Tell HN: Another PayPal Farce - Refunds my money to customer - <AUTHOR>

I run an Australian Calling Card website on the side which sells roughly A$800 in cards per month. I've never had an issue previously with PayPal up until now but I've read some shockers about PayPal which concerns me (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1096322756/working-on-a-friday-update-crying-over-paypal).
I received an email from Paypal over a week ago which states that they've decided to open an investigation of their own accord into a transaction of mine and that they require more information from me. I explained the transaction and that the buyer was furnished with a calling card code which they can use to place calls overseas in exchange for the payment made.
Today I receive the outcome of PayPal's decision. They decide to reverse the transaction and refund the customer. They provide no reasons for the decision they've made (which seems to be pretty standard for them based on what I've read).
So now the money's gone and I can't resell the calling card code either. Great.
So I write a complaint to PayPal:
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
To: PAYPAL
You have decided to reverse the transaction on this case:
Inquiry by PayPal - Case ID: PP-001-*
for transaction ID: 6VB
Can you please explain your decision?
I explained previously to you when the investigation was opened that in exchange for the payment the buyer made, the buyer was sent a Calling Card Code.
This same buyer has made the same purchase on two previous occasions over the course of a year as you can see from the following transaction codes:
8TK6 9PD3
Yet you have decided for no apparent reason to investigate and reverse the third transaction.
You have arbitrarily opened an investigation into a regular transaction and have created for me an unnecessary cost of time, effort and money. Furthermore, you have damaged my reputation to a repeat customer of mine.
I request that you reconsider the said case and explain your decision.
Richard
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I emailed the buyer as well and he's decided to pay again for the previous transaction ;)
The way PayPal treats its customers baffles me sometimes. If it has a legitimate reason to open an investigation and concludes that the transaction is wrong/fraudulent or whatever, then it should state its reasons rather than leave its customers in the dark. </comment><comment><USER2> When something like this happens with Paypal, you're lucky when you get out alive. Your business is still intact, your Paypal account is not disabled and the customer has payed again for the previous transaction. Why persist with this? If your goal is to try to change Paypal, your business can't have much going on - because there should be lots more important stuff that you need to deal with. Be grateful and move on.

<comment><USER3> I agree. As someone who has had their business PayPal account frozen and eventually (permanently) disabled, I can tell you that you'll get no response from them that will give you closure.

PayPal is a silly, silly business. You only stand to drive up your blood pressure if you go back-and-forth with them. You'll send passionate pleas for an explanation, only to be met with robotic responses.

Frustrating does not begin to describe it.

Move on and find another processor if you want closure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> PayPal has turned into just another mechanism for online fraud. Basically the way it works in the past few years is a customer can buy whatever they want from you using a credit card linked to their PayPal account. As soon as they get the item, they cancel the transaction and tell their credit card company that their card was used in a fraudulent manner without their knowledge. The credit card company then seizes the funds and PayPal is left in a situation where they can either eat the cost of the item and give you the money, or their "investigator" can find you at fault and force you to eat the loss. Because they don't have the power to challenge the credit card companies, they side with the customer almost 100 percent of the time and then stick you with the bill.

With non-tangible items, such as calling card codes, video game subscriptions, and digital items, there is pretty much nothing you can do to get your money. PayPal has act to like it has investigated the situation fairly, so they tell you that they sided with the customer no matter what evidence you have presented them with.

Unfortunately, this type of behavior is largely why eBay is in decline. My parents ran an online antique business in their spare time but they were forced to shut it down because it no longer felt safe. Personally, I've been on both sides of a PayPal dispute. When I almost lost a few hundred dollars selling a non-tangible item(luckily the item was recovered), the PayPal customer support rep told me that it didn't really matter what evidence I furnished and that if I wanted to sell something similar in the future, that I should try to deal locally because being scammed on PayPal has become an epidemic.

</comment><comment><USER5> DO NOT SEND AN EMAIL.

Seriously, don't, you're wasting your time. Phone them, their phone support is fantastic, their email support is close to non-existent.

(ps: the issue Notch had with Paypal is misleading, they weren't in the wrong)

<comment><USER6> This is absolutely true. I had a paypal issue recently and got immediate, useful help when I called, before they had even looked at the case I submitted online. Call!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had pretty much exactly the same. A friend bought one of my products via my site (tea) and I gave it to him personally the same day. Later Paypal reversed the payment with zero explanation. I didn't receive a single explanation from them, or even a response to my emails. They have a practical monopoly it seems, and dont seem to care an ounce about customer service for merchants. Let's all just switch to Stripe when they expand out of the USA!!

<comment><USER8> 1000+ HN points can't be all wrong. From 2 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883>

<comment><USER6> Sadly, if you're not in the USA this is of no use, for now, until they expand into other countries. I have a product launch soon and I'm seriously considering just extending the free trial period until they launch in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've not had any issues up to date however I've heard many other horror stories, and so I'm sitting and waiting for the worst to come. Till that day comes, I can't say I've had any problems.

I saw this link in my twitter feed (<https://stripe.com/>) and while it's not paypal, it seems relatively easy to integrate, though if I were a customer I'd probably prefer PayPal since it's much better known and there's the added bonus of not having to give your card details.

Since your client has paid you back the money, I'd let it drop so long as it doesn't affect your future payments and clients.

Good luck getting it all resolved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Unfortunately stripe is currently restricted to US customers

<comment><USER9> Which is the reason why I'm not using it... yet!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always try to play devil's advocate for PayPal. I think they process a shitload of transactions every day and end up getting a lot of flak for simply trying to cover their ass a little.

Imagine this scenario. You are a payment processor. A new client appears out of nowhere, and is processing transactions for $20 from credit cards all over the world all throughout the night, hours after creating his account. A percentage of these transactions fail and are placed multiple times. In a matter of days, the client has accumulated $600,000 and you have no idea what he's doing other than trusting the information he willfully provided in his merchant info.

What do you do? Do cash out 600k the moment this client requests it without performing any due diligence? Or do you freeze the funds, make him call in and verify, and get him his money within a week or two?

The business PayPal is in is inherently risky. Whenever I see some surprised post about how PayPal freezed your massive pile of rapidly accumulated funds instead of just handing it to you and assuming that they won't be dealing with thousands and thousands of scammed customers, I can't help but roll my eyes.

Have a little perspective, people.

This is obviously more about notch's situation and less about yours. Yours is just a simple misunderstanding and a less than adequate support system. Once again, thousands and thousands of transactions a day. Some aren't going to go perfectly.

If you are about to cite Stripe, well:

> Stripe is ten people.

Stripe is nice, but Stripe is ten people. They have nowhere close to the scale that PayPal has to deal with. If they reach PayPal's size and still remain developer friendly and don't have issues like this, I would be truly amazed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE: For those of you that are interested, here is PayPal's reply below

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Dear Richard,

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Our Seller Protection protects you from claims, chargebacks or reversals that are a result of unauthorized purchases or items your buyer didn't receive. With PayPal's Seller Protection, you are protected for the full amount of all eligible transactions.

If a transaction is eligible for seller protection, it will be marked as eligible or partially eligible on the 'Transaction Details' page. If it is marked as partially eligible, you are only protected for items a buyer didn't receive. Transactions of $250.00 or more requires the customer signs for the merchandise.

Here are some additional requirements you need to meet for seller protection:

       * Ship the item to the address on the 'Transaction Details Page.'
       * The goods must be physical items that can be posted.
       * Provide proof of delivery (we require online tracking to confirm

delivery). * Respond to our requests for documentation and other information.

To learn more about PayPal's Seller Protection Policy, click 'Legal Agreements' at the bottom of any PayPal page, and then click 'PayPal User Agreement.'

Sincerely,

PayPal Account Review Department PayPal, an eBay Company

Copyright© 2011 PayPal Inc. All rights reserved.

Consumer advisory: PayPal Pte Ltd, the Holder of the PayPal™ payment service stored value facility, does not require the approval of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Consumers (users) are advised to read the terms and conditions carefully.

</comment><comment><USER11> > I emailed the buyer as well and he's decided to pay again for the previous > transaction ;)

That alone should be enough for PayPal to issue apologies all around. Good luck with that.

</comment><comment><USER12> We have lots of issues with Paypal, I run a digital deals network for designers, coders, etc and our paypal account is constantly having issues. Being told it'll take 10 days before we can send payments because there was an influx in payments to us. When we run a deal there's an influx in payments because obviously they're daily deals.

This causes a list of problems but we're going to eventually switch to Stripe or another option.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be interesting to see how PayPal justify this given that the customer paid you again after they reversed it, not that id count on ever getting an answer out of them.

I don't think I've ever seen such terrible customer service and reputation management, it's like they're trying to scare people away.

<comment><AUTHOR> My thoughts exactly mate

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems pretty weird, but I'd recommend you'd move off paypal. Paypal is designed for low risk businesses, you're selling something which is "cash- like" which automatically puts you into a high risk category. And Paypal fraud detection systems give you far less leeway if you're considered to be high- risk.

<comment><AUTHOR> if you suggest a good alternative that's available in Australia, i'm all ears

<comment><USER14> If you're doing a reasonably volume of sales I'd recommend just using a merchant account provider (probably your best bet is asking around local startups to see who they use). You'll pay a higher premium due to your risk factors, but you'll get better service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This can happen from time to time, and I think most of the time they just end up giving the customers a refund.

From my personal experience, its better to just ask Paypal to refund the money and ask the customer to re-pay. Its a bit annoying, and you may get some disgruntled custoemrs, but a whole lot easier than going through the pain of asking Paypal for an explanation.

</comment><comment><USER16> PayPal should at least bother to investigate thoroughly before meddling with someone's livelihood. They pass judgement based on baseless assumptions and have no empathy for the damage they are causing.

If they can't handle the load, then they should just pass up the information to law enforcement and let them do the investigating and prosecuting of crimes made using their service.

Either one has to happen, but the current way they do business is damaging alot of lives. Something's got to give.

By the way, there is a Class Action Lawsuit being mounted against them for their unethical practices, like withholding funds from users or simply making unauthorized charges to the bank accounts of users and abusing their privilege of access.

Here's the link: <http://www.freedweiss.com/PayPal-Holding-Money.shtml>

Also, i called the District Attorney's office of Santa Clara County and they said that they get alot of people filling small claims suits against PayPal.

This is what happens when a company gets too big, empathy and respect for customers gets flushed down the sink :/</comment>


Scoble Adds Ads (there's got to be a better way) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/25/scoble-sells-out/

<comment><AUTHOR> I know professional bloggers have got to get paid, but I'd rather support them some other way than being bombarded by ads.</comment>


New Horizons Returns First of the Best Images of Pluto - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-returns-first-of-the-best-images-of-pluto <comment><USER2> Is "6 miles" a standard unit of length?

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing it was originally 10 km. Someone probably added a scale bar in km and then was told to change the label to US customary units.

<comment><USER4> I get that 'murica is too stubborn to go full metric, but can't we at least start switching from "Imperial (Metric)" to "Metric (Imperial)" in the popular science media?

<comment><USER5> For what it's worth, using the term "'Murica" in your post comes across as demeaning, and is thus inappropriate for HN.

Given that the image is a product of an American-led project, it seems perfectly reasonable (however unfortunate for the scientific community at large) that standard American units would be used to describe it.

<comment><USER6> > however unfortunate for the scientific community at large

Why is it unfortunate? What difference does it make? The units are completely unimportant. Units are a completely arbitrary thing, it's quite irrelevant what you use as long as you know what you are using.

You will never find a real scientist complaining about them, you convert to whatever is easiest for your task and move on. The only people who complain about units are those for which the units make no difference - like the person who you replied to. If those units said any other number would it make event the tiniest bit of different to him? No it would not. That picture could say 6km, or 6leagues and it would make zero difference to him.

It's a form of bikeshedding - people won't talk about anything important because that's too complicated. But the units are easy and make you seem like you are "in the know".

But actually it does not do that, all it does is let everyone else know you have nothing more worthwhile to contribute.

<comment><USER7> _" Why is it unfortunate? What difference does it make? The units are completely unimportant. Units are a completely arbitrary thing, it's quite irrelevant what you use as long as you know what you are using."_

In space [0], units matter ~ [https://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+technical+problem+units...](https://www.google.com/search?q=nasa+technical+problem+units&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

[0] And in reporting of news for technical accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's an amazingly active surface!

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know what the composition of the ice is?

<comment><USER10> Phil 'Bad Astronomer' Plait says the mountains are made of water-ice, the plains of nitrogen-ice [1]: "Pluto is so cold water ice is hard as rock, and can form mountains thousands of meters tall. The bright plain was probably lower elevation terrain which filled with nitrogen, which is much less rigid than water at these temperatures. It can flow like glaciers do on Earth. So what you're seeing there is a shoreline! It really looks like one, too, with the nitrogen ice meeting the highlands at a "constant sea level"."

[1] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/12/05/pluto_hi...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/12/05/pluto_highest_resolution_new_horizons_images_yet.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The flat plains look like they have dunes on them!</comment>


Ask HN: "Are you sure you want to leave this page?" - <AUTHOR> I used to regard such alerts as confirmation of the worthlessness of anything I read on the given web site.  Now it seems a staple of some otherwise fairly thoughtful .coms (e.g., telegraph.co.uk) Has someone in a position of (marketing) influence decided this is potent avenue to viewers/advertisers? <comment><USER2> I find those popups a highly-effective call to action - where the "action" is "click the close button for the tab".

</comment><comment><USER3> If you install and run NoScript in default deny mode, you will seldom ever be bothered by those horrible UI abominations.</comment>


Least Squares - <AUTHOR> http://holyshit.tech/statistical-learning/2016/11/06/least-squares.html <comment><USER2> great post with really good code examples.</comment>


One Windows Kernel - <AUTHOR> https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Internals/One-Windows-Kernel/ba-p/267142 <comment><USER2> >The most amazing aspect of all this is that the core of Windows, its kernel, remains virtually unchanged on all these architectures and SKUs.

Is that really such an exciting concept? Maybe I have a poor understanding, but I've been under the impression that nearly every competing kernel (Linux, Darwin, *BSD) is exactly like that. The only situation where I can imagine a slight departure is Solaris and its SPARC architecture, where SPARC had certain features to specifically to tie in with the kernel but I'm sure it still compiled to foreign architectures from the same codebase.

<comment><USER3> Well it is an exciting concept but it isn't as you point out unique.

It was fairly clear in the 80's and 90's there were two 'streams' of systems programmers, those who started at mainframes and mini-computers and were making things work on smaller and smaller versions of those machines, and those who started at the ROM monitor or DOS level type machine and made things work on larger and larger versions of those machines.

It was stark how differently the two 'types' of people approached operating system problems.

Windows "crossed over" from being more of a monitor type interface to being an executive interface with Windows NT at the hands of a former VAX software architect (which was firmly in the mainframe getting smaller path), and that cross over happened for the masses when Microsoft merged the NT kernel with the Window "old tech" kernel in Windows XP as I recall. By the time Windows 7 came around it was pretty much unified for life and has evolved since then.

If all you knew were Microsoft OSes, then yes it is an amazing journey. If however you had already been experiencing systems like UNIX that ran on everything from mainframes to PDP-11/70's you would not have been quite so surprised.

<comment><USER4> That's the core irony of the PC revolution. PCs started out with the explicit goal of being something different than mainframes and minis. But when people started networking them together, the only way to keep them viable was to essentially _turn them into_ mainframes and minis, just in different shaped boxes. So we've gotten to live through 20 years of PC vendors reinventing things that big-iron users had access to long ago.

<comment><USER5> (The original idea behind) PCs continued to exist long after networking, in the form of video game consoles. A Gameboy Advance isn't all that different from an Apple II or an IBM-compatible PC running DOS: both focus on running one executable and giving it complete control over banging bits toward "rich" I/O devices, where instead of abstractions over ugly low-level interfaces, the peripherals have been designed with nice ABIs that _are_ their canonical APIs (and, until the ARM era, the CPUs themselves were also designed such that their ISA, as written in macro-assembler, _was_ the canonical "high-level" language.)

Of course, eventually game consoles became networked too...

<comment><USER6> I think it was Casey Muratori who made the argument that we could return to having nice ABIs that are canonical APIs, and still have more than one program running via hardware virtualization features. Then any OS would just be like a hypervisor managing all of the OS-less VMs that, from their perspective, are interacting directly with hardware. It was an interesting idea.

<comment><USER5> Heck, you can get away with that today, by just creating a virtualization platform like Xen, but with much more carefully-thought-out exposed virtio hypercalls; and then writing unikernels against that interface.

Though, from another perspective, this model is exactly what the "transitional" era of game consoles did. The Nintendo Wii U, for example, normally [i.e. during a game] has a unikernel running across two "application processor" cores, that sees those as the only cores and has direct ownership of the peripherals; but then the OS [running on a third, separate, low-power core that the game VM has no knowledge of] can, at any time, force the game VM into the background with an interrupt, whereupon it must relinquish one of its two cores, some memory, and not touch the peripherals at all until the OS says it's okay; and then the OS can use the borrowed high-power application core, memory, and peripheral-hardware ownership to temporarily foreground an OS modal GUI, like a game manual or a web browser or an instant message.

Sadly, this was all abstracted, for the game developer, behind an HLL [that is, C] SDK—which is sadly a "requirement" in the modern era, given that devs are going to be porting their games to/from PCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like it's essentially confessing to something we already knew. Back at the turn of the century Microsoft liked to claim that Windows Server and the ordinary client NT were different in some important way beyond just the branding and price. People would even try to argue that Linux couldn't be a "real" desktop OS because it lacked some kind of secret sauce not found in a server OS... Hackers eventually found out how to tell a client NT kernel to behave exactly like Server, because of course they are the same kernel, duh.

Microsoft's reaction was to stop selling the two next to each other. There is no Windows 10 Server and Windows Server 2019 doesn't have a client version. So the exact same thing continues, but now there IS no equivalent product to prove the point that they're identical bar branding and price.

<comment><USER8> > Hackers eventually found out how to tell a client NT kernel to behave > exactly like Server

It was Mark Russinovich who did it with a utility called NTTune. Now he's the CTO of Azure!

<comment><USER9> You mean Mark Russunovich the sci-fi author: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rogue- Code-Jeff-Aiken-Russinovich/d...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rogue-Code-Jeff- Aiken-Russinovich/dp/1250035376/ref=sr_1_5)

That Azure stuff is just his hobby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
        Windows is one of the most versatile and flexible operating systems out there, running on a variety of machine architectures and available in multiple SKUs.

Linux, BSD, Darwin... You support a dozen architectures? How adorable. _condescendingly pats head_

<comment><USER11> > You support a dozen architectures?

And they only support four (x86, amd64, ARM, ARM64)! This is quite a cute thing to mention after saying you're "one of the most versatile and flexible operating systems". Ignoring the obviously qualifying language of "one of the most", I would argue it is still false -- virtually every mainstream operating system I can think of supports more architectures than this. Here is my quickly-put-together list:

        * Linux: 25.
        * MINIX: 15.
        * OpenBSD: 13.
        * FreeBSD: 7.
        * Windows: 4.
        * illumos: 3 (with arm* in development).
        * Darwin: 2.

_What an achievement._ Now -- don't get me wrong, Windows has done a lot of things, but they have set the parameters of this comparison and they don't fare well in it (even if you get past the qualifying language over a comparison that they decided to make).

<comment><USER12> _they only support four (x86, amd64, ARM, ARM64)_

To be fair, NT shipped on x86, PPC, Alpha and MIPS. There was a never-released version for SPARC. It was originally developed on the i860. Wasn't later Windows also available on Itanium too?

MS cut down on their list of supported CPUs for commercial, not technical reasons.

<comment><USER11> Linux also supported more architectures in the past that I haven't included in my count (same for the BSDs too). If you updated the count with all architectures ever supported by the platform then I have doubts that it would change the ordering significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what it would cost to purchase an Oracle license for that 1792 core instance.

<comment><USER14> The answer is: Whatever amount of money which Oracle's sales and customer research teams determines that you can barely afford to pay.

<comment><USER15> It seems to me like Oracle has figured out a sort of secret formula for making a lot of money through shrewd business practices while managing to avoid the public hatred Microsoft and IBM attracted when they did likewise.

Perhaps because they market to business leaders who could stand to lose a lot if Oracle unleashed the legal hounds?

<comment><USER16> > Perhaps because they market to business leaders who could stand to lose a > lot if Oracle unleashed the legal hounds?

I think so. But that doesn't seem like it's going to remain a viable business model for too long. Those who are forced by their bosses to work with Oracle today, are going to be the bosses of tomorrow. I personally know a company where anything oracle is explicitly blacklisted because of this reason.

Eventually, Oracle is going to run out of their oblivious- executive-type customers. (inc. govs)

<comment><USER17> >Eventually, Oracle is going to run out of their oblivious- executive-type customers

Perhaps some are oblivious, but not in general. At some point, when one gets busy enough, convenience and reliability trump bargains.

I know I can replace the backlight on my macbook, but I'm still going to the Apple Store. I know I can save 15¢/gallon at a gas station a mile away, but is it really worth the time and energy to do it at that price? That's why I buy Oracle and just about everything else.

<comment><USER15> > convenience and reliability

Modern cloud hosting usually provides all of the above you need. Is a PostgreSQL DB in Azure really any less reliable or convenient than an Oracle DB? Perhaps if you're already heavily invested in and comfortable with Oracle, but I don't think so otherwise.

<comment><USER18> Oracle still runs circles around postgres for high availability, backups and management tools. However most big companies are slowly migrating all their small Oracle instances to pg. I happen to work in one of those companies who's had enough with Oracle's outrageous pricing schemes and audit threats.

<comment><USER19> What do you mean by audit threats? I've never had the misfortune of working with Oracle software besides Java.

<comment><USER18> "Buy our new cloud offering or we run a license audit now as our contract permits" You have to find a way to give good cloud numbers for Larry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Windows Kernel is an insane engineering feet by itself, so getting to see how the inner components mesh in articles like these always fascinates me.

</comment><comment><USER21> So ... how long until Windows becomes just a Linux distribution similar to Android? 8 years? Sooner, later?

<comment><USER22> Windows is most likely to become another mainframe like OS, with its multiple execution personalties than yet another a Linux distribution.

Just like IBM i, IBM z, ClearPath are their own thing, and can also run Aix, Windows and GNU/Linux on top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it possible to "backport" the Kernel (and other parts, such as the WSL, with it) to Windows 7?

I'd like to have a modern Windows, but with the "classic" UI and no forced ads/bloatware/crapware. And yeah I am aware of W10 LTSB but it's not legally available for 99% of users.

edit: Looks like the post attracted a bit of a flamewar. Originally, I just wanted to know if this was technically feasible or not.

<comment><USER24> Same old story.

When XP came out, people were moaning that it looks like shit and how they wanted the XP kernel, but the 2000 look.

When Vista came out, same thing again, all that Aero looks like shit, disable it so that it looks like XP classic.

Now 10 comes out, same story, looks like shit, we want it to look like 7.

You should think deeper to see what drives this desire of yours. I bet that when Vista came out with the Aero look, you felt like it's shit forced on you, and you wanted the XP classic look. Now you want the Aero look that you once hated. Ironic, isn't it?

<comment><USER25> Win2K to this day remains my favorite Windows release. It was just so clean and practical. It had its frustrations (setting up a Win2K/WinXP/Win7 system from scratch was always a task and a half, with all the driver installs and updates involved) but once you got it set up it was great.

XP/7 aren't bad but they definitely felt more gimmicky.

<comment><USER26> I'm still carrying a Win2K Pro image around in VMware. It runs all the windows software I need (and this is the right way to choose an operating system IMO) and if it gets screwed up I can always blow it away and revert to the snapshot that's got all the service packs installed.

<comment><USER25> What software would that be, if you don't mind my asking? I was under the impression that Win2K support had been dropped from most software several years ago.

<comment><USER26> EDA and CAD programs. Expensive software but I don't need the vendors' "support" so their thoughts on my operating systems are not important to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wish they had the courage to get rid of the registry.

<comment><USER28> And replace it with?

<comment><USER29> How about a file system? Because that is precisely what the registry is, a file system in a file. The keys are just paths to a variable which can be a text or binary file.

And people who suggest SQL or another monstrous abstractions as an implementation need to take a step back and apply the idea of philosophical simplicity to their work. I honestly don't understand why people have this tendency to over engineer simple problems. I suppose it helps during review time.

<comment><USER28> It has a few more types than that[1]. While the registry is not exactly super elegant and suffers from issues I think it's a pretty simplistic answer to a complex problem, especially one rooted in history and rife with backwards compatibility concerns (windows still supports the legacy format used only in Windows 2000!).

People who sit back and say "replace it with text files/sqlite" don't really understand it or the problem it solves that well.

Using the actual file system brings in file system concerns - how do you handle registry transactions or concurrent updates?

1\. [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/bb7...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/bb773476\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><USER18> Well text files work perfectly fine for unix/linux. And the installation process is infinitely less painful.

<comment><USER30> They don't work perfectly fine.

Random inconsistent locations, random inconsistent rules for inclusions and imports, Random ill-documented ad-hoc formats, no standard interfaces to add/remove/set config values, no ability to put ACLS on individual config entries, basically no way to export and re-import or auto-merge partial config, without at least screwing up whitespace and comments or risking duplicates, no ecosystem wide single 'source of truth' pattern.

They work, but they're not nice.

<comment><USER18> I've never seen one using acls on registry keys. I have however seen several config files for the same program with different permissions. Think .ssh/config or /etc/sshd_config. For your partial config / single source of trust please refer to ansible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> "This is a picture of Windows taskmgr running on a pre-release Windows DataCenter class machine with 896 cores supporting 1792 logical processors and 2TB of RAM!"

Reminds me of an UltraSPARC T5 server with 3072 processors I used to work on... from five years ago. Old tech, eh?

</comment><comment><USER32> How is it possible to have CPU with 100% of usage and Memory at 0% of usage at this screenshot (Task Manager showing 1792 logical processors)?

<comment><USER33> It was a 2Tb of RAM machine I think? So 0.49% of that would be 9.8Gb? Plenty of space and it would still be "0%" used.

<comment><USER34> How come out of 1TB 9GB is 0%?

<comment><USER35> Rounding. 0.49% rounds down to 0%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> C'mon. Not even your own Drawbridge project is supported in Windows...

<comment><USER22> Have a look at WSL pico-processes, device guard, and secure kernel support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Forgot to add the line count of backdoors and stupid absurd shit like processing fonts on the kernel rather than userland so people can hack your 896 core machine and mine bitcoin.

<comment><USER38> Your claim of backdoors is nonsense of course, but the kernel mode font handling was indeed a security risk. However on recent releases of Windows, they changed font parsing to run in a user mode sandbox: see the "Mitigating font exploits with AppContainer" section of [https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/01/13/...](https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/01/13/hardening- windows-10-with-zero-day-exploit-mitigations/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wish Windows kernel been optimised for a given architecture. It is one of the examples where "one fits all" doesn't work. Even if Intel or AMD bring another grounbreaking generation of CPUs - giving mighty 5% increase in performance - it is all for nothing, because it gets eaten up by Windows poorly written guts. I don't know what kind of monster machine you need nowadays to watch YouTube video without audio breaking up or without having to dedicate one core just to handle the mouse.</comment>


EU says distrust of US on spying may harm terror fight - Suraj-Sun http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24668286

<comment><AUTHOR> Then keep the damn spying on _terrorists_ , not on politicians and CEO's. But let's face it. They can't help themselves. Even if they agree to roll back the spying a little bit now, they'll go back to spying everyone again in a few years, if they think they need that data for economical purposes.

That's why there needs to be drastically more oversight, that's a lot more effective, and with members of the Intelligence Committee who can declassify information _at will_ in congress, without anyone's approval.

Also the FISC needs to either be abolished, or disbanded, and create a new process for electing the judges, and creating a Court with much more transparency.</comment>


US election 2012: hug photo makes social media history - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov/07/us-election-2012-hug-photo <comment><AUTHOR> I guess it was lucky Twitter moved away from RoR ;)

Disclaimer: RoR fan.</comment>


Internet voting: Exactly what the 99% needs - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/104173-internet-voting-exactly-what-the-99-needs

<comment><USER2> Internet voting is untenable from a security perspective. An election is orders of magnitude more complicated than most online transactions, because your vote is just as important to me as my vote.

Whereas filing your taxes online is a one way transaction between you and the government, voting is one big symmetrical transaction between every member of the electorate. This makes it really tricky from a security perspective.

The reason that internet voting is worse than postal voting is the slowness of messing around with paper, the same reason which people tout as a positive. You cant change a million postal votes in a under millisecond from thousands of miles away. Think of the postal service as hash iteration.

For (lots) more info, see the following Google tech talk, "Electronic and Internet Voting (The Threat of Internet Voting in Public Elections)" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GjmRwfkRXY>

<comment><USER3> It's MUCH more difficult than banking or taxes. Not only must your vote be secure and counted; it must be anonymous! Not even you should be able to prove to anyone else who you voted for and there must be no audit trail that could tie an individual vote to a person.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't bitcoin solve this problem?

<comment><USER5> No, bitcoin is "pseudonymous", transactions are public. It's not necessarily easily linked to your real identity (hence the pseudonymity), but with today's profiling tech, is that any guarantee?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I reject the premise that the Occupy movement has very much to do with election administration. I'd bet voter apathy has more to do with the available choices on the ballot than difficulty in filling it out on time.

Further, I don't think Internet voting is automatically a smart way to boost turnout. Same-day registration, early voting, and no-excuse absentee voting are simple and cheap ways to make voting much easier without introducing a bunch of new security problems or dealing with unequal access to computers and the Internet.

<comment><USER6> _dealing with unequal access to computers and the Internet._

How is that a problem when most public libraries provide free access, and traditional early and on-time voting are still available?

<comment><USER3> This is not the biggest challenge to Internet voting, but surely you agree that it's unfair that some people would now be able to vote from home while others would not? At least around me, you might wait an hour for a computer at the library during busy times.

If the point is to let people vote from home at their leisure, why not just mail everyone an absentee ballot?

<comment><USER6> First let me state that I'm arguing from an assumption that technology, when not obviously bad, is inherently good, and that increasing the use of technology is a worthy goal in itself. So in my case, the point isn't just to vote from home, but to vote from anywhere _using technology_. I don't believe that it's necessary to share this philosophy, however, to want to see online voting become a reality.

Obviously there are security and coercion concerns that are more detrimental to Internet voting's prospects than the class division aspects. And an absentee ballot sounds reasonable, but is not nearly as convenient as online voting (and has more potential for fraud and coercion than online voting).

My main point is that I believe class disparity is a weak argument against online voting. I don't like using postal mail or waiting in line for an hour or more at the ballot box -- does that mean that it's unfair _not_ to let me vote from home or the library? At least in the US, with libraries, cheap DSL, and cell phones, the vast, vast majority of people not currently voting have easier access to the Internet than they do to polling stations on election day. Don't deny most people a benefit because a few people can't enjoy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Internet voting is a bad idea. It's vulnerable to coercion.

Even if we can guarantee the votes are submitted and counted accurately, it's impossible to tell if my boss was standing behind me telling me what to vote (or lose my job).

At a polling station they prevent coercion by enforcing secrecy. One person in a voting booth at a time, no cameras in the voting booth, etc. If you can't prove you voted either way, you're free to lie about how you voted.

<comment><USER8> > it's impossible to tell if my boss was standing behind me telling me what to > vote (or lose my job).

Then you just say you already voted and lie who you voted for. What will they do, confiscate your phone? (assuming phone voting). There are so many "outs" to the coercion scenario that it seems implausible that it would ever occur on any significant scale. What scenario can you think of where coercion would be a real issue?

<comment><USER9> > What scenario can you think of where coercion would be a real issue?

Forget about intimidation and consider bribery. Instead of a domineering boss threatening termination imagine a man with a laptop and a roll of $20 bills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While internet voting could perhaps help, I think a much simpler and more powerful change would be to switch to a Condorcet method of voting. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_voting>)

Nothing would do more damage to the two-party system than for the argument "if you vote for a third party, you throw your vote away" to be demolished.

<comment><USER11> Instant-runoff voting would probably be more practical. It's already used in America in some jurisdictions, so promoting it to the more major offices like President isn't as big a leap as Condorcet (since Condorcet's not actually used by any US jurisdictions).

<comment><USER12> Also, instant-runoff is easier to explain, because it's literally the same as holding hypothetical runoff elections on election day.

With Concordet voting, listing someone as your second choice can cause your first choice to lose, which would probably confuse a lot of people.

<comment><USER13> It would be misleading to gloss over IRV's significant failings if we're talking about criteria failure.

* 8 people vote: A, C, B * 5 people vote: B, C, A * 4 people vote: C, B, A

IRV eliminates C, despite the majority of voters preferring C over B (12 to 5). The order of elimination means that significant secondary preferences are often ignored.

<comment><USER14> Here's another hypothetical example:

6 * Republicans, Libertarians, Democrats; 5 * Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans; 2 * Libertarians, Democrats, Republicans.

Liberians are eliminated (despite the majority of voters preferring them over the Democrats), and Democrats win.

Notice how when you use party names, it makes more sense? The Republican and Democrat voters are simply voting "anyone but the other major party". If they are neck-to-neck on primary votes, then the secondary votes of the minor parties start to be counted. This is a feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER13> I see your point here, but all voters in your mockup presented the Libertarians as their first or second choice. As a compromise candidate, that's not a bad option.

Further, I don't think real-world voting would match up exactly with the above. There are people that would vote R/D/L and D/R/L, both of which are lacking from this example that would swing things away from the Libertarians.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not sure about if this is such a good idea. The writer comes from a point where everyone is active on the internet in some form or another. But in fact only about 72% actually were "connected" as of October 2010.

The same logic would declare surveys on the internet as representative of the society - and we have seen over and over again that these are often quite different to "reality". The idea would therefore favor those views popular among an internet crowd by lowering the access barrier towards this group as much as possible.

Historically American elections have been putting certain hurdles in place that aim not to generate the biggest turnout possible, but a turnout of those who are really interested in the subject (i.e. the preregistration in some states etc). But this is another discussion.

</comment><comment><USER16> Internet voting is the eventual future, but like has been said, the lack of representational elections and the broken two party system are why people are disinterested, not because they have to go to a local school and fill out a piece of paper.

Introducing online voting should be pursued as an option, just like early voting is. But we should not even think of making it a standard for a long time, because not everyone has internet access. And many people with internet access still wouldn't know how to go to vote.gov and fill in a form.

</comment><comment> muuh-gnu Whether all people go voting or not is irrelevant as long as they only can vote for so called "representatives" who then make all the important decisions.

It is more important to implement unfiltered direct democracy first. I want to vote on some stuff directly and let somebody else vote for me on stuff i dont care about. Thinking hard about changing _how_ to vote without changing _what_ you are allowed to vote on is a waste of time.

As long as I can not vote on stuff directly, I dont care for elections at all. All parties are the same, all representatives sooner or later become corrupt. The game is rigged in favor of people with money & influence, elections are a lie.

<comment><USER17> Oh yes, because all the direct democracy systems that have been created have worked _so_ well. You know what's worse than voting for representatives? Voting directly on dozens of bills that are so complicated that, unless you don't have a full time job, you have to rely on a bunch of summaries written by biased parties to interpret.

My favorite trick which happened in my city is having two bills that look nearly identical, except one looks better (more savings, more jobs, more whatever), but is actually illegal and will inevitably be struck down by the courts. The illegal one has a supersede clause in it so that if both are voted in, it undos the other, but since it'll be struck down for being illegal, nothing will actually change.

As someone whose state, city and county have implemented direct democracy, I can tell you it sucks. I'd rather have no laws passed then them passed directly via an uninformed electorate.

<comment><USER18> "I want to vote on some stuff directly and _let somebody else vote for me on stuff i dont care about_." (emphasis mine)

The key for successful direct democracy is encouraging delegation of decision making.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> With the Internet it is possible to involve the public much more than just with online elections. The FSF for example uses a website where people can comment on each draft of a license [1].

[1] <http://gplv3.fsf.org/comment/agplv3-draft-2.html>

</comment><comment><USER20> Just what the 1% needs to masquerade as the 99% (or, why be greedy, the 51%).

</comment><comment><USER21> do people here actually believe the current system isn't rigged? does anyone believe an internet based system wouldn't be rigged?

<comment><USER22> Rigged how? I'm fairly certain that a centralized homogeneous voting system would be significantly easier to audit for security loopholes than the current implementation, but if there were a security breach one would imagine it would be far more disastrous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you were to give everyone off from work for voting day on the contingency that they voted, most people still wouldn't vote.

Voting in the United States should be compulsory like it is in Australia.

A central location that would let people vote on bills would serve as a check on politicians votes.

As for the problem with not everyone having access to computers/smart phones, why not replace phone booths with electronic voting booths?

</comment><comment><USER24> This could be huge if voting could magically change the fact that the fundamental principles of state rule are unethical and contradictory.</comment>


When you are not talking - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone. I wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas day, whether you are Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Atheist, or believe something else.
The president and the first lady sent a Merry Christmas message out to all today, and I watched it on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rq4HDwY9Mc (I will comment with a clickable link later)
What I find myself doing sometimes when I watch a duo like this, is watch the person who's not talking. It's a hobby of mine to study human psychology and see what works well.
Anyway, I think Barack Obama and Michelle have done a great job here. It's largely about the mindset which you are in when you are staring at the camera, and supporting your partner. You have to listen to them as the audience would, but face the audience.
I think when we present our ideas as a team, we can all benefit from learning to be a better "supportive cast member" when we are not doing the talking. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rq4HDwY9Mc></comment>


Last.fm Re-design: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/lastfm_redesign_the_good_the_b.php

<comment><USER2> I'm a beta subscriber of last.fm so I've played with the new beta design and I think it works pretty well. I was never a massive fan of their pink design, the new one is a lot more clear and clean. The navigation could be sorted out a little but apart from that, it looks good.

</comment><comment><USER3> The new features they are proposing are great. I don't use Last.fm much but I like to browse the various areas like Events and Artists to find new music. The addition of Podcasts sounds intriguing as right now I mainly use iTunes for them but that's not very portable.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dear Last.fm,

Do _NOT_ do this!

\-- Sincerely from all of the internet</comment>


(Relatively) slow Google search (2.64 seconds) - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?q=%3Cscript[+\\t]%3F\\b[^%3C]*(%3F:(%3F!%3C\\%2Fscript%3E)%3C[^%3C]*)*%3C\\%2Fscript[+\\t]%3F%3E

<comment><AUTHOR> You might need to click "Search instead for" to trigger the 'correct' search.

It's also odd how:

<script[ \\\to[^<] _(?:(?! <\\\/script>)<[^<]_) _< \\\/script[ \\\t]?>

runs in <0.5 seconds, whilst:

<script[ \\\t]?\\\b[^<]_(?:(?!<\\\/script>)<[^<] _)_ <\\\/script[ \\\t]?>

runs in >2.5 seconds?

</comment><comment><USER2> Wow, I've never seen this kind of Google search before. I wasn't able to find documentation for it — would someone be kind enough to post a link?</comment>


NYPD wants Waze to stop locating DUI checkpoints - <AUTHOR> https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/apps/a26235682/nypd-waze-dwi-traps/ <comment><USER2> What's the deal with the legality of dui checkpoints in NY? I understand that they're technically unconstitutional, but in California they're ok because we're in a certain distance of the border l.</comment>


Deep Thoughts With Nicolas Berggruen - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-27/deep-thoughts-with-the-homeless-billionaire#r=read

<comment><USER2> This heading is totally bogus. For me, homeless means not having a home, and the means to be homed is a distance target. This fellow will always have the means to get a home. As him to sleep under a bridge in the middle of the cold New York winter, and tell me if he is still homeless.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. Nomadic, maybe.</comment></comment>


Apollo Astronaut and John Podesta Met to Discuss Extraterrestrial Disclosure - <AUTHOR> https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/15052 <comment><USER2> [https://edwardsnowden.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/the- art...](https://edwardsnowden.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/the-art-of- deception-training-for-a-new.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Crackpot astronaut Edgar Mitchell

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Mitchell#Post- NASA_caree...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Mitchell#Post-NASA_career)

<comment><AUTHOR> So you are implying that Obama would have chosen as his counselor the type of guy willing to waste his time with a crackpot astronaut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> anyone try the phone numbers?</comment>


Good Noows: A well designed news reader - <AUTHOR> http://goodnoows.com/

<comment><USER2> I saw that it wanted me to sign up before I could try it out, and clicked the back button. I have no idea if your service is a good one or not, I guess I never will.

And facebook integration? Seriously I think it is quickly becoming the obvious sign of a douchey website. Not saying that facebook integration isn't a useful feature in some sites, but nowadays when I see a site and it has a whole row of social network integration buttons it just looks desperate and exploitative, like the site cares more about using the audience to gain traction than to provide a good service.

<comment><USER3> As someone who creates apps that are somewhat experimental, I have to point out how irritating your comment is. He wasn't asking you to become a customer, he was asking for some feedback about his app, one HNer to another. Sometimes, that involves signing up for the service (gasp!). Perhaps this is a barrier to entry for the OP's potential users, but you could just express that in your comment in a less - to use your terminology - douchey way.

And the offhand dismissal of Facebook integration? Are you kidding? You bitch about having to sign up to use site while in the same breath complain that the OP is providing too many (convenient) ways for users to sign up for the service I'm sad this comment has so many up votes.

<comment><USER2> That is exactly my point.

Your unhappiness with my comment shows that you care more about what is good for your application than what is good for the user.

No matter how good your application actually is, with that kind of attitude I just can't trust you.

Your second sentence is a non sequitur btw. I'm not looking for easier ways to sign up, I am looking not to sign up at all. If a mugger provided me with convenient credit card and paypal options for how to give him my money, I wouldn't be happy with that either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bad things happen to the layout if the screen's vertical dimension is not large enough. The semi-transparent screenshots at the bottom move up over the text.

Also, I didn't like the bar at the bottom of the screen. If feels strange and also gets in the way. Personally I feel that the design could still use some fine tuning.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's a bit over-designed. The giant purple signup button draws the eye so strongly that at first I didn't notice the existence of a video and screenshots, or the little strip menu along the bottom.

It's kinda like a sales assistant that rushes up to ask if you're finding everything before you've gotten halfway from the door to the shelves...give me a chance to indulge my curiosity first, eh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi there, I am the developer behind Good Noows and I'd like to respond to a few posts here. I currently work on Good Noows in my spare time and I earn my living as a Product Manager at a mobile network operator. I started Good Noows because I simply couldnt find a news reader out there that serves my needs. I assume thats because it's very hard to get funding for it. Google Reader is top when it comes to functionality but I dont agree with their UI. Good Noows tries to address two segments of users and I hope that both are served ok-ish (feedback is actually quite good): 1) RSS reader users sharing my customer pain for a better browsing experience, and 2) the average consumer who doesnt even know what RSS is and just wants to set up a personal news stream (the twitter-like terminology with "stream" and "follow" is intended). Simple and quick.

\- No we dont get paid for listing feeds. I'd love that because it would be a great business model.

\- Sorry if the predefined sources in the catalog are not what you are looking for. Since I am German I do not have a complete overview of i.e. US-American politics blogs. I definitely was not biased when choosing them. I just used Technorati's top lists and looked for properly formatted feeds.

\- The layout is not yet optimized for touch devices at all. Apologies. I hope I'll find the time to work on it soon...

\- I decided to use Meebo because their sharing function does a good job. If you dont like the bar at the bottom, feel free to hide it (arrow icon at the right).

\- You have to sign on before using it because I (and my legal counsels) see copyright issues when they look at my product vision and feature roadmap. If you re logged in it's private consumption. I won't display third party content publicly.

\- Logging in with your social network account just simplifies registration. We dont get any personal data or anything from these auth services, just an ID (which is in some cases an email address).

Feel free to post any suggestions for feeds or features, other ideas, or just criticism here <http://support.goodnoows.com> I really try to do this very agile and user-focused...

Cheers

<comment><USER7> Personally speaking, the login requirement was a non-starter. Unless you can work out a deal with content providers to supply at least a sampling of the experience without an account, I'd say you're going to have a tough time attracting users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the deal with this? I see that it's a news reader. But I'll be darned if I can find any kind of description of its features, so I can decide if it's worth my time to move off of Google.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one that really enjoys a simple RSS reader like NewFire? Give me a big view of the current article, and every time I hit space bar, move forward to the next unread article.

</comment><comment><USER10> That doesn't look _startlingly_ like the Times Skimmer or anything.

<http://www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer/>

<comment><USER11> Meh. There are several of these for the iPad. Not sure it's super uncommon to have a different browsing interface anymore...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Two things:

1) I need OPML import. Before that's there, all I can really do is play with the interface to see if I like it; I imagine this will be the case for anyone who already uses a lot of RSS feeds. (Other users new to the concept, on the other hand, would be fine getting started with the sample feeds given.)

2) The Meebo toolbar needs to go. I get that social networking is a major focus, but adding an IM client to the interface is not helpful for anyone but iPad users (and even that's doubtful). If you must have it, I suggest detecting the user agent and removing it for anyone but them, or at least giving the option to disable it entirely in the options (instead of just "hiding" it).

Otherwise, it's a great start and I'd love to see where it's going. :)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a little nitpicky, but "Noows" keeps causing my speech center to blue screen.

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe it's just me, but the only thing i don't like is the toolbar at the bottom. Maybe the site would look simpler without it. And what's worse, the bar is almost useless at least in Chrome, as a link url appears at the botton left every time i hover over one, so that the bar is barely readable. Otherwise great app. I think it will replace Google News for me. I even included a tab with Ycombinator news.

</comment><comment><USER15> Kind of a wacky set of default sources for the political section. The only independent blog offered in their list of political sources is BigGovernment.com which is a great source of nonsense (let me be clear -- this isn't a partisan complaint. DailyKos is also a source of nonsense). Puzzled as to why they'd even include it.

<comment><USER16> _Puzzled as to why they'd even include it._

Probably got paid to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a little weird that the iPad-ish device on the homepage appears to be running the Windows version of Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER18> Awful UX for an iPad or touch screen device. Don't know about the rest because i gave up using it after 30 seconds, when i was shown the management panel and noticed how bad it was for touch screens.

</comment><comment><USER19> I love the UI on this, it's the kind of app that I'd run full-screen because it looks like a desktop app.

I'll give it a proper try when they can import OPML.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I see there may have been a misconception here; I haven't built this app. I discovered it while looking for an alternative to Google Reader.

</comment><comment><USER20> Locked up on me several times in Chrome.

<comment><USER14> Me too a few times. The drag and drop feature in the setup window is a bit slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I know it's coming, but until Google Reader importing is functional, it's of no use to me.

<comment><USER22> There are so many new RSS apps out there but it seems like they don't even admit to themselves that Google Reader exists. The project doesn't seem worth doing if you're just going to provide a subset of that functionality.

Do we want to comment on your site rather than the blog post itself? Probably not. Hacker News is an exception because there is a community of like-minded people here; that will not be the case on a generic aggregator. Solving the community issue is more important than dumping a ton of social features on it.

There are some enticing possibilities around RSS readers, but I think they mostly revolve around the incorporation of other ideas into them. Even a modest follower of RSS is going to hit information saturation after 20ish blogs, so a recommendation and ranking service would definitely be useful.

I looked over the screenshots and they didn't wow me. I would have been willing to try it, like the above poster said, if I could simply access the reader and add a feed to see what it was like. I'd understand that my settings weren't saved until I signed up.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Speed reading? - <AUTHOR>

How quickly do you read on average? Not how many books you read over a certain period of time, rather how much time do you have to invest into reading a certain amount?<p>Does anyone have any experience with methods, exercises or anything to help one read faster?  Of course, I mean improving speed without reducing comprehension or retention. Secondly, reading "technical" material is different from most other reading and this doesn't need to help with "technical" reading. <comment><USER2> Without claiming myself an expert in research on reading, and not a "speed reader" myself, I am probably able to deliver something of a lecture on this topic. Disregarding my lack of credentials, here's something you might find interesting in an unstructured manner. I apologize in advance for lack of sources; you can question me on anything I write, and I assure you there are sources but I won't bother digging.

Generally, proponents of speed reading don't know their stuff. Speed reading is based on the notion that the brain is underused in comprehending text; training would supposedly untap this potential. Don't count on it. Some say that if you read faster, you force your brain to focus, and so comprehension goes up. This works to an extent, noticeable, sure, but far less than hyped. And it is not a technique problem: it is a discipline problem. If you're generally focused at what you do, you're probably among the faster readers.

So most people read at about 250-400wpm, and this is related to the speed of the "inner voice," aka "subvocalization" (or, better, the phonological pathway/loop). So the idea is that if you reduce, or eliminate the inner voice, you can read faster. Programs that focus on these will claim 1000+ wpm. There is some truth to this, but these programs aren't all it takes.

Now when your eye sees text, it the brain takes time to parse it and register meaning. Conscious meaning, IIRC, happens after a 350ms mark, which means it is biologically impossible to read word by word, line by line, beyond the speed of the inner voice. This means that if you want to read faster, you're reading in blocks of text .

What does this mean? It means that when a normal reader sees a word, you're seeing a sentence or paragraph. Peripheral vision? Not necessarily. Peripheral vision doesn't have enough acuity to support parsing at a level required for detailed reading. IOW, most of the peripheral vision talk by these programs is BS.

The cases where PV is useful is when you have good familiarity with the text contours. How do you train this? The hard way: build your vocabulary, and read a lot. Reading is a "self-bootstrapped process," if you will. This is, AFAICT, the ONLY fool-proof, non bullshit method.

FYI, I recall two speed readers, who both read very fast but in different ways. First one reads blocks of text in a glance. He would see a paragraph and understand it in the time you read a sentence, in a kind of real-time, bulk- parsing process. The second one would read text in a "serial" fashion without regard to the meaning, into some kind of buffer, then think about it after he's done. The catch: both are geniuses.

The bottleneck in deciphering meaning from text is not at the text->parse stage (this is what SR programs focus on). It is from the parse->meaning stage. IOW, brain power. Fortunately you can train this, but probably not with some book or some program.

This is pretty thoughtstream. If you have other questions I'm happy to discuss.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this was informative. I'll believe you about the sources.

Who are the two geniuses?

I've heard the block of text at a time thing before. In fact, I even think most people who I know that read significantly faster than me do so this way. The strange part is that when asked, people have told me that they have a hard time deciding whether they read a word a time or in larger blocks of text. My only question would be: can this skill be learned/trained? If so, how does one go about doing that?

I'm a bit ambivalent about the bottleneck, at least personally. I guess it depends on what kind of reading you do most of the time, but I'm inclined that I read more materials that are written in simple text that was meant to be consumed easily and that in those cases the bottleneck is in the text->parse stage. When reading technical material (which I also spend a fair amount of time doing) the bottleneck is definitely on the parse->meaning stage and that process probably takes several orders of magnitude more time, but speeding up the text->parse stage would be worth its while still. I say this because the process is a little bit different when reading technical material. You get through the text and you think about it for a long time, do problems, discuss, perform thought experiments, etc. But everything in the list seems to be a different stage than the parse->meaning stage. It is more of a meaning->true understanding/intuition stage. Something like first you read and you need to comprehend what you have been told at a "language" level. Then you go and understand the concepts more abstractly and at different levels. However, it is difficult to draw the line between those two stages.

<comment><USER2> These geniuses were an accomplished scientist, and a high school friend (who will probably become an accomplished scientist). It shouldn't be hard to find these kinds of people among "smart" folks though, simply because they absorb lots of information on a regular basis. If we arbitrarily set the upper limit of normal reading to be at 800wpm (very optimistic and unlikely), there are people who still vastly exceed this speed. It's not just skimming: they will learn the stuff just as anyone else would, in an almost magical process.

You're right about the bottleneck, which makes my previous post's discussion not so good. There are multiple bottlenecks, and improving one area will not guarantee a result like those programs promise. If it's technical material, obviously, if you were Feynman you'd be able to quickly read hard paper without feeling uncomfortable (hence my reasoning about brain power). If it's Bearstein Bears, then, yes, you can fly over pages with total comprehension. As you said, here the speed of parsing text would make a big difference.

This is related to the "block of text" thing, which can be trained. It's not "reading in blocks" per se, but the training of fast visual pattern recognition. In this sense, it is similar to the pattern recognition the Rain Man used to count 270 or so matches in one glance. The most direct strategy then, is simply twofold. One, increase your vocabulary. Not just so you can answer test questions: you really need to know these words cold. Unfamiliar words take longer to retrieve from memory. Obviously, Charles Dickens would take longer to decode than Douglas Adams. (Hitchhiker is interesting though, since there are many invented terms; maintaining speed on this requires a relevant, but different, skill, and shouldn't be confused with that involved in vocabulary building). Two, read more, and ideally, when you read non- essential material (daily news perhaps), consciously push yourself (this takes discipline). The point of this is not for speed of parsing words. It's for recognizing the shapes of lumps of words. To illustrate: if you see "the Jedi reader reads fantastically quickly" a thousand times, you'll begin to parse that as a combined shape, in a single fixation. You will slow down, though, if you see "fantastically quickly, the Jedi reader reads." On the most part these two sentences are semantically equivalent, but the latter will take longer to parse, simply because it takes a different shape. But if you read that many times, you'll start chunking it like the other sentence. So reading a lot is simply to build up your arsenal of "familiar phrase shapes."

Again, this is the most foolproof way of training yourself. There are other things that may bring small improvements. But this is basically the heart of the matter. There are people who can parse unfamiliar word forms very quickly. The "bottleneck" here, as I understand it, is at the pipeline between CPU and RAM, and cache size. Genetics plays a big role here, so I usually don't bother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Once in a while if I find a good solid article or paper I'll paste it into ZapReader[1].

[1] - <http://www.zapreader.com/reader/index.php>

<comment><USER2> For those interested in these kinds of applications, this is an RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) device. Its chief benefit is most likely forced self-pacing (and thus, forced concentration), but I highly doubt it will assist your comprehension. For one, it is ludicrous to read "the quick red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog" and "scientists discovered more CP-violation than predicted by the standard model" at the same speed. For two, this RSVP method obliterates benefits of peripheral vision. Sure, you can do several words at once, but PV does its job above and below the lines as well. For three, it eliminates any recall aids you might have acquired by the shape of the text (ever think, "what was that word... it was at the left bottom corner of that page"?).

Otherwise, it's an interesting thing. I would play with that kind of stuff, but for experimentation.

<comment><USER4> I think the comprehension remains just fine. I use a desktop version of zapreader (now obsolete as far as I'm concerned, I like web apps much better), and I comfortably read at 800wpm without any comprehension issues. The brain caches words as they're flashed to your eyes, and you only have 2% of "real" (narrow) vision anyway, so from a psychological viewpoint it makes sense. That's also why zapreader has a pause button. The nice thing about my desktop reader (which I admit I don't use a lot, hence I'll switch) is you can pause it and show the context, which lets you think for a while if you want to.

<comment><USER2> Context is definitely important; the pause function is a nice touch. I don't deny that there are things you can read with RSVP. You probably can see that there are things that aren't suitable for RSVP too. It depends on the content and very importantly, the goal. But I will contest the usefulness of RSVP as a primary approach to reading in daily life; the case for peripheral vision above and below your current focus is strong enough. Your center of gaze is where meaning is most efficiently processed, but peripheral cues do enhance understanding. I would further reason that the spatial arrangement of text is also useful in aiding recall (different topic).

Also, the brain, or a little more accurately, your visual memory buffer, does indeed "cache" images, which does get deciphered in time, but as the text is flashed to your eyes at a constant rate, it doesn't make a difference. If I flash a stimulus at your eyes for 65ms, you may not consciously detect something, but it will register in your brain and you will process it, after the stimulus is gone. This is the visual buffer in action, but the processing is latent and does not occur at the same speed it takes to send the signal from the optical nerves to the visual cortex. If I flash many short pulses back-to-back, I won't bet on retaining most of the stuff.

The one-line RSVP has a fundamental speed limit before your forebrain cannot consciously register (hence willfully reflect upon) the material. While you can pause the reader, it requires intervention by your hands, which could be an unnecessary delay, because your eyes are far quicker and more fine-tuned for this task.

Anyhow, I'm sure zapreader has its uses. It does force you to read in a less lazy way, and is also useful (very definitely so) for training, but for those serious about reading very "fast," RSVP can only do so much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Had a speed reading class in 8th grade. Used an exercise to recognize several words at a time by reading pages with the material split into 2 columns starting with 2 words in each one building up to 4 or 5 over time. We were tested for reading comprehension and speed. It really worked for me, but not everyone. Can scan pages insanely quickly now. Retention is another story.

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book- Touchstone/dp/0671212095...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book- Touchstone/dp/0671212095/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207527635&sr=8-2)

I read that for a high school english class, and it changed the way I read. It teaches you how to absorb more information in less time.

<comment><USER7> I'll second that. I haven't read the whole thing, but the multiple, deepening passes idea is key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to work for a company that hocked speed reading training software. As a kind of side effect, I learned how to speed read.

The thing with speed reading is that you can increase the speed at which you read fairly easily, but your comprehension and recall will suffer greatly. I can probably read 500 words per minute, but comprehension is pretty low (~60%). At that point, it generally isn't worth it.

Speed reading is kind of a stressful activity, and there's only a very narrow set of situations in which it makes sense to speed read something. 95% of the stuff that I read, I read for pleasure, and in order to enjoy reading something you have to read it the "old fashioned" way.

If you want to teach yourself to speed read, books and the like won't really help much. It is kind of like learning to drive- you really have to just try it yourself. To start, sweep your hand over the words in an "infinity sign" pattern, with the height of each sweep being about 3 or 4 lines high. Don't read the words to yourself, just focus on the words above your finger. After awhile, you'll be able to detach your eyes from the lines, and you can stop sweeping your hand over the page. The key is to take in as much as possible with your eyes, and let your brain assemble everything in the background. You'll eventually get pretty good at associating key nouns with the verbs and adjectives around them. That's pretty much all you need to get 50-80% comprehension with most things.

(P.S. I'm not aware of any speed reading methods that don't come with a reduced level of recall/comprehension. I think it is just the nature of the beast.)

</comment><comment><USER9> If you think you're reading too slowly, the solution is to read less crap.

If you're enjoying your book, you don't wish it would end sooner. This would be like wishing your delicious meal would end sooner. And if you're not enjoying it, why are you reading it? The answer for many people is that they need to meet some quota to uphold their imaginary status as intellectuals. That's the real problem to be solved, not reading speed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why people are always trying to find shortcuts for somethings that are meant to be done very carefully.

Writing is done to communicate ideas, ideas that the author took considerable time to formulate and put into a coherent work. Reading is one of the tasks in life that should be done very carefully. The only way to read quicker and retain the same level of comprehension is to practice reading.

<comment><USER11> I noticed that as I became a faster reader, I lost my interest in novels. I used to think this was because my taste had changed, but now I think the speed itself is the problem. When I read novels in foreign languages, I enjoy them much more.

My advice, start reading slower (and closer) and save time by stop reading fluff. Anything worth reading is worth rereading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Check out Dictator: <http://dictator.kieranholland.com/dictator.html>

It lets you set how many words are visible at a time, so you can use it to do the exercises jakewolf mentioned.

I could read Crime and Punishment at about 600-700 wpm (around 200-300 is normal) and I think I still had good comprehension. You can also adjust the speed as you go if passages get more difficult.

Also, when I read normally, I don't read linearly. I scan a page and narrow in on interesting words. Usually, if the material isn't too tricky, I can understand a paragraph very quickly this way. It is how I read online.

Finally, it really helps to think about what the author is saying, especially if I try to anticipate what's next. This gives me something to compare and contrast with, which makes me retain and understand what I read much better.

<comment><USER12> i prefer to read word by word so i don't miss anything. if something isn't worth reading that way, i usually read a couple sentences at random places that way then leave.

i think a large majority of arguments would go more smoothly if people would actually read all the words instead of guessing what the other person is saying.

<comment><AUTHOR> I go back and forth between trying to read between the two styles. It mostly has to do with whether I'm trying to read to "savor the language" or to gather information. I'm definitely not willing to skim through Howl, but if I get the point on a textbook without having to read every word in a paragraph that's awesome.

<comment><USER12> haha textbooks. i used to just read the summary at the end of the chapter in most text books, and maybe the section headings, and that's it. skipping most pages is even faster than speed reading or skimming :)

of course that doesn't work for math textbooks and some sciences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If reading technical documents or for pleasure, I invest myself pretty deeply, taking a lot of time and occasionally re-reading passages.

If reading for just fast consumption of information, I often will use a multiple sentence technique where you read 2-3 lines as you go across and reconstruct the ideas as you go. It is unusual, but it works eventually. It is not meant for deep understanding though. Kind of like reading something and only getting the highlights (albeit very detailed highlights).

</comment><comment><USER14> i prefer to read slowly. as i understand it, part of the idea of speed-reading follows: step 1: you read the words aloud; this is slow because you can only read as fast as you can talk; step 2: you read the words aloud in your head without your lips moving; faster, but still slow because you can "see" faster than you can "hear"; step 3: you identify words/meaning through sight and not sound. the thing is, moving to step 3 takes away some of the musicality/beauty of language.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will try this next time I'm reading for leisure.

BTW: good luck on your YC application ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm generally a pretty fast reader. I've never done any speed reading courses, but I gre up without a TV so I read a lot when I was young.

I can read at somewhere between 575 & 600 wpm with <http://www.zapreader.com/> (I hadn't tried that before - interesting idea). That's not comfortable, and I need to concentrate to do it, but I suspect I'd still be getting close to 100% recall. I'm not a reading technique expert, but it seems to me that the zapreader software is specifically designed to stop people using skimming techniques, so if you can read at a good speed on that you are doing pretty well.

When I'm reading a novel I generally read at 1 minute per page. On average that's probably around 250 wpm, and I find that relaxing and easy.

</comment><comment><USER16> the biggest tip that i picked up on how to read faster is this:

eye movement is the bottleneck in the i/o process. your mind will process the words fast, you're losing all of your speed on moving your eyes across each word and focusing on them. learn to use your peripheral vision more.

on each new line, instead of focusing on the first word, focus on the second, but use your peripheral vision to read the first. finish up the line in the same way but backwards. you'll find you'll be reading markedly faster already, without really losing any of the meaning, context, or beauty of language.

you can speed it up even faster by taking the same technique to an extreme, but i don't like to do that, myself.

<comment><USER2> Eye movement isn't the bottleneck. I mean, reducing fixations will not increase comprehension. Sure, your eye takes time to move, but each saccadic jump takes less time (and is immensely precise with its jump, so it's a pretty optimized process) than that of text recognition to comprehension in your brain.

Peripheral vision serves as priming mechanism. You can better prepare your mind to piece together relevant words and form meaning, but don't expect it to support reading like the center of gaze.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Took a speed reading seminar, best method i found was to use a ruler and just slide it down the page, and you try to keep up.

Also, do not vocalize the words externally, it should just be read naturally.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen I budget two minutes per page for books, and three minutes per letter-sized page of text.

Stay away from speed-reading products. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading>

</comment><comment><USER18> Just read digg.com everyday.

</comment><comment><USER19> Don't bother. Just read more. I've always read very fast, and I don't think it helps that much. My experience has been that reading quickly is reading carelessly, which serves well for scanning and finding info - but to understand, you have to slow down and make metaphors, pictures in your head, or work with pencil, paper (or programming tools!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's why I excluded "technical" materials. You have to read those with pencil&paper and/or a terminal. However, I think there would be some benefit in being able to read things like novels or simple non-fiction quickly.

<comment><USER20> "things like novels"

Only if they're bad novels. When I read (good) novels, I'm constantly trying to slow myself down - to the point of literally mouthing the words or forcing myself to linger five minutes on a page. It takes so much longer to _feel_ a novel than it does to intellectually take in what's going on - so if I read too fast I end up knowing what happened, but not having experienced the novel.

As somebody pointed out on the 'heroes' thread, fiction often has a very high information content - it's just buried in symbolism and multiple meanings and the like.</comment></comment></comment>


It's Time to Reinvent Democracy - <AUTHOR> https://outlookzen.com/2013/11/06/its-time-to-reinvent-democracy/ <comment><USER2> To fix democracy we need to decrease divisiveness / polarization / party orthodoxy, and increase collaboration / independent thought.

Steps that reduce the 2-party power, and increase individual power (Ex. widespread ranked choice / runoff voting) would have major benefits.

</comment><comment><USER3> The big and obvious problem with any variation of this approach is always going to be "who gets to pick _x_ ", where _x_ can be

\- The system used

\- The criteria for who gets a voice and who doesn't, and how much of a voice

\- What is called a 'representative sample'

\- Etc., etc., etc.

There are only two systems that solve this problem.

Democracy (partially), by effectively abdicating responsibility and saying there are no such criteria.

And religion, where if the rules come from a universally accepted Higher Source, clearly that's who gets to pick _x_ and will be accepted by anyone who accepts the Higher Source.

</comment><comment><USER4> The primary advantage of democracy vs. most other systems (authoritarian, monarchy, etc.) is that leaders can be voted out of office.

The primary disadvantage, as noted in the article, is the tyranny of the majority.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Google's search engine works so well, precisely because it relies on > credibility-based differential voting power

I guess this explains why web search results no longer appear on the first page?

</comment><comment><USER5> That moment when those who lack the slightest clue what's broken with democrazy.

Decide they want to reinvent it.

What could go wrong.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes. Pro-Slavery Democracy cat is out of the bag.</comment>