In which Apple destroys my daughter's iPad forever - <AUTHOR> https://ericasadun.com/2018/05/22/in-which-apple-destroys-my-daughters-ipad-forever/ <comment><USER3> Oh, this is a painful topic.

A couple of years ago my son forgot the (3-digit!) PIN for his iPod touch. He tried various possibilities, with the device responding with increasingly long lockouts between attempts, until it locked him out permanently. I'm not an iOS user and I had no idea it would do that. I am still angry that it did. It wasn't associated with a Mac, so we couldn't unlock it that way.

He eventually shrugged and we ended up resetting the device, but he lost various pictures and videos. He had iCloud backups of some things, but it turned out he had been dismissing "your storage is full" warnings for some time.

Then the next day he came home from school, plonked himself down on the sofa, and without a moment's thought typed in the PIN he had forgotten. Of course it didn't work, as we had reset the device by then.

It still makes me wince but at least, unlike in this story, the device could be reset and reused and we didn't lose access to the iCloud backups that did exist. And ours was just operator error, facilitated by an uncaring machine.

<comment><USER4> > forgot the ... PIN

Schneier on passwords[1]:

>> Simply, people can no longer remember passwords good enough to reliably defend against dictionary attacks, and are much more secure if they choose a password too complicated to remember and then write it down. We're all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet.

Maybe not the wallet for a portable device's PIN; the wallet could easily be included with the theft of the phone/pad/portable. However, it's still a good idea to write down passwords (and maybe print out your private key in an OCR- friendly font) and store them in the fire-safe or safe deposit box or whatever you probably already use for important documents.

[1] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/write_down_yo...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/write_down_your.html)

<comment><USER5> I keep a few critical passwords in my wallet - but they're encrypted - <USER2> OTP type cipher I can hand crank in a few minutes - but useless to anyone who finds the scrap of paper covered in cryptic utterances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tbf - I feel really sorry that this happened to him, but on the other hand, I am extremely glad that a once-locked device can never be unlocked by anyone without a purchase receipt. I'm sure it deters the theft of iPhones/iPads at least a bit if they know the device will become completely useless once locked out.

<comment><USER7> I have carried around laptops and smartphones for decades now. Not a single one was stolen. Even if one was stolen now, what's the average cost of 'Stuff being stolen' over the years?

I had Laptops with me since the 90s. For over 20 years. If my iPad Pro gets stolen now, that's $1000 over 20 years = $50/year. I don't mind.

I really would love if a Linux distribution would support the iPad so I know I can do with it whatever I like forever.

<comment><USER8> Same. I've never had a phone/laptop/tablet/etc stolen.

Yet, "The number of smartphones stolen dropped by 50% in London, 27% in San Francisco and 16% in New York in 2014, according to an announcement by officials in the three cities" since the introduction of these anti-theft measures [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/11/london- sm...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/11/london-smartphone- theft-drops-after-kill-switch-introduction-iphones)

<comment><USER9> I saw a slightly suspicious looking cyclist come going past me, with a mask on ... he grabbed the guy in front of me's phone and cycled off!

That was in a pretty nice bit of London.

I've managed to let my laptop get taken when I was really drunk at a pub too <shrug>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From an usability point of view, yes it sucks

From a security point of view, they're absolutely doing the correct thing, though account lock-outs also allow for denial-of-service attacks

Maybe we need to not lock people out of their personal iPads forever (just make the person wait 30s between attempts) and if you want stronger security then you actually enable it (because people who want that are "smart enough" to set it)

<comment><USER11> I think Apple is doing the right thing. The error lays in the user, a) don't rememebr my security questions .... eh well... B) Apple provides ways to restore everything, two factor, email recovery etc etc, if you didn't take care of your own security for 7 years, what are you crying about? Sometimes I don't get users.

<comment><USER12> Don't blame the user for poor product decisions.

<comment><USER11> Yeah... because your email provider shuts down, and you keep using it for your apple account id, that is totally the fault of Apple.

<comment><USER13> Apple doesn't provide a way to transfer email account IDs.

<comment><USER11> .... I have done it, even I have transfered my account from one country to another, which many other services like Sony Play station forbid. So before saying something that is not true, double check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've actually been having problems recently with my account randomly being locked. I suspect it's bots trying to brute force, but its silly apple would lock my account instead of blocking the requests, especially since I have 2fa. Really annoying resetting my password only to have it happen an hour later. Tech support also has no idea why its happening.

Thing that I just noticed a few hours ago, their password change form has a max of 32 characters and my last apple pass was 64. Wonder if they made a change that broke something?

<comment><USER15> My kids iPad has been doing the same. It keeps saying we're locked out, and not accepting the (correct) password, and we have to reset the password constantly. No idea why it's happening. I've tried setting simpler passwords (I use KeePass and generate 32char complex passwords by default), but it doesn't help. I never thought of the fact that it could be someone brute forcing it and locking us out, I just shrugged it off as being "typical new- Apple". We're almost completely off Apple devices now because we have so so many problems with them in the last couple years, after being a happy Apple family since the Macintosh SE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The site seems to be offline. Here is an archive.org mirror: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180523090007/https://ericasadu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180523090007/https://ericasadun.com/2018/05/22/in- which-apple-destroys-my-daughters-ipad-forever/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Convince the police or FBI you're a criminal or terrorist. They will unlock it for free.

<comment><USER18> Convince them your daughter is a criminal, it's hers not yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunate, but perhaps a useful learning experience.

I disable iCloud on all of my Apple devices. Instead, I just make regular backups myself and tolerate different recent content on each device until synced with my Mac, which is backed up as well.

<comment><USER20> You don't have to disable iCloud to do regular local backups.

<comment><USER19> Sure, I'm aware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Next up: In which HN destroys my web server.

</comment><comment><USER22> Dealing with giant bueruecracy can be the most frustrating experience. bureaucracy's are ultimately made of people though and rules can be stretched, broken, or changed. I hope some real human working at Apple sees this, has some sort of power to change things, and is willing to step up to bat for OP's daughter.

<comment><USER23> There could be thousands of other people in this situation, though. Overriding the policy for one well-known blogger won't help those people.

<comment><USER22> No but this blogger bringing attention to the issue and getting the rule changed might.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not sure if its just me but there is a database connection error "Error establishing a database connection" while opening the site.

<comment><USER25> That tends to happen when a website gets on the HN frontpage. Try refreshing, eventually that worked for me.

<comment><USER26> You're just hitting the database with more requests. The only reason it'll work is if the site owner fixes something or, if the capacity doesn't change, your additional requests stop other users from accessing the DB. Just use a cached version and stop hammering the site.

<comment><USER25> I'm not saying to hammer down the refresh button.

And yes there is a very good reason for it too work: in most scenarios the amount of concurrent connections to the DB is at the limit. If you refresh once a minute later you're really not that much of an impact while the PHP instance might get the handle to the database needed to fetch the content. As a matter of fact, it worked for me with this exact article.

<comment><USER26> > Try refreshing, eventually that worked

> I'm not saying to hammer down the refresh button.

OK.

> If you refresh once a minute later you're really not that much of an impact

If every user does this, the site now has 2x the amount of incoming requests.

<comment><USER25> Yep but twice the amount of incoming requests spread out over time.

When the site doesn't load I think it's fair to do either 1 of 2 things:

1\. Accept that you can't read the article.

2\. Have some kind of retry mechanism ( for example: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/exponential- backof...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/exponential-backoff-and- jitter/) )

But I don't think trying once and complaining about it in a comment is making anything better for anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So the device is locked because Activation Lock (Find My iPad) was enabled. But the root problem is the AppleID lockout.

 _> Apple will not unlock her iCloud account... even though she has never forgotten her password._

This is news to me. Why on earth is she not able to get back in if she knows the password? Did she perhaps enable 2FA when "modernizing" her AppleID and lose access to the 2nd factor? That's the only thing that the Apple support document on this mentions as a reason for requiring more than your password.[1]

[1] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204106](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204106)

<comment><USER27> The article mentions they don't know the trigger, and neither does Apple, but yes, once its locked, the password is useless, you need the correct answers to your security question or you're screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not forever, looking at the screenshot - "just" 45 years.

I hope he gets this resolved - otherwise his daughter will have one hell of a digital time capsule to open in her late 50's - assuming apple or anything else still exists.

<comment><USER28> I don't think the author, Erica, uses "he".

<comment><USER29> Maybe he does. Haven't you learned not to assume anyone's gender?

<comment><USER30> I'm amused but not offended by "he". Feel free to assume my gender.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Destroyed? The account does not work anymore, but the device is doing exactly as told.

However i agree any electronic device should have the ability to factory reset. Software lock ins are terrible.

<comment><USER32> Functionality like this is pretty good to deter theft. If thieves can't easily re-enable bricked devices, black market price is much lower, thus there's less incentive to mug people carrying those devices.

<comment><USER33> anti-theft should never impact user experience in such negative way. there are different ways to let the user be in control of this anti-theft technology which are much more user friendly and less prone to these kind of situations.

<comment><USER8> There certainly is. Don't enable the PIN code.

Security, almost by definition, makes the user experience harder and worse.

<comment><USER3> Trouble is, a PIN code is useful as a very casual line of defence (threat model: your brother picking up the device and messing with your stuff). It's terrible that the obvious means to avoid that threat is also something that could lose you access to your device entirely.

<comment><USER34> That's actually not the case, the PIN doesn't lock out your iOS device. iCloud Activation Lock does.

It requires that if you factory reset the device (without first disabling icloud activation lock), you must authenticate with the same iCloud account it was previously using to "unlock" it.

This is designed precisely to make stolen iOS devices (and logic boards) worthless.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201365](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201365)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is painful but I don't see this as an Apple problem.

<comment><USER29> > The other day, Apple locked her out of her iCloud account and her iPad. We > don't know why. The Apple support people don't know why.

Sure seems like an Apple problem. I don't randomly get locked out of my Windows / Linux laptop or Android tablet without reason from the hardware / OS vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think this is the same person who post this, [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7138743](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7138743)

^ For more info.

<comment> yoz-y Probably not: the post is about an iPod whereas the article is about an iPad Mini.

This issue is actually quite old and I am very surprised (and sad) that is has re-surfaced.

<comment><USER36> I got your point, I just google search it to see if I found any help and see this post so wrote it here as it is similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Google cache version: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fericasadun.com%2F2018%2F05%2F22%2Fin- which-apple-destroys-my-daughters-ipad- forever%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fericasadun.com%2F2018%2F05%2F22%2Fin- which-apple-destroys-my-daughters-ipad- forever%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.5143j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

<comment><USER30> And archive.is: [http://archive.is/l834w](http://archive.is/l834w)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > She did not do anything to trigger the Apple ID issue.

I chalk this up to the child not wanting to admit they entered the wrong passcode too many times. iOS devices "disable" themselves after enough failed attempts. This is a good thing - you want this to happen if your device is stolen. "Disabled" only means you need to prove ownership by either:

a) Connecting the iPad (via USB) to iTunes on a Mac or PC that is logged into the same Apple ID account. This is the original method, from the era when desktop iTunes was mandatory to setup and sync iOS devices.

b) Using "Find my iPad" to reset the device via the iCloud web interface. This was added as an alternative when cloud sync/backup was added (ie: when owning a second device running iTunes became optional).

Two critical points from the OP:

1\. Inability to provide the birth date and answers to security questions.

2\. Inability to access the email account associated with the Apple ID ("her email provider deleted the account about 3-4 years ago").

These are only needed to perform password reset / account recovery for an Apple ID - which tells me they _do not even know the Apple ID 's password_, and cannot provide the information required to recover that Apple ID.

This person's situation is indistinguishable from a stolen device, by a thief who cannot prove ownership of the Apple ID. I say: "working as intended".

<comment><USER39> You appear to know what you're talking about, but I don't think you've factored this part into your theory:

> _The other day, Apple locked her out of her iCloud account and her iPad. We > don't know why. The Apple support people don't know why. I think it may have > to do with when I modernized my AppleID to use an email address, which is > what the iTunes account on the iPad is registered to._

I think you're implying that Erica (the OP) needs to use iTunes linked to her own Apple ID to recover this device?

And that the daughter's Apple ID may not be needed at all here?

<comment><USER38> I did in fact miss the purported locking of the Apple ID. It appears as though accounts can be locked under certain circumstances[1].

So the Apple ID was locked, presumably due to many accidental or malicious attempts to log in to the account. The account owner is then left having to perform account recovery, which is where the security questions and access to the email address's inbox come into play.

[1] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204106](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204106)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The site is overloaded, archived copy:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180523090007/https://ericasadu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180523090007/https://ericasadun.com/2018/05/22/in- which-apple-destroys-my-daughters-ipad-forever/)

</comment><comment><USER41> _she made up a birthday and answers to the security questions. 8 years later, she does not know that information and there's no way for us to guess it._

Well that sucks, but the vendor did provide an account recovery mechanism which they chose to circumvent.

<comment><USER16> I feel like Apple did nothing wrong here. If they parent/daughter chose to go around every recovery mechanism Apple provided it's their own fault. Physical possesion of a device should never equal direct access to all its data.

<comment><USER39> > _Physical possesion of a device should never equal direct access to all its > data._

Apple appear to have extended this principle beyond the data and are preventing use of the device entirely. It ought to be possible to wipe the device and start from scratch with a new Apple account.

<comment><USER41> If a stolen device can be trivially reset there is no deterrent to stealing them or to buying stolen property.

<comment><USER39> This case (OP's) is an example of when a device reset could be required despite not having been stolen. What we're left with is the balancing act of deciding whether this example is an acceptable price to pay to achieve the deterrent effect you're describing.

And I'd also be interested to know if it really does have a deterrent effect. Does anyone know if criminals really do avoid stealing iPads?

<comment><USER41> _when a device reset could be required despite not having been stolen_

For which you would use the security questions that they avoided doing for spurious reasons...

<comment><USER39> We've entered a loop here, because you're referring to something they could have done differently at the beginning, but we had been discussing the situation that had been created by them going through the process they way they actually did.

Yes, this could have been avoided by following Apple's procedures correctly. But given that we didn't do that, this story has highlighted a case where we can be prevented from using our device despite not having committed a crime.

There are presumably other cases where a similar could occur:

1) A mistake during the setup process. What if I enter the wrong birth date in error. 2) Death of device owner. What if the person who inherits it doesn't know the answers chosen.

I'm sure plenty of other cases exist.

Not being able to factory reset a device that you have in your physical possession is not reasonable, in my opinion.

<comment><USER41> _Not being able to factory reset a device that you have in your physical possession is not reasonable, in my opinion_

You have a car parked outside your house. You have no keys and no paperwork proving ownership, nor is there a record of you in any central repository. Should you be able to just claim it by virtue of physical proximity? I think most people and most legal systems would say no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Besides that, you couldn't empty the backups in the iTunes and start with a new password easily (without a reset in iOS) which also sucks.

</comment><comment><USER43> looks like it is stuck in 1970 or so, according the number of minutes in the image

Edit: 1972 to be exact

<comment><USER44> I wonder if you created a network with an SSID and password that matched the original if it would pick it up and update the date? This is what I did with my TV when I lost the remote, so I could add a phone as a remote.

<comment><USER45> After reboot, all iDevice SSIDs and passwords are encrypted with the device passcode.

This means the iPad can't automatically connect to known networks until the passcode is entered.

<comment><USER44> Is this true for all versions? If it's a 2nd or 3rd hand-me-down iPad as stated, chances are it's on a lower version.

I forgot that this was even a feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Maybe someone that works at Cellebrite might be willing to throw you a bone?

</comment><comment><USER11> Did you try to restore it using DFU mode?

</comment><comment><USER47> We did it guys. That server was smashed by the repellant hammer of hype.

</comment><comment><USER18> And this one time, when I updated my iPod touch, and both WiFi and Bluetooth stopped working.

<comment><USER18> I definitely don't think official software updates could be made not reversible. And worst brick a perfectly fine device. Would love to hear from the ppl downvoting too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is one of the reasons why you should just not buy Apple-branded stuff: such things are designed to be remotely-lockable.

With an Android-based device this couldn't happen. Provided that you have a backup of your data, you could just reflash the device, restore your backup and start using the device again.

Just don't buy Apple stuff. Between people having assistance denied (example: Linus Sebastian 5 k$ Mac Pro), people losing all of their music (there was one guy whose bootleg records was remotely wiped on all his devices and replaced with "originals" by Apple), and people like OP having their device turned in a shiny brick...

This is really getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER7> I find it surprising that Linux distributions still don't support iOS devices. Considering how many of these devices are out there.

What is the main reason? That it is hard to root them?

<comment><USER48> > What is the main reason? That it is hard to root them?

Imho it's just not worth it. There are a lot of way cheaper phones/tablets that you can get in order to run GNU/Linux.

Why would anybody bother ?

<comment><USER7> I use an iPad Pro because it had the best form factor + weight + performance combination I could find.

<comment><USER48> The subthread was about running GNU/Linux on Apple devices like the iPad Pro you own, not about the device itself...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Nobody in my house or in my parents house wanted to lock their iOS devices at all...yet with every major update, Apple tries to trick us into re-enabling touch/pin/etc security with dark UI patterns.

A _few_ times it actually worked when we weren't paying attention. Since I'm quite positive that nobody at Apple actually cares about what customers want or about their privacy and security, I'll just assume that this is more theater. Alternatively, perhaps they found that people who use touch/pin security are less likely to switch away from iOS or they buy more apps or something else that affects their bottom line.

<comment><USER50> Your assumption that nobody at Apple cares about the customer's privacy and security is completely ridiculous.

The fact that they have a setting to wipe your device after 10 failed pin/password attempts proves that they care about my security and privacy. There's no other reason to include such a feature.

Not to mention the secure enclave in iOS devices (and the MacBook Pro and iMac Pro, I think) or Apple's refusal of FBI requests to assist in unlocking iPhones.

<comment><USER49> Sure, there's no such thing as security theater and nobody spends money or effort putting on a show at all anywhere ever.

<comment><USER50> Perhaps you could explain why you think those things are security theater. Then your comment would have some actual substance.

<comment><USER49> What substance did your comment have? You simply named some examples of actions that Apple has taken which doesn't prove anything at all to your point since the very _definition of security theater is taking actions that make it look like you care about security_.

The reason I think that they are theater is the same reason that any corporation does things like that. It's just like Googles bullshit "do no evil" motto. _Apple has a long history of doing dramatic things for attention._ Do you deny that?

So, what's your reason? Do you take everything that any corporation does at face value, or just Apple?

<comment><USER50> The substance is that I actually use a security feature that Apple has implemented and it makes my device more secure. That's my justification for saying that Apple cares about security. If it was security theater, then the feature they implement would be for show and not actually make me more secure. I don't believe that's the case. Feel free to prove me wrong. That would count as substance.

The burden is then on you to give a reason that you think that wiping my device after 10 failed pin/password attempts is security theater and not just security.

Apparently your reasoning is just that "Apple is a corporation and corporations use security theater", which is a terrible argument. It assumes that _all_ corporations do certain things without room for exceptions. It also has nothing to do with the actions themselves.

> definition of security theater is taking actions that make it look like you > care about security.

If the actions you take to make it look like you care about security also happen to make you more secure, is it security theater? Can a company do something that both makes them look good in the public eye _and_ be good for their users? I think they can.

<comment><USER49> > The substance is that I actually use a security feature that Apple has > implemented and it makes my device more secure.

You're missing the point entirely. I said that Apple doesn't really care if you're actually secure or not...and your response to that is essentially "well, I feel safe". That says nothing about Apples motivations which is what my assumption centers around.

> If the actions you take to make it look like you care about security also > happen to make you more secure, is it security theater?

And? Again, you're not speaking to motivation at all, which are the target of my assumptions. I can assume anything I want about Apples motivations based on my view of their history and there isn't much you can do to prove or disprove that, which makes your own complaint about my assumptions rather ridiculous. It's a fucking opinion...get over it!

> Can a company do something that both makes them look good in the public eye > and be good for their users? I think they can.

Apparently it's good for some users and not so good for others as in the case of this posters story as well as my own.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yellowstone Has Bulged as Magma Pocket Swells - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110119-yellowstone-park-supervolcano-eruption-magma-science/ <comment><USER2> You can see the path that the hotspot carved as it moved across southern Idaho:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HotspotsSRP.jpg>

[http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=43.636075,-111.335449...](http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=43.636075,-111.335449&spn=6.320504,14.18335&t=p&z=7)</comment>


Succinctness Is Power (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html <comment><AUTHOR> Looking back, this is one of Paul Graham's essays that changed the way I code and think about coding more than anything else did. I can't re-submit this enough. Myself, never used Lisp in production but I get that Lisp probably suits best for illustrating the points made in the essay.

And I wish Paul wrote more on programming today (and switched his web site to HTTPS too!)</comment>


Ask HN: Boss with Steve Jobs Complex - <AUTHOR>

Dear Community Members,
I find myself in a difficult situation, but one I imagine must be common in the industry -- MY BOSS HAS A STEVE JOBS COMPLEX.  It would be unfair to say he is like Steve Jobs, because the Steve Jobs we all love was relentlessly dedicated to his projects, but my boss is not.  Let me explain --
My boss was appointed Project Manager, but he also wants to be Product Manager.  He insists that we all absorb his vision and build out the product and code it.  However, he refuses to detail out each screen, behaviors, and the like.  When we try to build out the screens/behaviors, he cites it as a waste of time and directs us to code out the vision.
Naturally, the results are usually misaligned with his vision, and we get chewed out and humiliated publicly.  There are often mentions about how he is a visionary and needs a team that can march to that vision.
Our boss is very successful and insightful, but has never been a product manager.  He refuses to acknowledge Product Management as a role and insists we should have the startup mentality where everyone has every role -- yet does not want to slog through the difficulty of defining the user experience.
He is very hard-working but has many responsibilities and only dedicates about 4 hours a week to this project.  Is this project destined for failure? <comment><USER2> I have no way of knowing whether your project is destined for failure. But to me that would be almost irrelevant - if I had a boss who humiliated people (publicly or privately), I'd be looking for work elsewhere. I wouldn't have put up with that kind of abuse even from Steve Jobs himself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have read so many stories of tough personalities like this who chew out their people publicly, yet in the process achieve greatness for themselves, their teams, and their products. I supposed I would have accepted this if I were working for Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Steve Ballmer, so I keep wondering if I should just suck it up and grind on.

But coding-to-vision rather than coding-to-design/spec seems so inefficient. Is this common?

<comment><USER2> _" I have read so many stories of tough personalities like this who chew out their people publicly, yet in the process achieve greatness for themselves, their teams, and their products."_

Honestly, this doesn't sound like that kind of guy. From what you described, he's "all hat and no cattle" (as they say in Texas).

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you for your thoughts on this. -going crazy

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've unfortunately been in the position of your boss in the past. In some of my early product management/project management roles, I would wave my hands write a few emails, one-pagers and expect the developers and designers would grok the vision and build something beautiful. Surprisingly, in my first experience, the outcome was wonderful -- the product was beautiful. At that time, I was naive and vainglorious enough to believe that the reasons for it were my 'vision'. The actual reason was a team of world class ux designers, visual designers and developers, who understood what I needed and created the product. The creative vision was theirs. So in some sense your boss is right, he doesn't have a unicorn team who can translate his day dreams into product.

On the other hand he is also profoundly wrong. Skip a few years, and I started up on my own, and could no longer afford those unicorn designers and developers. Now mere vision was no longer sufficient, I had to deal with actually firing up Photoshop and Illustrator and going from there all the way to writing HTML/CSS/JS, even the backend python for a prototype (Fortunately, I've always loved coding.) The learning was profound. Translating vision(even your own, leave alone others') into attractive product is a difficult skill that every serious product owner must understand. And they can only do so by doing (they may never master it). I'm not anywhere as good as those unicorn UX/devs I worked with in the past, but I compensate for it somewhat with, meticulous communication, verbal discussions, wireframes, mocks, sketches, functional prototypes, whatever, to get the product I want. Then I iterate the hell out of it by getting feedback. Learning to interpret subtle signs of friction in a users' experience was hugely valuable. The results have been good though slow.

If your boss is refusing to acquire the requisite translation skills, you will need to acquire them (and you will probably be the gainer in the bargain)

My advice to you here is to do the following:

1\. Ignore the public shaming, if possible, and focus on your boss's message. Iterate on design concept despite his demeaning you for mistakes. It may eventually make you the unicorn developer/designer. At the very least even if you realize you don't have a talent for design, you will understand where your own limits lie.

2\. Understand that the kind of people your boss is looking for do exist. They are not easily found, and are usually very expensive. So help your boss find one if possible. Learn from these people.

3\. When you've gotten these skills, please email me your resume. :-) (Just kidding)

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe, maybe not.

I worked with a guy as a contractor where he swears he was a Steve Jobs. Realistically, all he was is a guy with lots of ideas and no follow thru. So he wasn't a Steve Jobs at all and most all his visions totally violated good design principles. When I would point that out he would say because his thoughts were visionary and not yet known.

Yea, and I fart unicorns dancing and rainbows.

In the end, you have to evaluate for yourself, but in general if people don't have a loyal following, but expect that type of respect they are no Steve jobs. I have had some AMAZING leaders, and they inspired us to do great things. They would never spend only 4 hours on a project they believed in, and they would expect more from us. I am not saying you should quit tomorrow, but I personally refuse to help feed anyones ego like this.

And I am sorry, the idea of just doing it without getting some design guidance seems really stupid. I know the stuff we read about Jobs says he didn't need mock ups etc, but I totally think that is BS. He was a smart ass guy who likely had tons of mock ups before he ever said go to the next step. Reading his book, he commissioned projects and prototypes that showed design but weren't yet functional (IIRC), so no that isn't a Jobs type mentality, that is a God mentality and is just idiotic.

BTW no real leader publicly humiliates his team, it is counter productive. Yes some great visionaries have done it, but in todays world we know that is a bad idea and to nurture not humiliate people, so its just BS. BUT that doesn't mean you don't push them hard (which can be a fine line) and demand better from everyone.

<comment><USER5> "Idea guys" are mostly useless: the people that want credit for "thinking of something" and kick back while everyone else works. More often than not, they're deluded and "in love" with "their" "great" ideas that deny reality in high-def cognitive dissonance. (They're usually wantrepreneurs or enterprise busywork titles.)

What set SJ apart was positive value (being right more often than not, building people up to produce better work products than they thought the could, a determined direction, actual vision) on balance outweighing negative traits (histrionic tantrums, treating employees like shit, generally acting like an asshole).

 __A cautionary note: __If someone is going to play the eccentric jerk role, they 'd better be actually right nearly always and bring metric fucktons of net positive value by the containership-full to the business, staff, customers, partners and other stakeholders.

<comment><USER4> Totally agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've had to deal with this exact situation in the past, and I went through the same rationale.

My experience: you wind up constantly iterating, hoping for small "wins" \- where the expectations of your PM matches something you've produced. But these are far and few in-between.

You need world-class people who've lead projects to save and push things forward. The success of the project depends on whether you have someone on the team who's willing to stand up and push their own vision, and whether your PM is willing to budge. You WILL have to do mockups to some fidelity, just realize that your PM won't appreciate the work and the complexity that goes into it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've lead design & PM at several startups & I can basically tell straight-out, that building without a design, wireframe, or at the very least a written spec is completely inefficient & it's likely that you will have to rebuild this all later. Basically every company I've worked had a similar process in place (often lead by the CEO) - this process does not scale & it will cause technical debt to your engineering team.

For all I know, this guy may actually be some product visionary, but why isn't he telling this vision to designers to create the mocks so the intricacies are worked out before it gets to build? Is it because he doesn't believe this process would move quick enough?

Also, one huge flag for me is that not once in your post did you mention that his "vision" was based off feedback of users. This is the most important task of a product manager (collecting user feedback & filtering it back to engineering). In the past, I've also had hunches about how things should work & I've proven myself completely wrong either after asking users or in usability tests on the build I designed.

Remember, Steve Jobs was designing products for the average person - not a lot of startups target such a blanket market & most are targeting some subset niche. You really need to be a voice for the users you're targeting.

</comment><comment><USER8> I had similar experience, however in my case I built what my boss wanted. And he was happy. I managed this not by magic, but the beginning of my story looked strikingly similar to yours. And, of course, the project didn't fail.

So yeah, his method is not _that_ wrong. But there's a catch: in the beginning he was really interesting in pico-iterations. So not only I was doing, but every hour or so we were discussing what the screen looked like, going to the lengths of adding fake buttons that did not do anything, but helped to reason about the application.

After few years (you read it right), we no longer needed to talk a lot about what the company needed. Usually he would point to a problem to be solved, what he would like to see, and the development team managed to fill the gaps.

More recently, in another company with another boss, at a certain point she appraised the team for not really having to fill the gaps of understanding for the team: she spit a vision and we do it in our way. Every iteration she validates it, and of course ask for changes. Pretty average.

I think the real problem in your case is the attitude : public scolding and humiliation. For this, I have two alternatives.

If you are vested with stocks or somehow protected by some strong contract, and believe in the idea, the solution is to bark back. Abusive behavior are always multiplied by lack of balance and checks.

If you are just a developer, with zero personal benefits than compensation, the solution to your problem is quitting. Suddenly. Even if you do not have another job in sight.

The reason of this sudden quit is to ensure you halt the damage to you well being while staying in this company. The damage is and will be there: days you don't feel like working, arriving very late and leaving very soon, avoid opportunities, apathetic feedback when approached by people etc etc. In the right intensity, even depression. (well if you're in US you might want to actually get depressed and ask for compensation in court. Probably will give you more money).

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your thoughts. I think pico-iterations would be wonderful, and that is the big problem -- we meet twice a week (he has dedicated 4hrs a week and sometimes not even that.) Way too much time goes by before we test whether the build-out matches the vision. This makes it more disheartening because there is often so much wasted work.

However, I'm glad this worked out well for you -- I am going to try to split the 4hours more evenly, perhaps into at-least a daily review. Part of the problem is he seems to think we are all wrong in requiring all these reviews, rather we should simply implement the vision rather than just talking about it over and over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think you should work through the details with your team and own the project and defend your decisions. He can only humiliate you if you believe what he is saying. There are people you just can't please, however, that is how he is pushing you to be great. That is probably why he is successful.

To be honest I have never received even 4 hours per week from a manager, on a consistent basis. You need to manage him like he is upper management or a client, he will ask the impossible, not tell you how to succeed, and expect everything.

Build what he needs, and persuade him as to why it is great. He wont express the details because even he doesn't really know.

</comment><comment><USER10> You're lucky that your boss at least has a vision.

<comment><USER11> true that :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does he at least give feedback? Is it useful? Do the other team members work on this project for a similar amount of time? If not, you need to have a manager that has more time to dedicate to you and give the support needed. If the project is behind schedule, mention it to stakeholders or higher management.

<comment><AUTHOR> @theandrewbailey yes, he does give feedback, about once every several days. However, three days of coding can be wiped out with one piece of feedback. This is frustrating since it could have been nipped earlier on during a design session. Is it common for people to code-to-vision rather than code-to-design?

<comment><USER12> It doesn't really matter the methodology used, but there is always (should be?) some written design, requirements, or specification somewhere. I've only ever been on "corporate" type projects where lots of stuff has been defined in advance. I find it really nice, because I can focus on implementing things, not designing, envisioning, or winging things. While malleable to some extent, it's not like a new concept could be inserted.

It might also help to know who this product is for. Is it a B2B/internal or B2C project?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >Is this project destined for failure?

Probably. You should probably have a heart to heart with this guy and tell him how you feel without evasions or minced words.

In the end you're a professional, and professionals don't need to tolerate bad behavior on the part of an employer.

</comment><comment><USER11> How can a Project Manager boss around the requirements and judge the implementation - that is a job of a Product Manager and Dev or Design managers? Project Managers should mostly focus on the team finishing projects on time - like an Agile coach.

</comment><comment><USER14> You are in a shitty situation. Focus on finding a great job, and avoid investing emotionally in this one.</comment>


Viability of finding contract work for a team? - <AUTHOR> I myself have a background mainly in Java development but have been learning node.js, along with functional programming, I myself am Latino so, although I'm from the US, I have had a connection my whole life to a Latin American country where I still have family and have lately developed relationships with some developers there who have the skillset I'm interested in. I'm not trying to do some outsource business where I am some sales guy finding work and giving it to some offshore team but rather my idea is that I could possibly find contract work where I work partly as a developer and partly help manage the work with my team. Living near the bay area, I'm able to meet with companies there in person as well.. sorry if all this is too much into but basically I'm wondering if this sort of arrangement is one that is potentially viable, I'm asking mainly because I don't know anyone personally who has done this sort of thing, all the developers I know just work for companies their whole careers and aren't entreprenuial at all. Also I realize the bar would be high in terms of proving competency, etc, so I'm fine with that and ready to meet that challenge when it comes time to try this but mainly I'm not sure if this is something many companies would be open to? <comment><USER2> It can work if you can rely on the team members. How can we contact you?</comment>


Show HN: Kangaroo is the most efficient bookmark tool for business - <AUTHOR> http://usekangaroo.com <comment><AUTHOR> The fastest and easiest way to save, find, revisit and send links from Chrome Extension. All the helpful links are in your storage in the best way.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://bit.ly/2yCfrGk](https://bit.ly/2yCfrGk)

<comment><AUTHOR> Add to Chrome and Hop to it!</comment></comment></comment>


Can Binge Drinking Save Social Security? - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/can-binge-drinking-save-social-security/

<comment><USER2> You know things are bad when the NYtimes is publishing digg bait.

<comment><USER3> they are publishing anything that isn't depressing, and this is the best they can find.</comment></comment>


Microsoft to remove WoSign and StartCom certificates in Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/08/08/microsoft-to-remove-wosign-and-startcom-certificates-in-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> This is almost a year after the other major trust stores.

Message: Do not wait for Microsoft to make decisions if you care about the trustworthiness of CAs, their list of "acceptable" CAs is enormous, their criteria for accepting new CA roots are opaque, and they are slow to remove obviously problematic CAs like WoSign.

This is probably fine for your day-to-day web browsing habits, but if you have software that needs to trust e.g. API endpoints you should look to stop relying on Microsoft's trust store to decide if things are OK. And let them know - this makes no difference if just a few people do it, but if the message that end users care gets to Microsoft they just might become a bit more proactive and stop prioritising commercial interests over trustworthiness.</comment>


Deprecating Volatile in C++ - <AUTHOR> http://wg21.link/P1152R3 <comment><USER2> The headline is misleading.

"We propose deprecating most of volatile. [...] The proposed deprecation preserves the useful parts of volatile, and removes the dubious / already broken ones."

This is an important distinction to make because people sometimes overreact to misuses of volatile by effectively claiming that it's useless or has no meaning.

<comment><USER3> Correct. More specifically:

"Continue supporting the time-honored usage of volatile to load and store variables that are used for shared memory, signal handling, setjmp / longjmp, or other external modifications such as special hardware support."

Which is what people want and use volatile for in the vast majority of cases. Removing that functionality would render driver, OS and embedded development a pain.

<comment><USER4> > Removing that functionality would render driver, OS and embedded development > a pain.

It would be worse than "a pain", it would actually make it _impossible_. There is no way other than "volatile" to _guarantee_ that a load or a store to/from a particular memory address happens at a particular time (AFAIK).

<comment><USER5> You should.be able to enforce it with the memory ordering supported since either C++11 or 14 (can't recall which). It wouldn't be quite as easy to write down, but might provide stronger guarantees than the volatile semantics.

<comment><USER6> How would you do something like this [1] using those?

[1] [https://godbolt.org/z/Aj5bJ8](https://godbolt.org/z/Aj5bJ8)

<comment><USER7> I would argue that this particular example is useless. A volatile variable at file scope can easily be IO memory. A volatile static at function scope? Not so easy.

<comment><USER6> It can be set by a debugger for example.

In any case, the scope of the variable was not the point of the question. The behaviour doesn't really change if you make the variable a static file-scoped one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As mentioned in the link, the first version of the proposal - [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p115...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p1152r0.html#prop) \- has a simpler summary of what the actual changes are.</comment>


Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.ithkuil.net/ <comment><USER2> I found this New Yorker article helpful in providing context: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for- beg...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners)

<comment><USER3> This is a _fascinating_ article for anyone who is considering reading it. Long but absolutely worth it.

<comment><USER4> Today I learned that George Soros learned Esperanto as his first language.

<comment><USER2> I was skeptical of that - and still am. His Wikipedia page says his father was an "Esperantist" and that he was _taught_ Esperanto, as opposed to learning it as his first language. I find that more likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a series of progressive rock songs in Ithkuil written by John Quijada, the language's creator, and sung by David Peterson, language creator for _Game of Thrones_ and several other popular TV shows, available on YouTube. The latest installment is here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAJlr5C8fPA)

<comment><USER6> Pretty good musically, too.

It was a painfully long wait for the lyrics to start, though. Half of me wanted to listen to the awesome intro, and the other half just wanted to hear some damned Ithkuil. The former half won by small margin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, I'm not sure if it was the earlier article about this, or another documentary I saw, but I think it's been established that even as different languages have different "speeds" in terms of syllables uttered, the rate of communicated meaning is roughly the same across modern languages.

I wonder if that would hold up with this language as well - if it is so concise and precise, would it just mean that people take a while to speak it, and take a while to understand it after hearing it, before responding? Or is it possible that it's more Neo-in-the-matrix like where we'd immediately understand some complex idea right when it is uttered? I believe the former would be more likely but have no idea.

<comment><USER8> I am not sure. In Turkish, for instance:

bakimliliastiramadiklarimizdanmisiniz?

It's a single word. It means: Are you one of those people who we tried to convert to take care of themselves better but failed to do so?

The language proposed reminds me in some ways to Turkish :)

<comment><USER9> I've been curious about the extent to which people commonly use some of these long theoretically possible Turkish words. I was curious about that for German, too, before learning it; my impression since then is that German compound nouns with more than three or so base nouns are rare in practice (maybe outside of a few technical contexts, like names of legislation). Germans love to give examples about a Danube steamship company captain's hat or a rhubarb-loving barbarian's bar and so on, but they probably wouldn't actually _use_ such words spontaneously. So, how does word length work out in day-to-day use of Turkish?

<comment><USER10> Anecdotally as a second language speaker of Turkish, day to day Turkish doesn't use words that long. That's mostly just one of several very similar phrases used to point out how long and creative Turkish suffixes can get. However, many words one uses in day to day conversation have two or three suffixes tacked on. I'd say most words in a sentence have at least one suffix. Formal written Turkish you might find in a newspaper article discussing the latest political developments uses words with even more abstract suffixes. Such formal writing also uses long winded sentences which would be considered run-on in English and could occasionally be translated into a whole paragraph. It's a fascinating language!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised no one yet has compared Ithkuil to Babel-17:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17)

In the story, it's described as a language which forces clear thought, while secretly also forcing a change of beliefs.

</comment><comment><USER12> At first I thought it seemed like the kind of language machines will invent to communicate with each other.

But then I realized it's main features aren't clarity and precision. But instead it's a just another way of mapping human mental models to encoders and decoders. Speech and script on to ears and mouths and eyes.

Machines will have fundentally different mental models of meaning and also be able to create any encoder decoder pair to suit any range of sensors and actuators.

Machines could have a language in light, 3d printed objects could be scripts. A sculpture could literally be art and treatise at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER13> 'Concise and precise' seems the be the goal of this language. Like assembly language. It doesn't seem useful for mere humans. I would prefer playfulness and ambiguity.

<comment><USER14> I think precision is necessary if you expect to use the language to invoke conclusions or as a basis for inference.

Ambiguity in this context means you can derive some information but not as much as if it were precise.

"The weather is stormy" doesn't give you information about whether you need snowshoes or rainboots.

<comment><USER9> An interesting problem is that constructed languages that avoid _syntactic_ ambiguity by having a formal grammar with no unambiguous parsing (like Lojban and, I think, Ithkuil) can still have _semantic_ ambiguity. In Lojban there is never a syntactic ambiguity about what the asserted relationship between concepts is, but the language community readily admits that the underlying concepts themselves still contain cultural and other ambiguities, in terms of whether given language users would _agree_ to apply those concepts to particular things, situations, or people.

It's very possible that conlangs like Lojban and Ithkuil still contain concepts about storms that don't require a speaker to indicate what kind of precipitation the storm produced.

<comment><USER15> I'm by no means a Lojban expert, but some fiddling with [http://jbovlaste.lojban.org](http://jbovlaste.lojban.org) leads me to "vilti'a" for "storm", a combination of "tcima" (x1 is weather/a meteorological phenomenon [at place x2]) and "vlile" (x1 is violent/in a state of violence). You can then further refine this, e.g. by adding "lindi" (x1 is a lightning/electical arc) to get "lidvilti'a" for a thunderstorm [at place x2].

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like Toki Pona more.

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

Toki pona is another constructed language, but it is focused in minimalism and being easy to learn. Despite the minimalism you can express many things with it.

I would not use it for technological things though, since technological concepts require to start being creative with neologisms that can be hard to get.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very cool idea, and impressively well-thought-out. I have long toyed with the idea of a universal 'concept language' wherein all concepts can expressed as one of a set of "root" concepts that has had a chain of generic "transformations" applied to it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Off topic: I used to know a guy named Ithkuil. It's not a common name in North America, but it is definitely a personal name. I know how strange it is when you find a random software project. Send after you. There are at least a couple named "Igor" out there.

<comment><USER19> Are you sure they weren't actually named after the language? I have been using it for gmail for many years (just because I am a fan, not connected to the language other than that).

<comment><USER18> They were a post doc in 2004 so I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, the creation of a new ultimate expressive conlang is its very deprecation.

These languages begin with the notion that if the perfect language does not exist, we must start over entirely. The very act of starting over prevents any previous works from catching on.

I wonder what study has been done so far about specific linguistic paradigms that would be comparable to study about programming language paradigms like procedural vs functional, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is anyone here familiar enough with conlangs to compare this to others (like lobjan)?

<comment><USER5> Which other ones? There're _thousands_. Even if you just consider "popular" ones, there're a few hundred, for reasonable definitions of "popular".

Very briefly, lojban was conceived as a scientific experiment and tries to re- build the structure of language from the ground up, based on logical foundations with little or no connection to natural languages; the lexicon, however, is derived algorithmically from natural languages, and there is no particular emphasis on concision. Ithkuil, on the other hand, is much more of an artistic project, which makes use of the same basic mechanisms exhibited by natural languages but takes them to extremes in the pursuit of both precision and concision, and has an a-priori vocabulary.

Lojban is generally classified as a loglang and an engelang, while Ithkuil is generally classified as an engelang and an artlang.

The next most similar conlang to Ithkuil that I know of (and purely in my opinion) would be Latejami by Rick Morneau. Latejami is designed as an interlanguage for translation, and thus doesn't care much about concision (partly because it's mostly supposed to be used by machines, not humans) but does aim to be able to accurately represent any semantic structure that exists in any natlang, and goes to great lengths to systematize its semantics in ways similar to Ithkuil.</comment></comment>


Tor Project Accuses CloudFlare of Mass Surveillance, Sabotaging Tor Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://news.softpedia.com/news/tor-project-accuses-cloudflare-of-mass-surveillance-sabotaging-tor-traffic-501035.shtml <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11151423](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11151423)

</comment><comment><USER3> At my last company, we blocked Tor wholesale. In my experience, Tor users are 1% privacy nazis and 99% nefarious actors. I have zero qualms about blocking tor. They wont see ads, they wont buy anything and chances are they are there to do something you dont want.

</comment><comment><USER4> This seems like the responsible way for CloudFlare to deal with the situation, honestly.

<comment><USER5> An often broken captcha and tracking cookies is a responsible way for them to deal with it? I suppose I shouldn't ask what the irresponsible manner to deal with it would be.

<comment><USER6> I have used Tor occasionally on a lark and ran into these CAPCHAs. There is a version which is impossible to read or answer.

Ocassionally I get the "If you're a human, click this box" version which is an absolute godsend. Without that Cloudfare was a brick wall that prevented me to go any further.</comment></comment></comment>


Demonoid Domains Go Up For Sale - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-domains-go-up-for-sale-120812/

<comment><USER2> I know piracy is always rampant and for every site taken down there will be a new popping up, but the shut down of ISOHunt, Demonoid, even the PirateBay is only offering magnet now seems to be taking a hit.

For those of who us who aren't active in the community, the sites that we used to find torrents is slowly diminishing, or at least the quality of the sites is diminishing.

<comment><USER3> isoHunt is shut down? (I don't follow this stuff much, but I saw some of the people from isoHunt at DEFCON and the website still seems to be online; I could totally be misunderstanding the situation, though.)

<comment><USER4> HaloZero could be referring to this news: [https://torrentfreak.com/isohunt- forced-to-shut-down-in-the-...](https://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-forced-to- shut-down-in-the-u-s-100522/)

<comment><USER5> That article is from 2010. ISOHunt is alive and well. You can do there right now: isohunt [dot] com

<comment><USER2> I stand corrected, I didn't know they came back up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What really sucks is that the admins of demonoid didn't release an archive with all magnet links/data like thepiratebay did.

Anyway. There are still hundreds if not thousands private trackers out there.

</comment><comment><USER7> I fear a copyright lobbyist organisation will buy the domain, relaunch it under the moniker of a torrent website and then track user information to sue people for exorbitant amounts of money that artists will never see a single cent of. It's obvious the domain is going to sell quite well, the amount of backlinks and traffic to the site alone is enough to drive the price up into double digit millions. The domain will either fall into the wrong hands or it will fall into the right ones.

</comment><comment><USER8> So how long until someone makes the first private tracker plugin for a social network? It would be some bona fide utility from these things, at least...

<comment><USER9> facebook would shut it down instantly. A "Share with your friends" app would be awesome, and a powerful tool, but it wouldn't last a minute. Likewise, Google+.

Which is another good reason for us to hope an open social web continues to grow.

<comment><USER10> Just wanted to point at a nostalgic event from 2009, when Facebook began censoring Piratebay links: [http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all- pirate-bay-links...](http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all-pirate-bay- links-090408/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How much longer will usenet be safe? I'm dreading the day...

The people that run the major subscription services must be making way more money than Demonoid ever did.

<comment><USER12> I am surprised serious pirates bother with torrents, as you say Usenet is the easy way to go, buy a subscription. Your only point of failure is if your usenet provider is a front or cooperating with the MPAA

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone have an idea how much could these domains go for or how they could be monetized legally?

<comment><USER14> The obvious way to monetize it is to take advantage of all the incoming links from when it was a big torrent site. Just fill it full of stuff and it might rank highly for lots of keywords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The h33t.com logo shows the demonoid logo now. Maybe they work together now?</comment>


Chrome Business Devices - <AUTHOR> https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/ <comment><USER2> I really like the Chrome for meetings devices.

But it wonder if I can:

1- Cast content to the device to do a presentation/show a video during a meeting without having to plug HDMI cables, etc.. like if it were a Chromecast.

2 - Can I connect this to a SIP telephony/video server directly?. Sometimes is usefult to be able to dial in into the "telephone" inside the conference room.

If the answer to both questions is yes, I bet Alphabet will be able to make a dent in Cisco and Polycom revenues next year.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Never heard of this before: [https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/catego...](https://chromebusinessdevices.withgoogle.com/products/category/professional- development-services)</comment>


Lyft's IPO Was a Success, Just Not for Investors Who Bought on Friday - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/business/dealbook/lyft-ipo-stock-price.html <comment><USER2> > Lyft's stock market debut has set up its founders, employees, early backers > and even those who scored shares in the initial public offering Thursday > night for quite a windfall.

... not really? Most of those folks are locked out for several more months and can't sell -- at which point the stock may suffer increased selling pressure, much like Snap. These folks are no more successful now than they were a week ago.

Also the IPO price was $72 -- and Lyft is selling at $69 right now, so, no, the institutions that bought the IPO are not having a windfall at present. (But now I see this article was published Friday, before today's continued decline, so I see why this made it past the fact checkers.)

I found this simple graphic a great distillation of why Lyft and Uber may be considered overvalued:

[https://i.imgur.com/z1aCZaX.png](https://i.imgur.com/z1aCZaX.png)

<comment><USER3> It's actually worse than that for RSU holding employees. The taxation event occurs on share release for RSUs, at a cost basis of the price on release. In many cases, that will be the day of the IPO, at the IPO price.

If the share price falls over the lockup period, employees end up owing tax at a share price higher than they are able to sell. Some of that is usually offset by the company withholding some of the released shares for taxes, but the current withholding rate is substantially under most engineers' marginal tax bracket. It amounts to a ~10% extra tax penalty on the share decline.

<comment><USER4> > current withholding rate is substantially under most engineers' marginal tax > bracket

RSUs are withheld at Federal bonus rates, which seemed pretty reasonable (it's 25% until your total taxable comp from an employer hits $1M in the tax year, and then it jumps to 39.6%); and California equity statutory rates, which is the second to top marginal rate, which works out right, unless you made enough to pay the mental health tax.

Although, given that state tax isn't deductible anymore, perhaps 25% isn't nearly enough at the federal level anymore?

<comment><USER5> State and Local Tax deduction is limited to $10,000. It isn't eliminated.

<comment><USER4> In the context of a windfall, limited to $10,000 is effectively eliminated; especially in the context of 25% withholding not being enough.

Realistically, since the standard deduction is way more than SALT deduction plus the maximum mortgage deduction, few people are going to end up deducting those, unless they've made a lot of charitable contributions or had a lot of medical expenses in a given year.

The analysis of 2018 tax return trends is going to be very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The stock price drop isn't exactly surprising. There are heavy losses from last year, another year of tremendous losses this year, and while growth is highly valued there is a difference between losing 5%, 50%, or 90% of revenue in a calendar year.

Snap was certainly overvalued at IPO, again heavy losses and very large revenue growth projections. Each quarter that they missed in their MAU growth and/or revenue growth the stock got hammered. It hit a low and now is rebounding to more sensible levels. If they can get their spending more under control and continue their positive revenue growth they will mature into a solid public company.

The other challenge for Lyft is that it's hard to find a comparable. For Snap you have twitter and Facebook so you can estimate the costs it takes to run the operation as well as the potential revenue on a per user basis from two publicly traded companies that have both been in the market for a while.

With Lyft what stock would you use as a comparable to better understand their cost structure at scale as well as the proper way to value their customers true LTV?

The stock is still trading well above the last private round. I would consider it entering into true bear territory if it starts trading below the last private valuation. Which is what happened to Snap.

Then that shows you that valuing a stock on future growth especially at the later stages can be quite dangerous as any misstep is magnified.

This is also challenging news for Uber really. Because it has a similar story. Great revenue growth but heavy losses. If anything coming out first was great, they get all of the press and attention. The IPO was a great success internally because they capitalized the company well and given the pop and the receding stock price they didn't leave any money on the table.

Now that they are public it's going to be about the long game. Given the heavy drop in price, you would expect this to continue for the next several quarters until after the lock up period when more shares will hit the market. They need to keep hitting their numbers with no negative surprises as well. It's not crazy to see them get adjusted down 30-50% and have the stock settle into a floor before the fundamentals of the business really take over in terms of valuation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, it's called an exit for a reason. Essentially, a team of professional financial analysis that have models and experience pricing the stocks, and a knowledgeable PR team, decide the best time and the price to dump the stock onto the market in order to maximize the returns the existing equity holders will get. As a retail investor, you're practically betting against the house here.

<comment><USER8> If things were as simple as this, you could then always short IPOs for a while, and the expected value would be positive.

<comment><USER9> Yes, and the expected value is positive. Unfortunately for us, the banks that underwrite the IPO choose who to allocate the shares to, and they would prefer to allocate them to clients that have a history of not dumping the stock and/or lending shares out for shorts.

<comment><USER10> You'd think that if the EV was positive, that no one would buy the IPO, and would instead but a few days/weeks later. Why buy before the dip?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Options, specifically put options available on Thursday. Judging by reddit, everyone and their dog wants in on that.

</comment><comment><USER12> > It serves as an important reminder that amid all the hoopla around trading > debuts, small investors wind up taking a lot of the risk.

 _Speculators_ take on a lot of the risk, whether they be small or large.

</comment><comment><USER13> Too soon. Bottom fell out on Monday. Update.[1]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/technology/lyft- stock.htm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/technology/lyft-stock.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> JPMorgan priced this like a bag of numpties. They had a range in 62 to 68, but caved to pressure and jacked the price. Early investors are fine--if they had sense, they sold some before the IPO. Same with employees. But retail got screwed, and that's a shame for Lyft's long-term prospects amongst those investors, as well as for upcoming B2C IPOs, _e.g._ Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest.

<comment><USER15> I don't understand this expectation that retail investors should get a decent profit on a stock they bought days ago. It was priced at 72, went up a bunch, and is now down less than 5% from what they offered it at. It all seems... fine?

<comment><USER14> > _I don't understand this expectation that retail investors should get a > decent profit on a stock they bought days ago_

I don't have that expectation. IPOs are risky. IPOs of massively loss-making companies' non-voting stock are riskier still.

But when two sets of investors--on institutional and one retail--bought stock within days of each other, under similar informational and macroeconomic circumstances, and one of those groups (the latter) was prohibited from buying at the price the other (the former) bought at, and a single institution is the arbiter of the price at which bucket A buys and sells, and bucket B gets screwed to the tune of 20% on a day the general markets rose, it's a reason to call out the bookrunner as a numpty. Particularly for a name, like Lyft, that will disproportionately depend on retail investors buying their stock for months to come.

<comment><USER16> Well, so? Who was holding a gun to retail investors' heads to buy on Friday? Today's sitters-out can be tomorrow's reasonably-satisfied long investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Investopedia has a good article on this: [https://www.investopedia.com/university/ipo/ipo2.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/university/ipo/ipo2.asp)

</comment><comment><USER18> Lyft is a little down. By the time Uber IPOs no one will want to touch it. Hopefully this is the end of dotcom boom II.

</comment><comment><USER19> Didn't lyft itself say they have no idea if they can get to profitability? Wouldn't it make more sense to short lyft than invest in them? Ridesharing companies have been burning through investor money, and having a VERY hard time showing any real profits on the books, and with self-driving cars, the manufacturers will become their own rideshare, and likely change the model of car ownership to one of cars on demand.

<comment><USER20> > Wouldn't it make more sense to short lyft than invest in them?

Lyft beat Uber to IPO and raised a bunch of money. If Lyft's stock tanks, Uber will get an extremely depressed IPO and raise far less money while having a far higher burn rate. This could possibly cause Uber to collapse before Lyft and leave Lyft as the remaining big player in the space.

In short, the market is likely to remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

<comment><USER21> Lyft's stock tanking is good for Lyft... what a doozy. As an Uber employee I'm glad that's the case, it'll help prevent it from tanking :)

<comment><USER20> > Lyft's stock tanking is good for Lyft... what a doozy.

It's not "good". It's "less bad".

And, the really interesting question is if Uber implodes and leaves the field to Lyft, can Lyft actually take advantage of that? That's not at all clear, either.

So, it may simply be that Uber leaves a bigger impact crater before Lyft does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> At this point, every single person who bought Lyft in the last two days is underwater. The only ones who are still above water are the pre-IPO investors and I wonder what their lock-up agreements are. In no way can this be called a success for anyone, it's a terrible IPO.

<comment><USER23> The purpose of the IPO is to fund the company.

Many companies have been railroaded by the banks to price their IPO shares so conservatively that they make relatively little money on the IPO. It may be dwarfed by the amount the banks and investors make in a few days.

Taking the long term view, maybe this IPO is just fine. The company gets funds, they grow their business and the stock will rise well over time.

<comment><USER14> > _The purpose of the IPO is to fund the company_

IPOs traditionally had four purposes:

(1) Introduce a company's securities to public-market investors;

(2) Price said securities;

(3) Let existing investors sell; _and_

(4) Raise money for the company.

> _Taking the long term view, maybe this IPO is just fine_

Analysts overstate the importance of IPO dynamics. Facebook had a terrible IPO and. Snap had a great first day [1]. That said, burning an entire class of investors (retail) on day one, particularly for a brand like Lyft, isn't a great show. It's also reasonable to call out the bookrunner, JPMorgan, as a bad choice for future IPOs.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/snapchat-snap-open- trading-p...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/02/snapchat-snap-open-trading- price-stock-ipo-first-day.html)

<comment><USER12> If the retail investors don't like the price, they are not obligated to buy. Caveat emptor. They wanted to make a quick buck, and I guess that's fine. It's nice to want things. I feel precisely zero pity for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Instantly burning through invested money seems pretty on-brand for Lyft.

</comment><comment><USER25> No idea why anyone would hold at least until the lockup period expires.

</comment><comment><USER26> majority of the investment industry is about pump and dump during next round. as per usual, the unsuspecting retail investors driven by 'advisors' end up holding the bag. what else is new?

<comment><USER27> Add to that, that many/most of the "advisors" work for the same institutions that are making tons on the IPO.</comment></comment>


If you've lost smell or taste sense, you could be hidden carrier of Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-symptoms-loss-of-smell-taste-covid-19-anosmia-hyposmia-2020-3 <comment><USER2> If this is true, and I have anecdotal confirmation that it is, then this should be broadcast to the world as rapidly as possible, through every possible medium. A cheap, available self-test that identifies even a fraction of asymptomatic carriers is a huge win.

</comment><comment><USER3> I experience this when I have the flu.</comment>


Sun's JavaFX Mobile smartphone, the Neo 1973 (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20090209064119/http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/when_not_where <comment><USER2> Whoa, hold up - that's OpenMoko's hardware ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko)), the Neo1973. It predates Android, and was a serious attempt to use commodity free software (primarily Linux, GNU, and various GNOME components, I believe) to do a fully open source smartphone. Bear in mind this was in the latter days of things like Symbian, Blackberry, and Palm Treo, so it was pretty seriously ahead of its time. There's been a long line of similar attempts by various industry actors since.

I have one in my collection somewhere; I even tried to use it a couple of times as a daily driver, but sadly, the project was just too alpha at the time for that.

Certainly interesting that Sun was trying to use it (as relatively open hardware, from a hacker-friendly OSS project, it's was well suited to a skunkworks like that) for their JavaFX work, but it certainly wasn't their own "JavaFX Mobile smartphone".

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm actually a little excited to see where JavaFX goes today. Gluon just announced substrate [0] which uses Graal to turn JavaFX apps into native binaries.

[0] [https://github.com/gluonhq/substrate](https://github.com/gluonhq/substrate)

<comment><USER4> Presumably that would enable iOS as a target platform, which I presume cannot be done today on account of the no-JIT rule. I don't imagine it would have that much impact on desktop though, beyond better startup times and perhaps reduced memory consumption.

<comment><USER5> Not presumably, it does. They are shipping it. Have been shipping it since at least last year. Ahead of Time compilation is how they get around the no-JIT rule.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Throughout the text (laying out the Java vision), the user is described as a passive "consumer" who will be "reached", "targeted" and generally have their experience controlled by advertisers, device manufacturers, content owners and service operators. With nobody considering the user's perspective, it's no wonder the Java UX turned out the way it did.

</comment><comment><USER7> I truly wish this had gone on to become a viable consumer product - and the Creative Labs Zii Egg, too. PlaszmaOS, the Linux-based OS which ran the Zii Egg, was pretty darn efficient for a phone .. and it seemed to me that it came pretty close to being ready for market. I truly wonder why Creative Labs abandoned the project - they could have been a market leader in place of Android.

Some day I'll dig these devices out and have a look at them. Strange to realise how far we've come, yet what could have been much, much better if only CL and OpenMoko had the balls to follow through...

</comment><comment><USER8> What's little Jonathan up to these days? I heard he's involved in a health startup called CareZone, but I've heard very little about it.</comment>


Advanced CIA firmware has been infecting Wi-Fi routers for years - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/06/advanced-cia-firmware-turns-home-routers-into-covert-listening-posts/ <comment><USER2> This article gives the manufacturers involved:

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/15/15812216/cherryblossom- ci...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/15/15812216/cherryblossom-cia-router- hack-surveillance-dlink-linksys-belkin)

"Asus, Belkin, Buffalo, Dell, DLink, Linksys, Motorola, Netgear, Senao, and US Robotics"

I use a TP-Link router, so I guess my router can be hacked by the Chinese govt rather than the US.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Barring guidance from the Sponsor with regards to particular devices of interest, Cherry Blossom has attempted to support wireless network devices that are ubiquitous and readily available (at least in the US)."

_in the US_

</comment><comment><USER4> Just think about all these routers and modems, being handed out by pre- configured the operators and that are never updated or patched.

|Able to search for people by their VoIP number.

That is just evil.

Uch.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's the best router software I should be running for home use? Business use?

<comment><USER6> Maybe pfSense for your router, with a separate wireless access point.

<comment><USER7> or [https://opnsense.org/](https://opnsense.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> your tax dollars at work.</comment>


State Department Cables Warned of Safety Issues at Wuhan Lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ <comment><USER2> The mad rush to shout down the Wuhan Bio Lab escape theory was always so odd to me. It was mentioned as a possibility and then there was a sudden deluge of headlines proclaiming the idea was patently ridiculous, etc.

But if you actually read the articles their reasoning was basically that coronaviruses like Covid-19 already exist in wild bat populations. One even said that the virus wasn't deadly enough to be a bioweapon, which is obviously nonsense and indicates a significant amount of grasping and/or lack of imagination.

The fact is that numerous pathogens have escaped biological research facilities in the past, including from Chinese facilities in the past 15 years.

Maybe Occam's razor tells us that the coronavirus originated from the wild, but maybe Occam's razor is on the side of the escape theory. It's not clear right now. What is clear is that there is a lot of smoke.

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding is that there has been literally no evidence to suggest that covid-19 is anything other than a particularly virulent and dangerous zoonotic disease, which shouldn't be surprising given the originating environment.

This sounds very much to me like "we want to blame China for creating this"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://archive.is/N2Z1K](http://archive.is/N2Z1K)</comment>


EU proposal to stop terrorist sites even more ridiculous than it sounds - Suraj-Sun http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/proposed-eu-plan-to-stop-terrorist-sites-even-more-ridiculous-than-thought/

<comment><AUTHOR> "Internet companies must allow only real, common names."

"Social media companies must allow only real pictures of users."

"a system [to monitor Internet activity]...obligatory for browser or operating systems

That sounds so ridiculous, I can hardly come up with a good response for it. Is that what they consider "food for thought"?</comment>


Socket.io benchmarking - how many messages can you send per second? - <AUTHOR> http://drewww.github.com/socket.io-benchmarking/

<comment><USER2> Nice initial analysis! I would love to see this run using one of the popular node clustering modules with multiple CPU cores, and also the other socket.io connection types.

9k messages/second on a single 3.3ghz VM with 1,000 connections seems quite manageable and isn't out of line with other systems I've seen that are written in Java, .NET, C++. 100ms is an eternity to wait for a response, however. That's concerning. Especially since that is the case at low message rates. I wonder if that is a function of how the client is acknowledging the received data, rather than the actual time the server is taking to send it back.

What was the limiting factor on the server for this test? I've seen instances where the VM network drivers get in the way in this scenario. Or, you could also be saturating the network bandwidth to the VM if it's a 100mbit interface. Or maybe it's just simply CPU limited in user time by socket.IO...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is obviously not super precise, but the CPU pegs (load average 1.0, 100% usage) once we get above ~9k messages/second. I don't know how much overhead there is on socket in terms of bandwidth, but some back of the envelope math makes it seem like we're well below network bandwidth on a 100mbit interface. My instinct is that (per rauchg's comment above) that if those kinds of improvements can be made, then we're not yet butting up against a bandwidth issue yet.

As for comparing to other systems, I think we're certainly at the same order of magnitude, but some rough tests a friend of mine ran made it seem like a java server/client pair could send about 4 times as many packets per second. But that's a somewhat unfair comparison - socket.io offers a lot more than simply raw packet transmission and that additional abstraction is going to come at a performance cost. But I think being on the same order of magnitude as a really low level approach like that is a good place to be at this level of maturity of the technology.

<comment><USER2> When I say it compares in performance to other systems I mean other high level more-than-a-socket systems like XMPP servers, which I spent a lot of years benchmarking and optimizing. Of course to-the-metal binary packet systems will be much faster as you're doing the buffer management and choosing your copies wisely.

It would be super-awesome to see a profile of node.js when you run this test to see where the CPU is going. Is it something low level like the string parsing, buffer copying, socket writing, or maybe something higher level like some inefficient algorithm somewhere. As I read below that socket.io is focusing on performance now, I guess we'll know soon. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to know too, but I haven't had much luck getting profiling to work super well with node. I think I mostly just don't know what I'm doing and someone who did could answer this pretty quickly, but I haven't been particularly successful and figuring out exactly how that cpu time is being spent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Socket.IO author here. You might be pleased to hear as well that our focus on the next few releases is heavy on performance and making load balancing trivial.

We recently made the Socket.IO parser 300% faster. The new underlying websocket server is extremely fast (check the benchmarks at <https://github.com/learnboost/websocket.io/>), and optimizations to long- polling are coming as well.

<comment><USER4> I've been using websocket.io and I must say, refactoring the websocket server code out of socket.io was a great decision. There isn't really any clean, low- level websocket implementations for node that worked anymore after recent versions of Chrome and Firefox. Websocket.io is really clean, small, and works in all browsers.

Socket.io has a lot of bloat that isn't required if all you need is a simple Websocket communications. Please do not add long-polling to websocket.io, it's the wrong place to do that type of abstraction.

<comment><USER5> Brilliant - didn't know websocket.io had been broken out. I was patiently waiting for @miksago to update <https://github.com/miksago/node-websocket- server> however it had become clear this was a very low priority for him (fair enough).</comment></comment></comment>


Concurrency with Python: Threads and Locks - <AUTHOR> https://bytes.yingw787.com/posts/2019/01/12/concurrency_with_python_threads_and_locks/ <comment><USER2> Having multiple asyncio loops and multiple threads do not mix well.

Too bad, because you want to isolate things sometime.

<comment><USER3> It does after 3.5.3 and as long as you pop your loop after the thread has started.

<comment><USER2> In theory, yes it works in 3.7+

In practice, no

Can I ask you one example of what you mean? I want 2 separate event loop for 2 separate threads

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Counter example has a bug -- it doesn't join the threads before printing Counter.count. this could partially explain the low answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi aaron_m04, I have posted a correction to the post and given you credit. Please let me know if I have made any more mistakes, I don't want to mislead any more readers. Thanks very much for your time!

<comment><USER4> Great. Thanks for giving me credit and for updating this. Good work, by the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Global lock much?

<comment><USER6> You can use threads, locks, and concurrency usefully even if you have a GIL.

<comment><USER7> Sadly, that's not practically possible.

Yes, you can use multiple processes to mitigate some of the problems, but you will create other problems (for example: you now have to serialize all the objects through a message pipeline, which is expensive, or you have to use shared memory, which also requires copy operations, unless you want to write your entire code in a low-level kind of way but in that case, you might as well use a different language like C). In an existing system, moving everything to a different process can be a cumbersome experience.

What you really want is multicore support with a garbage collector that is concurrent and a runtime that doesn't have a global lock. Sadly, few environments support this. Erlang comes to mind, but also doesn't support structural sharing. Ocaml is working on multicore support [1]. GoLang, Haskell and Java seem your best choice for GC+multicore.

[1] [https://github.com/ocamllabs/ocaml- multicore](https://github.com/ocamllabs/ocaml-multicore)

<comment><USER8> > Sadly, that's not practically possible.

Why? With cpython there are plenty of cases where parallelism is possible with threads because the GIL is released (for instance most IO operations and many C based number crunching operations), making threads and locks useful.

<comment><USER9> So technically if you wrote most of your number-crunching code as a C module for python, then you could use threads...

Can't you see a problem here?

<comment><USER10> Lots of problems are merely I/O related, which can be solved just fine with Python threads. As for number crunching (let's assume that means CPU intensive tasks), you can always still resort to multiprocessing (which can also be combined with multithreading, I fail to see why such paradigms cannot be combined).

<comment><USER9> Well, io-related problems can be solved even better by using gevent.

The io-related problems I had with paramiko, on the other hand - last time I checked could neither be solved with threads or gevent.

So that's a weak point to be made anyway.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Top Real Estate Investing Blogs for 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://www.realtyshares.com/blog/top-real-estate-investing-blogs/ <comment><AUTHOR> As far as I can tell, this is the most comprehensive list out there.</comment>


Ask HN: Data Center Hardware - Start Up Idea - <AUTHOR>

I don't roam around data centers much anymore, but one thing I recall from the emergancy visits is a "Crash Cart."  Basically a keyboard, mouse and monitor on a card that you push down the row, plugin and off you go.
Configuring a server now I've got a monitor and keyboard plugged into it, but I'll have to move it soon and I started thinking about what a pain in the rear it is to move hardware around when you need to see what's going on with a headless server.
The idea:
Imagine a laptop.  Now instead of ports that you plug stuff into, imagine retractable cables in the back.
A VGA, DVI, PS2 (maybe?) and USB cables that you plug into a server and the laptop essentially becomes the monitor, keyboard and mouse.  All running off a battery.
Of course there are other methods to manage this type of situation from a DRAC card to just a normal ethernet port and a VNC client, but from a pure hardware standpoint, I imagine this might be very useful to some data centers.
What do you think of the idea?
If you build it... give me one.  :) <comment><USER2> All of the data centers I have worked in or have visited have had a KVM in each rack or cluster of racks. Many servers even come with a IP based KVM built into them ...HP does this for sure. It is a good idea but I think there are other products or methods that would reduce your target market.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah, the only viable use for an iPad.

Except of course you can't write software for the iPad without spending money so screw it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would imagine most serious data centers have either rack-mounted KVM's (the one that fits in a 1U) or some IP KVM.

</comment><comment><USER5> The majority of data centers that I visited generally does had a 1U KVM in the rack.</comment>


Interview Jerry Pournelle Greg Benford and Larry Niven (2013) - em-bee https://play.acast.com/s/starshipsofa/starshipechoes21stapril2013interviewjerrypournellegregbenfordandlarryniven <comment> em-bee i discovered this interview with some of the grand masters of science fiction.

it is endearing to hear them talk about their motivations to become writers, how they look at technology, what they struggled with and how they helped each other and collaborated.

skip the movie you were planning to watch tonight. this is the evening entertainment that will make your day!</comment>


Bruce Schneier TED talk: The security mirage - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier.html

<comment><AUTHOR> One-sentence summary of this 20-minute video: people are hopelessly bad at making security decisions because we respond to the feeling of security rather than the reality.

</comment><comment><USER2> A nice quote from the video: "If it's in the news, don't worry about it"</comment>


Finding the Blue Ocean of Life: Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> https://moadkid.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/finding-the-blue-ocean-of-life/

<comment><USER2> Hey people, this is Aman(Author). I am a budding entrepreneur and with this post, I have tried to answer the question "Why to startup?"</comment>


Some useful math cheat sheets - <AUTHOR> http://www.glump.net/content/abstract_algebra_cheat

<comment><AUTHOR> This wasn't supposed to be the algebra cheat sheet - this was supposed to be the index.

Sorry - _mea culpa_ \- here's what I intended:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346092>

</comment><comment><USER2> Also you could put in your title, that it's a pdf file

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - sorry - not been awake today. Too late to edit now, and it was never intended to be the PDF.

Again - apologies.</comment></comment>