Man discovers 30 year old Apple computer still in working order - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/17/tech/30-year-old-apple-computer-work-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> Why is this even news? Youtube is literally full of hundreds of thousands of similar videos. 30 years old personal machine is not even old. I can't even understand the importance of this story.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, pretty sure you can grab a working unit on eBay for under a hundred. It's cool... but absolutely not notable or newsworthy.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Kinda weird that this is CNN news.

There's lots of old computers in working order.

<comment><USER4> There are many potentially interesting discussions around this story. Just off the top of my head: the resilience of old hardware, the joy of rediscovering something previously forgotten, old computer games. Let's not make this about CNN's editorial choices (human interest stories have been a thing for a _long_ time) or whether or not this is news. After all, you submitted it.

<comment><USER5> It's a reasonable topic to write a story about. However, CNN could have chosen a much better headline, one that doesn't make it sound like a 30-year old computer that still works as some kind of oddity.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's a challenge.

We as readers (and HN participants) need to rise to it and do better than resort to knee-jerk reactions. Without excusing the behavior, CNN (and other online publications) are in a tough spot: so much of their revenue relies on eyeballs and clicks on ads, so the incentive to write headlines that drive those metrics, which is often in opposition to writing more sober, descriptive headlines.

We complain about click-bait, refuse to pay subscriptions, complain about the quality of journalism which costs money to produce, often react only to the headline, sometimes click anyway. Regardless of what CNN does, we can't abdicate our role and responsibility in the relationship, both with the media, and here on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I recently cleaned out my closet and found a Nintendo DS, 3DS, and 3DS XL. I hadn't touched them in years. To my surprise, all of them immediately turned on. I guess I'm so used to devices bleeding battery even when "off" that I figured it would be the case here, but not at all. I also found a Gameboy Advance SP with no batteries in it that booted immediately when I put fresh ones in. I think it says a lot that I was surprised by that.

I wish more companies built hardware the way Nintendo does.

<comment> black-tea Even original Gameboys still work fine. To the extent that they're barely worth anything. The only things that seem to fail on Gameboys is the batteries inside many of the cartridges, but it's trivial to replace those (you do lose your saves, though).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's actually quite a touching story! Among other things, this guy found a letter[0] that his late father had written to him on that Apple //e when he was 11 years old and away at summer camp.

[0] [https://t.co/Aog3MiSnXN](https://t.co/Aog3MiSnXN)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think that the best part is that he still has papers from when he was a kid on floppy disk. He was afraid of not being able to recover them, when the @textfiles symbol was sent out and [http://archive.org](http://archive.org) 's Jason Scott came up to bat. [https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1097251935453876224](https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1097251935453876224)

It there is anyone who can recover those files to a modern readable format, even if only in an emulator, it's him. Also, if you have any old Apple II, C64, or other vintage floppies, he's love to archive them. He's always up for copying....that floppy.

</comment><comment><USER9> 30 years ago was 1989. The Commodore 64 is older then that!

<comment><USER10> Yep. I have a 37yo working Commodore 64 here and I didn't get any CNN story for it.

<comment><USER11> Was it your parents' computer that you used as a child?

<comment><USER12> believe it or not people in their 50s or older are on the internet :)

<comment><USER11> My point was that was the point of the article, as much as the age of the hardware.

<comment><USER12> sorry missed the joke!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> But seriously, what do you think is more resilient? new or old hardware? do my laptop will continue working in 30 years without maintenance?

<comment><USER14> Bigger and more crudely build components probably play a large part. A Microprocessor from the 70s and 80s is made on much larger nodes than today's chips, traces and soldering points are bigger, PCB's thicker, almost all components sans resistors and wires were either bigger or build differently.

They have more material to play with while they decay compared to modern devices.

<comment><USER12> I'll bet good money that an IBM PC or PC XT that has been properly stored will boot up and be more or less as usable today as it was the day it was put to storage (especially the floppy-only models without an hdd).

<comment><USER14> Possibly, though I would still check capacitors and any voltage regulation (transformer and linear) to make sure it won't blow up suddenly because some wire coating rotted through.

<comment><USER12> I guess another candidate are any batteries leaking, but IIRC the PC & XT didn't have battery backed clocks & therefor no battery on the motherboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love that the saved game immediately brought up _Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH and DENNIS_

</comment><comment><USER16> This is like 85% of the way to an Onion headline.

</comment><comment><USER17> I got a Mac SE (circa 1987) that still boots. Can I get it on CNN?

<comment><USER11> Was it your parents' computer that you used as a child?

<comment><USER17> No, I flipped burgers all summer to save up $1,895 and then faked my way into the Apple Developer Program to get the 50% hardware discount. I took the Mac to college with me that fall and used it for almost everything while earning my CS degree.

I was still getting WWDC invites for a decade after that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's impressive that those 5.25" floppy disks are still good. Most of my 3.5" ones bit the dust long ago, along with nearly all my CD-Rs.

<comment><USER12> 5.25" were always more durable than the 1.44mb 3.5" ones. I used an '87-vintage PC XT clone till I got a Pentium in '95 & kept the old computer in a closet.

When I booted it up a few years later all my 5.25" still worked where as brand new 3.5" ones would be a good bet to not be readable even after a single rewrite.</comment></comment>


Java testing with Spock – Chapter 1 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://manning.com/kapelonis/JTwSpock_MEAP_ch1.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Spock is a testing framework written in Groovy that can also test Java code. It is comparable to the JUnit/Mockito combo but offers a much more descriptive DSL specifically tailored to unit tests among other goodies.

This is the first chapter of my upcoming about about Spock. It offers a high level comparison between Spock and JUnit.

Part 2 of the book will cover parameterized tests as well as mocking/stubbing with Spock. Your feedback is appreciated.</comment>


Google Chrome OS available as free VMWare download - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/20/google-chrome-os-available-as-free-vmware-download/ <comment><USER2> Not much to see here. It's the Chrome broswer, filling your screen, and nothing else.

Can't change screen resolution. Can't change keyboard layout. Can't even find those "cards" they showed in the demos.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's a torrent with no login:

[http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/5172101/Chrome_OS_Image_for...](http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/5172101/Chrome_OS_Image_for_VMWare.5172101.TPB.torrent)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's instructions and links to get the image. They have released images for VMWare and VirtualBox too. Download requires a gdgt login.

[http://discuss.gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/general/Download- Ch...](http://discuss.gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/general/Download-Chrome-OS- VMWare-image/)

<comment><USER5> > Download requires a gdgt login.

Guh. Who's gonna take one for the team and free those downloads from captivity?

<comment><USER6> Here's the VirtualBox image: [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/136177/chrome- os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vdi.z...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/136177/chrome- os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vdi.zip)

and here's the VMWare one: [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/136177/chrome- os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk....](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/136177/chrome- os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk.zip)

EDIT: Looks like you lot broke my dropbox public folder:

"Hi Hrishi,

This email is an automated notification from Dropbox that your Public links have been temporarily suspended on account of generating excessive traffic. Your Dropbox will continue to function completely normally with the exception of Public links.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line at email@example.com.

\- The Dropbox Team"

I'm taking down the files now. If anyone from dropbox is reading can you please reactivate my public links? Thanks.

<comment> brown9-2 The VirtualBox image just hangs at a black screen for me (using Virtual Box 3.0.4) - anyone else have this problem?

<comment><USER7> Reboot your machine, seems to fix the problem.

(I'm the one who built these gdgt images.)

<comment><USER8> Reboot the virtual machine? That hasn't been working for me so far. Disabling USB doesn't do anything else either. Perhaps you can post the VirtualBox XML file that describes the settings used for this VM, or tell us your platform and versions?

<comment><USER7> No reboot your actual machine. Usually fixes the black screen issues.

<comment><USER8> It didn't work for me. Thanks for trying, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> TechCrunch is also linking to a virtualbox image of the Chrome OS: [http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5170843/chromeos- image-999.9...](http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5170843/chromeos- image-999.999.32309.211410-a1.vmdk.bz2)

<comment><USER10> VirtualBox can read (and write to) VMWare images, FWIW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have the same problem as some commenters on this link point out: [http://discuss.gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/general/Download- Ch...](http://discuss.gdgt.com/google/chrome-os/general/Download-Chrome-OS- VMWare-image/)

Doesn't work for me on VirtualBox on OSX. I cannot login to the OS, saying there's no internet access/no offline login available.

<comment><USER4> I was getting that too. I rebooted, then left it at the login screen for about 20 minutes, then came back and now it's working.

<comment><USER12> Never did get logged in. I left it running (VMWare) for 2 hours, tried a few ways of fiddling with the network connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Beware.. the login box only allows 29 characters as a username and the throw away account I created is longer than that! (No thanks to the "googlemail.com" requirement in the UK..) So make sure your full Google username is shorter than that.

</comment><comment><USER14> There has to be a way to get a command prompt. It might be commented out in this build, has anyone looked through the source?

<http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os>

<comment><USER15> There doesn't appear to be any sort of "usage" notes yet, however [http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/how-tos-and- troubleshoot...](http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/how-tos-and- troubleshooting/developer-faq) has a list of keyboard shortcuts. CTRL-ALT-T should give you a shell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Works good in VMWare Fusion 3. Does anybody know how to change the screen resolution?

</comment><comment><USER17> how to install it?

</comment><comment><USER18> now I need to find another computer to stick it on to test...great...

<comment><USER4> Don't you know what VMWare is?

<comment><USER18> older computers, new at this, and would rather learn all this stuff the hard way. I do know what vmware is, I don't want to screw up what I have

<comment><USER19> How could running Chrome OS in a VM "screw up" anything you have?

<comment><USER20> I use virtual machines and am happy with them. However to be fair to the grandparent poster there have been issues with USB devices and VMWare.

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Vista64bitBlueScreensWithINTER...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Vista64bitBlueScreensWithINTERNALPOWERERRORImmediatelyAfterInstallingVMWarePlayer.aspx)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why startup founders should learn code - <AUTHOR> http://www.code-love.com/2014/05/19/startup-founder-learn-know-code/

<comment><USER2> A startup founder who doesn't code is (presumably) bringing something else to the table. Whatever that skill is, it'll be more useful to the future of the business for them to spend their time doing that thing than having an hugely inexperienced developer writing code. The likelihood of a startup succeeding will be improved far more if, for example, the non-technical founder went out and did some consulting work to bring money in to the business rather than spending time learning to code and picking up things that an experienced developer could crank through in 1/10th of the time.

That's not to denigrate coders or coding. It's a skill that everyone can benefit from learning, particularly in knowing a good way to approach problems. It's just not something a founder should spend time on - there are much more important things to do in startups. Startups don't fail because a template wasn't updated. They fail because people didn't know about the product or because the startup ran out of money. Fix _those_ problems.</comment>


How do you deal with terrible manager? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Keep a diary date and time stamped with the terrible things they do, so that when I've had enough I can take that to their superiors or for legal advice if needed.</comment>


7 Tips for New Businesses - <AUTHOR> http://b.lesseverything.com/2008/9/16/6-tips-for-beginning-businesses

<comment><USER2> Keep in mind, these are accounting tips for someone who's got a full time job and starting a business on the side.

With a full time job, you get taxed on your normal paycheck and on April 15th you pay the gov't the taxes you owe from your side business (if your withholdings weren't enough to cover tax liability).

If you don't have a full time job, you've gotta pay quarterly estimated taxes or pay interest on what you owe later on.

Also keep in mind, I'm not an accountant but the guy who gave these tips is one.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think LLC is much better than Sole Proprietorship, its really not that much more work and you get the advantage of having more legitimacy

</comment><comment><USER4> This post is targeted at people starting a one-man shop, not entrepreneurs in the sense of the word as used on hn.

If you've got partners and plan to grow and/or are planning on hiring several employees in the next few months, you should do the couple of hours of homework and lawyering it takes to file the right papers at the beginning.

<comment><USER5> If you have partners or upcoming hires, then you shouldn't look to any blog for guidance. If you're like me, hoping for traction to attract a good cofounder, this seems applicable.

<comment><USER6> If you want a cofounder, you don't want a sole proprietorship, because you need to divide equity.

<comment><USER5> When I find a cofounder we can figure out what kind of corporation to form, transfer IP to it, and _then_ split equity. Before incorporating, sole proprietorship is what you get by default. I wouldn't have had to fill out any paperwork at all except that I wanted to be able to advertise using the name OurDoings instead of Bruce Lewis.

<comment><USER6> Wokay. That makes sense. Of all the things we had to do to start our company, incorporation was the least dramatic. Liability insurance is the real bitch.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hipcamp Became the Airbnb of the Outdoors - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/how-hipcamp-became-the-airbnb-of-the-outdoors <comment><AUTHOR> Apropos the thread last week about recreation.gov: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21625160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21625160)</comment>


Http-decision-diagram - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/for-GET/http-decision-diagram <comment><USER2> Interesting, but how many people building HTTP applications actually follow this diagram in full?

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on the thousands upon thousands of HTTP applications I've crawled in my life, approximately 0.

A disheartening percentage of the work we've put into Tinfoil Security's web vulnerability scanner involves dealing with websites that aren't to spec, and so break in unexpected ways.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Facebook Open Graph Redirect Chrome Extension - <AUTHOR> http://chronline.posterous.com/introducing-the-facebook-open-graph-redirect

<comment><USER2> This is probably the 12th such Chrome plugin we have seen now. We released ours a couple of days after frictionless sharing was announced.

The extension gets complicated when you attempt to get it working for all variety of apps, because app developers are constantly updating the DOM to bypass our filters.

See this previous thread for details when another one of these was announced:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3810897>

see our original project and the code we have so far to getting this to work with other social apps:

<https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless>

I really wish we could have one project that works in all cases, rather than 12 projects that work in 5% of cases.

We are catching around 50% of cases at the moment with this code:

[https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless/blob/master/webkit/f...](https://github.com/byoogle/frictionless/blob/master/webkit/frictionless.safariextension/chrome/content.js)

but it is moving all the time. I am currently in the process of writing a generic rule engine that can be updated from outside of the extension (compare this to just searching on uiconnect.php in links).

Feel free to fork and contribute to existing code (I can't imagine that one of these previous projects wouldn't have come up if you Google searched).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think one issue with finding projects working on this already is that its hard to explain the concept to search for. Is this Facebook feature called "social reader"? Is it called "frictionless sharing?" "Open graph?" Users don't know how to name the feature in a way to search meaningfully for a way to block it, and there's no standard name among developers to search for preexisting efforts to contribute to.

I managed to find the "Unsocial Reader" while searching for previous efforts. I did not find "Frictionless", maybe because I didn't search for "frictionless sharing blocker," because that's not a term I thought to use.

In the case of Unsocial Reader, I saw it was doing Google "I'm feeling lucky" searches based on the title and figured the way I was doing it was more streamlined for the user because it was actually based on the article URL, and since my extension searches for a URL specific to Facebook (uiconnect.php) no changes to the DOM by app developers would bypass the fact that it still has to go through that Facebook URL.

In terms of cases it covers, it has worked every time I needed it to while I was on Facebook, but yes that was the extent of the testing I did. I think it is unfair to claim that all other projects besides your own work in only 5% of cases, considering the Unsocial Reader has almost 3x the users of Frictionless and a better star rating in the Chrome Web Store. Also, since a few sites represent the vast majority of the open graph links on Facebook (ex Yahoo), blocking their installers is most important to most users.

This was a weekend project of the mentality "I can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort." It's something I threw together, just to solve my own problems (with Facebook and with being unable to find a plugin that fixed the problem). But now that Frictionless has been brought to my attention, I will certainly look over the source and see if there's a way I can contribute. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article says that Facebook forces you to install the publisher's app when you click one of these links, but that isn't actually true. It's up to the publisher whether or not they want to prompt for an install to view the content. This is what Facebook calls authenticated referrals: <http://goo.gl/CQld3>

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I know, from working on an open graph app, you can either not prompt for an install of the app, or require an install of the app. You can't ask for an install but not require it to see the content.

Unfortunately, a lot of big news sites go with the force method, including Yahoo.

<comment><USER4> There is a definitely another subset that prompts you and when you select Close takes you to the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would imagine that this can be easily converted into a GreaseMonkey userscript. Since you have chosen to implement this for Chrome, the question which naturally comes to my mind is - is it even easier to write these addons for Chrome than writing an userscript?

Firefox user here, considering to switch for some time.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I have never worked on a GreaseMonkey script before...only used a Chrome extension because it seemed to fit the project requirements and it was the first thing that came to mind.

That said, I did find it extremely easy to create a Chrome extension. Really nice to have access to the DOM straight through javascript. Check out the source code for this extension...only took a few lines to write the actual logic

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is very good, thank you! I usually just copy the text and search it on Google to find the real article.

<comment><USER7> My friends and I do the same thing: highlight and google the title of the article instead of clicking on the link. The funny thing is we all learned to do this on our own! Quite disappointed to see FB recently added JS code to prohibit users from highlighting the title of the article (presumably to discourage users from doing this).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most aren't stupid enough to lose traffic from people refusing to install their app so if you hit "No" or "Close" most will redirect you to the article anyway. The alternative is to set it to "only me" in the dropdown on who can see what you read.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Actually, if you hit No or Close, none of these apps will redirect you to the article. Not possible with Facebook's current implementation. I know because I've worked on one of these Open Graph apps for The Duke Chronicle.

Only possibilities are, when the user clicks the link, to either bring them straight to the article, or ask them to install the app and if they hit "Yes," bring them to the article. Not possible to show the install app dialog box but not force an install in order to be redirected to the article. I wish it was though!

In terms of setting it to "only me" for sharing, yes that definitely works. But you're still giving the app read access to some of your Facebook info, and many users won't even think to change the setting to "only me" unfortunately.

<comment><USER9> The Guardian app (possibly UK only...not sure) redirects directly to the article if you click No and then remembers that you did that and redirects you directly from then on. Definitely the best implementation I've seen but I don't know the details about exactly how they did it.

<comment><USER10> It's possible to set your own "cancel url" if you just redirect people directly to the OAuth flow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whenever I encounter one of these articles, I just google the title. Easy enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is great!

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm glad to see that this was created! There has definitely been more than one time where I had a friend who read an article that interested me, hit the "install app page" and closed the tab.

This is just another example of Facebook wanting to collect more and more and more data about us.

Ever since Facebook got more and more involved with the "app" fad, I used it less and less. Currently it tells me when events are, birthdays, and occasionally I'll browse some friends and see what's new.

Facebook left my focal point of browsing a long time ago, what about you?

<comment><USER14> "This is just another example of Facebook wanting to collect more and more and more data about us."

Not really, Facebook already has the data, this is the app trying to get more data from you.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. It's not so much "Facebook collecting" as "Facebook giving away" your data.

How long will it be before people assert rights over their own graph? When apps like this slurp down your entire Facebook life without compensating beyond an article read, there's a kind of sharecropping going on.</comment></comment></comment>


jQuery.com Malware Attack Puts Privileged Enterprise IT Accounts at Risk - <AUTHOR> http://www.riskiq.com/resources/blog/jquerycom-malware-attack-puts-privileged-enterprise-it-accounts-risk <comment><USER2> As others have observed, if the attackers had wanted, they could have modified the hosted jQuery scripts and used them to attack other web sites. They don't seem to have done so, but this highlights how the practice of including scripts hosted by other parties is a security problem for the Internet as a whole.

But there's an easy way to fix it. Browsers should support a hash attribute for <script> tags, so instead of

        <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.min.js">

sites could instead say

        <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.min.js" hash="sha256:874706b2b1311a0719b5267f7d1cf803057e367e94ae1ff7bf78c5450d30f5d4">

This would also significantly reduce the risks from use of http instead of https, and from weaknesses in https itself.

<comment><USER3> And what happens when it's patched to fix a real issue? Your site will just break.

Just don't trust so many third parties with your site's security: Host jQuery (and other things) yourself.

<comment><USER4> Nah, the new version is hosted at a new url.

Even if we ignore the hash suggestion, you don't want to have some dev on the other side of the planet suddenly update one of your libraries on your live website.

That should never be a thing in the first place, so it won't be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here are the details on the RIG exploit pack served to users who visited jquery.com during the time in question (September 18th).

Exploits:

Java – CVE-2012-0507, CVE-2013-2465

IE 7/8/9 – CVE-2013-2551

IE 10 – CVE-2013-0322

Flash – CVE-2013-0634

Silverlight – CVE-2013-0074

Source:

[http://www.kahusecurity.com/2014/rig-exploit- pack/](http://www.kahusecurity.com/2014/rig-exploit-pack/)

<comment><USER6> This is why everyone should have "Click To Play" turned on for all browser plugins.

It would have stopped the Java, Flash, and Silverlight drive-by attacks even if you had a vulnerable version installed.

The IE/browser based exploits can only be mitigated by keeping up to date or utilising something like EMET (although I don't really expect everyone to be running EMET).

PS - CVE-2013-0322 doesn't look like an IE10 issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't help but think this was a huge missed opportunity for the attackers. Instead of hosting malware on the site, they could have infected just the hosted jquery and attacked a ton of sites all at once.

<comment><USER8> It's very sobering to think of all the havoc that would cause. Is it still best practice to call your jq up from the jquery cdn?

<comment><USER9> Not sure about the jQuery CDN but where I work it's best practice to serve it from Google's CDN. Probably should rethink that.

<comment><USER10> Reading this news, I was wondering, whether from a security POV, including jQuery from Google's CDN rather than jQuery's own would be better.

My reasoning was that Google is bigger, therefore probably has better security. They also need very similar technology for securing the AdSense includes. Finally, if someone manages to compromise Google, there might be bigger problems than hosting a malware-d jQuery (although that would be pretty big).

It's not a very convincing reason, risk-wise, IMO. I'm assuming that jQuery should be pretty on top of the security of their CDN. Also that proposed new hash/integrity attribute for the SCRIPT tag seems _way_ more promising.

<comment><USER11> You do however leak information to Google about your customers browsing behaviour. If you are using Google Analytics you obviously do that to an even greater degree anyway so there is no further harm for most users but it is more likely to be blocked by me and I always block Google Analytics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Speaking on behalf of the jQuery Foundation, we have currently not found evidence of a compromise. Read more info at our blog [http://blog.jquery.com/2014/09/23/was-jquery-com- compromised...](http://blog.jquery.com/2014/09/23/was-jquery-com-compromised/)

</comment><comment><USER13> So how does one tell if they have been compromised by the exploit pack?

</comment><comment><USER14> Can anybody tell, if users with Linux systems can be affected?

It seems, that primary Windows PCs are targeted, but since also a Flash exploit is targeted, that also existed on Linux, it is not clear to me, if a Linux system could be infected.

I don't know, if I visited the site at this specific date, but I am rather sure, that if I was, I used a Linux system.

<comment><USER15> It downloads a .exe apparently so no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> They even had a blog post about why you shouldn't link to the latest CDN version.

[http://blog.jquery.com/2014/07/03/dont-use-jquery-latest- js/](http://blog.jquery.com/2014/07/03/dont-use-jquery-latest-js/)

</comment><comment><USER17> When a non-technical website is hacked, I expect a dumb press release like this. But when an attack targets the tech industry, I expect a deeper level of coverage. What malware is served? Does it work on OS X or linux?

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems legit: [http://s.higg.im/image/0m2g2o1F2W1D](http://s.higg.im/image/0m2g2o1F2W1D)

<comment><USER19> I can't even get the malware site to load anymore... also, nice way to redirect people to your website ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This never happens when I use vanilla.js

</comment><comment><USER21> Direct link: [http://www.riskiq.com/resources/blog/jquerycom-malware- attac...](http://www.riskiq.com/resources/blog/jquerycom-malware-attack-puts- privileged-enterprise-it-accounts-risk#.VCF33EtRmns)

</comment><comment><USER22> there's a jquery plugin for that

</comment><comment><USER23> nowhere does it say that the CDN hosted libraries code.jquery.com were affected. So who cares.

<comment><USER24> Speaking as someone who whitelisted "jquery.com" in NoScript and RequestPolicy, I care. The various CDN-hosted libraries are very convenient, but to me they seem somewhat risky single points of failure. It's certainly possible that an attacker could parlay their access to the main JQuery web site into access to the the JQuery CDN (e.g., an admin uses the same password in both places). We're fortunate that (probably, hopefully) didn't happen in this case.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gwitter - creep on a GitHub user's last few commit messages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mplewis/gwitter

<comment><AUTHOR> It's quick and dirty and has no error catching, but it kind of does the job. Let me know what you think!</comment>


Flying Wing Crashed After Doing a "Barrel Roll" According to NTSB - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27808/northrop-n-9m-flying-wing-crashed-after-doing-a-barrel-roll-according-to-ntsb-report <comment><USER2> This was a tragic loss. It is important to note that:

 _some believe that a catastrophic issue, like an engine failure while at a high power setting or a flight control issue, may have caused a maneuver that looked like a barrel roll, but was totally unintentional_</comment>


Some decompiling, reverse engineering, and keygen tutorials - <AUTHOR> http://tuts4you.com/download.php?list.17

<comment><USER2> As a kid fumbling around proprietary Windows binaries, I felt liberated by the ideas of Fravia and +ORC. They taught me that I deserve to know what goes on underneath the software I use. Softice, IDA and w32dasm were the tools of the trade. But most of it were limited to finding where the MessageBox with the trial message pops up and reversing the conditional jump just before it. Here is a small tutorial teaching how to reverse and remove the trial limitation of an ancient version of UltraEdit : <http://188.8.131.52/fravia/uedilas.htm>

But after switching to a fully opensource stack, reverse engineering lost its charm. Understanding how things work is taken for granted and I can't imagine going back to an opaque proprietary environment.

Fravia passed away on 2009; but his archives are preserved here: <http://188.8.131.52/fravia/index.htm>

<comment><USER3> What you link to is Fravia+ previous project, more focused on software reverse engineering - <http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/>.

Fravia+'s last project - "Web Searchlores" was/is more aimed towards general reverse engineering and information searching. The site contains a huge collection of information, which curiously, although not updated for so many years, is still relevant today.pparently searchlores.org and fravia.com have expired and are "parked" by sombody. But looks like <http://search.lores.eu/> is the only remaining official mirror that remains from

What you say about the F/OSS certainly rings true, but at least for me, software reverse engineering has always been more as a training ground for reversing in general than to cracking software copy protections.

+greythorne has stopped updating his pages and +HCU's Linux infor, but mammon_ is pretty active, and even moved to Github: <http://mammon.github.io/> . Definitely worth checking out for more information about Software RE under GNU/Linux.

Nowadays there are a lot of opaque software in widespread use, so the main focus has shifted towards web platforms, where reversing is still applicable.

 _edit: style_

<comment><USER4> > although not updated for so many years, is still relevant today.pparently > searchlores.org and fravia.com have expired and are "parked" by sombody. But > looks like <http://search.lores.eu/> is the only remaining official mirror > that remains from

Fravia died a few years ago: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia>

For people interested in reversing I recommend to engage on the new <http://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/> and the "classic" <http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/>

One issue with reverse engineering information/community is the lack of organization. There are a lot of web resources about it but are not well interlinked (yes, the <a> tag). So, it is possible that a great tool is hidden in a page with low page rank. OpenRCE was successful in the past but nowadays people don't use it.

<comment><USER3> _> Fravia died a few years ago: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia> _

Yes, but 4 years are a considerable time on the web. Linkrot to and in some of the external resources can be felt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ahh. This brings back my memories of my teen years of reverse engineering. I enjoyed it so much I almost decided to go into malware analysis. Breaking crackmes, reversemes, spending hours writing code in C and dissecting what compilers came up with at all levels of optimization. Finding packers/protectors and figuring out how to remove them by hand and then building an olly script that would do it automatically. Cracking all the software you own (legally) just because. Back when CD cracks were still needed, I actually made my own, and it felt great.

I did all of my hacking on a Windows machine but now I use OSX almost exclusively. Does anyone know of roughly equivalent tools in this world? Maybe I'll take up the hobby again.

<comment><USER6> Check out IDA Pro, I think it's the go to tool for reverse engineering on all platforms now. Haven't been looking into it for a while though.

<comment><USER7> For a mere US$1129...

<comment><USER8> If price is an issue, consider the freeware version: [1]. It disallows commercial use, and lacks recent features, but it should be great for a hobbyist. If you need more than this feature set, $1199 is a bargain for what you get with IDA Pro, as others have mentioned.

[1] [https://www.hex- rays.com/products/ida/support/download_freew...](https://www.hex- rays.com/products/ida/support/download_freeware.shtml)

<comment><USER9> It is also windows only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Brings old memories to me :)

I used to do reverse engineering when I was a teenager, just for the fun. It made me feel powerful in a certain way. RE is a great mind puzzler! It builds lots of skills: I learnt a lot of ASM, how OSes worked on the inside, compilers, problem solving...

</comment><comment><USER11> I love the idea of this, but the fact that I have to download something scares the hell out of me.

<comment><USER12> I've got a virtual-box VM dedicated to this kind of thing. Install all your tools first from trusted sources, freeze that image and go wild.

<comment><USER13> Have you ever looked at Sandboxie? I like it, but it's probably not as secure as a VM.

<comment><USER14> That looks interesting, are you using it?

Is it as safe as it looks?

<comment><USER13> I've used it for years and I like it.

However, I'm not prepared to make any statements about how safe it actually is. I don't have quite deep enough security expertise to know that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For all the comments about crackmes and patching around messageboxes, I would like to mention that reverse engineering is arguably more valuable for its ability to surface file format information and/or protocol specifics.

In several countries, this is one of the expressly granted rights with respect to reverse engineering since it promotes interoperability and (more often than not) allows one to use a file format (or network service) long after the original software has expired [in the mortality sense].

I also highly recommend checking out the new <http://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/> since it is currently in its beta period and needs all the content it can get.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can also have some fun by doing crackmes at <http://www.crackmes.de>. Many crackmes require considerable technical and analytical skills. They also enable you to learn the underlying platform better.

</comment><comment><USER17> The number three has a nice virus file (W32.Drop:Banker.15ja.1201).

<comment><USER18> No, your antivirus software has a False Positive. I hate people that trust to AV without any attempts to use their brain. If your AV say to you 'JUMP TO WINDOW' - will you do it?

<comment><USER19> you _hate_ them? wow. anyway, i would also not jump out of the window, because some anonymous commenter says its not dangerous to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Good tutorials but how is this news?

<comment><USER21>
      What to Submit

      On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.

      If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

From: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html></comment></comment>


Eliezer Yudkowsky's Essay, The Simple Truth, as Free Audiobook - <AUTHOR> http://castify.co/channels/3-eliezer-yudkowsky-the-simple-truth

<comment><USER2> While saying this, I feel like this was the GMAT, and this audio a analysis of the essay thing. I felt that towards the end the objective of this "preview" was to draw people's interest into buying the rest of the essay, clearly enough that is the objective of any preview. But to me, I would say, it failed in drawing me, because:

1\. The audio only established the set-pieces but didn't actually even gave the glimpse of the whole essay, what I did get a glimpse of was the highly rhetoric sense in which it was presented.

2\. The audio ended abruptly, at the world literally, meaning, it was a half effort at making an audio preview, and there was no quality check, which I would expect, if the site is not that popular.

In one sentence, I'm interested to know what truth is, but I wasn't actually given a glimpse of his views on truth.

Apart this, I would like to wish them luck in their efforts, seems like a good platform with a unique approach to podcast. But somehow I felt, that it would take more than that to draw me (a last.fm fan) just yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> That audio is totally free and Creative Commons licensed—no need to buy it. While we would love for you come back and buy something, we'd also love it if you downloaded the audio and enjoyed it.

But you points about the way the preview is edited are well taken.</comment></comment>


Are Europeans Really Not Using Twitter? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2011/11/24/arabic-is-the-fastest-growing-language-on-twitter-sees-2000-increase-in-12-months/

<comment><USER2> >>Despite the fact that Arabic accounts for only 1.2% of all public tweets, the growth rate over the past year has been a staggering rate of 2,146%

It makes sense that if the usage is very low almost to the point of nil than any growth is going to seem "staggering". i.e. If you go from 1 person using it to 2 people using it then you've just grown 100%!!!

</comment><comment><USER3> Unless I'm missing something, this article only discusses tweets by language, not geography. Many Europeans use English on social media sites given the cosmopolitan nature of Europe and the likelihood that, if there is one language they have in common with friends from other countries in Europe and abroad, it is English.

I'm guessing there's a few lesser spoken European languages in that "all others" category.

<comment><USER4> Yes and no. No: in France at least, very few people use it. Yes: those who do use it in France, use it to talk people internationally (ie. in English).

<comment><USER5> So what do the French use for talking to fellow Frenchmen? (Like QQ for Chinese).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's are some books on distributed key value store? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There are few books written on Cassandra, Riak and Berkeley DB Java edition. They might be useful to you.</comment>


Apple Will Hold Fall iPad Event on Oct 22 - <AUTHOR> http://allthingsd.com/20131008/apple-will-hold-fall-ipad-event-on-october-22/

<comment><USER2> Jim Dalrymple gives a "Yep.":

[http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/10/08/apples-rumored- oct-22-...](http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/10/08/apples-rumored-oct-22-ipad- event/)

<comment><USER3> Though not really a stretch when coming from all things d.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm quite interested whether they add touch id to the iPads. Also will the ipad mini become the main focal point now somewhat like the 5c is to the 5s.

</comment><comment><USER3> The big question is, will there be a retina iPad Mini ?

<comment><USER5> Since you can get a faster processor and better display in a Nexus 7 for far less money, it better be some sort of improvement. The Reality Distortion Field isn't what it used to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> New MacBook Pros please!!</comment>


Jason Calacanis: Building his Site by Paying for User Generated Content - <AUTHOR> http://greenhouse.mahalo.com/ <comment><USER2> Anyone ever make revenue sharing deals for content? If so, what was the percentage, and deal structure? I'm dealing with seeding my site now, but want to keep costs down.

Thinking: x% as long as creator maintains content x% up to 3x market value of content x% up to 3x market value or x% till n time which ever is better for content creator.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think he's on to something building a Google/Yahoo/Wikipedia. Paying people to create the content on his site requires a lot of capital. This is the kind of advantage a successful serial entrepreneur has that a first-timer generally doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> This will not work because i) the web is too big ii) the web changes too quickly iii) it is gameable

This is a web 0.2 idea that died with Yahoo Directory.</comment>


Hashrocket: For $30,000 they'll build your web app in three days. - <AUTHOR> http://hashrocket.com/ <comment><USER2> It might be just me, but the name leads me to believe that these guys are just a bunch of stoners. "Hey, what if we call our company 'Hashrocket'?" [takes, another hit off of the bong/pipe/spliff] "Great idea, man...."

</comment><comment><USER3> They have two "in progress" projects. I guess we should come back in three business days (say, Thursday, Jan 24) and see what new projects they're doing instead. ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Their site doesn't render properly @ 1280X800 either. Also, the rendering is inconsistent - if I refresh the site, it will render with "Building a success web application is rocket science" over "our products"... hit refresh and it renders correctly... hmmm... Also, you would think that for 30 grand you'd get to pick the language of your choice?

<comment><USER5> _Also, you would think that for 30 grand you'd get to pick the language of your choice?_

That is actually the problem with many companies. The programmers are not the ones that decide which language to use. They're forced to use Java or .NET because the higher-ups want them to.

Why would you try and limit the productivity of a programming team by forcing them to use tools they may not like or tools that are weak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The downside is if their website design is anything to go by, it'll be as ugly as sin and have severe usability issues.

<comment><USER7> What's wrong with their website design? I liked it.

I see _some_ merit about complaints about iffy low resolution handling, but the design is good.

<comment><USER8> Well, for one, if your browser window isn't tall enough, you won't be able to see any of their contact info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Obie Fernandez! Zed Shaw thinks he's cool, and that's all the credibility I need. I would do business with Hashrocket if I worked in a big company.

<comment><USER9> "Zed Shaw thinks he's cool, and that's all the credibility I need."

This is a very dangerous way of thinking. You should judge people by more than "X says ..." . There are any number of competent people who think Obie is mostly blowing smoke and leaching off rails's popularity.

Obie essentially gave Zed a job when he needed one. You will never catch Zed say Obie isn't cool after that.

If you know someone at Thoughtworks, where people actually worked with him (and from where Obie left under a cloud ), talk to them to get a different opinion.

of course, the best way to judge someone is to look at their code/work with them for a while than "X says Y". You can get people saying anything about other people if you look hard enough. I wouldn't want to bet my company (or 30,000 $ for that matter) on such flimsy evidence.

And even if Zed really means it when he says "Obie is cool" , that doesn't make it right for your to bet your company on him. Quotes are no substitute for doing your own research.

<comment> daniel-cussen I can't educate my guesses that much. Like you, I'm not in a position where betting 30K on some dude I read about makes any sense. However, some people are in that position. Big companies regularly pay consulting companies like McKinsey hundreds of thousands and even millions for projects. The pay hundreds of dollars an hour for IBM coders. People who pay these prices may well be better served with a 30G project from Obie and a 14G website from Electric Pulp than with whatever IBM and McKinsey charge.

NB: I don't know the numbers. However, I recall the ballpark as being around 300 dollars an hour for a software engineer, and 400K for a study on the return on investment of a marketing campaign for a retailer. The first number is according to Joel Spolsky, and the second is according to Steve Levitt. I'm aware I'm risking arguments from authority here, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll do it for $29,995.

</comment><comment><USER11> Good luck to them if they can get this. I'm sure that the 3-days will have some caveat and they did say 1.0 in this time. If you were large enough, and had the funds, you might go to these guys to get something out the door quickly. From a PR angle also this will definitely get into the press. Interesting to watch

</comment><comment><USER12> Assuming they are working day and night, night and day that is close to $417/hr. The aspect of hiring high-class code hookers (or if you find that offensive, Ruby on Rails ninjas) aside, building a successful web site seems to be more about your network's influence when you launch.

<comment><USER13> Maybe there are 5 people on the team. That gets it down to $80/hr.

<comment><USER12> Yes, good point. Cheaper than a small team of lawyers. I remember a build-a- website in 24 hours contest nine or so years ago - perhaps Obie and his team might volunteer their productive capabilities for a deserving non-profit? I think the right pro-bono project would generate good PR and better karma. I am interested in seeing what (assuming the who, who comissioned the site allow it) kind of customer experience can be built in three intensive days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Their page doesn't render correctly in my firefox session. Do you get a discount if that happens to the site they build for you?

<comment><USER10> Can't read "About" at 800 x 600. I guess I've been fired as a prospective customer.

<comment><USER15> 800x600 is below the "industry standard". To design for people with resolution that low is to cater to laggards at the expense of the vast majority.

But if you're on a mobile device, the issue is much more complicated obviously, and you get a pass :)

<comment><USER10> The fact that their own web page doesn't render on every major browser or at every standard resolution screans louder than anything they say on it.

If you disqualify "laggards" as prospects, maybe you don't deserve to succeed.

And if you think that servicing one type of customer is at the expense of another, maybe you're not yet senior enough to be my vendor.

ADDENDUM:

Why is it that my hardest learned business lessons get downmodded so quickly? Who here is such a good hacker that they could afford to leave money on the table?

<comment><USER16> Here's a business lesson: don't implement features that cost more than your expected marginal increase in revenue. e.g. supporting edge case platforms at the expense of most of your users.

<comment><USER17> I loaded the home page in Internet Explorer 7 (should be main stream enough?). The page generates javscript errors when I click a link...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ...have multiple heart attacks, male pattern baldness (the girls too) and eye cancer to boot :)</comment>


1997 interview with James Cameron - <AUTHOR> http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/5180

<comment> helwr</comment>


Do Both. - <AUTHOR> http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/archives/000228.html

<comment><USER2> I hate to bring up opportunity cost here but uh...</comment>


Cross-trial of treatment outcomes in depression: a machine learning approach - <AUTHOR> http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(15)00471-X/abstract <comment><USER2> Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1yasoTn...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1yasoTn2Ad4J:lancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanpsy/PIIS2215-0366\(15\)00471-X.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: Value of "Smart Money" - <AUTHOR>

I have a fairly promising startup in the digital media space which has spent quite a while building its core product offering - we did not follow the current MVP trend. It'd actually be most accurate to say we built a couple solid products, pivoted/reengineered, and finally have some good traction in our new target market.
I covered the seed round myself based on previous startup success, we raised a couple million in series A from a variety of angels (mostly well-to-do real estate folks, who mostly are not-so-well-to-do these days). I now have a terms sheet for $5M from a high net worth individual who I respect for his sales skills and past business success, but who honestly hasn't a clue about the technology market and is definitely an aggressive personality type.
I am seriously considering going and shopping this deal to traditional VCs. I'm not in the Bay Area so my choices are probably limited since my understanding is that Bay Area VCs won't invest outside Silicon Valley. What's the community wisdom as regards "smart money" - am I going to get more value out of the connections VCs have as compared to the bird-in-the-hand value of let's take the growth capital and immediately start executing?
(New throwaway account for probably obvious reasons) <comment><USER2> Maybe if you get a great VC he'll play a big role in your success, but it's more likely he won't do all that much.

Raising $5M from a VC is no easy task. You should probably not waste months on that if you can get a check tomorrow from this guy.

The thing that stands out to me is that you mention he is an "aggressive personality type", which I read as "he can be a ruthless asshole". That's the biggest concern I'd have. For someone like that you cannot risk giving him control. You should control the board by a majority and protect that and everything else very well in the legal agreements.

</comment><comment><USER3> Shop the deal.

If the market value of your company is greater than your current terms, you'll find out.

As a datapoint from Spolsky here he is talking about his decision to shop the deal rather than taking the first offer. And keep in mind that his first offer was so called "smart money".

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M09UrRooSVs?t=25m00s>

</comment><comment><USER4> My impression is that Bay Area VC's will invest outside Silicon Valley if you get the right VC and you are the right company. Most SV Angels prefer to be geographically closer though.

<comment><USER5> The big names do. Depends, of course, if you can attract Kleiner or Benchmark or the like.</comment></comment>


3 Ways Bitcoins Could Be Worthless? - <AUTHOR> http://pjbrunet.com/3-ways-bitcoins-could-be-worthless/

<comment><USER2> Wow, somebody who doesn't understand mining writes about bitcoin. No, you don't get the "majority vote" because you have more users. Complete nonsense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why jump to that conclusion? I never said 1 person = 1 vote. What I'm saying is, if Bitcoin takes hold (meaning it's really superior to fiat money, people use it in daily life, etc.) then eventually a tiny percentage of people will end up holding most of the wealth in the world.

Hypothetically, let's just say 1% of the world ends up with 99% of the Bitcoins. That's generous because today it's more like .0000001% of the world owns 99.99999% of the Bitcoins. Using some common sense and a maybe a lot of imagination, the 99% of people who missed the boat will be pissed once they realize what happened. They missed the mining boat and they didn't get to buy Bitcoins for $1 either. The 99% won't just play along and say, "Golly, I'm so glad there's only 21 million coins because that allows me to preserve my wealth." LOL, yeah right!

(Again, we're assuming Bitcoin continues to gain traction over the next 100+ years, the value of Bitcoin is intrinsically tied up with its future potential.) The 1% will be so vastly outnumbered, it won't be difficult for the 99% to get control of the network. That's why I think the money supply should keep increasing if Bitcoin wants to be accepted.

If you think the 99% of people who missed the Bitcoin boat will be "OK" with Bitcoins replacing fiat money, then please explain why. Bitcoin won't make people any less greedy.

<comment><USER2> > Hypothetically, let's just say 1% of the world ends up with 99% of the > Bitcoins.

[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Doesn.27t_Bitcoin_unfairly_be...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Doesn.27t_Bitcoin_unfairly_benefit_early_adopters.3F)

> it won't be difficult for the 99% to get control of the network

What does "control of the network" even mean? Do you realize that at best this would make bitcoin totally useless resulting in a lose-lose scenario? Yes, that's totally a worthwhile attempt.

> If you think the 99% of people who missed the Bitcoin boat will be "OK" with > Bitcoins replacing fiat money, then please explain why.

Bitcoin doesn't have to replace fiat money to be successful. Besides, why would they not be? Seems to be the same argument as above, so [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Doesn.27t_Bitcoin_unfairly_be...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#Doesn.27t_Bitcoin_unfairly_benefit_early_adopters.3F)

<comment><AUTHOR> To address the link, I don't deny early adopters should be rewarded. They should be. But if Bitcoin is adopted by even 1% of the world (whether its fair or not) the "reward" could seem out-of-this-world extreme to the average person, if it continues to grow in value at this rate.

If Bitcoin wants more participation (fewer enemies?) ten years from now, there needs to be more incentive to keep it going. I think altcoins could alleviate extreme wealth disparity but that's a separate issue I won't get into. Bitcoins are already a target for theft and hardly anyone knows about them yet, seems reasonable to assume that gets 10x worse as they grow in value 10x.

As far as "control of the network" I was deliberately vague. The more I research Bitcoin there's a number of scenarios, I'm just repeating information I found various places. And don't you think we have only scratched the surface?

How about these?

1\. The blockchain is a big, slow-moving, easy-to-identify target that would be easy (for say an ISP) to detect, destroy, corrupt, etc. People say Bitcoins can't be blocked because all these pirated movies can't be blocked. There's a big difference. Every movie is different. The blockchain is easier to identify. Also people said Bitcoin transactions are small and therefore hard to detect. Wrong again. If say Amazon or Walmart starts using Bitcoin the blockchain will be enormous. Even if it can be trucated somewhat, that doesn't change the fact it's a big, slow-moving and easy to identify target.

2\. Just the fact Bitcoin can be altered to truncate its blockchain means the developers have only one chance to get a major change like that right. There's no "dev server" to emulate a world economy. If there's some little flaw in a major modification to the Bitcoin software, that could collapse all faith in the network. Don't you think? Also the developers are only human. Who could "save" Bitcoin if the developers made an unpopular or catastrophic change? I think it would be more interesting if the Bitcoin software was frozen so that it would not work at all if it was ever modified/reverse-engineered. Granted, I don't understand exactly how Bitcoin changes over time but seems to me experiments/improvements/updates should happen in the altcoins and Bitcoin should be safe from tampering. If the Bitcoin software can't be changed, not even by the developers, that makes the 21 million coin limit more real rather than an imaginary LOL limit.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I Recovered Millions of Transactions Using Tcl (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.activestate.com/blog/2016/08/tcl-big-data-how-i-recovered-millions-transactions-using-tcl <comment><USER2> Not TCL, but my Perl war story was I worked for a printer company. They had somehow gotten someone to record ink cartridge information into external data files. INI files to be precise, one INI per record.

They were literally spending 9 weeks opening about 15,000 INI files and pasting them into an Excel spreadsheet manually.

I was rather silly and made the claim that Perl was designed for this sort of thing, they challenged me and I felt my honour was at stake, so I whipped up a program to do it for them one night and brought it in the next day. I ran it on the INI files, and in about 20 seconds it had put all the data into a CSV file.

They were astounded that I had taken 9 weeks of tedious, error prone data entry and processed it in less than a minute. I just figured it was an interesting thing to do, and told them to keep it quiet as this was really outside my area, but they made me employee of the quarter anyway.

<comment><USER3> This is the curse of Windows - non-technical users assume that everything you can do with a computer _must_ be done via the UI.

This is perhaps not surprising - in the name of "ease of use" Windows works very hard to shoehorn you down the point and click route.

<comment><USER4> Visual is more natural, simple and rich way of cognition for human brain than symbolic expressions, there's nothing wrong with it. What's somewhat pity is the fact all the attempts to create any 'visual programming' tools failed miserably. Although we could easily imagine a tool that allows to point a field in any formatted text like INI file, and point the column in Excel where the values should be inserted, and automatically build the regular expression to parse the bunch of such files - that's not visual programming in any way of course, but if such a tool could be extensible enough, and extensible by the same visual way, I don't know but maybe some significant part of users should be interested enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> TCL is pretty awesome. I hadn't used it since the late 90s, but in a recent project I ended up integrating it into a Go project we're building, and it was _great_. Extraordinarily easy to do, and very powerful.

I really need to write a blog entry about it. It's now a valuable tool in my toolbox.

</comment><comment><USER6> Tcl is bananas. On the one hand, its approach to structuring data (cram everything into strings, including procedures!) is... idiosyncratic and not what I'm used to. On the other, it seems to work hand in glove with the "Unix Way" (for whatever that's worth), and I've never seen a faster way to get a GUI up and running than Tcl/Tk. Not Visual Basic. Not even Smalltalk.

<comment><USER7> It's a bit idiosyncratic for sure. For one I always thought why the hell would you design a language and not use "=" as an assignment operator. On the other hand it's not a good reason to reject a programming language when it has a lot of other good features.

<comment><USER8> > why the hell would you design a language and not use "=" as an assignment > operator

That's one of my favorite things about Tcl. It just makes so much sense. Testing equality is analogous to testing inequality. It's a complex and context-dependent operation. Binding a value to a symbol is a completely different type of operation, and there's no reason for it to look similar. Keeping arithmetic in its own little space makes everything else so much simpler.

Many of the most interesting new languages I've seen which don't come from the C/Unix school use something different for assignment, e.g., Factor (Forth), Clojure (Lisp), etc.

<comment><USER3> Nor is it just the new kids - ":=" for assignment goes back to Pascal and Smalltalk (IIRC Smalltalk used a funky left arrow, like R but a single char, but also allowed := because who has a funky left arrow on their keyboard?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Python is a great way to run Tcl ;-) Seriously though, Python's Tcl bindings are done at the C level and provide great interoperability.

At a previous job I utilized these low level bindings to create higher level bindings. Used reflection of both Python and Tcl to expose themselves to each other. Was able to seamlessly use Tcl objects from Python and vice versa.

<comment><AUTHOR> While browsing a Ruby codebase's config.rb recently, I saw several proc commands followed by bracketed subcommands and wondered if it was for some reason Tcl embedded into a Ruby script. Could that be an example of what you're describing here? What's the use case for that?

<comment><USER10> > While browsing a Ruby codebase's config.rb recently, I saw several proc > commands followed by bracketed subcommands and wondered if it was for some > reason Tcl embedded into a Ruby script

The proc method in Ruby takes a Ruby block, which is delineated either by brackets or do...end. it has nothing to do with embedding Tcl.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article says "Tcl's innate asynchronicity". Does anybody who knows Tcl care to tell more about this?

<comment><USER11> Tcl has built-in event loop functionality. You can put watches on file channels, network sockets or synthetic scripted channels, start the event loop, and have a completely event-driven program.

Writing a simple web server, for example, is trivial.

Tk accesses the C-based event API to turn things like button clicks into events. Python (and Ruby?) ships with Tcl in order to make use of Tk.

There's a thread extension that makes it easy to spawn separate threads which can inject events into the event loop, making hybrid event/thread programming simple.

<comment><USER12> This is right. It's "innately async" in the same way as Node: there is a built in event loop, and just about anything that could block (file I/O, GUI input, etc.) can be accessed through async functions instead.

<comment><USER11> One nice thing about Tcl vs. Node: Tcl doesn't crash if there's an error in one of the asynchronous call stacks. The Tcl interpreter catches the error and passes it to a (customizable) background error processor, and keeps going.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: AppleCare warranty ? - <AUTHOR>

the extra warranty increases total cost of apple product by 20% to 30%  ... is it worth paying that much? and if Apple can't guarantee its product's quality for even first 3 years then why should i buy that product in the first place? <comment><USER2> Quick fact check: Applecare is 10-15% of the cost of macbook airs and 24" iMacs. Maybe an ipod or something is higher, but they are replacing a lot of units dropped in toilets there.

Having bought many apple products starting back with that newfangled Apple][+...

I don't buy Applecare on desktop machines. It isn't rocket science and when they do screw up (one of my iMacG5s went through 3 motherboards with the bad capacitor problems) they typically cover it on extended warranty. Same with an early graphite Airport, bad caps 13 months out, but I replaced them myself before an extended warranty was announced.

Laptops are different though, there is an incentive to cut structure and flirt with the fringes of heat dissipation... I'm about even on laptops. Just before the 3 year period ends I send them in to repair the accumulated defects, such as a mild case of backlight blotchulism and a flakey keyboard backlight in a PBG4. I've extended the life of my PBG4 from 3 to 5 years because I had the warranty. I would not have paid $800 to have it repaired as a 3 year old machine. If I had had applecare on my PB5300 I would have made them fix the SCSI port, but managed to live without it.

Just think of it as insurance. Apple is telling you the expected cost of repairs for years 2 and 3 is around 10-15% of the purchase price. Most machines will not have any Applecare work and it is money wasted, unless you live close enough to the wire that an unexpected $800 bill to keep your computer running is a problem, then you might like it for the insurance aspect.

It added 13% to the cost of the lowest end Macbook Air that I just bought my wife. (Yeah, I know, I paid extra for a slower machine, but she carries it around a lot and wouldn't notice "fast".)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've got AppleCare on my MacBook.

Hard drive failure; call phone support; take MacBook into service center; No drives in stock (backordered, they'll be in stock in 14 days); Me - "Just put a larger drive in and I'll pay the difference."; Apple - "No.";

In the end I asked for my MacBook back, went round the corner to the whitebox computer store, bought a drive for $90, restored my backup and got back to work. Apple sent me a new drive in the post.

AppleCare - bah.</comment>


Monorail.js - Ultra lightweight MVC Framework for Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/runexec/monoRail.js

<comment><USER2> Hmm, picking the name of another MVC framework for your framework isn't great.

<http://www.castleproject.org/monorail/>

<comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)>

<comment><USER4> It's always strange when you see programmers who don't understand why namespace collisions are bad.

<comment><USER3> The annoying part about it is that it's easier than ever to do a search to see if there will be a collision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is that light weight? let's see it has scripts for skeloton projects/models/etc, has it's own orm's, and even ships with its own package manager. that seems like a lot of stuff is you're looking to light weight.

<comment><USER6> _"How is that light weight?"_

Look at the description:

 _"Monorail.js will never force you to install anything not needed for your project. The goal is to use what you need."_

Plus, it's definitely lighter than express.

<comment><USER7> As far as I can tell, this actually uses express.

<comment><USER6> Ah, I stand corrected. I apologize.

I think if I were to use a node MVC framework built on express, I'd go with Matador: <http://obvious.github.com/matador/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Matador actually looks pretty sweet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, here's a list of frameworks for node [https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules#wiki-web- framewo...](https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/modules#wiki-web-frameworks- full)

</comment><comment><USER8> Just wanted to ask: is there any kind of micro-frameworks for Node out there? Something comparable to Flask(for Python) or Sinatra(for Ruby)?

<comment><USER9> I've been using Backbone.js for MV'C' in Node.js and re-using my models on the client side.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, Geddy might be just as good if not better than backbone.</comment></comment></comment>


Passenger date header was incorrectly formatted as week-based year - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/phusion/passenger/pull/93

<comment><USER2> I'm a developer at Phusion.

Thanks everyone for letting us know. We're working on rolling out a new release right now. A new gem, tarball and binaries are coming up.

In the mean time, you can work around this problem by setting a Date header from your application. For example in Rails you can do:

        before_filter { response.date = Time.now.utc }

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > Passenger sometimes gets the date wrong when appending the http Date header > to responses. This happens when the week-based year differs from the > calendar year. It happens because it uses %G to print the year when it > should be using %Y (see this commit: 15ed1d4).

Took me a few hours to track this down -- and it's probably affecting a large majority of the Rails apps that are using a Passenger server.

Hopefully getting the word out can save some folks a few hours of banging their heads on their desks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anybody know why %G was used instead of %Y?

<comment><USER2> Mea culpa. I was looking for a formatter that would always format the year as 4 digits and never as 2, regardless of locale. But I didn't read the documentation correctly and thought that %G was what I needed.

<comment><USER3> Gotcha. I don't use Rails and wasn't trying to rub salt in, it just _seemed_ like there must have been a reason %G was used instead of %Y and I was curious.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why does Google not standardize parental leave for all employees? - <AUTHOR>

It seems to me that Google is in an excellent position to offer generous and standardized parental leave packages across all employees in all countries.
But instead employees are given varying benefits, based on the laws of the country they work in.
Why is this the case?
Seems like Google (and similar companies) are missing a large opportunity for hiring and retention gains... <comment><USER2> >But instead employees are given varying benefits, based on the laws of the country they work in.

I don't imagine so, but it is possible, are there any conflicts within the laws?

You would - of course - follow the letter of the law of the country you are working in before any 'standardization' you would do. Following the law is important.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep absolutely. Maybe perfectly standardized packages aren't possible, but they should (I think?) be able to offer "pretty similar" packages to all employees.</comment></comment>


Crowd-buying a sports team (awesome concept) - <AUTHOR> http://www.springwise.com/lifestyle_leisure/crowdbuying_a_soccer_team_upda/index.php <comment><USER2> This wisdom of the crowd's stuff shouldn't be taken so far.

Democracy works in two ways:

1\. It eliminates the extreme options. 2\. It's designed to ensure representation, not perfomance.

When you look at things that have been designed by committee, you're looking - at best - at mediocrity. This is a good thing when you don't want government performing too well in the wrong direction, but it's a hindrance if you are trying to establish peak performance.

Sports teams are looking for peak performance. The best way to achieve this is to install a knowledgeable dictator. The risk is that the dictator will make the wrong calls. It's a lot like business. Which is why public companies never innovate.

So, even if this flies, the team will be mired in being average. Never winning, never losing. Success would be solely dependent on the oddity of a year that the mediocre prevail.

To me, that defeats the whole purpose for having a team in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's been tried before, unsuccessfully so far: [http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/28/love.the.jets.idg/...](http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9909/28/love.the.jets.idg/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is more realistic. They dont need $500 million (as stated in your link) to buy a team. If you look at the numbers involved it is much more attainable.

<comment><USER3> I think it's less to do with the amount than post-sale management/operational issues.

Imagine the debate over whether or not to sign a particular player, e.g.

Still, it's an idea with appeal: it would be great to be a part-owner of my favorite teams.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything is based on majority vote. With over 50,000 voting members there is enough critical mass that it would be hard to sway the results for political reasons.

<comment><USER3> That might work, if you limit each person to one share of the team (there might be other rules needed, too).

Where it would break down is if a handful of people owned most of the shares, leading to factional in-fighting.

Most of the leagues (like the NFL in the Jets case), though, don't like this kind of ownership structure.

Do you think this group, if it can raise the cash, would be approved?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually a member of the group. Each person has only one vote. The group has already been through all the legal entities in England and has been approached by 4 teams that are interested in the investment.

<comment><USER3> Well, good luck with it.

If you're successful, I'll hit you up for luxury suite tickets when I'm in the UK ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Co2: an object system for C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/peterpaul/co2 <comment><USER2> I have read the code a bit.

So, should I consider it as a C++Lite edition? Because frankly it resembles CFront's coding style to be honest with you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Co2 example really reminded me of Obj-C</comment>


Tell us how you feel about kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd_tnfPoZj8orNC1g5K79Cnxzu5gbgwbfGzjd5kvMAIwmO_fg/viewform?usp=sf_link <comment><USER2> It would be helpful to declare who you are. This form and this HN post does not make it clear whether this is coming from Kubernetes or a random person/company.</comment>


US Man Stole 130m Card Numbers Using SQL Injection Attack - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8206305.stm

<comment><USER2> A bit disconcerting how this supposed fraud investigator is waffling about firewalls?

EDIT: just chatting to my boss about it; the fraud guy (Edward Wilding) came up and he rolled his eyes :) so Im guessing not the sharpest cookie in the investigative draw (my boss used to be a fraud guy)

SQL injection is so vague: anyone got better specifics on what was done? (I hunted around but no joy)

</comment><comment><USER3> If this is the large Heartland break-in from last year, then this guy also managed to install keyloggers/trojans in unallocated disk space on servers inside the datacenter. The trojans collected every track 1 or track 2 magnetic strip off every card processed at the facility for an unknown length of time. Heartland processes about 100,000,000 credit card transactions each month.</comment>


Godel Escher Bach QR Code shadow cube - <AUTHOR> http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:15232

<comment><USER2> Alas, I wish I had thought of this. I made a replica of the cube on the cover of GEB here:

<https://cubehero.com/physibles/iamwil/shadowblock>

It's actually not too hard to do with OpenSCAD or any other modeling tool that allows you to do intersections. So I've tried other three letter acronyms: <https://cubehero.com/physibles/iamwil/shadowblock/print>

For the QR Code Shadowblock in the OP, I wonder how he dealt with supporting all the structures within, but not all combinations of pixels on each face will work. Maybe he just played with it and rotated the QR codes to find a combination that will work.

I have thought about a QR Code Quine, where the QU Code contains an OpenSCAD file that is a model of the QR Code. However, I wasn't sure exactly how to tackle that, since the QR Code decoder is non-trivial.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just in case anyone doesn't get it, it's a reference to the cover for Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach:"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GEBcover.jpg>

<comment><USER4> The single most important book I think I've ever read. I've never read something that I kept coming back to year after year, reading a little farther into it every time. If I was stranded on a desert island with only one book, I'd bring this one. It would keep me busy for more than long enough.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. Especially because the whole book is about how things spring out of nothingness.

<comment><USER4> According to him that's what the books core idea seems to boil down to, but I think I'd bring the book with me because of all the other things as well: "fugues and canons, logic and truth, geometry, recursion, syntactic structures, the nature of meaning, zen buddhism, paradoxes, brain and mind, reductionism and holism, ant colonies, concepts and mental representations, translation, computers and creativity, consciousness and free will, sometimes even art and music of all things!" -preface to the twentieth anniversary edition

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only part of this that would be difficult is ensuring that there is no single dark pixel which is surrounded by all white pixels. As the dark pixel represents material and the white pixel is empty space, you'll need to use thin supporting structures within the QR margin of error otherwise there wouldn't be anything to hold the material in place. Do a Google Image search for "letter stencil" for what I mean by thin supporting structures.

That small caveat aside, it's super easy to construct: start with a solid block of material, take QR code 1, and from one face carve out the white pixels all the way through, keeping any thin connector pieces as required. Rotate to another face, do the same for QR code 2, rotate again, and do the last face for QR code 3. The remaining structure is what you 3D print.

<comment><USER7> Did you even go to the link? First picture on the page obviously shows narrow diagonal connector pieces as required to support weak or unsupported components.

<comment><USER6> You must have misread my comment. I stated that the connecting pieces are the only hard part in generating such a cube, not that connecting pieces weren't used in the cube shown.

The next time you feel someone is in error, consider presenting your argument in a nicer tone. The use of "did you even" and "obviously" makes you seem like a dick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of a thing I keep not having the time to design and 3D print, so I'm going to say it here so someone else can make it for me.

Platonic solid Matryoshka "dolls".

Essentially, I would like to have a sphere (admittedly not a Platonic solid) which splits in half to reveal an icosahedron which splits in half to reveal a dodecahedron and so on through octahedron, cube and tetrahedron. Making them fit nicely one inside the other.

</comment><comment><USER9>
      Note that QR codes cannot be read in mirror image, so only
      3 of the 6 possible cube orientations cast a readable
      shadow.

Well, now I can't stop thinking about QR code rotations. How big is the subset of QR codes that are valid in more than one orientation? (some combination of rotated, flipped, or mirrored). Treating the marks for position/alignment/etc as a separate layer and flip/rotate/mirror the rest of the code.

What about the different sizes of code? Can it only be done with, say Version 4 and not Version 3 codes?

<comment><USER10> >How big is the subset of QR codes that are valid in more than one orientation?

Given the placement of the position and alignment markers in a valid QR code it looks like the only symmetry it can have is reflection (mirror-image) symmetry about its main diagonal (the line from the top-left to the bottom- right) [1]. If you take any given QR code and replace the part of it that is below the main diagonal with a mirror image of the part above it then in the worst case you will lose 50% of the information contained in the code (actually less since the pixels on the diagonal stay there no matter what). Now, the content of a QR code generated with the heaviest error correction settings can be recovered even if up 30% of its data is lost [2]. If you generate a QR code where the part above the main diagonal is similar enough to the one below it (meaning at least 50% - 30% = 20% of symmetrically located pixels are the same color) then such a QR code should survive being made fully symmetrical.

The above is a simplification, though, since, generally speaking, error correction in QR codes operates on blocks and not whole codes. In practice it also may or may not be possible to generate a sufficiently symmetrical code in the first place, let alone one with the specific content you want.

[1] See <http://imgur.com/YMNIsgc>. The red line show the diagonal, the green arrows point out pairs of symmetrical pixels.

[2] [http://archive.is/20120915/http://www.tec- it.com/de/support/...](http://archive.is/20120915/http://www.tec- it.com/de/support/knowbase/symbologies/qrcode/Default.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone help explain how exactly this works? It casts a shadow that is a valid QR code? How does it cast a shadow? On what does it cast a shadow?

It looks awesome and someone clearly worked incredibly hard on it. I just want to understand it better.

<comment><USER12> It's meant to be 3D printed.

One you have that 3D printed cuboid in your possession, you point a flashlight towards one face, have the opposite face face a white surface, and scan the resulting shadow with a smartphone– and boom! It's quite insane.

<comment><USER13> The questions is, can any QR code be made to work or are you pretty limited in the info represented by the QR code?

I don't understand how QR codes work well enough to know the answer.

<comment><USER6> You can do this for any three sets of 1-bit images. There's nothing special except for ensuring that you have thin connecting pieces so that any "island" where material would otherwise be surrounded by empty space remains connected to other pieces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It looks like this is currently built for an infinitely distant light source. The sun might work, but you'd need mirrors to get the 3-shadow effect.

Fortunately, it should be relatively easy to tweak the shape for light sources at various distances. (though the easy way won't yield a cube.)

<comment><USER7> Text at link: _This is a complex image. To get a readable shadow your light source will need to be pretty far away to get a flat pass through. Perhaps someday I'll do a version with transformed geometry, matching specific close- up point sources._

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is the first thing I have ever wanted a 3D printer for.

<comment><USER16> ditto, I was just about to post the same comment. I have been watching 3d printing long enough. I read GEB a long time ago and it was the book that convinced me to go into computer science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17>
        Note that QR codes cannot be read in mirror image

It should be simple to make a QR reader that also reads the image flipped horizontally and/or vertically. That way reflections of QR codes could be read too. Maybe some readers already do this. The use case ould be quite small though.

<comment><USER18> One use case would be windows with a QR printed on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could this be printed with a 3D printer? I think that would be a fun thing to have sitting on a desk.

<comment><USER20> That is the very thing it has been designed for, from the beginning and through every step. The huge image on the linked-to site is of a 3D-printed object. Also, the site (Thingieverse) is a widely-known repository for 3D-printable object designs.

So: yes.</comment></comment>


Microsoft Word, RIP: 1983 - 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-word-1983---2009-rest-in-peace.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> This article has a nice tone, but I think the author makes a lot of generalizations by simply applying his current job/situation to the world at large. Specifically, I disagree with the following:

1) The world is going paperless. Alas, this is not happening. While it's true that some areas, like technical writing and review, _have_ made progress towards this goal, printer supplies remain a truly lucrative market.

2) People prefer software with fewer features. Yes, it's true that _people_ prefer a simple program that does simple things, _organizations_ have laundry lists of things they want and tend to buy the thing that does the most for the cheapest, even if there is overlap (insert long rant about organizational purchasing here)

3) The page metaphor is dead -- it's all web now. This would be great if it were true, but I seriously doubt it. Lots of people (like me) prefer a hard copy of work when editing. In addition, pages give reference points during conversation, stuff like "check out the first sentence in the third paragraph on page 3" which gets very unwieldy without pages

4) Superior collaboration software translates into superior document creation software. Wiki is great. Love it. But in lots of places, like law offices, when you create a document, _it has a very specific legal status_. It must be kept for a period of time. It must not be edited without a clear trail of edits. Etc. For folks in the healthcare, legal, and insurance world (among others) documents are simply electronic versions of printed pages that have a lot of rules associated with them. This isn't a societal convention as much as it is a legal one. Good luck on getting that changed anytime soon.

Word is a feature-heavy monster, no doubt about it. Nobody uses 99% of all that stuff in there. But there's a long way from making that observation to officiating at its funeral.

The rumors of Word's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

<comment><USER3> I think this is spot-on.

From a student's perspective, taking notes in class in Word is the de facto standard at this point. The outlining mode is intuitive and efficient.

Now let's say we were to replace this with MediaWiki. When I tab and shift-tab it won't indent and un-indent properly. While I'm sure there is Wiki markup to do outlining, there is no way you'd be able to do it fast enough in class while you're trying to get down everything the professor says.

The author, as parent points out, makes the common mistake of assuming what is true for one in a group is true for the entire group.

<comment><USER4> I still use word for some things, but taking quick notes is not one of them. Pure text is the best way to take quick notes, because you don't have to worry about formatting (and using the mouse to do formatting). If you learn how wikimedia works, it is probably easier than writing in word...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Pages are dead"... but his article is divided into two pages?

<comment><USER6> I get the irony, but I suppose here it is so that the ads all get a second hit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I completely agree with the premise of this article, but this line baffles me: ... Word's document format will always be complicated, even if it is natively XML and completely open, simply because it has to support all the thousands of features that Word itself provides.

This is akin to saying that binary has to be complicated because of all the numbers it can represent. Most features don't require a file format change in any way, even when storing, say, undo histories for new features. Word documents really aren't that complicated, unless they're made to be.

<comment><USER8> You must do some research on how complex OOXML is. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML> .Initially there was a huge opposition in making OOXML a open standard, but eventually Microsoft succeeded in pushing the standard. Ever wondered why a empty word document's size is ~34 KB?

<comment><USER7> I'm not arguing that it _isn't_ complex, I'm arguing that the feature-set of Word has nothing to do with the complexity of the file format by necessity. His assertion that the feature-set of Word is what makes it complex is simply foolish.

<comment><USER9> It's true that any _arbitrary_ file format's complexity doesn't _necessarily_ have to be tied to the feature set of the authoring tool (e.g. LaTeX), but in this case much of the extraneous complexity of OOXML _is_ tied to Word's feature set. In particular, the need for backward compatibility with features from previous versions of Word make this format more complex than it needs to be, given the current feature set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm happy with Latex & Google docs.

Anyway, well done MS Office.

<comment><USER11> I agree, the main reason (besides the fact that LaTeX is the greatest for any type of document, and that greatness is extended by XeTeX,) is because I still believe one must have good file structure. As much as CMSes and Wikis are the rage today in web trendiness, you still need to manually organize them in some way, and this doesn't solve the problem that the article hints at about sticking them on a network share. If it's gonna be lost in a network share it's gonna be lost in a wiki or a CMS. The difference is you might not be running an indexing service for your docs on the network share but searching is intrinsic to the wiki.

And also, git for tracking changes, version control isn't simple, I find that MediaWiki's version control is more annoying to use than git.

<comment><USER12> Outlines in Word is excellent for ensuring that a document has excellent structure.

I use latex a lot (more than Word) yet people do not see its limitations. It would be best if Latex is replaced with something like open source Adobe Framemaker or something.

<comment><USER13> LaTeX has limitations?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Office 2007 just got installed on my box at work, and the first thing I saw was a blue haze of controls and tabs that just confused me to no end.

When the feature set is as mature as what Office has, replacing the UI makes for more "look how old my current version is!" fodder for upgrades, but doesn't do much for making people on the fence want to stay with the product.

Then again, I am curious to know what the penetration levels are for various wiki products vs Word in the business market. I just can't imagine large non- computer companies embracing wikis terribly quickly. Word documents as data transfer still provide a simple and easy-to-understand model for how to write and share, even if it's a pain-in-the-ass in actual use.

If wikis want to replace word effectively, they'll need something like an Adobe AIR client. Web browsers are nice for lots of things, but I've nearly pulled my disks out and punted them across the room when an extra tab/backspace causes the browser to go back a page.

<comment><USER15> As I say above, a "real" word processor is much more than a text editor with WYSIWYG formatting. Anyone who works on reasonably complex documents would expect their software to keep track of cross references to tables, figures, sections, pages, etc. This is a feature than simply doesn't matter when writing a letter or a CV which is probably what most people actually use a word processor for. But Word 2007 has a whole tab devoted to just this, and another whole tab devoted to change tracking. The people who need it _really_ need it, and ultimately they're the ones that decide what word processor the organization uses. You might get them to switch to OpenOffice, but Google Docs is _long_ way from ready for prime time.

<comment><USER14> But Word's pretty terrible at that stuff, too. I've nearly thermite'd my machine when word screws up my styles or starts dancing with my inline images. I've stuck to svn/latex/emacs for real docs. Word tries, but it's just infuriating to make it put out a well-formatted, consistent document when you hit over ~150 pages.

If you can do it, you've got sk1llz I don't.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that's bloody annoying. But my point is: people who believe that Google Docs is a viable substitute for Word (and OpenOffice, etc) are probably not trying to write particularly complex documents, because if they were they'd have run into missing features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Though Google Apps has very much less features compared to Office, a small business could well operate perfectly just with Google Apps. I'm not sure what percentage of Microsoft's revenues are generated by small businesses but Microsoft is sure facing a tough competition this time. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER16> I'm sure a lot of buinesses (small or large) find the idea of hosting their documents (often containing business secrets or of critical importance) on the servers of another entity very, very frightening.

<comment><USER17> I think this is a critical flaw, in this day of HIPAA and SarbOx. Any business that allows someone else to store their data (or even process it) risks personal responsibility for their officers -- and what corporate CTO is going to risk that?

<comment><USER18> I don't buy this. I'm not an expert on S.O. but I'm close to one in regards to HIPAA. As far as HIPAA is concerned as long as you have a Business Associate Agreement that clearly spells out the privacy level expected from the other party you aren't going to get in trouble for a HIPAA violation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In a small company I worked for, we decided to put most of the internal writing into our MediaWiki. Project plans, memos, design whitepapers, meeting minutes, vacation plan, internal encyclopedia, FAQs for locally installed tools etc.

Earlier, the company had installed a TWiki, which quickly filled up with poorly-named pages. With a mandatory naming convention and readily available copy-paste templates (I wish MediaWiki had MoinMoin-like templates), this was no longer a problem.

It worked well for most of those things except for project plans (no way of summing up those table cells). For external documentation however (we offered consulting and engineering for safety-critical software), we used DocBook.

</comment><comment><USER20> By the features and functionalities that he writes, the software that can kill MS Word seems to be Google Wave.

</comment><comment><USER21> +1 for closed casket.

</comment><comment><USER22> I had never given this any thought at all but totally agree with the article. My company uses GoogleDocs for everything but rarely prints anything out. I'll have to look into the wiki thing.</comment>