Mozilla Fires Servo Devs and Security Response Teams - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/directhex/status/1293352458308198401 <comment><USER2> CNET (and Mozilla)[1] say that Firefox still has a fully functional security team.

The source for this is an unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN does not seem like a good venue to hash out rumors.

1\. [https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after- cor...](https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-coronavirus- pandemic-cuts-revenue/)

</comment><comment><USER3> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

</comment><comment><USER4> What?! Servo and the tech coming out of it is the _only_ reason I've begun using Firefox as my daily driver again. The Quantum stuff has made Firefox usable again. How are these CEO's chosen? Really seems like Mozilla should be turned into a CO-OP or something.

<comment><USER5> So there's a comment from the CEO here: [https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker- aGY62z](https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z)

"Please explain how your salary of $2.5 million couldn't be put to better use as part of Emerging Technology's budget?"

"Executive compensation is a general topic -- are execs, esp CEOs paid too much? I'm of the camp that thinks the different between exec comp and other comp is high. So then i think, OK what should mozilla do about it? My answer is that we try to mitigate this, but we won't solve this general social problem on our own. Here's what I mean by mitigate: we ask our executives to accept a discount from the market-based pay they could get elsewhere. But we don't ask for an 75-80% discount. I use that number because a few years ago when the then-ceo had our compensation structure examined, I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

No self awareness that rather than getting rid of people building interesting products, they don't realise that they should get rid of themselves and other executives.

Firefox has been on a downward trajectory in marketshare for the last 5 years. And they've struggled to reduce their reliance on search engine deals by creating other revenue streams.

They're all failures and have no self awareness.

Effectively answering: We've all got ferraris and McMansions to pay off

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who haven't seen it yet, handy chart of Firefox market share vs Mozilla Foundation chair salary [https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704?...](https://twitter.com/withoutboats/status/1217558588857544704?s=21)

<comment><USER6> Note that Brendan Eich resigned April 2014. Here is the original post for that graph and a bit of discussion on HN relating to the dismissal of 70 Mozilla employees at the time. : [https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584](https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Confirmation from a person on the Mozilla's (former) threat management team:

> _They killed entire threat management team. Mozilla is now without detection > and incident response._ > _Tristan, Alicia, Lucius, even our new director > are gone_

[https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/129322057088506265...](https://nitter.net/MichalPurzynski/status/1293220570885062657)

I wonder how Tor will handle this...

<comment><USER8> Is Mozilla trying to kill Firefox? Without an active threat management team, it would be irresponsible to recommend Firefox to any of my less technical friends.

Nowadays, a dedicated, excellent security team is table stakes for a web browser engine.

<comment><USER9> They are not responsible for firefox itself but the infrastructure surrounding it from that thread.

<comment><USER10> That to me reads as the build servers, etc. How is that not responsible for a safe binary?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> No comment on the firing of the security response teams, but isn't Servo pretty much a "finished proof of concept" since quite some time? Hasn't the techniques it pioneered been integrated, as far as possible, into Firefox?

When it began, the word was that Servo would be the next rendering engine. Some time later the message became that it was a "testing ground" whose lessons would be incorporated into Firefox but that it would never become a production ready engine by itself. If that is so, then essentially Mozilla have cut an R&D project. Whether that is _still_ as useful to Firefox as it was in earlier years is something that only the core Firefox engineers can answers. Regardless one feels that they might kept Servo and let HR or marketing take the hit.

<comment><USER12> That's exactly right, at least up to the last sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love Firefox, and it's been my main browser for 15+ years, but starting today I'm going to research alternatives.

It's hardly the first time that Mozilla has screwed up royally, but in general I have tried to defend them against most criticisms in light of the circumstances around browser competition (or lack thereof). But I'm not sure I can do that anymore though, because this is such a bad sign. This CEO and her administrator underlings are useless and expendable in comparison to the people who have actually make Firefox, and I hope they know that.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand how changing browsers accomplishes anything? It's clear the leadership doesn't care about Firefox. You're just making their case for them that Firefox isn't worth the effort.

<comment><USER15> Does Mozilla make anything that people use, other than Firefox?

<comment><USER16> Thunderbird, and as mentioned below, their HTML documentation is really good.

<comment><USER15> Oh right, that's actually my email client! But didn't Mozilla try to kill it a few years ago? Ah yes

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-scraps-thunderbird- dev...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-scraps-thunderbird-development- email-client-not-a-priority-anymore/)

> Mitchell Baker, the Mozilla Foundation's chair, said on Friday that > Thunderbird 's users seemed happy with the program being the way it is.

A pattern seems to emerge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Servo? The future of Firefox if it wants to have a future?

How about the management resigns for 10 years of terrible decisions?

<comment><USER18> Exactly! (sigh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A tragic example of the principal-agent problem in action. These people took over a nonprofit, gave themselves millions, and have just killed the team that was doing the best job furthering the organization's mission (preventing a browser monoculture). Just brutal.

It's an old story - an organization does good work, allowing it to raise money, attracting administrators, who hire more administrators and take all the money. The same happens in universities and public companies. I don't know how, but we have to find a way to keep people from latching on and sucking the blood out of our institutions like this.

<comment><USER20> >These people took over a nonprofit, gave themselves millions

It's more complicated than that: the current CEO of Mozilla has been involved at a high level from the start:

>In November 1994, Baker was hired as one of the first employees of the legal department of Netscape Communications Corporation. . . . She was involved with the Mozilla project from the outset, writing both the Netscape Public License and the Mozilla Public License. In February 1999, Baker became the Chief Lizard Wrangler (general manager) of mozilla.org, the division of Netscape that coordinated the Mozilla open source project.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Commun...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Netscape_Communications_Corporation_and_mozilla.org)

Don't get me wrong: I'm not defending this CEO's recent performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I followed the other thread today and this came up there as well. This is the first time I have considered not using Firefox as my web browser since it has existed. Not because I want to, but because it may simply not exist.

This is terrifying and I feel powerless to do anything about it.

Are there alternatives? How do I support Firefox-the-browser and the people who make it?

<comment><USER21> Chromium-based forks like Brave or Edge or straight up Chrome. Personally I use Brave as it's privacy focused and crypto friendly.

<comment><USER14> I don't care about crypto and I don't have any interest in a browser based around advertising. I've been willing to pay more for Firefox than I do for Netflix for literally years. I've never been given the option AFAIK.

Is there a Firefox foundation I can contribute to?

<comment><USER21> Mozilla is the non-profit that supports Firefox development. What are you asking? Why they don't have a subscription plan? They do have a monthly donation form: [https://donate.mozilla.org/en- US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount...](https://donate.mozilla.org/en- US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount=30&utm_source=mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=nav&currency=usd)

<comment><USER14> That's a donation to Mozilla, not to Firefox specifically.

I don't want a VPN. I don't want Pocket. I want Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Mozilla also fired #1 contributor to Wasmtime, while saying there are "vast new areas" (their words, not mine) beyond the web and giving Wasmtime as an example(!!!). This is a tragic comedy.

<comment><USER23> That's dissapointing. Wasm/Wasi is what got me interested in Web again.

Do you have source on that?

<comment><USER22> See [https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contribu...](https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/graphs/contributors) and [https://twitter.com/Sunfishcode/status/1293307332059774977](https://twitter.com/Sunfishcode/status/1293307332059774977). Pretty clear cut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Who wants speed and security in their browser anyway? These do nothing to justify a CEO's pay, much better to sack those pesky developers and focus on strategic partnerships which contribute to the bottom line

</comment><comment><USER25> I am curious how COVID impacted a company like Mozilla? Their main revenue comes from search partnerships, there were more people at home searching things during lockdown. In the internal message Mitchell Baker said:

"We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change — including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes become real."

<comment><USER26> Internet traffic hasn't dropped. See the Google IPv6 statistics for example. Mozilla's current trajectory has nothing to do with COVID. If anything it should have helped them as people working from home probably have more control over what software they can install vs workstations in the office.

The fact that Baker seriously brings up COVID shows why Mozilla has problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is so sad…those two teams represented a major part of Mozilla's initiative to make their browser secure. Maybe they won't be immediately missed, but I'm sure they'll be feeling the effects in the future.

<comment><USER28> I said this in the other discussion about Mozilla firing, but I don't think Mozilla management cares about Firefox.

From a business perspective I get it, Firefox must be expensive to maintain, with no clear way to monetize it when the search engine money dry up. Still, their main focus should be Firefox and finding a way to make their most successful project profitable. Skimping on security seem to be the wrong approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Skimping on security and removing the thing that made Firefox at least as fast as the competition...

What options do we have now then?

Because I'm surely not going to skimp on either of those things.

<comment><USER30> The browser that was built from scratch by open-source volunteers, before the distraction of Netscape releasing their code: Konqueror.

<comment><USER31> Konqueror is at this point just one of many WebKit browsers. Last time I checked (2011 when having a chat with one of the devs) they had two devs working on it in their sparetime, which is clearly not enough for a project of that scale. Some time after that, Konqueror switched from KHTML to WebKit as its default rendering engine, and at this point, I don't think KHTML is around anymore (or if it is, it's only around in kdelibs to satisfy API compatibility requirements).

<comment><USER30> Konqueror never had more than about five developers at a time, and yet managed to build a better browser than anyone else - by keeping the codebase clean and well structured, and by being able to welcome outside contributions in a way that Mozilla never managed.

WebKit _is_ KHTML, and since (as you say) it's the upstream rendering engine for many browsers, it makes sense for it to live in a "neutral" place; it's still an open-source project, and of course at this point it's had many contributions from outside KDE - which is how things are supposed to work.

If you prefer another WebKit-based browser then by all means use it - I've yet to find any that match Konqueror though. Just things like the integrated shortcuts from the context menu are better than anything else offers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wait, Servo is the core browser engine of Firefox isn't it? Do they intend to become FF another Webkit-based browser?

<comment><USER33> Not that I expect it but the idea is very intriguing at second thought.

What many people are (reasonably) afraid of at the moment is a de-facto monopoly of Webkit controlled by Google. So that Google is in a position to shape the web for their sole business benefit and against the benefit of the rest of us.

If FF joined the Webkit camp as an active driver, the monopoly (in terms of control) would be mostly gone and be replaced by what I'd call a standard and its broadly spread implementation. A web-standard implementation followed by all major vendors.

Of course branches are likely to divert after a while, but for brief moment in time, everything in web-land would be rainbows and unicorns.

<comment><USER34> > what I'd call a standard

Um, just calling a monopoly a "standard" doesn't make it so. There are already standards for the the web that are defined by the W3C. It is a win for a standard if there are multiple implementations rather than just one, not the other way round as you are claiming.

<comment><USER33> Read again. That's not what I did. Search for the word "control".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> They should fire "woke" CEO and hire technical CEO with a vision instead.

<comment><USER36> Baker has been with Mozilla since the very beginning. I don't how she is being "woke" here.

<comment><USER35> She is not being woke here. What is happening now is the effect of years of her prioritizing diversity and firing any developer with remotely conservative views over building the "best" browser. (whatever best means)

<comment><USER26> Well, she did start the layoff message with something about systemic racism.

But you're right in general. To anyone who thinks Mozilla might build politically neutral products, case for the prosecution:

[https://i.imgur.com/FN2L5ed.png](https://i.imgur.com/FN2L5ed.png)

It's obviously very problematic for the CEO of a browser company to have such overt politics. Who can take Mozilla seriously when they claim to be defending openness and freedom on the internet? Their CEO writes op-eds about the problem of online misinformation whilst blaming her own layoffs on COVID. Actions don't match stated principles.

<comment><USER37> Yikes, that screenshot looks pretty bad. Are you sure they are not tailoring it to the individual users' tastes? This can't be the default of their recommendation engine...

<comment><USER26> Why would someone bother to make that series of screenshots if it was something they'd explicitly requested?

Still, I figured I'd check to see what I get. I can't figure out how to get these "Recommended by Pocket" sites on my Firefox new tab page, but I only just signed up, so perhaps it takes a while to appear.

The Pocket Discover tab on their website seems like the closest thing to it. It has an extremely small collection of sources for its stories and with absolutely no range of perspectives at all. They're all metropolitan left outlets. I get: the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Quartz, James Clear (?), the Verge, Vox, the Washington Post, the Guardian and some Medium articles.

So, pretty good if you live in New York or Washington, I guess. I don't even live in America so this selection isn't so hot. Here's a sample of recommended story headlines:

"The Doomsday Invention: Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?"

"America's gun problem, explained"

"How exercise shapes you, far beyond the gym"

"Buying organic veggies at the supermarket is a waste of money"

"The true cost of being a black teacher"

"A pregnant woman with COVID-19 was dying, with one decision, her doctor's saved three lives"

"The rise of American authoritarianism" (it's about Trump, of course)

"One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgement of the child-free"

There are a few stories that might interest me here that I didn't cite, like "How vulnerable is GPS" (in the New York Times, of course). I personally seem to get more self-help and less woke content than in the screenshot I posted. But you get the idea. If you hate Trump, love any publication with New York in the title, eat quinoa, capitalise Black, and think children are a burden, you'll love Pocket. If you aren't like that, it has nothing for you.

Oddly, Pocket seems really buggy. A lot of recommended stories under Discover that come from Medium don't seem to have scraped the title correctly, so the title ends up being a raw HTTPS URL, complete with fragment specifier. One recommended story is just "Redirecting..." so they don't even follow redirects properly.

It feels like this experience sums up Mozilla under Mitchell Baker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Fundamentally, whether you use Firefox or not, having an organisation that has user's interests at heart, and is not a major global corp, developing a major browser, is something we all need. It ensures that the evolution of the web is in a sensible direction. Mozilla has been an important input in WebAssembly, for example. Thus, Mozilla's problems are all of our problems.

Mozilla has two major problems though. Firstly, it largely relies on what is eventually advertising revenue, in a time when users are increasingly using ad-blockers etc and privacy laws reduce the value of targeted ads. Secondly, it has little traction on mobile, where iOS basically just has Safari because of Apple's rules, and Android comes with Chrome very much set as the default (and few people change it).

I don't really buy that COVID has made much difference. I think that, ultimately, the two problems above are the issues, and I'm not sure what can be done about them.

Even if Firefox were replaced with a shiny-new brilliant FLOSS browser, we still need an organisation behind it that drives web standards in the right direction (and I think they do need to have a major browser to do that as effectively as Mozilla has), and it still needs the funding to do it, so would still face the same issues as Mozilla, even if it weren't Mozilla.

Someone should be taking Google and Apple to task over bindling their browser and not enabling proper choice on a fair basis, as the EU did to MS (and actually MS has stopped offering a fair choice of browser too, where you choose a default and it is installed, rather than have a default you have to change, that they keep changong back in updates).

</comment><comment><USER39> Mozilla was always the «good security and tech, bad management» to me. I hope they don't manage the tech away this time.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is someone influencing Mozilla leadership hoping to kill Mozilla off through bad decisions?

</comment><comment><USER41> Google Chromium has won. Microsoft gave up on edgehtml, and from the recent layoffs it seems Firefox is giving up on Firefox's competitive edge. No more devtools investment, no more servo means more of us will be using the fantastic chrome dev tools. This in turn means we won't be actively ensuring our sites work on Firefox as well as they do on chrome. This means even more decline for Firefox.

With the recent layoff decision, I feel Mozilla CEO is pulling another death from the inside like Marissa Mayor did to Yahoo. You can't abandon the one thing that people actually like Mozilla for and chase a shiny egg.

</comment><comment><USER42> > The VPN work, along with its Pocket service to save and ? > recommend news > stories and other online content, is in a > product focus beyond Firefox > where Mozilla is trying to find > new revenue sources.

Sure but I don't think Pocket has had a meaningful update in years.

</comment><comment><USER43> Like all of them?

<comment><USER22> Yes.

<comment><USER43> What is the future of the project then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder if they could just move Mozilla out of USA, pay less for entire workforce incl. management and still build great things? The reason they spend so much is because the have to compete with FANGs.

</comment><comment><USER45> I cancelled donations to Mozilla Foundation. Servo is important.

</comment><comment><USER46> Do we have a source on this ?

<comment><USER47> Not direct source:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120336)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Time to go back to Chrome :(

<comment><USER49> I would rather use Edge

<comment><USER50> Edge is now based on Chromium [1]. Welcome to the future, where you can choose from Chrome (Chromium), Edge (Chromium) and Opera (also Chromium).

[https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/microsoft- edge-making-the-web-better-through-more-open-source- collaboration/#GmSJg4uFjBM5y8Hz.97)

<comment><USER47> do all of them use google extension store to install adblockers like Brave (also Chromium)?

<comment><USER50> They have their own stores apparently (at least the user-facing front).

[https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/Microsoft-Edge- Ex...](https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/Microsoft-Edge-Extensions- Home)

[https://addons.opera.com/en/](https://addons.opera.com/en/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> RIP Rust

<comment><USER51> rust has enough momentum now it will probably survive. Although losing one of the biggest projects that uses it, will certainly be a be a heavy blow, and probably slow down development.

<comment><USER52> There's no reason to think this will impact Rust at all. Rust is now spread far beyond Servo and Mozilla is no longer employing most of the Rust developers. This has been the case for several years, AFAIU.

<comment><USER53> And big companies with a lot of money, such as Microsoft, seem to be starting to use Rust. If I was in a leadership position at Microsoft, I would be looking into hiring the Servo devs that just got fired.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The End of Guinea Worm Was Just Around the Corner. Not Anymore - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/10/04/767177987/the-end-of-guinea-worm-was-just-around-the-corner-not-anymore <comment><USER2> The discussion here 4 days ago from a Nature article:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21121064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21121064)

</comment><comment><USER3> The good news is they think they can pull off eradication even with the canine reservoir putting it back in uninfected lakes.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a good example of how titles can be misleading. I clicked on it thinking that the Guinea worm was approaching extinction (likely due to human forces that destroyed its habitat), and that conservation efforts succeeded in preventing the tragedy.

<comment><USER5> Because I'm already familiar with the Guinea worm, I understood the headline perfectly.

I don't think it's fair to criticize a publication for failing to provide 100% of context in a headline.

<comment><USER6> Changing the word "End" to "Eradication" would be sufficient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this in any way inspired by Netflix?

<comment><USER8> Um, no. Why would you think that?

<comment><USER9> The commentor did not do a good job of elaborating but I think it's actually not an unreasonable thing to wonder. If Netflix is trying to promote their documentary, getting Gates into the news as much as possible doesn't seem like an unreasonable strategy.

<comment><USER10> The Guinea Worm eradication campaign featured prominently in an episode of The Politician, a (fiction) series which was just released on Netflix. Coincidentally, I think.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The first ever dedicated smart watch keyboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.touchone.net/

<comment><USER2> I really like how they're stealing^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H repurposing the 2008 Obama for America logo for their company. Although, to be fair, their logo does have one less red stripe across the bottom.

Compare:

Obama: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_logo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_logo)

TouchOne: [http://www.touchone.net/Public/Home/default/images/logo.png](http://www.touchone.net/Public/Home/default/images/logo.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> Logo very reminiscent of Obama's campaign brand. Doesn't really seem in keeping with the product, style-wise.

<comment><USER4> I noticed that too. Could lose 50% of the US market right there!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I might be asking the obvious: isn't this just T9?

<comment><AUTHOR> The design is influenced from the T9 keyboard but is not just another T9 keyboard

<comment><USER2> You'll have to forgive me if I express some skepticism, seeing how you could just as easily say "The logo is influenced from the Obama logo but is not just another Obama logo," which sounds utterly ludicrous.

And lest you say 'but these are totally different,' I'm pretty sure that, just as the Obama for America campaign logo is a ®, the T9 keyboard is patented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like the idea of a circular keyboard for a smart watch. And yes Qwerty makes little sense on such devices since the only reason for it is all those people who trained to touch type learned qwerty which they can't do on anything but a normal sized physical keyboard.

Still while using the same "button" for three characters might have some advantages using a autocorrect system I'd like to see a rotary phone dial like interface where you can reliably enter one character at a time and without heavy reliance on autocorrect.

</comment><comment><USER7> It'd be nice to see an 8pen implementation on watches. It was a nifty take on a keyboard interface that didn't get much traction: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99vsUF4NuLk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99vsUF4NuLk)</comment>


Zuckerberg's So-Called Shift Toward Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/zuckerberg-privacy-facebook.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321609](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321609)

</comment><comment><USER3> Some companies just have business models that only work if the quality of life for the world as a whole declines. They focus on extracting value for a few at the expense of the many (many of which don't realize what's happening).

Facebook is one of them. Its entire business revolves collecting and selling information about its users. One day, the information released in this way will be recognized as the obviously harmful stuff that it was all along. We're not there yet, though.

<comment><USER4> Seems like society is taking the position that if you can't prove it does harm then it must be fine. I'm starting to understand where conservatism comes from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excerpt: "Here are four pressing questions about privacy that Mr. Zuckerberg conspicuously did not address: Will Facebook stop collecting data about people's browsing behavior, which it does extensively? Will it stop purchasing information from data brokers who collect or "scrape" vast amounts of data about billions of people, often including information related to our health and finances? Will it stop creating "shadow profiles" — collections of data about people who aren't even on Facebook? And most important: Will it change its fundamental business model, which is based on charging advertisers to take advantage of this widespread surveillance to "micro-target" consumers?

Until Mr. Zuckerberg gives us satisfying answers to those questions, any effort to make Facebook truly "privacy-focused" is sure to disappoint."

</comment><comment><USER6> FB cannot be privacy focused, the business model prevents it, there history belies it. How many times do you bang your head on a wall before you say no more?

<comment><USER7> FB's average revenue per user is $7.37.

Unless they move into fully subscription based service (good luck), I don't see any way for them to make that kind of money without using carefully targeted ads.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe Facebook will ever offer true end-to-end encryption. They will hold the master keys and allow themselves to inject whatever they want into "your private living room" while giving users the perception of privacy and secrecy.

Or they will try to monetize the metadata but keep the message body encrypted.

This feels like Zuckerberg embracing the backlash he's ignored and dismissed for so long and now trying to use it as a selling point because his traditional growth model is beginning to show signs of slowing.

<comment><USER9> They could also do "real" e2e encryption but perform keyword analysis on the message's content on the client

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Everyone I talked to, as well as any article I read about Zuckerberg's privacy statement, is not believing it. There are major trust issues Facebook and its CEO have created for themselves.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reading Zuck's post actually made me quite sad. I'm in perhaps the minority of folks that don't really care too deeply about FB tracking and advertising to me, but I feel strongly about the social implications of FB and the fake news problem.

FB has had an undeniably negative affect on society as a whole because of its ability to let people dive deeper into their own bubbles of reality (whether truthful or not).

Putting curtains on the blinds only means the problem will get WORSE, not better. People won't have that silly emotion called shame (not that they have much of it anyway) getting in the way of a good racist rant or news story about the end of the world or how people with darker skin are so scary.

At least now there's a chance someone with rationality will chime in if a story gets spread far enough. In the new private FB our divide is going to turn into a canyon :(

<comment><USER12> I'm curious to hear more from you on this, because I've always felt like Facebook-imposed censorship would be far worse than open dialogue on the site. People already wall themselves off inside of echo chambers that only reinforce already-held opinions, so is your thought that the worst of these echo chambers can be eliminated via FB filters?

Honestly, the most toxic content I've seen on FB hasn't been gore or racism or sexism or anything else distasteful, it's been blatantly false clickbait/opinion pieces that flare up existing divides.

I've always thought that the best way to make FB a decent place again would be to simply ban sharing of links, so that the feed could become what it was originally meant to be: a place where I can see what my friends are up to. But that would also mean FB would have to dial back its targeted advertisingm, which is all links (seriously, would contextual advertising really be that bad? Bad enough that we can justify the insanity that is FB data collection) and stop scooping up all the data they can get... which doesn't really seem their MO.

<comment><USER13> Youre saying censorship is bad right?

Here's the thing. Facebook already editorializes in two ways. First its community standards, and second its algorithm. THEY CHOOSE what to put at the top (first thousand) results of your feed.

They dont need to censor what people post to make BETTER decisions about what floats to the top. They just need to do a better job of prioritizing and placing better content. It is out there and it exists, surface it. They want to APPEAR impartial, as if your newsfeed is just what your friends post, BUT they are still deciding which posts are more important than the others. They are using the wrong signals to float the cream.

The question is less is censorship bad, and more "can/should fb better own that it is NOT impartial, and IS injecting its voice into people's conversations." If facebook wants to be impartial, then step back and act like an infrastructure, and if it wants to have a say in community standards, fucking own it and do a better job of judging what is worthy of the top of a feed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _" Things can get better if we want them to — through regulatory oversight and political pressure"_

aka Regulatory capture. Raise the bar high so no other social network startup can succeed.

<comment><USER15> I've always taken exception to this way of thinking. Assuming for a second that the regulations are _good_, for instance that companies must DELETE (really delete) all data after 90 days, why should I care if a Johnny-come- lately can't compete? The regulation is good for the consumer right?

You may then say that the assumption is big, and the regulations will be of a different (worse) nature. Well, then it's the regulation that is the problem, not the fact that only moneyed entities can afford to implement them.

<comment><USER16> What I find aggravating about debates over regulatory capture is that there's no space for saying that _both_ government and private industry are bad, because concentration of power is always bad no matter where it occurs.

Regulatory overreach is real, market failure is real, and regulatory capture represents a failure of all parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> He wants to build a western WeChat right? Isn't that the core idea of this supposed shift currently in progress?

</comment><comment><USER18> If Facebook really wanted to shift to privacy, they would add a paid, ad free, no tracking option.

<comment><USER19> Would that really fix anything? Nobody would trust that Facebook isn't tracking them anyway.

<comment><USER20> They already have shadow profiles of users not on the platform, so I'm sure they'd still track users even if they paid. There would just be some cleverly worded language about not using the data to show you ads, but that leaves the door open for other uses of the data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> More quotations from the article: "The plan, in effect, is to entrench Facebook's interests while sidestepping all the important issues...Will it change its fundamental business model, which is based on charging advertisers to take advantage of this widespread surveillance to "micro-target" consumers? ... We don't want to end up with all the same problems we now have with viral content online — only with less visibility and nobody to hold responsible for it...I think the problem is the invasive way it makes its money and its lack of meaningful oversight."

</comment><comment><USER22> Is any big company willing to pull from FB ad platform on grounds of privacy/ethics? I doubt even Apple, so called Epitome of Privacy can afford that.

Is there any organization where you can pledge to stay out of FB? I'll consider buying my products from Members of such organization.

<comment><USER23> Basecamp started a "Facebook Free" movement for businesses who pledge to not use Facebook in any way. Their original announcement: [https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free- business/](https://m.signalvnoise.com/become-a-facebook-free-business/)

Some press coverage of it: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/06/some-advertisers- are-quittin...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/06/some-advertisers-are-quitting- facebook-after-privacy-scandals.html)</comment></comment>


Threatened by Prejudices: French Revolutionary Textbooks - <AUTHOR> https://jhiblog.org/2016/09/12/threatened-by-prejudices-french-revolutionary-textbooks/ <comment><USER2> Are any translations of such textbooks available? I'm looking.

Most of the links in the article are broken. Try "bibliotheques- specialisees.paris.fr" instead of "bspe-p-pub.paris.fr". Catalog entries can be found, but not full text. Here's the pamphlet mentioned.[1]

The archives of the meetings on planning the post-Revolution curriculum are in the Internet Archive.[2] Seven volumes, in French. Probably useful only to someone doing a doctoral thesis on education in France.

[1] [http://bibliotheques- specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000...](http://bibliotheques- specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000657199?highlight=L%C3%A9onard%20Bourdon%20de%20la%20Crosni%C3%A8re&posInPage=0&bookmark=de46bc93-e961-4bcd-88ab-8c02fbdd4353&queryid=61bfd964-3adf-4ea1-aa7c-1d458b405568&searchType=all)

[2] [https://archive.org/stream/procsverbauxd01fran](https://archive.org/stream/procsverbauxd01fran)

<comment><USER3> Most of these books should be available in digitalised form on Gallica (from the National Library), here's the full scan of your first link for example:

[http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k48859k.r](http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k48859k.r)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I may be misreading this, but that seems to say that the object of education is to familiarize young people, by practice, with their constitutional rights and duties. There's talk of immunizing young people against the frivolities and corruption of the previous age. (He probably means the court at Versailles. Marie Antoinette and all that.) Prejudice comes up on page 5, as a result of those goals, not a object of it. He means class prejudice. Remember, they'd just dumped the nobility and killed off many of them. This is a sketch for the implementation plan for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

<comment><USER4> Not sure about the historic accuracy of this, but this scene [1] from Andrzej Wajda's Danton (1983) depicts the household of Robespierre and seems apropos.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/kcwmrh-R7T0?t=3m25s](https://youtu.be/kcwmrh-R7T0?t=3m25s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminded me of how lonely I feel in my society; defining prejudices in a Gadamerian way.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ah, the way to Pol Pot.

Murderous 'enlightenment', wiping out the mind of a society and trying to make a 'tabula rasa' for delirious fantasies of paradise on Earth.

Always works out well.

(Soundtrack: Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KTsXHXMkJA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KTsXHXMkJA) )

<comment><USER7> There's probably a middle ground between Pol Pot and a therapeutic nihilism that denies the possibility of improving society.

<comment><USER8> A middle ground? No way! Heresy! Either we utterly demolish all social norms and structures and create a top-down designed society, or we enshrine all traditions as immutable for all eternity. Anything else is just a wishy-washy half measure.

In all seriousness...

The optimum in a complex multi-objective optimization problem is almost never at the edge, and nuances do in fact matter. It really feels like at some point circa the 1960s American society completely lost the ability to think in terms of anything other than immutable absolute dogmas (a.k.a. fundamentalism in all its forms) and simplified sound-bite slogans.</comment></comment></comment>


uniVocity-parsers 1.3.0 is here with some useful new features - <AUTHOR> http://www.univocity.com/blogs/news/15989312-univocity-parsers-1-3-0-is-here-with-some-useful-new-features

<comment><AUTHOR> Contributions are welcome. Especially additions to:

1 - the set of supported annotations ([https://github.com/uniVocity/univocity- parsers/tree/master/s...](https://github.com/uniVocity/univocity- parsers/tree/master/src/main/java/com/univocity/parsers/annotations))

2 - our implementations of RowProcessor ([https://github.com/uniVocity/univocity- parsers/tree/master/s...](https://github.com/uniVocity/univocity- parsers/tree/master/src/main/java/com/univocity/parsers/common/processor))

Thanks for supporting our project!</comment>


Iran Takes Control of Cargo Ship; U.S. Sends Destroyer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/middleeast/iran-cargo-ship-us-navy.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The question is, what is the cargo ship carrying? There must be more to this story.</comment>


Show HN: pion/stun-nat-behaviour. Do you know your NAT rules? - Sean-Der https://github.com/pion/stun/tree/master/cmd/stun-nat-behaviour <comment> Sean-Der This is a cool utility that someone contributed to Pion! I get lots of questions around why certain calls need TURN, or how P2P works in general. When you run it you will get output like

      sean@siobud:~/stun$ ./stun-nat-behaviour
      2020/05/29 23:18:31 Connecting to STUN server:
      stun.voip.blackberry.com:3478
      2020/05/29 23:18:32 Local address: 0.0.0.0:56304
      2020/05/29 23:18:32 Received xormapped address: 18.104.22.168:56304
      2020/05/29 23:18:32 Received xormapped address: 184.108.40.206:56304
      2020/05/29 23:18:32 NAT mapping behavior: endpoint-independent
      2020/05/29 23:18:32 Local address: 0.0.0.0:41265
      2020/05/29 23:18:32 Received xormapped address: 188.8.131.52:41265
      2020/05/29 23:18:32 NAT filtering behavior: endpoint-independent

If you aren't familiar with Pion it is a collection of libraries to solve WebRTC/VoIP/IoT problems. It is by a diverse set of contributors, and we are always looking for me! I personally want to get this space to be more like the web, owned by individuals instead of companies.

Check out our other popular libraries

* [https://github.com/pion/webrtc](https://github.com/pion/webrtc) * [https://github.com/pion/ion](https://github.com/pion/ion) * [https://github.com/pion/dtls](https://github.com/pion/dtls)</comment>


Be Careful next time you install any Google Chrome extension - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/118052961641964843519/posts/NzTkDRnD3Fh

<comment><USER2> I think it's an important point to keep in mind, and honestly I don't understand why Google "by design" refuses to perform at least an automated test for extensions.

BTW: Awesome Screenshot has already disabled this behavior with the latest update.

</comment><comment><USER3> why not link to the article it self, instead to a post on google+</comment>


Walking the walk: Travel app Vayable trades the Valley echo chamber for Paris - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/09/16/walking-the-walk-travel-app-vayable-trades-the-valley-echo-chamber-for-paris/ <comment><USER2> Although it makes sense for this particular company because of its travel- oriented nature (and the largest market being Paris, and it's only for a month), I would say that moving an established business to a new _country_ is a rather drastic move, and unnecessarily risky. Moving to NYC should be more than sufficient for escaping the Valley bubble.

</comment><comment><USER3> Making the people building a travel app actually travel, what a concept.</comment>


NYSE suspends trading in Amazon, Alphabet due to pricing issue - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/25/nyse-suspends-trading-for-amazon-alphabet-due-to-pricing-issue.html <comment><USER2> I bet this is related to PILLAR [1]. There has been a lot of active work on this recently. B & C Tapes as reported have been slowly coming online over the past weeks [2].

[https://www.nyse.com/pillar](https://www.nyse.com/pillar) [1]

[https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/markets/nyse/Pillar_Upd...](https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/markets/nyse/Pillar_Update_NYSE_Tapes_B_and_C_symbol_migration_Approved.pdf) [2]

</comment><comment><USER3> Sort of a non-issue as those are NASDAQ tickers and are trading as normal everywhere else.

<comment><USER4> Non-issue for the companies in question. Not a huge issue for the NYSE itself, but not a complete non-issue either. If it's an isolated issue that never recurs, who cares, but if they start having more issues of this sort, it could add up to reputational damage. So not a big issue, certainly, but potentially not completely a non-issue either (for the NYSE).

<comment><USER3> Sure, I guess my issue was more with the headline. It sure sounds dramatic to say trading is suspended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "To me it sounds extremely minor and not a big deal," said Joe Saluzzi, > partner and co-founder at Themis Trading.

<comment><USER6> It is minor. One venue is suspending trading of a couple names. Anyone wanting to trade can do so elsewhere, including on the symbols' home exchanges.</comment></comment>


The creator of Pepe the Frog is suing Infowars - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/07/us/pepe-frog-infowars-lawsuit-matt-furie-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> Their argument is they have 1st amendment protection. Good luck with that!</comment>


Support for 100MB APKs on Google Play - <AUTHOR> http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/09/support-for-100mb-apks-on-google-play.html <comment><USER2> Too little, too late.

Google Play makes you jump through a bunch of hoops to ship an oversized APK, and the tools they provide are totally inadequate. (For example, see this years-old bug affecting expansion files: [https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=61344](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=61344))

Raising the basic size limit to 100MB doesn't fix any of the underlying problems. In fact it may make things slightly worse for users, because some developers who would otherwise have been forced to ship variant APKs or an expansion file (more work for the developers, but easier to download for users) will now just ship a single bloated APK instead.

When you get an app update, why do you still have to download the whole thing? Why not a binary delta? For that matter, why can't the _developer_ upload a binary delta to the store? The Play Store holds golden copies of each version of the APK, after all. Instead, we have the clunky expansion file system, and each developer has to do the work.

When shipping variant APKs to different phone sizes / architectures / etc, why does the developer have to build and upload each APK separately? Why can't the Play Store just do the "app slicing" automatically? In most cases it already has all the information it needs.

I realise that all this stuff is hard work, and my complaints really boil down to "Google should do all that hard work for me". But they have thousands of engineers working on Android and Google Play, so I don't think it's too unreasonable.

<comment><USER3> Google Play has been doing delta updates since 2012.

[http://www.androidcentral.com/what-are-delta-updates-and- why...](http://www.androidcentral.com/what-are-delta-updates-and-why-youll- forget-about-it-tomorrow)

<comment><USER2> Is there an up-to-date official doc or blog post about that? I haven't been able to find one.

It seems like in practice expansion files never use deltas, and (as far as I can tell) APKs generally don't either. I could be wrong about the APKs, or maybe my updates are always big because I'm using native code.

[Edit to add: my paranoid theory is that they pre-announced this, but then never properly shipped it. But I'd love to be proven wrong!]

[Edit edit: OK, it sounds like APKs already get deltas and it all just works invisibly. But I don't think expansion files get deltas.]

<comment> fredrik-j Expansion files do support a so called patch version[0] - which may sound like a delta but it isn't. The job of creating a patch and merging it with the main expansion file is placed on the app developer. Additionally there can only be one patch to each main extension file. There is not a new delta generated for each new version of the expansion file.

I'm not at all surprised if most developers just ignores the patch option all together and just re-uploads a new main expansion file every time any content has changed.

Besides, while seemingly well documented[0], IME expansion files requires quite a lot of undocumented magic. Including patching Google's own source code. Code that they recommend that you vendor into the app rather than include as a library.

Further the user experience is less than stellar. On many devices the expansion is only downloaded after the app is started the first time. So the app needs to work even while the file is missing, and at that time manually request that the system retrieves the file.

BTW, did anyone notice the fine print of this announcement? Only devices with Android 4.0 or newer supports 100 MB apk:s. If your app supports 2.3 - i.e. some 70 million Android users - you're stuck at 50 MB and will have to keep using expansion files to serve those users.

[0] [https://developer.android.com/google/play/expansion- files.ht...](https://developer.android.com/google/play/expansion-files.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Even though you can make your app bigger, it doesn't always mean you should.

I'm glad they included and expanded on this point. I used to be stuck on a gingerbread device that wouldn't let me install anything larger than a megabyte due to storage issues. I was always grateful to devs who kept their APK sizes in the kilobytes. Now I have a Nexus 5 and install 30MB+ APK's without hesitation because that seems to be the status quo. Does anyone know why most apps these days are so bloated in size? Is it all the frameworks and libraries we use?

<comment><USER2> For apps that use native code, you typically ship a "fat binary" with ARMv5, ARMv7 and x86 binaries. Maybe even ARM64 and x64 for the adventurous. Also the set of stable native APIs on Android is pretty small, so you typically include lots of frameworks and libraries directly into your APK, yeah.

It seems like apps written in Java have less of an excuse -- no fat binary needed and the system APIs are much richer. But maybe people tend to use a lot of frameworks there too.

Also, graphics can take up a surprising amount of space in normal apps, not just games, if you ship variants for all the different screen sizes. On iOS, for example, you include a startup image for each screen size / orientation. That could be a dozen or so full-screen images! And screens are massive these days.

Modern "flat" UI images ought to compress much better, though...

Overall, I don't think it's _just_ bloat, there is some justification. But I bet most apps could fairly easily be made significantly smaller.

<comment><USER5> _For apps that use native code, you typically ship a "fat binary" with ARMv5, ARMv7 and x86 binaries. Maybe even ARM64 and x64 for the adventurous._

It's not as if one of the major use-cases is to copy APKs between devices with different architectures and have them work easily, and I'm pretty sure it should be possible to implement something that detects which one the device is _before_ downloading, so how did this situation occur?

 _On iOS, for example, you include a startup image for each screen size / orientation. That could be a dozen or so full-screen images!_

Unless the images are truly very different (and I don't see why they would be), isn't it possible to just include the highest resolution images and resize if necessary?

 _Modern "flat" UI images ought to compress much better, though..._

If anything, "flat" UI means there shouldn't be a need to store much in the way of imagery - they can be procedurally generated very compactly in the code itself, or stored in some sort of vector format (even better) - but then again, I've seen people use huge _solid colour_ bitmap images for UI elements in other (desktop) apps.

Libraries/frameworks are slightly more tricky but once again, there already is a solution: identify them as dependencies by something like a hash, and don't download if they already exist. You may end up with multiple versions of the same "module", but at least you won't get multiple copies of the exact same one.

I'm really astounded that such wasteful practices are prevalant in the mobile device world, where bandwidth and storage are far more constrained than for desktops. It's almost as if they deliberately chose the most bloated way to do everything...

<comment><USER6> > I'm pretty sure it should be possible to implement something that detects > which one the device is before downloading, so how did this situation occur?

If you only have 2 architectures, and .so files in tens of kilobytes, it's just more convenient than building and uploading multiple APKs. When you have 3+ architectures, and 7MB javascript runtimes for each, it indeed feels ridiculous. Looking at you Titanium, NativeScript and now React Native.

> Unless the images are truly very different (and I don't see why they would > be), isn't it possible to just include the highest resolution images and > resize if necessary?

Good icons can be quite different in different sizes: in smaller sizes you remove details, adjust line thickness etc.

Another, now historic reason is that early Android devices were underpowered and loading correct size graphic vs loading-and-resizing was important for performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just curious how does large apps like Microsoft Word for Android gets packaged? The size on Play Store is 105 MB, and in App Info, it shows: Total - 152 MB, Application - 66.92 MB. Is there a way to look at APK sizes on these apps?

<comment><USER8> Most "AAA" wanna be 3D games these days they download a bunch of files. But word isn't actually big enough on small screen mobile devices to need that. Office 2016 is 2GB on the PC for it's full installation, if you don't install the fonts, templates, themes help and quite a bit of other nonsense you can cut it by almost half. On small screen devices Microsoft is shipping the office suit in individual APK's so they are probably still fine within the 50/100MB limit per size considering it's a much cut down version of office.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, how many apps can now fit on a (rumored) 16GB Google Nexus 5X taking into account that:

1\. APKs will expand when installed (dalvik-cache directory)

2\. APKs need to store user data and cache data (think Google Play Services, Chrome)

3\. Google's "ecosystem" takes up more than 1.5GB from user-space (services, chrome, maps, google app, gmail, docs, slides, sheets, photos, drive, hangouts, street view, tts-engine, youtube, music, calendar, games, webview, play store etc)

4\. User will want to store a few photos and videos on his phone and maybe have some offline music.

</comment><comment><USER10> I find it funny that they are rumored to be releasing the Nexus 5X today with only 32GB of memory and no SD card slot.

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I missing something? Because I play this >531MB game without any issues: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kabam.swat...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kabam.swat&hl=en_GB)

<comment><USER12> Several apps download a large amount of additional data to the phone after installation, typically large blobs like audio, video and textures. The limit on APKs only affected the part of the application that was shipped through the Play store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just in time when Google Chrome app went over 50MB. Coincidence?</comment>


Behind Rising Inequality: More Unequal Companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-rising-inequality-more-unequal-companies-1446665769 <comment><USER2> Locked behind a paywall, but I'll weigh in anyway. I did some quick calculations. I assume my company is representative of the general state of affairs elsewhere. Maybe I'm wrong, but whatever. The WSJ wants to talk about inequality within companies, so let's see exactly who is better off than who.

My company has greater than 200 people, positive cashflow, and products in the pipeline. The CEO of my company makes 136 times as much money as a median technical employee; these employees constitute the company's lifeblood and the company could not function in any capacity without them. They are paid slightly less than industry standard, though the other benefits and vacation package is industry standard.

The admin/HR/logistics people are the actual median in terms of frequency of people, and make 1/187th as much as the CEO. They are paid industry standard. The rest of the C-suite makes slightly less than the CEO, but similar; all of them make at least 100x as much as either median I've described, and there are of them total.

Seems like the cash is trapped at the very top at my firm, and probably most firms. Even a little redistribution would result in huge marginal gain for employees (2X) and little to no marginal loss for the leadership (-1/136th or whatever). I guess this harkens back to the old days when a CEO would "only" make 30x as much as a median employee. I'd prefer it if things were more like that.</comment>


China's central bank governor publicly warns of rising risks to financial system - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-04/china-s-zhou-warns-on-mounting-financial-risk-in-rare-commentary <comment><USER2> Ironically China's Central Bank is to blame for the enormous, and questionably productive, private debt... the true extent of which is opaque.

For more info the Aug 2017 IMF report is worth a read: [http://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Issues/2017/08/15/Peop...](http://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Issues/2017/08/15/People- s-Republic-of-China-2017-Article-IV-Consultation-Press-Release-Staff-Report- and-45170)

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, if China had tried to reign in its bubbles during the crisis from 2008, that would have been bad for then and the whole world economy.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, but it would have been better for china itself in the long term. The worldwide crash would have also provided political cover for its leaders, while if it crashes now, they are pretty much on their own in taking blame. I don't envy the spot they put themselves in, can kicking can only last so long.

<comment><USER3> Of course, you can never know the "ifs" of history, but crashing your internal demand at the same exact time when your external demand is collapsing looks to me like a perfect recipe for depression.

<comment><USER4> I was there at the time. It would have just been a minor correction, they could have pushed through more reforms at the same time. Instead they decided to to go full turkey on bubble expansions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I expect people to predict this will cause the downfall of China.

People had been attributing causes to the downfall of China.

"He is best known for his book The Coming Collapse of China (2001), in which he argued that the hidden nonperforming loans of the "Big Four" Chinese State banks would likely bring down China's financial system and its communist government and China would collapse in 2006, 2011, 2012, 2016, & 2017\. Critics say that Chang has destroyed his own credibility by making wrong predictions repeatedly."[0]

Here, Gordon Chang predicted that demographics will be the downfall of China.[1]

Does anyone want to add other causes to the downfall of China?

Being an author trying to make some money off people's wishful thinking is not a bad idea though.

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

[1]: [http://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-self-inflicted- de...](http://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-self-inflicted-demographic- disaster-here-14216)

<comment><USER6> It's actually really frustrating every time I see Gordon Chang on CNN or some other news channel as an "expert" on China. He makes these Harold Camping like predictions about how China will fail by a specific year, none of which have obviously come true.

I actually wonder if people who don't know his history of poor predictions that well see his last name "Chang" and assume that he has some inside knowledge or knows more about China than the actual pundit.

<comment><USER7> CNN wants to catch your attention long enough to look at the next advertisement. They don't care about whether Gordon Chang's predictions turn out true or not.

Predictions of doom and gloom are more exciting than 'most likely systems will muddle through and status quo stays king'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whatever is written there, was said for the last 15 years.

<comment><USER4> Yes, just like people warning about the housing bubble before 2008, that was never going to happen. In the 80s people kept talking about a Japanese asset bubble. Chicken little.

Also, this is coming from china central bank leader himself. Might as well be something Xi is saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, this looks like a very serious (non-political) analysis and the recommendations look very good: use regulation where necessary (eg against bubbles and fraud), use markets where they can work best (eg to foster competitiveness). Being able to follow up on these is where the difficulties come.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is what I said 2 weeks ago, about China:

People who travel there report empty buildings ( cause : loans not paid back and the mortgage are the buildings )+ multiple articles about bank failure ( eg. Google China shadow banking) I always thought China's motto was: Fake it, untill you make it ( their annual growth of 8% is based on a big part on empty buildings and not repaying loans. It is controlled by the governement and they try to eliminate the crisis by expanding influence in the world. Eg. Too big to fail) \</comment><comment>---- In short, the growth of China is artifically inflated to 8% per year, since many years --> huge internal debt. Now they are doing the same on a global scale. We are all doomed :)

</comment><comment></comment><comment>==== Can anyone elaborate where I was wrong or what the report says about this? Going to read it now..

<comment><USER7> About the 'ghost cities': start at [http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=23817](http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=23817) and follow the links. They are seldom ghost cities for long.

<comment><USER4> Kangbashi is still a ghost city, they've just zoned out a bunch of empty apartment buildings and moved the goalpost from millions of people to a few hundred thousand. Anyways, most 3rd tier and up cities in china have zones with lots of empty apartments, they are all sold out to speculators, but even the government can't think of anything to do with them.

I find it really crazy whenever I visit my wife's hometown in south Hunan (a small city with a couple million people and lots of dead real estate developments).</comment></comment></comment>


France denies Google appeal, says right to be forgotten must be applied globally - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/21/france-denies-googles-appeal-says-right-to-be-forgotten-must-be-applied-globally/ <comment><USER2> There is no acceptable outcome possible here.

Given the international nature of the internet, having things "forgotten" by google.fr, but not by google.com or google.uk, means in fact that they are not forgotten. France has a point.

But having somebody in France able to censor stuff in the US is also not acceptable. I've got to, what, go to France and win a court case there? To keep my US-based content available to the net? No !@#$% way, France. Get lost.

So there is no outcome that is remotely acceptable to both sides. I don't know how it ends, but somebody's going to be very angry.

Maybe the "best" answer is for Google to shut down google.fr, remove all their people from France, and tell France to block them at the border if they want to play that way. This would be painful and expensive for Google, but it might be the least-bad outcome...</comment>


Dinosaur tail found preserved in amber (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38224564 <comment><USER2> It's been a sad couple of years for people who grew up with Jurassic Park and now realize those scary beasts are just a bunch of mutant chickens.

<comment><USER3> Just wait until they realize that these were not warm blooded animals and thus the large ones, including T-Rex, would have moved slower than large African animals (probably a lot slower), the fastest of which are about half as fast as normal human running speeds. for the same reason, our stamina should also be vastly superior to dinosaurs. If we just simply keep walking after running away, dinosaurs will never catch up.

Even the smaller ones would only be able to maintain their top speeds for very short durations. Double digit seconds at the very most, and one can be fairly sure not more than 20/30 kph.

Humans, and in fact nearly every animal, should be able to easily outrun and outlast any dinosaur. Probably the same as crocodiles, where being a lot faster and having more stamina does little good once those jaws close, or if you can't tell where the animal is reliably (like underwater). So they should be a lot like crocodiles : a human can pester them (on land) and be nearly perfectly certain that (s)he's never going to get caught by the animal (which is practiced in North Australia to get the things out of your bedroom).

<comment><USER4> Central bearded dragon's are ~1lb reptiles and can do 25MPH which is faster than most people.

So, at least predator dinosaurs where likely faster than most people. We might do fine over long distances, but overall we are fairly slow.

As to being warm blooded, that's less meaningful for very large creatures. Body feathers are also a sign something is trying to conserve body heat which is a sign it's warm blooded.

<comment><USER3> Trained humans can maintain a speed of ~20kph for hours (as in plural). Peak speed for a few seconds (which is what would be required to escape these animals if reaction time is not the problem) is ~50 kph for humans (but only for 10 meters or so).

Apples to apples, humans are far superior to these speeds. The best animals for these measurements do crush these figures (by a factor of ~3), but I would expect that the best dinosaurs wouldn't.

> Very large animals are effectively warm blooded by default due to volume to > surface ratios cooling is a much larger problem than staying warm.

True, but being "very large" does not really help with either top speed or explosive power. The fastest animals are small (though not tiny, a decent-not- huge dog in size but _much_ lighter) brittle little things. They chase, rapidly inflict a mortal wound, and run away, waiting until it is abandoned to eat. Fast animals, from cheetahs to rabbits are much lighter than their appearance would suggest. The animals with greatest endurance are larger, but humans are, perhaps surprisingly, pretty good at endurance. Clearly we, at one point, hunted like dogs do : not by outsprinting an animal in an intense fast chase, but by wearing it down for hours, slowly closing in for the kill. Most animals should not be able to escape humans using that strategy. Human hunters would make an animal sprint for it's life 10 times, letting it "escape" 9 times.

<comment><USER5> > Trained humans can maintain a speed of ~20kph for hours

The _very best_ humans can only manage ~20kph for 2.05 hours (WR: 42.2km in 2:02:57 giving 20.59kph). Beyond that, the 50km WR is down to 18.3kph; 100km WR is 16.1kph; etc.

<comment><USER6> That's for modern humans. Bone density studies of humans ~10,000 years ago suggest our muscles were much stronger.

<comment><USER4> Endurance runners are not generally strong. Upper body strength for example is counter productive.

Further, Olympic paces are maintained by people getting aided with sports drinks at regular intervals etc. It's very different from the conditions primitive people would have lived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if we'll eventually find that all, or most, dinosaurs were feathered. I mean, it is a bit of a coincidence, that we find a dinosaur tail in amber and it just so happens to be from a feather dinosaur- it's a bit of a coincidence.

Have other dinosaur body parts been found so well preserved?

<comment><USER8> the nodosaur found in Alberta doesnt seem to have had feathers.

[https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-dinosaur-fossil-has- been-...](https://www.sciencealert.com/a-new-dinosaur-fossil-has-been-so-well- preserved-it-looks-like-a-statue)

<comment><USER9> Neither does a tortoise. It doesn't seem like growing armor is conducive to producing feathers on top of it.

<comment><USER10> And as you likely know, these are dinosaur contemporaries who are from that general lineage. So great example.

"The earliest fossils are from the beginning of the age of dinosaurs, in the late Triassic."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Assuming that birds _are_ a group of therapod dinosaurs, as many scientists now describe them, it is true that all _extant_ dinosaurs are feathered.

But it is exciting to see these fossils discovered, so perhaps they should be described as _extinct_ therapod feathers.

<comment><USER12> > Assuming that birds are a group of therapod dinosaurs, as many scientists > now describe them...

And mammals are synapsids, apparently[1], though that's not so much of an attention-grabber.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid#Relationships](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid#Relationships)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this the first discovery of color for dinosaurs?

<comment><USER14> If you do a search, you'll get a number of links (the farthest back I found was 2010) on feather color. I found one popsci article that describes how it was determined:

[https://www.popsci.com/discover-color- dinosaur](https://www.popsci.com/discover-color-dinosaur)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This makes one wonder what else might be found in these markets where this was found. This could have been so easily lost to science if the right person hadn't come along at the right time. If not done already, I assume more scientist types will start trolling the markets there.

</comment><comment><USER16> Consequences be damned, if I could make Jurassic Park, I would.

<comment><USER17> If we are able to get any DNA out amber that would be amazing. From what I understand DNA is not stable for that long. If we are able to get any DNA it would probably be inferred some microscopic structures or something left behind from the DNA. However, even then I doubt it would be complete. So why it would be amazing it would just be tiny fragments of DNA. I doubt we will even get a tiny fragment. So highly doubt we will ever get enough genetic information to be able resurrect a dinosaur. Even if we would could fill in the blanks with bird DNA.

So even if you wanted to I don't think you could. However, a mammoth for instance might be possible to clone.

<comment><USER16> If you imagine finding some big stash of amber with, say, 1 million different dinosaur fragments preserved, you could imagine using some statistical techniques combined with knowledge of extant related species to put something together.

<comment><USER17> yea and from my understanding it's only ~500 years or so. So a 160 million years is how old the article says that amber is. So that means what ever amount of dna would have been gone through it's half life over 300,000 times. Just thinking about that makes me absolutely certain that we would not even find an intact base-pair, and a single base pair is not even useful for cloning.

It's not happening unless there is some natural mechanism that increase that half life of DNA quite a bit, and is stable for millions of years. Otherwise we would need the DNA to leave some byproduct that we can detect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "We can be sure of the source because the vertebrae are not fused into a rod > or pygostyle as in modern birds and their closest relatives," he explained.

For non-experts (like me) I think it comes as a surprise to learn just how rudimentary these people's techniques are.</comment>


Mind of a Worm Uploaded to a Lego Robot to Make the Weirdest Cyborg Ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.eteknix.com/mind-worm-uploaded-lego-robot-make-weirdest-cyborg-ever

<comment><USER2> +1 for the weird title</comment>


Volume Monitoring in Kubernetes with Prometheus - <AUTHOR> https://blog.argoproj.io/volume-monitoring-in-kubernetes-with-prometheus-3a185e4c4035 <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be better to run node_exporter (with only the fs metrics enabled) in a sidecar container in the pod that mounts the volume? That way, you can get the metrics scraped with the right pod labels. If you do it by node, you will only get the node name as a label.

<comment><USER3> Yes. There is a disadvantage, that when your app already exposes metrics, you will have to tell prometheus' service discovery that you want to scrape two ports.

<comment><USER2> Well, you can easily set up Prometheus with a rule that automatically scrapes any discovered service (or pod) where the port name is =~ /^(exporter|.*-exporter)$/, for example. This allows you to name your port just "exporter", or you can have multiple ports named things like "volume- exporter".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> kubelet v1.8 collects volume stats, the proposal linked in the summary was forked, and the fork accepted & implemented: [https://github.com/kubernetes/community/pull/930](https://github.com/kubernetes/community/pull/930)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi, node exporter maintainer here.

Yes, running the node exporter in a container is still tricky which is why we recommend running it straight on the host. I like the nsenter idea, wondering if it could be integrated without shelling out but I think there were some inherit problems with Goroutines and nsenter preventing that. If your interested in exploring this, feel free to open an github issues. Even better though would be support of unisolated workloads in kubernetes, similar to rkt stage1.

</comment><comment><USER6> >" In this post, we discussed monitoring volumes on Kubernetes using Prometheus, node-exporter, and nsenter. One disadvantage of this approach is that node-exporter must be run as a privileged container. In the future, it may be better to have Kubelet collect the volume stats so that we can get the stats directly from Kubernetes instead of running node-exporter as a privileged container."

I thought that node-exporter was meant to run in a container or on the host itself. Are there any potential downside to the single node-exporter in a side car approach?

</comment><comment><USER7> Now I just need a flexdriver which receives the warning and activates the code to create a new ebs volume and adds it to whatever lm k8s volume. EBS gp2 is uselessly slow without just combining them into one super danger mount. As with everything else in amazon, never use one of x. Whenever I use S3 and EBS i put an abstraction between me and them because amazon.</comment>


A Saudi prince's attempt to silence critics on Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/mohammed-bin-salman-twitter-investigation/ <comment><USER2> Great story and a great read! I googled the characters afterwards, and there are some interesting addendums & updates:

Looks like Ahmad Abouammo (Twitter's former head of Middle East partnerships) was arrested in Seattle in Nov 2019, but Ali Alzabarah's escape to Saudi Arabia was successful (at least in terms of being arrested by the US government):

[https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-twitter- employees-...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-former-twitter-employees- and-saudi-national-charged-acting-illegal-agents-saudi-arabia)

BUT, as of a month ago, a filing was made to drop the charges (?!):

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/28/21345794/twitter- employee...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/28/21345794/twitter-employees- saudi-arabia-spies-charges-dropped-case-dismissed)

Fascinating case...

<comment><USER3> > BUT, as of a month ago, a filing was made to drop the charges (?!):

And I guess the reason for this might be very related with the last paragraph of the Wired's article...

<comment><USER4> The Wooing of Jared Kushner: How the Saudis Got a Friend in the White House

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/world/middleeast/saudi- mb...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/world/middleeast/saudi-mbs-jared- kushner.html)

<comment><USER5> Haven't the Saudis had a "friend" in the White House for decades?

<comment> blaser-waffle aka multiple Bush presidents

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Meanwhile, if you create a new Twitter account today from a VPN and follow 30 people, it will lock you out until you verify a non-VoIP phone number.

Removing the number instantly re-locks the account.

It's really immoral that they demand identity-linked PII while running such a loose ship, where anyone with enough money can buy their way in to obtain that PII, track you down, and maybe cut you up with a bone saw.

Twitter is complicit in this abuse, considering their explicit technical steps taken to ensure that you _cannot use Twitter_ without exposing yourself to these sorts of criminals in the governments of foreign countries, as well as similar ones in the government of Twitter's own jurisdiction.

> _And while Alzabarah's job entailed maintaining systems to keep Twitter > working properly, his position at the company did allow him access to the > private information of many users, including their phone numbers, email > addresses, and IP addresses. That meant that in some instances, Alzabarah > could not only help unmask an anonymous regime critic, but also pinpoint the > person's location._

<comment><USER7> > where anyone with enough money can buy their way in to obtain that PII, > track you down, and maybe cut you up with a bone saw.

TBF, I think that the vast majority of companies out there are vulnerable to this. I've worked for 8 tech companies in my career, none of which did anything beyond a basic background check.

Truly mitigating the problem you're touching on requires a level of vetting and surveillance that you'd typically see applied to intelligence operatives. I think this is similar to how we view infosec generally: those with sufficient resources will be able to penetrate a network, regardless of the design or execution of network security.

<comment><USER8> This is letting Twitter off the hook. It is not impossible to protect users personal information, even within a company, to a very limited set of people who actually need it, with audits on when and how they are accessing it, and periodic reviews of everyone's access levels. Mature organizations follow specific standards for this kind of stuff. For a company like Twitter, where the privacy of this information literally can mean life or death, it is unforgiveable to not have a better grip on it (cue some non-technical regional bizdev guy having deep access, as per the article).

<comment><USER7> That's a really good point, reducing access would help here.

If you're a nation state with the resources of Saudi Arabia, it still wouldn't be impossible to bribe or blackmail an employee who has prod access because companies don't have much of an eye on employees private lives. They would have the resources and theoretically the incentive to really dig into the social engineering/coercion side of things. You'd be amazed how many people that make incredible salaries are in fairly significant amounts of debt. It's pretty common in western culture, and that's a prime opportunity for those kinds of operations.

<comment><USER6> "prod access" should not be a single large group or access boundary.

Access to non-tokenized PII data stores or the small set of systems that require touching untokenized PII should be a very small compartment, with extremely tight min-two-person deployment/introspection controls and minimal change frequency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why hasn't Twitter banned Mohammed bin Salman from their website yet? Surely he has violated their terms of use many times at this point. Do Twitter's rules not apply to him because he's insanely rich?

<comment><USER10> Do rules apply to anybody who is insanely rich anymore?

<comment><USER11> Anymore?

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

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

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

Wealth and power have insulated those who possess them from the consequences of their actions since forever.

<comment><USER12> Yep, I once heard a quote: "rules and laws are like spiderwebs. They are sure to catch insects that cause trouble, but larger animals will just pass on through."

<comment><USER13> [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:20...](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2008.01.0063:chapter=5&highlight=laws)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In 2019 there was a massive exodus of Saudi dissidents from Twitter to Parler. I wonder if those people had some intuition of what was going on behind the scenes at Twitter [https://www.thedailybeast.com/about-200000-saudi-arabian- use...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/about-200000-saudi-arabian-users- suddenly-flood-parler-a-pro-trump-twitter-alternative)

<comment><USER15> I'm surprised it took that long when news of Saudi $300MM investment in Twitter came out in 2015.

If someone gives you $300MM, you don't say No to them. Indeed, you've likely already said yes.

<comment><USER16> Why not? What leverage do the Saudis have against twitter besides not giving them more money?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This highlights more than ever that whatever customer data your employees have access to, you need to log every single access to it, and have automatic audits- who should be accessing what? What accesses are surprising?

Seems like something one could build a SaaS business around- send them reports that <user> accessed <fields> about <customer ID> on <date>, along with a copy of attributes and roles about each user. Service could offer deep dives, querying, reporting, along with ML or rule-based flagging to say "That seems odd".

If Twitter can't build the infrastructure needed to do that, I can't imagine how few small companies can do it themselves either.

<comment><USER18> Telcos have this level of monitoring of accounts because employees routinely would abuse this access to find details of exs, family members, friends and celebrities (billing info, call detail records, etc.). The problem was there was no proactive monitoring - it was all reaction based upon complaints that would kick off the investigation. I asked why this wasn't automatic to detect clear abuse and the answer was "do you know how many people we'd have to fire if we went looking for abuse?".

<comment><USER19> If they're abusing their position they don't deserve to keep their job. The companies complicity makes them party to whatever these staff do. Whether a lawyer can prove that or not depends on the depth of the aggrieveds bank account.

<comment><USER20> So when I worked for the cable company straight out of uni and we would look up famous local people to see what packages they subscribed to, we should have all been fired? I guess technically, but that's pretty draconian. Are you also no mercy, hard on crime, 1-strike and you're out person, or more progressive in that area?

<comment><USER19> You answered your own question. Seems you're having trouble taking responsibility for the fact that you acted unprofessionally by lashing out with presumptive attacks on my beliefs, which are incorrect. The culture of that workplace is a mitigating factor for the lower ranked staff, conversely it is a compounding factor for the senior staff that failed to put an end to it and discipline those involved.

Should you have been fired? Depends on how much you abused your privilege and what you did with that information. Your comparison to 1 strike laws and greater crime is pretty rich given the information you improperly accessed could be used to blackmail others, or whatever. It's important to treat such information with the utmost respect. Your cavalier attitude and inability to accept responsibility in this regard may be very common within the tech industry, but such attitudes are also why there is a growing movement to; take data out of the hands of companies, and to harshly punish companies who fail to protect the data on one hand while vacuuming up as much as possible with the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems to be something quite common at Twitter to give information from its users, I have seen interviews where people openly admit that you can find the identity of an account holder if you have friends working there. After the last "hack" it looks like once you are inside their system, there are not many safeguards or auditing.

<comment><USER22> It would be good if this were an exception but it isn't. The easiest way to gain access to lots of privileged information is to work as support worker for a bank or insurance company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > A millenial himself, [MBS] spent his youth eating fast food, playing Age of > Empires and first-person shooter games, and keeping up with friends on the > internet, according to people who've known him since childhood.

It's worth remembering that dictators are not inhuman, and they are not so different from us.

> Asaker would pay more than $300,000 to Abouammo, deposited in a Lebanese > bank account that Abouammo had a relative open for him. "Proactive and > reactively we will delete evil, my brother," Abouammo texted Asaker just > before one deposit of $9,911.

They structured [0] the bribes to avoid SARs; structuring really does happen.

> A third, a Saudi, was "a professional" who used encryption to conceal his > identity, though once he signed in without encryption, and Alzabarah was > able to track his IP address.

> [Alzabarah] spoke with Asaker on an open phone line and communicated via > email.

> So rather than follow the FBI's request to keep things quiet to assist the > case, Twitter lawyers brought Alzabarah in the following afternoon, accused > him of improperly accessing user accounts, and told him he was temporarily > suspended.

Operational security is hard. Just one slip-up can doom the entire scheme, and here we see those slip-ups from everybody; from the folks being targeted by MBS, from MBS's goons, and from Twitter.

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

<comment><USER24> > It's worth remembering that dictators are not inhuman, and they are not so > different from us.

It's also worth remembering we're talking about someone who assassinates his critics and cuts them up into pieces. I would say the "bone saw" aspect outweighs the "playing AoE" aspect and he is very different from us.

<comment><USER25> The point is that in his situation we don't know how many apparently "normal" people will start sending bone-saws out into the world.

<comment><USER26> 100% this. It's also important not to dehumanise history's bad guys, because that leads to a culture of complacency whereby people think "it could never happen here, because they were monsters and we are not".

<comment><USER27> There might be two slightly different definitions of "humanize" at work here. Both of these are from the Cambridge dictionary [1]:

1) "to make something that is not human seem like a person"

2) "to make something less unpleasant and more suitable for people"

With dictators, I think we should try to do 1) but not 2).

[1] [https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/humanize](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/humanize)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very thrilling read, and the last paragraph sent chills up through my back.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't understand why Twitter didn't want to comply with the immediate request from the FBI. Straight up evil.

<comment><USER30> feds sometimes come with less straightforward cases, so I wouldn't say evil, more incompetent

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Remember when Saudi Arabia tried to convince Moxie to help them intercept people's Twitter traffic? [1]

[1] [https://moxie.org/2013/05/13/saudi- surveillance.html](https://moxie.org/2013/05/13/saudi-surveillance.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> if he played age of empires as religiously as I did, he should have realized nothing beats the long bows of the Britons...

<comment><USER32> goth's huskarl unit? They eat arrows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The larger the organization, the more likely that it will leak information...

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't like this article because it omits some crucial details that could lead readers down a specific path of thinking.

It's unclear if the inside men, Alzabarah or Abouammo, are living on H-1Bs, full American citizens, or are in the process of immigrating. Depending on the answer to that question, Twitter may need to block the employment of immigrants or citizens to stop this sort of industrial sabotage in the future. Otherwise, every country will try to have their own inside man and Twitter will be forced to overdedicate resources to countering them.

If they'd made his citizenship status clear, the solution would be far clearer to readers.

<comment><USER35> In what way is passport color a reliable predictor of trustworthiness?

<comment><USER34> Individuals are more likely to want to commit espionage for another state if they were born in or are a citizen of that state.

<comment><USER35> Individuals are more likely to want to commit espionage when they have money troubles. Why not hire only the already-wealthy?

Individuals are more likely to want to commit espionage when they are tempted with sex. Why not demand evidence of membership in closed religious communities to address that?

<comment><USER36> On the former, that's absolutely a thing with all sorts of levels to it. Base level is that most companies run background checks including a credit pull. Next level is use of elite academic credentialing, i.e., "we only like to hire from ___".

On the latter, because lol that is not going to have the effect you're looking for.

<comment><USER35> On the former, I'm quite aware of that. What I'm not aware of is this sort of loyalty screening for low-level employees, as suggested.

On the latter, you're getting closer to the point I'm making.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Traffic Server Proposal - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/TrafficServerProposal

<comment><USER2> Wonder how this will compare to Nginx speed-wise...

</comment><comment><USER3> I could really go for a sane caching load balancer. My experience with stuff like pound,squid and nginx so far leaves much to be desired (and chaining them isn't exactly desirable either). Why do they have default maximum url lengths less than IE that can only be fixed with a recompile, its madness I tell you :p

<comment><USER4> Might want to try Varnish ( <http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/> ), which has seriously impressed me with both its performance and flexibility.

I'm really interested to see how TrafficServer stacks up compared to Varnish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The proposal is a bit light on details - does anyone know if this has multilayer switch capabilities?

My kingdom for an open source layer 7 switch...

<comment><USER6> Does L7 count? <http://l7-filter.sourceforge.net/README>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> From my understanding, this is kind of a squid / load balancer in one? Or is it really just Yahoo's version of squid?

<comment><USER8> Travis, yeah my impression is similar -- a reverse proxy cache (e.g., Squid or Varnish) plus a light weight layer 7 load balancer (which is how I tend to use nginx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to see a comparison with varnish which has extremely similar aims.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand why this comment was downvoted?</comment></comment>


How much revenue top technology companies earn per second - <AUTHOR> http://happier.co.uk/infogram/amount-top-companies-earn-per-second.html

<comment><USER2> \- I wonder how long it will take a small startup to reach where these top technology companies have reached.</comment>


A look at what happens in SQL Server when SqlSatellite returns data - <AUTHOR> http://www.nielsberglund.com/2018/01/03/microsoft-sql-server-r-services---internals-xvii/ <comment><AUTHOR> We look at the inner workings in SQL Server when data is returned by the SqlSatellite</comment>


8-day Hacker Retreat in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> http://www.greatergoodretreat.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the organizers. Please let us know if you have any questions!</comment>


Missouri to use deafening military LRAD tech in construction zones - <AUTHOR> http://www.leftlanenews.com/missouri-to-use-deafening-military-lrad-tech-to-warn-speeders-in-construction-zones.html

<comment><USER2> _"...though it is unclear if the sound levels that are capable of overpowering 'loud tunes' inside a car are low enough to avoid damaging the hearing of a motorcyclist wearing a half helmet."_

Or a driver in a convertible. Or a driver who had to exit his car due to an emergency. Or construction workers farther down the road. Not to mention that drivers could get startled by the deafening sound (which might be painful) and lose control of their vehicles.

This seems like a rather ill-conceived plan to me, and I suspect it will result in lots of harm and many lawsuits.</comment>


GPU Profiling has landed in Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://benoitgirard.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/gpu-profiling-has-landed/

<comment><USER2> I'm the author of the feature & blog post, it wasn't mean to hit HN. This is meant for gecko developers right now as it only measures the compositing GPU time, and not WebGL GPU time (different thread+Context). If this proves to be useful for compositing time then we will likely discuss this with the DevTools about integrating it with the new performance tools being developed.

We're also working on exposing disjoint timer query directly to WebGL to let people profile exactly what they need [1].

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=974832](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=974832)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As a heads up, this looks like it's just for internal GPU profiling for now.

You need the Gecko Profiler Addon v1.14.2.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll also need FF nightly. This seems to lock up FF in OSX for me. In v1.14.2 of the add on has a new GPU option.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, sorry for posting this to the general web development community; it seems like this tool is only useful for teams internal to Mozilla profiling the gecko rendering engine. I was hoping it could provide a Gecko based alternative to chrome:tracing, but not yet.</comment></comment></comment>