How to talk to an open source project as a large scale or interesting user - <AUTHOR> http://blog.powerdns.com/2014/05/05/how-to-talk-to-an-open-source-software-project-as-a-large-scale-or-otherwise-interesting-user/ <comment><USER3> I have definitely had this issue with Haraka (a highly scalable SMTP server). On the one hand we have Craigslist as a user, who have been incredibly open and contributed heavily to the project, and on the other we have had people post cryptic bug reports that it didn't work for them, but clearly they were trying to use it at an interesting scale, and we would love to have helped.

We pride ourselves on being one of the friendliest MTA communities out there, so to find people who give up and quit using it is always sad. Many times we've contributed custom code to companies for free to help them out, but we can't do that if you are silent. So speak up, companies, even if it's only in private messages.

<comment><USER4> On paper I agree, from the other side of the fence, here is what the process looks like:

This looks good for what we want to do, let's test it out. Cryptic error. Google for 24h for a solution, can't find one. Ask on official mailing list / forum / bug tracker. Getting ignored as usual, or dismissed rudely. Never use that product ever again.

I'm a CTO and I do that process more often that I would want to, sometimes I don't get that far because Install instruction sucks, and usually that's enough to deter me.

A concrete example: Since The Guardian opened Scribe (their CMS WYSIWYG editor) I had it in the back of my mind for weeks because it looked really interesting and close to what I had been looking for. We were doing CMS upgrades recently, so I wanted to take the occasion to plug in Scribe.

It took only 2h for me to put Scribe on my "never use ever again" list. It all look pretty neat at glance, quick install, nice plugin system, yadda yadda,... However, their one line install simply doesn't work, their is no list of dependencies anywhere, and simply no documentation. Logged an issue notifying them of the poor quality of their setup instructions. Got a reply 7 days later, which starts a discussion. But now it's too late, still have personal interest for Scribe, however my company has already moved on.

I'm all for OpenSource, have some myself (though, more of a "here is what I did recently" type of guy), however if you want to pretend to be a serious library/framework/piece of software, that includes decent documentation with clear install instruction for most common distributions.

Plus, dialogue is good, but most of the time I need it right now, or in a very short time frame, so more often that not I will simply drop back to another less interesting piece of library (or nasty one) that simply works, because that is what matters, it works when I need it. (Again with the Scribe example, no matter how much I dislike TinyMCE, I ended up using it, because one line of JavaScript is all it took for it to work).

<comment><USER3> I absolutely agree and this is a problem that a lot of open source projects face (Haraka is not alone in this). In part it comes down to the fact that most open source isn't worked on full-time, and so documentation often takes a back seat to getting your feature-du-jour working.

But absolutely we could all use some improvement in these areas.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, just to be clear I'm not bitching at maintainers, just giving the perspective of a potential company wanting to use a library. Though usually I do try to follow up if I think the software/lib is really nice, but it's often on a personal level, not for my company.

Documentation is pretty boring to write,and not as fun as feature-du-jour, but may be there could be some guidelines about what a basic documentation should have, specially with GitHub it could be straight forward to have a Markdown template for basic doc (Installation, FAQ, Requirements, Contact points, ...), I know I use one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I'm seeing here is a customer support problem. And IMHO, PowerDNS isn't taking the correct steps to solve it.

It's funny, because the answer is right in the article. If your customer:

* is large and/or interesting * has a legal/security/marketing/ team that's worried about sharing information publicly * has an IT dept that doesn't know the whole company is depending on a single open source product * feels they have to use gmail accounts and made-up names to talk to you

Then maybe a public forum really _isn 't_ the place to expect your customers to ask for help.

I would suggest creating a partnership program for businesses like Cloudflare - swap tech support for publicity (which will then help drive adoption)

<comment><USER6> I think they should have a VIP program akin like WordPress. I think every serious Open Source project should have some kind of separated channel for Corporate/BigInstalls.

I would not entirely place the blame on PowerDNS here, it also points out that how our Corporate citizens can do better for the eco-system by being active partners with the Open Source projects they rely on, instead of hide and snipe mailing-listers.

<comment><USER7> I agree completely. They have this paragraph:

 _Another reason why employees at big corporations are loath to contact open source projects is that they assume they won't get help, and need to pay for support. And, while it is true that someone needs to pay the bills here, we realise that for many users, a support agreement is just not going to happen. Corporate IT might not even know the whole company is relying on an open source project. Questions might be asked. For such organisations, we are fine with providing free help on the public mailing lists. But to give proper weight and context to your issue, it helps if we know who you are._

I think corporate owners are in the _best_ position to offer money for services. They are usually looking specifically for some sort of support contract they can pay for! (If Corporate IT doesn't know, that company has bigger problems anyway.) Something like a VIP program would be a great way to get these types of users in the door. Feed all that money back into your open source project - if you're big enough you probably have project support costs anyway (hosting, etc).

I agree with your second point as well, and I think it reinforces my point, because you can take those internal people that you are dedicating to the task and make them the active partners to the open source project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting how the title "How to talk to an open source project as a large scale or interesting user" implies that the onus is on the _user_ to approach the open source project in the correct manner.

It might be more productive to think about "How an open source project should talk to a large scale or interesting user".

I was deploying open source software in large corporations more than a decade ago[1] and I formed the impression that open source projects could do a LOT more to engage with and support their users. It sometimes felt like the developers just didn't care about users. Documentation was often sorely lacking[2] and "support" typically came in the form of mailing lists that were full of users trying to figure out how the software worked, and swapping advice and tips - often a case of the blind leading the blind.

The end result was that corporate users would sometimes choose commercial software, despite the cost, because it came with decent support and/or had functionality that the open source alternative lacked.

These days, I think that a product manager is an essential part of any open source project team.

1: e.g. [http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tomcat- users/200009...](http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tomcat- users/200009.mbox/%3COFF2F061DD.C2B7EB05-ON00256960.004C94C4%40srv.uk.deuba.com%3E)

2: e.g. [https://www.mail-archive.com/linux- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg...](https://www.mail-archive.com/linux- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg00947.html)

<comment><USER9> your comments are, bluntly, massively entitled. One of the open source tradeoffs is that they often come with slightly more install/configuration work; in trade for usage freedom, the ability to modify the source, and of course, zero required cash outlay. I share ml code on cran because I wrote it and I'm happy to have other people use it; that doesn't come with a requirement for me to spend more than zero time helping them do so and when I do, it's because I happen to feel like it. Telling me you're doing something interesting (to me!) will often help interest me in helping you. The massive wave of demanding users that want hand holding typically don't even get a reply from me.

<comment><USER10> >your comments are, bluntly, massively entitled.

Really? I see no entitlement, merely a very common annoyance that FOSS projects are traditionally very bad at support (and your frankly, shitty, attitude is part of that, and part of the reason many enterprises consider community open source projects to be absolute last resort)

If I had a penny for every time I had a question ignored in IRC or mailing list ghost towns, I'd be running my own Y Combinator by this point. Those that will actually take the time to help users out, or projects with sufficient and good enough documentation that the "hand holding" as you put it, isn't necessary, are like refreshing oases in a vast desert.

<comment><USER11> I mean, would you be okay with support that cost money?

That seems to be the model that Red Hat went with, for instance.

<comment><USER10> I would be okay with no support (explicitly mentioned) vs no support where that's not implied to be the case.

        <rant>

There's nothing that sucks quite so bad as a link on a project page which says "Go here for help" \- you do so, then find out you are in an IRC channel with 500 people, none of which ever speak, any questions are simply lost in the ether among the hundreds of join/quit messages per hour.

In other words, don't say you provide support if you don't intend on giving it. At least a message along the lines of:

        This is provided as is, where is, if it breaks you get to keep both parts

..forewarns me to either not waste my time, or be prepared to waste quite a bit of time.

As it stands, now I've wasted time, and now I hate your project for being an unsupported piece of shit, and now I hate the developers for fucking lying about it.

This is a literal experience I'm fighting with _right now_.

        </rant>

And worse, every time a user encounters this situation, it tars all of FOSS with the same brush. It's what leads to people joining companies and remembering their experience and telling people not to use X Y and Z due to that bad experience.

<comment><USER12> turn off the joins/parts/quits in your irc client(we use irc at work, and its the first thing i suggest to new employees)

<comment><USER10> It's not that I can't see the message anymore, it's that whoever might be able to help likely won't be able to see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> OFF-TOPIC FOR ENGLISH-AS-SECOND-LANGUAGE:

For HN'ers who are still learning the finer points of English this title shows one of the many weird inconsistencies of the language.

Normally, when trying to say 'a thing' where the thing starts with a vowel we change the 'a' into 'an' so 'a axe' becomes 'an axe', 'a umbrella' becomes 'an umbrella'.

However this is a notable exception: when pronouncing 'user' there is an unwritten 'y' e.g. it is said 'yoozer', thus we wouldn't normally add another consonant here so it should be 'a user' not 'an user'. If you say it out loud you can hear it (and hopefully feel the extra tongue work that, traditionally, we try to avoid).

Another common exception is 'Hotel'. It takes 'an' rather than the expected 'a' as for some reason we drop the 'H'. For me it rolls better off the tongue with 'an' but this may purely be due to conditioning.

'Herb' is a difficult one as in the US it's pronounced 'erb' while in the UK it has a hard 'H'. Thus in the UK we use 'A herb' — I assume the US says 'an Herb' — correct me if I'm wrong.

It's nonsense like this that makes me pity you brave fellows who attempt to master our pidgin of a language!

Edit: change 'pigeon' to 'pidgin' :)

<comment><USER14> I (northern UK based) find "an user" feels wrong as to me the "y" implied by the way "u" is pronounced is a consonant sound so it should be "a user" \- though I pronounce the "a" in a softish manner (more towards "ey"), it might be different if you pronounce "a" harder or pronounce the "u" as more towards "oo" (reducing the y-like mouth movements).

Regarding herb: in written word it is "a herb" for correctness, though few in the north pronounce it exactly that way as the "h" is dropped to produce "an 'erb" or sometimes (though this makes you sound uneducated due to certain stereotypes) more like "a nerb" (this time with the harder "a" as in "an".

      It's nonsense like this that makes me pity you brave fellows who attempt to master our pidgin of a language!

The fairly arbitrary set of incompatible rules and standards that make up the English language mean it is difficult to learn perfectly (especially as there are arguments as to that "perfectly" means in this context) but it makes the language easy to learn to the point where you can survive using it in the languages native land(s) easier than many others. We are so used to subconsciously processing all the different accents we have in the relatively small area that is the UK and the extra nuances that creep in from elsewhere (poor education, influences from other cultures mainly via TV/film & music, etc.), that unless we are feeling pedantic we also naturally screen out the mistakes non-native speakers make.

It is common to respond to people apologising for their bad English with something along the lines of "don't worry, I deal with worse from people who have been here for generations". We are not being patronising here (well, at least some of us aren't!): sometimes we _genuinely_ do have to internally correct/translate more when talking to someone from 300 miles away than we do when talking to a Pole/Spaniard/what-ever who is not (yet) particularly fluent in English.

<comment><USER15> For "hotel" and some others, I believe the difference is whether or not the "h" is aspirated. That is, whether or not you take a short break at the word boundary. If you say it "in one breath", you get "an-(h)otel" with a very soft h and no or very little aspiration.

If you make the word boundary more pronounced, you get "a hotel" with a clearly noticeable air-burst, and a clearly distinct "h".

Same process as with "herb" etc. and some other words that can be pronounced both with and without aspiration in English.

This is much the same as in French, where if the preceding word end in a vowel (with certain exceptions) and the current word starts with a vowel sound, you can usually elide the last vowel in the preceding words _except_ when the "h" is aspirated. My French teacher liked to say that the French "thinks" they are pronouncing the "h" in those few cases (aspiration usually refers to cases where there's a strong burst of air in pronouncing the sound, but in French "aspirated h" does not actually involve fully pronouncing an "h", though there may be some aspiration)

(I may confuse this - this is based on recollection of my French classes 20 years ago...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is one of the pitfalls of a public only support mailing list. I know I post using a gmail psuedonym to get support for various open source apps that I use for side projects.

I'd be looking to provide an extra private/internal support email address made available to the largest customers.

<comment><USER17> Except that even the basic support [1] includes that:

> _Support via private (email) ticketing system_ , with guaranteed 8 hour > response time, during European office hours (9AM – 6PM, or 3AM – noon EST). > Includes resolution of 5 incidents. Does not include DNSSEC support.

although CloudFlare should have probably bought the carrier grade support.

[1]: [https://www.powerdns.com/support.html](https://www.powerdns.com/support.html)

<comment><USER18> And no prices on that page at all, so you need to contact them, and then you are dealing with a salesperson who sees CloudFare as a whale who needs to buy the $$$ carrier-grade support and get them a big commission.

<comment><USER19> If the customer would rather build their own system than risk talking to someone on the phone where money might be discussed, I'm not sure that the open-source vendor is the problem.

<comment><USER18> The contention was that Cloudfare could have just signed up for the cheap support plan if they wanted private problem reporting, and I don't think that would be as easy as was suggested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Curious to understand what the issue was.

<comment><USER21> I work on our DNS server, but I don't have a copy of the email that Matthew sent to the PowerDNS guys, but DNS is fundamental to what we do and so the ability to modify the DNS server was pretty important.

I think we got to the point where we just said "there are N features that we want" and decided to build our own. The result is that we've been able to do all sorts of stuff that's CloudFlare-specific: bear in mind that we handle two different sorts of DNS queries: external ones (that might or might not serve a CloudFlare IP that is proxying for a customer site) and internal ones (that need access to public, non-CloudFlare IPs). We also recently introduced a CNAME-flattening feature: [http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname- flattening-rfc-...](http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening- rfc-compliant-cnames-at-a-domains-root)

There are other things we want to do to be fast in two ways: fast to respond ([http://www.solvedns.com/dns-comparison/2014/04](http://www.solvedns.com/dns- comparison/2014/04)) and fast to update (which means integration with our replicated, global settings databases).

We also have all sorts of special things that we do to deal with attacks on our DNS infrastructure that include the DNS server talking directly to NICs for filtering and packet handling. We're also generating bpf bytecode directly for specific filtering activities.

Bottom line was that DNS is a core technology for CloudFlare; it made sense to totally own it. I don't think this says anything bad about PowerDNS. Note: HTTP serving is a core technology. If nginx weren't so configurable (especially through OpenResty) we could easily have been having this discussion about a web server. But equally agentzh (who wrote OpenResty) works for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> tangentially related: Thanks for once again pointing to PowerDNS. I've been using bind forever and I never really looked out for other alternatives ("it works - why should I bother learning something new?").

I had no idea what I was missing as from now on, I'll never again have to deal with forgotten serials or manually adding slave zones to the secondary DNS server.

Everybody still running with bind, thinking it's "good enough", ask yourself how many times you were inconvenienced by either of the two issues and decide whether it might be worth looking at alternatives.

The fact that PowerDNS apparently also is really performant doesn't matter for my mostly minimal use case, but it's good to know that if something great happens, I won't have to migrate again (not that migration is hard - <USER2> comes with a helper tool to read your bind config and produce SQL for your zone files)

<comment><USER23> May I recommend the excellent "Alternative DNS Servers" by JP Mens: [http://www.amazon.com/Alternative-DNS-Servers-Deployment- Bac...](http://www.amazon.com/Alternative-DNS-Servers-Deployment-Back- Ends/dp/0954452992/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399390889&sr=8-1&keywords=dns+book+mens)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It is impossible to comment on this specific example without seeing the actual email exchange. What I can say, is that a user _chooses_ how to disclose their identity and the identity of their company making the best analysis of an imperfect situation. Having worked for largely smaller companies (not in the business of protecting the global internet), I've been relatively lax in posting who I am and where I work. This transparency has been helpful on more than a few occasions.

If you are a "large and/or interesting" company, it would behoove you to disclose your identity in a safe and responsible way to projects (open source or otherwise) who represent any important part of your business. The trick is to do so in such a manner so as to derive the many benefits (increased responsiveness) without the many liabilities (spam, sales calls, etc).

By remaining mum about who you are, the signal to noise ratio of your requests do not stand out from the crowd. This is unfortunate for both sides. It does, however, reinforce the notion that companies and projects should aspire to provide excellent support to all users. You never know when you have a "secret shopper" in your midst.

</comment><comment><USER24> Often when a company want's to "help" it means make a sale regardless of how poor the technical implementation is, waste your time with SE level support, and power point presentations. When instead they should be focusing on the product first. If your user is reporting a scaling issue and your product is all about scale, that should be your first priority.

Vendors also need to remember, your users change companies, a user could be at some small unknown company on day, and the next be in control of a large budget at a high profile company. Your reputation follows that user, and what they want to see is you're making a good product. If the smallest company is reporting an issue that would affect your customers, I'd want to see that you're addressing the issue with that company so I don't have to at my large/interesting company.

</comment><comment><USER25> No sympathy. If your support for users is poor, then it is simply poor, and no excuses please. "We didn't know how big they were" doesn't cut the mustard.

</comment><comment><USER26> To complain that the only reason you gave someone bad support was because you didn't know who they were is pretty tone deaf.

Would you want to dine somewhere that got panned by a restaurant critic and then wrote an essay saying, "Well, we'd have been a lot more careful with his food if we'd known he was an important critic!"?

<comment><USER27> Your analogy is flawed. This is like a restaurant critic saying the portions were far too small, but failing to reveal when they ordered that it wasn't just for one person, but actually a party of 12 people.

<comment><USER28> Hmmm, I'd agree if the issues were all performance-related, or if the author had said "make sure to let us know if you are a large deployment." What the author actually said was "large or impressive" and that point was reinforced several times. I don't know how you measure "impressive" but it sounds a lot like "special" to me.

<comment><USER27> I imagine if you were using their product in an HFT setup (somehow) with only a few servers, but with sub millisecond requirements they might also be interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I read the first part of that quote as "White PowerDNS" and wondered if I was dreaming.

</comment><comment><USER30> How are DNS servers different from nameservers?</comment>


3-year-old repeatedly entered the wrong password, locked dad's iPad until 2067 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/09/tech/locked-ipad-boy-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> Not only is this an old post that pops back up from time to time. This can't even happen. The timeouts work out so that you can't enter a password until the allotted time. So 5 min, 15, 45, 60, etc. It doesn't jump from one hour to 48 years...

<comment><USER3> So bizarre.. the screenshot shows a super old version of iOS too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like a really ill thought-out and implemented security feature.

<comment><USER5> If you own the phone it is a simple fix. You can:

1\. Wipe the phone and restore from backup via iTunes. 2\. If you have find my phone you can remote wipe the phone. 3\. If you have neither you can put it in DFU mode and wipe it.

All of these prevent access to your data which is why you have the lock out feature in the first place.

<comment><USER6> All of these prevent access to your data, which is why lockout is a problem in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm assuming you can wipe it (via itunes?) - it doesn't prevent that does it?!?

</non-apple-guy></comment>


What Tinder Reveals About How Women Look for Online Hookups - <AUTHOR> http://jezebel.com/what-tinder-reveals-about-how-women-look-for-online-hoo-1443431082

<comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting paragraph is the last one:

"Nevertheless, apparently Tinder feels less desperate/embarrassing/rejection- oriented than regular online dating sites. One woman Friedman speaks with calls it "exciting and socially acceptable," and another says: "It didn't feel like offering yourself on a plate to a collection of the world's 'lonelies.'" Plus: "It also allowed for the more casual type of connection without seeming totally sleazy." Friedman puts it this way: "Tinder is fun." Which is what dating is supposed to be… right?"</comment>


TechStars Boulder demo day live stream today at 1pm pacific (4pm eastern) - <AUTHOR> http://demoday.techstars.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone can watch. The authentication is so they can get an idea of who is watching (although there is nothing preventing you from faking all the sign up info). Demo day starts at 1pm pacific but the stream might not start until 1:30pm after the intros.</comment>


The wreck of the Kulluk - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/the-wreck-of-the-kulluk.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> Craig Matthews, cited and pictured in the article, is my son-in-law's father. He's told this story a few times in my presence and I've always got the chills. What this article doesn't mention is that when he grabbed the floating cable, the size of a man's arm, with the grappling hook, the two vessels were both riding up-and-down on monster waves. So first, they had to synch both up to even make the grab possible. To hear him tell it, it was a totally hair- raising experience. His peers now know him as "The guy who tied THAT KNOT on THAT DAY." It may be the most famous "Bowline" knot ever after that write-up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of the Cougar Ace story: [http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/...](http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=all)

</comment><comment><USER4> " _Between 5:34 a.m. and 11:29 a.m., according to a later computer analysis by Rolls-Royce, the Aiviq's "wire tensile strength overload" alarm went off 38 times. It was set to trigger at 300 tons. The alarm, a piercing ring, would not stop until Newill acknowledged it on the computer screen. New to Alaska and new to a ship that was new to the world, Newill later claimed that the alarm never went off. Coast Guard investigators concluded that he mistook the tension alarm for another alarm that was known to be acting up._ "

Dialog box on screen saying _which alarm_ might have been an idea perhaps. Software was obviously logging all the events.

<comment><USER5> Nothing in the article suggests this alarm is based in software. Couldn't it just as easily (in fact rather more easily) been a strain gauge hooked up to an amp and comparator with a buzzer?

<comment><USER6> _…would not stop until Newill acknowledged it on the computer screen…_

Sounds like software to me. I suppose you could put a computer controlled relay into your physical system, but the software would still have to know which alarm it was disabling.

<comment><USER5> Huh, you're right. I read it twice without parsing "on the computer screen."

Anyway, the lesson I took away from this story was that you shouldn't have alarms that regularly go off and are known to be spurious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Extraordinary story. What I always found strange was how super rich corporations like Shell will skimp in making purchases of the required safety mechanisms, try to avoid taxes etc. and will ultimately end up with disasters such as this one, which could have been avoided if the tug had been stronger or better equipped, and the shackles had been new and strong.

<comment><USER6> The shackle gets a lot of ink in the media, and it did fail. The questions about who inspected it and how seem a bit misplaced given that it was rated at 120 tons and the tow line alarm registered over 300 tons more than 30 times, so missing provenance or not, it seems like the shackle was performed beyond its design limits and beyond what the engineers required. They were just wrong.

The towline itself was only rated to 85 tons, the towline manufacturer did well.

<comment><USER8> Typically, shackles of this sort have a safety factor of 5, meaning that if the maximum working load is 120 tons, the minimum breaking load should be >= 600 tons. Strictly, once the maximum working load has been exceeded, the shackle should be considered compromised. I don't have experience with any shackle on that scale, but my feeling is that you ought to be able to expect a good shackle to withstand 30 pulls to half of its minimum breaking load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some followup stories from the local radio station:

[http://kucb.org/news/article/heavy-lift-ship-arrives-to- retr...](http://kucb.org/news/article/heavy-lift-ship-arrives-to-retrieve- kulluk/)

[http://kucb.org/news/article/coast-guard-releases- findings-o...](http://kucb.org/news/article/coast-guard-releases-findings-on- kulluk-grounding/)

[http://kucb.org/news/article/shells-kulluk-drill-rig- headed-...](http://kucb.org/news/article/shells-kulluk-drill-rig-headed-back- to-unalaska/)

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://arcticready.com/classic-kulluk](http://arcticready.com/classic-kulluk)

Took a few seconds before I realised that arcticready.com is a parody produced by Greenpeace. I was previously unaware of this whole saga.</comment>


Hidden in Plain Sight: A Powerful Way to Beat the Market - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/hidden-in-plain-sight-a-powerful-way-to-beat-the-market-1497367597 <comment><USER2> A link to a non-paywalled copy:

[http://www.cetusnews.com/views/rk3GnTJF56fb?cat=life&title=H...](http://www.cetusnews.com/views/rk3GnTJF56fb?cat=life&title=Hidden- in-Plain-Sight%3A-A-Powerful-Way-to-Beat-the-Market)

</comment><comment><USER3> The underlying paper was posted seven (7!) years ago. Is the WSJ so far behind...???</comment>


LibreOffice 5.0 released - <AUTHOR> http://lwn.net/Articles/653574/

<comment><USER2> LOL, I just got around to installing the latest 4.x yesterday. Needed to update my resume... Pretty much everything else I use is either in Google Keep or Docs/Drive these days.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've tried to get a few colleagues to use it instead of Office, but without "outline mode" it's still a no-go, ten years later. Any hope in 5.0?

<comment><USER4> I wonder how many people actually use outline view. I didn't even know it existed until now.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty common with longer docs, ours use Word to write their class materials of say ~100 pages. A hotkey swaps between normal view and the outline, makes it easy to jump around the doc and see how it's structured and cite things.

I personally use libreoffice, but am not a big user of office apps. I'd probably use sphinx to do longform documents, but it's too much for normal folks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't really sound like a major version, but I don't mind. Does anyone know why they decided to number this as 5.0 instead of 4.x?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is actually pretty nice. Starts up faster than I can ever remember LO starting up.

<comment><USER7> [https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under- the-...](https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the- hood-5-0.html)

They've apparently done a lot of cleanup and speedup work under the hood. So everything should feel faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This version looks actually pretty nice. Using the format toolbar to the right you can almost forget is not Pages (iWork)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'll give it a go.</comment>


Dating Apps Destroyed Dating - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jointheround/how-dating-apps-destroyed-dating-b5b90a3fa65d <comment><USER2> [https://outline.com/DFbneW](https://outline.com/DFbneW)

</comment><comment><USER3> The authors are starting their own dating service. If (and it's a very very slim chance) they become successful, they'll get gobbled up by the Match Group. Rince. Repeat.

<comment><USER4> Anyone interested in making an open source dating app?

<comment><USER3> It would certainly be an interesting project but, in the end, a fruitless exercise IMHO.

Think about how hard it is to get traction for a great new game! The only way a dating app gets popular is by gaining a large number of participants in many communities. The only way that would realistically be possible is with pretty deep marketing pockets.

<comment><USER5> I think the best way to get a foot in the door as a dating app is to focus on a single community or subculture. Dating for nerds, goths, Christians, gamers, scientists or some other group that likes to hang out with like-minded people. Having only people from that group on your service makes it easier for users to find those like-minded people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I loved the Youtube video where a woman tries to impersonate a man and get a date with women on a dating app. She cannot believe how difficult it is for men:

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

At about 11 minutes in, the woman says, "Guys don't do this on dating apps. Just don't stop replying. They don't do that. Like, they don't 'ghost'. And, its weird that women do that so often."

</comment><comment><USER7> These same numbers applied before dating apps. The most attractive people at a bar, festival, club, park, etc. have more options.

Same can be said for most things though: sports, engineers, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> Spot on. Doesn't help progress in online dating that most of these apps are owner by one or two companies either</comment>


Machine Learning – Semi-Supervised Clustering - <AUTHOR> http://www.edupristine.com/blog/semi-supervised-clustering

<comment><AUTHOR> Clustering is a canonical example of un-supervised machine learning methods. Un-supervised, as in, true clusters (segments) don't exist or aren't known in advance. Hence method tries to separate observations in different groups without any way to verify if model has done good job or not. There are various ways we can try to measure performance of un-supervised clustering: Within- Cluster-Sum-of-Squares is one, Silhouette Coefficient is another</comment>


OpenBSD and the modern laptop - <AUTHOR> http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2017/07/openbsd-and-modern-laptop.html <comment><USER2> OpenBSD's WiFi support is still the deal breaker keeping me from trying it out. Per iwm's documentation [0], 802.11n only partially works (no 40MHz channels, and limited to 1x1), and 802.11ac doesnt work at all. That means a max link rate of 72Mbps, and a real world speed of maybe half that.

[0] [https://man.openbsd.org/iwm](https://man.openbsd.org/iwm)

<comment><USER3> That is plenty fast, for practical use the only parameters worth discussing when it comes to wifi is connection stability and range.

<comment><USER4> That's like, your opinion man. With 802.11ac on 5GHz, on a mac laptop, I consistently get about 800-1100Mbps. That is gigabit speed. And it's everywhere in the house and yard because I have the appropriate number of APs configured with the right signal power and antenna gain. I have no need for cables anymore on my laptops in any situation where I need speed, and there are many such situations. All my files at home are on a network share. No problem, wifi is fast.

I feel people have only used badly configured crappy consumer APs on crappy laptops (without MIMO) and don't understand that wifi doesn't have to be slow and unreliable.

<comment><USER3> I feel that you are sugar coating it a _tad_ bit much...

"A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks": [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/03/802-e...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/03/802-eleventy-what-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of- sucks/)

<comment><USER5> 72 MB, which isn't the real world speed, as stated, isn't a lot. Thats only 9 actual megabytes a second. Now download any sizable source code project, or, upload many small changes. Or, even just a movie from itunes or something.

Good routers can go over 100Mbps, easily, and I would never think that 'less' speed is 'okay' in a world where increased speeds are just a requirement of technology over time, and usage, of said technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really wanted to put OpenBSD on this old X1 Carbon 1st gen I had. I had trouble getting the installation with full-disk encryption working. The peeps in #openbsd/freenode were amazingly helpful, but after a lot of debugging we came down to "Is your hardware working correctly? Have you tried to install anything else?"

I ended up putting FreeBSD on it and it worked great for a while. Then came the reboots, the lockups ... turns out I really should have run memtest86 first. The memory was bad; probably several other things too. I purchased it from a dodgy used shop and didn't realize all of this until past the 30 days. The memory on those models are soldered in too. I ended up eBaying it as a parts laptop.

Supposedly a fully functional X1 1st gen runs OpenBSD great. :-P

<comment><USER7> I struggled a while back trying to get FDE on an OpenBSD install, and I think I did eventually get it working, although it took a good amount of time and effort. For comparison, back when I installed Arch with FDE for the first time, I found the documentation to be more than sufficient for getting it working relatively easily. Given OpenBSD's emphasis on security and the fact that the installer already can autopartition the hard drive its installing to, it would be awesome if the installer supported FDE in the installation without needing to manually deal with all the disk commands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just installed OpenBSD 6.1 on an old Lenovo Thinkpad T500, and everything works. Suspend/Resume when closed/opened, Intel wireless card, wired ethernet port, sound, trackpad, function keys for adjusting screen brightness, all work. Well, the fingerprint reader won't work, actually, but that's about it.

Would definitely recommend this setup for folks not needing anything fancy (not for gaming/3d apps), but for your average web developer, it'll do the trick.

The caveat is that a T500 isn't exactly "modern" (c. 2006), but it's got a Core 2 Duo @ 2Ghz and 8G of ram, which is plenty for my admittedly modest needs.

<comment><USER9> Echo this; I was using an X201s with a bunch of OS's

Linux has the mess of NetworkManager

FreeBSD idled hard and also has wifi-supplicant and crap.

Solaris is a dead end and you can forget wifi.

OpenBSD was perfect, it felt so cleanly engineered with wifi/wpa handled by ifconfig.

the only concern was the bluetooth- they do not support, in any form, bluetooth. Because: "We have never seen a clean implementation of bluetooth". And yes, they trail with wifi support, but on a 7 year old laptop, that's fine.

Did wonders for my battery life too.

<comment><USER10> > wifi-supplicant and crap

What's wrong with wpa_supplicant? It works really well, you just write one config file with all the networks and you can set the networks' priorities…

<comment><USER9> Much easier to just:

      ifconfig wlan0 scan

      ifconfig wlan0 ssid "thingIfound" wpakey "password" up

      dhclient wlan0

<comment><USER10> That's easy for joining random hotspots, yeah. But for a more stable setup, wpa_supplicant is excellent. I have a config that prefers my home network (which is EAP-TLS secured, how does ifconfig on OpenBSD handle that?), then mobile hotspot, then a couple other known networks. It automatically decides the best network to use.

<comment><USER9> That is indeed cool, I used to rely on my bash history to find my old ifconfigs for common networks I liked. It's lower power though. Due to lack of polling.

I guess there are advantages to the wpa_supplicant way of doing things too. But you have the option on openbsd too at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > and then it takes a bit of demonstrating that yes, the graphics runs with > the best available resolution the hardware can offer, the wireless network > is functional, suspend and resume does work, and so forth.

But then from the Gist the author linked wrt getting X working with HiDPI:

> I'm using X in full resolution of 2560x1440 with wsfb (backed by efifb(4)). > I configured my X session for HiDPI (retina), so I had to calculate and set > DisplaySize in xorg.conf to get the correct DPI. With my configuration > below, most but not all fonts display correctly. A few widgets still have > tiny fonts.

And later in that same Gist:

> I'm using Window Maker (since about 1997). It doesn't fully support HiDPI > but it is possible to make it useable by tweaking the fonts. Some widgets > are still tiny but window titles, menus etc. work fine.

So to fill in what comes after the ellipses for the typical respondent of news of a laptop running OpenBSD: "Really? But... wouldn't that require special trips to the internet to copy/paste configuration settings that still only partially solve the problem of a laptop running an OS that wasn't designed to run on a laptop?" And the answer seems to be: yes.

One more bullet point from that Gist:

> In /etc/sysctl.conf I have to disable suspend when the lid is closed: > machdep.lidsuspend=0

But the blog author says suspend/resume does indeed work. Is the blog author manually suspending/resuming, or did he get it to trigger correctly when the lid is open/closed?

<comment><USER12> >So to fill in what comes after the ellipses for the typical respondent of news of a laptop running OpenBSD: "Really? But... wouldn't that require special trips to the internet to copy/paste configuration settings that still only partially solve the problem of a laptop running an OS that wasn't designed to run on a laptop?" And the answer seems to be: yes

These problems seem related to the choice of WindowMaker, not OpenBSD. Choosing a different window manager or desktop environment won't have the same issues.

And ACPI events vary wildly, unless the two people are using the exact same model I wouldn't be surprised if their suspend/resume success is different.

<comment><USER13> I noticed this with my new XPS laptop last year. After moving to GNOME, things started Just Working. A lot of what we consider basic functionality is implemented differently by each DE, and running in userspace, or is completely absent (like power management or automatic/easy wireless networking).

<comment><USER14> I generally agree and also have an XPS but one extremely annoying thing is switching the screen scaling. I usually am using external monitors but if I want to use the built-in screen I have to change a few settings and restart half my applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do the BSDs support undervolting? Linux has Linux-PHC, but it seems to be broken, and in general the modern kernel does not play well with the old thinkpad I want to run this on. Did find nothing online, maybe someone here knows more?

<comment><USER10> FreeBSD has powerd, it works with P-states. You can also write to MSRs with cpucontrol(8), I think CPUs use that to adjust clock and voltage from the OS.

<comment><USER15> Under Linux, P-states are for Intel Core processors I think, but I do mean older than that. Pentium M. Maybe that's just not the case under BSD, or a mixup in terminology. cpucontrol could work here (but wow, that's raw). There seems to have been efforts to support it on other BSDs, [https://mail- index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2007/04/14/0003.html](https://mail- index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2007/04/14/0003.html) and [http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-est/](http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd- est/) mentions the voltage (but it does not seem to be configurable, and if I got it right, this later became powerd).

From what I could gather one could use cpucontrol to change the stored voltages and then let powerd, powerd++ or however OpenBSD handles this do its work. Thanks for that. But it looks like no one ever tried and reported on this. Hm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm running OpenBSD on a Skylake-gen ThinkPad E560. There was support recently added for Skylake graphics to -current snapshots, nvme(4) is quickly replacing SATA on newer machines and is ready for 6.2. If you have a spare laptop, follow pitrh and give installing OpenBSD a shot.

[https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/867484974953508867](https://twitter.com/canadianbryan/status/867484974953508867)

<comment><USER17> Interesting! Glad you are having a positive experience. Is your E560 using Intel graphics or AMD? I believe these models come with both.

<comment><USER16> Intel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is the best work around for graphical mounting/unmounting of a USB stick in version 6.1 and after? I'm using a doas line and the xfce-mount panel plug- in.

[Background: mounting/unmounting by non-root users was removed in 6.0(?) for security reasons and the toad daemon/hotplug solution became apparently unavailable)

PS: OpenBSD 6.1 on an older thinkpad (X200) just works fine with xfce4

</comment><comment><USER19> Why is there a dedicated 10GB partition for /usr/X11R6?

<comment><USER20> Here are some hints from the FAQ : [https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Partitioning](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Partitioning)

      Unlike some other operating systems, OpenBSD encourages users to split their disk into a number of partitions, rather than just one or two large ones. Some of the reasons for doing so are:

      Security:
      Some of OpenBSD's default security features rely on filesystem mount(8) options such as  nosuid, nodev, noexec or wxallowed.
      Stability:
      A user or a misbehaved program can fill a filesystem with garbage if they have write permissions for it. Your critical programs, which hopefully run on a different filesystem, do not get interrupted.
      Integrity:
      If one filesystem is corrupted for some reason, then your other filesystems are most likely still OK.
      fsck(8):
      You can mount partitions that you never or rarely need to write to as  readonly most of the time, which will eliminate the need for a filesystem check after a crash or power interruption.

Edit: verbatim format

<comment><USER10> That's fine with soft partitions like ZFS datasets, HAMMER pseudofilesystems or btrfs subvolumes. But OpenBSD doesn't have anything like that. The pain of "my /usr is not big enough and it's a hard disklabel partition with a completely separate filesystem omg how do I resize it" makes the partitioning sooooo not worth it.

<comment><USER21> This is not really an issue in practice, it just requires you to consider what you'll use the system for.

<comment><USER22> This always makes me very anxious with Linux. I don't know beforehand what I'll use my laptop for, it's not a server! Some development, some gaming, some general use. Who knows? I always end up creating 3 partitions: /boot (is this really necessary?), a single huge /, and swap. I know a separate /home is recommended (something about backups and seamless distro upgrades, which I never do anyway), but I never know how to size it relative to /.

I admit I do cargo-cult partitioning. I don't really know whether the recommendations out there are current, outdated, mistaken or what.

I find a lot of recommendations about partitioning, swap, memory etc, at least for Linux, are cargo cult anyway, or at least outdated and/or poorly explained, which amounts to the same.

<comment><USER7> One potential solution for this is to use LVM, which lets you resize the partitions later. Even if you do just want to use /, /boot, and swap, it can be useful if you later want to change your swap size or reduce the root partition size to add new partitions if you decide you want to dual boot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >root is a real user

Is this uncommon enough to need specifying? I've heard something along the lines of Ubuntu having no actual root user for security reasons, but I got no impression that this was a common approach. If root isn't a real user, what are your options when your main user is compromised?

<comment><USER24> It is considered poor practice on Linux to set a password for the root account. This is not the case on OpenBSD.

You can usually login by editing the grub kernel command line, and setting init=/bin/sh

Disk encryption may or may not make account recovery more complicated.

<comment><USER25> F if i know where this idea came from, though i guess it may be an OSX import...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> After reading this, I want to do it.

<comment><USER27> After reading this, I am wondering why anyone would want to do that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Apparently heavy users of other free operating systems do not always run > them on their primary workstations.

Yeah right... Some strange demographics in there...</comment>


Epistemic learned helplessness (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://squid314.livejournal.com/350090.html <comment><USER2> If I find myself being convinced by the argument, does that mean I should adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response or not adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response?

I'm partly being facetious, but it would be interesting to try to use a non- argumentative approach to persuade to use one, I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like.

As a kid I remember being told "brush your teeth in circles, it's better" and thinking "I'm sure something else will be recommended in ten years so I'm just going to go back and forth horizontally like I want to" and sure enough circles clean more plaque but push your gums up so downward flicks were recommended. Maybe a dentist can weigh in on current tooth brushing practice... That said, was I better off with my inferior method? That's kind of the crux of it. If we're blown about by every plausible theory, is that better than being blown about by nothing? It seems like this is a nested Bayesian decision problem that needs to incorporate switching costs, which I'd guess for some things are trivial and for other things are quite large.

<comment><USER3> I've thought down these paths a lot, and I came to similar but different conclusion. It's not simply that I don't trust argument - I weight arguments with evidence.

If you take the simulation argument for instance - if you're contemplating the probability that we are living in a lifelike simulation you must factor in the number of lifelike simulations you have seen.

<comment><USER4> >> you must factor in the number of lifelike simulations you have seen

Right. I take the position that there are problems that are unsolvable by technology; simulating the universe seems likely to be in that category. That position is fundamentally unprovable, but call it a hunch. Also, Occam's Razor argues against it, FWIW.

<comment><USER5> > I take the position that there are problems that are unsolvable by > technology; simulating the universe seems likely to be in that category.

Why?

<comment><USER4> It's hard to make a compelling argument for why a particular problem will never be solved. However, I think it's a reasonable supposition that such unsolvable problems exist. Resurrecting the dead, for instance. In order to faithfully simulate the universe, you'd apparently need complete understanding of the laws of physics. And, you'd probably need a tremendously large (and presumably very power-hungry) computer to run the simulation. There's no particular reason to think that physics will ever be completely understood, and the computer might need more power than all the stars in the universe can supply.

Again, it's extremely difficult to argue compellingly for why something can't be solved: even if it seems to be ruled out by known laws of physics (like traveling faster than light), you can always argue that new laws will be found someday that will be more favorable than the current ones. That argument never terminates, because you don't know what you don't know.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I am happy to accept speed of light as the limit.

I was more thinking about (hypothetically) using the same techniques as a quine to store a simulation of the universe inside a universe.

<comment><USER4> I have no idea how that would work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That is an excellent essay and it scares the crap out of me, because I see it play out every day in both directions and it often does feel exactly like epistemic learned helplessness.

There are so many biases that affect individuals (hindsight, hyperbolic discounting, confirmation, etc) that to get correct answers, you have to look at and trust other accounts. You have to do studies, you have to trust those studies, and you have to track actual hard evidence.

But large enough systems become increasingly opaque, and it can be hard to test your web of trust empirically. This reduces huge organizations to cargo cult behavior, or worse, fundamentally unsound behavior because "it worked for me."

I don't know what to do about this besides what CFAR is trying, which is to get people better at weighing evidence and changing their damned minds. You have to constantly be asking yourself: "what would the world look like if this were true? What would the world like like if it wasn't?" It is hard work, but I think it is critical to our continued improvements as a civilization and a species.

<comment><USER7> I don't know if the right answer is to be generally more open to changing your mind.

There are far too many things to be worried about: the danger of AI, religion, the environment, other political views, the results of scientific papers in dozens of fields... epistemic learned helplessness is a defence against wasting literally all of your time taking every argument seriously.

At the end, the author notes that we should be glad for the specialists who are well-versed in certain subjects enough to actually be able to evaluate and experiment on outlandish theories and unusual study results.

Maybe we need to emphasize more specialization? Or is it working alright already?

<comment><USER8> The other solution is to not really care all that much about most things.

There's some new physics result about how black holes interact with the quantum foam? I can't build anything practical with it, so beyond "that's interesting" it doesn't really matter to me.

Some food is suddenly found to cause cancer in rats? Unless it's fairly new, the effect on humans can't be all that strong or we'd have noticed by now. Something else will probably kill me first (like whatever the medical term for "old age" is these days).

Someone's claiming that some particular aspect of modern diet causes obesity? It would have to either make you feel lethargic (lower calories out) or make you hungrier (raise calories in). Both of which are directly observable and easily correlated to the contents of recent meals, without having to argue over mechanisms and confounders and personalized gut bacteria and such.

There's a new higher estimate for the percent of scientific results that are fake or poorly done or just statistical noise? This does help for knowing how not-seriously to take everything, but beyond "that's too damn high" the exact numbers aren't all that relevant (unless you're testing a fix).

Someone wants money to research AI risk? Are they looking at how to build safe AI, or how to prevent anyone either carelessly or deliberately building unsafe AI? Only the second is worth looking into further.

<comment><USER9> >Someone's claiming that some particular aspect of modern diet causes obesity? It would have to either make you feel lethargic (lower calories out) or make you hungrier (raise calories in). Both of which are directly observable and easily correlated to the contents of recent meals, without having to argue over mechanisms and confounders and personalized gut bacteria and such.

This is extremely facile. Take trans fats scarring arteries and causing systemic inflammation, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the author makes some good points, but I think the term "learned helplessness" together with the arguments made, imply that if reasoned arguments can't be trusted then nothing can. But I think that a better characterization is that people use other ways of thinking, such as intuition, emotion, etc. in addition to reason.

Any expert in a field other than pure math, will tell you that in order to evaluate an argument or evidence, you need experience and intuition, not just argumentation. Arguments are not a formal process that can definitively arrive at conclusions. The same applies to mathematical models. Economists often complain in private about the need to dress up their ideas as mathematical models, even when the model adds nothing to the discussion. This is especially annoying in empirical work, when no one is actually interested in the model, just the empirical results.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great read and interesting discussion. Reminder of how good HN has been over the years.

The idea of "institutional learned helplessness" is a useful one. There is a French term which I will mangle instead of google: 'Deformation professionelle' \- built in blind spots which come from having T shaped expertise...

I've been part of a hiring team for a sysops person and found this of interest:

[http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2015-02-24-charity- maj...](http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2015-02-24-charity-majors)

Overall the talk is ok - the point which stuck with me was the idea that you should look for a sense of institutional helplessness and filter for it when you hire Ops folks.

The speaker also said to look for folks with 'strong opinions which are lightly held' \- a double edged sword.

In a devops role there is an internal debate. Should I press point "x" ahead on principle? Or should i hold off and wait on the business/product requirements. Thinking slow and waiting on a full discussion of requirements before charging forth into battle can be seen as good process or passivity...

At work we wre having a discussion on where and how to involve QA processes in the build/deploy process. Devops took the stance - "this is a business decision - we will implement it as product sees fit" and we got push back for being too passive.

But this is a trivial example. I guess the bigger issues which inspire a "What can i do about it?" response. Recent readings on surveillance state and corporate interests (ie Bruce Schneier, etc) make me vacillate between deep, helpless feelings we are FUBAR to learning about constructive things like gpg, tor, etc

<comment><USER12> On "Should I press point 'x'", do a divide and conquer on it. Try to reduce the number of degrees of freedom from that decision point to a minimum.

IMO, you have to live with the ambiguity, but try to craft strategies that cover both with minimal ... perturbation. Waiting helplessly is not an option :) If all else fails, strawman the least cost solution first.

I also think there's value in having some measure of dissent from within the team. Done right, you'll synthesize solutions you would not otherwise have come up with. But you want this to be without rancor and without sinking large amounts of time.

On "... where and how to involve QA processes in the build/deploy process" \- make a complete list of steps, then balance which gets included as the risk profile emerges. Good risk analysis includes a comprehensive and complete plan for what happens when a step fails.

Finally, you simply have to manage perception. Quantify, quantify, quantify. As if you don't have enough to do....

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is related to things that people like Robert Axelrod have been studying. It's innovation vs imitation dilemma in social learning and evolutionary game theory.

Science. 2010 Apr 9;328(5975):208-13. doi: 10.1126/science.1184719. Why copy others? Insights from the social learning strategies tournament. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20378813](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20378813)

Related xkcd [http://xkcd.com/1170/](http://xkcd.com/1170/)

<comment><USER14> Like all good philosophy, this idea has a long history. I encountered it in Taleb's Black Swan as Pyrrhonian skepticism, which flourished in Greece as the Aristotelian Academy. Very down to earth and actionable advice on living and doing. Many Pyrrhonians were doctors and that colored their philosophical views—at a time when philosophy was taken very seriously and meant more than it does today (see it as a precursor of today's science).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author is now blogging at: [http://slatestarcodex.com/](http://slatestarcodex.com/) It's really one of the most consistently interesting blogs I read. Check out the top-posts section to see if anything catches your eye: [http://slatestarcodex.com/top- posts/](http://slatestarcodex.com/top-posts/)

<comment><USER16> It's one of my favourites too.

There've been a few lists of his best posts created by readers, e.g. [0] and [1].

Personally, my absolute favourite is Meditations on Moloch [2]. It's long, but has high concept density and highlights the very important causes of problems in the world that many people miss entirely when discussing important issues.

[0] - [http://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott- alexand...](http://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/)

[1] - [http://lesswrong.com/lw/mmg/yvains_most_important_articles/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/mmg/yvains_most_important_articles/)

[2] - [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some of the longest papers I've ever written were in support of conclusions that I don't even believe in. In my opinion they ended up being some of my best papers as well. The point wasn't to write in support of what I believe in or what I want to write about but what I think I can present the strongest argument for.

</comment><comment><USER18> > given that at least some of those arguments are wrong and all seemed > practically proven, I am obviously just gullible

Not gullible, he just needs to read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow".

The intuitive mind is unable to distinguish between consistency and truth. That is, a consistent story will always seem "proven" to the intuitive mind.

"Seeming practically proven" means little. You need to use the more logical part of your mind to crosscheck it.

<comment><USER19> I'd be very surprised if he hasn't read Kahneman. And even if he has, knowing about cognitive biases is a completely different skill than avoiding them. It's basically why the Center for Applied Rationality exists.

<comment><USER18> Well if he read it, he certainly didn't understand it.

> When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky's > Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read > it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect,

This guy believes in PROVING PSEUDOHISTORY. It's hard to understand what that even means, but let's look at specifics:

"Noah's Flood couldn't as a cultural memory...

\- of the fall of Atlantis

\- of a change in the Earth's orbit

\- of a lost Ice Age civilization or

\- of megatsunamis from a meteor strike."

A generous person could give these a 1% chance of being right. Maybe a 5% chance if you had a very convincing argument.

A gullible person might give one a 30% chance of being true.

But it is utter nonsense to assign 100% probability to any of these (that's what proof means, it means 100% likely). These just aren't provable matters.

Circling back to Kahneman, it really seems that he's getting persuaded by intuitive arguments, and the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" really dives into how this happens.

<comment><USER16> > _This guy believes in PROVING PSEUDOHISTORY. It 's hard to understand what > that even means, but let's look at specifics_

No, he does not. He only said that a good book proving pseudohistory sounds totally convincing to a history layman like him, and so does a book disproving the previous book. Since he can't tell what is false from what is true without huge amount of effort into studying history (no one has time to study _everything_ in that amount of detail), he concludes that his only solution to stay sane is to ignore both arguments and stay with the general science consensus.

> _But it is utter nonsense to assign 100% probability to any of these (that > 's what proof means, it means 100% likely). These just aren't provable > matters._

That's your implication, nowhere written in the text. The guy hangs out in rationalists circles, he knows better than to assign P=1.0 to stuff. I know because I read quite a lot of his articles.

<comment><USER18> I don't see how you're replying to my core point, which is that getting "totally convinced" is a function of the intuitive mind, and the intuitive mind will be totally convinced of anything that is consistent.

Could you help me understand the difference between "totally convincing" and proving? If you are "totally convinced" of something, isn't that a p=1.0?

Whether the topic is history or pseudohistory, words like "true", "false", "prove" and "disprove" really don't belong. Those words are fine in casual conversation, but they can't be part of the thinking of a serious person.

<comment><USER16> > _I don 't see how you're replying to my core point, which is that getting > "totally convinced" is a function of the intuitive mind, and the intuitive > mind will be totally convinced of anything that is consistent._

Well, I think that was actually his point - that if you're not an expert on a topic and don't have the explicit knowledge to counter your intuition, every relatively consistent set of arguments will sound convincing.

> _Could you help me understand the difference between "totally convincing" > and proving? If you are "totally convinced" of something, isn't that a > p=1.0?_

No, it's not, and assigning probabilities of 0 and 1 to anything is a _very bad idea_. See: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/).

Otherwise, exept of pointing out that we have intuitive and explicit parts of reasoning that often oppose one another, I'm not sure what you're getting at.

> _Whether the topic is history or pseudohistory, words like "true", "false", > "prove" and "disprove" really don't belong. Those words are fine in casual > conversation, but they can't be part of the thinking of a serious person._

Yes and no. They are shorthands. Unlike maths, in the real world you can't assign absolute true value to anything, but you can still be _really, really sure_. If I jump out of the fourth-floor window, I will hurt myself. That is true. Arguing that it's not true because you can't be absolutely positively 100% sure is just pointless arguing about words, a failure in communication. C.f. [https://xkcd.com/1576/](https://xkcd.com/1576/).

<comment><USER18> > assigning probabilities of 0 and 1 to anything is a very bad idea

THAT'S MY WHOLE POINT. Thank you. When a person says something is true/false/proven/disproven, that person is assigning a probability of 0 or 1 to it.

> > [http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/mp/0_and_1_are_not_probabilities/)

I nearly cited this exactly. I love that article because it clearly spells out what's disturbed me for years about cloudy thinking.

When someone says a matter has been "proven" or "disproven", they are saying the matter is closed, and they feel no need to update in the future.

It's not pointless arguing. That's really what the words mean, and that's usually what people intend when they use those words. Other uses are misuses. It's perfectly OK to mis-speak in casual conversation and we're all obliged to understand each other in the most charitable way possible. On the other hand - when someone consistently speaks in a way that sure to be misunderstood, it's helpful to point this out.

And seriously - Kahneman made the overall point more clearly, with a practical antidote we can use every day. Being "totally convinced" is a clean indicator that our intuitive mind has latched onto consistency. And that's a very useful guideline to introspecting that very conclusion.

<comment><USER16> Ok. So I guess we miscommunicated, and have been thinking about the same thing all along. :).

As for your original comment - the author of this article is none other than Yvain from LW, whom you will most likely recognize if you read stuff on that site. You can safely assume that he knows all this stuff we discussed and (being a practicing psychiatrist) is aware of Kahneman. Knowing this, and taking into account his typically casual style I invite you to re-read the article while applying the principle of charity, and see if your original criticism still applies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Feels a bit like "anecdotes are not data"; "arguments are not evidence" perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER21> "Well, you can prove anything with facts, can't you?"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n-UGQcG3Jw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n-UGQcG3Jw)

<comment><USER10> Well that's a good example of what the original argument was talking about since the comedian's argument was terrible (e.g. by the same logic we should not say that slavery is immoral, because the ancient Greeks practiced slavery).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is interesting that Pascal gets cited in this. With Pascal's Wager there is no leap really. It is very internal idea - an individual's relationship with God. "I might as well believe, there is no risk if I do so. If I am right there is a great reward. If I am wrong the result is what it would be anyway."

This is what I believe is a distinction between atheism and agnosticism. Belief vs a pragmatic ethic.

Pascal is identifying a throughly modern disconnect between what we privately might think and believe and how we act in public. His idea is radical because that split would probably not been conceived in the same way before. Over time this idea would become more socially grounded. Weber in "The Protestant Ethich and Spirit of Capitalism" would put forth a similar idea in terms of 'visible forms of God's grace'. Thus I am more blessed because there is an Audi A8 in my driveway and you are driving a Jetta...

Another perhaps more relevant case is Kierkegaard in "Fear and Trembling". I am probably misremembering political threory classes from 20+ years ago but the idea I retained is:

Think of Abraham and Isaac. In a nutshell Isaac is the much loved (and only) son and God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He takes his son up to the mountaintop and builds an altar. At the last second an animal is substituted. (Hmmm just occured to me that Miyazaki could do an interesting treatment of this)

The key idea is Abraham's resignation - which is different from passivity. He is willing to follow through. He hears God's voice telling him to do something batshit crazy. Because it is God he is willing to follow it through to its logical end. He has belief and resignation to God's will is the first step of that belief.

Now to the outside world Abraham is the worst kind of criminal. You would imagine him thrown in a dreadful prison and the guards looking the other way while that staple of tv dramas - prison justice is meted out. That doesn't change.

And Abraham doesn't even know if he is hearing God or if he is just crazy. And no one else knows either.

Back a decade or so ago when Intel's 'Trusted Computing Platform' was cause for debate, I remember someone saying "Just because Richard Stallman is paranoid doesn't mean that Microsoft is not after you" which I thought was hilarious and true and adopted it as my email footer for a while...

When I think of Stallman - I have enormous respect for the man, for his beliefs and his courage in following out his convictions. In my everyday life I use a Mac and install nonfree packages on my Linux servers so my actions are not consistent with that respect. It is too hard for me to browse the web in emacs and I enjoy twitter and the various inane 'Distractions from distraction by distraction' that are the internet.

I think Stallman is more right than wrong. I also believe in a Kantian imperative sense that we would all be better if we aligned our ideas of freedom and use of technology with his ideas. Without his ideas and his actions which broght thse ideas to life, we would be in a very different situation.

But I am much more 'pascalian' in my everyday life choices and actions.

<comment><USER12> But if it is indeed Stallman v. Gates ( which I doubt ) then Gates won the big war, while Stallman continues to win small skirmishes.

This is just all too convenient and narrative for my tastes. IOW, "It's complicated." That's my epistemic learned helplessness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _> This is the correct Bayesian action, by the way. If I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way, and I should ignore it and stick with my prior._

Wrong. The correct scientific methodology would be to store the new conflicting theories in your head while being unsure whether or not they are true (withholding judgement); later on, if new evidence sheds light on the issue, you can discard or keep it. The silliest thing to do is what this guy advises: Persistence on arbitrary facts because they were first. That's how religion works. Despicable.

I don't like how this guy treats "high school dropout" as an example for someone particularly stupid and naive. It sounds elitist and smug and detracts from the main point of the text. It reminds me of lesswrong.com

 _> I've heard a few good arguments in this direction before, things like how engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae_

Oh no, nothing is further from the truth. In engineering, you have to do a lot of subtle design decisions that aren't black-and-white at all. Difficult tradeoffs like cache invalidation, where there's no right answer in general.

All in all, a subpar article that goes on way too long and could be shortened to a couple of lines.

</comment><comment><USER23> Guy makes a shitload of basic philosophical errors, like most rationality training people. They are all centered around conflating logic with reality and ignring computational costs. If you cant connect a theory with reality that is rooted in specific, observable, actionable things, without requiring strong AI with a O(1) time complexity of synthesizing respinses, the theory is a nonstarter. If he was more aware of this, he would never get close to buying into claptrap like pascal's wager or mugger. So what if you believe in god or not? What does doing that or not actually get you?

It's amazing how many of these "rationalists" are using the concept as an emotional band aid against their resentment and other uncomfortable feelings.

And its not about compartmentalization. Ideas vary in their usefulness or actionableness. Sure, it takes instinct to distinguish them. But that is what "rationalists" are scared to death of, there being things like instinct and unconscious processing that, honed right, is often much superior to their laborious, droning but logical attempts to count every outcome, but requires faith in oneself.

It's really just a huge inferiority complex that they have. They are so insecure that they need universe-circumscribing systems of Bayesian logic to do anything. The truly rstional thingg to do is to put down the fucking rationality handbook, stop running the fucking expected value computations, go outside, live life, dare for the world to correct you, and get stronger or die trying. Thats it.

</comment><comment><USER24> This guy sounds absolutely insufferable.

<comment><USER25> He sounds like a guy Id love to have a beer with. We might just be able to understand each other :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The problem is that you shouldn't intrinsically believe arguments, at all.

You should believe _facts_. You should believe logical inference _from_ facts.

You should believe arguments insofar as they corroborate or refute facts.

And, if an argument can't be tested, it's not a very good argument.

<comment><USER25> Lol. And what precisely is a fact, but an argument about the state of the world being a specific way?

<comment><USER26> > And what precisely is a fact, but an argument about the state of the world > being a specific way?

Thankfully not. A "fact" is something that can be measured in such a way that even if you are totally antagonistic to my arguments, we will get the same result.

Now your "argument" may attempt to prove the irrelevancy or inadequacy of my facts, but the facts themselves should be unfudgeable.

<comment><USER27> The problem is that it is far far too expensive to rigorously verify all the facts one hears. So in practice humans need to rely on the trustworthiness of the person or institution saying them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Rationality" is the new "atheism".

All I got from this article:

"Sometimes, it's best not to commit to a position when you don't have all the facts (or if 'the facts' are essentially unknowable). But it depends!"

OP has a lot of ten-dollar words, tho.

So, what'd I miss?

</comment><comment><USER29> Poor guy. He reminds me of Leshrac from Dota 2. Lots of deep philosophy, leads to nihilism.

Here's one of the multiple big problems. Learning that arguments are often not valid is an amazing insight! However, it says nothing about what what you SHOULD believe, relative to the information you have.

The wise choice is NOT to believe based on your ore-conceptions (ie ignoring the stronger arguments). Better arguments are better than worse arguments. mediocre evidence is better than better arguments. And better evidence is better than worse evidence. And since better evidence is not a guarantee, we measure it by the efforts to disprove them.

So, lets take an example: the conspiracies for the world trade center attack. First we have the official story which we more or less know. Well, some people know at least. Then we have the video Short Change, which goes through a couple hours describing all the points where the official story doesn't make sense. It talks about physics, and background deals, and molten this and that. A lot of interesting stuff. It raised a lot of questions. It didn't provide detailed or reliable evidence, so more research was needed. So i watched the rebuttle video, which was twice as long. They provided evidence, with citations, from experts in their respective fields.

The part that was convincing wasn't "oh, this argument is right, this one is wrong". The part that is convincing is that I can now say "well, according to so and so, this is explained, and so is this, and so is this, and so is this, and so is this" down the line. Now, in this case there was basically nothing left at the end of the argument, but even if there was then I consider the sources. One source says xyz is still unexplained, but that source is now known for making things up and/or not knowing what they're talking about. The other source cites dozens of experts with detailed explanations, photo evidence, clear walkthroughs.

It's not "oh, this argument is better" anymore. Now it's "well, this one literally has no reason to believe it, but this one has a great deal of support."</comment>


DragonflyBSD 5.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release50/ <comment><USER3> This is a big release for a few reasons:

* major new filesystem (Hammer2)[1]

* OpenBSD might even adopt Hammer2 has a replacement of it's legacy filesystem [2]

* huge work on network performance. DragonflyBSD is agrubably the fastest BSD for network intensive tasks [3]

* IPFW has been rewritten to be multi-threaded which has resulted in huge performance improvements [4]

[1] [https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob_plain/HEA...](https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/sys/vfs/hammer2/DESIGN)

[2] [https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- tech&m=142755452428573](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=142755452428573)

[3] [https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf](https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf)

[4] [http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2017-Septemb...](http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2017-September/626329.html)

UPDATE:

To also give context as to what Dragonfly BSD is, DragonFly BSD was forked from FreeBSD 4.8 in June of 2003, by Matthew Dillon over a differing of opinion on how to handle SMP support in FreeBSD. Dragonfly is generally consider as having a much simpler (and cleaning) implementation of SMP which has allowed the core team to more easily maintain SMP support; yet without sacrificing performance (numerous benchmarks demonstrate that Dragonfly is even more performant than FreeBSD [5]).

The core team of Dragonfly developers is small but extremely talented (e.g. they have frequently found hardware bugs in Intel/AMD that no one else has found in the Linux/BSD community [6]). They strive for correctness of code, ease of maintainability (e.g. only support x86 architecture, design decisions, etc.) and performance as project goals.

If you haven't already looked at Dragonfly, I highly recommend you to do so.

[5] [https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/)

[6] [http://www.zdnet.com/article/amd-owns-up-to-cpu- bug/](http://www.zdnet.com/article/amd-owns-up-to-cpu-bug/)

<comment><USER4> [https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf](https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf)

Gotta love an undated presentation that compares DragonFlyBSD version 719bf70a37139bc3bedc84ab0975df7107155714 with FreeBSD version r314268. It can't be super old because Linux 4.9 was released in Dec 2016, but still.

<comment><USER5> [https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DragonFlyBSD/commit/719bf70a...](https://github.com/DragonFlyBSD/DragonFlyBSD/commit/719bf70a37139bc3bedc84ab0975df7107155714)

[https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=31426...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=314268)

So around 2017-02-25

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hammer has always looked cool on paper but it's a hard sell to switch away from the battle-tested options like ZFS for a v1.0 codebase. Filesystems are not really an area of the system that is amenable to flavor-of-the-month, and the dustbins of history are littered with one-man-show filesystems that didn't make the cut.

btrfs is fighting much the same battle for adoption and frankly has a much better chance of seeing success since it's not tied to a niche OS like DragonflyBSD. ZFS-on-Linux finally being available+stable was a massive milestone in terms of adoption since it finally broke away from the tight ties to the Solaris/BSD ecosystems.

So yeah, regardless of how amazing Hammer is, I do have to ask whether there's really space for another filesystem out there. Kudos to Dillon for going ahead and doing it anyway though ;)

<comment><USER3>
       Filesystems are not really an area of the system that is amenable to flavor-of-the-month and running v1.0 of a new codebase doesn't sound appealing.

Just as a counterpoint to running a v1.0 filesystem, Apple just rewrote from scratch their entire filesystem (APFS) and force updated their entire userbase of hundreds of millions of iOS devices and macOS to use a v1.0 of APFS.

They haven't seem to have any problems running a v1.0 filesystem and I have to imagine way more people are now running APFS then ZFS ever.

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

<comment><USER7> Apple must have invested incredible resources on testing that internally, because that was a very risky move, and well outside the norm for filesystem development.

<comment><USER8> Apple did some pretty brilliant stuff with testing. E.g. they had it silently test install itself on random user devices, verify everything was fine, and revert for several versions prior to release (presumably they picked users with sufficient spare room). The actual rollout was stunningly issue-free.

As an aside, this is one of the several unbelievably slick updates Apple has pulled off in its history, including:

\- the switch to 32-bit clean addresses only (which was probably the most painful switch Apple ever did!) in System 7.6

\- the switch to PowerPC (which caused fewer problems than the 32-bit clean switch!)

\- the switch to Mac OS X

\- the switch to Intel

\- the switch to 64-bit on desktop

\- the switch to 64-bit on iOS

Microsoft, (in most cases rightly) vaunted for backwards compatibility has had horrific snafus such as DOS 5 being the first version of DOS whose RESTORE program could read BACKUP files from the previous version of DOS.

(It's also worth noting that NeXT itself managed to support four runtime architectures with "quad fat binaries".)

<comment><USER9> > they had it silently test install itself on random user devices

I suppose that meant doing a small install in some virtual disk? I can't think apple put at risk anyone's data.

But then, that would not have been the same as actually testing the real hardware interface, would it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When installing with Hammer2 (EFI, encrypted root and swap), after rebooting and decrypting the root I get an error saying `mount_hammer2` isn't found. Has anyone else had this issue and figured out if there's a fix?

<comment><USER11> What Elhana said - mount_hammer2 isn't included in /usr/share/initrd so it's not copied into the image used there.

You can build a new initrd - cd into src/share/initrd/sbin, add it to the makefile, type 'wmake install' I think, and you may be good. I am guessing because I don't have an encrypted disk to test.

Otherwise, wait and there will be an updated 5.01 image soon, I'm sure - <USER2> recent KRACK vulnerability will prompt that, if nothing else.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the info! I'm fine with waiting for a 5.01; I just wasn't sure if I had installed it wrong or something

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does DragonFlyBSD compare to OpenBSD in terms of security?

<comment><AUTHOR> About the same as FreeBSD. IF you google youl find a few openbsd VS FreeBSD comparisons

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is anyone using DragonflyBSD in production due to its advantages?

Are these advantages so significant that it is worth it?

<comment><USER14> Those companies here [https://www.dragonflybsd.org/commercial/](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/commercial/) are providing commercial DragonflyBSD packaging or support.

Of course it's worth it. It's significantly faster and better

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Discussion from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477482](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477482)</comment>


Hyperlapse, Instagram's New App, Is Like a $15,000 Video Setup in Your Hand - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/08/hyperlapse-instagrams-new-app-is-like-a-15000-video-setup-in-your-hand/?mbid=social_fb

<comment><USER2> Paper, Bolt, Slingshot and now Hyperlapse? Not to mention Facebook proper, Messenger and Instagram.

As much as I enjoy using Bolt, and I'm eager to give Hyperlapse a try, I do wonder what's with Facebook's new found fascination for these 'microapps'? How long will they maintain them for?

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227198)</comment>


Ask HN: the equivalent of Code Complete in high level design? - <AUTHOR>

What book (if any) is considered the equivalent of Code Complete in high level (software) design? <comment><USER2> Define "design".</comment>


Ask HN: How do you store production credentials? - <AUTHOR>

Particularly, if you have fabric scripts that are responsible for running deploys etc, how do you distribute, store, and secure the credentials required to back these scripts and allow them to access servers and run builds? <comment><USER2> My solution is Keepass on a shared drive with very a strong password.

For production stuff, I would suggest you use a key file on top of a password.

Key file tips :

1- Key file on Truecrypt encrypted USB key.

2- Use plugin OtpKeyProv in in conjunction with RSA SecurID or other Random key generator.

Also, automate backup of the password database everyday.

<comment><USER2> I think you can also use Yubikey :

[http://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey- hardware/](http://www.yubico.com/products/yubikey-hardware/)</comment></comment>


Electronic throttles eyed in 'runaway' Toyotas - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/02/02/ST2010020204001.html?hpid=topnews

<comment><USER2> Woz says it's repeatable, and not caused by a sticking pedal:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1094857>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1095804>

<http://searchyc.com/woz+prius?sort=by_date></comment>


The World's Great Photographers, Many Stuck Inside, Have Snapped - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/arts/design/instagram-photographers-coronavirus.html <comment><USER2> Pretty sure most of them can still go outside. Most of the quarantine focus is on being alone moreso than being indoors.

<comment><USER3> Not true. It is really difficult to go outside and not touch any surface that might have been touched by somebody else. Opening doors, operating lift, sitting on a bench, all those things might get you infected. If you are infected you might, unknowingly, infect all those surfaces and transfer the virus to many other people.

More importantly, restrictions (at least here in Poland) are aimed at people who are careless and who need to be forced to stay at home. There is huge portion of population that thinks the entire thing is a hoax or that it does not really concern them because they are relatively healthy. Their selfishness lies in that they don't care they will take part in spreading the disease to people who, due to huge number of sick people, will have very little chance of getting help.

It seems only when the streets are clear it is possible to catch and confine those careless people.

Just read up on how people in Italy or Spain are dying, slowly suffocating, you might change your attitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Too bad it's all on Instagram, they were a terrible venue for high quality photography to begin with and now don't even show anything beyond a thumbnail without logging in.

<comment><USER5> even the "full" sized images are filled with compression artifacts and lose lots of quality after upload, not as badly as in facebook but still surprising and disappointing for a photo-centric app. i've tried a number of things to improve final quality but nothing worked well. if anyone has tips please share them!

<comment><USER4> It makes sense given the volumes of photos and bandwidth they have to deal with, but if they cared about visual quality they'd let users tradeoff number of daily uploads for higher quality/resolution but the know the vast majority views it on phones and couldn't care less.

<comment><USER6> There are probably UI patterns that could help balance the technical challenges bandwidth with the utility of high resolution images. Wikipedia for instance defaults to low resolution images but in 1-2 clicks you can access a high resolution view. This restricts the need to serve high resolution images to only the people who really do care about it.

<comment><USER4> It's not just bandwidth, it's also storage at instagram scale, but mostly because neither instagram nor the vast majority of their users find much utility in high resolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."

Looking over the comments in this thread, I'm left wondering what we should do if this were to ever become reality.

<comment><USER8> Hope dang realizes early enough to do something about it. Most of the puns I see on hn are heavily downvoted though, at least.

<comment><USER7> Yes, I think there is a tidal pattern here, waxing and waning.

With the shutdown, netizens are seeking new places to engage.

In some threads, an unpleasant critical mass is reached. Signaling [to other users, not just to Dang] on the issue can be helpful, I'd like to do this while respecting the spirit of the rules.

Edit: Maybe I can quote the "substantive" guideline and flag the comment, but this might make me technically a hypocrite. I don't have a problem with a silly pun or response, but the culture of pun threads is cancer imo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://archive.is/qG0hS](https://archive.is/qG0hS)

</comment><comment><USER10> Title says 'snapped', yet the content in the article is artists that are coping and optimistic and reflecting on the interestingness of the situation, and how the meaning of photographs are changing because of it. Seems like the title was designed to be overly dramatic.

<comment><USER11> It is probably a pun the author could not resist. Dramatic? Perhaps. Amusing? Definitely.

<comment><USER12> Should have gone with:

The World's Great Photographers, Many Shuttered Inside, Snap

<comment><USER13> It's really sad to see them lose their composition like this.

<comment><USER14> well framed

<comment><USER15> Avoidance of Interpersonal Exposure Reveals What Great Photographers Are Really Like

[Partially-obsolete joke]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mediocre work, lame headline.

<comment><USER17> I'm sure you've done better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slightly off topic, but does anyone else think it would be nice to have a policy against linking websites with aggressive/obnoxious paywalls?

<comment><USER19> The answer to DAE questions is always yes, regardless of the question.

I think it's a bad idea - there's no need to ban discussion of an article because not everyone can read it.

<comment><USER17> Especially when paywalls aren't really hard to bypass. Usually any thread involving a paywalled article will include an archive link.

For example: [https://archive.is/qG0hS](https://archive.is/qG0hS)</comment></comment></comment>