Uber and a Child's Death - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/uber-and-a-childs-death/ <comment><USER2> I can understand the argument that Uber has some liability here, either through their own negligence or vicariously. But the author of this article says:

"Mr. Muzaffar, who cooperated with the police after the accident, had been driving for Uber about a month, his lawyer said. It was a full-time job, using his own car, to support four kids. In the new sharing economy, he takes the fall."

Come on! Regardless of whether Uber also has liability, this guy hit three people and killed one of them, he's not some innocent fall guy. In any event, he either had or should have had vehicle insurance, so in what sense is he taking a fall?

<comment><USER3> If he only had standard vehicle insurance, it wouldn't cover him if he were driving professionally.

He'll take the fall because Uber's going to do everything in their power to ensure the claim doesn't hit their insurance. Fortunately, the CPUC passed a law last summer to ensure that the ride-sharing companies have to actually carry a significant level of insurance for their drivers.

Fortunate in the sense that this girl's family might see some sort of consideration for their daughter's death and the other injuries.

<comment><USER4> Right. The insurance problem is _the_ reason why I am hesitant to use these kinds of services (airbnb, peer-to-peer car rental, car-pooling apps). When something goes wrong, what happens? It just freaks me out - not that companies conforming to existing norms and regulations won't try to screw you over either.

<comment><USER5> I'm also wary for those reasons, but I believe AirBnB at least is making some efforts to do something about it (granted, after some bad PR [1] spurred action). They initially offered a $50k-per-host indemnity [2], and have since upped it to a $1m-per-host indemnity [3]. Assuming they'll reliably stand behind it (rather than get out of it via fine print, e.g. in cases of illegal sublets, which are common on their marketplace), that seems like a responsible approach to managing some of the risks their business opens up.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813956)

[2] [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/08/airbnb- in...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/08/airbnb-insurance- guarantee.html)

[3] [https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee](https://www.airbnb.com/guarantee)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, the argument (as the article relays it) is that a driver is only working for/with Uber when a fare is in their vehicle--therefore, the death of the child having happened when no fare was yet in the vehicle is not the fault of an Uber contractor/employee and by extension Uber.

This seems like a rather delicate interpretation of how people perceive group belonging and responsibility.

It also seems incredibly scummy.

<comment><USER7> Where do you draw the line though. How long does the driver have to have waited since the last fare before he/she is no longer 'on-shift'?

<comment><USER8> The lawsuit suggests the test should be whether the driver is logged into Uber's application. This would seem like quite a good test, in that it is measurable to an exact time, and presumably indicates that the driver is available for fares, meaning they are "on-shift".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Uber asserts that Uber drivers without fares are not Uber cars.

This is just Uber trying to reap the benefits of providing a taxi service, without bearing any of the costs of the risk created by their service. It's a textbook case of externalizing costs while keeping profit privatized. In this case, the costs will be externalized onto injured people because drivers almost certainly don't have the resources to pay the resulting damages.

Of course, cab companies do this too. If a cab kills your kid, good luck getting more than the $50k or so minimum liability insurance required by state law. However, cabs are regulated parts of the transportation framework. In theory, in return for externalizing these costs to the public, they have to provide certain benefits, such as not discriminating between rich and poor neighborhoods, etc.

<comment><USER10> Do you think the externalized costs of car-sharing services are greater than the externalized costs of government-regulated taxi services?

<comment><USER9> Depends on the location. In New York City, cabs are required to carry $100k per person/$300k per event liability insurance, versus the $25k/$50k state minimum, which is all you can expect Uber drivers to have. So more cost is passed back to the cab company in the form of insurance premiums, and less is externalized onto the public.

Moreover, in return for indulging the fiction that cab drivers are independent contractors, the public extracts certain concessions in return for taking on the externalized costs of accidents. Cab companies have to accept regulated rates (that are lower than what Uber charges), and have to agree to serve the whole city.

<comment><USER11> It's worth noting that it was the SF cab system's complete failure to adequately serve the whole city that gave birth to Uber in the first place.

<comment><USER9> I think cab systems have a lot of problems, for example the under supply of medallions in New York. I would favor abandoning the scheme altogether, and just requiring Uber-like businesses to carry a lot of liability insurance and meet certain requirements for driver identification. But while the existing system exists, and cabs have restrictions Uber doesn't, I don't think its fair for Uber to basically run a cab company while ignoring cab regulations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whether he was using said app at the time or not, the lack of hands-free capability on the app is serious. The case does make some good points about that.

Further, I don't think the "he wasn't actively driving someone in the car so he wasn't an Uber driver at that time" is gonna fly. I think it would be more accurate to go by his use of the app; if he was using it and driving around looking for a fare, he's an active driver. If he's not using it, he's not.

It's really sad that this little girl died, and anything Uber's app may have done to in any way contribute to her death should be fixed. I don't know if they're liable and I don't think them paying out a big sum will work, but they should have some impetus to improve their app from this. I'm sure they will be thinking about that anyway.

<comment><USER13> Actually if he was using the app Uber's lawyers are going to have a fun time because then he's being willfully negligent.

They will claim he should have pulled over and used the app in accordance with state law, and that uber is not at fault because the driver was being criminally negligent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reads to me as yet another example of how Uber wants to be a taxi service without having to submit to any of the laws a taxi service must.

<comment><USER15> Does it matter if the driver was in a Uber, Taxi or a personal car? It was a regular human in a regular car.

<comment><USER14> To my understanding, if a taxi driver was to strike a pedestrian, the taxi company would be liable, because the driver was operating for the taxi company.

Even though a taxi driver is pretty much a regular human, and a crown vic in taxi-yellow is pretty much a regular car.

<comment><USER16> Unless it crosses into criminal, then you are correct.

<comment><USER14> Right, criminal is a separate beast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How would regulation have prevented this at all? A cab would be as likely to hit the child.

<comment><USER18> The original article was really quite informative about this. Please have a look:

      When drivers accept a call, furthermore, they need to
      interface with the app. The suit goes on to note that
      under California law, it is illegal to use a "wireless
      telephone" while driving unless it is specifically
      configured to be hands-free — which the app is not. In
      essence, the suit argues that Uber was negligent in the
      "development, implementation and use of the app" so as
      to cause the driver to be distracted and inattentive.

<comment><USER6> As we've seen with the Google buses, when an individual does it they must follow the laws, and when a company does it it isn't a crime.

<comment><USER18> Well it's still a "crime", technically, but for companies at Google/HSBC/BP- scale the consequences are more like those for a misdemeanor -- i.e. you might pay a trivial fine, and maybe get a little egg on your face, but that's pretty much it. Whereas for an individual or a small-timer, the analogous violation would be treated as felony-class, or worse.

 _So dreht sich alles auf der Welt._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't help but think that a cab driver who ran over someone would be personally liable. Perhaps the cab company would be too, but the driver is licensed to drive completely aside from his employment. He failed to drive properly.

[http://www.dmv.org/ca-california/special-licenses.php](http://www.dmv.org/ca- california/special-licenses.php)

A truck driver who ran someone over similarly might be personally responsible and the company he was working for at the time might also be responsible. Truck drivers either work for an hourly wage (if the company they work for owns the truck) or they get paid by the mile (if they own the truck). What would happen if an owner-operator ran someone over on his way to pick up a job? I imagine that it would be completely on him and the company that arranged the job for him would bear no responsibility.

UberX drivers get paid a portion of the fares they collect, so they're not paid by the hour. I think it would be fairly clear they're not "employees" in the traditional sense but rather contractors. [http://readwrite.com/2013/08/19/financing-your-next- startupa...](http://readwrite.com/2013/08/19/financing-your-next-startupas-an- uber-driver#awesm=~oubvAUD9SPmnQY)

I'm not saying that I think Uber is doing the morally responsible thing by distancing themselves from this situation but neither is it an open-and-shut case that they're 100% liable for sure.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is Uber's first major "ransackgate" (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2825177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2825177), [http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for- air...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/the-moment-of-truth-for-airbnb-as- users-home-is-utterly-trashed/)): rather than playing dumb or being ultra- cautious and making teh same mistakes that Airbnb did they should _immediately_ move to make the situation right. Sadly this incident involves deaths rather than just theft.

Another thought: This incident points to precisely the same type of litigation that self-driving cars will have to face, in fact in those cases the service provider/manufacturer will be hit even more since there will be no driver to "take the fall".

<comment><USER21> I think that is going to be the biggest challenge of driver-less cars; we've seen the massive fuss when people start claiming their accelerators got stuck, what happens when someone claims their car crash was because of a bug in Google Car?

<comment><USER22> Well, in some sense it is moot. Driverless cars are a substantial shift in efficiency, so there is a strong economic pressure to adopt them. The fears you describe will only get traction in some markets. That will slow adoption, but it won't halt it.

Over time, the statistics about how there are far fewer deaths in driverless markets will shift the dialog.

Think about Ireland, where drunk driving deaths are understood by the public to be a legitimate public health crisis. If Ireland allows driverless cars and the UK doesn't, then the forcing function will be in place and the UK will eventually bend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How much would it cost Uber to just carry insurance for things like this? Would it materially impact their business? Anyone wanna take a stab at this?

</comment><comment><USER23> Gosh, this was flagged off the front page quickly...</comment>


An Interview with DuckDuckGo's founder, Gabriel Weinberg - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/article/559-gabriel-weinberg-interview/

<comment><USER2> I like DDG and I even converted chrome over to use it as its primary engine, however, recently I am noticing more and more spam links and less and less links that really matter. I think I am coming to the conclusion that DDG did this is the wrong order. They are developing a great frontend and using others backends, but to really beat google or MS or yahoo you need to develop a great backend that can filter results well and troll the web efficiently then you can put an awesome frontend on it.

I still think the real silver bullet will be to make a backend system that can peer with other systems to gather data and can be customized to get deep results from a small subset of the web that interests a particular user ( think corporation uses it for internal search and to make their site show up better on a common front end). I even started a research project to begin working with some of the things needed to accomplish it[1].

1\. <https://github.com/dkhenry/SimpleMapReduce>

<comment><USER3> > you need to develop a great backend that can filter results well and troll > the web

Trawl. The web gets trolled enough as it is.

<comment><USER4> Not to hijack further but 'troll' is technically fine there.

troll ... 4.(intransitive, fishing, by extension) To fish using a line and bait or lures trailed behind a boat similarly to trawling; to lure fish with bait. [from circa 1600]

<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/troll#Verb>

<comment><USER5> It's not fine because "troll" would be recognised here as the standard meaning, not the meaning from 1600.

<comment><USER6> The fishing definition is still very much in use. See e.g. [http://outdoorsportinggoods.poorfish.com/search?w=trolling+m...](http://outdoorsportinggoods.poorfish.com/search?w=trolling+motors?TrackingidPPCgadw12&gclid=CNmxqMj-_7ECFalDMgodJR0AEA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have never liked DuckDuckGo after seeing their advertisement tactics, especially the "educational" <http://donttrack.us/> minisite. Apparently your anonymous HTTP referer info (from Google Analytics?) will be sold to insurance companies / appear in a background check? It is blatant fear mongering and really made me angry.

<comment><USER8> It all goes into the huge (secret by law) national insurance database, which is accessible by all insurers. All information gained by an insurance company about an individual is put in there, and insurers are prohibited from discussing it.

<comment><USER9> Citation(s)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using DDG as my default browser for a while (though I sometimes revert to !g to search google), and I'm satisfied with the experience.

The main thing that would really improve my experience would be if it was faster. Google really spoiled my with the instant results and suggestions as you type.

I'm also looking forward to them switching to SPDY as I always use the encrypted version, and this should make it a bit more responsive.

<comment><USER4> Google has put so much effort into speed over the last 10 years that they can't perceptively improve much in this department going forward. So DDG's target is relatively stationary and closing the gap may be expensive but is at least straightforward.

<comment><USER10> That's a good point, though I'm afraid it might be one of those things where diminishing returns mean that it becomes very very expensive to catch up, and I don't know if DDG has the resources. Moore's Law should help, though, but personally I haven't really felt (subjectively) like DDG has become much faster since I've been using it.

<comment><USER4> The scale of capital investment needed is really only feasible in the context of an acquisition or maybe a huge DDG boom stemming from a massive Google privacy scandal.

<comment><USER10> Probably. But just adding autocomplete and improving speed some (doesn't need to be quite google-equivalent) would go a long way towards making the experience subjectively better.

Another thing that annoys me is that they have ads near the top of the results that don't load quite at the same time as the results, so I sometimes am about to click on the top result but an ad pops up and pushes everything down making me miss my click. If they could somehow avoid that happening, it would also make the experience better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> DuckDuckGo has _really_ fallen behind Google in the zero click information department, which is one of DDG's key selling points. DDG needs to have one or more major competitive advantages over Google in order grow. Privacy is great, but zero click is something obvious and usability orientated that really stands out. I'm not going to use DDG if Google gives me more zero click information no matter what; it just makes too significant a difference in search experience.

<comment><USER12> What about things like,

      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=frequency+of+letters+in+The+quick+brown+fox+jumps+over+the+lazy+dog
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=days+between+6%2F22%2F1979+and+10%2F5%2F1979
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hn+duckduckgo+interview
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=php+xml_parser_create+example
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=currently+in+theaters
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=msft
      https://duckduckgo.com/?q=currency+in+panama

The only one I think Google does better is "currency in panama" however it also gets the information wrong in the "zero click" answer. The only reason I like that result more is the Wikipedia answer on the right is just more appealing to my eye.

<comment><USER13> Careful... for "hn duckduckgo interview", at the moment, DuckDuckGo shows a HNSearch widget with three (stale) results, none of which is this page; no relevant results appear in the main listing. Google has no special widget, but this page comes up first in the main listing.

To digress a bit, zero-click is great when the information you want is actually accessible with zero clicks, but it's very, very limited: as soon as you need to click through to a website, special widgets can't compete with a solid backend for regular search results. That's why I can hardly imagine switching to DuckDuckGo...

<comment><USER14> Hey, I'm the intern who implemented the HNSearch Zero Click plugin, so let me explain the poor result:

A HNSearch (HNSearch.com) for "interview duckduckgo" doesn't return this thread at all, in any of the results (even on a 'stories' only search), however the one thing it does surface is your comment, because that exact phrase was found in it. I realized we weren't showing the right comments, and I found a very small bug which has now been fixed. So thanks for getting me to notice that :)

However, if you search "interview duckduckgo's" (ie. the same wording in the thread's title) the ONLY result returned is this exact thread (an HNSearch limitation).

These same results are fed to us by the HNSearch API and so the fault lies within HNSearch's search methodology (as far as I can tell). We're still looking for a resolution to this, however, any suggestions are welcome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like what I've seen from DDG so far. I don't expect it to be Google, but it seems like the search engine keeps getting better with each iteration.

With the launch of DuckDuckHack it will be interesting to see what people build for the platform. Plus, I'm just excited to see a talented team take on search.

</comment><comment><USER16> I used DDG for a few weeks, but ultimately switched back to Google. It was mainly for two things:

1) It's slightly slower than Google, which became more apparent after the fifth or sixth search of the day.

2) No images integrated with search results. I didn't realize how often I searched for images until I used DDG. At Google I usually get a few images and an "Images" link to click. At DDG I needed to add a !gi to my query.

Like JohnsonB said, there really need to be another draw besides just privacy.

<comment><USER17> I've found I add !gi to my search string subconsciously nowadays, when I know I want to perform an image search, whereas before I would enter my search terms, wait until google had loaded its results and then hunt for the images link to get the full image search results.

In some way it's 'trained' me to perform more targeted searches from the outset.

The slight lag before getting results is noticeable though.

I'm going to stick with the upstart for the moment nevertheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article mentions $115K in _revenue_ last year. How is that close to self- sustainable for a 10-15 person company?

<comment><USER2> They average 500% growth. If revenue also scales like that then they are well on their way to profitability.

<comment><USER19> That doesn't explain sustainability now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I purposefully use duckduckgo several times a year as my default search engine for several weeks because I like to support alternatives to mega corps.

Google meets my needs better and their recent power search class was very cool.

A little off topic but I have had more than a few fantasies about starting my own micro search engine. Text analytics and knowledge management in general have been an interest of mine since the early 1980s. What stops me is that if I were to invest my personal resources in this I would want tens of thousands of users getting value from my system every day, and frankly, I don't think I could achieve that. Gabriel gets an order of magnitude more than what I would hope for, so I hope that he is very satisfied with what he has achieved. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER21> This is one product I hope people really get behind. Good interface and smart aggregation. Keep it up guys!

</comment><comment><USER22> Sad that there's no mention of the huge role Perl + CPAN play in their infrastructure:

* [http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216392-a...](http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216392-architecture) * <https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/DuckDuckGoPerl> * <http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=848999>

They've also been visible in sponsoring the Perl community.

</comment><comment><USER23> Also, don't miss Gabriel's interview on Techzing [http://techzinglive.com/page/423/techzing-68-gabriel- weinber...](http://techzinglive.com/page/423/techzing-68-gabriel-weinberg- duckduckgo)</comment>


Ask HN: Where to get a timeline of important announcements and events? - <AUTHOR> Where to get a timeline of important announcements and events, for example the date time of announcing the unemployment rate and more? <comment><USER2> What's an important announcement or event?

I mean it's a pretty broad category you've stipulated but I guess the 'Current events portal' of Wikipedia [0] gives the best possible summary of what you're looking for.

[0][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events)

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems to include past events only but not upcoming announcements. To me an important announcement is one that may impact the stock market.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Interesting startups in the Kansas City area? - <AUTHOR>

I recently moved to the area and thought I'd check HN to see if anyone is part of (or running) an interesting startup here?<p>I'm a developer who just sold my software business and I'm looking for something awesome to work on next. <comment><USER2> I'm not KC-based but visited often for various companies.

Check out [http://www.kcitp.com/](http://www.kcitp.com/) and [http://thinkbigpartners.com/](http://thinkbigpartners.com/) for a cheat sheet on what's going on in the area. They're not comprehensive but cover a good portion of the space.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks for the links they'll be really useful :)</comment></comment>


Google+ Ripples brings something interesting to the table - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/GoogleRipplesBringsSomethingInterestingToTheTable.aspx

<comment><USER2> I don't buy that normal people care about analytics and stats and 'animating how their post moves around the internet' - might be cool for us geeks, or the marketers might find it useful, but for the ultimate success or failure of g+ I'm betting this feature will be entirely irrelevant. Twitter shouldn't waste their time worrying about this.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't agree more. Also I would like to add that most people's post don't get many reshares which mean this feature is completely useless for their post.

<comment><USER4> I get the feeling that the Ripples feature isn't designed for the average consumer. It's aimed at the marketing crowd. They can easily find out who the big "share hubs" are, and leverage that to potentially help promote their product or stay in contact with their community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a project by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg (at least, that's what I've heard). You can see some of their other work at <http://hint.fm>.</comment>


Time protection: the missing OS abstraction - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/04/15/time-protection-the-missing-os-abstraction/ <comment><USER2> This post lifts out the key parts of the paper [1] and is a good summary. I think the paper is an accessible read as well.

Not too much discussion two weeks ago when the paper was posted on HN [2], so I will raise a point I've made before [3][4][5] and is consistent with the recommendations of the paper (and another post in this thread [6]): this is an opportunity to improve the terminology, mental models, and formalisms of observable state, and its implications for information hiding, privilege separation, and computer system design.

This conversation needs not only to occur among (e.g.) computer chip designers and cryptography experts, but also among higher-stack users of that technology, so that the information leakage aspects and trade-offs can be analyzed together with other performance indicators of the system.

It seems as if the haphazard, ad hoc way that chipmakers and system architects dealt with this issue have contributed to an environment where Spectre could occur: and such timing attacks were never a secret, but resistance to them in various levels of mainstream computing appears to have been fitted in a patchwork of hasty fixes and well-meaning but informal caution. The conversation around this topic could use an upgrade, and the paper's authors agree.

[1] [https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/csiroabstracts/Ge_YC...](https://ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/csiroabstracts/Ge_YCH_19.abstract.pml) [2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19547293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19547293) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17308014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17308014) [4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16165942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16165942) [5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19644997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19644997) [6] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19670296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19670296)

<comment><USER3> You might even say there's room for a startup to reinvent computers (and operating systems) from the ground up.

Would you?

<comment><USER4> Well let's think it through. It would seemingly have to follow the Disruptive Technology arc. That means it would start off as a crappy computer that had really great information leakage control. And it would be marketed to a small but enthusiastic market who really values that, and doesn't mind that most everything else is a PITA.

Who might that market be?

<comment><USER5> Major cloud companies and VM providers?

Most of these vulnerabilities come from speculative execution impacting a shared cache.

<comment><USER6> Nah, cloud providers are under enornlis pressure to optimize resource usage (real estate, electricity, labor). A hardware design without competitive performance has a snowball's chance in hell of being adopted in that space. The economics of cloud datancenter mean that security only needs to be good enough, not perfect.

<comment><USER7> In that case, the perception that current hardware security is good enough needs to change.

Or the cloud vendors could start offering compute running on new, more secure hardware - e.g. special VM types marketed accordingly.

<comment><USER6> I think that this is wishful thinking on your part unless the drastic performance per power drops are negated.

I personally think that these performance drops leads to a horrific environmental impact because every performance drop means that more hardware needs to be provisioned and powered to counter it. So this directly results in more toxic waste from these elecronics and a higher carbon dioxide output into the atmosphere (cloud data centers are a major consumer of electricity). Compared to the long term impact of that, a extra few security breaches sound like the lesser evil to me personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It saddens me that we're collectively going to spend a lot of effort trying to patch out a problem that we've imposed upon ourselves. We were making such great progress in terms of processing speed until someone came along and decided that we need to have multiple tenants share the same hardware, and they should have no way of knowing anything about each other. The vast majority of consumer hardware will _never_[0] be exposed to this category of attack, but will pay the performance penalty regardless.

Fundamentally, the need is for a completely different model of computation to abstract away time-channel leaks. This cannot be fixed by patching existing software and hardware, and we're going to go through a lot of pain and anguish trying. As another comment points out, the well of possible timing attacks is infinitely deep (attached hardware, network performance measurements, etc.).

The two options are performance or security, pick one. It seems the industry is trying to pick both, and it's going to take us a long time to realize that we're going to get neither.

For clarity - my proposal is segmenting hardware and software products between the two categories of "general purpose, trusted computing" and "safe for shared hosting." The 2nd category is so small compared to the first, it seems unfair that its domain-specific problems should hamper the rest of us.

[0] Thanks to a combination of reasonable software mitigations (unprivileged lower-resolution timers) and that most of these attacks require arbitrary code execution in the first place

<comment><USER9> > my proposal is segmenting hardware and software products between the two > categories of "general purpose, trusted computing" and "safe for shared > hosting."

If a normal user is using a web browser and one tab has their bank information, and the other has a suspect website, then you have to be concerned about sharing resources and security.

<comment><USER10> I'd prefer to see 'trusted' sites being to use javascript only. Heck, even use javascript only after log in.

Alternatively, run them at an isolated context with no websockets, limited access to timing (second or two precision - a lot sampling needed), limited CPU and memory utilization, no sound, no GPU acceleration [likely another large side channel surface], etc. Ahh yeah and delete all their cookies while we are at.

Javascript has turned to a total bloat

<comment><USER11> Running somebody else's code is putting a ton of trust in them. Maybe someday we'll have great sandboxing, but for now, it makes no sense to let random sketchy origins to just run whatever code they please on your device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very cool ideas. Time protection is indeed a must going forward, particularly for cloud hosting. Not surprised that seL4 got there first either.

Getting this to work in raw Linux may be hopeless given the breadth of the kernel data, but they have smart devs, so maybe they'll figure something out.

And Rob Pike said systems research is dead. Ha!

</comment><comment><USER13> One issue I see here is that time protection would need to extend to anything shared, not just CPU micro-architecture. For instance, if a hard drive has a DRAM-based cache, that could be used as a timing channel, and the complexity of flash file systems opens up all kinds of potential leaks. In the case of two processes sharing network access, one process could conceivably estimate another's network access patterns implicitly by measuring latency through shared switches or drops due to buffers being filled. Mitigating this would require some kind of coloring support that goes as far as your ISP's switches, which seems impractical.

<comment><USER14> > One issue I see here is that time protection would need to extend to > anything shared,

We might see this issue as an opportunity. That is, by thinking about a concept called "time protection" we expose all these things subsystems are doing and make them easy to argue about. We can now say "Oh good, XYZ improves best-case speed, but sadly it also compromises _time protection_ ".

Having such a language means the industry can slowly start improving these things rather than sweeping them under the rug. It will not stop the improvement from being slow and difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As an alternative to this approach, I wonder if it's possible to push all sensitive computations into a few small components, and rewrite those components carefully to obscure any information that could be obtained from timing?

<comment><USER16> Of course. Branchless code equivalents can be written for practically anything, and you can force-prefetch memory regardless of branch(its an intrinsic in most C compilers), though this loses performance and branch prediction benefits.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't this approach be cheaper, both in performance and human effort, than fixing the entire OS to hide the timing information?

<comment><USER16> It would require doing this for any new/existing code exposing timing information, the current timing fixes/isolation patches are much smaller. It would make more sense in user code, like browsers/media players/etc to remove influence of branch prediction regardless of host OS, just like GCC does with retpoline insertion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very dramatic graphs.

I wonder when programming languages will start factoring out the ability to check system timers. Some capability-aware languages have already done so.

<comment><USER18> I wonder if high resolution timers were privileged, we could get by with lower resolution timers. I'm not sure any timing attacks would work with second or even millisecond resolution timers.

I don't see handling this at the programming language could help, and I think that whether timing is privileged or not is built into CPUs so there's nothing we can do about it, but this seems plausibly acceptable to deal with speculation. Permit speculation, but make it privileged to detect if speculation occurred.

<comment><USER19> Apparently low resolution timers do work, but you need more data.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16068631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16068631)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> irq-1 Just a thought, but can't the OS prevent applications from knowing anything about other applications? Rather than isolating apps by flushing/coloring everything, couldn't the apps not know what else is running? Two apps can't communicate, or one app spy on another, if an app doesn't know what else was/is running.

(Not sure why this is wrong, but confident it must be.)

<comment><USER20> These exploits work on a hardware level, and do not require the malicious app to know what else is running. For example, a VM does not know what other VMs are running on the same host in AWS, but Spectre/Meltdown still affected AWS hosts. They are reading data other apps have written to memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Or, don't let timing reveal privileged information? This seems like a sledgehammer for a fly problem.

<comment><USER13> How is what you're talking about different from what the article describes?

<comment><USER22> Application vs system level. I think the parent is saying that since the application is in a unique position to know what information is privileged it would be better to make available a library of constant-time functions that are resistant to timing attacks then constantly pay the performance cost of blunter system-level boundary enforcement.

However, I'm not sure how much merit this argument has since very few applications even bother with this level of protection but need it.

<comment><USER13> That works fine when an application just wants to protect a private key in memory. But if you want to build, say, an application where a user enters via keyboard information that you want to protect from another application, you have to worry about keystroke timing attacks. That means the application needs to hide whether it did anything at all in a given time slice, which can be inferred from the micro-architectural information discussed in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would like to see how Boeing and FAA decided to pretend that all is fine after the first crash, there were enough clues that MCAS has issues and I would like to see how was decided that is safe to fly while the software fix was not deployed.</comment>


Jeb Bush gets call on Apple Watch, gets confused [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4in1AUemxqM <comment><AUTHOR> For those to young to remember, this is his Dad and supermarket checkout scanners (in 1992):

[http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/05/us/bush-encounters-the- sup...](http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/05/us/bush-encounters-the-supermarket- amazed.html)</comment>


Lizard Squad hacker convicted on 50,000 hacking charges - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/crime/lizard-squad-indicted-julius-kivimaki/

<comment><USER2> This article features some impressively bad journalism.</comment>


GTK+ gets CSS style theming - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.gnome.org/carlosg/2010/08/23/css-like-styling-for-gtk/

<comment><USER2> Shameless plug to my favorite toolkit: Qt has had this for ages now: <http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/stylesheet.html>

The Qt guys also have been trying to take this a step further with the declarative UI / QML (basically a tiny DSL for UIs) project:

[http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/05/13/qt-declarative- ui...](http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/05/13/qt-declarative-ui/)

<comment><USER3> by 'ages' you mean 1 year?

<comment><USER4> Try Qt 4.2 which was released October 4, 2006 and thats not even to mention the fact that you could use it for months before that. [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/qt4-2-intro.html#widget- style-s...](http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/qt4-2-intro.html#widget-style-sheets)

<comment><USER5> When did 4 years become "ages"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great in concept, but copying from CSS itself seems like a bad idea. The lack of abstraction can lead to some really inelegant stylesheets or necessitate writing the stylesheet in another language and generating CSS with a compiler. The lack of conditionals and variables is, to my way of thinking the most significant limitation.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can understand adding stylesheets to GUI. That makes sense, perfect sense even.

But to copy all the flaws of CSS as well?

</comment><comment><USER7> This change seems very much in line with the GNOME philosophy. It would _greatly_ simplify theme creation.

</comment><comment><USER8> . . . and still look horrible.

You can't say that here! But the screenshot makes it pretty clear.

Edit: that's the default engine, as it says in the blog post. I still think GTK looks awful, but this is not really good evidence.

<comment><USER9> GTK+ doesn't "look" like anything. Themes and engines do though. Is that your complaint?

<comment><USER8> Technicalities and semantics. The only thing that matters is what I'm presented with as a user, and what I get when I use it does not look good.</comment></comment></comment>


David Cameron at TED on the use of IT to change government - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/david_cameron.html

<comment><USER2> The Conservative Technology Forum <http://www.conservative-technology.org/></comment>


Why is there no Red Hat for consumer products? - <AUTHOR>

Red Hat is a pretty successful open-source company.<p>I am wondering, why is there no company like Red Hat that builds awesome open-source products but for the consumer space? <comment><USER2> Because there is no business model for that company.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't buy that argument.

I would pay for an Ubuntu that runs flawlessly and supports more software.

<comment><USER3> Both RHEL and Canonical already offer that kind of support.

Specifically for Ubuntu: [http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu- advantag...](http://www.canonical.com/enterprise-services/ubuntu- advantage/desktop)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm trying to wrap my head around what "open-source products... for the consumer space" even means. Are we talking open-source toasters/microwaves/appliances? Doors? Windows? Toys? I'm just not sure I understand what we're talking about when you say "Products".</comment>


Ask HN: If you could pick any job, which one would you choose? - <AUTHOR>

Assuming that all the jobs are paying the same, to put money considerations aside, and that you are obliged to work. I am curious how many of you would stick to being a software developer. <comment><USER2> I'd like to get out of software development, but haven't had much luck actually doing so.

For now what I'd like to do is to impart what I've learned onto the younger generation.

I'm a good photographer; many have told me I could win awards. I've been tinkering with that again lately: [http://www.warplife.com/mdc/photography/](http://www.warplife.com/mdc/photography/)</comment>


40% of Groupon merchants say "never again" - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/10/forty-percent-of-groupon-merchants-say-never-again.html

<comment><USER4> I'm a physical goods retailer and I'd like to point out a bit of group-think on HN's part. 3 months ago, I asked you guys if I should use a Groupon clone (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490096>) and I got overwhelmingly positive responses (someone even called my concerns paranoid). Now the place is littered with negative attitudes toward Groupon. I don't think the facts underpinning my worries have changed, only the community's attitude.

<comment><USER5> HN likes to turn against companies that become too successful - FB, Groupon, etc. I assume it has a little bit to do with sour grapes and a little bit to do with not wanting monopolies forming.

<comment><USER6> HN likes Apple and Google a fair bit. I'd say HN turns against companies that turn against their users/customers.

<comment><USER7> I don't like Apple. But I agree with you. When I don't like a company it's because of specific behaviors of the the company that I turn against them, and not at all related to size or level of success. I don't like facebook because they have a long history of playing fast and loose with customer privacy, as well as turning a blind eye to out-and-out fraudulent and manipulative facebook apps (Zynga, for instance).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Groupon is a new method of marketing. At the end of the day, no matter what Groupon or anyone else says, there is not enough data about the results of this marketing to make any predictions.

There are a lot of new variables to consider. Beyond numbers, the small and medium local businesses that Groupon targets still aren't entirely web savvy. Heck, most of these businesses just figured out how to put together a halfway decent website let alone master an online community based method of marketing.

Groupon has come up in my regular day-to-day conversations with small, local businesses. To each one, I've said the following:

1) Building your own online audience is more valuable than relying on the one Groupon has. This isn't easy for the strong majority of local business owners, but even a few followers on Facebook point your business in the right direction. Imagine being able to carefully craft your very own Groupon. Even if you only had 50 people following you around the web and even if those followers were existing customers, you could extrapolate the data and gain the experience needed to make a powerful Groupon style campaign successful.

2) On Groupon, offer a drastic discount on a product that you could afford to give away for free. If you're not capable of doing this, don't do it. This is surprisingly difficult many small businesses because they don't know the true cost of their products. From labor to square footage, most small businesses consider a sale profit without having a complete view of product costs available.

As an example: Every year, a bakery near where I live prepares hundreds of small Cannoli pastries. The store lines people up down the street and sells a up to 12 at a time for nearly 75% less then what they regularly retail for. The store could afford to give these away for free every single day - <USER2> cost $0.06 each to make including labor, materials, packaging, etc. This would be a smart Groupon - get a big rush of people in the store at once with a Groupon then a trickle for the rest of the year. Upsell like crazy and give each customer _another_ coupon for 50% off of their next order and you'll encourage people to spend more.

3) When evaluating the feasibility and hard numbers behind a Groupon, do not assign value to branding or repeat customers. Think toward data collection and future marketing instead. I've seen a lot of companies featured on Groupon that must be thinking "a percentage of these people will come back" or "they'll know the name of my store after this!". Well, they won't. These are people who every-day, check Groupon for the latest and greatest place to save money. Sure, some people will come back and some people will remember your name - but if you assign any value to these things when budgeting a Groupon campaign, you're silly.

4) The smartest Groupons I've seen are those that can be scheduled. From restaurant reservations to car detailing, if you can figure out a way to have Groupon customers call to schedule a time, you'll be ahead of the game. Being able to control the flow of customers can help ensure that 50% of Groupon campaign problems go away.

In short: Your own audience is more valuable then that of someone else. Offer products on Groupon that you can afford to give away for free. Don't get sold on branding or repeat customers. Products and services that you can schedule (even with creative thinking) work the best.

</comment><comment><USER9> A customer who takes a common deal on Groupon is highly unlikely to go back to a business. At least here in the UK, Groupon's deals are all the same - restaurants, teeth whitening, facials (it just doesn't seem right typing that) and haircuts.

I can guarantee that there's going to be a teeth whitening deal every week - so why would I ever go back to a dentist and pay full price? Long term, these businesses are damaging their markets and industries. You'll struggle to build a business from fickle, deal-hunting customers.

That said, with things that are unusual I think Groupon is a good solution - <USER3> canoe trip, or climbing wall for example. There's less competition and it's a great way for people to try something that they might grow to love. But restaurants - come on!

It's like the reverse of a loyalty card - come again and we'll charge you double.

<comment><USER10> The benefit I can see to restaurants comes with people's preference for familiarity.

True, it'll be a tough blow to serve all that food for cheap, but if you can make people feel good about your restaurant for cheap, I think there is a good chance they'll be back, even if they have to pay more.

It's the reason why national brands can charge such a premium over generic stuff, even when it's exactly the same thing. People are risk averse and a Groupon takes half the risk out of a meal purchase.

<comment><USER9> Groupon is crack for struggling business owners. It's a minimal up-front cost for a massive rush. But then the rush disappears and you're left needing another one. It's a few months later that you realise you're more fucked than you were.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems like every piece of Groupon marketing says not to expect to make money off the deal itself. Then we see people like this complaining that the deal doesn't make money.

From what I understand, Groupon isn't trying to be a wholesaler for goods and services. They're providing an effective advertisement, not moving merchants up the supply ladder.

Though I can definitely see why people would be steamed if they expected that.

<comment><USER11> Groupon markets to you in a way that claims you'll gain long-term customers, that's where the retailer is supposed to make money.

The problem is that doesn't end up happening for a variety of reasons, as has been pointed out elsewhere in comments and the article. Of course Groupon would never tell potential customers of these flaws in the system.

FTA:

"The 32% that said they didn't make a profit from the program reported that customers rarely bought more than the coupon deal and few returned to the business at a later date."

Tough to make a profit from Groupon when you don't get any additional business from the groupon customers on top of what the groupon was for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is it that various media outlets find the whole 'hyperlinking' thing so hard?

The study author's page -

<http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dholakia/>

The study itself

[http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dholakia/Groupon%20Effectiveness%20...](http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~dholakia/Groupon%20Effectiveness%20Study,%20Sep%2028%202010.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> Groupon is pursuing a slash and burn strategy. They churn through merchants and spit them out. Their only goals are to increase revenues through

more cities more offers more revenue per offer higher share

Ultimately their interests are not aligned with those of their merchant partners. They refuse to cap the quantity on offers. They push for 50%+ discounts. They do nothing to discourage breakage. They use good businesses to attract their members but then they punish bad businesses with predatory pricing. So good businesses erode their brand.

Lots of problems here. Their model is far from broken (because there are so many businesses and the unit economics still work for their members) but someone will come along and fix this model for them.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 Most of the complaints from the 40% that are saying "never again" seem to have very little (if anything) to do with Groupon specifically, but rather the entire idea of advertising on a group deal/bargain site:

 _Poor tips, too many customers, angry customers (due to lack of product or wait time) are all potential side effects of a Groupon deal. The author of the study, Utpal Dholakia said it was almost a given:

"Because the Groupon customer base is made up of deal-seekers and bargain shoppers, they might not tip as well as an average customer or be willing to purchase beyond the deal."

This led to the finding that restaurants had the hardest time with Groupon deals, where service business such as spas and salons fared better. The 32% that said they didn't make a profit from the program reported that customers rarely bought more than the coupon deal and few returned to the business at a later date._

It shouldn't be shocking to retailers that offering deep discounts on a popular discount site is appealing mostly to people that only buy discounted goods, but it seems that it is surprising to some.

</comment><comment><USER14> If 60% of their customers want to participate on a regular basis then that's more than enough to build a billion dollar business. I don't see where the scandal is.

<comment><USER9> It's not a scandal - I don't think this is a con. But I'd be interested to know how many businesses actually do repeat deals. It seems obvious that brands/chains (who probably do research and analysis) are not (yet) interested.

<comment><USER15> They're interested. I personally know a national brand manager who is creating a new product for the sole purpose of running it on Groupon. Margin problem solved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is this any different than a company posting a 50% off coupon in their local newspaper? Groupon is just a different advertising route. I'm not sure why Groupon is being blamed for what follows after customers get the coupon in their hands.

<comment><USER17> It's _very_ different. When was the last time you cut off a coupon from your local newspaper (I don't even know the name of mine -> Google -> Oh, it's Daily Herald, cool!), saved it in your wallet and used it in the store a couple of days later?

Groupon's difference is: (i) it's on the internet, fueled with great publicity it has generated (ii) the brilliant social aspect of the groupon system and (iii) the deal is instantly bought now, not later. So it's not a coupon at all but a web-based deal.

Groupon is very good at creating hoards of customers; what it lacks, I think, is the consultation that should be provided to businesses about how to limit and handle the crowd. Even gap.com had a rough day when Groupon unleashed a national campaign recently.

<comment><USER16> "I don't even know the name of mine"

That's kind of scary. I just got a Sarah Palin flashback.

"Groupon is very good at creating hoards of customers; what it lacks, I think, is the consultation that should be provided to businesses about how to limit and handle the crowd."

Maybe they just need to allow businesses to put a cap on the number of coupons that are sold? Since a lot of companies are only advertising to their local market, I wouldn't even think this would be an issue.

<comment><USER17> :-) I doubt you read your local newspaper with the same zeal as, say, WSJ, Economist, etc. Local newspapers are quite irrelevant unless you are really tied to the community.

I think they already have the cap thing. However, it's not as simple as that. A lot of businesses possess neither the experience nor the theoretical skills to analyze what-if situations involving hundreds or thousands of new customers. When you say the companies are "only" advertising to their local market you are making teh same gross underestimation that some of these poor small businesses do: local can be _huge_! For example, AFAIK Chicago metro area is around 3M people, when you throw in the suburbs it around 9M. When you advertise to Chicago groupon, _all_ those people have access (e.g. I live 30 mi outside Chicago but still bought the Tall Ship Wendy deal at Navy Pier this summer, they were quite overwhelmed with the demand.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For a merchant to make effective use of Groupon, he must use it for one purpose: to acquire customers. Once someone comes to you via a third party, you must convert them into your own customer. This generally requires getting their personal info so that you can engage them directly in the future.

Amazon merchants have been doing this for years. Pay Amazon their commission for the first sale, then move the name to their permanent data base. 15% of the first sale is a reasonable customer acquisition cost; 15% of every sale is not sustainable (unless you have ridiculous margins).

Since many Groupon merchants meet their customers in person, an extra step is required: collecting personal info. Skip this step and you've just lost 2 things: your money and a name on your customer list.

<comment><USER19> Groupon may be the one to bring them customers, and you're right, it's the merchant's responsibility to convert the incoming people to customers. However, Groupon should find a way to help with this. Because if they don't, merchants will continue to blame Groupon for the failures. If this continues to happen, Groupon will fail.

<comment><USER20> Some anecdotal evidence, about Groupon's inability to make these deals "work" for merchants:

This Saturday I went skydiving, and used a Groupon I purchased last month. The skydiving school had nothing but bad things to say about Groupon. According to the school, they were told that they would sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 200-300 skydives--they ending up selling closer to 1200. Now the fact that the number of Groupons wasn't capped at something more reasonable was most likely an oversight on the part of the merchant. However, Groupon's sales staff should have at the very least alerted the merchant to the potential risk. In this situation, it seems that Groupon was attempting to extract all possible value from merchant--Groupon had to have had some inkling that the deal was not going to be mutually beneficial.

Can you extrapolate this to all merchants using Groupon? No, but the study results certainly didn't surprise me.

<comment><USER21> I thought that Groupon doesn't cap their sales?

<comment><USER22> They do, but they'll pass on sales if thats a requirement. They have a waiting list of customers. Imagine that.

Another anecdote, my friends 1 year old small business approached Groupon to do a deal, they turned him away and told him to come back when he has more press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One thing that I think is ridiculously misleading, is that when watching the video for "how groupon works for busineses"... they have the "we only make money when you make money" premise, and show bags of money piling up on both the business owners side and the groupon rep's side, at what looks to be a 5-1 ratio in the business owner's favor

Now it's pretty clear that in this instance they are talking about when the money is collected from the sold groupons - not the overall economic benefit that the business will see in the future (although it's questionable that even that will be favorable). From the Posies story and finding out that groupon takes at the bare minimum a 50% cut, this video is incredibly deceiving, borderline flat out lying to the business owner from the start... No wonder business owners are disenchanted with the whole process.

Click on "How it works" <http://www.grouponworks.com/>

</comment><comment><USER24> My startup -- <http://feastery.com> \-- was founded to address these problems for great restaurants. In general the issues around retention and customer quality have been around since the beginning but have been largely ignored by most writers. We match high-quality customers with great restaurants, and economically sensible offers. We help restaurants deliver a unique experience (not merely a discount) and we track retention so we can definitively prove ROI. It's a better model for our members and our restaurant partners. If you love food, request a membership here: <http://feastery.com/request_membership> </shameless startup plug>

</comment><comment><USER25> Fast growing company ever according to their CEO. Hiring 100 new employees a week. Uh oh.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting to think about ways in which using Groupon would be beneficial.

Maybe for a new entrant to a geographic market where they are willing to settle with much lower margins? So you would in that case use Groupon to get your initial customers at the expense of neighboring competitors. And by keeping prices permanently low you would potentially keep those customers.

Presumably, if you can keep that up and competitors cannot compete, you could drive them out of business and then raise prices. Sort of a Walmart 2.0 strategy.

<comment><USER15> Another merchant strategy: introduce a high margin product/service to your line for the sole purpose of selling it on Groupon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Groupon is abusing their position as leaders in that niche. That will backfire for sure and users will never forget.

A new startup in the field can disrupt the market...

<comment><USER28> You've used some popular words, but I'm not sure you're saying anything. The Groupon "problem" is somewhere between businesses making poor decisions in how or if they participate and Groupon taking too much of a cut. What can a new startup disrupt? Offer better terms for fewer users? Groupon can match or cut below the terms and offer more users, and they won't have any friction involved... Not take businesses that wouldn't do well under a Groupon? I'm not sure how not getting businesses to sign up is going to hurt Groupon either... Without anything there, you're doing little more than 'Happy Birthday! Stock Message!'.

You claim users will never forget, but they rarely remember. As fervently as some users denounce companies, most users are going to (likely rightly so) forgive, accept their token gift, and forget. There's always a big buzz, but the sting tends to fade quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Anyone interested in working on a Groupon-like platform that let's merchants sell their own vouchers on their site (or be licensed to smaller chambers of commerce / newspapers)?

I've been messing with one (in Rails) and I can get approval to be a 3rd party payment aggregator (we already do this with one of our products).

</comment><comment><USER30> The 32% that said they didn't make a profit from the program reported that customers rarely bought more than the coupon deal and few returned to the business at a later date.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

Does that remind anyone else of digg traffic?

</comment><comment><USER31> If customers haven't educated themselves about the danger of space-time accidents when they try to take a Toyota Maxwell 2033 out on the interstate, well that's just their fault. This ain't no internal combustion engine.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wow, is it really that easy to get the media to go into full attack mode?

a) We're given nearly zero visibility on how candidates were selected. Even on the Rice website they only list media mentions of the study, I would love to see the original sample, polling selection data, etc <http://media.rice.edu/media/Dateline_Rice.asp>.

b) Response Bias alone could swing the results up or down wildly with such a small sample size.

c) A piece of the article, reported as fact, is that restaurants are unhappy vs. other business types which they certainly do not have data to support. This is terribly misleading - from the article they surveyed "150 businesses spanning 19 U.S. cities and 13 product categories" indicating ~10 business in each category.

For the WSJ & others to report a half-baked study as pure fact without raising any of the questions above is mind boggling.

</comment><comment><USER33> "It smacks of a desperate attempt to jump on the trend-wagon and less of a well-thought out marketing move and that is the real crux of the problem."

I wouldn't be so quick to judge if I were the writer. This will just be one of many discoveries as this type of business grows and gains in popularity, and I have no doubt they will learn and react with their best judgment.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think the Restaurant.com model works better for restaurants since a minimum purchase is typically required and the tip is automatically included based on the actual (non-coupon) price. Although, I do find it hard to get coupons for the more popular restaurants.

<comment><USER13> I have never heard of anyone using restaurant.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The numbers in this article, and in the WSJ article aren't very clear.

40% of the merchants say they wouldn't do it again. 66% said they were profitable. This means some of these profitable merchants would not do it again. 32% said they were not profitable. We don't now how many of these would not do it again.

Of course, their is no information regarding the actual businesses themselves. A suffering business using GroupOn probably has a good chance of suffering afterwards. Advertising, whether through radio, GroupOn, or other sources, isn't a magic bullet.

</comment><comment><USER36> > What do you think of these numbers? Do you think Groupon's satisfaction and > return rate is closer to Mason's 97% or 60% as the survey says?

60% happy rate certainly sounds closer to reality than 97%, but am I the only person who thinks that's really, really good? Are there any forms of media/advertising that first time purchasers have above a 60% rate? I've tried different kinds of media and deals in the past, and had many things go abysmally bad. Print in particular. I think mature industries like newspapers, magazines, and TV commercials only have a higher satisfaction rate because they attrition'ed out some people who attempted that form of media. Once people figure out what businesses perform really well on Groupon, success/satisfaction rates will go up.

I'm thinking Groupon will work for businesses with high fixed costs and no variable costs (Chelsea Piers), businesses with insane margins (spas), and places that think they can replace a regular part of someone's life and get a returning customer (centrally located bagel shops, pizza shops, etc). Right now a lot of high variable cost unique experience type businesses are trying Groupon, and that seems suicidal to me, but eventually people will figure out what Groupon works for and what it doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER37> Here's my quite speculative thinking on the whole mess, admittedly also without having followed it in much detail.

It's not worth your time chasing such elusive bargains, unless your time is not worth a lot. (Exception, the "excitement of the hunt". See Atlantic City, Las Vegas, etc.)

If your time is not worth a lot, you're not going to be buying much (no resources). I.e. you're a low value acquisition as a customer. (And if you're into the "excitement of the hunt", then you're not too interested in settling down with a particular merchant, are you?)

It eventually follows that success for Groupon consists of promoting itself, not its customers' (the businesses contracting campaigns) long term interests. (Once again, the site's users are the product, not the customers. And while they may be nice enough people, they are not a good product.)

Also, users (the merchant's customers) associate their success with Groupon, not the contracting merchant. One-off bargains don't build customer loyalty.

P.S. Having now read the brief, linked article, I speculate further than an overwhelmed venue may actually be counter-productive; shoppers stick it out to get their bargain, but tell themselves, "Man, what a pain. I'm never coming back here again."

<comment><USER38> I agree with your last point - I won't purchase Groupons for events anymore, as they are miserably packed, and many of the people aren't enjoyable to be around (obviously anecdotal).

Most recently, OMSI (local science museum in Portland) offered half off admission to their adults only evening admission. The place was crawling with trashed people complaining about too much reading and that there needed to be more hands on exhibits.</comment></comment>


Fastest JSON parser in the world is a D project? - <AUTHOR> http://forum.dlang.org/thread/20151014090114.60780ad6@marco-toshiba <comment><USER2> Here's the "how so fast" explanation:

[https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/pull/46#issuecomment-14...](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/pull/46#issuecomment-147932489)

<comment><USER3> I still don't get it. ELI5?

<comment><USER2> The JSON looks like this:

        {"coordinates": [
           {"x": 0.65, "y": 0.23, "z": 0.91, "name": "fwgzd", "opts": {'1': [1, true]},
           {"x": 0.45, "y": 0.78, "z": 0.22, "name": "alfsj", "opts": {'1': [1, true]},
           ...
        ],
         "info": "some info"}

The benchmark code [1] (very readable) is reading an array of structs containing x,y,z from 'coordinates'.

[1] [https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/blob/master/json/test_f...](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/blob/master/json/test_fast.d)

I haven't read the code but the algorithm would look at this roughly like:

       See `{` process? yes
       See `"coordinates"` process? yes
       See `[` process? yes
       See `{` process? yes
       See `"x"` process? yes => new Coord, Coord.x = 0.65
       See `"y"` process? yes => Coord.y = 0.23
       See `"z"` process? yes => Coord.z = 0.91
       See `"name"` process? no, next token is `"`, skip to `"`
       See `"opts"` process? no, next token is `{`, skip to `}`

The tradeoff is that he's completely ignoring the contents of `name` or `opts` or `info` and those values could potentially be invalid JSON but this processor doesn't care.

The code is also picking up efficiencies from being a static C-like language. The "new Coord" isn't actually doing anything, the alloc happened for the array as a whole so the assignments just write a known size value to a known offset from the start of the array. He's also using SIMD instructions to process multiple bytes at a time and some other tricks but the skipping is the main difference.

I think it's also interesting that the Rust code implemented value skipping in the benchmark file itself. The relative slowness there is likely that the library used (serde_json) is the JSON plugin for a generic serialization/deserialization lib and that Rust doesn't have a way to do SIMD yet.

<comment><USER4> I wrote serde_json, and wrote the rust benchmark here a few months ago. Interestingly when I wrote this benchmark, I had my implementation as equivalent to RapidJSON on my Mac, but for some reason Kostya couldn't replicate it:

O[https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/pull/44](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/pull/44)

I'm guessing gcc just has some optimizations llvm doesn't.

Rust does have some experimental SIMD, but I'm not using it yet because I want the serde libraries to be safe to use on byte streams, and reading 16 bytes ahead could block if at the end of a socket stream. Hopefully we will get specialization soon, which would let me use SIMD when I know I have at least X bytes in a buffer.

<comment><USER2> I enjoyed your blog series on serde perf.

One thing I noticed in this example was that the D example worked pretty much exactly like I want serde to work in that it was able to deserialize a subset of the overall document and the Coord struct didn't need to exhaustively cover the individual json data objects. If there's a way to do this in serde, an example in the docs would be really helpful.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I need to get back into writing on it.

I just pushed up a rust pull parser version here: [https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/pull/54](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/pull/54). Is that what you were thinking of?

<comment><USER2> My wishes are much more prosaic. It's not clear to me just from reading your docs how I can extract data from a JSON file using the pattern this benchmark shows (top level key containing the data, other keys containing metadata about the request) without having to create otherwise useless struct to cover the outer wrapper object.

I see you have a reply to Gankro for a non-exhaustive flag and that'd work. As for the default, the current behavior is what I'd expect from a Rust lib given the correctness first mindset of the community but I will always be opting for non-exhaustive because I think most people providing JSON APIs consider additional keys to be backwards compatible (they are in dynamic languages) and I'd prefer my apps to not break in production for no apparent reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds to me like VW or Nvidia:

(Why so fast)

"On the downside I did not validate the unused side-structures. I think it is not necessary to validate data you are not using. So basically I only scan them so much as to find where they end. Granted it is a bit of optimization for a benchmark, but is actually handy in real-life as well."

<comment><USER6> What was the nvidia thing? I recall [http://techreport.com/review/3089/how- ati-drivers-optimize-q...](http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers- optimize-quake-iii) , but that was ATI.

<comment><USER7> [http://www.geek.com/games/futuremark-confirms-nvidia-is- chea...](http://www.geek.com/games/futuremark-confirms-nvidia-is-cheating-in- benchmark-553361/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, how is it going with D? Last time I gave it a look I really liked it, but I sadly left the place when I hit the multiple standard libraries problems.

Anyone using D in real life, among hackers here?

<comment><USER9> Facebook does [1][2][3].

[1]: [http://www.drdobbs.com/mobile/facebook-adopts-d- language/240...](http://www.drdobbs.com/mobile/facebook-adopts-d- language/240162694) [2]: [https://github.com/facebook/warp](https://github.com/facebook/warp) [3]: [https://github.com/facebook/flint](https://github.com/facebook/flint)

<comment><USER10> Actually Facebook is backing away from D. Not because they dislike it, but simply to converge on C++.

<comment><USER11> You work for facebook? They are rewriting w0rp in C++?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't read D, but here's the code anyway: [https://github.com/mleise/fast/blob/master/source/fast/json....](https://github.com/mleise/fast/blob/master/source/fast/json.d).

</comment><comment><USER13> On another note, I see Scala is doing really poorly in the JSON benchmark test: [https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks#json](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks#json)

<comment><USER14> Those aren't very fair to the dynamic languages and JIT compiled languages (this includes Scala).

* For the dynamic languages execution time includes the time it takes to lex, parse and interpret the source code.

* For language implementations with a JIT execution time includes the time the JIT takes to properly optimise hot code paths. Generally you start benchmarking after a warm up period in such cases.

The only fair comparisons are those between ahead of time compiled languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Although D may have a fast json parser, this benchmark is a horrible comparison. Really need a better way to do cross language comparisons.

<comment><USER16> The repo owner is accepting pull requests for the benchmarks so at least it's fixable.

<comment><USER15> It's a lot of work to fix this benchmark, which is fairly contrived to begin with. To start, have to adjust every sample to accept a warmup time, then run time (which is likely multiple samples), measuring results in that run time, both speed and performance. And you also have to be careful that the compiler is then not optimizing out the repetitions in the runtime, while still allowing optimizations that would produce the best performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Yep, that's right. stdx.data.json's pull parser finally beats the dynamic > languages with native efficiency. (I used the default options here that > provide you with an Exception and line number on errors.)

Nice to see that it only took a couple of years for the D community to beat in speed the scripting languages.

<comment><USER18> It's literally the next paragraph that extends this:

"A few days ago I decided to get some practical use out of my pet project 'fast' by implementing a JSON parser myself, that could rival even the by then fastest JSON parser, RapidJSON. The result can be seen in the benchmark results right now:

[https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks#json](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks#json)

fast: 0.34s, 226.7Mb (GDC) RapidJSON: 0.79s, 687.1Mb (GCC)"

<comment><USER17> I read it, so? What's wrong in grandparent?

<comment><USER18> Supplant "it only took a couple of years to beat scripting languages" with "it only took a couple of years to be the fastest JSON library inclusive of scripting and compiled languages" and I imagine you'll understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The D people laugh at the dynamic type languages, yet they have "auto" in- front of all variables ;)

<comment><USER20> To give a little more detail on the difference between type inference and dynamic typing, the following code is valid in a dynamic language, but a static language rejects it:

        auto x = 15;
        if (some_condition) {
            x = "Hello world!";
        }
        print(x);

And this solves real errors. I believe there's even a function somewhere in the Python _standard library_ that, if it finds one result, returns a string, and if it finds multiple results, returns a list of strings. Of course a string is itself iterable, so duck-typing goes horribly wrong.

<comment><USER21> I'm OK with dynamic types, they buy you something, cost you something. My big complaint is weakly typed languages (I'm looking at you, JavaScript). I've just fired SHIFT+CTRL+i and typed the line below in the JavaScript console:

        > (1 + "1") * 2
        22

At least it raises a TypeError in Python (unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'). OK, probably better to fail at compile time, but I would rather fail at runtime than not fail at all.

<comment><USER19> In the early days of my JavaScript'n I always used minus instead of plus when doing addition. But as the language and tools has matured I hardly see any type errors any more. I do have a habit of parseInt() that won't easily go away though :P

Besides the concatenation of numbers to strings and vice versa, most other type errors in JavaScript will give you a syntax error or something like NaN (Not a Number).

So don't mix strings and numbers. Everything else is just "objects". =)

One thing that causes lots of bugs though is undefined object properties. But I'm not sure if inferred types would help in those cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Yep, that's right. stdx.data.json's pull parser finally beats the dynamic > languages with native efficiency.

'dynamic' is the key word here. The title is misleading.

<comment><USER23> This post is about the fast project, which is claimed to beat RapidJson, a very fast C++ json parser.

<comment><USER24> If it was implemented in c++ using identical algorithms it would be no slower.

<comment><USER25> That's hard to know. It's always possible that one compiler generates faster code than another one for the same algorithm.

I wouldn't be surprised if most of the speed difference was down to correctness checks though.

<comment><USER24> There are full threads on why this impl is faster. It's cheating

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't know but the benchmarks are aweful, since scala and python using their built in Json Parsers and not the fastest parsers available and he is comparing some other super fast libraries against D and says "hoho" it's so fast.

Benchmarks are for the poor people who can't live in the real world.

<comment><USER15> Benchmarks would be fine if they could somehow actually compare performance between languages. I have yet to see any benchmarks between languages that are even close to being results that would actually be seen.</comment></comment>


Copy Protection in Modern Microcontrollers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/mcu_lock.html <comment><USER2> I think the word "modern" is misplaced here. All of the listed microcontrollers are more than a decade old.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great content, but I'd say that the page background color is a great copy protection measure in itself.

<comment><USER4> Content is from 2001 and the game has changed...seismically. There has been a Cambrian explosion in this field since 2k1.

<comment><USER5> Can you point to any newer resources?

<comment><USER6> There's a good paper by the Fraunhofer Society at the link below.

[https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/aisec/Dokumente/...](https://www.aisec.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/aisec/Dokumente/Publikationen/Studien_TechReports/englisch/Whitepaper_ProductProtection.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Cheers, I'll look through that in detail.

I remember Fraunhofer doing some interesting research using PUFs creating a foil device that covers special chips, where if the foil is tampered with, the memory of the chip is disrupted.

It's called PEP foil if I recall correctly.

Sergei's PhD thesis, is also an amazing read in case anyone hasn't seen it -

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/phd.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/phd.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dell launches purported MacBook Air killer - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/03/17/Dell_launches_purported_MacBook_Air_killer_1.html

<comment><USER2> I've seen very little evidence, based on Air sales, that it is popular enough to warrant killing.

<comment><USER3> Where do you get your sales info from? I've never seen sales numbers for the Air, and I'm curious to see what they're like.

Dell can't use this to compete with the Air. The Air's a luxury product - possibly the only real luxury laptop. It's for people who really, really, really like beautiful things that feel good, and who don't mind the fact that for that you're paying more than you would for a more powerful computer. Dell doesn't make luxury computers. I doubt they're skilled enough to make computers that work beautifully enough to deserve a luxury. Furthermore, you can't "kill" items in the luxury market.

This is more a computer whose form was influenced a lot by the Air. That's it. It's not as pretty but it's still thin, and it's a lot cheaper since chances are Dell will try to sell it to people who _aren't_ rich.

<comment><USER4> That's a very nice way of saying the Air is for idiots who have too much money and are more impressed by shiny stuff than by real merit.

<comment><USER3> If by "shiny stuff" you mean "it works really nice and feels good," then yes. That's what I'm saying.

I guess people who pay money for wallpaper are stupid? It serves no practical purpose. I guess people who buy expensive desks rather than cheap wooden ones, they're stupid? Or people who'll buy a sports car rather than a smart car? The people who'll pay money for an original painting? All really, really stupid, right?

There's a sort of design deficiency in the world of hackers and programmers. I'm certain it's not _just_ among us, but it's here that I see it most. People really don't seem to notice things like feel and look and effect. For a lot of people a design is just a long list of features.

The Macbook Air is not a machine for people who want features. It's a machine for people who want to feel a delight when they look at their computer, for people who enjoy the feel of a really light computer tucked under their arm. It's got a beautiful form and it feels beautiful when you have it open on your lap and typing feels beautiful. Those aren't features. There isn't a site that rates how good it feels to type on a computer. There's no score for this.

That said, calling good design "shiny" and saying it lacks "real merit" is pretty damn stupid, and I find the people who look at the Macbook Air and say they don't get it a little bit despicable. It's a bad attitude that gets people nowhere and encourages deliberate blindness.

(Another way to put it is: what do you have to gain from seeing movies in a movie theater? It's expensive and the food is bad and unless you're sitting particularly close to the screen, there's nothing that it offers you that a huge TV doesn't - with one exception, which is the experience of going to a movie theater. Good design is an experience.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This "killer" talk is lame. It won't kill anything.

I remember seeing the Air at the top of the laptops sales charts on the Apple.com store.

</comment><comment><USER6> at 4 lbs it's too heavy to compete with the air.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Air is thinner, way thinner. Adamo looks more like a cheap Macbook, therefore it should compete in the lower end segment, and price, specially price.

<comment><USER8> Depends on what you consider "thinner".. The Dell would fit in a 3mm smaller slot but won't cut cake as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The MacBook air is a so-so piece of hardware with a world class operating system. Dell can easily best the Air at hardware but definitely not at software (unless Apple frees Leopard)

<comment><USER4> Why not? Dell sells Ubuntu laptops.

<comment><USER3> Ubuntu is not world-class. I think Ubuntu might be close to competing with Windows, though it still lacks a lot of basic stuff. Both Ubuntu and Windows (up to and including Windows 7) are still years away from being on the same plane as OS X. (My policy is, until I see a text editor as good as TextEdit on another operating system, I won't even consider a comparison between the two.)

<comment><USER10>
       My policy is, until I see a text editor as good as
       TextEdit on another operating system, I won't even
       consider a comparison between the two.

You forgot to mention your first axiom:

      1) Nothing is as good as TextMate.

Be realistic here: VI(M), Notepad++, and Emacs are all great text editors.

<comment><USER3> Sorry - I was referring to non code-focused editors. The great thing about TextEdit is that it looks like Notepad when I launch it, and yet it has incredible support for design, typography, layout, and positioning. I can write most school papers in it, but it still looks and feels ultrasimple.

TextMate does some awesome stuff, from what I've heard, but it's much more focused on coding. TextEdit is more general-purpose, which is why it's my standard. Until another OS spends as much time making a kickass all-purpose editor, it probably hasn't got the level of detail that I want in my operating system.

<comment><USER10> Oh, woops! Misread TextEdit for TextMate! That said, I find that Wordpad is a fantastic simplistic tool for creating school papers. For Linux I tend to use the slightly more complex (yet still very clean) LyX.

<comment><USER3> Wordpad is really good, but it lacks the wow factor of TextEdit (which I'm slightly addicted to).

I've never used LyX; forgive me if this is a dumb question, but is it available for Ubuntu? I might boot up a virtual machine and give it a try if so.

<comment><USER11> Sure is, it's in the repo so "sudo apt-get install lyx" should grab it.

It's also available for Windows/OS X so you might be better off just trying it on your primary OS.

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

I don't think you're going to find the kind of simplicity you enjoy in TextEdit though.

Personally I use text-editors e.g. vim, for every kind of writing I do, code or not.

Plaintext formats like <http://eleanor.rubyforge.org/> (for screenplays) and Taskpaper (for planning/todo lists) are really helpful for this sort of thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56 <comment><USER2> His previous article also is really interesting. Read that first. (It's linked at the top).</comment>


No Windows 8 ARM support for x86 apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/15/sinofsky_windows8_arm_support_x86_apps/ <comment><USER3> I'm a bit confused. People expected x86 emulation on ARM architectures? That sounds a bit backwards to me.

<comment><USER4> I honestly expected that they were going to try at least for the initial release. Apple did release Rosetta when they moved to Intel, which allowed PowerPC-based applications to run on x86 Macs.

I'm not sure how much use that got, though, considering that Rosetta had a lot of limitations, and fairly terrible performance in a lot of areas. That's probably the main reason that MS didn't bother trying to support it.

<comment><USER5> Rosetta saw plenty of use just from Adobe apps. It took them about a year and half IIRC to release an x86 version of Photoshop.

<comment><USER5> edit: and didn't Office:Mac take forever too?

<comment><USER6> yeah, office 2008 was the first native x86 version, IIR (and I swear it takes longer to start up then the PPC version of 2004 did under Rosetta, which is just ridiculous).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> x86 apps on ARM is a distraction. The question is whether Win32 apps will run on ARM; MS has given conflicting information on this topic.

[http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/16/windows-8-arm-tablets- leg...](http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/16/windows-8-arm-tablets-legacy-apps- microsoft-office/)

<comment><USER8> Could you explain what you mean? Isn't "Desktop mode" Win32?

<comment><USER7> Yes. If Win32 is not available on ARM, maybe ARM systems won't have desktop mode at all.

<comment><USER9> I would highly doubt that.

'Desktop' can be seen as a panel on the start metro UI[0]. Remember, not all tablets will be ARM systems.. and I could see a market for ARM desktops too.

IIRC MS showed the desktop running on their very first demonstrations of v. early win8 on ARM, too.

0\. [http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/13/windows-8-for-tablets- han...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/13/windows-8-for-tablets-hands-on- preview/) @video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So in tablets, they're going to be in the same position as Windows Phone 7 - <USER2> great OS with a distinct app disadvantage and little consumer awareness. This only further raises the question of how much appetite device makers will have for a $75 (ballpark) software license, especially as these devices start to average closer to $400.

<comment><USER11> If we estimate around 80MM PCs sold in a quarter, MS generates about $60 Windows revenue for every PC sold, but their costs are about $22 (from Q411 results Rev $4.7B, Profit $2.9B). It will be hard for them to the cut license fee unless they can significantly increase unit sales.

This is probably why they didn't push WP7 on tablets.

For almost all the OEMs, the average margin on a PC is single digits.

<comment><USER9> Can we get some citations on these numbers please? ..we aren't even in Q4.11 yet?

Another key factor to bear in mind is that, at least today, tablets are an _additional_ computing device, and don't replace any existing PC.

<comment><USER11> Fiscal years don't always match calendar years. Microsoft's Q4 ends on June 30th.

[http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...](http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/PressReleaseAndWebcast/FY11/Q4/default.aspx)

I don't think you can say that tablets are bought in addition to PCs, as we've seen PC sales flatline and contract in the U.S. and Europe since the iPad was released. Nobody really knows what the long-term impact will be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've got to side with Microsoft on this one. I see no evidence that any of Microsoft's statements were misleading, not to mention that I think this break in backwards compatibility will only be a good thing for performance on ARM devices.

</comment><comment><USER13> So apparently when they say "ONE OS TO RULE THEM ALL" what they really mean is "ONE BRAND NAME TO RULE THEM ALL with a number of non-cross-compatible OS's which have the that brand name and a similar UI"

</comment><comment><USER14> Microsoft will incentivize developers through various means to help move apps to the new WinRT platform fairly quickly, thus help seed the ecosystem with ARM compatible apps. This isn't the same Windows Phone 7 apps chicken and egg problem. Microsoft will be pushing millions of Windows 8 computers into peoples homes sometime next year, which will help the seeding process. When this happens, I suspect we will see Microsoft provide preferred Windows Store placement for Metro apps, and a "Developed for Metro" strategy that makes the legacy x86 app experience seem antiquated and clunky. This upgrade sales opportunity will incentivize developers to push out new versions, which will help seed the ARM compatible apps ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why aren't they adding support for fat binaries (or something similar) like on MacOSX? So that developers can indeed release one single version of their app which runs on all the different architectures.

<comment><USER16> If you write your app on HTML/JavaScript or (presumably) .NET, it should run on both platforms.

If you are deploying native code, I would think that creating your own "fat binary" would not be too hard to do. Either install the right binaries with a MSI file or at runtime have the startup program be a small managed app that starts the right native app for the platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "One OS to rule them all"

Nice try, Microsoft, misleading people into thinking that. But it's more like:

1) Windows 8 for x86 desktop systems

2) Windows 8 for ARM (no native apps, and quite different)

3) Windows Phone for mobiles (based on Windows CE)

My question is why didn't they just make WP7 for tablets? I know Win8 wasn't ready, but from some videos I saw on TIMN of Win8 running on ARM tablets, it was clear that the dual core ones could barely handle it, and only the quad core Kal-el had more acceptable performance. I'm sure WP7 would've flied on those. Why did they have to port that whole 8 GB OS to ARM when it will have no legacy apps anyway?

<comment><USER18> > 2) Windows 8 for ARM (no native apps, and quite different)

I think the article might of worded it badly, but their will be native ARM apps for W8 on ARM, but not x86 emulation. It pretty much is the same as Windows NT back in the day.

<comment><USER19> > might _have_

> but _there_ will

FTFY. Sorry.

<comment><USER18> thanks, I guess. I should have used correct grammar while commenting on an article being poorly written. It is a shame that you have received down votes for it (I did up vote).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if they will go the other way though and emulate ARM on x86.

<comment><USER21> Why would they? Only reason you would need emulation is for legacy apps, which Win8 will have none of from ARM.

<comment><USER20> Development, sure it could run natively like iOS does(they just reroute the system calls), but it means you have to do more on device testing since the translation layer isn't bug for bug compatible with the device os.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> M$ is trying very messily to 'be the next Android'. So, what's new?

</comment><comment><USER23> So, there was someone who _expected_ that x86 win32 apps will run on ARM? ^_^

So, that rumors about miserable average level of intelligence in US aren't just rumors? ^_^</comment>