Visualizing Toxicity in Twitter Conversations - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cortico/visualizing-toxicity-in-twitter-conversations-3cd336e5db81 <comment><USER2> The visualization doesn't interest me nearly as much as how Twitter classifies something as "toxic". It seems subjective enough that one person's "toxic conversation" is another person's "sick burn". Unfortunately, the post doesn't contain any explanation or links regarding their classification algorithm(s).

<comment><USER3> I was curious about their definition as well. Our world is so hyper political and polarized that the definition of "toxic" and "hate speech" varies widely depending on your political ideology. There's zero space left in the middle.

<comment><USER4> holding a middle ground is frowned upon on the internet.

I've confirmed this myself by writing torridly on occasion and for sites which allow voting (such as HN/Reddit) I am rewarded.

When I make a nuanced, balanced and reasoned reply I am punished.

I bring this up because on twitter there is no 'disagree' button, there is only shouting at your enemy in 280 characters, that used to be 140 characters, enough that you can never actually make a reasoned assertion about anything.

I still have my twitter account, it's a shame to remove it because I have a good handle- but I can't escape the blatant fact that it is only inhabited by bullies. Both sides of a weirdly distorted political spectrum drumming/repeating their own rhetoric to each other -- and anyone who might try to strike a balance is seen as an enemy by both sides of the extreme.

The extremes of twitter almost caused me to hate feminism, A cause I actually have always agreed with. In turn it also caused me to hate ideologues who espouse fears of restricted freedoms/end of privacy. Which I also agree with.

Twitter is _not_ a place to go to have a conversation, it's a place where a conversation is thrust upon you if you speak, whether you want it or not.

I'm writing this because I agree with you. I've had a growing resentment for twitter due to the blatant, crushing pile-on that it allows.

<comment><USER5> Eh, I think you're experiencing something else. Moderation and hedging phrases seem more like blue-chip stocks in the internet points risk/reward game. You're almost guaranteed not to lose _that_ many points with a stance fewer folks will brigade, and if you hit the right tone, odds are you'll get a modest reward for pitching in. Picking a side and going all-out on some cultish activism is more like a venture capital penny-stock situation. With a perfect storm of the right audience, day, etc, you could get a huge internet karma ROI! And the other times, you lose everything.

YMMV of course, a lot depends on how "rational" the "market" happens to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Definition of "toxicity" is nowhere to be found in this post. Plenty of cool pictures, though.

</comment><comment><USER7> Someone needs to write a joke medium article from the perspective of Winston Smith. "Unpersoning thought criminals with AWS"

</comment><comment><USER8> So toxic, but what defines toxic, how were they categorised etc? Just can't take the term seriously anymore after all the buzzfeed videos educating me on American politics that's been shoved into my feeds.

<comment><USER9> Yup, they've muddied the waters, possibly on purpose.

<comment><USER10> For a more formal definition of "toxic", see these research efforts by Google and Kaggle, respectively:

[https://perspectiveapi.com/](https://perspectiveapi.com/) [https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment- classification...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic-comment- classification-challenge)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems unfortunate that the goal was to build a good internal marketing video, rather than a useful user interface that could be used for navigating Twitter?

</comment><comment><USER12> The final viz looks awful. In the attempt to make it look like a tree, you did get a tree but lost the informational value. I thought the earlier iterations had less noise and more signal.

There are plenty of books on visualization theory. Exposes pitfalls.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is an awesome related API by Google: [https://perspectiveapi.com/](https://perspectiveapi.com/)

Also check out this Kaggle competition: [https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw- toxic-comment-classification...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-toxic- comment-classification-challenge)

</comment><comment><USER13> Red and green are not a great choice for color blind people.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's amazing to me that people look at an online community such as twitter and then determine if it's toxic or not based on observed behaviors. They're just people. People are toxic on twitter. Twitter is not toxic. Twitter is exactly the way that people who use it want it to be.

How do you expect to change twitter without changing people? It's an exercise in futility. You can regulate it for eternity and it will still reflect the people who use and engage in the site.

<comment><USER14> The same people can behave totally differently depending on circumstances. For example: many people experience road rage, but they'd never behave that way outside of their car. Something about being in a car separated by a couple panes of glass causes a lot of people to act insane. It's similar for social media:

\- Twitter and Tumblr both have retweet/reblog with commentary, which makes it extremely convenient for people to tell their followers about something they dislike. Just click retweet, type, "Look at this dumbass.", and watch the likes come in.

\- Twitter notifies you if someone replied, quote-tweeted, mentioned you, or linked to a tweet of yours. This means that people definitely know when somebody disagrees with or dislikes them. If those same people were mocking them on some other forum, they'd never know and a cycle of hostility wouldn't form.

\- Twitter's character limit makes it hard for people to keep nuance in their ideas. Replies to tweets are sorted by time, so whoever replies first (i.e. gives their response the least thought) gets the most eyeballs.

\- Lastly, Twitter defaults to only accept direct messages from people you follow, meaning that most people can't criticize in private. They have to broadcast the criticism to the whole world, making it much harder for both parties to keep their egos in check.

These "features" combine to make civil conversation all but impossible.

<comment><USER15> All good points. One I would add: there is far less assumption of good faith from strangers on Twitter, and most parts of the internet in general.

For whatever reason, in-person interactions have a level of charity in them. You'll clarify misconceptions, give people the chance to make and walk back mistakes, and generally assume that your conversational partner is reasonable until proven otherwise.

Twitter is not like this. Many people seem to find it very easy to start a conversation with criticism, looking for evidence of stupidity or malice rather than trying to clarify it away. And there is almost no ground-level assumption that the other person is actually "trying" the way you are.

Seems easily traced back to Twitter not being a very human medium. As in the car example, it's easier to strongly dislike something when it's not obviously another human. But of course, the existence of trolls on the internet and mostly nonexistence of tolls in everyday life is a factor too.

For this reason, I've mostly given up on having any kind of remotely grey-area discussion on Twitter. I just use it to follow a few dozen people whose thoughts I'm interested in. And outside of HN and email/messaging, I don't talk through the internet at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome project. Always interesting to see original ideas in data visualization.</comment>


FOBO, An App for Auctioning Used Electronics in 97 Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://laughingsquid.com/fobo-an-app-for-auctioning-used-electronics-in-97-minutes/

<comment><USER2> I'd really like to see something replace Ebay/Paypal and be more like "the old Ebay". This is an interesting idea, but there are a number of aspects about the initial version of Fobo that seem to fall quite short:

\--97 minute auctions only? This might be great for electronics that are prolific like Apple hardware or game consoles, but it doesn't seem appropriate for most electronics, of which fewer exist and which have fewer potential buyers.

\--Only available via a native smartphone app on a single platform? No web- based interface? It might work in San Francisco, but it probably wouldn't elsewhere, and I don't like it philosophically.

\--It's really expensive. Ebay is horrible these days if you're selling a single expensive item without paying for a (relatively inexpensive) merchant account. This compares unfavorably even to the full price.

Maybe I'm just the opposite of the target audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Note we're in the ballpark of eBay fees. FOBO charges 15%, a 2% premium over eBay's total fees, which they aren't very upfront about (10% for eBay, 3% for PayPal).

<comment><USER2> I think the added transparency in Fobo's pricing is a great feature.

Ebay's recent change to a flat-rate system was horrible for occasional sellers. Until late 2012 or early 2013, the fee for computers and tablets was only 4% fee, making a total of 7% after Paypal.

What some don't realize is that these rates are still available--for $16/month. When selling a computer or tablet for anything over $270, it's actually less costly to pay for an Ebay Store account for a month and pay a total fee of 7% + $16 rather than 13%. It's an easy option, but it's not at all obvious to those who aren't in-the-know. I'd be curious to know how many people sell computers on Ebay for >$1000 and pay the full 10% fee--I would expect it's a small number.

So if you weren't familiar with Ebay but a friend gave you the tip to sell your $1000 computer with an Ebay Store, you'd end up with $64 more dollars from your sale than you would with Fobo--$914 instead of $850.

I appreciate that Fobo makes understanding costs easier, but that's not very helpful when those easy-to-understand costs are still higher than the extortionate, only-paid-by-those-who-didn't-read-their-selling-options costs from Ebay. I think a more competitive pricing strategy would reflect the true base price on eBay, plus a small premium for the convenience of not having to research it.

Perhaps there's justification for that level of a premium, and Ebay's choice to horribly obfuscate pricing has made it seem even more reasonable to those who aren't familiar with Ebay's pricing. However, I still don't think that makes Fobo particularly cost-competitive or a particularly good value unless the service can bring a huge audience to the auction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So this picks at another piece of the puzzle. I wonder if there is a place with something like BufferBox in the middle. It would work like this:

1) I decide I want to sell something, list it.

2) Person sees it and buys it.

3) I drop the merchandise off at a facility that takes it in, photographs it, and holds it.

4) Buyer shows up, shows their 'code' and picks up the merchandise, 'accepting' it when delivered.

I know it seems convoluted but the thing we have yet to capture is that 'sit there and look at it before actually handing over your money' power that buyers have a garage/yard sales with the time shifting/spreading aspects of online auction/resale.

<comment><USER4> There are ebay sellers who do exactly this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have used FOBO as a customer and a seller, pretty amazing on both ends. I really think that adding in payment support as an option in Yardsale would have helped boost that platform a ton. Perhaps if FOBO succeeds the team will circle back and give yardsale another serious go with everything they're learning from this project.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fascinating idea. I wonder if the savings from shipping and transaction costs (say of using Amazon or ebay) are worth the potential loss of value due to limiting your market (i.e. selling only to those around you). I know that I generally get a better price buying used electronics on Craigslist vs. Ebay, but rarely use that channel due to perceived danger of meeting up with someone random in person, though I suppose FOBO could solve that problem by introducing security and identity measures.

Will be watching with interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the ideas behind FOBO is that the market for popular consumer electronics is surprisingly liquid, even with a small number of users (>=1K). By guaranteeing a selling price near what you get on eBay, we try to completely remove market liquidity from your decision of whether or not to sell on FOBO. About half our items end up going to real buyers for at or way above starting price, in which case we don't step in to handle the resale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Check out FOBO's About page [http://www.fobo.net/](http://www.fobo.net/)

</comment><comment><USER8> San Francisco now seems to be challenging Texas for the title of the capital of the world.

<comment><USER9> Funny, my comment was going to be "I bet there's zero users in Houston" :-)

Given the sheer number of startups that only "launch" locally, even if I were in SF, I think I'd launch somewhere else, to get outside what is a vortex of innovation, especially if your app is dependent upon a network effect.

<comment><USER10> Launching locally in SF is an extremely good idea. I've worked in lots of other places and nowhere have I found a collective group of people who are willing to beta test your product. Better yet, if it sucks, they'll tell you why it won't' work and what should be improved - that's a good thing. Is there more noise in SF? Absolutely - but it's less of a turf war than people think it is. If your product is better than the competition, people _will_ adopt. Entrepreneurs bring products here to prove their ideas knowing there is a rich cashpile waiting to fund them when they need to scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> so does yardsale still exist? if not, what happpend?

<comment><USER12> You bet, it's still got a passionate community of 250k users across America. We started fresh because we saw an opportunity to build something really different which we thought had potential to realize the original vision that got us started at a larger scale... something crazy effective, fun for a community of individual sellers, like the old days of eBay.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do we need this many[700] Programming languages? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Do we need this many? No. We don't _need_ any. There are many reasons new languages get created, but very rarely does an old language ever die. Erlang was created out of a need for reliable, scalable, multi-threaded programs that could withstand failure. D (and arguably Rust to an extent) was created due to perceived failures in C++. Scripting languages weren't even practical for real programs for decades, so of course people created less verbose languages when they got the hardware.

In addition, new languages are being created for research (ML, LISP 1.0, Racket) and for _fun_. Not many of either of those categories catch on, but there's enough volume of them that they still proliferate.

</comment><comment><USER3> 700?! Ridiculous! we need to develop one universal language that covers everyone's use cases. [1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)</comment>


Google shows private photos on VU TV of any connected account - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/wothadei/status/1102090934739595264 <comment><USER2> Later, in response to a question whether he has actually seen any photos of other people he says:

        No, just their accounts are listed. I am not able to see any photos - not even my own.

<comment><USER3> That is NOT what is stated, which is:

>Although I am being shown a bunch of accounts to choose from, I am unable _to get photos from Google Photos_ to show on my tv. Not even my own.

The tweet (like almost _any_ similar tweet in my limited understanding) is not clear and void of actual "proper" descriptions of the issue, but it seems like the issue is with "random" images appearing in the "ambient mode screensaver" (whatever it is):

>Private @googlephotos of strangers are being shown to me in the ambient mode screensaver.

<comment><USER2> If you look further down in the thread you can see how someone asks whether he saw any actual photos and his reply (which is what I posted).

[https://twitter.com/wothadei/status/1102570006330597381](https://twitter.com/wothadei/status/1102570006330597381)

<comment><USER3> Maybe he is talking of the (small) photo associated to the profiles?

Like in this picture (by another user on the same thread)?

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0v-eAzWoAEiacn.jpg:small](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0v-eAzWoAEiacn.jpg:small)

But then what is the "ambient screensaver"?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trump says Google CEO Sundar Pichai called to apologize - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/15/trump-says-google-ceo-sundar-pichai-called-to-apologize/ <comment><USER2> I'm sorry Mr. Trump we'll make the website since your organization is "busy".</comment>


PLT Scheme is a Racket - <AUTHOR> http://www.racket-lang.org/ <comment><USER2> In my experience, recursion is the hard part of teaching a functional language like Sch^H^H^H Racket.

I've often wondered if purpose-building a tool for visualizing recursive processes would help.

They could call it Ponzi.

<comment><USER3> I learned recursion in C. Visualizing the stack, which was encouraged for whatever reason in the books I was reading, was useful to me.

<comment><USER4> What books were those? Sounds useful, I'd like to read that too.

<comment><USER3> Programming Abstractions in C: [http://www.amazon.com/Programming- Abstractions-Second-Comput...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Abstractions- Second-Computer-Science/dp/0201545411)

there might have been others but that was the main one where afterward recursion no longer confused or scared me.

there may be other books that are far more suitable. i would be surprised if there weren't, even. but that's the one i used.

<comment><USER4> I checked the author, Eric Roberts, and it looks like recursion is his specialty. Good reference, thanks for the link!

[http://www.amazon.com/Eric- Roberts/e/B001IOH3DO/ref=ntt_athr...](http://www.amazon.com/Eric- Roberts/e/B001IOH3DO/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The new website is not complete yet; more info on the changes: <http://www.racket-lang.org/new-name.html>

<comment><USER4> How is this change going to be implemented in Linux repositories?

I installed the old busted PLT/DrScheme via repo, will it get automatically updated to the new hotness Racket, or will I need to keep an eye out for a new package?

<comment><USER5> That's up to the linux packagers. It took them a while to settle on "plt- scheme" in the past, so it will probably take some time now too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since the documentation is'nt working, here's one question - is there anything similar to Leiningen for Clojure or , to a lesser extent, SBT for scala ?

<comment><USER7> I've thought about the same thing... it would be really nice to have something like this for Clojure...

We used Dr. Scheme through a lot of my college courses and it helped out

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cool -- have you told Robby about it? Do you envision this being a teaching language or production?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not my little project, it's a re-branding of the good old PLT Scheme by the original team. I just post the news. :O

As far as I know only the names changes.

<comment><USER9> There's also a release of version 184.108.40.206

<comment><USER5> 18.104.22.168 is the version of the repository -- it's a development version that should not be considered stable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tortuous History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/world/africa/tortuous-history-traced-in-sunken-slave-ship-found-off-south-africa.html <comment><USER2> The middle passage is one of the most awful things anyone can say about humans.

Another, sadly, is the current state of the US prison system.

I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't end slavery at all, at least legally.

> except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly > convicted

The drug war and prison state aren't metaphorical continuations of slavery, but the literal legal legacy.

<comment><USER3> > I'm always a bit amazed at how casually people talk about how "slavery > ended," punctuated by the civil war, when in fact, the 13th amendment didn't > end slavery at all, at least legally.

I always cringe when people talk about sweatshops being a thing of the past.

Being held captive and working for $0.23/hour [0] may not be _literal_ slavery, but it's at best a rounding error away[1]. And that's exactly the state of many prisons in the US, or factories and field work in many other parts of the world.

We haven't really ended labor inequality; we've just exported it, and we continue to benefit from the dirt-cheap costs of exploitative labor on a daily basis[2].

[0] [http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html](http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html)

[1] Remember that prisoners are usually expected to pay for their own costs- of-living while incarcerated, such as toiletries, and that the prices for these are set by a monopoly seller for the prison.

[2] [https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not- re...](https://theweek.com/articles/463364/11-products-might-not-realize-made- by-prisoners)

<comment><USER4> Look, I'm as critical of U.S. mass incarceration as anyone. And there are many problems--overcriminalization, mandatory minimums, rampant plea bargaining, prosecutorial misconduct, wrongful conviction. But despite all those problems, equating it with slavery--actual slavery as it was practiced in the U.S. through the Civil War--is senseless.

You are equating criminal incarceration (even unjust incarceration) with intentionally terrorizing innocent African villages, capturing their people and shipping them to another continent to live in chains.

It's a little like the tendency to call bad things, when they are bad enough, "genocide" or "holocaust" despite the very specific meanings of those words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even more "sad" is the current state of Mozambique.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the important thing to remember here - especially for gentrified 21st century software engineers - is that to fully own your guilt for slavery in the Americas, you must first ignore the history of slavery in Africa itself.

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

<comment><USER6> It is rather sad you have been downvoted, but alas in these PC days, not surprising. You are of course right, the audience here, of all places, should seek further education, and whilst pointing out the horrors of slavery, should not take the simplified modernistic version of suited Westerners sailing over, grabbing a boat load of locals and sailing them back for work. It was and is far more complicated than that. There is a reason it was called the 'Slave Trade' for a reason - the locals were more than happy to sell their bretheren. That is probably the saddest point of it all.

Well, sadest is that slavery still exists in most of the world, and yet we seem to consider it a relic from the past.

<comment><USER7> No one who studies the Atlantic slave trade (or the Indian Ocean slave trade for that matter) is going to deny that slavery existed in various forms in pre-colonial Africa. But there's an enormous difference between pre-colonial slavery and the system that began to emerge under the Portuguese, Spanish, and English in the 16th century - both in terms of sheer numbers, and (in many cases) in terms of the severity of conditions for slaves. It's analogous to constantly pointing out that Roman iron forges created air pollution in the 2nd century CE whenever people talk about 20th century environmental issues. I don't disagree that the general public should be educated about the multi- sited nature of slavery of course; as an historian of this period I just wanted to point out that the people who actually study and teach this stuff are not trying to portray it as a solely European phenomenon. However it is inarguably the case that the early modern European empires were responsible for upgrading both the scale and severity of a pre-existing slave system.

Anyway, to add something substantive here, I figured I'd link to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which is (from my point of view at least) one of the most significant achievements in historical scholarship in the last few decades:

[http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces](http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces)</comment></comment></comment>


SparkleShare - <AUTHOR> http://n0where.net/fuck-the-cloud/

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't change my title ! These are 7 alternatives [ not SparkleShare alone ]</comment>


Ask HN: Is Bing really better than Google? - <AUTHOR>

The folks at Bing have said, "To track our progress, we conducted tests that removed any trace of Google and Bing branding. When we did this study in January of last year 34% people preferred Bing, while 38% preferred Google. The same unbranded study now shows that Bing Search results now have a much wider lead over Google's. When shown unbranded search results 43% prefer Bing results while only 28% prefer Google results." [1]<p>My question is: Has any one else done this sort of study?  If so, what were the relevant percentages?  (And is there any trend over time?)<p>[1]: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2012/05/10/spend-less-time-searching-more-time-doing-introducing-the-new-bing.aspx <comment><USER2> A few years back (6 months before the first Bing study in the article) Michael Kordahi developed a site "Blind Search" that anonymised search results from Google, Bing and Yahoo and put them side by side, letting users vote which they preferred.

The site (<http://blindsearch.fejus.com/>) now seems somewhat-defunct, with Yahoo results failing show. Aggregated results posted mid-2009 (<http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=839>) (a little earlier than the original study) show Google on 41%, Bing 31%, Yahoo 28%, however.

As a purely non-scientific anecdote, I personally used the Blind Search website for a month mid-2011, preferring Google around 75% of the time, Yahoo 15% and Bing 10% of the time. (The latter two are interesting, because Yahoo is presumably using Bing's engine behind the scenes.) I probably don't represent a "typical user", however, as most of my queries are programming- related, which perhaps some search engines have better optimised for than others.

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone pointed out a cool Blekko feature recently: a slashtag called /monte

<http://blekko.com/ws/social+news+for+hackers+/monte>

I've done around 50 searches using /monte and not once did I pick something other than Google. Kind of spooked me out really.</comment>


More Tech Start-Ups Call It Quits - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123439862101275191.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_marketplace

<comment><USER2> Reactrix took 75MM (!) to project video games on the floors of malls, with an ad-supported (!) business model. 'twas ever thus.

Music startup Fuzz Artists couldn't get enough traffic to sustain a business model. So the founder blames the market, which in "better" times would have afforded him access to $10MM in capital to put his reckoning off by a couple of years. Shouldn't he instead be happy to have his life and his career back?

Or how about nTag Interactive, which sold RFID nametags for conferences. Not a crazy idea at all. But they hadn't had a news update since July '08, well before the market crash. What does this have to do with the current climate?

This is an incredible easy, lazy story for any journalist to write. There are _always_ a collection of companies with a sob story to write about. When that collection includes Facebook, LinkedIn, or (hell) Twitter, maybe the story will have teeth.

<comment><USER3> Unrelated question why do you put "MM" instead of "M" I've seen this before but don't know why it's done like that.

<comment><USER4> Probably because M is already an abbreviation for thousand, e.g. CPM.

<comment><USER2> That's true, but the AP Stylebook says $...M means million; I too have only seen this used among the MBA types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More tech start-ups funded (and controlled) by VCs are shutting down as VCs try to get their money out. Startups started by people who have a business plan to actually make money ,sell real product to real customers, rather than just attract VCs and cash in are doing rather nicely thank you.

<comment><USER6> Our business model couldn't be much simpler: build machines that save people and utilities energy and money, sell them at a profit. But it's still tough raising money.

<comment><USER7> We've had troubles raising money, too. Our core business is making real things, we have technology no one else has, it fits a under-served and well- defined market niche, and there's tons of customer interest. The deals that were available before just aren't there.</comment></comment></comment>


Michael Burry of 'The Big Short' says he has found the next market bubble - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/04/the-big-shorts-michael-burry-says-he-has-found-the-next-market-bubble.html <comment><USER2> Passive stock funds have consistently beat actively managed funds for decades, in part due to the high fees actively managed funds charge.

Even with a severe haircut, I doubt the passive funds will fare worse than actively managed funds.</comment>


Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-government-hackers-penetrated-dnc-stole-opposition-research-on-trump/2016/06/14/cf006cb4-316e-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html <comment><USER3> The only thing interesting about this story is that whoever did it got caught. Sort of.

Is there anyone here who really believes that every major campaign organization since, say, 2004 hasn't been completely owned up? What, you think the people that build the software and IT environments for campaigns --- sites that by design have millions of users with persistent accounts, and thousands of staff members at varying levels of privilege --- are the creme de la creme of software security talent?

Because, sure, I mean, everyone I know in software security and pentesting tells me "my first career choice is to go work in IT for the DNC and the GOP", but somehow along the way Google manages after a mighty struggle to outbid the 70k/year cost-center IT organizations offer for security talent.

If there was any interesting "oppo research" on McCain in the DNC servers during the '08 election, I will bet all the money in my pocket versus all the money in yours that the Chinese read all of it long before everyone on the official CC list did.

<comment><USER4> Is blase indifference how we respond to national level security breaches now?

If this was somebody's health records, the organization responsible for the disclosure would be under serious investigation (HIPPA), and throwing down retainers to every law firm in town.

Thomas, is it your opinion that those responsible for securing this data shouldn't be held responsible?

<comment><USER3> I think it's awfully silly to pretend that campaign IT organizations should be falling on their swords when the largest, most-talented, best-funded software security organizations in the industry do only a marginally better job when evaluated by outcome.

But, more importantly: I meant what I said. The only interesting thing about this story is that whoever hacked the DNC got attributed. You think the GOP isn't owned up?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> State sponsored attackers had "thoroughly compromised" access for over a year and were "expelled" over a weekend? Not bloody likely.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the weekend was spent burning all of their equipment?

<comment><USER7> Finally decommissioned that old SharePoint server?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure fire is sufficient for a SharePoint server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> But some people still hope for online voting. This is a preview of how other countries could decide your elections if you switch to online voting now (and that's assuming your own intelligence agencies don't compromise it first to support whoever is more favorable to them and to an expansion of their powers).

<comment><USER9> Chinese state actors even get involved in municipal council politics in Canada [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/government- infi...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/government-infiltrated- by-spies-csis-boss-says/article4392618/?service=mobile)

Insecure online voting would be icing on the cake

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There was a time when if you wanted to transport yourself or your goods across say Europe or China, you needed to hire mercenaries and they would protect your business from bandits on the way.

At various times (Mongols, US Navy vs pirates etc) governments stepped in and provided that protection (for a lesser price) and trade grew.

I'm not too sure how governments can provide protection in the online realm. Perhaps by providing minimal standards of security? (I know the standards exists but enforcing them?)

However, now my iPhone is FBI-resistant, and public keys are fairly easy to share, it seems that secure peer to peer communication is feasible.

So the shape of a more secure, bandit free internet is clearer - <USER2> mobile devices, and much much stricter standards that are enforced, but it seems an odd new world.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why wouldn't the intruders change anything while they were there?

For example, filtering out some important emails, with a goal of hamstringing the organization.

Also... The older I get, the more I realize that adults are just kids with very fancy tree houses. _MY treehouse doesn 't have rats. Get your leaders from here, not from there._

</comment><comment><USER12> Very little technical information. Still interesting article in its own right.

<comment><USER13> Some more technical information is available on CrowdStrike's blog: [http://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion- democr...](http://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic- national-committee/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "It's the job of every foreign intelligence service to collect intelligence against their adversaries,..." Hah. Translation: We've a firm foothold in their systems as well.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, but the problem with their systems is, it's all written in chinese. Our systems store information in english, which is a much easier language to read. So they have a natural advantage there...

<comment><USER16> And the us doesn't have native Chinese speakers?

<comment><USER15> guess this wasn't the thread for deadpan humor.

<comment><USER17> I didn't read any humor in it. It came off as something a stereotypical single language speaker (typically English) would say.

Or in other words: 说话像一个男人谁不说第二语言

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What does it look like when a Russian downloads these files? Is it PDFs? Text files? What do they see?</comment>


2 spaces after full stop are better than 1, except maybe they aren't study finds - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/two-spaces-after-period-are-better-than-one-except-maybe-they-arent-study-finds/ <comment><USER2> I like the extra space a lot. Not easy to achieve in HTML though; used to be you had to do something like ".  " (period, non-breaking space, regular space) to force the rendering of extra space without affecting word breaking. Now it's possible to create an encoded page, e.g. UTF-8 where the non-breaking space is simply inserted in the text instead of using the   hack. Either way, not natural and certainly not a first-class feature in HTML. Given how common HTML articles are, I expect the double-space to mostly die out.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone actually use /newcomments? - <AUTHOR> Just curious - I've been banging around HN for a while and have never really understood /newcomments. Was there orignally a driving idea around this? I've never really seen the concept of a contextless stream of comments before. I don't even dislike it - just a curiosity. <comment><USER2> I use it very often.

To me, it's especially useful at lower-traffic times to gauge which threads are getting attention. At high-traffic times, it's utility is somewhat diminished by presenting an almost-entirely new set of comments every time you click it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I mostly use /newcomments.

You get to see which articles have interesting discussion.</comment>


Don't Break Up the Banks. They're Not Our Real Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/opinion/dont-break-up-the-banks-theyre-not-our-real-problem.html <comment><USER2> It's simple you just need a leverage scale.

At $1T> in assets 1:1 leverage

500B-$1T in assets 2:1 leverage

... down until you get reasonable leverage numbers

The market will take care of the rest.</comment>


Voice navigation killed Apple-Google maps talks | Fox News - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/09/27/voice-navigation-killed-apple-google-maps-talks/ <comment><USER2> It's good to see that there was a rational business reason for the removal of Google maps, as opposed to the more common emotional reasons of Apple being upset over Android.</comment>


Early Adopters: How To Get The First Users To Your New Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.startbreakingfree.com/1322/early-adopters-5-ways-to-get-users-to-your-new-website/

<comment><USER2> I think the 37Signals and Joel Spolsky examples are a little misleading. Maybe this goes without saying, but when blogging to get traffic, be sure to remember your desired audience. 37Signals and Spolsky's audience is web developers, _like many HN readers_ , so they can promote their apps on a tech blog. If your audience is grandmothers or tweens, don't expect to get much traffic from your blog about Rails programming.

<comment><USER3> My blog is about 99% not relevant to the interests of my typical customers, but it is still useful as a friendcatcher. There are a couple hundred people who care about what my business is doing, as a consequence of blogging and other social activities over the years. This gives me an automatic boost to marketing of new sites/products/etc. For example, in 2010 when I get my new site off the ground, I can with a high degree of confidence predict that it is going to pick up a few dozen links in the first week from people who know me and care about what I'm doing separately from their (lack of) desire for my new site.

Nothing says you can't also have a customer-focused blog, too. I got around to installing one on my site a few months ago but haven't found time to write for it in a compelling manner yet. That will be another topic for 2010.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I agree with #2 unless your competition is really truly despicable. I think that if you use that method against something that's really popular, it will come back to bite you.

<comment><USER5> This is a lesson from Politics, if you focus all your energy into attacking your opponents it doesn't mean people will choose you, it just means people will choose not to choose.

This tactic _does not_ extend to business. You don't 'win' by having the most users, you win by making the most money, and having a wide open market is stupid and dangerous for a company. This is the _major_ failure with Apples 'PC and Mac' advertisements, it doesn't tell us why we should buy a Mac, just why we shouldn't buy a PC. This tactic presently works for Apple because the people who know the difference between a PC and a Mac are likely aware of the pros for Apple, they just need to be overwhelmed by the cons of a PC.

For a new product, your consumers have no knowledge of your pros, and slandering your opponents does nothing except clue them into their failures. The prime example here is again in politics, slander is a tactic always taken by the right-wing parties, however when your claims are hollow and see through they can fail by record numbers. This happened in the UK when Labour gained the majority with Tony Blair, the conservatives launched a slander campaign that not only alienated voters from the conservative party but had no effect on keeping liberal voters out of the polling booths, they essentially handed parliament to Labour. The conservatives here in Canada keep playing the same tactics and have yet to get a majority through their tactics. Again the same could be seen with tactics used against Obama, but they were baseless claims and liberal voters came out in force, conservative voters staid at relatively the same levels but decreased vastly in percentage.

<comment><USER6> _The prime example here is again in politics, slander is a tactic always taken by the right-wing parties, however when your claims are hollow and see through they can fail by record numbers. This happened in the UK when Labour gained the majority with Tony Blair, the conservatives launched a slander campaign that not only alienated voters from the conservative party but had no effect on keeping liberal voters out of the polling booths, they essentially handed parliament to Labour. The conservatives here in Canada keep playing the same tactics and have yet to get a majority through their tactics. Again the same could be seen with tactics used against Obama, but they were baseless claims and liberal voters came out in force, conservative voters staid at relatively the same levels but decreased vastly in percentage._

Oh come now, you can't think of any examples where left-wing parties have used slander against right-wing folks? I do seem to recall some negative, and frequently untrue, things being said about George W Bush, or Sarah Palin.

Attacking the opposition is a common tactic among all political parties in all countries. If it goes too far it can turn off some moderate voters, but at reasonable levels it seems to work reasonably well. It's far less common when marketing products -- I'm not quite sure why this is, but possibly because it's easier to come up with positive things to say about your own product ("It has shiny new features X, Y and Z!") than to come up with positive things to say about a politician ("... uhhhh.... hope!")

<comment><USER4> I agree that the person you're responding to was a bit biased politically. However, I don't feel that the comment was meant to be a discourse on politics as much as it was to illustrate a point about business practices. Thus, I'm willing to let it go.

<comment><USER5> I have seen left-wingers pull similar tactics, it isn't an exclusively right- wing tactic. I've likely only been through a fraction of the national elections that others on here have, I was only stating cases where I've exclusively _seen_ the tactics (two conservative campaigns in the UK that both times helped plant Tony Blair in the PM seat, similarly I've seen the conservative campaigns for Canada that have ineffectively gained Stephen Harper seats by reducing opposition votes, but despite several elections hasn't gained him a majority and he keeps with the same tactics, and I was in Canada during the latest US elections and saw similar tactics being performed on a national scale, I have however see democratic senators and governors pulling similar tactics on channels broadcast in Ontario)

I didn't mean to say this was an exclusively right-wing tactic by any means, I believe it's a moronic strategy and I've largely seen it performed by right- wing candidates who have high voter-loyalty, but I'm sure left-wingers with high voter-loyalty pull similar tactics when they can. I dislike bringing politics to HN, and that wasn't my intent, it was meant as an allegory for product marketing as essentially that's all politics is doing, advertising a 'candidate' product.

Insulting your opponent only goes so far, and I know here in Canada the conservative campaign didn't drive up their votes (I believe on average they lost votes over last year, but gained in percentages) it did however drive down their opponents. Yet it actually delivered decisive control of government to the smaller parties like the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP who can cause a majority vote for anyone they side with.

For example, if Apple enters the netbook market it can't follow the same advert campaign against Windows as Chrome OS will present a decisive third party that, like the NDP were pulling in the recent vote in Canada, can play the "well we don't suck, and we're not a complete ass" card of being 'the good guy'.

I couldn't think of a better allegory for not insulting your opponent, I suppose the simplest reasoning is this: It's childish, and you're allegedly an adult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> good suggestions. rank for long/medium tail keywords is incredibly important. it just takes time and concerted effort to do the work to promote your site and most people, particularly developers/hackers don't want to spend time on 'chores' like that.

<comment><USER8> here is the question about the long tail words, do you need decent page rank for just your main site's homepage, or do you need page rank for all those other pages too?

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't need page rank, even your home page doesn't if it's long tail enough.

Once upon a time I was tutoring people in finance. I registered the domain name HoustonFinanceTutor.com since that's where I lived. Within a few weeks I was #1 in Google for the search "houston finance tutor". It was a brand new website with zero page rank. It ranked there just because i had the keywords in the domain name, and this on-page factor was enough. Play around with it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not a terribly useful article.

2\. Tell people your competition sucks - unethical.

4\. Seed your site using Mechanical Turk - unethical, depending on the type of site you have.

5\. Have a blog - should be 'Have a Popular Blog'

He leaves out useful techniques like twittering about your new site using popular hashtags associated with its subject. Or posting it on Facebook, creating a fan site and encouraging your friends to spread the word.

<comment><USER10> Telling your people your competition sucks isn't unethical, you're just making them aware that you can provide them with more value. If you can't live up to your claims, you'll feel the backlash.

I can see that using Mechanical Turk could be unethical for certain sites (e.g: dating sites), but it could also be pretty useful, and was something I hadn't thought of at least.

Also, I don't see how your complaint about #5 applies to blogs but not twitter or facebook sites.

<comment><USER9> Instead of saying the competition 'sucks' I would instead explain why my product is superior to their. Accentuate the positives of your product, not the negatives of the competition (which, if they have already used the competitions they already know well enough).

As for #5, yes for a Facebook group it would need to be popular. But with twitter you can attach relevant hashtags to your post, resulting in it showing up in searches as well as for those that follow you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's kind of funny that "needing good content" is listed as a "con" in #3.

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid point :) I guess I was saying that with your brand new site, you might not have good content yet if it's supposed to be user generated. So it's a con because it's a chicken/egg problem.

<comment><USER11> That's a fair explanation. I think I understood the spirit in which that point was intended; it just stood out to me because of how often people harp on content being #1. I liked the post overall, for sure!</comment></comment></comment>


Qt license questions - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I'm working on a commercial software in c++ and Qt with other two friends.
We want to sell the software and distribute it with closed source.
Is the LGPL Qt license good for this? I mean, what are its restrictions? I've read something about static linking, but I'm not sure what it is.
Can you help me?
Thanks, Carlo <comment><USER2> One-line summary of the LGPL: "If you make changes to this library, you have to make those changes public; but aside from that, your code remains your own."

It sounds to me like the LGPL Qt license will work fine for you. (But I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, blah blah blah.)</comment>


AlphaGo Teach – Find new and creative ways of playing Go - <AUTHOR> https://alphagoteach.deepmind.com/ <comment><USER2> Many comments seem to miss the real significance of this.

This is not a joseki dictionary, and it doesn't play 50+ moves for you. This is AlphaGo Master's explanation of how it sees the opening. Humans have a very good understanding of endgames, and we might understand opening in a single corner, but when it comes to whole board knowledge, we are way worse than AlphaGo is.

As it happens, AlphaGo disagrees with human play a whole lot, just in this subset. There's well known fuseki strategies played by professionals that AlphaGo thinks are downright terrible, and it shows lines of how it would play against them.

Sure, it'd be nice to have even more moves and alternatives, but this is really nice, as it helps us in the parts of the game where we are the weakest.

Compare this to what Alpha Zero is teaching us about chess: It has interesting opinions regarding a few openings (Goodbye French Defense) but ultimately it's saying that our opening knowledge is very sound, but that it will not just crush humans, but traditional chess programs in the middle game.

<comment><USER3> When an AI is demonstrably so far beyond human ability that to even comprehend it requires the AI to help explain itself, you start to take Singularity futurists a bit more seriously.

<comment><USER4> This doesn't make sense. Computers do stuff that people don't "comprehend" all the time. In fact, in the past, one of the fundamental appeals and drives behind AI was to make systems that could explain themselves, not requiring complex analysis and experiments to understand what's going on. (And vice vera, systems that could understand humans without programming.)

<comment><USER3> > make systems that could explain themselves

Yes, but currently the systems we are building have no sense of will or agency.

If we succeed in building systems that _do_ have more complex objectives, then how can we be sure that the human and machine's objectives are aligned? How can you be sure the system is explaining itself to you in an honest way?

Note that there were two different goals in building computers and software: 1) building things that have full control over and 2) building things that are more and more clever and useful.

In the limit, those two goals can come into sharp conflict.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a way to do anything other than just run through this single opening set of moves? Not a lot of exploration here, or ability to 'find new and creative ways of playing go' Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> There are lots of branches. If you don't understand go strategy then you're not going to get much out of this

<comment><USER5> I've played thousands of games of go. I understand go strategy. I don't understand the interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I got super excited for a second...I thought this was Google releasing a working "virtual teacher" where it teaches different strategies of Go and allows you to play against it with different level of difficulty.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it is comparable in function to Kogo's Joseki Dictionary, curated by Alexander Dinerchtein (3p). e.g: [http://eidogo.com/](http://eidogo.com/)

Just that it covers the entire fuseki rather than just a corner.

As you get deeper into a branch it doesn't provide many variations, nor it explains why a variation is better than another. Joseki dictionaries sometimes will tell you one move is a mistake and show you how to punish it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't play Go at all, but I would love to learn from a self-adjusting AlphaGo tuned to win (say) %50 of the time. I feel like a whole new generation of players could be born from a "from scratch" approach.

</comment><comment><USER10> I missed the part where it said the win percentages are relative to black winning (as opposed the the currently playing side), and thought alphago was saying the best response to black opening with both 4-4 and 4-3 was tengen...

</comment><comment><USER11> Oh this is cool, is it basically giving you a view of what alphago thinks the win % is for a given board state while you're playing? With undo that's awesome.

<comment><USER12> no, it's a very small precomputed tree of moves. you can only click on an increasingly small subset of tiles after each move

<comment><USER11> Damn :( Thanks for clarifying though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would be sweet to play a whole game against AlphaGo at some point. Is anyone aware of when we'll be able to do that?

<comment><USER14> There's a project called Leela Zero on Guthub which appears to be Alpha Zero without it's neural network weights. I doubt it'll get the proper weights any time soon though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Surprising that it thinks the winrate for black is so low. I wonder what it would think of a komi of 5.5 instead of 6.5?

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it just me, or does the board go asymmetric way too fast?

This may be a UI issue...

</comment><comment><USER17> Clicking on the circles seems to do nothing in Google Chrome.</comment>


The art of debugging – or how it took me 3 years to fix my PC - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/content-uneditable/the-art-of-debugging-or-how-it-took-me-3-years-to-fix-my-pc-23a9f7ec1426 <comment><USER2> To taint the clickbait, it of course did not take them 3 years:

> I've recently been trying to resurrect my old PC. I haven't used it at all > over the last 3 years and moved twice in the meantime

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right. It took me over 5 years from the moment I assembled this PC to the moment I found the mistake ;)

Anyway, I don't think that anyone would actually think that I worked on this for 3 years. But when applied to software (to which this story lead me), I often hear "it took them 3 years to fix this". It's pretty much the same here. The bug was there, it caused serious issues (also with other systems), I applied various random workarounds and I spent a lot of time on it and yet, it got fixed by an accident much much later.

<comment><USER3> What I think is going on here is that such titles are subverting axioms of conversations that give language meaning normally.

It's perfectly reasonable _in general_ to say it took you 3 years when you weren't actually working on it all that time. Like, say, if you were talking to a friend who you tell everything to.

But when it's in a title or headline, it's implicitly presumed to be the most significant thing about your story to a stranger, thus what makes it notable and interesting. Given that baseline, one tends to interpret it as meaning you were working most of the time on it, because that makes it worthy of attention.

That's why it seems not unexpected to me for a person to feel disappointed and mislead.

<comment><USER4> I appreciate the sincerity and depth of your analysis. This nicely wraps words around a concept which I had considered, but never organized well, and previously never expressed. Nice work

<comment><USER3> Well, that was mostly inspired by something known as Grice's Maxims. I read about them years ago and immediately thought someone should write extensively on how discourse in reality not only often relies on assuming them, but also frequently subverts them, cooperatively or maliciously. But I'm too lazy.

<comment><USER4> Even better -- you've now given me a term to research further!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I went through something similar building my first PC. I had worked a summer job just to be able to afford one, researched all the parts obsessively, and slowly waited for all of the parts to be shipped to rural Alaska. I put the all of the components in the case, flipped the PSU switch, pressed the power button, and -- nothing, not even a BIOS screen. Five red LEDs were lit on the motherboard, indicating a major hardware fault: CPU, motherboard, RAM, or PSU. Well, there was nothing else for it but to start replacing the parts one by one to see what was broken. It would take a day or two to get the Return Merchandise Authorization, and two weeks shipping time in either direction, so every month or so I would get a new part in to try to get this machine to work.

That went on for about five months. I was crazed with frustration, and a growing pile of electronics boxes, tools, and testing devices filled the corner of my room. I had a collection of components which I was sure were working: the system at least appeared to boot to BIOS when lying on the workbench, but when all the parts were hooked up inside the case, we got five red lights again: major hardware fault. Finally, at the limits of my frustration, I turned to my brother for aid: "It works on the bench, but not in the box. I don't know why. You figure it out."

He returned not five minutes later with the widest grin you can imagine. I was incredulous, and this was a better practical joke than he could ever have devised. He showed me that having the case's reset button (correctly) connected to the motherboard caused the error condition. I was so thankful that I almost didn't want to strangle him!

<comment><USER6> I've seen situations such as that. Working outside the case, but not in the case is usually points to a short of the motherboard through the case (of course, assuming it is wired correctly).

<comment><USER5> As I recall, it took me a considerable while to determine that the equipment worked outside the case. I think I tried replacing the RAM, CPU, and PSU before doing the mobo, and unless you have an idea that the case itself might be the issue, well, why would you take the rest of the machine apart? And even if you suspected a board short, you might easily be misled into thinking that it was a part of the case touching the mobo inappropriately, and leave the reset/power leads connected: it's a lot easier to punch the case reset button than to use the tiny one built into the board. And of course, figuring out that the system works without the power switch connected is not super useful in itself: that is something of a necessary component.

I'm just still amazed that he figured it out that quickly; I really didn't tell him much about what had happened, and I'd hardly had time to leave the room before he'd solved it. What a jerk :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > This is not a story about CPU soldering or whatever hardware engineers find > sexy

Guess I should dig out my old writeup of blowing up the floppy drive I needed to boot my PC by dropping a pencil in it, and the ensuing repair..

</comment><comment><USER8> One time I had a tiny magnet inside one of my USB ports. Vexed me for several minutes.

</comment><comment><USER9> The I/O shields behind the PCs don't fit well, can cut you and are really bad design. Glad that new (premium?) motherboards have them integrated. [https://laurentschoice.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/io-1.j...](https://laurentschoice.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/01/io-1.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER10> I also have a very odd issue which I think has its root in the underlying firmware. I have an Dell Latitude E6520 notebook with a Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor. Though I bought this laptop in 2013, it is still fast and works quite well even with Visual Studio / ReSharper.

Only one thing, it is sluggish as hell. Mouse clicks not responding, everything feels slow. Except when I undock it from the docking station and redock it again. Then you feel the fan spinning up, the CPU doing work, and everything becomes smooth. I checked the clock speed, its the same before and after docking. There is nothing keeping the CPU busy either. Its like something is somehow preventing the system from executing efficiently until the system is re-docked.

The solution? I don't know, I might never find out. I will just keep redocking my laptop every time I boot Windows.

<comment><USER11> In my experience, the GPU, USB and SATA are the causes of sluggishness without CPU usage. Not sure what could be the problem with your dock - does it have a USB 3.0 controller that the laptop does not? eSata? You are 100% sure the CPU is not being heavily used by anything after first time docking?

<comment><USER10> The dock is a standard wide-connector Dell port replicator, with indeed USB, DVI connections and possibly eSATA. USB 3.0 did not exist back then.</comment></comment></comment>


Samsung will ask all global partners to stop sales and exchanges of Galaxy Note7 - <AUTHOR> https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-will-ask-all-global-partners-to-stop-sales-and-exchanges-of-galaxy-note7-while-further-investigation-takes-place <comment><USER2> Still, the top product on their Korean homepage ([http://www.samsung.com/sec/home/](http://www.samsung.com/sec/home/)) is ... Galaxy Note7 :)</comment>


Empty half the Earth of its humans. It's the only way to save the planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/save-the-planet-half-earth-kim-stanley-robinson <comment><USER2> We'll need to design a new economic system to make this work well, or we'll end up like Japan. Stagnant population growth == Stagnant economy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does it mean that humans currently occupy _more_ than half of the Earth?</comment>


Buffet's letter on contribution subtly advises about budget - <AUTHOR> http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/CNBC/Sections/News_And_Analysis/_Blogs/Warren_Buffett_Watch/_DAILY%20POSTS/Documents/120118_Buffett_Match_Letters.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the article that mentions the letters [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/impressed-delighted-warren- buf...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/impressed-delighted-warren-buffett- matches-204656439.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Does your employer pay for conferences? - <AUTHOR> Does your employer pay for conferences and give you paid time to attend?
If so, how often?
Do you think refusal to do so is a bad sign? <comment><USER2> Yes and yes, BUT - and this is important - you must be able to identify how attending this conference aligns with the organization's goals and help achieve them. In practice then you end up going to a conference every 2-3 years.

There have been instances where we've had tight budgets and couldn't afford conference fees, lodging and travel but the company provided paid time off to attend, since payroll is built into the budget. Even then they try to pick up one of the items such as lodging (which can get quite expensive if the conference is in San Francisco - we're in the Midwest).

Is it a bad sign? Well, what other opportunities is your employer providing for professional growth?

<comment><AUTHOR> In this particular case the conference was right next to my work place, it had some tracks that were very related to what i'm working on.

The only cost to my employer would have been three days I don't show up at the office. No travel or housing expense.

<comment><USER2> Was anyone else from your team going to the conference? Did you give them enough notice? Or are they being hard-nosed on never sending anyone to conferences ever?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is the conference and/or the schedule of talks directly relevant to my job responsibilities or am I going because my employer wants me to be there to learn something specific or doe a bit of passive recruiting? In that case employer pays.

Do I just want to go to a particular conference and my employer doesn't particularly care about the conference or I can't make a convincing case for a specific business interest that this conference serves? No, the employer does not pay.

Next time make sure that you add attendance at a conference that seems somewhat relevant into your employment contract. I have found that this is one of the better times to make the ask (e.g. "I want to make sure I am on top of my game and delivering best practices and new techniques to the company, so I think we should add PyCon attendance to the list of benefits/duties and I will also do a bit of recruiting there for the company...")

As far as what refusal means, it could either be that the department just doesn't have spare discretionary budget to fly you somewhere to sit in a hotel for a week or else they have the budget but just have no interest in sending you because they do not think it would be worth it. For the latter you can plan ahead a bit more and spend 4-6 months reminding the decision maker about some interesting talk at conference X and how it might apply to some activity the company cares about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I think I will do that next time, and note since the start that community & engagement is important for me.</comment></comment>


Google Removes Amazon's App Listing from Google Play Search - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/11/google-removes-amazons-app-listing-from-google-play-search-following-addition-of-appstore-instant-video-integrations/

<comment><USER2> By and large, Google (and the Google Play Store) play nice with other content distributors. Amazon don't.

I installed instant Video a week ago, and I was astonished at the lengths it went to to enable the Amazon App store. I can see why Amazon may do this, but from my perspective, it was just too dangerous. Instant Video and the Amazon App were uninstalled 10 hours later.

I've a 30 day eval of Amazon Prime. If I could legitimately install an app that had chromecast abilities, I would probably have stayed with Prime. As it is, I'm back to Netflix and the Google Play store.

<comment><USER3> Do you think Google will launch Fire TV/stick support for Google Play Movies/TV/Music in future?

<comment><USER2> Well they just launched youtube on Apple TV, so I don't see why not. There's an issue with having to buy the content on a separate platform (See Comixology for an example of this), but otherwise - yeah. I can see no problem with Google providing software to Amazon that allows content to be consumed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> More like "Amazon broke Google's terms of service and consequentially got removed from Google's app store"

<comment><USER5> Google changed the terms of the Developer Distribution Agreement, I don't believe Amazon was violating Google's terms when they initially put it in the play store. This article has more details: [http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/12/11/google-may-have- forc...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/12/11/google-may-have-forced- amazon-to-remove-its-main-shopping-app-from-the-play-store-because-of-its- appstore-integration/)

<comment><USER6> > Google changed the terms of the Developer Distribution Agreement, I don't > believe Amazon was violating Google's terms when they initially put it in > the play store.

Whether or not they were depends on what the "primary purpose" of the app was, which is very difficult to objectively determine (since there is no reason that the primary purpose has to be the most prominent function.)

Google changed the terms of the agreement in a way which made them much less ambiguous, which made the Amazon app _clearly_ in violation rather than merely _arguably_ in violation.

<comment><USER7> Considering the menu option wasn't there for a long time, and was trivially removed from the new app, I don't see how anyone could argue it was the primary purpose.

<comment><USER8> Well, considering how long they were separate and the little or no user benefit that came from merger of their app store and Amazon's other shopping app (especially post-Amazon SSO), it seems pretty clear that the primary purpose of the merged app was to sneak an otherwise prohibited app store past Google's terms, so...

<comment><USER7> That's quite a stretch. The purpose of a particular update to an app is not the primary purpose of the app itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I almost wonder if this was Amazon's end-game all along. I was somewhat surprised that they launched Instant Video in the way they did since installing apps within apps has been, AFAIK, non-kosher with the Play Store all along.

I'm not sure what their exact reasoning is, beyond getting to lay blame on Google, but I find it hard to believe that Amazon would accidentally fall afoul of Play Store guidelines.

<comment><USER8> I think their plan was to see how far they could get twisting the Play Store guidelines using the extra leverage they got from the long-awaited Instant Video app release. From their perspective, the worst case was returning to the previous status quo, so what did they have to lose?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anybody even use the Amazon app store for anything other than the free app deal they have every day? I just don't see why a user would prefer it.

<comment><USER11> There's a few reasons people _should_ use their store:

1) devs can set apps as free and there's almost always some decent stuff available for free / completely free, this is something google actively prevents by forcing free to be a permanent price change

2) you can buy 'coins' to spend on/in apps + games implementing amazon's services also give you coins back when you purchase which can give you a 20 - 30% discount all the time, this is especially great for all the expensive little kids games I get for my daughter

3) as a developer we've done over $70k in sales this year on the amazon store

The only thing it sucks at is being the only store on amazon's devices.

<comment><USER12> the 70k number is interesting, would it be possible for you to give a rough value in comparison to the Play Store?

<comment><USER11> Amazon is much, much smaller (just 10s of millions of us+uk people I think) but keyword optimization alone can get you started whereas play is much harder to get any traffic on, especially for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good. When I traveled out of the US, I noticed my phone battery life was terrible. Inspecting via catlog, I noticed that the amazon appstore (which I didn't actually have installed directly) was hitting an amazon url in an extremely tight loop, and getting a 403 Forbidden every time (you know, one of the errors that means "don't try again without fixing yourself").

My only explanation is that the amazon appstore has some sort of geographic restriction on the server-side, and the app wasn't written to handle that. I couldn't tell which app was actually responsible, so I just disabled or uninstalled every Amazon app, even though I find some of them useful (rapid package delivery notifications are pretty helpful in a city, when your package is probably sitting on the stoop unprotected). Doing so restored my battery life.

Hopefully this means Google is watching for Amazon's overreach now, and I'll be able to safely get my notifications again.

<comment><USER14> They leave your package outside your door? That's not ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Kind of funny to note that the "evil" microsoft never did any of this with the Windows model.

Imagine if Windows would make it impossible to install Steam for example.. unthinkable.

But if its Google its okay.

<comment><USER16> Google is not making impossible to install Amazon App Store

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> While this is Google's App Store and they can do pretty much anything they want, having such rules is simply anti-competitive. It is as good as saying that on Google Chrome, they will not allow people to visit Firefox.

Google has a 90+% of smartphone marketshare in many parts of the world, and this is abusing their power. Amazon is not installing malware or breaking copyright. Everything else should be allowed.

<comment><USER8> Amazon's store absolutely is allowed. Users just have to go to Amazon's website to download and install it for themselves. Considering that using Amazon's store means trusting not only Amazon and the store app, but every app installed via their store (almost certainly including some Google has never seen), this is an entirely reasonable requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> And therefore paving the way to even more malware in their very own ecosystem:

"Users who visit this site are asked to take a series of steps similar to what's required with downloading the Amazon Appstore standalone app. That is, they have to request a link to the app download, then change their device's security settings to allow for its installation."

Brilliant!

<comment><USER19> But not allowing that would be blocking all third party installs - one of the good features on Android.

<comment><USER20> It's a great feature for people who know what they're doing, but you probably don't want all Android users to allow third party installs- it just opens people up to too much risk.

<comment><USER11> There's no risk. You still have to _find_ APKs to install, if you download from official sources there's no higher risk than downloading from app stores.

Amazon's been recommending + allowing it for years, along with every operating system for decades.

<comment><USER21> At least in my country (Mexico), the advertisements in several ad networks like AdSense often contain malicious code which redirects you to a website telling:

"your version of WhatsApp is outdated, please update to the current version", and after a countdown (or the click of a link), it downloads a malicious apk to your phone.

I'm completely disappointed, since too many websites use AdSense, and sometimes I can't even check a website, because the redirection is too aggressive.

I understand that the people behind these shady advertisements use aggressive cloaking (ex. only injecting the malicious redirection when you are under a mobile network) to avoid being discovered.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Compiz: Ubuntu Desktop's little known best friend - <AUTHOR> https://code.mradford.com/post/the-ubuntu-compiz-desktop <comment><USER2> "Little known?" Compiz was the hotness of the century about a decade ago. Fire effects on minimizing windows and the famous "cube" to switch desktops. Compiz definitely propelled Ubuntu and desktop Linux in general to where it is now.

Check out this Google Trends chart to get the picture of where it was in 2007: [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=C...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=Compiz)

<comment><USER3> Trying to get compiz/beryl to work on my crappy dell inspiron was probably one of a few indirect factors that resulted in my cushy tech job.

<comment><USER4> Oh man, the memories! I saw the title of this thread and thought "no ways its the same compiz".

Somewhere on YouTube is a pretty cringworthly video of me demoing beryl by drawing fire anarchy symbols

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still remember when Gnome 2 reached its peak with Ubuntu in the early 2000's. It was pretty much the complete, reliable, configurable, and robust desktop that Linux ever needed. Anything since that has been a downhill, with new features being presented at the expense of other features and no-frills- but-functional design. I sometimes feel for Windows users whose basic desktop proposition has remained largely unchanged for quite a many years, disregarding some cosmetic updates.

The endless need to change things eventually caused Gnome 2 to gradually become unavailable. It would've needed maintenance, updates to support new library versions, and nobody was interested. There's MATE but each time I've checked is a non-polished mess based on Gnome 2 codebase. The original Gnome 2 was lean and tidy on the surface with lots of power underneath, possibly thanks to curation by Ubuntu.

The Gnome Classic in Ubuntu is okay-ish but it has a lot of leaky abstractions as well, and you feel it's sort of out of place. It takes some tweaking to change the window manager as the newer window managers tend not to be configurable enough so that I can't set my keyboard bindings to what I've had for decades.

The only thing that does remain the same is the shell which I gladly accept. Having grow up using an Amiga, however, it still feels weird not to have a fully-integrated, native desktop GUI that very much defines the feel of the operating system itself. Gnome 2 had that chance. Other Linux environments before and after Gnome 2 are mostly just a shell to run terminals, the editor and the browser.

</comment><comment><USER6> Um, Compiz is far from little known. When I was in high school (2005-2009) I remember installing linux for the first time on my main computer because of Compiz. The animations for switching between desktops looked very futuristic. It was cool to play with but because I built my computer for gaming Linux didn't really cut it for me. I even tried it again after watching a video about how WoW ran faster on wine on Linux than it did on XP. I distinctly remember the cube desktop switcher animation from Compiz in that video.

</comment><comment><USER7> Compiz kick started the belief that Linux "Year of the Desktop" could be a realt thing. Wobbly windows, fire and the cube were great demos to get people interested in Linux

<comment><USER8> i never believed that hype, but i loved the wobbly gobbly effects. Given linux desktop's general unsatisfaction, they were making it quite fun. The fact that it didn't crash easily helped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately, Compiz seems not to be actively maintained since 2016. It looks like the development is suddenly stopped. It is quite surprising to me considering the fame in the past. I'm kinda wondering what happened to them.

[1]: [https://launchpad.net/compiz](https://launchpad.net/compiz)

<comment><USER10> Huge amounts of fragmentation in the dev community for one.. there were several major forks.

<comment><USER11> What else could possibly have happened? Fragmentation is the favorite sport of Linux devs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As others have said, total throwback to 2005/2006 for me — my last proper attempt to make Linux everyday OS. The early Ubuntu days were so fun!

I remember ordering the free CDs for Warty Warthog (Which I still have somehere), just for fun - absolutely installing that initial release, alongside some Compiz/Beryl packages in an attempt to have fun.

And then I remember upgrading to Hoary Hedgehog either early or right on its release — and downloading a brand new show that ABC was airing called "Grey's Anatomy" — that I was angry had forced my favorite show "Boston Legal" into early hiatus. I have distinct memories of watching the pilot in one of the rotating cubes — but Wikipedia indicates Compiz's initial release was later so I may have used a pre-release or another WM effect thing.

Anyway. It's nearly 14 years later. Grey's Anatomy is one of the longest- running TV dramas of all time. It's creator signed a huge deal with Netflix after basically turnjjg Thursday nights into the biggest night on TV for ABC, and apparently, wobbly Windows are still a thing.

The Tumblr Pop Culture Died in 2009 is correct. Also, #getoffmylawn because I'm now in my 30s and old!

<comment><USER13> This comment was fun to read. I'm a couple years younger, but that Boston Legal part hit like a truck. Maybe it was the suggestion, but I can't knock the mental image of wasting hours futzing with compiz/Beryl/fuzion with Denny Crane in the background.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip and smile!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been using Ubuntu/Compiz for a couple years and it has some annoying quirks e.g. child windows that pop up on the wrong monitor! (thank goodness for WIN+SHIFT+arrow keys!!)

But... I have NO desire to go back to Win(10/8) horrible user/developer experience.

<comment><USER15> How did I not know about this keyboard shortcut until now?!? Being able to move a window between different monitors is such a great feature.

Thank you so much. Life will never be the same.

<comment><USER14> Merry Christmas!

Now if someone can fix another bloody annoying thing i.e.: file dialog box... filename is highlighted... start typing... it directs the input somewhere else (into a search field). Such a basic and annoying UI faux pas!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've never seen an expose knock-off that captured the magic. Even Apple managed to bungle it in recent releases. At it's peak, the feature really was perfect: perfectly smooth animation and a perfect-feeling organic layout. It didn't try to do too much and it didn't have an agenda of pushing some other feature down your throat.

<comment><USER17> i wouldn't necessarily call it a knock-off. i could be wrong, but looks like spaces first came to OSX in 2006, which is the same year that compiz launched

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaces_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaces_\(software\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz)

<comment><USER18> Exposé predates Spaces by a couple of years. The two wouldn't really be properly integrated (along with Dashboard which was practically abandonware even by this point) until Mission Control came along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Compiz may be great but unless I am mistaken, these features are in a default gnome-shell install. Perhaps the Ubuntu version of gnome is very different to a Fedora install?

On Fedora, the 'windows key' by default shows me a mission control esque view of all my open windows, and ctrl+alt+arrow keys moves to other virtual desktops. They can be changed to directly from the right hand side of the 'mission control' overview. Are these features both off/disabled on Ubuntu?

<comment><USER20> Yep, this is what I was thinking. Ubuntu 18.04

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> To each their own, but I really don't like the Compiz style of window managers. I have better things to watch than my windows moving around.

<comment><USER10> I appreciated the novelty as well, fast forward many years later and I'm doing a bunch of Googling figuring out how to disable the fancy animations on the work issued osx laptop.

<comment><USER22> It's funny how common this story is in this thread; my first Linux system was Ubuntu + compiz and I loved every little effect; now that I'm old(er) and boring, I'm running a stripped-down Debian on i3wm. It's pretty amazing that I've managed to run such vastly different systems over the course a decade with only incremental changes and have it fit me like a glove the entire time.

<comment><USER23> During my Linux zealot years (started with Slackware 2.0 back in the day), I used to experiment and play with any window manager I could put my hands on.

Nowadays I just use the default configuration of whatever OS I am on, just with some minimal configuration changes like icon size or mouse double click behavior.

<comment><USER22> I don't think the level of customization has changed too much for me, but the objective of my customization has. In college having it be cool looking mattered a lot more to me, and now having it be fast and have an efficient and highly customized interface is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sticky/Elastic windows was definitely my favorite compiz option. It was just so ridiculous and entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, this takes me back to 2004 or 2005.

I put together a compiz/beryl demo using the flame effects and cube switch in 2005 or 2006. It help converted a few friends over to run Linux on their home PCs (OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Gaim (Pidgin) and Citrix).

The flame effects were really the wow factor that sold it. I think only one person stuck around past year 3 but it really help prove to me that non-tech folk could be somewhat productive on the Linux desktop.

It also legitimized a Linux loner laptop in the laptop pool of the company where I was working at the time. Not too shabby for 2006.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is also bumptop from roughly the same time period [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ)

<comment><USER27> Nooface has a collection of weird desktops. It's no longer maintained, so here's the Wayback machine link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20070226171735/http://nooface.ne...](https://web.archive.org/web/20070226171735/http://nooface.net/3dui.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> One page 30Mb of GIF files.

I know that people likes autoplayed animation but please try to use <video/> tags. It can saves a lot of bandwidth and improve greatly the experience (especially on mobile).

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm not sure why so many people here are arguing with the "little known" part. Like many of you I owe a lot to compiz due to trying to get wobbly windows working 10+ years ago. But my mother has never heard of it, despite the fact that she'd have a vague idea of what "Linux" is if I asked her. That's the point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I mostly titled the article due to younger engineers not being aware of how configurable Ubuntu can be (or them possibly being intimidated by Ubuntu). I didn't anticipate so many compiz greybeards would check it out, haha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anyone know if this could solve VirtualBox's drop of support for 3D acceleration _for Linux guests using Wayland_?

[https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/18116](https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/18116)

> This is a consequence of our 3D acceleration for Linux guests, which was > designed for a GLX only world and interacts badly with non-GLX applications. > Since more and more desktop applications are expected to use Wayland rather > than X11 I have simply disabled it for guests using Wayland, thereby fixing > this issue.

I really want to update my old 14.04 LTS VM... however I need to find a way to keep 3D acceleration on (for front end dev, css animations and the like, plus overall much more responsive).

Though, anyone know what "disabled it for guests using Wayland" actually means? Will 3D acceleration work if I switch to compiz, or do they turn it off just based on the fact that it's a "Ubuntu" VM?

</comment><comment><USER31> I remember using Sabayon Linux way in the early days it came with or probably I tweaked it with Compiz and Beryl. The ATI drivers were something. So bleeding edge distro that it was crashing randomly. I had a 6 sides cube with each side representing a different desktop screen and wall paper. Fun times.

</comment><comment><USER32> Or use KDE and have all of this out of the box :)

<comment><USER33> Or use XFCE, get none of it, stop playing with your DE, and get back to work :)

<comment><USER10> XFCE is a true productivity DE. Gives you a few simple basic apps, and does a damn good job of managing windows. I so wish I could use it at work..

<comment><USER34> I don't get why KDE isn't considered a productive DE.

The dolphin file manager has an integrated terminal that automatically changes folder to match the one you've browsed to.

There's a ton of these small useful things that a light desktop like XFCE or LXDE wouldn't implement but are still useful.

<comment><USER35> KDE has too many options. That's the problem, there's too much desire to tweak just one more thing. By then you've blown a week of time. I've personally also had bad luck running KDE. I love the look however it's always run dog slow for me on any computer I've used it on when compared to other DEs. To each their own though, that's the beauty of GNU/linux.

<comment><USER36> >KDE has too many options. This a user problem, maybe some personality or mental issue that makes you waste time or get scared when you see options.

How you should approach this is to use KDE, then if you wonder ,"hi would be nice if I could put the notifications on left side since my right eye is bad -> then you go and find the option and move the notifications ,

Installing KDE and trolling to all options is a insane thing to do, do you also install Firefox and go into about:config and set all this options as you prefer ? Or you use Ff then ask , hey would be cool if Ff won't do this annoying thing , then you search the option and hope to find it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wobbly windows just recently made a revival with the original author separating it from compiz: [https://github.com/endlessm/libanimation](https://github.com/endlessm/libanimation)

far more info here: [https://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/libanimation- for-...](https://smspillaz.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/libanimation-for- everyone/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Having flashbacks to the cube with gears in that everyone used to love.

I hate animations now, they make the desktop feel less responsive in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER39> I used Compiz with 17.04 and it was nice, but I decided to give a shot at the native Gnome with 18.04 when I reinstalled from scratch. To be honest, it's not perfect but it does the job. So I will stick with it. And I don't want to install something that is not maintained anymore.

</comment><comment><USER40> Little?10 years ago was the main way to get nice desktop effects

</comment><comment><USER41> Lot of nostalgia. For those who want to try on mac you can have something similar with Deskovery

</comment><comment><USER42> Wobbly windows. Tiling. Emerald window decorations. Rotate cube. Endless possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER43> So it seems that a good chunk of us got interested in computers and programming due to wobbly windows. I guess that's Compiz' main legacy, heh.

</comment><comment><USER44> Just reading the string "Compiz" gave me absolute nostalgia-whiplash.</comment>


Why Let's Encrypt is a bad idea - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/why-lets-encrypt-is-a-really-really-really-bad-idea-d69308887801 <comment><USER2> Was really interested in reading this perspective, to be disappointed by a Medium paywall. A shame, as it seems like a contrarian point of view.

<comment><USER3> They're worried that LE is a big target for hackers since getting their keys would compromise such a huge number of websites. Also they wonder if LE is sufficiently motivated to protect those keys, since they are a non-profit and don't offer breach insurance, and don't stand to lose a lot of money. It wraps up by encouraging site owners to review breach insurance options offered by their CA or cyber insurance from some third party.

<comment><USER2> Cheers, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Determine Your Performance Impact by Meltdown and Spectre - <AUTHOR> https://stormforger.com/blog/2018/01/05/determine-performance-impact-by-meltdown-and-spectre/ <comment><USER2> Have you already received any feedback from clients about the performance impacts they observed due to the Spectre & Meltdown-related fixes? Would really be nice to see some figures for different kinds of applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, yes but no. :) Actually we're looking forward to have enough data and write about some conclusions. As you probably know the problem is to determine the concrete workload and the performance impact for these.

<comment><USER2> Sure. Looking forward to see some follow-up post from you guys!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the second paragraph we read this: The problem effects all systems, regardless of visualization or not.

Could it be that the author wanted to write virtualization?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed in a bit.</comment></comment>