Setting the record straight - <AUTHOR> http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2014/03/setting-the-record-straight/ <comment><USER2> _You don't have to give us your name and we don't ask for your email address._

true, but by having my phone number and my friends address book that lists my phone number, you in-fact have my phone number.

 _We don't know your home address_

You have my friends address book which has my address for my phone number and you have my phone number. So. No. You do in-fact have my home address.

 _We don't know where you work_

See above

 _or collect your GPS location_

that's what you say, but you really have my GPS location, at least to some degree as sharing my location is one of the features in WhatsApp I used at times.

 _None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that._

While I believe you that you so far haven't collected anything, there's nothing to stop your new owners from collecting the data.

This post is complete nonsense and I'm just ever so happy that I have deleted my account the moment the sale went public. Considering the fact that my GF was able to send messages to my account despite myself having deleted it, I doubt that anything was really deleted though. So thanks.

<comment><USER3> The post didn't ease my concerns either. To further extend your last point, I don't understand why FB would spend so much acquiring whataspp if they didn't plan to mine the data. I told my friends to expect targeted FB ads based on our whatsapp convos in the future.

<comment><USER4> 95% of WhatApp's messages don't event hit a disk and are served from memory. It would take big architectural changes to be able to mine them. (info from the erlang factory slides)

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting stat. How do you think FB will get an ROI on the 19B ?

EDIT: Also, do you think FB would/could man-in-the-middle the traffic a la NSA? No architectural changes to whatsapp are needed. FB could save and fwd the traffic. Crunch later.

<comment><USER5> It could be the difficult to quantify ROI of strategic benefit from keeping it out of the hands of Apple, Google, MSFT, etc

<comment><USER6> $19B, to keep competition at bay, rather than use it to innovate? When your main product is advertising? Silicon Valley is circling the drain...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Speculation to the contrary isn't just baseless and unfounded, it's irresponsible._

Easy now, you got bought by _Facebook_. Whatsapp may be retaining it's autonomy (for now), but the speculation that your messaging/other business records would be hooked into the greater Facebook data hoover was ANYTHING BUT baseless, unfounded or irresponsible.

Facebook's business model involves very heavy user surveillance. I'm not even saying that pejoratively, that's just how they operate. C'mon son!

<comment><USER8> > Facebook's business model involves very heavy user surveillance.

By surveillance you mean analyzing data their users voluntarily upload to their social network...so they can make money?

<comment><USER7> Yes, surveillance. The clarification I made in my previous post was meant to avoid exactly this tangent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we > wouldn't have done it._

                 _
                /•\
               /   \
              /     \
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+
      |                     |
      |                     |
      |                     |
      |  I want to believe  |
      |                     |
      |                     |
      |                     |
      +</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---+

      F. Mulder

</comment><comment><USER10> Jan Kaum tells an interesting story. Unfortunately, those are all empty words.

This is the exact difference between privacy-by-policy as opposed to privacy- by-design. If WhatsApp truly wants to make good on its promise, it must deploy _real_ end-to-end encryption such that it can never be in a position to be strong-armed into disclosing personal data, neither by stockholders nor by the government.

It's a shame that they are under the thumb of StaziBook, which will never actually deploy privacy respecting features, since that kind of goes against their business of mining and controlling the data of every single human on this planet.

<comment><USER11> > It's a shame that they are under the thumb of StaziBook

Is that a colored reference to Facebook? Did you refer to Microsoft as "M$" in previous times? A bit childish and detracts from your otherwise insightful comment.

note: I have a pretty much dormant FB account, and run Face-blocker software on all my browsers to avoid it's panopticon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a poignant story that the author has such personal reasons for his interest in privacy, but the bottom line is that WhatsApp has an absolutely _horrible_ track record of security.

Security is one area in which I generally don't give people the benefit of the doubt (the burden of proof is on them), and so far, WhatsApp has not done much to prove their trustworthiness[0] in this regard.

[0] Trust encompasses _both_ intent _and_ ability/execution - if either one is lacking, the trust fails.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Above all else, I want to make sure you understand how deeply I value the > principle of private communication.

How deeply? Enough to implement proper end to end encryption? Otherwise, you're just paying lip service to "privacy", just like Facebook and others are. They all say "we value your privacy greatly", but track and mine every single thing you do or say. The facts don't match the words in almost every case.

So _show us_ how much you value our privacy. Implement end to end encryption (by default, obviously - don't pull a Telegram).

</comment><comment><USER14> That's all nice and dandy and I don't have reason to doubt the noble stance of the founders, but what is the opinion on privacy of the _new_ owner of WhatsApp?

Anyone who has ever sold a business (or part of it) knows that new owners exercise control and it's their legally enforceable right to do so.

</comment><comment><USER15> Translation: Please do not move to the next WhatsApp clone to become popular. It would be really bad for Facebook and WhatsApp if the 450 million users switched to a new app overnight.

</comment><comment><USER16> This post fails to explain the value of Whatsapp to facebook at a very basic level. If everything about privacy in this post is correct, what exactly is facebook getting out of this deal? They paid 19B for Whatsapp, and are not going to collect any data on the users? How does that make any financial sense?

Appeals to emotion regarding the KGB are great, but you cannot convince me that a company the size of facebook would donate 19B to Whatsapp and expect nothing in return. Furthermore, having been acquired by facebook does not constitute a "partnership", since the decision making power of the founders has quite literally been sold off to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER17> You could pretend they were perceived as a threat for Facebook and Facebook just bought the peace of knowing they have no remotely significant threat other than Google+.

Although, knowing Facebook, I have a really hard time just taking this guy's word for it. I won't be installing Whatsapp until it's both free software and has end-to-end encryption. I'll tolerate it being centralized because Facebook/NSA having our metadata would be acceptable while we wait for a better alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a nice sentiment but how meaningful is it now that whatsapp is owned by facebook? Jan Koum may use the word "Partnership" to describe the Facebook/Whatsapp relationship but they didn't start a foundation or go in on an open source project together - Facebook bought Whatsapp.

</comment><comment><USER19> >If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn't have done it.

Doesn't the obligation to the shareholders and investors to make as much return on the investment trump any values the founders may have?

In other words, doesn't the business have to be showing that it's doing the right thing to their investors? Where the right thing means getting NINETEEN Billion dollars.

Edits: Another way of wording my question would be: Could they really have actually said "no" to them, and gotten away with it?

<comment><USER20> Also, getting bought out is not the same thing as "partnering with".

A partnership can be dissolved by either party. Facebook _owns_ WhatsApp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >The fact that we couldn't speak freely without the fear that our communications would be monitored by KGB is in part why we moved to the United States when I was a teenager.

>Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA

It is not respect for the user's privacy that keeps the NSA, the FSB or any other agency from listening to, storing or censoring your user's communications. Respect for privacy is a good _principle_ , but if the technology does not reflect the principle, it's there only to make some people (founders, employees, investors, customers and users) feel better.

</comment><comment><USER22> What value does Whatsapp have for Facebook if FB cannot mine the users for data?

What's the point of buying whatsapp? How does FB make money from those users?

</comment><comment><USER23> What about the data Whatsapp does collect? Like other people's phone numbers. What happens with that within Facebook?

And of course being principled about not tracking or getting more information than necessary and then partnering with the company that does nothing but just that is a bit perplexing to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> I really like the founder's sentiment, and the fact that it ties into his personal experience makes it more believable. However, the only real way to stick it to Facebook anymore is to stop using WhatsApp - they paid $35.56 for you, and they're not getting a refund.

</comment><comment><USER25> > _None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we > really have no plans to change that._

Just because WhatsApp has no plans today doesn't make plans to exercise it tomorrow less viable.

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems incredibly disingenuous to assert that WhatsApp won't collect personal data while sidestepping the question of what happens when WhatsApp identities become correlated with Facebook accounts.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow, that is extremely misleading and manipulative, especially with the "I'm from the Ukraine" anecdote.

They're not "partnering with", they're being _bought_. And as a result, they will owned by a company with zero respect for privacy, located in a country with little respect for privacy and the weakest privacy protections in the Western hemisphere. A company who's very core business model exclusively consists of selling their user's privacy to third parties.

WhatsApp's guarantees are worth exactly zero. At best, they are merely honest intentions, but formulated in such a misleading way that they become untrustworthy from the start.

</comment><comment><USER28> For someone who grew up in the shadow of the KGB, the post's author engages in some pretty blatant doublespeak using the word "partnership" to characterize a relationship which is wholly one-sided.

</comment><comment><USER29> > Make no mistake: our future partnership with Facebook will not compromise > the vision that brought us to this point.

I think this phrasing is the most telling. This is not a partnership. Facebook wholly owns Whatsapp. As soon as Facebook decides that their vision for Whatsapp is more important than the vision laid out in this post, Whatsapp will be powerless to do anything. The fact that Jan Koum now sits on Facebook's board may help to mitigate any change to Whatsapp, but it does not change this fundamental fact.

</comment><comment><USER30> uh oh . someone is scared...

</comment><comment><USER31> This seems kind of pointless. I don't think anybody believed Whatsapp wasn't storing phonebooks/location/etc before the Facebook merger, and I'm pretty sure nobody really believes Facebook won't in the future. Comes across as desperate to stop... something? Did I miss the outcry against this merger somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER32> Ever since Facebook bought whatsapp, my partner, family and I have switched to TextSecure, and we've been very happy so far.

If you're concerned about Facebook's record on privacy, TextSecure is the way to go. They recently added data messages, so it's no longer tied to SMS only.

(Note: I'm not affiliated with TextSecure in any way.)

</comment><comment><USER33> He should publish the terms of the sale if he wants us to believe that this privacy stance will be hard to change.

</comment><comment><USER34> > None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we > really have no plans to change that.

I love the "really" there. Even while trying to reassure people, he couldn't resist leaving himself at least a little bit of an out.

</comment><comment><USER35> I admire the sentiment, but I can't help being reminded of Wayne Rooney's "once a Blue, always a Blue" shirt. I'm sure he also meant it wholeheartedly at the time.

Sadly there are 19bn reasons for this situation to change.

</comment><comment><USER36> They're starting to feel the effects of the mass exodus to Telegram.

</comment><comment><USER37> > _None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we > really have no plans to change that._

I believe you.

However Facebook owns your company now, so the future of WhatsApp is not your call anymore.

</comment><comment><USER38> > Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA

I believe you, but I don't believe that Facebook shares your principles.

</comment><comment><USER39> Oh please. How utterly patronizing. Even down to the hackneyed "humbled" cliche in the first sentence. Jan Koum and WhatsApp, just take your billions and go buy a yacht. Are you really having fun trying to control the message?

Will people with platforms ever stop using them to spout self-serving bullshit?</comment>


C and C++ are not the same language. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.directededge.com/2009/05/21/c-and-c-are-not-the-same-language/ <comment><USER2> While I don't agree with everything the guy says, this is a huge pet peeve of mine: if someone says "C/C++" all the time, it is likely that they are skilled at neither, because anyone who has done significant programming in both knows quite well that the two are quite different in practice.

<comment><USER3> The two indeed totally different, but in lot of real world applications, the two are used together, and they are very complementary.

For examples, lot of straight C wrapped in Classes, and accessed in a very C++ way. It's appropriate to say C/C++ for these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for clarifying this; as someone who didn't take the usual CS in university route this often confused me.

I've added C to my list of languages to learn after Python, mostly from recommendation on HN and I want to get into machine learning.

<comment><USER5> for M-L, brush up on your basic* math, and jack up on the probability and statistics. an eetsy beetsy volume on numerical computing, just enough to understand machine representation of numbers and enough to understand errors (and their propagation!) should be enough.

don't hesitate to read engineering texts. the first few chapters of various DSP texts should give you an idea of what to look for ("oh, so it's loops over real-valued vectors! cool!") but if you read EE texts, feel free to ignore complex variables (unless your earlier math text was good enough to introduce them as vectors of two components :-)

An interactive language, preferably Octave/Matlab should come handy.

None of this will make sense right now, but hints are supposed by like that ;-)

\--

[Edit: * basic as in naive set theory, ability to reconstruct and prove properties of Real numbers using Dedekin-cuts, basic proof techniques, sequences, series, limits, functions as sets, basic trigonometric functions, the derivative and the anti-derivative, and most importantly understanding the various type of integrals, specially the Reimann. touching "real analysis" from the standard and Non-Standard angles should be enough. All this could be done in 2-3 months with the right texts. This is the minimal you will need to understand things; the basic properties of the logarithms should come handy, specially converting between logarithms of different bases (you will be working on bases 10 and 2, while the natural number is more prominent in engineering than CS.) ]

<comment><USER6> I would add Linear Algebra to mahmud's (great) list of mathematical "stuff to learn". A _lot_ of ML _needs_ Linear Algebra . (e.g Neural Networks, SVMs .. )

<comment><USER5> Thanks for taking over the thread for me plinkplonk. I posted a dense teaser and went to bed, then work for the rest of the day. You pretty much answered all subsequent questions the way I would have :-)

Let me add that beginners couldn't go wrong with mathematics texts by Serge Lang, first-rate mathematician and master teacher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg _Learning to think in C++ is much closer to learning to think in Java_

This is where I stopped reading. He mentioned "modern C++" many times, which actually should mean that C++ moved away from rigid pseudo-OO GoF-inspired structures, Java-style.

Java itself is a simplified snapshot of much older C++ (circa mid-90s) but equipped with garbage collection. Memory management is an interesting, actually, since C++ doesn't rely on heap allocation nearly as much as Java does.

Well, long story short: no, "thinking in Java" is a terrible, terrible way of describing how C++ programming should be done.

Thinking in _modern_ C++ is supposed to feel like you're trying to bolt on Haskell's type system on top of C.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure that's descriptive so much as an ideal.

In practice (mentioned this in the blog comments as well) I've found that the C++ world is somewhat divided between what I'll label the Boost and Qt camps.

Boost, as kind of a conceptual child of the STL, has extended more along the axis of exploring what's possible with the language, at times at the cost of pragmatism. The Qt camp, on the other hand, tends to hide most of the heavy use of generic programming in private classes and exposes more simplified APIs, typically with minimal use of templates in public APIs.

I personally, as a former long-time KDE developer, fall firmly in the Qt camp and it shows in the way that I write C++. It's also the style that's been preferred in the two companies where I've been employed as a C++ developer.

Which is _modern_ is mostly a semantic issue. I'd wager that while advanced template programming is more cutting-edge, it's also not in fact the way that very much C++ today is actually written, which is the definition of modern I was working with.

<comment><USER7> The book that defines the genre ("Modern C++ Design", by Andrei Alexandrescu), is all about template metaprogramming. I'd say that's the end of the semantic debate.

Maybe you could say that I'm in a "camp", but the C++ style that Qt uses is based on the outdated notion that compilers can't keep up with the "modern" features of C++. That style is antiquated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Current compilers still generate huge binaries for code that makes excessive usage of templates; I've personally had to rip out a lot of heavily templated code in the last year for that reason.

They also still (with the Intel compiler as a notable exception) generate nonsensical error messages when templates are used heavily.

The latter reason is one of many that a lot of _C++ programmers_ don't do well with heavy template usage. One naturally could fault those programmers, and I think that's half-way fair, but in designing reusable APIs, API usability is and should be a concern. The corollary seems is obviously a bad principle when applied to (graphical) interfaces: if the users weren't so dumb it'd be easy to understand. I believe the same holds true, generally, for API design.

Half-way related, I'm personally quite a fan of _Designing Qt-style C++ APIs_ :

<http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq13-apis.html>

As for "modernness" the point still stands; when some people say, "modern music" they mean "avant garde". Others mean "the stuff on the radio". I mean the stuff on the radio; Alexandrescu is the avante garde.

<comment><USER8> Compilation speed and incomprehensible compiler errors remain an issues for template heavy code but this is the first time I've heard complaints about binary size. Can you educate?

Theoretically the incomprehensible compiler errors will go away in the next couple years as compiler writers integrate C++0x "concepts."

<comment><AUTHOR> Every specialization of a template creates a new instance of it with new symbols. With heavily nested templating that can add up quite quickly.

The most problematic case at my last company was where there were several hundred specializations (just one-liners) one after another in some of the error handling code. Each of those specialized several more templates. I managed to shave a few dozen MB off of the binary size (and remember, larger binaries == more cache pressure) by replacing the templates with a base class and virtual function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am (a little) surprised at how well the C example reads vs the C++ version. I would have thought that an OO design pattern (here, Observer) is where C++ syntax would be a better fit.

<comment><USER9> One of my professors, Carter Bays saw some C++ and said, "So, is C++ just the new COBOL?"

(Dude wrote the world's _first implementation of merge sort_. It's saved on paper punch-tape! And he has stuff in one of the 1st 3 Knuth books.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "But C++ often hits a sweet-spot between languages where high-level abstractions are available with the raw power of C when you need it." He then goes on to say he uses Ruby and not Python. Is Ruby missing nice C integration? Python is oft-touted as the sweet spot here, although I have to confess I haven't done a whole lot of Python/C or Python/C++ integration.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just like Ruby more. You can connect both Python and Ruby to C APIs, and I've done so in the past from Ruby.

C++ integration is usually moderately more annoying since once you start moving beyond ordinal types cross-language communication becomes hairier. C ends up being the lingua franca between programming environments a lot of the time.

<comment><USER8> It is just as easy to extend any of the scripting languages with C++ as it is with C. SWIG and other systems like XS have built-in support for C++. Even if that weren't true, you can just make your interface header files 'extern "C"' yet enjoy the superior power of C++ in your implementation files.

There is no reason to favor C over C++ when extending a scripting language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. By "I extended them with C", I meant, "I extended them with a C interface"; the implementation was in C++.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A quick question about c++

in std::cout << "Whoopee." << std::endl; is std::endl putting a newline char after "Whoopee. "?

Anyway in the C example it could have been written puts("Whoopee."); instead of printf("Whoopee. \n"); puts() places a \n after the char * it accepts as an argument.

I'm sorry for the triviality here :)

<comment><USER12> std::endl will insert a new line, but it also flushes the buffer. So use'\n' when you need a new line and don't want to flush the output buffer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think if there were an extension to the STL for unicode, string handling and simple sockets few people would even need ruby :)

<comment><USER3> Look in to Boost <http://www.boost.org/doc/libs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks to me in the C version, he only frees the first listener. The C++ version also provides the listeners as a set. The C version doesn't mind if you add the same listener multiple times, so to be apples to apples you'd use a vector, but the code wouldn't change otherwise, so no problem there.

<comment><AUTHOR> \- That's an array of pointers; the listeners themselves aren't malloced

\- The set / list difference is noted just below the code samples</comment></comment>


Julia v0.7 has been released - <AUTHOR> https://julialang.org/downloads/ <comment><AUTHOR> For those of you not following Julia development: version 0.7 is effectively v1.0, the only expected major differences between the two is removal of depreciation warnings. In other words: if you've been worried about getting into the Julia scene for fear of constant breakages every time the version bumps, this time is over!</comment>


Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests - <AUTHOR> https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2019/07/11/thwack--insects-feel-chronic-pain-after-injury.html <comment><USER2> >> "People don't really think of insects as feeling any kind of pain," said Associate Professor Neely. "But it's already been shown in lots of different invertebrate animals that they can sense and avoid dangerous stimuli that we perceive as painful. In non-humans, we call this sense 'nociception', the sense that detects potentially harmful stimuli like heat, cold, or physical injury, but for simplicity we can refer to what insects experience as 'pain'."

I don't understand the insistence of the article to place quotes around the word pain when referring to what insects feel. These are animals that can sense their surroundings and react to stimuli. How else would they be convinced to avoid dangerous situations, than by an unpleasant sensation?

In any case, the simplest hypothesis is that all animals can feel pain. The null hypothesis should be the opposite. And it has to be a complex hypothesis that explains why some animals can feel pain while others don't (which is tricky).

<comment><USER3> > I don't understand the insistence of the article to place quotes around the > word pain when referring to what insects feel. These are animals that can > sense their surroundings and react to stimuli. How else would they be > convinced to avoid dangerous situations, than by an unpleasant sensation?

If you build a robot which senses dangerous stimuli and avoids them, does it feel pain?

Equating reaction to stimuli with pain is too sinplistic.

<comment><USER4> You feel pain, right? Well, an insect is a lot more like you than a robot... the mechanism by which it it decides what to seek and what to avoid is based on an infrastructure that's very similar to your own, even if much simpler. And the experience of pain appears to be something very fundamental in the wiring of living things, its avoidance being very directly connected to evolutionary success. So it is absolutely logical to assume this mechanism is fundamentally equivalent in humans and insects. The behavior is the same, the wiring is the same, why not use the same word?

For now, most robots's decision-making apparatus isn't anything like yours. So it really doesn't make much sense to use the same vocabulary. But that could change if we use neural-network computing in a way that appears to more directly simulate the functioning of living organisms. Maybe building an ant- robot that's really a functional copy of a biological ant isn't that far off, and in that case, sure, it might feel pain.

I don't see anything simplistic about this.

<comment><USER5> This seems like the most rational stance to me now.

I had a pastor once attempt to teach me that all animals are basically robots, and that this justifies treating them however we want. In his mind, we're the only ones actually 'awake'. I suspect a whole lot of people think like this on some level in order to justify all the ongoing barbaric treatment they willingly endorse or carry out.

Hearing that shook me up for a bit, but in the long run it accelerated the process of me abandoning religion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Infant surgery without anesthesia was common still in the mid 80's [https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant- surg...](https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surgery- without-anesthesia-went-unchallenged-832387.html)

> surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants > as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most > American hospitals.

It's unknown where the consciousness starts (the hard problem sense) is but it's not unreasonable to assume that sentience (ability to feel pain and pleasure and experience subjectively) and ability to suffer that comes with it happens long before the ability to form long term memories, object permanence, or other any other cognitive abilities.

<comment> rv-de Experiences of stress will even impact the neurological development of an embryo or a fetus. It's totally realistic to assume that a human will have to suffer psychologically even decades later from a psychological scarring caused by such surgery without anesthesia.

<comment><USER7> It is reasonable to entertain the hypothesis. It is unreasonable to assume that it is true.

<comment><USER8> I (and Occam's razor) would say the exact opposite - one should assume the effect will be the similar as for an older human, unless proven otherwise.

Otherwise you're making the unproven assumption that an infant's mind responds to pain differently - why would you think that? And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?

<comment><USER7> > It's totally realistic to assume that a human will have to suffer > psychologically _even decades later_ from a psychological scarring caused by > such surgery without anesthesia.

That's what OP said, emphasis mine. I agree with you: that infants experience pain in the same way as adults should be the default hypothesis. That they remain psychologically scarred by it for decades, however, should not be.

<comment> rv-de Why not? The obvious difference is that an adults nervous system is developed while an infant's is still developing.

"Early life stress may have a lasting impact on the developmental programming of the dopamine (DA) system implicated in psychosis." [1]

I highly recommend Gabor Maté's book "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" for a deeper discussion of how various types of pre- and postnatal stress impact a person's proclivity towards addictive behavior and ADHD.

But even for adults extreme and overwhelming stressful experiences can cause long-lasting and even multigenerational psychological consequences through epigenetic mechanisms.

1: [https://lirias.kuleuven.be/648892?limo=0](https://lirias.kuleuven.be/648892?limo=0)

<comment><USER7> The link you provide A) has a very low N (24, half of which are controls) and B) does not account for genetic confounding. Am I missing something?

Also, there is essentially zero evidence for hereditary epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic changes are common in the somatic cell lineages (which make up the entire organism except for the sperm and eggs), but there are very few plausible mechanisms by which epigenetic changes in somatic cells can somehow make their way back to the germ line cells (eggs and sperm) and, thus, exert an influence on subsequent generations. On top of the theoretical underpinnings being essentially implausible, there is no good evidence that hereditary epigenetic mechanisms exist. The only evidence I am aware of in humans are the children of Dutch women who went through a famine in 1944. However, that evidence has since evaporated. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia[0]:

"Moreover, the children of the women who were pregnant during the famine were smaller, as expected. However, surprisingly, when these children grew up and had children those children were thought to also be smaller than average.[11] This data suggested that the famine experienced by the mothers caused some kind of epigenetic changes that were passed down to the next generation. Despite this, a subsequent study by the same author failed to find a correlation between maternal exposure to famine and birth weight of the next generation."

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944–45](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944–45)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rethink Priorities (which focuses on foundational research on neglected causes) has carried out a massive amount of research recently on invertebrate welfare and sentience.

Their findings are well worth a read:

> Rethink Priorities reviewed the scientific literature relevant to > invertebrate sentience. We selected 53 features potentially indicative of > the capacity for valenced experience and examined the degree to which these > features are found throughout 18 representative biological taxa. These data > have been compiled into an easily sortable database that will enable animal > welfare organizations to better gauge the probability that (various species > of) invertebrates have the capacity for valenced experience. This essay > details what we've done, why, and the strengths and weaknesses of our > approach.

[https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/blog/2019/6/7/invertebrate...](https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/blog/2019/6/7/invertebrate- sentience-a-useful-empirical-resource)

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if one could make a case for having to be more humane in insect farming? Current practices include steaming and crushing insects to death.

(The Economist | Grub's up [https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2019/07/06/...](https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2019/07/06/beetles-and-flies-are-becoming-part-of-the-agricultural- food-chain?frsc=dg%7Ce))

<comment><USER9> Brian Tomasik argues that we should avoid insect farming entirely since it's likely worse (ethically speaking) than farming larger nonhuman animals:

> Entomophagy (eating insects for food) is sometimes proposed as an > alternative to factory farming because it has lower environmental impact. > But entomophagy is not necessarily more humane than factory farming of > livestock all things considered, and along some dimensions it's actually > worse, because it involves killing vastly more animals per unit of protein. > Rather than promoting insect consumption, let's focus on plant-based meat > substitutes.

[https://reducing-suffering.org/why-i-dont-support-eating- ins...](https://reducing-suffering.org/why-i-dont-support-eating-insects/)

<comment><USER11> That makes the silly assumption that all organisms are equal. I'm sure we can all agree that a human's life is more valuable than a bacterium's. Or else you'd have to admit to genocide every time you use hand sanitizer.

<comment><USER12> It's an interesting point though - if we remove human life from the equation, how do you define the "value" of an animal or insect life?

It will even vary from culture to culture; for example, cows are revered in much of India, and in much of the west we seem to place more value on values we perceive as "cute", such as dolphins, or "magnificent", such as whales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Somewhat related essay from a negative utilitarian about consequences of insects feeling pain: [https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of- insect-suff...](https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect- suffering/)

<comment><USER14> It's nice to see folks becoming aware of negative utilitarianism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a kid I would rip limbs off insects one by one and watch them suffer. As an adult I carefully capture them inside and release outside. With all the insect die offs and all, little critters who stroll into my place get a 2nd chance. Unless they are mosquitoes. Those suckers get a quick death.

</comment><comment><USER16> I once read something on Reddit that imagined how the world would be like if ants could make audible noise in response to being touched or killed. I feel like that definitely add a new perspective to how we see insects

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like there could be a mythical story or similar here.

Hero asks the gods for gift of healing. Gods grant the gift along with pain so that we know when we are injured (and of course, in need of the gift.) No gift from the gods comes free.

I'll be sure to be more careful with my insect friends. And I'll be more vigilant in compassionate killing.

<comment><USER18> This would be a sick joke from the God, because as the article imply, they still feel the pain after healing. It's worse than we have it.

<comment><USER19> Lots of people with long term pain have healed but still feel pain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> TLDR: They damaged a nerve in one leg of the drosophila fly. The injury was then allowed to fully heal. After the injury healed, they found the fly's other legs had become hypersensitive through loss of the pain inhibitors (GABA).

<comment><USER21> I believe they cut off a leg. I don't really get the part where they say they "allowed it to fully heal". [1] Maybe that was a different experiment in the same paper?

[1] - [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_JUvnmUwAAj7Sa.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_JUvnmUwAAj7Sa.jpg:large)

<comment><USER20> Well the text I posted was from the journalistic article. The scientific paper indeed says they let the animal recover from the amputated leg. However, as you say, I now agree that it is not clear what they mean with "recovery".

> We amputated the right middle leg of wild-type Canton S flies, allowed the > animals to recover, and then evaluated escape responses at different > temperatures. While intact animals displayed minimal escape attempts when > exposed to a 38°C surface, after amputation, flies showed significantly more > escape behaviors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why wouldn't they feel pain?

It's such a superior attitude to even consider that only humans could feel pain.

It's also obvious that any complex organism feels pain... It the most basic evolutionary protection mechanism. Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out.

<comment><USER23> Even the featured article puts pain in quotes and is like, "for simplicity, we'll call it 'pain'"

So actually it's not obvious that animals perceive the world as we do. Maybe you can only generalise our experience to warm blooded vertebrates.

<comment><USER24> Given the similarities between us and other animals, it should make more sense to have to disprove that they don't feel pain, rather than having to prove that they do, i.e., that they must feel pain should be the default assumption in the absence of data.

<comment><USER25> Which similarities?

Insects have a much, much simpler nervous system. They don't even have a spinal chord, and they have an exoskeleton.

I think maybe only cnidarians have a simpler (or similarly complex) nervous system.

Pain on a chordate might be comparable to pain in humans, with some exceptions like the Octopus (maybe) but that's about it.

<comment><USER24> But we don't know that insects absolutely couldn't experience pain, in the same way that we're certain a brick couldn't (unless one is a panpsychist). At least they have a nervous system.

<comment><USER25> Pain as in stimulus to nerve endings given damage to a limb yes

But pain in humans (or other more complex animals) is more complicated than that

<comment><USER24> It may be more complicated, but do we know the minimum complexity required of a nervous system to support 'suffering'? If not, surely we are obligated to give even the simplest nervous systems the benefit of the doubt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It looks like if this is extrapolated into our understanding of pain then using diatomaceous earth (DE) as non toxic pest control would imply quite some discomfort by insects as it acts mechanically as well as a desiccant. But on the other hand insects are unlikely to evolve around a mechanical opponent.

<comment><USER27> Well, I think evolution has never met something it can not overcome....

I think the point of the non toxic chemical approach is more about human health, or being organic...

<comment><USER26> True but it would take insects away from being insects and it would take much longer to evolve than it takes to evolve against chemical agents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This makes me feel even more terrible about burning spiders to death with a magnifying glass when I was a kid.

<comment><USER29> I also am feeling quite guilty reading this.

I think every kid in the midwest pulled a leg off a daddy long legs[1] at some point. They would keep moving afterwards, and to a kid this was fascinating (and reinforced the belief they were not like animals and could not feel pain.)

Regardless, now that I'm older I think most living things have a purpose and try not to bother anything that doesn't bother me, but yes, reading this I feel guilty :(

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae)

<comment><USER30> I never pulled legs off arthropods, nor did I ever use magnifying glasses to burn them. I did witness other children doing these things, and it always upset me intensely.

I'm probably an outlier. My mother tells me that from the time I could walk I captured bugs in the house and carried them outside to prevent them being killed.

I've continued the habit of rescuing animals from bad situations into adulthood and rapidly-oncoming old age. Once I caught a hummingbird in an Apple building in Cupertino and let it go outside. It was a beautiful iridescent green and so light that I couldn't feel its weight in my hand.

<comment><USER31> You're not alone. I never tortured any insects or animals as a child and it weirds me the fuck out that that is apparently considered normal behavior. I haven't seen signs of this in my own kids but then again I've taught them explicitly that harming sentient beings is wrong.

<comment><USER30> I think it's possible that we might be the weird ones. In the environment that our distant ancestors inhabited, squeamishness about harming animals might have been a significant disadvantage.

Or maybe not. Joseph Campbell claimed that a common feature of tribal mythology is ceremonial apologies and restitutions to animal spirits to make restitution for the need to kill them.

<comment><USER29> I think it all depends on the adults in your life. Maybe if we'd had a leader who said don't do that instead of "well they can't feel pain and they're pests" things would have gone differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This just in - Science gives evidence for a Jainist world-view!

</comment><comment><USER32> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20430622](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20430622)

</comment><comment><USER33> Duh. This feels like a topic that the scientific community has a bizarre and self serving view of. There's no reason to think insects don't feel pain, which is a basic evolutionary mechanism. So why the need to scrutinize the topic? Because of the need to defend a long line of justifications made throughout the decades as to why humans should be able to treat other beings poorly and still consider ourselves "moral".

</comment><comment><USER15> There are sushi places that serve live shrimp. Imagine being eaten alive and feeling that first bite crushing you in half.

</comment><comment><USER34> And people say boil the lobsters alive, they don't feel any pain.

<comment><USER35> Well, even if lobster is proven beyond reasonable of doubt that it feel horrible pain, I'm still going to boil it alive.

<comment><USER34> Why? Why not kill it humanely first?

We don't boil cows/pigs/chicken alive.

<comment><USER35> Why bother ? Quicker and more convenient. With cow/pig i think its more troublesome to boil it alive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> grandma always said if your gonna kill them dont let them suffer.

</comment><comment><USER37> Does my computer feel pain when I decrement %eax?

<comment><USER38> The computer is a part of you, and you should feel all the pain for trying to access out of bound memory

<comment><USER39> Thanks to cheap copying and the internet, developers can now ship that pain to any number of users instead of keeping it to themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> All the comments discussing the moral implications of harming insects are focusing on the wrong part of how useful this information is.

As the link says, this research indicates that we can use insects to do basic research on Neuropathic pain. Insects, being easy and fast to breed, and easy to manage in large quantities, makes this especially useful for research.

Now they can try all sorts of methods of tackling the problem, from drugs to gene therapy.

It's not, of course, proof that successes will translate to mammal or human models, but it's an excellent way to do some initial concept filtering.

<comment><USER24> Why are the moral implications 'the wrong part'?

If we found a species of aliens that clearly suffered like us but bred as fast as insects and were as easy to manage, would the moral implications of experimenting on them still be irrelevant compared to the utility of experimenting on them?

<comment><USER41> Because they didn't prove that insects expeirience pain as people understand it. They just proven that expeiriencing injury sensitizes an insect.

Article tries to balance between biting the audience with insect pain but then trying to not be completely false calls it 'pain' and nociception which is the only scientifically accurate term for what is observed.

<comment><USER24> GP seemed to say it doesn't matter whether they experience pain or not because the convenience of experimenting on them outweighs any suffering they may undergo. That's not specific to this experiment.

<comment><USER41> I was just explaining why focusing on moral aspect is the wrong reaction to this research. It's wrong because there are no moral insights from this research. They didn't obtain any new indications that insects feel pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well, this makes being faithful to my ethical commitments a little more complicated.

<comment><USER43> This morning I spent 20 minutes trying to hunt down a spider near my desk at home. I didn't want to clear all the wires and papers and hardware on the desk, and the spider used those to juke around me and my big napkin. Eventually I left and surfed the net on my phone; when I came back an hour later it was nowhere to be seen. But I was absolutely prepared to murder it the moment I got a chance.

On the other hand, I've been dabbling with hydroponics. Most suggestions say to plant 2-3 seeds per growing block, so that you are protected against the risk of seeds not sprouting. If multiple seeds sprout, you just snip the tiny seedlings and leave the biggest, hardiest one to grow. A few days ago I killed 3 small seedlings and felt incredibly guilty. About a third of the way to crying over it. Next time I will only plant one seed per spot, even though that means I will get average plants instead of big ones, and it will take longer to replant seeds that don't sprout. The feeling of killing those beautiful young plants was just too much to bear.

On the other hand I have never felt bad for the millions of plants that have died to feed me.

Nature is a dog-eat-dog world. Ultimately we've got to kill to survive and to have a livable habitat. I had seen the spider I was hunting this morning walking around my window a few times over the last few weeks, but I left it alone until it bothered me. Sure, it's sad to kill another living being, but spiders are much less conscious than us and we've got to eventually rationalize the fact that a human is worth thousands of plants and spiders and bugs (if not, then the only logical action would be to commit suicide, unless you dedicated your life to saving plants and spiders and bugs). Even if you don't kill them directly, you do so indirectly by participating in our modern economy.

Tldr it sucks, too bad :(

<comment><USER44> I don't understand why plants are particularly relevant to this equation. Your sentimentality for the young plants is irrelevant to whether or not they can suffer.

<comment><USER43> The parent was commenting that knowing that insects feel pain has made it harder for him to act in a way that feels ethical.

I suggested that we need to just believe that we are more important than those dumb(er) lifeforms, but we should still avoid unnecessary killing whenever possible. Like not killing bugs/spiders unless they are actually annoying you, and not planting so many plants that you'll need to kill the extra ones.

I guess the plant example also showed that our sense of morality can be very illogical - the parent has qualms over hurting bugs, I really disliked killing plants needlessly, yet we all go and eat vegetables (and meat) every day, and our society has committed many, many genocides to nonhuman species.

<comment><USER44> I suppose I don't understand the conflation of the very real mass slaughter of nonhuman animals, with harvesting plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I didn't realise the impact until I remembered how common circumcision is in the US.

<comment><USER46> It's ridiculous. This sort of mutilation should be flat out illegal. It's physical child abuse, plain and simple.

<comment><USER47> "I understand that this procedure will remove healthy and functioning tissue from my son's penis, and involves similar risk as other prophylactic or cosmetic surgeries, including infection, disfigurement, and death. I understand that the procedure may be performed without anaesthesia at the doctor's discretion. I understand that the doctor has recommended my son undergo circumcision because studies have shown a reduction in the risk for serious diseases in circumcised men; or else, that I have requested a circumcision be performed in observation of a deep and abiding religious or cultural belief which I reasonably believe my son will share when he would have been of age to consent himself."

Parents should have to sign a statement like this before it's performed. It should no longer be the default, and parents should understand that they don't have to be railroaded into the decision.

<comment><USER48> > the doctor has recommended my son undergo circumcision because studies have > shown a reduction in the risk for serious diseases in circumcised men

Source? Especially that this risk reduction outweighs the risks of the procedure is not proven as far as I know.

<comment><USER8> Looks like most medical organizations range from advising against circumcision, to considering making it illegal, with the notable exception of the US [1]. As for the protection against disease:

"Male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa [..] The effectiveness of using circumcision to prevent HIV in the developed world is unclear;" [2]

Since newborns are unlikely to have sex [3], there should be no harm in waiting until puberty, and getting the boy's input on what is an irreversible change.

[1] [http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/](http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/)

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

[3] C'mon man.

<comment><USER21> Requiring a family to wait until a boy is past puberty to consider a circumcision would be harmful, because the procedure is more difficult to perform, and poses a more difficult (and memorable) recovery period.

Parents have autonomy to make medical decisions for their infant children, and many are forced to make significantly more difficult decisions than a routine circumcision.

I was curious about the CIRP site you linked to and the policy statements they are referencing. I double checked just the first referenced policy statement, which is from the Australian College of Paediatrics. [1]

Interestingly, they reference a statement from 1996 which is no longer the current position. Evidence for the medical benefits of circumcision have gotten stronger, and the procedure has gotten safer and more likely to be performed with anesthesia. The updated statement [2] while still not advocating for routine circumcision for _all_ male children, is, in particular, missing the passage which CIRP specifically highlighted in the 1996 position.

This calls into question whether CIRP is interested in presenting a factual list of current statements, or if they have a particular agenda they are attempting to serve in presenting cherry-picked out-dated statements with a specific viewpoint.

[1] - [http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/acp1996/](http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/acp1996/)

[2] - [https://www.racp.edu.au/docs/default-source/advocacy- library...](https://www.racp.edu.au/docs/default-source/advocacy- library/circumcision-of-infant-males.pdf)

<comment><USER19> There is no medical benefit to circumcision. There is risk of harm.

Parents do make _medical_ choices -- these would be situations where there is a benefit to treatment and where there is medical consensus that the treatment is worthwhile.

That's not the case for circumcision where most doctors agree it shouldn't be performed other than for actual medical reasons like phimosis.

<comment><USER21> > There is no medical benefit to circumcision.

The WHO states, "There is compelling evidence that male circumcision reduces the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by approximately 60%."

<comment><USER8> "...among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa [..] The effectiveness of using circumcision to prevent HIV in the developed world is unclear;"

<comment><USER21> That's a quote from Wikipedia where the footnote references an abstract which does not include that statement.

Here's what the abstract does say;

> _Following the three randomized trials in Africa demonstrating the > protective effects of male circumcision on HIV infection, studies have > reported other benefits of circumcision including protection from certain > STIs, including human papillomavirus and herpes simplex virus 2. With data > accumulating on the public health benefits of circumcision and the > endorsement of circumcision from WHO, investigators have begun to evaluate > the feasibility, safety and cost of implementation of large-scale > circumcision programs. Limitations of circumcision have also been explored._

<comment><USER19> Circumcision does nothing to protect against herpes, hepatitis, chancroid, HPV, Chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis etc.

So the child is being exposed to risk of death or disfigurement for a hypothetical benefit for one STI where there are existing better protections for that, and other STIs.

<comment><USER21> I'll take the moving goalposts as a positive sign.

Here's another one that appears after a quick Google search;

Male Circumcision Reduces Risk of Genital Herpes and HPV Infection, but Not Syphilis

[https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/male- circumcis...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/male-circumcision- reduces-risk-genital-herpes-hpv-infection-not-syphilis)

When you google for circumcision risk of death, on the one hand is CIRP claiming over 100 infant boys die each year from complications arising from circumcision, and in the other hand the CDC saying they looked at every single infant death in 2010 and could not find a single one related to circumcision.

So I'll be done with this topic for the day!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Set your bug-a-salt to kill, not stun.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is this a surprise? Dogs and cats, being injured, show that they feel it and are sensitive to others touching where they hurt. Is it really that 'weird' to think that beings other than mammals would have this?

<comment><USER51> Yes. Complex behaviour and memory, ability to execute complicated tasks, and many other features are usually more common in complex/large organisms. It may not be surprising, but it's certainly non-obvious why insects would have persistent pain after injury - especially if it prevents them from effectively getting on with other tasks after the initial injury source / danger passes.

<comment><USER52> On the other hand, you could say the same thing about feeling pain in humans. Once the danger/injury source passes then being in pain is not good, particularly chronic pain that actually inhibits the person. We still have that though.

<comment><USER51> I could speculate at least 2 reasons for persistent pain. Before medicine, if you broke a limb, it was likely not as functional / strong as before. Long term pain is probably a good reminder to be careful about it. Also since we can form complex relations in memory, it's potentially useful as "remember how you thought you could do this thing? well, you couldn't, so don't try it again."

I think for people the equation is a bit different. We care about individuals in general and have limited number of kids. That's not the case for ants for example which seem quite replaceable / not able to recognise individuals (or even if they're alive).

<comment><USER53> The article says the pain causes the fly to protect its other five legs, as though it has learned from losing one leg that losing legs is a thing that might happen again. It's feeling the pain in those legs, not the place where the one was removed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Can dead insects feel pain?

Also, who the f is flagging my every post and downwoting me to the point of shadow ban?

<comment><USER55> You're not shadow banned on my end. HN rewards substantive comments.</comment></comment>


Win32 on macOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-December/156602.html <comment><USER2> I was only around at Codeweavers for a part of this huge undertaking, and only contributed a small part of the 32-on-64 MacOS patchset, but I must say this was one of the most impressive feats I've seen coordinated using mainly nothing but email and IRC for communication.

Everything from thunking layers to calling conventions to inline assembly in the Wine codebase had to be redesigned for this release of Wine; an absolutely massive proposition. Ideas such as dynamic binary translation and running Win32 executables in the MacOS hypervisor framework were considered, and some ideas I tried while hacking Wine gave me insight into other projects I hack on such as Qemu and LLVM.

In short; props to everyone who worked on this! It was a long time in the process!

<comment><USER3> > running Win32 executables in the MacOS hypervisor framework

Interesting, why was this discarded? Performance reasons? Or the API not being satisfactory?

<comment><USER4> How long will it exist?

<comment><USER5> IDK, a long time I'd suppose?

The oldest programs I can use reliably are win32 inside wine.

It may not be what you think is technically the best, but office 2007 works well and many games and other specialized too. The office license is cheap and does most of what I need.

Someone mentionned below, a perpetual license of Mathematica for MacOSX will be useless in a year, because of the deprecation. Their mistake was not buying the Windows version.

That's why I still buy win32 software to this day. Their binaries will work on anything for a long time.

<comment><USER6> There must be open source editors available that have feature parity with 12yo software.

<comment><USER5> Wine opens many new usecases. You realize the software rot myth was created by bad API deprecation pratices.

Think how different the market becomes when consumers can keep using a 12 years old license. You need to introduce fantastic new features to get my money. Changing the font, the menu and the colors won't do.

Even if it is free - why should I bother to learn this new software? The old license did cost me $5. If I misplace it, I can buy another for the same amount instead of paying year to year. And to this day it works reliably on every operating system I use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Speaking of code segments, the big thing that Catalina provides that enables > this all to work is the ability to create 32-bit code segments in a 64-bit > process. For that, they enabled the use of i386_set_ldt() in 64-bit > processes. The big caveat though, is that this functionality is restricted > by System Integrity Protection (SIP). For now, your best bet to get this > working for yourself is to disable SIP. (CrossOver doesn't require that, but > the mechanism by which we accomplish that is in flux internally to Apple. > When it settles down, I'll update this thread.)

This is quite curious. Apple inconvenienced so many users by "removing" 32-bit support on Catalina, and then they added support for local descriptor tables? I'm not aware of any use of LDTs on modern systems (except perhaps Chrome for additional sandboxing).

<comment><USER8> > This is quite curious. Apple inconvenienced so many users by "removing" > 32-bit support on Catalina, and then they added support for local descriptor > tables? I'm not aware of any use of LDTs on modern systems (except perhaps > Chrome for additional sandboxing).

For the specific purpose of enabling CrossOver's 32-on-64 support and things like it.

It's not too hard for the kernel to support user code merely entering the processor's 32-bit mode. CrossOver's processes don't even use 32-bit system calls or 32-bit Mach-O binaries, so support for those could hypothetically be removed, except that most of it is needed for watchOS anyway. But the most significant cost of i386 support was in userland, not the kernel: building separate x86_64 and i386 copies of every system library, and supporting the legacy i386 ABI, including an older version of the Objective-C runtime ABI. That's all gone now.

<comment><USER9> I am not privy to internal discussions, but it seems to me if there is really lots of ongoing maintenance needed at every release, and not simply exaggerating the need for occasional patches and bug fixes, then it is worth some consideration of re-architecting the way the compatibility mode works.

eg. Maybe draw the boundary of where you thunk at a different place. Maybe do more translation in user mode as this wine project did. Or focus on binary compatibility with old, frozen-in-time frameworks instead of rebuilding them with every OS build. Obviously the specifics will vary with actual details of breakage. But from outside, it seems like these type of questions weren't pursued to their maximum extent, resulting in pain for the end user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does apple have a good reason for killing 32bit support? I play a number of games that will now never run without a VM.

<comment><USER11> Killing it in the way they did? Not a dire technical one. In the past they managed to keep compatibility while switching operating systems ("Classic") and CPU architectures (68k -> PPC, PPC -> Intel). And that while being a much smaller company.

This is business, nothing else. Just like all the increased "security" restrictions. Corralling everyone towards the App Store. I think they've got too much legacy to ever totally cut off "regular" applications, but apart from that they're doing everything they can to move everything in the direction of iOS (or iPadOS now).

Not sure how long the days of the last commercial Unix will last.

<comment><USER8> > In the past they managed to keep compatibility while switching operating > systems ("Classic") and CPU architectures (68k -> PPC, PPC -> Intel).

The Classic Environment (OS 9 -> OS X) was dropped after 6 years.

Rosetta (PPC -> i386) was dropped after 5 years.

i386 -> x86_64 is now being dropped after _12_ years.

<comment><USER12> Your point notwithstanding, the big difference to me is this: Classic and Rosetta were _hacks_ with sucky UX. In particular, performance was terrible, in Rosetta because it was a full on CPU emulator, and Classic because it was booting Mac OS 9 in a Virtual Machine. Apps that used Classic also looked visually out of place.

Running 32 bit apps in Mac OS X Mojave is 100% seamless to the user—if it wasn't for Apple's warning dialogues that 32bit was going to be deprecated, most users—even _advanced_ users—would never even know the app was 32 bit.

And that's because 32 bit support is a key feature of the amd64 architecture—it's the main reason most computers today _use_ amd64 instead of the alternate standard proposed by Intel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a great feat and it creates a somewhat ironic situation: When I want to run an app on Catalina that happens to be 32-bit only, I'm practically forced to use the Windows version. I can't see how that was a smart move on Apple's side.

<comment><USER14> Could some of the wizardry described here be used to get native 32-bit software working again?

<comment><USER15> The system frameworks you'd depend on don't have a 32-bit slice anymore, unfortunately. You'd need to wrap every function in a think to make things work.

<comment><USER16> > You'd need to wrap every function in a think to make things work.

I think you meant "thunk".

<comment><USER15> I did but AutoCorrect unfortunately thunk differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _It also relies on a new feature of macOS Catalina to allow the creation of > 32-bit code segments in a 64-bit process._

How was this never brought up during all the "Catalina killed 32-bit" pitchforkings? Seems like a very important point, that has enabled the ability to emulate 32-bit apps.

<comment><USER15> It's gated by an undocumented entitlement.

<comment><USER18> I don't know how to mentally parse this sentence. (Not snark; stumped.)

<comment><USER19> "entitlements" are OSX Catalina's new(ish?) permission grants that applications need in order to access certain features like JIT or specific syscalls.

The entitlement needed for this feature to work is undocumented.

See here: [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/entitlements)

<comment><USER20> Entitlements aren't new, they existed since ages (OS X 10.11 already used them quite a bit).

<comment><USER21> Catalina makes them all-but-required, though, even for non-store apps, between SIP (System Integrity Protection) and the on-by-default enforcement of notarization.

On previous versions of macOS, regular developers could mostly avoid needing to touch them by just not being a store app.

iOS developers have had to think about them since the early days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Okay that's just impressive. I was wondering how they would adapt for 32bit support on Catalina.

</comment><comment><USER23> > It also relies on a new feature of macOS Catalina to allow the creation of > 32-bit code segments in a 64-bit process

Is this roughly equivalent to MAP_32BIT on Linux?

[http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/mmap.2.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man2/mmap.2.html)

<comment><USER24> No, it is like modify_ldt on Linux.

[http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man2/modify_ldt.2.html](http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man2/modify_ldt.2.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why OpenBSD/amd64 will not, and never has supported 32-bit binary compatibility on 64-bit.

[https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=148926149318522](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=148926149318522)

</comment><comment><USER26> >> ...coordinated using mainly nothing but email and IRC for communication.

I wonder what other projects (on a scale larger than your typical side hustle projects) are coordinated via IM chat or email?

On the surface, the Linux kernel coordination seems to be coordinated like this, but I am not 100% sure.

<comment><USER27> Every open source project that's reasonable enough not to hide all their communications in proprietary silos like Slack and Discord.

<comment><USER28> Ok I'll bite..

Seeing that both slack and discord save logs from the beginning (which irc doesn't), isn't communication less hidden if anything? It's far easier for someone new to play catch up.

There's a reason large open source projects moved to these (React, Rust, etc).

<comment><USER29> All of the replies to your comment seem to be pointing out that IRC can be logged, but they're missing the point. You shouldn't play catch-up on IRC. Any useful information to persist should flow into the docs or onto the mailing list. On IRC, no one is expected to stay abreast of discussions they were absent for.

<comment><USER30> Long-term documentation is not the reason logs are useful. Asynchronous communication is the reason logs are useful.

That is, you can ping people who are offline, or with a flaky network connection (e.g. mobile, where you can't keep a consistent TCP stream open), and they can still see your message and a bit of context when they get back.

<comment><USER26> Long term documentation should be not be in any emails or IRC logs. It should be properly documented as a formal documentation. But that is different to coordinating a team.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why is China building coal plants abroad? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/716347646/why-is-china-placing-a-global-bet-on-coal?t=1566247339933 <comment><USER2> Coal is cheap... at the moment... and

China has a backup store of coal it bought from Australia and stockpiled for decades.

China can command what ever price it likes for its coal if other countries refuse to supply coal to run these new power stations.

China can supply coal for long enough to get them into debt and sell out to China.

So it makes complete sense for china to go off coal.</comment>


Presenting without sharing my slides - sld-codes https://sld.codes/articles/Presenting-Without-Sharing-My-Screen <comment> sld-codes A solution for crystal clear slides for everyone using minimal bandwidth + slide navigation using gestures.</comment>


Show HN: VimCompletesMe, my first Vim plugin for Tab Completion - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ajh17/VimCompletesMe I made this because I was using SuperTab and noticed that it uses a lot more code when I wanted something really simple: for Vim to intelligently choose what to autocomplete for me. Maybe it has more features but to me, it tried to do too much in a single plugin.<p>So my goal here was to made a dead-simple, minimalistic Tab completion plugin. It does this with less than 60 lines of source code, compared to around 800 for Supertab. I hope you like it as much as I do. <comment><USER2> Check out YouConpleteMe as well. It is insanely fast with large code bases

<comment><AUTHOR> YouCompleteMe is a bigger install than vim is. It causes pain for a lot of people. I've gotten segfaults just because of an upgraded python, I've heard way too many people on #vim report about issues with YCM, the installation is a pain, and it's way too huge for my liking.

I like simple plugins that do one thing and one thing well. And you can see why I decided to make this plugin :)

<comment><USER2> I was just trying to be helpful, no need to be rude about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not trying to be rude, I'm sorry if that's how I came off.

I'm just trying to make people realize that there are better alternatives to YCM. I quite like neocomplete, which does the same thing as YCM, but is much, much, much smaller and lighter.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We are hiring - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/06/10/we-are-hiring/ <comment><USER2> If I didn't already have a job I love, that would be an awesome place to work.

Also, I have to echo that the job description is really well written. I wish everyone was even half so good at it. The only thing I might add would be expectations for the job roles, but I suspect you only want people who already know what to expect. ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very well written job description. I hate the tradition of writing an absurd list of "requirements".

<comment><USER4> They posted the job listing to the 37signals job board, too: <http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/9115>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very good way to find real talent, very nice.</comment>


Test it out: Twitter and Facebook Media/Content Search(ish) - <AUTHOR> http://www.getlikes.com/search/index2.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is kind of a hack with an older side project (FriendShuffle).

Try searching for keywords and playing around with those results (it is searching through status updates so keep that in mind when choosing your search terms).

Try out the example links below the search bar (Japanese Game Shows, etc.).</comment>


Ask HN: Is it still worth the effort to learn a (human) language? - <AUTHOR>

Is it still worth it to learn a (human) language, with the vast improvement of recent language translating technologies? <comment><USER2> 1). Learning Japanese is one of my proudest achievements and pretty much changed the course of my life.

2). Translation software is better but it's so bad compared to actual human comprehension that it is difficult to take serious anyone who compares the two. Including, ahem, parties unnamed at a particular Japanese megacorp who thought that Babelfishing design docs and shipping the result to India would result in quality software.

And for giggles I'm going to run this through Google translate:

日本語学習は私の晴れの成果の一つであり、かなり私の人生のコースを変更されています。 2)。翻訳ソフトウェアが優れているが、それは、2つを比較して、深刻な人を取ることは困難である実際の人間の理解に比べてそんなに悪くないです。以下を含む、エヘン、設計ドキュメントをBabelfishingと出荷結果をインドに高品質のソフトウェアをもたらすだろうと思った政党、特定の日本巨大企業では無名。と笑い、私はGoogleが翻訳を介してこれを実行するつもりです

Which actually says:

1) Studying Japanese is a proud success. Also, the [editor's note: no Japanese person would phrase it this way] course of my life has been very altered.

2) Translation software excels.

Comment to be resumed after the earthquake is over.

<comment><USER3> And running it back gives us:

Learning Japanese is one of my fine work, the course has changed my life considerably. 2.) The translation software is excellent, it is to compare the two, serious people are taking that bad compared to an actual human is difficult to understand. Including, ahem, a political document designed Babelfishing thought I would bring high-quality software in India and delivery results, in particular the Japanese giant is unnamed. Laugh, I'm going to do this Google translation through the

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you mean "learn" like most kids in American high schools learn another language from a book in order to be "conversational", then I'd say no, machines are (or will soon be) good enough to provide this level of translation.

If you mean learn as in immerse yourself in another culture long enough to begin generating the spoke language from "first principles" as it were (ie: enculturation), then I highly recommend. It changes your perspective in a way that can't be easily communicated to someone whose never experienced it. It will allow you to create translations that machines will be completely incapable of in the near future and probably even the far future.

In practice, it reduces to the difference between translating what was said and what was meant.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think so. I've done a lot of travelling abroad, and as an American who only speaks English, I was always a little bit ashamed that I could only manage one language. The shame was particularly great in poorer areas of Western Africa and India where people that didn't have half the education I did could speak four to five languages.

In fact, almost a year ago I left my job as a developer in San Francisco to accept a position in China solely for the purpose of becoming fluent in Chinese. I had taken classes in college, but those will of course never get you past the point of asking where the restroom is. I'm about 11 months into my venture, and my Chinese skills have improved by leaps and bounds (to such a point that I actually just did a full phone interview in Chinese). I took a huge pay cut to come here, but I think it's been worth it.

I can tell you that China is a very different country when you understand the language, and I'm sure this applies to every country in the world. So yes, I think it's definitely worth the effort to learn another language.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes. Since you are probably a hacker, learning a new language is as much a new way of thinking as it is a new way of communicating. Remember the first time you learned a functional language and went "holy moly-- I've never thought about programming that way." When you learn a new human language, the same thing happens.

Also, in at least the languages I know, English and Italian, translating technologies do a terrible job. Language is living and complex.

</comment><comment><USER7> Absolutely yes. A new language opens up a new world to you.

People who would otherwise consider you a ignorant tourist change their attitude towards you as soon as you greet them in their language. The more fluent you speak their tongue, the more they open up their real thoughts, and the more you are able to really connect with them, because they feel honored by the effort you made to converse with them.

This also has entrepreneurial implications: Your business partnerships in non- english speaking countries will significantly benefit from you being able to speak their language.

</comment><comment><USER8> Technology can not replace the joy of learning, or the joy of enjoying another culture. I learned Italian. It has nothing to do with my work, but I really enjoy an entirely different culture, and have many Italian friends.

Why not learn another language?

</comment><comment><USER9> Sure, it's personally very rewarding to be able to talk to someone or read a newspaper in another language.

Did I mention "there's an app for that!" :-)

I've written a pretty basic app for both iPhone and Android to help learn some Spanish vocabulary. There are many others too. It's a lot of work learning a second language but with mobile devices some of this can be done while waiting for a bus, etc.

Grab my free version and pester me to add the lessons, audio, improve UI, and conjugator. I'm half way done with version 2. Wish I could share code between Android and iPhone.

<http://www.h4labs.com>

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it still worth learning calculus now that there's Mathematica?</comment>


Ask HN: What's broken about the internet? - <AUTHOR> I've been interacting with a group of interesting people through the Mozilla Builders / Fix-The-Internet project.  A lot of great project ideas going on there.  There's talk of making Web 3.0.  Interesting stuff.. but, I'm curious,  what's broken about the internet, the web and tech?  If we're going to fix something it seems good to have a list of what we're trying to fix.  So what do you see as being broken?  Let's build a list I can take back to the group looking to fix things!<p>https://builders.mozilla.community/ https://mozillabuilders.slack.com/ <comment><USER2> These days you need an internet-device and an anti-internet-device like a Pi- Hole plus half a dozen browser plugins. Every driver of every part of your computer is trying to sneak out some of you data. Every website is full of trackers. You are not only fighting off criminals but also some of the most powerful corporations and every government. A hand full of companies run large parts of the infrastructre - you couldn't live without Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon if you wanted. The central social networks are hate and manipulation machines. Everything wants to sell you something. And when you pay to buy it, it tries to steal your data anyways.

<comment><USER3> This is what makes me the saddest. The internet has so much potential for good, but it doesn't appear to be heading that direction.

Every couple months I get an urge to give up on tech and start subsistence farming in the middle of nowhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In no particular order: \- The WWW - from a delightfully whimsical follow the rabbit-hole experience in the early 90s where discovery was hard, but content was king; to a centralised, AI-ranked, viral echo-chamber in the 00s and 10s where the discovery engines now control the whole experience and the content you see is presented based on who pays. The key problem here being the monetisation of discovery. We need solve search and discovery, but deliver it as an open Internet standard like DNS or HTTP.

\- Smart devices - buying an appliance with a closed-source, embedded device that relies on Internet connectivity and the solvency of it's manufacturer in order to operate it, patch it, secure it, and maintain it is the antithesis of what this planet needs right now. When the CA Root certificate(s) installed in your no-name smart TV expires and the OEM doesn't exist/doesn't care to provide you a firmware update, these devices will become less than worthless and most likely landfill. We need industry to adopt an open framework for smart devices that helps prolong their lifespan eg: a public Linux repo for updates to the underlying OS - the OEMs can deploy their own user interface, but end-users should be able to pick and choose if they wish (and most wont').

\- Trust - in particular X.509 certificates. A lot of progress has been made in making trust via digital certificates the default rather than a paranoid exception, with a large portion of the web being delivered over HTTPS, RPKI for BGP currently being deployed in large operators and DNSSEC showing some (admittedly slow) signs of adoption. What is still a major problem in this area is the complexity of certificate management and renewal. The work LetsEncrypt and the EFF (certbot) have done in automating this process is fantastic, but these are still a long way from mainstream usage.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, the biggest problems with the internet seems to be the World Wide Web. NNTP has improved (some of these improvements at my suggestions, such as support for 63-bit article numbers), and Gopher has also improved since the original specification (now there are "i" type lines in menus, which are useful), but WWW has just gotten worse (and that includes Hacker News to some degree too, but not as much as Google and Facebook and so on). I have set up not only HTTP but also NNTP, Gopher, QOTD, SMTP, etc, and may later also set up IRC, Telnet, Viewdata, etc. Additionally, many things I serve on the HTTP are just direct downloads anyways; no need to deal with 100 megabyte files just to access a text file or other file that you wanted to download. And, you can do it too, if you want to do, I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER6> Content mills -

Someone wise said that tools that make writing easier turn bad writers into worse writers.

Goodhart's law means that nearly all content is broken. It is judged by its view count and Google rank, so all it is good for is getting clicks and ranking well.

So much effort, so much money, ploughed into creating really really awful content which hides away the 10% that isn't crap (Sturgeon?).

<comment><USER6> Also targeted advertising

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Business model seems to be broken. I pay a giant internet bill each month, basically insane margins based on what it should actually cost to deliver much faster connectivity than what I get, yet none of that extra money funds the things that I actually use the internet for. (Why does it cost that much? Part of the reason may be that our local cable company is a government-enforced monopoly, that it's next to impossible to get right of way for new fiber, and that wireless is currently uncompetitive. Perhaps 5G may change things, but I'm not holding my breath.)

Moreover, the internet makes distribution nearly free and allows a nearly unlimited number of people to access information and digital media from all over the world, but lengthy (70 years or more) copyright terms make it illegal to do so in many cases. Instead, thousands or millions of person-hours are spent on the impossible task of trying to make bits behave like physical objects in order to satisfy legal and business requirements. When an organization such as the internet archive tries to make a digital library whose collection isn't bound by the constraints of physical libraries, they are sued by publishers for copyright infringement and potentially liable for $150k in statutory damages per occurrence.

<comment><USER8> This is a regulatory capture problem, not a tech problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> IANAE, but it seems like the "The web is for transfer of information" and "The web is for applications" ideas should be split into two separate domains. I shouldn't need an OS in order to read HN or browse a text based site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm thinking more and more the same, I'm beginning to think we need a dual function web.

Static web, and run as an app web.

I kinda have this by running with javascript off (this solves all sorts of other issues, though much of the web doesn't work that could work.) When I need to 'run as app' I allow js for that one visit.

<comment><USER3> That's what I do on most machines I use, but it just feels kinda wrong to not only have to use a bloated app, but also install add-ons to said app, when I just want to read some text

This is probably just me being picky though.

<comment><USER9> Smart comments. I don't think you're being picky. I'm kinda shocked that this is the only thread about reading because that's what I think is wrong with the web: It's not good for reading. I'm 4 years into co-founding a startup that's solving this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Making the internet more useful in the area of concise to the point information without sidetracks would be a big improvement. How is your startup approaching the reading problem on the web?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Privacy and removal of insidious tracking would be a good start.

I feel the web is too centralised, with half a dozen or so platforms essentially being gatekeepers of content on the web.

People link out on their sites much less tha in the past, in the belief that it raises the chance of penalising them on Google and hurt their rankings. Last I looked search engine are typically responsible for delivering around 50% of visitors to a site, and Google has a near monopoly in many countries.

Wikipedia while great provides a less than obvious set of rules and regulations before adding data into it. It typically tends to rank first on all major search engines for any query.

Social media have become moral compasses in what is OK and what is not OK to talk about.

A more diversified web moving away from these 'decision makers' IMO would make it a healthier place.

</comment><comment><USER11> Make it more decentralized ... why should stupid laws made in the US impact my experience ???.

</comment><comment><USER12> The lack of privacy and security. Throwing an ad-blocker on a browser is just a band-aid; the festering wound is still there getting worse.

</comment><comment><USER13> My world view (or more like a cosmic view) is this: Space and matter are fascinating phenomenon but the truly fascinating things happen between the two. Empty space and time are quite boring until you put matter in it.

The "Let the output of your program be the input of mine." philosophy was really good. Web applications do the exact opposite. All of the interesting shit is missing.

Keeping parts of a thing in separate places can be necessary at times but it usually is not. There is the layout of an article website and there are article in it. The articles with their videos and images are separate things as much as browsers are separate things from web pages (perhaps even more so).

The article can be a separate file. Like an iframe but as inline text. No <head>, no <script>, no <style> but if it has any of those they are ignored.

The other perspective also works. The data for a physical object could be a single file. One or more images, videos, docs, the meta data. Say a product, its price and description can be put inside the image file and be made accessible as a js object/json. Standards can be created, adopted and popularized. If the picture has one or more cars the meta data can have all the usual properties of a car with standardized key names. This seems chaotic and undesirable for large shopping platforms but if an object has a description, contact information and a price it can be sold. Setting up a small store could be as simple as dropping images into a page. One would want to parse out some of the meta data of course but there can be much more data available.

It makes reasoning about the website much more like we reason about the real world.

</comment><comment><USER14> Trolls, spam and ads. IoT - Internet of turds. GAFAM taking away control of our devices in pursuit of surveillance economy. But generally technical illiteracy of average consumer is getting worse. Certain web browser owned by the largest advertising company is playing with the idea of deprecating URLs. Maybe Mozilla Builders can find a way to deprecate TCP/IP so that we can start from scratch until eternal september mark ii hits us.

</comment><comment><USER15> Server farms are weird concept to me. I feel the infrastructure the internet is build upon is a bit archaic and could use a more rewrite. not sure how though

</comment><comment><USER16> Search. Google results are now full of SEO optimized low quality affiliate garbage.

<comment><USER17> I recently tried switching my default search engine to duckduckgo for like the 4th time in my life (I've been trying it about once a year), and this time I'm sticking with it. It's good enough now that I don't need to use google for every search. Maybe you could try again.

<comment><USER13> A search engine can be much better than google. All shopping websites of any significance have better features. (Is google treating links as competing technology?)

Denying the search provider a page view might work. Have them return xml. Use the OS, browser or custom theme. Build a search extension platform on top of it, sit back and watch what people come up with. (I would filter out websites that need more than x requests besides images and video, have more than y kb js, z kb css, make big news websites into a check box in the side menu, I can think of 30 extensions right now)

I made a search bar for Opera one time (widget) that had a row of submit buttons (icons) with different targets. It sat on top so one could just click the next button. It is hard to explain but it can be quite surprising to re- send your query some place else.

MyIE use to be able to open X search results in background tabs. A mouse gesture would close one and move to the next.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Search is shit because of advertising influence on algorythm design and tuning.

<comment><USER7> Having observed that major search engines often seem to hide what I'm actually looking for - web search results - "below the fold" (assuming it's there at all) I can't help but wonder if there is an opportunity for building niche "web search" engines that search the web (rather than the adverWeb, the seoWeb, or the goog/twit/faceWeb.)

As I've mentioned before, my favorite flavor of Google is Google Scholar. I'd also like to be able to slice/subset search results to get scientific, non- commercial, public interest, etc..

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> discovery . basically discovery through google is bimodal: either the same 5 top sites, or horrible SEO trash. Gimme answers from forums when i m looking for them, please

Mobile-everything craze. No we don't need to turn everything to information- sparse, inflexible mobile replicas. Give us more density, there's still a zoom-in function

kill the cloud. re-decentralize

</comment><comment><USER20> UI toolkits - Seems that all the highest quality UI toolkits (Ant, Material, Fabric/Fluent, etc) have way too much whitespace. It works for things that work well in "cards" but the low information-density is killing me personally. I think more developers would choose high-density UI toolkits if one was released by a major dev team and could be relied on to be maintained. Maybe Photon/Protocol could eventually fill this gap, I like them a lot more overall but they don't seem nearly as well-packaged for easy use, or at least don't seem to have a complete kit available at [https://www.adobe.com/products/xd/resources.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/xd/resources.html) or anywhere else really.

Walled gardens - not being able to build things that integrate multiple services. Instagram live videos, combining amazon and walmart listings, google places "here now", or unified client for iOS/SMS/Discord/Slack/Teams are all off limits to ambitious developers.

Centralization - Seems like home email servers are increasingly being ban- hammered by the major providers like Gmail, ProofPoint, etc so you have to have your mail sent by a hosted server. CloudFlare is also seemingly becoming a single point of denial/failure. Chromium can now effectively dictate W3C standards because whatever they implement instantly becomes the ground truth for web dev.

DNS/BGP - Sorely in need of a major update.

IoT - It's shockingly difficult to find IoT devices which can compute locally/privately/on-the-edge. Everything sends all the data back home and stores/processes it there.

Tracking - If websites insist on having an OAuth or email verified signup, I'd like my browser to quickly and quietly create a new profile for every domain, or even every visit to that domain. And otherwise keep all tracking/fingerprinting down to effectively zero. I'm really tired of being tracked everywhere all the time.

</comment><comment><USER21> Search because web spam.

I've been trying to get a blackhat webspam site down (it has child porn and piracy on it, besides spam links). But no luck so far, they effectively fool Googlebot and ruin search rankings.

</comment><comment><USER22> Talking about the www specifically: too many trackers, dark patterns, hard to use sites, cookie notifications are just an annoyance and often come with dark patterns and no opt outs, ridiculous asset bundle sizes, auto play videos, pop ups, ridiculously large attack surface called the web api, working group standards == Chrome is the standard, Chinese firewall, browser complexity makes it hard to compete, JS security challenges ...

</comment><comment><USER23> The social media walled garden - quite a few people I know rarely use a browser or don't even know how to use it. They get their news mostly from their social media apps, and they have a hard time spotting fake news. It is much easier to censor content in a social network than the open internet. People live in their bubble and are not exposed to different opinions and ideas.

</comment><comment><USER24> I believe that Web 2.0 / whole user generated content thing was kinda mistake, or maybe "we" (or actually you, oldas) weren't prepared for its consequences.

Not in the first years of its existence, but in last like 10 years.

Yes, I'm aware that HN's like that, but if the price for fixing that whole mess is this small, then go ahead.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd say that the ad-revenue model.

I've written about this here: [https://medium.com/anti-content/the-shape-of- the-internet-34...](https://medium.com/anti-content/the-shape-of-the- internet-343fdcbfcbc8)

</comment><comment><USER26> Mobile web app should feel native; now they're slow, clunky, don't have access to important OS features

<comment><USER13> A union?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Two things discovery (search) and dns (centralized). Not sure if they are both the same problem.

</comment><comment><USER28> We sort of don't have an Internet Bill of Rights.

We have a patient bill of rights for example.

</comment><comment><USER29> Phishing emails that take users to fake sites where they are asked to login resulting in stolen passwords. This insecurity makes users less likely to try new sites for fear of malicious JavaScript etc.

<comment><USER30> Email assumes that I want to see everything addressed to me. I don't so I have a spam/junk folder. But a lot of resources are wasted sending content that people don't care about.

Email should become a pull system, where you get a notification that a message is waiting for you on server X. Server X is trusted? Then I'll take a look, oh, it's fakegoogle@serverx, I'll block them specifically. I never see that content again, period. No one else can put a message into fakegoogle@serverx's outbox so I can be confident that I'm not accidentally blocking valid content (no address spoofing). If I trust someone, like email@example.com, then I can automatically retrieve the content until you prove untrustworthy (either by your deliberate actions, or by having weak security that grants others access to your system).

This also handles not just spam, but promotional content. If someone wants to send out promotional content to 1 million customers, I can optionally retrieve it or just "unsubscribe" by never retrieving it. It's on them to continue hosting content that's never retrieved so at some point they'll detect that Jtsummers has stopped getting their content and just stop sending it to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pull might also be a nice way to address the 'right now!' problem. Some, likely most information can wait till you're ready and doesn't need be available till then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> There trying to make end to end encryption illegal

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the consolidation of the internet has made it a lot less fun. I really miss personal websites being a popular thing.

</comment><comment><USER33> the "modern" internet - web x.0 - has a focus on ads, (personal) data- collection and commercialization.

this is a social not a technical problem -> imho. its broken beyond repair.

</comment><comment><USER34> Ads and laws

</comment><comment><USER35> Social media</comment>