Nearby Galaxy M82 Hosts a New Supernova - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/01/22/kaboom_nearby_galaxy_m82_hosts_a_new_supernova.html <comment><USER2> This supernova will be very important for figuring out what Type Ia SNe are. As Phil Plait mentions, astronomers only know that white dwarfs are involved, but there are several competing models as to how the white dwarf(s) explode. One of the main ways we will be able to distinguish between these models is by observing what the supernova looks like long after the explosion since this is when the shock will be interacting with distant material. Because this supernova is so close we will be able to observe it long after the explosion and will therefore be able to observe its interactions with very distant material.

This is important because the so-called single-degenerate model in which a red giant dumps material onto the white dwarf is expected to produce very faint hydrogen lines. Observing these hydrogen lines in the spectrum would be a smoking gun for the single degenerate model. On the other hand, if they are not observed, it would put very tight constraints on how the single degenerate model could work.

Another reason these observations will be useful is that head-on collisions between white dwarfs are expected to produce two separate explosions with different velocities -- this then produces double peaks in the spectral lines [1]. Sometimes these are hard to observe because the SNe are so far away, however. They will be most easily observable in this SN. If they're found it would be a smoking gun for a head-on collision between two white dwarfs.

[1] [http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.3347](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.3347)

<comment><USER3> My understanding is that there are three competing theories which have the strongest claim on explaining Type Ia supernovae. The classic theory is that a non-white dwarf companion star feeds material onto a white dwarf, which increases its mass. This kicks off a complicated chain of events, some of which may occur over timescales of a thousand years, ultimately culminating in the initiation of fusion reactions (initially Carbon, then Oxygen) in the core of the white dwarf. The fusion reactions release heat, but because the white dwarf is already under electron degeneracy conditions it is unable to increase pressure and expand to moderate the fusion reactions, so instead they are caught in a very strong positive feedback loop. In a matter of seconds the fusion reactions consume all of the Carbon in the star and then begin consuming the Oxygen in the inner core, this process releases more than enough energy to completely unbind the star gravitationally, the star explodes in a supernova. Alternately, it's also possible that a white dwarf star could have more than enough mass to undergo a Type Ia explosion but is kept in check by rapid spinning. As the star ages and the spinning slows down it crosses a boundary where the above events occur. Or, two white dwarfs could instead merge with each other.

It's actually likely, in my opinion, that all three models contribute to Type Ia events in nature, but it's currently unknown which variety is the most common cause of such supernovae.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" Given the fact that it's nearby, up high for so many observers, and caught so early, this may become one of the best-observed supernovae in modern times."_

 _" [...] But the good news is it appears to have been discovered about two weeks before it hits peak brightness. Supernovae get brighter over time before fading away, and this one may get as bright as 8th magnitude, which is within range of binoculars._"

</comment><comment><USER4> Its very sad to think about all the aliens living in or around the M82 galaxy. I hope they managed to invent inter-galactic space travel in time to escape to another solar system safely. God bless them.

<comment><USER5> You mean another galaxy, assuming the supernova would create inhospitable conditions throughout all of M82.

<comment><USER6> A supernova is a big explosion, but I don't think it's quite 'galaxy sanitizing' big.

<comment><USER7> An appellation reserved for gamma ray bursts (and only within the emission cones).

<comment><USER8> [http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/](http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/)

A nearby supernova would definitely be sterilizing to the kind of life found on Earth, and to a lot of other imaginable forms. Of course, "nearby" in astronomical terms is sometimes unintuitive. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Old news. that happend 12,000,000 years ago...

<comment><USER10> OP should have appended [-11,997,986] to the title

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Man these Samsung phones just keep getting bigger and bigger.

</comment><comment><USER12> " _And just to get this out of the way, we're in no danger from this explosion. It's far too far away._ "

Also, it happened 12 million years ago, so I think we are pretty safe.

<comment><USER13> How is this an argument? If I shoot a bullet from a very distant planet and it will reach Earth after 12M years, will you be safe if it came directly towards you?

<comment><USER14> Surely after 12M years, the bullet will have rusted to dust in-flight? :)

<comment><USER15> Not enough oxygen for it to rust. And even if it were, a collection of dust traveling at bullet speeds would still probably kill you.

But worry not! A bullet fired from 12 million light years away would probably be ablated into nothing by the interstellar dust.

<comment><USER16> Nope.

Stop and think about the fact that starlight can travel that distance. Therefore the accumulated dust along that path is not enough to block light. That little dust won't stop a bullet either.

<comment><USER15> But it's not just starlight - it's the light of a whole nova (and the collective light of a whole galaxy.)

I can see starlight from the bottom of a pool, but the water in the pool will still stop a bullet.

(I am not a scientist, I could be entirely wrong, but it seems like the collective dust of 12 million light years would surely ground down a bullet, while being intermittent enough to let starlight pass through in aggregate.)

<comment><USER16> Well let's calculate it. According to [http://www.universetoday.com/30280/intergalactic- space/](http://www.universetoday.com/30280/intergalactic-space/) there is about 1 hydrogen atom per cubic meter. According to [https://www.google.com/search?q=light+year+in+meters&ie=utf-...](https://www.google.com/search?q=light+year+in+meters&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en- US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=fflb) there are about 10^16 meters in a light year. So 12 million light years is about 10^23 meters. Avagadro's number is about 6 * 10^23. So a tube a square meter across is a bit under 0.2 moles of hydrogen. According to [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080619205711AA...](http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080619205711AAuBH5O) at standard air pressure a mole of hydrogen would be about 22 liters, so we're talking about 4 liters of gas at standard pressure. Which would be about 1 square meter across, and 4 millimeters tall.

The collective dust of 12 million light years of intergalactic space does not seem likely to grind down a bullet very much.

That said, the whole calculation is flawed because first you have to get out of our galaxy, which is much higher density. Though that also wouldn't stop a bullet. But then you have our atmosphere, and that most definitely _would_ destroy a bullet that tried to pass through it!

But the moral remains. Space is empty. Really empty. Unimaginably so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Awesome! How often do astronomers catch supernovae like this?

<comment><USER3> Fairly often. There are a couple ways that supernovae get spotted. Sometimes an amateur astronomer will find a supernova, there are lots of folks who actually do this as a hobby and surprisingly it's something that such folks can actually be fairly productive about, but it requires a lot of work. Also, there are various ongoing sky surveys of various sorts including asteroid detection programs which typically pick up supernova at a fairly regular rate merely due to being able to observe a huge number of galaxies in any given night (since supernovae are typically bright for periods of many days to weeks). Additionally, we've deployed a variety of satellites that have "transient detectors" designed to look for the signs of gamma ray bursts but also capable of detecting ordinary supernovae, sometimes.

For example, in 2013 over 230 supernovae were discovered. And currently there are about 3 dozen active supernovae that can be viewed with a telescope, but most of them are fairly dim in very distant galaxies and would require a fairly sizable telescope to be able to see (~300mm aperture or so). The M82 supernova is the only one that is currently visible with an ordinary backyard telescope or binoculars.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why would I see [dead] before my submission titles? - <AUTHOR>

I joined about 2 months ago and I've only submitted a few stories so far (3 or 4) and on my last submission I see that there's [dead] before the title.<p>Any insight on what's happening? <comment><USER2> Dead posts have been killed by either automated spam prevention or the editors. See "In my profile, what does showdead do?" here: [http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've actually read that document, but I guess I was confused because it was marked [dead] as soon as I submitted it, and it mentions nothing about automated spam prevention.

Makes sense though :) Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Because you're like that dude from The Sixth Sense.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> PS This post does not have the [dead] in front of it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't see the [DEAD]. Screen Shot?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://dew.dangelov.com/dewdrops/DEW-5229a26a3d7111.76365678...](http://dew.dangelov.com/dewdrops/DEW-5229a26a3d7111.76365678.png)

I've read a bit about hellbanning on HN, so thought that's what might be happening, but i think kbuck cleared it up.</comment></comment>


Mobile app startups are failing like it's 1999 - <AUTHOR> http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-failing-like-its-1999/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AndrewChensBlog+%28Andrew+Chen+%28%40andrewchen%29%29

<comment><USER2> Don't think we need this submission twice on the front page.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4389061></comment>


Fangle: create interactive documents from plain text - happy-go-lucky http://jotux.github.io/fangle/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's a bit weird to see this on the front page again. I did this ~4 years ago just as a proof-of-concept. I thought it would be a neat idea to have a plain- text way of writing forum posts that had calculations embedded.

I'm an embedded systems engineer and work almost exclusively in embedded C/C++, so forgive my absolutely awful javascript/coffeescript coding.

Previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5107106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5107106)

<comment><USER2> Your coffeescript looks a lot like my early Scala code. I basically wrote Java style procedural code using Scala. Over the years I've learned more about functional programming, immutability, mapping collections, etc. I've slowly refactored one of my big projects (removing return statements, using Options instead of null checks, replacing vars with vals, etc.)

Looking at your code, my brain is already reordering some of it :-P It looks clean though. I've noticed a lot of devs like to trash on coffeescript in favour of ES6 or TypeScript, but I've really grown to love the language. It's also neat to look at the compiled output and see what it does to make many of the functional elements work. Most of it makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is cool and has some overlap with a project I'm working on. [https://idyll-lang.github.io/](https://idyll-lang.github.io/)

Idyll provides this type of reactivity, but focuses more on making it easy for users to embed custom interactive components

<comment><USER4> Dammit, why didn't I know about this two weeks ago? This looks like a perfect fit for my flame maps page[0] - it even uses React for custom components.

How do you handle dynamically resizing windows/screens and canvas? I had to jump through a whole lot of hoops[1][2] just to get it to play nicely with it

Especially on Firefox canvas does _not_ seem to play nicely with flexbox, or any kind of CSS where you don't set the width/height explicitly in pixels.

[0] [http://linnarssonlab.org/flamemaps/](http://linnarssonlab.org/flamemaps/)

[1] [https://github.com/linnarsson- lab/flamemaps/blob/master/src/...](https://github.com/linnarsson- lab/flamemaps/blob/master/src/components/canvas.js)

[2] [https://github.com/linnarsson- lab/flamemaps/blob/master/src/...](https://github.com/linnarsson- lab/flamemaps/blob/master/src/components/remount.js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> HTML5: create interactive documents from plain text!

</comment><comment><USER6> The core idea is nice (using simple markup instead of code), but it seems developers these days are completely oblivious to the fact that HTML is extensible and was literally designed to do this kind of stuff. Markdown is better for simple text editing, JSON is better for simple data structures, but HTML is far superior for complex documents where you need to attach structure and behaviors to text.

Things it buys you out of the box:

      - No need to write a parser
      - You can make complex references via CSS selectors
      - Your structure (tags) has structure (attributes)
      - All the existing tooling will help you to debug if something goes wrong.

On this note, I regret that HTML5 had thrown away the good ideas from XML (syntax consistency and namespaces) along with the bad (weird sub-formats, entity definitions, directives and other complex crap no one used well anyway).

</comment><comment> m-ou-se This made me laugh: "His power level is [3000.1]. That's 0.09999999999990905 more than 3000."

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> What is this? They used web technologies to try and recreate what the web already does?

<comment><USER9> It's markdown with widgets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting concept. The variables seem a little unintuitive to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, after I got it working I came to the same conclusion. I started to create a new spec for an easier-to-understand format but never got around to implementing it.

[https://github.com/jotux/fangle/wiki/Format- ideas](https://github.com/jotux/fangle/wiki/Format-ideas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is the point? Why reinvent the wheel? HTML is text. Or do I miss something?</comment>


Grab is messing up OpenStreetMap data in Southeast Asia - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/19/grab-maps-osm-thailand-southeast-asia/ <comment><USER2> "The problems came to a head in November when the Open Street Map Foundation's board of directors rejected membership requests for "more than 100 applicants" from GlobalLogic, thereby restricting the number of outsourced representatives working on maps for Grab and other clients of the agency.

"There had been a mass sign-up of 100 new accounts on 15.11.2018 from India, most coming from one single IP address from a company "well known" to OpenStreetMap. There had been a larger amount of complaints regarding edits from that company, who provide "mapping services" to other companies," read a circular issued by the board."

This is poor journalism. If you read the linked post ( [https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf- talk/2018-Nov...](https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf- talk/2018-November/005456.html) ) it says the complete opposite. The new members were not rejected. (The request to block them was rejected)

<comment><USER3> There's also the implication that without OSMF affiliation you can't edit the map, which is wrong.

<comment><USER2> Yes that's totally wrong. The OSMF (now) has about 1,000 members, and OpenStreetMap has ~4,200,000 registered accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> SE Asia is a mapping nightmare. There are frequent duplications, and Google Maps in unreliable at best.

My first gym appointment was on Mao Tze Tung Ave, Phnom Penh. I turned up at the correct number at the correct time, to learn that I was 30 mins ride away over the wrong side of town. This is common. House numbers relate to plot numbers, plot numbers relate to developers, street numbers relate to an original plan of the city that is unrecognisable now. Drench it in rain for six months and nothing looks recognisable or anything like what you started out with. There are three developers building the same number house on the same street now. You want a Grab? hahahahahahahhahhhahhahah

</comment><comment><USER5> The meta issue here is that they didn't have a plan to then validate the changes afterwards. And Grab's contractors being from India know that streets can be unpredictable and change since it's assuredly the same for them too and not just a quirk in Thailand. It's an astonishing disconnect from reality based on western standards of paying attention, but I think this is pretty normal in SE Asia and causes a lot of problems. Hopefully they'll be able to shed these habits at some point.

<comment><USER6> > Hopefully they'll be able to shed these habits at some point.

...or, you know, companies like Grab can host their own data and provide their own services.

<comment><USER7> But then the data is tied up in their proprietary service. Like, I appreciate the attempt to contribute this kind of thing back, even if it was a bit ham- fisted.

<comment><USER6> > But then the data is tied up in their proprietary service.

It doesn't need to be proprietary. They can follow the lead of OSM and publish their data so that others can use and edit it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> OSM has full edit history like wikipedia, so 'undoing the damage' doesn't need to be hard.

They could have a simple flag on edits which say if they're done from satellite data, and if so what age the data is. Any real-world surveys shouldn't be allowed to be overwritten by older satellite data without good reason (eg. spam, or the real world survey was done badly)

<comment><USER9> Objects are dependent on each other and new, legitimate edits can happen on top of damaging ones which we would not like to revert automatically.

Yes, there are tools in place which can revert edits, but there is still manual checking required. The annoying thing is that companies sometimes go ahead and "invest" money into edits which turn out to be garbage and then volunteers need to revert or fix them up.

<comment><USER10> There are also a couple of subtle details of the OSM editing model that could make it a lot easier for a knowledgeable vandal to make changes that are rather more painful to undo than they should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a little confused as to why Grab would hire a firm to update OSM via satellite images. OSM had to be more accurate than the outdated sat. images so why was there a need in the first place?

<comment><USER12> Not defending grab, but osm has lots of false negatives. Satellite image does not have to be outdated - you can get less than 6 months old satellite image accurate enough to extract roads and buildings from Digital Globe or Airbus.

Shameless plug: At tensorflight.com we have deep learning models that can do just that.

<comment><USER13> 6 months old is outdated, depending on how fast things change on the ground.

Even 2 months old can be outdated (e.g. can be missing houses built since, or showing houses that no longer exist). In some areas, this can be a very significant effect.

<comment><USER12> For most use cases it's more cost effective to use existing, slightly old imagery. On the other hand, for some use cases, it's necessary to get a very fresh image and commision an airplane flight (or drone if the area is very small) - e.g. hurricane damage mapping.

<comment><USER13> It's more cost effective if your choices are to use the two vintages of imagery, sure. I understand why imagery can be stale.

My point was that OSM data can be much more accurate than the imagery. Or not, depending on location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure how that's going to be possible, but there's a need for big companies to "fork" open data before massively manipulating it. And merge with main system if everything works for them, hence contributing positively instead of screwing everything up.

<comment><USER3> That's the Mapbox way. /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> WTF

Grab is spending big $ to improve the maps and contribute back to the community.

How about less bitching and more helping them spend their $ better.

And a side note, Grab and the other products like it are revolutionising Asia.

They are allowing the poor to have more rides, giving the drivers consistent work, wiping out the tuk tuk mafias, are making the vehicles far more efficient and clean, allowing non local language people to use local people to take trips easily.

I've never seen anything like it. It's a revolution. It's how tech can truly change the world.

<comment><USER16> _improve the maps_

The contention of the "bitching" is that they are not actually doing that.</comment></comment>


Open-source implementation of AlphaGo in Keras - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Rochester-NRT/AlphaGo <comment><USER2> Please forgive me if this is a stupid question, but why does DeepMind use python instead of something more traditional like Lisp?</comment>


The VC Carried Interest Debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.metamorphblog.com/2010/06/the-vc-carriedinterest-tax-debate.html

<comment><USER2> I'm seriously unimpressed, the author's analysis is based entirely on wishful thinking, e.g. VCs "should pay their taxes just like everyone else".

Whatever makes him think VCs are going to take permanent cut in their income without reacting in one or more ways to mitigate it?

You can change the rules in the middle of the game, but to expect only one player to ignore that to his detriment is delusional.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a slightly tricky one because I do think there is potential for the tax change to negatively impact funding available for startups.

However, the impact should be minimal and I agree with Fred Wilson that carried interest fees are not really that fundamentally different from other types of fees and thus standard income tax levels make sense.

<comment><USER2> _A_ potential???

If you want less of something, or don't care if you get less of it, you tax it.

Totally ignoring the fairness issue (it's certainly a debatable point), starting from this status quo how can you possibly believe this change will not cause harm?

About the only way I see for the medium to long term is that VC firms restructure, which _might_ end up with a neutral or even better situation (Fred Wilson is hoping for the latter, but I didn't find his case very convincing).

But in the short term it's hard to see how it's going to be anything other than a mess not to mention a distraction from the real job.</comment></comment>


BDD100K: A Large-Scale Diverse Driving Video Database - <AUTHOR> http://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2018/05/30/bdd/ <comment><USER2> Massive. Features include:

\- 100,000 HD video sequences across many different conditions

\- 2D Bounding Boxes annotated on 100,000 images

\- 10,000 diverse images with pixel-level annotations

Comparable to Baidu's ApolloScape dataset which seeks 1M semantic images

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.06184](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.06184)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know if they will be open-sourcing their tool as well?></comment>


Ubuntu Edge vs Fairphone - <AUTHOR> http://steko.iosa.it/2013/08/innovation-ubuntu-edge-vs-fairphone/

<comment><USER2> "A seriously cool smartphone that puts social values first" -From fairphone.com

Isn't this totally different than what edge was aiming for anyways?

<comment><USER3> I think it is different, yes, and I posted a long comment on his blog about how the two really aren't comparable. I think it would still be nice to see a phone that "puts social values first" and simultaneously has the same goals as the Edge. I'm sure the price tag wouldn't be very appealing, though.</comment></comment>


Zoom Blow as Thousands of User Videos Are Found Online - <AUTHOR> https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/zoom-blow-thousands-user-videos/ <comment><AUTHOR> Submitting this so folks can discuss the actual root causes of the problem, because this may not be a zoom issue at all. Discussing with coworkers, we can see that the paid version allows saving to the cloud and users don't select the location, but the users of the free version may also be uploading directly to Youtube and S3.

This article does not really make it clear to us that this is an issue of Zoom uploading to unauthenticated S3 buckets (though the app does give you the option to remove authentication in the paid version). I would like the author to clarify as to whether or not they confirmed that the videos uploaded by the paid version can also be found in web searches, or if anyone here has also verified this. As for the naming, a coworker pointed out you can simply search for "GMT20200325" on Google / Youtube. Naming conventions get into the topic of obfuscation, but it is not clear if the app is uploading these files to searchable locations or users are doing this in reference to the article.

If this is just people uploading files manually to a public location, then it is on them, not Zoom. Youtube is obviously end users and they should surely know that is public. I can't imagine that many end users uploading to S3 or even knowing what S3 is without setting proper permissions.</comment>


Apple to support reps: 'Don't confirm Mac infections' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/20/apple_malware_attacks/

<comment><USER2> I worked in Geek Squad for 5 years (finally started making a enough money doing freelance development to quit this past december).

I've done malware removal on 5-10 computers a day, 5 days a week for most of that time. So I've seen thousands of malware infections on the average consumer's computer. I've seen more different malware infections than just about anyone outside of an antivirus research lab.

When I first started most of malware came from users downloading files from P2P sites. However, for the last 2 years nearly all the malware I found was installed via a drive-by download that happened without user input.

You can talk all you like about avoiding porn sites and installing AV software, but it's not that simple. The majority of the computers I worked on had current AV programs--they weren't able to prevent the infections. The situation with malware and windows is absolutely terrible, and it doesn't only happen to idiots who stuff their drives with porn.

Macs have security flaws--they aren't perfect, but when compared to the malware ghetto I've dealt with over the years, calling this a mac malware problem an "explosion" is just ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> Selection bias? Your conclusion that windows is a malware ghetto based on your experience at the geek squad is like a Doctor saying 'everyone is sick, because all I see everyday are sick people'.

<comment><USER4> I think the meaning was that Windows is a malware ghetto compared to Mac. More akin to a Doctor noticing that 95% of his patients are blondes and declaring that blondes tend to get sick more.

The significance of this is offset by the base rate though: unlike Windows PCs, blondes don't constitute 90% of the sample group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The users who are most likely to be infected by this stuff are the same users that Apple caters to in person in their stores. Many Apple customers (at least the ones that I know) have become used to in-store "geniuses" fixing their difficult computer problems -- setting up their email, installing software, that kind of thing. This is going to be very difficult for Apple stores to handle.

<comment><USER6> It's not really that hard, Windows support guys have been doing it forever. And, like almost everything else, it's easier on a mac (my mom got this malware... on mother's day)

The problem is: naive user + attack vector (bad default Safari options) + malicious attacker (advertising network).

The solution is:

* Cleanup - Kill process form activity monitor, delete app from Applications, and installers from Downloads folder (kinda shocked that there isn't more to it).

* Inform - Teach user about basic practices.

* Close vector - Safari's _Automatically open safe files after download_ checkbox.

* Block attacker - Install AdBlock for Safari (Bonus points).

All of the above, except the 'informing' part, takes all of two minutes to do, so I think the "Geniuses" at the Apple Stores can manage.

To those entrepreneurs whose business model is based on ads... sorry, but Adblock is the new Antivirus. I install it alongside any software updates or antivirus software (even on Macs, now).

<comment><USER7> > _Cleanup [...] kinda shocked that there isn't more to it._

Perhaps not with this "first generation" of OS X malware.

On Windows some malware replicate to files and have other self-preservation quirks making anti-malware software necessary.

> _I think the "Geniuses" at the Apple Stores can manage._

Against simple malware, yes. When crackers start investing time and effort into their malware (like on Windows), it'll be a different case altogether.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To be honest, I'm just curious why we haven't seen much _real_ malware yet. The Mac Defender stuff is a joke, but there's no reason why somebody couldn't be exploiting the recent Skype bug ([http://www.purehacking.com/blogs/gordon- maddern/skype-0day-v...](http://www.purehacking.com/blogs/gordon- maddern/skype-0day-vulnerabilitiy-discovered-by-pure-hacking)), or the Chrome/Flash bug (<http://www.vupen.com/demos/VUPEN_Pwning_Chrome.php>), the bugs found at pwn2own or the myriad other holes which are closed regularly via updates.

<comment><USER9> The reason is scale and alternative options: If you're a hacker, why focus on the Mac when you can target 10x as many people on Windows?

<comment><USER8> I have often seen this mantra repeated, but I can't believe that this is enough to dissuade _every single hacker_. With Macs approaching 10% of the market this has got to be worth somebodies time to have a go. And yet, I know a lot of folks with Macs and not a single one has ever had malware issues. Either nobody is getting hit, or they are getting hit with stuff so good and stealthy that they just don't know it :-) I'm certainly not arguing that Macs are invulnerable (far from it), I'm just genuinely curious why somebody somewhere isn't stepping in to fill the malware niche.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I'm surprised if no hacker just wants to penetrate the Mac to be able to claim victory, like "Steve Jobs, you thought macs couldn't get viruses. Let me prove you wrong"... or something like that?

<comment><USER10> Don't people like Charlie Miller do just that?

Of course, there aren't in it for the profit, where the only rational thing to do is to target Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yesterday I saw some mac osx malware being served up from a website listed in google image search results.

The search was Flamenco or something like that. My girlfriend pulled me over to show me that this website was saying it was from apple security and that I needed to download a tool to remove the Trojan.

Having just come back from a visit to Turkey, we found the Trojan reference funny.

I think if she was surfing with safari the .zip file would have extracted automatically, which I think would have caused many people to run whatever evil was stored inside.

<comment><USER12> That definitely is a stupid default setting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As far as I'm concerned, when I read this I had no problems with what Apple is doing. They got a memo stating that Apple is looking into it, and don't confirm/deny malware.

That's what they're supposed to do, no? This is hardly a cover up. Apple is simply reminding their support staff to not make promises they can't keep. This is a holdover till they have a solution. If their permanent solution is a cover up, that's a whole other story.

<comment><USER14> I agree... although it would be nice if they would step up for their customers in this regard, I just don't see a scandal here. (That's just The Register's style of reporting I guess, not to diss them or anything.)

However, the letter itself is interesting in that it confirms Mac malware is becoming a real issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> More abuse of the term "infection":

> _The con artists behind Mac Defender hook their victims by presenting Mac- > using web surfers with images that depict an antivirus scan taking place on > their machines. The images falsely claim users are infected with serious > malware and urge them to download and install the antivirus package. Those > who fall for the ruse are then infected._

Yes. It's _malware_. It has _infected_ the computer. Because they _downloaded and installed it willingly_. But "infection" implies "virus" to most people, and this is nothing of the sort.

</comment><comment><USER16> I hope Apple solve this by creating a consumer version or mode of OS X with a sandbox similar to iOS. I'd love if my mom had no way of installing software that could break the computer, without doing scary sounding stuff like "jailbreaking" or "enable developer mode".

<comment><USER17> Chrome OS is the epitome of this. The whole operating system is just a browser. Nothing to configure, install or break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The real news is not that Apple won't remove malware, it's that Apple is apparently actively working to conceal the truth and perpetuate the Mac- selling legend that Macs cannot get viruses.

<comment><USER19> It's not a virus. It's malware. Users install it, and it sends them to porn sites.

If you run "sudo rm -rld /*" on a Mac, it may not run so well either.

Of course, it may be a sign that more sophisticated malware (i.e. real viruses, and other stuff that actually exploits the Mac's vulnerabilities) will be on the way.

<comment><USER20> > Of course, it may be a sign that more sophisticated malware (i.e. real > viruses, and other stuff that actually exploits the Mac's vulnerabilities) > will be on the way.

Once an OS has the attention of malware writers (even user-installed malware like this), real malware won't be far behind. Especially when you consider how much easier exploitation is on OS X than, say, Windows or Linux. It's 2011, but OS X still doesn't have useful ASLR -- supposed to be coming in 10.7, but it was also supposed to come in 10.6, so we'll see how that goes.

<comment><USER21> > when you consider how much easier exploitation is on OS X than, say, Windows > or Linux.

[citation needed]

It wasn't until Windows 7 that windows finally got a reasonable security approach. I don't know what install bases look like these days but most PCs I interact with are still on XP which is obviously not harder to exploit that OS X.

<comment><USER22> That is not correct, most of the security improvements were already implemented in Vista, which was released in 2007.

<comment><USER23> Yes, but Microsoft has acknowledged that there were weaknesses in its 32-bit ASLR implementation for Vista; see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomizat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization)

<comment><USER10> 32-bit ASLR is going to be weak by definition. It's unavoidable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As a PC turned Mac user for the last 3 years, this is truly the best thing about working on the Mac platform. My girlfriend is still on her shitty HP laptop and it is so incredibly painful to watch her worry about viruses and malware on a daily basis.

I hope Apple's policy around this is not going to be sweep it under the rug because it could get out of control as Apple market share grows and more effort is dedicated towards hacking the Mac.

As stupid as this story is, it is still something that Apple is gonna have to probably start paying more and more attention to, given the trajectory of Apple market share in the future and the increased effort will be taken towards the Mac platform.

I think

<comment><USER25> _My girlfriend is still on her shitty HP laptop and it is so incredibly painful to watch her worry about viruses and malware on a daily basis._

WTF is your gf doing on a daily basis? Does she do reviews of shady porn sites? Install MSE (it's free) on your gf's computer and tell her not to install programs sent in email from people. Then tell her to stop worrying.

And if she does do reviews of shady porn sites, tell her to use a VM.

<comment><USER26> This blame the user bullshit has to end. My own girlfriend got a virus (it was hostage-ware to be precise) last year and doesn't visit porn sites, runs up- to-date anti-virus, and keeps Windows up-to-date and patched. She knows better to run random shit sent to her via email. She's very defensive and doesn't even open an email that looks shady. It was probably a drive-by-download, Flash, PDF, or Java, I don't know. Running combofix, anti-spyware scanners, and everything I could find on forums didn't help. She wasn't happy that I had to wipe her HDD.

It is painful to watch her worry about viruses.

<comment><USER27> All it takes is one or two mistakes. Typo in URL, click a link, blindly click past a prompt that you should be reading, and you have malware and you probably didn't even notice it, no matter how smart your girlfriend is.

<comment><USER28> Ad networks. Or just a reputable site screwing up. People often mention porn sites or incorrect urls, but it's worth repeating that the user doesn't necessarily have to do _anything_ wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Personally I feel that top-down control of customer support agents is fundamentally flawed these days, but that is a different matter.

</comment><comment><USER30> Mac Protector (another name for Mac Defender) tried to install on my wive's new MacBook Pro the other day when she went to live.com to get the last of her contacts and some emails. She knew not to provide it with permission to install and panic and disaster was adverted.

Mac Defender does look pretty real though and I could see how the uninformed or people that easily panic would give it permission to install. As one second your on the web then a 'window' pops up saying your infected with Virus and to get the latest downloads ect., and it all looks convincingly real.

I don't regret switching to Mac myself as my Mac runs so much smoother then any Windows PC, plus installation of software is a breeze, my MacBook Pro starts up in 15 seconds and it just works right out the box. There was no crapware pre-installed like my old HP laptop.

Additionally, when I researched looking into purchasing my MacBook Pro I saw that Apple does recommend using Anti-virus software and I do have it installed, with no issues and it doesn't slow my MacBook Pro down a bit.

</comment><comment><USER31> Original post - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564429>

</comment><comment><USER32> Here's an article comparing some decent Mac antivirus applications for those who are concerned:

[http://lifehacker.com/5800267/the-non+alarmists-guide-to- mac...](http://lifehacker.com/5800267/the-non+alarmists-guide-to-mac-malware- protection)

</comment><comment><USER33> awesome. even malware has higher usability on mac, than it has on other platforms. and if you pay for the snake oil.. errrr... remedy, the virus is gone. the virus writers are pretty awesome social engineers.

</comment><comment><USER34> OSX Lion better have an outgoing firewall.. Anyone know?

<comment><USER35> Little Snitch can do this currently, if you're looking. Outbound firewalls are somewhat annoying, though, as you have to authorize every single program at least once, which makes me think that Apple is unlikely to add one that runs by default.

<comment><USER34> Just wondering, could a trojan somehow control safari (or other approved apps) via a script, and then upload files to the hacker's server, circumventing little snitch and other outgoing firewalls?

<comment><USER36> A trojan can do anything a user can do, so yes.

The one thing Lion has going for it here is that apps can declare their intention to do certain things and then be prohibited from doing anything else. So, for example, a non networked app can tell the OS it has no interest in using network APIs and will then be sandboxed from them (so if its code is violated it won't be able to suddenly start phoning home). But, of course, this requires effort on developers' parts to support the feature. The key thing is that Apple's own apps are likely to use this feature.

But if you download some random piece of software and then run it and the OS says "are you sure?" and you answer yes then you're boned.

And again, if you already said "yeah" to "run this bizarro app from disreputable source", are you going to say "omfg no" when asked if it can use the network?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It says right in the article that AppleCare doesn't cover what users do to their machines. Microsoft doesn't remove malware that Windows users install either.

This thing is coming from Ed Bott's Microsoft column on ZDNet, where he's been hitting this hard for the second day in a row based on an "investigation" that involved him scouring the Apple discussion forums for a couple of hours. Two hundred clueless posts on a web forum out of a userbase of millions doesn't mean there's a "malware explosion," as he described it. Why are people falling for this flamebait?

<comment><USER38> The Mac Defender malware is pretty harmless. It downloads as a zip file, and users must manually click through the entire installer just to get it installed. How many Windows viruses are delivered as a setup.exe where you have to click next about 3 times and enter your admin password just to install it?

As usual anti-mac trolls love to jump on the bandwagon and bash the platform with one of the best security track records running.

<comment><USER14> Most Windows viruses these days have the exact same attack vector, simply tricking the user into installing them. All we're seeing here is that: (1) Despite the marketing, the Mac is not magically immune to these things any more than Windows is, and (2) now that OS X has obtained a reasonable market share it's finally become worth attacking.

Neither of these things should be surprising to anyone, and hopefully the antimalware situation on OS X will improve before progressively more insidious Mac viruses are released.

<comment><USER36> By definition a "virus" does not have this "attack vector". A virus spreads with no conscious user intervention. This is a "trojan" -- something the user inflicts on themselves, and neither the Mac nor Windows have any real protection against trojans.

Mac OS X 10.6 has virus detection built into the OS. Only a couple of viruses are detected because, oddly enough, that's all that have been found. Again, "viruses" not "trojans".

Most "anti-virus" software is worse than malware on its own -- it slows down the computer it's used on. Microsoft Windows, out of the box, will shut down your computer without asking you, quitting out of applications on the way. This, again, is exactly the kind of thing malware does.

<comment><USER39> Well if you want to get pedantic, a "virus" spreads by infecting legitimate executables, a technique that hasn't been viable since the days of "Don't Copy That Floppy". In everyday use, the word "virus" is synonymous with "malware" and almost always refers to a trojan or drive-by.

<comment><USER36> The difference between a virus and a worm has become blurred, since both spread without user intervention. But there's no such blurring with trojans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> As the OS gets more popular, Apple will need to add the kind of protective features present in Windows to deal with this sort of problem. Dismissing it isn't gonna work - this kind of malware is the problem these days rather than viruses. As a savvy user, I've never found the need to run antivirus software on Windows, but it would be the height of arrogance for me to scoff at the problems others do have and blame it on their stupidity.

As is the way with these things, Apple will stonewall, but I expect eventually handle the issue. In the mean time some of the congregation will snort in derision and deny there's a problem.

<comment><USER41> Apple is not going to solve the problem of gullible people typing their credit card info into a scammer's form, any Mac based solution (of which the obvious will be to lock down installation to the Mac App Store) is just going to push scammers back on the web.

<comment><USER40> No, but they can help solve the problem of gullible people downloading and running installers for known malware.

Honestly, listening to some Mac user responses to this problem, it's like entering a timewarp back to when all the measures implemented on Windows/IE to deal with this stuff hadn't even been thought up.

Possibly a quick fix, until it's addressed, is for folk on OSX to do their web surfing in a Windows VM, using a security-focussed browser designed for non- technical people, such as IE9. ;-)

<comment><USER21> >Honestly, listening to some Mac user responses to this problem, it's like entering a timewarp back to when all the measures implemented on Windows/IE to deal with this stuff hadn't even been thought up.

That's because many of the measures implemented on windows are fundamentally flawed. Virus/Malware scanners? Really? So we want to turn infecting people's computers into a business?

The MS approach has always been to make money on working around defects. I really, really hope Apple doesn't decide to go down this route.

<comment><USER40> > The MS approach has always been to make money on working around defects.

Internet Explorer and Windows Defender are both free.

Also, the _defect_ in this instance is allowing users to install software on their PCs and not helping them avoid installing malware. As this story shows, this is a defect that is shared and arguably worse on OSX.

<comment><USER21> Well, millions or billions _have_ been made on anti-virus software. The overhead to have every file or network operation read by some scanning program is too much. This needs to be avoided at all costs. Especially since there are better ways.

Again, the proper solution for the kind of people who would actually install a virus manually is to simply point them at the App store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Woof: <http://daringfireball.net/2011/05/wolf>

"According to a third article penned by Bott, AppleCare reps are seeing a four- to five-fold increase in the number of calls requesting support for rogue antivirus scams targeting the Mac"

So now a handful of incidents is cause for uproar?

"Porn sites just started popping up on my MacBook Pro," one user wrote. "Is this a virus? I have never had a virus on a Mac before and I have been using Macs for years. Please help!"

So it's just adware then? Oh no!

</comment><comment> burn-a-mac Hopefully this will make people think twice before buying crap produced by Apple.</comment>


Why SQL Sucks for NoSQL Unstructured Databases - <AUTHOR> http://writings.nunojob.com/2011/06/why-sql-sucks-for-nosql-unstructured-databases.html

<comment><USER2> Great article!!! ... and I agree. I work for IBM, and I dealt with SQL/XML before ... and I still agree with the article.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's better than SQL then?</comment>


What might the Amazon, Berkshire and JPM health care joint venture actually do? - <AUTHOR> https://25iq.com/2018/02/23/what-might-the-amazon-berkshire-and-jp-morgan-health-care-joint-venture-actually-do/ <comment><USER2> What I'm getting from this is a) It's mostly conjecture b) The author thinks it's likely that they will be creating something akin to "Kaiser Permanente lite"

Is there something else I'm missing?

<comment><USER3> Yea, sounds like Warren Buffet isn't really behind this whole thing (entirely my observation). This morning on CNBC he was asked about the deal and only mentioned about how it was really Todd Combs that orchestrated this thing. Buffett doesn't even commit to forming a company for this new insurance idea (also of note, insurance businesses are one of Buffett's largest sectors of ownership, why note just instruct them to fix this issue???)

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/full-transcript- billionaire-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/full-transcript-billionaire- investor-warren-buffett-speaks-with-cnbcs-becky-quick-on-squawk-box- today.html) (Search for Todd Combs, it'll bring you to the first paragraph talking about the healthcare insurance venture thingy).

<comment><USER4> is Berkshire in the health insurance business at all? Property/casualty and auto is presumably pretty different.

<comment><USER5> Yes it's almost completely different. A few of the actuarial concepts are similar but almost nothing else carries over. In fact, most health "insurers" have shifted away from selling insurance policies and toward becoming third- party claims administrators for self-insured group buyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Show us all what leverage is worth, perhaps? For my own small biz, $2500/month for one employee+family bought parity for solely health. I was far behind for dental/vision/etc. As a now employee of a large company, $500/month gets better returns than $2500/month as a nobody did.

<comment><USER5> That's probably not a direct apples-to-apples comparison because large employers typically subsidize employee health plan premiums.

<comment><USER7> yeah, would really like to know what the actual cost the company pays is, vs the employee share. might still be lower than $2500/month (probably) but I can't imagine a family plan in any major state costing $500/month, even with a huge deductible (I sorely wish it did tho!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One very simple thing they could do that might be helpful is provide an easy to understand guidebook for understanding the quality of various healthcare providers. Sort of a Michelin guidebook for healthcare

Currently, patients don't have the resources or information to assess the quality of their providers. Hospitals with fancy marble lobbies are more likely to be rated as high quality than hospitals with better quality scores but dingier interiors. People think that if care costs more, it must be better

Insurance companies have tried to build narrow networks that exclude high cost hospitals that nonetheless are publicly perceived as high quality, but public backlash, however misinformed, can quash these efforts. One example is UCLA vs BSCA a few years ago

<comment><USER9> > One very simple thing they could do that might be helpful is provide an easy > to understand guidebook for understanding the quality of various healthcare > providers.

That's not a simple thing to do, especially well, and you kind of implicitly note with your reference to existing quality ratings that lots of people have tried to do it with mediocre results.

<comment><USER8> I think there is an opportunity for the amazon / BH / JPM JV to use its scale, visibility and "outsider" status to create a standard that is simple and easy to understand by consumers, and actively market that standard in a way that medicare, startups or industry coalitions have not been able to

most quality standards are not even well known or standardized within the healthcare industry, and there are so many competing interests that it is hard for providers, payers, other stakeholders to align on a standard, useful and enforceable definition of quality. the JV is already insanely visible / high profile without anyone knowing what it does; if they create a quality rating system it will certainly get more attention than any other one created to date

also, amazon / bh / jpm in theory is better aligned with society in terms of what they want out of healthcare: 1) lower cost and 2) customer satisfaction. that group cares about making its employees happy, whereas other stakeholders dont have the same direct accountability to employees / patients: payers are only accountable to patients through the employers they serve, and providers are in theory accountable to patients but in reality more influenced by the health system that owns them or the payer that pays them

<comment><USER5> The major quality standards are published by CMS (Medicare) and they're very well known because reimbursement is now tied to hitting those metrics.

But in a broader sense it's really impossible to define objective quality metrics for individual healthcare providers. If a heart surgeon has a high patient death rate is it because she's incompetent or because she takes on the most fragile patients that no one else is willing to operate on? You might think that those differences could be controlled for but in reality there are too many confounding factors and research hasn't even been done to accurately quantify many of them.

<comment><USER8> It is hard, and once you've defined quality metrics, it's even harder to write a contract that captures them and get parties to agree on them

The latter issues might be resolved somewhat by the Amazon group; the former is still a concern, but I think there are opportunities to do meaningfully better things

This is just an idea, and I've not done much research on it, so take with a grain of salt: I think patient focused quality measures might be better. For example, look at cohorts of patients with similar characteristics (like in case control studies) who are experiencing a similar health event (knee surgery) and compare providers based on the outcomes these types of patients have. This is something the JV could do, is patient focused, and avoids all the challenges you mention with metrics measuring / managing individual providers (which isn't just hard to measure but demoralizing to docs)

<comment><USER5> That's exactly the problem. There's no reliable way to construct a cohort of "similar" patients. We don't even know all the variables other than provider quality which impact the outcome of knee surgery. Do we have to consider age? Genetics? Sex? Fitness level? Co-morbid conditions? Blood Type? Personality? Something else? That data simply doesn't exist, and won't exist in our lifetimes.

With large enough populations some of those confounding variables even out. But that doesn't help when trying to evaluate individual providers who treat relatively small numbers of patients per year.

Of course in any area all of the local doctors know from subjective experience and word-of-mouth which other doctors are skilled and which are quacks. But none of them will say so publicly, and you can't quantify those opinions.

<comment><USER8> People do case control studies all the time, the factors used depend based on disease but there is plenty of literature to support selection of matching factors

I think it would make sense to start at the hospital level; provider level probably isn't feasible as you say. Hospitals see enough patients where the sample sizes are pretty big, and they are the main cost driver in healthcare, so rating hospitals by cost / quality could work

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 1) UX for doctors. Make it easy to log records of visits without secretarial support.

2) Pharmacy at the Amazon warehouse for 90% of most used drugs.

3) Diabetes/endocrine specialist by Amazon as a kiosk in Whole Foods. Most preventable illness in the US is because of sugar over consumption, the rest we can't prevent.

Boom. They just shaved 20% off costs.</comment>


Bitcoin is dead. Long live bitcoin. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.metatony.com/2013/04/bitcoin-is-dead-long-live-bit-coin/ <comment><USER2> > One of the properties of a good currency is that over time it's value must > slowly creep downward.

Isn't a big part of the thesis behind bitcoin that this mainstream economic belief is false? After all, mainstream economic theory since at least the Great Depression would also say that central authorities (generally governments) should be very hands-on with their control of the money supply, which is another belief that bitcoin is clearly designed to challenge. I know very little about economics both mainstream and heterodox, but I think it's unfair to make this claim without at least mentioning that the designers of bitcoin are almost certainly aware of the belief and are deliberately challenging it.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It has all desirable values of gold

No it doesn't. Bitcoin is only valuable as long as it's valuable. Yes, that's tautological, but it's also true. Bitcoin is only valuable as long as people are willing to pretend it has value. However, gold has an intrinsic value that it possesses whether or not people are willing to invest in it, because gold is useful for more than just investing (for example it's used in jewelry, dentistry, electronics, etc). If everyone in the world decided tomorrow to stop investing in gold, you could still sell any gold you had for an amount based on its utility. But if everyone in the world decided tomorrow to stop investing in bitcoin, its value would immediately plummet to $0.

<comment><USER4> AFAIK, gold's value for non-investment use (i.e., "intrinsic" value) is a small fraction of its actual price today. I don't have a citation for that, but investment buddies have told me that. (Maybe someone reading this can give a citation?)

So, basically, gold has ceased to be priced at all based on intrinsic value, and entirely based on the projected fact that people will continue to want to use it as a store of wealth in the future, so therefore, you will be able to trade your gold for something else valuable. (Which is exactly the projected fact that is keeping Bitcoin going.)

Arguably, Bitcoin's property of being easily transferred and stored greatly outweighs the property of gold that there are real-world uses.

 _But if everyone in the world decided tomorrow to stop investing in bitcoin_

If.

At this point, it's pretty clear (to me) that that will _never_ happen, short of global government intervention. If there is a major dip in Bitcoin price, investors will buy it back up. Bitcoin has established itself as a useful way to store and transfer value _for investors_. For everyday transactions, I think it's in the process of proving itself.

<comment><USER3> Never? It's faaaar too early to make that claim. What if the cryptography is broken? Or if another crypto-currency comes along that's demonstrably better, to the point that everyone stops buying bitcoin and starts buying this new currency instead? These are but two scenarios that would cause bitcoin to lose its desirability, and therefore its value.

<comment><USER4> > Never? It's faaaar too early to make that claim.

It will never be more certain than it is right now. What are you waiting for?

> What if the cryptography is broken?

Sorry, but I trust ECDSA and SHA256. Quantum computers may be a concern eventually, but I think there are mitigation strategies for that.

> Or if another crypto-currency comes along that's demonstrably better, to the > point that everyone stops buying bitcoin and starts buying this new currency > instead?

What if a unicorn flies out of the sky and starts pooping rainbows? There is no possible crypto-currency that is demonstrably significantly better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have some research links on analysts/opinion leaders and their hype cycles?

I remember Nouriel Roubini bashing Gold on Twitter like never before all of the sudden starting about two weeks before the gold "crash". The whole thing happened without any significant "new" developments taking place (at least from my laymen perspective). These boom and burst cycles seem a lot like echo- chamber hyping. I would so love to see some research on how these echo waves start and succeed/fail.

</comment><comment><USER6> I couldn't make myself keep reading after this:

"The Federal Reserve, ... increasing the money supply ... by simply creating money out of thin air ..."

Ok so far...

"... which the Treasury then dutifully prints out as paper notes."

Um, what? Most money in circulation is never printed.

Also, bitcoin is NOT anonymous unless you're extremely careful about how you get it and how you spend it.

<comment><USER4> Sure it is. Get it from someone you don't know for cash at localbitcoins.com and spend it at a public computer. (To do that safely, you probably need to use a client like The Armory which would free you from needing to load your wallet onto a public computer.)

<comment><USER7> Transactions on localbitcoins.com are far from perfectly anonymous. Relatively anonymous, sure.

<comment><USER4> Why do you say that?

I mean, nothing is perfectly anonymous if government agents are already tracking you and have bugged your home and workplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ObFuturamaLaughHarder: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FopyRHHlt3M>

Instead of showing me a graph of gold price versus bitcoin price, at a time when analysts say gold has declined due to a lack of inflation in the world, as well as the Cyprus crisis, you should show me a graph of total amount of gold held as a store compared to total amount of bitcoins held as a store as that would demonstrate people actually switching out of gold for bitcoins.

Until then, I'm going to assume this is either a post of ignorance or perhaps just HN spam.

</comment><comment><USER9> My instinct says the same thing on Bitcoin acting as surrogate for gold in the near term (Say the next 4-5 years or so). I also think that the way it is structured could help it fulfill its currency aspirations in the long term by its ability to be broken apart into tiny little pieces.

Our brains (and economy) are not really used to working in decimals of something on a day to day basis, but if Bitcoin eventually settles around 1,000 or so you could see people start using it this way.

</comment><comment><USER10> You're right. 99% of the bitcoins owned today will never be spent on purchases. I wonder if this is simply due to ease of use. What can you really buy with them? If they were accepted everywhere would this be different?

<comment><USER11> The issue I think is that even if it were accepted everywhere, if it's value was going up, I won't want to spend it. Just by waiting I am guaranteed a solid rate of return. This is similar to deflation in the broader economy - people stop spending when they can buy more in the future for the same money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The so-called "hoarding problem" was debunked decades ago:

<http://mises.org/money/2s9.asp>

It's still orthodoxy among academic economists, but there isn't any historical evidence that it's actually true.

More recently, this article in Forbes explains the issue more succinctly:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/11/bitcoin- do...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/11/bitcoin-doesnt-have- a-deflation-problem/)</comment>


Meditation boosts part of brain where ADD, addictions reside - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/meditation-boosts-part-of-brain-where-add-addictions-reside.ars

<comment><USER2> When I began to work on overcoming my addictions, I never gained any traction on it until I made meditation a part of my routine. I don't know anything about the scientific aspect of it but I noticed that I was more patient with things, able to suffer/sit through things and sit with myself a lot more. I think the sense of self-comfort that came from meditation was the most important thing. not the sense of comfort, but being comfortable with myself.

<comment><USER3> Can you expand on how you started? Your routine?

<comment><USER4> <http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html>

That's what works for me. It's not at all involved, just concentrate on breathing. When the mind wanders, just pause & (non-judgmentally) go back to observing the breath.

Of course YMMV, but I find half an hour a day is enough.

<comment><USER5> " _It's not at all involved, just concentrate on breathing. When the mind wanders, just pause & (non-judgmentally) go back to observing the breath._"

That's the same method "Happy to Burn" describes, but I still find it a case of "easier said than done", and difficult to do.

<comment><USER6> That is the case, and that is the point. It is very hard, in fact impossible to do for more than a few seconds without practice. Which is the problem you are solving by practicing. If you can make yourself just sit there, not scolding yourself as you drift, but always returning to silence and the breath, you can go longer and longer without thinking.

Its just like physical exercise - repetition makes you better. And just like physical exercise, it makes your entire life better.

<comment><USER5> Right, and that's why I thought to comment about " _It's not at all involved_ " - it _is_ that involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More informative article here: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100816155000.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100816155000.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> Meditation is for the mind what physical exercise is for the body. That is why people do it, because it pays off in enhanced performance and mood. It is as difficult and painful to sit in intense focus for hours at a time as it is to exercise intensely for hours.

In my experience, both kinds of exercise pay off about the same amount. Taken together, they constitute a major self 'upgrade.'

<comment><USER8> That is one very real and tangible result of meditation. There is an aspect beyond this that grows from the concentration developed by regular meditation. I don't know about "enlightenment" but at least for me, after several years of steady practice, it's more about accepting things as they come and letting go of my ideas about how they should be. Somehow this has ended up nullifying the entire concept of an upgrade or enhancement for me, which is quixotic.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like you're happy :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps, we stress the need too often to overcome our "disorders" versus leveraging and unleashing the powers of being outside of the normal distribution of the population. I have known my own symptoms that are reminiscent of ADD (and a host of others!) for a while now but have chosen to not overcome them through adderall,etc. but realize that these abnormalities might make me a more creative individual. Of course, its easier said than done, and it will most likely be an internal conflict existing a lifetime. Meditation seems like a practical way of reducing stress and channeling focus...

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't think this article is informative at all. ADHD-Inattentive (or ADD)is primarily a frontal lobe condition.

I'm not convinced that meditation alone will boost attention. Meditation tends to boost alpha activity in the brain, but that only has limited advantage in attention.

Alpha boosting activities would help more with addictions.

<comment><USER11> I don't know anything about the neurological side of things, but many forms of meditation are all about attention management.

Put another way: if meditation doesn't boost attention, you're probably not doing it right.

<comment><USER10> Your probably correct; "if meditation doesn't boost attention, you're probably not doing it right."

As an EEG tech, the stories from the 70s were somewhat legendary, about meditation and EEG. Alpha training was considered almost magical.

<comment><USER12> What were these stories?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> interesting stuff. i tried meditation a while back and persisted for about a year. after which i had a sense of self which was previously lacking. i'm glad they're starting to verify this stuff with research.</comment>


OrientDB, the most versatile database I've run across - <AUTHOR> http://pettergraff.blogspot.sg/2013/12/orientdb-thanks.html

<comment><USER2> I read through the OP, and it's convinced me to at least have a look at OrientDB. It seems interesting, though I've never used a Graph database before, let alone something like this.

I'll be honest: I've pretty much only ever used Relational databases. I've not even properly tried using Document databases (the hype just didn't overcome my laziness and inertia!). On big big projects, I just wrote the queries I needed, with a schema I defined, and let my DBA deal with the nitty gritty of it... I really should learn more about the various classes of data stores. I know enough to understand a lot of the trade offs inherent to the major types (hence why I've stuck with relational, it fits the way i think about application data, and I haven't needed Web Scale(tm) for those projects, so horizontal scaling wasn't ever an issue), so I'm really curious how this one holds up under close scrutiny, and whether I can map how I think about data to how Orient works (or whether it's way of tackling it is better enough than how I think to just embrace it's style entirely).

Anyone here have experience with it? What use case, data model, etc. what trade offs did you make, and why?

<comment><USER3> I'm in the same boat. I've been looking at Neo4J, Titan, etc., as part of research for a new application I'm building. Our data set is fairly tiny (<<10M entities, almost certainly), but the information we're tracking is highly graph-oriented.

I've been trying to decide between a graph db, which seems like a better fit for the real world relationships but is entirely new to me, and postgresql with exports to graph structures for analysis as needed.

In particular, I'd be interested in deployment experiences with Orient and other graph dbs. I don't have a sys admin and I'm not one myself, so a PaaS platform is highly attractive.

Neo4J has a Heroku "try" option, but there's no clear upgrade path. Titan is flexible in terms of backing store (Cassandra, PersistIt, etc.), but seems to require self-admin.

Anyone deployed and maintained OrientDB or any of these other tools?

<comment><USER4> In your research, have you found any good graph database not written in Java?

<comment><USER5> Triple/Quad stores (specialisation of a Graph DB for storing RDF) are available written in C (4Store, Virtuoso) as well as Lisp (AllegroGraph).

They support a standardised query language called SPARQL which is based on matching graph patterns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been watching OrientDB from a distance for a couple years now. It remains incredibly interesting, and I want so badly to give it a real shot. Unfortunately, I don't [currently] have spare cycles to get into it.

I'm still waiting to hear about a large project with fairly significant scaling needs go on to sing the praises of OrientDb. Unfortunately I don't have the time or resources to become said project.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone point me to a documentation that explains the consistency choices? Is it CP? Is it AP?

</comment><comment><USER8> It has a nice/easy to use REST interface too (shameless plug: I authored the Python REST a few years back and the community has kept it up to date [https://github.com/emehrkay/Compass](https://github.com/emehrkay/Compass))

We are actually talking about moving away from a relational DB to a graph one for some of our internal data needs. A coworker was looking at Neo4j (another great one, but with licensing fees) and I told him bout Orient. Exciting stuff, especially when you factor in Tinkerpop's (tinkerpop.com) abstraction layer allowing you to switch out DBs.

</comment><comment><USER9> OrientDB has issues with documentation and tooling. Generally the drivers for each language are difficult to use and confusing. There is very little in the way of high performance ORMs which is the main reason you'd want to use something like OrientDB - mapping your classes directly to the database.

</comment><comment><USER10> I looked at OrientDB in a past job where we wanted schema flexibility but we ended up choosing Datomic instead.

<comment><USER11> Why did you end up choosing Datomic?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That site puts stuff on the right scroll bar (at least in Firefox). Highly annoying.

<comment><USER13> It looks terrible, but do you ever physically click on a vertical scrollbar?

I can't remember the last time I had to do this.

<comment><USER14> I can't remember the last time I had to use a handrail, but they're there for a reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really want aphyr to run this through jepsen now...</comment>


The Future of Adobe Fireworks - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/fireworks/2013/05/the-future-of-adobe-fireworks.html <comment><USER3> I'm now conditioned to read "The Future of Product X" headlines as "Product X Has No Future".

Sadly, the pattern holds here.

</comment><comment><USER4> The alternatives:

Sketch - <http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch>

Acorn - <http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/>

AnteType - <http://antetype.com/>

PixelMator - www.pixelmator.com

Unfortunately, none of them offers the blend of vector + raster tools that made Fireworks such a pleasure for web/UI design.

Most importantly, they are mac-only and there is no interoperability - <USER2> can't read from Fireworks PNGs, and there is no suitable format to export between any of them.

<comment><USER5> I keep seeing a billion alternatives suggested, but as a non-professional - and with the poor demonstrations of what they can on the websites - it's really hard to determine which does what, and which is better.

Are there any good side-by-side comparisons anywhere, because there are so many options out there (at least for Mac) that I I feel that the daunting array of options is actually going to deter people like me from getting one of those programs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first copy of Fireworks I bought when it was still owned by Macromedia and it was wonderful; so powerful yet easy to use. It was my impression that Adobe never really "got" it, or knew how it should exist in their ecosystem as a sort-of competitor to their other products. It was sad watching it flounder, but I wonder what Adobe could've done differently.

<comment><USER7> I feel like Adobe never really got macromedia tools at all. They knew they wanted to own the content creation market, but they never really understood the developer side of the content creation game. Fireworks is the last Adobe tool I use these days and I'm disappointed they can never understand why someone like me would continue to use it.

<comment><USER8> Adobe's own online presence is a prime example of how they don't understand the web.

Same goes for the decision to drop CS and continue with only their cloud-based services: they should've done that about 10 years ago. I can't remember for how long I've been saying I'd be willing to pay monthly for their programs if there only was such a subscription.

And I'm not trying to brag there. I'm meaning to say that it's ridiculous how slow they have moved. I've never met a person who didn't agree with the above.

I wonder how many students would've shelled out 20 bucks a month instead of downloading Adobe's software illegally if they'd done this sooner.

<comment><USER9> As a student, I still feel like their subscription model needs work. $20 a month is too much for a single application, especially when it requires a year-long commitment. $30 for the academic subscription is a good deal because it includes everything, but I only use a few of the programs. Again, this option requires a year-long commitment.

For an educational license, I'd gladly pay $10 for Photoshop. For a commercial license, I'd pay $20, but only if I could cancel at any time.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough, but at the very least, $20 (or even $60) a month sure beats the hell out of paying $2000 in one go, in my opinion.

Or to put it the way Adobe should've thought of it:

Assuming $50 a month (I pay more atm) over the 10 years since I quit school, Adobe could've made 6000 dollars on me.

Instead, they made 0.

(up until they launched creative cloud, that is)

<comment><USER9> It does, but before the subscription program, I wouldn't be surprised if 98% of users had pirated copies.

The subscription fees are much more reasonable, but I'd be astonished if the rate of piracy has changed more than a few percentage points.

I wonder if lowering the price to something around $9.99 or $14.99 and dropping the annual contract would grow the user base enough to increase overall revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a bit confused that they kept Dreamweaver but killed off Fireworks.

No web designer I know even uses Dreamweaver anymore, but plenty of people still use Fireworks. Odd decision by Adobe here.

<comment><USER11> I'm sure that more cuts are on the way. Having a breadth of products works well for software that's distributed in a non-SaaS model. Now, that they have embraced a subscription model, expect narrowing the product suite.

<comment><USER10> It's sad that so many software companies think it's a good idea to sell a "service" and not a tangible copy of bits and bytes.

It's less hassle to buy CS6 once and be done with it and upgrade when you want to, rather than keep renewing subscriptions and be faced with product changes you may not necessarily like or want.

<comment><USER12> I had CS5 Production Suite for Windows. I had to change my editing rig to OS X but at the time CS 6 had already come out and Adobe only was doing the OS- switching on the current version of the release of their software. So, they got me, and I had to do the creative cloud for $70/month (I didn't want to commit for the year).

I'm now waiting for the Final Cut Pro X/Motion to go on sale again, and wil be paying a one time fee of $250-$350 for Apple's editing solution. (I'm hoping I can get by on FCP, since the price is definitely appealing).

So, it might be "less hassle" or not...but it's definitely better for predictable revenues selling a monthly/yearly subscription, especially with the lack of tangible competition for some of the products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a great time to try Sketch: <http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/>. Does most of what Fireworks does much better. Unfortunately it's Mac only though.

<comment> chestnut-tree It would be great to see Sketch available for the PC. In the meantime, for of those on Windows, I would recommend trying Xara Photo and Graphic Designer.

<http://www.xara.com/uk/products/designer/>

They have a free trial, but they are actually giving away an older version of the software for free until 20th May 2013 (in the hope that users will upgrade, no doubt)

<http://www.xara.com/us/specialoffers/designer/>

Xara is more of an alternative to Illustrator but it includes some basic bitmap manipulation tools.

I have used Xara for many years and, in my opinion, it has a much better interface than Illustrator and is much more responsive in terms of screen redraw and speed. It's not completely equivalent to Illustrator in terms of features, but I would recommend downloading the trial (or the free version) and trying it out to see if it's suitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> WebCode is a vector drawing app that instantly generates CSS+HTML, JavaScript+Canvas or SVG code.

<http://www.webcodeapp.com/>

If you have a Mac, WebCode is a great alternative to Fireworks.

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, they also make an app called PaintCode which outputs Objective-C code: <http://www.paintcodeapp.com>

I'm sure they used to be part of the same app; I'm not sure when that changed or what the logic was behind it.

<comment><USER15> We just launched WebCode about a month ago (been selling <http://www.paintcodeapp.com/> for more than a year). The two apps obviously share a lot of internals. We decided to make WebCode a separate app because it has an entirely different target audience.

<comment><USER16> Avid PaintCode user here, just learned about WebCode. Interestingly, more than once I wished I had the ability to export from PaintCode to something web with CSS or Canvas. Great to know there's now an app for that, but wouldn't it make sense to kinda also have it as additional functionality (maybe in-app purchase) for Paintcode?

<comment><USER15> Technically, this is entirely possible. We have developer builds which support both kinds of code generators in a single app. We're still considering this.

<comment><USER6> From my own personal perspective it might be a good idea, because I think it really messes with your branding -- I saw the WebCode page and knew it felt familiar and thought it was "that cool app that outputs Obj-C code" but looked in the feature list and couldn't find it, got very confused, and then did a google search...

It doesn't help that, as far as I can see, PixelCut doesn't have its own homepage, and there's no link from the one app page to the other app page so I didn't even know they were made by the same developer without looking at the copyright notice at the bottom!

Just my opinion anyway. Great app either way :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> RIP Fireworks: I'll miss you.

I started at 13, with the school's copy of Photoshop 7, building silly brushes by creating crazy polygons with 3ds Max and altering them (funnily enough, they're still online! <http://girvo.deviantart.com/>).

I then began designing websites, using Photoshop, and slicing up the image with ImageReady (great for making GIFs too). But I always thought there must be a nicer way.

Fireworks was that nicer way. I bought myself (with my pay saved up for months!) a copy of Macromedia's Fireworks, and lo and behold, it's perfect. The mix of raster and vector (although I had no idea what that meant technically, I appreciated it), the excellent layout tools, the brilliant UI... it was perfect.

And now? Now it's dead. Thankfully, I no longer do too much graphic design, and most mockups I create are done in HTML/CSS these days. But I will miss it.

Suppose it's all the more reason to learn the GIMP properly!

</comment><comment><USER18> I was suspicious that something was up with Fireworks after purchasing the web bundle for CS6 and noticing that Fireworks didn't adopt the new dark minimalist design that Photoshop and Illustrator had.

I use Fireworks for all of my preliminary UI design work because it has the precision necessary to get across certain crucial design elements. Unfortunately, this is not possible with the low-fidelity wireframe alternatives and not intuitive in Adobe's other products.

Yes, many of Adobe's products have overlap, but prototyping is a key part of the design workflow and deserving of a dedicated platform.

</comment><comment><USER19> I knew this day was coming and yet I am still shocked. Fireworks is and always will be the best tool for wire-framing and web design, hands down. They've decided not to continue development of Fireworks and yet keep Dreamweaver? Dreamweaver is what I used for a period in my life when I was learning web development and you soon discover once you learn enough that it's horrible. I knew when Fireworks CS6 came out and Fireworks was neglected in the features and bug fixes department that it was only a matter of time.

Adobe is somewhat dead to me now. I'll continue to use Fireworks until it stops working completely and once it does might consider running a VM with a version of Windows that supports it. It's time for the open source community to step up to the plate and create an open sourced version of Fireworks, heck it would be amazing if Adobe open sourced Fireworks so us die-hard users who see its potential and power continue to make it better and keep it alive for many more years to come.

This wouldn't be such a bad thing if Adobe had another product like Fireworks, but they don't. Illustrator sucks for web design, Photoshop is too slow and bulky for agile web design or prototyping and the range of new applications Adobe has been bringing out don't really impress me in the slightest. The only way I can see Adobe from recovering from this is implementing some kind of way to load Photoshop in a "web mode" that gave you a similar interface as Fireworks but even then what about the features that make Fireworks so great? Pages, Master Pages, Styles, ability to click and drag elements around the canvas, Search and replace colours and fonts...

This is a very bad move. Those who say it's not a big deal have obviously never used Fireworks nor used it long enough to truly appreciate just how great of a tool it is. This one particular line in the post really grinds my gears, "We understand that Fireworks has one of the most passionate communities on the web" — obviously they don't understand at all, if they understood they'd see there is a following for Fireworks. Judging by the comments on the post (and they keep on coming) everyone agrees this is a bad move, I didn't see one comment that agreed this was the right thing to do. This is an attempt to move users onto newer web tools which in my opinion don't come anywhere close to the simplicity and power of Fireworks and most likely never will.

Fireworks was Adobe's only decent UX design tool and now I hope someone else see's any opportunity here to woo a very large number of Fireworks users who will be more than willing to pay for a decent and viable alternative to a very loved tool with a cult-like following.

It seems like Sketch from Bohemian Coding is the only decent Fireworks alternative that's out there and it's Mac only. You could use Gimp but we all know Gimp is far from a professional alternative to anything. This is a sad day for me and a lot of other people.

<comment><USER20> You pretty much wrote exactly what I was thinking, although you probably expressed it better.

I am lucky enough to have had a copy of cs6 purchased for me by my employer (to use as a hobbyist at home) and to be honest at the moment I can't envisage needing to upgrade for quite some time.

When I do feel the need to upgrade in like 5 or 6 years time when CC has been updated so much I feel like using CS6 is like living in the dark ages, I hope my employer is good enough to buy me a subscription or it looks like I'm stuck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At least FW will still be around and somewhat supported for quite a while. FW is pretty much feature-complete and can continue functioning well into the future.

</comment><comment><USER22> Try to get them to open-source it. It's a long shot, but worth a go, it might just save what we love about fireworks and put it in the hands of people who use it: [http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release- adob...](http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/adobe-com-release-adobe- fireworks-to-open-source)

</comment><comment><USER23> I grew to like Fireworks but can see how it could be effectively rolled into PS or Illustrator in some kind of FW compat mode if they wanted to. Which is to say they won't do that, and they'll otherwise likely screw the maximum number of users implicitly. That is unfortunate, but sadly seems like par for the course these days.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Over the last couple of years, there has been an increasing amount of > overlap in the functionality between Fireworks and both existing and new > programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Edge Reflow.

Because we'd all much rather have to work in and pay for all three of those applications than to have the one tool that does it right?

<comment><USER25> The monthly creative suite subscription is a pretty good deal and lets you download/use all the cs apps.

<comment> grey-area It's certainly a very good deal for Adobe.

As a customer I don't feel it's a good deal for me at all as it forces me to pay for upgrades and products many of which I don't want, and divorces the money I pay from any specific product, so that I can no longer choose to reward products which address my needs, and ignore those which don't. I have no particular attachment to Fireworks for example, but Adobe streamlining their product offering and making it into a subscription suite only subsidises things like Adobe Bridge which simply shouldn't exist, at the expense of apps and features which customers actually want. It's around $80 a month in the UK for Adobe CC, and of course they will increase this gradually over time as more customers are locked in.

Given the CS updates of the last few years, I have trouble finding reasons to upgrade from CS5, which works fine for me currently, and have no interest in paying them money every month to change the UI around arbitrarily and add more misfeatures like 'Save for Microsoft Office' in CS Illustrator, or reinforce the lack of working interchange between InDesign CS versions (in order to force upgrades). As a long-term customer it feels like Adobe updates are now more focussed on forcing participation in the upgrade treadmill than adding features or improving performance, and this move to subscription pricing with a 'creative cloud' just reinforces this trend - Adobe is now all about customer lock-in and forcing customers to pay in-perpetuity, rather than producing great products. The last great product they produced was Lightroom, and I've seen nothing impressive in the CS since that (for my use). One telling result of this move is that they have now withdrawn the 'perpetual license' that they started selling last year - that lasted 1 year it seems.

Perhaps this is inevitable in the mature stage of a corporation, but I'm sad to see what was once a scrappy underdog fighting the likes of quark become focussed on keeping wall street rather than their customers happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 I wonder what the thought process was behind allowing comments on a blog posting like this.

<comment><USER26> That's an interesting question. While we're kind of taking the conversation off topic, let me speculate.

Imagine, if you will, that you have a popular product that you wish to EOL. And you know that people will not be happy. In fact, there'll be people who are downright angry and feel somehow betrayed. But you're going to do it.

These people want to vent their frustration. These days, they can take to Twitter, blogs and any number of sites like HN and Reddit.

But what if, as you told them you were discontinuing the product, you also gave them space to scream blue murder? And they would be screaming directly at your company, without even opening a new tab in their browser.

Now you've corralled at least some of the vitriol on your own platform. Now you can turn off the comments in a week or a month and all that venom disappears like it was never there.

Whether this is Adobe's intention doesn't matter. It's an interesting idea none the less.

<comment><USER27> If it wasn't intentional by them, you've certainly explained the benefit of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can't recommend Antetype enough as not so much a Fireworks replacement but rather a much better and different tool that makes screen design much more efficient and easy: <http://antetype.com/>

</comment><comment><USER20> What I don't understand is that Adobe must believe web designers aren't using Fireworks, it is something I've used since the Macromedia days so maybe I've missed out on something.

If not Fireworks, what are all the web designers and developers using?

Edit: To clarify I do kind of see where things are going. Fireworks has no built in support for exporting SVG or web fonts and I have not exported a background image to use on a website as a rounded corner or drop shadow in quite some time since CSS 3 has become more widely adopted. However for making reasonably accurate mock ups I've so far found no better tool than Fireworks.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's weird they are killing this product because the existence of products like Sketch make it clear that there is a demand and a gap in the market for a good vector/raster tool for web design.

<comment><USER26> The existence (and ever increasing popularity) of Sketch can't be unnoticed at Adobe HQ. Therefore:

1\. They're going to buy Sketch¹

2\. They're about to release a new product that replaces Fireworks

3\. They're going to have some version of Photoshop and/or Illustrator capable of the same things.

My guess? They're going to buy Sketch. If #2 was the case, it would have been demoed at Max. If #3 was the case, they'd have demoed at least _some_ of those features at Max.

____

1\. When I say 'Sketch', I mean it-or-something-very-similar

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know of an alternative that works as well with PNGs as Fireworks does? And runs under Windows.

<comment><USER31> Alternatives to Fireworks' PNG export (compression): <http://pngquant.org> or <http://tinypng.org>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can't get that upset about it. Fireworks still works and will for many years into the future. I have Fireworks CS3, and I don't really feel compelled to even upgrade to CS6.

</comment><comment><USER33> So, who's going to start the petition to make this open source?

<comment><USER34> Why would Adobe make Fireworks open source when they plan to continue selling and updating the last version?

" _While we are not planning further feature development for Fireworks, we will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 as well as make it available as part of the Creative Cloud. We will provide security updates as necessary and may provide bug fixes. We plan to update Fireworks to support the next major releases of both Mac OS X and Windows._ "

<comment><USER33> No, I wasn't saying it would actually work ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does anybody have opinions on using Edge Reflow?

<comment><USER33> It is interesting, but certainly not finished software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Error establishing a database connection"... Looks like hn can overload even adobe.com. Or at list there blog.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why is Fireworks so good for web design? What does it have that Photoshop doesn't?

</comment><comment><USER38> Are there good free/open source replacements for Fireworks?

</comment><comment><USER39> Sadly... now that I was considering buy a licence...

</comment><comment><USER40> Well

</comment><comment><USER41> Sad for Fireworks that was a very good tool for WebDesign. I might be switching to Corel Draw as I dont want to have anything to do anymore with Adobe.</comment>


Google Glass facing bans before even released. - <AUTHOR> http://www.dvice.com/2013-4-10/not-shocking-all-more-places-prepare-ban-google-glass

<comment><USER2> These people are going to have to eventually accept that cameras will continue getting better and smaller. They're going to have to adapt somehow.

It's tough for casinos, but would you really go with off-the-shelf Glass to cheat? You'd hope a professional hustler would be a little more discrete than to walk around with an easily-recognizable piece of tech.

The theater ban is nonsense. If someone wants to film a movie, they already can with their phone or camera. Who wants to watch that low-quality film, though? This is not the kind of pirating that matters, but it will be a hassle for us prescription Glass users.</comment>


PSA: macOS Sierra drops support for many Macs from 2007, 2008, and 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/psa-macos-sierra-drops-support-for-many-macs-from-2007-2008-and-2009/ <comment><USER2> I'd love to see a version of Ubuntu geared towards getting the hardware configuration (multi-touch support, natural scrolling, etc) right out of the box. Those C2Ds are perfectly serviceable with 8-16gb ram and an SSD.

</comment><comment><USER3> If they had normal keyboards they would make great Linux boxes.

<comment><USER4> Don't let the non-standard keyboard get in your way. They still make great Linux boxes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should we block non-gzip HTTP bots to reduce bandwidth costs? - <AUTHOR> We run web servers on EC2 (behind ELB) and are dealing with high bandwidth charges.
The bulk of the bandwidth charges are due to bots scraping/crawling/pinging without gzip.
Is it safe to block requests made without the accept-encoding header? (and what HTTP status code should be used? 400?) Naively it seems it would only be inconveniencing poorly written and uninvited bots (SEO spam, bots trying to find exploits etc.)
Or should we respond with gzip compression, no matter what?
Or should we stop using AWS since the bandwidth is too expensive because of situations like this? <comment><USER2> may be consider adding something like cloudflare as a proxy to filter out the bots etc ? Only send what you need to AWS.</comment>


Calendar: All Tech Conferences in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://textcal.com/textcal/tech-conferences <comment><AUTHOR> Data imported from: [https://github.com/TextCalHQ/Calendars/blob/master/Tech/Conf...](https://github.com/TextCalHQ/Calendars/blob/master/Tech/Conferences.md)</comment>