Trap street - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street <comment><USER2> This seems like it gets posted every week. I have to say so what? Is it not totally understandable? I mean, cartography is an invaluable tool and because there information is public knowledge there has to be some way to stop those would cut corners and copy a map. Does it lead people astray sometimes? Sure. But is it causing so much harm that the practice needs to be called into question? No.

I'm not really sure why this gets posted here without any context though. Is this supposed to be a statement about copyright? If so, I have to say I'm really sick of these clever attempts to show how copyright is bad. Copyright is not good or bad in and of itself. It can be both and any discussion of it in absolute terms is ridiculous.

<comment><USER3> I don't think the original posting was taking aim at copyright infringement. I think it's just a neat idea that appeals to the hacker instinct - which is why it keeps popping up again and again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We did the same sort of thing in the pkzip source code 20 years ago. There were a number of pointless routines in the program that would be clear evidence of code theft.

These days I suppose an optimizing compiler would be smart enough to strip away any truly dead ends.

<comment><USER5> Ironic given that pkzip copied arc's source code

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First discussed here, almost 3 years ago. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504126>

Revisited here, 40 days ago, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4818584>

</comment><comment><USER6> Along similar lines, the shareware assembler A86 watermarked the binaries it produced, so that unauthorised use of unregistered copies could be proven. It did this by - or so it was claimed - choosing one specific instruction over another, when it had a choice:

[http://www.preterhuman.net/texts/computing/general/DOCUMENTA...](http://www.preterhuman.net/texts/computing/general/DOCUMENTATION/a01.txt) (see section 6)

</comment><comment><USER7> Google Maps directed me down a trap street once on the way to a new tutoring gig. I got lost, was late, and had to sheepishly call the family to ask for directions. Just glad I had a printout of the directions to show them.

Never used it for anything essential after that. Thanks a lot, Google Maps. You'd think they'd have the decency to add a "don't route down this street" flag to their trap streets.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't really make any sense: "trap streets" make sense and are used in, say, the base map that you see when viewing a Google map (that is, in the raster data). But why would Google bother putting a trap street into their own (proprietary) street data used for routing? Unless you are saying that Google Maps "directed" you in the sense that you were looking at a printout of a map that included a trap street, not actually a turn-by-turn.

<comment><USER7> I agree, it doesn't make any sense. But it happened. This was back in '07 or so, so before Google did live turn-by-turn. I had a printout of Google's directions from online.

It led me on a street that's never existed, and that would have had to go either over or through a very substantial hill to actually exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I make mountain bike trail maps[1] using OSM data, but when generating my first drafts of the final PDF files and distributing them for review I'll include similar trap landmark.

[1] Examples: <http://mmba.org/library/maps/riverbends/latest.pdf> [http://mmba.org/library/maps/clintonriverparktrail/latest.pd...](http://mmba.org/library/maps/clintonriverparktrail/latest.pdf) <http://mmba.org/library/maps/stonycreek/latest.pdf> <http://mmba.org/library/maps/addisonoaks/latest.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if it would be possible to automatically compare goog vs. bing, identify discrepancies and come out with a 'clean' map?

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't you need a third one to identify which map has the trap street?

<comment><USER12> Or a satellite photo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Although trap streets specifically refer to maps, I can't help but think of the trap that Google set up to bust Microsoft on copying their search results:

[http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating- copying-...](http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our- search-results-62914)

</comment><comment><USER14> Neat article!

I was googling for examples in Google Maps, and came across the corresponding article on open street maps[1], which is a nice supplement.

[1]: <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Copyright_Easter_Eggs>

</comment><comment><USER15> Dictionaries do the same thing with made-up words.

<comment><USER16> That's discombatulary!

<comment><USER17> Not in the slightest. It's a perfectly cromulent practice.</comment></comment></comment>


Leo Hendrick Baekeland and the Invention of Bakelite (1993) - <AUTHOR> https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/bakelite.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting that Baekeland's notebook uses Celsius instead of Fahrenheit yet modern American usage even in some engineering contexts uses Fahrenheit. See, for example, [https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/174413923-28247782-carb...](https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/174413923-28247782-carbon- steel-handbook-pdf.4544/) where temperatures are given in Fahrenheit with Celsius in brackets afterward.

<comment><USER3> He was from Belgium, so the use of Celcius is very logical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I find fascinating is people on youtube who do actual chemistry, including making bakelite.

Here is NileRed who gets pretty far considering he doesn't have a Bakelizer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8)</comment>


Tell HN: I accidentally ran up a $1000 Heroku bill - <AUTHOR> This is pretty typical.  Every few years something slips my mind and I end up stuck with a "Erik, you're a moron tax".
I was experiencing a spike of traffic when my site was on national news a few weeks ago, and I turned my dynos and workers way up on Heroku to handle the traffic.  The spike went down, but I forgot to turn off the dynos.
Flash forward a few weeks, and I am stuck with $1300 bill on a site that I'm not making any money on.  I asked Heroku if they could help me out a little... I'm a good customer, and even though I'm a cash-strapped in-the-red bootstrapper, I gladly pay them hundreds of dollars a month to run my sites, bills payed on time and in full.  I was hoping they'd maybe give me a little discount... not pay for my servers, but maybe not take a profit off of my stupid mistake.
They shot me down. No refunds available, even though these were virtual servers, and didn't contribute any real load to any of their machines.  Although obviously they provisioned machines for me, so they had real costs.
Part of me wants to be upset, but obviously I was the one who screwed up. Still, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I guess a smaller host might offer more personal care, but I wouldn't get Heroku's world-class engineering baked into their platform, which I really, really appreciate.
What do other folks think? Am I just a dumbass who lost a chunk of paycheck, or is this poor customer care? <comment><USER2> Heroku runs on top of EC2, and they get charged the same amount of money by Amazon whether your instances are idle or on fire. That doesn't matter, though, because businesses do not do cost-based pricing.

There comes a time in a young man's life when "haha, whoopsie, I'm a kid who is not responsible for his own decisions" is no longer sufficient for a do- over. I am not sure when that is, but if you're running a business, well, welcome to being an adult.

<comment><USER3> How horribly condescending and wrong. Any company that lets their customers go from huge fan to hater in a week has a major bug. The important question is why did their product turn a fan into a hater, and how can they prevent it?

Heroku should almost certainly have user defined cut off points. They should require every new user to set a maximum monthly bill to something they can afford (or "unlimited").

I did exactly that for a similar type of service I worked on. One of the biggest anxieties customers had was that they'd get a massive unexpected bill, just like this guy did.

Heroku's best move would be to cut his bill in half and institute a cut-off feature. Every service like it should follow suit.

<comment><USER2> This is the Ruby versus Java debate: should we treat professional programmers like they know what they're doing, or should we straightjacket them?

To which I answer: Yes. It is reasonable to run a Enterprise-oriented cloud scaling company which second-guesses your customers' decisions at every point. It is also reasonable to run an Enterprise-oriented cloud scaling company where a professional engineer engaged in capacity planning clicking OK to an estimate presented in 60 pt Arial is assumed to know what they're doing.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree. It's not an issue of straight jacketing programmers. It's an issue of reminding a user they are incurring an enormous bill for no reason. A simple "Hi, we see you're using X widgets but your traffic would allow you to reduce this to Y widgets. If you'd like to do that, here's a link. If not just ignore this email." That would solve the problem with very little effort. It would keep people forgetting and having a heart attack, getting pissed and leaving. It really doesn't matter if it is the customer's fault if it causes them to leave with a bad taste in their mouth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm going to go against the grain here and say it's partly Heroku's fault. If a customer is paying hundreds of dollars a week for a feature they're not using, that's the time to send a friendly automated email saying "Is everything okay?".

This is _especially_ important with a service such as Heroku, where users will be changing these settings all the time and so there's a high probability of human error.

<comment><USER6> I can think of loads of reasons why you might be legitimately in that situation...

Perhaps you intentionally provisioned a large amount of headroom for a forthcoming expected/possible traffic spike.

In that example it would be annoying to get "are you sure you want to have this extra resource running?" emails.

 _(sure, you should be building the system to auto-provision but that would have required a better programmer and you just got the interns to build it, etc)_

<comment><USER5> I get tons of emails saying "Would you like to buy viagra?". Getting an occasional email saying "You might be paying us too much money" is low on my list of annoyances.

<comment><USER7> Not only that, but I will almost never be annoyed by someone who says "wait, are you sure you really want to pay us that much?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This reminds me of something my friend did. We had an assignment to try out EC2 with Hadoop and we needed 8 machines, and we were warned in class to turn them off or they'd keep charging.

Guess who didn't turn them off.

So he casually mentions it to me and tells me that he racked up a 500 pound bill, but his CC didn't have any money in it so it was fine. I asked "so did you turn them off?" He said "no, not really, but it's okay because they can't charge me".

So he racks up another 500 pounds, and only turns the instances off when he finds out that he didn't use the inactive CC but another, active one. Long story short, he's 500 pounds out (Amazon were kind enough to refund the first 500, which disappeared as soon as it hit his account, since he owed another 500).

<comment><USER6> reminds me of a friend who was studying for his MSc Physics at Warwick... the students had to do a lab experiment with a radioactive isotope and were warned to only have the box containing the isotope open for a few minutes in order to reduce exposure to safe limits.

Guess who forgot to close this box and after 2 hrs of exposure now has to worry about cancer and/or infertility in later life. True story.

Look at it this way: at least your friend took CS and not Physics and thus is only £500 in the hole.

<comment><USER9> Borderline negligent, though, on the part of the instructor. Lab assistant or supervisor should have been double-checking safe handling of something that dangerous.

<comment><USER10> he can't be expected to keep track of something for 2 minutes without someone watching over him, but we can let the fellow operate a car, have mains power in his home, purchase cleaning chemicals, etc?

loads of graduate students in the physical sciences are regularly given access to stuff that dangerous or worse. if we've got to have somebody watching over each and every one of them, graduate education will grind to a complete halt.

<comment><USER11> You are supposed to get training when dealing with anything different and dangerous. Say you rock climb for the first time... and the instructor talks to you for 10 minutes about various stuff and somewhere in the middle he says: "and make sure to check that you can't see 'danger' written on the clasp of the harness, you may fall if it's not secured properly". You have _lots_ of stuff to think about... your posture, the grip, the path you want to take... in a group of 10 people, is it really that unlikely that one will simply forget?

That's why the first couple of times somebody more experienced will check everything about your harness.

<comment><USER10> and what will the training for remembering to close a box consist of? your posture, the grip, the path the lid will take?

<comment><AUTHOR> checking that they closed the box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm going to go with dumbass. Nothing personal there, but you turned up the level of service and continued to use it even though you didn't want/need it anymore. The fault is entirely on you. Think of it this way, they provisioned load to you which in turn even if you didn't use, couldnt be provisioned to others w/o potentially over provisioning.

<comment><USER13> Making money on people's mistakes seems like a bad business model. Give him at least discount and you'll have an evangelist.

<comment><USER14> You wrote as if Heroku were taking advantage of their customers. They don't, you pay for what you use. The poster should not even post such a self-centered post on HN to tell people to sympathize with him. He screwed up and he is a whiner. I don't want someone like that becomes an "evangelist" because all he'd try to do is to get everything his way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What you are doing is distasteful because you made a mistake and now you are using bad publicity against Heroku to force them to lower your bill (or just out of spite).

Heroku might optimize for this usecase by detecting spikes somehow and notifying you that you still have machines running, but other than that, I don't see how any of this is their fault.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish Heroku officially supported autoscaling. I've been using Google App Engine lately and the autoscaling and pay for what you _really_ use is very compelling.

<comment><USER17> They do for their background workers, but not the dynos. <http://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hmm, you might be out of luck, but it does bring up the question of why Heroku doesn't have load-triggered scaling, or some sort of dead-man's switch option.

<comment><USER19> There are third-party solutions for that, like this one: <http://github.com/ddollar/heroku-autoscale>

<comment><USER20> Having been a Heroku user for a while, and having looked into autoscaling for dynos and workers a few times (but not having really needed it yet), I really think they could do a better job of publicizing that these solutions exist.

I imagine that tons of their user base (especially for small hobby sites that only occasionally, if ever, see high traffic or run background tasks) look for this, and yet there's nothing pointing to it other than old posts on the mailing list. At least put information and resources for autoscaling in the Docs section of the site.

Acquiring resources only as long as you need them, and then releasing them when you're done, should be the standard service - complete user control should be the advanced feature set. They already do this for websites on a single dyno: they spin them down when they're idle for a while. But they don't do it with workers (what effect does the latency of starting a backup job up really have? it's already running in the background).

<comment><USER21> It's because they need to keep a process running all the time to poll the queue for new jobs. So basically, they keep an instance of your app booted at all times for job processing (if I understand how DJ workers work). And that's pretty much like a dyno, except it doesn't serve traffic. And there are no web requests to trigger it to spin up like there are for dynos.

<comment><USER22> One of Heroku's employees has a fork of delayed_job that handles autoscaling workers in the background. I use it in conjunction with several hourly cron jobs and it works like a charm. <http://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling>

<comment><USER20> Yes, I was aware of this, though I haven't had the need to use it yet.

But my question stands: why isn't this stuff very visible - i.e., on Heroku's DJ doc page: <http://docs.heroku.com/delayed-job> , or at least linked from there? Or published as an official piece of code on the Heroku github page?

<comment><USER23> Because it would decimate their bottom line if everyone stopped running extra instances.

<comment><USER20> Really? I would certainly hope that's not the case. Relying on customers overspending due to technical deficiency seems like a pretty poor business model.

I'd certainly be happier paying more per pro-rated unit of time that I actually use than I am feeling as though I'm in an arms race to not be fleeced.

Is there really that much revenue to skim off the top? Either way, they're paying Amazon out of those charges.

But I'm not so cynical as to think that their success is reliant on this income.

<comment><USER23> _Either way, they're paying Amazon out of those charges._

I'd be extremely surprised if Heroku actually spools up EC2 instances the moment you move the slider. It'd be a far more intelligent (and profitable) design to simply make sure there are sufficient resources to maintain the desired service levels with a buffer to deal with spikes in demand.

It should be relatively straightforward to provide service levels that are functionally identical to actually starting each "dyno" or "worker" with a greatly reduced cost structure.

 _Relying on customers overspending due to technical deficiency seems like a pretty poor business model._

I didn't mean to say they're relying on it, simply that it's adding to the bottom line and it would be greatly missed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am not surprised that they didn't give a refund; most businesses wouldn't. However, I think businesses these days should start integrating a one-time "whoopsie" allowance as part of their customer service (within reason, of course. It may or may not be feasible depending on your business model). You're probably going to have people that try to take advantage of this, but there are some people who make honest mistakes, and I would give them the benefit of the doubt. Just treat people well.

I believe if you take care of your customers, they'll take care of you. In general, the one thing that people will remember for life is how you make them feel.

The benefits of providing awesome customer service outweighs the cost IMO (I haven't done the math, but that's my gut feeling). I remember reading a story on reddit yesterday where a gamer experienced the almost exact same situation with Steam:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dcnp7/one_of_many_re...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/dcnp7/one_of_many_reasons_i_love_steam_customer_support/)

that provides a good example of how news of awesome customer service can be spread, and possibly grow sales (Zappos).

For example, I have several sites hosted with WebFaction.com and I'm unbelievably happy with their customer service. They respond within 10-30 minutes on any support tickets. I'll continue to use them in the future. (see how that was a good example of what awesome customer service can do?)

<comment><USER25> Why would you say most businesses wouldn't? I'd think most business would do something to help a loyal customer stay loyal. I agree with you that it's absolutely good business practice to help customers recover from their own mistakes.

On many many occasions, businesses have literally given me money even when it was my stupid mistake. Some examples just over the past few years:

\- Sprint credited me $100 when I racked up a $250 bill by not watching my usage

\- Bank of America credited me $100 when I left my card in the ATM and someone withdrew $100 from my account

\- Hyatt Place gave me a free room when I made a reservation on the wrong date (and never showed, or called)

\- Southwest Airlines gives you full credit if you cancel your flight any time

\- ATT gave me all my rollover minutes when I changed plans (by rule, you lose them - i had over 2700)

Those are just some examples that I can remember...I'm not sure it's a healthy mentality to expect this, but it certainly leaves a very positive impression. Leaving your customers in a state of feeling ripped off when you can obviously help is not the right business decision.

<comment><USER26> And you prove them in the right simply by recounting those instances here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's tough to say. You really sound like a reasonable person and if you are the model customer you appear to be then I would probably side with you.

I like a very simple rule: Customer retention is far more important than customer acquisition. It may be a flawed rule, I'm not sure since I'm not a successful business person. But it sounds good to me. It seems vitally important to retain your good customers.

<comment><USER9> Yes, the very fact the the OP is now considering (however causally) the idea of finding a smaller host with more personal care is something I'd be concerned about if I were his current host. Who knows, maybe he'll go out and find an awesome small host he never knew existed. Customer gone, and he'll probably start recommending the new host to all his friends and associates too.

If it were me, and a good customer made a mistake, I'd eat the cost to keep the goodwill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not sure why anyone but yourself is to blame, and I think it would have been nice for Heroku to give you a discount then, after this post they should go quiet and let you pay. I think this post is bad form.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd go with "Dumbass" and add "whiner" to the list. Why is it poor customer care when all Heroku did was saying no to an unjust request? You can move your site to another hosting service, or host it yourself.

"I am stuck with $1300 bill on a site that I'm not making any money on." So that means if you make money on the site, then you'd pay? What's the difference here? You're saying that because you're poor now, you don't have enough integrity to say "oops I did something wrong" and take the responsibility?

I'm myself a boostrapper burning thru my savings and to tell you the truth, I do everything myself to cut on expenses. I'd love to use Heroku, but they are too expensive for me to run. So if you don't want to make another mistake, then start to accept responsibility and learn to take care of problems yourself.

</comment><comment><USER29> Happened to me on EC2 once. They cut me a break and gave me 20-30% discount. They can though, because the idle machines were not costing them any money.

<comment><USER30> They weren't costing Amazon any money if they had excess capacity, but if those machines being in use prevented them from being sold to someone else then they did cost it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you could get away with turning up your dynos and workers in anticipation of a traffic spike and then not have to pay; it wouldn't be fun any more.

<comment><USER26> Why? It could be fun for everybody, just set a baseline and a peak level and use as much as required with a nice little graph of how close you came to your maximum allowance so you can plan your future hosting expenses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I happened something similar to me. I forgot I was running a recurring billing adwords campaign. I realized I had that campaign when the bill came with a lovely 3.700$ total. The worst part is I didnt got to sell anything.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't find this poor customer care, really: I consider this normal.

You're talking about "a few weeks": did you check your expenses in the meantime ?

I would put some reminders (google calendar etc) or habits in place to regularly check your expenses.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's human error. Simple as that. Happens to absolutly everyone even the brightest individuals. I've seen in "the livesite" that this kind of spike problems are more common than you think, and the ideal solution is to automate an alarm that tells you both, when a spike is happening, and when X throughput passes over a threshold. This kind of automation is easy and spares lots of trouble.Could be as simple as scheduled task parsing some logs. Some more fancy option is always good though :)

</comment><comment><USER7> At this point, I'd probably just be thanking my lucky stars it was only $1.3k. You'll make it back.

</comment><comment><USER35> Something like this wont happen to Google App Engine, thankfully.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can see the problem from both sides but really Heroku had some more more to gain by just crediting it or most of it in what you would say about them. Clearly by the rules, you should have to pay, but that does not mean that a business should not do the right thing and work with a customer.

Imagine how big a raving fan you would have been if they had credited the entire thing. That is a tiny cost compared to acquiring a new customer and turning them into a raving fan.

</comment><comment><USER37> I got burned by this on Heroku recently as well but to a much lesser extent $$$-wise. My app typically runs on 1 dyno because it's basically not supported anymore. At some point I must have been messing around in the interface and accidently bumped my dynos. Oops.

I personally think they should have a "WTF your load is like zero, you normally have X dynos, but you're using Y dynos for no real reason... dumbass" alert email... I certainly would have appreciated it!

</comment><comment><USER38> Reading this makes me laugh because today I got a $1400 bill from National Grid for gas and heating. The normal bill is around $40 usually. An interesting phone call awaits tomorrow. In all seriousness though Heroku should strike a deal since this is your first offense, just like banks will waive fees for you when you overdraft the first time.

</comment><comment><USER39> I got stuck with a large, unexpected bill at my auto dealer. They comped the next large bill. They're awesome and I'll be a customer for life. They're also the highest (Yelp) rated shop in the area so I bet I'm not the only one.

I suppose it depends on what sort of shop Heroku wants to run. It just seems like customer service is not a big deal to them.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm kind of disappointed that Heroku didn't at least chime in to comment on the situation in this thread. It's one thing to play hardball and stick to their guns, but when there's an obvious, popular thread about it, they should at least own up to the decision and chime in.

</comment><comment><USER41> In my experience a smaller host would have likely been sunk by your lack of attention requiring them to allocate more services (used or not), not be able to provide more personal care. You're lucky you're on a big host.

</comment><comment><USER42> This happened to me, but not an such a large scale with an EC2 instance. I emailed amazon and they severely discounted the bill, with a warning to be more careful because they might not be able to do it in the future.

</comment><comment><USER43> Well the lesson that I've learnt here is that when adjusting something like this up temporarily it is a wise idea to add an event to your calendar to switch the thing back down to normal levels.

</comment><comment><USER44> does Heroku have an api? if so, think of it as investment towards writing a traffic spike script/cron job =)

</comment><comment><USER45> First: If I were Heroku I won't give you any discount, not after this.

Secondly: Heroku is high class hosting, they charge you for being able to host yours "spikes of traffic".

Third: I'm pretty sure you enjoyed their free hosting plan for a long time, you should be thankful.</comment>


Declaratively implementing CPOs (customization point objects) - <AUTHOR> https://brevzin.github.io/c++/2019/09/23/declarative-cpos/ <comment><USER2> This seems like recreating the Mona Lisa in MS Paint. Are CPO's just basically higher order functions or what am I missing? Good read either way.

<comment><USER3> It's like a lambda ref, yes. C++ really stays the ugliest language around. It got better, but still is horrendous.</comment></comment>


Less than 24 hours on Udemy as an instructor and I'm close to leaving - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nickjanetakis.com/post/133482093993/less-than-24-hours-on-udemy-as-an-instructor-and <comment><USER2> Wow!

To some people, that article is going to seem like nit-picking, and insofar as it affects most people, it may be.

But my feeling on reading this article is gratitude. Thanks for writing it.

It's good for Udemy. If their business practices end up costing some content creators 87.5% of list price, then it's because the evil and/or lazy forces in the company have gained ground, and this kind of sunshine may weaken them.

It's good for content creators.

It's good for consumers. As a potential customer of courses like yours, I was discouraged at seeing their incentivization of cheaper, spammier courses. Why? Because even if education is turned into a product, it's is still a "buy-it- for-life" product where quality matters, and quality is the only metric I (and probably many of Udemy's shoppers!) really care about. Anything that could result in less noise/spam in their signal is appreciated.

It'll be interesting to see how Udemy responds.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who has been doing screencasts with voice, I can tell you the mic is really important. If you use a headset, even a good one, you can generally hear the spit swishing around in your mouth. It's awful.

A buddy runs a pro recording studio and recommended Aphex Microphone X. I haven't looked back. Aphex makes amazing pro microphone preamps that are pricey. They launched something called Microphone X which has a compressor and a "big bottom" feature that were previously only in their high end pro gear. It's quite affordable - about $200 compared to an EV RE20 broadcaster mic for $600. It's a USB mic, so you don't need a preamp or digi interface. You just plug it into your computer and you're all set. I use it with a boom stand and pop filter. I love them so much I use them for everything including skype calls.

What this does is negate the changes in volume as you get closer or further from the mic (compressor). Add some nice radio bass to your voice with the big bottom effect. And generally give you a pro quality mic with a USB interface.

Here are all three:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B73OJT2?psc=1&redirect=t...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B73OJT2?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage)

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DY1F2CS?psc=1&redirect=t...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DY1F2CS?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage)

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008AOH1O6?psc=1&redirect=t...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008AOH1O6?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage)

Sure, purists will argue the EV20 is worth every penny. But pre's like the aphex have gotten so good that they've made the gains from a high-end source mic worth a lot less, if anything.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that. I really _hate_ the sound of my own voice when I hear a recording back. The only microphone I did not have that with was an AKG that was priced way out of the ballpark and it needed an equally expensive pre-amp to go with it. Nice to see a reasonably affordable ($200 is still quite a bit of money) alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author raised $12,451 USD from 13 backers for a Flask course?

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickjj/build-a-saas- app...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nickjj/build-a-saas-app-with- flask-and-deploy-it-with-doc?ref=nav_search)

Maybe I'm in the wrong line of work.

<comment><USER6> IT education is a huge market. Unfortunately it also attracts a lot of fakers and cheapos -- in this case, the Udemy owners.

<comment><USER7> Its amazing how many phone calls you get in a week for IT education even at a small business / community college. These course aren't cheap either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Udemy's getting absolutely slammed today on HN. I wonder if they're paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very informative writup about a platform I had only heard of before.

Some comments on book publishers:

> A book publisher will happily give you better margins >

No. If, an author makes 5% royalties on their book sales they're really lucky! Mainstream publishers must make a cut, so they'll only fork out a tiny percentage of the profits, which is a tiny percentage of the wholesale price, which is 45% of the list price (standard wholesale discount).

So 12% royalties, is really like 4-5% of profits, and if the book is sold with extra discount, we're dropping into the 2-3% range.

> than that AND print you high quality hard cover books > while bending the > world to sell it for you in the process. >

More no. They'll put the book in a few catalogues, and maybe make a flyer or two. No world bending stuff.

</comment><comment><USER10> takeaway: break you lessons up into $5 (to you) chunks and the let them go on sale for $10.

</comment><comment><USER11> Udemy is a TERRIBLE platform. I'm surprised that so many instructors consent to putting their stuff on there. It's so much better to just have your content on your own hosted solution or Teachable (previously Fedora). Looks like there's a lot of room to innovate in this space.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't know if it's an open course hosting platform, but there's [http://02geek.com/](http://02geek.com/)</comment>


DL4 - <AUTHOR> I need to find providers that can program / maintain an application developed in dL4. Someone in the room? <comment><USER2> Jobs post are not allowed outside the official threads, but since this is a unusual language ... Why are you using it? Is there an interesting backstory?

Anyway, in case this is flagged:

Please see the FAQ regarding job posts: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

For the latest post, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring)</comment>


On the rapid computation of various polylogarithmic constants (1997) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ams.org/journals/mcom/1997-66-218/S0025-5718-97-00856-9/S0025-5718-97-00856-9.pdf

<comment><USER2> Using this algorithm, I set three records ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHex](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHex)), the last of which stood for 9 years and 10 months until a team at Yahoo surpassed it ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3171](http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3171)).

<comment><USER3> This is so cool. But, here is a question: why?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVd- rYIqSy8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVd-rYIqSy8)

Because we can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fabrice Bellard also did some research on pi digits calculations. Because of that, in 2009 he held a record for the longest pi expansion ever calculated.

[http://bellard.org/pi/](http://bellard.org/pi/)</comment>


Jonathan Mayer Threatens To End "Do Not Track" Talks - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/jonathan-mayer-threatens-to-end-do-not-track-talks-2013-6 <comment><USER2> This is one of the worst pieces of tech/business journalism I have ever had the misfortune to read. The overwhelming desire to paint Jonathan Mayer as David to the digital advertising industry's Goliath completely distorts the reality of the negotiations and misrepresents how decisions about both code and policy are made at Mozilla. It is insulting to Mozilla, which has been working in good faith on these negotiations from the beginning, and to Mayer, who it patronizingly describes as "just a volunteer who hangs around the offices of Mozilla."

It is also riddled with technical errors that suggest this journalist lacks even the basic understanding of technology that should be a prerequisite for working in this space.

This is all especially frustrating because, for some strange reason, these Business Insider pieces get a lot of traction online. This piece is on the HN front page at the moment, and their last, similarly asinine, piece about the proposal to block 3rd Party Cookies in Firefox has over 3,000 comments on Reddit. [1]

For a more accurate representation of the current state of Mayer's 3rd party cookie blocking patch, read Brendan Eich's recent post [2].

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1dy74c/jonathan_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1dy74c/jonathan_mayer_the_guy_who_just_turned_off_3rd/) [2] [https://brendaneich.com/2013/05/c-is-for- cookie/](https://brendaneich.com/2013/05/c-is-for-cookie/)

<comment><USER3> I would suggest Business Insider is banned from HN, there is no quality control, it is Demand Media's content farm model applied to news. If this was my responsibility I would also look very closely at who is upvoting Business Insider stories.

<comment><USER4> Yes and BI would probably not care or notice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The more alarming piece of the article is this:

"The move might also invite legislation from Congress."

So ... presumably a govt body would define what a web browser is, then define what tracking is, and then ... what ? Legislate browser code ?

Would wget need defaults built in for the code that comes over ? What if I 'nc' to port 80 and redirect to a file ?

What is a "web browser" anyway ? What constitutes consumption of tracking codes ? Are there punishments involved ? Is the curl library at fault if it is misused in this government mandated way ?

Terrible, depressing, and predictable.

<comment><USER6> Governments already (and appropriately) legislate all sorts of things about software.

* Some governments require windows to present a choice of web browsers.

* Some governments require websites, operating systems, or programs to provide for accessibility to the disabled.

Some governments also regulate information collection and sharing:

* Some governments (including the US) regulate what information credit card companies must provide to consumers.

* Some governments (including the US) regulate what info credit bureaus can collect, sell, require them to provide free copies on demand to those surveilled, and set up a framework for a dispute process.

It's perfectly reasonable for governments, as an agent of the people, to create laws and regulations around what can be collected and how. And yes, code may have to go into browsers to comply.

<comment><USER2> The long history of the interactions between relatively slow-moving governments and relatively fast-moving technology suggests that we should only legislate software as a last resort. One of the nice things about the proposed Do Not Track standard is that it requires no additional legislation. Once advertising bodies agree to some meaningful definition of DNT, any violations could be prosecuted using existing laws that protect consumers from deceptive advertising.

Online tracking is a difficult problem without a purely technical solution available. Even with 3rd party cookies blocked, advertisers will still use first party cookies (Google, Facebook), or more sneaky and difficult to mititgate mechanisms (browser fingerprinting, evercookies) to track Internet users.

Legislating is slow, uncertain, full of compromise, and riddled with conflicts of interest (hold the comparisons to the current DNT negotiations, please). While it is sometimes appropriate, or required as the only remaining recourse, it is far from an ideal solution - especially with a problem such as this where there is such an imbalance of influence between parties in Washington.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This can only play out a few ways, right?

A) Firefox holds its ground, Advertisers hold their ground as well. Advertisers refuse to work with websites that support the version of Firefox with "Do Not Track", unless the websites add some code to tell their visitors to use another browser/refuse to load the site. This leads to two scenarios:

Ai) Developers agree and implement advertiser strategy, Firefox becomes an unreliable browsing experience, market share slips. Firefox possibly reverses position.

Aii) Developers refuse to implement advertiser strategy (by using either another ad partner or moving to a different monetization strategy), and advertisers finally reverse position.

B) Firefox holds its ground, advertisers cave: websites start seeing less revenue from ads as targeting isn't as effective anymore, websites that get most of their money from ad revenue either start panicking and blocking Firefox users, or start putting up paywalls.

C) Firefox yields, advertisers get their way: pretty much the status quo.

D) Firefox yields, advertisers yield: some sort of compromise between the two camps.

<comment><USER8> B is what I'm worried about and I'm worried that this has a 90% chance of happening. I have about 2 years of experience working in online ads in some way shape or form, and it frustrates me how much the implications here aren't really being considered.

Currently, whenever I hear "I see too many ads for shit that is too related to my interests" (paraphrased), I consider it the ultimate 21st century 1st world problem. Because this is how sites make their money, and how Google got to where it is today. You want to cut off online ads? Fine:

\- Any sites that are free will undergo a paywall, as people don't work for free. \- More apps in the app stores increase their prices, as ad revenue is no longer there for the apps they create \- More paywalls and higher prices mean that lower income people and people in developing countries can't access free and distributable content.

And don't give me this BS about how "If X site were pay-per-use with no ads, I would totally pay for it" because power users don't power websites ... as soon as you charge for something then 90% of the users drop off. [See: Google Reader, any social network, etc.]

<comment><USER9> Most sites that are free won't suddenly turn paysites, people will continue to make blogposts for fame and the ability to _sell_ their own products (which isn't ads in the traditional internet sense), plenty of newspapers may have to close their news sites but the best of the them will make enough money the old fashioned way: charging a few bucks a month.

And that is basically what I want: an internet of people who are writing because they want to, about what they want, not demand media writing crap. I want the rest to be paid for, or run on donations (see Wikipedia). I would love the best webmail client to be one I had to pay 3 usd/month for but which integrated PGP, instead of gmail.

Adds create monopolies, paying for services creates oppertunism for competition.

<comment><USER8> "Adds create monopolies, paying for services creates oppertunism for competition."

I REALLY disagree with this statement, namely because the data shows otherwise when it comes to the online space -- for example, Waze became a legitimate contender by remaining free and instead doing location based advertising. Bing and other search engines are allowed to be decent competitors to Google because advertising drives search.

Second, donations is not a scalable model for the internet, as it definitely doesn't allow for competition in any meaningful way at large scale. Why does it work for Wikipedia? Because of its mission to remain free for anyone in the world (also because of a desire to be unbiased, but let's table that for now, because as politics tells us donations don't always lead to unbiased decisions.)

And honestly, that should be the crux here: the idea of a paywall for Wikipedia or any site that advocates for free and open information dispersal would immediately devalue its mission -- a rando in Uganda should have the same access to information as me in my cushy western Tech job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love the intention here -- but it seems obvious that this will just push advertisers to set up a subdomain that points to advertisers -- and advertisers will use ip address and/or browser fingerprinting to track across domains.

... and we'll end up right where we are today.

<comment><USER11> Giving another company the ability to serve content (javascript) on a subdomain would make ad companies prime targets for all kinds of hacking campaigns. Their ability to serve javascript and probably access session cookies on a large number of domains would turn them in some kind of skeleton key. This is bad for both the advertisers, the websites serving their ads and the visitors of those websites.

I certainly hope people would think twice about actually implementing something like that.

<comment><USER12> "Well we either run the ads with subdomains, or say goodbye to funding and our jobs."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The irony of this article appearing on Business Insider, a site which won't work if you try to load it with Ghostery or AdBlock enabled, is rather piquant.

EDIT: Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but the only way I can get an article to show up on this site is to disable all plugins, and load it in an incognito window. Up-to-date Chrome on up-to-date Lion.

<comment><USER14> Business Insider works fine with 3rd party cookies disabled.

(Edit: Chrome on a mac, no plugins. I've enabled 'Block 3rd party cookies and site data' and Click to play for flash)

<comment><USER15> Every time I click the "Continue to business insider" link I am redirected to the same page with the "Continue to business insider" link. I'm using Firefox and Ghostery on XP.

Weirdly enough after four of five clicks it finally directed me to the article.

<comment><USER13> Exactly the behavior I see, except that I've never gone more than three clicks before giving up and trying in an incognito window (where I have all plugins disabled). Since that tends to work, first try, it's become my default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There has been some talk that the reason Chrome stopped gaining share against IE and Firefox was because of the do-not-track situation. IE9 had it and then turned it back off by default, Firefox was the first to implement it and it is considering making it the default.

This is what I predict will happen, should Mozilla begin shipping with it turned on by default.

Advertisers will modify their contracts such that they pay $x if tracking is enabled on the browser and $y if it is not. $y will be much less than $x, perhaps 1/10th the amount because the Advertiser will argue it is harder to detect and prevent fraud without the tracking cookies.

Web sites will then these do not track (DNT) sessions as "low value" sessions and will either refuse to display content, or force some difficult to subvert captcha movie watching thing with survey in order to establish the low fraud barrier and get the 'good' price for ads.

The result will be that 'free' web sites will become even more obnoxious and subscription sites where they actually reduce or eliminate the advertisements altogether will become more practical.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have just never realised there are people like johnathon on our side out there. Thank you.

I also just realised that there are sites in the US, UK, Europe to watch and follow debates on each parliament, but the debates on the important workings of these groups seem to be sporadically reported, even here on HN.

Anyone want to help me setup a "theyworkforyou" for w3c working groups?

(I mean if congress rules how a browser should behave in the US, does it affect me here? If not then frankly these groups overrule each individual parliament in fairly significant ways )

</comment><comment><USER18> I do think there's something to the argument that any reasonable implementation of "Do Not Track" would just further entrench the companies who already have large consumer traffic (Google, Facebook, et al), by virtue of the substantial privileging of first-party cookies over third-party cookies at that point.

Now, you could argue, this is desirable -- after all, companies with large consumer brands have much more at risk in terms of doing unethical things with data (yes, I'm aware of the irony of saying that after the PRISM issue, but I think that only affirms my point). At the same time, does Google/FB/etc need any more help in dominating advertising than they already do?

</comment><comment><USER19> Wikipedia says 85% of Mozilla's revenue is from Google. Mayer's moves are sure to ruffle some feathers at the search giant if they go through with it in Firefox.

<comment><USER20> Aren't Google's ads already served via a first-party cookie?

<comment><USER2> Indeed - in fact, one little-discussed concern over 3rd-party cookie blocking is whether it would consolidate the power to track users into the hands of a few already powerful online companies (Google, Facebook, anybody that serves cookies on the domain that you also visit...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Jonathan and Firefox have yet to explain how embedded modules like Disqus, Stripe, or similar are meant to go about their business and without resorting to the EverCookie-like tactics? Facebook or similar apps requiring stateful sessions? I guess we'll all just setup 2nd party sub-domains for advertisers, or serve our ads off a Google domain (or <insert entrenched advertiser>).

</comment><comment><USER22> As long as I'm still allowed to block 3rd party cookies with a few exceptions (like Disqus), I don't really care.

If we (e.g. Mozilla, others, open web supporters) want to educate users about 3rd party cookies can't we just create a new startup wizard or something, like the windows "choose a browser" popup?

</comment><comment><USER23> I would suggest that advertisers and their cronies stop acting like scumbags unless they want to be treated like scumbags.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just block the cookies already, and allow the users to turn them back on on a per-site basis.

</comment><comment><USER25> Doesn't Apache not support DNT, so it's my this lately moot anyway?

</comment><comment><USER26> It's made me consider going back to Firefox from Chrome.</comment>


Start-ups have no room for VPs - <AUTHOR> http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2009/11/13/start-ups-have-no-room-for-vps/ <comment><USER2> I think he's wrong here. Job titles serve two real purposes. To denote rank and to represent what rank someone had at a previous company so they can get other jobs at that level.

The first need exists in any company with more than one person in a department. Once you get a second person you need to have someone be in charge in case there's a dispute. So rank is valid for companies of virtually any size.

On the second point you don't want your employees to take a hit by working for you. The problem with calling everyone a "member of the sales team" as he suggests is that you create a hole in someone's resume where it looks like they dropped in rank for some reason (VP of Sales to Member of the Sales Team). In a tough job economy that perceived hole could be enough for a company to pass the resume over. So stripping people of rank becomes a disincentive to your employees.

Startups are a different animal from big companies. That I agree with. But they still live in the same world and in this world, for better or worse, titles are important.

<comment><USER3> I wonder to what extent rank is used as currency. If holding the title 'VP of Sales' can raise one's earning potential, it's worth something. Part of your implicit package could be title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A very short and very instructional video, from someone who has been in the trenches.

My own experience is that most entrepreneurs do not understand is that building startups is not just about building products and features but about mitigating risks for your customers. Until you can successfully do that, no one can put their career and their families at risk by buying your products.

So the best way is to get all your co-Founders and early employees together and have them focused on what it takes to best serve your customers. When you can do that then you will find that customers do expect a CEO and a bunch of VP's because their managers (who must approve the purchase) expect the same. So this is about helping your customers who are becoming your champion within their organization.

But the trick is to make sure that everyone on your team knows that their titles and positions are only temporary (including the CEO) and their job is to build the company to the point when they can find their own replacement.</comment>


C++Now 2017 Videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_AKIMJc4roXJldxjJGtH8PJb4dY6nN1D <comment><USER2> C++ not my favorite language (maybe second favorite), but definitely interesting from the vids. Rust, D, C++.

<comment><USER3> C++Now is branching out. I gave a talk this year on FIFO communications and a tutorial on RaftLib. One not so C++ focused and the other definitely C++ focused (C++ library). I enjoyed the wide variety of people and topics. Will try to go again next year.</comment></comment>


Apple Says It Slows Older iPhones to Save Their Battery Life - <AUTHOR> http://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=572538593 <comment><USER2> It's not only to make them run longer - they're reducing the peak demand on the batteries to avoid spontaneous shutdown when the aged battery can't handle the load.

This seems like a good idea, and it appears to be well executed (ie it's not apparently based just on age or milage like a crappy car maintenance reminder), but Apple should probably have something in iOS that tells people their phone is running slow because the battery is 2 years old.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why- people...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/20/apple-addresses-why-people-are- saying-their-iphones-with-older-batteries-are-running-slower/)

<comment><USER3> This comment deserves more attention. And, in fact, means the headline is wrong.

Apple is _not_ slowing down devices to extend battery life. Apple is slowing down devices _to prevent the thing from crapping out entirely_ ("unexpectedly shutting down"). Arguably, this does more to _prevent_ obsolescence than _plan_ it.

Agreed with @djrogers suggestion to alert the user to the situation. It should not be a user choice.

"Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions [cold, low battery, battery age]."

<comment><USER4> Strange, I have an old HP veer That is 6 years old and it doesn't spontaneously shut down. I have a 3 year old android phone that doesn't spontaneously shut down. What is so special about iPhones and why do they crap out in 2 years?

<comment><USER5> This post gives us an estimate for what percentage of the iPhones are getting throttled by this issue. I think it's reasonable to use this as a proxy to estimate how many units were at risk of shutting down and it is the minority of units. Happily it appears both of your devices are in the majority of units which don't exhibit this issue.

[https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance- an...](https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery- age/)

<comment><USER6> If I read that correctly, is it 25% of two year old devices (6s) that are getting throttled?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Had the battery in my iPhone SE replaced about an hour ago to test this out

Geekbench 4 benchmark before [https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696](https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943439761066397696)

And after [https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736](https://twitter.com/invisiblea/status/943891561661812736)

<comment><USER8> What app or site are you using to test that?

<comment><USER9> Geekbench [https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/geekbench-4/id1130770356](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/geekbench-4/id1130770356)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get it. An old iPad 2 was running fine card games until we upgraded to IOS 9 a few weeks ago. Now it's almost unusable. Pretty sure we had the same battery before we upgrade, so why wasn't _cpu throttled_ before we upgrade?

This looks more like Apple needed to slow down devices to sell new ones and found a really good excuse for it.

<comment> compiler-guy There are two issues with older phones running more slowly, and you are probably encountering both of them

1\. Newer versions of iOS demand more processing power because they do more (or perhaps do it less efficiently).

2\. Old batteries can't deliver as much power.

So an old phone will new version of the OS mores slowly than a new one, regardless of the battery situation.

But, if the battery was marginal but hadn't hit the limit before the upgrade, then you get a double whammy

1\. The phone simply can't run a more demanding OS as fast as the old one

2\. The increased demand pushes the battery over the limit

At some point, the battery was going to age out anyway, so it was only a matter of time until you hit the second issue. But the upgrade made you hit it sonner rather than later.

<comment><USER11> > 2\. Old batteries can't deliver as much power.

Does anyone have a citation for this? I know capacity falls, but what fraction of peak current is lost with age? And what fraction with throttling just the CPU to 50% save in total load?

<comment><USER11> I guess we'll find out during Discovery!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How come that the MASSIVE slowdown of my iPhone 6s occurred after upgrading to iOS11? TBH the spin that Apple is sending out to make us believe that this was all a clever implementation (which it still might be) does not match with the reality that iOS 11 was creating the slowdown of a device that was working 'fine' before. And yes - this 6s is eligible for the battery replacement program and the Geekbench scores also indicate that this device has an issue. tl;dr: it seems that this is not the only explanation of the slowdown. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER9> You can see that a LOT more devices were affected on iOS 11. I assume they tweaked the algorithm as to when it's triggered.

[https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance- an...](https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2017/12/iphone-performance-and-battery- age/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My wife had a phone replaced off Apple about 6 months back because it was shutting down for no reason about 40% battery life.

She's recently upgraded from 10.x to latest version. She's noticed an actual decrease in performance to the point where she's nearly punching the phone. It just locks up for no reason.

I'd like to blame this on the battery or age of the phone but I can't. It is an iPhone 6 but it is only half a year old.

I believe that this phone should be able to handle the latest release just fine.

She's now looking at upgrading the phone.

<comment><USER6> Was her replacement phone a refurbished or new unit? Either way, she can probably get a brand new battery just by taking it in to the Apple Store.

Also, battery age isn't actually time based, it's cycle based. If your wife uses her phone so heavily that she has to recharge it multiple times a day, she's putting more cycles on the battery. Still should last more than 6 months though.

<comment><USER13> I'm not 100% on whether it was refurb or brand new. It came in a non branded box without a charger etc. The phone looked brand new.

I'm going to install the app to check what the CPU is running at.

It's still ridiculous that she was running 10.x fine, she only updated because someone sent her some emojis that her phone didn't understand and now is it's running like crap

<comment><USER6> The last time I heard of someone buying an iPhone in a non branded box, she ended up getting a box filled with potatoes. Your wife is already ahead on that person.

<comment><USER13> She didn't buy an iPhone in a non branded box, it's how Apple sent the replacement phone.

I thought it was weird when we got the replacement though.

<comment><USER14> I ve gotten these but never had an issue with any of these phones or iPads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> WOW. Conspiracy was real the whole time!

Devil's Advocate to spark discussion (I'm not an iPhone owner so no dog in fight):

Apple did the right thing by not putting a switch in to toggle this slowdown[1]. For many iPhone users, the phone is a magic box that gives them videos and apps and (unlike our HN audience) don't have a clue about how it works, nor do they care. If such a switch existed, these same people would see a twitter comment saying "speed up yuor (sic) IPhone by turning off this setting<comment>!!!!1" and would just do it.

The result? iPhones dying at a faster rate. Even today, as Android phones are barely updated at all, it is still a desirable selling feature of an Apple iPhone that it will be supported for years. People turning that switch on without understanding the consequences would shorten the life of their devices and then //still// complain about how the device didn't last that long.

I would think that a jailbreak-locked option would work IE you have to know enough about how your phone works to make the change, thus increasing your chances of making an informed decision on whether to shorten its life or not.

[1]Which is different than not telling people about it, which IMO is shady

Edit: remove italics

<comment><USER16> Or make the battery replaceable...

It pains me that I effectively have to choose between replaceable batteries and IPXX ratings.... T_T

<comment><USER17> The Samsung S5 is IP67 rated and has a user replaceable battery.

<comment><USER18> It also has a headphone jack while being IP67 and is still reasonably thin, which is an insurmountable design feat according to some opinions I've seen here.

"User replaceable" barely does it justice either. I just had the battery in my hands in under 5 seconds easily. People earlier in the thread stating iPhone batteries are easily user replaceable are ridiculous, when the process can take upward of 20 minutes, and can leave the phone temporarily inoperable if any of the multiple connectors aren't quite seated correctly. I'm also intrigued as to where all this imaginary extra weight and bulk is coming from when implementing specifically the S5 battery enclosure design, because having stripped down hundreds of iPhones and dozens of Galaxy variants I just don't see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Remember it wasn't until someone ran benchmarks before and after replacing their battery that apple decided to let the world know this was a thing.

<comment><USER20> This is probably the most scandalous part about this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Should be a switch in the settings. Prefer battery life or prefer performance. One more setting won't kill anyone.

<comment><USER22> The whole problem is that the batteries _can 't deliver_ that performance.

They can throttle the chip to what the battery can deliver or it _will_ crash. Maybe Apple's more conservative on the throttling, and some amount of performance could still be achieved without a crash, but there's zero chance Apple's putting a "make my phone unstable" switch in Settings.

<comment><USER23> That doesn't pass the sniff test. The available voltage from a lithium ion battery will decrease as it is discharged. When your phone turns off, that does not mean there is no more energy in the battery. It means there is no longer enough voltage to power the phone.

Over the course of many discharge cycles, the battery will lose capacity, and the point when the voltage is no longer sufficient to power the phone will come sooner.

But this is overly pedantic. People generally consider this point to be simply an "empty battery."

Android phones do not suffer these performance changes. Instead, the phones lose battery life over time, and within a year or so, you might be lucky to get 12 hours of life out of a full charge.

You can make an argument that we should optimize for duration or performance, but the difference is that casual Android users are aware that their battery is deteriorating, while casual iPhone users believe their phone is itself deteriorating, or else much slower than the newer models.

<comment><USER24> Wrong. The peak demand from the phone can exceed the available voltage even if you're at 30%, causing an immediate shutdown. That's what we saw a year ago. Now they no longer shut down unexpectedly, but the performance of the phone sucks, even with a battery that holds 87% of its original capacity.

<comment><USER23> I don't dispute that, but that does not explain the observations that a fully- charged, reduced-capacity battery performs poorly on a standard benchmark test versus a new battery.

It's not just smoothing out a peak demand. It's reducing the peak performance all of the time, and that is unique to iPhone.

<comment><USER25> That's not entirely accurate. They observed that with a fully charged battery it performed as expected. The CPU wasn't throttled until the battery was depleted.

<comment><USER24> That's not my experience. Unless depleted means 95% charged and 87% capacity compared to original spec.

Mine runs at 50% CPU speed under those circumstances. I wouldn't call that "performing as expected."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not a good implementation, this feature should be been far more explicitly stated in some sort of alert rather than buried.

This is something that is burning the good will towards apple. Something that is in shorter supply since the days of Steve Jobs. You can see the polarization about it on social media.

Again whether the feature was good/bad, there is clearly something to be learned from the shitstorm that it is causing. Something I hope Tim Cook learns quickly.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure what the right move is here. Apple _does_ have a notification once the battery reaches some threshold of "bad". But maybe it's too conservative? Clearly, notifying an iPhone customer that their battery is going bad when they're throttling CPU by 1% is too aggressive. 75% is too late. Where the right number lies, I don't know.

<comment><USER28> I ran the benchmark and my phone is affected (showed 1650 and 3000 when it the average for my phone is 2400 and 4000). I went into the battery menu people are saying that this notification shows up and there is nothing there about my battery needing to be replaced or serviced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Dear one of the richest damn companies on the face of the earth:

MAKE . IT . EASIER . TO . REPLACE . THE . BATTERY !!!

<comment><USER30> Yes. Also make the batteries standard, like they did with the chargers.

<comment><USER6> Yes, lets have lower battery capacity, and heavier thicker phones so that 2 years from now a user can save $30 replacing their battery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why doesn't it run on normal speed when connected to the charger?

</comment><comment><USER32> This isn't a new thing with smartphones, nor limited to iOS/Apple smartphones. Android does/did it too:

[https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3](https://plus.google.com/+YgorCortes/posts/CZ2GhoxgHk3)

</comment><comment><USER33> Sounds to me like Apple didn't factor the degradation of battery into the design of the phone and instead focused solely on their relentless push for thinness.

<comment><USER34> All modern batteries degrade past the point of usefulness. It doesn't matter how big the battery is if you leave it in the Sun long enough it will die. The question is, "what then?"

Many people are reasonably asking that they be made aware of the problem instead of quietly kneecapping the phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm somewhat impressed that such a detail hasn't leaked through Apple's walls in all these years. Tells a lot about secretive culture at Apple.

<comment><USER36> My reading of the article was that it's a pretty new "feature". I'm running iOS 9.1 on a 5s, and it neither shuts down in the cold, nor runs slower than it used to.

<comment><USER37> I have a hunch that it isn't, and they tweaked the algorithm around iOS 10, which made it a lot more noticeable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Let's get real here, they did this to reduce battery related warranty claims.

</comment><comment><USER39> Has it been confirmed whether Apple stops slowing the phone when the phone is plugged into AC power, i.e. the battery is not being used?

<comment><USER24> It has been anti-confirmed by me. My iPhone 6S continues running at 50% CPU speed, even when charging from the OEM adapter. Only thing that makes it run (a little bit) faster is if the battery charge gets above 97%.

(Also worth noting that the battery in my phone still holds 87% original capacity.)

<comment><USER40> That this is happening when the cell is still at 87% capacity is really the problem here. How do you justify degrading your system's performance when the cell is still soundly in the healthy region?

<comment><USER34> Capacity is not power. Old batteries produce less power (volts times amps) no matter how full they are.

<comment><USER39> What threshold(s) are used by Apple to determine when to throttle?

If a new battery is purchased today, how many months of daily usage will cause Apple throttling to begin?

If a Samsung and Apple phone are purchased on the same day, used the same amount and benchmarked each day for 24 months, would their performance graphs look similar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Alternative title: Apple uses crappy batteries

</comment><comment><USER42> Planned obsolescence

</comment><comment><USER43> The ability of HN readers to rationalize Apple's consumer-hostile practices is nothing short of breathtaking.

</comment><comment><USER44> Maybe, just maybe the batteries should be larger even if the case is slightly thicker.

It is one thing for Apple to compensate for weaknesses of current phones in the field. It would be another story if they plan to do this going forward without telling consumers at the time of sale. Car companies got in trouble over mileage...

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it ALL old phones based upon aggregate statistics and a heuristic, or are they monitoring supply voltage. Apple have not, to my knowledge, provided any data to support their claim. And even if they did, batteries vary in quality, even from the same batch. Why not a setting you can override? It is a MASSIVE performance hit. This feels a lot like Epson or whoever blocking old or third party supplies to "assure peak performance". People hate that but put up with this?

Edit: In case the subtext wasn't clear, without battery wear data, evidence of these power related resets, or active opt-in to the throttling, this behaviour is identical to an artificial hobbling of old phones to encourage future hardware sales. Yadda yadda lawyers.

<comment><USER11> Not that it look deep insight, but I am vindicated. Here come the yadda yadda lawyers. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/apple_sued_iphone_c...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/apple_sued_iphone_cpu_speed/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I hope they will do the same with their cars. When the tires get old, just slow down the car to keep it safe. Having a light come up that tells me my car needs maintenance is so old school.

<comment><USER34> "A run-flat tire is a pneumatic vehicle tire that is designed to resist the effects of deflation when punctured, and to enable the vehicle to continue to be driven at _reduced speeds_ " [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run- flat_tire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-flat_tire)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Even if any of this is accurate and true, replacing a battery in my older phone did absolutely nothing for increase in performance. This is undoubtably planned obsolesce.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is it widespread issue with other phones? I have a suspicion that either they have faulty batteries or they just got bitten by their tiny batteries. I think that battery should have some real life time (not one year, at least 3 years, preferably 5 years) and should be able to provide all the energy phone needed for functioning. Sure, capacity might be reduced, it's understandable, but that's all.

</comment><comment><USER48> Does anyone know if any Android vendors are using a similar approach?

I have an Android phone which apparently has a 40% degraded battery (60% total capacity remains, at least according to a battery health estimation app that I used since Android does not appear to surface battery wear via API) that is always _painfully_ slow, even if I'm careful to ensure that at least 10 gigs of free space to avoid storage slowdown.

</comment><comment><USER49> My iPhone 6s had two iOS updates in recent months. After these updates the iPhone is significantly slower, occasionally the screen doesn't respond to touch events, occasionally the screen is becoming black with little round loader in the center. Safari hangs. No other incident happened with the phone meanwhile, the only reason of the deteriorated behavior I could think of are these iOS updates.

</comment><comment><USER50> So they started this with the Iphone 6, so I guess my Iphone 5s became slow for other reasons?

</comment><comment><USER51> \- Apple has disabled to check how many cycles the battery has. \- Battery recall over shutdown issues \- Software to slow down the phone to save battery

All these three should explain Apple's behavior.

</comment><comment><USER52> If the phone OS was open source there would be no need for all the conjecture, black box research and revelations, all of this would have been available knowledge

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe provide an option in settings is a better idea...

Or even better, provide a level of battery saving.

</comment><comment><USER54> Much more importantly to me: Does this happen in MBP/OSX?

<comment><USER34> My 2008 MacBook Pro has a removable battery. Apple documents that without the battery (i.e. on AC Power) the CPU is underclocked because there is not enough power available.

So it wouldn't be unprecedented. And I wouldn't be surprised if other manufacturers do the same.

<comment><USER18> > Apple documents that without the battery (i.e. on AC Power) the CPU is > underclocked

This is an utterly absurd apology on behalf of Apple, something very common in this thread it seems.

Alternatively, perhaps Apple should sell their high-end model with an appropriately powerful AC adapter, regardless of the absence of the battery?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> do you recall "low power mode" in your iphone? This is exactly what it is. So, even your new iphone will operate slowly during low battery

</comment><comment><USER56> ...and this somehow coincides with new iOS updates.

After an explanation, everybody applauds this wise choice, protecting their phones from not working at all!

</comment><comment><USER57> THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. I always thought I was going crazy, thinking my increasingly "old" phone seemed slow. This is really irritating and disingenuous on Apple's behalf - as said above, they should at least add a switch.

<comment><USER58> My smartphone in 2008 was an iPhone. It slowed down unacceptably and I never bought another piece of Apple hardware again. My 3 phones since then all remained usable past 2 years until I was ready to replace them on my own schedule.

<comment><USER59> Same experience, but I went back to the iPhone once, only once, with the iPhone 5s, and then already deeply regretted it after updating iOS to the latest. I should have known they'd do it again after what I experienced with the iPhone 3g last update, which made the thing so slow it was unusable.

The iPhone 5s should have hardware that is much faster than what's in a Moto G2. Yet, my friend's Moto G2 feels smoother in use, transitioning between apps and the like, than the 5s. I bought the Honor 8 to replace it, a somewhat cheap, midrange android device. Everything on it feels so fast I probably won't replace it until its battery gives out completely. On the paper, the hardware of the Honor 8 is not as fast as modern iPhones. In practice when I open apps it's pretty much instantaneous. The device has enough RAM to keep everything running.

People keep complaining android manufacturers aren't updating the OS fast enough. I'd say good on them to make sure they only give us an OS build that's actually usable on said hardware. Apple doesn't even let you install previous iOS versions. Unlike iOS, most of Android's platform APIs are updated through the Play Store. Things like your web browser are also updated through the play store. So unlike iPhones where refusing new iOS updates means being stuck with browser engines that can't keep up with the web, your android handset stuck on older android is not actually becoming obsolete.

No matter how much nicer Apple's hardware looks and feels in the hands, I ain't ever giving them more of my money again. Premium prices should command more durability in time than this. Chosing to stay on an old iOS means you can't install new apps built on newer SDKs or get newer browsers and so on, so you really have to suffer the slow down treadmill with Apple. You don't have to on Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> So this might be the largest scam, ever? We're talking trillions USD. (Their yearly revenue is around $200B, most of it iPhone.)

(Wow, that was downvoted almost instantly.)

<comment><USER16> Apple's _total_ revenue since 2000 has been less than 1.2T, and it's not like they provided _no_ value.

Calling it a "scam" in any capacity is already a stretch. Calling it a scam in "trillions" is utterly hyperbolic, and equally stupid.

<comment><USER60> I clearly owe you an apology. It's not a trillion-dollar scam, it'a half- trillion-dollar scam. That totally changes everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Seems like a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER62> Well, that makes me want to upgrade.

<comment><USER63> What makes you think that Android isn't subject to the same physical limits of older batteries? You have more ability to customize the Android phones response to the battery condition but that doesn't change the underlying reason for the slow down: The battery can't handle the requested load anymore.

<comment><USER59> The battery can't handle 1 year of use because they undersized it. A 1 715 mAh battery will, once aging, be less able to provide the voltage asked by peak CPU usage than a 2900 mAh battery that has aged for about the same amount of charge cycles.

iPhones are the only device sold by Apple that are only rated for 500 charge cycles before degradation starts. Macbook, iPads and Apple Watches are rated for 1000 cycles. In the case of the Apple Watch I'd guess it's because despite being tiny, the SOC also doesn't ask for as much peak voltage as the phone SOC.

I've had the Honor 8 for a year. It's still holding a great amount of charge and running fine and as fast as the day I bought it. And unlike my 5s, no phone update is coming to turn it into a slow crawl.

The iPhone battery problem with regards to the topic, spontaneous shutdown at 30% and less battery remaining, is probably exacerbated since the evolutions that made those SOC more powerful than before. There wasn't a large wave of 5s owners having spontaneous shutdown requiring an OS update to throttle the CPU. That only started with the iPhone 6. A combination of paltry battery and modern SOCs having peak power usage that stress such battery more than before.

<comment><USER64> > And unlike my 5s, no phone update is coming to turn it into a slow crawl.

That's one way to celebrate being an Android user.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: eBook repository for the permaweb - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/marcojrfurtado/bookweave <comment><USER2> I've never heard of permaweb, so assumed it's either something built on a distributed filesystem such as IPFS or something something blockchain.

Smells like blockchain.

<comment><USER3> That was my first though too. A dug around a little and found some more info: [https://www.arweave.org/technology.html](https://www.arweave.org/technology.html)</comment></comment>


Weak PC Market Catches Up to Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/technology/weak-pc-market-catches-up-to-microsoft.html

<comment><USER2> Every time I read a report about the weak PC market, I am left stunned by the lack of innovation we've seen in desktop computing for the past ~10 years. I routinely reference my blog rants on the subject, and I'll do so again [1]. The desktop in 2013 needs to differentiate itself from portable devices--to stand out as providing something that simply cannot be achieved with a small screen. Desktops should be evolving toward immersion. The clearest path toward immersion is to make displays much larger and higher quality.

Microsoft and all of the desktop PC hardware manufacturers should be investing heavily in larger form-factor, high-density displays. I believe that combining an immersive display format with the ongoing developments toward gesture and touch input would give desktop computing a necessary renaissance.

These companies should feel ashamed that it took ~8 years to progress past the 30" 2560x1600 form factor to a $3,500 ASUS "4k" monitor. In 2013, a "4k" monitor on the desktop should be _entry-level_ technology. After all, _entry- level_ phones pull off still higher density. (Yes, I know that manufacturing a high-density large screen is expensive and that's the point; it's expensive because hardly any R&D is going into that channel and these companies have no idea how to stir up demand for something new and innovative on the desktop.)

A 4k LCD monitor should be entry level. Had desktop displays progressed steadily rather than regressing (thanks to the taint of "HD") after the T220, an enthusiast desktop today should be ~8k OLED or better.

[1] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/displays-are-the- key](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/displays-are-the-key)

<comment><USER3> Why?

I think they got desktop computing pretty much spot on. It's ubiquitous, cheap, reliable and good enough.

People aren't buying stuff because they're pretty happy with what they've got.

And 4k on the desktop? Fuck I really don't care if it's a 1280x800 or 1920x1080 display still.

<comment><USER4> Technical progress depends on getting people to be unhappy with what they have because theres something new that is genuinely better.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. The problem is nothing is genuinely better. Its just turd polish.

The only thing that has made a difference to me in the last decade is an SSD. On a daily basis, I can't tell the difference between my 2007 laptop and my 2013 high end workstation.

<comment><USER5> I made the step back from a HP Veer to an older Samsung Smartphone. The difference in DPI is enormous, and only after using a different font and a nice theme to hide the effects of low-DPI as far as possible I was able to stand the Android.

Which means for me that I'm sold on 4k Displays (and higher), if the effect is even only near to the one I experienced, if you get used to it, you won't want to get back. I image it to be equal to the effect of old CRTs with the curved display, which was unbearable after getting used to a (good) TFT or even one of the modern CRT without the curve.

The resolution change we experienced earlier, or at least I did, was always with a bigger screen. A 17" with 1024x768, a 22" with 1280x1024 and now ~24" with 1920x1080. So most(?) of us never experienced a real DPI increase on the desktop, only on smartphones or tablets.

I really hope it will be the next step after the SSD. Higher DPI-displays are genuinely better.

<comment><USER2> Precisely. Those who are ensconced and comfortable with the inertia of "good enough," may feel that way simply because they don't know how much they would enjoy a high-definition full-view desktop display because nothing like that exists.

I've said elsewhere that without the iPad 3, we'd still have 1024x768 on tablets and there would be those of us shouting for higher resolution tablets, only to be frustrated by counter-arguments of "1024x768 is fine!"

If you disagree with me--if you believe that a high-density large-profile desktop display is just plain silly--I hope that one day if and when we do actually see such a device become available, and you sit down in front of one and mutter, "wow!" that you will remember this conversation. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're a technical person who uses computers for your work, a weak PC market is a blessing.

There is absolutely no reason the general public should be using the traditional desktop computer. They should be using limited use devices tailored to the things that people want to do the most – prattle, get directions, browse the web, and buy stuff. They can use their smart phone or tablet for these. Such devices fit the technical commitment level of the general public, not demanding much in the way of learning or expertise.

Computers should be for computer people who are willing to make the investment that they require to use properly and effectively. The general public has consistently shown they do not have this capability, and only serve as drag on those technical.

As we move forward and the majority of the population is on phones and tablets those who have made the investment to use computers well will have a decided advantage in our increasingly technological world.

<comment><USER7> Interesting point of view. I wonder if the people growing up on smart-phones and tablets today will be unable to use productivity devices in the future, or whether tablets will become the new productivity device. My guess is that at some point in school, most students will need word processing and various other productivity tools, and will become acquainted with them that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My Dell Mini 9 still has some killer features that I can't seem to find on the market:

1\. < $300

2\. No fan

3\. SDD

4\. GPU

5\. x86

Because of the need to support Windows a lot of netbooks are missing the SSD and add the fan. A lot of the Chromebooks are Atom. The one Samsung one maybe fits this bill, but I think it is on its way out.

I had hope for Haswell, but turns out it may break #1.

Anyway, I guess I need to start thinking about Atom and what kinds of OpenGL ES kinds of things maybe, and forget about OpenCL or some such, which is probably appropriate anyway.

The point of how awesome the machine is that it is small, quiet, and an amazing terminal into the various clusters I utilize.

Thanks Microsoft, for killing them off.

<comment><USER9> It's arguably point #1 that's killing the PC market. $300 isn't much money to work with, and there's a _huge_ difference between a $500 computer and a $300 one. At the lower price-point, you're getting bargain-bin everything, every corner cut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's called market saturation. Most people don't need hardware upgrades for facebook and shitty flash games.

<comment><USER11> If developers were pushing the current CPU and GPU capabilities on PCs there would be more demand for upgrades, but instead most games target the current console standards and offer little else extra if they find more power available.

I suspect there will be a blip over the next 18-to-24 months as the next generation of consoles become common and developers start targeting them rather than the last generation, so what is not "bog standard" on the desktop will not be good enough, then it'll settle again once the people that care for high spec games on the PC have upgraded.

<comment><USER12> The most common use for PC's is Microsoft Office, web browsing, and email. None of those should be 'pushing the current CPU and GPU capabilities.' Most people aren't gamers or enthusiasts, those groups don't drive the market anymore.

Lets also keep in mind that most publishers would like to sell games to more then the 4 (size artificially small for emphasis) people who buy the latest graphics card every 6 months. That means targeting hardware on a 1-2 year lag at least. Hard core gamers, while a market that spends money, is very small. Targeting the most powerful doesn't make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The big question though is if sales are falling because people are switching to tablets/smartphones entirely or because they are buying tablets for a subset of their use cases. I'm a big PC fan and I would never replace my laptop with a tablet as my primary computing device. However, my next purchase will be a tablet, because I don't have one at the moment and it's great for surfing the web from the sofa. The marginal return of purchasing tablet is therefore higher. That doesn't mean my PC is going anywhere soon.

<comment><USER14> Another possibility is that older PCs are still good enough. My 4 year old Core 2 Duo MacBook with an SSD has felt speedy enough for all my day-to-day tasks (including driving a 24" display) that I just haven't bothered upgrading.

How well do Windows 7 and 8 perform on older hardware?

<comment><USER15> A computer that came with XP (let's say prior to 2006? 2005?) will probably still run faster with XP (though XP is literally 12 years old now..). However, from what I understand a computer that came with Vista will run faster with Windows 7, and faster still with Windows 8.

Vista upped system requirements from XP, but since then, MS has lowered system requirements and OS footprint on each release.

Remember though that there are PCs that were genuinely quite good (back then) which came with XP and then could also easily run Vista. This is sort of what I was trying to get at with the 2005/2006 limit. Meaning that some PCs that came with XP might still be able to run faster with Win7/8\. Just don't count on it if you got it in 2001 :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've long thought that it may have actually been better for Microsoft in the long run if the antitrust trial had resulted in breaking them up. Who knows though.

The constant forays into new markets isn't new- they've been doing that since the mid-90s at least. At that time they had essentially "won" the PC market and achieved 90%+ market share with Windows and Office. Those products grew and grew until they had nowhere to go. You'd think that would be great for them (and it has been), but stock prices for the tech industry are driven by growth, not profits. If you aren't constantly growing and expanding, your stock price will flatline or start declining. So, for the last 15-20 years Microsoft has been taking the profits from their cash cows and throwing them into one attempt at expansion after another- MSN, Web TV, Zune, Xbox (which was ultimately successful, but not especially profitable)...on and on.

Hardly any of their expansion attempts worked out for various reasons. Often their products were clones of some other company's already successful product, and coming out with something just as good (or even a little better) a year or two later is just not good enough to unseat a firmly established competitor. They also push the Microsoft and Windows branding hard, on everything they make, but those are just not brands that most consumers have positive associations with.

That's the fate of many tech companies, and it's kind of depressing: they have huge success with some core products, blow up over a short period of time, and effectively achieve monopolies with those products. The core products become cash cows, reliably raking in tons of money quarter after quarter, but they have nowhere left to go. So the company dedicates itself to throwing that cash cow money at one (usually) failed attempt at expansion to new markets after another, but hardly anything takes hold and they are punished by the stock market and their shareholders, despite the fact that they are still insanely profitable. In the worst case, some sea change in the industry comes along after a decade or two, and all of a sudden their dependable cash cow starts drying up. It happened with IBM, it's been happening with Microsoft, and it'll probably happen to many of the top tech companies right now. It sucks and it's stupid, but that's the nature of the tech industry; being publicly traded is a double-edged sword because if you're not constantly growing and expanding, your shareholders think you are failing. I wish more companies could settle into a state of doing one thing really well and not have constant pressure to expand, because that's ultimately what kills them.

</comment><comment><USER17> MS should just calve off it's different divisions. Seems like they are getting dragged down by forays into markets they aren't good in, e.g. tablets.

<comment><USER18> That's not necessary. Microsoft's net income this quarter was $4.97 billion. They're doing great. They failed to meet Wall Street's expectations this quarter, but that doesn't mean they're getting dragged down.

Additionally, the first few revisions of any new Microsoft product tend to do poorly, but Microsoft has huge stockpiles of cash that they can throw at the problem until they break into a market, dominate it, and start producing positive revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The desktop/PC market has lost all innovation. I'm not sure why. Things that we take for granted in other form factors: touchscreens, built-in battery backups, seamless bluetooth integration, voice commands -- should be standard by now in desktops. Once they assimilate what's great from other form factors, they can leverage the space on the desk to do things the other ones can't. Things like 3-D, very-large screen formats, wall displays, and gesture recognition.

Instead, somehow the desktop crowd started chasing gamers, creating faster and faster video cards and overclocked processors on the high-end. That was a nice crutch for a few years, but it's not a growth strategy. For the desktop/household PC to _grow_ , it needs to develop into something that it's currently not: an immersive computing experience that's part of your household. That might even include starting to team off with builders to make the PC part of the normal decorative process of designing houses. There's no reason some kind of swappable PC with a wall display couldn't be part of household room designs.

The form factor is dead because the industry has lost the ability to execute on a vision. Instead they're just trying to see how long they can milk the cash cow. Looks like we're now beginning to see an answer to that question.</comment>


Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Serpico - <AUTHOR> http://calacanis.com/2010/06/04/steve-jobs-mark-zuckerberg-and-serpico/

<comment><USER2> What's with all these random people posting open letters to Mark Zuckerberg? Delusions of grandeur seem to be running rampant...</comment>


How to Deal with 12 Bad Stereotypes at Meetings? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.weekdone.com/how-to-deal-with-12-bad-stereotypes-at-meetings/

<comment><USER2> I'll admit to being the multi-tasker during some meetings, but that's usually in response to an inefficient meeting wasting my time. I'd much rather at least be getting something done. In fact, I find that the companies where I most enjoy working have the fewest meetings - at my current job there are almost none and it's awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, bad behavior at meetings may be a bi-product of an inefficient meeting.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the problems that computing industry will try to solve in 2025 - <AUTHOR>

I recently saw a talk by Alan Kay where he asked all tech enthusiast to think of the problems  and use cases for a time span of 10 years. What problems do you think will be relevant after a span of of 10 years from now <comment><USER2> The problem of how can we make robots deliver lazy Americans from their beds to their cars.

<comment><USER3> Self-driving race car beds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finding jobs for human beings once the autonomous corporations and AIs take over.</comment>


Is Yang Still In Control At Yahoo? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/06/is-yang-still-in-control-at-yahoo/ <comment><USER2> When did Techcrunch become a gossip rag? I understand that reporters need to follow leads but their posts on Yahoo are starting to sound more and more like Valleywag.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, I find this disturbing. The deal broke down just a few days ago. It's going to take a week or two to figure out what happens next.</comment></comment>