Ask HN: How do you programatically deal with forum/blog trolls? - <AUTHOR>

Trolling is the age-old annoyance on the Internet, but the latest feature request I received for a forum that I am the technical lead on has me scratching my head.
Scenario: users are creating new accounts en masse just to troll other users.  They post inappropriate text/links/pics that disturb other users.
Proposed Solution: the admins/mods would like to see general users* unable to post any links/pics.  They can still create threads and post replies, but that data is just going to be text.  In order for them to elevate their privileges, they must show some entitlement (i.e.: purchases on their account).
My take: This smacks of elitism because I need to purchase something before I have privilege, but from a technological perspective it also ties me to another service that I don't control.  Accounts may be easy to create, and entitlements less so, but I don't think that will stop trolling (possibly just the image trolling).
So what tricks have you used to stop trolling on forums/blogs/etc.?
Edit: I neglected to mention that this forum runs 5,000-10,000 concurrent users throughout the day and over 3k new accounts per day, making any sort of manual moderation of users difficult. <comment><USER2> \- "Cave" feature, where the troll can post as many messages as they want, but those messages aren't seen by anyone other than the troll \- Duplicate account detection - if the same IP address appears on more than one account, the account is auto-flagged

<comment><AUTHOR> Accounts can look like they're coming from the same IP address all the time. If people access the website from inside a NAT, they'll have the same IP.

Cave is like a hell-ban, and it works when there aren't too many users on the system. The forum I work on peaks at 10k concurrent users with over a million accounts. It would make for an administrative nightmare (which is probably why the feature request tries to automate a solution).</comment></comment>


The Return of the WIZard: RCE in Exim (CVE-2019-10149) - <AUTHOR> https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/06/05/4 <comment><AUTHOR> Qualys re-posted their writeup and included the details that had previously been left out:

[https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2019/06/06/1](https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss- security/2019/06/06/1)</comment>


Cisco May Be Making A Run For Skype - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/29/cisco-may-be-making-a-run-for-skype/ <comment><USER2> Okay, so here's the new plan for startups: develop your product and execute it to near its full potential, then sell it to someone for $2B. But keep the core technology (just tell them it isn't important and/or you're just licensing it from this other corporation you just happen to own). Continue to collect licensing fees on said core tech. Then, when that person can't put enough time/effort/etc. into it, buy it back from them at 20% of the original price (after they've taken a huge write down of course). Next, raise a ron of VC money cause you're the shit, and then plan to IPO a very small portion of the company. Finally, while you're in the process of doing your IPO, get bought AGAIN, except for $5B this time. /rant

<comment><USER3> This is almost exactly what actually happened with WebShots (only with smaller amounts of cash).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webshots>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article should mention Webex, instead of leaving that for the fluff in the bottom.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebEx>

CISCO might want Skype just for the brand and userbase, since it already has a VOIP platform, far richer than Skype's (except maybe for the P2P stuff)

<comment><USER5> WebEx is the most horrible user-hostile piece of software out there, so hopefully they'll kill it in favour of Skype.

<comment><USER6> One a remote desktop control tool, the other's a phone call app.

<comment><USER7> WebEx Connect is still a frustrating piece of "Enterprise" software that I wish I wasn't forced to use on a daily basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This acquisition certainly makes a hell of a lot more sense than the lame eBay purchase. Seriously, how did anyone convince the board at eBay that purchasing Skype would be a good thing?

At least Cisco is in the telecommunications business and could roll the Skype brand and tech into real products.

<comment><USER9> I was in the same state of WTF until I asked about it a friend of mine, who was the CEO of one of larger Boston startups. It took him a couple of minutes to crunch the numbers in his MBA head and to show that eBay's purchase price was reasonable.

Apparently it _was_ a viable business transaction when it was conducted (excluding the not-purchasing-the-core-technology part).

<comment><USER10> Of course another possible explanation for this is that MBAs are all taught to value things the same (crazy) way and he is simply running the same valuation calculation as the MBAs at eBay and coming up with an equally crazy answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cisco owns Jabber, inc. Maybe they'll turn Skype into an xmpp-based service, allow federation with other service providers, and lose the proprietary protocols.

or maybe not.

<comment><USER5> What possible benefit would this be to Cisco or Skype or even to Skype's current users?

<comment><USER12> Cisco makes a lot of money on high-margin equipment to deal with IP traffic. If an inter-operable VoIP solution becomes the future of communications (or just raises the level of internet traffic in general) Cisco wins as people have to buy more network equipment (of which a bunch will probably be their equipment).

Skype's current business model is non-interoperability. If people are locked into Skype for Skype to Skype calling, then they'll pay Skype Out rates to dial phones. However, there can be a limit to how pervasive you can get with a closed network model. Cisco might calculate out that increased hardware sales would do them better. Likewise, they might feel that the Skype brand has enough clout to stand on its own.

I'm not saying that it's likely, just that there is a potential benefit. More internet traffic is probably a very desirable thing for Cisco.

<comment><USER5> Skype's current business model is _very_ interoperable. I have a traditional phone line right next to me which interoperates with Skype really well, and so do a billion other people.

By contrast, VoIP has _never_ worked (until Skype came along, and even now all non-Skype VoIP services are generally technical and business failures).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Democratically organised open-source organisation - <AUTHOR> i want to create an open source project blog... i am hoping someone can give me any advice on what i'm trying to achieve... are there any examples out there i am able to study? i would like advice on the direction i can take my side-project to align my projects goals to what potential end-users want?
i am a software developer and i do not understand much about businesses and organisations. this seems to make it very difficult for me to find out more information about what i am trying to achieve. i have tried searching "open source business model", but all i could find out was things about was advice on running companies from the perspective of some kind of CEO-type figure.
i was optimistic enough to think i could finish it by myself, but it seems that to create the project that i am trying to, is too much for one person... or at least too much for me to do by myself.
as a result of personal effort, i have made several functioning components for the project and i remain passionate about my side project. i am wondering what my options would be to be able to continue my project as open source.
while open source will allow for other developer to be able to work on the project with me, i am not interested in any particular help from the software development perspective (the main purpose of the project was to challenge me as a developer)... my main difficulty with this project is the organisational aspect. i have no idea what i am doing when it comes to business, legal etc (basically "things-that-aren't-software-development").
i thought maybe i can create some kind of blog that i kept up-to-date as the project progresses. i can add some commenting feature so i can get public feedback on the direction that i am working towards.
i have made a start at: https://glitr.io ... but this is a new method of working for me and i do not know anything about working this way.
i could use any advice/ideas anyone is able to give. thanks. <comment><USER2> I think you're putting the cart before the horse. These types of things often develop out of need or emerge organically within a group.

The main problem with doing too much from the start is that the process of defining the governance model of the organization is part of creating the organization. If you want to find people who want to be involved in something like this, it's likely that they want to be involved in the definition of the organization itself, not just part of the building of the outcome of the defined organization.

When building a community, which is effectively what you are doing here, a sense of ownership drives motivation and passion. Try to find others who would share your sense of passions around this and define the structure with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for you reply. i think our philosophies are aligned in expectation and this is part of the issue i am trying to resolve.

to be more clear about what is happening; i already am building a project which i plan to continue work on independent of support i manage to gain. my expectation is that any support will accelerate progress of my project and i do not not foresee a particular requirement to keep my project secret... therefore making this an open project will at least allow for external feedback on the decisions i intend to make.

i think my problem is that my current skill-set is strongly aligned to being a software developer. therefore i think there is a high risk to me making bad "business decisions". a few examples: \- marketing stuff \- legal stuff \- financing stuff \- how do gain customers \- what do my customers want \- "things that are done without a computer" \- etc

i particularly agree with your last two paragraphs... i would like to summarize them to the following expectation:

"an individual would be personally invested if they are actively contributing to decisions and do not feel that the decisions made by the community are unfair in cases where the individuals decision differs from the community consensus"

i have created a loomio account as per feedback from this posts thread: [https://www.loomio.org/g/NUlbf4Y0/glitr- io](https://www.loomio.org/g/NUlbf4Y0/glitr-io)

i also have the blog i previously created and is mentioned in the post body.

any advice on external tools for this is appreciated, but i would prefer to to consolidate the number of tools (to a minimum to make it easier for me to maintain). im hoping the blog ([https://glitr.io](https://glitr.io)) will be sufficient. i have integrated Discus ([https://disqus.com](https://disqus.com)) for comments. i dont see any particular reason i would be unable to integrate any other tools.

<comment><USER3> Personally I slightly more believe in benevolent dicatorships, than democracy, when it comes to open source :- )

A way to crowdsource ideas, upvote ideas so the core maintainers know what's popular. A way to disqus the ideas. And then the maintainer(s) / core developers, listens to the discussions, and they make decisions, based on that.

However making democratic decisions, where everyone has one vote (?), sounds like long term disaster to me :- ) because a few people, the core developers who build 99% of the software, will (I think) have 100 x more insight, than members in general. ? then, equal voting power = could drive away the core contributors? if the community makes weird decisoins?

> consolidate the number of tools

Then possibly a project I'm doing could be of interest to you. It's called Talkyard and let's you do both blog comments (like Disqus) and question- answers and crowdsourcing ideas (like Loomio), and simple chat channels, in one tool. [https://www.talkyard.io](https://www.talkyard.io)

You have a link to your project? Aha it's [https://glitr.io](https://glitr.io) about memes

<comment><AUTHOR> "However making democratic decisions, where everyone has one vote (?)"

you are right this could be a disaster... what are the options to to moderate this?

many cloud providers provide services that could be relevant here... to specify a few: \- [https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/](https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/) \- [https://cloud.google.com/vision/](https://cloud.google.com/vision/) \- [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/cognitive- service...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/cognitive- services/computer-vision/) \- companies that provide "moderation-as-a-service"

im doing this project as a hobby. no particular lofty goals for this project than "to work". my plan is to learn as i go along... but im expecting difficulty in the project (given i should only be spending hobby-time on it).

the success of this project would be great... but ultimately, this is not my goal. i do not plan for big deep investment in this project... purely for fun and education... im hoping there are others out there that could learn from this project too.

i will try to incorporate your feedback into this project. i think i need to document the project further before i can identify anywhere i should improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Until you have a big enough community, just assume the BDFL role. Once the project is big enough, you can resign your position to be democratically elected as chair of the round table.

</comment><comment><USER5> Check out Loomio [https://www.loomio.org/](https://www.loomio.org/) and similar products

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the reply. see: [https://www.loomio.org/g/NUlbf4Y0/glitr- io](https://www.loomio.org/g/NUlbf4Y0/glitr-io)</comment></comment>


FireIce: A major breakthrough for fighting wildfires - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/16/smallbusiness/fireice/index.htm

<comment><USER2> It's amazing that this isn't toxic. I'd be interested to know more about the chemistry behind it, but presumably they won't be sharing any details.

<comment><USER3> Wow. Non toxic. Cleans off with water. Doesn't linger in the environment. Easy to ship in powdered form. Sounds like a miracle substance!</comment></comment>


Moon Poised to Win South Korea's Presidency, Exit Poll Shows - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-05-09/moon-poised-to-win-south-korea-s-presidency-exit-poll-shows <comment><USER2> Moon 2017: Keep our orbital axis stable!</comment>


Volvo and Autoliv aim to sell self-driving cars with Nvidia AI tech by 2021 - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/26/volvo-and-autoliv-aim-to-sell-self-driving-cars-with-nvidia-ai-tech-by-2021 <comment><USER2> If there's one car manufacturer I'd blindly trust with my safety that's Volvo. Their cars might not be the most reliable, or the most exciting, or the most luxurious, or the most innovative, but when it comes to safety they're the point of reference.

<comment><USER3> Is that still the case since the GM buyout? I've not really been into cars for like the last decade so don't really know.

<comment><USER4> Volvo was owned by Ford. GM owned Saab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lets not also forget that Volvo has been field testing a lot of the sub systems needed for this for several years with things like: Lane departure warnings, BLIS, Auto break, adaptive speed cruising (that follows the vehicle in front of it) to mention a few.

</comment><comment><USER6> Strange. Volvo previously partnered with Uber for this cause. Cold feet?

[https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en- gb/media/pressrele...](https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en- gb/media/pressreleases/194795/volvo-cars-and-uber-join-forces-to-develop- autonomous-driving-cars)

<comment><USER7> Autoliv is very different from Uber. They are specialized in car safety systems and have a long history of cooperation with many car brands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel this will be much safer than anything Uber or Amazon or Alphabet can put together...

<comment><USER9> Uber I can understand. But Amazon and Alphabet have bigger names to protect.

Also, how much AI knowledge does NVidia actually have? They are big in computing hardware, not sure about AI.

<comment><USER8> Volvo does this for living. It's their main product.

For Amazon and Alphabet this is just about reaching a new market before the other guy. Things will be rushed, and they will move fast and break more things. I don't want to ride the car that was created by first-to-market.

<comment><USER9> But how do you envision that Alphabet is going to leverage being "first-to- market" in this case?

I'm expecting that people in general are more concerned about other aspects of their cars, than the self-driving aspect (as long as it's there), just like people don't care much about what kind of GPS is built-in for a certain car brand. So I'm not sure that Alphabet would try to rush things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Do webpages from techcrunch load correctly for anyone on Android. I have had problems for a long time thinking they would fix it but they never did.

<comment><USER8> Nope, its the hipster webdev dilemma ("everyone I know only use Safari on ipad pro").

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I notice that it's 2017 and volvo has exactly zero electric cars ?

Sure, they have the same old three-years-in-the-future concept cars that will never be produced ... but no actual fully electric car.

So very sad and lame.

</comment><comment><USER12> Will self driving cars need to be outfitted with SSD arrays as well? Will mechanics / shops be swapping out HDDs as they fail or do I have to go to the genius bar for that?</comment>


The Biggest, Baddest Security Events Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www2.csoonline.com/exclusives/column.html?CID=33495 The top eight events that changed the course of computer security history (and two that didn't). <comment><USER2> Wow, I had no idea that YC's Morris was the inventor of the first internet worm.</comment>


"Chromecast automatically transfers that PIN using short, inaudible audio tones" - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/chromecast/answer/6109292?hl=en&ref_topic=6109288 <comment><USER2> What specific range of threats is this supposed to robustly defend against? It's not difficult to imagine significant, inexpensive attacks that it doesn't prevent, just the presence of an audio bug of some kind, for example.

It seems like an "invisible ink" security strategy, which is really not fit for purpose.

<comment><USER3> > What specific range of threats is this supposed to robustly defend against?

None. It's kind of like typical residential window locks, it's a mitigation for near-zero-effort casual vandalism.

If you want security, you don't use guest mode.

> It's not difficult to imagine significant, inexpensive attacks that it > doesn't prevent, just the presence of an audio bug of some kind, for > example.

If your threat model involves people with covert audio bugs and wifi transceivers in your living room, them maliciously streaming stuff to your Chromecast is probably pretty low on the list of things they might use those things to do.

<comment><USER2> This isn't so much about the "threat" in terms of candidate devices which could act as bugs, or wifi devices in general (which aren't unusual, these days) but a question of whether the convenience being provided to guests is actually far outweighed by the risk that's being created for the "host". I'm not talking about paranoid hosts; it's more that a system shouldn't pretend to offer security of any kind when it actually doesn't.

Edit: so the threat is all the potential downsides relative to sharing wifi passwords on paper.

<comment><USER3> What it protects against is casual people outside the home, with no intrusion, connecting to the Chromecast. It's casual vandalism that would be easy with the direct connection Guest Mode without the PIN, but which the PIN pretty effectively defeats (provided the screen isn't visible to outside passerby.)

> whether the convenience being provided to guests is actually far outweighed > by the risk that's being created to the host.

What risk? If you are in my living room or compromise an internet-connected device there, you can stream to my Chromecast, sure, but you can do a lot worse with those preconditions independent of Chromecast Guest Mode.

<comment><USER2> The process of pairing two Bluetooth devices, for example, usually needs physical input on both devices. This setup weakens that requirement, and it's unclear why, other than convenience and gimmickry.

One possible risk is that streaming video to the Chromecast could be used to exploit security flaws in the video codec. That might sound like a stretch, but you're increasing your attack surface. Where previously, the host would have had to intervene to accept a stream, now there's this weak audio-based security system. However minor the possible risks to the Chromecast are, this method of authentication just seems to be asking for trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dane-pgp Now someone needs to set their PIN so that it produces this:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/score/o/s/ospfte7vv30brgi8c9rgh...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/score/o/s/ospfte7vv30brgi8c9rghjkmssmagbd/ospfte7v.png)

<comment><USER4> Close Encounters of the Third Kind reference, for those who don't read music.

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 Now I'm wondering if my dog is hearing it, and how annoying it might be.</comment>


Show HN: Released My IPhone App (Finderous) - <AUTHOR>

Hi Guys, I have just released my free IPhone App: Finderous, available on ITunes at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/finderous/id520384764?mt=8 .
   I would appreciate if you could pass on some comments and suggestions. About Finderous: It is a multilevel location based Q&A app, where users can post questions on city/county/state/country level for visibility according to the type of question. <comment><USER2> Honestly, the logo for your app could be a lot better. Design is a key element in how people decide to download your app. At least it is to me.

Hope that helps!</comment>


Unix's founding fathers [2004] - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/2724348

<comment><USER2> You might want to add (2004) to the title.

<comment><USER3> I didn't even notice until I got to the part that explained how modern computers had 0.5G memory and 40G hard disks.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... I didn't even notice ..."_

The date is on the top of the article but maybe I should amend the title.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The writing in The Economist is awesome; many magazines would struggle to convey programming, compiling, and machine code to a general audience.</comment>


China and Intellectual Property: Bunnie's Project Fernvale - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/why-its-easier-to-innovate-in-china-than-in-the-united-1709911838

<comment><USER2> I love Bunnie, and I love that he takes the time to document all his learnings about doing hardware dev in China. There are a lot of other people -- mostly those who work for multinational manufacturing companies -- who have learned the same lessons, but he sure has a knack for expressing them in writing (and great photos!).</comment>


EC2 Update – X1e Instances in Five More Sizes and a Stronger SLA - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-update-x1e-instances-in-five-more-sizes-and-a-stronger-sla/ <comment><USER2> For anyone else that is curious, the old SLA was %99.95.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20171114180320/https://aws.amazo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171114180320/https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/sla/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The x1e.xlarge isn't much cheaper (about 15%) than an r4.4xlarge, which has the same amount of RAM and 16 Xeon vCPUs at 53 ECUs versus 4 Skylake vCPUs at 12 (!) ECUs.

I don't quite understand why this exists. Maybe playing in-family reserved instance games, but this seems a little weird. I can't think of a reason why I would use the x1e.xlarge or recommend it to anyone.

<comment><USER4> It seems to be a perfect fit for redis, since that only uses a single core. We run redis on R4s today and it wastes most of the cores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 4TB of RAM is pretty impressive, especially if they are actually making money on this offering. It must be pretty expensive to have them sit idle at all.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the pricing on a x1e.xlarge? I'm not seeing it listed:

        x1e.xlarge    N/A*    N/A*

<comment><USER7> Looking like $1.209 per hour through Sydney. You might have chosen a region without them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Anyone using x1e.32xlarge for anything around here?

<comment><USER3> Not personally, but stuff like SAP HANA really likes having piles of RAM thrown at it.</comment></comment>


Google Cloud Partial Outage - <AUTHOR> https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/zall/20003 <comment><USER2> From a strictly "reliability" perspective it's not a good look for Google. Their reputation for developing high uptime systems has been endangered by the recent series of outages and service interruptions. When I signed on to GCP, I assumed that the same people who wrote the SRE handbook were in charge here... how could this stuff happen?

However, as an engineer... I can empathize with their situation. GCP has less public cloud experience than AWS. They're somewhat transparent about outages (so much better than being gaslit by AWS). Shit happens and at least the same problem doesn't happen twice, which is what I really care about.

However my non technical manager won't think this way and neither will other companies considering Google Cloud. GCP is in a tough spot from a marketing perspective if they get a reputation for being unreliable due to these incidents.

<comment><USER3> Is GCP actually less reliable than AWS or Azure, or is that only HN effect where everything bad about Google gets voted to the top?

I'm hearing a lot of talk from my contacts about AWS just simply denying and hiding any outages until they're undeniably proven - so perhaps the issue is just the fact that GCP is too honest?

<comment><USER4> Curious about this as well. Google hate here can be palpable

<comment><USER5> Wind back 5 years or more and this place was a Google love fest.

Somehow it seems that Google has managed to disappoint a lot of people.

<comment><USER3> > Somehow it seems that Google has managed to disappoint a lot of people.

Yeah, and those people aren't wrong - it's not like Google didn't do their own share of messups.

Still, the upplaying of Googles' faults and downplaying of other companies faults (even when they're the same!) has not been the best outlook of this community lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like how I found out about this here and not through an email. Tons of customer reports from our site of being logged out randomly (we use Firebase) and we had no idea why.

<comment><USER6> The outage is going on for almost 12-hours. Quick math says that's 99.86% reliability.

On top of this, they want to start charging $70/mo for GKE because they "[...] are also introducing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that's financially backed with a guaranteed availability of 99.95%" (pulled from pricing[0])

This is unacceptable.

[0] [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes- engine/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing)

<comment><USER7> I'm guessing because we are going through a pandemic they might be taking more time than usual to apply fixes.

<comment><USER2> They've been pretty vocal about the fact that this has nothing to do with the pandemic.

<comment><USER8> The outage itself might not have been caused by anything related to the pandemic, but the resolution is likely being done by engineers adjusting to working from home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The bad part here is that its impacting multiple regions. really hard for customers to build high-availability solutions when isolation boundaries can be breached this way. (disclosure ex-aws)

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute](https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute)

It just looks horrific from the reliability standpoint. May be Google should consider adding columns for affected regions! Maybe they are too honest in admitting the failures than other providers, but that page paints a very bad picture.

<comment><USER11> I'm glad they do. Compared to AWS this transparancy is a breath of fresh air.

And I'm no Google fan either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Already looking forward to that post-mortem. It might be morbid, but they are often my favorite things to read.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a disaster...

> We are currently investigating an issue affecting Dataflow, BigQuery, > DialogFlow, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Firestore, App Engine, Cloud Functions, > Cloud Monitoring, Cloud MemoryStore, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Storage, Cloud > Composer, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud KMS, Cloud Container Registry, Compute > Engine, Cloud IAM, Cloud SQL, Firebase Storage, Cloud Healthcare API, Cloud > AI, Firebase Machine Learning, Data Catalog and Cloud Console.

<comment><USER13> When you see that, it's almost certainly a low level networking outage (networking hardware failure or a very low level networking config change that isn't possible to canary with the vendor's current technology, possibly combined with something insufficient failover resources due to other issues).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently the outage is caused by a third party router bug: [https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1243398255083311105](https://twitter.com/uhoelzle/status/1243398255083311105)

</comment><comment><USER15> What region is this? I have not seen a blip in central.

</comment><comment><USER16> resolved as of 2020-03-27 06:54 US/Pacific

<comment><USER17> What UTC time is it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even Google needs humans to keep its services running.

<comment><USER19> I'll bet it was also humans who caused this outage in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment> F117-DK Oh my! GCP is on fire?

</comment><comment><USER20> I guess the number of comments here reflect how many people are using Google Cloud - apparently not much?

<comment><USER21> There's nothing really to say about it.

I run about 8,000 CPU cores in GCP and what am I going to say?

I like the transparency, in my experience it's more reliable than AWS- although AWS does _not_ report problems until they're absolutely undeniable.

Other than that, shit happens, this is upsetting but eh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Google Cloud was the least reliable major cloud provider in the last 2 years. May be they are too busy killing their other services, so they don't have time for other least important things like cloud.

<comment><USER23> Is this based on independent research, or officially-reported downtime? There are enough anecdotes in threads here about cloud reliability to suggest AWS is bad at reporting outages.</comment></comment>


ARMed Attack: Intel and AMD Do Not See the Torpedo Headed Their Way - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/article/4227086-armed-attack-intel-amd-see-torpedo-headed-way <comment><USER2> ARMs biggest problem is software, while some software are just scripts, and some can be recompiled. It's not that easy with everything. I don't see the change happening unless there is some pretty significant advantages.

AMD actually makes arm processors.

__[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#A1100-series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#A1100-series)

__[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K12)</comment>


Content and product marketing in the early stage of SendBird (YC W16) - <AUTHOR> https://kimchihill.com/2020/03/04/saas-content-product-marketing-to-build-arr-from-0-to-10-m/ <comment><USER2> Really appreciate Mark sharing his insights on getting going and growing marketing / customer acquisition in the early days. It's hard to rewind the clock on successful startups and see what they did (and focused on) to get where they are today.

It's worth noting that content marketing takes time and is only one piece of the acquisition strategy. It would have been helpful to see a timeline and if/how they allocated budget and time to other tactics near-term. Your content engine really doesn't tend to kick in until 6-12 months after you've developed some sort of an audience.

So, as you plan to go to market, what else are you doing to pair this good advice on building content with other tactics?</comment>


Designing a Corporate Entrepreneurship Program – A Qualcomm.. - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2013/01/28/qualcomm-the-best-corporate-entrepreneurship-program-youve-never-heard-of/

<comment><USER2>
      All while keeping in mind that employees, managers and
      executives have day jobs – so how could we ask them to
      spend significant time on new ideas while not sacrificing
      their present obligations?

Good to hear this acknowledged, but I didn't notice from the article what they did to address this problem?

</comment><comment><USER3> "...submissions grew from 82 in the first year to over 500 in its fifth and final year."

The article describes the program as a resounding success. Anyone know why it ended?

</comment><comment><USER4> can't wait for the part 2!</comment>


The Worst They Can Say Is No - <AUTHOR> http://www.nevertryneverfail.com/the-worst-they-can-say-is-no/

<comment><USER2> Great read. If you can tell when to apply it, this is a great saying to remind yourself of often.</comment>


Show HN: Chrome extension to avoid pastejacking - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/awalGarg/realcopy <comment><USER2> Does something like this exist for Firefox/SeaMonkey/PaleMoon?

<comment><AUTHOR> Firefox now supports the blink compatible Web-Extensions API so theoretically the same code (or with minimal modifications) should work for FF. I'd see if I can find some time to test it.

I personally use FF as my primary browser too, but I wrote this as a chrome extension just for a PoC, and packaging for chrome is quite easy. It's really a lunch-break-task :)</comment></comment>


Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/13/white-people-expats-immigrants-migration

<comment><USER2> Nonsense. Expat indicates citizenship status. An expatriate is a person temporarily residing in a country other than that of their citizenship. An immigrants on the other hand is a person in the process of changing their citizenship to their new resident country.

I've never heard a European immigrant referred to as an Expat in New York.

Here in China we are certianly not immigrants because it is made absolutely clear we are expected to eventually leave.

If anything the question is why are some people called Expats and some called Migrant Worker?

<comment><USER3> > An immigrants on the other hand is a person in the process of changing their > citizenship to their new resident country.

Nope. Immigrating usually implies permanent residence in the new country, not necessarily getting citizenship.

<comment><USER2> >Nope. Immigrating usually implies permanent residence in the new country, not necessarily getting citizenship.

I stand corrected- but expats in the countries they are referred to as such almost never have the option of permanent residence.

<comment><USER4> Here are examples of people using "expat" to include people with permanent residency:

"Even international medical insurance companies admit that for expatriates permanently living in France, it makes sense to join the national state health insurance system." \- [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/expat- health/8251102/...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/expat- health/8251102/Expat-guide-to-France-health-care.html)

"The 3 levels of residency status are: Permanent Resident – Expats who have lived in Japan for 5 years or more out of a 10 year period, ..." [http://aboutmovingtojapan.com/taxesforexpats.html](http://aboutmovingtojapan.com/taxesforexpats.html)

"If you are planning on moving to South Africa or are already one of the expats permanently working or on extended vacation here, it is valuable to be aware of the tax implications." \- [http://www.dirmeik.co.za/blog/2014/10/08/expatriate-tax- in-s...](http://www.dirmeik.co.za/blog/2014/10/08/expatriate-tax-in-south- africa/)

[http://juliedawnfox.com/2013/07/05/expat-artists- algarve/](http://juliedawnfox.com/2013/07/05/expat-artists-algarve/) \- a British expat who lives full-time in Portugal

[http://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2014/02/27/expat- arti...](http://www.theolivepress.es/spain-news/2014/02/27/expat-artist- enjoys-sweet-smell-of-success/) \- another British expat, 18 years in Spain

[http://www.theyucatantimes.com/2013/11/meet-expat-writers- li...](http://www.theyucatantimes.com/2013/11/meet-expat-writers-living-in- yucatan/) \- various expat writers in Yucatan, including a Canadian who moved there in the 1970s for love

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author has confused "race" with "education".

I am a white American who lived in the South Pacific. One of the things I noticed is that the term "Expat" was used to refer to a qualified worker who goes abroad to work for an international company for a specified amount of time.

My neighbor and friend was an "Expat" Fijian working on a two year bank rotation.

"Immigrant" was used mostly for migrant workers or workers that had an undetermined timeframe.

<comment><USER4> That is the simplest definition of ex-pat, but there are other types of ex- pats.

Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway are two of the most famous of the American expat community in inter-war Europe. In [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9202317) I listed a couple examples of modern ex-pat artists.

As perhaps an extreme counter-example, take a look at Wikipedia's list of American expats in Cuba [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_expatriates_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_expatriates_in_Cuba) . It includes Assata Shakur, who "escaped from prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba, in political asylum, since 1984". She did not go there to work for an international company, and she is there for an indefinite amount of time.

<comment><USER5> True - There are always "extreme counter-examples" to every situation and I enjoy people who like to be contrarians for the purpose of pointing out there are other "less simple" or more complicated definitions.

It does appear that your post didn't really address my main point, which was that "Education" separates the immigrant from the expat.

<comment><USER4> The article said:

> Top African professionals going to work in Europe are not considered expats. > They are immigrants. Period. "I work for multinational organisations both in > the private and public sectors. And being black or coloured doesn't gain me > the term "expat". I'm a highly qualified immigrant, as they call me, to be > politically correct," says an African migrant worker.

For your statement to be meaningful, what more education does this highly qualified African need to be considered an expat?

Do people go around asking for someone's educational level before assigning them the label "expat" or "immigrant"? It's much easier to believe that the main distinction is based on the more overt indicators of 'social class, country of origin and economic status', than education level.

For example, the thousands of Iraqi doctors, engineers, and other PhD educated people, who fled Iraq and moved to the US or European countries, are labeled "immigrants" not "expats", on basis of their ethnicity, and not on personal education.

To go back to the point of the Guardian piece, how is the term "expat" useful? Why not "call them immigrants like everyone else"?

I am an American living in Sweden, and I do not work for a multinational company who brought me here on temporary assignment. Do you consider me an expat or an immigrant? Can you tell without knowing my education level? At what point do I switch from one to the other?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Supporters of the startup visa should emphasize how it will attract expats instead of immigrants. Amirite?</comment>


Will HTML Ever Be Replaced? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/will-html-ever-be-replaced

<comment><USER2> Sometimes I feel like it HTML has been replaced when I view source on a JSON site.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great point. In some ways, couldn't the basic structure of a web page just be a package.json file?

I think between JSON and Markdown, you wouldn't really need HTML. Interesting.

<comment><USER3> Aren't JSON and Markdown ways of defining content, as opposed to layout? You would still need HTML or some equivalent to turn them into a document, even if they are 'human readable' natively.

<comment><USER2> No. If you view source it will be a blank page. They use CSS for formatting.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steven Pinker's Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Graphs Show Why - <AUTHOR> https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-05-18/steven-pinkers-ideas-about-progress-are-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why/ <comment><USER2> TL/DR: A counter argument to Pinker argument in favour of progress. Very self loathing and politically correct. Yet another example that everyone agrees more or less about what problems exist and vary drastically in the extent to which they should be considered emergencies that must be solved at any cost.</comment>


Show HN: I made a game with React Native (for web, iOS, Android, and Windows) - <AUTHOR> https://sudoblock.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I had a lot of fun making this, and I'm glad I finally got around to learning React Native. In hindsight, I think Unity would have been a better choice, but I like how my web version doesn't require any browser plugins.

I'm planning to write up a big blog post about everything I learned, and release all of the libraries I've made. In the meantime, feel free to ask me anything about React Native development.

</comment><comment><USER2> great game, how much does the apk weight ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The x86 apk is 7.4 MB, and armeabi-v7a is 6.13 MB. I've enabled Proguard, but I'm not very familiar with it, so there's probably some further optimizations that I can do.</comment></comment>


Swiss to vote on guaranteed income for all - <AUTHOR> http://www.thelocal.ch/20160127/swiss-to-vote-on-guaranteed-income-for-all <comment><USER2> Basic income might be okay in the beginning. But over time, I forsee more and more people using it, depending on it, and not contributing enough back into the system. Eventually it will collapse.

In my old neighborhood, I've seen generations of families living on welfare. They have no incentive to get a job and would much rather live without having to work. Since having children means more money from the government, the daughters of the family have as many as possible.

We need to promote prosperity, not deincenitivize it.

There should be a law in place that to vote on ideas like this, you need to prove that you paid some sort of tax in the last year. It could even be at a minimum wage job.

This way, we don't have people that don't know what it's like to pay money to the government, voting on laws in which they will never contribute.

I know so many people that change their mind on some of these ideas, when they realize they will be getting less money in their paycheck.</comment>


A practical guide to microchip implants - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/01/a-practical-guide-to-microchip-implants/ <comment><USER2> Nice read. One thing I would definitely want to have in my hand is a hardware cryptocurrency wallet, but that'll require power source and some interaction interface.

However, existing microchip implants can be used to increase security level for some apps/wallets. For example, you may have an app that require not only password, but also your NFC tag to read (concat both, for example). If hackers steal your password, they won't be able to login without reading NFC, and vice versa, if your NFC content is leaked, they still need password.

<comment><USER3> > _One thing I would definitely want to have in my hand is a hardware > cryptocurrency wallet, but that 'll require power source and some > interaction interface._

I can see this leading to people's hands being hacked off in some of the world's less nice places.

<comment><USER4> Or perhaps in some of the not so bad places...

[https://cointelegraph.com/news/man-robbed-at-gunpoint- for-11...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/man-robbed-at-gunpoint- for-1100-worth-of-bitcoins-in-brooklyn)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/28/britains-first- bi...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/28/britains-first-bitcoin- heist-trader-forced-gunpoint-transfer/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have two implants (an xEM and an xNT), and this article gets pretty much everything right.

The only thing I'd add is that mine can be felt under the skin.

<comment><USER6> Would you share examples of how you use it?</comment></comment>


Linus: "I no longer feel like I can trust 'init' to do the sane thing" - <AUTHOR> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/6/577 <comment><USER3> Is there any useful comment anywhere on this post that talks about the technical meat of Linus' post here? He explicitly goes out of his way not to go into a long-form argument about systemd, and then HN dumps something like 150 points of comment karma into systemd.

EDIT: Here are links to comments discussing the actual content of his email, in case anyone else came here for that and left wanting.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14734868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14734868)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733973](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733973) -> [https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/EJrEuxjR65J](https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/EJrEuxjR65J)

EDIT: I read all the comments on this post, and I am disgusted to report that (as of this EDIT, nitpickers) the 2 above-linked comments are the sum total of actual replies to the content Linus was trying to discuss. I hope LKML had more self-control than HN.

EDIT: 14733558, it was really excellent of you to try and defuse things, too.

<comment><USER4> Yes, he specifically goes out of his way to refer to init as generically as possible. But then drops this line at the end of the post:

 _And yes, a large part of this may be that I no longer feel like I can trust "init" to do the sane thing. You all presumably know why._

It's not hard to understand what he meant and for some of us it's articles like this on HN which give an opportunity to talk about systemd without being off topic.

IMO the take away from the article is that systemd has become enough of a moving part that it would be unwise to rely on it for default anything. Maybe I read it wrong but there's my take on the technical argument against using init to set default limits on processes. There are already defaults in the kernel so use them and allow an override for admins that need one.

<comment><USER3> It's impossible to misinterpret that he's referencing systemd, but _that 's not the point of his post_. He's saying, "Kernel over here, Init over there, One way transaction". You're talking about whether Systemd is qualified to _be_ init. He's talking about whether the Kernel-side or Init-side is responsible for defining a given value. He declares his bias clearly (trusts Kernel, doesn't trust Init, especially doesn't trust Init via Systemd) and then makes his point. I'm just deeply saddened that literally two comments out of a hundred bothered to discuss _his point_ , that divide, at all.

<comment><USER5> So talk about that divide. Clearly a lot of people care a lot about Sysemd and want to talk about it. It's even the title of the post.

Complaining that people aren't having the conversation you want to have is just weird. Start the conversation you want instead of complaining that others are failing to have it. No one is obliged to hold the conversation you want.

<comment><USER3> I came here to learn about a technical issue that HN felt worthy of the front page, because I'm not certain how I feel about systemd yet. I ended up learning what a bunch of people feel about systemd, but nothing about whether this is a reasonable divide strategy, or whether anyone has any arguments to counter his, or .. anything whatsoever. I'm glad the thread benefited the wellness of the community by providing an outlet for unresolved rage, but y'all missed a key opportunity here to consider a _new_ semantic about the Kernel-Init(Systemd) interaction before it's fixed into stone by commits or whatever.

<comment><USER5> Was the title different when you clicked on this story? If you clicked a story about how Linus no longer trusts init and expected some deep discussion of init/kernel separation, I kind of feel like you were destined to be disappointed. The topic was clearly Linus's distrust of init, not architectural purity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ted Ts'o, the Linux ext2/3/4 filesystem developer, posted this two days ago at G+ as well. Interesting discussion, particularly about 1) systemd's bad programming taste and complexity, and 2) Lennart Poettering's inability to admit when he is wrong.

"For me a lot of "good taste" is about adding complexity when it's needed, and avoiding it when it's not needed. And if you do have complexity, making sure you have the tools so you can debug things when they break. And for me one of the things that I don't like about systemd is that it has added a lot of complexity, and when it breaks, trying to debug it can be almost impossible."

Also:

"Heck, I don't even I want to file bug reports, just so I can get abusive messages from Lennart. At least when Linus flames me, it's because I did something wrong which hurts users and which I d*mned well should have known better, given my years of experience in the community. Lennart just flames you because you're wrong, and he's right. By definition."

And:

"The high bit, in my opinion, is "not being able to admit you are wrong". If someone (such as Lennart) is always right, then it's impossible to have a technical discussion in a post-mortem to avoid similar problems in the future. In a company, if there are personnel issues like that, you can escalate to the person's manager, or use other mechanisms. In the open source world, all you can do is route around the damage. Whether you call the inability for someone to admit that he or she has contributed to the problem a "lie" or just that they were "mistaken" is really beside the point as far as I'm concerned."

[https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/EJrEuxjR65J](https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/EJrEuxjR65J)

<comment><USER7> Ts'o strikes me as damn close to Torvalds in attitudes. The guy have been with the kernel for almost as long as Torvalds himself, happily developing EXT version after EXT version for it.

The problem is with more recent people, that seem to be more "american" their approach. Always looking to climb the ranks and find new domains of development to undertake rather than stick with one area and become deeply proficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Making too many assumptions about the user environment is not smart. Then you start putting constraints and becoming defensive when these assumptions are questioned. This is becoming a pattern for systemd as is blaming everyone else. [1]

Those who need the complexity or some features should adopt the technical debt, there is zero rationale to enable it by default and impose it on everyone.

For instance if you have too many network interfaces and naming is a problem then switch on predictable network names which btw is anything but predictable for human beings and let the 97% who don't carry on.

12 digit random names are simply not predictable or better for human beings than eth0, wlan0? If there is a problem predictable network names is not the solution.

Similarly if you need binary logging and an audit trail then turn on binary logging but don't impose it on everyone else.

Its time to move beyond silly accusations of 'hate' etc every time there is a discussion about systemd because at the moment it just serves to deflect criticism and avoid accountability for questionable decisions.

[1] [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2407](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2407)

<comment><USER9> _Those who need the complexity or some features should adopt the technical debt, there is zero rationale to enable it by default and impose it on everyone._

Indeed. Even if I have multiple ethernet interfaces, I'd prefer to map a MAC address to eth[0-9] myself. But most machines only have one ethernet interface and one WiFi interface anyway.

These things pop up all over the place. E.g.: why would I want to have NetworkManager on a server, which never switch networks and need to set up a VPN connection? Why do I need firewalld on a server? I rarely need a zone- based firewall on my laptop (probably like most users, I just block all incoming traffic), let alone a server.

Layer upon layer is piled to solve hypothetical situations that do not arise for > 90% of the population.

(I do like systemd as a service manager, but systemd and the surrounding ecosystem has made it terribly difficult to understand and debug UNIX systems.)

<comment><USER10> Most of my machines have more than 1 wired interface, and guess what? Those predictable names have caused me way more problems than they ever fixed. And those problems have always been harder to fix. Just stable names, like udev used to do were enough for nearly everything.

> why would I want to have NetworkManager on a server, which never switch > networks and need to set up a VPN connection?

It's funnier because NetworkManager must wait for the filesystems to be mounted, but then, networked filesystems (that are, those ones, important there) need a functioning network that NetworkManager postpones to after it's up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> systemd is a mess. A while ago I tried writing a script for CD ripping that ran when udev detected a music CD in the optical drive, ripped the CD, then ejected the disk.

This kept failing. It turned out to be systemd having a hardcoded timeout of something like 30 seconds on any process launched by udev, that couldn't be changed without recompiling it from source, or having it fork off some other process group that lacked this limitation.

From what I can tell, systemd has some of the worst sort of developer myopia, where whole swaths of legitimate use cases are actively destroyed.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like you're blocking udev while your script executes, and instead you should start a service from your udev script and then exit. For example, see systemd-run(1).

> ...where whole swaths of legitimate use cases are actively destroyed.

Your use case is fine. Your implementation doesn't fit with udev's design; that's all.

<comment><USER11> I was having udev starting a separate ripping script as a background process, and it worked on pre-systemd udev systems.

systemd kills the entire udev process tree (all children) including the ripping script after 30 seconds.

<comment><USER13> To fix this, perhaps it'll need to fork and detach the session, as per the standard daemonisation sequence. c.f. [http://www.itp.uzh.ch/~dpotter/howto/daemonize](http://www.itp.uzh.ch/~dpotter/howto/daemonize)

<comment><USER14> systemd's session killing stuff will happily kill anything that's been daemonised by the standard approach :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Linus has the proverbial moral authority to bootstrap an init system and the technical skill to pull it off. Amusingly, this strikes me something like the chairman of the Federal reserve hinting that he thinks interest rates are too high. Hopefully, the systemd developers will take notice and clean up some of their act. (Not to _insinuate_ anything. They have widely known problems in playing nice with other projects, taking feedback, etc.)

<comment><USER16> _waits patiently for Linus to get fed up with ___ enough to write it himself_

 _dies_

<comment><USER15> I don't really think he would, will, or wants to. But that he _could_ , and actually _might_ if he begins to feel that systemd hurts Linux, might create some positive pressure on the systemd developers. That's exactly the thing, like the fed. They have enough power that an implied threat can fix things (sometimes to some extent) without them actually taking any action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They [systemd] shouldn't piss him off too much. He will sit down for a week, come out with his own init system which will take over the world. /s but not entirely :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Like what happened to git in the past, will Linus write a new init himself this time?

<comment><USER19> Considering the broad range of such softwares that _already exist_ , written by people such as Felix von Leitner, Gerrit Pape, Laurent Bercot, and so on, why do you think that Linus Torvalds is the person to write one? Or _needs_ to write one?

* [http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/](http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/)

* [http://skarnet.org/software/s6-linux-init/](http://skarnet.org/software/s6-linux-init/)

* [http://smarden.org/runit/runit-init.8.html](http://smarden.org/runit/runit-init.8.html)

* [http://www.fefe.de/minit/](http://www.fefe.de/minit/)

* [https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/guide/system-manager.html](https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/guide/system-manager.html)

<comment><USER20> There were many version controls systems before Git came along. He doesn't need to write it. But if he wants, he has the technical chops to do a damn good job of it.

<comment><USER7> Few did what Git does, take multiple forks and merge them.

Most that came before were good at forking, but not so good at merging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The quote here in the title is missing the vital context -- the full quote is

""And yes, a large part of this may be that I no longer feel like I can trust "init" to do the sane thing. You all presumably know why.""

</comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of a relevant joke.

Systemd walks into a bar. It shoots the bar owner and proclaims itself to be the new owner. It then turns the bar into a farm, brewery and distillery, opens a casino, a freight rail line and an investment bank. Oh, and there's an init system thrown in there somewhere too.

</comment><comment><USER23> The internals of systemd are maybe not the best. But the UI is definitely easier to grasp than what existed previously.

<comment><USER19> I suspect that you are not aware of what actually _did_ exist previously. Mewburn rc had short pretty much declarative service definition files. Upstart had declarative configuration too, as did InitNG. Launchd, Upstart, and Solaris SMF had the launchctl/initctl/svcadm concept. daemontools/runit/perp/s6 had universal logging of standard output/error. And so forth.

* [http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/](http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/)

* [http://jdebp.eu./FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-s...](http://jdebp.eu./FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-side.html)

<comment><USER24> SMF without XML is gods init system.

It's so cleanly engineered, just like ZFS.. makes me sad that solaris died a death.

(Their package management was crap though tbh)

<comment><USER19> Well illumos exists and people can always pick up SystemXVI and work on it.

* [https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/](https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770))

<comment><USER24> I'm a sysadmin, I'm at the mercy of OS developers as to what I run on prod, and Solaris/IllumOS does not have the mindshare linux does.

I am certain that right now the choice of POSIX OS's at large companies such as mine is Debian or RHEL/CentOS. Smaller companies get away with ubuntu.

But nobody is making new infrastructure with IllumOS/Solaris. The most people will deviate is probably Free/OpenBSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just wanted to say that the issue is about automatically copying rlimits from the init processes to all processes executing setuid binaries - <USER2> Linus thinks that init could possibly apply some rlimits to itself for its own purposes which wouldn't necessarily be suitable for copying to any other random process.

IMO this idea with copying is in itself even less sane than init using rlimits on PID 1.

</comment><comment><USER26> Gee, such a surprise. Why didn't you speak out about it earlier, then?

<comment><USER7> Because he do not want to get involved with userspace bikesheding (beyond posting rants about insane defaults in his distro of choice).

He sees his domain beginning and ending with the kernel, and that's it.

Sadly certain people below him, that he trust deeply, are not so content (some even support Poettering and crew). And i fear the day he hand off the keys to the kernel to them.

<comment><USER27> Linus giving his opinion on userland is a far cry from bikeshedding though...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For those who can't stand lklm.org UI, here's the mail on spincs.net:

[https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2550717.html](https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2550717.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> When so many think that something is wrong, maybe there is some truth about it...

If even the creator have concerns, man, that's not a joke!

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder why Poettering chose Kay Sievers to work on systemd in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER31> I would assume this is about systemd. Personally my experience with it has been great - the occasional screw-ups (they did happen - something related to dbus made all systemctl commands fail until a reboot) were nothing compared to the time I gained not having to worry about prehistoric initscripts.

So while it isn't perfect, it's IMO a step in the right direction, if only by lowering the barrier to entry to actually using and managing the thing.

If you are worried about stability then you shouldn't rely on a single machine anyway. Personally I manage systemd screw-ups (though I haven't had one in production yet - all of them were on my personal machines while monkeying around with Archlinux) just like any other hardware failure - by making sure my app/service stays available even if I yank the power cord from the machine.

<comment><USER32> It seems obvious he is referring to systemd. I _like_ systemd, but Linus hates it when people break userspace, and systemd has broken userspace a _lot_.

Poettering seems to take the advice of "release early and often" to heart and pushes things into widespread usage long before they're quite fully baked. PulseAudio was awful for _years_ , and then it was good and we all stopped complaining about it. systemd was kinda crap for months after it became widespread...a ton of breakage, including in ways that were occasionally dangerous. We're lucky, I guess, that systemd didn't take as long as PulseAudio to stop sucking all the time (systemd still sucks some of the time, but what it replaced sucked a lot, too).

So, yeah, you can't break userspace if you want Linus on your team, and systemd has broken userspace now and then.

<comment><USER33> You seem to exist in a fictional universe where pulseaudio "got good" and doesn't suck. All these years later I have never seen that be the case. I think a much more likely explanation is that desktop Linux is less common since the rise of OS X in the "Unix-like developer machine" market so there are now fewer people noticing it sucks.

<comment><USER32> I believe the universe I exist in is real, but how would I know for sure?

Anyway, I haven't had to google about a pulseaudio problem in at least a few years. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1995. I've hated Linux audio for most of that time, and I've broken it in every possible way. But, today, my Fedora system has sound that Just Works. I don't know how it Just Works (though I know it's pulseaudio), because I haven't had to learn...because it Just Works. It works for Steam games, it works for browser audio, it works for system notifications, it works for movies, it even works for audio and music software. It's pretty weird.

Anyway, from what I can tell, the bugs, misfeatures, poorly thought out implementation, etc. all got worked out somewhere along the way. It took a long time. But, it did get fixed.

Have you actually used it in the past couple of years?

<comment><USER34> I did try to use it and discovered that it's impossible to configure mpd to run as a system service and be able to play sound while also allowing desktop applications to play sound. I forget all the details, but the way I figured out how to get sound to do what I wanted was to enable alsa dmix and to pipe everything possible through dmix, using pulseaudio only for the one or two essential apps that insist on it.

<comment><USER35> Funny, I just did that yesterday. I was reconfiguring my mpd server and I saw it was configured to use alsa (which, incidentally broke my sound occasionally). I set it up to use Pulseaudio and now I can listen to mpd server while listening to deezer.com that runs through browser while making a skype call on the same machine (not that I'd want to do it, anyway).

<comment><USER34> Also, alsa+dmix does everything pulseaudio does (for all my use cases) without having to run an extra daemon / abstraction layer.

<comment><USER36> > for all my use cases

Exactly. Does it support redirecting audio streams to another machine on the same network? That's a vital feature in our hackspace, where everyone can send audio to the room speakers via PA, and it's also used extensively in my living room (where the speakers are connected to the home server).

<comment><USER34> I don't know, but sending audio over a network sounds like the sort of use case that requires a sound server. Playing sound locally doesn't. Although, as I said elsewhere, I have mpd stream to icecast for playing my audio remotely so, in my case, I don't need pulseaudio for this: I imagine you could configure a similar setup where anyone on the local network can register with icecast as a "radio station" znd stream sound that way.

<comment><USER36> A workflow that enables network transparency by using a tool for radio stations might work for music, but not for anything with latency requirements. Imagine playing any video game with even a 100ms audio delay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Here's something I don't understand... Why do so many people hate systemd but not macOS's launchd [0]? Don't they serve similar purposes? I've been digging into macOS for a few months now, and I'm pretty happy with their defaults.

EDIT: I don't know why I'm being downvoted for asking a genuine question. I'm not a linux expert, so I'd love to hear your criticisms.

[0] [http://www.launchd.info](http://www.launchd.info)

<comment><USER38> I've worked with launchd, and I hate it more than systemd. Most of it is because of launchd's atrocious doc. Note that launchd was rewritten a few versions ago for Reasons [1]. I couldn't find any release notes that highlighted this, and you wouldn't know it from launchd's version number...

Thing is, launchd's developers made a good effort at preserving backwards compatibility, but it's far from perfect. And most online docs (such as launchd.info that you're linking to) is subtly out-of-date. For example, I see no mention of "service-targets": new launchd learned about "bootstrap domains" (huh?), which are namespaces implemented at the Mach (macOS kernel) level. It's not a Unixy thing. Trick question: how do you define a _user_ job that runs in the background even when the user's not logged in? How do you define a user job that runs if the user logged in via SSH (ie not GUI)?

It's late and I'm tired, I can try being more coherent tomorrow. There are some good sources of information hidden out there, but the first few Google responses are woefully obsolete. And fuck Apple's own docs.

[1] I'm not sure what the reasons are, but I suspect for a) merging iOS and macOS functionality and b) tightly integrating it with the kernel's XPC interprocess comms infrastructure (again, for iOS?)

<comment><USER39> > _do you define a user job that runs in the background even when the user 's > not logged in?_

Well, you can't. Only administrators get to define things that run when the user isn't logged in. That's an intentional decision.

> _How do you define a user job that runs if the user logged in via SSH_

Offhand, I don't think you can do that either, though I haven't researched this particular angle. And it would be surprising to me that SSH'ing into a machine would trigger daemons anyway.

<comment><USER19> > _And it would be surprising to me that SSH 'ing into a machine would trigger > daemons anyway._

You might want to find out about systemd, then, which does exactly this. (-:

A PAM hook indirectly causes a per-user systemd instance to be created at login and terminated at logout, which triggers all of the per-user daemons that the account has.

If one has a user that is used for lots of little SSH sessions, hundreds of thousands of times a day, the overhead of starting up and tearing down the per-user systemd for each one, not least in terms of the log noise, becomes a serious consideration, and one has to learn the systemd mechanisms for making the user a "lingering" one.

<comment><USER39> For an OS that is frequently used headless, starting up per-user daemons on SSH makes some amount of sense. macOS is designed to be primarily GUI-driven, rather than primarily used headless, so it makes more sense for macOS to avoid the issue that you describe by not supporting launching per-user daemons on SSH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I fucking hope not.

Linus is clearly very smart, but user-facing tools is not what he's good at. Git is a perfect example of this.

Mercurial and Git were created ridiculously close to each other, and their main features/use model are quite similar, and yet mercurial is literally years ahead in terms of usability. The results to a given command are 99% of the time, what you would intuitively expect.

Now here's what I _would_ love to see: Linus initiate a fork/rewrite/whatever of the init part of systemd, that _keeps_ the concept of non-executing service definition files. They don't have to be compatible with systemd but that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing either.

Edit: actually, aiming for compatibility probably means having to reimplement systemd weirdness, so probably _is_ a bad thing as I think about it.

<comment><USER41> It's quite frustrating seeing people complain about Git usability like it's some broadly accepted and objectively bad thing. As frivolous as anecdotes are, I took to Git very smoothly and I found it to operate in a very obvious and explicit fashion, particularly once I'd shifted my mental model from what I was using at the time (primarily SVN.)

Git is a very powerful, flexible, reliable and efficient tool. I'd be over the moon if someone wrote an init system holding similar values.

<comment><USER40> That's the thing: it _is_ broadly accepted as having poor usability compared to other version control tools.

If you haven't had those issues, you're one of the lucky ones.

Edit:

> Git is a very powerful, flexible, reliable and efficient tool.

I didn't say it isn't any of those things. I said it's harder to use than competitors such as mercurial.

<comment><USER42> Do you have a source for this widespread acceptance? I mean I get that version control in general can be hard for new developers to wrap their heads around but I never really had trouble picking up git personally, and the interns at my workplace haven't had any significant trouble either besides needing some coaching in how rebase works.

<comment><USER40> This comment (from a Hg developer on Lobste.rs [1]) is a good start:

> Furthermore, the proliferation of git wrappers says something. Mercurial has > a lot of users too (Facebook), and guess what, they don't write wrappers for > it. They do write aliases and extensions, using hg's established > customisation mechanisms, but they don't feel like the entire UI is so > terrible that it has to be completely replaced by a different UI

Then let's consider this snippet, from the people that _literally_ wrote the book on Git, in the Chapter "Git Internals" [2]:

> You may have skipped to this chapter from a previous chapter, or you may > have gotten here after reading the rest of the book — in either case, this > is where you'll go over the inner workings and implementation of Git. I > found that learning this information was fundamentally important to > understanding how useful and powerful Git is, but others have argued to me > that it can be confusing and unnecessarily complex for beginners.

If you don't know the internals, you don't really know git. I use git for client work on at least a weekly basis - not necessarily daily. I know enough to use it, and enough to know when I need to check the manual or search for something. I don't know the internals, and it's wrong that we 'need' need to.

[1]: [https://lobste.rs/s/klqjwc/two_commits_wrecked_user_experien...](https://lobste.rs/s/klqjwc/two_commits_wrecked_user_experience_git#c_hukpc8)

[2]: [https://git-scm.com/book/en/v1/Git-Internals](https://git- scm.com/book/en/v1/Git-Internals)

<comment><USER43> Careful with equating "Facebook is a wildly market-successful product" with "Every engineering practice at Facebook is industry-applicable and should be emulated".

<comment><USER40> I didn't, the Hg dev simply used Facebook as a very large, well known software shop that uses Mercurial. We could swap out "Facebook" for "Mozilla" or "Nginx Inc." or a number of open source (either community or corporate backed) projects.

<comment><USER43> We could do the same thing with Git though, so clearly source control scheme is not strongly correlated with actual success of the project -- which makes sense.

<comment><USER40> That wasn't the point of the comment.

The point was that there are a _lot_ of git "wrappers" created to solve the problem of Git's usability. The same doesn't happen with Mercurial, and it _isn 't_ just because of a lack of use, as demonstrated by X, Y, Z prominent/large software companies/projects using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Systemd is a steaming turd. However, it's one we have to live with, and there doesn't seem to be anything better on the horizon.

A good book on the subject might make things slightly better. However, it doesn't seem like anyone is interested in writing one :-(

</comment><comment><USER45> This is taking a quote out of context and trying to start the old usual systemd flamewar. Flagged.

<comment><USER5> This isn't out of context. It's a direct quote and links to the full content of the email.

Also " _If you flag something, please don 't also comment that you did._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd say that I no longer feel like I can trust 'git' to do the same thing either... but who am I kidding? I never trusted it to do the sane thing.

<comment><USER24> You can say some negative things about git, but sanity is not one of them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Magical /whiteboard – Live whiteboard meeting with WebRTC audio/video - <AUTHOR> https://magicalmeet.com/whiteboard <comment><USER2> The title reminded me of Google' Jamboard which was a smart whiteboard/display targeted for education and cooperations. Does anyone know how successful it has been or any future plans? I haven't heard anything about it's since it's announcement nor have I actually seen one in person or in any video other than Google's promotional videos.

</comment><comment><USER3> None of this makes sense. Maybe it's just my phone.</comment>


House of Cards season three is on Netflix right now - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/11/8021935/house-of-cards-season-three-is-on-netflix-right-now <comment><USER2> _" Update: And it's gone. If you've opened the page, don't hit refresh — trust us. According to a statement from Netflix (via CNBC), this early tease was caused by a 'bug in the system.'"_</comment>


Gates Foundation to Invest Up to $140M in HIV Prevention Device - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/gates-foundation-to-invest-up-to-140-million-in-hiv-prevention-device-1483023602 <comment><USER2> Where in the body does the device go? How is it inserted?

<comment><USER3> And how the heck do they make this cost-effective while still being safe? In Sub-Saharan Africa?

<comment><USER4> > And how the heck do they make this cost-effective while still being safe? In > Sub-Saharan Africa?

PrEP (as in the daily pill) is actually incredibly cost-effective. We already have distribution networks for HIV medications, because we need to treat people who are HIV+ with ARVs. So expanding those to be used by people who are HIV- is really straightforward.

The advantage of this proposed approach (the implantabable pumps), of course, is that it'd be more akin to an IUD, which is preferable in situations where people have reliable, but infrequent, access to medical care. That's a situation that applies a lot of rural and poor areas in developing countries.

We've already been looking into making PrEP available as a vaccine that would be effective for six months at a time, so I don't think this is particularly shocking of a proposal. (Which is not to say that it wouldn't be amazing if it works out - it would!)

<comment><USER3> (Re-phrasing.)

Right, but how exactly are they making a surgery/implant kind of thing safe and cost-effective in this area?

<comment><USER4> > Right, but how exactly are they making a surgery/implant kind of thing safe > and cost-effective in this area?

Same way a vaccine becomes cost-effective, I'd imagine.

The article is paywalled, but from what I can tell, they're using Truvada, so the research is specifically for the method of delivery, not developing the drug itself, which cuts the overhead costs dramatically. Stents[0] aren't expensive _per se_ ; the expensive part is installing them. But if that only needs to be done every six months, and if it can be done by an RN or NP, then the cost of delivery starts to fall quickly as well.

The main question I have is why they're heading down a fairly different road (subdermal implant) as opposed to a vaccine, since as far as I know, Gilead is already developing the latter. There must be more to this story than what I can find on the WSJ stub and the Quartz article.

[0] This isn't actually a stent, but it looks like it'll be something similar

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A device for this exists already. Is he going to invest all that money in Durex or Trojan?

<comment><USER4> > A device for this exists already. Is he going to invest all that money in > Durex or Trojan?

First of all, sex is not the only way to contract HIV.

Second - and most people don't know this - condoms are _not_ FDA approved for anal sex. They're not even tested for anal sex, and the testing requirements for condoms are specifically limited to vaginal sex[0].

But even if we look at vaginal sex, condoms are rather ineffective compared to other prevention methods, even when you look at success rates under perfect use. And perfect use is not what's relevant - what you need to look at are success rates under actual use). In this regard, condoms fail _horribly_ as an HIV prevention tactic.

Decades of unscientific education or education based on faulty science have caused people to subjectively underestimate their risk of contracting HIV when using condoms, and to subjectively overestimate their risk when using other prevention methods.

For example, how would you rank these behaviors in terms of risk levels?

* Having sex, with a condom, with more than one partner of unknown HIV status * Having sex, without a condom and without PrEP, with a single, HIV+ partner with an undetectable viral load * Having sex, without a condom while taking PrEP, with multiple partners of unknown HIV status

Surprisingly, the first is the _riskiest_ , and the second and third are comparable levels of risk. (The second is actually believed to be slightly less risky than the third, but the difference is not even statistically significant, let alone practically significant).

The common counterargument to this is that condoms prevent more than just HIV - except even _then_ , people dramatically overestimate the protection that condoms provide. HIV is pretty much the only (common) sexually transmitted disease that can be transmitted through vaginal or anal intercourse but not through oral sex or other forms of physical and sexual contact. Since most people only use condoms for intercourse, the added protection they provide for other STDs under these scenarios is a lot less than people imagine.

In fact, STD transmission rates are actually _lower_ among people who use PrEP for HIV prevention. The common explanation for this is that people on PrEP have to get routine checkups (every 90 days, usually), and this provides a convenient time to do other STD testing as well. For most people, the problem is that they simply don't do routine STD testing at all, which means they can have asymptomatic STDs (chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, etc.) for much longer, which makes them harder to treat, and pass them on to more people in the interim.

[0] [http://www.imstilljosh.com/fda-condoms-not-approved-anal- sex...](http://www.imstilljosh.com/fda-condoms-not-approved-anal-sex/)

<comment><USER6> > For example, how would you rank these behaviors in terms of risk levels?

Under 1% for all examples given.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Penis guillotine

</comment><comment><USER8> What's the point in posting an article where you can only read the first paragraph? It seems like click/subscription bait to me.

<comment><USER9> You should be able to use the "web" link under the submission title and, if necessary, an incognito window, to read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Obviously, this is great news and well-done by the Gates family. But I always wonder if we shouldn't be putting this kind-of money into what I consider society's most pressing problem which is our social intelligence, or in a single word, tolerance.

We can have all the technical/medical/etc intelligence but if our social intelligence lags behind then it creates the problems we have today such as over-population, racism, nationalism, etc. And, seemingly, this gap is increasing; we are now on the cusp of AI, machine-learning, robotics, automation, etc, yet we can't tolerant another person's skin-colour, or their lifestyle, or their life choices, or even their gender. Socially, we are apes with nuclear weapons.

I guess one might say that these innovations help mankind as a whole since they (should) increase quality-of-life. But these innovations only help if they help the entire base of the population pyramid. And as we know, greed and the pursuit of money/power/etc can and usually do create a world of haves/have nots which, again, are symptoms of a selfish, individualistic society. We only have to look at Martin Shkreli as evidence here.

So all these innovations pour out of labs, corporations, universities as the earth temperatures and ocean waters rise-up. We just don't have the political or economic will to understand that our intolerance, and the increasing gap between our social and technical intelligence is the biggest issue of our time.</comment>


The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project - <AUTHOR> http://nothings.org/gamedev/thief_rendering.html

<comment><USER2> "The techniques used in Thief were never written up and I thought it might be nice to write them down for once, even if they're now totally irrelevant."

No Sean. To someone who's currently reverse-engineering Thief for the purposes of remaking it for modern platforms, this is a wonderfully helpful document. Many thanks.

<comment><USER3> This indeed made my gloomy Tuesday morn a little bit brighter... I love Thief and I love game engine renderers. This reminds me to bust out my old pc and play it again.

<comment><USER2> My wife asked me why I still keep this one old laptop. I said it's the only way I can still play Thief. I've had no luck with VMWare, VirtualBox running XP or Windows 98, wine, CrossOver or native XP. That's Just Wrong and I'm going to change this state of affairs if it's the last thing I do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully GOG.com will get it sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER2> You can still buy Thief, Thief Gold and Thief 2 from various outlets and you can certainly get it working on a modern win32 platform judging from the responses on the game's forums. But it's a brittle process with no guarantees (as I know only too well) and only getting worse with time.

GOG might well come out with a version and I'd be ecstatic if they made a bundle which could run predictably on a modern platform. It would certainly save me a bunch of work :)

<comment><USER2> jegub I'm actually replying to you because there's no reply button under your comment for some reason.

I'm jealous - I really am ;) I know the process - hyperthreading fix, DDFix, DarkLoader, T2 meshes in T1, safe texture manager switch, reload the codecs and so on - works well for some people. I guess I'm scratching a (very large) personal itch.

<comment><USER4> If I'm not mistaken, the reply button takes longer to appear the more deeply nested a comment is, to discourage long, drawn-out arguments which detract from the value of a thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh man, I remember my first games industry job - having to write a billion different combinations of pentium hand-optimized polygon renderers. (Convex/concave, textured, gouraud, textured+gouraud, etc...).

We did some similar occlusion stuff in our (admittedly terrible) game ("Assault Rigs", Psygnosis). We sliced foreground object geometry along a plane where necessary to resolve sort issues with the background - and also to allow the scenery to cast "fake" shadows on parts of the object. I also came up with bitfield-represented PVS independently of the Quake guys :)

If I remember correctly, I did a special-case constant-z renderer for big scenery polys, but the in-game geometry used self-modifying code to set the constant U/V gradients for the spanline. Ugh.

Of course on the PS1, there was no software rendering anyway, and we just had to subdivide foreground polys to avoid affine-mapping artifacts. I'm still not sure how we dealt with all the seaming issues that that can introduce.

Ah, happy days :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Ah, Thief. That was an interesting engine to create levels for. I seem to recall that it tried to use real-world measurements which helped a great deal in terms of sizing things as compared to the player. Plus how the levels were created (subtraction from a solid world) was puzzling but then Unreal did the same. I always preferred Quake's level creation method.

But my favorite bit of the engine? Sound. It was so vital to gameplay you had to consider it heavily while creating a level. I don't think I had to consider how sound travels through a level since.

<comment><USER7> Just seeing Thief on here makes me go all gooey inside.

Dromed brings back memories. <http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/upcoming.htm> \-- The Garden, 2002, FM under development by mr_luc; screenshots here: <http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/ej/gardn/> \-- wow, way back.

Dromed was a bear. I remember the 'water brush hack' -- you couldn't make a cylinder with more than a certain number of sides (8)? But if you made an air brush with 8, a water brush with 8 but rotated, and then a water-air, and then a water-solid, you could make columns with lots of sides. I did that process over and over again to make a dome, and then to hollow it out on the inside, too.

I started programming for money around that time and had to leave it all behind. But every few years I've downloaded all of the Thief FM's and replayed through both games and the standout Fan Missions.

Except recently. I can't get it to work on Windows 7, with VMware or any other way.

The impressive things about the game engine were 1) the sound; 'room brushes' to apply different acoustics to areas, which promoted sound design to a first- class citizen of level design, 2) the object system. It was surprisingly flexible, and you could do a lot of very programming-like things because there were various stimuli and stimuli receptors you could attach to objects, be they AI or elevators or other things ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I couldn't really follow this article. But looking back at Thief, it was really ahead of its time. I think games nowadays still cannot match up with its stealth gameplay implementation. I would include Deus Ex in this as well. It made a great use of light and allowed the player to affect the light as well as the sounds they made. Really great game.

<comment><USER9> Don't forget System Shock 1 and 2. It's not a stealth based game, but it's made by the same people by as Thief and even System Shock 2 even uses Thief's engine.

System Shock 2 is still one of the scariest games around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thief was/is one of the best games i've ever played. Thief 2 as well. Thief 3 was a bit too narrow, but still decent.</comment>


World's First Desktop Hive for Edible Insects - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1468268424/l-i-v-i-n-hive/description <comment><USER2> not sure if spoof or real... :)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the problem you face everyday and can't find a solutions 4 yet? - <AUTHOR>

As A User - not developer - What is the problem that you face everyday and you couldn't find a solutions for yet?<p>Example: Information Overload, there is a lot of news and feeds that you don't have time to read every day <comment><USER2> Information overload is definitely a problem; too many disparate pieces of information, too many new languages and technologies to learn, too many priorities at work; too many interruptions... (too much caffeine) all of this leaves me in a constant state of near-panic. What I feel I really need is a sort of automated PA / life coach; to help prioritize (home & work), schedule; simplify and motivate. Something that takes the clutter and noise of the world and blocks most of it out, most of the time, feeding me what I need to know, when I need to know it, and keeping me on track.

Yesterday, Joel Spolsky talked about Software Inventory (<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html>), and mentioned a minimalistic project management tool that he would like to see made called "Five Things". Well, I think that we have a bigger problem of Intellectual Inventory - a glut of information, too many books, academic papers and articles that sit on the to-read list, all relevant, all interesting, and not enough time left in our life to digest it all. (It is true ... I did the sums - I have about 300 years worth of reading in my backlog)

So here is my problem: Intellectual Inventory management; productivity optimization; focus management.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a finance guy and programming hobbist, I say the whole business reporting thing is a big fat problem I deal with. I get bored easily, especially when updating power points or excel reports. Besides, when things get messy (data scattered all over), there is always a sort of fear that you might put some wrong numbers here and there.

Beware, there are solutions (Hyperion for financials, Business Objects for BI, etc.), but those are all too low level and they have no decent way to build views or to consolidate information from different sources, so people resort to the dreaded Excel, a piece of tech 20 yrs old.

I am pretty sure that technically this is not a big problem, there is no need for Big Data or real time or the like, but anything worth considering has to have a great user experience as Excel has got people used to click their ways out of troubles all the time (at cost of wasting hours on things that should take a couple of minutes).

</comment><comment><USER4> Bookmark organization. I use Firefox. But I've also used other browsers. ALL of their Bookmark managers and way of doing Bookmarks suck. I can never find anything in hundreds of Bookmarks.

<comment><USER5> What about delicious.com?

<comment><USER4> I used FURL, which stored copies of pages. Then FURL was bought by Diigo and deleted those saved pages (not the URLs). You really think I'll trust something like that again?

Anyway, I like things stored locally on my machine. With paranoia driving the gov't, I don't want to make it easy for them to root around in my life. Let them serve _me_ with a search warrant, not a Cloud firm behind my back and without my knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Figuring out how to make a living without having to get a traditional job.</comment>


How not to promote your Startup Accelerator on Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://screeley.com/how-not-to-promote-your-startup-accelerator-o

<comment><USER2> Usually I come here for the intellectual discourse on a variety of technology and business topics. All that went through my head, line after line, was "oh no he di-ent!"

</comment><comment><USER3> I commented on yesterdays piece and my thoughts can be seen there.

But....

It did feel like an orchestrated dialog from supporters of Mass. I wasn't surprised to hear they were asking for votes via Twitter. The comments were largely from people involved and they seemed rather defensive.

Creepy is one word - I would call it tacky.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think John was definitely in the wrong for attacking YC like that, especially on HN. I agree that definitely wasn't the way to promote MassChallenge.

I just recently applied to YC and it wasn't an easy decision. In fact I almost didn't apply for various reasons. Ultimately it was what the YC alumni have said about YC that made me decide to push forward. Getting $50k in cash is great, who wouldn't want that? But ultimately the odds of succeeding are dependent on so much more than whether you have enough cash to survive 3 to 6 months. Free doesn't make it better, it just makes it free.

<comment><USER5> its $150K my friend ;)

<comment><USER4> The FAQ on MassChallenge's website said $50-100k and that there's a $199 entry fee. I don't know if I'm mistaking programs but YC didn't charge me to apply.

<http://www.masschallenge.org/faq#q1>

<comment><USER6> I think Smirnoff was saying the YC gets you $150k cash, because of Yuri Milner + SV Angel's blanket convertible note to all YC companies.

<comment><USER4> Sorry about that. I was originally referring to MassChallenge's program in my comment and trying to point out that $50k free and clear doesn't make it better (as in better than YC taking an equity position).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this a story on Hacker News about a comment thread on another story on Hacker News?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it's very meta, so quite appropriate... ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I plus 1'd this just for the Whale Wars reference</comment>