Thunderbird 52.7.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/52.7.0/releasenotes/ <comment><USER2> Thunderbird is still the best crossplatform, multi account mail client around. Everybody migrated to webmail, but for those old grumps of us who still have multiple email accounts, and maybe even follow some newsgroups, tb is still the best player in town.

Thanks tb team for your work! I love you all!

<comment> cup-of-tea A proper mail client also seems essential for taking part in mailing lists. I used to use gnus but got too frustrated at people sending me email in stupid HTML formats that I couldn't read. Thunderbird is the easiest thing to use that behaves like a proper mail client but also deals with the garbage from bad clients like Outhouse etc.

<comment><USER3> At the moment I am using Wanderlust, to help with the html I have set it up so I can open them in firefox.

<comment><USER4> I've banished myself to mobile. I am trying out k9-mail and open keychain on Android. They are both available on f-droid and seem to work well. Open keychain is so much easier to deal with than what I remember of enigmail on the desktop.

<comment><USER5> OpenKeychain is currently the best way to manage PGP keys on any platform. I don't know why there's no good UI for the desktop, Enigmail is a distant second.

<comment><USER6> > OpenKeychain is currently the best way to manage PGP keys on any platform.

How is it the best on any platform? I thought it only existed on Android?

<comment><USER5> I mean it's the best of any GUI on any platform. It's Android-only, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll have to give it a shot, but the last time I used thunderbird it was unusably slow at pretty much everything. Compacting my folders would help for a day or two, and then it'd basically become unresponsive for 30s or more with any user input.

I hope they focus on performance in coming revisions.

<comment><USER8> I keep using Thunderbird because I haven't found anything better, but it's unbearably slow. I'd gladly jump ship to a better cross platform, featureful, responsive email client, but apparently they don't make these anymore.

<comment><USER9> There's no money in email clients.

<comment><USER10> There is actually. They sell at least the following three email clients: 1\. Incredimail 2\. The Bat 3\. Outlook

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been stuck 31.7 for years because it's the only version which honours font preferences in OS X. Theme and Font Size Changer was useless after version 41.1. Someone please tell they've fixed this nonsense.

<comment><USER12> I read that as "I've been stuck 31.7 years because it's the only ..." and did a triple-take on how old the software is and how long you've been using it. But no, Wikipedia lists it as "Initial release: July 28, 2003; 14 years ago".

Still very old to be in such widespread use, though. From where I worked to my grandma to my in-laws to the Linux poweruser that I am, a very widespread range of people use it. I am not 100% happy with it, but email is important enough that I want something stable (e.g. no bugs that either mess up my email server-side or stop it from working) and secure (both the connection and for viewing).

<comment><USER11> According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Thunderbird...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Thunderbird#Release_history) Thunderbird 31.7.0 was released on 12th May 2015.

<comment><USER12> Read what I wrote carefully, I misread it as "I've been stuck 31.7 years" ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love it, it has been my favourite email client since the Netscape days.

Don't forget to donate.

<comment><USER14> On the same page. Have gone through endless flavors of Linux, Win and OSX by simply copying the emails folder from system to system for close to 20 years now - and never lost one email. To say I appreciate this piece of software would be an understatement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> With the latest job I went from work GMail to company-hosted (and thunderbird) for the first time. I'm pleased to report it is far better than I feared. Thank you, Thunderbird!

<comment><USER16> I love Thunderbird, I have used it at several previous jobs and I'm finding joy in email clients again as I now actively avoid using the web client for gmail. I have never understood people's gripes with the client, but maybe I'm just not a power user.

Seems like Mozilla could be a trustworthy mail provider as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have 6 mailboxes I prefer to keep separate, and my email client history goes from Thunderbird to Postbox, then Thunderbird again, and then Spark.

Thunderbird was a good mail client, but the search is seriously broken. It's almost impossible to search Chinese at all, and when it searches Russian, some weird hits get mixed in, and some proper hits get ignored.

Postbox was very good overall, but every once in a while it would lose the whole cache, index, and sometimes even the whole downloaded history, and would spend a day chugging at downloading everything over again.

So for the last half a year I've been using Spark, and I'm pleasantly surprised by speed, search, and the feel of the app. Admittedly, there is no Windows version so it's not truly cross-platform.

</comment><comment><USER18> Mu4e + emacs is pretty neat and quite zippy

<comment><USER19> I'm using this setup too for quite a while now and overall, I'm pretty happy with it. But some HTML mail is barely readable. How do you deal with that?

I've written an emacs function which opens the mail in firefox, but I'm not really fond of that as every remote content is loaded by the browser. Is there a way to stop that?

<comment><USER18> with the xwidgets functionality its possible to view html mail in fashion that looks pretty much like chrome/firefox inside emacs with webkitgtk sadly I can't seem to get that feature working on my emacs on funtoo or manjaro.

See. [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mu- discuss/JqHEGycEy...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mu- discuss/JqHEGycEyKI)

If you have any suggestions regarding this I'd love to hear it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm using the default mac client. Is thunderbird better?

<comment><USER12> I don't know the default OS X client so I can't go into detail, but I'd guess that one is better integrated with OS X. On the other hand, Thunderbird works cross-platform and allows you to choose any operating system without having to consider a new mail client, set it up and learn new ways. You could probably even copy over your data folder and resume working without any set-up (`scp -r ~/.thunderbird user@newpc:` would be the complete migration process, assuming it works between OSes).

<comment><USER21> You're correct. You copy the profile folder and set the default profile startup to be the one you copied (I think this was in the profile.ini file) and it is if you never left. I this this between mac, linux, and windows machines and it functioned perfectly every time including add-ons, settings, filters, and themes.

<comment><USER22> _I this this between mac, linux, and windows machines and it functioned perfectly every time_

What OS did the profile _start_ on?

I copied my profile from Windows to Mac, and everything is fucked up. Because of the different line ending characters, as far as I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just started using it and finally dropped Airmail. I don't know why didn't do it years ago!!!

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice to see win XP continues to be a supported platform.

<comment><USER25> Honest question - why?

There are kids enlisting in the army now that were born after XP was released.

<comment><USER26> What matters is not when Windows XP was originally released, but when its official support ended, which according to Wikipedia was on April 2014. Both Firefox and Thunderbird supported Windows XP for a few more years after that (since Windows XP was and is still popular even after its official support ended); version 52 of both (which is an ESR release) is going to be the last one with support for Windows XP.

The operating system support doesn't change within a major release, which is why 52.7 has the same operating system support as 52.0.

<comment><USER12> > What matters is not when Windows XP was originally released, but when its > official support ended

Well, or when a serious replacement arose (because XP was aging at that point). Vista was quite alright if you had a beefy computer, but for the majority I guess it took until 7, which would be July 2009.

Not saying you're wrong or that support should be dropped, I'm just not sure end of support is the best date to use.

<comment><USER25> I think end of support is a pretty good metric. If Microsoft won't keep the underlying platform safe, one could argue it's ethically problematic but to continue to encourage people to use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It still feels like the 90s software.

<comment><USER27> Yes, and it would be great to keep it that way. But unfortunately, some say there are plans to adopt more "web tech", maybe Electron... I hope that day never comes.

<comment><USER28> Yes, let's hope this gecko and XUL based application never gets rewritten using web tech...</comment></comment></comment>


System76 Will Start Designing and Building Its Own Linux Laptops in January 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/11/20/system76-will-start-designing-and-building-its-own-linux-laptops-beginning-january-2020/#57535bfc3e16 <comment><USER2> I love the concept of System76, full stop.

What has kept me from seriously considering them, however, is the absence of AMD-powered systems from them. I understand the ubiquity of Intel-based hardware, but I don't full get why not even an option of an AMD-based system is available.

If they're going to go their own way in terms of hardware design, I would hope that they at least opened a line of dialog with AMD to explore that option. AMD is dying for a good laptop OEM, and System76 has the good sense to make it into a well designed package all around.

I hope to see something develop in this direction.

<comment><USER3> _> I don't full get why not even an option of an AMD-based system is available._

Intel has been mired in an anti-trust lawsuit in the EU for a decade now, on charges that they offer deep discounts to OEMs on the condition that they don't ship products from competitors (read: AMD) in volume. Such a program would put substantial pressure on OEMs to avoid AMD, since they'd still need to ship a large number of Intel-based products, and losing those discounts would mean their Intel-based products would end up substantially more expensive than their competitors'. The only way to get out of the trap would be to ship _nothing but_ AMD-based products, and demand for Intel is still strong enough that doing so would essentially be committing suicide.

All of which would explain why you don't see many AMD-based products from OEMs on the shelves, despite AMD's clear superiority in the latest generation.

<comment><USER4> > _" AMD's clear superiority in the latest generation."_

IS that true even for laptops? For my new desktop I did indeed get an AMD, also because of Intel's recent technical problems and backdoors, but for a laptop I could really not find anything good that used AMD, and I was lead to understand that for laptops, Intel is still best for some reason. (Do AMDs run too hot? I don't know.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm pulling for System76 in principle, but I've never been able to take the plunge on one because their chunkier Clevo/Sager-based designs have always paled aesthetically in comparison to the Dell XPS 13 line. Maybe that will finally change when they can design their own.

<comment><USER6> Did you take a look at these?

[https://system76.com/laptops/darter](https://system76.com/laptops/darter)

[https://system76.com/laptops/galago](https://system76.com/laptops/galago)

I have one of the chunkier ones. The roominess of its insides make me happy whenever I open it up (e.g. to clean it up).

<comment><USER7> I love System76 and used to own one of their desktops, but this just looks awful: [https://artoo.system76.com/assets/products/darp6/keyboard- on...](https://artoo.system76.com/assets/products/darp6/keyboard- on-1ae6cee302_1280.webp)

Thankfully the Thelio is absolutely beautiful, so I still have high hopes for their in-house designs.

<comment><USER8> Beauty is subjective. And luckily, that's not really a perspective you're often to encounter when using a laptop in the real world.

IMO, the XPS laptops don't really look a ton different when viewed from that angle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome news. I bought a Darter Pro back in March and the experience has been great. I was a little hesitant at first because I'm not a Linux expert, but their team puts a lot of effort into making sure stuff with Pop_Os "just works." It might not be quite as polished as a macbook, but it's a comparable product at half the price, plus I get to support open source. Thelio looks amazing and I'm excited to see what they can do in the laptop space.

<comment><USER10> One of the reasons I didn't get a System76 machine was because of how Pop!_os is branded. Everything about its branding, from the name itself to even the footer background on the website looks like a complete joke to me.

Of course, maybe there is a demographic that is in to this sort of branding, but I bet it's more of a detriment to overall sales than anything.

Is the OS as full of seconds-long bouncy animations and bubble letter finds as the branding and website makes it look? If so, can animations be reduced or disabled?

<comment><USER11> That might actually be a reason to _get_ a system76 machine, since I expect that the stock OS can be replaced with very few issues. Debian GNU/Linux is a lot leaner and meaner than Ubuntu or PopOS (which don't seem to differ significantly in their branding anyway).

(Even Fedora or CentOS are not nearly as comfortable to use in my experience, although they might be preferable in other ways!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If they lift everything physical from the 2015 MacBook it will be a runaway success.

<comment><USER13> That would be pretty cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please consider adding an Ultranav-like pointing device and an API for the battery-controlling EC (start/stop charging thresholds - unless you already have that). FWIW those are the only things that are keeping me glued to the Thinkpad line.

<comment><USER15> Same here. I love to keep my hands on the home row. Nothing can beat a pointer with a concave cap!

I check the system76 laptops every once in a while only to see if they added a pointer yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is such good news. Pop_OS is fantastic, but I've never been super impressed with their laptop hardware. The world really needs a way to buy a high-quality laptop that's running Linux, and supported.

</comment><comment><USER17> Popping in to note that if anyone is on the fence about the Oryx Pro, it's a fantastic machine, I love mine! System76 was a fantastic company to deal with.

After some initial troubles with the cooling system (I sent the laptop back and it was serviced under warranty), I've been chugging along the last few months.

I should note that the fans _can_ get pretty loud (from what I read on reviews other laptops like the Lenovo X1 Extreme are even louder), so while it _is_ portable, it might be a little bit intense to use at a coffee shop/coworking space.

For those interested, shameless plug to where I rambled about the experience, and getting Arch installed (which isn't an officially supported OS but worked fantastic): [https://vadosware.io/post/starting-my-journey-with-the- syste...](https://vadosware.io/post/starting-my-journey-with-the- system76-oryx-pro-and-arch)

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL What problem did you have with cooling? Mine has been working fine, but i can't help but feel terrified when looking at temperatures while gaming. It's been holding for 2 years though, so i guess it's fine...

<comment><USER17> Mine was DOA -- it would overheat within minutes of being started up, a cooling unit wasn't starting/working at all.

Yeah, I see high temps while gaming, but nothing crazy actually (~80C).

I actually have a second smaller laptop as a sort of redundancy _just_ in case, but if it's been good for you for 2 years maybe it's fine. I do have the newer model they just started making so I assume your model is shaped different as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just want a decent keyboard, non-soldered RAM, and a second battery with a quality 14" screen where everything works reasonably well out of the box on Linux. I don't care if it's a bit heavy or thick, I just want to have a good typing experience with high performance CPU options that don't get thermally throttled too bad.

Building a sleek laptop is all the rage these days, and everyone seems intent on convincing us that you can have a good keyboard in a thin package. Go the opposite way and make the best working experience possible and then work out how to make it easy to carry. As long as it's not ridiculously heavy (say, <5lbs or so), I'd consider buying it if it had a better typing experience.

</comment><comment><USER19> ~2020~ 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a feeling the chances of them making a 16:10 or 3:2 laptop are slim to none.

<comment><USER21> Nothing in the forbes article suggested they'd prioritize anything like that. Talking about wood grains and rounded corners, the priority seems to be more function following form.

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't expect anything resembling modern classic thinkpad replacements from system76 at this point. It's more like hipster machines incorporating wood and leather.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Will they be sticking with x86? They seem like one of the few companies that could get away with releasing a POWER line.

<comment><USER23> Why POWER over Arm?

<comment><USER24> Outside of the server realm, ARM ISAs aren't standardized and require a fork of the Linux kernel to support each individual board configuration. The consumer ARM space is a mess when it comes to Linux support.

<comment><USER25> There is only one ARM ISA. Well, okay, multiple (32 vs 64 bit, microcontroller vs unix-capable) but vendors don't change the ISA. (Apple has been allowed to introduce some extension for using a coprocessor (?) recently but that's it.)

The different crap between vendors is just the various onboard devices on the SoC, nothing to do with the CPU cores that implement the ARM ISA.

The "consumer" space is indeed not good, but there's only so many SoC vendors (and most of them rely on Synopsys DesignWare blocks for all the things) and mainline Linux supports most of them really really well.

The real fun time is for us in the BSD world, we're too small for e.g. Rockchip to care about us and contribute like they do with Linux :(

<comment><USER24> I got my acronyms confused, when I say ISA, I mean the ARM board equivalents of the Industry Standard Architecture[1] that preceded PCI.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good luck to the team on this endeavor. I have never had a chance to use a laptop / workstation from them, but they must be doing something right since they have been around for a while now and that the community has nothing but great things to say about them.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are the designs going to be released with a free license? And what exactly will they do/don't design?

</comment><comment><USER28> Damn, and I just bought one.

I'll have to buy another I guess =D</comment>


Tell HN: The Government has shut down Jotform without warning - <AUTHOR>

I just receive an email from Jotform informing me that the government has shut them down without warning, I use Jotform on my sideproject: http://www.feedsapi.com so if you are a user, check your emails and update your url. <comment><USER2> I can see that <http://www.jotform.com/> is working fine.

<http://twitter.com/#!/Jotform/status/169791387125026818>

</comment><comment><USER3> Announcement:

<http://www.jotform.net/announcement/domain/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Any context in the email?</comment>


UK government invests in Sabre air-breathing rocket engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23332592 <comment><USER2> The Brits are good engineers, and, compared to American juggernaut companies, specially in the defense and aerospace area, they manage to make innovation with very little.

The US military spent millions all through the 1960's upto the late 1980's for a successful VTOL aircraft. Along came the brits with fractions of the budget with a great product the Harrier GR-1.

There are some great arguments here, specially the savings in weight from Oxygen by pja.

But I want to ask something different. Even if there is a slight chance for this idea to succeed shouldn't we/they invest in it anyway? Making breakthroughs in jet engine design takes years and extraordinary amount of effort and money. If the government doesn't take the risk, long term innovation would be very difficult. Plus even if it doesn't reach its intended goals many side technologies are generated even from a failed undertaking...

<comment><USER3> _> If the government doesn't take the risk, long term innovation would be very difficult._

What I'm wondering is, if the taxpayers have to take all the risk and spend all the R&D money out of our own pockets, why don't we get to keep all the profits as well? I thought innovation was the role of heroic figures who eat risk for breakfast? I thought the massive, economy-distorting pay packages were justified by all that risk?

EDIT: obviously a lot more money is needed for marketing, manufacturing etc. But as I understand it the IP from these projects is basically given as a gift to favoured arms manufacturers when it's ready to become a product? Please correct me.

<comment><USER4> The article says:

"the government's investment represents about 25% of the total"

Personally I am quite delighted to see my UK tax money going to back this project. Compared to the amounts we spend on much sillier projects it is a rounding error.

[e.g. My home city of Edinburgh is spending £1 _billion_ on a rather short length of trams and the UK is spending ~£7 billion on two aircraft carriers when we can only afford to run one!]

<comment><USER3> In this case that seems pretty fair. Although if it's only 25% and it's such a great project I wonder could our bounteous financial sector not cover it?

Are the trams really still not finished? Blimey. My commiserations.

<comment><USER4> "Are the trams really still not finished?"

About a year from them actually running properly for passengers :-|

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whoa, this is really awesome!

For those that don't know, airbreathing engines are MUCH MORE efficient than conventional rocket engines.

Not only in terms of weight saved from not having to lug around too much O2, but also because of the way it works inherently.

I decided to make a space game once, with real world stuff on it, and settled for the Triton engine for my game spaceship, I did lots of research about rocket engines, and I was very sad when I compared them to airplane engines and it was clear how better they were, and yet useless in space.

But I never had this idea of mixing both... It sounds so awesome that I cannot describe it.

Also it allow some sci-fi stuff that is frequent but so far very broken (that is small fighter spaceship planes hybrids that can enter and leave atmosphere at will, that for now were usually handwaved by the author to explain that it has some weird super efficient rocket engine... with this tech that sort of stuff is less improbable)

<comment><USER6> Are they really more efficient, for real world uses?

The way I understand it, the argument goes something like this. To reach orbit you need to accelerate to very high speeds (Mach 25). To avoid crazy drag losses you therefore want to get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible. So being able to use oxygen from the air on your way up is a marginal gain at best, and almost certainly not worth the extra complexity.

<comment><USER7> The main advantage of the Sabre concept is not only using outboard air as substitute for onboard oxidizer, but also as reaction mass. This allows to accelerate to over Mach 5 while still flying in airbreathing mode, using a fraction of the amount of fuel that would be required to reach the same speed on pure rocket power, and no onboard oxidizer. Once that speed is reached, the air becomes too thin for the air-breathing mode to continue functioning, and the engines switch to rocket mode, burning onboard oxidizer instead of air; but because the ship is nearly out of the atmosphere at this point, it doesn't take much to finish accelerating to orbital speed. Think of it basically as replacing the whole first stage of a conventional rocket with some jet engines and a sip of fuel for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This made my day however:

      has passed an independent audit from European Space
      Agency experts, and Mr Osborne himself has inspected the
      test rig on the Culham science park in Oxfordshire.

The ESA has verified the engine, but thank goodness, George Osbourne double checked it all, just in case those rocket scientists missed micro-fluctuations in heat transfer gradients. I mean they were probably all French anyway.

George Osbourne (UK CFO/Treasury Secretary) is getting a lot of political flack, and having his name associated with UK home grown and based innovative technology is clearly something his press office wanted the BBC to know. Who were too lazy to cut the sentence.

<comment><USER9> You clearly have something against Osborne.

The UK government are investing the money. Osborne is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, why is it strange that he would be mentioned in the article as having a look at it?

He's only getting political flak from socialists and welfare claimants really - no surprise there.

<comment><USER3> And those well known socialists, the IMF: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/18/george- osborn...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/18/george-osborne-imf- austerity)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A couple of months ago there was an excellent BBC4 documentary about Alan Bond and Reaction Engines called The Three Rocketeers[1], which I believe has been re-posted on the internet.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqv45](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqv45)

<comment><USER11> It was an excellent documentary: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ_a21fPkYM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ_a21fPkYM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sabre Air will eventually revolutionize internet communication so that it is possible to get internet access cheaply anywhere on earth.

Commstellation a Canadian company are planning 72 micro satellites that will provide backbone capacity for cellphone towers. Latency will be in the 40 ms range. [http://www.commstellation.com/](http://www.commstellation.com/)

Currently smartphones become dumb phones as soon as you leave your country on vacation, in the future we will be able to connect to internet anywhere cheaply.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a dubious investment IMO.

Rockets that have shrouds have been thrown about for a long time, but they have one fundamental weakness. The shroud only works while in the atmosphere. After that, it's dead weight (since no significant aerodynamic forces come into play further up).

It's not quite the same as the SR-71 Blackbird engine which is a turbojet engine that morphs mid-flight into a ramjet. That's quite a spectacular piece of engineering especially since this was before the advent of computer-aided modeling. But the SR-71 was still very much an air breathing engine. The outer engine casing was still an essential part of its function.

Don't get me wrong; I wish these guys success and I hope my assessment is incorrect, but I just don't see how added weight to win over gravity lower in the atmosphere would help in the upper atmosphere and in space.

<comment><USER14> I don't know the maths involved, but the idea presumably is that they save more weight not carrying (as much) oxygen than they lose by adding the rest of the engine. By being able to draw oxygen from the air whilst in the atmosphere, they only need to store a smaller amount of oxygen for when they hit space. This is the main saving I believe.

<comment><USER15> Indeed. O2 is much heavier than H2 so if you can scavenge the O2 out of the atmosphere on the way up then the amount you need to carry for the final burn in space is much smaller & the weight savings are huge.

Consider that the Space Shuttle external fuel tank contained 650,000kg of O2 and only 100,000 kg of H2. Save 10% of your O2 needs and suddenly you've got 60,000 kg to play with. The Shuttle payload was only about 25,000 kg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I seem to remember Elon Musk getting a question about SABRE at a post-talk Q&A a while back (probably in the UK, perhaps an inauguration ceremony of some institution), but now I can't find it. He was skeptical and had some constructive things to say, but I'm not a physicist so unfortunately I can't remember the specifics. If anyone else finds it, kindly reply with a link!

EDIT: Found the video, but haven't yet found the specific time of the question. My connection is a bit slow, so jumping around in the stream isn't going so well. [http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211](http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211)

EDIT 2: Found it. Elon's reply is at 48:55.

<comment><USER4> Maybe he doesn't like it because it won't work on Mars? :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How and where does the nitrogen boiler(?) get its energy too cool helium to -170C at a constant rate? Is it effective to chill what must be ginormous amounts of air to -150C? It's all nice that the heat exchanger works, but where does that heat go?

There's a large discrepancy between the inlet air temperature (1000C vs 20C) in the article.

Somehow my sense for violation of the laws of thermodynamics is tingling.

<comment><USER4> They have details on their web site:

[http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html](http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/sabre_howworks.html)

My reading of their explanation is that in a full system they would "pre-burn" some of the hydrogen and oxygen also used to power the main rocket motor to power the cooling of the helium that then cools the intake air.

[NB I have no idea whether that would actually work or not - just trying to interpret what their own explanation is!]

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the link, this clears up a lot: [http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/images/sabre/sabre_cycle_10...](http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/images/sabre/sabre_cycle_1024.jpg)

There is no nitrogen in the system (not as consumable, anyway). Shoddy BBC reporting, as usual.

The heat exchangers use chilled hydrogen fuel they have to take up anyway, before it is burned in the rocket motor.

That makes a ton more sense.

<comment><USER4> To be fair to the BBC, what they describe is the test setup that has actually run, not the design of the full engine - which they haven't built yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Man, I really hope this engine works - they won't get a second chance if the prototype fails (which is a shame, since the concept is solid)...

And that prototype plane/spaceship just looks cool as hell...

</comment><comment><USER19> The british are cute.

that test rig looked like something the North Koreans would put together.

this is no where near being a "real program"

</comment><comment><USER20> I am a bit skeptical of any technology that uses helium. We just don't have viable ways to obtain reliably enough of the stuff reliably.

<comment><USER4> Well, there is an expensive plant in France that will be manufacturing helium from raw materials ;-)

[http://www.iter.org/](http://www.iter.org/)

<comment><USER20> Nuclear fusion has always been 10 years away. Lets hope that they will succeed this time.

<comment><USER21> The fusion itself is (afaik) essentially a solved problem. The trick is extracting net energy from it, since you use a lot in generating the plasma, massive magnetic fields to keep it contained, etc.

But if you just cared about the byproducts, I think that's a much easier problem.

Probably still 10 years though :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Putting What Little We Actually Know About Chrome OS Into Context - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2009/07/chrome_os_context <comment><USER2> Daring Fireball is once again right on target. I do, however, still take issue with two points:

1) "Is it feasible to use Chrome OS as your sole computer?" This question is asked, but then the arguement proceeds as if this question was answered "no". However, in reality, I think that this question is a definite yes for the vast majority of home users... minus iPod support... not an insurmountable problem.

2) The entire "An odd name" section. Yes, I agree that significantly different things should have significantly different names. However, Chrome OS and the Chrome browser are NOT significantly different things. That's the beauty of this. Chrome OS is a straight forward extension of Chrome the browser. It's actually a huuuuge win for Google that people don't know what a browser or an OS is. They know that "Google Chrome" is something that you can get on a small laptop or something that you can get on windows or something that you can get on a Mac. Who cares? The point is that people will learn that some web sites work best "Powered by Google" or "With Chrome" or WHATEVER and they will ask "how do I get get this program?" and just because that question has two answers (an OS or a browser) doesn't mean they have to have two different names. You walk into a store and say "Give me Chrome". You can get a Chrome netbook or you can get Windows with Chrome OEM installed. The sales rep will explain, in a non-technical and probably highly-incorrect form, what Chrome is, and people will buy a Chrome OS netbook or an Windows laptop with Chrome OEM-installed, and be less confused.

 _Technical folks can overcome the naming confusion, but non-technical folks won't even know that the naming confusion exists._

<comment><USER3> One of Microsoft's greatest accomplishments in the original "OS war" was to confuse users to the point where they didn't understand the difference between an OS and a computer. Most people didn't, and still don't, quite understand what a PC is vs. what Windows is, and this was brilliant. How can a competitor compete with your OS when users don't even know OS's exist? Most people have no idea they can install anything other than Windows on their PC, so to most people having anything else run on their computer means "buying a new computer". Google's goal is to make browsers _the_ dominant platform in whatever way possible and completely commoditize everything "under" the browser, from the hardware all the way up to the OS in the same way that Microsoft's goal was to commoditize everything under the OS. It makes sense to me that a good goal for them would be to not make these things distinct and instead once again heighten the confusion. Google wants a very limited number of brand names that are tied to getting things done "browser", "googling", "apps", "chrome", etc. Then in Google's ideal world, when users go buy their next computer, and the salesperson says "this runs google chrome os", they will hear "this runs chrome" (which they have installed on their windows machine and use for most their work), and will thus say "oh ok then I can buy it".

<comment><USER4> >One of Microsoft's greatest accomplishments in the original "OS war" was to confuse users to the point where they didn't understand the difference between an OS and a computer.

How, exactly, did Microsoft bring that about? Did your mom know the difference before Microsoft came about, and then they made it too confusing and she forgot?

<comment><USER3> Most other OS vendors made it a _thing_ to differentiate the OS from the computer, and still do. Apple wants you to know what Mac OS X is, and Linux obviously does as well. Microsoft worked very hard to blend the experience. In fact, they continue to do it today. Notice that their ads are "I'm a PC", _NOT_ "I'm running Windows".'

Also, the point is not necessarily whether people are somehow born knowing the difference between the hardware and the OS, but rather that it is beneficial for some parties for people to be educated on this subject (such as Apple, and Linux), whereas it is not beneficial for others (Microsoft), and hence Microsoft can perpetuate this by simple inaction.

I think its a clear win for Google if people start being further confused about the difference between browsers and OSes, since their whole goal is to convince people that the browser is the OS.

<comment><USER5> But apple ads are "I'm a Mac", not "I'm runninx OS X" so they don't care either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He completely misses the giant iceberg that is Google Native Client -- there's only a few simple 'local' apps necessary for ChromeOS to be a perfect full- time desktop for me:

* A good terminal emulator / SSH client

* A VNC / Remote Desktop client

* A means of running a custom GNU userland locally -- User-mode Linux would be great, x86 virtualization would be good.

NaCL could also be a terrific gaming platform -- none of the crippling performance issues from Flash, and existing software is very portable to it. Think about games like QuakeLive and Off-road Velociraptor Safari -- fuck, think about a port of Steam with even a fraction of the catalog!

<comment><USER7> _[Google's] Native Client is an open-source research technology for running_ _x86_ _native code in web applications_ (<http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/>)

As Ars noted ChromeOS's hardware parters are pretty heavy on the ARM side of the fence. Presumably they could do something like Apple's dual-binaries and implement support for ARM. But it's no longer a no-brainer.

That said Native Client with it's cross platform video/audio libraries etc is pretty cool - shame it hasn't spread further yet.

<comment><USER5> It's included with Chrome now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Chrome OS is not for everyone and it will be successful in its target marget - Netbooks.

Netbooks are under powered devices. Even when you run a full OS on a netbook, it is not a pleasant experience to run resource heavy applications like Photoshop. No one buys a netbook to run those kind of apps anyway. People look at netbook as a device on which they can read stuff, do some emailing or some light editing of documents. These are functions which Chrome OS can fulfill pretty easily. So I do expect Chrome OS to be a success in the netbook market. Outside of netbooks, maybe on tablets. Unlike Techcrunch, I don't subscribe to the idea that Chrome OS is a credible competitor to Windows. So Chrome might succeed in the netbook market but that won't put much of a dent in Windows dominance.

My 2 cents: [http://www.manu-j.com/blog/google-chrome-os-a-speculative- an...](http://www.manu-j.com/blog/google-chrome-os-a-speculative- analysis/361/)

<comment><USER9> But there are still plenty of "lightweight" Windows apps that won't run on Chrome, like Skype.

For anyone who has used a full-featured Windows/Ubuntu netbook, Chrome OS looks like a step backwards. However since few netbooks have been sold, Google may be able to target people who have no preconceived ideas about what a netbook can do.

<comment><USER10> Skype won't run, but Gmail will, and it has video chat, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With daring fireballs obvious and declared bias for Apple, its hard not to be a little cynical sometimes. Is it so ridiculous to talk about Chrome OS being a linux, or does it just make him feel better about Apple to downplay the relationship between BSD and OSX?

<comment><USER12> Why would he downplay that? And Gruber was never a blind Apple fanboy — when apple does BS, he calls it BS (just search for "shit sandwich" in the article and follow the link). I have a feeling that you completely missed the point there.

<comment><USER11> I like daring fireball but its a blog mostly about Apple. He will criticize Apple, but only when he's only talking about Apple by itself.

<comment><USER13> RTFA (or your comment's parent) - He describes Apple's web-apps fiasco with the iPhone as a shit sandwich (and links to his lengthy essay on said sandwich) in this very article, which is 90% about Chrome OS.

<comment><USER11> I didn't know there was any question that Daring Fireball was an Apple advocacy site. A large focus of this article was the way in which Chrome OS couldn't be considered Linux because it won't use X. There are other non-X linux distributions so his argument seemed odd to me. Given OSX's relationship to BSD it seems to an argument born from rationalising the rebranding of BSD to OSX. I don't think Google is going to feel any need to distance itself from Linux because it is not planning on selling Chrome OS.

Having said all that for sake of clarity (if there is any in that paragraph) I'll try not to comment on future Apple stories on this site, it doesn't seem productive.

<comment><USER10> Except this isn't an Apple story.

It's more than just not using X that will make Chrome OS "not a Linux." Describing an operating system distribution as "Linux" implies an entire eco- system of software that Chrome OS will probably not have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _I wouldn't be surprised if it's only supported for use on new PCs that are specifically certified to work with it_

Isn't it supposed to built on a Linux kernel? In that case, I think it will potentially run on a rather wide range of hardware.

<comment><USER15> That's assuming that google would be going the "just another linux distro" route. Personally, I don't think they will. My guess is the fact that they've chosen linux to be the kernel of their OS is purely an implementation detail that they intend to hide from most users. I think they will want to make an OS that's as easy to use as a browser, which means severely limiting the types of hardware it can run on.

<comment><USER16> Sure they'll hide it. However, Linux has pretty good hardware support, and it will get better with Google's backing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _At a precise technical level, Linux is not an operating system. It is a kernel that can serve as the core for an operating system. What most people mean by "Linux", though, is an operating system built around the Linux kernel._

Hmmm. I disagree with his semantics. Linux _is_ the operating system. The rest of a distribution - the userland stuff - is the environment. Since Linux is a monolithic kernel, all operating systems code exists in the kernel itself. Consequently, on a Linux system, everything in userland is not part of the operating system.

<comment><USER6> The bootloader, libc, and init fall very squarely on the 'operating system' side of the fence.

<comment><USER10> I agree - I had forgotten about what's necessary to even _get_ a running kernel. I was thinking about the distinction between things that any usable system needs (like a shell, or programs like ls) but are not actually part of the operating system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I can't see the appeal of Chrome OS over something like Ubuntu NR.</comment>


Report: Facebook Revenue Was $777 Million In 2009, Net Income $200 Million - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/05/report-facebook-revenue-was-777-million-in-2009-net-income-200-million/

<comment><USER2> Let's say that they have quadrupled that, so $3.2 B revenue, and that they have greatly reduced their operating expenses (new servers, etc.) - so let's say they are making 50% net income, which would be almost impossible - that is still at best-case scenario $1.6 B a year, which hardly justifies $50B .

Even the most optimistic growth targets are going to bump up against hard limits: people can't spend more than x hours a day online, there are maybe 5 billion users worldwide as a potential market.

Unless the CIA is going to pay them a couple billion a year for data mining access (CIA's VC arm was an early investor) since we have all so nicely classified ourselves and our social graphs for "TIA" purposes, I can't see the valuation sticking.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, where the heck is this $50B valuation coming from? I know those are '09 numbers, but even with wicked growth, that's quite a P/E.

<comment><USER4> it's called faith-based investing.

<comment><USER5> The user base is growing at something like 200% a year. In five years, they'll have over 32 billion users. Just figure out a way to make one or two dollars off each user...that can't be so hard, right?

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately there's a hard cap on the number of potential users in the world. There's about 7 billion people in the world right now, even if we're generous and suggest that 50% of the population are potential users you're limited to a 3 billionish maximum. They currently claim over 500 million active users, which means they're already at 1/6 of their maximum. Furthermore, the law of diminishing returns suggests that their growth will slow as they get close to their population limit. So unless they can figure out how to monetize those users in some significant way I can't see the potential for revenue being close to what the current evaluations are suggesting.

<comment><USER5> Irony is no fun when it is explained.

<comment><USER7> Ironically that was sarcasm anyway.

<comment><USER5> You're right! I'm so terribly sorry for getting my words all confused. It's a great thing that HN has such sharp and savvy editors like you to set shmucks like me straight.

<comment><USER7> You're very welcome :-).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At least. Some numbers. NOW the debate is going to be fun, with some numbers to play with...

So let's see...

Google is valued at $195B, and had a profit of $6.5B in 2009. 6.5/195 => 0.033

Apple is valued at $306B, and had a profit of $14B in 2009. 14.0/306 => 0.045

Same ballpark.

Now...

Facebook is valued at $50B, and had a profit of $200MM in 2009. 0.2/50 => 0.004

Facebook over-valued in the long term ? Sure. In the short term ? It's the (speculative) market at work.

<comment><USER9> The average of both Google and Apple = (0.033 + 0.045)/2 = 0.039

Assuming a profit of 500M over a revenue of 2B , the valuation should be = 0.5/0.039 = 12.82B

The valuation of Facebook is 3.9x over this, which does not look so bad !

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My place of employment currently allows users to surf Facebook, though it blocks many other sites. I wonder if the guys upstairs will one day pull the plug on FB when firing people is no longer an option to boost productivity. I wonder how much of a risk this scenario is to FB. There are a lot of un/der employed folks out there though.....

</comment><comment><USER11> So we find out the emperor has no clothes. Unsurprising.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can anyone get profit/revenue to valuation ratios on pre-IPO Google so that we can do some more rational comparing?

<comment><USER7> How would this be rational? Facebook is not Google. Google's primary market (search) is nothing like Facebook's (personal communication).

<comment><USER13> Both of them market in advertising. The delivery method is different, but it's still advertising.

<comment><USER7> That's like saying that because Fry's and The Olive Garden both accept cash that they are in the same business.

Just because Facebook and Google both make money by selling advertisements doesn't mean they are in the same market.

For example, Google makes so much money from advertising because they can show users ads pertinent to their search query at the point they are often making a buying decision.

However, Facebook users are on the site because they bored or communicating and not even considering buying something. Not to mention that a large portion of Facebook users have very little discretionary spending money or ability to purchase online anyway.

The market and motivation involved between the two companies is completely different and not comparable.

<comment><USER14> Bingo! I purchase a lot of online ads, and I can tell you, I give nearly all my ad budget to Google. I tried Facebook for a while, with the exact same ads and the exact same product, and the result was shocking. Nearly 10x less conversions than with Google. I think the reason is simple. Google users were already searching for me, facebook users were just bored looky-loos. When people start to realize this about fb it could be the short of the century.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PyBridge - Reuse your Python code in native Android applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge <comment><USER2> Any other way to have Python application ported/migrated/converted on Android?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's Kivy, although it doesn't use the native Android look & feel..

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks nice. Is there a quick start or simple example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Check the MainActivity.java file [1]. It shows how you can extract the necessary python files, send a JSON message and get the response back from the embedded Python interpreter. The readme file [2] talks a little bit on what is going on and which files you need if you want to use Python in your own existing projects.

The all project is a bare-bones Android project that you can import on Android Studio and run on a real Android device. I've added instructions on the readme file on how to build and run it, and I have an app in the Play Store that uses this "technique"..

[1] [https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge/blob/master/app/src/...](https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge/blob/master/app/src/main/java/com/jventura/pyapp/MainActivity.java)

[2] [https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge#how-it- works](https://github.com/joaoventura/pybridge#how-it-works)</comment></comment>


The Next Vulnerability: Looking Back on Meltdown and Spectre One Year Later - <AUTHOR> https://www.rambus.com/blogs/the-next-vulnerability-looking-back-on-meltdown-and-spectre-one-year-later/?hss_channel=tw-19615847 <comment><USER2> The basics of the spectre exploit were discoverable 20 years ago and run deep, to the very core of branch speculation. This is nothing but marketing for risc-v and rambus, there's no magic in risc-v that prevents spectre except that the ecosystem is so primitive that they barely have any speculative processors...

We could have found the spectre exploit 20 years ago. To me, the fact that we didn't until now is maybe the most interesting thing.

<comment><USER3> I think one of the reasons is that nowadays we run a lot more untrusted code on top of our hardware, due to things like Javascript and virtualization. Meltdown and Spectre would not be as dangerous 20 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > These challenges are going away as chipmakers and innovators collectively > leverage open-source to develop better solutions and reduce time-to-market. > The open source RISC-V architecture is particularly notable for its > availability of unencumbered reference implementations and compiler/software > support. As a result, RISC-V greatly reduces the amount of ancillary work > required for a processor security project, allowing design teams to move > more quickly and focus on areas of innovation – including security.

Is this a thing? I have not heard of anyone working on trying to replace x86 with RISC-V because of Spectre…

<comment><USER5> It probably switched a few orders from Intel to AMD, where the performance hit of the Intel patches vs the AMD ones changed the performance/$ enough.

But probably nothing of enough volume to be notable.

Risc-V would be unlikely, since there's not yet real server class silicon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I view the current situation as a good time to invent 32+ core CPUs with less fancy features like all speculative execution or branch prediction (at least not to the extent which made Spectre/Meltdown possible anyway). And a good time for a next-gen kernel to emerge that can make use of several kernel- reserved cores and with better preemptive scheduling overall.

Not a hardware guy or a driver programmer but I believe this area stands to get some innovation.

<comment><USER7> We have today 32+ cores CPUs with minimal or no branch prediction and speculation. They work spectacularly well on some specific workloads but are terrible for general purpose computation. They are called GPUs.

Speculation and branch prediction is not going away. On the contrary is going to get more and more sophisticated.

What needs to die is the belief that you can rely on just software (i.e. memory safety) for isolation between trusted and untrusted code[1].

[1] Yes, meltdown bypasses hardware protection, but that's an intel specific fuck up, not inherent issue with speculation.

<comment><USER8> > What needs to die is the belief that you can rely on just software (i.e. > memory safety) for isolation between trusted and untrusted code[1].

I don't understand how you came to this conclusion. How does spectre indicate that you can't rely on software for isolation?

> meltdown bypasses hardware protection, but that's Intel specific

It's not Intel specific. Certain ARM and POWER architectures are also vulnerable.

Spectre bypasses hardware protections too, just in a more subtle way.

<comment><USER9> The idea behind spectre is that speculative execution bypasses software protections.

Given if f(A) B else C, one cannot safely assume that B only gets executed when A resolves to true. It is not reasonable to expect programmers to produce safe code in an environment where they have to doubt if statements.

This could be solved without any major overhauls in hardware, by just updating it to make speculative execution actually speculative and not commit any side effects until it knows it went down the correct branch.

<comment><USER8> Sure, I get it. Perhaps I phrased my response poorly.

This comment:

> What needs to die is the belief that you can rely on just software (i.e. > memory safety) for isolation between trusted and untrusted code

is an argument that doubting if statements should be acceptable, and that the assumption that only B has architecturally visible side effects when A is true is not sound. I disagree strongly with that.

You _should_ be able to rely on software checks for some things. Going forward, the solution is _not_ to rewrite software to not depend on software mechanisms (e.g. bounds checks) for protection (unclear what would be used instead...) but to _fix the hardware_ so these software mechanisms work.

What needs to "die" is not "belief that you can rely on just software," but hardware that violates fundamental guarantees.

It sounds like we agree on this, I just wanted to make my point clear since I see now that my original comment was not clear.

FWIW, this is essentially the argument Torvalds made when Intel tried to add feature flags for non-broken speculation.

<comment><USER7> I don't think Linus has any expectation that spectre v1 will ever be fixed in hardware.

<comment> loup-vaillant There's a difference between what you expect, and how you think things should be. Linus was probably making a normative statement, not a prediction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel uneasy giving up general purpose computing in the name of security. Can't we have both?

<comment><USER11> Yes but at a performance cost. I _think_ general purpose scalar processors lack any of the timing vulnerability since they almost literally do one thing at a time. But you are winding back the performance clock 1-2 decades - that's not to say they are unusable, for instance the arm core in the pi zero is scalar... but I doubt there is any modern desktop x86 equivalent without speculative execution.

<comment><USER7> More like 4 decades. OoO itself is about three decades.

<comment><USER12> Yup. OoO is a thing from the mid-nineties for us mere mortals. CPUs like Pentium Pro and AMD K5. Of course the _first_ out-of-order CPU is way older CDC 6600, back from 1964.

MIPS R2000 from 1986 could do simple form of speculative execution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How many people's computers are known to have gotten hacked via Meltdown or Spectre?

<comment><USER14> How would you know? It allows reading privileged data without actually taking over privileged processes, and wouldn't leave behind any signs of what happened.

<comment><USER15> It really would depend on what they did and how they did it.

If the "privileged data" they read was, say, the root password which they used to gain root access and then started snooping around the system as root or modifying parts of the filesystem, that could be easily detected.

If the exploit itself was performed over the network or if the privileged data they read was transferred over the network, that might also be detected, depending on how it was sent and where it was sent to.

If they tried to launch attacks or probes from the exploited system they could be detected at well.

Network intrusion detection systems and host detection intrusion systems could both help here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What strikes me the most is that the state of the art in CPU architecture is immune to Spectre and Meltdown, yet it isn't once mentioned. Makes the article sounds like Intel funded stuttering.

<comment><USER17> Can you expand on which CPU exactly you are talking to? I'm genuinely curious.

From what I've seen, every major high-end CPU architecture is affected, because they all rely on speculation. Of course, some low-end CPUs (such as ARM Cortex-M cores) don't have speculation, so they aren't vulnerable. But on the high-performance front, I haven't seen a credible alternative that wasn't vulnerable to speculative execution side-channels. Which one am I missing?

<comment><USER8> Given the phrase "Intel funded" 'childintime is probably confused and thinks AMD Zen is not vulnerable.

<comment><USER16> Intel is under threat, not only from AMD, but from the end of the x86 era. Of course they need to protect their current bread and butter, but AMD isn't their only worry. Far from it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Teaching a Computer to Read: NLP Hacking in Python - <AUTHOR> http://blog.scripted.com/staff/nlp-hacking-in-python/ <comment><USER2> The CPU cost to do use this approach is terribly high. I don't think this approach is going to give better results than a few simple rules and NLTK would.

This API will do a better job telling you what an article is about. [https://www.mashape.com/stremor/stremor-noun-phrase-and- part...](https://www.mashape.com/stremor/stremor-noun-phrase-and-part-of- speech-tagging-alpha)

That said, the approach we use for our TLDR software and search rankings doesn't rely on just frequency, the adjectives that amplify the content, the sentences with emotion attached to them, and the "charge" of words matters too much.

Consider the following:

That frakking loser Drakaal came over and hijacked my NLP thread. Just because he does NLP for a living, and thinks he knows everything doesn't mean a thing. My NLP is way cooler because it uses machine learning and that is the future of NLP, not the heuristics model he uses for his stuff.

What is the "core" of that? Clearly it is about how Drakaal sucks, but we only mention him once. NLP is important, machine learning is important, but really it is about why Drakaal sucks.

<comment><USER3> I tried to test your example with your API, but it requires a credit card even for the freemium plan. Is there any way you can make a rate limited API that never charges to avoid that? I'm not familiar with mashape so it may not be possible.

<comment><USER2> Saw you are trying it out. Awesome! Sorry the documentation is a bit weak right now, we had people wanting it so we got it out, rather than getting all the docs complete.

<comment><USER3> I did try it out. It does a good job of pulling out different bits and categorizing them. I went ahead and ran the example you had and put it up to continue the conversation([https://gist.github.com/adpreese/6722561](https://gist.github.com/adpreese/6722561)). If you want me to take it down, I will certainly respect that but I thought it'd be convenient for anyone else paying attention.

The noun phrases part of the response gave a concise list of things, including the word thing(hijacked, NLP thread, stuff, My NLP, thing, Drakaal, cooler, heuristics, Just). That's maybe good at picking out the nouns, but it's not really actionable yet. It might be great as the bag of words to use for trying to classify something, but by itself the best it's giving me is NLP/heuristics if I had the concepts grouped together, somehow. I think that's a reasonable takeaway from your example, but I'd be curious what your thoughts are on it.

PS. I tried the TLDR API on a copy and paste of the original article with commas, periods, and single and double quotes removed but it returned a 500 error. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I'd love to see what it spits out if you can help me out.

<comment><USER2> We have the groupings and we can use sentiment to get the importance. The API is somewhat limited compared to our full bag of tricks, mostly because we don't want to give away all of our secrets, but also because we change things pretty often and would have to let others know when we made changes if they were consuming an API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Actually, I think you could save yourself some trouble and use scikit-learn's built-in text preprocessing utils:

Word counter: [http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.fea...](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.feature_extraction.text.CountVectorizer.html)

Hashing vectorizer if you want to trade off explainability for speed and scalability: [http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.fea...](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.feature_extraction.text.HashingVectorizer.html)

TF-IDF weighing: [http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.fea...](http://scikit- learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.feature_extraction.text.TfidfVectorizer.html)

Also, if you transform bag-of-words vectors into a dense form, you're gonna have a bad time (insert appropriate meme picture here). In large corpora, dimensionality grows quite substantially - if you work with news corpora or Wikipedia, you're in the 100k-1M dimensional space pretty quickly.

Great to see an approachable explanation for NLP. As they say sometimes, when you know how it's done, it stops being "Artificial Intelligence".

</comment><comment><USER3> How do you deal with keeping your super rare words list sensible? For many forms of technical writing I could see things getting out of hand where you have lots of tiny dense clusters not really close to anything else if you didn't manage the list well.

<comment><AUTHOR> As with most successful applications of machine learning, it's about finessing your approach based on the problem at hand. In our case, we have classes divided on the level of "Medicine," "Real Estate," etc. So, we could throw away lots of words that only occurred once or twice in the massive corpus we crawled to build the language model and still have a pretty robust representation of the subject you're trying to represent.

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact, if your training corpus is sufficiently large, you'd be shocked how many words you can eliminate right away for a term frequency of one or two. I went from millions of words in the vocabulary to something like 60k just by ignoring words that happen once or twice in the corpus. Plus, you probably won't learn much about the relationships between words if they only occur a few times in the corpus.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but consider that some rare words are much stronger indicators of topic than more common ones. Even more so if you look at n-grams. If you use something like wordnet you can get a lot of meaning out of low-frequency words and throw away the meaningless higher-frequency ones that occur in too many categories to be useful.

<comment><USER3> Sure, there's value in rare words, but I don't think anything that occurs across the corpus fewer than 3 times is going to tell you anything useful. You need a certain amount just to have it be a real signal. What was the least frequent useful word in the data set, msalahi?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to see a content marketplace company using technology well ahead of its peers. I wonder how many other firms are pursuing this type of commercial research.

<comment><USER7> Great question! Probably not very many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Genius</comment>


Medieval DNA suggests Columbus didn't trigger syphilis epidemic in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/medieval-dna-suggests-columbus-didn-t-trigger-syphilis-epidemic-europe <comment><USER2> This is all interesting, but the second half of the article pretty much says that the headline is a bit of a stretch. The potential date range for the tested bones is wide enough that they could have died after Columbus's return.

> Molly Zuckerman, a bioarchaeologist at Mississippi State University who > studies ancient Treponemal disease, praises the researchers' feat of > extracting Treponemal DNA, but notes that the sample date ranges are wide > and can't fully disprove the Columbus hypothesis. "This paper does not > provide that kind of golden prize of evidence of syphilis in the pre- > Columbian period in the Old World."

<comment><USER3> The diversity argument is stronger. Even if you argue that the skeletons post- date Columbus, now you also need to argue that it wasn't just one case that came back but several (or that the understanding of its mutation clock & strains are wrong).

<comment><USER2> Well, there were more than one sailor on the expedition -- and there's no reason why one sailor couldn't bring back multiple strains. In some cases, a dominant strain drives out the others, but not in all microbes.

<comment><USER4> Am I missing something here?

Why is this about Columbus, the skeletons are dated mid 1400's - 1600's.

This is quite ridiculous. This is like that one star that is like 80 million years older than the Big Bang, in the estimated age range.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis)

> Until that time, as Fracastoro notes, syphilis had been called the "French > disease" (Italian: mal francese) in Italy, Malta, Poland and Germany, and > the "Italian disease" in France. In addition, the Dutch called it the > "Spanish disease", the Russians called it the "Polish disease", and the > Turks called it the "Christian disease" or "Frank (Western European) > disease" (frengi).

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of the way the US administration likes to use the term "China virus". Nothing ever changes.

<comment><USER7> China did try to pin the virus on US intelligence agencies (IIRC). Guess you're right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Alfred Crosby's classic history The Columbian Exchange explores how syphilis was perhaps the only major disease that went from the New World to the Old World. Well worth a read even though it's almost 50 years old at this point.

Also I hadn't realized until recently that the "syphilis spread via Columbus" theory was current in the 18th century. There's a section in Voltaire's Candide where it's discussed.

</comment><comment><USER9> How do you contract syphilis other than sexually? The Spanish did not bring many women with them in their expeditions, and people that don't bathe are not precisely sex symbols... so it's not hard to figure out what happened.

The fact that Spain still has monuments dedicated to murderers, human traffickers, slave owners, serial child abusers says a lot about a country.

<comment><USER10> Or Genghis Khan, Muhammed, the zulus, Egyptians, Assyrians, romans, Aztecs etc etc etc. every single color, creed you pick it. All mass murder and colonization. Human history in a nutshell.

<comment><USER11> No no, those were all victims of circumstance. Western cultures are uniquely capable of moral reasoning and are therefore more culpable than everyone else. I think that's what pop culture is telling me...</comment></comment></comment>


Suggest HN: Downvote button should prompt for a comment - <AUTHOR>

The idea is pretty simple: if you go to downvote a comment, the system should prompt for a comment of your own as to why you're doing so.
I have a few reasons why I think this would be a good idea:
A) Downvoting someone without a comment doesn't give the user context for /why/ it was downvoted, leaving them in a confused state. Did someone merely disagree, or did the comment violate an unspoken community rule?
In essence, a teaching moment is lost. A downvote with a comment lets people know what the community expects, which helps us to maintain what hacker news is about. When new users see a marginalized comment, they'll know why that happened.
B) It's well known in psychology that people tend to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. A score of -4 is a lot worse feeling than a score of +4 is positive feeling. This has a subtle effect on user incentives.
In the current system, I think it incentivizes people to post something that they know will be popular but that doesn't add much to the discussion, rather than something interesting but perhaps more nuanced and easily misunderstood. By adding slightly more friction to the down voting process, I think it will make people more thoughtful as to why they're doing it. I think this will also add more civility to the discussions. <comment><USER2> Better yet, remove the downvote entirely. People are using it unthinkingly in drive-bys to say they disagree, rather than it's original intended purpose of "This is inappropriate for HN." Soliciting a comment won't make them comment - they'll ignore it, or insert something inane.

You can't change people's behavior, and I think the "down vote" should disappear. Let us work on reinforcing rather than punishing.

Things that genuinely don't belong should be flagged. Further, things that are flagged should be _raised_ in the rankings, not lowered, until they get to the point where they have enough flags to be deleted. This would mean that genuinely inappropriate items/submissions/comments would become more visible, so they get more flags more quickly and get deleted more quickly than happens now.

<comment><USER3> maybe we should use the stackoverflow flag concept? that way you could flag an item for being:

* off topic * inappropriate/offensive * low quality or 'noise' * other (which would require a comment)

then down votes could be removed entirely (or at least deprecated) and if an item was flagged enough the item could be removed.

<comment><AUTHOR> That could also work. I think the advantage of a more personalized message is it's a bit more human. If I'm downvoted for something I'm more inclined to take the message to heart and not be offended if someone took the time to explain something rather than just attach a label on it. I do think what you describe has the advantage of being easier to understand though, and accomplishes many of the same goals.</comment></comment></comment>


Recruiters Are Pretty (and how to find one) - <AUTHOR> http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/08/09/pretty/

<comment><USER2> David - you are one of my favorites, but what does Recruiters being pretty have to do with finding/not finding a good one? This is a great article, but is there a tie-in I'm missing here?

<comment><AUTHOR> First, thanks. The focus of the article is obviously on ways to identify and evaluate recruiters from an engineer's perspective. The part about some recruiters being pretty was something I felt worth noting that was on my mind (a few mentions to me recently), but not worthy of an entire post.

The pretty part is just an abbreviated rant on the way the industry is headed, where substance and knowledge are being replaced by trying to get a candidate's attention with shiny things. It's not new, just annoying.

<comment><USER2> I agree with the direction of the industry, and your abbreviated rant, except I think they are trying to get attention with... anything at their disposal.

For me what is interesting is how magnetically opposed developers can be to a perceived outsider. And how that works against the recruiter, etc. in question. E.g. We're really lucky with our outside recruiter and she has a lot of credibility, but when she hung out at our booth at OSCON with her lovely female assistant, they clearly stood out and attendees cut a wide swath. Same thing at a different con with one of our investors: extremely technical guy, but you can spot his BD/VC uniform from across the room. I shuffle their conversations away from my booth.

Conversely, I had an interesting conversation in a booth at a different con, where after 20 minutes of talking to me (messy ponytail, company tshirt, jeans, tigers) about our stack, a guy said to me, "Wait a sec, you smell like marketing." By which he meant that I was coming across as non-technical as we got deeper into the technical details (totally fair - I am not a professional developer). I think he felt bamboozled by my lack of shininess.

The shiny girl probably like being shiny, and don't care for the tshirt/jeans/ponytail uniform. There's actually a lot of cool ways technical women subvert the uniform without freaking anyone out (I have hot pink lipstick). I would venture they feel uncomfortable about standing out more than they are plotting to lure you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Half the recruiter's battle is getting inside that force field that technologists put up regarding recruiters. In another HN thread, I offered to have a discussion about career to a fairly well-known tech community member, and was immediately accused of trying to recruit the guy (although I do no work in his geography, which I even alluded to in the post). People assume recruiters are always recruiting, so it's impossible to have a conversation. I've run a Java Users Group for 13 years and they are comfortable because they know me, but if I go to meet a client company onsite, they seem to think I'm casing the place to start poaching.

It's a strange business with lots of dynamics, and the issue I mention isn't discussed much in my experience. I've seen BD/sales types at my UG meetings, both male and female, that scared people away due to their look, or even by a harmless "Hi" from them (people at UGs hate sales pitches).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Legal Marijuana Alternative: Spice - <AUTHOR> http://articles.dailypress.com/2010-10-03/news/dp-nws-spice-10-04-20101003_1_spice-jay-sedwick-hookah-lounge

<comment><USER2> I've heard of this stuff before but upon reading this and doing some Wikipedia research, I stumbled upon this:

The US Drug Enforcement Agency announced on 24 November 2010 that it will use its emergency scheduling authority to ban the drug for one year while further studies are conducted. It will be placed in Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act within a month of the announcement.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JWH-018>

[http://www2.wspa.com/news/2010/nov/24/dea-issues- emergency-b...](http://www2.wspa.com/news/2010/nov/24/dea-issues-emergency- ban-5-chemicals-used-make-fak-ar-1129798/)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/24/dea-using- emergency...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/24/dea-using-emergency- power_n_788149.html)

So much for the "legal" part of this.

edit: added links to news articles mentioned in the wikipedia article (for the lazy).

<comment><USER3> They used to sell that here in Ireland. I think it was introduced maybe five years ago. From my understanding, it wasn't really all that close to marijuana. Anyway, its illegal here now.</comment></comment>


Software engineers (actually) get rich - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ScITp-jW-s <comment><USER2> Not bad info, but it's incongruous that he's doing this from the front seat of his car.</comment>


Basic DHT security concepts - <AUTHOR> http://www.freedomlayer.org/articles/dht_basic_security.html

<comment><USER2> If this interests anyone, definitely give the S/Kademlia paper a read, it goes into depth on these concepts and other attacks.

[https://doc.tm.uka.de/SKademlia_2007.pdf](https://doc.tm.uka.de/SKademlia_2007.pdf)</comment>


Ember Data 0.13 Released - <AUTHOR> http://emberjs.com/blog/2013/05/28/ember-data-0-13.html

<comment><USER2> In my opinion this is a key missing part of the Ember framework. Angular includes similar functionality built-in. In my project we've been using jQuery methods to handle interacting with our REST API, but Ember-data would make those interactions much more seamless and automatic.

<comment><USER3> I don't think this is so true. Angular's $resource has different goals and functionality than something like ember data. To me, Angular's $resource looks closer to Backbone's sync methods.

Things I don't see in Angular's $resource:

* Identity map

* Support for switching adapters (e.g. online/offline)

* Relationships

<comment><USER4> If that's the case, they don't care. Ember-Data is the datamapper pattern in Javascript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm hoping this changes the pace of the project. Public releases should keep us focused.</comment>


'That's Not Funny ' Well, It Is to Dave Chappelle - <AUTHOR> https://spectator.org/thats-not-funny-well-it-is-to-dave-chappelle/ <comment><AUTHOR> Does this mark the return of 'offensive' comedy?</comment>


Apple confirms some iPad Pros ship slightly bent, but says it's normal - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18148957/apple-ipad-bend-pro-2018-shipping-manufacturing-confirmed <comment><USER2> I don't understand... Apple is supposed to be the company that produces premium technology, their products supposed to signal status, it's supposed to be the epitome of aesthetics. How come in the recent years they're doing these easily preventable mistakes? I don't think Apple doesn't have a well-paid QA team. They probably do. So they found this bug and decided to ship it?

<comment><USER3> Their obsession with thinness and lightness has stretched their manufacturing QC beyond its breaking point. Almost all of the widespread hardware problems Apple is experiencing these days could've been avoided if they would just allow themselves an extra millimeter or gram here and there.

<comment><USER4> >Almost all of the widespread hardware problems Apple is experiencing these days could've been avoided if they would just allow themselves an extra millimeter or gram here and there.

That's a bold claim. Can you back up it?

<comment><USER5> >That's a bold claim. Can you back up it? They made similar products in the past that were thicker and not easily bendable. That seems to speak for itself.

<comment><USER6> Apple also changes materials and processes all the time. Despite being thicker ( _and_ shorter), the iPhone SE bends more easily than newer iPhones like the 6S [1], 7 or 7 Plus [2].

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWRnDVcfA3g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWRnDVcfA3g) [2]: [https://www.squaretrade.com/press/SquareTrade-Labs- iPhone-7-...](https://www.squaretrade.com/press/SquareTrade-Labs- iPhone-7-Generation-Makes-Splash-Water-Resistance-Still-Falls-Hard)

<comment><USER7> Every device that supports 3D Touch is highly resistant to bending, because AIUI the way 3D Touch is implemented basically puts a metal plate inside the phone. This is why the iPads never got 3D Touch, because they'd end up too heavy with a metal plate that large.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These iPads can easily be bent in half with bare hands: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUBsxCcJeUc&t=385](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUBsxCcJeUc&t=385)

Doesn't bode well for them holding up in, e.g., a backpack or briefcase that ends up being sat or stepped on. Or even just being shoved into an overhead compartment or beneath a seat.

<comment><USER9> _These iPads can easily be bent in half with bare hands_

Why would you want to?

I just don't understand the way people treat their tech devices these days. I see millennials putting iPhones in their back pockets and then wondering why the screen shatters when they sit down. _You are putting a piece of glass against your butt and sitting on it!_

I remember when flip phones, digital cameras, floppy disks, and even Atari 2600's were handled with care. Because they would break, and were expensive to replace!

Do people act this way because stuff doesn't cost enough? Because paying for stuff with credit makes it seem like it's free, and therefore not worth anything? Or has the magic just gone out of tech for the average butt-storing phone user?

<comment><USER10> You shouldn't have to treat a $1000 device like it's going to turn into dust. Sure, don't chuck your phone at concrete walls, but in general a phone needs to be able to take a spill occasionally or have someone sit on it because those things happen in real life.

It sounds like Apple has sacrificed too much in the name of being thin, and really botched their structural integrity.

Devices exist to be used, not kept in a museum.

<comment><USER9> _You shouldn 't have to treat a $1000 device like it's going to turn into dust._

I don't understand the link between price and resistance to damage.

If I buy a Faberge egg for $4 million, I don't expect that I can sit on it without causing damage.

A friend recently spent $20k on new windows for his house. I don't expect them to be baseball-resistant because they cost more than his previous, cheaper, windows.

 _It sounds like Apple has sacrificed too much in the name of being thin_

I don't disagree with this. I'd rather have a little thicker laptop in exchange for a better keyboard. But because my laptop cost $4k, I don't expect that I can treat it anyway I like. It's a computer, not a rock.

<comment><USER11> > I don't understand the link between price and resistance to damage.

People expect tablets to be somewhat durable, and they expect the best tablets to be especially so.

<comment><USER9> _People expect tablets to be somewhat durable, and they expect the best tablets to be especially so._

Then why is there a massive market for protective cases and screen protectors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The bend is the result of a cooling process involving the iPad Pro's metal > and plastic components during manufacturing, according to Apple.

So it's a manufacturing defect. Calling it a "side effect" instead is just semantics.

<comment><USER7> A manufacturing defect implies it's an unexpected outcome. This is an expected outcome.

<comment><USER13> Really? So apple intended to ship non-flat tablets? What is the rational for intentionally making _only some_ of these non-flat? What advantage or innovation does the non-flatness of a certain percentage of ipad's allow? I mean it totally seams plausible that they simply neglected to mention how non- flat tablets are the next big innovation when they were announced.

Or, perhaps this is just damage control because it is fucking embarrassing on a "premium" device.

<comment><USER7> You're confusing "designed" with "expected outcome". Obviously Apple didn't design the iPad to be pre-bent, and presumably they're not thrilled about this. But that doesn't mean this isn't an expected outcome of the manufacturing process. It's not a desired outcome, but it's one that I guess Apple decided was acceptable in order to meet the other goals they had for the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am an ardent Apple fan, to the extent of sometimes defending them in public or private forums.

This is maybe the most bone-headed, indefensible response I've ever seen from them.

I get that these are really large, thin devices. I get that they are totally different than the iPad 2 someone might wrap in a case and give to a kid. But saying it is a feature, not a bug, is ridiculous.

Their response has immediately made this twice as bad from a PR perspective. Unbelievable.

<comment><USER7> Where did they say "it's a feature"?

<comment><USER2> "it's not a bug, it's a feature" is sort of a phrase/meme referring to bugs that have been tried to not like a bug by PR departments. In this case, we see that this is a bug (iPads are supposed to be flat), but Apple claims "it's normal" to sell their device: classic "it's not a bug, it's a feature" attitude.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems like a cop-out to me. I love Apple products but dismissing manufacturing issues as something we should accept as okay is just wrong. I recently bought the iPhone XS Max so I'm not anti-Apple but I expect premium quality for a premium price.

</comment><comment><USER16> My Yoga Book (Lenovo) and Surface Book Pro (Microsoft) are perfectly flat, and they've been around the world several times.

<comment><USER17> Lenovo consistently blows me away with build quality. They're simply insane, especially the Thinkpads.

<comment><USER18> Can't say I'm having that experience with my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen. The speakers are the worst sound I've heard in a laptop in a long time, the Dolby HDR screen isn't calibrated out of the box (it has a terrible +10% red tint), and it doesn't charge if the device is switched off - it has to be in sleep mode. I'm regretting my purchase.

But that said - it's replacing a MacBook Pro that had to be fixed by Apple 6 times, each time for a faulty SATA flex cable that failed every two months so it couldn't boot from the internal drive. So far the X1 Yoga hasn't had that kind of problem.

<comment><USER16> And it's not bent, is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Magic Keyboard has exhibited the same problems since last year: [https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/12/07/the-magic-keyboard- with-n...](https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/12/07/the-magic-keyboard-with-numeric- keypad-is-apparently-bendy/)

This is a pattern.

</comment><comment><USER20> The thin glass screen of our iPad Pro broke only three weeks after we got it. It fell onto the floor from a height of about 50 cm. Of course, the screen is not covered by the warranty and cannot be repaired. I would not recommend the iPad Pro to anyone who expects premium products to be at least as robust as the average tablet.

</comment><comment><USER21> I accidentally sat on my 2017 iPad and bent it a bit. It was fairly easy to bend it back. Depending on the extent of the bend it might be possible to straighten these out as well. Of course this isn't ideal, but it should be possible to create a procedure to iron out the bend.

</comment><comment><USER22> Just bought a Pelican case for my work Macbook since I bike and have to travel with it. I'm so scared of liquid damage to the diagnostic port just inside the vent. All it takes is one drop to short and kill the MUX chip. Mac products are stupid fragile.

<comment><USER23> What backpack do you use? Both of my Timbuk2 bags have incredible water resistance. I've been out with them in dozens of thunderstorms - the kind where you get home and have to change out of all your clothes - and I haven't had so much as a notebook page get wet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just a speculation;

Apple must be working something really big for years with a lot of engineers shifted to that secret project. I am seeing lots of products not getting enough attention for the last 2-3 years.

\- Safari is moving really slowly and not improved a lot except security-wise.

\- iPhones haven't gotten a revolutionary feature for a long time.

\- MacOS did not get significantly better comparing to last 3-4 years.

\- Siri looks like a paused project.

and so on..

<comment><USER25> Or just becoming bloated and complacent.

<comment><USER24> Very possible and I would be sad in that case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I sometimes what would happen if the Samsung battery kind of issue happened with Apple. I'm sure that they would give some logic and majority of users would still accept it. For the most people at this point it seems it's not what apple did wrong, it's what I did to cause their product to fail.

</comment><comment><USER27> "You're holding it wrong"

</comment><comment><USER28> JeremyRigsEverything showed that you need substantial force to bent an iPad. Isn't this just a single batch that had some bad luck in the factory?

<comment><USER29> It didn't look very substantial in the video posted here earlier:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUBsxCcJeUc&t=385](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUBsxCcJeUc&t=385)

<comment><USER28> I have seen that video. Look at the color of his thumbs as he bends the tablet, they are quite white so I think the force is larger than you think. Of course, without comparison, it is hard to tell.

<comment><USER2> Are you trolling? That person bends a $500 machine with 2 thumbs. This is unacceptable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>