I Won $104M for Blowing the Whistle But Was the Only One Who Went to Jail - <AUTHOR> https://melmagazine.com/i-won-104-million-for-blowing-the-whistle-on-my-company-but-somehow-i-was-the-only-one-who-went-to-7ed8a808d50c <comment><USER2> A little more detail from a neutral source on why Birkenfeld was jailed: [http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1928897...](http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1928897,00.html)

<comment><USER3> One difference between the two stories is that the Time article says he went to the Feds _because_ of the problem with his bonus. That doesn't make sense because he had already spirited out the UBS documents which he wouldn't have had access to after resigning. He also didn't know at the time that he would eventually get a whistblower bonus. So the separation bonus was real money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This almost makes some kind of sense. The "whistleblower award" he got was the percentage of recovery the IRS pays as a bounty for intelligence on tax avoidance schemes; it's a portion of the money he actually helped recover for the government. There is a rational case to make for someone being both fully culpable for wrongdoing while still remaining entitled to bounties they've satisfied.

For another complicated IRS recovery bounty case, see the story about Vanguard's "internal whistleblower" who is making the case to the IRS that their cost-saving structure is an unfair advantage, and that they owe taxes on those savings to the government. If that "whistleblower" prevails, he'll have harmed the retirement savings of tens of millions of Americans, all of whom benefit from Vanguard's novel structure. But there you go!

As for this guy's superiors not being prosecuted, yeah, that sucks. The prosecutors can only make the cases they can make; this guy confessed.

<comment><USER5> "There is a rational case to make for someone being both fully culpable for wrongdoing while still remaining entitled to bounties they've satisfied."

Not really. Throwing them in jail sends the message that whistleblowing is looked down upon, and thus fewer people will do it. If the whistleblower doesn't have immunity from prosecution, the only way for them really to blow the whistle is to confess to a crime.

<comment><USER6> The mistake he made was implicating himself in a crime without getting the deal first. He should have gone in and said "I can testify to criminal behavior, but only if you'll give me immunity." That's probably what his bosses did.

<comment><USER4> It should be either-or. Either you take the time and the money, or you get off with a warning and don't make a dime from the IRS.

<comment><USER5> Why? Without that money, what's the incentive to blow the whistle? Not to mention that most whistleblowers are blacklisted, so they have a difficult time finding work after doing so. If they don't get that money, they'll likely end up under a bridge somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's worth noting that both Kathryn Keneally, the assistant attorney general mentioned in this article, and Kevin Downing, the lead prosecutor that got him jailed, both now work for private law firms helping large corporations shelter their taxes.

<comment><USER8> It's the elephant in the room, textbook revolving door regulatory capture.

<comment><USER9> So, let's ignore the SEC here for a second (which truly is a mess):

These folks are tax lawyers. They obey every ethical restriction placed on them by the state bars.

If they quit the federal government, where exactly are they to go to have a job?

<comment><USER8> The narrowness of career paths for highly specialized attorneys combined with the possibility of entering an altogether different remuneration universe at the law firms the DOJ is _theoretically_ adversarial to is what makes the revolving door spin, and the spinning of the door is what turns "adversarial" into " _theoretically_ adversarial". That is the problem. I didn't say there was an easy solution.

The generalization of this principal to other government institutions (agencies, departments, offices including even the presidency) is one of the great problems of governance of our time. You can take the remuneration discrepancy as the "0=1" conclusion of a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument against unfettered capitalism or as an argument that resistance is futile.

<comment><USER9> "That is the problem. I didn't say there was an easy solution."

I do not believe there is _any_ solution, actually, other than paying them enough to not want to go into private law firms :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whistle blowing is a total crap shoot. We'd have much more of it if that wasn't the case.

<comment><USER11> _If_ the data you provide is so damning you don't even need to prove that you're a reliable source, then you could submit it anonymously, as an encrypted block along with a public key to decrypt it.

Then, if things look favorable, you can step forward and prove your identity by supplying the matching private-key.

I expect the problem is that first "if" \-- authorities may want to be super- sure of the origin of the information before they proceed with it.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, an encrypted block? A public key? Like, for my desk drawer? A private key? But i alreaady gave the public key out how can it be private too?

See where i'm going with this? You've put a massive technical stumbling block on non-technical folks in order to expose wrong-doing.

<comment><USER11> Only if they do it _from scratch_. However, most of the possible encryption options and complicated parts of PKI aren't needed or relevant for this use- case.

It's arguably even simpler than a zip-file utility when it comes to workflows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It sounds like he didn't actually go to jail for the crime he blew the whistle on, per se, but for continuing to cover up part of the crime afterward by refusing to produce information they knew he had. Maybe all the folks who got non-prosecution agreements actually cooperated with investigators.

<comment><USER14> Maybe. Stories like this are what make me sick when I think about our Justice department. That, and Aaron Swartz...and a slew of other things I guess.

<comment><USER4> It's "Swartz". Aaron Swartz. Not "Schwartz".

<comment><USER15> That's what he said

<comment><USER4> No, it isn't. (I'm not hitting refresh on these things waiting for the corrections).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Green-Man " _I've tried to invest the reward money wisely. I collect Formula One memorabilia and antique hockey gear and sweaters from the NHL's Original Six teams._ "

I'm not sure if I understand the term "wisely" correctly.

</comment><comment><USER16> I was so confused by the chronology, particularly with respect to smuggling diamonds in a toothpaste tube[1], which I'd read about previously.

What I can't figure out is if that evidence was actually retained and entered as evidence at trial, or if the image in the article I linked was a reconstruction.

[1] [http://upstart.bizjournals.com/views/columns/2008/09/17/UBS-...](http://upstart.bizjournals.com/views/columns/2008/09/17/UBS- Diamond-Smuggling-Scandal.html?page=all)

</comment><comment><USER17> His book: [http://lucifersbanker.com/](http://lucifersbanker.com/)

As secretary of state, in an unusual move Hillary Clinton intervened with UBS to help it out with the IRS and DOJ. He seems to imply that Hillary brokered the treaty to release the 52,000 names -- a deal which they backed out of citing Swiss law after only providing 4,500 names -- because of the global corporate elites tied to our government, politicians from all over the globe and CIA who would be implicated. He notes that the CIA funneled the money from Iran-Contra through a Swiss bank account, and the plane used to deliver the 400 million in unmarked cash to Iran came from Geneva. He also thinks it was the CIA that leaked the Panama Papers, selectively exposing names.

After Hillary's deal, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according the foundation and the bank.

There is no evidence of any link between Hillary's involvement in the case and the bank's donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton. But her involvement with UBS is a prime example of how the Clintons' private and political activities overlap.

It should also be noted that in 2011 the Clinton Foundation announced a partnership with UBS on the CEO-UBS Small Business Advisory Program which connects "small businesses" with \- One-on-one pro-bono strategic financial and business counseling \- Access to the entire suite of UBS's resources, including senior leaders within the firm's marketing, human resources, operations and Investment Banking divisions \- Opportunities to network with industry influencers and major decision makers in both the private and public sectors.

The ten small businesses enrolled in the program had average annual revenues of $8.44 million in 2010 and together employed a total of 400 people at the end of 2010. The entrepreneurs and their companies who participated are: Julie Azuma, Different Roads to Learning, Inc.; Dinesh and Josh Boaz, Direct Agents, Inc.; K.Y. Chow, GM Printing; Richelieu Dennis, Sundial Creations; Kenny Lao, Rickshaw Dumpling Bar; Tamara Mangum-Thomas, Sharpened Image, Inc.; Mike DiMarino, Linda Tool; Marjorie Perry, MZM Construction & Management Company, Inc.; Jeffrey Smalls, Smalls Electrical Construction, Inc.; and Larry Velez, Sinu.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just to clarify a minor point -- the person he says threw her Blackberry across the room in frustration over his award is described by the NYT article as being frustrated because it was _larger than her department 's entire budget_, not necessarily because he got an award at all.

<comment><USER19> And she threw it "across the table", not across the room as he stated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Aha, but does he need to pay taxes on that $104 million? =)

<comment><USER21> Yes he does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> And this is just the tip of the ice berg. Think about all the scheming, scams, power mongering, corruption and outright crime that goes on in the banking business. Self regulation my ass. They're gambling on the whole planet basically. And ofc nothing will ever chance, because the banks own the goverments. A single "occupy wall street" protester will certainly get more time in the jail for minor offence than a bank exec would ever get for his crimes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Fuck this guy. No, seriously, fuck this guy. Why in the hell would anybody who's not an asshole decide to aid and abet the state in its coercive expropriation of money? I find this guy repulsive.

<comment><USER24> Huh? He's the _only_ person out of dozens/hundreds/thousands of employees who pursued. Everyone else is happy to have a comfy job that pays their bills, while burying their heads in the sand and praying that nobody shuts them down so they can keep their cushy salaries performing illegal work.

"Fuck this guy". No, fuck almost _everyone else_ who works for these kinds of companies, pretending like they're not the scum of society.

Word to the wise: if you work for this kind of company, and do not have the gumption to stand and fight, get the hell out and run for the hills. You might just wind up being the scapegoat; better to get out and let the other willing participants take the fall.

<comment><USER23> 'Illegal' does not mean immoral. I would dodge taxes if I could, as I don't much appreciate people robbing me.</comment></comment></comment>


The Last Days of Marissa Mayer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/11/19/the-last-days-of-marissa-mayer/ <comment><USER2> You know you are irrelevant and pretty impressive that you are a multi-billion tech company and HN doesn't even comment on you.</comment>


Facebook Suspends Controversial Data Sharing Feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_suspends_controversial_data_sharing_featu.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d3545c905e15b36%2C0 <comment><USER2> Facebook's relationship with the public has always been quite interesting. It presents a quandary: Facebook's main (only?) source of revenue comes from advertising, but if they make too much too public too soon, they'll lose their entire user base. So, they've been making changes over the last few years that greatly facilitate advertising, while minimizing the rate of increase of user dissatisfaction.

It bothers me enormously that users have complacently allowed Facebook to operate in this way. What's more fascinating is the level of innovation we see from a company that employs over 2,000 people: it's not too incredibly impressive. I'm sure most of their work is in maintaining their 60,000 servers, but even still, for the amount of salaried engineers they have, wouldn't we expect something more impressive than a product that has remained relatively unchanged for the last few years?</comment>


Nest is launching an API - <AUTHOR> https://nest.com/developer/

<comment><USER2> App idea for someone: make a simple alarm.

I have a few Nest devices, and they all do motion detection. If I'm away for a few days, I'd love an alert if my Nests detect someone in the house. It could alert me to check a security camera, and then to call the police.

It could do fancy stuff, like only alert me if I'm not at home by checking my phone's location. Or perhaps you could set off the fire alarm to try and ward off intruders.

I imagine alarm systems are on Nest's roadmap. I'd be worried if I was ADT.

<comment><USER3> Nest is reinventing home automation badly, IMO.

You can already do all that and more with plethora of Z-Wave devices with Vera* without any external services.

<comment><USER4> One z-wave motion sensor and the cheapest Vera hub would cost $200-250. Getting more out of the Nest he already owns costs $0.

<comment><USER3> A motion/temperature sensor from Monoprice: $30.

A VeraLite-G (eBay make an offer): $135.

A Z-Wave thermostat (2-gig CT100 that can display humidity on the main display): $80 (I got a couple for $62 on sale)

No dependency on Google to control your home: priceless.

Disclosure: I use MasterCard sometimes.

<comment><USER5> Are you trying to say that those parts are equivalent to a Nest? That's like saying some wheels, an engine, 4 doors == BMW.

<comment><USER6> He's saying it's functionally equivalent. engine + 4 doors + wheels = working car.

I owned a BMW once and you literally could not tinker with the car yourself. The engine was a sealed black box. Kind of like the Nest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> matthew-wegner Obligatory link to a Python script you can use today: [https://github.com/smbaker/pynest](https://github.com/smbaker/pynest)

I use this to turn my Nest's away mode on and off when my iPhone leaves my home wifi (I live alone, and in Phoenix, so this helps my power bill quite a bit).

<comment><USER7> May I ask how you detect that your iPhone leaves the wifi network?

<comment> matthew-wegner I just ping it continuously. If it doesn't respond inside of some threshold--I think 5 minutes?--I assume I'm out of the house. On battery, the iPhone checks wifi pretty regularly, and actually holds a wifi connection when plugged in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This page has been up for a few months I think. Nest has always had an API, it's just been unofficial. There's plugins to hook it into all the major home automation hubs/systems, and open source packages for integrating it into your own code. I used it to make mine voice controlled and to put this together on a touchscreen -- [http://i.imgur.com/C9yNLkP.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/C9yNLkP.jpg)

<comment><USER8> That looks amazing. Would you mind sharing any links you have on how to get started? How did you accomplish the voice control?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I personally will never buy a Nest or any home automation devices that _require_ any external service(s) to control and function.

OTOH, I'm probably not part of the target market, as I'm perfectly happy futzing around with Vera* and VLAN/VPN/SSH tunnels.

<comment><USER9> Nest does _not_ require Internet connectivity. It is optional. [http://support.nest.com/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use- Nest](http://support.nest.com/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest)

<comment><USER3> If you actually read the link you mentioned, Internet connectivity to Nest (Google) service _is_ required to make any changes (control) remotely. Why would people buy a $250 to use as a regular thermostat?

I'm not opposed to Internet connectivity per se but the external (Nest/Firebase/Google) services requirement for remotely controlling and/or automation of the devices.

The only appeal of Nest to a hacker is its industrial design, IMO. Apparently its UX is not that great (humidity display fail) either, while an $80 z-wave thermostat is much more usable/flexible.

<comment><USER10> >Why would people buy a $250 to use as a regular thermostat?

I guess, because the learning feature is still nice.

Myself, I wanted a Nest up until google bought them... no way I'm giving them sensors in my home.

<comment><USER11> >Myself, I wanted a Nest up until google bought them... no way I'm giving them sensors in my home.

Do you have a smartphone that has anything made by Google installed on it? If so, they already have lots of sensors in your home. Some of which they haven't tapped into yet, some they have.

If not, do you ever use any of their services from home? What about all the sites that use Google Analytics? Even with just that, they know where you live and could easily compile a set of times you're at home, which is just about the only thing that Nest data gives them. (I personally don't view the humidity at my home that revealing, privacy-wise.)

I want to stress that I'm not trying to antagonize you or belittle your stance- I feel privacy is very important, and it makes me happy when others feel the same. I'm just trying to show you that unless you've taken (what some would say) extraordinary measures, Google already knows more about you than what Nest is going to give them.

<comment><USER10> I don't run all the spyware services like Google Now, and use CM with Privacy Guard (considering moving over to XPrivacy though). I block ads and scripts such as GA.

There's a gap between "not using the internet" and "not at home", which can't be gained from GA, but can from a motion/temperature sensor.

The truth is, I do consider the measures I take to protect my privacy as being, while not extraordinary in the common sense, certainly more than perhaps 96-98% of people. There is a tradeoff between privacy and functionality in many things, but a hacker can always take what they need from the anti-privacy side while maintaining far more privacy than other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was announced in September: [https://nest.com/blog/2013/09/25/calling- all-developers/](https://nest.com/blog/2013/09/25/calling-all-developers/)

When that happened, I immediately filled out the form asking for more information. And I have heard not a single peep since then. I've actually been assuming that since the Google acquisition, this project may have been shelved. Is there actually a sign of life? The submitted link doesn't seem to have any new information.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that they choose the Firebase protocol.

<comment><USER14> Definitely a lot of overhead keeping sockets alive for this when deltas must be few+far between. Wonder why they eschewed mqtt or rest... ? I imagine a lot of integrators are going WTF to a Firebase approach for a thermostat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let's hope their security is good... or we may see headlines like this in the future:

"Hackers gain control of networked thermostats, thousands hospitalised and injured"

<comment><USER16> I may be cynical, but I think we're only just now entering a world of hurt where home automation system providers learn about information security the hard way.

Also, pretty funny: [http://i.imgur.com/ouoxxoZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/ouoxxoZ.png)

<comment><USER17> Nest, being owned by Google, probably have the best chance of running a secure infrastructure.

The other companies involved in home automation? Not so much. The kit will probably be about as secure as most SCADA systems - and that's going to have some serious consequences one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Top of hackernews:

* How not to write an API

* Nest is launching an API

Kidding aside, I'm excited to see interesting uses of Nest's API in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER19> I went with ecobee thermostats (ecobee.com) because it already has a rich API. It doesn't have motion detection like Nest, but it does have a very useful web interface and a decent app for iPhone and Android. Since I work from home and have a stay at home wife with two young children, the motion detection was not a selling point for me. I wanted something a bit more Cisco router and less Apple Airport Extreme. I've been very happy with the 3 that I have in my house. My only complaint (and this is true of all connected thermostats) is that it relies on the company's infrastructure. If ecobee goes out of business, I lose much of the utility of the devices, though they don't turn into bricks.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's because the DIY hobbyist is catching up: [http://dalybulge.blogspot.co.uk/](http://dalybulge.blogspot.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Shameless plug: I'm building an open platform to enable you to build amazing devices without Google in the middle. If you are interested, you can learn more about it at nitrogen.io or [https://github.com/nitrogenjs/service](https://github.com/nitrogenjs/service)

<comment><USER22> Nice work. I've been hacking something similar together to get my Raspberry Pis talking, but this seems much more cohesive.

Copy advice: ditch the superlatives in the introduction ("amazing devices") to make some room for a more pithy description.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My roommate bought a Nest about 6 months ago and I haven't seen any real potential or usefulness out of it. It doesn't actually add functionality to my HVAC system, just more ways to complete what simple function my old thermostat could do -- with more points of failure.

</comment><comment><USER24> No thanks. Promising company sold out to Google.

</comment><comment><USER25> Know that I went out for a run (fusion of location and biometrics data). Turn the a/c on before I get back. Handy.

<comment><USER26> Yep, this is the kind of thing I want too. A few scenarios (assuming that one person is living in a particular place):

I want the thermostat (with knowledge of outside temperature and winds) to know that my HVAC can increase the temperature by, say, 1C every 30 minutes.

Based on what it knows about my location and biometrics, it can drop to the minimum to prevent the pipes from freezing or other problems when I'm gone, and know when my classes/work ends and commute time to turn on the system at just the right time to be pleasant for my arrival. Maybe detect/realize that I'm in a, or will be in a, traffic jam, and hold off accordingly.

Integrate it with my alarm clock to cool the bedroom by a few C overnight, but warm the place up so I'm not chilled when I get out from under the blankets.

Detect that I've gotten out of bed in the middle of the night, and start blasting heat into the bathroom.

<comment><USER3> Trivial and cheaper (for more thermostats/sensors) to do with $80 z-wave thermostats and one Vera* controller with no external service dependency.

Nest is $250 each. Ouch.

<comment><USER4> The dozens of hours of programming involved in replicating what Nest does to address his desires would not be "trivial and cheap". Your suggested substitute does not learn the heating/cooling efficiency curves of your HVAC system, does not automatically change the temperature when you go to sleep and before you wake on an adaptive schedule just by (re-)training it a few times, and does not turn on the heat when it detects motion. Even manual scheduling doesn't replicate what Nest does for you there; since Nest learns the efficiency of your system, it can calculate the number of minutes it must run to produce the desired temperature change, and turn on the system at the exact right time _before_ you wake up to reach that temperature on time.

Nest can do all that out of the box, and it doesn't cost $250 for a new one on eBay, where you're quoting the rest of your prices from. They're $185-200 there BIN, and regularly on Amazon from the Amazon Warehouse Deals seller, which makes your z-wave stuff the "ouch" purchase. Whatever your opinion on having the API hosted externally, the product itself has some smart stuff built in. Looks pretty snazzy too.

For the record, I have a VeraLite and some z-wave stuff too. I'm not a huge fan. I don't care that Google hosts the API for my thermostat. I do care that if I'm standing outside my front door and want to open the deadbolt over z-wave, it takes 15-30 seconds, with a 50% success rate of the command getting through at all.

<comment><USER3> I was partially being facetious. This article is about a Rube Goldberg-esque API and this site is about hackers. I'm just pointing out that it can be done cheaply with better flexibility and precision by hackers like me. I'm one of those people who find the Nest algorithm frustrating and want to tinker with it (with more properly placed sensors etc). It's not really rocket science for people who understand the basics of control theory.

BTW, what does a deadbolt have anything to do with your Nest/HVAC system? Do you want to depend on Google to open/close your locks as well? It's _not_ normal to take 15-30 seconds to open a Z-wave deadbolt remotely (it's immediate if you use the lock keypad) with 50% of success rate: something (probably the security C/R exchanges) is timing out: the default timeout is 20 seconds. For me, it was 100% (knocking on wood:) with a few seconds latency for the times I tried, executing a night arrival scene from a phone in a car, which turned on path/door lights and unlocked the door, because I'd have groceries/takeouts in my both hands.

I'd tend to agree that Z-Wave devices and a Vera* controller is probably too much for non-tinkerers to handle in the current state, because average people can't even handle a wifi printer :). There are people who use Nest as a basic thermostat, i.e., for the looks only.

The main motivation for me to squawk on this topic is that I don't like the _trend_ of external services (nothing against Google per se :) owning my data and now control of my home.

We (hackers/tinkerers) can do better and demand a choice.

<comment><USER4> > something (probably the security C/R exchanges) is timing out

Yes, something's definitely timing out. If I watch the Vera UI after sending the command, it times out and retries several times before giving up. Yet other times it works, but usually only after at least one retry. The hub isn't too far from the door, and there's no walls in-between. The unreliability of z-wave stuff is my biggest problem with it.

The Nest responds pretty much instantly to commands despite them having to go out to the internet then back. The unofficial APIs provide access to everything the device and its web/mobile apps can do. Same with my Belkin WeMo switches and sensors -- you're probably not a fan of WeMo either, but I'm a fan of them responding instantly and speaking UPnP.

The divide between these products isn't really about "tinkerers vs non- tinkerers". If that was it, Nest/WeMo/etc would win over the monoprice z-wave stuff any day. They're much easier to hack with (no extra hardware required, HTTP APIs, open source libraries readily available) and typically do a lot more than the generic single-function devices.

The divide you've set up is around privacy and external dependency. The tradeoffs there aren't the same, and not everyone's going to agree with you on that either, even hackers with full knowledge. I don't necessarily think self- hosted and self-supported APIs are a better future. That's a future that would limit a lot of the cool stuff you can do with these devices to us, instead of making it available to everyone. Most of the coolest stuff in our homes today already relies on entrusting a certain amount of control and information to 3rd parties, from your electric company, to your ISP, to the makers of all the set-top boxes connected to your TV, to the phone in your pocket. All of these things involve giving up tons of data and control of your home.

I have no problem with "smart thing" makers hosting APIs so long as they remain trustworthy with that data, and reliable, which is not a huge ask. I'm a lot more confident Google can run Nest's API reliably and securely than Vera staying in business and keeping its P.O.S. MiOS functioning.

<comment><USER3> Well, locks are special beasts due to the security command class, which requires extra challenge/response round trips. My VeraLite-G (the cheap $135 one) is more than 50ft and a couple of dry walls away from the door and the overall latency is consistently around 1.4 seconds measured, while sending commands to the thermostats takes less than 0.2 seconds. It feels instant enough for me. The commands to the lock is routed through my thermostats and appliance module. I'm actually pleasantly surprised with how well the Z-wave mesh network worked. I need two Wifi APs to cover my house, if it were not for the second AP, the wifi signal at the door would be too weak to function reliably.

OTOH, I'm too somewhat disappointed at the quality, security and the development of the MiOS, but we as hackers can at least do something about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: how do you archive/preserve your source code? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like your input. When you're done with a software project (not open source), how do you preserve/archive your code?
Would you use something like longaccess.com as a long-term backup solution? (disclaimer: I'm the founder of longaccess)
If our service was immediately available, would you use it from the command-line, or would you wait for a desktop GUI?
Any feedback would be valuable. Thank you. <comment><USER2> All my work is via Git. So in my team we use GitHub for our normal projects (pay per project), and when we're done, I put it onto BitBucket (pay per user), so whatever I put onto BitBucket is then free of charge. I think I'll stick to this solution as it's cheap (read: free).

However, if I was to use your service, I'd be happy to use command line.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you domness. What is the average size of your repo?</comment></comment>


Facebook's new features secretly add apps to your profile - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/151087/2010/05/facebook_addingapps.html <comment><USER3> I came on HN just to see what Facebook might have done in these whole 24 hours of my absense from internet. And boy, am I totally freaked out.

Edit: Yep, I can see apps showing up in recently used. One of the sites was vBulletin.org. I seriously do not want anyone to know that I have a forum.. at this point I am seriously considering retirement from facebook.

Dear Facebook, Screw Yourself. Thanks.

Edit 2: I'll be honest here - I was never much concerned about my online privacy, why? because I had faith that no comapny could get away doing something such as this. Lost my faith. Disappointed..

<comment><USER4> It amazes me that you ever had faith in facebook. Why did you think facebook would be different than other social networks? Did you think facebook would be around forever? Did you think all the work, energy, and time you put into facebook wouldn't simply evaporate?

Imagine if you had invested all the time you put into facebook into your own life. Making your life better. Making the physical world around you better.

That's what saddens me the most about facebook. All the hours that are going to evaporate. All the productivity there could have been.

Facebook is like a battery that stores everyone's labor and we are all about to collectively chuck that battery in the trash. Well, not "we all"... I never signed up because I knew this is how it would turn out.

Not to pour salt in the wound. Quite the contrary. It's more like a caring hug when it all falls apart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> OK, done with another round of wading through Facebook's privacy settings, etc. and fixing what Facebook did. This is getting annoying.

<comment><USER6> Why not just assume that most stuff you post on Facebook is probably public? Saves a lot of time.

<comment><USER7> Because this isn't something you posted on Facebook, this is just visiting a site and as a consequence having an application added. As the article points out, though the app doesn't show up on your profile, a friend who looks at the application home page will you see you in a list of "friends who have this application."

I agree it's hypocritical to post something on a Facebook wall and then complain if someone reads it; you post something, it's public to some extent, and you'd better be ready to face consequences of that. But this is an admitted bug that allows friends to see if you've visited a site without you having taken action other than visiting the site. That's just plain wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just checked my applications list on Facebook this morning, just days after when I last checked it, and I can confirm the behavior reported in this story. I didn't ask for an application to be installed at all, but two were. Yes, that is malware.

After edit: just changed my Facebook status message to remind me my friends that they know other ways to reach me, with better privacy. I think it's time to take a vacation from Facebook. I don't like this contempt for customer.

<comment><USER9> "I don't like this contempt for customer."

The advertisers are the customer. You're the product.

<comment><USER10> It's contempt for the product then, and if they're not careful all of their products will get up and leave.

<comment><USER11> nah they won't. products are dumb on average. you're probably on the right slope of the bell curve and can't fathom how gullible the other side of the hill is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tip for others cleaning their profiles:

When you go to the Application Settings page make sure to change the drop-down from "Recently Used" to "Authorized." Otherwise you will not see all the apps/websites that are associated with your profile.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for the advice. There were a lot of applications I didn't know had sneaked in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> " _... if you go to an application's profile page, you can see a list of your friends who also have that app installed, essentially getting a unintentional peek at their browsing habits._ "

This creeps me out more than anything else Facebook has done yet.

<comment><USER15> This is not a new feature.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, they could see apps you _authorized_ before. Not sites that add themselves, essentially showing your web browsing habits to all your friends.

<comment><USER15> See my other comments. Apps are not randomly being "Authorized" and you can only see your friends who have "Authorized" an app.

Nothing has changed..

<comment><USER16> You're the only one who has that experience. I didn't authorize anything and I have 5 extra apps in my profile.

<comment><USER15> "Recently Used" != "Authorized"

<comment><USER14> The unsettling fact remains: Facebook is tracking users' activity on third party sites without express permission (though perhaps it's in the TOS; I'm not sure). And evidently, they're somewhat incompetent at hiding that information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Facebook's response (via pokesperson David Swain, FTA):

 _In this case, there was a bug that was showing applications on a user's Application Settings page that the user hadn't authorized. No information was shared with those applications and the user's list of applications was not shown to anyone but the user. This bug has been fixed._

<comment><USER18> Sounds to me like the bug was showing you the application on the list - <USER2> actually putting it there.

<comment><USER14> Yes - this still reveals that Facebook is tracking users' activity on third party sites without express permission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is really bad. I administer a site that uses IntenseDebate. That site has not integrated any of the Facebook Graph API at all. However, we do allow Facebook logins through Intense Debate. To my surprise, I see that this site has been added to my Facebook applications.

So, if you use third party sites that in turn use Facebook's API, you effectively add Facebook Graph API to your app.

<comment><USER20> So does this mean all Facebook plugins introduce this flaw as well? Terrible news if so because we just integrated the "Like" button on our service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Facebook's open graph is seriously scary. Since I joined Facebook (circa Sept '07) I have defended their privacy standards, I thought were doing a great job, considering the shear size of the problem.

Not so anymore. In the last two months, I've read more articles about their antics than in the last 3 years. Here are the significant problems I have with them now: 1) Defaulting to public for user posts 2) Open graph - any web developer or rogue person has much more power and access to my "personal" data, where's the opt-in instead of opt-out? 3) Random and chaotic code glitches, e.g., live chats being visible, private messages getting delivered to the wrong person. As a web developer, I know it's hard. We're humans, we make mistakes, but these are inexcusable. Even remotely decent testing would have uncovered them.

To sum it all up, Facebook has a great thing going, 400m users, $1b valuation, large app database. But if they want to keep their dominance and users like me, they need to seriously review their stance toward privacy and user's rights. It isn't up to par.

</comment><comment><USER16> Facebook seems hellbent on getting me to delete my profile.

They just succeeded.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there any way to block this without logging out of facebook?

The article says how you can get rid of an application, but not how you can stop new apps from being added (or is that just it, you can't).

Would a greasemonkey script be possible which blocks facebook scripts from running when visiting a non-facebook domain?

<comment><USER23> Maybe I should use facebook in incognito mode. Or better yet, make a VM specifically for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Facebook's usage is starting to decline, so they have to do everything they can -- while they still have users -- to maximize the value of their graph for the investors who are going to do whatever they have to with that graph to salvage what is left of a crumbling social network.

People on facebook right now are going to be getting spammed for years and years and years, in the mail, on their birthdays, to their cell phones...

You have no idea the lengths to which people will go to salvage hundreds of millions of dollars...

<comment><USER24> > Facebook's usage is starting to decline

I've had that feeling for a while now, do you have any independent figures or is that a gut feeling?

<comment><USER4> Just a gut feeling. I've... _we've_ known something like this was coming for a long time. Remember, MarkZ is a bit of an egomaniac. Have you seen what happens to egomaniacs when their world starts to crumble around them? Not to get overly dramatic, but you know the Russians gave him hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a _lot_ of money.

You know, in startup land, we tend to think the world works differently than the world works. Mark's investors are probably putting a huge amount of pressure on him right now and the activity on the web over the past few weeks has sent FB users leaving in droves.

HN used to be full of FB fans, API fans, technical fans look how that has turned in just a couple weeks...

If you were facebook and you saw your subscriber base growing and growing, then plateau, then start to decline rapidly -- uncontrollably, what would you do? What would you do if you knew that your worth was dropping just like that.

Imagine having millions of dollars in the stock market today when this mess happened. You'd be sick right now. That money won't come back. Facebook's users won't come back and Mark's chances of keeping his paper billions is evaporating right before his eyes...

I can see it. I can _feel_ it. The writing is on the proverbial facebook wall.

<comment><USER24> According to pretty much every site that ranks websites according to traffic / visitors facebook is currently #2 and rising, some hard proof that that is more than a gut feeling would go a long way towards substantiating that this is not just a tech sector issue.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, but I've always been a little ahead of the curve. ;)

Seriously though, it'd be impossible for anyone outside facebook to provide any hard proof of their utilization. From the outside, it's all speculation.

What is your estimate on FB's future? Here's my prediction: Facebook users revolt. Another social network evolves, or an existing one becomes the dominant, perhaps orkut or ning, or foursquare. I'm not sure I'm just an observer, but I think within the two to three year mark, facebook will be about as popular among the "in crowd" as myspace is right now and we'll be talking about some other network in 10 posts to the front page of HN.

Facebook will try to get someone to buy them for maybe a couple hundred million. Tons of investors will be angry. Mark will be declared the egomaniac who didn't know when to quit and he'll struggle for the rest of his life to find another successful project.

<comment><USER24> here is what I think abouy fb:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172025>

<comment><USER4> Looks like we are pretty much on the same page then.

<comment><USER24> Yep. Now to get some hard numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> <my first and hopefully last facebook rant>

I never joined facebook, myspace, or linkedin and have no intention of ever doing so.

About once a week, a friend of mine tells me I really ought to join facebook, and every time, I ask them why.

Lots of reasons, they tell me. To get reaquainted with long lost friends. To find out what others are up to. To let others know what you're up to. etc. etc. etc.

To which I say:

If we lost touch, there was probably a reason.

If you want to tell me something, email me or call me.

If I'm not important enough for you to single me out outside of a social network, then I don't want to know.

If I want you to know anything about me, I will tell you.

If I want to market myself, I will, in a manner over which I have control.

If I want to find something out, google is my friend.

I do not want anyone to know who I am, what I'm up to, or who I communicate with _unless I specifically tell them myself_.

I never thought of myself as a privacy prude, but it seems like every week people are bitching about facebook privacy problems. What did you expect?

I realize I'm in the minority here at hn, but I still don't get it. What's the big deal about facebook? And what did we ever do before?

</rant>

<comment><USER26> > What's the big deal about facebook? And what did we ever do before?

Facebook has solved two standing problems for my social groups. Your friends and acquaintances may be using it similarly, without you knowing it. Or maybe not.

1\. Easy and effective photo sharing. It's easy to upload pictures and tag the people in them. If someone uploads a photo with you in it, you will get notified. The end effect of this is that everyone at events, outings, and parties gets copies of the photos taken there.

What did we do before? For many of my social groups, nothing. Those photos were not shared. For two of my social groups, we set up dedicated sites for sharing our photos.

2\. Event planning. The events interface works as well as any other I've seen. And if everyone is already on Facebook, it's not as annoying as evite or some third party site where people don't have accounts. I had a friend that refused to get a Facebook account for years and we always had to call or email him separately from the rest of the group. This created more work for the event organizer (which was perceived as somewhat rude) and messed up the attendee counts, because he wasn't in the RSVP numbers from the Facebook event.

What did we do before? Played telephone tag and sent group emails. This works fine for smaller events with just a few people, but it doesn't scale past about 5 or 6 people. It also doesn't work in the tell-your-friends-to-invite- their-friends scenario where you still want RSVPs from everyone.

<comment><USER27> Those both sound like good use cases for a Google Wave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> To clarify, there was a bug that was showing applications on a user's Application Settings page that the user hadn't authorized. No information was shared with those applications and the bug has since been fixed.

</comment><comment><USER29> Read the article again, there's an update. It was a bug.

<comment><USER30> Update published on the article:

      Facebook's Response
      After this story was published, Facebook spokesperson David Swain contacted us and
      confirmed that the appearance of unauthorized apps was a bug:

      "In this case, there was a bug that was showing applications on a user's
      Application Settings page that the user hadn't authorized.

      No information was shared with those applications and the user's list of
      applications was not shown to anyone but the user. This bug has been fixed."

      It does appear that unauthorized apps are no longer being added to users' pages,
      however any unwanted applications that were previously added will still need to be
      removed manually.

<comment><USER31> That makes several "bugs" in a week that are glaring privacy holes. Not much better than a "feature" in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This should serve as a good reminder to not surf while logged into websites that may contain important personal information or that could cause personal damage if compromised.

<comment><USER33> Or you could simply turn off accept 3rd party cookies and never ever use facebook connect.

<comment><USER34> I don't have any applications added when I visit the sites listed here, and this happens whether I have third party cookies blocked or accepted. There may be something else my system is doing to block this behaviour, or it may be a feature only rolled out to some users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> With all this talk of people leaving Facebook, I can't help but wonder how much of a dent this actually makes. We're the techies, we pay attention to things like this. Our friends, the nontechies don't, and they don't care.

We're out numbered 5:1 by nontechies who aren't going to raise a fuss from this.

<comment><USER8> _I can't help but wonder how much of a dent this actually makes._

Time will tell. But Facebook's other issue is legal and regulatory exposure, besides user loss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> According to an article update, the applications weren't actually authorized and were showing up when they shouldn't have been (aka they weren't actually 'installed'). Not that that restore my faith in Facebook whatsoever.

I never use facebook connect anyway.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have a question. Under Privacy Settings -> Applications and Websites, they have this sentence in the text: _When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to Everyone (Edit Profile Privacy) as well as your publicly available information._

Now, my question: Does this mean that when I visit some website that's "Facebook-enhanced" and I don't do a damn thing, is the site going to pull the info? What the heck is a "F-E" website? The ones with the little "fb" icon they just introduced?

</comment><comment><USER38> FYI, the gothamist network of sites (LAist, Bostonist, DCist, Phillyist, Chicagoist, SFist, Austinist, Houstonist, and Seattlest ) is doing this as well.

</comment><comment><USER39> Like many of you, I have several browsers installed (I'm on a Mac). What I started doing is not log into Facebook on my "main" browser, Firefox, instead logging in with Safari, where I don't do much else. Flipping to Facebook is now a Command-Tab instead of Command-`, other than that I'm not disrupted much. So, good idea, bad idea?

<comment><USER40> I've been doing the same. I think of them as the "browser of record" and the "accounts not yet tied to my full id browser." I'm thinking that the next steps in the arms race (if needed) are along the lines of putting one or both of them in virtual machines, having one or both use some different proxies.

I like better the idea of a greasemonkey script that would block sites from reading my facebook id.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone else wonder if Facebook churns their policies just to get disinterested and annoyed users to sign in one more time to fix their settings?

</comment><comment><USER42> These guys sure have some nerve...I just saw the below as I tried to edit my privacy settings

"When your friend visits a Facebook-enhanced application or website, they may want to share certain information to make the experience more social. For example, a greeting card application may use your birthday information to prompt your friend to send a card"

<comment><USER40> On the "Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites" page, there is a "What your friends can share about you" listing.

This is the really fun thing about all this... they seem to know how to put just enough controls here and there in the labyrinth of settings so that few specific complaints really stick. While, at the same time, they never unify the intent of the controls into something that the user can see all the implications of their settings and then set them the way they want.

To me, this just cries out for some visualization. Maybe some nested circles (each circle representing a friend group) around the user in the middle, arrows (representing the types of information that is shared) radiating out to the furthest circle which can see that information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This was getting way out of my tolerance so I deactivated my account. If facebook doesn't clear this mess I am even deleting it.

</comment><comment><USER44> I guess Ghostery's blocking of Facebook Connect is stopping this "feature" working for me.

</comment><comment><USER45> Now I only visit facebook in an incognito chrome window.

</comment><comment><USER11> i'm so glad don't have a facebook account.

i'm also glad i deleted the account i had with a national facebook-clone a long long time ago.

all this pseudo-social bullshit is getting on my nerves. go out, meet people, exchange phone numbers and email adresses and maybe even STDs, but for fuck's sake don't delude yourselves into thinking facebook means being social.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'd go to Facebook to delete my profile but that would involve logging in which means might end up making things worse. ;p

</comment><comment><USER47> Nowadays I'm afraid to surf the net whilst logged onto facebook. That's how bad it's gotten.

</comment><comment><USER15> Unless I'm wrong, these are sites you have authorized via Facebook connect. They were always there. (Any site using facebook connect is an "app") And they always showed your friends who have also "connected" to that site.

(Edit: Seems to be confusion between "Recently Used" and "Authorized")

<comment><USER14> Sorry, you are wrong. No authorization is required.

<comment><USER15> Well then somehow it skipped adding them to my profile. Any app that shows installed for me is one I authorized.

<comment><USER14> An event that trigged it for me: visiting break.com (after previously logging into facebook) resulted in a Break application being added without consent.

<comment><USER48> I just signed up to an eventbrite event and the eventbrite application is now installed, I declined the facebook connect notification

<comment><USER15> "Authorized" or just under "recently used"?

It is disconcerting that they show under recently used, but in no way is facebook adding "Authorized" apps at random to peoples profiles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Seriously freaking out guys. Getting too complex</comment>


Ext Core 3.0 Beta released under MIT license - <AUTHOR> http://extjs.com/blog/2009/04/04/ext-core-30-beta-released/

<comment><USER2> These guys seriously need to stop messing with their licenses!

Their ExtJS library switched to GPL in their 2.0 -> 2.1 upgrade ( [http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/04/24/ext-discovers- step-...](http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/04/24/ext-discovers-step-2-of- the-slashdot-business-model/) ); for me this meant we had to remove ExtJS from our product.

There were 2 concerns: obviously the fact that it was GPL and we'd then be locked in to paying licensing costs or be forced to open source everything; but more importantly that this meant that the switch would hurt the project going forwards, and we'd be investing in a dying framework.

After the way they handled their switch to GPL, this feels like an attempt at confusing people into thinking that ExtJS is MIT licensed, rather than trying to be a better community player. Unless they're going to commit to putting ExtJS under the MIT license of course...

And don't even get me started on the background to their 'Ext GWT' product...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd rather they get it right. This 3.0 release is a clean start hopefully. The Core will be MIT license, so there's no confusion over what you can do and what you can't do with it. I've got no problem with them building great commercial frameworks on the open source core, especially if it means some of that commercial stuff might eventually migrate down the chain to the open source version. Of course, people were burned on the previous license switch so they lost some developers there.

Aside from the licensing issues, I think the ExtJS developers (Jack Slocum et al) are great javascript hackers. ExtJS is a great javascript framework, particularly the data grid component.

There's also the upcoming Ext 3.0 Designer, which reminds me of the 280North Atlas GUI designer. <http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52258>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For the most part, several Javascript libraries have solved the basics of cross-platform browser support quite well and entire ecosystems were built using them.

I regard Ext Core to being quite similar to other libraries even though it could pack more quality features into just a relatively small file. That is, If I were looking for something "current" I would look into Ext Core as well. But I have high hopes for YUI 3 which will have dynamic loading of features and contextual programming with both CSS and Javascript to let folks create relatively safe and packaged Javascript programs that could then be embedded in other sites without disrupting their looks or functions.

Perhaps YUI 3 is a little bit on the "over-engineering" side, but so long as it works as a stable foundation down the road it could well be the future.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have tried the previous versions and I was a bit confused about it. It seems the extjs does not really care about no-javascript, because switching off javascript led to all sorts of issues. Its not so much that we expected people to have javascript turned off, but people are using mobile browser with limited capabilities and with using extjs the experience would degrade too much. At that time I was not impressed since I was looking for a non-obtrusive way of implementing javascript based interaction enhancements into our project and I expected (perhaps wrongly) the extjs framework to take this into consideration. Anyone have any experience with the new version and how it behaves now when javascript is either turned of or has limited capabilities?

<comment><USER5> ExtJS, being one of the most UI-focused libraries, seems to regard javascript- less browsers as a non-target. I don't blame them -- Ext focuses on window design and emulating desktop functionality rather than use as a page enhancement.

Though I stopped looking at them with all of the licensing crap issues from earlier. Not sure what this new license will entail for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like the new core api a lot. Ext.select acts similar to jquery's $() and Ext.request acts similar to jQuery.ajax. Good to see more standardization in the js framework library design.</comment>


Piracy: are we being conned? - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/piracy-are-we-being-conned-20110322-1c4cs.html <comment> ryan-allen As an Australian, hypothetically our US counterparts are often viewing and discussing brand new popular television as it comes out in America.

In Australia, hypothetically said episodes tend to come out a number of days later for very popular shows and often weeks or months later for less popular shows.

This is due to hypothetical dinosaur age licensing of said programs from hypothetical Australian media companies.

I have heard hypothetically on a number of occasions, hypothetical Australians downloading hypothetical series only hours later than they were literally aired in America.

The exact same things happens (hypothetically) with DVDs and whatnot. Contextual shows like South Park make less sense when aired in countries like Australia many months after they were aired in the US.

What do these companies expect is going to happen?

\---

On a side note, a television series that portrayed the story of a number of gangland murders was produced, and was to be aired WHILST THE TRIAL WAS STILL ONGOING. Now the magistrate in their epic wisdom decreed that the show was not to be shown in the state that the crimes were committed, as it may contribute to biasing the jury of the case (there's a correct legal term, which I forget).

What happened was that the show was aired in all other states except Melbourne, as ordered by the judge, and the very next day there were people STANDING ON STREET CORNERS IN THE MELBOURNE CBD selling DVDs of the episode to people as they were stopped at red lights. I kid you not, this actually happened.

Anyway, long story short the main man was convicted and later murdered in prison, but I hope this illustrates the utter lack of understanding and wisdom of Australia in these matters. Hypothetically no wisdom at all.

<comment><USER2> As an Australian, most of that is true. Not hypothetical at all.

<comment> ryan-allen Ssssh, they recently outlawed swearing in Melbourne, Australia. It's all f __*ing hypothetical!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> >claimed piracy was costing Australian content industries $900 million a year and 8000 jobs.

Is it just me or does even this clearly inflated figure seem like pocket change? The economy of Australia is some $900 billion a year and counting. The costs of enforcing such legislation and the impact on people's freedom and privacy is surely not worth a mere 0.1% of the overall economy even in the best case.

<http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/>

<comment><USER4> Yep. Lobbying is generally ridicolous, spend $10m to get the law changed to keep $100m of 'lost' sales, costing the country as a whole $1000m in limitations, which is also what the labels said they were losing to pirating. Made up numbers, but it is something close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree: piracy is a problem. But here's an even bigger problem to worry about: the government believes statisticians. I have come by so many stats that are clearly wrong, and no one (sometimes not even the government) will question the math behind it. It is just believed that the source is valid and everything makes sense; especially in a case like piracy that people are aware of its effect (but not the magnitude of that effect).

My heart sank when I read this: "Ferrer said that, even if the numbers were not completely correct, there was no denying that piracy was a significant issue for the industry that was only expected to increase with the arrival of the National Broadband Network."

<comment><USER6> > here's an even bigger problem to worry about: the government believes > statisticians

I think this is an oversimplification, and a dangerous one. These statistics are biased, one-sided and misleading. That is indeed a property of some or even most statistics, just as "being wrong" is a property of some or even most information. Yet no-one would think to proclaim that the problem with government is that it believes information.

Real statistics, like real science, is a force for good. Bad statistics, like pseudoscience, is a force for bad - but it can only fool the ignorant. The solution isn't to ban statistics. It's to educate decision makers so they can tell the difference.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. I see lots of people arguing that statistics is a lie, a bad thing, a tool of evil, etc. Statistics is a tool - just like English language. I don't see people condemning English as a tool of evil because you can lie in it.

<comment><USER8> About English: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Piracy would not be an issue in other countries if these countries too had access to Netflix, Hulu, Crackle (Sony stuff), TV.com, CBSnews.com/video and the others. Though there is justin.tv and youtube, but both are not marketed and cant be marketed as a place to watch copyrighted material.

<comment><USER10> It may not be as large of an issue but it would still be an issue. I know several people who no longer rent movies due to how easy it is to pirate and watch (before it even comes out on DVD).

<comment><USER11> I know a ton of people that used to pirate, but since netflix and hulu became fairly decent, do not anymore. Most people don't want to pirate, but do so when there is no reasonable alternative. Yes, you will always have people that pirate. A lot of them do it for no good reason too. I know one such person that has gigs and gigs of movies he has never watched and will never watch. I think a lot of those people wouldn't have paid even if there were no alternative.

<comment><USER12> > Yes, you will always have people that pirate. A lot of them do it for no > good reason too. I know one such person that has gigs and gigs of movies he > has never watched and will never watch.

Sounds like that person was motivated by as compulsive desire to collect things rather than a desire to watch movies.

<comment><USER13> Progress bars are a cheap dopamine hit.

<comment><USER14> <http://progressquest.com/>

maybe this should be a better "hit" than pirating then :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The entertainment industry--music, television and movies--is living in the past. Content is distributed through physical media and balkanized distribution deals. Movie and TV studios cannot envision a world without traditional cable distribution.

Pretty much everyone who reads HN knows this.

The gaming industry has largely ditched these old world models. Titles are generally available worldwide within days of initial release. Games are AFAIK not region-protected (they could be on at least console platforms). Digital distribution, at least for PC games, is widespread (ie Steam). What's more that distribution is awesome. Delete a title? Want to re-download it? Not a problem! Not so with iTunes.

Take Game of Thrones, a series produced by HBO with immense worldwide interest. I imagine piracy of this is enormous. Unfortunately, HBO, which seems stuck in the premium cable model, will look at this of evidence that we need more regulation and prosecutions.

What it actually means is there is unsatisfied demand. If people could buy it on iTunes or buy an HBO subscription on their PC on iPad without having to have a cable subscription (which HBO Go requires) then there would be a lot less piracy IMHO. Of course international distribution would also interfere with HBO's traditional distribution deals.

Basically, HBO is just leaving money on the table when I'm sure people would pay $3-5 per episode of GoT as long as they could watch it when they wanted and re-download or re-stream it as desired.

Most, if not all, US networks distribute their content via the Web, either directly or via Hulu (or both). Some place further restrictions like a window in which you can watch the content or a one week delay (as Fox does).

I like this model. I have no TV. I don't want a TV. I don't want a cable subscription (other than for internet).

The problem is that the experience is so awful the choice becomes either pirating it or not watching it. The ads break, they will switch you out of full screen mode, if you have to go back to the content (because it breaks, which it does) you will have to endure a half dozen ads to find the spot you were at and the inventory is repetitive and pointless (1 in 3 online ads are for Geico I swear, and I live in NYC and have no car so why am I being tortured with them?).

Part of the problem there is that advertisers are also stuck in traditional media. I wonder why this is. My best theory is that there are no accurate metrics on audience or conversion with, say, TV advertising so advertisers are basically buying into the lie that networks sell them.

Another theory is that traditional media reach audiences that online media don't.

But why can't I pay for a Hulu with no ads? I would. I have two theories about this too:

1\. Hulu likes having a relationship with advertisers; and

2\. The people most likely to pay not to see ads are the ones of most value to the advertisers.

So instead Hulu tries pointless differentiators to get me to buy Hulu Plus, like being able to watch it on my iPad. That would actually be nice but if I have to watch it on my laptop instead so be it.

The one company that seems to get online distribution is, of course, Netflix. Watch as much as you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want for a flat fee. They've obviously solved the problem of distributing royalties and so forth to content owners. Why can't anyone else?

That'll probably change today with iCloud. Ironically, the record companies don't like how powerful Apple is but they've created the monster that is iTunes by first insisting on DRM and then shutting out other players. They wanted Amazon and Google to pay for playing music you own when it comes from a hard drive in the cloud rather than one you own. Neither did.

The result seems to be that they've turned to Apple as their saviour, which will probably make Apple even more powerful.

The whole situation--music, movies and TV--is utterly stupid.

<comment><USER16> That is because, right at its heart, the _universe_ does not respect owning information. Therefore it makes no sense that some subcomponent of the universe, say a person, or other entity could either. Sure, you can own a book on which information is printed, or multiple "copies"; that is, multiple physical books. But to the universe they are not copies, they are discrete physical entities. But when you are only splitting energy streams, that is making electronic copies; those are true copies. And this is where the lie that is "copyright" steps in. Literally, "the right to copy". As in, some entities, typically people, have it, and some do not. The fact that a new term had to be made up to give this fictitious idea a reality illuminates how baseless it is in the actual universe outside human society. Since the entire thing is predicated on a lie - the lie that the act of copying electronically can truly be controlled - it is intrinsic that it cannot last, since it has no basis in reality outside our minds. The would-be copyright owners sort of admit this when they try and use scare tactics to keep people from infringing on their so-called copyright. They do this with big FBI warnings (which the FBI had no hand whatsoever in creating), and those stupid "you wouldn't steal a car, would you?" ads. It sounds almost like someone is trying to convince _themselves_ of the veracity of owning information and the right to copy it. I, for one, think that the sooner the human race gets the hell over the idea that information can be owned, the better. There are other, better ways to make money through entertainment, and the entertainment industry is sooner or later going to have no choice but to face the music. It has been happening for decades, and the ubiquity of computers is making it worse for them, and better for everyone else, at last.

<comment><USER17> The universe also doesn't respect owning property. Saying that an arbitrary collection of atoms (a chair) belongs to another arbitrary collection of atoms (a human) is delusion pure and simple. It's just a delusion that a lot of arbitrary collections of atoms (humans) share.

<comment><USER18> Which, of course, is the whole point: property is an illusion with utility. For physical things like chairs, the concept 'makes sense.' What OP meant by invoking the universe was really to say that _people_ don't respect intellectual property.

And if you look closely, people don't respect physical property to an exact degree. We share, we borrow, we lend, we lease, we sometimes treat human work as property, we're generally just lazy with our accounting of ownership. Which, you know, is kinda cool.

Anyway, you use the word arbitrary as if the arbitrary nature of the line makes the line meaningless.

<comment><USER19> I think what Produce means to say is that many of our institutions and cultural facets are made up. There is very little natural backing for many of the laws and customs of human society (human rights? ha.) Invoking natural law to make a point about the utility of an abstraction makes no sense in context of all of the other abstractions that we use frequently in our lives (eg, property).

<comment><USER17> Actually, I was making the opposite side of the same point. Personally, I consider the existing abstractions to be as irrational as these new ones. It seems, to me, that people are hugely over-complicating life while arguing that survival is not possible any other way (or that the current way is the best we've got). The simple fact is that we fall prey to fear very often and construct these elaborate schemes to make us feel more secure. It would be more efficient to, as a species, at least make an attempt to face our fears. The issue is that we're biologically wired to survive in an environment of scarcity. We go kind of crazy (in the sense that our ideas do not match reality) when things are abundant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The war on piracy is like the war on drugs. Giant waste of time and resources, will never end, and no gets out without losing an arm.

<comment><USER21> The problem is that piracy destabilizes the price of whatever is being pirated. Digital goods are only worth what people are willing to pay and if everyone knows they can go to thepiratebay and get it ford free, it will be $0.

So even though companies know they will never win the piracy fight, it sends a message that it's not okay to download it for free (as opposed to doing nothing).

<comment><USER22> No.

I don't deny there is a demographic that will always obtain for free what it can but it's a lot below 100%. Witness the documented effect of services like NetFlix on piracy levels or the warnings in software such as PDFCreator or Paint.Net that if you paid money you were conned. For whatever reason, some people will pay for the freely available.

Not to mention that, very often, material via sources such as TPB is of lower quality - inexpertly cut off at the start or finish, periodic glitches, whatever. Plus it's hardly got high availability and consistent cataloguing. People will pay for a reliable, quality service.

<comment><USER21> yes.

"For whatever reason, some people will pay for the freely available."

If piracy wasn't stopped and it was advertised everywhere that in all the search engines that you could get commercial software for free, these numbers would be very close to 100%.

"Not to mention that, very often, material via sources such as TPB is of lower quality - inexpertly cut off at the start or finish, periodic glitches, whatever. Plus it's hardly got high availability and consistent cataloguing. People will pay for a reliable, quality service."

TPB has a search box. software is a perfect copy, music is usually near perfect, and many times the movies (not always), are ripped right from the studio or DVD.

<comment><USER23> I disagree strongly. The Pirate Bay is infested with malware, fake torrents, media monitoring companies, and lots of other undesirable stuff. It is difficult to navigate and use.

Here's the way that record companies should make money: $20/mo for access to that company's entire catalog, unlimited download, well-organized, high- quality rips, vetted torrents (i.e., uploaded by the company itself, malware free), etc. If you've ever used one of the big private music trackers they make an excellent prototype for a for-pay service that would allow the rights holders to rake in even more money than they currently make. They were eventually able to figure it out with VHS, I don't know why it takes them so long with the internet.

<comment><USER21> "I disagree strongly. The Pirate Bay is infested with malware, fake torrents, media monitoring companies, and lots of other undesirable stuff. It is difficult to navigate and use."

There is a rating system. If there is a virus, someone will complain. How is it difficult to use? looking for Photoshop? put it in the search box and click "search".

"Here's the way that record companies should make money: $20/mo for access to that company's entire catalog, unlimited download, well-organized, high- quality rips, vetted torrents (i.e., uploaded by the company itself, malware free), etc. If you've ever used one of the big private music trackers they make an excellent prototype for a for-pay service that would allow the rights holders to rake in even more money than they currently make. They were eventually able to figure it out with VHS, I don't know why it takes them so long with the internet."

The record companies already negotiated with terrorists and lost, why would they believe that this time will be any different. You can get songs for 99 cents, Netflix tons of movies, preview music through Grooveshark, Last.fm, and Pandora. Yet, it's still not "enough". Piracy is worse than never and there are a new set of excuses as to why you have a need (and a right) to downloading someone else's hard work for free.

The beginning of the entitlement generation.

<comment> guard-of-terra "Piracy is worse than never" Is it? Something to back this claim up?

<comment><USER21> haha,

There is a pirate party in Sweden and sites like thepiratebay get millions of visitors per day.

<comment><USER21> Love the down voting too. Proves to me once again about the political nature of HN and why a pure democracy doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think one of the best ways to at least look at why the music industry is really reeling is to take a look at album sales and singles sales.

When CDs hit the market, there was no compelling way to get singles. CD singles were relatively rare, and few people wanted to buy cassingles instead of CDs. This is at odds with the the music industry existed up until that point.

Take a look at the list of best-selling albums and best-selling singles on Wikipedia. Sort the categories by year. There's fewer than 10 high-selling singles there from 1992-2004, while there are dozens of multiplatinum albums from the same era.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best- selling_albums_in_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best- selling_albums_in_the_United_States#10.E2.80.9314.C3.97_platinum)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_singles>

<comment><USER22> Only to some degree; single sales have also partially dropped off because the relative cost of albums has decreased. I bought my first album in 1987-8ish for about £8.50 - the same purchase today would most likely be £10 and back catalogue releases are very frequently on sale for about £5-7. Factor in 24 years of inflation and....

tl;dr - albums now cost much the same as singles used to in real terms, but have more music. Why shouldn't people buy them in preference?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Internet, like DVD, VHS, cable, radio, and sheet music, is just the latest in a long line of transmission mediums.

Use of each medium to transmit work that was once locked down and overseen by a controlling influence has always been considered piracy when that medium was in its infancy -- right back to sheet music -- as Cory Doctorow notes in a video interview with the Guardian[1]:

"The copyright wars aren't new, of course. In the first part of the 20th century you had sheet music composers who represented the only real 'music industry'. They were an industry as a pose to a trade because they had an industrial apparatus; a copying machine that made sheet music. And so they could sell it even when they weren't there.

"Then you had performers who weren't really an industry; they were just a trade, because you could only make money as a performer if you were actually performing; there was no industrial component. And then someone invented recorded music, and the performers who were buying their sheet music down at Tin Pan Alley and performing it all these years started performing it into recording devices.

"And the composers said, 'What are you doing? You're selling our compositions without our permission! You must stop this -- it's an act of piracy!' And the performers said, somewhat understandably, 'You sold us the sheet music, didn't you? Didn't you think we'd perform it?' And different states came up with different answers, but at the end of the day, all the countries that made the transition to having a successful recorded music industry said that composers actually don't get a say in whether or not their music is recorded. They may get some money from an automatic royalty system, but you don't get to say 'this can only be performed here' or 'only that guy can perform it'. Once it's been performed once, everyone can perform it and everyone can record it, because that's how music is.

"So here you have the great pirates of the first decade of the 20th century: the music performers; the record labels. And the record labels turned around, not that long afterwards, and pointed at the radio stations and said, 'What are you doing playing our records on the radio? You have no business doing it! What we did when we took those compositions without permission, that was progress! What you jerks are doing... that's just piracy!' And, of course, the broadcasters went out and they said, 'no, you should let us broadcast' and they eventually won that fight and then _they_ were the brave pirates who became the main stream.

"And so when cable channels started taking broadcast signals and pumping them over cable wires, the broadcasters said, 'Well, you know, when we took that music from the record labels that was progress, but when you take our radio diffusion and pump it down over a cable that's just piracy'. And the cable operators fought that fight.

"Then along came the VCR, which could record programmes off the cable, and the cable operators, having won the fight with the broadcasters, said, 'You know, when we took the broadcasts that was progress! When you take our cable transmissions and record them on a VHS cassette, that's piracy!"

"And then, the company that invented the VCR, Sony, joined with the major studios in suing the Internet for taking movies that had been diffused on DVD or VHS cassette or over the air and said, "You know, when we put your cable diffusion on a VHS cassette, that was progress, but when you take it and put it on the Internet, that's just piracy."

"The biggest difference now, I think, is the extent to which they're being taken seriously. I think it used to be true that no lawmaker believed he could be re-elected by breaking the thing that his constituents use to entertain themselves. And now there seems to be an awful willingness to go to Corfu with a music composer and come back and propose that the Internet should be censored and that people who are accused of file sharing should be locked out of it and so on. And I guess that's the major difference and the thing that gives me anxiety about the future of the Internet.

[1]: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/may/30/in...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/may/30/internet- piracy-cory-doctorow)

<comment><USER26> Thank you for this - I had never heard it before. What struck me was how every successive new distribution method was first called piracy. What comes after the Internet?

<comment><USER27> Why, realtime performance distribution, of course.

Think about it, with state-of-the-art piracy, currently you 1, can listen to 2, any music 3, anytime, 4, anywhere. So the only thing that's really a competitive advantage to channels is time between performance originally recorded, and general availability.

Not sure how this could be really "liberated" with the performance business still remaining profitable -a moneypooling service maybe? But there's definitely room for improvement on the current distribution model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is it just me, or has iTunes Match finally made this whole world a slightly better place?

I mean of course, in terms of actually finding a way to monetise content acquired through any means - i.e. I download album over BT, pay itunes match sub, sync lib, then artist gets royalty. It seems like we're finally approaching a sensible business model.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love music - but I'll be honest, I rarely buy my new music. However, the music industry still gets my money, and here's how.

If I had to spend let's say $10 per CD, and on average I get a new CD every week (I do) that's over $40 per month. Instead, I get my music for free, and I spend the $40 going to a concert almost every month. So far this year, I've been to 4-5 concerts.

Now, I'm not saying this is legal or this is even "right" but it's just what I do. Besides, bands don't see much money from CD sales, they get money from touring, so I much more prefer to spend my money in the way that more directly affect's the band's paycheck.

I do still occasionally buy CD's. For example, Linkin Park's new album "A Thousand Suns" I downloaded before it was even released so I could listen to it, although I had already pre-ordered it and received it a few days after it was released (it's still unopened)

</comment><comment><USER30> Another view would be to look up publicly available company revenues and see that their annual revenues are totally not affected at all. You can see an increase in year on year. No were are those figures dipping or near bankruptcy like what they claim.

I'd love to see these revenue

</comment><comment><USER31> Yes, we're being conned by lobbyist-written "research" that contains wild (but always bad) guesses about the piracy impact but which has nothing to do with the real world.

It's been going on for a long time now. Remember how they compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler? Yeah, only to go on and make billions of dollars off of it.

If they really want to investigate something that's hurting the industry, maybe they should look into that Hollywood accounting thing.

</comment><comment><USER32> The best way to reduce piracy is to shorten copyright. Lets give the industry what they want, 6 month copyright length. This would vastly reduce piracy, by the time the DVD comes out it's legal to copy. I think after that they'll be begging for the return of piracy.</comment>


Eavesdropping Iguanas Use Mockingbird Calls To Survive - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2012/03/15/eavesdropping-iguanas-use-mockingbird-calls-to-survive/ <comment><USER2> Mockingbirds in the Galapagos are smart. Of all the animals we saw on our recent trip there, the Mockingbirds were the only ones that knew that we had water. They knew about both plastic bottles as well as re-usable bottles in bottle holders on backbacks. They were the only animals that begged to get stuff from us - every other animal ignored us (except for the baby seals, who wanted to play with anything that looked like it could move!)</comment>


Show HN: Facebook video chat, web based and iPad app. - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I've been working on a side project to do a video/voice chat application which uses your exiting Facebook social graph.
You can do video chat with up to 4 friends, or broadcast yourself privately ( friends only) or publicly. As mentioned in the title, we have an iPad app which has been accepted in the store two days ago. It provides the same functionality as the browser based app.
Additionally I'm broadcasting myself from 2:00 pm EST -> 3:00 pm EST. If you'd like to join the broadcast or ask any questions technical or otherwise, feel free.
Some notes on the FB permissions we ask for, and why:
xmpp_login - When you try to call an online friend who is not in the app, we send them an XMPP message from you to join you in the app.
user_online_presence - Used to know when you're online in FB
friends_online_presence - Used to know when your friends are online in FB
offline_access - Used for simplicity, otherwise we need to juggle token expiration. We only do things on your behalf when you're online.
publish_stream - Every two days we push a little "X is using happychat" to your wall. <comment><AUTHOR> App on facebook <http://apps.facebook.com/hppycht/>

In the iTunes store <http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/happychat/id441038527?mt=8></comment>


The Sumo Matchup Centuries in the Making - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-sumo-matchup-centuries-in-the-making/ <comment><AUTHOR> Pretty geeky look at trying to match current sumo champion with one from centuries ago - thought folks might enjoy.</comment>


Ejecta – A Fast, Open Source JavaScript, Canvas and Audio Implementation for iOS - <AUTHOR> http://impactjs.com/ejecta <comment><USER2> One of the coolest things I learned from the original blog post [1] on Ejecta was a trick that the library uses for drawing polygons on the GPU in OpenGL without triangulating them first [2]. It's one of the coolest graphics programming tricks I've ever seen and when I understood how it worked my mind was blown.

[1]: [http://phoboslab.org/log/2012/09/ejecta](http://phoboslab.org/log/2012/09/ejecta)

[2]: [http://www.glprogramming.com/red/chapter14.html#name13](http://www.glprogramming.com/red/chapter14.html#name13)

<comment><USER3> With a bit more trickery, you can even implement the Non-Zero fill rule (Canvas2D default), instead of the simpler Even-Odd rule. Ejecta now supports both:

[https://github.com/phoboslab/Ejecta/blob/master/Source/Eject...](https://github.com/phoboslab/Ejecta/blob/master/Source/Ejecta/EJCanvas/2D/EJPath.mm#L361-L396)

<comment><USER4> Could I also use this technique to clip a scene to the path of a complex polygon?

How does it hold up with many overlapping shapes of varying color; wouldn't it lead to far more state changes and ultimately much greater fill-rate?

And what are your thoughts on using this for font rendering?

This looks brilliant. Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would be nice to see some benchmarks. I can't see how this could be faster than just running it in Safari. In Safari you get access to far faster javascript jit than you do in the embedded app js engine. The app itself just translates the javascript canvas calls into objc calls to the core graphics.. which is what safari's canvas does anyway? Is the extra level of indirection through safari enough to compensate for slower jit? Plus it's a lot harder to compile this than it is to put a js game on the web.

Needs benchmarks to be able to make any decisions.

<comment><USER3> (Ejecta dev here)

Ejecta uses OpenGL ES 2 for Canvas, not Core Graphics.

The default demo that comes with Ejecta[1] runs with 60fps on the iPhone4S. Just try it in Mobile Safari. Even Desktop Browsers struggle with this. Of course it's a contrived benchmark, but it still makes a point, I think :)

There are also a lot of other reason to use Ejecta. If you _want_ to distribute your App in the AppStore, the alternative is to use a WebView framework such as PhoneGap, which can't use JIT either. That said, the raw JavaScript performance is rarely the bottleneck for games - most of the time, drawing is.

[1] [http://phoboslab.org/crap/bezier/](http://phoboslab.org/crap/bezier/)

<comment><USER6> Hi, sorry to hijack the thread. What JS chart tool play well with ejecta in iOS? You know?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ejecta is awesome. So is ImpactJS. Dominic (the creator) is experimenting with making Ejecta cross-platform so hopefully we will see an Android version soon.

</comment><comment><USER8>
        The JavaScriptCore API is private on iOS,
        which means you're not allowed to link to it.
        Ejecta therefore comes bundled with its
        own version of the library to circumvent these
        restrictions.

So you are basically using another VM(a second javascript core) in an IOS app. Isnt it forbidden to do so,running VMs in IOS apps?

A better approach would be to do like TITANIUM ,except that you expose a CANVAS like API,so that your javascript canvas framework is compatible with it => less work,and no trick that would make your app kicked out of the store once the scheme is busted.

<comment><USER9> No, it isn't. It would make the likes of Xamarin and RubyMotion impossible. You're confused with the fact that App Store policies do not allow downloading and running new executable code.

<comment><USER8> I thought Xamarin and RM compiled to objc.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I am pretty sure that Xamarin compiles down to Obj-C on the iPhone, but on Android it includes a VM in java that runs .net (mono).

<comment><USER11> Close. According to [http://xamarin.com/how-it-works](http://xamarin.com/how- it-works) , they do Ahead-Of-Time compilation to go straight to ARM binaries for iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I use Ejecta for almost all my prototyping, super easy to make changes during a meeting to do live iteration testing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why not use v8 and make the runtime run "everywhere"?

Edit: Sorry, just realised the development is done in Objective-C.

<comment><USER3> v8 also doesn't have an interpreter mode, just a compiler. On iOS you can't allocate writable+executable memory, so you can't use v8.

As I mentioned in another thread, I currently have a toy project that implements most of the Canvas2D API in plain C. Maybe this will amount to something some day.

<comment><USER13> AFAIK, you can turn off JIT compilation in v8, isn't that true?

<comment><USER14> No, you can't turn off JIT compilation in V8. V8 has no not-JIT execution engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looks cool, but "works out of the box except for controls" is pretty much "doesn't work out of the box" for games...

</comment><comment><USER16> It's not really a "JavaScript implementation" when it appears to be just a wrapper around JavaScriptCore, innit bruv.</comment>


Ask HN: Do investors want a single CEO identified? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a Bay area hacker currently working on a startup with a co-founder and a small team.  We've been getting some interest from VCs.<p>We're wondering how much we'd need to formalize the business if we took VC money.  Specifically, would we need to specify one of the two of us as a CEO?  How do startups normally deal with this? <comment> a-priori Research In Motion has two CEOs, and they seem to have done fine. As long as you divide the responsibilities clearly, I don't see why it would be a problem.</comment>


[video] a new tool to make your workflow as a front-end developer a lot better - <AUTHOR> http://blog.debugme.eu/check-out-our-new-video/ <comment><USER2> yup, that's what we need, more tools</comment>


How To Mass Export All Of Your Facebook Friends' Private Email Addresses - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/how-to-mass-export-all-of-your-facebook-friends-private-email-addresses/

<comment><USER2> Have tried this in Firefox, Safari and Opera - both in Classic and New Mail environments.

Always ends up with 0 imported contacts. Makes me wonder if Facebook have disabled this for now... ?

<comment><USER3> This probably has to do with your privacy settings. I set it up so applications can get as little information from my profile as possible (though I hardly use any apps anyway). I tweaked them temporarily to get this to work, got my contacts, then undid my tweaks to regain data privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone else find this amusing?

Facebook is so hypocritical, "We wont let you export your friends email addresses" but when there's money/profitable partnerships involved sure go ahead take all you want.

Michael was correct to append the second statement with "unless it's with a partner that's making it worth our while." This just shows the arrogance of Facebook these days!

Apart from that just exported 568 contacts :D

</comment><comment><USER5> I was able to do this but I could only get 184 out of 221 contacts. Not sure what happened to the others. Could it be that they don't have an email address associated with their account?

<comment><USER6> Maybe their emails are set as hidden..

<comment><USER7> Anybody know how to set this? I tried to figure it out yesterday but gave up after a minute or two.

EDIT: Account (top-right) > Privacy Settings, click Customize Settings (lower middle, small text), then very last setting is your e-mail address visibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Change your gmail address with your new yahoo email on facebook and it will work.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not really sure what the big deal is here. I just tried this, and the only addresses it was able to import were for people with their email addresses set to public (or at least visible to me).

Has Facebook patched the issue already, or does Mike really think it's a security issue to do something automatically that you're already able to do manually or with a scraper?

<comment><USER10> He is pointing out the hipocrisy of FB, they say that this shouldn't be possible but they make it possible as long as it is on their terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Had to switch to classic mode in Yahoo mail and then turn on compatibility mode in IE9.

Worked great.

</comment><comment><USER12> This did not work for me "0 contacts imported"

<comment><USER6> Doesn't work in Chrome. Tried in FF and then it worked.

<comment><USER13> I just tried it an it worked fine for me in Chrome (OS X). I had changed my Yahoo settings to Yahoo Asia a while back so I could enable POP, and when I created the new email address it defaulted to Yahoo Asia.

Not sure if this played a part but I now have all my friend's email addresses in a CSV file on my local HD...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sweet, just exported 1002 contacts using safari on my iPad! This makes me irrationally happy.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was unable to export contacts to yahoo with chromium and firefox ("0 new contacts imported" message) I'm registered with gmail email on facebook.

Would you share do you use gmail email in fb and is export successfull?

</comment><comment><USER16> Worked fine for me as well (using Chrome). I was able to get 591 out of 622 contacts, assuming those individuals changed their privacy settings to hide their email..

</comment><comment><USER17> I just did this with Yahoo mail on Firefox. I just realized that it actually imported my wife's friend's emails since she was the one still logged into Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER18> This worked for me on GNUlinux/Firefox 3.6

103 contacts imported.

I decided I wanted a backup, just in case <insert_screweduser_scenario_here_>

<comment><USER19> Facebook deletes your profile? Facebook up and disappears?

<comment><USER20> Be creative! How about Facebook only exports proxied @facebook.com email addresses?

<comment><USER19> Oh god...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why can't you use the API to get all of your friends' email addresses? I thought you could use an access token to query a friend for 'email'.

<comment><USER22> I haven't done Facebook API stuff for a while but it used to be that the emails it would give you were @facebook.com proxy addresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Worked for me in Opera.

<comment><USER24> Didn't work with FF, Chrome or Safari on Windows XP. "0 Contacts Exported".</comment></comment>


Infographics: Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles - <AUTHOR> http://ithare.com/infographics-operation-costs-in-cpu-clock-cycles/ <comment><USER2> Right branch of if on superscalar should cost 0 cycles since corrrect branch prediction basically removes the if.

Also the first few operations could arguablly be said to "cost" 0 cycles in Out-Of-Order superscalar provided that other instructions are able to execute independently.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really enjoy reading these ithare articles. They are so packed with information!</comment>