The Joys And Ethics Of Insect Eating - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/04/03/297853835/the-joys-and-ethics-of-insect-eating <comment><USER2> Interesting article. I've always found it amusing that insects are so taboo in most cuisines, yet we already eat all sorts of weird creatures[0].

However, I agree with the author at the end. This is a weird statement by the interviewee:

> If you're a vegetarian, I can't imagine a reason why you wouldn't want to > adopt insects into your diet

I can think of a lot of reasons.

Some people just don't want to eat living creatures capable of sentient thought and pain (even if the process used to raise and kill them is painless). I'm painting with an incredibly broad brush, but in my experience, vegans tend to be more focused on farming practices - I know several vegans who say that they would be comfortable eating eggs or dairy that they themselves farmed (so that they could be sure that the hens/cows are being treated properly).

But vegetarians (and vegans) have a number of different reasons for their dietary preferences - some of them are also interested in the treatment of animals, but they may instead (or also) have a vegetarian diet for reasons related to health, religion, etc. Most of these reasons would apply equally to insects and to birds/fish/mammals.

[0] obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1268/](https://xkcd.com/1268/)

<comment><USER3> Well, if one can't imagine why a vegetarian wouldn't eat insects, one needs to expand the imagination. While not speaking for all vegetarians, one of the reasons I don't eat animals or insects is that I hold to the idea that no creature should have reason to fear me. Sure, insects get killed in the harvesting of plants, but I don't harvest plants for the expressed purpose of killing insects.

As with most things it is typically more complicated than "here's a single reason, making it easy for you to mount a counter argument that you think quite clever."

<comment><USER4> Does it matter, to a cricket, whether it dies so you can put it on your supper plate, or merely so you can fill said plate with roughage?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Before clicking:_

"Insects, huh? Shark Tank had a cricket meal business funded a couple weeks ago and they said they could help them with a PR campaign advocating cricket eating. What do I bet that this article I am about to click on will not be about the more common sorts of insects eaten such as grasshoppers and worms, but will prominently feature crickets and cricket meal, proving the author, whoever that is, is a stooge for Big Media?"

 _< Click. >_

"Bingo. The Shark Tank guys are good. Really know how to play the game."

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure I'd go all 'stooge' on them. Its an interesting story and it resonates with a lot of current issues (Warming, farming, PETA, Etc) Of course if the story comes from some young hippie looking guy, as a reporter, you're less likely to report on it than if it comes from some 'known successful' person. Its a characteristic of our society that things the 'cool people' are doing is worth talking about. Is that stoogeism? Or is that someone vetting the idea for some reporter who doesn't want to waste time on otherwise suspect idea?

<comment><USER7> [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have tried these, and they are surprisingly delicious: [http://www.exo.co/](http://www.exo.co/)

They are labelled as "Made with cricket flour", but other than that you wouldn't know it was any different from the dozens of similar protein/nutritional bars out there.

They are a bit expensive, but I highly recommend getting the sampler pack at least once if you're at all curious about the taste, texture, etc: [http://www.exo.co/products/pre-order-multi- pack](http://www.exo.co/products/pre-order-multi-pack)

This is the other "major" brand of cricket-based protein bars: [http://chapul.com/](http://chapul.com/)

<comment><USER9> I'd love to try some of these. One thing though: the bars from both brands are relatively low in protein (10g for Exo and only 5g in the Chapul bars). I wonder why that is?

If they want to appeal to the high-protein/power athletics crowd, they need to bump up the protein a lot. As of now, there's not much to distinguish these from a much cheaper Clif bar.

Higher protein bars, like the BioX bars, use a lot of soy protein, which is sub-optimal. It would be great to get a ~20-30g protein bar with cricket protein.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I clicked through to one of the retailers and grasshoppers are >$36/lb ... I can order more nutritious steak for less. Seems like the pricing is way off thus far.

<comment><USER11> I've talked to one of the folks at Little Herds here in Austin ([http://littleherds.org/](http://littleherds.org/)), and he explained that he'd like to eat a lot more bugs than he does, because he enjoys them and they're nutritious, but the cost is still prohibitive even for him (who is involved in the farming of bugs for consumption).

I'm not sure I understand why that is. The argument is that scale is the biggest limiting factor, but I would think achieving scale would be so much easier. A million crickets is a lot easier to house than even a few hundred steer. I really want to see evidence that insects are sustainable and affordable as a food source before I dive too far down into that particular rabbit hole.

I'm a vegetarian for ethical and environmental reasons, but I'm not sure my ethical stance extends to include insects and arachnids (though I do take them outside rather than kill them). I already occasionally eat clams and scallops and oysters. I'd probably eat bugs, if they were sustainable to farm and if they were not for economic elites only; I also tend to opt out of luxury economies on ethical grounds.

<comment><USER4> You take arachnids outside? But they keep insects down! I'm perfectly happy to cohabit with them, so long as there's a clear and evident understanding that where I go, spiders don't, and _vice versa_ \-- I mind me of my childhood home, which we shared with a sizable black widow who made good use of the space behind the toilet tank; as long as you didn't go carelessly sticking your fingers in dark crevices, you had nothing to worry about, and that's a good rule in any circumstance. (And black widows really are lovely creatures, once you know how to treat them with proper respect -- not at all like the false widows now cropping up here in Maryland, which are so godawful ugly as to make you imagine they spring full-grown from the forehead of David Cronenberg.)

But don't take my word for it; try it for yourself -- next time you find that a spider's spun her web in a corner, leave her be, and you'll likely find yourself less frequently called upon to escort importunate insects out the door; she'll be happy to take care of the problem, to the benefit of both of you.

<comment><USER12> More importantly, indoor spiders don't thrive outside. They'll just try to get back inside. Outdoor spiders are different species.

<comment><USER11> Well, they should go buy their own motorhome. If they cause me trouble (like landing on my face, crawling across my food, hanging out on my pillow or toilet seat, etc.), they get a ride to the outside. Them's the rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Many cuisines involve insects, but they are all traditional. It's just not more widespread because, unfortunately, cattle replaced all other protein sources in most places, specially in the west, where we apparently created a beef addiction.

Here in Brazil there's a dish that involves flour and fried ants. It's delicious, tastes like shrimp, but I only tasted once since it's rare. Ant- eating is an influence from native americans. In Cambodia there's also deep fried tarantula. I never ate it, but apparently it's also delicious, tastes like crab.

Basically, most insects once deep fried will taste like shrimp or crab, so not bad.

There should be more available, since they are apparently way more efficient (and clean) to produce than cattle. Cutting down the forest to raise beef on grass, or cramming a bunch of mammals in a warehouse then wasting money on antibiotics _doesn 't make any sense_.

</comment><comment><USER14> My company[1] did a bit of flavor profiling research for a few Ento farmers and startups. Once you get over your aversion to the idea of eating crickets or mealworms, their actually quite good! The crickets always reminded me of french fries (and I don't even eat fries....).

We have a vegetarian on our team who felt fine eating them. No pain, no harm.

Lobsters on the other hand... jury is out on weather they feel pain.

[1] www.Gastrograph.com

<comment><USER15> When we were in Shanghai for ChinaJoy, we stopped at a Yunan beer bar called Southern Barbarian. Our appetizer was a plate of deep fried crickets, meal worms, and bees. They all had a nice potato chip feel and taste. The bees made my lips numb, so I stopped eating them.

<comment><USER14> Gotta love China; I had Wasp Larvae when I was living in Yunnan, and loved it!

The numbing was probably from Sichuan Pepper Corn [1] not the bees themselves!

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a few startups in this area, like [http://www.chirpfarms.com/](http://www.chirpfarms.com/)

There's lots of opportunities around food. Supermarkets and grocery stores are a $522 billion business in the US alone.

We are planning a hackathon around food in the South of Sweden after the summer. Check out [http://hackformaten.se](http://hackformaten.se) if you're interested.

<comment><USER17> > Hack för maten

Haha! I see what you did there! :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've tried raising crickets to feed our bearded dragon. It's damn hard. As easy as it is to find them under leaves etc. in the garden I was never able to maintain a breeding colony. And they smell pretty bad too.

<comment><USER19> Pig farms can smell pretty bad too!

I imagine there will eventually be a market for units that click together to create insect farms. Heating, lighting, food and water, with different shelves for different bugs.

I haven't seen anyone talking about the killing process. Do you just throw them into a deep fryer and hope for the best? Gas them?

I have a strong aversion to the idea of eating insects. I don't know how serious my hunger would have to be to overcome this. And that's for already dead and cooked insects. Give me a cage of wriggling moving bugs and I would have a really hard time killing cooking and eating them.

(I don't eat shrimps or prawns or lobster or similar for this same reason).

<comment><USER20> There were guys on Shark Tank with this idea for crickets. They had it all figured out. I can't find the exact episode on YouTube now, but here's the story:

[http://sharktanksuccess.blogspot.com/2014/03/cricket- energy-...](http://sharktanksuccess.blogspot.com/2014/03/cricket-energy- bars.html)

<comment> T-hawk The full episode is on ABC's site, probably up for another week or two.

[http://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank/episode- guide/season-05/5...](http://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank/episode- guide/season-05/521-chapul-garage-door-lock-morninghead-packback)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The strangest part of this story is that the author ate some cookies some random stranger sent her. I'm not sure if I'd be that brave.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra I try to avoid eating invertebrates as a general rule. The only exception is crustaceans perhaps.

<comment><USER22> Out of curiosity, may I ask why you avoid eating invertebrates?

<comment> guard-of-terra They are disgusting, or arent't tasty, or a combination of both.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Meetup - Boston - Tonight - Feb 6th, 2013 - 6:00 - <AUTHOR>

Date: Tonight, Wed. Feb 6th, 2013
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Meadhall in Cambridge Center
In case you need to get a hold of anyone,
http://www.meetup.com/hn-boston/
We should be upstairs, but ask the hostess where we will be. <comment><AUTHOR> This is pretty informal, just a get togher to meet some new people. Come on out for a few drinks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> UPDATE: We will be sitting in the back by the stairs rather than upstairs.

</comment><comment><USER2> any tips on finding parking? I might decide to come up from Providence.

<comment><USER3> I expect you'd be able to find metered on-street parking. Note that the city of Cambridge meters only take quarters (no dimes or nickels). The Meadhall is a couple blocks from the east end of the MIT campus. Here is a list of parking garages in the area if you can't find a metered street spot: [http://web.mit.edu/facilities/transportation/parking/visitor...](http://web.mit.edu/facilities/transportation/parking/visitors/public_parking.html)</comment></comment>


[1703.06211] Deformable Convolutional Networks - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06211 <comment><USER2> That paper came out a year ago, and it seems like a great idea. I wonder why it didn't get spread more.</comment>


Use Atom to edit in Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tuvistavie/atomic-chrome <comment><AUTHOR> To answer the questions of the use case, here is mine. I spend quite a lot of time editing in Chrome, especially Github and StackOverflow, and found myself doing the following:

* Start editing in Chrome

* It becomes long so copy-paste to Atom and edit there

* Copy-paste back to Chrome

To avoid this, I have then be using [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoil...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoilgiofhhhodbodcfgomelhe) to edit directly in Chrome but thought that it would be better to use a real editor rather than a subset, which is why I created this package.

I have an editor opened almost all the time, so pressing a shortcut and being able to edit directly there without copy-pasting around is actually saving me some time compared to my previous workflows.

</comment><comment><USER2> I use this Firefox add-on to edit text in gvim from time to time:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all- text/...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all- text/?src=search)

But I don't see the advantage of editing text areas with atom, which presents an extremely similar text editing experience compared to the experience the text area already provided. On the other hand, moving to Vim to edit a particuarly long comment or what have you makes more sense because I get to use the crazy keybindings I've drilled into my fingers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Atom is a full featured text editor, like vim or emacs. The editing experience is therefore way superior to Firefox or Chrome textarea, and you can use all the shortcuts, plugins and goodies you are used to. For a short comment, a basic textarea is of course enough, but when you write something a little longer, I think it is a real gain of time to be able to edit in a real editor.

<comment><USER3> Atom has a very good vim-mode that implements vim key bindings. You can do similar things to get emacs or custom key-bindings

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A similar behavior is available with edit-server[1] and the accompanying Chrome plugin[2] in Emacs.

[1]: [http://melpa.org/#/edit-server](http://melpa.org/#/edit-server) [2]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/edit-with- emacs/lj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/edit-with- emacs/ljobjlafonikaiipfkggjbhkghgicgoh)

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I was about to ask about Emacs.

What a cool idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like this idea. As Firefox tightens its sandbox security eventually things like It's All Text! won't work anymore.

I have some bugs open on the project and maybe someday I can switch from Vim to Atom comfortably.

I also hear that the It's All Text! author is lazy... every time I go home to the family. ;-)

<comment><USER7> Hm. I love It's all text and use it all the time with my Firefox and Emacs setup.

Are you saying that you're its developer, and that you're not going to maintain it anymore?

That would certainly make me sad :(

<comment><USER6> I'm glad you like IAT! I am indeed the developer.

I'll continue to maintain IAT! as long as it can work in Firefox.

Firefox is changing its security model for extensions to make it more like Chrome's. Eventually, it will be impossible for IAT! to work as a pure extension anymore.

Over the years, I've been working on IATED ([https://github.com/docwhat/iated](https://github.com/docwhat/iated)) which was meant to be a replacement for IAT! -- a sort of IAT! next generation.

IATED would be two parts: a server to open the editor and an extension that talks to it.

But I've become distracted and disheartened by figuring out how to make it as simple to install and use as IAT! yet remain secure.

Some issues:

* I know enough security practices to know I'm not even close to being an expert. IATED has the potential to do really bad things if insecure. Letting a malicious page read random files on your file system (or worse, write them!) is the obvous vector.

* I would want to support the same platforms: Linux, OS X, and Windows. But each platform has very different requirements. Windows users are going to be confused if IATED is purely command line driven, for example.

* What language should I write it in. I have several false starts, with the current 'master' branch being JRuby. But depending on the JVM seems horrible. 'golang' is pretty new and maybe the way to go. I'm not sure.

* I work on IAT! mostly alone, though xOneca has been a great help. Writing IATED by myself is discouraging. I'd love to have someone who knows about golang or Windows or security help me write IATED.

Anyway, that's roughly the state of IAT! and IATED at the moment.

Ciao!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be even cooler if HTML input can be edited using markdown source.

For eg., you compile an email in Gmail, but edit it using Markdown in Atom (or whatever editor); the final content gets rendered as HTML. Effectively you are sending HTML email that was composed and edited in Markdown.

<comment><USER9> It would be so great to have that for Jira and its obscure formatting conventions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree. I am going to give it a try. Thank you for the idea.

<comment><USER9> Awesome! I'm happy to help test - email in profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Use cases I thought of and I haven't even used it or similar plugins:

You want to use Atom's Markdown preview of a reddit comment or a github issue or anything else that takes Markdown.

You want autosave of a comment/input in case you accidentally close the tab, navigate away, or restart your browser.

You want to write code in a comment/email.

You want to use more advanced editing commands, things like undo-tree.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone else jump into an editor to write emails or essays?

I find myself wanting simple, distraction-free plain text with no UI cruft for any writing more than a few sentences.

Personally I'm using either the Write Space extension for Chrome or Sublime today, but it seems like the author has the same use case, and with the added convenience of auto sync.

<comment><USER11> Yes. For one, I don't trust myself to not accidentally hit a keyboard shortcut I'm used to using on my native editor, but happens to collide with an important function in the email client. I also despise gmail's interface in general these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be cool if browsers simply created easy-to-find temporary files on disk that mirror the contents of the text box, and can be copied or edited externally. Then you could use whatever editor you want, or simply copy the file to edit later. Hm.. maybe a FUSE filesystem could be used for this.

</comment><comment><USER13> The only real use-case I can see here is getting access to multi-select, and find/replace utilities, or perhaps other custom shortcuts you might use. Overall a neat little trick. Atom is not my usual editor of choice but I could see a few small potential use cases.

<comment><USER14> I usually copy-paste longish things to the text editor (or at least to clipboard) to avoid data loss in case the webapp crashed / browser crashed / HTTP request failed / I mistakenly pressed backspace when out of the textarea (which navigates to previous page)

It happens rarely but when it happens, it hurts.

<comment><USER13> A browser extension I didn't know I wanted. Keeps history of textfields when I navigate away, and gives me an option to restore.

<comment><USER14> There are some, like [1]

But I use many browsers, webapps reset the forms contents with JS etc. It's complicated.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus- form-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form- recovery/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love this. There used to be a TextMate plugin for Mac browsers that did the same thing (well, without the live sync).

Am going to use this for some aged web forms at work that have pretty hostile UX and that I often c&p into rather than bother trying to type.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm still sad Pterosaur [1] is no longer maintained.

[1] [https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur](https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur)

<comment><USER17> What about Vimperator or Pentadactyl?

<comment><USER16> The _textareas_ are close, but it's not the same as having the actual editor. I use UltiSnips a lot, which without the actual editor you can't use. It's the same with a lot of Tim Pope's plugins (abolish, surround, etc...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Damn, I thought this meant Atom support on Chrome OS :(

There still isn't a good text editor that does regex find and regex replace (caret doesn't).

<comment><USER19> if you can't install/compile vim on your computer it is not a computer

<comment><USER20> I don't know if I could _install_ Vim on my father's Chromebook (probably yes), but I do know it came _preinstalled_! That makes it a computer too, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sounds like GhostText:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghosttext-for- chro...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ghosttext-for- chrome/godiecgffnchndlihlpaajjcplehddca?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER22> If I need to edit outside my browser, I would normally just press Alt+Tab to switch to my text editor, type the text, then Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V. It feels about as fast and works with all web browsers and text editors.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is also what is used to do, and I found it added some unneeded overhead, so I thought it would be easier to simply sync it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I used Automator on OS X to create a system service to do something like this. Creating it was really simple - just a "Run Bash Script" action with "/usr/local/bin/subl" in it. Right clicking text anywhere in the system and choosing "Edit in Sublime" will open it in ST and replace the original text once you save the file.

</comment><comment><USER24> Cool, but not sure I'd use this. The only reason I could see this being used is if you're writing code into a textarea that isn't syntax-aware, or if you just really want vim keybindings when you're typing a long email.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could be cool to add this to a webapp with socket io. Make collaborative coding.

<comment><USER26> Like Floobits for Atom?

[https://floobits.com/](https://floobits.com/) [https://floobits.com/help/plugins/atom](https://floobits.com/help/plugins/atom)

They also support Sublime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd be more interested in a generic solution that makes a live mapping from webkit internals to files via FUSE.

(I have zero experience with webkit to know if this is a reasonable undertaking.)

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a really cool idea, accidentally pressing my Sublime shortcuts on website forms is definitely a very common mistake for me.

<comment><USER29> There are similar plugins for sublime out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I really like the idea and atom is my editor of choice but I struggling to find a use case where I would use this day to day.

</comment><comment><USER19> i'm more interested in the screenshots window manager.

having been forced on a mac recently... just the fact i can't move my windows with <one key>+<mouse left button> is driving me crazy. and to add insult, the title bar that i have to hit to move windows is smaller then anything on browsers such as chrome and firefox.

<comment><USER31> I _think_ that's i3. But it's Linux anyway, why would you be interested if you have to use Mac?

<comment><USER19> i'm a moron. noted.

i guess i saw something that reminded me of the cocoa/whatever-osx-UI on the the screenshots. but looking closer now, there is nothing other than atom and chrome, both have custom inconsistent UIs that do not hint the OS they are running on. you are right, it can be linux or anything else.

<comment><USER32> You can use something like Divvy (Paid - on AppStore) or Spectacle (Free - [https://www.spectacleapp.com/](https://www.spectacleapp.com/)) to achieve the same effect

I personally use Divvy because Spectacle didn't exist when I first started using mac

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting concept, but why? Why would I use this?

<comment><USER34> Because editing text in a textarea is a horrible and frustrating experience?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can somebody explain why would one ever want to use this? No trolling, I might be missing something here. I just don't see any use for it right now.

<comment><USER36> Aside from some of the other mentions, this could be pretty neat for someone who manages many WordPress sites, or any other CMS' for that matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> nice work :) i will use it

</comment><comment><USER38> nice!

</comment><comment><USER39> Very cool, but I'm struggling to see the purpose of this. The time it would take to focus on the textarea/ contenteditable field, then press the icon just to begin typing from a different program seems like a waste. Either that, or it has extremely narrow uses; none of which are readily apparent in my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER40> The screenshots demo-ing this tool in use shows the native WYSIWYG editors in the respective sites to be more feaure rich and intuitive.

This seems like a fun programming exercise with little real utility.

<comment><USER9> The utility is the lower cognitive overhead of having all the UI that you don't need hidden, responsiveness, and having more lines of text visible on one screen. Similar reasons one might use WriteRoom.

<comment><USER40> I'm certain WriteRoom serves a niche. If it indeed was such a pain point in, WriteRoom should've achieved the scale of a .. Evrernote? Just saying that as developers, we tend to believe that our own little quirks is how everyone on the planet likes things to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wow, this is sooo.....useless. Atom is Electron which is Chrome so you can run 2 Chrome instance and sync some text between them.

<comment><USER42> Two instances of chrome is not relevant here. Read first comment for its use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> As others say, there's no use for this.

It would be really cool to have some kind of a bidirectional WYSIWYG for web design. Edit a text field in a Chromium window managed by Atom, and it makes the same change in your template file (or even JSX file). Edit something in your template, and the change is instantly painted to the browser window.

I know this wouldn't be trivial to implement, though.

<comment><USER44> I believe you were downvoted as its somewhat offtopic, but I wanted to share that your idea is implemented. [https://developers.google.com/web/tools/setup/setup- workflow...](https://developers.google.com/web/tools/setup/setup- workflow?hl=en)

this works today, really well. give it a shot.</comment></comment>


YouTube Comment Ranking Is Broken - <AUTHOR> http://edwardspoonhands.com/post/66425515182/ok-so-my-friend-emma-puts-this-video-of-her

<comment><USER2> Another way the new comments are broken: whenever you find one of those comments "in reply to [user]", if you click on the message, you're not shown the replied comment like you would have before the changes. Instead, _a new window_ opens, with the same video you were watching starting again from 0:00 (and, at last, the comment you wanted to read). Who decided that awkward behaviour?

<comment><USER3> I hope this is a bug since the behavior is so terrible I hope no developer did this intentionally. But if it is a bug why has it not been fixed already?

<comment><USER4> That was probably done because comments also appear on one's Google+ page. In that context you want to see what video was commented on.

But it seems extremely clumsy not to implement a solution that takes into account the context in which the comment is shown. Just more evidence that the project was pushed through in a rush, without regard for consequences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another example; there are 'honest trailer' clips for high profile movies, mocking them with a fake trailer. Most of them are pretty fun and comments were likely to be "hey x was funny", "oh god y reference is great", 'lolololol' or similar. You might say that these comments were junk.

But! currently, most of the top comments are from people complaining that the authors "did not understand the movie" or that it was a great movie because "director was living in paris during bla bla".

Wat?

Previous comments were from followers of the channel, they were relevant. New ones are apparently from humorless bitter men.

<comment><USER6> Why are they only men?

Are men only bitter , are women not allowed on the internet?

<comment><USER5> I think I subconsciously wrote that as most of the commenter names would indicate they were indeed, men.

Or that I thought "people" in my native language and went with a poor translation in my head.

Or, I'm a douchebag with an anti-women agenda, funded by several organizations. Spreading my idea that women should not be allowed on the internet as you just figured out as a smart person you are.

Who knows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can report this stuff to Google by installing Google Report extension in your chrome browser. Through that you can say your problem easily and I am sure about that in the next algorithm update, they are going to take care of it.

<comment><USER8> riiiiiiight

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seriosuly, like a week ago Top Comments would display the actual top comments, as in highest-rated. Then they switched it to most-replied-to.

Now it just shows random crap, definitely not sorted in any meaningful way.</comment>


Launch HN: Apozy (YC W17) – Use browsing habits to stop phishing and spot breaches - <AUTHOR> Hey all,
I'm Rick, the founder of Apozy. We're a YC-backed company in the current batch and we've created a browser extension that stops people from getting hacked by things like phishing and malware. We're excited to get your feedback, hear your ideas, and answer questions!
I've been a hacker and penetration tester for 10 years. I started out by poking around people's computers in 7th grade, then moved to poking SQL databases behind forms around high school. I eventually wrote a talk about session hijacking on MySpace in 2007 and was absolutely beyond horrified to stand in front of a bunch of people and pretend I know WTF I'm doing.
Soon after I was hacking Fortune 500 companies at a few consulting firms and decided that phishing was a way bigger problem than people really knew at the time. That ended up being right, considering it's now the most successful attack vector for breaching companies. I wanted to change the way people solved this problem and that's how Apozy was born. I introduced the idea to my now cofounder, Erhan, and he was onboard almost immediately. Erhan was the best developer I knew, had run a development firm in the past and was a hacker by hobby.
Fast forward to today, we're busy building our solution to next-gen attacks. Apozy's browser extension immunizes you against phishing and malware attacks. Phishing is out of control--1 in 3 companies fall victim to CEO fraud emails alone--and the current approach of blacklisting sites can't keep up. Instead, Apozy analyzes your browsing habits to stop you from entering data into suspicious sites that don't fit your usage patterns. We also aim to protect privacy by providing objective site privacy ratings, stopping trackers, and upgrading connections to HTTPS. Apozy is currently free to download on the Chrome store and soon will be on Firefox.
To check out Apozy, you can visit our site at https://www.apozy.com or head over to the Chrome store at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/apozy-trusted-brow.... <comment><USER2> Does this send the users entire browsing history to Apozy?

If so, what bits are you sending? Just the top level domain, just FQDN, entire URL, or are you tracking engagement time on websites as well? How long will you maintain, or plan to maintain, the user's browsing history?

Any plans on monetizing the consumer end of this to build a profile of where the users are spending their time?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no data collection by default. Everything is opt-in. The only information we communicate is what you opt into. The browser history stays in your browser and is not sent to Apozy.

If you're opted into privacy scoring it sends only the FQDN of the current site to our service. We conduct privacy scoring on the server side because it would slow down the browser otherwise. If you're opted into community protection, CSP violations are sent with the URL. This allows us to detect undiscovered malicious sites and share them back to the community.

Currently we have no plan to share any information to monetize on the consumer end. We make money by enabling businesses to control fine grain permissions on corporate rollouts.

<comment><USER2> > There is no data collection by default. Everything is opt-in. The only > information we communicate is what you opt into. The browser history stays > in your browser and is not sent to Apozy.

Maybe I'm not getting how this works, but how can a service like this function without sending the URL (or FQDN etc) to a remote service? It's too much data to have the entire map of all servers on the internet bundled locally (probably a pain to update too...). That said, what does it mean to use this plugin but not opt-in? Is that possible, or are you referring to users opt-in as part of the install?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't need to send any information to our service to protect you from bad sites because that is handled locally. The browser history already exists so the load on your machine is the same with or without Apozy. We use the headers to make it efficient for a large number of sites - 1M+

Using the extension without opting in means you don't see site privacy grades but you're still protected using a Trust on First Use model of security created with your browsing history.

<comment><USER2> > We don't need to send any information to our service to protect you from bad > sites because that is handled locally. The browser history already exists so > the load on your machine is the same with or without Apozy. We use the > headers to make it efficient for a large number of sites - 1M+

Okay so the local version is comparing the user's current page vs. the sites they've gone to prior? And if it seems off based on some heuristics it flags the page. Interesting idea.

Wouldn't work for me though as I have my browser set to nuke everything each time it's closed.

> Using the extension without opting in means you don't see site privacy > grades but you're still protected using a Trust on First Use model of > security created with your browsing history.

I originally thought it was just this piece which would need _some_ type of client / server interaction to either fetch the "bad lists" or send the current URL/FQDN for validation.

<comment><USER3> > Wouldn't work for me though as I have my browser set to nuke everything each > time it's closed.

If you don't nuke your local storage, it should still work. I do suspect it may be more annoying without any browser history to go on because there's no model built, so you have to 'prime the pump' a little more than a user who has history would have to.

-Erhan

<comment><USER4> Are you storing a shadow browser history in localStorage?

<comment><USER2> I would imagine it's either that or they're somehow querying localStorage for the existence of any data for a given domain to indicate that you've been there before (which obviously wouldn't work for sites that don't use localStorage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > 1 in 3 companies fall victim to CEO fraud emails alone

Citation needed. I'm sure the number will look like that at companies who open and forward the email, doubt it's that high off the cuff.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hey Rick -- sounds like an elegant solution to a huge problem. Are browsing habits transmitted in any way to your servers, or are they analyzed locally?

<comment><AUTHOR> Browsing habits are analyzed locally. We only collect data if privacy grades or community protection is enabled via opting in. For those features we only collect the bare minimum to conduct analysis and the dataset is anonymous.

<comment><USER7> For corporate use -- does this discount the bill?

<comment><AUTHOR> Community features allow us to improve the product across the board and we would take that into account. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do you have the statistics for browser usage at enterprise companies? Obviously you don't support everything yet but I imagine the money in info sec is all up enterprise/micro$oft. Curious what comes after the browser extension.

<comment><AUTHOR> MS definitely has a hold of the market but it's changing pretty rapidly. We have big plans!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Genius idea. I just installed it! What are some things coming down the pipeline?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We're working on device support across the board, improved privacy scoring, and toying with the idea of adding Google's Perspective - [https://www.perspectiveapi.com](https://www.perspectiveapi.com).

<comment><USER10> Apple Safari support in the future? Also, if I'm using a self-updating malware blocklist within extensions such as Ablock Plus, how would Apozy do better than that to prevent phishing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Safari will definitely be up soon.

The reason why we're better at that than an AdBlock is because we use a whitelist approach. When using a whitelist, all the newest sites and attacks are blocked by default. AdBlock will always be slightly behind on that. Additionally, AdBlock won't protect you from inputting your credentials into a phishing site if you somehow end up on a bad site. As a side benefit, since we don't scan the DOM, we don't slow anything down!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this still useful without a solution that works on mobile?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be launching a mobile version for FF + Android soon. We agree, mobile is a place where this can also help immensely.

<comment><USER11> Not super clear from your post, Is it a version that works on FF on Android, or one version that works on FF and one version that works on Android in general?

<comment><USER12> I'm assuming FF for Android because it's the only browser on the market with decent extension support to my knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neet idea!

What representation are you using for each site (ie a sparse vector, full text, etc)? How do you compare newly visited sites to old ones?

<comment><AUTHOR> Site comparison is done natively using Chrome's history APIs. As far as representations for each site, we don't need to scan the DOM because our extension relies on native sandboxing via CSP headers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Phishing is not hacking.</comment>


Stripe begins private beta in Australia - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/au/features

<comment><USER2> This will be interesting. Payment gateways in Australia need some competition - the main ones are ezPay and Westpac (a bank).</comment>


Goldman Sachs sent a computer scientist to jail over 8MB of open source code - <AUTHOR> http://blog.garrytan.com/goldman-sachs-sent-a-brilliant-computer-scientist-to-jail-over-8mb-of-open-source-code-uploaded-to-an-svn-repo <comment><USER3> I read the original Vanity Fair article. I have to say that the whole thing looks like nothing more than Goldman using its governmental influence to send a message to its programmers that if they leave for another firm, there will be hell to pay. After he won his federal appeal and was released from federal prison, Goldman convinced the State of New York to file charges for the same conduct. That case is pending and he is out on bail. A recent motion to dismiss that case based on double jeopardy was denied. Welcome to the USA - where money buys you all the justice you could ever want.

<comment><USER4> Justice as it was meant to be (John Rawls, Kant, et all): "Entitlement to legitimate expectation."

Justice as it is practiced: "Legitimising the expectations of the entitled."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link bait title -- _It was open source code mixed with Goldman Sachs proprietary code_. This is also a summery of a much larger and more complete Vanity Fair article [1].

[1] [http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis- gol...](http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman- sachs-programmer)

<comment><USER6> It was stealing proprietary code that could have cost Goldman hundreds of millions of dollars.

<comment><USER7> To me it is not clear why stealing the proprietary code could have cost CG hundreds of millions of dollars.

Proprietary code that wasn't developed and tested with generic requirements in mind can rarely be economically re-used outside of the original company context, as it reflects the structure and the processes of the mother-company. In fact most organisations I know decided to throw away their code base entirely when restructuring or upgrading their internal systems as re-work was deemed uneconomic, because the gap between the code and changed environment is too great.

Data is salvageable and immediately valuable; however re-using the code requires a considerable effort, it would also be very hard to keep in secret. The news of their platform being fully or partially re-used at competitor's would have quickly reached GC and they could have shut down the competitor entirely whilst suing them for all of the profit.

Of course one could steal the code for analysis so they could try and exploit the technological weaknesses in GC trading patterns, however this is not the argument given by the article or GC.

<comment><USER6> There's two reasons here...

1) As was mentioned by Shubb, there is a predatory aspect to algorithms. If I know how your algorithm will work, I can create one that will be it. You can think of it as programming robots to fight. If I've seen the source code for your robot, I may be able to program one that can exploit it's weaknesses. (Worked against the Death Star!)

2) The HFT world works best when the ideas aren't well known. Let's say I identify a mispricing. It could be, "When this Mutual Fund moves, this similar ETF moves 0.1ms later, and these stocks react to the EFT and move 0.2ms later, but they forget these other 3 stocks 0.3ms later, so actively long those stocks for 0.3ms, and short the rest, and reverse after the time is up." No need to dwell on the details, just understand that it exists. If only one person has identified this mispricing, there are a lot of pennies to be swept up. As soon as two people know about it, the game is up.

While this type of competition could conceivably be good for the market as a whole, it's definitely not good for ther person with the algorithm.

If I have the code, perhaps I can deduce the algorithm.

<comment><USER8> Although it doesn't state what _was_ taken, it does mention that the copied code in question is _not_ related to the trading algorithms.

If it did, then Goldman's reaction would be well justified (to the extent that sub-millisecond arbitrage that siphons billions out of the markets each year and into the hands of a few firms can be justified).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The most interesting part of the reaction from the Vanity Fair piece for me is how so many geeks had no idea of this story until it was spelled out to them by a mainstream magazine (even though the Aleynikov case was extensively covered here on HN).

Now would be a good time to highlight the cases of hackers that Michael Lewis doesn't have time to write about: Bo Zhang, Michael Meneses, the Madoff programmers, John Kane (has had most charges dropped now), the Liberty Reserve guys and almost everybody ever charged with Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

<comment><USER10> What's the story with the guys who worked for Madoff? I've heard nothing of this.

<comment><USER9> Here is a Wikipedia article on the upcoming federal trial, but a warning that it is all based on the indictment and doesn't have the defense side of the story:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jerome_O'Hara_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jerome_O'Hara_and_George_Perez)

This case contradicts the FBI findings from the Madoff case, and relies on the programmers having of _had to know_ that their system could also be used to print out fake trades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love to stick it to Goldman as much as anyone else here, but I think the story is probably more nuanced than "Goldman jails innocent programmer for leaving the firm". I know that I have on occasion kept copies of source code for projects that I'm proud of (and there was often some open source code involved; that changes nothing). Not to give it to someone else, but because I was proud of the work.

That is probably a breach of contract but I don't think it should be a crime punishable by jail time (unless someone can prove that said code was used to aid another company).

<comment><USER12> Proving that the code was used to aid a company is not a good measure of the seriousness of of the crime. What if you take the code and store it on a device with really low security? You don't share it, but you allow "hackers" to easily take it, so you are in fact aiding competing companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article talks about the _requirement_ to release source code to the public, if modifications are made. This is a common misconception, but generally not the case, depending on the license. Typically, source code release is required if the software is distributed. If you've modified open source software for internal, private use, you typically are not compelled to release the source code, because you are not distributing the software.

<comment><USER14> I've updated the post to reflect this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It could have as easily been phrased (and likely would by a prosecutor) as "a cache of source code longer than the King James version of the bible." The defence could respond "only about three millionths of the amount of data in a human cell's nucleus." "More than seventy times the amount of software needed to land on the moon!". The amount is irrelevant. He released proprietary source code which is an offence under current law, with fairly well established sentencing guidelines. I agree that the law should be changed, but if you protest a law by breaking it, the results shouldn't come as a surprise.

<comment><USER16> you'd have a point, except for the part where an appeals court unanimously acquitted him

<comment><USER15> I said that breaking a law has fairly predictable results. Among them the possibility of acquittal on appeal. In fact, if you're doing it for some sort of protest reason, this might actually be the goal (building case law against an unfair/unconstitutional law or interpretation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmmm. Ok so this guy uploaded both OS and Goldman-authored code - as stated in the article. And uploading pure OS code wouldn't make sense anyway as it would be available anywhere. And did so immediately prior to taking a principle role at a competitor start up - no wonder they checked. He knew he was doing something wrong - as stated in the article - and his reason for deleting his bash history makes no sense (surely bash doesn't cache passwords) - <USER2> he was trying to cover his tracks.

They're gonna want to protect their IP - particularly when it could give a competitor a huge advantage. It's not surprising they went after him.

<comment><USER18> > surely bash doesn't cache passwords

It does if you're careless enough to type them out in clear text, e.g. when connecting to a mysql database:

        mysql -h host -u user -pMyPassword database

<comment><USER19> Useful tip: with

      HISTCONTROL=ignorespace

in your .bashrc, if you start a line with a space, it won't be entered into your history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The original Vanity Fair article tries very hard to paint a picture of a stereotypical overly naive techy.

Little carefully inserted details such as pain-the-back side of having to mow the lawn, all these details should be creating a picture of life-unsavvy coding reclude in reader's mind. The reader supposed to chuckle "how naive, anyone who is on $270K can just hire gardener to take care of the lawn!"

I have personal knowledge of programmers taking the code with them when leaving employment for no particular reason except for "in case I might need it as a reference" and then never ever looking at it again. In my mind it's very much akin to hoarding.

I have very little doubt that the code would be unusable outside of GC infrastructure.

What does seem unusually harsh is the punishment for the crime when no damage was ever done to the victim; to me this is an attribute of a show-case trial.

</comment><comment><USER20> Linkbait title to blogspam for a vanity fair article, contains copypaste snippets from the original.

<comment><USER14> I think there is probably still a little bit to be said for curation in this world. The original article was quite long (and a great read and I recommend it) and there were nuggets in it I found interesting.

I actually did try to submit the original article myself earlier today, and noticed that it had already been submitted several days ago. So at least I did upvote that.

<comment><USER21> Garry, yes curation is important, in fact, that's why HN exists, to curate and comment _primary_ sources.

If the article has already been submitted then why try to resubmit it after copying and pasting the content into another URL?

The best way to do this on HN is to take the stance of the opposition and write an inflammatory headline, "I support (unpopular position) X, because (popular position) Y is considered harmful"

<comment><USER14> I didn't submit this particular item, nor did I upvote it. I wrote it on my personal blog because I thought it was interesting.

Also that sort of title is editorializing, and that's not encouraged.

<comment><USER21> My apologies garry, I didn't look at the OP. Personal blogs are personal. ;-)

I completely misunderstood your initial comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Previous discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6146446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6146446)

<comment><USER23> I was disappointed in that previous discussion. Take away the off-topic stuff and it seemed like most reactions varied from "Good, throw the book at him" to "God that guy was dumb".

If Lewis' portrayal is accurate, then Aleynikov is pretty clearly an otherworldly technical type. That doesn't mean he should be exempt from laws, but it's not irrelevant either. For one thing, to anyone who knows the type, it says something about intent: his intent was likely not to exploit someone else's secrets, but to work on interesting things. A programmer like that wouldn't download code because it contained secrets; he'd download it because it contained library routines that he didn't want to have to rewrite someday. Why would he steal secrets? Anything important, he could just derive later. He probably thought that Goldman's technical designs were all wrong and would make a point of not copying them anyway.

There are countless stories of otherworldly technical types, including many heroes to people here, running afoul of laws or regulations and having to be rescued by the more worldly members of their scientific/technical community. I expected this technical community to recognize that pattern in Aleynikov and react with some empathy, because we all know someone like that or have a little of the type in ourselves. Instead we got a bit of a Colonel Blimp chorus. I hope that was just sample bias.

I wish we could see that source code. After reading Lewis' article, I would be shocked if it contained anything of nontrivial value to Goldman.

<comment><USER24> According to the indictment the source code included Goldman's propriety stock option pricing algos.

<comment><USER25> But the Vanity article explicitly states that the "Jury" asked him whether he took the strats (the trading strategies) and he said "No."; the response from the "Jury" was telling, they said "Why not take the valuable stuff?"

<comment><USER24> Pricing algorithms are different from trading strategies (although they're obviously related). In any case that's purely a matter of evidence, he either copied a piece of code or he didn't.

<comment><USER25> But breach of contract and copyright are civil issues, not criminal (modulo the insane copyright criminality laws of late). Besides, no damages have ever been postulated, let alone proved.

<comment><USER24> Trade secret violations can be prosecuted under criminal law, any company can request a criminal investigation in such a case. In the last decade there have been around 100 criminal convictions for theft of trade secrets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Since when is a crime measured in megabytes?

<comment><USER23> The degree of harm caused is often a factor in measuring a crime, especially when it comes to sentencing. As Garry points out, 8 years for this is crazy.

<comment><USER27> Well it is 1 year per megabyte... seems perfectly fair to me!

<comment><USER28> Now, that'll teach people to be concise!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm reposting one of the comments from the blog here for a bit more exposure. I think this gives a good alternative viewpoint on the case:

"I worked literally side by side with Serge while at Goldman Sachs, so I have substantial perspective on this. Let's be clear -- Goldman Sachs did not pursue him, the relevant district attorney of NY did. Goldman's job is not to prosecute, it is to provide the facts of the case to the judicial system, which decides whether to go after him or not. We can argue about whether the punishment was excessive but let's stop blaming a firm that is a private company which has no ability to prosecute. And I can tell you that what Serge did was incredibly against the terms of his employment agreement. The open source aspect is overblown, obviously if it were freely available and not substantially different he would have no need to upload it days before he left. The fact of the industry is people steal code all the time, he just happened to be one of the unfortunate programmers to be caught and made an example of. But it certainly doesn't mean he's a victim here. When a company is paying you 500k+ a year to write code on its time, the understanding is that they have the say as to what happens to it, not you. You can't just say, I don't think this is that materially different so I'm going to send it to myself before I work for a competitor."

</comment><comment><USER30> This guy has made two mistakes: 1\. He used OS code without consulting first with legal departament of the company. 2\. Transferred the source code outside the corporate network without consulting first with legal departament. His boss may be not competent in this field, but the legal departament must be and, I beleive, they already have a policy for OS solutions. This developer made a measurable damage to the company, which should now take some efforts to clean up the OS code or face possibility of being required to release it's own code under OS license. I clearly see this as a good reason to sue him.

The main problem with this situation is educational: "brilliant scientists" and "smart developers" (especially from ex-USSR countries) are not paying enough attention to the legal issues related to their jobs. They do not try to secure their rights and do not consider the possibility that they violate the other's rights by their technical actions. It would be great if CS courses in universities will include a short talk about what's good and what's bad in legal field. For now, the more attention will be paid to such cases, the better for everyone.

<comment><USER31> So then you support making an example of this guy, because others don't pay enough attention to the law? Am I reading that right?

<comment><USER30> No, you are not reading it right. There's no "because" in my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Seriously, this part (if true) doesn't really help him.

"He pulled up his browser and typed into it the words: Free Subversion Repository. Up popped a list of places that stored code, for free, and in a convenient fashion. He clicked the first link on the list. The entire process took about eight seconds."

Pushing "proprietary" code to a repo without knowing that it is a) secure and b) allowed feels like a great way do not follow a NDA.

</comment><comment><USER33> From the comments: "Why are you putting him in jail? Again, Goldman has no ability to put people in jail. Only the justice system does. Why this kind of narrative continues to be OK with people, I have no idea."

This justice system didn't decide out the blue to go after Aleynikov one day. G.S. _asked_ them to do it. I suppose if you work for G.S. you need to be very good at rationalizing things in order to sleep it at night.

If I worked for G.S. I would probably tell myself: "G.S. doesn't cause the starvation of millions of people, we just speculate on food commodities." (Google "goldman sach starvation")

</comment><comment><USER24> From the indictment the source code contained "the trading algorithms that determined the value of stock options" and was "hundreds of thousands of lines of source code".

Source: [http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/021110aleyn...](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/021110aleynikovindictment.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER34> After reading the whole VF article I come to two conclusions.

1\. If you work for a company which (as I'm sure GS does) has a policy forbidding you from uploading company data to the public cloud, don't violate that policy. Especially if it's source code you wrote while working there. (The open source argument is a red herring. It doesn't matter.). And super especially if you're about to leave for a competitor.

2\. If you work in an industry and for a company that is being scrutinized by the Feds and is heavily regulated, really REALLY don't violate policies like this arbitrarily and on your own, because you might go to jail.

Is it "fair" what happened to him? No. But lots of unfair things happen. He paved the way with his thoughtless actions.

</comment><comment><USER35> Was he tried by a jury of software engineers?

<comment><USER36> The notion that once be tried by a jury of one's peers is practically meaningless for any 'crime' involving scientific knowledge or any specialized competence.

<comment><USER37> If you read the original Vanity Fair piece, Lewis assembles a true 'jury' of his peers - that's the best part of the piece.

<comment><USER38> The problem with that is you tend to start narrowing down the views and opinions in that group.

People who work in IT tend to be smarter, richer, more inclined to be left leaning in their politics and so on. They have expertise to understand the problem but they don't necessarily represent the views of the country which is what a jury is meant to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Goldman is above the law...</comment>


Slate Star Codex has been deleted - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/ <comment><USER2> An extremely avoidable tragedy. I can't imagine why NYT wouldn't be flexible about this, they have countless articles about a wide variety of people (actors/performers, other authors with pen names, people with chosen names for a variety of personal reasons, etc) in which they respect the subject's wishes. It seems so arbitrary for them to refuse in this case.

<comment><USER3> There's an unfortunate trend of journalists at large outlets gleefully throwing their weight around and being unnecessarily vicious in their treatment of smaller media entities and blogs they perceive as ideological opponents.

NBC was the main entity prodding Google to deplatform Zero Hedge and The Federalist. Similarly there was CNN's threatened doxxing of meme makers that targeted the brand, and how unified large media were in supporting the internet-wide deplatforming of Alex Jones.</comment></comment>


Experience Rot - <AUTHOR> http://www.uie.com/articles/experience_rot/ <comment><USER2> _Here's a counter-intuitive fact: Chances are all those features you 've been adding to your design are hurting your user experience. Every feature that's squeezed in, in the name of giving your design a competitive edge, has been making your design less competitive._

Some people seem to misunderstand the definition of the word "fact." No, this is NOT a fact. If you have to say "chances are" in the definition of your "fact," you're citing something that can change; it's not a fact, it's an observation (and in this case not even a well-supported one, often verifiable though we might find it).

No, new features do NOT necessarily make your design "less competitive." What that even means varies vastly and indefinably between almost any two given projects. Any given feature may be implementable in ways that do or don't improve usability/competitiveness, or that simply don't affect it, and even those perceived differences are likely to vary from user to user.

 _How_ a feature is added to the interface, how the interface is structured, who it's built for and what they expect and are familiar with, whether it's intended to attract people outside of a single strict target demographic, whether all features are available to all users... these are relevant facets that make this "fact" absolute crap.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article starts begins with an assumption and draws inevitable conclusions that are all out of whack.

The reason a TV remote is overly complex is because, while _you_ might not need the "control caption" button, there is a subset of users for which it's critically important, and it is not practical to produce 15 variants of the remote. Google Docs is experiencing massive uptake is because it's online, linked to your gmail account and convenient to use - but it has got a long way to go before it displaces Word as a professional document publishing app (ever tried to get a print version of a good doc that was exactly the same as what you had on screen?). And FFS - has OP _used_ Salesforce.com? Look up 'feature bloat' in the dictionary and you should get a link to it.

 _Of course_ there is always friction between features and user experience, but it's the designers _job_ to marry the two. A designer who always says no is not going to be a designer much longer.

<comment><USER4> User experience designer here. I think the point of the article is that it's the business owner's job to say 'no'. The designer can make recommendations and provide best practices, but he or she should never be held accountable for requirements and feature sets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a developer and project manager, I love these posts. As an owner or senior manager, I hate these posts.

That is the divide that needs crossing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny how many "blame the designer" comments I'm reading here. I'm a UX designer very accustomed to dealing with the kinds of feature creep issues Jared addresses. Allow me to give you my perspective.

Given the opportunity, any competent interaction designer will give you a great user experience, IF they've been allowed to practice User Centered Design (user research and modeling, rapid prototyping, user testing). That's a big "if."

In reality, we have to balance user needs with business drivers (mainly keeping up with competition), marketing, technological constraints and of course legal and compliance. Each situation is different, but most of the time, whoever holds the purse strings gets final say. The end user almost always gets thrown under the bus.

Oh, I scream and holler and hold up extensive research to back up my rationale. But ultimately decisions get made by risk-adverse middle-managers who are more concerned with protecting their department's status quo than actually taking their customer's real needs into account.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hate these kinds of articles. He gives the example of a TV remote with never-ending complexity like pause, record, slow motion, rewind, and so on. However, what is the solution? Saying that one should say "no" to all but essential features is a nice platitude but, after saying "no" all those times and whittling the features down to the bare essentials, what are the underlying principles with which one can present those essential features to the user without over-complicating the user experience?

I'd like to see a case study taking all the complexity that a modern remote has and yielding simplicity. Would you go from a 50 button remote down to the Apple TV remote which has only three buttons and a four-way directional pad?

What would Jared Spool's properly designed remote control look like?

<comment><USER7> You raise a good question, and it's really annoying to read articles that tease out specific examples and never offer the alternative. However, I'd say you answered your own question. The TV remote really needs to be nothing more than a D pad, select button, and back button (could probably even dispense with that). You then just work on the software which is context aware and presents you the simple 2-3 choices you need within each context.

<comment><USER6> If you're offloading buttons from the remote into a context-aware software interface, the interface now becomes an integral part of the UX. And avoiding an additional button on the remote control in favor of a software menu may, in fact, degrade the experience. Having a "swap to previous channel" button is likely a better experience than making someone access that functionality via a software menu.

Saying "just make it context aware" is a bit too much like "How to draw an owl": [http://www.maniacworld.com/how-two-draw-an- owl.jpg](http://www.maniacworld.com/how-two-draw-an-owl.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great. Even more important for apps, where only little real-estate is available and your app has to nail that one use case (because if you try to do two use cases, your users will move away to two apps who do either use case much better than your app).

If you totally got this post, also read this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985951)

</comment><comment><USER9> it's called feature creep.

</comment><comment><USER10> In my opinion, this is one of the things that is keeping Eclipse from progressing. I still use it when programming Java because of the 3-4 awesome time-saving features it provides that a text editor couldn't handle, but I just can't be bothered to learn where it hides the rest of the functionality that might make it more generally useful.

</comment><comment><USER11> It took me to the end of the first paragraph to realize that "Experience" was an adjective not a verb in this situation. (i.e. I read it like "Experience Mexico!" not "Usability Rot")

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second- system_effect](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect) not much has changed in the past 40 years

</comment><comment><USER13> This article really does just assume that you are a bad designer.</comment>


Google Buys BeatThatQuote, a UK Comparison Site Violating Google's Guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://www.seobook.com/beatthatquote-buythoselinks

<comment><AUTHOR> Update - Google Confirms Beat That Quote Spamming Activities By Penalizing BeatThatQuote.com

<http://www.seobook.com/beat-it-beat-it></comment>


Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News but the Tech Companies? - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/why-can-everyone-spot-fake-news-but-the-tech-companies <comment><USER2> Wow, this is meta.</comment>


Scope exit in C++11 (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://the-witness.net/news/2012/11/scopeexit-in-c11/ <comment><USER2> What everybody seems to miss (including in the other comments here) is the fact that no kind of hackery with destructors will ever make them equivalent to scope(exit) or finally{}, because of the simple reason that destructors invoked via exceptions can't throw their own exceptions. And this makes sense, because destructors are meant to _release resources_ , whereas finally/scope(exit) are meant to _execute after prior operations in a LIFO manner_. Not all operations that need to occur in a LIFO manner are inherently tied to resource acquisition. More fundamentally, one is inherently about data, and the other is inherently about control-flow... simply put, they're different tools with different use cases, even though people don't bother to make the distinction. Nevertheless, if people insist on using the same hammer for both nails, the language needs to address this fundamental issue before people can claim it's possible to do scope(exit) or the equivalent in C++.

<comment><USER3> > _destructors invoked via exceptions can 't throw their own exceptions_

`finally`, in languages that have it (and presumably, scope(exit) too), face fundamentally the same problem with exceptions that destructors do: if an exception is already propagating, and you throw another one, _what happens?_ , since you (presumably) can't have two exceptions. C++ says tough / don't do that / you're terminated. Other languages just forget about the other exception, and you lose the context (which can be a pain to debug; though I think more recent versions of Python, for example, will attach the original exception as a "context" to the new one) but your program continues execution.

Languages that expose a result object, e.g., Result in Rust, force you to deal with the issue yourself, essentially, by deciding at the site what to do with it. (The downside being the increased amount of code, though to some extent I believe the language can supply tooling to help there; Rust is again a good example. The upside is you get to choose what happens.)

(I see these more as a tradeoff, that different languages have different opinions about.)

<comment><USER4> Java from the beginning allows you to chain exceptions and that is a core part of debugging.

In Python this is a very recent construct and few libraries use it, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This type of construct is unnecessary in C++11; the presence of RAII containers and structures totally obviates it. C++ provides a language-level construct for logic performed at the end of object lifetime (i.e., when value types fall out of scope or when heap-allocated objects are deleted): the destructor!

This person is describing an error-prone reimplementation of std::unique_ptr with a custom deleter. I could understand the value of an article like this if the use of C++11 were not allowed, but given that the article is written with C++11 in mind, I fear the author has totally missed the point of RAII-style resource management that the newer language-level constructs provide.

Deterministic destruction and associated logic, as well as the RAII strategies that follow, are perhaps the greatest strength of C++. Languages like Rust have gone on to improve this even further by eliminating some of the greatest sources of error. Capabilities like this don't seem accurately described as C++ learning from D; indeed, if D provides hooks for running logic when names fall out of scope, that seems more accurately described as vice versa.

<comment><USER6> That's if you program "object oriented". In my experience object orientation in C++ often means something entirely different than in a GCed language like Java or C#. It's totally reasonable to program data-oriented in C++, especially for time critical applications like games. Unfortunately, this rules out many abstractions and mechanisms that make sense in a modern C++ application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's nice to see some D ideas make it into C++.

I think that D is kind of like Mercurial: both less popular than some other wildly popular alternative, but we still hope that at least some of their ideas trickle back into the more popular sibling.

<comment><USER8> C++ is like English - widely used, and steals like hell from other languages.

D is probably more like, hmm, Esperanto? Carefully designed but few people know about it.

Haskell would probably be Lojban...

<comment><USER9> While I'm a C++ fan, I'd readily concede it's much closer kin to (verbose) German than (laconic) English.

Java's even more verbose, so it probably has the stronger claim on German,* which I guess makes C++ Danish and Perl English. :)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty similar to std::lock_guard (and similar RAII types). Except instead of unlocking (or tearing down a resource, etc.) upon destruction, it invokes a lambda.

</comment><comment><USER11> The site doesn't load for me. Here's an archived copy:

[https://archive.is/srQvw](https://archive.is/srQvw)

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, so much debate over the specific manner in which to solve a problem. More needed on the which problems to solve, I think.

</comment><comment><USER13> (2012)

</comment><comment><USER9> You can do the same thing with no C++11 features other than C99 variadic macros. (IMO cleaner, too).

      #define SCOPE_EXIT(...)\
      	struct SE##__LINE__##_{~SE##__LINE__##_(){__VA_ARGS__;}}se##__LINE__##_

<comment><USER14> I'm curious: is __VA_ARGS__ part of the standard, or just widely used?

<comment><USER11> It's part of the standards since C99 and C++11.</comment></comment></comment>


The lesson of Flappy Bird for games developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamezebo.com/news/2014/02/05/lesson-flappy-bird-games-developers-and-it%E2%80%99s-not-what-you-think <comment><USER2> "the number one key to success is dumb, blind, luck"

This is a red herring.

The number one key to winning the lottery is dumb, blind luck.

That is true.

But don't categorize the entire game industry, let alone this developer's story in that framework just because it's easy for the media to generate pageviews about a lottery winner.

The macro reality is that proven business models around building a studio on the back of high quality apps (or highly aggressive pay-to-play apps), purposeful marketing models, etc exist all over the place.

The micro reality of this developer is the guy has run his studio for 4 YEARS, had published several games before in a variety of formats, etc.

So he's a 4-year overnight success.

He didn't throw in the towel, and more important than "blind luck" in his story was perseverance, and he didn't "die" (1).

So please don't tell people that the most important factor in becoming successful is to go out and buy lottery tickets.

(1) [http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html)

<comment><USER3> _So please don 't tell people that the most important factor in becoming successful is to go out and buy lottery tickets._

But that's exactly what perseverance is in this context, buying more tickets. You can't win the lottery if you buy no tickets, and the more you buy, the more likely it is you will win. You can't have a hit game if you produce no games, and the more games you produce, all else being equal, the more likely one will be successful. Luck plays a dominant role and you can't control opportunity, but you can increase your exposure to it by continuing to show up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They forgot to mention Lesson #1 which is go ahead and just blatantly rip out the tile graphics from an old Nintendo game and reuse them, it is easier than wasting time creating your own and apparently you can get away with it.

<comment><USER5> When the biggest mobile game companies in the world rip off other people's games, why on earth would an independent developer not also feel entitled to do the same?

<comment><USER4> There's a pretty big difference (legally and ethically) between making a game that has similar mechanics to another game and just outright ripping out graphic assets to place in your own game.

<comment><USER5> First of all, that's a pretty big accusation to level at someone on public record: are you 100% certain that the graphic assets have been lifted pixel- for-pixel? Second, I agree with you on the legal point: it's much easier to 'protect' visual assets than it is a game mechanic. However, I dispute the fact that ripping off someone's game mechanics is, somehow, more ethical; in both cases, you're simply copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own. Just because one is easier to define, and therefore protect, in law, doesn't mean they're not both pretty nasty ways of operating.

<comment><USER4> Not that big of an accusation when the theft is so obvious.

It doesn't really matter if the graphics are pixel-by-pixel the same, modifying them a bit to make them slightly different doesn't protect you. See: EA's lawsuit against Zynga over The Ville which Zynga had to settle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "But maybe what game players really want is a game that is fun and free, with no strings attached."

I just respect any game that has no strings attached. I have mostly given up on iOS gaming because there's just so much niggling and begging and nickel- and-dining.

This will be remembered as a dark age, not a golden era.

<comment><USER7> This was recently posted to HN: [http://honestandroidgames.com](http://honestandroidgames.com)

Not iOS, of course, but the whole purpose is to feature games that are either free, or have a one-time purchase, whether in a marketplace, or in-app, that provides the entire game, no recurring purchases, etc.

<comment><USER8> Nice site, thanks for the link. I really think there is an underserved blogging market for curation of apps and games, especially with a specific theme such as this site does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The linked blog talking about the "suspicious" rise of the game misses the appearance of flappy bird on Pewdiepie.

There's also a comment talking about how to monetise the game "properly" which gives advice about some reasonably ghastly monetisation techniques:

> At the very least he should have added a interstitial upon opening the game, > and maybe one everytime the game becomes active. He should have included a > retry button.

> There should have been a more games & free game button. He could have added > a remove ads in-app purchase, and made it so that you can only get rid of > the ads for 'x' amount of time before you have to buy again.

> He could have provided upgrades like buying shields and/or lifes so you can > get further, getting rid of peoples frustration.

<comment><USER10> Genuinely curious, what's so ghastly about an interstitial upon becoming active, and a retry button?

It's a free game, I think people expect ads by now. Maybe not every time the game starts up (or having a daily limit) but that's not the worst thing in the world.

<comment><USER4> Being free is likely the only thing that has stopped Nintendo's lawyers from coming down on him like a ton of bricks at some point in the past 8 months or however long the game has been out.

If he wants to monetize it he really better change the graphics first (though technically he's still copyright infringing regardless of whether he is charging for his game).

<comment><USER5> Is the pipe graphic literally lifted from Mario, pixel-for-pixel? Or is it just very similar. TBH, I don't think he's infringing any more than King, Zynga, et al.

<comment><USER6> Setting a pretty low ethical bar when you compare to King and Zynga.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting to take a closer look at this game. Make something intuitive enough where people think "Of course I can beat your high score in this, look how simple it is" and then it make it _insanely_ difficult.

Side note: I wonder if the developer meticulously chose the "flap height" and pipe width such that it would drive us all insane, or if he just got lucky.

<comment><USER12> >Side note: I wonder if the developer meticulously chose the "flap height" and pipe width such that it would drive us all insane, or if he just got lucky.

Its hard to say. I guess most people find this pretty compelling, but to me it comes across as an unplayable clone of helicoptergame.net. It looks pretty polished for a pixel game, but I don't consider bad controls, intentional or not, to be a clever game mechanic.

<comment><USER13> It's not really polished. There's no music. And almost all of the in game graphics are borrowed from other games. So I guess it's polished in the sense that those other games did the polishing.

It really does come off as someone who started out trying to clone Mario, or someone who was just trying to make their first game without expecting anyone to actually download it.

The lack of a paid ad-free version shows that it wasn't really expected to be downloaded millions of times.

<comment><USER12> Polished probably isn't the right word for it. I just meant that the graphics are cohesive(even though they are copied) and the animation is smooth. Most popular games fail to achieve even that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The key to success is essentially, word of mouth (or the internet equivalent). And addicting gameplay.

Every single person I know in the real world (ie. not on the internet) is playing this game. I know more people playing this game, right now, than Angry Birds in its heyday, or Candy Crush right now.

It's funny how such a simple game can capture people's attention - I'm addicted, my high score (from yesterday) is 90 :-0

<comment><USER15> Wow, I am super out of the loop as this is the first I've ever heard of it.

<comment><USER16> Even though I don't know people in real life, I couldn't miss it. The only sites I visit are HN and Kotaku, and it's front page on both. And now it's on HN twice.

Success flows to success, but good luck creating either a chicken or an egg from nothing.

<comment><USER15> I visit this site and facebook every day, and reddit now and then so I'm surprised I haven't encountered this.

Um... not sure what you're getting at, but I'll try to work on that chicken. Or egg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Imagine if the developer added a challenge feature in the game where can share score with friend? it'd be twice as popular.

i think the pipe width was picked based on how it was in a certain nintendo game, he got lucky, but he's also talented developer (his other games really fun as well.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't it already have a score-sharing feature? My nightmare earlier was the addition of IAP to decrease the difficulty ever-so-slightly; combined with score oneupmanship, that would probably lead to the end of civilisation as we know it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I found that the audio for this game made it much more fun. The coin sound is pleasant and familiar, and reinforces me to want to play.

The punching sound when you die is pretty hilarious, and makes me want to try again. Because, hey, if I got a good laugh from dying, maybe I'll have another laugh from it again. The death punch is accentuated by the slight screen shake as well. nice little touches.

There are other mechanics that make it rather addicting, but I found the sound and other little touches added a lot.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is Flappy Bird just a clone of that rediculously fun helicopter tunnel game that everyone used to play on AddictingGames, the name of which escapes me right now? It's funny how many of these record-shattering Android and iOS games are just polished versions of ancient Flash games.

<comment><USER19> It's a mix of that and the bird vehicle from Machine Gun Jetpack which used the same tap/flap mechanic. Thrown together with some mario sprites and not so great hit detection.

<comment><USER20> The flapping mechanic looks a lot like swimming in Super Mario Bros (1985), or the flying in Joust (1982), minus the ability to control your horizontal movement. So it seems pointless to compare it to more recent games. If the game involved only jumping, or climbing ladders, or shooting, would we try to figure out which other games had that mechanic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No, it's not luck. Unless we're talking about growing up in Palo Alto at the dawn of computers, luck usually has very little to do with success. It's all about persistence and market understanding. In this case, it's mostly about creating games that people actually want. Good games are challenging and fun, so people buy them. Graphics, music, etc. are secondary. It doesn't take Bungie or John Carmack to make Tetris, but it's one of the best games ever made. Why? Because it's fun. I'd probably buy a knockoff Tetris app for $20 before I buy a beautiful but completely boring game like Infinity Blade for much less.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but making a fun game can be luck. There will be developers that don't need luck (or are lucky to not need it?!). Rovio made _A LOT_ of games other than Angry Birds; is making a lot of "bad" games and then one "good" not luck? I'm sure they set out and had equal confidence in each of their games being gold mines, before they were not or, in the case of Angry Birds, were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The lesson here is: "Free is the new black". I have an application that, once I begin to charge for it, fell off the radar and into hacker's greedy hands. Must we all simply be media containers?

</comment><comment><USER16> I have a prototype I wrote sitting on my phone right now that has very similar mechanics. But I don't believe for half a second that, had I finished it, it would have achieved one ten-thousandth of the success. In the age where anyone who wants to can create games, music, art, whatever on their computers, there's a ton of great work languishing in obscurity for every single work that finds the straight-and-narrow to the big time.

<comment><USER24> Luck is also a huge factor. Sometimes it's just one of those 'right place, right time' moments that can't really be replicated again.</comment></comment>