The Spanish Flu Didn't Wreck the Global Economy–Why Did Covid-19? - <AUTHOR> https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-05-28/spanish-flu-didnt-wreck-global-economy <comment><USER2> It is said, "Science learns it's lessons only after the funerals."

I'm going anecdotal here. Probably the super connected world we live in, coupled with the differences in education between then and now, we can not and will not allow millions of people to be killed on account of the global economy. We can rebuild the economy at will. We cannot get back dead people.</comment>


UK spy bill will force tech firms to disclose future products before launch - maze-le http://www.zdnet.com/article/uk-spy-bill-will-force-tech-firms-to-disclose-future-products-before-launch/ <comment><AUTHOR> There's a lot of comments in this thread throwing up their hands about this. That's the attitude that will let this sort of thing happen.

Bills are published like this well ahead of them even being debated so that interested parties can comment.

There's a major faction within the Conservative party that is pro privacy (e.g. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7450627.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7450627.stm)), and it's also pro business. This is anti privacy and anti business. It's a winnable fight, but not if you give up at the first suggestion of a thing you don't like.

Write to MPs, say "As CEO of awesome corp I would seriously consider relocating to Berlin". That sort of thing will get attention.

<comment><USER2> People of Ireland speaking here:

-Not a massive fan of the British surveillance state?

-Want to stay in the EU?

-Enjoy low corporate tax rate of 12.5%?

-Enjoy friendly, well educated, English speaking, Pro-American people, good beer, decent music, nice quality of life, low crime and safe green natural environment?

-Want (relatively incompetent) pro-business government to butt out of your companies launch plans?

Invest in Ireland -> [http://www.idaireland.com](http://www.idaireland.com)

This has been a public service announcement from the country next door. #irelandlovesyou :)

<comment><USER3> I've started putting my affairs in order in preparation to move to Ireland should Brexit actually happen. There will be massive upheaval in the UK if it goes ahead, and I'm not sure sticking around would be my preferred option.

<comment><USER4> As a mainland European, I'm starting to root for Brexit too. The sooner we're rid of the toxic influence of England, the better. It's a shame though, as England was a huge proponent of necessary EU reform as well.

<comment><USER5> Sadly you don't have a vote! Aside from this bill which has not been passed yet, what's the toxic influence you're concerned about?

<comment><USER4> No, I'm not sad about that. It's not my "fight".

I was mainly referring to the xenophobia expressed in the lead-up to the official campaign. It seemed to be mostly directed at Eastern Europeans, but the UK isn't exactly doing a stellar job accepting Syrian refugees either (what's the latest figure? 20,000 refugees over a five year period? That's the same figure that The Netherlands accepted just last year. Sweden admitted 4x that figure in 2015).

But the overall repressive stance towards software/technology, or the authoritarian stand-off between the MoH and NHS doctors doesn't help to raise my opinion of the UK either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't forget this from 2 months ago.. UK surveillance powers bill could force startups to bake in backdoors

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265666)

These laws WILL affect UK tech start-ups if privacy has anything to do with their business model.

I have said so in the past, don't register your tech startups in the UK. Boycott is sometimes an effective means for change. UK law makers know this could back-fire, they are taking a gamble they have already lost.

</comment><comment><USER7> Between the US and the UK, this is just getting comical.

How do these governments not see that the people who would do harm to us will get their encrypted tech from somewhere else and bring it with them.

Just adds full to the fire that this has nothing to do with protecting citizens.

<comment><USER8> In the end, it's about controlling citizens and predicting their behaviour, not protecting them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do we just end up in a state where the idea of a 'firm' has to radically change?

It feels like the ultimate endgame of all of this is either that the technology industry just freezes (because innovation is killed by bureaucracy), or that we end up in some cryptopunk space in which the only interesting stuff happens over Tor/Freenet/whatever else.

And of course, the latter becomes harder every day with hardware backdoors.

I think that fundamentally the idea of the state regulating commerce is flawed.

Individuals want to be able to make choices, but at the moment they can't because economics forces their hand. Apart from a few radicals, everyone has to use a car, has to use the subway with its' smart card, has to use their mobile phone for business, because otherwise society doesn't have a role for you any more.

Can UBI help here? Or are we really just doomed to basically disable the Internet we created because it's too powerful?

</comment><comment><USER10> And what about open source software that anyone can download from the internet? How does Govt UK intend to manage / police that?

<comment><USER11> Logically, there has to follow a law that forbids using hardware, software, or anything else for that matter, that wasn't built in accordance to the new rules. So go dig up grandpa's type writer and slide rule...

<comment><USER12> You kid, but the kremlin went back to purely mechanical typewriters a few years ago for this precise reason - and even they can be bugged.

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_cryptanalysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_cryptanalysis)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Red tape, costly, lengthy & opaque approvals process - exactly what the UK tech industry needs to flourish. /s

The chilling effect could be that compliant companies are fast tracked, while those who insist on due process get quagmired.

</comment><comment><USER15> FFS, are they just trying to kill off the tech industry in the UK?

<comment><USER7> And the US...

"Any company with operations in the UK -- including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, which have submitted written evidence calling on the British lawmakers to revise the bill -- would have to comply with the rules."

<comment><USER16> This will not kill US tech companies. Maybe their UK market.

I'd love to see those companies just leave UK ale let them have what they asked for.

<comment><USER17> This will affect US companies though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Idea: Create a company who's explicit purpose is to create and submit billions of iterations of the same software for their auditing purposes which horrifically unreadable/obfuscated code that completely swamps whatever agency is responsible for the process, and effectively DoSes them until literally nobody can release software at all.

</comment><comment><USER19> From today's Dilbert: [http://assets.amuniversal.com/721c8690d8e901334e5c005056a954...](http://assets.amuniversal.com/721c8690d8e901334e5c005056a9545d)

</comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like 1984 coming closer and closer each day.

I wonder however about the negative consequences to the tech industry, why would a company purchase a service they can not trust anymore due to weak encryption?

They government probably also will miss their target completely as criminals/ terrorists etc will simply choose other products and services.

</comment><comment><USER11> We're really living in the age of overreaching surveillance. Law makers seem rabid and unable to consider reason: Just because surveillance is possible, it also has to be taken to the very top. They cover their asses while ruining everything else in the process.

</comment><comment><USER21> Say goodbye to the tech industry in the UK!

<comment><USER22> Indeed. Won't be buying British at all from now on. In fact, I'm putting UK on my blacklist of places to go, and places to buy from/invest in.

Sorry Brits. You are letting your state fall into absolutel disaster. I'm putting you in the same bag as North Korea, now - your state cannot be trusted one bit.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious where you are based, as someone in the UK, I'm not keen on going to the US because of the crazy border controls amongst other things.

<comment><USER22> I am in middle Europe, in the sort of country where the lessons of these sorts of shenanigans are not, generally, over-ignored by the general populace at large, and the citizenry indeed feels genuinely responsible for not letting these apparat re-emerge as a means of social control.

Alas there are generations and generations of Westerners - after all, we are stateless here in the HN frame - who are, moreover, completely willing to overlook the crimes of their state and just let it all happen, "for whatever reason". This is why I, also, choose not to ever live in the US. (It is the only reason: that I chose not to.)

Members of states currently erecting apparatus of human social control, with explicit intent to violate human rights of any individual, no matter their non-/statehood, need to do one thing to change it all: move. Keep moving. Abandon your culture, and acclimate to a new one. Repeat, ad inf.

<comment><USER23> 300,000+ people a year emigrate from Britain. What number is required to "change it all"? Have you experienced a revolution of any kind? Studied revolutions in detail perhaps? I haven't, but I do live in the UK.

Perhaps you believe if we just voted for the other party, everything will change? It's so much bigger than that.

<comment><USER22> Yes, well, its a start ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> First thought was that people would protest this by flooding the relevant department with product updates, maybe triggered on each commit. Then I noticed the caveats:

\- Updates don't count: only significantly large changes need disclosing.

\- Can't be forced on companies with fewer than 10,000 users. Maybe commercially led open source products could claim that users are spread across many forks each with fewer users.

\- New product disclosures only applies to communications companies already forced to backdoor existing products. Maybe we'll see companies akin to Alphabet evading the need to backdoor new products by forming separate companies.

Overall I'm more worried by the requirement to backdoor communications than having to disclose new services. Security shouldn't be sacrificed. Additionally the gagging order would prevent companies from being honest with their users as well as making it harder for them to fight against it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Worth remembering that this has effectively been in place for some time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6893947](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6893947)

<comment><USER26> In the US, we've had this[1] in place for some time on products for phone networks.

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> So the UK intelligence wants the capability provided by the Echelon surveillance network back?

It's actually not as chilling in the sense that this would be nothing new - rather, I'm sure the spooks are grieving the fact that people are moving to secure technologies.

I'm pretty sure that before the internet no envelope or phone call was inaccessible.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is quickly shaping up to be another "War on Drugs"... It's hard to determine whether UK lawmakers actually think bills like this will make them more secure, or if it's just one incremental move in a long term strategy to remove any assurance of privacy.

Either way the UK gov is looking highly incompetent.

</comment><comment><USER27> And I thought the character of 'C' in the Spectre(2015 film) was a bit over the top. How silly I was, the fact that it culminated only on one character was actually a massive understatement

</comment><comment><USER29> So it's prior restraint?

</comment><comment><USER30> Could this be applied to browsers I wonder?

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. The fact that it's a crackbrained idea won't stop law makers. To quote a sentence I once heard: "It's the law, reason doesn't enter into it". You had better not get caught using the wrong browser in the U.K.!

<comment><USER31> Simply mandate IE6 for everyone. Easy to hack, no longer supported so hacks keep working, no need to announce new versions, problem solved.</comment></comment></comment>


Using deep learning to find emoji in pictures - <AUTHOR> https://emojini.curalate.com <comment><USER2> This is hilarious.</comment>


Measuring Re-Identification Risk in De-Identified Content - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/dlp/docs/compute-risk-analysis <comment><USER2> If you were expecting anything more than Google trying to k-anonymize your datasets, you will be disappointed.

 _"K-anonymity was born out of a desire both to quantify the re- identifiability of a dataset, and to balance the usefulness of de-identified people data and the privacy of the people whose data is being used."_

Researchers have also shown recently that many high-dimensional datasets (mobile phone metadata, online ratings, etc.) cannot be de-identified without loosing all their utility [1, 2, 3]. In that case, there is no distinction between quasi-identifiers and sensitive data. All the information in the dataset can be used to identify an individual. De-identification algorithms such as the one used here make strong assumptions that the data collector knows which information can and cannot be used to re-identify individuals.

[1] [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf)

[2] [https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01376)

[3] [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/536.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6221/536.full)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have taken Data Privacy course and as a project we scraped LinkedIn for "people also viewed" part. Some of the LinkedIn profiles had Twitter accounts linked and by traversing those accounts and their connections we were also able to identify the Twitter handles of Linkedin users that did not list it, even by using simple string comparisons and text similarities. So, cross- referencing works even for a simple stupid like this, imagine what people can do with advanced methods.</comment>


Estimating unobserved SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/08/20/2005476117 <comment><USER2> It seems cases and pandemic related deaths are likely dramatically under reported and detected:

[https://austingwalters.com/u-s-covid19-less-tests-more- death...](https://austingwalters.com/u-s-covid19-less-tests-more-deaths-no- end-in-sight/)

Real deaths seem to be closer to 250-300k at this point (whereas officially it's 170k-180k).

Also testing is down for those curious... about 25% down from a month ago.

 _edit_ : added "pandemic related deaths" - not all deaths are necessarily covid, but could be from lack of healthcare availability, etc.

<comment><USER3> I know for a fact deaths are dramatically under reported (at least in FL) because I have relatives that died of COVID and the nursing homes put congestive heart failure and respiratory failure as cause of death and not COVID. After receiving positive COVID test results...

<comment><USER4> It's much less clear cut than that. In fact death with COVID ≠ death from COVID every single time, even for elderly people.

<comment><USER5> Well sure, and that is a perfectly valid comment at the micro level. However, we can relatively clearly see that the COVID-linked death reporting is under- reported from mortality baselines.

Therefore it's highly likely that for a given death it is more likely to be incorrectly categorise as non-COVID when COVID was responsible, than to be incorrectly designated COVID.

<comment><USER6> For contrast the UK overcounted its COVID deaths

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/britain-says-it- overcou...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/britain-says-it-overcounted- coronavirus-death-toll- by-5377/2020/08/13/f6f171a6-dce0-11ea-b4f1-25b762cdbbf4_story.html)

<comment><USER7> It overcounted some of the test based deaths, but in terms of excess mortality there were probably still more covid deaths than have been reflected in test- positive death numbers, so it's still an undercount.

Here is some data here on excess deaths: [https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2020/07/15/tracking...](https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > 108,689 (95% posterior predictive interval [95% PPI]: 1,023 to 14,182,310)

So between 1000 and 14 million. Got it.

<comment><USER9> Not all of those numbers are equally likely though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. An estimate that infections were _multiple_ orders of magnitude higher than detected in mid-March is higher than I'd heard before, although I suppose it's probably implied by the "basically everyone in New York caught it" theory.

<comment><USER11> As nice as it would be, seroprevalence studies have ruled out the "basically everyone in New York caught it" theory.

<comment><USER12> A substantial percentage of infections are believed to not show up in seroprevalence studies. One of the major areas of research right now is determining how large this population is.

<comment><USER13> > A substantial percentage of infections are believed to not show up in > seroprevalence studies

What is the reason behind this?

<comment><USER14> The thresholds for antibody tests were established using known true negative samples (e.g., blood banked before the pandemic) and known true positive samples (e.g., patients who tested positive by PCR). But patients with worse symptoms are over-represented among people who tested positive by PCR (since they're more likely to seek a test), and patients with worse symptoms will generally have higher levels of antibodies in the blood. So if anything, the sensitivity of the test is probably an overestimate, which would make the number infected an underestimate.

I've seen a few papers testing asymptomatic patients (identified by contact tracing or other mass testing), with mixed results. NYC uses an in-house test for which I don't believe any paper exists, so I don't think we can say anything there. The IFR from NYC's serology is higher than most other estimates, which could imply under-ascertainment but could also be real (e.g., because they forced nursing homes to accept positive patients, because they were doing early intubation that we now know is harmful, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Delhi, at least, appears to have around a 5% detection rate over the past month.

There was a population-wide serosurvey conducted from Aug 1st to 7th, which resulted in a 29.1% prevalence estimate, and an earlier one from June 27th to July 10th, which resulted in a 22.8% estimate. Assuming a 2 week period for IgG to be detected after infection, these surveys correspond to prevalence as of 20th July and 20th June roughly. With a population of 20M, that's around 1.25M new infections in that period. The confirmed cases by PCR testing increased by ~60000, yielding (roughly) a detection rate of 5%.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been looking at the infection rates in the US falling over the past few weeks, and I'm wondering if it's because we achieved herd immunity for the current r0, people changed their behavior when they saw cases rising, or fewer people are getting tested because with the lag in processing time, a positive result isn't actionable.

<comment><USER17> The way that the areas that are now most resilient are the same areas with high population density which were hit very hard early on (NY, NJ, for example) tells me that we have somehow hit herd immunity. There is some evidence coming out that other coronaviruses (which cause the common cold) could have causes immunity in some unknown percentage of the population, meaning the percentage of SARS-CoV-2 infection required to reach herd immunity is much lower than thought.

<comment><USER18> Share the evidence or delete the comment as misinformation.

<comment><USER14> Multiple papers (including one in Nature[1]) have reported T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in something between a third and half the samples collected before the pandemic. That doesn't mean the virus won't replicate in people with that pre-existing immunity, and there's evidence from homeless shelters and such of almost everyone testing positive (both by PCR and later for IgG in their blood); but people with that T cell immunity very likely get less sick, and might be less infectious (though near-certainly still infectious, and that's more speculative).

And it seems from the hostility of your response ("delete the comment as misinformation") that you find it incredible that herd immunity could exist with less than 1 - 1/R0 of the population infected? But even ignoring any pre- existing immunity, that calculation assumes a homogeneous and well-mixed population. That's clearly not the case, since some people (a nurse in a crowded ER, a police officer, a store clerk, a nightlife enthusiast, etc.) have far more contacts than others (a remote worker who gets stuff delivered). People with more contacts will get infected first, with disproportionate harm, and then become immune first, with disproportionate benefit. Many papers have modeled[2] this; though no one's found a great way to measure that heterogeneity yet, so for now, it's hard to say much beyond that the effect exists, and is potentially big.

And finally, herd immunity isn't a binary threshold, especially in a heterogeneous population. As others have noted, even places without enough immunity for R < 1 will still have slower spread than in a naive population, or may get to R < 1 from the immunity plus slightly more cautious behavior. Conversely, places that do have R < 1 overall may still have pockets of spread in sub-populations with unusually high R0. In any case, it's no conspiracy theory to believe that NYC developed significant amounts of immunity along the way to its ~24k (about 0.3% of the population!) deaths.

1\. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z)

2\. [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.20021725v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.20021725v2.full.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I seem to be hitting trying to read this. Can someone help summarize the results of this analysis?

<comment><USER10> The core result is

> Simulating from 1 January, we obtained 108,689 (95% PPI: 1,023 to > 14,182,310) local infections cumulatively in the United States by 12 March > (Fig. 1A).

What that means is that they don't really know - that confidence interval is absurd - but they have reason to think there could have been 100k Americans with the coronavirus on March 12.

<comment><USER20> Results with such confidence intervals should not be allowed to be published.

As if we don't have enough fake news/hype going around.

<comment><USER21> I don't understand the comments on this thread that seem to want to suppress preliminary data about COVID.

Sure, the confidence interval is ridiculously large but the paper is open about its methods and conclusions. It's definitely in the "more work is needed" category, but I don't see how this information should not be published.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Service Discovery: An Amazon ECS Reference Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/service-discovery-an-amazon-ecs-reference-architecture/ <comment><USER2> This is going to come off as incredibly dense, but if the upstream services' (goodreads, etc) DNS names are statically configured in app, why do we need all this glue? Can't we just point a DNS record at an LB and add/remove instances from the LB, making it entirely opaque to the downstream service (portal)?

I'm not seeing what this buys. Maybe I'm dense. Anyone care to help me understand the value here?

Looking at the code further, it looks like there are failsafe hardcoded DNS names, but otherwise the DNS names for an upstream service are delivered via an ENV variable. I don't get what's happening here that's magical.

<comment><USER2> Is it that standing up a new micro service will have its DNS automagically created? Is that really all this buys? Some predictable automated DNS management?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> All you get from this is a pretty CNAME alias for your ELB hostname. Since you're (manually) creating an ELB for each service, you might as well copy & paste the ELB hostname to your app's config.

I wish Amazon did more to improve their ELB offering:

1) A single ELB costs $18/mo, regardless of the number of backend hosts. This might be OK if you're using ELB to front HTTP traffic from users, but it's crazy expensive for internal service discovery.

If your app has 5 micro-services, that's $90/month just for having a basic mechanism to access your ECS services.

2) ELB requires all backend hosts to expose the same port for load balancing. You can't balance to the same EC2 instance on different ports.

3) As a consequence of (2), you can't have multiple containers on the same EC2 host behind a load balancer.

Many popular programming languages have a global interpreter lock; you usually have to spawn multiple processes to make use of more CPU cores. People do that with things like gunicorn inside the container or with multiple containers + a haproxy load balancing container. It would be so much easier if ELB did all this instead.

4) ELB doesn't support URL maps. (i.e. different sets of backend hosts for different URL paths) The Google Cloud Platform load balancer supports this, and it's a tremendously useful.

"""[...] without the need for "sidecar" containers or expensive code change."""

People use "sidecar" and "ambassador" containers precisely because ELB is lacking functionality. Improving ELB will go a long way towards making service discovery easier on AWS.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dns is not always a great solution if there are multiple A records. We wrote about a method for doing this with iptables and consul here.

[https://tech.iheart.com/load-balancing-services-using- consul...](https://tech.iheart.com/load-balancing-services-using-consul-and- iptables-204cde23b072#.map38p2am)

<comment><USER5> I'm confused on why in your article, you say the setup doesn't use a load balancer. How is a dynamic reconfiguration of IPTables not the same as a load balancer? What happens when your iptables box dies?

<comment><USER4> Bc iptables would run locally on each server. So you would access localhost:8000 which iptables would auto load balance to the nodes consul had. There is no central iptables server

<comment><USER5> ah, some how that wasn't so clear. Clever idea, but how do you distribute load across your front-end servers (or whatever is your actual public facing service)? Do you still rely there on a load balancer or round-robin DNS? I guess I'd be concerned about how to scale those instances in response to demand..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazon had/has an internal ActiveMQ implementation based in this architecture. When it worked, it worked fine. It was nice to be able find all active hosts using any DNS tool of your choosing, and applications didn't need to have any client config. However, when it failed, it meant debugging DNS, which few engineers were prepared to think about or do at 2am.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am surprised to see them advocating Route53 for service discovery. Route53 has a very low API rate limit (5/req/s) where simply loading the web dashboard can effect production use.

<comment><USER8> Where do you see such a rate limit?

The only limits I've seen for Route53 are the number of hosted zones (50 by default?) and I don't see why that would be an issue. You'd only need one zone per app environment (dev/qa/prod).

<comment><USER9> [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/DNS...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/DNSLimitations.html)

>All requests – Five requests per second per AWS account. If you submit more than five requests per second, Amazon Route 53 returns an HTTP 400 error (Bad request). The response header also includes a Code element with a value of Throttling and a Message element with a value of Rate exceeded.

Though the general AWS recommendation for API limits is implementing exponential backoff + jitter.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/api- retries.htm...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/api-retries.html)

<comment><USER8> Interesting. I didn't know about that limit.

I suppose you can take it a bit further by batching requests (says up to 100 changes per request) but that would complicate distributed apps where the requests aren't coming from one coordinator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't this then give a map to all your internal services for the world to publicly discover?

<comment><USER11> Route53 supports private DNS. [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2014/11/05/amazon...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2014/11/05/amazon-route-53-now-supports-private-dns-with-amazon-vpc/)

<comment><USER10> Awesome didn't know</comment></comment></comment>


Opera accused of offering predatory loans through Android apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/19/opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps/ <comment><AUTHOR> > _Also, the apps reportedly scraped phone contacts to harass family, friends > and others with calls and texts in hopes this would pressure customers into > paying up._

Yikes. You'd think with social pressures like this they'd be able to offer _lower_ rates in return.

That would actually be an interesting business model — lend money to people who agree to allow themselves to be publicly shamed if they miss payments. It's like a loan that's secured by your social capital. Of course, this would only be available to people with a significant and verifiable social footprint.</comment>


Ask HN: Why some author links are light-green? - <AUTHOR>

I noticed some author links are colored light-green? [#3c963c].
Is this intentional or by preference? <comment><USER2> The green color indicates recently-created user accounts. I wouldn't purport to know why this was implemented, but I think it helps to identify potential spamming and trolling, as that tends to come more from accounts that were just created rather than from older accounts.

<comment><USER3> It's also pretty inconsistent. Sometimes a username will be green and not- green on the same page.</comment></comment>


How to make it rain on AngelList - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thesecretofraisingmoney.com/angellist/

<comment><AUTHOR> My co-author and I wrote a primer on how to get funded on AngelList. It's vetted by (and contains contributions from) AngelList management.

I would love to hear any comments or feedback.</comment>


Duplicity in the Double Vowel: From Taazr to Proxino - <AUTHOR> http://blog.proxino.com/post/8694310609/duplicity-in-the-double-vowel-from-taazr-to-proxino

<comment><USER2> It's more memorable if you say 'Tee Double-Ay Zee Arr'.

But it really sounded foreign, and that's a bad thing. When people think something is foreign, they give up -trying- to understand or remember it before they ever start.

Oh, and you may have change the domain name, but you didn't bother to update the text on the page.

</comment><comment><USER3> I forget where I originally read this, but I heard a suggestion that if you're going to go with a creative misspelling for a company name, only make one spelling change, not two.

So, either double the a (Taazer) or drop the e (Tazr) but don't do both. (Think Digg or Flickr.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Taazr looks Arabic to me (تازر). According to Google Translate, it actually is a word: "Synergy." Was that the origin of the name?</comment>


Firing Employee #1 - <AUTHOR> http://battlehardened.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/firing-employee-1/ <comment><USER2> _"It was still the same great work he had always done. Just now more people depended on what he produced. Tom was often fuzzy on his time estimates. If Tom would say a job would take one week, what he meant was it could be done in one week if everything went well."_

If I could play that old record-scratch noise here, I would. Let's pause the tape for a moment and ask a question: What do you mean by _if everything went well_?

I'm a Tom. I've been with a startup for two years now. At first I was knocking it out of the park. Made my deadlines and even had time to work on some new things. Everyone was happy, especially the customers.

Move ahead a year. The customer base has grown, but the staff hasn't. I'm juggling 12 projects now instead of 3. By the time I get some flow going I'm interrupted for three other fires. Oh, and we need a marketing demo put together in an hour so our sales guy can make his flight.

So now _my_ work is suffering. And I know the CEO is looking at me like he can't depend on me like before. I pad my time estimates by twice what I did before. Deja vu.

The only difference is that I'll be out of here before _my_ CEO has a chance to figure all of this out. Did I mention I'm the only programmer in the firm, and I don't plan on giving two weeks notice? More like two hours.

I don't blame your Tom for stretching out his time estimates. I don't blame him for not showing up for your project management coaching. Everything you've written reads like a Rands article without a happy conclusion or useful advice. You're just fortunate that you had enough staff and momentum to keep things moving after you fired Tom.

(Am I projecting just a little here? _Hell yes._ )

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually it sounds more to me that he should be the one resigning instead of firing "Tom". But well perhaps as the owner of a company he can't really fire himself, so someone have to be the scrape goat which is Tom.

However, it is good that he understand that he is partly to blame too, as some startup founders I seen rather shift all the blame to someone and fire him and think of many reasons why it's not their fault at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kudos in your honesty in admitting some fault... but, why on earth, especially given your humility about the whole thing, did you fire him in the middle of the day and make him do a "walk of shame?" A senior employee who has done good work in the past deserves a little more respect than that.

Not saying he didn't ned to be let go, but there's various degrees of letting someone go and the "clean out your desk now" approach is by far the most brutal and punitive.

That's what you do to someone caught embezzling money, not a solid individual who just proved not to be a good match for the team.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right. I'm not going to defend what I did, but the question deserves an answer. I was caught up in my own emotions. Tom not showing up for the meeting felt like personal attack against me. That he was flaunting my "authority", shoving it in my face that he didn't need to do what I asked.

With a bit more maturity and hindsight I know that I should have waited until those feelings had passed before doing anything. That's another lesson learned -- never act when in the grip of your own emotions.

<comment><USER5> What would have been the correct approach for Tom? Admit early on that something wasn't working? Alert you that there was workflow problem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been in similar scenarios (as Tom) and it usually boils down to inspiration. As soon as someone gets overloaded and piled on its very difficult for them to feel inspired or at all good about their work. Instead they feel trapped under an increasing workload and consequently feel unappreciated by the organization. You can't feel good about your efforts when your head is always barely above water. From there its a downward spiral.

I've always quit after giving management a warning in the past when this occurs because I feel it borders on exploitation and usually signals something wrong with management and the business as a whole. The real problem is Tom should have quit much much earlier to find a healthier environment.

</comment><comment><USER7> Kudos to the author for being so honest and writing such a post. Obviously he'll be successful at avoiding this in the future if he's taking such a personal look at the situation.

That said, I can't help but think about one of the most common statements I'm hearing out in the industry these days:

"We can't find any good developers."

Is it really that there are no good developers? Or is it that there is an over abundance of people without the skill, knowledge and experience trying to lead a company of developers?

I believe this is a good illustration of that point (not trying to slight the original author in any way).</comment>


Software suite for nation wide pre-collage tests in Finland - TBF-RnD https://github.com/digabi/ <comment> TBF-RnD Being the birthplace of MySQL and Linux, naturally it's open source. Question is the math editor good enough?

test editor here: [http://digabi.github.io/rich-text- editor/](http://digabi.github.io/rich-text-editor/)

Finnish education have gotten good scores internationally and ease of testing and administration speaks for digitalization. Still isn't the cognitive context switch caused by looking through menus to high for such a stressfull setting?

(article in swedish) [https://svenska.yle.fi/artikel/2018/04/05/oro-over- digitala-...](https://svenska.yle.fi/artikel/2018/04/05/oro-over-digitala- studentprov-i-matte-jag-har-raknat-pa-papper-hela-mitt-liv)</comment>


Car Guy Pits AmazonBasics Motor Oil Against Name Brands, Results Are Surprising - <AUTHOR> http://digg.com/video/amazonbasics-motor-oil <comment><USER2> Direct link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=370&v=a9DWGtXpYU...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=370&v=a9DWGtXpYUc)</comment>


Security and Cryptography Mistakes You Are Probably Doing All the Time - <AUTHOR> https://slashdot.org/submission/10870518/security-and-cryptography-mistakes-you-are-probably-doing-all-the-time <comment><USER2> There's no comments in the Slashdot thread, we should update the URL to [https://towardsdatascience.com/security-and-cryptography- mis...](https://towardsdatascience.com/security-and-cryptography-mistakes-you- are-probably-doing-all-the-time-7407c332944f)</comment>


How the C64 version of CuBase works [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Cubase64_White_Paper_by_Pex_Mahoney_Tufvesson.pdf

<comment><USER2> This is a really neat demo, but like all demos, has a lot of tricks behind it. Analyzing demos is sort of like reading a mystery -- much of the fun is figuring out how the "twist" ending will be pulled off.

In this case, his first trick is from the demo C64MP3, which just plays the Tom's Diner clip (2 minutes of 8 bit samples in 64 KB).

<http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=87985>

The trick there is that the female voice works in a narrow range, so he is able to make a very small sample table. The higher frequencies are regenerated with the SID chip using the noise function. That's why it sounds so breathy or scratchy. The amount of noise for each sample was measured on a PC.

The real-time effects are done through one of two methods:

1\. Digital domain -- timestretching or compression just involves repeating a sample or discarding it, respectively

2\. Analog domain -- the SID has a lot of neat features, including analog filters. So he can post-process the samples by just reconfiguring the hardware. The sub-bass is regenerated by playing a triangle wave with one voice at the proper frequency (again, driven by the tables generated by the PC).

Very neat stuff. Knowing the tricks behind it makes it even more amazing. BTW, the SID has an analog-in port so you could hook up an external audio source and do a lot of the filtering or mixing with SID voices there. I'm not aware of anyone doing that, but I'm not an expert on this scene either.

</comment><comment><USER3> Video showing the product: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4GWheE4Gkw> Very cool.

<comment><USER4> While I found this video to be entertaining and awesome, I don't like how they're trying to compare the compressor & 'tube' etc settings to 30k outboard gear and imply you're just as well with this...

Still cool though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mahoney is also a well known and liked music mixer at <http://remix.kwed.org/index.php?search=mahoney>

</comment><comment><USER6> I was pretty amazed by the video, Mahoney is brilliant. Thanks for the PDF, I'll read it thoroughly.</comment>


Beware of Future Creep - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1324-beware-of-future-creep <comment><USER2> _"At best, your 'foresight' can result in wasted time, where you spun your wheels for a few hours (or days!) playing 'what if' and 'let's pretend', trying with too little information to think of how best to architect your code to accommodate that future feature."_

Actually, at best, your time was _not_ wasted, your advanced-planning allowed you to be more agile down the road, and you saved the day. Don't be fooled into thinking that Jamis' 'best case' is everyone's best case. It's certainly not mine.

It's true that some people go overboard when it comes to thinking about future features they might need (guilty as charged...when I was younger). But, like anything and everything else, it's a skill. You do it, you make mistakes, you learn from mistakes.

What have I learned? Mostly I've learned how and where to focus my time thinking about future features -- determining which features are wheel- spinning features and which are likely to come to fruition. That skill comes with experience.

At a practical level, I've learned to carefully plan-out the hooks I'll need to implement likely future features. I don't implement the features, but I make sure I've thought through the API to get me there even if there's nothing behind it yet. Even that takes time, of course, but if properly focused, that time is time well spent. In many cases, it's well spent simply because it helps me to get back to the job at hand. :-)</comment>


Marc Andreessen: "Study STEM" - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/money/business/story/2012/09/14/jobs-fight-haves-vs-the-have-nots/57778406/1

<comment><USER2> "A vanishing middle class." This is becoming too true. Especially with the middle class receiving the least amount of help. The poor get free boosts, the rich get breaks. The middle class work horse gets beat the hardest.

"Liberal arts? Out of luck."

STEM is the driving futurue for our country. There should be more incentives for students who pursue STEM related degrees to attract the new next generation. There hasn't been enough of a push with this in our education system. Instead we are still allowing students choose what they please without any real world knowledge that their degree path makes a huge impact on their job outcome. I think we do a poor job on that.</comment>


The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy, Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/22/the-beauty-of-typography-writing-systems-and-calligraphy-part-2/ <comment><USER2> Together with part 1 ([http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty- of-typ...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of- typography-writing-systems-and-calligraphy-of-the-world/)), quite an informative summary of different writing systems. I find different scripts fascinating, and know little about most, so this is a nice entry point to learn more.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating article. It really impresses upon one the differences and commonalities between the different scripts. I never realized how much art there was involved in these other languages.

I'm bilingual, perfectly fluent in both English and Arabic. From my studies/experiences, I find that English alone from all others that I've come across is a purely functional language. It serves no other purpose than to _get the message across_ and do so effectively. Most other languages are a form of sacred art, with a million rules deciding how the script itself is formed, what's acceptable and what's not, and tend to hang on to certain words, typefaces, accents, and dialects in written form even when the spoken language so greatly diverges from the traditional written script.

A primary example here is Arabic: the spoken and written languages differ quite drastically, with the spoken dialect turning into an almost different language as you move across from the Levant areas (Syria/Jordan/Palestine/Lebanon) over into Iraq and then the Gulf countries (Saudi, Kuwait, etc.) and finally into Africa at which point it doesn't even come close to resembling its spoken counterpart that we started off with.

Yet, with all that, the written language is 100% identical. Even though there are new _words_ from region to region (not just a matter of intonation/inflection/dialect), the written language is perfectly identical and can be shared understood without difficult. In reality, these people know two different languages entirely. This is, by and large, caused by the memorization of the Quran, which is the holy scripture for Muslims which comprise the majority of the Arab world. The Quran is set in the official "formal Arabic" and Islam doesn't allow for the rewording or modernization of the script since Muslims believe that the actual wording (rather than the meaning) of the Quran was sent down from Allah and is sacred and not be modified (though translations of the Quran exist in almost all languages for reference/reading purposes, the religious actions such as prayers, etc. must be done with the formal arabic script, even in non-arabic-speaking parts of the world such as India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even the States).

Back to the point at hand: In French, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and more there is so much attributed to the beauty of the script, the perfection of the symbols, the fluency of the spoken language, and the scientific rules holding the language together. Languages aren't _really_ living in the same sense as they are in English: new words aren't _officially_ added as often, and the languages themselves serve a much more interesting and less "mundane" task than simply getting ideas across. These languages exist in and of themselves, in a way, they're not only there to serve the speaker: the speaker actually serves the language in many ways.

<comment><USER4> English is very germanic and the germanic languages are very functional as you say. However, it has both celtic and romantic influences (both formal latin through the Roman conquest and later French influence). It is this interesting hybridisation that gives it both functional power (I hear an anecdote of how the French do not have a general purpose word for 'get', instead it is strongly contextual) and (often unused) artistic extensibility.

<comment> a-priori English is interesting in that we almost have two independent vocabularies. When speaking informally, you tend to use Germanic words more, and when speaking formally, you tend to use Romance words. I'm writing this formally, which is why I'm using words like "speaking" (which comes from Latin) instead of "talking" (which comes from Middle English).

For example, compare "I need to pick up bread from the store when I'm finished." (Romance words, sounds formal) to "I must get bread from the shop when I'm done." (Germanic words, sounds informal). Both mean the same thing, but (ignoring the stiff wording) the first sounds like something you would say to your grandmother, and the second sounds like something you'd say to your pal at the bar.

<comment><USER5> Minor correction. "Speaking" sounded like Germanic to me, sprechen/spreken, and Merriam Webster confirmed it. The latin roots gave us "orate", "dictate", and "eloquence".

<comment> a-priori Ah, yes, you are right about that. I don't know where I got the idea that "speak" was Latin-based.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fragmentation considered harmful (1987) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-87-3.pdf <comment><USER2> IPv6 bans in transit fragmentation. If any part of the network can't forward a too large packet, it informs the host and puts the onus on them to resend it.</comment>


Remixing two of the famous Rosling bubble graphics - <AUTHOR> http://truth-and-beauty.net/projects/remixing-rosling <comment><USER2> On my browser, the little carousel at the top has different sized images and it causes the entire body to keep jerking up, and down, and up, and down. I had the patience to inspect the graphs because it's quite interesting, but this little blip didn't improve things any. Thanks though!

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a great way to visualize a third dimension on a two-axis graph. Now I'm thinking about how to do that in d3...

<comment><AUTHOR> Well.. it's simply using the size of the dot for the 3rd dimesion. Not a new idea.

What makes it visually appealing is that the 3rd dimension is time. And the x/y parameters do not change much over time. So many dots of similar size are close to each other generating a path.

Also the motion blur from one dot to the next is useful only because the 3rd dimension has a special meaning. It would not work if it was "income" instead of "time".

<comment><USER3> Dot size is used frequently, but I haven't seen many static visualizations that plot the series multiple times using cues (in this case, dot size and opacity) to indicate the data relationship. I see it all the time in animation form, though.

It reminds me of the famous Minard chart of Napoleon's adventures [1], but doesn't draw the focus as completely to the time dimension as his does to the survivor dimension.

I think you're right about the special nature of the third dimension in this case. I wonder what things other than time it'd work for. It feels like it'd work well for other things that are time-like -- results from different iterations of an experiment, for example.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#Work](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#Work)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a very lovely, thought-provoking graph, from the article:

[http://truth-and- beauty.net/content/01-projects/10-remixing-...](http://truth-and- beauty.net/content/01-projects/10-remixing-rosling/01.png)

</comment><comment><USER5> So in Russia the life expectancy went down, AND the fertility rate went down. Oh my, the country is in a real demographic problem...

<comment><USER6> Looks like it's been going up again since the 2000s and is back to 1980s levels now. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#mediavie...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#mediaviewer/File:Russian_male_and_female_life_expectancy.PNG)

Anyone know why it went down in the 90s? I've been looking around and most sites just say "social and economic turmoil".

<comment><USER7> How much do you know about Russia in the 90s.

<comment><USER8> Are you surprised people don't know this? That's why the US is the new SU and CN is the new US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that the fertility rate went up in the UK, unlike everywhere else.

<comment><USER5> Could this be because of immigrants, whose birth rates are higher? [just guessing here]

<comment><USER10> So I had always heard this is the case, and now believe this must be a common misconception. See Table 6 in this file from the Office of National Statistics:

[http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference- tables.h...](http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference- tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-320361)

While from 2004 to 2012 total UK fertility increased from 1.80 to 1.98, the fertility rate for non-UK born women actually /decreased/ from 2.50 to 2.29 (albeit in a slightly messy non-monotonic fashion) while the fertility rate for UK born mothers /increased/ from 1.69 to 1.90 quite monotonically.

It would be interesting to see the stats including 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant mothers (i.e. born in UK both with parents born elsewhere).

<comment><USER5> I wasn't aware of UK-born mothers' increased fertility rate.

However, I'll argue that even if the fertitily rate of immigrant mothers decreased, this can explain the data because if more immigrants came in, the average fertility rate goes up (given that immigrants' decreased rate is still quite a bit higher than UK-born).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Correlation and causation...

Pretty graphs though.</comment>


The Dimming of GE's Bold Digital Dreams - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dimming-of-ges-bold-digital-dreams-11595044802 <comment><AUTHOR> Mirror: [http://archive.is/LZyAi](http://archive.is/LZyAi)

</comment><comment><USER2> Looking forward to reading the book. Wondering what brings GE to the current point. I always regard it as one of the jewels of the Crown but perhaps I was wrong.</comment>


For Shelby Cobra roadster's 50th, designers 3D print a working replica - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2015/01/12/shelby-cobra-50th-anniversary/

<comment><AUTHOR> When I was a teenager I got the chance to ride in one of the original Shelby Cobra's and the experience has never been equaled.</comment>


$820,000 of funding, despite being scientifically impossible - <AUTHOR> http://www.iflscience.com/technology/artificial-gills-underwater-breathing-device-has-820000-funding-despite-being <comment><USER2> Please don't link to such blogs. They shamelessly refer to the original Reddit comment[0] that had all of the device analysis they blatantly ripped off, only as "One knowledgeable Reddit user has pointed out that the device could be electrolyzing the water" whereas he "pointed out" the whole article.

0.[https://np.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/4av9xw/t...](https://np.reddit.com/r/shittykickstarters/comments/4av9xw/triton_allows_you_to_breathe_underwater_100k_in/d13so58)

<comment><USER3> While you said not to reply to such blogs (and I totally agree), you didn't provide any alternative.

Here is the actual indiegogo campaign for the device

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/triton-world-s-first- arti...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/triton-world-s-first-artificial- gills-re-breather)

<comment><USER2> I posted the Reddit post link which has both the campaign link and the original comment calling it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Products like this are great. Just like those stupid magnetic bracelets, they signal to me that the wearer is impulsive and lacks critical thinking skills.</comment>


Intel's CEO is trying to revamp his 48-year-old company - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-ceo-brian-krzanich-changing-intel-2016-7 <comment><USER2> This article paints a very dire picture for the future of Intel.

It is very telling that an organization as capable of Intel was not able to foresee the decline of their profit engine and pivot correctly before they had to take drastic choices like mass lay-offs.

I wonder what the future for the semiconductor industry holds if Intel falters. I think we'll see a dominance of x86 chips for the next 5-10 years but in the mean time there's a lot of ground for others to cover.

Perhaps we'll see competing organizations started by these jilted ex-employees of Intel. I think that Intel is wrong to discount the experience and ability of their older employees.</comment>


Incorporated – Open Sourcing Our Blog - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sendtoinc.com/2013/11/06/incorporated/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for open sourcing this. We are using it at [http://blog.sdslabs.co/](http://blog.sdslabs.co/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting me know!

I should put it somewhere that if you end up using it, I'd be interested to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I based mine on some else his blog as well and open sourced mine as well in hope others benefit from it. I am glad to see most jekyll/middleman/octopress users open source their blog. Without it, mine wouldn't look as good as it does. What I have added is a way to turn jekyll a bit more into a CMS by automating the generation and deployment: [http://born2code.net/blog/2013/05/27/simplify-your-jekyll- pu...](http://born2code.net/blog/2013/05/27/simplify-your-jekyll-publishing- process-with-wercker/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome! We used it for [http://docs.subtome.com](http://docs.subtome.com) =)

</comment><comment><USER5> Jekyll is pretty neat. I too recently switched from wordpress to Jekyll and haven't looked back. I have open sourced my blog at [https://github.com/abhayv/abhayv.github.io](https://github.com/abhayv/abhayv.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER6> Neat!</comment>


Assorted thoughts on the Apple event - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2012/10/23/assorted-event-thoughts <comment><USER2>
      "Fusion Drive might be the most interesting announcement
      today for our day-to-day computing. Similar SSD-as-cache
      arrangements have been kicking around in the Windows PC
      market for a while, and the Seagate Momentus XT brought a
      large cache to laptop drives a few years ago, but these
      have only brought mixed success and mediocre improvements so far.

      With tight OS integration, larger performance gains are
      possible."

As someone that has used Momentus XTs in a few different systems, they make a very significant day to day difference when compared to a non-cached standard HDD of similar RPM. The improvement clearly isn't the same as a true SSD, but is is very noteworthy, especially given the price per GB of these drives versus true SSDs.

Also, I don't see how having "tight OS integration" will improve this sort of drive. The drive already knows which sectors you are accessing the most and can optimize the cache for that, how is involving the OS supposed to make a significant difference here?

<comment><USER3> The OS knows about entire applications / resource bundles / documents and can run stronger heuristics against your usage than a blind block-level controller.

<comment><USER4> Fusion Drive is just flashcache with some sort of adaptive caching algo. There's zero reason to care about what the type of a file is. The reason they showed it like that in the keynote was because normal people don't know what a block device is.

<comment><USER5> You are not correct, it is _not_ a cache but instead something that provides the union of storage between two drives. Remember, the examples have stuff _only_ on the SSD.

Instead, this appears to be an implementation of so-called "tiered storage". This is novel in that is the first time such an approach has been applied to consumer grade solutions. Usually, one might find tiered storage as part of an extremely expensive solution that EMC might give you as part of an elaborate storage system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't believe they upgraded the iPad to version 4? This seems like only yesterday that the iPad 3 was announced.

Also Marco says at one point about the six different versions of the macbook pro for only 3 different size points. Is this a sign of the Jobs touch being lost?

The iPad mini is different in that the Nexus 7 was the first sub ipad size tablet to make a mark before Apple. This won't make a huge difference to mini sales, but it does reek off Apple chasing tails.

</comment><comment><USER7> The 13" Pro can't be the perfect choice without discrete graphics. The Intel HD 4000 may be the best Intel graphics to date but a 4 megapixel display is going to bring that chip to its knees.

<comment><USER8> It'll be interesting to see what the reviews are like and how many people play down the occasionally poor UI performance that seems to plague the 15" model.

I'm itching to replace my MacBook Air with a machine that sports a Retina display, but as it stands I think I'll have to wait for the next generation with better performing graphics that can do the resolution justice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What would be great is if Apple stops selling spinning platters all together and just sold SSD drives. This would probably drive the price point of SSD down further and more quickly. I put an OWC 6g extreme SSD drive in my mbp and it felt like a whole new 10x faster machine. I'll never go back to spinning disks.

<comment><USER10> Totally agree: <http://youtu.be/H7PJ1oeEyGg?t=34s>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _"The Mac Pro will continue to lose customers to the iMac and Retina MacBook Pros"_

I suppose that's true, but the point that appears lost on Apple is the number of customers that they're losing to other PC manufacturers altogether.

I really do wish they'd either kill the product so that we all know it's not part of their landscape moving forward, or upgrade it already.

</comment><comment><USER12> > I don't mind the lack of a Retina screen in the first version. As we can see > from the iPad 3 and 4, lighting and driving a 2048x1536 screen just can't be > done well in a small, thin, light, inexpensive device yet. Maybe next fall, > or maybe the year after that.

This is being presented as though the only two choices were "retina" or 1024x768, which is obviously not true. I understand Apple's rationale for using the previous generation's resolution, but it means they shipped a device which is inferior to the competition in at least one measurable way. I'm not a spec-driven purchaser. I don't care that the iPad mini has less RAM or fewer cores than the Nexus 7 (disclosure: I own this). But a tablet's display is a critical part of the experience and I find Apple's decision here to be a let down.

<comment><USER3> Don't over think it. They used the resolution of the original iPad and iPad 2 so no applications need to be modified.

Only low end devices engage in a nerdspec race. Personal status devices are marketed as experiences and life accessories. Who gives a flip what's inside if it makes you happy?

<comment><USER12> The display is on the outside.

<comment><USER13> The glass is on the outside, the screen is behind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The retina MacBook is heavier than I expected. Appreciate chopping out an optical drive doesn't magically shave 1kg off but I'm still slightly disappointed, despite placing an order regardless.</comment>


CIO's Are Wasting Money on Ticketing and Monitoring Systems…and Here Is Why - <AUTHOR> http://www.taos.com/2015/04/03/cios-are-wasting-money-on-ticketing-and-monitoring-systems-and-here-is-why/

<comment><USER2> Non click bait wording: Ticketing and monitoring systems should be integrated</comment>


Clickjacking Google - <AUTHOR> https://blog.innerht.ml/google-yolo/ <comment><USER2> I love this kind of arrogant corporate responses "working as intended".

(look Facebook on sharing user's data)

Just because something is "working as intended" does not mean it's ok or correct.

BTW a bunch of Google' authorization is based on 3rd party cookies (e.g. Stackdriver), could anyone explain to me why? It's technically not challenging for Google to implement other ways.</comment>


You probably shouldn't be using Kubernetes for your new startup - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/liquid_chickens/you-probably-shouldn-t-be-using-kubernetes-for-your-new-startup-2hj6 <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing. I can see how it would be a big tribal knowledge magnet and skillset to add to your payroll early on.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone had an Amazon Firestick hogging LAN bandwidth behind a firewall? - <AUTHOR> I finally narrowed down the device that was flooding my household LAN with traffic, especially when I was streaming from the Internet on my Kodi box: An original issue Amazon Firestick.  When I pulled it's power, my LAN dropped to normal level.  It had been flooding the LAN with 800-900kbps of traffic. <comment><USER2> I've experience problems with bandwidth and resource consumption from the fire stick when I had Kodi and the Downloader app installed, wiping it to factory resolved the issues, and have yet to see it return.

I haven't done any sort of recording or looking into the issue, but I was suspicious enough that I didn't reload them after the reset.</comment>


Why I Hate the Internet (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tgmag.ca/tgo.v2/antinet_e.html

<comment><USER2> It's amusing to read this after fourteen years.

Yes, the Internet is not free. But neither is high-fructose corn syrup. What HFCS is, is cheap. And the Internet keeps getting cheaper. The old argument seen here -- that the Internet will just be a plaything for the rich -- gets less relevant every day.

Back in 1995 only geeks knew that the Internet was an amazing social tool. That's how it was possible for this writer to claim that "friends, gym or art class, school clubs or teams, driver's ed., or other such aspects of high school life... could never be delivered direct-to-you through the internet". Gym class _is_ hard to deliver via TCP/IP (alas for our waistlines) as is driver's ed -- but friends, clubs, teams, and art class turn out to be lots of fun online. And the author falls for the common fallacy of _either/or_ , familiar from such classic stupid debates as "nature vs nurture": Either you have an online life or you have an offline life. The notion that these two things might evolve to _augment_ each other was impossible for this writer to grasp in 1995.

As for the final point:

 _information posted on the internet has virtually no proof of reliability_

That could have been written yesterday. People are still fighting through this canard. As if the folks who could afford printing presses, radio transmitters, or TV sets have always been trustworthy.

As time goes on, we see ever more clearly that the mandarins of older media use the word _reliable_ the way European missionaries used the world _Christian_ and the ancient Romans used the word _civilized_ : As a disguised synonym for "respectful of the established authorities that I serve".

</comment><comment><USER3> A media studies professor told me that the problem with the Internet was (1) people don't understand how it works so it depowers them further (2) there are a lot of hidden environmental costs (3) quality of information is questionable because everyone can post anything, and (4) everyone thinks everything is a revolution: they thought that about radio, television, etc...how they were going to change our world and didn't. Like the author of this article, she pointed to how select large corporations control the infrastructure. I responded in a presentation that:

(1) Not everyone needs to know how medicine works in order to benefit from medicine, and it does improve our lives. It is a good thing that not everyone has to know TCP/IP, or the inner workings of browsers to use them. Further, unlike many other elements of our society, to learn and get involved in this one is a lot easier.

(2) It's true that silicon development, and waste from computer equipment is contributing to our environmental problems, and we should fix that, but that is a larger systemic paradigm problem we as a society have and is not specific to this industry

(3) The problem of unreliable information exists with or without the Internet. That problem is tackled by people organizing who have shared interests, organizing to create certifications, show trust in others, build reputation networks, etc... this is the case outside of the Internet, and it is the case with the Internet as well.

(4) The Internet is not going to be like television or radio, because it is fundamentally different. Although organizations like the FCC were designed to protect limited air waves from corporate control, they ended up doing the opposite, and even if they were doing a good job there would be a lot of hierarchical control. What we have on the Internet is something particularly incredible. The powerful organizations that control the infrastructure needed to build something that worked reliably, for many purposes, and although the reasons for this were originally military and such, what we have is something not hierarchical, something that you can become a node on, something that with very low cost of entry gives you the ability to distribute your content. Sure, most of this ability is used by many people to maintain their MySpace page, but that they can make it incredibly different. Further, browsers can modify the content being sent to them, the Internet allows groups of people to create their own communities, and their own sub-networks.

Not all of our social problems, that we lie and try and manipulate each other, that we waste a lot of our time, that we produce a lot of a junk ... the Internet doesn't make these problems disappear, but due to its remarkable difference from other mediums, as you all know, opens many incredible possibilities. When I did the presentation MIT's Open Course Ware was still new, I recommended my university follow suite and make classes available in video, they haven't but other schools have. Wikipedia is accessible in a lot of languages. I have been to third world countries, and it is a lot easier going to a cyber-cafe, which there is more so every year, than it is to go to the United States to get a higher education, or purchase books/find a library, and sift through the amount of books that would be needed to get this amount of information.

A number of you agree that there is a lot of wrong, and time wasting information on the Internet, but just take a look at the site you're on - through organization, that giant pool of information is being filtered. If you follow a link to MIT, you know the quality of the article is going to be better; it builds reputation with you, just as Hacker News gives you a greater feeling of quality than reddit. We can go further and build reputation systems that can be added as browser plug-ins, community based, or organizations accrediting... we can think of ways of making through lots of information, and even without the Internet we'd have that problem. Also, it's unlikely that any time in the near future you'll be able to go through some information source and just know it's all right, before the Internet, and continuing into now that it's here, you have to trust yourself foremost, and learn how not to waste your own time, and value sources that give you information that checks out with you.

P.S. Recently at a dinner with a Sociology professor, I got the 'Internet is going to kill us all' shpeel again (she didn't know I worked in the industry), and I'm realizing there's two sides to this: people who think the internet is going to solve every problem magically (as opposed to being a tool to help us solve those problems), and those who think the Internet is going to destroy the world magically (as opposed to being a tool to help us destroy the world).

<comment><USER3> Quick information filtering tip for people dealing with information overload and lots of useless information coming in from feeds:

* make an excel sheet, with the following headers "name","total posts","interesting","assets","valuable","significant","added" (day you added the list to the excel sheet) then the computation columns "% interesting", % assets", %valuable" "score","total days","posts per day"

organize your feeds by channels (interests like Software Business for Hacker News is what I have it under) of things interesting to you... score = (# valuable * (#significant * 50))/(posts per day)

Hacker News currently has a score of 86 for me. When reading feeds on the total I just add the # unread, go through, if I come across an asset (resource/site/service) I mark it (not used in score because those can be found easily later), same with valuable to me, or significant (changed perspective, therefore would be difficult to just search for)

now that you can see what information is flowing in , what its fulfilling, and they scored against each other -- sore apples will fall out of our list rapidly (reddit and such would never survive...) and when you find some new feed, new resource, within a week or so you start seeing how it compares.

works for me, great results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Any knucklehead with a computer and half a brain can write anything he or she wants on the internet."

[citation needed]

<comment><USER5> I have half a preserved brain sitting behind me on a shelf (seriously.) I think I'll make a sign with that phrase on it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> We can't blame the author for his shortsightedness, just look at what people write about twitter. Also there was no google or wikipedia then, and the internet was still mostly a collection of static html pages. There is nothing interesting about a giant stack of document.

edit: But still, not that he didn't make a fool of himself :D

<comment><USER7> The author is a 'she'; and her main point is relevant, even today. We've found ways to counteract it, but we still get bitten all the time by nonsense that just anyone can put on the Internet.

<comment><USER8> Wheras books and newspapers are all completely true? Anybody can say or publish anything they want - in this sense the internet is an extension of the nonternet world, not a contrast to it.

That is, her main point is irrelevant. The internet may not improve on this, but it's not unbearably worse either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just a poignant today as the day it was written.

</comment><comment><USER10> history of beets :) - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beet#History>

</comment><comment><USER11> As for the trips to the library that is true. You can now get the latest up to date research which is as reliable as it gets and that must be able to revolutionise the way we learn.</comment>


What I learned after writing Clojure for 424 days, straight - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@shivekkhurana/what-i-learned-after-writing-clojure-for-424-days-straight-8884ec471f8e <comment><USER2> > As a blogger, there was no incentive for me to write about it

It is my somewhat limited observation that professional closure devs work more and talk less (including blogging). Perhaps this is one factor in the low visibility of the language.</comment>