Git the fsck out - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/11/23/git-the-fsck-out/ <comment><USER2> _But, every single time I want to do something, I have to look up a whole slew of commands. Why can't I just memorize them? Because they're horribly arcane and obtuse._

I don't think this has anything to do with Git. I remember the commands just fine, without having to use Google.

<comment><USER3> So a Microsoft engineer is drafted to the army. On the shooting range he can't hit the target at all. When sergeant notifies him of zero hits, the engineer puts his finger into the rifle's barrell and pulls the trigger. His finger is ripped off. After evaluating the finger engineer turns to the sergeant and says:

\- On my side everything is fine - bullets are flying out. The problem is with the targets.

<comment><USER2> That's a nice story, but it doesn't apply here. The guy who wrote the article is just dumb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Many of the comments here and on the blog itself are perfect demonstrations of developers' disdain for usability and oridnary users. "Is it hard to use? Works for me. Man up and study, Nancy!". Good grief.

<comment><USER4> Version control in general is not _meant_ for "ordinary users"; it's for developers. I mean, sure, it can serve as a versioning system for just about anything, but it is overwhelmingly used for code. Git doesn't need to be easy for my Dad to use because he has no use for it.

Despite having lived partially on the command line for nearly a decade now, there are still commands that are simply not intuitive to me. This isn't the developers' fault, it's my fault for not becoming more familiar with the commands and _understanding_ why they actually make sense.

 _find $directory -type f -name ' <asterick>' -exec mv {} $directory2/. \;_

If you want to move thousands of files and can't use a single _mv_ command, something like this will work. Most of it makes sense to me, but what's with the _{}_? That doesn't seem intuitive. And what about the extra _/. \_ crap? I would never think to add that junk and without it (iirc) the command returns some esoteric error.

I'm sure if I read the proper manpages, I could figure out what purpose those seemingly extraneous symbols serve.

<comment><USER3> As others mentioned, cvs is not just for developers, it's also for doc writers, lawyers, UI testers and designers. All that goes into a product must be versioned.

But fine, let's say it's for developers only. Did you notice that the article is written by a developer? Clearly GIT is too difficult for some of its core aduience - developers.

Blaming the user is not the way to build something people want.

<comment><USER4> Yes, _some_ , but not _most_. I switched from Subversion to Git myself a couple months ago and it took a week or two, but I learned "the git way" of doing things. Yes, I would need to look up the command to remove a remote branch, but I haven't done it in weeks and didn't commit it to memory the first time so that's understandable.

Building something people want doesn't really need to be a goal of open-source software. Most software is built in the first place to solve a need of the person or people building it. Since they're not getting paid, what do they care if everybody wants to use it? A large majority of people seem to like Git. There will always be those who do not and I'm sure _everybody_ has something they dislike about it. The difference is, Git is not commercial software, so making it more usable need not be an overwhelming goal -- although, you could fork it and make it your goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> His problems seem to be directed more at GitHub and Unfuddle than git itself. Things like deleting a remote branch are not especially esoteric, so it seems like he just has trouble adjusting to the new way of thinking in git. That is fine, but his assessment of it is about as far from objective as possible.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm still not understanding the big fuss about git. Okay, distributed source control is wonderful for OSS communities, but I'm not really seeing the point for a proprietary piece of software built by a small team.

Perhaps I just don't understand source control enough, but the fact remains that for me, svn has never really given me any want, really. There's just no reason for me to change.

<comment><USER7> The major win is that a DVCS decouples the "commit as save work-in-progress" from the "commit a carefully polished jewel of a changeset which will live for eternity in the revision history".

i.e. you can commit locally frequently, and push refined changesets upstream. The best of both worlds.

Other top benefits include sideways pushing (work on desktop A & B, push work- in-progress between them without polluting the central repo).

Yes, you can get a lot of the DVCS benefits from giving people personal, scratch brances in a central CVS, but for various social and technical reasons that seems to rarely happen.

<comment><USER6> I suppose that's where I just don't understand things: What benefit does committing locally bring? Why not just not commit at all until you have that "carefully polished jewel"? Unless of course you're working on a change large enough to justify it's own branch, in which case the point is moot.

The sideways push I get, but given that I use a laptop I find it irrelevant to me.

<comment><USER8> Because you no longer have to think much before committing. You don't have to spend hours reviewing the code and having others look over the patch before you push it to the main tree: you can just commit it locally and go work on something else.

Then, later, you might get an idea on how to improve your previous change. You go and amend it. And so forth. Eventually, you have a set of changes that's ready to be committed and which you have _used locally for long enough that you can tell it doesn't break anything obvious_. Then, you go through the code review, and finally push the changes.

With a completely centralized system, you have one of the following going on:

A. You don't actually do code reviews before pushing changes, and trunk is broken half the time.

B. You wait all the time on your changes being reviewed, and you can't commit them until they have been.

C. You revert to tarballs and diffs for dealing with different changesets.

I was forcibly pushed into using git from svn, but now I'd never go back: its simply _so much easier_ to say "OK, I'm done with this change, I'll commit it!" and not have to wait for everyone else to be in the office/online/available to look at the changes before I do so.

This is especially important when dealing with separate changesets that necessary depend on each other, where you can't merely make a new branch for the new change because it requires the old changes.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the reply. That certainly explains some clear benefit. That's the first time somebody's laid out for me in that fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would seem that some of these git "problems" can be solved the way you'd automate anything else in Unix...write your own scripts or aliases.

Tools are not _supposed_ to please everybody. (They can't, since for every person who loves the default configuration, there will be someone who doesn't.)

If you can't remember that "foo -bar -baz -squareroot4515" is the command to do X, then make a shell alias or a script that performs these steps for you, and call it whatever you want.

<comment><USER10> I think the point of the article was that he shouldn't have to edit his _ssh settings_ to use Git.

<comment><USER11> And he doesn't have to. ssh-keys is just a convenience.

Most of the complaints in this article can be restated as, "I haven't taken the time to understand my version control system and so every little thing I do is foreign and strange. Therefore I am resentful." With the multiple-user- account issue being more of a github logistics than anything else (if you host your own repo, you have the entire unix permissions model is available to you).

Everyone knows git is weird and new and has a much more complex interface than SVN, but the tradeoff is that you get an extremely powerful and flexible version control system.

<comment><USER3> >> "I haven't taken the time to understand my version control system and so every little thing I do is foreign and strange. Therefore I am resentful."

It seems to me you look down on such opinion? That's what usability is about - make things easy enough to learn so that users are not recentful.

<comment><USER11> >> It seems to me you look down on such opinion? That's what usability is about - make things easy enough to learn so that users are not recentful.

We're software engineers. It is our _job_ to understand more complex software models. Git's usability isn't terrible, it is just a more complex model that requires a more thorough understanding of the underlying principles. And given how trivial it is to find and read such data, my sympathy is limited.

What's more, git's usability is a radical improvement path. Between services for remote repos (like github and gitorious) and better and better command line tools (GitX, for example). At some point you have to bite the bullet and _understand_ your tools.

We're seeing a lot of this reluctance in the industry as people are forced to confront distributed concepts.

<comment><USER12> _"We're software engineers. It is our job to understand more complex software models. Git's usability isn't terrible, it is just a more complex model that requires a more thorough understanding of the underlying principles."_

My job is not to spend time understanding how to use the version-control flavor of the week -- my job is to write software.

You may not realize it, but you're advancing the usual, dressed-up, _ad hominem_ attack of the perspective-challenged nerd: _"tool Y is EASY if you just try to learn it!"_ (the implication being that if you don't want to spend time on a yak-shaving expedition to learn tool Y -- when tool X works just fine -- then you're lazy, dumb, or both.)

Version control is a tool. Good tools let me do my job and get out of the way. Bad tools force me to spend a lot of time "understanding" them before I can be productive.

<comment><USER13> So I guess that most programming languages would qualify as bad tools to you then? Seeing as how they force you to spend a lot of time "understanding" them before you can be productive.

<comment><USER12> My job isn't to learn version-control systems. Time spent learning a programming language is a direct investment in productivity; time spent learning a version control system is, at best, a required distraction.

<comment><USER11> Your job is most certainly to maintain a working and current toolchain. This includes programming languages and the tools that produce software in tandem with you. This isn't just for your employer, it's for the sake of your own career. Or do you _want_ to be like those poor men who came before us, knowing and learning only COBOL, who now complain that software engineering is a young person's game?

If I interview a software engineer and they don't know how to use a version control system and actively express disdain for the concept of making sure that the progress of development is captured, then I would not recommend we hire them. Anyone who's had git-bisect save them a huge effort locating a bug would probably feel the same way.

Version control is every bit as important as your editor, debugger linker, and binary examination tools. If you don't know how to use them, you're not ready to start playing the game on a professional level.

You might say that I'm using Ad Hominem here, but I don't feel it's that way. There are minimum standards for software engineers who want to develop software professionally, and using version control and understanding why we use version control is pretty high up on the list. If a basketball player isn't ready for the NBA, it isn't Ad Hominem to tell him his game needs more work, even though he may feel very insulted by the concept.

<comment><USER12> _"Your job is most certainly to maintain a working and current toolchain."_

Subversion works. It's well-documented, simple, and there are many tools that work with it. Tell me why it's an inappropriate choice for a "working and current toolchain".

 _"There are minimum standards for software engineers who want to develop software professionally, and using version control and understanding why we use version control is pretty high up on the list. If a basketball player isn't ready for the NBA, it isn't Ad Hominem to tell him his game needs more work, even though he may feel very insulted by the concept."_

Not wanting to learn the version-control flavor of the week is a very different thing than not knowing how to use version control -- and it's suggestive that you've so confused the two concepts. To extend your basketball metaphor, version control software isn't part of the _game_ , but rather, a piece of the _equipment_. If you suggested that an NBA player should spend even a day "learning" how to dribble with a new type of ball, he'd laugh you out of the room -- _unless_ that ball added a significant advantage to his game.

Being a professional is more about judicious decision making than it is about raw knowledge of technology. The transition of a pre-existing project from Subversion to Git adds huge complexity, in exchange for very little, as far as I'm concerned. When the situation changes, and Git adds more value than fad, I will re-evaluate.

<comment><USER11> _"Subversion works. It's well-documented, simple, and there are many tools that work with it. Tell me why it's an inappropriate choice for a "working and current toolchain"."_

Because it is not a distributed version control system. As more and more people use a dvcs, they realize how incredibly flexible, useful, and generally more powerful it is vs. a centralized vcs.

There is clear value added on numerous levels over subversion. You simply haven't bothered to research it.

 _"Not wanting to learn the version-control flavor of the week is a very different thing than not knowing how to use version control -- and it's suggestive that you've so confused the two concepts."_

Git is not a flavor of the week. It is emerging as the dominant contender after literally 2 years of fighting and evolving for superiority within the dvcs community. This field is not new. It's suggestive of how out-of-date your information is that you aren't aware of these.

 _"Being a professional is more about judicious decision making than it is about raw knowledge of technology."_

Yes. And I'm directly saying that you're making poor professional decisions. DVCS isn't fad anymore, it's the new standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> we just started a new project and we tried out git briefly. our prob with git is it supports ssh auth only (not HTTP Auth), which is retarded. makes setting up new users a pain. and leading non-techies thru setting it up is quite a challenge.

the other major prob is lack of windows support.

the people coding git clearly don't care about average joe users, just unix geeks.

don't forget, there are a lot of people who use source control that have never opened a command line in their life (like designers, doc people).

Because of these issues we had to switch to subversion....

<comment><USER15> And Subversion is perfectly appropriate for your uses! TortoiseSVN is a snap to use (and it's not the only great svn GUI out there), and Subversion seems to make sense to people. The only reason I see to use git is if you're trying to keep a bunch of developers who are running off in different directions to maintain a somewhat coherent codebase. Or if developers want their own playground. Even then, though, I worked at a company that used centralized Subversion, but almost every developer used git-svn locally. Different tools for different applications!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems you could replace all occurrences of subversion with cvs and all occurrences of git with subversion and you'd have a blog post you could date 2001.

<comment><USER17> Um, no. Because the specific complaints the author is making about git (compared with svn) aren't in fact ways in which svn is worse than CVS.

If you didn't like Subversion (and preferred CVS) in 2001 it was because it was too new, because you'd heard scary stories of repository corruption, because you didn't like having a single revision number for your whole repository, that sort of thing.

The only one of those that's at all parallel to any of what Micah is saying about git is the last one.

Now, sure, both Micah's complaint now and an anti-svn complaint in 2001 fit the template "There's this cool new thing, and I'm not convinced it's an improvement on its predecessor". But, guess what, Micah said more than that, and the actual point is in the specific complaints he made, not in the fact "someone thinks something isn't better than what it's allegedly a better replacement for".</comment></comment>


Mikey Hicks, 8, Can't Get Off U.S. Terror Watch List - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/nyregion/14watchlist.html

<comment><USER2> _Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.

Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list._

No, the boy is not on the list. It's that other suspicious adult who's "on the list."

Which is disingenuous, because anyone who shares a name with anyone on the list is treated as if they were on the list.

Any govt official who says an eight year old boy, or a 90 year old lady, or a US Senator is not on the list should be slapped by his junior high school composition teacher. And then searched.

Everyone is a criminal. Everyone is on the list.</comment>


China is on track to beat its peak-emissions pledge - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/china-is-on-track-to-beat-its-peak-emissions-pledge/ <comment><USER2> I've lived there and can say from experience China just makes stuff up. The local governments are responsible for reporting to higher ups and they don't want to miss targets, so they straight up lie. In reality it's a house of cards. You can lie about a 2% change once, and twice, and three times, but soon your lies compound and it's clear you didn't reduce emissions by the rate you reported. Only time will prove me correct about this. They do this with air quality regularly. Chinese official numbers of PM2.5 are regularly 30-50% lower than what the US embassy reports.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why you're getting downvoted on this, it's a common problem in authoritarian governments of all stripes. Nobody gets promoted from Apparatchik to Senior Apparatchik by pushing back on the quotas set for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to be proven wrong here but I tend to suspect them of fudging their numbers, so to speak. There is a lot of corruption at the municipal level and there is incentive for local officials to overstate their progress.

That said, pollution is pretty serious in their bigger cities so I hope for everyone's sake the numbers are true.

<comment><USER5> Is it easy to fake the numbers this days where you can automate a lot of the measurements?

<comment><USER6> Well, it depends on who's making the measurements. How easy is it to actually measure China's emissions by a neutral third party?

<comment><USER7> With the proposed new set of EU's Sentinel satellites hopefully to be launched in the coming years, it should be trivial. That is, if the proposed mission actually happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a bizarrely upbeat article. China's CO2 output will supposedly peak at 10 tons per person for $21,000 GDP per capita. Using the article's numbers, The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 emissions. Note also that China's population will peak and then start declining in just a few years, which has a lot to do with why CO2 output will peak: [https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1S8048). The only reason US CO2 output didn't peak decades ago is that the US population continues to grow steadily.

<comment><USER9> > The US achieves triple the GDP per capita with just 60% higher CO2 > emissions.

The paper is based on the environmental Kuznets curve model [1], according to which growth in GDP per capita eventually allows more environmentally friendly policies to be implemented, causing pollution per unit of GDP to shrink again. That's exactly the effect that allows the US to generate a higher GDP with comparatively smaller increases in CO2 emissions. The paper uses the fact that some countries are farther along the curve than others to empirically fit the parameters and uses that to estimate when CO2 emissions per capita will peak given current economic development.

Note that that's just about the per-capita measures; the expected peak in population compounds the effect.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Kuznets_curve)</comment></comment>


Office 2016 Is Microsoft's Best Hope to Show It's Changed - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/09/office-2016-microsofts-best-hope-show-really-changed/ <comment><USER2> It's certainly changed but the question is if it's better.

I did play with the beta version of Mac Word and it was beautiful but buggy right up until the last release. And honestly, I was editing primarily _bulleted lists_ and was _enraged_ that it somehow to this day couldn't do that consistently (copy/paste across lines does unexpected things, indentation seems to differ on every single line, and the, er, list goes on).

And then the final version came and a LOG-IN screen appeared after Word's characteristically-long launch (presumably because they have to launch an entire Windows VM or something on the Mac). That's it; you can't do anything else. So I enter what I think is my log-in ID and password and it sits there spinning for a LONG time with no functional way to cancel aside from force- quitting, and then it eventually says the log-in is incorrect. Apparently I needed some other account but it wouldn't tell me why my choice didn't work.

So, Office became pretty but worse in every practical respect and _far worse_ in some brand new ways. Seems to me Microsoft is about the same it has always been.

<comment><USER3> Office for Mac OS has been around for longer than Office for Windows. It is all developed natively and is not as you said, a Windows VM running it.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I've been running the Mac OS X Offce 365 for a couple of months. It's native and very Mac like. Excel has crashed a few times on me, which is what I use mostly. It's downloaded large updates 3-4 times. I haven't noticed crashes after the last update.

<comment><USER2> It doesn't crash but it doesn't behave the way it ought to.

If I'm performing simple text edits I shouldn't be surprised by _anything_ it's doing in terms of formatting. And if I have to wait several seconds for it to open a trivial document in _its own file format_ that even _TextEdit_ can open immediately, that's a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The marketing of "we are sorry and we are listening to our users" which turned out to be a load of crap when Windows 10 came out turned me off to any promises made in the future.

<comment><USER6> They do listen though.

<comment><USER7> Windows 7 was the turning point I remember, when Gates came back to make up for Vista and they took every piece of feedback possible.

<comment><USER8> Windows 7 was just a re-badged Vista with a sprinkling of new features. None of the criticisms that people try and lay at Vista's feat are untrue about Windows 7.

Vista largely got criticised for:

\- Higher memory usage (than XP).

\- Driver issues (in particular graphics and sound). Because Microsoft made changes to the Windows Driver Model, and big name manufacturers (Nvidia, Creative, et al) weren't ready at release, and produced either buggy drivers, or no drivers at all.

The reason why Windows 7 was better received is:

\- It wasn't called "Vista." It was/is fashionable to bash Vista. They could have literally re-released Vista without one change and it still would have been treated better than Vista was (which is essentially the 7 strategy).

\- Hardware moved forward. Vista and 7 don't run well on 1 GB of RAM. By the time 7 shipped most new PCs had 2 GB or more.

\- Drivers were fixed/improved. When 7 shipped it ran Vista compatible drivers which were time tested by that stage.

Ultimately I just roll my eyes at people who continue to be critical of Vista. At least 8/8.1 I understand their perspective (Start Screen, etc), but trying to bash Vista while holding up 7 as this incredible release is just strange given how similar the two are.

<comment><USER9> Whatever your thoughts are on Vista, the changes pretty much had to happen. The old driver model was just that: old. Something had to give, and unfortunately a lot of companies weren't ready. Windows 7 cleaned up much of the UI, fixed some performance issues, and was released at a time that drivers and memory usage weren't as big of a deal. Does that make Win7 that much better than Vista? Not really, but it does make Win7 a better release simply due to timing.

I'd say that Apple could have had a similar issue with going from OS9 to OSX, though they at least had a long period of some degree of backwards compatibility. They, however, handled the transition much better since they controlled all of the hardware and drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The group pictures suggest they're also releasing an indie-folk album in a few months.

</comment><comment><USER11> Three photographs with six managers, and then the people sitting around the big table in the photo at the end are "Microsoft workers." Not engineers, designers, or writers, but "workers." I know Wired probably chose this presentation, but I can't help dwelling on where the emphasis is.

</comment><comment><USER12> While I'm a Windows user buying a lot of MS's developer tools, I fail to see the need for changing Word every couple of years. I still have Office 2007 which covers 95% of my needs.

<comment><USER13> Sorry but just for clarity, what 5% of your needs is in the new Office compared to 2007? Only reason why I say that is I hear this 95% a lot.

When we looked to switching away from Office to something else people would say 95% was covered by say Google Docs or another tool and people would go hmmm and see that as a negative. I asked for the person to tell me what the 5% we were missing and maybe we could fulfill that need with another tool. One week later we made the switch since no one could find a single thing anyone would be missing. One year later no one is missing anything and we were covered for 100% of our work needs.

<comment><USER14> Wait, are you saying you moved from Office to Google Docs and nobody could find a thing there missed? So nobody ever used table of contents, styles, paragraph formatting, a document that has mixed landscape/portrait pages, cross-references or templates? How is that possible? What kind of profile are those users, I mean, what sort of work do they do in Word? (I'm assuming we're only talking about Word here and not Excel, because then it'd be even harder to believe)

<comment><USER13> 100 Percent Yes. It was for one department that makes reports from visiting peoples homes that are just written documents. We didn't go with Docs but it would have worked fine.

I would say our company of 400 people have very little need for Word and they don't know how to use Excel besides making budgets with no real complected formulas.

<comment><USER15> > "100 Percent Yes. It was for one department that makes reports from visiting > peoples homes that are just written documents."

Did you explore using Mail Merge?

<comment><USER13> Why would people need mail merge when making written reports? Heck I bet you the money in my wallet that less than 1% of current users even know how to do a mail merge let alone have a use for it. Sure in the 1980s and 90s doing mail merges for people's Christmas letters felt like a killer app at the time doesn't really get used much these days in Office.

<comment><USER15> > "Why would people need mail merge when making written reports?"

Depends on whether you want the data to be easily reusable or not. Is there no need for any summarisation of the data on these reports? Is the layout of these reports standardised in any way?

Mail merge isn't exactly an advanced feature, all you need is a basic Excel spreadsheet containing the data you want to insert. Takes 10 minutes or less to teach someone how to use it.

<comment><USER13> You do know you can do mail merge in Google Docs?

I am certainly not trying to say mail merge is an advance feature. I am just saying MOST people can not do a mail merge, THE VAST majority.

<comment><USER15> Cannot because they can understand it or cannot because they haven't been shown it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > and a machine learning-based help feature called Tell Me

Uh oh.

<comment><USER17> "It looks like you're trying to write a _potato_. Would you like help?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I understand this is journalism, but the pictures give an ominous tone that, regardless of how much I read, I can't overcome. No one is smiling or looks remotely happy.

<comment><USER13> Also I think of a bunch of things that clearly shows that Microsoft has changed.

They released a programing tool in LINUX for one.

</comment></comment><comment> zero-rated Microsoft has changed in what way? It no longer spies on its users and reports them to the CIA?

</comment><comment><USER19> While I personally prefer other system to develop personal project (I do that on a mac), at work I use windows 10 and recently I have thought about switch from Evernote to Onenote.

I wouldn't have imaging that in the past, mostly because the microsoft product were so unpolished that were terrible to use (although sometimes very advanced).

microsoft IS changing, and I think they are moving in the right direction. (I don't agree in all of their choices, but I like the result).

<comment><USER20> > mostly because the microsoft product were so unpolished that were terrible > to use

Unpolished compared to what? Open office? Apples offerings? Surely you are joking. MS Office is probably the most polished and feature rich office suite out there. For me nothing else compares, the only factor that was off-putting about using office was the cost. The cost deterrent has largely gone away, so for me there's almost no reason to use anything else, other than to investigate future alternatives.

<comment><USER7> Ya, I don't know what he is talking about either...Office has always had complete and fully functional features in every release - you never got a product which didn't have features of it's predecessor (maybe aside clipart/wordart or gimmicky stuff like that), nor partially implemented features.

<comment><USER21> Office 95/97 was a time when you had to open the file in the same version it was saved in or the formatting and any embedded objects could change. This happened both ways - not just a backwards compatibility issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Question(s) for speech technology experts. - <AUTHOR>

I would really appreciate if someone working on speech technologies (speech to text or text to speech) can provide some insight on this?
Since past couple of months, I have been completely fascinated with what speech technologies (specifically speech recognition and speech synthesis) can do and how they can enhance the user experience. I decided to delve deep into speech synthesis technologies. From my research into available solutions, there is a huuuuuuuuge difference between the open source solutions and the commercial solutions available for $$$$$.
From what I have read about speech recognition, the open source solutions perform extremely poorly when compared to their commercial counterparts.
Has anyone else here looked at the possibility of improving any of the available open source speech technologies to a level where it is close to the commercial ones? Is it even possible to improve Sphinx or festival to a level where it can be commercially used without developing everything from scratch? Is it something even worth investigating?
Is it possible for someone working in this area to articulate the challenges(technical/monetary etc.) involved?
Okay, thanks a lot for reading this. Looking forward to your comments.
P.S.:
I would really really like to get opinion from someone who has worked or is working in this area about their experiences. I am located in south bay. I am also attending the startup school this month. <comment><USER2> I worked at Nuance Communications for about a year doing voice application development. I'm not familiar with Sphynx, but I did talk to a number of people at the company about it (this was 2004-2005).

From what I gathered it would be pretty difficult to get speech synthesis up to their level. A single "voice" will be generated by taking _tens of hours of audio_ and using algorithms to splice them together based on the text.

The only significant monetary constraint is going to be if you want to have a real voice talent doing your recording in a studio, but I wouldn't try to tackle the technical issues without a subject matter expert</comment>


How come ability to hire isn't a criterion for investment? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2012/10/18/how-come-ability-to-hire-isnt-a-criteria-for-investment.html

<comment><USER2> In relation to this subject I recently interviewed for a CIO position in which they asked for permission to ask my references about my ability to reach into the tech talent pool and pull out candidates. They where surprised at how many of them came back with replies like I would quite my job tomorrow to work with him again, by very strong technical individuals. I think the ability to hire is a underrated skill by executives, while I see it as potentially a make or break for someone who's duty will be to assemble a team.</comment>


What Life Leaves Behind - <AUTHOR> http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/what_life_leaves_behind/

<comment><AUTHOR> The search for life beyond our pale blue dot is fraught with false positives and dashed hopes. Will the chemical and mineral fingerprints of Earthly organisms apply on other worlds?</comment>


ARPANET dialogues - fictional chat logs - <AUTHOR> http://www.arpanetdialogues.net/

<comment><USER2> If I'm not mistaken, this might very well be the first recorded instance of internet trolling!!

MARCEL BROODTHAERS It should be encouraged to be freely available.

RONALD REAGAN Marcel nothing is free you know.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS I know Ronald. I know. We have your great nation to thank for this.

RONALD REAGAN Yes Marcel I do believe you have much to thank this great nation for. Indeed.

RONALD REAGAN America is great nation.

RONALD REAGAN I can think of no other nation that has contributed as much to ideas of democracy and free enterprise as my own.

<comment><USER3> RONALD REAGAN Free. Well who pays for it in the end though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some interesting dialog here.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: Students I think could benefit from this greatly. Vast networks of students. Youth must be provided with the means to grasp this opportunity.

RONALD REAGAN: Sounds a bit out of control to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is this real? Everyone sounds like an obvious caricature of themselves.

<comment><USER6> The lack of _any_ mention of these chats in any historical literature I can find is also suspicious. I could imagine the transcripts being lost until now, but if indeed Ronald Reagan, Edward Said, and Jane Fonda had an ARPANet chat in 1975, I would've expected to be able to find at least one person having mentioned it!

Additional reason: the supposed discoverers are media artists, and this project was presented at a new-media art festival, rather than, say, a history conference (and no mention of how the transcripts may have been unearthed, or from where). Feels very much like a media-art project.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely, and the script almost has a sort of story arc as they await the arrival of Jane Fonda. It feels play-like.

<comment><USER7> Not just a play, but a fairly bad play.

Another objection: it's 1976. Would these folks have even known how to type? Governor Reagan wouldn't be complaining about the difficulty of typing, he'd have one of his secretaries come in and type while he dictates.

 _Also_ also, I just don't see Ronald Reagan agreeing to take time out to chat with Edward Said and Hanoi Jane at all.

 _Also also_ also, Reagan would be funnier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think Ronald Reagan basically defines himself as a communist here. He says communism is "the suppression of liberty in the name of a common good." But shortly before that, he suggests he is against Jane Fonda's "liberty" in the name of the "liberty of millions of Americans" (the common good).

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: But I imagine you might not always appreciate her [Jane Fonda's] views Mr Reagan.

RONALD REAGAN: No I dont care much for Communist sympathizers to be frank.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: But surely she is liberated in her freedom to do so.

RONALD REAGAN: If ones liberty threatens to undermine the liberty of millions of Americans then I must disagree Marcel.

<SNIP>

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: Thats a good point Edward. Can you even tell us what communism is Mr Reagan.

RONALD REAGAN: Its the suppression of liberty in the name of a common good.

<comment><USER9> Exactly what I noticed. It's the central philosophical problem with classical liberalism right there! Before I sent this to friends: is this an April fool?

edit:

[http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/03/the-arpanet- dia...](http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/03/the-arpanet-dialogues- blog-archive-vol-i.html)

Yeah, a hoax, though disingenuously justified as a "FLIP".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For those who are unaware, Francis Fukuyama is the Hegelian who said at the end of the Cold War that we have reached the end of history. I think it's one of the most provocative and misunderstood statements of the past 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER11> Definitely not genuine. Clicking on the symbol at the bottom right of the page leads to a disclaimer posted 3 April:

<http://www.arpanetdialogues.net/disclaimer/>

Interesting, all the same.

</comment><comment><USER12> EDWARD SAID: How do you measure success?

RONALD REAGAN: I measure it in our prosperity and in our influence on the world stage.

Translation: Money and power.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would love to see this with the background sound of running ASR-33s...

</comment><comment><USER14> who are these people? Marcel Broodthaers and Edward Said appeared incredibly smart in those chat logs. And Ronald Reagan? would it be politically incorrect to say that he sounded like a close-minded, conservative, ignorant prick? how this guy ever became a president? I wonder...

<comment><USER13> > how this guy ever became a president?

Democracy ensures a people gets the leader is deserves.

And, before you shoot me, remember I am from Brazil and we just had 8 years of Lula. Yes, we got what we deserved too ;-)

As far as Reagan is concerned, he was not the worse Americans did to themselves, by far. Could have been, but he got incredibly lucky.

<comment><USER15> Compared to The Carter, Ford, Nixon sequence; Reagan was a lot better for America. At least they stopped writing those "Do we need a new form of government / Is the Presidency obsolete" editorials.</comment></comment></comment>


Notion encourages busy-work - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/diesdas-direct/notion-encourages-busy-work-and-im-tired-of-it-b1e049edb663 <comment><USER2> I am a huge Notion supporter - it's our organizaation's brain and one of our most important tools.

However, having used the tool for more than a year at a 20 person org, one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to place new pages. There is "Notion anxiety" about not wanting to mess up the board.

One thing we've done to address this is by adding two common tables, the Documentation table and the Meetings table. Anytime anyone wants to create a new doc, they can simply add it to the documentation table and then tag it to their team, and we have a full list of all of the docs everyone has written. From there, if a certain piece of documentation needs to be somewhat else, it can be pulled out and moved there. Additionally, each team member has a default "project board table" and if you say need to create a quick to do list, you should just add it to your personal board. Having these "default tables" rather than a special table for each specific project may really help your team.

Notion requires intentional planning, and you need to be opinionated about the architecture. If you just keep adding things on haphazardly, it's going to turn into a mess.

Finally, I do agree with OP that notifications could signicantly be improved. If anyone from Notion is reading this, please think of notifications like emails. At the moment, notifications are only in the state of read/unread, and as soon as I open my notifications, they clear. Instead, I want my notifications to be a mini-inbox, where I can view notifications, respond to notifications, archive completed notifications, and filter notifications into channels (the same way I can filter emails). Notifications are a to do list, and should be thought of as such. Having this set up would address OPs concern about being able to filter notifications at the email level by setting the filtering logic in the app.

<comment><USER3> My team started using Notion last year, and this rings true:

> one of the biggest pain points I have seen is people not knowing where to > place new pages

I have also seen this happen with every knowledge-base software I have ever used. A team's knowledge-base (which represents a shared domain model) is evolving all the time, as people's understanding of the domain evolves, and sometimes there is information that is valuable but doesn't have an optimal home in the current domain model.

The only way I've seen it successfully managed is by having different standards for information structure depending on how well the information's role is understood by the org.

You need dumping grounds where one can quickly jot down relevant information for later processing, and you need areas that present a more structured view of what you know to support decision-making, and a schedule for consolidating and structuring the unstructured knowledge. This creates far less pressure to put everything in the right place at first.

I think of it like a write-ahead log, or like how food is dumped into the stomach before the individual nutrients are extracted and delivered to various destinations around the body - you don't deliver each nutrient molecule to its destination before eating another.

<comment><USER4> > I think of it like a write-ahead log

Lovely analogy.

It's also how high write-throughput databases work. First write the data in a way that's optimised for getting it committed to storage and at high density.

Only later, in the background, maybe at a more convenient time, is the data reorganised for finding and reading things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't a new phenomenon - my favorite past example of this is the FileMaker series of applications.

The biggest hurdle to building most great tools isn't the coding, it's the process of carefully thinking about the problem and designing something that fits without being overly complicated or too basic. Incidentally, learning to code often gives you some basic understanding of this issue.

No-code tools like Notion or Filemaker throw users straight into the deep end of designing their own solutions, and because of the data-agnostic nature of the tool it's difficult to build in guardrails to stop the user from over- complicating their solution.

<comment><USER6> At the same time, I believe there is value in allowing people to over complicate their solution. Let the user learn how to simplify their workflow over time instead of limiting them from the start.

<comment><USER7> Thank you - great comment. I have the same issue with the social networks - they are too limiting. They give you a little box to type your paragraph into. Give people hypertext - yah they'll make a mess, but they'll do amazing things as well. And people will figure develop the skills over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Notion was the tool that made me realize I wanted opinionated tools.

At first I was excited by all of Notion's possibilities, but after a while I felt this was not a strength but a weakness.

We were on Notion for six months, without much enthusiasm. I switched us to Clubhouse + Stack Overflow for Teams and we're loving it.

<comment><USER9> Couldn't agree more.

As a pilot run - tried migrating small amount of knowledge base from Evernote to Notion but it just feels too overwhelming. Upending existing information architecture (with umpteen possibilities re: templates) quickly gets exhausting.

This is when I realized, I need an opinionated tool. Gave up and went back to Evernote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Gardening Notion boards becomes an activity in itself … Notion doesn't get > out of the way, it's malleability always invites you to tweak your boards > further, to add another property, to connect another relation, to add > another view, to go through your board and complete data on all cards.

Sounds exactly like the problem so many folks here are having with Emacs. Malleable tools, while powerful, often become a huge time sink if you go into the rabbit hole of tweaking them too much. And it's often hard to resist.

<comment><USER11> Very relatable. I feel the same way about dotfiles, and fancy programming languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you think of Notion as your team wiki, it's an exceptionally good tool.

Probably the best "wiki" I've ever used. I've used Trac, MediaWiki, MoinMoin, Confluence, GitHub Wiki (+ Gollum), and finally Notion. Notion is easy-to-use for non-developers, but still mostly supports Markdown. It makes rich content easy, including tables, in-line images, code snippets. It supports GDoc-style real-time editing, fine- & coarse-grained permissioning, in-line comments, mentions, and versioning. It's a great wiki.

It's really, really easy to over-use a wiki for everything. It's also really easy for wikis to get under-utilized, out-of-date, etc.

But if you're a fully distributed team with 20+ people, you need somewhere to store your team policies/practices, your culture, your vision/roadmap, etc. Notion is a great fit for this.

If you try to use Notion as the "hub for all of your work", you'll certainly be disappointed, just as you would have been using any other "wiki" product for this. For example, though we use Notion as our team wiki, we still use:

\- GitHub Issues for bug reports, because it's built perfectly for this, and links with code and pull requests seamlessly

\- GitHub project boards for code-oriented project management, because it can kanban-ize GH issues to visualize capacity, issue stages, and project/milestone progress

\- Trello for non-code project management, because if you're not a programmer, Trello is much simpler than GH Issues/Projects, and nails the experience of a kanban project board

\- StackOverflow for Teams for FAQ-oriented team & product knowledge base

\- GDocs for long docs, forms, slides, spreadsheets, and so on -- and especially when these need to be shared "officially" with external parties

\- Slack for real-time chat and notifications, often linking to the above tools

I think part of the dissatisfaction expressed in this article is that Notion is being hyped (especially with the VC valuations) as "the future of all work", similar to Slack in a prior startup generation.

Slack is better IRC for busy teams who prefer a SaaS. Notion is better MediaWiki for busy teams who prefer a SaaS. Neither is an all-in-one work hub. Neither is "the future of work". They are just communication/collaboration tools in different categories.

<comment><USER13> The Achilles' heel for use as a simple wiki, IMO, is that you can't just make a simple table for layout, it has to be a "database". This is OK as long as you stay in Notion, but it sucks for exporting.

Dropbox Paper's table implementation is really nice (now if they'd just hurry up with their Dropbox 2020 thing and unify Paper and regular Dropbox folders...)

<comment><USER12> Agree that Notion should consider adding a "simple" table that isn't the full- blown database.

<comment><USER14> I often end up valigning text in vim and then pasting it as a code block to Notion :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> After a few months using Notion at work, I feel such a relief when I get directed to a regular office-style doc (Google docs in our case, but Office would be just as fine).

This week I formally proposed my team move out of Notion for all internal documentation and back to google docs.

Notion is the best and easiest to use wiki there's ever been, I guess, but the reasons I tried wikis before and never stuck with them still apply to it.

<comment><USER16> I'd love to hear why you prefer word processor docs over a Wiki?

For me, Wikis solve the big problem with word processor documents: It's hard to define the relationships between documents. But I'd also love to hear other perspectives, e.g., what people dislike about them.

<comment><USER15> Some quick thoughts, they may be incomplete or ambiguous but hopefully will provide some idea:

\- A wiki combines content and organization of that content. This is a strength (documents know about each other) but also a weakness (the organization system must understand and support the types of documents it contains). I'll expand in the next points.

\- When I use a filesystem to organize, it doesn't need to care what types of documents I throw in there. In a wiki you are typically led to keep copies, not originals, of such alien document types, as attachments to a wiki- supported document.

\- If you are willing to commit to a certain organization filesystem (this is not optional in a wiki), you can usually hyperlink documents using your filesystem's url format (e.g. gdrive urls).

\- I have found repeatedly over time that the very ease of use of multiple documents across a wiki leads to people spreading information across multiple items "because it's so easy to navigate". But, similar to my impressions with codebases where functionality is heavily spread and atomized across a multitude of files and small functions/classes, this can hinder the ability to grasp or comprehend the compete intended contents of a document. (see [http://number- none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carm...](http://number- none.com/blow/blog/programming/2014/09/26/carmack-on-inlined-code.html) for more about atomized code)

\- As outlined in the article, wikis tend to have to duplicate a lot of existing document editing, layout and rendering technology and standards, and very rarely reach the level of power and quality that dedicated tools have. In keeping with the intent to make them easy to use and navigate, they end up making the easy stuff easier (great for non-tech or beginners) but the hard stuff harder. So, for something trivial they are great, for complicated stuff they become a hindrance. I can't remember the last time I wrote or formatted something in Notion and _didn 't_ feel like I was fighting a 2-decades-old word processor.

\- Extra customizability like Notion offers, make it quite powerful but also exacerbates the above point, because it's not just the basic built-in feature that may work half as good as they could, but the customizations end up in a similar state (because it's not a full app development platform).

<comment><USER16> Great, thanks for writing this up. I agree with all of these points, these are the trade-offs, I end up preferring Wikis, but I can certainly see how someone can prefer other formats for these reasons.

Two more quick questions if you get a chance: Which document format do you prefer? It sounds like you like to mix different document types, but I'm curious what your bread-and-butter/default choice is? I'm also curious what you mean by "complicated stuff" (in "for something trivial they are great, for complicated stuff they become a hindrance"). I'm assuming you mean things like inline graphs and diagrams? But then this ties into my first question, I'd be really curious to hear what tool you think does do things like that really well? (I've always just exported from other tools.)

<comment><USER15> Say.... 50% docs, 25% powerpoints, 10% excels, 5% images, 5% mp4 videos, 5% other (.ai, audios, SWFs, jsons, source code excerpts...).

For complicated stuff I mean yeah, sometimes tables, sometimes multi-columns, sometimes embedded visuals, sometimes even just some unorthdox layout (like, trying to add a paragraph with my comments in the middle of someone else's bulleted list).

Any of them can be argued, but I've found them useful often. Any of them may be solved by a particular wiki like Notion... but never all of them, because writing a fully featured document editor (or, as seen above, several editors) is a HUGE task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I used to be in the camp of finding better workflows with these tools. I ended up just gardening them,losing time elsewhere.

Now I just prefer the simplest dumbest tools possible for specific use cases. Notebook + sticky notes for task mgmt, GitHub repo for code snippets, simplenote for private information, Google docs for collab

<comment><USER18> Thank you for pointing out Simplenote. All I've ever wanted is the ability to take basic textual notes on any device (including Windows) with perfect sync and with dead simple but native mobile apps. OneNote got me pretty close, but the sync feature is far too buggy to rely on for serious work; I can't deal with syncing issues when I need to pull up a note in a meeting on my phone. I'd looked at Notion but it offers much more than what I need, so using it just for basic notes was clunky. Simplenote appears to be exactly what I want.

<comment><USER17> ah yeah onenote suffers the same problem as notion. Too many ways of doing things.

I've learned to take less notes over the years. If I need image or gif support I just use slack to shoot myself the information, slack's been my new temporary dumping grounds

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is an old problem, it's a mixture of amusement and resignation to see it keep coming up in new areas.

In the salad days of my early undergrad, i spent about three weeks hand tuning (very poorly) an init.el, learning latex, fiddling with auctex and bibtex and makefiles, and doing no work. Quite literally sophomoric.

Learned a lot about elisp, and fuckall about mechanics, but dang if i didn't have the prettiest lab reports.

<comment><USER20> Hard to look down upon spending 3 weeks learning elisp and latex during undergrad! Tell your employer you did this and they'll be less kind probably :D

<comment><USER19> right?

as it turns out, dropping months into obscure trivia of how to do all this silly nonsense has paid off in my professional life, but it sure felt like wasting time at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I keep being intrigued by Notion but ultimately old warhorse Evernote remains the core of my knowledge system. It amazes me that this long into the lifespan of the iPad there is really no competitive way to read/annotate/search and store large numbers of documents across iPad and desktop other than Evernote.

<comment><USER22> What about OneNote?

<comment><USER21> For my usage I find OneNote way clunkier dealing with large numbers of documents. I'm sure it has awesome advantages for people with other workflows. I have also only dabbled in it so maybe I'm missing something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I keep being curious about notion(and evernote), but can't get into it. Probably because my current solution works well for me.

I simply use markdown files synchronized using dropbox. I use Emacs Org Mode on desktop, and Editorial on iOS. Editorial is still by far the best markdown text editor on iOS, although it's, very sadly, almost never updated anymore(it's still pretty close to perfect, so I keep using it).

I write down all my thoughts in one single journal - a "Notes" folder in dropbox, with markdown files for every 2-3 weeks of notes, called like "2020-05-02.md". Sometimes I use a bash script to combine them all into one big file to easily search through them.

I use ">>" symbol to mark the important ideas/insights so I could easily search for them later.

I use hashtags to organize ideas and notes by topics. Like #pst for blog post ideas, #gamedev for everything I've learned about game development, #book for books I want to read, #health 2020-05-02 for daily notes about my health, #todo 2020-05-02 for todos, etc.

Notes aren't organized in any other way, it's just stream of consciousness. When I have an idea or learn something - I open Editorial and write it down at the end of the currently open file, and if it's important I mark it with a hashtag or ">>".

Every few weeks I search through all the important thoughts of the past few weeks I've marked with ">>" and collect them into a separate file, so I have a kind of a summary of what I've learned/thought about in the past month.

Works really well for me.

Also I can highly recommend Dynalist, it is like a superior version of workflowy. An app for nested lists. Can be used as trello, as an outlining app for writing, as a way to keep a list of your project ideas and the tasks you need to accomplish. I use it to outline fiction, organize my ideas for games and 3D art I can make, and for anything else that fits well in this format.

Finally, Track And Share is the best habit tracker on iOS that I could find, highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like a reinvention of Lotus Notes with today's technology.

<comment><USER25> I agree. I haven't used notion but the complaints are identical to my lotus notes experience. I wished I could have entered expense reports in a real program fit for purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> We run our company through Notion. Part of using it is establishing your own best practices within the company. Since Notion is flexible, it provides you the opportunity to be rigid and make the decisions on database design that is right for your team.

Notifications in Notion are very poor and that is a valid criticism mentioned in the article. I imagine it will only improve over time and with the coming public API we should start seeing third-party tools supplementing Notion for specific use cases.

</comment><comment><USER27> Notion has always felt like it's trying to do so many things that it falls short from being good at anything. Products like Trello are good because they focus on one thing and one thing only. Notion has their features and priorities spread-thin. I feel like they could have done much better if they started out with a single feature, somewhat master that implementation, and keep building on features to the app. This way, they can at least manage their priorities and not have to concurrently chase down 20 features.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd be curious to read a study as to productivity tools actually do help people be more productive.

Anecdotally, I used to use many different tools from EverNote, WunderList etc.. but over the past 2 years my process has been use Google Drive as a journal and write down my top priorities on a post-it.

Post-it naturally forces me to prioritize a small number of tasks and my journal is to help me document everything I learn. I don't see ticking off low leverage items as a value add to anyone even though the dopamine rush does feel good.

</comment><comment><USER29> My teammate has described Notion as a B+ solution for everything. It's impressive how many things it can handle, but it's all in a merely decent manner.

<comment><USER30> I agree. Table rows have to have names, kanban boards have to have "no status" list, number field doesn't support my local currency, you can't round numbers to a fixed number of decimal spaces, instead being forced to use something like:

        round((10/3)*100)/100

Can't save custom icons, so I have to re-upload one of like five custom icons I use over and over again. Can't open items in a database as a page automatically, but have to click on "open as page" over and over again, it supports Markdown but not quite:

" instead of > for a quote.

[] instead of * [ ] for a to-do.

Supports h1 to h3, no support for h4 to h6.

Switching between Markdown and Notion is a real pain in the ass. All of those are _so close_ to being perfect, but there's like one major annoyance with the majority of the features I use. B+ indeed.

That being said, you can reference other notes pretty easily within the text and create tables with no hassle (unlike in Markdown), making the other solutions I've tried C+ at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I agree with this.

I've collapsed everything to Workflowy for myself, and Basecamp for projects with collaboration, or that may someday need significant collaboration. Documentation lives in repos in text files. Everything else starts to feel like busywork.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm using notion for personal stuff and have found this line too. Personally it's still the best note taking basic + kanban board. I use github issues with zenhub for code stuff and notion for everything else. I have a global tags database in notion and then I use a global recursive self referencing tasks table so I can link thing globally easily and then just create views when I need to. I think you can get lost but overall it's nice having one source of truth with different views.

I think the product lacks maturity. I think the notifications are garbage, and the inability to hide / emphasis / format the data for a specific form or view is lacking. I think they tried and failed with templates. They need a form builder and more view windows present in places like the properties list.

In my experience regardless of the flexibility of the tool, somebody will want to waste time building out the tool from that 80% to 100% use case when they should have just been happy with the 80%.

</comment><comment><USER33> Been hearing the same hype about Roam Research, just as Slack, Zoom, and countless other 'shiny new' consumer tech products.

<comment><USER34> I've recently switched from Notion to Roam, and feel good about adding to that hype. I can't judge between them as enterprise tools, but as personal note stash I far prefer Roam. Roam doesn't have Notion's awesome flexibility that the author of this piece describes. But for me it does the important parts better.

It's great to see the deep competition in this area. Even as a current Roam fanboi, I'll switch again with little regret when something better comes along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I do really Enjoy Notion as my personal note-taking/productivity app, but I agree that its collaboration features make it really hard to use with more than a few people.

</comment><comment><USER36> Notion reminds me of Sharepoint. Too flexible and too generic, with absolutely zero opinion about differentiating content or workflow strategies or UX. Those kind of tools are usually optimized for prolific creation, but not for meaningful, productive consumption.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like Notion and I can't stand it. The interface is entirely unsuited and too slow for what it's trying to do.

<comment><USER38> Notion's speed really counts against it for me also. I'd find it so frustrating if my day-to-day revolved around it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm slightly late to the party and also slightly off-topic but usually I get very good answers from the HN crowd so here goes nothing:

Does anyone have any recommendations for open-source alternatives to Notion? I'm mainly looking for a Notion-alike that works offline but still has the same flexible structure and "database views" of other pages like Notion.

Closest I've found is TiddlyWiki, but it's documentation and data structure support is a bit all over the place. Not impossible to get through, but maybe there is something more polished out there?

</comment><comment><USER40> For those looking for a Notion alternative: at my previous company, the excessive customizability of Notion convinced me to switch everyone from Notion to a more lightweight and opinionated tool called Slab. We made the switch in early 2019, and far as I know, everyone still loves using it!

This also replaced some other documentation tools we were using, like Google Docs (partially), GitHub repos of Markdown docs, and Guru.

[https://slab.com/](https://slab.com/)

(I'm not affiliated with Slab other than as stated above.)

</comment><comment><USER41> I was amazed to find Notion which replaced a lot of apps with features like database, notes, spreadsheet, wiki. But later on I realised it was better to use different solutions which were the best in their domains instead of a huge universal app which tried to do all the things in a half baked way.

Right now I use Bear for notes, google sheets for spreadsheet/database etc.

</comment><comment><USER42> was excited when i first used it, but it's like swapping a notebook for a stack of handwritten notes

</comment><comment><USER43> I Use it to manage my personal backlog (work and personal goals boards) and as a note-keeping replacement (lots of templates for meeting summaries, daily meetings, one on one etc).

I have a daily page that summarizes all of my tasks for today (from all of my workspace) professional and personal and I start my day looking at this board.

I think Notion is very good for this purpose. I had no luck trying to convince my organization to transform from Atlassian tools towards this unified solution.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ten years from now people will figure out a tool like Notion doesn't save you from how hard of a problem Information Architecture is - the same way companies learned creating intranets and internal Wikis twenty years ago.

</comment><comment><USER45> I like notion because it's pretty simple and works on all my devices. The only other app like that is Gmail. Google suite is awful on mobile, otherwise it would probably be sufficient for my needs.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm a big fan of the default table with an url and some tags. Gets me 90% where I want most of the time

</comment><comment><USER47> Maybe the 40 hour work week encourages busywork?

</comment><comment><USER48> The gtd system by David Allen and a blank text file will get you 90 percent there. An app like Dynalist pro will get you the other 10 percent.</comment>


Tales from the WTF company, part I - <AUTHOR> http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/tales-from-the-wtf-company-part-i/

<comment><USER2> Perfect example of not asking the right questions during an interview. You can usually find out if a place is this jacked without ever joining the payroll if you know what to ask them. Interviews are a two way process. You're interviewing them, just as they're interviewing you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ultimately, tales like this (and DailyWTF postings) are "junk food" for the mind. Sure, they may give a smile and easy sense of smug superiority... but do you learn anything?

Don't we already know there are a lot of bad workplaces, a lot of fubar'd codebases, a lot of clueless-muddle-along programmers? Indeed, so many that you could read a sad-funny tale every hour on the hour for the rest of you natural life and not exhaust the FAIL?

But is that a good info-diet?

Or just cheap sugary click candy, fattening one's ego without any mental nutrition?

<comment><USER4> Also, you learn from the mistakes of others. A much less risky approach than learning from your own.

<comment><USER3> If there is a lesson, sure.

But the point of "WTF?!?" is that the stories include blatant, astonishing incompetence.

I've never seen one end "but it turned out there was a genuinely good reason for what made me think 'WTF?', so I learned something".

They're all, "<nelson>Ha-ha</nelson>, even a slightly competent programmer can feel better than those poor saps!"

<comment><USER5> Sure, some stories are more enlightening than others, and there is a point of diminishing returns. But I think the stories are pretty useful; they provide anecdotal evidence for various development anti-patterns. They imbue an appropriate sense of apprehension whenever someone says "Source control is too complicated." or "Then we serialize the object to an XML text field..." or "A testing environment would cost twice as much."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> she did you the biggest favor.</comment>


Ask HN: HN losing comments? - <AUTHOR> Did HN just lose a bunch of comment data? My account shows a last comment of two weeks ago. Yet there were about a half dozen comments that just disappeared in the last 15 minutes. <comment><USER2> I see comments newer than 2 weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=windexh8er](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=windexh8er)

</comment><comment><USER3> Email the contact link at the bottom of the page. email@example.com</comment>


Maybe there is hope for 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/24/face_criminal_ai/ <comment><USER2> Flagged to fix the title.

This is the letter that supposedly called it junk science: [https://medium.com/@CoalitionForCriticalTechnology/abolish-t...](https://medium.com/@CoalitionForCriticalTechnology/abolish- the-techtoprisonpipeline-9b5b14366b16)

The central claim that the title of the original paper would suggest is that criminality can be predicted by using image processing (original title: "A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing").

This is the press release of the original paper: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200506013352/https://harrisbur...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200506013352/https://harrisburgu.edu/hu- facial-recognition-software-identifies-potential-criminals/)

The response letter claims:

> AI applications that claim to predict criminality based on physical > characteristics are a part of a legacy of long-discredited pseudosciences > such as physiognomy and phrenology, which were and are used by academics, > law enforcement specialists, and politicians to advocate for oppressive > policing and prosecutorial tactics in poor and racialized communities.

The thing is though, either the claim of the paper is right or wrong, if they can predict criminality with 80% accuracy from faces based on image processing then it can do that.

So either they can, or they cannot. If they cannot, then challenge them on that aspect of their paper, if they can, then no amount of "debunking" changes it.

This seems a bit like some moral panic rather than a well founded scientific objection.

If the claim is true, would it not be better to know the truth? Why should we hide claims about fact? If the claim about fact is wrong then it is wrong, no need to hide it, just say it is wrong. If it is right it is right, I really don't get the need for moral outrage here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full title: Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea; Springer ditches paper from research tome after mass protest by boffins over junk science

<comment><USER3> 2nd part of title would be preferable to the 1st which you've used here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just trying to follow the site guidelines, The Reg' makes that hard, hence the explanatory comment ...

<comment><USER3> There's some interpretation allowed, even encouraged. The goal seems to be to stick with _something_ from the source rather than creating an entirely novel title.

 _If the title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we 'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."_

 _Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't editorialize._

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

General guidance, from dang, 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10597136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10597136)

Reg example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21277129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21277129)

Long title rewrite: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16662989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16662989)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm': Yuval Noah Harari - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-dataism <comment><AUTHOR> The new motto says: "If you experience something - record it. If you record something - upload it. If you upload something - share it"</comment>


Sheetz Store in Winston-Salem (NC) Testing Bitcoin ATM - <AUTHOR> https://www.wxii12.com/article/sheetz-store-in-winston-salem-testing-bitcoin-atm/28342839 <comment><AUTHOR> ATM will let patrons buy/sell Bitcoin ... a half mile from my house.

( I wish I still had my 325 Bitcoin that I sold at a decent profit to order a Butterfly Labs Monarch Bitcoin miner. I even plunked down additional cash for a second one. I moved from Bay Area to Winston-Salem at around that time and kept looking for decent cheap office space with a good electric power supply. I'm glad I didn't sign a lease because, of course, BFL never delivered their Monarchs. I was fortunate to get a full cash refund. )

</comment><comment><USER2> I doubt anyone would go there and use bitcoin except students at near by University who would use the school electricity to mine bitcoin. (I went to school there so I know kids do that lol)</comment>


How to Write Shared Libraries (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf <comment><USER2> I gotta say, if you're a systems programmer then this should be on your required reading list. Probably along with some other papers by Ulrich, like "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory" and "Futexes Are Tricky" [1].

[1]: [https://akkadia.org/drepper/](https://akkadia.org/drepper/)</comment>


Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works Shooting for 100 MW Fusion Prototype by 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.e-catworld.com/2013/02/lockheed-martins-skunk-works-shooting-for-100-mw-fusion-prototype-by-2017/ <comment><USER2> Should probably get rid of whatever crap site this is... but here is the direct youtube video. He basically talks about a new kind of fusion reactor they've been working on in skunkworks and how it's different from the reactor people have been trying to build forever.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY>

</comment><comment><USER3> Do we really want to give traffic to such a fringe site? (It's mainly about the E-Cat scam [http://psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-Rossi_Energy- Catalyze...](http://psiram.com/en/index.php/Focardi-Rossi_Energy-Catalyzer) )

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, but how the heck is skunkworks being associated? maybe it's a lie. But this popping up elsewhere: [http://americansecurityproject.org/blog/2013/lockheed- martin...](http://americansecurityproject.org/blog/2013/lockheed-martin- outlines-plans-for-nuclear-fusion-reactor/)

<comment><USER3> The problem isn't the video itself. It's the rest of the site. You could have posted a direct link to the video:

[https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/ahJzfmdvb2dsZS1zb2x2ZWZv...](https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/ahJzfmdvb2dsZS1zb2x2ZWZvcnhyEAsSCE1vb25zaG90GNKGAww/solve- for-x-charles-chase-on-energy-for-everyone)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just a decade away from commercial applications? Hmmm, isn't "the next big breakthrough" _always_ a decade away?

A good rule of thumb: unless the technology has been proven to work and they are _just_ working on commercializing it, "a decade" always means, "we have no idea when we will have anything, if ever."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just out of curiosity: what if fusion was perfected? what are the consequences? massive economic growth & population? Does the earth become an heat sink?

<comment><USER5> The world changes in a very significant way. Three things become true:

1) Oil no longer has to be dug out of the ground, various long chain hydrocarbons can be created with the CO2 in the air and water.

2) Fresh water no longer becomes an issue because arbitrary amounts of sea water can be converted into fresh water.

3) Generally food becomes easier to produce as both more land is available for it (irrigate with desalinated water) and 'food products' like corn aren't used in energy products.

The other two fusion science experiments go under the monikers of 'polywell fusion' and 'focus fusion'. That stays away from the various "low energy nuclear" type devices which are currently considered hoax material (and popular on the e-cat site) by most scientists.

The discovery of a practical fusion system is one of the 'good' things that could happen in the next 50 years which would change the world in mostly 'good' ways (mostly because economies that depend on oil exports would lose pricing authority on oil and slowly collapse, leaving behind angry and often dysfunctional nation-states)

<comment><USER6> I suspect you haven't worked out the feasibility of large-scale desalinization for food crops in the US. It doesn't seem economically reasonable, at least not until food is an order of magnitude more expensive than now.

We pull out ~30 cubic km of water from the Ogallala Aquifer per year. Let's estimate how much power is needed to replace this with seawater.

At 2780 J/liter, this requires about 3 gigawatts, assuming perfect efficiency. Realistically it's more like 15 GW. Okay, that's doable. The US generates about 1TW of electric power, so 1% would go to desalinization.

Next, you need to pump it to the midwest. The second Los Angeles Aqueduct cost $90 million in 1965 dollars to carry water 137 miles. That's about $500 million in 2013 dollars. The entire Aqueduct transports about 0.4 cubic kilometers of water per year. You'll need about 10x the length to get from the Gulf to the aquifer, and 8x the volume. You'll also need a distribution network, which is likely another 4x to the cost, and you'll need to pump it uphill, which means there's more expensive upkeep.

This sets a low estimate of 300*$5 billion = $1.50 trillion in construction costs, and that's deliberately low-balling the estimate. The Ogallala produces about $20 billion in agriculture each year. I don't think it's financially reasonable.

Also, where do you dump the brine with all of the salt that you've extracted? Back into the Gulf? That's going to seriously affect the marine life. Or do you fully dry out the salt and use it in place of salt mining? I calculate this as 1 gigaton of salt/year, or about 5x the current world production of salt.

Even with free power, it doesn't seem that desalinization could replace the supply that we currently get from the Ogallala Aquifer. At least, not without having much higher food prices.

Instead, you'll have to relocate farming to some place closer to the sea which is also water restricted. In the US, this is ... where? More of the Central Valley? Where is the Nebraska-sized chunk of land by the coast that lacks only water in order to flourish?

Or we import more food from Australia, which seems the prime candidate for this approach.

<comment><USER5> Have you considered the ramifications of moving where farming is possible? The combination of desalinization and the ability to make long chain hydrocarbons (like fertilizer) means you can farm the San Fernando valley with seawater and take a tremendous load off of the California aqueduct system. Places in Mexico become targets for new farms. All freshwater in the southeastern part of Texas can come from the Gulf of Mexico. It is an interest experiment to look at a map of coastal areas with arid or desert climates, and think about those becoming farmland.

The brine issue is non-existent, as both Qatar and Saudi Arabia have demonstrated with their desalination plants you can pump a lot of sea water through them with the output water having only slightly more salinity than the input water.

That and the fact that fusion power is initially additive to the total power output rather than replacement power. The challenge is of course the numbers. The original Nuclear energy projection of power 'too cheap to measure' was based on an assumption that once nuclear power regulatory structures were in place, the cost to build a plant would converge to something close to the capital costs. That assumption turned out to be false. If it turns out to be false for fusion as well then we'll have different effects.

<comment><USER6> "like fertilizer" - fertilizer by definition contains elements besides hydrogen, carbons, and oxygens. It is not a "long chain hydrocarbon."

The brine issue is not non-existent. [http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae- news/environment/desalina...](http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae- news/environment/desalination-threat-to-the-growing-gulf) "Between the tankers, pollution from urban centres and the brine disposed from desalination plants, the Gulf is almost dead."

Well, I guess if it's almost dead then the effect of the brine has a less overall impact. What would the effect be on the shrimp industry in the Gulf?

Saudi Arabia produces 450 million liters per day. That's 5.2 m3/second or 0.16 cubic kilometers/year, or about 1/20th what the Ogallala Aquifer provides. I found that Qatar produces 1.5 million m3/day = 17 m3/second.

<http://www.cvwd.org/about/agricultural.php> says that the "Coachella Valley Water District delivers 280,000 acre-feet annually ... to irrigate nearly 60,000 acres of farmland." That's 11 m3/second on average, so about the same order of magnitude. Also, "Overall crop production exceeds half a billion dollars a year."

By comparison, Israel has about 460,000 acres of farmland and California has 9 million acres of irrigated land.

Now, how much will the infrastructure cost to build the desalination plants, and the canals, and the pumps needed to make the entire system work against gravity? Even if you assume the power cost is free, there's a lot of maintenance overhead, and the system is more fragile then a gravity fed aqueduct.

I'm definitely not saying that it isn't possible. I pointed out that Australia would be an excellent place for this. That's why I said that it wouldn't be that useful in the US. While you're correct about Texas, that's still only a small percentage of the US farmland, and Texas doesn't have the same weather that makes California so successful.

But using desalinated water for irrigation isn't free/cheap by far, and the cost of power is not the only constraint in making it successful. Any analysis which doesn't include the costs of moving water uphill and delivering it is necessarily incomplete and inadequate.

<comment><USER5> 'fertilizer' -> Ammonium Nitrate - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate> (NH4NO3) Nothing more than air (using the Nitrogen) and Water normally the Haber-Bosch process used natural gas as its source of H2 however it is also easily produced by splitting water if the energy is "free".

<comment><USER6> So? NH4NO3 is not a hydrocarbon. There's not even a carbon in it.

"In organic chemistry, a hydrocarbon is an organic compound consisting entirely of hydrogen and carbon" - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocarbon>

"an organic compound (as acetylene or butane) containing only carbon and hydrogen and often occurring in petroleum, natural gas, coal, and bitumens " - <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hydrocarbon>

(And it looks like I shouldn't have included oxygen.)

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I misunderstood your point. I thought you were saying that you couldn't make fertilizer at a desalinization plant being driven by a fusion reactor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Plasma physicist Pekka Janhunen points out in the comments that the losses in a traditional magnetic trap are high, this is what the Tokamak was invented for in the first place.

(That's also what the Polywell tries to solve).

Haven't watched the video.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nuclear fusion is always only 10 years away from working.

<comment><USER9> Funny, it used to always be 20 years away. Before that it was always 30. It's strange how the number keeps decreasing with the passage of time.

<comment><USER8> Yes I won't disagree that the technology is getting better and that we are getting closer to achieving it. But a commercial fusion reactor in ten years seems very unrealistic with the current regulation and standards set by current government regulatory bodies.

When I was in school studying nuclear engineering, the running joke was that fusion will always be N amount of years away from happening. It seems like every year or so a new company or group of researchers has found a breakthrough that will allow fusion to happen in N amount of years even though we have yet to reach breakeven in a research setting.

<comment><USER9> There'd be some need for regulation but less than with fission. The only nuclear waste is activated reactor components, not transuranics and fission products. The reactor turns off like a light switch, with nothing to produce decay heat, and it has no potential for a runaway reaction. (It's hard enough to get the reaction going in the first place.) The only potential radiation release is small amounts of tritium, and there's no concern about fissiles getting diverted for weapons. Tritium has some weapons use if you're ready to progress to thermonuclear bombs, but in that case you hardly need fusion reactors to make it.

If we manage boron fusion, we'll be producing less radiation than burning equivalent coal, and won't have tritium. It's hard to see how anyone would justify regulating that for anything other than electrical safety, just like any other power plant, and for radiation standards on par with medical equipment.

People bring up that joke in the comments section of every fusion article ever published. The fact is, fusion has progressed exponentially since about 1970, about as fast as Moore's Law, despite a level of funding far below what those early optimistic advocates said we needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I note that submarine reactors are typically on the order of 50Mw, and surface ships (CVNs -- aircraft carriers -- typically; also some Russian Arctic ice- breakers) are up to 100Mw per reactor.

Anyone smell a [Naval] market?

<comment><USER11> I doubt it, but my understanding of the topic is limited.

AFAIK nuclear reactors are popular on naval warships because they dramatically reduce (and in some cases eliminate) the need to refuel. It's one _huge_ factor crossed off of your logistics problems - modern CVNs can go literally decades without refueling, with the only resupply being jet fuel, munitions, and life support.

Doesn't fusion demand constant refueling (like most power plants)?

<comment><USER12> >Doesn't fusion demand constant refueling (like most power plants)?

I don't think the half-life of deuterium/tritium is particularly long, so even if you could store it, it might not last decades before use. Though on the other hand, it's conceivable that you could design the reactor so that it produces deuterium/tritium on site from hydrogen cracked from seawater.

But realistically the reason we want fusion over fission in the first place is the proliferation concern. All of the other arguments against fission are NIMBY nonsense that could be applied equally to a whole swathe of chemical processing facilities that nobody seems to care anything about because they're not _OMG nukular_. And there is hardly a major proliferation risk from a reactor surrounded by military personnel on a vessel designed to securely carry actual nuclear bombs, so it makes the specifically military application kind of questionable.

We really need fusion for two reasons. 1) There is a better chance that we can actually build a large number of reactors without roving gangs of idiots destroying their cost effectiveness with gratuitous and intentional red tape, and 2) we can build them in countries we don't trust without making it easier for them to blow up the world, which will help to fight global warming vs. those countries continuing to burn oil and coal.

<comment><USER10> Deuterium is stable. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years. Like all proposed fusion reactors, you have to feed fuel in constantly rather than firing it up with a critical mass in situ, but you could store enough Tritium to run an aircraft carrier for a year in a smallish liquid gas cannister. (Smallish by aircraft carrier fuel tank standards.) ((With lead shielding. _Lots_ of lead shielding. Tritium belts out about 9650 Curies of radiation per gram in the shape of beta radiation, which is enough to kill you _really_ quick if you get it on or in you.))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did they actually show a picture of it? I guess there are limits on what they could reveal</comment>


Jonathan Ive interview: simplicity isn't simple - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/9283706/Jonathan-Ive-interview-simplicity-isnt-simple.html

<comment><USER2> "It's the 'finishing the back of the drawer' - you can argue that people will never see it and it's very hard to, in any rational sense, describe why it's important but it just seems important. It's a way that you demonstrate that you care for the people that you are making these products for." That quote probably sums up why so many other companies fail at doing what Apple does with hardware.</comment>


Skype vulnerability discovered by Pure Hacking - <AUTHOR> http://www.purehacking.com/blogs/gordon-maddern/skype-0day-vulnerabilitiy-discovered-by-pure-hacking

<comment><USER2> There is easily enough information in this post for a reasonably clever blackhat to rediscover the vulnerability. I'm reasonably certain I can guess what it is.

So don't use Skype on Mac if you can help it, and if you must use it turn off messages from sources not in your contact list.

</comment><comment><USER3> "About a month ago I was chatting on skype to a colleague about a payload for one of our clients," he wrote. "Completely by accident, my payload executed in my colleagues skype client."

If I had to guess, they were probably pasting back and forth JavaScript "payloads" for an XSS and broke the parser that Skype is using for formatting chat messages. Not that interesting.

Chat messages on Skype aren't exactly the most effective propogation mechanism either. Don't you have to be approved as someone's friend before they can send you a message? This probably won't be used in any massive attacks any time soon. Until then, continue to annoy your girlfriends as the author apparently did.

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of times where I believe threats are overhyped. This is not one of them.

1) The default privacy setting in Skype is to allow anyone to send you a chat message. I know plenty of Skype users who complain to me about random chat messages, which indicates to me that they haven't changed their privacy preferences yet.

2) Regardless of the type of payload they used, "Low and behold I was able to remotely gain a shell." Remote shell. Through a Skype message. Would you give a random person shell access to your computer? It's more than interesting, it's terrible.

3) Spammers already infest the Skype network. If they discover this vuln before Skype patches it, you can fully expect that it will be exploited.

There is no mention of priviledge escalation in the article, but once you have a shell, the world is your oyster. There are bound to be exploitable services locally on the machine. Once you're in, you've got the run of the place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How long until Skype fixes it and we see the details? Skype seems really bad about fixing/disclosing things. Anyone else remember this? [http://forum.skype.com/index.php?s=17fbdf08801503eebf66d315f...](http://forum.skype.com/index.php?s=17fbdf08801503eebf66d315f03d14b6&showtopic=310121&st=20&p=1633781&#entry1633781)

HN page: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656174>

Edit: woops, my bad, apparently SkypeMate is independent.

</comment><comment><USER6> Skype claim to have already fixed the bug with their release last month on April 14th: [http://blogs.skype.com/security/2011/05/security_vulnerabili...](http://blogs.skype.com/security/2011/05/security_vulnerability_in_mac.html)

Sadly the fix seems to be only for the 5.x series and there's no indication for holdouts like myself on whether 2.x is affected or not.

</comment><comment><USER7> Another scary thing here is that, since Skype 5.0 sucks so badly, many people downgraded to 2.x and Skype probably will ignore that release when they fix the vulnerability.</comment>


A CEO has to do only two tasks: hiring and setting vision - <AUTHOR> http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/ceo-hiring-vision.htm

<comment><USER2> Thats a great post, to some extent I think its true.

Most people tend to specialise in a particular skill set (development, sales, marketing), people with a broad spectrum that are suitable for high flying roles are very hard to find, just ask HP. Most CEOs I've worked with have tended to have a natural slant towards a particular skill and this tends to influence strategy. I know this only too well from my own experience, I try to counter this by getting involved in areas of the business I don't know so well, every day is a school day. Back to the post, IMHO its impossible to set any vision (especially a successful one) unless you spend time understanding the business as a whole, this means getting involved.

Zombie CEO's = fail</comment>


PCAP or it didn't happen: packet capture for the insanely bored - <AUTHOR> https://www.kimballleavitt.com/pktcapture/ <comment><AUTHOR> Source code here - [https://github.com/kimbo/pktcapture](https://github.com/kimbo/pktcapture)

</comment><comment><USER2> This made me laugh. Thanks, I really needed that.</comment>


Show HN: I analyzed 40,000+ trending YouTube videos. Here are the results - <AUTHOR> https://www.kaggle.com/ammar111/youtube-trending-videos-analysis <comment><AUTHOR> I used Python with packages like Pandas and Matplotlib to analyze a dataset that contains data about more than 40,000 trending videos collected over ~7 months. The analysis is done in a Jupyter notebook with beautiful visualizations and charts. It aims to find patterns in these trending videos, and to extract insights that can be used by people on YouTube.

It got a good reaction on /rdatascience on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/9kpmcn/i_analy...](https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/9kpmcn/i_analyzed_more_than_40000_youtube_trending/)

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm a tad cynical, but 'beautiful visualisations and charts' is a bit of an overstatement

<comment><AUTHOR> I was stating my own opinion in the comment, although I respect yours</comment></comment></comment>


Kingrow K1 smartphone with e-Ink display - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUdZIXOct2U <comment><AUTHOR> Apparently this is Android 8.0 in background (according to youtube comments). Looks promising, maybe we have distraction free phone coming.

I would kill for a phone like this with Whatsapp or Viber or Messenger and not only SMS (reduces communication costs a lot).</comment>


The Billion-Dollar Ultimatum - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrishamby/the-billion-dollar-ultimatum <comment><AUTHOR> Buzzfeed are running a multi-part, long-form set of articles on a massive secretly-negotiated rewrite of national legal systems under the guise of "international trade", though the pacts go far beyond this. The TPP, TTIP, TiSA, and BITS have at their core the Investor-State Dispute System.

This is a binding, no-recourse court, to which only one party may bring cases (corporations), with the judge and jury stacked by that party's friends and business associates, and for which there is no appeal.

While prospects for these treaties are dimming, they're not dead yet, and in the US and elsewhere, politicians, including President Obama, are engaged in a last-ditch push for approval.

Support for these pacts runs deep throughout the corporate world, including much of the information-technology sector: Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Verizon, among others.</comment>