The trillion-dollar lawsuit against Tether - <AUTHOR> https://danco.substack.com/p/the-trillion-dollar-lawsuit-part?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo2MTQwNiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTYwNDE1LCJfIjoiR04vbWEiLCJpYXQiOjE1NzI4Mjk2NDksImV4cCI6MTU3MjgzMzI0OSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTg2MjMiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.LEnAhs6P88d7mEmzqAZmdP2O767cIwRI73guebuO6L4 <comment><USER3> I'm all in on the concept that Tether is a fraud. However, isn't it slightly premature to file a lawsuit over losses? The latest price charts still have tether at $1~=1USDT. If you have Tether and are worried about its liquidity, shouldn't you just sell Tether to someone who wants it in exchange for something else?

Or is there some kind of problem with doing that transaction that I'm not aware of? Maybe some limitation that's not reflected in the price charts?

Edit: I see that this is not actually about Tether's liquidity at all. Instead, the accusation is that Tether was used to pump and dump Bitcoin, and those who suffered damages under this theory are people who bought Bitcoin at the top.

<comment><USER4> Can you spell out (maybe ELI5) why the concept of Tether is a fraud? Why is it not possible to back cryptos to a stabilized "1:1" "medium/currency" (which itself is another crypto it seems) and finally the USD dollar ?

<comment><USER5> Tether's market cap is $4,132,688,008 USD. That means that the folks running tether need to have 4B in reserves. That is... unlikely.

<comment><USER6> This amazes me. It's really hard to get $4B in revenue for an actual product. But they have sold 4B pretend dollars that are no better than dozens of other cryptocurrencies?

<comment><USER7> Actually worse than other cryptocurrencies. Because Tether can collapse if (when) they are found guilty. The "normal" cryptocurrencies can collapse only when the market as a whole says so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gemini created an audited, 100% reserve stablecoin; no one uses it. This suggests that there is no genuine demand for stablecoins and that Tether has been entirely scam and hype driven.

Dollar amounts in a litigation complaint and headlines about "sued for $X million!" are not usually that meaningful; remember your Gell-Mann amnesia.

<comment><USER9> _This suggests that there is no genuine demand for stablecoins_

That just suggests that "audited" and "100% reserve" are not the most important features to people using stablecoins. What is more important is having a deep market on Binance, which is where most BTC <-> stablecoin trading happens.

Despite these terrible news articles, which are indeed reporting accurately that there are terrible flaws in Tether, you can still trade Tether for $1 right now. A hundred dollars worth of Tether is still more valuable than a hundred dollar payment made via a credit card.

<comment><USER10> > What is more important is having a deep market on Binance

It sounds like you are arguing that being popular is what matters more to being popular

<comment><USER9> Well, yes. There are huge network effects for stablecoins.

Let's go for a more specific example. Let's say that you hold one bitcoin on Binance, and you believe the price of bitcoin will go down today. You would like to exchange your bitcoin for dollars, and then tomorrow, exchange your dollars back into bitcoin.

Ideally you would just use plain old US dollars. But since it's crypto, you can't. What you _can_ have is a stablecoin.

So which stablecoin should you use? There are two costs to using a stablecoin.

Cost #1 is that when you exchange, you won't get the perfect rate. You'll have to pay some fee, and the precise exchange rate you get will depend on the liquidity of the market.

Cost #2 is the chance that this stablecoin collapses in value while you're using it.

For Tether, in my opinion cost #2 is high. All these dubious stories about the underpinning of Tether are true. That means the risk it collapses tomorrow are higher than the risks that other stablecoins collapse tomorrow.

However, cost #1 is probably lower for Tether than it is for any other stablecoin. Because there are more traders operating in Tether, you get a better exchange rate.

This is why Tether isn't just hype, it is providing real value to people through being the most popular stablecoin.

Would we be better off in a world where the most popular stablecoin also had a solid financial backing? Yeah, I think so. But that isn't the same as saying that Tether has no utility today.

<comment><USER11> Why not just use a reputable exchange, which actually lets you exchange your BTC into real dollars, as opposed to funny money dollars, like Coinbase?

I understand why a money launderer wants to trade on an exchange which does not let them withdraw USD. But why would a normie (who, at some point, wants USD) want to do so?

<comment><USER9> This specific example is why you wouldn't want to exchange your BTC into real dollars. The user doesn't want to withdraw fiat dollars, they just want to exchange Bitcoins into a dollar proxy, then exchange back. Sometimes the cost of a less-liquid exchange is higher than the cost of using stablecoins instead of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this is a much clearer explanation of the fraud involved in Tether's valuation. [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and- bitfinex/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex/) Lots of discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377892)

<comment><USER13> The article actually links to it midway. How would you know, if you clearly haven't read it...

<comment><USER14> Come now, surely there's a difference between the due-diligence of "reading the article" versus going beyond that with "checking the identity of every link it contains."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Question: Who was the dumper in this pump-and-dump game? Tether was clearly the pumper.

Second: The claim that the they are liable for the damages of the loss from the peak is a bit weird. IF it was a pump and dump scheme, and I at least agree with the pump side of things, then the values were all inflated falsely anyhow. There should be punishment, but basing it on the losses from peak is very strange and not realistic.

<comment><USER16> Largely long-time Bitcoin holders and smart ICOs. Anyone who's a real (not paper) Bitcoin millionaire probably got that way by selling near the peak. Ditto anyone whose salary has been paid by a crypto firm that collected millions in an ICO. Most of the engineers working for companies like Consensys, Brave, Filecoin/IPFS, etc. are indirect beneficiaries of the 2017 Bitcoin bubble.

The ICO boom had an interesting triple-pyramid-scheme structure that accelerated both the rise and the fall. If you bought into Ethereum in the early days, you probably paid with Bitcoin; it wasn't possible to buy ETH direct until ~2017. And similarly, if you bought into ICOs in 2017, you bought with ETH. That meant that the folks investing their money in ICOs weren't actually putting $200M into Filecoin; they were putting ETH that they had spent maybe $20M (in aggregate) in, which was likely purchased from someone who had bought it with $2M in Bitcoin. The eye-popping ICO valuations attracted more people into the market, which allowed smart ICOs to unload their ETH immediately at inflated prices and convert it into a big corporate war chest. Once the bubble popped, this mechanism worked in reverse (a bunch of dumb ICOs that had held onto their ETH all try to sell to capture the tiny pool of inflowing capital, which does nothing except force down the price of ETH), leaving folks who bought at the top of the bubble and ICOs that forgot to sell holding the bag.

Ironically, this mechanism holds the basics of a functioning financial system: money was transferred from people who weren't doing anything with it to pay salaries of people doing productive but speculative work. It was transferred pretty clumsily, with a lot of people losing their shirt and a fair bit of waste and scams in the receiving projects, but if any of the receiving projects deliver, it succeeded.

<comment><USER17> > it wasn't possible to buy ETH direct until ~2017

Coinbase added ETH support in 2016: [https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-adds- support-for-ethereum...](https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-adds-support-for- ethereum-b8046cf486d0)

<comment><USER16> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems extremely unlikely they will be able to prove much of anything. The Bitcoin markets in particular are extremely complex: lots of disparate exchanges, actors, and entities all vying for a piece of the pie and some of them are not necessarily acting in line with regulations or norms. How can you possibly prove that one entity is responsible for a global phenomenon that happened over a period of several months? How do you even establish evidence that what happened on one exchange affected another?

<comment><USER19> Same way you find evidence for other crimes... emails, texts, messages, witness testimony, etc describing their plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tether is the FUD that never stops giving, anyone remember Bitfinexed from 2017?

Do people try to manipulate price? Of course they do. Sometimes it works, retail investors get excited and pile in. Sometimes it doesn't, and whales get rekt. Markets are messy.

How do we fix this? Stop barring Bitcoin companies from working with mainstream banks, and USDT volume will dry up.

<comment><USER21> If Bitcoin companies maintained an adequate level of know-your-customer/anti- money-laundering compliance, maybe the mainstream banks would work with them. But as it stands, the banks have no reason to take any risks in dealing with them. If people resort to Tether and get burned, it's not the banks' problem.

<comment><USER22> Indeed. The crypto dream often involves being able to move huge sums of money around the world, with no ability to trace it to real people. This is the opposite of what established financial systems want. Of course they don't want to legitamize crypto currencies, they'd be introducing a massive vector for crime and tax evasion.

<comment><USER7> Yep. The honest actors don't want anything to do with money laundering, the shady actors want these vectors for themselves so they can take a cut.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/heatherfarmbrough/2019/03/29/sw...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/heatherfarmbrough/2019/03/29/swedbank- faces-escalating-money-laundering-scandal/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's frustrating to read these allegations as somebody who has spent the better part of the past year studying various exchange trade execution data feeds, and writing an algorithmic trading bot.

Yes, Bitfinex lead the market a lot of the time in the 2017 Bitcoin bull run.

Yes, Bitfinex "printed" hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tether, which was initially distributed to large players on Bitfinex and Bittrex exchanges, also poloniex I believe was in on the issuance contracts.

But that doesn't mean that Bitfinex fraudulently pumped up the price of Bitcoin.

In fact, that would be impossible, even if they tried to fake the price higher... as they would lose tons of real money to arbitrageurs in the process...

The (nano)second that any one single exchange gets out of line in terms of price, there are trading bots out there that notice that, immediately buy up as much BTC as they can on every other exchange that is below that price, and then immediately dump 100% of what they just bought on the exchange that is out of whack (Bitfinex).

And if they weren't losing real money to the arbitrageurs, (presumably because they restricted USDT withdrawals which has never happened for more than a few days straight at most), then the arbitrageurs wouldn't be buying up Bitcoin on every other exchange that is not Bitfinex and selling it for USDT or USD fiat... they would simply ignore bitfinex as a fake volume exchange.. like 50% of the exchanges listed on coinmarketcap currently are.

There is a reason that Bitfinex was leading the price pumps... they were the main gateway to millionaires the world over buying into the crypto ecosystem.

You had to give iFinex at least $100,000 cash wire in exchange for USDT to get into the game, and there was a waiting list for that "privilege".

Some exchanges shut down their registration page for months because the KYC processing backup was so severe.

There was real demand for Bitcoin back in 2017.

Finance is difficult for most people to understand.

High frequecy traded crypto finance ecosystem with synthetic-USD, USDT, USD, TUSD, USDC, etc. is especially so.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure what you're understanding what the article claims - <USER2> wasn't just increasing the price on their exchange by showing a fake price.

They created money out of thin air and handed this out to players to buy BTC with. Those players then bought BTC in quantities that drove the price up. They created price-inelastic demand out of nothing (you don't care about the price as much if you're buying them for free).

<comment><USER25> I am reminded of the South Seas Traiding Company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How could there possibly be $1.4t in damages when the market cap of BTC maxed out at around $400b? Also, while I don't deny that there was probably fraud here, just because a security is lightly traded and illiquid that doesn't make its price "fake".

<comment><USER27> Author specifically says the damages would be treble the underlying loss, as per RICO and antitrust law.

I've no idea if this is true. But interesting nonetheless.

Hard time seeing a court awarding the loss to the entire peak to trough market to market, especially if the fraud was part of the money that inflated the bubble, but who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > This is not just "we are upset that we lost our crypto money and we'd like > to sue someone"

Yeah...no, that's exactly what this is.

</comment><comment><USER29> The overcollaterized approach is by makerdao is surely interesting in comparison to tether

And in spite, it is not widely accepted in most major exchanges [https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dai](https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/dai)

But tether strength sound to be due to recognition and deep order which is what makes a currency getting value from "nothing"

</comment><comment><USER30> > If anybody asks questions ("Where did all those Tethers come from? Prove to > me they're collateralized"), sell some of your inflated Bitcoins for real US > Dollars at a profit, stick those dollars in your bank account, and then say > "Look! Here they are! Just like we promised."

This makes no sense. The money has to come from somewhere. Sure it can be fake money in Tether $$ but once you cashed out somewhere (in cash or your bank account) then the money should be real.

Tether market cap right now is $4bn. The proclaimed value created/destroyed is $450bn. The market cap of all crypto at the beginning of 2017 is $18.3bn and the market cap right now is $246bn. The difference is massive (around $220bn).

Now let's look at the market depth, because this is something everyone likes to claim: The order books are thin. This is far from being true. Looking at Gdax, the market bids to a 10% discount is around $12m. From my experience, trading crypto markets, it'll take around three times that much dollars to take the price to these levels. Many things kick off: 1. Hidden buy orders and 2. Bots arbing with other exchanges and 3. Fast bid makers who use neither visible or hidden bids.

That's around $35m that you can dump on a single exchange for a 10% discount. That doesn't take into account: 1. You can use multiple exchanges 2. You can use private sales or OTC and 3. If you are selling $100m of crypto (or even stocks), you'll probably do it over the course of a few days unless you think the instant discount is less than the stretched one.

If Tether created a $300bn market from a $4bn of cash, then that's genius, no? But wait, that's not what the author saying. The OP is saying that these $4bn don't even exist. Then Bitfinex/Tether created a $300bn market out of nothing. Uhh, no. I'm having a hard time believing that.

tl;dr: Dude goes on a lengthy non-sense rant and has no real proof backing his facts.

<comment><USER21> It makes sense if Tether buys BTC with USDT that it just created out of nothing, then sells those BTC later for real dollars. Those real dollars can be used to collateralize the USDT "after the fact", and if the price went up between the two transactions, Tether keeps the difference.

It's sort of like an uncovered short of USDT - they take a negative position, buy BTC, sell BTC, then cover the negative position. (Except "cover" in this case really means "collateralize the USDT that someone else is holding".)

EDIT: I have no idea if that's what they were actually doing, but that's my interpretation of the author's interpretation of the lawsuit.

<comment><USER31> it works as long as the price is going up but once it goes down, it enters an inescapable downward spiral.

<comment><USER21> Yep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Civil RICO is almost always a joke.

[https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not- rico-...](https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-dammit/)

"Dupes play along by describing RICO claims as "charges," and generally by acting like a RICO claim suggests that there's already been a finding that someone did something wrong."

</comment><comment><USER33> These guys are geniuses.

Just like that - leveraging their platform and influence they have minted 4 billion USD worth of new kind of money. Out of thin air.

What will be the ultimate kicker if it ends up working - in the sense that there is a need for a stable coin, and it fills that need.

</comment><comment><USER34> this author's argument falls apart upon even slight scrutiny. If tether caused bitcoin's huge 2017 rally, what about 2013 when bitcoin went from $100 to $1000 in the end of the year? Or 2016 when it went from $200 to $600? maybe it was just people buying. Coins that had nothing to do with tether, such as eth and ripple, on other exchanges besides bitfinex, also went up huge. I think tether's contribution to the 2017 bull market was negligible.

<comment><USER35> Your unstated major premise here seems to be that every jump in BTC's price must have the same cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> From the post:

"Allegation #1: The 2017 Bitcoin Bubble was market manipulation, and Tether was how they did it

Allegation #3: They might've gotten away with it, too, if they hadn't gotten robbed while busy scamming"

But the big Bitfinex hack was in 2016, while the bubble in 2017. What do I miss here?

<comment><USER11> Between 2017 and 2019, they sent hundreds of millions of _dollars_ to a money launderer (Crypto Capital), who outright stole 10% of them, and had much of the rest frozen by the SEC.

Bitfinex currently claims that the IOUs they have from Crypto Capital are worth the paper they are printed on. I have strong doubts about the accuracy of this claim.

<comment><USER36> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> that's one of the most resilient conspiracy theories lasting for years. The drama attracts all kind of Bitcoin haters although factually there is not much to it.

</comment><comment><USER38> What about DAI?

Will SEC have a good case that it is a security, if it's proven to be a stablecoin? No expectation of profit.

</comment><comment><USER39> USD is printed in necessary quantities to satisfy market demands, and is used by its issuers to buy some privately issued assets on the market, injecting liquidity into the stagnating ecosystem. This is called "quantitative easing".

If USD works this way, why shouldn't USDT?

<comment><USER40> Two main reasons.

Holding a US dollar is a bet on the US economy, the US government, and the US banking system. Those have their flaws, but there's a lot of built-in checks and balances that keep them reasonably accountable.

The other is that the Fed does all of its currency management very much in the public view. Whereas the USDT management has been somewhere between needlessly opaque and flat-out fraudulent.

<comment><USER39> The second one is important, thanks. I don't think that government money have any more sanctity than any other, but yes, transparency and well-defined RoE and accountability are important.</comment></comment></comment>


You should make a blog! - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog <comment><USER2> As much as I'd be greatful for being paid to start a blog, I'm not sure what the point of it is. Aren't there like a bazillion blogs out there already that are absolutely desperate for traffic.

And on the other hand, as a consumer of such information, I find it harder and harder to find original indie blogs. I'm still looking for a good blog search engine that allows me to find blogs on Niche topics. does anyone else have this problem? or is it just me? the best i can usually find is something on quora.

<comment><USER3> Blogging is really for two main reasons, order depends on your priorities.

1\. For yourself, to help clear your mind and clarify your thoughts.

2\. For convincing your future employers you're not a con artist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been meaning to write an article on my first experiences with Rust and embedded development, coming from a JavaScript/TypeScript background or my experiences in switching from Windows to Arch or Vim as of late, but I feel somewhat discouraged from writing, as if it might lack quality. Do you have any tips on overcoming this feeling?

It's a shame, because I see a lot of value in writing down one's thoughts, e.g. more easily noticing gaps in knowledge of a subject.

<comment><USER5> Writing takes practice like any other skill. When I go back and read my earliest blog posts, it's a total cringefest. A stumbling start is nothing to be ashamed of, and is a requirement for a strong finish.

<comment><USER6> Are you only interested in blogs from people with and about technical skills, or is any focus tech related all good?

<comment><USER5> I evaluate them on a case-by-case basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been wanting to start a blog since I joined college. It's been more than a decade now. I want to keep it simple. I finally changed my website to html, css only. No js, no plugins, none of those cool static site generators. None of those fancy effects. Simple text and it looks pretty clean and simple on mobile too. And it's fast! Finally after years of playing with my website (my landing page) after having tried dozens methods and tools I am happy with it.

I think that's how I will write my blog posts too. Whenever I want to write a post (that won't be frequent) I'll just add a html page in my /blog dir on github pages and link it on /blog.html with date/title and all. I am sure there are tons of such blogs out there. And then I will request OP to donate to Internet Archive :)

<comment><USER8> I understand the no js/plugins, but why not a static site generator? Static site generators (at least most) are the only "new" technology that seems to make things simpler instead of more complicated, and SSGs are a massive time saver regarding themes, sitemaps, robot, optimization, etc.. and there are no dependencies at all. It also helps me writing. I run `hugo serve` that autorefreshes in the background, then I have split up my screen with right being my vim and right my browser. Takes 1 second to see the result of what I am doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Writing a blog is a nice way to reflect. I've written a couple (unpublished) books so it's pretty obvious I love writing.

Listing my blog, which I'm working on adding a bunch of features too next week (it's my own static site generator etc) including subscriptions. It's all very technical stuff and I plan on writing more.

I plan on writing about my month long trip to China as well, that will probably be on a new blog though.

[http://blog.winricklabs.com](http://blog.winricklabs.com)

EDIT: https is broken and does a weird redirect. Will fix when I'm back home.

<comment><USER9> Https fixed [https://blog.winricklabs.com](https://blog.winricklabs.com)

Adding rss/subscriptions next

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I need to update my blog. I was using Advent of Code as a way to jump back into it, but life happens and I haven't been able to keep up with the problems and the write ups and life.

I do love this list as an opportunity to find some new blogs to read!

I will list mine here in an effort to not be a wuss and for anyone who also likes collecting interesting blogs.. though I wouldn't categorize mine as interesting yet.

[https://logancollins.us/blog/](https://logancollins.us/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Drew: unrelated question having just read your software distribution post and noticing you use Alpine - have you tried NixOS? What does Alpine have (or lack that others have)?

<comment><USER11> Not OP, neither an Alpine user, but tried it once.

For me, the main selling point of Alpine is that it's not what RMS would call "a GNU/Linux distribution", since it doesn't use the GNU userland. This means, no GNU libc (Musl instead), no GNU Coreutils (Busybox instead), etc.

It became kind of famous thanks to Docker because an Alpine image is (or at least, was) only sized at 6MB.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Last Words. HN user's final post before being banned - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kelukelugames/Last-Words <comment><USER2> Are these the comments that got them banned, or simply the last words on accounts that were doomed based on previous comments?

Certainly some, in isolation, do not seem all that bad. People have said much worse to me without issue. So I have to assume that the bans were based on additional content we aren't seeing here.

<comment><AUTHOR> The latter for most of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some of these are actually quite funny. Its like the person knew they were getting banned after their comment and were indirectly saying goodbye before slamming the door. Not sure if it makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat; thanks for sharing... now, we need a Big Data Analytics / Tone Analyzer package run over it :=D

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this post is flagged or banned because it doesn't appear in the show page.

</comment><comment><USER5> "No." \--betteridge

made me chuckle.

</comment><comment><USER6> You can click on the user name and look at his comments to see replies.

<comment><USER7> For some but not all.

Odd how for some users the comments don't show up at all.

This is a good resource and it does highlight some chilling effects.

jinglewoof has no comment history even with showdead on, but other users have their comments preserved.</comment></comment>


Getting rid of the OOP mindset (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKYCA3UsmrU&list=WL&index=26&t=0s <comment><AUTHOR> This is a quote from the related blog post ([https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015](https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015)) that I found interesting:

> Starting from a place where the details don't exist inevitably means you > will forget or overlook something that will cause your plans to fail or lead > to suboptimal results. Starting with the details and repeatedly compressing > to arrive at the eventual architecture avoids all the pitfalls of trying to > conceive the architecture ahead of time.

While I disagree that OOP is completely useless, I have found that designing a solution with an OOP mindset can lead to a time consuming and tedious exercise of trying to figure out the best names and interaction patterns for things that might not need to exist to begin with. Sometimes a language constraint or the design of a library you want to use prevents the OOP vision from being realised in the implementation.</comment>


Don't hold back your Ruby programming - <AUTHOR> http://scalabilitysolved.com/dont-hold-back-your-ruby/

<comment><USER2> We have the same reading taste, I've read those Ruby books already, I would also recoment the book "Eloquent Ruby".

I use Sinatra for small and large applications, no regrets, it is awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eloquent Ruby was on my shortlist, it is a good book but I think Practical Object-Orientated Design In Ruby just pushed it out of the top 3. Good to see another Sinatra fan here :)</comment></comment>


Get your rejection on with the Journal of Universal Rejection - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.pacificu.edu/~emmons/JofUR/

<comment><USER2> I guess that this journal does not even send out rejection letters. It if did, you could consider using this Rejection of a Job Rejection letter as a template for a reply:

Rejection of rejection letter

Dear Sir or Madame,

Thank you for your letter of February 9th. After careful consideration, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me a job in your department.

This year I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of candidates, it is impossible for me to accept all refusals.

Despite your department's outstanding qualifications and previous experience in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will assume the position in your department this March. I look forward to seeing you then.

Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely, <you>, Esq.

</comment><comment><USER3> The contrarian in me would want to send him something so stupendously and awesomely good that he'd actually want to publish it but couldn't.

</comment><comment><USER4> if you like academic jokes, check this other one: <http://phdchallenge.org>

</comment><comment><USER5> So _this_ is where I've been submitting my papers to...

</comment><comment><USER6> If you like JofUR then you may also enjoy Rejecta Mathematica: <http://math.rejecta.org/> (Note: it is in fact serious by the way.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I can produce the exact same results from any Journal.</comment>


Evolving an image out of polygons - <AUTHOR> http://screamingduck.com/Article.php?ArticleID=46&Show=ABCE <comment><USER2> A promising direction to go would be to generate gradients using the polygons instead of colors directly and use Poisson blending [1,2] with gradient mixing [e.g. 3] to generate the final image from that. It would lead to many fewer noticeable artifacts at a similar compression ratio.

But I should point out that, while a fun hack, this is not really a viable compression method in practice.

[1] Original paper: [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=703822277846437904...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=7038222778464379047&hl=en&as_sdt=1,48)

[2] Some easier-to-understand slides about it: <http://www.cs.unc.edu/~lazebnik/research/fall08/jia_pan.pdf>

[3] Someone's project implementing it: [http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1950-g/results/proj2/edw...](http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1950-g/results/proj2/edwallac/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Related discussions as we've talked about this stuff before here:

* <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392036>

* <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389727>

* <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503811>

* <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=450886>

(this is still an excellent post however)

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat. After playing Out of this World a long time ago, I was wondering if it was viable to compress video data using polygons annotated image block overlays in the high-frequency/high-error areas. Looks like I might've been onto something, since it seems like polys alone are pretty good at capturing the image.

<comment><USER5> This has been done a very long time ago when the demo group Spaceballs released "9 fingers" on Amiga, where a number of video sequences were reproduced entirely in polygons. There were artifacts but the effect was impressive at that time, when MPEG-1 decompression was impossible on such low- power machines. You can check the effect on youtube. I do not know what tools they used to compress the video into polygons, though.

<comment><USER6> "As far as I remember, we used a S-VHS camcorder and replayed the video with a VHS-player capable of showing the video one frame at the time with a certain degree of "stableness". Then we digitized the frame with a normal digitizer (DigiView?). Custom software were then used to "vectorize" the images. But all this is a little hazy. It's been "a few" years since I called myself Dark Helmet..."

\- [one of the dudes who wrote 9 Fingers]([http://www.youtube.com/comment?lc=9Y2eZp3mPIlNEaQPjdPLHJ3xls...](http://www.youtube.com/comment?lc=9Y2eZp3mPIlNEaQPjdPLHJ3xlsWALEoKr39UZ3pPihQ))

I would not be surprised if the algorithm used to compress the video into polygons was called "tracing it by hand". I'm pretty sure I've read that was the algorithm used for their earlier video-focused demo "State of the Art".

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your answer - very interesting. You must have owned an Amiga if you know this matter in so great details :)

I did not know that for "state of the art" they drew the vectors by hand. Which is basically what Eric Chahi did for Another World back then, using rotoscoping. I am assuming that the technique they used for "9 fingers" is different though. They are WAY more vectors in 9 fingers than in State of the Art, and that would take a huge amount of time to reproduce them on screen. I am pretty sure they found a smarter way to do it (you can guess this from the fact that the video reproduction in vectors is almost perfect in 9 fingers, while in state of the art the animation is sometimes jerky and they use shadows/blur/changing background to hide the imperfections).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would it make sense to include the error image in the format to make the compression lossless? As I see it, if the final fitness is high enough, the error image should be highly compressible?

<comment><USER8> No. The error image just contains "the hard stuff".

<comment><USER9> That's not really true. The residuals of a good lossy compression algorithm ought to look like uncorrelated noise with a smaller dynamic range than the original image, and the second fact (smaller dynamic range) makes them compressible.

<comment><USER10> Dynamic range is not really relevant to compression. Entropy is much more meaningful, and error images typically have a huge amount of entropy.

<comment><USER9> That doesn't make any sense. You've taken an image with arbitrary bytes, and turned it into one where the bytes are tightly centered around a small range of values.That's perfect for Golomb coding (for instance.)

<comment><USER11> No free lunches. For a lossless compressor, (Information theory bits of polygons) + (Information theory bits of remaining error) >= (Information theory bits of original image), where the > represents the possibility that the first two elements aren't perfectly separated by your process or have inescapable overlap.

I specify "information theory bits" because they aren't really what you see in the computer's RAM; they're closer to "post-compression bits". But regardless, no matter how you move the encoding around there is no escaping information theory.

<comment><USER9> Obviously. That's the definition of compression. If the image is well modeled by overlapping polygons + small residuals, the encoding will better approach the uncomputable ideal, and thus, compress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why don't people date their blog posts? (or web pages in general)

<comment><USER13> People do. He didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice. Reminds me of a similar project which I've discussed here: [http://www.puremango.co.uk/2011/03/genetic-algorithm- example...](http://www.puremango.co.uk/2011/03/genetic-algorithm-examples/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I liked how when I read the article, the first picture looks like Hitler out of the corner of my eyes.</comment>


IPv6 Leakage and DNS Hijacking in Commercial VPN Clients [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~hamed/papers/PETS2015VPN.pdf

<comment><USER2> VPN services having their clients use a 3rd party server is completely irresponsible. "We sell a privacy service. Oh, but that said, we send your DNS queries to a company that logs and monetizes them".

Fortunately, there are VPN services that take what they pretend to do a bit more seriously. And who know how to run their own DNS servers.

Some even provide DNSCrypt-enabled DNS servers (public, or for their customers) in order to mitigate leaks (ovpn.to, ipredator.se, and I think cryptostorm).

</comment><comment><USER3> I founded (and still run) a VPN provider, Lokun.is. Just as this paper mentions, most of the providers make very bold claims. I've tried to avoid that, but entering this space without promising (seemingly) nonsensical things means that you won't gather much traction.

And I'm OK with that. I will rather build good tech and be honest with my users, rather than giving them a false sense of security. As I mentioned in another HN comment the other day[0], I have mostly been operating in a niche market in Iceland, circumventing dual pricing for bandwidth on home connections.

VPNs are good for some things, but they are not tools made to give you absolute privacy as some claim. I've been running Tor exit nodes and tried to be as clear as I can about what a VPN is and what it is not.

I have also tried to keep most of my code on GitHub[1] with AGPL as license, and I'm not aware of any other provider that does this. Of course, it won't help with the issues outlined in this paper and I probably should have published server configs as well. But this project is nearing it's end for me, so it's probably too late for that. Although I'm not opposed to cleaning up that repository and publishing on GitHub.

Since starting this project I have watched about a dozen VPN providers start up, make ridiculous claims (this paper mentions some VPN providers claiming to provide better privacy protections than Tor) and often disappear just as quickly as they appeared. This market boomed after Snowden and a lot of the providers will not shy away from outright lying to their customers. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt because maybe they don't fully understand themselves what a VPN is. But thats even worse.

This entire market is weird. A recent example that comes to mind is a certain VPN provider posted on reddit[2] claiming that even themselves cannot see the IP address of their clients. The reddit thread was deleted shortly after I responded, but the claim remains on their blog.

Of course not all providers do this. I have on purpose not been naming the providers I have been talking about. As always, be careful about who you trust and what you trust them with.

I have shared this paper in the capacity of Lokun.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791770)

[1]: [https://github.com/benediktkr/lokun- record](https://github.com/benediktkr/lokun-record)

[2]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN/comments/3aecvi/how_we_keep_you...](https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN/comments/3aecvi/how_we_keep_your_real_ip_address_hidden_even_from/csbvo1h)

<comment><USER4> Hey, it'd be great if the rest of your site (like the FAQ) had english translations as well... Will definitely consider your service when my renewal comes up. Currently using vpn.ac and curious if anyone has any feedback about them since i note they were not in the paper.</comment></comment>


Taking Back the DNS - <AUTHOR> http://www.circleid.com/posts/20100728_taking_back_the_dns/ Every day lots of new names are added to the global DNS, and most of them belong to scammers, spammers, e-criminals, and speculators. The DNS industry has a lot of highly capable and competitive registrars and registries who have made it possible to reserve or create a new name in just seconds, and to create millions of them per day. Domains are cheap, domains are plentiful, and as a result most of them are dreck or worse. <comment><USER2> So this was about a year ago... what's happened since then? I'd never heard of DNS RPZ before now.</comment>


Updated Microsoft Store App Developer Agreement: New Revenue Share - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2019/03/06/updated-microsoft-store-app-developer-agreement-new-revenue-share/ <comment><USER2> Here's how the new payment structure works:

> When Microsoft delivers a customer through other methods (tracked by an > OCID), such as when the customer discovers the app in a Microsoft Store > collection, through Microsoft Store search, or through any other Microsoft- > owned properties, then you will receive 85 percent of the revenue from that > purchase.

> When there is no CID or OCID attributed to a purchase, in the instance of a > web search, you will receive 95 percent revenue.

So this is all about rewarding organic discovery, or paid discovery outside of Microsoft channels.

In other words, by allowing your app to be discovered first through the Microsoft Store search, you're paying Microsoft what amounts to a 10% commission.

And then, regardless of how it was discovered, you're paying 5% to Microsoft just for being on the platform.

It will be interesting to see what effect this has on the ecosystem. On the one hand, it seems like a reasonable shifting of costs. If you rely mostly on Microsoft for acquiring new customers, then Microsoft should get a little bit more of a cut, and if you rely mostly on your own marketing methods, then it should get less. But on the other hand, part of the strength of an ecosystem- based business model is that it's a one-stop shop, and one would think that Microsoft would want to incentivize discovery happening within that ecosystem, not to disincentivize it.

<comment><USER3> So if they are browsing your website, decide they'll probably purchase it, but then later they open up the Microsoft store and search for it there, you lose money you would've had if they'd immediately downloaded it from a link on your website?

<comment><AUTHOR> If they click your link (that includes the `?cid` parameter) while they're on your website, I believe the `cid` value is cookied/stored with their Microsoft Store profile, and will be respected even if they buy later directly from the Store.

If they visit your website but don't click the link, then there's no way for the Store to attribute the sale to your website, so you'll probably be charged full freight (15%).

<comment><USER4> Can you just include an invisible iframe with that link so the cookie gets placed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft is like a competitor in a Three-legged race ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three- legged_race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-legged_race)) except both runners are running in opposite directions.

You have one side that's actively working to make Windows obsolete and another that's flailing about trying to make it relevant somehow.

I'm a bitter ex-Windows Phone user, so my perspective could be colored.

<comment><USER6> I was a WP7&8 user as well as developer and yes the whole story left me a bitter taste, especially at the end. I had fun getting phones for free, participating at MS hackhatons, making friends and of course learning to develop mobile apps but it seems every decisions by MS during after Mango have been against the consumer. Also at the time the store took 30% as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be interested to take the pulse of HN:

When you are looking for a new Windows app, does opening up the store even cross your mind?

I nearly always go to a web search + download first. Or if it's something dev- centric I look at scoop or chocolatey. The Windows Store is far, far behind in my mindshare.

There are a few glimmers of hope though. Python has begun to distribute via the store which is cool. And the Linux distros available are helpful in some edge cases or for a quick dev environment.

<comment><USER8> My issues with the store apps are that most of them act like "apps" and not like "programs/applications". For example, they close on their own with no warning. I tried to use the store version of the Pandora app, but it would be closed when I left it paused for too long. Same with Facebook's Messenger. I don't want that. I want to be able to control when I open and close a program.

<comment><USER9> That doesn't happen to me with the messenger app...

My biggest issue is the amount of unofficial apps that look official. It's a trust issue. If I go to the website I at least know that I'm getting legit software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Desperation move. Microsoft is probably looking at its internal Store numbers and realizing it is a failure.

I guess this is the final attempt. We'll see if it works.

<comment><USER11> They were talking about this change in 2017, and actually said it will come in 2018,so they kind of actually took too long to implement this.

That said, I'd say the Store is not breaking any records. It looks like their reaction to that is to allow other stores on Windows while taking a step back and concentrating on being a good platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can understand Microsoft having an app store when Windows Phone and Windows RT were still around, but now Windows is all x86, so people aren't even installing desktop apps anymore outside of games and work-specific apps (say, R), that wouldn't appear on the app store anyway.

What's the most popular app on Windows Store anyway? I use Windows 10 every day and I've never noticed anything outside of Bejeweled, Candy Crush and other "mobile" type games.

<comment><USER13> A lot of classic x86 Win32 apps are in the Store these days, too. It is a safer way to buy and install such things. (Photoshop, iTunes, Office, etc.)

Windows is continuing to expand to ARM even without phones right now. The HoloLens 2 is reported to be built around a Qualcomm Snapdragon.

Windows 10 ARM tablets/netbooks are a product again, in trying to compete with Chrome OS, and it isn't a repeat of the Windows "RT" tablets because Windows 10 on ARM now supports x86 emulation and a lot of classic 32-bit Win32 applications.

Just because you currently don't have a use for the Store doesn't mean that no one has a use for the Store. It's nice finally having a proper central app installer/updater without every application developer installing their own baroque updater and running it on every Windows startup. Getting rid of the Apple Updater alone by installing iTunes from the Windows Store is such a relief.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is an amazing deal for Win devs and one of many needed efforts if MS intends for the Microsoft Store to remain the number one platform for software downloads on Windows.

Currently I'm seeing much more dev excitement for platforms like Electron where you can slap a wrapper around your existing web tech but damn would I love to see a renaissance for native Windows apps. I feel like Microsoft botched native Windows dev by having many and competing eco systems, some which feel incredibly outdated. It says a lot when even they prefer Electron for stuff like Visual Studio Code.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice move! I hope that Google & Apple will reduce their 30% tax someday..

<comment><USER16> I think this system would work well for game platforms too, such as Steam. A big point of contention for Steam is, how much the platform does for advertising your game. By having two separate taxes depending on how the game was found, you can have the best of both worlds. If you do your own brand building and advertising, then those sales get a better cut, while the platform can also get their cut for the advertising they do.

This also aligns the incentives on what the platforms advertises, to some extent.

<comment><USER17> Steam already relinquishes their cut if the game is bought via a third party retailer. It costs nothing to generate or activate Steam keys outside the Steam store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried adding a web app to the store. Its extremely complicated compared to adding a hosted web app to chrome, where you just need an app manifest. For the windows store you need a bunch of xml files and it seems you must use their IDE. I want to build the package manually via command line so I can understand each step and then automate it.

</comment><comment><USER19> >The new fee structure excludes all games and any purchases on Xbox consoles.

Interesting considering the rise of Epic Store

</comment><comment><USER20> The Microsoft App Store is a complete graveyard so it hardly matters what they do or don't do with it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I feel like given the circumstances, Microsoft should probably make distribution free and collect no revenue, at least until the platform becomes popular.

There are costs to targeting the Windows platform, especially if you're doing things their new preferred way (UWP). Primarily a slow, difficult to work with development kit. Lots of mysterious crashes that you can't do much about, lots of leaky abstractions over COM.

If anything, Microsoft should be paying developers to target their store. I do personally prefer modern apps and the experience of the store, I just know not to reach for it first. As a customer I would appreciate more apps, they need to figure out a way to make the platform more appealing for developers.

<comment><USER22> They've attempted to do that before: [https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4124548/microsoft- paying-...](https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4124548/microsoft-paying- developers-cash-for-windows-apps)

All that lead to was a bunch of similar looking apps of questionable quality flooding the store.

<comment><USER23> That was absolutely retarded. I remember they went around universities handing out Lumia 925 mobiles to anybody who uploaded a few apps... imagine the quality of the apps.

If only they had spent that money on actually making the OS better. Imagine that.

<comment><USER24> > If only they had spent that money on actually making the OS better. Imagine > that.

What do you think they were trying to do? Apps are what make an OS good. Even if they caused 10,000 trash apps to be created and only 100 good ones, that's still 100 more good apps than they had before.

<comment><USER23> Not having a new toolkit every version would've been good. Allowing users of WP 7.* to update to 8, good too. Allowing all users of 8.1 to update to 10.

Also their own apps were poor. I remember Skype for WP 8 was absolutely unusable. MS is composed of many teams and many of them clearly didn't give a shit about WP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What was Microsoft's cut before?

<comment><AUTHOR> 30% on one-off purchases of apps and IAPs, and 15% of subscriptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Will this kill Steam? I suspect that's their main adversary as in mobile space they are non-existing, yet they can't dominate gaming space on PC.

<comment><USER5> Games are still 30%, so no.

Apparently Microsoft believes that there is demand for a Windows Store and its apps, but games on the Windows Store are so successful that they don't need the cut.

I would not have thought that possible, but I don't have access to Microsoft's business metrics.

<comment><USER27> I thought the same thing, but there's a rumor suggesting Microsoft may make Xbox One games available on Windows via the Windows Store. It seems a bit far fetched to me, but not impossible. If true, they might be right about not needing to cut it and still be able to threaten Steam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They don't _quite_ require that you log into your desktop with an online account to use the store, but the route around this is non-obvious.

</comment><comment><USER29> That's cool... assuming you can get in:

[https://getpolarized.io/2019/02/28/dear-app-stores-dont- bloc...](https://getpolarized.io/2019/02/28/dear-app-stores-dont-block-apps- lead-with-the-carrot.html)

I found out that our app was crushed after 2 weeks of development.

Basically, they won't let us in because we use Electron.

Electron is developed in part (primarily) due to Github which they now own.

TWO WEEKS I spent porting to the MS App Store only to have them just crush us ...

It's great that I can make 95% of zero...

But seriously. If anyone from Microsoft is listening - please unblock us ;)

I'm considering submitting this as a PWA but it's missing a lot of features as a PWA.

<comment><USER30> Hi, I'm a Microsoft employee and own the certification for apps. Electron is allowed. I checked with my team it. The failure is related to browsing capabilities which have to comply with 10.2.1.

<comment><USER31> No vested interest in this whatsoever - just wanted to let you know that it's cool you picked this up on HN, followed it up internally and responded publicly to clarify the situation.

That kind of transparency really helps build confidence in Microsoft Store as a platform. It's important to show that the team is accessible (and, frankly, human). It also helps to correct misleading narratives (e.g. "MS Store doesn't Electron apps").

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 If only they did this while Windows Phone was still a thing, maybe (and a big MAYBE) it would have fared better in terms of developer engagement compared to iOS and Android.

</comment><comment><USER32> It is not surprising that in terms of develop engagement, Microsoft is at a huge disadvantage. They need some differentiation to attract developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's part of it. It's also a more open platform, so they have to compete with, say, Stripe or Digital River etc. on their commission percentages to get the big Windows software titles on board.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is a smart move that will drive more traffic to the Windows Store. They should have done this ages ago!

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm surprised it isn't 100% – it should have been so from the outset.

It's not like Microsoft really needs the revenue from the half-dozen apps available in their store right now. What they need is _momentum_.

If I were in charge of making this decision I would pull the levers on every incentive I can give developers, cause God knows most people don't even remember the MS Store exists...

<comment><USER35> Compared to the massive cut Apple takes on their app stores Microsoft's revenue split seems pretty generous.

I downvoted your comment because you aren't being intellectually honest to suggest it makes sense for them to provide payment processing, update management and DRM for free to app developers when at the very least they'd be losing big on the credit card processing side. So your comment reads as an elitist jab against Microsoft and not actual constructive criticism.

<comment><USER34> I am being intellectually honest. Users make the platform. Microsoft should recognize they are dead last in this race and bite the bullet to provide developers with a clear incentive to develop for the MS store.

Apple takes the massive cut they do in their app store because developers can't really afford not to pay for that level of access to users.

One day when (IF!) Microsoft's store becomes relevant like that, they can think about what share they're entitled to

Finally, but also importantly, I don't know where in God's green world you got "elitism" from... which is pretty rich coming from someone calling my comment intellectually dishonest and "not actual constructive criticism".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you use SSH keys at work? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! Do you login to SSH servers regularly at work? If so, what are you using to manage authentication?<p>- Teleport - ScaleFT - Raw SSH Keys + authorized_keys file - Something else?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> I chose to build an OpenLDAP cluster with public keys assigned to user accounts as attributes. It's moderately complicated (since you have to extend the standard schema, set up accurate access controls and alter SSHD on the clients to retrieve the public keys from LDAP instead of locally), however it means the entire stack is under my control and not dependent on an internet connection or a third-party provider. It means I can use the same LDAP auth system I already have set up to manage central auth.

Definitely archaic in the era of Teleport (I looked at it, but decided against giving a third party control over my auth system), but it's pretty reliable and works well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting thanks! How do you get your engineer's public keys uploaded to the ldap server? Do they generate keys themselves and upload to some portal?

Also what makes you distrust teleport -- is it just third party code? I think you can (or have to) self host it but maybe that's not true for enterprise.

<comment><USER2> There's a neat Python application, ssh_ldap_pubkey, that not only retrieves the user's pubkeys (e.g. can be called by SSH) but also allows users to manipulate them (add/delete). So end users generate the keys and push them to the LDAP cluster themselves. The backend servers then validate SSH keys against the LDAP servers instead of locally, so it's a perfectly logical extension of existing LDAP functionality.

It's not specifically Teleport I distrust, it's most cloud-based software due to its often-woeful attention to security. Also, if we suffer a major internet outage and my systems lose connection, it shouldn't stop me SSH'ing into them. So long as my LDAP machines, on the same LAN, are up, I can get in.

I also dislike paying for something we could build ourselves for little-to- moderate effort :)</comment></comment></comment>


CashRegister in PyQt5 with barcode logon and 32 programmable buttons - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Sales <comment><USER2> Programmer who also works in retail, uh no, this layout highlights all the wrong things. The list of items is half the screen, my current system has it at about 1/4 and buttons are enormous, very easy to use and rarely ever miss a button or hit the wrong one, this looks like that will happen all the time. Also we have a lot of colour in buttons that relate to use (payment buttons red, department buttons green, account buttons yellow), this has grey and grey and grey. It might work but I pity anyone using this system. I think with some more UI considerations for the actual use cases (what do register users need the item barcode for? I might enter it but once the item name pops up I don't need it taking up my screen) this could get good. I also don't need whitespace between buttons, have them as big as you can.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should not compare this with a commercial program, I'am a hobbyist and not a professional. I think it's a good effort for an open source product.

<comment><USER3> He is still giving you constructive feedback that you can use to improve your product. Even if it's just a hobby. I assume that is why you posted it here?

If I my add something as well. Use a local git program to commit and add files instead of using drag 'n drop from the website. Add commit massages with a short description of what you changed.

I would also remove all the logos in the program.

Keep at it :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response. In the installation directory is a changelog.txt in which all the changes and additions in the program are documented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of this DOS PoS freeware that's been around for a while:

[http://keyhut.com/pos.htm](http://keyhut.com/pos.htm)

[http://keyhut.com/posphoto.htm](http://keyhut.com/posphoto.htm)

If it's run on straight DOS then there's no need for OS updates, no worries about viruses, no telemetry yada yada :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> The guy who made this also made a desktop gui ERP application to teach himself python (or programing general, I forget). He is an inspiration.

Keep doing what you are doing Dirk.

[https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Pandora](https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Pandora)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your inspiring comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How this compares to commercial software solutions? Seems very interesting.

<comment><USER7> Poorly. I can't imagine using this in a fast-paced retail environment.

<comment><USER8> Any specific reasons why you think it would compare poorly to other commercial applications. I have tried the ones at Walmart and they are sometimes very slow to respond .

<comment><USER9> To be fair, some commercial systems suck on UX too, but some of them are much better than this.

If you compare it to eposnow[0] for instance, and see the adoption of large clear buttons.

The real differences, as I see it, between this and commercial systems are

1) most commercial tills are clients that poll a server that allows central management of stock, prices, and extraction of sales data by api

2) commercial tills can integrate with card machines, so the price comes up on the machine automatically, and successful payments are registered on the till. In a busy store this stops under/over errors.

The world needs a decent, hackable, open source till, because there are many situations where you need small but important extra features. Without the above I would say appeal is going to be limited, but good luck to the author

[0]:[https://www.eposnow.com/uk](https://www.eposnow.com/uk)

Edit:formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> It's easy to put this on a server with clients pos. For a server database system postgreSQL is used.

<comment><USER9> It might be worth clearing that up in the docs then. I missed it

<comment><AUTHOR> In my past i have developed client server applications. Long time agoo before relational databases appear. In the time of dbii and clipper (compiler and linker) But i'am retired now and i have not a network in my home to apply with ip numbers for testing. Thats the simple reason that i did not explain it in my documentation. But anyone will be my guest and fork it and work on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Screenshot [https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Sales/blob/master/Cashregis...](https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Sales/blob/master/Cashregister.png) Documentation [https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Sales/blob/master/Installat...](https://github.com/DirkJanJansen/Sales/blob/master/Installation/Sales_CashRegister.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 2020-06-26 Added 5 changeable buttongroups with each 39 programmable buttons. Bigger coloured buttons and removed logos from front end.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Changed to 40 bigger buttons. Layout changed and applied some colors. With thanks to Phillipharryt for his constructive comments. Thanks buddy!

</comment><comment><USER10> Asking out of curiosity: why did you choose Riverbank's python binding instead of Qt's?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know the difference. I learned myself python, Pyqt5 and postgreSQL in a relative short period, mostly by examples and documentation online. Got a little knowledge from my past by learning and programming in Clipper and QBasic for my last company, long time agoo (1997-2002). Now i am retired and i like to program in python (My age is 75)

<comment><USER10> Gotcha. I'm a commercial Qt developer and starting to think about Python being a first-class language in my ecosystem. But I've learned that the more robust binding, PyQt, is a GPL/Commercial offering separate from the Qt licensing.

Qt for Python is the "offical Qt" binding but it's not as robust or even supported on some platforms like embedded. It's a bit frustrating.

Still, nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> I have looked at C++. But development in Python is fast and you get more ideas. So for development and testing i should prefere Python and then i should program it in C++ for commercial use. I saw earlier in my former business, that interpreters were used for big programs. That way you can test fast, for you can see your errors fast.

<comment><USER10> Totally agree. It's even more useful in a cross-compiled development environment.

Typically I'm developing in Qt/C++ on a host and then using a custom crosstool chain to recompile for the target. The entire cycle isn't that bad, but it's not instantaneous. Using Python has radically sped up some parts of what I'm doing on the target hardware.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NET Memory model and the volatile keyword (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://igoro.com/archive/volatile-keyword-in-c-memory-model-explained/ <comment><USER2> So from I'm understanding here, the volatile keyword makes sure that the code always has the latest value when it is read by a thread. Otherwise, you might get a cached value.

A lock, on the other hand, does the same thing, but goes further in preventing other threads from changing the value while the lock is in place.

So the volatile keyword seems to be great for read-only operations on data shared between threads, but won't prevent a race condition if the same code that is reading the data is also updating the value. A lock would be necessary for that.

Interesting. I knew about volatile in C++, but I wasn't aware that C# had a volatile as well.

<comment><USER3> More interestingly is the C# Interlocked class for some of that sweet sweet lock free operations.</comment></comment>


Cortana is really bad - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@johndavidback/cortana-is-really-really-bad-6ca96733ef4d <comment><USER3> Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked.

I cannot even begin to count how many times I've tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn't find it.

I _never_ want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I'll do it in Chrome's address bar. When I type "notepad" I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web!

Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?

<comment><USER4> See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comforting to know everyone is having similar problems ... though still just as bewildering as to why it's happening in the first place.

It's weird that there are no great "magic search" tools on any desktop environment I've used. Windows 7 is close, but doesn't include any fancy results (can't have it do quick math, etc). Mac's Spotlight gets everything right, except it won't open a new window if I type, say, "firefox". It'll just pull up a window I already have open (no way to change that behavior without weird hacks). Unity's gets confused and breaks too often. Cinnamon's sorts results alphabetically. Gnome's is fairly close to ideal, though it forgets launch history too quickly (if I type "calc" and select LibreOffice's Calc just _once_ it'll start showing that first, instead of Calculator which I want 95% of the time when typing "calc").

<comment><USER5> There IS a magic search tool, I've been using it for years.

[https://everything.en.softonic.com/](https://everything.en.softonic.com/)

"Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.

<comment><USER6> Despite your glowing review, I cannot bring myself to download and install _anything_ from sites like these. I'm sure it's a great program.

<comment><USER7> Everything's site is voidtools.com

[https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/](https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > ___The Product Manager in charge of this feature should be immediately > fired._ __

I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point. I use a little hyperbole to emphasize the fact that a product with an incredible global reach should default to well-planned and executed features, particularly if they are sprung upon you with desktop alerts. Hate it or not, someone did a very, very bad job here. Most likely many someones.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you that it should be implemented better, though I've honestly come to expect this from Windows.

It's just a bit extreme considering you submitted it to HN, where the people directly involved actually have a chance of seeing it.

<comment><USER9> I can see why he did it. These aren't beginners. They're experienced developers and managers. If you work at one of the top 5 tech companies in the world on a product most of the computing world uses then maybe this shouldn't be acceptable.

Why is it that this is acceptable for Microsoft to publish? It's not and what makes it worse is that it often gets abandoned. If they had a history going back and finishing this or making it better I'd give them a pass, but I doubt without something bordering vitriolic appearing on HN/Medium no one will care.

I think that's the real complaint. Doesn't anyone care about the experience anymore? I feel like it's only Apple who both cares and has executed a strong long term plan for this. I opened my iPhone X and that thing worked. I actually love all the little things they added. It is hard to do that, but it's these little things which make the product special or down-right frustrating when they don't.

<comment><USER10> If the current MacBook Pro is any indication, I'm not sure how much Apple cares about experience, either. I'm still trying to figure out who that machine is made for: Horrible keyboard, gimmicky Touch Bar, worse battery life than the previous generation, no ports relevant to existing devices (including Apple's own flagship smartphone)... I don't think Apple can be accused of sweating the details anymore, either.

<comment><USER9> Very true, but Apple is consumer focused, vs Microsoft is enterprise focused, and so I think we still have a better chance for Apple to react to this than Microsoft would have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The whole experience of the start search / cortana / mix is horrible.

It can't even fuzzy search. Type "view event" and it brings up "view event logs", if you type "view events" it instead searches bing, in edge, for "view events".

Edge isn't even my default browser. Bing isn't my default search engine, and I didn't want to browse the web.

Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from "here's the program you want to run" to popping up it's search engine.

<comment><USER12> Back when I was at MSN everything become oriented at delivering Bing searches at all costs, so whoever did this probably boosted their stats, got a 4.5 on their review, and now nobody dares improving the behaviour lest they have to justify the millions of lost Bing queries per day.

<comment><USER13> I bought Windows 10 this year and if this is the sort of behavior I should expect from a Win OS these days then I'll probably just go to linux or even back to OSX.

<comment><USER14> You should expect much worse! (and be careful investing in the Apple ecosystem either, because I doubt they have the restraint to avoid doing just as bad on the desktop)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Alright, I'm glad this is brought up. I am back on Windows 10 after being on OSX for years. For the most part its fine, but it does a lot of things that I just plain don't understand. I have no idea how to configure the little metro page to my liking (like, I know how to remove stuff, but how do I make it useful?). Why does it even exist?

I can see Microsoft put _a lot_ of work into making Win10 user friendly, but it seems like their designers don't understand their users or something. OSX has some bizarre interactions as well (like Finder, wtf is happening there), but for the most part it just works.

I guess I don't really know what I want my operating system to _do_ precisely. I want it to be smooth, I want it to open programs quickly, I want it to move files around without hassle, and I want it to be secure while also be easily extensible. Unfortunately there's a lot of different interpretations of what those things should be. I can appreciate that making a world class operating system on top of decades of legacy code is difficult, but I also need to say: WTF is half of this shit?

Windows doesn't even come with a simple key reassignment. I had to download SharpKeys to set Caps Lock as Ctrl. That sort of thing just comes with OSX.

<comment><USER15> Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. At this point I'm more annoyed with the software that come pre-installed on operating systems than what they don't have. I can always download whatever apps I want.

But I totally agree that designers don't understand their users. I think there's a sense that Windows has to be "cool" like Android and iOS rather than just "useful".

<comment><USER16> > Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. I > can always download whatever apps I want.

I'd agree that the OS shouldn't come pre-installed with major applications. Those are things that I've invested time and effort to learn and where I have a definite preference on what I want to download.

But to having to research little things like key reassignment apps becomes a real chore. Then you have to download and install it, make sure it's not malware, and if you use multiple machines, repeat those steps.

The older versions of the iPhone and the iPad didn't come with a calculator. I don't know if current versions now include a calculator, but having to test a dozen different garbage calculators out of 1000 mind-numbing choices in the app store was a real pain in the neck. Any simple ad-free calculator included in iOS would have been OK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How can I disable Cortana?

I've tried and failed. I don't know why it is necessary an auxiliar app just to index my executables just to be able to type a few letters and start them quickly.

<comment><USER18> The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.

<comment><USER19> > The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.

Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I just have a web browser open. Windows, you don't need to do everything at this very moment.

Why can't Windows Update be as simple as this? [https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d...](https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d7e-9dc6-821074570be3/49f58bac6fcc3e9f2d671a739c0f1e00/fedora2220052915.png) [https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png](https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png)

Instead what I get (even with Windows 7) is a spinning wheel that says "Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes...". Happens every time I want to use Windows (which is more of a reason to stay in the Linux partition tbh)

<comment><USER20> > Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the > hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM.

I have 64 GB of RAM, and even tried turning off the swap. Still see that HDD light blinking. I don't know what is going on.

<comment><USER21> Its gathering telemetry, running live traces on your software, gathering statistics, everything gets packaged and uploaded to the mothership regularly

<comment><USER19> > Its gathering telemetry, running live traces on your software, gathering > statistics, everything gets packaged and uploaded to the mothership > regularly

but GP has 64 GB(!!) of memory. They don't need to write the information to disk. They could just ship the data from the memory straight back to the mothership, no? I mean Office 365 has a heartbeat and nobody complains about the near constant network chatter. It just makes Microsoft look insidious (is that the right word?) that they're collecting all this data.

The fact that gaming mode [xbox on youtube] exists makes me think that Windows is driving with one hand tied behind its back when not in game mode. Why would they do this?

[xbox on youtube] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc- ka42BMls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc-ka42BMls)

<comment><USER21> but what if you crash? precious personal data gets lost, have to flush everything to HDD immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really wish Microsoft wouldn't bloat Windows with all these useless features. They're still acting like they are building a mobile OS. Windows 10 would be fantastic OS if it wasn't for all these misguided attempts to act like iOS and Android.

<comment><USER22> They made a mistake starting with Windows 8, I'm guessing they were worried about the iPad eating into PC sales. Well it turned out that that didn't really happen but we are stuck with the tabletisation of Windows anyway.

I've been trying a Surface but it's going back because it isn't good at being a tablet nor laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of those new gadget commercials that show existing issues being super difficult when they really are not. You were probably in a terrible mood when you wrote this which makes it much worse than it is. It could try to parse the tracking id for sure and you probably have never dealt with tracking packages before through an API but they give you not that much info most of the time, just like "arrived at shipping location" or "on route to destination" type messages with some times, totally depends on when the tracking is sent out. This is just a very specific use case that isn't so user friendly anyway but sure they could do it better but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary.

<comment><USER24> >but the package id won't get you the name of the package in a human readable format so nickname is necessary.

Google can figure it out. I order something, i get cards in Google Now telling me exactly what i ordered and its shipping status, without any interaction on my part. It just happens.

If microsoft can't figure out how to do this, fine. But if they're going to pop up notifications saying "hey, i can track packages for you", they should be at least sort of on par with the competition.

<comment><USER23> Right, isn't that because they are integrated? If you are buying from the google store that has all the info, makes sense. Were you buying from a microsoft store as well? Just wondering because I agree if that is the case, otherwise, there is no integration there. But cool that google has it. I was under the impression is was just some random feature to track a package, my bad if so.

<comment><USER25> No. If I buy a package from Amazon and the tracking information goes to my gmail account, Google Now cards will automatically show my tracking numbers with links to view full tracking information.

<comment><USER26> And you wouldn't expect Windows to sneakily read your Gmail account emails.

What if you buy a package from Amazon and the tracking info goes to your outlook.com email? That'd be a fair comparison here. (maybe simply forwarding the email from Gmail to the outlook.com email associated with your Windows account would be sufficient?)

<comment><USER27> He says he's given Microsoft access to his inbox

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> One piece that's missing from this post is -- what did the email containing the tracking number look like?

GMail, for example, only parses out package numbers if the retailer sends schema.org markup for it. ([https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-...](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel- delivery))

</comment><comment><USER29> The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put 'track order' in the subject with a little button to click. This goes to the URL provided in the email, not to some magical service that magically determines if that tracking number came from UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, China Post, or whatever. Due to how couriers merge and get acquired you don't even have consistent tracking numbers for a given courier. So it is much better for the customer to not be guessing this stuff with Cortana.

Not everyone uses gmail. But, in the UK, for ecommerce, you can fully expect more than 50% of the order emails to be gmail addresses. Therefore the xml snippets approach is worth doing.

[https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/](https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/)

<comment><USER30> This is also present on outlook. I wonder why Cortana can't just use that same logic. I guess they had to justify their existence by coding up the same thing again.

<comment><USER31> Cortana does use the same logic for automatically finding the tracking information, that has nothing to do with anything in the article though, which is about the UX for _manually_ entering the tracking information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is just old school Microsoft engineering. Add a feature bullet point to the package, don't worry about how it's integrated or if it works. It's the same with most anything from them you dig in to.

</comment><comment><USER33> As much fun as it is to bash Microsoft and Windows (although, let's face it, Windows has been so much better in the last few releases), I personally think Microsoft, its engineers, as well as its PM deserve (some?) empathy rather than anger for this.

I mean, I can almost imagine how this thing happens. Someone somewhere sometime said, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if xyz?" Someone else replied with "oh yeah, and it's not THAT hard!" And the PM is probably like "well, low risk, too, so whatever you wish."

Then, the feature is thrown together, with or without explicit planning. It probably attracts way higher attention than expected, because either it is hooked into mechanism intended for real important stuff or it can be demoed so nicely (imagine: if you are the developer doing demoing, you probably have the damned tracking number ready for copy and paste). It does not support all operations, because no one looks at it twice after some brief "yo, so cool" moment.

The annoyance may or may not have a bug associated with it somewhere. But let's be realistic. If you are a PM, which one would you choose: "some nobody- care feature is not easy to use" or "if you stand on 1 leg, jump 3 times, press the code of Mordor, Windows seg faults itself". The 1st one is vague and, let's be frank, not that big of a deal. The 2nd one is a big deal: data loss and all manners of unspeakable conditions may break loose. So, any PM would do the 2nd bug first.

I mean, seriously, _how_ would you ensure this tiny corner (which a comment below actually says, "I did not realize it exist") is "easy to use"? No automation tests can catch it. Demoing (again, the developers know how to use it and probably come prepared) won't catch it. A/B testing probably won't even get to it. Its bugs (except if that bugs involving Start menu crashing down) probably have priority between "when I have better work-life balance" and "when the machine is capable of fixing its own issues."

\--

I will agree that all of these don't justify for a shitty experience. Shitty experiences, no matter how small, are shitty. But then, even LaTeX, perfected as it is, annoys me once in a while. Even Emacs, glorious as it is, has "I swear I will switch to Eclipse" moments. And Scheme has about 70 different ways of doing OO programming, none of which really works for my little case.

So, maybe a bit more love/understanding? It probably helps your (i.e. the users') blood pressure anyway.

<comment><USER34> I don't think they deserve empathy at all. If they can't implement the feature to the level of being usable they should just cut the feature instead of annoying the user.

So much software development today is about getting story points on a velocity chart and claiming that features have been delivered even if the feature is actually useless. A Minimum Viable Product should actually be viable.

<comment><USER35> So, let's fail Spotlight on iOS too, because searching for tdbank never works for me to bring up the TD Bank app. Seems like such a simple thing, but nope. Can't forget that bloody space. And that seems like a bigger failure than anything the article was talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I try to use Cortana to control my Xbox One sometimes. Saying "Hey Cortana, pause" is really handy if you're in the middle of watching Netflix, and you get a phone call, or some other life event happens. Or it would be, if Cortana didn't take 15-20 seconds to think about it, and only work about 75% of the time, despite having an 8 core processor and a huge array of sensors.

</comment><comment><USER37> Removing cortana was the first thing that I did when I installed windows 10. However even the basic search is incredibly bad. It took months before it even considered searching in Downloads folder (patch fixed it I guess?). And portable apps? Yea, gl with that.

But my main problem with searching is when I search for settings and windows apps. That's just pure trash. There're no aliases so if you don't know exactly how MS named the functionality you're fucked. And if you know the english word for it, it doesn't show up either. And the worst thing: if you KNEW how it used to be called but not the current translation you're also fucked. E.g. in english you search for screen saver. In czech it used to be "Spořič obrazovky" but now it's "Šetřič obrazovky". (btw neither of these even show up in the creators update, but in falls they fixed it and "Šetřič obrazovky" will return correct result).

Another thing that bothers me with search is diacritics, you have to use it if you want to find anything that has it. And gl with that when using english keyboard layout.

It's increadibly frustrating to use and I've mostly given up on it and use powershell whenever I can. That doesn't fix my problems with diacritics when searching documents though.

</comment><comment><USER38> Doing anything that approaches human interaction levels is hard. As soon as you make something that responds to language, or looks like a humanoid robot people will automatically expect it to work at the perceived level (i.e. like a human).

That means users will get frustrated quickly if it misunderstands or or makes other mistakes. It completely breaks the interaction. To add on top of it, it makes the human feel stupid having to enunciate or repeat the same thing over and over. If they'd would be typing into a search box for search application, they'd be fine with it not working because it's just a stupid program. As soon as the program is an "AI" or an "assistance" it better be darn good, or it will make users very angry and frustrated.

There is also some little part of the human brain that says "oh you think you can act like a human, let's how you respond to this", so they will deliberately mess with it or provide it with confusing input just to see what would happen. (I saw customers do it, they were already frustrated because of a different reason, but used the speech interaction API to really demonstrate how broken the product is). Can't blame them, it was broken, but it was a useful less on to learn.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've been very disappointed with Cortana. On numerous occasions it has been faster to grab my Macbook out of my backpack. Why is Spotlight able to find a file on my Windows desktop's network share that Cortana would not find?

And to top it off Spotlight shows me accurate previews of Excel and Word documents. But Cortana, another Microsoft product, does not. Perhaps that's a compliment to the team that makes Office for Mac.

<comment><USER40> Actually, AFAIK, Apple uses the Pages rendering system for that? I know Quick Look and Preview are also able to view, but not edit, .doc and .docx files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's got nothing on "Bixby," Samsung's me-too entrant into the world of largely useless voice assistants.

</comment><comment><USER42> "People get worked up as hell and I frankly just want to have fun with my devices."

How is this entire post anything but "getting worked up as hell"? Seems to me to be a case of "when other people complain, they're whiny, but when _I_ get annoyed, heads must roll!".

</comment><comment><USER43> This is most user journeys with MSFT products recently.

</comment><comment><USER44> That entire menu makes me serious question whether anyone at MS actually uses Win 10.

No MS I don't feeling spending half an hour figuring out what the hell is going on in that UX. That pretty much says it all about how intuitive it is dear designer...

</comment><comment><USER45> Interesting that elongated micro-whines have now turned into long-form blog posts.

To be honest all of these smart digital assistants have failed me as of late. I used to be able to just text-to-speech searches straight to Google and it did what I wanted to for the most part. Now when I try just any type of reasonable query (I think so at least) Alexa or Google Assistant usually comes back with "Sorry I don't know how to do that" which is frustrating.

Reminds me of the VR hype. Maybe I should just wait for 10 years and this stuff will finally be usable.

</comment><comment><USER46> The speech recognition of Cortana was pretty excellent - which is what the guys at Microsoft Research care about. The rest just seems to have got messed up in politics.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have really enjoyed the comments here. I have observed that among my acquaintances Cortana can be either _really_ helpful or _really_ not helpful but I don't see a lot of in between sort of "good for this, but not this" sorts of reviews.

From the perspective of a dialog system I see it as a bunch of assumptions that are made prior to engaging in the dialog. And given that hypothesis I have looked at people interactions to see how people deal with this sort of 'communication mismatch' and how they detect it.

Certainly there are repeated asks of the same question slightly rephrased as an indicator of a mismatch, but there is also a general resistance to interacting. So with people if someone gets frustrated talking with you and stops, I've seen people use that as a signal to seek out an understanding of where the mismatch is, but in computer dialoging systems that check, and subsequent re-framing is completely missing.

The other thing I've observed is that often a dialog system seems to try to be 'human' in its interaction but because it is a computer the user communicates to it like a 'user' not like a human. Adding what might be relevant search terms to the utterance as an example. For example, I listened as a person pitched to Siri "I want pizza" and was frustrated at the response ("This is what I've found on the web about Pizza") And added "I want Dominos Pizza" (additional search term, vendor name). But Siri appeared stuck on being unable to parse an acceptable language target for 'I want'.

Changing that to "Call dominos" or "Where is the nearest Dominos" works well because it as a pre-built in answer action (Telephone call, map directions).

All of this the "level 4" version of autonomous conversations where the computer can navigate what it is you are saying and what you expect as a response.

</comment><comment><USER48> Seriously. I refuse to use Cortana on my Xbox One and went back to the native "Xbox" commands. The latency of cortana was atrocious and usually after all that would either reask the question or not do what Xbox would. Microsoft is really good at taking a good thing (Xbox) and making it more bloated and slower.

<comment><USER49> Wait, you can go back to native 'xbox' commands?

Oh wow, you can! [https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey- cortana-...](https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey-cortana-and- use-xbox-voice-commands-on-your-xbox-one/)

Thanks, had no idea - assumed that when MS shipped that update the old kinect voice recognition just went away. "Xbox, turn off" and "Xbox, record that" were the two most used voice commands in our house, but "Hey cortana" never seems to respond when you call her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Jeez, this guy gets really angry and swears for pages and pages over a stupid little feature he doens't like.

</comment><comment><USER51> Funny how MSFT used Cortana, sure she is a popular character, but she falls very far away from good to deadly to us. She ends up going rampant and turns other AIs against us. Not the most forward thinking, given where they are taking the character.

</comment><comment><USER52> The sad thing is that the Windows 7 start menu wasn't any better. This is not a regression, just some sort of following the tradition.

I use an old, discontinued app called Executor that I configure manually. It's not a whole lot better in terms of matching, but, because it can be configured, it is much better in terms of getting it to do what I want. It definitely can't track your packages, though.

[http://www.executor.dk/](http://www.executor.dk/)

<comment><USER53> The Windows 8 start menu was fantastic however.

Just start typing (like you're supposed to do now), but it would search only programs and settings pages, lightning fast. Then Cortana came and it tried to read your mind and search the internet and it all went to shit again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Well, the Projected Delivery Date is 25th November 2017.

How do I know? Took the number and looked it up at ups.

I think, I'm not sure, but I think, if ups delivers on time. Cortana will give you a message, stating the package will arive tomorrow right on 24th of November. Just one day before.

Maybe John David Back will give us an update, when his package arrived.

BTW delivery times in the US are terrible compared to Germany. Next Day delivery is the state of art. Germany is also much smaller in comparison.

</comment><comment><USER55> It will be a while before these digital assistants work properly. None of them work in a way that anyone can possibly call "intelligent". If I was feeling charitable then I'd describe them as merely intrusive.

When these things do finally get their act together, we will all live in a world that is different from the one we live in now. I hope it is a better one.

</comment><comment><USER56> I just use Everything to search. It's great.

</comment><comment><USER57> It is the bing of personal digital assistants...

</comment><comment><USER58> If it's worse than Siri that is _bad_.

I pulled my hair out one day after telling Siri a half dozen times to "remind me about [an appointment] in two weeks"

It kept making an immediate reminder that said "appointment into weeks" - <USER2> weeks??? When would someone even say that unless they were saying something like "Days turn into weeks"???

</comment><comment><USER59> So, anyone know how does it work? I mean, the "tracking a package in Cortana". I'm intrigued now.

<comment><USER60> It usually just reads your email and shows you the packages based on that. I've never had any problems with it.

<comment><USER61> Yeah - it is pretty good at finding packages in my email that follow conventional tracking numbers. I have personally experienced the problems mentioned in the link when trying to add them manually though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> If I type "lync", the default option is to run Skype for Business (Lync's successor).

If I type "skype" the default option is to install Skype for Business, even though I already have it installed.

It is very unintuitive. It is as bad as the search in Jira/Confluence, and that's saying something.

</comment><comment><USER63> Why would you paste in a URL when trying to track a package and not just the tracking number?

I mean if you have the URL just go to the URL and track your package.

I'm pretty sure Cortana was designed as a human interface and not a web browser...

</comment><comment><USER64> Have eclipse neon and eclipse oxygen installed

Slowly type out eclipse in search bar

Watch it randomly switch between the two at each character

Randomly as in, sometimes it suggests oxygen on ecl and sometimes it suggests neon on ecl

</comment><comment><USER65> OP: Is that your actual tracking number? If so, I'd blur it - it may leak your info

</comment><comment><USER66> it's the straw that broke the camel's back for me and windows as a desktop os. hello again fedora :)

</comment><comment><USER67> Really really bad

</comment><comment><USER68> And yet Cortana is still better than Siri.

<comment><USER69> Not even close.

<comment><USER68> > Not even close.

"Searching the web for 'Knot every clothes'..."</comment></comment></comment>


NASA skips Titan Explorer to go back to Mars in 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/17195-nasa-mars-landing-mission-2016-launch.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I was really rooting for this project:

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

Robotic boat over liquid sounds far more interesting with life potential?

Maybe a few more years.

<comment><USER2> From what I've read, this was the last opportunity for the Titan mission until 2040.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh that's horrible then, sigh.

Well hopefully the public and funding won't get bored with Mars.</comment></comment></comment>