Nginx Inc. raises $10M in Series B round - <AUTHOR> http://nginx.com/news/nginx-inc-raises-10m-series-b-round/ <comment><USER2> I've been using nginx for a very long time, but I am getting a bit nervous about it. As an example, the nginx Plus feature of "Application health checks" has me concerned. This is the feature that performs an HTTP request on a backend server to determine if it is healthy.

That's such a simple and necessary feature of any reverse proxy that it should obviously be included in the free version.

So, are they going to avoid ever implementing it in the free version? Would they turn away patches to add that functionality? I know there was an open source patch that never made it in, but I don't know why.

And what about staging/dev environments? Do you really have to pay full price to get basic features for internal testing servers?

<comment><USER3> Just curious, do other reverse proxies have this feature? Why aren't you using them?

To me this sounds like exactly the sort of feature that belongs in an enterprise product. So simple it could be implemented with a shell script in an hour or two by any competent sysadmin, and just out of being core functionality.

The idea would be that by buying the enterprise product you save yourself the time/money of being/hiring that competent sysadmin. How is that not reasonable?

<comment><USER2> Yes, pretty much every reverse proxy supports this. Most other software sucks in much bigger ways. And no this could not be done with a shell script.

<comment><USER4> Not easily, but this can be implemented by having NGINX proxy to Haproxy and have Haproxy do the health checks.

Scales well enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> this is getting ridiculous, first mongo.db next nginx.

HEADLINES FROM NEXT WEEK:

 _cat_ raises $750M at valuation of $25B

The venerable gnu shell program 'cat', which is an integral part of 70 million developers' toolchains and helps power shell scripts on 70% of the world's Internet servers, has completed raising a seed round of $750M at a valuation of $25B.

"We could have raised more", said Richard Stallman, "but by only parting with 3.3% we are leaving ourselves room to grow. More and more people are starting to use Gnu/GNU utilities, and our eventual market base is 7 billion people. We have no plans to monetize."

<comment><USER6> How is that ridiculous? Why can't nginx or MongoDB monetize its strength?

10gen was a startup and MongoDB was built to make money.

You can keep a project "open source" while offering enterprise level of support. Look at Puppet, Chef and now Ansible.

The world needs business. Nginx is mature and actually deserve to run as a business. The developers are already consultant for a long time; they just want to monetize Nginx publicly, as a startup.

Are you afraid Nginx will become the next Microsoft Windows Server? I can't predict future but with 100% of faith I say nginx will be fine in the next several years.

I don't necessarily think free software == win.

<comment><USER7> If I'm a small business that can't afford "enterprise" pricing and nginx starts stagnating because all of the effort has gone to nginx-plus, what then?

<comment><USER8> Then you choose another open source offering or fork nginx and start implementing the features it's missing.

<comment><USER9> And that totally sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how this impact open source nginx... I guess they will rather keep adding new things to Plus.

Seems less open source friendly business model than Trolltech (Qt), Red Hat, MySQL...

<comment><USER3> Why? I work at a company with a similar business model, and it's benefited our open source product tremendously.

<comment><USER10> Just to clarify: Any company which got open source model is awesome.

Just in that case transition may cause that they core product will not be evolving as fast as we would wish. Without digging depth, things like "Advanced load balancing" just in paid plan makes me anxious.

<comment><USER3> I can't speak for Nginx, but it seems to me their enterprise product is very reliant on their open source product. Their customers will probably users of the opensource product that seek a little extra.

If they would slip up and let another open source software be better than their open source product it would eat in their customer base and eventually cost them money.

This is why this business model is so awesome. It is both excellent for the users, who benefit from having the core contributors be paid and highly motivated to improve and maintain the project, and good for the contributors who are finally able to work on the project they love without the distraction of having to do other work for money.

That's not even mentioning side effects like the fact that paying customers are more likely to give feedback and report bugs/missing features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "NGINX is now used by 16% of all Web sites"

I wonder how much traffic are generated by this 16%? I would assume the traffic will be more than 16%, probably above 50%.

<comment><USER11> I doubt it, because Google doesn't use nginx for anything public facing, and I'm pretty sure Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft don't either. That already counts for a huge chunk of internet traffic.

Nginx is good for relatively high traffic sites, but not so high traffic that you have entire teams of engineers rolling your own load balancing!

<comment><USER6> Do you happen to know why they don't and what do they use? If they are using Apache, I assume they have a custom version that is highly optimized. [http://www.serverwatch.com/article.php/3911511/Google- Speeds...](http://www.serverwatch.com/article.php/3911511/Google-Speeds-Up- the-Web-with-Apache-Web-Server-Module.htm)

I guess for all fairness, yeah, let's only count public facing. I think with internal proxy nginx will probably be even higher.

<comment><USER12> > _Do you happen to know why they don 't and what do they use?_

Google originally used a modified version of Apache (and, as you have linked to, contributed a module to it), but my understanding is the Google Web Server is now so far removed from Apache it bears virtually no resemblance to it.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if they ever plan on open sourcing parts of their web server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Recently switched to Apache largely because of Nginx Plus. I do wish them luck with that project though.

<comment><USER15> What scale are we talking about here, a home server or an enterprise deployment?

<comment><USER14> Home servers and hobby projects. So scale is tiny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you are looking for the future of http server stuff look no further than: [http://mew.org/~kazu/proj/mighttpd/en/](http://mew.org/~kazu/proj/mighttpd/en/)

<comment><USER17> I don't understand why a minimalistic Haskell server (while neat) is the "future of http server stuff". While I'm glad it puts up similar benchmark numbers to Nginx, what reason is there to switch?

Nginx is plenty stable despite not being written in Haskell.

<comment><USER16> Yeah but you don't want people knowing you don't have the monads to handle their http requests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know that they plan to add dynamically loaded module support in a future release. As long as they don't plan to keep that feature as an Nginx Plus feature then I don't see much to be concerned about.

As it stands right now, a lot of users aren't able to make use of 3rd party modules because of the overhead (recompiling). Once dynamic modules are supported the community should be able to fill in the most desired features.

<comment><USER19> Taobao's fork supports dynamic module loading with other enhancements. [http://tengine.taobao.org/](http://tengine.taobao.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nginx Inc without mr. Sysoev is just a support company.)

There were rumors that he had plans to rewrite big parts of the server, so- called nginx2. If this Nginx Plus is what they would do instead, that is pity.

In my humble opinion, while nginx/core is brilliant the module system is over- engineered and too complicated, and there are lot of room for improvements.

<comment><USER21> He was describing the outlines of Nginx2 just the other week at a conference so it is still happening.</comment></comment>


Natural language datetime parsing web API - <AUTHOR> http://www.timeapi.org/ <comment><USER2> Hey, you should use the date_range gem! (Shameless self-project pimping) Look at some of the things it adds to chronic:

[http://github.com/fizx/date_range/blob/459812f091a67ce8d4b0e...](http://github.com/fizx/date_range/blob/459812f091a67ce8d4b0e737282f4712b9cdd59a/spec/date_range_spec.rb)

Edit: Oh, and you should add a batch api. Request latency will easily trump parsing time.

But yeah, keep up the good work. I need to find/create a good open web/api/scraping/big-data meetup, preferably in SF, not the valley.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/this+friday+at+lunchtime>

by design?

</comment><comment><USER4> First thing I tried was "today"

Got back an internal server error, and then got back 1pm tomorrow (even with the correct timezone).

</comment><comment><USER5> As much as everyone hates PHP, this would've been some two lines in it, using strtotime()

It's really one of the best functions in the language. <http://nl2.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php>

</comment><comment><USER6> Very cool. Noticed it doesn't always throw an error when it's sent nonsense:

<http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/first+firday+this+september>

Gave me the third Wednesday of this September.

</comment><comment><USER7> Uh...

        %w[ rubygems sinatra chronic ].each {|x| require x}
        get "/utc/:time" do |time|; Chronic.parse(time).to_s; end

(Also, Chronic is extremely slow).

<comment><USER8> You've pretty much got the idea.

<comment><USER9> Nothing wrong with that. Can be useful for non-Ruby apps, for example. BTW. A JSONP version could make usable from JavaScript..

<comment><USER7> It's already usable from JS.

        $.get("/time-thingy/utc/" + whatever, function(date) {
            alert("your UTC timestamp is " + date);
        });

Not to be snarky, though, but this seems pretty silly. What major web framework doesn't have natural-language date parsing? There are BSD-licensed C libraries that do it. Why remote that?

<comment><USER2> Pointers to the C libraries, please! (beyond GNU Getdate, which doesn't really do this.)

<comment><USER7> I went looking for the one CVS uses, found this:

<http://www.datejs.com/>

and stopped looking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> you should make one based off of my plugin smartmonth!

<http://github.com/perezd/smart_month/tree/master>

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/7+hours+before+tomorrow+at+noon> <http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/7+hours+before+noon+tomorrow>

<comment><USER6> This is a problem with Chronic and not with the webapp. It looks like Chronic doesn't understand the distinction between midnight and noon.

*Edit: Looks like a lot more is wrong with Chronic.

<http://www.timeapi.org/pdt/seven%20hours%20before%20tomorrow>

<comment><USER12> <http://www.presdo.com> has a much more powerful natural language time parser (that system handles all the timezones in the world) but they don't have a great api for extracting that info. It can't handle stuff like "seven hours before tomorrow" but it can do more common phrases like "tomorrow after lunch" or "day after tomorrow at 3pm"

<comment><USER13> _day after tomorrow at 3pm_

Lol, even I would be thrown by that phrase... (a comma might help)

It's like SQL.

The problem with SQL isn't that simple SQL phrases are that different from normal language _OR_ that complex SQL phrases break the rules of simple SQL phrases.

The problem with SQL is that humans beings have a lot of trouble understanding complex phrases that follow the most consistent possible rules followed by simple phrases...

So clever NLP often just out-clevers itself communicating with us... (remember SQL was originally intended to be a language usable by even non-programmers and ended up being a language that even many programmers feared ... though I have an unusual fondness for it).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hard Times in Silicon Valley? Not for the Payments Startup Stripe - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/business/stripe-valuation.html <comment><USER2> Gather round kids. There was once a day where processing payments online was something that you signed up for with a fax machine, or a merchant processing salesperson. You might even walk into a bank to get a merchant account, then they would sell you an online gateway for $20-99/month plus transaction fees. If you were lucky, it was Authorize.net, not some 5th party proprietary garbage with a ColdFusion SDK. Not to say Authorize.net was any fun at all to work with, but at least there was a Ruby Gem for it that mostly worked. Payment processing was hard. PCI audits sucked. Millions of full credit cards were stored in MySQL, unencrypted because it was left to the developer to engineer security. REST API? Hah. Hope you know SOAP and XML, and you're using the correct schema version.

Stripe made untold pain and suffering disappear. Congrats to them for getting rewarded for doing so- they have unlocked billions worth of economic value by making that process easier.

PS. Here's a fun little quote from the Authorize.net docs today, 2019-09-19:

The Authorize.Net API, which is not based on REST, offers JSON support through a translation of JSON elements to XML elements. While JSON does not typically require a set order to the elements in an object, XML requires strict ordering. Developers using the Authorize.Net API should force the ordering of elements to match this API Reference.

Do you know how to force a JSON object's elements to be specifically ordered? I don't.

<comment><USER3> Is simple. You construct the blob of JSON by hand, just cat some stings together (or implode with "\n"). Then it's real easy to duplicate keys too. (JK, it's stupid).

Fun fact tho, the PostgreSQL jsonb data type sorts the keys, and seems to put shorter key names first, then keys with the same length in lexographix order - neat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am always going to regard seeing the simplicity of the first Stripe payment widget, realizing it was amazing, and not immediately breaking down the door to work there as a major career mistake.

That mistake will only be one upped by seeing the signs in the windows in Palo Alto of the original Google logo and then typing it in at home, being amazed, and not breaking down the door to work there. :)

<comment><USER5> Ha! Jerry Yang used to camp out at my place or my friend's house in Tokyo when he went to a VLSI seminar as a, I guess, poor VLSI PHD candidate/student.

We used to chat late at night, and I would say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to advertise on your and Dave's bookmark list!

Oops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't it more "hard times for Silicon Valley companies that don't make money and/or makes losses that grow with increased users"?

<comment><USER7> The most egregious such company (WeWork) actually being an NYC company.

<comment><USER6> Uber and Lyft both make losses that are directly proportional to their usage. Eg more users or more trips will only ever increase their losses.

WeWork makes a lot of money for the CEO - I recall he used a large amount of money he cashed out during earlier rounds to _buy the building that We leases_.

<comment><USER8> That's equally genious and stupid. WeWork has to be successful to be able to pay the lease. If WeWork is successful then he can continue to make money from WeWork via being a CEO. He should have 'diversified'.

<comment><USER6> It's even better - people clearly need office space, so _even if WeWork fails_ he can lease to other people.

If WeWork fails to pay for their lease he can take them to court - and I would not be surprised if there are some fun creditor priorities in the bankruptcy terms of the lease agreements.

Seriously, I appreciate screwing the VC funders, but it does kind of demonstrate the kind of guy he is.

<comment><USER9> If WeWork fails it will likely be _because_ people don't need office space (i.e. a recession).

<comment><USER6> Much like Uber and Lyft, we work runs at a loss that scales with usage. In the event that continually losing ever increasing amounts of money somehow results in bankruptcy all of the people currently leasing office space will probably try to lease the building space directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google was founded right before the dotcom bubble burst.

Yeah, we are still headed for a downturn/correction/crash or what have you.

But valuable companies will continue to be.

<comment><USER8> Stripe "sells shovels". People want to exchange money, that will always be a basic tenet of commerce, and Stripe facilitates that. Bravo Stripe.

<comment><USER11> Stripe goes a step further, and makes it easy for the shovel-sellers and the shovel-buyers to get what they want. Good on 'em!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does everyone deal with sales tax/VAT collection with Stripe? If selling software licenses for example. It seems like you have to use a third-party solution [1] and wondering why Stripe doesn't provide such a service themselves.

[1] [https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax- integration](https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration)

<comment><USER13> We introduced the Tax Rates API earlier this year to help with this: [https://stripe.com/docs/billing/taxes/tax- rates](https://stripe.com/docs/billing/taxes/tax-rates). It doesn't do everything just yet, but we're getting there!

<comment><USER12> Hey that's great! Thanks, will give this a go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Stripe has an actual product that businesses actually use. They aren't playing the underpants gnome game of:

1.) Light money on fire to grow

2.) ???

3.) Profit!

<comment><USER15> To be fair, WeWork has an actual product that businesses actually use too.

<comment><USER16> Selling dollars for 95c is a game anyone can play.

<comment><USER17> ... anyone that can seduce VCs, speak charismatically and preferably has a prior track record.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is a reason why a little known company called Adyen is a $25b company on its own. Despite being less developer friendly they have contracts with way more big money enterprise firms...your Facebooks and Googles and Ubers of the world.

Stripe might be great for small companies or regional ones but there are many reasons why they haven't won over high volume global enterprise cos yet.

<comment><USER19> Amazon isn't a big company? How about Target? Digital Ocean, Slack? Lyft?

[https://stripe.com/customers#b2b-platforms](https://stripe.com/customers#b2b-platforms)

This list isn't exhaustive, it's just a few of the companies that have OK'd being put on the list.

<comment><USER18> Depends on the company, but absolutely no way that Stripe processes all of Amazon or Target's payments. It is a minority of payments, at best. And the WSJ article explains that Lyft is trying to in-house payments away from Stripe to save money.

I'm not trying to rag on Stripe by the way, but I have worked in payments at one of these large tech cos that did not work with Stripe. They didn't start trying to target enterprise customers as their initial target base, and there are simply things that enterprise customers expect more than developer friendliness when it comes to choosing a gateway or processor. That's all.

For some context for _why_ Stripe is not necessarily suited for enterprise see what Finix Payments is doing [https://www.finixpayments.com/](https://www.finixpayments.com/) \- the value prop resonates much more with enterprise...would say they are basically a developer friendly Anti-Stripe.

<comment><USER20> Amazon has direct integrations for payments in the US and most major countries, but farms out payment processing in certain low volume regions to Stripe.

Optimize a region's payment processing as volume increases is what Amazon is doing internally...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MYwindow – the Gumroad for event tickets and other goods - <AUTHOR> https://www.mywindow.me

<comment><AUTHOR> We built this with a simple belief that, also with other digital goods, Selling event tickets or Memberships should be as easy as a tweet or a DM!</comment>


Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/08/05/watch-commander/ <comment><USER2> The article indicates many states are beginning to supply federal agencies with biometric data including driver's license photographs. It also states a local police force (the NYPD) was a customer of a facial recognition system.

How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?

I don't think the founders [US-centric post, but I think this applies to most technologically-advanced nations] envisioned this type of surveillance, and thus offered little protection against it. As the technology to employ this type of capability becomes simpler and cheaper, potential resistance in the form of court processes and public opinion will be comparitively slow to form. This will get a lot worse before it gets better.

<comment><USER3> Slightly off topic, but I am curious and don't understand, why do you care what the founders did or did not envision? You live in a democracy, where you elect people to govern the country in a way that suits the majority of the population.

The way I see it, these issues aren't about what someone 250(?) years ago wanted, but _what the people who are alive today want_. If their views outweigh those of the electorate today, is it even still a democracy?

<comment><USER4> Because democracy without an underlying system of values is indistinguishable from a tyranny by the majority (in other words, it cannot be two foxes and a hen voting on what's for dinner). That underlying system of values, as I understand, is the constitution. A law can be unconstitutional even if the entirety of congress votes in favor. While specific needs of American society have changed, I don't believe the values espoused by the US founders have changed a great deal over the past two centuries.

Disclaimer: not an American.

<comment><USER3> Is it not similarly "tyrannical" to be bound by the views of people who lived a few hundred years ago. I believe that the constitution specifically forbade the vote to certain segments of society by race/gender? Which is one example where values have changed significantly.

Not to mention, there have been amendments to the constitution as I understand it - or are those only additions rather than contradictions/supercededants?

<comment><USER5> American here, what Dalek_Cannes said was correct, but to add to that, we have a system to change the underlying views. These are called Amendments, and that is how we changed the underlying view to allow everyone to vote. The difference between an Amendment and ordinary laws is that Amendments are really, really, really big deals that have the authority to redefine those value systems instead of working within the definition as ordinary laws can.

There are only 27, the first 10 of which was kind of a "Constitution out of beta" thing that all happened at once, so you can kind of consider there to be 17 changes to the underlying values. That way when one occurs it's a BIG DEAL and can't sneak past the people as easily as say, the Patriot act or the NDAA, both of which are pretty easy to make a case against that they go against the core values but were voted on quickly at times no one was looking.

Also we have a separation of powers where Congress creates laws, the President acts as a leader and can also prevent Congress from creating laws in some cases, and the Supreme Court can challenge legality of laws. The idea is that the Supreme Court challenges laws against Constitution + Amendments, so they can strike down a law as being unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court does not have the power to strike down an Amendment as it by definition is the constitution.

If Congress creates bad laws, it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to point it out. However they are only legally allowed to do that when a case is put before them. Imagine being legally restrained from refactoring unless a customer files a bug report. Part of the reason the US is having some trouble with laws as I understand it is Congress + some organizations are working to prevent laws from going to the Supreme Court on technicalities. Such as person X tries to take law Y to the court with evidence Z, but evidence Z is "classified" so they are legally not supposed to know the evidence and cannot legally present it in court.

A similar problem our country is facing is that the lack of refactorization is catching up to us so our legal system has become an insane mess that only highly trained specialists (lawyers) can even attempt to navigate. Then people learn how to abuse the system and can try to attack people on all the un- refactored points of the law. This is how patent trolls work, the addition of the law (patent) is a relatively easy process and the removal of bad laws (bad patents) can only be done by challenging it in court. This causes thousands of bad patents to exist because no one can challenge them until it is used against someone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These revelations are too new to be from Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and Bruce Schneier suspect a second leaker.

[https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/485081861119832064](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/485081861119832064)

<comment><USER7> Yap. This is exciting. Just like one bad thing about Snowden (and Binney) was that if public was not outraged enough, it would actually make things worse. As those who administer these programs will just get bolder and expand them. It it a little too early to decide if this effect it taking place.

But one good thing is (and I've said this before in relation to the whistleblowers) is that it will encourage more whistleblowers.

One of the apparent requirements for working at many of these 3 letter agencies is patriotism. If you show patriotism, you are a good candidate. They will spend money training you technical things, but they can't train you to be a patriot and love your country. The "problem" with such patriots is that they actually take to heart things like "Constitution", "Privacy", "Freedom" and so on. The hope of the agency is that with enough brainwashing and threats of loss of job, imprisonment, etc., these values would move to the background.

The "pragmatics" on top understand that those concepts are just there for propaganda. It is the sys admins and other mid-level analysts that might actually believe, and might just pull a Snowden so to speak once in a while.

NSA understood this and immediately went into self-preservation mode. They probably never even thought along the lines of "OMG we have let the public down, we have screwed up, etc etc.", rather they saw it as, we are not threatening and controlling our employees enough. So instead of spying less on our own citizens, we should institute "no-lone-zones" (like nuclear silos have), so you are together with an accountabil-a-buddy who is supposed to snitch on you if you do something silly.

<comment><USER8> > This is exciting.

Not really convinced about that. What's important/exciting should be what we _do_ about it, not how many messengers we have. We really have enough information by now to know what's at stake. Meanwhile, if you remember a couple of months back, the NSA sent out an internal memo stating that they simply intend to "winter the storm", and that seems to be what's happening until now (besides a few more or less symbolical proposals from the gov't).

> [...] it will encourage more whistleblowers.

Not convinced either. Again, we already know that deep changes would be needed. Also, whistleblowers, in this case, are obviously ready to die for their cause. There are not many people like that. And the World's support for people like Snowden has been completely absent or at least appallingly weak. And then, there's the fact that the NSA is currently in a huge lock-down process, which makes me think we won't see another Snowden, when this is done. That's why I believe, either there is change now or pretty much never.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just love the label they used for the No Recognized Terrorist Group Affiliation on that graph.

<comment><USER10> UTF-8 art

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And yesterday Australia announced that it will be pushing ahead with an ISP level data retention scheme in the name of fighting terrorism [0]. This is after last year explicitly asking for feedback on the proposal to retain Australian's internet history, and receiving countless concerned letters from the community (along with security agencies who were pushing for data retention) [1].

I suspect in a decade or so that we will also have a similar chart as this post [2].

[0] - [http://www.zdnet.com/abbott-brings-on-mandatory-data- retenti...](http://www.zdnet.com/abbott-brings-on-mandatory-data-retention-in- australia-7000032324/)

[1] - [http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hous...](http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=pjcis/nsl2012/report.htm)

[2] - Only an order of magnitude smaller due to our population difference.

<comment><USER12> Yes. Results of the poll on the Sydney Morning Herland article [http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political- news/data-s...](http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/data- storage-could-be-used-to-fight-general-crime-tony-abbott- says-20140806-3d78h.html#poll) visible at [http://imgur.com/u71Keqs](http://imgur.com/u71Keqs) \- 97% oppose mass surveillance.

Our 'democracy' has become non-representational. I'm honestly considering quitting my job, returning to Australia and joining the Wikileaks party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _The CIA uses a previously unknown program, code-named Hydra, to secretly access databases maintained by foreign countries and extract data to add to the watchlists._

Hmmm, this seems like a pretty obvious vulnerability. When's the last time the CIA actually did something "secretly"? (Oooh, how would we know? Actually the last time they did something un-secretly was like a month ago, so there's a bound of sorts.) So if you do something to piss off the spooks in e.g. Russia or Israel, expect to be entered into their troll-the-CIA database, soon thereafter to be Hydra-ed into Obama's special uncategorizable tracking system.

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp- uploads/sites/1/20...](https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp- uploads/sites/1/2014/08/shrug_chart_final1.jpg)

¯\\(ツ)/¯

</comment><comment><USER15> Well this is no big deal, I'll just vote for a guy in the next election who will dismantle this system... oh wait.

</comment><comment><USER16> "Directorate of Terrorist Identities (DTI)" sounds like something right out of a dystopian novel.

<comment><USER17> Like "Ministry of Truth"?

<comment><USER18> Minitrue prevents crimethink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They called the system Hydra? Really? Seams like some agents read too much Marvell comics

<comment><USER20> At least they're showing us their true faces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How depressing.

</comment><comment><USER22> thanks obama</comment>


Show HN: Relaunching of the Distil Networks website - <AUTHOR>

www.distilnetworks.com
Distil Networks is a security service that blocks malicious bots attacking your website. We stop automated attacks that are responsible for web scraping, form spam and click fraud.
We just relaunched our website and would love some feedback about the new design and the clarity of the value proposition.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I like the design, and the description of the service is very clear. If I were purchasing it, I would want to know how you handle search engine bots.

<comment><USER3> Good point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ability to detect humans versus bots... sounds great.

</comment><comment><USER5> Love it!

<comment><USER6> Beware of the Theft and Fraud Bots! Great job team, love the new layout.</comment></comment>


New Google transparency tool shows gov requests, blocked traffic - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/new-google-transparency-tool-shows-gov-requests-blocked-traffic.ars <comment><USER2> I don't see how simply saying that country X made n requests creates transparency. It would be much more useful if there were some kind of metadata about the requests. Are they criminal investigations, national security issues etc. ??</comment>


Build Your Own Circular Log with MySQL - <AUTHOR> http://dt.deviantart.com/blog/36639591/

<comment><USER2> If you don't mind having a more static table size, you can also do:

      create table test_table( id integer identity(1), val varchar(max) )
      -----
      create trigger auto_updater on test_table after insert as
      begin
       declare @id integer = (select id from inserted)
       declare @val varchar = (select val from inserted)

       update test_table
       set val=@val
       where id=@id%10+1

       if @id >= 10
          delete from test where id=@id
      end

Then to insert you just insert. It'll auto-override the correct entry.

      insert into test_table(val) values ('hooray')

insta-looping for free (syntactically). Though I did write this in t-sql, I'd assume one can pull the same trick in MySQL (identity => autoincrement). You can also have it timestamp while you update.

</comment><comment><USER3> This helped me find another really cool way of handling this. INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a nice solution, but doesn't seem to solve the problem they present at the start of the article. "What we wanted was a way to keep at least 24 hours worth of entries at all times"; but their solution only stores the last MAX_CIRCULAR_LOG_ROWS entries.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, good point. Luckily we have a regular rate of messages and we knew that 2 million would be enough to always have roughly 24 hours worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wouldnt it be faster to have the log_id in a variable so you don't have to do a select and an update? In fact wouldnt it be faster to just store 48 hours and delete the oldest 24? Is it going to kill you to have 47:59 hours of logs?

<comment><USER6> That's exactly my thought. You wouldn't even need a database then and you could use a flat file for each day.

<comment><USER7> they probably have this in SQL because of the ease-of-use to run stats on it though.</comment></comment></comment>


Teachers Are Moonlighting as Instagram Influencers to Make Ends Meet - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/teachers-instagram-influencers-school-tpt-pinterest <comment><USER2> Because a few teachers are instagram influences doesn't mean that "Teachers" as a profession are doing this widely. You could pretty much replace the word teachers with any profession and this would probably hold true.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad people are finally catching on to this fashionable narrative- generation tactic. When a reporter writes "X people are doing Y", all that means is that at least two X people each did Y at least one time. That's it. It doesn't mean Y is common or ascendant among X or the typical X does Y or even that any X is at the present moment continuing to do Y. This kind of headline sure sounds like a broader claim though!

Reporters and editors are people with a knack for language. They understand that for this phrase, the gap between denotation and connotation is a chasm. That we see this particular phrasing constantly anyway suggests a certain malfeasance.

I'm really tired of having to read my news adversarially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Teachers are moonlighting by selling lesson plans online to make ends meet. Some of them use Instagram to promote. This isn't new, the trend has been growing for years. Here's a 2009 NYT article discussing it - [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/education/15plans.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/education/15plans.html)

This is significantly different than your average instagram influencer who generates revenue by finding advertisers and convincing them to pay based on reach.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice client placement, Teachers Pay Teachers publicity team. You've pulled off a real coup, getting a fawning article in one of the largest news websites in the country.

Poor news judgement, Buzzfeed editorial team. You've taken a handful of wildly successful and unverified samples to make it seem like this is a trend or widespread occurrence among professional teachers.

These two quotes stood out in particular:

 _School administrators have largely been supportive, too_

 _Henry said her Instagram can help students and their parents connect in a more natural way and have more meaningful conversations about what they're learning in school._

Really? Administrators have no problem with school facilities being used for this purpose, and parents think sponsored Instagram content is a "natural" way to connect?

I have kids in our local public school system and follow teachers and administrators who use social media channels to share events and special learning experiences. I am also well aware of the struggles to pay for supplies, and have paid the extra fees and donation requests when they've come up. But using these channels as a personal side hustle would be really disappointing, if I learned it were taking place at my kids' schools.

This article does a disservice to the profession, IMHO.

<comment><USER6> BuzzFeed is a disservice to the profession, more generally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > One teacher in Texas told BuzzFeed News she makes a $50,000 a year, but made > over $200,000 in a year through Instagram.

Wow. That's some serious cash.

<comment><USER8> I suspect that it would be news to the IRS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are Instagram "influencers" still making money? How and why?

<comment><USER10> Yes, and so are "rockstars". The thing is that not everyone who plays a guitar is a rockstar and not everyone who posts on instagram is an influencer. For the large majority there is no money to be had, but for few lucky individuals you can make a decent bug doing it. Though if you are planning on switching carriers I'd bet on rockstar over Instagram influencer.

<comment><USER11> Unless you already know how to play guitar like a rockstar, I imagine trying to become an Instagram influencer is a bit lower risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Ends meet". $50,000

That's a salary better than the national average.

I mean, I respect the hustle. Get paid and all that. No shame in the game. But pretending that you already aren't doing better than most people is kind of being dishonest.

The woman I wound up marrying said much the same. She heard other teachers complaining about the pay and how they need summer jobs, etc. She was like, "This already pays better than any other job I've had, if I could survive off of that, this is no problem".

<comment><USER13> $50,000 is on the higher end of the spectrum for teachers. In Texas, the starting teacher salary is around $38,000. Plus, teachers have to provide their own supplies, be at the school by 7 am every day, stay late helping with extracurriculars / helping students, and work late grading among other things.

<comment><USER14> So don't do it.

If I found myself continually grousing about my low pay relative to other professions, and all of the indignities and hardships I suffered, I'd find another job.

<comment><USER15> Ok role playing time. Your a teacher. You majored in some subject like music or English. You probably spent 4-5 years in school. Maybe you have some debt. Your working as a teacher right now making 45k. What do you do? Getting an education in something useful could take 4 years + debt. You could goto trade school , 2 years?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe factor in guaranteed lifetime incomes in many states before complaining about "low salaries":

"The average annual pension for a retired Illinois teacher in fiscal year 2017 was $54,180"

[https://www.trsil.org/news-and-events/pension- issues/teacher...](https://www.trsil.org/news-and-events/pension- issues/teacher-pensions-too-generous)</comment>


Siri doubles iPhone data usage - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-06/apple-s-voice-recognition-siri-doubles-iphone-data-volumes.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting stuff in terms of operator subsidies. Apple gets the best deal by far in this area but not sure how long this will keep up. With capped plans this data usage can become more of a OPEX driver for the operators rather than an RPU generator. Could we see bigger subsidies to manufacturers that come up with ways to reduce data load?</comment>


Jason Calacanis launching new startup conference: Launch - <AUTHOR> http://launch.is/

<comment><USER2> What I like: lower price ($400 vs. $2000 ticket), focus on real entrepreneurs, possibly innovative model with actual investments

What I don't like: lawsuit with TC. Too much bad blood. Risks killing the whole effort.

</comment><comment><USER3> that's the big thing? I thought his newsletter was going to be long researched articles, actual investigative journalism that goes beyond the generic coverage you see elsewhere...not just announcements that so and so company has launched...and a conference?

This sure sounds like he is just jealous of Arrington and Techcrunch and wants a piece of the pie.

</comment><comment><USER4> The way the rocket is offset I keep seeing Lunch first before seeing Launch. I suppose if your launch is successful you will get to eat your lunch so to speak.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was my immediate association as well. I guess there is no such thing as a free launch.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't help that the rocketship looks a bit like a slice of pizza.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With the .IS domain name, I thought for a moment he might hold the conference in Reykjavik.

</comment><comment><USER6> Launching another spam site?

<comment><USER7> He'll be taking content by scraping other startup conferences and pretend to add value by re-presenting it.</comment></comment>


Daring Fireball: Cookies and Privacy - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/cookies_and_privacy

<comment><USER2> I was unaware of those optional cookie settings. When I read that second paragraph I almost left the article to make the privacy change before I realized that I was already using Safari.

I can almost guarantee that, if asked, most users would request that their browsing not be tracked some ad company you have no knowledge of. An interesting case where Apple's policy is far more reasonable than Google's.

<comment><USER3>
        I can almost guarantee that, if asked, most users would request that their browsing not be tracked some ad company you have no knowledge of.

I think that depends on how you frame the issue. "Do you want to have your privacy invaded by evil marketing companies?" vs. "Would you help Google to know you better, so it can serve you better ads?"

For me, ads are a necessary evil because I don't want to ever pay for every content I consume on the internet. So, If third party cookies are used to serve me better ads, ads that actually interest me, then I'm all for it.

Just this past week I finally decided to move my blog from Dreamhost to a Managed WP Hosting company, and it was all because of their ads following me all over the internet. I'm thankful to Google that it showed me those ads and not something about beer or hip-hop music or macrame or whatever I don't care for.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Having spoken a lot about these issues to regular people, I would bet most people would give up privacy for better ads. Just as most people would give up privacy for a safer world.

<comment><USER5> What are better ads? If I want something specific to buy, I can search 1000 million places on the web and find it with unprecedented ease. So why I need "ads" at all? (and much less "better ads").

Plus, if I searched Google or visited sites for "depression", "dildos", "flatulence problems", "David Hasselholf CDs", "weight loss", "quit your job" etc, I sure as hell WOULDN'T want to see "better ads" targeting me for such topics --especially when I'm browsing with other people around me.

<comment><USER6> Better ads are ads with higher click-through rates, which provides more dollars for the site whose content you are freely consuming.

Higher click through rates come from a better match between the user's interests and what the ad is offering. It is good for the advertiser (since they get more customers), and the site (since they get more ad revenue), and the user (since they see relevant ads instead of garbage).

<comment><USER5> _Better ads are ads with higher click-through rates, which provides more dollars for the site whose content you are freely consuming._

Well, I'd happily pay to get rid of the ads, given the chance.

 _Higher click through rates come from a better match between the user's interests and what the ad is offering. It is good for the advertiser (since they get more customers), and the site (since they get more ad revenue), and the user (since they see relevant ads instead of garbage)._

It sure as hell isn't good for me. I don't want to see "relevant ads".

For one, they are just there to make me spend more.

And second, as I said above, I ABHOR relevant ads shown when I browse, especially with other people around, that can guess that all those "adult diaper" ads I'm being shown have something to do with what I was searching for in private.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I realize it's an ad hominem, but I'm surprised Gruber didn't further emphasize the fact that Battelle runs an ad network. Of course it's in his best interest to be able to set 3rd-party cookies. Understanding that puts Battelle's argument in a different light.

Given that Mozilla claims they "fight for the users," is there a reason Firefox doesn't also default to only allowing first-party cookies? (Perhaps it has something to do with the massive deal with Google that represents 90% of their revenues?)

<comment><USER7> There is an article on how to do it: [http://support.mozilla.org/en- US/kb/Disabling%20third%20part...](http://support.mozilla.org/en- US/kb/Disabling%20third%20party%20cookies)

It mentions: "Some websites (e.g. Microsoft's Hotmail, MSN, and Windows Live Mail webmail) use third-party cookies for purposes that are not necessarily privacy concerns, and disabling third-party cookies may cause problems with those sites."

That's probably the reason.

<comment><USER8> Google who is mozillas 90% income is not mentioned but ms is the examples to make them look bad..sleazy at best

<comment><USER9> Have you read it? They're saying that some websites use them for purposes that are not privacy concerns. As long as Google doesn't do this - by which I mean, as long as they _only_ use third-party cookies for tracking - they're irrelevant, because Mozilla would shut them down anyway.

It's only sleazy if you see it as an attack and not a simple explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What bothers me here is that Google broke a contract. Since there is no way to determine between people who intentionally set that preference and those who are just using the default settings, I guess they consider us "collateral damage."

They could have gone public with the issue. They could have alerted users and given them the option to change the defaults. They could have found some interesting ways to make allowing 3rd-party cookies more advantageous to the consumer.

Instead, they coded a hack to intentionally ignore your privacy settings. Maybe it's not a huge action, but I can't hold that action in my head together with the mantra of "do no evil." I just can't. And I'm truly saddened by that.

<comment><USER11> Excellent point. I don't think they realize how much actions like this erode people's trust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with Gruber here, in that most people, if randomly sampled, would prefer only the sites they are explicitly visiting, track them - and not some underlying ad-network that just happened to appear on the web page.

That is - I might visit nyt.com, and have no problem have them tracking who I am, (I.E. that I have a subscription and can see more than 20 articles / month) - but I would prefer that the underlying advertisers not be able to track me from site to site just because they happen to be one of the advertisers on nyt.com (and whatever other web pages I visit - eventually they would start to build a pretty significant profile around me)

It may be the case that there are some legitimate (and useful) cases where third-party cookies are useful - but, if that's the case, I'd rather _explicitly_ allow that use, rather than have it allowed by default.

Hard to imagine very many people who would prefer the third-party tracking by default - and I vote for inconveniencing that small group of people, in order to protect the privacy of the much larger group who don't even know what a "cookie" is or how it works.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good story, but there's one thing missing: Safari on iOS does not block 3rd party cookies by default. It blocks them until you interact with a 3rd party element on the site. Then it accepts them. And Google exploited that by faking an interaction with a 3rd party element.

This "3rd party cookie only on interaction" is a setting that most desktop browsers don't have. You can either accept or deny 3rd party cookies. So, in that regard Safari on iOS _is_ different than the rest. But I'd argue that it's a very sane default setting and I hope that normal browsers everywhere start adding this setting too. I'd use it!

</comment><comment><USER14> Gruber makes an assumption that the only thing that third party cookies are used for is ad networks and tracking. A whole bunch of common (especially the new social tools) you use rely on third party cookies.

Its not 3rd party cookies to blame, its their use. There are legitimate uses for third party cookies. If I care about blocking ad networks, I use an ad blocker. I just dont go ahead and limit the functionality that these cookies offer.

<comment><USER15> > Gruber makes an assumption that the only thing that third party cookies are > used for is ad networks and tracking.

I think it'd be more fair to say that this particular use-case is the one that he's emphasising. And, in the context of privacy, it's the one that regular users are going to care about the most.

> If I care about blocking ad networks, I use an ad blocker. I just dont go > ahead and limit the functionality that these cookies offer.

That might work for you, as an individual, but Apple couldn't do it without copping a _lot_ of flak. Imagine if they suddenly blocked ads by default—the web would go crazy.

I would posit a guess that there are more sites out there that need ad revenue to survive than there are sites that need third-party cookies to survive.

<comment><USER14> More people want their FB likes than you know. If you dont want, you should not start generalizing that the mass population doesnt. Also, half your favorite sites will disappear without those evil ad networks. A large number of people choose ad driven products than subscribing/paying for a service.

<comment><USER16> Why do you think ad networks can't survive without targeting? Missing third party cookies doesn't even mean that all targeting is impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a pretty embarrassing meeting after opening a blog in Safari plastered with lingerie ads during a presentation. Near as I can tell, my wife opened mail from them in GMail and that was enough association to serve the ad.

So, who is to blame? The ad service for serving something inappropriate, my browser for having a bad default privacy setting, or myself for not changing the privacy setting and lending my wife the laptop to check her email?

No more 3rd party cookies for me. It's rather shameful that these ad networks have seen fit to work around a sensible default. It's worth a mention that this isn't new - flash cookies have been a workaround for ages.

<comment><USER18> Would you prefer they had absolutely no knowledge about you, and they just randomly showed you lingerie ads? Because that's going to happen in a future where the ad networks can't track the user at all anymore. Totally random ads.

<comment><USER19> I think what most people would prefer is that faceless ad companies not have a list of all the porn sites they've visited along with whatever real world info they could gather on me sitting in plaintext on some unpatched server in Cutrateistan.

I'm pretty sure you want that too but please continue with this utopian straw man about how this is only about better ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They don't need cookies to track you when your browser footprint is unique enough (<http://panopticlick.eff.org/>). So you still need a tool like Ghostery (<http://www.ghostery.com/>) to disable the snippets that can track you.

But then again: when everybody is blocking Google and Facebook, how would they earn there money?

<comment><USER21> Well by then those dinosaurs just have to abandon their outdated business model and innovate.

Just like we keep telling the MPAA/RIAA to do.

I'm only half joking.

<comment><USER22> It's no joke at all. They're no more entitled to their gravy train than Hollywood is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can anybody name a specific situation in which they've been inconvenienced by not allowing third-party cookies? I've always had them turned off, and I don't think I've ever not been able to do everything I've wanted to. I realize that this is a hassle for people like facebook/google, who want to be able to track us as we move from site-site, but I'm wondering how often it negatively impacts the individual user?

<comment><USER19> I don't think it's universal but I've been on sites where I've been forced to enable it to use their commenting platform (cant recall if disqus or intensedebate).

It's either no longer a problem or depends on a site's implementation though because I've used both platforms without 3rd party cookies recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _> In short, Apple's mobile version of Safari broke with common web practice, and as a result, it broke Google's normal approach to engaging with consumers.

I'd have used "tracking" in place of "engaging with", but that's semantics_

Actually, it does break Google's way of engaging with consumers. +1 buttons (as well as Facebook Like, Diqus comments etc) require 3rd party cookies.

<comment><USER24> Actually, no it doesn't, because people only need to see those buttons _if they already have a relationship with the service in question_.

Example: I don't have a Google+ account, so I don't need to see the +1 button. If you have a Google+ account, you would have a cookie, and thus be able to see the +1 button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In need of more emphasis is the fact that while many have received these cookie settings unaware and may prefer wide open settings, Google and others have no way to discern the difference between those users and those that legitimately want to opt out.

</comment><comment><USER26> An interesting problem about 3rd party cookies is this: Google offers users to control their privacy settings using the Ad Preferences Manager (<http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/>). Now if a user has 3rd party cookies disabled, Google does not know the user, and thus cannot apply her preferences.

An alternative solution on the browser side (and I think I saw this before somewhere) would be to only send cookies to a 3rd part site if the user has visited that site 1st party style before; i.e. don't accept 3rd party cookies if they are new. That's a pretty weak signal in the case of Google (who doesn't visit that page?), but at least for many other websites it could improve the status quo ante. If I've never visited some ad network's site, they should probably not be able to track me. Ads could then display inline a "Customize Ads" link that allows users to opt in to targeted advertisement.

"User has visited 3rd party host somewhen" is probably too bad a signal. We'd need something like "User wants to use 3rd party website". That's probably not possible to build with the tools we currently have.

<comment><USER26> Downvote but no reply?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What might Google do if Mozilla bundled the Ghostery privacy extension with Firefox? Or even AdBlock Plus? Google would still receive search referrals from Firefox, but tracking Firefox users across the web would be more difficult.

"Don't want to be tracked by advertisers? Use Firefox, not that browser built by the web's largest advertising network."

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there a clear guide to only allowing "first party" cookies using Chrome?

<comment><USER29> 1\. Open your Chrome preferences

2\. Select Under the hood on the left

3\. Hit the Content Settings button at the top under Privacy

<http://i.imgur.com/KMynO.png>

4\. Check the box labeled Block third-party cookies and site data.

<http://i.imgur.com/s6tG6.png>

<comment><USER30> Edit:

The reason for the cookies is this plugin: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhnjdplhmcnkiecamp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hhnjdplhmcnkiecampfdgfjilccfpfoe)

\---

Maybe you can help me: I have the same preferences but there are some strange cookies I can't delete.

My Preferences: <http://cl.ly/EW0B>

My current cookies: <http://cl.ly/EWuU>

After I clicked on "Remove All": <http://cl.ly/EX96>

When I now restart Chrome (without visiting any sites and about:blank as start page) all cookies are back: <http://cl.ly/EWBr>

Any idea what could be causing this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Gruber on Google's cookies:

 _"I'd have used "tracking" in place of "engaging with", but that's semantics."_

 _"Sounds wrong, or is wrong?"_

Gruber on Apple's storage of GPS data:

 _"[It's] either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight."_

I don't mean to rip on the guy directly. Gruber's a competent writer, and in the technology world, that's rare. But I don't understand why his opinion on Google's cookie debacle are "news" when his agenda is so obvious; what Apple does is good, what Google does is bad.

<comment><USER12> I think in this situation, it's a question of intent. I don't think anyone has suggested that Apple was trying to do anything other than make it easy for you to acquire GPS lock by saving your location information, and the long backup history was an oversight. In the case of Google bypassing your browser security - it was clearly not a case of oversight - they went to a lot of effort to deliberately override the browser intent.

One was an error of incompetence, the other was willful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> We have a major problem in this industry with bloggers and journalists collecting an indirect paycheck from large corporations. Here we have Gruber, who collects an indirect paycheck from Apple (Apple's provision of indirect access to inside knowledge drives traffic and authority to Gruber's blog), squaring off against Battelle, who collects an indirect paycheck from Google (Gruber wrote a book that was an overly-positive history of the company -- for which he collected both an advance and ongoing royalties, and he relies upon its executives as guests for his expensive conference).

We can see the practical problems with this situation in that Gruber cannot come out and say the plain truth -- that Battelle's opinion is absurd, and only furthers the case to look at him as a Google shill. Apple's default privacy settings on Safari are to be commended; they are part of why I always suggest Safari as the best option for a WebKit-based browser, regardless of Chrome's bells and whistles. Google's actions in this area cannot be defended by any sane person -- they are clearly subversive, and the notion that Google "knows what's best for consumers who simply didn't know better" is utterly Microsoft-Circa-1990s Evil (with a capital E! This was the whole argument for bundling Internet Explorer, among other things).

<comment><USER12> By "Inside Knowledge" I presume you mean the 1-week advance review of OS X Mountain Lion. Providing Journalists with advance information under embargo is common in pretty much every industry (Automobile Industry, Camera Industry) - it lets them write their articles so they are ready for release at the same time. The WSJ, NYT, and other outlets all got the same treatment.

I don't believe Gruber has ever written a book.

99% of Gruber's articles are just him providing a (somewhat snarky) view on the industry - it's pretty rare for him to write an article that has any inside knowledge - My guess is that it's less than 1 in 100.

He's been a pretty enthusiast regarding Metro/WP7 recently - as those product appeal to his design aesthetic. I suspect that if Microsoft continues to execute well, that Gruber will be seen as a Microsoft/Apple Design elitist in years to come.

<comment><USER32> I agree with you -- just presenting a balanced view of the motivations driving both bloggers' posts. Gruber has far less to gain, as Apple isn't going to provide employees for Gruber to interview for a book/conference.</comment></comment></comment>


19 unprofessional email habits that make everyone hate you - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/bad-email-habits-that-make-you-look-unprofessional-2016-9/#-1 <comment><USER2> It's not "unprofessional", but by far the the most annoying emails come from people who out of habit use the phrase "Please Advise" as the closing line to EVERY SINGLE EMAIL.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I think "please advise" simply means "you better answer or I'll get mad at you" :)</comment></comment>


How to Plot Valentine Heart with Python and Matplotlib - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1J-_Q7Xtbw&t=13m32s <comment><USER2> That was fun! Liked the bit about XKCD plots too. The two equations used are:

y1 = sqrt(1 - |x|) * sqrt(|x|)

y2 = (-3/2) * sqrt(1 - sqrt(x))

Can someone explain me how to find these equations? I would like to use these equations but it would be good to know what they mean before I use them. :-)

<comment><USER3> Hi!

Thank you! I am the speaker in this video. I have explained these equations with links to graph plots at this Reddit thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xwuv3/a_mathematical...](https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xwuv3/a_mathematical_valentine/cffeykn/) (2014 thread). I hope that helps.</comment></comment>


Anatomy of Propaganda: Russian Election Hacking and the Migrant Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dialogue-and-discourse/anatomy-of-propaganda-russian-election-hacking-and-the-migrant-crisis-fd62ff278d10 <comment><USER2> You may want to fix the link to [https://medium.com/dialogue-and- discourse/anatomy-of-propaga...](https://medium.com/dialogue-and- discourse/anatomy-of-propaganda-russian-election-hacking-and-the-migrant- crisis-fd62ff278d10) \- yours requires logging in (and having an account).

<comment><USER3> Changed from [https://medium.com/me/stats/post/fd62ff278d10](https://medium.com/me/stats/post/fd62ff278d10). Thanks!</comment></comment>