Apple Rejects iOS App for Using MoltenVK (Vulkan Over Metal) - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Apple-Rejects-iOS-MoltenVK&x <comment><USER2> Nat Brown from Valve posted a comment on the article:

>I know app rejections and the Apple ecosystem rules can be frustrating and cause a lot of consternation, but in this case I _think_ this is likely a legitimate rejection for using the kIOSurfaceIsGlobal=true flag when creating an IOSurface - Apple documents this as private and not allowed by sandboxed apps on iOS, and there are legitimate security & sandbox reasons to not support IOSurfaces that can be guessed and mapped to a foreign process using IOSurfaceLookup(). It's likely Apple's static analyzer found this during submission. We (Valve) worked to add this type of IOSurface-backed MTLTexture for Vulkan VR support for macOS and I suspect it slipped into the iOS build inadvertently - we don't need that support on iOS (yet? If somebody knows the developer and can point them my way (firstname.lastname@example.com) I'd be happy to figure out if this was the only issue, and I'll create a PR for MoltenVK to drop the global flag out of the iOS build.

>Apple graphics folks I work with are fine with MoltenVK, and many Apple and AMD folks have provided concrete technical feedback to improve the performance of MoltenVK, and we have uncovered bugs in HLSL->GLSL->SPIR-V->MSL together which should help make the entire graphics ecosystem stronger.

[https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest- phoron...](https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix- articles/1034847-apple-rejects-ios-app-for-using-moltenvk-vulkan-alleged-non- public-api/page4)

So, no. Apple isn't out to get MoltenVK. On the contrary, they have been helping improve it's performance.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a deceptive title. It wasn't the use of MoltenVK, it was that MoltenVK used non public APIs. It even says in the article:

> We were alerted today by an indie game studio that one of their iOS games is > now rejected by Apple over its MoltenVK usage. Specifically, the game was > rejected for "non-public API" usage. Apple's rejection letter cites the use > of non-public interfaces around IOSurface, which is used directly by > MoltenVK.

<comment><USER4> Seems to me an all-too-convient rationale to force devs to use the proprietary Metal framework directly.

<comment><USER5> No... Sounds like a commonly enforced policy which is being enforced normally. Why would they really care about which gfx api they use?

<comment><USER6> I thought apple in general follow this guideline unless you are one the big guys? Is that right or am I remembering this wrong?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's an issue for this on the MoltenVK github page: [https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/193](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/issues/193)

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, there's no information there about which private API use needs to be removed.

<comment><USER9> The only level of private API use that Apple will accept is 'none', so this question is at best immaterial. _All_ of the private API use needs to be removed.

<comment><USER8> Right—they (Molten) might not know which of their API calls is to a private API. Although that's doubtful—you have to deliberately go out of your way to use a private iOS API, using performSelector: or similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The confusing thing about this situation is that the game apparently was developed in Unity 3D, which has a Metal backend for iOS, with a fallback to OpenGL ES for older devices. Unity doesn't have a Vulkan backend for iOS.

</comment><comment><USER11> from TFA: MoltenVK uses non-public APIs, so this is no policy change from the app store

</comment><comment><USER12> Apple's Metal migration is nothing new, stop complaining.

</comment><comment><USER13> Typical Apple jerk move.

1\. Apple didn't provide Vulkan support.

2\. Developers of MoltenVK found "public" Metal API to be inadequate, and used something that Apple considers not public to implement Vulkan translation.

3\. Apple found an excuse to ban usage of MoltenVK under pretense that their non public APIs shouldn't be used.

Surely, Apple could:

1\. Provide Vulkan to begin with.

2\. Provide public APIs in Metal that are adequate to implement Vulkan.

But doing that would reduce Apple's lock-in, so they are resorting to jerk moves. Apple being Apple.

<comment><USER14> To play the devils advocate, Why should Vulcan propagate their own APIs instead of picking one and porting others to work on top of it? All they are doing is this: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/) Considering they don't control any platform, they are misguided.

<comment><USER15> Vulkan was called Mantle before AMD gave it to the open standards group. Mantle existed before Metal and Apple knew it was being made into an open standard before they released Metal.

AMD and Khronos were open about their plans and Apple was/is part of the group.

To answer your question, Khronos are trying to promote an open free API to help developers save time and effort, picking Metal as a closed source and late arrival would be unworkable.</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin Money-Laundering Cartel Was Operating from Inside a Florida Prison - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/07/04/this-bitcoin-money-laundering-cartel-was-operating-from-inside-a-florida-prison/ <comment><USER2> Clickbait. Also not laundering as it starts with Bitcoin.

> Authorities were first tipped off in 2016, and inmates found success with > their scam a total of 43 times.

> "Out of those 43 transactions, all deposits made onto commissary accounts, > it was just over $8,009 in theft," said Cardillo.</comment>


Show HN: Cheapshot, a multiplayer GPS game - <AUTHOR> https://cheapshot.co <comment><USER2> Very cool IDEA, could be the new _Farmville_! Also, why are all the sprites emojis?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Emoji is a free and a well-known franchise that we actually love. Our first submission to the App Store was without any graphics, just emoji symbols. However, we found ourselves in the Emoji Crackdown (Apple rejecting everything with Apple emoji) so we had to create our own set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really like the idea. Show it to my kids and they are out playing right now</comment>


Responsive Elements - <AUTHOR> http://kumailht.com/responsive-elements/ <comment><USER2> this is one of the most brilliant tools imaginable.

once we understand how to use the flexibility that is only _hinted_ at, with this tool, we will start to be on our way to a web that is _much_smarter_ at displaying our content in the best manner possible.

i've been looking for someone to make this conceptual breakthrough for _years_, so i'm very glad to see it.

kudos, kumail, for your ability to "think different".

-bowerbird

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone care to explain the cons of using this?

<comment><USER4> Not a list of cons exactly, but it's trying to take an innate property of CSS and browsers and make it seem like a breakthrough, an innovation. It isn't.

With the linked article's methods one can create a horizontal expansion tool. But we can already do that by horizontally stretching the browser's window. In fact, using Chrome, I can horizontally stretch this HN submission window and produce the same effect.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: do you think i should put more efforts in this jquery plugin? - <AUTHOR>

I just developed this night a jquery plugin allowing you to simulate live text typing on DOM elements. It is very basic for now since it is just a few hours fresh.
I think it could be handy for some designers to make their website feel more dynamic, for example for coding tutorial or writing lessons producers. Any thoughts to share?
Github: https://github.com/gwendall/textplayer
Demo: https://gwendall.github.com <comment><USER2> Looks like a js news ticker so it's not exactly novel. Lots of those around.

</comment><comment><USER3> demo link broken?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for that, no https --> <http://gwendall.github.com></comment></comment>


Always-on voice search from your desktop: "Ok Google" comes to Google.com - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/always-on-voice-search-from-your-desktop-ok-google-comes-to-google-com/

<comment><USER2> This is really, really cool!</comment>


Origami for the web: Fold up the DOM - <AUTHOR> http://oridomi.com

<comment><USER2> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6822792](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6822792)</comment>


A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> To me HNs biggest feature is the lack of features and the lack of 'innovation', or rather redesigns for the sake of redesigning.

Keep up the fantastic moderation and the wonderful lack of innovation, HN people!

<comment><USER3> Completely agreed. The site:

1) loads instantly

2) is mostly plaintext.

Reddit, for what it's worth, provides about the same features but on an absolutely heavyweight site. Especially the new (redesigned) SPA reddit

<comment><USER4> SPA is one of the worst things to happen to the web. There are a small number of instances where it makes sense but it just ruins sites like Reddit, especially on a mobile device.

<comment><USER5> When do you think SPA's are the best fit?

<comment><USER6> SPAs are the best we can do for... applications. Online spreadsheet? SPA. Document editor? SPA. Image editor? SPA. Visual programming environment? SPA. IDE? SPA. Facebook makes sense as an SPA too - it's basically a rich widget "dashboard" app with some content creation applications inside of it. Building applications for the web is still not the greatest experience because you're fundamentally building an application over hacks built to expand an abstraction built for hypertext content (the DOM). But, honestly modern JavaScript frameworks, TypeScript, and transpiled environments like Elm all do an admirable job working with what they have.

On the flip side, SPAs are terrible for hypertext content, because existing web technology was literally built for that. Why should a blog be an application? The content creation side, sure, maybe, but viewing a blog? That's literally what HTML was made for. A table of contents full of links like the HN or Reddit homepage? That's pretty much hypertext 101.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'll add one to this list, I'm sorry if it comes off as complaining, but at least it's topical.

There is more than one karma tracking algorithm that can be activated for a given account. That is to say, a downvote is not always a downvote, and an upvote is not always an upvote, and the point score of a comment is not always exactly equal to the number of up and downvotes.

Accounts that are flagged for posting flame-baiting or ideological comments can be switched to an alternate voting mode where votes are not counted the same way. This may mean that any manual downvotes are given greater weight, or upvotes are underweighted, or downvoting is automatically applied after some time providing a type of downward gravity which must be overcome.

I don't know the precise algorithm. It's complicated by the fact that I've been getting auto-downvoted by bots. But due to some overly combative COVID related posts my account is in this current state. I've found that even researched technical comments of mine will inevitably end up at -1 karma, or struggle to stay above 0.

After reaching out to dang about bot-downvoting Daniel was nice enough to look into it and confirmed my account was getting bot-downvoted but also explained that my account had been flagged and made some suggestions on posts that crossed the line. I've had a long and mostly enjoyable relationship with HN so hopefully I'll be out of purgatory soon.

To be clear I have no interest in debating whether the feature was misapplied in my own personal case, but rather just it's abstract technical merits make for great meta-discussion of moderation techniques for social media boards.

<comment><USER8> I was going to mention the same thing. This happens on Reddit too.

If your posts are unpopular for any reason you're automatically penalized. Doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, you're penalized for posting anything that people disagree with or don't want to hear.

That's why sites like Reddit and HN will always be echo chambers. Dissenting voices are automatically silenced. Not 100% of the time, but often enough that most will probably never waste their time posting.

<comment><USER9> I find that Reddit is generally much worse about this kind of thing; perhaps it is the culture or maybe it is the fact that votes are public. If you say something people don't like, they'll quickly pile on you. For some reason people there _really_ like going with the flow, and you can't even reply to clarify without them coming after you. I have found it much less likely that this happens on Hacker News, and people are generally more willing to listen to a comment regardless of how others felt about it.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it's just reddit, I believe these systems are prone to triggering some primitive human instincts towards group interaction. I can think of a few plausible explanations for a discrepancy in outcomes across HN and reddit. Perhaps hidden scores or the per-comment floor HN uses suppresses it. Perhaps HN attracts a particular sort of personality while reddit attracts a more representative slice of humanity. Maybe reddit is harder to moderate, has worse moderator tools, worse mods, or just too many people. I'm not sure what the answer is, but one way or the other I consider these sort of systems to be failed experiments.

> _Researchers from Hebrew University, NYU, and MIT explored herd mentality in > online spaces, specifically in the context of "digitized, aggregated > opinions".[4] Online comments were given an initial positive or negative > vote (up or down) on an undisclosed website over five months.[5] The control > group comments were left alone. The researchers found that "the first person > reading the comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an up vote if it > had been already given a fake positive score".[5] Over the five months, > comments artificially rated positively showed a 25% higher average score > than the control group, with the initial negative vote ending up with no > statistical significance in comparison to the control group.[4] The > researchers found that "prior ratings created significant bias in individual > rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created > asymmetric herding effects".[4]_

> _"That is a significant change", Dr. Aral, one of the researchers involved > in the experiment, stated. "We saw how these very small signals of social > influence snowballed into behaviors like herding."[5]_

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think there are some "features" missing from this list. I seem to recall that Hacker News will transparently remove some characters from titles (such as emoji and exclamation points), which seems like a bad feature to me, and one that people should be aware of.

<comment><USER9> It will remove many emoji from comments as well, although not all of them. Not sure what the criteria is for that, either.

<comment><USER12> That's a shame, because I could see legit and serious reasons why someone would want emoji in comments. For instance, what if someone was trying to illustrate a point by "drawing" a diagram of a network, using different emoji to represent different types of nodes.

<comment><USER13> As someone who despises emojis, I am more than happy that they are removed. There are other ways we could show the hypothetical example.

<comment><USER14> Agree. It's almost as if using vocabulary is wrong. I've been watching how our conversations deteriorate by gratuitous use of emoji. It seems that some seem to think that emoji can cut through all language barriers, because they're universally understood. Unfortunately, the effect I see is newspeak to the detriment of all, as we lose the nuances of language itself, and indeed we become more 'visual only' in our language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oooh I didn't know about /invited. Few stories of very high quality, looks like HN back in the day

<comment><USER9> /invited is basically the second-chance queue for things that have been personally stamped to be interesting by the moderators, so it's generally pretty good.

<comment><USER16> It's only a small part of it, the ones that were too old to put in the queue directly, so we emailed repost invites for them instead. It's on my list to publish a more complete page. The _types_ of stories are much the same on the larger list though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > > [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822)

Hacker News has so many strange, undocumented things that even such a list is incomplete. I've run into entirely new things I didn't know existed just by using it more, or by happening upon one of 'dang's comments…

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's an example:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20643177)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't forget about their API on github.

It's simplistic but you can still use it to write a sh*ttier version of HN.

[https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

I just wish they'd open source their We're-Not-Reddit behaviors library.

<comment><USER18> The API has no authentication, which makes it useless for anything other than a reader.

<comment><USER9> You may find this interesting, and as a bonus it also includes something that you haven't documented: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526)

<comment><USER18> That is indeed interesting, but I have a feeling it'll be documented once it launches. :P

<comment><USER9> Was talking more about the existence of an alpha-tester list, which has some additional features itself :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Also needs a section on muting. If too many of your consecutive comments get downvotes you start encountering "you are posting too fast" messages, even if it there was over an hour between comments and several hours since your most recent.

<comment><AUTHOR> For related prior discussion:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+are+posting+too+fast%...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+are+posting+too+fast%22+AND+\(%22hn%22+OR+%22hackernews%22\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've always found it kind of ironic (or at least funny) that the code for HN isn't open source.

<comment><USER21> For me I find it funny that HN doesn't scale. Whenever there's an unusually active topic, the mods have to scramble to make countermeasures to keep the site up.

<comment><USER16> That's not true. I wonder where you got that idea.

It is true that the app server runs on a single core and we don't have a lot of performance to spare. But it handles the current levels of active threads reasonably well. The main concern is that if average load goes up significantly we'll be in trouble at some point.

We've got an ongoing major project that will hopefully flatten that curve, but unfortunately it's hard to find time to work on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is amazingly useful. I've been on HN for nearly 13 years and I only knew about a fraction of this stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree, not sure why after X amount of rep is earned something like this is not featured for just for new users, users who haven't viewed it, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ah, there is nothing past 501? I was hoping something else would unlock for user whose karma points are over 9000.

<comment><AUTHOR> PG's phone number used to appear if your rep got high enough, not sure if that's still a feature.

<comment><USER24> On his profile page (/user?id=pg) you mean? I don't see it there with 11k rep. It might require higher rep nowadays or indeed be removed.

<comment><USER25> 65K karma (and #22 on /leaders) and I don't see it. I think that was a joke.

<comment><USER26> It happens somewhere between ten and eleven digits of karma :)

<comment><USER27> Relevantish short film:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae2ghhGkY-s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae2ghhGkY-s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I agree with most of those policies, but "downranking of tutorials" seems kinda dumb. I could see it making sense for "how to React" drivel that people use for self-promotion, but I've learned a lot from 1-off tutorials I saw on HN first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reasoning is HN's goal, per dang, is to promote substantially new information — unless the tutorial fits this meaning, it's less of a priority to feature than those posts that do meet it.

Worth noting there's nothing stopping you from building custom HN searches like this to find tutorials posts, though this would not solve the likelihood of the community posting related comments:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=tutorial&sort=byDate&type=story)

<comment><USER29> Citation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, read all the comments by dang (aka HN's main mod) here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239164)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'd love if I could choose on my user page not to see my HN points total always there next to my name in the top bar. Seeing that often turns me into someone I don't like.

<comment><USER16> We might implement that as a profile option. One question is where such a feature should fall between minimal (don't show karma next to usernames in top bar) vs. maximal (don't show any point totals or karma about anything). I feel like it might be better to go the whole hog and just have the maximal option. 'nokarma'.

<comment><USER30> Oh great. Yes, I guess not seeing the voting on one's own comments would be good too. (Looking at the score on my comments is a very small percentage of my HN time, but my HN total score is there every time I return to the main page. Have to learn to ignore it I guess.)

As long as it doesn't mess with the voting system too much! Maybe there'd be many more bad comments if people couldn't see their points total/comment scores.

<comment><USER16> The maximal version would hide story points as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >> If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings. The default is #ff6600. Here's the complete set of colors users have set.

Happy to see that the most #bada55 colour of all is in that list.

<comment><USER32> Would be nice to see a sorted list and the count for each color. Could even bucket very similar colors so we get a sense for the general HN taste for colors, though I don't know the first thing about bucketing colors.

I use #93a1a1, personally (i.e. $base1 from solarized [https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/](https://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/))

<comment><USER33> I use the Dark Reader extension [0], and the standard HN topcolor stood out too much, so I darkened it to #fff0e6.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/darkreader/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/darkreader/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Neat. Been here nearly a decade & didn't know that downvotes are capped to -4 for example.

<comment><USER35> Is that a recent change? I'm pretty sure some of my less popular remarks earned double digit negative points.

<comment><USER18> No, that's been around forever.

Back when comment scores were public via the API, I retrieved the lowest- rating comments for each month. which was always -4: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdHXgp...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IfbSDYVBXiHZCuMdHXgprhmeCVc4XDtOGizF9CSGyUo/edit?usp=sharing)

Bonus histogram of comment scores calculated in 2014: [https://minimaxir.com/img/hn- comments/distribution_comment_p...](https://minimaxir.com/img/hn- comments/distribution_comment_points.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've wondered why we can't comment on YC jobs postings on HN. I imagine commenting would be beneficial for questions/answers about the company or position.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because they are officially sponsored YC related ADs.

<comment><USER37> Although it is a fact, that doesn't really answer why you can't comment on them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Generally speaking ADs don't allow comments. Have an example or reasoning why this would make sense?

<comment><USER38> for users: How about "I tried it, I like it" or "this product gave me warts", both things it could be useful to know.

for makers of products HN people like: Comments could draw more attention to the product, more clicks, more sales.

for makers of products HN people don't like: No, can't think of a reason why allowing comments on ads would make sense.

<comment><USER39> The ads are job ads, not product ads. All of your criticisms don't really apply here. I say this as a person who doesn't like them and rather wishes they weren't here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Comment "markdown" syntax with some examples would be a nice addition to this.

<comment> ainar-g While we're on the topic of HN syntax, I _really_ wish they would add proper blockquotes. Quotes in monospace look ugly, especially on mobile, and quotes that simply start with a ">" aren't visually distinct enough, imo. Just indenting a paragraph when it starts with a ">" would probably be enough.

<comment><USER41> Not allowing quotes drives users to limit their quoting to a relevant part. I observed other places that users have a hard time to limit themselves and context is always there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> [https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors](https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors)

<comment><AUTHOR> Are these the only supported "custom colors" ?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7432201)

<comment><USER43> No, you can set any CSS color if you have the minimum karma required. The linked page is just a list of colors that users have actually set.

I really wish any user could set a custom topcolor. I found the default orange hard on my eyes, and I was glad when I could change it.

Mine is #d0c8b5, which is simply a darker version of the page background color. Plain and unobtrusive, and the bit of orange in the "Y" logo sits nicely in the corner.

<comment><USER44> And you can always use user.css to adjust per site CSS to your preference. I use it for a few sites; there are addons that facilitate it, but I've never bothered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Not mentioned, but you can be "rate limited", where you can post up to ~ 3 comments per hour (?not sure), else you get a "posting too fast, please slow down" message. It's keeping us trolls at bay

<comment><USER46> Didn't know that was a thing. Is it a function of your karma?

<comment><USER45> No, manually flagged

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> "Posts without URLs get penalized." That's strange. Does that include "Ask HN" posts? I would have thought that submissions with no link would be good discussion starters.

<comment><USER48> Could this be why most Ask HN posts are desaturated? I always wondered why that was the case.

<comment><USER29> "Desaturated"?

<comment><USER49> The text color is lighter, as if the post had been downvoted.

<comment><USER29> That's the 'visited link' color, which indicates that you've visited a given post's link. Posts do not change color based on votes. For posts without a link, reading the post requires still visiting the post's link, so it works out as expected from there.

<comment> frosted-flakes No, the actual colour of the text on text-only posts is super light. I read somewhere a while back that it was supposed to discourage people from using it too much.

Here's an example from the front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930)

<comment><USER29> Ah, thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think the minimalistic design is appropriate and efficient mostly.

…with a couple caveats regarding accessibility: the default font is way, way too small, and some colours don't have enough contrast (eg, the "visited link"). Also, a tiny bit more of formatting would make comments more readable while keeping them sober and focused (eg, blockquotes, monospaced inlines, true hyperlinks).

</comment><comment><USER51> Is there a simple link to get the top stories from the past week? /best seems to only return from the past couple days.

</comment><comment><USER52> I was always kind of surprised that there's a relatively high karma threshold for downvoting, but seemingly not for upvoting. Seems like it would invite voting rings. I guess there's already other software to detect that though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Downvotes per item are limited to -4 and the signal-to-noise ratio for negative votes beyond pushing them below the "new comment" boost is of little positive impact in filtering content, in my opinion.

And yes, there a lot of filters in place for upvotes, many of which are intentionally kept secret.

Personally, I don't use downvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Thanks for posting this. I've been an avid reader of HN for years (with a few modest/minor submissions). I had no idea about a substantial amount of this... I wonder how much is commonly known in the community?

</comment><comment><USER54> Does anyone know why the top bar sometimes has a thick black line underneath it?

<comment><USER16> minimaxir should add that one! It doesn't look like it's on the list.

<comment><USER18> Huh, I thought I did add that. Will do!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can we make feature requests here? Hah.

I would absolutely love it if the comment box was taller than 7 lines on mobile, perhaps just at least when editing a comment.

<comment><USER29> If you set the delay profile value to X it'll let you edit and save a comment for up to X minutes before other users can see it. I use it extensively on mobile and have mine set to 7.

<comment><USER7> Ooh, that's a good one because I tend to post then edit, edit, edit, so a little delay would be nice. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I find it interesting that politics and diversity each have their own section on here. I always considered diversity a political topic.

<comment><USER56> I suspect that it's more about optics than practicality. Not all diversity topics are political, but most diversity topics are probably outside of what the mods believe to be within the purview of HN.

Making it a separate category bin bypasses all of the hemming and hawing over particulars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The front page way back feature is pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER58> One thing that I'd like to know is if there is any kind of penalty if the stories you submit get flagged.

<comment><USER16> No.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Thanks! Pretty useful. Can anyone supply a good comparison between Hacker News and Reddit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Stating the obvious, Reddit was in the first YC batch; YC is HN's parent company. Further, HN was created in part because Reddit's intend is more general than HN; HN's intend is to focus on substantially new information that triggers both curiosity & notable dialogues.

<comment><USER60> Tip: intend is a verb. She intends to win the election. What did you intend? Paul intended not to lose.

Intent is a noun. That is her intent.

Intent is also a verb: She is intent on winning the election.

You wanted "intent" as a noun in both your usages above.

<comment><USER61> I don't think intent is a verb. It is either a noun or adjective. In the sentence "She is intent on winning the election" the verb would be "is" and "intent" is an adjective that describes her.

Compare:

His program focused on dinosaurs. (verb) His program is focused on dinosaurs. (adjective describing his program).

You would never say "his program intented on dinosuars" because it's not a verb.

<comment><USER60> Correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> "Moderators will sometimes rescue a post which didn't receive a lot of upvotes and reset the submission time on the post."

This sounds more like manipulation of content based upon moderator viewpoints or interests. HN has a wide enough audience to hit a good post the first time around.

<comment><USER63> > HN has a wide enough audience to hit a good post the first time around.

Unfortunately, it is widely agreed that a lot of good quality content goes unnoticed. Which might be due to the sheer number of submissions.

That could be seen in yesterday's post about quality content that goes under.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> /leaders is pretty cool. First place got over 300k points, wtf.

<comment><AUTHOR> Related link, leader list:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)

Direct link to top users by rep:

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

(tptacek's comments are super useful and extremely knowledgeable)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I'm glad to know about the hex-color change ability.

</comment><comment><USER66> incredible that all these features in combination is what make hackernews great.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good bye HN!

Dang (HN's mod) just asked me to be identifiable and given that's not a good fit for me, this will be my last post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441542](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23441542)

<comment><USER67> >Dang (HN's mod) just asked me to be identifiable

But that's not what they said. Were you asked to use your real name? Nothing stopping you keeping to one, anonymous sounding username

<comment><USER68> I see where billme is coming from. I don't do it here (because I don't comment much, because I mostly use [https://hackerweb.app](https://hackerweb.app) for reading), but I do it on reddit.

Once you've left enough comments, a motivated party has a good chance of identifying you based on the intersection of your (relatively uncommon) interests, various bits and pieces of the personal info that you tend to drop in comments etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> People should check out [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/), it's like HN but with less censorship and less content marketing BS.

<comment><USER39> lobste.rs is almost entirely content marketing spam, and it actually has heavier censorship of non-spam than HN does; you can see this pretty easily by checking their mod log.

<comment><USER70> I just looked at their mod log. The last article removed by a moderator was deleted because it was "not about computing". I read the same article on HN, and it gave rise to some interesting discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437529](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23437529)

Some of the most interesting discussions on HN are not directly related to computing, and they're one of the main reasons why I stick around HN (and would not be interested in moving to lobste.rs).

<comment><USER71> Howdy, Lobsters admin here - I agree entirely with you, and expanded on that in previous comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22156438)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Errors – Gotta Catch 'Em All - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2019/gotta-catch--em-all.html <comment><USER2> Exceptions are clearly superior to error codes in most cases. Easier to maintain, easier to handle, and you can attach much more contextual information to them.

Shameless plug for my open source PHP error handler: [https://github.com/slashtrace/slashtrace](https://github.com/slashtrace/slashtrace). I use it as a catch-all mechanism that displays detailed information about the error when running in a development environment, but sends the data to an external service (Sentry in my case) when in production.

Obviously there are a ton of places in the code where you want to catch and handle exceptions yourself, but having a catch-all acts as a safety net.

I do like their approach of logging stats for exceptions that don't represent system errors, but which they monitor anyway (like the BadClientRequestException).

<comment><USER3> > Exceptions are clearly superior to error codes in most cases.

I disagree with this, on a very strong and deep sense. When you program, there are no exceptional cases. All possible behaviors should be treated on equal footing, using the control structures of your language. When you try to open a file, either you can or you cannot, and none of these two cases is exceptional in any way.

I would rather say that a programming language that supports exceptions is broken by design. If the language even _forces_ you to use the exceptions, then it leads inevitably to spaghetti code.

<comment><USER4> Say you have library that takes a filename and returns the contents after some kind of decoding. If the file is inaccessible (doesn't exist, in use, user doesn't have permission), you don't want the library to take any real action on that. It shouldn't display a message, attempt to correct the filename or retry the same file. It should just let the caller know that an error occurred, and ideally what that error was.

Okay, so we'll return early with an error code and probably some kind of nil result. (Because we're not using a system that's so archaic that it can only return one value!)

But the caller of the library was some middleware that also can't be expected to handle the error usefully. It returns the same error and result to its own caller. And let's say there are a few layers like this until we finally get to the top layer where we can translate that error code into a big, red message for the user saying "file not found".

Now how is that any different from raising an exception? (Other than the extra 'if error: return error, result' lines you need.)

<comment><USER5> > Now how is that any different from raising an exception?

Exception bubbling is implicit.

There's no way to know which exceptions can be thrown from a function just by looking at its code, nor looking at the called-functions code. You have to keep in your head all the call chain up to the first function that does not call any other function (good luck with that).

Even worse: we don't even know _where_ the function can stop running and start unwinding. This leads to defensive programming. Hello try-catch soup!

It's a slippery slope that gets worse and worse with each abstraction layer.

Languages with typed errors have been nothing but a joy for me.

<comment><USER6> > There's no way to know which exceptions can be thrown from a function just > by looking at its code, nor looking at the called-functions code.

It's good you don't actually need to know that! And if you did, it wouldn't matter anyway because somebody could come along in the future and change that code that currently uses a database and change it a web service and all that knowledge would be wasted.

All you need to know is what exceptions you can handle and where you handle them. What error codes or exceptions each individual function everywhere up the call chain can raise is almost inconsequential.

<comment><USER5> > All you need to know is what exceptions you can handle

Ah, so that's "all" I need to know!

And that's what typed errors do.

<comment><USER6> You might only be able to handle restartable network exceptions. In my case, that might be a single base type. So I put a try block in where I can handle that exception (where my network code starts) and I'm done.

Do I need to check the return type of the thousands of methods that might make up that operation? Nope. Typed errors make me do a lot of work passing stuff around and declaring types that literally don't matter. If somebody adds a new method that does another network call, I'm still good and I didn't have to do anything.

<comment><USER5> You like implicit. I don't.

I don't think we can discuss deeper than that.

<comment><USER6> Actually, for the most part I don't like implicit. But I also like encapsulation and polymorphism and you can't have those things if you are exposing implementation details all over the place.

The other thing I don't like is pointless boilerplate code.

But I do like strongly-typed languages and originally I thought I'd like checked exceptions before realizing just how wrong that concept is. It's not hard to see the parallels between checked exceptions and error returns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The blog post is proposing exceptions in the context of an MVC style app where the code that throws the exceptions is part of a request pipeline that also has a global exception handler. This handler would be capable of logging and translating the typed exception to some acceptable output to the consumer.

It seems most people arguing against this clearly didn't read the post or they don't understand the context and are giving their opinions on exceptions _in general_.

The crux of the post is to leverage the fact that your controller code (in typical modern MVC frameworks) doesn't run in a vacuum, to reduce a lot of boilerplate/repetion around error handling.

</comment><comment><USER8> One subtlety is that you had better watch the bad client request rate during deploy. I've seen SLOs completely blown and swept under the rug (accidentally) because infra bugs caused "user" errors.

</comment><comment><USER9> I rarely observe developers investing in _forcing_ the error conditions that they're supposedly handling. Without that mechanism, your error "handling" might be code that looks good and does nothing (or worse, the wrong thing).

For example, in this case: the claim that error handling is "centralized"...how can you be sure? It is generally trivial to locally ignore or capture errors that may not propagate even if they should. Dependencies may not be well-behaved. If you cannot _force_ (or fake) key conditions that "should" cause a component to fail, you don't really know how that error affects the system or if it can even be seen by the "centralized" handler. One of the issues with exception handling is that programmers may think synthesizing each exception "tests" the condition, when you may not even be able to prove that the real error _will_ lead to the expected exception. You have to be able to simulate or force the bad behaviors themselves, independent from your exception hierarchy.

I'm also skeptical that having local error code "disappear" is a net win. When debugging, you'd probably have to add it all back to know how the heck an error might have originated from that local code. At the very least, local code to _reveal_ errors should never go away.</comment>


Run Crouton in a Chrome OS Window - T-A https://plus.google.com/+FrancoisBeaufort/posts/JDVkXALPcNq

<comment><AUTHOR> For those of you looking to get this going here's a tip: At the moment there is a bug in Crouton where you need to put "wixi" first in the list of targets when building a new chroot to get the extension to bind correctly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Typo: I meant "xiwi".

      sudo sh -e ~/Downloads/crouton -t xiwi,extension,core -r trusty

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> My experience getting this to actually work on my Chomebooks (didn't work at first), and then turning it off. I turned it off because at this point 3d acceleration isn't enabled in the Chrome window, so games like Minecraft are not performant enough. A dev environment should work great though.

This is copied from the g + thread.

I have tried this and initially had some issues getting it to work, maybe my experience can help others to get this working:

For me I already had a crouton chroot running Ubuntu Trusty on 2 different Chromebook so I did not want to wipe and start over (after all in unix everything is a file).

so to update my chroots I did this after installing the chrome browser extension:

$ sudo sh ~/Downloads/crouton -u -e -t xiwi,extension -n trusty

this loads the new targets and the '-e' encrypts the chroot and forces me to make a root password for the Chromebook which seems like a good idea.

So on one machine this is all I had to do ... .If I run $ sudo startxfce4 it pops up a window, however for the other machine it would continue to open full screen.

the reason for this is wrong symbolic link at /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc

basically if it is linked to /etc/crouton/xserverrc-x11 you get the full screen version, if it is linked to /etc/crouton/xserverrc-xiwi you get the windowed linux.

to change this simply:

$ ln -s /etc/crouton/xserverrc-[xiwi|x11] /etc/x11/xinit/xserverrc

edit: Google plus's markup syntax is jacked with no apparent way to escape a "-"; so the strikethrough is artifactual.

broken up: $ ln -s /etc/crouton/xserverrc-[xiwi|x11] /etc/x11/xinit/xserverrc

(the brackets [] with the | indicate choose one)

These computers are used by my kids and the linux partition is primarily used to play Minecraft. As there is not currently hardware graphics acceleration in the xiwi linux chrome window the performance is quite poor with Minecraft so I switched back to the xserverrc-x11 config. This will be much better once GPU acceleration is supported in window (whispers of which can be seen on the github PR), until then I guess we will have to <Ctl>+<alt>+<shift> \+ forward and back to use linux on our Chromebooks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds great.

I would like to read about your experience using ChromeOS/ChromiumOS on a dev PC. What's your workflow (text editor, dev-IDE, web stack)?

<comment><USER4> My ChromeOS machine is a thin client that's used for SSH, connecting to either a server somewhere, or a beefier computer at home, so I can work from the couch.

Originally had crouton set up for some local dev (CLI tools only to save RAM; vim and a compiler are all I need), but it kept trashing SD cards. Everything was run off SD cards, because my particular chromebook (Acer C720) doesn't have that much onboard storage, only 16GB or so. But SSH is really all that I need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you dont want ChromeOS but a real laptop, why not just get a proper laptop instead?

<comment><USER6> The Chromebook is a good piece of hardware for the price. And it's not a _laptop_ but a _Linux laptop_ which you don't just pick up at the local Best Buy. It's a mess putting Linux on a Windows 8 laptop.

<comment><USER5> > It's a mess putting Linux on a Windows 8 laptop.

I can see how it affects the price and things gets a bit more expensive due to the Windows-license, but how on earth is it "a mess" installing Linux on a laptop which previously had Windows on it?

Especially given all the loopholes and workarounds people have to resort to to actually get Linux running on these locked down so-called "Linux" laptops?

I mean... This article itself is proof that Chromebooks are worse than Windows-laptops, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Speaking of things running in places where they were not necessarily meant to run, I have pretty much ported all of Unix to run as an HTML5 app in a browser tab. The whole thing is just a steaming pile of javascripty goodness.

It currently just copies OSX for the GUI, but I just wanted to do that to get people interested in helping me develop it, rather than trying to confuse end users. I've been hacking on it pretty constantly, all alone, for the past ~2.5 years, so if anyone wants to start working with me, let's talk! You can find my email on the site by clicking on the Pac Man icon and then "About".

First mission: work on a new GUI look and feel so big bad Apple doesn't come with their lawyer armies...

Try it at [http://urdesk.net](http://urdesk.net)

<comment><USER8> care to share the unminified source? From what I can see in my inspector it looks like you've just made some HTML UIs that look like a couple specific Mac apps, which alone would be a far cry from "porting Unix" and not that original of an endeavor

<comment><USER9> You probably don't want to see the unminified source. He has reimplemented CSS as well as ASCII conversion in JavaScript. Oh, and he's mutilating prototypes left and right with extremely necessary functions like

      HTMLElement.prototype.add = function (a) {
        this.appendChild(a)
      };

There's code for asymmetric encryption and some sort of mail client buried in there... As well as a very faithful almost-Bash parser... and I can't for the life of me find where `ls`, `ln`, and `pwd` are executing from. Because this terminal has them apparently.

A lot of work was put into this, a lot of very interesting work. But I feel like a lot of this could be done a little more easily now with the invention of Emscripten... and even then, why would we have native apps ported to JS when we could just have JS apps?

If you have some free time, pop open the Chrome Devtools and click the Sources tab, paste that JS right into [http://jsbeautifier.org/](http://jsbeautifier.org/). It is truly interesting. Just don't know if I'd have written it myself.

I feel like UNIX works well enough right where it is. And if you really need a true UNIX in-browser, [http://bellard.org/jslinux/](http://bellard.org/jslinux/) can help you out.</comment></comment></comment>


A wiki for prepaid SIM cards around the world, suitable for iPhone & Android - <AUTHOR> http://paygsimwithdata.wikia.com/wiki/Pay_as_you_go_sim_with_data_Wiki

<comment><USER2> In Italy this is the default (pay as you go). There are maybe something like 1% of mobile phone users using a contract.

IMHO the best data provider is WIND: there is a plan where with 9 euro/month (called "Internet NO STOP" <http://www.wind.it/it/internetmobile/scheda542.phtml>) you have 1 GB of traffic in GRPS/EDGE/3G/HSUPA, when you consumed the whole Gigabyte you can still surf without being charged but with limited speed of 32 Kb/s.

There is another similar option with 19 euro/month where the limit for the fast speed is instead 10 GB.

<comment><USER3> You can get 3GB/month for 5Euro with 3 (Tre): [http://www.tre.it/public/scheda_opzioni.php?id=22&idOF=1...](http://www.tre.it/public/scheda_opzioni.php?id=22&idOF=184&ref=22_1)

And you get phone calls at 10cents/minute too and free data roaming when you visit any other country in the world where 3 is also available.

That's way better than Wind or any other competitor out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The SIM lock is why I have yet to buy an iPhone. I don't mind the mandatory contract and I don't mind having to buy prepaid SIM cards when I travel abroad. But I live in Canada and travel elsewhere quite often; roaming charges are such a blatant rip-off that they render the phone useless when it is most needed.

Yes I know I can jailbreak it, but I'm not going to buy a premium product to only be saddled with sysadmining it so i stays up-to-date.

<comment><USER5> I believe you'll be able to buy the iPhone 4 without a SIM-lock in Canada direct from Apple:

[http://store.apple.com/ca/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph...](http://store.apple.com/ca/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone)

Then you can stick whatever SIM card you want and it'll work. Unfortunately, you'll be stuck with paying a lot at the beginning for the phone. It's also possible that you can get your carrier to unlock it; I know some UK carriers will.

<comment><USER6> All UK carriers will - they're obliged to.

Not sure how a SIM-locked iPhone is any different to any other phone that's SIM-locked - any pretty much any phone that's subsidised will be locked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a cracking resource if your travelling abroad, one thing to mention is that if your travelling to the UK, 02 has a £2 a day for 500meg on both the iPad (microsim) and datastick format, however it usually lasts more than 24 hours as they seem to have a script that runs at midnight cutting anyone off that has been on for 24 hours... if you do it early in the morning you tend to get 36-40 hours out of it..

</comment><comment><USER8> Looked at the US page, from ATT: $10.24 / MB for data. Seriously? What year is it?

<comment><USER9> I noticed that too -- in the Philippines, they have two big carriers with will both sell you unlimited data for one day for the equivalent of US$1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fantastic, added Boost Mobile info for the U.S.

Anyone know of a prepaid SIM provider other than Boost who does unlimited data in the U.S.? Boost coverage is too spotty for me.

<comment><USER11> I would recommend T-Mobile. I'm using a Blackberry Curve 8520 using their unlimited data plan, 500minute unlimited text plan. $70.71/month to month/pay as you go plan.

The EDGE service is spotty, like Boost but they also have sufficient selection of 3G and Android phones.

<comment><USER10> I am in a unique situation. I am using a GSM phone with GPS mainly as a location sensor. So, I don't need any voice minutes, just unlimited data, for as low a cost as possible.

3G would be nice, but don't even really need 3G.

Other than spotty coverage, Boost fits the bill perfectly. They have unlimited data for 0.35c per day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not very structured information, but the forums here are somewhat useful to mine for information: <http://www.prepaidgsm.net/forum/gsm-3g-prepaid- worldwide/></comment>


"I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong" - new Gladwell book - <AUTHOR> http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/007918.html

<comment><USER2> Based on that description it doesn't sound like he's looking carefully at people who weren't successful:

"There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery — in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business — and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck." - Nassim Taleb

Gladwell's previous work on genius isn't that promising either: [http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/05/gladwell-and- genius.htm...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/05/gladwell-and-genius.html)

Finally, I doubt that the book will be better than this: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of- Excellenc...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of-Excellence)

<comment><USER3> Taleb's statement about risk could be made succinct. Risk-taking appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success. That's hardly a damning criticism of either book despite being disguised as such.

Phil Mickelson is a prominent example of the unbalanced view that the general public has of risk-taking and its relationship to success. Before he won a major, he was roundly criticized for taking too many chances. After winning, he was renowned for his creativity. Little thought has been given to the idea that his willingness to embrace risk and to accept the possibility of failure might be critical to his success.

<comment><USER4> Taleb's statement is a much stronger claim than your summary that "Risk-taking appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success"

Your summary allows for the possibility that there are other factors besides risk-taking that can help ensure success, and in particular your statement leaves open the possibility that these factors could include working harder, being smarter, etc. etc. Taleb's statement explicitly rejects that possibility, arguing that the factors which distinguish the successful and the non-successful are ones you don't even have control over.

<comment><USER3> I distilled Taleb's quote to what was worthwhile.

Saying that some smart, hard-working risk-takers failed is not a counterexample, and that's all Taleb was doing, at least in the quoted passage. It's roughly the same as saying that starting cards in Texas holdem don't influence the outcome of the hand because AA sometimes loses. It suggests that he doesn't understand the definition of risk.

You need to know only the basics of Bayesian inference to conclude deduce that if hard work, intelligence, and willingness to accept risk are overrepresented among successful people versus the general population, those traits are probably influential to success.

Maybe being smart and working hard doesn't make you a lock or even likely to succeed. But you'd be naive to think that your chances wouldn't be better than a competitor who was dumb and lazy.

<comment><USER2> You would also be naive to buy a book from a guy who gives you an explanation for something and conveniently neglects to mention, or perhaps doesn't even realize, that his explanation only accounts for 5% of the variance. A guy who tells you that hard work and risk taking will improve your chances from 1% to 5% in a one field but will improve them from 1% to 50% with less risk in another is giving you information that is actually worth something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gladwell is a good storyteller. He weaves disparate things together in a way that seems convincing and brilliant at first but dissolves on inspection. When challenged, his answer is, Oh of course I never said that anything was _true_.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, entertainment is fine, Gladwell is an intellectual entertainer, nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, his narratives do depend on an implicit claim to being true discoveries about how the world works; they're not nearly as valuable and interesting if they're not.

If you look up the definition of "charlatan", Gladwell is perilously close to it.

<comment><USER6> While trying to pin down what exactly Gladwell is concluding is generally difficult, you're certainly right, his gift is definitely in the story telling.

And honestly, that's good enough for me. While I believe that I am up to date on the latest in Computer Science I am not well read on the any of the recent or popular studies going on in social psychology. And Gladwell brings that research to the forefront.

Gladwell was the first to expose me to Paul Eckman's work; a man that has dedicated his life to recording and interpreting the micro-expressions that individual faces take on as different emotions escape us.

This led me to think "Oh, this would be greatly if I could interpret these expressions and use them in my weekly poker game." And sure enough Mr. Eckman offers a training CD. <http://www.paulekman.com/cds.html>

Gladwell is dusting off the basement academic journals, painting them with great story telling, and shining a spotlight on the research. And that has merit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing._

Those things, of course, are all that pop pyschologists ever look at.</comment>


The Effects of Selling Orientation on Interviewers' Judgments - <AUTHOR> http://amj.aom.org/content/57/3/624.abstract

<comment><USER2> It looks like this article requires a paid subscription. sigh…</comment>


Music Hack Day New York Video Recap - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys5iU_4w73Y

<comment><USER2> This looks like it was a pretty awesome time. Is this sort of thing open to anyone wanting to build something cool? Could I happen-to-be-in-New-York-City my way into the next Music Hack Day?

<comment><AUTHOR> NYHacker & General Assembly are hosting events like this on a quarterly basis.

NYHacker: <http://nyhacker.org> General Assembly: <http://generalassemb.ly></comment></comment>


Search vs. Recommendations, or Authoritative and Related Sources in a Graph  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.directededge.com/2009/10/25/search-vs-recommendations-or-authoritative-and-related-sources-in-a-graph/ <comment><USER2> misspelled "Barak Obama"</comment>


Ask HN: Incoming mail service for domains? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of any services out there where  you can add a DNS mail record for your domain, and the service will configure an incoming email system for you?   Pretty much like what Google Apps does, but non-Google  (I'd like something with better customer service)<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> <http://fastmail.fm/>

<http://www.dnamail.com/>

<comment><USER3> I heartily recommend FastMail. I've been using them for a couple years now for all my mail, and they've been great.

They have so many features it's almost comical (it's all in the small details, e.g., you can download your list of last login times as a CSV file; they can SMS you a one-time password if you're in an Internet cafe; etc.).

Once I had a problem with incoming mail from a certain domain not reaching my inbox, and they were extremely helpful. it felt like the guy had nothing else to do but help me. (Oh, and it turned out the problem was on another network, not their end).

In two years I've never experienced any outage.

Really, overall an awesome service (they're not paying me to write this, promise!)</comment></comment>


The Raspberry Pi is succeeding in ways its makers almost imagined - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/27/the_raspberry_pi_is_succeeding_in_ways_its_makers_ialmosti_imagined/?mt=1440654319379

<comment><USER2> Nice - I want to employ some of these kids in a decade's time...

(Meantime, I'm half expecting my boss to suggest emptying out the room with the foosball table, filling it with artificially-colored-cordial and sugary snacks, and getting a class or two full of schoolkids in there every weekend and waiting for one of our behind-deadline projects to magically appear! ;-)</comment>


80 — Trip logging on your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://geteighty.com/

<comment><USER2> The problem with some of these minimalist sign-up pages: I have no idea what's being pitched to me. I mean, yes, "track my trips" (or, in the About section, track my driving). What does that offer me that makes it worth trying?

If the product has any value, the page isn't illustrating it to me. The point of a minimalist page isnt' to throw just /any/ one-line slogan/summary at you, it's to throw a one-line that captures the value the product is offering you.

(By the by, I'm not being at all facetious - I still don't know what that app is supposed to do. Is it a mapper? A timer? Does it link photographs to GPS to track roadtrips? All of the above? None of the above? "Track" is just too vague).

<comment><AUTHOR> You're making a valid point, thank you very much for the feedback.

I added "Keep track of your driving and export your trips when you need to file expense reports, do your taxes or other deductions", instead of the secondary "sign up" message.</comment></comment>


Britain won't stop putting animal fat in its cash - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/10/news/animal-fat-banknotes-bank-of-england-cash/index.html <comment><USER2> If I was a vegetarian, i'de be asking "if not animal fat, then what?". Synthetic glue? Vegetable glue (milk-based for example)? All these have their own damages on the biosphere, indirectly. The mining for loads of synthetic products is associated with deforestation, and vegetable-based products can sometimes be orders of magnitude worse (for example listen up and take yout seats for the upcoming crises palm oil has/is/will cause, the media is getting fired up for that one with test articles showing interest (see: nutella)).

I don't get it, instead of taking arbitary stances, can't we take more informed stances? Maybe animal-based binding agents kills the least animals for all we know...

</comment><comment><USER3> Sad news</comment>


Uber in talks to sell UberEats' India business to Zomato - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/15/ubereats-india-zomato/ <comment><USER2> I'm surprised Zomato isn't circling the drain. They killed the only reliable and popular restaurant review website in my city when they bought Urbanspoon [1]. Now all we have is Google Maps where everything has five hundred reviews and 4.3 star average because they use Google Opinion Rewards to populate it.

[1] [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=AU- WA&...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=AU- WA&q=zomato,urbanspoon,yelp)

<comment><USER3> I believe they are doing well in India. It's the main review site there.

<comment><USER4> Reviews and listings seem to be taking a backseat now in India as well. A couple of years back you could expect to see a new restaurant listed and its menu posted within a couple of days of opening. Now it often takes months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Never used Uber Eats. It seems that Swiggy and Zomato have been largely successful in retaining their users.

</comment><comment><USER6> Definitely bad for consumers in the long run to have less competition.

But Uber just never seemed to invest in Eats. The app was slow and dated, and basic things like adding an address required whole lot of gymnastics.

Not to mention it was available in far fewer cities than Swiggy/Zomato

</comment><comment><USER7> Uber will stand in history as another example where investors took over the founder and tried to squeeze out all profits as soon as they possibly can while squashing away all extravagant outrageous ambitions. Uber used to be the flagbearer of the logistics revolution in the world, now reduced to operational excellence for a mere cab-hailing app for the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value.

<comment><USER8> Uber was always a mediocre business. It's becoming visible now, but that's a matter of time, not the fault of the CEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh, that sucks. I am going to miss the huge discounts it offers over its competitors.

<comment><USER10> I agree. It's sad that SoftBank isn't interested in subsidizing our lives anymore.</comment></comment>


If You Want to Be Happy, Quit Facebook? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/11/16/quitting-facebook/ <comment><USER2> Facebook has its pros and cons. While I continually seem to lose a bit of faith in humanity while on it, the truth is that it is the easiest and cheapest way to keep in touch with family back in the states. And it happens that I've met a few great people as a result of it.

Which is a real problem with studies like this: There isn't a viable alternative that could take its place. Sure, some have tried: But none of them have taken hold enough to convince some family members to switch over. The main thing missing from other platforms is that they don't cross-communicate. It is like a phone that won't connect to another company's phone, even if it is located next door.

In addition, there are a lot more options other than on or off facebook. One can limit their time on it, limit the folks they friend, and other such things. How do these people fare comparatively? Do they find exceptions to the rule - people that find themselves lonely without the broad connectivity?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd been off FB for something like 3 months... then the election happened.

the resulting re-engagement was incredibly depressing and not particularly interesting. i've been off now for a few days and i already feel better. YMMV</comment>


Ask HN: Take an enterprise level job, or start my own company? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to ask this, but I figure it is the best community to do so.
Today I received an offer to work at an enterprise level company that works in iOS development for multi-national businesses. I have spent the past four months looking into an iOS role that I would fit in and this company seemed perfect for me. Not thirty minutes after, I received an email that an iOS project I had started almost a year ago has gotten the finally go-ahead for investing. In all honesty I thought the project would never go through as all discussions just faded away and communication from all parties had dropped (there was a conflict of interest within the funding originally). This email was completely out of the blue surprise.
Now my question to HN is: in your experience and in your opinion, which job would you take? The financially secure one, or the one with the most risk? I haven't sat down to talk about the investing yet, so I'm not even sure how the pay would be for that, but I do know the pay in the other job.
The challenge becomes, how can I appropriately put off accepting the other company's offer, while I go into next week's meeting about the funding? <comment><USER2> Easy - If you have wife and kids, take the secure route (Enterprise Job)

Otherwise, take a risk. If you landed the Enterprise job once, you can do it again.

<comment><AUTHOR> No family, but just got a small apartment with my girlfriend. This is the same approach I was thinking personally. Thanks for the tip!</comment></comment>


Putin Issues Desperate Warning of WWIII - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMMscY7Btus <comment><USER2> Just more Russian Propaganda.

What is more frightening than this is the susceptibility of Americans to fall under the spell of Russian Propaganda.

Here is great article on "Why Americans are so vulnerable to Russian Propaganda".

[http://empr.media/politics/kremlin-uses-weaknesses- propagand...](http://empr.media/politics/kremlin-uses-weaknesses-propaganda/)

On a tangent....

Trump at the moment has Manafort at the helm steering his campaign.

Here is a little about the man in charge.

[http://preview.tinyurl.com/jprwsce](http://preview.tinyurl.com/jprwsce)

> As Roger Stone has boasted about their now-disbanded firm: "Black, Manafort, > Stone, and Kelly, lined up most of the dictators of the world we could find. > … Dictators are in the eye of the beholder." Manafort had a special gift for > changing how dictators are beheld by American eyes. He would recast them as > noble heroes—venerated by Washington think tanks, deluged with money from > Congress.

Americans need to be wary, they are in the midst of a Russian hybrid war where information is being used to confuse them and create a situation that is not beneficial for them.</comment>


Google discloses another Windows security issue after deadline exceeded - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/p/google-security-research/issues/detail?id=128 <comment><USER2> So there are 3 issues [1] against OS X, released a while ago, and one against Microsoft. Why the HN focus on the Windows bugs? At least Microsoft is communicating with Google, and have patches planned, just not on the exact timeline of the arbitrary 90 day deadline. Is there something about the OS X ones that doesn't warrant the same exposure/discussion?

[1] [https://code.google.com/p/google-security- research/issues/li...](https://code.google.com/p/google-security- research/issues/list)

<comment><USER3> I think the issue is not the bug count, but that Microsoft tells Google "we will release a fix on day X," and Google says "X is past an arbitrary day we chose, so sad" and discloses a zero-day. Some people think it's an irresponsible PR stunt by Google, others that Microsoft would just put off fixes forever if Google didn't do this.

Maybe there's a similar story with OS X, but there doesn't seem to be a public record of it.

<comment><USER4> > _[...] and discloses a zero-day._

90-day, you mean. It's only zero-day if they had zero days to come up with a solution. That's what "zero-day" means.

<comment><USER5> Actually, 0-day refers to the time since public disclosure.

<comment><USER4> If that would be the case then we would have another term for the thing I just described, because that's the worst case scenario.

Anyhow, the Wikipedia article disagrees with you, too. Got any sources for your definition?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In another news, google stop fixing security bugs which cover 60% of the current android users (4.3 or older). Not saying microsoft is right, but they just dropped windows xp support last year (that is >10 years of support).

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/01/google-wont-fix- bug-...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/01/google-wont-fix-bug- hitting-60-percent-of-android-phones/)

<comment><USER7> Thank the carriers for being jerks for that one. I know on the last time this article came up I took a hard line on them, but upon further reflection, it's not like they can just write a patch and have it out in a week. Heck, it takes _months_ for point releases to go through acceptance testing at the carriers, and probably not insignificant amounts of cash.

At least they're starting to own more of the ecosystem. I wouldn't expect this to be as big of a problem on newer devices.

<comment><USER8> Carriers not rolling out updates a) doesn't waive Google's responsibility to roll out patches to their largest OS cohort and b) is really all Google's fault because they let the carriers get away with it and have never reigned them in even after years of incompetence on the carriers' part.

It's not an excuse.

<comment><USER9> Why are you blaming Google, and not Samsung, HTC, LG? Aren't they the ones who produce software updates for their phones?

I really don't see how Google is stopping them from updating their handsets.

<comment><USER8> See the beauty of the situation is that _they are all at fault_. However, only one company makes the core OS software these hardware manufacturers run on.

Perhaps if Google provided the update and the pressure could be put on the manufacturers to roll out the update to their paying customers...?

<comment><USER7> That assumes that you can make enough consumers with these (relatively) older devices care loud enough for any "pressure" to be applied to the manufacturers.

Security updates aren't sexy and don't get applied unless they include shiny things along with them.

<comment><USER8> Right now, the customers have zero power because Google and the manufacturer simply point fingers at each other as to who's to blame.

Releasing the update gives the customer power to press for pushing their manufacturers.

The whole model where carriers or manufacturers can send updates is ridiculous. Carriers update baseband. Manufacturers should defer to google for Core OS updates and Google Play. The fact that they're even involved is simply a recipe for disappointment.

It's bad for everyone because compromised machines simply reward and embolden the criminals which will eventually increase the harm to everyone who ins't a criminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It should be noted as a point on this specific bug that, since wasn't fixed in the EXTRA time allotted and subsequently disclosed, this is a good thing. Impersonation is something that Windows Administrators can readily disable and manipulate via Group Policies and Active Directory. There's not a one-fix-for- all disable in this case, because impersonation is used in very nuanced ways. That being said, every organization can quickly and with a little effort tighten up their impersonation rights.

</comment><comment><USER11> What I would like for Google to do is instead of publishing the details of the bug, after the deadline they would publish vague summary of vulnerability, so people would know it exists, but not quite able to exploit it right away. That would both inform people about danger and put pressure on MS, but without puting so much risk onto systems.

<comment><USER12> That is not providing information about how to protect against the vulnerability regardless of a patch from Microsoft. Full disclosure is the only way to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can understand both points of view with the disclosure of the security issue. A while ago I discovered some security issues with Adobe ColdFusion and Railo. I wish I had put a deadline on disclosing the Adobe ColdFusion issues, as they dragged their feet so much (with admitting it was an issue and progressing with a fix) that at points I felt like throwing in the towel. Regrettably, instead of lighting a fire under their ass, I waited. At the time I was working on an open source side project, which would have pointed fingers towards where the issue was for any curious people.

I ended up halting development of my project while I waited for Adobe, to the point where I no longer wanted to work on it. I had stopped for too long and I didn't want to dig anything else up. Having no legal type knowledge myself or knowing anyone who could offer such advice, I was also too concerned to reveal anything for fear or any legal reprise.

So, the threat of security disclosure is warranted to pressure others into putting in the effort. However, the impact of the disclosure should be considered. If it will seriously affect others (who aren't responsible for the fix) and put them at risk, there should be the flexibility there to work with them on a deadline.

<comment><USER14> Did Railo fix the bug?

<comment><USER13> They fixed one of the issues I reported. I don't believe I had official confirmation of the other issue I had with Railo being resolved. I probably should try it out again on their latest version, but I don't use Railo and haven't found myself with much fondness for ColdFusion either.

But I should probably pull my thumb out and check ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Google should ask money to keep it secret longer. Around 30 000$ a day IMO. Then give this money back to android device manufacturers scammed by Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER16> As they should do, Microsoft is notoriously bad at security patching and have had more than enough time to issue a suitable fix. It won't be until we start doing this will all (closed sourced) vendors that'll we'll actually see improvements - otherwise what incentives for these company's are there? Making themselves look good is their primary objective, right next to sales.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hopefully this inspires change within Microsoft's development processes. Security issues are a big deal. While 90 days is difficult for them (and other companies), I'm sure with some investment on process improvement and or hiring more staff, they can get these fixes out faster. They owe it to their customers to do the right thing.

<comment><USER18> Somehow I foresee Microsoft trying to rush out a security patch to a hugely complicated piece of software so it can be distributed to hundreds of millions of devices running countless hardware configurations just to appease Google ending very poorly for everyone but Google's marketing department.

<comment><USER17> Is it unreasonable to expect a company like Microsoft to be able to release a stable fix to protect their customers within 90 days?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What software is this for? Chrome? It's not clear from the bug report.

</comment><comment><USER20> Dick move by Google.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, Google really should not really worry about discovering all those endless Windows vulnerabilities and let all those hacks (such as Sony's) to continue. Security by obscurity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The first thing Microsoft does when they learn about a zero-day is to hand it to the NSA. Microsoft doesn't get to fix it until the NSA tells Microsoft they're done exploiting it. Google may be pissed about this. They've been pissed off before about NSA's shenanigans.

<comment><USER23> I suspect that Google is an NSA front organization, which is why Google _appears_ to be pissed at the NSA.

In any case, I think both Microsoft and Google would be high value targets for all sorts of infiltration by the NSA, whether it's sanctioned by the power structures of these companies or not.

<comment><USER24> So HN has gone from seeing Google's name on a PRISM slide, to assuming it's entirely an NSA outfit?

Apple was on one of those slides. I suppose they're an NSA front organization as well?

<comment><USER23> I'm just a single HN'er and I wasn't really thinking of PRISM... I was thinking more along the lines of how obviously valuable it would be to the NSA to either A) start companies like Google or B) infiltrate them.

I also said that I _suspect_ that's the case, not the I _assume_ it to be. Given that the NSA seems to do what it wants and the obvious motivation for infiltrating or starting companies like Google...I think the suspicion is warranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Doubling the deadline to 180 days is probably reasonable IMO.

<comment><USER26> Might be, but I'm sure if it's important they would allocate resources to getting it fixed ASAP.

I doubt the fix for this and testing takes 90 days, or even 45 days.

<comment><USER27> This apparently _does_ take that long, but should absolutely not.

<comment><USER28> Either Google is sending Microsoft bug reports like rapid-fire, and Microsoft has already fixed dozens of them that we haven't found out about - or for some _strange_ reason, Microsoft didn't fix the only two bugs Google reported in the last 90 day period.

If that's the case, then either Microsoft _forgot_ about them, or they carefully orchestrated a PR scandal against Google (wouldn't be the first time - like the time they built an unauthorized Youtube app that Google _specifically_ told them not to build, and then notified the whole media about it, putting words in the reporters' mouths).

<comment><USER29> Well, Google _has_ been sending Microsoft (and other vendors) lots of other bug reports: [https://code.google.com/p/google-security- research/issues/li...](https://code.google.com/p/google-security- research/issues/list?can=1&sort=-id)

What I find interesting is that there are at least a couple of cases in which bugs were marked as being subject to the 90-day disclosure deadline, but not made publicly visible until days or weeks after the deadline had passed.

[https://code.google.com/p/google-security- research/issues/de...](https://code.google.com/p/google-security- research/issues/detail?id=111)

[https://code.google.com/p/google-security- research/issues/de...](https://code.google.com/p/google-security- research/issues/detail?id=113)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does Your Learning Management System Marginalize Women? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/85f70e865749

<comment><USER2> This whole thing just seems like an employee misinterpreted a phrase by the CEO and instead of apologizing for publicly calling him out based on the mistaken interpretation doubled down so he could feel self-righteous about his original decision.

If you google "silence as consent" the top results are filled with the parliamentary interpretation and given the context it's obvious that's what the CEO meant. The employee assumed the worst rather than the simplest explanation and made a fool of himself in the process. His heart was in the right place, at least, and had the CEO actually made a joke about rape during a quarterly meeting, calling the CEO out on it may have been a courageous decision that could have changed a toxic company culture. That wasn't the case though and he just threw away his job for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of the dongle/forking joke fiasco. Anytime a woman hears a crude joke she thinks it is directed at her and all of womankind. The man must then be shamed publicly. This is our future.

</comment><comment><USER4> The rape interpretation is not one I've heard before, or the one I would charitably assign given the context. But if I was in Josh's position, I would apologize while still being shocked at the misinterpretation.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to find remote work as a front-end? - <AUTHOR>

I lost my job two months ago, since I sent around 200 resumes, nobody want to hire a remote. Where I can search for remote position in CA, NY or TX? <comment><USER2> If you sent that many resume, you are not targeting well enough.

Best old advise is to network: get to know people in the area through meetups, local events.. and ask them for more contacts. It's harder but more focus.

Unless you want freelance route, then site like elance.com would be best to start.

</comment><comment><USER3> Angel List is a good place: [https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22remote%22%3Atrue%7D](https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22remote%22%3Atrue%7D)

Also, I'm looking to hire a front-end developer. angel.co/velocis

</comment><comment><USER4> The point is they do not need a remote engineer.Next, you just need to send resumes to those company who needs remote front-end engineer</comment>


Ask HN: What was your most successful project invented under the shower? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> 10 years ago, in the shower, I made a project to create own user badges on one Polish portal, even the portal administrator helped me to create better design.

At that time my MySQL database had more than 600 mb :D, which is about 135 thousand users.</comment>


Turkey Says It Sent 500k Coronavirus Test Kits to United States - <AUTHOR> https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-03-19/turkey-says-it-sent-500-000-coronavirus-test-kits-to-united-states <comment><USER2> Clearly they value Americans more than their own citizens</comment>


Reasons Not to Use 99Designs - Refund Policy and Poor Customer Support - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/Reasons%20Not%20to%20Use%2099Designs

<comment><USER2> If you read the chat log he posted, it actually makes him look bad more than anyone else. Yes, it's bad, shady practice to require someone to call you to get a refund you promise, especially if you don't list that they have to call you anywhere.

But again, looking at the chat log, the 99 Designs guy is very apologetic and helpful and Andrew immediately says "OK, I think I'll blog about this and post it to Hacker News and see what everyone else thinks." (This is in response to "Justin" from 99 Designs apologizing for the inconvenience of requiring a phone call).

Hacker News is not your personal soapbox.

<comment><USER3> I don't even see a big deal about requiring a call, as long as the call itself goes smoothly and they don't give you the runaround or use bullying tactics to talk you out of it. They offer refunds if you contact them... that on its own doesn't sound shady or like a bad practice in any way. I'm not sure why the author feels entitled to an automated refund process--the biggest impression I get from the post and chat log are that he just really doesn't like talking to people on the phone.

<comment><USER4> While i haven't read the chat transcript all i can say in response to the don't-want-to-call thing is:

Not everyone is as good in spoken english as he is in written, most probably for everyone with english not being their mother-tongue as me.

As i can only speak for myself: I wouldn't be comfortable taking a call as much as i would be writing a response...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, the company asks you to place a phone call to get your refund. A phone call they pay for courtesy of a toll-free number. When you refuse because... of whatever made-up reason in your head... they are apologetic in the online chat and give you your refund anyway. And then you make a whiny blog post about it.

Good companies listen to their customers when they have a legitimate complaint. But the best companies know that when a customer is being too whiny and entitled, it's best to fire that customer.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not my experience with 99 Designs. I used them to come up with a design for our site, and contacted the customer service several times - to extend it a few times, or to just find out my options. They were always helpful.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the best use case for 99designs is to browse around, find logos/designs from other contests you like and then contact those designers directly. They will likely work harder because they know they are getting paid and you will get a longer term relationship.

That said, I know the 99Designs process does work for many people, so the above might not be good advice for most people.</comment>


Ask HN:  Why is Dubai saving 'The World'? - <AUTHOR>

I'm just confused why they are going to spend 7 Billion dollars saving this waste of space?  Reminds me of 'Stiltsville' in Miami - a city built on sandbars off the coast... destroyed and epic failure.<p>What are they thinking?  Whats the rationale? Anyone know? <comment><USER3> The rationale is that the UAE and generally the Gulf States at a point decided to invest their money instead of investing them in funds in Europe of the Americas. They had a vision to create a 'Singapore' in the desert and they almost achieved it.

The financial crisis that hit the world - and which did not originate - <USER2> that part of the World created most of the mess in Dubai as well as numerous other places. They also saw all our overseas investments devalued which caused problems in restructuring their debt.

There is no comparison with 'Stiltsville'. Trying to save their Companies and investments and _paying_ their creditors cannot be labeled a failure.

<comment><USER4> Not really a Singapore, more of a Vegas. They know their oil money is going to run out one day, so they need to invest it in something sustainable and concrete. That would be tourism, tech and finance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A colleague of mine's father was one of the engineers that designed the first Dubai "island" - the one that the Burj Al Arab was built on. Even more so than the subsequent Palms, The World was a colossal expense, but that is not the main reason for the Emiratis to save it. They will spend any amount to avoid loss of face in the international community. For an Emirati, title and appearances are far more important than wealth. This is just IMHO from living there for a number of years on 2 separate occassions.</comment>