Cachier: Persistent, stale-free local/cross-machine caching for Python functions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/shaypal5/cachier <comment><USER2> Why Mongodb as a cache backend, rather than something like Memcache or Redis?

</comment><comment><USER3> While we're talking about python caching libraries, I'd like to recommend [https://github.com/codeinthehole/django- cacheback](https://github.com/codeinthehole/django-cacheback)

"It's an extensible caching library that refreshes stale cache items asynchronously using a Celery or rq task. The key idea being that it's better to serve a stale item (and populate the cache asynchronously) than block the response process in order to populate the cache synchronously."

</comment><comment><USER4> What does "stale-free" mean in this context? That term appears to be a little hard to google.

\- edit: spelling

</comment><comment><USER5> Something like this could be the basis of an improvement in Ansible.

At a guesstimate 70% of Ansible tasks are common code yet are transferred to the controlled machine every single time.

<comment><USER6> I was reading about PowerShell remoting and discovered one of the benefits of remoting is what you want out of something like this applied to Ansible: code blocks modules and other data can be handled across machines implicitly or explicitly.

I think such things abstracted out to a Python C&C system would be amazing myself.

<comment><USER5> Well Pyro has been around for a long time; I haven't looked at it closely so I don't know why it doesn't seem to have a lot of mindshare. Certainly sounds great.

[http://pythonhosted.org/Pyro4/](http://pythonhosted.org/Pyro4/)

There are other distributed options as well.

[https://wiki.python.org/moin/DistributedProgramming](https://wiki.python.org/moin/DistributedProgramming)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't see the cross-machine part being useful unless you are already running a MongoDB cluster, because that's a pretty big dependency.</comment>


I used to be on Reddit - <AUTHOR> ...but recently began to appreciate the diverse and more curated set of topics discussed on Hacker News. Anyone with similar feelings? <comment><USER2> Definitely, migrating here was a pretty good decision.

</comment><comment><USER3> HN is the new cool neighbourhood. I hope it doesn't become mainstream enough to be ruined by gentrification.

<comment><AUTHOR> How come you think this is happening? Do more people just simply randomly discover it by accident, are they being recommended HN, or do more people find it through ads on the web?

<comment><USER3> I wasn't saying that it _is_ happening, just hoping it doesn't get to that point. I found it myself (which I consider late) while I was doing steps to verify my Keybase account. I had only heard of Y combinator once through a friend who works at Google, I've never seen ads or any other mentions of it.

Anyways my point was that, like all the cool places on the internet started with some kind of : low graphics, quality content, friendly community. After a while, maybe 5-10 years, more or less, adoption grows to a point where a corporation wants to buy the place. If they are allowed to do so then they modify the rules, curate the content, add the advertisement or subscription fees and start making money with it.

After that your parents join and the place becomes just an ordinary social network, boring and gentrified as the cool people who were there in the first place move out to another small, new, cool community, and the cycle repeats itself.

So all I'm trying to say is that HN is cool and I hope it doesn't fall into the same trap down the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes.</comment>


Make Money on Android - eBook Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.kreci.net/android/make-money-on-android/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I want to spent $20 on a eBook that is only 20 pages long. If it were print - I probably would. Since it is not however, I'd much rather pay 9.99 or 4.99 or even less.

Money-back guarantees are great and all that, but if you're anything like me, it isn't worth the trouble to try to get your money back in a case like this.

Any chance this price will go down, or there will be a promotion for HN users?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will be giving some free copies in my future posts. You may watch my facebook account for details. I will consider discounts in future. It is the price that I have decided to share my knowledge and below this price it is not as worth to create competitors ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "loose time" -> "lose time"

What did you use to create this ebook? Interested in publishing on the Kindle? I'm testing out a system of my own if you are... get in touch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - will consider this.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Comments are as usual welcome and desired!</comment>


Ask HN: when you're hiring, how important is a MS/Ph.D? - <AUTHOR>

As someone who is graduating fairly  soon, I was curious how important employers think it is for someone they hire to have that graduate degree. If the candidate was, let's say, 24, good hacker, a (possibly failed) startup under his belt, would the lack of a graduate degree matter? <comment><USER2> At our tiny branch of a division of a subsidiary of a large fortune 500 corp, a degree is neither a hinderance nor a help for technical staff. At higher levels, management staff can't get promoted without a masters degree in a business field (usually an MBA, but I'm working on a masters in accounting as an alternative to an MBA). So this means that one needs the masters in business-ish degree by the time one is a manager with the actual worker bees being 3 levels beneath one. Years ago, when I worked at the large bankrupt car company, at the division I worked for, one needed a masters before getting promoted from first line manager (where the people that did the actual work were 1 level beneath oneself).

We don't get to see resumes until after HR has screened them for buzzword compliance. Prior to the absolute hiring freeze, we didn't see too many programmers with a degree at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> First, it clearly depends on the position and organization. Some (especially when dealing with the government or large organization) will require it.

With that said, for the mid-level developpers I have personally been involved in interviewing, I find it to be a positive mark but hardly decisive. I have personally always given an interview to someone with a master's degree on their resume.

Of course, more than one of those people with masters did poorly in the interview, while I have also seen people with no degree at all do very well.

So in short, I think that a master's will normally help you get an interview, but rarely play much of a role in actually getting the job.

</comment><comment><USER4> I personally look at any degree information last. Sometimes it figures more prominently; like if someone had a grad degree from MIT for example. Otherwise, I'd much rather have someone that I think can write software well over someone that can write papers well.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think getting a masters really separates the wheat from the chaff, education wise.

It's part of an elite.</comment>


Ask HN: WebMail packages for personal use - <AUTHOR>

I want to start storing my e-mal in a MySQL backend and I am looking for a webmail package that I can run on OS X that will accomplish this.
I know that Zimbra is very RAM intensive. I am sure that asking for something like GMail is out of the question as well.
Thoughts?
Updated: More Reasoning: I have about 8gb of e-mail (compressed) over the course of the last 10 years. Sure some of it could be cleaned out to reduce the over all size. But I get concerned about portability, data lose, crashes, etc. I want to be responsible for my own data and know that I have it whenever and where ever I am.
If I change systems, platforms, etc then MySQL and a web mail interface is pretty portable. I don't have to worry about converting e-mail to a new platform. I also don't like leaving all of eggs in one basket like MobileMe or Yahoo. What if something happens? They are not without failure and mistakes. <comment><USER2> Webmail clients don't do mail storage like desktop mail clients like thunderbird/outlook, i.e., there is no "download messages for offline use" option. Some usually cache message data of mails you accessed, but that's different.

Most webmail clients talk to a backend IMAP server which does the storage. The most popular and open format for mail storage is Maildir. So get a local IMAP server running with Maildir and access the IMAP server with <http://roundcube.net/>

Considering that you have 8GB of mail, I would suggest you go with <http://dovecot.org/> and its mdbox storage instead of Maildir, that way if you don't like dovecot for some reason, you can convert from mdbox to Maildir to migrate.

The last piece of the puzzle is to bring in new mails from your mail account(s) to your local IMAP server. For this probably a tool like <http://wiki.github.com/jgoerzen/offlineimap/> can be used.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell DBMail is the only mail server I know that uses a MySQL backend to store messages:

<http://www.dbmail.org/>

It does run on OSX. You'd then need to install a webmail client which can talk to DBMail via IMAP. Most of them work this way. My personal favourite is called Roundcube:

<http://roundcube.net/>

It's written in PHP. Of course, you'd need to install a web server too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't think of any webmail packages that will read the data directly from MySQL. You could use Google Apps for your day to day email use and then use IMAP to grab a copy of the mail and store that in MySQL?

If you don't want to go the Google Apps route take a look at <http://roundcube.net/> .

Edit: It looks like Roundcube can use a MySQL db to store mail.

<comment> mike-cardwell Are you sure it can use a MySQL db to do that? I know it stores preferences in a MySQL db, but actual message data...?

You'd also need an MTA that can deliver the mail into the database in the first place...

<comment><USER3> Yep you're right. Sorry only had a really quick look at the Roundcube page.</comment></comment></comment>


Crayola's Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.weathersealed.com/2010/01/15/color-me-a-dinosaur/

<comment><USER2> That chart looks a bit like a function approaching a chaotic phase transition aka singularity (which is hinted at in the last few grafs).</comment>


A Developer's Take on Why You Shouldn't Use PHP - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/fuzz/php-a0d0b1d365d8 <comment><USER2> I don't know if OP knows this, but this whole article is a satire of the idea that Node devs would feel superior to PHP devs.

I'm going to flag it because it's basically someone flaming the Node community and has no interesting or original content outside of that.</comment>


Perils Of Credentialism - MIT Example - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adventnet.com/svembu/2007/04/26/perils-of-credentialism-mit-example/

<comment><USER2> From the end of TFA: _Bill Gates could never have been the Dean of Admissions at Stanford, but the Computer Science building at Stanford carries his name._

sigh, i wish people would stop using Gates, Zuckerberg, and other drop-outs from elite colleges to rally up salt-of-the-earth populist propaganda like "oh you can come from humble down-to-earth roots and be a college drop-out and still be a billionaire!" many of these guys came from highly-educated, upper- middle-class families and went to elite private high schools and colleges. the true populist heroes are lurking here amongst the HN readership ... people who have successful autonomous small businesses that are making a good living.

<comment><USER3> I think that's a really good point.

\- Gates, Allen: Harvard

\- Bezos: Princeton

\- Page, Brin, Yang, Filo: Stanford

\- Zuckerberg: Harvard

All these had the brains, drive and position to at least get accepted by a top-notch school. But that got me thinking, what exceptions are there? I thought of Jobs/Wozniack, but what other big hitters out there went somewhere besides and A-list school? I know they are out there, especially the multi- million dollar hits, but naturally, the press doesn't mention someone's school, unless it's a big name.

<comment><USER4> Paul Allen went to Washington State University. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "To maintain intellectual honesty and consistency, MIT should announce that it would henceforth stop requiring formal credentials in evaluating candidates for this and other similar jobs. In other words, future candidates like her, who feel confident in their ability to perform the job, shouldn't feel the need to invent degrees on their resumes. Come on, you may say, how are they supposed to find out who is a good candidate and who is bad. Well, they hired her based on an invented degree, didn't they? Didn't she work out OK for 28 years?"

I'm not following the line of thinking here. A single instance of a high performer with fake credentials does not negate the fact that credentials tend to be a rough indicator of performance in many jobs.

<comment><USER6> The same point that jumped out at me from the article. Which one of the documented logical fallacies is this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I entirely disagree with this article.

[First a factual correction: the original job she applied for (some administrative job) did not require the high-level credentials she faked.] Now my opinion: Whether or not somebody is fit for the job is not for the applicant to judge but for the employer. You cannot fake something in order to seem well-fit. For the same reason that a student, who feels she is capable of doing PhD level work, can't inflate her GPA. For the same reason that a student who feels she can make it through MIT can't add additional honors and awards to her MIT application. It is not about who can make it and do an OK job. For many positions, there are many more qualified applicants than slots. The faking of the credentials is extremely immoral and pretty much nullifies her worth to me. Human frailty, you say? More like human greed? It's not like she got caught faking credentials during her first year of employment. She was at MIT for 20 years. At some point she must have realized what she did was immoral. 20 years is more than enough time to quit the job, without a public spectacle, just giving a personal reason, and going into some other business without faked credentials (maybe her own business, like she does now). Money must have been too good to take the right path. PS: I am not bitter against MIT or MJ in particular; I actually was an MIT student admitted under MJ's leadership.

</comment><comment><USER8> First of all, this article is three years old. Second of all, Marilee Jones blatantly lied about her credentials for 28 years. Yes, she did a fantastic job while she was at MIT, but that doesn't change the fact that she lied. This is not an issue of credentialism, it's an issue of trust and integrity. As far as I'm concerned, what she did is on par with the kid from Harvard who was recently charged with fabricating his life story...

[http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/05/by_gl...](http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/05/by_globe_staff_60.html)

<comment><USER9> Everyone makes mistakes - this was certainly worse than some but really, I don't see how she would ever have had an opportunity to honestly correct the mistake after getting hired without this happening, so she had little choice but to live with it. It does raise the issue of why she had to fake her credentials - or even feel pressured to - to be considered for the job if she was a good candidate without them.

<comment><USER10> She could have honestly corrected her "mistake" by saying "I don't have a degree; I lied on my resume."

<comment><USER11> Many organizations have a policy that you can and will be terminated at any time for lying on your application. If she admitted it, bam.

<comment><USER10> Which has precisely Zip to do with being honest. Honesty isn't a sliding scale, where you say one thing if its good for you, and another if it harms you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> MIT is a beacon of intellectual integrity. As such, it is the duty of the institute to let her go. Condoning her actions would be condoning fabricated information, and thereby undermining the entire scientific research community. They punish students with the same sort of rigor, why not the faculty?

<comment><USER13> This comment has said more than all others so far in this thread, and I agree with it. While I'm of the camp of individuals that think the job market, and society as a whole should be more performance and output oriented versus what a degree says (because for what it's worth, I should never have so much as graduated high school yet here I am working for Samsung USA), allowing her to stay would have compromised the ethos of what MIT represents. Well stated gjcourt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The point of firing her isn't to get rid of a bad worker; it is based on game theory. The firing hurts both MIT and the dean, but it should dissuade people from lying in these kinds of situations.

<comment><USER15> Dunno if they sent the right message. "You will be able to get away with it for half a lifetime but will have to pretend to be sorry when we find out."

<comment><USER16> >but will have to pretend to be sorry when we find out."

Uh, they fired her. So the message is "you'll get fired when we find out". Which seems like exactly the right message, given their goals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Too often, I see bloggers willing to give executives and public officials a pass when they are caught in a lie. The rationale is that the people are otherwise doing a good job, but the bloggers ignore the irony that part of the job was enforcing the rules and imposing judgments on others.

If you're a Dean who has ever kicked a student out of school for an honor violation, I have no sympathy when you get called-out for lying. Too many students get kicked out of school and have permanent black mark on their record for similar offenses; why should the Dean get a pass.

If you're a former President whose job as chief executive is enforce the laws of the country, then I have a hard time having sympathy when people find-out you've lied under oath. Too many people go to jail for perjury; why should the President get a pass.

If you're a former New York prosecutor famous for corruption cases, then I have little sympathy when you've been caught hiding funds to pay a prostitute. Too many people are vilified for this; why should an Attorney General get a pass.

All that being said, I don't judge this Dean, the former President, or the NY Attorney General. Instead, I judge the bloggers who have a double standard for people they like.

</comment><comment><USER18> The reason she was let go had nothing to do with her lying, it had to do with her doing a good job for so many years.

Some first-year employee with little visibility might be forgiven for lying about academic credentials on her resume. Sweep it all under the rug. No harm, no foul. The Dean of Admissions with a wonderfully effective career and lots of praise could not.

(Actually, after I wrote that I had second thoughts. The fact is that _any_ challenge to the idea that college credentials are critical to job performance in an academic setting must receive the most severe punishment.)

I think there is a bit of populist rabble-rousing going on, but that doesn't detract from the fact that there is a serious point here as well. In my opinion, after that much service to the university, somebody should have cut her some slack. Surely MIT is big enough to let in the occasional person of competence sans degree.</comment>


Salem woman denied use of Facebook because of Native American name - <AUTHOR>

At what point do we just call Facebook racist?  They really don't seem to be taking any action to fix discriminatory policies.<p>* Salem woman denied use of Facebook because of Native American name - KPTV - FOX 12 || http://www.kptv.com/story/28853494/salem-woman-denied-use-of-facebook-because-of-native-american-name<p>* Facebook's Name Policy Strikes Again, This Time at Native Americans | Electronic Frontier Foundation || https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/facebooks-name-policy-strikes-again-time-native-americans<p>* Petition · To Allow Native Americans to use their Native names on their profiles. · Change.org || https://www.change.org/p/facebook-to-allow-native-americans-to-use-their-native-names-on-their-profiles <comment><USER2> You may call Facebook racist right now, if you would like. But let's look at this from another side shall we? Facebook has approximately 9000 employees. They have approximately 1.4 Billion users. Or in other words, they have about 1 employee for every 156,000 users. This means, they don't actually keep track of every user that shows up to their site. They couldn't. They would have to have every employee in the company look at a user every 10 seconds, every moment of every day to look over the users in a one year time frame.

So, what they actually do is automate the system and attempt to catch people who are not following their rules using algorithms. A human never reviews such a case at all. If someone is blocked it's because some piece of code decided they are trying to game the system. It doesn't just catch Native American's. It probably catches thousands or more accounts per day of people who actually are trying to game their system. What you are reading about is a handful of false positives on an otherwise successful system.

We also need to remember that users like these are NOT Facebooks customers. Facebook attempts to be nice and fix the problem and actually it seems like they make things right more often then not. But these users are Facebooks product, not their customer. Their customers are advertisers who want to put their advertisements in front of people. They treat people really well for not really needing them at all.

<comment><USER3> Using algorithms to limit the amount of work facebook employee's have to do to make sure users are following the rules makes perfect sense. It doesn't explain why you would cut humans out of the process entirely.

To your point about users are not Facebook customers is technically correct, but these users are actually the product that facebook is trying to sell. If you were a company looking to buy ad space would you use a platform that mistreated your potential customers?

<comment><USER2> Oh, and with all of that, I have to say no, they are not racist, sexist, or any other -ist. They honestly don't care who you are. If you fit the profile of someone that their advertisers are willing to pay them to put ads in front of, you will be allowed into the system. It is purely a matter of economics in a capitalistic society.

<comment><USER4> Yeah because the economics of a capitalistic society are never racist...

And, more to the point, if Facebook designs an algorithm for validating names that assumes that names not conforming to particular cultural norms are not valid, that is in fact racist.

<comment><USER5> It's more like calling an English spellchecking algorithm (or its authors) racist because it doesn't recognize some words. It could be racist, but it could also just be that writing the software is difficult. And validating/recognizing names is a well-known AI problem.

I'd rather just call all of this anti-human, because it's actually about empowering robots and monetizing humans.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm selling my mobile app, before launch. Is it a good idea? - <AUTHOR> I have been working on different ideas within the faith-based space (Christian Community) for the last 2 years. But for $1,500 I got from friends, I have paid all bills from my pocket.
The first concept (sanicms.com) failed with good reasons, but it brought in a new idea (Notisha.com) which I'm now selling before launch.
I'm selling because I've basically run out of cash to push it through the pilot phase and the conflict with my fiancee has gotten to unbearable levels, all because of what I've been working on.
I haven't quite given up on it (Notisha.com). If I had some cash I would still pursue it. Raising money at this stage would likely not be possible as there's no traction.
What would you have done if you were me?
Here's a link to the auction (https://flippa.com/7997879-notisha) and a small rant I had a while back (https://hackernoon.com/im-done-building-technology-solutions-for-church-cb6f60d77617#.ju8gujrg3) <comment><USER2> I can't think of any way to answer this question in a meaningful way.

SaniCMS sounds like something for sanitation, btw.

> [...] they seemed to be cautious to not say something that criticizes the > product.

Well yeah. In general, people don't want to come across as sounding critical. The feedback loop is a two-way street--the responsibility for gathering accurate, honest feedback doesn't lie just on the people you're trying to sell it to.

> The church is too cautious to try out new things.

That's a pretty broad brush. It sounds like you put a lot of eggs in a fairly small basket. That's not generally the most effective approach, while understanding it's good to have at least _someone_ on board before going broader.

> They preferred buying the product but at a very low price or getting it for > free.

Huh. That's so weird.

Regarding Notisha: there seems to be nothing "faith-based" at all around a Q&A app. While having a target market is swell, if your focus is _too_ narrow, you're missing a ton of potential opportunity.

At this stage in your startup mentality, I think attempting a sale might be the best approach. Startups require grit, unwavering dedication, and a willingness to stay with it.

You already have the app and the infrastructure: why can't you float it on the side?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your analysis of the post I made earlier. I have learned a thing or two from it.

If the sale fails, I'll definitely do it on the side but with a few tweaks.</comment></comment>


Patents a priority for startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Patents-a-priority-for-startups-3780203.php?cmpid=twitter

<comment><USER2> Today's business landscape has the added issue of global commerce, meaning a US Patent can easily be sidestepped with off shore servers. So, international patents are needed, which are exponentially more expensive in both finances and time to acquire. Then, the patent(s) need to be enforced, with your own financing.

Patents are a rich man's game with an industry (patent attorneys) professionally trained to leach the maximum amount out of the disputing parties. As an international patent holder, I urge everyone to consider trade secrets and gaining market traction the higher priority. So what if you develop a business that some small startup has a patent? It's too expensive for the startup to enforce their own patent, and if the startup aligns with a deep pocketed ally, chances are they will be consumed and that deep pocketed ally's interests pursued.

Make the business and the business community will align with you. Go after the patent(s) and be financially and (as a result) organizationally drained to the degree that your business is not receiving the focus and attention it requires.</comment>


Get ready for a lost decade - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123007755316531663.html <comment><USER2> My all-time favorite HN comment about this issue:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=329218>

I felt a lot better after reading this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd bet not, actually. The lost decade in Japan was due to unique structural problems in the Japanese economy. The current recession is just a classic speculative bubble. A bad one, certainly, but not qualitatively different from the speculative bubbles the west has been bouncing back from since the 17th century.

<comment><USER4> no denial about speculative bubble but with abysmal savings, lack of educational resources, and near certain evaporation of low skilled jobs not sure - when it bounces back to what level it can go and how sustainable bounce back will be.. fundamental problems must be acknowledged and tackled..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fear mongering among the investor class, sweeping generalizations to prove that Obama is going to screw up. For example, he thinks giving money to banks was a good idea, but asking them to lend it is bad. I thought the whole idea of the bailout was to resolve the liquidity crisis. Without lending you still have a liquidity crisis. And the article is a little short on alternative policies.

<comment><USER6> >"he thinks giving money to banks was a good idea, but asking them to lend it is bad:

Giving banks money was to prevent further financial collapse and panic. Forcing them to lend money to people that they don't think can afford it sounds like deja vu, this time with government backing. I couldn't think of a more short-sighted policy. Talk about not learning from history, and in this case history is 2006.

Furthermore, he says:

>"Large "confidence" costs were always destined to flow from the extreme steps being taken, even if advisable, to prop up the economy. The federal government's alternating takeovers and bailouts of companies are inherently destabilizing and create massive uncertainty in investors and businesses."

One of the reasons that economists who study the matter think the Great Depression took so long to end was that the sudden, drastic, and unpredictable actions of the New Deal created uncertainty and reduced business investment. It is certainly a valid point to keep in mind with a President promising a "Green New Deal" and a "New New Deal".

Obama hasn't got in office yet, but his stated ideology is certainly troubling to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ugh. Is this really the WSJ? I thought they used to only print stuff like this in the anonymous opinion columns.

<comment><USER8> It says at the top "Wall Street Journal. Opinion Journal"

It has no byline. At the bottom it says "Please add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum."

Not sure how much more they could do to tell folks that this is an editorial. Seems like this misconception happens a lot, though. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381821>

<comment><USER9> It does have a byline and a dot-picture of the author, to the right of the title: "By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR."

So by the conventions of newspaper editorial pages, it is the opinion of the author, not the opinion of "the paper". (It is still generally the sort of opinion the WSJ has always favored.)

<comment><USER10> He works for "The Paper", though:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holman_W._Jenkins_Jr>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We've already lost one decade. Why not another?</comment>


A Guide for Webmasters: How to Disable Ad Blockers from Your Site - <AUTHOR> http://www.wiyre.com/guide-how-to-disable-ad-blockers-for-webmasters/ <comment><USER2> [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm/related?hl=en)

Your site is much more usable with this installed.</comment>


Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with Fitness Tracking - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/be-healthy-or-else-how-corporations-became-obsessed-with-fitness-tracking-b0c019faff8d#.wes4gmn96 <comment><USER2> My employer/provider (Blue Cross) offered a $100 discount on insurance premiums in return for me taking a vial of my own blood and mailing it off to them for testing.

Although I am in (mostly) good physical shape, I found it beyond creepy and refused to do it. But I worry about them increasing the discount in the future. It'll be harder to say no when it's $1000, or $2000. And let's be real: it's not a discount, it's a penalty for when you don't do what you're told.

And given how my insurance doesn't even cover a 30-minute ER visit without sending me a bill in the mail for $1700, it's hardly even worth having insurance at all. At least at my age.

<comment><USER3> >>> And given how my insurance doesn't even cover a 30-minute ER visit without sending me a bill in the mail for $1700, it's hardly even worth having insurance at all. At least at my age.

Until you show up uninsured at the same ER for the same visit and end up with a $10,000 bill because you don't have insurance.

Whether it hits your deductible or not, insurance negotiates rates that are easily 75% cheaper than what you'd pay without it.

<comment><USER2> > Until you show up uninsured at the same ER for the same visit and end up > with a $10,000 bill because you don't have insurance.

That's the problem, though. If I can't afford it, then it doesn't matter whether they charge me $1,700 I don't have, or $1,700,000 I don't have. Either way, I'm not going to pay it, and it's going to end up going to collections and dinging my credit.

Let's say the worst possible case happens and I get cancer. They don't treat you for that in the ER, other than the bare minimum to keep you alive. But to get those ungodly expensive $3,000 a dose drugs would require too much out of pocket. I wouldn't be able to get them with or without insurance.

<comment><USER4> If you come in with a cash payment offer you can likely get the same discount. You do have to be willing to do a bit of negotiating however. Because nobody without insurance is actually paying those $10,000 bills.

<comment><USER3> That is false. You will typically get a 10% or 15% cash discount from the hospital ticket price. Still easily 3x what an insurance company would negotiate for you.

Some hospitals allow you to fill out extensive paperwork to apply to have greater bill reductions, and you need to send in several years of tax returns, bank statements, a personal financial statement, an explanation of your situation and why you can't pay in full, etc. It's a grueling, paperwork intensive, and invasive process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >If he chooses not to participate in the program, Abrams must pay an extra $50 per month toward his premium.

Is he paying $50 more for not participating, or getting a $50 discount for participating?

If it's the latter (Anthem insurance doesn't change their premiums, but now rewards people for using preventative medicine), then how could anyone object? It really is a win-win, and people who don't want to participate are no worse off.

But, if Anthem Insurance aren't trying to motivate healthier behavior, but only trying to identify people who are already trying to become healthier (or stay healthy) and lower their premiums in order to remain more competitive, then it's the former. Workers are being penalized because P(Not trying to be healthy | Doesn't participate in the wellness program) is greater than P(Not trying to be healthy).

What this actually means: The trying-to-be-healthy population are no longer subsidizing the not-trying-to-be-healthy population. I don't know if this is a bad outcome, I remember hearing an interview with Cathy O'Neil (the author) where she applies the same rhetoric and logic to loan approval and to criminal sentencing, in both cases she ignores the fact that going from the status quo (in this case, one where wellness programs exist) to her preferred reality (in this case, one where wellness programs do not exist) tends to take a lot of innocent people who are winners in the status quo (in this case, people who try to stay healthy, and enjoy lower premiums) and makes them into losers (since now they have to pay the same premiums as people who don't use preventative medicine).

> Except, as it happens, this regimen already exists and it's called > humiliation and fat-shaming. Have someone tell you you're overweight, or pay > a major fine.

I'm not overweight, so maybe I don't have the right perspective on this, but how terrible could "having a doctor tell you that you're overweight" be? Like, the only context I can understand this quote is that "Have someone tell you you're overweight" is some sort of grievous injury, and not just trivially inconvenient.

<comment><USER3> >>> but how terrible could "having a doctor tell you that you're overweight" be?

How terrible would it be to have a doctor tell you to stop smoking? Or to stop drinking? Or stop abusing drugs? Or to stop cutting yourself? It's all self destructive behavior just like overeating.

Has our culture really become so sensitive that it's now no longer acceptable for a doctor to tell you when you're being unhealthy and contributing to your own demise????

<comment><USER6> > How terrible would it be to have a doctor tell you to stop smoking? Or to > stop drinking? Or stop abusing drugs? Or to stop cutting yourself? It's all > self destructive behavior just like overeating.

It's not terrible, it's just pointless. Fat people know they're fat; people who self harm know they self harm and they know it's not ideal.

Merely saying "stop doing that" does nothing ot help them stop.

<comment><USER7> This is why a doctor won't tell his patient: "stop FOO". Instead, they might nudge him with information. Respecting the patients knowledge and struggle, a doctor is understanding, supporting and able to connect with others who have successfully "stopped FOO".

A good doctor understands that an eating disorder is part of a complex, intertwined and difficult to understand network of causes and effects. Helping the patient understand the complexity of the situation is often the first step towards a permanent solution.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I agree. Some people in this thread don't, and are saying that merely telling someone that smoking is harmful is enough to make that person stop smoking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If that certainly _is_ true, that's a multi-million dollar chaching for the ADA and the ACLU. Also, if I was working for CVS I'd have my lawyer on that like flies on rice for a number of slippery slope reasons. That fires me up a ton, because if let's say the FitBit tracker they give you requires login, they might do the setup for you and slap it on your wrist. Well, that information contains monitoring and GPS coordinates and what is the policy around that? What is the retention of data? What is the sharing of data policy? I mean CVS case really raises an eyebrow for me.

"The national drugstore chain CVS announced in 2013 that it would require employees to report their levels of body fat, blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol — or pay $600 a year."

</comment><comment><USER9> In the long run these corporate solutions are what is needed. Why? Because currently there is no financial incentive, in the short term, to stay healthy. Health insurance costs continue to increase and adverse selection continually makes this worse.

The bias in this article is disturbing because currently even the government is doing nothing to incentive people financially in the short term in this same way. Think 50 years down the line - if systems like this aren't in place we are in serious trouble. There is no perfect solution but to blame companies for tying health and its costs to short term costs is insane. This is a GOOD THING. Wake up people!

This reminds me of a quote (paraphrasing). "The market is the worst form of economic distribution, except for all others."

<comment><USER10> There's already a health incentive to stay healthy, by definition. If people won't obey a health incentive, why will they obey a financial incentive?

And there's already a financial incentive as well: Discrimination provides a financial advantage to people who appear more healthy (younger, thinner, taller).

<comment><USER11> Staying healthy is a really long term goal. You need to do it every day but there's no immediate penalty for not being healthy on a day to day basis. Penalizing someone financially is much more real and tangible than "that pizza you ate today is contributing very slightly to your degrading health"

<comment><USER10> That sounds plausible, but on the other hand, it also sounds plausible that the immediate discomfort of dieting for most people would outweigh the immediate financial incentive.

An additional plausible explanation, that always has to be considered until it's eliminated, is that wellness reward programs don't work at all, but tap into the psychology of the HR managers who buy that kind of stuff.

I was only thinking in terms of a simplistic "homo economicus" model, in which a worker acts rationally in their own best interest. If we abandon that model, I'm not sure we have a useful alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _Those who don't reach the targets in three categories have to pay an extra > $1,000 a year toward their health insurance._

It sounds a lot less sinister if you rephrase it:

 _And those who reach targets in three categories get an extra $1,000 on their paycheck, that comes from the discount on their health insurance._

This kind of data should not be known/tracked by your employer ever, for reasons of privacy. That's totally different from your health plan knowing, however.

The deep question here, regarding all health insurance (including national schemes), is -- to what extent should you be expected to subsidize other people's intentionally unhealthy life choices? To what extent should people who make these unhealthy choices be forced to pay more for them? If I get diabetes because I drank 20 cokes a day...

But it gets even harder, because who defines healthy? The long-term effects of so many activities is so unclear, or under so much debate -- just like sugar, for example.

<comment><USER13> I have a somewhat more practical objection - when you reduce their pay, how are these people supposed to get healthy again? Achieving healthy status seems more costly than maintaining it, but with this system, if you fall behind, your resources are further reduced on top of you being physically worse, making it even harder to get back to being healthy. It's like Mario Kart without blue shells.

<comment><USER14> Except it's not a cut for people who don't follow. It's a bonus for those that do. Anyone can get the bonus, just do the dance.

<comment><USER15> Huh? Surely you understand that there's no difference between calling something a "cut" or a "bonus" when the result is the same?

<comment><USER14> Perception my friend. Perception is everything.

We give a tax cut to people with kids to encourage families in the US. How would people react if we changed it to a no-kid penalty paid by all people without children? Same thing right? But we would react very different to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They took a good idea (welness programs) and made a creepy dystopian thing out of it (biometric tracking for penalizing you on health insurance). That's what _Weapons of Math Destruction_ is all about: tracking, data mining/collection, algorithms that discriminate people based on the data collected. This article is essentialy a advert for the book. I've read some of it in a library.

</comment><comment><USER17> One of the big problem with Wellness programs is the same problem of measuring programmer productivity by tracking LOC -- it's a set of numbers that are only a proxy for the real thing. I look good on some numbers typically used and not so good on others, but I've only needed preventative maintenance for a while.

Of course, what the insurance companies really care about is their cost, not your actual health, which is why the folks with the discounted plans wound up using the insurance more at a past employer -- strong encouragement to exercise more caused more exercise-induced injuries, particularly among a set of mountain bikers that became competitive once the company started logging their mileage as part of the "Wellness" program ... and they started logging broken bones!

</comment><comment><USER18> My employer gives me and my wife $50 total monthly deduction from our insurance payment for not smoking.

Of course if they find out you got sick from smoking, your coverage will be denied.

My worry is what if they try to use this as a way to avoid covering catastrophically expensive illness where the underlying cause might be ambiguous and subject to interpretation.

</comment><comment><USER19> My company requires an annual health assessment be completed in order to avoid a higher insurance rate. There is no requirement that the data entered in the assessment be truthful. It seems like applying such a requirement would be difficult as all the data are self reported, therefore difficult to verify much of it. I have little objection to this approach.

On the other hand the "livewell" points scheme seems annoying. I wonder whether employers consider the added cost. Most employees will complete such extra work-imposed requirements while at work instead of actually working. Suppose this costs four hours per month, that could easily work out to 5k/yr in most tech jobs. That's probably an underestimate. How does that compare to the reduced cost of insurance coverage?

<comment><USER20> I think healthy employees have benefits besides just insurance benefits. Being healthy has a lot of benefits in general (less sick days and in my experience better focus and mood) and people should be taking some short breaks during the day regardless. I think of these programs actually affect employee health then they are worth a cost

<comment><USER19> > I think of these programs actually affect employee health then they are > worth a cost

That may be so. But there are multiple costs: lost work due to completing these mandates, potential indignation over privacy concerns resulting in excess turnover, and other second order effects. My experience with the financial management teams at multiple companies leads me to believe that none of these, beyond the first order cost reduction ("ooh, lower insurance costs!") are being considered.

It would not be that time consuming to complete an analysis of this. Depends strongly on your labour costs. But it should be considered. One could imagine this increasing the overhead of most large companies by a few percent, depending on how much the insurance reduction is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the sane approach is to provide voluntary incentives, without excessive tracking or "punishments" for not hitting arbitrary targets. My company has quite a variety of informal health-related perks and programs (gym discounts, on-site yoga, fun runs, etc.) which many people seem to enjoy using or participating in. There's no coercion, either overt or implicit, which I think is the key to success with these kinds of lifestyle issues.

<comment><USER9> This is voluntary.

<comment><USER21> I think I'm getting at removing the "or else" part of the scenario.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Those interested in the legal basis for medical premium insurance discounts based on wellness programs should read Incentives for Nondiscriminatory Wellness Programs in Group Health Plans. It has all the details on what is and isn't legally allowed.

[https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2013/06/03/2013-12...](https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2013/06/03/2013-12916/incentives- for-nondiscriminatory-wellness-programs-in-group-health-plans)

</comment><comment><USER23> As a European: WTF. This is a perfect example of what is wrong with the US healthcare system and employment-based health insurance.

The privacy headache of having the employer handle medical information alone would make this impossible (in Germany at least).

</comment><comment><USER24> how about going back to a real 40 hour work week so we have time keep in shape

<comment><USER25> Or we could decouple access to healthcare from employment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Companies need to control healthcare costs which are quite high in the US. Things like screening etc. theoretically should help by catching diseases earlier starting prevention earlier.

<comment><USER27> The original sin here is that healthcare insurance is managed by a company instead of the government. That gives an employer too much power over their employees.

In Europe healthcare costs are just another tax, which rate is set by goverment and your employer is just responsible for substracting that from your salary and transfering to government's bank account, but has no say about how much you should pay.The plus side is that your employer simply does not give a damn about your lifestyle choices.

<comment><USER28> > The plus side is that your employer simply does not give a damn about your > lifestyle choices.

Employers still want you to be healthy because they don't want you taking days off work sick. In-service death benefits from heart attacks or whatever could be hundreds of thousands of euros and they still pay them even if you have a national health service. It's probably cheaper to pay for a gym than sick days and in-death benefits.

<comment><USER27> You are partialy right, some employers will still care about your well being, but the point is that

1\. Not all employers will care, and that fact alone gives you some choice.

2\. Even employers that do care can only encourage you to live healty lifestyle but cannot punish you for not following their recomendations (financialy or otherwise)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If the article were instead devoted to exploring the application of similar programs in a different context, perhaps it would have been named "Drive Safe or Else: How Car Insurance Companies Became Obsessed with Tracking Your Speeding Tickets".

There are clear benefits to charging insureds in proportion to risk, especially controllable risk. But of course these benefits need to be weighed against potential negative impacts. There's some discussion here about how to strike the right balance. It may be comforting to learn that actuaries, who design these risk classification programs, and regulators, who monitor and approve them, aren't just making this up as they go along. We're guided by principles, a basic summary of which [0] covers some of the topics discussed in this thread. Of course this only scratches the surface.

[0] [http://actuarialstandardsboard.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/0...](http://actuarialstandardsboard.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/07/riskclassificationSOP.pdf)</comment>


Dear Internet: Let's Demo The Slow Lane - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2014/05/dear-internet-lets-demo-slow-lane.html <comment> loup-vaillant But we _already_ have such a slow lane. And it _already_ made the internet less free and less useful.

It's the upload bandwidth.

Weak upload effectively killed peer to peer. File sharing is slower than it could be, and e-mail, chat, blogs… are all in the "Cloud". Very convenient, but also dangerous (insert random EFF or FSF argument here —they all apply).

With a worthy upload bandwidth, all these things could use a server at home, with many advantages for choice, control, privacy… You could argue it's impractical for a lambda user (and it is), but that's not the problem. If someone try to sell a simple server with a fantastic UX that host e-mail, blog, vlog, social network, and distributed encrypted backup, all out of the box, it would still suck because of the damn bandwidth —and firewalls in some cases. So, this business model is dead in the water, which is why it is still so dammed difficult to install one's own mail server.

You want net neutrality? Start with a neutral bandwidth. Stop treating users like consumers, and they may stop acting like ones. With any luck, it should kill YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Skype… except the users will still do what these "services" offer.

<comment><USER4> To be fair that was for technical reasons, and I think it will change soon with fibre. They tend to have sane upload speeds, e.g. 10 Mb/s.

<comment> loup-vaillant In France, the cheapest fibre is Gb, symmetric. Yet they want to sell us 100Mb download, 10Mb upload. Also, many are reluctant to give us a decent IPv6: many give us a /128, instead of the recommended /48, or just the bare minimum /64\. The technical reasons are long gone by now.

The whole debacle may have _started_ for technical reasons, but I suspect now they're just addicted to centralization. Maybe tighter control of the end user leads to more money down the line?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Issue is severe, but the proposed solution does not sound efficient in any way. In comparison to blackout day:

1\. Turning site off is a lot easier than installing apache module and configuring it. What if site admin does not even have root access?

2\. Customer getting the slow site load might not get the message, but instead turn around for a competitor. [1]

[1] 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. - [http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading- time/](http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/)

<comment><USER6> I don't think slowing the site down really helps convey the speed difference anyways, because they aren't seeing it apples-to-apples.

Instead, I think you want to load two version of the site in to iFrames (or something) and throttle one.

This would also be a good way to show a user how crappy their connection is compared to a _real_ high speed connection: The problem isn't just that they are creating a "fast" lane and a "slow" lane, but the fact that US-based "fast" lanes are actually fairly slow to begin with.

<comment><USER7> The iframes idea is a really good one because it wouldn't require changes to the web server configuration. The throttle could simply be simulated with delayed loading using JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How about something simpler - Make images load slowly using JS.

A ton of popular consumer sites - facebook, instagram, reddit/imgur are hugely image based. A few lines of JS to make them slowly load (perhaps PNG artifacts for bonus points) and you could very effectively get the point across all while quickly serving a nice large banner.

Offtopic: As a google fiber customer myself, his mention of not remembering the upload speed, made me think of how we need bandwidth to get to the point where it doesn't matter. CPU speed used to be something you quoted. For the last few computers, I don't care anymore, because its simply "enough". I fear the current telco/ISPs wouldn't agree with that idea...

<comment><USER9> Remember the days before PNG, before JPEG, when GIFs loaded _several times over_? That sure was fun, watching the image get slightly clearer and clearer and then just stop, leaving you wondering about that final level of detail.

Back then of course you'd be opening an image _that_ big & detailed in a separate window, but now we've got some image-heavy websites with dozens of these things. Retina screens don't make things easier, either. Loading 12 pseduo-GIFS _in serial_ would be the mind-killer. My imgur? Facebook?

Serious question: would it be _evil_ for Google to push out an 'educational patch' to Chrome? Firefox probably wouldn't.

<comment><USER10> They didn't load several times over, they loaded progressively. It was all the same file, but as soon as one level of detail could be displayed, it would - <USER2> very sensible optimisation in dial-up days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone think of any advantages to a non-neutral internet?

I can think of a few - Netflix and Skype would work better.

Most likely, we'd be able to pay for priority traffic, just like we pay for a large AWS instance. Non-priority traffic might be cheaper than current bandwidth.

It would be crazy to suggest all sites be forced to use the same size AWS instance...

Some types of traffic are bandwidth sensitive, like video. Others are cost sensitive, like Linux DVD images.

If you think that an end to neutrality will 'ruin the internet', don't you expect consumers to choose ISPs and services that don't do it?

<comment><USER12> You are burning an artificial technical straw-man. There is no _technical_ capacity limit at play here. Networking technology has leapfrogged the bandwidth available to consumers many times over, and to boot, it is pretty much infinitely scalable.

So when theres no problem transferring all of Netflix, Skype and BitTorrent simultaneously, why slow any of it? Sure, at times hardware fails, fiber is damaged, and ISPs can feel free to prioritize traffic at that time, we certainly have the technology to do that.

But what is certainly not ok is slowing traffic because you are not willing to invest into your connectivity, investing not even enough to actually deliver all of the meagre bandwidth (100 Mbit is 1995 vintage technology, where in the US can you even get that?) you have sold to consumers.

<comment><USER13> _There is no technical capacity limit at play here._

This. The US market is ripe for disruption or regulation. Sure, if you live remotely in Arizona, it may be hard to get a fat pipe, but it seems that even most cities have outrageous prices.

I currently live in Germany. We have 150MBit downstream, 5 MBit upstream, plus phone and television for 40 Euro per month. When we lived in The Netherlands we were on 130 MBit downstream internet. Even in the stone age (2004) we had 20MBit downstream DSL for 20 Euro per month. Since downloading music and movies was legal in the Netherlands until recently, many families were saturating their connections. Netflix is not that demanding in comparison.

The current situation in the EU shows that it is possible to get high-speed low-cost internet with net neutrality.

<comment><USER11> Strikes me folks here are really complaining about a broken cable market, made up of local monopolies.

I googled the American cable market a bit, and some of what was described - the cable majors carving up the country so as not to compete, or aggressively blocking new competitors - that stuff sounds like anti-competitive practice.

Writing from a country with a functioning cable market, when I hear 'ISP will charge for X', I think 'Well I will change ISP then'. If you can't do that, I think net neutrality is the least of your problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would be great and informative and effective, except that the most visible sites* have no incentive to play along with this little song and dance, as they are the ones proliferating anti-net-neutrality for their own private gain.

So it will basically just look to people like I'm running a shitty technical job serving my site, most people will think I'm stupid, they won't learn a damn thing about net neutrality or why it's important, and stop visiting my site in the process. =/

* that many people use exclusively with their internet-time, like Youtube, facebook, Netflix, etc

<comment><USER15> Netflix is "proliferating anti-net-neutrality"? They seem to be actively and publicly pushing for net neutrality.

<comment><USER16> They want to maximize profits. So keeping costs down is important, but it's even more important to keep competitors out of the game.

Currently they have no serious competitors, so they see the Comcast-tax as a pure added cost. But if this practice goes big and becomes an added cost to the market, barriers to enter it become higher, which keeps their position entrenched.

Of course this would require a lot of formalisation (and quantization, estimating numbers, times and potential competition and market evolution) but still, most of the same questions are going through Netflix executives' heads.

<comment><USER17> >Currently they have no serious competitors

Prime video. Hulu.

>most of the same questions are going through Netflix executives' heads.

Conjecture. Contrary to populist belief, not every corporation is a soulless, amoral entity. Netflix has yet to demonstrate _in even the smallest way_ that they are for anything but complete neutrality.

<comment><USER18> Indeed, it's hugely to their benefit to be for net neutrality these days. A non-neutral internet would drive up costs for them and/or their customers for the data connection. If it drives up their costs it eats into their profit margin and they either soak it or raise prices. If it raises customer costs as a general increase on broadband cost, then customers have less money to spend on Netflix and other services. If it drives up customer costs because they now have to pay a Netflix prioritization fee, then they might not choose Netflix at all when Mediacom/TWC/Cox/whoever is offering a cheaper streaming media service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am working with Fight for the Future on a JavaScript code snippet (called 'Slow Lane') to simulate a slow loading process + rip the FCC a new one. This project needs to launch next week to make the maximum impact and we need help to make it superb! If anyone with web skills is interested in helping out, please email firstname.lastname@example.com or me directly at firstname.lastname@example.com ...

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't know that this is the solution (or even that there's a problem). I know my opinion isn't very popular on HN on this issue; but I continue to share it because I feel it's important that people understand the view from the other side of the fence. I expect to get downvoted because people disagree with me, but then magical internet points never really mattered much to me.

I think all this talk of the "slow lane" is a bit tinfoil-hat. Companies like Comcast have no interest in slowing down web site traffic; in fact they do a lot of QoS to make web browsing faster and more responsive. This type of traffic (DNS, HTTP requests, online gaming, etc.) tends to get put in a high- priority QoS class: the data transmitted is often small and it greatly improves the user's experience. ISPs have a huge incentive to make this type of traffic as responsive as possible; and given the low bandwidth requirements, this should definitely be possible. It makes their service "feel" faster to the customer and it's the right thing to do for the customer.

Video streaming services are another story. They don't need to be responsive because they pre-cache a lot of data; in fact the right thing to do from a technical perspective is QoS them into the basement. Video can handle this; it's high bandwidth and low latency. The thing is, streaming video accounts for about 80% of peak Internet traffic. A small percentage of users (~30%) are starting to overload the ISP's last-mile networks with video traffic.

The types of high-bandwidth scenarios that the ISPs will be pushing the "fast lane" on are going to be almost exclusively video streaming services. Video streamers have had to pay CDNs for years anyway if they wanted their videos to stream quickly. The idea is that because these services have such a disproportionate effect on bandwidth usage, they need to contribute economically to avoid a tragedy of the commons [1] situation. Your average website or app that's not pulling 1.5+ mbit/s over an extended period of time is likely going to be fast regardless because it's in the ISPs best interests to make it that way.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

<comment><USER21> >Companies like Comcast have no interest in slowing down web site traffic

Yeah? How about money?

As a comms engineer, I too think about the technical implications of this.

But you have to remember that the people who push for the abolition of net neutrality are mainly the finances guys, i.e the ones responsible for bringing as much money as possible to the company. And when you put yourself in their shoes, all of a sudden you get dreams of Comcast turning the Internet into the same kind of market it has in cable television. And you very quickly forget about QoS, bandwidth, latency and the job of "delivering the bits" and just think in terms of profits. You wouldn't know what most of those terms mean anyway...

<comment><USER20> Well, in short, any web site with any money to pay the ISPs is likely already running on a CDN that's been paying the ISPs for a decade. The portion of that market that's not yet monetized is likely very small. Besides, slowing down general-purpose web traffic makes it look like your service just totally sucks ass.

But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty. There's almost no cost for them to just QoS the low-bandwidth stuff up and it makes people think their service is better.

<comment><USER22> > But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty

Exactly, so people will just leave that ISP and sign up with one that doesn't throttle traffic. Except most people have only one ISP in their area. Yay free market!

<comment><USER20> Even in a truly free market, most areas would only have one ISP. See how Verizon and AT&T have dramatically scaled back or stopped their FiOS/U-Verse rollout plans. If a company with easements and existing infrastructure (and thus lower costs) has decided it can't justify the investment, how would anyone else?

<comment><USER22> I was saying "Yay free market" as in "a truly free market is a bad idea as seen by local ISP monopolies," not as in "our free market has failed us and needs to be freer."

In a truly free market, there would be one company that owns everything, including infrastructure. Not a world I'd like to live in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think simulated slowness is probably better than actual slowness. Something like a javascript file you could include that would hide all the content on the page and show each element at the same speed you'd see with a throttled network. That way you could still display a message about why it's happening, etc. and it's much easier for the average developer to implement.

</comment><comment><USER24> Disclosure: I'm a Feld fanboy. I think it's a brilliant idea. However, to actually coordinate it would take some doing. Blackouts are relatively easy technically. Slowdowns, not so much, given that most companies that give a crap work diligently to improve the user experience and speed things up.

The financial impact could potentially be huge (as I'm sure blackout was as well). But what's even tougher about this idea is getting companies like Google and Netflix in on the "simulation". They're most likely not going to be on the slow lane. Now let's say some we get a whole bunch of startups who would get penalized by the slow lane to do this for a day. Would it make as much of a difference to the masses? The initial effects will be subtle, but the long term impact on economic activity and startups in general could be devastating.

That being said... if this movement is to take hold we'll need some web server plugins and some JS magic to help it happen at a massive scale. Maybe some of my fellow geeks at the bigCo's can convince them to join in for a day too, for the sake of all of us.

</comment><comment><USER25> Apple has included the Network Link Conditioner in the past few versions of Xcode. Works great for simulating slow network for your apps.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Networ...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/WhyNetworkingIsHard/WhyNetworkingIsHard.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems to me that this protest would have a far higher impact than the blackout - or at least a far higher annoyance factor.

The services it would impact most are high-bandwidth such as content streaming, but of course those may be reluctant to participate as it could realistically ruin their goodwill and quickly decimate their user base.

</comment><comment><USER27> Here's v1 of slowlane.js, might be able to help: [https://github.com/yodaiken/slowlane/](https://github.com/yodaiken/slowlane/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I really like this idea except for one thing; it would show users a comparison of slow (what they get now) and _really_ slow. But not what they would get if they lived in, say, Seoul.

The problem is, most people don't realize that, all things considered, their internet really isn't as fast as it could be. They think it is because they have no basis for comparison. And the ISP's bank on this... literally.

<comment><USER29> That's what burns me. We already pay ISPs to deliver the data that we request. They should take our money and improve their infrastructure. Instead, they want to get paid again, by e.g. Netflix, and the result would _still_ be basically the same shitty third-world service we get in the US today.

Many of us _already_ get a Slow Lane Demo every day during "prime time" evening hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm thinking this is a false advertising issue. they say they provide X speed and throttle it down. we need to get the attorney generals in on this issue. they should only be able to advertise the slowest speed they throttle down to.

</comment><comment><USER31> _" Algorithmically, all sites could slow themselves down dramatically, demonstrating what performance might look like over a 1/1 pipe. Or even a 0.5/0.5 pipe."_

If the former, it would make precisely _no difference_ to me. Openreach (UK) provide adsl over copper via an older phone exchange in my immediate area. This is one mile from the centre of a major city. The local authority actually took Openreach to court and lost.

To put this into perspective the government is about to spend around UKP60 Billions over 20 years to provide a high speed train link to London so the journey time drops from 1h30 to 45 min...

</comment><comment><USER32> I can't wait till I have to buy packages based on the type of content I want to consume : $10/month email $20/web $30/music $60/ video. Bonus Package - <USER3> $5 for gaming $20 for large file download.

/S

This is where we are heading.

</comment><comment><USER33> Late to the discussion about the general issue; could someone please help me understand what's the difference between the "Fast Lane"/"Slow Lane" and good old QoS?

<comment><USER34> It basically is QoS. But out of your control. And in favor of the highest bidder.

<comment><USER33> Was QoS ever under my control? I can manage things up to my router, but not upstream from it. (IANAS, I Am Not A Sysadmim)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> One quick, effective and probably not entirely illegal manner to raise the issue would simply be putting a sign on top of any comcast user's pageview saying something like, "Since your internet provider has forced us to pay X amount of money per GB to provide our service to your specific account, and we currently haven't figured out a cost scheme to account for that, your movie viewing experience is being adjusted to fit our current costs. (hyperlink)Tell Comcast how you feel about this."

<comment><USER22> "Dear customer 5281132821292,

Thank you for writing to Comcast. At this time, your wishes are of no concern to us because we have a monopoly in your area.

Best, Comcast Consumer Relations"

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A class action lawsuit is overdue against these internet providers over selling. I feel like I'm on a 128k ISDN most days, it's literally that slow. When you call in, they say, well, "Up to 3Mps" doesn't mean you will get it. ISPs are charging us by possible speeds, they need to deliver or discount when they can't. if you promise me about 10-15 widgets an hour for $50 and all you can consistently deliver for a month is 2-3 widgets. You should not demand $50.

</comment><comment><USER37> Would users actually notice?

And, really, users who have bought based on price per Mb download speed without any other metric are partly to blame for this. If users had been honestly buying based on bandwidth used we would not have ISPs offering "unlimited (until you hit the limits)" internet connectivity. (This is not to excuse the ISPs for their sleazy misleading advertising).

Give people a price per GB and then tell them how many GB they download each month. Price that GB sensibly and route traffic fairly.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think a better demo would be a game where you're playing the ISP trying to maximize the profits from captive neighborhoods of customers. There could be activities such as offering a toll gate speed-up packages for popular websites, and placing your former lobbyist as a regulatory officer, and buying up more ISPs to get more captive neighborhoods.

</comment><comment><USER39> One main problem with any attempt by a site to slow down its service is that all similar/competitor sites must slow down equally. Otherwise we get the game of one site provider not slowing down (or slowing down as much) because of the incentive: if they are faster, they generate more visits than competitors.

<comment><USER40> The article, as I understand it, suggested a banner on the site stating why the site is slow, and to get out of the slow lane 'click here'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> _What if we did the same by Demoing the Slow Lane for a day._

As someone who remembers using 110bps connections, this is amusing.

</comment><comment><USER42> two can play this game. Netflix could serve B&W versions of movies to the clients of non-neutral providers. The official line could be something along "this movie have been optimized for the low bandwith connections by removing colors and stereo sound; contact your congressmen"

</comment><comment><USER43> Best idea I've heard so far is to intentionally slow traffic only for known government IP blocks. If we can convince Google, Wikipedia, and other big sites to do this, Washington would definitely notice. I'm thinking of writing a script that site owners could use to do just this.

<comment><USER22> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712345](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712345)

You may want to get in touch with rubbingalcoholic/FFTF and see if you can help out!

I've demoed the widget they're working on and it's painfully awesome.

<comment><USER43> Thanks! I sent them an email. If anyone else is reading this later, my code is here: [https://gist.github.com/matthewdfuller/69f990f58f1e0850443e](https://gist.github.com/matthewdfuller/69f990f58f1e0850443e)

It's pure JS and simulates the old dial-up-style loading of pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> How about we block comcast and the fcc from accessing google. See how they like it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Why stop at the slow lane? There is nothing preventing ISP gatekeepers from wholeheartedly denying access.

Slowness is just the beginning -- the end-goal is making the internet into multiple competing walled gardens where users are treated as silos that require permission to access. The global reach of the internet is at risk here.

Imagine if Netflix wasn't accessible to Comcast users from the beginning because they wouldn't pay the toll. Would it have thrived and grown as quickly as it did, or would it have died in it's infancy?

What about Skype? Skype stepped on the toes of incumbent ISPs' long-distance revenue streams, I wouldn't put it past AT&T to purposefully degrade the quality of Skype calls _or even outright deny them from happening_. Prior to being bought out by Microsoft, would they have had the revenue to pay for access to users? Would Microsoft have even bought Skype at all?

<comment><USER46> We see this already with blackout outs in cable TV for various sports games ect.

In fact, it took 4 months to resolve a dispute between DirecTV and the Weather Channel [0], which affected 20 Million people. There was _some_ outrage, but not enough to for DirecTV to relent. Instead, the content provider was forced to change [1].

There are lessons to be learned here for other content providers, like Netflix. My worry is that the gatekeepers still hold too much power and are strong arming content providers, using consumers as pawns.

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la- et-c...](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct- directv-weather-channel-deal-20140408-story.html) [1] [http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/04/08/weather- cha...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/04/08/weather-channel-cuts- reality-shows-in-directv-deal/7472653/)

<comment><USER47> You have the sports blackout backwards. The content producer has demanded the blackout, not the gatekeeper, which would be happy to have the viewers.

<comment><USER46> Blackouts occur as a negotiation between local channels and the regional broadcasters (gate keepers), in general, such that local channels get priority over regional broadcasters.

Here is an example of a gatekeeper forcing blackouts the other way around [0]. The content producer was required to enforce a blackout on local channels as part of the deal with the gate keeper. Net result? Consumers lose.

[0] [http://articles.philly.com/2014-03-27/news/48599544_1_philli...](http://articles.philly.com/2014-03-27/news/48599544_1_phillies- games-comcast-cable-sports-games)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Much more effective would be for operators to ban ISPs. Imagine the internet telling specific users that they have to get off comcast or whatever in order to use their service for a particular day out of every month. Do it maddox style with a nice middle finger. Make users want to switch instead of just pretend like there's no alternatives.

<comment><USER49> >Much more effective would be for operators to ban ISPs.

I heartily disagree with this approach. Not only does it harken back to the days of Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe and the like where each service had its own content, but it's very anti-internet.

>Make users want to switch

That's great if there are alternatives to switch to.

Yes, I could technically switch to dialup. It is _technically_ internet. It's not going to allow me to do any work or any of my hobbies, however. So I don't consider it a valid option.

Yes, I could also try out some kind of dish provider. If I wanted to chop down some trees. Besides, those also don't work for me (almost no upload bandwidth, and horrible latency issues).

>instead of just pretend like there's no alternatives.

I live in an area where Comcast literally is my only option for high-speed internet. I'm not pretending.

<comment><USER48> > I heartily disagree with this approach. Not only does it harken back to the > days of Prodigy, AOL, CompuServe and the like where each service had its own > content, but it's very anti-internet.

Anti-internet to ban an ISP that is trying to decimate the internet? How does that logically make any sense?

<comment><USER49> Lets say each website / server admin blacklisted various ISPs from their servers because they did something the admin didn't like. Maybe they noticed throttling to/from their site, or spam, or just had such a bad experience once as their customer that they now considered that ISP to be "bad for the internet".

What would we end up with? Most of the internet not working for anybody. Friends sending you links that you can't get to because you're on different ISPs. Needing to buy service at more than one ISP to "provide coverage". If it happened on a large enough scale, it would unravel what we know as the internet.

This is what I mean when I say it's a bad idea.

<comment><USER48> I'm talking about a protest movement, not a permanent solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> You slow down HN and Reddit and I'll be up in arms with a burning pitchfork and a sharp spiked cross.

</comment><comment><USER51> This blog has now made it to my global blocking file for serving the entire post as an image file instead of as text.

<comment><USER52> I'm also seeing something strange on my iPhone. It looks like there's something off with the antialiasing, and the text isn't selectable. It looks like a scaled up image, though I don't think it is.

<comment><USER51> Yeah, seems to be something stupid they are doing when serving to mobile devices.

<comment><USER52> It also looks similar (like it's scaled-up) on my retina MBP, but the text is selectable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Transit App now free with vehicle locations - <AUTHOR> http://thetransitapp.com We launched Transit 2.0 today, a completely free version of our public transit iPhone app now with real-time vehicle locations. <comment><USER2> These guys have really nailed how to make a great app. From performance to design, without losing sight of the core value add for their target user. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an app I found really cheap when it came with a yearly subscription.

</comment><comment><USER4> A truly exquisite app: gorgeous, useful and a pleasure to use:

</comment><comment> mauricio-OH Love the app!!</comment>


Using symlinks to sync with Dropbox on a Mac - <AUTHOR> http://ikarandeep.tumblr.com/post/84739976341/using-symlinks-to-sync-with-dropbox-on-a-mac

<comment><USER2> Sooner or later this will break. I used this method for years. However, the latest versions of Dropbox (around 2.6.7) screwed the whole thing up: since Dropbox doesn't support symlinks, it frequently "thinks" that the permissions of the symlinks is the permissions that the linked-to files should have. And since symlinks often look like "lrwxrwxrwx" it will chmod the original files 0777, i.e. user, group AND world writable, which is probably not what you want.

E.g., I had symlinked my webserver's directories into Dropbox, only to find out that all the files had their permissions changed to "-rwxrwxrwx".

Your mileage may vary, but be sure you know what you're doing. Dropbox is unreliable with symlinks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info. I just checked and I'm using 2.6.31 which seems to be the latest version: [https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes](https://www.dropbox.com/release_notes)

Also just checked permissions on files and they seem to be correct.

I'm running OS X 10.9.2</comment></comment>


What Goes Around Comes Around (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://mitpress2.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262693143chapm1.pdf <comment><USER2> From the abstract:

This paper provides a summary of 35 years of data model proposals, grouped into 9 different eras. We discuss the proposals of each era, and show that there are only a few basic data modeling ideas, and most have been around a long time. Later proposals inevitably bear a strong resemblance to certain earlier proposals. Hence, it is a worthwhile exercise to study previous proposals.</comment>


Doubting death: how our brains shield us from mortal truth - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/19/doubting-death-how-our-brains-shield-us-from-mortal-truth <comment><USER2> Isn't this essentially what Terror Management theory ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory)) outlines?</comment>


Real-Time Ray-Tracing in WebGPU - <AUTHOR> https://maierfelix.github.io/2020-01-13-webgpu-ray-tracing/ <comment><USER2> I read Practical Parallel Rendering (1st Edition: 2002) quite a long time ago, on someone's recommendation. There's quite a substantial section on how to build and manage effective job queues that's worth a read even if you don't do any CGI.

But there's also a thesis in there: given that scene descriptions grow in size much faster than screen resolution increases, there should be a tipping point where ray-tracing is more efficient than rasterization. I don't think they expected it to take quite this long though.

<comment><USER3> "Practical Parallel Rendering" is a great book for anyone. It really is "Parallel Work Distribution Options: The Book".

The argument that "Ray tracing is logarithmic in scene complexity while rasterization is linear. Therefore, ray tracing will win eventually!" ignores the fact that rasterizers also use hierarchical graphs to maintain logarithmic complexity just like ray tracers do. You could make the same argument if you compared a well-designed rasterization-based system vs. a naive ray tracer that brute-forces every triangle vs. every pixel.

The difference is really a focus on local vs. non-local data. Rasterizers focus on preparing data ahead of time so that it can be directly indexed without searching. Ray tracers focus on making global searching as fast as possible. Rasterizers do more work at the start of a frame (rendering shadow, reflection, ambient occlusion maps). Ray tracers do more work in the middle of the frame (searching for shadowing/reflecting/occluding polygons).

It's wonderful that we finally have both accelerated in hardware. HW ray tracing still has a very long way to go. Currently, budgets are usually less than 1 ray per pixel of the final frame in real time apps! Figure that out how to use that effectively! :D But, it still opens up many new possibilities.

<comment><USER4> I (lycium) wrote a bunch on this topic on a recent thread on reddit r/hardware, with many similar points: [https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/enn41z/when_do_yo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/enn41z/when_do_you_see_fully_path_traced_aaa_games_being/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >>> Recently I began adapting an unofficial Ray-Tracing extension for Dawn, which is the WebGPU implementation for Chromium

Wow, very impressive! I believe this is only available for MacOS Chrome Canary, with enable-unsafe-webgpu flags toggled on. But we are starting to see more example code.

[https://github.com/tsherif/webgpu- examples](https://github.com/tsherif/webgpu-examples)

This is the first specific RTX target engine I've seen so far though. Starting to feel like the future with full time real-time hardware rendering capabilities in the browser ;)

Do you mind my asking what you plan to build with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for you comment.

The Ray-Tracing Extension is currently only available for Windows and Linux.

My next plan is to implement the extension into Dawn's D3D12 backend, so I can build chromium with my Dawn fork and have Ray-Tracing available directly in the browser (at least for myself) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey, I really appreciate your work on these bindings. I have done a lot of work with Metal on iOS, and found it frustrating to start over from scratch when trying to combine graphics and deep learning (CUDA on Linux). It would be awesome to see a future where you can write high-performance GPU-driven apps in a cross-platform way with js/webgpu/wasm and slap in platform-specific UI, without bundling all of Unreal or Unity. Running in a browser would be an optional convenience.

Anecdotally, I was trying connect PyTorch's CUDA tensors to the GL textures that Electron/Chrome uses to render in a Canvas without going through CPU memory, but couldn't figure out where to inject my code. Chromium's GPU code is quite a maze. Perhaps a smarter person will be able to accomplish that.

<comment><USER7> You may be interested in this Chromium fork that Intel is working on which adds a machine learning API, loosely modeled on Android's NNAPI: [https://github.com/otcshare/chromium- src/commits/webml](https://github.com/otcshare/chromium-src/commits/webml)

It's not likely to be standardized as is, but the code demonstrates how to integrate something like this into Chromium. There's a Web ML community group that's working to figure out what could be standardized in this area. [https://webmachinelearning.github.io/](https://webmachinelearning.github.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Now if only Apple would get off their high horse and allow SPIRV so that the WebGPU standard can go forward.

<comment><USER9> Totally! I share your frustration.

And I'm cautiously optimistic that the recent conversation the GPU Web working group had with the Khronos liaison will spur some SPIR-V progress.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6ns6I3zs-2JL_dT9hOkX_25...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6ns6I3zs-2JL_dT9hOkX_253vEtKxuUkTGvxpuv8Ac/edit)

The meeting notes also reveal a clue as to why Apple might be pushing WSL so hard:

 _> MS: Apple is not comfortable working under Khronos IP framework, because of dispute between Apple Legal & Khronos which is private. Can't talk about the substance of this dispute. Can't make any statement for Apple to agree to Khronos IP framework. So we're discussing, what if we don't fork? We can't say whether we're (Apple) happy with that._

 _> NT: nobody is forced to come into Khronos' IP framework._

<comment><USER10> We sincerely think a text-based language is better for the web. It's honestly weird that anyone thinks a binary format is a good webby choice. Both our browser engine people and our GPU software people agree.

Khronos basically said in that meeting that it would be fine to fork SPIR-V, which would solve Apple's and Microsoft's issues with their IPR framework. We've also discussed using a textual form of the SPIR-V format. We've offered all sorts of compromises. It's Google that isn't willing to budge, even stating in a WebGPU meeting that they never even considered what compromises would be acceptable to them. Encourage Google to be open to meeting in the middle and maybe we will get somewhere.

<comment><USER11> I do agree that a text based format is better in many cases. A byte code format would suck for debugging. People want to type their shaders directly into a browser window and have compilation happen in less than a frame. Shader compilation needs to be fast enough that it takes less than a frame because people do have things like colour pickers in their in-browser shader editor where you can drag the value around and it changes the text. To emulate this without browser support would require a lot of work.

But that text based format should be GLSL because that's what everybody's shaders are already written in for WebGL and obviously there will be a transition period where both WebGL and WebGPU will have to be supported (which is easy since most people use a library such as Babylon or Three).

Having a text based language that is not GLSL is pointless IMO. You have the drawbacks of both a bytecode language (need to ship a compiler with the page to compile GLSL into WSL) and textual formats.

As an outsider the most logical option is to support both GLSL and SPIR-V.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there any good WebGPU tutorials?

I've been wanting to play around with graphics programming for a while and the web is such a perfect platform due to cross platform compatibility and lower barrier for entry.

<comment><USER13> It's barely got any support ATM.

[https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation- Status](https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status)

I doubt you'll see a lot of good tutorials for it until you start seeing it land in stable versions of browser (or even nightly builds tbh).

While starting to show it's age, WebGL should have a lot of tutorials and you can start working with it today.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if people will use WebGPU directly or use a higher level framework/library such as Babylon? Looks like it has support for it but doesn't seem everything is supported yet but haven't personally played with it.

<comment><USER15> I'm of the opinion that WebGPU should try not to be a friendly API on its own, but instead practically mandate a framework on top. This is the philosophy that the newer APIs like Vulkan/D3D12 adopt; that you should have a higher- level renderer driving it that's able to reason about your entire scene graph. I've suggested as much to the WG before, who roughly seem to agree.

[0] [https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/171](https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/171)

<comment><USER16> I don't agree. The Vulkan and D3D12 APIs didn't have to be so programmer hostile, they're just badly designed APIs.

Thankfully, WebGPU took a lot of inspiration from the Metal API, and less from Vulkan and D3D12, and thus is usable without a "sanity layer".

<comment><USER17> That sanity layer ended up being yet another way to foster adoption of middleware engines.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>