What happened to Japan's electronic giants? - <AUTHOR> http://bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21992700 <comment><USER2> There is some truth in this article but it misses some of the really key factors.

1) Value of the Yen. The Yen is seen as a safe haven and has been at almost ridiculous levels (considering trade balances and government debt) at least since late 2008. This is crippling exports (and/or profitability) in these price sensitive markets (TV's, computers, phones) as even though much production is abroad they still have massive cost bases in Japan.

2) Development of Korea. LG and especially Samsung took the place of the aggressive upstarts driving down prices and then building up the quality as Japan once did to the West in markets such as cars. It will be interesting to see what China's development does to Korea in 15-20 years. So far the aggressive pricing from Korea has kept Chinese TV brands from prominence but that may not last.

3) As Japan prospered and incomes rose it became uneconomic to manufacture commodity items there. Outsourcing and offshoring production damages the feedback and development loop between production and design that enables efficient optimum design of products. Also they narrowed the parts of the supply chain that they supplied to focus on the high value ones that could still be profitable but that costs control and foresight into important developing areas. e.g. Samsung could develop LCD panels in exact form factors to fit their devices and to use them as structural elements in TVs getting a jump start on Sony. (Sharp had[has?] their own panels but the quality wasn't uniformly high and they were overly dependent on their home TV market anyway).

4) There is very little profit in many electronics items. TVs especially are not a source of profits (maybe Samsung makes some but it is hard to tell from their annual reports). Aggressive and falling prices, unstable panel supplies and the fact egos and ecosystems are on the line means that the once stable profit source of CRT TVs has been replaced by an LCD bloodbath. Even in mobile phones only Apple and Samsung are really making money (along with a number of component suppliers getting their slices).

[Former Sony employee.]

<comment><USER3> I think it's also an issue that many Asian companies haven't figured out how to add value with software the way a company like Apple does. Apple can ask a big premium on their tablet and phone devices based on the exclusivity and capabilities of iOS. Certainly lots of innovations could still be achieved in (e.g.) the television markets by creating great software for these products. We still don't have really "smart" television sets.

This is the reason why I think the rumoured Apple television set will be a big hit with very nice profits when it finally arrives.

The key is to differentiate with the competition and if you can't differentiate on a hardware level, then you have to do it on a software level.

<comment><USER2> > I think it's also an issue that many Asian companies haven't figured out how > to add value with software the way a company like Apple does.

I think you can completely remove 'Asian' from that sentence. Few companies ANYWHERE have figured out how to add value with software like Apple does.

I'm still highly sceptical of "smart" TV although I am a big believer in easy UI and attractive content. My own long term view (since about 2002) has been the TV control will move to a handheld touchscreen display (a tablet) removing most or all of the UI from the main display.

I also think there are good reasons why Apple hasn't entered the market. It will be hard, even for them to make money there. Also to deliver what is accepted as a TV requires significant localisation to broadcast and cable standards. Apple may be able to go with HDMI and internet connections only but that isn't something that many other companies would get away with. I don't think that they will make real money if they do come although they could still hurt Samsung which might make it interesting to them.

<comment><USER4> There are three main phone/tablet OS's out there from Apple, Microsoft, and Google which are all US companies. The real question though is why did Google have to step in with Android vs Samsung / Sony / LG etc already having a high quality OS? They had been making quality feature phones for a while, but somehow never made the jump and said the hardware if fast enough for something close to a desktop OS.

<comment><USER2> I think Apple were exceptional with brilliant vision of how a smartphone should work and the ability to develop from a clean slate without having to support existing platforms before the initial launch. They also left out many features competitors had which I think would have been harder to do with an existing product line.

Google had by that point been sucking in huge volumes of software talent. Once given the iPhone as a template they could develop quickly and then iterate further improvements but they are also exception. They are also a software company and critically a web services company rather than a broad electronics company. They are far from infallible (GoogleTV).

Microsoft were years late to the party despite existing mobile OS. They are also a massive (although fairly broad) software company. They also saw an almost existential threat in iOS and Android devices. They still may fail to reach a position of power in this market.

For a platform to reach the point of positive feedback between developer and consumer feedback needs scale. It isn't surprising that the offer of attractive, cost free platform with developer support was attractive and competition (in the software space) killing. Unless you were confident that you could win in the software space why wouldn't you take Android?

That only five platforms (Symbian and RIM being others) emerged is not surprising, less may survive. Given that who would you expect to have the scale, commitment and capability to develop the best mobile platforms?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We had some Brazillian electronics company also flopping last 10 years.

Reasons I indentified: Losing creators and get swamped by middle-manager types... Too bad one of them don't even had a choice (the founder died, and this resulted into them switching from the most inventive electronic toys I ever saw, to low quality cheap DVD players, Karaoke machines and cheap Guitar Hero rippoffs using their Karaoke tech)

Second: Neglecting software... This one is obvious that when I applied to those companies as programmer, they wanted to pay me less than my rent was, absurdly ridiculous (and they all have a very high programmer turnover rate)

Third: Excessive outsourcing and subsequent problems in managing quality. This was particularly striking with one company, that fixed the first two issues and licensed from China some products (developed in China, and not rip-offs) that would have high demand here.

Indeed, that plan ALMOST worked, their products sold so much they frequently had online store freezing by excessive visits, and their products were always out of stock...

But then reports showed up of exploding chargers, screens with lots of dead pixels, and so on... This went for about 6 months, with the demand still outstripping the negative reports, but eventually it became clear they could not find a outsourcer to do it properly, and they had divested themselves of their factories many years ago, and had no know how anymore in manufacturing, and did not even had sufficient knowledge to visit the outsourcers factory and force them to fix their process.

They are bankrupt know, to much unhappiness of the costumers attracted in their short lived renaissance.

<comment><USER6> Pardon the tangent, but did you ever write/blog about those "inventive electronic toys"? I am not speaking as a producer, but as a consumer and over- grown child. Were they like robotic/Legos/construction kits like they had back in the 80s/early-90s? Or something completely different?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's simple: they've always been very good at hardware but not that good at software. It was fine in a time where software was just a minor part of electronics, but today the software is the most important part, and the hardware is just here to make sure the software can run flawlessly.

<comment><USER8> If the Japanese are bad at software, it's somewhat odd that Japanese programmers wrote a huge proportion of the world's greatest video games....

They're also world leaders in software development for robotics.

Japan also developed 3G (UMTS), which is why Japanese phones no longer dominate the Japanese market.

<comment><USER9> It is true that Japanese studio created some of the greatest games of all time. But I have also heard reports that every game was rewritten from scratch. The DIY concept was entirely alien.

Source: 84 Play Podcast interview with Gregg Tavares (I think, I cant relisten to the podcast now). Linked if interested [http://8-4.jp/blog/?p=1423&lang=en](http://8-4.jp/blog/?p=1423&lang=en)

<comment><USER10> I remember reading some article about Japanese gamedev years ago that said the same thing. No OO, no standards, lots of repetition, &c.

<comment><USER11> But why on Earth would you need skill and technique when you've got so many overtime hours of good old Japanese _hard work_? /sarcasm

Idiots...

<comment><USER12> That makes it very difficult to understand how other parts of Japanese culture can be so focused on perfection. Even western programmers use he word "Zen" to describe the simplicity and perfection of code that we strive for.

<comment><USER11> Well, some Western programmers use Zen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sony.. just ugh.

I couldn't tell you how big of a Sony fan I was - TVs, cd players, PS 1-3.

Then they removed my ability to run Linux on my PS3. They stopped caring about giving the PS3 any new functionality that wasn't for plus members.

Blu-rays that I bought stopped working in that system, or took forever to load because the blu-rays started downloading massive new commercials to play for me before the movie started.

That was the breaking point for me.

What happened to Japan's electronic giants? I can't speak for all of them but Sony started blatantly chasing money. I get that companies exist to make money but, for crying out loud, don't make it so obvious that you're only out for money.

<comment><USER2> > What happened to Japan's electronic giants? I can't speak for all of them > but Sony started blatantly chasing money. I get that companies exist to make > money but, for crying out loud, don't make it so obvious that you're only > out for money.

Have you seen the losses that Sony has made over the past decade? They are pretty desperate and need to chase money. It isn't like they have massive margins.

They main problem is that they are amateurs at chasing money compared to companies like MS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would suggest that a title change will say it all:

What happened to Japan's _electrical_ giants?

Hitachi's boss says it in the article

      "Digital technology changed everything," he says.

      "In the television industry it means that just one chip is
      now needed to produce a large and high quality TV picture.
      So now everybody can do it."

What they did was electrical engineering - but apart from washing machines, everything consumer is on a chip. Hitachi has seen this and run, all the others should be following suit, or trading on their names as brands for Android phones.

<comment><USER15> A vacuum cleaner on a chip? A microwave oven on a chip? A large LCD screen on a chip?

I don't really get what you mean by "everything consumer is on a chip". Making LCD screens is quite hardware-y and I thought quite difficult to do well too.

<comment><USER16> More or less this

Let's go back to the 80's. Electronic products had to be done with lots of components. There were chips, but they did much less than what they do today.

Also, more mechanical parts (think VCR, Camcorder, etc)

So the real work was doing more with less components and good quality.

Today, with better chip technology and 'solidization' of technologies. (magnetic tape to flash memory, crts to lcds) today you can realistically have an LCD tv with only a couple of chips (apart from the power source, lcd panel and some other components like speakers and maybe the tuning part). There's nothing much to tweak. There's software, but that's increasingly commoditized as well.

And the japanese apparently can't innovate software-wise.

<comment><USER14> _And the japanese apparently can't innovate software-wise._

I am going to be nit-picky, and go for

... Large Japanese conglomerates with contractural and social commitments to current and past employees, huge management layers ... apparently can't innovate software-wise.

Ruby probably counts as a plus in the innovation side.

(Look I know it was nitpicky and you did mean that anyway, but this is HN, it is late, so I apologise )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Article misses the fact that managers rather than creators took over the electronics companies. Losing creativity meant losing an edge.

<comment><USER18> There was an article I read a while back that pointed out that the exact same thing happened with the American Auto industry before things started to go to crap.

<comment><USER19> Would you happen to have a link to that? That sounds like an interesting read.

<comment><USER20> Try _The Reckoning_ by David Halberstam: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Reckoning- David-Halberstam/dp/0688...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Reckoning-David- Halberstam/dp/0688048382) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I worked on a Hitachi based coal plant in college. The Japanese were the originators of high precision engineering, and it shows. TI's OMAP program is going the same route: pursuing long term, more stable business instead of consumer facing chips. I suspect that wages in Korea are much lower, allowing them to manufacture ripped off designs at a much lower price.

Sony's problem is that they're an engineering driven company in consumer markets. While they often win the spec game, they aren't vertically integrated enough to give the same consumer experience that Apple can. Ars has covered many of their missteps in depth.

<comment><USER22> Actually I think Sony would have been (and in part still would _be_ ) perfectly vertically integrated. They were big in content, home electronics and hand helds. In the beginning of the last decade they could have hardly asked for a better position to completely dominate the electronics business, the way Apple/Samsung do now - but it was all for nothing. Instead of integrating everything, they just let their divisions keep doing their own thing until it was too late.

<comment><USER23> They tried to "vertically integrate". Really hard. Thing is, they hung the hardware on MemoryStick and the software on ATRAC. Oops.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Minimal Mac just ran a picture yesterday that does indeed say it all: [http://minimalmac.com/post/48088436702/yep-pretty-much- sums-...](http://minimalmac.com/post/48088436702/yep-pretty-much-sums-it-up- via-w-cie)

BTW, I kept looking at the first picture and wondering how many people were employed making all those devices versus those now making the components for the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting tidbit in the article is that majority of Sony's profit comes from their _life insurance_ business:

<http://www.splatf.com/2011/11/sony-profits/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think they are failing because sometime in the mid-Nineties, in the effort to compete with lean and hungry overseas companies, they lost their legendary reputation for quality and customer service, as they tried to respond to changing circumstances.

A couple of examples of my own:

Around 1996, I bought a cassette recorder made by Aiwa, which had been a fairly upscale electronics brand. It looked nice from the outside, but when I examined it closer after buying it, I realized it was a fairly crude, generic cassette recorder of the time, made in China, probably the generic output from a factory there that Aiwa had slapped their name onto.

It failed in less than a month. I brought it to the store for a replacement and that one failed too within thirty days, exactly the same way the first one did. Obviously, Aiwa had not done extensive testing on this model, and I think probably didn't even design or supervise its manufacture.

In the early 2000s, I bought a Sony Palm OS PDA. It was very advanced and had great features that I loved. But it failed in two weeks due to bad connection to the lamp that lit the LED display. After a few minutes' search on the Internet, I saw this was a well-known problem with this device, caused by a design flaw.

I took it back to the store, and got a replacement that failed exactly the same way in two weeks. The store wouldn't give me another, so I had to rely on Sony's warranty service.

It was my worst-ever warranty experience. After a long conversation with customer service reps in India, I was able to convince them it was actually failing. They sent me a box to return it in. It took almost a month to come back, only to fail with the same problem about three months later.

I went through the whole process again, waited another month. This time the repaired (or replaced) device came back rattling around in a box with no packing material. It too failed, several days after the one-year warranty expired.

I think the decline of the Japaneses electronic giants has been caused by a combination of several things. Japanese technology companies built their reputations during the late Sixties and Seventies, at the start of the Japanese economic boom, when they had a highly skilled workforce willing to work at relatively low wages, compared to the US or Europe. They had already sharpened their quality and innovative abilities in the intense domestic Japanese market, which was extremely competitive and where the consumers were very picky about quality. That market was protected, so there was almost no competition from overseas.

When they moved into Western markets, they were the young, scrappy underdog taking on dinosaur companies like RCA and Phillips, that could not respond fast enough to compete effectively against them. They were also aided by the low value of the yen relative to the dollar, which made their products a very good value.

So all of these things have changed. Complaints of unfair trade eventually forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition. As the article pointed out, now Japanese companies are the dinosaurs in their domestic market, competing against Apple and Samsung. Meanwhile, the yen is very high against foreign currencies, which hurts them badly in export markets.

The Japanese labor market has also changed. Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had. Wages have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.

Also, the Japanese population is declining, with fewer and fewer young workers, and those coming into the job market have been conditioned to expect comfortable, high-paying, lifetime office jobs, not manufacturing jobs.

Meanwhile, the inefficiencies of the lifetime employment system in Japanese companies have made it very difficult to adapt to changing circumstances by laying off workers, even as that system is starting to break down.

It's like a perfect storm of bad news for Japanese companies, but in many ways it is very similar to what happened to electronics giants in the US thirty years earlier as they tried to defend against Japanese competition and eventually failed.

<comment><USER26> > Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their > parents and grandparents had.

I have a few "salary man" friends in Japan, and they work really really hard. Like "hard to imagine anyone working harder".

However, if my experience working in (non-tech) companies in Tokyo has taught me anything, it's that people have to work so hard because of some startling inefficiencies (and some serious peer pressure) and a great resistance to integrating technology into the work flow (e.g. this is the first year I received internet in the office).

This sounds hard to believe as Japan has produced some amazing technological innovation, but there is a really strange mindset in the higher ups concerning digital conveniences, and they appear to be influencing protocol. For example, ATMs have working hours, and some are not available on weekends at all, and others have higher fees the later in the evening it is (and this is a cash dominate society).

<comment><USER27> Ah, a japanese friend of mine used to joke that it was little dwarves working in the ATM that gave out the money. The extra fee in the evening was just overtime pay :-)

<comment><USER28> That's not entirely untrue, as you can indeed ring a bell and someone comes from behind the ATM to help you. Why I was not allowed to withdraw money on Sunday even if I did not need help is beyond me and so every monay I stood in the queue before the ATMs of people who couldn't get their money on Sunday either.

Also, I pay 0,68€ with debit or credit card in Europe whereas I had to lug around coins and stuff in Japan. Very cash-centric.

<comment><USER29> I've noticed that even in the USA, it is much more common for smaller "Mom & Pop" shops and restaurants owned and operated by Asians (not just Japanese, but Chinese, Filipinos, etc) to be cash-only, or if they do accept debit/credit cards they have very high minimum purchase requirements.

I get the reasoning behind why they do this (to avoid the handling charge overhead), but I've always wondered why the decision to do so seems to be far more prevalent with some cultures than others and I've always wondered if it is really a net negative for them as there are quite a few places I would otherwise go to frequently but avoid (because I know that as someone who prefers not to carry around a lot of cash that paying will be a bit of a pain in the ass at those places). Presumably I'm not the only one who makes this choice regularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Japan's electronic giants fell because there's no longer an electronic industry. The computer industry has "annexed" the electronics industry and the Japanese companies were never good at computers.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's the same economic shift we see since industrial revolution.

Nobody here remembers, but one Italy was the cheapest labor. Everyone produced cheep stuff there. Then some companies started to produce quality product (and win races with what was cheap cars) and to be proud of made in Italy (which was a bad thing before). And when Italian design became expensive, markets moved on.

I think there was another country in this step, but let's say cheap labor is now in Japan. When it started, only college students would buy Japanese cars (death traps) and Japanese stuff was deemed cheap. Come the same cycle. Companies start to show pride and produce quality stuff. Now made in Japan is expensive.

Market moves on to China... Kia is now the car of the new rich with bad taste. But this will change soon (they are even trying to win prestigious rally in Africa) and soon Chinese products are going to be expensive. And probably some Latin or African country will be the next cheap labor.

<comment><USER32> Kia is from Korea.

<comment><USER31> You are correct. I think Korea is the country i couldn't remember before :)

And it's following the pattern alright. Kia, Hyundai, lg.

All companies that started with race-to-the-bottom products that are now trying to be market leaders

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I was expecting at least a mention of Mecha-Godzilla. What happened to him was the old Godzilla.

Sony was a really big inspiration to Steve Jobs, or at least Akio Morita was. It has been very surprising to me to see Sony slip repeatedly. I think they got caught up in just packing in features without a real vision to unify what they were trying to accomplish.

<comment><USER34> Sony is being killed by Sony's content division, that is, the movie studio and the music label.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> On a related but tangential theme, I once started an argument by claiming that Japanese culture does not support the emergence of strong individuals. Perhaps, in electronics as in software, it really does take someone with a huge ego to send a product back to the development labs because 'the black is not black enough'.

</comment><comment><USER36> "Mr Nakanishi's strategy is working. Hitachi is back in profit. Hitachi trains are the front-runner in the competition to replace all of the UK's fleet of inter-city high-speed trains. "

Mouhahha. Strategy is a long term thing. You can't the effects just in a couple of years. What a joke of an article.

</comment><comment><USER37> Japan suffered economic slump. Where people used to dump old electronics to buy new versions (there's a Japanese word to describe the perfectly good trash that people used to collect to furnish their homes) they had to stop because they just couldn't afford to do that any longer.

</comment><comment><USER38> In the '70s and '80s Japan was hungry, they wanted to leap up to being a world-class country and a high-tech, first world economy. So they took risks and let innovation rule. Then when the high-tech sector got big they tightened up and reined in risk and creativity, causing them to miss out on several key market turnovers in tech.

Look at the biggest smartphone manufacturers: samsung, apple, huawei, htc, zte, LG. Mostly Chinese, Korean, and US companies. Only recently has Japan seriously entered the touchscreen smartphone market competitively. Maybe if Japanese company's get hungry enough to innovate they'll make a comeback.

</comment><comment><USER39> May be one reason is that they had a lot of cool only for Japan market devices? It is more difficult to make different devices for different markets, Apple on the other hand made one device for all the markets.

<comment><USER8> Sony Trinitron TV sets, PlayStations etc were cool everywhere. Nikon and Canon cameras still are. It's just that the Japanese specialised in high quality manufacturing, and the market went to China's low-wage manufacturing instead.

Foxconn basically uses humans as robots, and this is temporarily cheaper than using real robots -- Japan's speciality.

<comment><USER40> >It's just that the Japanese specialised in high quality manufacturing, and the market went to China's low-wage manufacturing instead.

Apple iPhones are largely assembled in China, and nobody would claim they are low quality. Chinese manufacturing isn't low quality, unless that's what you want to pay for.

Furthermore, I claim that in the last 10-15 years, the quality of Japanese electronics actually declined.

<comment><USER41> The quality in the iPhone comes from great design and choice of materials. There is nothing particularly good (or bad) about the quality of its manufacturing. You'll also notice that non of the actually important components like the CPU or the screen come from Chines companies (yet)

<comment><USER42> Not sure this is true. I'm no manufacturing expert, but I've heard a million stories about how intensely involved Apple is in their manufacturers' processes. c.f. how the glass is fitted on iPhone 5s: [http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/12/how-the- iphone-5-is-...](http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/09/12/how-the-iphone-5-is- made/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This makes an amusing contrast with the frequent articles decrying the loss of manufacturing here in the US/UK.

<comment><USER44> Interestingly enough, there is talk that manufacturing in the US is rebounding... to the point that some people are referring to it as a boom. The reasons why it's happening are varied, but it's an interesting phenomenon to observe. I'll be interested to see if it holds up over time...

For more on this idea, see:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the- inso...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-insourcing- boom/309166/)

[http://business.time.com/2013/03/28/is-the-u-s- manufacturing...](http://business.time.com/2013/03/28/is-the-u-s- manufacturing-renaissance-real/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Often wondered this too. Japanese hardware is still good, but difficult to compete on price compared to Korean/Chinese.

They have great developers, and have had for a long time, but it feels like the corporate structures themselves are too rigid to allow innovation to surface.

You know these companies are doing something wrong when hobbyists have to reverse-engineer their firmware to get the functionality they want and need (I'm looking at you Canon and Panasonic). Sony is not much better, the user interfaces of their hardware feel 10 years old and the recently opened "app store" for their cameras is a joke, with no SDK or 3rd party apps available. As they focus away from TV's to cameras and sensors, that's something they should definitely fix if they want to succeed.

The best thing these consumer electronics companies could do is open source parts of the firmware/software and engage more with consumers who are taking a more active role in developing products these days.

</comment><comment><USER26> Though, Abe, the current Prime Minister of Japan a very conservative fellow, he surprised (at least) me the other day by announcing that he's interested in creating a culture of entrepreneurs and startups.

The most shocking quote in a recent piece in the WSJ[1] might be Abe, referring to Rakuten.com's Mikitani, saying "I ask Mr. Mikitani to not be afraid of being labeled a trouble maker and to speak his mind to his heart's content." You really can stir up some trouble in Japan by suggesting changes to the status quo (something foreigners do with regularity), so it's very interesting to see a guy like Abe say this. Maybe I misjudged the guy.

I think Japan needs to move away from the big electronics companies and focus on creating an environment more conducive to creating young interesting companies.

1: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732434580457842...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324345804578424333742053290.html)

</comment><comment><USER46> Um, maybe they are failing because modern electronics are more about software than hardware. If devices are becoming very small PC's with ARM processors, then of course software companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft will do well.

Companies like Sony have hardware DNA, not software DNA.

</comment><comment><USER47> A conflicting opinion: The market used to be narrow where being Japanese made actually mattered. Now flood that market with absolute cheap garbage from China and it bifurcates into mostly purchasing cheap garbage and "everything else is better but costs twice as much and it doesn't matter who makes it as long as its not China".

What I'm getting at is the fight shifted from Japan vs the world to China vs the world.

<comment><USER48> All my nail clippers are japanese make. They're truly amazing compared to the crap that floods the aisles of your average US retail store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Sony has been plagued with inability to deal with technology which disrupts their business model in any way.

Network walkman which didn't support mp3 on purpose(would cannibalize media division) was so technologically stupid and ever since then they have lost the plot

</comment><comment><USER50> It's simple, they didn't let their developers run free and are paid too little. You have to pay the creators of wealth in order to get wealth in return.</comment>


Ask HN: When do you know that you should stop testing a hypothesis? - <AUTHOR>

You've build a lean canvas for your project. You have many hypotheses regarding each part of lean canvas.
Let's say you have:
Sample idea: calculator online
Lean canvas: ... 2. Customer segment - hypothesis 1: analytics in finance companies would use that - hypothesis 2: children in school would use that ...
Testing hypothesis 1: - You have written no code for the calculator. - You build landing page with a subscribe form. - You ask 20 influencers in the financial world. - You post your idea to Hacker News, Reddit and some other forums.
As a result: - You have 160 subscribers ready to use and pay a 1$ a month for it - Your post on ASK HN gets 10 upvotes and 20 comments (15 positive, 5 negative) - Your post on reddit gets 5 upvotes and 3 positive comments - 4 influencers say "yeah I like it, would love to try it", 3 say it's useles, and 13 stay silent
Is this result good enough to keep testing the hypothesis? How much more time would you spend to keep testing this one hypothesis? Do you think that this result is great or very bad? What else would you do to increase the numbers?
In short - what would you do? <comment><USER2> "In short - what would you do?"

I would try to talk to as many of those initial captured subscribers directly. Either this will be over phone, in-person etc. I will try and assess "what" and "why" they need based on the discussions and not necessary "how" they need it at this point. Rinse and repeat. Do this manually. Don't worry about using automation and cool stuff. Keep it simple.

There is a big difference between saying "hmm looks cool. i may use it" vs "shut up and take my money". You want to work towards the latter of course. The former is just a start but not the end.

One advice on pricing. If not sure, always price high than low. You can always reduce pricing based on your market demand but almost never a good idea to raise pricing. Also clients who will value your product will not worry about price too much and if there are clients who cannot pay you for what is worth, those are not your ideal clients.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it would cost about $1 a month to collect $1 a month. Also I think people in finance companies can afford more than $1 a month.</comment>


Show HN: How to Take Smart Notes on Karma - <AUTHOR> https://www.karma.fm/p/TlQNNgt/how-to-take-smart-notes-on-karma <comment><USER2> dang!! I look at a lot of stuff like this and the prompting to connect your notes here looks very cool. personally I am at a point in my life where I'm not picking up new things I can't self-host (unrepresentative techie) but I'm really looking forward to see what people do with this.

also, this is maybe the best thing I've read today: [https://www.karma.fm/p/mWmnXji/im-a-little- robot](https://www.karma.fm/p/mWmnXji/im-a-little-robot)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been trying to figure out how to accelerate my personal self-education with technology, and this represents my latest attempt at solving that problem.

Two questions for you:

1) What are your initial impressions? 2) What would make you fall in love with something like this?</comment>


Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news184310039.html <comment><USER2> Interesting. It seems like an amazing material, but I wonder what long-term health problems might arise due to exposure to nano particles of silica.

<comment><USER3> It can't be much worse than exposure to the chemicals in most of our cleaning products.

<comment><USER4> What about pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicavolcanoconiosis?

( _Strictly speaking, I think there needs to be a volcano involved to create the fine particled silica relevant to that disease, but how often do you get a chance to naturally work it into conversation?_ )

<comment><USER5> You spelled it wrong :-). "...silico..."

(I've always been disappointed that it's "...microscopic..." rather than "...microscopo...", which seems rather unnatural.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I know this is from physorg, but after the second paragraph I was reading it in a Billy Mays voice.

Still, it sounds interesting, and if it works as they say it does, I imagine it will become quite ubiquitous.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Article makes it sound like those iraqi bomb detectors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"... The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non- toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. ... Liquid glass spray is perhaps the most important nanotechnology product to emerge to date. It will be available in DIY stores in Britain soon ..."_

Not news but a PR release. It pays to be cautious when making claims to be _"new"_ , _"harmless"_ and _"available in stores soon"_. The claim the particles are 100 nanometers is significant.

Why?

Well it appears that a lot of research is done on nanometer particles, health and lung function and the threshold for damage around 100 nanometers ~ [http://www.google.com/search?q=100+nanometer+particles+and+l...](http://www.google.com/search?q=100+nanometer+particles+and+lung+function) even more for 50nm. Below a certain size, particles are membrane permeable - when breathed in, pass directly through the air/blood membranes of the lung into the bloodstream. There is a lot of research to suggest that sub .25µm particles of diesel (2.5 micrometers = 2500 nanometers) causes health problems ~ [http://www.google.com/search?q=.25+micron+diesel+particles+h...](http://www.google.com/search?q=.25+micron+diesel+particles+health) An explanation here to why ~ <http://www.lungoregon.org/air/Diesel.html>

_"... PM (Particulate Matter) has now been linked to a broad range of adverse health effects, both respiratory and cardiovascular, in epidemiologic and toxicologic research. ... The primary impetus for the 1997 PM NAAQS and the current proposed revision has been epidemiologic evidence that associates PM with increased risk for mortality ..."_ ~ _"Small Particles with Big Effects"_ , William N. Rom, M.D., M.P.H.", [http://ajrccm.atsjournals.org/cgi/content/full/173/4/365#BIB...](http://ajrccm.atsjournals.org/cgi/content/full/173/4/365#BIB2)

So I'd really like to know when materials like this are even suggested before they are released for commercial and human use without significant long term testing. Think asbestos and the long lead time for <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestosis>

</comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone been able to dig up the patents on this? I tried a quick google patent search to try to get more technical detail on what they're doing and how they're doing it, but I haven't found the patents. They mention patents, but don't say much about them.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't find a link anywhere about how to purchase this. Anyone have one?

<comment><USER10> Try here. <http://www.der-nano-shop.de/>

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the link... Although this image was the only part I understood before running it through Google Translate:

<http://www.der-nano-shop.de/prinzip.jpg>

:-D

<comment><USER12> Ah, it keeps the schmutz out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think for 'breathable' they meant 'porous' or permeable, otherwise it makes no sense.

<comment><USER14> Yes, it is a rather strange bastardization of the word, but it has been used for e.g. fabrics for expensive ski jackets for a while now. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/breathable>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterproof_fabric> "Breathability is measured by the rate at which water vapor passes through, in the units of grams of water vapour per square meter of fabric per 24 hour period (g/m2/d), often abbreviated to just 'g'. "</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Phone or Money? - <AUTHOR>

Most of us carry our "Phone" and "Money" everywhere we go. If you can only take one thing with you leaving home, which one will it be?<p>Phone or Money (cash/credit cards)? <comment><USER2> Money. Having a wallet solves much essential needs. (Buying food, buying drinks, getting home, etc). Although some of these can be done via phone, the current infrastructure does not support them [not as easy as it should] yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Absolutely money. With money you can buy a phone or access to a phone if needed.</comment>


Octopus to Leave RavenDB for SQL Server - <AUTHOR> http://octopusdeploy.com/blog/3.0-switching-to-sql

<comment><USER2> Hopefully it's a sign of no-SQL-web-silver-bullet hype calming down.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be interesting to get Oren Eini's opinion on this, as the author of RavenDb. ([http://ayende.com/](http://ayende.com/))

</comment><comment><USER4> Have to go into Reader mode on iOS to read your content, otherwise it's all rendered blank.</comment>


The Apple Mac Cost Misconception: Macs and Their Prices - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/apple-mac-leopard-windows-vista,1985.html

<comment><USER2> Comparisons with an arbitrary notebook are just silly. For starters, if one is a 15'' screen model and the other one is 17'', they are in completely different categories.

<comment><USER3> Summary: Apple options are horribly overpriced. Dell XPS laptops are overpriced and are similar in price to Apple systems.

I spent a few years developing OS 8,9, and X Software back when OS X was new. I used a dual G4 and upgraded to a G5. I honestly don't miss OS X it's just an OS and their hardware is expensive in useless ways. If your building a 3k system use 8GB of ram not 2 Xeon chips and 95% of the time you will be happy you did. I am currently using a 3 month old 1200$ dell and its fast enough that I just don't notice any issues. If I would upgrade anything I would spend ~2k on better displays a long time before I upgraded my computer.

PS: Granted some people might be CPU bound and happy with 2GB of ram but that's got to be a tiny fraction of the market.</comment></comment>


CSS Tricks - <AUTHOR> https://css-tricks.com/ <comment><USER2> This might not be particularly useful, especially if you're not the owner, but the relative sizes of elements on the page reminds me of early phone browsers in a really uncomfortable way. I couldn't look at the page for more than ~30s before my eyes started to hurt.

I have no idea why, maybe I need more coffee.</comment>


Windows 8 Secure Boot May turn tables on Microsoft Says Developer - <AUTHOR> http://paritynews.com/software/item/228-windows-8-secure-boot-may-turn-tables-on-microsoft-claims-developer

<comment><USER2> So the boot process which is required, by design, to allow you to modify the list of keys... allows you to modify the list of keys? Not really sure how that's "turning the tables on Microsoft".

<comment><USER3> I suspect so many users will reject the new OS out-of-hand and demand their tech-savvy friends install whatever, whether it be Linux or a previous version of windows, that we are going to see a particular set of tools instantly become very popular, and a lot of tech-savvy people complaining loud enough to the OEMs. Eventually OEMs will be confronted with a hard choice, and they may or may not choose to do what end-users demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The problem here is that once Microsoft's keys are gone, the drivers for > graphics (plug-n-play) and such other devices will not be usable as they are > signed by Microsoft. This means enrollment of just the drivers is not > possible without actually trusting everything else signed by Microsoft.

Wouldn't it be possible to remove the MS signature, and resign the binary blob with your own?

</comment><comment><USER3> Come October, I hope OEMs come to their senses and not foist this mess upon us.

<comment><USER5> For 99% of users it's not a mess.

For the average user, it just means that certain attacks will no longer succeed, as the Windows boot loader/Kernel will be verified before loading, and cannot be cracked.

For the techie user wanting a different OS, they will either turn off secure- boot or replace the keys, a one-time operation.</comment></comment>


Worst UI design features that should be avoided but are still in common use - <AUTHOR> https://stayintech.com/info/uidesign <comment><USER3> Password reset forms that force you to type in your email address again - <USER2> you've just typed it into the login form.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would add sticky navbar on mobile..

<comment><USER5> Especially toolbars both on top and bottom, leaving very little room to read the content on mobile.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apps that don't auto-save.

<comment><USER5> I guess the best is to save automatically, but to also have a save button for certain type of users who want to "be sure that is was saved"?</comment></comment>


Antarctica just hit 65 degrees, its warmest temperature ever recorded - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/02/07/antarctica-just-hit-65-degrees-its-warmest-temperature-ever-recorded/ <comment><USER2> I'm not that concerned about this. Ever recorded? I don't think humanity has been recording temps in Antarctica for hundreds of thousands of years, which would show us cycles and we could rule these cycles out.</comment>


Columbia River Crossing: An Alternative Proposal - <AUTHOR> http://www.sierraclubgreenhome.com/go-green/landscaping-and-outdoors/columbia-river-crossing/ <comment><USER2> That's a grand design, and "lids" over the freeways are all the rage on Mercer Island and in Medina. I'm not convinced that a lid would reduce the Columbia River Bridge's wind resistance, especially if it has a lot of trees on top.

Secondly, The Columbia River Bridge is very long, and I don't know that Washington and Oregon could fund this. Washington already has several infrastructure improvement projects underway around Seattle, including the State Route 520 bridge expansion and State Route 99 tunnel project. A flyover- style overpass was just completed as part of the Interstate 5 - State Route 18 exchange rebuild, to make the interchange more safe.</comment>


Gmail down; Outage could last 36 hours for some  - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9129347 <comment><USER2> That's 3 strikes, and Gmail: you're out. I'm moving my domains off gmail as the primary MX.

Is there a viable alternative to gmail for conversation view and search?

<comment><USER3> This mentality always strikes me as odd; like firing an employee when they make a mistake.

The key factor to consider should be "Have they learnt from this?". The outage has happened. It won't unhappen. The question now is, will Google fix the problems that caused this, or don't they care.

<comment><USER2> The 3 mistakes in short succession show that they haven't learnt from this, and I should make provisions for myself.

Somewhat similar to a staff member who has had 3 warnings is obviously not learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FUD, it's only down for "a small subset of users". Works fine for me, both web and IMAP.

<comment><USER5> GMail's Wikipedia article suggests that 100 million people have used GMail. Even "a small subset" could be a substantial number of people.

<comment><USER4> ... But yet the headline made it sound like all of Gmail was down when at best it's a small percentage. When the headline says "Gmail down" and I look over and see that Gmail is in fact not down, it's an incorrect headline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My Gmail is working considerably better than my access to HN recently.

The safest course would be to keep some other email domain, download it locally with whatever email client one prefers (as I have long done) but have everything forwarded to Gmail. That's what I did after a local computer crash hosed my access to email for a while. But now I like accessing my Gmail through Gmail's interface, EXCEPT for the lousy way that Gmail implements adding new names to address lists for mailing to multiple people at once. I've had no service interruptions at all the last few times Gmail service interruptions have been in the news.

<comment><USER7> For those of us who like the gmail interface this seems like a reasonable option. But, you still have to "push" the problem to another provider. Who do you rely on for your 'some other email domain'?

<comment><USER8> Gmail acts as a POP client too, if you want to wrangle with that. It's in the options.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any devs interested in messaging app? - <AUTHOR> My Cofounder and myself are looking for someone to join our team. We already have an app in the app store with positive growth. We are looking for someone to help iterate a rebrand/new features and designs based on user feedback.<p>We are open to explore options whether that be a cofounder role or contract role. This is a great  opportunity at a early stage startup. <comment><USER2> Please let me know what's the best way to contact you, and discuss this further.thanks.

</comment><comment> e-sushi You've got a typo there… "oppritunity" should be "opportunity". #JustSaying</comment>


Google just released a new +1 button design. - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/+1/button/

<comment><USER2> It's really sad to see this company I idolized so much going down this path. It's all about catching up to facebook. Some weird burning desire that has completely gripped Larry Page and put him on this disenchanted path.

With all that capital he has at his disposal, and no need to ever worry about money again: change the world! Focus on those self driving cars, space exploration, bringing the world into the digital age.

Honestly who cares if Zuckerberg has you beat at the most effective way to tag your friends getting drunk, and wasting time at work. Facebook had it's value in making the internet mainstream, but it is no innovator, far from it.</comment>


The History of Silicon Valley: Transistors, Stanford, and Venture Capital - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/founder-playbook/the-history-of-silicon-valley-transistors-stanford-and-venture-capital-6a761f171e9d <comment><AUTHOR> If anyone's from the valley and has any corrections or addition they think are important I'm happy to update it

<comment><USER2> Any particular reason why DARPA isn't mentioned?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah its a three part series. Internet and computers are next.</comment></comment></comment>


What's Coming in Go 1.15 - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/820217/47ed80088c03b18d/ <comment><USER2> > Michael Knysze significantly increased throughput of memory allocation for > large blocks by redesigning the memory allocator's "mcentral" data structure > to reduce lock contention. The new allocation code is more than twice as > fast for blocks of 12KB or larger.

Excellent! Nice to see these sorts of infrastructure enhancements.

</comment><comment><USER3> The fun thing about the Go compatibility promise is that it doesn't work as well as the go developers probably imagine; just last week one of my older Go project was discovered to be broken; wouldn't compile anymore. golang.org/x/crypto was responsible, they used some code that wouldn't work in more modern go compilers anymore. Granted, I had not maintained the project in 3 years but I also had everything vendored just in case go decided to break anything upstream, and the broken parts didn't even touch on anything that the compatibility promise excludes.

I think the Go devs should improve in that section a bit.

<comment><USER4> I had the same issue. The issue was a security one [https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-11840](https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-11840) which required a breaking change to fix so their options where leave everyone vulnerable but could compile or break anyone that uses this code and fix it. I think they made the right choice.

Also golang.org/x/crypto is not a core library so doesn't actually fall under the compatibility guarantee but they seem to try their best not to break it.

<comment><USER3> Neither of those things applied though; I had x/crypto vendored, so it didn't change it's code either and the CVE is unrelated to the actual code that broke (I used blake2b) and again; it was vendored, so my code wouldn't break but be vulnerable.

<comment><USER5> How did vendored code that didn't change break your build?

<comment><USER6> The easiest way to accomplish that is definitely with //go:linkname

You can use a comment of the format '//go:linkname [localname] [method]' to link some function as another one. Notably, this includes unexported private methods in the go runtime and stdlib.

I've seen code in the wild that uses this to grab go's map hash algorithm, get monotonic time, and other things.

The go authors have used this hack themselves in the stdlib often enough because the runtime doesn't expose some knob, and rather than thinking that perhaps other developers may want that knob too, they instead use such hacks, but they also don't support said hacks (because how could you, obviously keeping all private functions stable forever is silly and impossible)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >On Windows, Go 1.15 now generates executables that use address-space layout randomization (ASLR) by default. ASLR uses position-independent code to randomize the addresses of various data areas on startup, making it harder for attackers to predict target addresses and create memory-corruption exploits.

Impressive this is only landing for Windows now after PPP made a spectacle of the lack of ASLR back in 2013. [http://pwning.net/2013/04/21/exploiting-a-go- binary/](http://pwning.net/2013/04/21/exploiting-a-go-binary/)

<comment><USER8> Ehh I agree with you but I also haven't seen an "actual" exploit for a go memory corruption vulnerability outside of POCs.

Like I know it's possible with effort and maybe it was just lack of interest or adoption (like lets be fair its not a browser writing or pdf rendering engine type of language...) so while that situation was not great it never struck me as a burning problem with practical impact in the ecosystem either.

Interested in any pointers if possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are some examples of medium-large Go projects where the code is well- written? By that, I mean code that would make a good example for someone trying to learn the "right" way to do things.

I was briefly learning Go a while back. I'm curious how well gorotuines and channels have held up as building blocks, and how extensively they are used in real projects.

<comment><USER10> These days when I see a fast, reliable CLI tool I think "this has got to be written in Go" and a lot of the time they are. Some examples: the new GitHub CLI, Docker, Hashicorp tools, ngrok (though v2 is not open source), Caddy, the list is quite long. I can't vouch for the quality of that code, but I suspect some of those projects are good starting points. And I've found the Go standard library source to be really helpful (and generally fairly easy to understand).

<comment><USER11> Speaking from some experience, Go is probably the best option these days at "do one thing well" command line tools - the mix of library support, native binaries, and the simple, stable language make it a good fit for a weekend project that opens files, munges strings and pushes them over standard protocols.

When Go has to support a large application that defines a platform in itself, the downsides of the language rise to the forefront, but that level of expression usually isn't entailed in a Unix-style CLI tool.

(Rust also has more potential for performance scaling in this space, but with the "if you have the time for that" kind of caveat.)

<comment><USER12> > Rust also has more potential for performance scaling in this space, but with > the "if you have the time for that" kind of caveat.

When you have a CLI for some network-based service, the network latency is going to be magnitudes larger than the performance differences between Go and Rust anyway. (Or at least in 99% of cases.)

<comment><USER13> some suggestions are that in the future, the I/O latency is going to get very low, network speeds very fast, etc.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM3PhGGllL0&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM3PhGGllL0&feature=youtu.be) [1] [https://www.ece.rice.edu/~willmann/teng_nics_overview.html](https://www.ece.rice.edu/~willmann/teng_nics_overview.html)

<comment><USER12> Unless that 10-gig NIC messes with the speed of light, I don't see it reducing the RTT between me and some server in the US by any significant amount.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A good presentation did the rounds a while ago[0] that does a deeper dive but the main things for us are the performance, smaller binaries and the improvements in tooling.

The one thing I wish they added though? `go new` and have it initialise a new project structure that stopped tiny package syndrome and bizarre Makefiles in repos! [1]

[0] [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1veyF0y6Ynr6AFzd9gXi4...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1veyF0y6Ynr6AFzd9gXi4foaURlgbMxM- tmB4StDrdAM/edit#slide=id.g57812b4045_0_66)

[1] [https://rakyll.org/style-packages/](https://rakyll.org/style-packages/)

<comment><USER10> Re "go new": I think part of the problem with that is that people have quite different ideas of what a good project structure is. It also varies a lot between a simple CLI tool (for which main.go and maybe go.mod is enough) and a large multi-package server project.

Can you explain what you mean by "bizarre Makefiles"? I've never used Makefiles for my (admittedly fairly small) Go projects, because "go build" just works.

<comment><USER14> I've seen a number of projects where the root directory is a load of other folders and then there's a Makefile and it's a kafkaesque nightmare.

I agree on the toplevel `main.go` vs the `./cmd/myapp/main.go` style needing catering for that only comes out as the project evolves... maybe it should be a go vet addition instead :D

<comment><USER15> Go modules are removing the need for much of the Makefile magic. You still have use of a Makefile if you need vendoring or are dealing with non-public branches, but things can be much simpler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _A new time /tzdata package was added to allow embedding a static copy of > the time zone database in executables._

This is a BIG improvement. One of the big benefits of Go is static binaries. Having the TZ data includes will make deploying even easier.

<comment><USER6> The heck? This seems silly, and like an active nuisance. Timezone data changes multiple times each year. You can see this by the tz-announce email dates [0]

Why would I want to have to update recompile and deploy a go binary 2-10 times a year just because Morocco decided to remove DST from one of its regions?

I'd much rather the go authors not encourage me to do something dumb like encode tzdata in a nonstandard un-updateable location in my binary rather than having it in a standardized location that the OS will update for me as appropriate.

[0]: [https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz- announce/](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/)

<comment><USER17> Go will use the system timezone data, this is just a fallback the programmer must _opt-in_.

<comment><USER16> Tz data is not always available (see alpine base image, or scratch). When it is available, it may be out of date. It may never get updated in fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm also pretty happy about what landed in the cryptography packages.

Session ticket keys, which are a major weak link in Forward Secrecy in TLS 1.0-1.2 [0], are now rotated automatically every day, and dropped after 7 days [1]. Session keys are also dropped once they get too old [2], instead of becoming an increasingly powerful Forward Secrecy liability.

The tls.Config.VerifyConnection callback is a much more powerful and usable way to customize peer verification [3].

X.509 root CAs are now extracted on macOS by linking directly against Security.framework with some assembly glue, instead of using cgo [4]. (Warning: awakens Cthulhu.)

crypto/x509 now ignores the 20-year-deprecated Common Name field by default [5] and has a consistent rule about invalid hostnames [6].

crypto/elliptic now provides MarshalCompressed and UnmarshalCompressed for compressed point encodings [7].

The clever TLS 1.3 downgrade canary in the server random is now enforced client side [8].

PrivateKey and PublicKey types implement Equal, giving a consistent method to build type-safe interfaces for them [9].

math/big has a new Int.FillBytes method for fixed size, zero allocation byte serialization [9], which we used all over the crypto packages.

RevocationList and CreateRevocationList were added to crypto/x509 to generate spec compliant CRLs [11].

crypto/ecdsa has two new functions, SignASN1 and VerifyASN1 that operate on encoded signatures instead of big.Ints that everyone was encoding/decoding anyway [12].

Plus some performance, cosmetic, correctness, and documentation improvements! Not a bad cycle overall, even if it made sense to focus on smaller scope tasks for a while.

[0]: [https://blog.filippo.io/we-need-to-talk-about-session- ticket...](https://blog.filippo.io/we-need-to-talk-about-session-tickets/)

[1]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/43f2f5024b](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/43f2f5024b)

[2]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/6ea19bb668](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/6ea19bb668)

[3]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/62a3f2e27c](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/62a3f2e27c)

[4]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/6f52790a20](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/6f52790a20)

[5]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/d65e1b2e41](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/d65e1b2e41)

[6]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/9d1e120c42](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/9d1e120c42)

[7]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/5c13cab36b](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/5c13cab36b)

[8]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/a6c6e59655](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/a6c6e59655)

[9]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/b5f2c0f502](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/b5f2c0f502)

[10]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/c9d5f60eaa](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/c9d5f60eaa)

[11]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/5d47f870a6](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/5d47f870a6)

[12]: [https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/8c09e8af36](https://go.googlesource.com/go/+/8c09e8af36)

<comment><USER19> > Session ticket keys, which are a major weak link in Forward Secrecy in TLS > 1.0-1.2, are now rotated automatically every day, and dropped after 7 days.

Wooooah, that's awesome! Up to now I think only Caddy has been doing this automatically & by default, I'm happy to see the std lib able to offer this too. Maybe we can simplify some of our code base. (Although, on second thought, Caddy can rotate the keys distributed across a cluster so as to improve TLS performance behind load balancers, for example; so we might still need to use our own home-brewed rotation. Which is fine!)

> The tls.Config.VerifyConnection callback is a much more powerful and usable > way to customize peer verification [3].

Also looking forward to using this in Caddy! Right now we use VerifyPeerCertificate which is... fine, and definitely better than without it, but I am sure plenty of users will be happy to have the extra flexibility and added robustness of VerifyConnection.

Everything else looks stellar too -- keep up the good work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a well-written article for lwn subscribers, by HN's very own @benhoyt. If you read lwn, I definitely recommend subscribing; it consistently has high- quality technical content.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was surprised to see ASLR was not enabled by default on Windows. Is enabling ASLR by default a common thing on Windows?

<comment><USER21> It is commonly enabled for C++ compilers, but ASLR defends against attacks that Go code is not generally vulnerable to.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if that is accurate, ASLR defends against quite a range of attacks that are the result of code execution, which AFAIK can still occur in Go, Rowhammer comes to mind here as a universal crack against languages.

There is no downside to activating ASLR either, so I'm not sure why it isn't.

<comment><USER22> Does addr2line still work with ASLR? Because that could be a reason not to.

<comment><USER3> addr2line works depending on the code and compiler/libc. Your libunwind may be able to output relativ code addresses, in which case addr2line will work if you use the stacktrace. GDB should handle this as well. If your c compiler doesn't support it you can just disable compiling PIEs which automatically disables ASLR but that should be reserved for debug builds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Speaking of the future, does anyone here have an idea as to the the time frame when generics could land in a release?

<comment><USER24> An year or two.</comment></comment>


Dear Tech: A letter to the deadbeat teenage son at the end of a tough year - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/tech-as-deadbeat-teenage-son.html <comment><USER2> This is what I like to see from the folks, a bit of gumption! Take some of that gumption, use it to learn a smidgeon about the technology you use every day, and steer it whichever way you want it to go! Take a look at those companies doing annoying crap, and compete against them!

Oh too hard for ya? Well by default that kind of means you're content to let someone else be in charge and to remain a hapless piece of passive audience meat, who takes whatever's dished-out to you. Though it would be nicer for everybody around you if you'd do that more quietly.

Help the homeless! Great idea! It should dovetail nicely with your current efforts. Wait what's that you say, that's _tech 's_ job? You're too busy making the Toyota payment and doing pottery in the basement? Too busy paying for a basement you don't need, in a subdivision nobody cares about, so you can do pottery in it?

Even so, it's good you're finally kicking tech out of the house. I didn't say anything that whole time you were spending every waking moment paying attention to tech, coddling tech, worshipping tech, making tech into the spoiled monster it is today. I just hope you can follow through. Your request for the WiFi instructions doesn't bode well, or indicate a lot of conviction, or speak much to your usefulness as a role model or a man. A real grown-up would say "no tech" and that would mean "no tech" and they wouldn't go asking for the WiFi instructions like a lil' bitch!

</comment><comment><USER3> yeah, okay. as if it's possible for tech to be "kicked out" and "forced to get its shit together". reading this was awkward, I think it encourages looking at products or corporations as a single entity that should have a moral compass or sense of responsibility. if people want to ditch tech, fine, but I wish in these comparisons it'd at least be acknowledged that corporations mainly exist to make money. I suppose it would require a large amount of humility to do that though as it would also be admitting to succumbing to advertising, and being "tricked" into expecting "real life change and support" from a product, or something like that.

Thanks for posting this.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it's quite possible for tech to get kicked out.

Facebook and Google are financially viable because keeping mass profiles and leveraging them for profit is legal at the moment. There's no intrinsic reason it should be.

Uber is regularly kicked out of places, usually with justification. Its business model is to spent huge amounts of money undercutting the taxi industry until it is destroyed and no one has an option left. Then they hike the prices. This ignores the fact that municipalities can just take Uber's drivers under regulated rates and make Uber irrelevant again.

Amazon's AWS is funding the rest of the company in their march to destroy all competition. It's the same model as Uber, but more viable, since you can't just legislate logistics into existence. All it would take is an antitrust action that breaks up Amazon in any way that separates AWS from the rest, or a law that voids Amazon's preferential treatment from carriers, including themselves, making shipping a common carrier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR: The "tech industry" as a general concept does things I don't like and I want everyone to know. Period.

I'm getting really tired of reading stuff like this - endless, tongue-in- cheek, vapid complaining, without any real solutions or call to action. Seemed to be a staple of 2017. I would also like to note how ironic it is for the media to complain about Facebook and Twitter propagating fake news when they're just as bad. For all the complaining about the tech industry, journalism seems just as morally deficient, but journalists are losing their credibility at a faster rate. Insult, meet injury.</comment>


Ask HN: Pitching my idea at Startup School? - <AUTHOR>

So I'm going to London Startup School soon and I want to use this opportunity to talk to some people about my idea and validate it (or convince me it's not worth pursuing, equally valuable). Is it polite to try to start conversations like this or will people think it's selfish to bring up your idea when you've only just met? <comment><USER2> The format I use is:

Read the person's name card and try to understand how to pronounce it. If it's a foreign name, every letter usually should be pronounced as written as otherwise it would not be there.

Hi, ___. What are you building these days? If what they are building is interesting, I ask more questions about it and decline to talk about what I do until I have a good understanding of what they do.

...

Eventually the conversation will turn to you. Now you can say something like "I am building ___ that solves the ___ problem for ___ by _______________________."

This statement should be practiced and fluid. Ideally, you should tie to the other person's business. Try to keep it under 15 seconds. Then stop and do not continue unless the person you are talking to asks you more questions about it.

...

I usually close the conversation with. "I think your ideal prospects are ___. Is that correct? ____ knows me and I'll send her an email about you right now, if that is OK. By the way, do you by chance know anyone who would benefit from using my product today?"

The key is to be able to add value to the other person immediately. You should be genuinely interested in learning more.

Simply categorizing your contacts and interconnecting them when appropriate also creates value. Just be careful to not create irrelevant introductions.

Unless the person you are talking to is representative of the target market, it is unlikely you will get validation. You may get informed of existing competition, which is valuable. I ask for referrals on the spot, but that takes practice to do smoothly.

I will go out of my way to not give you negative feedback. I've slipped a few times and it just made me feel awful. That is why if you wish to be talked out of doing something going to a place full of entrepreneurs is a wrong approach.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it will be pretty much expected that people will be talking about their ideas at Startup School. I'll be there and would be happy to strike up a conversation about that kind of thing.

However you may want to think what you'll actually be asking people or what you want to get out of it. If you're trying to validate your idea - are we even your intended customer?

Alternatively you maybe looking more for some opinions on the technical challenges, to find someone to work with equally excited by the idea, info from people with industry experience, advice on the business side.

Ask the right kinds of questions and hopefully you'll get more than a general 'neat idea' kind of response.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's a very delicate situation. You can definitely try, but its about time, place, and reading their reaction.

Do you have any presentation material? Improvising is very hard to do. Its extremely difficult to convey a complex concept, and there's absolute no way they're going to understand it as well as you do. For this reason, there's no way they'll understand the value of your concept as much as you do.

Find the right venue. If you have an opportunity to give a formal presentation, then prepare for it. If not, you'll have to improvise. You can't demand other's attention, so you'll have to find the right time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yeah it will be hard to find the right times. Usually I'm pretty sure about an idea before I start on it but this one is the first that I'd want to really hear what other programmers have to say about it. Any tips on how else I can go about validating the idea if not just approach people at Startup School?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just do it! yeah, go for it. That's the point of going to startup school, build your network, connect with like minded individuals.</comment>


Google claims trade secret status for hiring information - <AUTHOR> http://www.penipress.com/2011/04/17/google-wont-release-minority-hiring-statistics-claiming-trade-secret/

<comment><USER2> "Since Google is hiring over 6,000 people this year, those picketing there say they want to make sure that their respective groups have a fair shot at being hired."

No, what they are really trying to do is to come up with hiring quotas for their respective groups. Look, Google, Apple & others are already _very_ hard pressed to get enough candidates to interview and hire. I don't think they are in any position to say "Hmm, this guy's a Latino/a, let's pass".

The fact that they have no idea what they are talking about is evident from one of the signs that one of the protesters in the photo is holding up saying "Break Up the 'Whites Only' Club at Google". Jeez, have you ever been in the Googleplex? It cannot be called the `Whites Only Club` by any stretch of the imagination (unless you redefine "white" to include Indians and Asians). The first fact you notice is how many women there are (I heard estimates of >40% in general >10% in engineering, and that's unheard of in a technical company).

Similar arguments apply to Apple (although, admittedly, people are better dressed there, Job's influence?)

</comment><comment><USER3> This part was funny: "Google targets a specific list of schools, she added, and focuses on hiring candidates with a high college grade point average. All of this could be a factor that discriminates against minority groups."

"Minority", I suppose, must be read as "not white or Asian".

</comment><comment><USER4> While I think this is a BS excuse to hide behind(trade secrets, really?), Google has every right to hire only the most qualified applicants it finds. If they have to hire people based on race, how is that not discrimination? These people are advocating racism, as long as it benefits their race.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is a cautionary tale for any company - Try to hire as diverse an organization as possible. At least if you try and you fail you can document that failure (like Cisco has) and folks won't hold it against you.

Or you can be Google and claim that such information is a trade secret. Sigh.

<comment><USER5> Why should you hire for diversity instead of just trying to hire the best? Isn't the goal to eliminate racial and ethnic discrimination rather than change its focus?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, apparently I completely failed to communicate.

You should hire the best folks you can find. Period.

You should do everything you can to avoid missing out on hiring excellent people who are present in groups where finding such people is harder and/or less likely.

If you do both of those things, then there is never an issue with revealing how diverse your hiring is because you're trying to find the top talent regardless of protected class and you've got documentation to back that up.

Personally when I went through interview/hiring training at Google I felt like they did at least said the right things about hiring, so I was disappointed that they would hide behind the 'trade secret' excuse. These are the people that overthrow repressive north African nation states they should be willing to share how they are trying to find the best folks they can.

<comment><USER5> I must have misunderstood your first comment because I agree completely. I don't have any data about it, but I would think that any large tech company would be much more interested in having the best people than they would be in hiring only from a limited pool.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do with excess 2.5" HDDs - <AUTHOR> I have a small pile of notebook hard drives of varying sizes that I'm not sure what to do with.
They work fine. I pulled them out of laptops that I upgraded to SSDs.
Other than turning them into portable hard drives by putting them in an external enclosure, what are some ideas? <comment><USER2> I take my old drives and put them in a RAID1 btrfs volume that serves as large back-up volume consisting of miscellaneous drives. I only need that volume when my main drives fail, and then one other drive in the btrfs volume fails. Seemed like a good idea years ago.

Nowadays after watching the btrfs mailing list, I think the day I have to test the RAID1 redundancy will be like Russian roulette.</comment>


Adventures in Office Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/06/02.html

<comment><USER2> "So if you ever hire an architect and tell him or her to create something cool enough to put in a portfolio to show to potential clients, and you invite the architect to make a beautiful and useful space instead of a cheap and nasty space, the architect will love you and go to the ends of the earth to figure out ways to raise the ceilings another 2 inches."

Sounds a lot like web design/development.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article it is announcing is here: [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/how-hard-could-it-be- ad...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080601/how-hard-could-it-be-adventures- in-office-space.html)

Discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=207005>

</comment><comment><USER4> I really enjoyed reading that. Shed light on the things you do for a small company that few people ever talk about.

Makes me wonder how much revenue they're pulling to be able to afford that.</comment>


Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/408171/artificial-intelligence-is-lost-in-the-woods/?href= <comment><USER2> > A machine with a conscious (simulated) mind can feel wonderful on the first > fine day of spring and grow depressed as winter sets in

No, that's a human perspective, based off our bodily needs for sun, air and nature. It's got nothing to do with conscious AI.

Instead of "consciousness", which is a slippery word, meaning many things to many people, with implications in neurology, physics, AI and religion, we should use the RL framework.

In reinforcement learning, you only need to define 3 things: perception, action and reward. They are clear cut, don't leave so much to interpretation and have direct applications in AI agents and robots; human brains use RL as well.

If we ask ourselves: can we make a general RL agent? Can we master perception, action selection and learning from sparse rewards? Well, it's a whole different game when put in these concrete terms. We don't get lost in qualia, dualism, monism, what it's like to be a bat, hard problem, and other armchair consciousness philosophy concepts.

Perception/action selection/reward is enough to describe consciousness.</comment>


Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 2015/2016: Support in GNU Compiler Collection [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/cauldron2014?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Cauldron14_AVX-512_Vector_ISA_Kirill_Yukhin_20140711.pdf

<comment><USER2> Hm, what's with the legal disclaimer at the beginning and at the end? I know it's for when Intel "lost" the legal battle about AMD for how icc intentionally pessimises for non-Intel CPUs[1], but what does that have to do with gcc? Is this a poisoned gift to free software?

On a different note, I'm excited to see that AVX2 includes broadcasting. Maybe future iterations of g++ will be able to automatically speed up broadcasting operations in GNU Octave!

[https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Broadcas...](https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Broadcasting.html)

The scatter instructions seem interesting for handling Octave's complex arrays as laid out in memory, interleaving real and imaginary parts. This is essentially std::vector<std::complex> in C++. Matlab instead stores each complex part contiguously, essentially std::pair<std::vector<double>, std::vector<double>>.

I have a question: are these vector instructions inherently running in parallel? Do they get spread out over several cores? Sometimes I get the impression that fancy new vectorisations are losing the optimisation race in favour of new tricks to better parallelise. Is that what those conflict detection instructions are for? Is this automatic? Do we really have truly automatic vectorisation?

[1] Intel's excuse is that they cannot guarantee that non-Intel CPUs have the full instruction set, but this is so obviously a lie, as if AMD's architecture were some obscure, undocumented beast that requires the worst possible opcodes.</comment>


How and why to startup a startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoqgAy3h4OM <comment><AUTHOR> As an aspiring startup creator currently working on a project, I got so much value form this first video course in YC's startup school ([https://www.startupschool.org/](https://www.startupschool.org/)). Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, and Dustin Moskovitz, Cofounder of Facebook and Asana, both give succinct, memorable lectures.

Here are some of my takeaways from the course...

From Dustin:

\- Rather than starting a startup, it could be better to join a small or large company with traction (more resources, more reach, better chance of success, potentially equal payout if you join early) \- Starting a startup is fucking hard (long hours, not glamorous, high chance of failure) \- You should only start a startup if you "can't not do it" (think of yourself 30 years from now -- will you be saying to yourself, "Wow, I should have given that thing a real shot?") \- You should only start a startup if you have passion and aptitude (you're the best person to do it, you want to do it, and you'd be depriving the world of something incredibly valuable if you didn't do it) \- To not fail, you need to be persistent in finding new ideas and accept when one idea isn't catching on with the market

From Sam:

\- What's on your side as a founder is that it can be very expensive for investors to write off crazy ideas \- Machine learning and A.I. are going to be the next big things (like the Internet, smartphone, etc) \- It's easier to start a hard company than an easy company because you attract a lot of great talent and interest when you have a big idea \- Cofounders are good, but only have a cofounder that you have a shared history with \- A cofounder that shares your vision is better than a cofounder with the skills you need \- When you start a startup, go niche/narrow -- start with a smaller market that will really love you \- Get to know your users really well (visit them, ask them hard questions, spend the day with them) \- Only hire good people; don't hire mediocre people just because you need people now ("the team you build is the company you build") \- Don't give up -- ever -- if you believe in what you're building and people want it (someone applied to YC seven times before getting accepted) \- You have an obligation to yourself and your investors to take care of your health</comment>