The story of the Slovak national top-level domain - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Oskar456/stolen-sk-domain-717e070f6735 <comment><USER2> Unfortunately this story is archetypal for a post communist country like Slovakia. The state is essentially captured by mafia-like groups and oligarchs and many public services are irreversibly lost to rogue private companies with ties to politicians.

<comment><USER3> It's not as bad as this comment sounds.

<comment><USER4> no it's shame. btw i'am Slovakian

<comment><USER5> I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's not as corrupt as, let's say, Africa, or even Eastern Europe is. I'm Czech. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I suddenly felt the urge to visit [http://astalavista.box.sk](http://astalavista.box.sk) again. Next up: zombo.com

<comment><USER7> Just checked. So glad Zombo.com is still there.

<comment><USER8> html5zombo.com also exists, for when your device doesn't support Flash, but you still need to do anything.

<comment><USER9> Don't be limited by browser plugins. The only limit is yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why the government got a judicial decision, from it's own legal system, stating that the original company (non-profit) couldn't have changed its ICANN records when they changed to be a for-profit company. Have done that back at that time, and everything would be ok.

<comment><USER11> In 90s, law was totally unprepared to handle this kind of issues or anything related to data or internet. And Slovak court system is very slow and avoids dealing with many known corruption cases, even today.

<comment><USER12> Also there is some sort of system here where you can pay for a expert witness who will confirm your story. As a foreigner living here I can't get anyone to explain it to me with any sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm gladly surprised on how well the brazilian TLD registrar works in comparison of some private players in other countries like Godaddy, although lacking some features. It is simple, straightforward, just works.

It is managed by a non-profit with a very diverse board: [http://www.nic.br/pagina/for-an-increasingly-better- internet...](http://www.nic.br/pagina/for-an-increasingly-better-internet-in- brazil/)

I would enjoy to learn about the history of its creation

<comment><USER14> internet in Brazil started early with universities.

the br domain was introduced in 89 and handled by the same organization that handle out government research grants (FAPESP).

even though most universities only got tcp pipes by 91, domain was used for things like uucp and such before.

in late 90s, when Brazil got a president who privatized the country, it left fapesp and become a political thing but still with heavy ties to academia, which in Brazil is also very political to begin with, given that almost all the top ones are state run.

Google understood that and now they have a big state university in their pockets (by hiring top professor and keeping them on campus), which is the alma mater of the current person in charge of the br domain now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is not limited to Slovakia. Mauritius and South Africa also struggled for years before getting back control of their TLD (but they eventually did). And quite a few African countries have the same problem, it seems.

</comment><comment><USER16> The story sounds so bizarre that I imagine there might be bit more behind it. Like the fact that it apparently took 5 years from the takeover to the government to even begin negotiations, during which the .com-bubble both grew and burst, so I imagine that the matter of a TLD wouldn't have been completely obscure at the time. Also I'm not sure why the government couldn't have just unilaterally taken over the TLD and charged the people behind the takeover with fraud or something?

<comment><USER17> Well, .com-bubble came and went, but mind the settings.

Yes, nowadays, new buildings in every larger city come with gigabit ethernet wiring and several ISPs' fiber connected to the basement switches as standard. Older flats (pre-revolution era, before 1989) have FTTH GPON from two or three providers. Really historical buildings have at least DOCSIS 3.0 or VDSL. That's the physical layer. You can get 100 mbps/300 mbps internet (depending on where you are and how lucky you are) for about 20 eur/month, no data limit.

But that came for the price of very slow starts. After the fall of the socialist ("communist") government in 1989, there was:

a) chaos everywhere, many large companies (in the "common domain" beforehand) and employers of many workers were fraudulently privatized to the hands of few con-masters only to be turned into quick cash through sellouts, or just to be defrauded primitively (literally: 1. have a political friend, 2. privatize for one crown, 3. withdraw cash [millions to billions of crowns] from all bank accounts, 4. let it go bankrupt). You could buy and carry firearms no questions asked (nowadays we still have more reasonable firearm laws than the rest of the Europe, even some form of Castle Doctrine - in Europe!! - but now you at least have to go through psychological and firearm test and you cannot be a convict -> didn't matter in 1990's and even worse, there were global amnesties, even applied to serious criminals, because "communist" judges must be wrong, so let's release everyone from the prisons - and those few not released revolted so hard, army had to be called in). One day you could be a common Joe, the next day you are a multimillionaire via privatization through a friend in politics. Or you may be a common Joe going about your common life and while returning home from work, a car or phone booth next to you explodes, because one mafia group was paying debts to another...

b) high demand for foreign goods and low wages relative to foreign currencies. Imagine buying a 486 computer for 100.000 crowns, whereas your monthly wage is 4000 crowns... Would you pay your two years income for a computer?

c) missing voice/data infrastructure (power, water, gas was fine, it was fine well enough to be defrauded without any investment for many many years ;) ). Well into 1990's, you still had to be on a waiting list for... a phone line.

\----

So, in 1999, we had a high school field trip to the offices of telephone company, to be shown a 56k dial-up internet shared across 10 or so computers there. A year later, the whole school (20 old computers in one room) was wired through one 56k and we were loading, line by line, new screenshots from the upcoming Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge.

Well, you could get dial-up at home, for around 1% of your monthly wage PER HOUR... Many of us, the luckiest ones, actually got the dial-up after 2000 and were given the limit (by parents already strapped for cash) of 1 hour internet a day.

While I cannot comment about the accuracy of the takeovers from the OP's article (I was in the high school after all and was offline fiddling with the expensive LPT scanner, not watching politics), and there always are hidden agendas and components to the story; just to summarize, in those days:

a) nobody cared about the .com-bubble, the internets were a very expensive gimmick to download as many Pascal tutorials and early-media (game reviews mostly) content as fast as you can on a time-metered connection, typically not originating from the .sk TLD,

b) many large companies, say machine industries or water mains, with all their assets were privatized and brought to insolvency on monthly basis (from that era, "privatization" is still used as a curse word with negative connotation).

\----

The answer to the question why government didn't take over the TLD by force unilaterally - simply, the first governments cared about defrauding as much as they could, and the next governments cared about being viewed as the "right" alternative to the previous ones, while trying to defraud all what was the left with less media exposure.

And finally, when some wise heads finally came to the realization what the internet has become worldwide and will become nation-wide, we were already in the middle of accession negotiations to become an EU member, implementing required laws. That may be the final answer to your question:

\- the defraudation was done in the "wild west" years of 1990's after the revolution,

\- while the "repair" had to be done under the strict international-grade laws and you simply can't take it unilaterally back...

\----

I don't want this to sound overly negative, it was fun years. For example, I, being born in the 80's era still experienced in my late 90's teens: 8-bit era, 16-bits and finally 32-bits, as they got to us belatedly in 90's. People, being fed up with slow, time-metered and monopolised 56k even in 2000s, started popping up amateur 2.4 GHz networks everywhere, even on remote villages, and that in turn, with "real" ISPs seeing they would get nowhere with lesser service offering no advantages over a next-door high school students' wifis, has lead us to the FTTH/FTTB paradise we have nowadays. We also skipped the ISDN entirely (although it was available). There was time- metered 56k, flash, flat-rate 56k and wifis everywhere, flash, ADSL, flash, fiber. The fast 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit transformation experienced in one's youth lead us to many world-grade startups and companies for the country with the population count of one larger capital.

Just wanted to say that 90's were dark in Central Europe and things more life- important than a TLD had changed hands then...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'am from Slovakia and this one of many examples, how greedy guys tooked opportunity after fallen communist regime and state laws didn't covered this kind of situation. It's big shame this is not resolved yet. But there is initiative to change that and give back national registrator back to public hands. I hope it will happen soon. The only other country that gave it's top level domain to private hands is Laos. Their .la is mostly used by biznisses from Los Angeles. But that's Laos, not country in EU.

<comment><USER18> Hey slow down young commie. Do you realize that almost all gTLDs and most of ccTLDs in the first world are managed by private commercial entities (source: CENTR stats on ccTLD management)? Even .CZ, coveted by the author is managed by private association (association members are registrars).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Also, the domain is still not open to foreigners.

Why should it be?

<comment><USER17> Well, with background in the darker parts of the internets, I'm still against all forms of domain squatting, typosquatting, etc. Others would also describe me as a heavy EU-skeptic.

But! If you are a company registered in whatever EU country, and, by law, you can do business in all remaining states and in some cases (taxes, consumer protection) you are even bound to adhere to their local laws - then, why you couldn't have a local TLD? And what if you even hold an EU-wide recognized trademark?

Say I am Spanish company AcmeRoadunnner, with EU-wide trademark on AcmeRoadrunner, I cannot get acmeroadrunner.sk, because I don't have a Slovak entity? What for? I am already bound by harmonized EU legislation and when I sell to Slovakia, I must behave in relation to my customers (when they are consumers and not business entities) and file VAT according to Slovakia laws.

Say I am Slovak self business AcmeCoyote. Should I really need to create 27 other business entities in 27 other states to register other domains and prevent domain squatting, when I'm already bound by the 27 states' laws when I sell there?

Ridiculous! And a nice job for proxy registrars...

PS: In an interesting turn of events, fairly recently, a proxy registrar was found guilty for breaking gambling laws, where the page hosted on domain registered by him for his client was showing gambling ads not conforming to Slovakia legislation... So it is about having a local scapegoat to punish.

PS2: Imagine you cannot send goods to any country, unless you create a business entity there. In SK-NIC's case, it's the vice versa case, you can sell here, you MUST charge our VAT here, you MUST obey our consumer laws here, but hey, sorry, you cannot get ours TLD, f __* you...

<comment><USER3> You know there's a thing called organisational unit, right? If the .eu and .com domains aren't enough for you, you're most likely required to have one and when you have one, you can register .sk domain. Check the laws.</comment></comment></comment>


Can dial up be as good as broadband? - <AUTHOR>

Well, where i come from internet is very expensive and very few people can actually afford it. Dial up is affordable. By means of implementing a proxy, which compresses all the data and have a app on a computer that decompresses that data and feed that into the browser, can the dial up connection be as good as low speed broadband ? Picture below for clarity web<-fast connection->| proxy server |<--compressed data(dial up)-->app <comment><USER2> No. Most data is already compressed so compressing it again won't improve anything.

One way that it could work would be having the server (really) near the client and pre-cache most links from the visited page.</comment>


IBM OS/400, Programming ILE Concepts (WASI 31 Years Ago) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This link doesn't go anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, something went wrong with the submission.

The link is

[https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/ile...](https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_73/ilec/sc415606.pdf)</comment></comment>


Attacks on ECDSA Signatures With Single-Bit Nonce Bias [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.irisa.fr/celtique/zapalowicz/papers/asiacrypt2014.pdf <comment><USER2> So great.

Every DSA signature requires a random nonce/key _k_. If _k_ is predictable, DSA falls apart. We demonstrate that here:

[http://cryptopals.com/sets/6/challenges/43/](http://cryptopals.com/sets/6/challenges/43/)

The same problem occurs in elliptic curve DSA, which is just the DSA construction implemented on the elliptic curve discrete log.

What's also true is that if _part_ of the nonce is predictable (or leaked), DSA falls apart --- albeit over more than just a couple signatures. With tens of bits leaked, you might needs hundreds of thousands of signatures.

How would you ever leak _part_ of a nonce over thousands of signatures? One easy way is to generate a nonce that appears cryptographically random, but doesn't fill the modulus. For instance: a 128 bit random number sure seems strong, but if it's filling a cryptographic parameter that's meant to be 256 bits long, fully 128 bits of that parameter are predictably zero.

Here, though, you have a predictable nonce bit leak that can occur purely by accident even given a reasonably sound implementation!

<comment><AUTHOR> I hadn't seen the new cryptopals website for the Matasano Crypto Challenges. Looks very promising, and I'll probably be giving it a run very soon :)

Are you accepting contributions for any of the solutions? I'd be happy to try and contribute some in Golang.

<comment><USER2> We will get to them, these 5 words I swear to you, &c &c.

What's slowing us this time is that I left Matasano in October.

It doesn't help that every time this discussion comes up, I get email asking us _not_ to post the solutions. :)

<comment><USER3> Can you not post solutions once the answer is given? Like ProjectEuler?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know I'm probably going to only understand some tiny fraction of what I read in this paper, but I'm sure going to have fun trying.

BTW, you might want to add "[pdf]" to the title. It seems the automated pdf detection and title editing missed this submission for some reason, so I reported it to hn@ycombinator.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, that was my fault, I accidentally deleted the [pdf] when I edited the title to better reflect the paper's title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat! I only saw it done with 2-3 variable predictable leading bits before.

A Schnorr-style signature with a deterministic nonce, like djb's EdDSA/Ed25519, is probably a better way to go these days, since the patents expired...!

</comment><comment><USER6> Time to switch to EdDSA?

<comment><USER7> The paper has basically three parts.

(1) Shows attacks on ECDSA where there is a one bit of bias on the nonce. These should work equally well on Schnorr signatures of their various forms, including EdDSA (though EdDSA proscribes a particular nonce generation scheme which should hopefully not result in observable biases, other standards proscribe similar schemes for ECDSA users, e.g. RFC6967). If it turns out that the hash functions used for deterministic dsa in these systems are biased, this attack crops back up.

(It's not news that biased RNGs can result in these attacks; the interesting part is that they were able to actually perform an attack on a non-toy curve, with only a one bit bias. Past attacks were mostly theory, and also needed more bias.)

(2) Some unusual curves can have an optimization which common implementations might take which results in biased nonces. These curves are not widely used on the Internet. I'm doubtful you've ever heard of them (except Bitcoin's curve, which is a GLV curve, but I'm relatively confident _no one_ is using the endomorphism in signing). They also give advice on avoiding that weakness.

(3) One way of avoiding the weakness while still using the optimization is to decompose a uniform number instead of using two random numbers, they show an argument for a power attack against a candidate constant time decomposition algorithm. Again, moot if you're not using the optimization.</comment></comment>


SHOULD_I_BUILD HN?: Can't ever seem to figure out where to go for dinner? - <AUTHOR>

SHOULD_I_BUILD is a new term I'm starting for micro-validation of ideas. Prelaunch, pre MVP, pre- leancanvas...pre anything! Is it worth pursuing, I ask?
My first one:
An app that I click a button, it tells me where to go get food. Remove the paradox of choice like you get with Yelp. It could pull data in from my credit card transactions to suggest "favorites", or "newbies", based on my purchase history.
Should I build? <comment><USER2> For personal growth, and scratching your own itch? Certainly! I think just about everybody who has learned to use rand() functions and arrays has built this for his or herself at least in some incarnation.

Basing it on past CC transactions to build choice is an interesting though.. so is foursquare check-in data?</comment>


Sweden proposes ban on ride-sharing services that make profits - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sweden-taxicommission-idUSKBN13Q3YD <comment><USER2> The key word in this title is "proposes". That's a strong signal that the article is political fluff.

Sure enough, read the text for actual information and you'll see that it's reporting on a press conference about a commission that issued a report. This, through the magic of journalism, turns into "Sweden".

</comment><comment><USER3> So, they want to encourage ride-sharing in the original meaning - carpooling. Not the "taxi company in disguise" meaning. Sounds fair enough to me.

For context, the taxi regulation in Sweden is very light. There is no medallion system limiting the number of cars, and no regulation of prices. You just need an extended driver's license, an approved taxi-meter (same as how grocery stores need their scales to be approved), and the pricing plan listed clearly in the window.

There has been quite a bit of criticism of this lack of regulation, since some private taxi drivers will prey on tourists by overpricing their services by 3x and waiting at airports. Since their rip-off prices are displayed right there in the window, it's fully legal. Tourists don't know the typical price of a taxi, and fresh off an airplane are not sure what the local currency rate is (Sweden isn't on the Euro), and hence get ripped off.

<comment><USER4> "So, they want to encourage ride-sharing in the original meaning - carpooling. Not the "taxi company in disguise" meaning. Sounds fair enough to me."

I'm not necessarily a fan of Uber, but this is ridiculous.

If 'taxis' are legal in Sweden then there's no reason Uber should not be able to operate _so long as they are obeying the laws_.

Ostensibly, this is about a specific issue - distance travelled and the lack of ability for tax authorities to measure that.

Two things to know about Nordic countries:

1) They are super, super aggressive when it comes to tax things. Cheating on taxes is worse than some major crimes!

2) They are culturally anti-business and anti-entrepreneurial. I know this may seem odd given the number of startups - but their version of 'socialism' is cultural. To be a 'business person' or 'CEO' or to 'have your own company' even up until the 1980's was considered a 'dirty word'. They have this view that 'private business is immoral' in some ways. It's hard to describe. They are just default skeptical of anyone creating a business. Obviously that has evolved a lot over the last 30 years, but the underlying cultural phenom is still kind of there.

Finally - this may simply be political. Taxi entities around the world are trying to find ways to get Uber banned, and so they find an issue or concern that gives them a legal footing.

Again, I'm not for or against Uber really ...

<comment><USER5> As a Swede:

1) Cheating on taxes is quite literally stealing from every other person in the country. That being said I think there is a lot of small scale cheating going, especially for small cash-driven businesses.

2) There's no hostility towards entrepreneurs as far as I've seen it, quite the opposite. However people in general do seem to realize that there is a very real tradeoff between business interests and the interests of citizens. You can't have 0% corporate tax and free healthcare and education.

As for Uber Pop, the drivers are not volunteers and are simply either taxed for the profits they make through Uber Pop or they can do actual not-for- profit car pooling.

<comment><USER6>
       You can't have 0% corporate tax
       and free healthcare and education.

Sure you can. You tax more elsewhere, e.g. higher VAT, higher income tax, higher captial gains, higher giraffe tax ... The possibilities are infinite.

Taxation is ultimately a social tool to organise how people work as a group/nation, who does what etc.

I think Estonia has or had 0% corporate tax.

<comment><USER5> Right, just to clarify. You can have 0% corporate tax rate, you just have to recoup those taxes elsewhere.

And as corporations are benefiting from free education and healthcare they clearly should pay into that system too.

<comment><USER7> I think you should study the field of tax incidence a bit.

Corporate tax actually falls on shareholders and workers. It _sounds_ nice: tax those faceless corporations and not us nice citizens. But the actual end result is not necessarily what one may think.

You will of course find lots of material claiming this and that about corporation tax, because people are passionate about it, but for some balance, this is a summary I picked at random:

[https://hbr.org/2014/08/who-pays-corporate-taxes-possibly- yo...](https://hbr.org/2014/08/who-pays-corporate-taxes-possibly-you)

(And in case of Sweden, consider that it is a particularly open economy.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Uber is currently seeking to convince Europe's top court that it is a > digital service, not a transport company, in a case that could determine > whether app-based startups should be exempt from strict laws meant for > regular companies.

Uber found a way to abide by New York State's existing regulations for a special license for drivers and commercial insurance. Everywhere else it plays make-believe - 'we're just a technology company' \- for as long as it can.

The end-game in Europe is probably that Uber Technology will abandon its ambitions to be a not-a-taxi company, and provide its app to local transportation companies who are already regulatory-compliant.

The taxi company that I used to drive for was large enough to build its own modern [1] app-based dispatching system. So they don't need uber's technology anymore.

[1] [http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi- dispatch-v1.0/](http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.0/)

<comment><USER9> > The taxi company that I used to drive for was large enough to build its own > modern [1] app-based dispatching system.

If nothing else, I appreciate that Uber is pushing taxi companies to develop on-demand hailing apps. I've started seeing local companies advertise them specifically in response to Uber's success.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My take on the whole Uber vs Taxis thing is much more about just convenience and user experience.

If the taxis got together and created an app that you could hail a taxi, track its progress, and follow it to your destination, and take the payment automatically, there would have been no (or far less) need of Uber.

I have had several experiences where I called for a taxi, but none arrived. Then I went to the main road and hailed one within minutes.

So it's all about user experience.

<comment><USER11> > If the taxis got together and created an app that you could hail a taxi, > track its progress, and follow it to your destination, and take the payment > automatically, there would have been no (or far less) need of Uber.

They did. Before Uber even existed.

Check out [http://www.taxi.eu/en/](http://www.taxi.eu/en/)

<comment><USER12> The problem is that it doesn't solve the problem with availability. With surge pricing, Uber is able to get you a ride whenever you want, if you are willing to pay for it. With fixed pricing it regularly happens that you won't be able to get a taxi for hours during busy periods. I've just been to Potsdam (Germany, Uber is banned there) and wanted to get a taxi back at night. I tried for 45 minutes by hailing and calling the local number several times, with no success. Either I couldn't reach anyone or they told me they don't have anyone available. Luckily I did this while already walking in the right direction, so I was at the hotel after 80 minutes. With uber I'd have paid more but would've had a ride within 10 min or so.

This ability to always get a ride within a few minutes, no matter where and when, that is what I (and many others) like about uber. Tracking cars in the app is nice but hardly the defining factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not sure if the following has already been mentioned in other comments, so apologies if I'm posting redundant information.

The "ride-sharing services" that make profits are _already_ illegal in Sweden according to court decision, since it essentially means "taxi company without the annoying taxes". And consequently UberPOP has been suspended in Sweden along with several other EU countries (as also noted in the original post).

So the new proposal mostly seems like a way to clarify legislation: If you do something systematically to make a profit, we call that business and you pay taxes and follow all other relevant legislation (worker's rights etc). Makes very much sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER14> Stockholm is full of 'fake' taxis that take you longer routes and charge you more money.

I'd much rather use Uber.

<comment><USER15> I would use any taxi company that charged me the price up front, paid through the app, calculated based on distance from source to destination and some heuristics about time-of-day, time-of-year, etc.

The driver would be incentivized to get you to your destination quickly and there wouldn't be that awkward tension about whether the guy is taking the best route, driving too slow or whatever.

Even if they occasionally lost money because of freak traffic conditions, I'll bet they would win over a lot of customers.

<comment><USER9> I feel like the discussions of what Uber does undervalue this. Medallion systems are silly, Uber is using some shady legal arguments, etc, fine. But the actual taxi experience is often _terrible_.

Last time I took an actual taxi in a new town, the driver spoke next to no English, misunderstood my destination, and got lost 3 times. He tried to drop me off in the middle of the woods because his outdated Garmin told him to. He then tried to charge me ~$80 because of all the bizarre detours, demanded cash instead of a credit card (at the end), and tried to follow me when I objected.

That's exceptional, yeah, but not hugely so. Uber's biggest value to me is the guarantee that the driver will have clear directions, not try to change route, take a credit card, and otherwise not scam me. The cab industry in a lot of places is _really_ corrupt compared to other businesses.

<comment><USER12> It's not that exceptional, I've experienced that in several countries. Of course you could complain, but first you have to know who to contact at the local authority. With uber it's easy. If the driver tries to rip you off, you contact them and get fast and helpful support. And you won't have to pay if the driver decides to take a detour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "A photo illustration shows the Uber app logo displayed on a mobile telephone, as it is held up for a posed photograph in central London" \- that's some caption!

</comment><comment><USER17> So I'm guessing that Uber is going to start a Swedish non-profit and pay all profits to their (likely) Irish entity as tech licensing fees and keep moving.

Anyone have a reason to think this won't be the outcome if they can't fight this in court?

<comment><USER18> Uber will not make a profit for decades, break-even is a stretch of credulity.

Unless you think they can somehow turn around $2bn loss on $1.8bn revenue in a very thin margin business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Profits are evidence of the creation of social value, not deductions from the sum of the common good."

[http://www.nationalreview.com/article/256612/welcome- machine...](http://www.nationalreview.com/article/256612/welcome-machine- kevin-d-williamson")

</comment><comment><USER5> The 600 or so Uber Pop drivers that have been found by the taxation agency have had an extra ~2kUSD added to their taxes.

</comment><comment><USER20> So I guess Uber is on the clear

</comment><comment><USER21> The key word is "profits". Uber has certainly never made those.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is anyone really surprised that Sweden, of all places, is suggesting this?

</comment><comment><USER23> That's insane, when you know that this is exactly the buisness model of one of France's largest, if not the largest, tech company Blablacar

<comment><USER24> As a German, I say that is exactly what is wrong with Blablacar, so this is a good thing ;) Blablacar rpesents itself as a service that matches people having a spot in their car and people needing to travel from A to B, and for a long time they did just that. Now they started mandatory booking though their payment system (with the added benefit of insurance, granted), and everything about it has become worse: my girlfriend lives far away from big cities, but relatively close to the Autobahn, and it is much worse now for her to get a ride. Previously she could message people offering rides that should take them close to her place and ask them how much they wanted, now private communication is prohibited, fares seem precalculated, etc...

I guess it is a hard market, sure, but nobody forced them to compete against simple ride sharing websites, but they did, and now try heavy handed tactics once they captured a big piece of the market... /rant

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> alright but now this time FOR REAL!!!

</comment><comment><USER25> but why tho?

</comment><comment><USER25> its ur boi

</comment><comment><USER26> Sorry, but either regulate it as the taxi industry or force the taxi industry to be a profitless business as well. If being professional is defined by having a certificate or such then simply have these services require their drivers provide such certification.

Honestly, just how many ways can we find to prevent innovation from disrupting the protected by daunting regulations from occurring? At times I am beginning to wonder if this is less about protecting current businesses as it is government losing control over its people.

<comment><USER27> Taxi regulation in Sweden is very lax and it's trivial to become a certified taxi business and get a taxi license. Uber could have the paperwork taken care of by early next week if they wanted, they just doesn't want to comply with the few necessary regulations.

<comment><USER28> Uber does exist in Sweden, with a service that requires the drivers to have a taxi license. UberPop that was shut down didn't.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Victory – ReactJS library for building interactive data visualizations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/FormidableLabs/victory <comment><USER2> The size of the React and Victory libraries in the demo is close to 800 KB. How can this be reduced? For instance, it took ~12 seconds to render the chart with network and CPU throttling.

<comment><USER3> Well, you could always take the Forbes approach and show a ten-second fullscreen ad. Then you've only got two seconds to cover for. :P

<comment><USER2> Oh, you mean their <fuck-visitors> custom element? Yeah, I've considered that.

<comment><USER4> I never could find a name for that, thank you for fixing that problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks pretty slick. Awesome to see that FiveThirtyEight is using it, too ([http://formidable.com/open- source/victory/about/#showcase](http://formidable.com/open- source/victory/about/#showcase)). I've always wrestled with D3 when doing charting, so I'll have to give this a try.

</comment><comment><USER6> Formidible Labs is one a great shop with great engineers. Awesome seeing their work on HN.

</comment><comment><USER7> I replaced ChartJS with Victory on a recent project for charting investment performance, and was generally very pleased with the experience.

The focus on composable components fits well with the React way of working, and enables easy customisation (which was one of the main reasons for moving away from ChartJS) - you can even directly add SVG elements inside your Victory chart components if you want custom graphical elements.

Another interesting result of the switch was that the rendering quality of the vector (SVG) charts rendered by Victory was a lot nicer than the raster (Canvas) ones rendered by ChartJS, and it particularly fared much better at rendering smooth interpolation curves for a chart with a fairly large amount of data which looked "bumpy" with ChartJS.

Overall I'd highly recommend giving Victory a go if you need charts which aren't too specialised but do require some customisation. It seems like some of the paid-for solutions such as Highcharts are probably still the best option if you require something more niche.

</comment><comment><USER8> D3 plays really nicely with React already. I'll try this out, but not sure if I'd switch.

<comment><USER9> For basic charting I'd have to agree with you. D3 has some awesome utility functions (scales, SVG path generation, the entire geo side of things... ) but their method of binding to the DOM was always hard for folks to wrap their mind around. So replacing the confusing part with React/JSX has made a lot of visualization code MUCH cleaner.

Doing animations gets a little harder and I still haven't found a really nice way to do it. If anyone has any good suggestions I'm looking. I've done some stuff with React Motion but it was much harder than the equivalent d3.transition call.

<comment><USER10> For me, the problem with D3 is how low level it is. It gives you the underlying structure and calculations to do visualization, and that means you can do incredible things with it, but it's a long process. I felt like I was building things from first principles.

<comment><USER11> I've always thought about D3 as 'jQuery for SVG'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the minimalism of the demo charts.

Most charting frameworks tend to have default configurations which demonstrate more features than necessary as an advertisement of their competence for potential users, who are likely to copy default configuration and also take demo charts as cues on what charts should look like. It isn't the only dynamic which causes charts to tend to have superfluous or untuned features but it has some effect.

</comment><comment><USER13> the documentation isn't very beginner friendly, I found recharts much easier to get started with

</comment><comment><USER14> I tried it. The documentation is not helpful at all. I couldn't manage to create a simple chart with basic features.

<comment><USER15> You should let them know specifically what problems you ran into! I'm sure they'd be willing to improve their documentation, they just need to be given constructive criticism :)

I've used Victory and didn't run into any issues, but then my usecase was very similar to their examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found Victory really interesting, but:

"This project is in alpha release. We're hard at work fixing bugs and improving the API. Be prepared for breaking changes!

SEMVER Minor version bumps should be considered breaking changes until we hit v1.0.0. Patches can be considered safe."

Current version is v0.14.0.

<comment><USER17> Can you clarify what the issue is? That's how semver works and how most substantial software projects start – with an unstable API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> awesome. gonna give this a whirl tonight!

</comment><comment><USER4> well done

</comment><comment><USER19> This is not cross framework compatible because of react. Unfortunately I can't use it :( Will stick to c3js.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure I understand this comment. The title says "ReactJS" library. Do you mean it isn't compatible with React Native? Or did you really expect it to be compatible with Angular and other libraries?

<comment><USER21> There is a React Native version of Victory that reuses a lot of the same code base with different render targets (react-native-svg components). The api is identical. Check it out: [https://github.com/FormidableLabs/victory- native](https://github.com/FormidableLabs/victory-native)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How I Stopped Using MeteorJS for My App - <AUTHOR> http://stories.remotebase.io/post/rewriting-without-meteor/ <comment><USER2> Lesson 1 of writing code that doesn't die with 200 users: don't use mongo.

Glad you got meteor fixed up by sad you stuck with Mongo. H

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think my app died with 200 users purely owing to the technologies I used. Those may have not been the best tools for the job, but with some precautions, I could have made them work fine.

If I see performance issues with Mongo, I will switch. But I don't want to switch just because I can.

<comment><USER2> I think that is a good idea when looking at new technology in general. However in this case

1) switching databases is a lot of hassle especially without an ORM. Why choose wrong from the start?

2) Mongo not scaling well and being a poor choice is documented across thousands of articles all over the net. At some point it may be worth accepting "hey maybe the entire world isn't stupid and this tech really does suck."

I could see your point if somehow Mongo provided massive time savings, but I am very doubtful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tips. I think (1) is a good reason to switch but I am not familiar with the topic of (2) yet. I will do some more research & talk to people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I recently built an app called RemoteBase using MeteorJS, a full stack JavaScript framework. I had some scalability issues, and rewrote the app.

Here is why and how I rewrote the app with Express + React + Redux without MeteorJS. Hope this post mortem helps JavaScript developers and future me.

<comment><USER3> Nice to hear about your experience with meteor

Take a look at Loopback, it is built on top of express, allows for rapid development and in my experience scales really good. For example it has load balancing out of the box.

It is definitely my tool when building nodejs Rest APIs

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You echo the issues I've encountered with Meteor and the reasons why we got rid of it. MongoDB is the worst when having to do, well, anything with it. We've moved to FeathersJS with a SQL Backend and could not be happier.

</comment><comment><USER5> Great, and I just spent a full month learning Meteor.</comment>


Unity Editor for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/05/30/announcing-the-unity-editor-for-linux/ <comment><USER2> I've been using the "experimental" LTS 2017.4 Linux version at work for over a year and the only platform-specific issue has been broken .NET 4.6 support, which has long since been fixed in 2018.x. Other than that, I've found the Linux builds to be in good shape since the 5.x series (platform-independent Unity buggyness notwithstanding).

</comment><comment><USER3> Linux gaming on the rise now, thankfully mostly to DXVK and D9VK projects.

Seems like one of big corporations funding the authors, probably Valve (old Microsoft kind-of-enemy).

<comment><USER4> Steamplay has been a huge influence in my household. Dunno about the bigger picture. It's much less hassle than the Wine wrappers of old and for the most part just works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well the question is if Blizzard ports Hearthstone to Linux as a "hey, we have a beta for you guys", and bring some buzz. The annoying part is the battle.net launcher.

<comment><USER6> The Battle.net launcher uses Qt, and they already have a macOS version of it, so it shouldn't be too difficult to port.

Edit: That said, it's not like the lack of Unity Editor on Linux was stopping them from having a Linux version of Hearthstone. It has been possible to target Linux for years.

<comment><USER7> One simple example: battle.net installs its own root certificate to the OS trust store. How do you do that for Linux? There are plenty of distributions with different rules. That would be some work.

<comment><USER8> Why would it do that in the first place?

<comment><USER7> I think that they're running webserver on localhost and they are connecting to it from their website opened in browser, probably for some integration.

<comment><USER4> How is that going to work when most of the users are behind NAT/Firewalls? That's a connection model that just doesn't work well on the modern Internet.

I'm also kind of baffled by the need to install a Blizzard root cert in the cert store. That's normally only necessary for people who are too cheap to get their certs signed (Blizzard makes enough money to do this) or who want to MitM encrypted traffic from your host.

<comment><USER7> You're opening their website. JavaScript on their website connects to [https://localhost:12345](https://localhost:12345) and uses that connection to interact with battle.net software that runs on your PC. NAT/Firewall is not an issue. But that client software have to present valid certificate for that localhost website. To do so, they generate that self-signed certificate at installation time and mark is as trusted, so browsers will accept it. There's no other way to do that, really (well, there's a way actually, but it requires to sign some very non-standard agreements with certificate authorities, I know that Plex does that). Blizzard does not use that certificate to MitM your connection, because they don't send it back, it's generated, stored and used locally.

I don't like this practice too and I would opt-out of that "feature" having the choice. I just used to develop similar software, so I understand why they did that.

<comment><USER4> Do you actually need a root cert for this? Can't you just install the server's self-signed cert?

<comment><USER7> I think it's actually self-signed certificate for domain (localbattle.net) which resolves to 127.0.0.1, not CA one, sorry for misinformation.

<comment><USER4> That's much less troubling. It's much harder to engage in shenanigans in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love it! This really shows that game devs are starting to treat Linux as a first-class citizen.

<comment><USER10> I think this is more about making it easier to run the Unity editor headless in a docker container than it is about making lives easier for those extreme few who actually want to use the editor within Linux. Linux users often choose Linux because it is open. The Unity editor is definitely not open.

That's an educated guess, not something I know for a fact, and it makes sense given what I know about how the tool has evolved.

Unity has been able to produce games that run on Linux for a long, long time, so Linux is making some headway, you're right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is a good reaction to Godot's growing popularity.

<comment><USER12> Godot has caught my eye a bunch of times but I'm still not quite convinced to use it yet. I guess I need to just try it.

<comment><USER13> It is very intuitive! I picked it up in about 30 minutes, and I'm using it for a small project for a friend. I've previously written games in Python/Pygame, WebGL, and C++, and I've tried out Unity and was a bit overwhelmed. Godot is way faster, simpler, and friendlier. Try this tutorial: [https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/step_by_...](https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/step_by_step/your_first_game.html)

I recommend using GDScript instead of messing with C#, which is supported but much more difficult to set up. GDScript is really similar to Python, the editor has Intellisense/autocomplete (even for strings!) and all the documentation is built in under the Help menu. It's a very very pleasant experience overall. It's also the first time I've been able to work fully offline thanks to the extensive built in help, and this does wonders for productivity.

<comment><USER13> I'd also like to point out that Godot 3 has full 3d support with PBR support, custom shaders, skeleton animation, and basically everything you'd expect in a 3d engine. It's way more fleshed out than when I last looked at it in Godot 2, and ready for prime time.

<comment><USER14> They have quite a good as on system as well don't they? A good ecosystem around a slick and open core might very well be a winning concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> hope it's better than UE4 support for it, which is basically 'here's a bunch of code, good luck'. it has such crippling bugs its utterly unusable. Good luck unity to do better! I hope they make it awsome.

<comment><USER16> Well, the UE people don't support Linux in their own games...

<comment><USER17> They used to :( R.I.P. years of Unreal Tournament on Linux. I remember distinctly that 2004 ran _faster_ when I booted into Linux.

<comment><USER18> They even used to (somewhat) recently. Rocket League (UE3) ran in linux.

<comment><USER17> I didn't know this, I was hoping for it long ago when I used to play. Maybe worth installing to see if it's good.

If it stays on Steam, anyways. Epic's store probably won't ever support Linux I'd imagine :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dear Unity: please get a floating license server that runs on Linux!

<comment><USER10> They have the ability to sell floating licenses, but you must work with a sales rep to get them, and purchase through one of their resellers, if I recall.

I do not know if they roll their own license server or if they can use commercial license servers that may already be in place in an organization.

<comment><USER19> their license server is still under development

<comment><USER10> Things like this make me scratch my head.

License servers exist. Surely it is cheaper for them to license from someone who does license servers, or use a client's existing license servers than it is for them to develop and support their own server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great!

I have high hopes for it, since the experimental version already worked quite well for some time. Still, Unity was one of the reasons I got Win10 on an external hard drive...

It's quite a dead meme, but with things like photopea, Blender, smooth Linux VsCode version, stepping stone distros like Mint and now Unity the year of the Linux desktop might come!

<comment><USER21> I am interested in a switch to Linux (web developer, I use OSX, I need the terminal for all my tasks) but had not looked at Mint yet. The website looks like it was made 15 years ago, are they more modern than the website seems?

<comment><USER22> For "most MacOS-like experience" and "willing to compromise on FOSS philosophy for practical convenience in GPU-related work", I recommend taking a look at Pop!_OS. It's System76's take on Ubuntu with Mac-like UI tweaks and proprietary Nvidia drivers built in.

<comment><USER23> I've personally found Budgie Linux to be the most "MacOS-like" distro. It is also based on Ubuntu.

Earlier this year I was forced to do an OS refresh on my home system, and I decided I wanted something closer to MacOS; before I had a hacked together system that approximated (virtually identical) Crunchbang (#!) - but was based on Ubuntu Minimal (14.04 LTS) and built up from there.

I wanted something that was still "lightweight" in the sense that it did what you wanted and no more; something with a fairly MacOS-like "intuitive" interface. I wanted something that could be configured easily without needing to hack on config files (as I had to do with my mess - updating OpenBox, etc). But I still wanted to be able to easily modify it to make it mine (unlike MacOS which is pretty locked down in the modding department).

I looked at PopOS, I looked at Mint, I looked at straight Ubuntu, and I tried BunsenLabs (what evolved out of #!); it wasn't until I tried Solus that I found the interface I liked - Budgie Desktop.

Unfortunately, I hated the Solus package management system; I wanted my Debian archive files, and Ubuntu repos, etc! But a quick search found me Budgie Ubuntu - I tried it, and loved it.

Ultimately, to each their own; Budgie Linux may not meet your definition of "MacOS-like" \- but it met mine, and is certainly worth a look I think. I don't regret choosing it (my only "regret" \- which is minor - is choosing the 18.04 LTS - so I couldn't get the latest version of Budgie, and won't until the next LTS release; currently Budgie is on 19.x (x.10 and x.04) - and that version has the latest version of Budgie, but LTS won't get it until 20.x).

<comment><USER24> I liked Budgie, which is an "official flavor" of Ubuntu these days[1] like Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. Personally I didn't find Budgie to be a lot nicer than stock Gnome, but it has some visual flair for sure.

1: [https://ubuntubudgie.org/](https://ubuntubudgie.org/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Won't somebody fix the Guardian banner - <AUTHOR>

I'm no webdev, but there must be a better way of implementing the banner for the Guardian website.
Clicking on a story and then scrolling down causes the page to jump as the banner shrinks itself, and the first couple of sentences can be unreadable.
Is this kind of thing ok? I just can't believe that this has been allowed to exist for so long on such a prominent website.
How could this be implemented better? <comment><USER2> I'd suggest one of two things:

1\. Contact The Guardian and share the issue with them

2\. Forget about it, and delete this Ask HN post.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Example: [http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/24/barack- obama-...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/24/barack-obama-lands- in-kenya-amid-huge-security-operation)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you use an ad blocker? My friend at The Guardian (whose HN account is new so you might not see his reply) reckons this could be caused by an as blocker messing with the CSS.

</comment><comment><USER3> I emailed a link to this post to a friend who works at The Guardian.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's your fix: turn off javascript.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's because of your ad blocker messing with the css</comment>


GitHub's new notifications: a case of regressive design - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/13/GitHub-notifications.html <comment><USER2> I have been using it for a few weeks and really like it actually. It's much better than Github's old notification system, where I would click on something that I couldn't resolve there and then, it would get be marked as seen and I would inevitably forget about it. Now I am in control of what I see as done and I can easily unsubscribe from things I don't care about without unsubscribing from a whole project.

I also don't get on with Gitlab's system at all. Haven't tried git.sr.ht but this new Github design is way better than anything I have used before.

<comment><USER3> Agree. For me although it's not great as of now, it's already a huge improvement. I have confidence about my actions now. Notifications can be located and managed more easily.

It's good enough now for me. I hope they look into Gist next. So many missed opportunities there. Head over to Show HN and you'll find code snippet management softwares there from time to time. Almost all problems they are trying to tackle can be solved by a better GitHub Gist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I sent GitHub my own negative feedback. The worst parts for me are that I get notified about _my own actions_, and that clicking on the item that the notification is about doesn't immediately mark it as read/done. I have never seen an inbox system where clicking on an unread notification didn't automatically mark it as unread.

Additionally, clicking on "Done" once you're in the notification-specific page will navigate you away from the current page back to the notifications list. This is pretty disruptive to me.

Granted, I keep inbox 0 everywhere so my habits may be different than average.

I like that the notifications are removed in realtime from the list if you click "Read" there. (However, possibly due to varying line lengths, the page sometimes jumps while marking each item as read in the list. This is annoying.)

My guess is that the product team had a solid UX in mind but the engineering team was pushed to release before it was polished enough to be a solid improvement on the existing system.

<comment><USER5> > Additionally, clicking on "Done" once you're in the notification-specific > page will navigate you away from the current page back to the notifications > list. This is pretty disruptive to me.

But if you're done with that notification, why would you want to stick around? You wouldn't yet be done by definition.

<comment><USER4> I guess that's just not how I think or how I'm used to using an inbox. I click done to get the banner out of my face. The important part was the notification not the requirement to buy into their task management system.

<comment><USER6> Yeah that banner is annoying and takes away lots of valuable space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I haven't spoken to anyone who likes the new UI. Do you?

I've heard many people in our team rave about how the notifications overhaul has made them far more efficient.

[https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1195176650008252416](https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1195176650008252416)

[https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1194675684020383744](https://twitter.com/timneutkens/status/1194675684020383744)

<comment><USER8> I haven't heard many things about it, but what I've heard has only been positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I could not really pinpoint why the new UI is bad, but it got me to finally switched 100% over to emails to manage all my GitHub notifications; I disabled them in the Web UI completely.

I find my email client (Thunderbird) and custom filters to be a much more powerful and flexible way to manage the hundreds of notifications I get every day. More than 99% of these emails are automatically sorted in folders, tagged, etc. So that I can efficiently prioritize what I look at. This saves me massive amounts of time. In the end I always have an empty inbox, which I find pretty satisfying and it helps me focus.

<comment><USER10> People with Thunderbird are not their target. They want the Outlook people.

<comment><USER9> Here you go: [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-email- messag...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage-email-messages-by- using-rules-c24f5dea-9465-4df4-ad17-a50704d66c59)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had tried the beta/preview, and it was terrible.

It was as though they had created a mailbox, and I was looking at a long, small-font, mailbox message list.

I'm not a design expert, but I felt annoyed and, somehow, a bit confused (?) ...

I don't understand why they would do this. Kind of reminds me of the supreme folly that is Microsoft's Metro designs.

<comment><USER12> My first reaction was similar to yours, but after using it a few weeks I much prefer it over the old notifications. Those were _really_ bad. These are functional and I expect them to be further polished as things go by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've seen a lot of active open source users talk positively about the new design. I personally disabled email notifications completely and wouldn't want to go back. Having a clear separation between unread, read, and archived is a huge step forward.

Also, I'm not sure why it matters to have notifications grouped by repo. At least for myself it rarely made sense and only wasted space in the UI.

<comment><USER14> For me, grouping by repo was useful because I don't care about every repo equally: some produce few notifications but are extremely important, while other repos (that happen to produce a lot of notifications) aren't that important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good thing about GitHub is that if you have email notifs enabled, they put a fake CC in the email

        {review_requested | author | assign | mention | your_activity | subscribed} @ http://noreply.github.com

Then you can create filters in your email client and sort this stuff into different subfolders.

IMO this is still not enough granular ([https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1222918835172495360](https://twitter.com/__jakub_g/status/1222918835172495360)) but overall it's quite ok. Feel free to ping GH support if you agree with my tweets so maybe this gets prioritized.

</comment><comment><USER16> I gave them the same exact feedback a few weeks ago. Got zero follow up so i suppose it worked for some. I will just stop using notifications i suppose.

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree and sent my own feedback, where before I had one button to click "Mark all as read" but now it's three clicks and hidden, I actually didn't know it was possible until just now when I tried it out again.

Also what does "done" even mean? If I'm mentioned in an issue but it's not closed should I mark it done?

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the new one is OK for a quick overview, but I still prefer email. Sieve + this rule[1] files emails from each repo in a folder (following org structure), and I can flag things I need to come back to, mark things I don't care about as read, and have thunderbird pop a notification in the top of my screen for repos I really care about.

(I know I am definitely not the target audience for the page)

1 -

      # GitHub
      if allof(exists "X-github-recipient",
               header :regex "List-Id" "<([a-z_0-9-]+)\.([a-z_0-9-]+)[.@]") {
          set :lower "organisation" "${2}";
          set :lower "repo" "${1}";
          fileinto :create "INBOX.GitHub Code Review.${organisation}.${repo}";
          stop;
      }

</comment><comment><USER19> It is still light years ahead of the slipshod UX of Gitlab.

Gitlab checks off all the feature boxes that managers love to see, but for devs that use it, it's a disjointed and inconsistent experience compared to github.

<comment><USER20> Examples? Would love to get your feedback to our UX team.

<comment><USER21> For my part, my main complaints with GitLab's UI are:

1) It's too slow. If the same UI were 2x faster it'd be a lot easier to use.

2) It doesn't meet the bare minimum of "at least do something useful" if JavaScript is turned off

3) Getting around the various tools available for a single repo is difficult

Pot calling the kettle black a bit with that 3rd one, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's been great for me for one major reason: I used to work on a pretty active project, but have since moved on. I don't have time or energy to look at things from that project anymore, but notifications from issues I participated in drown out the things I'm working on now. The new UI lets me bulk unsubscribe from those issues, which has been great.

Of course, being able to just bulk unsubscribe from an entire project and all its issues from the outset would be better.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been using it for several months now and at first I found it cumbersome but now its quite nice. Working on a very large OSS project, I end up with quite a few notifications. I need to be able to work through them and decide if I want to act now, later, some day, or never. The new system works perfectly for that. The article's complaints seem to be mainly about the UI/UX of the project, which IMO is not nearly as important as the Concepts (in the Jacksonian sense [1]) it empowers. UI/UXs are relatively easy and can incrementally improve over time. Concepts are difficult and heavy.

Do I have complaints regarding the UI/UX? Of course. But it's beta software, it would be insane for me not to.

[1] [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software- abstractions](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/software-abstractions)

</comment><comment><USER24> I haven't been using it myself yet, but this afternoon a colleague just said "Whoooohaa, the new notifications screen on github's great".

Seems he was very happy to be able to manager his notifications with more "fine tuning" than before.

And you, what do you think of it?

</comment><comment><USER25> Where is the sticky header? Scrolling down the page I don't see anything sticking to the top.

Also I didn't even know where to look to find the page. I guess I relied far more on checking my email and seeing notifications for things there and then bouncing over to Github to look at changes. Definitely going to spend a little more time trying out the notifications.

<comment><USER26> It's on the page you see _after_ you click on a notification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The only thing that made me go back to old design is "Mark all as read" is gone.

Who thought it is a good idea to remove that button?

<comment><USER12> You can mark all as read. To do that select all, click the ...-button and then Mark all as read.

Not super streamlined, but it definitely is there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminded me to write some feedback for the new notification UI in GitHub. I requested a feature that was in the classic version, to hover and preview latest comment without going to another page to view what trigerred the notification. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with some of the new features.

</comment><comment><USER29> I miss the old way that organizing notifications by repos, so that I can work on the repos in higher priority.

</comment><comment><USER30> I didn't like it at first, but after actually using it I find it very helpful in keeping on top of all types of things to do/watch/respond.</comment>


Ftp trivia for $1000 please alex, it's the daily double - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36344079/in-ftp-protocol-how-do-i-know-when-a-file-upload-is-really-done <comment><USER2> Please use the correct title of the article (stackoverflow question) so users don't have to guess what's behind it. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> wow i had no idea that was a guideline. I was like, how can I be creative and get attn to my so question in a funny way. sorry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think there is a way to check if a file has been completely uploaded on the client side. On the server side, use something like inotify to monitor the uploaded file.</comment>


Sticking with Windows 7 over Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/technology/personaltech/sticking-with-windows-7.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> I installed Ubuntu for the first time tonight. Microsoft somehow forced me to finally move to Linux.

I have this laptop that came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed. The laptop fell down and the hard drive got damaged. I had to get a new hard drive. Unfortunately, I couldn't re-activate Windows even in spite of the fact that my one year warranty period has not ended. Being a noob on matters technology and software development as well not having previously made a recovery disk for the same laptop, and the fact that both the seller and the HP appointed support shop have declined to help me, I was thus forced to move away from Windows. Interestingly, the options available for me were either to use a non- genuine copy of Windows 10 or adopt Linux. Well, I didn't want to pay for the same OS twice.

<comment><USER3> Good. I will not use Microsoft's operating systems as they have never put your interests first. I find this disturbing.

I have been running various Linux distros since Microsoft came out with Windows XP and their BS licensing which tied one copy to the hardware.

Whether its DRM or mining personal data, people just need vote with their wallets and send a message to them saying these profit-making shenanigans won't be tolerated.</comment></comment>


Nationalist Anthems: Remembering a time when composers mattered more - <AUTHOR> https://theamericanscholar.org/nationalist-anthems/#.Xf-Shi2ZNQL <comment><USER2> I spend much of my free time either playing or listening to classical music, so I'm very familiar with articles like this... and every time I read them, my mind translates the author's lament to "remember the good old days when cultural relevance and value was determined exclusively by upper-class middle- aged white people?" I make no apologies for being a cultural reactionary, but I question whether "the wider culture" \- as opposed to the educated white elites writing for national media outlets - cared any more for Shostakovich in 1942 than they do today, or why indeed they should care in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> What an incredibly short-sighted article, I have so many points of rebuttal I'll offer just two:

\- Firstly, millions of people can now listen to brilliantly-performed classical music and no- or low-cost. As compared to the few who could afford the luxury of the concert hall or wait for the radio to play such music.

\- Secondly, the idea of the lone, genius composer is obsolete. Conservatory- style composition classes focus on teaching classical harmony at first, later expanding into modern concepts and compositional devices. This may seem to lead to the image of a Beethoven-esque composer, writing notes and conducting ensembles and orchestras, but the reality is that the composer of the 21st century is more of a collaborative structural-architect who grapples with technology as much as with harmony, melody and timbre: designing instructions and working closely with performers who provide, in turn, virtuosity.

I grew up listening primarily "composed" period music for ensembles and orchestras, and still have a great and profound love for it, but I have an increasing admiration for modern composers and musicians who have embraced all the aesthetics of their surroundings and the influences of their peers. Modern composer/performers/musicians have enriched music for us in all styles of music from pop to alternative to country. It's a wonderful time to be a listener, and it doesn't require a Rachmaninoff concerto to be impressed (though, we can still be impressed by Rachmaninoff..)

</comment><comment><USER4> Remember when people killed themselves en masse for the right song? Those were the good old days...</comment>


Japan to hang 'Black Widow' who dated rich men and poisoned them with cyanide - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/news/409000-japan-black-widow-cyanide/ <comment><USER2> This seems appropriate: she murdered, she confessed freely, she has no remorse and is proud of herself. There's no doubt that she's guilty.</comment>


Plague Inc. Removed from the App Store in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/27/plague-inc-removed-from-apple-app-store-in-china.html <comment><USER2> Lol I've been binge playing it as corona virus. I lost a lot of skill on that game. Having trouble making it past bacteria level.</comment>