Spoofers Tricked High-Speed Traders by Hitting Keys Fast - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-13/spoofers-tricked-highspeed-traders-by-hitting-keys-fast <comment><USER2> I'm not even sure if I would consider this fraud (personally).

I mean, if the initial outstanding orders were at risc of actually being bought and he had to deliver, then I think it is just fine that the market is naive enough to judge the worth of a company on some anonymous seller, rather than company performance and market-place condition of said company.

What's next, you start moving stock prices through twitter bots?

I think stock traders should be punished by the market place for acting on poor signals and acting like sheeps.

If he could in fact not deliver the initial sales, then not only is it fraud, but it is a broken system that allows you to put up stuff for sale that you don't own.

<comment><USER3> It's an odd situation, for sure. After all, these share orders were being entered by humans and could have been sitting in the market order books for several seconds. In that time, anyone could have taken their orders. So they really were genuine offers to sell and buy shares.

Compare that to high frequency traders where it is alleged that 'flash' market orders are submitted and cancelled so fast that no-one could actually take them. How can that be considered OK and yet these human traders are labelled fraudulent?

<comment><USER4> >So they really were genuine offers to sell and buy shares.

They weren't genuine, that's the point. They were offers made with the express intention and hope that they never get filled.

The orders from high frequency traders in contrast are honest orders, when they are sent they honestly express that the trader wants to trade at that price. The fact that they may then be withdrawn 800 microseconds later when the HFT recalculates its price in response to some stimuli and changes its mind about the price, doesn't change the fact they were honest. They're just fast as well. That's what control systems do, they update their outputs when their inputs change.

<comment><USER5> Why does his state of mind matter? I mean it matters for criminal matters, but why for civil?

Either he actually was willing to make good on his offer or he wasn't. His reasons are irrelevant.

"hope that they never get filled" is not a reason to make this a crime. If he actually refused to fill them, then sure. But hoping?

<comment><USER4> I don't write the rules, I'm just telling you what they are. I guess it boils down to the idea that bluffing is banned in financial markets. What differentiates making a bluff from a regular raise in poker? You have to 'make good' on the bet either way, yes? The difference is that you're 'hoping' that you don't get called, 'hoping' that your opponent folds. Not allowed in markets. Probably a good thing too, or they'd be even more chaotic as they degenerate into bluff and double-bluff. Having said that spoofing is still widespread, likely because it is hard to prove and some regulators aren't as tough on it as they should be.

<comment><USER6> Saying that bluffing is not allowed is disingenuous. Why, then, are sellers allowed to break up big blocks of stocks into smaller orders to avoid triggering algorithms in the market? How is that not bluffing. "I have 1M shares to sell, but if I do that, I'm going to take a bath. But if I trickle them in, break them up, etc..." \- what makes one strategy, and the other a bluff?

<comment><USER4> What you describe is called 'slow playing' in poker, not bluffing. Put it this way, if spoofing (bluffing) were legalized in markets, how do you think it would work out for the little guy? Who has the advantage in no-limit Texas hold em? The guy with the biggest chip stack bullies the pot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Remember when S. Hawking, E. Musk, and others warned to be cautious about the future of AI? I think the contrast defined here between the AI: HFT (High frequency trading algorithms) and 'Monkeys' (the alleged fraudsters, bashing buttons in a quick and manipulative fashion) shows already that we don't like to judge AI the same as we do with humans; while the manipulative effect of both techniques is hard to judge and compare, the argument made is mainly of another order: intent.

On the highest level both AI/HFT and Monkey do this for their own earnings. Society decides that profits out of investment are well earned because they serve some important mechanisms that allow companies to operate. HFT used this as an important argument: they add volatility to the market thus allowing more realistic prices. But the same argument can also be made by the Monkeys.

On a lower level we now start to distinguish: the Monkey techniques are manipulative and were used out of malicious intent. Some AI/HFT techniques may be manipulative but intent disguised: if the technique or decision to "manipulate" was devised by AI, who is to blame?

</comment><comment><USER8> Be clear that this behaviour is illegal. Totally. This is the heinous crime of not being Goldman Sachs or RBS or $BIG_FOFF_BANK with political connections. Make offers that others slavishly follow because they haven't got a clue what the real value is, you're getting prosecute - even if you will trade at the prices you quote. Manipulate libor, bullshit credit risk, rip off your customers with buy recommendations while selling? Help the greek govt get a loan that immediately doubles? No worries. Only small guys who cut the big guys lunch have anything to worry about from regulation enforcement. This is called "regulatory capture" and it's just appalling how common it is and how little is done about it. Hell if you're even seen as a big player you can literally rape children and get a deal for a ridiculously light sentence and they agree to stop investigating and prosecuting other offences and then be met by a member of the royal family when you get out. Literally rape children. [http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/03/lawyers- seek-...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/03/lawyers-seek- evidence-prince-andrew-lobbying-jeffrey-epstein) Is there nothing all these lawyers can't corrupt? Yeah the things they fucked up through sheer incompetence. Anyway kids the lesson here will be HFT is bad for you because the spreads in the market you can trade are now tighter, so you have lower transaction costs putting more money in your pocket but Goldman's lucrative market-making is lost to them. Bad for goldman's is bad for you. Oh and bubble markets are caused by short-selling. Investment fund reporting season, rash of stories about HFT and short selling and how evil they are - just please ignore those huge fees mutual funds charge for their underperformance. 1-2% of your wealth per year. 6 figures of your money, please look at short selling and HFT and not that because that's not scary at all.

</comment><comment><USER9> We are going to see more cases like this, as market-making robots increase their trade volumes. Big players are pouring more and more money into automated trading, and that trading relies on algorithms. Often the algorithms involve some sort of machine learning, and therefore depend on the input data, which is vulnerable to manipulation.

For example, imagine a bot programmed by some 5-10 person team at a hedge fund. They find that running sentiment analysis on twitter and news comments can accurately predict whether a given security will rise or fall in response to a fed press release. The profits are good, so the team manager moves a couple million into the algorithm. One night after work, a team member tells his programmer friend about the algorithm, and mentions some of the most profitable stocks. This friend goes home and programs _another_ bot to corrupt the sentiment analysis dataset, by posting fake comments with properly tuned sentiment. The hedge fund bot reacts as expected, and now the friend has the power to manipulate the bot. He has outsmarted the bot and can take advantage of the high volume trading.

That might be a bit of a contrived example, but corruption in machine learning data is a very real problem. People are just starting to study it. [0]

[0] [https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity14/sec14-paper- wang-gang.pdf)

[1] [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1128824](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1128824)

</comment><comment><USER10> HFT systems were tricked into making bad decisions?

Boo hoo hoo! Won't anyone please think of the HFT systems?

<comment><USER11> I don't think anyone is suggesting that it is wrong to "trick" HFT systems (for instance HFT systems make most of their money "tricking" other HFT systems).

What is wrong is doing something expressly illegal to do it. Oh and then putting it into an email chain with an FBI informant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The stock market doesn't seem to be a very well designed game if such simple moves have to be made illegal.

</comment><comment><USER13> The only reason why this is "illegal" and HFT is legal is that the HFT firms are paying customers of the exchange. It's really quite scary how complicit and front-runned the whole stocktrading business has become. I really recommend Flash Boys which is an interesting read on the topic

[http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt- ebook/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt- ebook/dp/B00HVJB4VM)

<comment><USER11> Layering was illegal before there was HFT.

Also, everyone who has any expertise in the way markets and especially electronic markets work, thinks that "Flash Boys" is a terrible book on the topic. You literally are worse off in understanding for reading it.

Try "Dark Pools". Still sensational and occasionally wrong, but at least it gets close.

<comment><USER13> I can agree that Lewis was perhaps more focused on weaving a compelling story than focusing on the finer details of HFT. Nevertheless its a good primer on the subject and an interesting read. Thanks for the tip about Dark pools

<comment><USER14> The problem is that it is absolutely _not_ a good primer on the subject, and the only way you could know this is if you have experience in electronic trading already.

If you are trying to learn about electronic / high frequency trading by reading "Flash Boys" you are actively working against yourself. You will literally be more incorrect after you have read this book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I quite liked the style of writing in this article. It's days like this that I wish news outlets like Bloomberg and IFR has RSS feeds for particular journalists.

<comment><USER16> The do: [http://www.bloombergview.com/rss/contributors/megan- mcardle....](http://www.bloombergview.com/rss/contributors/megan-mcardle.rss)

[http://www.bloombergview.com/rss/contributors/matt- levine.rs...](http://www.bloombergview.com/rss/contributors/matt-levine.rss)

<comment><USER15> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> These people have just found a way to abuse the stupidity of HFT. IMHO, they have played along the rules and the SEC should ban HFT.

<comment><USER11> >IMHO, they have played along the rules

Your humble opinion is factually incorrect. At the heart of this story it doesn't have anything to do with tricking HFT (how ever much that may appeal to you). They broke a basic law, one that everyone who trades knows, and then they put it in an email chain to an FBI informant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article has to be completely misrepresenting which part, exactly, was illegal here. Nearly every high frequency trader in every electronic market aims to do something very similar to 90% of what he describes here.

Is it all because of the motive? And bots can legally do the exact same thing because it's harder to prove any motive behind a bot's actions?

<comment><USER19> _which part, exactly, was illegal here._

The part where he did this with the expressed intention to deceive the market. This is one of those cases where your intentions are far more important that your actions.

<comment><USER18> Internet lawyers... why did I bother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone explain to me why this is illegal?

<comment><USER21> He tried to manipulate the market to take an advantage of the shift: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation)

You are not allowed to do this if you are a simple guy from the street.

<comment><USER22> You are not allowed to do it, full stop.

<comment><USER21> I don't think High-Frequency and Investment Banks are following the rules. Until caught.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Let's say you trained a bot with reinforcement learning, rewarding profitable trades. And it, by itself, learned this strategy.

Would it be illegal? Sure, the reason the strategy works maybe price manipulation, but it is hard to ascribe _intent_ to it all the same.

<comment><USER11> That is precisely why this case is so good for the SEC, there is an email chain.

If you had an email chain stating that you were going to train your bot to layer, that would show intent, which would make it illegal. Otherwise it isn't.

Intentionality is at the heart of the law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I build surveillance programs to look for activity such as spoofing and layering. It is not always as clear cut as these cases make it out to me.</comment>


High IQ May Lead to Increased Risk of Mental Illness - <AUTHOR> http://thriveworks.com/blog/higher-iq-increased-risk-for-mental-illness/ <comment><USER2> "I am shocked -- shocked! -- to find gambling going on in this establishment!"

( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_MEx](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_MEx) )</comment>


Eve Online Development with CCP Ripley [podcast] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gaslight.co/post/52886607762/ccp-ripley-development-director-of-eve-online

<comment><USER2> I wish I had more time to talk with her. I think CCP is doing some amazing things and I'd like to know more about how

</comment><comment><USER3> I never really got into Eve, but this is an interesting podcast.

Thanks for sharing cdmwebs.</comment>


Show HN: TerminusHub, Distributed Revision Control for Structured Data - <AUTHOR> https://terminusdb.com/hub/ <comment><USER2> Hi! It seems some graphic content is served via 'http' instead of 'https', raising an exclamation mark in browsers: [https://terminusdb.com/documentation/](https://terminusdb.com/documentation/)

Also, a small typo in 'Quickstart Ac(c)ademy'.

Thanks, and looking forward to checking TerminusHub!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - we noticed that about the hardcoded http graphics! Need to fix. Thanks for that and the typo spotting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed! Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Core team here! Amazing to launch after years of work.

Computers are fantastic things because they allow you to leverage much more evidence when making decisions than would otherwise be possible. It is possible to write computer programs that automate the ingestion and analysis of unimaginably large quantities of data.

If the data is well chosen, it is almost always the case that computational analysis reveals new and surprising insights simply because it incorporates more evidence than could possibly be captured by a human brain.

And because the universe is chaotic and there are combinatorial explosions of possibilities all over the place, evidence is always better than intuition when seeking insight.

As anybody who has grappled with computers and large quantities of data will know, it's not as simple as that. The joy of analysis and insight is often crushed beneath a mountain of tedious data sourcing, preparation, management and cleaning tasks - ugly ETL scripts that are a horror to maintain and the double horror of trying to extract data with unknown character encodings from undocumented legacy systems - CP-1252 and its friends.

It shouldn't be like this; it doesn't have to be like this. Computers should be able to do most of this for us. It makes no sense that we are still writing the same simple and tedious data validation and transformation programs over and over ad infinitum. There must be a better way.

This is the problem that we set out to solve with TerminusDB. We identified two absolutely indispensable characteristics that were currently sorely lacking in data management tools.

The first one was a rich and universally machine-interpretable modeling language. If we want computers to be able to transform data between different representations automatically, they need to be able to describe their data models to one another.

The second major missing requirement is effective revision control. Revision control technologies have been instrumental in turning software production from a craft to an engineering discipline because they make collaboration and coordination between large groups much more fault tolerant - and boy humans produce faults. The need for such capabilities is screamingly obvious when dealing with data - where the existence of multiple versions of the same underlying dataset is almost ubiquitous and with only the most primitive tool support.

In October 2019, we released version 1.0 of TerminusDB - it contained the culmination of 4 years of building out the data modeling capacity that we needed - the W3Cs web ontology language with a closed world interpretation.

We chose this solution firstly because OWL is by far the best thing humanity has yet produced in terms of a rich, machine-interpretable data modeling interchange format. It is essentially first-order logic with set operations - when it comes to platform interoperability nothing beats mathematics! And adding a closed world interpretation to OWL turns out to be surprisingly easy and semantically unproblematic (closed worlds are contained within open worlds).

In January 2020 with version 1.1. we released the first version of our immutable revision control storage layer - with many of the ideas shamelessly borrowed from git, but expanded significantly because when dealing with data, you need to distinguish between things like schema and instance data and keep them aligned. It turns out to require a significantly more complex structure of internal pointers, but it can be done!

In June 2020, we release version 2.0 - this included the revision control API - push, pull, branch and merge fully integrated with the database, query, and modeling engine. At this stage the database itself was more or less complete in terms of features, but there was one more critical and important point before we could say we had managed to deliver on our vision.

With distributed collaboration technology there is always a bootstrapping problem - it's no use having technology that allows you to collaborate on data in a peer-to-peer decentralized way unless there are other people out there to connect to and collaborate with. To overcome that problem, we needed to deliver an infrastructure that would allow people to get started, to share and find data and collaborators.

Today we release TerminusDB version 3.0 and at the same time we open the doors of TerminusHub. The database is now fully integrated with the hub, allowing all TerminusDB users to share, store, publish and collaborate on databases with other users and do so at the grand price of free. With this release, I think we can say that we have a product that delivers on our vision.

The product itself is only a means to an end. We built TerminusDB to take away the pain of building amazing evidence bases for computational analysis. Although we will relentlessly continue to focus on product and remove every pain point that shows up, we now have the type of tool that we wanted. Now we are going to build some truly wonderful data resources.

<comment><USER3> Cool! I tried to find some information on what versioning is like. I'm not very familiar with OWL and RDF, but I'm trying to get a sense whether the diff between two ontologies is like the set difference between the set of RDF triples, or if there is additional structure on top of that, so that the diffs are more "semantic".

<comment><USER4> Not OP but good question. The diffs end up being semantic and not merely a difference of triples. This is due at least in part to the open world nature of RDF and concepts such as reasoning and materialization.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. It would be great to get some more detail on this.

Quick note, it seemed like it supports only closed-world ontologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you using a self-signed cert?

I'm getting a "Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead" from Firefox.

<comment><USER6> Yes, because the desktop client runs on localhost (or 127.0.0.1 actually), there is no way to produce a valid self-signed cert that won't cause browsers to complain. The desktop electron app causes this problem to disappear from view, but otherwise it's more or less unavoidable if you want to allow people to connect over https to a service running on loopback - in our case it's really what we want as we're a bit paranoid about exposing users to internet- borne risk!

<comment><USER5> What? Why can't you just use a reverse proxy that terminates ssl?

I don't think you're going to get any traffic if the landing page people see is a security warning.

<comment><USER6> I don't think a reverse proxy would work in this case due to the JWT security requirements (callbackable internet accessible endpoints). In any case, that's one of the big reasons we are favoring the electron app as the primary desktop interface because it takes the problem away. The browser based interface is targeted at server deploys and in those cases if you're hosting from a proper ip address, you want to install your own cert of course.

<comment><USER5> I don't know what to tell you, I personally run many services this way, and I've yet to encounter a situation where this doesn't work.

Regardless, your landing page currently is _inaccessible_. That should be a major concern.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Submarine aircraft carrier - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_aircraft_carrier <comment><USER2> It is possible to still visit the HMS M2, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_M2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_M2)

But.. you need to be an experienced diver as it lays at 35 meters... [http://www.divernet.com/wreck-tours/p301708-wreck- tour:-5the...](http://www.divernet.com/wreck-tours/p301708-wreck- tour:-5the-m2.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting - an airplane - submarine was developed in 1964 - [http://1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/KleinBernhard/65...](http://1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/KleinBernhard/6559.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why aren't all military ships submarines? Why do they have to float?

<comment><USER5> At first it makes a lot of sense, but there's a bunch of reasons why surface vessels are needed:

1\. Cost - submarines are a PITA and expensive to build and maintain compared to a 'regular' ship. Also torpedoes are very expensive, about 2.5x the cost of a Tomahawk which is often a perfectly adequate solution in a lot of cases.

2\. Radar - No use underwater unfortunately.

3\. Planes - If you want to launch lots very quickly, you need to be on the surface. Likewise if you want to shoot one down, it's much easier if you're on the surface.

4\. Missile defense - ties in with Radar I guess, but if you want to intercept a missile it's much easier to do from the surface.

5\. Amphibious assault/landing - much easier to sling out some landing craft and amphibious vehicles on the surface than it is underwater. It's also much easier to transport large numbers of them.

6\. Size and weight - I could waffle on for paragraphs about this but tl;dr size/weight = need more power. Generating power is very hard and/or expensive to do quietly, so it makes sense to try and keep subs no bigger than they need to be.

7\. Show of force - A deterrent will only deter someone if they know it's there, and you're not supposed to know where a submarine is.

Having said that, submarines are incredibly useful machines within their own domain - sneaking around and either doing or supporting clandestine operations, and in some cases acting as a very credible nuclear deterrent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> someome is reading /r/evilbuildings :D</comment>


Add support for CSS3 properties to IE6-8 with CSS3PIE - <AUTHOR> http://www.css3pie.com

<comment><USER2> Be careful with this. We've used it on a number of sites, and whilst overall it's beneficial, there are a number of weird things to watch out for.

For instance:

      - Don't add rounded corners to a <table> element - this will crash at least IE7 on XP
      - Don't try to rounded corners an element you've hidden with the "left offset" technique (position: absolute; left: -9999px;). This will crash at least IE7 on XP.

I think there a few others I have since erased from my brain due to IE-induced PTSD. YMMV.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm submitting this again, even though it already got lost in the "new" queue once (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736030>) because it's an amazing solution to a common problem. It helped me tremendously and mentioning it in another thread seemed to have helped others (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2085671>).

<comment><USER3> I think this works great in some situations however on a site I was working on it fell down when zooming the page and ended up having to revert to the usual image based rounded-corners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What kind of black magic voodoo is:

       behavior: url(PIE.htc);

Javascript-y?

<comment><USER5> Haven't quite digested it yet but it seems to be microsoft's attempt at a component model for html/javascript/css.

[http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms531079(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms531079\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 66kb of JS (compressed) is a bit much, this should be broken down piece meal so you can do JUST rounded corners, drop shadow, etc. Would be much more useful that way (rounded corners I'd imagine account for vast majority of the use cases). Cool though.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've tried to use this in the not-so-distant past, but unfortunately it introduced all kinds of weird rendering bugs to the site. I hope others have better luck.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thank you! :D

</comment><comment><USER9> Hallelujah!</comment>


DevOps Is Undead - <AUTHOR> https://blog.opsee.com/devops-is-undead-ad128c543165#.op10oecin <comment><USER2> > If DevOps is dead then what happens to the people doing DevOps?

They'll do the usual thing they were doing until now: they'll work as sysadmins and system programmers.</comment>


Non-Politically Correct Slate Star Codex blog Posts Erased from Internet Archive - drevil-v2 https://web.archive.org/web/20200623220234/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ <comment> drevil-v2 Here is a few more I have noticed that are missing. There is a common theme here.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200618075053/https://slatestar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200618075053/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical- mind-and-gender-identity/)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200624052049/https://slatestar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200624052049/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive- theory-of-the-political-spectrum/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand your posting. You seem to imply that archive.org is actively deleting these pages for some reason? How do you know they are "missing"? Were those links once showing the correct page? Else, how do you know there wasn't a server failure on the Slate Star Codex server which caused the ArchiveBot crawler to not record the expected page?

Note that all of those pages have 100+ copies saved, and most of them show content matching the current page.

334 captures for the title link - [https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://slatestarcodex.com/201...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary- philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/)

105 captures for the first comment link - [https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://slatestarcodex.com/201...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical- mind-and-gender-identity/)

183 captures for the second comment link - [https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://slatestarcodex.com/201...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive- theory-of-the-political-spectrum/)

The second of these three shows a capture of an error message from Slate Star Codex ("This is somewhat embarrassing, isn't it?"). The other two show a capture of a 404 error. This suggests that the error is not on the archive.org side, else, why the different error messages?

The common theme is the failure captures were all about the same time, relatively recently.

Perhaps there was a server failure at the Slate Star Codex site which prevented the ArchiveBot crawler from capturing those pages at those time?

<comment> drevil-v2 When Scott Alexander posted his final blog entry, someone on the HN thread linked to internet archive which I used to read the first 10 or so blog posts since I had never read that blog before.

Now some 6-8 weeks later I go back to continue reading and I found that any posts dealing with social issues from those first 10 was no longer accessible even though I read them on the internet archive on those same links not more than 2 months ago

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=slatestarcodex](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=slatestarcodex) shows a posting here titled "SlateStarCodex Is Back Up" at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23913340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23913340) . It's from 19 days ago.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23610416) shows "I Am Deleting the Blog" dated 48 days ago.

June 23, 2020 (the link of the capture used in your title) was 48 days ago. The other two links you gave were captured on June 24 and June 29, so the 'common theme' is that all of the captures occurred within the period the blog was shut down.

Where is the HN comment posting showing the links you followed which once worked but no longer work now?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NSA decryption revelations 'provide roadmap' to adversaries, US warns - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/06/nsa-encryption-revelations-roadmap-us

<comment><USER2> You caught us red-handed, and then is your fault, not ours. Lets put in jail witness and set free assassins with this way to see things.

The one doing wrong is the US government. And the affected by what they are doing is the rest of the world, both foreing countries and US citizens. Not reporting what is happening means that they would be deepening what they are doing and abusing even more of everyone (specially by the people that know about this)

</comment><comment><USER3> The roadmap being, basically stay away from commercial encryption software. Don't trust hardware that you can't see. Worry about secure routers as much as worrying about secure endpoints. Shouldn't that have been obvious?

</comment><comment><USER4> "Office of the director of national intelligence also suggests stories published by the Guardian and New York Times are 'not news'"

I've noticed one of the best ways to kill or slowdown the outrage over news like this is to write comments such as "this isn't news...it's old stuff "we" already knew...so what's so the big deal?!" \- even though that's completely ridiculous, because if the person making that comment "knew about it" because he's been one of those "conspiracy nuts", as they used to be called pre- Snowden, it doesn't mean that _everyone_ knew about what the NSA could do, and what has done.

Besides, even now we don't actually know the full extent of what NSA has been doing. So it's very disingenuous to make comments such as "we knew that already" in an effort to kill outrage over it (whether intentional or not).

I don't know if NSA has noticed this strategy, too, and are now using it on purpose (just like they're already using psy-ops), but at the very least saying that what the Guardian and NYT unveiled is "not news" is lying to our faces, because just yesterday they were trying to get these stories from getting published.

So which is it, NSA? Is it "not news", or are you trying to stop them from getting published, _because_ it's news?

I know NSA and the administration have gotten very good at using words meaning the opposite of what they're doing (like Newspeak), but they can't have their cake and eat it, too. Either "everyone already knew this", or "the revelations are helping the enemy". Pick one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Im curious who is so heavily flagging this article? Fell off the front page in minutes...

</comment><comment><USER6> The adversaries are us.</comment>


Debian 10.4 - <AUTHOR> https://www.debian.org/News/2020/20200509 <comment><USER2> I cut my teeth on Red Hat (before Fedora was a thing), used Gentoo for a few years when I cutely believed that waiting hours for compiles to finish was fun and useful, but for the last 8-10 years I've been on Debian.

It's not perfect, but it gets the job done. For my laptop I usually run testing, and then stick with stable for 6 months or so after it's released, before switching back to testing. For me, it's a good balance between stability and having recent versions of applications.

<comment><USER3> I use both gentoo and debian. I find it hard for either one to replace the other. I can't let go of the control gentoo gives me and as you noted the smooth and stable binary based debian let's you get the job done fast with little hustle. I try to mix and match, using gentoo as a minimalist and debian as a full blown desktop or prod network(http,etc...) server.

<comment><USER4> In which cases do you need the minimalism Gentoo provides?

<comment><USER5> I've seen companies using Gentoo (with a lot of tooling around it) in specialized context.

Particularly in military contracts, Gentoo brings you several things:

1) you have a full audit trace from the compilation, and in paranoid situation, it's a huge plus.

2) it permits you to minimize the OS footprint quite a lot (feature flags), which helps improving security (less exposure).

3) it permits an high degree of customization, including the combination of software versions used.

4) it's relatively easy to import a patch and maintain an overlay yourself.

We have to keep in mind the constrains of Military contracts: The systems tends to be quite complex, validation is quite lengthy, updates are far in between, they tend to use specialized/weird/not powerful hardware which might need some tweaking, and the level of traceability is generally quite high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a relative Linux newbie, who's running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on two laptops at home, would there be any advantages to Debian 10.4 over Ubuntu 20.04?

(I assume at least some of that answer would depend on my use cases and hardware, but if you have general insights to the differences, some of us might find that useful!)

<comment><USER7> No ads in your MOTD

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motd_(Unix)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motd_\(Unix\))

Never heard of MOTD before. I'll keep an eye out for it since I haven't encountered it yet (as a newb!)

Presumably getting ads is pretty annoying!

<comment><USER8> It is, and it's one of the more annoying MOTDs I've encountered. You won't see it unless you get rid of the login manager and login at the terminal. Or, use the server edition.

<comment><USER9> > _You won 't see it unless you get rid of the login manager and login at the > terminal. Or, use the server edition._

And even though you don't see it, it's still there -- on every Ubuntu install (by default) -- phoning home to Canonical (every 12 hours, if memory serves).

(Some users may not mind, of course, but they certainly don't go out of their way to let you know about it beforehand, which is my major issue with it.)

<comment><USER6> I had no idea this was a thing. Thanks for the details. Do you happen to have a link handy for more information? If not, I'll see what I can find scouring the internet!

<comment><USER9> Here's an HN thread [0] from a few years ago regarding "advertising" in the MOTD, specifically, and Ubuntu's "dynamic" MOTD, generally. (I'm not sure if all of the hardware/system details were being sent back then, though.)

The relevant "snippets" responsible for this behavior live in their own directory, /etc/update-motd.d/, if memory serves. That may not be exactly right -- perhaps unsuprisingly, I don't have an Ubuntu box handy -- but it should at least be close enough to help you find the actual directory.

\---

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14662088)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Please note: Starting with Debian 7, the minor number is not part of the Debian release number, and numbers with a minor component like 9.4 or 9.7 now indicate a _point_ release. Basically, only security updates and major bug fixes, with new updated installation media images. This, 10.4, is _not_ a new major release of Debian.

<comment><USER11> So your point is that a .x release is a minor, point release? Isn't that obvious by itself?

<comment><USER10> It didn't use to be that way; Debian 3.1 was a major release after Debian 3.0, and Debian 6.0 had minor releases up to 6.0.10. This did not change until Debian 7 (which was called 7, not 7.0, and had a minor release numbered 7.1). Therefore, many people might still be used to the first minor version number being a major release, even though it is not true anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What would I do without you, Debian? Thanks team for all the work, if you happen to see this. It is _very_ appreciated.

<comment><USER13> For me it was: Redhat-> Slackware -> FreeBSD -> Debian

I should probably donate

<comment><USER14> Take a look at the website for Debian's parent organization, Software In The Public Interest, and see all the projects they are responsible for: [https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/](https://www.spi-inc.org/projects/)

Contributing is not a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My problem with Debian (and Ubuntu) has been that often when I want to install a seemingly little piece of software, be it a library or a program, I end up getting the whole slew of stuff - frameworks, daemons, even language processors I haven't suspected existed. (This may not be the distro's problem, but I believe at least some of those things may be optional, and I would have liked to treat them as such.)

<comment><USER16> You can't even install a GUI without getting every web browser, mail client, office suite, and more under the sun.

<comment><USER9> You _can_ , but it does require one to RTFM and know/learn about the available installation options.

My automated "preseed" installs are quite minimal. I don't recall exactly how many packages I end up with on a new install but I _think_ it was 224 -- much fewer than what you'll end up with when doing a typical installation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've actually been using Raspbian Desktop installed on a laptop to develop software for raspberry pi. For some reason it's faster compiling xojo apps than windows or mac. Debian FTW!

</comment><comment><USER18> I used to love the shit out of Debian., but nowadays, that I am really startled and shocked what it had become. Try to get nvidia graphics running on an optimus based laptop, and you will find yourself in a midst of an multiple hour long try and error prone session of head-shaking and cursing. Graphics installer -> no touchpad?!?!? Blueutooth A2DP -> fix it by hand..... This list goes on and on and on...

<comment><USER19> I built a PC in 2005 with an Nvidia graphics card and ran Debian on it exclusively. I had a lot of trouble with that graphics card over the years, but that wasn't caused by Debian, but rather by Nvidia, because they did neither offer nor even support open source drivers. My conclusion was to not buy any Nvidia product again, until they offer proper open source drivers for it. Since I retired this PC I haven't owned any Nvidia product anymore and I couldn't be happier. Sure the drivers for other graphics cards aren't perfect either, but at least I don't have to deal with binary blobs anymore where nobody except of the manufacturer can fix issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> debian is awesome.

<comment><USER21> it really is.

thank you to the team for a great OS and for keeping the spirit of ian murdock alive.

the tough decision for me right now on my laptop, is whether to use MX Linux, which has been great the last few years, or this Linux Mint Debian Edition, which i've been trying since the latest release and is very nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The first Debian release I used was slink (released March 1999). I stopped using debian on most of my personal machines when they switched to systemd. This is because a few of them refused to boot or exhibited strange init related bugs after the switch.

<comment><USER23> My first Debian was also Slink, installed from a box of floppies onto a 486. Had to use rawrite to put the disk image onto the floppies. That box of floppies is still around here somewhere, though the 486 is long gone.

<comment><USER24> I remember the troubles using _" dselect"_ without a stable internet connection, _" apt"_ came quite later (with _Potato_ or _Woody_ , don't recall). On the other hand, I never had the need to try something else...

<comment><USER22> I think apt was actually in slink. I remember the dist-upgrade to potato over a modem. It was so far ahead of the rpm based distros then.

But the installer still dropped you into dselect for a long time thereafter. Once it was installed it was smooth sailing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Bloomberg Is Advancing C++ at Scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.techatbloomberg.com/blog/bloomberg-advancing-c-scale/ <comment><USER2> This is so devoid of actual information. Doesn't sound like Lakos has moved much past "Large scale C++ software design".</comment>


JVM Notebook: Basic Clojure, Java and JVM Language performance - <AUTHOR> http://berlinbrowndev.blogspot.com/2009/07/jvm-notebook-basic-clojure-java-and-jvm.html

<comment><USER2> Here is a seemingly relevant thread from the Clojure group: [http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...](http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/289904c1a5deb8d8/07326af651db0ef8?lnk=gst&q=berlin+brown#07326af651db0ef8)

It was pointed out on there that this is not only a language comparison but a data structure comparison as well. Also, there are no type hints in the Clojure code. Without type hints it would be expected to run significantly slower. It's still an interesting comparison because you would generally only use type hints in performance bottlenecks. I'd be especially interested in seeing what kind of difference it would make in this case.

</comment><comment><USER3> Persistent data structures are a lot slower then mutable ones, so this was no surprise.

I wonder how clojure would have done with the new transients syntax (<http://clojure.org/transients>).

</comment><comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, I wrote a simple non-optimized quicksort function in Common Lisp (SBCL) and timed a 180,000-element sort at 567ms, about half as much as the Java version. I'm sure that could be improved greatly with better coding and type hints.

Here's the code <http://donnieknows.com/blog/sbcl-fast>

</comment><comment><USER5> OK, let's write the performance critical part in Java or Scala and Clojure wins hands down for the rest, where we spend our development time at most.

<comment><AUTHOR> Or write the whole thing in Clojure and drop to Java / Scala when you find bottlenecks. (In the same spirit of Python & Ruby people 'dropping to C' for performance when needed.)

It seems to me that Scala is becoming the de facto Java replacement; which strikes me as nothing but a good thing.

<comment><USER6> I know it's a controversial question but why do you prefer Clojure over Scala?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's controversial at all. I prefer lisps in general, and that's pretty much the extent of it. I think Scala is a fine language, but it's not a lisp.

<comment><USER6> I see. I expected some technical reason, but obviously personal preference is fine too :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well... I guess you could say preference for lisps is a technical reason; but only if you are into macrology.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dell could emerge as a public company through a reverse merger with VMware - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/29/dell-is-considering-a-sale-to-vmware-in-what-may-be-techs-biggest-deal.html <comment><USER3> I can't wait for Dell to go public again, so that we can someday have a repeat of the last private buyout debacle, in which banks literally couldn't keep track of who owned Dell stock[0], and Dell shareholders simultaneously argued that the stock price was too high while _also_ suing for it being too low.... and won[1].

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-14/banks- for...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-14/banks-forgot-who- was-supposed-to-own-dell-shares)

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-01/michael-d...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-01/michael- dell-bought-his-company-too-cheaply)

<comment><USER4> Appraisal rights lawsuits are essentially trolling in the M&A world. It's a nuisance markets, bankers, lawyers and courts have to deal with, but they're not relevant to anyone who isn't a party to the deal.

Dell going public again in no way indicates there will ever be another private buyout. That may or may not happen, and both the market and the industry have changed much since Michael Dell took it private.

Different groups of shareholders argued different things... appraisal rights are weird, and at the end of the day 99% of people in Finance will argue that the judge's decision on that case is entirely inconsistent with even the most basic principles of corporate finance and capital markets. Just because one guy who happens to have the power to decide the lawsuit's ultimate fate says his version of the facts is right doesn't mean he is _in fact_ correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I do DevOps, with a heavy focus on the Infrastructure side, and there is a comical amount of misinformation buried throughout that article.

I don't have the background to comment on the reverse-merger, but the VMware- AWS partnership is generally regarded as a smart move, giving Amazon access to enterprise customers who weren't moving to the cloud, and giving VMware a way to get in on that sweet Cloud OpEx budget.

VMware has been doing a pretty good job of being the SDN one stop shop for companies that want that, and selling SDN components a la carte where required.

<comment><USER6> I heard from Dell/Silver Lake that NSX was super hot and could be a major revenue earner for them. Is that true?

<comment><USER5> I've been told its a big deal for VMware, and from my personal experiences its been popping up everywhere lately.

I did recently just get my NSX VCIX, and handled several large scale implementations of NSX, so I might be a little too biased to tell if its really taking off, or if it's just a big deal in my little part of the pond.

Either way, it's a neat piece of technology, and I enjoy playing with it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dell has a large debt load (not quite as much as some of the news outlets are reporting because they have something like $15bn+ in cash).

The change in tax code makes debt more expensive because you can't offset all of the interest. However most private equity executives believe that with the drop in corporate income tax, the effect is roughly net neutral. Not quite sure what the situation is for Dell.

I imagine a big motivator for Dell to buy VMware is to unlock the cashflow. They can then use the cash to pay down the debt. Including VMware, the debt load on as a multiple of EBITDA is roughly 3.5-4.0x net debt/EBITDA which isn't that high.... for PE

At the moment they own ~80% of the company but can't access the cash even though they book the profits on a look through basis.

<comment><USER6> They have ~$47bn debt with ~$18bn in cash. Giving them a net debt of ~$29bn

[https://investors.delltechnologies.com/news-releases/news- re...](https://investors.delltechnologies.com/news-releases/news-release- details/dell-technologies-reports-fiscal-year-2018-third-quarter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title is misleading, perhaps a mod could switch to the subtitle fragment "VMware could buy Dell in massive reverse-merger"

While legally it would be VMWare buying Dell, practically Dell already controls VMWare. The manoeuvre is a reverse IPO, a way for Dell to go public without the rigmarole.

<comment><USER8> Of course you mean go public _again_.

...didn't Michael spend a lot of time and angst going public, for long-term success' sake?

<comment><USER9> He did, but the corporate tax cut was funded partially by giving less preferential treatment to debt (only being able to deduct 30% of the interest) and Dell was taken private with tons of debt. The takeover of EMC added tons more debt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dell goes public, bet they'll start making shitty PC's again. In 2012 I had 3 of their 'high' end pc's die on me. Btw, I was just a noob CS/CE college student tinkering around with software. Couple of years later 2016, after they went private, noticed my friend's Dell XPS developer edition had, what I would say good quality. Not top notch, like Lenovo high ends or Macbooks but definitely decent.

</comment><comment><USER11> The Dell-EMC merger was reported at $67B by cash and stock. I am not sure how much Dell paid out in cash, but I am imagining something like 10,20% were paid to the major shareholders, and the rest were just stock shares? How does this cash + stock payout work in practice?

<comment><USER12> Apparently Dell has $50B debt, maybe a large chunk was cash? Unless that's private buyout debt I guess.

<comment><USER6> They have "cash and investments balance of $18.0 billion"

[https://investors.delltechnologies.com/news-releases/news- re...](https://investors.delltechnologies.com/news-releases/news-release- details/dell-technologies-reports-fiscal-year-2018-third-quarter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would be nice. I don't know what happened when they went private, but they are hard to deal with now. 3rd party VARS regularly underbid them for the same exact equipment. And the salespeople can't get out of their own way, seem frustrated, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't get over the rumor mill... Friday, VMware stock jumps 20% on word that Dell would buy the remaining 20% of VMware to then IPO. As of this morning the opposite is leaked and VMware may buy Dell and the shares slide 16% the other direction. Many articles say that the board is going to meet later this month to decide. It's amazing that tens of billions of dollars in value swing on a few unsubstantiated whispers. There may be some truth to it but I don't think we are any closer to knowing

</comment><comment><USER15> Check out how many insiders at VMWare dumped their stock in last 12 mos vs prior 4 years.

</comment><comment><USER16> I read this as "public cloud company" originally...then realized it just said "public company".

I wonder if public cloud could be in the cards though. Merge with HPE, Rackspace and maybe even Cisco and be a dinosaur public cloud play competing with IBM for scraps?

<comment><USER13> They all started private clouds, but as far as I know, only IBMs Bluemix/SoftLayer survived. For some reason, there's no real competition in that space.

I would guess there are enough overly cautious CIO types out there to support a "big" competitor to Bluemix.

Though, I'm hoping Amazon's announcement for official support for K8S starts a new era where public cloud providers actually compete, and drive down things like ridiculous egress pricing. If the public cloud is affordable, the need for hybrid/private/etc drops down.

<comment><USER17> _> They all started private clouds_

I see this from the inside professionally and I'm not surprised by the outcome. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are basically unmatchable. IBM likely survives on incompetent managers paying more to ensure they don't get fired, but nobody else has that advantage.

Kids, don't play datacentre at home.

<comment><USER13> Right...but it stifles progress a bit by encouraging stodgy F500 companies to stay with colo arrangements or worse.

Non elastic, or high egress cost apps are still too expensive to run on public clouds. Or, the transition period, where you're half in/half out, kills you because of overpriced egress.

<comment><USER17> _> Non elastic, or high egress cost apps are still too expensive to run on public clouds._

Unfortunately for the sector I'm in, this is becoming less and less true every few months. Besides, a lot of managers simply don't care, they'll just compensate higher opex with a few redundancies, it doesn't matter - <USER2> capex budget goes down, they cash the big bucks, and if apps don't work it's the nerds' fault.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Never going to happen because of conflicts, VMware makes too much revenue from HPE

<comment><USER19> Dell acquired EMC in 2015 and already owns 80% of VMware. This is just talking about DELL doing a "reverse-merger" with VMware as a way to get back into the public markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is like those dotcom boom "all shares" sales or two companies contracting each other to record revenue.

No wonder they are both tanking if upper management is fully occupied playing valuation games and swapping chairs.</comment>


23 must-read books that Bill Gates recommended in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-book-recommendations-in-2018-2018-12 <comment><USER2> You may find this useful - I did.

All of Bill Gates Recommended reading from 8 years....

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18579610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18579610)</comment>


Ask HN: Which appointment booking service is easiest to integrate in your app? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on startup with a long and arduous application process (horrible outsourced MVP here: www.growthstreet.co.uk) which requires a skype/in person interview. I'm looking for an appointment booking service that we can quickly integrate with to manage those bookings. What have you used with success? Which are the services to avoid?
Thanks
George <comment><USER2> We use Setmore: [http://www.setmore.com/](http://www.setmore.com/).

Very happy with it and the developers are responsive to issues (even from free users like me).

I found many customers were booking appointments without figuring out the equivalent time in their timezone, missing their scheduled appointment because of the confusion.

The devs added a new hover feature to make it clear what their local time is for available slots.

We use the subdomain. Iframe integration is also available (not amazing on mobile).</comment>


NYC and SF devs needed to teach coding in high schools - <AUTHOR> ScriptEd brings professional software developers into under-resourced high schools to teach students to code. In 2018-19, we will reach over 1,200 students in 50 high schools in NYC and the Bay Area. With a community of over 300 volunteers, ScriptEd is a great way to meet like-minded people, help youth access careers in tech, and make a big impact in your community with your skills and free time. To learn more or apply, visit www.scripted.org/volunteer. <comment><USER2> Highly recommend doing this! I volunteered in New York last year and had a great time. Wrote about my experience here: [https://www.coryetzkorn.com/blog/volunteering-with- scripted/](https://www.coryetzkorn.com/blog/volunteering-with-scripted/)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're the best - thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I strongly recommend volunteering. I taught in Oakland in the '17-'18 school year. It was a great experience and I will gladly do it again as soon as I have a more flexible job. I was anxious about the known and unknown challenges, but that faded quickly after the first couple classes. I learned a lot from this experience, and I'm a better person for it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've done this for four years and it has been a very rewarding experience. Happy to answer any questions folks might have.</comment>


McDonald's Happy Meal Unchanged After 6 Months On A Table.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/13/mcdonalds-happy-meal-photos-6-months_n_761364.html

<comment><USER2> Interested in reading (or, seeing) this, however, the link is broken.

</comment><comment><USER3> i thought that similarity of experiences is a founding principle of fast food retail.</comment>


Microsoft Paying Bloggers to Write about Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2014/06/17/microsoft-paying-bloggers-to-write-about-internet-explorer/ <comment><USER2> While I can understand some of the concerns here, I'd encourage you to look at where Internet Explorer is now; it's come a long way in the past few years.

IE today offers a brand new experience with many different features. The reworked Internet Explorer lets you search smarter and do more with its cool new features, such as multitasking, pinnable sites, and full-screen browsing.

Wherever you are, Internet Explorer is the ideal way to play games, catch up on your reading, watch videos, and browse the web, of course. Use fast and fluid Internet Explorer across all your Windows devices—tablet, Windows Phone, and TV with an Xbox with an Xbox Live Gold subscription.

This program is really a great way for bloggers and HN commenters to spread the word about the new Internet Explorer web experience in a cool, visual way. There's also opportunities for fun prizes and rewards through duration of the program.

<comment><USER3> I hope this is comedy. If it isn't, give me a break :)

Excuse the vent - I just spent two hours fixing some shit just for IE...

Seriously. I spent a LOT of my time in front of IE and this is the real story:

The built in search determination is awful. Half the time, valid web sites are sent straight to bing. It's worse than Safari and Chrome by miles. The only hope is hit Ctrl+E to force it to search. It's as smart is a lobotomized monkey.

Pinnable sites are just bookmarks outside the browser. This isn't really all that useful. I have never seen a person use it, ever.

As for multitasking, it supposedly no longer crashes the entire browser if a tab goes. That is total trash. Many a time have I lost the entire thing after a tab crashed. As for security, the recent unpatched hole for several days says how the privsep implementation DOESN'T work well (mandatory integrity control). It's half arsed at best.

As for Windows Phone, I owned one (Lumia 820 w/ WP8). The IE version is abysmal. It crashes regularly, renders text in crazy sizes randomly all over the place and hardly works at all across the web. Why? Because people don't use it so no one cares about it. Perhaps that isn't Microsoft's problem but even Microsoft's web site doesn't work properly (MSDN subs+Azure management portal) The browsing story on my Moto G is an order of magnitude better than WP ever was for me.

Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for? The XBox is a horrible abomination. Most of the games whinge and moan if you're not plugged into the Internet, even if you want a single player campaign. It's painful. The whole thing is obstructive and painful. The browser on my 360 is slow, unreliable as well and doesn't render half of the sites anywhere near how they should be rendered.

The big one for me really is that Microsoft can't even make their OneDrive versions of Excel work properly with IE11. Half the time (on several different machines) the spreadsheet display gets corrupted around the currently selected cell.

Then we come to the dev story:

1\. The entire back end of IE is a shit crock. The dev tools have no idea what is happening on the wire. They have no idea if the HTTP runtime got the file from cache or the wire meaning we have to use proxies. What's the point of it then?

2\. The console is useless, even on IE11. Half the time it doesn't work and the code inspector lies a lot about the state of the DOM. The same with the object inspector.

3\. The icons and UI is horrible. Until you've been using it for a bit, it's unusable. Try it on a laptop as well - the left bar is unusable. The only hope is undock it from the browser and Alt-Tab. Some idiot thought that the Azure management portal looked cool and lets change everything to make it look like that.

4\. The debugger JS regularly crashes the entire browser and doesn't always hit breakpoints.

5\. Compatibility mode. This is a royal PITA for us. It has cost us a shit ton of money. First we got told by MS that this thing was Jesus' sandals. Now we have 2000 users with random distribution of forced compatibility view and no way to turn it off. Inevitably that means we now have 2x the number of test cases to execute.

Just no. Seriously. They can go hang. I've had to put up with 15 years of this crap.

<comment><USER4> _Why should I pay for an XBox live sub to use something I paid for?_

Since earlier this month, you don't need to pay for an XBox Live Gold subscription to use apps like Hulu+, Youtube, Netflix and IE (!). Although I can't see the point of IE on the XBox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's really amazing is how lackluster the whole campaign is. IE is a touted as a "new browser", but here are the features they are especially proud of:

      1) Full Screen Browsing.
      2) Multitasking, which apparently means "Skype while full screen browsing".
      3) Reading view, a la the Readability or Clearly plug ins.
      4) Pinned sites, which I guess I don't understand, but it looks like Windows 8 tiles.

[http://www.rethinkie.com/hello- again/#/newbrowser](http://www.rethinkie.com/hello-again/#/newbrowser)

Do I qualify for a payment?

<comment><USER6> That's because IE development is typically around 2 years behind the others. So they can only "brag" about stuff others have already had for a while, but try to spin the features as new.

<comment> mkr-hn It works for Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That "Advocate Marketing" company has a list of customers in the slider banner on their website: Target, _AT &T_, Fossil, Dole Food Company, McDonalds, _Bing_ , _Verizon_ , UnitedWay (non-profit?!), 3M, Anheuser-Busch, The Clorox Company, Walmart, _EMC Corporation_ , Aveda Corporation, Expedia, _Windows Phone_ , Citibank, Purina, Wells Fargo, _Snapfish_ , Clinique, Oral-B, Sara Lee, _Haier_. (IT companies/brands are italicized.)

<comment><USER8> It's a nice list for search engine providers.

Perhaps DDG could low-light results that include companies that have paid- blogging programs?

"Caution: the quality of these pages might be low because $CORP pays bloggers to promote them"

<comment><USER9> Advocacy tracking/detection/whatever would be a great feature for ddg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For reference, here are details about the program:

[http://unbouncepages.com/7975010c-edb3-11e3-b3e0-12314000cce...](http://unbouncepages.com/7975010c-edb3-11e3-b3e0-12314000cce6/)

</comment><comment><USER11> They pitched me as well yesterday: [https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/478757246323548162](https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/478757246323548162)

</comment><comment><USER12> As long as Microsoft continues improving IE the way they have been I'm not going to get my undies in a bunch over a little astroturfing.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's nothing new under the sun. On several websites i visit it's become increasingly difficult to tell whether or not someone is a paid marketer (giving rise to parodies thereof, and consequently Poe's law).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the news is that it was sent to Arrington of all people. Plus the "Go TechCrunch" bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess it says a lot about how much Microsoft has improved over the years that this seems "low, even for Microsoft." right?

<comment><USER15> When you need to pay people to write about your product, it means you've fallen pretty deep. Just like Detroit would probably be forced to pay businesses to settle in their town to attract them in the first place.

<comment><USER14> I doubt it's so much that they need to, but that someone in that large organization authorized it, either not knowing any better, or seeking some short term benefit ignorant of the long term negatives.

<comment><USER15> > that someone in that large organization authorized it,

The fact that it's even remotely possible shows that this organization does not have much principles in the first place, unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love the "Go TechCrunch!" line at the end.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope now everyone sees the Penny-Arcade reviews in a totally different light, too (and by the way, Gabe has already admitted to getting lots of free stuff from Microsoft).

<comment><USER17> It may be the case that he gets paid, but the Surface is at least a legitimately good piece of hardware (much better in its product domain than IE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The problem is that now this is public, any positive review of a Microsoft product will be viewed with suspicion, having the very opposite of the intended effect.

<comment><USER19> Many have always viewed with suspicion to most positive IE reviews in the past. I like giving a honest try for IE from time to time, just like the Bing search (as a user and developer), but always it looks like almost on purpose IE team just refuses to fix most of the annoying things. I believe changing a name might be a good start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This stuff is true for many things in many businesses. and media is just a piece of the Iceberg. Video Games Magazines/websites have been paid for decades to write positive review and generate awareness for certain games, and I guess most people are aware of it. That's why I usually take with a big grain of salt anything that's written without any clear declaration of conflict of interest (or its absence).

</comment><comment><USER20> Just a few hours ago I have run into a weird bug in IE 11. I am guessing some cookie values are cached and this is leading to unpredictable behaviour in my app. Seems to disappear when I have the dev tools open or when I clear the browser.

IE8 -> IE9 -> IE10 was fraught with stability issues that didn't go away till I upgraded to 11.

I get it that all browsers have bugs but somehow IE seems to lead the pack.

<comment><USER21> No kidding. I also have weird IE bugs on sites that work flawlessly in other older browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately, IE hasn't fixed its main problem yet, and that problem is the slow upgrade cycle. Until they fix that IE will unavoidably remain the lowest common denominator of all browsers (on average).

I'm sure that by the time IE11 becomes obsolete I'm going to end up dreading the fact that a huge set of missing features will have to be taken into account.

</comment><comment><USER6> Remember when Google penalized its own Chrome in the search engine? They should do the same with these IE posts now. After all, they apply that rule to everyone else, so why not Microsoft/IE, too?

Downrank the posts and the sites, and ban their Adsense accounts - if Google wants to treat _everyone_ the same way, and not just the little guy.

</comment><comment><USER23> Next step in MS evolution would be paying bloggers to write about Windows ;) Though it might still take a while.

<comment><USER24> Windows8 to be precise.

Wouldn't want that marketing money go to waste, paying people to write about how to successfully upgrade from Windows8 to Windows7 to have a real desktop OS to work with instead of a Frankenstein Hybrid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Microsoft doesn't deserve a second chance. They went out of their way to destroy Netscape and then allowed IE to languish for years. Microsoft has always been an underachieving bully. Mediocrity is part of their DNA and they simply have no desire (or ability) to make good products consistently.

<comment><USER26> They don't deserve a second chance at what? Being your friend?

If Netscape had their way you'd be paying for web browsers.

The web is a pit of mediocrity held together by hacks. What browser do you use that isn't mediocre?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There is no need to pay for marketing, IE creates jobs, period. Endless hours of web dev goes to fixing stuffs just for IE, that's what distinguish a professional Web developer from template generator. _trolling_

</comment><comment><USER28> Meh, so many companies do this, it's not new or evil.

<comment><USER29> Advertisements masquerading as impartial opinion pieces are not evil? What is evil - strangling kittens?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I thought that was the norm these days... Or maybe I should ask, what major blog doesn't accept payments to write articles about whatever? Thats how the blogging business works.

</comment><comment><USER31> The thing is, it's boring. We don't care! We have had good browsers for years! Too late to the party as always MS.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why am I getting a Déjà vu? I've seen the "Go TechCrunch" comment before. This looks like a repost to me.

<comment><USER33> It's just that Mike Arrington, whose posts on TC have been some good money printers for many startups of the fund he went on creating, likes to bash who is more naïve and less expert than he is at monetizing or rewarding Web contents. So, yes, he's probably repeating himself somehow, here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> yeh Microsoft definitly is inspired by Google in this regard... [http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping- sponsored-p...](http://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored- post-campaign-for-chrome-106348)

</comment><comment><USER35> This seems vaguely familiar to me... Remember when they paid to port apps to windows phone?

<comment><USER36> Paying developers to port their apps is completely legitamete. It's a chicken and egg problem. Users don't want to use the platform because there are few apps, but developers don't want to write apps because there are few users. If Microsoft can spend some money to get additional apps in the store it's just a business decision. In my opinion they should have dedicated more money to that program.

This on the other hand is deceptive and I think pretty embarrassing. Completely different scenarios.

<comment><USER37> It's not quite as slimy as, say, Samsung paying for fake grassroots badmouthing of competing products [1], but it's little different from fake user reviews on Amazon, unless the blogger discloses upfront, in a very visible way, that it's a paid-for post.

Nothing wrong with rewarding developers for porting app to your platform, there is nothing deceptive or otherwise unethical about it.

1: [http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web- rev...](http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/04/17/samsung-fake-web-reviews/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > I believe it will be easier for them to pay users to use Internet Explorer.

</comment><comment><USER39> Of course it does,like it is paying astroturfers right here on HN.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wait... I thought the browser wars were over?

<comment><USER41> IE still represents abut 20% of Browser usage, it's still more than Firefox and a lot more than Safari.

You never know, the new direction MS is taking with regards to openness may bear its fruits. It's going to take a lot for MS to regain its past market shares, but personally, I'd prefer if it stayed around and compete with the other browsers.

I don't want Chrome to end-up being the new IE.

<comment><USER42> At least Chrome is constantly updated, is fast, and most parts of it (certainly the important parts) are open source... If there's going to be a browser monoculture, Chrome seems like the best option at the moment...

<comment><USER43> You mean Firefox is the best option. All of it is open source.

<comment><USER44> Well... so is the Chromium project.

<comment><USER45> But practically no one uses Chromium; they're using Chrome, which has significant proprietary components.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So unsurprising.

</comment><comment><USER47> I think this is perfectly legit.

Of course as long as they do not instruct you WHAT to write and do not interfere your publishing process in any way at any point.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is why I like about working in Microsoft's Marketing. They have a lot of money to spend (or waste). It's just fun to experiment different things with huge resources. So why not? I would do the same if I work in IE Marketing anyways. There is nothing bad about it but the ROI is probably low. However, there is always a way to tweak the metrics to say: hey, I ran a successful IE rebrand program or some shet like that. Go Microsoft (Marketing)!! ;-)</comment>


Big Tech's 'Innovations' That Aren't - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-techs-innovations-that-arent-11567033288?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> > What "innovation" remains in this space is innovation to keep the treadmill > running, longer and faster, drawing more data from users to bombard us with > more ads for more stuff.

A tweet from @iamdeveloper today:

1950: how do we get people to listen to more ads?

1970: how do we get people to watch more ads?

2000: how do we get people to click on more ads?

2020: how do we get people to be ads?

2030: people are ads now

<comment><USER3> I laughed, and there's a good amount of truth to this. Although imo a lot of the IG influencers and sponsored Youtubers already are walking advertisements.

<comment><USER4> That is the point that is being made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a little ironic that his only example of "real" innovation is the moon landing which was a huge government program he certainly wouldn't support now.

I generally agree that current big tech companies don't really do much innovation anymore but I fear that he is just attacking the companies he doesn't like for political reasons but leaves others out.

The whole excessive partisanship sucks. It makes you question the real motives behind good looking ideas and unfortunately these suspicions are often correct.

</comment><comment><USER6> The WSJ calling out exploitation of the American public at the expense of big corporations? Wow.

The cynical motivations are transparent, but oh well. Best of luck, Senator Hawley.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. I agree with the premise but I feel like this article is a sleight of hand to distract from non-tech companies exploiting people.

<comment><USER6> One lens to view American politics through is as a proxy war between two factions of the American elite. One is comprised of tech, media, and various service firms; the other is finance and extractive industries.

The only really strategy for clipping the wings of any of those industries is to ally yourself with the faction that doesn't represent them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think Hawley's position or presentation are perfect, but if you can separate the wheat from the chaff this is a really good start.

And even if you don't like it at all, let this just be another indicator that the general population is starting to wise up to the fact the "tech" business model has been getting more and more exploitative. You can continue rationalizing the systems you build at your dayjob here on Hacker News, but in the real world dang isn't around to hush the people who want to tell you to go get fucked.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't agree with his claim that big tech advances are responsible for teen suicide rates, and definitely don't appreciate him trying to capitalize on it to push his own agenda.

I must say though,

>What passes for innovation by Big Tech today isn't fundamentally new products or new services, but ever more sophisticated exploitation of people.

Does have some truth to it

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure the claim isn't that "big tech advances" bear the sole responsibility for teen suicide rates, but rather that they contribute to them in a substantial way.

The atrophy of real-world relationships he mentions is not something he made up, but rather a real problem. And I would be surprised if someone could prove that this problem doesn't contribute to teen suicide rates at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Silicon Valley's giants are no longer producing better products and > services. They're exploiting people.

Why can't they be doing both, like industry has done since industry was a thing?

I think the senator has a very narrow definition of innovation which for the great part has been about combining existing elements to create something "new". Viewed like this, there's innovation all over the place.

I do like some of the restrictions he advocates for, but I doubt they'll ever be anything more than talking points.

</comment><comment><USER12> Help me brainstorm here (genuinely):

I'm trying to think of innovations in the last few decades, but everything I can think of is a refinement of an technology invented 50+ years ago (mostly at bell labs) made possible by the exceptional strides in semiconductor manufacturing. It's certainly nice to have technology spread more widely from research labs to the general public, but I'm wondering if there are innovations happening now that I don't know about because they aren't widespread (yet?).

Anyone have any ideas of innovations since say 1980 other than in semiconductor manufacturing?

<comment><USER13> "Eventually we will run out of things to rip off from Douglas Engelbart"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

<comment><USER14> > The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the > fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, > graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the > computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and > a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work).

Whoa, 1968! It seems incredible that was half a century ago!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Corporations do whatever is most profitable. If we don't like what they're doing, the only way to change it is to incentivize something else. Were the U.S. a country with interest in funding public-works projects - infrastructure, science, etc. - we'd benefit massively from the amount of brainpower and energy stored up in Silicon Valley. Instead, we get more adtech.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this after hearing Professor Scott Galloway identify Hawley's article as a "win" on "Pivot", his podcast with Kara Swisher. [0]

This week's episode covers a lot of ground and is worth listening to. It includes topics ranging from Tesla being purchased by Volkswagen, the value of Peloton, and the possibility that China is winning the Trump administration's Trade War. (Disclosure: Swisher and Galloway are progressive and liberal, and much of their commentary reflect that angle.)

[0] [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pivot/id1073226719#epi...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pivot/id1073226719#episodeGuid=c3d0e2fa-0241-11e9-8252-fb15b182e848)

EDIT: proofread first sentence!

</comment><comment><USER16> > That's why I've proposed banning the "dark patterns" that feed tech > addiction.

Further proof that both Republicans and Democrats are the party of big government these days.

</comment><comment><USER17> This would sound fresh if it had been written in 2011. Now, it just sounds like it was written by a republican senator.

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe we can finally unite the Democratic focus on the "little guy" with the Republican desire to hurt the Democratic donor class with the random number generator of the President and get some actual legislation passed here.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is he really insinuating that infinite scroll and autoplay contribute to teen suicide rates? I accept that Facebook/social media is huge part of the problem (and many many problems), but there are many more factors at play. It's far too easy to just scapegoat Big Tech for 100% of the problem instead of considering _other_ causes as well.

<comment><USER20> It's ironic how you're criticizing him of being reductionist by reducing his argument to one line from his essay. Not saying I agree with him, but your take isn't as fresh as you think.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any other crossfit lovers? We need a better app - <AUTHOR>

The current offering of apps for crossfit is sparse and fragmented, and there's no functionality for really tracking progress or integrating with the crossfit site. Part of the problem is that crossfit doesn't offer any sort of API.. but there's potential for linking back to and pulling data from their servers. A geomapping feature for finding other crossfitters in the area would be exceptionally useful as well - it sucks doing the WOD by yourself! (foursquare + crossfit FTW) I'm happy to work on the UI/wireframes/potential design/use case stories, if someone with programming ideas would be interested in teaming up. (note: crossfit.com is not a web app, a mistake in my estimation) <comment><USER2> Hi, I'm the co-owner of CrossFit Quantum in Toronto, and co-author of As Rx'd, which is still under going development, just really slowly. Combine that with the iPad and there are so many tempting avenues to follow.

There are certainly a number of interesting services to talk to nowadays, location-based ones would have been a no-brainer if they were around when we were writing As Rx'd.

If you'd like to chat about anything my email is in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tyler, thanks for reaching out. I'll email soon. I'm wondering how intensive the location-based functionality would be to incorporate, because beyond that, I'm finding As RX'd to be really useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seconding <http://www.withfit.com>. You can track the CrossFit WODs at <http://www.withfit.com/programs/CrossFit+Main+Page>. You can also track your own custom workouts or other affiliates workouts. It's also super easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about <http://beyondthewhiteboard.com/> ? It's not perfect, but it's fairly good at tracking progress.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hey, this is exactly what I am working on! I love crossfit, and there are some good applications out there, but I think there is more space for other applications.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow. Googled "crossfit webapp" and this came up. I'm a regular HN reader and ust started crossfit and I'm fucking loving it.

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://www.withfit.com/></comment>