Andy Grove and the iPhone SE - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2016/andy-grove-and-the-iphone-se/ <comment><USER2> > "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was > introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do…At the end of the day, > there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a > certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our > forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can > make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the > volume was 100x what anyone thought."

This was an interesting time for embedded microprocessors. I was a big fan of DEC/Intel StrongARM and XScale, and the team I worked with preferred using them in designs.

I disagree that it was simply an economic choice, and I think anyone who worked in the ARM embedded industry around that time would also disagree. The move to sell off XScale was after years of neglect. The most obvious defects were the PXA250, which could only cache write-thru due to a bug (Wikipedia does not mention this), and the lack of USB2.0 high speed, despite it being a key feature of every competing SoC.

It was obvious to everyone in my industry that ARM was going to take off in a big way, and exponentially -- "microcontrollers" had grown up, and reasonable compute power could be put everywhere at home, and even carried around with you.

Intel, on the other hand, was seen by everyone I knew, to be more concerned with cannibalization of its low-end x86 market. Stealey and Atom were coming down the pipeline (Silicon Valley secrecy wasn't what it is today), and Intel was looking to make a play in the market. Except, Intel's designs were off the mark by orders of magnitude in power consumption, and could never fill that niche. Still, the word in the street was Intel had bad internal politics at play, and its ARM offerings had to go.

So yes, it's a great shame Intel missed that incredible opportunity at a pivotal moment. But no, it was not an economic decision.

<comment><USER3> I can remember how RISC chips were going to take over the world, Linux/RISC was going to be the greatest threat to Intel. 10/20 years later x86 is everywhere from the Macs to high end servers to lowliest tablets. The latest Atoms are actually very good.

ARM meanwhile dominates the lowest end, but no one really makes money out of it. I think Intel was wise to avoid.

<comment><USER2> > 10/20 years later x86 is everywhere from the Macs to high end servers to > lowliest tablets. The latest Atoms are actually very good.

10/20 years later, ARM represents the vast majority of both volume and profit in home personal computing. x86 is only "winning" if you define a very small category to compare against ARM.

> ARM meanwhile dominates the lowest end, but no one really makes money out of > it. I think Intel was wise to avoid.

Edit: Meanwhile the "PC" category became largely irrelevant. That's what Intel missed.

<comment><USER4> _> Edit: Meanwhile the "PC" category became largely irrelevant. That's what Intel missed_

That's a ridiculous claim. 2015 shipments of 288.7 million units (Gartner) may be down but they're still huge: that's _791,000 per day_. And sales of Windows tablets and 2-in-1s are growing very rapidly.

Are tablet sales "largely irrelevant" because they're lower than PC sales (206.8 million, says IDC), and even if you include tablet PCs running Windows, declining even faster? [https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40990116](https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS40990116)

<comment><USER5> Apple did not become the world's most profitable company selling macs, they became it selling arm based devices.

That's the market Intel missed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Intel would go on to sell XScale to Marvel in 2006

I was astonished to see how far reaching the Marvel Empire has become (I do like their comics and tv shows and movies :-)), but it's _MarvelL_.

<comment><USER7> I just had a discussion about the spelling difference with a coworker yesterday, and couldn't believe I didn't notice this today. Good catch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fantastic read, thank you. I too thought about what the iPhone SE means in regards to the (somewhat failed) launch and disappearance of the iPhone 5C. Targeting a lower price with higher-end materials certainly is a turn-around from their strategy a few years ago... I had never considered that the 5C was simply a decision based on manufacturing and supply chain issues, as the article states. Very interesting.

<comment><USER9> I love the iphone 5c. I love that it works great, its fast, it cost me $160 on craigslist, I can throw it across the room or drop it and it doesn't break, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been wondering what is the thing that will come along which Apple totally ignores and ends up dwarfing them. Who knows, but it seems like VR is a possibility. Imagine if someone ships a very immersive VR experience, that's going to be a lot more compelling than the 5" phone screen in your hand. And it doesn't seem to be a space Apple is paying any attention to, though of course they could just be doing things in secret.

<comment><USER11> VR by definition cannot impact everyday life the way smartphones or PCs did. It will forever be a novelty, imho.

The real threats for Apple, imho, are successful web companies expanding towards hardware. Apple does great HW and poor online services; someone doing great online services and great HW could hit them badly. Google got close already; Microsoft will try again once they complete their retooling; Amazon are unfocused but could fish a winner with some original thinking; Facebook/Dropbox/others might also challenge at some point. Luckily for Apple, hardware is very difficult to get right and get profitable.

<comment><USER12> Virtual and augmented reality seem like the endgame for what phones do for us now. Instead of a computer on every desk, or every pocket, it's one in every eye.

I'd rather follow a set of virtual arrows to my destination than have to keep checking my phone. This goes for a lot of tasks I use my phone for. Though the privacy concerns are more worrisome than mobile phones!

<comment><USER11> Vr and augmented are different things. Augmented has potential, but the heavy lifting will likely be done in smartphones for the time being, like it's happening with watches. The smartphone is the perfect "unit of computing" as it is; we will get better interfaces, but the mobile revolution has already happened. Augmented won't be as transformative as smartphones have been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing i wonder about: iPhone sells on status, for example in china. Would people compromise on something as critical as screen size for status ? Can a small sized screen project status well, even if it's understandable socially that bigger is better ?

</comment><comment><USER14> > Andy Grove died yesterday. He is widely considered the greatest CEO in tech > history.

I thought the consensus was that _Steve Jobs_ was "greatest CEO in tech history". Make up your mind Silicon Valley!

<comment><USER15> It might be clearer to say that AG was the best _tech CEO_ in tech history, and SJ was the best CEO in tech history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> iPhone SE is at a full 30% premium price as compared to US. So a product priced at the magic price point of INR 27500 is instead at a prohibitive ~ INR 40000 which most consumers in India will balk at.

The SE will sell massive volumes in India if the pricing matches the one in US - but at the current point its very uncertain looking at Indian consumer landscape.

<comment><USER17> Read the last footnote

<comment><USER18> Your footnote is still missing the context. The iPhone 5c launched at Rs 41,000 back in 2013 too. While the SE is obviously a better value than the 5c was, it is still priced out of reach for most people and the impact will be marginal in international markets. More likely it will result in more of the Indian elite getting the SE, instead of the 6s, resulting in a lower ASP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> tldr: growth at the expense of margins, like AG did in the late 90s</comment>


Hybrid Synergy Drive - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Synergy_Drive <comment><AUTHOR> Didn't realize this system used a CVT-like system to generate electicity. I've generally been curious how this system seems to be significantly more complex yet more reliable than many modern internal combustion engine drivetrains. (My personal perception, haven't done much research to look it up).</comment>


Cable Lengths Algo - <AUTHOR>

I need an algo to do the following:<p>(01) You have a number of cable drums of length L each.<p>(02) You need to cut lengths of cables from these drums say, n1xL1,n2xL2,n3xL3, where n is the number of cables and L is their length.<p>(03) You need to minimize waste.<p>Does anyone one of a solution? Any mathematics papers? <comment><USER2> Feels a lot like a variation on the Knapsack problem, which is known to be NPC-Complete.

If that's true (and I haven't verified it - that's your problem) then you can use any of the variations on the greedy algorithm to get a reasonably good solution.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it is very similar actually, I followed the link and is the cutting stock problem <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_stock_problem>, seems quite complex. Need to do more reading!</comment></comment>


High Availability at Braintree [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintrust/ruby-conf-australia-high-availability-at-braintree

<comment><AUTHOR> Slides available here: [http://www.pgrs.net/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/rubyconf_aust...](http://www.pgrs.net/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/rubyconf_australia_high_availability.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER2> Excellent insights on running a high availability operation, one of the best technical talks I have heard this year.</comment>


A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels (1995) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/tr-95-51.pdf <comment><USER2> This is a classic paper, and well worth reading if you use relational databases for anything serious. Using 'phenomena' is a nice framing, and one that I found particularly effective for understanding how to write correct database transactions at various isolation levels. Perhaps the most surprising result here is "REPEATABLE READ »« Snapshot Isolation", meaning that it's not possible to order one of the two as "stronger" isolation.

The author list here is a round-up of real database legends, including the late Jim Gray and Pat O'Neil, and Phil Bernstein and Elizabeth O'Neil who are still doing work in databases and systems.

<comment><USER3> Also, to your point, I believe it is possible to strengthen Snapshot Isolation to the point where it is strictly stronger than Repeatable Read. There was a paper at VLDB circa 2007, I belie it was done by a researcher from Oracle. Can't recall any details, other than the guy was pretty young and well-spoken.

<comment><USER4> I believe that you're thinking of Michael J. Cahill:

[https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse444/08au/544M/R...](https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse444/08au/544M/READING- LIST/fekete-sigmod2008.pdf)

This became the basis of PostgreSQL's serializable snapshot isolation feature:

[https://drkp.net/papers/ssi-vldb12.pdf](https://drkp.net/papers/ssi- vldb12.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Quite possible. In the years since my brain has completely unloaded transaction processing to make room for supply chain management, so I can no longer relate to the subject to see if it's the same research. :(

I recall I approached him in the break and congratulated him on the fantastic presentation. And it was fantastic - like a murder mystery story, it kept you on the edge of the seat, answering questions it has created earlier and culminating into _the_ answer. An older guy, probably his science advisor, protested that it's not only the presentation that was good, and the research itself was not too shabby. To that I retorted that for all we know there was a lot of good research in the room but we will never find out because delivery was lacking. Research must beget research, it's what makes science from hobby. I think we reached an agreement. I often think back to that moment - what we build should lend itself to further building, or it becomes a dead end. Neither science nor technology are made from dead-ends, the proverbial shoulders of giants must stack up for the civilization to advance.

<comment><USER4> Here is the thesis itself:

[https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/5353/m...](https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/5353/michael- cahill-2009-thesis.pdf)

I do remember thinking that it was unusually well argued and presented. It's much more accessible to the practitioner than a lot of the other research in this area. In my experience this is a positive signal about the quality of the research.

<comment><USER3> That's gotta be him. I just read the abstract, it's mountain-creek-clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone would like to learn more about this topic, Jepsen has some great articles on isolation levels and consistency models.

[https://jepsen.io/consistency](https://jepsen.io/consistency)

</comment><comment><USER6> (1995)

<comment><USER7> Added. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Input your logs, output anything unique - <AUTHOR> https://feeduno.io/ <comment><USER2> If you are looking for example logs, the loghub project by logpai is a pretty awesome place to take a look.

[https://github.com/logpai/loghub](https://github.com/logpai/loghub)</comment>


Hacking Google ad-words - <AUTHOR>

Ok, so this is just passed the theory stage, but I thought I would see what others are thinking.<p>Within Google Ad-words, you can set a Max-CPC, and then google gives you a very precise estimated rank.  I am wondering if anyone is willing to own up to using this to find out how much a competitor is willing to spend to get the top spot. <comment><USER2> Yup. It's not just based on bid though. They calculate your positioning based on your quality score as well.

This isn't anything _that_ new. Pretty standard fare if you've got an account with a decent budget that wants to push out other competitors.</comment>


Idea for date formatting strings - <AUTHOR> http://notes.torrez.org/2010/07/idea-for-date-formatting.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fnotes+%28Notes%29 <comment><USER2> The idea might sound good, but the moment localization comes in, you learn that you'd much rather specify your date value in a template with some function like

       date_for('de_CH', SHORT, some_date_value)

and be done with it. In Switzerland alone, we have three ways (or four, depending on who you ask) to specify and format a date. Heck, we can't even agree whether the decimal point of numbers should be a period (de_CH) or a comma (fr_CH)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great in theory, but in practice it would be really tough to implement. A lot of assumptions would be made. For example, what should "01-01-01" be interpreted as?

Also, date format strings are pretty standard. If you ever forget them, just type `man strftime` at the command line.

<comment><USER4> Precisely. Ultimately, no one is going to use a language where there's no way to output a date in a form that will be sometimes ambiguous. And how often do you really even find yourself printing totally unambiguous time stamps? For my part it's way more likely that I'll output "2-11-2009" than "Monday, January 1st 2004 10:43 EST".

<comment><USER5> Ambiguous example formatting strings would give an error, as an invalid one does now. I like the proposal, although localization is an issue as the examples would have to be in a concrete language.

Removing unneeded abstractions is positive, specially if you have to deal with conflicting models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To remove ambiguity, you could say months should be represented by December, days by the 31st, weeks by Friday, and so on. In that way it would be easy to implement _and_ easy to write to. Then the case of "01-01-01" becomes "31-12-99", for example. Still easy to read, still easy to implement.

<comment><USER7> This removes a lot of flexibility, which is the whole point of date format strings. "31st" doesn't give you the choice to print just the number, or the number and its ordinal suffix ("-st," "-rd," etc.). Also, preferably "Friday" should stand for the _day_ , not the week. :)

<comment><USER8> All of the things you say can be had by doing things grandparent's way with minor tweaks.

<comment><USER7> But then you're left with essentially the standard php date format, except instead of one-letter tokens, they're all longer.

<comment><USER5> But concrete and equal in all languages, which is the point of the OP.

<comment><USER9> the strftime format is an open standard that's already the same in all languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wrote something like this a few years ago. It's hard to get all the edge cases right, but it works well enough for my purposes. I still use it occasionally as a format string generator - I paste the format strings into my code rather than doing the natural language parsing thing every time.

Here's a demo with source (PHP):

<http://ramenlabs.com/dbe/>

</comment><comment><USER11> This is why PHP's strtotime is pretty much my favorite function OF ALL TIME. If I were to marry a programming construct, I would definitely court strtotime. Oh man...

</comment><comment><USER12> I've thought of this before as well. PHP's changing syntax for different functions is particularly annoying. Self-documenting is an added bonus.

<comment><USER8> It actually strikes me as a negative to readability; what should look like a format string instead looks like a static value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Don't think this will work.

Simple example:

10 Jan 2010 //parser determines that "10" is ambiguous, reads Jan as "month" and "2010" as year. So "10" is day of the month.

Now consider the same date but written as "dd-MMM-yy" format:

10-Jan-10 //Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER14> An instance like this is when a Good IDE with nicely documented functions is a huge plus.

</comment><comment><USER9> so how would you say something like ISO8601 week of the year?</comment>


TellHN : This is my new app, AzankaLyrics - <AUTHOR>

I created a minimal lyrics formatter (http://lyrics.azankatech.com). It's a "scratch your own itch" kind of app and I implemented only the features I needed.
No more scrolling or tiny fonts while you're singing a song, your lyrics will be formatted to be the biggest possible for your screen.
What do you think of it? <comment><AUTHOR> clickable : <http://lyrics.azankatech.com></comment>


Oracle Confirms Plan B for the JDK - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/09/plan-b

<comment><USER2> Am i reading this right, are they dropping Swing from JDK7 release?

<comment><USER3> I don't believe so. Looks like they are dropping the Swing Applications Framework which is an add-on to make Swing apps easier to develop.

<comment><USER2> OK cheers, I thought it was a bit drastic.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Raising the cost of your product? - <AUTHOR>

I've been selling my SaaS solution for the past 5 years at the same cost.  We have some clients that are amazed at what they are getting for the price, and not a single complaint that it costs to much .. but would this be a reliable indication that we can raise the cost without p*ssing our clients off?<p>If anyone has been though this, what strategies did you use when increasing your prices?  How did it go down with your clients? etc. <comment><USER2> Careful about raising prices for _existing_ clients. You don't want to seem like you're pulling a bait-and-switch.

That said, you might even get greater customer satisfaction if your existing users realize "hey, I'm getting a better deal than most people!" I'd raise the cost for new signups and maybe create incentives for existing users to refer new signups (if your service is in a field in which that makes sense).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your insight. I see what you mean about the bait-and-switch which makes sense for recent customers but I don't think it could be seen like that for the ones that have been with use for many years if we only increase the price by 5-10% which is around inflation anyway.

We have toyed with the idea of charging more for new customers and are about to implement a program of free laptops for referrals so it's good to hear someone else make the same recommendation.</comment></comment>


Apple to Launch 'iPhone SE 2' in Early 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/03/kuo-iphone-se-2-early-2020/ <comment><USER2> So it will just be a cheaper version of the 8, not a smaller SE-size phone. Might as well just buy the regular 8 now and not wait.

</comment><comment><USER3> The defining quality of the SE model is its 4" screen size. If it's a 4.7" screen size then it's not an SE - at least not to those of us who love the SE. It's about size. I want a modern, 4" phone with a camera sufficient for taking snapshots and pictures of whiteboards.</comment>


Why Testing Is No Longer Sufficient for Today's Software Delivery Pipelines - <AUTHOR> https://blog.overops.com/why-testing-is-no-longer-sufficient-for-todays-software-delivery-pipelines/ <comment><USER2> This article goes on about "why traditional testing is not sufficient". I think their view of 'traditional testing' is a strawman.

Traditional testing _never_ said that 100% code testing was sufficient.

Even 100% branch testing isn't sufficient. SQLite gets bug reports (eg, through fuzzing) even though they have some of the highest covered code _ever_.

Viktor Fracic's comment "Code coverage means nothing" _is_ the traditional view on coverage. Code coverage only means something when you are testing so that code coverage can help. Otherwise, it's easy to get high coverage with meaningness tests.

And that's been the view of code coverage for a very long time.

Ditto for "High quality testing takes time and doesn't guarantee success." Has anyone ever said that high-quality testing guarantees success? Perhaps a few odd-balls, but it's never been the majority view.

"I'd rather see people move fast and be comfortable with failing" depends very much on your market. (Boeing avionics, _ahem._ )

In other words, testing has _never_ been sufficient. Only necessary.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like they are essentially arguing for the ol' "move fast and break things" \- though I guess in a slightly more responsible manner: You can't catch all problems with thests, so it's important to be able to react quickly to problems - and in fact, being able to react quickly is already important from a business perspective anyway.

Sounds reasonable, I just wonder what kind of practical differences this advice does make.

I do hope this isn't a lot of talk to go back to the Facebook style of "moving fast and breaking things" in the end. The "let your users be the QA" part somewhat sounds like that...

</comment><comment><USER4> Software engineering shall rely more and more on mathematical proofs. Go Idris! :)

</comment><comment><USER5> there is no alternative to testing;

that coverage as a metric is insufficient to quantify the quality of testing is not a surprise to anyone.

</comment><comment><USER6> _" Viktor Fracic: "Code coverage means nothing."_

I guess I don't have any need to listen to that Viktor guy, then. If Viktor runs his tests, gets 50%, and wants to try and convince me it doesn't mean anything, he's going to find it falling on deaf ears. I don't care how "meaningful" ones tests are, if they only cover half the code someone is queueing for a bad day somewhere down the line.

OTOH, I have heard with my own ear holes a test manager say that they had hit 100% coverage and therefore testing is complete (paraphrasing). A test manager at Microsoft said this in a meeting with other people present. So I can see where Viktor might be coming from, but he has still thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

<comment><USER7> I don't know everyone else's experience, but I found unit testing encouraged me to write better quality code. Testable code is better code. Methods are smaller and have more focused purpose, leading to more reusability. Writing unit tests with >98% coverage forces me to think more deeply about and have a greater understanding of the code I'm writing and how it all interacts. I am more likely to consider edge cases where things might go awry and deal with them. So even if someone believes that tests don't buy them anything directly, I can only speak for myself but the second and third order effects have been great for my career.

<comment><USER2> I found that unit testing with small methods meant I was writing my tests to those methods.

But the methods were specific to one implementation approach.

If I wanted to rewrite the algorithm, eg, for clarity or performance, I ended up replacing many of the tests, which felt like test churn.

I prefer trying to figure out where the semi-permanent/API-like interface are in the code, and test through that. The result is closer to integration testing than unit testing, although I use a unit test testing framework for it.

<comment><USER7> I had the opposite experience. One of the many good practices unit testing encourages is encapsulation. With encapsulation and mocking during testing, there is very little chance of a cascade affect when changing a method or doing some refactoring.

<comment><USER2> The question is, what's the encapsulation level?

If you only change the internals of a method, then it's clear that the method call is the API.

But the specific method calls are rarely the deliverable (outside of library packages). Those are usually much higher, eg, web API or command-line options. Instead, the methods can be rather fluid.

My experience is that the "unit testing with small methods" approach usually emphasizes testing each method.

The analogy I use is that of building a bridge, where you don't care what sort of bridge is made, only that it can handle a specific amount of traffic.

So I build a truss bridge, with tests that each of the struts is correct.

But this is programming, and I decide it's better to replace the truss with a suspension bridge, so I do that.

Which means I have to throw away all the strut tests, since I don't have them.

While if I had only used load tests from the start - integration tests for what the customer actually wants - then I could do wholesale rewrites without changing much of the tests.

<comment><USER7> I want to be clear I'm not disagreeing with you here. But I would like to point out if you were building a real bridge every component would be inspected individually. They wouldn't just let you build a whole bridge and do a final load test. Whether that level of robustness/ confidence is important will be highly contextual.

<comment><USER2> Yes, and part of the mythos of unit testing - especially around small methods - is based on that real-world analogy, when "this is programming", and many of the rules are quite different.

As another analogy, if you breadboard a device you can test each individual component directly. Once it's on a chip, most of those individual tests can no longer be used. That's not to say they can't be tested, only that the testing must be done on a higher interface level.

So, do you use those higher-level tests, which are more like intergration tests, or do you write the low-level unit tests and expect to throw the away at any sort of non-trivial code changes?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook says Pages that regularly share false news won't be able to buy ads - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/28/facebook-fake-news-ads/ <comment><USER2> The risk here is not that the system will have bad goals, it's that it's easy for manipulation to redefine the core terms used to classify "bad" content. Even now, we regularly see even clear terms like "correct" or "incorrect" applied by fact-checking websites through a fairly biased lens.

This is not a partisan issue, when you start down the road of handing the keys to shaping public thought to a powerful party, you're there when the power changes too.

This is no different than being able to tell when someone is bullshitting just as you walk through every day life, and thinking we need to shield the poor naive populace from harmful ideas is borderline stereotypical paternalism.

This is all obviously a big deal to old media, who have made an art not out of sharing incorrect truths, but of very selectively sharing truths, to the point that what emerges does not really represent the truth at all. They didn't lie, but they aggressively shaped. Of course democratic access to the pieces they'd rather suppress (on both sides) threatens that model. They'd love us to toss out this particular bath water.

<comment><USER3> The game has changed. There are people with intolerant and twisted views trying to manipulate the naive herd of sheep who blindly follows whatever people like on Facebook.

Knowing the tactics of people behind fake news, it's good that Facebook is responding accordingly to punish and get rid of bad actors on their platform.

It's once again showing that we can't have pure anarcho decentralization. It would be a haven for bad actors that goes unpunished.

We can absolutely set definition for what is bad and what isn't bad. What is clearly bad is writing fake news about certain group of ethnic group you hate and manipulating others into believing your twisted idiosyncratic views about Jews, Hindus and Moors.

edit: there is some heavy downvote brigading going on here. I've alerted the mods.

<comment><USER4> sad to me that people are so quick to dismiss the principles of free speech on the basis that "the game has changed" after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.

(inb4 1st amendment is only for the gov - that is a selective truth. the principles of free speech exist outside of government.)

<comment><USER5> > ...after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.

People couldn't manipulate millions of others as easily. You couldn't even REACH millions of people easily. And you had to be an actual authority figure to be given that power (perhaps a corrupt practice but still).

The communications landscape is quite different from 2000, remarkably different from 1980, extremely different from 1960, a world away from 1920, and bares very little resemblance to 1820.

How do things in the 1500s and 1600s say that thins aren't different?

You said thousands of years, how do the lessons of 2000 BC show us things haven't changed?

<comment><USER4> so how did Hitler rise? How did freedom of speech treat the West at the time? How did the opposite help Europe?

<comment><USER5> That was less than 100 years ago, after the invention of radio and newsreels; I'm not shire how it proves the point of unfettered free speech either.

I'd love to see examples of unfettered free speech from the 1600s or much MUCH easier.

<comment><USER4> Ancient Athenians adored freedom of speech. Naming a warship after the very concept.

399BC - Socrates speaks to jury at his trial: 'If you offered to let me off this time on condition I am not any longer to speak my mind... I should say to you, "Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you."'

1516 - The Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus. 'In a free state, tongues too should be free.'

In the 1600s, Galileo was executed for mere speech.

<comment><USER6> Galileo was _executed_?

<comment><USER4> Oops, sorry. Hoouse arrest for life and all texts burned. Here are a few executions & persecutions for speech: [https://www.wired.com/2012/06/famous- persecuted-scientists/](https://www.wired.com/2012/06/famous-persecuted- scientists/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is unfortunate that platforms like Facebook have become the beacons of pessimism. I am talking in the context of the usage of social media tools to harm society, rather than help it.

For me, FB, TW, etc have become unreliable sources of news.

Here, FB is trying to limit ads from pages that share false news, but who will decide that??

1\. FB - Leads to a dangerous slippery slope of putting too much power into a single,private, profit-seeking entity.

2\. Users - It alienates sections of society.

3\. Other sources - Inherently unreliable.

Seemingly, FB getting into the media distribution business itself is troublesome for a society, especially when you have a platform whose algorithms prioritize profit, consequently leading to construction of powerful echo chambers.

The trouble with these echo chambers is that they nullify efforts of the society to promote meaningful debate and discussion.

Even before the era of FB, the world was struggling with misinformation, lies, subversion of facts, etc. Now we have reached a point where Presidents can lie, often within a span of a few hours, and it's essentially forgotten and things move on. These echo chambers are the primary culprit for this IMV. When efforts to educate constituents is taken head on with echo chambers, the echo chambers inevitably win.

Reminds me of the novel where the speaker in a press conference is denouncing country A, and is handed over a note from his aide, and the speaker immediately switched the narrative denouncing country B, all the while the press simply accepts what is told.

<comment><USER8> "Fake news" appears to be "news I don't like" and has no correlation with the accuracy of the content. Conveniently, Facebook seems to agree with many major media outlets about what news they don't like, so they can present their arbitrary definition of "fake" as objective and conveniently no one can break through the bubble to prove otherwise.

<comment><USER9> Some groups flat out make up news stories to fit some narrative. What else are you going to call that than 'fake news'?

'Candidate X comes out as gay.' 'Secret photos reveal candidate X at KKK lynching.' Are both rather over the top, but also the kind of lies that influence elections.

<comment><USER2> If you don't like that, you're going to hate the physical realm, where anyone can make any claim and you're left with nothing but your wits to discern the truth

<comment><USER10> This misunderstands the way technology, social media in particular, have exacerbated problems with misinformation. No one is claiming the media was perfect before. Obviously hoaxes and false rumors have always been a thing. But social media has made disinformation _scalable_.

<comment><USER11> For as long as I can remember, National Enquirer and other magazines like that adorned the racks of every grocery store and book store I've ever been to. Yellow journalism was coined as a term over 100 years ago. There's nothing new about "fake news". And it has been scalable since the invention of the printing press.

<comment><USER12> No one believed bat boy and even the plausible stuff in those was never the subject of design making. The National Enquirer is as much News as the Onion is.

The tragedy now is that there are sites that aren't neatly packaged as entirely false but are. The Internet has empowered people like Alex Jones and other people spouting pure falsehoods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So how does Facebook _really_ know if something is fake?

You can't trust user reports. They will say a story is fake when they don't like it.

You can't trust some worker in Bangladesh to determine this either just as easily as you can determine if something is NSFW.

You still can't trust AI.

So how? It hires specialists in each field to determine what is real and what is not?

<comment><USER14> _" The company has already been working with outside fact-checkers like Snopes and the AP to flag inaccurate news stories. (These aren't supposed to be stories that are disputed for reasons of opinion or partisanship, but rather outright hoaxes and lies.) It also says that when a story is marked as disputed, the link can can no longer be promoted through Facebook ads."_

If Snopes/AP tells me something is false, I'm perfectly willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps this will change in the coming decade, but for now, this seems like a perfectly reasonable heuristic.

<comment><USER15> Honestly, the fact that you think snopes is unbiased is pretty shocking to me, and gives me little hope that Facebook would ever be able to properly determine what is "fake news".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is really interesting. I wonder how it will effect Pages that are known for sarcastic/satire type of content on purpose. Pages like The Onion, Hard Times, etc. I feel like there would have to be a lot of work in the fact- checking part of this. At what point will it be too manual of a process, or will the algorithm start to fail on these "grey" areas?

Also, it's nice to see Facebook implement a feature solely for the user that could be costing them ad money.

<comment><USER17> They played with flagging satirical articles back in 2014: [http://mashable.com/2014/08/17/facebook-satire- tag/](http://mashable.com/2014/08/17/facebook-satire-tag/)

<comment><USER18> I see a lot of comments on satire links that clearly demonstrate that large numbers of people can't always spot satire. That possibly says more about the current cultural and political climate than it does about people's gullibility though.

<comment><USER19> It's not Facebook's job to spot satire or fakes for people. Users expect a "common carrier" type experience, not news curation.

<comment><USER17> Facebook has over two billion users. "Users expect" a wide variety of different things, and I suspect if you polled them there'd be plenty who expect Facebook to do some curation, particularly in the "trending topics" sort of area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Back in November, PC World did some testing with fake FB accounts to see what fake news would be targeted at them. It was pretty eye-opening: [http://www.pcworld.com/article/3142412/windows/just-how- part...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3142412/windows/just-how-partisan-is- facebooks-fake-news-we-tested-it.html)

> The Macedonians may still be at it, because our Republican supporter, Todd > White, was flooded with partisan posts. Worse, over a little more than two > days, we counted 10 such posts in his feed that were fake, most accusing > Democrats or their supporters of illegal activity. In all, White was clearly > exposed to more spin than his Democratic counterpart, Chris Smith, who saw > exactly zero fake news stories.

<comment><USER21> Sounds like there is an untapped market segment. By the next US election, someone will have figured out what kind of content gets Democrats riled up, and makes a ton selling headlines to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER22> Er, that's easy. It's done already by large corporate news sources. Just go browse The Guardian or The Independent (both UK outlets) to find a constant series of clickbait stories designed to maximally upset people with Clinton- style views. Random Macedonians can't make money doing it because those advertising dollars are already sucked up by much larger and better known brands.

There may also be a structural issue (in the USA). If you lean Democrat you probably trust mainstream US media sources like the NYT, Washington Post, CNN, ABC etc. These sources all very openly pushed Clinton and her policies. If you hear a story that sounds initially dubious, you search Google and you don't find anything to support it, you probably will conclude it's not true.

However if you lean Republican and already don't trust these media sources, searching for a story and not finding it will not tell you anything, because you are already expecting those sources to try and suppress information that makes left-leaning causes look bad. So you might find a bunch of YouTube videos or right wing blogs or whatever and conclude that is sufficient.

The US media does publish a lot of biased unfactual garbage, including lots of opinion dressed up as fact, but it's usually quite skillfully done and they avoid pushing stories that are trivially false like "Putin issues arrest warrant for George Soros".

<comment><USER15> Having swung right in recent years, I'm now dealing with this very problem. It takes a ton of effort to get the full picture on a given story. The more controversial it is, the more google's search results will be dominated by rags like Vox, Slate, and HuffPo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Unfortunately we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, we could have completely open and unfiltered platforms which guarantee freedom of expression but at the same time leave our institutions (public and private) vulnerable to malicious influence.

On the other hand, we could attempt to build systems whose purpose is to remove fake news, so defending ourselves against a particularly aggressive form of attack on our institutions, but at the same time creating a situation in which that system is given the power to decide what is fake and what is not.

Are highly speculative opinion pieces which make accusations far from the main stream fake? What about when a complex event takes place and there are numerous 'takes' on how the event played out. Whose version of the events - whose version of reality reality - does the system use to make judgments on the veracity of news?

The situation is complex and we must tread carefully.

<comment><USER22> Is it complex? I don't think so at all.

Facebook can easily just tag stories they think are false, and give people a button to hide or show such stories (or even show ONLY such stories to make it easier for people to build trust in the system). It would be a kind of spam filter for news stories.

Facebook could then stay neutral, could avoid claims of censorship, people who want to only see "true" news could be happy, people who don't trust Facebook's friends to filter their news feed could also be happy, and everyone wins.

They aren't doing that because their goal is not to help people detect fake/false news. Their goal is to suppress it entirely. They do this because like quoquoquo above, they believe their userbase contains vast numbers of sheep who are incapable of rational thought. Just tagging things won't be the "solution" to the existence of such people, which is why their tactics are controversial.

Are they right about their users? It's a big world. But rather than try to help people spot BS and learn from it, their view appears to be that such people are irredeemable.

<comment><USER24> They're correct. People cannot spot BS and learn from it, including you and I. We'll put much effort into mastering a certain area of reality and truth, and find other horizons clouding over by the day: we cannot, as humans, reality- check everything we're confronted with, because it's too much. We're not shepherds or subsistence farmers anymore, with a world tightly constrained and comprehensible. Our world expanded, leaving us behind.

I'm tempted to call this an iron law and suggest it's why we've never spotted alien intelligence in the so-vast universe. Perhaps intelligent species inevitably turn to expanding communication, and drown in it very quickly—their efforts turned to zero-sum gains, eventually triggering their destruction one way or another.

<comment><USER12> We live in a single objective reality. There are ways to get at the truth.

Some of those ways are even easy. Can the claims be tested, sometimes this can shortcut you strait to the truth. Knowing how to check sources gets you one step closer. Knowing how to assess the quality of sources, helps. Knowing how to understand the original source material is crucial. Checking that a multitude of sources agree. Determining if the sources are trustworthy (in the web of trust sense). In the case of claims about the natural world being able to duplicate experiments is the ultimate source of truth. There is more but much of this can be done with just a few web searches.

Many Millions of people don't or can't do any this. How many times have we fixed someone's else's computer with just a google search?

Now for the part where I get downvoted. I blame religion. If you do even the most basic checking into most religions they start seeming off. The sources are often unverifiable books. They make claims about the natural world that don't line up with evidence if they are even testable, worse they often contradict themselves. They often have a long history of actively covering up the truth of reality as best they can. What chances does a mind have at navigating a potentially nuanced modern political landscape when its critical faculties have been dulled to the point of accepting as literal truth some or all of the stories about virgin birth, miracles, resurrection, denial of evolution, implausible claims of the earth's age and many other manners of objective non-true things. Religion damages critical thinking. Demagogues and autocrats have always like reduced critical thinking.

<comment><USER15> What makes you so certain we live in a world of objective reality?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's a good step, I wonder how that effects pages which host widgets from "Outbrain" and the like. So Salon (for example) has a block of "you might also be interested in" articles scattered around their content.

Articles is a pretty charitable term for them I guess but headlines like:

"Tiffany Trump's IQ will shock you" "You won't believe what she looks like today" "Plastic surgery nightmares"

and so on... does Salon get docked for Outbrain's lack of integrity? Does Salon's "organic shares" get penalized? What about sputnik news or Russia Today (RT.com)?

I think it is a great step in the right direction, but they have far more responsibility than just refusing money from them for ads.

Bots on the Hamilton 68 dashboard [http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/](http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/) clearly work together to amplify the voices of antidemocratic forces. FB & twitter should (in my opinion) detect and prevent fake-viral root and branch.

</comment><comment><USER26> This will be a massive time saver for me. It's a real comfort to know that, from now on, all stories on Facebook will be real news. No more reading the articles to spot the BS, just a quick skim of the headlines and I'll be fully informed on the important matters of the day. /s

<comment> wu-ikkyu >They "trust me". Dumb fucks.

-Zuckmeister

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've followed social media for a long time (starting back when one could actually read every single Usenet post daily).

There is a definite life cycle to social media sites. Those reaching the "too big to fail" stage are usually about to. AOL, CompuServe, MySpace, etc were all indominately massive juggernauts reaching to take over the media world - and vanished almost overnight. The sudden influx of editorial censorship in Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc is a clue that a large number of legitimate users (who just happen to hold differing expressions of differing views) are facing the option of leaping to another up-and-coming site. Between that, boredom with format limitations, and an otherwise growing sentiment of malaise, I'm seeing the signs that FB etc won't be with us much longer.

And no, it's not "different this time". It's the same this time.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, no. The reasons that those other systems failed has nothing to do with this particular issue. People will still be able to share their bullshit to like minded people to their hearts' content, which is how the vast majority of information gets shared through facebook. All facebook is saying is that they will not take money from these bullshit mills.

The vast majority of people couldn't care less about whether Breitbart gets to advertise on facebook. They aren't going to uproot their presence there to make a political point, either. Most of the people on the site who hold those views are 50+ year olds who want to see photos of their grandchildren. They can still get all the nonsense they want by watching Fox News in the evening, which is their preferred method anyway.

<comment><USER19> Imputing & dismissing a large fraction of your audience, or friends of your audience, as "deplorable" is not a wise marketing move. They may be 50+, they may watch Fox News, but they consider Breitbart a canary in the coalmine, and may prove quick to throw their not-inconsiderable weight behind cheesy non- sequitur upstart quietly years in the making.

<comment><USER27> Again: grandparents aren't going to abandon a website en masse, a website they use primarily to view photos of their families, just because they certain ads are not being shown.

Not stories. Not shared posts. Ads. They will still get all the ads they want to their hearts content from right-wing sources should those companies buy ad space, it just won't be from knowingly bullshit sources.

Breitbart? No. Rebel Media? No.

WSJ? Yes. The Hill? Yes.

It's not difficult to understand, and it isn't going to change anyone but a handful of nutball's facebook habits. There's no alternative platform in this space that isn't app-first, which eliminates it from consideration for generations that are and will continue to be desktop-first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hmm will they apply it to all politicians and political parties? Every politician ends up saying false things now and then.

<comment><USER29> Something tells me one political party will be exempt.

<comment><USER30> And something tells me that the political party that will benefit may invest heavily in these information-filtering companies (if they are not already), closing the circle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm an ad buyer on Facebook and sometimes Facebook gets very strict, and they ultimately come to a compromise between ad performance/advertisers and their policies.

I know people are scared of 'censorship', but they probably will end up just targeting those crazy conspiratorial pages that clearly share the most bogus stuff to prey on people to later sell bogus products to. You'd be surprised at what's out there..

</comment><comment><USER32> There's nothing worse about fake news than many other kinds of bad content -- the only difference is the attention it is getting right now.

When fake news passes from the spotlight, and something else takes its place, what will they do then?

Even if fake news is a larger business threat to facebook, they can't justify it to the public: "they are allowing horrible thing XYZ, but blocking fake news?!".

</comment><comment><USER33> Uh? What about "fake ads"?

What about the billions of page views for spammy bs on all platforms and sites, shouldn't those be taken out?

<comment><USER34> good luck with that. those fake ads make Facebook money.

<comment><USER33> That was my point :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think it's kinda pointless. By definition, false news generate some kind of shock feeling that urge people to comment and share the link, creating a viral loop of people (a digital angry mob) fueling the false content as real.

Blocking it to be advertised might - just might - slow its viral expansion. Is that the best FB can do about this?

<comment><USER36> This seems like something DNS providers would be better suited to handle, assuming its something you would want to stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Part of the strategy employed by mainstream media to misinform the public is _selective_ reporting. That is, either the entire event is not reported if it doesn't fit the narrative, or parts that don't fit the narrative are simply omitted or deemphasized. Will FB detect and demonetize that as well?

<comment><USER38> No, do you have a suggested way to do this? Seems impossible at FBs scale.

<comment><USER37> Then it's just one-sided censorship in favor of narrative peddlers who run major media corporations, and it has nothing to do with suppressing "fake news".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> So, is it a way to admit at long last that Pages that don't buy ads won't get any readers?

</comment><comment><USER40> false news according to "fact checkers" are not 100% accurate and depends on the statement in which they are checking. you can see this by the careful choice of words in which something may be claim to be true or false when all actuality its more complex than that. it is weird why facebook would be getting into the realm of censoring things at all.

<comment><USER41> > it is weird why facebook would be getting into the realm of censoring things > at all.

Not really. The entire Valley is beside themselves over Trump being elected and Twitter, Facebook, etc. feel partially responsible because Trump and his supporters were able to use the platforms to their advantage. To be outplayed by Republicans through the use of technology was previously thought impossible, so they're going to "fix the glitch" that made such tactics possible.

<comment><USER5> Eve if you ignore theoretical bias it may have terrified them to realize that they may have unintentionally had a SERIOUS effect on the ruler of the free world by not only allowing but accidentally promoting obviously fake content.

There was plenty of relief content that would have defected the election. The fake stuff may not have actually changed the outcome.

But to realize your 'keep up with my friends' business has the power swing elections? That has to be a terrifying prospect.

<comment><USER41> > Eve if you ignore theoretical bias

Real bias, but moving on...

> But to realize your 'keep up with my friends' business has the power swing > elections? That has to be a terrifying prospect.

I really doubt anyone at Facebook, Twitter, or Google would have said "oh my God, what have we done???" if some insidious bit of "fake news" helped Hillary be elected.

<comment><USER5> > Real bias, but moving on...

I wasn't trying to talk to these specific cases, but I would agree the valley leans left.

> I really doubt anyone at Facebook, Twitter, or Google would have said "oh my > God, what have we done???" if some insidious bit of "fake news" helped > Hillary be elected.

Really? If my choice got elected because of my site I would be happy I didn't lose but I would be TERRIFIED that I had so much accidental power. What if I'm not a good steward? What if I accidentally misuse it? What if someone else takes over and REALLY misuses it?

I think (hope?) people would understand the power involved and not want to mess with to much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If Facebook had existed in the 1960s, after the Warren commission report, would articles speculating that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy who did not act alone count as fake news?

</comment><comment><USER43> instant question: which entity decides and how does such entity decide what news is true news ?

<comment><USER44> Anything not politically correct and anything that doesn't contribute to manufacturing consent will be labeled as "fake" news.

Scary times ahead. It's straight out of 1984.

<comment><USER45> It's spookier than 1984. There was no prediction of "Big Data" and how prevalent addiction to an omnipresent internet would be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I really really doubt that this is going to have any effect at all. Although many are septic of the attribution of "actual cyber attacks", I doubt that that skepticism can be stretched to include the disinformation/fud spread by the West or Russia.

That is to say (although it might not be the case _now_ ) that these websites/accounts are not dependent on ads for funding or growing their audience. This might cut down on lazy journalism (or churnalism as it's called) but as soon as the free proxies for the disinformation dry up, a couple of 'funded-behind-the-scenes' will take their place.

As for stopping the growth of the respective perpetrators audiences, likely also ineffective. There's a bunch of alternative platforms that lend themselves very well to fud spreading, twitter or a google search come to mind. Ultimately people, once converted, _want_ to read and talk about the latest and greatest evil of <target>. No need to take out ads, your friends will want to tell you.

</comment><comment><USER5> So you can't buy ads to bring people to your page.

How about you can't monetize your page? How about every time you do this you get shut down for X time (hours?) and it doubles every time you reoffend within a short amount of time. One or two free strikes.

</comment><comment><USER47> So they _can_ identify such pages. This is a really small penalty. Why not just outright suspend such pages for a duration that increases with every offence?

<comment><USER48> Why doesn't facebook come out with there own online wiki and only allow stories based on approved of facts that have been vetted by members of internal fact team.

At least we would know what facts they believe and what facts they don't

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This seems to be the same idea that Google rolled out over YouTube. Demonetize videos that "may not be appropriate for all advertisers." However, the videos which are usually being demonetized are those simply expressing a dissenting opinion. It's going to be interesting what this system classifies as "fake" or "incorrect" news.

</comment><comment><USER50> The gofundme to help 'save snopes' [https://www.gofundme.com/savesnopes](https://www.gofundme.com/savesnopes)

There are efforts by David Mikkelson to regain control after Proper Media bought half the company from Mikkelson's ex wife and business partner.

</comment><comment><USER51> Yet another effect highlighting the distinction between "free speech" and "equal speech".

</comment><comment><USER52> If anyone selects for you what to listen and what to ignore, then you are allowing forces you do not control to decide on how to nurture your discernment about reality. In mass. Think about that. As noisy as it gets, if we loose freedom of speech we _will_ be gone.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this policy is going to be particularly damaging to The Onion.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is like light (or indirect) censoring...

</comment><comment><USER54> I predict we're going to see a lot of pages being classified as "fake news distributors" when Mark Zuckerberg's presidential campaign kicks off.</comment>


Alexander Litvinenko: the man who solved his own murder - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/19/alexander-litvinenko-the-man-who-solved-his-own-murder <comment><USER2> This article [0] was all over the news (and here) a month ago, but I can't find the extended discussions, only [1]

[0]: [https://medium.com/matter/6cfeae2f4b53](https://medium.com/matter/6cfeae2f4b53) [1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10725274)

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds like a good title for a crime novel. Interesting read about problems they have with democracy and free speech in eastern europe.

</comment><comment><USER4> Regardless of the veracity of the article, there's an unsurprising amount of pro-Russian astroturfing occurring in the comments.

<comment><USER5> I think that's a given these days. Russia, the US and above all, Israel, are becoming masters at it. It's just one more tool in the cyber-arsenal.

Still, in this case it is quite obvious, but the Russians aren't known for being subtle.</comment></comment>


A new Svbtle layout - <AUTHOR> https://svbtle.com/?beta=true

<comment><USER2> On the homepage, that there is a featured article as well as additional information to the right side a.k.a. more stuff to read reminds me a lot of the Mashable craziness.

It's very hard to focus on content, reading left to right, when there is unimportant information that I have to constantly filter out as I go line by line.

And as someone else had said, the individual blog posts pretty much follow the same layout style as medium. I actually think that this, even more minimalistic design, takes away from the aesthetic that, in my opinion, made Svbtle stand out - namely, the colours and the logos.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first Svbtle layout was by far the best designed blog layout at the time - the sidebar with a description of the writer was very well built. This new layout is interesting - reminds me a lot of Medium.

</comment><comment><USER4> I stopped caring since they're so exclusive.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very annoying how an arrow snaps into view a moment after I scroll every time. Yet another layout that fails at mobile.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why not just have the dateline static? Why make the user hover for it to show? (Does it appear on touch devices?)

Why does the top-right svbtle menu start as a dot? Why not just keep it in its expanded state?

The scrollbar on OS X appears white, despite there being a white background. I don't know why.

Why is the Kudos button presented on the side and at the bottom? Don't you only want people to do that after they've read it? It kind of mucks things up. Same for the author dot in the lower-right.

I like Medium's friendly author photos, but I guess svbtle is about the author iconography.

</comment><comment><USER7> Not a big fan... The movement of all "navigation" to the right feels unnatural and my eyes keep trying to shift focus to the right (away from the content). Poorly done, IMO, for these usability issues.

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems like the actual blogs weren't redesigned ([http://barrettsheridan.com/options-101](http://barrettsheridan.com/options-101)), just the actual Svbtle site (which collects all the blogs, like Medium does).

EDIT: I'm somewhat wrong; adding ?beta=1 on any blog gives you the new redesign. Each user's main page is pretty much the same, but the individual blog posts are lacking the sidebar.

</comment><comment><USER9> In my browser at half width (840px) the new layout forces horizontal scroll. I'm used to shrinking text when this occurs, but for a blog it's annoying because the content itself isn't that wide. The vertical bar on the left is unnecessary, and the other stories bar on the right could easily become narrower. The old Svbtle layout fits _perfectly_ at this width and is very readable.

</comment><comment><USER10> On a Galaxy S3 in tablet mode the new design of the main site is awful. Horizontal scrolling and all. The article view is great though.

I look forward to the wp knock off :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Not a fan.

</comment><comment><USER12> The mobile view is horrible. Why would you make us do horizontal scrolling on a smartphone?!

</comment><comment><USER13> I can not un-kudos article. Or can't I?</comment>


Ow Putin Weaponized Wikileaks to Influence the Election of an American PresidenT - <AUTHOR> http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/07/how-putin-weaponized-wikileaks-influence-election-american-president/130163/?oref=d_brief_nl <comment><USER2> "Weaponized Wikileaks"? What does that even mean?</comment>


'Don't ignore your stupid ideas.' - <AUTHOR> http://williamwilkinson.com/post/3089051066 <comment><USER2> Not shown: 1000s of goofy iphone apps that generated close to $0

If the moral of the story is "Do funky apps for fun and be happily surprised if they make any money" then I agree. If the moral is "Do funky apps and expect to make $16k over a weekend" then I have to disagree.

Note: I say this as the co-author of a very nice funky app: <http://fakewhale.com> I am currently waiting by the phone for investors or acquirers to call.

<comment><USER3> What does fakewhale even do? Kind of not a good sign that I couldn't figure that out.

<comment><USER2> I'll let pg explain: <http://fakewhale.com/tweets/69535>

<comment><USER4> I don't see the point.

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For all the new designers out there, please don't add a CSS text shadow to the main body of your text content. By highlighting everything, you make everything less readable.

<comment><USER7> And don't replace the default scrolling with javascript, it's slow.

<comment><USER8> And doesn't work right. Hitting "page down" doesn't work unless you first click on the page with your mouse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't ignore your stupid ideas... that only waste a few hours of your time if they don't go anywhere; otherwise, your first instinct is probably the one to go with.

</comment><comment><USER10> IMO his big win was getting an iPhone app dev (who can actually execute) agree to make an app for him on the premise of splitting revenue. Either this was real early time of the "App goldrush" before anyone knew money could be made or the dev was a friend (post seems to imply it was a random twitter follower).

Anybody with a reputation as a good iPhone app dev get the age old "idea guy" proposition at least 3 times a week: "I got a great app idea.. I'll give you some of the $ if you code it just for me."

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth, if anyone came to me with those screens and that idea, I'd code it in a day. There's a difference between "I have this idea for a game, here's a sketch of a character" and "I have an idea for a simple app that I've already done most of the work on and it will only take a few hours to code".

<comment><USER11> can you send me an email? firstname.lastname@example.com i have an ultraquick iphone app i want to make. i have kickass wireframes already.

<comment><USER10> ^ I rest my case ;)

<comment><USER12> Meh, Zack's the real deal, exactly what the poster mentioned looking for. He has some pretty good ideas, executes on them as much as he can, and outsources what he can't.

I understand your point, I just think there's a difference between the stereotypical dude-bro idea marketing guy preying on developers and people who can carry their own weight.

<comment><USER13> The issue isn't that these people don't exist, but much as happens on dating sites, the women(devs) get message after message after message...It becomes incredibly time consuming weeding the -few- goods out from the chaf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What does this say? I mean, it's nice that he made a popular app and a ton of money, but there is nothing to learn here. It was either raw luck or a stupid populace or both that made this happen. There's no insight in to the design of a well made and genuinely entertaining or interesting application here, just a gimmick app that somehow made it big.

It's discouraging to read things like this, because the implied moral is "any stupid idea you come up with has a chance of making it big". But if that's true, then why bother taking your time to design good applications? Why strive for excellence when some random gimmick app is just as likely to make money?

<comment><AUTHOR> It reminds you that when your small ideas require proportionately small efforts, you might as well do them and see what happens.

Too many people inappropriately shrug off their smaller thoughts as not worth doing, because they're not going to 'change the world' or some other low- probability outcome.

<comment><USER15> I noticed this a lot when I tried blogging a couple of summers ago. The articles I thought would be hits bombed, and the stupid ones I wrote just for fun [1] ended up being huge successes.

Inevitably, I just resigned myself to the fact that I _don't_ know what'll be successful, and the only way to find out if something will work is to do it.

[1] <http://phillipcohen.net/articles/simcity/> (got like 30,000 hits)

<comment><USER16> I've noticed the same thing with comments on HN. More often than not, it's the silly one-liner that gets voted up rather than the thoughtful, introspective, and deep comment. I suppose human attention is always the biggest force you have to contend with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Stupid ideas is all I have. Looking forward to the millions I'll be making soon. Thanks for the encouragement, Billy!

</comment><comment><USER18> When a field like apps is so new, the effort required to innovate is low. People bring their expectations about the level of effort from areas where expertise is well developed. Think of databases and algorithms. Eventually novelty apps will have to become pretty sophisticated (if they haven't already).

</comment><comment><USER19> Genial, simple, effective and well paid. I'm a bit jealous I didn't have your "stupid" idea :).

</comment><comment><USER20> Not shown: 1000s of goofy lifes have been saved from this app.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good timing for the idea. Last September Apple added the following to their guidelines: "15.5 Apps that includes games of Russian roulette will be rejected"

</comment><comment><USER22> Sounds like he had the luck of the draw.</comment>


What started your interest in development? - <AUTHOR> I think stories about what first piqued a person's interest in development are great and can be inspirational - share yours <comment><USER2> I took a programming class senior year high school, 1975. We programmed via mechanical teletypes connected to the school district's mainframe via acoustic couplers where you put a phone handset into the cup things. We "stored" our programs on paper punched tape, and turned our rolls in for assignments. It was kind of interesting but it didn't really get me then.

Joined the Navy, did telephones and gyrocompasses. My first job out of the Navy was for a military contractor, and part of our contract was keeping engineering studies up to date. All paper based, and if you changed one thing then you had to flow it all through again, manually, on a new form. Or use whiteout. It drove me insane.

So I taught myself how to program the department's minicomputer (don't remember the machine or the language). Now we could make one change and the program would flow it through and print out a fresh new paper for inclusion in manual folders. Wheee ha!

I quickly figured out that that was much more interesting than my actual job, so I quit and went to school.

</comment><comment><USER3> David Blaine (yes, the magician guy). I saw his first TV show when I was a teenager and got interested in magic. I started collecting magic secrets that I found online and built a site to serve as a repository for card sleights-of- hand.

On my first job at an internet cafe, business was slow, so I took the liberty of building a website for it. The owner got happy and told some other people that I could build sites. And then people started paying me to build their sites. I learned Flash, PHP and Javascript as I went (yes, Flash was big back then).

After I got a more fundamental grasp on programming, I started to learn about more advanced stuff on my free time (reading about algorithms, different programming languages, design patterns, etc).

Now I make a pretty decent living with a interesting job, get occasional unsolicited job offers, and I have an open source project that people keep saying they like ( [http://lhorie.github.io/mithril](http://lhorie.github.io/mithril) ).

Moral of the story: I like programming.

</comment><comment><USER4> I was working as an IT guy at a TV station in Utah back in 2012. I was approached one day by the senior graphics designer at the station, who figured I had too much free time on my hands.

He offered me a challenge:

Build something to parse the weather data we receive in .csv format everyday, and then display the correct weather background loop for the weather guy.

I took him up on it. I learned enough Java (to be fair, I had taken an intro to CS class a year or two prior) to cobble together a GUI based program that would send commands via TCP to the VizRT servers (commercial graphics system for broadcasters) and that would control which background clip (sunny, rainy, snowy, etc.) would play. I would read in the .csv file and then extract out the info I needed to determine which clip to play.

I expanded the program to monitor the VizRT servers. It would ping them and if no reply was received I would display the server IP, and highlight it in red to signify an error.

This little side project is what really set me off on the course to learning programming for real. I started looking into alternative education and learned about Dev Bootcamp, a coding school in San Francisco.

Long story short I started learning to program ruby on my own, I applied to Dev Bootcamp, got in, graduated this past March, and I'm now currently on the job hunt. This entire process took just over a year. I've now won hackathons in languages I wasn't even taught (objective-c) and I attend a bunch of local meetups and learn more about programming every day.

I kept a blog for most of this journey, which can be viewed at [http://www.rickarubio.com](http://www.rickarubio.com) if you'd like to read more about how I transitioned into programming.

You can also check out my code on github: [https://github.com/rickarubio](https://github.com/rickarubio)

Or follow me on Twitter: @rickarubio

If you're considering learning to code and being a programmer, now is a great time to start :)

Feel free to msg me anytime if you'd like help on learning to code in Ruby or JavaScript!

</comment><comment><USER5> Friendster. It was the time when overlay layouts in Friendster was a thing. I was in high school that time and I want to impress my friends. I researched about overlay layouts and found a site where you can download and modify them. I wanted more, I want an overlay layout for myself. Not just anything that was downloaded in the internet. I learned that HTML is the way to do it. I studied HTML through PageTutor ([http://www.pagetutor.com/html_tutor/index.html](http://www.pagetutor.com/html_tutor/index.html)). It was the best tutorial I found.

After successfully created my overlay layout, I decided to create a website for our group of friends. I then uploaded it in Freewebs (now [http://www.webs.com/](http://www.webs.com/)). My teacher saw that site and ask me to join a competition. I won awards and made it up to 6th place in the national competition.

That was my realization. I realize that I can do and I want something like this. I decided to take up Computer Science in college. Learned how to code and that was it.

Thank you Friendster.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1983, 8th grade. I was in wood-shop class and my teacher asked a friend and me if we'd rather be in "computer shop" (I think we were acting up and he was sick of us). First program was on a Commodore PET, drawing on the screen via POKEs to the video area in memory.

Got hooked and for X-mas a couple of months later, my mom got me a TRS-80 color computer.

</comment><comment><USER7> Middle school early 1980's. BASIC in gifted class on a Tandy computer. I don't remember the model (it had an affixed CRT monitor). I was so impressed that I saved up all summer and bought a TSR-80 color which hooked to the television. I think it was like $180 which was all summers lawn mowing money. I was 13. It was awesome.

I deviated into other fields and although I have been Linux enthusiast for a long time, finally came back to programming about 4 years ago, first as a hobby, then as people I knew needed some stuff that I knew I could write, professionally. I haven't looked back since (although I was making more money before... I really love programming and don't want to do anything else anymore... damn you TSR80!)

</comment><comment><USER8> Around 1983, I went with a friend into an electronics department store. He typed following lines onto the screen: 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10. Pressed run and walked away.

I was immediately hooked. Love at first sight.

I got one of those babies: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_Laser_200](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_Laser_200) and since then I'm programming :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> When I was a little kid in Venezuela, my dad got us our first computer for home, it ran DOS 6.1 and my mom couldn't get the commands in english. So I spent a few days writing a translation of it using batch files that would change "COPY" and "DEL" to "COPIA" and "BORRA". That got me hooked.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had a frustrating work environment where we didn't have access to the tools we needed to do our jobs. We did however have access to a variety of scripting languages. So i learned to code in order to make the tools we needed and enjoyed it more than the original job i was doing.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's all there was to home computers at the time. A BASIC REPL. There wasn't much else to do except play around with it and hand-type BASIC programs from computer magazines.

<comment><USER12> I remember in 1982, or 1983, the family was given a 48k Spectrum, with a bunch of cassette tapes, for Christmas.

Unfortunately the tape-player was broken, and because this was back in the 80s in the UK there was basically zero chance of catching the store open and getting an exchange made until the new-year.

So the new computer enthusiasm was killed in my sisters, and I enjoyed myself reading the manual, and typing in examples from it, then later games from magazines, and similar.

That's what fuelled my programming: Typing in code on a ZX Spectrum, then later writing my own in BASIC and then z80 machine code. From there I graduated to machine-code/assembly on the PC, Java, C, etc.

I assume I'd have been curious how the black-box worked eventually anyway, but I do wonder how things would have turned out if we'd had a working cassette player all those years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Making Unreal Tournament mutators in junior high and working on a few mods after that. Unfortunately I never did much with the game programming stuff after high school.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had a book called "Keys to Infinity" which was a kind of odd pop maths book.

It had some code in it.

</comment><comment><USER15> 8th grade programming course at school in the 80s. They taught us Basic back then.

</comment><comment><USER16> Write with Wordpress in MS-DOS and hide those documents.</comment>


Autonomous Weapons "Could Be Developed for Use Within Years - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/autonomous-weapons-could-be-developed-for-use-within-years <comment><USER2> Who will advocate for the open carry of HERF guns when autonomous weapons become common? I mean, they're trickle down into police departments very rapidly, just like dirtboxes and stingrays did. Our only defense will be arming nearly all capable adults with powerful HERF guns that don't harm humans, but will render a rampaging robot killer into a pile of sparking junk.

<comment><USER3> Drones designed to kamikaze radio transmitters vs people with high powered radio transmitters designed to kill robots.

That's got dystopian future game show written all over it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Baasil.io an Open Source, Scalable Realtime Stack-As-a-Service - <AUTHOR> https://baasil.io/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting, tremendously bad product name though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Not sure it changes anything but the double 'aa' is not a typo. The first part of the name 'Baasil' stands for BaaS (Backend as a Service).

My original plan was to pronounce it like the plant 'Basil'. The voice actor in the demo video just decided to call it Bah-sil so I just let it be.</comment></comment>


I Used Google BigQuery to Map the Locations Mentioned in Herman Melville's Books - <AUTHOR> https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbwjBFsW4ipv3ivKZ7bEYA_B5ElDlO-g6F3f0oa8xKlH8k-Z2ac/exec <comment><AUTHOR> First off, just wanted to say that I'm in the process of learning programming. I'm an English lit major and this is just a project that I've been using to learn.

I recently used BigQuery (in conjunction with Google Apps Scripts and Sheets) to get all the coordinates of all the locations mentioned in Herman Melville's works. I then mapped those coordinates using the Google Maps Javascript API.

You can click on each bubble for the name of the location and how many times it was mentioned. Bubble size is relative to amount of mentions.

For more details on how the maps were made, I set up a more technical (although probably poorly written) blog post here: [http://www.gregorygascon.com/blog/2016/4/25/mapping- literatu...](http://www.gregorygascon.com/blog/2016/4/25/mapping-literature- with-google-bigquery-and-maps-javascript-api)

Also big thanks to [http://gdeltproject.org/](http://gdeltproject.org/) for the datasets!

</comment><comment><USER2> Neat idea. Do you know why it missed Nantucket? (Gets heavy mention in Moby Dick).</comment>


CSS-only plotting - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/asciimoo/cssplot/ <comment><USER2> Might as well use inline styling to accomplish the same (without adding tons of CSS):

99%

50%

30%

90%

10%

70%

30%

90%

<comment><USER3> Why do you bring this up? Is this more ideal? I thought writing inline css was an accepted awful thing to do. Or is that just a simplification for new developers? Why do you benefit from doing this?

<comment><USER4> Inline CSS isn't any more awful than any other meaningless presentational markup.

Why use inline CSS? Because it's simpler and obvious. The proposed hack has no upsides: it isn't any more accessible, isn't any more maintainable, and it isn't any more performant (quite the opposite).

To me it's in the same category as replacing `<font color=red>` with `<span class=red>`, because "font is bad".

<comment><USER5> The proposed hack has the upside that all of the bar charts on a site are governed by the same CSS.

The CSS is ugly because of the many redundant rules. But if you have x bar charts on y pages, then one ugly CSS file is better than x repeated ugly spots spread out in y HTML files.

<comment><USER4> Inline style for bar height doesn't preclude use of external styles for common properties like color, borders, etc.

Also it's very unlikely you'd have many charts with markup written by hand. I'd expect charts to be generated from a template from a proper data source, so change in markup of all charts would still be done in one place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I loved the simplicity, and wanted to know how it was done.

[https://github.com/asciimoo/cssplot/blob/master/cssplot.css](https://github.com/asciimoo/cssplot/blob/master/cssplot.css)

      .bar-chart ul li[data-cp-size="0"] {
      height: 0%;
      }
      .bar-chart ul li[data-cp-size="1"] {
      height: 1%;
      }
      .bar-chart ul li[data-cp-size="2"] {
      height: 2%;
      }
      ...

Still find it cool, but a 1200 line CSS may be a bit too much for a practical application.

<comment><USER7> Couldn't this be reduced by, like, a lot by simply using this CSS3 gem?

height: attr(sata-cp-size px);

<comment><USER8> Someday, but right now the support for using 'attr()' function in properties other than 'content' is very poor.

<comment><USER9> Correct, attr() for use with anything than the content property is unsupported by most browsers.

([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/CSS/attr](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/attr))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Usually, "CSS-only" articles and repos are either technically impressive, or clever solutions for production environment problems.

Considering attribute selectors have been around for a while, I fail to see a decent use case. Any progress bar or 2-dimensional chart of this kind needs to be generated dynamically, either through the backend or frontend, same thing. In this case, they're inserted as data attribute values. What's the difference with using inline style attributes (left: 10%; width: 90%)? They're generated automatically, so verbosity is not an issue. And you'd save yourself 1200 lines of CSS.

What about flexibility? CSS provides the ability to style each of the 400 options differently, right? Well using a "x24 y78" CSS class would be as simple. But in the end, you only want to give different height/width bottom/left values. The styling remains unchanged.

Writing _every_ possible option of a _dynamically_ generated chart into a _static_ CSS file, just for the sake of "Simplicity" and "No javascript required" seems like an overkill.

On a side note, anything dealing with percentages instead of pixel values is automatically granted the keyword "Responsive".

</comment><comment><USER11> Neat idea, a little disappointed looking at the source though. A class for every possible datapoint doesn't scale particularly well.

</comment><comment><USER8> No need for duplicating the value in the attribute and also in the element by including this snippet.

      [data-cp-size]:after { content: attr(data-cp-size) "%"; }

</comment><comment><USER12> i think what you made is cool. keep making cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER13> With the addition of a few CSS transition rules these could be animated really easily.

</comment><comment><USER14> if only CSS supported for loops and variables..</comment>


Cybersecurity Ventures predicts 3.5M cybersecurity job openings by 2021 - <AUTHOR> https://cybersecurityventures.com/jobs <comment><USER2> 1\. This is written and published by Cyber Security Ventures. Their bias should be obvious.

2\. The 3.5 million is a global number. India is projected to have 1 million of them.

3\. The article seems to also try to drum up demand for Managed Security Service Providers, a service Cyber Security Ventures provides.

4\. Many currently open Cybersecurity jobs pay less then what a tech minded person can get selling clicks or SQL reports. There is a difference between an "open position" and a position that meets the labor market. Open positions that stay open most likely are valued below the market. I'm sure many goverment agencies have open Cybersecurity jobs.

5\. It's 2018, are we really going to keep using the word cyber?

<comment><USER3> fwiw I was once browsing jobs wondering why one in particular had such strange hours and requirements until I realized that the search had also returned results for what amounted to security guards

<comment><USER4> FWIW, data centers do have guards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, one role in this might be that a lot of cybersecurity jobs are complete bullshit, and or their certifications are.

I won a free certification course as an EC-Council Certified Security Analyst, and it's the biggest joke I've ever seen. It's such a massive fucking joke that I decided to not even renew my certification for free because it would just have been a waste of time.

Most of these "cybersecurity" jobs are download Metasploit and run autopwn, install garbage antivirus everywhere. Maybe layer some more bullshit on top like network intrusion detection and web application firewalls. If you get still get owned talk some bullshit about how advanced the attack was and that there was nothing you could have done.

The other option is to go and write exploits and sell these to government agencies.

I don't really want to do either of those, so I'll stay far away from this field, even as an infosec enthusiast.

I'm sure theres also some real infosec jobs, but i'd say they're pretty rare.

<comment><USER6> > I won a free certification course as an EC-Council Certified Security > Analyst, and it's the biggest joke I've ever seen. It's such a massive > fucking joke that I decided to not even renew my certification for free > because it would just have been a waste of time.

I've been in the field for a couple of years. I work for a global corporation with 10k+ employees and most of our team members in the security department are judge on their skills and various other factors and we filter potential candidates with a small CTF. Certs have very little importance for us, but we're the exception. Most big compagnies require certifications and oddly they are the ones getting hacked.

In the field, we all know that EC-Council certs are bullshit. They are, at best, the laughing stock in infosec because their "Ethical Hacker" certification is a multiple choice answer and requires little technical knowledge and no hands-on.

However, there are a few certs out there that need a lot of work and technical knowledge to be learn for passing it, such as OSCP. It might be easy to get for someone with 10+ years but for relatively new comers, it's a really good challenge to tackle. I started with their lab, thinking it was going to be a piece of cake for me but it's more difficult than I expected, which is a good thing.

But I see your point and I mostly agree.

Care to explain why you think intrusion detection is bullshit?

<comment><USER5> >Care to explain why you think intrusion detection is bullshit?

If they're signature based they're not better than antivirus. I have zero faith in signature based systems.

For the stuff that uses machine learning, I have to admit, I have no idea how that stuff performs. But in general I wouldn't trust a machine learning model to not be fooled.

Edit: Add to that HTTPS, I don't buy any claim that they can spot malware traffic from malware that isn't dumb, and I don't think MITMing all traffic is an acceptable solution.

<comment><USER7> Anomaly detection doesn't do much better than signature systems do. It finds real stuff, but it "finds" so much garbage that the signal is swamped by it.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about network detection systems but antivirus heuristics used to be terrific.

You can assign 100 students to develop a trojan for a week. At the end of the week, more than 90% of the software are detected as generic trojan by the antivirus.

<comment><USER5> > _You can assign 100 students to develop a trojan for a week. At the end of > the week, more than 90% of the software are detected as generic trojan by > the antivirus._

Probably because 90 of these 100 students have no idea how AV heuristics work and what the trivial tricks are to completely stomp them.

<comment><USER8> Some of them quickly realize that the AV is flagging all their binaries and they try to evade it. They will soon discover that it is far from trivial.

Don't underestimate the students and don't underestimate the AV. The world is full of surprises.

<comment><USER9> I had an intern who came to the job with one he had written in his idle time. Nothing detected this, so I am thinking that it is not hard at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unfilled job postings doesn't mean there's a shortage. There might be a shortage of experienced IT security experts willing to work for $40k in the most expensive cities of the world, but if there was an actual job shortage, degrees and certifications wouldn't be a requirement, they'd just take a risk hiring people willing to learn.

</comment><comment><USER11> As an outsider of the security industry, do people feel like the importance of security is actually going up, or are people becoming progressively less concerned, given how desensitized we've become to hacks and data leaks?

E.g. the Equifax hack was a pretty big deal, but nobody's that upset, everybody moved on real quick. Same with hundreds of other major hacks.

<comment><USER12> Your point, well observed, is that there are very little repercussions. It is becoming important and more prominent (than say 10 years ago) due to constant media exposure and the constant breaches being seen, so there are a lot of roles being opened and functions are being built where there weren't any before. As a whole though, businesses will deprioritize security for increased business performance, which you can understand.

Regulations like GDPR coming along should have some bite to get people into action, but until that's actually observed there's not much going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds great. But how would I (software engineer) go about moving into those sorts of jobs? Do bug bounties until I make it?

<comment><USER14> Talk with ops guys and have a security guy (that typically is on that team) assign you things to fix.

It's a bull shit job, as far as software development goes. Sure, you'll learn a bunch of hacks and ways to fix them and maybe pass cissp cert if you really don't want to code anymore.

<comment><USER15> It's not a bullshit job. It's 3.5 million supposed jobs, many of which are bullshit. All sorts of unrelated things are being lumped together.

      a. compliance
      b. red teaming
      c. actually trying to secure stuff
      d. trying to find holes to exploit
      e. etc. etc. etc.

Some of these involve lots of code. I posted one of those in the "Who is hiring?" thread, and that one takes some serious hard-core coding ability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Worked with a security solution, spammed company's distribution list specifically for this work with alerts. I ended up analyzed everything and found not just false positives but also wrong analysis from their analysts... this is to say the intention to selling security solution out could be good and genuine, but the values in return can be nothing. So why companies pay? 99% is "let the experts deal with the problem, if shit happens, we know who to blame, we have done our due diligence so one more thing to check off on auditor's radar."

</comment><comment><USER16> Have they considered paying more?

</comment><comment><USER17> Add projected unfulfilled cyber security jobs to the title.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am 66, I guess I have plenty of work

</comment><comment><USER18> I am 66 I guess I will stick around

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm surprised that blatant spam got so many upvotes/comments.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ironically, going to [https://www.cybersecurityventures.com](https://www.cybersecurityventures.com) in Firefox throws an SSL certificate error: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN. This does not fill me with confidence regarding this company's security prowess.

<comment><USER21> Do you think there's much overlap between the people generating reports and the people in charge of hosting their domain/ managing certs?

<comment><USER20> I'm just making more of a general comment re. the website/company, not the specific post this HN thread covers. Granted, it's a minor detail, and most people probably won't hit the www version of the site, but for whatever reason it's the version of their site that my search engine surfaced, so FWIW I just found it ironic.

Peace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ugh. Another site that hijacks scrolling. Why?</comment>


Show HN: Tell Me What to Do - <AUTHOR> http://tmwtd.io/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating. My hunch is that this could be an amazing way to create an MVP. Didn't realise you could create typeform forms that support stripe details. (And for that reason https is probably not required since the stripe details get sent to an https endpoint separately if I'm not mistaken. In fact the typeform form probably gets submitted via https). That said, a few small examples of what could be suggested might make people more willing to pay. Can't quite say what might be good because I don't live in the areas and therefore can't use it but my hunch is that it might help. Samples of what could be done, or some form of social proof could help loads

</comment><comment><USER3> Or just ask a friend who lives there.

This might be a good idea, but I don't see why one should pay for it. It's like saying "I'll tell you which color dress you should wear. But first, pay me."

To make a recommendation that is actually worth paying for, you need to know a little more about the persons taste than you do.

</comment><comment><USER4> Add HTTPS. Don't be irresponsible.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is this thing asking for my credit card number?

</comment><comment><USER6> How about you tell me what you're doing before asking me to pay you??</comment>