DuckDuckGo now fingerprinting visitors? - <AUTHOR> https://forums.whonix.org/t/duckduckgo-now-fingerprinting-visitors/6497 <comment><USER2> The site is giving me a 429, but discussion Reddit seems to indicate this is misleading. DuckDuckGo has code that includes calls to `getBoundingClientRect()` which can be used, most likely with other metrics since it just tells you the size of the window, to fingerprint visitors. However, inspection of the source reveals it's just part of normal layout code.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ad4h0u/duckduckgo_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ad4h0u/duckduckgo_now_fingerprinting_visitors/)

<comment><USER3> Had a feeling that this entire post was just privacy "purists" taking something a bit too far. I'm not confident that knowing the size of your browser window is enough to definitively ruin your life.

<comment><USER4> This is frequently some of the most identifying bits of information about you. Have you try the eff's panopticlic? It'll tell you how much the combination of things like your resolution, available fonts and available extension can identify you 1 in a few hundred thousand or million of visitors. This is a legitimate concern for a privacy oriented search engine that claims not to track you.

[https://panopticlick.eff.org](https://panopticlick.eff.org)

<comment><USER5> 1) Just because it's possible to use this in an aggregate fingerprint doesn't mean the collection of this one datum in isolation is actually for fingerprinting

2) Given the context of the actual API call, this is probably for benign purposes and not for fingerprinting

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's impossible to use a platform without revealing some details about yourself. Either physical or organic, they will get some data out of you.

What's important to me, personally, is that platform doesn't share or sell what it has learned about you, and doesn't use potentially sensitive information in its advertising.

It would be unrealistic to expect a platform to not collect any data and still function. Analytics is the foundation for the feedback loop that it takes to effectively develop something like DDG.

If I go to an adult toy store I expect the person at the counter to know, but I don't want him telling everyone else.

<comment><USER7> Not all data collections are created equal. Canvas fingerprinting really only has one use, and that is to try to circumvent a user's decision to delete site cookies (or not accept them in the first place). That, combined with the fact that DDG's entire marketing campaign is that they respect your privacy, is a bad sign. They may not be using this information for anything nefarious now, but it does seem plausible that this is a canary in a coal mine.

<comment><USER8> Are they using canvas fingerprinting though (or are they fingerprinting screen resolution)? I downloaded Canvas Defender to check and it doesn't go off, though it does on tons of other sites. Which seems like it'd be a big story as well, that they were working with a company to hide it. But that sounds unlikely. I think they are fingerprinting screen resolution. Which isn't that unique.

<comment><USER7> That's a good question, I don't know. But they are not setting off my anti- canvas measures either (I use jsblocker) so I'm guessing you are right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hmm. Benefit of the doubt, they might have just included this library for something else and might not be fingerprinting/logging individual browsers. I'm sure we'll see a response from DDG on this.

uMatrix+disabling Javascript explicitly will help prevent tracking for those who know how.

The privacy aspect of DDG was always their marketing point, and I think we all knew it couldn't be totally true. Surely they must be harvesting data of some type, or else how would they expect to earn revenue? Others' have shown that at least some of their services run on AWS, so if Amazon really wanted your data (like if they were served a National Security Letter), I'm sure they could get it without DDG even knowing.

<comment><USER10> > The privacy aspect of DDG was always their marketing point, and I think we > all knew it couldn't be totally true. Surely they must be harvesting data of > some type, or else how would they expect to earn revenue?

Simple. They can run display ads instead of targeted ads.

Since they have the search term you just typed, they know exactly what you're looking for at this moment, and can target with that.

<comment><USER11> It looks like they also insert affiliate codes into search result URLs for sites like Amazon and eBay.

[https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and- affiliates](https://duck.co/help/company/advertising-and-affiliates)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you really want to avoid internet privacy concerns, stay off of the internet. If you are so paranoid that you trust no one on the internet, stay off of the internet. If you want to be part of the internet, you have to make a reasonable guess as to what to trust, and ignore the paranoia where you find bad things everywhere. Even being off the internet, someone somewhere is still tracking you in ways you don't even realize. Living as a hermit in a cave on an island with no people is not a lifestyle most people want. DDG is still way better than any other option.

</comment><comment><USER13> > DDG are without question data brokers, and commercial websites that make > promises like DDG does will not survive for long if they actually keep them.

I'm not convinced that this is a law of nature, but it does seem to have some truth in it. I pay ~$5/month for services like Feedly and Evernote. I'd be willing to do the same for a high quality search engine that does not make me the product.

<comment><USER10> Search is probably the most likely counterexample of your rule. They can sell ads based on search terms instead of user profiles. This might be leaving some profit on the table, but might not.

They can generate artificial scarcity by preventing the search query stream from being joined to user profiles by third parties.

If they end up with a well-educated, affluent userbase (likely, given their selling point), they can charge a huge premium for that scarcity.

This trick is much older than the internet itself.

<comment><USER13> If they are advertising to me based on my search string, I'm still the product. Ads are part of what I'd pay to evade.

<comment><USER14> Do you object to companies advertising to you based on the magazines you buy, or tv you watch, or roads you travel to work on?

If you are against advertising full stop then fine. This article, and peoples claimed grievances are with tracking, rather than advertising per se.

Edit: Missed your first post. Ignore me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I only ever use DDG with Tor Browser Bundle, because even though they are a 'privacy first' search engine, it doesn't stop some intel agency sitting in their data center and being able to attribute certain search queries to specific users.

As a bonus: Last time I checked The Tor Browser Bundle displays a prompt anytime the canvas API is used in some javascript, and you can opt out of canvas fingerprinting this way.

I know DDG doesn't always have the results you are looking for, but for more long-tail queries and advanced searches I can use Startpage[0] which basically proxies the results from Google (using vanilla Google with Tor is a pain because of captchas).

[0] [https://www.startpage.com](https://www.startpage.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not familiar with the mentioned API in the article, is it possible they are using it for just statistics on what type of browsers visit their website?

I know as a software developer I'd design tests to ensure the wa testing is done in the order of the most users impacted.

</comment><comment><USER17> DuckDuckGo is a company, so it's aim is not develop something to solve a problem they have but making money. That's why it can't be trusted as any other proprietary service.

Only FOSS so projects developed by someone, companies included, with the aim of solving some _authors_ problem or desire can be trusted to a certain extent.

The rest it doesn't count much you may have "ugly dictators" or "less oppressive dictators" but they are still dictators. It's their nature, no matter how good intentions they have at start or they try to keep.

<comment><USER18> Companies aren't required to make money, this is a popular misconception. The company can have any purpose or set of purposes unless it's illegal, and most often even if "make money" is on the list it isn't the sole purpose.

I appreciate that HN might be more likely than most places to be inhabited by people who can't imagine any other motivation except money, but for most of us there are other priorities.

<comment><USER17> An ancient proverb say "power corrupt, money corrupt": if you start a company with good intention when (if) money and power arrive you start to head naturally toward "dangerous" directions...

Of course exception may exists and actually I'm sure exists, but they are exceptions, not "the rule"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, while it's possible DuckDuckGo is secretly evil, the API call in question seems to be perfectly innocuous. While the size of the screen is certainly one part of a fingerprint, there are far more benign uses for it, and trying to frame DDG as evil over such a benign use is misleading at best (and maliciously dishonest at worst).

I'm sticking this in my "guilty until proven innocent" file.

</comment><comment><USER19> My search results have been really good lately on ddg, even for topics I thought were ambiguous. I hope it wasn't related

</comment><comment><USER8> Are they just fingerprinting screen geometry or doing canvas fingerprinting?

Because I can't find where they are doing canvas fingerprinting, that or canvas defender doesn't say anything on only DDG. If they are just getting screen geometry, which I suspect, that's not enough to de-anonymize you. As far as I know anyway.

<comment><USER19> On panopticlick, screen resolution is consistently top 2 most uniquely identifying things they fingerprint (edit: for me), hence the concern I suppose.

<comment><USER8> That's odd. Because this is my result (in order of "x browsers have this value):

Canvas Fingerprinting: 1 in 3e6

User Agent: 1 in 2e3 (not many using FF on Linux I guess)

System Fonts: 1 in 3e2

Timezone: 1 in 5e1

A few other things < 1 in 10

Screen Size and Color Depth: 1 in 6

Screen Size is nowhere near identifying to me. There are just huge drops in the order of magnitude in this stuff. I can't imagine standard fingerprinting is that reliable. Though I wouldn't be surprised to learn if there were certain trends about things. Like if you identify I'm using FF on Linux it tells you I'm nerdy. That'd be good for targeting ads, but not good for unique identification. I thought that's why cookies are used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Mirror: [https://archive.fo/5TxMb](https://archive.fo/5TxMb)

</comment><comment><USER21> I use ddg for their uncensored search, I have no reason to trust them with my privacy. But when I search for sci-hub or libgen then the first result is always the relevant webpage.</comment>


How far has Microsoft fallen? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworld.com/tablets/21504/how-far-has-microsoft-fallen <comment><USER2> They are indeed confused.

We are working with large enterprise clients (big pharma). Last two years they practically all adopted iPads for their field forces. Went with single device policy, which created a lot of pain for IT - no Office, no deployment tools, no AD, etc.

MS and Intel then start a marketing blitz in those IT departments, hey, enterprise, we love and understand you. Cool, IT guys fall for it.

Problem?

MS wants enterprise to adopt Win8 Pro on Intel devices. Which practically _all_ are around 1000$ and have a battery life of 4 hours.

Enterprise IT wants something similar to the iPad, for even cheaper. They want an iPad with sane deployment tools and MS Office. Cheaper. Because their people in emerging markets have limited budgets.

Enter Windows RT. It is just like an iPad, cheap, better power efficiency on its devices. Awesome, right? Except that it does _not_ offer the deployment and management tools needed. It is practically an iOS device in that regard. The MS Office on it is Home/Student _Preview_ edition, which seem to be upgradeable if you have the right CALs. But it runs like shit. Buzz is that the whole thing was a very late add once they realized that MS' main selling point was Office. Late, panicky scramble.

And now add the fact that MS seems to be launching MS Office on iOS soon.

And then we have Modern UI. Nice for consumer apps. Facebook looks cool. But enterprise tools? On iOS we have freedom. On Modern there are guidelines, horizontal swipe and pagination is key. You're used to high information density, utilization of screen real estate to show as much as possible on one screen to avoid a user needing to navigate away? Forget that on Modern UI. Whitespace rules, it is like the GMail redesign on steroids. No wonder they need Classic UI to make MS Office available - Modern UI in its current strict incarnation cannot scale to offer this kind of functionality.

So yeah. Intel is not in a good spot. Microsoft neither. The next 6 months will be decisive. Lots of pilots going on, Samsung has a good enough Win 8 Pro device out there, Surface Pro still not here. Surface is not even launched in Japan, might not be till late next year.

Whoever is in charge of platform strategy at MS should be made to go away. With access to those resources they should be kicking ass.

<comment><USER3> > MS and Intel then start a marketing blitz in those IT departments, hey, > enterprise, we love and understand you. Cool, IT guys fall for it.

Serious question here; is it that much different in the US? At 'big whatever' I have been in the EU (besides, strangely enough(?), France), the 'IT guys' don't like Windows/MS and would not choose it if it was up to them. I see Ubuntu, BYOD Mac OS X, iOS for management and force-fed Windows (with a lot of complaining).

People working mostly on Excel (or other Office components) would pick Windows, but those are not 'the IT guys'?

<comment><USER2> Enterprise IT as in systems for end users (you can call it Commercial IT). The IT guys themselves will not use Win 8 Pro / Surface of course. Just the business users. But Enterprise IT departments make the purchasing decisions.

It all depends on scale. Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it. OS X might, but no one has tried so far. MS Office is the killer here, if you can't run it, you're dead. That's why MS was caught so surprised when the iPad took off, against all _logic_.

<comment><USER4> "Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it" - yep, it costs too much. No... wait, it's free. There's no deployment tools... no... wait, there are... There's no good office softw... nevermind. No one has ever... wait, there's that town in Germany. I give up. Why isn't Ubuntu suitable? It even comes with an RDP client so you can use Windows-only programs remotely...

<comment><USER5> LibreOffice/OpenOffice doesn't work as well as MS Office. Google Docs doesn't replicate all of the functionality that MS Office offers, and doesn't work as well. The productivity difference[1] would easily be worth over $200/person/month for people who use Office a lot.

[1] From features that Google Docs and to a lesser extent, LibreOffice, don't have or work poorly, and speed especially vs Google Docs.

<comment><USER4> the only area where I can see this as being a problem is with Excel. For the others, use a web-authoring tool. Why create a MB document in Word, to attach to a SharePoint page, then send a link to every pointing out the new document? Excel has some specialized math functions (and data presentation abilities) that are beyond LO/OO. But I think it's such a small percentage of people that need that functionality, you could replace MSO w/ LO/OO and most everyone would say 'meh' and go back to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My god, give them a break. Can we get at least one positive article about Microsoft on HN? It doesn't matter what Microsoft does they always get ridiculed for it. Any effort, no matter how good, gets completely obliterated. Microsoft hasn't been the most innovative company lately but they're slowly adjusting their line of products to at least try to get somewhere. Yes, Surface doesn't stand up to iPad, but it's a very solid product nonetheless. Yes, Windows 8 is a big deviation from norm, but it is an innovative move forward that needs a bit more work. Yes, C# and the entire .NET ecosystem isn't as popular as Rails and gets absolutely no love on HN but it is an _incredibly_ powerful environment. For fuck's sake, stop hating Microsoft just to hate it and embrace their efforts to move forward and compete just like you do Google and Apple.

<comment><USER7> No thanks. When you recall their once-titanic power, their vicious business culture, their decade-long seizure and stagnation of the entire web, the way they openly eat their own with gusto, and the incalculable amounts of money and effort thrown into the boundless swamps of their fetid platforms, you realize that watching them tumble and smash on the rocks below is never, ever, ever going to get old.

<comment><USER8> I'm looking forward to seeing similar things happen to Apple.

<comment><USER9> Why? Why wouldn't you want a company - any company - to do well, build great products, make their shareholders happy, and generally succeed?

<comment><USER8> Because I don't think their products are so great, and I believe they're having a negative effect on the industry.

<comment><USER10> If you find an ubuntu laptop with build quality equal to a MacBook Air or Pro, I'm all ears.

Same thing with the iPhone or iPad.

<comment><USER11> > If you find an ubuntu laptop with build quality equal to a MacBook Air or > Pro, I'm all ears.

Ummm... what about Ubuntu on the MacBook Air or Pro?

<comment><USER10> That would work, unless you were determined to avoid Apple (I'm not)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I enjoy using Windows 8. There are problems. Shutting it down isn't obvious. Selecting "Lock" will bring up a sign in screen. Putting your computer to sleep won't... its all a bit strange. Like I said though, it is a fairly enjoyable experience.

I haven't used the Surface. I don't see myself getting one. I have the iPad2. I only use it to surf the web. I don't need a replacement. Maybe in 2-3 years.

I think Microsoft has got a branding problem. The Surface is obviously running something different to Windows 8. I only get it because I know what ARM is... its impossible to explain to my parents. "It runs on a different type of processor so is different" is met with a blank face or "But its runs Windows right?"

There is also a fear, especially with my parents about Windows 8. They have just about mastered Windows 7. A lot of this fear is misplaced. There was a lot of talk of Desktop UI and Metro UI. It would have been simpler to say "The start button has been removed and instead has its own screen making programs easier to find and use."

Instead they banged on about different UI's. Different types of applications. All very confusing. Then you have the lack of branding. I still call Windows 8 app's "Metro". I think it is a good name. I don't know what they are called now. When I enter the store in Windows 8 it isn't obvious what the new name is either..

Microsoft made a big mess of branding and advertising Windows 8. Someone should be fired because it is harming the take up of what is imperfect but pretty good software.

</comment><comment><USER13> > _And, since Windows RT doesn't look or feel like prior versions of Windows > and doesn't run applications written for them either, why call it Windows at > all?_

This is called "brand extension". Brand extension is a crime against marketing and against common sense.

The reasoning goes like this:

\- we have a strong brand

\- we have a new product

\- no one will know this new product exists unless we spend huge amounts of advertising to inform the public about its existence

\- oh but wait! we have this strong brand! why not attach the new product to the existing brand, to jump start it?!

\- (and BTW, our strong but old brand can only benefit from this hot new cool product being attached to it)

At first it seems to work: the new product grows faster with brand extension than without.

But very fast, people become confused about which is which and what does what, and prefer two uniquely branded and well-positioned competing products against the whole "line offering".

The "hot new product" usually ends up polluting, weakening, if not killing the parent brand, instead of rejuvenating it.

This is exactly what is happening with Windows RT.

Microsoft isn't the only culprit however. "Google Play" is a similar move. It hasn't started to hurt Google yet, probably because it didn't catch, and people continue to call the Android app store... well, "the Android App Store".

But rest assured it will come back to bite them.

<comment><USER14> My amateur marketing analysis follows...

"Brand extension is a crime against marketing and against common sense" Agreed and it's an example of something Apple has gotten very right. Apple is the banner brand.

What is Apple? It's a hardware device manufacturer with mostly excellent software and services. You buy an Apple X and you're buying (post Mac but still applies):

iPod.

iPod smaller.

iPod much smaller.

iPod with a touch screen.

iPod with a touch screen and phone.

iPod with a touch screen, internet and much bigger.

iPod with a touch screen, internet and slightly bigger.

Some thinner, some fatter, some with cameras, some without.

They've almost never stumbled in extending the brand and creating new sub- brands because the initial umbrella brand isn't 'used in vain' or diluted.

What is Google? Google is an ad supported AI interface with occasionally excellent hardware, and genius software services. You buy a Google X and you're buying? It remains to be seen (although I suspect it's coming) what exactly the 'Google Nexus' is.

What is Microsoft? Microsoft makes Windows and Office, enterprise software and is a sticker on the side of other people's products. When you buy Microsoft Windows X you get??

<comment><USER15> I'd say the iPod Nano is the only device Apple has really screwed up in terms of a consistent message. First it has a clickwheel, then it doesn't. Oh look there's a camera, and now it's gone. It's small enough to stick in a watch wristband - but wait, now there's a touchscreen and it sorta looks like it runs apps except it doesn't.

Totally incoherent. I loved the first few generations with a clickwheel, they were great to use on the go. I have no idea what the _point_ of the latest model is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And for more fun: \-- C:\Windows\System32 contains 64 bit binaries, while \-- C:\Windows\SysWow64 contains the 32 bit ones (that is on a 64 bit version of Windows)

Then the naming of $(Platform) $(PlatformShort) in MSVC IDE.. Explore for yourself - it's fun, it's even more fun when the windows sdk, dxsdk, and other ms's sdk's use different naming conventions for the same things.

Or the WinDir vs SystemRoot

it's something about Microsoft creating too much confusion with their naming

<comment><USER17> These are hardly problems. Users don't generally encounter system directories or identifiers in IDEs, and these patterns have emerged from MS's traditional dedication to maintaining backward compatibility, which is usually much more important to developers and power users than having directory names be completely descriptive of what's in them.

The problem with Windows RT is exactly the opposite: they've _broken_ backward compatibility, severely, and created a product that bears no resemblance to what the vast majority of users recognize as Windows, yet they've decided to call it "Windows" anyway.

<comment><USER16> most often, it's us developers becoming users of some other software. And real users are puzzled sometimes, there were at least couple of emails to the sqlite mailing list about missing sqlite3.dll from users. In one case it was some tax program installing it in the system32 folder, messing it up with another one (why would they do that is another matter), also as someone posted below, there is Program Files, and Program Files (x86), but there apps that do not follow that convention (internally they have their own bin32, bin64 folders), and it comes to users again - usually plugins for various creative suits - audio, video, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple kills Microsoft here. My bias:

They deprecated every major Mac hardware and software transition into a virtual machine.

* Mac OS 9 to Classic Environment

* PowerPC to Rosetta

Apple brands, changes brands, and moves forward. Microsoft makes Windows proper compatible with the new. They have done an amazing job both from the tech and marketing front.

And yet, computing is now the rest of us, not the "enterprise". We have amazing computers in our pockets. The enterprise changed, allowing and adapting to iPhone and Android devices.

Our phones do more interesting things than our Windows desktops.

</comment><comment><USER19> As a developer working with Microsoft products I have a very mixed feeling about what the company is doing right now. The tools and products for developers and professionals are amazing. Visual Studio might be the most visible example but there are really tons of great tools and libraries (and many are actually open sourced). The problem is that I cannot see any of this greatness translated into end-users killer-apps. LOB apps surely benefit from it and other ecosystems (OSX, iOS or Android) will not catch-up for a long time. For me there are two Microsoft: one for the developers and headed by Scott Guthrie and the other for consumers. This last one does not have a clear vision and is just trying to catch up with Google and Apple.

<comment><USER20> I used to using visual studio and thought it was good. But after using emacs, I donot think it is good any more. and the libraries/APIs seems not well designed too now.

<comment><USER19> When talking about VS and libraries/APIs you really need to be more specific. VS lets you work with very different technologies from native C++ to .NET languages, including web stacks.

The user experience may vary but if we are talking about the .NET world I think it is a very strong package.

The only equivalent I can think of would be the Eclipse/Java combo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Windows RT (Run Time) - it's the best product name since Windows NT (New Technology). While all those other bad software companies waste your time with OT (Old Technology) and CT (Compile Time), Microsoft gives you the NRTT (New Run Time Technology) you deserve.

<comment><USER22> with Modern ui

<comment><USER23> Which should be called modern since Modern (uppercase M) refers, in the world of art, literature and architecture, to Modernism, which is not at all modern.

(this was written in jest)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Heh, there was similar journalistic confusion in a Maclean's magazine article (Maclean's being Canada's main weekly news magazine):

"Microsoft also unveiled a tablet this month. The Surface will have a built-in keyboard on the screen cover and run on the Android operating system…"

Yep, Android!

Source: Maclean's magazine for July 16, 2012, page 47.

<comment><USER25> That's like O'Leary on the Lang & O'Leary show saying that Pinterest is a productivity search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm in the minority who believes that Microsoft's tablet strategy is reasonable.

Their long-term goal is to provide tablets that look more or less like the incumbents (8-10 inch, light, 10 hour battery life, 9mm thin), but can also run any Windows app you want. But that's not possible for another 2 years or so of advancement by Intel and other hardware suppliers. So what do they do until then? Just wait? No, they release two devices: an ipad competitor that's not a hybrid, and an ultrabook competitor.

They may both have modest sales, but the Windows store will start getting populated with apps, and Windows 8 will become familiar, so that when they CAN actually build a 'perfect' hybrid, all the other pieces will be in place.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft in the mobile world, but until they launched Windows 8, I actually thought the idea of the "hybrid" device might work, and may be the future of both tablets and PC's. You can use it as a PC when you need it, and as a tablet, when you don't. Best of both worlds, right?

Wrong. When I started using Windows 8, I realized it's actually the _worst_ of both worlds. If you want both in the same package, then you have to live with a ton of compromises. Here are some of them:

1) You can't have a large screen, if you want to use it as a tablet, too. Maybe 11" at most, and that includes hybrid devices more like Surface, with light weight tablet parts, and detachable keyboard. The ones like Lenovo Yoga are completely unusable as tablets, unless you intend to use a "tablet" on your desk all the time, at which point, what's the difference compared to just using a touchscreen laptop?

2) Then 10-11" screens are not very usable for real work as a PC, so you have to compromise a lot in that, too.

3) 10-11" is pretty large and heavy for a tablet, and it seems most people are starting to gravitate towards 8" or smaller tablets, which makes it even more likely that people will want the tablet and the PC as 2 different devices in the future.

4) If you want a "hybrid", then you're forced to use x86 chips, and unless you want the performance of a netbook, you need Core chips inside. These have 3 major drawbacks: low battery life, heat/noise, and high price tags.

5) Windows RT devices, while a bit better on the tablet part, because of the ARM advantages (better battery life and more competitive prices), can't seriously be called "hybrids". They only have Office for PC use.

6) 13" or higher "hybrids" are also a joke, as you can't seriously use them as tablets.

7) You're still forced to use or avoid the "touch mode", even when you want to use it as a PC. I consider Windows 8 worse for a PC user than Windows 7. I brings a lot of new stuff that are there to annoy the PC user, not help him. Whatever small benefits it has over Windows 7, they are not worth it for the worse user experience. And this is for the more "techie" of the PC users. For "normal" mom and pop users, they are going to find it even worse, after using XP/Windows 7 for so long, and now having to basically learn and unlearn a ton of new stuff, which is not easy for this type of user.

So whichever way you go, either more towards the PC part, or the tablet part, you're going to run into major compromises, if you want to use a single device as both PC and tablet. So I don't think anymore that hybrids are the future, as they seem to do either one part pretty badly, or be mediocre at both. You're better off keeping these two type of devices separated.

<comment><USER28> I assumed that (not now, but in 5 years time), you'll bring your 7" or 10" tablet home, plug it into its dock (a-la laptop docks now), which will hook it up to your full size mouse and keyboard, and your 27" high resolution monitor.

It'll have enough processing power to do what most people need from a machine, and when you need to go out, you grab it out of its dock, and all your programs, files and settings are with you, running on their tablet-optimised version.

This is the end game as I see it and I'm pretty convinced this is what Microsoft is planning for. If that's the way it goes, they have a huge head start over Apple who are insisting on keeping OSX and iOS separate.

<comment><USER29> _when you need to go out, you grab it out of its dock, and all your programs, files and settings are with you, running on their tablet-optimised version._

This was what the future looked like 10 years ago until cloud-provided software and storage became an option. This was the videos Microsoft showed us and it all looked _fantastic_.

Now I'm wondering why on earth would I lob files manually around? It's as old- fashioned as synching your phone via USB and iTunes. You did that 5 years ago. Not now. It's a stone-age solution created by stone-age approach to computing. We demand better now.

Now I have one Google doc document, which is a live document. It's always the latest version, with all the latest collaborations, and I don't need to bring it with me. That's _great_. I don't know which documents I'll need. And you can't be realistically expected to bring them _all_ with you always, just to be covered.

The "future" you are painting sounds old fashioned and I don't want it. That is Microsoft's main problem now: Their future insist we should keep things which are obsolete (like local files) at all cost, and they are doing it to attempt to keep the relevance of their OS as it used to be.

In services like Office 365 they are very explicit about not creating a "document", you are creating a ".docx-file". This is 100% orthogonal to the way they tried to do things on the desktop (hide the extensions at all cost, because they were "confusing").

Now they are back-pedalling hard. Now people _must know_ that they are creating a MS Word file. In the cloud. As if that makes sense.

They are either confused, conflicted, panicking, a mix of those, or just appearing to be entirely uncoordinated right now.

Even as a .NET developer I am seriously starting to doubt Microsoft's future, at least as far as client-platforms go.

<comment><USER30> "Now I'm wondering why on earth would I lob files manually around? It's as old-fashioned as synching your phone via USB and iTunes. You did that 5 years ago. Not now. It's a stone-age solution created by stone-age approach to computing. We demand better now."

AT&T and Verizon's monopoly on wireless spectrum called, they want their $50 a gigabyte.

<comment><USER29> That's a US problem which the rest of the world is not constrained by. It's not going to stop technological progress.

Especially not when wifi and wired internet is completely and utterly untouched by it. That's how 99.99% of the business market is deployed.

And you have governments to regulate monopolies. Demand action from your government instead of complaining about it online. That has worked out pretty well for Europe.

<comment><USER30> > It's not going to stop technological progress.

Are you kidding? I don't want to sound ethnocentric but what technology has taken off on a global scale that _didn't_ at least work in the US? It isn't even about GDP, it is that the US accounts for between a third and half of major 1st world consumers.

A great example of the inverse is how most major streaming services only serve US customers. The rest of the world can take it in stride and just pirate all the media, though, so progress on that front doesn't really slow. However, if you tried using truly cloud based computing with everything remote, it would never work in America because the internet coverage is way too bad (it is also really bad in a lot of other first world monopoly telecom nations like the UK, Canada, and Australia though).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I spoke with an MS recruiter and they have 4k new job opening. We will see some more violent flailing before they die. Maybe even innovation.

</comment><comment><USER32> There are two dovetailing things going here.

# 1 is Windows' part in the disruptive innovation curve which I think touch OSs are clearly following. In the beginning new technology is not directly competing with other players in the category. It is drawing marketing share from non-consupmtion. That's been most of what mobile has gobbled up to now. Then comes low & mid end consumption come next. We're seeing some of that already. People bringing a tablet on business trips when they would have brought a laptop 2 years ago.

Windows seem to be trying to "catch" tablets on their way to "high quality use" on the disruption curve. "Primary computers" used by professionals, students & such. Current Android/iOS devices are not really ready for these uses so they have some time. If they can get enterprise on to Windows machines, they may be able to build a moat (or at least some basic battlements).

# 2 is Microsoft's lipstick-on-a-pig marketing. Marketing fundamentals like product segmentation, branding, naming, pricing. MS have never been smooth with that kind of stuff. "Windows Home Office for Students (noncommercial use only)" has always felt like a contrived afterthought. I'm sure it's well researched and functional, but it's not elegant. When you don't have the elegance at the more fundamental level of marketing it's harder to communicate. So Windows RT/Metro/Surface/Phone/Touch/8 is not going to be understood by consumers until they start using is.

If it was another company, Id say they're doomed. But Microsoft are stubborn and resilient. They may do it.

</comment><comment><USER33> MS is definitely confusing the market. Their ARM offering should be for tablets only and shouldn't be called Windows RT or Windows anything else. It should have been called Metro OS or some such. It shouldn't have included desktop mode, which serves no other purpose other than to confuse things.

No one would have been confused.

I don't believe I've used word "confused" enough times.

<comment><USER34> Confused isn't strong enough. I see utter bewilderment as I try to explain to my peers what they difference between RT and the bog standard Windows 8. Usually they get bored and wish they hadn't asked the question.

If it runs office and IE in the desktop, why can't I install games? What application store? What's ARM? What does RT stand for? Why would anyone want that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Storm in a teacup. Its no different to Windows CE, or a plethora of other similar named products. Most people who would be confused will no doubt have a sales person to explain the situation. Most other people will have a clue and this won't be an issue.

To be perfectly honest this reminds me a lot of the PS3 vs Xbox reporting when they where released. PS3 couldn't catch a break, still sold OK, but nothing but terrible reviews. Eventually it came out of the woodwork was most media agencies where taking money from the gaming industry (and probably MS) to write anti PS3 articles, out right media assassination. My money is on the same tactic being used now.

<comment><USER36> An entire industry was being paid off to slag the PS3? I've never heard of this before.

<comment><USER35> No idea if you're being sarcastic or not.

If not its quite common, thats what PR companies do, usually they just do positive stuff, but when you have a lot to loose it can go negative.

Having worked in big media you learn very quickly that everything is paid for in one way or another. Sometimes quite innocently, free interviews on TV which involve the use of there company name. Other times more sneaky stuff, basically differing levels of bribery.

Generally its not to bad, an interview with a pop star releasing a new album, my friend however gets flown all over the world regularly to review movies and games. Everything paid for, thousands and thousands of dollars splashed on him... as long as he continues to write positive review... he'd hate to loose his free holidays in Germany or Las Vegas or London every 6 months or so. So he writes things in a way that keeps his perks. Judging by the lack of negative reviews I'd say the game industry has almost every game reviewer paid off.

The ones that annoy me the most are advertorials, paid stories about certain topics or companies. PR companies basically come in with the story finished, all the wording the way they want it and are willing to pay money to get it into the prime time news.

I'll admit 90% of the time they get turned down on there first try, but they keep trying, and generally they get there way as smaller agencies and especially bloggers will take the money forcing the larger companies to publish a story as well not to loose market share.

Some blogs have bene exposed multiple times for doing it, I believe engadget went on the defensive after being accused of these practices, and there has been a few other examples involving Google and Facebook I can faintly remember within the last year or so.

If you weren't aware of that going on I hope I haven't shaken your trust in the media to badly. But its all about money at the end of the day, and with dwindling profits more and more agencies are caving to PR money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have to agree about the lack of a compelling use case for the ARM version of Surface. The Surface Pro, which is non-ARM and runs the desktop version of Windows 8, so it can run "legacy" Windows 7 programs, but the drawbacks are that it has worse battery life and costs another $400 more. At that point why not just get a laptop.

I actually think Windows 7 is great, it is the most useful, customizable, business-appropriate, and non-broken version of Windows in a while. I was really impressed with Microsoft when I got my corporate box updated to Windows 7 and Office 2010. I thought they were on the right track. But with Windows 8 they tried to fix something that wasn't broken, and abandoned their core market in the process.

They really should have forked their OS product line. Windows 8 RT should have been called "Windows Touch" for tablets and phones, and they should have continued to iterate Windows 7 as "Windows Desktop" for business/productivity users. There is no need for Windows 8/Metro/Modern/whatever on a desktop computer, because vertical touch screens do not work ergonomically.

</comment><comment><USER38> Question: how long before Bill Gates steps back in to be CEO of Microsoft?

<comment><USER39> Never. Why would he? He's made all the money he'll ever need to make, and by all accounts is happy and fulfilled with his role in his non-profit. Why go back to MS to right a sinking ship, have his public image tarnished (again), and have to deal with the stress of being CEO? What would he gain from it?

Gates seems to be happier and more fulfilled (certainly better-liked) than he ever was while he was at MS. I just don't see the value proposition for him in returning.

<comment><USER40> Bill still owns a lot of Microsoft stock. He might not care about the money for his personal gain, but he does care about the mission and goals of his foundation. More money for Bill = more money for foundation.

I don't see Bill returning to Microsoft being a likely scenario but the value proposition is definitely there if he feels his ability to do things with this foundation in the future threatened.

<comment><USER41> Speaking of the Gates Foundation, it appears to be involved in myraid shady dealings - [http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Gates_Foundation_Critiq...](http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Gates_Foundation_Critique)

<comment><USER42> That website is one dense concentration of crazy. Each of those links is to yet another article by the same guy where he does some ranting, then mostly misrepresents some aside in an article at another source, then "just asks some questions", then closes with some more ranting.

<comment><USER41> Plenty of those articles link to mainstream sources.

First one I looked at linked to this, for example: [http://www.npr.org/2011/06/03/136920664/gates-foundation- sho...](http://www.npr.org/2011/06/03/136920664/gates-foundation-shows-off- new-headquarters)

Which contains the same kind of information they are talking about:

> They're influencing governments in lots of different ways — and > corporations, and really everybody else in society, and it's not just about > writing checks

So clearly this isn't just a philanthropic effort - it's a political machine with real influence.

More:

[http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2012751169_gatesmonsa...](http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2012751169_gatesmonsanto29m.html)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie- haimson/post_1315_b_788...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie- haimson/post_1315_b_788994.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> maybe Microsoft needs to revamp their marketing efforts. They have some great things happening in the innovation space (for example [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/technology/microsoft- renew...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/technology/microsoft-renews- relevance-with-machine-learning-technology.html?_r=0))

<comment><USER17> They ought to revamp their marketing efforts from square one, starting with figuring out who their customers are and what products those customers will want to purchase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> For the PC world, I'm happy with a 13" ultrabook running Windows 7 (Asus Zenbook UX31A).

At least I can get work done on it from the recliner and plug it in to an external 24" monitor and keyboard for more serious work.

In my opinion the greatest thing about Windows 7 (other than general stability and being less annoying than Vista) is its window key + arrow hot keys to move application windows around super fast on multi-monitor setups. (and to do exact right/left splits on single monitors)

There is nothing appealing to me about Windows RT/Surface or Windows 8 for laptop/desktop, they both look like they will just get in the way of creating or working on anything.

<comment><USER45> >In my opinion the greatest thing about Windows 7 (other than general stability and being less annoying than Vista) is its window key + arrow hot keys to move application windows around super fast on multi-monitor setups. (and to do exact right/left splits on single monitors)

As an Xmonad user I am simultaneously aghast and amused.

Also, this is available on Mac OS X and I use a utility to make available the same behavior.

<comment><USER44> I was actually considering adding "sad but true" to the end of that line... because... it is.

=)

Also what app do you have to use in Mac OS X for sane window management? One thing that bugged me about giving a 15" MBP a chance was how "maximizing" windows doesn't actually maximize them and that sort of thing. I guess I thought window management was supposed to be built into the OS out of the box.

<comment><USER46> Apple UI paradigm is different to that of Windows. The windows of Windows are application based, while the windows of the Macintosh system are document based, hence the seeming "lack" a screen maximisation.

<comment><USER47> I don't get the "document based" label - in my opinion it's misnomer. It's anything BUT "document based" when you are working on a photoshop document and behind its window you see your finder, your desktop icons, your desktop background, your browser and so on. How is it that a "document based" UI philosophy?

<comment><USER48> There is no application window. Instead, each application shows one window for each document, plus tool palettes, etc in their own window. The application would take over the global menu bar when active.

This is in contrast to Windows 3, which had the "multiple document interface", in which each application had its own single window, with the application's main menu under the title bar, and containing a sub-window for each open document and tool palette.

There are pros and cons for each design. The Mac's document-based style is aimed at making it easier to work with several apps at once. This sort of drifted away with the modern one-window Apple apps. Now they even go fullscreen, which has been a decent way to use Microsoft MDI apps since the 16-bit days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't windows RT is for ARM cpu? MSFT just does not bother to port desktop mode to ARM chips. Two possible reasons for not porting desktop mode are:

1.x86 and arm architecture are different and it is not easy to port. 2.No existing desktop application for ARM.

Windows RT seems to be windows 8's partial port for ARM chips as I understand.

<comment><USER49> Windows RT has the desktop -- with the same task bar as Windows 7, littered with icons as it's always been back to Windows 95 if you so choose, plus the familiar shell apps like Explorer and Task Manager. All the Microsoft Office apps that come bundled with Surface also run in "desktop mode" -- they're not Metro apps at all.

The only difference between Windows RT and Windows 8 is that the only sanctioned way to install software on Windows RT is from the Windows Store, where all apps run on both CPU architectures.

<comment><USER50> Re: "...is from the Windows Store, where all apps run on both CPU architectures."

From the OP quoted article:

"While Windows 8 and Windows RT can both run so-called "Modern" apps (formerly known as "Metro" apps) designed for touch-sensitive screens, even those apps must be converted, or ported, to Windows RT, and not all Modern apps appearing in the Windows app store have been ported over, compounding compatibility issues."

<comment><USER51> If you write an HTML/JS, it will always run on all architectures.

If you write a .NET/XAML app, by default it will be compiled to a CPU neutral IL that runs on all architectures (you can disable this and target a specific CPU architecture).

If you write a C++/XAML app, by default Visual Studio will compile different versions of the app for each architecture.

For the vast majority of Win8 apps, "converting" to ARM is just a cross- compile. It is only when you are doing very specialized things that you actually need to worry about the CPU architecture your app will be running on.

<comment><USER37> Does that mean if there's an open source application you like, all you have to do to get it on your Surface is open the source code in the latest edition of Visual Studio, recompile it, transfer the files to your Surface, and you will be able to install and run it?

<comment><USER52> Unfortunately no because chances are this open source code is using some parts of the Win32 API that are not supported by WinRT, so you would have to replace the invalid API calls by the new (probably asynchronous) ones... Maybe even completely rewrite the GUI if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Yes, sure, it is confusing for the user. But that is the whole point. Microsoft trying to use the Windows brand to get into the mobile market. This is the only advantage they can possibly have over Android and iOS

</comment><comment><USER54> Perhaps the real truth is that Microsoft always needs a version 1.0, before they get things right with version 2?

<comment><USER55> The problem is that whereas previously people would just stick with the 2.0 of Microsoft's previous generation; they are now switching to a competitors 1.0 that was better thought out than Microsoft's offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> _There is a great deal of ruin in a nation_. -- Adam Smith.

</comment><comment><USER57> Confusion OS.

</comment><comment><USER58> Os are becoming less relevant for "most" of uses , with cloud services ,and apps running on the browsers. Os will always be relevant for software requiring intensive computation ( games , complexe CAD programs , etc ... ). So Microsoft might lose some relevance , it is normal. Microsoft has also a branding problem regarding public products.But is doing very well in Enterprise products.

<comment><USER27> I see the consumer market as a "lower-end" enterprise market, or the enterprise market as a "higher-end consumer market", just like I see the server chips market as a higher-end consumer market.

The problem is that when you lose the "lower-end" market, it's only a matter of time before you lose the "higher-end" market, too (5-10 years), according to Innovator's Dilemma.

I know it's not a perfect analogy because it's two companies instead of one, but Nokia losing the leadership in the "consumer smartphones" market, made it even more obvious that RIM will lose its leadership in the enterprise market, too, but with a several years of delay, because the enterprise world moves more slowly.</comment></comment>


Where can I find porn APIs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-porn-APIs <comment><USER2> I upvoted because I thought it was a discussion of how to obtain porn via APIs.

It's not. It's about how to block it. So I take my upvote back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I was looking for the other way: services that provide APIs to connect with videos, categories, etc.</comment></comment>


Investigating ray tracing, the next big thing in gaming graphics - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/135788-investigating-ray-tracing-the-next-big-thing-in-gaming-graphics <comment><USER2> Oh ray tracing, the nuclear fusion of computer graphics. It's coming! It's amazing! Meanwhile the industry still keeps burning coal.

For applications that deal in perfect lighting, yes it's probably a useful technique that would benefit from hardware support. But where is the real- world benefit for the rest of us? For most consumers, lighting provides about 2% of a game's value and 0% of everything else.

<comment><USER3> I for one, believe it would considerably simplify the implementation of graphics engines. To make rasterization look good you have to do a lot of optimizations and go trough a very long pipeline. You don't have this problem with ray-tracing. Plus the same base technique (ray-tracing) can be used for a lot of problems in graphics: visibility checking, lighting, reflections, diffraction, motion blur, ...

<comment><USER2> I've heard as much too. It'd be interesting to see today's best raster effort put against the same game assets in a ray-traced engine with a real-world game going on.

Anything can look good when you've got 10 minutes and 500 processors. I want to see what happens in 16ms. :)

<comment><USER4> Since you're concerned with frametimes, let's also add in the asset production pipeline and effort. As it's been mentioned, cutting edge rasterizing consists of lengthy pipeline for every single effect imaginable(also sometimes to the graphics assets, mind you) while raytracing does all that almost by default(soft shadows and global illumination are problematic for example, path tracing fixes this but is some two orders of magnitude slower).

The real problem with raytracing is that it's asymptotic computational complexity is far worse when you count scene objects. To compensate this you either lower the resolution or lower the lifetime of a ray(how many bounces it's allowed to make).

<comment><USER2> Very interesting. Thank you for the additional detail!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ray-tracing as it currently stands will never dominate computer graphics, because it is essentially brute force. Progress is being made in reconstructing a scene out of a very noisy, low sampling rate [1], which is a much better indication of the future direction of raytracing, where a series of advanced prediction and reconstruction algorithms are used to efficiently render scenes, rather than simply throwing more hardware at the problem.

[1] [http://www.tml.tkk.fi/~samuli/publications/lehtinen2012siggr...](http://www.tml.tkk.fi/~samuli/publications/lehtinen2012siggraph_paper.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I've only looked at the images in the PDF, and not the text, but could a similar technique be applied to image demosaicing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the best real-time raytracers around is Brigade 2: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF2c1uHiYyY> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdw1HvzKt1M>

It could really use a 3rd GTX580 to run the reconstruction filter that blackhole linked. But, it's getting better at a steady rate.

Meanwhile, the voxel cone tracing technique mentioned in the article (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAsg_xNzhcQ>) is a great hybrid. Rasterizers are great at primary visibility, but are terrible when the algorithm needs non-local information. By supplementing the rasterizer with a fast-but-blurry ray-tracer, you get most of the benefit of both techniques.

</comment><comment><USER8> Increased use of ray tracing effects in games? Sign me up!

Fully ray-traced game engines? Oh no not again. Damn you Nintendo for starting this nonsense with those faked Project Reality demos...

Graphics engines have more in common with street magic than simulation in that the best ones use just enough physics and mathematics to get the job done and not a bit more. Wake me up when John Carmack says ray-tracing is the next big thing.

That said, ray-tracing has all sorts of unconventional uses outside of strict computer graphics i.e.:

<http://www.tomsarazac.com/tom/Bicycles/headlight-tracer.html>

<comment><USER9> John Carmack has said a number of times that it is not the next thing, but it is the thing after next (or the thing after).

The benefits of ray tracing come in precisely because it is more like simulation than street magic. Once you get to sufficient complexity, it is too hard to maintain an illusion. The truth is more consistent than an elaborate lie.

We are not yet close to that level of complexity. We will be eventually. Anyone putting a date on that time before it arrives is almost certainly going to be wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is exciting. Indeed, it has been "just a few years away" for a few decades now but at some point I'm sure it will show up.

I'm sure I'm not the only one on HN who has written a ray tracer, and once you have it's easy to extend it to something like Metropolis light transport or photon mapping. I remember when my code first worked (without error) how amazed I was that such a small amount of programming can achieve such realistic light simulations!

A website known as OMPF used to be about the only forum online for people interested in ray tracing and global illumination. For some reason, it seems as though it has gone down :(

</comment><comment><USER11> I would like to see somebody take consumer gear and matrix it to the point where it supports real-time fully photorealistic ray-tracing.

Yes, it would be crazy expensive. Yes, it would be impractical. But it would show that a) it is possible to create without inventing anything new, and b) it costs $X dollars. Leave Moore to figure out the rest.

The industry could use a benchmark to tell us just how far away this is and a model of how to get there without creating a billion-core CPU.

Also, it seems like this would be something that would be amenable to a FPGA system. If so, it might be a lot closer than we realize. Don't know.

<comment><USER12> Uh, you mean like this ? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blfxI1cVOzU>

Intel was pushing their Larrabee architecture as the answer for a while.

<comment><USER11> Actually no. I've looked at a couple of these videos, and all they show is that current technology can be pushed to somewhat approximate realtime ray- tracing. Here's another example of that: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbokPe4_-mY&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbokPe4_-mY&feature=related)

So I'll spec it out. HD video, 30fps, editable with in-world physics.

Don't see anything off-the-shelf that's close to that today. My question was if it were possible to hack something together. If so, what did the configuration/cost look like.

Perhaps the answer right now is "no". That's cool. Just wondering.

<comment><USER12> It is certainly possible to hack something together, the national labs have done this for a while using off the shelf parts to create a 'video wall' that allows them to visualize their simulations. Taking the linked example and applying that technique would suggest you could use somewhere between 12 and 16 'copies' of their setup driving each driving a tile of your HD display.

'in world physics' is well managed by things like the PhysX engine that nVidia sells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find it strange that people talk about ray tracing as if it is _the solution_ when in fact it's not even the best of the approximations to the rendering equation that we have. For example caustics can't be adequately represented with ray tracing.

Photon mapping, radiosity, etc can give much closer to photorealistic results.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it OK to put "share your comments on HN thread" in your blog post? - <AUTHOR> Before I begin, I want to be clear I'm not trying to blame anyone and just asking because I am really curious how HN policy works.
As an avid HN reader, I sometimes come across blog posts that link to the HN thread. They say something along the lines of "Discuss this on HN", etc. Here's an example that's on the front page right now: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-were-building-a-business-to-last/ (Again, I'm not blaming anyone, and I think these guys deserve to be on the front page)
I know that HN has a voting ring algorithm that penalizes direct links (For example, it's a common knowledge that when you share something on HN you should never share the HN link directly), and I'm sure these guys know what they're doing (and apparently so, since it's on the front page, they must be doing something right).
So, I'm curious, is it OK to link to a HN thread from a blog post? <comment><USER2> It's not a voting ring; the blog maintainer just doesn't want to host comments on their site. I don't see why that should be penalized.

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't know that HN penalizes posts that people direct-link.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it does?

Isn't that exactly OP's point: HN doesn't penalise, therefore they get a boost on HN by passing on their own traffic (the boost leads to more traffic for them, ...) and is that 'OK'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unless HN was scraping the blog post, how would they know the blog post has a direct link to the HN post?

The only thing I can think of, is that HN looks at the referer. If the referer is from the same domain as the HN post url submitted, perhaps they flag that.

<comment><USER6> The Origin headers I'd think. Right? From that if all the users commenting are from the same Origin that might look fishy.</comment></comment>


Lawsuit brings $289M verdict against maker of Roundup weed killer - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/lawsuit-brings-289-million-verdict-against-maker-of-roundup-weed-killer/ <comment> k-ian The chemical in question is glyphosphate, which is quite controversial. Regulatory agencies have argued that it's generally safe as an herbicide but the jury here has decided otherwise.

The fact that Monsanto (roundup maker) is incredibly unpopular doesn't help their case either...

<comment><USER2> This kind of fact isn't really well suited for a jury to try. There should be some other mechanism for civil suits. 12 laypeople cannot be a good judge of whether the latest Intel CPU violates an AMD patent or whether this or that medical literature is more compelling. They will just ascertain the theatrical skill of expert witnesses.</comment></comment>


Beat Detection on the Arduino - <AUTHOR> http://dpeckett.com/beat-detection-on-the-arduino <comment><USER2> There's a lot of not-actually-correct content on this article.

<comment><USER3> Could you possibly expand upon your comment for those of us who don't spot the wrongness right away?

Otherwise, what was the point of posting your comment?

<comment><USER2> The biggest howler I found before I stopped reading was: "There exists another algorithm known as the Discrete Fourier Transform which essentially implements a single bin of the Fourier transform. I did experiments using the optimised Goertzel algorithm on the Arduino, "

It reads like the guy did some googling, found some blogs and / or wiki pages, and just banged together enough of what he found until he got an effect he wanted.

(Also I'm not familiar with the cpu inside the arduino, but his code is using floats, and I'm a little skeptical that anything with hardware floats is too slow to do a real time small-ish DFT, especially since he appears to only be sampling at 5k )

<comment><USER4> avr-gcc libc has an implementation of floating point math but it's not accelerated at all by the AVR hardware (i.e. there is no FPU). Most Arduino boards (the Uno) are 16mhz with only 2kb of memory, so running a full FFT is possible but quite tricky and limited.

For folks that like embedded stuff and audio, check out a Cortex M4-based board like the Teensy 3.1. It has faster floating point, much more speed and memory, and some basic DSP functions like FFT, etc. built in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you politely refuse to disclose previous salary information? - <AUTHOR>

In a recent interview, I was asked both how much I made at my last job and what my living costs were. I know not to respond to these things, but this was on a third interview after the interviewer had previously mentioned a couple times that the employees of this company don't care about how much money they get paid.
I ended up revealing both of these things because I felt like I would seem greedy if I didn't. I know this is irrational, but I couldn't think of a clever or polite way to move past the issue.
Does anyone have any advice for handling this type of situation? <comment><USER2> You say, "It's my assumption you have a range of pay you're willing to pay for this position. I'm very interested in working here so this isn't _all_ about the money, but I know what I'm worth and I'd like you to make an offer to see if we're on the same page."

So this assumes:

1\. You researched the company, the position, and maybe know other people in the company and roughly what they make. 2\. You researched your skillset, your experience, and have a rough idea of what you're worth. 3\. You've adjusted for location, whether you're FT or contractor, medical, dental, time off, holidays, any bonus structure, and stock (not options!). 4\. You're not making an emotional decision because you're not happy in your current position or unemployed and desperate (HR folk will eat you for lunch).

Be prepared, do your homework, and be confident about your value to the company and be firm about it.

The bottom-line, never give them any salary information. This is like going to a car dealer and saying, "I'll pay whatever you want and take nothing on my trade."

But always always be polite, deferential, and calm.

</comment><comment><USER3> >> "the employees of this company don't care about how much money they get paid"

More for you, then!

Seriously though, that's always an uncomfortable question when it comes up.

Before accepting my current job, I was interviewing at another place. When asked, I kept my current salary private and was honest about my reasons: "I'd rather not disclose that, because it puts me in a bad situation when it comes to salary negotiation."

They responded with something along the lines of "Once an offer goes out, we don't negotiate beyond that. We try to pay employees what they're worth and we think we do a very good job of making that evaluation before hiring into our team."

Note that what they said seems like they gave me an incentive to offer a number. But read a little more closely and note that this really isn't the case.

I reminded the HR rep that the job listing had a salary range posted, and if any offer was outside of the "very high end" of the range, then I would likely to decline. Once a company makes a decision to hire you, they _want_ you. If they aren't willing to negotiate a salary beyond an initial offer, then good luck negotiating a raise.

In my case, I had 2 more interviews (one via phone, one in person) before I decided that the company wasn't a good fit.

<comment><USER4> I did one more than that. I lied.

I'm not saying that this works all the time or that it's ethical, but sometimes it can result in a significant pay rise.

<comment><USER5> It's not really any less ethical than trying to strongarm a potential new hire into a salary 10-15k lower than it would have been otherwise, especially when they're likely creating hundreds of thousands in value annually for the company.

<comment><USER6> I don't think anyone was implying that they are being "more ethical" or "less ethical" than their counterpart in a negotiation. Many people care about behaving ethically, even when dealing with unethical people on the other side of the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tell them you earn $300k and have a $3M mortgage, and another offer.

Edit: Seriously though tell them it is none of their business and they should make an offer. If pushed then give them an amount that is at the very top end of your expectation. So if you are happy with $100k and wow for $120k then say you earning $140k and this just about covers your cost of living. If they ask how on earth you need $140k to live tell them that it is "for family reasons" and leave it at that.

If you already have given the number, just tell them you are finishing up an interview this week with another company. Then tell them you had an offer for $X. Then see if they increase their offer.

</comment><comment><USER8> > How do you politely refuse to disclose previous salary information?

Say you're under a salary NDA?

Although this mightn't be the best answer to the question, answering with a figure, made up or not, might help you in some way.

> Living costs

Well this is none of there business and is a signal of sorts. But that said it's an intriguing question if they are not in the 'stay far away' category.

Firstly the interviewer might just be a nerd with bad people skills/inexperience in interviewing (Assuming you're in IT)

Secondly maybe the company is very serious about work life balance rather than hard cash.

I'd be asking why they want to know living costs and why as an employee it's important for them to know. Then politely declining or continuing depending on how you feel after a conversation.

But this is an out there question you can't prepare for, next time it'll be something else weird. Everything is easy in hindsight.

The salary question is more common.

</comment><comment><USER9> I awkwardly said "I would prefer not to disclose that."

I later (after I joined) asked the recruiter about it and she told me that sent a message to her that I was either overpaid or underpaid. The offer (after some negotiation) came in 20k higher than my previous salary.

</comment><comment><USER10> _" In a recent interview, I was asked both how much I made at my last job and what my living costs were. I know not to respond to these things, but this was on a third interview after the interviewer had previously mentioned a couple times that the employees of this company don't care about how much money they get paid."_

Snarky responses:

"Are you trying to determine what is the _most_ you can pay me without me feeling insulted?"

"I hear you bro. I probably feel the same way about money as the company founders. Unless of course, the founders are trying to make as little money as possible."

"That's great to hear. You should be able to pay me more with all the money the other employees didn't want."

</comment><comment><USER11> I use one of two responses depending on where in the interview process I am.

1) Early in the interview process I respond with: "I'm sure we'll find a number that works for both of us, but for now, I want to make sure it's a good fit."[1]

2) If it is during a final round or they are offering the job, I like to turn the question on the interviewer and ask: "What is the salary range you have in mind for this position?"

1\. [http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/on-refusing-to- dis...](http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/on-refusing-to-disclose- your-salary-in-a-job-interview/?_r=0)

<comment><USER12> Why are employers (generally) so inflexible with their salaried offers? I've been offered jobs where I really wanted to work, and they wanted me. They offered me 60% of my market value because that was all that was in the budget. If they had let me take Fridays off (for my own consulting work), I would have been fine with this, and they would have been ahead (paying 60% for 80% of my time).

It's such bullshit. Hiring sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've never been asked what my living expenses are. I would have been flustered by that question as well, honestly, since it's not up to a company to try to somehow match my living expenses with their pay (unless you live in Japan as a salaryman, of course. patio11 wrote a very enlightening article about that, well worth a read to see the difference in cultures).

Anyway, to answer the question. I have been asked many times what my salary was at my last company. I often reply with simply what I want and a range I will accept. "I received a number of raises and bonuses but I was at about $x. I will accept a range from you of $x to $x + y-k, depending on your benefits." I find the confidence wins over 9 out of 10 times. Additionally, I always have this conversation very early on. At this point I will ask in an initial conversation if we are on the same salary page, "Your company sounds interesting but because I am a <Senior, or whatever> level engineer I want to make sure we are on the same compensation page. I am currently at $x and I am looking for $x - $x + yk to move. What are you looking to pay for someone with my skill set?"

Edit: I see someone really disagrees with certain viewpoints on this question. Would the down-voter like to share why they are down-voting?

<comment><USER14> I didn't downvote, but your formulas don't make any sense. What is y? What is k? Why are they multiplied together (or subtracted?)? Isn't x - x + yk simply yk?

Also more substantively, if you are already making $x, why would you volunteer that you'll accept $x to move?

<comment><USER13> I see I should be clearer on that formula, you are absolutely right. What I meant was a range of $x to $x + $y(thousand) more. Such that I would take $100,000 to $110,000 depending on other factors such as benefits.

I also should have been clearer in stating that I generally will pick the initial "$x" value of the range by deciding what I want. However, if asked, I will often state this is where I am at my current position, even if it is not my actual salary. I do not often share what my actual salary is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At this point in my career I start all head-hunter conversations with "I work 100% remote as a W2 employee (not contractor) with full benefits. I travel 1 - 2 weeks a year, work 40 hours a week, and make $x. If you can meet or beat that let's keep talking, otherwise thanks for your time."

It keeps the conversation short which is nice for both me and the recruiter. And if they have something interesting to say then I know it's worth my time.

<comment> wes-k It's taken me a while to learn this direct, cut to the chase, approach when it comes to recruiters. Huge time saver!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They want to set your old salary as the reference point for your new salary. If you're moving laterally, this isn't awful, but it is if you're looking to move up.

A better anchor (both closer to market and better for you) is to research the median salaries for that type of position in the area. Many job sites (I most recently used Glassdoor for this) give these numbers. It's not perfect, but it's a better starting point.

The actual words I would use are "Well, the median salary for [position] in [City] is $[dollars]. I'm looking for something that pays somewhere in that ballpark." If there are reasons you think you should be paid more than the median (you're very well qualified, the company tends to pay above median, etc), I would wait until after the offer is made, when you're in a stronger position.

</comment><comment><USER17> Are most of their employees younger?

"Disclosing that information could only result in neutral or negative outcomes for me. It is not logical for me to behave in such a manner. Do you generally hire people that make illogical decisions?"

If they're asking you for detailed salary information like that the answer to the above question is going to be yes regardless of what they say. Don't accept that kind of abuse of information asymmetry. If they behave that way during the hiring process, imagine how they will behave once you have committed to the job. Find a better place to work IMO.

The government publishes transparent salary information for over 800 types of jobs, segmented by state. [http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm](http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm)

</comment><comment><USER18> One thing you should mention is that while salary isnt your only incentive, not enough salary is a massive disincentive. You may not be taking the job for the money, of course you're taking it because its an awesome company, with awesome people and you love the problem they're working on, however, no matter how amazing it is, if you dont get paid enough, its not worth it.

Its not their job to tell you how much you can live on, they can make an offer, which should ALWAYS be pushed back upon with a counter offer until you come to an arrangement. Also, golden rule in negotiation, is be prepared to walk away, otherwise, you lose.

As Phamilton says, just say "I'd prefer not to disclose that." and perhaps add, "I will take any offer under serious consideration."

</comment><comment><USER19> "I appreciate the question, but I do not feel that my previous salary nor my living expenses impact my ability to perform my duties at this company. Now, what do you feel that this position is worth to this company?"

</comment><comment><USER20> Can I suggest a different approach? Instead of dodging the question, put yourself in a position that you're happy to answer. "My last contract gig paid $100/hr. That's $200k yearly on an annual basis."

</comment><comment><USER21> There's no need to offer a huge explanation straight away. Just say 'oh I'm looking for $X' and smile. Most of the time people don't push it further.

If they ask for more info, just repeat & say 'well I'd like it to be noted that for this position I'd be looking for $x'

It can feel really awkward but remember it's equally awkward for the person asking your salary. Try & keep it light hearted with short answers, you only only have to be slightly more persistent than they are to keep the number secret.

</comment><comment> wes-k You should also understand that the recruiter or hiring manager knows exactly why they ask that. It's not like it is a secret that answering it gives them an excuse to pay you less.

<comment><USER22> It's a way to avoid offering more than the bare minimum it takes to get you to take the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A simple "Sorry - I cannot disclose due to contract signed" should fix the issue. There isn't much the company or recruiter can say beyond this.

Think of a salary negotiation as an Enterprise Sale. Always force the other side to offer a number first and try and try and delay this until they see value in your service (i.e. after the interviews)

</comment><comment><USER24> Tell "it's confidential according to the contract I've signed with my previous employer".

As a compromise - tell: "it's in the ballpark between A and B", where A was your actual salary and your desired salary is in between A and B.

<comment><USER23> I would rather not give a range. Anytime you give a range for a quote (even though this is not a quote, it kind of is), the person on the other side will go with the lower value, rendering your higher value meaningless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've seen the living cost question a few times today here on HN, and I've never seen that before. Is this a thing these days or is it specific to the startup culture perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER26> Nick Corcodilos of Ask the Headhunter has good things to say about this, along with a lot of other stellar advice: [http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/](http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/)

<comment><USER27> Nick should headhunt someone to fix that site up a bit. Awful.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, it is. On the other hand, visitors who really need what he's saying will wade through it.</comment></comment></comment>


HN Summary - <AUTHOR> http://hnsummary.com/

<comment><USER2> _Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News_

What's the algorithm for what makes it to this site? Or is it some random guy's editorial discretion?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, what is the algorithm?

What would be cool is if you implemented something like Netflix, you know like a recommendation engine. Something that bases of your tastes and preferences and also uses the preferences of those users that have similar tastes as you do. Base on that you can recommend what's "worth reading." :)

<comment><USER4> And you can figure out what people have read using the (soon to be closed by Mozilla) CSS history hack. You can easily index every story on HN by pinging and scraping newest every 20 or minutes. Don't worry they wont block you ;)

<comment><USER5> The problem when indexing isn't getting the _new_ content; it is getting the ~1,240,000 older posts that aren't on newest anymore.

<comment><USER4> You can grab that from searchyc.com, or just ignore it. You can get reasonable recommendations based on the latest articles. This would not be a general purpose recommendation engine, so you would actually need much less data. Attempting to analyze 1 million+ articles seems like overkill in this case. You could just scrape for a week. If you are building this I actually have several months worth of articles indexed, and would be happy to provide the db dump of 80,000+ articles.

I'm actually thinking about hacking this up this weekend as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not being facetious, just trying to find out if this site is for me: all the summarized articles so far have zero technical content (ie stuff on Python, Javascript, memcached, hardcore bit-on-bit action, etc). Is this intentional and indicative of hnsummary's content in the future?

Now this is me being facetious: should the answer to the above be yes, I find both hnsummary's name and its tagline of "Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News" to be presumptuous at best, misleading and condescending at worst.

</comment><comment><USER7> Any plans/desire to do a daily audio podcast of these, release by ~5pm EST so people can listen to it on their drive home?

I have some ideas for this, @covercash on twitter if you're interested in chatting.

<comment><USER8> I'll contact you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can you redirect the comment link for each summary to comments over here?

<comment><USER8> I include a link in each summary back to the HN comments for the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You should disclose what you consider to be "worth reading". Hopefully you have a bias that is different then the front page, otherwise it's really no different than that.

<comment><USER11> On the other hand, he is contributing both a news filter and summaries. Perhaps there is value in the summaries, even if the filter mirrored the front page directly (sort of like Slashdot?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool. Can we get the story on this? Is it done by a human, e.g. will it stop working for a week while said editor is on vacation? Is it auto-generated by vote count? Details please.

[edit] I have to assume it's an editorial thing, since the summaries couldn't be auto-selected like that, I don't think.

[edit 2] dschobel beat me to the question.

<comment><USER8> Yes human. I summarize articles I find most interesting and would be of interest to the HN community as a whole. As long as I'm up-voted then I'll keep doing it.

<comment><USER13> Any plans to summarize or highlight the comments you find most interesting?

<comment><USER8> I've thought about that. If I see interesting comments I may work it into the summary with a citation. My first choice would be to direct people back to HN for the article discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News_

Isn't that the point of upvoting?

<comment><USER15> How so? Why would the most popular stuff always be the stuff worth reading? That's certainly not true for most media. Do you suppose that the Billboard Top 100 is the music most worth listening to?

Not saying that having an editor pick them out is necessarily going to do a better job, but there's certainly room to do a better job.

<comment><USER2> I think in a relatively niche community where the readership submits the content and then determines what's popular, ranking probably correlates better with quality vs billboard or other mass media where the relationship is strictly producer -> consumer. That's just my intuition though.

<comment><USER15> Well, I agree, of course, it's hard to say that we don't do better than Billboard. That was a little bit of hyperbole. But consider: People upvote things for a zillion reasons.

Because it made them chuckle. Because they agree with it. Because it shoots down another submission they really disagree with. Because the post wasn't very good but it had a link and the link was really good. Because the author came and posted in the comment thread and said something interesting about it. Because their buddy posted it. Because a minor HN celebrity posted it. Because it's all about banana-flavored threadsafe data structures in Erlang and they did their Ph.D. thesis on banana-flavored data structures and nobody ever posts about them anymore.

Most of those barely correlate to what we mean when we say "quality" at all. The people who upvote only things that are "high quality" probably upvote much less, in fact, than people who upvote for other reasons. So that's why I would not expect upvotes to correlate with quality.

<comment><USER16> At the moment, everyone upvotes anything containing the word 'iPad'. So boring. I think editorial control usually works far better than voting up/down by users. Democracy absolutely sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is an awesome idea and could be awesomer if turned into a full news website instead of just a blog, with multiple editorials and pictures and shit.

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe at some point you should allow users to write their own reviews so that your admins aren't stuck writing them all the time? Maybe some sort of social networking utility?

</comment><comment><USER19> I just want to say thank you.

</comment><comment><USER20> Damn recursion.</comment>


Remote Pair Programming Resources - <AUTHOR> http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Remote-Pair-Programming-Resource.html&Itemid=29

<comment><USER2> Interesting. All the tool he mentions are fairly separate. Makes me think you could build a startup around "remote pair programming". Something like the best parts of

VNC + Etherpad/TextMate + Basecamp + Github + Trac

in a real-time sort of way</comment>


Managing Scrum - 4 teams - <AUTHOR>

You need to manage scrum with 4 teams of 4-6 people.
These teams are geographically distributed so sticky notes are not an option.
All 4 teams are generally working on the same product, however, they will be focused on separate  parts of a larger system. At times tasks will span teams.
What tool would you use for managing the backlog and the sprint backlog? <comment><USER2> Check if seenowdo will work for you. <https://seenowdo.com/></comment>


Gamer died during live-streamed attempt to play 'World of Tanks' for 24 hours - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/23/va-man-died-during-marathon-attempt-to-play-video-game-for-24-hours/ <comment><USER2> Tragic, but I wish the article were more educational about this. Yes, _don 't sit down for 24 hours straight_, I know. I just wish the article stated the cause of death - what happened exactly? Was it a pulmonary embolism? Could it have been something else? Perhaps dehydration leading to cardiac arrhythmia?

I'd like to be focused in taking preventative measures.</comment>


Leaked image suggests Amazon may be making an Alexa Camera - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/leaked-image-suggests-amazon-may-be-making-an-alexa-camera/ <comment><AUTHOR> Juat don't ask it to open the pod bay doors...</comment>


Jeff Bridges.com - Latest Update (his site has a really bizarre design) - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffbridges.com/latestaug10a.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder if Why the Lucky Stiff designed it!

</comment><comment><USER3> too much work to read... if everything was scaled smaller I might bother to actually try

<comment><USER4> Really? I found it a pleasure.</comment></comment>


What's Facebook Releasing Next Week? Not Project Spartan. - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/facebook-ipad-spartan/

<comment><USER2> Let`s step up the war of releases between Facebook, Google et al. the only winner is the consumer!</comment>


Pyleus: An Open-source Framework for Building Storm Topologies in Pure Python - <AUTHOR> http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2014/10/introducing-pyleus.html

<comment><USER2> Really cool -- we've been working on a similar framework at Parse.ly called streamparse:

[https://github.com/Parsely/streamparse](https://github.com/Parsely/streamparse)

[http://blog.parsely.com/post/1172/streamparse/](http://blog.parsely.com/post/1172/streamparse/)

Will really look forward to evaluating this and seeing how the frameworks compare, and perhaps some way to collaborate across the projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> streamparse appeared after we had put some development into Pyleus and started using it a bit at Yelp.

Future collaboration would be excellent—there's a lot of room for improvement in Storm's support for other languages via its shell components and hopefully our projects can contribute to that.

<comment><USER2> Agree. Also want to plug my friend Dan Blanchard's IO::Storm, which is a nice binding for Perl!

[https://github.com/dan-blanchard/io-storm](https://github.com/dan- blanchard/io-storm)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the plug!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Worth mentioning: Petrel, one of the first frameworks to appear ( [https://github.com/AirSage/Petrel](https://github.com/AirSage/Petrel) ). Worked well for us, few tricks inside, but importantly our code was concise and clear</comment>


Why New Jersey's Unemployment Insurance System Uses 60 Y/O Programming Language - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/new-jersey-unemployment-cobol-coronavirus.html <comment><USER2> The "a 60 years old programming language" thing is such an odd opening given that you could also say that anything running C is "technology from the 1970s" using the same logic. It's a shame that following that statement, a significant chunk of the article seems to be spent countering the idea that it's and old, uncool language.

I wish more words had been given to why FL tried and failed to get something newer off the ground while MA succeeded. While the legacy system might work just fine, extending its lifetime might just be kicking the can further down the line, increasing maintenance costs and making transition an even riskier change along the way.</comment>


Sometimes, Beetles Make Toads Regret Their Meal Choice - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/science/bombardier-beetle-toad-vomit.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront <comment><USER2> Take a while and watch toads eat if you ever get the chance. They're absolutely voracious. When I lived in the south, they used to hang out on my front porch, eating all kinds of bugs attracted by the light. I once saw a toad try to eat a slightly smaller toad. If it's smaller than them and it moves, they'll try to eat it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm totally convinced that if toads were larger, they'd eat us too. Frogs are pretty tough as well.

 _The hairy frog is also notable in possessing retractable "claws" (though unlike true claws, they are made of bone, not keratin), which it may project through the skin, apparently by intentionally breaking the bones of the toe.[1] In addition, the researchers found a small bony nodule nestled in the tissue just beyond the frog's fingertip. When sheathed, each claw is anchored to the nodule with tough strands of collagen, but, as Gerald Durrell[4] discovered firsthand, when the frog is grabbed or attacked, the frog breaks the nodule connection and forces its sharpened bones through the skin._

Breaking its own bones to make a weapon? Check.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In hindsight, it's quite a brilliant tactic. Wait to be swallowed, then fire all you got into the predator's insides.

</comment><comment><USER4> "After the beetles were swallowed, a small explosion could be heard inside each toad, indicating that the insects were firing their defenses."

To write that line in the NYT and not accompany it with a waveform in 2018 on the web is a little disappointing. Perhaps the prose is more poignant than the practice.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I was also expecting an audio recording of the small explosion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's hope oysters won't evolve that!</comment>