Turkey tries to have a German comedian locked up–in Germany - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21696903-german-satire-and-turkeys-thin-skinned-president-turkey-tries-have-german-comedian-locked <comment><USER2> It's quite sad that we still have "Lèse-majesté" and blasphemy laws in Germany in the 21st century :(

This case has created quite a media hype in Germany though, with comedians trying to top each other in violating this law now -- not sure if that's what Erdogan intended... "Nichtlustig" for example: [https://www.facebook.com/NICHTLUSTIG/photos/a.186737799993.1...](https://www.facebook.com/NICHTLUSTIG/photos/a.186737799993.155561.131582549993/10154258375649994/?type=1&theater)

<comment><USER3> The other artists are no violating the law though. In making fun of Erdogan trying to act against Böhmermann they are engaging in satire, criticism by exaggeration, which is wholly different and completely legal.

<comment><USER2> Well maybe they don't go exactly that far, although the Nichtlustig drawing seems to be at a similar level. Dieter Hallervorden calls him a terrorist (ok, that's hardly an insult given his treatment of the Kurds), Sonneborn "the crazy guy from the Bosporus" (and he is looking forward to see the Böhmermann's specific allegations investigated in detail by the German justice system). Mathias Döpfner (a comedian in a very special sense) writes "Ich möchte mich, Herr Böhmermann, vorsichtshalber allen Ihren Formulierungen und Schmähungen inhaltlich voll und ganz anschließen und sie mir in jeder juristischen Form zu eigen machen" (not sure how to translate this correctly.... "I fully agree and with all your insults and I would like to make them my own words in a judicial sense")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> tl;dr: That article is severely misrepresenting various realities.

German here:

The dude didn't do satire. He straight-up went on a tirade of insults against Erdogan in a way that contained literally zero satire (i.e. criticism by exaggeration), and was found funny by approximately nobody.

He even declared he knew that what he was doing is illegal but he isn't actually doing it and only reading the "poem" as an "example".

It is obvious to basically everyone here that what he did was roughly equivalent to saying:

"I know it is illegal to call for all people with black skin to be murdered, for example with a speech that would roughly go like this: <insert 5 minutes of hate speech calling for the aforementioned> But what i did is different, see, since this is only an _example_!"

There are very few germans who're actually opposed to having Böhmermann be hit with the full legal force, since:

Our very first law states that the human dignity shall be inviolable. This means insulting someone without actually engaging in satire can be countered with a law suit, usually punishable with fines. Insulting a high-ranking foreigner representing their nation elevates the punishment to possibly a few years of jail, since suddenly that person is playing with the fate of the rest of Germany while also violating a person's dignity.

<comment><USER2> Well I am German too, and I am quite opposed. I think Böhmermann did a good job of creating a public discussion about our ancient Lèse-majesté law that should be finally abolished (together with similar blasphemy laws that somehow survived to this day). Also, Erdogan basically called for this by his ridiculous reaction to the Extra3 video.

P.S. Also, what exactly is the difference between the content of the article and your statement except for your added sentiment?

<comment><USER3> I never said there aren't people who do oppose it. :)

As for that law: Böhmermann could still be sued without it, just not have to worry about a jail sentence. And frankly, i prefer that over having Erdogan express his anger towards Germany differently, which is the whole reason this law exists.

<comment><USER4> If Erdogan is going to express his anger towards Germany in any way beyond a strongly worded protest, it will backfire. Let him have his hissy fit and ignore him.

<comment><USER3> Do you think it is fair and just that only others should suffer the consequences of Böhmermann's inability to control himself?

<comment> j-pb Yes. Why should Germany suffer for Erdogan's inability to control himself?

<comment><USER3> Holy shit, what a dishonest argument.

If you disagree with the premise of my question and think i asked the same question, then it's fine for you to state that and have a dialogue on that point.

However pretending to answer my question, yet actually answering a completely different question is just very dishonest.

<comment> j-pb You just don't want to admit that you side with the position that is backed by authority.

If Erdogan hadn't acted like a huge dick there wouldn't have been a need to insult him.

So why should Germany censor itself just because Erdogan is a whiny little cunt?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recently, on a related thread, I said "Erdogan playing to the Turkish crowd, he knows that he's not going to get that guy cencored or anything in Germany", sort of (1). Now if he succeeds at getting him processed, I'll indeed be very surprised, and sad for Germany. I hope Germans won't let such a humiliating thing happen.

(1) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11396532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11396532)

</comment><comment><USER6> German comedian?

Is that the punchline?

<comment><USER2> Did you know the Germans tried to develop a weaponized super-joke in WWII that would make enemy soldiers laugh to dead?

<comment><USER2> p.s. Here is the corresponding documentary: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdWGlJrG6sQ&list=RDsdWGlJrG6...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdWGlJrG6sQ&list=RDsdWGlJrG6sQ#t=329)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's sad that the importance of free speech was understood by Socrates and Plato 2,400 years ago, but is still not grasped by so-called "free societies" like Germany.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does Turkey realise they have basically no hope of joining the EU now? (Not just because of this incident, but all the similar incidents over recent years).

<comment><USER9> Well, if they voted out Erdogan that would help.

<comment><USER8> It wasn't much better before him.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did you turn your PhD into a startup? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious to learn more about folks who were able to build companies around their research ideas. Did you have know going into your doctoral studies that there may be commercial applications or discover it along the way. Also curious if there any interesting and complex problems where research applications could translate into business opportunities. <comment><USER2> Most PhDs shouldn't, or can't, be a startup.

If they could, something would be terribly wrong: Something that could be done by two cofounders in the proverbial garage, and paid for by commercial industry, was instead consuming valuable research funding. A PhD, like any form of research, prioritises in discovering the unknown and expanding what we know, rather than seeking a commercial goal. (The exception is projects that "win the lottery": they went digging somewhere that's useful research but commercially unpromising, and stumbled on something directly monetisable. This is the case for most biotech, but it is - by definition - rare.)

But the _people_ who do PhDs...that's a different matter. By the time you're eligible to do research, you've hauled yourself to the frontier of your chosen field, and fully grokked everything humanity knows so far about your topic. This kind of deep expertise can often pay off in solving an adjacent commercial goal.

Take my history: I did my PhD in usable programming systems. The actual day- to-day work (controlled experiments, inventing and analysing imaginary hardware extension, writing papers) wasn't even a little bit commercially relevant. But the experience, the surrounding reading, the techniques, and the knowledge I picked up from colleagues really set me up for when I started my startup.

These days, I head up [https://anvil.works](https://anvil.works), making a programming environment for the web that doesn't suck (along with a cofounder who did his PhD a few offices down, in human-computer interaction). Would Anvil make a good research topic? Hell, no - it's recycling good ideas from the last 20+ years. Do our research experiences make us _really_ well positioned to solve this problem? Absolutely.

</comment><comment><USER3> I originally did a PhD in chemistry - spent loooooots of time organizing papers, research, files, etc... hated using platforms like Mendeley and many other inefficient file / knowledge management systems. Also extracting the information into one space and working with the knowledge was super clunky...

When I met my co-founder, he was actually already working on a solution for this. Obviously, we vibed immediately We're now working on a reading tool that allows you to build a knowledge base directly from your reading. The tool already supports importing and reading of pdf, epub, and capturing webpages. The tool has an integrated reader that allows you to do a whole bunch of stuff, including incremental reading and creating flashcards directly from annotations Various other features are in there and we have a long list of features coming up. We also have a native Android app coming out in the near future

This is what we're building: [https://getpolarized.io](https://getpolarized.io) Would love to hear your feedback. We're actually very close to a major release. if you're curious, you can play around with the beta of that release here: [https://beta.getpolarized.io](https://beta.getpolarized.io) (you'll need an account to do so)

Not quite a startup in the chem space, but 100% a problem that I encountered every day and I'm sure many other PhDs, software engineers, and other knowledge workers encounter :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm selling a product that I built as a spin-off from my work towards an MSc.

I originally built a product for data collection in order to answer my research questions, and realized that other people probably had the same problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> how did you go from hey this might a common problem to let's build product?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd also be really interested to hear if anyone turned a startup into a PhD.

<comment><AUTHOR> So I actually did that. I transitioned in applied AI research about four years ago (came from an creative writing background and did a variety of other things spanning technical project management, business analysis and data analytics). Over the past three years worked at two different AI startup where I lead most of the deeplearning research.

I got to work on interesting problems like language modelling, neural program induction, question answering / information retrieval, and conversation AI in the context of enterprise problems. Found the problem space incredibly fascinating and the fundamental research often lacking. I was able to get in a funded AI phd program this year. Many of the NLP and deeplearning challenges we faced in both startups have become the inspiration for my phd work (exploring augmenting deeplearning methods with external knowledge graphs for causal reasoning over text).

<comment><USER6> Current graduate student here who would be absolutely thrilled to hear more about your story. What sort of creative writing did you do? What was your rationale for leaving industry?

I went straight from undergrad to grad school, because 1) I had the privilege/opportunity of doing so and 2) I felt if I started collecting money in tech, I wouldn't be motivated to return to academia as I'd probably just make do with exploring and learning in my free time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish could done it your way. My journey was rather haphazard but one I'm proud of none the less. Sorry for the confusion, I studied creative writing in college. I initially gained most of my tech skill volunteering to build websites for non-profits and self study and eventually got a masters degree. Most of my job came from being able to sit at the intersection of business and technical teams since I was communicate relatively well about technical to non-technical audiences.

Working with applied AI problems also showed many of the limitations of the current research. I felt there was opportunities to move the needle on fundamental research through applying to more complex problems.

As for leaving industry, it a mixture of motivations. Most my of experience in AI is through applied work and self learning. I really wanted to build a strong theoretical foundation so I could have to ability to solve more complex problems that I saw in our startups. The second was intellectual curiosity and passion. I'm fascinated by words, NLP and AI. I love storytelling and find it fascinating that our experiences both socially and with reality are mediated through language. In many ways working on NLP and AI has made think deeply about how we use language to communicate and be humans. Finally, I'm I kind lucked in opportunities to do deep learning research without a phd and formal training. This really isn't replicable outside of the startup space as most ML/AI research requires a phd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spark would be a good example</comment>


Astonishing OS X bug lets anyone log into a High Sierra machine - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/28/astonishing-os-x-bug-lets-anyone-log-into-a-high-sierra-machine/ <comment><USER2> Original thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676)

<comment><USER3> That's a thread for Sierra, this thread is for High Sierra.

<comment><USER4> No, it's just inaccurately titled. It only works for High Sierra

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dupe. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676)

</comment><comment><USER6> Who is going to bet some future Mr. Robot episode would feature it?

</comment><comment><USER7> Original thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15800676)</comment>


Don't Worry About Deepfakes. Worry About Why People Fall for Them - <AUTHOR> https://undark.org/2018/12/13/how-worried-should-we-be-about-deepfakes/ <comment><USER3> I think this misses the point. Deep fakes will simply make all video and audio evidence subject to significant doubt. We simply lose a whole body of media as evidence that most people will accept - the provenance will become all important.

Like Mattress reviews - all video and audio will become an evidential dead zone.

<comment><USER4> Sign all content and post pubkey in as many public records as possible - <USER2> that help?

<comment><USER5> Only if you trust the owner of the signing key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm most worried when we can't evaluate the footage in question. Currently, the media is advocating regime change in Saudia Arabia on the basis on a video that has allegedly been reviewed by the CIA (and journalists?) but the American people are not allowed to see this film.

Meanwhile, we are being blasted with propaganda by the same folks (Vox, Buzzfeed, et al) that says "Don't believe something is true just because you see it on video". Does anyone else see the contradiction?

Regime change is a serious and violent consequence for a video provided by an ally with a strong motive to have MBS removed, and no one is questioning whether this could be the "killer app" use case of this technology? I think it could be, but there is no way of knowing unless we see the footage. The alternative is to trust the CIA.

<comment><USER7> The Saudis themselves aren't claiming they didn't kill Khashoggi, only that MBS was unaware of it. This boils down to semantics, doesn't it? I'd be a lot more concerned if they took a position that this was a total farce. They haven't. Why do you think some kind of fake video or audio was needed then to convince world leaders that this has crossed a line?

Also, how are the collective of regular people at all qualified to verify such a video? There are people whose job it is to do this kind of thing and if we think that is a broken system, that's another issue altogether.

<comment><USER8> > This boils down to semantics, doesn't it?

No, the CIA position that MBS knew about and ordered the murder and that it was not a rogue operation does not differ only by "semantics" (except in the sense that every difference in meaning, even the mostvsubstantive, is "semantic") from the "rogue operation" cover story that the KSA retreated to after their "he visited and left the consulate with no problem, if something happened it had nothing to do with us" story failed and then the "okay, he was killed in our embassy, but it was not murder, just a fight that he started" story also failed.

> I'd be a lot more concerned if they took a position that this was a total > farce.

They did take that position until they realized that it wasn't working.

<comment><USER7> So are you saying they changed their story to fit a false narrative? If so why would they do that?

Also, if you are saying it was a rogue operation, executed by Saudis, wouldn't the Saudis still hold some responsibility?

If say, US special forces or the CIA killed a journalist critical of the US against the intent of the commander in chief, someone still is going to have hell to pay.

<comment><USER8> > So are you saying they changed their story to fit a false narrative?

They changed their story from one false narrative (that exculpated them from any connection) through a series of others (which admitted slightly more connection in each, but in all cases carefully denied a direct role for the crown prince.)

> If so why would they do that?

The initial lie was to deflect any blame. The subsequent revisions were due to the fact that the initial lie was transparently false, so everyone assumed the worse, so they continued to search for a lie which would both be accepted and at least mitigate the blame the regime was getting.

> Also, if you are saying it was a rogue operation

I'm not saying that, the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is. That's the story they've retreated to, all previous exculpatory stories having failed.

> If say, US special forces or the CIA killed a journalist critical of the US > against the intent of the commander in chief, someone still is going to have > hell to pay.

Since MBS is in the middle of massive purges to consolidate his absolute control under the cover of an anticorruption campaign, having the excuse of a rogue operation to _also_ use in those purges isn't exactly inconvenient. But, yes, the "rogue operation" story does naturally bring some blame onto the government of the Kingdom, which is why it was the third story, and not the first.

<comment><USER7> I am not assuming you have an opinion or knowledge on this but you seem more informed than I am. If the Saudis are retreating to this story, what is the theory on what may have really happened? This back and forth, I thought, stemmed from the idea that the recording is or could have been faked (unclear by who, Turkey?), it sounds like, from what you said above, the tape doesn't matter except that it caused Saudi Arabia to change its story. If it did, it sounds like it was a good thing since it made them retreat from as you said, a transparently false lie.

At this point I'm not sure what my point is any more. Sorry :)

<comment><USER8> > the Saudis are retreating to this story, what is the theory on what may have > really happened?

The dominant one (and what the CIA has reportedly concluded) is that the Crown Prince (the effective ruler of the Kingdom) ordered the murder; the precise motivation isn't (AFAIK) clear; Kashoggi was a critic of the regime with a significant media impact, but what in particular led to the killing is murky, but MBS isn't running a warm fuzzy regime that is generally respectful of human rights and individual liberty, so while them killing a dissident Saudi journalist abroad is unusual, it's not much outside of their normal patterns; murdering dissidents (or executing them without an opportunity for presenting a defense) isn't new, nor is surveillance and harassment of Saudi dissidents abroad.

> This back and forth, I thought, stemmed from the idea that the recording is > or could have been faked (unclear by who, Turkey?)

Yes, and that was the initial Saudi claim when Turkey claimed to have tape. Apparently, some of Saudi Arabia's defenders haven't caught up with the new regime story, which no longer denies anything that is believed based on the tape alone, but only the attribution of the acts captured in the tape to the command of the leadership rather than rogue elements, which (AFAIK) is not at all rooted in the tape content itself.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for all this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Moon landing was fake and climate change is a hoax.

You don't need deepfakes to trick people. Some people are just wired to believe in conspiracy theories.

<comment><USER10> That's true. People see stock footage from After Effects in a Youtube video or a lens flare or a bad Maya model and believe it's credible evidence of ghosts or UFOs or politicians secretly revealing themselves to be reptilians. Not a lot of people actually need video to be convincing to be convinced by it - bias is self sustaining.

<comment><USER9> 15 years ago I worked with a computer programmer who believed the Moonlanding was fake.

Join any discussion on climate change in the Wall Street Journal and you'll see a large number of people who believe it's also fake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a hard time understanding how deepfake change the game : we could already use doubles/actors and trick footage if we wanted to forge a video.

We might become more critical of videos but footage from an untrusted source has never been reliable.

</comment><comment><USER12> Was Saddam's WMD coverage from CNN a Deepfake? I'm curious as to how people would classify this.

<comment><USER13> So, about 5 thousand chemical ammunition that were found there are not WMD?

<comment><USER12> These were supposedly accounted for before we went, they're not "The WMD" we went looking for. These stories are written in a manner to confuse and mislead. I'm still confused, anyhow, the latest is below

[https://theintercept.com/2015/04/10/twelve-years-later-u- s-m...](https://theintercept.com/2015/04/10/twelve-years-later-u-s-media- still-cant-get-iraqi-wmd-story-right/)

<comment><USER13> No, they weren't accounted since US Army found them in all the strange places.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hover plugin for jquery - <AUTHOR> http://jupiterjs.com/news/delegate-able-hover-events-for-jquery

<comment><USER2> Can we have some explanation for why it's 1.4.3 only, as in, what's new in it that the plugin requires?

Thanks.</comment>


Ask HN: Could someone, please, review the copy of my website? - <AUTHOR>

I am launching a product in the international market, but I am brazilian and not fluent in English.
Some people already gave me feedback that my copy doesn't sound professional due to some "subtle grammar mistakes". It is a relative small splash page, could someone be kind enough to voluntary to do a quick review of my copy?
Thank you, very much.
the website is: www.companynote.net (clickable on the comments)
PS: Feel free to give any feedback you want (related or not to the copy).
EDIT: All changes sugested by creyes123 and specially pzxc are already published! Thanks a lot, guys! <comment><USER2> I spent five minutes looking at the page. That is all I can spare for free. I have written books and hundreds of blog posts. Unfortunately, it is going to take a lot more than five minutes to thoroughly evaluate and rework the page. Have you considered using [http://www.fiverr.com/](http://www.fiverr.com/)?

Right away, I noticed some layout issues. I assume you already know about those. Overall, I like the layout and use of color. Here is a rewrite of the main tagline:

"Send offers to your customers through Facebook. Quick and easy. Much better than sending emails."

<comment><AUTHOR> wow! Thanks, great sugestion about the tagline! I will use it right now.

I will take a look at fiverr. The thing is that I assumed is not that far off a good enough page, so an "amateur" native english speaker could spot a few mistakes on a quick look.

(and I wasn't wrong, I got a great copy sugestion and a lot of good corrections by pzxc below! :) )

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.companynote.net/](http://www.companynote.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Your company (or competition) never tried this before. -> Your company (or competition) has never tried this before.

We are the first in market. -> We are the first to market.

But people spend less time on e-mail and more on Facebook each day. -> But people spend less time on e-mail and more on Facebook every day.

Notifications are spam free -> Notifications are spam-free

Facebook notifications don't have spam, as Facebook take good care with user experience on its platform. -> Facebook notifications are not considered spam, as Facebook takes good care of the user experience on its platform.

only the customers that want will receive your offers -> only the customers that want your offers will receive them

Users spend more time on Facebook than on e-mail and let less notifications unread than emails. -> Users spend more time on Facebook than on e-mail and leave less notifications unread than e-mails.

CompanyNote lets you customize all parts of your message: the notification text; the image of your offer content and the link where the offer will redirect. -> CompanyNote lets you customize all parts of your message: the notification text, the image of your offer content, and the link where the offer will redirect.

This is the app your customers will signup, authorizing you to send notifications to them. -> This is the app your customers will use to sign up, authorizing you to send notifications to them.

In order to access the console your company must provide a valid Facebook account. -> In order to access the console, your company must provide a valid Facebook account.

We will send a weekly report with the analytics of you app and notifications. -> We will send a weekly report with the analytics of your app and notifications.

This report will inform: -> This report will inform you about:

Contact to more product and price details -> Contact us to get more product and price details

If you are still a small business with limited budget, ask for details of our less customized low-price option -> If you are still a small business with a limited budget, ask about our less customized, low-price option

CompanyNote is the product of the Brazil based company -> CompanyNote is the product of the Brazil-based company

We enable companies and business to communicate with their clients through Facebook native notifications feature. -> We enable companies and businesses to communicate with their clients through Facebook's native notifications feature.

\-----

Those are the spelling and grammatical errors I could find on your homepage. FYI, I am a native English speaker who always got straight A's in English class. It only took me 5 minutes because you only asked me to review your copy, not your layout/design. You're welcome! :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you a lot! :) If there is any favor I can retribute, email me (on my profile) You basically just saved my company! :) (just kind of an exageration). Thank you very much for your time...

I am indeed more worried about copy. A good product can get away with not ideal design and layout; but no one trusts a poor copy, with grammar and spelling mistakes.

<comment><USER3> No recompense necessary except to pay it forward -- sometime in the future, when you can help someone easily, do so and tell them to pay it forward also :)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Email design slicing and coding for you. - <AUTHOR> http://email2code.com/ <comment><USER2> I have no idea what this is or does, and my confidence is not increased when the alleged number of point on the HN submission is misreported.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Colin, first of all thank you BIG TIME for making effort to make a comment! It just sucks when you make something, looks useful, but then nobody seems to get it... and it just fades away...

Now getting to the point :): 1) What it does? It takes a PSD file of your email design and spits out HTML code of email template with sliced images, that are used in that template.

2) "HN submission is misreported", for me it shows 2 points, when I visit the site, and it seems to be correct on HN too, there is a slight delay ( I have just noticed that myself ), but it is a more of a loose for me, because it shows less on my page, than on HN. HN doesn't really provide a "share" button, so I used this hack from <http://hnlike.com>. I am using it first time, but it seems to be legit...

Feel free to add some more criticism :)</comment></comment>


Do we need and did we ask for so much choice? - <AUTHOR> http://www.romku.com/blog/2011/09/do-we-need-and-did-we-ask-so-much-choice

<comment><USER2> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less)</comment>


Cloud Call Center Software Like Talkdesk or Amazon Connect for Twilio - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ozonetel.com/2017/05/twilio-cloud-call-center-software-like.html <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR, Take your Twilio account. Get a Kookoo account. Copy settings and you have a full fledged cloud contact center on Twilio.

See you all at Signal Conference :)</comment>


The open source code powering Occupy Wall Street - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/FLOSolutions <comment><USER2> My favorite is the forum that runs on (and only requires) a Linksys router. <https://github.com/FLOSolutions/openwrt-forum>

<comment><USER3> Said router, of course, the product of a capitalist organization....

<comment><USER4> Well, if you demand nobody use anything that their ideological opponents produce, then anticapitalists can't use anything ever produced by a company (like this router), and libertarians can't use anything ever produced by a government (like the internet). Then only apolitical flexible people are allowed to even get online at all...

<comment><USER5> That's fine by me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The 'occupywallst' project's description reads: 'Stomping out capitalism, one line of code at a time'. Is that truly the goal; to eradicate capitalism?

<comment><USER7> It's a bit more nuanced than that; they really mean 'stomping out capitalism for all values of capitalism that involve political corruption and destroying the middle class'.

<comment><USER8> Seriously? That seems to speak to a lack of knowledge about how economics actually works. Would they say 'stomping out programming tools that let people write evil code' ?

My confusion stems from the fact that political corruption and the plight of the middle class have less to do with 'capitalism' (an economic theory involving free markets) and more to do with 'some people are evil.' There seems to have been as much 'political corruption' and 'middle class stomping' in the Soviet Union and they didn't actually have capitalism as an economic theory. That is why it confuses me when capitalism seems to be the target.

The institutions in the US that protect citizens have been under served by people who they represent. That I get. How many times have you heard someone ask for ideas for 'avoiding doing jury duty' or 'only one loser is running for school board seat 12'. Those institutions, the justice system, local governments, are the pre-cursor institutions of Congress and federal departments.

What is more impressive to me is that you have to let someone serve who gets elected and a lot of places you can get elected just by throwing your name in the hat (I'm talking various cities and counties around the US, no Congress).

So why isn't it "OccupyLocalGovernment" ? Then you could do stuff like prevent disasters of Bell California [1]. You know, "Think nationally, serve locally." kind of thing. Get some experience running the city, move up to the county, then state, then you'll be well trained and positioned to run for Congress and fix things. Frankly if folks did that it would scare the crap out of the New American Century types.

[1] [http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-more-high-bell- salarie...](http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-more-high-bell- salaries,0,7947506.story)

[2] <http://www.newamericancentury.org/>

<comment><USER9> I can not agree with this more. Take your local government seriously. Serve your civic duty. Maybe you don't like it, but it is like writing documentation. Something that needs doing but few like. Do the job with humility, and then finish out your time. Administration and government need to not be given up to those simply seeking power.

<comment><USER10> It is interesting -- in a conspiracy sort of way -- that we knee jerk assume that participating in local government is boring and tedious. It can actually be quite fun: makes me wonder about why we try to convince everyone it is boring... maybe so they don't pay attention? ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not sure if this is applicable, but an aggregator of sorts was put together for a local hack day a couple of weeks ago:

<http://occupywhere.herokuapp.com/> <https://github.com/markturner/Occupy>

</comment><comment><USER12> Hah, I read it as "the open source code powering Wall Street". Was all set for some hot tips about tweaking your kernel for high-frequency currency arbitrage, but no...</comment>


Google is leapfrogging Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37261393/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

<comment><USER3> The whole leapfrogging thing implies (to me) that you are not only doing more things than someone, but also doing them better. Yes, FroYo has added a ton of great features to android, however I still feel that Apple has not yet been leapfrogged in the most basic parts of design for core parts today's mobile experience.

The most obvious of these to me is text entry via touch screen. There can be no claims of leapfrogging until I can use an android device's touch screen to SMS someone without pulling (what little is left of) my hair out.

Next is the whole activity response/switching thing. Yes, blah blah, tradeoffs for multitasking, whatever. Why not have a way to turn off non-system multi- tasking in favor of super lightning quick responsiveness on android? It's enough to almost throw the phone across the room when you are trying to answer the phone and key presses don't register.

In terms of industrial design, there have been no great leaps by any of Google's hardware partners - Every single android handset I've used has felt like a cheap, disposable piece of junk (G1, Hero, N1) or a giant tank (Droid) compared to the first generation iPhone. I haven't played with the incredible yet, so I still have hope, but not much.

Google and Apple have taken two different approaches to mobile. Google is trying to throw as many different features into android in as short a time as possible, and Apple is set on perfecting each detail before incorporating more. This is fine, it's two different philosophies.

After my prolonged experiences with the G1 and the original iPhone, I'd much rather live day to day with software and hardware that has been developed to Apple's design and usability standards. (I'm talking about the system software here, not 3rd party apps) I hope in the coming year Google has a chance to go back and spend time polishing what they've accomplished so far instead of continually heaping feature upon feature onto android.

If Google can get back to user interaction basics and stop mucking around with some of their other tangents, they could make android great, not just passable.

Or maybe I was just too abused by my time with the G1 to judge this argument fairly anymore, definitely possible.

<comment><USER4> >There can be no claims of leapfrogging until I can use an android device's touch screen to SMS someone without pulling (what little is left of) my hair out.

This is almost certainly what you are used to. I haven't had any difficulty with my nexus one. The iphone drove me to insanity everytime I tried to type on it.

>Every single android handset I've used has felt like a cheap, disposable piece of junk (G1, Hero, N1)

Everyone I know who has seen the nexus one in person found it much more attractive than the iphone. (sampling bias, yadda yadda)

>Or maybe I was just too abused by my time with the G1 to judge this argument fairly anymore, definitely possible.

That's the only reasonable explanation I can come up with for your post. (I feel your pain on that one. ;)

<comment><USER3> It's kind of funny - people seem to be fairly split down the middle between our posts, even with all the up and down voting.

What I was used to before I got the G1 was a Samsung Trace, which could not be considered any sort of "smart phone". No Qwerty keyboard, tiny screen, etc. I did not actually use the original iPhone until about a year ago when a friend gave me an unlocked 2G when she got a 3GS.

I don't know much about the subject of text input, but there are two distinctly different implementations between android and iPhone. Android tends to be more predictive, but less enthusiastic about what it thinks you mean, and hence less corrective. I find the more decisive autocorrect on iPhone OS to work out much better for me. It's less about picking out words from a suggestion list and more about just banging away on the keyboard and trusting the software knows what I mean.

<comment><USER5> The biggest advantage Android has in this area is that Google doesn't have to get it "right" for everyone. On Android phones you can just switch to one of the other keyboard implementations if you don't like the default.

<comment><USER3> recommendations? and not swype please.

<comment><USER6> Smart Keyboard Pro: text expansion, custom dictionaries, custom skins, and more. I'm not the developer even if I sound like a walking advertisement, I just love the app that much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are few things that bothers me when people talk about Google taking the lead:

1) They are comparing two different things, an open OS vs an OS tied to one company.

2) Google didn't surpassed anybody. FroYo hasn't been released yet and they are comparing them to a phone that is going to be updated in two weeks. FroYo has tethering, but iPhone has tethering since 3.0, if AT&T doesn't allow it, it isn't Apple's fault. And I'm not sure how free that wireless hotspot will be. FroYo is faster, but nobody knows if faster than OS 4.0 on the new iPhone. They presented wireless sync, but nobody knows if Apple will introduce the same in two weeks. After all, they bought Lala for some reason. Maybe it's just me, but I like to compare shipped products, not demos and announcements.

<comment><USER8> The tethering issue may not be Apple's fault, but that's fairly irrelevant since you can't get the phone with any other carrier in the U.S.. Point being, no matter whose fault it is, the iPhone just doesn't have tethering in the U.S..

Otherwise I tend to agree, there are no devices shipping with Froyo so saying it has surpassed a shipping and soon-to-be-updated product is a bit silly.

<comment><USER7> The only Android phone that initially will have that functionality won't be available with AT&T nor T-Mobile... And the Nexus One isn't a pentaband phone either.

<comment><USER9> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'll be able to flash froyo to my nexus one, correct?

And the nexus one _is_ available on at&t.

Ergo, I will be able to tether my phone on at&t.

Right?

<comment><USER7> Why do you think AT&T would let Nexus One tether before the iPhone?

<comment><USER9> How would they be able to stop me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think Apple as a very mature company likes the long term strategy. They start with a bang but they also realize Version 2 of a product, at its core, is strikingly similar to Version 10. I don't think they feel pressured to dominate a market probably because their business model doesn't require it. The iPod was a bit of a fluke in that sense. It had a lot more to do with the competition losing than Apple being hell bent on domination. Google on the other hand, like Microsoft in the past, needs to succeed with big volume. More searches, more data collected, more services to serve more advertisements, new places to put advertisements, etc.

<comment><USER11> I think that was a good description of Apple Computer, Inc. Now that we live in the post iPhone world of Apple, Inc., they seem to be behaving quite differently. Their strategy seems dominated by short term market share grabbing in the mobile space, rather than long term product innovation and higher priced products.

<comment><USER12> * Their strategy seems dominated by short term market share grabbing in the mobile space, rather than long term product innovation...*

Even in light of the iPad?

<comment><USER12> Actually, I've rethought my comment a bit and I agree with you. I see the way Apple is behaving now very akin to the early PC wars, when a bunch of platforms were trying to become the dominant one.

These days, the platform war is the tablet form factor, and the iPad is definitely cheaper than anyone really expected. I have yet to see an actual competitor, in terms of price, software, and retail locations.

So sure, it's a land grab right now. But I wouldn't confuse that with true product innovation. They're just taking it step-by-step. And I'm sure the iPad still maintains their margins, although it seems cheaper. (my hypothesis as to why it has no camera, cleaning cloth, included slipcase, etc.)

<comment><USER13> "But I wouldn't confuse that with true product innovation. They're just taking it step-by-step."

Iterative improvement and innovation are not mutually exclusive. Just like with the iPhone (which had no app store at launch, and would be boring by today's standards,) most of the iPad's innovations are ahead of it. You don't have to revolutionize a market right off the bat to be innovative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is more remarkable to me than any Apple vs. Google rivalry is how infrequently the press has mentioned Microsoft in articles on the matter. Is it a given that MSFT has gotten so far behind that it won't ever catch up?

<comment><USER15> Palm?

<comment><USER14> Yeah. They've been mentioned even less in all of this. Certainly the HP takeover and the quiet surrounding it hasn't helped their PR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love all the new android phones I see.... and I like the openness - <USER2> hacker in me wants one.

But you know - the iphone/ipod Touch - it took me 10 seconds to figure out how that stuff worked.

I had to ask my friend to show me how to navigate around his android based phone with all it's buttons and gestures and whatnot...... I can definitely see more possibilities wiht the android - but Apple still has them beet on the Mom test.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting on how the tone of the Gizmodo article is almost over-the-top pro- Google and anti-Apple. Seems almost like a backlash to the entire Jason Chen/REACT situation.

</comment><comment><USER18> The thing to watch is not the feature list on one phone or platform release but the innovation speed and how fast you can improve the product in a closed environment vs an open one.

</comment><comment><USER19> Man, how breathless can one article get?

Nothing is this simple in real life.

</comment><comment><USER20> Something seems suspect about an article on (ms)nbc claiming that google is now beating apple... Can't quite put my finger on it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wasn't Google supposed to announce an encrypted search this week? Whatever happened to that? Anyone has the inside scoop?

<comment><USER22> [http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/05/encrypted-google- sea...](http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/05/encrypted-google-search- coming-to-a-browser-near-you.ars)

It's coming

<comment><USER23> it's here. (beta)

<https://www.google.com/>

<comment><USER24> I get redirected to the http site. (I use Duck Duck Go---which is encrypted--- but I just wanted to let you know.)

<comment><USER25> My guess is that it's being slowly rolled out to some of Google's front-end servers. I'll get the SSL homepage one load, then a few minutes later when I'm round-robinned to a different server, I get redirected to <http://>.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Froyo looks really cool, and I would seriously consider the jump from iPhone to Android, but AT&T has such crap android phones. I want a nexus one or a droid!

<http://listeasy.net/>

<comment><USER27> no spammy links please</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the best resources for learning caching strategies? - <AUTHOR> There are myriad of ways to improve and optimise application performance, but one of the most commonly used is caching. I want to learn more about caching strategies especially in the context of modern distributed applications. What do you think are the best resources to build better understanding on this topic?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> As a cloud architect, I highly recommend this guide: [https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design- primer](https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer)

All the patterns are there. Fan out for buffering writes to increase the amount that can be cached for reads, write through cache, write back cache, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually have this bookmarked somewhere but forgot about it. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Specifically, this lecture from Hellerstein's CS 186 is a good basis for understanding cache strategies. [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhMnuBfGeCDPtyC9kUf_h...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhMnuBfGeCDPtyC9kUf_hG_QwjYzZ0Am1) In general, the entire course is probably worth watching. In the end, optimizing performance means looking at the specific properties of an app and engineering specific tradeoffs of time, space, and robustness. That's what the lecture illustrates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

Were you trying to link a specific video? Your link just points to the entire playlist.

<comment><USER3> Sorry. Lecture 6 (part 2 of files and disks) talks about cache strategies...but the entire list is worth watching except for parts about class administration. Triplebyte had recommended it to me after unsuccessfully interviewing.</comment></comment></comment>


How To Install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.technreviews.com/install-windows-7-sp1/ <comment><USER2> Are you serious?</comment>


Apple expects Chinese sales 'to overtake US' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20983689

<comment><USER2> I will not be surprised if China overtakes US to become apple's biggest market. iPhone is so widely known across China that people in the village I was born can speak something about it.

iPhone is showed off by many as a symbol of wealth and social statue, so they all want to possess one and many high schoolers in my school in China use iPhone as their phone.

However, I'd rather like to see Xiaomi, an Android phone made by a Chinese company, to develop well, and eat most of Apple's share.

Apology for my poor English.

<comment><USER3> Much like in the rest of the world then, the status thing that is :)

<comment><USER4> Which is sometimes funny because in the west it feels like everyone who wants an iphone has one, yet they keep judging status on it.

This reminds me of how everyone on reddit still think they are part of a small and secret elite community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well duh. With 4x the population of the US why wouldn't Chinese sales overtake the US's?

<comment><USER6> China is a lot poorer.

<comment><USER7> There isn't one China, there are at least 2, maybe 3 chinas. Coastal China is industrialized, urbanized, modern, and wealthy. Inland China is poorer and less developed, and the remote provinces like Yunnan are just a few steps above seriously poor countries like Afghanistan or Haiti.

<comment><USER8> Have you been to Yunnan? I lived there for a year. The two cities I've seen the most of were about at east-Europe levels of development, surprisingly (to me). The rural areas fare worse, obviously, but I wouldn't expect to meet that much Haiti-level poverty. Wikipedia pegs the "absolutely poor rural population" at 3 million - out of 46 for the whole province. For Haiti, there is 54% of abject poverty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Asymco has a good posting on this, also comparing to prior US growth and Microsoft's comparable performance: [http://www.asymco.com/2013/01/11/when- will-apples-china-reve...](http://www.asymco.com/2013/01/11/when-will-apples- china-revenues-overtake-the-us/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. It seems to me that in the United States, many people have relatively advanced cell phones and a computer. But in many places in China, this isn't yet the case. So while Apple might sell more products in China in the short term, it's hard to say that this will be the case in the long term. For example, Apple will never sell so many iPods as it did in the past, since so many people these days have an MP3 player or a phone that can do the job-- or even an old iPod.

<comment><USER11> Someone made this same argument to me 4 years ago when the first apple store opened in Beijing. Deja Vu I guess. Maybe apple is really a fad that will just die out on its own, but they've been saying that for years now.

<comment><USER12> _"Maybe apple is really a fad that will just die out on its own, ..."_

Well... Android can give iOS a run for its money.

But there's no way Windows users who switched to an Apple laptop are going to switch back to a PC running an OS made by Microsoft.

Most people _love_ their Apple laptops and they are now so entrenched in schools and amongst devs that there's no way Apple is going to "die" anytime soon. They could stop selling iPod, iPad, iPhones and whatnots that there would still be a market for laptops. It would be back to the "old" Apple selling, well, computers. But dying? Apple existed before I was born and I think they'll still be there long after I'm dead, just like IBM.

For what it's worth I'm no fanboy: I'm using a PC running Linux...

<comment><USER11> Are we still talking China here? Many Macbooks were running Windows 5 years ago, and now they have mostly transitioned to OS X (its rare to see a Macbook running Windows now). I don't think there are so many Macbooks in schools though, its mostly a thing in the young professional crowd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those that want to see how China is changing: Don't visit China. Visit Hong Kong.

No other place exemplifies the rise of the Chinese middle/upper class like it does. The size and popularity of the high end boutique labels e.g. LV, Hermes, Zegna, Gucci far exceeds that of Tokyo, Paris, London, New York. If Apple does cement the iPhone as a status symbol alongside the LV bag it is going to soak up a tremendous amount of profit.

<comment><USER14> > _If Apple does cement the iPhone as a status symbol alongside the LV bag it > is going to soak up a tremendous amount of profit._

This idea fascinates me because tech brands have always been commodities or at best trendy. If Apple can achieve long-term status along the lines of upscale fashion labels that will be absolutely amazing and yet not undeserved.

<comment><USER13> The interesting thing is how much the retail strategy has played into it.

If you walk down the high street in Ginza, Tokyo you see the Apple Store (which is always packed to capacity) just down from Chanel and Cartier. Which with its strong architectural design really makes it feel like it belongs alongside those other brands.

What's telling as well is that the Sony HQ in Ginza feels so dated.</comment></comment></comment>


Reddit No Longer Accepts Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/03/28/reddit-no-longer-accepts-bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> All I've been seeing is red across the board for the past few weeks, someone must be hurting.

[https://coin360.io/](https://coin360.io/)

<comment><USER3> It's so apperent that the price of cryptocurrencies aren't really related to how well they are functioning in terms of tech.

LN is working on main net, tx fees are very low and atomic xchain tx are working on some major chains.

<comment><USER4> Bitcoin has been artifically overvalued by "investors" (with little to no technological understanding) ever since the rally last fall. It's returning to its real valuation. I don't see that as a failure in the long run. I still expect it to grow - with its ups and downs - in the long run.

<comment><USER5> Kind of feel like with everyone who piled on in accepting it, and now so many fairly well known players abandoning it... well maybe in five years things will be different...

<comment><USER3> Yeah it's painful to see it being dropped by people.

Typically I've found trying to predict what will happen with BTC's price on even year long time scales to be near impossible. However for the majority of the time saying it will be higher in 5 years has been correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not surprised. Right in line with Steam and others. Bitcoin failed.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't say it failed, more like foiled by investors less interested in the technology and more intent on making profit, which has killed any chance it has of becoming an actually viable currency. I had dreams of paying for physical goods in store with BTC, maybe through NFC, but thanks to price fluctuations that will probably never happen.

<comment><USER6> Super fair point. I agree with your nuanced perspective, thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


SortSupport: Sorting in Postgres at Speed - <AUTHOR> https://brandur.org/sortsupport <comment><USER2> I didn't know postgres used HLL internally to decide whether or not to use SortSupport. That's clever!

</comment><comment><USER3> The article references the tick function from CryEngine briefly ([https://github.com/CRYTEK/CRYENGINE/blob/release/Code/CryEng...](https://github.com/CRYTEK/CRYENGINE/blob/release/Code/CryEngine/CryPhysics/livingentity.cpp#L1275)). How do people manage to figure out or learn how to read and work on something like this? It looks mindbogglingly complex.</comment>


Riot Games bought out by Tencent - <AUTHOR> http://www.riotgames.com/articles/20151215/2132/riot-comp-changes-incoming <comment><USER2> Tencent had already owned 92% of Riot Games, this was just for the remaining 8%.

<comment><USER3> Interestingly, it means there's no more Riot stock. So for employees, share based performance incentives now can only be paid in cash.

It sounds like a net benefit to employees - they get a liquidity event and their future bonuses/compensation are more predictable (esp since Riot was never going to IPO).

<comment><USER4> That's not how stocks work there are different types/classes of stock and different types of options. They can still give employees non voting stock and issue ESO's. It's quite rare to issue full equity with voting rights to employees. ESO's generally have quite strict vesting and are non-transferable so this is pretty much a company wide ETO incentive bonus.

<comment><USER3> "This allows us to move away from a Riot equity program towards a cash based incentive program that allows Rioters to share in Riot's success."

sounds like you're describing what they had in place before, but now they will only do cash. i don't know what 'ETO' is either

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's unfortunate that Riot is now owned by a non US firm.

<comment><USER4> Tencent also owns a big steak in ActivisionBilzzard, Epic and many other US game companies.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you want Screenhero back? (Screenhero-cofounder here) - <AUTHOR> Screenhero (YC W13) was acquired by Slack, and our tech powers Slack Calls. Today, Slack announced it's sunsetting Screenhero-style screen sharing in Slack Calls.
I know there are lots of people that loved Screenhero, and I'm curious if your needs are being met through existing alternatives (Tuple, UseTogether, Zoom). If not, I'm considering working on a successor.
FYI I've been working on rebooting my previous startup in the remote desktop space, and have built Scrn (https://scrn.app) with a small team. But with today's announcement, I'm wondering if there's a far greater need for a Screenhero-style  remote work / collaboration product. <comment><USER2> I don't think anything is as good as screen hero used to be. The problem that I've had since it's been integrated with Slack is that it often acts like there's not enough bandwidth. Choppy connections, etc. I end up switching to a Google Hangout which will typically work fine.

I think there's some clear space for "remote pair programming" tools.

</comment><comment><USER3> Our company misses screen hero big time, comes up in discussion often. The only suitable replacement we've found is vscode liveshare which is actually very good but not everyone wants to use vscode.

</comment><comment><USER4> I loved using Screenhero to pair program with my buddy in SF. I'm in Hawaii. Screenhero was fantastic for taking control of the keyboard and mouse (which is not possible with Google Hangouts). Please bring it back!

</comment><comment><USER5> These folks seem to thing there is a market for something like it:

[https://tuple.app/](https://tuple.app/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Tuple's one of the alternatives I meant — I just edited my original post to explicitly mention them along with UseTogether. If the needs are met through tools like this, that's great, but if not, I'm potentially interested in solving this problem permanently.</comment></comment>


Dunkin' Donuts Aren't in California… Yet? - <AUTHOR> http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/07/05/dunkin-donuts-arent-in-california-yet/ <comment><USER2> Wow, 3 points in an hour? Well, since at least three people care, there used to be Dunkin' Donuts in California. At least they were here in LA until about 12 years ago, when they gave up on trying to crack the market.

The interesting thing is that in the LA area there's a former DD that rebranded itself "Boston Donuts" and had the same donuts (but not the coffee, sadly) ever since:

<http://www.yelp.com/biz/boston-donuts-la-habra>

Maybe there's such a holdout up north as well.

<comment><USER3> As a Boston native, I can attest that people go to Dunkin' Donuts for the coffee, not the donuts. That is the main attraction of the place - donuts, bagels, etc - are all secondary. A chain that doesn't have the coffee is bound to fail.

Here's another article talking about this - [http://www.lasnark.com/attn-los- angeles-entrepreneurs-please...](http://www.lasnark.com/attn-los-angeles- entrepreneurs-please-open-a-dunkin-donuts-in-la)

<comment><USER4> In regards to that article and many others I've seen: I know there's HUGE demand for Dunkin' Donuts here. I would _love_ to open one, and it seems I would meet most/all of their franchisee criteria - not to mention I'm shopping for a business to either buy or open, franchise or not right now anyway. The only problem is that they don't give out any franchising opportunities in CA. I'm sure I'm not the only person who would kill to open one here. I could think of half a dozen locations in LA where I could buy out an existing business or lease a space.

So PLEASE blame the company, no one else. I wish I could just get that through all those thick skulls (especially comment #8 on that link) that think you just need to throw money at a franchise to open a new store so it's just a lack of people interested in doing so. It's NEVER that easy to run/start a business, and if the company says no, they mean no.

<comment><USER5> I read an article in the late 90s in Esquire magazine about a businessman who tried for _years_ to open a Krispy Kreme franchise in a new state. He loved Krispy Kreme and knew it would be a hit. They refused. He visited headquarters, wrote them letters, became friends with the secretaries. He was persistent to the point of obsessive. He didn't take no for an answer. They finally relented after (iirc) 9 years. It's a good article - worth finding on microfiche.

<comment><USER4> I wish I was that dedicated ;) But I don't have years to spend (I have other plans for my life at this point too!), this is a family venture, and there are lots of other franchises and independent businesses out on the market.

Maybe someone else might be that obsessive about opening it, but I'm not the person. I'm just pointing out though that it's not possible that people with enough money and experience haven't considered trying to open a Dunkin' Donuts in California lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know enough about Dunkin' Donuts to know the answer to their situation specifically.

That being said, a lot of food corporations own multiple trademarks / brands. Sometimes when a corporation buys another corporation, a decision is made regarding branding, and the geography of where each brand will live.

This is why you have Hardee's on the East Coast and Carls Jr. on the West Coast. They're the same company, albeit with a slightly varied menu.

So, I wonder if there is a DD owned donut chain in California, and it's just not common knowledge.

[Edit: I did a little research and it looks like that may be the case. There are quite a few multi-national corporations with a hand in Dunkin Donuts' corporate life: <http://www.dunkinbrands.com/aboutus/history.html>]

[Edit 2: Evidently it's not that complicated; Dunkin Donuts was in CA previously, and withdrew in the late 90's due to market forces (i.e. poor sales). I read an article that said in 2002 95% of their locations were east of the Mississippi.

So, it looks like it's just economics at work.]

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure this is such a horrible thing. I live in LA and there is no shortage of good coffee shops of all sorts (I'm definitely not counting Starbucks here, but I may be slightly partial to Peet's and Coffee Bean both for convenience if I can't find anything else). I haven't noticed anything terribly different up in San Francisco either.

Annnnd well, if I'm not making my own coffee at home (which I usually do), I've fallen in love with the iced coffee at McDonald's. I don't like anything there (except maybe the 60 cent ice cream cones), but that iced coffee is mighty cheap and is pretty drinkable.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think donuts wont be a huge seller in the bay area. It seems they are more of a comfort food when it is cold, and it is never that cold in here. Plus people are more health consious in here (SF is the slimest large city in the USA).

Plus there are so many options for coffee. Dunkin Donuts coffee is mediocre, slightly better than McDonalds. The only thing that they have is the huge cup sizes. A medium DD coffie is more like a large starbucks one.

Anyway, I lived in Boston for three years, and moved in SF, and never missed them.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised more people don't roast their own coffee. I've been doing it for over a year now. It's easy, and buying green beans is roughly a third the cost of buying them roasted. (Of course, you can make the process as technical as you want, which would no doubt appeal to many here.) Most importantly though, freshly roasted coffee tastes infinitely better than anything can buy at all but a few specialty shops.

</comment><comment><USER9> The worst part is that I see their commercials on TV all the time (in SF)...Why do they lead me on like this??!

</comment><comment><USER10> We don't have them near me, so I have to ask - is there anything particularly good about them other than their donuts? Do they have WiFi? Are they open 24/7?

I find myself at Starbucks more than I'd like to for the WiFi and they close too early.

</comment><comment><USER11> At least we have In-n-Out!

</comment><comment><USER5> Finally had a Krispy Kreme donut. I really don't understand the hype. Maybe if I had grown up with them as part of my formative years?

</comment><comment><USER12> A lot of their stores don't make their donuts fresh anymore. They have a distribution network, and it's supposed to reduce overhead.

</comment><comment><USER13> Having DD again is one of the few things that has made moving from SF to Cambridge more palatable for me.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm dying for some west coast dunkin donuts and starbucks doesn't come close...</comment>


London Stock Exchange hauled offline after major data problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3262702/london-stock-exchange-hauled-offline-after-major-data-problem/

<comment><USER2> Clearly the problem stems from writing a finance-related application in something other than VBA-running-inside-Excel. "Linux"... what will they think of next!?

(I'm being sarcastic, but people say stuff like this every day and aren't. That's what's scary.)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a lot of ignorance going on in the articles out there. I know nothing of the internals of the project but it was commissioned to replace a system that has frequent outages (including a major one last week). Teething issues, while not desirable, are inevitable at such an early stage of the project. It's bound to be an incredibly complicated system.

I feel for the devs working on it. Bet they didn't have a fun morning....

<comment><USER4> Does this same logic apply to, say, a control module in a space craft, or the software behind an MRI machine?

<comment><USER5> Any time you are dealing with a system with that many users, you are going to introduce a lot of chaos (in its mathematical sense). Chaos is nearly impossible to test for because there are just too many permutations.

You are (probably) right that any particular piece of a trading system would be easier to build and test than the examples you gave, but in aggregate, I think it would be much more difficult.

<comment><USER6> No it isn't. It's a matter of maturity and mindset. The avionics industry has it - they use Ada and formal methods, most of the rest of the software development world doesn't. and they pay the price. Honestly I questioned the competence of the LSE when they outsourced their development for the first windows based trading system to a consulting shop.

Simply put, they outsourced a core, critical part of the UK's financial infrastructure to boobs. However, I do see some hope in haskell and ocaml entering the financial market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> London Stock Exchange is live, offers no real explanation for outage

[http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it- business/3262766/lond...](http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it- business/3262766/london-stock-exchange-is-live-no-real-explanation-for- outage/)

</comment><comment><USER7> The last paragraph is quite interesting - 3 different exchange platforms having problems in the same week one after another. While this might be just a coincidence... maybe someone knows how to crash the systems?

</comment><comment><USER8> Major issues just a week after moving to a new Linux-based system [1]? It has potential to be a fairly nasty PR-blow.

[1] [http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open- source/3260727/lond...](http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open- source/3260727/london-stock-exchange-in-historic-linux-go-live/)

<comment><USER9> It's a new system that does a ridiculously difficult thing on a scale that makes it nearly impossible to test completely.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> London Stock Exchange has called a crisis meeting with market data vendors

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262882>

</comment><comment><USER10> I suspect malicious activity or automated trading systems could be the source of problems, in addition to engineering. Don't assume it's automatically Linux vs .NET.

</comment><comment><USER11> Where is the back up? Heads should roll</comment>


Show HN: Guess the Gibberish - <AUTHOR> https://gibberishgame.com/ <comment><USER2> Cool concept but I think you need to be clearer about the rules, maybe provide a demo video or something. It took me a while to realize that it was just a phonetic/weird spelling of the word. I had to flip the card to come to that realization. So it would be a good idea to build some kind of training video or more detailed example instructions. This is the sort of thing that people can teach other people to do when playing a game but that only works once you have players. Someone has to read the manual/try to play it first.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To kill boredom (ours and hopefully yours) and keep us sane and distracted from the current situation we are all in, my girlfriend and I developed a fun little online multiplayer game (desktop only for now). You will need at least one fun friend and a video/voice chat of your choice to enjoy the game. The rules are listed on the website.

We struggled with the page design, so could use some input. Any feedback would be much appreciated.</comment>


Tech companies are misusing creativity in their quest to change the world - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1101430/a-nobel-prize-winner-says-tech-companies-are-misusing-creativity-in-their-quest-to-change-the-world/ <comment><USER4> >> One example is Endless, a computer company founded by a young Californian named Matt Dalio. I know his father, Ray Dalio, a successful businessman who became very interested in my ideas and my work

This is the real root problem - People are helping their already rich friends too much. Companies shouldn't be about the CEO and their friends, it should be about the product and the customers. Promoting the children of your rich friends in your news articles doesn't help balance out wealth equality.

There are thousands of other (poorer, more determined) entrepreneurs like 'Matt Dalio' who probably deserve the attention even more.

>> Dalio did not give up.

Yeah that totally deserves its own paragraph; not giving up is a huge achievement when daddy is a billionaire. It's almost like the author's subconscious is trying to tell us something.

<comment><USER5> Rich people can take risks. Poor people can't.

<comment><USER6> > Rich people may take risks. Poor people must.

This seems more accurate and realistic about the source of the discrepancy:

Rich people have the luxury to choose which risks they take and make calculated endeavors, but are never forced to take a risk and have great ability to manage their total exposure to risk.

Poor people are inundated with being forced to take bad risks and manage the danger between them constantly, such that they can't properly gather resources to take on additional voluntary risks (even when they have an expected reward) because it poses too much systemic danger with the additional risk.

That said, once you count in drug sales, the poorest 10% of people I know have a higher per capita entrepreneurship rate than the richest 10%. So in practice, poor people _are_ actually taking on business risk at a higher rate as well, though it's again motivated by necessity.

The biggest discrepancy is, of course, access to capital and explain the vast majority of the discrepancy in outcome.

<comment><USER7> Anecdotally, I knew drug dealers in high school. It was not out of necessity, but greed. I'm sure some are out of necessity, but not all.

<comment><USER6> I think you have the implication reversed:

I'm not saying drug dealer -> poverty.

I'm saying poverty -> necessity to try _something_ to escape a slow death.

(And for cultural reasons, the latter often appears as greed when successfully applied, rather than desperate necessity. Look at the motivation for the hustle, not the outcome. A fear of a very real death to poverty is usually the motivating factor.)

This means that you end up with a lot of people having some kind of hustle, which the statistics also reflect once you remember that drug dealers (and other criminals) are a form of business. So you find an unusual amount of businesses per capita, again remembering to include drug operations and similar activities.

<comment><USER8> > (And for cultural reasons, the latter often appears as greed when > successfully applied, rather than desperate necessity. Look at the > motivation for the hustle, not the outcome. A fear of a very real death to > poverty is usually the motivating factor.)

Totally agree. Also depends where you go to school, though. There are drug dealers who are poor and do it because it's one of the more attractive (if risky) job options, and there are well-off student drug dealers who know that they can get away with being caught because of their socioeconomic status.

In either case, it's not a totally unreasonable risk-reward evaluation, especially (as with everything) if the dealer knows how to execute (i.e. be careful). I knew several people in the latter camp, and I wouldn't necessarily call them "greedy". Though I suppose I generally dislike the term "greedy" because it's usually pejorative without giving _any definition_ of what greed is or why it is bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Profit - rather the Willingness to Pay - indicates the true preferences of society/individuals. While we may claim otherwise, at the end of the day, we sometimes value pleasure over health.

And if society truly cared about quality of life for the poorest/weakest, the market would re-align itself, and the direction of creativity would be self corrected.

I feel capitalism and profits are working just fine, we just don't want to admit what our true preferences are.

<comment><USER10> That's not quite accurate. Willingness to Pay indicates the true preferences of _people who have money_. If you try to take it as a metric of the preferences of society you will get the preferences of individuals weighted by their net worth.

<comment><USER11> That's not quite accurate, otherwise there wouldn't be a wide variety of things to choose with lower incomes.

You forget that the market responds to the total volume of buyers at various levels. There are a lot more people in the 0-150k bracket than the people in the 150k+ bracket and when you count the total spending in dollars by each category as a whole, the first group is significantly more powerful.

The most successful companies sell to the masses (McDonald's, Walmart, Google, Facebook). The rich have a much smaller influence on the market than you would like to think.

<comment><USER12> The rich surely have influence in proportion to the total amount of wealth that they have. Wealth is unevenly distributed enough (a quick google says top 1% have control of 38% of wealth) for this to be a significant skewing factor away from an ideal market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The title of the article should really get rid of "tech". This is an inherent feature(or bug depending on perspective) of a capitalistic system wherein companies are designed for profit and will target markets where there is more potential profit.

This is true of many other industries, not just tech, although tech has been capturing much of the interest and ire of not being different. Any time a company accepts outside money, they have a fiduciary duty to build their business in a manner that will lead to the highest return - "maximizing shareholder value."

Now, this is not inherently bad to maximize value as we have seen the largest growth the world has ever seen (not just at the top end, but for the poor as well) because of the innovation and creativity that has occurred due to chasing profits.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I really don't think tech companies truly are in a "quest to change the world" unless you believe every word spoken at demo day. Should be retitled: "Companies are using creativity to chase profits" because that is what they are doing and is what they should be doing in the current economic system.

I completely agree that incentives and structures should be changed to dramatically reduce the income and wealth disparities. The struggle is the will to voluntarily forego profits.

</comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of one laptop per child and this is similarly misguided. Poor people don't want this and can't make much use of it.

What poor people want is clean water, a stable source of food, security, health care, honest government, etc, etc. They'll be happy to have a cell phone, but it's not going to change their life.

The problem of poverty isn't the result of lack of access to information.

<comment><USER15> The successful people I've talked to who came from poverty would disagree. They all have stories of some specific program that gave them some additional tools to help educate them, inspire them, and give them the ability and drive to lift themselves out of their original situation. Now, these individuals almost universally are putting at least some of their energy back into similar programs to help others. So no, giving out laptops won't magically eliminate poverty... but it might create the person who devises the solution that does.

<comment><USER16> I know this is all anecdotal so my input is ultimately useless and not applicable to society at large, but I grew up poor and am now "successful" (by conventional standards).

There was no specific program that inspired me or gave me a leg up - <USER2> worked was the fact that my parents were strict and absolute hard-asses who didn't put up with any of my bullshit growing up. I resented them for a long time, but have come to see that they were mostly right.

But hey, you may very well be correct in that a social program works for others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> GREAT article. It definitely reflects the current state of society, and most important, people. Selfishness is the standard, money is our god. We need to open our eyes and start acting, otherwise the results will keep being the same and nothing will change.

Capitalism should be reformed and a new economic system - based on sharing economy, but in the real sense - should arise.

</comment><comment><USER18> > It is interesting to note that new technology products are never launched in > the poor segment of the market and then gradually adapted to higher-level > markets

Inclined to disagree. Plenty of wealthy people see the "market potential" of starting in poorer places ( _cough_ Africa) and 'locking up' marketshare.

hell, zuckerberg and others tried pushing through the precedent of zero-rated internet for proprietary services in india and other countries as a way to lock up precedent for when they'd bring the same tech to america. (Not that the latter has needed any help being complacent with zero rating - <USER3> india beat us on that front)

</comment><comment><USER19> Technology is already changing the world in the way he wants and profit is only part of the reason, but still an important part. Many people have, for non-profit and profit reasons, attempted to fix the issues of computers not being wide spread or fix connectivity problems in developing countries.

The two groups that seem most likely to solve the connectivity problem(s) have profit incentives behind it: Facebook and Google.

There are almost certainly others as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> > _The more we advance in technology, improve our infrastructure, spread > globalization, and bring efficiency to the economic system, the more > intensely global corporations focus their strategies on competing to serve > the wealthiest and the middle class_

A question: is it actually true that these things are correlated? I don't know, but on the surface of it, it's not clear to me that they are.

</comment><comment><USER21> "But statistics show that we only consume a fraction of what is actually available online."

"In practical terms, it is actually possible to take all of the images and data from every website the average person visits in a lifetime, compress them, and fit them onto a single 2-terabyte (TB) hard drive inside a computer."

These are among the many "unspoken truths" of the web, viz. that right now on your person or nearby you have enough storage space to hold every bit of information you will ever need in your lifetime.

I would like to see the statistics.

Obviously, companies like Google are not going to embrace truths like these.

When a user can search a database of downloaded data ("data dump") locally, even without a connection, how would a search engine track the user's queries?

Right now, public information, from academic research to user-generated content, is being hoarded by a few companies and used to collect information about those who wish to access it, which is then used to sell ads.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon and is not necessary.

This is supposed to be the Information Age. We can all access public information in large quantities at high speeds without constant monitoring in the name of pillaging advertising budgets.

While it may not be possible to save _every_ piece of information one needs in advance, certainly _much_ of the piecemeal access to static data that we do today could be averted. (Personally I have been doing this with DNS data for many years, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.)

Why is piecemeal access something anyone would want to avert? Matters of cost, reliablity and inefficiency aside, it is piecemeal access, one query at a time, each and every one traveling over a insecure network, logged and analyzed 24/7 by myriad third parties all desperate for cash, that gives rise to memes like "You are the product".

It is the gratuitous use of an insecure, invasively monitored network to query information which could be stored locally that is the root cause for many of the complaints that internet users have today. This type of use enables the practices by third parties that users complain about.

</comment><comment><USER22> Greed and war has always been the best motivators.

</comment><comment><USER23> Capitalism is an economic system and an ideology based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. You want creativity? Leave capitalism.

<comment><USER24> > Capitalism is an economic system and an ideology

That's the problem right there: Capitalism has proven to be excellent at organising an economy. It's excellent! It works with human nature. The largest problems automatically provide the largest reward for solving! It locates decisions at the lowest possible level!

The problem is when people use it as an _ideology_ , i. e. as an end to itself. Intellectual property, for example, with its zero marginal costs, isn't as good a fit for capitalism as wheat: When you're charging $10 for a movie, many people will not watch it because it's only worth $5 to them. That's an inefficiency as glaring as communism ever produced, because it is value lost as a tribute to keeping the structure intact, even though no work would be required for it at all.

There are many more inefficiencies of capitalism that we conveniently ignore. The complete finance sector is nothing but the bureaucracy needed to organise capitalism. Competition is a great method to get better results, but it also involves a lot of duplicated efforts. Advertisement is–and this is the usual argument of people defending it-neccessary for the functioning of capitalism because it spreads information the market needs. The inequality needed to serve as motivation breeds unhappiness and crime.

These aren't arguments to abandon capitalism, because it quite obviously is the best system we've found so far. But that shouldn't preclude us from trying alternatives, especially in niches that are so different that the outcomes may be different from the traditional production of physical goods.

<comment><USER25> I don't think you described capitalism as an ideology. You seem to simply be talking about inefficiencies in capitalist execution.

Capitalism as ideology is a bit different. For example, if someone is rich, they are higher status, but not only that - they are assumed to have innate characteristics that make them better, such as discipline and intelligence. We've created, and this predates capitalism and allowed for its spread, a social system that equates wealth with social power.

That's a part of capitalism as an ideology. Another part is that people automatically view things in terms of cost. They weigh choices in monetary terms, as opposed to social, moral or physical.

I disagree with your example of capitalist inefficiency, as well - you've chosen a price equilibrium inefficiency but you're using that example to illustrate that a product is ill-suited for capitalism. It isn't; if the movie was priced correctly, the inefficiency would disappear. Plus, as you pointed out, there are negligible costs for distribution (it's not really zero, but who cares) so profits on a product like that would be significant. That seems to me to be a better product for capitalist exploitation than wheat.

<comment><USER24> > I don't think you described capitalism as an ideology

I wasn't trying to. I was saying that it works well as a means of organisation, before pointing out its weaknesses. Ideology is when you ignore those weaknesses, and try to shoehorn everything within the framework of capitalism.

> If the movie was priced correctly, the inefficiency would disappear

The problem is that it's hard to price it efficiently, because the value is different for different people. You can try price-separation, i. e. by geography, or the cascade of movie theatre to download to broadcast TV. But there's still a loss of welfare. As another example: I will never pay for a subscription to the WSJ, or to Adobe Creative Cloud, or to NGINX Plus. But my life would be marginally better if I had access to these products. And the only reason I don't is because there's no way to allow people like me access, without also allowing those free access that are currently paying.

<comment><USER25> Ideology isn't when you ignore something's weaknesses and shoehorn everything within its framework. Blind adherence to an ideology can cause that, but it's not what the word means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Creativity for its own sake isn't better as a model for society than profit.

Furthermore having the richest pay for development of new technologies which are then later on distributed to the poorer is in my view the right direction it basically indirectly taxes the rich first.

Tesla would never have been successful if they started with cars for everyone. The fact that they made it a desirable item, to begin with, worked to their advantage. A better place is an example of the wrong strategy.

To me, this reads more like a PR piece than anything else.</comment>


Firefox 8 beta gets Twitter search straight from the browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.silicon.com/technology/software/2011/09/30/firefox-8-beta-gets-twitter-search-straight-from-the-browser-39748021/?s_cid=557 <comment><USER2> The implication here is probably that Twitter is now paying some amount of money to the Mozilla Corporation.

Which is good, because being too dependent on your competitor (Chrome) for income could be tricky at some point.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's an official Twitter add-on that enables this on earlier versions of Firefox as well:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter- addre...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-address-bar- search/)

<comment><USER4> This is slightly different. This add-on (along with the Twitter Firefox build, <https://twitter.com/#!/download/firefox/>) also lets you search Twitter using @ or # in the address bar.

The beta 8 stuff just adds Twitter to the list of default search engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> DuckDuckGo[1] can give you this today.

[1] <http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html>

<comment><USER6> So can Firefox[1] :)

[1] <http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Search%20bar>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Firefox has an increasing mindshare problem now. And that comes from the fact that they're losing all the "early adopter" types to Chrome, which then promote the new beloved browser to everyone else, friends, family, etc.

They started "winning" a few years ago because they got all the early adopter types. Then Chrome came and stole them away from them. Mozilla needs to add stuff to their browser that will make these early adopters come back.

And they really need to fix that whole compatibility issue with add-ons. I couldn't believe I couldn't use Ad-block in Firefox 7 because it wasn't compatible.

The developer is obviously at fault here, too. Firefox 7 has been available in some form for 2-3 months now, since just like Chrome, all their Firefox version go through a process of pre-alpha, alpha, beta, stable, and each one lasts about 6 weeks. So how come Ad-block is still not available for FF 7 then? Is the developer taking a long break or something?

But the fact that Firefox makes all add-ons incompatible _by default_ without any modifications from the developer, is also _unacceptable_. Either get rid of the old add-on system completely and leave that mess behind, and fully support the new extension engine (the one similar to Chrome's), or make it work already! What's the point of an old add-on system if only 10% add-ons work when the new version launches?

Also they might need to reconsider their current design, too. I don't know what it is, but something seems _off_. Maybe it's their 2 column menu that seems weird to use to me, or maybe it's just because I've been using Chrome for a long time and FF is too different from it now. I don't know, but I think there's work to be done on the design.

And do we really need that small search box in the right? I think it clutters the bar. Being able to search on any browser using the TAB key after typing the site name is also something I love about Chrome.

<comment><USER8> You took a link about FF adding a twitter search option and turned it into a rant about how FF sucks and Chrome rules. But ok, I'll bite.

I've used the two extensively, and the only thing (for my use case) that Chrome has over FF is interface speed. Here are a few things FF does really well over Chrome.

Low level extension access to the browser: This is the reason you don't have Noscript or HTTPS Everywhere in Chrome, it's also the reason mouse gestures are fundamentally broken on Google's browser. For example perform a gesture to open a new tab, then perform a gesture to close it. Oops, you can't, since extensions are disabled in certain types of pages on Chrome due to its security model.

Search as you type: You actually have to hit CTRL+F in Chrome to start finding stuff, versus just starting to type in FF.

Tab activity notifications: On FF, I can have Gmail, Reader, etc.. pinned as app tabs, and if they get updated with new items the tab gets highlighted. Chrome, for some strange reason doesn't do this and you have to keep opening the tabs to check for updates.

Search keywords: Much more straightforward to add in FF, just click on a search field and select "Add keyword for this search". Chrome automatically adds just about every search engine/form you come across to a huge list, which you then have to trawl in order to customize the one you want.

Bookmarks & History: Chrome's bookmark manager sucks big time, I guess Google wants you to search and not bookmark. FF has a half decent manager with tag support. The Wonderbar also works a lot better than the Omnibar when searching your history and bookmarks.

Tiddlywiki: This is the big one for me (although only tangentially Chrome's fault), I use tiddlywiki extensively and FF is the only working browser on non-Windows platforms.

So all of these annoyances in Chrome negate the gain I get from its speed by a large margin. Again, this is my particular use case, but I definitely get stuff done quicker in FF than in Chrome.

And by the way, the initial extension breakage is fixed on FF 7.0.1, which was just released.

<comment><USER9> I also don't think this thread is the place to discuss these things, but since it's here already...

Wouldn't search as you type be fundamentally broken on any website featuring keyboard shortcuts? (I'm not a Firefox user, so I don't know how that's handled).

Pinned tabs are highlighted in Chrome when they receive updates. The pulsing used to be very eye-catching, but for some reason they now reduced it to an almost unnoticeable searchlight-like effect from left to right over the tab chrome and favicon.

In Chrome you right click any search field and choose "Add as Search Engine", just like Firefox. It also picks up on any search that you've done automatically, so you can just tab-search from the URL bar as you're typing a site name that you haven't explicitly added a shortcut for.

At the end of the day, they're both very excellent browsers that have almost reached full feature parity with one another. I don't think either one is better, it's just a personal flavor and preference at this point that you can't qualify, equivalent to preferring Chocolate over Vanilla ice cream. In fact, users now have 5 competing, well-built and standards based browsers to choose from. The true winner of this browser "war" was the end-user, which is who should have won.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just love the fact that twitter is being integrated into more systems now. Even Apples integration into iOS 5 is a serious move up for twitter. Business seems good on their end.

</comment><comment><USER7> They should add Blekko and DuckDuckGo as options, too. I don't know if DuckDuckGo can pay them, but Blekko probably can.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think DuckDuckGo is already in the list. At least I saw it in Aurora channel for Firefox 8.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just checked in Aurora again. It is now v.9. And DuckDuckGo is in the default list.

<comment><USER11> @darkduck - There must be some kind of misunderstanding here. I've got the latest source and we're nowhere to be found.

[nil@tmbg ~/mozilla-central]$ grep -r duckduckgo . [nil@tmbg ~/mozilla- central]$

Furthermore, the list of the default / available plugins can be found here: [http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/file/a896a9e237a0/brow...](http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/file/a896a9e237a0/browser/locales/en-US/searchplugins).

If you have any information about the future of this, we would be really excited and interested to know, but we would appreciate a screenshot or a link to verify. I expect you have DuckDuckGo in your search list from before (thanks!) and the new installations are just picking up on that in the preferences directories generated upon install.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Glad to see what's on their list of priorities.

I'm sure they're getting a kick-back, but still.

</comment><comment><USER13> not sure if this is useful to any real users?</comment>


Desert Bus: The Very Worst Video Game Ever Created - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-worst-video-game-ever-created.html

<comment><USER2> I really hate the source article's headline; it completely subverts the article's most important point and renders the whole article one that will likely be glossed over by readers who wouldn't otherwise know what Desert Bus is. Something like "How The World's Worst Video Game Makes Sick Kids Happy" would've been a lot more eye-grabbing and useful in highlighting why Desert Bus is so important.

The New Yorker never ceases to disappoint me.</comment>


Show HN: Made 2 iPhone Apps at the Same Time To Save Time or Make Time Fly - <AUTHOR> http://evolyte.com/apps/

<comment><AUTHOR> We built these because we love iOS, but also because we're running a number of product and marketing-based experiments, which we'll be happy to share once we've compiled all the data, if anyone is interested of course.

We're also in the process of working on a few other iOS apps: <http://bit.ly/EvoApps>

As always, we'd LOVE to hear any feedback, both positive and soul-crushingly negative. Thanks fellow HNers!</comment>