If you are a small team [...] don't bother with Amazon Appstore. - <AUTHOR> http://bithack.se/news/apparatus-amazon-july-4-2011.html

<comment><USER2> _"In my opinion, the users should be educated about the very sophisticated permission system on Android instead. The user should learn to determine whether a permission should be required by an app"_

That's just ridiculous.

[editing to expand...]

Software firewalls never took off on the windows platform because asking regular users about just one permission (should app X be able to contact the internet?) proved impractical.

Expecting end-users to be able to understand BROADCAST_STICKY ("Allows an application to broadcast sticky intents"), MANAGE_APP_TOKENS ("Allows an application to manage (create, destroy, Z-order) application tokens in the window manager"), and REORDER_TASKS ("Allows an application to change the Z-order of tasks") is pure fantasy.

<comment><USER3> The more experience with end users I get the more my design goal is security in spite of them. (I recently got an email from a user who was disappointed that a program I wrote prevented him from doing what he wanted to do, even though what he wanted to do was illegal and would expose him to substantial liability.)

"Click next to ruin your life" is not good application design. I shudder at "Carefully evaluate whether any of the following statements allows a malicious person to ruin your life."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried putting a free app of mine up on the Amazon store just to see how quick it would move compared to Android Market. It sat in the approval queue for 2-3 weeks, long enough that when I got an email from them about it, I totally forgot I had even submitted it.

Their response was that I had improperly signed my binary; I misread their instructions and uploaded the same APK I sign for the Market. This is stuff Apple catches immediately upon upload so you don't wait a week to find this out.

I then had to wait 2 more weeks for the re-signed version to get approved. That's no fun.

</comment><comment><USER5> I, as a user, think the slow review process is a good thing. He complains about it being rejected for a single letter, but that letter was a lack of security for ME, the user. That's very important to me, but apparently not to them.

I'll agree the rest of the failings were stupid on Amazon's part, though.

However, I doubt I'd have pulled the app. I'd have found ways around the problems, like creating a US account, using a proxy, or having a fan post a review giving the email of the developer and asking upset people to contact them.

And he never did answer why it doesn't work in airplane mode if it isn't connecting to a server.

<comment><USER6> The implication was that it _does_ work in airplane mode, and that the reviewer was lying.

<comment><USER2> I just tested the free version (under AdFree then in airplane mode), and it does seem to work fine.

It doesn't help that the developer never actually says that he tested this, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ok I am going to attack these points one at a time:

\- 2 week approval process --> this works in the Apple app store model, sure its slower but they just need to work on it. I would hope they also do things like battery life test given that recently it has come to light that most android apps murder battery life for no good reason.

\- No consumer contact --> amazon needs to fix this asap. It is critical for vendors to be able to contact their clients.

\- No refund policy --> is this even legal in the US? I think we just need to take it to court to find out :( It is quite refreshing to hear that app developers actively refund to make frustrated customers happy. However on that note, the main reason for this is because Apple can FORCE your app to be removed from your device if you get a refund, google/amazon cannot. therefore amazon is trying to prevent people from just downloading and then asking for a refund thus legally getting a free app. Not to mention the fact that rooted devices (htc is going to allow rooting without hacking bootloader now) can do things like give amazon/google the finger when it comes to asking the device to uninstall apps, even if its built-in.

\- Cannot quickly deploy fix in 30 minutes --> this is true for the Apple store too. I think going with the release cycle, this can be either a good or bad thing. Ensures you test your fixes and try releasing asap. I think in many cases the approval process is justified because it prevents things like malware from being pushed as an update.

tl;dr

\- I like Apple App Store approval process \- Amazon needs to heavily focus on client <-> developer communication channels. Even if not email and in-app store. \- Refund policy is possibly legitimate due to uninstall concerns.

<comment><USER8> > No refund policy --> is this even legal in the US?

Sure. There's nothing illegal about 'all sales are final'.

As far as the 'refund gets you a free app' concern: paid apps from Amazon and come with Amazon's DRM. Google provides a way to do license verification with paid apps in the Android Market. Google also allows a 15-minute window to get a refund. So, presumably, Amazon not allowing refunds is a decision that is not based in purely technical grounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I actually like the decision by Amazon to require secure communication. This is something that is very hard to verify as an end user and incredibly important in the days of Firesheep.

</comment><comment><USER10> Long review times, the inability to reply to user reviews, getting ridiculous erroneous comments, and lack of manual refunds? Sounds like iOS/Mac App Stores.

<comment><USER11> Reducing the price of submitted software without consulting the developer is the most outrageous part of this story, don't think Apple do that.

<comment><USER5> That has always been part of the contract you have with them, and was widely criticized when the Amazon Android Store first came out.

It is my understanding that they guarantee a minimum amount of money to you, even if they give it away for free. (Which means they pay you when they give it away.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> (Warning: this really doesn't have much to do with the author's Appstore problems.)

This is more from a proficient user perspective than a developer's, but...

I absolutely loathe the Market. I'm pretty sure I have never had a positive experience with it.

The simplest thing is its packaging. The Amazon Appstore will run on anything - install the APK, and you're done. I've had a grand total of one app (Peggle) tell me that my device (CM7 Nook Color) was unsupported, and even then I could still manually install it from the My Apps list.

Compare that to the Market, which doesn't come in a nice little APK. Instead, if you're on an AOSP-based ROM, you have to install a separate gapps package through the freaking recovery menu. That is a huge pain in the ass. Then, there's the whole "unsupported app" crap. I don't care if you haven't tested your app specifically for my device, there's a fairly good chance it'll work perfectly fine. Having the Market restrict apps like that is quite irritating.

Then there's the installing. Somehow, even the simple act of installing an app doesn't work right. On multiple devices, running multiple ROMs (official and un), I have had the exact same problems: An app will, after pressing the install button, take forever to actually pop up in the notifications bar, and even then there's like a 20% chance the download will fail if you have more than one app download going at once. The worst thing the Appstore does when you're downloading more than one app is that the UI gets a tad laggy.

Also, Google's "unique" software license management. On both the iOS App Store and Amazon's, if I "purchase" a free app, it's mine forever. Period. Even if it goes to being a paid app. On the Market, if I purchase a free app and it goes paid, I basically get to keep the copy on my phone and that's all. If I go to another device or wipe my existing one, app goes bye-bye.

Google's awful management of the Market doesn't help, either. If you look outside the top fifty apps or so, it's all garbage- redundant soundboards, extremely poorly-coded games that wouldn't pass any sort of quality checks, that sort of thing. It's a little hard to look for good apps when there's so much complete crap.

Apologies for the rant... it's a bit late.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, Google's official market is the glitchiest thing I've seen in a while. I will note that I've had no problems with the concurrent downloads/installs failing since I bought a Galaxy S II (my previous Nexus One had that problem constantly), but aside from that, I have every problem you described and several more.

I have a Xoom as well as the SGS2, and I'd estimate that 70% of the time, the two devices disagree on what apps I've bought. If I buy one on the phone, it never shows up on the Xoom, and vice versa. The web interface is the only one that has a consistent picture of apps I've bought. However, it doesn't always work. On several occasions, I've gotten into situations where an app has an update available, but trying to update just fails silently (and immediately - you see the download indicator flash for maybe a tenth of a second and then it just vanishes). The only way to get past it is to use the web interface to send to a device, which will also fail, and then retry the update from the device. This doesn't always work, but if I repeat it enough times, eventually it will. Usually at least. I have had to, on a couple of occasions, resort to googling for an apk file that I can put in my dropbox account to manually install from the phone -- for apps I got from the Market already. I think I've only had to resort to a web search once. Usually, I can find the apk/odex files on the one device it install on and pull them from there. Isn't it great that I'm considering "adb pull" as a victory for installing an app that has a big "Install" button right next to it?

Some apps show up one day as available in my country (Iceland), and then 15 minutes later they aren't.

Sometimes I get notified that updates are available for built-in apps like Maps. Those often fail, and there's no way to get rid of the update notification.

In short the Market is a train wreck, and that's not even considering the poor state of discoverability and management.

Amazon on the other hand has at least solved the problem of producing software that functions to a minimum standard of fitness of purpose. Their organization doesn't seem much (if any) better than Google's, but at least I know what's going to happen when I click a button on their site. I'm confident that I'm not going to spend the next 20 minutes hunting for an apk file for the app I just bought because the store I bought it from went up in a puff of smoke for no apparent reason.

The sad part is that even with all this, I still prefer Android, and I've been a heavy user of both the iPhone and iPad. Just imagine how much nicer it would be if they gave a shit.

<comment><USER14> "The sad part is that even with all this, I still prefer Android"

Why is that?, not trolling, just interested

<comment><USER13> Mostly, my complaints about Android revolve around issues outside the devices and OS. The market is dreadful, but day-to-day life with the phone is nicer (better notifications, widgets, additional useful functionality, etc.)

iOS5 should close the gap on a lot of this, and it's certainly a more usable OS in a lot of ways. I'm probably committed at this point, but it'll be interesting to see one way or the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just a point of clarification: the T-Mobile Comet is a Huawei device (a variant of the Ideos), not a Motorola device.

</comment><comment><USER15> I downloaded this game from the Amazon AppStore when it was free, and am sad to learn I'll not be getting future update, but I totally understand why and support the dev here.

One thing that does shock me is that the dev was unaware that Amazon could change the price to whatever they fancy (99c minimum) as that was pretty widely explained and discussed when the Amazon AppStore launched.

</comment><comment><USER16> My experience (trying to install Peggle) was being told, after lots of hoop jumping, that I live in the wrong country.

It would be nice to be told at the start. Now I'm so annoyed with the AppStore I removed it.

</comment><comment><USER17> This sounds more like a clueless rant than anything else.

> much like pretty much any website does not use HTTPS.

Apart from that just sounding line an awful sentence, that sentence is pretty much the same as saying "well bobby doesn't eat his vegetables, why do I have to!"

The author then claims his server would be burdened by the additional overhead of SSL. Funny, because I remember reading an article back when FireSheep was in the spotlight from Google stating that SSL only adds an additional 1-2% overhead tops. Over-exaggerate much?

> It turned out Amazon fails to filter out devices that should not be > supported according to the Manifest file.

Welcome to the world of fragmentation. Honestly, that is the biggest difficulty with coding for Android. I really don't think you can blame Amazon for this, however. Even the Apple App Store lets iPod Touch users download applications only designed for the iPhone (unless they changed it recently). But this is an issue you have to deal with on every platform. Apples had the big PPC/Intel issue with requiring 2 binaries, one for each processor type. It's up to you to make it as clear as possible to the user if their device is supported or not.

>3\. Where are my customers?

Put your email address in the description? How about in the app itself?

>Since there are so many devices available, supporting them all is difficult.

That's like a car mechanic saying "There's so many types of engines, I don't think I can learn how to fix them all!" Programming isn't something your mom can do on her way home from a soccer game. It can take an enormous amount of time, dedication, and skill. Once again, the author is blaming Amazon because coding is "hard".

The author then goes off about a review that was left filled with inaccuracies. That's yet another problem you'll have to deal with in a service like the Android Marketplace or Amazon Appstore. If they let you cherry pick reviews, it would lead to developers burying negative reviews that reveal their application does something "evil". The more time you spend getting all upset about a comment a user left, the less time you're spending improving your game or application and the less I actually would want to spend money on it.

As for the price change, the author provides next to no information on this.

Don't get mad at Amazon because you found out what Fragmentation and trolling from commenters is.

<comment><USER18> > Welcome to the world of fragmentation. Honestly, that is the biggest > difficulty with coding for Android.

This horse was beaten so many times, it is already dead.

> I really don't think you can blame Amazon for this, however.

Sure you can. Google Market handles this condition gracefully, i.e. if you can't run it, it will not show it to you. So why to hold Amazon to lower standard?

<comment><USER17> Ah, does it really? I don't have an Android phone so I honestly wouldn't have known unless you said something.

<comment><USER18> Every Android application comes with file called manifest. It specifies many things, but in the context of this debate also permissions and device capabilities required. If your app requires gyro, accelerometer, high-dpi display, OpenGL ES 2.0, specific texture formats or whatever, you put it here.

And here comes Google relationship with device manufacturers. As you certainly know, Market is not a part of the open-source android release, but proprietary app, that has to be licensed, if you want to distribute it on any device. So when the manufacturer licenses the app for the specific device, it also provides Google with device capabilities. Google puts it into the market, so they can show you only those apps, that your device is capable of running.

Amazon, of course, does not have such a database, and also does not have relationship with device manufacturers. It is up to them to find a way to build similar filtering mechanism. Nobody said, that building competing market is easy and that reviewing apps is enough. Good luck trying, though.

<comment><USER19> It seems slightly odd that Amazon can't have their Market App run a bunch of tests on install that generate the appropriate set of device capabilities. The major ones (Android version, OpenGL level, screen size, presence of GPS etc etc) are just a single API call each. Hard to believe that Amazon is unaware that this is a huge end-user experience fail for their customer base.

(Reading between the lines of the original blog post, possibly they just failed to enforce device restrictions for the free "App of the day" promotion.)

<comment><USER18> Yes, one would suppose that the Amazon market client would report device capabilities and the market would adjust response to that. Let's hope that they will learn.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pirahã defies Chomsky's theory of universal grammar - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto

<comment><USER2> Everett's claims have provoked a firestorm of debate. I was lucky enough to take a seminar with David Pesetsky from MIT shortly after Everett's story began appearing in the popular media, and he discussed what he perceived as serious flaws in Everett's findings and methodology. Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues have since published a lengthy and detailed rebuttal (<http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411>) that shows that Piraha does in fact have recursion. In fact, the surprising thing about Piraha is how unremarkable it is. It shares traits with German, Hindi, Hebrew, and many more languages. Pesetsky, et. al. also believe that the argument that quantifiers do not exist is not supported by the facts. More details are in the paper.

As far as their culture is concerned, there is evidence from other anthropologists that the Piraha do indeed have creation myths (the rebuttal paper actually includes one on page 44).

People jump on stories like these because it makes for a good news story ("Rebel Linguist Takes Down Noam Chomsky"). But the evidence I've seen doesn't sound so convincing.

<comment><USER3> Linguistics is not my field, so please bear with me...

As much as I admire and respect Chomsky, would it be too far-fetched to claim that he lacks field work and expects the world to adapt to his theories, rather than adapting his theories to the world?

Theoretical physicists sometimes suffer from the same problem. They see reality as an approximation of theory. Experimental physicists are the ones "in the trenches", so why not listen to what they have to say? Same goes for linguists. Advances in theory should be based on experiment and observation. Otherwise, theory becomes _l'art pour l'art_ and degenerates.

<comment><USER2> He does lack field work. But there are many other linguists, like Pesetsky and Stephen Pinker who have spent plenty of time in the field.

Field work for linguists amounts to working with people on dying and lost languages, but also the hard work of understanding and analyzing the intricacies of common languages like Hindi, German, and English. While Chomsky himself may not spend an inordinate amount of time proving his theories in the field, others have.

It should be noted, that Chomsky's theories have changed over time to reflect current findings. But the basic ideas of Universal Grammar and the essence of recursion in language have stayed the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A superb piece. I couldn't help reading the whole damn thing. The interplay between the scientific and human dramas is masterfully done. There are so many things I could say about this article that I'm not even going to try.

I didn't recognize the name John Colapinto, but it didn't take long to figure out that I've heard him before. He wrote a book about the infamous case of a boy who, after a botched circumcision as a baby, was forcibly raised like a girl to satisfy the pet gender theory of an unscrupulous psychologist. It was a tragic story. The boy grew up to courageously challenge the identity that had been imposed on him and lived as an adult male, but killed himself a few years after the book was published. I remember hearing a riveting interview with him and Colapinto on Fresh Air (<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1111038>).

So that makes two great pieces by John Colapinto. I wonder what else I've missed.</comment>


Close All Tabs in Chrome Except the Current Tab - <AUTHOR> https://browsernative.com/close-all-tabs-extension/ <comment><USER2> i thought chrome already had "close other tabs" in the context menu when you right-click a tab

<comment><AUTHOR> but that closes tabs only in the current window</comment></comment>


Talos Secure Workstation - <AUTHOR> https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-secure-workstation <comment><USER3> This machine is way out of my price range; but I am very interested in the frequently mentioned "open-toolchain FPGAs" in their descriptions.

AFAIK there are only a handful of very specific chips that you can currently get away with not using vendor tools against, like ICE40s.

I would be willing to put a fair amount of money into crowdfunding for better open source -full- toolchains for FPGAs (especially something targeting Xilinx devices). The vendor tools, aside from being closed source, are all huge bloated disasterpieces, and none available for macOS.

<comment><USER4> Yeah and unless the FPGA manufacturers start supporting open toolchains, it can end in an instant when the parts become EOL and Lattice (maker of the ICE40 series) starts obfuscating.

The problem with open toolchains from the manufacturer's point of view is that they have nothing to gain and everything to lose. They don't want to sell chips one at a time to hobbyists. They want to sell them millions at the time to GM and other companies. In their mind, open toolchains buy them nothing but leave them open to competitors stealing their designs. I'm not saying this view is accurate, it is just how chip vendors think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was pretty shocked that they're asking $18k for a workstation and hoping to get $3.7 million total. I was rather excited for it but this project is stillborn in my opinion. I may end up having work order one of IBM's basic dual-Power8 systems, which are only $6k: [http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s821lc/index.ht...](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s821lc/index.html)

<comment><USER6> I think it's odd that they offer no cheaper workstation configuration - <USER2> $18k price includes maxed-out ram, a higher-end workstation class graphics card (32GB ram on the card! much cheaper workstation cards exist), and an LSI SAS controller card instead of using built-in sata3. A more minimal configuration could probably shave $10k off the price (but maybe they thought it wouldn't make sense to pay $8k for a minimal config).

<comment> tpearson-raptor Hi, Timothy here from Raptor Engineering.

As mentioned on a different comment, we are investigating adding a lower-spec machine to the lineup due to popular demand. We had not anticipated the level of demand for a pre-built workstation with a less powerful configuration.

Most likely, this new configuration would scale the RAM down and replace the high-end workstation GPU with a mid-range consumer card. More information will be posted to the campaign page when we have this option available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want one of these badly, but sadly the price is not for me. I hope they find a big enough market, but I'm not really convinced.

$4,100 for the motherboard, add $1,135 for the slowest CPU and your minimum buy-in is $5,235 or $7,450 for the top-end 12-core (we can assume that RAM, GPU, Storage costs are the same as any other system)

</comment><comment><USER8> IBM POWER looks to be the most performant libre computing platform in existence, but $4100 for Raptor Engineering's Talos is still too pricey for me -- I'd suggest US$1000 to US$1500 for plain ATX motherboard + CPU, supporting affordable standard commercial consumer components is probably the point where crowd funding is viable as a desktop computer for regular software engineers and tinkerers (well the kind of people who seriously consider buying a Novena).

But Talos is expensive as it uses a custom board, with custom open-source firmware at relatively low volume, so a more affordable Talos desktop is probably infeasible.

I guess for that it needs to be a desktop (not a workstation) -- so a much more stripped down system dropping expensive components such as the FPGAs that a secure internet connected server, or a typical software engineer's desktop don't need.

In other IBM POWER news, Google has recently announced it's Open Compute Project POWER9 server -- the Zaius P9 Server: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709995)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am considering pledging $250, to support this effort within my means, and to be able to try things out with a VM. But I see no details on how much RAM, computing power, and storage space will be provided.

Edit: If the VM provided is anemically underpowered, the platform will be little more than a curiosity for me.

<comment> tpearson-raptor We have not worked out the exact specifications of the virtual machines at this time; we need to balance usability against overall cost and that depends to some extent on the number of signups we receive.

Initial targets were a dual core VM with 2GB RAM and 10GB storage. Would you consider this underpowered or acceptable?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not bad at all. :)

Edit: In terms of CPU and RAM, this is comparable (in the sense they can be compared) to a $20/month VM at Digital Ocean.

As far as strorage, have you considered using standard drives in addition to enterprise SAS drives?

Are you trying to go mainstream with the platform as quickly as possible, or just trying to carve out a niche for now?

<comment> tpearson-raptor The cost difference between SAS and SATA isn't all that much, and SAS has some nice benefits especially when used in a RAID type configuration.

We see this first run as targeting more niche and corporate / government type use cases, however (should funding be met) subsequent runs after this first one may be targeted more at a mainstream audience. It's far too early to tell at this stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you're interested in building your own system, you can buy the CPU separately:

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing- systems/power8-...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing- systems/power8-cpus)

The price range is $1,135-$3,350.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great! Many people have been waiting for this. Potentially it'll also come with other boot systems.

Though I'd choose the mainboard only + CPU and add an old, passive GPU for price reasons

If you can't afford the mainboard or a full system, please pledge some money for user freedom.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A less-expensive configuration has become available. For $8,750 you get an 8-core CPU, 128GB of RAM, a Radeon RX 480 GPU, and 2 x 2TB hard drives.

I really want to see this project succeed. I am leaning toward buying just the motherboard and CPU. I prefer SSDs, and don't need massive storage anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you want Power8 stuff to come down in price to something that is reasonably affordable (even __only __double the cost of a current generation core i7 and $190 motherboard), what 's needed is for the top-ten Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers to make standard ATX format boards for it. Period. Tyan, ASUS, Supermicro, MSI, ECS, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> They probably want to see interest before making a large investment in Power8.

Interestingly, some Asus and GIGABYTE motherboards for AMD and/or Intel processors support Libreboot:

[https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/](https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/)

So in theory, if this campaign succeeds, it may catch their attention, and we may have more affordable options down the road.

<comment><USER9> _They_ don't support Libreboot, but Libreboot supports them. They (Asus, Gigabyte etc.) give a damn about free/libre boot firmware, let alone Libreboot.

That's why we need companies like Raptor Engineering! Vote with your money...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> These are expensive, but the power 8 systems are really fantastic. I used to work extensively with power servers when they first started offering Linux support, and they just have fantastic performance characteristics under heavy load.

<comment><USER12> > _they just have fantastic performance characteristics under heavy load_

That sounds interesting, but could you elaborate? The comparisons to comparable Intel systems I've seen did not seem to suggest anything like that, it was more like sometimes Power wins, sometimes x86 does and both are quite similar performance wise. What kind of tasks did you observe to perform well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seriously, do not buy this at these prices. Briggs & Stratton servers are much cheaper and you can use the money you saved to muffle the sound. [http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/08/refreshed-ibm- power-l...](http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/08/refreshed-ibm-power-linux- systems-add-nvlink/)

<comment><USER14> The hook for this over other ones is that this is designed to have no binary blobs required, completely open and auditable firmware, etc. It's for people that care about security and are disgusted by the trash-fire that is the lowest levels of our computing stack.

[https://secure.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php](https://secure.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php)

<comment><USER13> AFAIK all the OpenPower boxes use the same firmware, so why not buy the cheaper Supermicro ones?

And on a practical level we know that people who bleat about firmware blobs are not going to spend $6,000 to escape from them.

<comment> tpearson-raptor Hi, Timothy here from Raptor Engineering.

The lesser expensive servers do not use the same firmware as Talos™ or even the more expensive IBM systems. The cheaper machines reduce cost by using proprietary firmware components wherever possible, and by dropping as many features as the market will bear at the lower price point. This is not the market segment that Talos™ is aimed at.

<comment><USER15> I believe their point is that the segment this is aimed at might not exist. I suppose that's why it's a campaign :) I'd also be interested for $1-2k even, but not at new car prices.

<comment> tpearson-raptor Regarding the cost of non-consumer hardware, especially hardware in the $1k range, I encourage you to check out the presentation entitled "Talos™, OpenPOWER™, and the World Beyond x86" at [https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor- computing-systems/talos-s...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing- systems/talos-secure-workstation#a-world-beyond-x86)

That presentation offers several potential explainations for why that particular market segment is locked to proprietary, non-libre offerings only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 18,000 is kind of pricey. If they had a less fully loaded machine for a more affordable price, I'd be tempted.

<comment> tpearson-raptor Hi, Timothy from Raptor Engineering here.

Given the strong and consistent feedback on this we are looking at adding a more minimal pre-assembled option. Most likely this would involve scaling the RAM count down and dropping the GPU to a mid-range consumer card. More information will be posted to the campaign page when we have this option available.

<comment><USER17> This is a pretty redundant comment, but I echo that sentiment! Slightly more modest price tag and configuration and I'd snap one of these up in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really wonder what sort of work you could do on this - most platforms don't have Power8 support do they? So likely no frontend, obviously no mobile, most tooling probably isn't available either...

<comment><USER8> The less hip Linux distributions have very good support for the less popular CPU architectures. For example, Debian Jessie has an official ppc64el (ie, POWER8) release as well as mips and other platforms with low mindshare [1].

In my experience with Debian armhf of a ARM Chromebook (via crouton), all the packages repositories all work out of the box and I haven't noticed any issues. The only exception I've had has been (ironically) the Chromium browser -- but that application is famously complicated to build.

The past few years I've been pleasantly surprised smoothly developing on machines using different CPU architectures is with open-source software (thanks to good automation (build bots), robust unit testing, and hard work by Debian maintainers and their upstream developers)

Compared to the closed-source world of applications (application compatible between Windows and Windows RT, or Apple's transition from PowerPC Macs to x86 Macs), being CPU architecture agnostic using purely open-source software requires no effort at all. But being architecture agnostic using closed source applications of course suffer from the same issues as the other platforms.

[1] [https://www.debian.org/ports/](https://www.debian.org/ports/)</comment></comment>


The State of Developer Ecosystem in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://www.jetbrains.com/research/devecosystem-2018/ <comment><USER2> In quant finance space, Python has been gradually taking over matlab/sas for signal/model implementation.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to see signs of Julia growing in that space

<comment><USER2> It is indeed growing as a high-performance computation-focused language, but not to the scale of Python yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After a 6 month foray into Ruby/Rails, was just going to hop back into learning Spring Boot today, brush up on Java 8 skills and the like.

Great to see Java is still #1 Hah!

<comment><USER5> What's making you leave the Ruby ecosystem?

<comment><USER4> More cushy jobs maintaining Java Monoliths, with better benefits and easier on the brain cause projects move so slow and are so inefficiently managed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's suddenly making Python so popular? I mean, it has been around since the 90s, why is it suddenly gaining tracking in 2017-18? What changed?

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't call it sudden at all. Python is great for the reason Java is great: diverse robust ecosystem for a ton of different fields. It's about ubiquity.

It's installed on virtually everything already. It's one of the easiest languages to learn (the basics), and is used as a teaching language. Even outside of CS everyone knows it.

Used in web programming (Django, Flask, etc.), numerical computing (Jupyter, numpy, scipy, pandas), AI/ML (TensorFlow, scikit-learn), bioinformatics, easy bindings to EVERYTHING (openCV, bullet physics, kafka, zookeeper, protobuf, json, xml).

It's usually concise enough, mostly straightforward to read, reasonably structured (though big codebases can become a pain). In most companies you see python used in tooling ALL THE TIME. It's fantastic for ducktape programming; often 'promoting' a largeish bash script to python. It ate perl's place there before.

I've even seen ipython work well as a login shell. Jeezz.

Sure the 2.7 -> 3 thing was a ton of drama, the package manager situation changes ever few years, but hey: a lesser language and ecosystem would have fallen apart under it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Java+Python fan boy in all their incarnations.

<comment><USER7> > I'm a Java+Python fan boy in all their incarnations.

Yet not mention of jython :)

<comment><USER5> Fan of Jython (though I have a few gripes) excited for graalpython.

If you can get really really good interop you can throw away half of Spring, Guice, dependency injection, etc.

You can use python code as your configuration format. Have it set everything up. Glue all of your Java pieces together for your service. Runtime is and critical paths are all Java.

That's the dream anyhow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does javascript have more penetration than HTML/CSS? I can't think of that many reasons to use it if you aren't doing web work.

<comment><USER9> I take it that you don't use node? I write all my scripts in node instead of bash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 30% of devs have no unit tests?

<comment><USER11> Was also expecting a higher number ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I didn't know HTML/CSS are programming languages...</comment>


Richard Glossip and the End of the Death Penalty - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/richard-glossip-and-the-end-of-the-death-penalty? <comment><USER2> Oh FFS, is all reporting this bad? They paint a picture of a guy that did nothing, and was convicted on one testimony.

In reality, Glossip admitted he tried to cover up the murder. He knew where the body was, but pretended to help the search. Apparently, he had planned to help the murderer cut the body up and dissolve it in acid.

Is he guilty of "masterminding" the crime? That's the part where they only have one testimony and would seem uncertain. Was he involved in the crime? Without a doubt, by his own admittance! He's not innocent. He might be innocent of the aggravating factor of having hired or killed for remuneration but he's not innocent of the murder.

You'd think sites would spend a few minutes reading the court papers on this. Or not, because it doesn't present a nice case. "Don't kill this accessory to murder, just imprison him for life!" "He's innocent of hiring a hitman, he only wanted to aid the murderer!" \-- I guess that doesn't have a nice snazzy line to parrot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to see some sources referenced here. The claim that he "planned to help the murderer cut the body up and dissolve it in acid" is, as far as I know, based purely on Sneed's testimony and has been denied by Glossip.

Glossip definitely made mistakes the day after the murder. But there's no physical evidence connecting him to the crime scene. To say that he admitted to being "involved in the crime" seems like a stretch. He's maintained his innoncence since the start.

A better story with details on the case is here: [https://theintercept.com/2015/07/09/oklahoma-prepares- resume...](https://theintercept.com/2015/07/09/oklahoma-prepares-resume- executions-richard-glossip-first-line-die/)

<comment><USER2> Summary here: [https://www.readfrontier.com/investigation/two-truths- and-a-...](https://www.readfrontier.com/investigation/two-truths-and-a-lie- what-records-interviews-reveal-about-richard-glossips-murder-conviction/)

Court of appeals document here: [http://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/10/10-6244.pdf](http://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/10/10-6244.pdf)

The first article I linked mentions finding his wristwatch where the body was. But I can't find another source on that so perhaps they made it up. (Or maybe it's in some of the linked documents in their article.) The court of appeals doc does note that Glossip did not mention Sneed's involvement until after the body was found. There's "made mistakes" and there's "was really covering up a murder".

Attempting to cover up a murder - that is, helping a murderer get away with it - is that not often being an accomplice or accessory (there seems to be some difference of what determines what)? Seems fair to say that's being "involved". Meanwhile, many of the articles declare full innocence. Reading through the court of appeals doc, that really does not sound like the case.

I understand - the death penalty is atrocious and shouldn't be allowed. But declaring this guy to be _innocent_ , when his actions really state otherwise - that just damages credibility.

It does really teach one lesson: Never talk to police. Had he used his 5th amendment right, he'd probably be far better off. Though his actions alone probably would have gotten him a serious sentence.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Java is one of the Best Programming Language  - <AUTHOR> http://javarevisited.blogspot.in/2013/04/10-reasons-to-learn-java-programming.html

<comment><USER2> Is there a nimble framework for web programming in Java? Is it Spring?

I used Java in C.S. school, but it seemed overly cumbersome. But after using Rails for the past 2.5 yrs (and hating it) and PHP before that, I'm open to a more versatile - but stable solution. Python seems great for everything non web (seemingly nowhere near as robust as Rails for web development..)</comment>


The word "lox" hasn't changed in sound or meaning in 8k years - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/the-english-word-that-hasnt-changed-in-sound-or-meaning-in-8000-years <comment><USER2> > For example, sound [k] changed to [h] from Latin to Germanic, and the Latin > word casa transformed into the English house.

The way this is written is incorrect. German is not a daughter of Latin, and the word "house" has a fully understood old Germanic origin [1].

Borrowings from Latin to German starting with the hard c sound retain that sound.

The relationship between the old Germanic and old Latin is that of cousins. The various Proto-Indo-European "k" sounds became "h" in Germanic and retained their "k" pronunciation in Latin.

i.e.

English PIE Latin

hound kyon canis

who kwo- qui

1\. [https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/house-word-origin- etymology/](https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/house-word-origin-etymology/)

<comment><USER3> Hey, it's tangential but it always funny to me... Are you perhaps german? I have no idea what other language would have "language" as feminine =). Though, in polish "speech" is. One of the meanings is quite close, esp. In the example of "mother speech" which seems like a direct copy of mutterspraeche. Its exatcly the same in meaning and literal translation.

I think it is interesting how words got their gender established as part of their etymology. It baffled me when learing german that every other word had it different and it's important for grammar.

<comment><USER4> yup it's strange, for instance Serbian and Croatian are almost the same in many things (even used to be treated as one language for a long time before the political split), but still many common words have a different gender - e.g "flu" is in Sebia "grip" (masculine), while in Croatia it's "gripa" (feminine), but "planet" is in Croatia just "planet" (masculine), while in Serbia it became "planeta" (feminine). And there are even the words like "bol" (pain) that is written and pronounced exactly the same in both languages, but feminine in Croatian, and masculine in Serbian.

<comment><USER5> Gender often follows pronounciation, not the other way around. Female inflection correlates with objective inflection, to a degree. Dropping Ablaut "-a" is not too odd. Ger. "Grippe" is often used as a name, thus without article, just as you say "I have [sickness]", except for "flu", where _flu_ is maybe influenced by _flow_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is apparently an English word that has completely bypassed the English, because I've never heard the word 'lox' for 'smoked salmon' in my life. Did this somehow go from mainland Europe straight to America?

<comment><USER7> It came to English via Yiddish and therefore via the Jewish people. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot more Yiddish words in American English than British English considering the size of the Jewish populations in both countries, the timelines for their immigration, and the roles they have traditionally taken in society.

<comment><USER8> It took me quite a few rereadings before it finally clicked that you're probably not implying that there are more words in American English originating from Yiddish than those coming from British English words.

<comment><USER9> Yes to clarify I believe OP is implying: there are more Yiddish words in current American English than there are Yiddish words in current British English.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Sorry, I probably phrased that original comment poorly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "lox": From Yiddish לאַקס (laks, "salmon"), from Old High German lahs, from Proto-Germanic lahsaz ("salmon"), from Proto-Indo-European laḱs- ("salmon, trout"). Cognate to Icelandic lax, German Lachs. More at lax.

It had a number of sound changes in between, and modern English "lox" just coincidentally resembles PIE's "*laḱs-". It should also be noted that the "k" is palatized, meaning it'd be pronounced more like "lakys" or "laksh".

<comment><USER11> This is fascinating to me. There's also "lax" from Old Norse, which also means "salmon". There's an Irish town near Dublin named "Leixlip" which comes from "Lax Hlaup", meaning Salmon Leap. It's also the location of some of Intel's big fabrication plants, to bring this back to technology for no good reason.

Wonder if HN can display Norse runic characters. This is the name "Lax Hlaup" in the Younger Futhark runic alphabet: ᛚᛅᚼᛋ ᚼᛚᛅᚢᛒ

<comment><USER12> > Wonder if HN can display Norse runic characters.

HN can display any character as long as the computer rendering the page has a font that supports the glyphs.

<comment><USER13> HN removes some Unicode ranges, like emoji and a few other symbols.

<comment><USER12> Now that's interesting (and somewhat understandable).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm betting that 'ma' hasn't changed in dozens thousand, if not hundreds thousand years.

Also, dunno how legit this guy is, but he wrote a fiction book about life 32000 years ago, and did some research for it: [https://www.livescience.com/39324-shaman-kim-stanley- robinso...](https://www.livescience.com/39324-shaman-kim-stanley- robinson.html)

> _Kim Stanley Robinson: Once I realized that the narrator had to be talking > and not writing, that made a huge difference. Then I had to think about > words. I had to think about every word … I realized that as a normal writer, > one of my most common phrases to start a sentence would be "in fact." The > word fact began to look wrong. They didn't have facts. That's a modern > concept … I couldn't use all kinds of words. I tried to examine every word > ... I did develop a different vocabulary for all of the words for sexual > parts. That was because the English language words are all heavily weighted > by Judeo-Christian or modern pruderies or concerns. They all had baggage. I > went back to Basque and Proto-Indo-European and I used real words. I just > used real words from their time. What we're finding is that Basque is > amazingly old, Proto-Indo-European is amazingly old ... There are about 100 > words that linguists now have determined are probably as old as 15,000 years > old that never changed like "mama" and "aye." I've been getting a fair > amount of incredulity and a little bit of objection to having my characters > say "mama mia," but it turns out that both of those words are outrageously > ancient._

</comment><comment><USER15> Funny, the only "lox" I know of is shorthand for liquid oxygen.

<comment><USER16> I really only know of either usage because a Bond movie I saw as a kid had the villain disguise his order for liquid oxygen as smoked salmon. Or something. Recollection is a little hazy.

<comment><USER17> I think the joke was that Bond is such a gourmet that he is the only one in the room who knows that "LOX" means smoked salmon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Short, frequent words are more likely to appear genetically related by chance.

Source: [https://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/E3253](https://www.pnas.org/content/110/35/E3253)

</comment><comment><USER19> The fascinating speculation for me is the similarity of Krishna and Christ.

I first read about this in the fantastic book "Ideas" by Peter Watson

[https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-History-Thought-Invention- Freud...](https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-History-Thought-Invention- Freud/dp/0060935642)

<comment><USER5> Linguists will say that Christ didn't have a /k/, hence "ch", and then religiouss fanatics (what a pleonasm) will join in and give their versions of heavily revisionist history, a few serious scholars will admit that nothing worthwhile is known about either as a living being, and the debate will be desolved by the notion that the onus of proof is on the claimant, who will be called wrong, if not lunatic, until proof is advanced.

For one, dating of the stories does not really match, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> From where is the idea that the sound hasn't change, can be?

That is a incredible claim. Is common that all the languages across history to have an explanation in how was pronounced or have sound samples of how the people talk about?

Because that is the only sure way to do that claim.

Just taking in account the changes I see in my own city, is impossible that words not change the sound. Heck, you can bet it change among people in the same HOUSE!

ie: I truly want to know how this can be proved...

<comment><USER21> It's called "the comparative method" and it has a very robust history of allowing us to view sound changes from the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Take that [0], Lisp. 8k years.

They wore chest beards back then.

[http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/the-lox- language.html](http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/the-lox-language.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> I recently stumbled upon the word 'lakh' in the Indian number system meaning 100000 [1] , which according to Paul Thieme [2] may be related to the German word Lachs, for salmon, referring to the innumerable fish in a swarm. The way languages are connected in their histories while seeming so disparate today keeps fascinating me.

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

[2] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh)

</comment><comment><USER24> Huh, I wasn't aware of this word in the English language, but it is remarkably similar to the Swedish word "lax" which just means salmon. I guess our languages are more related than I thought!

<comment><USER25> English and Swedish are both Germanic languages, which means they share a lot of basic vocabulary. And a few centuries after the split between North and West Germanic, a bunch of vikings invaded England and stayed there for a long time, leaving another large number of words there. A few more centuries later, English was diluted somewhat by French, but that was mostly fancy words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was curious about the Turkish word Pilav so looked it up. It turns out it's related to both Pilau in India and Paella in Spain, brought by the spread of Islam. In all cases it's rice or other grain cooked in a broth.

It's a much more recent dispersion than Indo-European, but I still found it fascinating that the Spanish, Turkish and Indian restaurants in my town have this connection in their cuisine.

<comment><USER27> Here's the etymology given in Nisanyan's etymology dictionary for Turkish: from Persian which in turn is from Sans pulāka पुलाक rice bowl < Sans pul पुल् a group

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The only places that call it lox are places that have considerable Jewish > populations, even in the US.

The first time I heard the word was from my GF's (and future ex-wife's) mom; whose sister was married to a Jewish man. Sadly, due to a then recent bad taste experience with a pickled herring in wine sauce--I never sampled any until years and years after that. Oy vey; a lot of wasted years there!

</comment><comment><USER29> I didn't realize people knew about liquid oxygen 8000 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER30> Moreover, salmon probably entered English during the time French was the language of English nobility:

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salmon](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salmon)

Richard the Lionheart was actually Richard (probably pronounced something like Rishaa?) Cœur de Lion and spoke French:

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

Apparently only one fourth of English words are of Germanic origin:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin#/media/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart.svg)

<comment><USER31> By the usual pattern in English, "lox" would designate the living animal, while "salmon" would designate what you'd put on a bagel (cf ox/beef, lamb/mutton).

<comment><USER30> Also: swine/pork, deer/venison.

Turkey as the name of the bird is however something still unclear. It's not called so in Turkey.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't quite understand the "not changed in sound" part.

AFAIK, "lox" came to English through Yiddish, which got the word from German. And in German, the vowel was always "a" not "o" (e.g. [https://ia600301.us.archive.org/32/items/etymologisches00klu...](https://ia600301.us.archive.org/32/items/etymologisches00klug/etymologisches00klug_bw.pdf) traces the word to "lahs"), so the vowel quality and the final consonant appear to have changed.

<comment><USER32> The German word 'lachs' and the English word 'lox' are pronounced, essentially, identically.

<comment><USER33> But the German "ch" phoneme doesn't even exist in (American) English?

<comment><USER34> It's not pronounced from the throat like the German "ch" but otherwise it's as close as it gets.

<comment><USER35> There are (at least?) three different ways "ch" can be pronounced in German: Throaty as in "Buch", a slightly altered "sh" sound like in "Bücher", and just as plain "k", like in "Lachs".

<comment><USER5> I was very surprised to see wiktionaries phonetic transcription and sound sample of "Buch", apparently it is not throaty everywhere.

It's a /k/ in all "-achs", e.g. "Dachs", "wachsen", "Flachs", exactly as in "bochs" the emulator (compare "boxen"), except across boundaries, e.g. "wachsam, wach-sam" (wakeful, at guard), or contractions, e.g. "[Meister seines].Faches/Fachs".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Along the same lines, what I find fascinating is how similar the words for mother and father are across nearly all languages, even non-IndoEuropean ones.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/wo...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/10/words- mom-dad-similar-languages/409810/)

<comment><USER2> There are 2 main competing hypotheses to explain this. The first one is that these words are historically related. The other one, which is controversial, is that these are the result of Sound Symbolism:

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

In particular sound symbolism hypothesizes that the initial "m" of many similar "mother" words is related to the sound of a lips sucking milk, like the verb "mamare" in Latin meaning "to suck".

<comment><USER37> Neither of those match the rather unsurprising answer I've heard before, which is that "mama" and "papa" are two of the simplest sounds babies can make and therefore two of the sounds babies are most likely to start making first as they learn to speak. And us parents naturally assume the baby is trying to talk to us when they start making sounds, so we latched onto "mama" and "papa" (or the various extremely similar sounds in other languages) as being the words the baby was using to refer to us.

<comment><USER38> Yes but then we might expect that in some languages "mama" and "papa" are reversed. What is surprising is not just that these simple words seem to be preserved but that they mean the same thing.

<comment><USER37> I think "ma" generally comes first in baby's lexicon, and historically the gestational parent has been the primary caretaker (and the gestational parent in most cases has the identity "mother"), so it's no surprise that the "ma" sound is associated with mother.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A friend and I used to pour over a massive dictionary to discover insights into ancient indo-european thought. An example: "world" a conjugation of two germanic words - "were" (man) and "ald" (age). We surmised that the "world" was everything a man experienced during his lifetime, from birth to death.

Gives meaning to the phrase, "Not the end of the world."

</comment><comment><USER40> They jinxed it.

In a few years, "lox" is going to mean something entirely different, like a stray thread on a shirt or something.

</comment><comment><USER41> I beg to differ. Lox is salt cured (brined) for an extended period and not smoked. It's usually somewhat salty. Nova is short cured and cold smoked, and not nearly as salty as lox. At least at the Jewish delis I've been to. Google backs me up.

</comment><comment><USER42> Linguistics is a pretty amazing field that I always feel like I should learn more about.

<comment><USER43> I've sunk a lot of my spare time into binging all sorts of Wikipedia articles on the evolution of languages.

<comment><USER10> Same. There's usually a linguistics-related article on the front page of HN every couple days too. Seems like people who are interested in software tend to also be interested in linguistics...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Danish is "laks" and the sound is very close to the English one too. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER45> Really? When I was growing up lox meant liquid oxygen the fish was called salmon in my experience its only recently that English speaking people began to use the word for liquid oxygen for fish.</comment>


DRM authentication servers stop Dragon Age: Origins from working - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/04/drm-run-amok-how-bioware-and-ea-are-screwing-users-right-now.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the author's description of the failed troubleshooting he did is as interesting as the issues surrounding DRM:

 _The overwhelming impression that a user gets from a Google search for this error message is that this is a known, solved problem, and that one needs only to apply the right mix of hacks and tweaks (plus maybe a complete reinstall or two) in order to set things right and get back to playing. So hacking and tweaking is exactly what many of us set about doing. And doing. And doing. And doing. None of it worked. Or, when it did work, it had nasty side-effects like naked party members with no access to their gear. Again, we were vainly trying to fix a new server problem that had the symptoms of an old client problem._

</comment><comment><USER2> I'll bet the version off pirate bay works fine. I know this is kind of snarky, but if they want to successfully combat piracy they need to make the pay-and- play experience better than the pirate one. DRM only affects those who play the unmodified game.

<comment><USER3> I bought the mac version from Gametreemac -- when I have periods of dropped connections, my game doesn't give me a warning, it completely dies. This has forced me to save nearly every minute or so. Terrible UX :(

Almost makes me wish I torrented a copy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do these companies host and maintain their own DRM systems? If they do it seems like they would fall in love with anyone ready to provide a bullet proof 99.99999% uptime DRM solution.

<comment><USER5> Steam?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Note: we've contacted Bioware and EA PR for comments, and as of press time have received no reply._

Last time I checked they didn't have a press time(not being a print organization and all), so what does this mean? Did they wait twenty minuets for a return phone call then publish?

<comment><USER5> They probably do have some kind of publishing schedule to space out their articles evenly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like no one was at the wheel over the weekend so the problem went unnoticed for a couple of days. Or if there was someone they didn't monitor the forums.

</comment><comment><USER8> The emotionally charged nature of the article was presumably intended to provoke a sense of outrage/injustice in readers, however it only made me feel pity for the author. He shows signs of being an addict--one whose life has become so narrow that such interruptions in game playing take on monumental importance.

"..spent my free time this past weekend needlessly trapped in troubleshooting hell." You're damn right, it was needless. Here's an idea: when something doesn't work, chill the fuck out. Do something else with your time while the problem is resolved.

"Malicious neglect"? Really? Only an addict could become convinced of that.

<comment><USER9> Addict? It seems to me that he's merely someone extremely passionate about something.

This is also a case of one of the worst DRM-related fears coming to fruition. You no longer have (legal) access to a product you purchased. You're now essentially _licencing_ games from the publisher and they get to decide when that licencing expires.</comment></comment>


Videos: The Startup Concept and Why I Want to Start a Company? - <AUTHOR> http://www.SiberianFruit.com <comment><USER2> Interesting. Rock on!!!</comment>


[pdf] the Berlin Tunnel Operation (1952 – 1956) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP07X00001R000100010001-9.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I found this compelling to read - there was an aspect of "it's so cool they did this", but also an feeling that the people on either side of the cold war, the day to day engineers and soldiers, military and intelligence, were just people, with humor and humanity, no matter what side they happened to be on.

"The lack of an adequate base line made the surveying problem especially difficult [...] so a baseball game was organized with the objective of knocking a baseball as far into the East Zone as possible. This scheme was frustrated by the friendliness of the East German guards who kept returning the baseball."

<comment><AUTHOR> (see also) [https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Blake-British- di...](https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Blake-British-diplomat-and- Soviet-spy)

George Blake was mentioned in the story as having known about, and relaying information to the Soviets about the tunnel during its construction.</comment></comment>


The Unlimited Web - <AUTHOR> http://jnfr.posterous.com/the-unlimited-web

<comment><USER2> The internet is not free or unlimited. There exists bandwith limits because the cables can't take more than that. There exists hard disk limits, because hard disks cost. Any business who is offering something unlimited is taking a risk and trying to keep up with the need of space by adding more space when customers use space.

The price of 50GB storage is not free, it does cost but only about 3 Dollars according to the first 1TB hard drive which came up from DuckDuckGo. In this 1TB hard drive you can store 50GB partitions for 20 users. If the hard drive cost's 60 dollars then it's 3 dollars per user. So to say drop box is making about 6 dollars profit from 50GB accounts though the over all profit depends on the amount of free accounts. Box.net took huge risk to steal dropbox users with the free 50GB accounts.

After it's in the amounts of tens of thousands users the 50GB free account is not really a free anymore. The space for 10k users is 500TB and cost is 30,000 dollars.

So it is not free nor unlimited. Get that idea out of your head right away.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out some places where my article may have been misunderstood. I agree with you that there is definitely overhead for box.net to be providing the 50GB free for new users and I will re-iterate my point that I definitely believe that they will eventually profit from the risk they took. The point I was trying to make was less on the price but more on the rate at which the web is expanding in the sense of space and what we set as limits and caps.

Comparing how things were less than a decade about and now (with web hosting plans, gmail's release) suggests a growing trend that the web is quickly becoming "unlimited", and this sense of "unlimited" is quickly becoming the norm. The gripe I was trying to express with the article was how some companies fail to see that by continuing to quantify the resources available to users.

<comment><USER2> I have to agree that the sense of the web being "unlimited" is becoming the norm, though the web will never be unlimited unless we break light speed and find a way to store unlimited data.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your group messaging use cases? - <AUTHOR> So group messaging is becoming more popular and some argue that will be the new form of social media.
I'm curious what do people use group messaging for and what are the most popular use cases?
Let's discuss the group messaging behaviors. trends etc <comment><USER2> Machine to Machine, for one thing.

That is, that kind of system is a good communication fabric for many "internet of things" applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> but where do people fit in then?</comment></comment>


Amber Rudd doesn't get encryption and says she doesn't need to - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3018477/amber-rudd-doesnt-get-encryption-and-says-she-doesnt-need-to <comment><USER2> There's 1001 things that the home secretary 'should' have a deep understanding of, but realistically, someone in such a position has to make decisions all the time in areas where they have relatively little knowledge. (Not that I have any time for Amber Rudd, but this isn't a fair criticism.)

<comment><USER3> She doesn't have to know how to "roll her own crypto," but if she intends to legislate something like this she definitely needs more than superficial understanding of it. She is trying to "ban math" after all. You don't think she needs to take a little extra time to get a deeper understanding before trying something like that?

How do you get more than superficial understanding? You listen to all parties. Something tells me she's just taking GCHQ's words at face value that terrorists use encryption, therefore encryption must be banned, without weighing other side negatives like increased cyberattacks due to breakable encryption, a harm to people's privacy rights due to GCHQ's very own and well documented abuses, and so on. Something tells me GCHQ isn't going to give her _that_ side of the story.

Also, politicians need to understand that the solution to stopping terrorism _can 't be_ just "banning stuff".

Terrorists are now using trucks to drive into people. Should we ban trucks? They will soon send remotely controlled autonomous cars into groups of people. Should we ban cars or even autonomous cars (once millions are already on the road, by the time something like that happens)? And so on.

Plus, what the GCHQ often conveniently "forgets" to tell the public is that they were already warned about the extremists. But they did nothing to stop them?

Why? Well it could've been incompetence, or inability to take action, or simply the fact that there are too many false positives [1] that someone has a certain X percentage chance to do such a crime. Mass surveillance is only going to make that _worse_ not better. So why do they keep pushing for it with the banning of encryption?

They can already do targeted surveillance do against anyone at anytime, no matter their encryption or opsec, considering they've hacked component suppliers such as Gemalto and others. So that's clearly not an issue. It's the mass surveillance they want, and so far we've seen no evidence that it would help them. But we do know it's going to make things a lot worse for the rest of us, in more than one way. So I think she needs to spend a little more time on it compared to the other "1,000 extra things" she needs to decide on.

[1] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_f...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_for.html)

<comment><USER2> I think your problem with Amber Rudd is really just that you disagree with her view on how much access the government should have to people's communications. I don't see how any of your points have much to do with how much Amber Rudd knows about encryption. In fact, a lot of your points seem to be on the broader topic of government action in response to terrorism and don't have much to do with encryption at all.

As far as legislation is concerned, remember that there are many many people who work on drafting any given bit of legislation. Amber Rudd would not be doing it by herself.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to introduce your startup to the world? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to launch my new startup but I'm not sure how to promote it. I know that HackerNews is a great community to introduce it but regularly no one pays attention to a new user posts. Social media is good too but not for those who don't have enough friends on the web or their friends are not their audience. For example I'm launching an English startup but mostly my friends do not understand English. <comment><USER2> One lesson I've learned over the years: You can keep launching until someone notices, but if you have to "launch" in the first place, that's the business equivalent of a code smell.

Once you accept that you will not get coverage on any of the major sites, you can think about how to promote your product. You should have already started before you built anything, to make sure your product solves someone's problem. If it solves even one person's problem well, chances are they will know other people who have the same problem and will be your biggest advocate / promotion avenue.

For promotion, sometimes the old tricks are the best tricks. Yes, ads cost money, but $100 spent on AdSense can still send a lot of people to your site if you spend it wisely.

So don't worry about launching, worry about minimizing your customer acquisition cost. And start by simply advertising so you have an initial cost of acquisition for your estimates.

<comment><USER3> This.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Our startup is an automatic summarization API ([http://www.textteaser.com/](http://www.textteaser.com/)). I once wrote an article in Medium ([https://medium.com/medium- ideas/59b1747c1d36](https://medium.com/medium-ideas/59b1747c1d36)) to showcase how our technology will perform with Medium articles. It received good feedback. Frontpage in Hacker News plus top post in Medium for last month. We then create a bot in Reddit ([http://www.reddit.com/user/tldrrr?sort=top](http://www.reddit.com/user/tldrrr?sort=top)) to summarize submitted articles. Mostly good feedback but some subreddits banned the bot eventually.

So my tip is, don't just show the world your product. Show the world what your product can do.

It is best if you can show your product to where people are familiar with. In my case I used Medium, and Reddit. I'm planning to do it to some popular web applications next time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately we are still in beta, but this is exactly the problem we are tackling. Hopefully within a couple of months we will be helping you or similar people. In the meantime, I agree about the good comment below about advertising. And also you should be pushing it to friends and family first. Although a language barrier seems to be an obstacle, I am sure you can find at least a couple of friends to use/recommend your app. We think of it as a tree, first branching is hard but possible, the rest is just growing the tree. Advertising as well as active participation is key here. Needless to say, good quality product/service is essential too. All the best with your endeavour

</comment><comment><USER6> It depends entirely on the type of business you are building. There is no one fits all answer. Give us more background, otherwise you should read PG's memos or answers on Quora.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on a Google Reader alternative which in my opinion is a lot more useful! It gathers the news from across the web based on the user's interests and summarizes them like summly. Also it comes with a system to save the posts to read them later and let's users to add their own feeds and lets the users to turn the posts summarizing on or off for specific feeds.

<comment><USER6> This looks really cool and I actually need something like this. I would target busy people who don't have time to read full articles, and I would use a mobile platform to distribute this (iPhone/Android apps). Try also students that needs to summarise long text for school, this should help them. And blog writters should put a preview/summary of the article on top of it so send it to them as well, with an example of their article summarised in your emails.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much direct client interaction necessary for remote developers? - <AUTHOR> Recently joined a local team of developers working with a remote client. We are having twice a week remote meetings with the client where each developer updates the client about individual performance and shares next milestone etc.<p>Is this the right approach? Do each developer in a team (consisting of both senior and junior devs) have to directly interact with the client? Or, it is the job of Project Manager / Team Lead? <comment><USER2> Face to face? None.

I've never met anyone I've worked with or work for at my current gig in person and I am well over three years in on it.

There is no point in arguing that face to face time isn't beneficial though.

If it feels necessary/feasible/practical to meet your client in person, then do it.

If it can be avoided and you work well together despite the distance, then just roll with it.</comment>


UK "Privacy not Prism" organisation - <AUTHOR> https://www.privacynotprism.org.uk

<comment><USER2> This has to be the first time that Comic Sans hasn't offended me in some way.

On a more serious note, I will be donating to this.

<comment><USER3> Consider a recurring donation to the UK Open Rights Group - they're the people behind this

[http://www.openrightsgroup.org/](http://www.openrightsgroup.org/)</comment></comment>


Uber banned in Delhi after taxi driver accused of rape - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/08/uber-banned-delhi-taxi-driver-accused-rape

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715912](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715912)

<comment><USER3> flag it instead.

<comment><USER2> Do you think I haven't?

<comment><USER3> Good good, I'm flagging too :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Cheese Bad for You? The Evidence Says No – With Some Exceptions - <AUTHOR> https://blog.insidetracker.com/cheese-bad-healthy-evidence <comment><USER2> Sugar is the crack that's killing us. Cheese is fats and proteins, which we handle very well. But the occasional fruit was our biggest source of sugar. Its rarity makes our bodies crave it like a drug, and today it's so cheap it's basically free.

<comment><USER3> Right on! Just see how it affects your skin (and beyond)... [https://www.prevention.com/beauty/skin-care/a20428803/how- su...](https://www.prevention.com/beauty/skin-care/a20428803/how-sugar-ages- your-skin/) "In fact, collagen is the most prevalent protein in the body"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > For someone with a family history of heart disease or high cholesterol, > fresh cheeses are best due to their low cholesterol content.

Dietary cholesterol doesn't correlate strongly with blood cholesterol. You can eat a ton of it and your blood cholesterol won't change one iota. That's one of the misconceptions behind the vilification of eggs. The article disparages butter for the same reasons, but evidence is also showing butter was falsely accused.

There are too many pseudoscientists in the nutrition industry. You can't trust anyone. The only thing I know for certain is to not overconsume. That'll keep you healthy 90% of the time.

<comment><USER5> You rightly point out that nutrition is rife with pseudoscience (and obsolete scientific paradigms), and that you can't trust anyone. Here are some sources to add credibility to your claims. As one might expect, reality is more complex than your comment, as well as "cholesterol = bad":

[https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should- you...](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/fats- and-cholesterol/cholesterol/)

\- The biggest influence on blood cholesterol level is the mix of fats and carbohydrates in your diet—not the amount of cholesterol you eat from food.

\- _For most people,_ the amount of cholesterol eaten has only a modest impact on the amount of cholesterol circulating in the blood. _For some people, though, blood cholesterol levels rise and fall very strongly in relation to the amount of cholesterol eaten. For these "responders," avoiding cholesterol- rich foods can have a substantial effect on blood cholesterol levels._ Unfortunately, at this point there is no way other than by trial and error to identify responders from non-responders to dietary cholesterol.

[https://www.cdc.gov/features/cholesterol-myths- facts/index.h...](https://www.cdc.gov/features/cholesterol-myths- facts/index.html)

\- Myth: Eating foods with a lot of cholesterol will not make my cholesterol levels go up.

\- Fact: It can be complicated. We know that foods with a lot of cholesterol usually also have a lot of saturated fat. Saturated fats can make your cholesterol numbers higher, so it's best to choose foods that are lower in saturated fats. Foods made from animals, including red meat, butter, and cheese, have a lot of saturated fats.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the reminder—-don't accept what I said as fact, because we still don't know. Your CDC link is a little behind the times, because it's still claiming saturated fats are "the enemy."

I actually read one of the sources behind your first link just before I posted my first comment to check my facts, and in the parts not quoted by your article it says that responders usually absorb proportional levels of HDL to LDL, making their blood cholesterol similarly neutral to non-responders.

I'm not going to tell someone who has heart disease to go eat a ton of eggs, but I will say that if you're healthy you shouldn't worry about it. Just don't eat too much of anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm dubious of this article. After lookup up a couple of the (unlinked) references around apparent increase prostate cancer risk in men..

The conclusion of _Dairy Products and Cancer Risk in a Northern Sweden Population_ [0] is the opposite "In conclusion, this study does not support any major adverse or beneficial effects of fermented milk, non-fermented milk, cheese, and butter in the diet from a cancer risk perspective"

The second (of three) references for this claim; _Dairy products intake and cancer mortality risk: a meta-analysis of 11 population-based cohort studies_ [1] does mention elevated prostate cancer risk - "However, whole milk intake in men contributed to elevated prostate cancer mortality risk significantly". But this is about whole milk consumption (specifically, not cheese, yoghurt or butter)

We're living in a GPT3 world.. is this the product? The references don't support the claim (granted I only tested two of 21 references), and that last article-summary point "If you want to be deliberate in your cheese choices, consider sodium, calcium, calorie, and protein content" means _absolutely nothing_

[0]: [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01635581.2019.1...](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01635581.2019.1637441) [1]: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27765039/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27765039/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Kudos for also visiting the primary sources. Regarding this question:

> We're living in a GPT3 world.. is this the product?

No. I just found the author's bio: [https://nutrition.tufts.edu/profile/staff/julia- reedy](https://nutrition.tufts.edu/profile/staff/julia-reedy)

You may have questions about the post (and they may be valid), but clearly the author has experience reading and explaining nutrition research. Errors, if any, may simply be errors.

<comment><USER6> As the submitter, perhaps you know more than I.. but where did you find the link between that Tufts profile and the author? Given you've submitted insidetracker more than once, perhaps you're affiliated, in which case I'm curious why the profile isn't properly linked.

If you try and find her on insidetracker you just get a list of her articles, or a vague blurb that doesn't even mention her Tufts appointment

<comment><AUTHOR> I Googled for the author's name and degree acronym - basically, I copied the article's byline. Her name and degree ("MNSP") are unique enough to find other bio pages, including the one I linked to.

I'm not affiliated with the company or her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _evidence shows that cheese doesn't deserve to be treated the same as meat or milk_

Who in 2020 still thinks that meat, in and of itself, "promotes disease"?

<comment><USER8> It's clearly associated with obesity, heart disease, etc.

Keeping animals too close together, like it's done in industrial-scale meat production, provides the right conditions for diseases to mutate to something very dangerous. The swine flu and Covid are good examples. The overuse of antibiotics might lead to a catastrophic spread of resistant bacteria in the future. Not all meat is produced this way, but most is.

<comment><USER7> Beef liver isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Parmesan is a superfood. That is all I needed to read! [http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190127-italys- practically-...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190127-italys-practically- perfect-food)

</comment><comment><USER10> > "Multiple meta-analyses show that, with the exception of prostate cancer, > cheese does not increase cancer risk"

Well, that's a fairly dangerous exception, no?

</comment><comment><USER11> the evidence is "50-80 grams/day is ok", per the article.

That is an actually tiny amount of cheese, if you can be bothered to measure it. So yeah, indulge if you want (I do!) but be aware it's still not a very healthy choice for daily consumption.

<comment><USER12> As a French, that seems a very reasonable amount to me. The article says this amount covers one or two servings, and it seems about right although I don't have a balance at hand to check it ;) Use small helpings, of tasty cheese.

One point not covered here is that the fat in cheese, although unhealthy animal fats, are very effective at stopping hunger. I noticed that if I take cheese for lunch, I'm not hungry at all until diner. Without, I may feel a need to stack late in the afternoon. And I wouldn't be surprised if this snacking were much worse than the small portion of cheese. So it's an indirect way for cheese to help keep a balancing diet: as a help to fight (very bad) snacking.

Also, it's best to eat cheese for lunch, where you have the whole day to "burn" it, and skip it for diner. At least that's the recommendation past a certain age, where you need to be more careful about your waistline...

<comment><USER13> Your comment shows the difference between American and French diet habits. A French person having cheese for lunch means a 50gr slice of Roquefort with some bread. An American having cheese for lunch is two slices of pizza with a giant Coke. Then Americans are confused why the French can eat all those fatty foods and not gain as much weight.

<comment><USER12> Yes, and it reminds me of another effect: I don't have the reference at hand, but I read about a study showing that to "feel full" you need a lower intake of strong taste food versus bland food. Then the Roquefort definitely beats the rather bland pizza cheese, no contest ;). The "smelly French cheese" is a well known joke, but it may actually help getting full and stopping eating with a lower calories intake than blander food.

<comment><USER14> Oh yea, love Roquefort. I remember it was quite difficult to get where I lived in the US maybe 10 years ago and then suddenly it started appearing at normal supermarkets.

I've been told unpasteurized cheese is hard to get in the US still and is somehow tastier. Haven't had a chance to confirm.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What does Urbit do? - <AUTHOR>

I have seen several high ranking posts related to Urbit. I have spent some time on the site, but I cannot figure out the purpose of Urbit. What problem does it help solve? What does it do? <comment><USER2> Someone posted this link to an explanation a few hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6492366) It looks like that blogger will be writing more on Urbit soon. At the very least the comments on that blog post are informative & opinionated: look for the one by "StephenH".

Basically, Urbit's thesis is that "the internet is broken"\---that it's a square peg document delivery system hammered viciously into a round distributed applications hole---and that UNIX is overpowered / for sysadmins. Urbit's goal is to replace your C-based OS and your HTML-based web with a unified, typed functional, VM-ish "thing". (Source: what I remember from the presentation video.)

To summarize: fix broken web, fix broken OS, create the developer's idea of a decent functional language. I think he knows he's being quixotic, but his morale is good and he's having a nice time of it.

Anybody at all please go ahead and correct me if I got anything wrong---I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the link www.urbit.org</comment>


Facebook 10 year roadmap, user base : Mark Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10103472646530311 <comment><AUTHOR> This doesn't look right. In 10 Years, ship 5M+ Gear VR units? 5M units have already been shipped from November 2014 to January 2017, just over a 2 year period, doesn't shipping an additional 5M+ over a 10 year period seem a bit small? [http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/04/samsung-confirms-it- sold-5...](http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/04/samsung-confirms-it- sold-5-million-gear-vr-mobile-headsets/)</comment>


CNN: Next net 25 startups to watch - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/21/magazines/business2/nextnet_intro.biz2/index.htm <comment><USER2> From following the usual blogs such as Mashable and TechCrunch, I expected some other startups to be included. A few of those 25 happen to be dealing with advertising, targeted or otherwise. It's interesting when a lot of these startups are built on the notion of promoting and selling others' products. Perhaps there will be a steady decline in companies that actually create something new to offer. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a strange mix. About half seem obvious, and the other half totally random.

<comment><AUTHOR> which ones are you thinking about?</comment></comment>