Wine 1.7.12 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.winehq.org/announce/1.7.12 <comment><USER2> I've been the Ubuntu developer responsible for Wine's packages for almost a decade now.

Over the years I've encountered a lot of skepticism about Wine, with some people even wondering if we'd be better off without it existing. I've never been convinced.

I hear an incredible number of stories about people who wanted to use Ubuntu, but couldn't because of one Windows app. Increasingly, I hear the inverse -- people who are happily using Ubuntu now because Wine works well enough.

Data is hard to come by, but my best estimates put Wine's install base at something on the order of 10-25% of Ubuntu users. That means millions of users of my packages. Most are running games. Some use it for some sort of critical business function like a legacy app.

I've contracted with a good number of companies who use Wine for critical business purposes. Wine is quickly becoming the porting tool of choice for making Mac and Linux versions of Windows software -- often times the game will work without modification, and when it doesn't these days it is dramatically cheaper to improve Wine than to rewrite applications.

I do understand some of the skepticism though. A single bug can render an application completely unusable, so from a user's perspective it's very hard to tell whether Wine is 99% done or 5% done. But in the future, you won't even know you're using Wine -- it'll silently be powering your steam games.

<comment><USER3> >But in the future, you won't even know you're using Wine -- it'll silently be powering your steam games.

Do you mean it'll be powering Windows-native Steam games, or that Wine is somehow related to the Linux version of Steam?

<comment><USER4> I think he's referring to developers making a quick port using Wine as a wrapper similar to Cider.

Cider sucks, though.

<comment><USER2> Yes, this is what I meant. Cider does suck, because Cider is based on a proprietary fork of a 7 year old branch of the Wine code and couldn't keep pace with the open source version. There's a reason Transgaming abandoned Cedega as a consumer product, and it's been that free Wine has been vastly superior for a while.

Codeweavers has already moved into the porting space using their expertise around free Wine, and perhaps not surprisingly Transgaming has begun to pivot into completely different areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honest question: What do people use Wine for? The only thing I ever tried under it was games, and for that it was... meh. I'm assuming my experience was sub-par because my expectations were unreasonable.

But I'd really like to know whether people are actually effectively using things like Office with Wine or whether there's some Door Number Three that I'm just not seeing.

<comment><USER6> An open source project I contribute to uses wine in a pretty cool way I think. Actually it's mentioned in these wine release notes - LMMS.

It's a music production studio, and one of the features that it offers is to use a VST instrument. A VST instrument is a .dll file which provides a virtual instrument for the user to use in their music project. So here we have this native linux app but it is able to take advantage of .dll plugins using wine.

<comment><USER7> Aren't there licensing issues around the VST SDK which means LMMS rarely ships with VST functionality built in?

I tried building it with VST support once, not exactly seamless - not sure I ever got it to work.

<comment><USER8> There's a clean-room reimplementation that LMMS ships with called VeSTige. Ardour3 also uses said code for VST hosting.

The effort isn't complete (they didn't re-implement all the corners), but it works well enough.

<comment><USER7> Ah, thanks for the info, must check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I use Wine on and off, so much that I bought the CrossOver app that's built on Wine.. I use it on Mac to run windows-only programs for work like Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio and a small desktop tool we wrote a Lon time ago. I think Wine is amazing but must admit that one day it's use will probably be obsolete (there are alternatives to the Microsoft programs that are more or less "good enough").

<comment><USER10> I think that when Wine was originally started, the goal must have been for it to be obsolete one day. That day is still very far away, and regardless, Wine is a technical marvel.

<comment><USER11> No. Win32 programs will be around approximately _forever_.

Win32 will be one of those "forever" technologies. Like COBOL and now Java.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really pleased to see the activity level in Wine.

It's clearly a long struggle with a horrible beast but they are brave souls for doing it.

I think this will all be increasingly significant with Steambox coming along so nicely.

Wine, for example, can play Planetside2 which is probably the one game that would keep me from getting rid of Windows over the longer term.

</comment><comment><USER13> I played Max Payne the whole way through a few years ago on Mandriva. Worked a treat. I ended up buying a Crossover license as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations! Wine's existence continues to be superior to its nonexistence. I can't say it's ever been _convenient_ to use, but switching operating systems has always been at least slightly worse.

</comment><comment><USER15> Blizzard games on Ubuntu desktop, they all work perfectly.

</comment><comment><USER16> I look at the list of bug fixes, and I can't help but think that this is a losing battle, and that there are much more worthy projects that the concerted efforts of these undeniably skilled developers could be building.

<comment><USER17> I have to agree. I think it's a great, and much needed, project but I discovered that just beefing up my hardware a little and running Windows on VirtualBox was cheaper in the end. Many applications don't work out of the box, and require all sorts of twists and turns to get them working, if at all possible.

<comment><USER18> > running Windows on VirtualBox was cheaper in the end

"cheaper"? Wine is free software, whereas to run Windows you need a Windows license.

<comment><USER19> Your time is never "free".

<comment><USER18> Time and money are not seamlessly convertible at all, so, if this was the intended meaning of the comment, I think "cheaper" is misleading in comparison with e.g. "faster", "easier", "more efficient", "less time-consuming"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Plenty of EVE online fixes. I wonder what their distribution of users is..

<comment><USER4> I think having developer "support" helps motivation and I wouldn't be surprised if some contribute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> With virtualbox and its alternatives it's really hard for me to find a reason to use Wine, and yes I do not play games under Linux. Anyone can list some main usages for Wine?

</comment><comment><USER22> On OS/X I tried

sudo port install wine

and it works! Of course I already have Macports installed, but this could be interesting to runs Windows apps alongside Mac apps.

</comment><comment><USER23> wow! I didn't know this thing is still around. At this point, doesn't it make sense to make OSXE? I know it's not as catchy as WinE, so how about OXE?

Kidding aside, I think the world needs an iOSE on windows and linux

<comment><USER24> There's a project in the works, but I don't know how active it is. It's called Darling (DARwin on LINux): [http://www.darlinghq.org](http://www.darlinghq.org)</comment></comment>


Welcoming Beat Games to Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.oculus.com/blog/welcoming-beat-games-to-facebook/ <comment><USER2> Now seems like a good opportunity to shout out Revive ([https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive](https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive)), which allows you to play games intended to be Oculus-exclusive on any VR hardware you like (technically, anything that supports OpenVR).

The VR market is thin enough as it is. Splitting it up into walled gardens is more likely to just kill it than to carve out a monopoly for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish this didn't happen. They make it sound like they want to mess with mods already...

<comment><USER4> They will likely be forced to 'mess with mods'. Unfortunately the mods enable song piracy, and Facebook is a much more lucrative target for litigation.

<comment><USER3> Being able to play user-made levels is the single reason why I love the game. I'd be willing to pay for an Apple Music-like subscription to have my favorite songs as levels but the community ones are way more fun than the official stuff anyway. I wouldn't support it if it ended up turning into Guitar Hero DLC-hell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the answer "This is just the beginning" that was added in at the end of their response to the question "Do you plan to acquire other studios? What else are you doing to accelerate VR?" on this page.

Facebook obviously has enough cash (53B) to get a huge lead in VR and I'm curious how many competitors will be able to compete with the scale they're already at.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how much they paid.</comment>


Court OKs Removing Content From The Public Domain - <AUTHOR> http://techdirt.com/articles/20100621/2320049908.shtml

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting story, but poorly reported and understood (IMO, but IANAL). I think the court is right, which is ironic, given my extended rant about copyright overreach only 2 hours ago (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1453080>).

Quick-but-simplistic summary: US musicians played music of dead Russian composer Shostakovich, which was in public domain in the US, for fun and profit.

Meanwhile, US complains to Russia about failure to enforce US copyrights and halt piracy there. Russia points out that those works were never copyrighted in Russia and are thus in the (Russian) public domain. US invokes Berne convention, saying that US copyright registration is sufficient for worldwide recognition. Russia points out that US has cheerfully ignored Russian copyrights. US admits Russia has a point and passes an act (URAA) to respect foreign copyrights in US.

Shostakovich's work is no longer in the US public domain as a result: performances infringe newly (and retroactively) established copyright. Copyright holders demand royalties for any future use; performers balk, and plead reliance on previous public domain status. Agreement impossible, lawsuits launched, performers as plaintiffs claim that extension of copyright to previously unprotected works violates 1st amendment.

-

The court decided three basic things. First, that the US government has an interest in seeing US copyrights enforced overseas; and as this depends on treaties which in turn mean we must reciprocally enforce overseas copyright in the US, the government's interest in upholding international copyright treaties trumps that of US musicians to play the music of Shostakovic without paying any royalties.

Second, it doesn't infringe free speech insofar as it is content-neutral: the copyright status of Shostakovic has changed not because the government wishes to suppress performances of his music or because it hates the performers in question, but simply because the works of Shostakovic ought not have been in the public domain to begin with.

Why not, you ask - aren't I supposed to be against endlessly extending copyright? Indeed I am. But Shostakovic only died in 1975. Even under shorter grants of copyright, his work would normally be protected for many years to come, so that his heirs or publishers could enjoy the fruits of his creativity as he saw fit to assign his rights. The only reason for this to be overlooked, and his work to find its way into the US public domain, is that when Shostakovic died Russia was still part of the USSR, with whom we had no sort of copyright arrangements because the USSR was a communist regime which did not believe in such things anyway. Since russia is no longer communist but has since become a signatory to the Berne convention, and since they have retroactively extended the normal protections of copyright to works created before the fall of communism, under the Berne treaty we have to respect that; otherwise we would be in the curious position of saying that Shostakovic must remain in the US public domain out of deference to the (lack of) copyright protection resulting from the laws of the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Third, the performers dislike the fact that since the copyright has been extended to the works of Shostakovic, the URAA means that all the copyright holders have to do is give them a year's notice before they either pay royalties or give up performing his work. In the UK, they say, a rights holder must pay money to someone who relied upon a mistaken public domain classification, to reflect the loss of income they suffer due to their sudden inability to sell the newly-copyrighted work. The court disagreed, pointing out that while UK law would require them to be compensated for their inconvenience before the rights owner could start licensing the work, it would also impose a mandatory immediate halt to their performance activity, rather than the 12 month grace period allowed under US law - and so they are no worse off, overall.

So in a nutshell, US performers of Shostakovic music were getting something for nothing, because but for the composer having lived and died under communism, his work would never have been in the public domain to begin with. To argue otherwise would be like saying to Russians that Soviet law still applies to all property created before 1992.</comment>


The AI Cold War That Threatens Us All - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ai-cold-war-china-could-doom-us-all/ <comment><AUTHOR> "IMAGINE IT'S 2022: America's confrontational economic policies have continued, and China has refused to yield. Huawei and ZTE have been banned from the networks of the US and key Western allies. Through investment and theft, Beijing has reduced its reliance on US semiconductors. Rival tech superpowers have failed to develop common standards. US and Chinese academics increasingly deposit their cutting-edge AI research in government safes instead of sharing it at international conferences. Other countries—like France and Russia—have tried to build homegrown technology industries centered on AI, but they lag far behind.

The world's nations can commit to American technology: buying Apple phones, using Google search, driving Teslas, and managing a fleet of personal robots made by a startup in Seattle. Or they can commit to China: using the equivalents built by Alibaba and Tencent, connecting through the 5G network constructed by Huawei and ZTE, and driving autonomous cars built by Baidu. The choice is a fraught one. If you are a poor country that lacks the capacity to build your own data network, you're going to feel loyalty to whoever helps lay the pipes at low cost. It will all seem uncomfortably close to the arms and security pacts that defined the Cold War."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This will greatly affect the trend of the world on going open source.</comment>


We are not nearly as determined by our genes as once thought - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/68/context/its-the-end-of-the-gene-as-we-know-it <comment><USER2> The title of this article should be, "We are exactly as determined by our genes as once thought, but we don't know precisely how this works".

We can estimate how genetically determined a trait is by comparing identical to non-identical twins, or by comparing full siblings to half siblings and adopted siblings. There is a long history of data in this area which is just as valid today as ever. This article points out that we know very little about how specific genes determine specific traits. True. But we can know _that_ a trait is genetically determined without knowing _how_ a trait is genetically determined.

<comment><USER3> We don't even have to do that. Just compare humans to mice or fruit flies or nematodes. Genes make all the difference there. If people can accept that genetics cause the huge variations between species, why not accept the small variations between individuals? Why this "100% nurture" fundamentalism?

<comment><USER4> The left abhors facts of genetics just as the right abhors facts of climate change. In both cases there is a lot of virtue signaling going on, they know that the science is not on their side but they can not admit it because to do so would get them cast out of their in-group.

<comment><USER5> I dunno. What if the right found out that poor people are poor because of genetics, luck and environment, i.e. no fault of their own, rather than laziness? Oh man, that'd be a problem, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER4> Once you account for "genetics, luck and environment" the only thing left is free will. I think you are absolutely correct, "Does free will exist?" is a huge problem for politics, philosophy, sociology etc.

<comment><USER6> My position is that if it doesn't exist, it is a necessary fiction to keep our laws and social norms working. They are based on what feels just and right, the rationalization of which requires free will.

I don't see how laws and social norms would work without the assumption of free will. I'm not saying it would be absolutely impossible.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you. We are determined by factors we do not control (genes, environment)

The justification of criminal justice is to make an example to society that a behavior is unacceptable. Thus creating an environment where that behavior is discouraged.

In my mind the environment is responsible for a criminal. The way we have chosen to punish their environment is to remove the individual from it. This brings shame to the family or splitting up a family or loss of income due to the person being removed. The person with the hardest punishment(in jail) is least responsible.

In dictatorships they actually punish the family of the criminal, which is a contributing factor to how they can hold power. Everyone is more invested in everyone conforming.

On the positive side, is parents feeling pride if their children succeed. We cannot give the success directly to the parents for raising their child, therefore they enjoy the success of their children by proxy, pride.

This of course extends to every link being a product of their environment and thus, for now, we need the fiction of free will. How would a society that accepts there is no free will function? That would make a mind blowing sci-fi film or novel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author's fear is that current views of genetics will lead to horrible policy decisions; thus, genetic determinism should be undermined. Evidence against simple, linearly addititive genetic determinism is used to argue against genetic determinism more broadly.

I am very much in favor of genetic agnosticism, the position that we are currently very poor at predicting complex traits from genetic data (and may always be). Failure to predict does not negate genetic determinism per se. However, clonal animals and human twins provide fairly strong evidence of the limits of genetic determinism.

<comment><USER9> Identical twins raised separately end up rather similar in adulthood. So human twins actually provides fairly strong evidence that genes substantially (though not exclusively) determine how we end up.

<comment><USER10> They end up remarkably similar, but it turns that remarkably similar isn't nearly similar enough to be useful in most contexts. In fact, I think the biggest lesson of the social sciences is a deeper intuitive understanding of how individual variation will completely dominate any other statistical factor in anything made of people, and how fortunate we were that the physical sciences were much simpler.

<comment><USER11> Stanford's Youtube channel has a series of lectures for Robert Sapolsky's class on Human Behavioral Biology, and he spends a good amount of time on genetics there. The view he presents there is that there is no such thing as a gene FOR something, because the effect of a gene is a function of the environment in which it is expressed. For example, it's incorrect to think in terms of a gene for depression, but it is more reasonable to think of a gene that will make you vulnerable to depression if you are exposed to strong stressors during childhood.

I recommend watching the entire playlist, but I've linked to the punchline at the end of Behavioral Genetics II. I've linked to him discussing the heritability of plant IQ, followed by the heritability of depression example I alluded to earlier.

[https://youtu.be/RG5fN6KrDJE?t=3200](https://youtu.be/RG5fN6KrDJE?t=3200)

Again, I recommend watching the entire lecture if you have an hour and a half, both lectures if you have 3 hours, or all the lectures if you have, like, 40 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who actually does have a bit of knowledge of genetics and molecular biology, I couldn't get through all the fluff. What are the actual news presented here?

<comment><USER13> TL;DR: we don't understand genetics well enough to make definite statements about the degree to which genes determine phenotypes, how this happens, how malleable or environmentally influence-able it is, etc. As a result we should not dogmatize statistical inferences from genomics and heritability studies, especially if such dogmas influence policy or prejudice.

I studied genetics quite extensively and none of that is news to me at all. Dogmatic genetic determinism is Dunning-Krueger effect territory, not because it's _impossible_ but because we don't know enough to be certain enough about it to make it useful. Trying to assert otherwise is wishful thinking, usually by people who really wish there were a way to make scientifically credible assertions about the value of human beings based on their genetic lineage (hint hint).

The best way I can describe what _seems_ to be happening with genes and development is that it's something loosely analogous to procedural world generation in games. You have this genetically encoded series of very complex chemical structures that when embodied in a given environment and "executed" via energetic processes generate a phenotype. The phenotype is the product of a set of genes _embodied in_ an environment. Beyond protein structure genes do not contain any kind of "blueprint" for anything any more than e.g. a fractal equation actually contains its complete output. The blueprint analogy is even wishy washy in terms of direct protein structures due to things like RNA transformations, epigenetics, proteins influencing how other proteins form, etc.

<comment><USER14> I really like the idea of comparing procedural generation to genetics! I'll use that myself next time I need to explain things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No mention of twin studies? The article doesn't appear to distinguish between genes as unit of inheritance and heritability of traits which many studies seem to indicate is quite significant.

<comment><USER16> I think its common to focus on the similarity of identical twins. But I actually think the variance in identical twins is far more interesting because it suggests something very radical about the role of development in the non biological sphere.

I can give you one example that gave me pause and you should know.

At the EAC cafe there were twin kitchen staff. However one was lean and the other was more tubby. Unless there was a transcription issue in the gene for metabolism I think there were identical genes at play. Thus the resulting variance is non biological developmental.

There are tons of other anecdotal observations I have made in my experience with identical twins. I think any variance (assuming perfect cloning) suggests something that is non biologically determined.

<comment><USER17> > Unless there was a transcription issue in the gene for metabolism I think > there were identical genes at play. Thus the resulting variance is non > biological developmental.

This conclusion is incorrect. The variance was perhaps not due to genetics, but it would be really strange if it wasn't _biological_.

<comment><USER18> Well obviously it's partly non biological. For example, I weighed 52 pounds more several years ago compared to Monday morning. The reason for this disparity is social and psychological.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I agree with most of the comments made so far, that this article is terribly written and generally uninformative. Nevertheless, I believe that the author in primarily trying to convey that "genes" themselves are far less important that science used to think they were. Although this isn't huge news to geneticists, it may be to some.

However, if this is the intended message of this article, much of his writing is, at best, slightly off topic. Even though the protein coding regions of the genome are far less important than we first believed, that does not mean that genetic heritability is necessarily unimportant. I would have loved to see a discussion about the heritability caused by non-protein regions of the genome. Maybe another time...

<comment><USER17> > Even though the protein coding regions of the genome are far less important > than we first believed, that does not mean that genetic heritability is > necessarily unimportant.

In fact, it _cannot_ be unimportant since evidence showing genetic heritability (in the sense of explaining a part of phenotype variance between ancestor and descendant) is not invalidated by the fact that it does not explain the variance completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I did _in vivo_ brain surgery using animal models. The rats were all from specific strains geared towards being almost genetically identical as possible. I can say, each one of these rats developed in a completely unique way from behaviour through to anatomy despite being kept in a highly controlled environment (same food, light, water, routine, conditions etc). Even the location of their brain anatomy differed highly. So even in almost genetically identical models, there is a high degree of individual variability.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Governments followed a famous 1938 United Kingdom education commission in decreeing that, "The facts of genetic inequality are something that we cannot escape," and that, "different children ... require types of education varying in certain important respects."

It's unfortunate that some people will leap into new and unsettled scientific 'discoveries' as if they were gospel. It's as though cultural responses to the old 'supreme authority' were simply transferred onto a new one.

Sadly, in this case, the historical outcome is a prime example of that danger. The tentative - and upgradable - nature of science must be communicated in the teaching of it, including the news and the reference works.

Now and then it's only human to admit 'I don't know'. (As Jacob Bronowski took pains to demonstrate in 'The Ascent of Man'.)

</comment><comment><USER22> I thought this was already a fairly established fact vis a vis epigenetics and the mechanisms behind which genes actually get expressed.

</comment><comment><USER23> biorxiv is not a journal

<comment><USER24> This is actually a good point. I love arXiv and what it's done for article access, and I hope biorXiv takes off.

But "in the online journal _Biorxiv_ " is still a sort of ridiculous attempt to drum up credibility. Heck, I'd be more inclined to overlook it, but the mis-capitalized title and nonstandard italics both serve to make it look more like a traditional journal than it really is. (And, of course, it's being cited to prop up a _really_ sloppy article.)</comment></comment>


I wrote a compression algorithm, hire me? - <AUTHOR>

https://github.com/YoavGivati/Givati-Compression
A smart and lossless data compression algorithm with a focus on repeating data structures like JSON/JSONH, network and language permeability, decompression without requiring a pre-agreed dictionary, and minimum size over speed. Compression and speed comparable to Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) implemented in Javascript, PHP/Python coming soon.
I'm a software engineer/entrepreneur with design sense. I have 8 years of programming experience and 5+ years of experience building cool interfaces / apps, and consulting for some well known people. Fast learner (I taught myself about data compression, conceived of and wrote this in 3 days). I've been a technical co-founder at a stock related startup and have managed a small team of developers.
html5, node.js, mongo, mysql, php, flex, python, jsp/jstl
I'm building [inkapp.co] as a part of [chalkhq.com] but need funding, or a steady income for a few years at a loving company that wants me on their team.
Anyone hiring in the Toronto-ish, Ontario-ish, Canada-ish area? willing to relocate anywhere for the right gig, 3 and 10 page CV available on request.
Dear hacker news, please help me get hired before the end of January. <comment><USER2> I respect the initiative you're showing, but I'm a little skeptical of your choice of presenting your own eponymous compression algorithm as part of a portfolio, especially without any theoretical guarantees or rigorous experimental data on its performance. It gives the impression that you're either not aware of the rich history of data compression algorithms, and the heavy burden of proof on any new algorithm, or you like re-inventing the wheel. Please take this as constructive feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate it.

The first one is correct, I never thought about data compression at all until 3 days ago where I had a lot of JSON to store. The best Javascript compression implementation I could find by Googleing around was lzw, which due to the way it steps through the data and builds the dictionary is inherently inefficient, never mind that it compresses to an array which can only be stored as far as I know as text delineated by commas which tends to increase size. So I wrote one that analyzes and prioritizes the dictionary before applying compression, and doesn't need a dictionary to be predefined like lzw does, which is necessary for one of my use cases.

I wasn't going for "I'm a compression expert", I was just going for "Look at my latest weekend project" and "here's a code sample."

The decision to name it after me was a hard one, but I figured namespacing my projects would prevent me from using up all the good ones.

I should also emphasize that I have no idea if this particular algorithm already exists somewhere, I've only looked at a few compression schemes. Didn't mean to invent, just wanted to solve my particular JSON problem with client-side compression and get data smaller than I could achieve with existing libraries.

<comment><USER2> As I said, I appreciate the initiative. At the very least, consider posting benchmarks comparing your scheme to the output of gzip.

<comment><USER3> Agreed.

Also, be aware that many non-expert attempts to develop compression algorithms turn out to be flawed. However, it sounds like you've developed a compression pre-processor specifically targeting JSON-like structures, which seems like a much more plausible accomplishment than a non-expert developing a brand new general-purpose compression algorithm that can beat LZW.

All that said, if I were considering hiring you I would be much more interested in your ability to rigorously analyze the strengths and limitations of your algorithm (rather than the algorithm itself). Plus, without that rigorous analysis it makes it much more difficult for me to judge the quality of your algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> contact me at email@example.com. We're hiring in downtown Toronto.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks great, I'd love to see an eventual port to PHP. Incidentally, I know this was just a project for the weekend, but why don't you just rely on gzip'ed encoding/deflate?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote an html5/canvas chalkboard the weekend before that lets you replay your drawings and get a link to send them to other people. I don't want to link it here because it'll crash my server if a (hacker news) of people start saving drawings.. anyway it stores the path data as JSON on the server as a text blob to optimize database queries... otherwise it would have to fetch thousands of rows just to get a single drawing. I wanted to reduce storage, but also bandwidth; specifically for uploads which can take a while(a short drawing produced around 1MB of JSON), I also thought it would be cool to add the drawing data directly in the url or send it to someone in an email —hence using a modifiable alphabet for the hashes, or allow unrestricted drawing and save it to html5 localstorage.

I figured I might as well put the ideas I had into code and on github so others could help refine it, and if it turned out not to work that well was planning on attempting to implement gzip in javascript.

Incidentally in my unreliable data specific benchmarks using my algorithm + gzip resulted in smaller files than just gzip, but I'm not going to make that claim without more benchmarks. Hard to say if you can exploit http gzip compression and store the gzipped data on the server, whether the extra time using my algorithm as a pre-compressor would be worth any byte reduction achieved for that use case.

Also the current implementation is focused on compressing ascii characters into fewer ascii characters, it should be possible to implement a version that compresses bits into smaller bits and achieves better compression for use cases where you can compress to binary and ascii isn't a requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You may want to put your contact info in your profile. The email field is only visible to admins.

<comment><AUTHOR> done, thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're hiring in Montreal. Would love to chat: firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Ask HN: Apple Rejected Our App Because It Was Too "Simple". Options? - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
We built a somewhat "complex" feature which included simple mobile apps as a pretty important component. The feature, in some detail, is at https://trovebox.com/feature/collect
Trovebox is a multi-user photo services for businesses. We made a new feature named Collect that makes it easy for a business to let others send them photos (imagine attendees at a company party or event) without having to sign up, sign in or install any software. Part of that feature are mobile apps for Android and iOS if the user would rather send photos via an app than through a mobile browser.
The entire feature hinges on simplicity.
This is the reason per the app store terms.

  2.12: Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as
  apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected
 This is the reply from the App Store.

  Thank you for your prompt response and providing detailed information
  about your app. However, upon our review, we noticed that your app only
  allows users to submit photos. We found that your app does not include
  enough functionality to be appropriate for the App Store. For additional
  app design information, watch:

  iOS Development Videos
  Ingredients of Great Apps
  iPhone and iPad User Interface Design

  We look forward to reviewing your revised application.
 We don't care or want to add any features to this app. So where does that leave us? <comment><USER2> I have also had a simple app rejected, then approved once some complexity was added. It was a totally silly app that was pretty much an exercise in what exactly they would accept as the simplest app. ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iuplift/id469338399](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iuplift/id469338399))

Initially, the app was just showing canned upifting phrases. This was rejected. Second submission allowed the user to add their own phrases, using some native controls to show/edit this list of phrases. This was accepted.

What I would suggest is perhaps adding something like a way to manage different collect links in the app. Keep track of which photos you have sent to a collect. They seem to also love you to do things that are not easy to do in a web app. Maybe if you added camera access from within the app (useless I know, but still), maybe image cropping etc before upload? Is there metadata attached to their submissions to the collect link? Perhaps allowing them to edit this metadata in a table view.

I think you need to come up with reasons why you can't just make it a web app and want it to be an app (why do you want that anyway?) and be sure to implement those things.

My reasons for wanting my apps to be apps and not web sites is because phone apps are cool and people want an app not a website - it seems weird to me that apple do not think the same way. I understand they don't want any more fart apps, but most phone apps could be reasonably done as web apps now anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What I would suggest is perhaps adding something like a way to manage > different collect links in the app.

Good idea.

> Keep track of which photos you have sent to a collect.

We are already doing this in the app. But maybe doing it for the multiple "collect"s that we're tracking might help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Submit a more complex application with features you can disable server side after review. While Apple doesn't approve of easter eggs they can't see during review, I've never heard of them noticing (let alone complaining about) features disabled after review.

You should also carefully consider why you don't support email and MMS. You should allow your customers to to say "Text Pictures to 12345 or email them to email@example.com"

Downloading an app is unlikely to be easier than using the native sharing features for most users, so keep that in mind if you really care about simplicity and ease of use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That's a good idea.

We'll definitely consider email/sms. But the app isn't required at all. What this feature enables is one link that works across devices without requiring any software installation. The app is optional.

Here's an example, [https://trvbx.co/8f890593c5](https://trvbx.co/8f890593c5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the app slick and native feeling? Are there useful features the app can have like knowing what photos are newer than last run/upload or excluding those already uploaded from what is offered?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's slick and native feeling. We spent a bit of time on the UI.

One useful feature it has is that it keeps track of the photos you've already sent. But again, it's a small part of a much larger feature which is actually pretty awesome.

We could add something else but the problem is that it _is_ a simple app and adding something doesn't guarantee that it'll be enough to get approved.

<comment><USER4> Tweak it, doesn't have to be a major change and resubmit with information about what it does that a native app can't in the review notes (tracking sent images).

If that doesn't work maybe add basic image editing options (cropping etc.) or think about whether there are useful offline features you could add.

Note that I don't have much experience with rejections but that is what I would do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I also wonder if we can basically resubmit it and hope we get a different reviewer. Based on 2.12 it just doesn't violate any of the points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why don't you want to add any additional features? Specially if there are any that can make the experience easier for users.

For example: You say users can easily send photos, but the premise is wrong, in the sense that it takes the same number of steps for a user to:

1\. Click a picture

2\. Open the picture

3\. Select to send it via email/mms/whatsapp/etc. or share it on facebook/dropbox/etc.

4\. Of course the next step would be select a contact, add an @user and add a message if they choose.

5\. Hit send/share/etc. to confirm

I am guessing they would need to choose a business or contact in your application too, so it does not really add anything "new" and is no more convenient or simpler than other options.

On the other hand; If you added features to:

1\. Take a picture from within the app

2\. Allow users to directly load pictures from the phone

3\. Tagged pictures with the exact GPS coordinates (with the users permission)

4\. Allowed users to sort, tag and share (using a privacy first approach)

You could request businesses to pay a small fees to get access to semi- publicly shared photos on your application that share the geo- location/coordinates with their event location and time. This could also be done in real-time.

You could also automate sharing/backups to other services that you can integrate using tags and other user preferences.

Only then will you have a complex enough product, that actually simplifies the users activity.

edit: formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a few points in your post that don't address the needs of (our) business users.

If you run an event with hundreds or thousands of attendees you don't want them all emailing or SMSing photos to you.

Or if you run a travel agency and want to provide a way for people to share photos after their group vacation your suggestion won't work there either.

There's a lot of use cases that we've been discussing with customers.

      Only then will you have a complex enough product, that
      actually simplifies the users activity.

Can't say I agree with that statement :).

<comment><USER6> You are doing the right thing. Your app exists to Collect photos for a business, that's what it should do.

Some apps have screen shots that aren't screenshots but more like presentations explaining screenshots. You could try that to make clear the great things going on at the other end of your Collect app?

Your real audience will be the Business's users, but in this round, your audience is the Apple reviewer. It needs to look, to them, like it's doing something cool.

Or, since your install vector is a link:

* Use an HTML5 app!

That was the original intent for the platform, and iPhones and iPads support that.

Have a look at [http://forecast.io](http://forecast.io) or [http://forecast.io/lines](http://forecast.io/lines) for examples of apps that install as HTML5 apps w/o using app store, and do cool things.

In your case, you can upload photos and EXIF data, and you can get to an install faster.

There are so many async js file uploaders to S3 at this point, you're golden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Port the mobile app to Android, make a killing there.

If you really insist on iOS, add a big Easter Egg.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, not sure what that means :).

We have an Android app and yes we need an iOS one too.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link to the feature in more detail, [https://trovebox.com/feature/collect](https://trovebox.com/feature/collect)

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe you can add a invite and rsvp feature. That lets the business send out an invite to all attendees asking them to download the app and submit photos.</comment>


Ask HN: How to change security culture? - throw-uudbdbck My software developer colleagues have what I consider to be "dangerously wrong" attitudes about software security. I'm at a loss for how to persuade them to improve. I've tried to provide clear, friendly, not-pointing-fingers feedback, but I'm moetly met with smiles and nods and then the code moves into production with the security flaws intact. I see no signs that management cares.
Is there a technique that you've used successfully to change developer (or management) attitudes?
We're in the U.S. Primary and Secondary education markets, so there are rules and regulations, and we do store Personally Identifyable Information (PII) for young children, mostly in the form of performance measures. <comment><AUTHOR> The most common reasons for resistance are: you have insider knowledge that makes it easier to find/exploit bugs and that we're not a big enough target for people to explicitly hack us.

And they're not necessarily wrong either.

Despite the paranoia about children's information, it's not actually worth very much, so why bother to steal it?

If you do anything that has grades, you may find that students are motivated to hack you, but otherwise there are probably not a whole lot of people who will target you.

If the issues are so brazen that automated tools like sqlmap will hack you, then that's probably a good thing to show.

Even if you manage to convince people that security is truly lacking, security needs to be painless rather than something everyone buys into and is constantly vigilant about, so try to advocate for solutions that can handle security for you automatically, eg libraries, etc.

But for most orgs, you're really not likely to get hacked through your webapp (unless it is truly atrocious), but rather someone in your org accidentally installing ransomware and encrypting your shared files.

</comment><comment><USER2> Provide a POC of an exploitation of the security flaw, nothing will change someones mind faster than letting them experience something themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi, there are two different target audiences you point to: your SW dev colleagues, and the management. These are two very different groups of people, with different roles, tasks and perspectives. Adjusting your communication to their needs is a key to your success. Here are a few suggestions on how to influence your colleagues to be better aligned with the security needs you see: SW Devs: \- introduce hacking days, with CTF's and similar competitions. The purpose is to show how easy it is to hack the code. As competence and interest grows, focus the scope on particular areas you would like to secure/have identified as higher risk. \- invite a "real" hacker to share her experiences with you and showcasing some of the possibilities \- do a pentest to demonstrate the level of security. If no budget, do it yourself. \- access the system access logs, and show who is accessing the system. Also show who is trying to gain access. \- If using a WAF, show logs of the SQL injection attempts and and other nasties going on. \- get a pineapple or use Metasploit and similar tools to show how easy it is to infiltrate, sniff and collect data. Lots of people do not get this... \- Find one colleague who see the point (i.e. find someone to support you and help you convince the others). In social psychology, one is nothing, two is a crowd! \- If you have budgets, bring a colleague or two to events like Defcon/Black Hat, BSides events or local hacker / security workshops/meetups. Use this to build interest. \- Apply SDL (Software Development Lifecycle) and SCF (Security Culture Framework).

For management: \- identify and document the risk (as they see it, not from a technical perspective) - i.e. what business risks exists, how will / can / may they impact the business. \- make a case for improved security / secure coding: business value of providing secure products (reducing risk for customers, improved compliance etc etc) \- start simple, with one area/topic \- invite the managers to join the hacker talk (above), or better, have the hacker person do a 10-15 minute sitdown with management.

These are just a few suggestions known to work at other companies worldwide. Most can be done with no/low budget, and then they can be scaled up over time as budgets allow for it.

The arguments that hackers don't find you a relevant/interesting target as comments suggests, is BS. There are so many different hackers out there, and their focus and areas of interest differs by the hour. Do a serious risk and threat assessment, then make your decisions based on that. Keep it up to date, as the landscape changes often.

Check out the free Security Culture Framework: [https://securitycultureframework.net](https://securitycultureframework.net) which is quickly becoming a de-facto standard for building and maintaining security culture.

If you are interested in more on this topic, consider downloading the Security Culture Report 2017: [https://get.clt.re/report](https://get.clt.re/report) \- it provides some interesting findings on what influences security culture, how age and gender impacts, and proposes a standard method to measuring culture.

<comment> throw-uudbdbck Wow! A lot of helpful info here. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Firefox 12 Running in a Win2K VM in WebAssembly in Firefox 63 on MacOS 10.6.3 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/justindarc/status/1033115285950275586 <comment><USER2> The title has a mistake. The actual version is "macOS 10.13.6 High Sierra". I'd be very impressed if a modern browser ran on an operating system from 2009–2011.</comment>


CSS: Taking control of the cascade - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3003-css-taking-control-of-the-cascade <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how much I agree with this approach. When you do what this article is describing, you are creating a very tight coupling of your css structure to your dom hierarchy. This can create a lot of issues when you are trying to refactor your code or getting new people on-boarded to the project.

These rules can get very confusing when someone tries to edit your HTML by adding classes to a new element they created, only to figure out that those classes don't add any styles in that particular context. Good stylesheets should have classes that have consistent behavior no matter where they are on the page.

That said, I think SCSS (and sass/less) is pretty nifty. The real heavy lifting they do, for me at least, comes from mixins and being able to programmatically create classes.

For an example, look at how the rainbow effect is created on this page: <http://html5readiness.com> (it's with a for loop in sass, technique is outlined in <http://nimbupani.com/notes-from-html5-readiness-hacking.html>)

<comment><USER3> _> I'm not sure how much I agree with this approach. When you do what this article is describing, you are creating a very tight coupling of your css structure to your dom hierarchy. This can create a lot of issues when you are trying to refactor your code or getting new people on-boarded to the project._

We've found it to be just the opposite. Because nested selectors don't repeat the names of parent elements it's a piece of cake to grab a block and move it up or down in the tree or just plain move it somewhere else. We find that we refactor more because it's so much easier to hold the style model in your head and so clear where to move a block of styles in order to increase or decrease their scope. That just makes for better CSS.

<comment><USER2> I tend to chain selectors as little as possible in plain CSS, so I generally don't run into having to read huge chains of sub-selectors.

I will agree that heavily-cascaded stylesheets are practically impossible to read. Writing styles in a way that reduces your need to create long inheritance chains feels like a more flexible option (not so tightly dom- coupled) that doesn't require a "style model", though.

How do you handle adding the same styles to page elements that aren't siblings/exist in vastly different areas of the dom structure?

Mixins could probably do it, but writing too many of those would open up new problems.

<comment><USER3> _> How do you handle adding the same styles to page elements that aren't siblings/exist in vastly different areas of the dom structure?_

That's usually a case for refactoring. Either by pulling styles common to both elements out and up the tree so they apply more widely or creating a class that can modify both. In the latter case we'll usually use a technique like the last example in the article (more of an OOCSS approach) that works independent of the dom structure.

<comment><USER2> Makes sense. Do you ever run into specificity collisions when you pull styles out of the main style tree?

I could see whatever you pulled out being clobbered by the huge amount of specificity you have built up by mirroring the dom. Heavy use of the child selector would probably prevent that from happening as much, though.

<comment><USER3> It's difficult to explain without lengthy examples but we aren't seeing a lot of collisions (really none) because we're very careful to only nest when necessary and only as deeply as necessary. We aren't taking a stand here and completely obliterating cascading, we're just being mindful about when things really should flow to child element instead of just letting it happen all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've worked on a project which used a technique like this, but was not even as closely mirroring the DOM, and the end result was terrible. We ended up with specificity horrors which will best not be seen. Nobody wants to touch those stylesheets anymore.

<comment><USER5> Some details would be nice.

<comment><USER4> Well, multiple editors were at work. The approach described creates selectors that were generally more specific than they needed to be. Eventually, people needed something to be styled differently in a context that was already heavily specified. So they needed to have even more specific selectors to override an existing selector. As soon as someone stuck some ID in front of that whole selector (which is almost too easy using SASS/SCSS) it was basically game over.

I think OOCSS is an approach to help here, but once you have such a mess it is pretty hard to refactor.

<comment><USER6> God, when this OOCSS thing will be forgoten. It just moves mess to another place and instead of mess in CSS you get mess in CSS and HTML.

<comment><USER4> I guess you can create a mess either way. For me OOCSS was easy to scale out onto lots of elements and it was certainly easier to keep track of what is affecting what once you change something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like a really interesting step toward HTML/CSS 'libraries' where you have reusable styles on reusable small chunks of DOM.

The to-do list example they use is a good one. You'll occasionally see jQuery used like this, to instantiate blobs of page in known configurations.

I don't know enough about, say, SproutCore or JS GUI libraries like it to know if any of them use this approach, but it seems like an obvious thing for them to do.

Or I may be overrating the approach. Still, sounds useful.

</comment><comment><USER8> I do a lot of near-pixel-for-pixel reproduction from Photoshop documents, and I find that using rule nesting, mixins and child selectors (a similar style to the final example from the article, the first example is atrocious) definitely helps me build more semantic HTML.

Here is a quick cut-and-paste from a LESS stylesheet:

<https://gist.github.com/1212027>

There are a lot of random items and I find it easier not to cascade styles as much as some recommend. I try to consolidate styles into generic classes or mixins as I find opportunities to re-use them. I try not to use the child selector unnecessarily (the article uses it a totally unnecessary amount) because I often need to add unsemantic wrapper elements to achieve the right effect.

<comment><USER3> The examples in the article are simplifications for the purpose of illustrating the points. We'd almost never use nesting to any element all the way back to the HTML or BODY laments. But when you have elements like SECTION, ARTICLE, LI, DIV, etc which can be nested infinitely in HTML judicious use of the child selector is a godsend.

The examples in your gist would not benefit from additional use of child selectors, but I'll bet they'd appreciate it if the parent elements did :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll be doing a talk in October covering this topic and front-end development in general at Magmarails.

I think this article is a step in a good direction whether or not you agree with it - main reason being that front-end development NEEDS more discussion. It's heavily undefined, and unrefined right now.

</comment><comment><USER10> The alluded to arms-race reminds me of Nicole Sullivan's presentation about CSS best practices: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2439420>

A video of the presentation is the first response to the top comment.</comment>


Falcon 9 No Damage Found. Ready to Fire Again - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/682717803166695425 <comment><USER2> That's such a huge step for SpaceX! Congratulations to all from the team. And gorgeous photo of the Falcon 9.</comment>


What happened to the iPad? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/10/28/what-happened-to-the-ipad/

<comment><USER2> I'd be interested to see these numbers compared to other mobile devices to see how the other manufacturers are doing.</comment>


The One Character Block Comment - <AUTHOR> http://www.vancelucas.com/blog/the-one-character-block-comment/

<comment><USER2> Please please don't do this. It hurts readability, and relies on a subtle grammar ambiguity. Without a highlighting editor (e.g. reading a diff in a code review) I'll be scratching my head trying to read this. And tools like editors that have an imperfect parser are likely to get confused.

There's a chance you'll confuse yourself (or your code reviewer or other reader) and spend an hour debugging to find what you thought was commented out wasn't. That's not worth it to save one keystroke.

<comment><USER3> I think the purpose the author shared this technique for is when you need to constantly comment/uncomment a block of code for testing.

I agree with you, though. Once you're done with your experiment, reset the commented lines to something more conventional.

<comment><USER4> Even then, any editor worth its salt supports comment toggling with a single keystroke anyways. Good editors (vim, cough) can even toggle lines or paragraphs regardless of cursor position.

So I agree, this hack is more trouble than its worth.

<comment><USER5> the FF webdeveloper extension is the one I find easiest for live CSS editing - though I'm using firebug more and more - it doesn't have comment toggling (it's just a text field). Such tricks are handy.

Unless you're trying to work them around CSS comment hacks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone who discovered, went bananas for and then eventually stopped using this trick on their own, raise your hand.

:)

</comment><comment><USER7> In C I don't use block comments, I just use:

        #if 0
          ...
        #endif

One character, no comment syntax hacks.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is also an old trick to test whether your code was compiled as a C++ or not:

      2//**/2
        == 1) ? "C" : "C++"

<comment><USER9> Is there a situation where you would need this instead of "#ifdef __cplusplus"?

e.g. [http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/mixing-c-and- cpp.html#...](http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/mixing-c-and- cpp.html#faq-32.4)

<comment><USER8> No. It's just for hack value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Emacs users: try the comment-dwim command, usually bound to M-;. This will toggle the commented-ness of the selected code and be relatively smart about it. "dwim" stands for "do what I mean". :)

<comment><USER11> Yes! And for the times when you are in a mode that comment-dwim doesn't know the comment syntax for, you can use the string-rectangle (C-x r t) command to comment regions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a nice trick, but I will probably stick to Ctrl-K-C (block comment) and Ctrl-K-U (block uncomment) in Visual Studio, just out of habit. I hate leaving big block comments in the middle of a module anyways: hurts readability.

<comment><USER13> It's probably telling that his code sample is PHP. Though I seem to remember Eclipse having support for CTRL+/ style block commenting/uncommenting. Most other good IDEs (and emacs, as noted below) do it too.

But yeah, I sometimes take for granted how nice VS.NET is at these little detail things (though I use resharper-style CTRL+/ bindings for this particular feature). Thanks to this author and his pain for reminding me how good we have it.

<comment><USER14> _It's probably telling that his code sample is PHP_

Excuse me, but last time I checked PHP was one of the most widely deployed languages in the world, which a lot of people smarter than you and I spend their working time hacking. Can we please stop the PHP bashing.

<comment><USER15> (Disclaimer: I work in PHP)

PHP is popular. But the language sucks. Big-time. Popularity does not mean something is automatically good, in a technical sense.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely agree, and judging by the score of my parent comment maybe I didn't make myself clear.

I don't mean to say that PHP is a perfect language by any means, far from it. My point was more that just because some code example is written in PHP you can't automatically infer that the code is inferior. I personally think that's terribly arrogant, but that may just be me.

<comment><USER4> _My point was more that just because some code example is written in PHP you can't automatically infer that the code is inferior._

Perhaps I'm terribly arrogant but I do make that inference. Simply because the number of _good_ coders who would pick PHP when given a choice is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very small. And shrinking.

<comment><USER14> Most coders don't have the choice.

I'm sure that if it was up to the programmers many big sites would be hacked out in Haskell, but as it is an awful lot of them happen to be done in PHP. And Coders have jobs and bosses.

<comment><USER4> On their personal blog?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Or, you could use an editor more advanced than notepad.exe and use a "toggle comment" command which which allows you to switch between

      //line 1
      //line 2
      //...
      //line N

...and...

      line 1
      line 2
      ...
      line N

...with more flexibility than using a syntax trick.

</comment><comment><USER17> I find it really helpful to have a duplicate-and-comment-block command, so you can immediately start hacking on an uncommented dup. Used with another command to dump blocks to a junk file, it's like a wee block-level SCM.

<comment><USER18> This is a pattern I tend to use as well because it lets you reference known working code when changing things, and easily switch between development and stable code. However, usually it's just one line, so "copy, paste, comment, move" works well enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The real solution is to make your code work properly every time.

Or, in Plan 9's acme editor, we just highlight the desired text and execute the following command in the tag area: Edit s/^/\/\//g

Then when we're ready to go back, we just select again and do: Edit s/^\/\///g which is the same as the previous command but with one forward slash moved.

Alternately, in almost every case it's easy enough to just stick in /* */ comments around it and delete them as necessary.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I must say I didn't expect so much hate for this comment hack. Hack? That's right, it absolutely is a hack - and it's definitely not the most elegant solution.

I think a lot of people really missed the point here, and used comments as a way to flaunt their clearly more impressive and infinitely superior geek prowess by using IDEs and emacs.

The point was to present a solution that was fairly platform and language agnostic. If I had included an IDE shortcut in the article, I would have had to go through a long list of all the IDEs out there and all their corresponding shortcuts. I would have then been inevitably flamed for missing some or for not representing a specific programming language.

Oh, and don't forget to bash PHP or point out how much I suck at programming for using PHP. Because everyone knows only cool developers and true geeks don't use PHP.

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems to be a lot of hate on this trick here. One difference between this trick and "I just press <shortcut key> in my IDE" is that this will comment out one block of code, but will also _uncomment a second block at the same time_.

</comment><comment><USER21> He keeps saying "backslash" when it's a forward-slash (or just "slash").

<comment><USER5> Suppose it depends on whether your normal language is rtl or ltr?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > this trick will work with any language that supports both single-line and > block style comments

isn't this just a horrible workaround for not having a debugger?

</comment><comment><USER23> uuh surely most editors can do this for you? m-x comment-region in emacs for instance

<comment><USER24> I think the point of this is it's application agnostic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's usually command / in TextMate.</comment>


Why the First Bootcamp to Teach Swift is Not a Bootcamp - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bloc.io/2014/06/first-bootcamp-add-swift-bootcamp/

<comment><USER2> The New York Code + Design Academy is actually the first school to launch an in person evening program on Swift, being taught by the good folks at Bitbase:

nycda.com/classes#IOS

The course launches on July 7th =)</comment>


Why U.S. Cities Aren't Using More Electric Buses - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/06/electric-bus-china-grid-ev-charging-infrastructure-battery/591655/ <comment><USER2> Disclosure: im an engine mechanic for a small chain of diesel truck repair shops in the midwest. ive also done fleet maintenance for a city bus fleet.

The reasons electric buses arent seen more often are many, and they arent political at all.

\- Tooling. Fleets generally maintain all the tooling necessary for specific make model and design of a vehicle. if that fleet gets large enough, they get a seat at the manufacturers table to help steer development and ensure a sustainable product that doesnt increase rider cost or decrease economy/comfort. Battery fleets would mean having to outfit shops with new training for high voltage, arc/flash suits, hot-sticks and other tools. Youre likely going to need to hire a few electricians to train and oversee people as well.

\- lifecycle maintenance. As a fleet mechanic I know down to the day, minute, and hour when my motors are clapped out and when everything needs to be replaced. Diesel engines can run for several million miles if well maintained, but the lifecycle on a fleet electric vehicle is quite a bit more limited. A Cushman or Toyota fork lift for example is often entirely electric and sees a similar duty cycle (high tork, long service, low speed.) Replacement batteries are provided from a third party every year or two. Fleet operators in most US cities havent the slightest idea what the real-world operations lifecycle is for an electric bus. Its likely going to be pretty poor if youre operating these busses in places like Wisconsin winters or Arizona summers.

\- Again, Tooling. If you told me I was in charge of a fleet of electric buses id probably quit. Youre talking about 50-60 busses for a small city, so youll need a set of substations dedicated for high speed charging. youll need your own PPD (Physical Plant maintenance) to handle generators during power outages, cooling during summer, and general repair. Your existing diesel fleet just requires a fuel dump and an apprentice mechanic. Youre also going to need to understand how to dispose of something that can, if punctured, explode into flames. Most oil recyclers in fleet operations pay _you_ for the oil you give them and grant a discount on the new stuff. Ive never seen a fleet battery contractor for forklifts that has ever done more than pickup, drop off, and fees.

<comment><USER3> Everything here could have been similarly said about the change from horse- drawn buses to internal combustion. Wah - you can't just have a stable-boy feed them hay! Wah - you can't just clean up after them with a broom! Wah - you'll need to train people used to dealing with horses to deal with engines.

I don't think moaning about having to get new tools or training is particularly helpful in the grand scheme of things. If you are going to spend money on new buses, spending money on new tools is a given.

Buses seem like such a no-brainer for electrification, I'd hate to think that we're carrying on with diesel polluting our air and killing us just because the mechanics are losing their shit over having to do something new. Please wake up.

<comment><USER4> Your reply is a bit snarky but I do tend to agree - and in fact if I was the GP I'd see it as an opportunity. Skill up on electric fleet maintenance, maybe do a certification, speak at a conference or two and suddenly you're an expert for ICE-to-electric fleet conversions, of which are are going to be thousands in the coming years. Play it right and you could parlay rapidly ageing skills in the old ways into a lucrative, high-demand role heralding in the new. Sounds pretty good to me?

In any technological sea change there are winners and losers. Winners sense the wind changing, adjust their sails, and charge bravely ahead. Losers linger adrift in denial, refusing to adapt until the maelstrom inevitably takes them. Hint: be a winner.

<comment><USER5> Lucrative government contracts? You are going to need a team of lobbyists and crony sales guys and millions of dollars to handle the overhead of businesses that deal in government. Actual knowledge of the subject matter will be way down the list of requirements to earn lucrative government contracts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The real reason to look at battery-electric buses is pure dollars and sense. Battery-electric buses can have lower lifecycle O&M costs. The current generation might not have lower O&M costs, but there is definitely a path to lower O&M costs with electric versus bus with internal combustion engines.

<comment><USER7> The main issue right now is range anxiety.

In today's world, a diesel bus is able to run for an entire day, doing route(s) back and forth without going back to the depot for refueling and charging. This can be true for an electric bus, but in general the range is not longer, and depends on stuff like

\- elevation changes in the route

\- climate; not only do batteries perform worse in cold weather, but heating and cooling makes up a significant amount of energy draw. In an ICE bus usually the ICE itself generates waste heat.

[https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/electric- bus-...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/electric-bus-battery- recharge-new-flyer-byd-proterra-beb/577954/)

> Similarly, the Minnesota source claimed that over the three-week trial, > electricity consumption was 70 percent heating and only 30 percent motion.

> Wright said (as of early fall) that Moscow's trial routes for > BEBs—trolleybus Routes 73, 76, 80, and 83—have had to use more buses just to > run the same service, pointing to before and after slides. The four routes > appear to have gone from 46 trolleybuses to 82 BEBs without any increase in > service frequency, presumably because BEBs have considerable down time for > midday charging.

That incurs a lot of additional costs:

\- buses not in service while driving to and from charging points are personnel and vehicle hours that cost money, especially if after charging you need to be able to place the driver in a bus actually going into service

\- you are maintaining and storing a much larger fleet of buses now

Until an electric bus can be made that can run _a full day_ without charging, costs will rise for electric bus adopters.

<comment><USER8> You can charge the busses at the endstation with a inverted "train roof thing" for 5 min/45 min drive.

Heating should not really be a problem. You should use some open flame heater with e.g. gas, wood spill etc for that not high quality electricity or gasoline.

(Sorry swedish but look at the picture of the setup) [https://www.bussmagasinet.se/2018/03/premiardags-i- ostersund...](https://www.bussmagasinet.se/2018/03/premiardags-i-ostersund- for-scanias-elbussar/)

<comment><USER9> I am extremely skeptical about your open flame idea, especially from a security standpoint and temperature control/maintenance.

Also, if as another poster says 70% of the energy goes to heating then why replace this with a very dirty energy source? Kinda defeats the purpose.

<comment><USER8> Ye, maybe I should have written enclosed open flame. I meant some sort of protected open flame heating a tube of water. Is burner the correct term?

Having a auxiliary diesel burner with water as medium is standard practice in the area. The buses have so large windows that the heating power is quite ridiculous. Maybe EV-buses need smaller windows? I tried to figure out how the buses and the article are heated and another article states electricity and oil burner when it's quite cold. ([https://www.jamtkraft.se/om- jamtkraft/nyhetsrum/stadsbussar-...](https://www.jamtkraft.se/om- jamtkraft/nyhetsrum/stadsbussar-laddade-med-fornybar-el/))

I don't think it's reasonable to heat them only with electricity in that climate. Maybe a wood pellet burner could be used if one is made for automotive use? I wonder if the pellets would bounce around too much ... probably only good enough in rural areas where there would be no smog problems.

The specification demands on heating oil is lower, so you could make it from only tall oil (tree oil). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_oil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_oil)

<comment><USER7> Biomass or biofuel being renewable or good for the environment is debatable at best, especially when considering unintended consequences (like Brazilian rainforests getting slashed for biofuel crops).

<comment><USER8> Obvoiusly the best is to not use the energy in the first place, but what renewable ("regrowable") would be better than biomass if heat is what you want?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is interesting to me that we aren't seeing a larger uptick in utilities funding this kind of investment. The article does mention that in one of the pilots, it was indeed funded by the local utilities. My interest lies in why that isn't more wide spread. I can only imagine the massive amounts of revenue, if not also kick backs from various government subsidies, that a given utility would receive if EV buses see wide spread use.

That is not to say that there would not need to be investment in the utilities infrastructure, but it would pay out in spades over time. OTOH I can also see an argument to be made that the utilities may not want to see this happen everywhere, especially in highly populated areas and areas that see power supply issues in general.

<comment><USER11> Utilities are pretty highly regulated in the US, there might be political or legality reasons it would be hard for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given the challenges with charging them with limited real estate in city centers, would it make more sense to install overhead wires, like a trolley bus, but retaining the ability to drive disconnected from the wires and constantly charge when in an area with the wires?

<comment><USER13> Buses are pretty big and don't care too much about weight. Surely you can slap on a battery big enough to power the bus all day.

Since the bus is already parked _somewhere_ during the day, couldn't you charge it then? From what I've seen there's usually a gigantic parking lot somewhere in the city where all the buses go to sleep. Would the parking lot need to be much larger to accommodate charging stations? I assume it's already got a diesel pump of some sort to feed the buses since you don't exactly see city buses at normal gas stations.

<comment><USER14> It comes down to energy density.

That setup (charging where the buses go at the end of the day) requires the buses have enough battery to go their entire day on one charge. But then, that restricts the ability to take a just-now-ending-service bus that's out on the road, and redeploy it to fill in for a bus that is running late, or a bus that has broken down.

(I have seen this happen: I have seen a VTA "Rapid" 522 bus, just about to go in-service at the start of its route, switch to "Not in Service" and leave without picking anyone up. When I called in to report the weirdness, the agent on the other end checked and told me that an Express bus nearby had broken down. That was the right call: The Raid bus was closer, and the Rapid schedule frequent enough to absorb the loss.)

So ideally, you would want charging points to be available where buses sit during the day. That is at least at one end of the route. It can be done, it just takes more infrastructure.

> I assume it's already got a diesel pump of some sort to feed the buses since > you don't exactly see city buses at normal gas stations.

While I was an undergrad at Ohio State, I drove 35- and 40-foot buses for CABS (the campus bus service). We did indeed have a diesel tank and pump on-site. But occasionally it would break down. When that happened, we would indeed use a normal gas station! All of the nearby gas stations with diesel pumps were evaluated for bus access.

<comment> munk-a I wonder if you could get away with charging most of the buses by having overhead lines in heavy bus traffic areas to power and charge the buses during a portion of the route before having them return to full battery usage. This might also simplify overhead line deployment as there are some areas that are poorly suited for lines - line deployment could be focused on easy to service and deploy areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems like misguided faux environmentalism, like banning plastic straws but keeping the longtail of plastic waste. Electric buses are good, of course, but a well-designed and highly utilized bus network, even with the dirtiest diesel engines, is going to get you serious wins over GHG/CO2/VOC emissions from automobiles if you can replace those trips.

<comment><USER16> Certainly we don't want to make perfect the enemy of the good: given a fixed budget we're probably better off buying 2 diesel buses rather than a single electric bus.

But don't forget particulate emissions: I believe that's the primary motivation for electric bus conversion. Buses are a significant portion of particulates in many cities, and particulates kill people.

<comment><USER17> _given a fixed budget we 're probably better off buying 2 diesel buses rather than a single electric bus._

I think the situation is a little more complicated than that. Electricity is a much cheaper fuel than diesel, and maintenance costs are lower for electric vehicles too, so in the long term electric buses may end up saving more money than they cost.

Add to that the fact that interest rates are very low right now, and it may even turn out that financing the electric buses and charging systems could allow cities to save money from day one, though I haven't crunched any numbers so this is admittedly just speculation on my part.

<comment> semi-extrinsic > maintenance costs are lower for electric vehicles

I think there is a <citation needed> here. Do ICE drivetrains really constitute a large fraction of the maintenance costs on cars and buses? In my experience, suspension and steering, and auxiliaries, are the things that break.

<comment><USER18> My anecdotal evidence of ~90k miles on our EV says yes. A coolant flush, tires and windshield wiper fluid are the only things I've done in that time.

Compare that with Brakes, Oil changes, Transmission service, DPF + DEF and the host of other things you get with a diesel engine + transmission.

We've got a diesel truck, diesel tractor and EV, it's pretty easy to see the maintenance differences between the three of them over the years(the tractor being the highest with the added complexity of a hydraulic system).

<comment><USER19> I don't know anything about cars. Why did you need work done on your brakes on a diesel but not on an electric?

<comment><USER20> I doubt it's due to the EV's regenerative braking; if anything, that's a more complex system with more things that can go wrong.

The answer is probably easier: a Prius is 3300 lbs and a Dodge Ram is 6600 lbs and carries much, much more if working. Those truck brakes are going to be thrashed much harder.

<comment><USER21> The regenerative braking system is not complicated at all. In fact, it comes basically for free!

All that happens is you cut power to the motor but leave the wheels attached to the motor. This is the same as "engine braking" on a manual. The wheels turn the motor, which steals kinetic energy from the car and charges the battery.

There's no extra bits or anything. It's all in the drivetrain that's there already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are current US bus sizes right-sized? Perhaps we need smaller buses on more interesting routes. Really large buses with mega-batteries (possibly literally megawatt sized) seems impractical compared to natural gas. However, 10 passenger shuttles, and more of them, might be practical. If the operating costs can be lower with electric, then that should free up budget to hire more drivers to drive more routes to drive better utilization, etc.

<comment><USER23> More buses means more drivers, and salaries are probably the biggest expense here

<comment><USER24> Self driving buses on fixed routes with special infrastructure put in by the city to help out might be the lynch pin here.

<comment><USER25> Self-driving buses might be great, but there's no point in waiting for them to be invented when there are such large gains to be made today from better and more frequent bus service, and increased efficiency/reduced pollution (from both ICE and electric buses).

<comment><USER22> I completely agree. Instead of adding to the ever-expanding pavement, we could use that money smarter for free or greatly reduced public transit, and tons of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The correct question would be: why is the US so very very very bad at public transportation in general?

Electric busses are just a (tiny) extension of that question.

<comment><USER27> The cities are less dense, and the population boomed (and moved to the suburbs several miles away) in a time where the economy was good and car ownership was cheap.

<comment><USER28> And we're paying for it now, because they're too sparse for the tax base to support urban services and too dense to have self sufficient services like deeply rural areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> LA ran into many of these issues in it's electric bus pilot program, as reported in the LA times last year: [https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la- me-electric-buses-201...](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-electric- buses-20180520-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> Indianapolis is about to start a new electric bus service along a new line called Red Line:

[https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/transportation/201...](https://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/transportation/2019/05/23/indygo- electric-buses-red-line-wireless-charging/1212252001/)

They are facing problems though with the range etc. So be interesting to see the long term result of this project and I'm hoping for the best. This area desperately needs better public transportation.

</comment><comment><USER31> E-buses consume 6 times the power per mile as a e-sedan. So they are more efficient if the average passenger load is larger than that.

<comment><USER32> So, they are more efficient with 10 passengers[1].

[1][https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july...](https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july-30-2018-average- vehicle-occupancy-remains-unchanged-2009-2017)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Seems like hydraulic hybrid for buses would be a much bigger win. 80% capture of braking instead of 20%.

</comment><comment><USER34> why are electric vehicles so much more expensive to buy?</comment>


The "Faster Zombies" blog post - <AUTHOR> https://richg42.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-faster-zombies-blog-post.html <comment><USER2> _" Valve being deeply involved with Linux also gives the company a "worse case scenario" hedge vs. Microsoft. It's like a club held over MS's heads. They just need to keep spending the resources to keep their in-house Linux expertise in a healthy state."_

This is absolutely the point of Valve's Linux involvement, Steam Machine, and so on. It doesn't have to be perfect. It barely has to even work. It's a "fleet in being", ready for a fight with Microsoft that may never come.

Apple take 30% from all game transactions on Apple's iOS.

Google take 30% of all game transactions on Google's Android. (Amazon presumably take 30% from all Fire devices, but hardly anyone uses their store).

Valve take 30% of (many) game transactions on _Microsoft 's_ Windows. Somewhere at Microsoft there is a whiteboard with 'Valve' crossed out and 'Microsoft' written instead. They've a long way to go there without getting shot down by anti-monopoly authorities, but don't think they'll never try.

<comment><USER3> > Somewhere at Microsoft there is a whiteboard with 'Valve' crossed out and > 'Microsoft' written instead.

This is exactly the kind of visual that we need in order to coherently think about the past and future of software.

It's a great short-story writing prompt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a shame if the biggest impact of Steam on Linux has been to encourage Microsoft to improve DirectX performance. I wasn't aware of Valve layoffs particularly hitting the Linux team, but it doesn't surprise me. Valve's efforts towards Linux have been quite minimal in the last year or so. Perhaps they're working on something behind the scenes, but SteamOS/Machines were effectively dead on arrival, and even Steam VR/HTC Vive still doesn't support Linux.

The "faster zombies" blog post mentioned was very big news at the time for Linux gaming, but since then, not a single OpenGL game has replicated the performance of L4D2. It's an accepted fact that games will see an FPS hit on Linux - not the end of the world, but not something that's ever going to attract gamers to switch to Linux unless they have other reasons.

Vulkan may change things, Dota 2 and Talos Principle benchmarks have been promising, and showing signs of the Windows beating (or at least matching) performance they promised 5 years ago.

<comment><USER5> I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for Linux.

Overall, I'd guess the Gabe (having worked at Microsoft) is pretty comfortable with that platform, but likes having Linux their as a hedge (with potential to open up new markets too).

<comment><USER6> > I'd imagine it's because little effort is put into optimizing games for > Linux.

I wonder what's changed. Used to be people would reboot into Linux for better performance in Quake.

<comment><USER7> I don't recall that ever being a thing, and my quake addiction began playing on a cyrix based computer at large (for the time) lan parties.

We did a lot of things to eek out more performance but as far as I recall no one was booting to Linux to do anything except run dedicated servers.

<comment><USER6> It certainly worked for me. Linux ran SNES9x, Quake, and UltraHLE faster than Windows 95/98\. I even got better pings. I stopped doing this around the time Windows 2000 came out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember Valve articles from that period when the Windows 8 Store was being introduced, and Valve started pushing Linux. I remember reading a similar article from them on the subject, but that one mentioned DirectX 9 Source Engine on Windows performance versus OpenGL 3 on Linux, which is a shady comparison to say the least. Just mentioning it, since such details got curiously ommited in the referenced article.

</comment><comment><USER9> s/discrete/discreet/

</comment><comment><USER10> A mod should perhaps retitle this. It's an insider's look at Valve's Linux effort. The title is correct, but not great out of context.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. The title really doesn't make sense.</comment></comment>


Google Container-VM Image: A Container-Optimized OS Image Based on Chromium OS - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/vm-image/ <comment><USER2> This is the image that the instances in a Google Container Engine cluster run. Nice that its getting easier and easier to run a local cluster - for most things it doesn't matter but every so often I'd like to test things in a kube configuration locally before deploying to staging/production.

Edit: at least I'm assuming these are the same images as what they run GKE with due to the same name - can anyone confirm this?

<comment><USER3> As of today, GKE uses the Debian-based ContainerVM: [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/container_v...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/container_vms)

<comment><USER4> Here's the issue tracking the switch: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/25276](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/25276)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now it[1] just needs a centralized lock service[2] for safe cluster-wide rolling upgrades! The three release channels are already there, with the Omaha upgrade system.

1: [https://coreos.com](https://coreos.com)

2: [https://coreos.com/etcd](https://coreos.com/etcd)

<comment><USER6> Probably should link this as well: [https://github.com/coreos/locksmith](https://github.com/coreos/locksmith)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems these images use systemd (a nice departure from the init.d scripts used in the previous container_vms images [1]).

[1] - [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/container_v...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/container_vms)

<comment><USER6> Yes, it runs both systemd and upstart. Staying true to chromiumos, upstart is still the /sbin/init. I believe both upstart and systemd support some subset of the sysvinit api (e.g. rc and /etc/init.d).

The previous debian based container-vm image only ran upstart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope it's not as "lightweight" as android and chromeos.

<comment><USER9> CoreOS is also based on ChromiumOS. I wouldn't be too worried on if this is lightweight or not. Google has been running everything in containers since 2014, and before that they were using containers since the mid-2000s. When it comes to containers, I'm don't think anyone has more experience using containers at large scales than Google.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Rate my Startup:  Search Stream - <AUTHOR>

http://www.searchstream.co<p>Search Stream is a social search engine.  It's a search engine that has an integrated social bookmarking and notes section.  it use your search terms as the tags. <comment><USER2> The UI is not intuitive. You need some messages that help the user navigate and use the site effectively. Right now I m just clicking around trying to make sense of it. (you could include messages with a "Dont show this again" option)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback.... the messages with don't show again is a great idea.

what part is not intuitive? the search engine? the blog part? the integration of the two?

<comment><USER3> It took me 60 seconds or so of blind clicking around before I even realised what the site did, and this was after reading the description on this post.

Maybe include some information on the front page describing how the service works. If you want to go all out link to a video demonstration of it working or a quick walk through.

<comment><AUTHOR> the video is a great idea. i agree... it's a big problem explaining the site's functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a good example... where you get an idea how it might be useful

[http://searchstream.co/index.php?search=mp3+arcade+fire+subu...](http://searchstream.co/index.php?search=mp3+arcade+fire+suburbs)

<comment><AUTHOR> it's a link to download the arcade fires new album, much more useful than the spam in google's results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't seem to add more than 3 bookmarks.

Also you should have a short url that I can tweet/email to someone else that will load up the bookmarks I saved. This would be helpful if I was trying to help someone find information.

<comment><AUTHOR> ok i will change that.

they are being added, but they don't show on main page. if you click more results you can see them. and you can see them on the blog.

<comment><USER3> I didn't notice the more results at first glance and I doubt many other people would have either.

I would suggest expanding the box to show all the users saved results for that search. If you are committed to keeping it limited to 3 results I would suggest moving the "more results" link to a more prominent position under the links and possibly showing a counter next to it so it looks like "$num_links more results".

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea about the number is a good one. i will add that. i will also try to make it more prominent... great idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why would you not buy searchstream.com for this? Is it not worth it? I just went to it and it is just a parked page.

<comment><AUTHOR> how do you suggest i go about that? i emailed the company that owns it, and haven't heard anything. i also bought that stupid thing on godaddy that tries to grab it, to no avail. it was recently renewed.

<comment><USER4> I think that's all you really can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://www.searchstream.co></comment>


DNA Sample from Son Leads to Arrest of Alleged Serial Killer Father - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/dna-database/ <comment><USER2> The headline tells us that we will be reading about how DNA solved yet another case. The twist being a son's DNA being good enough to convict the Father. So why exactly do they include tidbits about how blacks will be disproportionately affected?

At the end of the 5th paragraph you get "A disproportionate number of people with profiles in the database are African American." So? What does this have to do with the DNA convicting a serial killer?

Seems more that there really is not much of a story so lets stick in some race baiting flame war topic to drum up the story.

<comment><USER3> The son's DNA was _not_ good enough to convict the father. The son's DNA was good enough to lead police to investigate the family which lead to the arrest of the father.

The problem regarding race that the article mentions is simply one of social statistics: if 10x more convictions per 1k convictions occur for group A than group B and we assume convictions are familially independent (close enough), people in group A are 10x more likely to be suspected of a crime via familial inference than those in group B.

It's not quite racial profiling but it does imply that you have fewer rights as a genetic relative of a convict than as a non-relative. That's somewhat disturbing.</comment></comment>