Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/25/wait-what-mobile-browser-traffic-is-2x-bigger-than-app-traffic-and-growing-faster/ <comment><USER2> What the report is based on: a median value selected from the traffic to 42 of the top US websites (it ignores those which don't have both and app and a website) from data provided by Comscore.

The term "traffic" is never defined. Web requests? Quantity of data transferred? Both of those would have significantly shapes depending on whether the client was a browser or an app.

It's also interesting to note that the top 10 "Browser Reach Advantage" websites are basically text based websites - news sites, wikipedia and blogs.

Things I learned from the report: the top website (with 207.0x Browser Reach Advantage) Blogger has an app.

<comment><USER3> The y-axis is labeled "Unique Visitors".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The difference between web and app is trust.

A website has write access to my screen, my speakers and my internet connection. Plus limited read access. To keyboard, mouse, device orientation etc. Other rights can be granted (location, cookies etc). It can do all this only as long as it's "open".

An app usually has read/write access to large parts of my device. The whole sd-card, raw internet access, the camera, the microphone, ask me for money etc. And it can keep doing so even when it's "closed".

We will see the two converge. Websites will have more rights they can ask for. Apps will be better to tame.

But trust will keep being the differentiator and they will keep co-existing. There is friendship and there is marriage. Both have their use case.

<comment><USER5> That is such a nerdy perspective, totally stuck in the filter bubble.

I don't think that explains the difference at all. I think it's about convenience. People don't want to use apps for the diverse things they do on the web all the time. Apps may be convenient if you use them frequently (and then only marginally, especially with improving speeds and more people paying attention to making websites usable on phones), but if you use something not so often?

<comment><USER6> poeple especially don't need apps of 150mb+ each, and premium phones come with limited storage forcing costly upgrades on top of an hefty price.

the only competitive advantage for apps is push notifications, and the sooner browsers and phones can build that into a standard the better (including opening the right page when clicking on a specific service notification)

<comment><USER7> The other thing is privacy. I don't want to give every service a "full access" into my phone. At least I have a feeling, that my privacy is in better hands, if I access services using up-to-date mobile browser (or Tinfoil for Facebook) instead of a native app running on my phone.

Looking at the ridiculous number of permissions different apps would require to run on my (Android) phone, using mobile site of the most of the services seems safer choice. Android 6.0 may change this with switchable permissions, tho.

<comment><USER8> I remember having switchable permissions since 4.3. Did something change in the meantime?

<comment><USER9> AppOps got canned since 4.4 in AOSP and are coming back in 6.0.

<comment><USER8> It went away in 4.4 but I have it again on 5.0. I had to use Xposed to get it to work on 4.4 but now it's on again by default. I see people complaining it's not present in 5.0, though. Strange...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For years it has been obvious that the web would beat apps in aggregate, but apps would have better engagement. If you wrap your website in an app using ionic and treat it like a standard site no one will use it. While soneon has noted trust (which is true) it is also fir convenience. The browser is a great app and can run many apps in parralel while quickly shifting between them, it is CONVENIENCE as mych as trust.

If your app does mot extensively make use of the hardware and can be run as a website, it has no business being an app. This is obvious, being proved now, and the app craze will pivot from shit-tier websites in iOS clothing to things that add real value and interface directly with the phones hardware because they need to provide security, access to a protocol, or leverage hatdware (accelerometer, camera, Bluetooth, etc)

</comment><comment><USER11> I believe that mobile browser will beat apps, like it did on desktop. Mobile browsers were unusable, sites were not mobile-friendly, devices were slow with tiny screens. Now those factors change and browsing websites on modern smartphone is much more usable. And it's likely that we will see shift from mobile apps to mobile websites in the near future.

<comment><USER12> >like it did on desktop

It's pretty great that this happened. I'm so sick of using these pesky desktop applications. Just remind me, which web apps can I use for the following?

-Audio production

-3D animation

-Video editing

-CAD design

-Writing/debugging software

<comment><USER13> Audio production: [https://soundation.com/](https://soundation.com/)

3D animation: [https://clara.io/](https://clara.io/)

Video Editing: [https://www.wevideo.com/](https://www.wevideo.com/)

CAD design: [https://www.tinkercad.com/](https://www.tinkercad.com/)

Writing/debugging software: [https://codenvy.com/](https://codenvy.com/)

Now of course I expect we'll here the "but it misses feature X". I'm sure that's true. Next, someone will point out that generally, 80% of people don't need feature X, and the fact that it is online means it is many times more accessible. We've seen this over and over again.

Remember when everyone thought web based _email_ couldn't possibly work for them because of feature Z? I'm sure that's still true, for a few people.

So can we skip that whole discussion?

But I don't know if the message we should get out of this is that the web wins, or than new ways of distributing functionality to more people cheaper wins.

<comment><USER12> Let's be clear - I was never suggesting the the web can't beat native. The op was stating that the days of native are behind us. It is strictly untrue.

> Remember when everyone thought web based email couldn't possibly work for > them because of feature Z?

No, I've always used web-based email clients. Did a software developer really say this?

<comment><USER14> Back in the early days of webmail, when IE6 was new and we had 28.8k modems, someone almost certainly said that. 20 years ago we used Eudora, PINE, Netscape's mail client, or (if you were really unfortunate) Outlook Express.

<comment><USER15> Pine -> Mutt -> Webmail for me. Those desktop clients were(are?) horrible. For iPhone/iPad I do like Inbox though.

<comment><USER16> POP was horrible, IMAP made things much better, but the web clients had already won.

A modern desktop client is much better than a modern webmail client when it's available. It's interesting that desktop clients have been continualy improving, while web clients have been continualy getting worse.

Anyway, both have their use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't it because the browser loads user interface and code all the time (sure, there's caching, but still), while apps only load data?

<comment><USER18> This year, browsers are implementing the Service Worker spec [0] which is a major improvement to the previous App Cache spec [1]. Both could be used to load UI (and all other static assets) when offline.

There are also numerous headers for describing TTL for downloaded assets, and APIs for offline storage (localStorage, indexedDB).

I think the main differences are that while the web has these capabilities, you don't get them for free. You do have to go out of your way to use them. Usually, they're developed assuming an Internet connection, then made to work offline. Usually, it's the other way around for native apps.

[0] [http://www.w3.org/TR/service-workers/](http://www.w3.org/TR/service- workers/) [1] [http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/browsers.html#a...](http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/browsers.html#appcache)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The problem is terminology and the exact focus of each study. Morgan > Stanley's study [browser > app] is focused on unique visitors — calling it, > somewhat misleadingly, "traffic" — while comScore's report [app > browser] > is focused on actual user time spent.

Explains the surprising result.

</comment><comment><USER20> Apps use less data than mobile web sites - API's over full HTML/CSS/JS stacks. When a web page on a modern news site can be ~20MB, this news is no surprise.

<comment><USER21> I don't know what news site you're visiting...in any case, this is about unique visits, not bandwidth consumption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> These reports never clarify how they count browser use embedded in apps, notably Facebook and Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER23> Most popular used apps/platforms nowadays are not related to hardware (Facebook, Twitter, Medium). Chances are, your product isn't too.

The only thing annoying me in mobile browser experience is the UI. For example, Safari on iOS. Let's hide URL bar and get rid of back/forwards buttons in favour of using gestures 100%. Then, most of websites will be perceived as apps for majority of users anyway.

By moving to native we officially obey corporations to control our products and it's surely not the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't browser traffic also contain more ads and tracking stuff...? (which also contributes to 'more data')

<comment><USER25> Nope - that traffic is not "bytes" but "Unique visitors". Misleading label, yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > The difference between web and app is trust.

Hm, do you really think this is a mainstream concern that is driving this?

</comment><comment><USER27> It's a ridiculous to call the metric measured by this study "Traffic". All it's counting is "unique user's as counted" on all the websites.

So while I'm scrolling through twitter app on my phone, I might click on about 20-30 random links (most of which open in the browser), take a quick look and swipe away the tab. According to this study, I just presented myself as "Unique User" on 20-30 sites. All the while, I'm simply browsing twitter.

So according the methodology of this study, I just generated 30x the "web traffic" as compared to my app traffic. It's a patently ridiculous way of measuring mobile usage.

</comment><comment><USER28> Uhm. I would say it's more notable that 1/3 of mobile traffic is seemingly under the control of a few companies. If you were ever concerned about the openess of the Internet, this is it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm pretty suspicious of the data and the analysis in this study - even though I "like" some of the conclusions. I wrote a post about it here: [https://www.distilled.net/resources/5-things-that-make-me- su...](https://www.distilled.net/resources/5-things-that-make-me-suspicious- of-morgan-stanleys-report-on-apps-vs-mobile-web/)

Hope someone finds it useful.

</comment><comment><USER30> No, it's not "growing faster". Numbers from the article:

        2013: 1.8x
        2014: 1.7x
        2015: 2.1x

Get two up years in a row, and maybe there's a trend. You could get that much increase from increased bloat on a few key sites' home pages.

</comment><comment><USER31> Probably a lot of this is Android users, who can't trust apps.

</comment><comment><USER32> and bot traffic is 80% of your entire site traffic

<comment><USER31> and 80% of unique visitors too (not sarcasm).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> One of my pet peeves are the sites like LinkedIn and scribd that push you hard to install a c-rap. If at all possible I prefer to browse desktop sites on my tablet father than mobile sites that assume I have sold my firstborn son to Verizon in exchange for the right to breath through a straw in places where Verizon feels like providing service.

</comment><comment><USER34> Fastest growing, yeah... [https://xkcd.com/1102/](https://xkcd.com/1102/)

And also Traffic says nothing about usage. I mean a Browser needs to download more things than any App will do, thats why Apps are used so heavily. the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself

<comment><USER35> I've only read the headline, but it claims mobile traffic (whatever that means) is both larger and faster growing, which renders the xkcd strip irrelevant since the two religions are competing on only one of those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Flipkart needs to take a heed.

</comment><comment><USER37> Only 2x? I thought it would be much higher

</comment><comment><USER38> Web for the win!

</comment><comment><USER39> I find is to so much easier to just type out the URL of what app I need - facebook, reddit, youtube, etc -

Its just faster to let google auto-complete then having to browse my own phone for the app that I need.

typing the letter "f" is faster than exiting the browser and using my OWN EYES to browse left to right row by row the apps on my phone. How cave-manish.

<comment><USER40> On the iPhone, it's easy to search for an app with a quick swipe down.

As for cavemanish, some might argue "clicking a large icon" is less cavemanish than having to resort to something as unnatural as a keyboard.

<comment><USER41> And in iOS 9 you get Siri suggestions, so most likely you won't even need to type anything.</comment></comment></comment>


Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://setosa.io/ev/eigenvectors-and-eigenvalues/ <comment><USER2> 3Blue1Brown has a good series on YouTube for building intuition in linear algebra:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab)

In one of the last videos in the (relatively short) series, he discusses eigen-*:

~'eigen-stuffs are straight-forward but only make sense if you have a solid visual understanding of the pre-requisites (linear transformations, determinants, linear systems of equations, change of basis, etc.). Confusion about eigen-stuffs usually has more to do with a shaky foundation than the eigen-things themselves'

[https://youtu.be/PFDu9oVAE-g](https://youtu.be/PFDu9oVAE-g)

All of the videos in the series, including this later one on eigen-things, focus on animations to show what the number crunching is doing to the coordinate system.

<comment><USER3> 3Blue1Brown (Grant Sanderson) is really, _really_ good. I follow a number of education channels on YouTube, and Grant blows them all out of the water for the kind of insights, new perspectives, and inspiration he provides. His animations are fantastically put together to clearly and unobtrusively illustrate the point he's making. I also really like his voice, soothing, clear and with enough intonation to avoid boredom, and perfect pace. I wish I had his linear algebra series back in college, I suspect I would have done much better.

He's the creator I support the most on Patreon: [https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown](https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown)

<comment><USER4> I've taken 3 college level courses on linear algebra and only really got an intuition for eigenvectors/eigenvalues when watching his video series. Super great!

<comment><USER5> I had problems with Principal Component Analysis; nice to see he's got one on that as well!

[http://setosa.io/ev/principal-component- analysis/](http://setosa.io/ev/principal-component-analysis/)

(edit: ugh, contains an ad for MacKeeper)

<comment><USER6> What, you don't want to remove your mac from trash?

Incidentally, that particular grammatical quirk is one I've seen a number of times. Is it a thing for people coming from Russian? Or just general difficulty with remembering the order of the two subjects in two-subject phrases?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whenever this kind of stuff comes up I feel like a bit of a fraud...

I've written a bunch of scientific data analysis code. I have a science PhD. Written large image analysis pipelines that worked as well as the state of the art... been published etc.

For the most part I've found basic math and heuristics to be good enough. Every so often I go relearn calculus. But honestly, none of this stuff ever seems to come in handy. Maybe it's because most of what I encounter is novel datasets where there's no established method?

I reasonably regularly pick up new discrete methods, but the numerical stuff never seems super useful...

I don't know, just a confession I guess... it never comes up on interviews either for what it's worth.

<comment><USER8> For a large fraction of probability theory, you only need two main facts from linear algebra.

First, linear transforms map spheres to ellipsoids. The axes of the ellipsoid are the eigenvectors.

Second, linear transforms map (hyper) cubes to parallelpipeds. If you start with a unit cube, the volume of the parallelpiped is the determinant of the transform.

That more or less covers covariances, PCA, and change of variables. Whenever I try to understand or re-derive a fact in probability, I almost always end up back at one or the other fact.

They're also useful in multivariate calculus, which is really just stitched- together linear algebra.

<comment><USER9> I think the first point is only true for symmetric matrices (which includes those that show up in multivariable calc). In general, the eigenvectors need not be orthogonal.

<comment><USER8> Yep, you could well be right. The image of an ellipse under a linear transform is definitely an ellipse, but I'm not sure about the eigenvectors in the general case.

The symmetric case is by far the most relevant for probability theory though.

<comment><USER10> In general it's the eigenvectors of the positive-semidefinite (hence symmetric) part of the left polar decomposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting to see this back on the front page after three years. Still remember us sitting in our living room drawing this on paper and arguing about the right approaches.

Maybe one day vicapow and I will make a triumphant return to the explorables space, but life has a way of getting in the way as you get older.

<comment><USER12> That was [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8918259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8918259).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Eigen{vectors,values} seemed like this totally arbitrary concept when I first learned about them. Later it turned out that they are actually really awesome and pop up all the time.

Multivariable function extrema? Just look at the eigenvalues of the hessian. Jacobi method convergence? Eigenvalues of the update matrix. RNN gradient explosion? Of course, eigenvalues.

</comment><comment><USER14> I highly recommend 1Blue1Brown's Essence of Linear Algebra series[0] to highly grasp and comprehend linear algebra.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab)

<comment><USER15> This is truly a favorite of mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Classic paper on Google's PageRank: "The $25,000,000,000 eigenvector"

[https://www.rose- hulman.edu/~bryan/googleFinalVersionFixed.p...](https://www.rose- hulman.edu/~bryan/googleFinalVersionFixed.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> Am I the only one with [Math Processing Error] all over this source? Ctrl+F gives me 57 instances of that string

<comment><USER18> I see that on some pages. Try reloading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Quantum mechanics should be listed as another reason to learn about eigenvectors and eigenvalues! =)

</comment><comment><USER20> Beautiful demos/explanations. Would've been really handy back in school.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great interactive demos.

</comment><comment><USER22> There's nothing to see here.

<comment><USER23> what do you mean? this seems like a strange statement, given the context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The visual explanation movement falls flat for me. It's like trying to understand Monads through blog posts. It's great if you already understand the concept to develop your intuition, or if you've never heard of the concept to pique your interest, but it won't help in the intermediate area where you know what you want to know but don't understand it fully. I need to build proofs through incremental exercises to grasp these concepts.

<comment><USER25> As someone who understands eigenfunctions already, I don't understand the pictures either. Here is the best way to think about it: a matrix is a transformation, a composition of rotation, scaling, etc. Eigensets are lines going through the origin that the matrix moves points along. So a rotation would have no eigenvectors because _none_ of the points move in a straight line, while a scaling along the x axis would have an eigenset that was also along the x axis, consisting of the points that were moved straight up or down.

To imagine finding the eigenset, just ask, could I draw a line through 0,0 such that any point I put on it would stay on it after the matrix acted?

<comment><USER26> > So a rotation would have no eigenvectors

Rotations have eigenvectors: a 2D rotation has two complex eigenvectors, a 3D rotation has one real and two complex eigenvectors, ...

<comment><USER25> That's a fair and true catch, but I can cover myself by pointing out that the article was only talking about matrices in R^(m x n). ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kathy Sierra "get back on your blogging horse" pledgebank - <AUTHOR> http://www.pledgebank.com/kathysierra <comment><USER2> Why?

Part of being in the limelight is dealing with the nutjobs that come out of the woodwork. If Kathy Sierra isn't comfortable/can't handle/plain spooked by the effects of the spotlight, why would I want to pressure her back into it?

She had a great blog, but let her lead her life the way she feels is right, and not be selfish.

</comment><comment><USER3> They have blogging horses now? :-O

(I feel so 2007 all of a sudden....)</comment>


WSJ journalist John Carreyrou shares year-long Theranos investigation [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgwJA-GOlg <comment><USER2> I really liked the point made about how Carreyrou being an NYC-based investigative journalist (with a focus on healthcare, not tech) who is largely disconnected from SV has enabled him to approach this story in a way that SV tech journalists would be afraid to, because it could jeopardize their careers.

Carreyrou was part of a WSJ/NYT team that received a Pulitzer last year[0] for a series of pieces on Medicare billing[1]. That's one of the reasons why I'm surprised some prominent Valley personalities didn't take his articles more seriously from the beginning[2,3] - he's not some two-bit tech blogger with an axe to grind. There's a world of difference between investigative journalists, like Carreyrou or Bob Woodward, and tech bloggers like Michael Arrington or Sarah Lacy.

0: [http://www.poynter.org/2015/for-the-wall-street-journal-a- pu...](http://www.poynter.org/2015/for-the-wall-street-journal-a-pulitzer- long-in-the-making/337879/)

1: [http://graphics.wsj.com/medicare- billing/](http://graphics.wsj.com/medicare-billing/)

2: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-19/early- ther...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-19/early-theranos- investor-remains-supportive-even-without-answers-ifydlf03)

3: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzI763-NPug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzI763-NPug)

<comment><USER3> > There's a world of difference between investigative journalists, like > Carreyrou or Bob Woodward, and tech bloggers like Michael Arrington or Sarah > Lacy.

Or, for that matter, Jason Calacanis. It was really uncomfortable watching parts of the video where Jason would go off on speculative tangents and John Carreyrou would have to bring things back to statements supported by facts.

<comment><USER4> Jason's a personality and pundit, that's sort of his job, much like objective and sourced facts is Carreyrou's job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FWIW Carreyou and his WSJ colleagues were awarded the Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting last year for a project on Medicare fraud:

[http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/7226](http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/7226)

The work they published to win the award was great, but he'd been fighting that fight for many years...and his dogged pursuit led to the CMS agreeing to publish the reimubrsement data in full, for the first time ever:

[https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and- systems/sta...](https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and- systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/medicare-provider-charge-data/physician- and-other-supplier.html)

If you're interested in what the data contains, it's only a couple of GB as a flat table, but contains Medicare reimbursements for every doctor, for every type of reimbursed procedure, which allows for a lot of interesting analysis about healthcare in general...I wrote up a walkthrough that explains how Carreyou arrived at his numbers for the lead story in the investigation: [http://2015.padjo.org/tutorials/sql-walks/exploring-wsj- medi...](http://2015.padjo.org/tutorials/sql-walks/exploring-wsj-medicare- investigation-with-sql/)

I've never met him or asked him how he did his work...but it underscores what a great thing he and the WSJ managed to accomplish: producing an important investigative story and pushing for the release of the data so that anyone else could reproduce it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought this was a great conversation. There right about the strangest part of all of this is the CEO mixing it up on Twitter while the company is obviously suffering from some serious issues.

</comment><comment><USER7> Any TL;DR?

<comment><USER8> It's recap of all the news & revelations on Theranos till Walgreen's shutting down its Theranos Wellness Center (i.e., till yesterday).

John Carreyrou just summarizes the events in chronological order through his answers to the interviewers questions.</comment></comment>


Don't use release candidates - <AUTHOR> http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/dont-use-release-candidates-use-stable-branches-instead/

<comment><USER2> Having an RC doesn't mean you abandon development on it. What exactly is the difference between calling it 'RC' and 'stable branch'?

Both get released to users, both get changes backported.

Except with RC, you're honest. It's a _candidate_ for a full release. If you call it "stable", you're misrepresenting facts. You're not stable. You wouldn't even know, since you had no widespread testing on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends heavily on the team's culture. Are we talking a team who uses beta as code for not fully supported yet or a team whose stable releases aren't very?

</comment><comment><USER4> "In 5 days time I will fork whatever we have in development and I will declare it stable branch, release 1.12.0. That's not going to be a stable version, and we don't pretend it is."

... Except that you've called it stable, so you -are- pretending it is.

The only thing I would get from such a naming convention is the sense that you don't actually care about stability, since you call things stable when you know they aren't.

Release Candidates, on the other hand, show you are trying to be stable but realistic about the possibility of showstopper bugs.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't disagree with this more.

1) Most bigger open source projects have a core team. Think about the jQuery team for example. Often, the release candidates are intended for the core team, not the general user.

2) General users of a particular project generally know better than to use RC's in production. They might not be part of the core team, and unless they are going after a specific feature or bug, will ignore RC's and go with latest stable releases.

3) Release Candidates are supposed to be feature complete. If a user needs to start testing their applications against new features being introduced can usually do so early against Release Candidates. So contrary to the author's statement, indeed you can expect 3rd party engineers doing those kinds of integration tests to file bugs when things aren't working right. I've certainly done it, and I imagine many devs on HN have too.

4) If you want to look at a situation where you _don't_ get Release Candidates, remember how often Facebook changed and broke Facebook Connect over the last couple years. It is _not_ fun having to re-architect your FB integration 3x within a matter of a few months because they just pushed code live with little or no warning.</comment>


Is this the best WordPress Shopping theme? - <AUTHOR> http://themes.fuelthemes.net/?theme=uberstore

<comment><USER2> It's ok. Is it compatible with WooCommerce?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is based on WooCommerce

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No</comment>


Microsoft Issues WanaCrypt Patch for Windows 8, XP - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/05/microsoft-issues-wanacrypt-patch-for-windows-8-xp/ <comment><USER2> Active discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14329914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14329914)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was curious how Windows 8 could already have reached the end of its support lifecycle. Turns out Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 are no longer supported but Windows 8.1 Update still is. Great naming scheme...

</comment><comment><USER4> The article says

« Microsoft no longer supplies security patches for those versions of Windows. The software giant today made an exception to that policy »

From what [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer- guidance-for-wannacrypt-attacks/) describes, I think it would be more accurate to say

« Microsoft now supplies security patches for those versions of Windows only to people who pay for custom support. The software giant today made an exception to that policy »

(which would explain why it didn't take them long to come up with a patch).

</comment><comment> m-j-fox Does anyone know if any non-MS implementation like samba is vuln?

</comment><comment><USER5> source?

<comment><USER5> Oh, I found on another post: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/msrc/2017/05/12/customer- guidance-for-wannacrypt-attacks)</comment></comment>


Learning a new language with Audacity - <AUTHOR> http://www.pagef30.com/2011/03/most-effective-method-for-learning.html

<comment><USER2> My method for learning English was a little bit different. First, the groundwork was definitely laid at school, because in my country's school system learning English is mandatory. But after I finished school, I could hardly speak English without errors. I could write and read it, but I couldn't speak it fluently.

I was aware of this, but I didn't know what to do about it without going abroad. Then, after a while I happened to find out about The Daily Show [1] by coincidence and I started to watch it every day. This was the best thing that could've happened to my English skills.

They have different guests on the show everyday, so you get to hear a variety of different dialects, and you get to hear actual spoken English (not the scripted dialogs from Hollywood), and you also learn a lot about American culture. There are surprisingly big parts of American culture that don't get imported into Europe. :-)

After a year or so, my English got good enough that you can't hear an accent anymore, I think. I actually don't know how good or bad I am, because I don't know any English-speaking people to whom I could talk to. Which is a little bit sad.

But if one day my chance arises to move to the USA, I'm at least ready language-wise.

[1] <http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/>

<comment><USER3> Care to upload a clip of you talking? I'm sure the native English speakers here can evaluate your progress

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe it's obvious, but using more or less the same technique with a piece of music and an instrument in your hands works great, too. You learn small nuances in how better musicians play while also getting in some good ear training. Works much better for me than getting sheet music and interpreting it in my own (amateur) way. It certainly works better at correcting little problems than most teachers can.

Sound editors like audacity can slow down sections and then do pitch shifting to make it sound like a slow version of the original. It's very difficult to use those features to make a good recording (it usually sounds at least a little weird), but for doing quick and dirty analysis of a song that will be thrown out within a few minutes, it's fantastic and easy.

I've used this method a few times over the years and wish I had time to do it more. Now that this article made the connection to learning a new language, I can actually see myself learning a new language, which has always seemed like it would take too much time. Obsessing over sound clips in Audacity seems totally normal to me, though.

</comment><comment><USER5> This method sounds effective. For improving your accent, I suggest reading while listening to audio-books. I used this method to improve my French and it proved very effective. Plus you can choose pretty much any book/topic you like.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is how I learned Scala.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow. This is _exactly_ how I practice Japanese. Edit: Actually, I go a bit further and practice my pronunciation with Audacity. I go over a segment, over and over, trying to copy the speaker's accent exactly.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thank you. That is pretty cool. If only I had a better way to overcome the mental block keeping me away from using the required mental bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER9> A minor note: "konnen" is not a German word. I assume the author meant "konnten" (past form) vs "könnten" (2nd Konjunktiv/imperfect subjunctive).

</comment><comment><USER10> VLC doesn't have looping (that I know of) like Audacity, but it has a slow- down/speed-up feature. Slowing down a movie by 50% just about triples my comprehension (Japanese). I wish we'd had such technology when I was studying Spanish in high school..</comment>


Ask YC: Good language/DB combination for distributed naive Bayes classifier? - <AUTHOR>

I want to create a classifier which can run on multiple hosts and have all of the hosts be eventually consistent. erlang looks tempting, but I was wondering what would be a good db to pair with erlang for this? or is erlang maybe not the correct idea? <comment><USER2> If you want to go the Erlang route (highly recommended, but be prepared for a bit of a learning curve if you are not familiar with functional programming) then you would do well to look at the Scalaris project (fault-tolerant, distributed, eventually consistent key-value store that can use paxos for consistent transactions) or the Kai project (similar scope and goals.)

You can also probably get pretty far with the built-in mnesia database.

</comment><comment><USER3> Take a look at kdb+ (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257771>) a language environment with built in database capabilities and distributable. (I'm just learning it so I may have accidentally misrepresented it).

</comment><comment><USER4> Cassandra, HBase, or HDFS with hadoop if you like java (almost as fast as C++ for numeric stuff). CouchDb if you like erlang (terrible for computations though).</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best day to announce new feature? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, we are about to announce some new features to our platform and I was curious if anyone had any data regarding best day (and time of day if available) of the week to announce a new software feature.  TIA <comment><USER2> In my experience, it doesn't really matter. However, one suggestion I do have is to roll out the feature to a beta group first. I manage a bunch of products at my company, one of them which has ~400 unique visitors per day using it. I typically roll it out to a group of 10 of the power users that I have a direct line of communication with. They vet the new features over a few days and give me feedback. I know they won't leave the service because of a bad bug, so it's worth it to let them throw a bunch of use at it (that you often times don't think of when making the feature).

</comment><comment><USER3> I saw something recently that said Tuesday. Lemme try to find it.

Got it: <http://philosophically.com/dont-launch-your-product>

<comment><USER2> I would argue that isn't really relevant in this case. They have a working product and are announcing new features. The linked article is pretty different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't release it on a Friday unless you're willing to give up your Saturday to fix bugs</comment>


Tell HN: Assange seeking asylum in Ecuadorean Embassy in London - <AUTHOR>

Breaking news on BBC and Guardian websites. <comment><USER2> He probably heard they had hot Latin girls there.</comment>


Japan unearths site linked to human experiments - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/21/japan-excavates-site-human-experiments

<comment><USER2> While I agree that this item is of interest in general, can you elaborate why you think it's of particular interest to Hacker News? I can see nothing that makes this specific to hackers.

But you've been here on HN a long time and have accumulated huge karma, so obviously you know better than I. I read the guidelines and see:

        Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports,
                   unless they're evidence of some interesting new
                   phenomenon. ... If they'd cover it on TV news,
                   it's probably off-topic.

This seems like something that would get covered on TV news.</comment>


Ask HN: What's a good reliable local replacement for Dropbox? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to replace Dropbox with some local servers, using rsync on the software side.<p>(I don't need the sharing-between-computers feature of Dropbox, just the backup feature.)<p>So, on the hardware side, what are some reliable long-term options? <comment><USER2> Check out Owncloud [https://owncloud.org/](https://owncloud.org/) it is a popular free and open source alternative. It does even more than dropbox.</comment>


Ask HN: Do Hackers spend too much time sharpening their axes? - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed the trend in myself, I've researched about a gazillion text-editors and IDEs, at the end of the day, they all do the same (with some differences, Ofcourse). But, I always feel something is wrong, and I search for better tools all of the time.
I also the same trend in hacker news, Anything close to Vim Config or Bash Productivity, gets high votes?
That makes me wonder, do we sharpen our axes more than we really should? <comment><USER2> It's in our nature. We'll spend an hour writing a script that would save us maybe 5 minutes of work, but for us that's a net gain because the work is instantly finished the next (theoretical) time the problem comes up. We get it beaten into us as developers to never repeat ourselves, so if we see it happening in other things we instinctively try to abstract it out into something easily repeatable.

While on paper it might not be worth it a lot of the time, I find it starts to pay off emotionally when I'm deep in the zone hacking on a project. You know the feeling, when you have to interrupt your marathon coding session to quickly take care of something maintenance-wise. I remember a command that came up when I was "wasting" a weekend looking up bash tricks, and then hop right back into what I was doing. Otherwise I would have had to come to a complete stop, spend a good portion of time solving my issue, and then likely the rest of the day is shot because my concentration was broken and I'd rather just triage e-mails instead.

In short, my mental attitude has improved the more I learn tiny productivity tips, because of how they compound into one another to keep me doing what I do best: crank out quality code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Atleast, you saved a lot of time with this precise comment :D

<comment><USER4> He must so he can get back to his vim vs emacs article ;)

BTW, I do this all the time too. I sure a lot of us have had "OS fever" where you continuously install a new flavor of linux every day for a week until you decide to go back to your original. There may be no cure for this...</comment></comment></comment>


How Face Detection Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.cognotics.com/opencv/servo_2007_series/part_2/sidebar.html <comment><USER2> I gave a talk at Scotland on Rails last year about image processing in ruby, including using OpenCV. Getting it working well with Ruby is a bit of a pain, but it can be done. My fork of the ruby-opencv gem is at <http://github.com/bantic/ruby-opencv> and examples of using it to do face detection are at <http://github.com/bantic/image_labs>

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice article. Still a little bit tough to follow though. I actually just finished getting OpenCV face detection working with Core Video in OS X, it's accuracy is very impressive.</comment>


FSF welcomes AdBard network for free software advertising - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/news/ad-bard

<comment><USER2> _The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today welcomed the launch of AdBard a new advertising network for technology based websites based upon the promotion of Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) friendly products and services._

"Free, Libre, and Open" is probably the greater assault on language, though their dislike of commas also irritates me.

Can somebody explain how this network works? What makes it different from any other ad network? Is it just that it advertises free software?

<comment><USER3> _Is it just that it advertises free software?_

It is that it _doesn't_ advertise proprietary software. Read the press release: the FSF feels that proprietary software is immoral and that advertising both gives aid and comfort to the enemy and taints the purity of the people who take money for it.

The FSF's quirky-but-harmless religious views aside, I'm all for more options in advertising. Candidly, though, I hope the sites hosting my OSS competitors don't switch to this network -- the ads I put on them perform pretty well.

<comment><USER2> I must say, the layout for the ads is pretty nice. They lifted The Deck's design more-or-less, and that's not at all a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://adbard.net/></comment>


First Black Elected to Head Harvard's Law Review (1990) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/06/us/first-black-elected-to-head-harvard-s-law-review.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Money quote: "For better or for worse, people will view it as historically significant," said Prof. Randall Kennedy, who teaches contracts and race relations law. "But I hope it won't overwhelm this individual student's achievement."</comment>


Librato merging with Traceview into new Solarwinds offer AppOptics - <AUTHOR> As a Librato customer I just got this email:<p>> My name is [name] and I'm a Customer Success Engineer at Solarwinds on the Librato team. You may or may not have heard, but Librato and Traceview have combined into one service named AppOptics. Our new offering combines the best of APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, and Custom metrics into one product.<p>> We will continue to support Librato going forward, but we are highly motivated to move your account over to AppOptics. Why? Features like tracing, tag based measurements, and a variety of new collectors have been added. Also, all future development effort will be focused on AppOptics. <comment><USER2> Librato founder and current Solarwinds employee here. Happy to answer any questions. Important to note that AppOptics is effectively a proper superset of Librato, internally it's powered by the same infrastructure and is API- compatible with Librato's newer "multidimensional" (i.e. tagging) data model that we launched just over a year ago. The "superset" is a huge swath of new capabilities per the email above.</comment>


Show HN: My social music app - <AUTHOR> http://like.fm

<comment><USER4> I should disclose that I am a massive music junkie. 94,000 plays on Last.FM to date[1] - it wasn't clear what the bet I was taking was with Like.FM (good domain) what _is_ it? how is it different to Last.FM? Seems like its this:

> Merge their top tracks intelligently into the ultimate list of new songs

Sooo why not a Last.FM app?

Just my brief $0.02 cents, feel free to reach out to me (or reply here) as I am obsessed with this space.

edit: some thoughts...

1) nice simple sign up

2) omg is that ajax logging in? always wondered why people don't offer that, cute.

3) the player on the right is the right concept but wrong implementation - <USER2> like how hypem.com has done it. takes up less space.

4) still not entirely clear what the value proposition is - what does it do? _specifically_ what value does it bring?

After playing with service for a few moments and reading your comments, I can imagine this being an _epic_ service that acts as a "Last.FM for Online Content" via scrobbler/bookmarklet, and tracks what i've recently watched/listened to - just my $0.0.2

[1]: <http://www.last.fm/user/Hejog>

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, when I started doing this I didn't even know Last.fm showed your play history. So I didn't know Last.fm already had some of the features. And before I started I had extremely limited exposure to Last.fm.

I tried their Mac client once and it was a horrible experience (it was a windowed app whereas Like.fm is a menulet in OS X).

I remember it being an additional layer on top of how you normally listen to music (hearting songs). Like.fm uses existing user interface to generate your top tracks (rate songs directly from iTunes + frequency of play).

But most importantly, none of my friends, or anyone I knew, uses Last.fm (and I believe 2 out of 300 of my facebook friends have the Like.fm app installed). So I figured there's space to make a way for non-music-enthusiasts to share music info with each other. That's why Like.fm is really passive. You just play songs from iTunes like you normally do, rate them like you normally do (if you do). Then on Like.fm I guess what your current top tracks are, and share your play history with other people.

Also Like.fm doesn't require you to play hundreds of songs to build up a robust profile. The top played list on your profile is meant to represent your _recent_ top tracks. So you just have to play some of your current top songs and it _should_ be accurate. Recommendations will be based on who _you_ choose to follow, so it's not directly dependent on training the system with your playback data. However the one problem at the moment may be that there aren't enough users to follow.

<comment><USER4> ahh, just noticed a problem for me - I've transitioned to using Spotify instead of iTunes... Service sounds intriguing though - i would recommend integration with Last.FM for scrobblers.

Also, there are tons of 3rd party scrobblers for Mac. iScrobbler is pretty decent.

I don't meant to sound negative. I think Last.FM has sewn up the "data" space (eg: what I'm playing, top artists) - but it sucks for recommendations, social, and everything else.

It isn't clear to me how your service is different to Last.FM in terms of setup. EG: I'm not a Last.FM user ... am I going to use your service, instead? Saying only 2 of my friends use x service _so I made a competitor for them to use_ seems like mildly false logic. In these spaces I'd like to see something that works around the barrier to entry (requiring a scrobbler of some sort)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly where I'm going to hit hard: social.

Integrating with Last.fm is a great idea. I honestly never event thought of that.

<comment><USER4> check out Spotify if you can, they've made sharing tracks super easy - <USER3> suck at the Last.FM bits.

As a music junkie I use a few services:

Last.FM for the data (on me & friends (but not Facebook friends...))

Spotify for playback and sharing songs to friends (but not Last.FM friends - Facebook friends)

Hype Machine for _hot_ music recently (scrobbled to Last.FM)

The _huge_ weak spot is recommendations. Where do I go for artists like Eminem? I currently use the Spotify related artists page, boy does it suck.

Actually, I also use What.CD for music recommendations..

This is what What.CD suggests for Eminem: <http://grab.by/5MLs>

and this is what Spotify suggests for Eminem: <http://grab.by/5MLu>

Neither brilliant, honestly.

So yes - recommendations - valuable. Powered by my friends, what's hot, and algo for similar. Make a Pandora Radio minus the Radio bit, sounds useful. Maybe a weekly digest of similar artists I'll enjoy based on what I listened to this week.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think artist recommendations is a different beast from user recommendations. Recommending similar users is something relatively easy and the main roadblock right now is there not being enough users.

But if I go into artist recommendations (as opposed to general new song recommendation and recommending other users), I'd take the same approach and do something much more dynamic than a fixed list of similar artists. So perhaps taking the subset of users who like Eminem A LOT and taking their top tracks under the same genre, merging them (as if you followed them), and providing that as a list of similar trending artists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea, except I think my friend have horrible taste in music. Top 100 billboards are filled with popular music, not good music.

<comment><AUTHOR> Songs will be recommended indirectly from other people on like.fm via the follow feature. So you can follow everyone, and eventually I will have in place user recommendations (recommend other users for you to follow).

I know that friends != music friends, which is why you don't have to be friends on the site to follow (you can follow anyone). The only other problem is finding other people to follow, which is something I'm working very hard to solve.

<comment><USER4> just a random data point, but I'd recommend either ignoring bkudria (no offence!) or going full hog on a solution - in my experience people are black or white about social recommendations, and it isn't worth spending the resources to convert the people to the service. Focus on people that want it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One "bug" that seems like it would be hard to fix is normalizing the volume. Linkin Park's _New Divide_ was substantially louder than Neon Trees's _Animal_.

The site looks good and I get the idea, but I'm not sure exactly how useful it is for regular listening. It seems to me that it's designed to play one song at a time? Personally, I have my own music library that I ranked and then listen to mostly on random. Sometimes I'll be in the mood to hear an album or an artist, and I'll play that. I have several friends that listen exclusively to Pandora.

The point is, I and everyone I know basically put on music we like and then go about our business, pausing only occasionally to switch to another album or thumbs-up/thumbs-down a song. Sitting there and consciously "discovering" music is just not something that I know anyone in my circle to do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Autoplay is something I'm planning to add, mainly to complement the merged top tracks from your followers (so that it can auto play the top tracks of people you follow).

The ability to play music on the site right now however is a convenience thing. You can browse a friend's profile and check up on what they're listening to. And I figured you'll eventually pull up youtube to listen to one of those songs, why not just integrate that into the site directly.

I guess at the moment, until I get auto play integrated, I'm targeting more of the people who listen to their own iTunes library and occasionally try to find some new songs to add to their library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Someone mentioned that the "iframe must go" -- I thought it was fine. I'm on 1280x1024.

Besides that, here are my initial thoughts:

I didn't explore the site enough to figure out what it did, beyond find music on YouTube and play it. I understand it can track other people's iTunes and WinAmps, but I'm not really interested in that. I find listening to ShoutCast channels and Pandora adequate, and I'm not convinced this service could up the ante.

I was impressed by how quick it was, that the forward and back buttons worked, and the overall design was pleasing. Visually, it looks like your site can be a serious competitor in your space.

That's pretty much my unfiltered first impression. Hope it helped.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. You got the gist of it. I can't really target the Pandora user until I get a viable auto play mechanism.

However if you listen to internet radio from WinAmp or iTunes, Like.fm can keep track of the history so if you want to play a song again you can do that from the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The iframe on the side _has_ to go. It looks very out of place. Maybe try something like extension.fm's [1] player that is more unobtrusive.

Also the layout doesn't work well with smaller screens. The margins are cut off on my 13" MBP [2]. The width is >1200px. It should be 1000px max.

1\. <http://extension.fm>

2\. [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/533753/Screen%20shot%202010-08-06%20...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/533753/Screen%20shot%202010-08-06%20at%208.03.34%20PM.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually not an iframe, or a frame at all. The site uses no frames, except for the facebook stuff. I've actually gone through multiple designs and have tried the player on top of the site and on the bottom.

I've actually never tested it with small screens so thanks for bringing that up.

<comment><USER8> > It's actually not an iframe, or a frame at all.

Well there is a fixed position CSS box on the right with the main panel w/ overflow scrolling, so its just like an iframe.

Maybe its the small screen size, but it crowds up the layout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a bug, I tried to listen to "OMG by Usher Featuring will.i.am" through billboard top 100 and it says "Embedding this video is disabled by its owner".

Very cool app though.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's weird since I tell the YouTube API to only return embedable videos. I'll look into it.

EDIT: I'm not getting that error. Is it still happening?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the first time I've shown this to a (hopefully) large audience. So if you have any comments, suggestions, or if you've found a bug, please let me know here or email email@example.com.

You guys can check out a sample profile: <http://like.fm/chris> (it's mine).

</comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, I'm confused. What is it? I downloaded the iTunes app and it...doesn't do anything. Huh? Is it like a scrobbler?

Why should I use your interface when I have my music on my laptop?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's like Last.fm's audio scrobbler.

It's a lightweight daemon that just sends your current iTunes track to Like.fm.

Then you just play songs in iTunes like normal, and rate songs in iTunes, and then it will show your current track, history, and top tracks on your Like.fm profile. You can also add that profile as a tab in your Facebook profile (as pictured on the home page).

I really didn't expect the MVP to be so confusing. Can you help me find better way to explain it?

<comment><USER10> Yeah I guess I understand. What niche does it fill? How is it different from Last.fm or Rdio? Or is it just latecomer?

<comment><AUTHOR> Like.fm isn't meant to replace iTunes as a place where you can play music. So it doesn't compete with Rdio at all. The music is just sourced from YouTube, so anyone can do that. The ability to play music is a convenience feature.

My main goal with Like.fm is to have a music app where you can publish what you've listened to that isn't targeted at music enthusiasts (2 out of almost 300 facebook friends have a last.fm app installed). You can follow people and merge top tracks. It's extremely passive (no need to change music listening behavior) so it's easy to get started. Really you just install the desktop client and go about doing your music listening business. And when you want to peek at your friend's music just check out their profile or their facebook. If you want new songs, theoretically, the merged top tracks stream will have best new songs for you.

Passivity is key to Like.fm. It's not a niche community of music lovers. It's designed to layer over your regular listening habits, and grab some interesting info to share with people.

<comment><USER10> Also, I didn't even notice the "menulet" in my menu bar until I read it on another comment. The app just seemed to have a preferences bar. You should tell the user about what you've installed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


RDP and the Critical Server Attack Surface - <AUTHOR> http://dankaminsky.com/2012/03/18/rdp/

<comment><USER2> In Windows Vista and Windows 7, the ability to have a PC act as a RDP server (host) is limited to the server SKUs and Ultimate. Windows Starter, Windows Home, and Windows Home Premium do not have this feature (it's actually there, but requires a hack to enable).

This was a business policy to help differentiate the Pro & Ultimate versions from the cheaper Home versions.

When we were building Windows Home Server, I fought hard to get the policy of not supporting Remote Desktop (host) in Windows Vista/7 Home and Home Premium changed.

We wanted to make it so that WHS could more easily enable people to connect into their home computers remotely via WHS, but the policy meant that only Windows Vista/7 Ultimate and Pro could act as a RDP host which severely limited the reach of this feature.

It is probably a good thing (for MS) that I failed to convince the Windows business leaders to change this policy; imagine how many PCs there'd be out there if in 2003 I had gotten this policy changed and had been successful in making RDP popular amongst non-power users...

As an aside, I bet sizable # of those RDP end points Dan found are actually running Windows Home Server. WHS (which is really a version of Windows Server 2003) enabled the RDP host by default because that's what the Windows Home Server console uses. It also used UPnP to enable port forwarding for remote access to the server. Users' have to opt into this feature, but many do...

The good news (for WHS users) is by default WHS automatically takes Windows updates; users have to explicitly opt-out and we intentionally tried to push them away from opting-out of updates. So almost all WHS boxes probably got the patch on Tuesday. I know mine did.

<comment><USER3> On a side note, home server has seemed like an excellent project with huge potential that MS as a whole has basically shunned and abandoned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is anyone familiar with the RDP implementation on Windows and how it handles privilege separation pre and post authentication?

Niels Provos, Markus Friedl, Peter Honeyman released a paper in 2003 that analysed the number of privileged (8,391) vs. unprivileged (17,589) lines of code that are executed by OpenSSH [1]. These figures included calls to libraries such as OpenSSL and zlib. A key point from the paper: _"Privilege separation prevents known security vulnerabilities in prior OpenSSH versions including some that were unknown at the time of its implementation."_

OpenSSH has changed significantly over the past decade and I haven't been able to locate more recent analysis of the privileged:unprivileged LoC ratio in OpenSSH. For the brave, the source code provides a good indication of the current state of OpenSSH[2] and the amount and type of code executed in privileged and unprivileged modes.

Privileged mode is needed to open low numbered ports (<1024), read/process the private host key and fork new processes post authentication assuming the identity of another user. A great deal of effort and research has been put into ensuring that only the minimal amount of privileged code is executed. Where OpenSSH code can be executed within an unprivileged process, it is.

RDP appears to have a much longer and significantly more complex session initiation process [3]. MS12-020[4] indicates the vulnerability occurs during the pre-authentication stage (Client MCS Connect Initial PDU with GCC Conference Create Request [5]). Thus it appears the RDP implementation on Windows doesn't utilise granular privilege separation pre-authentication? How about post-authentication privilege separation?

Privilege separation is _very_ important.

I rephrase the question (assuming Microsoft's implementation doesn't utilise granular privilege separation by default):

 _"Who could possibly be so stupid as to recommend or use RDP on the open internet knowing the implementation doesn't have granular and well designed privilege separation?"_

[1] <http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/privsep.pdf>

[2] [http://www.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/sshd.c...](http://www.openbsd.org/cgi- bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/sshd.c?annotate=1.388)

[3] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc240452%28v=prot.10...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc240452%28v=prot.10%29.aspx)

[4] <http://aluigi.org/adv/termdd_1-adv.txt>

[5] [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc240836%28v=prot.10...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/cc240836%28v=prot.10%29.aspx)

<comment><USER5> _"Who could possibly be so stupid as to recommend or use RDP on the open internet knowing the implementation doesn't have granular and well designed privilege separation?"_

The bigger question in my mind is why put _anything_ on the open internet unless you have to? RDP is great, but put it behind some sort of VPN solution or tunnel it over ssh. This goes for any service that should be private use.

The name of the game in security is shrinking the potential attack surface area to as small as possible, and having multiple layers of checks.

<comment><USER6> We shouldn't expose sshd to the open internet? Should I be wary of services that do?

<comment><USER7> I'd argue that the audited security of OpenSSH is better than most VPN solutions.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but there are still configuration problems. I remember having once set the root password to "", thinking it will lock everything out. Turns out that it only locks it for login, but not email server authentication. Someone managed to send emails as root@mybox, logging in with a blank password.

I realize this isn't OpenSSH, but there will always be stupid users. Exposing as little as you can is a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I run a Windows shop and for the longest time we used a third party product called Radmin for our remote administration. Finally, after some time we switched over to RDP for a number of reasons... but one of the top ones is simply that is has such massive adoption. Any vulnerability that bubbles to the surface will be announced from the highest mountains as is the case here. When I was using a third-party product there could have been a critical update released and I don't feel I would have heard through the grapevine for quite some time.

In my opinion, having a vanilla Microsoft stack is useful in a lot ways, one of them being that news travels fast within the Microsoft ecosystem.

I agree with the author though, nothing is more eye roll inducing then when some unhelpful fellow chimes in with "Why are you doing it _that_ way?" and 'that way' is the way million and millions of people are doing it.

</comment><comment><USER10> A mate and I have set up a free web-based tool to help folk check their exposure to this bug. it's at <http://rdpcheck.com>. i encourage you to tell those who should know

<comment><USER11> I have RDP open on a different port. Could you give me an option to enter the port#?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We limit RDP access via Cisco ACLs at our border routers. So that only the vendor IPs that require RDP access may get to those machines. And, we turn it on when they call opening a ticket for access. We don't leave it open to them all the time.</comment>


My experience using Hackintosh low-end PC for 3 years - <AUTHOR> https://my-site.now.sh/hackintosh <comment><USER2> Really reminds us who are able to pickup RAM or a graphics card for a few quid that not everyone in the world is so lucky.

Very impressed with what Jhonny managed to do.

It does beg the question though - what's next for Apple's cheapest Mac, the Mini.

I think there is a real opportunity for Apple to release a low powered Mac Mini say the size of an Apple TV which is ARM based and allows schools, universities and folks unable to buy the latest and greatest to have a stable, Unix based development and media platform to work on.

<comment><USER3> > It does beg the question though - what's next for Apple's cheapest Mac, the > Mini.

If the MacBook Pro is any indication, a price increase (due to the addition of Thunderbolt 3 ports and an Intel CPU with Iris Plus Graphics) and zero user- upgradeable parts (soldered RAM/SSD)?

If the new entry-level Mac mini has a Fusion Drive or 128GB SSD as standard this would also result in an additional price increase.

I can see more and more people going the Hackintosh route as Macs generally become more expensive.

<comment><USER4> Apple just reduced the price of the 13" MacBook Pro to $1299. That seems to be inline with PCs from Dell with similar specs.

<comment><USER3> > Apple just reduced the price of the 13" MacBook Pro to $1299.

The 13" MBP is now $200 cheaper because Apple cut the SSD capacity in half (256GB > 128GB). If you want the same size SSD as the 2016 base model had you still have to pay $1,499.

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/06/10/review-apples- new-...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/06/10/review-apples-new-kaby- lake-13-macbook-pro-without-touch-bar-unexpectedly-speedy-vs-2016-model)

 _Apple cut a big corner in the device 's on-board storage to reduce the price to $1,299 —and we feel that it shouldn't have. If you own the 2016, you have at least 256GB of storage. We feel that the 128GB is a big step backwards for those considering the 2017 who already own a 2016._

[https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/08/2017-vs-2016-macbook- pr...](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/08/2017-vs-2016-macbook-pro-tech- specs/)

 _Apple refreshed its MacBook Pro lineup this week with Intel 's seventh- generation Kaby Lake processors and faster standard graphics options from Intel and AMD. There's also a cheaper 13-inch MacBook Pro with function keys starting at $1,299 with 128GB storage, compared to $1,499 for the previous base model._

<comment><USER5> It's not at all surprising that Apple went back to 128GB for the base model. Flash memory is pretty expensive right now, and 128GB is actually usable for a lot of purposes. They'll most likely go back to 256GB when they're able to transition to 3D NAND flash memory.

<comment><USER4> If I'm going to spend $1500 on a MacBook Pro, I would rather get 16Gb RAM/128Gb SSD than 8Gb/256GB SSD. I can always add more external storage if needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really interesting to hear this story and to leave the personal context to the end makes it even more impactful. The perseverance and creativity that this person obviously had to show to get this to work for so long are really inspiring, even if lots of other people have done similar things before. I really hope things get better for your country soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is not true you cannot use Store or iCloud because it is not a real Mac. I have been running a hackintosh for half a year now and I use iCloud, Store even iMessage works.

<comment><USER8> I am pretty sure that you need a Board Serial Number (SN) from a real Mac. At least about a year ago this was the case. Did you use a SN from a real Mac? If not, then you probably got lucky.

I think there is also the possibility of calling Apple's support hotline and letting them manually activate a randomly generated Serial Number.

See also here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/525dsb/getting_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/525dsb/getting_imessage_working_on_el_capitan_and_sierra/)

<comment><USER7> For the Store and iCloud you do not need anything. For iMessage you need to generate a motherboard SN and other stuff, it is not so easy but doable with the right tutorial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Linux would provide support for old hardware far in excess of what Apple provides. It's an OS for the many, not a priviledged few; and needs your support.

It's also a big security gamble downloading these hacked OSX images from questionable sources.

<comment><USER10> Linux ran on 80386 until not long ago. Now it requires an 80486.

<comment><USER11> 486 was released 28 years ago

<comment><USER12> Yeah but spare a thought for people who can't afford CPUs that recent. What's my pop-pop with his 386 gonna do?

<comment><USER13> FreeBSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Later on I got to read a lot about the Kexts that basically are the equivalent of the drivers in microsoft windows and _look for the ones that would serve me for my video card_ , Everything worked fine.

>A few months passed until Yosemite came out, with a renewed interface a lot of improvements, and even _included support for my set up_

>But I did the same again when buying my new _GT520 card_. And to this day everything has worked perfectly

This makes me wonder whether his hardware happened to be used in some Macs or Apple deliberately made those drivers for Hackintosh users?

<comment><USER5> Apple tends to ship drivers that will work with almost any GPU from the same product family and generation as the chips Apple is actually using. They could definitely do more to lock things down if they wanted to.

I suspect that the slight lost hardware revenue is significantly offset by the App Store revenue and long-term benefits of keeping users on the Apple platform, so Apple doesn't have strong motivation to get in the way of Hackintosh use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Someone should send this guy an iMac

<comment><USER16> That's a wonderful idea. If somebody sets up a gofundme I'd be happy to pitch in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> He isn't missing much by not having the app store. I've used a mac as my primary computer at home for since before the app store opened in 2010 and have yet to find a indispensable app on the app store.

<comment><USER18> I started using macOS 2 months ago (iOS development) and had the impression I needed the app store for OS upgrades and xCode.

I there another way?

<comment><USER19> You can get XCode and OS Updates through [https://developer.apple.com/download/more/](https://developer.apple.com/download/more/) (you need a login, but it's free AFAIK).

EDIT: Actually just checked, looks like there is no update for el capitan or sierra on the dev portal. Drats.

My app store works on my hackintosh so I never actually had to use the dev portal anyway ^^'. I used an old mac's ID.

<comment><USER18> Nice to know.

I heared much FUD about hackintoshs, I'd just want a mac for work without much hassle to develop. So I kust bought a mac book pro from 2013.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this a standard blog design or is the author of this post also a very creative designer? I am really impressed both by the content and the design of this post.

<comment><USER21> It's very hard to read for me due to the low contrast and monospace font.

<comment><USER22> The _black on white_ monospaced font? As a programmer I found it great.

<comment><USER21> Looks like this for me [http://i.imgur.com/XNvYDk7.png](http://i.imgur.com/XNvYDk7.png)

<comment><USER23> Probably font rendering issue at your end. It looks like this: [http://imgur.com/a/9ArvB](http://imgur.com/a/9ArvB)

However, it uses mac-specific fonts first, the free fonts (dejavu sans mono, bitstream vera sans mono) and then it falls back to Courier New and browser- set monospace font.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed

<comment><USER23> Out of the curiosity, what was the cause?

Courier New is ugly, but not that ugly. Was it necessary to finetune the cleartype parameters?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A/B Street: A simulation game to fix Seattle's traffic - <AUTHOR> https://abstreet.org/ <comment><USER2> Hi, author here. Previously posted to HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763636](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21763636)). I just released alpha -- check out this cheesy trailer ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxPD4n_1-LU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxPD4n_1-LU)).

Happy to answer questions! And if you're serious about running this in your city, the importing process has improved greatly since December, so get in touch.

<comment><USER3> Minor issue I noticed: whenever I launch the app on Windows, the mouse hit- targeting is off vertically by ~40 pixels. Resizing the window makes the problem go away for the rest of the session. I'm on Windows 10, 1920x1080, and I haven't modified scaling/DPI settings.

<comment><USER2> Could you give [https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/suites/828409393/art...](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/suites/828409393/artifacts/9222718) a shot? If that URL disappears or you don't want to re-download the whole .zip, just the fixed binary is [https://www.dropbox.com/s/j2hh8xrugtsxslc/game.exe?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/j2hh8xrugtsxslc/game.exe?dl=0)

<comment><USER3> That new build did NOT fix the issue for me.

Now that I'm looking more closely, this looks like some sort of initial aspect ratio issue, possibly related to a resize.

The game launches and the window either starts maximized or it maximizes itself. If I restore (un-maximize) and re-maximize, the aspect ratio is clearly different because the logo in the center of the screen gets slightly taller (while staying the same width).

In other words, the initial aspect ratio of the graphics seems incorrect (squished vertically slightly for me, running at 1920x1080).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you like this game consider checking out Cities Skylines. Traffic is a major part of the game. With the vanilla edition you can already do a lot, but if you want to route lanes you need the traffic manager mod [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=16376...](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1637663252)

<comment><USER5> Do any of the mods give the simulated people real commutes? I gave up after I made a city with a full subway system and zoned areas and watched as the simulated citizens left home, went to work, and then went to another random home at night.

It completely ruined my fancy subway system's timetable. :(

<comment><USER6> A relevant movie from the USSR comes to mind (which was also discussed recently): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irony_of_Fate)

<comment><USER7> Another somewhat relevant film: :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_\(1998_film\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're interested in this kind of planning problems, check out the NeurIPS Flatland challenge, in which we try to optimize traffic on railway networks, in association with the Swiss and German railway companies!

[https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/neurips-2020-flatland- cha...](https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/neurips-2020-flatland-challenge/)

(disclaimer: I'm an organizer)

</comment><comment><USER3> This simulation confirms that the easiest fix is to not have the West Seattle bridge be broken :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been really hoping for the Maps team at Google/Waze to release a similar "traffic congestion" view to highlight consistent hot spots. A simulation is also pretty good, but the real data from Maps/Waze users will be even better!

Ideally, a government dashboard to see traffic congestion changes per year, month, day of week, but also hour. If we can create metrics for cities like p99 door-door trip time (i.e. latency) policy makers can better measure changes, bottlenecks, etc and plan better.

<comment><USER10> Your hope has come true! Kindof. I don't think this comes with a dashboard, but the data is there

[https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waze-for-cities-data- puts...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/waze-for-cities-data-puts-traffic- data-on-google-cloud/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem is there's only so much room for automobiles in a city. The more you decrease traffic, the more you'll induce demand to fill those improved traffic flow patterns.

The more infrastructure that is built downtown, the more people want to be downtown.

<comment><USER12> That's not a reason to not improve infrastructure anymore than "the more chocolate we produce the more people want to buy chocolate" is a reason not to make chocolate. It just shows you're ludicrously underserving demand.

<comment><USER13> Efficiency matters. If allocating 100 million currency units to widening a highway from 5 lanes to 6 lanes improves people/hour capacity and quality of life less than other solutions, the other solutions should be chosen. In addition to diminishing returns on the way we've always done it, there's a hard limit of about 2000 cars/hour/lane.

Chocolate is not free at the point of use but roads usually are. Without price signals or other limits people over-consume resulting in a shortage and people paying in time.

<comment><USER14> Hence an easy solution to traffic is increase the cost of driving. Which Seattle already has dynamic tolls which change in price:

[https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Tolling/TollRates.htm](https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Tolling/TollRates.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is awesome, although part of the traffic problem is the horrible condition of the roads around Seattle, and a failure to enforce basic traffic laws - specifically - the left lane is for passing, and probably more importantly, do _not_ stop in an intersection. Just because the light is yellow, doesn't mean we need to stack more cars into the middle of the road.

I walked to work (when I lived in Seattle recently) but the amount of traffic jams I saw caused by both regular people in their cars, and the mass transit bus drivers, driving right into an intersection as the light turned red is crazy. I don't know how you can plan traffic flow around it, because as green as the light might be, no one is moving with a bus sitting in the middle of the intersection.

<comment><USER16> Plenty of selfish/oblivious drivers, but don't overlook the selfish pedestrians causing intersection traffic backup too. There are plenty that are crossing right up until the light is red (even if they don't have a "walk" signal), making it impossible for more than one car to make the left turn. Everyone needs to work together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Rad! It's a bummer that Amazon employees will have a hard time contributing to this (as Amazon prevents collaborating with anyone on any side projects that are 'games'.) Their offices surround some of the worst traffic in the city, and it'd be interesting to have some of their engineers contributing.

<comment><USER18> What? That's a real thing? Bypassing the feeling of "how can that even be legal?", how can people join a company that puts these kind of restrictions on it's employees? Kind of feels like that Amazon employees put themselves in this situation, so hard to feel bad for them.

If any company tries to limit what I do in my free time, it's a quick and hard "no" on working for them.

<comment><USER17> They don't tell you until you've started.

<comment><USER18> _That_ has to be illegal, even in the US?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is completely awesome. I've considered doing something similar (mostly while sitting around in Austin looking at traffic lights backing up 100+ cars to allow 2-3 to enter from a side street) or looking at a pair of lights (accidentally?) acting like a metering device. Particularly city wide as I'm 100% convinced that the actual traffic engineers here are doing something wrong. They reworked a bike lane a few years back on a street I was driving on daily and then I could see them out there for months trying to work around the fact that they backed up a couple major intersections a couple blocks away as a result.

So the question is, given a bit of ML/etc driving it, and some actual commute time data, what are the changes something like this actually can be used to improve traffic?

<comment><USER2> There are lots of data quality and simulation assumption issues that prevent results from being meaningful. I'm mostly positioning this as a way to get people interested in coming up with specific ideas, but of course I'd love to reach trustworthiness parity with industry standard traffic sims.

I actually got started in traffic sim while I was in Austin! If you know anybody there who'd be interested in putting in some work to get the area running smoothly, I'd love to include it as a second city in the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The trailer looks amazing. I was actually just imagining a video game like this a few days ago, so it is something of a wish fulfillment plus baader meinhoff syndrome to see this.

I can't wait till tonight when I'll have enough time to get it installed and try it out!

</comment><comment><USER21> This idea was supposed to be my master's thesis project. However I found something different and never did the original idea but's it's always been in my mind.

Big kudos to the author for this nice project ! I hope it gives further ideas to people playing it

</comment><comment><USER22> This project is wicked cool, and I almost missed that they built it using Rust. I like the language a lot, and I think something like this is a sign of it moving towards real maturity, where the utility of the programs starts outshining the method of its construction. I'll be really curious to see if any project proposals end up citing this over the next couple years as an impetus for starting to experiment with different approaches to their traffic infrastructure, or at least inspiring people to become more engaged with it.

<comment><USER2> I gave a [talk]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chYd5I-5oyc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chYd5I-5oyc)) to a Rust meetup with lots of gory details, if it's interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How much would be involved to adapt this to other cities?

<comment><USER2> [https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/new...](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/new_city.md)

Biggest barrier is lack of trip demand data. If you come up with how many people leave from building1 to building2 at time T using some mode of transport, then this can work.

<comment><USER24> Hey this is something I've been working on as a side project for the last 2 years. Using traffic cameras to detect the flows through intersections with the goal of providing better stats to governments and city planners.

Hopefully I can have the poc going in the next month. A city wide integration with something like AB street would be really cool and was phase 2 for this project. Phase 3 being an optimised citywide traffic control.

<comment><USER2> Whoa, this would be awesome! Strongly consider publishing open datasets. :) Could you talk at all about how it works, or what privacy issues you've dealt with?

<comment><USER24> Sure, the system takes a raw camera feed and spits out an entry into a sql db which will then, depending on customer requirements, be provided in a format they want.

In between these steps, (all based in python) opencv takes the video, splits it, sticks some of the frames on a kafka cluster.

Another node picks up approx 2 fps, hands it to a object detection algo based on tensorflow which then puts the results on another kafka topic.

A heavily customised tracking algo pulls all of the frames available and the tensorflow results for initialisation and reverification. Once a vehicle is tracked through the field of view the vehicle is counted.

For the privacy issues, as this is only tracking for a short amount of time, not tracking between intersections and not tracking persistent uuids or numberplates, there shouldn't be too much trouble. But it will depend on the local law requirements. As this is a statistical problem, tracking the actual path of a car between point a and b isn't completely necessary if you can get a sufficient amount of coverage over a city. (You probably already understand this.)

As for opening the datasets up, I plan to do this with the poc. I've been using the Biloxi Mississippi camera live stream from youtube for all of my testing so far. My poc will be a website with this live stream having an overlayed view and the ability to download the stats for the day/month/year etc. As for other cities, I'm sure a FOIA will be able to get you the data. But I will be pushing to publish it openly as they will have to pay for it either way.

As you can probably tell, I'm trying to turn this into a business and the costs of actually collecting and processing the data isn't something that is reasonable for single person to bear. After talking to the traffic dept for my country, the largest city of 1.5m has about 3000 cameras. But I am aiming for a system that's cheap enough to enable 24/7 monitoring as that's when this all gets pretty exciting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Woah, the data comes from OpenStreetMap!

Is it possible to create a map with one click for a new city?

I read through [https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/art...](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/articles/map/article.md) but I can't tell if this must be manually followed.

<comment><USER2> [https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/new...](https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/blob/master/docs/new_city.md)

Not quite one-click, but you can try the one-shot importer. You'll probably hit some issues; I have strict assertions to prevent regressions in Seattle. Please file a bug if you can't get a new place to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would love to see a simulation system like this that also involved other "graph" components of city infrastructure -- like power, water, food, rail, air traffic, internet, mobile service etc. The ripple effects could be very hard to guess at, but could make for really interesting scenarios. Imagine trying to increase power when the only "lever" you can change is food prices!

</comment><comment><USER27> In the real world, how is traffic routed? I often wonder what controls obviously inefficient intersections and how easy or hard it is to fix that.

I assume that there are software systems that take in schedules and various inputs (cameras, magnets, crosswalk buttons) but I'm curious if anyone works in the field and would talk about their experience.

<comment><USER28> Check out the Kimley-Horn Integrated Transportation System (KITS):

[https://www.kimley-horn.com/service/kits-advanced-traffic- ma...](https://www.kimley-horn.com/service/kits-advanced-traffic-management/)

A user manual might give you some sense of the complications (bus priority, special events scheduling, etc.):

[https://dpw.lacounty.gov/TNL/ITS/KITS/site_files/LACO%20KITS...](https://dpw.lacounty.gov/TNL/ITS/KITS/site_files/LACO%20KITS%20Manual.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So cool! I'm sure there's a reason this hasn't been done, but I'm curious if there would be value in doing using this for some type of folding at home distributed optimization problem solving. Converging on actual suggest improvements that might not seem obvious

</comment><comment><USER30> Adding a options for rethinking current systems would be nice.

For example, autonomous vehicles would be interesting. You potentially don't need intersection control with all autonomous traffic. Or what is the benefit of certain streets or lanes being designated autonomous only?

And what is the impact of education? Is there a way to change behavior that's cheaper than changing a street for example? You can change the street, but you can also change how people use the street.

<comment><USER31> > You potentially don't need intersection control with all autonomous traffic

I thought this myth had been widely debunked. In a world where every commuter drives a 100% autonomous car, you still have hobbyists driving old vintage cars, cyclists riding non-autonomous bikes, pedestrians, birds, runaway shopping carts, etc. disrupting the flow of traffic. Without traffic control you make the intersection in-crossible for a significant subset of the traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> When are we getting the CHAZ DLC?

</comment><comment><USER33> Fixing the traffic lights would go a long way towards improving traffic flow in Seattle. How much time do you spend sitting at a red light when there's no cross traffic? How often are you and the 5 cars behind you abruptly stopped to let one cross traffic car through?

Lots of traffic lights already have cameras on them. Hook 'em up to an AI and a goal of maximizing throughput.

<comment><USER34> This sounds simple but it really isn't.

First, the vast majority of signals aren't networked, they're on simple timers. And you can't just put them on the internet for hopefully obvious reasons.

Second, there's a bit of a butterfly effect. Change one thing and the whole system reacts in sometimes unpredictable ways.

Third, you need to account for pedestrians too. There's ADA requirements around how long signals are green for based on the width of the road.

Fourth, you need to account for pedestrian load. There's no cameras trained on the areas where pedestrians gather. If you're going to say they just need to press the button, no:

[https://cal.streetsblog.org/2020/04/01/stop-touching- pedestr...](https://cal.streetsblog.org/2020/04/01/stop-touching-pedestrian- beg-buttons/)

Basically, it's really not that simple.

<comment><USER35> Not really, all the above points was solved 40+ years ago.

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

<comment><USER36> I'm curious if you have any professional experience with this? How well does it accommodate bicyclist and pedestrian traffic flow? In Seattle they're trying to accommodate these kinds of traffic instead of cars because it's really expensive to build more streets. And we've learned over the past 20 years that optimizing for car traffic means making it less safe and harder to walk or bicycle.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's so special about "Dark Mode"? - <AUTHOR> Everyone and their mother is talking about dark mode on different apps as if this a new thing or as if it does anything revolutionary. Dark themes have been around forever. I don't get it. Are we really out of innovative things to celebrate and rave about that "Dark Mode" is at the top of the list? <comment><USER2> The difference with the "new" dark mode on Windows, MacOS and now iOS/ipadOS is that it's a system wide setting. Apps and even websites can (or rather should) support it. How many hours would you have spent modifying themes, creating new css rules or installing extensions in browser to get those results before? And you'd still not be able to do so with most apps/software.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting question. I've assumed it is an parallel affect of battery usage and visual/ocular-health under various lighting conditions. Officially, I too would like to know.</comment>


Why Piracy Works - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg

<comment><USER2> If you are a Pirate this is what you sometimes get - [http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/17/engrish-hilarity- on-.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/17/engrish-hilarity-on-.html)

And that was after 23 mins of bit torrenting what I thought was Snow White.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not to mention that getting the DVD is easier in the first place :(

<comment><USER4> I disagree--I have to either leave my house or wait a few days for Netflix/Amazon to rent/purchase a DVD, but I can fire up BitTorrent 24/7 and have access to almost as many movies within minutes.

<comment><USER3> Sorry that is what I meant.</comment></comment></comment>