Ask HN: Is it wise to put password validation on a signin page? - <AUTHOR>

I was just prompted to log into the BBC website (https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/id/signin). When entering my username i got a nice green tick - i took this to mean that the username existed (is this itself bad practice?). When i entered my password i got another green tick - this was more confusing. Was it checking my password before i'd clicked signin? That would be weird. But no, it was just checking it met the password policy for length etc.<p>Is this necessary or useful on a signin page? I found the message confused so once again, a debate on best UI practices for signing pages. <comment><USER2> The first green tick apparently does not test for username existence, but only an acceptable username format.

I think there may be interactive attack models against logins where you separately report "this user does not exist" from "the password was not correct" -- somewhere in the back of my head is a "general rule" that you should just report "login failed" in both cases. However I do not recall the details. It might be worth contacting someone who has worked on real-world implementations of the Secure Remote Password protocol to know what exactly the threat model here would be. (I'm choosing SRP only because I know that I've seen SRP implementations generating deterministic 'fake keys' for users they do not recognize, since SRP requires a user-conditioned response from the very start of the protocol.)

On the other hand, you could probably create a system which allowed interactive password checking without revealing the password and without allowing for easy brute force attacks. The idea would be to combine a slow one-way memory-hard function f (like scrypt) and a zero-knowledge login system like SRP.

The idea would be that I would send you all of the detail needed for a full key negotiation except for the verifier V that you're supposed to finally get -- i.e. the quantity in the zero-knowledge proof where you go "and if that equals V then I accept the login." Instead I'd send you f(V), so that I am not revealing my hidden data, and so that it takes you, say, 100ms to try any password -- providing a sort of instant feedback for 'normal' users while suitably strengthening them against actual brute-forcing.

</comment><comment><USER3> You will probably get mixed opinions. I prefer that a "sign-up" page gives clear indications of the minimum standards required for passwords (although these should be inclusive and not exclude characters).

Validating the user name is always a bit of a problem - assuming you want unique usernames (and can't use an email address). It is nice to be able to offer some user feedback (with some back end validation via AJAX) but then again you don't want to give too much away about pre-existing user names.

On a "sign-in" page then there should not be any validation of the password at the client end - this should only be done at the server and if the user name/password combination fails then the user should be told of the failure but not which element failed validation. I also like to slow the response to an invalid log-in.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is stupid if you ask me. First - the site provider almost always overvalues his creation while the user just wants a test drive. So making you think of a secure password on the fly just means more utilization of the password recovery system.

Much better approach is to accept on the initial registration and to flag the password as weak in the DB next to the BCrypt hash and when the user becomes invested you can harass him as much as you like to give a stronger one.</comment>


Julia v0.1 released - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/julia-users/Ld2uzedyx4I

<comment><USER2> Are you one of the development team ?

I've just started looking at Julia. I've read the 2 blog posts on Shell sucking. A couple quick questions:

1\. Reading from STDIN. I only succeeded with "readlne(STDIN)". All attempts to use open() failed. i tried open(STDIN,Int64) but had to Ctrl-c out of it.

2\. How to read one character from STDIN. Is there some getch() alternative. I tried `read -k` etc but all attempts to call the system `read` failed.

3\. How to execute a system (zsh) builtin? e.g. i tried:

        readall(`print -rl -- *`)

(the backticks may not print here.)

I did read that the shell will not be able to expand the asterisk. Is there any way to execute this?

4\. Is there any direct way of getting directory listings and details other than using `ls` which is not standards across systems and does not use a proper delimiter for separating columns.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And for the source link:

<https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/tree/v0.1></comment>


MS Product (read-Marketing) Group responds to Reddits questions to IE9 - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_team_responds_to_your_questions/

<comment><AUTHOR> I for one am VERY disappointed in MS on this. The corporate/marketing jargon in their responses is what will lead them to fail.

Honest question: Is this an age thing? After reading some of the "witty" things they tried to say it sounded like my 58 year old dad trying to spew out playful banter to my friends at a bar...it just doesnt work.

<comment><USER2> _After reading some of the "witty" things they tried to say it sounded like my 58 year old dad trying to spew out playful banter to my friends at a bar...it just doesnt work_

Yeah there was definitely a generation gap there...I know people who work at Microsoft, and they're some of the wittiest people around. Maybe Microsoft should have let the devs actually answer the questions instead of the suits from marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> _Developers should be able to write their code once and it should work consistently in any browser._

So why is it that developers can write code that works on FireFox, Chrome, and Safari, but requires tweaks and hacks to work in IE?

 _Fundamentally, it's about a better web, not a better browser. There is so much more that can be done. That's why we build Internet Explorer_

More doubletalk. If they truly believed in a better web, they would build a browser with a gecko or webkit engine so developers could be assured that their sites would work without spending time on hacks. If developers could have all the time they spent on cross-browser compatibility back, they could spend more time building a better web.</comment>


Launch HN: Charityvest (YC S20) – Employee charitable funds and gift matching - <AUTHOR> Stephen, Jon, and Ashby here, the co-founders of Charityvest (https://charityvest.org). We created a modern, simple, and affordable way for companies to include charitable giving in their suite of employee benefits.
We give employees their own tax-deductible charitable giving fund, like an "HSA for Charity." They can make contributions into their fund and, from their fund, support any of the 1.4M charities in the US, all on one tax receipt.
Using the funds, we enable companies to operate gift matching programs that run on autopilot. Each donation to a charity from an employee is matched automatically by the company in our system.
A company can set up a matching gift program and launch giving funds to employees in about 10 minutes of work.
Historically, corporate charitable giving matching programs have been administratively painful to operate. Making payments to charities, maintaining tax records, and doing due diligence on charitable compliance is taxing on HR / finance teams. The necessary software to help has historically been quite expensive and not very useful for employees beyond the matching features.
This is one example of an observation Stephen made after working for years as a philanthropic consultant. Consumer fintech products aren't built to make great giving experiences for donors. Instead, they are built for buyers — e.g., nonprofits (fundraising) or corporations (gift matching) — without a ton of consideration for the everyday user experience.
A few years back, my wife and I made a commitment to give a portion of our income away every year, and we found it administratively painful to give regularly. The tech that nonprofits typically use hardly inspires generosity — e.g., high fees, poor user flows, and questionable information flow (like tax receipts). Giving platforms try to compensate for poor functionality with bright pictures of happy kids in developing countries, but when the technology is not a good financial experience it puts a damper on things.
Charityvest started when I noticed a particular opportunity with donor-advised funds, which are tax-deductible giving funds recognized by the IRS. They are growing quickly (20% CAGR), but mainly among the high-net worth demographic. We believe they are powerful tools. They enable donors to have a giving portfolio all from one place (on one tax receipt) and have full control over their payment information/frequency, etc. Most of all, they enable a donor to split the decisions of committing to give and supporting a specific organization. Excitement about each of these decisions often strikes at different times for donors—particularly those who desire to give on a budget.
We believe everyone should have their own charitable giving fund no matter their net worth. We've created technology that has democratized donor-advised funds.
We also believe good technology should be available for every company, big and small. Employers can offer Charityvest for $2.49 / employee / month subscription, and we charge no fees on any of the giving — charities receive 100% of the money given.
Lastly, we send the program administrator a fun report every month to let them know all the awesome giving their company and its employees did in one dashboard. This info can be leveraged for internal culture or external brand building.
We're just launching our workplace giving product, but we've already built a good portfolio of trusted customers, including Eric Ries' (author of The Lean Startup) company, LTSE. We've particularly seen a number of companies use us as a meaningful part of their corporate decision to join the fight for racial justice in substantive ways.
Our endgame is that the world becomes more generous, starting with the culture of every company. We believe giving is fundamentally good and we want to build technology that encourages more of it by making it more simple and accessible.
You can check out our workplace giving product at (https://charityvest.org/workplace-giving). If you're interested, we can get your company up and running in 10 minutes. Or, please feel free to forward us on to your HR leadership at your company.
Our giving funds are also available for free for any individual on https://charityvest.org — without gift matching and reporting. We'd invite you to check out the experience. For individuals, we make gifts of cash and stock to any charity fee-free.
Happy to share this with you all, and we'd love to know what you think. <comment><USER2> How do you do payouts to nonprofits? Are you partnering with/running your own donor advised funds, like Benevity?

As a non-profit one of the most frustrating things is how unacceptably slow Benevity is at paying out to nonprofits. It takes _2-3 months_ after they receive the funds to pay them to the nonprofit. (It takes an entire month to even show up as pending, and another month to show the details.)

This does not include time for verification, which happens annually. This is just the timeline due to their inability to run a scalable organization. It has gotten worse over time.

Our partners are usually surprised when I explain this timeline to them.

(Benevity has also been completely unable to consistently update our display name across all of their partners, so we have to tell people who work at Google to search for a different name. Support has been going to "get back to me" on this for over a year.)

After having some experience as a non-profit, I would never choose Benevity for a for-profit, and if you can kill them I would be very happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a big point. And we ensure our payouts to nonprofits happen on a regular basis.

We consider the innovation of our venture to be 50% compliance tech, for this very reason. Our system automates a bunch of the charitable compliance steps and allows us to issue payouts to nonprofits on a regular, predictable monthly cycle. And it's scaleable.

We consider charities to be an important stakeholder and the payment getting to the charity in a timely manner to be a meaningful piece of the donor experience.

This is one example of historic workplace giving platforms being built only for buyers, not other stakeholders.

<comment><USER3> Do you hold payments or wait for minimums before mailing checks? I'm just curious if smaller non-profits that don't have donation volume face any downside.

<comment><AUTHOR> The minimum contribution, grant, and payment out to nonprofits are all $20, so we never run into a situation where we wait to send payments to nonprofits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> About 7 years ago, my team was asked to assist at a university hack-a-thon focused on addressing inequalities, poverty and health. We wanted to bring attention to our dev cloud platform, but had no money budgeted for prize give aways. Out of need, we decided to try a hack ourselves. In the 3 week lead-up to the hack-a-thon, we short-listed 4-5 approved charities that qualified for matching employee credit. Using our dev cloud platform, we quickly stood up an internal facing crowd-funding site explaining our goal to raise funds to internal employees. These funds would be assigned to one of the short-listed companies, but was as yet unassigned. During the hack-a-thon, our selected winner was given the opportunity to pick which charity should receive the prior raised funds. We then completed the matching funds forms for all contributing employees and asked them to sign and submit. It was a great experience on so many levels. We raised $800, definitely more than we would have normally received for a hack-a-thon prize. It was matched for another $800 by our company a few months later during the annual cycle. A children's hospital received an unexpected $1600 for their discretionary fund (crayons, art supplies, music, ...). We had a real-world example of how our dev platform could bring quick value to an idea. It really got us thinking about how much more efficient our corporate matching processes could be. I salute initiatives like the OP.

</comment><comment><USER5> Any chance of providing a donations API? This sort of no-fee approach would be amazing for building all sorts of charity-focused apps, from walkathons to nonprofit crowdfunding campaigns, public matching campaigns etc. The minimal functionality would just be to allow a site to direct a user to a page that allows them to complete a grant for a particular amount to a specific nonprofit and receive a callback when the grant is submitted.

<comment><AUTHOR> We would love to build an API. We constantly have conversations about it amongst our team. It's just a matter of priorities. Agree it would be amazing to see people build more charity-focused apps integrated with our funds.

We are working with a few select strategic partners to help their giving via Charityvest (that eventually would be replaced by an API). If you have an organization who might be interested in working with us, have them reach out. We'd love to chat with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For some reason I hate the combination of companies and charity. If a company wants to be charitable they should pay their employees livable wages and give them quality benefits. Everyone wants to show how charitable they are but nobody wants the janitors to be able to support their families.

<comment><USER7> Googlers for example already earn very livable wages.

(I agree that companies shouldn't do charity. But for very different reasons.

Just provide good and cheap goods and services to customers, and pay your shareholders and employees.

Those shareholders and employees as real person can make their own decisions on charity. No need for matching etc.

You can also consider not optimizing your taxes as aggressively, and treating the 'excess' paymnents to government mentally as if they were charitable giving.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "HSA for Charity."

Nice rebranding on DAF, which get a bad rep as a rich persons tool to avoid taxes.

This is pretty genious

</comment><comment><USER9> How can you find out more about the specific investments that Charityvest will be making? Our definition of highly liquid and "safe" might be different :)

Also, is there something inherent about Schwab/Fidelity/etc charitable index funds that make the fee load so high? If you could offer this at a lower rate, that would definitely interest me as well.

I actually just signed up for a Schwab DAF, so am certainly interested in learning more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Today we only invest in money markets. Asset preservation is our top priority, and we can't ever have balances down in our app. That would be a terrible experience for our donors. So we'll only move beyond money markets with great caution. Our platform automates so much of the aspects of processing charitable gifts, even a small financial return is gross margin profitable for us.

It's worth noting, we offer a free DAF because we don't offer an investment capability for our donors today. Our DAFs currently function like checking accounts. The investing we do of charitable assets is invisible to our users.

For any donor who doesn't think their charitable assets will sit for years before being sent to charity, we're a great option for making giving much easier.

<comment><USER9> Awesome!

One thing that would be nice would be some fixed-income related products. My goal is to build a decent principal amount and then use the interest/dividends to continuously donate, but this might be a minority strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> DAFs at established administrators, like Fidelity/Vanguard/Schwab, rely on brand name so that users trust the money they donate to the DAF will be granted to the non-profits they make recommendations to.

Other than being currently connected with YC, what else can users rely on that their donation to Charityvest will in fact be granted to the non-profit the make the recommendation to?

<comment><AUTHOR> Trust is an important factor for us. You're right, and YC helps, but we also have other structures that make things transparent.

The charitable assets in our app actually go into a 501c3 public charity (Charityvest Inc), a part of our social enterprise, which has to file a Form 990 every year making its financials and board members public. We launched in 2019, so our first 990 filing is this year. We also conduct our own internal financial audit which we plan to make public on our site. Our charitable operations will be increasingly transparent.

We're also partnered with / backed by other significant institutions: Yale University, The Farm at Comcast NBCUniversal, Dwolla, Plaid, Synovus Bank, etc.

You can also follow up with any charity you grant to out of Charityvest yourself and ask them if they receive Charityvest's grants in a timely manner. Generally all charities will gladly confirm receipt of a donor gift.

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER11> > _You can also follow up with any charity you grant to out of Charityvest > yourself and ask them if they receive Charityvest 's grants in a timely > manner. Generally all charities will gladly confirm receipt of a donor gift_

This is an important part to emphasize, and it's good practice IMO. My work does a year end charity drive through United Way - you can donate to any charity, but the donation has to be made through United Way to get work- related benefits (for example, a pizza lunch for the dept, etc).

I donate to my college every year during these year end drives, but I also book an appointment for the end of January to call up my college and verify they've received my donation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I reading this right, that even if it's an employer-provided plan, you can't do paycheck withholding? That seems like a big speed-bump.

I have a DAF myself, and really love the way it separates the tax event [donating appreciated stock] and the donations to specific charities. But if it was all just about cash from my checking account, I'm not sure I'd find it worth the bother--I'd just mail checks to the charities directly. Once you can do regular automatic deposits, whether from payroll or from a user's bank account, I think it becomes a much more compelling service. I do hope you get there soon.

I do see that the gift-matching part can make it a valuable service even so. I look forward to your taking on Benevity for the gift-matching part; I've found their service and customer support to be rather poor.

<comment><USER13> I had a chat with someone working on a similar product in this space. The problem being solved here is the _matching_ component of charitable giving (which you mentioned).

Turns out, running a matching program at a company is pretty annoying at a certain size. Much less monthly charity stipends, etc.

Withholding from the paycheck would certainly be a great addition in the future, but is not necessary in the MVP to have people pay for the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. We have found matching programs are painful to run.

It's also a small misconception that payroll deduction giving is pre-tax. Giving is a post tax benefit either way, so we think it's a better experience for the donor to have control of their monthly automatic contributions rather than having to bug their HR / finance department at their company to increase/decrease it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great idea - we did this by hand with a normal DAF - but a lot of work.

Quick question - can you accept check donations (ie, for amounts > $10K or so?). For larger DAF balances folks want to move / family offices / etc having the ability to handle a check would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we can! Here's a quick article outlining the details. [https://support.charityvest.org/en/articles/4142972-can-i- do...](https://support.charityvest.org/en/articles/4142972-can-i-donate-via- check)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a CharityVest user and the product has changed my approach to giving.

I now have a monthly total giving budget which goes into CharityVest that I can then disperse when a cause I'm passionate about comes around. I previously would mostly do one-off contributions (with a few non-profits that I regularly backed through their own tools) but it feels better to "budget" my total giving.

I'm glad to say that the product has increased my overall giving and has ensured that every dollar I've sent goes to the non-profit.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can you outline what the hard benefits are of a corporation paying $2.50/employee/month are, for the corporations and/or employees and/or charities?

According to your website, I can set up an individual account not tied to my employer and it's free to do so.

Can you also explain what the process looks like of connecting an individual account to an corporate account? (ie: I have a Charityvest account and my future employer has a corporate account)

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely.

Our workplace product does charitable gift matching automatically according to rules the company sets up, and provides reporting to company leadership on all the aggregate giving / matching / participation data across employees. A company can see their aggregate charitable impact in a broad sense.

To your second question, the giving funds belong to each donor, but companies can establish an affiliation with each donor's fund for the length of the employment, which allows us to enable that company's gift matching and reporting. It's not unlike a 401k at Vanguard for an employee—technically the employees, but the company facilitates the benefits for the length of employment.

So if an employee joins a company with a fund, we just add an affiliation between the company and that user's fund (via an email address). Likewise, the affiliation is removed when an employee leaves. Matching/reporting cease for that donor, but the charitable dollars in the employees fund will continue to be in their fund.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you working on expanding beyond US nonprofits? That would be a requirement for competing with Benevity for customers that are multinational corporations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Eventually we can, but given our stage, we're focusing on US giving.

Our focus right now is to make the giving experience amazing for employees of SMB and mid-market companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My company uses this! And they provide some matching on donations, so it felt worth it to go in and find a worthy charity.

</comment><comment><USER18> How do you handle employees donating to a cause the company may not want to associate with? For example, the NRA is a registered nonprofit but I don't think you'll find many startups interested in donating to their cause.

Edit: Separately, I do think this is a worthwhile idea and I hope you succeed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. We have existing customers who are doing this today—they have guidelines for charitable organizations they don't fund.

Today, we enable the company admin to quickly cancel any grant that gets loaded in their hopper of monthly matching grants. They can cancel any grant from their dashboard in two taps. The employee who submitted the grant for matching will get notified their match wasn't approved.

<comment><USER18> Got it, glad to hear you've thought about this. Can I also say I'm glad you're deciding to charge the company instead of the individual users or the charities themselves.

Whenever I see companies targeting the nonprofit space but planning to monetize on the nonprofit side, I'm always skeptical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a great idea!

Are there two separate donations or does it add the company's name after the donor's name? Some way to notify recipients about the low cost of managing a charitable donation match program with your service would be great.

Have you encountered any charitable foundations which prefer to receive cryptoassets? Red Cross and UNICEF accept cryptocurrency donations for the children, for example.

Do you have integration with other onboarding and HR/benefits tools on your roadmap? As a potential employee, I would like to work for a place that matches charitable donations, so mentioning as much in job descriptions would be helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Our matching system issues an identical grant from the fund of the matching company. It goes out in the same grant cycle as the employee grant so they go together.

We haven't yet encountered any charity that prefers to receive cryptoassets.

We have lots of dreams about thoughtful integrations with HR software, but we want the experience to be excellent, and we want to keep the experience of our existing app excellent. We'll be balancing those priorities as we grow.

<comment><USER19> > _Our matching system issues an identical grant from the fund of the matching > company. It goes out in the same grant cycle as the employee grant so they > go together._

So the system creates a separate transaction for the original and the matched donation with each donor's name on the respective gift?

How do users sync which elements of their HR information with your service? IDK what the monthly admin cost there is.

There are a few HR, benefits, contracts, and payroll YC companies with privacy regulation compliance and APIs [https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=Payroll](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=Payroll)

[https://founderkit.com/people-and-recruiting/health- insuranc...](https://founderkit.com/people-and-recruiting/health- insurance/reviews)

<comment><AUTHOR> Separate data records, yes, separate payment, no. The charity receives one consolidated check in the mail each month across all donors (one payment), and the original donor's grant will be on the data sheet as well as the matching grant from the company's corporate fund (separate records).

Today, users create their accounts directly with our app, and they are affiliated with their corporation in our app via their email address. So we don't integrate with any HR information.

Administrators of the program can add and remove employees via copying and pasting email addresses (can add/remove many at a time). We aim to integrate with HR systems of record in the future to make this seamless.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for clarifying.

Do you offer a CSV containing donor information to the charity?

Do you support anonymous matched donations?

Can donors specify that a donation is strongly recommended for a specific effort?

...

3% * $1000/yr == $2.50/mo * 12mo

<comment><AUTHOR> CSV: yes if they request we'll happily provide.

Anonymous: yes it's an option on our grant screen

Specific efforts: yes on the grant screen we enable donors to add a "specific need" they'd like their grant to fund.

:-)

<comment><USER19> Outstanding. CSV would be helpful for recognizing donors in e.g. annual and ESG/CSR reports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This sounds great. We already use [https://percentpledge.org](https://percentpledge.org) though. How is this different?

<comment><AUTHOR> Percent Pledge focuses its giving on cause portfolios, and you can't give to specific organizations.

We invite our donors to give into their own charitable fund, and support specific organizations when they feel like a strategic opportunity has arisen. Donors are more satisfied when they can give bigger on things they are really passionate about.

Percent Pledge also has a 5% fee on every dollar given through them. We have no fee. 100% of your money goes to the charities you support. We want to eliminate fees from giving!

<comment><USER21> How do you make money?

<comment><AUTHOR> In two ways: 1\. We charge a per employee per month SaaS subscription to companies for our workplace giving product. 2\. We invest a portion of the balances in our charitable funds (aggregated across all users) in safe, highly liquid assets to create a financial return. The money is not restricted in any way and is available for granting to nonprofits at any time. Robinhood uses this same model with uninvested cash in its app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A bit petty but, clicking the masthead on the support page, I expected to be directed to the homepage. Not have it reload the support page.

</comment><comment><USER23> I really don't think it's very friendly to need to create an account to see what charities are supported.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have all 1.4M eligible US charities in the IRS database.

Some places of worship are not included as they've never filed with the IRS, but we can add them very simply.

We can support your charity of choice as long as it's legally possible to do so!

<comment><USER23> Did you get your list from [https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt- organizatio...](https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt- organizations-business-master-file-extract-eo-bmf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we do start with the IRS EO BMF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Love the idea! Keeping track of receipts is such a pain this tool looks like it automates everything.

</comment><comment><USER25> Best work keep continue ...</comment>


My Year in Startup Hell - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ <comment><USER2> What a thoroughly fascinating article, how refreshing to read about a startup where the writer has no obvious interest in working there and knows no other startup will ever hire him again! For once we get honesty and transparency!

Also a really interesting insight into the dynamics of gen X getting a job in a gen Y led company. He honestly thinks the gen Yers "eat up" the indoctrination.

In my experience no one thinks they're changing the world, no matter how much cold cool-aid they get served.

It's much more about gen Ys sense of entitlement stemming from tech representing such a large part of the western economy. No gen Y wants to get paid peanuts, while being told what to do by a gen X that can't understand a VLookup.

It's an adolescent arrogance that goes into young adulthood.

Interesting move with not signing whatever legal docs that allowed him to write a book and trash hubspot. A gen X firm would never overlook that.</comment>


Companies That Hire Remotely - <AUTHOR> I've created a list of Companies That Hire Remotely Right Now.
Here are already 200+ Companies with Job Openings.
There are: Open Positions For Different Niches,
Required Location for Position,
Direct Link to a Careers Page of a Company.
Most of them are for IT Developers
If you're from North and South America, Asia, Africa, EU – You Can Find a Remote Job.
The link is in the comments <comment><USER2> > The link is in the comments

Use the URL field on [https://news.ycombinator.com/submit](https://news.ycombinator.com/submit) then add extra text as first comment. Similar to the last 5 times this website got submitted.

</comment><comment><USER3> So I ^f for embedded and the only one there I click through and it wants me to be in San Jose. What am I missing (other than a remote gig)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://periodix.net/blog/companies-that-hire-remotely- right...](https://periodix.net/blog/companies-that-hire-remotely-right-now- feb26/)</comment>


Steve Jobs pledged to 'destroy' Google smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1cc07d6c-fb83-11e0-9587-00144feab49a.html#axzz1bcoEaYyG

<comment><USER2> Well no duh. Not to sound juvenile, but it should come as no surprise the extremely inventive and competitive genius that was Steve Jobs would take aim at one of the lagest internet companies in the world delving directly into his business space.

Patent issues alone, I find it very likely Jobs saw Google's foray into iOS as a direct assault on one of his flagship products.</comment>


Stick 'em up – A surprising history of collage - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/look-closer/stick-em-up-a-surprising-history-of-collage <comment><USER2> Nice arrival. Though they missed my favourite collagist, ollage and digital compositing (aka Photoshoping) are effectively the same thing. Realising this made it easier for me to teach the latter.</comment>


Google offers clearer search labels after EU probe - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22293238 <comment><USER2> >Microsoft-backed lobby group Initiative for a Competitive [Online] Marketplace

I hadn't heard of that before. It is… amusing, to say the least.

<comment><USER3> Nearly all the anti-Google groups that complain to competition authorities in any country are funded (at least in part, generally almost entirely) by Microsoft. The strategy seems to be "if we faced huge costs dealing with regulatory oversight, so should they."

<comment><USER4> Usually the case is - if an organization A is opposing or campaigning against an organization B then A is mostly likely to be funded by {C} which is an organization or a group of organizations opposed to A in a financial, philosophical or social way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone explain the EU's reasoning here? If Google promotes it's own services or even mixes ads with with search results, how is it "unfair" or in this case illegal?

</comment><comment><USER6> Does Google actually promote links to their own services? (Outside of marked advertisements, I mean.) The article isn't totally clear on what 'ranking policy' refers to, exactly.

I know they have the ability to specially promote 'social' content that they think is relevant, and presumably that's tightly coupled to their services (but also supports Twitter and Facebook, as far as I know). Is there something else going on here?

<comment><USER7> Try finding a video that isn't on YouTube without specifying the property in the search.

<comment><USER8> Seems to work fine with a test search for [gangnam style]; the results page shows five videos, and only one is from YouTube: <http://i.imgur.com/zv0TsRH.png>

<comment><USER7> Now do a video search. Note the difference.

<comment><USER8> The top few are PSY's official channel and official videos, followed by videos on dailymotion, mtviggy, and jibjab. Paging through, I'd say about half of the results are from YouTube, mostly "how to dance gangnam style" home videos.

I don't see anything obviously wrong with these results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to move my laptop screen to see what is an ad and what is not. Forget about Google that tested this to death to confuse users, but not even FTC sees this as a problem. That should be illegal, ads should be clearly and unambiguously separated from content. Kudos to EU.

That makes me not trust a thing from Google, especially when they can make a buck. They even turned Shopping in 100% ads, without promptly disclosing it (you have to click on a tiny thing on the page to read that Google is listing results based on payment to Google)

Same with other Google content. Their claim to fame was impartiality but now the pages are 95%+ Google properties and ads. People, and I mean average Joe and Jane, should be updated on the change.

<comment><USER8>
      > I have to move my laptop screen to see what is an ad
      > and what is not.

Do you have a screenshot? When I do a search, even for very ad-heavy queries such as [credit card], the ads are still clearly marked with colored backgrounds and notes like "Ads related to credit card".

      > They even turned Shopping in 100% ads, without promptly
      > disclosing it (you have to click on a tiny thing on the
      > page to read that Google is listing results based on
      > payment to Google)

In shopping, at the bottom of the page is a notice that "Google is compensated by these merchants. Payment is one of several factors used to rank these results." It appears to be about the same font size as the body text in ad blocks.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _Do you have a screenshot?_

His screenshot on your screen will just show you what you always see. It's not going to show you what his screen displays.

EDIT: Here are some poor camera phone photos. The ads are clearly marked as ads, but at a normal viewing angle the background is almost invisible. This is on an uncalibrated old Lenovo thinkpad monitor.

(<http://imgur.com/a/BKY4w#qcXWJdc>)

Google should assume that people have shitty monitors and have no idea about calibration and make ads very clear. This is a complaint that was made when Google first started putting ads at the top of search.

Of course, they're free to not do that and carry on as they are, but they're likely to find regulatory interference increases in the EU.

<comment><USER8>
      > His screenshot on your screen will just show you what
      > you always see. It's not going to show you what his
      > screen displays.

If he has an incorrectly-configured video driver or a program that modifies color temperature (such as f.lux), his screenshot would show it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It (Scott Kupor) - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Sand-Hill-Road-Venture-ebook/dp/B07MQT97PV <comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt:

"It's an unfair truth that VCs get a lot of at bats, lots of chances to invest in a home-run company, while most entrepreneurs get to step up to the plate only a few times. Or to mix my sports metaphors, you get only a few real shots on goal in your lifetime while we VCs get several. Because of this imbalance, specifically regarding investment decisions, information asymmetry can come into play (often at the expense of the founder). The VCs are repeat players and thus have the benefit of lots of years of developing their understanding of the various mechanics (especially when negotiating term sheets), whereas founders have been through the process only a handful of times, at most. What I hope to lay out for founders is a better understanding of and appreciation for the interplay between VCs and founders in order to level the playing field. Information asymmetry should not pollute the foundation of a marriage that could last ten years or more."</comment>


Your phone knows more about you then you might realize - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/12three3/10-things-your-phone-knows-about-you-that-you-wou-1x2bt <comment><AUTHOR> I try not to share too much

</comment><comment><USER2> 'than'</comment>


'996' Is China's Version of Hustle Culture. Tech Workers Are Sick of It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/technology/china-996-jack-ma.html <comment><USER2> Might call it just a "China's version" but I'd rather that its a global thing than anything.

When you look for any decent startup talks, you have people like Elon Musk and Jack ma (of course) claiming to work "every waking hour" and that they used to do it.

Also, being from India, I have had interviews with Startups like:

Them: _technical questions_

....

Them: _do you have any questions_

Me: What about the leaves and weekly working hours?

Them: _What do you mean?_

Me: Is it a 5 day working or 6?

Them: _Okay, we already don 't like you. (For real, their words)._

Me: Ummm.. Thanks?

<comment><USER3> I have been told that I was rejected for not being a cultural fit. I strongly suspect that was because I asked them about working hours/ days and told them that I have interests outside of tech and I take my time off seriously and don't really believe in 365 days hustle atmosphere.

In India it is very difficult to find developers who have interests beyond coding, drinking and binge watching TV shows and unfortunately, they expect the same out of you.

<comment><USER2> > told them that I have interests outside of tech and I take my time off > seriously and don't really believe in 365 days hustle atmosphere.

Yep, that might be it.

> In India it is very difficult to find developers who have interests beyond > coding, drinking and binge watching TV shows and unfortunately, they expect > the same out of you.

Well, the problem here, while looking for a job is that your interests should not bother them and the other way round too. That is something some interviewers can't comprehend.

<comment><USER3> > Well, the problem here, while looking for a job is that your interests > should not bother them and the other way round too.

You're correct. In my situation the interviewer asked "you're idea of an ideal company to work for". That is where the whole saga started when I mentioned I like my down time and hobbies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> '996' isn't isolated to China. I first experienced this in the late 90's when startup dotcoms were battling things out with each other. In most cases, we first pushed ourselves to those levels of enterprise because we wanted to release new functionality, ahead of the competition. After we started burning out, that's when management started herding us in this direction because they don't get that work is not done when you're asked to join pointless meetings.

</comment><comment><USER5> if it's your own business go ahead - build what you like for how many hours your like. But I'll never expect employees working on a salary to this kind of hours except maybe for 2-3 days for a specific project a couple of times a year.

</comment><comment><USER6> That Baidu guy hit the nail right on its head, 996 works when you're in a new booming industry because the lucrative rewards are going to be worth all those long hours put in. But when you're in a maturing sector it just feels like a never-ending grind without getting much in return.

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't one of the main points of having a communist revolution (I am fully aware that China is no longer communist, except in name), the idea that people should be able to work 40 hour workweeks, 5 days a week?

[https://www.texasaflcio.org/sites/default/files/article/feat...](https://www.texasaflcio.org/sites/default/files/article/featured/8-hours- labor-history.jpg)

<comment><USER8> > Isn't one of the main points of having a communist revolution (I am fully > aware that China is no longer communist, except in name), the idea that > people should be able to work 40 hour workweeks, 5 days a week?

No, which is why your sources identifies it as a union goal, not a Communist revolutionary goal.

A Communist revolution is about who you are working for, not how much you work.

<comment><USER7> Whether you agree with it or not, it's a documented fact that Marxist/Leninst theory is clear on the desire for a reasonable length of working day.

[https://socialism.com/fs-article/karl-marx-on-the- struggle-f...](https://socialism.com/fs-article/karl-marx-on-the-struggle-for- a-shorter-workday/)

Marx gives credit to the abolition of slavery for sparking new life in the U.S. labor movement in Capital, Volume I, published in 1867, in a section on the length of the workday.

"In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours' agitation that ran with the seven- leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.

The General Congress of labor at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866) declared: "The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labor of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working-day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained."

At the same time, the Congress of the International Working Men's Association at Geneva, on the proposition of the London General Council, resolved that "the limitation of the working-day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive … the Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit of the working-day."

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately, there is often a great difference between Marxism and Marxism- Leninism (aka: Stalinism).

<comment><USER8> Leninism and Stalinism aren't the same, though Leninism-Stalinism would be a better name for the latter than Marxism-Leninism is for the former.

<comment><USER9> Stalinism's typical name for itself is Marxism-Leninism, though. I don't think the etymologies make any sense, but when someone calls themselves a Marxist- Leninist, that is what they mean.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Outsource IT or in-house IT? - <AUTHOR>

We are a small company near San Jose, about 40 employees, running both a small manufacturing operation and about half a dozen web facing applications (12 or so servers). I'm the CTO, have a programming background, and am remote (on the east coast) from the company.
We used an IT outsourcing firm for number of years at $4000 a month (which I suspect is WAY below market rate for a dozen production servers, and 50 or so workstations). They covered monitoring the servers and emergency response, server backup, server upgrades, infrastructure consulting, physical phone and network infrastructure, helpdesk, email, and employees' laptops and desktops maintenance. Basically they did everything IT.
The company is getting out of the physical side of the business. It's a little company which has an Indian office which does most of the maintenance remotely. About two years ago they realized that the business doing remote maintenance of servers was a better business for them and focused in on that. So now they are shutting down the physical side of their business to focus on that remote server monitoring, backup, and maintenance.
So now I'm looking at three major options. First use the company for their remote server monitoring and maintenance, and add an IT employee (a jack of all trades type) to handle the physical stuff. Second look for a IT outsourcing firm that probably covers everything that the old company and not use the old company for anything. Third embrace owning more of IT and putting together a network of freelancers who can cover our needs.
Is one of these options a terrible idea? Is one of these options a great idea? Am I leaving out super important details? <comment><USER2> Hey,

What was the response time of the old firm? What are the stacks of the servers vs workstations? How many hours per week did 4k/mo get you?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Very Fast, usually less than 15 minutes (less than 5 to an emergency) during the day. And within 10 or so minutes for an escalation (from monitoring or person) 24/7.

2\. Two server stacks (co-location and in house). ~ 8 or so physical servers each place. Workstations are about 50 with most being very simple machines in the manufacturing area.

3\. It was a flat fee. My guess is it was ~

<comment><USER2> What is the differentiation between the colo servers, and the in-house? I am imagining that everything on site, ran the day to day "office" stuff (email, active directory etc); and the colo was something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Colo is for customer facing systems (we sell software as a service). In house is for helping run the factory and staging / dev systems version of colo systems.

<comment><USER2> If it were me, I'd try to compartmentalize the factory/day to day IT stuff, and the dev + colo systems. Having a basic IT shop to handle printers, workstations etc, and a specialist or freelancer to handle the dev + colo work, would be my suggestion. Have you looked at retainers? I was thinking about starting a retainer based IT consultancy (10 hours a month for 1250$ w/ 4 hour response time or something similar). I am curious to see what your thoughts are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. That is similar to my 3rd thought and very similar to one of the programmer's thoughts. Makes a lot of sense since it would be hard to find the person who wanted to do the day in and day out 'fix the printer' stuff and also have the skills for the more high end stuff.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Identity is broken. - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekatsea.com/identity-is-broken

<comment><USER2> There aren't any great solutions to this problem on the horizon yet, sadly. FB login isn't a viable option because they or so aggressive about using it to mine data, and let's face it - there are probably plenty of logins and services people don't want co-mingled with their public persona. Google login is another non-starter but for similar reasons, but with the added issue that they have so many services, with so many TOS's that you run a very real risk of losing access to a bunch of third party accounts if you ever run afoul of Googles' policies and they terminate your service. This happened to a lot of people who signed up for G+ but were not above the required age: they lost access to gmail and all the other Google services simply because they didn't read the fine print.

Oddly enough, I think it might be credit card companies who are in the best position to solve this problem. They already have a large infrastructure for detecting fraud, they have the trust of the general public, and they already have a high level of integration with many websites. More importantly, they have a business model that is not predicated on selling your data to make a profit (well, at least not entirely).

<comment><USER3> The video linked at the end suggests using NFC-equipped smartphones to transmit blinded credentials containing just enough information to gain entry (e.g. I am over 18, I have authority to enter this pub, etc). What do you think about that solution?

<comment><USER2> I like the idea of a physical key like this a lot. I think it matters though that we are talking about something that happens 'over the air' (even if it is just NFC). The security would need to be bulletproof. I'm not very knowledgeable how these systems work for NFC other than RFID's in credit cards. With credit cards there is a dynamic CVV code that can only be used once so if somebody sniffs your card they can't use it for more than one transaction. This might be acceptable for credit cards, but it isn't ok at all for a login scenario because if they compromise your login once, they potentially have access to all sorts of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think OpenID + owning your own domain is a good solution to this problem. You simply put some special HTML in the header of [http://<yourdomain>](http://<yourdomain>); to create a "delegate" that points to an authenticator of your choice. If this authenticator goes down or is compromised, then you edit that HTML stub to point somewhere else. I prefer using my domain name as a single point of failure over my email address, because I think it's harder to lose control of my domain name (actually if I lose my domain then I've lost my email too, as that controls my MX record).

The problems are that not every site supports OpenID, and that owning/maintaining one's own domain isn't as easy as getting an email address (tough for grandmas to do). The former issue would solve itself if OpenID would become more used (kind of a paradox), while the latter is slowly gaining traction, I think (now with sites like GoDaddy it's not too hard for lay people to buy a domain and write HTML with a WYSIWYG editor). Remember, there was a time when getting an email address was not a trivial thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> FB login is a good concept, but I've seen too many situations where "Log in with Facebook" leads to a page asking me to give permission for the app to post to Facebook on my behalf.

There's clearly a need for a standard login, but there's also a need for a much brighter line between identification and permissions. Until that happens, even when it's available, many users will shy away from using a standard login.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. I think that Google could actually solve this single-signon problem by encouraging more website to auth with Google. They should stay clear on permissions tho and not ask me to connect the rest of the internet to my Google+ account, otherwise I would shy away from this solution much like I shy away from Facebook. Actually, right now I trust Twitter the most, when it comes to authorizing apps; not sure why that is though. Maybe because I am under impression that Twitter isn't going to post more cat pictures to my profile just because it can.

<comment><USER6> What advantages are there of using Google-specific authentication over using OpenID with Google?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mozilla is trying to fix this, through the BrowserID (Mozilla Persona) project.

<http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/>

This article actually somewhat validates the approach BrowserID takes: you use your email address as your ID. BrowserID provides a way to verify that you own the email address in question (that you are who you say you are).

There's a lot more planned, but the core of it is simple and easy to implement.

ObDisclaimer: I work for Mozilla, but not on Persona.</comment>


App Submissions On Google Play Now Reviewed By Staff, Include Age-Based Ratings - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/17/app-submissions-on-google-play-now-reviewed-by-staff-will-include-age-based-ratings/ <comment><USER2> I've already been getting kind of ridiculous suspensions due to this. A dice puzzle game where all you ever earned was points for making the right patterns was banned for encouraging gambling.

So, uh, goodbye one of the few things that made developing for Google better than developing for Apple. Really don't know how they could possibly be bragging about this.

<comment><USER3> Hey, there's still the Windows Store. While ostensibly reviewed, they really let everything in. I've found fake Windows Updates. Fake Dropbox, Facebook (second result, even shows up in the start menu if you type in Facebook!), and more. Some even show "Microsoft" as the publisher. And in every case, tech support tells you to piss off. When reporting a fake Dropbox app, the CSR told me it seems to work and recommended installing it again. So if MS is willing to help phish users, they'll probably let a dice game slide by.

Oh and if you get caught, just resubmit. It took Netflix at least 3 times of back-n-forth with MS before they started permabanning fake Netflix. Other software devs have told me that MS refuses to do anything to help them, even when a 12 yr old could see this hurts users, the brand, and ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, there's certainly something rotten with Microsoft's App Store. I'd hazard a guess that most of it is outsourced to India and there's some internal bureaucracy putting it outside of purview of the people who could fix it. It's hard to even search for top apps that you know the name for.

I think its one of those things when Microsoft gets around to focus on it they'll "fix it" but for now, crappola.

<comment><USER3> I'm almost definitively sure it is related to some misguided KPIs or having someone's bonus tied to the metric "number of published apps". At one point, MS was offering $100 or $200 per app, up to 10 or 20 apps. No one would believe a single dev is likely to publish 20 quality apps. Instead they really wanted shovelware. There are thousands of apps that are literally just wrappers around a web page or YouTube channel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> after getting 100k active users, and over 2million sessions per week, which was 1 year after submitting my app, google play suspended my app without warning, and i lost all.

they were right, i didn't accurately follow their terms, but if they reviewed my app once submitted a year ago, that could've been avoided.

it was a bitter experience for me, and i decided to port my app to iOS. i heard iOS provides warnings atleast.

<comment><USER6> If you think Apple will provide a more cooperative experience you are mistaken. I've built apps for years and many times a short discussion with Google allowed me to re-post an app with some modifications.

Unless you are making apple SERIOUS revenue (think high6 to 7 figures) they will shut you down without even a response.

<comment><USER7> "I've builds apps for years and many times a short discussion with Google allowed me to re-post an app with some modifications."

The vast, vast, vast majority of people are not able to find a person at Google to have that discussion with in the first place.

"Unless you are making apple SERIOUS revenue (think high6 to 7 figures) they will shut you down without even a response."

Apple tells you before your app goes live.

<comment><USER8> > Apple tells you before your app goes live.

Look at the situation with PCalc and Transmit. Both apps which offered a killer feature, got approved by review and even featured by the editorial team, then pulled after having been on the front page of the App Store.

<comment><USER9> What on earth could be wrong with a calculator app?

<comment><USER10> It put a calculator in a widget in the notifications area. [http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/30/apple-no-longer- rejecting-c...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/30/apple-no-longer-rejecting- calculator-widgets-from-the-app-store/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And they've been doing it for the past few months and no one knew. So I think this is a good thing all around, as long as review times don't increase to Apple levels.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice. I just hope they won't be as annoying as Apple.

<comment><USER13> Well if you've been submitting apps in the last month or so then you used this system. They say even with adding humans apps are approved in hours not days/weeks as has been known to happen with Apple. Also they use a lot of automation to reduce the number of apps and the amount of work each reviewer has to review.

<comment><USER14> > days/weeks as has been known to happen with Apple.

That's understating it. Long review times are the norm, not just known to happen. I've never had a submission take under 72 hours. Typical is 4-7 days. (And I've done it dozens of times.)

It's incredibly frustrating when you have users (or clients) complaining about a bug you fixed days ago. I don't understand why they're still have such a deep approval queue after almost seven years. I guess they don't consider it a problem. The perks of having a huge market share, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google tries to automate everything, so it amuses me that they have had to fall back to manual reviewers instead of fully automating the process.

<comment><USER16> So many poor quality apps though on their marketplace, I don't think they have any other choice but to revert to a manual review process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wasn't the point of creating walled-garden app stores the notion that it created checks and balances to prevent malware and bad user experiences from getting on people's devices? Wasn't that the entire reason we were supposed to be fine with the notion that we'd be giving up a portion of revenue to be able to get onto users devices in pretty much the only way the vast majority of our users understood how to do?

In other words, "you had ONE job, app stores, ONE JOB."

<comment><USER18> It was hardly the only job, especially considering Google's store didn't _have_ the review process until just now.

That cut pays for the payments infrastructure, bandwidth to deliver the app files, etc. that you don't have to provide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's nice.. I hope, now, they will respond to developer queries also..

</comment><comment><USER20> Ironic given how the rhetoric suggested the "walled garden" was an evil to be avoided. Over time Apple is being proven right.

<comment><USER21> I can still sideload apps onto my android device, no? I don't view a monitored app store as a "walled garden", I consider it a convenience. I view limiting what I can install as a "walled garden" and Apple definitely falls into that category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a surprising deviation from their traditional stance of "throwing more people at a problem is never an acceptable answer" (which is almost literally their justification for off-loading the bulk of their support to an online manual and a "users helping users" forum with "actual humans" being a scarce resource even paying customers are usually allowed to tap into).

</comment><comment><USER23> Now, will there be any increase in developer program fee? Since reviewing requires resources and will cost more money to Google now onwards.

</comment><comment><USER24> Two companies and possibly very few people decide what apps will reach a billion people. Sure wish we could elect those people.

<comment><USER25> Why should they even control this? It should be an open system by default....

<comment><USER26> And why is that?

<comment><USER27> I believe pnathan is implying they would prefer to buy and own a device to use as they choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I noticed they are working with ClassInd but are not clear how.

I really hope this won't open the door to censorship on Android, one of the reasons why I make mobile games is exactly to circunvent ClassInd (as the article calls it).

Here in Brazil, to release any entertainment product (even live Circus Shows are included on this), you must first ask the Ministry of Justice to give you a rating, the process, specially for things that aren't a Circus Show, is very long, slow and cumbersome (example: you need to do it again every time you make an official update of your software, and the process involves writing lots of paperwork, sending the physical papers to the Ministry, and waiting AT LEAST 30 days).

Although officially they claim it is NOT censorship, the process is mandatory for all entertainment, even if free, the law allow them to punish (with 2 years in prison and fines) anyone that are distributing, storing, selling, buying or creating things without ratings, and they can deny rating you (meaning that even if you ask, if they deny the rating, you are de-facto censored).

This does have an obvious effect here:

People here create fake US accounts to buy stuff on Xbox Live and PSN, because the local versions of XBL and PSN follow the law, and has much less content.

Steam don't have official Brazillian offices, although recently they stated to charge in BRL, and have portuguese translations, the charging part is handled by Brazillian companies and credit card processors, in a way that if Brazil government go ater Steam, Steam can just cut-off Brazil (and let the CC processors take the blame and the lawsuit).

Apple for a while, got in conflict with the government here, the Ministry of Justice threatened to sue Apple for 2000 BRL for each unrated app, back then 300.000 unrated apps already existed, Apple in response just set entire categories to be hidden from iTunes users with Brazillian IPs or accounts (leading to lots of fake accounts, sometimes using stolen CCs, and iTunes access using proxies).

Eventually, some merciful judge ruled that since Apple don't have offices here, they don't have to follow our law, opening access again.

Also, like I said, I make mobile apps to avoid that law, what I do is that I have a Brazil company, a Swiss company, and then I make the Swiss company, hire the Brazil company to create software for hire, then the Swiss company that "create" the completed entertainment software, and sells it (including to Brazillian users, that frequently pay with international CC, of course this leads to lots of inefficiency, since I have to pay taxes on exchanging CHF to BRL, after users already paid taxes on exchanging BRL to CHF, beside the exchange fees, the sale tax from Brazil to Switzerland, and the income taxes on both Brazil and Switzerland).

<comment><USER29> > also, like I said, I make mobile apps to avoid that law, what I do is that I > have a Brazil company, a Swiss company, and then I make the Swiss company, > hire the Brazil company to create software for hire, then the Swiss company > that "create" the completed entertainment software, and sells it

Why do it in Switzerland, instead of say, US Delaware?

<comment><USER28> 1) Some of the investing co-founders already lived in Switzerland

2) Some of the non-investing co-founders lived in Switzerland before, or would not mind living there in the future.

3) Switzerland, as bizarrely my phrase might sound, is more free than US, with laws regarding corporations easier to understand, and less crazy problems, for example no extremely stupid patent and copyright laws like US have.

So, in case US corporations get sue-happy against us (like they always do against each other), the best they can do is sue us in Switzerland, and there the law will be usually in our side (instead of siding with copyright/patent/whatever trolls)

Also we did check how much would cost us, including hiring the appropriate lawyers and accountants, to setup our stuff in Delaware vs Switzerland, and Switzerland was cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If they want to make the appstore a better place, why not spend some time to make search work? I dunno, an eigen-vector algorithm of some sort.

Copying Apples mistakes are not the way to go.

<comment><USER31> I believe the top search engine in world with 100s of search engineers have thought of an eigen-vector algorithm of some sort".

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> These are very good news. We have enough malware and spyware in play store.

</comment><comment><USER33> I always wonder how big a staff they would need to review so many apps uploaded every day.

</comment><comment><USER34> I like the Apps, Games, Utilities method of organization.

I didn't see any word on judging 'content'.

</comment><comment><USER35> As an Android and iOS user, I think this is a step in the right direction. As a player I'd rather have a curated games store that allows me to discover new games easily.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't the Humble Bundle store fall in that category?

<comment><USER35> Yeah, I didn't even think of that. But Humble Bundle is only known to a core audience and if Google did something like HB, I think they could leverage Android as a serious gaming platform (Apple too, but I don't think this will ever happen. They just don't "get" games).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm glad Google got the funding necessary to hire more -people- to review submissions. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)</comment>


What's new in Unicode 9.0 - <AUTHOR> http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2016/01/whats-new-in-unicode-90.html <comment><USER2> We managed to get Power Symbols into Unicode ([http://unicodepowersymbol.com/](http://unicodepowersymbol.com/)) and it was all sparked by a conversation on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6828102)

<comment><USER3> Does anyone know if there are plans to incorporate "powerline" symbols, a la [https://github.com/powerline/powerline](https://github.com/powerline/powerline)? Or are those already Unicode compliant, and simply missing from most font libraries?

<comment><USER4> Powerline symbols are private use codepoints.

I think it might be better this way. You need a font that supports them anyway, and they're not intended to convey anything in the absence of such a font, so it doesn't matter that they're private use.

If the symbols got official Unicode codepoints, switching to the official codepoints would break all existing Powerline-compatible fonts. And if something better than Powerline came along it would have to happen all over again.

<comment><USER3> I understand that it would be backwards-incompatible, however it would be nice to make it official, considering it's been proven useful.

It wouldn't break existing Powerline fonts, however, because those private-use codepoints would still work as long as they're not assigned to anything else.

<comment><USER4> This is still exactly what the private use area is for: "I want a code that tells _this particular font_ to show _this particular symbol_ , and nobody will need to know what this code meant 20 years from now".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone scratching their head over the reasoning behind the ballooning number of emoji might enjoy reading this post by the same author: [http://babelstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/whats-new-in- unicod...](http://babelstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/whats-new-in- unicode-80.html)

<comment><USER6>
      The question is, now that there is a mechanism for defining skin tone
      colours for Unicode characters, will this be enough? Or will users
      demand a similar mechanism to specify hair colour and eye colour? And
      will users want to expand the concept of modifier characters to cover
      any colour and any Unicode character?

I find the thought absolutely horrifying

<comment><USER7> Why?

<comment><USER8> Add modifiers for proportions and it'll turn Unicode plaintext into a general- purpose drawing language.

<comment><USER9> > Add modifiers for proportions and it'll turn Unicode plaintext into a > general-purpose drawing language.

Not even that: it's all special-purpose stuff with narrow use cases.

<comment><USER8> I think Unicode has already enough features to address any (x,y) point with some precision (think Zalgo) - now add colors and scales, and soon someone will start encoding pictures in plaintext (and I don't mean ASCII art)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm currently refactoring LibreOffice code around font handling, and I have to say text is _complicated_. I've had to do a lot of reading about Windows, Unix and OS X font and text handling, and to be honest I really think so far that Apple has the cleanest platform for handling text.

I could be wrong about this, and happy to be challenged (actually, I welcome it with some reasoning because I'm still getting my head around all the systems fully). Anyway, just an aside.

<comment><USER11> I'd just like to ping a thanks for the effort you put in.

Libreoffice is pretty popular in India as a teaching tool.

Just wanted to draw your attention to two points: Libre is impossible to pronounce in Asia. Which is why people are not able to Google for you (how do I tell my friend to Google for X).

It would be great if you could take Google Noto fonts into account. There are several vernacular language users in India who would love to switch over to Linux.

Emoji ! In fact, its not a bad idea at all to consider LibreOffice to have an independent font installer (like the way Atom editor does plugins)

<comment><USER10> The work I do is tiny compared to the other developers :-) I'm really getting more out of contributing to the LibreOffice code base than The Documentation Foundation gets from me! But thank you, it's always great to hear that someone appreciates our efforts.

It's interesting to hear that LibreOffice is being used in Indian education - in my opinion Indic scripts are by far the most advanced and complex writing system, even more so than Arabic and East-Asian scripts!

In terms of fonts, we use Graphite, Pango and Harfbuzz in an attempt to wrangle out font handling. We've got some serious text layout issues (look for the comments in the code around DXArray!) but the basic guts are there. It's a complex issue and you can see how over 30 years there has been many, many stabs at getting international fonts and text handling right. I think I have so far counted 10 classes that _just_ handle fonts... And have recently removed one (FontInfo) that didn't seem to actually do anything!

So refactoring such an old module in the project might take some time, and also bare in mind I'm (sadly) a monolinguist so mainly at the moment I'm trying to streamline class hierarchies, get some saner class interfaces, merge classes where appropriate, review the font mapping code and try to understand how we deal with three very different approaches to font and text handling on OS X, Windows and the rest of the Unix world...

In terms of Noto, I think it would be unwise of us to bundle a font installer. It's not a bad idea, but LibreOffice UI code is currently tightly coupled to Star's VCL which was at one point a cross platform visual component library that could stand on its own: that has now gone by the wayside and the LibreOffice team is currently trying to wrangle it into a more stable and responsive framework. But it's quite hard to make another program out of it (sadly).

Another reason is that the distributions are actually better off bundling the fonts themselves via their package management systems, and for Windows and OS X I really think I'd suggest embedding the fonts you want to use in the document themselves if that's the concern.

As for the name: unfortunately that won't change now. Blame that on Oracle, who decided not to give the TDF the trademark and instead gave it to Apache, where the code is currently bitrotting away :-(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "What are letters?"

"Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read."

\-- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)

</comment><comment><USER13> Those emojis, including the taco, will be there for generation after generation of people to ponder and behold. The taco seems like a pretty transient thing to put into something as important as unicode.

<comment><USER14> IMO the entire emoji-in-unicode idea is ridiculous - it's a hack around the inability of allowing arbitrary markup across platforms. But, we're stuck with it because Apple said "we're doing this" after seeing Japanese phone makers do it with arbitrary encodings last decade and the entire rest of the industry caved, completely without regard for how much worse it makes text rendering, processing and layout engines (to which they say "you can just not support it", and instead turn Twitter and the rest of the web into mojibake).

But that's just my opinion on the matter. I'm certain I'm wrong and they're actually just the best thing since sliced bread since apparently every woman I've ever met loves the damned things.

<comment><USER15> I think it's actually pretty neat that they are regular unicode characters, as they then can be applied in any text field, making for fun stuff like using it in Address book contact names or calendar event names or even the terminal. That wouldn't work if markup was required.

<comment><USER16> I think that's exactly his point.

That we have an entire industry where humans in the past could do anything in freeform (pen and paper) we are now limited to representing that as text only. While our human-needs for adding extra "stuff" is still there.

If we had an industry-wide "standard" text-representation (with associated UI- widgets and controls) which had the ability to include more than just text, this wouldn't be a problem and we wouldn't need to standardize each new "symbol" we want to represent as "text" in our applications through Unicode.

Using Unicode for this certainly feels like inappropriate piggy-backing and a giant hack.

<comment><USER15> Creating a "standard" text-representation UI widget and markup that works universally sounds like a much larger engineering effort compared to adding some code points to an existing standard, with a much larger room for errors and differences in the implementations. Perfect is the enemy of... something that (already) works :)

<comment><USER8> What you said is pretty much textbook definition of short-sightedness :). Perfect is the enemy of good, therefore in things that are actually important (like critical infrastructure) we should not stop when we reach "good enough" :). Or, worse is sometimes better, but usually it's just worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been dying for a modern pentathlon emoji. My life is complete.

</comment><comment><USER18> The emojis here makes me sad in multiple levels.

Most of all makes me sad because they seem to be prioritised on a higher level than some of the oldest written languages on the planet.

<comment><USER19> > Most of all makes me sad because they seem to be prioritised on a higher > level than some of the oldest written languages on the planet.

1\. is there any evidence for that claim or are you just making things up as you go?

2\. which scripts are specifically blocked because of emoji "being prioritised"?

Keep in mind, Unicode 9 includes 74 new emoji and 7227 non-emoji codepoints including 4 new scripts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd been bracing for the inclusion of fistbump, selfie, and "talk to the hand" emoji for some time now. Now I can finally text in peace.

<comment><USER8> I wonder what's the expected lifetime of SELFIE though. Will it even be a thing in 20 years?

<comment><USER9> > Will it even be a thing in 20 years?

I'd expect emojis to go out of style before selfies. Selfies are just a quick, easy, and ubiquitous way of getting a photo of yourself (which people have wanted since the beginning of photography). They're just taking off now because the technology that allows them (front-facing phone cameras) has become widespread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> But you can't send the new emoji over basic SMS, because SMS, uses a variant of UTF-16 from the era when people thought 16 bits was big enough. (So do Java and Windows, although there are hacks in both to get past 2 bytes.) The new emoji are all up in the astral planes, beyond 2 bytes.

<comment><USER22> Emoji has always been beyond 2 bytes. The Unicode spec also includes "surrogate pairs" which allows a higher plane code point to be represented as 4 bytes.

<comment><USER21> There are a few 2-byte emoji:

0x2639 Frowning face

0x263a Smiling face

(Hacker News doesn't speak much Unicode; the Unicode symbols won't pass through.)

<comment><USER23> So what happens if I put a standard smiley in a message? (Grinning face Unicode: U+1F600, UTF-8: F0 9F 98 80)

Edit: I see, it disappears.

<comment><USER24> Hmm. Does HN use MySQL with "utf8" encoding as backend storage? ;)

<comment><USER25> for those not getting the joke: mysql has a thing called "utf8" which is not in fact utf8 and will (depending on settings) either truncate text when it meets a 4+ byte character, or raise an error.

It also supports real utf8 in more recent versions calling it "utf8mb4"

<comment> david-given This made filing a bug about Thunderbird not sizing astral plane code points correctly slightly more hilarious than it should have been (Mozilla's Bugzilla instance runs on MySQL)...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm curious the real value of supporting dead languages. The number of texts in said languages are presumably no longer growing.

There's no harm in it, particularly in further out plains, just my knee jerk reaction is "why?".

<comment><USER14> I can't understand how you _don 't_ see the value in supporting ancient and dead languages with precise full text search, enabling lossless reproduction and alternative representations through printing, web sites, etc. Why wouldn't we want to try to keep our pre-digital records alive by immortalizing them digitally?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I need that pancakes emoji.

<comment><USER28> I love pancakes! If they're going to add anymore foods then it should be pancakes damn it :)

In all seriousness I'm very curious to see how far this will go. Do we really want these graphical glyphs in Unicode or would they be more suited for another encoding to separate them (but perhaps provide a way of interoperability?). Honestly I'm out of my wheel house trying to think of ideas of doing this better so I don't really know.

<comment><USER19> > but perhaps provide a way of interoperability?

There's the rub. Unicode is a fine way to provide interoperability, has been since at least Unicode 1.1 (which added — amongst many others — U+263A WHITE SMILING FACE or U+25EE UP-POINTING TRIANGLE WITH RIGHT HALF BLACK) and probably 1.0 (but I can't be arsed to look up 1.0's symbolic codepoints)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Mmm avocado!

</comment><comment><USER30> More emoji, seriously? Is this what the future of tech standards looks like? When is this validation-hungry-teen-catering-ego-fest going to stop...

I'm getting really sick of the direction mainstream tech (which is I guess driven by mainstream culture, or lack there of) is going these days.

<comment><USER31> Pictograms have been with us for years. Hieroglyphs, Chinese/Japanese all have their roots in drawings of real life items. They're easy to understand and can frequently convey more meaning in a single glyph than a dozen conventional words.

<comment><USER32> I don't think unicode should be used to convey pictographs. I understand the need to cover _writing systems_ such as hieroglyphs, but adding in randoms pictographs (like emojis) and permutations (like skin colors) seems like too much complexity for what is expected of unicode.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What will you pay $10/month for? - <AUTHOR> Some of the categories that I could think of are as follows:-
1) Automate X task. 2) Curated list of X delivered to Inbox. 3) Simple API for doing X. 4) Integrate X with Y.
Would love to hear the thoughts of HN community on this. <comment><USER2> Here's what I pay for:

[http://nsscreencast.com/episodes](http://nsscreencast.com/episodes) $9/month.

Github is $12/month.

Ask people what they actually pay for because people might not spend the money once you build it.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) yes, if it works like i want 2) no, i could bot that 3) Simple? Then no, i could code that. 4) Probably</comment>


Ask HN: Am I obsolete? - <AUTHOR> I'm being constantly rejected at interviews. I was lazy not to change company early in my career. Now after 12 years when I finally started trying, I feel like I am obsolete and no company wants to hire me. Thing is I am not a worst programmer. I did receive many performance awards in my company and for most of the years received good salary hikes. In last few interviews I did well in coding questions but (I think) failed in design/architectural questions. I worked in a small company(300-500) for a very long time, where I never faced challenges that large or even medium size companies face. This has put me way behind other programmers with same number of years of experience.
I even tried applying for positions requiring 5-6 years experience, but for those I don't even get an interview call.
I'm so much depressed right now, I don't know what to do anymore. Is my career as a programmer over? What should I do? <comment><USER3> No you are not.

From experience, HR screeners often view people who stay in the same place as "coasters". You need your resume & approach to aggressively counter this storyline. Without even having seen your resume, I'm assuming you're not effectively doing that.

So, I think you need a great recruiter. Yes, yes, scum of the earth, bla bla. But: you clearly are not able to translate your experience into something droolworthy for the right employer, and I'm guessing you're not aggressive about getting feedback about why you're not getting callbacks or how you could improve in interviews (?)

A great recruiter will do that for you. I think you should just acknowledge that weakness and find a great recruiter. A _great_ recruiter, not just any sucker who contacts you cold on linkedin.

How to find one? It's easier to find a great recruiter than it is to get hired for your full market potential: Ask around. Friends, ex-colleagues, etc. If you're absolutely dying email me: email@example.com, and I'll try and help.

You'll be fine. I checked out your comments. You're an experienced Java Dev in Seattle. Have faith.

</comment><comment><USER4> A friend of mine just took 6+ months to find a job, and he's excellent. Sometimes that's just how it is.

My advice: find some other people's resumes, somehow. Compare them to yours. I had read my friend's, and thought it was okay. Then I had to read 10+ for my boss, weeding out the good/bad, and I realised that I was wrong. His was waaaaay too long and had waaaay too many words in long paragraphs.

It needs to be quick. Tell me, fast, what you do and what you're good at. Keep it short. Remember, I'm reading 10 of these in an hour under pressure - <USER2> don't have time for your life story.

Hope that helps in some way? Keep at it mate. It'll come good in the end if you skills are solid.

</comment><comment><USER5> > I even tried applying for positions...

You're doing it wrong! STOP applying to jobs online, instead shift your efforts into networking. Start talking with people who could use your help.

85% of critical jobs are filled via networking > [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all- job...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-jobs-filled- via-networking-lou-adler)

Can you reach out to 5 potential new contacts a day? That's very doable> [http://www.npr.org/2011/02/08/133474431/a-successful-job- sea...](http://www.npr.org/2011/02/08/133474431/a-successful-job-search-its- all-about-networking)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did get some interviews through networking but I couldn't clear those. Till now I couldn't understand why, till my last interviewer told me since I'm from small company operating at small scale I'm not suitable for senior position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just a FYI: Most interview calls come out of contacts and not by blindly mailing your resume to email@example.com. If you did just that, I am not surprised that you haven't gotten interview calls by simply sending emails to mailboxes nobody reads!

</comment><comment><USER7> There is literally 0% chance you are obsolete. You have to focus on the opportunities that match your skill sets that is all.

</comment><comment> d--b How many interviews did you take? Where do you live?

<comment><AUTHOR> 10 to 12 phone screens in last 2 years and I was constantly trying to arrange interviews. out of those 3 progressed to onsite interviews, but was rejected in all 3. I'm in bay area, but need to move to seattle soon for personal reasons.

<comment> d--b 3 rejections is a fairly small amount. dont get discouraged. There are many reasons why you might not have been a good fit for them. Keep trying.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Trends may predict Covid-19 cases in US hotspots - <AUTHOR> https://www.cghjournal.org/article/S1542-3565(20)30922-8/fulltext <comment><AUTHOR> Increased Internet Search Interest for GI Symptoms May Predict COVID-19 Cases in US Hotspots</comment>


Pure Programs: Pure functions all grown up - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudseal.io/blog/2019-06-07-pure-programs <comment><USER2> Great Article

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Sprint intercepting images and serving low quality compressed versions - <AUTHOR> https://community.sprint.com/baw/message/697431

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed this also happening on LTE in the Bay Area, they claim it is because they are deploying new towers, but it appears that threads related to this exist going back six months in other areas.</comment>


RSS Replay - <AUTHOR> http://rssreplay.heroku.com/ <comment><USER2> Many feeds are limited to the last X posts. (How) does this workaround that? Are there some big feed archives or caches on the web?

<comment><USER3> It uses the PostRank API, which looks like it has historical data for feeds that PostRank has previously analyzed. So maybe it can provide archived data for some feeds (but not all)? <http://apidocs.postrank.com/Feed-Engagement- API>

EDIT: For all the feeds I tried, it just started with the most recent item, not the first. So it's like having a DVR for feeds - you can time-shift them to watch later, but you can't go back and "record" things that happened in the past.

I'd really like to create a similar service that crawls the site itself and uses heuristics to figure out the right order for all of the archived posts/entries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a fantastic idea, I often come across an old blog that I want to read through chronologically.

Edit: Something like this build into Google Reader would be great.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a specific version of this for webcomics called Archive Binge.

<http://www.archivebinge.net/>

I don't know if this is all that interesting to hackers, but I've found it entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great idea. Is it possible that it's better suited as a feature of an RSS reader?

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Does not appear to support https feeds. Eg, mine:

<https://secure.grepular.com/rss>

</comment><comment><USER7> tad sad I did't know about this years ago, thinking of all the things I wish could have lasted longer. oh well.</comment>


Integrate Security into your development workflow - <AUTHOR> https://workflow.shieldfy.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everybody I am Eslam Salem the co-founder of Shieldfy. I am very happy to introduce Shieldfy workflow to you. Shieldfy workflow designed to I integrate security to every step of your development cycle. Please review the concept/feature and if you are excited about it as we register in the private beta to have a deeper look. Thanks</comment>


So Many Missives of Appalling Idiocy and Envy Embarrassing to Behold - <AUTHOR> https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/missives/ <comment><AUTHOR> 'I have suspected for years that the STEM fields posed the most dangerous threat possible to the unopposed dominance of politically correct sociological idiocy over the entirety of the university environment, basing their claim to validity on recognition of something approximating a universally accessible objective reality.

...

But, make no mistake about it, scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians: your famous immunity to political concerns will not protect you against what is coming fast over the next five or so years: wake up, pay attention, or perish, along with your legacy. Whatever you might offer the broader culture in terms of general value will be swept aside with little caution by those who regard the very axioms of your field as intolerable truly because of the difficulty in comprehending them and considered publicly as unacceptably exclusionary, unitary and unconcerned with sociological "realities."'</comment>


Laptop and Tablet in one - Lenovo Ideapad Yoga Review - <AUTHOR> http://ultrabooksreview.com/catalog/lenovo/lenovo-ideapad-yoga-59343898/overview.html

<comment><USER2> For years (years), this has been the obvious configuration to me for a laptop. Very happy to finally see it happening in a credible offering.

Not obvious from the pictures, but at about 6 minutes into the video it shows th screen completely flipped around flat in tablet-only mode.

The only improvement I'd make is to have the optional sleeve that covers the keyboard in tablet mode be somehow integrated with the unit, maybe something that slides from the bottom and then flips around to cover the keyboard. Otherwise that sleeve will either be lost or left at home.

Now what's left is to have these things more mainstream, and then gain Linux support.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Only two cons: -Lack of Ethernet port -Non-backlit keyboard</comment>