Montreal Is Leading the AI World Takeover - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudraker.com/en/cloud-co/montreal-is-leading-the-ai-world-takeover <comment><USER3> It's interesting most Americans don't seem to be aware of how much good tech work goes on in Quebec (say kay-bec not kwa-bec). I went a few years to work on SoftImage3D and it was the same with computer graphics, lots of talent and innovation I was not aware of.

It may not be the "Silicon Valley of AI" but the point is they are a hotbed.

I would recommend it if you have an interest. People are very friendly, tons of good restaurants, night life, and culture. You get a bit of European flavor without leaving the continent. It is advisable to commit to a crash course in French. Yes a lot of people speak english but for a variety of reasons it makes a big difference in what you'll get out of being an expat.

<comment><USER4> I've been considering for a while moving to Montreal to be closer to the US for practical reasons. Any idea how easy that is as a french citizen?

<comment><USER5> French citizen living in Montreal. The easiest way is probably to come here with a PVT (Programme Vacances-Travail, or Working Holiday VISA) but you must be under 35.

You could also find a firm willing to hire you but there will be paperwork and they'll have to prove that they haven't found a Canadian citizen for the position you'll occupy. It's a bit of a pain for the company but some companies are used to this (consulting firms mostly). You'll then have a 2 years VISA + working permit.

Or you can go the permanent resident way, from France, but it's gonna take a long time (often 3+ years).

My advice is to come here as a tourist for a few weeks to have a feeling of the city. Try to come in winter, as it's a bit harsh and a non negligible number of expats go back to their home countries after their first winter here. Other than that, it's a really beautiful place and I love living there (been almost 5 years now).

Hope it's helpful!

<comment><USER4> Thanks, that's very helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think there are a lot of Intelligent, Educated, Talented and Creative people in Montreal. But that probably can be said of many places across the globe. So the raw materials for successful tech hub are (partially) available.

However, the government seems to to the major 'driving' force behind this, just like they are doing with the Video Game industry in the Province, with big subsidies, tax breaks which 'artificially' boosts local studios.

Now the future will tell if the artificial injection will create a lasting, self-sustaining tech hub, or will simply evaporate in the next elections (if a different government decides to cut the Business friendly regulations). But if we take the historic example of the local video game studios (there are a TON of studios around town!), there is a big potential for Montreal to become an important AI center.

Ex-Gamedev (and Montrealer) ...

<comment><USER7> Media City has been around more than one electoral cycle in Montreal.

Also here the govt is selecting the _kind_ of jobs via tax breaks. The USA has tax breaks for Facebook/Amazon and many others, but it's not targeted it's just a catch-all rule of big companies paying no tax.

The state in any country creates the environment in which business lives. The idea that the USA is some kind of "natural" environment for business and everything else is synthetic is not something I can agree with.

<comment><USER6> Yes you are right about the subsidies, they have been around for the major part of the last 15-20 years. So chances are, they will continue to be a driving force which no new elected government will want to 'cut' (financially and politically impractical).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isnt as far fetched as one may think.

There's a lot of talent in Montreal and great technology has been developed there.

There's a lot more entrepreneurs than many assume from their daily interactions.

Example:

The worlds first visual word processor was developed in Montreal by Stephen Dorsey - well before Gates, Jobs and Woz.

He then went on to develop real time fax over IP in the late 80s / early 90s and owns the patent on t38.

Steve and his company are still active, developing communications tech that's used worldwide.

This is just one example of many I've unexpectedly encountered doing business in the area.

Never say never :)

</comment><comment><USER9> "AI is now the technology shaping our world more than ever before."

This, the first sentence of the article, does not express a thought. Read it carefully. It's on a par with "More people have been to Russia than I have."

<comment><USER10> It's not _quite_ that bad.

If you make the (ridiculous) assumption that, at any given time, there is _exactly one_ technology that is shaping 5he world more than it ever did before, then the sentence becomes intelligible. Of course, that's not what they meant...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cloudraker is based in Montreal, unsurprisingly.

</comment><comment><USER12> Air Canada isn't a global company. It's a flag carrier for Canada only.

The rest is wishful thinking. Building an industry isn't just top down (all the braggy stuff was about top down), the bottom up stuff is critical and important.

Good luck with it. But I feel like while the research might be OK, the commercialization will come out of the bay area anyways. There just isn't enough quality people to do this in Canada.

<comment><USER13> What do you mean by "bottom up" in this context? They mention having a lot of researchers (grunts) and now a brand new startup accelerator.

> There just isn't enough quality people to do this in Canada.

Do you really believe that would be the cause?

<comment><USER14> I believe he/she means that, while it's important to have quality infrastructure in place (fun locations, decent food, good pipes) to support startups and tech, it's absolutely critical to have a small group of hackers which actually DO things. Otherwise it's just theatre.

The jury is still out on whether one comes before the other or vise versa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been thinking about making the move from Toronto to Montreal. Way cheaper rents and the city has better transport than Toronto, but I'm worried that getting by in only English is going to be an issue.

<comment><USER16> It depends; finding work is usually the biggest problem, but it's easier when you work in tech than in other fields. I know several people who done the same but work remotely

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Has AI advanced from the 1990s? Or has there been a change in the environment it can be applied to, with the rise of big data, big infrastructure - <USER2> everything?

<comment><USER18> They learned how to train deep nets ten years ago (and are getting better fast as new techniques are invented). As a result, neural nets started taking over.

Big Everything is important, but without the new techniques for deep nets, AI would not be so sexy right now.

<comment><USER19> This should not be downvoted, he is essentially correct.

'AI' has always been around, but the 'big leap' we've seen recently is entirely due to researchers finally able to make Neural Nets actually work :).

'Deep Learning' really refers to a specific kind of Neural Network.

The first application was image recognition. It's also used a lot now in voice recognition - and they're trying to jam it into everything possible.

I think it's basically fair to say that at least in 2016 AI pretty much boils down to Deep Learning / Neural Nets to move something more classical along in terms of capability.

What 'AI' means changes over time, but I think it's safe to say the renewal and hype is based on the 'big eureka' in Neural Nets and their relevant applications.

<comment><USER20> Even that I don't think involved much of a "eureka" moment, but mostly incremental improvements due to the environment changing. A lot of neural-net techniques from the '80s and '90s that didn't work that well at the time, now work well because we have sufficient data and computation power (especially via GPUs) to make them work. There have been improvements as well of course, but they're evolutionary improvements, while the big breakthrough was big data + big compute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No aspiring or self-respecting AI researcher could take an article like this at face value. "The largest concentration of independent AI researchers in the world"? Citation needed. Better yet, data.

<comment><USER13> Here's one data point: There are about 150 academic AI researchers in in an area of 1.4 square kilometre radius in downtown Montreal.

<comment><USER19> Montreal has more students/capita than anywhere in North America, due to a clustering of big Unis downtown.

So, in a way, it has a 'geography' advantage to such numbers :).

That said, I'm highly doubtful that they will be able to effectively leverage the knowledge.

Bombardier etc. are slow, monolithic entities, who will no doubt take AI up, but I wonder how effectively and profitably for local entities.

Air Canada is an airline operator - much like Verizon etc. - they 'operate' they don't 'innovate'.

On the startup side, Montreal is weak - no as bad as other places unknown for startups (say, Houston?), but it does not have the 'acquiring entities' to take up the funnel. Toronto has this disadvantage as well, but because it's bigger, English, and a little more well-known, I think it's less of a problem.

The language issue cannot be overlooked - a little less than 1/2 of Montreal is primarily English speaking, and though basically every Francophone speaks English, it does affect how networks are oriented. Francophone networks are weak. They are very local, and poor, and for a variety of reasons a little 'self oriented'. This is a Quebec thing, but also a French thing, and naturally a thing that happens when you're an enclave of people speaking something other than English in North America.

Finally - there is a lack of industrial spirit in Montreal. They are academically, socially and creatively inclined, but they don't want to build 'products and services' and aren't keen on making 'big bucks'.

The series of 'big business' magnates that came up in Quebec over the last 40 years have been mostly locally oriented: taking up TV/Media, Energy and retail banking sectors during the 'quiet revolution'. The big 'startup' here is a Circus!

In my very Francophone neighbourhood, 100% of the waiters and waitresses will tell you they are 'in school' or 'actors' or 'photographers' \- yet many of them are late 20's early 30's - and it's not exactly hollywood around here. An acquaintance calls herself a 'playwright' and she's written 2 tiny productions for the local theatre with 2 actors each - no props or anything. She's late in her 'career' already. This attitude is due to a bunch of historical factors and it runs deep.

I'm not suggesting people can't build great companies here, and surely some will pop up - and there are some natural advantages such as lots of students and ridiculously low cost of living ... but I'm not sure if anything big will come of it.

To grow a startup you need all sorts of motivated people with special skills: recruiting, supply chain, sometimes niche stuff like ASICS etc. - I never, ever meet anyone here remotely in that vein.

It's a great city, but I'm not sure it will ever be the 'leader' in anything applied or industrious. I predict a few wins here and there.

<comment><USER22> >"Montreal has more students/capita than anywhere in North America, due to a clustering of big Unis downtown."

This statement is not true, its not even close:

Montreal with a population of 1.65 million and 248K students would mean around 15% of the population are students.

Larger students per capita in North America would include:

Ames, Iowa 34.2 percent.

Ithaca, New York 32.8 percent.

State College, Pennsylvania 31.8 percent

Lawrence, Kansas 31.1 percent,

College Station-Bryan, Texas 30.6 percent.

For just raw student population numbers in North America:

Chicago has a student population of 670K.

Dallas-Fort Worth and Miami have 380k students each.

San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston, and Detroit each have 300K students.

Sources:

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

[http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/08/americas-leading- colle...](http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/08/americas-leading-college- towns/3054/)

<comment><USER19> Sorry to disagree.

"With access to six universities and twelve junior colleges in an 8 kilometer (5 mi) radius, Montreal, Quebec (Canada) has the highest proportion of post- secondary students of all major cities in North America. "

All of the examples you gave are small college towns.

'Ames' 'Ithaca' 'State College' \- those are not cities etc.

Montreal has 6 major universities and other colleges crammed right downtown in a tiny radius.

San Francisco does not have 300K students in the city. There are only 800K residents in SF, that would make almost 50% students :). The 'Bay Area' \- sure. But the bay is huge - and not really even a city.

Chicago is a massive, sprawling city with 600K students.

Dallas-Forth Worth - again - massive, sprawling cities, geographically spread out.

Montreal - not including the suburbs, just the city proper, has 100's of thousands of students.

I think the only other city with the student density would be Boston and the numbers may be off because Harvard and MIT are technically in Cambridge, not Boston.

<comment><USER22> What the OP stated and what I was responding to was:

>"Montreal has more students/capita than anywhere in North America, due to a clustering of big Unis downtown"

They did not state Montreal has the highest student population density areas which is what you are now saying by qualifying that with some spatial component. They said highest "per capita."

They also did not specify "city", they said "anywhere."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> They will be exported because the capital isn't readily available there to bring these ppl together in one place.

</comment><comment><USER24> "X is leading Y"

I thought that kind of marketing died in '00s.

</comment><comment><USER25> Very cool.</comment>


A Rare E.R. that Treats Opioid Addiction on Demand - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/health/opioid-addiction-treatment.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if/when we'll see clinics offering kratom as an alternative treatment for pain management and opioid withdrawal. There's heaps of _anecdotal_ evidence of its effectiveness for helping people to get clean, but we're lacking research to corroborate it, and I can imagine people are hesitant to start such research in case the FDA succeeds in banning it—on the basis of what seems to me junk science and fearmongering, I might add, but we'll see.

More to the point—a typical dose of kratom is less than $1; it's hard to abuse since taking too much will just make you dizzy/nauseated/anxious, a mistake most users only make once; it doesn't cause respiratory depression (doesn't recruit β-arrestin2) so it (EDIT: _probably_ , although we don't know for certain) won't kill you if you overdose; and if you're in withdrawal, it will take you from "not fine" to "fine" within an hour without getting you particularly high or keeping you dependent like methadone/suboxone.

There are certainly downsides—e.g., it's moderately addictive itself and can interfere with testosterone like any opioid—but its potential utility in fighting the opioid addiction epidemic is clear. If I had my way, it'd be guaranteed to remain legal and available over the counter to people over 18, thoroughly studied for side effects and drug interactions, and recommended/prescribed as an alternative PRN treatment for withdrawal symptoms—and other conditions like anxiety, if you don't want to get hooked on benzos.

I know this: it saved multiple people in my life from opioid abuse, and myself from alcohol. That's got to be worth something.

<comment><USER3> > _it's hard to abuse since taking too much will just make you dizzy > /nauseated/anxious, a mistake most users only make once; it doesn't cause > respiratory depression (doesn't recruit β-arrestin2) so it won't kill you if > you overdose;_

This is dangerous misinformation. It is known to cause seizures, psychosis, and liver toxicity, and some medical authorities say it _does_ cause respiratory depression. It has been linked to several deaths. As with any drug, more research is needed, e.g. to isolate the effects from those of other drugs that users commonly take with it. But no one should be encouraged to put this stuff in their body.

<comment><USER2> You're right—I'm absolutely not suggesting people go out and take it willy- nilly. I'm saying we have anecdotal evidence that it could be effective in a clinical setting, because people (including myself) _are currently_ going out and taking it willy-nilly. Personally I would like it to remain available OTC but I'd be fine if it ended up scheduled for prescription only.

It's my understanding that there are no records of deaths that were clearly caused by kratom alone—but there are a few dozen cases that the FDA has published where someone has died with kratom in their system, usually alongside other drugs such as opiates, alcohol, benzos, or steroids—but also (and here's where I call "junk science") from a fall and a gunshot wound. We currently don't know to what extent it interacts with other drugs—it's a bad idea to take it with anything else that affects your breathing, or an MAOI.

As for the "won't kill you" claim: β-arrestin2 recruitment is responsible for the main deleterious side effects of traditional opiates, including respiratory depression, constipation, and tolerance buildup. These are _reduced_ but not _eliminated_ when taking kratom, similar to how morphine behaves in knockout mice lacking this protein. It _could_ still certainly kill you, although the best estimate we have right now is "you'd have to take an awful lot of it"—probably via extracts, unless you want to eat a few pounds of leaves.

Mitragynine and 7-OH-mitra are metabolised by the liver, and yes, there are some reports of liver toxicity. I have heard of seizures in cases where someone was already detoxing and susceptible. I had not heard of kratom- induced psychosis—do you have a citation handy?

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia is citing the psychosis claim to:

 _Warner ML, Kaufman NC, Grundmann O (2016). "The pharmacology and toxicology of kratom: from traditional herb to drug of abuse". Int. J. Legal Med. (Review). 130 (1): 127–38. doi:10.1007/s00414-015-1279-y. PMID 26511390._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have the same types of Suboxone clinics here plus a mobile clinic, so they come to you to get clean [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british- columbia/a-bc-c...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british- columbia/a-bc-clinic-is-showing-how-quick-treatment-can-get-patients- offopioids/article33815291/)

Interesting France has been doing this since the mid 90s.</comment>


Ask HN: What did you accomplish in 2010 and what are your goals for 2011 - <AUTHOR>

It's nice to take a look back and reflect on the past year before starting a new one. What did you accomplish this year and what do you plan on accomplishing in 2011? <comment><AUTHOR> I'll start:

[http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2010/12/31/2010-a-hung- truon...](http://www.hung-truong.com/blog/2010/12/31/2010-a-hung-truong-year- in-review/)</comment>


Side-by-side comparison of Microsoft's TellMe and Siri (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHoukZpMhDE

<comment><USER2> What a difference in performance. And apple is still saying this is in beta? What is Microsoft saying theirs is in alpha? I hope so.

</comment><comment><USER3> the first tellme interpretation is spectacular :)</comment>


iPaaS – Integration Platform as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://altkomsoftware.pl/en/blog/ipaas-enterprise-systems/ <comment><USER2> I consulted with a company using boomi which appears as one of the winners in the article.

In my experience, it was painful and the solution should have been replaced with a small in-house custom script.

Boomi uses some visual scripting that seems to require a lot of training. I suspect this is the salespitch - programmer not required. Instead, you end up needing consultants specialized in this particular system which are even more expensive.

In the end, boomi worked for this company as an expensive, complicated message queue.

<comment><USER3> One of the key benefits of an iPaaS is the pre-built connectors to popular systems and servives. Did the solution not require connecting to external systems?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> iPAAS' are essentially ESBs remarketed for the cloud for organatisations without the in-house expertise to coordinate building their own integration hub with a combination of tools like Kafka and API management gateways. Organizations lacking the * Architectural leadership

* Coordination capabilities

* Engineering resources

* strong comms between teams

tend to go for these solutions to paper over their existing problems. Particularly those around engineering capabilities.

These solutions work great for a while until the edge cases around data arrival and consumption usages resurface.

It's important to note that these solutions shine when it comes to the API discoverability across teams and light data format translations but as soon as that has happened get your data out quick!

Don't be tempted by their in-house solutions that try to solve caching, scaling and the ETL languages provided because they will tend to be half-baked and not as battle tested and will lock you in. The commitment for a large org using these systems is a 5-10 horizon.

By all means check them out and be ready for alot upfront design work to find the sweet spot and alot of engineering effort and frustration (alot).

</comment><comment><USER5> i'm working in the enterprise integration field for a few years now. most vendors seem to have no idea how to get their integration product in the cloud. most of the time its just their old product as a docker container.

graphical drag and drop languages are everywhere. mulesoft has their anypoint studio, software ag has their flow language. at least for software ag i know you can barely refactor this graphical stuff unless you edit the source xml files by hand (bad practice, i know).

even as an expert those products are hell to develop. i have never felt so unproductive. big, clunky, barely usable ...

most of our customers moving away from big platforms like that. some move to java+api spec+api gateway, some go a step further and put their apps on k8s.</comment>


Will the US handing over to ICANN be only positive? - <AUTHOR>

A slightly easier read can be found @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/30/icann_us/
Otherwise you can read in far more detail @ ICANN http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-30sep09-en.htm
Either way, i'm curious to understand/read what others might seem are potential positive and negatives for the move away of "ownership" and control from the US Government to a Non profit organisation "ICANN".
Does it even matter considering the amount of information which is routed thru the US?
Who funds ICANN? So many questions, even if you just post links for me and others to do some reading, that would be great. <comment><USER2> A discussion on one possible outcome: the fight over trademarked domains:

U.S. Loosens Grip On ICANN, Domain Chaos To Follow? [http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/172901/us_loos...](http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/172901/us_loosens_grip_on_icann_domain_chaos_to_follow.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link.

generic top-level domain = gTLD

As mentioned in the article, I do think one of the major issues with ICANN taking control has been the perceived idea that they will allow for a lot more gTLD.

As startups, the question will be do you buy out all the domains for with that name.

Or will an increase in gTLD create a semi "sorted" order. ( Perhaps categorised is a better word )

ie: I sell cars, I will be buy a domain under ".car".

I want wine, so I will do a google search "red wine site:*.wine".

Not speaking chinese / japanese / arabic myself, what happens when they put forward a desire to have "foreign word" top level domain. How do us none readers of the language search/find or even know they exist.

Clearly, for my own knowledge I need to read more, but if ICANN's "only" funding is from tax of domain names. You would believe they will be less influenced by funders etc. Which ultimately is a good thing, I feel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think it will have that much effect; the Internet works and will keep working as long as ICANN continues to basically do nothing.

ICANN is funded by a tax on domain names. IMO that money is wasted, but at least it's being wasted in a harmless way.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to go from here? - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I'm posting under a throw away account because I have friends involved that would know my original account.
I've been interviewing at a Los Angeles-based game developer for a web developer position. I have a few friends who work there. The interview process is wrapping up, and has been great. Things are looking very positive. I'm very positive that I will be receiving an offer from them.
I'm from the mid-west, working at a small company that I truly dislike. I also have friends here, which at least makes being at work enjoyable, but is despise my boss because of certain things he does. I could go on for hours about him, but mainly I just feel like he doesn't deserve the things he has managed to get - he's just a scumbag. I code at work here, too. I'm aching to quit but am scared to quit without something to move to - I only have about $10,000 saved up.
So, this job change would seemingly be a great opportunity. It'd put me out in CA doing web coding at a young, neat company. But, I honestly feel in my gut that it's not what I want. I just feel like what I'd be doing there would be so insignificant. I want to be creating neat, useful tools that help people on a daily basis. I want to be creating services of value to people. It is what I have always been passionate about.
So I am confused as to what I should do. Moving to California has always been a dream of mine, but not under these circumstances, really. I always thought that if I were moving out there, it'd be to San Francisco to live out my dream. I just think if I moved to LA, I'd stare out the window wishing it were SF I was looking at. It's not exactly about location, for me, it's more about doing what I love and feeling fulfilled by it.
This feeling has been ramping as I proceed through this interview. I just read this blog post (http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/09/how-i-made-a-principled-decision-to-quit-my-six-figure-day-job/) and am in a pretty irrational state of mind right now. I feel like quitting my current job, turning down this game company offer if they make it, and using my $10,000 to try to bootstrap my own project. This would be the most insane course of action if I were to ask anyone in my family, or maybe even anyone else at all. But, I feel like life is short and if I don't try this now then I'll never have the chance again.
What do you all think? Should I take this new job offer if it's made, and move out to LA? Should I remain at my current job, and bootstrap something in my free time? Should I go all in, and quit my current job and bootstrap something? <comment><USER2> My 0.02 :-)

Option 1: As you said, continue your current job (rationalising it as a part of 'startup pain') while bootstraping your startup.

Option 2: Join the LA company; it would at least bring you closer to SF, and keep looking for openings/opportunities in your areas of choice. (You could continue to bootstrap even in this case.)

Given what you've described above, I'd say option 2 (if it comes through) would be a better choice.

HTH and all the best.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sure, LA is _in_ California but it is far away from SF and Silicon Valley that it is a different place.

I speak from experience - I live in SF having moved from London in 2006. At the time I had a large offer from an LA based firm, a firm I later did a year's stint at by commuting between SF and LA.

LA is NOT SF. If you move to LA you will have a ton of fun outside of work but you will still lack the buzz that is SF.

Take a week's vacation from your job and travel out to SF for interviews and meet people. Hit me up (email in the profile) if you want meet up. You'll almost certainly get offers and that should be enough to prove it is worth moving out here for.

The bottom line is that many startups won't make offers or even interview you unless you are here in the city and so you gotta be out here even just to plan the next move.

</comment><comment><USER4> At first I thought it would be less risky to do LA first and typed up as much. But now I'm thinking otherwise. You absolutely can do it in one step if you are motivated enough and can sell yourself. With $10k you can expect to live for at least 3-4 months in a cheap fashion(carless, renting with roommates) in the Bay Area. So start by planning for a long vacation out here - get a weekly-rate motel, AirBnB, or go couchsurfing. Go to the local hackerspaces, go to meetups, make some contacts. Get a good demo side project together. Maybe complete the demo, then quit your job and move. If you like the demo as a product, you can try pitching it. You might need funding to take it further, but that route is as possible as a job in the current environment.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like you need to look for additional options, if you don't like your current job and this new opportunity doesn't sound like an ideal fit. If you are doing software work and want to move to SF instead of LA, plus work on "creating neat, useful tools that help people" there are lots of companies hiring in the Bay Area. Just keep looking until you find the right opportunity, or are ready to start your own thing. Moving to a city you don't want to be in for a job you're not excited about is a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> Obviously the one clear course of action is to leave your current company. You hate it there, and it isn't taking you where you want to go.

If you're talented, you won't have any trouble finding work in SF. You could take a small amount of your savings and 'move' to SF for a couple weeks. Make sure you like it, and work the networks to find a job.

If you're going to go on your own, definitely apply to YC.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why not leave the current company, join the new one (or look for one if such option is available), and moonlight your project?</comment>


Good Devs Don't Like Magic - <AUTHOR> http://tatiyants.com/good-devs-dont-like-magic/

<comment><USER2> This is why I like python more than ruby. I feel like ruby has more magic and is harder to deobfuscate than python.

This eventually bubbles up to how rails does things.

Another note is CoffeeScript. I've looked at it but generally feel like it is too much magic with not enough reward. Yet I like jquery which is just the right amount of magic and lots of reward.

</comment><comment><USER3> Completely agree with this. In fact, the Django community realized this years ago and created a "magic removal" branch that went on to become trunk because it was much easier to understand.

</comment><comment><USER4> Then why aren't you busy moving blocks of binary information in and out of CPU registers?</comment>


Street cannabis 'contains dangerous amount of faecal matter' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47811251 <comment><USER2> Ahh the old poop drugs moral panic.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there another source other than the "street" that this can be compared with? The implication makes it sound like the street as a source is the problem, but there's no other source mentioned.

<comment><USER4> you mean like all the professional grow operations / distributors / shops in legal state?

<comment><USER3> Well yea. At first I thought this was going to be a hit piece on the unregulated, non-government certified products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In Spain as it was tested there. But still.. it beyond gross

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow. I'm never having edibles again, at least not until it's legal in my state.

</comment><comment><USER7> Brings new meaning to the phrase "That's some good sh __, man! "

</comment><comment><USER8> So does your toothbrush.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hash in particular was tested.

<comment><USER10> Might make sense as its made by hand sometimes, so theres a logical source of the matter

<comment><USER11> From the article:

> The acorns, he said, were more likely to be contaminated because of how they > were brought into the country - the cannabis is wrapped up in small plastic > pellets and swallowed before the drug smugglers then "take a laxative and > expel" them in a toilet. These are then sold by dealers.</comment></comment></comment>


Dazzling NASA 4K moon video crackles with craters - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-4k-moon-video-tour-lunar-surface-lro/#ftag=CAD590a51e <comment><USER2> Direct link to video avoiding down (for me) website: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5Pj6GQL2o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr5Pj6GQL2o)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you like this, I'd recommend following the JAXA YouTube channel. Beautiful HD moon footage: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0GX- nGSXMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0GX-nGSXMA) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KWtG66lEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1KWtG66lEQ)</comment>


Eric Hunsader wants to upend the world of high-frequency trading - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-man-wants-to-upend-the-world-of-high-frequency-trading-2016-02-02 <comment><USER2> This is one of those articles that sounds carefully sourced, but really isn't. To say that Hunsader is a controversial figure would be deceptively understating it: "a conspiracy theorist without the theories" is one description I've received. I've heard good things about Nanex data, but also lots of warnings about taking their analyses too seriously.

Meanwhile, the article sources nothing but pundits and advocacy groups that were predisposed to promote Hunsader's theories, regardless of how accurate they've turned out to be --- for instance, it includes a warm quote from Brad Katsuyama, who left a job at a giant investment bank to start a new exchange ostensibly designed to retard HFT.

It is far from clear that Hunsader was right about the Flash Crash, and Navinder Singh Sarao's spoofing operation is to HFT what... well, actually, let's just let Matt Levine's headline about Sarao do the rest of the work:

[http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-21/guy- trading...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-21/guy-trading-at- home-caused-the-flash-crash)

</comment><comment><USER3> For the record I really enjoy following Eric's twitter stream but be forewarned that he isn't the end all be all expert on market micro-structure.

Infact I find he is alot like the book flash boys. Entertaining and capable of finding interesting data and putting his own spin on it but he is often just flat out wrong.

At one point he and I were talking when he claimed that Canada doesn't have a MOC auction, which 1) is just false, and 2) very easily verified by a 10 second google search.

Having said that, his graphs of market micro-structure are among the best I've found from anyone on twitter. Just don't blindly believe that when he shows a chart and claims shenanigans that there is actually something nefarious going on, which to be fair makes him no different than anyone else on twitter:)

I now view him as soneone who has earned his spot at the table as a market micro-structure "expert" but is very biased in his views.

</comment><comment><USER4> >His first trading program, which reversed long and short positions on futures when their moving averages crossed, turned $6,000 into $36,000 in a year.

Ah, for the good old days when simple techniques like that actually worked.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article's incredibly positive tone reads like a submarine advertisement for Nanex's services.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Hunsader mainly uses social media to spread his viewpoints, at times > tweeting dozens of messages a day to nearly 72,000 followers who include > major exchanges, banks, regulators, traders, portfolio managers and > journalists. He frequently illustrates his posts with charts, clips from > news articles and screenshots of other peoples' tweets. Hunsader calls his > tweets "pure, unfiltered news."

Definitely worth following, if only for the great charts: [https://twitter.com/nanexllc](https://twitter.com/nanexllc)</comment>


Ask HN: Should I Re-Brand? - <AUTHOR> Spent a year building something, the brand name goes for a toss!
Been working on an app for last 9 months, the marvel fan in me got the inspiration of the name from Spiderman Homecoming. Little did I know, it would turn out to be a BLM keyword. No points for guessing, the keyword "Karen"
For a small team re-branding keywords, backlinks, animated videos, competitor pages, api integration links is another month of effort.
What should I do? <comment><USER2> Can you imagine a local news piece on this?

At the end of the ten o'clock news in the U.K. we always had a funny / interesting little human interest story to finish with. The news anchor always kicked it off with "and finally".

"And finally, a dog got more than it bargained for when it accidentally hitched a lift from London, to Scotland"

"And finally, a London toddler is being hailed a hero for calling emergency services, when his mother fell seriously ill".

This would be a great local, or even national, tv news piece. "And finally, a local internet entrepreneur, more used to benefiting from web trends than falling victim to them, has been left embarrassed by a fast growing meme that threatens to make him a laughing stock. And he's asking for your help to turn it around".

Or it would be a great commercial radio dial in thing. They could tell your story and ask people to call in with things that haven't aged well (that guy who got his wife Isis' name tattooed on his arm) or whatever.

Or columnists are crying out for cute little stories like this to base something on.

The competition would be for people to rebrand / rename it for you and just adds a bit of fun to it

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, makes sense, but doing a cold-outreach on shoe-string and for a lost cause?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've created a twitter poll if you were me, what would you do - [https://twitter.com/karenapp_io/status/1285460269821390848](https://twitter.com/karenapp_io/status/1285460269821390848)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great opportunity. Tech and business journalists / bloggers / podcasters will want to talk about it. It won't be the big story, but a fun side-piece to chat about before the big story, or something.

Make sure you put out an official PR statement when you have your new name and send it out to as many journalists and pundits you can find. If you have a Twitter, definitely post the announcement there. If you don't have Twitter, get one right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> whom exactly to reach out, what should be pitched?</comment></comment>


Goldman Sachs Will Pay $120M to Settle Benchmark Manipulation Case - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/12/21/goldman-sachs-commodity-futures-trading-commission-isdafix/ <comment><USER2> Get accused of stealing a backpack -- spend a _thousand days_ on Rikers with no trial.

'Attempt to manipulate a global benchmark for interest rate products known on Wall Street as "ISDAFIX"' \-- well, we all know the drill by now.

† [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the- law](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law)

<comment><USER3> moral in the story is, go big and stay free (helps if you can hide behind mega corporation walls.)</comment></comment>


Europe Is Searching For Its Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/05/europe-is-searching-for-its-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> It's just a little further east in Tel-Aviv.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure why that got down-voted. It's a true statement.

<comment><USER3> Tel Aviv may have a concentration of startups, but it's as unrelated to Europe as Silicon Valley is.

<comment><USER2> That's not true. Tel-Aviv has a lot in common with European cities.

But maybe you meant there can only be one Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER4> I think the only common thing, is that somehow Isreal in soccer and olympics competes with european teams. Mainly the reason is that all the countries around Isreal hates its guts. That still doesn't make you any european. Flagrant racism and human rights in isreal are just appalling, and very anti- european. I don't see people want to move to iseral (unless they are jewish), for a startup.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Designing to Reveal the Nature of the Universe: Jonathan Blow, Marc Bosch[video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/OGSeLSmOALU <comment><AUTHOR> This is a game Design talk that covers the relation of Game Design and mathematics. Jonathan Blow is the creator of Braid and The Witness, and Marc Bosch the creator of Miegakure (a puzzle game about exploring and understanding the fourth dimension).

Here's the quote about the talk from the Youtube summary.

> We present a game design aesthetic that values looking for systems that > express these truths in the cleanest possible way. We explain how this is > different from more-traditional combinatoric design techniques; we show > examples from our games and describe a method for applying the aesthetic in > general.

One of the points of their aesthetic is to make a narrow enough search space often only making one possible way to solve the search space. You begin the game with a small enough search space that it's easy to learn the rule. When you introduce a new mechanic you enlarge the search space, but your mechanic should be found out by being the only way to solve the puzzle.

It seems Jonathon Blow and Marc like to introduce the mechanic in by their aesthetic, because the User makes the satisfying logical discovery themselves. When the search space is too large or it's just some random combination or the user stumbles upon the solution without learning why it works it makes for a bad user experience it will either be too dull or frustrating.

I watched this quite along time ago and saw it on hacker news before as well, but just shared it with a coworker looking to create puzzle games and thought I'd share here as well because it's a very interesting talk.</comment>


A backdoor in the Ruby gem bootstrap-sass - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/785386/7792816b5e552e7e/ <comment><USER2> I agree that it is likely low impact:

> _In the grand scheme of things, this backdoor likely has a fairly low > impact. As noted, the backdoor was found and fixed quickly but, for a little > while, it did have the potential to wreak havoc on affected sites. It is a > popular gem, but the version that was backdoored was not from the current > 3.4.x branch; 220.127.116.11, which was the last good version before the > compromise, was released in September 2014._

Always a good reminder tho to use a defense-in-depth strategy. Containerize your applications and keep the image as lean as possibly so the attacker's capabilities are minimized.

<comment><USER3> This is a bit like saying we left the safe open and nothing was stolen so its not that big of a security problem. The specifics of the exploit is besides the point as it could be anything.

This is an indictment of the designers of wild lands systems like ruby Gems and npm and a culture of pulling in hundreds of dependencies that simply cannot be verified by end users.

It's one thing if this was just for developers who made a conscious decision to use a gem or npm package, but the whole system is carried on to end users who are expected to have a build environment and pull in hundreds of unknown gems and packages which in turn pull in their own dependencies simply to deploy.

This is bad engineering and design, it not only dramatically increases the complexity of deployment and wastes millions of man hours in debugging, versioning and build issues but leaves end users exposed to security issues.

<comment><USER2> I agree with you, but I do think the ease with which dependencies are managed in eco-systems like Ruby and JS is quite valuable. As most security-related things it's a cost/benefit analysis, and the benefit of the current systems are very high.

I do wish we'd move toward more of a system of forced MFA, GPG signed binaries, and a lot more conservatism on the part of developers before pulling in other gems. I don't think it's realistic to abandon it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dupe?

[https://snyk.io/blog/malicious-remote-code-execution- backdoo...](https://snyk.io/blog/malicious-remote-code-execution-backdoor- discovered-in-the-popular-bootstrap-sass-ruby-gem/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19569959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19569959)

</comment><comment><USER5> Glad to see the ruby community handled this quickly and professionally. Proud rubyist here.

Far cry from the way a recent npm vuln was handled.

<comment> jake-low Are you referencing the ESLint backdoor? From my recollection, the two incidents seem really similar. Both were noticed and unpublished quickly. Both could have been prevented by 2FA. Can you elaborate on why you think this incident was handled better?

<comment><USER6> For some reason, a subset of Rails community feels compelled to boost it by knocking whatever is more popular, e.g. Java in the old days, JavaScript these days. Rails is fine, but that aspect of the community is unnecessary and immature.

<comment><USER7> It's not fair characterize a whole community by the actions of individuals; it's just throwing around more mud.

Aside from the root comment, there is no evidence here to support the broad strokes you're making.

<comment><USER6> I specified subset, and it's from my experiences over the years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I was curious about was why it targeted a fairly old and quite specific version of the gem. Made me think they had a specific target in mind.

Also, pretty impressive it was found so quickly.

</comment><comment><USER9> I posted some ideas on how to reduce the risk of this kind of problem in the future. See: [https://dwheeler.com/essays/bootstrap-sass- subversion.html](https://dwheeler.com/essays/bootstrap-sass-subversion.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> A few more of these and we'll all ditch package managers in favor of plain git repos. Commit SHAs inherently guarantee content integrity.

<comment><USER11> Can you elaborate on how you see this as an integrity problem? A new malicious version was released; at no point did the attackers represent their new release as the same code as the previous release.

<comment><USER10> When you "git all the things", upgrading a dependency can equal a `git diff`. Upgrades become reviewable.

I envision a future where organisations routinely review upgrades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Next, imagine a bad library hijacks all other libraries on dev machine and compromises them too. A true pandemic warm begins. Will happen eventually to gems or npm.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain what the backdoor could do? It's exposing some session token that someone could then use to login an account on some website that used this gem?

<comment><USER14> Everything in the first line is a diversion to make the code look complicated but realistic. The eval is what the backdoor does, which means it looks at a cookie with some basic encoding, and runs it as ruby code. There's no authentication or anything here, the backdoor will work for anyone who cares to set that cookie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is at least a week old news and was promptly fixed.</comment>


Norway aviation firm orders 60 all-electric airplanes, drops operation costs 80% - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2019/04/11/norway-60-electric-airplanes/ <comment><USER2> This makes a lot of sense for a flight training business, because most flights are only 1 to 1.5 hour and stay close to the airport. The biggest cost component in an hour of flight training is the cost of fuel and engine in a traditional plane like a 172.

The price is 350k per plane, but they're buying twice the fleetsize. Let's assume that's half because of charging time (takes longer than refueling between students) and half because they expect to grow by offering lower cost training. Then the price of 1.5 of these vs 1 traditional is 1.5 x 350 = 525k vs about 400k for the 172. To make up the 125k price difference you need to fly 1562 hours at a 80 dollar/hour cost saving (this works in Norway because electricity is lower cost there than in most of Europe, and aviation fuel prices are high). That's 2 to 3 years for break even in normal flightschool operations (500 to 750 hours / plane / year). Planes in flight school operations last at least 10 years and in some cases many times that.

So expect many more training operations to make the switch in the coming years. Especially if the maintenance cost of electric planes are somewhat proven.

<comment><USER3> Is it an issue that training will be a different sorts of planes than graduates will fly or are the characteristics close enough?

<comment><USER4> The basics of flying a plane are the same because the physics are the same. The differences in engine and fuel type will yield different checklists and procedures but that's true for many planes in the same class now.

Today pilots and students get a "class rating" that certifies they know how to fly that general class of airplane such as single engine land. You might learn in a Cessna 150 or 152 and then switch to a 172 for the larger engine and more fuel so you take bigger cross-country legs. Those planes are in the same class so it's an easy transition.

Even so you can't just go rent a 172! You'll need someone to sign off saying you know how to fly the 172 or you'll have trouble renting the plane or possibly with insurance. Insurers want to see some time learning to fly a new model before going solo.

So if you learn to fly an electric airplane in the US you'll still get Private Pilot - Airplane, Single Engine Land (PP-ASEL) but you will require further training to hop in a gas engine plane that's also single engine land.

The "land" part is to distinguish those planes from sea planes (planes which can land on water) which are different enough for their own class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Orders and refundable deposits don't mean jack shit for something that hasn't been produced fully yet. A lot of people are willing to put money down on a fantasy.

The company has, like, 1 of these prototype (still experimental class) planes. As commented elsewhere here, certification, etc. is a big hurdle. Clearly they're following Tesla's playbook -- but with something much harder to produce.

The press release's lazy language makes it sound like they already achieved these benefits. Wait until even 1 plane is delivered to see.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't say much harder to produce. A small aircraft is mechanically simpler than a car: a few moving surfaces connected by cables, no gear box, simple suspension. Avionics are complicated and expensive, but they'll likely use existing units, so no extra risk there.

<comment><USER7> >A small aircraft is mechanically simpler than a car

Maybe so, but the consequences of a failure of the design or the implementation are much higher.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. This was no doubt very expensive for Cessna.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_162_Skycatcher#Wing_mod...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_162_Skycatcher#Wing_modifications_of_aircraft_in_service)

Can anyone think of a car recall that required 32 hours per unit to fix?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another interesting thing to watch in the electric airplane space is Harbor Air and magniX.

[https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-partner- to...](https://www.harbourair.com/harbour-air-and-magnix-partner-to-build- worlds-first-all-electric-airline/)

The float plane business seems to make a lot of sense in this regard because, at least in the Washington state and BC areas, it involves a lot of small planes and relatively short flights that aren't easily replaced by other modes of transportation, especially for people who essentially use them for commuting and can't live the same lifestyle using a ferry boat instead.

I don't have enough knowledge to know if the technical aspects make sense from an aviation perspective but nothing stands out as unfeasible.

</comment><comment><USER10> The move makes sense, the price doesn't. Many modern light planes have a cost starting at $100,000 and it can be as low as $60,000 without the engine (based on Rotax engine price and full price of the plane). The electric engines are by comparison much cheaper, I expect less than $5,000 and the batteries are ... well, Tesla tells how cheap, let's say $20,000 (that is 3 times a Tesla 3, which I seriously doubt). My math goes to ~ $85,000 for the base model, if you add full glass cockpit, leather chairs and even retractable landing gear you get to $120-150,000 price tag. I am not comparing with a 172 because most of the flying school is done in 2 seaters like the 152. It does not make a lot of sense to use a 4 seater for that.

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately that's not how aircraft pricing works, due to very low economy's of scale. A 172 definitely doesn't have 400k in parts in it, yet that's what a fairly simple model costs new out of the factory today.

The costs of certification, development and liability insurance are adding a lot to the price.

<comment><USER10> I know how it works as I am looking to buy my own 2 seater for some years, I fly rented. I am familiar with the US versus European manufacturer pricing differences and I just paid over $1,000 for a new radio a few months ago, the kind of radio that would be $50 if it would not be "aviation".

<comment><USER11> Presumably there are some reasons for the higher cost, or someone else would come along and sell the radios for much less and take over the market. I expect in aviation higher reliability requirements would add something to the average costs for many things.

People (me included) complain about the same thing when it comes to 'marine' parts - they're often 2 - 3 times higher in price than land-based parts (usually automotive or RV parts). There are actual differences in the items in many cases though - for example, marine engine parts have to ensure they never throw any spark, because explosive fumes in an enclosed engine compartment are a real safety concern that well ventilated automotive engines don't have. That takes extra R & D and different manufacturing processes for much smaller production runs (increasing pro-rated capital costs).

Plus, market forces seem to show that people are willing to pay the higher prices - perhaps that's in part because most of the people buying these things have more money than people buying commodity (automotive etc) parts.

<comment><USER10> Yes, there is a reason for the higher cost: price gauging. A pair of 7" displays with Android like software and GPS are ~ $10,000, if you want it in 12" you pay another $5,000. There is no competition in the market. This is why so many people use iPads and $100 software instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whats the range / flyable time of these planes?

Also, what would say, (for arguments sake) you were to put "wings and a prop" on a tesla - are the rotor motors in a tesla sufficient to spin a prop at the rpm necessary, and then would its battery pack's weight be an issue in plane format?

(I also want to put a tesla pack in boat form)

</comment><comment><USER13> Why aren't the batteries hot swappable?</comment>


Helpful Resources on Web Crawling? - <AUTHOR>

Lately, I have been trying to think of a project to work on that would occupy my time while I'm bored in the dorm. I don't really know what it will be yet, but I want it to involve a web crawler because those are really interesting to me for some reason. For example, The Hype Machine (http://hypem.com) has a crawler that pulls MP3 links from a bunch of music blogs. That is awesome! How does that work?!
I found some open source crawlers, but have no idea where to start. I've read some research papers on them as well, but they seem outdated. I'm looking for resources that would help me get started with the most modern approach--if that makes sense.
I would really appreciate any helpful resources you might have to share. Thanks
I am most familiar with PHP, but I am open-minded. <comment><USER2> Check out the Nutch crawler. It closely integrates with the Lucene search engine project.

If you want something which is very specific (like the hype machine) you can easily create a basic crawler in python. There is not much change in the crawling strategies. Just a basic programming knowledge and reading the documentation of the urllib module (in python) would be enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> I came across Nutch actually. I just didn't know if it was recommended.Thanks, I'll look into urllib and find some python tutorials.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> read the oreilly book. On your sources: read ToS, robots.txt, and don't pound on anybody servers, even if you're iwthin ToS.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158902>

theres a bunch of python scrapers in py pkg index

[http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=crawle...](http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=crawler&submit=search)

until you're sure your IP won't be blacklisted, test crawler from your friend's houses. I've heard that many cablecos/telcos regard a request for a new IP as very suspicious!

</comment><comment><USER4> We had a recent discussion about this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150077>

</comment><comment><USER5> solr might also be worth a look. <http://lucene.apache.org/solr/> It's based on Lucene also but has JSON/XML connectors to alleviate some of the pain of using Nutch.

<comment><USER2> solr is a search engine (based on lucene which itself is a search engine). it won't help the OP as he wants to crawl websites. Maybe if he wants to search through the crawled data later, he can use it. I would recommend solr instead of lucene as it has faceted search and updates to documents which (i think ) was missing in lucene.</comment></comment>


Eatsa, a fully automated restaurant, opens today - <AUTHOR> http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2015/08/31/fast-food-reinvented-eatsa-a-fully-automated-restaurant-opens-today/

<comment><USER2> > there is a team of about five or six back-of-house kitchen staff (or as I > like to imagine, magical elves) who are hidden from view and prepare the > food. There's also one attendant on hand to help the tech challenged.

So no, it isn't fully automated. Just the front staff. That's not nearly as interesting, and the headline is intentionally misleading.

<comment><USER3> It's essentially a drive-thru that you walk through and there is only one person to complain to when you find a bug in your salad. I don't see how this is anything "new" at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In 1964 my parents took me to a restaurant in New York called an Automat (see [http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/revisiting- the-...](http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/revisiting-the-era-of- automatic-dining/)). It had a wall with little windowed doors that would open for a few coins. Inside were dishes of food that one could take to your own table.

Off topic aside: we were in New York to go to the 1964 World's Fair. All I remember of that was the IBM pavilion. There I wrote handwritten digits on a card (in little boxes) that a machine read and printed out. Even then I was fascinated with computers.

</comment><comment><USER5> >As it's all automated, be aware that the restaurant only accepts credit cards. No cash.

I understand the allure of credit cards for their target marker, but has the author not heard of vending machines, ATMs, and other automated cash handling systems already in place? Those need regular maintenance, to be fair, but considering there's a regular staff of cooks that wouldn't be a problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not exactly a new concept: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_%26_Hardart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horn_%26_Hardart)

</comment><comment><USER7> So for those of us on the east coast, this is what Wawa has been doing for years now. Except now you can't mill around watching them prepare your food.

</comment><comment><USER8> This vaguely reminds me of a "restaurant" I ended up at in an industrial area in France while staying near the airport for a flight the next day. The entire place consisted of one wall of frozen foods and another wall of microwaves. Not completely automated but pretty minimal human involvement since you had to microwave your own food.

</comment><comment><USER9> So 'fully automated' means 'partially automated', i.e. just the order-takers are missing. Still a kitchen; still busboys; still hand-made food delivered to a cubby with your name on it.

I guess 'fully automated' means 'lousy service' now.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a pretty common thing -- except the glass door cubby hole thing that your food gets put in. You find in a lot of Taiwanese restaurants machines at your table for ordering, requesting things like water and utensils, etc. Yes they have people who bring these things out to you, but otherwise it doesn't sound too different. What's new here? If it was machines preparing the food the title might be more deserved.

</comment><comment><USER11> San Francisco plans to raise its minimum wage to $15 in a couple of years. Expect to see more businesses that follow this model.

</comment><comment><USER12> Considering the recent troubles with Listeria Blue Bell had I would be very worried if all the food was automatically prepared. I don't think we're there yet food-safety-wise; can a machine detect and clean foreign object contamination, yet? Probably not.</comment>


Pholosophers suggest Sci-Fi books - <AUTHOR> http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SF-MasterList-141103-byauthor.htm <comment><USER2> Surprised Frank Herbert isn't on the list, while generally agreeing with it outside of that omission.

<comment><USER3> One person recommended two of his stories. _Dune_ and _The Jesus Incident._</comment></comment>


Google's CEO on the Enduring Lessons of a Quirky IPO - <AUTHOR> http://hbr.org/2010/05/how-i-did-it-googles-ceo-on-the-enduring-lessons-of-a-quirky-ipo/ar/pr

<comment><USER2> Very interesting article. The letter from the founders to the investitors is also worth reading: [http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders- lette...](http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-letter.html)</comment>


How to CLEAR Your MENTAL CACHE - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekmindfitness.com/mindfulness/how-to-clear-your-mental-cache/

<comment><USER2> "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things"

<comment><USER3> and off-by-one errors.</comment></comment>


Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/dont-tell-people-to-turn-off-windows-update-just-dont <comment><USER2> Heavily discussed at time of publication 7 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14340286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14340286)

<comment><USER3> I see a lot of articles that are dupes, but nobody ever says anything. Just curious - Are we all allowed to talk about something twice or not? Looks like plenty of people commented on this posting of the story, so I'm left wondering - what's the intention of this comment?

I don't see anything in the guidelines about duplicates here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Are moderators responsible for pointing this out or just regular users? Who eventually marks something as a dupe? Is it in response to a comment like this?

Is this actually the most highly rated comment or did mods put it there?

(Again - just curious!)

<comment><USER2> The site policy about reposts/dupes is explained in the FAQs:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

 _If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok._

And you can see more commentary on it from dang via this search:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20significant%20attention...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20significant%20attention%20year&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

Any user can point out that a link is a dupe or has been posted before. It's helpful for others to be able to see earlier discussions (whether or not it was in the past 12 months and qualifies as a dupe), and evidently moderators don't always realise something is a repost until a user points it out.

There are no hard and fast rules about what user can or should comment about stuff like this, but the mods seem to appreciate it any time people are helpful.

And when a post is marked as dupe, the mods will push the explanatory comment (either from them or another user who already pointed it out) to the top of the thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Microsoft needs to make Windows Update better.

Microsoft especially needs to do two things:

1) respect the DHCP settings that tethered devices provide (Android provides option 43/ANDROID_METERED) and NOT suck every data plan dry when on the road (maybe would be worth to expose an API to applications "the primary internet connection is metered, do not suck dry", given how huge any kind of update is these day)

2) give users the fucking option to only subscribe for security updates and not for the latest "feature" set. I know many people who disabled Windows 7 auto-updates after every other month MS would re-enable the W10 update nagware screen. This is way beyond hostile behavior, not even Apple goes this low. I went Apple once Win8 was coming out, definitely not going back until MS either gets a grip or makes W10 LTSB (the one on a "stable" track e.g. for embedded devices, without nagware, ads or other bullshit) available for general sale.

oh, and 3) provide a Windows 7 Service Pack 3 and installation media with all the updates preinstalled. Having to either upgrade by hand or mess around with ISOs is not exactly customer friendly.

<comment><USER5> > not even Apple goes this low.

Apple goes just as low, OS X asks me every day to update to High Sierra and the option is only "Later" and it can't be swiped away quickly like a normal notification.

I ran an iPhone 4 for until the iPhone 7 launch, I used to keep it on iOS7 because after iOS4 rendered my 3G unusable I knew to no longer update. Every single morning it would ask me to update, which I had to carefully dismiss. It would always download the update filling up my phone to the brim which I would have to then manually delete. If my phone was full it would give me another option offering to temporarily delete apps (Which it claimed would have data restored from iCloud but I knew they would not).

My Mothers iPad auto-updated locking her out of her painting app (Brushes, as used by David Hockney), I had to use a dodgy 3rd party app to extract her documents or they'd be lost for good.

At least Microsoft gives you options to downgrade and supports old OSes, unlike Apple who stops handing out the encryption keys.

<comment><USER6> They follow their traditional policy. A huge part of Apple's income comes from hardware. They will use every method to convince you to continue the vicious upgrade circle, whether you care about new features or not.

A customer that is satisfied with their current setup is a lost customer. So Apple's only hope is to make sure the battery is as difficult to replace as possible - because this component is sure to fail sooner or later.

<comment><USER7> > A customer that is satisfied with their current setup is a lost customer.

A satisfied customer is a customer who will eventually come back (want something new, lost or damaged device, or just general wear and tear). A dissatisfied customer will look elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> But this satisfied customer probably wouldn't buy every iteration of the iPhone. I guess that's what the parent was aiming at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's how Windows Update "works" for me: "installs" an untold number of patches, does an untold number of reboots, then displays that the update "failed", and undoes all said patches, with the same number of reboots, to bring my PC back to where it was before the update.

Failures have generic error messages that don't point to any useful information from the (abysmally bad) MS forums.

So yes, it is disabled. Once every few months, I try again, and usually get the same result.

I have multiple backups of everything, so hopefully if WannaCry 2 hits, I'll survive. Or maybe not, but in the meantime, I'm sorry but I can't spend all my time watching my PC doing updates that don't update anything.

<comment><USER10> I had the same problem. Don't waste your time like I did by searching for a solution beyond reinstalling windows. Reinstallation is the only way.

<comment><USER11> Reinstallation is not the only way. I had this problem on a fresh install on a VM, meaning reinstalling would have resulted in exactly the same problem. The only way is to remove it and literally install a _newer_ version of Windows, i.e. one with the offending update already incorporated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A comment at the end of the article:

>Lost productivity to malware = 0hrs. Lost productivity to windows auto updates = 28 hrs. Sitting here right now losing time and money to an unauthorized update. I know how to avoid malware on my work laptop.

That's a bit like how some people (who weren't THERE) think the Y2K-thing was a non-event: they didn't see all the work that got done fixing things before the big day.

<comment><USER13> I don't even know what to say to the guy you are replying to. Holy...just wow. Can you imagine trying to fix something when some of your users are just unwilling to let you try anything to fix it?

<comment><USER14> > Can you imagine trying to fix something when some of your users are just > unwilling to let you try anything to fix it?

That's what happens when you 1) don't understand the problem you're solving, and push things that aren't appropriate updates through an update mechanism, and 2) lose user trust.

<comment><USER13> Do you really think that they don't understand what problem they are solving?

Compare the number of patches vs windows 7 or the number of cases that require a reboot since XP...they are working towards a better system. That being said, I really, I'm not trolling here, think that you can't make users happy in this age. People have been trained by interactions with crap companies, Microsoft included, to go from 0 to apoplectic immediately just to get a resolution. There's no benefit to being a happy user, you won't get your issues looked at...and there are always issues!

<comment><USER14> > Do you really think that they don't understand what problem they are > solving?

 _Yes._ Every single person who turns Windows Update off should be considered a critical bug, and their use case should be understood and fixed. The fact that they instead _still_ use it to push anti-features means they still don't understand why people still turn it off.

If they started, _today_ , focusing heavily on getting people to trust Windows Update again and leave it turned on, they'd have a massive uphill battle. But I've seen no signs that that's a focus at all.

<comment><USER13> Wow, man. Talk about back seat driving. Why do you think that they have spent over a decade refactoring the operating system into smaller components that can be installed and updated independently? What about peer-to-peer updating and all of the updates that not only don't require a reboot but don't require any user intervention whatsoever?

Something that is an "anti-feature" to you is someone else's (in the case of windows, several million someone else's) every day must have.

<comment><USER14> That's not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about things like misclassifying updates as "important" or "critical" rather than "optional" to get them installed onto more systems, which makes people stop trusting that distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think a lot of the hate for Windows Update is because of how slow it is.

I have a Windows machine I use for gaming. Its started about once a month and whenever I turn it on it is almost unusable for the first 30 minutes because its checking for updates and installing them. This is totally on Microsoft and their bloated update mechanism.

<comment><USER16> Windows machines need to be on for about half a day every week. I know no other device that needs this kind of attention, apart from helicopter gas turbines that are best kept slowly spinning.

<comment><USER11> Microsoft thinks just because Google can force-feed Chrome updates to users, it can do that with Windows too. It doesn't seem to comprehend that an OS has fundamentally more stringent availability and reliability requirements than a browser.

For example, my Chrome ("stable") right now just renders most new windows as completely white -- no address bar or anything else. Because Google decided to force-feed me a buggy version I never wanted or asked for. So I have to open 2-3 new windows before I get a working one. It's painful but I can still do that, or use Firefox/IE if all else fails. If this kind of crap happened with the OS I would not be able to use my laptop at all.

<comment><USER7> It's also a different install process. Chrome doesn't decide to automatically close itself to apply the updates, and they are applied fast enough that you usually don't notice unless something changed. Neither can be said for Windows - the reboots are often unexpected and the install can be lengthy. If Microsoft got it closer to Chrome (no forced reboots and applied without triggering a potential long "Configuring Windows Updates" stage), it'd be much less of an issue IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Windows update worked a lot better for me when there was the notification of updates. I shut my computer down every day, so I would update my computer every Tuesday when I turned it off.

Now, they have completely broken my work flow for staying up to date. There are no "active hours", if my computer is on, I am using it. No, I don't want you downloading updates without my permission, I am actually trying to use my internet without latency and bandwidth issues.

I understand I am not the majority of users, but it is very clearly the power users that understand windows update that are creating blog posts on how to disable windows update, so maybe to avoid the cobra effect Microsoft should cater to such power users even if the majority of people aren't going to use those features.

As it is, for me, a more effective work flow would be to disable automatic updates and just check every Tuesday when I don't actively need my internet or mind my computer rebooting. The problem is, I am fallible. If only there was some way to remind me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Security fails when a large percentage of the your customers think it's too painful to use.

That's a failing of your software, not the customer.

OSX and Chrome gets it right. It's possible.

<comment><USER19> I don't get it. How is updates painful? You do not have to restart your PC when they show up, just like on MacOS - you can click "Restart Later".

<comment><USER20> Windows is far more painful.

Firstly, it'll keep prompting even if you choose "restart later".

Secondly, unlike most linux environments, it doesn't perform the updates which take effect next restart, it actually performs the update next restart.

That means if you find yourself needing to restart forgetting you've updated, you can find yourself suddenly having to wait a very long time before your computer is usable again.

They often take multiple 'restarts' to apply, typically you might have to wait the first shutdown, then when it boots back up it'll be "applying updates", then it'll restart _again_ having done those updates. Occasionally you'll even get a third restart.

That's compared to 'nix applying the updates but them not having taken effect until a restart which isn't normally noticeably slower than any other restart.

<comment><USER13> They actually take a long time because people put them off. Catch 22.

<comment><USER21> I generally allow rebooting after each update is downloaded. I haven't had any case where it _did not_ take a long time, and putting off the reboot until after a second set of updates has downloaded doesn't seem to make it significantly worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Sometimes, updates will annoy you

Unfortunately, that is an understatement. If you are using a Windows computer at home, it's one thing. If you are responsible for a company network of 80+ clients, Windows updates (pre Windows-10, at least, I have no experience with Windows 10, yet) are a little bit like Russian roulette.

It's one thing if an update breaks third-party software; I suspect this usually means the third-party software did some questionable things begin with or is just crawling with bugs (I am looking at you, Siemens!).

But if Windows updates break functionality like, say, communication with a WSUS, or booting properly (I could go on and on and on...), it is my responsibility to at least do some research how this month's update may affect my users, instead of blindly installing anything Microsoft throws my way.

I wholeheartedly agree that keeping systems up to date is very important. But unless Microsoft gets its act together and makes updating as painless as on, say, Debian or CentOS, I am going to have mixed feelings on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think it's great that Microsoft are pushing updates but it's slowly wearing me down. Keep in mind I'm 100% on board with getting security updates out as broadly as possible as fast as possible.

But for the last two days Windows Update has gone rogue and started gobbling up CPU. GOG Galaxy has gone nuts as well, I uninstalled it but I can't uninstall Windows Update. I can't even _stop_ Windows Update, it'll go into the "Stopping" state but ... no dice.

It's like literally everything is coming for my CPU [1] for updates updates updates. It's a 6700K so there's 8 threads at 4GHz being used 60%...

I'll probably re-install Windows 10 over the Christmas break and cross my fingers.

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/8hZXE](https://imgur.com/a/8hZXE) (Windows Update is _Service Host: Local System (3)_ along with _Update Orchestrator Service_ and _Remote Access Connection Manager_.

<comment><USER24> I've used W10 since it's release (August 2015) on many devices, and it only keeps getting worse. There's no way they do this unintentionally. At work I primarily use Linux, but also have a W10 laptop for testing. I'm used to the fact that the OS can eat all of your CPU and SSD (50-100% SSD usage for 30min? WTF is it doing?), you have no idea when it stops and you have no control over it. Last time I was unable to use the laptop for a good hour. Sometimes longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I normally have a lot of time for Troy Hunt, but on this one I'm not sure I agree with him.

If Windows Update provided only essential updates for security and stability by default, and if it did so transparently so everyone could see exactly what was being done and why, and if it did so with minimal interruption to the user's real work, he would have a decent argument. But none of those things is the case.

Look at the comments on the article, or here, or on countless other forums since the Windows 10 fiasco started. Heck, look at Troy's own acknowledgement:

 _I 've had Windows Update make me lose unsaved work. I've had it sitting there pending while waiting to rush out the door. I've had it install drivers that caused all manner of problems. I've had it change features so that they work differently and left me confused. I've had it consume bandwidth, eat up storage capacity and do any number of unexplainable things to my machines._

I've seen those things too, and more. I've seen unfortunately timed updates cripple a sales team right before a crucial demo, months in the making, that was supposed to close a £1M deal... in a small business that closes perhaps 2-3 such deals a year and relies on them to pay everyone's salary. Not much point worrying about encrypted filesystems if your business went bust already.

The fundamental problem here is that _Microsoft is no longer trustworthy_. They have demonstrated, repeatedly, that through both negligence and malice they will break systems that install their updates. The Microsoft that some of us trusted back when we bought our Windows 7 machines is not the Microsoft of the past few years, but we're stuck with those machines now, so we have to find the least risky path forwards taking into account as many potential problems as we can. It is far from clear to me, on the evidence to date, that accepting all of Microsoft's updates by default is safer than rejecting all of them by default.

</comment><comment><USER26> Initially Windows 10 felt fresh and nice, combined with all the other 'nice' things Microsoft have been up to...i was happy. Being able to ssh from windows cmdline...excellent stuff. But...

...with every stupid update, and after every boot up Windows insists on settings, programs and games it wants you to have. Should i have to curate my own powershell script to disable and remove some of the shit that gets forced on me. I paid for my OS, why do i get to suffer like this. Microsoft please sort this out, you're pushing me away. You know, looking at the Steam for Linux game list now, we're getting close to a point where the Gamer in me might see an opportunity to leave.

</comment><comment><USER27> I just hate the moving platform that Windows has become. Windows 7 did plenty of updates already and they could take forever or incidentally break something, but an installed system would essentially stay the same. As of Windows 10, anything can happen at any time. You install a system, do nothing and the next day it has Candy Crush on it. (Yes, you can fiddle with the registry, but WTF??) New functionality is pushed and with it, default behavior changes. The most annoying one that comes to mind was default printer management. From one day to the next, the default printer started changing. Every time there is one more thing to remember to turn off or work around, but it won't be enough, because at a random point in the future, Microsoft will decide you want it differently. Sometimes they ask—Edge opening to show some release notes and conveniently using the opportunity to offer to make itself the standard browser—but not using the standard browser in the first place already pisses me off and that question is really one too far. Recently a family member clicked the wrong button, making Firefox disappear, resulting in a panic call because they "lost" their bookmarks, logins, etc. /rant

There are many improvements since Windows 7 that I can appreciate, but those practices—together with the increasing privacy violations—are a complete shame.

</comment><comment><USER15> On the other hand python virtualenvs, npm, docker containers almost never get updated and people almost religiously fight for the ability to freeze packages at specific versions.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well, yeah, obviously a bad idea. But the real question everyone in "security" should be asking themselves is "if the idea of having better security is such an easy sell to even the vaguely-clued-in, what have we implemented so poorly that people still use insecure practices? Or go out of their way to disable security?"

The article's point here is that no matter how much windows update might suck, you still need to use it. And that's the problem with security people in general. It's not like they "think their shit doesn't stink" it's that they everyone must put up with whatever level of stench because security is just that important. Which gives them zero incentive to reduce the smell. They'll probably just blame the developers for fucking up the distribution mechanism the same way they blame developers for having the temerity to write bugs.

Unfortunately, the impression I get is that "the security community's" answer is that users do things like disabling windows update because security hasn't been sanctimonious enough towards the unwashed masses, and we should just get on with taking away all of end users' control over their systems for their own good.

</comment><comment><USER29> It continues to amaze me that Windows is so terrible at system updates when pretty much every Linux distro out there has done it in a more-or-less sane way since day 1. openSUSE doesn't require sitting at the shutdown and startup screens for hours when I install a single update. Ubuntu doesn't forcibly reboot itself if I leave it unattended. CentOS doesn't disguise new "features" and nagware as critical security updates. Slackware doesn't burn through my mobile data constantly downloading updates. Even Android seems to do a better job than Windows, and Windows Update alone has existed for longer than Android has at all.

If Microsoft knew how to do system updates in a way that wasn't an absolute fucking pain, then I'd be a lot less tempted to just turn off automatic updates on Windows.

</comment><comment><USER7> If Microsoft et al. want me to leave Windows Update enabled, they either need to push way less updates (security updates only track) or at least make the install process faster (which would probably be helped by not pushing new features). Losing two days of progress on a video encode[0] due to a reboot when "you aren't using your PC", or pulling out my laptop to do something time-critical to be greeted with 20 minutes of configuring Windows updates, means I'm turning it off ("download and notify to install" Group Policy setting). These are real problems; malware is only a _potential_ problem (largely mitigated by keeping offline backups).

[0] Fairly ridiculous x265 settings on a laptop CPU, as I'm not keeping the source files so want to ensure optimal quality.

</comment><comment><USER30> You see a lot of this kind of thing in HN threads as well, (including using older unmainted/vulnerable browsers), where there is presumably a subset of users who have very strong feelings about automatic updates and are also blind to the security implications of disabling them.

Keep your machines and software updated with the latest patches people. Keep your parents and non technical friends machines updated with the latest security updates. Don't ever tell them to disable it because your heavily customized windows 7 setup broke a little bit one time after a huge windows update.

<comment><USER31> Security patches are a good thing, but reseting privacy settings, reinstalling Candy Crush Whatever/Cortana/Skype, re-enabling spy/adware, changing the UI EVERY.DAMN.TIME. is definitelly not good.

There are so much abuse people can take before they start considering the actual malware a lesser evil than Microsoft's malware-like OS.

My Windows box is running 10 LTSB with wuauserv disabled. I keep zero important stuff there, most of my gamesaves are synced with cloud servers from the game's developers (Overwatch and Elite: Dangerous) or from the store (Steam and GoG), so I can wipe it out any time with no real losses.

The important stuff (taxes, documents, pictures, etc.) are all on a notebook running Debian that is mostly kept cold.

Speaking on Debian, Microsoft could learn a LOT from them. Specially with regards to the strict policy of not adding new features to a stable version.

<comment><USER32> One of the best things about LTSB is cumulative updates. I get 1.5Gb of security and bug fixes every month or so that quietly installs in the background. Like it was in Win7. And when its done it just sits there waiting for me to MANUALLY push the restart system button. Without ever nagging about it.

Honestly regular Windows is a fucking joke.

<comment><USER31> > I get 1.5Gb of security and bug fixes every month

That's a joke all by itself. Not even a rolling release distro like Debian Unstable or Arch produce that volume of patches in a whole year...

Windows has two major problems in regards to updates:

1\. It's utter inability to update files that are currently open by programs. All Unix and Unix-likes can handle deleting/moving/replacing open files gracefully by keeping a reference to the old file in memory. Windows can't, so the only way to update the most used DLLs is by rebooting.

2\. It's a monolithic system, with so many cross dependencies, it's almost impossible to make small, punctual updates of independent packages. Hell, Unix was 23 years already when Windows NT 3.1 was finally released, MS used to develop and sell Xenix, yet they learned nothing from those.

It ridiculous how inept they are handling updates. If they ever ask me how to do it properly, I'd advise them to throw the whole idea of Windows in the trash and start again from a BSD (or maybe buy Solaris from Oracle). Slap an improved WINE for partial, best performance compatibility and a full VM for lower performance, full compatibility. It worked well for Apple while transitioning from "classic" MacOS to MacOS X, it could work for MS, as long as they don't screw it up completely.

<comment><USER30> > It's a monolithic system

FYI, Windows is anything but a monolith - especially the kernel. It's heavily built around services and message passing.

Whereas actually Linux _is_ a monolithic kernel (granted, the ecosystem on top is not so much).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I actually agree with the person commenting the original article:

> The "security updates" situation reminds me of organized crime's protection > racket: Either pay us to "protect" you or bad things will happen. In the > case of automatic "security" updates -- and not just Microsoft's -- we're > compelled to pay in computers and programs that are corrupted with unwanted > new behaviors. If you don't accept those, well then your computer will be > insecure. So "pay up" or else.

</comment><comment><USER33> The thing I don't understand is the insistent nagging and it's persistence that a restart NOW is really needed and then often forcing you to restart.

This all worked perfectly on windows 7. It downloaded in the background and would install whenever I restarted the system myself. No nagging, ever. Of course, I get why some people might have problems with automatic downloads or automatic installation on restarts, but I feel it was still worlds apart from the current windows 10 behavior and a good compromise between staying up to date and getting annoyed. So why has this actually changed? Why does it need to nag all the time now and force-restart in the middle of the workday? Who gains form this?

</comment><comment><USER34> In the newest AWS Workspaces images, Windows Update is disabled. I'm having to enable it manually on newly-deployed Workspaces. (Probably a bug that will get reverted on their next refresh.)

</comment><comment><USER35> The biggest issue is reboots. They interrupt workflow. They stop the user using the computer for several minutes: the updates are applied after the reboot instead of being applied and then switching to the new binaries, the user has to save all their work manually, the user has to restart their applications manually, and the reboots often make new updates available requiring further reboots... Reboots are a DOS attack. Don't DOS attack your users.

The same goes for "feature" updates that break the existing workflow.

</comment><comment><USER36> Tell them to install a better OS.

</comment><comment><USER37> Having used a Chromebook, I hope someday desktop operating systems can become as easy to update. All you really ever have to do is restart and things are up to date. Mostly similar with Android on the Google Pixel phones. Google is oddly ahead of the curve with making updates really painless.

Of course, inconvenient or not, it's pretty hard to deny that disabling updates is a stupid proposition.

</comment><comment><USER38> Holy fuck, CNET actually tells people to turn off Windows Update?!

I'm starting to think published tech advice should be treated like legal or financial advice. If you give out stinkers like this and they turn out to be violently harmful to its readers, you are liable for it.

Microsoft doesn't get off free —they've been cocking this up consistently— but turning off WU is antivax level stupidity.

</comment><comment><USER39> A Windows Insider Here, and while I'm enjoying the Ubuntu Subsystem on my machine, I somewhat regret opting in. I hate waiting for hours just for getting some negligible updates & patches for Windows Defender AV or a software I don't use like Paint 3D, Mixed Reality Viewer, etc . Still, I like showing off my fancy terminal to other Windows noobs.

<comment><USER40> I'm pretty happy with dual booting. Restarting the machine into a solid Linux distro on a modern machine takes maybe 30 seconds (often quicker restarting back into Windows), and it's nice to get MS out of my face for a while. The whole subsystem thing always seemed like the worst of both worlds to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> # of times I've lost Valuable data because of malware: 0 # of times I've lost valuable data because of Windows Update: ~10 # of times malware has made my computer unbootable: 0 # of times windows update has Made my computer unbootable: 2

</comment><comment><USER42> Last I checked, even if you wanted to, you couldn't turn off Windows Updates.

<comment><USER43> Windows Update likes to kick in when I'm playing online, making fps drop to 10. Tried all the buttons to make it ask before downloading stuff but it didn't help. My last punch was disabling the Windows Update service.

<comment><USER44> Please don't disable windows update for gaming. There is a gaming mode (which really ought to be called normal mode) which should help. The only other stipulation is you must keep your computer plugged in, turned on, and connected to the Internet as much as you can so windows can do its thing while you're not using it.

<comment><USER45> Windows: it's like a small child you have to take care of. They're lucky gaming is most popular on Windows, otherwise they've got zero going for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> For those who uses windows primally for gaming in its home protected network, it's better not to update windows forever, because a new patches and fixes only make windows slower.

</comment><comment><USER47> I find the Windows Update in windows10 pretty good :-) Not as good as OS X update mechanism, but it's miles ahead of what we had in previous Windows :-)

<comment><USER48> I'm reading this tread and thinking "am I the only person who's not bothered by Windows Update?" It just does whatever does, and occasionally asks me to reboot, which I do. And life goes on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If only Microsoft could separate feature updates from security and bugfixes... Oh wait they can! They are!

I'm using Enterprise LTSB. Solid as a rock. Windows as a service: they haven't done anything since 1607 that I want.

</comment><comment><USER49> As a Sys admin i can say only F __YO(( very much: \- delay windows update by 2 days \- see what happens \- ohhh no 1% users blue screen 10% auto update on \- watt for final path \- still blue screen of dead \- wait for new windows path \- install on 10% more machine do snapshots \- wiat for new pathes \- install on 10% machines \- ok its now works without issue \- install on 100% PC</comment>


If you die early, how will your children remember you? (RecordMeNow app context) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-47334604 <comment><AUTHOR> I don't have any association with the RecordMeNow app -- hadn't heard of it before this article -- but I thought both the article and app were interesting and brought up points that hadn't really crystallised for me before. For example, rather than having letters to open on special events which crops up in news stories from time to time, instead wanting more everyday mundane info -- along with being able to dip into it in a self-directed way. Seems like it makes sense upon reflection.</comment>