Windows Terminal Preview 0.9 - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-preview-v0-9-release/ <comment><USER2> So this release is exciting for me, because it contains my first ever open source contribution, in the form of a setting that allows one to disable that annoying dialog box that pops up when you close a window with multiple open tabs.

<comment><USER3> What's the setting?

<comment><USER4> It's described in the article:

> set "confirmCloseAllTabs" to true at the top of your profiles.json file

<comment><USER5> Is it just me or it should be the other way around - set it to "false" so confirmation is not required?

<comment><USER6> The name is somewhat ambiguous. Does it mean to ask the user to "confirmCloseAllTabs"? Or does it mean the act of the user setting the value of this setting to true means to "confirmCloseAllTabs"?

I find your interpretation slightly preferable over what was actually implemented in this case.

<comment><USER5> It turns out that description in this blog post is wrong. Profiles.json Documentation from rstat1's commit ([https://github.com/rstat1/terminal/blob/58f442dfd2a476de5552...](https://github.com/rstat1/terminal/blob/58f442dfd2a476de5552249535668fd9c185467b/doc/cascadia/SettingsSchema.md)) describes new setting this way:

"When set to true closing a window with multiple tabs open WILL require confirmation. When set to false closing a window with multiple tabs open WILL NOT require confirmation."

I just checked it and indeed setting it to "false" turns off confirmation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's faster than any Bash terminal I've tried so far on WSL. Tried ConEmu and Hyper.

ConEmu glitches out for me on tmux. Hyper can be a bit slow, but is most accurate for me.

I'm doing tmux + vim with 256 colors. So a lot of stuff has to come together and "just work"

Windows Terminal over the past months fixed glitches. It's update-able via Windows Store.

Oh, and the font "Cascadia Code" is one of my favorites. Very clean. Actually, I'm using it on Linux now in my terminal [1].

The other thing is Windows Terminal works great on a huge monitor, too. No lag when rendering. Feels lite. I compare its snappiness to rxvt-unicode. Faster than iTerm2.

Just my perception, never benchmarked.

And this goes along with WSL 2, which is worth reinstalling Win 10 for if you left because of WSL 1 problems. This stuff is fast. I can throw multiple multiple beefy node projects, python flask/django apps, building C++ projects, importing postgres DB (4gB import with a lot of indexes), all at the same time.

[1] I dual boot still. There is a shortcut on Windows 10 minimizes all windows that I can't disable easily. It loses my workspace positioning and isn't recoverable. I hope this gets changed - it'd be a dream.

<comment><USER8> Would you recommend WSL 2? I updated it and regretted it immediately due to a bug where accessing the Windows filesystem through the ubtuntu shell is something like 10-100x slower. Running 'git status' takes > 10 seconds to return. Do you stick exclusively to the Linux filesystem?

<comment><USER9> Linux accessing Windows is indeed _way_ slower under WSL 2, and I get the impression from what I've heard that this is unlikely to ever be improved much. But working the other way round is a bit faster than it used to be, if I recall correctly, and working purely within ext4 is _enormously_ faster than under WSL 1.

Combined with the steady improvements to being able to access the Linux side from Windows (under \\\wsl$\ _machine-name_ ), and being able to mount that to a drive letter (I have my ~/.zprofile run `/mnt/c/WINDOWS/system32/subst.exe A: '\\\wsl$\arch' > /dev/null`, which delays subsequent login shell startups by 30–40ms, but that's not too bad), shifting all your relevant stuff onto the Linux side and still working with Windows tools where desirable is quite feasible.

I moved all my files (including a >700MB Git repository) from C: to A: after upgrading to WSL 2. _Well_ worth it. I do most of my work in a terminal (the Linux side) or in gVim (the Windows side).

<comment><USER8> Interesting. Is it possible to use something like Visual Studio Code (my main editor due to a lot of TypeScript focused work) with the Linux filesystem? I think I tried this and couldn't get it to work but I can't remember and maybe I did it wrong and am just incompetent.

<comment><USER10> The "Remote - WSL" extension allows you to open a folder inside WSL but keep writing code inside VS Code running as a Windows process. It's available at [https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-remote- release.git](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-remote-release.git)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've read all of the blog posts about the Windows Command Line [1] and the following posts and it still boggles my mind how long it's taking Microsoft to overhaul their command line and create a decent terminal emulator. They're on year 6 of this effort, if you didn't know. I don't think people at MS are stupid or anything - I obviously have no idea of the real complexity underpinning this stuff. But holy cow. This is a problem that's long been solved on other platforms and it just seems ludicrous.

1\. [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows- command-l...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line- backgrounder/)

<comment><USER12> The team on it is rather small. I think M$ takes it as a side project more than a new feature for the OS. But I agree with you, should've been done ages ago. When they first put out powershell, for example, would've made sense.

<comment><USER13> The team is incredibly small compared to other teams. 2-4 devs at a time, roughly a tenth of those on powershell. Much of the difficulty of the project came from the lack of resources yes, but also the age of the codebase. It was originally written in the 1980s (before most of the dev team was born) and the original authors had long since left the company by the time the mothballs were dusted off. The team also owned other codebases that time had to be split between.

Maintaining compatibility and performance were two of the main unbreakable tenets of the team (and Windows in general). This made it difficult to move quickly with features right out of the gate. A few of those years were spent understanding the system and modernizing the code from crufty C to C++17, while still managing to add features.

One of the first dev tasks I heard about when I became exposed to the project was of a dev mapping out all of the PVOIDs in the codebase so they could be eventually replaced with better abstractions. Another fun one was a different dev that refactored the GDI rendering, as a side project squeezed in around other tasks. The new renderer ended up being much faster and ~7000 lines shorter, if I remember right. We also took CJK language support quite seriously, which was difficult as none of the devs could read one of those languages day to day to catch bugs quickly.

<comment><USER14> 1980s? For some reason I always assumed cmd was re-written for NT in around 1991.

<comment><USER15> Hi. PM on Windows Command-Line here:

A couple of things:

1\. You're confusing Cmd (the command-line shell) with Console (the terminal UX you see and interact with on-screen) 2\. Development for NT started in Oct 1989 and the first version of NT shipped in 1993

You might find it interesting to read my series of posts on the evolution of the Windows Command Line: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows- command-l...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line- backgrounder/)

HTH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mouse events still don't pass through to tmux which makes it unusable in every day usage. In other words, if you use tmux and have Vim open and try to click into Vim or any tmux window, nothing happens. This also happens without tmux too if you're just using terminal Vim. It's like the event gets absorbed and thrown out.

I highly recommend to check out WSLtty if you're interested in a good WSL terminal: [https://github.com/mintty/wsltty](https://github.com/mintty/wsltty)

It has equally as low input latency, really good keyboard shortcut support, clickable URLs, tmux works perfectly (with and without the mouse), it's rock solid, uses almost no resources, has smaller / less distracting window borders vs MS' terminal and it has lots of themes. I've been using it for full time development with tmux + terminal Vim for almost a year now and it hasn't failed me yet.

<comment><USER17> They just started working on this [https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/376](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/376) I don't think it'll make it for 1.0 as they are doing a new feature freeze.

<comment><USER16> That's unfortunate because it was reported many many preview versions ago by multiple people and that issue you linked is from a year ago.

I wish they would hire the dude who makes WSLtty. It feels like the MS team doesn't want to address the really important things that make a terminal optimal for full time development. It's like they spent 3 years creating a tabbed interface and supporting icon emojis but ignored other critical features for so long (for the longest time you couldn't even zoom in and out with a hotkey).

<comment><USER13> With respect, emoji support and tabs were the most requested features for years according to the uservoice page that tracked the public feature requests.

I no longer work on the project but that team is filled with some of the most passionate and dedicated people you could find to shepherd the console from where it was to now. We collectively lived and breathed the console, yet the team was always understaffed and almost always had at least one dev that was pulled off by management to work on what was believed to be a higher priority project.

Implementing the emoji support took me years and that doesn't even count the rendering of them, just the ability to shuttle them through the internals and back. Tabs as well required quite a bit of work behind the scenes, there was an entire blog series written on the work that led up to tabs being possible.

<comment><USER18> There is a substantial difference between random (but massive) user feedback and expert user feedback. UserVoice fails utterly at capturing the latter, because very specific (and critical) user feedback gets buried under "nice" things that fall outside the 80% of what users actually _need_.

As a former Marketing guy (reformed) I've seen this time and again, and really wish features were prioritized differently—not to diss on what you did, since I've had plenty of pains with encodings, code points, etc. over the years-but considering the target audience for a terminal, I would definitely have prioritized mouse reporting over it, because it would make non-Windows users happier and more likely to adopt Windows/WSL as their primary development platform.

<comment><USER15> PM for Windows Command-Line here.

Appreciate your feedback, but we solicited and received feedback from many, MANY sources. UserVoice, Stack Overflow, Github Issues, customer interviews, email, Twitter, comments after speaking at events, comments from customers at booths at OSCON, Build, Ignite, JSConf, PyCon, etc. to name just a few.

We received an OVERWHELMING number of asks for unicode text support. Emoji are simply one class of unicode glyph but they're pretty important for those working with tools/scripts that use emoji to indicate the state or outcome of an operation.

Further, many users speak non-Latin languages which require non-ASCII glyphs, some of which can be quite challenging to support in a grid-based display format (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew).

This whole class of asks around "Unicode Support" required not just a brand new renderer that could actually draw the correct glyph in the correct cell, but also a whole new way of storing, iterating, and navigating variable-width code-points qucikly and efficiently.

These asks (and many others like them) vastly outnumbered asks for mouse support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using the new terminal for a while now. I was missing emacs key bindings I thought it was because of the terminal. It turned out it just wasn't enabled on powershell:

        Set-PSReadLineOption -EditMode Emacs

1: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43295639/update- powershe...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43295639/update-powershell- keyboard-bindings-to-be-emacs-style-like-bash-shell)

<comment><USER20> This is what I do to make my bash muscle memory happy:

        if ($host.Name -eq 'ConsoleHost')
        {
            Import-Module PSReadLine
            Set-PSReadLineOption -EditMode Emacs
            Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key 'Ctrl+V' -Function Paste
            Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key 'Ctrl+v' -Function Paste
            Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key 'Ctrl+/' -Function Undo
            Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key 'Ctrl+Backspace' -Function BackwardKillWord
            Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key 'Ctrl+LeftArrow' -Function BackwardWord
            Set-PSReadLineKeyHandler -Key 'Ctrl+RightArrow' -Function ForwardWord
        }

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Other than some pains to get it all setup, it's actually a fairly pleasant experience doing web development on Windows now. Edge (chromium), VSCode, WSL (Ubuntu), and Windows Terminal all feel pretty good.

Plus this was setup on my otherwise dedicated "gaming pc" with an i7 9700k and fast ram/storage so it's nice being able to use all that power

<comment><USER22> I've started using hyper yesterday and it seems much more polished than this.

<comment><USER23> Hyper is quite slow, isn't it? It definitely was when I tried it.

<comment><USER24> It's really slow if you spool a lot of output. It's unusable for me for that reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It been using this for about 3 months now and I'm actively looking for something else now. I ssh into beefy server machines to run all my actual jobs.

* The biggest issue for me is that it's crashed 8 or 9 times. Most times when this happens I lose some long-running process I forgot to nohup. This is the first terminal I've had crash so regularly. There's also some link to the crashing and accessing it from remote desktop but I can't figure out the trigger.

* The memory usage seems to really jump up sometimes, I have over 2GB being used right now between my usual 5 or 6 tabs ssh'ed into other machines.

* It can get in a state where it pegs my cpu at 30%. I think this happens when it's spooling text faster than it can be output and it's trying to catch up. It doesn't happen all the time.

* copying text. The option to automatic copy on selection (similar to what I'm used to from gnome-terminal) is frustrating. If you select text, change window focus and copy something else, then refocus the terminal it'll re-copy the originally selected text!

<comment><USER25> Git for Windows comes with the best terminal for Windows that I've found: [https://gitforwindows.org/](https://gitforwindows.org/)

I've tried ConEmu, Cmder, Cygwin, and Alacritty.

<comment><USER24> Which I presume is just Mintty ([http://mintty.github.io/](http://mintty.github.io/)) ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bravo. Aside from WSL, Windows Terminal is probably the best developer tool Microsoft has come out with in quite a while.

I've finally been able to retire my Cmder installation.

<comment><USER27> Can't retire cmder until I can hide tabs and have some padding around the edges...

[https://i.stack.imgur.com/ASKAX.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ASKAX.png)

<comment><USER28> Can you share your config for that?

<comment><USER27> Sure, here you go: [https://pastebin.com/qJBRFb3V](https://pastebin.com/qJBRFb3V)

Let me know if it works. Probably has a bunch of junk you won't need (like various custom color palettes I played around with). I may or may not have edited other .cmd files outside of the ConEmu.xml realm so that may warrant some tweaking too

And you'll need the Monaco Font (and Ubuntu Mono for the lambda) for it to look exactly the same

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've recently taken to trying an Ubuntu Hyper-V VM, VS Code, and the new Terminal preview as an experimentation platform for use with Expo. It's solid. The hardware (Ryzen 3700X+32G) was relatively cheap, and it's working quite well. If I was Apple, I'd be concerned - I was going to upgrade my 2012 Mac Mini, but I now don't see the rush.

<comment><USER15> As a matter of interest, have you tried WSL? It's a much more integrated experience than the isolated VM approach.

<comment><USER29> WSL 1 and Expo don't play nice with each other; Expo was causing ephemeral port exhaustion and making both Windows and Linux unusable. WSL 2 should fix, but I don't want to jump to an insider build quite yet.

[https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/2913](https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/2913)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > A new global setting has been created that allows you to always hide the > "Close All Tabs" confirmation dialog. You can set "confirmCloseAllTabs" to > true at the top of your profiles.json file and you'll never see that popup > again!

Did they just phrase this backwards or is that the total opposite of what you'd expect?

<comment><USER23> Sounds right to me. "I confirm that I always want to close all tabs."

<comment><USER31> I am glad I scrolled this far. I too had the same question in my mind and thought the config variable was confusing. But the way you phrased it made it clear. I originally read it as "show confirm-close-all-tabs dialog box".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I hope they will add a proper BiDirectional[1] text support for languages like Arabic, Hebrew, etc. There is a prominent new standard for terminals[2] that should unify the support in the terminals and terminal programs. See the corresponding issue[3] in the Windows Terminal repository.

[1] [https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17](https://gist.github.com/XVilka/a0e49e1c65370ba11c17)

[2] [https://terminal-wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/](https://terminal- wg.pages.freedesktop.org/bidi/)

[3] [https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/538](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/538)

</comment><comment><USER33> Maybe someone here can help. I have a major usability problem with this. It actually seems to be a regression from cmd.exe.

I often like to run `cls; build -with -long -output;`. And then I scroll to the top to see the first build error. With this, when you issue a clear, it only blanks the visible viewport, and you can still scroll back through all the old stuff.

[https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1305](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1305)

There's a lot of information here that's over my head about how this actually isn't a bug, and different pieces of trivia and history. But I still can't use it for my use case, which is a thing I do often.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, this is the canary in the coal mine for me.

The Windows behaviour is correct, the Linux behaviour is inconsistent and was kept for historical reasons only.

Microsoft has been overrun with developers who think that whenever there's a conflict between the Windows and Linux ways of doing things, then automatically the Linux way is correct, because of a 60-year old UNIX legacy that _must be preserved forever and ever_. Even on different operating systems. Even in green-fields codebases being developed in 2020. Even if it makes no sense at all. Even if it's a regression compared to what Windows does now.

This is not the only example. Mark my words, it's just a matter of time until junior Microsoft devs reintroduce all of the stupidities from Linux that have no place in any sane operating system:

* Button action occurs on mouse-down instead of mouse-up, making misclicks uncancellable.

* No delete key support to match Linux backspace-only behaviour: [https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/66434/delete-key-do...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/66434/delete-key-doesnt-work-on-command-line)

* Cursor key support is removed in favour of vim-style hjkl movement keys that make sense only on ADM-3A terminals from the 70s: [https://superuser.com/a/599152](https://superuser.com/a/599152)

* Selection copies instantly, wiping out your clipboard whether you like it or not.

* All output becomes text, because strong typing is for soft people that haven't mastered sed/awk.

* PowerShell is replaced by bash, because why would anyone need consistent naming, readable scripts, and pervasive tab-complete? We want to save precious bytes on our 300 baud SSH connections!

* SSH for Windows instead of WinRM, which has been included for a decade.

<comment><USER35> I doubt "junior Microsoft devs" reintroduce what you think is somehow related to Linux.

And a "sane" operating system is independent of shells (whether *sh or PowerShell or cmd) and is also independent of the GUI running on it.

Button action is related to the GUI you're running, not Linux.

Delete key actions are related to termcap which indeed is historical. However, any sane GUI terminal handles that. How many people actually operate a windows machine via a serial port?

Cursor key support: I used terminals in the 70s and 80s. Many of them had arrow keys that were supported. See termcap above that was specifically to handle these sorts of issues.

Multiple clipboards, again, are dependent on your GUI, it has nothing to do with the terminal or the PTTY underneath it in Linux/Unix.

All output becomes text, is actually a misnomer. It is that all output (by default) comes out of stdout and is an octet stream.

SSH didn't exist when there were 300 (or 110) baud connections. TTYs did and devices like the VT-52 that supported certain escape sequences to do things that were relevant to a screen as opposed to a printer with keyboard attached.

SSH vs WinRM. Neither were around when the Unix TTY/PTTY/line drivers etc were established. In fact, telnet and rlogin weren't around either. They're not even comparable. SSH establishes an encrypted tunnel between processes, WinRM is a SOAP API client/server protocol for performing remote admin.

But hey, tell us what you think about systemd.

<comment><USER34> > And a "sane" operating system is independent of shells (whether sh or > PowerShell or cmd) and is also independent of the GUI running on it.

No, it is not. An operating system is not just a kernel. It's a collection of components, of which the kernel is just a tiny part. Windows is the combination of Win32, WMI, DCOM+, Active Directory, Registry, NTFS, GDI+, DirectX, and so on. Take away even a couple of those, and you no longer have Windows.

Applications are programmed _not_ against the bare kernel API, but shims like Win32. Similarly, applications are programmed against the standard operating system shells. A Linux install script that requires "sh" will not "Just Work" on Windows. A program that requires CMD.EXE batch files will not "Just Work" on Linux, even if it could otherwise, such as a Java app.

That's just the APIs and shell languages. The GUIs are the same. That's the _human_ interface to the OS. An Apple OSX app ported as-is to Windows (preserving the look & feel) would feel horribly out of place.

Other than the GUI, the only other human interface is the text shell. It's _important_. It's a significant chunk of the experience for advanced users. Directly porting Linux-isms to Windows is just as out-of-place as directly porting a Mac app to Windows.

> Button action is related to the GUI you're running, not Linux.

Switchable GUIs are an X-Windows thing. Most other operating systems, such as OSX and Windows have _consistent_ GUI toolkits. Linux doesn't. Its arbitrary button click behaviour is insane. When your learned habit is to depress buttons for a second while thinking twice about potentially harmful actions, knowing that you can cancel by moving the cursor off and releasing, the outlier Linux behaviour is shocking in its indifference to 99% of the installed GUI base that existed at the time.

> Delete key actions are related to termcap which indeed is historical.

I still can't use the del key like... 50% of the time I interact with non- Windows operating systems, particularly over SSH. How is this still a problem in 2020!? Please explain why this has been simply _unsolvable_ for all of this time. The 101-key layout has been out for 30 years. That's three decades. THREE!

> Cursor key support

I was being sarcastic at this point. However, you will still find people arguing with a straight face that ijkl movement is "superior", which is just hilarious.

> Multiple clipboards

Windows has one primary clipboard. One. It now has clipboard history, but I'm willing to bet that 99% of its user base is unaware of this feature. The standard for 99.99% of its apps is to _not_ overwrite the clipboard on select, yet I've seen apps ported from Linux introduce this behaviour to have that "Linux feel".

This is just as wrong as porting the Mac OSX look and feel to Windows.

> All output becomes text, is actually a misnomer. It is that all output (by > default) comes out of stdout and is an octet stream.

That's splitting hairs. Practically all Windows APIs are Object Oriented, especially the ones used for scripting, such a WMI. They're not text-based. The notion that what Windows is "really missing" is a bunch of text-oriented Linux shell tools is just nuts. It already has native shells that are better suited to it, such as PowerShell.

Meanwhile I don't particularly recommend PowerShell to Linux people, because its string processing capabilities are not particularly good.

> SSH didn't exist when there were 300 baud connections

Technically true. However, telnet did exist, it was just less secure.

> SSH vs WinRM. Neither were around when the Unix TTY/PTTY/line drivers etc > were established.

The point is that I keep hearing Linux admins clamoring for SSH support on Windows, with the argument that Windows is hard to administer because it doesn't have a secure remote shell. Even though it does. They just don't know about it, because they use bash on Windows instead of PowerShell.

The irony is that securely distributing SSH public keys is essentially an unsolved problem (unless I'm missing a recent development), whereas WinRM uses Kerberos to automatically negotiate a temporary key.

Be honest: what fraction of the time do you verify that the public key fingerprint of your first-time SSH sessions really match the fingerprints of the boxes you think you're connecting to?

I'm guessing never...

> But hey, tell us what you think about systemd.

Sure: It's about time Linux caught up to Windows NT 4.0

I can't wait to hear the wails of anguish when the Linux world is dragged kicking and screaming into the Windows 2000 world of Active Directory and its magic powers called Group Policy and ACLs with more than 3 entries.

I had just recently wasted _days_ trying to figure out why some Linux box was basically locking up on a customer network only to discover that pre-systemd the secondary DNS doesn't do what you think it does. It's not a _backup_ DNS server for the primary server at all! If the primary fails, then DNS has failed, period. The primary will be tried 100% of the time with a 30s timeout before the secondary is tried. The secondary will never be treated as a primary, no matter what. Failures aren't cached. Successes aren't cached. Nothing at all is memorised. TTLs may as well not exist.[1] If you have a process that takes multiple DNS requests to succeed, you now have a guaranteed connection timeout.[2] Meanwhile OSX, IOS, Windows, or Linux with systemd will just instantly switch to the secondary DNS and keep trucking along like nothing happened. You know... for redundancy.

I looked this up, researched the issue at length.

There were endless posts on the systemd forums asking for the legacy behaviour back, arguing that the evil systemd people were destroying some sort of precious heritage by introducing heretical notions from other operating systems like _automatic failover_.

No logical arguments were made. Nothing sane was said. Just an endless torrent of "but that's how it always was".

This is what I think of systemd: I wish there was more of it, and less adherence to 1960s accidental history.

[1] I found it amusing that only RedHat had a working DNS resolver pre- systemd. The others were either insecure due to being abandoned, or did not follow DNS standards such as adhering to TTLs properly. We needed strict TLL support because load-balancers on the network were using short TTLs for some entries.

[2] Anything complex like Kerberos auth to Windows or SAML auth to anything behind a load-balancer. This typically involves 5-20 DNS lookups. At 30 seconds a pop, it's a guaranteed authentication timeout for any reasonable DNS timeout. Even if the DNS timeout is dropped to the minimum of 1 second, this is outrageously slow for a middlebox that does authentication as a part of a high-performance API workflow.

<comment><USER36> > Most other operating systems, such as OSX and Windows have consistent GUI > toolkits.

Has been not true for more than a decade. Between win32 user/comctl32/shell32 widgets, office widgets, xaml and uwp, saying nothing of the mirriad of third- party widget libraries used by applications by Adobe, Autodesk and other third parties, which one is supposed to be consistent and canonical?

Somewhat consistent widgets in windows applications were last seen at the end of 90-ties. Since then, linux desktop blushes in envy, how inconsistent it could be.

> I still can't use the del key like... 50% of the time I interact with non- > Windows operating systems, particularly over SSH.

Has it occured to you, that this might be a problem at your end?

> The irony is that securely distributing SSH public keys is essentially an > unsolved problem (unless I'm missing a recent development), whereas WinRM > uses Kerberos to automatically negotiate a temporary key.

You know that you can use SSH with Kerberos too, right?

> If the primary fails, then DNS has failed, period. The primary will be tried > 100% of the time with a 30s timeout before the secondary is tried.

Nope, but it is configurable. Did you happen to have a misconfigured system? Default timeout is 5s; and your config option will be just capped to 30s max.

> Failures aren't cached. Successes aren't cached. Nothing at all is > memorised. TTLs may as well not exist.

I guess you didn't notice nscd, part of the glibc since '98, either.

> Linux with systemd will just instantly switch to the secondary DNS

Systemd by itself won't do anything like that. You can use systemd-resolved, which is an optional part of systemd (afaik only Ubuntu uses it by default); but otherwise, systemd won't touch your resolver config. NetworkManager (default in RHEL7 and 8) will, though.

<comment><USER34> > Has been not true for more than a decade. Between win32 > user/comctl32/shell32 widgets, office widgets, xaml and uwp, saying nothing > of the myriad of third-party widget libraries used by applications by Adobe, > Autodesk and other third parties

This is somewhat proving my point.

Windows has _essentially_ only two GUI toolkits: Win32 GDI+ and WPF/UWP. Both follow the same very-high-level paradigms: Where the toolbar belongs, what the minimise/maximise/close buttons look like, how scrollbars work, keyboard shortcuts, clipboard behaviour, etc...

OSX similarly has only had a couple at any one time, such as Cocoa and Carbon.

These were not introduced concurrently, but simply represent the evolution of the operating systems over decades, with the explicit aim of standardising on the latest framework.

It is precisely the apps that fail to follow these consistent paradigms that feel jarringly alien.

Like you mentioned, Adobe applications are notable. They're ported from MacOS! They use a complex emulation layer to run on Win32, which is why they feel clunky and slightly weird even today.

Many CAD GUIs such as Autodesk products were developed in the DOS days, long before standardisation. Even Excel suffers from this, it's the odd one out in the MS Office suite because it was originally developed for Macintosh.

Sometimes this can be a good thing. Google Chrome introduced the tabs in the title bar UI paradigm, and it's now becoming standard.

> Since then, linux desktop blushes in envy, how inconsistent it could be.

Linux always had several _competing_ GUI frameworks, many of which were introduced concurrently, and continue to coexist. There's Unity and GTK+ as notable examples, but there are many others.

> Has it occured to you, that this might be a problem at your end?

Explain to me what I'm doing wrong, such that on dozens of devices with many different terminal emulators the "del" key specifically doesn't work for me about half the time. What _mistake_ am I making? Am I pressing it too hard? Not hard enough? Did I plug the keyboard in wrong?

Seriously though: I don't expect the Windows key to work on Linux, Solaris, or BSD. I do expect the Del key to work. Every time. Not just sometimes. Not just with some tools. Always. It shouldn't be a thing that can go wrong without special effort.

> You know that you can use SSH with Kerberos too, right?

The Kerberos support in Linux is a hilarious joke compared to Windows.

It's almost like... there's a parallel universe where 99.999% of Kerberos servers are _not_ Active Directory. There are only University labs with a single IP address for the KDC because, _meh_ , if authentication fails, what's the the worst thing that can happen? You just get to skip the CS lab class today!

Kerberos as seen in Windows doesn't need kerbtab files and hard-coded IP addresses. It supports site-to-site roaming efficiently, and can tolerate spectacular levels of infrastructure failure before authentication actually stops working.

I have an honest question for you: Do you have a reference to a good how-to for setting up robust Kerberos auth for Linux with vaguely comparable features to Active Directory? E.g.: Dual-redundant servers _per-site_ , site-local auth by default, tolerance of arbitrary component failure, etc...

PS: I discovered how broken DNS is in Linux precisely because of Kerberos. Linux as-is simply cannot handle something as "complex" as DNS-based server discovery during auth, because it's not designed to have a reliable DNS client.[1] The only vaguely robust, caching, standards-compliant DNS resolver for Linux is the one in systemd.

> Nope, but it is configurable.

There is no timeout value that can be set that will make something as complex as Active Directory Kerberos auth work consistently on pre-systemd Linux. If you use 1 second, you'll get spurious timeouts when servers are busy, and 2 seconds is already too long because of the large number of DNS requests required.

> nscd

I tried it, but it ignores TTLs and its caching behaviour is simply broken. Some of these are known issues over a decade old marked with "WONTFIX". Here's a recent one, as an example: [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1367565](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1367565)

RedHat's "sssd" works well enough, but it's the outlier. The system I was trying to fix was forced to use an older, pre-systemd SUSE distro.

As I said, I researched this for _days_. The issue was a show-stopper for the client, so significant effort was sunk into trying to fix it.

The outcome of the investigation was: "upgrade to a SUSE distro with systemd, all previous versions of Linux simply do not support DNS properly". That's just nuts, if you think about it for a minute. It's not like DNS is a new protocol!

> Systemd by itself won't do anything like that.

Well no, granted, but this is splitting hairs. Most systemd-based Linux distros however use "systemd-resolved", which is AFAIK the only working DNS client on Linux other than the RedHat-specific sssd.

The idea of systemd is to _move away_ from resolv.config, which is an ancient and _fundamentally broken_ way of configuring DNS.

Mind you, even systemd has issues! It cracks me up to read things like this:

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/466336/how-to- make-...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/466336/how-to-make-systemd- resolved-stop-trying-to-use-offline-dns-servers/466340#466340)

The stated problem: "If I run systemctl restart systemd-resolved then it will switch to another server and continue working, but it will randomly switch back to the offline server after a while and name resolution will again fail. How can I tell systemd-resolved to stop using an offline DNS server and quickly switch to one of the other ones it knows about?"

The _insane_ response: "DNS professionals have known for long that if you want DNS service resiliency in any network, you do not leave that decision up to the client implementation. It is a too important decision to leave to the resolver implementations of clients to make."

That's just crazy. Literally crazy. This idiot is saying that you need either a hardware load-balancer appliance, anycast IP, or some other complex network configuration because the client "cannot be trusted"!!!

Meanwhile _all other operating systems_ fail over to a working DNS sever perfectly fine within milliseconds, completely transparently to the end-user.

Check out this _raw arrogance_ : "I implemented anycast DNS with iBGP and OSPF in two ISPs and one University in the past, with dramatic improvements in the uptime availability of the DNS service."

So what this Mr Bigshot Linux Admin is saying is that if you have a home network[2] that gets a primary & secondary DNS pushed down from your ISP it is YOUR FAULT for not configuring your ISP's iBGP or OSPF routing properly. Get good, scrub!

[1] This is a difference in philosophies, which is interesting by itself. Linux is highly modular, clearly separating client and server functionality. So the DNS client is _just_ a client. It is not a "server" and does not perform "server functions" such as caching or failover. If you "want" server functions like caching, you have to run a local server on 127.0.0.53 and loopback to it. This then forces all DNS requests to traverse multiple processes and involve the network stack even if the data is in cache. Contrast this with OSX or Windows, where the DNS client has a simple _in-memory_ cache and the DNS server has a full database that caches on disk as well.

[2] Or WiFi hotspots. Or 4G tethering. Or any cloud network. Or large corporate networks where you are not the network admin. Or any network using Windows Active Directory DNS. This insistence of having "one reliable IP" for DNS instead of "client-side failover between an alternate IP list" in Linux will never stop being a constant, endless source of hard to fix failures until it goes away and dies in a fire.

<comment><USER36> > This is somewhat proving my point.

Not at all.

Microsoft Office always used custom widgets; the Office division wanted their new toys for their package, but they didn't want to wait for or to be limited to future Windows versions, so they shipped their own, much to the chagrin of the Windows division. After Office shipped, some of them were incorporated into system, but they were re-implementations, not the versions used in Office, so they always were slightly different. Some of them were not (remember the auto-hiding menus in Office 2003?)

On the Adobe side, even relatively new and modern apps, cross-platform from day 1, like Lightroom, used custom widgets. For the "old" apps, they are using their own thing; they are not native on Mac either. It doesn't matter, that they were ported from MacOS, they grew their own thing. Photoshop was originally written in Pascal, and that doesn't matter either.

CADs that were written in pre-Windows days had their UI completely rewritten since then. Several times. Today, acad uses ribbon, and yet, the widgets are non-native. They sometimes need to do things, that are difficult with native widgets. And of course, they want to own their look and feels. Exactly like the Office team.

And then there was the theming craze. Later, everyone wanted their own branding. And then Electron happened.

> There's Unity and GTK+ as notable examples, but there are many others.

Unity is not a GUI framework. It is a shell (something like explorer.exe in windows, that draws the desktop). While nothing prevents applications to draw their own widgets (like Blender does, on all platforms, including Windows), there are about 3 modern, usable widget libraries: GTK+, Qt and Electron. Qt and Electron are used cross-platforms, they are not Linux exclusive. It is not simple to use GTK+ outside Linux, and it is not an objective anyway, so few people try.

Yes, historically there was Athena, Motif, and a bunch of others; there were cross-platform toolkits like Tk, there were cross-platform wrappers like wxWidgets. But most of them applied to Windows too.

> Explain to me what I'm doing wrong, such that on dozens of devices with many > different terminal emulators the "del" key specifically doesn't work for me > about half the time

I don't know, what specifically you are doing. Maybe your terminal emulator configuration is broken. It might ask for a terminfo entry that it doesn't support properly, or whatever. Contact the vendor of your terminal emulator and try to work it out with them. I don't have any problem with del key, neither on native linux desktop (gnome-terminal), nor with pc keyboards attached to a mac (macs do not have del key on their native keyboards).

> The Kerberos support in Linux is a hilarious joke compared to Windows.

The Kerbeos support in Windows is hilariously broken. It can kinit only in single realm (I'm routinely using several, at once) and it has to be AD. Neither Linux nor Macs have a problem with this (Macs are using the Heimdal Kerberos implementation, that some Linux distributions and Samba are using too).

> There are only University labs with a single IP address for the KDC because, > meh, if authentication fails, what's the the worst thing that can happen?

So for a broken Kerberos implementation, Linux is at fault?

To make things simple, just use sssd. Despite it being a Redhat sponsored project, it is available in other distributions too, including Debian.

> Kerberos as seen in Windows doesn't need kerbtab files

Oh yes, it does. Keytabs are Kerberos secrets; that's how Kerberos works. Windows just doesn't show them to _you_. They are secrets, after all ;). But otherwise, try "ktpass /h" in your favorite windows terminal.

If you mean that applications that use SSPI do not have to be bothered with them - that's something different. For something similar on the Linux side, see gssproxy (it is by default on on RHEL).

> hard-coded IP addresses

Neither does any other system. But I suspect it has something to do with your broken DNS. Or someone trying to workaround the broken DNS.

> It supports site-to-site roaming efficiently

Just not multiple realms, right?

> I have an honest question for you: Do you have a reference to a good how-to > for setting up robust Kerberos auth for Linux with vaguely comparable > features to Active Directory? E.g.: Dual-redundant servers per-site, site- > local auth by default, tolerance of arbitrary component failure, etc...

Check out www.freeipa.org. It is a nice, packaged set of apps, that include Kerberos, LDAP, PKI and more. It is vaguely comparable to AD; it has few things that AD doesn't have (HBA!) and vice versa (don't expect GPO). You can have multiple replicas, not just two, you can replicate among sites, etc.

There's just one problem, though: it won't work with Windows clients (easily). It works perfectly with Linux and Mac clients. For Windows, I've thrown in the gauntlet, created trust with AD domain and pointed windows towards AD (the superior Windows Kerberos support, yay!). But I hear there are people who managed to make it work with Windows clients in some limited ways (Kerberos only. FreeIPA LDAP has different schema than AD LDAP, that will not work with Windows clients, unless Microsoft starts play nice).

> Linux as-is simply cannot handle something as "complex" as DNS-based server > discovery during auth

Querying srv and ptr records is not complex.

> The only vaguely robust, caching, standards-compliant DNS resolver for Linux > is the one in systemd.

Systemd is not resolver. Systemd-resolved is. You are making exactly the same mistake are most systemd detractors, conflating multiple applications into one... Also, I guess that the makers of dnsmasq or kresd would take such claim personally. Especially dnsmasq, which is a resolver that has been used long before systemd-resolved existed.

> There is no timeout value that can be set that will make something as > complex as Active Directory Kerberos auth work consistently on pre-systemd > Linux.

Again, it is nothing complex, you just have something broken and project from there.

> Well no, granted, but this is splitting hairs. Most systemd-based Linux > distros however use "systemd-resolved", which is AFAIK the only working DNS > client on Linux other than the RedHat-specific sssd.

If you redefine "most" as "only Ubuntu", then yes. Otherwise, no. Other distributions are not using systemd-resolved.

SSSD is not DNS resolver either. It is identity/auth service. It won't make your gethostbyname() work, but it is capable of verifying your credentials. It is not Redhat-specific either, just developed by Redhat. It works perfectly with Debian too; it happens to be the easiest way to join kerberos-based realm.

> The idea of systemd is to move away from resolv.config, which is an ancient > and fundamentally broken way of configuring DNS.

Not really true. Yes, resolv.conf is something that everyone would like to move away, but there are still applications, that expect they will read it and figure out DNS settings out of it.

For the same reason, OSX keeps resolv.conf too; but reading it could radically differ from what `scutil --dns` would show you.

> This then forces all DNS requests to traverse multiple processes and involve > the network stack even if the data is in cache.

Since we mention systemd-resolved here so often, it should be noted, that it comes with nss plugin (nss-resolve). So it doesn't work as dns-proxy for most apps, like you describe, only for these do their DNS resolving by themselves.

> Contrast this with OSX or Windows, where the DNS client has a simple in- > memory cache

Except it is not, in OSX and Windows it works similarly. See dnscache ("DNS Client") service in Windows, or mDNSResponder in OSX (yes, it is not only bonjour responder, it caches DNS too. In older OSX versions, it was done by Directory Service).

> This insistence of having "one reliable IP" for DNS instead of "client-side > failover between an alternate IP list" in Linux will never stop being a > constant, endless source of hard to fix failures until it goes away and dies > in a fire.

Linux doesn't insist on this. Some people, which might be using Linux, do. I've seen many incorrect claims or configurations across all systems, Linux doesn't hold monopoly there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I hate the Windows command prompt. Because when you have several of them open and they overlap each other, there is no way to tell where one window ends and the next one starts. The problem is the almost-invisible border. In Windows 10 they added fancy features such as translucence and took the border away, and to some people this may look beautiful, but for others it created a usability nightmare because overlapping windows just blend into each other.

</comment><comment><USER38> Somebody fill me in. What is the strategic value to Microsoft of making their own terminal? Especially when there are apparently so many out there. Also, why are there are so many? I guess as a web dev I've always just accepted the basic terminal and it's been fine for me. Am I missing out?

<comment><USER39> Strategic value is turn developers from macOS back to windows and have better sales for windows laptops.

The basic terminals on linux/macOS are fine. The basic CMD terminal on Windows is terrible and is NOT ok.

<comment><USER38> I've done all my developing on a MacBook. This makes sense now. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've been using this for the past 6 months for git and enjoy it. I only have two gripes: linebreaks are broken e.g. when writing long commit messages, and there's still no way to do proper multi line commit messages. Hopefully this is solved now, will check on Monday!

<comment><USER41> For what it's worth, Terminal doesn't do anything special with line breaks on shell prompts. PowerShell, however, might.

If you're using powershell, you can escape newlines with `. If git bash, \\. If CMD, I don't know what to tell you -- I don't use it for any serious work. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Last time I checked, long text wraps in the same line, and it's not even visual only (when you press Enter to run it, throws error bcoz the command is incomplete).

Also, lines pasted from Sublime don't include newlines.

</comment><comment><USER12> Gonna wait for the feature-complete release and try it out to see if I switch out to it from Cmder.

</comment><comment><USER43> If it does SGR 53 overline, with tmux 3 it'll be able to have some really nice status lines.

</comment><comment><USER44> Been trying to set a shortcut to move between panes of a tab. Anyone done this successfully?

</comment><comment><USER45> Waiting for final release of this (and wsl 2) to switch to Windows from my Linux.

</comment><comment><USER46> Nice. Command Line Arguments part is great for opening tabs for the demo use

</comment><comment><USER47> I might finally ditch mintty that comes with Git for Windows

</comment><comment><USER48> No mouse support still? Am I wrong?

<comment><USER49> I can highlight text with mouse, right-click to copy it and then right-click again to paste it. Ctrl-V, C don't work out of box. Gestures on track pad don't scroll. What else are you missing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> When will MS Terminal get slashes pointing in the right direction?

<comment><USER51> Already does if you use WSL :)

<comment><USER52> Also powershell happily lets you use slash, as god intended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Look at this wagon, honey. It has no horse. FFS.

</comment><comment><USER54> Ah, yes, the only terminal emulator which phones home to Microsoft to let them know what you've been doing with it.

Or you could just, you know, actually use Linux or BSD.

<comment><USER51> It's open source.

You mind pointing out in the code where it "phones home to Microsoft to let them know what you've been doing with it"?

<comment><USER54> [https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal/blob/master/src/termin...](https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal/blob/master/src/terminal/parser/telemetry.cpp)

[https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/src/termin...](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/master/src/terminal/parser/tracing.cpp)

See also the corresponding hpp files.

<comment><USER41> Funny enough, I crawled through this exact code to comment on another thread[1] about telemetry in the console, but did so before the code was open- source.

The files you're linking to--specifically in terminal/parser--serve to tell a local developer running a text-mode application what VT sequences are in common use to help that developer figure out where to apply effort. We can also request that people enable these traces and _explicitly view their contents, then choose to send us the data_ to help us troubleshoot VT parsing issues.

There trace logs aren't even wired up to the "telemetry" stream that everybody's so afraid of: TraceLogging is a local data capture solution first and foremost, and anybody can look at what's being produced using Windows Performance Analyzer. Nothing from this tracing provider leaves the user's computer.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322398), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324538)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unix Folklore - <AUTHOR> http://www.peteradamsphoto.com/unix-folklore/ <comment><USER2> They had "Plan 9 from outer space" figure in the lab. It may have inspired Plan 9 OS. Nice to see how these small details percolate.

<comment><USER3> It says "The model of Tor was created by Bell Labs researcher Tom Duff as a nod to the movie's influence on the naming of the "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" operating system. Plan 9 was the last version of UNIX developed at Bell Labs."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really not interesting</comment>


CSS-Tricks: Guidelines for URI Design - <AUTHOR> http://css-tricks.com/guidelines-for-uri-design/ <comment><USER2> I wouldn't follow half that advice in particular No evidence of the underlying technology and No WWW are misleading, there are subtle issues around these that you want to be careful about. The author overgeneralises.

Short linking is a ridiculous idea, I can't wait until it dies a horrible painful death.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any simple, clean and well-designed forum solution out there? - <AUTHOR>

Why nobody made a proper forum, with a good UX/UI? Discourse is the closest existing software but it's not well designed, user profiles are a pain in the a<i></i>…
Something as well-designed as branch.com but that you could use privately. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> You are seeking a solution to a non-existing problem.

People seem quite content using shitty-looking forums.

Measure ease-of-use as 1 of the key elements.

No point making a great UI/UX when nobody knows where the login is.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's just a problem people moved on from awhile ago. There were a few years when building a forum-solution (as a wordpress plugin or a standalone solution like VBulletin or PHPbb) was good business. But these days, who would you be building it for exactly? Many of the popular forums are either perfectly happy with their old solution, or are running on something completely custom.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll answer everybody here but I was thinking about something I could use for a company. A place where you can both talk and manage people - a bit like Discourse but with proper profile management. I don't think people are used to shitty forums, I think they accept it because of a lack of other solutions. But thanks for the recommendations, I'll give it a look.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you checked out Muut [https://muut.com/](https://muut.com/)? It's completely customizable with CSS, uses a lightweight javascript client, minimal design and focuses on the conversation (text). You can also use it privately. That requires a subscription. It's a hosted service.

Disclaimer: I work there.

<comment><USER5> It's so trendy you can't even rightclick-newtab with it.

Why haven't you guys customized the scrollbar ? It would be way COOLER. Probably change the speed, so it can be personalized for your forum.

And why not an infinite-scroll ? Who needs pages anyway.

No javascript? Are you a scraper? Fuck off neanderthal!

You need a link of the thread? Go search for it dummy.

Only thing left to do is to break the back button.

<comment><USER4> It's hard to read get your actual points through your comments but I'll try to address what I can.

Right-click new tab is available when you click the link icon available from the burger when hovering a title. That burger holds sharing options. That also holds a link to the thread.

Click the bubble with the number of posts at the bottom to keep loading comments. We've found most people don't need or want pages. The search is typically good enough and new/active threads are bubbled to the top so you're not constantly searching for that active thread you were on last night.

We also send email digests while you're away from the forum to keep you informed on new replies. You can watch/unwatch any post or subscribe to all new posts.

Muut combines forums and commenting and works really well for aggregating comment threads on blogs, for example. Many of our users use it support as well. It also works great as a standalone forum. Is it vBulletin? No, but that's on purpose and in an attempt to make online conversation better. So no, it doesn't look like the traditional forum of the 90s.

As for c2prods updated response I'm not sure how much profile management c2prods needs. That's one of the areas we're currently working hard on along with ACL. Muut isn't the right fit for everyone; but it is a legitimate suggestion to the original post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Idk if it's just because I am used to it or what, but I love the old forums. They don't look the best but I enjoy using t hem. When I try to use discourse or something similar I have no idea what I am doing.

</comment><comment><USER7> so i believe one of the StackExchange founders left full time work at SE to build a start-up directed to here. ([http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/)). i I think this was maybe two years ago--no idea about their product.

<comment><USER8> Jeff Atwood created Discus. The poster is explicitly looking for alternatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> I quite like discuss but I need a better user management…

<comment><USER8> What user management tasks do you anticipate?

What I've gleaned from listening to the StackOverflow/StackExchange podcasts is: If you can a build a community, community members will be inclined toward handling a lot of user management as part of their engagement in it.

There's also the implication that if you're not trying to build that sort of community, it's unlikely to be successful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have you looked at Xenforo? I find it fine.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have spent many hours looking, only to come up empty. Discourse looks great, but I do not like Ruby and it runs like a fat pig with a lame leg. In other words, it needs decent hardware and careful tuning to get it to run well. Their only supported platform is Docker under Ubuntu, which is a bit restrictive. All the PHP forums look ancient and I hate PHP with a passion, too.

I would love to have something like the D language forums ([http://forum.dlang.org/](http://forum.dlang.org/)). Very snappy performance. But last time I checked there was no documentation whatsoever for the software.

Muut is an option, but I much prefer hosting it myself. Less expensive and more control.

I would love to see an open source forum coded in a high performance safe language like Haskell. In another year or two, Rust might be an option, too.

I get so frustrated about it, that sometimes I dream of launching a Kickstarter campaign. That is how the blogging platform Ghost got started, and it looks to have worked for them.</comment>


Microsoft to Vista Owners: You'll Pay for Our Mistake - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/167434/microsoft_to_vista_owners_youll_pay_for_our_mistake.html

<comment><USER2> It suggests that $120 is an outlandish price to pay for an operating system, but it doesn't seem so outlandish to me, if it's a good piece of software. People will spend that price, per month, on a cable or satellite bill (even in our current economy), so why wouldn't they spend that much for an upgrade to the software that all of their computer software runs on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Vista is a good operating system. Much better than XP. Windows 7 is better than both.

This article is just another in a long line of "I heard Vista sucks (but never tried it) and 7 is good (but never tried it)" articles.

It's a cliché argument with a predictable conclusion. There's not a single interesting, unique, or insightful thought in this article.

<comment><USER4> Why is it that the entire internet is covered with opinions mirroring this, dismissing everyone who doesn't like Vista as "having not tried it", but whenever I actually ask people in real life, the _universal_ conclusion of _everyone_ who has tried it is that it was terrible?

These people who think Vista was a great step forward seem to only exist on the internet and nowhere else.

<comment><USER3> _> seem to only exist on the internet and nowhere else._

Is this a metaphysics question? I exist outside of the internet.

 _> dismissing everyone who doesn't like Vista_

I wasn't dismissing every argument against Vista. Just this guy's.

There are several valid arguments against Vista. Namely, it has heftier memory requirements (at least 2 gigs) and needs a decent video card ($150+). These are real concerns, and problems XP didn't have.

However, this guy made the blanket statement "Vista bad, 7 good". There's no subtlety or analysis.

<comment><USER5> "Existing on the internet and nowhere else" is a typical way to categorize people, given the existence of global communication. Having never met either of you (as far as I know), you only exist on the internet to me, and to each other. The rest is opaque.

As for Vista, we're not dealing with it as it is, but as it is reputed to be. And it has a terrible reputation. The technical merits versus XP can be argued, but its poor image is hard to contest: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista>.

We take that as a premise, because the technical bits don't matter any more, in the presence of Windows 7. The meat is the use of price as a tool to drive better initial reception of 7 than Vista. There's no need to analyze "Vista bad", because it is already widely believed to be bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In a dark room brightened only by the flickering of a monitor, Bill Gates' eye dart to a private video feed secretly monitoring all Vista users.

Fire glints his glasses. Anger sparked heat burns a hole in his pumped fist. He squeezes and breathes fire: "You'll pay for our mistakes."

</comment><comment><USER7> The cheap 'two week sale' upgrade option is only available for certain regions which notably excludes the EU (apart from the UK). Due to the action against Microsoft concerning browser bundling, EU users will need to preform a wipe and clean install to get Win7.

[http://www.itwriting.com/blog/1552-windows-7-cheap-prices- bu...](http://www.itwriting.com/blog/1552-windows-7-cheap-prices-but-painful- upgrade-for-eu.html)

<comment><USER8> They can thank their governments for that stupidity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you live in China, maybe they'll give it to everybody for half price during the week of National Day (Oct. 1st) as they did with Office last year to _celebrate the "liberation" of the country by communism._

Why don't they offer the same deal for July 4th in the US?

</comment><comment><USER10> Years ago, when computers were $1000 or more, it seemed plausible to charge $200 for an OS.

Nowadays, with netbooks around $250 it is not such a good idea.

Much worse during a recession.

<comment><USER11> And with so many free alternatives especially Ubuntu, its going to be a bit tough for Microsoft. We might see a considerable amount of people willing to try Ubuntu or other alternatives.

<comment><USER8> You people really do live in your own little world, don't you? The average person hasn't a friggin' clue what Ubuntu is, never mind thoughts of installing it on their computer. LMAO.</comment></comment></comment>


"You Can't Sell a Notebook" – Why I Keep Secrets as a "Wannabe Inventor" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/why-i-keep-secrets-as-a-wannabe-inventor-cc06886147d3 <comment><USER2> The important thing is to keep secrets at the correct level of detail. 'What an invention does' is generally what you should be okay telling just about anyone. 'How it does it' is where you keep it secret or get patent protection.

Reducing it to practice is the function of the inventor. That is the difference between a wannabe inventor and an inventor. In short, if you don't yet know 'how it does it', you don't really have anything to keep secret yet. Now sure, some ideas are so simple that once you know what it is, figuring out how to do it is child's play. But I note that you didn't reveal an example of a new eating utensil (which could be really cool), but instead you revealed a type-on-air keyboard which probably has non-trivial development costs and risks. How it works is worth protecting in that case.

Investment has different levels of risk and reward. Inventions which have not yet been reduced to practice are very high risk. If you can't attract investment at the current level of perceived risk, you ought to do what you can to drive out risk or show that the risk is lower than perceived. This usually means doing much of the development on your own (typical garage inventor) or establishing a good business case for paying the development costs (finding the customer before development).

I don't know if creativity can be taught or not. I have had classes on creativity, and some of the people who come out of those classes are quite creative. On the other hand, I have also had classes on math, and a few of the people who come out of those classes can do math. I'm still not sure if math can be taught, much less creativity. ;)</comment>


Lars Bak on Dart - <AUTHOR> http://gototoday.dk/2011/10/10/lars-bak-on-dart/ <comment><USER2> Dart is the language a Smalltalk VM guru would build after getting fed up with trying to make Javascript go fast. The semantics seem very well-selected to include only dynamic language features that we know how to make fast.

<comment><USER3> Can you give examples of features we know how to make fast?

<comment><USER2> So the V8 lineage of VM's (including Strongtalk and Self) has two major tricks: type feedback and optimistic inlining with deoptimization. They can see what implementations of a method are actually being reached at given call- site and then optimistically inline those specific implementations, transparently deoptimizing the call-site if that inlining later becomes invalid. You can support a lot of dynamic features on top of this framework:

1) Sensible numerics. Dart numbers are represented as integers until they can't be, overflowing to bignums if necessary. The semantics are similar to Smalltalk's or CL's except without exact fractions which is a reasonable design decision in this day and age.

If a given invocation of '+' is always operating on integers, the VM can emit a regular integer addition plus a type-check. If sometime later a float appears and the type-check fails, the VM can fall back to the generic implementation of '+'.

Unrelated to the above, we've known pretty much forever how to efficiently represent integers in a tagged fashion so they don't need to be treated as a special "primitive" type.

2) Generic operators. '+' and '-' are methods rather than special functions as in CL. For the reasons outlined above, there is no reason to special-case '+' or other common operators in the VM. The VM can always inline whatever actual implementation of the operator is actually being invoked at any given call- site.

3) Generic iteration objects. There is no reason to special-case iteration for arrays versus lists, etc. If a loop always ends up iterating over an array, there is no reason the use of the Iterator.next() method can't be optimistically compiled down to a simple pointer increment plus dereference.

4) Higher-order functions. There is no reason to discourage use of higher- order functions in tight loops (e.g. with map or similar functional constructs). If the same function is always called in the loop the VM can optimistically inline that function.

Some of the things that Dart leaves out are introspection related. There is no Python obj.__dict__ which would make it hard to implement objects as linear structures. There is no introspection of the stack frame as in Python's locals() or Javascripts arguments object which make it harder to allocate local variables to registers (or represent them as SSA values in an optimizer). LuaJIT is at the cutting-edge of optimizing-away some features like these, but it's not well-understood yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone give more information about the thread lock in class initialization that he's talking about? Is he talking about static class initializers?

If so, I agree with him that these definitely seem like a terrible idea, along with destructors in java (in c++ they are fine because you call them explicitly). I wonder if anyone has actually found a good use for them.

<comment><USER2> [http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/memoryModel/archive/1223.ht...](http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/memoryModel/archive/1223.html)</comment></comment>


Firm founded by Putin-linked ex-KGB spy to guard US Moscow embassy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41947030 <comment><USER2> The actual title on the BBC article at this time is:

"Firm founded by KGB spy to guard US Moscow embassy"

This change should be reflected in the subject line for this post.</comment>


Waymo Hires Ex-Tesla Engineer to Lead Self-Driving Hardware - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-22/waymo-hires-a-top-tesla-engineer-to-lead-self-driving-hardware <comment><USER2> I find it hilarious how the limited supply of these engineers is forcing these companies into ping pong hiring.</comment>


Gut directly connected to brain, by a newly discovered neuron circuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/your-gut-directly-connected-your-brain-newly-discovered-neuron-circuit <comment><USER2> Dozens of doctors over the years have rolled their eyes at me whenever I reported that my excruciating migraines were connected with flare ups in intestinal pain.

Many would make passive aggressive remarks like "What?... Maybe you should have a psychiatric evaluation." At one point I decided to trust them and go along with it, resulting in years of medication and dealing with withdrawal symptoms upon deciding to quit, which they claimed did not exist at all and that I was making it up.

I am happy that numerous studies like this one continue to vindicate all the things I reported to doctors over the years, although it is likely that the arrogant doctors continue to lack the introspection to realize what they did to me and many other patients, and thus admit nothing, in spite of the increasing evidence that they were flat out wrong.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately medical doctors are not scientists. They do not collect new evidence, they just try to fit their observations (the symptoms) in the straight-jacket of the catalog of drugs or surgery they are aware of (the cure). Sometimes they choose to ignore symptoms you report, and sometimes they recommend a cure that can have terrible secondary effects without saying one word about those.

If you make the mistake of believing that they are scientists, and present your own observations of possible cause and effect, they will either ignore you or mock you. I have so many examples of my own and close relatives, from the glaringly perceptual to the more subtle and personal, and have very little respect left for their profession and insane costs.

<comment><USER4> Doctors in that sense, and similarly lawyers, seem like the best candidates to be replaced by ML/AI.

Why aren't we on this yet? (or are we?) That would be one of the best applications of AI, with wide benefits for civilians the world over but also causing social upheaval and thus facing resistance from the humans it attempts to supplant.

<comment><USER5> 1\. Because the health industry is about as regulated as it gets so even if ML/AI is possible there is zero chance of it being allowed to replace the advice of a doctor.

2\. Because most people like seeing their doctor and talking to someone about their issues. There isn't exactly an appetite for disruption here.

<comment><USER6> I make reasonable use of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Fox_Pharmacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Fox_Pharmacy)

When I want a medicine that requires a Dr's prescription, I can go and fill out a survey on their site. A real Dr (presumably) makes the actual prescription and my drugs show up. I am much happier for not seeing a doctor or talking to someone about my issues.

The survey I take isn't traditional ML/AI, but it's definitely AI, as it boots me out of the process if I answer some of the questions incorrectly.

Anyway, my point is: there's already disruption here, and it's awesome.

<comment><USER7> That's not awesome that you hacked the system to prescribe yourself anything you want. At best you're going to get the least efficient path to treatment. At worst you could miss a serious condition and kill yourself.

<comment><USER6> I am using the system directly as it is intended to be used, exactly as the UK government is intending it is to be used. I'm not sure what you think the hack is here. How the process works is detailed here:

[https://www.doctorfox.co.uk/how-it- works.html](https://www.doctorfox.co.uk/how-it-works.html)

And you can see how they're regulated in the UK here:

[https://www.doctorfox.co.uk/regulation.html](https://www.doctorfox.co.uk/regulation.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The link to Science in the article has a much more precise description of what was found:

 _The anatomist Friedrich S. Merkel predicted in 1880 that sensory systems are composed of epithelial cells and sensory nerves, which together transform environmental cues into neural signals that trigger our rich sensory experiences (1). We now know that this hypothesis mostly holds true for the canonical senses of vision, hearing, taste, and touch. Perhaps surprisingly, the peripheral outposts of these classical sensory systems (eyes, ears, tongue, and skin) are dwarfed by the human body 's largest sensory organ—the gut. Enteroendocrine cells, which are rare epithelial cells that decorate the gut lining, have long been suspected to be sensory receptor cells that inform the brain about ingested nutrients (2). Since their description, these cells were assumed to play a role in metabolism and gut physiology by releasing slow-acting peptide hormones that stimulate neurons throughout the gut and in the brain. On page 1219 of this issue, Kaelberer et al. (3) challenge this view by demonstrating that gut enteroendocrine cells locally excite sensory nerves through release of the neurotransmitter glutamate. A recent study of enterochromaffin cells, a subset of enteroendocrine cells, also found that gut signals are transmitted at epithelial-neural synapses through release of the neurotransmitter serotonin (4). Together, these findings overturn a decades- old dogma that enteroendocrine cells signal exclusively through hormones._

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1203](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1203)

What's new here appears to be the finding that the small molecules serotonin and glutamate are acting as neurotransmitters in the Enteroendocrine system, in addition to the peptide hormones that had originally been known.

The brain tends to use small molecule neurotransmitters rather than peptide hormones to signal. So the finding, AFAICT, appears to link the brain and gut even more chemically close together than had originally been thought.

</comment><comment><USER9> This headline is so wrong. The vagus nerve has been known about for thousands of years: [http://www.acnr.co.uk/2017/09/naming-the-cranial-nerves-a- hi...](http://www.acnr.co.uk/2017/09/naming-the-cranial-nerves-a-historical- note/)

What they are claiming to have discovered is that an unexpected type of info is being transmitted along this circuit.

<comment><USER10> I don't think they're talking about the vagus nerve, but rather some neuron- like components of enteroendocrine cells in the gut that allow a faster connection between those enteroendocrine cells and the brain (which of course travels through the vagus nerve).

> Enteroendocrine cells, which stud the lining of the gut and produce hormones > that spur digestion and suppress hunger, had footlike protrusions that > resemble the synapses neurons use to communicate with each other. Bohórquez > knew the enteroendocrine cells could send hormonal messages to the central > nervous system, but he also wondered whether they could "talk" to the brain > using electrical signals, the way that neurons do. If so, they would have to > send the signals through the vagus nerve, which travels from the gut to the > brain stem.

In other words, just because the vagus nerve innervates the small intestines on the macroscopic scale does not mean enteroendocrine cells have a complete electrical connection to the brain on the microscopic scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just last night I bought a copy of Gut by Giulia Enders, partly as a present for someone. She goes into a lot brain/gut stuff. There's some on youtube here [https://youtu.be/BJ-C99FwRHQ](https://youtu.be/BJ-C99FwRHQ)

</comment><comment><USER12> i could sense a correlation within my own body at a period in my life where i was eating just sugar and processed food, that habit manifested a deep depression which was only cured by water fasting for 23 days. After that experience, there was no doubt in my mind that the gut and mind are connected.

<comment><USER13> The fact that diet may be deeply connected to mental state, does not necessarily mean the mechanism is neural.

It could be as simple as high blood glucose levels causing depression (there's some evidence for that).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was thinking about this (sort of) the other day. Trying to think generally about the first animal life and how that translated to what we are today. Basically the insight I had was that we're just stomachs with arms and legs and brain.

<comment><USER15> Sort of. The essential quality is that you're likely to have children who then have children. A walking pair of gonads or ovaries is more accurate.

Here's the human body scaled proportional to brain usage:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Front_of...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Front_of_Sensory_Homunculus.gif)

(Mildly NSFW?)

The genital areas were not scaled because – seriously – they would far eclipse the hands.

<comment><USER16> then isnt this picture kind of pointless and not supportive of your point at all?

do you know if a picture exists thats truer to scale including genitals?

<comment><USER15> I was _just_ looking for that. It's annoying how difficult it is to find.

The only result I found was [https://imgur.com/R24W168](https://imgur.com/R24W168) (definitely NSFW).

I wish it were possible to represent the female body in the same way for comparison, since motherhood may give rise to some surprising differences.

Still, these pictures seem closer to "Let's imagine what might be true" rather than "this is rigorously scientific," given the inconsistencies between models. Nonetheless it seems generally true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> village-idiot "Alternative" medical people have been saying it for a few years now: gut health matters a lot.

It's kind of frustrating having industrialized medicine scoff at people's experiences, only to turn around and "discover" what they'd been told about repeatedly.

<comment><USER17> I rarely hear alternative medicine proponents saying anything about gut health. Chakras, bach flowers, essential oils, that kind of things.

<comment><USER18> Then you've not heard from any real alternative medical practitioners, then!

A naturopath who focuses on diet and nutrition will not push this kind of stuff on you! They've known about the gut-brain connection for years, now.

<comment><USER17> I just realized I raised confusion between proponents and practitioners, sorry. I never reached for a naturopath, only hear about alternative medicine from people into it.

<comment> village-idiot Also: there is a huge range of "alternative" medical practices. Some are straight up quackery, while others are actually interested in science but aren't following the standard party line.

It's why I put alternative in scare quotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This study could be another feather in the cap of late Dr.John Sarno who advocated that a lot of diseases including gut problems, stomach pain, back pain, etc are caused by TMS. Which is basically saying that your brain can cause stomach ulcers, Gerd, etc using the peptide network whenever it feels the need for it (like to manage stress, hide emotional abuse, etc)

<comment><USER17> TMS ?

<comment><USER19> Tension Myositis Syndrome (1)

(1) [http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/An_Introduction_to_Tension_Myosit...](http://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/An_Introduction_to_Tension_Myositis_Syndrome_\(TMS\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I bet this is why you get a sense of impending doom when you have to vomit.

<comment><USER21> I always thought it was so strange that something as relieving and safe as vomiting makes us feel like the world is ending.

<comment><USER22> Maybe so you don't want to repeat what led to the vomiting in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I get migraines a few times a month lately, 90% of the time it coincides with a stomachache. I've heard that the gut uses more serotonin than the brain. I am not surprised to find more communication.

<comment><USER24> This might help:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6zoIgraWs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6zoIgraWs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Unfortunately most comments are about problems with medical doctors and not about the subject of the article.

Can you share your personal experiences about how gut issues effect your mood and decisions. For instance, I observe that when I have gas in the digestive system the world is colored as a place of pending doom or catastrophy. The smallest problems turn into unsurmountable imaginary disasters. I believe the microbes (or parasites) in the gut color the world this way. When the stomach is happily filled and satisfied the world looks like a nice place.

For food addiction, like craving sugar, I observe that I could never keep promises to myself not to eat chocolate. I was guessing that the microbes or parasites in the gut had direct access to the nervous system and they could always override the decisions of the mind. Now I know that there is such a mechanism as explained in the article.

I think the gut is what we used to call the sixth sense because the mind can only perceive senses one at a time but it seems that the gut can synthesize all sensory input and make a better decision. Also the gut knows more than the mind. But how do microbes in the microbiome who have brief lifetimes make such decisions I dont know. So what are your observations about your sixth sense?

<comment><USER26> There is a simple solution. What if I tell you that there is a simple hand posture will take all the gas from your body?

Read about Apana vayu mudra. Do it for 10 minutes when you have a gas trouble and see what happens. Hint: you can't stop burping and farting.

Some random site I found online which has a hand picture of how to do the mudra: [http://www.healthmelody.com/heart-health/apana-vayu-mudra- he...](http://www.healthmelody.com/heart-health/apana-vayu-mudra-heart-blood- pressure/)

<comment><USER25> The point was not about the elimination of gas, although thanks for mentioning that. The point was to have examples of how the gut effect the mood. Because the article talks about nervous system in the gut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The vagus nerve is know for a long time, what exactly is new?

<comment><USER28> Indeed. What's new is what sort of information is conveyed from the gut to the brain via the vagus nerve. Note: information is also conveyed in the other direction from the brain to the gut.

This study shows that your gut is equipped with environmental sensors (enteroendocrine cells) that can convey nutritional information from the gut to the brain on short time scales (~seconds or faster). It's like your gut's "eye" in that it can "see" what's going on, like sugars are present, and convey this to your brain.

I'm not an expert on the gut-brain field but I've always wondered where food cravings come from, especially specific ones that pregnant women often exhibit. E.g. craving dirt. My conclusion is that your body must have a way of sensing what nutrients you're ingesting and missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I started drinking kefir and I think it is making me just generally better at a lot of things

<comment><USER30> From a few days ago.

"Probiotics labelled 'quite useless'"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927802)

I wonder how much of "X helped me" is a result of the placebo effect and how much of it is truly helpful.

<comment><USER31> The science is still out and likely will be for a long time, but I think people are generally too eager to label anything they don't understand as impossible or a placebo effect. Not everything true is scientifically known, or ever will be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Interesting. I wonder if that could explain the stomach problems I get when taking some pharmaceuticals that are meant to target my central nervous system.

<comment><USER33> Depending on the drug it could just be that the gut has receptors for common neurotransmitters also used in the brain like serotonin and opiates.

</comment></comment><comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL Oh, that explains why I have heartburn when I don't sleep well!

</comment><comment><USER34> What implications does this have for the scifi severed heads of futurama?

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm fascinated by the fact that even now we're making new discoveries about the human body.

Similarly, I'm fascinated how Western science tends to look down upon Eastern "medicine", often ridiculing those that believe in herbal treatments or homeopathy. While I'm not advocating either of those approaches to healing--I don't know enough about either--it seems that Eastern medicine tends to take an individualized approach to medicine that Western medicine is only now starting to realize as important. Furthermore, discoveries like this one seem to indicate that there are constantly new things for us to learn and consider. We should pause to think that other, older cultures, may have made these discoveries (or relationships/inferences) years ago and started to think about ways of leveraging the to improve health.

<comment><USER36> > homeopathy

Homeopathy is not 'eastern'. It was started by a German.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy)</comment></comment>


Operation Darknet - Anonynous takes down child pornography hosting server - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/T1LHnzEW

<comment><USER2> Couldn't they have just grabbed info useful for law enforcement? Or installed malware useful for law enforcement?</comment>


Ask HN: How does one find startups to intern for? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to intern for a startup since I've worked in a corporate mobile company already. I'd appreciate everyone's opinion of what they think are the best companies to apply to.
EDIT: Assume moving anywhere isn't an issue (currently living in Canada if it matters).
Thanks <comment><USER2> I would recommend instead of finding companies that are looking for interns, target a company you want to intern for and reach out to them directly.

This is definitely the more proactive method of landing an internship. But the more successful interns I have worked with all had an idea what they wanted and they went straight for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, I have a rough idea of what I want, but I feel like applying to startups that actually needed help.

I tend to think I work really hard and efficiently as possible, so I like to help in what ways I can. Since I'm looking for an internship now, I figured I could apply to companies that had a dire need for interns.

The win-win scenario is that the company gets the help, and I get the experience (obviously).

<comment><USER2> What's your area of interest? Mobile? Web App? Front-end? Backend? If you don't mind sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've worked on native UI application development on mobile. Automation testing with various frameworks.

On the side I've been learning/working on some web development. Most of my experience in that has come from building my website using Jekyll and some node stuff here and there.

I learn fast (fast enough to be useful) so throwing something new at me is a familiar and welcoming experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Where do you live? Are you prepared to move to the Bay Area if not already?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just updated my question; moving shouldn't be an issue.</comment></comment>


What computers will look like in Utopia...according to Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5173140/what-computers-will-look-like-in-utopia-according-to-microsoft

<comment><USER2> Looks more like in the eyes of Apple if you ask me</comment>


Tiny houses for the homeless thrive in Eugene: Would this work in other cities? - <AUTHOR> http://www.oregonlive.com/hg/index.ssf/2014/11/tiny_houses_for_homeless.html <comment><USER2> Opportunity Village has 30-units. I love the idea but the danger of grouping any type of safety-net properties together in one bunch (such as section-8 housing, micro housing for the homeless, etc.) tends to ghettoize a desperate community. This has negative effects within that struggling community (drugs, Alcohol, psychosis) and the broader community at large.

I don't have a solution (who does) but 30-40 units is probably manageable for the police, fire departments, and mental health services but to prevent fires they really should include solar or something.

<comment><USER3> Do you feel the idea is a net negative, or that other ideas work better? I guess the optimist in me would like to see _something_ work. The tiny homes would mean fewer homeless folks pushing overflowing shopping carts around.

The location appears to be mixed residential and industrial, with a trailer park and a few small homes nearby. It might be the same type of area where the homeless already reside. [https://www.google.com/maps/place/N+Garfield+St,+Eugene,+OR+...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/N+Garfield+St,+Eugene,+OR+97402)

Reading the website, residents must pay $200/mo, contribute to the village, and follow 5 rules. Not sure who enforces the rules. And $200/mo means it's not for the poorest of the homeless. [http://www.squareonevillages.org/#!opportunity/c959](http://www.squareonevillages.org/#!opportunity/c959)

I know that San Jose recently relocated a "few hundred" people from "The Jungle". It was a success, they say. But there are still thousands of homeless in San Jose alone. [http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2015/03/30/city-to-use- jungle-c...](http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2015/03/30/city-to-use-jungle- cleanup-as-model-for-other-homeless-camps/)

<comment><USER2> I am not qualified to say if it is a net negative or positive. I just presume that if you are homeless and you have a roof over your head that is definitely a net positive.

I would actually consider donating. Ho much does it cost to build a "shed?"</comment></comment></comment>


5 things the media does to manufacture outrage - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@parkermolloy/5-things-the-media-does-to-manufacture-outrage-ba79125e1262 <comment><USER2> Good dissection of what has come to be news. While this was an obvious and egregious example of made up outrage, there are many subtle examples with more complex psychology behind it in order to push narratives. Lots of news actively try to push public opinion toward what they believe to be right or to take a cause rather than present facts and let people make up their own minds.

But, as with canned laughter, maybe people would rather someone else make their minds up for them.</comment>


Security flaw in 'nearly all' modern PCs and Macs exposes encrypted data - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/12/security-flaw-in-nearly-all-modern-pcs-and-macs-leaks-encrypted-data/ <comment><USER2> I suppose the original article is [https://press.f-secure.com/2018/09/13/firmware-weakness- in-m...](https://press.f-secure.com/2018/09/13/firmware-weakness-in-modern- laptops-exposes-encryption-keys/)

But even that is very light on details:

 _The attack exploits the fact that the firmware settings governing the behavior of the boot process are not protected against manipulation by a physical attacker. Using a simple hardware tool, an attacker can rewrite the non-volatile memory chip that contains these settings, disable memory overwriting, and enable booting from external devices. The cold boot attack can then be carried out by booting a special program off a USB stick_

I suppose they attach something JTAG?</comment>


Ted Nelson Says That Bitcoin's Satoshi Nakamoto Is Shinichi Mochizuki - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/05/19/ted-nelson-says-that-bitcons-satoshi-nakamoto-is-shinichi-mochizuki/ <comment><USER2> Discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733290>

Other sources:

* <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733499>

* <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733497>

</comment><comment><USER3> another wannabe traitor</comment>