Snapchat will file for IPO next week - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/27/snapchat-will-file-for-ipo-next-week/ <comment><USER2> This might be what's needed to really fire up the tech industry in Los Angeles. Hopefully a critical mass of the newly rich Snapchat employees stick around in Venice and the westside to seed future growth.

Then again, there goes the neighborhood.

</comment><comment><USER3> Will be interesting to see delta between next week's financials and leaked financials from 2015

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know, having an IPO at the tail end of one of the biggest bull markets doesn't bode well for me. I'm expecting a major pull-back in stocks either this year or next. I don't see Snap doing well, at least short-term.

<comment><USER5> Could be the bang that pops the bubble.

<comment><USER4> yeah, and I wouldn't be surprised if it does really well in the very beginning. Bubbles oftentimes have an even bigger spike at the very end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Current valuations:

\- Facebook: $350B

\- Twitter: $15.7B

\- Snapchat (projected): $20-25B

\- IAC (owns Tinder): $5.45B

Interesting (and probably appropriate) that the market is pricing Snapchat closer to Twitter.

<comment><USER7> > _Interesting (and probably appropriate) that the market is pricing_

I'd be cautious in considering the valuation at last funding round to be "the market".

<comment><USER6> Fair point!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the easiest (step by step) way to buy stocks at an initial public offering?

<comment><USER9> Step 1. Create an investment bank. Step 2. Make a close relationship to the institution managing the IPO. Step 3. Too late, the existing big banks get dibs.

They might be willing to sell you some scraps after the price has been run up into the stratosphere and all of the incumbents have made their profit.

<comment><USER10> A better strategy:

1\. Wait a while

2\. Buy them cheap

3\. Wait some more

4\. Now they are even cheaper, duhhh!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> hurray! March is going to be fun. September will be a good time to be selling luxury goods when the employees are able to liquidate no matter what the share price does.

</comment><comment><USER12> A transfer of wealth to Los Angeles -- Let's hope this can help the movie industry.

</comment><comment><USER13> Company name is 'Snap', not Snapchat.

<comment><USER14> They do call it "Snap, inc" in the first line of the text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This IPO is going to be incredibly interesting to track. Facebook and Instagram have been cloning Snapchat features as fast as they can, and Snow (Korean Snapchat) is growing rapidly in non-western markets.

</comment><comment><USER16> Who would be investing in it? Non-millennials?

<comment><USER17> Plenty of millennial in the target audience of this website are doing A-OK and are perfectly able to invest, though perhaps not afford a house in Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment><comment> j-walker Is their plan still to make money via ads in the stories?

How will Facebook's new features (basically a clone of Snapchat) affect this?

<comment><USER18> > How will Facebook's new features (basically a clone of Snapchat) affect > this?

Just based on usage within my circle, I don't see FB's clone attempts affecting Snapchat at all. FB is actually starting to piss me off with all of the spammy push notifications they keep sending out. If anything they're going to lose market share from people like me uninstalling their apps.

"(name) just posted for the first time in awhile" "(name) just started a live stream".

<comment><USER19> The Facebook app is incredibly hungry (on Android). Dropping the all brought me hours of battery life and per charge and hours per day from no longer finding myself randomly vegging on my feed.

I use a home screen web shortcut - it looks like an app and runs quickly. You won't regret the jump.

<comment><USER20> Yup. I've also found that I check FB less often using the mobile site, which has also been good.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Make your Mac chime again - <AUTHOR> https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/bring-back-mac-os-startup-sound-2016-macs.2224371/ <comment><USER2> Wait, apple dumped the power on chime? Okay so this brings to mind [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH9saUP2460](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH9saUP2460)

I miss unique per model startup tones. There are archives of all the Apple startup and crash tones out there- really fun to click through them.</comment>


Ask YC: Recommend me *the* best Javascript book/reference - <AUTHOR>

What's the very best Javascript book that you know of?<p>I'm specifically looking for one that goes into modern Javascript techniques, similar to the prototype crowd. <comment><USER2> O'Reilly's "Javascript: The Definitive Guide 5th Edition" by David Flanagan teaches Javascript really well including Ajax and DOM.

The first half of the book is a Javascript tutorial while the rest is a language reference. Good book.

<comment><USER3> And, after reading the Definitive Guide:

<http://www.packtpub.com/jquery/book>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Didn't we just cover this? Yes, yes we did: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61311>

<comment><USER5> except that the free download link for the pdf mentioned has since been removed.

inurl:javascript.the.definitive.guide filetype:pdf

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Best book hands down for learning JS is called Simply Javascript from Sitepoint written by Kevin Yank and Cameron Adams.

</comment><comment><USER7> Take a look at the videos on Yahoo by Douglas Crockford on the Javascript Programming Language, and his "Advanced Javascript". Very well presented.

<http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/></comment>


A Mail from Paymentwall CEO to Employees - <AUTHOR> http://ain.ua/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/221.jpg <comment><AUTHOR> A few quotes by Honor Gunday (according to comments from ain.ua):

"I like to fire people, to break them. Then when they are broken its much easier to brainwash them into corporate culture."

"It's very bad when people leave the company by their decision because it's uncontrolled process. It's much better to fire them in advance even if they work hard. This way you take control."

"Ukrainians are lazy and narrow minded", "Indians are liars", "Vietnamese are dog eaters", "Philippinos are passive and not pushy"

"Duty trip is a priviledge even if you go to a distant country for a long period, live in the local office, work 24/7 and are not paid per diems"

"We are not paying high salaries because we provide extra stuff: food, office dog, etc"

"You should not have a personal life separate from your work life. Your work is your life."

"We should fire the cat because it is not entertaining employess, not performing well enough - she is sleeping all day".

"I am cooler than my friends because I am richer than all of them".

"We don't need a QA/tester - do you need a mommy to clean up your code?"

"All those who left the company - regardless by their decision or we fired them - are f __cking losers. "

"All those Ukrainian companies, except for Paymentwall, are crappy companies."

"This dog is smarter than you."

"I don't want to hire experienced people, because they ask a higher salary. Let's go to that student career fair."

"We need to find ways how to smuggle that office furniture into the country in order not to pay custom taxes."

</comment><comment><USER2> Well, there's more to it, the initial article has been updated with a screenshot from a mailout to employees, it's simply brutal and offensive to Ukrainians [http://ain.ua/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/221.jpg](http://ain.ua/wp- content/uploads/2015/09/221.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly where the HN submission links to.

<comment><USER2> The content in the update is outrageous

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> And the good news it's all real and true! Just check Paymentwall's CEO Honor Gunday replies to numerous reviews on Glassdoor [http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Paymentwall- Reviews-E692198...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Paymentwall- Reviews-E692198.htm)</comment>


The 'infuriating' saga of the Texas teen suspended after rescuing a classmate - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/27/the-infuriating-saga-of-the-eighth-grader-suspended-after-rescuing-an-asthmatic-classmate/ <comment><USER2> If one of the comments at the end of the article is to be believed, the author left out a ton of possibly relevant information. The information includes the type of school it is (a school for kids with disciplinary issues) and the girl involved having a history of faking asthma attacks.

Regardless though of the information brought up, there's no reason to suspend a student for this, so hopefully this wasn't the case.

<comment><USER3> Sigh. Shoddy reporting, and people who don't take responsibility for themselves. The girl says she blacked out and then remembered someone picking her up. Right.

How this became a national story, I'll never know. But I do know I've been in situations with young adults who don't own their mistakes, or find ways to do what they want to do, such that it seems like they had no other choice. You look like a monster as a kid is "practically dying" while you know their history and brutally selfish tactics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Texas is a crazy place

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'm absolutely sure this could never happen anywhere else besides Texas.</comment></comment>


Ask PG: I'd like to delete my account. - <AUTHOR> Can anyone help with this?  From what I've gotten from google I'm meant to contact PG somehow.
It's not exactly clear how and if there's some channel I can use that doesn't clutter his inbox I'd like to try that first.
Edit: Thanks for the tip - title changed, hopefully that helps. <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry to those who are curious, but I'm not going to state my reason - it's not all that personal but is still well with in the realm of "my own business". Surely it's not a prerequisite for deleting an account.

If I knew that there wasn't a standard way to delete accounts I probably wouldn't have signed up in the first place. It might help keep the number of temporary accounts, so there's a chance that it's a feature.

The current plan is to wait a while longer, then I'll send PG an email.

A point that I find interesting is that if I didn't care about the community at all I could probably exit the site very rapidly by way of a submission script - not my style, but does make me wonder if it's been tried before. I'm sure it's quicker than an exchange of emails :) And it remains an option if nothing else will do the trick.

<comment><USER2> > I could probably exit the site very rapidly by way of a submission script

But that would certianly fall within the realm of "hacking"

<comment><USER3> It would fall under SPAMMING.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Considering how even non-personal information becomes identifiable in aggregate, this is a feature that any social site with a conscience should have. Otherwise, the risk to privacy is both impossible to gauge and continuously growing.

<comment><USER5> Or, alternatively you could simply think about the consequences of what you write before you write it.

ANY words you write on the internet or even in email start to have a life of their own right after you hit that 'reply' button. If you're the kind of person that would not stand by their words even years later then you probably shouldn't be clicking that button.

It saves others work down the line, and it saves you embarrassment.

<comment><USER4> I think you've missed the point I was making. The consequences are unknowable at the point of writing. The ability to search, organize and analyze data has grown and will continue to grow.

Online practices that were downright conservative in 1997 would expose personal details today. Similarly, what is safe now, likely won't be in the future as data from even more sources gets correlated.

 _"ANY words you write on the internet or even in email start to have a life of their own right after you hit that 'reply' button. If you're the kind of person that would not stand by their words even years later then you probably shouldn't be clicking that button."_

This idea is ridiculous. People can't be expected to never change their minds and email users clearly have an expectation of privacy. Perhaps a few odd characters would happily "stand by their words" and share their email histories with the world, but the _vast_ majority of us would not.

<comment><USER5> You have it backwards :)

 _Because_ you can not know the consequences at the time of writing you have to think ahead and not write stuff that you think you might regret in the future.

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride, you can _wish_ for a way to undo stuff you said in the past but in practice it will only get harder to do that in the future.

More and more frequently the second you hit 'submit' your content is syndicated all over the globe. I pose that it is impossible to even know who copied down your words and where and when they'll pop up in the future, you should write with that in mind.

The law is a decade behind reality, it has never been any other way with technology. You may be legally in the right and you may have certain expectations but that will not make much difference.

Witness Jimmy Wales trying to wipe out the fact that he owned a porn site, in his profile it says (on wikipedia no less) euphemistically that 'bomis targeted males', but everywhere else ( <http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/12/69880> ) for instance it is clearly visible that it was.

The facts stand by themselves, no amount of handwringing or wishing is going to make that any different.

If you don't want to be confronted with your own words in the future, don't write them and if you don't want to be confronted with your own actions in the future, don't do them.

There is no undo button on email to begin with, and no, you can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy there because you are _sending_ your words to someone else.

Who can then choose to make your words public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not even sure if that possibility exists but since your account does not seem to be attached to anything personal as far as I can see and since you have barely posted / commented here what is the reason you want it deleted ?

Keep in mind that deleting an account means that all the replies to your comments / submissions would be left 'hanging' in space.

<comment><USER6> I don't know about the US, but over here in the Netherlands any service must respond to a request to remove your records. They must comply, or provide a very good reason why your comments/submissions must remain. (In discussions comments can stay if required for the discussion to make sense, but the name has to go).

<comment><USER7> HN is not in the Netherlands, so this is completely irrelevant. (Just like when some company in the US sends a DMCA takedown notice to the Netherlands.)

<comment><USER8> technically, YC has a European subsidiary (a startup funded by them).

<comment><USER5> So ?

Europe != NL.

And even if, a subsidiary incorporated independently is not going to be liable for acts of the parent company unless they are actively engaged in the same activity.

And in this case they would not be, Ycombinator owns and runs the forum, that startup does its own thing.

<comment><USER8> you misunderstood. it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).

on a much larger scale, watch for the impending fight between the EU commission and facebook about this very issue.

<comment><USER5> No, you misunderstood the law.

A startup funded by YC would never ever be seen as a subsidiary.

Google NL BV can be held to the law with respects to google.com, but some start up that google funds will never be used to hold google.com to NL law.

<comment><USER8> Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway), it does however affect the question whether the parent is conducting significant business in a particular country. Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.

For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.

<comment><USER5> > Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are > not operating the website in question anyway),

Good, because the answer to that is clearly 'no', but

> it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a > particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data > protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).

Suggested clearly otherwise, so it looks like you have changed your stance on that.

> Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against > Arrington personally) is a different matter.

Arrington was personally liable, which is a completely different thing than the one you are talking about right now.

> For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would > simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.

I disagree with you.

A free, online forum is exactly what it seems, a place where your opinion can be expressed and will distribute your opinion to strangers.

Expectations like this is what drives the weird terms-of-service that many websites have, the overhead on the kind of activity deployed and the income generated from that preclude manual intervention on behalf of every Tom, Dick and Harry that decide they want to rewrite history after the fact. Besides it being simply a lot of work.

If you do not want your words to be stored in an online service, do not put them there in the first place.

Fora are especially important in that they serve as means of communication, in effect you are asking to be able/allowed to retract your statements after any arbitrary period of time.

If that were to be actually enforceable the only thing that would change would be the terms of service, getting you to agree explicitly with the giving up of that particular right since it completely renders the whole forum concept moot.

Every thread topic ever started by a user that requests to delete their content, every answer to every comment they ever wrote would suddenly stop making sense.

news.yc gives you an hour after you post to retract your words, if you do not wish to make use of that right then it lapses, which I think is a really nice medium between the two worlds.

<comment><USER8> I have not changed my stance on anything.

Do not make deletions out to be more work than they really are, as others have mentioned the suppression of content from a particular account is already implemented to combat spam. Anyway, deletion of particular message is technically the same as allowing edits after 1hr with a fixed replacement text (such as "[deleted by user]").

User-triggered account "deletion" would be a trivial addition instantly obviating recurring, tedious discussions like this. Even Google lets you retract your submissions from their usenet archives and Groups in a simple way.

There are many valid reasons why a user may wish to have their messages removed that override the interest of forum integrity.

No right lapses after one hour since there is no permanent license grant for user submitted content to HN in the first place (lack of TOS). The copyright of entries remains with the user.

<comment><USER7> Spam is not eliminated by deletion, it's eliminated by killing. If you set showdead=1 in your preferences, you can see the spam. It's annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Edit your title to add _Ask PG_. Hopefully PG will read those.

If you don't mind me asking, can we know why anyone would want to delete their account?

<comment><USER10> Or just send him an email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What do you want to delete?

Your comments?

Your name from the comments?

Remove your access?

</comment><comment><USER12> In a similar vein, I'd like to rename my account. Though, I doubt this is easy, so I'll just grin and bear it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Try to hack into the HN servers and drop your records ;)

<comment><USER14> <http://xkcd.com/327/> should give you a start ;-)

<comment><USER15> news.yc uses flat files.

<comment><USER14> Then instead of "delete" we will have to use "sed" or "grep -v" to remove the login... ;-)

<comment><USER16> use ack! - [<http://betterthangrep.com/>]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just post two ironically abusive comments and before long you're banned with no appeal or explanation, worked for me.

(or that's what I think happened - they even let you post for 2 weeks without telling you no-one can read it!)

</comment><comment><USER8> i did mail pg with a similar request (different account), and he essentially responded that he could not be bothered to implement deletion or do it manually.

</comment><comment><USER18> PG is the site admin, his mailbox is the appropriate place for site admin questions, surely?

<comment><USER19> The poster has said:

"if there's some channel I can use that doesn't clutter his inbox"

Since this is standard netiquette, actually his mailbox would be an extremely unusual place for questions like this.

<comment><USER18> What is standard nettiquette? Cluttering a site used by hundreds of people to ask an admin question to an admin? Yes the poster said he doesn't want to clutter his inbox, but regardless of want isn't that the right place for his question?

I know pg is _PG_ , but _that_ doesn't seem relevant to _this_.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask: Anyone knows of an open source cron expression generator? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> <http://www.cronmaker.com/> ?

I believe it's "Quartz" specific (a scheduling framework) so your mileage might vary

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://www.corntab.com/pages/crontab-gui></comment>


Ask HN: What to do in a situation where a person is making sexist comments? - <AUTHOR> I recently attended a data science meetup. I met a woman visiting from an Asian country on a year long internship. A male engineer introduced himself to her. He proceeded to tell her that she was beautiful, something about her eyes being the right shape. However, he then went on to tell her that she should just go to clubs to pick up a hot, successful guy with her looks. He immediately ended the conversation, turned to another male intern, and asked him questions about the program. I was stunned and did not know how to react. At the time, all I could think was, "what the  are you saying?". I don't believe that creating a scene would have helped the situation. How would you respond to a situation like this? <comment><USER2> I would do nothing. Even if woman has shown signs that she is offended by this and I would feel need to help her to cope with stress, I'll do nothing. It is hard to talk with offended and to not offend her even more.

I generally try to avoid communicating with extremely sensitive people. It is pain to talk with them trying to guess if the next my comment would offend her or it wouldn't. It is just boring, you need to stop making fun from life, stop joking, stop thinking in unexpected ways and try to think in a ways the most people think, because it is the only safe way.

Situation becomes worse if such a sensitive person already feel offended.

<comment><USER3> The OP is clearly asking about how to respond to the male instigator of the situation. Your misreading of the question, as well as your assertion that the woman involved in the story is "sensitive" and that, to understand how she feels, you would need to "stop making fun from life" and "try to think [the way] the most people think" shows a complete a total ignorance and lack of empathy on your part. The OP made no mention of the woman's reaction, everything you are saying is based on your own flawed assumptions. Please rethink the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To the male engineer - preferably with her in earshot: "Hey, that's way out of line and spectacularly unprofessional. We don't do that here. Treat people with respect. You owe her an apology."

</comment><comment><USER5> Well it works for some gals, so what's there to lose. that guy was following the same attitude..."nothing to lose".

Chill man and don't react.

If you are single, this is for you:: What you can do is.. goto her and apologize, saying" I am sorry on that man's behalf, not all scientists are like him. .......and switch the conversation about something she has into or about field of internship she is in. :)

<comment><USER3> What there is to "lose" is a sense of dignity and self-respect that comes from treating others with respect. The woman in the story was almost certainly at a data science meetup because, big surprise, she wanted to engage with others on the topic of data science, network, discuss current areas of current research, etc. Not to be treated as a fleshy object of sexualized adulation and Asian fetishization.

Why would OP only engage with the woman if he/she were single? Do you only talk to people about their interests if you're trying to get laid?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would introduce yourself to her and mention that you thought the previous guy was an idiot and a freak.

I would then engage her in a data science topic and ignore the guy.</comment>


Purelymail: Cheap email with custom domains, 2FA - <AUTHOR> https://purelymail.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> No affiliation with the service. Just a happy user. Great UI. 2FA implementation with TOTP, app passwords and backup codes. Custom domains support SPF and DKIM. Very cheap pricing at $10/year for "all-you-can-eat" with some soft limits. Looks like a one-person project but developer has been active with regular updates on the both the service status and issue tracker.</comment>


Microsoft Kills Windows 10's Automatic Driver Search - <AUTHOR> https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/microsoft-kills-windows-10-driver-search/ <comment><USER2> That sucks. I much preferred the drivers Windows automatically finds over navigating shitty vendor websites that break their links every other year and sometimes just take down all drivers for some of their product.

It also takes away some of the power Microsoft had over hardware manufacturers regarding driver quality; the WHQL program has only improved driver quality in my experience. Of course companies like NVIDIA encourage you to use their website version that doesn't need to pass all the quality checks because it's faster, preferably by making you sign up and letting them track what you do on your computer with some of their spyware, but that doesn't take away from the fact that Microsoft-sanctioned drivers are usually much more reliable and secure than random downloads a vendor decides to throw on their website.

It also makes a lot of older hardware useless. Microsoft's database contains many more drivers for less common, cheaper brands than vendors' websites, especially when the devices in question is older than three years and they'd much rather have you buy a new laptop than give you a driver for the motherboard.

I too have been bitten by the random software popup when plugging in a "gaming" mouse from Logitech, but I think it's wrong to blame Microsoft for the shitty software their vendors throw online. Microsoft judges drivers on stability and code quality rather than weird features like side programs, so if Logitech asserts that their customers want to use the program to use all the drivers' features, then who are they to object?

<comment><USER3> It would be so easy to implement as switch for something like this. It is like Microsoft really tries to not give users a choice these days.

<comment><USER4> I think part of this is because Microsoft already has mountains of barely used legacy code they need to support. With every choice they remove, they can remove some of it, or at least make sure it doesn't grow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It appears most people here have't read the article. Unlike what the title states, Windows is not losing the ability to automatically find drivers. Take note of this bit:

> _The option to manually browse your PC for a driver is still present. You > can also still update your drivers via Windows Update. The update only > prevents the Device Manager from using the internet to update your drivers._

</comment><comment><USER6> Every time when I clicked Automatic Search it searched for ages and found nothing. I knew something was wrong with it.

It is mind boggling that Microsoft after all the years with dealing with the OS couldn't make it work.

<comment><USER7> It is mind boggling how smart and clear thinking people want so badly to dump on Microsoft, to the degree that it blinds them to objective reality. Auto driver update functionally is now in windows update and it works well. This is mentioned in the article. They are killing this because it's broken and they don't need it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Actually, starting with Windows 10 Release 2004, all device manufacturers will be able to mark driver updates as automatic, while optional driver updates will appear within an "Optional updates" area of Windows Update. This obsoletes the tedious search for driver updates within Device Manager.

Source: [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/hardware-dev- center/s...](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/hardware-dev- center/shipping-label-changes-and-manual-drivers/bc-p/1183469)

</comment><comment><USER9> Driver search seems like a relatively simple collective action problem that the OS provider is well-positioned to solve. It seems like all that's necessary is to extract an identifier for the device and have a repository of (operating-system, identifier) -> driver that device manufacturers can upload to.

I guess it's the extras that kill things. Product differentiators like applets, software utility suites etc. probably make drivers less than simple modules, and more like installable software packages. It's in the OS vendor's interest to commoditize this and make devices generic, but not in the device manufacturers' interests.

<comment><USER10> This is essentially what Linux does. The "driver repository" is just the kernel source.

<comment><USER11> Only for the FOSS drivers. Which often suck.

<comment><USER10> Almost all the drivers on Linux are FOSS. I've never owned a device that needs closed drivers (other than phones and dear god do those drivers suck balls) but I've heard some pretty bad things from friends and people on the internet who have had to tolerate closed GPU drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the basis that 90% of the time when it did go off to the 'internet' (aka some Microsoft site) to find drivers it would spend hours doing it to only come back with nothing, it's been pretty useless for some time now.

One wonders if it's been broken for ages, and MS have finally decided to put it out of it's misery.

<comment><USER9> Occasionally Windows 10 Update will bump my graphics card driver and I'll need to go off to nVidia and get the proper latest version which isn't just a bare bones driver.

When it works, it's not even necessarily what you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really liked the feature, Once on my win7, I installed a cheap plug-n-play network card with realtech microcontroller. Assuming,it will work outof box. It didn't. Then I just used my mobile for usb tethering, quickly launch the automatic search from settings and thats all. It found the needed drivers automatically.

</comment><comment><USER14> Might be a good thing - once to my horror it just installed some manufacturer crapware when I plugged in a new mouse, and it did so without asking for permission. The software was the type of thing that makes you sign up for an account so you can adjust DPI and make it do weird things with colours. This was a few years back and hopefully this change means the end of stuff like that.

I think when working with a piece of hardware that requires a specific driver the user is best placed to go to the manufacturer website and download it.

<comment><USER15> Back before Nvidia had automatic detection I'm pretty sure I installed the wrong driver and somehow caused some major issues with my PC. This was well over a decade ago.

Now I have some application of theirs sitting in my system tray and it makes life much easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This feature has sucked for a long time, and it's past time that they got rid of it. It rarely works and, as the article notes, it offers a misleading message when no updates are found. Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER17> The only downside to this that's springing to mind, is when you plug in older hardware.

Sometimes manufacturers go out of business or no longer provide downloads for older models.

<comment><USER18> Or provide drivers only on a disc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Windows 7-10 users may like SDI Tool Origin. It's libre software and it automatically fetches what you need.

</comment><comment><USER20> What an awful clickbait title. Can this be changed? It's totally misleading and lacks the important information that this only applies to the Device Manager. Automatic Driver Search through WU, of course, hasn't been removed. That would be crazy.</comment>


Comparing IPFS and Dat - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/comparing-ipfs-and-dat-8f3891d3a603 <comment><USER2> One thing I did not see compared is overhead. I haven't tried Dat yet but IPFS seems somewhat fat from my tests of it. It eats it's fair share of RAM and CPU. I expect a distributed everything store to eat disk but being light on RAM and CPU can be important. Disk is cheaper.</comment>


Online Ads Are Booming, if They're Attached to a Video  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/business/media/11adco.html?_r=1&ref=technology

<comment><USER2> I just wish they wouldn't show me the _same_ pre-roll over and over. If they do that more than twice, I leave, and I don't come back.

</comment><comment><USER3> $75 CPM. Just wow.

<comment><USER4> I guess an online ad view is more valuable because it's better targeted, and has more potential since it is more interactive.

<comment><USER5> A quick Google search says TV ads in prime time is $25 CPM...

How is online targeting better? The site might have a demographic profile, it can avoid showing an ad more than once per user, but it's nothing like search targeting...

<comment><USER4> Companies like Coke and Apple purchase TV ads to do branding too. That's something text search ads just can't do that well. It's great for suggesting someone something at the right time though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh crap, there goes the neighborhood.

</comment><comment><USER7> I hope this is true</comment>


Tom Tom sells Customer driving data to cops, apologizes - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tomtom_apologizes_for_selling_customers_driving_da.php

<comment><USER2> I get the feeling that we are only in the beginning stages of this change.

Both customers (in this case law enforcement but I'm sure there will be others) and vendors (like Tom Tom) are under economic pressure and willing to try alternatives outside the 'usual practices.'

That creates a sort of 'invention energy' (I know, a pretty squishy term) which enables disruption.

For a while I've noticed that sheer inertia keeps a lot of things in place. Back at Sun I designed a replacement for the YP service called NIS+, and because it was more secure and could do more things, as a young engineer I figured "Folks will dump YP faster and jump on!" But customer after customer I talked to would say "Well _we_ haven't had exactly those problems with YP, it works for us how does this new system connect with that system?"

The answer was it connected poorly, I really had a hard time believing anyone would want to continue using YP and so didn't spend a lot of time on thinking about backward compatibility (beyond moving data over).

What I had learned was that system administrators (my customers) were a cautious group. They don't change if they don't have to, and while they may sample new things if they can do so without disruption, their high order bit was 'hold the course.'

Later as networks got bigger and some of the features that NIS+ provided were impossible to do any other way, adoption began to rise. Eventually lots of networks were run using it (this was after I had left Sun, the product that was widely adopted was the work of the NIS+ team, not me)

I had discovered for myself a way to internalize what a lot of people call the 'Value Proposition', which is the value the customer will experience by adopting the product. This is a pair of terms, one is pain and one is features. So you 'win' by reducing pain-points (sometimes you can have the exact same feature set and less pain to win), and you can 'win' by adding new features. These are the fundamental components of 'invention energy.'

As various things develop technological capabilities, those capabilities can be combined into a wide range of possible 'features'. As various customers develop pain (either through economic changes, or requirement changes, or environment changes) their willingness to step away from doing things the same way they always have also increases.

Today we have organizations that are charged with maintaining the safety of large populations of individuals, which are constrained by budgets which constrains their manpower and other assets. We also have a huge explosion in personal connectivity, social graphing, and location based services. A lot of pain, and a lot of possible technologic feature combinations. That creates a lot of invention energy around using this data in marketable ways. Tom Tom finds someone willing to buy their data about who is driving around when (which no doubt they collected so they could better predict traffic patterns). The customer in this case wants to know where folks are speeding so they can install enforcement devices to mitigate that. Apple collects data so that they can provide faster location fixes, but also develops an asset which can tell competitive phone companies where customers congregate.

Bottom line is I think we will see a lot of more of this kind of thing as the whole privacy issue plays out.</comment>


Fred Turner: Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn't Exist - <AUTHOR> https://032c.com/fred-turner-silicon-valley-thinks-politics-doesnt-exist <comment><USER2> _No Neutral Ground in a Burning World_

[http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground- burn...](http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/no-neutral-ground-burning- world/)

> I know that you didn't ask for this job. You didn't ask for this role in > society. None of you, not one of you, wants to think about the many people > that can be affected by one fucking perfectly normal bug or mistake in > the technology that you built. And this is one of the reasons we keep > our heads down. No one became a geek because they wanted to be the center > of political attention.

> That just happened.

> You don't get to choose. You don't get to choose what era of history you > live in and what that era wants to do with you. And this is a moment when > it's all up for grabs. That's what it means to say we're on a burning > planet. And what it means to say that we don't have neutral ground is that > you're at the center of that fire. You set it. You're one of the people > that set it. You're one of the people that tend it. And everything you do, > the changes you make over the next months and years are going to chime down > decades and centuries and shape the lives of people you will never know > [...]

<comment><USER3> The solution to social problems are not going to come from nerds sitting in ivory towers, who so far have been happy to take credit for unintended positive consequences and look the other way or get defensive when negative consequences show up.

The is the wrong class of people to be guilt-tripping. As dumb as trying to guilt trip someone on Wall Street. Not that guilt tripping works at all any class of people. It just produces short term fixes under pressure with costs down the line.

Techies need to be guided by social scientists, psycologists, anthropologists, politicians local to different cultures. These are the people on front lines dealing with the consequences. That is the only route to a better place.

<comment><USER4> If these people are so important, why aren't they making the millions and the decisions? The money and the power are in the technologists and management. We need a route to your proposed route. Some way to convince large organizations of software developers that ethics is, somehow, more important than money.

<comment><USER5> > If these people are so important, why aren't they making the millions and > the decisions? The money and the power are in the technologists and > management.

You literally answered yourself. The key is that "important" != "earns money or has power".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Apolitical" spaces are a tool. Specifically, it's a polite fiction that lets people drop their overt political agendas in favor of getting shit done, working together, enjoying a hobby, remaining on good terms with people, eating dinner with family, or whatever other highly valuable thing people get together for.

It's not "politics doesn't exist". It's that the advantages of declaring a political cease-fire in many contexts outweighs the cost of not being able to advance your personal agenda. This is _especially_ true in many engineering and technology contexts, where creating a product that generates business value for your company is orders of magnitude more important than your political concerns. Even if you think your politics is extraordinarily important, the answer is likely to donate a portion of your salary to political groups rather than politicizing the workplace.

<comment><USER7> That depends on what you mean by "politics" \- if you're being unfairly discriminated against on race, gender etc grounds, that's something that other people have already brought to the space. Your options are to accept it (at a permanent disadvantage) or complain (risk being dismissed as "politics").

Sometimes the political is really personal.

("Apolitical" is like "leaderless" or "self-driving": there really is a leader or a driver or a politics, it's just that everyone agrees to pretend that they don't exist or their intermittent intervention isn't crucial)

<comment><USER6> Well yeah, your choices _in general_ with an apolitical space are to either break the no-politics cease fire or decide that it's bad enough that you're not getting a good enough deal to stay quiet. People tend to underestimate the value of the cease fire, though - I wouldn't break it at my workplace for a $5k/yr raise, more than that might be worthwhile though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It isn't that politics doesn't exist, it's that politics and engineering are two different things.

Nobody designs an infrastructure to change your desire such that you desire a red Popsicle and not a green Popsicle. They design a generic infrastructure that can influence your desires and the specific desires are fungible parameters. It's equally capable of making you want red over green or green over red, or want to conserve water, or stay home from the polls on election day, or drink more Ovaltine. The engineering portion is the same in each case. It's a general-purpose tool.

The politics is in what you use it for. But that's the same as anything. A wall or fence with the same engineering specs has very different consequences when it's used to corral livestock than when it's used to imprison people.

The issue is that some companies (e.g. Facebook) are not just doing the engineering, they're also making the political decisions. They're not just creating a general-purpose technology, they're also deploying it in a specific way. And making the decision for everyone because they don't have enough competition.

<comment><USER9> > It's a general-purpose tool. The politics is in what you use it for.

That's exactly the view they are arguing against. There is no hard border between tool and decision to use it, the infrastructure will always shift the context of what's possible and alter society.

Once nuclear weapons become possible, a coldwar and arms race becomes imminent. Once a massive, uncensorable communication network becomes pervasive, the old social institutions that guide public communication become irrelevant and we build new ones or face massive misinformation and propaganda campaigns. It's not that we choose to use social media to propagate fake news, it's the inevitable political consequence of their technical structure.

This is not an argument against building things. But an argument for taking responsibility for what you build and acknowledging that building technology is a political move, it strongly affects the inner life of the polis.

<comment><USER10> If a smith makes a hammer for nails, makes the blueprint available for everyone and someone uses that hammer model to kill someone, is the smith evil? Should the smith no longer make the blueprint available because hammers can be used for evil?

Has the smith made a political move by making the hammer available to everyone? Because all the smith wanted to do is share his knowledge to everyone, so everyone can smith their own hammers.

Ultimately the smith is not morally responsible for what people do with the hammer IMO. The entire intent behind all actions of the smith was to do good, can we call him evil for that?

Similarly I don't think simply building tools is a political or moral move. Rather, it's what you encourage people to do with it and what people do with it that is politically and moral. If I encourage my tool to be used for the better of society, am I evil is a small number of people abuse it?

Don't get me wrong, I still think SV is a den of abuse, however that is because social networks like Twitter and Facebook aren't the hammer. They're not neutral tools. Both profit from moral abuse of the platform, it is enabled and encouraged to do so. Google as a search engine is making it's tool with the only intend to manipulate and abuse users for ads.

There is definitely tools that exist in a moral vacuum (just think of a selfhosted radioshow software, it can host a show about pro-LGBT and one about 9/11 conspiracies, should the author be responsible for either?). But social networks and the tools you mention are largely not it. Those tools have been made with the purpose to do evil.

<comment><USER11> Google and co aren't the smiths, they are the ones that hire them

<comment><USER10> In this example, they hire smiths to do evil and the smiths comply to make tools for evil. You can equate Google and Friends to the Smiths since the outcome is the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think that's fair. Personally, for a long time I didn't _want_ politics to exist. I wasn't good at it, thought it was a waste of time and resources, and hoped to ignore it. But that clearly didn't work. E.g., the innocent BBS nerd havens of my youth turned into an online communication system that has let terrible people organize around the world.

<comment><USER13> IMO the prior you was correct. We don't even think about all of the good these tools have done because we take it so for granted. The fact that these tools were built, without reference or consideration for politics is one of the greatest things ever to happen in human history. The fact that the internet is open, free, and (somewhat) decentralized would _never_ have happened had politics been allowed to worm its way into the design process, and that would have been a tragedy of unspeakable proportions.

<comment><USER14> Isn't the internet only (somewhat) open/free/decentralized because of the politics of the people that built it?

<comment><USER13> Sorry, i'm not sure if i'm understanding correctly. I have two equiprobable interpretations of your question:

1\. The internet is not completely decentralized due to the politics of its engineers.

2\. The internet being designed to be open and free was, as much as any other architecture, reflective of the politics of its framers.

I suppose they are essentially the same question, though. You're right, the architecture of the internet does reflect the politics of its engineers, to a degree. But I think it mostly represents an attempt at the most flexible, simple architecture to provide infrastructure for other applications without being opinionated about those applications. Which, on the one hand, is sort of a political choice, though I feel it's only political in the sense that it avoids any and all political considerations. Its politics are neutrality and agnosticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When someone dresses up their politics as apolitical, it's impossible to discuss politics with them. _Usefully_ , anyway.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems to me that these kinds of authors always see the alternative as a Silicon Valley with _their_ politics. This article describes a bunch of concrete things that tech companies ought to do: ensure the poor aren't marginalized, bring local communities together, and don't provide mechanisms for creating echo chambers. But what neither Turner nor Khan discuss is how tech companies will realize they ought to do this.

What if Amazon politicizes in the direction of libertarianism, and decides its only social responsibility is to increase the world's GDP?

What if Facebook politicizes in the direction of social justice, and determines that segregating people into identity-based safe spaces is the way to go?

What if Google politicizes in the direction of some political party, and decides it's duty-bound to tweak its search algorithm to hurt opposing candidates?

<comment><USER17> Personally I see the alternative as a Silicon Valley which accepts that its output can never be "neutral" or "apolitical", no matter how many claims are made to the contrary, and which gives consideration to that _before_ building things, allowing that consideration to influence the design.

Any time you're building technology with (or with the intention of) mass reach, "if the person I consider to be the most evil in the world were to commandeer this, what's the absolute worst they could manage to do with it" is a useful question to ask. If some companies had asked this question far earlier in their lifecycles, we might see a very different world around us today.

<comment><USER18> How many VC's want to see that question answered in the pitch deck?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Given the number of topics that are flagged from the HN home page because they involve politics it's difficult to disagree...

<comment><USER20> He's talking about the neutrality vs agency of technology, which is largely unrelated to most of the political articles on HN. For context, here is a good thread with a bunch of Ph.D. researchers linking to their favorite academic resources on this topic:

[https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/oSUhsJffQNCxSFVBQNCLKA/air- age...](https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/oSUhsJffQNCxSFVBQNCLKA/air-agency- neutrality-algorithms)

This thread on technological determinism vs social construction of technology is also very relevant.

[https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/QNW9-XK6RdmoeRtUp4b5eQ/air- see...](https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/QNW9-XK6RdmoeRtUp4b5eQ/air-seeking- short-introduction-tech)

Anyway this is what Turner is talking about when he's talking about algorithmic bias and actor-network theory. It has nothing to do with random articles about Trump's immigration policies or affirmative action or whatever, which is most of what gets flagged on HN.

<comment><USER19> I dunno, I've seen a few HN posts about, for example, the Facebook news feed and its connections to the propagation of fake news. That's absolutely connected to the "neutrality" of the news feed (it's an algorithm! Algorithms can't be bad, they're just math!), but will be flagged all the same. It's a shame for many reasons, but not least that it's a fascinating topic.

<comment><USER21> There have been quite a few major discussions of that. I think people start to flag such a topic when it enters a later stage of repetitiveness. Call it the Snowden effect.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


6 Tips for Turning Shoppers Into Buyers - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/startingabusiness/startupbasics/startupbasicscolumnistbradsugars/article189404.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Summary version:

Determine your conversion ratio then attempt to improve it

1\. Make it really clear what differentiates your from the competition

2\. Identify bottlenecks in your sales process.

3\. Get your customers engaged.

4\. Keep the conversation/interaction going with more leading questions -> dont ask questions that can kill the conversation

5\. Review and adjust your sales pitch often</comment>


Spin up your Heroku dyno automatically after deploy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.joshdzielak.com/blog/2012/03/11/spin-up-your-heroku-dyno-automatically-after-deploy/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome - except that the post deploy hook times out waiting for my app to load after being deployed.

Heroku takes over 30 seconds to get my app from 'deployed' to 'running', and it's not even a very large app yet.</comment>


EduHack - New Career, without going back to school - <AUTHOR> http://eduhack.me/

<comment><USER2> The site doesn't seem legit for me. I got the following email from them after sign-up:

Thank you for signing up for EduHack!

You can really help us out by sharing with your unique URL with your friends:

[http://eduhack.me?lrRef=jP0nK](http://eduhack.me?lrRef=jP0nK)

You can always find out how many people you have referred

by coming back to [http://eduhack.me](http://eduhack.me) and entering your email address again.

Thank you, The EduHack Team

e: I don't know how to quote :/

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure that's just the default LaunchRock email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this solely for developers or does it cover other fields?

</comment><comment><USER5> any site that you can't examine before signing up sends a red flag.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sketch.</comment>


Ask Hacker Newsies: What tool(s) do you use to "wireframe" your UI? - <AUTHOR>

Any good tools out there for creating wireframe prototypes of web apps?  With just HTML, trying different layouts of UIs is pretty slow-going. <comment><USER2> Sharpie and Paper.

Its quick and it helps you to focus on the bigger picture and not the details see: <http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_Interface_First.php>

especially this part: The Orange Pen That Started Blinksale

<comment><USER3> The thing Sharpie has over pencil/pen is that it makes FAT lines. Just makes rough sketches feel better. You can get about the same thing with a whiteboard, as well.

<comment><USER4> The reason fat lines feel better in a sketch is that you're not forced to overcommit about the precision you want. Another alternative (often used by architects) is to make thin lines but deliberately make them wobbly.

<comment><USER5> Sketch and storyboard artists for film and animation often use sharpies for this same reason. You want to convey an idea first - people often zoom in on the finest detail in a drawing or design, and using inexact lines makes the design itself the thing you focus on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pencil & paper, or occasionally pen & napkin.

At work we had a dedicated UI designer, and he'd occasionally use Macromedia Fireworks for UI mockups. But that was primarily because our boss wanted professional-looking mockups to show to prospective customers. For communicating and iterating on ideas, I've yet to find anything that matches the productivity of paper. There were times where a week's worth of Fireworks mockups and meetings were resolved in about an hour when I brought a stack of paper into the designer's cube, took 5 minutes to sketch out a couple screens, and had him iterate from there.

</comment><comment><USER7> As others have said, pen and paper... I happen to like colour so sometimes I use coloured pencils but it's really not required.

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out omnigraffle (mac only).</comment>


In 2018, Tumblr Is a Joyless Black Hole - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/in-2018-tumblr-is-a-joyless-black-hole-1827294865 <comment> temp-dude-87844 Despite the hyperbolic title, the article dwells into the reasons for Tumblr's perceived and actual decline. Among them: reliance on user-generated content being a blessing and a curse, issues around learning and navigating emergent community etiquette, and users' eventual frustrations around discovery, privacy, and harrassment. Some suppositions are made about management style before and after the Yahoo acquisition, but in truth Tumblr was always buggy, new features came out and disappeared, and reappeared with little warning, and Yahoo's impact, aside from more ads and a different account creation flow, was mostly in users' minds.

Ironically, the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites based around user-generated content, like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook. Tumblr was the platform en vogue for many who coalesced around an interest or an identity, for entertainment and self-exploration alike, but the same ease of discovery that allowed Sherlock fans to find each other, or Questioning individuals to explore LGBTQ+ communities, make now-revoked or now-offensive posts easy to find, and make it easier for malicious actors to target, troll, and harrass.

The pendulum is swinging back towards more closely moderated, more closed communities, that even if they represent groups that are marginalized in the overworld, are more homogenous around a particular set of attributes. This migration is slowly leaving Tumblr feeling stale. Given enough time and enough people, another platform will grow to fulfill the same social purpose that Tumblr once did for a different generation of users, and some time later those unhappy with that platform will migrate to somewhere more public to benefit from greater exposure and a more diverse cavalcade of content.

<comment><USER2> > the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites based around > user-generated content

This was what caught my attention at being remarkably non-unique:

> Another structural problem of Tumblr is that deleted blogs don't really go > away. Once a blog has been reblogged to someone else's Tumblr, they are > essentially posting it again as a copy of the original.

It's a well-aired controversy for the Web at large, including the EU's "right to be forgotten", hardly specific to Tumblr.

It made me wonder if the article isn't more a lament that Internet discussion forum platforms in general have failed to adapt to modern usage/expectations.

I hadn't considered the pendulum idea until you brought it up. I had merely assumed there isn't enough moderation labor available given the increasing number of users, but that wouldn't apply to a closed community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Was on there from 2009 ~ 2016. Being queer & trans, it was the first online social platform where I could be exposed to new narratives and interact with others.

Previously it had been forums and YouTube, but neither felt as personal. I ended up meeting a former partner and current one on Tumblr.

Tumblr however was hemorrhaging money. The way they commercialized it following Yahoo's purchase discouraged trans authors: content was marked as NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily accessible to unregistered members, tags that were used to find trans content became inundated with prn spammers.

Nothing has really filled the gap left by Tumblr.

<comment><USER4> > content was marked as NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily > accessible to unregistered members

Why is this a bad thing? I've seen people mentioned this before in a negative way, but I don't understand why it hurts tumblr.

<comment><USER5> I used to read random people's tumblr, some gamedevs and whatnot had posts there.

What tumblr did was that suddenly all "NFSW" things to US standards (that are different from say... Japan standards), was hidden, not showing anymore on google searches, and when trying to click random hyperlinks ending on blocked content fairly often.

After this happened, I stopped reading tumblr, since I am not a poster, and have no intention of ever writing in tumblr, I don't feel like going through all the trouble of creating an account, and finding where they put the opt-in for NFSW posts, and keep logging on every time I click on a random link that tumblr moderation bot decided was NFSW.

I have a degree in digital animation, so I had for example tumblr block me from a blog that contained some references about character movements, because it featured "naked" characters (more like characters without texture genitals and clothes, but since women boobs you can't 'delete' from a model without changing how it works, they are always there, evne if without nipples, but in US culture that is frowned upon and get tagged NFSW).

Or some christian blogs talking about what is sinful or not, and so on. Tumblr differently than say... "Medium", is self styled less seriously, where people are more casual, not a place to find academic essays, so when the content is hidden, you can assume maybe is not worth your time going out of your way to register in the service that you have no intention of actually using.

<comment><USER6> > _" What tumblr did was that suddenly all "NFSW" things to US standards"_

What was honestly expected? Tumblr was an American company and they got bought by another American company. The brand had a reputation for hardcore pornography which was doubtlessly toxic to advertisers (most of whom are also American companies), so expecting Yahoo to turn a blind eye just wasn't realistic.

If you want a website moderated to the Japanese standard, you should probably find a website run by a Japanese company that supports itself with advertisements purchased by Japanese companies (a Japanese company in the business of selling advertisements to American companies would probably apply the American standard.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My personal experience with Tumblr was weird. A friend of mine had it and talked about all the cool friends she made on it which sounded super cool, so I joined. From there things got real weird because in my experience the community is very clique based. My friend wouldn't tell me her screen name since she ranted about life in her blog and I was in there, so I just started liking things I thought were cool and reposting. Talking to people on the platform though became clear that the "real" Tumblr users actively despise new users over fears that Tumblr will be come too popular or something along those lines, this was around the time Yahoo was looking into it. Needless to say it was a very hostile community and I ended up leaving after 2 weeks.

</comment><comment><USER8> Using Tumblr is a challenge.

When I first started reading Tumblr blogs I was confused about the themes people used. Depending on the layout, the far side of quote pyramids often becomes so ridiculously narrow that all characters are stacked on top of each other. Conversations become unreadable.

Some other, modern themes use a different layout that doesn't have that problem.

I wondered why people put up with the old style until I found out that the usual way participants look at conversations is on their dashboard, which discards themes and uses the modern layout. People don't look at their own blogs. Blog themes _aren 't designed for reading_. Only people without accounts have to deal with that, but they can't complain because they don't have accounts.

The whole reblogging system is a disaster. It's like a comment tree, but you can only look at one branch at a time.

<comment><USER9> I remember experiencing that myself, closing the window, and leaving with a sour opinion of tumblr. This sounds like a very solvable problem, and one that could have measurable results with a high ROI if fixed. Wonder if they've tried it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Affective death spirals:

[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral)

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: (Where heat == intelligence)

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative- cooling-of-group-beliefs)

<comment><USER11> Heat should be seen as diversity of viewpoints rather than intelligence

<comment><USER10> That's arguably better. In the original formulation, I think it's that the sub-population that is genuinely intellectually curious gets jaded, while the sub-population that is into capitalizing on group-think starts to take over. In this way, it's also related to intelligence.

<comment><USER11> Eh, I think that's mostly a consequence of the group considered rather than fundamental behavior. See e.g. the discussion about the same effects in science as they develop their own group think (jargon)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can a building host a party so toxic that the building itself is socially irreparable?

We have a different obligation to software than we do to physical things; digital hangouts are after all just a computer program. What makes a thing popular seems to be a product of the number of people present crossed by the social weight of the people present. We might say that a party becomes uncool once a certain class of people has joined, or is uncool once a certain class of people have left.

The article says that the people on Tumblr are often horrible to each other and that it ruins Tumblr; we can burn that digital building down but it will just be rebuilt, with the same swelling of cool people coming and going, and undesirables lingering, in a cycle that cannot be broken.

I think that social media must necessarily follow the forest fire model, with lots of expected, regular burnings-down to allow for regrowth.

<comment><USER10> _We might say that a party becomes uncool once a certain class of people has joined, or is uncool once a certain class of people have left._

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative- cooling-of-group-beliefs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Says Kotaku. Talk about joyless... Also looks like a stealth ad for another web site (pillowfort).

</comment><comment><USER14> Tumblr was mostly a free porn-stash portal in the beginning, and even though David Karp denied it[1] it's still the case even today. Just do a site:tumblr.com <porn_keywords_here> and you'll find plenty of NSFW tumblogs...

[1] Source: 2011 What Is Responsible For Tumblr's Recent Explosive Growth? => [http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked- as-n...](http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked-as-nsfw- responsible-for-tumblrs-recent-explosive-growth-traffic_95/)

</comment><comment><USER15> > "In my formative time in fandom [before Tumblr], learning the rules and > etiquette of the space was not optional, it was baked into the entire > structure of fandom," Danielle said. "There was a hurdle of entry to fandom; > it was organized into moderated communities and kinkmemes and other places > that had rules, and even more than that had real live people who ran stuff > and would prevent drama from boiling over."

I'd argue that this is overblown. Way back in the '90s, most organized online fandom was on Usenet. Usenet had no formal rules. Sure, there was a ton of cultural norms, but there was no enforcement. If you were really tired of somebody, you could put their name into something called a "killfile" which would hide their posts from you (killfiles were entirely client-side). And ultimately despite the "Eternal September", Usenet worked well enough. Trolls came and went. Every once in a while a group would be dragged into the Meow Wars. But it was still less toxic than LiveJournal.

I mostly remember the LiveJournal age (and the UBB/vBulletin/phpBB age that existed alongside it) as something that was dominated by moderators who cared more about bikeshedding and wielding power than actually keeping awful people out. Rules enforcement was more like "You didn't format your post exactly the way I want it, this is your only warning, next time you're banned!". And in the meantime toxic people would just run rampant with concern trolling and/or attacking other fans for every little thing and the mods would just sit there and do nothing.

On UBB/vBulletin/phpBB boards, it wouldn't be uncommon for half the threads on the front page to be locked often with the threads ending with snarky moderator comments like "Use the search function next time dumbass". Or for all discussion on a particular subject to be shoved into a "megathread" with no threaded comments (god, I hated those forums; I miss WWWBoard).

Fandom has always been toxic.

Edit: Though I'll say that Tumblr's software and organization is godawful. The fact that until very recently the only way to comment on someone else's post was to reblog their post and add your comment at the bottom is just bizarre, nonsensical, and not conducive to any kind of productive discussion. And how reblogs and likes all got shoved under the "notes" category. You see a post gets 700 notes: you have no idea if it's a good post that got 700 likes or a shitty post that got 700 reblog-comments calling it out. And straight reblogs are treated the same way as reblog-comments too, so "soandso reblogged this post" is worthless. Are they sharing your post or replying to it? Gah.

</comment><comment><USER16> Somebody still uses Tumblr?

<comment><USER17> Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.</comment></comment>


JIT Fuzzing Solver: experimental constraint solver using coverage-guided fuzzing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/delcypher/jfs#jfs <comment><USER2> Heh. Reminds me of this joke project of mine, written in response to aphyr's ridiculous and awesome fake interview blog posts. Solving the 8-queens problem using a fuzzer:

[https://github.com/zellyn/fuzzyqueens/blob/master/fuzzyqueen...](https://github.com/zellyn/fuzzyqueens/blob/master/fuzzyqueens.go)

</comment><comment><USER3> Successful "reduction" from a NP-complete problem to an undecidable one :-)</comment>


Alaska's thawing soils are now pouring carbon dioxide into the air - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/08/alaskas-tundra-is-filling-the-atmosphere-with-carbon-dioxide-worsening-climate-change/?utm_term=.da7f3e23dc07 <comment><USER2> I wouldn't be surprised if such feedback loops have been excluded from the models of climate change because they paint a picture so dire that no amount of mitigation (if there were any serious attempts at mitigation going on) could save our way of life.

"Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with increasing frequency.

<comment><USER3> It was never true that human industry was the main cause of co2 release into the atmosphere.

Which is one of the reasons to doubt that all those climate accords will have any influence on global warming at all.

> "Sooner and worse than expected" is a phrase I expect to hear with > increasing frequency.

If you increase the input into self-reinforcing feedback loop that is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Not that at that point it makes a large difference, but it certainly makes _some_ difference.

Feedback loops are notoriously hard to mitigate.

<comment><USER4> What if it's all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

<comment><USER5> Then trillions of dollars were extremely inefficiently allocated to the task of creating better worlds and a much _better_ world could have been created with that money instead, costing lives in the process.

Having noble goals doesn't immunize you from accounting.

<comment><USER6> I recommend you read "Money: The Unauthorized Biography [0]" You'll never look at money the same way again. Money is not a commodity even though we treat it as such. It certainly is not a finite resource.

Plenty of money gets created everyday for thing far more stupid than trying to save the world. Look at how much money has been created (and will be spent) for no good reason at all in the current cryptocoin bubble. The massive capital gains are going to be cashed out and spent somewhere, creating market distortions, making people who contribute nothing insanely wealthy. Money is not sacred. Better we use it to try and save the world than to treat it as if it (and the market) are some all-wise, ever-perfect allocator of human and natural resources.

[0]: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F1W0DAO/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

<comment><USER5> I already have an alternate view of money. I look at generalized wealth more directly, with money merely an somewhat interesting special case that is less special than most people think it is. (I tend to think even economists pay too much attention to currency. Not that they pay attention _only_ to currency, but that they pay _too much_ attention to it.) The simple truth is that if you bend the economy towards creating wind and solar and cutting down hydrocarbon usage and all the other things we have to do, all the people doing that stuff as the result of a hoax aren't doing something else that would have been more useful.

Money isn't the issue; finite time and resources are.

My point has nothing to do with how terrible capitalism is or any silly bete noirs like that. It is simply the observation that if we waste our time on A, we can't be using that time to do the better B. It sits at a level of fundamental truth far below debates about economic systems or the nature of money.

<comment><USER3> I wonder where the theory that government spending is simply free actually comes from, that somehow when the government spends money (or enacts regulation or taxes, same thing) that the cost is somehow magically not that everybody has to work more and/or harder to achieve those things.

But it's sure becoming a popular theory.

Also: I think what you're describing might be the broken window fallacy: [http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window- fal...](http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fallacy.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think this is specific to Alaska - there's something similar going on in Siberia and other places where melting permafrost has the potential to do serious damage.

There are even books (and soon at least one movie) on how restoring wooly mammoth populations can save us.

\- [http://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/534768716/woolly-breathes- new-...](http://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/534768716/woolly-breathes-new-life- into-a-scientific-saga)

\- [https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050308/woolly-ben- mezri...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050308/woolly-ben-mezrich-book- interview-george-church-deextinction-genetics-synthetic-biology)

<comment><USER8> For those looking around these sources wondering how woolly mammoth populations can save us, from The Verge article:

 _So these Russian scientists, the Zimovs, roped up a huge section of the permafrost starting in the '80s and are repopulating it with these large animals: reindeer, horses, bison. They've been able to lower the temperature of the permafrost by as much as 15 degrees [Fahrenheit] by reintroducing large herbivores. The mammoth project is all about this. If we can introduce a mammoth herd to the tundra, we can maybe save the environment for another 100 years, because they'll help put into place these very natural processes to keep the environment colder._

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Arctic ice has 1400Gt of carbon locked up as methane. [1] This is equivalent to 1400/10 = 140 years of human 2016 activity. [2]. Methane also has a stronger effect than CO2. If ice starts to melt, we are doomed.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions#Contr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_methane_emissions#Contribution_to_climate_change)

[2]: [https://www.co2.earth/global- co2-emissions](https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions)

<comment><USER10> How long would that all take to melt? According to your source only 50 of the 1400Gt could be abruptly released.

<comment><USER11> I think they've tried to convert those 50Gt into palatable comparisons: It equals to a 2 additional degrees increase of global warming, or reaching the 2100 temperature in 2080. But we're talking about methane – the original article was about CO2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The study, based on aircraft measurements of carbon dioxide and methane and tower measurements from Barrow, Alaska, found that from 2012 through 2014, the state emitted the equivalent of 220 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere from biological sources (the figure excludes fossil fuel burning and wildfires).

That's an amount comparable to all the emissions from the U.S. commercial sector in a single year."

</comment><comment><USER13> That's probably so however Siberia is contributing much more. The whole of subarctic tundra is at risk for rapid melting and co2 and methane release as trapped ancient organic material decays. There are also other major, imminent issues: the uncertain liability of the ESAS clathrates, zero summer sea ice (arctic ocean heating) and jetstream abnormalities (hence more variable weather day-to-day).

Anyone whom wants actual facts ought to watch Paul Beckwith out of University of Ottawa on YT for detailed updates and analysis on climate change.

[https://youtube.com/user/PaulHBeckwith](https://youtube.com/user/PaulHBeckwith)

<comment><USER14> Or perhaps another more honest source, who is upfront about the statistical uncertainties underlying all but the most basic climate science.

Hell if you want a good scaremongering, there are some old Van Impe videos around somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment> crush-n-spread The atmospheric carbon situation is not good, and we (as a species) need to come up with actionable geo-engineering solutions. Here is one.

Rainwater hits mountains and dissolves silicate minerals into cations that flow into rivers and then oceans. The oceans naturally uptake carbon from the atmosphere by reacting atmospheric carbon with cations in the water that come from those dissolved silicate minerals. This uptake de-acidifies the oceans and produces food for ocean life; for us to collect all the carbon produced in the USA last year, we would need to crush about 60km^3 of silicate rock (which is in abundance) and spread it along coastlines.

To successful sequester enough carbon to save the ecosystem, this might one of the best options we have. This paper [1] does a good job of explaining what I've touched on here.

[1][http://www.greensand.nl/content/user/1/files/rog20004.pdf](http://www.greensand.nl/content/user/1/files/rog20004.pdf)

<comment><USER15> This is a very interesting proposal. Hopefully this will become part of the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks because we were out of time yesterday" strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> And if you think that's bad ... you check out what's happening in Siberia : [https://www.wired.com/2016/12/global-warming-beneath- permafr...](https://www.wired.com/2016/12/global-warming-beneath-permafrost/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation?

This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide).

I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmosphere. China has developed a way to leave carbon in rock. Meanwhile we have had a way all along - TREES! Those and algae in the oceans.

The "answer" I often hear is that the carbon will eventually be released when the trees burn in forest fires. Well, first of all, what matters is the overall biomass of trees. And secondly even if it didn't, that buys us many decades.

PS: How come this is being so heavily downvoted?

<comment><USER18> Trees are not a carbon processing factory, they are a carbon battery. If they die the carbon will be released again during decomposition. Once they are planted they must be maintained into perpetuity, unless they are planted where they will naturally survive. Maintaining these forests will probably involve energy usage that releases more carbon.

We need method of fixation that is both permanent and does not have the constraints that tree planting does.

<comment><USER17> They don't have to be maintained into perpetuity. The trees covered a lot more of the planet when left alone. It is HUMANS that reduced the biomass of trees over the last few thousands of years. And especially last 100.

"Maintaining" the forests simply involves restraining humans from interfering. Or even better, chop the trees down and replant, using the wood for construction after fireproofing it!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Couldn't one try to at least limit the feedback loop by spreading sulfur over the affected regions by plane? (Simulating a volcanic eruption that reflects sunlight)

<comment><USER20> We will almost certainly be spraying sulfur dioxide (and dealing with the acid rain) in the next few decades. It will be too little too late though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What sort of effect does this increased CO2 have on the plant life in the area? Do they benefit from the increased CO2 leading to more plants/trees, etc?

<comment><USER22> Yes, undoubtedly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Worth pointing out that this article is over 3 months old.

<comment><USER24> There are more recent articles than this one. New York Times, CNBC are all reporting it in the last 24 hours.

[http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2017/08/22/permafrost-thawing- faster...](http://www.rcinet.ca/en/2017/08/22/permafrost-thawing-faster- feeding-climate-change-study/)

And they're citing an April 2017 published paper: [http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n5/full/nclimate32...](http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v7/n5/full/nclimate3262.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Has the waterline changed:

[https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/AK/3_rid/waterfront_at...](https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/AK/3_rid/waterfront_att/globalrelevanceex_sort/62.034411,-146.189575,57.818429,-154.231567_rect/6_zm/0_mmm/)

<comment> mark-r Sea levels are a lagging indicator of global warming.

<comment><USER25> Citation? How long is the lag? Years? How long does it take to fill a bathtub? If so much ice is really, actually melting in the world and has been for years; no shoreline changes have occurred anywhere in the world, then that must be some amazing lag.

<comment> mark-r The ice that's melting today is floating ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, because it's subject to warm ocean currents. Floating ice doesn't change sea levels when it melts. The ice that matters is the glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. Glaciers weren't formed in a day, and they won't melt in a day either.

<comment><USER25> That is correct. Glaciers melt constantly, new snow forms as moisture accumulates in higher elevations and condenses, falling as snow. The snow becomes the beginning of the glacier. It's a cycle that repeats. It is repeating right now, every year.

[https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/life- glacier.html](https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/glaciers/life-glacier.html)

[https://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glaciers.htm](https://www.iceagenow.com/List_of_Expanding_Glaciers.htm)

[http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/11/Pio_XI_Glaci...](http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/11/Pio_XI_Glacier_Chile)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Launch solar shade!

@

Sea levels drop.

<comment><USER27> a) We can't

b) What secondary / tertiary / ... / n-th order effects would that have? I'm guessing you don't know.

<comment><USER28> This is a reference to a computer game, not a serious proposal:

[http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Council_Proposals](http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Council_Proposals)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> and we can't even get people to agree that there's a problem.

and we have no leadership to guide our response.

and we can't winnow our way out of this alone.

what now?

<comment><USER30> Consider how lucky we are to even have spent any time at all to reach a point in the cosmos to make this realization. Even if humanity manages to survive past this problem, there are many more including the overconsumption of the world's finite resources. Perhaps it is inevitable given a biological imperative to be selfish. Our means of survival in future generations may be determined by our ability to adapt to withering resources, reuse of existing and exploring space for more. Consider the issue of water reuse; some amount of research suggests that graphene filters when they come to fruition may help with far more reuse and recycle of water. Other work such as the electric transport systems, high speed hyperloops, and 3D print manufacturing combined with a closed loop system may help bring down massive resource waste. There is a lot of tech to be hopeful of but it won't be all positive. Many of it seems to be adaptations to a world which is constantly at risk for extinction

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Probably the asteroid Apophis, due to hit the Earth in 2029, will cause enough cooling to prevent most clathrate from melting. If that works we have a nearby supply of small asteroids that we can fire at the Earth to deepen the winter effect. It works best if you hit a shallow coastal shelf area with lots of limestone rock. Maybe we will sacrifice the Caribbean?

<comment><USER32> If we are going to be re-directing asteroids, then put a couple of metallic ones in a stable orbit and turn them into foil sunshades.

<comment><USER31> Tinfoil hats for the whole planet? I love it!!!</comment></comment></comment>


Tell HN: I created a Delicious+Hacker News Chrome Extension - <AUTHOR>

For the past 6 months, I completely abandoned Delicious for Hacker News.  I figured the history of my upvotes was basically a replacement for what Delicious was offering me.  Someday I figured I would write an app to search my HN history for good material. However, I just realized that I only have access to the past 7 pages' worth of upvotes (210 in total).
I have been losing links I thought were saved!  I wrote this mashup extension as a quick solution that enables me to keep a permanent record of links I like here on Hacker News.
The extension works by popping up a save form every time you upvote.  I plan to make it more subtle over time, but in the spirit of lean product design, I plan to live with this for a few days and decide what to do later on.
It is only about 15 LoC. Fork it on Github if it's useful to you!
http://github.com/paulrosania/hacker_sync
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdlbaeiklbcclmbibhedlihcaeocidhj <comment><AUTHOR> Clicky:

<http://github.com/paulrosania/hacker_sync>

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdlbaeiklbcclmbi...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cdlbaeiklbcclmbibhedlihcaeocidhj)</comment>


Sequoyah – Inventor of the Cherokee Script - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah <comment><USER2> Even more fascinating is that the Cherokee syllabary may have been the foundation for the West African tribe Vai's syllabary, one of few scripts invented in Africa. When freedmen went to Liberia, or rather what would become Liberia, some Cherokees opted to join. One of them became a chief.

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

Edit: See also [https://whyafricanlanguages.org/2019/01/28/sequoyahs- ghost-a...](https://whyafricanlanguages.org/2019/01/28/sequoyahs-ghost-at- grand-cape-mount-liberia/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always loved this story. It's a great demonstration of how _incredibly_ difficult inventions become easier just by knowing they're possible. Other than once in the fertile crescent (arguably once soon after by Egypt), once in China and once in Mesoamerica people haven't successfully invented writing.

But after knowing writing was _possible_ it just took a single determined individual, such as Sequoyah, to create a writing system for a language previously only spoken.

<comment><USER4> He knew more than just that writing was possible. He also knew how writing worked and he had the idea of using characters to correspond to phenomes. It's closer to building a device once you know how it works than it is to inventing something once you know that it's possible.

<comment><USER5> > He also knew how writing worked and he had the idea of using characters to > correspond to phenomes.

Actually, he didn't. He knew that the Americans had a writing system that was sparse in its use of characters, and that it was capable of reflecting all text, but he didn't know any of the actual principles. This is why he created a syllabary (each character is roughly a syllable [1]) instead of an alphabet (each character is a phoneme). He also had access to an English-language Bible, although he couldn't read it--this is why Cherokee has several characters that look like Latin letters but have completely different pronunciation (ᏣᎳᎩ is pronounced "tsalagi").

The creation of the syllabary also corroborates the general history of scripts: most scripts start out as logographic, morph into a rebus phase (homophonic punning--using a picture of an eye to represent "I" because they sound the same), and then transition into a syllabary. In the development of Egyptian, the script instead became an abjad (reflecting only consonants); by the time this came to the Greeks, they added vowel letters to make the first alphabet (and all alphabets are essentially derived from the Greeks); the abugida innovation (marking vowels systematically) happened a few times, although most existing abugidas derive ultimately from the Brahmi script. Sequoyah skipped straight to a syllabary because of access to Latin script that illustrated that logographic script wasn't necessary.

[1] Mapping are of course rough in all forms of scripts, but syllabaries are usually even rougher to map, since languages can have quite complex consonant clusters. In practice, most such scripts tend to stick to classifying CV (consonant-vowel) pairs as syllables and use multiple characters to represent CVC, CCVC, CVCC, etc. syllables.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's funny but I don't remember much about it now, other than he was one of my heroes when I was young. I can't remember the age I was either - but I think it was between 8 and 10.

The only thing I do remember is having a book with the portrait by Henry Inman in it [https://npg.si.edu/blog/portrait-sequoyah-henry- inman](https://npg.si.edu/blog/portrait-sequoyah-henry-inman) I still remember that portrait, and sitting around daydreaming that I was him.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found his name in Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel", I'm halfway and it's an interesting read about how the world became to be as it is and generally interesting tidbits.</comment>


Does Facebook copyright "white text on blue background"? - <AUTHOR> http://twitpic.com/5ix6x4/full

<comment><USER2> I absolutely get the craziness of the claim. But given it's listed fifth of five claims they take issue with (others being outright trademark infringement,) I imagine they really only care about it in congruency with the others.

I doubt (hope?) that even a giant like Facebook would go after every person who uses lowercase white text on a blue background.

(That said, I've never used the app in question. I'm assuming the other claims, not referenced in the post, have a ring of truth?)

<comment><USER3> But they won't sue every person, this applies only in the context of a facebook-related app, which is probably not completely unreasonable to ask

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reading the article, clearly they're trying to prevent confusion between facebook api apps and facebook. So no. flagged for linkbait title.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks to me like they are paving the way for the Facebook iPad app by try to reduce any risk of confusion between non-official apps.

</comment><comment><USER6> Trademarks are not copyrights.</comment>