Green Scream: The Decay of the Hollywood Special Effects Industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/oscars-vfx-protest/

<comment><USER2> Is is the role of govt to prop up business models that are failing? There is no "right to profit".

Failure is a vital part of the market. Failure is the market saying, "This capital can be used more effectively somewhere else."

Failure is _not_ bad. It may be painful but it's necessary.

Think about it, should the govt subsidize every startup so that none fail?

<comment><USER3> Govt subsidies are (in theory) an investment; you invest money in X so that you can make more money (or value) from Y.

In that sense, for example, there's a train of thought that if creating VFX in the USA becomes untenable then its move to other countries may drag money with it, then know how, then creative talent, then innovation, then production, then the entire industry and then it associated power for cultural dominance.

The entire sequence can be debated and argued and nitpicked to death (and I don't know enough about it to even try), but the underlying idea is valid.

<comment><USER4> Even the underlying idea (essentially mercantilism) is questionable.

While it can clearly benefit certain special interests (hence its popularity), it simply cannot benefit a whole society _on net_. Rather than repeat the whole argument, I'll just cite Adam Smith (a guy who was much more moderate than often portrayed by modern partisans), who showed in no uncertain terms that subsidies and tariffs make a nation poorer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is funny is that VFX costs have been going DOWN

Today, I can do professional VFX in a "cheap" computer (of course, you want to shoot for the high end), together with software easily acquirable.

Compare that to the beginnings of ILM for example.

This smells much more of bad business plans + companies tolerating studio's abuse (payment delays, overstaffing to meet deadlines, etc)

" In order to compete, VFX houses in Southern California have to charge way less, leading to slim-to-none profit margins"

Aah there you go. The absurd of housing prices (and everything) in California. Like you need to be close to your customer in this times of internet and FedEx, you can set shop in Seattle maybe and cut your costs

<comment><USER6> It's artist time that is expensive - even render time is cheap in comparison. VFX houses are happy to spend loads of money on renderfarms and wait 12 hours a frame, but it's mainly artist time that costs money.

Software cost only has a small influence in the general picture, although the Indian and Chinese VFX companies using unlicensed software gives them even more of an edge than cheap labour by itself does.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the cost of keeping HW up to date is non-negligible, even if it is a small part of the costs.

That 12h per frame has remained more or less constant for the past years, they'd rather have more details than speed it up =) (I suppose modern hardware can render Toy Story today in real time and even more)

But the cost of artists reflect the cost of where they live, pick a less expensive city in the US and you can probably match UK/New Zealand

Of course, it can't be NullPointer, Wyoming but in a bigger area it shouldn't be a problem

<comment><USER6> A lot of the more mundane stuff is already "outsourced" or given to VFX houses' offices in other parts of the world like India.

e.g. SPI send all their Roto to India, they've just moved all their comping and lighting to Vancouver, it's mainly just R&D that's in Culver City now.

That's probably going to happen more and more now - instead of having dedicated Roto departments, it'll be outsourced as a way to cut costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if the constant shifting of VFX houses to new countries and employees coming and going from the field is why we are seeing uneven results in movies? Most special effects-laden movies have a few CGI shots that just look awful. And you would think that VFX would be steadily improving in quality, but while we often see more impressive results in terms of what can be done the accuracy of them isn't always holding up and the realism and reliability isn't improving at the same rate that technology and new techniques are.

This could end up with Hollywood shooting themselves in the foot. Movies are getting more and more CGI, but CGI that breaks the suspension of disbelief can really ruin a movie.

A lot of people complained about the VFX in Wolverine, for instance, but shouldn't the VFX in that have been better than the X-men triology? Well, when you have seventeen different companies doing VFX shots for a movie, you're going to get uneven results. There was some really good VFX in Wolverine, but there was some really bad stuff too, and I'd have to believe the studio going cheap is what led to it.

<comment> mkr-hn You can produce amazing work with entirely free and open source tools like GIMP and Blender, so it's definitely not the technology.

<comment><USER6> You _can_ produce work that looks good, as they _technically_ have the features, but the workflow is generally atrocious for open source tools. This means it takes a lot longer to do stuff.

On top of this, the technical limitations of GIMP and Blender are much more limiting than what high-end apps like Nuke/Mari for texture painting (want to do 32k x 32k texture painting at full 32-bit float for RGBA), and things like XSI rending to PRMan or Arnold, kicking around 200GB of geometry at render time.

GIMP and Blender can't get anywhere near those use-cases - yes, they're extreme, but those are the things companies like ILM, SPI, Weta, Framestore, etc deal with on a daily basis.

<comment> mkr-hn This is good to know. I assumed Blender and GIMP had workflows with comparable efficiency once you got used to them. I've never used the commercial tools.

<comment><USER8> Gimp I don't care for, but the workflow in Blender is fairly good really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised everyone took the economics angle to criticize VFX houses.

There was a time not long ago when Computer Science looked stupid because a programmer in India could do the same software engineering work for 1/3 the pay. I doubt free-market thinking programmers came out of the woodwork to applaud cheap Indian labor.

Besides, as other commenters noted, what is outrageous economically speaking is the $400 million B.C. handout, not cheap labor. That doesn't sound like free market to me.

I think VFX artists just need to unionize. They have the same "real" problem software engineers do, which is this pretentious notion of artist.

Like software engineers, VFX artists aren't professionals or artists. They are given bulk work that requires technical expertise to execute, like a welder, a makeup artist, or a teacher (my grin, it is huge).

To drive home the point, an HN software engineer commenter complained that at the same point in his and his doctor friend's career (about 7 years), the doctor was earning radically more money. Lawyers too, I might add, being real professionals, earn what VFX and software engineers _expect_ to be earning. Nevermind consultants and their enormous bonuses.

A Blackstone consultant can retire at 30, even though your average software engineer or VFX artist could dismiss what the consultant does as "making PowerPoints."

The artists line shows how out of touch VFX artists are with their role in Hollywood.

If VFX artists want to take more ownership, creative and financial, direct features. Don't hire actors. Distribute yourself. It happens, like Neill Blomkamp. You don't have to start Pixar.

<comment><USER10> > _"I think VFX artists just need to unionize."_

This will never happen, for the same reason the video game industry will never unionize. It's a glamour industry where there is absolutely no shortage of starry-eyed dreamers who've been sold more on the ideal of the craft than the reality.

It's hard to unionize when there's a lineup of naive dreamers stretching all the way around the block, all ready to pounce into your seat at the first opportunity.

<comment><USER11> There are unions for film writers and actors, and for the major sports leagues, which are all clearly glamor industries. Only differences I can think of are:

1) They were unionized in a totally different business climate. Union's a dirty word now. 2) They're all at least about protecting seniority and the established workers, kind of like the criticisms of the teachers unions. There are a lot of circular requirements for the movie unions - only SAG actors can appear in SAG movies, but to join the SAG, you have to have said a line in a SAG film (clearly there are a few loopholes).

The sports unions tend to fleece the younger members - the MLB union doesn't care about the minor leaguers, so a lot are living around the poverty line, NBA players are fine with the fixed draft pay scale because it's more money for them at the expense of players joining the league.

Tech tends to be ageist (moreso than professional sports - think about that for a second) so there's no core of veterans trying to coalesce to protect their position. I don't think it'll ever happen, is what I'm saying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From what I've been hearing about DD, the problem is terrible management more than anything. The outsourcing looks financially attractive on paper but doesn't actually get the job done (the last 10% taking 90% of the time and all that. sound familiar?), leaving Venice to pick up the pieces after the show is already late and over budget.

<comment><USER6> But that's inherently a problem with feature film (and especially animation stuff) - even the studios like FOX and Disney only get the profit once DVDs and merchandise have been selling - before then, they've given out millions to finance the production.

DD were pretty stupid trying to do the feature animation thing, and changing their company name a few times has caused them even more financial trouble in terms of having to buy software multiple times for site licenses.

<comment><USER12> What's inherently a problem, bad management? :P

There's always uncertainty that any subcontractor might be just saying they're making progress, only to blow up at the end. But this shouldn't be happening internal to the company.

Hadn't heard that about the software licenses! I thought the naming shenanigans were only the holding company, are you sure that wasn't just from adding licenses for Florida?

<comment><USER6> Fair point, yeah it's internal with them, I hadn't thought of that.

Put it this way - they've bought Nuke three times, and they made it originally!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Top tier VFX studios in the U.S. not only hire stellar artists but also help guide the direction of the creative be it a commercial or cutscene. It reminds me of the difference between the various times I've worked with Carbon Five/Pivotal Labs vs a significantly cheaper alternative in another country. In that sense, I don't think the top motion graphics studios will all go out of business because of outsourced work, as their high level of creativity, direction, and execution is simply something outsourced work cannot completely replace. Learning how to be a stellar software engineer is more than just learning how to code in a language or two. Likewise, learning how to be a strong VFX creative is more than just learning how to use a few programs.

For the record, the peeps I know in the VFX make just as much money as the average engineer (125k - 250k).

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder, if this is just the result of an technology shift. Twenty years ago, one needed highly specialized guys to build star ship models and coordinate a stop motion animation of a space battle, ten years ago one needed for basically the same scene guys with really expensive workstations and Maya licenses. Today one can do very high quality work with free tools on an standard PC. ( And one can easily copy a few GB of rendered scenes to a server half a world away.)

At least my observation is, that quite a few short films ( often as projects from film schools) are getting to a point, where they have really amazing VFX.

This trend is probably accelerated by the more general use of VFX. Someone who specializes in building star ship models can only find work in SF films, but today someone who can render a complex transition for an advertisement uses the same technologies as someone who does 'real' VFX and can consequently transition much easier to real movies.

</comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like that industry is getting hit by outsourcing, am I reading this right? Does look like articles about software engineering outsourcing a decade ago. The reality is, if your work can be done by someone else at a lower cost, you're in trouble. Whether that person live in your country or not, has little impact nowadays. If you stay at the edge, making sure your work cannot yet be done by someone else, then you'll get paid a premium for it. That's just how things work, basic economics. Don't make taxpayers carry your burden.

Ps: written by someone who saw the impact of outsourcing first hand.

<comment><USER16> The problem is if you take that argument to its natural conclusion, the only people in the US with jobs in the future will be waiters and baristas. Who will be able to afford what the robots/companies are selling? It's not that simple. There is a delicate balance between livable wage and low operating costs. Ford knew he had to pay his workers enough to be able to afford the cars they were making.

<comment><USER15> actually if you take that argument to its natural conclusion the only people in the US with jobs would be people who innovate and create new value. Don't think that waiters and baristas fit in that category. If i was either, i'd be really worried about my prospect, and would probably fall back to organized labor to protect my jobs, because the economic mechanism definitely would not!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Though not a typical business this sounds like a trade issue to me. Governments are subsidizing a product for export to the detriment of other countries.

Perhaps it's time for a large tariff on maple syrup and hockey-pucks?</comment>


50 things that made the modern world: Paper [audio] - open-source-ux http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04q774r <comment><AUTHOR> This whole series has been great. Highly recommend subscribing.</comment>


Let's make sure Heartbleed doesn't happen again. - <AUTHOR> https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/lets-make-sure-heartbleed-doesnt-happen-again/description

<comment><AUTHOR>
      This Crowdtilt will fund a focussed crowdsourced security assessment (otherwise
      known as a bug bounty) on OpenSSL.
      ...
      Security crowdsourcing company Bugcrowd will organize a "sprint bounty;"
      coordinating and incentivising the security research community to thoroughly
      test OpenSSL for potential security concerns.

I'm a little worried this is just PR move for Bugcrowd, but it might be genuinely useful in producing a bunch of bug reports for holes not discovered yet.

(Having said that, if you're a blackhat the amount you'd get selling or using anything you found would eclipse whatever Bugcrowd would pay you... But that'd happen regardless if this ran or not.)

<comment><USER2> We think it'll be useful.

You're right re the payout amount for blackhats, but it only takes one whitehat to claim a reward for a bug to get killed, and the idea of a sprint is to get a bunch of them focussed on the same target at the same time. We've been running sprints alongside the more traditional ongoing bug bounties since we started, and they're very effective.

Hopefully we will get enough individuals and companies backing this to make the rewards attractive to the right kinds of researchers.</comment></comment>


Adam Curtis: Have computers taken away our power? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/06/adam-curtis-computers-documentary?intcmp=239

<comment><USER2> History shows that there has been many tools that in the past have resulted in the people acting in a way that when viewed from a certain perspective could be construed as limiting the individuals ability to act individually.

Be it religion through the writings in the bible and actions of the church, printed news papers through the selection of what is reported and the application of the bias of the owners, or radio and television providing a filtered window on the world, there has always been deliberately or otherwise tools out there that have resulted in a large part of the population forming a consensus of opinion and action.

Saying that computers have taken away our "power" is much the same as my parents saying that TV "rots your brain", without taking into account the ability of TV to also expose you to thoughts and ideas that would never have been available to the average person just a couple of generations earlier.

Do computers have the ability to reduce the power of the individual? Of course, in the same way as individual power was taken from those who use to slave in the fields of medieval England or were stuck in the early factories of the Industrial Revolution. This is not to say that it is inevitable that everybody who has anything to do with computers will inevitably loose power to them? again no... some do, but those with the education, drive and ambition to do something powerful for themselves have never had a better chance to embrace the chance and do almost anything they can dream. Those without the ambition will, as always follow the crowd.

<comment><USER3> >Be it religion through the writings in the bible and actions of the church, [...] resulted in a large part of the population forming a consensus of opinion and action.

This comment suggests to me you don't know much about the Bible or about the Church.

Jesus doesn't teach religion. The Church has virtually no consensus outside the Nicene Creed (and even then that's simply a definition of the Church others will argue for a more liberal or more conservative definition). Christianity is, at the centre, about personal action.

I see what you're getting at, I think. The person of Jesus Christ is like an anchorage point for peoples lives that gives them a certain locus. Computers, though I think we're probably talking about the Web really, do something similar - the Web is like a secret society for everyone who can access it.

>Those without the ambition will, as always follow the crowd.

Which crowd? Like the Church there are focuses of people, lots of them. Unlike IRL one can choose to be allied to almost any group one wishes without geographical restrictions. Online one makes a positive affirmation as to which group one wishes to be allied to. You don't have to, for example, keep visiting a site and taking part in their memes and affirming their groupthink you choose to.

IMO you need more than just ambition, you also need opportunity. To some extent you may be able to make opportunities and this is probably vastly easier if you're wealthy, already well connected, etc., just as in the past.

<comment><USER2> I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that a vast majority of any society follow that societies norms, either because they believe that this is the "right" thing to do; through fear of either being looked down upon by that society as being "different" or by fear of some authoritarian body actually doing you harm for daring to challenge the status quo.

Through time the communication tools we use have acted as an enabler to ensure that the norms and expectations of that society are expressed clearly, and in most cases provide some modelling of the correct way to behave.

The internet initially allowed a disruption of societal norms. Those so inclined could find online a different society with different norms than the persons physical society. The physical society reacted by branding these individuals with derogatory names such as geek and nerd.. in some cases thinking that the internet had created this divergent behaviour, not realising that the geeks and nerds had always been there, building new things and working with the cutting edge, but now they could almost completely escape from there physical environment and take up full time membership in there online societies. Those members of the first online societies had power, in that they knew how to fully use this new communication methods, whilst everybody else looked on and wondered how the geeks could control this strange new thing, and behave as creators not just consumers that the norms of the physical society required that most people be.

This has again changed. Over the last ten years, the physical society has redefined its norms of media consumption to include the use of online spaces. Peoples communities now have extended onto the Twitters and Facebooks, providing them with yet more channels to consume, and in some cases create.

So what has happened to the geeks and nerds who pioneered this online society? In some cases they were lucky enough to be able to create the environments that define the internet, and are running the systems that the normal people use. In other cases they, still not able to fit into anything that could be considered to be normal are again pushing the limits of what society will allow. In some cases they have dropped out of the internet world, seeing it as being taken over by the "normal" people, and are therefore working wholly in the physical world. In other cases they are pushing (and in some cases breaking) the limits of what is legal online by ensuring the availability of knowledge without restriction, but in all cases they are using the tools they have to create.

So back to the original question, have computers reduced our power?

For most people, they never had any power to start with. They would blindly follow the social norms without question and act as a consumer to the information and entertainment channels that society accepted.

To those who don't accept the status quo... the power is still there. People can still hack society moulding it to find a way to live that they can accept. Computers and the internet are great tools to enhance our abilities and in this way multiply an individuals power in way that has not been seen since the invention of the printing press.</comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla Labs: Towards Browse-Based Browsing with Home Dash - <AUTHOR> http://mozillalabs.com/prospector/2011/01/26/towards-browse-based-browsing-with-home-dash/ <comment><USER2> They should finish working and polish up Ubiquity before they move onto this... Ubiquity was really nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> While the idea behind this is very cool, I find the actual interface to be appalling and overly complicated. Also the usage of things doesn't seem as natural as they make it out to be. At this point most people have used browsers so trying to reinvent them in this style is the wrong way. Though I admit that with some time and polish it could be better (as with most things).

</comment><comment><USER4> Would it be possible to recreate something like this as a Chrome extension?

<comment><USER5> I doubt that. From what I know Chrome has no skinning support. The only thing extensions can do is to add button/icon next to/into address bar. So unless Google decides otherwise something like this won't be possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the overlapping row of tab thumbnails at the top</comment>


Doing What I Love...Not Sure It Is Work...StockTwits - <AUTHOR> http://howardlindzon.com/?p=3972 <comment><USER2> "but making content is not something I recommend to friends."

Couldn't agree more, I give newspapers and (sometimes) mainstream blogs credit in that area.</comment>


Understanding Kafka with Factorio - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/understanding-kafka-with-factorio-74e8fc9bf181 <comment><AUTHOR> When I saw this title, I first thought it was about understanding the cockroach-like aliens in Factorio, but it is actually about queuing and congestion and parallel processing with conveyor belts and factories!

With the caveat that Factorio is EXTREMELY addictive, properly described as "programmer crack", here are some other Factorio related discussions:

Factorio – a game where you can automate basically anything (factorio.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11266471)

[http://www.factorio.com/](http://www.factorio.com/)

"This game is like crack for programmers." -kentonv (Tech lead for Cloudflare Workers, author of Sandstorm.io, Cap'n Proto)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11269098)

Raycasting engine in Factorio game – Facto-RayO v1.0 [video] (youtube.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19878688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19878688)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM)

Factorio to talk about horizontal scaling of software services (medium.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095271)

[https://medium.com/@chrisfauerbach/gamification-of- horizonta...](https://medium.com/@chrisfauerbach/gamification-of-horizontal- scaling-4a6c394c9e75)

Mapping Factorio with Leaflet (cloudflare.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18185058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18185058)

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/mapping-factorio-with- leaflet/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/mapping-factorio-with-leaflet/)

<comment><USER2> Pro-tip to others who think 'Programmer Crack' is hyperbole- it is not.

Factorio does have a rather steep learning curve, and the UI is not the most intuitive. But. Once how it works clicks, it clicks, and suddenly morning. And I'm in my 40's, I'd thought my days of unexpected overnights while working on fascinating problems were mostly behind me. Highly recommended, but be aware.

<comment><USER3> I had to uninstall it last weekend because I came to realize my playing it was no longer healthy. I mean, that sounds funny, but I'm being totally serious. I've had a few games like that in my life, and I've come to recognize a few signs that what I'm doing is not good for me anymore.

But wow, what a great game.

<comment><USER4> I've only had 2 games like that in my life, EverQuest (also called EverCrack) and Factorio (also called Programmer Crack). I had to go cold turkey or I was skipping the gym and meals and not sleeping!

<comment><USER2> One thing I credit Factorio for (and I am not joking at all when I say this, despite how ridiculous the statement might seem) is learning to be a little more understanding about folks that deal with addictions. I've never had a problem not doing something to excess, so I never really understood people who do. But when I first discovered Factorio a few years back, there were enough times where I didn't do $ActuallyRatherImportantThingX because I was allllmost done with some aspect of a megabase to give me pause.

There are lots of games I can play for a specified amount of time and be fine with it. Pretty much all of them, really. Factorio, I get _annoyed_ if pulled away in the middle of a project. So now I know to not even start unless it's free time for the rest of the night.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those who don't know factorio is truly a masterpiece of a game. It's described as "programming the game". Strongly recommended to everyone here.

<comment><USER6> So I must be the only person on HN who doesn't like it too much. I love the concept and the factory building - but I found the necessity to move a player character manually with direct controls to be incredibly detracting from the process of building factories. I have no idea why they couldn't just include a mode where you have your typical RTS-like mode where you just go and click on things that you want to do without playing a game of "will this 5 pixels tall character fit through this gap between two machines or not". Also, this might be a personal preference - I found the game's style to be hard to read, it's far too dark even when played at maximum brightness...it's just an endless sea of dark brown.

<comment><USER7> By mid-game your actions should be pretty divorced from the Player Character. Once you have a bot network you can place down items anywhere you can see on the map (i.e. have Radar coverage), allowing you to build anywhere you want without having to be nearby. You can even use the bot network to expand the bot network & radar coverage.

<comment><USER8> Additionally, maintaining the stock of material for your bot adds yet another fascinating layer of complexity to the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote this article a couple of months ago and didn't expect it to appear on my news feed all of the sudden. Thanks for the love everyone. Any questions are welcome of course!

<comment><USER2> How do you like the .17 update? :D

More seriously, I am curious about what people who haven't played Factorio think of the article. Since I've sunk $bignum hours in to it, I found your explanations clear, but I'd like to hear what those who haven't think.

<comment><USER10> I haven't played Factorio, and have just barely used Kafka. Therefore, if there was any subtlety, it was lost on me. Nonetheless, this article was clear. I thought this cute and I liked it, but I'm not sure that I gained any new insights into Kafka. This is not a criticism!

However, one of the main advantages of Kafka, I thought, was that it's so much more than a queue, since data is replayable, etc. The article does mention this as a shortcoming of the analogy, but isn't this one of the main selling points vs other message queues?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The analogy helped me understand, but in factorio belts are required primarily because everything takes physical space. What are real world use cases for kafka? Is it primarily if your data is too much to simply store in a db?

<comment><USER12> Push architectures put all of the control on the producer, but become quite painful in the face of an unreliable consumer. Pull architectures put all of the control on the consumer, but become quite painful in the face of an unreliable producer.

Message queues allow the producer to think it's participating in a push architecture, while the consumer believes it's a pull-based arch. Because the message queue itself does _very_ little work, it gets to play a very well- behaved consumer insofar as the producer is concerned, while behaving like a well-behaved producer for the consumer. The queue's buffering then allows both the producer and the consumer to misbehave to some degree while the queue itself keeps the illusion of good behaviour.

Kafka specifically falls under the category of log-oriented message queues, which are eminently useful for distributing any workload that looks like "tail a log and process each line as it comes in" across a large number of nodes.

<comment><USER9> This. With the slight nuance that it works better if you don't think of it as queues, since that suggests messages being removed when processed.

The big win when introducing Kafka is that (apart from the schema) it completely decouples producers and consumers of messages. That in turn reduces the required coordination between independent teams within an organisation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's crazy! I installed it yesterday for the first time to try out the steam proton thing and was literally up till 3 am. I didn't realise the programmer crack angle till I read this. I'm screwed.

<comment><USER14> You're screwed.

Also press Alt

And use "Q" while hovering over an object to put it in hand (if it's in your inventory). Press "Q" again to drop whats in hand. I played waaayyy to long without knowing this and it is unbelievably useful, saves mountains of time digging through your inventory.

<comment><USER2> Also, Z to drop something on the ground if you find your bots a little to assertive about filling your inventory back up and you find yourself stuck. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the analogy works better with queues and distributed services in general, rather than just Kafka.

</comment><comment><USER16> You lost me at the part about partitions. It might help if those gifs were labeled.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I started out labeling them, but that turned out to be extremely tedious. Does anyone know of tools that make annotating gifs easy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a similar web game - [http://www.factoryidle.com](http://www.factoryidle.com), for those who can't/won't play FactorIO, with a similarly addictive quality.

<comment><USER18> I'm getting 403 bad request responses from cloudfront on that url

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A better way to understand Kafka is to fill a room with rakes, turn of the lights, and walk around.

<comment><USER20> This sounds like an idea founded on experience, but without including any details about how you arrived at this sentiment the comment doesn't bring any value to the thread.

<comment><USER21> Not GP, but early versions of Kafka had a lot of poorly-chosen default settings and sharp edges. eg, it was tuned for speed and availability over reliability, so it could lose your data if you weren't careful (not dissimilar to early versions of MongoDB that way). It was possible/easy to set up topics with no replication, so you'd lose data on your first server outage. KStreams had no real error handling - it would just explode and not even really tell you why. I wasn't as close to the operational side, but there were a lot of problems there too.

IME it has gotten better over time, but it's still pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot if you don't understand what you're doing with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Isn't this a repost?

<comment><AUTHOR> Dang suggested reposting it since it didn't get much attention the first time.

<comment><USER22> Wow, I ask a valid question about a old post and I'm punished with multiple downvotes. Lesson learnt.

<comment><USER23> You were downvoted because you did not RTF FAQ.

<comment><USER22> But you're happy to abuse me. So that is acceptable then.

<comment><USER23> How did you came to the conclusion that I am abusing you by pointing out that you did not read the FAQ?

My message was not even unsolicited. You were asking why and I gave you an answer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 'Flash Boys' Exchange Is Growing Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-16/the-flash-boys-exchange-is-growing-up <comment><USER2> I am deeply confused by IEX. It seems like anyone who knows anything about HFT thinks the narrative proposed in Flash Boys is completely ridiculous and mostly incorrect, including what Brad Katsuyama says. Is there something else interesting about IEX that people outside the industry don't really understand, or is it an entire company of people who have deeply flawed ideas about HFT and how it works?

<comment><USER3> Just because Flash Boys presents modern electronic exchanges incorrectly, does not mean that some people aren't worse off in the modern HFT world.

In particular, large block buyers, who previously got to take advantage of inefficient price discovery to get better prices have been negatively impacted. It is in their best interests to make it possible to buy a very large amount of traded products without the price changing.

IEX is built from the ground up for those market participants and none of them have any misunderstanding about how the market works. They just don't like it.

<comment><USER2> Right, that makes sense, but Katsuyama and Lewis both present IEX as a morally superior, cleaner stock market. It makes sense that large block traders would want a different way to do large block trades, but why not just see it as an alternative financial product that has some demand just like the regular stock market, instead of making it a moral issue? I guess my question is, do the people who work at IEX drink the Kool Aid?

<comment><USER4> The large block traders need someone to trade with.

By making it a moral issue, IEX can attempt to trick suckers into joining the market so that the large block traders can take advantage of them.

Watch this video (put out by IEX) and think about how it's trying to manipulate people: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2OZkTesSx0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2OZkTesSx0)

<comment><USER5> From some content presented in Flash Boys, a question:

Why would large block traders like to trade with someone pinging the market for 100 buy/sell orders, waiting for discovery, and then changing the price on other markets from information gained from these pings? If the market were rid of these pings, as the 350ms delay is intended to do?

Or to put the same question another way, why would a large block trader not like all trades being done at the same price or at a better or equal price on other exchanges (discovered by IEX) rather than some of the block done at the original price and the rest done at a higher price because 'liquidity' was provided by HFTs driving up/down prices on other markets and then selling/buying from the large block trader this 'liquidity'.

<comment><USER4> See the comment up thread from kasey_junk:

"In particular, large block buyers, who previously got to take advantage of inefficient price discovery to get better prices have been negatively impacted. It is in their best interests to make it possible to buy a very large amount of traded products without the price changing."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To lay the ground work for what's going on here....

In the US you can be an ATS(Alternative Trading System) or a full blown exchange. All dark pools are ATS's. This gives you a bit more leeway in terms of what you are allowed to do, ie hide orders, trade only at midpoint, trade only at certain volume's etc, even report trades in a slower fashion.

A full blown exchange has alot more scrutiny but comes with one huge caveat, all other exchanges must route orders to you if you have the NBBO(National Best Bid or Offer) as dictated by the SEC's REG NMS 611.

This means if an order to sell comes to the NYSE for 5.00 and takes out the entire first level forcing the NYSE to have a bid of 4.99 and there is still more volume in the order, the NYSE has to send the order to another exchange still showing $5.00 as its bid.

Since the exchanges make money when each share is traded they don't really like to do this( as a side note, this is how flash orders came about, exchanges "flashed the order to a select few market makers for 50 milliseconds before sending it to another exchange giving the market makers a chance to fill it, and keeping the commissions at the exchange, people got pissing about it and it no longer happens).

If IEX transitions from being a dark pool to an exchange this requirement to use their quote as part of the NBBO might mean more liquidity, and hence more profit, for them.

The issue with this is that IEX is the first proposed exchange, atleast to my knowledge, that has an intentional built in delay, meaning that its quotes are by design slow and stale as compared to the other US exchanges.

They are arguing to the SEC that since the NBBO is determined by the SIP(the system that aggregates all other exchanges quotes to determine what the NBBO is), which itself is slow, that this doesn't really matter much.

On the other side of the debate is a literal whose who of the finance world, not just HFT's, arguing the slipper slope defense, ala well if they delay 350 microseconds, what's to stop someone from having a 2 second delay or 1 day delay in showing quote.

I don't really have a dog in this fight but most people I know believe that IEX is going to lose this fight, though there is a loud contingent at the SEC itself that wants IEX to win to act as a test case for what the SEC can do to shape the market microsructure of the US cash equity markets.

As to becoming a place to list your company, I think Levin is right here... no one cares at all what exchange the company is listed on, even the company itself.

 __EDIT __replaced ECN with ATS above

<comment><AUTHOR> > All dark pools are ECN's

This isn't quite true. Every dark pool is an ATS (alternative trading system). An ECN is a different kind of ATS that displays its quotes publically, unlike a dark pool. I don't think there are any ECNs left that have any kind of volume (since LavaFlow shut down in January).

<comment><USER6> Yikes, you are 100% correct. I appreciate the correction!

[https://www.sec.gov/divisions/marketreg/mrecn.shtml](https://www.sec.gov/divisions/marketreg/mrecn.shtml)

I blame wikipedia which says:

> ECNs are sometimes also referred to as alternative trading systems or > alternative trading networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub What would happen if you split the tick interval to three 30 second intervals, where during the first interval new orders are collected in private, the second serves as a 30 second waiting period, and at the third all previously private orders and matches/trades are made public and broadcast?

So collect (30s) -> wait (30s) -> broadcast (30s) -> collect...

<comment><USER7> One of the better proposals to fix whatever market structure issues we have is to move to "frequent batch auctions", in which a micro-auction would occur every 30 seconds or minute, which would amount to a similar thing. I'm not aware of any research that discusses whether such a system would be workable in the presence of the existing continuous trading market.

<comment><USER4> There is research on this. It won't work the way you hope. Here is the problem:

What happens if in a single batch you have more buy orders than sell orders at a given price (or vice versa)?

<comment> a-dub One side eats up all the liquidity on the other side and the price moves appropriately in the next tick?

It would clearly have to be separate from the high frequency discrete market. (c'mon, don't call it continuous!)

<comment><USER4> On the side where all the orders aren't filled how do you decide who gets filled and who doesn't?

<comment> a-dub At equal prices, random selection. Anything else seems like it could be games.

Could lead to some funny movements though. Value aliasing! : )

<comment><USER4> So lets say at tick one 1 see that only 50% of the buy orders were filled.

At tick 2 I want to buy 100 shares. But maybe I'll guess that only 50% will be filled this tick too, so maybe I should submit a buy order for 200 shares instead? This kind of game playing can lead to highly unstable outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder why they're using a "magic shoebox" instead of a call market a la [http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/wellman/?p=40](http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/wellman/?p=40).

<comment><USER3> Because call markets don't actually solve any of the supposed problems of HFT. Unless the call market has a global monopoly (an impossibility that we wouldn't want if it were available) venue arbitrage is still an issue.

Further, no one who proposes call markets ever talks about the matching algorithm in the face of order book imbalances. How you do tie-breakers can either still have speed advantages or has other probably worse disadvantages.

<comment><USER9> neither does their magic shoebox. It doesn't solve anything and HFT firms aren't meaningfully impacted by the shoebox</comment></comment></comment>


Spore creature creator and steganography - <AUTHOR> http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200806/spore_creature_creator_and_steganography.html <comment><USER2> Steganography has always interested me but using it in this way never really occurred to me. It would be cool to see someone do the same kind of thing with hCard info. You could embed your hCard in a profile picture and then by just dragging, or saving, the picture you would have their contact info.</comment>


Runtime Analysis of the M-to-N Schedulling Model (1996) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50.4682&rep=rep1&type=pdf <comment><USER2> >By introducing a second layer of scheduling, the M-to-N model makes performance tuning to the model exceedingly difficult.

Reminds me of Simon Marlow's work[1] on tuning the Haskell runtime for a specific use at fb.

[1] [https://simonmar.github.io/posts/2016-12-08-Haskell-in- the-d...](https://simonmar.github.io/posts/2016-12-08-Haskell-in-the- datacentre.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> You still see M-N models in many software systems but they are used almost exclusively to keep one flavor of work from hogging resources.

Everyone else gets one share of the processor and the executor/task/job pool splits M shares among N tasks or queues up all but the first M, or combines elements of both strategies.

</comment><comment><USER4> Go uses the M-to-N model for it's goroutines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I am actually curious to hear Brian's take on Go's runtime, given its rather impressive performance characteristics. Brian is also bearish on segmented stacks.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Secrypto API to encrypt/decrypt text - <AUTHOR> http://secrypto.herokuapp.com <comment><USER2> Ok, what are the advantages of using this tool? what form of encryption are you using? Why this is a thing?

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a way to HTTPS / TLS curl? If not, this tool is pretty useless from my cryptographic understanding, since someone could see the transactions if they had access to your web logs. Not nitpicking, just bein' real.</comment>


6 Tips to Recovering From a Typo in Your Printed Sales Letter or Brochure - <AUTHOR> http://www.smallbusinessgurus.com/content/view/477/65/ <comment><USER2> Before I even read the title or realized the point of the article, I noticed they used the word "envelops" instead of envelopes in the introduction... What irony. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> One man's irony is another man's prize :-) The question is...can you find the second one? The person who finds the second one first wins a prize.

<comment><USER2> Hey, Ben pointed to my comment in his comment on your site, and you gave him the prize? :)

Here are some more mistakes I found: Give the bonus only to people _that_ [WHO] respond to the offer in your main piece.

Here's one I found that same day, in the PDF article: (www.pdfonline.com). _PRF_ Online is an easy to use service to create PDFs.</comment></comment></comment>


New Macbook overheats in Hangouts and Skype, microphone input garbled - <AUTHOR> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7048457 <comment><USER2> The 'garbled microphone input' seems a bit of a red herring, it's likely that the thermal throttling is kicking in which is causing the audio recording app to get slowed to below real time making it sound like garbled.

I've had the laptop for about a month now, and yes, Hangouts will bring it to its knees, but for some reason Hangouts will bring just about any laptop to its knees.

Battery life is as advertised, you do get 8-10 hours of web browsing, and shockingly, about 6-7 hours doing some light development work with Xcode. I've definitely had times when battery life seemed a lot worse than it should have been but that has been solved with a quick trip to Activity Monitor to see what's eating the CPU.

Spotlight Web Content was a common culprit so I turned off Spotlight Suggestions (also Bookmarks and History) and that made a noticeable difference.

I've only had heat come up as an issue once; turns out it needs to be on a hard surface when you're doing something CPU intensive. Who'd have guessed?

<comment><USER3> >Hangouts will bring just about any laptop to its knees.

because Google insist on forcing their own codec and encodes in pure software bypassing hardware h264 encoder block on cpu/gpu.

<comment><USER4> They insist on forcing, for HD as someone noted earlier, an open and non- patent-encumbered codec. h.264 is great, but it is an Apple-centric solution.

<comment><USER5> The way I see it, H.264 is more about practicality than anything else. Hardware acceleration for it is everywhere. VP9 is great, but until there's hardware acceleration available for it, it's a bad idea to use the codec on devices where high CPU usage is undesirable.

<comment><USER6> Codec & hardware acceleration is a chicken-and-egg problem: who would include h/w acceleration for a codec that isn't being used?

<comment><USER5> It wasn't a problem when H.264 was new. There were devices that had H.264 decoding support well before it was popular with users; I remember iPod videos sporting support for it back when DivX/XviD and flv was the norm. Eventually because devices had support for it, people switched over to H.264 and the older standards died out.

<comment><USER6> > It wasn't a problem when H.264 was new. There were devices that had H.264 > decoding support well before it was popular with users;

You might be happy to know that it's not a problem for WebM either! There are[1] devices that have VP8 decoding support right now. Just not all devices (just as not all devices had H.264 hardware decoders when it was new.)

Obviously the iPod would supported H264 since Apple were a member of the consortium pushing it (MPEG-LA)[2]. Similarly, ARM Chromebooks support VP8 because Google is behind it. Several chip-makers have promised support: Intel is taking a wait and see attitude [1] and might support it in the future

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM#Hardware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebM#Hardware)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#H.264.2FMPEG-4_AVC_lic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA#H.264.2FMPEG-4_AVC_licensors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hangouts is awful in general...it heats up even very powerful computers in the process of showing pixellated, glitchy video with distorted audio, even over a very low latency 200 megabit connection. We use it every day for work and its a source of constant frustration. Honestly I'd prefer a conference call on a landline, we have the video off most of the time anyway because it seems to cause more audio dropouts when it's on.

<comment><USER8> turn off HD quality and it stops using the VP8 codec (no hardware acceleration) and drops back to H264 which is hardware accelerated. My cpu usage goes from 80% to less than 20%.

edit: only applied to hangout

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a severe problem for me with my 15" MBP. Long meetings (heck, even short) with colleagues make it extremely hot to the touch (keyboard and frame) and destroy the battery. Same with streaming netflix or youtube videos. Microphone seems fine but not great quality.

It wasn't my decision to purchase this computer, it was my company's, but I'm very disappointed in its performance at simple two way audio video communication via hangouts and skype.

I'll add that it can also get extremely hot just from running a simple local node.js server and mongo database. Not sure how normal that is but they seem like they should be fine considering i have no incoming or outgoing traffic, it's just keeping the port open.

<comment><USER10> I'm relatively new to Macs, but it seems like it's partially a cultural thing. When I first got a macbook for work, I found my fingertips got really uncomfortable from how hot the keyboard and mousepad got, and assumed there was a problem to be solved, but several Mac-centric colleagues said they just got used to it.

I wound up downloading some random app that lets you control when the fans turn on - and voila, a cool(ish) keyboard. As near as I can tell, by default OSX intentionally just leaves the fans off until well after things get uncomfortable.

<comment><USER11> I've gotten first degree burns from an old MBP that overheated. It's like they didn't test it..

<comment><USER12> This has been an issue ever since they went unibody. A single, solid block of aluminum in direct contact with heat generating components. It's hard to believe they didn't intend the unibodies to act as heatsinks. Hasn't hurt their popularity at all, though.

<comment><USER13> I had a first generation MBP Intel back in 2006 , Core Duo, before the unibodies came out. Now THAT one was hot - I had to keep the fans cranked through software all the time or it would randomly shutdown from overheating. Apparently it was a misapplication of thermal paste in the manufacturing process.

Other unibodies have been okay, the retina MBP being the best so far I find at even heat dissipation.

<comment><USER12> I also had a pre-unibody core duo. Mine was a 17 inch, though. Guess mine had all its thermal paste in the right place. :) It got hot enough to be uncomfortable, but not hot enough to burn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hangouts over taxes just about any machine, it's ridiculous. FCP exporting a 4k video uses less CPU than Hangouts does to show a choppy video feed.

<comment><USER15> Are you using Chrome? Apparently under Safari Hangout uses much less CPU.

<comment> TD-Linux This seems highly doubtful. They are both Google's code - one is just packaged as a plugin rather than built into Chrome.

<comment><USER16> It's possible that they are using different video codecs. On Safari H264 and on Chrome VP9 but with only H264 being hardware accelerated.

This is just a total guess of course (and I'd have thought it would depend on what the other end of the chat supports as well), but I bring it up since people have recently been complaining about YouTube in Chrome using far more CPU than YouTube in Safari, because YouTube uses VP9 in Chrome. e.g. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330357)

On the other hand it's possible that it's just the general suckiness of Chrome video performance, even when using H264 it seems to use over twice as much power as Safari: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806976)

<comment> TD-Linux Well, Hangouts on Safari is a Google plugin. I believe it generally uses VP8. Hardware doesn't matter, as what's needed is an _encoder_ \- and hardware encoders usually aren't good enough to use for real time chat. Encoding video for any format well is going to be costly, hence the original article mentions complains about Skype as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds just like the 2011 i7 MBP I had or "the cockburner" as it was officially named.

Might be the CPU throttling due to heat. There is no active cooling system on the new MacBook by the looks so I reckon it's thermally managing itself by doing less causing other problems.

<comment><USER18> Beware, "the cockburner" can make you sterile.

<comment><USER17> It got replaced. Plus I have three children already :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is one of the reasons (along with a discrete GPU) that I stick exclusively to the 15" rMBP line. Yes, fans are unsexy and all that, but it's got two of them, they're very good and fairly quiet, and the shell is big enough to serve as a decent heat sink by itself.

<comment><USER20> The 15" rMBP will apparently throttle if you load the CPU + discrete GPU at the same time. That said, I have no use for GPU, and I've been pretty impressed by how cool it stays given the thin profile and quad-core CPU.

<comment><USER21> Do the fans stay at a pretty consistent level, or do they throttle a lot from quiet to noisy?

I'm thinking of getting one, but the people I know who have them tend to use them in noisy environments and can't answer my questions.

<comment><USER20> It depends on what you're doing. Most of the time, the fans are totally inaudible. Even at full bore, it's an unobtrusive "woosh" not an annoying "whine." And Apple probably has the best fan control in the business in terms of not fluctuating between different speed ranges. It's actually kind of a shock to go back to a ThinkPad and hear the fan struggling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If your computer is behaving in this manner, the cause is most likely broken hardware, not a design defect. The only solution is to take your laptop to an Apple store for diagnosis and repair.

I've had the 12" MacBook since its release in April. I use it as my main development machine. I have no problems with Skype, Hangouts, WebRTC video chats, etc. I've had exactly one overheat warning, and it was completely understandable. I was outside, in 90ºF weather, and my laptop was in direct sunlight. I maxxed-out the CPU cores for too long. OS X warned me that performance was reduced and, "Closing Google Chrome may help cool your Mac down." That's it. No data loss. No suspending to RAM. I ignored the warning and my laptop worked fine.

Hundreds of thousands of people use the same Apple hardware in the same way. If Hangouts or Skype reliably caused these problems on the MacBook, tens of thousands would be complaining. Instead, we just get a few isolated cases. Curiously, they don't seem to troubleshoot by checking Activity Monitor, Intel Power Gadget[1], etc.

 _Every_ time I've managed to troubleshoot with someone who complained about these sorts of issues, the cause has been an overlooked (or deliberately unmentioned) hardware issue. For example: Someone posted a video of their extremely slow MacBook[2]. I helped him troubleshoot, and it eventually came to light that the laptop had been dropped, bending the frame. It was so bad that the heatsink had been separated from the CPU! It's amazing that the machine ran at all. The video is a testament to Apple's design and engineering, not an indictment of it.

Now when I hear about supposed design issues in popular hardware, my explanations weight toward "clueless/disingenuous user" and away from "design defect." Both happen, but the former is much more common than the latter.

1\. [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power- gadget...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget-20)

2\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FF_iYZg5oU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FF_iYZg5oU)

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a latest-model rMBP 15" with a R9 M370X. I use it for developing iOS apps and it works great… even with long periods of repeated tweak+compile sessions, it only gets moderately warm and still manages good battery life. The only thing I can find that really gets it cooking is WoW, but laptops aren't made for gaming anyway and the heat is fixed by dropping WoW's settings down to something more reasonable.

The thing about modern Macs is that Apple designs the hardware (and OS, for that matter) assuming that the user will be running well-written, efficient applications. When you use software like Chrome and Hangouts where efficiency wasn't ever a serious consideration and extended periods of 100% CPU usage are a given, well yeah, of course you're going to get a lot of heat. The solution is to use (and thus, encourage the creation of) well-optimized, efficient software, not to cram in more cooling.

Honestly, there's no reason for desktop software to be as gluttonous as it is. If desktop software developers went to the lengths that mobile devs do to make things runs smoothly, we'd be in good shape. It's fine to make use of the absurd power than modern computers afford us, but only do so when the power is truly needed (video encoding, etc) or when there's some significant benefit to the user. Even then, do so in an intelligent way (use CPU cycles for the actual task at hand, not for expensive abstraction layers, VMs, etc) and offload as much as possible to HW acceleration instead of lazily dumping everything on the CPU.

</comment><comment><USER23> My 2011 MBP gets super hot when viewing Flash videos or browsing particularly javascript heavy websites, so it doesn't surprise me to hear that these things are struggling under the load.

</comment><comment><USER24> I had the same problem with the first rMBP. I used Intel's power gadget and could see the CPU clocking down to .8 GHz after a few minutes of Google hangouts.

After a clean install and still having the problem Applecare let me schedule a pickup for my laptop. Had it back in less than a week and then everything was fine.

So the less was to gather the evidence with utilities (such as the Intel power gadget), and then once you know it is hardware problem you can just keep pushing until you get a replacement but feel perfectly justified since you have evidence.

</comment><comment><USER25> Mac or PC, the idea that laptops should not get warm, or that you put them directly on your naked legs or something and then you complain about their heat is completely alien to me...

<comment><USER26> And yet, it's not that strange; laptop should be used on the lap, hence the name, right?

High CPU usage, fine, but for regular things that should be perfectly optimized by now like watching videos or using Skype shouldn't cause as much heat as - apparently - it does.

<comment><USER25> > _And yet, it 's not that strange; laptop should be used on the lap, hence > the name, right?_

Maybe that's the origin of the name, but there are, well, desks, kitchen tables, folding trays on airplanes and tons of other things besides.

Who really uses their laptop "on the lap"? Is that a comfortable position to read or type in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Honestly once I though Google is doing their deep learning processing on my machine when I use Hangouts!! Are they using CPU for image processing? That could be an explanation.

</comment><comment><USER28> Every aluminum macbook(pro/air) that I have used gets hot from basic use. The computer will feel hot to the touch because aluminum is such a good thermal conductor(170W/mK). smcfancontrol can be your friend if you have legitimate heat issues.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'll preface this statement by saying that I LOVE my Macbook Pro. (Retina, 15-inch, mid 2014) However, I do find it disheartening that it overheats so frequently/quickly. It generally overheats if I have more than 8 or 9 chrome tabs or I have a server running (ember-cli causes it to instantly overheat). The worst and hottest it's ever been was when I tried to play Starcraft on it the first day I got it. Haven't tried since... My wife is always joking about how my computer sounds like it is rocket ship about to take off because of the noise the fans make on a consistent basis.

<comment><USER28> Define overheat...the MBP just gets hot "overheat" or greyscreen of death "overheat"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Mid-2014 15" MBP (Top of the line model with upgraded processor)

Even with the upgraded processor I have no problems with heat while playing 3D games on battery power.

I would contact Apple.

</comment><comment><USER31> Notice this is coming from a user who did not even use a task monitor first. He writes in a followup post that he had a task maxing his CPU on the background.

Every system should come with a simple task monitor installed and running in a visible place, e.g. an icon in the Mac menu bar. Yes I know about the Activity Monitor - it's not enough.

It's basically like being sold a car without the engine oil temperature gauge.

<comment><USER32> This is why the first thing I install on any Mac is MenuMeters. Beautiful, simple, and, as you impress, essential:

[http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/](http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not sure why this is FP on HN right now, but if we're doing Apple Support this morning, then I just want to say that all of the Macbook Air I have owned had overheating issues after about 1 year. The fan starts going crazy and battery drains fast. The first time it happened I thought it was a fluke, but now it's annoying.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've used Skype on my iPad to do one-on-one video calls lasting about two hours and not had any issues with audio/video quality, overheating, etc.

Now, I know that iPads and MacBooks are completely different beasts, but it's puzzling that something that works so well on an iPad can work so poorly on a MacBook.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm very curious how the new Macbook compensates for overheating when there's no fan. Anybody know?

<comment><USER36> It throttles the CPU to a lower energy state when using the chassis as a heat sink becomes insufficient to maintain the temperature within some thermal operating envelope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yeah, my 2013 MacBook Air would turn into a little jet turbine if I was on skype for too long. But to be fair, Windows laptops do the same thing, I have no idea why video encoding for skype is so stupidly intensive. Is there no way to do it in hardware?

</comment><comment><USER38> It would be interesting to know which browser(s) they are using for Hangouts and if they observe the same behavior in Safari if it's not the one used.

</comment><comment><USER39> What adds to the problem seems to be that Intel was overly optimistic with respect to the ability of their Core M processors to run fanless.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel-core-m- pe...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel-core-m-performance)

In summary, yes they can run fanless when idle, but under load, they will be heavily throttled due to thermal constraints.

Maybe next generation we can finally have truly fanless ultrabook-level performance.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if this has anything to do with Apple soldering on plenty of the hardware components (such as ram) or not.

<comment><USER41> Not really. Soldered ram should actually produce a tiny but less heat, since you're eliminating the resistance of the connector on the system board and the circuit board the ram would be attached to, to slot into the connector. It should be measurable, but small. OTOH, eliminating the connector makes a significant different to the system height.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> My brand new Macbook overheats from watching Netflix. Battery life when working (no video) is about 3.5 hours. Was really hoping for that 7-8 hours.</comment>


Google Maps Timeline - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/maps/timeline <comment><AUTHOR> Submission Statement: While I'm sure this is very old, I hadn't realized it existed. And it's very strange to see a history of my every movement, every day, for several years -- mostly correlated with my owning an Android phone.</comment>


Once again, Path steals your data without permission - <AUTHOR> https://eeqj.com/20130201/path-privacy/ <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem nearly as clear-cut to me as Path's earlier grabbing of users' address book data. In this case, Path is accessing metadata of photos which the user has expressly granted Path access to. This is different from real-time location data.

<comment><USER3> I agree -- I think this is more Apple's problem than anything.

If I disable location data for an app, Apple shouldn't allow any form of my location to be passed to that app.

<comment><USER4> Path managed to screw up so bad last time they forced a _change in the OS_. A year later and they're caught again uploading some of the user's data that weren't explicitly granted access too. At least they can't scan the pictures without you choosing one in the photo picker.

At this point, I think Apple needs to pull the app and revoke their developers license.

I seriously doubt they'll do that. It's more likely some new law will be passed because of this than Apple will take such a big step.

And I don't think a new law is likely at all.

<comment><USER5> At this point, Apple should change their camera app to make it clear when it's geo-tagging.

<comment><AUTHOR> I _want_ geotagged photos. I take tons of photos and use the timestamp+geotag to archive lots of other datestamped data according to my travels, not just photos.

I just don't want every sketch-ass third-party app that I want to post some scenery into to know exactly where I am.

Too much to ask?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a silly thing to feign being outraged about. If you don't want Path to have access to your photos, then do not explicitly give it access to your photos. If you give the Camera app access to Location Services, then EXIF data is as much a part of your photos as aspect ratio, resolution, and the content of your photo. This is no different than if you gave Twitter access to Location Services, then gave Path access to your Twitter account, and then were supposedly outraged at Path being able to read the location of your tweets.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not feigning - I did not wish to provide Path (or my Path contacts) with my current location. Yet, Path published my location without my consent (after I had turned off location services for the application).

There is nothing that suggests that granting applications access to the content of your photos also grants them access to your current location.

<comment><USER7> You are not granting them access to your current location...you are granting them access to the photo's location.

Facebook and Twitter also makes available the location of your photos. Is there a particular reason you are singling out Path? I hope it's not a stretch to assume this is a page view grabbing technique.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't use Facebook because of their privacy track record, and I have all geolocation disabled for Twitter.

Twitter respects the geolocation setting, and strips the exif location data from photos when serving them. Whether or not they do this before upload is unknown, but pictures posted to Twitter from the iOS app do not include location data when geotagging of tweets is disabled.

The reason I'm not picking on them is because neither of them (Twitter due to Doing The Right Thing, Facebook due to lack of opportunity) have published my private data in express violation of my wishes. Path did so today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one that doesn't think this is wrong? Metadata seems like fair game to me and I hardly think that Path is deliberately trying to steal data. They are probably just trying to make their user experience better.

(That's not to say we shouldn't have a discussion about data ownership and privacy. Just that we should wait to be outraged at things that actually deserve our outrage.)

<comment><USER9> I agree about the outrage part. There may not be malicious intent from Path, but I do think that there's a better way of allowing users to control their data. A simple extra option of "include location data from photos" would mitigate this entire scenario.

<comment><USER4> > There may not be malicious intent from Path

Malicious implies they're trying to do harm, which I don't think is the case. But geotagging posts when the user clearly didn't authorize you to access that information is dubious and underhanded at a minimum.

After last year's incident, they've lost all benefit of doubt.

<comment><USER10> I agree based on a dictionary definition of malicious, but I think people are using it here to mean "things that they know users explicitly don't want and are doing anyway". Having privacy settings and then completely ignoring them might not be malicious - you don't intend to harm your customers, only to increase your profits in some way - but I think that common usage of the word "malicious" would include that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So I think the problem they have with this is that it makes Path look duplicitous.

On the one hand, you've indicated to Path that you're not interested in them making your location public. Maybe from an API standpoint maybe that just means location data off your phone, but from the user's standpoint, in a "use case" sense, it means your location, in any form.

And then Path adheres to that-- because they have too in an API sense-- but then goes right ahead and works out your location _differently_ and uses that.

It reminds me of Airlines who advertise unreasonably cheap tickets and then have a bunch of extra fees and forced insurance which makes the total you have to pay right back up with everyone else. They aren't lying, in a vacuum their tickets are cheaper, but in the real world they aren't.

Path aren't lying either: they are not using your phone's location data off your phone, just like you asked. In the real world though, they're still doing it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't see any stealing taking place here. Path doesn't access your location data as you instructed it. It accesses your photos' exif data which is a completely different thing.

Even if path didn't process and show in html these data, since you uploaded an image file which contains them, they would be available to anyone with access to this -now public- image through other means, like a simple browser plugin.

Let's go over this again: you set path to not access your phone's location api, you didn't set path to strip your exif data from your photos. If this feature is missing, you can ask for it.

Since you are a security researcher I would expect you to understand the real issue and warn your readers. Instead you act as you discovered a security flaw. What security issue you'll discover next? That credit cards have interest?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm a little bit in line with the other folks - if you grant access to a photo, the entirety of that Photo (exif data et al) should be available to the app.

I have another question (and I really don't mean it as snarkly as it'll sound) - if you are trying to keep yourself hidden - why are you posting to a social network (Path) and an aggregation site (hn)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Should my desire for my personal location to remain private (for whatever reason: safety, professional courtesy, contractual obligations under NDA, et c) mean that I should not want to maintain any other type of digitally- mediated social communication with my colleagues, friends, and family?

That doesn't really make sense now, does it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not clear in the post: Is Path taking location information from photos and geotagging posts that do not include these pictures? Or are they just publishing the picture that you gotagged yourself and asked path to publish?

The former is outrageously slimy and the latter is clearly absolutely reasonable.

<comment><USER6> As far as I can tell from testing the app, it only posts the location of a photo when you explicitly post it to your Path. With Location Services turned off, I posted a photo that lacked a geotag and it contained no location information. I then posted a photo that had a geotag, and it posted the city the photo was taken in. Also, curiously, if you post a geotagged photo without any description text, it seems to omit the location data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This post annoyed me. I have a solution: don't use Path. Also, don't share your photos. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER16> as little as this adds to the discussion, i think the title of the article is a huge exaggeration - uploading a geotagged image to a photosharing site that then displays the geotag in a user friendly format is hardly "stealing your data"

<comment><USER17> Clearly this guy doesn't know the legal grounds for libel. You can't throw unfounded accusations of malicious intent around. He deserves to be sued for publishing this BS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> iOS 5 used to require that you prompt the user for location data in order to have access to photos camera roll in a non standard user interface.

iOS 6 introduced the 'Access to Photos' privacy settings/prompting that separated photos from location.

This 'location' embedded in photos is different than user location, and I guess should really be considered a third case. I think 'photo metadata' might be an acceptable third option with an explanation of all that contains. Some photographers don't want their non-location EXIF data known too.

</comment><comment><USER19> I happen to like this feature. If I don't get a chance to post a photo at the time I take it Path will know where it was taken if I post it later.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a completely irresponsible headline. If loose claims of "theft" like this were directed at my company, I'd sue for libel.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have a very hard time believing Path is doing anything underhanded or malicious here. Link bait?

<comment><USER17> His whole twitter feed is link bait. And he's deleting all disagreements in the comments on his blog. We have fed the troll.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Once the data leaves your device, it is all business. There is nothing much you can do about it.</comment>


Every City Should Have an API: Let's Start With Watertown, MA - <AUTHOR> http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/09/06/every-city-should-have-an-api-lets-start-with-watertown-ma/ <comment><USER2> For the city of Los Angeles, I would love an API that takes a street address and an array of options and returns the street parking restrictions that apply. There are lots of places with confusing signage (e.g. [http://www.wreckedmagazine.com/images/joeyredmond/typicalpar...](http://www.wreckedmagazine.com/images/joeyredmond/typicalparkinginlosangeles.jpg)), and it would be nice to get a boolean response to the question "Can I park here now?"

<comment><USER3> My god I would love that. Can it have a guarantee that you won't get a parking ticket? Just kidding.

That said with a tool like that wouldn't the # of parking tickets issue by any city go down and thus they would have an incentive not to allow such a tool to be widely deployed?

I swear that parking signs are deliberately put up to confuse people so they can get more revenue!

<comment><USER2> Well, according to their mission statement, their goal is not to generate revenue, but _"to ensure transportation routes in Los Angeles flow safely and are not blocked"_ (<http://ladot.lacity.org/tf_Parking_Enforcement.htm>)

Of course we know the real reason is $$$. But if we take them at their word, providing access to this data would help them achieve their goal by helping motorists park properly and legally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out data.gov.uk. They have APIs for lots of data for almost everything including legislation, schools and roads.

        http://data.gov.uk/linked-data

Here is a road:

        http://transport.data.gov.uk/doc/road/A454

Jenni Tennison writes on her blog about the use of RDFa, Microdata, URLs, versioning of URLs and other interesting topics:

        http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/140
        http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/141

</comment><comment><USER5> The original post this refers to is at [http://www.mattmacdonald.com/2011/08/20/api-access- questions...](http://www.mattmacdonald.com/2011/08/20/api-access-questions- for-tyler-technologies-creator-of-munis/) where Matt, the Watertown resident, wrote to TylerTech. Apparently they responded with a letter I'll paraphrase as "no."

<comment><USER6> The answer was not "no", it was "We won't discuss the private details of a client's (the municipal government) system, please contact the client directly."

Original Text

"We value our relationship with our clients and are committed to protecting their privacy and security protocols. I have shared your request with the town and would direct you to the Town of Watertown for information regarding your request."

<comment><USER7> And this is a proper response from the vendor. The vendor should not attempt to get involved with political decisions about what should be available and what should not be available. They honor their contract, they stay out of trouble.

If the town officially holds the position that the information is "non-public" or "secret," then you go to the courts, not to the vendor.

Now, if the town agrees and goes to the vendor and the vendor says "no" or "that'll be a 10x increase in fees," it becomes the town's responsibility to find a compliant vendor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe Watertown is different but every local government I've had to deal with is crawling with luddites.

<comment><USER9> It's a slow process, for sure. It's difficult to even explain the utility of an API to the non tech-savvy until you show them an app that uses the data.

I live in NYC and they're doing a great job- but change isn't immediate. I'm really interested in the area of governmental data- I feel like there's a need/use for an open wiki style directory of info, but <http://opengovernmentdata.org/> is already a good resource.

<comment><USER10> I agree that it's a slow process, but it's happening. At the city level, it's good to have someone within the Mayor's office or City Council that really cares about it. It's starting to happen here in Philly with <http://www.opendataphilly.org>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've wanted to do something similar except with Real Estate transaction data in the state of MA. Most residential real estate transaction data is available via each counties registry of deeds website (<http://www.masslandrecords.com/malr/controller>). The challenge is much of this data is stored using proprietary systems with limited (or no) APIs and different counties use different systems.

Much like with Real Estate data, the biggest hurdle with this initiative is there is no standardized convention from one city to another. With data being all over the place it makes developing a community driven data gathering platform "wicked hard". What I think would be a good starting point is define some standards so that when the ad-hoc data is transformed it follows an agreed upon convention. This approach would allow for a centralized data sharing platform to be developed making data available via all kinds of different formats(RDF,JSON, etc).

tl;dr: Awesome idea but comes with some difficult challenges.

</comment><comment><USER12> Shout out to PDX API by Max Ogden: <http://pdxapi.com/>

</comment><comment><USER13> Fred Wilson @ Union Square Ventures is a proponent of NYC Big Apps. I believe he's on the judging panel?

Here is where ideas are submitted: <http://nycbigapps.com/>

Here are finished apps: <http://www.nyc.gov/html/mome/digital/html/apps/apps.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER14> I did this, but for a specific city service in Madison, WI. I built an API for the Madison Metro bus service that provides a nice web service for developers, but does ugly screen scraping behind the scenes.

<http://www.smsmybus.com/api/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Max Ogden (a fellow at Code for America) has been working on a site to help turn Excel spreadsheets and CSV files into usable JSON APIs for developers. You should check out datacouch.com — might be of interest.

</comment><comment><USER16> Matt has a website where he posts all of his awesome projects and dealings in his efforts to open up Watertown: <http://www.mattmacdonald.com/>

</comment><comment><USER17> Lots of open datasets can be found at <http://open.mflask.com/>

</comment><comment><USER18> there should be API but for programming the city. and regulations written in programming language.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think Google's recaptcha has gone greedy off late? - <AUTHOR> For past some time, on a lot of websites I visit the usual one click 'recaptcha' doesn't work, and it asks me to click various images. That would be ok, but while previously you generally had to click just one category of images, recently I've been noticing they keep on showing multiple images in multiple categories (cars, bicycles, cross walks, buses etc.) and force us to click on all of them. Google is making us do slave work for free, and we don't seem to have many options if we want to use a particular website. Just wanted to check if anyone else has observed a similar pattern. <comment><USER2> I've noticed the same thing. It's pretty annoying.

The original premise of Recaptcha was: "Do good by helping digitize books".

Now it's: "Provide some free work classifying images so we can improve our commercial products, because the owner of the website is too cheap to pay for spam detection tech."

<comment><USER3> > too cheap to pay for spam detection tech.

Can you suggest alternative?

<comment><USER4> Honeypot hidden fields are still fascinatingly efficient. Plain old captcha, even self hosted, is not bad. Written text questions that need actual answers (2+3 = write in a word). Combine some of them, you're good to go.

<comment><USER3> Honeypot is bad because it does not prevent malicious users that can write bots. Same goes for 2 + 3.

Plain old captcha is pretty much the only choice AFAIK.

<comment><USER5> It really depends on what you are protecting. In many cases, no one is going to build a custom script to defeat your custom captcha method of they just want to spam your comments section. The problem with widely used systems is that it is more efficient to write a bot to circumvent them and then look for others who use the same captcha system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes I have absolutely noticed the same thing.

It seems to be quite excessive.

A few years ago it was like "we need to make sure you are not a robot".

Now it goes like this "we need to make sure you are not a robot ... oh yeah it seems like you are a human ... hey you have a moment to help me identify these road signs? how about these shop fronts? a few cars? ... thanks!"

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes, I also noticed this. It's especially annoying since many companies chose to implement "always on" Google Captcha on their login pages now (as they can't or won't implement proper defenses against brute-forcing). This makes logging in really painful. I guess for Google it's a pretty lucrative arrangement though as they basically get billions of free click workers that annotate their ML training data.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yeah, noticed this. They are forcing us to solve multiple captchas for no reason.

Google wants to improve their AI for FREE!

<comment><USER9> I wonder if Foogle is crowdsourcing Waymo's vision system...

<comment><USER5> Funny thought ... at the scale that Google operates, you could use still images to crowdsource waymo driving in real time on quite a few cars at once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my experience you are unlikely to have problems when you are logged into your Google account with an "old" cookie. If you block cookies, ads & third party js/trackers, use firefox containerisation and other privacy addons, they will punish you by letting you identify traffic lights for a few minutes.

The logical explanation is that they use various tracking methods to evaluate your "human score" and blocking them makes you suspicious, thus the repeated and increasingly hard tests.

<comment><USER11> > If you block cookies, ads & third party js/trackers (...) they will punish > you

Exactly. I feel like Google is trying to beat me into submission.

> the repeated and increasingly hard tests

I don't mind solving quick captcha, but I'm often asked to solve one after another, repeatedly, just to be told that I missed something and I have to do it again - even if I'm 100% sure that I solved the captchas correctly. It happens every day. This is malicious, abusive behaviour.

<comment><USER12> Also puts pressure on users to switch to chrome so that they avoid this hassle.

<comment><USER5> I get the same hassle in chrome. Haven't noticed it being any worse now that I switched to Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a conspiracy theory: they track the persistence level of the user and if the user is very persistent then there is no harm is giving them a few extra puzzles to solve right? I honestly think this might be the case.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes, 20+ times sometimes. Totally user-hostile.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes. In fact I posted a similar thread only a few weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18320236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18320236)

This along with GDPR popups and now having to verify every device you log in with via email (separate to 2fa) is making login a real pain across the web.

</comment><comment><USER16> An aside: Some sites have recaptcha that solves in one try everytime while most will present 5-7 images. I'd assume that there is some sort of aggressiveness setting for it, which may be set to very high by default(benefits google I suppose?) when not configured properly ...

</comment><comment><USER17> I've effectively given up on Google Captchas. If there's a site that asks me to go through with one, and it expects me to click on pictures, I just close the site and do something else. I absolutely refuse to play their monkey through tens of images with excruciatingly slow fade-outs/-ins. They've become frustratingly obnoxious over the past year or two.

<comment><USER16> That is not an option anymore as all major services use captcha. Previously, I'd just delete my account/cancel subscription & reported my irritation with recaptcha, but now all major services I need to use are doing it, so no choice. Only Amazon/MS/Apple using old wiggly captcha, everyone else is on recaptcha :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yup, I've noticed that for several weeks now. The other day I had to click traffic lights for 7 images to submit a comment somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER19> My anecdotal experience: it's much more work-intensive on mobile sites than desktop. I seem to have to do multiple rounds of "storefront", "crosswalk", "bridge" detection before it finally goes away.

makes me long for the days of Rapidshare Cats.

</comment><comment><USER20> Not only those recaptchas — I just had a page present a Google-branded widget that asked me a market segmentation type personal question to allow me to read an article. I clicked the back button instead. The greed is indeed a bit over the top.

</comment><comment><USER21> Yeah, I've been noticing that too. The best part is that they don't even work that well against bots anymore; I'm literally running a Firefox plugin that autofills audio captchas with Google's own services.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have been having the exact same thought. Lately, it's been too much work, it says 'failed, try again' until you do a bunch of them - cars, traffic lights, bicycles, etc. It makes me mad.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yep super annoying. I know sears went bankrupt but now you can't use their website at all b/c of the recaptcha. If I were these companies I'd cancel the Google recaptcha services.

</comment><comment><USER24> Also, if you're using Firefox, you will encounter those "verify you're not a robot" far more than if you're using Chrome which is something I hate.

<comment><USER19> Interesting. I have noticed that recaptchas can be frequent on Firefox Android, and yet I hardly ever run into them on Mozilla Brave Android, which is built on Chromium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The weird thing to me is that I'm either checking a box and doing nothing or going through some annoying process. There isn't much middle ground.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've entirely given up when I encounter a Google captcha. It thinks I'm a robot 90+% of the time and takes so long it's just not worth it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I often struggle to pass reCAPTCHA, it usually takes 2-3 tries before I am considered a human-being

</comment><comment><USER28> I have noticed too. It asked me so many times, I was really annoyed.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think recaptcha is terrible for many reasons. That is one of them.

<comment><USER30> What are the others?

<comment><USER31> Tracking?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yeah need some deep neural network solution to solve these for us.

</comment><comment><USER33> Maybe blame the bots and spammers that have led to a situation on some sites where aggressive recaptcha is the only defense?

<comment><USER31> So far the only thing I saw that could break previous "squiggly text" style captchas was some research papers. I have yet to see any of it used in the wild.

So I doubt spammers brought this upon us - the previous captchas were more than effective at keeping them at bay already.

The real reason is shitty Google being greedy and needing someone to label their training data.

<comment><USER34> Reddit has tons of bots and I've heard Twitter is just as bad.

<comment><USER31> A lot of social media "bots" are actually human farms against which no captcha can defend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Do you use a VPN OP?

I assumed that was my issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do use at times, yes, but mostly not. Even when I'm not using it and logged in with my 'official' personal account, it shows these images to click on, at least three sets of multiple images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I call it censorcaptcha lately. it is pretty clear when the algorithm put you in hell-ban mode.

hide your cookies from google and get removed from any internet discussion. only the voices oblivious to google tracking have a place now.</comment>


Samsung Global Privacy Policy – SmartTV Supplement - <AUTHOR> http://marker.to/3C2icG

<comment><USER2> site attempts to install a chrome extension.</comment>


Introducing GitHub Checks for continuous integration - <AUTHOR> https://blog.github.com/2018-05-07-introducing-checks-api/ <comment><USER2> Really happy to see that GitHub ship more often lately. This feature seems really well done - I'm a bit bothered that the API is reserved only for apps installed through their marketplace - it'll be impossible for instance to report a custom Jenkins job there.

<comment><USER3> The Checks API is available for all GitHub Apps (the next-generation of GitHub integrations, see: [https://developer.github.com/apps/](https://developer.github.com/apps/)), not just apps on the Marketplace. That said, I'm not aware of a Jenkins plugin that acts as a GitHub App (yet).</comment></comment>


Former Yahoo Engineers Shed Light On Why Delicious And Other Acquisitions Failed - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/18/former-yahoo-engineers-shed-light-on-why-delicious-and-other-acquisitions-failed/ <comment><USER2> It's much more interesting to read the original Quora thread instead of the pre-digested TechCrunch commentary.

[http://www.quora.com/Yahoo-Acquisitions/Why-did-the-web- serv...](http://www.quora.com/Yahoo-Acquisitions/Why-did-the-web-services- group-at-Yahoo-fail-after-acquiring-Flickr-Delicious-Upcoming-MyBlogLog-and- others)</comment>