An Introduction to Probabilistic Programming - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10756 <comment><USER2> I was introduced to probabilistic programming by Frank Wood and Brooks Paige at DARPA's PPAML program, and they are excellent teachers. Highly recommend this resource! Anglican is a great language embedded in Clojure so this is particularly good for those on JVM

</comment><comment><USER3> How does this compare to probmod[1] and webppl[2]?

[1] [https://probmods.org/](https://probmods.org/)

[2] [http://dippl.org/](http://dippl.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://probabilistic-programming.org/](http://probabilistic-programming.org/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I always feel like I'm missing something deeper when I hear / read about "Probabilistic Programming" \- am I wrong in thinking that it's a well thought way of expressing Bayesian Models through the language of OOP? I always feel like the marketing side of this is hinting at something greater, but I haven't seen any deeper connections past a good design choice.

<comment><USER6> Having a way to express Bayesian models is a requirement for probabilistic programming but that's not the "point".

Representing a Bayesian model in some language is not useful by itself. Being able to do efficient inference without requiring the programmer to implement an inference algorithm for each model they want to specify is the point of probabilistic programming.

<comment><USER5> I see that, so I should be thinking of the use of the phrase "probabilistic programming" to be more analogous to "Nonlinear programming" than to "Functional programming".

<comment><USER7> Or maybe more analogous to "differentiable programming" or "logic programming": a style of programming that supports a broader range of operations than "running."

Also, it's not quite that you are using a DSL to encode Bayesian models traditionally represented in other ways; you are using a full-featured programming language to express a set of models larger than the set that is easy to express using existing formalisms. (That said, there are also some models that are easier to express using those other formalisms; you can think of them as being DSLs in a Turing-complete probabilistic programming language, which make it easier to express certain limited classes of programs.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> can some one give a quick tldr of probabilístic programming? is it a convenient way to use Bayes (update priors) or is there more to it?

<comment><USER7> "Updating priors" is quite complex, and arguably describes every interesting task you'd want to do as a learner, reasoner, analyst, etc. One view of probabilistic programming languages is that they allow you to express your priors—i.e., uncertain beliefs about the world—as programs, and help you to answer all sorts of interesting questions in the contexts of those programs.

As a concrete example, you might write a program expressing your beliefs about how the scenes you see come to be: some random objects are placed at some random positions, lighting sources are placed, and then a rendering algorithm converts that scene description into the light intensities perceived by your eye. If you write this up in a probabilistic programming language, you can then ask questions like: supposing I see this image, what are some likely scenes (positions and shapes of objects) that might have produced it? How does that distribution over scenes change if I know that the light source was here, or that there was a small chair there, or that my vision isn't that great and I should trust the image's pixels a little less? Section 1.3 of the introduction linked above lists many more applications for which probabilistic programming turns out to be useful: breaking CAPTCHAs, constrained procedural graphics, automatic program induction/synthesis, recursive multi-agent reasoning... and, as the authors write at the end of this section, "the list goes on."

Of course, solving the inference task in full generality, for any program and query that the user might write, is very difficult; you can design pathological cases where it boils down to solving the halting problem, and is therefore uncomputable. Different languages take different approaches to addressing this difficulty. They might limit you to writing certain kinds of programs for which a limited class of inference algorithms can always be made efficient; they might try to plan a fancy inference algorithm based on the specifics of your model; they might just expect you to learn which programs will be tractable and which won't; or they might provide abstractions that make it possible for you to safely experiment with writing new inference algorithms (or combinations of existing ones) specialized for your use case. Probabilistic programming is still a young field and this is an area of active research.

<comment><USER9> > supposing I see this image, what are some likely scenes (positions and > shapes of objects) that might have produced it?

Sounds like there exists a device where I can write some program, run it over some inputs, pass the program and the outputs to the device and have it magically infer the possible inputs. This is basically logical programming. Then we add a probabilistical layer on top of that.

Maybe the probabilistic part hides some significant simplifications. Even relatively simple programs are nontrivial to express logically. See, for example, the pure treatment of arithmetic in [http://okmij.org/ftp/Prolog/Arithm/arithm.pdf](http://okmij.org/ftp/Prolog/Arithm/arithm.pdf).

What kind of programs are practically feasible with Probabilistic Programming?

<comment><USER7> Great connection. Here's one way of looking at it: when you add stochasticity to your program, you make it easier to search the space of possible solutions (and you also relax the criteria for what it means to be "a solution").

In (deterministic) logic programming, the default search strategy is backtracking. We search the space of "inputs that could have produced this output" exhaustively. Each set of inputs we try either works or doesn't, and doesn't tell us anything about whether similar inputs will behave similarly.

In probabilistic programming, we can use the information we have about probability densities to tell whether we're on the right track; as we search, we can tell if we're getting "warmer" or "colder." Suppose I have the simple probabilistic program:

       def f():
         a = normal(0, 1) # mean 0, stddev 1
         b = normal(0, 1)
         c = normal(a+b, 0.1)
         return c

In this generative model, I choose two random numbers, add them together, and then pick a third number very close to their sum. This could be thought of as a probabilistic version of the deterministic program f(a, b) = a+b. If I want to "invert" it, and condition on c=2, say, I can walk around the space of a priori likely (a, b) values, "scoring" them based on how likely "c=2" would have been given the particular (a, b) under consideration. The tight bell curve around the value c=2 can be seen as an implicit "loss function," telling us how good or bad the current solution is. This is very different from a logic programming approach, which would be able to exactly invert the + operation; but as you pointed out, it's nontrivial to formulate `+` correctly as a logic program, whereas here, we are free to use an imperative implementation of `+` (or much more complex deterministic operations, like a 3D renderer).

There is research in probabilistic logic programming languages, which can be seen as combining some of the strengths of both paradigms, though that's not covered by the introduction linked in the OP.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Drums of Cyberwar - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/drums-of-cyberwar/ <comment><USER2> Did I ask you to put my electricity supply on the internet? No: I did not. I did not ask SCADA to go on the web. I didn't ask hospitals, power nets, gas supply, airlines, police to do this.

Nobody asked for the critical infrastructure to be exposed and made brittle. A bunch of turkeys just thought it was a good idea.

<comment><USER3> I'm very happy that medical data can be transferred digitally some places though. It's taken 6+ months to transfer records when moving.

<comment><USER4> That can be done between federated EPIC EHR systems using their API endpoints without exposing those endpoints to the public internet (either over VPN or dedicated lines). With that said, the API endpoints _are_ exposed for rebranded EPIC mobile apps to interface with the EHR systems operated by health systems (for consumer access), as well as Apple Health (which can OAuth to EPIC).

I don't know how Apple Health is pulling data in from the VA health system [1] (one would assume an API of some sort), but I plan on exploring it soon.

[1] [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/health-records-on- iph...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/health-records-on-iphone-now- available-to-veterans-across-the-us/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How many paragraphs, but no mention of the agar on which this is all growing - the incompetents connecting all of this Swiss cheese to the Internet in the first place. It's like if there were a spate of car break ins because everyone in a neighborhood got complacent with leaving electronics on their passenger seats. But then rather than the police cautioning people to tidy up, they branded the trend "autowar" while seeking federal assistance for their novel problem.

The Internet, by its very foundation, has always been best regarded as an environment of hostile noise. Creating direct communication between people in different countries fosters mutual understanding and peace, but requires a reliance on technical laws to cross jurisdictions. The people beating these "drums" are simply looking to avoid that technical responsibility by imposing their jurisdiction onto everyone else. These are ultimately the same destructive warmongers that have traditionally plagued humanity, setting their sights on subjugating the latest frontier.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/drums-of- cyberwa...](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/drums-of-cyberwar/)

"a cybersecurity researcher .. demonstrated .. the easy availability of the .. unsecured access points of the industrial control system — the ICS — of a wastewater treatment plant not far from my home in Vermont."

Have these people ever given consideration to not connecting their SCADA units directly to the Internet.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/20/slammer_worm_crashe...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/20/slammer_worm_crashed_ohio_nuke/)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/16/power_grid_cybersec...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/16/power_grid_cybersecurity/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Good book. Covers the same ground as a number of other ones, but has some new information and he interviewed more technical people than most of these books do. If you aren't familiar with this area at all it would be a good place to start.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Took over the facility's automated controllers and caused the centrifuges to self-destruct."

I have a problem with the truth of this statement

<comment><USER7> It's all pretty well documented in a wide variety of sources, but if you want the definite read check out "Countdown to Zero Day" by Kim Zetter. Lots of technical information about how Stuxnet/Olympic Games actually worked. A good book as well.

<comment><USER9> I think they are questioning the "self-destruct" claim.

My understanding is that the aim was to have the centrifuges return erroneous information rather than obvious sabotage like self destruction.

<comment><USER10> Wasn't the idea that the centrifuge would spin in a way that causes premature failure, but the controller display would instead show it spinning at the correct speed? Depending on how you interpret the meaning of the word "erroneous" this could align with what you're saying.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Navient CEO: The student loan crisis we should work together to solve - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@JackRemondi/the-student-loan-crisis-we-should-work-together-to-solve-8629b800de89 <comment><USER2> Stop treating all student loans as equal. A loan to study humanities should have a higher interest rate than a loan to study mechanical engineering or become a doctor.

Charge rates based on the expected future cash flows, taking into account unemployment rates by degree, and kids will sort themselves out by choosing a field of study in-line with their risk appetite.

</comment><comment><USER3> whats the student loan crisis?</comment>


General Mattis, Reflecting on Iraq and Afghanistan - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-meaning-of-their-service-1429310859

<comment><USER2> Not much of a reflection if American military leaders cannot see and will not state that these two wars were horrific and immoral -- sacrificing thousands of young Americans without serving the interests of the American people, while paving the way for radical enemies of freedom such as Iran and ISIS.</comment>


Ask HN: What kind of office do you have? - <AUTHOR>

So... long story short, I'm finally getting my own office.  That's kind of sweet, I know, but want some ideas on how I should pimp it before I move in.
What kind of office do you have?  Are you facing the door or away from it?  Do you stand?  Dim lighting or bright?  Couch or none?  Music?  Plants, aquarium?  NC or NO doors?  What rocks your boat?
Thanks for the advice!
P.S. I've been in a cube, and also doubled up before. Of course, I hope next up is a home office :) <comment><USER2> I'm facing the door (normally open), and not facing the window (which overlooks the Rockies). When I faced the window, I found I didn't look at the monitor, so facing away at least lets me get work done. I have 2 bookcases, one full, the other one getting there. I leave the shades open until about 1pm when I close them because the direct sunlight makes everything unreadable. There are 3 chairs, a whiteboard and another desk (which is unoccupied, and with a hiring freeze is very unlikely to ever get occupied).

Because of a bad experience getting laid off at a previous job (if I hadn't tailgated someone else in, I never would have been able to get my personal books and stuff), I normally don't keep more posessions at the office than I can carry out by myself (meaning no aquarium, or other bulky stuffs), and just books.

<comment><USER3> Interesting comment about not facing the window -- I don't have an office, but I've heard many people say that having their computer in front of a window is good because looking back and forth between their computer and whatever is outside the window helps to prevent eye strain.

<comment><USER4> _helps to prevent eye strain._

I couldn't back this up without looking into it more... But I think the exercise also helps prevent/reduce/stall/mitigate short-sightedness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From what I've seen people like facing the door...

I remember I once got the choice window desk in a large office (very large - was actually a trading floor of sorts).

Whenever I came in on weekends I'd sit with my back to a massive, empty open space. It didn't feel like an issue when there were people around during the week - but when it was just me it really creeped me out. Eventually I swapped with a location that didn't have it's back to the open space.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I thought about completely facing the door, but mainly because I don't like people staring at my screen when they walk past. However, I can also imagine getting extremely distracted by people walking past all the time. There are people who sit at a 45 degree angle from facing the door, but I feel that with that I would be both distracted and have my screen looked at by passerbys.</comment></comment>


Content Is King (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20010126005200/http:/www.microsoft.com/billgates/columns/1996essay/essay960103.asp <comment><USER2> > For the Internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work. > The long-term prospects are good, but I expect a lot of disappointment in > the short-term as content companies struggle to make money through > advertising or subscriptions. It isn't working yet, and it may not for some > time.

And that was back in 1996..

<comment><USER3> 22 years later, we still don't have a good way to pay for content!

<comment><USER4> I think we do - advertising is still a perfectly legitimate way to pay for 'free' content., plus subscriptions where they make sense.

The current problem isn't that we can't or won't pay, or we can't or won't accept advertising. It's that each generation of adtech becomes more and more user-hostile until we're forced to fight back.

So the popup became the pop-under, and devolved into popup bombs until browsers were forced to act. Tracking has gone from associating an ad-view with its context, to growing that context across their entire ad network until they've profiled exactly what demographics and markets you fit into, and browsers are starting to fight back.

It's not that we won't accept advertising. It's that advertising is in a constant race to the bottom. And I think - I hope - we're about hitting the bottom of the current generation of adtech.

<comment><USER5> No, advertising is inherently problematic, and always has been.

* It's intrusive.

* It's distracting.

* It promotes a host of anti-usability features

* It's creepy, and you're creeping me out.

* Ads themselves price-discriminate -- though how and when I can never be certain

* The mechanisms of advertising networks pose security issues

* The goods and services which are most highly advertised are those which I'm least inclined to buy.

* It's not relevant.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24107v/forbes_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24107v/forbes_asks_why_do_programmers_hate_advertising/)

Adding to the above, from four years ago, I've since realised that advertising:

* Promotes crap content.

* Kills quality content.

* Undermines truth and liberal democracy. Supports and sustains demagoguery, fascism, and institutional oppression.

See Dwight McDonald, "A Theory of Mass Culturei" ([https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...](https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDonald_- _A_Theory_of_Mass_Culture.pdf)) (1953) (PDF), Hannah Arendt, _The Origins of Totaltarianism ([http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=arendt%20origins%20tota...](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=arendt%20origins%20totalitarianism)), and Gerry Mander's _Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television* ([http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Mander+arguments+elimin...](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Mander+arguments+elimination+television&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def)), for starters.

Hamilton Holt's excellent 1909 lecture, "Commercialism and Journalism", available from the Internet Archive, addresses most of the modern complaints against advertising, at a time when it was just beginning to massively re- shape (and, to be fair, enable) the modern media landscape.

[https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt](https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The marketplace of ideas idealism is interesting. It seems to crop up every now and then as the aspirational model for how ideas should propagate especially with technological mediation. But I'm not sure how valid it is, given that the reasoning is by definition circular (that the best idea is the most popular and the most popular idea is the best).

But either way, maybe the world _would_ be better if content wasn't free, if it wasn't trivial and inexpensive to artificially inflate access to attention. As it stands our "marketplace of ideas" is at best a market for lemons.

When did we go from the shiny, utopian visions to this advert-overloaded cyberpunk future of attention hackers [1] and panoptic sousveillance?

[1] [https://points.datasociety.net/hacking-the-attention- economy...](https://points.datasociety.net/hacking-the-attention- economy-9fa1daca7a37)

</comment><comment><USER7> > A major reason paying for content doesn't work very well yet is that it's > not practical to charge small amounts. The cost and hassle of electronic > transactions makes it impractical to charge less than a fairly high > subscription rate.

> But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content > providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you > decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won't be writing a check or > getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You'll just click on what you want, > knowing you'll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.

> This technology will liberate publishers to charge small amounts of money, > in the hope of attracting wide audiences.

> Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of > ideas, experiences, and products-a marketplace of content.

I wonder what happened to the future of 1996..

<comment><USER8> PayPal and credit card companies made paying online easier than the various micro-payment companies could, but weren't interested in the same business model.

<comment><USER9> There's still the model of sending content via MMS to smart phones (or even dumb phones) with carrier billing. Yes the one that has been used for selling custom ringtones in the 1990s. With Android's stagefreight bug a couple years ago Google managed to put it out of consideration such that people must go to app stores instead. But carrier billing has always been the obvious native payment method on the mobile web where telcos already have your details and a customer relationship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "But to be successful online, a magazine can't just take what it has in print and move it to the electronic realm. There isn't enough depth or interactivity in print content to overcome the drawbacks of the online medium.

If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines."

Bill clearly didn't consider that the 'drawbacks of the online medium' would be eliminated by everyone having a computer in their pocket. I pay for online- only subscriptions to The Economist and The New York Times, and these apps are essentially just electronic copies of their paper cousins.

Bill also seems to have missed the possibility of _not_ producing content but instead acting as a platform for others to produce content. The network effects of such platforms have led to wildly profitable enterprises such as YouTube, Facebook and Spotify. Given Microsoft's own network effects, it's strange that Bill didn't consider this angle.

<comment><USER11> Before search engines and open source CMSes were widely adopted, it was reasonable to expect that basic news sites were going to be insanely valuable. The barriers to entry were high but the reward was now exponentially higher with the global reach potential

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > A major reason paying for content doesn't work very well yet is that it's > not practical to charge small amounts. The cost and hassle of electronic > transactions makes it impractical to charge less than a fairly high > subscription rate.

> But within a year the mechanisms will be in place that allow content > providers to charge just a cent or a few cents for information. If you > decide to visit a page that costs a nickel, you won't be writing a check or > getting a bill in the mail for a nickel. You'll just click on what you want, > knowing you'll be charged a nickel on an aggregated basis.

To think this practice still isn't widespread 22 years later...!

<comment><USER13> It is more possible now to do though thanks to cryptocurrencies.

The brave browser in particular has built in micropayments feature.

[https://brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/](https://brave.com/introducing- brave-payments/)

<comment><USER14> Cryptocurrencies don't solve practically any problem that a MYSQL server can't solve

<comment><USER15> They're trustless and borderless, and if something like Lightning Network works out, would be a great tool for microtransactions like the ones mentioned here.

It'd be much easier to get a bunch of sites to use a decentralized currency than have someone's payment service on a "MySQL server", not to mention that cryptocurrencies have a natural equilibrium for payment fees, while such a service would only be looking to squeeze out as much fees as possible from this theoretical new way of paying for content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This was before p2p and user contributed content

alternate article: Content is not King

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18050621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18050621)

<comment><USER17> Yup I find the odlyzko article much more informative and prescient.

See for example recent article on front page here yesterday(?) about the music industry now making a fraction of its previous money. Or even the old numbers paling in comaprison to Google Facebook Amazon - information, social connection, and buying shit.

The content industry is just not that big, $$-wise, and never has been. Humans are social animals, it wins out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> At any given moment there usually seem to be one or two New York Times articles on the HN front page, which I assume means a reasonable proportion of us are subscribers.

I don't really see what's wrong with the subscription / paywall model, other than it means letting go of "information wants to be free" dogma and admitting Rupert Murdoch was right about something. At this point it seems preferable to the ad-driven business model.

<comment><USER19> One issue that is not addressed by the subscription model is the subsidizing effect that the ad-based model has:

The finance professional who lives in New York has very valuable page views. The African school girl does not. Yet, through advertising their values are averaged. The affluent subsidize the poor without even knowing it.

Putting content behind a pay-wall reduces this effect and creates an informational disparity that will only broaden the gap of equality between the two.

The New York finance professional just has to decide that the subscription is "worth" paying. The African school girl cannot make this same decision.

<comment><USER20> For me this is the _only_ positive aspect of our ad-based Internet. It allows people with no money or means to use it - be it a poor African girl, or just me when I was a kid - to access the same information everyone else can. If we could solve that somehow, then killing off Internet advertising would immediately improve the world.

<comment><USER21> Libraries solve that need, so if there's a way to help fund that type of initiative, especially if it already exists, we should all promote it aggressively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not the exact topic, but related - a recent opinion I blogged about, related to recent experiences working news-media -- [https://weblog.cenriqueortiz.com/general/2018/08/14/in- media...](https://weblog.cenriqueortiz.com/general/2018/08/14/in-media-and- journalism-content-is-king-but/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Remarkably prescient

</comment><comment><USER5> The more often I see this piece, the more I'm impressed by how poorly it's aged, the errors it contains, and how much ignorance and/or covert attempts at media monopolisation it reveals.

Beginning with the title: though often attributed to Gates, the phrase probably originates with Viacom's Sumner Redstone, a man whose wealth and fortune came not from content by by distribution -- control over content.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kums8SGXHoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kums8SGXHoo)

[http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=a0R7b5b](http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=a0R7b5b)

Information and markets are a poor match. Market pricing works best where goods are uniform (either individually or on aggregate average), their qualities are readily determined (or again tend to average out well), where the fixed costs of production are low and marginal costs of production high (relative to one another), and externalities, both positive and negative, are small relative to market price.

Information goods violate virtually all these assumptions.

* Quality is highly variable.

* Quality assessment is difficult, and often frustrated by other factors.

* Quality isn't, and often cannot, be known in advance.

* Variance of individual instances is high enough that averages rarely suffice.

* Fixed costs of production are high, particularly for research, also to an extent for selection, review, and editing.

* Variable costs of production (e.g., publication) are low.

* Information goods typically have very high positive externalities -- they benefit those who don't directly consume them. Occasionally they have high negative externalities -- e.g., smallpox, "superflu", advertising, or weapons research.

David Brin is amongst those who've argued for micropayments. He, along with others, is wrong.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/)

Nick Szabo, Clay Shirky, and Andrew Odlyzko have all argued this point better than I.

 _Successful_ media payment systems tend to be:

* Subscription or serial based.

* Bundle based.

* Patronage based.

(That is: they look a hell of a lot like a Viacom cable or Microsoft Office 365 service plan, not a micropayments scheme.)

The idea that content creators should be paid _by the piece_ is another frequently-iterated myth. The purpose of compensation _is to enable existence_ , and the intermittent and happenstance reward of creative activity is notorious for failing at this. Historically, solutions have tended toward patronage, independent wealth, control over a production venue (as with Shakespeare and his New Globe Theatre), or other forms of live performance in which the ticket booth serves as a literal gateway between audience and performer at which a toll may be levied. More recently, the notion of generally-supported creativity through public support, paid in taxes, has come into vogue, as with the UK's BBC and a small fraction of US works.

Adam Smith argued against piecework:

 _Workmen, on the contrary, when they are liberally paid by the piece, are very apt to overwork themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years.... We do not reckon our soldiers the most industrious set of people among us. Yet when soldiers have been employed in some particular sorts of work, and liberally paid by the piece, their officers have frequently been obliged to stipulate with the undertaker, that they should not be allowed to earn above a certain sum every day, according to the rate at which they were paid. Till this stipulation was made, mutual emulation and the desire of greater gain frequently prompted them to overwork themselves, and to hurt their health by excessive labour._

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8)

The notion that improved network speeds has been soundly refuted by experience. It turns out that William Stanley Jevons was right: reducings costs of a good or service (here, the time cost of information transfer) _only serves to increase the consumption (or production) of that good._ Or, in this case, bad. Today's webpages rival Gates's 1990s-era operating systems in _both_ data throw-weights _and_ capabilities as malware-distribution and surveillance-enabling systems.

[http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm)

If you want to gain something from this essay, invert it completely.</comment>


Google the way it's supposed to be - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=all

<comment><USER2> I must be the only one who likes the new Google interface.

<comment><USER3> Am I the only one who's been seeing the new interface for several months now?

I only saw it in one of my browsers, so I figured they were doing a slow rollout, but it sounds like everyone else has been taken by surprise by the new interface, while I figured it was public knowledge long ago.

<comment><USER4> Nope, me too. I've had it for a few weeks. Don't like it much, wastes space, but it's not the end of the world. Oddly enough, the old look is showing up for me now- I'd been using the new look in this browser for weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be happy with new design if it either hides the sidebar by default or gives me all the options by default. On most of searches, I see only 'Everything' and 'More' options. I'm already seeing 'Everything' on my search, what's the point of always showing the bar when I have to click once to see all options, making it entirely pointless.

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone actually direct their browser to "google.com"? I always type the search query in the address bar, then I only ever see search results.

<comment><USER7> If you use Chrome, you can easily direct Google to use the old user interface for search results pages.

Go to preferences -> Default Search -> Manage -> Add a new search engine

The enter this as the search URL "[http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=%s](http://www.google.com/search?hl=all&q=%s) (enter whatever for name and keyword) and make it the default search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just use Keyboard Shortcuts experiment (<http://www.google.com/experimental/>), which hasn't been updated to a new version. I can't image searching without it.

<comment><USER9> Same here. I'm hoping that enough other people are hooked that someone will create a Firefox extension for it.

<comment><USER10> Give it some time. The keyboard shortcuts experiment was disabled because it didn't work with the new interface and there wasn't time to fix it, but there's some attention being put into updating it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a way to generate a url for a particular query? I have a homepage with a bunch of search boxes.

Incidentally, anyone know if there is a way to generate a url for a Twitter search? The one I had been using stopped working recently.

<comment><USER12> Like this?

[http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=all#hl=all&q=this](http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=all#hl=all&q=this)

<http://twitter.com/#search?q=this>

<comment><USER11> I'm having trouble making an html form that will generate the request Google seems to need. Do you know what a form would have to look like?

The Twitter url doesn't work for me, incidentally. I get a Twitter search page but with no query or search results.

<comment><USER10> The only thing Google needs is the q parameter:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com%20g...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com%20google)

You just need a form with action="<http://www.google.com> and a text input of name "q", assuming you only care about English-only.

<comment><USER11> I'm not trying to generate an ordinary Google search. I'm trying to generate one with the clean search results pages Google had before the redesign, which you can get from the search page linked to in the OP:

<http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=all>

My question is how to make a web form that produces the same results as the page above.

<comment><USER10> [http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com%20g...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com%20google&hl=all)

i.e. put a hidden input with a hl=all in the form.

(I make no warranties about this hack continuing to work past next week.)

<comment><USER11> That works. Thank you so much! What a relief.

        <form action="http://google.com/search" method=get>
        <input type=text value="" name=q size=30>
        <input type=submit value="Go">
        <input name=hl type=hidden value="all">
        </form>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like having the option of seeing more recent results, particularly the past year. The new layout requires more clicking to get that, and I keep forgetting which of the ambiguously names side menus I need to click to get it.

And I see that clicking on the posted link has now changed the default appearance of Google every time I use it. :(

</comment><comment><USER14> Honestly as long as I get my relevant, quick search results I don't really care that much. Obviously it is also important to have a reasonable UI that stays out of your search result; none of the design changes that Google have been through is disruptive enough for me to complain. There might be minor annoyances, but its still much much better than the second and third best options out there.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's still missing the dictionary links to word meanings for the query on the results page.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find the left sidebar annoying and very rarely use it. I wish there was a feature do enable/disable the sidebar like in the old interface. Other than this, I love the new visual tweaks.

</comment><comment><USER17> I like the design. So let me complain about something else: mailing- list/forum/newsgroup archivers. For instance, search on a certain type of error message, which as a developer I frequently do, and the first couple pages of results are littered with these.

Example: [http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=python+441+Art...](http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=python+441+Article+has+no+body)

I wish they would do 2 things:

1\. Make sure the original message -- say from the original mailing list, newsgroup, or forum -- is listed first. Not necessarily #1, but above all the scrapers.

2\. Consolidate the archivers (mail-archive.com, derkeiler.com, pubbs.net, etc.) into a single entry, perhaps with sublistings or something.

Now where's the Google suggestion box?

<comment><USER10> <http://www.google.com/quality_form>

But yes, we know. There are Googlers that read HN, you know. :-)

<comment><USER17> Hmmm. I got a server error. But it sounds like the problem is recognized. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the one good thing about the google design change is that it may open the door a little bit for other search engines with different interfaces. The fact that we all like the old google design so much show how much everyone has gotten used to it.

<comment><USER19> It opens up the door for a competitor with the same design as the old google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anybody else consider the new page number highlights less usable and intuitive than the old ones?

For example, on the old version of the site, navigating to Page 2 highlights the second 'o' in red, and the number 2 in red.

On the redesigned site the same scenario shows a number 2 with the same color as the other numbers and bold as its only distinguishing attribute.

At a glance I find it harder to quickly identify the current page, and I suppose this would give less experienced users even more trouble.

<comment><USER21> It'd be interesting to know how many users click past page 1.

My behavior is more usually to look at page 1, and if what I'm looking for isn't there, adjust the search terms.

I think the new numbers are pretty easy to see though.

<comment><USER22> I have my homepage set to <http://google.com/advanced_search?num=100>. The num=100 makes the select box default to 100 results per page. I've been using this for years; I loathe pagination. In the past (let's say the Geocities era), it wasn't rare for me to click through to pages 2 and 3, even when showing 100 results per page.

Aside: I _swear_ there used to be an option on the Google home page for a (possibly very brief) time circa 1999–2000 that allowed you to select the number of results per page. But the Wayback Machine makes it appear otherwise, because a cursory glance at the archives shows that the select box only appeared pre-2000 on google.stanford.edu. But I don't think I ever googled from that domain. I might be wrong on the last point, though. There's absolutely no way I'm wrong about the select box appearing on the home page, though, because the removal of it was the entire reason I began clicking through to "Advanced Search", so that I could change the value to 100.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't know if it says something about me or Google's corporate culture, but I have absolute faith that any change Google make is for the better. After reading all the "41 shades of blue" type stories, I struggle to believe that they would implement a change of any significance without very strong data, let alone a complete redesign of their core product. On an instinctual level, I feel that if Google's design clashes with my assumptions then my assumptions are probably wrong.

<comment><USER19> I think I agree with you for the most part. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt until about 3 months have passed. If after three months I still feel that they've done something wrong then I'll start to believe it. The reason why I've listed elsewhere in this thread, when change to something familiar happens we will have a 'knee jerk' response that is conservative, even if in the long term we'll change our minds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The cursor in the search text box is not vertically centered (Firefox). Can't take my eyes off whenever I visit the page.

</comment><comment><USER25> My only problem is the left justification of search results. On a wide-screen monitor, it's a little awkward.

</comment><comment><USER26> Quit Safari

Open Terminal

        cd /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/

        cp Safari Safari.bak

        perl -pi -e 's/rls=en/hl=all/g' Safari

        cd ~/Library/Safari/

        mv SearchProviders.plist.signed SearchProviders.plist.signed.bak

</comment><comment><USER27> Really miss the simplicity of the old Google. Hope they don't go the way of Yahoo :/

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't understand why Google, and many other companies, change things that aren't broken. First they did it with Youtube, and now with their SERPS. Can someone explain the point of that? All it does is piss off users.

<comment><USER29> I happen to think that the new YouTube is much more consistent than the one of the past.

<comment><USER30> It's consistent, but consistently plastic. I feel like I have no hope of figuring out how the site works except by trial-and-error, because everything looks encapsulated in white plastic that might cover what's just underneath.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My gmail address is shown on the top right. Thank you to remind me that I am tracked, I don't see the connection between the search interface and my gmail account I created just to pin down my name.

</comment><comment><USER32> It would be very nice, if it can be centered vertically too!

</comment><comment><USER33> When do people here go to the Google home page? I only use Chrome and Opera so I never need to visit a url to do a web search.</comment>


Derek Powazek: Pixish Closing 10/31 (What He Learned About Community, User Generated Content, and Launching) - <AUTHOR> http://powazek.com/posts/1370

<comment><USER2> _In nine months we only grew to about 5,000 members_

sigh...My startup has been running for almost 2 years and I've only got 4000 members. Still, we're profitable now, so I try to focus on revenue and not think too much about raw membership.

Still, I wonder why someone would just shut it down? A site with a community of 5000 is surely worth something to someone. Sell it to a friend for a beer or two?

<comment><AUTHOR> If I had to guess he's shutting it down in large majority because of the tiresome spec work debate

<comment><USER3> Powazek mentions "We underestimated the "spec work" issue." You mention "the tiresome spec work debate". Not having followed Pixish previously, can someone give a nutshell summary of this debate/festering issue?

<comment><USER4> "Spec work" refers to speculative work. A client will ask one or more designers to each submit one or more designs with no guarantee of getting paid unless their work is selected as the winning bid.

It should not be confused with pro bono work, where the work is unpaid but the relationship between client and designer is transparent.

The practice is by no means limited to the design industry, but due to the nature of work involved, is where it is most rampant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've never met Derek (we've exchanged emails), but I feel a certain kinship. His previous startup was <http://jpgmag.com>. The real lesson for me is that there's a lot of luck in every startup. You can do everything right, and still fail, or do everything wrong, and still succeed.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have to admit, until now I hadn't heard of Pixish ... and I work in the photo/imaging space.

Out of curiousity, is Derek on HN? What is to become of Pixish's assets and IP? I know people that could leverage this platform.</comment>


Norway businessman's wife kidnapped for ransom - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46808777 <comment><AUTHOR> Payment of €9m equivalent demanded in Monero. Might this be a sign of things to come?</comment>


Ruby on Rails website defaced? - <AUTHOR> http://rubyonrails.org/

<comment><USER2> More likely they let it expire or the registrar messed up. (DHH claims the latter: <http://twitter.com/d2h/status/1590279638>)

(Speculation: Why don't US registrars usually offer autorenewal? Here in Europe, especially Germany, it is unthinkable that my domain would just expire. I get auto-renew by default, no matter how I pay. Conversely, with the US servers and domains we hold, sometimes people don't even get payment reminders _before_ the expiration date. Only when it's too late do you get a notification. I find that strange.)

<comment><USER3> I've always wondered how people could forget their domains. I get at least 7-8 reminders for my domains prior to their expiry, and that's even on domains set to auto-renew. It didn't occur to me it was a difference between European/US registrars.

<comment><USER2> Friends of me had it happen with web hosters, server housing and domain registrars. When they were just starting out and forgot to tell the provider to get the monies from their credit card, or whatever, they would just disconnect the server or park the domain. Happened a few times and is really annoying. I had assumed it to be a function of the far better giro system here in Europe, but since a few months I'm paying most things by regular credit card bookings instead of bank transfer, and it still works.

Maybe people just need to ask for and demand automated payment?

<comment><USER4> the fact that it happened twice I think is telling though. At that point they have only themselves to blame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not a hack, but a registrar issue.

<comment><USER6> Parent is correct: <http://twitter.com/d2h/status/1590279638>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> you can buy a domain back (more correctly, extend your lease, not buy back - because nobody can get a long hold on it in that time frame) at the same price in the time frame of 3 days - no matter what. Sadly, I speak from experience.

</comment><comment><USER8> So who is the registrar? Seems pretty serious to screw up a domain like that, especially a domain that is so major in the web dev world. I want to know who to avoid using in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> it seems to be <http://www.enom.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The use enom, so their domain is in holding atm, so only the owner can renew it. They will mostlikely have to pay ~135$ is it is considered in a redemption period.

Enom does offer an auto renewal option, but its an option, not a default.

Domain Name:RUBYONRAILS.ORG Created On:19-Apr-2004 22:40:29 UTC Last Updated On:23-Apr-2009 00:07:53 UTC Expiration Date:19-Apr-2010 22:40:29 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR) Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED Status:AUTORENEWPERIOD

</comment><comment><USER9> You'd think after the last time, they would have switched to a decent domain host that sends reminders.

</comment><comment><USER10> Should just be able to log in and renew. Looks like it's an eNom reseller.

Domain Name:RUBYONRAILS.ORG Created On:19-Apr-2004 22:40:29 UTC Last Updated On:23-Apr-2009 00:07:53 UTC Expiration Date:19-Apr-2010 22:40:29 UTC

Ip of parked paged owned by eNom

</comment><comment><USER11> <http://www.whois.net/whois/rubyonrails.org.com>

It seems like the owner info was changed a few hours ago to <http://buydomains.dk/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe Oracle will buy this now too.

</comment><comment><USER13> In Luxembourg (.lu), the registrar just disconnects your domain name for or a few days before it's free to register again. If your domain doesn't work anymore, you will probably notice and check if you have missed to pay or not.

</comment><comment><USER14> The exact same thing happened last year.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> That means the domain must be bought back by Rails? What is your price estimated for the buyback?

</comment><comment><USER15> Conflicting messages are abound:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/rubyonrailsorg- domain-d...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/rubyonrailsorg-domain- derailed-by-hacker/)

<comment><USER16> That's not a conflicting message. That's poor reporting combined with an attempt to imply drama that anyone familiar in the least with domains can see is highly unlikely.

Edit: The reporting is about this good: "man in valet jacket seen driving car he doesn't own to hotel entrance. Possible theft?"

<comment><USER17> And yet, we still put up the techcrunch articles.

<comment><USER16> Their "source" was a random tweet from someone with _no_ relation to the situation. They should be embarrassed. I'm going to tweet that Microsoft is switching to Linux to help them with their next article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Uhoh. Looks like someone forgot to renew the domains.</comment>


Hacking breaking news - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathisonian.com/weblog/hacking-breaking-news

<comment><USER2> This looks really cool! Would love to see where it goes. This looks like a step towards the future, to me! Nice.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd sell this back to your old news company!</comment>


Meeting Ticker - <AUTHOR> http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/ <comment><USER2> Nice. I was told by an ex-Disney exec years ago that they implemented the exact same thing for high level meetings there. I can't imagine what a one hour meeting there costs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice approach. But it scares me to start this ticker when i look at the meeting schedules in our company ...

</comment><comment><USER4> Trying it out to see if it will help us have shorter and less frequent meetings.

</comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't work in IE6!

</comment><comment><USER6> reminds me of "a meeting without an agenda is a chat"

</comment><comment><USER7> Brilliant, I can't wait to use this (or rather... I can).

</comment><comment><USER8> I knocked one of these up a while ago, used a stylesheet that's supposed to be good for an iphone, I haven't got one to try myself.

<http://www.davedevelopment.co.uk/meetingclock/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice app.

However, it assumes certain things about the size of the font displayed, without which it displays incorrectly. And guess what? In my case, it assumes wrong. Bad web design.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, it didn't work for me in the latest Chrome or IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Alternatively, leave this open throughout the day to see how much money you've earned.

<comment><USER12> Alternatively, leave this open throughout the day to see how much money you could've earned, but didn't because you're reading the internet.

<comment><USER13> Yay for business models that decouple money earned from hours worked for the sake of working hours. After I get 3.0 of my app launched the website won't suddenly throw a FatalLackOfButtInChairException, even if I'm e.g. sleeping or on a date when I could be working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> IMO Github made a mistake in allowing this kind of personal web page. It's very nice and all but has nothing to do with their business.

<comment><USER15> What do you mean? Github hosts git repositories. git repositories are a great way to manage your website. github charges you money to use your own domain name for your github website, but lets you try it out for free.

The github pages concept adds value to your subscription, which seems like something that's very good for their business. Seeing this page is like free advertising for Github. "Wow, I could have a page like this too. Wow, I can manage it with git. Hey, only $7/month to get private repositories and my own domain name for this site. <buy>."

<comment><USER14> Actually, the site at the top of the thread is free: tobytripp.github.com. You only have to pay if you want the CNAME support, as you suggest, but this example is not of that. So I suppose it adds value to the free subscription, yeah.

But .. is it really worth diluting the brand, and diverting the team's attention? I have seen personal articles on a username.github.com blog which have nothing to do with code. Someone seeing the site via one of these avenues for the first time would come away with the impression github is a free blog provider. And, amongst other things, they are!

And what happens when people start, saying, hosting large media files? It might not have happened yet but it will. Then one of them gets slashdotted, the site slows to a crawl, and the team's running around putting out fires caused by some free service which doesn't have anything to do with version control, just "adds value" to having an account on that site.

Well, I guess they've thought all this through and decided it's in their interests. I was just surprised, is all.

<comment><USER15> _And what happens when people start, saying, hosting large media files?_

There is a size limit. But unless Github is hosted off of someone's DSL line, this is probably nothing to worry about.

<comment><USER14> The size limit is 300M. You might be surprised what a 50M file being downloaded a few thousand times in quick succession can do to even a 100Mb link.

<comment><USER16> These downvotes for sho seem to be done more along the lines of "let's downvote the heretic who doesn't love github" than actually being related to the arguments made. IMHO.

If I end up with a minus five too, I guess I was right :P

<comment><USER17> It's because the original comment only complained about Github, without adding to the discussion of the link.

The other Github bashing didn't even make sense. Github offering personal websites doesn't expose them to any more risk of bandwidth issues. Someone can already make a public repository full of 50MB files that can be downloaded by anyone. Having a lightweight interface that lets you display HTML files in your repository doesn't change that.

<comment><USER18> It didn't complain about github. It raised an interesting discussion about github's business model. But you're right: it was not adding to the discussion of _the link_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is it like to be a geek in a prison? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Prisons-and-Prison-Life/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-geek-in-a-prison/answers/3770981 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6966453)

Number 20 on the front page, 241 comments and counting.</comment>


WHO to send team to China to investigate Covid-19 origins - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/30/global-report-who-to-send-team-to-china-to-investigate-covid-19-origins <comment><USER2> WHO sends team to China to take dictation of China's vetted and official narrative.

Sort of like how the handled the first several months of the pandemic.</comment>


Xplain – Explaining X11 for the rest of us - <AUTHOR> https://magcius.github.io/xplain/article/ <comment><USER2> Personally, my favorite explanation of X11 is found on page 139 of the Unix Hater's Handbook [http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf)

"A truly portable X application is required to act like the persistent customer in Monty Python's "Cheese Shop" sketch, or a grail seeker in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Even the simplest applications must answer many difficult questions"

Read the original for the hilariously accurate dialog that follows…

<comment><USER3> > page 139 of the Unix Hater's Handbook > [http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf)

For quick access, put page 177 in pdf reader to get to printed page 139.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes these work:

[http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf#page177](http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf#page177)

or

[http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf#177](http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf#177)

<comment><USER5> The actual form would be

[http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf#page=177](http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf#page=177)

For pdf.js (used by Firefox), refer to [https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/wiki/Viewer- options](https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/wiki/Viewer-options)

If using Adobe Reader, refer [https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pd...](https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_open_parameters.pdf#page=5)

(The second variant mentioned by you that works in Firefox using pdf.js appears to be a undocumented feature!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Author here, let me know if you have any questions or comments! Given how much attention this is getting, I should probably finally finish one of the three articles I have sitting around in the backlog.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the writeup. I've been wanting to read about X11 for a long time but didn't know where to start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://medium.com/@slavapestov/yesterdays- news-c52f2be95205...](https://medium.com/@slavapestov/yesterdays- news-c52f2be95205#.acr1rvmmo)

"Unlike X11, where the graphics primitives were rather low-level and all input event handling involved round-trips to the client, NeWS was advanced enough that simple widgets, such as scroll bars and sliders, could be implemented entirely server-side, only sending high-level state changes to the client, more along the lines of "slider value is now set to 15" than "mouse button 2 released". Similarly, the client could ask the server to render a widget in a given state, rather than repeatedly transmitting sequences of graphics primitives."

<comment><USER9> .. as it was always done in Windows with the native controls.

<comment><USER10> Windows native controls could be remoted? The point of the comment above is that NeWS communicated events at a higher semantic level than X between the display server and the application. This communication was network transparent.

<comment><USER9> Not remoted, but the semantic communication between the kernel and the application is at the event level for native controls such as the scrollbars example mentioned.

<comment><USER11> That's not how Windows GUI works, to some extent it's the other way around with all controls being implemented in client's user space code. The difference is that for windows, there is one standard client toolkit that is part of the OS API. BTW, even window decorations are drawn by the client.

The kernel side component does even somewhat less than X server, as all drawing is done either by direct writing to frame buffer from userspace or thru DRI-like direct rendering mechanism. Kernel side "display server" then only handles message queues and input and tracks which screen region belongs to which window (and set's up the shared memory accordingly, in theory).

For 16 bit windows, one might say that the userspace libraries are somehow part of the kernel (as there is no user/kernel split in win16 and one of the libraries is even called kernel.dll), but in win32 case these libraries are userspace.

On the other hand, NeWS principle is that server implements turing-complete virtual machine (based on postscript) that executes arbitrary code uploaded from clients (which then can define behavior of widgets, specify new ones or even create windows whose complete behavior is server-side).

<comment><USER12> > all drawing is done either by direct writing to frame buffer from userspace

Before Windows 10, though, GDI was in kernel space, so it was a bit higher level than that, no? Old-style GDI apps would send state-of-the-1980s-style graphics primitives to the server, while newer apps would just write directly to the framebuffer, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author appears to credit the X Window System or Microsoft Windows with repaint-on-expose. To my knowledge that was first implemented (along with regions) by Bill Atkinson for the Apple Lisa, because he misremembered what he saw on the visit to PARC; overlapped windows in the PARC systems at the time didn't automatically and efficiently repaint only the affected area.

</comment><comment><USER14> The interactivity of this series is just _amazingly_ helpful in visualizing what the heck is going on. Honestly, for me that makes this one of the few links on HN that I might actually read all the way through. And may even use it as a homeschool lesson for our kids, if it seems written simply enough (which at first glance it is).

</comment><comment><USER15> For those who might want to understand why Wayland was created. Also tons of fun facts about X11. Really nice talk of Daniel Stone about X server from 2013:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44)

<comment><USER16> Frankly i find that video a case of preaching to the choir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Even my manager who worked on the original X/Motif codebase in the 80s when DEC and HP was working on it doesn't enjoy talking about these details. Pretty good write up, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> _> Several new technologies have appeared_

You should probably also add Vulkan + WSI to the list.

UPDATE: I just realized, this article is from 2013.

<comment><USER19> Neither Vulkan nor WSI are essential for operation of X11 or Wayland. Vulkan is "just" a new API to talk to GPUs, completely separated from windowing (just as is OpenGL) and the WSI part of Vulkan aims for a standardized method to allow windowing systems to expose the low level graphics device they're working towards to client applications so that implementations of APIs like Vulkan (but also OpenGL) can talk to it. WSI is kind of a generalized API for what GLX or WGL are doing. This neither revolutionary nor a new technology. Just a unified, agreed upon, window system neutral API for something that's quite old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> the X11 server written in Javascript here: [https://magcius.github.io/xplain/src/server/server.js](https://magcius.github.io/xplain/src/server/server.js)

</comment><comment><USER16> > While I do personally believe Wayland is going to become The Linux Display > Server Of The Future®

Best i can understand, wayland is a protocol spec rather than a set of code like X. Each compositor/wm is individually responsible for implementing said protocol and thus take over the job of X (input handling et al).

Meaning that there will no longer be an X server to act as a independent arbiter of behavior. Whatever the devs of whatever DE you are logged into will have the final word.

The more i learn of Wayland, the more i expect it to turn into a hairball to match X. Only now without a network option ("too insecure"), and with GPU acceleration.

BTW, why are we so bent out of shape about this seats concept? Why oh why are we continually trying to turn a single user piece of hardware into a desktop mainframe?!

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone who's interested in X11 (the protocol) and the Ruby language should have a look at Mathieu Bouchard's incredible implementation [1]

There's some quite beautiful Ruby code in there, e.g.:

      module X11
        k = Keysymdef = {}
        c = Cursorfont = {}
        [k,c].each {|x| x.extend X11::MAssignForHash }
        k[%w| space exclam quotedbl numbersign dollar percent ampersand |]=32..38
        k[%w| quoteright parenleft parenright asterisk plus comma minus |]=39..45
        [...]

[1] [http://artengine.ca/matju/RubyX11/](http://artengine.ca/matju/RubyX11/)

</comment><comment><USER22> [https://github.com/magcius/xplain/issues/15](https://github.com/magcius/xplain/issues/15)

<comment><USER23> Why isn't this just an email to the author?

<comment><USER24> Because others can't see it then. Also, it'll appear on his github that he's _contributed_ to the project.

<comment><USER22> That project is a labor of love and the author asked for very little in return, but he did ask for it, publicly: [https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh- pages/article/regi...](https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh- pages/article/regions.html#L402-L415)

Had he asked for money, I probably would not have sent any. But he asked for something that I can provide with ease, so I did. And I enjoyed it.

Is that really what this is about? Is it wrong to do good if it might benefit the do-gooder in some way? Can we all take a collective moment to think critically about that? :)

(anyway, you're wrong(ish?). Posting an issue does not appear to have added my name to [https://github.com/magcius/xplain/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/magcius/xplain/graphs/contributors) . Though I could have sworn that I've seen what you are talking about happen before. \ _shrug\_ , that's github's fault.)

<comment><USER24> An issue tracker is a tracker for issues, not the guestbook to the project. You could've emailed the author, link to him on social media, on your website, submit to reddit etc... but you choose to open an _issue_ on his _issue tracker_ , and put that here on HN in a comment. Even if you intended differently, it's how it look to an outsider.

On your last paragraph, yes, github used to show who reports issues as contributed to the project to which they reported. I recall at one point having reported an embarassing silly issue (a very stupid config mistake I made that I don't recall) to Pelican blogware and it went there among the contributed projects as a badge of dishonour. :) But now I checked, that section seems to be gone from the profile page on gihtub.

<comment><USER6> I don't have social media, and GitHub issues are indeed acceptable for giving public feedback of any sort, though I understand not all projects are ran this way. I clarified this point:

[https://github.com/magcius/xplain/commit/91fde0e87116ec834f1...](https://github.com/magcius/xplain/commit/91fde0e87116ec834f1d500d5757c7229bffbcdb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Excellent description of the (somewhat needlessly) complex X Window System (the Blit and Rio are so beautiful). Still makes me sad that COMPOSITE doesn't build in XQuartz for OS X. I posted on the mailing list, but got a pretty non- helpful response.. [0]

[0]: [http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.xquartz.devel/912](http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.xquartz.devel/912)

<comment><USER13> What did you find non-helpful about the response?

<comment><USER25> It would have been nice to get an update on the status of building the COMPOSITE extension into XQuartz, not a link to a new library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This looks like a great article but on a phone the margins are as wide as the text! And they used that wrapping mode that stretches lines out instead of truncating them which looks great if you don't want to read the text but is super annoying when you are.

<comment><USER6> This article series wasn't designed for phones! It uses heavy interactive figures and diagrams and I actually expected it would bring most phones to a halt with all of the drawing...

I don't know much about front-end dev and made something that looked decent on my laptop. PRs are most appreciated if you want to make it presentable on mobile devices.

<comment><USER27> It seemed to work fine on my iPhone. My only complaint was the font size was a bit too small. Also reader mode didn't seem to work so I wasn't able to use that as an alternative to get a reasonable font size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Check [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Competitors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Competitors)

</comment><comment><USER29> How are the interactive windows that are displayed in the page created? Is that a complete simulation of X server done with JavaScript or is it something unrelated to X server?

<comment><USER6> It's a simulation of an X server done with JavaScript. The README.md explains it in a bit more detail: [https://github.com/magcius/xplain#demo-framework-- xserverjs](https://github.com/magcius/xplain#demo-framework--xserverjs)

Basically, I emulate what an X server would do, semantically, without implementing any of the actual wire protocol. The codebase is, I hope, pretty well commented and designed as something to learn from.

[https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh- pages/src/server/s...](https://github.com/magcius/xplain/blob/gh- pages/src/server/server.js)</comment></comment>


How I reverse-engineer an application for security assessment - <AUTHOR> https://hashnode.com/post/how-i-reverse-engineer-an-application-for-security-assessment-cjrfre4ra00nqlbs1uluv8va7 <comment><USER2> too thin to be of any use. worse page layout than even medium. goodness.</comment>


Man Forgets About Buying $27 of Bitcoin, Is Now Worth About $1M(2013) - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/man-forgets-about-buying-27-of-bitcoin-is-now-worth-a-1454150399 <comment><AUTHOR> 3549*5000 = wonder if he keep it cause it's worth like 18M today.</comment>


Google Users in China Fear Losing Important Tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/world/asia/17china.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> One thing this article seems to miss is that Google offers a lot of tools in which Baidu were not their primary competitor.

Google Translate comes to mind. Baidu don't even seem active in this space, their online translator app goes to the website of some (human) translation agency [1] who pretty clearly didn't develop the machine translation software they're featuring on their website (based on the fact that all their language pairs have English, rather than Chinese, as one of the components).

My guess would be that with Google Translate out of the picture, Yahoo Babelfish probably gets most of their traffic instead -- better quality than Baidu's provider.

[1] <http://www.netat.net/></comment>


Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/troubled-startup-color-loses-cofounder-peter-pham/ <comment><USER2> I would love a chance to see the Color founders doing office hours with pg! Or even just pgbot. I can see it now:

      Color guy:  We're building an app that lets you share photos with
      your mobile phone, with people within 100 feet of you, but it uses
      your social graph to make sure you see stuff you're interested in.

      pgbot:  WTF?

      Color guy:  I mean, it lets you share pictures that you just took, and
      people within 100 feet of you will see that you just shared a picture.

      pgbot:  What problem does this solve? If they're 100 feet away,
      wouldn't they have seen the same thing you saw, or even taken the
      same picture anyway?

      Color guy: You don't get it, it's mobile... pictures and mobile,
      together.  Like peanut butter and chocolate.

      pgbot:  Who wants this?

      Color guy:  Well, erm, I mean, erm, that is, aaahhh... um, you
      know... like, um, aaaghh... well... uhhrrmmmm... college kids.  And
      hipsters.  And hipster college kids.

      pgbot: You mean the two classes of people least likely to either A. have
      money, or b. spend money, unless it's on cheap beer, crappy clothes,
      or Apple hardware?

      Color guy: But, but...

      pgbot: Who's going to pay for this?

      Color guy:  Aaaah, well, you see... aaah... umm....

      pgbot: I worry, I worry...

<comment><USER3> I see the value prop though. At parties, weddings, events etc, where you'd likely be in a picture, you'd wanna see what everyone else shot.

Haven't you been to a party where everybody took pics and you couldn't wait till they uploaded the pics on FB or something to see what they shot?

<comment><USER4> > _"Haven't you been to a party where everybody took pics and you couldn't > wait till they uploaded the pics on FB or something to see what they shot?"_

yes, but I'm at the party for _the party_ \- I have no intention of spending the entire party staring into my smartphone and living vicariously through the pictures of the lives of people _ten feet away from me_.

<comment><USER5> This isn't necessarily true.

Have you seen how much people spend, and how much trouble they go to for wedding photos?

<comment><USER4> Wedding photos are still admired _after_ the fact. There still isn't a use case for "hmm, I wonder what images people are taking within a 100' radius of me!".

<comment><USER6> There is a use case for, "I wonder what images were taken within 100' of me!"

If the app is on, and tracking photos that were taken, then can resolve it after the fact (and get those photos), I think a lot of people would be interested.

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't that be in Facebook's territory? i.e., "Hey Facebook, I took these pictures at Bob's wedding. Based on the geotag, can you show me other pictures from nearby at the same time?"

It seems convoluted (not to mention a gigantic drag on your battery life) to do so on each and every device in real-time.

<comment><USER6> Not quite the use case I was considering.

Your phone knows where you were, when. And says, "Here is where I was, what pictures were taken around me?" I want this information regardless of whether I was personally taking pictures.

Keeping a history of where you are can be done without much drain on your battery life. It can just log a location every few minutes.

<comment><USER7> Is location really the key piece of data differentiating "pictures from Bob's wedding" from "the universe of pictures", though? I would think some concept of tagging that went beyond mere location would be far more useful.

80% of the time (walking down the street, sitting in my office, etc.), I don't care about pictures that were taken around me. For the 1% of the time that I DO care, I can probably easily name the thing that I want to see pictures of. Location is perhaps a handy filter for "tags that might be important to me", but it's hardly the sole determiner, or even a major factor, in whether any given picture will be one that's interesting to me.

<comment><USER6> The point is that if you, say, go to a conference, you want to see the random pictures that strangers snapped which you might be in.

<comment><USER8> And what is the chance that random stranger is using Color? 0.000001%. So why don't you just walk over there and ask him to send you a copy? Social networking at its finest, in real time, at a conference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I noticed today Color have removed the notice on their office that they'd like fellow denizens of Palo Alto to stop by and give feedback.

They've also turned off the projectors showing pictures from the app on their front windows. Very quiet at their office at the moment.

<comment><USER10> Maybe this is the sort of thing Color would be good for -- monitoring what changes within a 100 foot radius of an office building, scanning faces for lawyers, accountants, M&A people, etc. This the stock market may actually pay for!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing that worried me is that the founder said they didn't launch at SXSW because he wasn't a fan of conferences. It was on within a few days of launch and seems like the perfect proof of concept for it. When you have just been funded for so much who cares about your personal preference.

Either that or you need some kind of exclusivity in niches to build a critical mass of users like Facebook with colleges. Google Wave was a great case for the path color has gone down not working, people getting into the app, not seeing anyone else to interact with and forgetting about.

Even having a fake persona in it that you can delete, just to give people a feel for how the app works would be better than what they have now.

<comment><USER12> Actually, they didn't even know about SXSW.

<comment><USER13> Wait, what? SXSW is so hip and popular it's no longer hip and popular. It's been written up in Parade Magazine for fucks sake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me or does Arrington sound like he got snubbed by color somehow? Did they not show the proper respect through the usual startup TC story begging or deny him an investment opportunity? I know a lot of the community is unimpressed with color and I'm certainly not some big fan, but to me he sounds as petty and bitter as when they run the "yet another yahoo fuck up" gloating stories.

<comment><USER15> Maybe he has just been around long enough to realise theft when he sees it...

(Yes, I know they didn't get the whole $41m up front.)

<comment><USER16> Theft from whom? Presumably the investors who paid them $41M did more due diligence and know more about the company than any of us.

It's possible that this was a bad investment decision, but it certainly isn't theft.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some startups manage to get on Arrington's wrong side and he goes Perez Hilton on them.

This startup might have gotten too much investment at the wrong time but it is built by the same type of hard-working and brilliant people that apply to Ycombinator, only they had a good track record and contacts with more traditional venture capitalists. I'd like more in depth analysis than shallow criticism because there's as much and maybe more wealth in information that could be gained from what went wrong with their plan.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's fun to bash something, but I think Color has a lot of chances left. They have a rockstar team and the money to support themselves for several years. Their current product isn't very good, but it's a mistake to write them off or call them "troubled" this early.

</comment><comment><USER19> Color was a nice way to relive the life and death of Cuil.

</comment><comment><USER20> From the box about Peter Pham at the bottom of the article:

 _Currently is the Co-Founder and President of Color._

I understand it can be difficult to keep these things up to date, but at least make sure it doesn't contradict the article it's posted on!

<comment><USER21> It's techcrunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This was expected. I like the idea of a proximity-based social network but the problem is that they didn't do a good job presenting it that way and they were overshadowed by a very negative launch to the tune of 40+ million dollars. Set up to fail from the very beginning.

</comment><comment><USER23> Color will burn through it's funding and declare bankruptcy in 24 months or less. Anyone want the under?

<comment><USER24> I don't know. Burning $40 million for a new venture takes a special kind of ignorance and incompetence when you're surrounded by shaking heads from all corners.

Sequoia believed in them. Maybe they haven't opened the bag of tricks yet. It's too early to write them off.

<comment><USER21> In 1999 that was _normal_

<comment><USER25> Sure, but how much did a GB of RAM, a GB of bandwidth, a Ghz of CPU, and the code to run a basic service on it cost?

<comment><USER26> All those dollars aren't for equipment or even for salaries, they're likely for marketing/advertising in order to do a big rollout in the already crowded world of mobile social networks.

<comment><USER25> Further supporting my point. In 1999 you needed millions in the bank just to get the product ready for prime time, and competition was thin. In 2011 you got everybody and their 19-year-old college dropout brother pursuing a lean startup using free open source tools on bargain-basement hosting that can support tens of thousands of users for less than a 1-bedroom rent.

Raising 41m for a mobile app pre-launch is just too many eggs in one basket IMHO. Obviously this has tainted everyone's views of Color, and maybe they actually need the money and have a solid strategy, and I won't lie and say I'm not a little envious of their fundraising power, but mustering all the objectivity I can, I just can't get behind the strategy. Putting that kind of money in the bank on day 1 just drains the hustle right out of the team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> They pulled the Android app from the market and it has not returned. Odd.

It was really, really terrible, but you would have thought that it could have been fixed up by now...

<comment><USER28> I am still wondering why there is no explanation for this. It's been a couple months since it left the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'll skip how half-baked and confusing their app was, and go to an implication of the idea.

Color relies on having groups of people and really works best in a crowded area. Heck, it relies on two or more people using the app at the same time in an area. I can see it working great at concerts, but it seems to fail at the night out with friends and one person taking shots.

It also seems that it is the opposite of Facebook for rural users. Facebook or Twitter allows people to connect over great distances and see things far away. Me taking photos on Color during my road trip seems like a huge mismatch. It just seems like it cannot be "the goto service", and that makes it vulnerable to never being used.

Lastly, let's assume there was no Twitter at the time of the US Airways Flight 1549 (Hudson plane water landing) and Color was it. Would the wave of information been different? Does that matter to Color?

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't take any merriment in the fact that things are not going well for another entrepreneur, so I hope they turn things around. I think it's time to pivot. Get over the mode of trying to appear to hipsters who sit around the bar looking at their phones and do something that regular people will enjoy. And this time don't take shortcuts; no more deals like they did with the british paper to have a special page of Color photos from the royal wedding. Go viral this time, win it because people genuinely enjoy what you're doing.

</comment><comment><USER31> The problem is not necessarily because Color didn't get traction. Entrepreneurs have a great deal of patience and will try different things. My reading is that there is some kind of disagreement over direction (either with the other founder or investors), and Peter decided he had already made enough F* money from his previous venture he's going to walk.

</comment><comment><USER32> Arrington is clearly enjoying this.

</comment><comment><USER33> Who all want to say , I told you so ?</comment>


Trent Reznor on his new role at Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/31/7139201/trent-reznor-talks-new-role-at-apple

<comment><USER2> Great,

Do not integrate with I-tunes and bring back Mog! I thought Mog was hard to use, Beats is ridiculous. My need to find a song by saying I am sitting poolside naked, just woke up, and eating a mango is next to nil.</comment>


To Increase Productivity in the Office, Get Outside - <AUTHOR> https://www.branchfurniture.com/blogs/turn-key/office-productivity-outside <comment><AUTHOR> Five easy hacks to get the benefits of being outdoors while still being ultra productive throughout your workday.</comment>


Why Apple's Swift Language Will Instantly Remake Computer Programming - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/apple-swift/?mbid=social_fb <comment><USER2> To be honest, this article is fairly laughable. Swift is vendor locked to the extreme, has a buggy closed source implementation and is no more revolutionary than any other modern language coming out.

It's only a thing for apple developers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "But even if Swift remains an Apple-only thing, it's impact could be greater than any other language that has sprung up in recent years, and it may achieve mass adoption faster than any language in modern history. "

I don't even like Node, but it is hard to imagine that Swift will get adoption faster than Node.

If 100% of Objective C users switch the adoption could be fast since you'd have a new mature-ish language as the preferred language for a large install base. But I don't see the libraries and modules being there to allow most devs to just switch right away.

<comment><USER3> > _" But I don't see the libraries and modules being there to allow most devs > to just switch right away."_

Obj-C libraries have interfaces auto-translated to Swift, so barring some edge cases are already entirely usable.

Writing a Swift app isn't a problem right now because of lack of library support, but mostly because the compiler still likes to segfault and taunt you. Frequently.

Either way, I like the language, I've been working with it for the past month, and it's neat and brings a bunch of _really_ nice concepts to the table.

But "remake computer programming"? Wut.

Swift will quickly become _the_ standard for OSX and iOS code, but that is but a tiny corner of programming-dom.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info, I don't do much Apple.

I shared because I think it is worth hearing the claims even if I don't share the author's view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a dupe. It's a good idea to check before submitting:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Why+Apple%E2%80%99s+Swift+Language...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Why+Apple%E2%80%99s+Swift+Language+Will+Instantly+Remake+Computer+Programming#!/story/forever/0/Why%20Apple%E2%80%99s%20Swift%20Language%20Will%20Instantly%20Remake%20Computer%20Programming)</comment>


Failing in College and what to do about it - <AUTHOR> http://www.rodrigoalvesvieira.com/failing-college/

<comment><USER2> My first experience with Uni was horrible. I was hoping to learn serious computer science, but got disappointed by maths, physics, electronics, etc. I was one of the best at programming, but overall result was very poor, I was one of the worst. Additionally I failed calculus at 1st semester (but other exams were passed) what made me depressed and I did 1.5yr pause doing completely nothing (barely used computer-I started hating it).

Now I'm 22. Decided to start one more time at the same Uni, same faculty, second semester ahead. I'm getting average (or little below avg) marks. I became more focused on non-IT-classes, because I managed to find ways how can those math/phys "things" can be used in practice.

Result:

+I became little more self-confident, headstrong, hard-working guy

+I developed ways to be more connected with people

+Forcing myself to study things I don't like (physics) somehow makes my brain smarter, nimble, flexible

+I don't struggle with procrastination

-Being older than the others in group is little bit uncomfortable

-Problem with employers asking questions about that pause/harddepression period

-Endless comparisons to younger friends in my mind

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I agree with every single point you've made.

I often see myself making comparisons too, but now I think they're more likely to result in bad feelings than in bringing me any kind of useful knowledge. So I just consider them useless and try to not make comparisons again.

Thanks for sharing. Good luck for you and me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I just failed precalculus, but I've aced my programming classes.

Is it worth switching majors? I've been programming forever, but the math simply too hard and not interesting enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> The concept of majors and minors in undergrad school does not exist here in Brazil. However, I only imagine myself as a Software Engineer in the future and CS is the only course I can do. So I basically have no choice, I'll have to become very good at Math. I will succeed. I better do.

<comment><USER4> In my experience, the math courses tend to get easier later on for a variety of reasons:

1) You learn simplifying techniques. (you'll learn to love the Laplace transform)

2) You get better at studying. I also failed my first (and second) calculus course. It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn how to study. (Tip: Find a friend to study with!)

3) You'll eventually start applying it to interesting problems. I found control theory really interesting, so it became a lot easier to care about the math involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your experience and a tip man.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Message in a Binary Bottle - <AUTHOR> http://cabel.me/2013/01/11/message-in-a-binary-bottle/

<comment><USER2> I understand the philosophy that Easter eggs can undermine confidence in software security, since if the programmer could sneak that by, who knows what else they could sneak in. However, from a human/sentimental standpoint I miss the era where Easter eggs were more prevalent. It made it more clear that there were people behind the development of the stuff we use every day.</comment>


Chinese studying in US become 'political cannon fodder' as visa process tightens - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3011584/chinese-studying-us-become-political-cannon-fodder-visa <comment><USER2> In my whole lifetime I've only stumbled on a scmp article once or twice but lately it seems they have been pushing on 'educating' the western world . I literally see scmp news everywhere now, FB, HN, and YT. Are you guys experiencing this too ?</comment>


Facebook Admits Censoring Content in Pakistan - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/197644/facebook_admits_censoring_content_in_pakistan.html <comment><USER2> Google in China, tweeter in Iran and Facebook here have shown three very different responses to local requests for censorship. All three of these have done what they believe to be in the best interests of their business.

As individuals, we don't always do what is in our own personal best interest. We choose to execute what we percieve to be our social responsibilities and we do so, at least in part because the society at large expects this of us. Shouldn't we expect corporates to carry a little bit of social responsibility?

When companies act this way, they further reinforce preference falsification and put local movements for social change years behind. Now the moderate Muslim in Pakistan will find it even more difficult to publicly express her views and this will push the tipping point for a more moderate Islam in Pakistan by quite a few years.

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's ever reasonable to expect a business to do something that is not in their self interest; their existence is predicated upon selfish behavior. When companies take socially conscientious actions that would appear to go against the company's best interest, they are almost always doing so after weighing the relative benefits of increasing public goodwill and maintaining direct profits and finding goodwill to be of greater benefit.

I would argue that the same thing applies to individuals; that no rational actions are truly outside of self-interest, because we do what makes us happy, even if the action itself would appear to be selfless.

<comment><USER4> A more interesting, if obvious, related question: shouldn't we, through our political representatives, demand that corporations carry a little bit more of social responsibility?

That would be the rational thing for us to demand, since a more liberal Pakistan would make both us and Pakistanis happier. Nowadays it is a matter of corporations' interest rather than law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Facebook said on Tuesday that it has blocked users in Pakistan from accessing the 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day !' page on its site out of respect for local standards and customs._

...and thus advocating a lowest-common-denominator philosophy for the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's next? Will they start blocking Planned Parenthood's Facebook page for the bible belt? Blocking the democratic party in red states and the republican party in blue states?

</comment><comment><USER7> A decentralized model would not be able to do this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Advertising and free speech are fundamentally incompatible. Notice that no "everyone buy pepsi" group is blocked.

</comment><comment><USER9> Facebook 0, Google 1

</comment><comment><USER10> Both the local government and the people wanted this solution, hence FB delivered. The problem is when government would want something and people don't. What would FB do then?</comment>


My virtualization workflow for testing/dev - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kdecherf.com/2013/04/11/my-virtualization-workflow-for-testing-slash-dev/

<comment><USER2> Mine: <http://www.vagrantup.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> I already checked Vagrant (at that time they did not support other thing than VirtualBox). And now the KVM provider seems to request libvirt

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mine: AWS micro :(</comment>