Salesforce CEO: tech billionaires 'hoard their money' and won't help homeless - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/17/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-san-francisco-homeless-interview <comment><USER2> The current budget is $300 million per year for homeless relief in SF. There's approximately 8000 homless in SF.

300000000 / 8000 => $37,500 per individual per year.

How is the problem getting _so much worse_ with almost $40k per year being spent on _each_ individual homeless person? Where is that money going? How are these programs so inefficient that $40k spent on bulk relief is ineffective?

Why does anyone think that just increasing that number per person is going to solve anything, without a detailed plan about how to spend it?

Given the above, it's entirely rational to oppose Prop C, which doesn't provide details, transparency, or accountability about how the money will be spent.

<comment><USER3> Many of the most severe users of multiple systems are astronomically expensive. Almost $100k/yr per person. It's emergency room visits that aren't paid for, ambulance time, nurses, doctors, surgery, helicopter rides to trauma centers, everything.

It's not effective because it doesn't address any of the root problems. It just patches the person up and sends them out again, until they have another heart attack or psychotic break and end up running up another hospital bill.

[http://www.counties.org/sites/main/files/file- attachments/pd...](http://www.counties.org/sites/main/files/file- attachments/pdf_distribute_hums_overview_2014_rev_110514.pdf)

Blatant plug: The folks at RideAlong are trying to solve these problems and they're hiring. I had a chance to work with them very briefly and they are really engaged and committed to solving these kinds of problems. YC alums too. [https://getridealong.com/about-us/](https://getridealong.com/about-us/)

<comment><USER4> Is that report actually referring to homeless? Looks like just "high users of multiple systems", which could include someone who has accommodation (e.g. family member's house) but is bankrupted by healthcare costs.

<comment><USER3> They're largely homeless, from what I know, and virtually all don't have what I'd consider secure housing, depending on how you define that, but yeah, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I don't doubt billionaires hoard money, I think trying to solve this with taxes is misguided. They should look at the stats showing how many homeless ended up in that situation because of rising rents.

I'd be willing to bet NIMBY antics are a large cause of this problem. SF metro area has the 4th highest rate of homeless people per capita, I have to imagine absurdly high rents is a part of it.

SF politicians don't want to admit this because of the donations/support they receive from NIMBY groups, but they are very clearly the cause of many problems in the bay area, whether its housing or slow transit expansion. It's especially ironic that such a "progressive" area would be so rife with elitism and gate keeping.

<comment><USER6> If someone can't afford rent in SF, they have other options besides living on the streets. For example, they can move somewhere cheaper.

The homeless in San Francisco are mostly people who can't afford to live anywhere because they are incapable of generating or maintaining anything of monetary value. Rents could fifty bucks a month and they'd still be on the streets. The problem, then, is how to take care of those people.

<comment><USER5> There will always be a percentage of homeless that are as you say, usually because of mental illness. To say "most" of them fall into that category is a huge assumption to make without data to back it up.

<comment><USER6> I think most rational and competent people would choose sharing an apartment in Bakersfield over living on the streets in San Francisco.

<comment><USER7> Some people are not competent or rational.

And you cannot get a decent job without a place to live, which also puts pressure on bankruptcies. You cannot share an apartment when you have a family or when you cannot afford even that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wikipedia says there are ~7k homeless people in SF [1]. We are spending $250m/year [2]. That's $35k per person. At $3k/mo we could be housing everyone at market rate in SF studios, or housing them somewhere cheaper plus paying them a basic income to cover food & clothing.

I may be thinking about this wrong, but it seems like doubling our spend might be a bad idea when we're doing so badly with what we're spending already. (Interested in input from folks that actually know how these numbers compare to other cities' spending).

However if we're actually doing well with the money we're spending (e.g. comparison to other cities is favourable) then absolutely let's increase the spend. I'm a little suspicious about the "let's tax the tech companies" mentality though; why not just a progressive individual income tax? (Or a moratorium on tax breaks for companies?) If we treat the tech companies like a piggy bank, then we'll eventually drive them away, and the whole region will be much less well off.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area#San_Francisco) [2]: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million- incre...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-increase-for- San-Francisco-12902707.php)

</comment><comment><USER8> 'Benioff also criticized Stripe, a payment platform and another major San Francisco tech firm opposing Prop C. The company claimed the measure lacked a "comprehensive plan" for spending in a recent op-ed and has also given more than $400,000 to a campaign fighting the measure, making it the largest donor.'

As a company with deep connections to HN, I for one hope that the Stripe staff active here are doing everything they can to challenge this embarrassing activity by their company. A good start would be to publicly express your opinion about this sort of lobbying here on HN.

These companies benefit hugely from government subsidies in various forms, and really the least they could do is abstain from using their tremendous power and resources to manipulate the government into making decisions that favor their bottom lines.

The Stripe founders are entitled to whatever backwards, selfish position they want to take, but they shouldn't be spending $400,000 on behalf of the company (a community of people) to try to buy a given policy outcome.

More broadly, it's sad that even the progressive mayor feels the need to make policy decisions based on fear that massively wealthy tech firms will punish the city if they ask them to pay a slightly fairer share of shared expenses. What we need is a cultural change, away from "anything that drives profit is justifiable" to "successful companies that side with their own profits against the public interest should be ashamed."

<comment><USER9> They are well within reason to lobby against policies they see as more destructive to the business community than the claimed net benefit. If you want an example of why you can't whimsically tax businesses for whatever you want, look at what happened to the yacht building industry in the US. Idiotic taxation destroyed it and cost thousands of jobs and millions in lost tax revenue.

You can simultaneously be for fixing homelessness and be against destructive taxation of an industry.

>they ask them to pay a slightly fairer share

Let me stop you there. Your notion of calling this a "fairer share" is completely subjective and political. Why isn't a 99% tax of all profits fair, why not 0%? The phrase "paying their fair share" is nothing more than a baseless appeal to emotion, unless you're literally suggesting everyone pay the same amount for services they use. However, given that you are advocating raising taxes on entities already paying vastly more than the bottom 1/3rd, I strongly doubt you actually want equal taxation.

<comment><USER8> We're talking about politics, and I'm saying that Stripe should be ashamed of themselves. That's an inherently subjective and political claim. If you want to structure society and government according to empirics, well, good luck with that. An appeal to emotion doesn't have to be baseless.

The broader tax environment in the United States is leading to growing income inequality. There are other countries with successful economies who tax the highest earners much more than we do. In my subjective opinion, fairness requires those who have been lucky enough to become rich to pay more taxes than they do in the U.S. at the moment. If it were up to me, companies who resist paying more taxes while their founders become overnight billionaires should be made to feel ashamed of doing so, hopefully driving up the cost of acting contemptibly toward their surrounding community by making it harder for them to hire. My subjective belief is that the problem of homelessness is worth spending more money on, and that it's really the least these companies can do to sit out of taxation debates.

Having $400,000 to spend manipulating public opinion is having a thumb on the scale. The ideal of democracy is not that whoever has the most power should have the loudest voice.

<comment><USER10> > The ideal of democracy is not that whoever has the most power should have > the loudest voice.

The ideal of democracy is that everyone has an equal vote, no matter how loud their voice. Anything else is basically reminiscent of _Harrison Bergeron_. [0]

(And, in this case, the entity with a voice here does not even have a vote! Though its individual workers and owners and stakeholders do.)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron)

<comment><USER8> The concept of "personhood" for corporations has really done a number in the collective consciousness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I literally spit on my keyboard:

A yes vote is a vote in favor of authorizing the city and county of San Francisco to fund housing and homelessness services by taxing certain businesses at the following rates: 0.175 percent to 0.69 percent on gross receipts for businesses with over $50 million in gross annual receipts, or 1.5 percent of payroll expense for certain businesses with over $1 billion in gross annual receipts and administrative offices in San Francisco

If your business is low margin, high gross collectibles, this will KILL your business.

Transaction and retail companies will get murdered.

<comment><USER12> It's very strange to see a tax written against gross income, not net income. When did this start becoming a thing?

<comment><USER13> Weird indeed. What happens if the company had $100M in revenue, but a $10M loss?

Are they expected to take out a loan to pay the tax?

<comment><USER14> They work with the taxman to figure out a payment plan over time. Tax payments can be deferred under GAAP, and also by the IRS if the entity isn't able to pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This tax is supposed to generate $250-300 million per year. This is a crazy amount of money for a 47 sq mile city with 885k people.

Say you hand out this $300 million to people. Without building any more housing, this would clearly just raise rental prices with almost no change in homelessness.

Say you try to build 1000 new units of housing and pay out $300 million to the jobs created in that process. The people with these new jobs being given this $300m would drive up rental prices and shift a different group of people onto the street who can't afford the higher costs anymore.

Suppose you have rent control to try to avoid that shift. Then where will the people doing these newly created jobs live? There's a housing shortage throughout the entire bay area. They will probably have to commute huge distances.

You can't just build housing for homeless. You need to build more housing for everything else in the chain too.

<comment><USER16> ~25$ per person per month for a city as rich as SF does not seem like a crazy amount of money to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think Benioff's biggest character flaw is that he doesn't do any analysis past the point where it supports his political position. Instead of understanding the root cause of the problem he has his solution in hand and castigates anyone else who disagrees.

Prop C is bad public policy because it does nothing to prevent homelessness, which is what San Franciscans should care most about. The homeless problem has been caused by the government distorting the housing marketplace. Allow people to build housing and get rid of rent control and the problem will solve itself.

I think Benioff should be open to listening to other people instead of being so adversarial.

</comment><comment><USER18> Because I looked it up: the sf chronicle endorses "no" on prop C (so opposite of Benioff).

[https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2018/november-elections- gui...](https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2018/november-elections-guide/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Progressives in the city are quick to demonize Breed for calling out that the proposition doesn't add any kind of accountability to the funds. Yet, I bet if the proposition added a 1% sales tax, or general city tax applied to all residents, suddenly those same progressives would go silent.

It's so easy to sit on your butts and complain that Dorsey and the Collisons aren't doing more to help the homeless, but then to not call out SF's shitty non-profit grant system that makes the current funds hard to trace. Trust me, every single person in this city would be all over a concrete plan to fix the problem. I just don't think taxing the biggest businesses is going to do anything except make it more expensive to run your business in SF.

</comment><comment><USER13> The one thing I don't like is how when someone becomes super rich, suddenly their opinion becomes super important.

Benioff's opinions are no more important than your next door neighbor's.

Even though Benioff May be worth billions, he still only has one vote.

</comment><comment><USER20> Link (PDF) to the City's economic analysis of Proposition C: [https://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Econo...](https://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Economic%20Analysis/hgrt_economic_impact_final.pdf).

</comment><comment><USER21> While my large metro center has homeless, compared to the west coast cities its nothing. It was a humanitarian crisis 10 years ago. Today its a caste system.

</comment><comment><USER22> One of the primary properties of the tech boom (and, lets face it, almost all industrialized capitalism) is that it doesn't account for nor take responsibility for side effects of their overwhelming wealth. Some are even convinced that its a net positive and nothing should be done - despite the fact that the winners are investors and the upper class employees, and the losers are those adjacent who have to move 2 hours away. Maybe shame will get some people to budge, but I think the decision makers such as Jack/etc are so far away from being able to empathize with the people that are harmed that there's no real chance.

Also slightly amusing: Jack doesn't think that this is the "best" way to solve homelessness. Whats the best way, since clearly he knows about it, and why isn't he doing it?

<comment><USER23> > Also slightly amusing: Jack doesn't think that this is the "best" way to > solve homelessness. Whats the best way, since clearly he knows about it, and > why isn't he doing it?

I mean, it's pretty obvious that the best way to address homelessness involves having _homes_ so that the most vulnerable of our friends and neighbors can stop _being homeless_ by being in _homes_. This idea has given rise to an approach called Housing First. Which, by an odd twist of fate, has actually been shown to work!

This being San Francisco, this is utterly impossible. Nothing makes San Francisco politics break out in furious community meetings and protests and CEQA complaints like the prospect of building things. There's nothing Jack can do about that, even with all his money.

As near as I can tell, San Francisco doesn't actually want to solve this problem. Instead, it wants to feel good about how kind and compassionate its policies are without actually accepting change into the city's fabric.

<comment><USER14> > Jack doesn't think that this is the "best" way to solve homelessness. Whats > the best way, since clearly he knows about it, and why isn't he doing it?

This is by far the most irritating thing about reading CEO's "success story" profiles. It's always about going to market with the MVP, because if you wait long enough to make it perfect, the opportunity is lost to a competitor.

But when it comes to tax policy, the plan has to be perfect and not annoy anyone and anything less should be rejected outright.

<comment><USER23> For my part, I think it's worth considering that how perfect a plan has to be to implement should be a function of how readily it can be adjusted to match changing requirements. An MVP SaaS product is pretty tunable.

It's possible that local tax policies, particularly as mandated by and only changeable by plebiscite, might be slightly more difficult to adjust (win an election, get one chance every two years) to changing requirements or to handle undesirable effects.

<comment><USER14> You're right, it's far from a perfect analogy. And the electoral cycle means that the tax might not be in place long enough for it to make a measurable impact. My comment was more about the way in which taxes are discussed in American political discourse; there is this implication of a rigid permanence, as though such policies can never be reversed. They absolutely can; as you pointed out, incumbents can lose to candidates who promise to repeal the tax.

<comment><USER23> I don't know how familiar you are with Prop C (the subject here) and California governance, so please pardon me if I belabor something you already know in an effort to clarify.

I'm not talking about candidates. We're literally talking about tax policy set and enacted via plebiscite. Elected officials don't get to tinker with it. As slow and complex as it is to change policies via representative democracy, it's _far_ worse when you have to hold another plebiscite to fix glaring issues. Which has happened more than once in California political history.

That's what's at hand here. Tax policy enacted via a means that elected politicians don't actually get to work with. The issue you so correctly and wisely point to is messy enough - just imagine how much worse this particular Californian mess is.

For all that you're _completely right_ about the apparently insane way tax policy is treated in American discourse, I think it might be worth considering that it could be encoded wisdom. Political attention spans tends to be short, inertia is real, and any policy creates winners who want to preserve it. Never mind questions of actually being reasonably sure about effects.

With all that in mind, treating tax policy as something you might not get to reform in a reasonable timeframe might not be the silliest of ideas. There's a good chance that it might be closer to the truth than expecting a calm, collected, non-partisan, informed debate aimed at making the policy work as intended once it's been shown to be in need of improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not just tech billionaires.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm really not a fan of the entitlement attitude that we should just take money from the rich to fix our self-inflicted problems.

<comment><USER8> I think the question is whether or not "the rich" are part of "we" or not. Businesses are built using public infrastructure and in some cases (like Twitter) direct, massively valuable government subsidy. In my opinion, "we" are asking "each other" to pay more money to solve public problems in proportion to "our" ability to do so.

<comment><USER26> Everyone uses public infrastructure. That's what makes it "public infrastructure". Should we raise your taxes to 80% "because you use the roads that are built by taxes"?

<comment><USER8> No—but we should probably do what we can to make each person and company's tax burden proportionate to their size and income. And we probably shouldn't frame efforts to do so as "taking money from the rich" as if wealthy people are somehow living in a separate community.

<comment><USER27> Isn't a flat tax rate already "proportionate to size and income"? What's the justification for higher tax rate for the rich? I agree that their wealth depends on public infrastructure, but I'm not sure that their level of dependence is higher than us.

(I'm asking as a proponent of progressive tax rate, just not for this reason. So I'd like to clarify)

<comment><USER8> I may not have expressed my position clearly. Because most costs of living are fixed and not proportionate to income, taking 20% of the income of a poor person will have a disproportionate affect on them, as opposed to someone with a very high income for whom the difference will only marginally affect their standard of living. Take 30% of someone's $20,000 income and you will deeply compromise their ability to exist comfortably in society. Taking 30% of someone's $5,000,000 income will have no effect on their ability to cover their needs and live comfortably.

A flat tax, then, is actually quite regressive, rather than neutral.

Speaking in terms of companies, though, there is also a question of proportion vis a vis size—bigger companies and their employees tend to cost taxpayers quite a bit more than small businesses. There are no giant Twitter-like subsidies for five-man firms, for example. Larger firms are much more likely to make use of legal infrastructure, to need regulation, and to have the power to seek accommodation by the government for infrastructure needed for their given business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Marc Benioff is one of Paul Ryan's big donors.... maybe he should start paying taxes with action instead of talking about it in self serving press interviews

<comment><USER8> Source? I found an article from 2012 saying that he donated a measly $10,000 before Ryan was fully revealed to most as the craven monster we know him as today. Not saying you're wrong, just curious to know exact details.</comment></comment>


Fun with gradient masks and the iOS 7 status bar. - <AUTHOR> https://nrj.io/fun-with-gradient-masks-and-the-ios-7-status-bar

<comment><USER2> I'd love to see this article for web developers as well. The new iOS version is reducing the gap between native and web apps in many ways.</comment>


Google Capture the Flag 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://capturetheflag.withgoogle.com <comment><USER2> "The Contest is open to individuals who are (1) over the age of eighteen (18) at the time of entry; (2) not a resident of Brazil, Quebec, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, or Crimea;"

WTF with Brazil and Quebec being in that list...

<comment><USER3> Also: "Entrants warrant that their codes are their own original work and, as such, they are the sole and exclusive owner and rights holder of the submitted code and that they have the right to submit the code in the Contest and grant all required licenses."

Does that mean exploits can't be cribbed off someone else's (open source) ones or use libraries? Not being able to do that completely changes the game.

It seems like they copied and pasted rules for a programming contest...

<comment><USER4> We added this section for the write-ups. We want to be able to republish write-ups and their code if we want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off topic: do certain domains or certain users get a bump in value in the HN ranking algorithm? This post is currently 34 minutes old, has 4 points, 0 comments, and is currently ranked 12th on the front page. That seems like an unusually high ranking for a post with this level of engagement.

<comment><USER6> I just looked, and every post made more recently than this one (as of now) has exactly 1 point, so its not that crazy to see this on the front page.

<comment><USER5> That is true. It is a Friday in the summer and it is already late afternoon on the west coast. It is possible that HN is unusually quiet at the moment and obviously something still needs to make the front page even during slow downs. I just don't remember seeing numbers that low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you don't follow the links:

"we'll be hosting the online qualification round of our second annual Capture The Flag (CTF) competition. In a 'Capture the Flag' competition we create security challenges and puzzles in which contestants can earn points for solving them. "

<comment><USER3> Also for those familiar with CTF terminology, TL;DR is:

Online; Jeopardy; Finals onsite (4/team) w/ cash prize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really want to "flag" this post. But not really.</comment>


Susan Fowler's Uber Expose Should Win a Pulitzer - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2017/06/14/susan-fowlers-uber-expose-should-win-a-pulitzer/#4a2a8c862230 <comment><USER2> If a journalist with no experience learned to code on the side and built something interesting we would applaud. We wouldn't make them an SRE at Google or Uber. Fowler did something great and it was powerful despite not being her life's focus. There are journalists who are as good as Fowler is at technology. I dont think a Pulitzer is the venue to recognize Susan's work, nor do I think she would win. I do think we should recognize her writing, and believe she has already had a meaningful impact

<comment><USER3> > _built something interesting_

This is really under-selling what Susan Fowler did. She exposed and reformed a massive, multibillion-dollar company with a single essay. How many journalists have done that?

Some, certainly. But not many.

<comment><USER4> She should be recognized for the work she did, but awarding the pulitzer to this is a reach.

I see this as a media-train hop. If this same situation had happened in a multibillion-dollar financial company that didn't have as many subsequent PR issues, would we be praising her as high?

I'm not trying to take any thing away from her. I want Uber to crash and burn and be forgotten. I want her to receive as much as possible in terms of justice. What I DON'T want is for this to be spun into click-bait PR for the pulitzer, and tangentially - Uber. What about the millions of women who get harassed daily but work for less "important" companies? Shouldn't they be considered potential pulitzer winners for their blog posts and facebook statuses?

The only reason anybody cares is because Uber is A Big Name. This will not change her life for the better. Uber will continue doing as it has been doing. The issue will not be solved. But these articles will get clicked on.

<comment><USER5> I don't know if you are aware of who Pulitzer was, or what the award is about, but 'a media-train hop' often describes what wins the pulitzer pretty well.

<comment><USER4> So just keep on keeping on then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An interesting idea. Fowler certainly deserves credit for her work. As the author correctly notes, it was not only a courageous thing to publish, but also an impressive piece of writing.

On an unrelated note, the experience of reading this article for me was absolutely destroyed by the Forbes ad-block-blocker and the ad-first design of their article view. There were a couple of autoplaying video ads and one particularly pernicious scroll-locking ad on the sidebar to the right. Forbes is one of the very worst offenders in web monetization, as they demand you turn off AdBlock and then serve you a garbage reading experience (usually of a poorly written article by an unpaid or low-paid "contributor"). Every time I visit their website, I feel a sudden urge to start espousing Ev William's gospel that Something Must Be Done about content monetization on the internet, before Futurama becomes reality:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGklt4BSQ8)

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here ... I feel your pain, every day.

<comment><USER7> Must be incredibly frustrating for you. Forbes is a prestigious outlet, a place where you _should_ be proud to publish your work... yet they go out of their way to make it a huge hassle to read it.

I wish you had other options. :(

<comment><AUTHOR> That's gracious, thanks. Still, each writing home has its own mix of +/-. The overall Forbes environment offers fast turnaround, editorial freedom and sizable readership. And it pays! Getting 80% of my top five priorities in one stop is about as good as it ever gets.

Still, writing with fewer ads has its appeal, too. I'll mix things up every now and then with some postings for Quora, Technology Review, WSJ, etc., which fill in other circles in life's Venn diagram.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I only associated Pulitzers with journalists, reporters, writers, and other professionals in that vein. It's a fascinating new era where anyone (not just professionals) could be eligible because of the Web and its ability to connect people.

<comment><USER9> So you take a previous Pulitzer prize winning piece and the one variable you change is the author isn't a official journalist™ and now it's not Pulitzer worthy?

I would like to be believe the Pulitzer Prize should recognize exceptional work and the fact that exceptional work can come from anywhere shouldn't really be a problem.

<comment><USER10> To me, good journalism tries to discover new facts and synthesize the existing information available, which doesn't exactly seem like what Susan Fowler did when she wrote about her personal experience.

So, if the goals of the Pulitzer prize were to reward good journalism, I do not think this would be a good choice.

However, if the goals of the Pulitzer is to reward good writing that has an impact, regardless of whether it is journalism™ or not, then this seems like a good fit.

I feel like the Pulitzer prize leans towards the former though, if you look at the National Reporting Pulitzer this year, it went to WaPo for some Trump reporting, which AFAICT has had no impact whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Forbes article references the article with this useless link: [http://www.linkedin.com/today/](http://www.linkedin.com/today/)

Here is the correct link: [https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on- on...](https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very- strange-year-at-uber)

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here ... Thanks for the catch. I just repaired the article link so that it works, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think it will be decided by the committee whether she gets the Pulitzer or not. Certainly there's a lot of paper out there around uber that contributes to the impact. But her commentary also has larger implications and in some sense reflects for better or worse society at large. We see it in the Senate confirmations and in the Congressional inquiries where members of Congress and the Senate are accused of being hysterical or otherwise out of order. We have a president who bragged about sexual assault. So it doesn't matter if she's a journalist or not.. she brought a spotlight to bear on an issue we largely ignore which is about the treatment of women.

</comment><comment><USER13> Jack Schafer's piece on the superficiality of the Pulitzers comes to mind[1]. Awarding one to Fowler might be a decent corrective.

[1]: [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2009/04/so_you_won_a_pulitzer.html)

<comment> shawn-butler Yes awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama certainly did wonders.

It would be better to simply not award one if there is no actually worthy work rather than pander to cultural whims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Susan Fowlers piece was powerful, and definitely deserving of some kind of award/commendation, but I'm not sure if a Pulitzer is the right kind of award. My understanding is the Pulitzer is for investigative journalism, which I wouldn't call her article purely because the intent was not to embed yourself into Uber for a year and research/experience all the messed up things that went on with the intent to publish an expose.

Also, and maybe I have the wrong impression from TV/Movies, but I was under the impression that the Pulitzer usually gets awarded to investigative journalists who expose corruption/scandals on a larger scale than this.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great example of a Personal Essay struggling with Truth and Context in ways that resonate with others. It's quite easy to dismiss a Person / Former Employee Complaints with "Oh that's just your experience, it's not a _real_ problem" but it's not Honest[1]. There's merit in sharing personal truths by way of anecdote. Change can follow.

[1] Hysterical delivery, too much emotion, swearing, or just bad writing can ruin a piece's impact before it gets to its message, but when done with great craft, it's a sight to behold.

</comment><comment><USER16> Disclaimer: I am not a writer and don't know anything about the Pulitzer, or even the criteria/categories, so my comment is genuinely curious here:

I'm not trying to downplay the importance and impact of Fowler's work, however, it seems a bit weird to me to award a Pulitzer using any of its existing categories. (Whether or not a new category should be created for her or whether an existing category's criteria be changed to allow for her work is a separate matter entirely).

The reason being is that I feel (with my admittedly complete amateurish opinion here) is that journalism as a craft should deal with the nature of third-party and objective investigating and reporting. There is a huge objective nature to journalism. Oftentimes, the expose or journalistic work undertaken by the journalist is about a third-party occurrence or individual(s), not about the journalist themselves.

Journalism is a noble profession. Example: War journalists. Soldiers risk their lives for their country; journalists risk their lives for something even less than that: a story. The story is almost never about the hardships the journalist undertook to report on such a story, only how those hardships affected others. Not the journalist themselves. They are removed and external to the story. Out of the picture frame, so to speak. The journalist recognizes that they are simply an external observer, with the key difference between themselves and who they report on is that they have luckily been blessed with the platform, the podium, from which their voice can be heard. They have the means to speak to the masses, and they must speak, but not for themselves. For others. Those that are unheard. It's not "I was rained on for three days straight camping out in the mountainside" it's "THEY were rained on for three days camping out in the mountainside".

My point behind all this is that at the heart of it, while Fowler's work was certainly impactful and shed light on a lot of issues at Uber/tech, it was not really journalism. There was no research and no investigation done into the treatment of women at Uber, other than a brief mention of her chatting with other women at the company who experienced a similar situation with the same manager she had. Other than that, it was mostly what happened to her. Arguably, I would feel like this should disqualify her even for the Public Service Pulitzer (which is usually awarded to newspapers, not individuals anyways), as the philosophy of Fowler's blog did not seem be in line with what I would consider to be journalism: the service of lending a voice to the voiceless. She wasn't speaking for others so much as she was speaking for herself.

Does that matter? After all, can't you say that a lot of external good came out of her personal blog on her personal experiences? I think it matters. I think journalism should remain objective and external to the reporter. There's too much of a conflict of interest and incentive to embellish details otherwise, when speaking and reporting for yourself and your benefit.

Tangential to this point is the fact that this story "fell into her lap" by virtue of it happening to her. She didn't seek out this story, something that was hidden in view. She merely recounted her experience. I'd give more credence to her blog as journalism if she made a marked effort to make the story more than just about her, even though the harassment happened to her as well.

I'm not trying to discount her story for a Pulitzer by virtue of Fowler not being a journalist, I am arguing on a philosophical level, a recount of something that happened to you is not journalism.

<comment><USER17> well put

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If Silicon Valley technologists were on the case, we'd still be waiting on "tangible" data indicating there was a problem to begin with.

<comment><USER19> Too bad Fowler herself is a "Silicon Valley technologist."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> With all due respect to Susan Fowler and her courage, I think this would be an insult to investigative journalism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Article author here ....

Thanks for reading. Not sure if you had a chance to read the actual article that ran between the headline and the comments section, but just in case ... In paragraph 10 of the story, I observe:

"It would be hard for a single blog post, no matter how detailed, to compete in the Pulitzers' investigative reporting category, where winners tend to be multi-part series that involve resource-intensive data collection. But the Pulitzers' public-service category is more fluid."

More broadly, the grand old prizes (Nobel, Pulitzer, etc.) are wrestling with ways to update their century-old formats to match the world we live in. Any effort to stretch old boundaries will be at least slightly controversial. Even so, it's a more interesting world if the Nobel Prize for literature stretches to include Bob Dylan than if it doesn't. In the same way, starting to think about how/where to recognize the very best of the blogosphere in the Pulitzers is a conversation worth having.

<comment><USER21> > Thanks for reading. Not sure if you had a chance to read the actual article > that ran between the headline and the comments section...

Grade A snark like that is how we know this is a Pulitzer-winning journalist.

<comment> shawn-butler Snark deserves nothing but derision.

I can't think of a single redeeming value of snark to be honest. It's facetious, dishonest and toxic. It's not even good comedy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


George Clooney and how the Media is Broken - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mygovhub.org/post/19415537048/george-clooney-and-how-the-media-is-broken

<comment><USER2> I've noticed the BBC has been headed down that sloppy slope for about the last five years.</comment>


Skateboard Lets You Ride Down Stairs With Ease - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670161/watch-this-skateboard-lets-you-ride-down-stairs-with-unbelievable-ease#1

<comment><USER2> As a FC commenter pointed out, the clearance is so low there's not many stairways that the current iteration could tackle.

Also: that video. Come on.</comment>


Turbofan Engine Model (.NET) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/artfulhacker/Turbofan-Engine-Model <comment><USER2> This is great, I remember when I was in grad school, I was chatting with my professor and he mentioned how all the turbofan data that was (at the time) available was rather out dated. The models we used made some egregious assumptions. A lot of our effort was wasted validating data that ultimately proved to be largely inaccurate.

I hope this will encourage researchers to collect accurate data and make it available publicly. Kudos to this team!</comment>


Wordpress's blog support PubSubHubbub - <AUTHOR> http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/rub-a-dub-dub-in-the-pubsubhubbub/

<comment><USER2> This is great news. Further adoption of web sockets and PuSH (a little less ridiculous than PubSubHubBub) is good for developers and users alike. More interesting web experiences for users, and more business and hobby opportunities for developers and entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yay!</comment>


Bug 1202858 – Restarting squid results in deleting all files in hard-drive - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1202858 <comment><USER2> I love how deadpan the bug report is:

        Actual results:
        All files are deleted on the machine.

        Expected results:
        Squid is restarted.

Not many details yet but it sounds similar to the Steam bug [0] from last year.

[0] [https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for- linux/issues/3671](https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for- linux/issues/3671)

<comment><USER3> I would bet on the issue being in the init script itself rather than squid. (I'm assuming squid doesn't run as root by default in rhel) If that's true then it's another point for more sane process managers (upstart/supervisord/systemd/...)

<comment><USER2> Agreed, I should've elaborated. All it takes is something like this in the init script without checking if the variable is empty:

        rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"*

<comment><USER4> And this is why it is important to write something like

        set -eu

on top of your bash scripts -- execution will stop on errors (non-zero retvals) and on undefined variables.

<comment><USER5> or check the variable before using it, like any other programming language:

[[ "$VAR" ]] && rm -rf "$VAR/*"

I think most of these issues stem from the fact that most developers that write shell scripts don't actually understand what they're doing, treating the script as a necessary annoyance rather than a component of the software.

<comment><USER6> If anyone understands shell scripts, it would be people writing init scripts at Red Hat :)

Anyways, that is _not_ anything like other programming languages. Checking in that way is error prone and not really an improvement (nor equivalent to set -o).

      [[ "$DAEMON_PATH" ]] && rm -rf "$DEAMON_PATH/*"

See what I did there? It's an rm -rf /* bug because "checking variables" is _not_ the answer.

In other programming languages, if an identifier is mis-typed things will blow up. E.g., in ruby if I write:

      daemon_path=1; if daemon_path; puts deamon_path; end

I get "NameError: undefined local variable or method `deamon_path`"

These issues do not always stem from bad developers. Bash's defaults are _not_ safe in many ways and saying "people should just check the variable" isn't helpful here.

<comment><USER7> Shameless plug for my language "bish" (compiles to bash) which aims to solve many of these annoyances with shell scripting: [https://github.com/tdenniston/bish](https://github.com/tdenniston/bish)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My good old trick to mitigate that is:

        touch /-@

I also always do it in my home directory:

        touch ~/-@

That's the first thing I do on a new host.

When accidentally running rm -f *, the command expands to -@ first, which is not a valid option and makes the command fail before doing any harm

        rm: illegal option -- @
        usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...

<comment><USER9> As someone who uses the commandline a lot but isn't exactly a wizard, why does this work?

<comment><USER10> The * is expanded by the shell to a space-delimited list of filenames, but the shell does not adequately escape filenames that can be misinterpreted as arguments to 'rm'.

<comment><USER11> That's kind of scary — in that case I guess I should avoid creating a file named -rf.

<comment><USER12> That is really interesting.

Can someone knowledgeable about the shell expand on this? I don't dare test it on my machine.

<comment><USER13> Shell session to demonstrate (DO NOT DO IT IN THE DIRECTORY WITH IMPORTANT FILES):

      $ touch important
      $ chmod 400 important
      $ rm *
      override r</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>--  vbezhenar/staff for important? n
      $ touch -- -rf
      $ ls -l
      total 0
      -rw-r--r--  1 vbezhenar  staff  0 Mar 24 14:35 -rf
      -r</comment><comment>--  1 vbezhenar  staff  0 Mar 24 14:35 important
      $ rm *
      $ ls -l
      total 0
      -rw-r--r--  1 vbezhenar  staff  0 Mar 24 14:35 -rf
      $ rm -- -rf

</comment><comment><USER14> We had one of these kinda bugs.

If you uninstalled our software it deleted a major chunk of your Windows registry, crippling your computer. It was a one character error in our script. The first ticket read "Uninstalling [Product] destroys your computer".

I was responsible for customer support. Good times! Was a rough week. We managed to not get sued.

<comment><USER15> Pretty terrible that such a thing is even allowed by Windows. This is why as a user I like Apple's OS X sandbox.

<comment><USER16> Similar things have happened on OS X: [http://apple.slashdot.org/story/01/11/04/0412209/itunes-20-i...](http://apple.slashdot.org/story/01/11/04/0412209/itunes-20-installer- deletes-hard-drives)

<comment><USER17> Parent said "This is why as a user I like Apple's OS X sandbox.".

This is a bug from 15 years ago, much much before the sandbox feature was introduced.

A sandboxed iTunes would have prevented that.

<comment><USER18> A sandboxed iTunes would also prevent syncing your iPod and importing existing music collections, because those both require access to files outside the sandbox, which is probably why Apple hasn't done that.

<comment><USER19> Programs can read files outside their sandbox if they're asked to by user input[1]. Sandboxing does not prevent interaction with USB devices

[1] See "Powerbox and File System Access Outside of Your Container" at [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Securi...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Security/Conceptual/AppSandboxDesignGuide/AppSandboxInDepth/AppSandboxInDepth.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thanks OP, this actually made me laugh uproariously. Anyway, I'd be willing to bet 100 push-ups that (unless it was malicious and not a bug), this thing is caused by some clean up code somewhere that originally intended to do "rm -rf /path/to/squid/socket" but the function that was suppose to generate the "/path/to/squid/socket" string instead generated a null which was then parseString'd onto a "" via some + function that was trying to do "/" \+ null.

But I'm neither a redhat user nor an OS dev, so I might completely wrong.

<comment><USER21> That's almost exactly how I blew up a test server once. (rsync --delete in place of rm) Taught me to be extremely careful when dealing with absolute directory paths.

<comment><USER22> Oh man... Rsync deserves extreme caution even compared with other bash commands. It's so easy to erase everything and copy terabytes again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hmm, there are two possible candidates in the init.d script for the RHEL 6 package of an older version of squid (doesn't look like bug submitter is using a current version).

In stop():

        rm -rf $SQUID_PIDFILE_DIR/*

and in restart():

        rm -rf $SQUID_PIDFILE_DIR/*

SQUID_PIDFILE_DIR is hardcoded to "/var/run/squid" at the top of my copy of the init script. But, neither of those rm commands check first to make sure that SQUID_PIDFILE_DIR isn't empty (or, better yet, is in /var and doesn't contain ".."), and either the submitter's copy of the script is mangled or something else somewhere is stomping on SQUID_PIDFILE_DIR in the shell environment.

...I should grep my init scripts for "rm".

<comment><USER24> squid-3.1.10-29.el6.src.rpm (from ftp.redhat.com, buried where they keep SRPMs) has squid.init within, and that file has no mention of SQUID_PIDFILE_DIR. A few other spot-checked versions are the same way.

[https://github.com/mozilla-services/squid- rpm/blob/master/SO...](https://github.com/mozilla-services/squid- rpm/blob/master/SOURCES/squid.init) ... however ... whatever that is, does.

Did they take this upstream init script somehow?

<comment><USER25> This looks like it:

[https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1102343](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1102343)

I guess they applied that change which was obviously written against a very different init script where the variable is actually defined, got QA to test it and immediately backed it out.

<comment><USER23> Oh, good call. Yeah, you found it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26>
        "Thanks Swapna and Red Hat QE for catching this issue before the package was released. Great work!"

Looks like this wasn't released into production.

<comment><USER27> This comment should be at the top. False alarm, squid users, and now back to our regularly scheduled HTTP proxying.

For more details on why this issue doesn't affect squid users: [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/restarting-squid- resul...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/restarting-squid-results-in- deleting-all-files-in-hard-drive/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It looks like the start-up/shutdown script is doing an rm -rf on a bash variable that's evaluating to null.

<comment><USER29> It's hard to trust anyone that would ever depend on such a variable without having some sort of precondition.

<comment><USER6> "it's hard to trust anyone that writes a dumb bug".

Listen to yourself. We've all written dumb bugs. We've all had that one line of code that was an obvious mistake. I still trust people who write a bug here and there because if I didn't I would have to forgo trusting everyone for everyone makes dumb mistakes sometimes.

<comment><USER30> At this point I refuse to trust anyone who writes shell scripts. Bugs happen, but a shell script is practically guaranteed to have zero automated tests and variable-related bugs are all too common.

<comment><USER31> Surely your distrust should be aimed at shell scripts not at everyone who has written one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 10 bucks says the lesson learned will be "remember kids, always set -u (and other good ideas, like set -e, set -o pipefail, and personally I like set -o posix but you'll need to give up process substitution for that)."

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm having trouble finding the related commit that fixed this, can anyone else find it?

<comment><USER34> This bug is an internal QA bug. The reporter is a Red Hat tester. The buggy RPM was never released outside Red Hat, and so there's no requirement to release the source. When RHEL 6.7 comes out the source will go up on ftp.redhat.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Maybe I would add a new record to this [https://github.com/icy/bash-coding- style#good-lessons](https://github.com/icy/bash-coding-style#good-lessons)

<comment><USER36> ..aaand this bug happened in 2014 as well?

<comment><USER35> no, it's my mistake. I have fixed that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Scary. Even more scary is the fact that the bug has been open for a week, one person has confirmed 100% reproducibility, and no one seems to care at Red Hat. Isn't deleting peoples hard drives a big no no ?

<comment><USER38> Ahh Redhat, the distro which chose to symlink a bunch of binary lib files from Apache into the etc directory.

"Why is grepping /etc taking so long? Binary files in /etc?!? WTF?!?"

Coming from Debian, Redhat seems to make a lot of irk-worthy choices.

<comment><USER30> As opposed to Debian, the distro which chooses to break tomcat (a program which unzips into a single folder and is thereby completely self-contained) up into a million different pieces and scatter them randomly all over your hard drive?

<comment><USER39> To be fair to Debian, that's how it's supposed to work. You untar into /opt, self contained, while your apt install puts things in the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, which means config goes into /etc.

You'll find most distros follow some FHS standard, although there's some differences in interpretation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Samsung Ditches Middleman, Brings Blockbuster, Amazon Content to TVs - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/samsung-ditches-middleman-brings-blockbuster-amazon-content-tvs

<comment><USER2> Say a TV should last 10 years, does anyone think this service will still be supported in 10 years?

Integrating functional units saves space and cost, when one has a vastly different lifespan than the other can ultimately be wasteful. Consider how many iMacs are retired to basements and closets with perfectly fine displays, just obsolete or broken computers.

At least in this case, you can just quit using the Samsung service when it is abandoned or standards overtake it and plug a box in. So you can think of it as your first internet delivery box is integrated, the rest will be standalone.</comment>


Kindle Kids Edition - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B07NMY72SC <comment><USER2> My kids have had the Kindle Fire tablets for a few years. The hardware is pretty underpowered but they were super cheap. However the Amazon software on top of it is fucking TERRIBLE. To allow your kid to access a web site, you have to log into the tablet with your own PIN, twice for no reason, then wait for the horribly laggy app to load, then add the site, then go back to the kids' login.

My hopes for this Kindle reader wouldn't be high.

<comment><USER3> I second this. It's an awful experience. Especially they're "all you can eat" kids buffet, FreeTime Unlimited. Constantly having to manage disk space. Searching and getting no/missing results for terms as basic as "dinosaurs". I bought three, for the price of one iPad, and after a few months just bought iPads because it was so ridiculous for the kids and for me to have to manage.

<comment><USER4> Plus one, we just got rid of our Fire tablet and FreeTime Unlimited. They constantly shift the content around, which means that we have to constantly go in and block out the garbage. Just let me whitelist stuff, and automatically blacklist anything new?

The tablet itself was grossly underpowered and not up to the task of just navigating around. While it did hold up to a kid, physically, it was not a great experience for anyone involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Walled gardens like the Apple iPad and Kindle provide strong management controls for content and time management. And these seem necessary to help parents manage how their children consume.

The risk for competitive ecosystems without these central controls, of course, is that people have a tendency to stick with the tools they know. And I am certain that these companies consider the stickiness of their ecosystem as kids transition into adulthood.

<comment><USER6> I'm admittedly in the Amazon/Kindle ecosystem, but the fact that they allow you to upload your own documents and eBooks to your Kindle circumvents any feeling of being locked in, personally. You aren't required to obtain your eBooks from Amazon, and Calibre[1] almost totally automates the transfer process.

[1] [https://calibre-ebook.com/](https://calibre-ebook.com/)

<comment><USER5> I am all in on the kindle ecosystem as well but everything that isn't in the buy path is really a second class citizen.

Personal docs don't sync page progress

Library checkout process has a sign out button right next to the borrow button

It is all subtle nudges that feel designed to keep you in ecosystem.

<comment><USER7> > Personal docs don't sync page progress

Hmm, I never considered that because I mostly just send-to-kindle-by-email and then read those docs from only one kindle device. How many devices do you read on?

<comment><USER5> phone, tablet, and kindle

<comment><USER8> and PC sometimes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My elementary aged child has a Kindle locked in FreeTime mode. He checks out Kindle books from our local library from my phone once a week. There's no clunky E-reader based browsing for books, a near infinite supply of well curated books by librarians, no subscription, and it involves all steps he can do by himself. I highly recommend this setup for anyone thinking of a device like this!

</comment><comment><USER6> Happy to see that ads are disabled on this device, and there's no option for an advertisement-subsidized version like the normal Kindle.

<comment><USER10> Don't know about the regular Kindle, but on even ad support Fire tablets, the ads are disabled while a kids profile is active, though that wasn't always the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like a rather well designed offering, pricing seems to be fine as well.

But imagine the horror if your kids most sacred book gets removed from the offering by amazon and there is nothing you can do to fix this (besides buying the paper version, maybe). But would your kid know how to use it?

<comment><USER12> Amazon took the 1984 incident very seriously, so I think it's exceptionally unlikely to recur.

<comment><USER13> What do you mean by "they took [it] very seriously"?

I have absolutely zero trust in Amazon to be fair or reasonable, so I pirate the ebook then buy the paperback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do kids really prefer those garish covers? When I was a kid I wanted my toys to look like adult toys.</comment>


Twitter Search is Now 3x Faster - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.twitter.com/2011/04/twitter-search-is-now-3x-faster_1656.html

<comment><USER2> I personally didn't find them slow before. What I /did/ find is that they were useless: you can only search a reasonably recent time period, and all search results (even things like @mentions to your own account) get hard-limited after 800 results. I'd much rather they didn't get faster but simply became more useful. As it is, finding "important" tweets based on search terms works better using Google than using Twitter.

I mean: if you have a lot of people talking to you (maybe you just released a new version of a product that has over ten million users) it can actually become impossible to see what people are saying because it falls over the 800 window. I seriously got frustrated one day and wrote a program to log tweets sent to me so I wouldn't lose them. :(</comment>


Writing Linux Programs in Raw Binary - <AUTHOR> http://www.g-brain.net/tutorials/writing-linux-programs-in-raw-binary.txt

<comment><USER2> Back in the day (on the Sharp MZ-80K) the 40x25 screen was directly memory- mapped with each character on the screen being one byte. So it was possible to write programs by typing them in to the display as characters from the keyboard and then executing them was as simple as calling the start of screen memory.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess, if assembly mnemonics are too readable for you you can write the machine code in binary. I guess the most interesting part of this is the stuff required to let the loader know what to do with your binary blob (i.e. what the linker would normally do), the rest is just looking up opcodes. Sadly the latter is what the author focuses on.</comment>


Why We're Not Hyping Our Launch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/8020425a9c2

<comment><USER2> ok, i see. you're not hyping your launch, which is gonna happen in the next few weeks. instead, you're hyping the "fact" that you're not hyping your launch (which, nonetheless, is happening in a couple weeks).

great. that's brave. thanks for keeping us up-to-date.

-bowerbird</comment>


Palindrome Day 20200202 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sumymus.de/palindrome-day-20200202 <comment><USER2> The nice thing about today's date, 2020-02-02, is that it is palindrome in three date formats: YYYYMMDD, DDMMYYYY, and MMDDYYYY.

This should probably be called "Universal Palindrome Day" because it is a palindrome irrespective of the endianness (big, little, or middle) that is used in various countries.

Here is the list of all such dates until the year 9999:

      0101-10-10
      1010-01-01
      1111-11-11
      2020-02-02
      2121-12-12
      3030-03-03
      4040-04-04
      5050-05-05
      6060-06-06
      7070-07-07
      8080-08-08
      9090-09-09

The next such one is over 101 years away from now.

Here is my own blog post on this topic: [https://susam.in/blog/universal- palindrome-day/](https://susam.in/blog/universal-palindrome-day/) :-)

<comment><USER3> I love the term "middle endianness" and how clearly it highlights how nuts the American date notation is.

EDIT: fwiw, in my native language, most numbers from 100 and 1000 are pronounced middle endian, so I'm not complaining.

<comment><USER4> The American date notation is simply a direct reflection of the spoken language. We say "February second, 2020" and we write "2/2/2020". (Contra the root comment, I can't agree that 2/2/2020 is a palindrome.) I don't see this as being crazy or even unusual.

When order matters, you invariably want big-endian notation, which is why that notation is acceptable everywhere regardless of the usual native notation. But by the same token, it means that all other styles are equally "nuts". European day-month-year notation doesn't have any technical advantages over month-day- year.

<comment><USER5> That middle-endianness is spoken doesn't make it better. It's still crazy.

Starting with the most general and ending with the most specific is a logical order. Doing it the other way round is also logical. But starting with the middle makes no sense.

It doesn't seem unusual to you because you use it often.

That said I'm German and I realize that German postal addresses are crazy for the same reason. I wish we'd adopt the Chinese format: country first then province (state), then County then town then neighborhood then street and house.

German addresses are middle endian: street then house number then zip code then city then country. The right order seems to be: city, zip, street, house number. Most general to most specific.

<comment><USER6> What's so crazy about the German notation? Seems to make perfect sense, as it goes line-by-line from the smallest to the largest sorting unit:

1\. Exact street location (street + house)

2\. District (postal code)

3\. City

4\. Country

Also I prefer this order over the Chinese, because I assume most people handling mail will need to smallest details and it would just be very annoying if local mailmen had to skip over country and city names every time before reaching the bit they actually need.

<comment><USER5> The house number is smaller than the street, but the street comes first. If we put the house number first, then we'd get a logical order.

<comment><USER7> You're thinking of street and house number as two things. Germans don't. Or at least I don't. Your approach makes as much sense as picking movie titles with numbers at the end apart into two things.

<comment><USER8> Street and house number are certainly two different things. It's more like series of movies (Die Hard 1, Die Hard 2, etc. are different movies but part of the same series. In the same way, a street could be seen as a series of houses or addresses. So the smallest unit is the house, then the street.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's like a movie series. It's Die Hard 2. That's one name, not two, "2" and "Die Hard", but one: "Die Hard 2".

<comment><USER8> I didn't say it was two names, I said there are two different movies within the Die Hard series. Just like two different houses on the same street.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but each movie is a single entity and the number is part of that entity. Just like with "street+house number". It's one entity, not two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope this is pointed out to kids in classrooms all over the world. Growing up I remember my teachers would point out these cute number tricks/events which contributed to piquing my interest in math and numbers, and eventually engineering.

<comment><USER10> > I hope this is pointed out to kids in classrooms all over the world.

For at least some of them it's the summer holidays and they are heat addled and doing something completely mindless with no idea of the day or date. I'm rather jealous.

<comment><USER11> Also, it's Sunday.

<comment><USER12> Superbowl* Sunday

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also: it's day 33 (palindrome) of the year and we have 333 (palindrome) days left.

</comment><comment><USER14> 02/02/2020 is the most palindromic date ever.

[https://youtu.be/4fE_sXZjxng](https://youtu.be/4fE_sXZjxng)

Not only that, but it's a strobogrammatic number when viewed on a 7-segment display.

<comment><USER15> What is "most palindromic"? Wouldn't 11/11/1111 be the "most"?

<comment><USER16> The video notes that it is also the 33rd day of the year and 333 days remain. Thus another palindromical event.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's finally the year of the DECSYSTEM-2020! It was so far ahead of its time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20)

</comment><comment><USER18> And it's my birthday. I always joked that my birthday was US-proof (I'm not American), but this year it's extra-special.

<comment><USER19> A happy birthday to you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Today is my son's due date! I've been hoping for months that he'll be here on time for this palindromic birthday, but nothing yet...

<comment><USER18> Eh man, can't do much about these things. I was born on 02/02, married on 05/05, first child on 07/07, but the second child "broke the chain" with a 21/11...

<comment><USER21> happy birthday!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's also coming up: 02/02/2020 02:02:20.20

<comment><USER23> For us located in EU it's at 20:20:02:02 in the evening :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Depending on how you write your dates, 20211202 is the next one.

<comment><USER25> And, if you write your dates that way, what will the one after that be? 30100103?

<comment><USER26> In a thousand years, we might be on yet another calendar system.

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

<comment><USER27> I think we already are using another calendar system! Most used dates in existence are probably using Unix time, at least I know I only check the calendar a few times a day but I have systems running checking it multiple times per second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For once, I found out about this early in the morning instead of the day after.

</comment><comment><USER29> For those in the US, also groundhog day and superbowl sunday (american football championship).

<comment><USER30> > superbowl sunday (american football championship).

And for many it's "watch a bunch of ads with budgets in the $5-10+ million range" day.

<comment><USER31> [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-football-is- ev...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-football-is-even-in-a- football-broadcast/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's also my 21st birthday! So close.

<comment><USER18> Happy birthday! Same for me, although my years are almost exactly twice yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I remember where I was at 8.02 pm (2002) on 02/02/2002 - on the phone to my mum, who was in a different timezone so couldn't enjoy that palindromic minute.

Sadly I slept through 0202 this morning...

</comment><comment><USER34> FTA:

> Because of the Gregorian Calendar Reform of 1582, the numbers of days after > 1001-01-01 are fictitious, strictly spoken. They are valid only then, if we > adopt the reform for dates before 1582, subsequently.

The explanation is muddled. This concept has a name, the definition at WP is succinct and clear: [http://enwp.org/Proleptic_calendar](http://enwp.org/Proleptic_calendar)

</comment><comment><USER35> for those who slept in, 05.05.2020 is coming soon... the mirrored day...

</comment><comment><USER36> This post would not be complete without The Ballad of Palindrome by Riders In The Sky:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzvQEstC03o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzvQEstC03o)

A Spaghetti Western style story, starring your hero, Palindrome.

<comment><USER37> How would this be a Spaghetti Western rather than just an American Western?

<comment><USER18> In some quarters, "spaghetti" has just become a derogative term meaning "low quality". Sadly, the concept that "spaghetti western" was actually a genre with certain characteristics but containing a number of masterpieces, was lost under the wave of poor clones of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Project Euler palindrome problem.

[https://projecteuler.net/problem=4](https://projecteuler.net/problem=4)

</comment><comment><USER39> There will be lots of palindromes coming up:20211202,22200222,21211212,22011022,22211222...

</comment><comment><USER40> There is also the 20th of February.

20200220 yy/mm/dd

02202020 mm/dd/yy

20022020 dd/mm/yy

</comment><comment><USER41> 02-02-2020 also work (02022020)

</comment><comment><USER42> Happy birthday to me!

</comment><comment><USER43> The Human Palindrome will be born tomorrow and die on 2121-12-12 at the age of 101. And in true palindromic fashion, his life will start and end with diapers.

<comment><USER44> Any responsible parent will call him Bob or Anna, of course. Taking surnames into account is going to be a bit harder.

Here's a good resource for anyone becoming a parent today: [https://parentinghealthybabies.com/palindrome- names/](https://parentinghealthybabies.com/palindrome-names/)

<comment><USER45> Oof, that list is terrible. Natan is listed twice, and there's at least one name that isn't a palindrome. The only two names that really work from that list is Anna and Hannah. Nobody should name their kid Bob in 2020, it's not a «young» name yet. Thr older Bobs need to die off before it's an acceptable kid's name.

As for the rest of those names, I refuse to acknowledge them as names. They're more like onomatopoeia.

<comment><USER46> Ada, Ava, Eve and Viv are all names I've seen in the wild and would consider reasonable names too. There's also nothing wrong with Bob, despite what you seem to think. So together with Anna and Hannah, that's 7 names.

<comment><USER44> All of you are just talking about American name fashions. The point of 20200202 is that it's a palindrome in every single country and culture that uses AD and the Gregorian calendar. Many of these names may be very suitable in other cultures.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Big O of N(US/Canada), Jobs from the perspective of software engineers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bigoofn.com/search <comment><AUTHOR> We are reading software engineering positions from Career pages of all companies, early stage startups to established companies. The data might have some small hiccups but we are continuously cleaning it. Suggestions/critiques/advice are very welcome!</comment>


Ask HN: As a tourist in the US, what should I do if I have coronavirus symptoms? - <AUTHOR> The doctors I've spoken to are refusing a house call and suggested I go to the ER, which sounds like a bad idea.
Currently in Las Vegas but I've been in Los Angeles for a few weeks until 3 days ago.
I keep getting bounced from phone call to phone call, and everyone either say ER or contact your health insurance.
I've isolated myself since I started to exhibit symptoms and I have protection and disinfectants.
It seems a tad irresponsible to just let it heal because IF (big IF) it's indeed corona I could have spread and those people/places should know. <comment><USER2> If you're elderly, immune-compromised, have cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, or cancer then call a doctor or call/go to an ER. These are hi-risk groups and require close monitoring.

You most likely won't NEED to see a doctor simply because you have a coronavirus symptom - you may have something else entirely or only a mild case of coronavirus. After all, most people recover quickly from coronavirus.

Don't hesitate to ask your hotel for help. Do they have a nurse or doctor on call whom you can speak to? Let them know you're ill and how ill. Many hotels will support your own self-management by periodically checking on you (calling and checking on you every 4-6 hours, etc.), providing over-the-counter medications or, if necessary, calling 911 to dispatch emergency personnel to transport you to the ER.

However should you develop respiratory distress or fever over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (coughing and sneezing optional) then get thee to the Emergency Room as soon as possible. Don't wait and don't worry about insurance.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Call your embassy/consulate. If your health is not seriously threatened then just stay where you are, but as you are discovering the US is not well configured to handle a public health crisis like this and there's probably nothing else you can usefully do.

</comment><comment><USER4> The two questions are how old are you? And do you have any health issues. If you're under 40 and no health issues then keeping yourself isolated is most important, because you're unlikely to have a serious outcome.

Best would be if there is a drive through clinic. Difficulty is likely you don't have a car.</comment>


Ask HN: Current best practices when POST as GET seems unavoidable? - <AUTHOR> When the concern of "very long URLs" rears its head (and just won't go away) in REST API design discussions for read-only endpoints, and when there's enough time for careful planning of a new or overhauled API, what are the best practices in 2017 for using POST as if it were GET?
The following answer on Stack Overflow seems to have merit, but what strategies are really working well for you real world API implementers?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30767665/how-to-be-restful-with-long-urls/30773811#30773811
It would be nice if "use GraphQL instead" was an option, but let's assume it must be a plain old REST-ish HTTP API. <comment><USER2> You can always refer to long data by URI. Either a locator where the data is available, or other kind of identifier that names a previously created resource.

You can make it more human-readable than a "wall of parameters" too, if you succeed in naming the parameter data that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's more or less the solution given in the SO answer to which I referred. I like your idea of giving the created resources human-friendly names/paths; it may be that the POST data can even indicate a preferred name, though the server may need to modify the name to preserve uniqueness, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The SO answer by user1907906 would be my preference as well.

It appears that you trying to wrap generic SQL queries with REST. That is not really the intended use case for REST. A GET should be retrieving a single resource or small set of resources with relatively few query parameters.

Since REST is not suitable for "query heavy" use, I would prefer to use GraphQL if that is the nature of your API. If you are prevented from using GraphQL, then the SO solution is probably your next best bet.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're spot on. This pertains to a more or less homegrown query DSL (or family of DSLs) that gets "translated," in a sense, by the server to SQL and/or MongoDB queries. The read-only endpoints being queried represent collections of a great many items, so being able to filter–search for, say, a dozen to a few thousand at a time is a real need.

Using GraphQL would probably be better, but if it's not an option then it's not an option.

I am, though, looking at dynamic-rest[1] and Eve's "projections"[2] for inspiration, i.e. to allow for flexible queries that more closely match particular use cases (of the API's users).

[1] [https://github.com/AltSchool/dynamic- rest](https://github.com/AltSchool/dynamic-rest)

[2] [http://python-eve.org/features.html#projections](http://python- eve.org/features.html#projections)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious why GraphQL isn't an option - if you're already submitting the request as a POST, what's preventing you from using GraphQL?

<comment><AUTHOR> Assume management isn't willing to make it part of the stack at this time, and that's the end of the discussion.</comment></comment>


BuyLater is evolving - <AUTHOR> http://buylater.com

<comment><AUTHOR> BuyLater was a great service to easily track great products so you could save money when prices dropped. But we think we can do even more to make shopping online better.

6 yr old explains BuyLater: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCC2NsoYqDU> (2:00)

BuyLater Walkthrough: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSFSGR_BM8U> (2:380

To sign up for a one time message when our new service is ready to be announced go to <http://buylater.com> and leave us your e-mail.

Thanks!</comment>


OpenBSD 6.4 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.openbsd.org/64.html <comment><USER2> Undeadly.org mentioned the following highlights:

"Selected highlights include:

* Support has been added for qcow2 images and external snapshots in vmm(4)/vmd(8).

* "join" has been added for Wi-Fi networks.

* Security enhancements include unveil(2), MAP_STACK, and RETGUARD. Meltdown/Spectre mitigations have been extended further, and SMT is disabled by default.

* rad(8) has replaced rtadvd(8).

* bgpd(8) has undergone numerous improvements, including the addition of support for BGP Origin Validation (RFC 6811). smtpd.conf(5) uses a new, more flexible grammar.

* For the first time, there are more than 10,000 (binary) packages (for amd64 and i386)." [1]

[1] [https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=201810181400...](https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20181018140057)

<comment><USER3> LWN has a good article about unveil() which also discusses the approaches taken in the Linux world.

[https://lwn.net/Articles/767137/](https://lwn.net/Articles/767137/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't taken the time to write this up, but one of the handy things about OpenBSD is you can take a small 16GB USB stick, format it with one small FAT partition and copy the installer to that. Then you boot the installer on your Ubiquiti Edge Router and install OpenBSD to the unpartitioned space.

With a little work you can have your own caching DNS server including domain blocks for tracking sites and if you want privoxy or a squid proxy. It's also easy to set up your own root CA and switch over to certificate-based authentication for wireless clients as long as the wireless base station supports radius.

I haven't published a tech note on it yet because Android still complains about importing self-signed certificates even when you import the root CA.

<comment><USER5> To be fair: you can do that with probably any unixoid OS. IMHO, it is just much easier with BSDs because a) documentation of how to do it is much easier to access than on linux or the other two(TM) and b) BSDs tend to follow the KISS-principle - meaning: even with the superb documentation one can just read the posix shell scripts to save some time.

<comment><USER4> >To be fair: you can do that with probably any unixoid OS

Totally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Time to update your BCHS stack: [https://learnbchs.org/index.html](https://learnbchs.org/index.html)

<comment><USER7> That's pretty sweet! Although C is possibly the worst language to build web applications..

<comment><USER8> I see your C and raise you a COBOL[1,2].

[1] [http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM](http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM)

[2] [http://adrianzandberg.pl/cobol-on- wheelchair/](http://adrianzandberg.pl/cobol-on-wheelchair/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used OpenBSD for some time as a platform for a hobby servers around version 4. It is very stable, has low hardware requirements for a base system (I had running WordPress on 32MB RAM and Pentium 200 MMX to my amusement), has very fast and powerfull firewall / packet filter. It is one of the most elegant operating systems I've ever used. Simple in use but has huge functionality. I second that documentation is one of the best. Must try it again maybe on desktop this time.

</comment><comment><USER10> The new unveil(2) system call is now available. Discussed previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18194008](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18194008)

</comment><comment><USER11> I run OpenBSD as my border firewall which it handles very well.

One thing I wish that OpenBSD devs would change in their philosophy is the --help messages. Many commands simply offer a list of switches, as if that's somehow helpful. Sometimes you need the detail in a man page, but a lot of times you don't and it would save so much time and energy to have a succinct list in the --help message itself.

# syspatch --help usage: syspatch [-c | -l | -R | -r]

<comment><USER12> Read the manpage.

One thing I really dislike about modern UNIXes is their lack of decent manpages in place of standins like --help.

I _love_ the BSDs and especially OpenBSD for their attention to manpages. It's the main reason why I don't use Linux anymore unless I have to.

Adding detailed --help messages would take time away from maintaining manpages, it also presents a duplication of information. If you want to know what the switches do, read the manpage.

<comment><USER13> How do you live without docker containers? The fact that docker doesn't run on BSDs is what drove me away.

<comment><USER14> ...the same way the world has managed to survive for decades without Linux containers in general (let alone specific wrappers around that like Docker is)?

With OpenBSD specifically, you can get 90% of the way there with chroots, standard process isolation, and a bit of shell scripting to handle deployment automation.

Yeah, Docker's cool, but it's really not that hard to run multiple applications/services on the same physical machine while keeping them from clobbering each other or the OS in general (step 1 being to make sure each service/daemon is running under its own minimally-privileged user).

<comment><USER15> _> With OpenBSD specifically, you can get 90% of the way there with chroots, standard process isolation, and a bit of shell scripting_

This is a classic case of "THAT HackerNews response to Dropbox" [1].

If it's that easy, why isn't there a prepackaged wrapper with simple switches, rather than leaving developers to fight for themselves among piles of custom hacks?

The problem is not just deployment, the Docker differentiation is simplification of the development pipeline. OpenBSD should seriously look at their story in that area, because it's one of the few where they could still potentially compete (because Docker is still fundamentally a pile of hacks, and pretty insecure too).

Unless, of course, everyone is happy to remain "the little project that could" and crack jokes like the BCHS stack.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

<comment><USER16> _OpenBSD should seriously look at their story in that area, because it 's one of the few where they could still potentially compete (because Docker is still fundamentally a pile of hacks, and pretty insecure too)._

I'm pretty sure the Open BSD developers are completely comfortable with their story. They develop this software for themselves first. If you like it and it's useful to you you are welcome to it. If not, look elsewhere. That's been their working philosophy all along and if you ask me that's what makes it so great to use. Every piece of the system is carefully thought out and organized so it doesn't suffer from nearly as much feature creep as other systems.

And as far as setting up chroit and isolating processes; it's not hard and sometimes you don't need someone else to write a script for you when you can do it yourself in 10 steps or less.

<comment><USER15> _> I'm pretty sure the Open BSD developers are completely comfortable with their story._

They were pretty comfortable with their patching story -- until enough people complained and lo, syspatch(8) appeared.

Beyond the posturing, nobody likes to run a project that nobody else uses; and sometimes even _lusers_ are right.

 _> Every piece of the system is carefully thought out and organized_

I am not saying they should rush out a crap docker clone, but rather a "carefully thought out and organized" docker alternative.

 _> you can do it yourself in 10 steps or less._

It's still 5x the steps you need with docker. As I said, it's about simple reproducibility rather than just isolation. Even if it were easy to write my own docker-compose (and indeed many people argued the same, when docker first emerged, because it actually _was_ little more than shell scripts), having one well-defined set of tools helps tremendously with kickstarting adoption and to avoid reinventing the wheel every few weeks.

<comment><USER17> I would be surprised if user complaints were the motivation for syspatch. More likely, the author built something he found useful, and contributed it to the project.

Most of the time on the openbsd email list, when a "user" suggests a feature or asks for a change to something, the reply is something along the lines of "sounds great, where is your patch?"

<comment><USER18> Exactly this. Unless of course you became an Iridium level donor with the caveat that someone promised to build a Docker clone for you.

Edit: And in response to toyg's comment, here is a link to a video of a talk by the developer in question, who mentions in passing that he builds things for OpenBSD that help him put it into production. This is less than a minute into his talk. Please educate yourself about the project before making ridiculous demands on the devs' time and falsely assigning wrong motives to them. It's unfriendly.

[https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/openbsd_base_...](https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/openbsd_base_system_maintenance_made_easy/)

<comment><USER15> _> Please educate yourself about the project _

Oh, I am educated enough, don't worry. Which is why I was so surprised to see it finally adopt a solution for a problem that had been pointed out for 20 years, after spending those 20 years replying to everyone that it was just _the wrong thing to do in principle_.

 _> It's unfriendly_

It's also unfriendly to gaslight away blatant problems, for whatever reason, until they get fixed -- at which point they are admitted as actual problems. Then again, OpenBSD is hardly a friendly project, culturally speaking.

<comment><USER19> I've read through this subthread with objective concern.

A criticism that seems fair has been presented here in a benign, non- antagonizing manner, and I am very perplexed as to why all comments arguing in favor of that view have been anonymously downvoted wholesale without anything approaching sufficient substantive explanation.

This is not the kind of behavior that (the) HN (community) is respected for.

Let me sum up what I see here.

\- Someone argues in favor of Docker, and are downvoted by enough people their comment turned grey. I think this means it's at -5 or -10 or something. So, no explanation, no comments; just downvotes.

\- The one reply that goes into a bit detail comes from a traditionalist UNIX standpoint, and is a bit passive-aggressive. (This comment isn't grey.)

\- The next reply frames the parent as "THAT HackerNews response to Dropbox", and highlights that the implied simplicity and sense of "only one obvious way to solve this problem" is in fact not implied and that significant wheel- reinvention must (and presumably has) be done "on the ground". Docker's simplicity is highlighted along with its insecurity. This comment is grey.

\- The next reply further brushes-off the stated arguments by (passive- aggressively) noting that the project seems successful enough, and maybe that's because they actually have it figured out. (This comment isn't grey.)

\- I read the next reply as a gentle reminder of the importance of remaining relevant going forward - and the fact that this doesn't necessarily mean ground-up reinvention. This comment is also grey.

What is going on here?!

A nontrivial number of comments in this thread, and the other OpenBSD threads I've seen, are basically all chanting about OpenBSD's perfection.

Good customer service, good social skills and forward thinking are some of the most fundamental aspects of commercial success. Does open source think it can get away with "no shirt, no shoes" just because it's free? :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Announcement mail: [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=153987076201158](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=153987076201158)

This is the 45th release of OpenBSD!

</comment><comment><USER21> * PIE support for the m88k platform.

I'm quite amazed that there exists hardware where they can test this! Maybe there are some embedded systems still using motorola chips?

Anyway, OpenBSD is great. I'm running it on my router and it also powers my 96 mb ram dual pentium pro 200 mhz computer from the 90s :) That computer also has a quantum fireball 20 gb disk as it's main storage, another thing I am amazed that still runs..

Donate to this project, it deserves it!

<comment><USER22> A dedicated developer is keeping it alive by maintaining support for the OMRON LUNA-88K & LUNA-88K2 Unix workstations from Japan.

[https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html](https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html)

OpenBSD also used to run on Motorola's 88k VME boards, but the mvme88k port was discontinued after 5.5.

[https://www.openbsd.org/mvme88k.html](https://www.openbsd.org/mvme88k.html)

If you have any spare parts/systems, I suspect aoyama@ would be interested in hearing from you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Because Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT) uses core resources in a shared > and unsafe manner, it is now disabled by default. It can be enabled with the > new hw.smt sysctl(2) variable.

Is this on all architetures or just Intel's Hyperthreading? I'd imagine that other CPU's with hardware threads (especially the 4 and 8 way Sparc T series) would be quite hobbled in terms of performance with this change.

<comment><USER24> Should be specific to Intel's Hyperthreading, according to the ml announcement [0]

[0] - [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=153504937925732](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=153504937925732)

(edit: words)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My biggest turnoff with OpenBSD is the more complicated package management if you want to have new versions and security updates beyond the versions packaged with the release. As far as I know you either have to stay on the bleeding edge with -current, build packages yourself, or trust a third party (M:Tier) to build for you, who last I checked were behind on firefox builds. I'd love to someday run it on my laptop though.

<comment><USER26> The best part of OpenBSD (to me), as opposed to say, FreeBSD is that pkg -u only brings in security fixes, instead of unrelated crap I don't want.

When I want new packages, I'll upgrade the operating system. I very much appreciate the stability of packages during a release cycle.

<comment><USER27> This is very probably because you have

        url: "pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/latest",

in your configuration file instead of (say)

        url: "pkg+http://pkg.freebsd.org/${ABI}/release_3",

<comment><USER26>
        url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/quarterly"

This is the default configuration.

<comment><USER27> Not originally it wasn't. That was a change in 10.2 .

* [https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/a-mini-faq-on-pkg.49694/p...](https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/a-mini-faq-on-pkg.49694/page-2#post-339590)

* [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports-announce/2...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports-announce/2014-April/000079.html)

<comment><USER26> It's the default now, and 10.2 was released over three years ago. What exactly is your point?

<comment><USER27> That your configuring your system to be on these update cycles is very probably why your system is on these update cycles. This should have been abundantly clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I run OpenBSD on my router and it's great. It was refreshing to not need Google for figuring out how to set things up, because _everything_ is in the included manual pages, which often do a great job explaining new concepts. Want a quick intro to OSPF? man ospfd

I don't think I'll run OpenBSD as a desktop OS unless performance drastically improves, but it's staying on my router for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER29> can you elaborate on your performance concerns?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> in similar news openssh [0] released a new version recently. noticed 7.7 [1]applied to this openbsd release

[0] [https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-7.8](https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-7.8)

[1] [https://www.openbsd.org/plus64.html](https://www.openbsd.org/plus64.html)

<comment><USER20> OpenSSH 7.9 should follow the OpenBSD release.

<comment><USER20> [https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html#7.9](https://www.openssh.com/releasenotes.html#7.9)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting, I've been running Linux for 15 years, yet I can't understand how to upgrade from 6.3, which I just installed on a cloud server, to 6.4 by reading the official document.

(Specifically the part "instruct the boot loader to boot this kernel" because it says to type in the file name during the boot process, which is not exactly easy on a remote machine.) [https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade64.html](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade64.html)

I have a lot of respect to OpenBSD devs when people don't contribute back much even if they use OpenSSH everyday but a bit more friendliness doesn't hurt to let people try it out more.

<comment><USER32> Do you have console access, via VNC for example?

If so, download the new bsd.rd image and place it in /

Reboot, and at the boot prompt type:

boot bsd.rd

Then follow the prompts.

<comment><USER31> Yes, I was struggling to do this from the remote shell but I had remote access to the console to specify the ram disk to get through the upgrade process but I'd consider I'm one of the lucky ones when providers like AWS doesn't have that feature to access boot process in real time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am so tempted to install this after a 15 year break...

<comment><USER34> You can try it right now inside virtualbox, and 20 minutes later you realize that it is has all you need. After a few days, you'll notice that you spend most of your time inside the virtual machine, and then it makes sense to turn your setting upside down and work directly on the saner system.

<comment><USER35> How well does the inverse works - running VMs in OpenBSD to use Windows, Linux? Is it for example possible to run Virtualbox with good performance in OpenBSD?

I'm tempted at using OpenBSD as OS, but need to run things like MS Office. A VM is probably the easiest way to do that.

<comment><USER36> There is an OpenBSD-specific hypervisor (vmm) in recent releases.

I cannot comment on whether it is suitable for running VMs at this time.

<comment><USER14> From what I've gathered (and experienced last time I've tried it), Windows support is nonexistent right now. That might change eventually, but OpenBSD and Linux (and I think NetBSD?) are the initial targets.

QEMU is available in packages/ports, though; while almost certainly slow, it's a start. VirtualBox on Linux requires a kernel module, so unless someone manages to port that to OpenBSD (which would translate to adding it to OpenBSD's kernel, which doesn't support loadable kernel modules anymore), that one probably ain't an option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> liv-io what a great day, thanks so much OpenBSD developers! I have to update some Ansible roles this weekend :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Syspatch working out of the box! That's really big news, in my book.

Guess I should give OBSD another chance...

</comment><comment><USER37> Back in college our OS course used OpenBSD and I had a great time learning kernel development. Too bad I'm heavily invested in Arch right now!

</comment><comment><USER38> Impressive work what the openbsd folks do. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER39> Linux is a depressing mess after you've used OpenBSD. Such a high quality system, with stellar documentation. It's unfortunate that Linux has become so popular even though the BSD's are so much better. A bad historical accident. Damn you Linus...

<comment><USER40> Is OpenBSD suitable for use on a laptop? I have a Dell Latitute 7370 running KDE Neon, and it runs really well. All hardware is supported, battery life is on-par with Windows, etc. Would OpenBSD work well on this laptop?

<comment><USER41> I'd like to hear about this as well. OpenBSD has been on my list of "to try" for quite awhile but the app/package thing has been a big question mark for me.

I _really_ enjoy being able to apt-get or brew install pretty much any of the applications out there and am a bit worried about how that experience would be on OpenBSD. I guess the best way to find out would be to try it eh? :)

<comment><USER42> There is the core install and then packages that you can add just as easily as apt-get.

<comment><USER43> Does that apply to updates as well?

<comment><USER18> Yes. syspatch and pkg_add -u handle updates.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


2018 CES Weirdest Gadgets - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/pictures/ces-2018-weirdest-gadgets/4/ <comment><USER2> A bit of warning that pictures of men's bulges were going to pop up on my screen would've been nice.</comment>