python
      import string
      from random import Random
      okchars = string.letters + string.digits + "!@%^_&*+-"
      print ''.join( Random().sample(okchars, 40) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do you implement a failed login delay?

I assume you'd have to just sleep before sending the response. But this could tie up all available threads for processing requests and bring down the site under heavy attack.

<comment><USER6> You refuse to allow login during the delay period. That is, after the 5th failed login, for the next 16 seconds, if the user tries to login, you say "Wait sometime before trying again." You do not accept and check the credentials supplied during this time. You simply refuse to begin the authentication process until the delay period has elapsed.

<comment><USER4> And exponential backoff is fine but not when it gets to be too much, it turns into a DoS problem. You could try to key it by IP and never let it go past, say, 2 minutes per source IP.

i.e., if me simply knowing someone's account name lets me disable their account for the next day or longer, that's a big problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As described I don't really see how the solution proposed handles DoS attacks any better than a lock out after x failed attempts.

The key to preventing DoS attacks is that the throttling is specific to a given host so that when the genuine user attempts to log on (presumably from a different host than the attacker) they can do so without any throttling.

<comment><USER8> DoS meaning you can lock people out of their accounts, not that the site is brought down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Plague: Our recent unknown intruder penetrated using the superuser account, giving him access to our whole system.

Margo: Precisely what you're paid to prevent.

The Plague: Someone didn't bother reading my carefully prepared memo on commonly-used passwords. Now, then, as I so meticulously pointed out, the four most-used passwords are: love, sex, secret, and...

Margo: [glares at The Plague]

The Plague: God. So, would your holiness care to change her password?</comment>


It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are - <AUTHOR> https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/an-excerpt-from-it-didnt-start-with-you-how-inherited-family-trauma-shapes-who-we-are-and-how-to-end-the-cycle-viking-april-2016-by-mark-wolynn/ <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical that there isn't some undercurrent of suggestion in the way the therapist keeps pulling in family history. There's something of a just-so- story in how each of his patients seems to have some "inherited" trauma. I'm willing to concede that it's possible that this is the case, but the vignettes in the article involve no small amount of magical thinking.

<comment><USER3> The problem I see here is the over reliance on Freud and Jung and epigenetic. Freud's misconceptions aren't needed to explain how behaviour and anxiety can trickle down from a generation to the next and epigenetic has nothing to do with skeletons in the closet. Behavioural therapy, CBT and `modern` approaches do a much better job at modelling all this. (I wouldn't be surprised if we see more epigenetic and less quantum physics buzzwords in the coming years in those kind of books).

More importantly there's the question of whether it really helps to analyse the past in details to find a nexus point that would explain the patient's problems or not. Behavioural activation show some promises and good results and it almost doesn't explore a patient's past.

To be clear: I am not saying trauma can't make ripples through generations (on the contrary, I am inclined to believe it, based on literature and personal experience) but the model described in that article has shortcomings, relies on refuted theories and modern models explain things better.

On the other hand we know that when a problem is well defined (it's cancer, let's fight it!), external (I'll kick this SOB away so hard it won't ever come back) and random (I failed the interview because I was just out of luck) then the patient/person has a much better chance to rebound. So maybe the whole Freudian approach works as well for some as voodoo works for others. This is the placebo realm though and modern therapies have much better results than psychoanalysis anyway.

<comment><USER4> Freud's biggest contextual problem was outlined by Alice Miller in most of her works, notably "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware" and "Drama of the Gifted Child".

It was basically that Freud was suffering from his own unresolved childhood traumas and avoiding them forced him to narrate his theories from the perspective that the _parent was innocent_ and the _child was guilty_ , especially when discussing the treatment of seemingly misbehaved children.

Unfortunately, this continued to be the main perspective in psychoanalysis and child development until the late 1970's/early 1980's

She gives an explanation in its simplest form in a 1987 interview with OMNI Publications International:

 _Traditional analysis, says Miller, duplicates the parent-child relationship with the conventional analyst in the position of power._ [...] _The child undergoes a long inner struggle "between the fear of losing the person he loves if he remains true to himself, and panic at the prospect of losing himself if he has to deny who he is. A child cannot resolve a conflict of this nature and is forced to conform because he cannot survive by himself. Therapy should not repeat this condition."_

fascinating read if anyone's interested, especially when she describes the first time she discussed this to a conference of psychoanalysts:

[http://www.alice-miller.com/en/the-feeling-child/](http://www.alice- miller.com/en/the-feeling-child/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the suggestion, I'll get around it this weekend. Have you heard of Jacques Van Rillaer ? He wrote the black book of psychoanalysis which stirred things up in Europe some years ago.

<comment><USER4> The Black Book seems like a fun read. I'm having a problem finding a copy in english (spanish, french, and chinese so far) but it's definitely now on my finding/reading list!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "A boy may have his grandpa's long legs and a girl may have her mother's nose, but Jesse had inherited his uncle's fear of never waking"

Wait.. what??

How could Jesse inherit something from an uncle who had died before he was born?

This whole article feels too much like magical thinking.

<comment><USER6> Many people are naturally scared of spiders and snakes. Some evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Paul Ekman claim that some fears like these are coded into our genetics because of the many of our ancestors before us who were killed by them.

<comment><USER7> What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory?

I thought the idea was that fear of spiders (a heuristic in an arachnophobic's amygdala that they inherited genetically) was at some point adaptive for their ancestors. That is, people with a fear of spiders are around today because their ancestors had some random genetic mutation that caused them to exercise caution around spiders, which conferred a survival advantage in their particular context. In our context it's maladaptive (evolution is very slow), and so considered an irrational phobia.

<comment><USER6> >What? Evolutionary psychologists believe in inherited memory?

Inherited instincts and emotions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How did this pseudomedicinal rubbish get so much votes? At least tell me you didn't read up to the obviously bunk parts before you upvoted. :[

(The strange thing is, there is sometimes an opposite trend here to consider the whole science of psychology nonscientific.)

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand why we even bother teaching Freud anymore except as a cautionary footnote. Dude basically just made a bunch of shit up and called it theory.

</comment><comment><USER10> My grandparents were taken away during the Cultural Revolution so my parents grew up alone. They never had any role models for how to raise children. At least that's why my aunt tells me whenever I complain about my parents.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just leaving this here...

[http://skepdic.com/ancestrallineage.html](http://skepdic.com/ancestrallineage.html)

<comment><USER12> Appreciate the context; thank you RichardCA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ohm = mc^2 ?.... seriously?

</comment><comment><USER4> Glad to see this reach the font page today! it's little talked about, but how we grow up and the skills we develop to navigate childhood basically defines how we use and develop technology. it begs the question, what kind of technological and security environments will flourish as familial and childhood trauma become individually resolved on a mass scale?

</comment><comment><USER14> Fascinating read. I always thought there could be some kind of link between the social trauma of The Black Death and the eruption of The Reformation.

</comment><comment><USER15> Garbage in, Garbage out.</comment>


S3 trickery, do the unthinkable - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/s3-trickery-using-it-as-a-scheduler-c618103b1cf2 <comment><AUTHOR> S3 never stops to amaze me, did you ever try to schedule tasks with it ? Give it a try</comment>


Binary – The game // My first iOS game. Feedback is welcome - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/binary-the-game/id961350275

<comment><USER2> For starters, finding it on the App Store is impossible. I had to search for your name to get the correct app to pop up. Nothing you can really do at the moment, but just a head's up.

Game play is fun. It's a nice casual game, but of course if you want to score highly then some critical thinking is involved. If I want to kill some time swiping my screen I can see this being enjoyable, but if I'm wanting something a little more challenging I can do that playing this as well.

I'll keep it around for a bit. Thanks!</comment>


Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work - <AUTHOR> http://www.macuser.co.uk/9015-adobe-creative-cloud-outage-leaves-adobe-users-locked-out <comment><USER2> My recipe for dealing with "cranky" proprietary software like this:

Step 1. Buy CC subscription and install what you need.

Step 2. Look for a good patch/crack that makes everything work ofline, and that still allows you to update.

Step 3. Make peace with the risk of having installed some possible malware on your machine with the patch/crack (ie. do the sensible thing of doing you shopping and ebanking on the other dedicated machine you only use for this).

Step 4. Stop caring that step 2 is illegal and get on with your life, you paid for the damn thing and nobody will really sue you for using it in a way that breaks the damn EULA anyway...

<comment><USER3> My "recipe" is this:

Uninstall and switch to Sketch. [http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/](http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/)

I have been so, so happy. Not 100% apples-to-apples of course but it's been great for my UI design needs, way better than Photoshop/Fireworks.

For bitmap editing I supplement with Pixelmator (only $15!). I used to say Photoshop couldn't be beat because of insanely hardcore features like content- aware fill, but then this is happening: [http://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2014/04/17/sneak-peek-at- pixe...](http://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2014/04/17/sneak-peek-at- pixelmator-3-2-sandstone/)

<comment><USER4> I do wish there were better alternatives for each and every app in the CC. The only one that's competently matched is Premiere.

Pixelmator is good, but Mac/OSX only. It also doesn't have adjustment layers, meaning that if I want a layer to be black and white, I'd have to open it up separately, desaturate, then import it back in as a new layer, delete the old one and rearrange.

They finally have a 16bit color, and apparently the content aware fill is coming.

<comment><USER5> Wait, what... where is Premiere matched? I am tied to Windows because of CC. Namely, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects and AME - all Adobe. If Adobe only ported their stuff to linux then I could switch completely. Autodesk already has me covered with Maya and other tools, The Foundry as well, FadeIn is a great alternative to Final Draft (although I bought both)... I only need Adobe CC alternatives, especially Premiere - or AVID to port MediaComposer.

<comment><USER6> Sony Vegas Pro is decent.

<comment><USER5> Edius is decent too, not close to MC or Premiere though, but neither Vegas or Edius have Linux versions. Only, close enough, app that is on Linux is Lightworks - yet it is cumbersome to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And this is why I won't trust SaaS that doesn't provide a _viable_ self-host solution (which for practical purposes tends to mean Free software, although I suppose "binary" only self-contained jars might be a realistic alternative). And also why I can't see myself selling/working on such a solution without providing some form of _viable_ / _realistic_ exit strategy/alternative.

With traditional apps, you run the risk of eg: your laptop crashing/being stolen -- but if you _need_ to work, you can just go and pick up a new laptop, burn an hour or so reinstalling your application(s) -- and hopefully get your work done by the deadline. With a self-hostable SaaS, you can spin up a vps/dedicated server and install, maybe even in less time -- but with "closed" SaaS -- you have no option.

Of course, with all (high-bandwidth) SaaS-solutions, network access becomes a single point of failure.

<comment><USER8> We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions. SaaS, too, will win out after a few hiccups.

<comment><USER9> In a very real sense our data is an extension of ourselves, a part of our minds. In contrast water, electricity, and banking are by-and-large anonymous basic services that have no further properties.

I get that cloud storage people think of themselves as the utility providers of the future, after all it makes instinctive sense to want to own something which consumers will spend their whole lives on. I've been in meetings where SaaS people gave presentations saying stuff like "...and in the near future the average person will spend 60% of their total income on cloud services; let's make that future happen!"

The difference is of course that after a power outage or after changing your utility providers, everything is back to normal - but after a little "cloud accident", all your stuff is simply gone. Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well. It turns out, we're being re-educated to accept a world where _everything_ is just rented, not only including the stuff we "bought", but also the right to keep our very own creative output. Let the severity of that sink in for a minute.

We're drifting into a setting where basic properties of our digital lives are taken and then rented back to us at a horrendous markup.

<comment><USER10> Exactly and the analogy with the utilities is bad for another reason too.

It makes sense for the utilities to be centralized generating electricity for every house separately is inefficient and has only become recently viable with solar panels. Where possible people tend to switch to that for independence or a combination of both.

Getting water to every house in a city is impossible without it being centralized.

SAAS on the other hand is not necessary. We can do the same thing without requiring constant connectivity or by building and app that requires connectivity only when absolutely necessary for it to work.

However we can't ask for rent if it's not a service. I for one avoid all SAAS like the plague.

I don't mind one time payments hey if i get enough value from the product I wouldn't mind the option of donating extra however monthly payments make me look twice at how much value I'm getting or if i can get it from a product that requires a one time payment instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And this is why proprietary lock-in is wrong.

Adobe seem to do all they can to screw up the computer their software is installed on. On a Mac you are supposed to drag an app into the Applications folder; to delete it, drag it to trash. Adobe software doesn't work like this. To install a trial of their software you have to install multiple apps, that can't be easily removed, and put up with their stupid Adobe logo in the title bar even when you're not using their software. You can't even use a trial without signing up for a "Creative Cloud" account.

Adobe's "Creative Cloud" is a great example of how to alienate and annoy your customers.

(Don't get me started on Flash)

<comment><USER12> What's funny is this is what Quark did in the 90s and then they got their market share stolen by Adobe. The same thing will happen to Adobe at some point. There will be so much user frustration that people will pack up and leave to the first reasonable tool that comes along.

<comment><USER11> If you're one of those, I highly recommend Pixelmator - download at pixelmator.com. My choice for a really simple, easy image editor is Acorn from Flying Meat Software - [http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/](http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/).

It's like Apple's Numbers compared to Microsoft's Excel - there are things that the most sophisticated couple of percent of users will miss, but for most people it's a great alternative.

Adobe can't die quick enough to make me happy.

<comment><USER13> I second this: Pixelmator is great. But most heavy Photoshop users won't leave Photoshop unless dragged away. It's all they know. Sure they'll kick, scream, bitch. But suggest something like Pixelmator you get excuses like "But Pixelmator doesn't have [insert obscure filter that they've only used once in their life]".

In the end, they'll still stay on Adobe's CC.

<comment><USER14> Actually Pixelmater doesn't have tons of NON obscure features, professionals (and image editing enthusiasts) use day in, day out.

We don't just crop, resize and apply some blur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it funny that my graphics card is now faster than the world's fastest supercomputer in 1997, yet I am forced to "offload" stuff to cloud.

I bought CS6 suite as it became clear Adobe is moving full steam ahead with CC. I think it is one of those examples where the move serves only company's interests and doesn't make much sense to users (except for continuous updates that might accidentally break things as well). The initial pricing might have been competitive for some packages, for many users however caused substantial increase if they used to skip one cycle for upgrades. I understand Adobe needs a predictable revenue stream though I consider this as a flop.

</comment><comment><USER16> Could this be grounds for a class action?

> Adobe had categorically assured users and journalists, when replacing > Creative Suite with Creative Cloud in May 2013, that apps only needed to > check in with the server every 30 days, telling MacUser in a written reply > that products would continue to work for 99 days in the absence of a server > connection.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cloud computing is a great theoretical idea, but extremely fragile in the face of serious crisis, like economic meltdown, wars, sanctions or even natural disasters.

All the websites, always-on apps, mobile operating systems, etc will be worthless if (when) the shit hits the fan. In case of global economic meltdown, the companies would be unable to pay for the huge data-centers, the providers will go belly up and it would be next to impossible to restore or recover the data stored in the 'cloud'.

Imagine waking up one day and not having access to the Internet. Try it and see how much you can do with your computer.

And with Russia under KGB dictatorship (read: insane, evil people), that shit can hit the fan as soon as this year.

That's why it is imperative to create an offline database of important things which would be available even when the clouds evaporate.

By 'important' things, I mean open source code (eg. offline github), wikipedia and other encyclopaedias, scientific works, books, music, movies. From this angle, I consider thepiratebay to be the most important archive of art that humanity has collectively produced. I've even started working on some sketches of a distributed read-only filesystem based partly on the concepts in the bitcoin blockchain, but I guess a simple solution using torrents plus a distributed offline index, can do the job just fine. Anyone else thought about this ?

<comment><USER18> A simple solution that works now tends to beat a complex solution still on the drawing board. I'd say go ahead with the torrents plus distributed off-line index.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

\- Leslie Lamport

<comment><USER20> I consider this quote tounge in cheek. A properly distributed system will keep your system functioning even when remote components are down.

<comment><USER21> Unless you require both consistent data and partition-tolerance ;-)

[http://www.slideshare.net/alekbr/cap- theorem](http://www.slideshare.net/alekbr/cap-theorem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone have access to GIMP download statistics for the past ~10 days?

Edit: Answering my own question... Not the main repository, but it's something.

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp- win/files/GIMP%20%2B%20...](http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp- win/files/GIMP%20%2B%20GTK%2B%20%28stable%20release%29/stats/timeline?dates=2014-05-01+to+2014-05-16)

<comment><USER23> Too bad GIMP is such a crappy alternative.

<comment><USER24> Ehh...depends what you're doing.

99% of the time, I just need to crop an image to a certain size. GIMP is actually much _better_ than photoshop for this particular exact task. Nice UI for resizing the selection box in place. Other simple tweaks - brightness/contrast etc - are handled perfectly competently.

It certainly isn't a drop-in replacement for the sort of magic 'proper' photoshoppers do. But for a semi-competent web-monkey like me, it suffices perfectly well on those occasions when imagemagick is too blunt an instrument.

Vector to bitmap conversion sucks, though. Seriously, if IM can do this without pixellating everything to buggery, why not GIMP?

<comment><USER15> Lightroom is far better for the tasks you mentioned than GIMP. IrfanView or XnView would be also perfectly adequate for your simple tasks.

Forget about easy skin retouching in GIMP, no 16-bit/channel in official release yet, forget about high-end fashion photography with GIMP. It's still not there :-(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When I had to go out to buy licenses a few months ago for an intern at our company and found out that it is no longer possible to buy the regular Adobe licenses for the latest products we solved this by using competitor products and open source projects to give us a patched together set of tools.

The money was not an issue, what was an issue is that I think that tools should not be shoehorned against all logic into a pay-to-play model, they should just work. Imagine your c compiler or your editor failing to work because some third party service is down. To me that is not an option.

I hope Adobe learns their lesson and re-instates the licensing model they used in the past and gets rid of their 'Creative Cloud' nonsense asap.

And if they don't then I hope some competitor will realize this is a huge opportunity and will jump into the gap opened up here.

Adobe is good, but they can be beaten, especially if they shoot themselves in the foot (repeatedly).

</comment><comment><USER26> As a result of this outage today, I found myself switching Pixelmator and Sketch. So far, so good.

<comment><USER27> Best of luck! I have been using Sketch for my job for 3 weeks now. It has its bugs, but Adobe already lost me as a customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a hard time understanding why anyone would lease a service that is vital to their job, or at least without a backup. If your livelihood depends on something then spend your money appropriately. Even if you did sign up for CC you can still have an older version ready to go in a pinch.

<comment><USER29> Adobe is increasingly forcing you to do it.

EDIT: For example, can you figure out how to _buy_ Photoshop from this page? I can't. I've been trying for a couple minutes.

[http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/software._sl_id- conten...](http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/software._sl_id- contentfilter_sl_catalog_sl_software_sl_mostpopular.html)

<comment><USER30> You have to find it here, I've had this page bookmarked since they started pushing CC, just in-case.

[http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/cs6._sl_id- contentfilt...](http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/cs6._sl_id- contentfilter_sl_catalog_sl_software_sl_creativesuite6.html)

<comment><USER31> Wow! I didn't even realise it was still possible to buy Adobe products the old-school way.

This is extremely good news.

<comment><USER32> Yes - but it's old versions that will no longer be updated. You can usually find older versions directly from resellers at Amazon at prices below Adobe's direct prices.

<comment><USER33> The older versions also will not accept files created in the newer Creative Cloud versions. This has been a constant source of frustration at my office. It's an excellent way for Adobe to encourage/force everyone to buy CC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Complete non-hacked photoshop CS2 is freely available with serial - [http://www.techspot.com/downloads/3689-adobe-photoshop- cs2.h...](http://www.techspot.com/downloads/3689-adobe-photoshop-cs2.html)

It works pretty well in Wine as well, if you fiddle with the settings.

<comment><USER35> If you Google around Adobe released a statement saying that those CS2 downloads and provided serial number are for customers who bought CS2. Adobe switched off their activation servers but made the serial numbers available to mitigate that.

<comment><USER34> They are undoubtedly for those customers, but legally you have to enforce copyrights to keep them. There is no way that Adobe could argue that they are still enforcing copyright restrictions on the binaries of CS2.

<comment><USER36> You're confusing copyright with trademarks. Trademarks must be defended if you want to keep them (this is logical: if other people are using them, they are no longer a mark of your trade). That doesn't apply to copyright; it's an entirely automatic process.

<comment><USER34> You are right. Thinking it through you can of course put a restrictive license on stuff that is publicly available, otherwise of course open source would not work. What Adobe may have done is confused their original license terms by posting a download with key, so a court is very unlikely to award more than nominal damages should Adobe get annoyed with it being used, but you are perfectly correct, their copyright still holds up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm a developer, and I only use Adobes products to pull images and the like out of Photoshop/Illustrator files given to me by my design team. I don't want to use Adobes software, as its entirely wasted on me. But I don't think any of the other apps handle PSD's (a horrid file format) well enough to allow me to replace them :( Anyone in my position that _has_ replaced them? What should I look at?

<comment><USER7> I've had fair success using Gimp for similar use-cases -- with the caveat that that is mostly for design mock-ups made in photoshop (no vector graphics to speak of).

There's definitely a learning curve, and Gimp still has a long way to go -- but it's passed into "usable" quite a while ago for my uses.

[edit: if anyone knows of other alternatives (preferably that runs on Linux and/or under Wine, preferably Free software - but also closed source -- I'd love to hear about it]

<comment><USER38> I used to do this until somebody sent me an Illustrator file. GIMP or any other free alternative (e.g. Inkscape) I've found won't handle those correctly.

<comment><USER39> I recently had to open a simple Illustrator file in Inkscape and it worked well enough. But yeah I wouldn't be surprised if it choked on more complicated stuff. You can of course always ask your clients to save as SVG.

<comment><USER40> I found that SVGs between Illustrator and InkScape aren't fully compatible either. Sometimes objects wouldn't get filled in the same way. Most problems seemed to be on the Illustrator side, though, not InkScape. Or maybe the other guy didn't quite know what he was doing, but still that's a real problem, and he isn't dumb either.

I bet you'd get all sorts of minor glitches and artefacts with even more complicated vector imagery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It really is the moments like this when I look at my stack of Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, and Darktable, and am glad that I invested in the alternate solution.

<comment><USER39> Not sure why you're getting downvoted for this: I'd say you're allowed your little moment of schadenfreude after having invested all these time in tools many designers won't yet take seriously!

The real catch though, is that design work is almost always done in collaboration—so that it's not just enough to switch yourself, you need to find other people to work with who use similar tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Was just restored an hour ago apparently, with no compensation for the downtime of the people affected....

</comment><comment><USER43> Bohemian Coding has finally fixed the grid snapping bug that plagued all previous versions of Sketch so I will definitely not be renewing my CC subscription when it expires. CC feels like it has much more do with Adobe's needs than mine.

</comment><comment><USER44> And this is the sticking point for cloud-focussed systems. It's too early to implement an "always-on" attitude in so many parts of the world. I hope the backlash to this 24-hour outage (which in some cases will lose clients over) acts as the poster-child for would-be cloud-only services.

</comment><comment><USER45> 7.5 hours worth of repeated (and I mean _repeatedly_ explaining the situation to each new contact) tech support calls over a licensing issue that was, ultimately, a 10 minute fix (allowing for included administrivia) that was _already sitting available for access /correction on the computer in front of a "supervisor"._

That left me swearing Adobe would never see another dime from me or people I advise. And it leaves me repeating this anecdote every time the news surfaces another story about their cr-p administration systems and support.

And these are the people who are going to be involved in e.g. EME DRM in _our_ browsers? I sincerely hope not.

</comment><comment><USER46> What should happen due to this outage:

Adobe Management: Oh no, our users cannot work. Let's remove the requirement for our software to phone home _just to open /work_.

What will probably happen:

Adobe Management: Hmm, maybe let's try to make our servers more available?

<comment><USER47> The phone home is apparently periodic. I worked in Photoshop and Illustrator multiple times yesterday with zero problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have CC and was able to work fine all day. I wasn't able to sign in but that has no bearing on me doing my job. Was this something that affected the licensing servers and I just happened to be lucky?

</comment><comment><USER49> One of the issues with the move to the cloud with formerly desktop software is exactly this. I used to use the analogy of an army using guns, except instead of a magazine holding bullets they had a long hose feeding them rounds. It sounded great to the generals, because instead of carrying around 20lbs of munitions, the soldiers just needed to carry around their guns. Of course all it took is for somebody to put a kink in the hose to put them out of the fight completely.

</comment><comment><USER50> That's what you get when a business has a monopole on a market.You're now free to go to competition... not.Put the industry itself is responsible for this.

</comment><comment><USER51> Here's a list of Mac OSX alternatives to everything in the Creative Cloud: [http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/graphics-roundups/the- best-...](http://mac.appstorm.net/roundups/graphics-roundups/the-best- alternative-apps-to-everything-in-adobe-creative-cloud/)

</comment><comment><USER52> Never outsource your core business.

Never outsource critical infrastructure that your core business requires to operate, unless you have a backup plan. If GitHub goes away, you can switch to BitBucket. If Digital Ocean goes away, you can switch to Linode. If Adobe CC goes away, what do you switch to?

</comment><comment><USER53> I just bought acorn and idraw but everyone here is recommending pixelmator and sketch :(

<comment><USER54> FWIW, I moved from Pixelmator to Acorn and prefer Acorn immensely. Don't feel so bad.

<comment><USER55> For what little I do that doesn't require spinning up Photoshop on the Windows beast, I use Acorn on the MBPr. It just feels nicer than Pixelmator to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Meanwhile, sensible people who don't rent their software are laughing from CS6.

<comment><USER57> Until CS6 stops being supported by some operating system or processor architecture in the future.

<comment><USER56> x86_64 will never die, it's too pervasive, and as much as mobile fans think the future is underpowered ARM with the actual processing being done by a third party sifting through your personal data (who generally use x86_64 anyway), reality isn't following their expectations.

<comment><USER57> I don't know about that.

And anyway, I've had 2 expensive pieces of software meant for professional production, that just stopped working over the years for various reasons. "Old" versions of Vegas Video don't work in anything past Windows XP. Same goes for "old" versions of Pro Tools. Also, with the old Pro Tools, make sure you don't have a dual core processor, because that breaks it too.

My point is, there are many factors which can suddenly render software obsolete. I wouldn't expect CS6 to run on anything but really old unsupported hardware in 5 - 10 years.

One of the best things you can do for your career is to remain flexible about the tools you use. Always be on the lookout for alternatives.

<comment><USER56> Then virtualise it - by the time it doesn't, someone will have Linux-style containers working in windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Wait, do you really have to have a constant internet connection to run Photoshop now?

<comment><USER59> Australian here. Using the subscription version of Creative Suite avoids the $4000 fuck-you-Australia markup they add onto the price of the full version.

So yeah, we don't get to edit photos when the internet is down or Adobe's servers fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> You can still use CC software, you just can't update or have access to their shitty sync software.

But all the apps work, they don't require an internet connection (for 30 days at least), so it's not the disaster everyone is making it out to be.

<comment><USER61> No, if you read the very fine article, you'd see that users specifically were encountering problems running apps. Some users were unable to run the apps getting unexpected errors when trying to do so despite what you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I wasn't a fan if CC at first but it's turned into an incredibly good deal for me at $30 per month. A little downtime from time to time can't be avoided. People just love to complain.

<comment><USER63> _> >A little downtime from time to time can't be avoided. People just love to complain._

If you feel this way then image-editing isn't your core task in your job.

Imagine if the github.com maintainers had your attitude. _" Meh, some downtime here 'n there. Whuchagonnado?_" A github outage for __OVER 24 HOURS__ would freakin' wreck me and my coworkers. The image-editing department for a high- fashion magazine in New York or Paris with those already near-impossible deadlines losing 24hrs is going to make some execs somewhere very angry.

<comment><USER64> I would think git's distributed nature would make this a lesser issue. You would just have to set up another remote target and push/pull from that (say on AWS or some other provider).

<comment><USER7> Sure. But not having access to the tickets database might cripple a team pretty badly.

One reason I'm still toying with the idea of trying fossil[1] "for real" and/or find/make a tool that distributes issues within mercurial/git like [http://www.bugseverywhere.org/](http://www.bugseverywhere.org/)

Note-to-self: looks like hattawiki might be a nice companion on the path to "distributed everything":

[http://hatta-wiki.org/Install](http://hatta-wiki.org/Install)

[1] [https://www.fossil-scm.org/](https://www.fossil-scm.org/)

<comment><USER65> For a distributed wiki try gollum. It's the wiki engine behind the github wikis and it's basically a wiki where the database is a git repo. I love it for family use. I can put up a nice web interface for everyone else to edit and yet I use git push/pull and my normal text editor. Works great.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Helps FBI Track Down George Floyd Protester - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/09/16/apple-helps-fbi-track-down-george-floyd-protester-accused-of-firebombing-cop-cars/ <comment><USER2> >Apple has given the feds vital evidence from one of its iCloud users who was arrested for firebombing cop cars during the George Floyd protests in late May.

Spelled protester wrong, its: 'rioter'</comment>


Show HN: Trigger webhooks on database events (Postgres) - <AUTHOR> http://hasura.io/event-triggers <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! We'd made an open-source component called skor [1][2] a while ago and we've now merged that work, fixed many of the issues, added a convenient UI so that triggering webhooks / serverless on specific database events takes only a few seconds to setup.

Features:

\- Atomic and reliable event capture

\- Configure retry logic or retry dynamically using `Retry-After`

\- Redeliver events manually for easy debugging/dev

[1] [https://github.com](https://github.com)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16976459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16976459) ,</comment>


Zynga Now Worth Less Than Its Own Office Building - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/halting-problem/zyngas-offices-now-worth-more-than-zynga-the-company-47a704d48249 <comment><USER2> I suppose you can consider them the equivalent of a one-hit wonder in the music industry.</comment>