CoffeeScript 1.8 released - <AUTHOR> http://coffeescript.org/#changelog HN doesn't allow resubmission of the same link that points to the change log [1], so here's the change log:

    The --join option of the CLI is now deprecated.
    Source maps now use .js.map as file extension, instead of just .map.
    The CLI now exits with the exit code 1 when it fails to write a file to disk.
    The compiler no longer crashes on unterminated, single-quoted strings.
    Fixed location data for string interpolations, which made source maps out of sync.
    The error marker in error messages is now correctly positioned if the code is indented with tabs.
    Fixed a slight formatting error in CoffeeScript's source map-patched stack traces.
    The %% operator now coerces its right operand only once.
    It is now possible to require CoffeeScript files from Cakefiles without having to register the compiler first.
    The CoffeeScript REPL is now exported and can be required using require 'coffee-script/repl'.
    Fixes for the REPL in Node 0.11.
 [1] http://coffeescript.org/#changelog <comment><USER2> Ok, so coffee script is great.

...but really? This is a totally unexciting minor point release with basically just bug fixes; no major new functionality or interesting features.

Who cares? Why is this rising on the front page?

(no seriously, am I missing something?)

<comment><USER3> Also, this just links to the homepage, which has nothing to do with the title. Can someone please either change the title to "CoffeeScript Homepage" or update the link to a changelog?

<comment><USER4> For the curious – [http://coffeescript.org/#changelog](http://coffeescript.org/#changelog)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still no generators/yield support :(

<comment><USER6> You're going to wait a long time for that. I would personally look for an alternative as I feel the project is not being managed properly. Where is CS road map ? there is none. I hope people will definetly move to CS redux ,which seems to be to CS what lodash is to underscore. Same for Backbone,what's the roadmap ? and noone sees a pattern here ?

<comment><USER7> I think Ampersand is the analogue for Backbone. It does the same stuff, but it fully embraces modules, npm, and browserify and it's got great computed properties. These days I work mostly with React, but if Ampersand had existed a year and a half ago I'd have been all over it.

[http://ampersandjs.com/](http://ampersandjs.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> CoffeeScript novice here. Can someone please tell me why/why not coffee script should be used rather than JS? Is it usable in serious prod level projects? Looks very clean.

<comment><USER9> I feel like it gives me a 10x increase in productivity when coding JavaScript projects. I consider it irresponsible to not use it.

<comment><USER10> All of my projects have been in Coffeescript since 3 years ago (over 100k lines of code). Have had almost little to no problems. Like you, feel 10x more productive when I'm using it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> coffee-maven-plugin 1.4.11 ([https://github.com/talios/coffee-maven- plugin](https://github.com/talios/coffee-maven-plugin)) with 1.8.0 support/defaults has just been released to Maven Central for anyone building coffeescript under the Apache Maven build system.

      <dependency>
        <groupId>com.theoryinpractise</groupId>
        <artifactId>coffee-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.4.11</version>
      </dependency>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> HN doesn't allow resubmission of the same link that points to the change log [1], so here's the change log:

        The --join option of the CLI is now deprecated.
        Source maps now use .js.map as file extension, instead of just .map.
        The CLI now exits with the exit code 1 when it fails to write a file to disk.
        The compiler no longer crashes on unterminated, single-quoted strings.
        Fixed location data for string interpolations, which made source maps out of sync.
        The error marker in error messages is now correctly positioned if the code is indented with tabs.
        Fixed a slight formatting error in CoffeeScript's source map-patched stack traces.
        The %% operator now coerces its right operand only once.
        It is now possible to require CoffeeScript files from Cakefiles without having to register the compiler first.
        The CoffeeScript REPL is now exported and can be required using require 'coffee-script/repl'.
        Fixes for the REPL in Node 0.11.

[1] [http://coffeescript.org/#changelog](http://coffeescript.org/#changelog)

<comment><USER12> You can resubmit a link by changing the url slightly. For the policy on reposts see the FAQ.

We changed the url to the changelog.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you @dang & @CyberShadow</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Announces EC2 Container Service for Managing Docker Containers on AWS - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/amazon-announces-ec2-container-service-for-managing-docker-containers-on-aws/?ncid=rss <comment><USER2> So not anymore than I can do with Mesos and Docker on other cloud providers. I can use Marathon for a nice UI as well.</comment>


FBI Calls on Tech Companies with Encryption to Reconsider "Their Business Model" - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/12/09/comey-calls-on-tech-companies-offering-end-to-end-encryption-to-reconsider-their-business-model/ <comment><USER2> I personally say that we start a movement to ban the unencrypted communications that have commonly been used by terrorist to collaborate on recent terrorist attacks. If the FBI really wants to protect us they will help push for the ban on the most common communication used by terrorist: unencrypted!

</comment><comment><USER3> The FBI keeps saying it's technically possible which of course it is however, if I want to ensure my users have the best encryption I can offer end-to-end I would not store the key to unlock that encrypted communication. If I was forced to store such keys I'd have to spend a lot of time (money) making sure I kept them safe. It seems far more likely that in this scenario the keys would somehow become compromised. If I don't store them then I don't have to worry about that threat at all.

</comment><comment><USER4> > citing fear that her grandchildren might start communicating with terrorists > over encrypted PlayStation systems.

ugh

<comment><USER5> The real irony of that example is that game consoles would be one of the secure methods of communication that would persist if encryption somehow disappeared. Messages can be sent by in game actions which are very difficult to monitor, even if unencrypted.</comment></comment>


An OpenStack Crime Story solved by tcpdump, sysdig, and iostat (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved-tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-2/ <comment><USER2> "So many proxies, so many things happening in the shadows."

A fairly accurate description of a typical experience of running OpenStack. A behemoth of complexity to manage, requiring an operator to understand a huge amount of layers, ranging from high level concepts like VRRP-based HAproxy setups all the down to kernel network namespaces and low-level tap-devices. All at the same time and with no central control plane to debug but rather crawl multiple log files from multiple systems in parallel.

Back in 2014 OpenStack may have been a thing but nowadays, 4 years later, people learned a lesson. There is no value in being a full-stack operator of infrastructure for systems. The idea of running a complex, distributed architecture like a private cloud at the same or higher stability and comparable or even lower cost than public clouds eventually proved futile.

That's why in 2018, consensus is, infrastructure for systems has been replaced by infrastructure for applications (k8s). The infrastructure is typically consumed on public clouds.

<comment><USER3> I think that's poignant. The example that comes to mind is SAP: their dev teams embraced both, OpenStack and K8S, culminating in this glorious monstrosity[1] called openstack-helm, by which you could run Kubernetes on bare metal nodes, then deploy OpenStack on top of that, and finally running Kubernetes on those virtual machines again.

The idea being that if your customers need Kubernetes clusters, you should be able to provision them on-demand from elastic resources.

This seems like a great approach, since you can pick a layer to apply redundancy at, and only apply it there. You do not need a triple-redundant control plane built on a redundant backplane, if you are confident in the redundancy of the backplane. I am not a customer of SAP but I am a fan of many complex uses of Helm, and this seemed like it had been very well-considered application of the tool.

Anyway learning about this implementation left me with a slightly dirty feeling that I was idolizing a Rube Goldberg level of complexity system that didn't need to be so complicated.

Then I heard about Gardener[2], which solves the same problem without OpenStack at all. Seed clusters create shoot clusters, with their control planes deployed inside namespaces of the seed cluster. There's no virtualization overhead, and you get all of the same benefits in terms of supervision. Also from SAP. I hope I get to work with something like this.

[1]: [https://github.com/sapcc/openstack- helm](https://github.com/sapcc/openstack-helm)

[2]: [https://gardener.cloud/](https://gardener.cloud/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure if intentional but that is the second episode. Here is the first episode

[https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime- story...](https://blog.codecentric.de/en/2014/09/openstack-crime-story-solved- tcpdump-sysdig-iostat-episode-1/)</comment>


Graduate school for unemployed college students - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/graduate-school-for-unemployed-college-students.html <comment><USER2> I don't believe that "unemployed" in this sense means "without paycheck." I considered myself unemployed after graduating from college because I was making my money by catering. Not exactly why I went to college...

So, with that interpretation; I was making barely enough to pay what little bills I had, I was able to do one of the things on Seth's list: I taught myself HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL, and PHP. I built a couple simple DB driven websites for a friend's band. I then started messing around with the Asterisk PBX and foolishly tried to sell one to a company in the area and fortunately was saved a lot of pain and was hired by them instead.

The whole time I was told that I should be trying to get this type of job or the other, but I was dead-set on ending up in doing something technology- based. I think it was a good 18 months before that happened.

I don't think Seth is saying anything revolutionary. A piece of paper alone doesn't make your a good hire. If they aren't biting with what you have, then work on making it into what they want to see. Over simply; stop wallowing, get over any feelings of entitlement that may be lingering, and do something productive.

<comment><USER3> You have an awesome point here and an excellent story.

One thing that Seth does not mention that may be worth considering is actual grad school. It is true that a master's will never replace experience, but it can help you get interviews and stand out in a stack of resumes. Certifications also help if you are interested in tech.

A certification will never get you a job (certainly not one you would really want), but it can help you get interviews. I say this as someone that was told point blank I got one of my earlier job interviews because of my certifications when I was starting out and who later used them to help weed out stacks of resumes when they were on my desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _If you wake up every morning at 6, give up TV and treat this list like a job, you'll have no trouble accomplishing everything on it._

And quickly run out of money!

The reason unemployed people are not multitasking hobbies, volunteering and self-improvement programs is that it costs money to go places, do things, and meet people.

<comment><USER5> I doubt it. I've lived in a fairly expensive city (New York) for about $800 a month. Add in $100 or so a month for extra food, and money for either a bike or a metrocard, and you _still_ have a lifestyle you can pay for with a part- time job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seth -- I know what you're getting at. Instead of hanging out watching TV, get involved deeply with things that make you a better person.

Oddly enough, those qualities are supposed to be the things that college gives to kids. Yet we have to remind them. Wonder if the public could get a partial refund on all of that money we spent?

But putting it in a quick list loses the point. Makes it look like a to-do list instead of your life's mission: learn something! Pour yourself into something bigger than yourself! Plus people can then take potshots at each item in the list, completely missing the point.

</comment><comment><USER7> Theses are all great ideas, but they depend first on having the ability to pay rent, buy/obtain food and secure other basic requirements for life. That's hard to you when you don't have an income.</comment>


CSS Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.appfolio.com/2012/11/16/css-architecture/ <comment><USER2> I like this point "Never use a mixin if you're not passing an argument. Mixins without arguments are much better used as templates which can be extended." Which is a fair call I think.

However "Never nest rules purely for code organization. Only nest when the outputted CSS is what you want." is something I find harder to agree with.

If you don't do this then you're missing out on a ton of productivity from these tools and for what? Saving a few bytes in a CSS file that's going to be cached after the first request.

It's a pity we can't use Less or Sass directly in the browser in a reliable manner. CSS4 maybe?

<comment><USER3> The suggestion "Never nest rules purely for code organization" isn't to save a few bytes, it's avoid the specificity trap. Too many people who write Sass use nesting to make their code look more appealing in their editor, but what they end up with is unnecessarily specific selectors.

The file size issue isn't really that much of a concern unless you're on a really large site, but specificity issues affect everyone.</comment></comment>


The History of Alice and Bob - <AUTHOR> http://cryptocouple.com/ <comment><USER2> >In the history of cryptology, women tend to be either systematically excluded or reduced to objects.

This is probably true, but cryptography/theoretical computer science might be one area where women have better representation than in other subfields of hard sciences.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafi_Goldwasser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafi_Goldwasser), who invented a huge portion of modern crypto (zero-knowledge, set lower bound, doubly-efficient proofs, etc.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irit_Dinur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irit_Dinur), who basically invented property testing as well as a novel proof of the PCP theorem that wasn't hundreds of pages long

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~danama/](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~danama/), also known for her work on the PCP theorem (wife of Scott Aaronson)

[http://elaineshi.com/](http://elaineshi.com/), several papers on making ORAM and secure multiparty computation practical

Probably notable that the first three listed are all from/at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

<comment><USER3> Anecdotally, crypto conferences have noticeably more women than other areas of computer science.

From the data, women are better represented in virtually all fields of science, from molecular biology to astronomy to pure mathematics, than they are in computer science. Computer science and physics are the two worst STEM fields for gender parity.

My guess (that's all it is) is that cryptography is an intersection between CS and mathematics, and the mathematics draws more women into the field.

<comment><USER4> My personal impression is that you're right: there's quite a lot of women cryptographers (thinking of "attendees of crypto conferences", but of "top figures in the field"), but these women are disproportionally from a mathematics background.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They used to say "Sex sells", but in 2017 it's "Sexism sells" (or "Diversity sells").

This is a perfectly well-written article with great content, but I don't know why the author has to bring up sexism etc.

If we didn't have "Alice and Bob" and instead had "Albert and Bob", the trolls would say "oh look at this there's no diversity! they are oppressing people by getting rid of female names from examples!".

But we DO have "Alice and Bob". Alice even comes BEFORE Bob. But look at how people make up sexism stories about how this is an "oppression", and Alice and Bob are a couple.

I have never thought of Alice and Bob as a couple. Maybe it's your sick mind who want to monetize sexism, that came up with that imagination.

<comment><USER6> The idea of "Sexism sells" is probably a concise explanation of why the whole modern SJW (for lack of a better term) thing bothers me despite the fact I agree with what they are saying for the most part.

<comment><USER5> It's not just about social justice warriors IMO, it happens everywhere you can translate politically correctness into money.

I would even go further to say social justice warriors are rather cute because all they have to gain is 15 minutes of fame. What's really dangerous is the mainstream media, because they have a lot to gain from using this theme to bring down entities. A lot of controversy => A lot of page views => A lot of ad revenue. And they are desperate for more ad revenue as content becomes more and more commoditized.

There's a serious conflict of interest. While these clueless public bash on other people for being "politically incorrect" after reading these intentionally provocative articles, they don't realize that from media's point of view they're nothing more than vegetable being farmed. This is why I have no sympathy for the dying media companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Ar-Curunir The article's thesis might or might not be true (I don't think it is in the field of cryptography), but the article certain it doesn't provide anywhere near enough evidence to conclude that the trope of "Alice and Bob" is used to oppress people.

The article cites one presentation that a single researcher used as evidence that Alice and Bob are viewed as a couple, but I've seen enough crypto presentations to assert that most researchers don't view Alice and Bob as a couple in any way (in fact, many crypto presentations use Bob the builder and Lewis Carroll's Alice to represent Alice and Bob, and they certainly don't make a couple).

<comment><USER7> I'm curious what character is typically used for eavesdropper Charles.

<comment><USER8> I thought Eve was the eavesdropper.

<comment><USER9> She is. Maybe the parent wonders why A, B is not followed by C. E could stand for eavesdropper or just evil.

<comment><USER7> And who is the man in the middle?

<comment><USER10> Mallory, the malicious man in the middle.

<comment> m-watson Aw, you beat me to it. I had a meeting to run to and didn't respond. But adding to that there is a whole wiki (of course there is) about this. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember meeting Bob Morris from NSA back in 1990. He was with his wife. I was bitterly disappointed that she was Anne and not Alice, but at least we got to play croquet.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am not too happy with the timeline of the article. It seems to conflate RSA and DH exchanges, which are foundamentally different, although can (and are) used together.

If one doesn't know this already, it seems to imply that DH exchange led to inventing RSA... Mathematically and also practically they are independent.

Edit: To clairfy further: RSA and DH exchanges are not even that commonly used together as they serve two different purposes.

With RSA you have a key-pair (public and private) and you can write something with someone's public key that only the owner of a private key can read. This is called asymmetric encryption.

With a DH exchange you can establish a shared secred (usually, a shared key) on an untrusted channel without needing any previously shared data. The shared key can then be used to encypt further communication with symmetric encyption.

<comment><USER3> The most important and widely used cryptosystem on the Internet uses them together: DH to derive a key, RSA to sign the DH parameters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find it weird that 'heteronormative' is now lumped in with 'sexist' when a hetero world view is literally 'normal' (as in, held by a significant majority).

<comment><USER13> By definition, "normative" means there exists an imperative to conform to the majority condition.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative)

<comment><USER12> Huh, I didn't realise it had that connotation. Although I feel better about having missed its meaning, given:

> Normative is sometimes also used, somewhat confusingly, to mean relating to > a descriptive standard: doing what is normally done or what most others are > expected to do in practice. In this sense a norm is not evaluative, a basis > for judging behavior or outcomes; it is simply a fact or observation about > behavior or outcomes, without judgment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shame the article doesn't mention [1] - a relatively recent piece from a leading cryptographer, which contends that the use of Alice and Bob (especially with the usual caricatures) makes light of the impact of cryptographic vulnerabilities, and in doing so, makes them less obviously important. I'm not sure whether I fully agree with that viewpoint, but it does seem like an important question to discuss.

[1] [http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.pdf](http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here: I've never enjoyed the basic premise of the Rogaway article, but that would require its own engagement to properly discuss. That said, I had forgotten about his engagement with Alice and Bob, so I ought to include it. His argument against cutesiness, however, misses the deeper political point, and unfortunately comes off as politically superficial.

<comment><USER3> That's surprising. What do you perceive to be the basic premise of the Rogaway article? It's certainly not about cutesiness. "Politically superficial" is not how I'd choose to describe it.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I recall the gist of the Rogaway article, from memory, (again, it's an important enough article that it really does merit serious attention):

he argues 1) cryptographers (and computer scientists in general) should be more political (good!), 2) cryptography needs a new framing (good!), 3) privacy and exception from government search is an unalloyed right (not so good), 4) better crypto will solve privacy issues (not so good).

In sum, the article does a lot of good work, and more than anything, it contains some important and refreshing rethinking of the field of crypto. This is all very important. Nonetheless, it ends up taking for granted a number of political positions that should, I think, _also_ be contested (Rogaway takes the first step!). More crypto does not equal a better world.

<comment><USER3> Also from memory, but I recall the biggest takeaway from that article being that cryptographers should be mindful that the direction the research community pulls the field to is not necessarily congruent with the public interest. The field of cryptography is fascinated with tricky hard problems, but some of those problems may be more useful to those who would harm privacy than to those who would protect it. So, for instance, if we stipulate an actively hostile signals intelligence community and a polity that is being pushed towards weakening end-to-end crypto, we ought not to be spending much research time making key escrow more effective, which we might accidentally be doing.

I don't think "Alice" and "Bob" have really much to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Didn't Alice and Bob have a hardware column in Computer Shopper in the old days?

</comment><comment><USER16> I've created a pretty nice combination of these names. "trevalmabo" (Trent,Eve,Alice,Mallory,Bob) - it reads "trust eavesdropping on man in the middle"</comment>


Ask HN:Relocate to India - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I 'm currently working in USA on H1B visa. Would love to relocate to India. My dilemma is that cannot pack up and move back without any job offers in hand. My current employer does not have an office in India. One of the options that i have is find employment in a company which has office. Finding jobs in India through job portal is difficult given non availability for in person interviews. Would like to network with some fellow hackers to find job in India. Any other suggestions would be great. thanks Sorry for the double post...didnt have the correct title <comment><USER2> Are you a native Indian? If not, then getting employment visa is another headache you'll have to deal with.

Also, you may want to try this site :<http://hackerstreet.in/news>

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, i m. thanks will check the link out.</comment></comment>


How the Bloomberg terminal made history - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3051883/behind-the-brand/the-bloomberg-terminal# <comment><USER2> Surprised this article mentioned chat only once. The secret sauce to Bloomberg's stickiness is their collaboration features via what's know as Instant Bloomberg.

Here's an article about a bunch of banks actually working together to unseat Bloomberg's chat: [http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/banks-back-rival-to- bloomberg...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/banks-back-rival-to-bloomberg- messaging-system.html)

<comment><USER3> I've got a Symphony account. It's okay I guess, but Bloomberg has the network effect, and that's a very difficult thing to overcome because for at least some period of time you'll be asking people to use multiple communication platforms, at which point, some of them will just revert to their original platform.

<comment><USER4> I would have to guess once Symphony is proven some of the banks will strongly encourage/require communication with their traders to go through Symphony. or it might be another failed Bloomberg-killer. Will be interesting.

I don't think the first commercial Bloomberg terminal was in 1982, but I could be wrong. Michael Bloomberg was still at Salomon until mid-1981. Maybe there was a prototype sometime in 1982. Merrill didn't invest until 1983 and that's where the early terminal got all the bond data. I don't think it was a big factor in the market until like 88-ish, Salomon launched their Yield Book project to compete around 1988-89. There was some kind of an exclusive with Merrill and/or bad blood with Salomon and they couldn't even buy a terminal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Most [job candidates] don't know a lot about us" That's a disgrace, as a geek I would love to put my hands on a Bloomberg Terminal! Although at $24,000 per year, it won't be any time soon I guess :-)

<comment><USER6> What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes is available free.

It's not that complicated. The hard part is making sense of all that numeric information. There are a number of fixed-layout screens you can pull up to follow entire markets broadly, and those come up with one or two hot-key presses. Then, there are standard analyses for individual ticker symbols. There's a news story system. There's a way to load up an Excel spreadsheet and run that, using live Bloomberg data. (Underneath, it's a Windows PC.) Those spreadsheets are typically pre-built by staff at trading firms, specialized for whatever they're doing. The number of keystrokes needed for most queries is very small.

One of the minor Bloomberg features is something like Craigslist, but for rich people. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing.

If you push the Help button twice, you get text chat to Bloomberg's help desk.

<comment><USER7> > What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes > is available free.

While that's true for stocks and key rates, Bloomberg is all about bonds, and there is really no competition there. And it's not only the market data that's important. Bloomberg provides reference and indicative data on hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fixed income instruments.

<comment><USER8> Yep, and those bond (and swap) prices are not public prices in the same way as equity prices from exchanges. They're indicative dealer quotes. ALLQ shows a stack of dealer quotes. No other system does this...

<comment><USER9> Eh, you're a bit off. You can find compiled quotes in lots of places, and individual quotes from any broker or dealer, so there are other systems that do this (maybe none that have exactly ALLQs same dealers giving quotes). But you're right saying that many times these prices are indicative quotes from dealers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the first (and largest) SaaS companies!

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't it be more like HaaS? Hardware as a service? Since they sell the terminals not just the software?

<comment><USER12> Most install the software on their own hardware. Definitely wasn't the case back in the day hence the moniker "terminal" for the desktop software.

<comment><USER9> Mostly correct, most financial and commodity institutions I've visited make heavy use of their (extremely expensive) keyboards.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I was strictly talking about the software. Keyboard is sort of essential for operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux Here's an interesting alternative viewpoint about the Bloomberg terminal interface published in 2010.

[http://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg- makeover](http://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-makeover)

From the article:

 _" Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg's current "complex" interface...The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied these users are.

The Bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible, but it allows traders and other users to pretend you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use it."_

Dare I suggest that this tendency to keep software unnecessarily complex is something quite common, particularly in the open source community where attempts to improve ease-of-use are often met with resistance and claims of 'dumbing down'?

<comment><USER7> To someone proficient on a Bloomberg terminal, it's like emacs or vim. Your hands never leave the keyboard.

Would you call emacs unnecessarily complex?

<comment><USER13> Sure, but there are also an awful lot of developers using Sublime for good reason.

<comment><USER14> There's a lot of people using yahoo stocks as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Working on a casual gaming or pc/console game start-up? - <AUTHOR>

After reading a great interview with the guys behind Mass Effect, I was curious to see if any one is working on a gaming startup?<p>(Link to article: http://venturebeat.com/2008/03/29/qa-with-bioware-founders-on-mass-effect-and-life-at-ea/) <comment><USER2> Yes, focusing on casual gaming. Would say more, but we're in the first iteration and NDA pretty much prohibits leakage.</comment>


Advanced Machine Learning with Python – FREE Until 6/8/17 at 7PM ET - <AUTHOR> https://www.packtpub.com/packt/offers/free-learning <comment><USER2> Thanks for the link. Was able to take advantage of the offer.</comment>


Why Microsoft Continues to Chase Internet Search - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/why-microsoft-continues-to-chases-internet-search/

<comment><USER2> Theory: MS wants to eat into Google's revenues to cut down on their ability to build apps that encroach on their territory. It won't work, but I could see them thinking that.</comment>


Adobe Shadow – a new way to debug mobile web sites and apps - <AUTHOR> http://corlan.org/2012/03/07/introducing-adobe-shadow-a-new-way-to-debug-mobile-web-sites-and-apps/ <comment><USER2> If only it executed JavaScript...</comment>


[Petition] Tell Microsoft to stop making browsers - <AUTHOR> https://www.change.org/p/tell-microsoft-to-stop-making-browsers?recruiter=522724148&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink <comment><USER2> What's next? Tell bad developers to stop writing code?</comment>


Press release : www.offerbooker.com bypass the hotel reservation systems - <AUTHOR> http://offerbooker.blog.com/2013/06/08/press-release-www-offerbooker-com-bypass-the-hotel-reservation-systems/ <comment><USER2> It'd work better if the embedded video actually was embedded.</comment>


Belief in College Has Become Religious - <AUTHOR> https://fee.org/articles/belief-in-college-has-become-religious/ <comment><USER2> There is a big difference between:

1) Any degree from a top 15 college

2) A STEM degree from middling college

3) A liberal arts degree from a mediocre college

This is because the value of college is the signal it gives to employers and the network that it can build for you.

I agree that "college for all" is a terrible proposition, but you can't discount the benefits for students who attend top schools or who get degrees that directly lead to higher-paying jobs.

Also - looks like the author of this article has not just an undergrad degree, but also a MA in Economics, so he's not really practicing what he preaches.

edit: formatting, minor updates

</comment><comment><USER3> "No one knows what actually happens in college or why it's supposed to make you more successful."

I stopped reading after this line.

Anybody who takes what FEE says for more than a grain of salt, is in fact, 'religious'. When you understand that they are a libertarian think-tank, you would see the obvious bias against social infrastructure and would rather have our education system collapse than have smart, well educated citizens.

"Break out the champagne, and get busy doing real stuff in the real world. Don't live your life by averages and aggregate data that reflect little more than the superstitions of the day."

Not everyone can be a successful drop out like Bill Gates

<comment><USER4> The problem is with FEE, that as think tanks go, there isn't much thinking, and just a lot of trope repetition. They make AEI seem like RAND.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The tone of this article seems to be suggesting that a likely conclusion is that you should not bother with college. However, I wonder if a better way to look at the current system is that you need to pick one of two approaches - (a) if you are a genius and can get a free ride at one of the very best colleges, do that, and (b) if you can't, get the absolute cheapest degree by going to a public community college and transferring to a 4-year public school, because the goal is to get the piece of paper from a legit university for the absolute least price.

</comment><comment><USER6> If I were starting out today fresh from high school, and were interested in technology as a possible career, I would consider certain certifications from the likes of Cisco, Juniper, Oracle, any of the various code schools, etc., strongly consider them, against protracted, ghastly expensive college degrees, which are rapidly losing value in the marketplace.

</comment><comment><USER7> College is a cargo cult.</comment>


News sites reining in nasty user comments - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/07/19/commenting.on.news.sites/index.html?hpt=Sbin

<comment><USER2> Oh, this is the same CNN that

      "CNN yesterday ended the 20-year career of
      Octavia Nasr, its Atlanta-based Senior Middle-
      East News Editor, because of a now-deleted
      tweet she wrote on Sunday[...]"

[http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/08...](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/08/media)

So you know, _whatever_

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if Bayes theorem can come to the rescue here like it has for spam?</comment>


Whats after Whatsapp? The Rise of Enterprise Messenger - <AUTHOR> http://peerim.posthaven.com/whats-after-whatsapp-the-rise-of-enterprise-messenger

<comment><USER2> Our company uses IBM sametime. One of our clients use MS Lync. I genuinely think enterprise messaging is still in very early stage.

<comment><USER3> One of my banks (HSBC) uses sametime internally.</comment></comment>


Snoop – a tiny JavaScript library for test spies - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/therealparmesh/snoop <comment><AUTHOR> For those of us looking to move away from heavy-handed JS testing libraries (big APIs, huge `node_modules` graphs, etc.) like Jest, Mocha, Jasmine, and Sinon - here's a small, modular piece to add to your JS testing toolbelt.

snoop - Easy breezy test spies fo sheezy.

Recommend to use with the absolutely wonderful uvu - [https://github.com/lukeed/uvu](https://github.com/lukeed/uvu).

See: [https://twitter.com/lukeed05/status/1283378348970762240](https://twitter.com/lukeed05/status/1283378348970762240)</comment>


Calculate Latitude/Longitude Distances in MySQL with the Haversine Function - <AUTHOR> http://tumblr.jonthornton.com/post/1419487206/calculate-latitude-longitude-distances-in-mysql-with

<comment><USER2> Anecdote on Haversine: in 1.6, MongoDB's built-in "geonear" was using non- spherical indexing, but I needed to get more accurate results in a project, so I queried 3 times more records and used Haversine afterward to sort records again, client-side. Here's the ruby code:

<http://gist.github.com/559482>

Since then, MongoDB 1.7 has been released with spherical sort support ([http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Geospatial+Indexing#Geos...](http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Geospatial+Indexing#GeospatialIndexing- TheEarthisRoundbutMapsareFlat))

</comment><comment><USER3> Why in the world would you use this when MySQL has almost proper geospatial support? It's far more efficient and less incorrect.

I swear - next time I'm going to get a R-Tree novelty account.

<comment><USER4> Because Mysql doesn't have support for distance searches.

<comment><USER3> Using the Buffer function it does. Then MySQL will utilize the geometry index, rather than scanning the table. Not clear in the docs, but it's there.

<comment><USER4> Do you have an example?

<comment><USER2> I'm interested as well (really, as someone who uses sphinx for that currently).

<comment><USER4> Hey, I'm also using Sphinx :)

Also, thing is filtering is not much of a problem as you can use the Haversine formula ... it gets to be a problem if you also want sorting from closest to furthest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of those things you never think about when reading a map or driving in a car, but it's the explanation behind why you fly all the way up past nova scotia when on a plane to europe.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sphinx (<http://sphinxsearch.com/>) is really good at geo/spatial searches on MySQL data

Example: [http://www.god-object.com/2009/10/20/geospatial-search- using...](http://www.god-object.com/2009/10/20/geospatial-search-using-sphinx- search-and-php/)

<comment><USER2> Seconded; I've been using it with the thinking_sphinx rubygems and it always worked great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> <rant>I've got a better idea: use postgis and get rid of mysql and its quirks.

Yep, I just reinstalled an old app yesterday, and for some unfathomable reason it loses communication with mysql at some point (it worked perfectly for what, 6 years?). Gosh, I hate mysql.</rant>

<comment><USER2> Honest question: if it's unfathomable, what makes you think it's caused by mysql, rather than some system update, driver or app dependency issue ?

<comment><USER7> It's a perl program running on Debian stable. Apparently it fails to communicate properly with mysql 5, but works fine with mysql 4. I assume the Debian dbd-mysql package to be compatible with the Debian mysql 5 server, so of course it could be Debian fault, or some error in the program. But I prefer to unjustly incriminate mysql because postgres is so much better anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Beware, coordinates are not always expressed in the same referencial (geoid, ellipsoid, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER9> wont that completely negate the value of the indices that lat/lon may/may not sit on and result in a complete tablescan?

<comment><USER10> I've got this on a site I'm building that offers a sort by distance option. There's definitely a performance hit. I'm going to look into 'dumber' ways of filtering out the data prior to running this function. Maybe start by including state in the where clause, for example.

Any other ideas?

One solution I saw used more simple arithmetic to calculate a range of coordinates within levels of distance. That could be pre-cached, but it's a lot less accurate.

<comment><USER11> Geohash: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash>

(Edit: to be more specific, you can get a pretty good distance measurement using Geohash and comparing strings. Obviously, indexing strings is something databases do well. The exact distance a single character corresponds to depends on longitude & latitude, but there are lookup tables for that. There are also edge conditions to be aware of which may affect your application)

Or, use Postgres which has geospatial indexes.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the pointer! This looks interesting. The edge conditions seem like they might pose a problem. I'll have to check out how often it would occur. Maybe the geospatial indexes are a better bet. It looks like MongoDB supports them also. Good excuse to try that out.

<comment><USER3> The edge cases happen all the time.

Using a B-Tree on a Geohash (like MongoDB does) is a bit more efficient that just indexing min/max values, but not by much. MySQL, PostgreSQL and even SQLite have R-Tree indices that perform 10x better.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07316 <comment><AUTHOR> In short: NVIDIA has made a neural network which steers a car based on a single camera and trained only with footage from cars being driven manually. No control theory, no rules of the roads, not even the concept of a road is encoded manually.

Video here: [https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9raQzOpizn1TkRIa241ZnBEcj...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9raQzOpizn1TkRIa241ZnBEcjQ)

This is pretty cool. Granted, it does not handle extremely complex traffic situations (yet), but is it a much simpler approach to what most other groups are doing.</comment>


A tour inside Western Digital - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/525-western-digital-tour.html <comment><USER2> Very cool, but what a horrible website layout and design. Makes it hard to read and hard to see the photos.</comment>


Ask HN: When should comments be flagged? - <AUTHOR>

What's the consensus on flagging comments?  My personal approach is to flag only those that are obvious spam or genuinely abusive, but sometimes I wonder if the site would benefit from a collective lighter trigger on dumb jokes, me-toos, and memes.<p>Unlike downvotes, there is no visibility into how others use flagging.  What does everyone else do?  Has anyone thought through the endgames and decided they have a best strategy? <comment><USER2> Definitely flag/downvote any of the /. crowd stuff... anything that smacks of an Internet meme probably deserves to be done away with.</comment>


Why the High Cost of Big-City Living Is Bad for Everyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-the-high-cost-of-big-city-living-is-bad-for-everyone <comment><USER3> From the article: "One hardheaded answer is to build more housing. An increasing supply of housing would theoretically put downward pressure on prices. The reality, unfortunately, is that almost all urban construction happens too late."

That last sentence does not sound like an argument against this approach, but an additional argument for it. If there is a secular trend of urban rents outpacing inflation, it sure seems like a "better late than never" situation.

<comment><USER4> I live in Toronto. It is mind-blowing the number of condos being built. More are in progress now here than exist on Manhattan. But as far as world cities go, the condos and rent are both very affordable. So I think to a certain extent it does work to build more, but it is not 1:1, and lots of people come here because of the (relative) affordability.

<comment><USER5> It's a reminder that we have a prisoner's dilemma on our hands: if one city fixes things, they share an disproportionate burden of the load that will follow. Real success will only happen if everybody coordinates on better land- use policy.

The likely outcome is that they won't, and here we are.

<comment><USER6> What kind of land-use policy are you proposing and how will it be kept out of the hands of politicians who abuse it for their own personal gain?

<comment><USER5> My ideal reform would be the Land Value Tax[0], which admittedly has run into problems in execution with poor implementations.

It depends upon assessments on land value that reflect current market value of that land. In one notable case of the LVT in practice (Pittsburgh), assessors made a real hash of it, with assessments well out of proportion to market demand.

I would like to see a proof of concept to fix this, mainly an automated algorithmic assessment map of land values, based off of public sales records. It's a fun project to attempt; I should start up a repo some time.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax)

<comment><USER7> The problem with using sales records for LVT is the central concept of LVT is that it's based on unimproved value, and actual sales of land usually include improvements and separating out there unimproved value is non-trivial and hard to validate.

<comment><USER5> Yes, that's the challenge. But with some assumptions (within an urban area, neighboring plots have about the same land value; when a plot is sold at two different times, the difference in the prices may reflect the rise in land value), one could get some reasonable estimates.

<comment><USER8> Waiting for a plot to be sold may take too long. How about an auction based pricing model?

Property owner declares land value and pays tax based on that value. Taxman has checks and balances to make sure that the declared land value isn't egregiously low balled.

The declared land value is made public and anybody can make an offer to buy the land at that value plus a premium. If the offer is accepted, all is good and we have a new declared land value.

If the offer is declined, a new declared land value is set at the offer price. The owner pays an additional tax to reflect the new declared value and a penalty if it is found that the old declared land value was (significantly) below prevailing land values.

The trick is in setting the penalty in such a way that it becomes unappealing to declare less than fair market value. The risk is that declared market value is unduly inflated to protect against the penalty, but the property owners self interest in paying the least amount of taxes should protect against that. Also applying a (small) fudge factor to the acceptable fair market value when the penalty does not apply should help. Markets do move and there is no need to (harshly) penalize normal appreciation and market developments.

<comment><USER7> > The declared land value is made public and anybody can make an offer to buy > the land at that value plus a premium.

That works for _property tax_ , but it doesn't work for _land value tax_ , because the key difference between LVT and property tax is the former is based on the _unimproved value_ of the property, while the latter is based on the value of the property _as it is, with all improvements_.

A self-declared value that is legally tied to an offer to sell at a fixed premium is clearly a self-assessment of the _improved_ value of the property, not the _unimproved_ value that LVT is supposed to be based on.

<comment><USER8> Fair enough, but that just brings us back to the problem of separating the improved and unimproved value. If we can do that, which we must be able to do if LVT is ever to be implementable, we can still use the auction method proposed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am concerned that we will kill the golden goose...neighborhoods will consist of only the elderly (who remain by virtue of prop 13), and the wealthy. Seems inevitable that neighborhoods of this composition can only support service industries (hair salons, restaurants etc) and will eventually become economic dead zones.

In this model, the Bay Area becomes a glorified version of Sand Hill Road...cozy offices for a very few at the top...and every other facet of industry pushed out to affordable areas.

<comment><USER10> This is exactly what is happening. The whole South Bay is slowly imploding.

<comment><USER11> south bay isn't that expensive. It's just SF. South bay is cheap compared to the average income of the Bay area

<comment><USER12> Are you kidding me? Dunno, but $3k/mo for a 3bdrm apt is pretty unaffordable. Add $500 for duplex, and $1k for a single-family.

That's literally double what it used to cost 10y ago.

<comment><USER13> SF would be $3k for 1bdrm

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe we could actually let people work remotely, and not waste billions of hours commuting. Then we could leave these fucking urban and suburban hellscapes, and go live somewhere with green grass, and trees, and mountains, and human-scale communities. Maybe people wouldn't be so neurotic.

<comment><USER15> That is only one of many factors involved. We are talking about communities. When a big new software innovation comes out people have meetups and talk things over. That doesn't work with a highly distributed workforce. No matter what employers do the same forces will be at work concentrating high end labor.

<comment><USER16> I don't disagree that there's value to physical concentration and face to face. But not every talented engineer (and associated financial/business/etc. people) can live in Silicon Valley or wants to. It's a constraint. Yes, there are concentrating forces but, as an industry, we need to live with the fact that there are countervailing forces. Distribution, even if its not absolute, is the reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > It would mean, more or less, an urban Marshall Plan for housing.

I would like to see this, at the national level: federally strip all downzoning from urban cities, then increasingly tax single-occupancy houses, focusing on subsidizing and activating high-density housing for all income strata. There's no reason Seattle, San Francisco, LA, etc can't all be turned into high-density high-efficiency Manhattan-esque locations. With the increased density comes a more effective tax base and a better scale for urban services.

<comment><USER18> Simply make it legal to build higher-density housing with smaller setbacks, less required parking, smaller room and unit sizes, etc. The affordability problem will take care of itself, no subsidies required.

For existing owners, they will get a huge payout because their land becomes MUCH more valuable. The downside is that certain neighborhoods where supply is most suppressed will change very much, very fast, and the people that don't sell and leave will probably not like that.

Preferences aside, this cannot be done without hugely disrupting municipal finance, primarily the provision of public schools. Residential property and services are subsidized by commercial/industrial tax revenues, and there is no linkage between assessed value of property and number of school-age children (e.g. two empty-nesters in a mansion pay multiples of the property tax of a family of 5 renting an apartment). And that's just operations! Building lots of new school capacity, when land has just become very expensive, is not something existing cities/school districts are equipped to do.

However, Americans are tough and smart and can figure stuff out. These are just the current obstacles that exist.

<comment><USER19> >For existing owners, they will get a huge payout because their land becomes MUCH more valuable.

But these very same owners are the ones blocking such construction, even despite being the same people that will receive a financial windfall; they prefer to keep the neighborhoods as is even at this tremendous opportunity cost.

So, it still requires some eminent domain or overriding local government.

<comment><USER18> Sure, owners prefer to sacrifice total windfall in favor of stability and control. That is proven across all cities everywhere that land use controls exist. I'm just saying it's not all bitter medicine for existing owners if land use controls are loosened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cities are inherently places where wealth begets wealth. I can say after living in LA I see the process of its Mahattanization. My guess is my kids won't even understand a suburban LA other then as a historical artifact mostly represented in old films and TV shows.

<comment><USER5> Affordable suburbs are, I've come to believe, a transient phenomenon. They exist for a brief and beautiful moment when there's cheap land outside a city center. Then their demand exceeds their supply... and you know the rest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> SF specific anecdote - I had a radical idea while walking up Divisadero last week. What if we removed Divisadero and Geary St. and built apartments where the road is today. You'd have European style narrow streets for pedestrians and could increase the density massively. Imagine taking out the multiple lanes across Geary St and how much housing could be built. Would there even be a NIMBY problem since the road is publicly owned?

<comment><USER18> Yes, huge NIMBY problem - people drive/bike/ride busses on those streets, and business are on those streets. (not saying they wouldn't benefit from a change, particularly businesses, but many people object to huge changes) You don't need to own something to be a NIMBY.

More practically, the width of even wide streets like Geary is narrower than the depth of a typical SF building - <USER2> [https://goo.gl/maps/YbJmqxpgEW62](https://goo.gl/maps/YbJmqxpgEW62). Roads overall take up a huge amount of space in a city, but no single road is all that much area. For instance, it looks like the right of way on Geary is about 110'. If it went the full length of SF (~7 miles), then the whole road takes up less than 100 acres. For reference, Park Merced is 150 acres.

It would be great if all the lightly trafficked side/residential streets could be squished from 60' to 40', you're talking about 50 blocks -> 1000' width, which is over 3 blocks wide and about a thousand acres, which is approaching the size of the Richmond district (and that's just if you squish in one direction). But you can't just pinch-to-zoom in real life :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Article doesn't seem to assert that it's bad for everyone, just those who aren't already at the top of the ladder. The author even goes so far to say that city living is a "luxury good" for those who can afford it.

</comment><comment><USER23> There are some inherent problems with making cities affordable.

Dense construction is more expensive per unit area. So even if you could spread out the cost of expensive land among many units, a high density building will cost more per unit to build. Shrinking living spaces can only be taken so far before they hurt quality of life.

So city dwellers will always pay more per unit area because of building costs.

Second, traffic from density imposes costs on transportation. So movement is more difficult in a dense environment.

Eventually, these costs overwhelm the networking benefits of cities, and dispersion is the result. This has already happened with industry, which requires more space than services to be profitable. We are now seeing the service economy priced out of the Bay Area, leaving only the rentier economy.

Density is not a panacea.

<comment><USER24> >Second, traffic from density imposes costs on transportation. So movement is more difficult in a dense environment.

haha what? no. Suburban sprawl and car oriented transportation systems are dramatically more expensive than denser communities where you can viably walk, bike and take public transit. There are all sorts of studies on this.

Consider how expensive it is to walk 15 minutes to work for example. (it's free)

<comment><USER25> Doing the same distance in a city, compared to the countryside or small towns, always takes longer.

Driving is slower (traffic jams, traffic lights, crossings everywhere...).

Public transportation is slower (think train and long/middle distance busses _vs_ local busses and subway and tramway with their stops every few hundred meters).

Cycling is slower (same as for cars + the repeated effort of restarting after every slow down or stop + damn paint and gutter plates everywhere that should be avoided or ridden with care).

Heck! even walking is slower (pedestrian 'jams' slowing you down, avoiding people, traffic lights, crossings every 50 or 100 meters, cars/trucks parked on sidewalks...).

Basically, what's fast and efficient is a point to point transport with 'emptyness' between the nodes. It's not being bogged down on a dense axis or area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Because of urbanization which will continue to go on for a long time it's going to be next to impossible to drive prices down around the big cities.

People will simply just move as close to opportunties as possible and that will drive prices further up.

This is why cost of living is going up not down. For all the great things technology does it doesn't solve one of the most fundamental needs of humans.

</comment><comment><USER27> The best thing about a city is the forced contact with people who are radically different with each other. Only with time spent together can you begin to understand one another [1]. Given the vitrol and hatred being dished out between disparate groups around the country and the world, making city life affordable has an undeniable macro-level social good aspect to it.

[1] one reason why many of us are hopefuly that the Internet will increase our contact with others around the world with radically different upbringings and world views from our own, helping us understand and empathize with one another better.

<comment><USER28> Sorry but this feelgood empathy-saves-us-all stuff really irks me, frankly I'm not convinced the world will suddenly get better if we all learn to communicate our feelings more effectively.

There are plenty I wouldn't bother saving in a life-threatening scenario, and they're perfectly normal people that I just happen to have fundamental disagreements with.

That said, I think we are witnessing the effects of your ethno-emotional proposal -- we are all forced to confront each-other's differences as we all come online and the world is convulsing. The internet is amplifying hatred and fear rather than dispelling it.

<comment><USER29> That's because the Internet does not require human contact. We all act differently in person than from behind a keyboard and a Wi-Fi connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the key point that the article makes is that change happens over decades. That's not to say that _some_ change can't happen over shorter periods but anything fundamentally altering is something that may produce effects in thirty years--and probably in a way at least somewhat different from what was intended.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's 2016. Why is that picture blurry?

<comment><USER31> If you're using NoScript the image is blurry until you allow newyorker.com

<comment><USER32> I'm on my phone in Chrome (so no extensions) and it's super blurry.

<comment><USER33> I'm on Chrome (iOS) as well. It remains blurry for ~5 seconds and then gets up to normal resolution.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Monitor websites for changes with notification of what changed - <AUTHOR> https://diphur.com/intro

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this here a while back and since its show hn day, thought I would give an update. We are now at 103k registered users and went to a paid model last month.

As always, would love feedback from the crowd here.

</comment><comment><USER2> A few comments: add pictures and change the youtube link to an embedded video. For me, whenever I see a large blob of text, I skip it. I like seeing a picture to show me what it is about first.</comment>


The Birthday Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem <comment><USER2> Rule of thumb (useful for cryptography, among other things):

If you draw randomly (with replacement) from N numbers, you'll need to draw approximately sqrt(N) times until the probability of a collision (drawing the same number again) rises to 1/2.

For example, if you generate random keys with 128 bits, then after generating 2^64 keys you have a good (50%) chance that you've reused a key.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack)

</comment><comment><USER3> As FabHK[0] says[1], the rule of thumb is that you are 50% likely to get a collision with about sqrt(N) selections from N objects.

We are, of course, more interested in much smaller probabilities of collision, and that's why I wrote about this[2] some time ago, giving the derivation, and the actual formula for those who just want the answer.

It's been submitted and discussed before[3][4], with some interesting comments.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FabHK](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FabHK)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21069837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21069837)

[2] [https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheBirthdayParadox.html?si25h...](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheBirthdayParadox.html?si25hn)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19296265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19296265)

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4753014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4753014)

</comment><comment><USER4> I just recently published a blog post on this topic: [https://www.mcherm.com/unique-ids.html](https://www.mcherm.com/unique- ids.html)

Sadly, I am still getting pushback from others at my company who are either not convinced by the math or for whom any such analysis doesn't matter. "Yes, but there is still a chance of getting a duplicate, so I don't think this can be safe."

<comment><USER2> Yes, that is funny.

It feels a bit insane - how do you choose your secret private Bitcoin wallet key? Easy, just pick one randomly! Oh no, but someone else could pick the same key. Sure, but the probably is so vanishingly small, we really really really don't have to worry about it...

It is a bit hard to wrap your head around it, but the maths is solid (assuming, of course, that you have a good source of randomness).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack)

Also shameless plug: [https://blog.rinatussenov.com/collision-probability-and- birt...](https://blog.rinatussenov.com/collision-probability-and-birthday- paradox-ef98b84fe009)</comment>


MIXXTAPE: Bringing back cassette tapes in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.gadgetdx.com/mixxtape-bringing-walk-man-back-2017/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. Wonder if it works in older cassettes players like my Panasonic RQ-2103?</comment>


Fall of the Designer, Part 4: Credible Threats - <AUTHOR> http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/4/28/fall-of-the-designer-part-iv-credible-threats

<comment><USER2> If font and color choice with a few vectors was all this designer ever did, then he was in trouble with our without this tool set.

The visual elements of design are only the most superficial elements. Identifying a user problem, creating an interaction journey to solve it, and mapping that to a programmable interface are the valauble parts of design because they are HARD and often not very fun.

Almost anyone can follow color theory and the grid system.

<comment><USER3> > If font and color choice with a few vectors was all this designer ever did, > then he was in trouble with our without this tool set.

I would say it's more like, for many businesses, a few icons and color choices is all they want in the first place. The bare minimum to have your site/app/whatever not be ugly or unprofessional. And now there are a lot of ways to do that without needing a designer.

I don't think this is a good way to make software, without someone whose job is to think about the person on the other side of the screen, but it is a way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great series of articles, although I may be biased because I agree with almost everything I've read so far.

On the flip side though, I think one could argue that this is the rise of the designer/developer, rare as they might be. The flatness trend has created a world in which truly outstanding design can shine against a back drop of blandness. Designer/developers have way more of an edge than ever before.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article points out that the Windows 10 icons really suck. They don't even look like they belong to the same family. They suck so badly that Iconfactory, which designed some previous Windows icons, issued a public denial that they had anything to do with the Windows 10 icons.

Maybe the next trend will be to get rid of icons and go back to words. Expecting people to learn a new pictographic language for each new product is not working. See the article linked here, and look at the icons in row 1, column 3, row 2, column 1, and row 2, column 3. Any idea what those mean? On touch devices, mousing over an icon to get a popup that tells you what it means no longer works. The user has to know.

There's an SF book by William Gibson, "Idoru", where one of the lead characters carries an icon dictionary around with her.

</comment><comment><USER6> For what it's worth, I don't think the presence of, essentially, online paint programs with click art support is the end of the designer. Before I worked in tech almost every place I worked had a logo designed by one of the principles. Usually they used Word, Paint, or an image editor. Squarespace might lower the barrier to entry but they're not exactly infusing artistic skill into those that lacked it before.

<comment><USER4> I think a big point in each of the articles is that design is being devalued by lots of conspiring factors. These sorts of tools are positioned as suitable replacements for a real designer. Square space did issue and update stating they don't think that's the case, but still, it's a sleek presentation and people could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Logo designers are safe from automation until someone invents an algorithm that can understand design trends happening out in the world and create something that stands out.</comment>


What beautiful HTML code looks like [Pic] - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/examples/CleanCode/CleanCode.jpg <comment><USER2> Nice Image, some great advice, I would like to have it as my desktop background but...

Doctype Transitional.

 tag without width and height.

 ?

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't HTML code -- this is PHP code.

<comment><USER4> It's all HTML except for a couple of server-side includes that happen to use PHP to include HTML. In any case it's definitely a better example of HTML code than of PHP code :)</comment></comment>


Google boils down the CAPTCHA to a simple checkbox to prove you're not a bot - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/03/google-boils-down-the-captcha-to-a-simple-checkbox-to-prove-youre-not-a-bot/

<comment><USER2> Original Source: [http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/12/are-you- rob...](http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/12/are-you-robot- introducing-no-captcha.html)

Cool that it now takes into account who a "normal" user might be for a particular site before challenging. More Humble Bundle traffic is let through without CAPTCHA, than Wordpress traffic.</comment>


Will China Compensate the World with Trillions of Dollars? - <AUTHOR> https://www.egyptindependent.com/will-china-compensate-the-world-with-trillions-of-dollars/ <comment><USER2> Of course not.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's true they are so much to support the case against China in its whole Covid-19 management:

[https://vodpub2.v.news.cn/publish/20200430/XxjhmeE007026_202...](https://vodpub2.v.news.cn/publish/20200430/XxjhmeE007026_20200430_CBMFN0A001.mp4)

</comment><comment><USER4> Trillions of RMB, maybe

</comment><comment><USER5> this is completely absurd. why is this posted and allowed here?</comment>


Reasons not to use Skype (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://stallman.org/skype.html <comment><USER2> Another reason not to use Skype is that their support is pretty poor.

They've deleted Skype numbers from my account without warning. Someone linked my and my wife's account because we used them on the same PC, and refuse to unlink Skype and Microsoft accounts.

I'd love to find an alternative, but given that everybody already has Skype accounts the lock-in is pretty significant.

Don't much like the alternatives Stallman proposes. Using long distance phone calls seems worse than Skype, phone companies have provided governments with even more access to user data than most tech companies.

<comment><USER3> Stallman won't like it but Facebook Messenger has voice calling built in now and it works very well. I was calling someone in SE Asia from rural Massachusetts recently and the quality was great with very low latency. It felt like a natural conversation given the connectivity challenges on both ends.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I can't see myself using it for work though, which the majority of my Skype calls tend to be.

<comment><USER3> You don't need to be Facebook friends to complete a call but I can still see that expectation being an obstacle to establishing one. Is there a space for a very simple WebRTC call application? It seems like everyone is focused on video calling or more full-featured products.

<comment><USER2> I'd love it if the default was to use some very lightweight WebRTC app where you just created a new link for each conversation.

I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon unfortunately.

Regarding Facebook, it still feels weird, I'm not sure I can put my finger on exactly why. I just want to keep "friends" and "business" totally separate.

<comment><USER4> How was this service Mozilla once included in their browser called, something from Telefonica? Worked pretty well for me. Maybe they ditched it to early?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stallman claims Skype isn't encrypted end-to-end and then suggests using "free" alternatives that are not in the least bit security concious or end-to- end encrypted.

<comment><USER6> Also the "long distance phone card" suggestion ignores that every major telephone company in the US was caught providing information without any legal obligation to do so.

<comment> loup-vaillant This articles seems to date back to 2012, most likely before the Snowden revelations. He probably have changed his mind since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For once I agree with RS; I haven't used Skype in ages, particularly because it's just crappy software.

Honestly, I'd view Skype as malware at this point, the number of exploits is too damn high and it barely integrates with anything ever. It's the kind of integration you'd normally see from a cheap car purchase where the Entertainment System is a iPhone 2 taped to the seats and the trunk smells like dead raccoon.

<comment><USER8> I agree it needs improvement and we should have alternatives but it's the best in terms of video and audio quality/compression. The UX can be improved.

<comment><USER9> Skype Business maybe. Regular Skype is crap. We're currently using slack for our team which works great. Privately I user FaceTime and appear.in but that's not good for group calls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "The most obvious alternative is a long-distance phone card."

What part of Stallman's position makes him fine with communicating and encouraging people to communicate using switches running proprietary software?

For that matter, how does he justify using the Internet rather than anything other than community networks running open source routing software?

<comment><USER11> > What part of Stallman's position makes him fine with communicating and > encouraging people to communicate using switches running proprietary > software?

Richard Stallman is probably a direct descendant of the Massachusetts Puritans, which explains everything. No one ever characterized the Puritans as having a logically consistent ideology.

Seriously, we owe him a very large debt of gratitude for igniting the open source software movement. He is responsible for GCC and the GPL, and he attracted a group of very talented developers around him. Let's cut him some slack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How does he feel about landline phones? The entire thing is just as closed source as Skype and even more easily monitored.

And assuming he is okay with landline, would Stallman call a cellphone? What if it was a free software cellphone?

<comment><USER13> While I get your point, most traditional landline networks do encryption at the premises. Look at, for example, the Secure Terminal Equipment ISDN phone used by defense agencies. To state the obvious, the alternative of provider enabled encryption would be a bad option anyway; the track record of most telcos doesn't inspire a lot of faith in their ability to keep anything a secret.

It wouldn't be hard, and certainly not a capacity strain, to get some old modems and haul encrypted PCM in realtime across them. Or even to roll your own PSK/FSK standard to transport said PCM over. There's no packet format or anything you're necessarily limited to.

As for cell phones themselves, I can certainly see the threat. Even without going into Batman-esque theories of someone putting malicious software on your phone that activates the mic when it's idle, it's well known that the cellular networks make extensive use of GPS capabilities. With access to an operator's network, it would probably be relatively trivial to build a very detailed history of someone's whereabouts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there any usable alternative for voice calls? Ring and Tox had problems setting up connection from android to debian linux last time I tried both of them.

I really want to replace Skype with something so I can stop using Google Play. Signal is not an option as it is only available via Google Play too.

[0] [https://ring.cx/](https://ring.cx/) [1] [https://tox.chat/](https://tox.chat/)

<comment><USER15> How about wire? [https://wire.com](https://wire.com)

<comment><USER16> So I had a flick through the website, and I fail to understand how this service makes any money.

This automatically makes me suspicious that either they'll eventually start collecting data, or the service will disappear as soon as they are acquired.

<comment><USER14> At least they explicitly promote with "No profiling or data gathering" with a link to [https://twitter.com/wire/status/768797320792117248](https://twitter.com/wire/status/768797320792117248)

Also they promote Spotify

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It sucks - but as is always the case with free vs nonfree software - there are few alternatives.

Among the few alternatives available are Google (hangouts) and Facebook.

Stallman waves his hand and mentions Jitsi and Mumble which aren't comparable in features to Skype (Chat + Voice + video + desktop sharing on all platforms including mobile). Jitsi does look promising but not quite complete.

A chat/voice app is like a social network, it has a critical mass so I can't switch unless everyone else does or my alternative is interoperable.

Software being free as in speech is perhaps twice as important to me as it is for the average user, but that still means I'd rather have a polished proprietary app that spies on me, than an unpolished free alternative. Skype is exceptionally _bad_ , so shouldn't be too hard to beat in terms of polish.

<comment><USER18> But did you _actually_ try the alternatives?

I've been using mumble for more than a decade now, and I've pushing it into 3 working places as a substitute to skype, asterix and lync (the microsoft voip solution).

It's not really oriented for 1-1 conversation, which is odd to use at first, but once people start to use channels and the built-in chat you hardly go back.

The latency and voice quality is stunning, even across lousy links. There's simply no match. The built-in mic wizard is also well designed. If people follow the setup correctly, you can have hour-long conversations across the globe with 10 people and it's absolutely fantastic. I work in research, and I've aggressively pushed to do long phone conferences over mumble for exactly this reason.

With some colleagues we even setup some channels that broadcast with PTT, and it's genuinely fun if you're spread across offices. You can decide if you want to participate by joining or not the right hierarchy. This is something is often done for lan parties, but turns out you can find other uses too ;)

Like I said, the main shortcoming is that mumble was never designed for 1-1 conversations as you would expect in skype. We hack it around by creating temporary channels. I've always meant to improve the UI in this regard, but we found that the temporary channel approach has advantages as well [you can invite other people in a call - for one].

With outdated hardware we still manage to hold >100 of conversations over a single server, as basically it's only network bound.

You have a point that mumble does only audio, but fortunately this is what I care the most. We (unfortunately) still have to use other software for desktop sharing, but generally still use mumble for audio.

<comment><USER19> I don't know if Mumble (or Ventrilo, or Teamspeak, or Discord) are really comparable.

They require you run your own server (although Discord abstracts that), that everyone know the server details, and that everyone be authenticated for your server in some manner.

They're great for playing video games, but Skype matches up a lot better with what a lot of people use it for – making phone calls.

<comment><USER18> True, but I'd like to mention that these are still _valid_ options for companies and teams. Not to mention that latency will inevitably be superior with a local server.

I'm not sure there's a way around it. Skype is pretty much centralized now. Alternatives using NAT-piercing solutions never worked as reliably for me, and the ID still needs a central directory anyway.

What we ended up doing for flexibility is letting our mumble server open (passwordless access), but speaking is disabled in the root channel, so it's useless for strangers. Secondary channels are password protected, guests cannot join, but teams can set up their hierarchy as they see fit.

When we invite a guest, we just point him to the mumble installer and our server. When he pops up, we drag him into the right channel. No password necessary. It's a fairly smooth experience. Definitely not as fast as a skype group call the first time, but just as good after that. In fairness, this beats pretty much any dedicated conference system I had to use elsewhere.

The channel permissions in mumble are pretty flexible, so there are multiple workflows possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reasons to use Skype: \- you need to talk to someone, and by the time you've explained why you don't want to use Skype you could have already been done

<comment><USER21> We're talking about the long term here :D

One minute lost by saying you don't want to use Skype might give you the benefit of convincing another person to join you video conference platform choice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The only reason I need to not use Skype is that it is shit.

<comment><USER23> Not as shit as Skype for business

<comment><USER24> Tell us how you really feel

Whats wrong with "Skype for Business?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Skype? Ah, 2012. We're now in 2017, and in this country Skype just isn't the standard (I'm not saying it isn't used anymore). What is the standard? Well on phones, people seem to be using WhatsApp, with a movement who swapped to Telegram. There's some people who use FaceTime, but they're Apple users. There's some people who advocate Signal, but I know nobody who uses that. Then for gaming there is Discord which I started using in 2016 which Just Works (tm), has a feature set and UI from this decennium, and doesn't require one to run their own server (unlike TS/Mumble/Ventrilo/..). Finally, in 2016 I swapped to a different phone plan; unlimited phone calls is part of my (very cheap) subscription for my phone. The disadvantage of the unlimited plan is GSM's 'bad' quality (I generally don't have an issue w/it), and it is 100% being logged by telcos & nation states. But so is Skype.

To be fair, I don't think RMS would be happy with any of my choices. Discord is open source, but the servers aren't. WhatsApp is proprietary, and owned by Facebook (Skype is proprietary and owned by Microsoft). Signal is only distributed via GCM which is a proprietary platform (F-Droid is blocked).

</comment><comment><USER26> This is true of all IM that isn't based on open protocols and has mandatory end-to-end encryption. Which is why I use tox [0].

[0] [https://tox.chat/](https://tox.chat/)

<comment><USER27> I prefer Matrix[0] since it has some nice features (encryption, message history, multiple devices, audio, video, files), supports most major platforms, can be self hosted and importantly, supports push notifications so your battery isn't destroyed like it is with Antox.

[0]: [http://matrix.org](http://matrix.org)

<comment><USER26> But alas, it sucks (no support at all!) at ipv6 (e.g.: On a ds-lite scenario), it is federated instead of decentralized, and its end-to-end encryption is optional.

<comment><USER27> IPv6 is indeed bad but:

\- "federated instead of decentralized": I believe Matrix's federation implementation qualifies as decentralised. There's _some_ centralisation (homeservers) but not much.

\- "its end-to-end encryption is optional": I don't really see this as a problem. If you want it, you have it. If you don't, you don't. Sometimes end- to-end encryption isn't desirable, in a business environment where you need communications to be auditable for example.

<comment><USER26> > IPv6 is indeed bad

It's terrible, and the reason I don't use matrix. While behind ds-lite, the only option I'd have is to run my node on an untrusted location (eg: a rented server).

> "its end-to-end encryption is optional": I don't really see this as a > problem. If you want it, you have it. If you don't, you don't. Sometimes > end-to-end encryption isn't desirable, in a business environment where you > need communications to be auditable for example.

Sure, but in a post-snowden climate, I can't recommend a solution where end- to-end is optional to anybody. The problem is that when it is optional, people will readily downgrade to point-per-point encryption when they experience any issues. It's terrible to give less tech-literate people the option of insecure communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Open Source Minisip (discontinued?) offered encryption over VOIP calls: [http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/minisip](http://www.voip- info.org/wiki/view/minisip)

It is amazing that Skype still has not been re-engineered and and open source lone released. [http://www.oklabs.net/skype-reverse-engineering-the-long- jou...](http://www.oklabs.net/skype-reverse-engineering-the-long-journey/)

</comment><comment><USER29> The problem with his first argument is that it is a logical fallacy (affirming a disjunct). Just because one does not say A, does not mean that it automatically must be B. He says "most likely", but even this is not certain. I agree, it feels that it must be true. But then again this is an inductive fallacy. Simply because most companies we know that have acted in such a way actually were eavesdropping on its customers, one cannot say with certainty that this is a general rule.

<comment><USER30> Big fancy words with zero content and a complete lack of arguments.

> He says "most likely", but even this is not certain.

That is the exact meaning of most likely.

> Simply because most companies we know that have acted in such a way actually > were eavesdropping on its customers, one cannot say with certainty that this > is a general rule.

It would be plain idiotic to not assume the worst until proven otherwise, especially after everything we learned in the past few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Good points.

Check out as a possible alternative:

1) riot.im 2) matrix.org

</comment><comment><USER32> Reason to use skype:

So your dead account doesn't get immediately compromised and you screw your friends over in the process as your account starts sending out malware- infested links.

 _glares at the seven or so users in his blocked list, users that jumped ship to Telegram and left their Skype accounts open to exploitation_

<comment><USER33> Sounds like you should delete your account when you go inactive, and sounds like you should GTFO if their security is that terrible.

<comment><USER32> Not much else has quality video chat at high resolutions/ Hangouts likes to drop out. It's one of the reasons Google Helpouts failed so hard, Hangouts utterly sucked as the video chat intermediary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I use the Matrix messaging client riot.fm instead

<comment><USER14> What is riot.fm? Maybe [https://riot.im/](https://riot.im/)?

Is it able to do at least audio calls?

<comment><USER35> Riot can do audio and video calls, I've had good luck with it (currently gets used between my friendgroup instead of phonecalls). Check out [http://matrix.org/](http://matrix.org/) for the server implementation details and [https://riot.im](https://riot.im) for the biggest client. Currently, it only supports 1-on-1 audiocalls/videocalls. No group calls yet.

Forewarning that while it supports end-to-end encryption for the chatting bits, the actual audio data is not encrypted. The call request/advertisement can be encrypted though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> And again, Stallman is right. Despite how much convenient, cheap, and easy Skype could be.

P.S. Is today the "day against Stallman" in Hacker News? Come on.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's hard to take this article seriously when it starts out with stuff like " _A nonfree program denies users freedom, which is unjust in itself._ " If you don't want to use Skype, I can respect that. But to accuse the developers of moral failure just because they didn't make their software free... That is an absurd view of morality.

<comment><USER38> The author is Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation. He has spent the last 30 years trying to rid the world of proprietary software; first by working on free alternatives in the form of GNU and later through his activism work.

The Open Source movement grew out of a group of pro-Free Software people who felt that Stallman's morality-based arguments were ineffective at convincing businesses to switch to FOSS.

Modern internet companies and countless startups would not exist were it not for Stallman's initial efforts over 30 years ago and his "absurd" view of morality.

<comment><USER37> Your entire comment is a reverse ad hominem. Just because Richard Stallman did a lot of great things doesn't make his view of morality any less absurd. There's nothing _unjust_ about a Software company choosing to develop and market "non-free" Software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone have experience with Wire? It sounds good:

* open source, code on github

* e2e encryption (apparently derivative of Signal's Axolotl double ratchet)

* chat/voice/video, and group chats (all encrypted always)

* based in Switzerland

* clients for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Linux, Web

* can sign up with phone number or email or username

* reasonably responsive on twitter

* yada yada yada

I use it on iOS and quite like it, but not that many people on it yet :-/

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the main reason not to use skype is the lack of network effect.

Since so few people use skype, everybody else has little motivation to use skype, ad nauseum.

Honestly, the only people I've seen that use skype are recruiters. Other than that it seems pretty much dead.

<comment><USER41> At my current work place, Skype and Lync (or Skype for Business) are what we used for team communication. It works great until we need to onboard/offboard people. I also need to set status to DO NOT DISTURB because I wanted to avoid the constant ding ding ding notification.

At a previous workplace, Skype and IRC are used (IRC are for mass communication, whereas Skype is more for personal-level communication).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> What is a good solution that allows dialing to pots? Google voice and what else?

<comment><USER43> Roll your own with any VOIP software?

<comment><USER24> Could you elaborate? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13345341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13345341)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Not a fan of Skype, but in one of Stallman's other articles he says:

"Public agencies exist for the people, not for themselves. When they do computing, they do it for the people. They have a duty to maintain full control over that computing so that they can assure it is done properly for the people. They must never allow control over the state's computing to fall into private hands."

This guy has a lot of faith in government and his treatise actually sounds rather Marxist. History is littered with public agencies that obstensiby exist for the "people," but in fact exist for no other reason than to enforce the power of the state. I don't trust government -- I endure it. Government is necessary in a way not dissimilar to the necessity of colonoscopies.

</comment><comment><USER45> Skype is owned by Microsoft. No worries it will die out eventually.

<comment><USER46> Microsoft has been around for almost 50 years, though. They must do something right?

<comment><USER43> Microsoft has acquired very few products, and of those a shockingly slim number have succeeded.

I can only think of Excel as being the real survivor here. Others, like SoftImage, were a fleeting acquisition. Many more were buried alive.

<comment><USER47> DOS is a acquired product, for $50k? :-)

They only finally disable cmd.exe in the latest update.

.bat files still run.

<comment><USER43> Somehow I overlooked that, but it's true, that's their first and most significant acquisition.

They didn't buy the company or talent, mind you, just the software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I feel Skype is abandoned by Microsoft, but I do not have other option. Same with Google Voice.

<comment><USER24> Google Voice is stagnant and I am scared about losing it. Are there any other comparable services I can jump ship to before I lose my number?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Agreed, use anything else (but whatsapp)

</comment><comment><USER50> Understanding what Microsoft does with Skype tells you everything about Microsoft.

The only reasonable conclusion: Switch from Windows to Linux.

</comment><comment><USER51> Whats up so many Stallman posts lately?

</comment><comment><USER43> This is apparently from 2012 but not labelled as such.

<comment><USER52> May explain why he didn't mention webrtc, unless he has some misgivings about it.

<comment><USER53> IIRC isn't he against most JavaScript due to the fact that you can't easily dynamically replace a JS module with another?

<comment><USER52> That, and most of it has no clear licensing. Thus i suspect he consider them potential judicial tar pits...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Good for you Richard. Still don't care

</comment><comment><USER55> I am not sure who this guy is, but he seems a little out of this world.

<comment><USER56> Stallman warned people in detail about the dangers of putting everything in "the cloud" years and years before everyone started putting their photos in the cloud, getting hacked, and celebrities' nude photos being leaked on the internet. If you think he's crazy about a topic just wait 5 years, you'll admit he's right.

<comment><USER57> Also obligatory xkcd : [https://www.xkcd.com/743/](https://www.xkcd.com/743/)

> If you think he's crazy about a topic just wait 5 years, you'll admit he's > right.

2012 → 2017 : yep after Snowden leaks in 2013 that confirmed Microsoft joined PRISM in 2007, the fear of eavesdropping in Skype does not seem unfunded anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "A nonfree program denies users freedom, which is unjust in itself. "

This is the worst reason to not use Skype.

The remaining reasons about surveillance etc. are reasonable reasons to not use Skype.

</comment><comment><USER59> "Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved." \- Stallman's blog is not giving me the freedom to distribute the blog as please. It is infringing on my freedom.

Anyone else find this ironic / hilarious?

<comment><USER60> Why would that be ironic ? It's ensuring others receive the same freedom for the copy you make of the page, which is also the essence of the GPL license, and the whole philosophy of the FSF.

<comment><USER59> My issue is with the no-modification part. This is the exact argument he gives for not using some software - that users are not free to modify the software and hence it is malicious.

<comment><USER61> Have you heard of the FSF? It's not called the free everything foundation for a reason. There's no irony or contradiction here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> "Skype requires the use of a client program that is not free software; in other words, the users don't control it — it controls them.

A nonfree program denies users freedom, which is unjust in itself. Making the ethical issue sharper, for you to use Skype is to encourage someone else to use Skype, which means you're pressuring someone else to surrender freedom as well. This is plenty of reason to refuse to use Skype, but there are more reasons."

How it pains to read such texts. "Everything that's not open source is evil."

<comment><USER63> Your use of "open source" in summarising RMS' opinion is rather unfortunate and leads me to think that you don't know his positions very well.</comment></comment>


Microsoft reportedly in talks to acquire GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/06/01/microsoft-reportedly-in-talks-to-acquire-git-hub/ <comment><USER2> OMG.

They killed Skype. Now they're gonna kill Github?

</comment><comment><USER3> it will never happen ;)</comment>


Show HN: Dr, an in-browser AsciiDoc static content system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jonathonf/Dr <comment><AUTHOR> This was inspired by Jr, [https://github.com/Xeoncross/Jr](https://github.com/Xeoncross/Jr), which does a similar thing for Markdown documents.

There's probably a lot of potential improvements but let me know what you think. :)</comment>


PPCB-MAKER a prototype PCB maker, create your PCB at home - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ppcb-maker

<comment> n-gauge What about disposal of the harmful chemicals used for etching? (ie you can't just tip them down the sink)</comment>