Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3822 <comment><USER2> The only really valid criticism I see here is the binary blob problem-- clearly this is a poor way to store user configuration data, and completely antithetical to the kinds of philosophies that undergird Linux _and_ Ubuntu.

But really, the core of the issue that's been raised by Unity is that Ubuntu seems to be moving away from catering to power users to cutting features essential to them in favor of appealing to more amateur users. One can lament that decision, and even disagree with it, but I don't know how fair I think it is to criticize Unity for lacking those kind of power user features.

After all, it isn't like power users are exactly wanting when it comes to replacement options in the Linux space.

<comment><USER3> Unity also simply regresses on many UI issues, relevant not only to power users:

* When a maximized window is behind an active non-maximized window, the panel serves as its title bar. But it actually spells out the name of the active window. Very confusing.

* Additionally, in the same situation, all of they standard mouse gestures on the panel (e.g: double-click to unmaximize) do not work. Maximized windows don't get the right-click-title gesture to work at all.

* No window list at a glance (useful for remembering your context/state with the UI)

* Hides important buttons such as close window, as well as the menus, where non-power-users will not know to look.

* Panel unhide takes a relatively long time -- slowing down almost every interaction with the UI.

* Workspace switcher does not support window drag, unlike the gnome panel workspace applets.

* Workspace switcher requires multiple selections to switch to a window.

* Alt-tab switches applications, not windows, which is more confusing, as it associates unrelated windows together, as if the mere fact they're implemented by a certain application necessarily means they relate. This also requires more keystrokes to reach the window you want -- when you don't have many of them in a workspace, which is a typical situation for organized users that actually use workspaces.

I could go on and on. Unity is an immature, alpha-quality piece of work that seems to have been thrown out because of a deadline.

<comment><USER4> Many of these traits are shared with OS X. It's a different mindset, and I'm sure Canonical has done plenty of research on usability. From what I've seen most people who arent savvy computer users happen to like it.

<comment><USER5> Please do not slander OS X like that. I've been a happy OS X user since 2005. I look at GNOME 3/Unity and I vomit. Vigorously.

If this was an attempt to be Mac-like, then it was pure cargo-cult UI design. They clearly have no understanding of the actual design process.

The last Linux desktop environment I was reasonably happy with was KDE 2.x. I tolerated 3.x.

<comment><USER6> Please, a bit less hyperbole and more constructive criticism.

<comment><USER5> Fine:

> _When a maximized window is behind an active non-maximized window, the panel > serves as its title bar. But it actually spells out the name of the active > window. Very confusing._

This just doesn't happen in OS X that I've ever observed. It's in fundamental conflict with the OS X window management paradigm.

> _Additionally, in the same situation, all of they standard mouse gestures on > the panel (e.g: double-click to unmaximize) do not work. Maximized windows > don't get the right-click-title gesture to work at all._

Again, this is just inapplicable to OS X.

> _No window list at a glance (useful for remembering your context/state with > the UI)_

This is true for OS X, as far as it goes, but OS X UI practices seem to make it less of an issue than it would be on Windows or a typical Linux desktop environment.

> _Hides important buttons such as close window, as well as the menus, where > non-power-users will not know to look._

I'm not even sure what this one is about. It seems inapplicable to both Unity and OS X.

> _Panel unhide takes a relatively long time -- slowing down almost every > interaction with the UI._

Hiding off by default in OS X, quite fast to unhide.

> _Workspace switcher does not support window drag, unlike the gnome panel > workspace applets._

OS X supports this fully.

> _Workspace switcher requires multiple selections to switch to a window._

Not true of OS X.

> _Alt-tab switches applications, not windows_

True of OS X.

8 properties total, 1 I can't make sense of, 2 that are more or less shared. If my post was hyperbole, the one I responded to claiming "many" of these were shared with OS X was, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For what it's worth:

I try to use the mouse only when necessary (even when browsing the web), and I like to launch my applications through text search. Actually I don't need the Unity sidebar at all, unless perhaps when I want to see what hidden apps are running. I arrange my windows using ctrl-alt + numpad and I switch between workspaces with ctrl-alt + arrow keys. The new active window switching with alt-tab and alt-shift-arrow keys is nice. All in all I'm happy with Unity and it got better with 11.10. Being 50% on Ubuntu and 50% on OSX I have to say that I wish OSX had a little bit more of Ubuntu-UI in it.

Just writing this to offer a counter-point to all the anti-Unity posting. Perhaps everyone should try to play around with Unity shortcuts and see if it's really that bad.

Here's a post detailing some of them: [http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/04/ubuntu-11-10-oneiric- oce...](http://blog.sudobits.com/2011/09/04/ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-ocelot- keyboard-shortcuts-for-unity/)

<comment><USER8> Preach it brother. I still use Gnome-Do (or Synapse sometimes) to launch apps via text search. I honestly think you could design an entire OS UX around that motif that would end up more efficient and more intuitive, even for new users. If the Start Menu and Google Instant had a baby, that would be the result.

<comment><USER9> Yes, desktop environments such as Unity seem to be designed with text search in mind. Instead of navigating a menu tree or filesystem tree, users are expected to "search" for whatever they're looking for.

Which works pretty well... until you realize that these desktop environments are also pretending to target the tablet market, where text entry is an order of magnitude less convenient than it is on a regular computer.

<comment><USER10> > target the tablet market

that's why you have large-ish icons for frequently used applications and why you can pin them to the launcher bar.

<comment><USER9> Yep, that definitely helps. But I have yet to see a Linux UI that would help me find anything other than most frequently used apps on a tablet nearly as easily as I can on a regular computer. We'd need a different sort of UI for that.

I doubt that the text-search paradigm is the right way to go about developing a tablet UI of the kind that we need. Anything based on mouse clicks would seem to be a much better starting point for the transition to tablets. Unfortunately, both Unity and GNOME 3 require a lot of clicks to get around, which is equal to a lot of screen-tapping on a tablet.

<comment><USER11> The most popular touch screen GUIs, iOS and Android, default to a grid of icons, like most major desktop GUIs (Windows, OS X, Gnome, KDE) have desktop icons. I don't see this as hurdle.

<comment><USER9> iOS is lovely. All the apps are represented by finger-sized icons.

In Ubuntu, neither Unity nor GNOME 3 have any desktop icons by default. Unity at least has a dock on the left, but GNOME 3 requires you to click "Activities" before you can do anything else.

In both, the only way to have desktop icons is by changing an obscure setting in an application that isn't installed by default.

Unity's dash is also far from a "grid of icons". You need to open the dash, click the "more apps" button, and finally click a relatively small target at the top of the list before you can see all of your installed apps in a grid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who's been using Ubuntu full time since 9.10 (though I'm really not a Linux "power user."), I was pretty much horrified by my upgrade to 11.10.

In tweaking a few compiz settings, through their config GUI, I managed to crash compiz hard enough to need to reboot several times.

Unity itself is incompatible with Desktop Cube for some reason, and trying to force it just breaks everything. (I like Desktop because it seems to be a more reliable desktop switcher, anecdotally.) I don't mean "force it" like changing the config directly. I mean "force it" like pressing the button that asks if I really want to activate it.

So I tried out Gnome 3 for the first time. It tries so hard to LOOK like OS X, yet it winds up being way worse than either OS X or Gnome 2.

Maybe I'll try Kubuntu. Or Linux Mint. Or just keep trying to like this new crap. I don't know.

<comment><USER13> I have a problem with people turning from Ubuntu because they lost a pet feature. Ubuntu is changing how to look at the desktop and surely what was built around the old api will not be fully supported at first. But it's just a matter of time before it's functional again.

I'm pretty sure the Desktop Cube can be made to work seamlessly with Unity. But it's not Canonical's job to make it so. And if Canonical somehow managed to lock some of the desktop features into Unity, than we must simply pressure then into building something more flexible so as to allow other open source providers to work with a more pluggable interface.

<comment><USER12> I'm not turning away because Desktop Cube doesn't work, I'm turning away because it completely messed up my system by simply trying to turn it on, through the GUI.

I wasn't messing with my X configuration or any other insanities. I clicked a button in the settings, and had to Google around just to get back to a working computer.

What other landmines are waiting for me? What if I install KDevelop or some other KDE-based program? Will that cause everything to break too? I don't know, but I never before had to be afraid to just try things. Now I have to worry if whatever I'm doing is "Canonical-approved," and I'm not okay with that.

(I really doubt KDE is going to cause a problem, it was just an example.)

For the record, I played with Gnome 3 a little more, and I'm willing to give it a longer chance. Avant Window Navigator is a must, though.

Overall, it just seems like Gnome 3 and Unity have all of my least favorite parts of OS X jammed into it for no good reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of the commenters in the post mirrored my thoughts exactly; I'm sticking with the 10.04 LTS, and if this garbage isn't sorted out by the next LTS, I'm jumping the Ubuntu ship. I understand that everyone is trying to target touch screens and tablets, and that's fine as an added feature, but you can't leave the keyboard and mouse folk behind. That's especially true when they make up the overwhelming majority of your users.

I'm actually quite surprised more people haven't spoken out against Metro in the new Windows for the same reason; that interface looks dreadful to use with a mouse. I've been told that Microsoft at least left in a "classic" interface that holds true to the name. If that's true, Canonical needs to take that page from their book...

<comment><USER15> My understanding is Metro is just the traditional start menu on steroids. At any rate, Microsoft seems better able to pivot than Canonical.

<comment><USER14> That's sort of true. They are clearly targeting the touch market with it, but it's a lot more than just an application menu. It think it's a brilliant touch interface, but an awful mouse one, though, to be fair, I have yet to use it in any form. As I understand it though, Metro is just a layer on top of Windows, and it can be turned off if that's what you want to do.

<comment><USER11> Metro is fine with a mouse. I would like to see it become the new widget layer on top of the desktop wallpaper, without hiding the old task bar, and preserving a Windows-7-style start menu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I too disliked Unity at first when it reared its head in 11.04 (didn't help that it still had some obvious bugs), but I gave it a try and have grown to like it a lot. They've polished it up quite a bit in 11.10 and it's even better now. I definitely would not want to go back to the old menu-driven way. (I would add that most people I know that use Ubuntu are of the same opinion)

Fully agree about the config hell, though. One time I wanted to back up my gnome terminal profile settings using gconftool, to discover that the terminal settings are stored in the middle of an XML file that covers a whole slew of gnome settings. So to do the backup/restore, I would either have to back up _all_ of my gnome settings, or write a custom script to patch just the section of the XML file I need changed.

<comment><USER17> After a couple of months of using Unity and trying to fit in with its way of doing thing I jumped back into classic and was immediately at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm inclined to agree with him. Unity will be cool some day, but I don't think it's there yet, and Gnome 3 was completely broken when I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10. Binary configuration files are an abomination against DMR.

I'm fed up with Ubuntu pushing alpha-quality releases on users to get free testing. It's making Linux look bad. A couple years ago, Ubuntu was Debian that "just works" on the desktop. That's all I ever wanted, and I think I've found it again in Linux Mint Debian Edition.

<comment><USER14> I feel the same way. Unity wasn't ready for prime time, and I honestly believe it still isn't. They've forced the user's hand here and made it worse by not keeping changes speedy. Additionally, I hate nearly all the changes to the default applications they've made in the last 2 or 3 releases too, but that stuff is easier to fix.

Back in 2006 I made the move to Ubuntu from Gentoo because I was tired of constantly tweaking things to make my system work. Ubuntu ushered in an era of Linux ease that nobody before them had, and as far as I'm concerned, nobody has since. Sadly, they've started to muck that all up. I don't see anyone else out there making a distro that "just works" and has the out-of-the-box functionality Ubuntu does either, which is the most upsetting part for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Binary blobs for configuration should be considered evil.

I'm all for sane defaults and making design decisions and keeping options away from the users - not having huge preference panes. But keep a hand-editable text configuration file.

I spent some time using IceWM (shipped with EEEpc 701) and the jwm. So I guess I'd be using jwm again.

<comment><USER20> _Binary blobs for configuration should be considered evil._

Next do you get to 'binary blobs for code should be considered evil', have a LISPiphany and found Symbolics?

<comment><USER21> Zetalisp didn't store code in binary blobs. There's a reason Smalltalk, Zope, and Interlisp are or were tiny-minority platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have been using Gnome in its classic form for a very long time but, I switched to Gnome 3 after the upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version. I must admit it is starting to grow on me.

When I first used Gnome 3 (back when it was first released) I hated it; it was buggy and the whole concept of gnome-shell seemed flawed. Now its seems many of the bugs have been worked out and the usability improvements of gnome-shell is starting to show. Gnome 3 is still far from perfect and there are still A LOT of things missing that I had grown to rely on from classic Gnome (like being able to arrange my panels) but Gnome 3 seems to be progressing and I have high hopes for its future.

I am less hopeful for the future of Unity frankly because it has so many bad ideas built in to it. One such bad idea is the heavy reliance on hidden elements that need to be hovered over for them to be visible.

Personally I think Ubuntu would do well to pick up Gnome 3 and run with it instead of Unity.

<comment><USER23> I'm also liking feeling pretty good about gnome3. It's missing some important configuration options for me (I don't want windows to auto-raise in sloppy mode), and I miss my system-monitor applet in the panel, but I think it will be great in another release or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I first read this article, I got ready to post a hasty reply with all my pet hates about Gnome 3, Unity, etc, etc.

Then I remembered the original reason I started using Linux, as a native Windows user, and that is "Choice". So you don't like Gnome. Guess what? Don't use it! You have so many other choices of window managers available to you.

Shed a tear for those users on proprietary systems who don't have choice. Don't like the new Start menu? Nobody cares.

<comment><USER13> Right you are.

Also, maybe since all the power-users are so dissatisfied, they could join and manage a new packaged Ubuntu, maybe OUBUNTU (old ubuntu). They have that choice.

I for one am happy to have a linux distro geared towards everyday desktop use and modern devices, and that I can show my family/friends as an alternative choice and have them not reply that it's just so damn ugly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I disagree with esr on Unity (I kind of like it), he raises a very serious point about configuration being kept in binary blobs. I cringe when I see it in XML - blobs are an even worse idea.

<comment><USER25> Thats a rather bizarre way to store config data I can't see any architectural reason why this would be desirable, does anyone have any insight into this?

<comment><USER26> Performance and footprint. If I remember correctly, the binary format is used so that dconf can mmap the configuration into memory. This means that a read on the configuration database doesn't involve any system calls and only one copy needs to be in memory (no matter how many processes are using it).

<http://live.gnome.org/dconf#Design>

I'm generally a fan of text-based configuration files but in this case I think the benefit exceeds the cost. Reading configuration used to take a non-trivial amount of time on startup.

<comment><USER18> For some reason, gnome-settings-daemon reads ~/.thumbnails on login, and ~/.thumbnails was unbounded in size. Mine was 700M when I learned what caused all the disk IO. I think a lot of the perception of text config files being slow may have more to do with that than the actual performance of the configuration system.

The middle ground would be to cache settings in a binary file.

<comment><USER10> Why would it read 700MB of stuff right after login?

<comment><USER18> I don't know why. I just know that it does. The problem is described here: [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings- dae...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings- daemon/+bug/505085)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _Eventually, by making a fresh account, taking checksums of its dotfiles, adding an applet, and taking checksums again, I found out that the new panel configuration lives in a file called .config/dconf/user that is an opaque binary blob._

I think the OP is a perfect candidate for Arch Linux.

</comment><comment><USER28> Personally, I really prefer Unity to classic Gnome. Unity is the best desktop experience I have had. I've been using it since 11.04 out. Unity had some rough edges when it was first released, but a lot of that has been ironed out. I really like the direction Unity is going. I feel that it uses space in a more intelligent way. I am very glad that Canonical has taken the initiative to build a better desktop environment. Many people don't like change, and I feel that is the category that many of the people criticizing Unity fall into. I do agree that Unity is not as easily customizable as I would expect, but again, I enjoy most of the decisions that comprise Unity.

</comment><comment><USER29> Reading this thread makes me pretty sad. Usually there are people on hacker news that at least know the background, and generally there is a measure of respect that other people might actually know something about what they work on. The Gnome developers (which includes me) have more than ten years of experience working on unix and developing a desktop for it. Please don't assume we're making decisions because we're stupid, we might actually have reasons to do what we do.

Lemme try to explain some background on configuration storage in gnome.

But first, the main complaint in the article is that you can't modify the layout of the fallback mode panel in gnome 3. This is just not true, you can modify them in the UI just like before, only you have to hold down alt when you bring up the menus, etc. This was done because a lot of people accidentally changed their panel around causing problems. I'm sure this change could have been better documented and whatnot, but it _is_ possible.

Once upon a time there was a design decision in Gnome to use so called "instant apply" configuration options, rather than having each config dialog button have "apply" buttons. You can disagree if you want, but this decision drives the design of the configuration framework. Basically, it implies having some kind of service that handles configuration changes that will tell other applications of configuration changes. Thus was born GConf.

The original on-disk format for GConf was an on-disk tree that mirrored the gconf key hierarchy, where each directory had a %gconf.xml file that listed the keys in that directory.

However, it turns out that this is a major performance problem when reading settings. Each such file you open causes two random access seeks on the hard drive. One to read the inode and one to read the data. Hard drive consecutive data read speeds are pretty high, but seeks are very slow (for physical reasons), which was significantly affecting login and app startup speed of gnome.

So, we merged the all the separate files into xml tree files, using one per application. This cut down on seeks a lot and improved performance. (Of course, a negative aspect of this is that the xml files are not very human readable anymore. But the vast majority of readers do not access the text files directly anyway.)

However, even after this gconf reads was a problem for log in performance. We do of course do local caching of gconf data in each process and we preload it in chunks, however during login the gconf daemon was acting as a serialization point for all processes that were starting up. Also, all these xml trees were pretty verbose, so parsing and loading also took some time.

Over the years we increased our knowledge of the problem space, and eventually we came up with a replacement for GConf. It has two parts, one is the API, which lives in glib, called GSettings. Its an abstraction for settings with change notification that has client-side schemas (as opposed to server side schemas like with GConf, another thing we learned). The implementation is pluggable, there is an ini file backend, a win32 registry, and the DConf backend, which is the default for Linux distros.

DConf uses a binary on-disk format that is mmapable and readable without "parsing". I.e. each app maps the config file readonly (sharing this memory), and lookups is done directly in the in-memory mapping without an intermediate parsed copy of the data. The data is stored in an efficient hash-table which allows very fast key lookups with few pagefaults in the file. The actual data is stored using GValue, an immutable binary datatype for recursive types that is in glib. So when a value is returned we don't even duplicate it but just return a wrapped reference to the data in the mmaped file.

Writes to dconf do go through a daemon which handles write serialization and change notification. Communications with the dconf daemon is through dbus, which incidentally has an on-wire binary data format that is a subset of GValue.

So, how does this help us? Well, for one thing we never block during login for reading configuration, as all reading is parallelized. Secondly we don't spend any time parsing files, as the config file, once mapped, is already in a compact "parsed" format. Thirdly, we never waste any memory storing copies of configuration data on the heap.

Now, there are some obvious drawbacks with binary formats. For instance, you need tools to modify them, like the dconf-editor GUI app or "gsettings list- recursively". Secondly, you can't use text based tools like e.g. git, emacs or diff/patch to maintain them.

But, you got to realize that we are not unaware of these problems. We are well aware of them, but we made the conscious decision that the real life problems with the many-text-files approach to configurations (as listed above) outweigh the advantages. Especially considering that most of our users don't need to directly modify the config files.

<comment><USER30> Anecdata: I've supported Ubuntu desktops for non-technical users, and they do indeed seem to have an amazing ability to accidentally re-arrange panel items, even with "Lock items" ticked. I'm entirely in favour of making it more difficult -- although I probably wouldn't have figured out holding down "alt" by myself, but I would hopefully have found it with some googling.

<comment><USER31> Rearranging panel items is surprising clunky compared to Mac OS X.

Also, resurrecting panel items that have accidentally been deleted can be difficult. The "Add to Panel" menu is missing some critical panel items that can (for unfathomable reasons) be removed, such as the "Applications" menu!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I always wanted to try out awesome but never had the motivation. Yesterday gnome3 packages started popping up in unstable so I gave it a whirl on an old machine. The only good thing I can say about gnome3 is that it finally gave me the incentive to make the leap to awesome...its truly awesome.

<comment><USER33> I'm very happy with Awesome running on top of arch linux. If you like the configurability of awesome, also check out luakit:

<http://luakit.org/projects/luakit/>

It's a lua binding to webkit that allows you to fully customize your web browser as well, with a configuration scheme similar to Awesome. By default it's configured with VIM bindings, imo better than the vimium or vimperator plugins.

<comment><USER34> Luakit is definitely an interesting project. I'm checking it out, but I'm not ready to make it my primary browser, if only because the user documentation is bad enough that the best way for me to figure out how to open a URL is to read the configuration files.

<comment><USER33> Search this ArchLinux thread, lots of great tips: <https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=97375>

"o" or ":open" plus a url, "t" or ":tabopen" plus a url. "d" closes a tab. Press tab to autocomplete. "B" to add a bookmark. "H"\"L", back\forward in history. To perform a search, simply start your open or tabopen command with "google " or "duckduckgo " etc. If you are on a site that uses javascript keyboard controls, press CTRL-Z to enter pass through mode. ":wq" saves your session (pages that are open will be reloaded next time) and quits.

If Javascript doesn't work in gmail or google plus, change

> _"AppleWebKit/%s.%s+"_

to

> _"AppleWebKit/%s.%s+ (KHTML, like Gecko)"_

in globals.lua and it will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> After having used Unity for many months, I recently switch back to "Gnome classic" and when I upgrade to 11.10 it will be Xubuntu.

It would be great if Canonical concentrated their resources on making the system faster, like they did until recently (improved start up speed etc). However, now they seem to be dumping all work into reinventing the wheel by creating yet another Linux desktop GUI.

</comment><comment><USER36> Whatever, I spent so many years with Gentoo/Arch + Openbox/DWM that I'm just happy to install Ubuntu, copy over my dot files and have 98% of everything working within 30 min of downloading the distro.

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree about Unity being terrible, I just hope the Ubuntu dev's are going to realize this and relegate it to an "experimental" UI and then go back to the classic as default

<comment><USER14> I'm hoping they backpedal too, especially for the next LTS. I'm pretty doubtful that they will though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If Ubuntu has done anything wrong with the full-on switch to Unity in 11.10, it's that it's kindly done us the favour of removing a classic desktop and not even providing anything approaching similar to replace it. I can't speak for Gnome3 since it doesn't like my hardware at all, and its 'classic' mode seems broken (possibly as a result of compatibility issues).

Anyway, that wouldn't be a problem at all, but Unity is still flawed, is totally unproductive for development work, and there's a distinct lack of customisation:

The launch bar is useless, and doesn't work at all if you let a window snap to the left hand side.

You can only add application shortcuts to it (why can't I add bookmark folders?).

There are no configuration options to be seen (what if I don't want auto- hide?), and whatever options there are, they're minimal.

Workspace switching isn't smooth at all and requires a strange number of clicks to make any use of.

Auto-hiding menubars just obscures GUI elements I'd like to be able to see at all times. If they're not there, I have to stop and remember where to look, because I can't just glance at the top of the screen. The actual name of the app is always visible, but clicking it does nothing. This is unbelievably unintuitive.

As for it replacing the classic desktop, I'm not sure what exactly was wrong with it, and why a GUI fit for a netbook or tablet is now being shoehorned into a desktop OS before it's had enough care and attention to bring it up to par with the standard desktop experience.

I regret running the upgrade and as soon as I can I'm switching to something more productive and usable, because 11.10 and Unity feels like too big a jump into unfamiliar (and unstable) territory.

And this is coming from an OS X user (who only uses Linux at work).

</comment><comment><USER38> I was a Ubuntu user for the pass 2 years, only until the heat problem kicks in. I don't know why most people don't have this problem, but my computer is extremely hot while running basic graphical tricks, and moreover, this thing has not been fixed for the last 3 releases. And secondly, the Unity is extremely stupid for multiple monitor. If he has 3 monitors, how would he like it to constantly look to the left most monitor just to switch between tasks? I recently purchased an additional monitor, and because of this stupidity, I no longer use Ubuntu despite I hate Windows so much. This could be a reason why Ubuntu will NEVER get to offices, since most of them have multiple monitors.

Wonder if we could have USERS to say what they want in each release? If Ubuntu continues this path, I'm afraid tech-savvy people will stop using it, not to mention many new users will never start trying.

<comment><USER39> Most people don't have the problem because it's related to a specific piece of hardware in your machine. Search Launchpad and see if you can add any new details to the bug report, or file a new issue if one doesn't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm probably too late to this discussion, but I work at a windows shop, and use ubuntu at home and on servers, so it is an irritation that the ubuntu UI has become more mac-like, starting with the close button moving to the left- hand side. This is mainly because I find it inconsistent. I have put off upgrading ubuntu for this reason, currently I'm on 10.04.

What I don't like about ubuntu since 10.04, is that it the UI has become "opionated", without having the customizability that pre-gnome desktop managers have.

Specifically, there should be options to put the close/minimize/maximize buttons on whichever side I prefer, and whether to use mac-style menus or windows-style menus.

</comment><comment><USER41> Seriously, what is with Ubuntu and locked down panels? Would it be so hard to set up a user default in the home directory and then let me edit?

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting to note that nobody mentions Enlightenment or the Ubuntu-based Bodhi Linux disto. I really can't figure out if Enlightenment is simply living in a dark hole of obscurity or if it's actively ignored. (And if it's being ignored I'd love to know more about why, I've always enjoyed it as a desktop environment.)

<comment><USER43> For the Linux boxes I keep around, E16 is still, after over a decade, my preferred graphical shell. In fact, I don't think I've touched the config since around 2001.

That said, I don't get all the bashing on GNOME and Unity; yeah, there are rough spots (and obligatory "power users" who think GUI means a window that shows one checkbox for each command-line option), but they're trying to do good and I applaud them for the attempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why is there so much negativity?

They are providing a free software option for you, and they work very hard on it. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it. But why be angry at them?

As for Ubuntu 11.10, I am posting this from there. Yes, Unity has some annoyances. But overall things work quite well.

<comment><USER45> He's providing _feedback_ , even if in an indelicate way, and sharing useful information to other users, such as the binary blob configuration file.

 _But overall things work quite well._

It's an opinion. Clearly the author begs to differ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> schiptsov posted, in an apparently auto[dead] post:

> Yes, all those better ways to do the configuration, such as gconf2, oneconf, > and other shit is really annoying, same like people who missing power and > flexibility of a text file, not an XML but plain old var=value, or, OK, some > Yaml. But what can we do? The mediocre crowds are migrating from windows > realms and they like to copy and paste, not to think and learn. ^_^

I just wanted to respond to schiptsov's comment by pointing out that copying and pasting is something you can do if you have a name=value or YAML text file, but not something you can do with gconf-editor. So if there are "mediocre crowds" who "like to copy and paste", they'll be better served by text-based configuration files.

</comment><comment><USER46> I would suggest checking out Elementary OS. It has been a better experience for me.

</comment><comment><USER47> Linux Mint 11 is a fantastic distribution for anyone who isn't into Unity or Gnome 3. I wish I had started using it sooner.

<comment><USER48> Do they have good repositories? One thing I liked on Ununtu is that they have almost anything I need in their repositories. I never have to compile anything, or even run an install file.

<comment><USER9> Mint uses the same repositories as Ubuntu for the most part. You can also use the Debian Edition, which uses the same repositories as Debian Testing. Both repos are as comprehensive as they get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> whaa a poor power user did not get what they wanted..wha..wha...

For background ESR work is not in UI but in small but important stuff like GPSd, etc..

He is work here..both GNOME and Ubuntu have made decisions that are making an impact as far as driving adoption of new users to the platform..both sets of developers deserve big round of applause..

</comment><comment><USER50> Come on .. not another Unity rant.

All Linux desktops before Unity sucked. Gnome 2.x sucked, big time. It looked ugly, and had only ugly themes. Its applications menu was completely useless. Its panel sucked. Its model for putting and managing launchers/shortcuts on the panel sucked. It was a complete mess.

Most Linux users were using Docky + GNOME Do.

I personally was using XFCE, because at least its panel was prettier and more customizable.</comment>


Microsoft closing down CodePlex, tells devs to move to GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/microsoft-closing-down-codeplex-tells-devs-to-move-to-github/ <comment><USER2> > At the time, there weren't a tremendous number of good options for hosting > projects.

Are there now?

Don't get me wrong, I love github but honestly, I wouldn't want everything to converge into a monoculture we're slowly moving toward.

<comment><USER3> Git is immensely portable at least... I mean all you need is a remote SSH and you can push to that for remote/upstream. Now that doesn't include issue tracking or work items, etc.. but then again, pretty much all the options on that side are locked in. Compared to migrating a TFS repo, for example, it's night and day.

<comment><USER4> Mercurial has better cross platform support.

<comment><USER3> Okay... and the point? My argument was regarding platform lockin. As to cross- platform support, what platforms is Mercurial well supported on that git isn't? The big three (Windows, Linux, macOS) are well supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14006734](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14006734)

</comment><comment><USER6> So finally I can remove the static tunnel to be able to update from codeplex repos on Linux. A nightmare</comment>


IBM to Acquire Linux Distributor Red Hat for $33.4B - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-said-to-near-deal-to-acquire-software-maker-red-hat?srnd=premium <comment><USER2> > Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. advised IBM on the deal > and provided financing.

Earning lots in interest rate, I guess finance companies are the worst to take advice from</comment>


Restarting the LHC: Why 13 Tev? - <AUTHOR> http://home.web.cern.ch/about/engineering/restarting-lhc-why-13-tev <comment><USER4> Is 13 TeV exciting? It's too bad science isn't exciting to more people.

[http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4499048/joel-hefley-kill- ssc](http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4499048/joel-hefley-kill-ssc)

If we had been we'd have had 40 TeV almost 2 decades ago.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collide...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider#Comparison_to_the_Large_Hadron_Collider)

<comment><USER5> As a physicist, I'm compelled to note that the SSC was projected to exceed its initial budget by a huge margin, perhaps 300%. If we can't constrain costs, we don't get to have nice things.

The loss of the SSC was a tragedy, but the fact that Congress was willing to allocate $4B for such a project (>$7B in today's dollars) would suggest that there was widespread national support for such a thing. At the time of proposal, that was $18 _per person_ in the United States, ballooning to $54/person as projected. That's one heck of a bake sale.

<comment><USER6> True, it's sad that it was going to overrun costs. But it was ambitious-- imagine how ahead of its time it was if it could have achieved 40TeV 20 years ago.

It's also depressing when you consider what we did decide to spend money on. The cost of air conditioning alone in Iraq was $20B. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/air-conditioning- mi...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/21/air-conditioning-military- cost-nasa_n_881828.html) Edit: I'm not suggesting we go to war and not keep our troops air conditioned--it was a necessity given the conditions. I'm suggesting that when such a tiny fractional cost of the war more than the cost of the SSC, maybe our sense of relative costs was warped.

<comment><USER7> Just to play devil's advocate -- and taking several levels of cynicism as a given -- the energy security of the USA is worth far more than what we ended up spending on the Iraq war.

For all the money that the EU has spent on the LHC, it hasn't really paid off to that extent. Even if you consider "the web" as part of that payoff, it's not the equivalent of guaranteeing every person in the western world stable access to cheap energy.

(I'm not saying I agree with that rationale for our adventures in Iraq, I just don't think it's _quite_ fair to make the comparison you're making. There's more at stake in Iraq than a stable democracy for a small country.)

<comment><USER8> FYI, "the internet" can be fairly credited to DARPA in the USA.

It is "the web" that can be credited to the LHC.

<comment><USER9> In a lesser known twist there was heavy debate on the SGML working group that documents shuld have embedded links. For various reasons that did not come to pass but it Effectivly pushed back the web by 5 years until HTML showed up. Presumably if DNS has been out just a little bit sooner the web would have taken off much sooner. Though computer cost and limitations may have set slowed adoption.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_L...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language)

<comment><USER10> The web phenomenom is the appearance of four major components in a very short period of time:

        - <USER2>
        - <USER3>
        - a graphical browser that even my mother can use
        - freely deployable web server software component

Sure, HTML is an important piece of the cake. But the most important one is definitely ... (well, choose for yourself :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Turn Bluetooth Off When You're Not Using It - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/turn-off-bluetooth-security/ <comment><USER2> Note that disabling Bluetooth will break Apple's cross-device integration of your clipboard, open tabs/documents, and open apps between multiple devices, as well as Apple Pencil, AirPods, and some of the functionality of Personal Hotspot.

If you use any of these features, you are using Bluetooth. Be mindful of side effects when following instructions for security you find on the Internet, even if they're from WIRED.</comment>


What UI really is (and how UX confuses matters) - <AUTHOR> http://feltpresence.com/articles/19-what-ui-really-is-and-how-ux-confuses-matters <comment><USER2> great article, as always, by Ryan Singer (of 37 Signals fame).</comment>


Brain seems to categorise death as something that only befalls other people - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/19/doubting-death-how-our-brains-shield-us-from-mortal-truth <comment><USER2> That's because everything and everybody else is a figment of my/our imagination :)</comment>


A/B Testing iOS Apps Like a Pro - <AUTHOR> http://lukabratos.me/blog/2014/01/14/a-slash-b-testing-ios-apps-like-a-pro/

<comment><USER2> Neat project. A few concerns I have:

1) ideally you would be able to measure change in every metric, not just ones you whitelist for a specific experiment. What if adding one feature changes how people interact with a completely different feature? You would want to know about this.

2) just showing change without any sort of hypothesis testing is just begging for people to draw unfounded conclusions from the results. Instead of a vague note that more than 100 sessions is necessary to get significance, you need to have real confidence intervals at the very least.

<comment><USER3> I'm a data scientist and I actually think this is a smart way to go.

The author could have implemented a simple Chi-square test and gotten CIs. The problem is that conversion rates are usually < 6% and that means you'd have to have a MASSIVE sample size to detect a difference.

Our basically Type II error is much more important than typical statistical applications. Our statistical power is super important.

The author could implement Bayesian statistics with a Beta distribution prior initialized with alpha = 3, beta = 100 (mimicking a 3% conversion rate). The results would be robust to this prior information. The problem is that there is no closed-forum likelihood solution. This means you need to use Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. Web servers don't like that.

In my experience, if you see a nice 10% boost in conversion rate (conv. b / conv. a) after some representative period of time like a few days, you should just go with that result.

In that way, you don't ignore what's smacking you in the head. "The implementation had a higher conv. rate or not over a few days." Detecting small differences really well with stats is fairly pointless in this space.</comment></comment>


MH370: A different point of view - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/106271056358366282907/posts/GoeVjHJaGBz This seems like a simpler explanation. <comment><USER2> This doesn't explain the zigzagging trajectory of the plane after its disappearance:

 _Indeed, soon after MH370 disappeared, reports emerged that recordings of Malaysian military radar returns showed an unidentified track that could correspond to the flight turning left onto a westward course and descending. At the time it was difficult to assess the validity of that claim. It's been bolstered, however, by a Reuters report earlier Friday stating that Malaysian military radar showed the flight following a course westward over the Malay peninsula and then heading out over the Indian Ocean, passing specific navigational waypoints as it went.

According to the report, this latter portion of the flight followed an unusual zigzag trajectory as it worked its way toward the north and west. This is a very inefficient way to get from one place to another, but it had some consequences that may have been useful for whoever was in control of the airplane. For one thing, by navigating between well-traveled waypoints, the plane would have seemed to military radar operators to look just like all the other well-behaved commercial traffic traveling over that stretch of ocean. "That's going to seem like unsuspicious traffic," says Maarten Uijt de Haag, a professor of electrical engineering at Ohio University. Had the plane left the well-traveled routes and struck out on its own, it would have been far more conspicuous.

Another consequence of the zigzagging trajectory is that, like a fox crossing back and forth over a stream to eluding a pack of hounds, it obscured where exactly it might be heading._

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/14/mh370_dis...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/14/mh370_disappearance_if_the_malaysia_airlines_plane_isn_t_in_the_indian_ocean.html)

<comment><USER3> or the climb to 45k

<comment><USER4> Plenty of weird reasons to climb like that[1]. I think people dramatically underestimate how mechanical and/or electronic system failure combines with human misjudgement to make things operate in entirely unpredictable ways.

I've never been involved in an air crash investigation, but I have done many system outage investigations. The majority of them[2] involve a failure of a hardware/software system, followed by manual intervention done without complete information. The number of times I've seen small problems escalate dramatically by the combination of automatic systems and manual intervention is enough to make me assume accident when something like this happens.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_rep...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_report)

[2] Ok, the majority that don't involve the deployment of new software.

<comment><USER5> Completely agree. I'm surprised that, especially on HN, the large number of people who won't apply Occam's Razer to the situation.

I imagine that most air accident investigations begin like this; confused, competing information from numerous sources of varying reliability. Just with the internet and 24h news, everyone is following along with each revelation (see also the Pistorius trial).

Give it some time, let the investigators work and report their findings. I'd be very surprised if it's not a combination of system failure and human error in reacting to the failure.

<comment><USER6> > I imagine that most air accident investigations begin like this; confused, > competing information from numerous sources of varying reliability.

Not to mention that but when things happen on the plane, pilots are given confused, competing from numerous sources. This is why I assumed it was an accident (like Air France 447) at first.

> Give it some time, let the investigators work and report their findings. I'd > be very surprised if it's not a combination of system failure and human > error in reacting to the failure.

That was my first impulse too. Google "IEEE Automation Paradox Air France 447." However, this is really hard to square with the engine information. So you have three possibilities: the plane flew an uncommanded course on autopilot for 5 hours following an accident, the flight data is wrong, or it is a hijacking.

In this case an investigation is hard because there is so little information. It took until the black boxes were recovered from AF447 to determine what happened there. Here? We don't even know where the plane is, much less the relevant recorders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In every instance of cabin fire, even ones where the fires spread extremely quickly and are eventually fatal such as SwissAir and ValueJet, the crew contacted the ground. And this was the case even when co-pilots were literally out of their seats actually fighting the fires. Yet _every single time_ the ground was alerted about an emergency. This is what veteran pilots do.

Also, for a fire to destroy the multiple electronic systems so as to render the transponder and comms useless, the smell of smoke would've almost certainly been recognizable long before the damage was complete. In this case, the pilots would have alerted the ground.

It was the pilot and/or co-pilot acting deliberately. I would bet my life on it.

<comment><USER8> An Egypt Air 777-200 had a cockpit fire on the ground. This would complicate a reponse.

[http://www.avherald.com/h?article=44078aa7&opt=0](http://www.avherald.com/h?article=44078aa7&opt=0)

Presuming they lost the battle, instrumentation/ap would drop out. Eventually, the fire would burn through the cockpit (see pictures above) and depressurize the a/c. Fire would then go out. Engines would keep going.

Eventually, someone will correlate wind directions with any required in-flight cg changes (fuel tanking) not being completed and I won't be surprised if a pattern emerges.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Except is it really possible for a 777 that just had its entire avionics destroyed by a fire and a total loss of cabin pressure at 35k feet to maintain relatively level and straight flight? If the fire is really that catastrophic, I would reckon the plane would crash soon thereafter. It would also be unprecedented (as far as I know) to have the crew aware of a fire and unable to alert the ground (either because the comms were inoperative or the pilots were incapacitated). Also, another pilot is now claiming he established radio contact with 370 at 1:30, but that it was "mumbled" and brief. I guess the radio was working and there was a butt in the seat?

I dunno. Who am I kidding, it's all circumstantial at this point.

EDIT: I'm not sure if the Cairo incident is a good example of how quickly a fire can overcome a crew. They were on the ground with the jetway still connected, so it's quite a different situation.

<comment><USER8> Well, didn't maintain level and straight flight. The damage would probably not be as bad as Egypt Air, because any small hole would immediately depressurize the a/c, whereas EA kept burning for 20 minutes.

Cockpit window heater fires:

[http://archive.chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2010/06/us- boeing...](http://archive.chicagobreakingbusiness.com/2010/06/us-boeing- cockpit-fire-cause-not-fixed.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sequence of events this implies when coupled with other information:

1\. Electrical fire starts, takes out ADS-B transponder, pilots unaware and continue the flight as normal 2\. They radio a goodbye as they leave ATC, still unaware of anything which means that a fire has taken out a transponder and they are unaware of that fact 3\. The fire is discovered. The crew put on full-face oxygen masks and the pilot makes for that airport either by dialling in a bearing into the autopilot or disengaging it and flying for it. 4\. They attempt communication but fail because the systems are out due to the fire

At that point, we then have a lot of things to consider: was it pilot input or autopilot that took them to FL450? When did the pilots lose the ability to land, either because of control surface damage or because they were incapacitated? In the event of being alive but unable to fly the aircraft because control surfaces were no longer responsive to cockpit or autopilot input, is there anything else they could/would do other than do some maths and work out when the inevitable crash was coming? If they could control some surfaces but not others would they use that to buy themselves more time, e.g. climbing to ceiling (FL450), or would they get low quick?

This theory raises quite a few questions then, but it's a perfectly valid hypothesis: the issue for me around it is understanding why the pilots didn't go on to make the landing suggesting loss of control or their own lives by that point. The only way we'll get to understand that is by finding the black box which of course would explain the whole thing anyway.

This theory also suggests a likely ditching or crash into the water, and if that were the case then I would expect sonar operators over a large part of the region to hear the black box locator, pretty much as they did with the Air France crash.

<comment><USER10> _" The only way we'll get to understand that is by finding the black box which of course would explain the whole thing anyway."_

I appreciate that there are technical challenges and costs associated with the following idea, but it would be quite an interesting project to create a system that would transmit Flight Data Recorder (FDR) information to a ground location.

Off the top of my head, it would need to be flexible, perhaps recording more detailed telemetry in cases where cellular networks were available, to being able to provide critical, but perhaps less-detailed telemetry, in cases where only satellite communications were available. In addition, data monitoring systems could be programmed with the intelligence to transmit more detailed telemetry in the event of an anomaly (e.g., the "left turn" with regard to MH370). This would be an attempt to find the right balance of data fidelity, with regard to available transmission capabilities and associated costs.

Sadly, as it is now, we are left with relying on essentially locating the proverbial "needle in a haystack" with regard to locating the FDR. Another example is the case with AF447 [1]. Although the FDR was recovered, it was not until nearly 2 years after the incident.

My heart goes out to those that lost loved ones. Not having closure is an extremely painful and difficult process to endure.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447)

<comment><USER11> Alternatively, why don't planes have floating EPIRBs ([http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_radiobeacon](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distress_radiobeacon)) or even floating black boxes? They could be attached to one or more points on the plane where they're likely to be released if wreckage sinks.

<comment><USER12> Black boxes do have an ELT. If the plane had crashed it's likely they would have been found it already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I took a flight on a 777 from Dulles to London a couple years ago. A few hours into the flight the captain announced a suspected cabin fire and the smell of smoke in the cockpit. The crew shut off all the circuits they didn't need to fly the plane, the captain took a left turn, and we made an emergency landing at Reykjavik. Just sayin'.

<comment><USER14> Sure. But a gas leak recently brought down two buildings in Harlem and that's akin to someone posting, "we had a gas leak and I just called the gas company, they switched it off. Just sayin".

Point is: things don't always go to plan, and successfully avoiding disaster once does not necessarily set a precedent.

<comment><USER15> I guess the point was that turning off transponders and other things could have been the crew's reaction to suspected fire. Obviously the radio messages do not go along well with this theory. On the other hand I'm at least a little bit confused about what pieces of information about the case have been confirmed and what is just from "anonymous sources".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One big hole in this theory is that its been widely reported [1] that a transponder was switched off _before_ the pilots last radio contact. The pilots would have had no reason to pull the breakers before the last communication if they weren't already aware of a fire.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/malaysia- airlin...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/malaysia-airlines- flight.html)

<comment><USER17> Another massive hole is that the closest airport ,at the point where communication was lost, was Sultan Mahmud in Kuala Terengganu. Long runway, approach directly from sea, can accommodate a 747 according to Wikipedia. There is no justification to go to Langkawi which is on the other side of the Malay Peninsula.

<comment><USER18> Never underestimate "pilot familiarity." In an emergency, a pilot is going to favor an airstrip he/she is familiar with over an unknown one. Perhaps the captain was more familiar with Langkawi?

<comment><USER19> apparently the co-pilot was fresh off his 777 training which occurred on Langkawi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Except that the left turn was pre programmed into the flight computer.

[http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-rep-peter- kin...](http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-rep-peter-king-sen- chris-murphy/story?id=22914614)

"KERLEY: The prime minister confirming the report by ABC News the communications gear was deliberately shut down. Now we have learned from a source close to the investigation that whoever was controlling the plane preprogrammed that sharp left turn right off of the flight path, convincing investigators that someone was in control of the jetliner, either a rogue pilot or a hijackers."

</comment><comment><USER21> One problem with the theory: The first communication system was shut down _before_ the pilot's last message 'All right, good night'. If it had been an accidental fire that caused the pilot to cycle the systems, I would imagine the last message would have been more along the lines of "Holy Smokey Bear, the plane's on fire!"

<comment><USER19> the last ACARS message was received before the ATC goodbye.

the next ACARS message was scheduled to be sent after the goodbye, but it was never received.

the time when the ACARS was disabled would be within this window.

<comment><USER22> The NYT is saying that some Malaysian government officials are confused about how ACARS works, leading to the confused reporting.

The above comment is accurate: the last ACARS message was received at 107, and the next one was expected at 137. The voice communication was logged at 119.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia- airlin...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlines- flight.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is what I've been saying for the last couple of days.

The cool thing with watching this story develop in real time is understanding how fucking incompetent conspiracy theorists are. From confusion on how ACARS works, to the limits of radio comms, to the organization of the plane's electrical system to their complete misunderstanding of how accurate primary radar readings are at the edge of range. These people aren't qualified to speculate in the slightest.

If you don't know what you're talking about: shut the fuck up.

By default I disbelieve all conspiracy theories, unless overwhelming evidence is forthcoming, because their proponents don't know shit.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is probably the most intelligent explanation I have heard. Everyone wants to make this into some Hollywood action movie with terrorists, kidnappings and sneaking through airspace.

<comment><USER25> This author isn't helping the cause either. He is going as far as calling the pilots "heroes". He is grandstanding just like other journalists.

One would think that cabin smoke was one of the first scenarios experts considered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> MH370 might have entered into a blackhole and come back as a dove.

What's with all this speculation?!?

<comment><USER27> So you're saying the best way to figure out what happened to MH370 is to do nothing, don't think, don't have any ideas, in no way make any effort to interpret the facts as they present themselves or try to fill in the blanks with educated guesses?

Nice plan.

<comment><USER28> Well it definitely won't be bloggers and armchair investigators who figure it out. Unfounded speculation is irresponsible and immature behaviour the very least.

<comment><USER29> Some people seem to enjoy it as a sort of creative challenge, it seems, which I guess doesn't really hurt anyone (I don't envision the victims' families reading these threads). That's fine as far as it goes, although these threads always seem to branch out into bizarro conspiracy theories about the Mossad trying to smuggle the Reptilians' sacred crystals into Liechtenstein and wondering about why the "all-powerful, all-seeing" governments are hiding what they know about it.

<comment><USER30> Why don't you envision the victims' families reading this sort of thread? If I were the relative of somebody on that plane, I'd be reading every single article and thread I could, trying to keep the hope of finding them alive, alive. Surely I'm not the only one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The big thing that's been bothering me about the hijacking hypothesis is that there's no clear logical motive behind it. This indeed makes more sense than anything else I've read so far.

<comment><USER32> What do you mean? There's plenty of motive for hijacking, just as always. Especially a flight filled with Chinese civilians headed to China. There has been a rash of terrorist attacks within China recently from Xinjiang separatists, including several different mass stabbing attacks just this year which have claimed dozens of lives.

One might hypothesize that terrorists managed to take control of the airplane and divert it only to have the passengers counter-attack and then in the chaos that followed either control of the plane was lost and not able to be recovered or it was intentionally crashed. Even with reinforced doors it would not take very long for highly motivated individuals to breach them, whether that's the attackers or the passengers or whomever.

I'm not saying that anything of the sort is likely but similar things have happened before.

<comment><USER33> I had the same idea. This remains the most plausible theory (IMHO) I have heard since the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The part about tire fires producing "horrific incapacitating smoke" seemed a bit odd to me --- the landing gear are located outside the pressurised part of the fuselage.

<comment><USER35> Read about Nigeria Airways Flight 2120 ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria_Airways_Flight_2120](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria_Airways_Flight_2120)).

An under-inflated tyre caught fire during take-off, the plane took off unaware of the fire, when the landing gear was retracted the fire spread burning through electrical and hydraulic lines.

A fire "outside of the pressurised part of the fuselage" doesn't mean the same didn't happen here.

<comment><USER18> Sure, although the NationAir DC-8 tragedy was a different jet. The 777 is significantly more advanced and I believe has some sort of fire detection in the wheel well; they would have known very shortly after takeoff if there was smoke. Unless we're saying that the fire immediately disabled the ability to communicate the fact that there WAS a fire to the pilots...

...but that seems unlikely too, because I imagine the 777 has backup systems that would alert pilots in case a system as critical as the fire detection equipment in the wheel assembly was not responding.

I'm not saying the fire scenario is impossible; I'm still erring on the side of this being a tragic systems failure, and not a malicious act. I just think it might be entirely unlike anything we've seen in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> When I was considering a similar scenario, I looked at the airports around there and found Kota Bharu to be much closer. The runway may not be similar in length, but if your plane is on fire, you would not be picky.

It is at least 200km closer than Langkawi. The flight path was also close to Kota Bharu, so one theory does not exclude the other.

Maybe somebody with more knowledge of an autopilot can offer some insight: what happens is you overshoot your programmed target? With it go in a holding pattern? Would the autopilot disengage? Or will the plane continue on its course?

<comment><USER37> Apparently, the autopilot can put it into a holding pattern:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522)

Whether or not it would, I suppose, would depend on how it was programed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Look how close it went to the airport... it flew right past it because of the fire?

[http://findmh370.tumblr.com/](http://findmh370.tumblr.com/)

<comment><USER39> Yes, if the fire had incapacitated the pilots and the plane was on autopilot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The 777 aircraft reports ACARS (Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System) every thirty minutes and it is typical of pilots flying overseas to squawk transponder code 2000 immediately after signing off from the regional ATC. If a secondary radar was not listening to the 2000 frequency it would have no record of the plane in that region. So, if the plane did go down in the 30 minute block between the ACARS transmission, AND AFTER the sign off, it would easily explain the radio silence, because the plane wasn't silent, it just wasn't transmitting & was not visible to secondary radar.

Obviously, this means the plane had to go down very quickly (because it had so much altitude) and while being a consolidated mass (blown up or shattered planes scatter debris which are easily identified). It's very possible they suffered from an electrical failure from a fire, but it's much more plausible there was some control surface failure. For example in Alaska Airlines 261's case the horizontal stabilizer jack-screw failed unconstraining the entire horizontal stabilizer causing the plane immediately dive 31,000ft and hit the water in under 5 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER41> Doesn't make sense. Langkawi is on the other side of the country. There are airports on the north east side of Malaysia.

</comment><comment><USER42> This nytimes article mentions that a satellite picked up four or five signals from the airliner, about one per hour, after it left the range of military radar. The only information which can be deduced from those signals is the angle of the plane to the satellite. From the last transmission 7.5 hours after take off they were able to draw an arc on the map which corresponds to the deduced angle(see article). If we draw an arc for each of the last five transmission, and if we assume an average speed of the plane wouldn't their pattern suggest a certain direction of flight?

</comment><comment><USER43> this is actually a not that bad theory. The question is: have they already scanned that area?

<comment><USER44> According to the author, the plane may have continued on auto-pilot after the crew had been killed by smoke inhalation. It's a large area to search.

<comment><USER45> This could also explain the climb to 45,000 feet if the plane was on auto pilot and the fire was messing with the instruments.

<comment><USER46> Not likely.

The Pitot static systems (which are redundant) on a 777 are very far aware from the transponders. So this fire that magically spread all the way across that, somehow allowed auto pilot to have enough elevator control, change the engine power, but not realise it was hitting the ceiling, then was able to calmly decent from an above service ceiling height?

Incredibly unlikely set of events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This theory still doesn't explain the lack of any debris. Perhaps some will float to occupied regions at some point - but not everything sinks or burns.

</comment><comment><USER48> The autopilot until fuel exhaustion theory doesn't explain how it ended up on this line:

[http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/73602000/jpg/_73602229...](http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/73602000/jpg/_73602229_possible_plane_area3_624\(3\).jpg)

<comment><USER49> I we 100% sure that the plane turned to west? This line aligns with; where the plane lost, and where the oil platform worker noticed a fire on the sky. May be the plane was on the sky, or on the water why pinging?

<comment><USER48> Huh?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> i agree with the story, however the author did not write the possibility that the plane could be shot down by air force and was covered up within those 5 hrs that they failed to report.

also i heard somewhere the captain used to live around that airport and is familiar with it..thats why he decided to go there.

</comment><comment><USER51> Surely a fire would have caused the plane to crash in 10-15 minutes, it certainly wouldn't have gone on flying for 6+ hours more! The previous cases of on-board fires I read about all have the plane crashing or landing within 20 minutes of the first systems failures.

</comment><comment><USER52> This does corroborate the oil rig worker's account of a seeing a plane burning midair.

<comment><USER53> Didn't he say that he saw it crash and that they didn't find it where he claimed?

<comment><USER52> They haven't found __anything __yet, so not sure what to make of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> How many (remote?) airports in the Maldives are good enough to land a 777? Seems like the perfect remote spot for landing a plane! Torsten @ [http://www.mightytravels.com](http://www.mightytravels.com)

</comment><comment><USER55> I have no specific knowledge of airplane systems, but I wonder if the airplane's computers could have been hacked to produce the disappearance? It would explain why so much effort would go into the planning, with the plane then appearing to be dumped in the indian ocean. The hacker would not have been on the plane, and the indian ocean is deep enough to make recovery and diagnosis of the hack difficult. It might explain how such a precisely timed sequence of events occurred.

I wonder if someone on HN has an understanding of what kind of safeguards go in to preventing a fly-by-wire system from being compromised. Presumably systems like communication, cabin pressure, navigation, etc are separated. Perhaps some of them are not software-based, and thus could not be compromised (but maybe their power could?)

It seems really unlikely, but so do most other theories.

</comment><comment><USER56> But how often do two passengers use stolen passports to board the plane?

<comment><USER57> Not infrequent enough in SEA that you are surprised at <1% of your pax using them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> of course a fire is a great way to get the pilot/copilot to open the door - "smoke in cabin"...

I think the other guys theory about a second triple 7 better than this.

</comment><comment><USER59> Wow that was the most lucid piece I've read about the incident - also good to have found somewhere to point my crazy conspiracy theory family to :)

</comment><comment><USER60> It's hard to believe that there are no communication failovers. A fire in the cabin should not mean a loss of contact with the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER61> Great analysis. Still, it falls under the category of "wild speculation" until the plane is found.

</comment><comment><USER62> Why would the satellite logistics system get shut down but still continue to send hourly pings?

</comment><comment><USER63> Courageous captain dealing with a cabin fire radios "all right, good night" ???

</comment><comment> matt-attack > Yes, pilots have access to oxygen masks but this is a no no with fire.

Anyone know why?

<comment><USER64> I'm guessing because concentrated O2 is extremely flammable and would be fuel for a fire, when the opposite would be needed. Rapid fire-suppressant systems basically work by sucking all of the oxygen from the room/space as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER65> The flight deck O2 masks are specifically designed to provide positive pressure to avoid smoke inhalation in the event of a fire. There's no real reason not to use them - if the fire is close enough that it would matter you're already dead.

<comment><USER64> Makes sense to me. Thanks for clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> If fire was the problem, why didn't the pilot just land by sea?

<comment><USER23> You clearly don't understand how unsurvivable water landings are.

<comment><USER67> This video demonstrates what actually happens when a widebody airliner attempts to land on the ocean:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE2Yn0cipTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE2Yn0cipTY)

767s are bigger than A320s and the ocean is a lot rougher than the Hudson.

<comment><USER68> That video demonstrates what happens when you try to land in the ocean while you are fighting with hijackers which causes a sudden dip to one side, when you happen to be over a coral reef for the engine on that side to hit. Even with that, the crash was quite survivable. A large number of the fatalities were due to drowning, because people inflated life rafts while still inside, which blocked them in so they drowned when the plane sank.

This is probably not a good crash to use as a baseline for predicting what would be typical for an ocean landing attempt.

<comment><USER69> I assume you could probably hit the water at an even lower speed than that without stalling the plane before you got there?

<comment><USER70> The plane ran out of fuel.

The hijackers, who were apparently young, stupid and intoxicated - forced the pilot to try to fly to Australia, even though the pilot said they didn't even have enough fuel to make it 25% of the way.

The plane ran out of fuel off the coast of Africa, and the engines died.

The pilot used a Ram Air Turbine (basically using airspeed to drive a turbine) to provide emergency power so he could land.

However, I assume the hydraulics didn't work at this stage, hence he couldn't use the flaps to slow it down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> this theory follows the keep it simple rule. though simple, it doesn't apply here. I'm sure experts have already looked into the option of simply turning "left".</comment>


Harvard Students Fail the Test Louisiana Used to Suppress Black Vote in 1964 - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/harvard-students-fail-the-literacy-test.html

<comment><USER2> At first this was surprising, but those questions aren't as hard as they are making them out to be.</comment>


Research Confirms a Link Between Intelligence and Life Expectancy - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/research-confirms-a-link-between-intelligence-and-life-expectancy/ <comment><USER2> AKA the "Darwin Award"</comment>


A note for application developers about using Site's logo instead of css sprites - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> A note for application developers: I find it hard to get the logo of any website due to the fact that most websites use css-sprites to show their respective site's logo. If I am having a public site and would like to give information about other sites, I am not able to show the related site's logo because the logo is embedded with other images in a css sprite. Consider, I like to show Twitter's bird logo in my pubic listing but it's infact a css sprite like this [https://g.twimg.com/sites/all/themes/gazebo/img/sprite.png](https://g.twimg.com/sites/all/themes/gazebo/img/sprite.png) In this case, there is no way to show the site's identifiable logo. I would suggest developers to have site's logo as a separate image and don't mess up with other css sprites as this will hinder from showing your identity uniquely.</comment>


India's food tech unicorn Swiggy buys AI start up Kint.io - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/india/1541716/indias-food-tech-unicorn-swiggy-buys-ai-startup-kint-io/ <comment><USER2> This acqui-hire is part of our strategy to scale our tech prowess by bringing in entrepreneurial teams that can solve unique customer problems, while leveraging the network and resources at Swiggy," said Dale Vaz, Head of Engineering and Data Sciences, Swiggy. Kint.io is the first technology-led acqui-hire for Swiggy as it makes investments in its long-term strategy of building AI-first platforms

[https://mcdvoice.zone/](https://mcdvoice.zone/)</comment>


Ask YCombinator: What Happened To My Hacker News Comments? - <AUTHOR>

I'm browsing my comments history and just see my comments from 20 days ago.<p>What happened to my previous comments? <comment><USER2> They're still there but your personal threads page does not display all of them.</comment>


My sixth day with Haiku: Under the hood of resources, icons, and packages - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-sixth-day-with-haiku-under-the-hood-of-resources-icons-and-packages-abec8d0e4ec6 <comment><USER2> I value probono's opinion on these things because he has a similar disdain for package managers as I do and a similar conception of the way things should be. Unfortunately he has so far only confirmed my belief that adding a package manager to Haiku just made things more complicated. Sure, he recommends some behind-the-scenes magic that can make it a little better, but that's never going to be as good as just being simple in the first place.

Also disheartening (though not at all surprising) is the developer response to this: "We optimized for the most usual usecases here. If there is actually a demand for this beyond one user, we can implement". That's my problem with "magic", it only appears to work the way you expect until your usecase falls outside of the expected, then the illusion is destroyed.

The HVIF format sounds like a really good idea. If I ever get around to making my own desktop environment, which is looking more and more likely to be the only way I can escape the dystopia laid out for personal computing's future, I might use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Unfortunately he has so far only confirmed my belief that adding a package > manager to Haiku just made things more complicated.

You keep saying this. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Package managers add a certain kind of complexity to parts of the system that, without it, would indeed be "simpler." But it is an extremely powerful lever that allows _removing_ far, far more complexity than it adds, especially when it comes to porting software. We were very thoughtful about this tradeoff and tried very hard to get it right.

Let me ask you this, then: You have repeatedly made this claim. How much have you actually used Haiku, both before and then after the package manager? Because the entire point of the package manager was to pull the complexity away from the users and to us (the developers and maintainers), where we can manage it and automate it away, which is what we have done. If you as a user are seeing some issue, we would greatly like to know about it so we can solve it.

> Sure, he recommends some behind-the-scenes magic that can make it a little > better, but that's never going to be as good as just being simple in the > first place.

If it were truly about simplicity, don't you think Apple would have done it already? Or some other company -- that is, being simpler means spending less time and money; and any company that could save money and turn more or the same profit without losing customers would do it in a heartbeat.

> That's my problem with "magic", it only appears to work the way you expect > until your usecase falls outside of the expected, then the illusion is > destroyed.

You are using ""magic"" in scare-quotes. Why? You do know this is all code, written by us, and which can be modified by us, or someone else, right? There is not some file called "package_manager.cpp" which was written by someone in a basement 30 years ago that is incomprehensible to human eyes. These are well-thought-out systems that are designed to fit in with the rest of the system in a coherent way.

It is also the case that "we optimized for the most usual usecases" is how _99% of software is written_. So why are you singling out package managers, or at least our package manager, as a problem here?

I also note it sounds like you are going a lot from theory (i.e. "I read the package manager works this way") and not practice ("I used the package manager and found X".) Is that right?

At least probono seems more than happy with Haiku and its model:

[15:52:55] <nepugia_q> if you are serious about wanting to make a better linux desktop linux distro sign me up :P (have been trying to bootstrap a distro for some time now, with much less gnu tools than we have now (and putting / on a tmpfs and so))

[16:02:58] <probono> nepugia_q now that i have found Haiku i think we should invest here

<comment><USER3> I'd just like to say thanks for working on Haiku. I enjoy playing around with it in a VM every now and again and it's a nice change from the daily driver.

I'm a JS developer, but I enjoy learning and using C in my spare time. I'd love to try contributing but it seems like you use C++ so it might be a few more years :D

<comment><AUTHOR> We only use C++ as "C with Classes", not the unholy nightmare that is the STL, so you may fit in more quickly than you expect... :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hive-minds and Kleptocrats - <AUTHOR> http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/hive-minds-and-kleptocrats/

<comment><USER2> Although this was first, comments are here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998827></comment>


How to Fix the News - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/deadnews

<comment><USER2> "Together, these three points seem like the recipe for a genuine news show: intelligent, comprehensive, and entertaining. And yet, I can't think of a single thing that follows them."

Isn't this the concept behind 60 Minutes? Frontline, 20/20, John Stossel, etc. also follow a similar model. These shows are all both high quality and popular.

<comment><USER3> They definitely _were_ , once upon a time. 60 Minutes has lost its edge over time; I'd say they never really recovered from the episode with Brown and Williamson (dramatized in the movie "The Insider"). I don't know when 20/20 disintegrated, but when I see it now, I can barely distinguish it from Dateline NBC, which is little more than a new cartoon for children.

<comment><USER4> Like any show, 60 minutes has its ups and downs, bad stories and good. But on the whole I still watch it and find it very high quality and well produced.

Other news(y) shows I like (some of the time): Q&A (on C-SPAN), Charlie Rose, Sunday Morning, and Meet the Press.

<comment><USER3> I second the Charlie Rose show. It's not outstanding, but I'd say it's the only TV show in America that attempts serious interviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This American Life, while excellent, has very little to do with news. Perhaps you could compare it to a typical human interest story. But its goal is clearly not to provide information on current events.

<comment><USER6> I clearly say I'm talking about their episode "The Giant Pool of Money" which was very clearly a news show, co-produced with NPR News.

<comment><USER5> Ah, missed that. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Too bad that most people want dumb news. It is touching that some people make a valiant effort to create something intelligent, but the fact is, they will always be a struggling minority.

Even Hacker news is no exception: I constantly click on those "The most important thing you need to know" articles, against better knowledge. It is just the way the human brain is wired - therefore we will always read the sex gossip stuff and only occasionally force ourselves to read something more demanding.

<comment><USER8> i learned not to click them.

so either brains aren't wired that way, or we can rewire them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't Jon Stewart already fit the bill? Intelligent, comprehensive, and entertaining. And, more news value (pound for pound) than just about any other news show.

<comment><USER10> For some reason, I don't think basing selection of news stories on whatever is the funniest to crack jokes about is the "goal" we should aim for with reporting. Not trying to knock Jon Stewart, but just because sometimes he is more informative than some news shows doesn't mean we should be looking toward him to set the standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The writer makes the common mistake to equate circulation decline with decline of interest in the news. That clearly isn't the case which even a quick look at Pew Research stats would show. People are getting their news from the internet.

The news and music industries are very similar and despite what you read both are booming. It is the newspaper and recording industries that are buggered.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's a bit more subtle than that. Consider Wall Street Journal. It does not fit the general "decline of the news" theme, and for a good reason -- it's a great product. It is getting harder and harder to sell bad products, convenient delivery is no longer sufficient for success.</comment>


Ask HN: Should developers collectively refuse to take coding challenges? - <AUTHOR> An increasing thing I'm seeing is these coderpad like challenges in interviews. And now I'm beginning to see it in roles that are not exactly purely development focused.
When I was applying to jobs years ago, this has never been a factor. Noone watched my computer screen while I coded some algorithm.
I have a background and projects that speak for themselves. Is this not enough to showoff? <comment><USER2> I think this sort of collective action is unlikely.

Why do they bother you so much? Watching someone code is a pretty good way to see how they think about a problem. Seems pretty straightforward that if you want to hire someone to do a thing, you might want to see how they do the thing first.

Evaluating based on past projects is tough because you don't know if/how much help they've had from collaborators. Could have forked someone elses project and renamed it. A surprisingly high number of people apply to software jobs who literally don't know how to code.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be nice to use your background instead of coding, but there are enough people that can't seem to do it in real time that it feels like testing this way reveals something. Imagine making a writer write a few pages right on the spot, it would be kind of silly. And what if you say you can't use a dictionary, you have to use our typewriter, and you can't look things up on the internet. You must spell correctly.

</comment><comment><USER4> I just don't like coding challenges about algorithm and data structures. I know more about API design, infrastructure and web security.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm refusing them sometimes, or I spend a few hours and if it's not going good, I go do something else.

I'm tired of proving myself.</comment>


Ask HN: Possible fix for the 'lost' submissions? - <AUTHOR>

There is a big problem with submissions (good ones!) falling through the cracks.
There are countless examples of really good stuff that got submitted and that scrolled off the new page without getting votes. These are then stuck in limbo, they can't be re-submitted no matter how good they were.
Most people seem to monitor the new page but do not make the click to the 'more' link a the bottom.
I can see several ways to fix this:

    - put up a little blurb of text on the new page
      that explains this and invites people to
      go to page 2 and beyond to 'rescue' the
      good stuff that is under threat of being
      lost

    - a small code change the increases the
      length of the new page based on the
      age of the oldest item, say the oldest
      item at the bottom of the 'new' page
      should always be at a minimum 5 hours
      old (if it doesn't get enough votes in
      that time then too bad).

    - Randomizing the 'new' page across the last
      200 submitted links so that the 'new' page
      is a sample, rather than a sequence
 <comment><USER2> Two things:

\- Most of the submissions in the home page are pretty good. We cannot discuss every single interesting thing in the world. We are discussing just a small subset of them and as long as we are getting a very high quality home page, the lost submissions are not a problem.

\- You can always resubmit links (if you think they are extremely good) by manipulating the url. Add another query parameter to the url and resubmit it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You can always resubmit links (if you think they are extremely good) by > manipulating the url. Just add another query parameter to the url and > resubmit it.

I think you may have opened a can of worms there.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I don't think we want to resort to hacking the system to keep good submissions in view (notwithstanding the name of this site).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe a karma threshold for letting people resubmit stuff? (that is no longer accessible other than via ?id=x)

I was going to suggest decaying old stuff faster, but looking through the 210 current items available through clicking "More" from the /news page, only 3 are listed as 2 days old (none 3 days).

</comment><comment><USER5> Reddit handles this one pretty well by displaying a random new story in a box at the top of the page. That way lots of new stuff gets some exposure.</comment>


Survival of the fittest: exercise 'can fight ageing' - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8385700.stm

<comment><USER2> Running 80km/week (~50 miles) is pretty intense! I'm happy when I do 12-15 miles. Still, this is good news for my telomeres apparently.</comment>


A government-guaranteed basic income - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/11/government-guaranteed-basic-income

<comment><USER2> A much smarter proposal also comes from Switzerland: [http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidgen%C3%B6ssische_Volksinitia...](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidgen%C3%B6ssische_Volksinitiative_%C2%AB1:12_%E2%80%93_F%C3%BCr_gerechte_L%C3%B6hne%C2%BB) . In Switzerland people will vote this month about a proposal, that companies should not be allowed to pay their highest earning employee more than 12 times the amount they pay their lowest earning employee. This would decrease the income gap, but doesn't force minimum or maximum wages on a company.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Compounding the problem would be upward pressure on housing prices that a > UBI may spur.

Easy housing loans with low deposits make house prices go up. A universal basic income would make rents go up.

<comment><USER4> A more optimistic prediction is that a UBI would encourage the development of more low-income housing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've held as a belief it would raise prices - because more more would become available to basic consumers and would be spent on basic consumption.

Can such a hypothesis be proven false?

<comment><USER6> I would predict that such inflation would be short lived. On a basic income, the majority of money would be spent on mostly basic products, with the occasional, but rare luxury. This would suggest a lot more dollars chasing few goods, but not the type of goods where the marginal cost of production is high. Any initial inflation would therefore be eroded by increased commoditification of basic products.</comment></comment>


Spurious Extrapolations: What if U.S. college tuition costs keep rising? - <AUTHOR> http://www.randalolson.com/2016/03/26/spurious-extrapolations-what-if-u-s-college-tuition-costs-keep-rising/ <comment><USER2> Really interesting and funny post. I like seeing posts like this that don't embellish everything with grandiose phrases and words. This is a straightforward entertaining and interesting read.</comment>


SaaS Happiness Analytics: Why You Should Measure Net Promoter Score - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fanexam.com/why-your-saas-needs-the-net-promoter-score-to-measure-customer-satisfaction/

<comment><AUTHOR> Most SaaS platforms have at least half a dozen of analytics tools to measure every single behavior. But most don't actually engage the client directly using a customer sentiment framework, like Net Promoter Score. This type of feedback is crucial for company growth.</comment>