New iPod touch - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/ipod-touch/ <comment><USER2> Sweet glad to finally see iPod Touch getting some modern love, just wished they came with bigger screens.

Does Android have a comparable device? i.e. Internet/Music sans-phone in your pocket that's great at capturing quality vids/pics?

Edit:

The Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 looks close: [http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/samsung-galaxy- camera-2](http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/samsung-galaxy-camera-2)

<comment><USER3> I'm sure the Android ecosystem has many equivalents, but they'll never be very high profile. The cellular hardware inside phones doesn't add too much to the cost, so customers are better off just buying a phone and not putting in a SIM card.

I'm pretty sure Apple sells the $200 model of the Touch at a bit of a loss, which they can do because people who buy and iPod Touch rather than an iPhone will probably buy a lot of music, and most of them will buy it through Apple (or subscribe to Apple Music).

The only other smartphone makers that have significant music services are Amazon and Google. A non-phone phone doesn't really make sense in the Nexus line, which is meant to be a demonstration of the core "Android experience". In Amazon's Fire lineup, it doesn't really make sense because it's too similar to their existing products. Actually you could argue that the Kindle Fire is the equivalent to the iPod Touch in Android world.

<comment> stephen-mw I very much doubt Apple sells anything at a loss. It's really not their style. Their margins are the envy of the entire industry, and Apple takes home 90% of cell phone profits[0]

The fact that they can create a phone/device with "inferior" tech and sell it at blockbuster margins proves to me that most people aren't interested in specs, but rather the whole experience and ecosystem. This is something Apple understands well and invests heavily in experience.

[0] [http://www.cnbc.com/2015/02/09/dominant-apple-takes-90-of- sm...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/02/09/dominant-apple-takes-90-of-smartphone- profits.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that the landing page describes colours, screen resolution, even the CPU architecture and speed - but not the storage capacity. I have >100GB of music on on old iPod Classic and capacity is the most important factor for me.

<comment><USER5> [http://www.apple.com/ipod/compare-ipod- models/](http://www.apple.com/ipod/compare-ipod-models/)

16 - 128GB in price ranges of $199 to $399

<comment><USER6> Haa 49$ for a 2GB screenless player. I wonder how large is the profit on this one. And I thought Sandisk were mean to charge 40$ for a 4GB Sansa Clip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting that it has the same design aesthetic as the 6/6+ but has a smaller screen (4"). I bet a lot of people would want an iPhone the same size as this thing.

<comment><USER8> No, it has the same design aesthetic as the iPad Air. The sides are rounded in a "quarter pipe" versus the "half pipe" completely rounded edges of the 6/6+.

<comment><USER9> This is interesting. I wonder how that decision was made.

<comment><USER10> Because it's the same design it's basically always had? Apple is _far_ more conservative with iPod Touch redesigns than iPhone. It's generally just updating the back and colors slightly to match it with current aesthetics.

<comment><USER9> It's just interesting to me that the iPod touch (which many people think of as "an iPhone minus the cellular chip") follows the design cues of the iPad (which many people think of as "a big iPhone, often minus the cellular chip"). There certainly doesn't seem to be any one right answer so I think it'd be interesting to hear how Apple decided on the rounding they use on the various models.

<comment><USER11> Well, the iPod Touch really is a smaller iPad when you think of it. These two are a lot closer than they are to the iPhone.

<comment><USER9> I don't know. An iPad with cellular is hardware-wise arguably more similar to an iPhone than to an iPod touch. Software-wise, it doesn't have Phone.app, of course.

So I suppose that's maybe the key: whereas iPads and iPod touches are always meant to be held at arms length, iPhones are additionally expected to be held against your ear and are shaped slightly differently because of that additional use case.

Or maybe it'd be hard to make a "half-pipe" from aluminum on a device as thin as an iPod touch.

Or maybe it's all just arbitrary and everything in life is random and meaningless.

<comment><USER11> > Or maybe it's all just arbitrary and everything in life is random and > meaningless.

The recent evolutions of Apple's design often make me think that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there even still a market for such devices? While $200 dollars may be a lot less than an unlocked iPhone, its certainly not cheap. Plus you can get an iPhone 6 at that price if you are willing to get into a contract.

<comment><USER13> Kids under 10 that want to play iOS games.

<comment><USER14> Or Siracusa...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's weird that they are stuck to the 4" screen size with the iPod Touch. I fully expected them to make one the size of iPhone 6, like every previous iPod Touch.

<comment> stephen-mw Some of us prefer this screen size. I'm actually holding off until the 6s to see if they launch a model with a small screen.

<comment><USER15> Oh absolutely, I can see that people still prefer that screen size, I'm just surprised that Apple decided not to go with a larger size on the iPod Touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does this make it a reasonable development device for iOS?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's what I'd use it for. Apple sells them at WWDC for betas, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if they will ever put the GPS in the iPod, or if they consider that a big differentiator for the iPhone.

<comment><USER18> I think the GPS receiver comes "for free" with the phone hardware (the DSP/antenna package).

So, I doubt it, just because it wouldn't add much and would cost significantly more (both in components and battery life).

With this kind of device, you're only online when in wifi, so location-aware services are limited too. i.e. what would you do with the GPS info? Maybe photo tagging?

<comment><USER17> I make Gaia GPS, so I care about people being able to locate themselves on a downloaded map, while offline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I feel silly for being excited about this, but I'd _love_ it if they carried over these color options to the new model of iPhone. The blue is very sleek.

</comment><comment><USER20> I want 160gb classic back!

<comment><USER21> I totally agree. Mine is still going after 5 years of use so I'm expecting to have to replace it any time now. The 128G option is acceptable but, since I'm touching that now, I'll have to thin my library a bit. Still, its better than the 64G and smaller.

<comment><USER10> Do you truly need your entire library on your device at any one time? 160GB of songs is roughly 111 days of continuous listening (assuming ~1MB/min, but I do admit that number goes up with higher bitrate content). Nobody truly needs that much music at any one time.

<comment><USER22> The point is to not have to manage it.

<comment><USER10> The point is flawed. If you aren't going to listen to 90% of your library, why even waste space for it? For that 0.00000001% chance when you remember you loved Fall Out Boy as a teen and want to relive those memories?

<comment><USER23> Right but the alternative is to have to go through and decide what music I might listen to.

<comment><USER10> I mean, there are smart playlists that can be based on last played date (eta: or ratings, or play count, for that matter. Honestly the iTunes smart playlists are a powerful but hugely underused feature), and iTunes fully supports selective syncing where you can just sync certain playlists you like and the smart playlist, and nothing else. iTunes was built as a music management system. Regardless of the crud that has been added on since, that's still what it is at its core.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Didn't see that one coming.

Except, there was this: [http://www.macrumors.com/2015/07/10/new-ipod-touch- nano-shuf...](http://www.macrumors.com/2015/07/10/new-ipod-touch-nano-shuffle- july-14/)</comment>


Ebola death toll rises to at least 2,296: WHO - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/09/us-health-ebola-toll-idUSKBN0H41MW20140909 <comment><USER2> For what it is worth, if you wish to keep up on this topic (and candidly, you will want to keep up with this topic), then an excellent resource is the mailing list for the International Society for Infectious Diseases, called PROMED. The stories posted there are relevant and the list is mainly read by epidemiologists and other relevant medical professionals. It is a good resource for reporters trying to keep track of the stories (The Economist, for example references PROMED quite often), and occasionally features some very insightful commentary from people who are the leaders in these fields. [http://promedmail.org](http://promedmail.org)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great link, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure I fully understand. This is fewer deaths than many seasonal influenza outbreaks (with more flu deaths in fewer months). How deadly is this, because so far, it hasn't had the impact I expected?

<comment><USER4> here's a more comprehensive, recent (10/8/14) study with plots showing exponential growth in transmission. They have projections out to january 2015

[http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/obk-14-0036-early...](http://currents.plos.org/outbreaks/article/obk-14-0036-early- epidemic-dynamics-of-the-west-african-2014-ebola-outbreak-estimates-derived- with-a-simple-two-parameter-model/)

Btw, reddit.com/r/ebola is doing a fine job collecting relevant news on the outbreak.

<comment><USER5> This study seems to be overly optimistic about the ability to control the outbreak... thus projecting 25K cases by the end of 2014 yet only projecting 140K cases overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've fount the TWIV podcast to be very helpful to see through the fear mongering. They do a special on ebola , risks and treatments under way [http://www.twiv.tv/2014/08/10/twiv-297/](http://www.twiv.tv/2014/08/10/twiv-297/)

</comment><comment><USER7> You know how at the start of disaster movies you see odd clips of the news with reports of whatever's going to cause the disaster being reported in the background while they establish your empathy with the characters?

That's how I feel whenever a report on the Ebola epidemic pops up. Like here.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good VICE segment on the current epidemic in Africa:

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

</comment><comment><USER9> A really good book that predicted this outbreak back in 1994 is called "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance" by Laurie Garrett. She actually has an excellent chapter on the Ebola virus and explained how this disease is so virulent. Ebola mutates very rapidly.

<comment><USER10> Good book, but no, the mutation rate _isn 't_ particularly high for Ebola.

<comment><USER9> I believe this refutes your statement:

[http://www.ibtimes.com/origin-ebola-outbreak-may-be-bat- viru...](http://www.ibtimes.com/origin-ebola-outbreak-may-be-bat-virus-has- rapid-mutation-rate-1673118)

300 mutations since May?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought this was a link to a list of all the names of the people who had died.</comment>


Tech giants set to challenge Facebook and Google's ad dominance - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/facebook-google-duopoly-advertising-tech-giants-media-e382e5e2-21eb-4776-93c0-7d942ba80ada.html <comment><USER2> It's the targeting that matters. If it's just eyeballs that's not worth much. It's finding eyeballs that are interested in what your selling, which is easier to deduce with targeting.</comment>


How we messed up being one of the early Slack bots - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/reportbot/how-we-messed-up-being-one-of-the-early-slack-bot-7c8073f885ba <comment><AUTHOR> Happy to share here. This is our story, Might help other ones not to repeat the same mistakes done by us.</comment>


Tracking down the teenage hackers of the Inner Circle (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-untold-story-of-the-teen-hackers-who-transformed-th-1770977586/ <comment><USER2> _[John] Maxfield always tried to stay off the radar, but after he was exposed as an FBI informant in late 1983, he became the most loathed man on the internet._

Well ... the ARPAnet? Until RTM came along?

The word Internet was first used in RFC 675, in December 1974. But I think the author _actually_ means "the Inner Circle and their friends and supporters". The man had his day as a vigilante until about 1990, then faded into obscurity.

<comment><USER3> I met Maxfield briefly, at a talk he was doing at my college, probably sometime around '87 or '88\. He certainly wasn't trying to stay off the radar then, he was inflating his role in all of this quite a lot.

As it happens, I was attending that talk along with one member of the Inner Circle (not named in this article), as well as one other even more respected hacker, BIOC Agent 003. Not that I'm an uber-hacker myself - my association with them was mostly a matter of coincidence.

Maxfield told a number of anecdotes about famous hacks and takedowns, like the famous Fargo 4A phone switch thing. Having some knowledge of these events from my friends, it was clear that he was stretching the truth to inflate his own importance. My friends called him out on this, and I remember much of the rest of the talk being Q&A with the audience directing questions mostly at my friends rather than to Maxfield.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was excited for a second because this was the name of my EverQuest guild.

Different inner circle. Though to our credit we did wake the sleeper on Xegony. ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> He reminds me of Terry Davis , hope it won't end the same?</comment>


Google Just Did a Pad-Left on Go (For App Engine) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcloud-golang/commit/f95c875f2894b735501920cce2ab858f2110b23a#commitcomment-16831591 <comment><USER2> "pad-left" is not just "somebody changed some code we depend on", it was a trivial little library that was removed and broke half the npm world. Libraries change and code breaks, that's not news.

Plus the Go community's quasi-official position as of 1.4.2 was still that you should vendor your dependencies, and "you should vendor your code" is the official position now. If your code broke because of a remote commit on the internet, that's your build system's problem, not the internet's.

<comment><AUTHOR> My Google Product (which is fully supported) broke because of a Google commit

<comment><USER2> I see and acknowledge that. That is not a "pad-left" issue. That is "a commit broke my code". If that set off a pad-left sized reaction every time it happened HN would be nothing but "commits that broke code" on the front page every day.

I assume you weren't vendoring before... are you vendoring now?

<comment><AUTHOR> For the sake of the argument lets say I vendor my code (notice that this is 1.4.2 golang and most vendoring tools were formed around 1.5), This doesn't help a guy that tries today to start a new project on Google AppEngine/Go using Google code. Major functionality is broken in the sense that he can't compile his code. Google Samples (and from official documentation) is broken. How vending helps in that case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a shame that app engine is still running on go 1.4.2, I would have understand if it was using 1.5 (since 1.6 is still quite new) but 1.4.2 still uses the old and slow GC. And now this...

<comment><USER4> If you pay attention to where AppEngine is getting love these days, it's moving towards Google-accessing libraries on VMs, and becoming relatively language-agnostic. The just released Node.js libs, and other languages are coming.</comment></comment>


Google switches GTalk's VOIP protocol to Jingle - <AUTHOR> http://xmpp.org/2011/06/the-future-is-jingle/

<comment><USER2> My original email had more details:

We are pleased to announce that we have launched support for Jingle XEP-166 and XEP-167 for Google Talk calls to and from Gmail, iGoogle, and Orkut. We have also added the same level of support to libjingle (<http://code.google.com/p/libjingle>), which is used by many native clients. From this point on, it will be our primary signalling protocol, and the old protocol will only remain for backwards compatibility. We also plan to soon update Google Talk on Android to speak Jingle, but we do not plan on updating the Google Talk Windows application.

We suggest all clients that interop with Google Talk to switch to using Jingle rather than the old protocol. We will remain backwards compatible with legacy clients by continuing to speak the old protocol as well. If you wish to continue working with legacy clients, such as the Google Talk application for Windows, you may also wish to continue speaking the old protocol. But the future is Jingle, and the old protocol will eventually go away.

Finally, we are still working on implementing XEP-176 (ICE-UDP). In the meantime, you'll need to use our draft-06 version of ICE, which is implemented both in libjingle and in libnice, two open source libraries.

I hope that this will be a support to the Jingle community and futher our efforts to have open standards for voice and video communication.

<comment><USER3> In light of interoperability, could you please address the Google rationale for going with XMPP rather then SIP, as there is considerable support for SIP in existence, e.g. IMS on 4G networks, VoIP providers, PSTN gateways, Skype Connect, etc.?

<comment><USER4> I'm one of the authors of the XEP and was part of the Google Talk team back in the day. I haven't been working on it in quite a while so I really don't speak for the current team.

First off, I'm super proud of these guys finishing off this work. It was a long time coming.

As for why we chose XMPP over SIP: The team had made the choice to base the core IM product on XMPP before I joined. That decision was based on the ease of implementation and interoperability. XMPP for IM is much simpler than SIP/SIMPLE. The easiest answer here is that it was the most logical fit to the product we had built at the time.

My personal opinion of SIP is based on a 6 year old snapshot of the technology. Things have undoubtedly changed in the meantime. Based on that snapshot, I wasn't a fan at the time.

\- It is an amazingly complex and confusing technology. It is worth noting that SIP is the longest IETF RFC out there. Meanwhile, the core XMPP spec is easy to understand and implement. It is also an IETF standard. Extensions are well modularized and documented.

\- The security is hacked on after the fact and, at the time, was unevenly implemented. In basic SIP, one unauthenticated UDP packet makes a phone ring. XMPP security is based on TLS and DNS and is a required part of the core.

\- Federation was a patchy mess and showed SIP's telecom roots. You pretty much had to get the lawyers involved to do anything. Federation in XMPP is a DNS SRV lookup.

The world has moved forward since then so hopefully this provides some context for the decision at the time.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious as to why the windows Google Talk product has stalled - I always thought Google planned to improve it to make it a worthy competitor to Skype, but it seems to have stalled.

And now this news indicates that it appears to be AbandonWare. Which is a real pity.

<comment><USER6> I guess for Google the browser is the platform. No need to make dedicated Windows/Linux/OSX programs.

<comment><USER7> I agree. They likely still have intentions of making it a Skype competitor, but it will be in the browser rather than on the desktop.

<comment><USER8> The latest inclusion of voice and video protocols in Chrome agrees with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The annoucement email itself: [http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/jingle/2011-June/001640.htm...](http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/jingle/2011-June/001640.html)

This is great news. Google has been one of the driving forces behind Jingle, but as they were implementing it far in advance of being standardised, the drafts/standards have since changed. Other implementations have to maintain support for several close but not quite the same dialects. Google updating their software will make interop much easier.

I've been somewhat critical of Google's attempts in this direction ([http://senko.net/en/gmail-videochat-the-good-the-bad-and- the...](http://senko.net/en/gmail-videochat-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/)), and I'm very glad to see I was wrong :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, I am not sure why Google went with XMPP when the rest of the telecom and networking industry is gravitating towards IETF SIP as signaling protocol. There are so may overlaps in both of them in the sense that they use the same components such as SDP and ICE. Can anyone from Google or otherwise throw some more light on

\- Why Google prefers XMPP over SIP \- In what areas XMPP is better that SIP

I am not stating that one is better than the other, but would like to understand the core differences and advantages.

Also with Google moving on with XMPP and other major vendors converging on SIP, where do you see the inter-operability issue heading towards?

<comment><USER11> I guess SIP has weak support for Instant Messaging, which was the primary use case for Google Talk before video chat came along.

On the other hand the Jingle spec [1] contains many references to SIP:

"Furthermore, Jingle is not intended to supplant or replace existing Internet technologies based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP; RFC 3261). Because dual-stack XMPP+SIP clients are difficult to build, Jingle was designed as a pure XMPP signalling protocol. However, Jingle is at the same time designed to interwork with SIP so that the millions of deployed XMPP clients can be added onto existing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks, rather than limiting XMPP users to a separate and distinct network."

[1] <http://xmpp.org/about-xmpp/technology-overview/jingle/>

<comment><USER3> If this had happened for email, we would have had to deal with a myriad of different clients, servers and 'interworking' gateways.

I really don't understand why the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and the telcos can't agree on a standard. Guess business reasons are behind this. After all, walled gardens are great if you are the incumbent, it's how Skype got to be so valued.

Maybe the FCC should step in and take this on.

<comment><USER12> _If this had happened for email, we would have had to deal with a myriad of different clients, servers and 'interworking' gateways._

That was the networking prior to the wide adoption of IP and SMTP. There were DECnet mail clients, and clients for various other networking protocols, and users needed to know explicit bang-path routes and gateways.

Seeing this churn and this fragmentation is unpleasant, but it also means that you can see rapid advances and new features and different approaches. Once the market matures and the churn settles down, we'll see more of this sort out toward protocol consolidation.

In general, areas with high churn are some of the most interesting parts of the whole computer business. They're among the least mature, and often with the most innovations.

<comment><USER3> I hadn't looked at it from this perspective, thank you for the enlightenment. I'm just too impatient.

What irks me is that the IETF keeps banging away at protocols to solve issues like the transition from PSTN to IP (e.g. ENUM), or IM interoperability, but then nobody really implements them, or as in the case of ENUM, the incumbent telcos, at least in the USA, sit on it forever. Or some startup cooks up their own solution and kills it, like Skype.

I'm all for interoperability sorting itself out, but it does not seem to happen in the messaging/real time communications space. We still have SMS, a gazillion IM protocols, and many isolated islands of video calling. Skype, Qik, MSN, Yahoo, FaceTime, Google, I could go on. On top of that is the confounding issue of different audio and video codecs and whatever patent issues surround them. A formidable gordian knot, of which it will be interesting to see how it will be cut - if ever.

<comment><USER13> I'm far too impatient as well, I suppose. It seems to me (from the armchair where I quarterback) that IM interoperability isn't happening not because companies prefer the advantages of their chosen protocol, but because they simply want to "be the platform." I can't imagine a better advantage than actually being able to talk with any of my friends on any other client.

If email hasn't proven a standard can be beneficial to everyone, I don't know what would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it a real shame Apple have no interest in making their iMessages and FaceTime networks interoperate with XMPP and instead going their own way. We're going to end up with people on different mobile OSes hesitating to communicate with each other because they'll fall back on expensive SMSes (a network effect much like today with discounted in-network calling).

</comment><comment><USER11> Can iChat speak Jingle?

I just tried the combination of web-based Gmail <-> iChat and the web client can see that the iChat client has a camera and I can initiate a call but iChat never shows an incoming one.

If I go iChat<->iChat over Google's XMPP server I can make a call. Does iChat speak yet another incompatible video call extension if it used with an XMPP network?

Adium can't do AV either.... Can anyone recommend a OS X client? Video chat is currently the last thing that stops me from uninstalling Flash.

<comment><USER15> <http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#ichat6>

iChat in Lion will features service plugins.

<comment><USER16> It's not clear whether this includes audio and video? It may be only for text chats.

<comment><USER15> Lion supports Yahoo's AV protocol, and I assume it's integrated using the new plugin architecture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder why the Windows client will officially not be updated to Jingle? If it was just "not at the moment," they would have either kept mum or said so, but to actually say that it won't be updated..... that says a lot.

<comment><USER18> The official client never got video chat support either. It's received very little love over the past couple of years.

Personally I think the only native client they are interested in anymore is Gmail in Chrome...

<comment><USER2> We care about gmail on all browsers :).

<comment><USER19> What about people who don't like or use the Gmail web UI (I use it over IMAP) but would still like to use Google Talk to stay in touch with friends? Is my only option to use third-party clients? I like Google Talk but dislike Gmail, and tying the two together doesn't really work out in my favour.

<comment><USER20> "What about people who don't like or use the _Gmail_ web UI"

Well there is always <http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client>

Opening a webbrowser window with that and you are set. No Gmail UI, and you get video chat.

<comment><USER21> I wonder why the gadget doesn't have an option for calling normal phone lines like the Gmail UI does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For information on support in GNOME's Empathy IM client and on Maemo/MeeGo, see <http://blog.barisione.org/2011-06/broken-gtalk-calls/>

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder what impact this will have on 3rd party devices like the great Obihai that interface with Google Voice?

<http://www.obihai.com>

<comment><USER2> I don't know how Obihai works, but if it uses SIP to talk to Google Voice, this will not effect them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone know if this update applies to Google Voice? And whether it will now be possible to initiate a standard RTP stream via XMPP? That would make SIP interoperability with Google Voice practical. At the moment it's held back by the fact that Google Voice requires some custom ICE packets to be exchanged on the RTP sockets before it will commence sending RTP. Which means there are no SIP clients that can talk RTP with Google Voice when the call is initiated over XMPP :(.

</comment><comment><USER24> Google Translate integrated with Jingle could/will be a joy to use.

I would love to talk to a college student in Greece about the local economic sentiment over VoIP.

<comment><USER25> Check out <http://babelverse.com/> A startup coming out of Greece btw :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How does this play with WebRTC? Are they complementary technologies?

<comment><USER2> Yes, complimentary. You could use WebRTC to implement a Jingle client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Skype is dead, and Microsoft just wasted $8.5 billion for that poison company.</comment>


Can we have a JavaScript login to Y Combinator news? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> AJAX login wouldn't be bad, but I'd prefer AJAX voting. A page reload forces you to hunt down the comment thread you were just reading.

<comment><USER3> Also the links keep expiring. If I open multiple tabs, by the time I get to some of them all the links are invalidated. IIRC, same thing if taking "too long" to write a comment.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I mean like the way reddit does it, it is much nicer then being sent to another web page.

<comment><USER4> How is it different? Click - Enter Auth info - Press Submit.

If you let the browser save your password then you only have to click once.

What we do need is a remember me feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No, not that I have a say

<comment><AUTHOR> why not?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Link to your Github  - <AUTHOR>

It would be interesting to see what HNers are working on, also to see their style of coding. So if you don't mind, leave a link to your GitHub. <comment><AUTHOR> <http://github.com/chegra/></comment>


This is a cyclical, not a structural, unemployment - <AUTHOR> https://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/2012/el-js.pdf

<comment><USER2> _It is possible that another kind of structural shift has occurred, such that workers' skills do not match those demanded by the economy._

This has been echoed by employers - they need to hire but can't find people with the right skills. Liquid unemployment needs skills to be widely transferable across a variety of jobs, which apparently is no longer the case. The work skills that most people have are no longer skills which other people find valuable. To change this state, people have to be trained, and someone has to pay for that - individuals, their parents, a company, governments, private donors, somebody.

ITTET, companies believe they can't afford to hire untrained workers -- to afford to train their employees. Having a current employee do this job is cheaper than hiring, meaning companies really aren't expanding the capacity at which they can supply their respective markets.

The Mulligan perspective is interesting, but it conflicts with the Laffer curve.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree. It's mostly a problem precipitated by globalization starting with the IBM layoff of '93. Since that layoff, loyalty (employer to employee and employee to employer) has completely eroded to the point, where neither has confidence of how long one will "keep" the other around. This means that employers no longer bet on people with right talent, but not the right skills because it is conceivable that the employee could leave in a few months to a few years after any required skills have been acquired/mastered.

These problems are further precipitated by tech companies giving HR departments exactly the tools they asked for and not the tools they need. HR departments asked for tools to help them perform better skill-to-position matching, often based on keywords, and approach very prone to false negatives (i.e. people ideal for the position not even being considered). What HR departments actually need are tools to help them determine who would likely succeed in positions that need filling based on comparable or transferrable skills.</comment></comment>


Ask PG: How do we get dead links reactivated? - <AUTHOR>

Was commenting on a post and then the post was marked dead, but its not, how do we get posts reactivated? Do mods take a second look if there are comments? I assume it was marked dead because of the lack of info, but then the OP came in and explained. As it was a "Review my start-up" post I would like to get it reactivated again because I miss those sorts of post on HN. Original thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4267936 <comment><USER2> Make a new submission.

</comment><comment><USER3> HN is very hostile to non-YC startups. Just avoid this site for promoting your non-YC startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that's true. YC start-ups have a built in fan base, but the site isn't hostile to anyone.</comment></comment>


Reporters Without Borders Uses Perverse Censorship To Defend Freedom Of Speech - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewnewton/2011/06/24/reporters-without-borders-uses-perverse-censorship-to-defend-freedom-of-speech/ <comment><USER2> advert paid for by 'castlight', apparently</comment>


Trivial authentication bypass in libssh leaves servers wide open - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/bug-in-libssh-makes-it-amazingly-easy-for-hackers-to-gain-root-access/ <comment><USER2> From the reading, the "hack" is pretty embarrassing. The server->client message that announces you're authenticated is instead sent client->server and the server just sets its mode to that. Abracadabra, you're logged in!

<comment><USER3> Suspicious-me wonders who wrote/committed that code... Is it a "plausibly deniable mistake"?

<comment><USER4> I guess you could say that about absolutely any bug though? This isn't particularly underhanded, and it's more of a broad design flaw than a subtle change. If you wanted a "backdoor" you could absolutely do 10x better than this.

<comment><USER5> How could you do 10x better? Because it's a broad design flaw there is no suspicious LOC or suspiciously overcomplicated code needed to hide the backdoor. You have to understand the whole context to notice the bug.

<comment><USER4> But it's still there in plain sight. I'd hazard a guess that this may be the first time a solid code reviewer looked at the code, and spotted it straight away*

If you wanted 10x better, you could throw in some code that exhibits undefined (but known on major compilers) behavior, or super subtle C issues. Even a simple if statement in C forces all kinds of wonderful promotions and type conversions which can truncate, wrap, and drastically change values in ways that even most C developers aren't aware.

I encourage folks to go check out the "underhanded C contest" before suggesting that this bug is a backdoor.

*The person who found this, Peter, is indeed insanely good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note that libssh != openssh, which is what's probably running on your server.

<comment><USER7> I tried to find what it is used in. The site claims that it's used server-side by GitHub: [https://www.libssh.org/#text-5](https://www.libssh.org/#text-5)

<comment><USER8>
        $ apt-cache rdepends libssh-4
        libssh-4
        Reverse Depends:
          libpam-x2go
          yafc
          x2goclient
          tmate
          remmina-plugin-nx
          remmina
          openvas-nasl
          libopenvas9
          libssh-dev
          cockpit-bridge
          kio-extras
          hydra

This is all of the packages that depend on libssh in Debian Testing, doesn't seem to be very problematic, I've only heard of one thing on this list, and that doesn't use the server code anyways.

<comment><USER9> Tmate might have issues...there's both client and server code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _" GitHub isn't vulnerable [...] my guess is you'll be left with a small handful of random sftp servers or IoT devices and little else!"_

That sounds reassuring. It's not as if hacking some random IoT device is going to win the jackpot.

Oh wait, it totally can: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/07/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/07/21/how- a-fish-tank-helped-hack-a-casino/)

<comment><USER11> Most embedded devices which have ssh server functionality use Dropbear. You'll have to look really hard to find anything which uses this "libssh" server functionality (which, again, is _not openssh_).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Apparently there was an almost identical vulnerability in the Python SSH library Paramiko too: [https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko/issues/1283](https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko/issues/1283)

</comment><comment><USER13> Earlier discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18236372](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18236372) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18230610)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is this a code error or a protocol error? If a protocol relies on a message from the client side to allow access, it's a protocol error!

It's unlikely that ssh - a protocol that powers large swaths of software, has such an error, but always good to hear from the experts that this is indeed a coding error.

<comment><USER15> It's an incorrect implementation of the protocol, yes. That message should only be sent from the server to the client, and the server should not take any action (besides dropping the connection) when it's received.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Move along. This isn't the exploit you're looking for.

(Unless your server uses the relatively uncommon libssh on your server. If you use openssl you're not vulnerable. Github's not vulnerable either.)

</comment><comment><USER17> What a strange coincidence :/

First we had the YouTube outage and a bit later, this issue appeared...

</comment><comment><USER18> I never heard of this library before. Most projects seem to use libssh2. [https://github.com/libssh2/libssh2](https://github.com/libssh2/libssh2)

<comment><USER19> Well, if there is libssh2, most likely there is libssh.

<comment><USER20> They are unrelated. I think libssh2 is named that as it implements the v2 ssh protocol.</comment></comment></comment>


Ministry of Defence files on UFO sightings released - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14486678

<comment><USER2> It feels a little like the MoD are being attacked for not investigating these things more seriously, but as a taxpayer I'm not particularly upset by that. What do you think? Should I be?

<comment><USER3> It depends. If all they have is unreliable, inconsistent eyewitness testimony, then it's acceptable to ignore. If they have physical samples they've not tested or electromagnetic readings they've not had analysed, then it's an incompetent blind spot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The thing I don't get about aliens is that they seem to have the technology to pass through lightyears to our galaxy, but somehow don't have the technology to hide themselves? Yeesh.

<comment><USER5> I don't see what is odd hypothetical about having one hard technology but not another hard technology.

Intersteller travel is only hard from a physics point of view if you want to go from X to Y and then back to X, with not too much time elapsing on X. If that isn't a constraint, it's just engineering and biology:

1\. If you need to get back to X, without too much time having elapsed on the ship, you just need to go fast. Time dilation keeps the trip short for the travelers.

2\. If you are willing to make a one-way trip, you don't need to go fast. There are a couple of approaches:

2a. If you need the original crew to arrive at the destination, then some form of suspended animation (cryogenics?) will do, as well extending your lifespan.

2b. If you don't need the original crew to arrive at the destination, then you can do a generation ship.

If/when we do encounter aliens, I would not at all be surprised if they aren't much more advanced than us. For instance, a civilization that recognized an upcoming planet-wide natural disaster that they could not avert (e.g., big asteroid on collision course), and abandoned their planet on a fleet of generation ships, each ship wandering the galaxy looking for a habitable planet to take over.</comment></comment>


Linux Gamers Make Up ~2% Of Valve's Steam Users - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNTQ

<comment><USER2> Here are Steam's December Linux numbers that I recorded back in January:

      OS                         Share Delta
      Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit        0.29% +0.29%
      Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS 64 bit  0.26% +0.26%
      Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS         0.13% +0.13%
      Ubuntu 12.10               0.12% +0.12%
      Other                      0.71% +0.14%

Note that this was the first month that Linux use was recorded, which means that the delta for "Other" is almost certainly entirely Linux (for example, there was no "Linux Mint" option then).

Here's this month's numbers, for easy comparison:

      OS                          Share Delta
      Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit         0.71% +0.28%
      Ubuntu 12.10                0.38% +0.19%
      Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS 64 bit   0.31% +0.31%
      Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS          0.20% +0.20%
      Linux Mint 14 Nadia 64 bit  0.17% +0.17%
      Linux 64 bit                0.14% +0.14%
      Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS 64 bit   0.11% -0.22%
      Other                       0.82% +0.06%

BTW, if you're a Steam user on Linux, don't neglect to fill out the hardware survey if you get selected. It really is an awesome resource for determining the capabilities of the average gaming computer. There's also a handful of _strange_ results... is Firefox really six times more popular than Chrome on Windows? Are there really people still gaming on 640x480 monitors?

<comment><USER3> A lot of people who use Linux like to use open source just because it's open source, and not particularly because it's better (anyone who says LibreOffice is just as good as MS Office is crazy). That's why you see a lot more firefox and chromium than you do on Windows or Mac.

<comment><USER4> Well on Linux your only choice of (mainstream) browsers is firefox or chrome/chromium so you would probably expect that.

Same with office.

<comment><USER5> And Opera. Pretty much anything other than IE and Safari.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm actually really frustrated by Steam's linux port. If you're not running Ubuntu it's freakishly inconvenient to get running.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining that Steam doesn't have a gentoo package that is maintained by them. I'm pissed off that they call apt-get directly from the application, don't make it easy to discover steam's requirements to run, have a confusing maze of launch scripts, and a bunch of other major no-no's.

The ubuntu desktop is an easy access market, with some big upsides from Steam's perspective. But there's a long history out there of vendors successfully handling a broadly usable linux port without pulling this kind of nonsense (attempting to maintain dependencies system-wide without even asking if it's okay!), and a great number of linux users are happy to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and rebuild libpng or whatever for any special application requirements if they're not running your 'officially supported' distribution.

That having been said, I'm playing Cave Story right now on linux.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't integrate that well in Ubuntu to start with. There's no app menu integration for Unity.

Edit: I mean the unified menubar. Steam menubar is attached to the steam window, not at the top of the screen.

<comment><USER8> Steam doesn't use a toolkit and overrides compositor decorations. It is never intended to integrate, it doesn't integrate at all on Windows or Mac either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Valve was giving away a promotional item in Team Fortress 2 for users who logged into the game from a Linux machine. The last time they did this, for users who logged in from a Mac, the promotional item became a kind of in-game de facto currency.

There were lots of users logging in once from an Ubuntu VM instance for the item; it'll be interesting to see if this growth continues now that the item giveaway is over.

For reference: <http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Tux>

<comment><USER10> > The last time they did this, for users who logged in from a Mac, the > promotional item became a kind of in-game de facto currency.

FWIW, this won't happen again, as the Tux items are not tradable.

<comment><USER11> They're likely to become tradable soon as the promotion is now over and other promotional items become tradable after their promotion is over.

Still, I personally doubt they'll be worth much unlike the Ear Buds you got from playing on a Mac purely because at the time trading didn't exist. So no one went out of their way to get them, leaving only the people who actually had Mac with them, making them highly sought after because there's only so many of them. Not to mention it's outside of most peoples knowledge to run an OS X virtual machine. While with this Linux item its been expected to be worth a lot and making a Linux virtual machine is relatively a simple task, meaning now there's a lot more Tux's to go around.

A similar thing to the Ear Buds also happened with a promotional item for "Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse" in the past called "Max's Severed Head" (<http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Max%27s_Severed_Head>) which rocketed in price when trading became available due to the fact there's a limited amount of them and they don't randomly drop while playing. They're currently worth around 26 keys which is ~£50 if you buy the keys directly from the store, but keys can be found cheaper and the price of course changes all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Rather than the silly "doubling" headline, there's another number that's much more interesting: that Linux users are 2% of steam users and OSX is 3%. Compare those numbers with total share: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems). OSX is at 7% and Linux at 1%.

It'll be really interesting to see where the Steam numbers end up when they stabilize.

<comment><USER13> What complicates matters is there's no good way of knowing how many Steam "Windows" users are people who use OS X or Linux as their main OS but boot into Windows to use Steam because of poor graphics card drivers.

<comment><USER14> Yup. I'm definitely included in this bunch. My graphics card (Nvidia Optimus) doesn't work on Linux, so I'd much rather dual boot and game on Windows.

<comment><USER15> Have you tried Bumblebee? <http://bumblebee-project.org/> I've heard that people get their Optimus cards to work well with it.

<comment><USER16> Yup, using Bumblebee with primus-run and CS:S runs perfectly smooth on my laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Relevant xkcd comic: <http://xkcd.com/605/>

<comment><USER18> I'm excited about this because I assumed all the people who wanted Steam on Linux would download it immediately, leaving no room for growth in the second month. The fact that it's still growing is a good sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Even better, I dare say that Steam's Linux market share has experienced _infinite_ growth since February (where it was 0% exactly). Amazing, really.

<comment><USER20> It wasn't 0%, there are plenty of wine users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hope that steam breaks the myth that Linux users will not pay for software.

<comment><USER22> The Humble Bundle's statistics [1] have offered an argument against that perception for a while. On average a Linux user pays $11.02 for a Humble Bundle, while Windows users pay $5.93 and Mac users pay $8.43. Linux and Mac users are also overrepresented among the Humble Bundle's buyers (having made 8% and 11% of the total number of purchases respectively) compared to the gaming community at large.

That said, I'm not sure how widespread this myth really is outside of select Internet communities. Enterprise Linux users are known to pay for their software (even if somewhat indirectly, e.g., through support contracts), and the biggest myth concerning desktop Linux users seems to be "huh, are there any?".

[1] See <http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humble/> for a great report.

<comment><USER23> That doesn't really tell us anything because Windows users have much more choice as to where their gaming money goes compared to Linux users and Mac users. Same goes with the overrepresentation.

<comment><USER24> I don't think that was the OP's point. The conclusion that is usually drawn from the myth that Linux users aren't willing to pay for software, is that there isn't a viable market there. There clearly is, however, as the HIB has demonstrated.

Even if you ignore the overrepresentation of Linux users, the fact stands that when you look at total revenues, Linux rivals OS X.

<comment><USER13> HIB definitely demonstrates that Linux users are willing to pay for software (which is awesome!), but I'm not sure that there's enough data to use that to conclude there's a viable market there.

We know that the HIB has drawn in significant revenue from Linux customers, but that doesn't give us the faintest clue how profitable they are (remember, that average $11 Linux sale has to be shared with multiple developers and charities). You might take the fact that they keep offering more HIBs as a sign that Humble Bundle (the company) considers its humble bundles (the promotions) to be successes, but it's not a guarantee that the metric they're using to define success is profitability. They've raised nearly $4.5 million in funding, so they're not strapped for cash; it's very possible they're more focused on using the bundles as a marketing channel than as an actual revenue stream, convincing consumers to trust the Humble Bundle brand name and developers/publishers that they're a meaningful distribution platform.

tl;dr: the fact that a successful venture-funded startup is selling software to Linux users, when we don't know if they're profitable or what their long- term strategy is, doesn't necessarily imply that there's a viable market for selling software to Linux users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As someone who has absolutely zero interest in gaming, this is the most exciting news I have read on HN for a good month or so.

</comment><comment><USER26> Meh. The one and only question that matters is "how many Linux users would buy my game that would not have bought it on either OS X or Windows". That number is significantly smaller than 2%.

I'm very excited at the prospects of SteamBox and can't wait to learn more. I'm not sure Steam on desktop linux will ever be meaningful.

I do wonder what happens if Steambox comes out with some flavor of Linux included but installing Windows grants an automatic 20% performance increase due to drivers. Hell, I'd install Windows even if it were only a 5% increase.

<comment><USER27> Wasn't there a post form Valve that showed they can already get 20% improvement on Linux? Given that they're also working to improve the graphics drivers for Linux, I don't really see where that "automatic 20% performance increase" for Windows would come from. Sure, the driver itself might be 20% slower, but the Linux stack is already faster than the Windows stack AND there is room for improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> More games please. Many of the bundle games are also not available.

<comment><USER29> My recommendation for the day is Kentucky Route Zero. It runs beautifully on my mid-range Ubuntu laptop and frankly it has been one of the most astounding gaming experiences I've ever had.

<comment><USER30> I was thinking of trying that and Serious Sam 3. CS Source and TF2 have run great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What percentage of Linux gamers are also Windows gamers?

If P(Linux | Windows) = 1.0, we know steam grew operating complexity instead of business.

<comment><USER32> The way I understand it is that they are making an investment in Linux to allow their upcoming steam box to run Linux.

Also it allows (or will allow) users to avoid using Windows just to be able to play games. This is a good thing all around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> There have been a few occasion's where I've managed to pry the number of Wine users out of Valve over the years -- the Linux usage numbers look fairly similar.

Unfortunately, there was a period of about a year or two where the hardware survey would crash under Wine, so the data is probably very biased against Wine users (even I learned not to opt in).

</comment><comment><USER34> Most of these are VMs to get a new TF2 hat, anyway.

</comment><comment><USER35> I expect this to increase.easier than OSX because OSX machines are inherently expensive.

Also I know many persons that don't used Linux only because there was no steam for it.

<comment><USER36> As a long-time Steam user on OSX (I have the TF2 earbuds to prove it,) the games available on OSX and Linux are a paltry offering (one of the top selling games right now on OSX is "Left 4 Dead 2" released in 2009.)

There are few top-tier games. Borderlands 2 is the only recent game that comes to mind. It became so discouraging that I built a PC gaming machine. I hope for a day where I can buy new games on an OSX or Linux machine, but I do not plan on holding my breath.

<comment><USER37> The part that kills me about Borderlands 2 on OSX is when they finally released it you can't play with your character from steam... you haven't to make a new one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am curios to see what version of OpenGL people have.

<comment><USER31> server glx vendor string: SGI

server glx version string: 1.4

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Steam's support on OS X is the suck. I don't know what the experience is like on Linux, but given there is less competition from better stores on Linux I wouldn't be surprised to see Steam be a big hit on Linux.

As for me, after being a steam user for years, but given the fact that I haven't been able to play team fortress for 5 months now despite playing it for years, in the future, I'll use the Mac App Store.

<comment><USER40> What do you find problematic on the Mac version? My office has weekly TF2 games and a bunch of us use Steam on OSX. The only gripe I have is that it doesn't remember my password, but other than that it seems pretty much identical to the Windows counterpart.

<comment><USER41> Personally, I'm impressed by how horribly implemented Steam's OS X gamepad support is. That takes skill to do, when other apps Just Work™.

Also, Steam.app used to suck heaps of CPU just idling in the background, often enough that to make the fan audible in laptops. That improved lately, but still isn't perfect.

Not to mention the frequent crashes when you quit. I guess it's quitting either way, but still.</comment></comment></comment>


C++11 metaprogramming applied to software obfuscation (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-14/materials/eu-14-Andrivet-C-plus-plus11-Metaprogramming-Applied-To-software-Obfuscation-wp.pdf <comment><USER2> And operator"" _obfuscated1 has a serious bug, as it returns a temporary buffer allocated on the stack.

<comment><USER3> What is the lifetime of a constexpr struct? I do not have the answer, but I suspect that is why this is not a bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How well does it defend against this deobfuscation approach? [https://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/debray/Publications/generi...](https://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/debray/Publications/generic- deobf.pdf)</comment>


JVMLS 2015 – Multi-Language Runtime [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOnyJurioyw&list=PLX8CzqL3ArzUo2dtMurvpUTAaujPMeuuU&index=14

<comment><USER2> magaudet and I are from IBM and are happy to answer any questions.

tl;dr: IBM is breaking apart its JVM runtime technology to allow easy reuse and integration of its GC, JIT and Tooling into other languages. This has been proven with a JIT + GC + Diagnostics enabled version of Ruby (MRI) and Python (CPython)

<comment><USER3> (And working on the Ruby JIT)

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks like great work! Will there be a paper?

Why did you decide to show results from the synthetic benchmarks in bench9000, when there are 43 kernels from real compute-intensive libraries that are in- use in production (the PSD.rb and Chunky PNG benchmarks)?

Working on JRuby+Truffle I found that I could actually better optimise those benchmarks compared to the synthetic ones. The more complex code provides more opportunities to make big gains in performance compared to the simple code in the synthetic benchmarks.

<comment><USER2> We presented early perf numbers from the classic subset which we felt had well known benchmarks. We wanted to present an good overall view of what we can do right now as opposed to biasing towards only the best running benchmarks. There was also the matter of presentation, its a bit easier to present a chart of 9 versus 43.

The team is interested in working on a paper, once the hard work is closer to being done.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The LeapPad -- a tablet for kids - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/leapfrog-unveils-tablet-computer-for-kids/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's another link with videos of the product:

<http://www.leapfrog.com/leappadtease/index.html>

Their tagline is quite good -- an iPad for you, a LeapPad for them. Given the physical condition I've seen some of my neighbors iPads are in -- at $100 this is the best investment they can make.

</comment><comment><USER2> Ok, I'm already sold. My 3 year old has the Leapfrog Explorer and loves it. I'm amazed at the things she learns form the games. There's only one thing she loves more than that and its my wife's iPad.</comment>


Heroku dyno scaling down - <AUTHOR> https://status.heroku.com/incidents/633

<comment><USER2> Yep, my app is down and can't be restarted.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand the incident report, can someone explain exactly what is happening?

I know my existing apps are working, but I cannot push new code. Does this affect only code pushes?

<comment><USER4> > The API is still in maintenance mode. As a result, app deploys (git push), > scaling commands (heroku scale), and one-off dynos (heroku run) remain > unavailable. We will post an update as soon as that functionality is re- > enabled.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I guess I was thrown by the "API is still in maintenance mode," which suggests broader implications. It would have been clearer if they'd written:

The following services are not available: app deploys (git push), scaling commands (heroku scale), and one-off dynos (heroku run). All other services are running normally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a result, app deploys are also down.

</comment><comment><USER6> can't deploy code</comment>


Would music piracy drop sharply if studios charged less? - <AUTHOR>

I had a heated argument with a friend of mine months ago and have been unable to stop thinking about it ever since.
I think that if Music studios charged less for digital downloads say 20 - 50c per song, instead of  $10 for an album or 99c per song as they do now, people wouldn't feel the need to steal music.
My friend argued that at that price point, the music studios would lose a lot of money, because they'd kill their cash cow (CD albums) and there is no guarantee that digital music sales would double/quadruple to pick up the slack.
What do you guys think? PS: I also think that they need to 'age' albums the way they do in real life ... if you go on Amazon to buy an album from the 90's chances are you can pick up a used copy for $2+shipping ... but the digital download still costs $9.99 ... its just insulting. <comment><USER2> The per-song model is broken - they should charge a monthly access fee for he entire library. I currently spend $0 on music. If the record companies pooled their copyright resources together and allowed me to pay them $40/m for unlimited access to their entire catalogue, I'd be a customer for life, paying them a whopping $480 a year, for the rest of my life.

That said, severe price reductions do work too. If songs were $0.20, I might be tempted to buy some every once in a while, just like I do buy DVDs at £3 per.

</comment><comment><USER3> Music piracy has not decreased concert attendance, quite the opposite.</comment>


Path's Playbook For Appealing To Normal People - <AUTHOR> http://robberbaronblog.com/2010/11/paths-playbook-for-appealing-to-normal-people/

<comment><USER2> This is the route that Diaspora and those who want to be "the next Facebook" should have taken. Just give ordinary users a mechanism for sharing things with their closest friends that's easier yet just as flexible as email, and you have a winner.

Idea: have an easy way of sharing stuff that's for "everyone except for the parents." (Also have a way of tagging friends who are your parent's closest friends.) Combine this with a way of tagging already-published stuff as "not for the parents" which will revoke items which you've already sent. (Also delay everything sent to parents and friends of parents by 30 minutes or so, so you have time to change your mind without their ever knowing.)

EDIT: We're reaching the point where your computer/smartphone photo sharing mechanism can detect your face in photos and detect scantily clad people. We should be able to have the device detect these conditions and your parents on the recipients list and pop up a dialog asking, "There's racy content in this photo, do you want your parents to see it?"

<comment><USER3> @tylerstalder left this in the comments of the post:

[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social- networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)

It's an excellent deck from a Google UX Engineer that describes the scenario you are talking about with sharing with "everyone except for parents".

The problem that the deck illustrates is that the breakdown isn't just Parents and Everyone else. Each person has 4-6 different groups, each with its own level of appropriate or relevant content. The trick is designing to account for each.

<comment><USER2> I think the trick is to leave a path open for a person to discover that their personal social Venn diagrams are this complex. There should be several stages. At each stage, a user discovers some pain (I wish I could leave my parents out of this) and then discovers an easy solution. (Ah ha! I can use this "parent" tag and then it prompts me so I can choose to not let my parents see this.) The user is pleased, until they discover their next pain. (I don't always want _all_ of my friends to know about...) The end result is that you've solved the user's pain several times over, and so they love your product.</comment></comment></comment>


The one where I try and explain Surface RT vs. Pro - <AUTHOR> http://www.webnotwar.ca/surface-pro-arm-intel-x86-x64-wat

<comment><USER2> As a consumer, it's a sad thing to see what Microsoft does with the "Surface Pro", in my view a product that would take the ultrabook segment by storm.

Microsoft obviously has struck some deals with pc producers and committed to hold the product back until after the holiday season. They probably even make more money that way.

It's just a matter of time, until Apple is going to counter the Surface with their own ios/macosx hybrid, which I think is the future. I would not be surprised to see the first hint for this "surface" sometime early next year, after the holidays, and before the actual Surface Pro hits the stores.

Microsoft is betting for Apple to not pull this off so quickly, but if they are wrong, the Windows market share will continue to shrink at an accelerated pace next year.

Microsoft had their shoot this Christmas season to do something bold and go big with Surface RT AND Surface Pro, but they choose to give in with the OEM's.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even though I work for Microsoft I don't know the details about when/how they decide to do a product/device launch. That being said, I know myself and many others are excited by the Surface Pro as a truly portable development/work tablet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm holding out for the pro version so i can use it for development purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many of us are, Surface RT is a great device but a lot of us are excited about having a tablet that we can do real development on as well!</comment></comment>


The Reasons Children Should Learn to Code - <AUTHOR> http://sambulosenda.com/blog/2014/08/04/the-reasons-children-should-learn-to-code/

<comment><USER2> I see it more as computer programming being a trade just like anything else [http://online.wsj.com/articles/computer-programming-is-a- tra...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/computer-programming-is-a-trade-lets- act-like-it-1407109947) I agree with you but at the same time I think that at the end of the day a lot of these will end up being a market-driven rather than a creator-driven decision. Some kids will take up coding because of the pay, others because of the passion. Some will be passionate about coding but will end up doing other things for pay, such as nursing. Personally when I have children of my own I would teach them coding but I am not going to continuously barrage them into being software programmers because I'm not in charge of their lives.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most blog posts about teaching children coding focus on why it would be useful for children to learn to write code. That's fair enough, but it ignores the problem that teaching time is finite - the question is not 'would it be useful to learn to code?' (that's obvious) but rather 'is coding the most useful thing that these hours could be spent on?'.</comment>


Taking Apart a Tesla Battery - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2019/09/07/fail-of-the-week-taking-apart-a-tesla-battery/ <comment><USER2> Reparability score: 0

Compare to Taycan battery: submodules are replaceable: [https://jalopnik.com/an-extremely-detailed-look-at-the- porsc...](https://jalopnik.com/an-extremely-detailed-look-at-the-porsche- taycans-engin-1837802533)

<comment><AUTHOR> I was totally surprised. I figured all Tesla batteries would be made of interchangeable Lego-like modules.</comment></comment>


Best startup landing page service? - <AUTHOR>

What's a good site that provides a simple landing page (that you don't have to host yourself) to gather pre-launch email signups for a site?
Something I could point the name servers of my domain to relatively easy.  LaunchRock is invite only it seems.  Is there anything public out there?
EDIT: To clarify, I'm thinking more of a "beta, pre-launch" landing page. Something that briefly teases what's coming and says "sign up to be notified first." <comment><USER2> We have been experimenting with LaunchRock and will launch our beta invite site in about two weeks using LaunchRock. Actually, we're trying to get some feedback on the background image so I'll submit a separate post asking for feedback on that from the HN audience :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want a priority invite to LaunchRock, just email me at jameson at launchrock dot com. We're going to open it up as soon as we can, but we're focused on scaling right now and a few other things before we're 100% comfortable letting the masses in.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know why LaunchRock is invite only. I built the same thing for one of my websites in an hour. If you want the code, send me a message and I'll be happy to share it. For reference, my landing page is @recipebot.com

<comment><USER5> Your this seems like a really simple / elegant solution. I have been using the Good Karma List machine at my site - <http://www.formactivate.com/beta/signup.php>

but your seems a lot more elegant. Possibility of getting the code?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll build one for you, for a fee of course.

example:

<http://printableprompts.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> Use <http://unbounce.com/> with Wufoo forms.</comment>


ChunkHost is giving away free VPS hosting - <AUTHOR> http://chunkhost.com/r/SignUp <comment><USER2> FYI, it is only the first chunk you get upon signup AND it stops being free after 4-5 weeks. It wasn't explicitly clear on the landing page.

<comment><USER3> You _do_ get a lifetime discount after that time is up (or at least you did when I signed up).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "100% network and server uptime. Guaranteed." is a bold claim to make.

<comment><USER5> They actually have pretty mediocre uptime, too. Good for a cheap dev box, not so great for production stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> ChunkHost is currently looking for Beta Testers (in the U.S. only) to shake this new service down! For Beta Testers, the first 512MB chunk is free.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://chunkhost.com/faq>

      How long will the beta be free?

      At least 5 weeks. Sometimes longer, depending on capacity.

      When your beta chunk's time is up, we email you asking you to take a survey about the experience. At the end of the survey, you can choose to keep your chunk and begin paying for it or let it be shut down.

<comment><USER7> 5 weeks? Meh... I did sign up, almost out of compulsion... Can one have buyers regret from something that is free?

Most places have introductory offers of a month free or super reduced price with money back guarantees on services that don't need a shake down.

Had I not been acting so compulsively after just waking up, I wouldn't have bothered for a pithy 5 week (possibly more...) free "beta". It's not worth taking the time to setup something on this account if it's just going to switch to traditional billing in 5 weeks, IMHO.

<comment><USER8> > Can one have buyers regret from something that is free?

Sure, if you feel you were misled, and now you have to spend time to ditch the account before they bill you.

Remember what Tyler Durden says: "the things you own ... end up owning you".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I signed up for hosting from these guys about a year ago and have been pretty satisfied. The service just works, and the support I get has been great. Granted, I'm just running a simple little personal site. It's nothing of critical importance or anything.

</comment><comment><USER9> They don't seem to be able to verify my (valid) credit card. I'm hoping it's not a scam, but if it's not, they may have gotten shut down by their payment processor for a lot of suspicious $0.01 authorizations.

</comment><comment><USER10> US only. BOOOO!

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems to be full at the moment. I signed up and they said, no room for beta testers at the moment, but they'll tell me when there are openings.

<comment><USER12> Me too. Why couldn't they tell me this before I submitted my credit card info? Now I have to watch and make sure no charges come through. I clicked the "Remove card" link from my settings page, and hopefully they'll actually do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> US only strikes me as a weird condition, and taking the CC card to check seems suspicious to me.

It's also a bit disappointing as I'm in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER14> 32GB per node and only two SATA drives in RAID-1? Sounds like IO wait might be pretty high on nodes that are filled up.

</comment><comment><USER15> not giving my CC for free trial</comment>


Moving Django to GitHub: the postmortem - <AUTHOR> http://www.holovaty.com/writing/django-github/

<comment><USER2> I would have liked them to move to bitbucket.org because it was built with Django.

<comment><USER3> > I would have liked them to move to bitbucket.org because it was built with > Django.

But Mercurial itself wasn't (although it was written mostly in Python). I think this is a good example of taking the pragmatic choice (GitHub) over the ideological choice (Bitbucket).

<comment><USER4> BitBucket supports Git repositories...

<comment><USER5> That's mostly irrelevant. A lot of people are not using Github just because it supports git - the network effect is one of the key drivers in choosing Github.

<comment><USER4> Certainly but that wasn't on OPs list of reasons to use it :)

<comment><USER6> Looks like it was:

> Why Git/GitHub, as opposed to Mercurial/Bitbucket or some other system? > Because it's very well-made, and it's where the people are.

Where the people are would imply because of the social aspects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> is it really valuable to keep the svn repository up for scripts that do automatic updating? since nothing further will ever be pushed to it, those scripts are now tracking an increasingly out-of-date repo.

the other point of view is that there are servers that the admin has had a reasonable expectation of being able to set up and let run itself, but those servers shouldn't be pulling from anyone's svn repo anyway.

<comment><USER8> Off the top of my head, here's one (somewhat) common use case that can break:

        pip install -e svn+http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk#egg=django

It's definitely reasonable to keep the old repo up, for this case, and others.

<comment><USER7> but that is now getting an old version of django. is that really what is wanted?

<comment><USER9> If you're getting a specific version, sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm thrilled and excited to see this transition. I'm also very grateful for all the work the Django team does. I really love the framework as a whole.

I hope the Django team can fully utilize the benefits of using github, and further decrease the resistance to contributing (through pull requests).

With this change bugs like #17144 wouldn't haunt me for months on end, because I'd just fix it.

<comment><USER10> Also, please don't end up like the mongodb github project. They have 70 pull request, 0 closed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _cough_ retrospective _cough_

A postmortem is what you do when you try to understand the cause of death: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem>

</nitpick>

<comment><USER12> Definitions notwithstanding, I tend to prefer the term 'AAR' (After Action Report). I had a manager in an early campus IT job that had been in the Marines, and he enforced a strict mandatory-AAR policy for anything even remotely complex.

It's really a fantastic idea and something I fully intend to use in every capacity that makes sense going forward. It doesn't make much sense as part of the software design flow, but it absolutely could (and probably should) be a tool in any deployment protocol.

My AARs usually read pretty much like this blog post, more or less to the T, although we emphasized what we would do differently in the future more.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I think it's an excellent practice. I get the metaphorical use of "postmortem", but think "after-action report" (for the document) and "retrospective" (for the meeting) better capture the flavor of what a good one looks like. And like you, I think the most valuable part is what to do differently next time.

The way I work them into the software design flow is just to do them regularly, with varying granularity. We do one every Friday afternoon with beers for the last 30-60 minutes of the day.

Normally we discuss whatever interests us most about the week past. But a couple of weeks ago one of the engineers suggested we do one covering the whole year, and it was great. Lots of interesting observations.</comment></comment></comment>


Unicode 6.0.0 - <AUTHOR> http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/

<comment><USER2> Looks like Apple's emoji, which they added as a Unicode font in iOS to avoid implementing an extra layer of software just for emoji (relying on the telco to translate the codes sent via text/email from non-iOS devices) made the cut. Might soon be the death of the proprietary emoji text stuff in Japanese phones. It should be in Android soon, if it isn't already.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Bamum* supplement section sure has a lot of cool glyphs

<http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-16800.pdf>

*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamum_language>

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh no! Hundreds of smileys (emoji) in the character set. Usually I block the smiley-gifs with an ad-blocker. Need to look for a character-based blocker now.

<comment><USER5> You can see them on the 2nd page of <http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf>

Rather more than I might ever need, but that comes with the territory of Unicode.

• 3 variations of cold sweat.

• 9 variations of cat faces, mercifully none of them include a LOL.

• The {see,hear,speak}-no-evil trilogy is represented.

• Weirdly, the iconic smiley face, two dots and an arc in a circle is not present. You have to pop over to 263A and get that one.

• To encourage adoption, I will start using 1F645 in real life to indicate _NO GOOD_ , though no one will understand why I impersonate a walrus.

Sadly, there is _HAPPY PERSON RAISING ONE HAND_ and _PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION_ , but without both a left and a right one hand or a pair of leaning two hands we can't make the emiticons sway back and forth to music. Oh well, unicode 7.0. (And I think _PERSON RAISING BOTH HANDS IN CELEBRATION_ looks like he is the victim of a stick-up.)

Handy Link: <http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/> wherein George Douros gives you free use of his many fonts of obscure unicode symbols, but he hasn't drawn the Unicode 7 ones.

<comment><USER3> There is also a new "miscellaneous symbols and pictographs" block, including a lot of user interface icon type symbols: <http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F300.pdf>

And new "transport and map symbols": <http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F680.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _the new official Indian currency symbol: the Indian Rupee Sign_

Ah yes.. in Gnome/GTK type "ctrl shift u 20b9"

 _The latest release of the Unicode Standard also includes support for the ancient Indian Brahmi script that was in use during the reign of Emperor Ashoka._

That's circa 232BC - of course a lot of buddhist (read - Chinese, Japanese, etc.) scripts originate from Brahmi, which was arguably used as a medium of religious evangelization to spread Buddhism from India. But I guess the language is effectively a dead language.

</comment><comment><USER7> "222 additional CJK Unified Ideographs in common use in China, Taiwan, and Japan"

Enough to make the japanese stop not wanting to use unicode to represent their language?

<comment><USER8> As I understand it (and I know almost nothing about Japan), the problem wasn't with the number of characters in the CJK set, the problem was with CJK unification itself. If a Japanese reader goes through the list of CJK characters, what they'll see is a bunch of Chinese characters that happen to usually have almost the same shapes as Japanese characters. Apparently, some characters (relatively obscure ones used for names) are still missing.

At the time, the majority opinion at Unicode was "that's just a font problem" but you see, it was people from Europe who were pushing for CJK unification in the first place. However, there are some characters in CJK whose standard glyphs are so different from the Japanese kanji that they are unrecognizable to native readers. Language experts would look at both glyphs and say they are the same character, but most people are not experts.

The lesson learned (since this is HN): If you are writing an internationalized application, make sure you use the right font for Japanese users and the right font for Chinese users.

And this is one more reason why internationalization is hard, and just using UTF-8/16/32 strings is not good enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No copyleft symbol, no public domain symbol (although this was just announced). Too bad! Glad to see that roasted sweet potatoes made the cut though...

<comment><USER10> This is done by a committee... Takes quite a while for stuff to be added. Languages in developing countries lobbying for their symbols to be added / formalized have to wait ;)

<comment><USER9> That's understandable. I'm sure the bulk of the work goes toward the new language characters. I just wonder who lobbied for roasted sweet potatoes...</comment></comment></comment>


Google's diversity efforts fall flat - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/googles-diversity-efforts-are-making-little-progress-2470784457.html <comment><USER2> So if the current efforts are failing, maybe they are based on false assumptions (that are not being questioned) and one should try other things.

Nah, that's crazy talk!</comment>


Firefox about:protections WIP mockup of trackers blocked for you - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/FirefoxNightly/status/1146327913891028992 <comment><USER2> As mentioned in one tweet: it's not only trackers but cryptominers and social or fingerprinting scripts.

<comment><USER3> A social script or fingerprint script is also a tracker. I'll grant that blocking cryptominers isn't expected from this title.</comment></comment>


Why I Self-Funded My Startup - <AUTHOR> http://yongfook.com/10-reasons-why-i-self-funded-my-startup-and-so-should-you.html

<comment><USER2> This is a great piece. I too started a company just 5 months ago. Fully bootstrapped and now con track to do 7 figures this year. Cash is king. You'll also be protected from the bubble when it goes BOOM :).

</comment><comment><USER3> >1\. You are forced to focus on revenue

This is really the biggest point. Plenty of "cool ideas" are implemented in favour of more needed products in the marketplace -- needed so much that people will pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Much-needed balanced view.</comment>


Beautiful responsive layout with grid - <AUTHOR> http://www.designmadeingermany.de/13-1/2/

<comment><USER2> I don't know about this. The design of that link is gorgeous, but I think readability suffers this way.

Reading text left to right in columns and paging through long articles would end up being annoying. If an article is long, this design wouldn't work as well because you'll have to constantly click the next button to go through all the pages.

And the thin columns make it hard to read lengthy text because there are only a few words per line so you're constantly having to scan for the next line.</comment>


Start-Up Blows Through $300 Million In VC Cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-paybytouch6dec06,1,6344497.story

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the poor url. Go to the following for the full story:

[http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- paybytouch6dec06,1,634...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi- paybytouch6dec06,1,6344497.story)

</comment><comment><USER2> "The Pay by Touch saga is a cautionary tale about what can happen when investors allow an entrepreneur to have too much control, experts said."

I would say its more a cautionary tale about investors giving an entrepreneur too much money. 600 employees before turning a profit!

</comment><comment><USER3> Impressive. I actually know someone that started something similar to it in Toronto, and it resulted in a flop as well. <http://www.dexit.com/> It is basically toast from what I understand.

On the other hand, MC's paypass seems to be excelling.

</comment><comment><USER4> How not to not not start a startup...

</comment><comment><USER5> He bought like CardService International that is a good one to own, he should have just chucked the whole fingerprint scanning idea and improved the companies he bought with the investor cash... if he wasn't so unstable.

</comment><comment><USER6> grr @ account-required news sites

<comment><USER7> Slice off the ?parameters from the article URL. :)</comment></comment>