The Stunning and Expected End of Gawker - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2016/06/11/the-stunning-and-expected-end-of-gawker/ <comment><USER2> I think the problem goes deeper than "don't publish sex tapes".

I have had a substantial number of news blog stories written about me, and I think among the general population of news bloggers there's a lack of professional ethics of the kind journalists supposedly used to have. Certainly not all bloggers are bad; some of them are upstanding, but really the majority are not.

When the incentive is just to get the most hits, it is very easy for a blogger to present a quote or situation out of context, or even for an editor to slant a headline in a certain way, in order to make the maximally inflammatory result. When this happens, it is parasitic behavior -- they are degrading your reputation in order to make money. But the amount of money they make off that article is small compared to how much you value your reputation, so the result is massively net-negative to the world.

This has happened to me A LOT so I have a pretty well-tuned sense for how it happens. I also have a pretty long list of journalists and outlets I won't do interviews with ever again.

The issues get pretty subtle. For example, it is common for them to take a one-or-two-sentence aside from an interview and write a ehole article about it, making it seem like you called a press conference just to say that one thing -- which is a massive distortion of your intent (and usually your personality). Because they want the most hits and people being enraged makes hits, it is usually a negative distortion. And it's intentional -- they are trained to look for these opportunities. I think it is very unethical, though of course there is nothing illegal about it -- you did say that exact thing.

I think as long as that is happening, it is hard to take these sites seriously as producing "journalism".

<comment><USER3> I was listening to Jake Tapper on On The Media today - and he said something that struck me.

Trump had attacked Cruz's father and the news cycle covered this as "Trump levels charge - Cruz denies charge". Tapper's line stuck with me - "that's not journalism, that's stenography".

Journalists need to be somewhere between our ears and eyes and our conscience. It is a hard line to walk. Most fail.

<comment><USER4> I don't know who originally voiced that critique, but Glenn Greenwald has been harping on 'stenographer jounalism' for a long time.

[https://www.google.com/webhp#q=glenn%20greenwald%20stenograp...](https://www.google.com/webhp#q=glenn%20greenwald%20stenography)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who thinks Thiel should be left out of the story of Gawker and HH sextape? In the light of a lawful verdict his motive of bankrolling the lawsuit is completely irrelevant. The only discussion where Thiels involvement is relevant is the one about how a commoner (or millionaire in the case of HH) needs a help of a samaritan/avenger billionaire to get justice.

<comment><USER3> Err, yes. Thiel was completely out of order backing legal suits in order to achieve a "political" end.

If he was not suing an unsavoury gossip-monger the discussion around this would be vastly different.

Irrespective of the legality this was a spiteful campaign at odds with the stated case(s) involved.

Yes he should be held to account for it.

Edit: change to clarify middle paragraph.

Is this a UK/US thing? Being outed in the UK was a political action for sometime in the 80s but has more or less had its time - it has no shock value and little political value. Or is the focus on the supposed cause of thiels actions the irrelevant part?

<comment><USER6> It's a shame your comment has fallen victim to the disagree button. While I disagree with you, which I'll get to in a moment, it greatly disappoints me how some of the supposed intellectual thinkers on this site would like to hide your comment because they disagree with it. I didn't find it to be spam or inflammatory, which is to my understanding the type of post the down arrow is supposed to be used for.

Anyway, what he did was legal. There's nothing to be held accountable for. Whether or not it's right or wrong in general is not really a topic I'm interested in. Since the legal process worked as it's supposed to, I believe this to be what you might call right though. Gawker has had this coming. If they hadn't made it so easy by publishing garbage, Theil would have been powerless.

<comment><USER3> Is it legal to fund another parties court case, to influence their decisions (why did hogan drop insurance-covered issues?) and do so without knowledge of court? I am not sure those are clear answers - we shall see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Nick Denton's incendiary publishing empire, Gawker Media, collapsed under the weight of his excessively cruel and cutting philosophy today, an outcome many predicted, but that Denton miraculously dodged for a decade, as subjects chose to thicken their skin rather than get into protracted and destructive litigation, until Peter Thiel anonymously bankrolled them._

 _an outcome many predicted_

If it wasn't an outcome that many stakeholders expected, it wasn't expected. Were there any people trying to cash out while the trial was happening?

<comment><USER8> That quote is perhaps better understood as "something many thought would happen eventually". That doesn't mean they'd know which time in particular well enough to cash out.

I (and many others) can predict with some certainty that the stock market will have a one-day drop of more than X% eventually. That doesn't mean I know when that will be well enough to "cash out".

<comment><USER7> My point is that "something many thought would happen eventually" doesn't contain any information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The trial has been fascinating in its own right for the debate around the principle of freedom of the press vs a person's right to privacy, regardless of everything that has happened since and the other issues surrounding the trial.

Sex tapes seem like a clean cut invasion of privacy, but what if the material in question wasn't a sex tape but a phone call being taped (such as the audio from the tape which revealed that Hogan had made racist comments)? Are the contents of that audio in the public interest?

I think everyone who knows what Gawker are like feel like they played with matches and got their fingers burnt. Whether an invasion of privacy is worthy of a $140m fine is questionable, but it will definitely deter other press organisations from making similar moves to what Gawker did. The implications of that for the press aren't necessarily good, but if the guidance is clear that Sex tape are a no no then I think we can find a sensible middle-ground to the whole issue of the freedom of press and the right to privacy.

<comment><USER10> Some other went to jail for making a business out of publishing sex tapes without victims' consent:

[http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/04/revenge- porn-...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/04/revenge-porn-website- operator-jailed)

I think gawker got away pretty well with just a fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Journalistic "Outing" started with OutWeek, a gay publication of the 1990s which pushed the gay agenda by finding public figures who were closeted gays and publishing stories about them. But the big change was in 1995 when the Wall Street Journal did it to the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine.[2] After that, it was almost mainstream journalism. This issue seemed to be over; the "outing" side had won. Are we seeing a reversal of that?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OutWeek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OutWeek) [2] [http://articles.latimes.com/1995-03-10/news/ls-41090_1_jann-...](http://articles.latimes.com/1995-03-10/news/ls-41090_1_jann- wenner)

<comment><USER12> Views differ, but personally I don't think this counts as "outing". Thomas's article was mainly about Valley culture's implicit support for homophobia; Thiel was just an example. And many people around in that era say that Thiel's sexual preference was widely known at the time in the Valley. Since Thiel wasn't closeted, I think "outing" is the wrong term here.

<comment><USER2> Are you serious? The headline was "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people."

<comment><USER12> I am serious. Possibly we have different opinions because a) I read more than the headline, and b) I read the opinions of people who were around (e.g., at PayPal) at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most of the commentary on this case has revolved around whether it is just for Peter Thiel to fund the litigation, but can we just pause and say that $140 million for invasion of privacy is kind of out of control?

<comment><USER14> Is it? Please tell us what's the going rate for privacy then since you seem to know that that figure is not correct. What if it were you privacy? How much would it be?

<comment><USER15> $3 million in the general hypothetical. In the case of a single sex tape, probably more like $750k.

<comment><USER16> You can't safely put a price on rights at a level that wealthy organizations can easily afford.

<comment><USER14> Exactly, but I think the commenter was less interested in actual discussion and more interested in being snarky. Ironic in a discussion about the demise of Gawker Media.

<comment><USER15> Not at all. Those were sincere numbers for what kind of damages I think would be reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What would an equivalent "litmus test" be for appropriate free speech in this day and age? The often quoted example in the school textbooks is the Oliver Wendell Holmes decision regarding "falsely shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" example

</comment><comment><USER18> Gawker's attitude seems contradictory:

[http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/robyn-urback- why-i...](http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/robyn-urback-why-is-hulk- hogans-sex-tape-news-but-nude-photos-of-jennifer-lawrence-an-invasion-of- privacy)

Or a shorter summary:

[http://imgur.com/gallery/CQ5qgvu](http://imgur.com/gallery/CQ5qgvu)

<comment><USER19> The more telling thing about that apparent surface level contradiction is that it's entirely expected behavior to anyone who knows what Gawker Media _is_.

Jezebel's tagline might as well be "Narcissism and benevolent sexism dressed up as gender issues."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Show me your tiny but useful project - <AUTHOR>

I just built http://wethr.ca - it only took 3 hours and $5 for a domain name. It's extremely basic, but extremely useful to me as-is. That got me inspired, that I could build something so useful so quickly. So please share your smallest, but most useful project - even if it's super buggy and nowhere near finished yet. <comment><USER2> Wrote a simple command-line TODO list manager called "j" in ruby. I use it everyday. if you have rubygems, it can b installed by

      gem install j

<http://github.com/HashNuke/j>

<comment><USER3> Neat, my implementation of the command-line TODO list manager is sh-todo (written in POSIX compliant shell for maximum portability):

<https://github.com/asb/sh-todo>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I threw together <http://www.dragdropcomics.com/> to make it easier to create Rage Face comics on Reddit, then I realized that there were already two or three very good and fully fleshed out Rage Face comic web apps, so I kinda left it as is. My idea was that artists could upload their own character sets and people could pick a character set to make a comic out of, but I never really moved beyond the initial version of it.

</comment><comment><USER5> This one from me <http://netreputation.co.uk/extractor/>

created it as a way to screen scrape a page easily and generate a rss feed out of it for my other projects.

</comment><comment><USER6> I made this command line client for arte+7 -- the online archive of the French/German tv station arte:

<https://gist.github.com/5723dfec63b24d64bf6a>

If you like arte but rather use mplayer than Flash, this might be interesting to you. Note that it supports resuming downloads.

<comment><USER7> This is fantastic. Many thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://coloringout.com> \- I'm not very good with colour schemes - this one let's me take an existing css and transmogrify it to a new colour, keeping the relative "distance" between each colour value. I built it in php and then in python. I use it....don't think anyone else does though :)

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://karmurl.com> \- give feedback to receive feedback.

</comment><comment><USER10> The following approximation of Adobe AIR took gluing together and/or modifying about a half-dozen existing open source projects with just about 100 lines of code:

<http://code.google.com/p/deskml/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Reddit Notifier for your Mac OS X menu bar: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/reddit-notifier/id468366517>

</comment><comment><USER12> I built <http://stackmonthly.com/> to help me discover the better questions asked on StackOverflow, and improve my knowledge.

<comment><USER13> That's a great one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://zrp.tournament.de>

A google maps based roundtrip solver using three different optimization algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER15> I created a compact plaintext Todo list format: <http://www.texttodo.org/>. I use it everyday.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wrote a simple timecard program.

<https://github.com/kisom/timecard>

</comment><comment><USER17> I've created <http://mybus.ca> to quickly access Calgary bus schedules

</comment><comment><USER18> <http://bouncely.com> \- Bounce processing for Amazon SES

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://tinfo.linkstore.ru> WHOIS for Twitter

</comment><comment><USER20> Share What You Make - <http://swym.me>

</comment><comment><USER21> siri is for your iphone, twitjustice will read twitter feeds for you on your mac - <http://twitjustice.org>

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://github.com/FreeRPGengine/Free-RPG-Engine-FaceBook- Ga...](https://github.com/FreeRPGengine/Free-RPG-Engine-FaceBook-Game-App) Free FaceBook RPG game engine

</comment><comment><USER23> <http://www.hilite.me> \- source code beautifier</comment>


Show HN: With my site InSeason you always know what food is seasonal (europeans) - <AUTHOR> https://simon-frey.com/inseason/ <comment><USER2> This amazing! I have been trying to eat and shop more consciously and local! This is a great way to consume :) love it</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way of learning calculus, if you already know pure math - <AUTHOR> I'm in an awkward position where I have good familiarity with pure math and don't have a problem doing proofs in e.g. abstract algebra, mathematical logic, theory of computation—but my applied math is pretty badly lacking.
The particular goal I have in mind at the moment is to be able to understand Maxwell's Equations clearly (partly because of their intrinsic and historical interest, partly because I think what I need for that will get me to what I need for other things). I also have a good amount of practice working with vectors and matrices already.
But, whenever I look for resources on calculus and differential equations, they are these massive text books, and I'm looking for something way more concise. I don't need a ton of practice doing calculations with these things (I don't think)—I would probably just use software if it came to it. I just want to be able to understand concepts expressed through them. (I'm also not a fan of videos, but would be open to using some as supplementary material.)
What resources/activities would you recommend to most efficiently re-learn basic calculus, and for the first time learn differential equations. (My top choice so far if I were forced to use a big textbook is Strang's "Calculus".) <comment><USER2> I second psyklic's recommendation of Spivak and/or Apostol if you want to "learn calculus the hard way" \-- e.g. if you want to learn calculus in a rigorous manner that prepares you well to keep going.

An informal, brief book on vector calculus is Schey's _Div, Grad, Curl and all That_. I have not read it personally, but I have heard good things about it. It is probably the quickest way of achieving your immediate goal of understanding Maxwell's equations.

Free online copy: ftp://collectivecomputers.org:21212/books/morebooks/Mathematics/Div,%20Grad,%20Curl%20and%20All%20That%20-%20Shey.pdf

For single variable calculus, if you want an entertaining and enlightening quick read, I recommend Thompson's _Calculus Made Easy_ :

[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf)

No proofs, but lots of helpful informal explanations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heh, sounds like I made some decent choices then ;) I just saw your comment now, but in the interim picked up Calculus Made Easy and a short 'manual' on differential equations that John Baez recommended somewhere. I also recently acquired Div, Grad, Curl, but from the looks of it, I won't get much out of until after my little Maxwell's equations project. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It sounds like you would most enjoy a Calculus book that introduces you to Real Analysis. So, take a look at Spivak's Calculus, which is rigorous and written for people passionate about math. Another rigorous alternative is Apostol's Calculus.

These books will prepare you for a more concise Real Analysis text such as Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/divine-proportions- rat...](https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/divine-proportions-rational- trigonometry-to-universal-geometry) \-- o0o, but that's trig rie?</comment>


Yo-yo problem - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo-yo_problem

<comment><USER2> Currently writing a plugin for Jira, definitely encountering this. Many of my classes that extend/implement a jira class/interface have at least 3 parents, sometimes more.

Another thing that bothers me which may be java specific is the verbosity, classes that are 5+ words like "AbstractEditConfigurationItemAction" are very common.

<comment><USER3> None of my java classes are this that long. 3 words max.</comment></comment>


The "Behind The Sofa" Certificate Transparency Log - <AUTHOR> https://filippo.io/behindthesofa/ <comment><USER2> >behindthesofa is only reachable over modern protocols, so insecure HTTP and IPv4 are not supported.

Not supporting HTTP seems ok, but what's the reason for not supporting IPv4?

My ISP, switch, and OS all support IPv6 but I wasn't able to configure it so even though I want to use IPv6, I wasn't able to ever get it to work.

That's now 2 things I can't use; loopsofzen.co.uk and behindthesofa. I really hope this doesn't get more common else I'll essentially get locked out of the Internet.

I guess I can always use Google and Facebook.

I wrote about my problems with IPv6 here if anyone is interested: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/5q9dog/struggling_wit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/5q9dog/struggling_with_ipv6/)

<comment><USER3> The twitter account has this[0]:

>We now offer a legacy (IPv4) mirror of the behindthesofa homepage: [https://filippo.io/behindthesofa/](https://filippo.io/behindthesofa/)

The actual service is at [https://ct.filippo.io/behindthesofa/](https://ct.filippo.io/behindthesofa/) (IPv6 only)

[0]: [https://twitter.com/_behindthesofa/status/858600027727462400](https://twitter.com/_behindthesofa/status/858600027727462400)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm missing the potted merkle tree next to it.

</comment><comment><USER5> One might be forgiven for expecting it to make heavy use of CouchDB.

<comment><USER6> Fortunately, Trillian supports pluggable storage backends!

[https://github.com/google/trillian/tree/master/storage](https://github.com/google/trillian/tree/master/storage)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why doesn't Cloudflare run a serious CT log?

<comment><AUTHOR> ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can't tell if serious or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> At Up in the Air Ltd we take Merkle trees and user security extremely seriously. If you have any concern please contact support at firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found my moment of zen the second time I read this.</comment>


Can we have perfectly secret anonymous conversations? - <AUTHOR>

I was recently reading a bit more about Freenet, Perfect Dark and other anonymous, uncensorable P2P networks and I was wondering if there was a mechanism to actually have secure, off-the-record messaging in such a network. It would be kind of like the "untraceable hacker" ideal that you always see in movies.
It would work something like this: two or more people join a channel with a unique id, and then they start posting to it, and the whole thing would be handled with an Off-The-Record protocol. Thus the conversation would have perfect forward secrecy, AND the people would be untraceable.
I guess it would be straightforward to use the existing freenet mechanism of storing a file and keep storing derivative files representing the evolving conversation, where each message is signed with that user's private key and also using vector clocks.
Sorry for all the lingo, but I'm just thinking about this and I wonder if anything like this exists. A truly untraceable, anonymous, uncensorable, secure channel for conversation that would exist as long as there was a robust enough network topology to handle it. The only way the participants would be able to guess each other's identity is by referencing some prior communication they had, maybe combined with one-way hashes of "something they have" and "something they know", ideally of which there is no record anywhere (so they can't prove the identity to anyone else).
It all comes down to this: how can we have secure conversation sessions where the participants know one another's identity, but cannot prove them to the outside world? <comment><USER2> GPG does the same thing. People having your fingerprint associated with a name in a key server is not an authoritative association and thus no government entity or anyone concerned with security to a moderate degree would even take such an assertion of identity seriously. Of course, it could give hints in any sort of investigation to find out who owns the key based on the fingerprint, but that's the problem with any system. To say "This person is who they say they are", an individual digitally signs the other person's key after having made proper arrangements to verify the identity they claim to hold, or what have you. You do not need special agreement protocols or hashes, you only need standardized schemes that work off of any public key cryptography system; GPG is not the only solution and a new system as you describe is simply more complex than needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> But to really anonymize the traffic and make sure it is not censored, don't we also need to make it a hard problem to find the originating node or track a session? Given the network topology it may be easy to track down the computers used to transmit the IP packets.

<comment><USER2> You can do that by distributing messages in an encrypted form. Effectively, turn your messages into encrypted blocks and do key exchanges when retrieving them from nodes and propagating them around the network. It would be a decentralized system. This would practically remove the potential for tracking a message; it would require massive cooperation from many node owners or their respective authorities (Internet providers, law enforcement, etc).</comment></comment></comment>


Why O'Reilly Media doesn't use DRM - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0411/focus-tim-oreilly-media-e-book-antipiracy-steal-this.html <comment><USER2> Little-known fact that shows just how enlightened ORA is: you can go to <https://members.oreilly.com/account/benefits>, and buy any ebook upgrade from a physical book for $4.99.

They don't even check--they just take your word for it.

I just hope people don't abuse it, but, as Tim says, they'd rather have 100K books floating around and 10K books sold, than just 10K books sold. Can't help but improve their visibility and overall sales.

Good folks.

<comment><USER3> The ebook revenue is nearly 100% profit; the marginal cost of selling ebooks has got to be near zero. So if more people buy ebook "upgrades" by falsely claiming they bought the book, that's better for O'Reilly than making them prove it.

<comment><USER4> Are you kidding? Once more ppl get to know about the $5 books, OR will have to start verifying ownership or take a huge hit on sales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really gratified that the guy who once wrote, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy" has built his business successfully on this same principle.

<comment><USER6> There was an article on HN a few weeks ago about a guy who was selling something I don't remember. But he used to sell books. And when talking about piracy he asked the audience who did not agree with him "how many of you are fanboys/fangirls of an author and will buy everything that person makes" which was followed by "how many of you bought the anything made by that author as your very first introduction to him/her as opposed to borrowing it from someone, reading it in a library, pirating it and reading it, etc...?"

People understand the value of things. If you give people something they value and want more of, they will gladly pay for it (the value that they see it's worth) because they want you to keep producing. They know if they stop there will be nothing new. So the end-goal is to make people see the value you produce (even if its giving them that thing for free) because instead of instant-value you will get long-term customers.

<comment><USER5> That sounds like Neil Gaiman's take on piracy:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2351978>

<comment><USER7> Or Eric Flint's take on it, which resulted in Baen Books putting a respectable number of their books online for free:

<http://www.baen.com/library/>

It's been a good boost to sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Of course, they put your name & other info on every page of the PDF generated for you. That probably works as a general "shaming" mechanism, such that most folks won't share indiscriminately.

<comment><USER8> Which is the right way to discourage large-scale piracy.

If I put my copy of an O'Reilly ebook online for anyone to grab, it's obvious the copy floating around is mine and I'm a jerk. But I can still give a copy of the PDF to a few friends and encourage them to buy a copy if they like it.

And, there's absolutely _no way_ this is going to somehow bone me in the future. The authentication server isn't going to go down, it's not going to mistakenly think I lent out my "last copy" or lock me out of my purchase because I don't have internet access.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if there's any legal precedent for a friend being the jerk in a scenario like this. "Friend" uploads ebook/music track/magazine I bought and "lent" him/her to file sharing site or whatever. It's my name in there, so _I'm_ going to be the one who's going to be sued.

<comment><USER10> Yes: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmine_Caridi#Piracy_incident>

<comment><USER11> In other words, giving your book to somebody in good faith but the person then pirates it will cost you $300'000 (or at least it did in this case with Caridi and DVD screeners).

In other words, you better not share, unless you've got a lot of money laying around...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No DRM? What are they talking about. As a "Safari Books Online by O'Reilly" subscriber I'm constantly confounded by annoying "features" that seem to have almost no purpose but to prevent you from copying anything from the online versions (like code sections). While it's not technically blocked or prohibited, these features sure don't seem to be there to enhance online reading.

<comment><USER13> I still can't get over how bad Safari is when O'Reilly are so great in everything else they do. Does O'Reilly proper run the site?

<comment><USER14> I haven't used Safari in a long time, but it used to have non-O'Reilly books. I'm sure some of those publishers aren't as willing to go without DRM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I bought 98% of my ebooks from B&N because they allow to download them in ePub. I've also removed the DRM from all of them, not to share them, I haven't shared one single ebook yet, but to have them open and readable from every other reader. Tim O'Reilly perfectly got the point.

This is my first message here (sent from my CR-48 with Verizon :)), Hacker News is a great community, I also read you guys on my iPhone, keep working hard!

</comment><comment><USER16> To be fair, the vast majority of people who live in a First World country and who have an interest in getting an O'Reilly ebook also have the means to easily pay for one—or to put it on their employer's expense account.

<comment><USER17> I think you may be underestimating the number of poor students in the First World.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tim gets it. Those who can pay, will.

Those who can't pay, this time: 1) benefit from the information and 2) may pay for a book in the future when they can afford it. 10k in circulation is free advertising, to some extent.

</comment><comment><USER19> Forbes article is abridged. Full interview here: [http://blogs.forbes.com/jonbruner/2011/03/25/tim-oreilly- on-...](http://blogs.forbes.com/jonbruner/2011/03/25/tim-oreilly-on-piracy- tinkering-and-the-future-of-the-book/)

<comment><USER20> Yes, this version is significantly better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> None of the DRM-related revelations in the article should be overly shocking to the HN crowd. For me, the most interesting nugget of info was that e-books now account for a quarter of O'Reilly's revenue. (top of the second page)

<comment><USER8> Of course, but this is printed in _Forbes._ The more that the non-tech crowed sees that publishers can succeed without customer-screwing DRM, the better chance other publishers will follow suit.

<comment><USER9> I know, I guess I was just pointing out that this was hardly _news_ for _hackers_ , and potentially saving others the time of reading all of it, looking for the newsworthy bits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recently took advantage of the Borders bankruptcy to snag several o'reilly hard copies at 40% off. I've always loved having the hardcopies. Even with 2 big monitors there's always enough shit vying for screen real-estate.

</comment><comment><USER22> Purchased and downloaded a book from Wrox this weekend, looks like they're taking the same route. Loved the experience.

</comment><comment><USER23> Another factor that makes O'Reilly different: Lots of their customers are open source / Linux users, who are usually opposed to drm, have the technical knowledge to break drm, and are used to standing up for what they believe to be digital rights.

This means if they used DRM, it would likely be broken, openly, by their target users

</comment><comment><USER24> I always wonder, when people say they don't mind about piracy, what part of it is genuine, and what part of it is pandering.

Do they really mean what they say? Or do they secretly hope there would be no way to pirate their products?

<comment><USER2> Tim is an absolute straight-shooter. He's not pandering and he's not playing games. That's the way they think. (An old co-worker of mine is his right-hand man, running the book publishing business.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "People who don't pay you generally wouldn't have paid you anyway."

That and other quotes. Man, I'm so glad were finally said by someone who won't be written off as a hippy, communist, hacker, etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> Follow the link to the unabridged version, that official version cut a lot of interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> Wow, this guy is such a level-headed guy...or at least it seems that way, his outlook is great.

</comment><comment><USER6> Seems like whenever there is a no-drm success and they are interviewed it is EXACTLY the same argument/story:

1) If 10,000 people will buy my X I will have sold 10,000. I will not have sold more since nobody else was willing to pay.

2) If 100,000 people also pirated my X then potentially a few of them would like it and either buy it, or buy a future product from me, which translates into more sales.

3) Once my X is hacked it is hacked for good (or something to that extent) and people pirating have no problems with DRM while people who legitimately bought X have to deal with DRM.

4) DRM can cost me sales just as piracy could.</comment>


The Future of mobile is not about mobile (Video of Keynote at FOWA - London) - <AUTHOR> http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/videos/stefan-fountain/ <comment><USER2> A bit long, and a bit too much of an ad for his company (soocial). That said, he said some thought provoking things about the term "the cloud" that changed my opinion on it somewhat.

Prior to watching the video I sided with Larry Ellison of Oracle, saying that "the cloud" is at best renaming something we already have/do and probably more self-flagellating than anything else. In the video he contends (as many others do) that "the cloud" is about pushing the commodity line up from electricity or ISP service through the application layer (hosting services and browsers). His contention is that this is a big win for everyone, including software providers, because it's something you expect to have, just as electricity is, so demand rises accordingly.

This casts Ellison's position in a different light for me, because as the market currently exists they're the incumbent, and they arguably have the most to lose by any change (they potentially have a lot to gain as well, but the downsides, if mismanaged, are very direct and real). One argument about commodities/utilities is that you very rarely have electricians or plumbers on site at home, or even in a business of thousands -- it's a service that you generally don't even keep on retainer, you call on an as-needed basis. Oracle's database software is poorly placed here, a fact that's hard to argue against if you've ever tried to install and perform basic DBA tasks on it.

Also, apologies for quoting "the cloud" every time. It's 2008 and I'm still having a hard time using the word "blog" without quotes. Argh. This is going to take some time. :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Shorter version is here: [http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/videos/stefan...](http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/videos/stefan- fountain/highlights)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I kept waiting for him to say something novel, but gave up after about 15 minutes. Clearly, I'm missing something.

</comment><comment><USER4> A very vivid presentation, definitely worth checking out</comment>


Moviebarcode - Movies compressed to a single frame - <AUTHOR> http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I find just seeing the color palette says a lot about a movie. And of course "Hero"/"Ying Xiong" is amongst the compressed movies: [http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3515529474/hero-ying- xio...](http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3515529474/hero-ying-xiong-2002)

<comment><USER2> That was definitely the one that stood out the most to me. It's always one of the first movies that comes to mind when I'm thinking about color in film.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, though at times "Hero" is borderline heavy-handed with color. However it manages to remain beautiful. One thing I've learned, though, from a set- designer friend, is that nearly _every_ movie is highly attuned to color and lighting.

If you're looking for other films that use color in interesting ways, check out the "Three Colors Trilogy" by Kieslowski.

<comment><USER3> Did you perchance see Star Trek: Nemesis? That was the most heavy-handed use of color in film I've ever seen.

<comment><USER4> If ST:N was the most heavy-handed you've seen, then I guess you haven't seen Transformers. Or any blockbuster action movie made in the last 5 years.

[http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange- ho...](http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood- please-stop.html)

Edit: I'm slow, this was linked in the comments below.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're talking about color as a storytelling element, not as a mechanism to get a visual pop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Completely predictable but still fascinating:

[http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3514313860/the- matrix-19...](http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3514313860/the-matrix-1999)

<comment><USER6> That's actually the first movie I went looking for.

<comment><USER5> I had to stop and try to remember what the white lines were about.

Twelve years ago, wow, sigh.

<comment><USER7> It helps that they come after the red (pill).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This suits PleasantVille perfectly. [http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/photo/1280/3542457911/1/tumbl...](http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/photo/1280/3542457911/1/tumblr_lh6x12tYR81qhtovi)

</comment><comment><USER9> You mean, not every movie uses a Teal/Orange palette?

[http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange- ho...](http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood- please-stop.html)

<comment><USER10> You can see the trend, though. Most big movies since the 2000s seem to fit this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting to see, but I still prefer the temporal compression applied in <http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/> .

<comment><USER12> It's amazing how a couple of well-chosen frames can capture the spirit of an entire film.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A few years ago, I wrote a freeware app that did something similar, based on Brendan Dawes' "Cinema Redux".

<http://threewordtitle.com/thumber/>

<comment><USER14> Hey, this is really great. I love these apps which turn existing video into new forms of media. If you haven't seen it already, you should check out Cory Arcangel's "Colors PE."

<http://colors-personal-edition.coryarcangel.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be awesome to know the exact details on how these are made. Is it a histogram basis with thresholds to choose which colour is shown, or simply the entire frame compressed to a couple of pixels thick, and then just include some percentage (like 1%) of frames. These are great, you really can tell a lot about a movie, like how long mostly unchanging scenes last, and the overall colour palettes used. Great stuff!

<comment><USER16> I'm pretty sure it's some straightforward cropping/resizing of some subset of the frames in the movie. The barcode for Slumdog Millionaire[1] presents some pretty compelling evidence that this is the case.

That barcode has a persistent pattern in its lower part: every once and a while, there's the same four light blue lines straddling three sets of light grey lines. That movie is about a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire". For reference, I found a screencap of the show on Wikimedia[2]. You'll notice that the location and pattern of the lines in the barcode correspond with the location and form of the question boxes in the show. The light blue lines are the outlines of the boxes, and the light grey ones are the text. I don't have a copy of the movie with me, but I suspect that if you linearly interpolate between horizontal position in the barcode and temporal position in the movie, then the scenes where the question boxes are on the screen will correspond with the locations in the barcode where the pattern appears.

As to whether the frame is cropped or resized to be 1-pixel wide, my guess is that they are resized. My reasoning is that if the frame were cropped, then you might not always see the light grey lines along with the light blue lines in the barcode, since you might take a slice of the frame that falls along spaces between words in the questions and answers. Since the appearance of the question box pattern is pretty much uniform, it's probable that the entire frame is resized, so each pixel in each slice corresponds to the "average" color value of pixels at that height in the sampled frame (I say "average" because I don't really know how downscaling algorithms work).

[1]: [http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lh9wkoPf5s1qh...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lh9wkoPf5s1qhtovio1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=0RYTHV9YYQ4W5Q3HQMG2&Expires=1299620414&Signature=wrHldiPKdgbmFPIqOuA6dpOOdHE%3D) [2]: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a4/Ken_Basi...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a4/Ken_Basin.JPG/250px- Ken_Basin.JPG)

<comment><USER17> You see the same sort of artifact with kill bill, which often has titles at the bottom of the screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone have info on exactly what was done to make these? Is it just taking frames and stretching them vertically?

<comment><AUTHOR> The authors of the blog don't say, but here's one approach: <http://wordpress.mrreid.org/moviebarcode/>

A discussion using mplayer for faster output is also attached at [http://projects.metafilter.com/2996/Make-your-own-Movie- Barc...](http://projects.metafilter.com/2996/Make-your-own-Movie-Barcodes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looking at the archive, the ones that jumped out the most at me were

Bambi <http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3658592877/bambi-1942>

Hero [http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3515529474/hero-ying- xio...](http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3515529474/hero-ying-xiong-2002)

Tron (1982) <http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3500707114/tron-1982>

Surprisingly The wizard of Oz was less interesting than I would have thought. Though the scenes in the Emerald city (bookending the assault on the Witch's castle) do jump out.

[http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3512965847/the-wizard- of...](http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3512965847/the-wizard-of-oz-1939)

</comment><comment><USER20> I'd like to see a movie like Sin City and House of the Flying Daggers :). Really neat idea, but tumblr might not be the best way to display the information.

</comment><comment><USER21> <http://0xdb.org> and <http://pad.ma/> use similar timelines for all there videos. the code create the timelines can be found at <http://code.0x2620.org/oxtimeline>

</comment><comment><USER22> Another way to browse the site is by the /archive/: <http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/archive>.

Come to think of it, I might use some of these as my wallpaper.

</comment><comment><USER23> A fun addition to this would be tagging memorable scenes from the movie.

<comment><USER24> In some cases, the colors actually do that quite well.

For example, look at The Fifth Element. You see that patch of white between the beginning and the middle? That's the scene where Leelo is brought back, I believe. It's the only scene in the movie that I can think of where there's a significant amount of white (although it's possibly Corbin's apartment...). It struck me how recognizable it was before I saw your post, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like it. What about:

1\. Grouping by director / DP 2\. Color analysis (by genre, decade, etc)

</comment><comment><USER26> Lots of blues, oranges, and green. I suppose there is either a bias for filmmakers to prefer these colors, or something in the algorithm 'prefers' these colors?

<comment><USER27> This is why I don't really find the images of much use, but they are still fascinating. I think the images completely fail to show the spirit of a movie, all they are good for is for _reviving_ the partially lost feeling of a watched movie. I think they are a great example of computer art.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I dont know for why, but it really impresses me and gives me a feeling that what i am seeing is just amazing.

i guess i am starting to get art now :)

</comment><comment><USER29> Bummer, I want to see Akira Kurosawa's Dreams

</comment><comment><USER30> I was looking for Kung-Fu Hustle, but cant seem to find it(?). I suspect it'll have a lot of pink in the beginning

</comment><comment><USER31> Another "reminds me of...": amarok moodbar

<http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Moodbar>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/niels_olson/504888318/>

Can you pass movies through higher-dimensional fourier transform?

</comment><comment><USER32> can anyone find 2001? that trippy space color light show near the end could be cool

<comment><USER33> Interestingly, those shots were filmed using a technique called slit scan photography. Though not quite what you were asking for, someone has reversed that process in order to reveal the original images used to create the effect: <http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/>

<comment><USER34> Someone also noticed that Pink Floyd's Echoes is nicely synchronized with the scene. AFAIR, both parties claimed it was a coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is great! It deserves to be hosted on a dedicated service, though: something with search, at least, and preferably with a link to the software used so that submissions could be crowdsourced.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is cool and all, but are there any uses for it?

<comment><USER33> This could be useful if placed along a timeline in an interface for seeking to a specific scene in a movie or video.

Representations like this are also sometimes used for automatic shot boundary detection (vertical edges in this type of image = an edit to a different camera shot) in video content retrieval systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Reminds me of the plugin for Amarok, moodbar.

<http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Moodbar>

</comment><comment><USER38> Kurt Ralske has done a lot of good work in this space: <http://retnull.com/>

</comment><comment><USER39> everyone going on about this check out Cinema Redux - movies distilled into one image, from 2004! Done with Processing! <http://processing.org/exhibition/works/redux/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER40> Is it possible to associate each strip with a number, like the real barcode?

</comment><comment><USER41> An interesting, abstract twist on cinema redux.

</comment><comment><USER42> I would love to see what Sin City looks like.

</comment><comment><USER43> it reminds me of some of ad reinhardt's earlier artwork.

</comment><comment><USER44> You can see how the teal and amber palette has become more and more popular in recent years.</comment>


Show HN: Mailergram – Follow Instagram users by email - <AUTHOR> http://mailergram.com <comment><AUTHOR> Built this a few months ago for personal use (following local restaurants and breweries for event postings), and after hearing from some friends that they'd be interested as well, slapped a front-end on it and here we are :)</comment>


E-waste mining could be big business and good for the planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44642176 <comment><USER2> I am in the e-waste industry. There are thousands of companies doing this already. This article is written like the BBC just discovered this. While there are many small processors there are also big ones like Arrow Electronics. The hottest item is phones. There is a small shop down the road from me that processes 300K phones a month. They are not capital intensive but are very labor intensive. Most of the money is in reuse. They clean and test the phones, grade them, and sell them on. The non-working ones can have their parts salvaged. The true scrap is sent on to smelters to extract the valuable stuff and dispose of the rest responsibly. Most follow the Responsible Recycling (R2) standard. Some things like cathode ray tube glass has a negative value, meaning you have to pay someone to dispose of it.

<comment><USER3> Serious question, once the things that still work have been repaired, resold, or dismantled for parts to repair other things. Is there ANY way that with north American labor costs and insurance, OSHA standards, pollution regulations, energy costs etc, that it's economical to start melting down printed circuit boards for metal recovery?

Because either I am guessing this article is delusional, or they're completely ignoring the part where the dirty messy work gets done by people in a poor country for $1/hour wages.

<comment><USER4> Nope, the items with negative value cause significant problems. CRT displays are the largest design problem that recyclers are working their way through.

Just this week, ECS Refining, Apple's main recycler in California, shut down. All of their unprocessed material is now the responsibility of their landlord. [https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs- refini...](https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2018/07/03/ecs-refining-set- to-close-down/)

<comment><USER5> ^ fact. I work for a refurbishing company, and while some of the scrap generated gets a decent payout from the recycling folks [the best common category being old PII and PIII boards / older finger boards AKA controller cards], the negative value stuff like CRTs, fluorescent lamps, and Ni-Cad batteries is awful to deal with. The big CRT operation in my state shut down a while ago, so now they have to be sent out of state i.e., cost more now to offload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've tried both metals, refurbish and parts recycling...

Refurbishing or selling for parts is MUCH more valuable than metals recycling. It's also MUCH MUCH more work.

Three first problem is getting valuable E-waste at a good price. (Free or cheap in large quantities) then comes separating out older parts (higher gold content), then identifying and testing newer parts for refurbishing or parts sales. Then advertising refurb or parts, then the sale, then support for the items you sold.

While there are a LOT of parts in closets, basements or other storage, it is difficult to obtain products that have a high resale value at the right price.

Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and/or using less power.

Also, recycling does have risks-- including dust, toxic fires, and safe disposal.

It's not impossible to make money recycling/refurbishing, but it is difficult and usually requires scale.

<comment><USER7> _Then factor in that newer computers and phones are getting much faster and /or using less power._

This part is hard for me, as a big proponent of "reduce, reuse, recycle." Reduce isn't that hard until your technology becomes obsolete. Reuse is typically impossible because people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete. So recycling is the only option left.

<comment><USER8> >people don't throw out technology until it's obsolete

People throw out computers (including screens and everything) because the mouse stopped working, or the power supply needs replacing or the computer got a virus. A washing machine needs a new door-seal, a cooker needs a new light, people actually throw out that sort of stuff. Ebay has helped to make a market for junk, but oftentimes it seems people over-estimate the financial value of their used stuff and that hinders reuse in favour of replacement.

<comment><USER9> « A door seal's gonna cost as much as a new machine sir. » Every repairman.

It's a difficult economic issue. Suitably skilled repairmen only exist medium economies, where we produce enough income to teach youngsters soldering, but when the economy is not developed as much as to have marketers take the power over the makers (think Juicero). In the Western economy today, repairmen are more salesmen on the field than actual people capable of repairing anything. I've never seen one actually repairing an appliance.

I have my doubt whether it's really the machines getting built in such a way that repairs are impossible, oftentimes it does seem like a little more search could have found the defective wire, but let's be honest, if they want to survive in a big city, soldering won't pay enough. And that's where the economy is surprising. Somehow those repairman jobs have higher hourly rates than replacing the machine, meaning shipping a new 50-kg appliance across the world is less costly than shipping a repairman across New York.

<comment><USER10> That's really just economy of scale at work, right? Shipping one repair man to a single location is less efficient than shipping ten thousand units from a factory to a distribution center. Servicing all of your customers (new and old) with the same mechanism is more efficient than having different mechanisms for new (sales & delivery) and old (repair).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This ship sailed. Its generally accepted that e-scrap processor's margins are 15% or less. Its not just the cost to access/buy the materials that keeps margins low. The CAPEX costs are enormous, there are large operating costs, and regulatory compliance is also very expensive. Further complicating matters is government flip-flopping on mandated electronic scrap collection regulations that make it tough for business to predict future returns on investment. Add to that the volatility of the commodities markets and its no easy task to make a profit these days in electronic scrap. Nobody is getting rich of e-scrap that doesn't already have a foot or other appendage in the game.

<comment><USER12> Isn't 15% a pretty good margin? Restaurants & retail make low single digit margins.

<comment><USER11> On a risk adjusted basis, no. You're buying the raw material assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb. That just happened. Or, you've invested $30m - $100m in an Ontario e-scrap plant assuming the CADGOV won't reverse its e-scrap policy. Then it does essentially that and the market you thought you had has changed dramatically. That happened.

<comment><USER13> > assuming aluminum heat sinks will be .67/lb, only to discover that by the > time you've liberated the Al from the stream the price has dropped to .40/lb

Maybe you can use a financial hedging contract to lock in the price of alu?

<comment><USER14> Typically the volumes are relatively small, which makes it's expensive to hedge.

It's a penny game. If you are making a 35% spread on your buy/sell the one time inventory depreciation will definitely hurt, but your spread and net pennies per pound has also gone down substantially as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would like to see more e-waste initiatives based in reuse instead of recycling. To me it seems like any advances on the recycling front are outpaced by throwaway tech culture and general overconsumption.

Seeing as processor speeds have pretty much plateaued [1], I wonder if it is useful to start thinking less in terms of precious metals and instead in potential processing power of e-waste. I remember a discussion on here about cheap web host providers using consumer grade boxes as servers. With today's cluster technologies, there's certainly creative applications for processing power that would end up in a landfill.

[1] [https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt- incr...](https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-increasing/)

<comment><USER16> Power consumption is going down with each gen and is big cost driver. Also heat dissipation in data centers is costly. Gotta consider TCO in these cases.

<comment><USER17> This is almost completely wrong, because Dennard scaling ended around 2002.

Power consumption in mainstream CPUs has been a few picojoules per instruction since the Pentium. Even the MSP430 is almost a pJ/insn. Modern ultra-low-power CPUs like the STM32L reach down below 0.3 pJ/insn, as did the LPC1110 a decade ago. Its more mainstream STM32F siblings are still stuck at 1.5 pJ/insn. Research CPUs using exotic logic families have been below 0.05 pJ/insn since 2000, but are too slow for mass adoption.

Power reduction this millennium is almost entirely about changing architecture to GPUs and other more specialized hardware, using wider registers (with SIMD instructions at times) and being smarter about turning things off and ramping their clocks.

Concurrently we've seen a huge move from languages like C and Java to languages like JS (10x the computational load of C even with JIT) and Python (200x, or 5x if your program is dominated by Numpy.)

So power usage is not a big reason for not using CPUs from 5 years ago.

<comment><USER18> From that argument, we should be coding everything in hand tuned assembly, because hand tuned assembly gives a 10% to 200% speedup over C.

The number one slowdown I've seen in rendering web pages, were not bad algorithms or bad programming languages, but bad database queries.

And if that's the case, there is a lot more optimization in the DB to be gained than rewriting your back-end to C, say.

<comment><USER17> This was true in 1995, assuming you can spend unlimited time writing your code. You can almost certainly get an order of magnitude better performance with a custom backend written in a low-level language instead of a SQL database. And, I don't know if you've ever used a SQL database written in Python instead of C, but I have, and it's definitely a lot slower.

But it's not true today, because today hand-tuned assembly is slow compared to what you can do on the GPU or an FPGA or a TPU.

And, of course, it's not true that you _should_ do this if you can't spend unlimited time writing your code. It's entirely reasonable to use slower languages like Python and JS if you can hack faster as a result. Since many of us are taking that entirely reasonable option, the number of CPU cycles needed to run basic applications is going up, which increases power consumption.

<comment><USER18> > And, I don't know if you've ever used a SQL database written in Python > instead of C, but I have, and it's definitely a lot slower.

I don't doubt that but on today's web stacks you use either MySQL or Postgres typically and both those are written in C.

Yes, you can create your own DB written in a low level language, but you'll be hitting the same issues that the DB solves for you (indexing upon insertions, query optimizations, transactional operations, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, back in the old days, with gold bonded dies in ceramic housings almost all ICs had good value. This was in 1975 or so. Back in those days they also plated 30-50 micro inches on fingers. Then gold hit the roof, and all parts had gold "adders" = increased prices along with gold. They would like to use 1 micro inch plating on fingers, but copper and gold are totally miscible(same series in the periodic table) and with 1 micro inch the copper would migrate to the plated surface by diffusion and corrode with the CO2 in the air = green shit. Then they found that 5 micro inches of nickel plating would block diffusion and they could use 1 micro inch gold over nickel, so by 1985 or so, fingers began to decline. They are still valuable, but nor worth $100 a pound like the old military trimmed fingers were. So find scrap buried in the 1970s, and you might have a shot - but only if you get a lot of boards, refrigerators had very little gold.

</comment><comment><USER20> When its time to upgrade the ewaste extracting robot, its child will mine their parents.

<comment><USER21> You're dark, I love it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Literally just met someone for the first time yesterday who is moving to Texas to do this.

Apparently, the refresh rate for cloud data centers is now getting down to 2 years or less. Easier to expand by replacing instead of leasing new space. This, combined with how environmentally conscious the big cloud companies are, has led to a big demand in IT Asset Disposal services. Also obviously there are security aspects in play here.

In PW Singer's novel about war with China, pretty sure this was a big plot point when imports of microchips stopped and regular citizens had to donate their iPads and what not to be stripped of valuable material.

<comment><USER23> > moving to Texas to do this.

Why Texas? Are there lots of data centres there? If so, is that an energy cost thing, because it seems a place with greater cooling requirements?

<comment><USER24> Texas has been big with datacenters for a long time. Apparently some tax exemptions may be involved, as well as good access to a lot of power.

[https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data- centers...](https://www.dallasnews.com/news/news/2015/07/10/data-centers-an- absolute-gold-mine-for-north-texas-cities)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting they mentioned Apple's Daisy. I feel that Apple gets an unfair amount of criticism for their lack of ewaste initiatives but none or very little is attributed to other smartphone OEMs like Samsung.

<comment><USER26> Most of the attention stems from organizations like Greenpeace which tend to attack high profile targets in ways that are as much self serving as they are beneficial if not more so.

* Regarding Daisy, I'd be curious to hear how it handles damaged iPhones. Can it and to what degree? What percentage of iPhones can be recycled by it? I fear that any iPhone that's compromised won't be recycled out of concern for breaking the recycling machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> When I was 8, my dad gave me a broken Mac Plus. He said that if I could fix it, it would be mine! So I did. Later, when I was 15, I bought, fixed, and re- sold a class set of 20 iBooks.

[http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#iBookRepair](http://peterburk.github.io/blog/#iBookRepair)

Then I went off to university and studied Electronic Systems Engineering. But for the last 7 years, I've had work experience in software. I still regularly fix computers for friends.

If there are tech recycling companies in NZ/Australia/Canada that are hiring, I'd be so excited to do this full-time. If I got another job in Vancouver, I'd volunteer with FreeGeek, just because I enjoy it so much. I wish I could get paid to do my hobby though.

<comment><USER28> How do you learn to do this? I am a CS grad(Bachelors) and I got my first computer and started programming when I turned 19. Before then I used to just browse the web.

What should I focus on to get more hands-on the hardware part?

<comment><USER27> I just taught myself, using what was then PBFixit, and is now iFixit. When it's already broken, you can be more confident about trying to take it apart - it can't get worse!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Recycling individual components is profitable with sufficiently low wages. Here's Bunnie Huang talking about that: [https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464](https://youtu.be/y5QkM2Work0?t=1464)

You can make a reasonably good living in Shenzhen by reselling expensive chips from discarded hardware.

</comment><comment><USER30> If it's a good business it can't be "good for the planet".

Not just because it's the absence of business that is good for the planet (absolutely speaking), but also because it being a business just means to encourage more e-waste (for it to be mined). Plus all the externalities.

It's just another case of "we screw the planet badly, but we put some plastics in special recycling bins, so that's ok".

</comment><comment><USER31> As other people already said, extracting metals from old electronics has been a thing for a long time. I don't know about gold/cooper/etc, but I met a guy that was extracting galium arsenide from circuit boards, last I heard he was opening a large plant in China. AFAIK it is (was?) actually pretty difficult to pull that off, so he's one of the few people who do that.

</comment><comment><USER32> Obligatory How It's Made on gold recycling from e-waste: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Sp6Qhe1i8Y&t=3s)

</comment><comment><USER33> I have left computers for dissassembly and recycling since they had a "turbo" button on them.

I don't know where else to dispose them, it's not like I could leave one in my trash bin. Metal bin?

<comment><USER34> In Sweden, "special rubbish trucks go around cities and pick up electronics and hazardous waste such as chemicals." (1). You can look up how that works exactly. It's Sweden's way to do the EU WEEE directive.

In Copenhagen (this probably varies across Denmark) I have a small electronics bin in the apartment building basement, with all the other bins. Officially, I think its to be used for anything that fits, with larger things taken somewhere else.

When I dispose of my desktop PC, I will take 5 minutes to unscrew the motherboard, drives, PSU etc and put them in the electronics bin. The case will go in the metal bin.

When I dispose of old elections at work, the whole lot goes in the large waste electronics container.

(1) [https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling- revolution/](https://sweden.se/nature/the-swedish-recycling-revolution/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I work across the street from one in California and they do a ton of business. Lots of trucks dropping stuff off daily, which they weigh and charge.

</comment><comment><USER36> doesn't this process involve lots of nasty chemicals to extract the precious metals from circuit boards and the like? i saw an article on Hackady[0] about this a while back

[0] - [https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old- elec...](https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/salvaging-gold-from-old-electronics/)

</comment><comment><USER37> _Someone_ is gonna be rich</comment>


The new burger chef makes $3 an hour and never goes home. (It's a robot) - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-27/flippy-fast-food-restaurant-robot-arm <comment><USER2> Rise of the Robots!

They took ur jerbs!

They work for less and don't need sleep or sick days. But who gets the $3 the robot or its owner?

<comment><USER3> It goes to Miso (the robot company) which is leasing the robot to the restaurant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Artisanal burgers command premium prices.</comment>


Why Aren't More Americans Atheists? - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/why-arent-more-americans-atheists-109732.html?ml=m_u5_1#.U-QNmfldXix

<comment><USER2> Of course the subject is bound to rub some people up the wrong way. What I will say is that science should not be viewed as a substitute for a religion, they're separate areas of human endeavour. Science frequently used as a tool by atheists to justify their position to non-atheists, but in the way it's used it's almost followed as a matter of blind faith. Just stop trying to justify your position, you made your choice and that's it.

<comment><USER3> I know a lot of very religious people. I also know a lot of atheists. My personal religious beliefs put me squarely in neither camp - I'm not secular enough for the atheists, and I'm not religious enough for evangelicals.

I can say without question that overly evangelical religious people leave me alone about my non-religiousness FAR more than atheists leave me alone about my non-atheistness. Which, for the latter, is "almost never".

If you're an atheist, I don't care. Nor do I care if you're strictly religious. But it seems to me that atheists try so very hard to prove their superiority by nature of being atheist that they sound like they're more blindly following dogma than the most evangelical people out there.

<comment><USER2> Exactly jgeorge, and for what it's worth I'm mostly agnostic (sounds like you are too).

<comment><USER3> Actually, I don't consider myself agnostic at all. I firmly believe in the existence of some incarnation of a deity, be it a God, Superior Intellect, Grand Architect, or whatever else you want to call Him/Her/It/Them. Just where that entity fits in my own universe view is a little different than most, which is non-standard enough to weird out my religious friends and too- religious-still to placate my atheist friends. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Important notice for certain AC wall plug adapters and World Travel Adapter Kits - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/important-notice-for-certain-ac-wall-plug-adapters-and-apple-world-travel-adapter-kits/ <comment><USER2> The last paragraph (starting with "Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984.") seems weirdly out of place here. Ignoring that it forgets the Apple II series, isn't "empowering people" exactly what this recall is meant to avoid?

<comment><USER3> "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -George Orwell, 1984

"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology -- where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!" -Apple, 1984

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever. - George Orwell, 1984

"I'm still in boot camp." \- Steve Jobs, 1985

<comment><USER4> The circle of life rotates fast[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axSnW- ygU5g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axSnW-ygU5g)

<comment><USER3> And furiously.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EExgxtJjRS8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EExgxtJjRS8)

"Feel Different"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is just the wall-adapter head for Hong Kong/Singapore/UK being fragile and they're offering free replacements for affected customers. Seems like the right way to deal with this, and they've done similar replacements in the past for other power adapters.

<comment><USER6> They did this for Australia a few years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > white, with no letters in the inside slot

You can identify it by the lack of identifying marks.

</comment><comment><USER8> Now, to be fair, only a small number of users find being shocked with 240V to be a negative experience...

<comment><USER3> I'm not positive about that, and would currently direct you to some alternating explanations.

<comment><USER9> that's quite a shockingly negative view of the world you have, keep current with more positive news would probably make you see watt is important

<comment><USER10> This is a terrible pun run. I will cleanse myself with a simple mantra:

Ohmmmmm... Ohmmmmm... Ohmmmmm...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Announcing AWS X-Ray – See Inside Your Distributed Application - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-x-ray-see-inside-of-your-distributed-application/ <comment><USER2> I'll be talking about this on the [https://twitch.tv/aws](https://twitch.tv/aws) stream at 12:30 pacific if you guys want to ask questions / learn more.

(I WORK AT AWS)</comment>


Recovered Covid Patients Often Have Heart Damage - <AUTHOR> https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200729/recovered-covid-patients-often-have-heart-damage <comment><AUTHOR> >Red Sox ace Eduardo Rodríguez out for season with Covid-related heart ailment

[https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/01/eduardo- rodrig...](https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/01/eduardo-rodriguez- coronavirus-out-for-season)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> >Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916)</comment>


Ask HN: I am not a programmer but a coder, what should I do? - <AUTHOR> As mentioned in this old article [1], I have mostly done assembly line coding for 10+ years.  I have mostly made enterprise Java software.  Basically Web applications that do CRUD. I have had ambitions to carve my own path.  But it hasn't succeeded.  Don't get me wrong, I am in a reputed firm with good salary.  Nothing to complain on surface. But internally I find my job meaningless.  I have great colleagues.  But the work is that of a coder.  Stitching programs.  Nothing very challenging.<p>I envy those working in startups on cutting edge tech.  Those at FAANG making real impact on the world.  I am not sure if this is even a problem.  What are my options?<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591243 <comment><USER2> Reality check: Most of those at FAANG companies are writing CRUD apps or fixing trivial bugs or improving the performance of selling ads by .1%. Yes, the code is deployed widely, but most of what people are doing is still menial. Additionally, if you follow HN news, you might realize that while FAANGs are having a "real impact on the world", that impact is largely negative.

I wouldn't build your life satisfaction on your job/career. Do what makes you money, clock in your time and get your check. Then put your real mental investment into a side project that intrigues you. And if you're lucky, someday someone will pay you for it.

<comment><USER3> People don't seem to understand that. You maybe have 5% of the engineers/researchers doing the really technical stuff and breakthroughs, the rest is an army of average devs doing the implementations and grunt work. The bad part is that somehow people started to think that working for FAANGs is the end goal in itself. I still remember a colleague of mine who left our startup to go work for Amazon, between his application and his first day he got affected to another team and ended up working on shitty legacy Perl projects and being on call during weekends... Every single aspects of his work was worst than before but hey, he worked for Amazon™

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a cynical joke at Google that's something along the lines of "we're mostly calling other services and moving protocol buffers around."

I think most people at FAANG companies probably end up doing the same. For every Jeff Dean doing something cutting edge there are probably like a 1000 engineers working on things that really aren't that glamorous, like iterative product improvements and integration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does it make sense to continue stitching services? God knows I have paid my dues. I owe myself something meaningful.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, if you're unhappy with your work it's worth looking around. I'd just think about what you would find fulfilling, because it differs from person to person.

A good framework is from the book Drive by Daniel Pink. He argues work motivation can come from (a combination) of three things: autonomy (being able to self-direct your work), mastery (being good at and improving at your craft), and purpose (seeing a connection between your effort and some impact you care about). Which of those matter more and in what way are unique to you. If you care about mastery and intellectually stimulating work, you should seek it out. And not all challenges are purely technical, sometimes there are interesting product or team challenges as well. On the other hand if you're happier working on some mission you're passionate about, maybe that's more important to look for.

I just felt like you held too much reverence for FAANG type companies. They are obviously successful and full of smart people, but may not scratch the itch you're looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would hesitate to label yourself with those ambiguous terms, especially if it's in any negative light. It's like trying to differentiate between "software engineer", "developer", "programmer", etc. It's mostly made up, and the points don't matter.

If you're interested in joining one of the FAANG companies (if only to dispel the myth that it's all real impact), a strong computer science foundation is very helpful. Unfortunately, success in their interviewing processes is more reflective of your ability to solve algorithm problems on a whiteboard rather than your ability to get work done, but the good news is that like anything else, it's doable with a good foundation and practice.

The next question is what to do once you make it to one of those companies and find yourself stitching programs again, but that exercise is left to the reader.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the simplest way is to just pick a side project to work on. You have full control over what you create. I always encourage my team to do this if they have the time.

I have done it myself to learn new things.

</comment><comment><USER7> > I envy those working in startups on cutting edge tech. Those at FAANG making > real impact on the world.

Startups don't work on cutting edge tech. FAANG employees aren't making any more of an impact than you're making wherever you're working.

<comment><USER8> Start ups do work on cutting edge tech, you just need to be at the right one. Most FAANG employees work on incredibly boring projects. The competition at google to get into a top project is fierce.

<comment><USER7> > Start ups do work on cutting edge tech, you just need to be at the right > one.

Sure, let me put it in a different way - working on cutting edge tech isn't dependent on the maturity of your company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am in exact same situation as you and been looking for ways to get out of it. I'm looking for answers too here so not much to suggest but my approach is to learn a different tech/role that I find interesting and try to get job there, in my case machine learning. Try doing that and slowly overtime you will gain the skills and hopefully a job that makes some impact

</comment><comment><USER10> What do you mean by carving your own path?</comment>


Why companies last? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lion.co.uk/community/questions/4ef8e4a4cc20d54ddc00000f

<comment><USER2> I like reading Collins, but he's not much for rigor. His "Good to Great" companies didn't stay Great.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's broadly true. Do you agree with the general attributes of companies that breed longevity though? I've summed them up correctly or incorrectly as passion, leadership positon and business model.

I guess the Amundsen-Scott South Pole and others are often repeated but still, they are well worth remembering and can be applied to business.

<comment><USER2> My sense is survival (as opposed to market outperformance - the subject of his later book) comes from 2 sources: Financial conservatism and culture.

Procter and Gamble does well because of low leverage, and a culture that values long term investment in the company's brands and people. Same with GE, IBM and many others of the Collins list. I would add Berkshire Hathaway to the list.

Unfortunately I find that concepts like Passion, Best in Class and Economic Engine to be hard to measure.

One of the comments on your post had to do with innovation. It's very hard thing to identify is what's the right level of innovation - too much and you're chasing every fad, not enough and you're stuck in the mud like Xerox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with your thoughts on the concepts identified, very hard to measure. (especially in terms of the balance sheet or other financial reporting)

Another example of a company that seems to manage to manage innovation is 3M. They've got a history of unveiling innovative products each decade without fail and have grown steadily over the years. Often under-rated IMO.

<comment><USER2> They were the penultimate example in the 80s and 90s, but are they still? (I don't know the answer, but I believe the innovation machine has slowed)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree, innovation has slowed and for me anyway, financial innovation hasn't quite replaced the physical type e.g aerospace.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JSC loves ES6 - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/7536/jsc-loves-es6/ <comment><USER2> It seems weird to focus so much on es2015 features, when so many of them are polyfillable (not optimal, sure, but still) when there is such uneven support for DOM (and related browser) API features in safari.

I mean, where are service workers? Give me a nice, cross-platform way to handle offline-first and I'll be happy. But hey, it isn't like there's some kind of browser monopoly on iOS or anything, like there was in windows.

<comment><USER3> > I mean, where are service workers?

Every discussion about anything in Safari on HN, even if not at all related, for the last year or two has included multiple people complaining about the lack of WebRTC.

Now it's here and there is a new complaint /s

I agree with threeseed that it probwont come and frankly I don't see why I'd want it (or web notification, or even WebRTC). They only seem to support the use case of replacing real apps with webpages which I don't want to do and makes no sense to me as an end user (I understand the freedom motivations).

<comment><USER2> With service workers you can transparently intercept outgoing XHRs and replace their results with cached values. You can even do a cache race if you want (cancel the xhr if your cache returns first). This is a hugely important feature for making web apps work offline-first. I mean, it's also a big part of progressive web apps, which is the next thing I'm going to complain about. (I don't personally care much about webrtc, but I can see why people do care about it).

The general point isn't about any one feature in particular. It is about a history safari has with not implementing (or half-heartedly implementing, as with indexeddb for so long) APIs that are important to making the web a useful platform.

Reasonable people can disagree whether or not those features are _good_ , but it seems basically true that my mobile web work is constrained by what iOS safari outright refuses to do, more than anything else.

<comment><USER4> This seems like a very strange API. Why do you need a proxy to intercept network requests coming from your own app?

<comment><USER5> To serve that requests from local storage if your device or the server is offline.

<comment><USER6> Can't this be solved by a library? It seems like you could easily build a facade in front of requests that queried local storage...you would just need to figure out whether the device/server is online or not.

<comment><USER7> It's not just XHRs, it's _all_ requests by your app. The HTML, the CSS, images, everything. The entire site can be served offline by this API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The benchmark at the bottom showing how far behind Firefox has fallen on JS performance is pretty telling. It confirms my own recent observation that Firefox is _at least_ 3-6 times slower in practice for the particular app I'm working on.

<comment><USER9> This benchmark is only representative for websites built with lots of new ES6+ features. On general JS performance, Firefox isn't quite that far behind (but still behind to the best of my knowledge).

<comment><USER10> And that's all fine...in a lab. In the real world, all I have to do to experience Firefox's performance is click "Home" on my Twitter account. More often than not I'll get an alert that "A script has stopped responding [...] Continue / Stop Script," and it will still take 60+ secs to finish refreshing the page. Meanwhile, all Firefox tabs and window instances are frozen.

<comment><USER11> That's more of an indication that Chrome monoculture encourages crap developer practices. There's no reason a messaging site should be so bloated that it brings a modern browser to it's knees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really wish we would stop calling it ES6. Browser vendors should be especially careful to call ES2015 by its correct name and help stop perpetuating the confusion (ES6, ES7, ES2016, ES2017, you can see how this quickly gets confusing).

<comment><USER13> ES6 is 3 syllables. ES2015 is 6 or 7 (depending if you say "twenty fifteen" or "two thousand fifteen").

I'm a dev. I'm lazy. I have no particular objection to the idea of moving away from ES6 as a name, but if the new name isn't more useful, it's not going to gain any ground.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately it's the name we're stuck with though, and it makes a lot more sense because ECMA releases are yearly.

Not judging, but if high profile articles and browser vendors started addressing it correctly we wouldnt have any issues migrating, more syllables or not.

<comment><USER13> I'm a touch confused...are you saying that if everyone used the year-based nomenclature, the inconsistent support would go away? Today in 2017 I have some ES6/ES2015 features I can use as well as some ES7/ES2016 features, but there are also other ES6/ES2015 that I can't count on being supported, and quite a few ES7/ES2016 features I can't count on.

How are these problems alleviated if we change the name we use? Or have I totally misunderstood your point?

Side Note: I'm not a fan of using a year for the same reason we (i.e. most everyone) stopped using it for versioning - That previous iterations have been done on a yearly cycle does not mean that future iterations will follow that schedule. That, however, is a side argument that neither of us touched on.

<comment><USER12> Just talking about the name.

You can see how this is confusing, here's a recent one just from today by Craig Federighi [https://twitter.com/feross/status/871839072590979076](https://twitter.com/feross/status/871839072590979076)

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure this ship has sailed for ES6. It's been referred as such while it was in development for so long, it's here to stay.

The next one might be different. But they really need to come up with a better than than "2017" or whatever. There's no similar problem with C or C++, and that's likely because they use 2 digit years, not 4 digit - C++17 isn't super short, but it's not a mouthful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Worth noting that Safari Technology Preview was the first browser to support all of ECMAScript 2016+ features.

* [http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/](http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/)

<comment><USER16> Although IIRC Chrome and/or Firefox had all but guaranteed tail-call optimization (not a source code-level feature, obviously) first.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that's right. Source?

<comment><USER16> Just Chrome, but yes: [http://web.archive.org/web/20160303192336/http://kangax.gith...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160303192336/http://kangax.github.io/compat- table/es6/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That shows WebKit supporting tailcalls. It doesn't a show Chrome supporting tail calls.

I vividly remember us implementing tail calls and v8 not having them yet at that time. This was almost 2 years ago.

<comment><USER17> Chrome has had them for a while. Supposedly they just hid them behind a flag because they weren't satisfied with some perceived deficiencies in the spec. (Check out [https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/04/es6-es7-and- beyond.ht...](https://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/04/es6-es7-and- beyond.html.)) WebKit did have it somewhere between mid-October to early December of 2015. ([http://web.archive.org/web/20151207203829/http://kangax.gith...](http://web.archive.org/web/20151207203829/http://kangax.github.io:80/compat- table/es6/)) Chrome didn't get it until late April of the next year ([http://web.archive.org/web/20160526102037/http://kangax.gith...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160526102037/http://kangax.github.io:80/compat- table/es6/)), though there's no snapshot until late May. People worked on the spec in a different order.

Chrome also had a failing array prototype under some non-standard syntax for a while. Despite claiming 100%, Kangax didn't show them passing. Test results have fluctuated as the tests themselves were refined. I've seen some passing results later turn into fails. That's why none of the browsers are at 100% for ES6 currently.

I'm still grudging at Apple for the year's delay between Safari 9 and 10, which left all the clueless Apple customers on ~53% ES6. Yes, WebKit had regular updates, but they didn't do a gradual release and few people thought to install WebKit instead of Safari (or even the TP). Other browsers had much better beta channels than Apple. And didn't pointlessly delay on things like WebRTC. Or block other browser engines like iOS to protect their app store.

Chrome did a good job of releasing updates gradually, but there are still some ES6 performance issues to be ironed out.

<comment><USER18> _I 'm still grudging at Apple for the year's delay between Safari 9 and 10, which left all the clueless Apple customers on ~53% ES6._

But Apple got to 100% ES6 support before anyone else: [https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712?lang=en](https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712?lang=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another great reason to migrate Electron to WebKit. With WebKit and JSC Electron will be faster and will use a zero amount of RAM and battery!

<comment><USER20> We shouldn't be migrating Electron to anything… we should be getting rid of it. Electron is a cop-out for mediocre dev teams to make mediocre desktop apps. The result is a world where we run apps like Spotify and Slack are the main battery-killers because their engineering teams were too lazy to make a real native app.

<comment><USER21> You assume that if there wasn't Electron that those apps would exist at all.

<comment><USER22> Maybe if they can't invest in proper native apps, they shouldn't exist. Electron is a scourge - clock speeds are not getting any faster, and tying a user application to a single-threaded execution model would have been recognized as suicidal a decade ago.

<comment><USER23> Can't you just not use them if you don't want to, rather than wishing all other people wouldn't be able to use them either?

<comment><USER22> I can wish for something better. It's frustrating when I look at what desktop applications looked like and ran like ten or fifteen years ago, and how little has appreciably changed now, beside ballooning resource requirements.

<comment><USER23> I think what fooey meant (and what I agree with) is that what has changed now is that those apps exist at all: compared to ten or fifteen years ago, more apps are written now, they work better and on more platforms, and they are updated more frequently. Tools like Electron play a part in that.

Sure, we could wish that more effort would be spent while producing just as much. Realistically, though, that's not going to happen, and that's not due to people being lazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Updated numbers with Dev versions of other browsers - [https://twitter.com/bmeurer/status/871962560324657153](https://twitter.com/bmeurer/status/871962560324657153)

The difference in speed is much lesser. Wonder how this will all change by the time their technical preview actually makes it to stable.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been staying away from most new ES6 features because when I tested them a year ago (either transpiled or with native support) they were slow as molasses in every browser I tried. Hopefully having some better benchmarks gets Firefox and Chrome developers to also get to work on this.

<comment><USER26> Do you mean that you saw actual differences when using Javascript in a normal website? Or that they were slower than the alternatives in a synthetic benchmark? It would be _really_ surprising that those were the performance bottlenecks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Firefox on Sierra is extremely slow. Not just javascript but everything else. Can't understand how it differs so much compared to being run on Ubuntu.

<comment><USER28> I have the exact same experience. Firefox on macOS is sluggish but on the same machine on Linux it's very responsive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Will this translate to better performance for languages that compile to Javascript and have so far used pre-ES6 constructs?

</comment><comment><USER30> A bit odd that they don't call it ES2015.

<comment><AUTHOR> We were calling it ES6 since before it was called ES2015.

<comment><USER30> >> We were calling it ES6 since before

Who is "we"?

<comment><AUTHOR> The WebKit team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > ES6 requires completely new compiler and runtime features in order to get > the same level of performance that we have with ES5.

Given that other languages mandate that additional features have zero overhead if unused, this seems like a particularly bad way of evolving a language.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is huge. Jeff Atwood was right all along...</comment>


Now Relax - <AUTHOR> http://nowrelax.me/

<comment><USER2> This is quite cool. I've been using calm.com. Any plans to expand the visual/aural set?

</comment><comment><USER3> Any particular reason it asks to narrow the window?

</comment><comment><USER4> What does this do that calm.com doesn't do better?</comment>


The Power of Persuasion - <AUTHOR> http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_power_of_persuasion/ <comment><AUTHOR> The content of that article is part of the same author's book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" ([http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_power_of_persuas...](http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_power_of_persuasion/)) which is one of the most interesting books I have ever read.

Even though it is not "new" I posted it because I wanted to ask the question of what are some of the sites out there that you have found employing those techniques to sell their product online.

<comment><USER2> I was going to post the exact same comment just now. I loved `Influence', read it in almost one sitting. Makes you look at marketing and interaction under a different light.</comment></comment>