IKEA Frekvens LED box hack - <AUTHOR> http://spritesmods.com/?art=frekvens <comment><USER2> Shout out to the amaaaaazing folks at Teenage Engineering who built this with Ikea, you can also 3D print accessories for the Ferkvens: [https://teenage.engineering/designs/frekvens- hacks](https://teenage.engineering/designs/frekvens-hacks)

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Had my eyes on this for a long time until release, then just around those days had too much to do and missed out on it completely. All sold out. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the same guy that installed Linux on his hard drive's controller. A very interesting read:

[https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack](https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack)

<comment><USER5> Maybe I'm mistaken, but it doesn't look to me that the Linux is running there. (Of course, it doesn't mean his effort is any less)

<comment><USER6> I think you are: read [https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=7](https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=7)

<comment><USER5> Sorry, you are right, I missed that part! Really fascinating hack!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This isn't the only project to hack the Frekvens. Here's code + instructions (not mine) for hacking the box with an Arduino + AdaFruit GFX library: [https://github.com/frumperino/FrekvensPanel](https://github.com/frumperino/FrekvensPanel)

It seems fairly approachable if you don't mind the disassembly / reassembly required.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a very nice hack, and I enjoyed the writeup (minus the fact that the site isn't easily readable on mobile).

As someone who does a lot of this stuff too, I've kind of realized that it's hard to get an audience unless you're making YouTube videos. I've heard of many "YouTube makers" but very rarely has someone sent me an article like this one.

Does anyone have first-hand experience with this? I don't much like making videos, but if that's what gets more people to see my stuff, maybe it's worth it. Am I correct or do I just see the videos from creators because they managed to already get popular, and they just happen to be on YouTube?

<comment><USER9> Videos are easier and more entertaining to consume than text for most people. The audience of a text post like this is mostly hacker types; if turned into a video that's as much about the entertainment value as the nitty gritty, your audience now becomes 99% bored tech enthusiasts and 1% hackers, and you could plausibly go from a few thousand reads to your article to a few hundreds of thousands views for your video as on top of that, the YouTube platform itself acts as a reach multiplier.

So yes, if your goal is to make money/get an audience rather than purely documenting (nothing wrong with that), you're much better off making a 10 minute YouTube video than writing a 5 page article.

<comment><USER10> This. Your target audience is the determining factor. Though, you can do both: Put the gritty technical stuff in an article while the live demo and a talk goes into a video.

Personally I don't care for video and most videos people send me go unwatched. It's just not productive and I can scroll and skim text for interesting bits faster than skimming a video.

Most "technical" videos are simple tear downs for entertainment or a lengthy demo with a long winded how-to or technical overview. ZZZZzzzzzzz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of when I went crazy with some Christmas lights: [https://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/turning-ge-color- effects-g-35-c...](https://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/turning-ge-color- effects-g-35-christmas.html)

<comment><USER12> I own two strings of those lights because of you and that article. Thanks for the inspiration and entertainment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For the impatient, the final product is here: [https://youtu.be/UCPUPO21Cwk?t=17](https://youtu.be/UCPUPO21Cwk?t=17) linked from the fifth page of the post: [http://spritesmods.com/?art=frekvens&page=5](http://spritesmods.com/?art=frekvens&page=5)

It's an eye that follows movement around, pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER14> Funny how abit of clever software can take full advantage of the hardware. The authors eye is way more impressing than the OEM's.

<comment><USER15> Well, he didn't take full advantage of the hardware - he changed significant part of it (raising total final price by 1/3). Nevertheless I agree - it is very impressing ! :)

<comment><USER16> > he changed significant part of it (raising total final price by 1/3)

Have to say the coolest thing about the recent collaboration projects from Ikea is you get work from well regarded product designers at prices everyone can afford.

<comment><USER17> That is Ikea's usual modus operandi. Their merchandise is well designed and engineered for the most part. The cheap furniture is good - but only for the price. Some of the less cheap stuff is pretty good quality, like kitchens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone explain how PWM (pulse width modulation) uses more computational power than binary code modulation (or bit angle modulation)?

<comment><USER18> I can. Say you want to display one 'frame', that is, one run where you display all the pixels where the pixels on average have the intensity you want them to have. Because you can only turn the pixels off and on, you need to send a certain amount of 'subframes'.

PWM works as such: you send 256 subframes at the same time interval, and if you want a pixel to be 50% dimmed, you turn it on in half of the subframes and off in the other half. When you want it at 1/255 brightness, you turn it on in only one of the 255 subframes.

BCM/BAM works as such: you send only 8 subframes, but each subframe has a specified time when they are visible: each following subframe stays on for twice as long as the previous one. For example, subframe 0 is visible for 1 ms, subframe 1 is visible for 2 ms, subframe 2 is visible for 4 ms, subframe 3 is visible for 8 ms, etc. Now, by turning on the pixels in some subframes, you can exactly specify how long they are on in the total frame: say you want to have your pixel at a dimness of 200, you'd turn it on in subframe 3, 6 and 7.

As to CPU use: because you only need to calculate and send 8 subframes instead of 256, everything takes up less CPU. Especially during the longer subframes, the CPU can context switch out and go do something more useful while waiting.

<comment><USER19> That didn't explain the energy difference.

The on-time power is identical in both cases.

PWM has more capacitive-switching energy cost (in wires and it gate cap), and crowbar current. But I'm curious how much of the total energy is due to these transients, because LEDs burn a ton of power. Is crowbar/capswitching 50% 90% 1%?

Now the hardware to compute the binary signal is the same as the PWM because you still need to subdivide the clock and count to know how many phases have passed to pulse at 1, 2, 4, 8ms, etc. This is typically done with dedicated hardware (the Atmega has a fairly unsophistcated PWM compared to TI, ADI or STM). Ideally you want the PWM to use the IO fabric to DMA the data, and not have the CPU twiddle GPIOs, that's a sledgehammer approach.

Also, the PWM rate is not fixed, it does not have to be 256 pulses. Depending on the hardware it can go from Hz to MHz (it impacts responsiveness). But that is a function of the MCU, and Atmega has fairly coarse adjustment for the PWM modes.

Ironically, the point of PWM is to actually _save_ power.

<comment><USER20> What do you mean by "crowbar current"?

Running the bus for a large array definitely takes a lot of power, but I agree it wouldn't be huge compared to the LEDs themselves.

> Now the hardware to compute the binary signal is the same as the PWM because > you still need to subdivide the clock and count to know how many phases have > passed to pulse at 1, 2, 4, 8ms, etc. This is typically done with dedicated > hardware (the Atmega has a fairly unsophistcated PWM compared to TI, ADI or > STM). Ideally you want the PWM to use the IO fabric to DMA the data, and not > have the CPU twiddle GPIOs, that's a sledgehammer approach.

BCM isn't used when hardware PWM is an option. It's used for displays driven by long long chains of shift registers where you have to reload a whole frame to change an LED's state. Your DMA is sending data to a hardware SPI transmitter, not a PWM block in this case. There are ICs designed for _very_ large, high-end LED arrays that have hardware PWM for each LED, but they're less common and much more expensive.

You also don't really need to 'compute' BCM. You generate a bit-sync pulse or interrupt or whatever that runs once for each bit. At that point you just grab the pixel from the frame buffer, mask the correct bit, and output it to the array. The advantage over PWM is this bit-sync only runs 8 times (or whatever the bit depth) instead of 256. The shortest time between syncs is still the same length of the equivalent PWM signal, but the length between them grows but double each time (up until the start of the next period).

> Also, the PWM rate is not fixed, it does not have to be 256 pulses. > Depending on the hardware it can go from Hz to MHz (it impacts > responsiveness). But that is a function of the MCU, and Atmega has fairly > coarse adjustment for the PWM modes.

256 is the number of grayscale colours (2^bit depth), not the pulse rate. Just like PWM, BCM can run at any rate or any bit depth.

You're really hung up on microcontroller PWMs. They're certainly helpful, and you certainly can use them to drive LEDs, but they top out at anywhere between 2 and 24 channels, so they aren't cost-effective for large, dense arrays. These LED drivers are really just shift registers, so they're dead simple and very, very cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Feels like IKEA could capitalize on an opportunity here to provide a beginner friendly devkit to control the patterns. I love writing software but am less delighted by physical messing around :)

<comment><USER22> I think this is a too small niche for IKEA, but they should help selected hackers or small companies to fill these niches. Maybe this is already happening and we do not notice.

<comment><USER23> This is happening at least with more traditional Ikea items, for example cabinets: [https://www.semihandmade.com/pages/about- us](https://www.semihandmade.com/pages/about-us)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Ikea is an interesting store. Even if you go in having in mind you're only > going to buy that one thing that you actually need and this time you're not > going to be distracted by other crap, you tend to come out with about three > times the amount of things you wanted to buy.

Yeah, there's a lot to say about Ikea's psychological warfare. They are really good (not to mean their products isn't, you get my drift).

<comment><USER25> I've always been amazed by how IKEA are thought of as this highly ethical, sustainable company. Despite making billions revenue in Australia every year, they pay almost zero $ in tax.

<comment><USER25> Why downvote? It's a fact.

<comment><USER24> We obviously both hit a nerve :D.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you like Blinky toys, check out the magicShifter3000 which is a persistence-of-vision-based pocket computer with its own built-in web editor and other crazy features (lightshow, arpeggiator, etc.):

[http://magicshifter.net/](http://magicshifter.net/)

Fully open source, available here:

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

<comment><USER27> Looks like the firmware is AGPL but the electronic schematics are under a non- commercial license [1].

[1] [http://magicshifter.net/#features](http://magicshifter.net/#features)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For a much more interesting (but similar) bit of kit, see the Pixoo ([http://www.divoom.com/product/pixoo.html](http://www.divoom.com/product/pixoo.html))

<comment><USER29> I am very into this. Did anyone ever come up with an API style interface to control what gets pushed to one of these?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would love to see this installed above a doorbell.

Blank until someone approaches, then the "Eye" appears with no sound, and follows the persons movement at the door.

Super creepy.

</comment><comment><USER31> This will probably be the only Teenage Engineering device I can afford.

I just need to find a store that carries them.

<comment><USER32> > _I just need to find a store that carries them._

What, apart from IKEA?

<comment><USER33> Isn't IKEA currently closed in most countries?

<comment><USER32> IKEA's not closed here. And they still have delivery services and now they have an option to pick up your order from the loading dock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm really annoyed this range isn't getting a more global release. We won't be seeing these in Australia.

</comment><comment><USER35> I think the gamma on that code is off. Pixel values != linear luminance

</comment><comment><USER36> looks like ikea carries over their minimalism to their PCB design, too.

<comment><USER37> the firm they collaborated with on this line is no stranger to PCB as art and function: [https://teenage.engineering/products/po](https://teenage.engineering/products/po)

<comment><USER38> Oh these guys have a really cool synth

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Unreadable design on the website, but a cool project.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, sorry, last time the CSS got updated was 2010... what specifically makes it 'unreadable' for you?

<comment><USER40> The fact that one article is split to N pages, for one thing. I gave up on page 2.

<comment><USER41> There are only five pages (it shows you in the right pane). I had no problem with clicking "Next" but even if you dislike that I suggest you persist - it's a nice project, a well written article and worth reading.

<comment><USER18> It's a good point, though, and one I heard earlier. Spritesmods used multi- page articles from the beginning (which is nigh 14 years ago now), initially because, I dunno, more of the web was like that? Later, when I needed the money, it was because I liked header ads more than long articles with interstitial ads. Now I don't quite need the money anymore, maybe I should throw out ads and either default to everything-on-one-page or at least give that as an option.

<comment><USER42> Yes please. The less ad tech sprawled all over the internet, the better, and it sets a great example!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Having the ad so close to the "Previous" and "Next" buttons is a violation of AdSense terms of service because it strongly encourages accidental clicks, especially on mobile. But I suppose that's the whole reason they broke their blog post up into multiple pages in the first place.

<comment><USER18> My excuse is that the design is close to a decade old by now, and that back in the days, there were enough pixels between the two as the resolution was much lower. I don't need ads anymore, so I disabled them site-wide; that's the best way to fix the issue I figure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So this IKEA thing is a 16x16 LED box. (btw: Ikea is evil)

Related: LEDmePlay 32x32 LED box with some cool games:

[http://www.mithotronic.de/ledmeplay.php](http://www.mithotronic.de/ledmeplay.php)

The actual 32x32 RGB panel (6mm pitch) is around $19 from AliExpress. There is even a handheld version with 4mm dot pitch.

<comment><USER45> Why is Ikea evil?

<comment><USER44> I had some issues with them. They screwed up and their customer support didn't even answer two written letters.

<comment><USER46> And that means they are evil? Wow, people nowadays.

<comment><USER47> Depends on the screw up, if it caused actual bodily harm and they didn't respond I would be inclined to call them evil too.

I will conceded to playing devil's advocate here though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: War rooms? - <AUTHOR> What's your experience with war rooms? Does your team have one? Do you find them useful? Best practices? etc <comment><USER2> We use warrooms when launching games.

Good idea, have a wall of dashbooards, ensure you have at least one person of every competency in the room (in our case; AI programmer, Network Programmer, DBA etc;) And also have 1-2 communication folk, someone technical who's job it is to communicate with the management layer, and the management layer to shuffle information from Frontline/Support back and forth.

This fragmented communication stream from frontline needs to be collated and sorted, do not waste engineer time with it, you will spend too much critical time there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Debating the same thing at the moment in a company I'm working with.

Thinking about it as a way of resolving coordination problems and politics.

I.e everyone in the same room. No input from outside of the room except by designated communicators . No email , slack, Skype, etc. One board, goals for the week and the day and just work and conflict resolution all day long. No small talk.

Coffee, tea , doughnuts, noise cancelling head phones , sandwiches .

<comment><USER4> sounds healthy.</comment></comment>


Show HN: TalkTalkTalk – An easy-to-install small chat room, with chat history - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/josephernest/talktalktalk <comment><USER2> This is a really good example of how you can obtain 80% of the value of huge, complex apps with 1% of the code. It feels like the open source/self- hosted/simple app market it is probably under-served. Chat is one example, but another is a small, simple 'social network' for a team, group of friends, or family.

<comment><USER3> ha yea but also an example that the last 20% is 80% of the work

the chat right now needs features to prevent abuse

<comment><AUTHOR> totally true: abuse/flood control will be the next additions. ideas welcome about how do to it.

<comment><USER4> What about ROBOT9000?

[https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd- signal-a...](https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal- attacking-noise-in-chat/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should add some antispam, at least.

I was able to keep your server down by using only this:

> setInterval( function () { for(i=0;i<=9999; i++) { ws.send(JSON.stringify({ > type: 'message', username: $('#username').text(), message: 'seems like the > ws server is fucked. stop spamming' })); } }, 1000);

<comment><AUTHOR> This _small_ chat is intented for a small team, not for global internet usage like I do here :) Usually in a small team there is no spammer, and if there is one, he's banned quickly from the team :)

But yes, I'm open to contribution about antispam / flood control. Constructive additions appreciated :)

<comment><USER6> I like a log the design.

[https://github.com/josephernest/talktalktalk/blob/master/tal...](https://github.com/josephernest/talktalktalk/blob/master/talktalktalk.html#L268)

I think you could escape the text from #writing before sending it.

[http://stackoverflow.com/a/4835406](http://stackoverflow.com/a/4835406)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the _real_ cleaning / sanitizing part has to be done on the server... I'll work on this in the next weeks, after some other more important projects... This is just a proof-of-concept fun project anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> everyone is discussing there [http://184.108.40.206:7311/](http://18.104.22.168:7311/) (live demo), so nobody is discussing here :/

<comment><USER7> Joseph was very angry because everybody were using the name "joseph" yesterday.

Don't be angry!

<comment><AUTHOR> i wasn't angry actually, maybe the angry "joseph" was another one ;) this troll session helped me to think about flood control, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thank you. Look forward to playing with / using this.

Reminds me of using Jabber years ago with a couple of friends. Not for the protocol, but for the clean interface and essentially having "our own place".

Something I've a pretty strong hankering for, these days.

</comment><comment><USER9> add abuse control, log archive, image inserting then it will be golden

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it open for bots?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. You can talk in this chat with JS : ws.send(...).</comment></comment>


Don't Just Roll The Dice 2.0 - A usefully short guide to software pricing - <AUTHOR> https://efendibooks.com/minibooks/dont-just-roll-the-dice

<comment><USER2> Thank you a lot -- I was looking for something exactly like that :-)</comment>


The Other Location Shoe Drops: Facebook Deals. Will It Discount Rivals? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/03/facebook-deals/ <comment><USER2> I'm still leery of location checkins. It'd have to be a pretty good deal to be worth it.</comment>


Reconciling Mozilla's Mission and the W3C EME - <AUTHOR> http://andreasgal.com/2014/05/14/eme/ <comment><USER2> This is terrible news from end to end.

To solve it, we need to tackle the root problem and not blame the browsers: those who want to infect our open web with DRM.

Cancel your Netflix subscription. Let them know why. Same with Hulu. Same with amazon video. same with anyone who tells you to that your open web is less important than their unwillingness to embrace the new, digital frontier.

Don't give money to the asshats who push this crap. Simple as that.

This is only the beginning if you let them in. What will you accept next? Drm infected Images? HTML infected source which can only be decoded on windows? This is not the end. The line must be drawn and it must be drawn now.

<comment><USER3> Canceling your streaming service subscriptions won't be sufficient, even if everyone did it.

You have to stop consuming Hollywood content. Stop going to movies. Stop watching TV shows. Stop listening to recorded music.

Then you might actually make a difference.

The streaming services are just stuck in the middle here -- Hollywood won't sell them, or anyone, content without DRM.

DRM actually makes sense for a streaming service, where you only have a temporary license to the content anyway. You're buying the right to watch or listen one time -- how is that supposed to be enforced?

<comment><USER4> As discussed below, DRM never makes sense since it's not effective anyway.

<comment><USER3> You live in a very sheltered bubble if you think DRM is not effective.

For most people, DRM is enough to stop them. It's only a select few people with a deep understanding of technology who can defeat even the most basic DRM.

<comment><USER4> _> For most people, DRM is enough to stop them. It's only a select few people with a deep understanding of technology who can defeat even the most basic DRM._

I don't think you get the point. Most pirates never try to beat any DRM. They pirate what other capable few provide to them DRM free. Yes, some initially break that DRM. But it takes one knowledgeable pirate to do it in order for the rest to get it DRM free ever since. So, going back to the point above - DRM is not effective for anything except degrading the product for legitimate users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is naive to expect that decrypted media stream will ever be leaving CDM module as so optimistically shown on that illustration.

Microsoft dropped and neglected a bunch of great features when shipping Vista, but it went out of its way to drag Protected Media Path into it. PMP is fronting a major industry effort to create trusted software _and hardware_ framework that on one end accepts encrypted stream and on other draws video pixels on the screen, all the while showing a middle finger instead of raw data to the user on whose system this whole circus unfolds.

It will be _laughable_ to think that CDM won't be PMP-based. Getting access to the raw data with CDM in picture is a pipe dream. Mozilla, sandbox, open source - no matter. CDM _exists_ to prevent raw data leaks.

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

<comment><USER6> _It will be laughable to think that CDM won 't be PMP-based._

Even on Linux and OS X?

<comment><USER7> Edit: It's said to be a downloadable extra at user option.

The Moz page description of the sandbox says the CDM won't have any system access, so it could not distinguish whether PMP is there or not, except maybe by flags in the input from the browser. So either the Mozilla sandbox-CDM can't work as described or PMP won't be required.

Someone correct me if I've missed something there.

<comment><USER8> So were about to see Iceweasel fork a bit more from base firefox and add a button to render the "encrypted" content to file?

10/10 media industry, you guys are just the absolute best about sticking your fingers in your ears and singing lalala while substituting reality with your own where electrical charge isn't replicable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _and in the near future this should allow us to retire plugins altogether._

I don't see this as a universally "Good Thing".

 _The Web has evolved to a comprehensive and performant technology platform and no longer depends on native code extensions through plugins._

You mean the Web has evolved into a Doctor Frankenstein's monster like hodge- podge of kluged together hacks, layered on top of layers of other hacks, layered on top of still more hacks, in order to make a Web Browser a poor man's operating system.

So if we can extend our operating systems by installing programs, why shouldn't we be able to extend our poor man's operating system by installing plugins?

I'm assuming this is referring to killing of NPAPI and not other "extensions" mechanisms, but it seems (from what I've heard here and there) that people are mostly proposing to replace NPAPI with "nothing" or with less powerful APIs that would limit plugins significantly.

<comment><USER10> Replacing unsandboxed plugin APIs like NPAPI that can directly access the OS with sandboxed plugin systems like NaCl and emscripten that support sandboxed native code seems like a major improvement. The browser is quite enough attack surface area; let's not expand it further by having plugins.

That said, while the article's described sandboxing approach to EME works better than the alternatives (assuming content providers will support it), that's a lot like saying "at least the arrow through your eye wasn't on fire". Gee, thanks.

<comment><USER11> > Replacing unsandboxed plugin APIs like NPAPI that can directly access the OS > with sandboxed plugin systems like NaCl and emscripten that support > sandboxed native code seems like a major improvement.

Until you want to write a plugin with a legitimate reason to directly access the OS.

<comment><USER10> Legitimate reasons to directly access the OS are typically "there isn't a browser API for this yet". We have multiple Open Source browsers now; submit a patch to one or more of them to add a new API, and ideally start working to standardize it. The result will be far better and more secure than a one-off custom plugin to pass through specific OS functionality.

<comment><USER11> If Firefox had an API that allowed you to do anything the OS allows you to do then there would be no sandbox. If it doesn't then there are things you can't do with the browser API that you could do with direct access to the OS.

<comment><USER12> But the goal is not to do everything that native applications do, but instead provide features to users. Here's an example: lets imagine it's 2005. You have a native application that stores 1 GiB of data to the disk for caching of media assets. Now you would like to reimplement that as a browser app, but there's no browser API for disk access. What's the solution? You could provide a browser API for direct arbitrary disk access, but that's clearly not secure enough. Instead, File API was created with a lot of restrictions compared to the api that the operating system has.

If you think it this way, you can go extremely far in replacing native applications. I guess the core problem is that OS APIs were not designed to execute unsafe code, but browser APIs are.

Ultimately, there's no application-level feature that couldn't be implemented with a well-designed browser API.

In addition, I like it that browsers are creating new APIs relatively slowly. The reason is simple: security is difficult, and there's time to actually think about security issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nothing prevents mozilla if they would want to add a warning box similar to self-signed certificates every time a website tries to access DRM code outside the users control.

It would serve the goal of objecting to the EME, while users can continue to access all content they want. It would also put the responsibility to the website if the black box called DRM causes problems, locks up, or cause havoc on the user. Third, it allows users who do not want DRM to hijack their machine to explicit express their approval before such code is executed.

<comment><USER14> This is exactly the situation today with Flash. Click-to-play is akin to a warning. Users are somewhat aware Flash causes problems, locks up etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> >We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.

Then so be it. If Mozilla's mission is to improve and defend the "open" web, then EME should never have been considered for implementation. They shouldn't sacrifice their goals for the sake of market share.

<comment><USER16> Think about winning the battle vs. winning the war.

Mozilla could draw a line here, and no further, and not implement EME. But the consequence might be that FF market share drop significantly, as "Mah netflicks don't werk."

Suddenly Mozilla lose a large amount of revenue, development is scaled back, and the relevance of FF is reduced. Eventually FF is marginalised and Mozilla no longer involved in discussions about the future of the web. I think everyone would be disappointed if that happened.

The issue here is that the W3C is trying to push a round peg into a square hole. Laws passed by governments are in opposition to reality, and the only way to solve the problem at hand is security by obscurity and 'trusted' devices.

While it's noble of Mozilla to resist change of this type, it's fighting an uphill battle against legal precedents and legislation that is trickling down into technology. I don't think it's a battle that winnable until changes are made to IP frameworks the world over.

<comment><USER17> _But the consequence might be that FF market share drop significantly, as "Mah netflicks don't werk."_

Then maybe those users deserve the loss of their freedoms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "...Firefox users are at risk of not being able to access DRM restricted content (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu), which can make up more than 30% of the downstream traffic in North America."

While this statement is factually accurate, using the file-size of a type of content as a measure of relevance should be of little relevance to the discussion.

</comment><comment><USER4> Netflix is considered the main driver behind this DRM madness. In the context of Netflix, an often voiced reason for DRM is the fact that it rents movies, rather than sells them. Besides DRM being completely ineffective to prevent piracy, the concept of rentals itself doesn't make any sense for digital goods.

The core logic behind a rental (for physical goods) is reusability. Physical goods have a fixed cost of production per copy, so the price of selling it should cover that cost. Renting is expected to be cheaper than buying, because the object is returned to the renter which allows reusing it for new clients without expenses on another physical copy. I.e. most of the price in the rental case goes for the service of using it, and not for covering the cost of production.

With digital goods this whole premise doesn't apply. There is practically zero cost of producing another copy, so reusability is implicitly achieved with practically no expense by copying bits. And it also means there is no need to return the merchandise so it could be reused by others, since the merchant easily duplicates the merchandise practically for free. Therefore why would renting cost any different than buying? The whole concept of renting is illogical for digital goods. Therefore user can buy the digital merchandise for a (lower) price as paralleled by physical renting, while still retaining the ownership.

Netflix proponents claim, that they are charged per month to access anything, so in such context renting makes sense. But it still doesn't. They are charged for the _service_ to stream the data. I.e. for convenience. It's cheap not because they need to return the merchandise so others could reuse it (as above). It's just cheap as is. There is completely no need to prevent users from retaining a copy once they watched it (i.e. which means buying). In order to it put in practical perspective, Netflix can be achieved without any DRM by selling each copy for some small price or / and charging a monthly fee for a convenience of streaming that data from the cloud while users could also keep those downloaded DRM-free copies all they want. I'd totally subscribe to such service. But I'd never subscribe to Netflix the way it is now because of DRM.

<comment><USER19> Claiming that rentals don't make sense in the digital age is focusing far too heavily on the technical fact of how digital data works, and completely ignoring the legality of things, including intellectual property.

If I make a movie and sell you a DVD, the terms of the sale prohibit you from, say, showing this movie in a theater to a bunch of strangers and charging them money. Yes, you own the physical DVD, but you don't own the _intellectual property_ of the movie itself. This holds true for physical copies, and it holds true for digital distribution as well. You are purchasing the right to personal use of the movie (i.e. viewing), and that's it.

If you want to e.g. show it in a theater (whether or not you're charging admission), you have to purchase that right separately. And that costs a lot more.

In the case of rentals, the company that is doing the rentals pays for the privilege of renting out the movie, and the cost they pay is predicated on concurrent access to the movie being limited.

When it comes to digital rentals, limiting concurrent access to the digital movie file doesn't make sense. Users who rent things digitally expect there to be no wait. But in turn, they're only given access for a _limited time_. For iTunes, that's 30 days since you paid for the rental, and then only 24 hours since you started actually watching it. You can't rent a movie on iTunes and watch it every day for a month, because you don't have that legal right. You must pay for that privilege, which is to say, you must buy the digital movie.

For Netflix, the limited access to the movie is gated by you having an active Netflix subscription. The moment you stop paying for Netflix, you no longer have access to the movie. This again makes perfect sense, since you're paying Netflix for the right to access all of their streaming movies for the duration of your active membership. You are not paying for completely unrestricted access.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of digital content, the only way to actually enforce these legal restrictions is by use of DRM. It sucks, but it's a fact of life. This is true for rentals, and it's generally true for purchases as well.

<comment><USER4> _> yes, you own the physical DVD, but you don't own the intellectual property of the movie itself. This holds true for physical copies, and it holds true for digital distribution as well._

This is really irrelevant. When you buy a book you also own the book, and not the intellectual property it contains. Same thing with files - you can own the file, but not the intellectual property it represents. So legally nothing is wrong with buying digital goods (files), while the intellectual property they hold is only licensed to you (and not sold). I don't see how it correlates with any necessity for DRM.

 _> But in turn, they're only given access for a limited time_

I don't see a need for it. Limited time of rental is justified for physical goods. For digital it's not (I explained above why).

 _> his again makes perfect sense, since you're paying Netflix for the right to access all of their streaming movies for the duration of your active membership. You are not paying for completely unrestricted access._

I understand Netflix terms, what I question is their sensibility. You say it _makes perfect sense_. I don't see any sense in limiting access. Netflix can charge the same thing for unlimited access, plus allowing making backups and still make the profit (it can add a charge per file if they worry that users would just download the whole catalog at once).

 _> Unfortunately, due to the nature of digital content, the only way to actually enforce these legal restrictions is by use of DRM._

No, DRM can't enforce it (since this stuff is pirated practically instantaneously). So why is it used?

<comment><USER20> _" No, DRM can't enforce it (since this stuff is pirated practically instantaneously). So why is it used?"_

Strongly suspect this is due to contractual obligations with the studios.

The agreements will almost certainly stipulate that content must be sufficiently protected. Hence Netflix plays ball, if it wants access.

<comment><USER4> My question "why" was not pointed at Netflix. It was pointed at publishers (studios, etc.) which demand that DRM. They have no valid answer for that question.

While Netfilx aren't an ideological champion for DRM, they are a huge proliferator of it. Compare it to distributors which sell only DRM-free content and actually attempt to influence publishers to sell through them (like GOG for games). Those are actually doing something good! Netflix just help to spread the sickness claiming that "they have no choice". But that's a poor excuse.

<comment><USER6> It's a form of price discrimination. If you want to watch a movie once ("rental") it costs $5 but it you want to watch it unlimited times it costs $20. As a customer, I appreciate this because it allows me to pay less when I want less.

<comment><USER4> Why discriminate? Let's say users watch N movies per month on average. They can set average purchase price per movie at $20 / N, not at $5. That's it. They can combine the two to make it more even. Charge X per month for the convenience of streaming and Y per movie for the purchase (and aim to arrive at the same $20 / month roughly). All that doesn't require any DRM.

<comment><USER21> Because money. If 20 users are willing to pay $20, and 80 are willing to pay $5, Hollywood can make $20 _20+$5_ 80=$800 instead of $5*100=$500.

<comment><USER4> It's not $20 per film. Not sure what you are calculating.

<comment><USER21> It's an example. The exact price can be used in the same formula. Read [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination)

<comment><USER4> I find such price discrimination to be a despicable practice, unless we are talking about differentiating prices because of different average level of income in those markets. And even so, regional discrimination becomes even less relevant in the digital space. The fact that such practice leads to resorting to unethical methods in the digital world (DRM) implicitly proves the point that it's crooked.

Related subject discussed on GOG: [http://gog.com/news/getting_back_to_our_roots](http://gog.com/news/getting_back_to_our_roots)

<comment><USER21> I agree, but they have every financial reason to keep doing it. How would you convince them to sell one product for one price to everyone for less total money?

<comment><USER4> Usually such crookedness can be avoided if competition is high enough. I.e if competitors can be profitable without ripping customers off, they could do that in order to attract customers to their option. Seeing that they are losing customers, those who resorted to price discrimination start thinking about restraining their greed. Unfortunately when completion is weak, or all participants agree on using this crooked practice to keep the prices high (which should be illegal really), they get away with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22>
        <audio drm="true">
        <img drm="true">
        <article drm="true">

As soon as you let them put a foot on your house is absurd to believe that the rest will not follow.

</comment><comment><USER12> >preventing users from saving the content

How can an open source software prevent users from saving the content? If the CDM decrypts to plaintext, it should be trivial to modify the open source sandbox to save the plaintext data. (Obviously the software can prevent saving the content by default).

<comment><USER23> According to Mozilla's official statement[0], it will not be open-source (it will be an open-source wrapper around the closed-source binary)

There is still the question of the analog hole[1], but that's a separate matter (unrelated to open source vs. proprietary binary blob).

[0] [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the- challen...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of- serving-users/)

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

<comment><USER11> Nobody really uses the analog hole. It's actually easier to do it digitally, and will remain so, because securing a device against arbitrarily many attackers with physical access and arbitrarily large amounts of time and resources is a practical impossibility. The analog hole is just the formal proof that DRM can never be effective, because if you can see it or hear it you can record it.

<comment><USER24> Actually Cinavia is an interesting example of trying to close the analog hole. You can point a camcorder at your screen and record a movie, but if you try and play that recording back on a fancy TV or BluRay player, it still won't work because the audio track has encoded instructions in it saying "expect an encrypted/DRMd media stream". If the player sees the content expects to be DRMd, it silences the audio after about 20 minutes.

<comment><USER25> That's quite interesting! Does it rely on steganography? Because as far as I know, it's quite difficult to keep the integrity of stego contents if the system is public knowledge (e.g. a low pass filter may destroy high frequency watermaking). The sheer amount of degrees of freedom in a minute of 30fps 4k video though makes it seem not so hard to accomplish a steep ( video quality x decoding probability ) tradeoff for attackers.

Of course, then there's the software integrity problem -- I can't imagine a feasible system that prevents bypassing the software verification completely. Or, for hardware checks, I can't see a regulation enforcing "All TVs _must_ have this enabled" (i.e. you just buy from an open brand).

This would be more interesting though for authenticated video streaming. Imagine every user is required to reveal a real identity to retrieve content. Then they can not only watermark the content but point to the exact user responsible, as long as the content has enough degrees of freedom to support it. Makes file sharing a lot harder if you can be held responsible after an indefinite period.

<comment><USER24> It watermarks into the audio track and is by all accounts incredibly sophisticated and robust. Pirates have been trying to destroy the watermarks for years and all they achieved is making the soundtrack unlistenable.

For bypassing the software verification, it can be made quite hard although it's kind of irrelevant today because it only became mandatory (via BluRay Consortium "regulations") in 2012. So there are still lots of players around that don't do it and this will be the case for the forseeable future. Verance is doing a big push to get it into TVs and other things but I'm not sure how successful they are being. The technology works without a doubt but of course when you add up licensing costs, etc, it's not always necessarily a win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> All the system is rot from the bottom up.. The Honcho's (tm) are putting their dirty hands and corrupting all over .. even the things we take for granted as community driven and serving for a greater good

Dont use Netflix, Dont support DRM, fight for DRM free software..

We took millions of years to make copy and cloning of any information free(as in freedom and in beer) and now some bastards want to turn this into a crime just because they want to profit?

Its just the beggining of something really bad that can corrupt all of the good things we take for granted now, as free education, knowledge sharing and the free flow of information

</comment><comment><USER27> I understand Mozilla's philosophical objections to the EME, but if the alternative is Flash/Silverlight (and it's pretty clear that is, in fact, the alternative), I don't think Mozilla's mission loses out by implementing the EME.

<comment><USER28> Flash works on the three major desktop/laptop OS', ChromeOS, all the consoles afaik, and Android. EME will probably result in balkanized DRM that will never work on a bunch of those things (or you'll have to worry about whether the content you want to watch supports your platform).

EME is a _step down_ from Flash for consumer choice. A big fat one.

<comment><USER29> Flash DRM has never worked on Linux, AFAIK.

<comment><USER30> See "Linux" in [https://www.adobe.com/products/adobe-access/tech- specs.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/adobe-access/tech-specs.html) .

The problem is that copyright holders can still stipulate policies that exclude Linux. For example, [http://voddler.com/en/](http://voddler.com/en/) greets Linux users with "Here you can rent and play movies. For even more movies and TV-series, visit us from your PC or Mac, where we have a even larger selection."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >we vary this unique identifier per site (each site is presented a different device identifier) to make it more difficult to track users across sites

What a load of horseshit. They know perfectly well that different identifiers can be tied to the same user with other shared identifiers like advertising tracking identifiers, and yet they pretend they're somehow solving the problem.

Worse, the focus on privacy, while fine, misses the point. Users WANT to be able to download and save content for later consumption. Enabling the prevention of that is not a user friendly act. Sure, content owners have to cope with content sharing and piracy. But maybe that's for the best. Really great content owners like O'Reilly Publishing are providing non-DRMed content today and doing just fine. Create more value than you capture.

Something is rotten at Mozilla. They should be fighting this tooth and nail, but they're going the way of the money. And giving Adobe more credibility in the process... ugh, talk about adding insult to injury. This will mark the demise of Mozilla as a respectable organization.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's very important that users be able to disable ALL of this functionality with a simple compiler flag. Not just disabling it in the process.

We've seen the failure of "sandboxing" over and over again, and especially with a closed-source, certain-to-be-compromised payload, it's guaranteed that at some point it will be breached.

<comment><USER33> did you read the blog post? you have to actively consent in installing that plugin to use it. without plugin the sandbox is code without attack surface.

<comment><USER32> It's unclear to me from the post that the sandbox code will be unbundled from Firefox. Furthermore, it should be possible to distribute a compiled version of Firefox that doesn't have the ability to install the module in the first place, with a minimum of effort.

If you don't enable it by default, but the first time a user visits any website with a video ad they get a clickthrough that downloads and installs it, a huge portion of the user base will end up with it installed. This is less than desirable if you care about security.

I'm sure security- or ideological-focused distros will do a version of this anyway, but it should be supported upstream to segment the code as much as possible so as few vulnerabilities leak into the "main" codebase as possible.

<comment><USER34> I don't understand your argument. If you are installing firefox for yourself, you don't need a version with the support compiled out; just don't install the plugin.

If you are installing firefox as sysadmin for someone else, you don't need a version with the support compiled out; don't give the users rights to install plugins.

What use case has less security just from the sandbox being enabled?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw an interesting comment from gerv @ Mozilla: "Current plan: CDM can scrape memory to check sandbox is a sandbox it trusts." [http://lwn.net/Articles/598640/](http://lwn.net/Articles/598640/)

</comment><comment><USER35> You know, I've long avoided the Pirate Bay for movies and other copyrighted media, and I pay monthly for month Netflix and Amazon Prime.

However, if Netflix is going to push shit like this and PMP in our faces, then I think I'm going to have to take a look at this Popcorn Time app. Particularly with PMP, it's getting to the point where it's hard for "media- compliant" Linux users to run our open source OS and legally access media at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'd be interested to see if any content providers actually make use of this; it seems to be missing certain technical requirements they claimed their partners required during the EME design phase. (In particular, a secure hardware video path and robust node-locking support. This design doesn't appear to actually be able to lock content playback to particular hardware at all if anyone makes even the most trivial attempt to bypass it.)

<comment><USER6> The history of SDMI vs. iTunes and AACS vs. Windows XP has taught me that DRM "requirements" are just the opening position in a negotiation. Apparently Mozilla doesn't have enough leverage to get rid of DRM completely but they have enough to water it down a bit.

<comment><USER36> Possibly, but they've already managed to get the W3C and several of the other big browser vendors to agree to meet those requirements, which gives them some pretty strong leverage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> So the open source wrapper can receive unencrypted audio/video frames. Does that mean it does the video decoding too or does it get the compressed stream back?

Either way it doesn't sound like a very strong protection of the content as you can access it with at most a single generation compression loss.

Is it me or are the content providers and the DRM providers realising the limits of DRM and loosening their requirements?

<comment><USER38> No, it just means they were ignorant enough about the technology to allow Mozilla to do it this way - _for now_. Also, Mozilla gets to say now that "look, we're implementing DRM, but _it 's not so bad_".

However, once the content owners see how useless this method is (they all are, but this in particular), they will demand heavily proprietary closed source down to the metal software to protect their content. And since Mozilla has "already" kind of agreed to do this, they'll have no choice but to implement that _much worse_ version of DRM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Wonder what Brendan Eich would have thought of this.

<comment><USER40> Wonder no more: [https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad- drm/](https://brendaneich.com/2013/10/the-bridge-of-khazad-drm/)

He said essentially the same thing; _" We are working to get Mozilla and all our users on the right side of this proposed API. We are not just going to say that users cannot have access to streaming Hollywood movies, as that is a good way to lose market share and not have any product with which to uphold our mission."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is a sad day for the web, but it was honestly one that was inevitable, and one that we all had a hand in making. If you want to know why we have DRM in the web, step 1 is taking a look in the mirror. Mozilla does not represent a majority market share of browser users, and so their voice in the W3C can be over-ruled by the voices of the other stakeholders, among them 3 enormous corporations with substantial media interests.

What follows is harsh, but I believe it to be true. Feel free to tell me that I am wrong, because I fully admit that I could be letting my emotions speak and I could be wrong.

Back in the day the web was ruled by a monopoly and it sucked. Mozilla released firefox but the web only broke free of microsoft's control because people like us did the work to break that control. I started using firefox, and I helped get most of my family members onto it. And many of my tech savvy friends did the same. Slowly but surely Mozilla's market share grew until it reached the point where Microsoft had to react and start to implement web standards, because if they didn't people weren't going to wait for them. They were going to switch to Firefox. And for a brief time we had the promise of a global network for the distribution of information not controlled by a single large corporation, but worked on by a committee which had a large part of its membership come from a public benefit corporation, whose only interest was empowering people to use that network to enhance their lives.

The web exploded, and fearful of being left behind large corporations got into the game with their own browsers. And rather than learn from what happened last time we let a large corporation get majority user share, we, and by "we" I mean you and I and all of the other people who should know better, went right for it.

Google released a cute cartoon describing the inception of chrome, beginning with hiring away people from Mozilla, talking about all of the great things their browser would provide. Microsoft started up development of IE again, and Apple released Safari. A lot of us looked at Firefox and said "Thanks for helping to save the web as we know it, but Chrome is _so_ much more minimal! Safari as a great _look and feel_! See ya later". Richard Stallman gets a lot of flack around here for his eccentricity when it comes to computing, but goddammit the man can see past his own nose and understands that taking a dump on the only body advocating for you and I in favor of switching to something on such trivial concerns as "look and feel" is a great way to end up right where we are today. Where Mozilla has been marginalized so much by the relentless rush to Chrome that Google can go ahead and implement a DRM scheme on its proprietary OS and then force that through the Web Standards body with the help of Apple and Microsoft. When Mozilla doesn't have enough market share to stop it, because we've all switched over the Chrome based on Octane benchmark scores, and switched over our parents and friends. Where I routinely run into "desktop" sites that are straight up broken in Firefox and fine in Chrome because people can't bother with anything other than webkit prefixes, and where the mobile web is an even bigger disaster of Chrome/Safari specific junk.

So a few years from now, as you continue to bask in the glow google's super minimal interface and safari's incredible smoothness, as Chrome sends your browsing data back to Google and DRM starts to leak into other areas of the web (want to save that image? Sorry! Want to copy this text? Protected! Don't even think about looking at the source) cast a thought to Mozilla, probably still working away to do the best it can for you. Then ask yourself if selling out the web was worth it for the handful of beads you got from all the interests that wanted to close it down and lock it up, and if all the smoothness and look and feel in the world was worth it for the promise of what the web might have been had we not let it slip through our hands.

</comment><comment><USER42> Why is this even an issue? Sure it's offensive. But it's offensive like someone flipping you off, not like them breaking your leg. I am aware of zero freed-media channels that begin with web content. Music, movies, TV shows; all of the content that isn't available through corporate means is available online from people who don't copy the bits off of their browsers.

This DRM is trying to plug a hole that isn't leaking.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why not make is a configuration option whether to enable the DRM in Firefox? People who only want to see non-DRM content (much like people running GNU/Linux with "libre" software only) can simply disable the DRM, and the users that are not actually tech savvy won't have to resort to, say, _shudders_ MSIE.

<comment><USER23> I'm wondering this as well - why can it not be implemented (from the browser perspective) as a plugin that is downloaded upon first use?

Isn't this what Iceweasel on Debian will have to do anyway, since Debian cannot ship non-free software in their main repositories?

<comment><USER44> Yes, it will be a plugin that is downloaded on first use. That's exactly what the blog post describes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> So this DRM is going to use the hardware TPM on cpus I would imagine. This would make it very difficult to break. Well done everyone that supported UEFI!

</comment><comment><USER38> So - what other good truly open source browser is out there?

<comment><USER46> Firefox.

Chromium is a mess, Opera is Chromium, WebKit will support this no doubt.

<comment><USER47> Given that Apple is one of the major DRM vendors, it's a pretty good bet that Safari will support EME. WebKit proper, it's unclear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Mozilla can't hold the line on DRM. but Mozilla has no trouble holding the line on the Javascript monopoly.

<comment><USER49> Scuse my ignorance, which JS monopoly? What is Mozilla doing?

I love mdn for my js reference needs, something to do with that?

<comment><USER40> I believe pekk's talking about not supporting any other client-side languages besides JavaScript (e.g. Dart, PNaCl, etc).

<comment><USER49> I was under the impression this is true of all browsers, don't all client-side languages like Dart or TypeScript compile to JS before they can be run?

<comment><USER40> No, Chrome has supported PNaCl natively since version 31. And they already have a fork of Chromium with a native Dart VM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> The writing was on the wall a while ago once Google implemented this into Chrome(Netflix on Chromebooks was the first real world use of this IIRC). Firefox no longer has the market power it once used to have thanks to Chrome being bundled and installed by default with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates etc. Google has been spending massively on pushing Chrome even bundled as default on new machines with OEM agreements to reduce payments to Mozilla in the long term and it's working since the past few years.

Pluginless HTML5 support for H.264 followed a similar path, in which Google promised to remove support from Chrome in favor of WebM(which FF and Opera added support for) but never did, in the meantime Firefox and Opera relied on the promise and then were forced to start implementing support once they realized Google was not going to keep the promise and it was hurting them and then included support(I don't think Opera ever did?).

Three of the four major browsers, Chrome, IE, Safari are owned by huge corporate interests and Mozilla is pretty much powerless since users blame FF if it doesn't support something, so I expect more of such things to happen in the future. It's pretty much game over at this point and I fear this is only the tip of the coming iceberg with all these companies having huge media deals for Play Store, XBox Music/Video and iTunes.

<comment><USER51>
      > in the meantime Firefox and Opera relied on the promise
      > and then were forced to start implementing support once
      > they realized Google was not going to keep the promise
      > and it was hurting them and then included support(I don't
      > think Opera ever did?).

Not only that, Mozilla partnered with CISCO to make h264 usage free for all. Now, people can modify and redistribute Firefox and still retain the ability to play h264. Something that Google gave a shit about when they included h264 in Chrome, but not in Chromium.

If you are using Chrome, don't fool yourself, you are not using an open source browser, but you are helping Google further the agenda of its stakeholders, and they made it clear what their priorties are when they took the first step by implementing this on Chromebooks.

<comment><USER52> > If you are using Chrome, don't fool yourself, you are not using an open > source browser, but you are helping Google further the agenda of its > stakeholders

As an example, Chrome won't ship an adblocker by default... but they _will_ add code to prevent popunders from working.

Guess which ad format Google doesn't do...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Well then, how is Midori doing these days?</comment>


U.S. mulls paying companies, tax breaks to pull supply chains from China - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-supply-chains/u-s-mulls-paying-companies-tax-breaks-to-pull-supply-chains-from-china-idUSKBN22U0FH <comment><USER2> I recently stumbled upon an old article from the 80s addressing Japanese- American relations ([https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987...](https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1987/12/21/69996/index.htm))

 _" HOW JAPAN PICKS AMERICA'S BRAINS Much of its economic success has been built on bought, borrowed, or stolen technology. Now U.S. companies are striking back -- but a two-way street is still far off.[...]"_

I think it's pretty hilarious how every two decades the US apparently goes through some sort of geopolitical anxiety often combined with the fear of some Asian nation taking over the world with robots and technology. Even the recent sci-fi like Her and Westworld filming in China/Singapore reminds me of the Neo-Tokyo craze of the 80s and 90s.

Well, we all know how the American auto industry turned out after the US engaged in protectionism and shielded its industry from competition, so I can't wait to see what the outcome of this is in ~10 years.

<comment><USER3> Except China does really steal IP. It's not just a couple decades problem.

Also a pool size of 1 previous occasion isn't really a huge correlation.

<comment><USER2> Well Japan also did really steal IP. As did the United States a long time ago ([https://apnews.com/b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53](https://apnews.com/b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53)). When the Germans were lagging behind in the industrial revolution they actually send businessmen to the UK for the sole purpose of copying factory layouts of chemical factories.

Nations that try to catch up will always attempt to copy, as do firms within any given country. It's not really that big of a deal because it's just one of the pathways of how information diffuses, and nobody is really in any position to throw a stone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the end goal here?

Move a small number of strategic industries back? We already do that by just requiring them to produce locally. Seems much cheaper and more effective that a subsidy.

Pressure China to respect interlectual property? I don't think that will have much impact if the IP in question is worth more that 25bn.

Pressure China on other issues (Corona, Minorities, Democracy, HK)? You'll need your allies in the EU, Nafta, the middle East etc to all agree to do the same. Has anyone asked them?

The big issue with China is people have ignored them for decades hoping they'll get better if they're left to it. They haven't. So now you need a joined up policy to actually do something. 25bn USD in "look, we semi sorts tried something for a week and it didn't work" isn't gonna cut it.

<comment><USER5> When China uses the threat of cutting off supply chains to a country [1] in order to advance their own political agenda, that country should obviously protect their own national security by moving their supply chains.

Edit: Additionally, other countries should take note and protect their interests also.

1\. [https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3925556](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3925556)

<comment><USER6> All corporations should follow the idea of not putting all their eggs in one basket even if that is the cheapest/best idea if you want to over-optimize.

In IT, we have backup plans, we have backup locations and resources and yes it costs money to keep such options available. Global companies need backup countries and suppliers that can supply what they need should something happen to the main supplier/country. It doesn't have to be full equivalents in capacity but should be possible to scale eventually.

Having backups and alternatives reduces the likelihood and effectiveness of explicit threats by your main location.

<comment><USER7> In the "old days," ICs used to be dually sourced. For example, Intel created and manufactured the 8086, but AMD also manufactured them. Not a perfect solution, but better than one single manufacturer. Sadly, one can't really do that now because of how small the features on chips are getting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We should use Mexico. Wages will be low. Shipping can come on trucks or rail. The labor pool is plenty large. And if we get into a large war it's close enough to more easily defend our factories. And the country is on good standing with the US, no aggression between the countries.

Mexico is preferable to China in almost every way. We start by lowering the tariffs there and raising them on a timetable in China. There's nothing that says it has to be all-or-nothing USA manufacturing. If we find another country to build up, there's only room to benefit. This is all within the scope of government powers.

The long term solution I'd mainly prefer is to directly subsidize the industries that we deem important to a manufacturing base, but beyond that at least lets find a country that doesn't threaten to destabilize what we've got going on.

</comment><comment><USER9> Diverting some of that military budget towards something even more important strategically might help.

</comment><comment><USER10> > A controversial idea being floated in Washington would allocate as much as > $25 billion to companies that make essential goods to move production home, > ensuring that even products far down the supply chain were sourced > domestically, according to two administration officials.

The U.S. goods trade deficit with China was $419.2 billion in 2018. $25 billion is nothing.

<comment><USER11> It's not equivalent - that $25 billion is going to part cover the DIFFERENCE in cost of the goods created in China vs. the US.

Every dollar that is spent in the US and not China is removed from China so consider that if something is 10% more expensive to make in the US and that $25 billion covers the difference then the Chinese economy has lost 100% of that money and the US economy has gained it all at a 10% premium.

The west needs to seriously consider doing far more of this and spreading production around to countries like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia etc.

<comment><USER12> Interestingly, Apple plans to assemble the new "AirPods Studio" in Vietnam: [https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/19/apple-over-ear- headphon...](https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/19/apple-over-ear-headphones- vietnam)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> want to bet this will be a huge sum to some five companies instead of smaller loans?

</comment><comment><USER14> Silly rabbit. The reason why companies are in China to begin with, is because of the massive Chinese market itself.

Think about it. 1.4 billion people are finally coming online, and into the middle class.

GM, Ford, Boeing, KFC, Starbucks, McDonald's, Apple, Microsoft, etc. And then, all the European luxury companies, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Airbus, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Lamborghini, etc. And then, all the Japanese brands too. Toyota, Honda, etc.

If American companies leave China, then guess who is going to eat their lunch? The European and Japanese companies would love for American companies to leave. That's just less competition for them! This is now like shooting at fish in a barrel. It's like Capitalism on cheat mode.

And then, the big ticket. The Chinese companies themselves. If they haven't come online yet, then they're going to make a splash in another 10 to 20 years. Then the competition will get really interesting.

You should realize, that the Chinese love American cars. Nobody here in America, really cares about Buick, but that is a favorite brand in China. Why? Because the Chinese prefers to buy American cars instead of Japanese cars, because it doesn't remind them of past historical grievances dating back to the Second World War. So, in this regards, American companies are operating in China on easy mode.

But with the way things are going, these American politicians, are about to squander the good will that the Chinese people have towards American companies and their brands. And once lost, this may not be easy to regain. The Europeans and Japanese (and now the Koreans) are ready to jump in, and take that lucrative market share from the Americans.

So, to the American companies, do it. Pull out at your own risk.

<comment><USER15> I think the essential stuff still needs to be made locally to handle uncertainties. I don't expect everything to move back. And certainly stuff made for consumption in China can be made there. Like American brand cars. And I think even Europe and Japan have the same concerns. We can't pull all our eggs in one basket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> And it won't do anything unless either: 1) The government commits to purchasing (some or all of) the American made essential products, or otherwise mandates their purchase by private companies. 2) Tariffs.

Capitalism will always find the cheapest materials and labor otherwise.

<comment><USER5> Enter the Defense Production Act. When all the states declared national emergencies, that made this law obvious to invoke.

[https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential- actions/memorandum-o...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential- actions/memorandum-order-defense-production-act-regarding-3m-company/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like socialism.</comment>


Google, Smart to Establish Free WiFi Stations in Philippines - <AUTHOR> https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2019/02/15/1893840/google-smart-establish-free-wifi-stations <comment><USER2> > PLDT-Smart Enterprise Business head Ernesto Alberto said the Google Stations > would replace the existing free public WiFi provided by the > telecommunications company in different locations nationwide.

So they already had free WiFi stations and now they're gonna be rebranded as Google Stations?

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook already basically subsidizes their mobile data, too. I'm rather curious of the motivations of both companies here, to be honest.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, the majority of the people in the Philippines are severely oppression due to status quo of greed and corruption by the upper-middle to upper classes. There is so much socioeconomic pressure to keep the working class poorer and poorer because public utilities are sometimes scarce and always expensive. Internet and electricity is "like water" in developed countries such as the United States; however, even water and electricity is expensive and scarce for the majority population of the Philippines. Keep in mind the minimum wage is around 360 Philippine pesos a day ($7 USD), while pre-paid load of 300 PHP gives you 1.5 GB of data for 30 days. Electricity is extremely expensive, especially since it's so hot, that if you run air conditioning during the summer times, the cost of electricity is at least 5000 PHP per month (~$100). The trade off is worth it. See cost of living estimates here [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/in/Manila](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Manila)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google and free in the same sentence...like the uncle that paid for your college, but...</comment>


Build a Portfolio Website in a Flash: Guide to Making a Site on GitHub Pages - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/build-a-portfolio-website-in-a-flash-9d5ec30a73a7?source=friends_link&sk=e58d743b55b200736b4212c7546360a4 <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be an article about how Github is preventing scraping of your personal information by recruiter sites by displaying your profile information in a flash container.</comment>


IKEA's e-commerce was already pretty bad. During Covid-19, it fell apart - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90547486/ikeas-e-commerce-was-already-pretty-bad-during-covid-19-it-absolutely-fell-apart <comment><USER2> Do you know if Ikea uses a custom e-commerce setup or one from a platform provider?</comment>


Ask HN: Open source library to generate music programatically? - <AUTHOR> Have you heard of any open source library to generate music programatically? I'm interested in generating music from the "first principles", that is to say, chords or notes. <comment><USER2> There is the music21 python project from MIT [http://web.mit.edu/music21/](http://web.mit.edu/music21/)

It's been awhile since I've used it but it worked well and could generate and analyze music in the classical Western tradition.

I used it in a project to generate midi music in the style of specific composers based on Markov chains. Sadly I don't have the source anymore otherwise I'd link you to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks promising, thank you very much.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your Timeline predictions of the far future of the Internet? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> How far future are we talking here?

A decade? A century? Next millennium?

Far enough in future, I predict we'll see internet technology become integrated with our own bodies, and brain interfaces used to surf the internet merely by thinking about it. That's really the goal all this network stuff has been leading up to, and that's arguably the final step needed to make it all truly ubiquous.

On a closer time frame, well I think voice commands and interfaces are in for a revival. We're already seeing them with systems like Siri and Alexa, and the technology for them is already creeping into web browsers like Google Chrome. So I believe in the next few years, we'll see a large increase in sites that rely on voice commands to operate and return auto generated spoken content in return. Like how your stereotypical computer works in a sci-fi show.

However, I don't really see VR ever being too big online. It's a useful technology and will certain have its uses for online games, chat rooms and other such services, but the idea of a 'city' like interface you walk around as a future internet just seems like a clunky usability nightmare more than anything. Interfaces will get faster and easier to use, not just more fancy looking.

So yeah, those are my thoughts on the matter.</comment>


Personalised Emails Are Critical For Startup Campaigns - <AUTHOR> http://customer.io/blog/personalized-emails-for-successful-campaigns.html

<comment> dj-wonk Re: "Spending a little bit of time to make sure your data is clean can pay off big in the long run."

Clean data is better, sure! But who spends just a _little_ time cleaning their data? For data of any significant size, that's pretty optimistic, if not laughable.

Sure, for a new startup with maybe a few hundred sign-ups, this sounds possible.

To be fair, the above quote is in the context of customer names. Any suggestions for validating customer names? In the abstract? Matching against real names? In the US? Worldwide?</comment>


Nearly every Intel CPU since Skylake found vulnerable to USB based attack - <AUTHOR> https://www.techspot.com/news/71836-nearly-every-intel-cpu-since-2008-found-vulnerable.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669262)

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15656931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15656931)</comment></comment>


If Printed Dictionaries Are History, What'll Children Sit on to Reach the Table? - <AUTHOR> https://www.neh.gov/article/if-printed-dictionaries-are-history-what-will-children-sit-reach <comment><USER2> Why, the phone book, of course. Usually the yellow pages, if you were in a reasonably sized metropolis. Nobody used a dictionary; I can't imagine where this misinformation came from.

The advantage of using a phone book was that a new one was delivered, completely for free, every year, so you just had to hang on to an old one if you were particularly fastidious, and otherwise just used the current one. And they were softbacks, so were more comfy to sit on than a hardback dictionary. Not to mention that not all households had a dictionary, while I seem to recall that the market penetration of landlines was something like 98% of American households (with subsidization for poorer folks) and they all had phone books; both were pretty much necessary to carry on a normal life.

Now, let me tell you about paper roadmaps, and how they were available for free at pretty much all gas stations (though the ones at Esso were considered the best), on a little rack near the door. No problem perusing the selection while your gas was pumped and oil checked by the attendants. (And there was no food or candy available to buy, so your other options for amusement were pretty limited).

<comment><USER3> For the younger readers, phonebooks were the ad supported contact directories that preceded search engines. They were forcefully delivered to just about any address with a landline across the country (typicaly yearly, sometimes by multiple publishers). People found alternate uses for them.

<comment><USER4> Does anyone else still get phone books? I've never had a landline but still get one dropped off at my door annually in Denver. It goes straight to the recycling bin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently tackled a book that was rather above my French reading level. It only took about half an hour spent fumbling with my Larousse before I plunked down $6 on their iOS app so that I could get back to reading my book. That weekend, my trusty old dictionary and I paid a visit to the used bookstore.

It's hard for me to imagine an information technology that's been more thoroughly superseded than the print dictionary. Electronic media make it faster to look words up in the first place, sure. But I also get audible pronunciations, and, if a definition includes another word I don't know, I can just tap on it to navigate to its definition. A print encyclopedia, you can at least sit down with a volume and just read it, and it's an experience that's sometimes more fun than surfing Wikipedia, by virtue of feeling a bit more random and serendipitous. But using a dictionary is always vaguely unpleasant; all you want to do is accomplish a specific task and then get back to your business.

The author is right. They really do derive most their value these days from being, in effect, large blocks of wood.

<comment><USER6> I've had the reverse impression over recent years: dictionary sites have become so bloated and unusable, between ads, comment systems, inefficient JS, and abysmal "mobile-friendly" pages I've gone back to my old hardcover whenever convenient. I imagine part of this is use-case, however: I tend to use a dictionary infrequently, mainly when I'm reading with the shelf within reach, so the overhead of launching an app or navigating to a website is a lot higher than practicing a second language, where you might keep the app open.

And of course it never lost its place as the canonical Scrabble-checker.

<comment><USER7> I use Wiktionary — no ads, comments, and it's fast.

My father had an "Official Scrabble Word List" book, which was just a list of words without definitions. An app would be even better for this: you could take a photo of the word, and it could give a simple yes/no without any chance of "accidentally" seeing other words.

<comment><USER8> +1 for Wiktionary.

As for Scrabble, [https://scrabble.hasbro.com/en- us/tools#dictionary](https://scrabble.hasbro.com/en-us/tools#dictionary) works just fine, although it needs JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a certain nostalgia for dictionaries as well. That is, until I actually end up having to use one nowadays. It one of these problems that modern technology has completely and utterly superseded. You can find people arguing for the superiority of analog audio or film cameras (if only for purely subjective or emotional reasons) but I wonder if you'll find many people who still go out of their ways to use a paper dictionary instead of one of the digital alternatives available. It's so much faster and convenient. You can also easily look up any slang word, archaism, proper noun etc...

I've been learning Portuguese lately and quite naturally, having grown up using dictionaries extensively, I bought a Portuguese dictionary. I end up not using it, I just look up on my smartphone instead. The main problem is not so much the lookup speed but the fact that a small pocket dictionary simply doesn't have enough words while large ones are way too bulky to use comfortably and carry around.

I suspect that for people learning languages with a more complex script (chinese comes to mind) modern technology make things a lot easier as well, I remember reading that looking up words in a Chinese dictionary could be quite complicated for a beginner.

<comment><USER10> A paper dictionary is nice when reading a paper book. I seem to have two "flows" in my brain, one for reading on paper and one for interacting with a computer screen. Looking up a word on the computer seems to break up one flow with the other, whereas I don't have the same problem flipping through a book.

<comment><USER6> This is also the case, at least for me, whenever I sit down to do some serious writing - a thesaurus/dictionary set is easy to glance into momentarily, while looking up a word on my phone completely disrupts my concentration and mindset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one here that still makes my kids look up words in dictionary? We have all the e-devices but I think there's something worthwhile about re- enforcing alphabet order in words, learning by wandering or happens upon words nearby in paper dictionary. The kids also have to sound out the words to try to find it so they learn different word-sound patterns. All this skills are practiced each time they do a quick dictionary lookup.

<comment><USER12> It's useful to learn things the hard way, but then move on at some point once internalized. I remember as a teen avoiding the drudgery of the dictionary and it affected my vocabulary for a decade+, until I got onto the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clearly the answer is to hot glue a stack of the obsolete and unrepairable devices that you had to upgrade from every 18 months.

<comment><USER14> Wouldn't those be lap bottoms then?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Obsolete editions of "Java: A Beginner's Guide"

<comment><USER16> or any books about javascript frameworks that are older than a year

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So I decided to go on dictionary.com. Here's what I see on the front page:

-We asked "What is the state of the USA in five words? The responses are not what we imagined."

-Can you translate these famous quotes from emoji?

\- How is pansexuality different from bisexuality?

\- Epic Fail. (seriously, the article is titled this.)

\- When a cat is so cute you want to bite its face? (sic) There's a word for that!

Those are some of the articles on the front page. Clickbait, on a dictionary. Then you start to wonder why you are trusting it when it needs to monetize with clickbait.

<comment><USER7> \- "What is the word for the smell after it rains?"

I'm interested in that, but certainly not interested enough to watch a video.

Fortunately, a quick search tells me the word is "petrichor", and has the etymology [1].

I can't find a word for the cute biting. All the sites have maximum-GDPR all- the-tracking boxes, which is my new cue to hit "back".

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/petrichor](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/petrichor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Printed dictionaries are basically ordered lists with metadata, so look-ups are O(lg n), and by a human no less!

Online dictionaries are likely to be backed by, well, a _dictionary_ , which allows for O(1) look-ups.

<comment><USER19> > Online dictionaries are likely to be backed by, well, a dictionary, which > allows for O(1) look-ups.

I think that this is true only under simplifying assumptions of a sort that would also allow one to claim that dictionary look ups are O(1) (with constant equal to the size of the dictionary).

<comment><USER18> I was thinking more along the lines of a hash map.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was very glad I still had my printed dictionaries that day they digged the cables over by accident. I'm not going to loose a large part of my functional literacy, just because the power/internet goes out. Even if it only happened one time for the rest of my life, it would be worth the 20cm of shelf space it claimed.

<comment><USER19> > I'm not going to loose a large part of my functional literacy, just because > the power/internet goes out.

Is your functional literacy really so dictionary-bound that a temporary outage makes you lose a large part of it? (Maybe it is! But I think that, for most people, referring to a dictionary, online or in print, is an occasional act.)

<comment><USER20> I would say that any persons functional literacy will be enhanced with access to a dictionary (digital or printed), unless they can the dictionary by heart. I wouldn't called that bound. I would just call it putting in your best effort.

I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of text. Most people don't do that, but they should.

<comment><USER19> > I would say that any persons functional literacy will be enhanced with > access to a dictionary (digital or printed), unless they can the dictionary > by heart.

I agree! (Further it is impossible to know a good dictionary by heart, since it should be updated regularly.) I didn't mean to suggest that normal people don't need dictionaries, only that it seems a bit extreme to suggest that a large part of functional _literacy_ (not just fluency or eloquence) would be lost by a _temporary_ loss of access to one.

> I personally confer a dictionary whenever I write more than a paragraph of > text. Most people don't do that, but they should.

Just this one time, I hope that it is OK for me to nit-pick and point out that you almost certainly mean 'consult', not 'confer'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They won't need to reach the table because they're going to do everything using a tablet from their beds.

</comment><comment><USER22> Printed dictionaries had one advantage that hasn't been superseded by the web: They didn't try to _deliberately_ give false information. I've noticed that some dictionary sites give entries for words that are spelt incorrectly. And I don't mean British vs American spelling or words whose spelling is in flux. I mean flat out wrong. I presume they do this to get more hits from people searching for the wrong word. And no, they don't always tell you it's wrong. (I'll see if I can find an example and update my message.)

Another irritation is that you can find support for any possible meaning of a word or phrase if look around -- with sites like urbandictionary.com all it takes is 1 person to invent a meaning and if you're not careful, you'd think that it's an accepted usage. It takes way more work now to be sure of any result.

<comment><USER19> > Printed dictionaries had one advantage that hasn't been superseded by the > web: They didn't try to deliberately give false information. I've noticed > that some dictionary sites give entries for words that are spelt > incorrectly. And I don't mean British vs American spelling or words whose > spelling is in flux. I mean flat out wrong. I presume the do this to get > more hits.

They did it, for the same reason, or at least to prevent copiers stealing their customers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 3d Printed seat. Parametrically described in Open SCAD

</comment><comment><USER24> My idea of a hot date was looking up dirty words in the unabridged dictionary.

<comment><USER25> Was?

<comment><USER24> All the hot action's at urbandictionary.com these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The Cooshee, or course. I bought one in 2001 and all 7 of my kids have used it.

[https://www.babysmart.com/copy-home](https://www.babysmart.com/copy-home)

</comment><comment><USER16> I keep a dictionary and thesaurus. They're actually pretty useful when you need to think of names for projects. I personally haven't found an electronic dictionary that lets you 'browse' as well as a physical one, but if anyone knows of one I'd like to check it out.

<comment><USER8> I mean, there's word lists (like /usr/share/dict/words on Unices). Combined with an actual dictionary that allows some semblance of browsing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Phone books. They're thick too.

<comment><USER28> Phone book? What is that?

<comment><USER29> Of course I haven't used (and for that matter not sure I've seen) a white pages in years. But yellow pages can still be somewhat useful for finding local services of various types. A lot of local service businesses are still pretty bad about online presences.

<comment><USER28> Where I live (Denmark), nobody _makes_ any phonebooks anymore. I believe the last time I used one was in 2003.

<comment><USER30> I've not seen a phone book since moving to Norway, and just realized it after reading your comment. In the states, I'd get at least one every year - sometimes two - and it didn't matter if I wanted one or not. I honestly think they print them because businesses pay to be in them.

<comment><USER29> >I honestly think they print them because businesses pay to be in them

Well, sure. That's what the yellow pages basically are--advertising for local businesses. (There may be some level of listing that's free. I don't know.) As other have noted, my local yellow pages is pretty small and thin these days though with the caveat that I don't live in a city. I suspect that a listing/ad is no longer quite the requirement for local businesses that it once was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The Sears catalog

</comment><comment><USER32> My gigantic Japanese / English scholarly dictionary of course. Or the technical manual X for Dummies. Either one...

</comment><comment><USER33> Ridiculously large font on my 4k monitor. I have to zoom out to about 33% to make it readable on chrome.

<comment><USER34> On mobile, the left 25% of the screen is occupied by two tiny share buttons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Horowitz and Hill, duh.

Or Peskin and Schroeder if you still need the information from H&H

</comment><comment><USER36> Amazon boxes filled with disused smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER37> This whole article is offensive to my personal sensibilities. I suspect this is because (not that I'm as fancy as the author) I have at least a smidgen or shadow of taste, so not being able to ostentatiously display how dignified and fancy I am with a useless tome I would never reference isn't a terrifying prospect. I'll just have to develop other empty, meaningless ways to impress people, like having my think piece inexplicably hosted at neh.gov.

<comment><USER38> Did you even read it? I think not.

<comment><USER37> Most other comments here answer the question in the headline. The actual body of the article is an utterly ponderous exploration of dictionaries as signalling, to which I directly respond. If anything, my comment is perhaps the most on topic.

Plus, your comment violates HN comment policy.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I go to college? - <AUTHOR>

I've posted on here before about which colleges are good and paying for college but now that I've graduated and this is actually a reality I'm having second thoughts as to actually going to college this fall.  I was thinking about waiting a year.
I'm 17, I just gradated last week, and I'm working full time for a startup (http://popvox.com) making more money than I've ever made.  I want to move out this summer, you know all that fun stuff.  If I don't go to college I think I would move out, get an apartment, work, and save money.
If I do, I'm not sure how it will play out with work.  I love work.  So it's not really work.  I am a web designer and mobile designer for Popvox.  I do all sorts of fun things.  Better than fast food.  I think I should wait.  What do you think? <comment><USER2> If you go to college it will give you more options and opportunities over the long run — and frankly the longer you wait the less your chances are of going. Also if you study what you love it will open other doors that can't be opened at a job (unless perhaps you're working with a room full of Phds at Google). Unless you think the dot.com that you're working for now is the next Google -- or unless your parents are very wealthy (in which case opportunities aren't an issue) it would be a very prudent idea to go to college.

</comment><comment><USER3> 17? Take it from us old fogies - the older you get the more responsibilities you will have. You won't have the freedom to go to school and mingle as you do now. I'm not going to say go to college (never went myself) but you have way more opportunity now in your life to explore and learn than you will in 10 or 15 years when you are definitely in the working-age category.

</comment><comment><USER4> Go to college. I've seen guys who didn't and they have very narrow focus and don't know any other fields other than their own little field - deep as it may be.

College let's you try different things. It gives you a chance to explore subjects and fields in a way that no other opportunity will easily provide.

</comment><comment><USER5> "making more money than I've ever made." <\-- may I ask how much are you making now?

At the end of the day, if you are making a ton of money and have a very realistic shot of making enough to retire in the next two to four years, then it may make sense to continue at the startup for a year.

I think the question is phrased wrong, because it seems like you are asking "Should I go to college now or wait a year?" And that answer really depends on the prospects of the company.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can see waiting a year but you should definately go. You will never again meet as many women as you will in college. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER7> I deferred school until the Spring semester (starting January) and ended up working for IBM for about 7 months right out of high school. Went back to work for them every summer.

Other people I know stretched the 4 years out to 5 or 6 and worked while they studied (stick with Tuesday and Thursday only classes).

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it's ok to wait a year if you really intend to go to college afterwards. College provides a lot of learning outside the classroom and the experience you gain there working with other people and learning from them could benefit you down the road.</comment>