What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit? - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-concept-would-improve-everybodys-cognitive-toolkit <comment><USER2> Those are all too specialized. Although not exactly science, I would recommend number sense. This is how to estimate. Approximate, ratios, percents, add, subtract, divide, multiply and apply them to daily life. Many people can divide but a lot of people don't know how to figure out how long it will take to travel 2 miles when going approximately 60mph.

Even harder but oh so wonderful if it were true - knowing the difference between conditional and joint probabilities. Expecting to flip 5 heads in a row is a small chance. Flipping the 5th head is far more likely.

Another: the question, hypothesize, measure, discard/refine loop.

Oh and if you have lots of people doing something with a small chance of occurring, just because you managed it does not rule out mere luck. Being amongst those few who managed to fairly flip 5 heads in a row in a group of 160 is not to do with skill.

honorable mentions: opportunity cost, expected value, mean vs median, solving equations of one variable, newton's first law, how to write if statements and foreach loops. Finally in this day and age when I say graph to someone circles joined by lines and not a curve on a 2d grid should come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd highly encourage everyone to read Kahneman's book. It really makes you appreciate the fact that what we consider "thinking" and "decision making" are usually just sequences of lazy cognitive biases that [poorly] approximate solutions for substituted questions. Unfortunately, I suspect that there already is a response bias to the readership of that book, since only those who are willing to question their own thinking process and metacognition would be interested in this kind of book.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also enjoyed that book very much, and I'm trying to expose it to people who otherwise would not come in contact with it or the general topics it discusses. We're probably preaching to the choir here :)

<comment><USER4> I hadn't heard of that book and because of this post, its on my reading list. So, some people in this choir maybe wayward and would do well with sermons like these :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Martin Rees, I'm calling you out:

"even though the concept may not yet have percolated all parts of Kansas, and Alaska."

That's pretty cold, man. And since when is beating up on one's socio-political opponents to feed our prejudices and toot our own horns a _scientific_ attitude? Yes, even when you happen to be right.

I mean, Dawkins I can expect that from, but from the President of the Royal Society / Master of Trinity College, Cambridge?

You need to scroll down the page and read that next bit there about cognitive humility, jerk.

<comment><USER6> Makes a fascinating read but it is sad how some of these highly reputed thinkers proclaim their personal views as the sole truth. Their attitude reminds me on politicians with their same old black and white demagogy.

<comment><USER7> There is a reply that says "Evolution is a scientific fact, not a personal view." that has been permbanned !

Editors ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A theory which makes false predictions is false. It doesn't matter how many words you can marshal in its support, it doesn't matter how many celebrities you get to approve of it, it doesn't matter how great the universe would be if it were true, it doesn't matter how many people wearing white lab coats swear up and down it's true or how many pieces of paper they wave at you claiming it's true, a theory which makes false predictions is false. That is the only relevant metric for a scientific theory.

(For brevity's sake, I simplify the criterion for deciding what theory is false. I'm not sure the complexity of a full specification is called for here.)

<comment><USER9> _A theory which makes false predictions is false._

Absolutely.

Now please note the following simple logical step:

> A theory which makes false predictions is not useful.

This is probably an assertion which is implicit in your mind, but is it really true? Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen cases where a theory which makes false predictions can be useful. It can be useful to motivate people, or manipulate them. It can be useful as a starting point for a better theory. It can be useful as an approximation when a better theory is not available. It can be useful as an argument to oppose someone with a different theory who is trying to manipulate people in a different direction.

Theories that make false predictions can be tremendously useful - even within the framework of science (as a starting point or an approximation).

<comment><USER8> It's a simplified POV for generic people's cognitive toolkits. If they can internalize this idea, then you can move on to trying them on the caveats and details and levels of falseness and etc etc etc. But _way_ too often, the existence of caveats and details is used as an excuse to simply discard the undesirable theory, or to claim that theory A has caveats (example: "Newtonian physics isn't quite right") and theory B has caveats (example: epicycles), so why not just go with theory B?

You're not wrong, but the more sophisticated approach you're suggesting is also more dangerous in its own way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Learning to believe half a dozen impossible things before breakfast I'd say is the most illuminating. It informs us how easy it is for our views to be shaped and cautions us to act with more humility and more tolerance for people who believe in something different.

Another one is to learn the transformative power of environment on a person. (see recent article on heroin addiction among Vietnam war soldiers). If we are so easily influenced and changed by our society, then what kind of society do we need to shape to create a better self?

<comment><USER11> "If we are so easily influenced and changed by our society, then what kind of society do we need to shape to create a better self?"

The number one problem in my not so humble opinion: the 40 hour workweek.

What would happen to society if we could only work 4 hours a day? Would the economy crumble? Or would we learn to rationalize business processes, automate crapwork, prioritize better, stop consuming needless junk, think twice before engaging in wasteful projects, reflect more, etc?

Do less, but better and wiser. That sums up a sane society in my view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "What would prove my assumption (or idea) wrong?"

It falls under experiment design, but it's a much more straightforward and easy to understand question. You can ask kids that question (they're quite good at it). Really helps narrow down avenues of inquiry & speed up your problem-solving.

It's only useful if the person is already interested in being less wrong, but everyone is interested in being less wrong about _something_. When they (you) are, this is an excellent question to ask.

</comment><comment><USER13> No human is perfect. The only way to expand your pool of _correct_ knowledge is to spend time seeing things from competing perspectives, allow the possibility of being wrong, and to evaluate ideas based on evidence.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm greatly enjoying the read, and it's a question that appeals to me greatly. Most of us frequently make a statement akin to "everybody else is stupid", although we usually except those around us at that time. After all, only __other __people make that class of mistake. We'd never do that. It's just pruning the gene pool!

The reality is a little more uncomfortable to accept, and a lot of it lies in the fact that we don't always know __how __to think, leading to us not knowing __what __to think.

Side note: I'm disappointed in the lack of copyediting in most of those essays.

<comment><USER15> Vilayanur Ramachandran should probably have proof-read his, after listing four examples he forgets one. He was probably trying to decide which was the better example, cold fusion or telepathy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My favorite, from Steward Brand:

 _Confronting a difficult problem we might fruitfully ask, "What would a microbe do?"_

</comment><comment><USER17> That you are running on hostile hardware, and that "you" only has access to a small part of this hardware. This clears upa lot of confusion once it clicks for people IME.

<comment><USER18> I always find this Yudkowsky-esque conceit somewhat lacking. It's not that one shouldn't examine the motivations of your various... motivations.

But it just seems so close to depersonalization, as witnessed by your interesting pluralization mismatch ('"you" only has'). That supposedly hostile methodology is actually very sensible once you understand it.

I suppose that's what comes from assuming that the hostile hardware is merely a statistical assertion of the Bayesian variety.

And apparently it is functional for some people, so... I suppose that's merit enough.

<comment><USER17> "personalization" to me implies some sort of narrative that strings together your behaviors into a supposedly coherent personality. In this respect depersonalization is good.

<comment><USER18> That's hilarious. You guys (assuming you're arguing the lesswrong perspective) are an intellectual house of cards, you know. Eliezer can't even keep his house in order.

<comment><USER17> Quinean naturalism + cognitive science is a house of cards. Good to know. Do you have any other useful information?

<comment><USER18> Attacks are directed at the weakest point, not the strongest.

<comment><USER17> do you have a substantive critique to link to or should I take it on faith that such a thing exists?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This one is more method than concept, but it's pretty central to science: It's okay to change your mind. Knowledge is based on facts devoid of moral value, and some of these facts will be replaced as we learn more about reality. A body of knowledge that can rebuild itself in the face of new evidence, and goes so far as to seek out new evidence, is one that gets stronger and healthier.

</comment><comment><USER20> My favorite: Signal Detection Theory. It seems applicable to many different areas in life especially as we become more and more data oriented. Which emails to read, which server exceptions to respond to, which person talking to you is attracted to you, which visitors will buy, etc., etc.

It wrinkled my brain and got my pulse quickened.

</comment><comment><USER21> My pick, "marginal benefit" and conversely, the sunk cost fallacy.

</comment><comment><USER22> I liked Richard Dawkins' pick of the double-blind experiment. However, the significance of it for the lay person is entirely in why it is necessary. The concept itself is only a consequence. It's nice for people to know what a double-blind experiment is, but it doesn't give them an instant ability to evaluate scientific research. Even double-blind experiments can be flawed, and you wouldn't want people thinking they could trust the validity of a study just because it's double-blind. If consumers and voters started demanding double-blind experiments, advertisers and other liars would have no problem producing misleading results from double-blind studies.

No, the significance of double-blind studies is in why scientists have to go to such extraordinary lengths to escape bias. The ways bias can influence judgment and can be communicated subconsciously between people are pretty amazing, and they justify the skepticism that scientifically literate people take for granted but other people take for unreasonable stubbornness. "My uncle has seen ghosts, my cousin has seen ghosts, and I just told you I saw a ghost. Why don't you believe in ghosts? You just refuse to believe because paranormal phenomena are embarrassing to your narrow scientific worldview."

To help people understand why scientifically literate people think they way they do, we need to tell them stories about how bias affects experiments and leads to bogus results. In his essay about cargo cult science, Richard Feynman tells a great story about an experimenter who discovered an unexpected source of bias in an experimental setup for rats running a maze. That's a perfect example for the general scientific audience, for whom rats running mazes is an icon of objective quantitative science, but the general public needs examples where psychological bias creates results that they personally know to be important and know to be false. Understanding those stories will give them a completely new outlook on the information they take in every day.

Also, the stories need to put people in a serious frame of mind. No matter what their level of ignorance, people have enough meta-cognitive sophistication to worry that if they absorb our scientific skepticism they will miss out on a lot of fun things. They _like_ believing in ghosts. They _like_ believing in aliens. They like believing that there are extraordinary things in the world that are as accessible to them as science and technology are to the nerds. We're trying to rob them of their fun. Sure, they can still play at believing, but it won't be quite as thrilling. (It really is just as fun to watch _The X-Files_ or read Harry Potter when you're scientifically literate, but I don't think they'd believe us if we told them :-) Also, it's a lot less fun to listen to your friends tell stories about how they saw a ghost in the Winchester Mystery House and how they know it was real because the tour guide knew what it looked like without being told because other people had seen the same one. Sigh.)

To get around resistance to the lifeless, booooring scientific worldview, we need something awful to shake people out of that fun frame of mind. Children dying of cancer because of biased studies, something like that. Even better, children getting abducted and molested. TV news shows know how to make people pay attention; let's put their techniques to good use. Unfortunately, my scientific education stopped after my sophomore year of college, so I'll leave it up to others to provide concrete examples ;-)

<comment><USER23> Just making people aware that _any_ cognitive biases exist would be a huge win.

<comment><USER24> Whenever I'm pretty sure of a hunch I have, I like to review this list to remember how utterly useless human cognition is:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are we supposed to add ours now? If so then

"Free will does not exist"

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

</comment><comment><USER26> Designing experiments to differentiate between possible explanations. It is the key to problem solving in general.

For example - when I debug program, I often fail to apply this concept, and change things randomly to guess what's wrong, or stare at screen guessing. Most often, controlled experiment answers the question faster and more definitely, than guessing, or experimenting without plan.

</comment><comment><USER27> Develop your ability to create complete silence in your mind. Subconscious control over the inner workings of your subconscious mind is what Richard Feynman was working on.

Thought is about clearing the table, placing the tools on the table, moving the tools around, isolating the product, removing it, then starting over by clearing the table. Most humans never take anything off the table. Learn to clear your mind's table.

<http://www.cyberbore.com/puzzle/klok.html>

<comment><USER19> That sounds useful, but not a scientific notion from what you're telling us. Could you start by defining what you mean by clearing the table? Is there any way to compare/contrast it to what sleep does?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not a scientific one, but a mathematical one:

Hypothesis testing.

Statistics inverts your thinking, because it asks you to only tentatively accept every single conclusion you make ("fail to reject").

All science rests on this, the twinned ideas that 1) something must be testable for it to be useful and 2) it is only through embracing uncertainty (it _is_ possible for a coin flipped 50 times to come up heads 50 times) that one can mediate certainty.

</comment><comment><USER27> Stop asking dumb questions:

<http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>

And get Motivated, this video gave me years of motivation.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsSC2vx7zFQ>

Hold a man underwater, watch him fight, tell him, when you want to succeed as much as you want to breath there, then you will be successful. Thing is, most people don't want to be successful, they want to date, they want to party, they want to EAT, they want to sleep and have sex and have nice cars, nice houses, nice wives. When you want to be successful as much as you want to breath, you will be successful. It's all about priority.

</comment><comment><USER27> Your mind is a symphony of interdependent systems, specifically sulfur ion channels, like dominoes that right themselves. The software that runs on these sulfur ion channels are not optimized for how your brain works because our schools today were designed by people who didn't believe processing was done in the brain.

To improve your cognitive toolkit, understand how and why your brain processes data, and change the way you think to improve processing speed 100 times. This book tells you how.

[http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Performance-Hacks-Tools- Overclock...](http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Performance-Hacks-Tools- Overclocking/dp/0596101538)

</comment><comment><USER27> You need to learn how to learn, read the article on page 22 of this HN Magazine, When I read it my life changed.

<http://issuu.com/babo/docs/hackermonthly-issue1>

</comment><comment><USER27> Coffee, Espresso, monster energy, redbulls and certain Chocolates are drugs that can put your body into panic, fight or flight mode, use too many of these drugs and your overall output is greatly diminished.

Understand the power of the drugs in these drinks, and respect them, only use these drugs on things where you are growing yourself in a positive way. Use them while you are in a self destructing situation and your brain orients itself to optimize for that.

<http://visual.ly/15ish-things-worth-knowing-about-coffee>

</comment><comment><USER27> Will power is a muscle, like your forearm, if it is atrophied then you are not taking time out to purposefully exercise it.

Philip Zimbardo talked about the formation of will-power in children, it has a direct influence on the success later in life. Improve your own cognitive toolkit by getting another child off on the right foot.

From the video, children who are predisposed to deny themselves pleasure by holding out for a future reward differentiate the rich from the poor.

<http://fora.tv/2008/11/12/Philip_Zimbardo_The_Time_Paradox>

</comment><comment><USER27> Learn by heart and be able to name all of the fallacies used in conversation, there are about 200 of them used every day. Practice spotting them on tv, radio and in conversation. Humans are remarkably illogical, knowing the names of every fallacy helps, commit all of these to memory:

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

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

</comment><comment><USER27> You need to focus on and cultivate your tenacity, listen to this video.

Video about how our educational system produces (or doesn't) entrepreneurs, the keyword is tenacity.

[http://fora.tv/2010/04/14/Developing_the_Next_Generation_of_...](http://fora.tv/2010/04/14/Developing_the_Next_Generation_of_Entrepreneurs)</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone developing for Roku or similar platforms? - <AUTHOR>

I'm also interested in hearing opinions on the future of this market and 'on demand' content for TV. <comment><USER2> Not Roku but I'm going to be porting a webapp to a boxee app soon enough. I'll share once I do!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to comment even if you aren't developing for Roku or similar</comment>


Answering Health Questions via Text with IBM Watson and Twilio SMS - <AUTHOR> https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/03/30/answering-health-questions-via-text-ibm-watson-twilio-sms/

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/05/29/best-hacks- wats...](https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/05/29/best-hacks-watson- bluemix/)</comment>


SMT Solving on an iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~bornholt/post/z3-iphone.html <comment><USER2> > The i7-7700K is a desktop CPU drawing at least 45 watts of power and clocked > at 4.5 GHz when running a single-threaded workload; in contrast, the iPhone > was unplugged, probably doesn't draw 10% of that power, and runs (we > believe) somewhere in the 2 GHz range

A12 runs at 2.5Ghz, and draws ~3.64W of power. I also think the actual power draw of the i7-7700K may be north of 45W, Anandtech claims 90W (with a TDP of 91W).

I bet if you could pop a heatsink on the A12(X) and overclock it/up the TDP, it would come very close or beat intel at most single-threaded applications.

Source: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max- re...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review- unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4)

<comment><AUTHOR> I cleaned up that text a little bit -- the 7700K doesn't draw the full 91W TDP when only a single core is loaded, as in this experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> a. single threaded code

b. extended benchmark duration - no thermal throttling encountered

c. straight forward C compiler - no special code for the GPU unit or whatever

d. main reason is probably memory and cache configuration

I think it is time to consider A(RM) and Intel cores at par. Qualcomm cores maybe X% slower but they will close the gap.

It is now a question of system trade-offs, as designers jangle memory sizes, cache sizes, cores, cooling, vector extensions, etc

This is a really pivotal event.

And dont forget AMD challenging Intel on like-for-like cores.

Its pretty amazing that noone has put together a real ARM alternative for the server side.

<comment><USER4> The consequences of that are big. This will lead to commoditization of IP cores, cpus, and this will lead to a race to the bottom with the likes of Allwinner, Amlogic, Rockchip, NXP offering products competitive with Intel, Amd, Apple, Samsung. As the margins will go to near-0, companies like Intel will suffer the most.

This is assuming that semiconductor process improvements will significantly slow down or completely stop.

<comment><USER5> Agreed this can lead to interesting times again in the cpu space. I guess this can lead to two scenarios : either there are possible improvements that are possible but were not necessary for intel to unleash to be dominant, thus leading to significant improvements (in whichever direction, parallelism, power, cache, price) and compute will be better for the same price thanks to competition or investments won't be worth the perf gains and while prices will go down, performance will stagnate since there won't be much incentive to pay ten times the price for 10% improvements (random BS numbers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for this - with the release of the A12X Bionic, I've wanted to do something similar - i.e. build some specialized tools to leverage that CPU for atypical / non-mobile use cases.

I wish Apple would get on with it and include Terminal.App and the FreeBSD user land and Xcode for iOS so we can start running a shell and doing interesting things with this new hardware :-)

<comment><USER7> Yes, as a previous-gen iPad Pro owner, the biggest regret with it is, that I cannot run even some very basic Unix programs on this great hardware. A more open iPad - even if the whole Unix userland would be contained to a sandbox - would be a dream.

<comment><USER8> It seems Apple has some really good profit margins on it's hardware. So, in theory nothing is stopping System76 or a new competitor from introducing high quality iPad-like Unix systems.

<comment><USER9> ...Except lack of design team to do all the custom design work that Apple does. The systems you talk about are assembled from off the shelf parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd definitely believe that cache plays a big role -- while I don't know nearly as much as the author about how SMT solvers work, I've seen how much Z3 bogs down when two instances are running in parallel. That's quite consistent with the cache explanation.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really like the new Apple hardware ; it's fast enough to do most things on (like this example), but there are no real serious production apps for developers. I have been building my own tooling for iPad but it's really not something that can be released. I do use the iPad as daily driver for most things, but writing code on it is still not very feasible. There is no way (as far as I know) to 'catch' actual crashing processes, for instance if you make a boo boo when coding something with UIKit (check Continuous editor for iPad for an example of something that will be crashing completely all the time when/if you try anything serious on it), the entire app will crash and that's not really workable. If it is possible to actual prevent that, it would be possible to make an actual interpreter with a debugger and make a programming environment on it.

But for experiments and in-house tooling, it works very well, and I barely have to touch my laptop ever because I have enough tooling to do most things I need to do.

Small things are; more developer freedom (allowing fuller control; probably will happen very very slowly) and better keyboard (for the iPad Pro).

<comment><USER11> EDIT: by hardware I mean to say the mobile hardware, not the laptops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Exciting. And the cache size is likely the main reason. But that can not be concluded from the analysis.

>>VTune agrees, and says that Z3 spends a lot of time waiting on memory while iterating through watched literals.

But how much is "a lot" is not specified. And the propagation also allocates memory sometimes, to keep the learned clauses. Not sure how Z3 manages this, but couldn't it be that the mallocs are just slower on that desktop, so an OS issue?

</comment><comment><USER13> It's worth keeping in mind that Intel tied architecture to process node, and have been stuck on 14nm for many years. Very little changes have been made to Skylake (2015) by Intel even with the latest 9th gen release. They're starting to look long in the tooth on many fronts, AMD's SMT is more efficient, and AMD has a much better boost algorithm as well (Precision Boost 2), among other aspects.

Had their roadmap not tied node to arch, this comparison wouldn't look so damning. Also, many engineers left Intel for Apple because they're talented and tired of releasing Skylake every year. Once Intel fully decouples node and arch, we should see non-mobile CPUs running away from mobile chips like the A12.

This benchmark is essentially Intel's 2015 design on 14nm vs Apple's 2018 design on 7nm.

<comment><USER14> > This benchmark is essentially Intel's 2015 design on 14nm vs Apple's 2018 > design on 7nm.

Except it's what Intel is selling in 2018.

<comment><USER13> I'm not trying to offend anyone who feels compelled to be naturally defensive or take some sort of "side" here.

Nor am I defending Intel (I recently chose and now use a Ryzen 2700X), I'm just contributing additional facts and context to the conversation for anyone who wasn't aware of it since I read all the comments here and no one mentioned it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Could Apple's next "innovation" not be a consumer product but to own the chip world? The iPhone "just" being the beta test for the chips?

<comment><USER16> They probably don't want to sell those chips for Android to keep their competitive advantage, and the PC market is probably too small to be worth the investment compared to the iOS market.

<comment><USER5> Intel is currently worth 1/5 of Apple 1 Trillion. I guess they may want to grow by 20%, but not at the price of exclusivity oof the 1bn device market chip exclusivity - however I'm not sure anyone has an iphone because it's the best benchmark performing phone. What's next, overclocking, liquid-chilled phones ? (after looking at it for fun, yes, it does seem to exist, just look up liquid cooling gaming phone ).

<comment> ben-schaaf I'd bet that if a mobile chip manufacturer unlocked their chip for overclocking, someone is going to put it under LN2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this probably has a little to do with AMD. AMD wasn't there to push intel and they introduced incremental upgrades for a while. I remember when athlon64 was introduced it really kicked intel into gear. At this point it might be that there might be less you can do to improve performance since we might be hitting semiconductor limits, but I think a lack of competition probably didn't help/</comment>


Extreme makeover on videos - kickass technology from stanford  - <AUTHOR> http://zunavision.stanford.edu/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an amazing new way for advertisements.. If feasible legally - like not disrupting the copyrights on current video.

I particularly liked the portion where the ads on the stadium keep changing. Bill boards, static advertisements would take a whole new dimension. For folks watching the same game on TV - the TV channels can cut a deal to rotate ads over there.

I think one of the big display ad guys would acquire them.</comment>


Email is not free (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2013/04/email-is-not-free <comment><USER2> _" These traits were all present in our outlier group. They had an open and egalitarian office, with no individual offices. Every screen had an array of windows open — Skype, GChat, Campfire, Dropbox, Yammer, and Google Docs — the right technology for the right situation._"

Surely none of these alternatives to email is "free" either. The cost of recovering your focus after being interrupted by any type of communication is high. At least emails, being asynchronous, can be easily ignored until later if you're concentrating on something important.

Also, if you use a half dozen different modes of communication, I imagine it would be hard to look for something that someone sent you last week.

</comment><comment><USER3> this is pretty much an advertisement for google docs instead of email.

The article paints gdoc over email as the holy grail to fix communication. Gdoc barely fix document sharing!

There is no concept of groups. Well, there is, but it is broken beyond repair. Same for search (who would have thought). The default for a new doc is for it to be private. And people will often make a copy from group A, and share the copy with group B, so group A doesn't see that this person gave access to group B. Then this grow exponentially.

Another permission problem is that if you don't have access to edit, you also can't see history!

All this is made worse by the fact that the URLs are meaningless big hash strings.

Google docs are only good for a single use-case: if you are producing documents with several hands. And only while the document is live. After that, I hope you publish it some place more sane, even if it is copy-pasting into an email chain.</comment>


Hackers Hijack DNS Server of BlackWallet to Steal $400,000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-hijack-dns-server-of-blackwallet-to-steal-400-000/ <comment><USER2> So, I have accounts on several DNS providers and notice that the security is barebones, mostly username and password. Now, I've got a few domains but exactly $0 in revenue or other people's stuff to worry about.

With all the obsession over painful security everywhere: stupidly complicated passwords that require password managers, 2FA with SMS or Google Authenticator, and that new terrible system where I have to click on pictures of cars or roadsigns for 5 minutes like I'm being tested for cognitive decline -- all that stuff, and some of the biggest DNS providers have miserably simple security.

I didn't see details of HOW DNS was hijacked in that article above but that's just one of my guesses.

Watch, soon you'll need to click on pictures of storefronts when logging in.

<comment><USER3> I can only encourage people to vote with their wallets on this. I moved my domain registry to AWS over a similar situation, after evaluating several alternative registrars and not finding MFA. I would certainly do so with DNS.

Much like Microsoft's security push around Windows XP SP1 - security will become important to these companies when it impacts revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sucks for the victims, but haven't there been enough hacks to know that webwallets (whether you hold the keys or not) are a bad idea?

<comment><USER5> They are too convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a major financial crime.

Why are they talking to their ISP to get details instead of involving the authorities for an actual investigation?

Where is the police report? Who is investigating this?

<comment><USER7> > _This is a major financial crime_

This is a major felony involving anonymous holders of a cryptocurrency, many of whom probably aren't reporting their holdings to the IRS, on a wallet that itself probably isn't reporting holdings nor earnings to the IRS nor complying with the simplest of money-transmission KYC laws. I struggle to imagine why this would be a priority for the public to pursue. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

<comment><USER8> There's an awful lot of "probably"s in your comment.

A wallet doesn't need to report anything because it's a wallet. Requiring a wallet to report "holdings and earnings" would be like requiring a safe to report the same information. And many users do report holdings to the IRS or any other agency as needed.

But even if they didn't, this should still be pursued. A lot of criminals use cars, does that mean the police shouldn't look into car thefts?

<comment><USER9> His point is that most people aren't claiming their bitcoin earnings which means they aren't paying tax on it.

Why should my tax dollars go to find your money that you aren't paying taxes on?

<comment><USER8> >Why should my tax dollars go to find your money that you aren't paying taxes on?

Because you have no proof that taxes aren't being paid. You (and others) have just decided that some of these people are doing something wrong without any kind of trial or even investigation and are saying that the government should ignore everyone impacted because of those you assume are doing bad things?

At the same time, I don't believe the government should just tell you "tough shit" if you've also done something illegal at some point.

<comment><USER9> Are the biggest exchanges reporting earnings to the IRS? No, coinbase only reported the top earners and are actively refusing to give all data.

There's a reason why regulations were created and Bitcoin skirts around them. Don't expect those same regulations to protect you if you don't follow them. It's the Wild West for crypto right now and some people are going to make it big but the majority are going to lose.

<comment><USER8> But I and many others are following them, to the fullest extent.

"Bitcoin" doesn't skirt these regulations, people do. I agree that it's a problem that some exchanges don't follow KYC laws, but it's not a law that they must report every person's earnings to the IRS. Coinbase is following all the required laws, and asking them to go above and beyond what is needed "or else" you won't get help is mafia level tactics. And I'd love for you to give me a list of exchanges that take USD and don't follow KYC laws (I'll save you some time, there aren't any with any significant amount of users, because they all get shut down).

And none of this has anything to do with Bitcoin, it has to do with Stellar. A cryptocurrency that is ironically very KYC friendly as you don't use multiple addresses, and all transactions are public. It's magnitudes easier to track Stellar than it ever would be cash. (Or do you feel the same way that someone that had cash robbed from their house shouldn't bother contacting police because they were skirting the law?)

Not to mention that tons of criminals use the internet, and there are a nearly unlimited number of illegal websites and "companies" which are doing bad things online.

Does that mean we shouldn't expect any kind of law to protect us on the internet?

Many car drivers routinely break traffic laws whole driving, does that mean that we shouldn't expect any kind of police help for car drivers?

You are assuming that some of the people here are breaking the law because unrelated companies aren't going above and beyond the required laws, then saying that none of the affected people should receive help because of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The hijacked server isn't even displaying a security certificate. Why would anyone conduct a financial transaction without this present (I'm assuming cryptocurrency holders are relatively sophiscated).

Also can browsers do anything to warn users "the last time you visited this URL there was a valid certificate, but there is no longer any, shall we proceed?"

<comment><USER4> >Also can browsers do anything to warn users "the last time you visited this URL there was a valid certificate, but there is no longer any, shall we proceed?"

so... HSTS? afaik (at least with firefox), it doesn't even let you override the warning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article is a bit sparse on details of the actual attack; Was the original site not over https? Or was the attacked site storing session cookies in insecure cookies?

<comment><USER12> The website owner posted an update on this Reddit thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7q9g31/statement_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7q9g31/statement_blackwallet_hacks_update/)

It looks like the hacker was able to log into the website's hosting provider account. The hacker then changed the DNS to point to a different server that had an exact copy of the blackwallet.co website but with a small injection of some javascript to siphon off the master keys that people were entering.

<comment><USER13> Simple yet effective.</comment></comment></comment>


Building Kind Social Networks (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://postlight.com/insights/building-kind-social-networks#.69mdqenq2 <comment><USER2> Real name policies may (or may not) foster civil discourse, but they do so in a way that favors the already privileged. It's a burden for marginalized people and a barrier to them resolving their issues.

I was molested as a child and women generally tend to have less agency over their lives than men. When I first got online, I used my real first name and last name. I eventually moved to _middle name and place_ as my default semi anonymous handle for privacy reasons because my first name plus last name is so distinctive. I'm back to using my full name online, though my handle in most places is first name plus middle name.

It was a long journey of getting there. It included a divorce, figuring out how to talk publicly -- which I think men tend to get inculcated with early and women don't -- and assorted other factors.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. If you only want civil discourse in your space and that's all that matters to you, you can achieve that by limiting it to very privileged people with no serious personal problems. Insisting on real names is a polite means to exclude anyone for whom speaking publicly under their real name might be a problem, so I'm sure it can help keep things superficially civil in your little corner of the universe.

I am also sure it helps further narrow the lives of people with already narrow existences by ever so politely silencing them online in ways they are already silenced offline. Which isn't actually all that kind, imo.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for this perspective.

I've been reading Mike Monteiro's Ruined by Design. In one of the chapters he points out how tech companies' policies for the communities they create are set by "tech bros" - predominantly white privileged males, who have never experienced life as a poor person, or as a woman or as a person of color, or as a non-heteronormative person or a combination of the above.

He quotes a conversation with a female designer friend of his, discussing twitter's anti-abuse policies added a few years ago. She said that if there were any women on the team, Twitter would've never had launched without tools to solve abuse.

But that problem never existed in the universe of the original decision makers.

<comment><USER4> I am interested to hear more about Ruined by Design. I read the sample chapter on Uber on the website [0] after reading your comment. The author seems very biased against any sort of good that might come out of Uber. Is the entire narrative anti-VC and anti-SV and deems the issue a systemic problem, or does the author provide counterpoints and examples where good decisions are made and can be made?

[0] [https://www.ruinedby.design/sample- chapter](https://www.ruinedby.design/sample-chapter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think that a use-real-names policy is conducive to good conversation, because it means that everything you say has to be something you would be comfortable saying in front of your family and your employer and the whole rest of the world. That takes a lot of topics off the table -- sex, politics, anything that is controversial, anything that might become controversial in the next ten years... Discussions become very bland when everything you say has to be designed to protect your real-life reputation from every audience that will ever have power over you.

It's better to create a system of reputation independent of real-world identity. If new users have limited privileges until they've been around for a certain amount, or if only one account is permitted per IP, even an anonymous account with a name like XxX_FakeName_XxX becomes an identity with value and a reputation. By engaging in bad behaviour, that identity would lose reputation, and might even be banned. Because of the loss of privilege or technical challenge associated with creating a new account, bad behaviour is disincetivized without actually attaching real-world identity to anything online.

There's a balance to be found between lowering barriers to entry and raising barriers to re-entry, but if the balance is done properly it can make a big difference.

Of course, none of this works without moderators doing the legwork of throwing out bad actors, but this is the difference between effective moderation and token moderation that is too swamped to actually do anything.

This also works better in smaller communities, but I think smaller online communities are just healthier in general. This is part of why monoliths like Facebook and Twitter are so toxic -- there is no "Twitter community," rather there are a thousand Twitter communities all of which are bumping into each other constantly because they occupy the same space.

<comment><USER6> > means that everything you say has to be something you would be comfortable > saying in front of your family and your employer and the whole rest of the > world. That takes a lot of topics off the table -- sex, politics, anything > that is controversial, anything that might become controversial in the next > ten years...

different suggestion: learning how to talk about that stuff with your family is a better long term solution. I don't know if this is a cultural thing but in my country talking about sex or politics with your family is pretty normal, if you don't have a raging political discussion over family dinners it's not a good conversation.

I think anonymity or pseudo identities are pretty broken. We're social animals, our identity is what gives us stake and it keeps us responsible.

I don't think anonymous opinions are more "real" because they are unfiltered, I think they are more likely to be thoughtless. If we don't stand for something with our name I don't think we're more intelligent but rather we just care less about what we say, I don't think the youtube comment section is known for its great insights.

The only reason I don't have my real name here and on a few other sites is because in the past I repeatedly ended up with angry people who had an axe to grind spamming me on my personal mail, so I feel you can't really unilaterally disarm, but I think collectively we'd be better off.

<comment><USER7> > different suggestion: learning how to talk about that stuff with your family > is a better long term solution.

I agree, but unfortunately, for many people that's just not an option. Think abusive or mentally ill parents. Think people living in the middle east. It's normal for people to seek spaces where they can speak more freely, without needing to change the whole world to make that possible first.

<comment><USER8> ... think Evangelicals, Mormons, Witnesses, Catholics...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I helped build a (acquihired and now defunct) startup in this space. Totally agree that if you care about kindness / civility, you have to bake it into the design from the get-go.

We ended up sticking with a real-name policy, which does have some downsides (examples like the one in OPs post where someone can come out as gay in a country where it's illegal obviously wouldn't fly), but having people use their real names meant less ability to hide behind anonymous identities.

Obviously, that wasn't enough on its own, so we tested a few other dynamics that also helped. For example, you had to commit to a pledge before writing anything. It did end up being really civil and thoughtful, but we never got beyond thousands of active users and never figured out a business model.

<comment><USER10> Real names have little effect imo otherwise why my dad's facebook feed is so crazy.

Compare github/hn/discord to places where people use their real names.

It's a moderation problem. As networks grow, moderating them becomes harder and why popular things end up becoming toxic. They just don't have enough people to set a community expectation or tone.

<comment><USER9> Yes, on its own real-name policy doesn't work. But in connection with other choices, it can help a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the obvious solution is to give users power over who can comment on their stuff. My Facebook feed could easily pass as a "kind social network" because I only follow blood bowl interest groups and only have friends I actually like in the real world.

Don't get me wrong, I too had a friendslist full of anyone I'd ever met, I followed news and stuff like that. And it drove me to the point where I was ready to quit Facebook. Then I got into blood bowl and needed Facebook for our national league, and I had to figure out how to make social networking not suck. The answer was to remove all the people I didn't actually care about.

These days my feed is relatively slow, and usually rather boring, but I use Facebook more than ever because of my blood bowl interest groups. These groups too are moderates in a way that would get the average Twitter commenter banned by their first post. Sure we might as well use some phpBB thing, and we might as well use IRC instead of discord, would be nice for a privacy and anti- advertising concern, but Facebook is where people are.

</comment><comment><USER12> My experience with podaero.com has been that things are very civil in small groups where everyone gets to know each other - regardless of whether real names are used (users there have the option between real name or pseudonym).

I think it's when the groups get so large that nobody really knows each other - that's when things become less civil.

edit* - here's an invite link to take a look if anyone wants to: [https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod](https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod)

<comment><USER13> Isn't this true in real life as well? Humans don't behave well in large groups both online and off.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I'm reminded of the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility. Then there's also the phenomenon of lynchings, which I believe are still a big problem in some countries.

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

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Trying to enforce characteristics for the network at the global scale is incompatible with the most basic degrees of freedom of expression. However, at some point all large corporations - so far - want to weaponise their control of the network to steer its characteristics at a global scale. This is why all large social networks suck so badly. They all try to be a one-size-fits-all social overlay to the Internet, and this is a fool's errand.

</comment><comment><USER15> The double edged sword here is groupthink. If you are trying to have a discourse about being gay in a social network comprised of people from Saudi Arabia, they might flag your very loving and helpful posts as being hostile. Thus banning you from their network.

In the end, I think it would result in even tighter bubbles where all information we find uncomfortable is eventually filtered away.

I think a better angle would be to figure out how to create an environment that encourages open mindedness and willingness to let others be themselves without forcing anyone into our own views. Easier said than done, I know.</comment>


Why can't Microsoft get their products right on the first try? - <AUTHOR> http://owened.co.nz/why-cant-microsoft-get-anything-right-on-the-first-try <comment><USER2> In the past, Microsoft's business goals, and the needs and wants of their customers have aligned fairly well. This is no longer true. Microsoft's current business goals are to lock customers in to their app store environment and their cloud computing infrastructure.

The main goal of Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 was nothing to do with improving the experience for customers, it was about establishing and locking in customers to the Windows app store.

Likewise, the main goal of Office 2013 was about migrating and locking in customers to Office 365.

Microsoft included all the features they needed to fulfill their business needs. Once these programs were released though, customers saw that they didn't meet their needs and wants. Microsoft was left with no choice but to respond by (slowly and halfheartedly) giving them what they wanted.

This stands in stark contrast to Apple (at least under Steve Jobs) not only putting the needs and wants of their customers first, but anticipating the needs and wants of their customers before they themselves even knew they had them.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. \-- Steve Jobs

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOgOP_aqqtg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOgOP_aqqtg)

</comment><comment><USER4> Missing features weren't Microsoft's problem with Windows Phone. You can't ship from day one with all the features whether you lead or follow.

Waiting until everything is there is a recipe for burning out your team and shipping 4 years later, with zero apps in your app store.

No, the problem is there's simply no compelling reason to own a Windows Phone.

iPhone integrates with Windows just fine. It's popular and feels "safe" because there's safety in numbers, and it has all the apps.

Android is doing well, too.

Microsoft had the chance to ship a phone that integrates better with Windows than any third party phone OS could, but they didn't figure out anything interesting to do with, and just shipped a normal smartphone with a trendy UI on it.

Look at Apple and "Coherence" now. This is the kind of shit Windows Phone should've provided for Windows computers. Instead their roadmap speaks about unifying kernels and what not. Nobody cares about your unified kernels, Microsoft. Ship features that bring visible value to users.</comment>


Hack removes firmware crippling from Nvidia  graphics card - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippling-from-nvidia-graphics-card/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+hackaday%2FLgoM+%28Hack+a+Day%29

<comment><USER2> Already on the front page <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398555></comment>


Ask HN: Apple screwed up our company's name. How do I fix it? - <AUTHOR>

We're based in Brazil and our name - MyTraining Serviços em Tecnologia da Informação -  has two Portuguese characters in it that apparently are not supported by the app store. As a result, we are being listed by Apple with some crazy symbols in our name making us look buggy as you can see here:
http://i.imgur.com/cXzV0wp.jpg
Has anyone here passed through something similar or know a channel that I can use to sort this out with them? I'm not being lucky using Apple's regular channels for this so far.
[UPDATE] Found a way fix to the problem: just got off the phone with Apple support and we are going to change the "ç" for "c" and the "ã" for "a". It's good enough for me and it's going to be updated in 24 hours. reply <comment><USER2> Does your name work in a UILabel on an app? It's hard to believe they do something different than that.

If not, try to find acceptable characters to use instead.

This is more likely an iOS SDK bug than an AppStore one -- see if you can reproduce it in an app and open a Radar. I would not expect the AppStore support to care or really be able to help.

[EDIT: quick test in latest Xcode beta -- looks fine]

Another edit: look at this app

[https://itunes.apple.com/app/id940870961](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id940870961)

Are you using literally the same character in your name?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it works in a UILabel on the app. The quick solution would be to change the name of the company but unfortunately we can't do that unless we legally change the name of the organization as well (I think).

Thanks for showing me that app. We are using literally the same character in our name, I will try to get in touch with them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found a way fix to the problem: just got off the phone with Apple support and we are going to change the "ç" for "c" and the "ã" for "a". It's good enough for me and it's going to be updated in 24 hours.</comment>


Multitenancy with V8 Isolates: Cloudflare Workers Implementation Details - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloudflare-v8 <comment><AUTHOR> Note that the desktop version of the site has a transcript. For some reason it doesn't show up in the mobile version.</comment>


Show HN: json-anything - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/keyle/json-anything/ <comment><USER2> Read up on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url_encoding> \-- surely php has built in functions to handle this.

Note that `#` should be encoded as `%23` and that your suggestion of encoding it as `%` results in invalid urls.

Also this means e.g. search result page urls can be passed without resorting to POST.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but the point was to be able to do it all as GET. Support for POST only became a necessity trying to parse some search engines with parameters in the url.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you encode `&` as `%26`, `=` as `%3d`, `?` as `%3f` etc. You only need to resort to POST if you would hit length limits with your constructed url.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again, I see your point, but this would make the syntax absolutely obscure.

The idea is to keep it simple, to just call

         ?url=theurl&sel=.simple_stuff

I will look at using something else than % as you suggested.

<comment><USER2> It doesn't make the syntax obscure, it makes the syntax standard. Your syntax, being ad hoc, is obscure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting project but what's the advantage of using this over YQL?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't familiar with that use of YQL. Thanks.

It's a shotgun api, within 5min I can get any site just by calling a url, using jquery-type selectors. I think that's pretty cool. No sql-like syntax.</comment></comment>


A PHP Compiler, a.k.a. the FFI Rabbit Hole - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ircmaxell.com/2019/04/compilers-ffi.html <comment><USER2> Ironically about the only acronym he does NOT try to explain is FFI, the reason for the project.

> A foreign function interface (FFI) is a mechanism by which a program written > in one programming language can call routines or make use of services > written in another.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> When you think about how dynamic PHP is wouldn't you pretty much end up with the source code and a PHP Interpreter baked together into a binary?

<comment><USER4> From his GitHub page:

 _" Future Work - Right now, this only supports an EXTREMELY limited subset of PHP. There is no support for dynamic anything. Arrays aren't supported. Neither Object properties nor methods are supported. And the only builtin functions that are supported are var_dump and strlen."_

[https://github.com/ircmaxell/php- compiler/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/ircmaxell/php- compiler/blob/master/README.md)

He basically has avoided that road thus far :)

I think you're right though. Things like eval() and ${$deref-me-at-runtime} aren't going to be easily compiled.

<comment><USER5> There are many who would argue that removing those features from PHP would be a massive improvement.

<comment><USER6> Replacing php entirely would be a massive improvement. I only had sorrows with it, the kind of language that is painful to write all the way through.

<comment><USER7> PHP 7 is so much better and PHP 8 is on track to become even better.

<comment><USER6> Can't really agree. 7.3 differs so much from 7.0 that migrating is just not possible without careful code rewrite. How is a version good when it is incompatible inside minor version releases?

I know little about version 8 though, but as long as they are not abandoning backwards compatibility it won't make up for the language flaws

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks really cool, but it's a little above my skill level. Does this mean you could protect your PHP source code if you wanted to compile and then distribute it?

<comment><USER9> Please don't do this. It's both ineffective and pisses off those of us who try to produce good bug reports when your obfuscated software misbehaves.

<comment> munk-a This is just a general issue with third party code - C/C++ libraries have always suffered from this weakness. Still, I've worked in places where if we were unable to distribute our library closed source the business wing wouldn't let us distribute it at all - everyone is welcome to their thoughts on copy- left software, but a thing that exists wouldn't have existed if we could only release it open-source (and yes, we even explained how licensing worked to the higher ups)

<comment><USER9> I'm confused.

This is a compiler. The difference between distributing the output of this and a compiled C or C++ library is basically that this emits machine code that no sane C or C++ compiler would emit today. This does not prevent me from figuring out how the parts you want kept secret work, it only spreads bugs out over more code.

My objection is twofold: first, on practical grounds, this makes producing good bug reports harder. That's because there's more code to prove isn't the true source of the problematic behavior.

The second is aesthetic. If your goal is to keep your secrets, this does not accomplish it.

<comment><USER10> No, such behavior does not make technical sense, any more than bits can be coloured. Yet... [https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another cool (and more functional) compiler is Peachpie. You can compile WordPress and run it on. Net vm. From the reports it's even few times faster than "native" php :)

[https://www.peachpie.io](https://www.peachpie.io)

</comment><comment><USER12> I appreciate the clear explainations of AOT, VM, etc. Someone tried to explain AOT to me a while back, but I didn't understand anything.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone know how this compares to PHC? It was an ahead-of-time compiler for PHP.

[https://github.com/pbiggar/phc](https://github.com/pbiggar/phc)

<comment><USER14> phc is dead, so there's that :)

Apart from that, it seems to be following a similar path, but is a little bit earlier down it. Could probably look at the code we generated and copy some of the solutions.

PHC was also designed to support eval/dynamic features by embedding the PHP interpreter and optimizing around it. Not sure that this implementation is going down that path, which has upsides and downsides, the upside being that eval can be handled. Would be interested to see what he ends up doing.

<comment><USER15> How heavily does eval get used in PHP?

<comment><USER14> More than you'd think. I did some analysis (in 2008 mind you, long time ago, PHP4/PHP5). I think I found that half the packages on sourceforge (sourceforge!) had a use of a dynamic construct.

When I looked into it, it wasn't so much eval as dynamic includes, often used for localization:

        $lang = "en";
        include("l18n/$lang.php");

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is amazing work and great job documenting! I had no idea about the Foreign Function Interface coming to PHP 7.4, that's exciting.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wonder why meta-compilation is not more popular? There are already some frameworks available like RPython for quite some time, Truffle is relatively new.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very impressive work, will comment again if I manage a test compile of some minor project! :)

</comment><comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP)

<comment><USER20> HipHop turned into HHVM, which as of Feb no longer supports PHP going forward. [https://hhvm.com/blog/2019/02/11/hhvm-4.0.0.html](https://hhvm.com/blog/2019/02/11/hhvm-4.0.0.html)</comment></comment>


Black Swan Magnet - <AUTHOR> http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/black-swan-magnet/

<comment><USER2> Fundamental flaw: If you can't predict a Black Swan how can you attract one?

<comment><USER3> It's not about prediction, it's about odds. If you don't know the outcome it's better to have 200 possibilities than 1 "great idea."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Taleb's point is that unexpected outlier events are the ones that have the greatest impact. Prediction works because the next moment is usually not much different from the current moment.

</comment><comment><USER5> HN specific linkbait title? Y Combinator was only mentioned in one sentence.

<comment><USER5> Note: the title has since been changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Black Swans have jumped the shark.</comment>


Conference for Founders by Founders - <AUTHOR> http://www.eleoconference.com

<comment><USER2> sounds awesome!</comment>


HTML5 is a terrible trap - <AUTHOR> http://john.freml.in/html5-terrible-trap

<comment><USER2> > offline access is a really important part of the mobile user experience

Yes, it is. That's why HTML5 has the cache manifest [1]. With that, you don't need a connection on an HTML5 web app if you wouldn't need one on an installed native app.

> access to device specific APIs like camera, accelerometer, notifications etc

There are already plans, drafted specifications [3], and working implementations [4] for device APIs.

> performance and responsiveness will be worse.

Performance is getting better with time, as mobile JavaScript implentations get better (Nitro on iOS, Chrome Mobile on Android). Responsiveness can be improved by using hardware-accelerated CSS transitions instead of JavaScript animation, by disabling built-in wait times on the touch of an HTML element [5], and more.

[1]: <http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/> [2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL> [3]: <http://www.w3.org/TR/html-media- capture/> [4]: [http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/geolocation/trip_mete...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/geolocation/trip_meter/) [5]: <https://developers.google.com/mobile/articles/fast_buttons>

</comment><comment><USER3> Having built a few enterprise level HTML5 based applications, a number of the issues you discuss are easily overcome. HTML5 has local storage, such client side databases, cross session storage like server apps do, so data can be stored locally when offline and synchronized with a server when back on-line using AJAX or WebSockets. Also, as Kerrick mentioned, there are 3rd party device APIs already available such as PhoneGap, Adobe Cordova, Rhomobile, Appcelerator, and more. As for performance, I agree with you to a degree. Older phones, or tablets, have problems with CSS3 animations due to the OS' lack of, also as Kerrick mentioned, hardware acceleration support in older mobile browsers, but newer phones and tablets have no problem. As for the loading experience, you don't need "load a bunch of JavaScript" to control the loading experience, if you assume the default state to be loading, which is actually very similar to native apps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Youll get the same connectivity issues with a native App that requires a connection that suddenly loses connection

Native platforms are far from bug free

It makes sense for the business to release a just good enough HTML5 app rather than platform specific apps built by multiple teams at x times the cost.

It's easier to find a html5 developer than it is to find an android, iOS and any other platform you want.

How do you propose you solve these issues?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I can agree that this is true for the consumer market, and the Facebook mobile app is a good proof for this story. But I'm more interested in enterprise apps and I can see a lot of value there with HTML5. Build simple app (front-end site, usually in the backend there are dragons) apps with a "branded UI", that work the same on all the current, and future, mobile platform.</comment>


Child obesity '35-40 percent' inherited from parents, study finds - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10668.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of:

[http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/39252](http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/39252)

with author credit removed.</comment>


Beta Test Our App (TickStart) - <AUTHOR>

We recently launched our app, TickStart and are looking for some additional beta testers to provide us with some great feedback.
TickStart is a time and productivity tracking application with a real business focus. We're looking for some small to medium sized consultancies and teams that do project based work to kick the tires and check us out.
You can visit http://tickstart.com for more information and to sign up. Thanks!! <comment><USER2> Initial impression, the account name, site subdomain, and user name are all quite redundant. At best, why not just use username, and subdomain?

However, the interface is VERY impressive, and very responsive. I love that you can see your weekly total, and daily total in the main navigation toolbar. At a glance, that helps out a lot. I haven't yet produced enough time for an invoice, so I'm not sure if it can create invoices so far, but so far I am very impressed. This might persuade me to move from FreshBooks.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the comments!

The reason for account, user and subdomain is that a single user can be a member of multiple accounts and a lot of people name their account one thing, but want a different url.

Invoice creation via freshbooks is not quite wired up 100% but is very close.

Thanks again for the feedback!

\- Bradley, Squeejee/TickStart

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://tickstart.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> The copy is weak, but the "time cards translate to bottom line" idea is good. I would lead with that.

 _"TickStart connects time tracking directly to your bottom line. Quantify your employee's productivity..."_ etc

</comment><comment><USER5> great app. These same guys just won an award at SXSW.</comment>


Cuban: Uni Basic Income Is "One of the Worst Possible Responses" to Automation - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/mark-cuban-universal-basic-income-is-the-worst-possible-response/ <comment><USER2> I rather agree with him, but I also see it as inevitable in the __far off __future</comment>


Tmate - Instant terminal sharing - <AUTHOR> http://tmate.io/ <comment><USER2> I've tried this out and it is dramatically better then other alternatives, full screen-sharing suffers from latency issues (screenhero, logmein, etc...) and sharing an ssh session is a pain to get setup (e.g. wemux). I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER3> A package for Archlinux: [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tmate/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/tmate/)

<comment><USER4> Added on the [http://tmate.io](http://tmate.io)

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really really like this project.. combined with some HTML output page of some sort, one can display errors in real time to an interested party for debugging purposes.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't get it why not just use tmux?!

tmux -S /tmp/pair

chmod 777 /tmp/pair

tmux -S /tmp/pair attach

<comment><USER4> Because you need to open some port on your router, create an SSH account, and let your friend connect to your machine. That's a pain point.

<comment><USER6> From the video it looks like this works via SSH as well so you will still need to "create an SSH account, and let your friend connect to your machine"

<comment><USER2> You don't need to create an SSH account or let your friends connect to your machine. Your session is proxied through the tmate.io server (safely) so that you can avoid the headache of opening up a connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is this any better then wemux

<comment><USER4> with wemux, you still need to give SSH access to your local machine, but with tmate, you don't give SSH access. As a matter of fact, you don't even need an SSH server on your machine.

The trouble of having to setup networking // SSH accounts is gone</comment></comment>


5 technologies to protect Earth from an asteroid strike - <AUTHOR> http://www.humansinvent.com/#!/11531/5-technologies-to-protect-earth-from-an-asteroid-strike/

<comment><USER2> Planetary Resources founder: 'Humans will migrate off Earth in the next 30 years' <http://www.geekwire.com/2013/planetary-resources/></comment>


Ask HN: No Ebola Stories? - <AUTHOR>

Are submissions with the text "Ebola" getting auto-deleted?  Not a poor choice, necessarily, but an interesting choice for sure. <comment><USER2> Certainly not deleted, but they are being given a weak penalty in the hope that only the most HN-appropriate (i.e. intellectually interesting and/or providing significant new information) posts will rise to the top. We take the penalty off when we see one of those, and upvotes can overcome it anyway—the penalty is deliberately weak to allow for that.

Edit: here's an example on the front page right now: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461304).

The intention is not to suppress an important topic but to hold the countless me-too posts at bay—the ones that don't add anything significant. When the massive wave subsides, we'll remove the penalty. For example, there was a period where HN did this for NSA stories, but that hasn't been the case for a while.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know about auto-deleting, but I can imagine there's a lot of flagging going on.

From the HN Guidelines: _" If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic."_[1] So if it's just an article like "2000 more people died of ebola in Liberia today" or "one more person was quarantined in Dallas", then it will probably get flagged (especially if it's the 13th article with a similar headline). If it's more hacker-related, like "mathematical models for predicting the ebola epidemic", it might have a better chance (as long as it's not the 13th article with the same headline).

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

</comment><comment><USER4> Nope.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ebola#!/story/sort_by_date/0/ebola](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ebola#!/story/sort_by_date/0/ebola)

</comment><comment><USER5> Try reddit.</comment>


60mo joins FreeAgent - <AUTHOR> http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=737af80795c8036af8d34cf92&id=49f1e24104&e=a9a5203359 60mo has been acquired by FreeAgent, the UK's biggest and best accounting tool! Important information about your 60mo account. Here's the deets.
 Bloody 'ell, we've joined
 the FreeAgent team!
We're extremely excited to announce that 60mo has been acquired by FreeAgent, the UK market-leader in online accounting software. 60mo was built to make the lives of small business owners easier and we're happy to be joining a team that shares that passion. Also, they have a castle!
What does this mean for the 60mo team? We've joined FreeAgent as the charter members of their US team and will be working to help bring the FreeAgent platform to the tens of millions of US small business owners losing sleep over their finances. There is a ton to be done, and we are chomping at the bit to get started.
What does this mean for the 60mo product? As our focus will be on the FreeAgent platform, we'll be sunsetting the 60mo product in the next few months. 60mo users will be able to get an export of their data until the product is shut down, but data integrations such as Yodlee and QuickBooks will no longer be supported.
How can I export my data? Contact us at support[at]60mo.com with your account id from the admin area and we'll provide a full csv file export including all of your major data items.
What happens if I don't export my data? No matter what, we care first and foremost about the privacy and security of your data. After the shutoff date, all customer details and data will be deleted from all instances of the 60mo databases and will be unrecoverable.
Who is FreeAgent? We might be biased, but we think that FreeAgent is one of the best products serving freelancers and small businesses today (and they don't even wear kilts to work). Give it a try, you won't be disappointed!
--
A note from the founders: As entrepreneurs building a product to help other entrepreneurs, we'd like to say "Thank you!" to our customers, supporters, friends, and families for their encouragement and patience. The last few years have been an incredible experience, and we feel privileged to have worked with you. <comment><AUTHOR> FULL TEXT FROM THE ANNOUNCEMENT: \</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

60mo has been acquired by FreeAgent, the UK's biggest and best accounting tool! Important information about your 60mo account. Here's the deets. Bloody 'ell, we've joined the FreeAgent team!

We're extremely excited to announce that 60mo has been acquired by FreeAgent, the UK market-leader in online accounting software. 60mo was built to make the lives of small business owners easier and we're happy to be joining a team that shares that passion. Also, they have a castle!

What does this mean for the 60mo team? We've joined FreeAgent as the charter members of their US team and will be working to help bring the FreeAgent platform to the tens of millions of US small business owners losing sleep over their finances. There is a ton to be done, and we are chomping at the bit to get started.

What does this mean for the 60mo product? As our focus will be on the FreeAgent platform, we'll be sunsetting the 60mo product in the next few months. 60mo users will be able to get an export of their data until the product is shut down, but data integrations such as Yodlee and QuickBooks will no longer be supported.

How can I export my data? Contact us at support[at]60mo.com with your account id from the admin area and we'll provide a full csv file export including all of your major data items.

What happens if I don't export my data? No matter what, we care first and foremost about the privacy and security of your data. After the shutoff date, all customer details and data will be deleted from all instances of the 60mo databases and will be unrecoverable.

Who is FreeAgent? We might be biased, but we think that FreeAgent is one of the best products serving freelancers and small businesses today (and they don't even wear kilts to work). Give it a try, you won't be disappointed!

\--

A note from the founders: As entrepreneurs building a product to help other entrepreneurs, we'd like to say "Thank you!" to our customers, supporters, friends, and families for their encouragement and patience. The last few years have been an incredible experience, and we feel privileged to have worked with you.</comment>


Bitbucket is down - <AUTHOR> http://status.bitbucket.org/incidents/9bjzwrdn3c7j

<comment><USER2> Guh. They've been down for nearly an hour :|

<comment><USER3> Did you get a notification of the 2-hour scheduled maintenance window?

<comment><USER2> I did not...</comment></comment></comment>


Say hello to node.x - polyglot async on the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://tfox.org/2011/07/11/say-hello-to-node-x/

<comment><AUTHOR> Make sure to check out the readme details: <https://github.com/purplefox/node.x/blob/master/README.md></comment>


Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs - <AUTHOR> https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-israel-systematically-hides-evidence-of-1948-expulsion-of-arabs-1.7435103 <comment><USER2> My ancestors lived in Israel since 1880, and the Arabs raided their villages, burned their fields, and massacred them in riots. Before Israel they lived in Yemen, where they faced pogroms and blood libel. What the West cannot understand about the Arab-Israeli conflict is that it's not just a political war, it's also a race war and a holy war. What's happening in Israel is biblical, and reducing it to politics cannot possibly capture its complexity.

<comment><USER3> Palestinians got screwed over by something geopolitical. Again and again they were egged on by their Arab neighbors to walk away from more equitable treaties. All in the name of geopolitical Arab nationalism. Today their Arab neighbors are building cutting edge cities, while Palestinians are asking for a fraction of what they were offered in the 1920s/30s.

<comment><USER4> To be clear, not a single Arab country wants to see an independent Palestinian state. Not a single one. The Palestinians were not even included originally in the Arab League that was supposed to represent their cause. Palestinians were considered a threat to the stability of the post colonial "middle east" (a fabrication created by the west) and they are still treated as such. The crimes committed by Israel not withstanding.

<comment><USER5> > To be clear, not a single Arab country wants to see an independent > Palestinian state. Not a single one

Where are you getting your information from if I may ask? There are literally millions of anecdata for the contrary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ben gurion. Arthur Ruppin. Golda Meir. Kleizmer, eugenics and pathos. Israel did a fantastic job of milking the world's empathy while committing horrible crimes. Also, nothing to do with Zionism. Hertzl, a proud ethnic Jew (Sephardi), despised the Eastern European mob that would eventually take Zionism over and Judaism and turn it into a farce.

</comment><comment><USER6> Tens of thousands killed, millions forced to flee their ancestral lands overnight, guess who I am talking about: Germans Post WW2. They too loved their lands which they too had lived in for millennia. How many Germans do you see blowing up cafes in Warsaw or Prague asking for their land back?

How about the 12 Million South Asians displaced in the partition of India & Pakistan? How many Hindus/Sikhs do you see asking for their lands back? the Indus Valley (modern day Pakistan) is the cradle of Indian civilization.

Mind you, both these events happened at the same time (1945-50) as the founding of Israel. Somehow they all seem to have moved on with their lives, and yet the Palestinians seem to be the only one fixated on "our lands" and indulging in self-flagellation.

IMHO the The Palestinians just need to get over it and move on with building a new life in some Arab countries. This idea of condemning generations to oppression and racism, and living in that hell hole of Gaza/West Bank, in the vain hope of winning it all back, is utter insanity.

</comment><comment><USER7> Really appalling. But I'll just point out this is being reported by an Israeli newspaper. I look forward to the day a report this critical of its government can be freely published in Arab nations.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe Arabs are under the illusion that their government is non- tyrannical. I live in Egypt and there's not a single person I've met that doesn't think their government is corrupt, oppressive and inept. So there's really nothing revealing or surprising that a newspaper could report.

"BREAKING: Egyptian government is corrupt. In other news, water is wet."

On the other hand, there are perhaps many Israelis who believe the false narrative that the Palestinians sold their lands and left, but changed their minds and started the aggression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> An Israeli friend told me that after the Shoah her countrymen faced a choice. They could say "never again" or "never again to us."

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYork...](https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948)

</comment><comment><USER11> Malmab personnel interviewed at the end of the article:

> But isn't concealing documents based on footnotes in books an attempt to > lock the barn door after the horses have bolted?

> "I gave you an example that this needn't be the case. If someone writes that > the horse is black, if the horse isn't outside the barn, you can't prove > that it's really black."

For additional context, this is with regards to the scholarship of Benny Morris[0]. Plenty of liberal democracies use and abuse the concept of state secrets, but to abuse it in such a petty and transparent way feels...counterproductive?

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris)

</comment><comment><USER12> Could be useful to mention at the same time how many jews were thrown out from neighboring countries.

This somehow slips everyones minds as those were successfully integrated and not set aside in refugee camps to be played as a pawn in the western media guilt and shame game.</comment>


Vim's new hybrid line number mode - <AUTHOR> http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2013/vims-new-hybrid-line-number-mode/ <comment><USER2> Wait, what? This is new? I've been using this "hybrid" mode for about a year... Actually, I didn't know it was a hybrid, I just assumed that's how relative line numbers always work

Hmm. I don't know what version of Vim I was using when I first started using this line number mode since I've been keeping my install updated, but my install is from around this time last year.</comment>


Why every new generation of programmers are becoming dumber than the last - <AUTHOR> http://freeworld.posterous.com/why-every-new-generation-of-programmers-are-b <comment><USER2> I disagree with the summation of the article, the point of advancement is to make something so common place and autonomous that it does not require understanding to use.

Advancement is not ignorance it is creative capacity used in different applications. Lets take for example electricity, at one point, it was only usable by those that knew how to generate it. At a certain point higher level interfaces where developed like the power line and then the outlet. At a certain point the generation of electricity was wholly separated from the consumption of electricity. People no longer needed to understand how to generate electricity to use it, even if they where developing new and novel technology that relied on electricity. They may need to know a little about the consumption characteristics of electricity but they could be totally ignorant about how to generate it.

I see the computer as very similar, we have moved beyond the implementation. For most tasks the hardware has been abstracted away allowing the creative to focus their efforts on higher level advancements. It does not mean they are some how dumber just that their understanding may be focused on more advanced subjects.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1> C++ is a bad example, it has notoriously leaky abstractions which require a soup to nuts understanding to effectively use it in a professional setting.

>What's the fun of letting someone do all the work for you?

2> Getting onto another task. The levels of abstraction in today's toolkits give you 10-100x the functionality for the same effort 12 years ago for many things (including modern C++ libraries).

3> Embedded programmers most definitely are still getting into hardware constraints. Good iPhone and Android devs worry about power and memory all the time as well as performance differences in multiple versions of devices as well as when memory gets scarce. Embedded Linux developers worry about total system memory footprints/lifecycles and boot/update cycles, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Those who started out as programmers at the beginning of the computing era and who remain in the same field of computer science are of course, going to be experts in their fields due to years of accumulated experience, knowledge and skill.

So while the guy has made his points, I wonder, is this a classic case of survivalship bias? Just like when I hear people say, "They don't make houses like they use to." - isn't this the same? What if, the mediocre programmers of the past have simply moved on to other fields?

And of course, as many people have already commented, there remains many programmers who continue to work quite close to the metal. However, while their area of expertise lies in building embedded software systems, I would not automatically assume they are going to be fantastic at, say scaling a website to serve up to 100 million live views per day.

</comment><comment><USER5> To go with the breadth of the analogies. Don't you think the gas idea is a little way over board? I mean, "refuelling" is really still a part of the car, it will never not be an integral part of driving a car, and thus people will always know about it. The same way as the concept of objects in OOP or pointers, or simple looping. These are core facets in programming, and as long as programmers know about this. I think we are good to go.

As for my analogy, let's take fire. When fire was created, people had to use the lowest of levels to conjure it: rubbing sticks (or waiting for lightning). Now, we've had a lot of "high level" fire makers that, despite the fact that we do not have any knowledge on the machinations of stick rubbing, we are still knowledgeable about the "management". of fire.

</comment><comment><USER6> Or every generation of programmers gets larger and more varied than the last because of increasing computer penetration (there was a time when they weren't in most _governments_ , now they're in most _pockets_ ), the lure of jobs and exposure through school.

As your population grows, your average usually goes down unless there are more smart-and-deep people than not. That's why each generation of college grads is dumber, for example: more people go as a percentage but more people aren't super-smart as a percentage. Even if you have more S&Ds than not, selection effects might bring you down over time because they were the first adopters, leaving the remaining pool worse on average.

Never ascribe to character what can be more easily ascribed to population.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't buy his arguments even though they are common. I don't think there is anything virtuous about using only a few kilobyte of memory when it would be better to just use the couple houndred MB that would make your program simpler.

Likewise I don't think that frameworks are an issue, they just speed up dev time and you need to understand how they work at some point anyway (properly when the abstractions break down).

</comment><comment><USER8> Does it really make sense that each new generation of programmers learns all of the previous generation's knowledge, as well as the "new" knowledge? Take this 10 generations into the future, are you really expecting them to know about AND gates and race conditions? What's the point? Could they not spend the time advancing technology further, instead of looking back?

</comment><comment><USER9> I think [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Integrated_de...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Integrated_development_environment) are making programmers dumber

</comment><comment><USER10> _Says the 16 year old_</comment>


Facebook is lying - <AUTHOR> http://www.flyingpenguin.com/?p=7858

<comment><USER2> Why link to a blog post that does nothing but quote from TechCrunch? Better link to <http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/09/give-us-our-data-facebook/> instead.</comment>


Why the iPad Pro needs Xcode - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@stevestreza/why-the-ipad-pro-needs-xcode-8335ee787a09 <comment><USER2> It's not only the native UI. Getting rid of the deploy to device step would be a big improvement. Shortening the feedback loop between coding and testing improves opportunities for experimentation.

This is why 20 years later, we still code web pages with a text editor in one hand and a web browser with the ctrl+r hot key in another.

</comment><comment><USER3> Exactly the thing need now. Desktop to build Desktop apps. Tablet to build tablet apps.</comment>


Remote Workers Can Get a Cushy Apartment, Free Office Space, and $10,000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/11/remote-workers-can-get-cushy-apartment-free-office-space-and-10000if-they-move-tulsa/152812/ <comment><USER2> honestly not a bad deal for someone who is okay with having a limited selection of things available to them.</comment>


Ask HN: Browser Gmail signon newly prompts for Google Chrome account access? - <AUTHOR>

Call me semi-old-fashioned: I access Gmail from a browser -- Google Chrome on Linux, ATM.
This morning, I sign on.  Instead of routing to my Inbox, I am sent to an intermediate page prompting me -- sorry, I've forgotten the exact language -- to allow/integrate Google Chrome access to my Google account.  There are buttons for 'Yes' and 'Skip', and links to 'Tell me more' and "Advanced Settings".
Mistakenly, and expecting the 'Tell me more' to be typical, minimal and simplistic language, after hesitating I click on "Advanced settings", hoping to gain better insight into what this involves.
Instead, I'm routed to my Inbox, with a pop-up stating that bookmarks, settings, blood type, genome, etc. will now be synchronized.  Um... NO!
Fortunately, it includes an "Undo" button, that I immediately click (I can already hear the sound of my data being sucked into Google's maw).
My BIG mistake for not simply clicking "Skip" at the prompt, and/or taking the time to confirm that the 'Tell me more' link was indeed going to be kind of useless.  (I guess the caffeine was still in the process of kicking in.)
Looking through my account settings, I see there is a setting that gives Google Chrome "full access", and that this is still set.  I don't know whether this persists from this most recent experience I've just described, or whether it was pre-existing.  There's no 'Tell me more' link by it.  Is it for e.g. notifications in the Chrome browser, or is it still allowing Google to -- via my browser -- "read my mind"?
Further, has my data already been "absorbed" as a result of this morning's action?  Is there anything I can do -- beyond the "Undo" button I described -- to actually and/or further undo this? <comment><AUTHOR> I had to trim my OP to fit the 2000 character limit (which, per my text editor's statistics, appears to be mis-measured at least against the text as input).

I'm a long time Gmail user. This prompt was new, this morning. It appears to be part of Google's relentless drive to push everyone to "one account" where all their personal data -- including bookmarks, etc. -- is synchronized to / stored on their servers.

Google: I don't appreciate this "resistance is futile" approach. Knock it off, please!

AND, please provide some clear links to full descriptions of what is going on particularly with respect to these settings, on your Account Settings pages. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, as usual, Google's immediate help -- via a search pop-up from the Account settings page that links to the page where this setting is presented; there is no help linked/provided on the actual page -- is useless.

Searching from the Google home page, I ran across this chain of links. It still provides no description of whether/when this setting is activated. As my tab, bookmark, etc. settings did _not_ carry over automatically to this instance of Chrome when I started using it, I am brought to conclude that this morning's annoying and unwelcome pop-up did indeed turn on this synchronization setting for my account. And that the thereupon/thereafter presented "Undo" button was bullshit -- it didn't undo the synchronization setting.

Full account access for Chrome

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/chromebook- central/G...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/chromebook- central/GarPIJIY92Q)

wherein a respondent links

Why sign in to Chrome

[https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139?hl=en)</comment></comment>


Developers Are Writing the Script for the Future - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-are-writing-the-script-for-the-future/ <comment><USER2> Any TLDR on what this speech is about? There is absolutely no information on what it's about. Could be about anything.</comment>


Search removal request under European Data Protection law - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch

<comment><USER2> I hope someone creates an index of all of these removed pages ala the DMCA takedown notices for easy access.</comment>


Indie Game Dev Funds Game ($70k) and Creates Vintage Masterpiece - <AUTHOR> https://www.foundat.io/n/successful-indie-game-development-case-study/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is one of the best indie trailers I've seen in a long time.</comment>


Materia v0.3 now supports MySQL – September release - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/webshell/materia-designer/releases/tag/0.3.0 <comment><USER2> A backend without user management is not worth it in 2016.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the next feature to be added. Come back check the October release, with User management and Payment addons. MySQL was asked by lots of users since launch 3 weeks ago.

<comment><USER2> Great. Just subscribed to the newsletter. I like the UI though. Quite slick for a 3 weeks old beta app.</comment></comment></comment>