Chess World Championship: Stockfish live-analyzing game 7 - <AUTHOR> http://analysis.sesse.net/ <comment><USER2> Magnus Carlsen with a rating of 2835 is playing against Fabiano Caruana with a rating of 2832.

This is their 7th game. They tied for all the previous 6.

<comment><USER3> They're called draws. The match will be tied if it's 6-6 after 12 games, then they'll go to tiebreaks - 4 rapid games, then if still no winner, up to 5 mini-matches of 2 blitz games, then ultimately an Armageddon game if needed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_2018#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_2018#Match_regulations)

<comment> forgot-my-pw In the highest form of chess, perhaps all games will be a draw. I wonder if someday we have to modify the rules or use a different variant that prevent draws, like Shogi for example.

<comment><USER3> Sure, maybe one day. People were speculating on the coming 'draw death' of chess 100 years ago,[1] but it hasn't really been a problem so far. What was a problem, was players agreeing to an early draw without playing the game out (Imagine, say, tennis players 'agreeing to a draw' after 10 minutes) A lot of tournaments nowadays have rules prohibiting draw offers before move 30, or draw offers at all.[0] The best players are just much better at defending than people were 100 years ago, and they're very good at bailing out to a draw when in inferior positions. Also, computers have taught humans a lot about defensive possibilities, which are larger than people had thought.

The situation in matches is different to that in tournaments, where it's no good drawing all your games if you want to win the tournament. In this match, drawing every game, then drawing all the tiebreak grames, then getting black in the Armageddon game and drawing, will make you world champion. And historically, if a world championship match was tied, the champion automatically retained their title. (Tiebreaks are a recent development)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_by_agreement#Steps_taken_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_by_agreement#Steps_taken_to_discourage_draws_or_short_draws)

[1] e.g. Here's Capablanca (world champion 1921-7) writing at length about it in 1925 [http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/capablanca7.html](http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/capablanca7.html)

He created a version of chess with 2 new superpowered pieces to avoid the 'draw death' problem [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capablanca_Chess](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capablanca_Chess) (that page mentions some other similar variants)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Watching the game live with this open in another tab is cool. On Friday, it showed that Caruana had a winning position with a mate in around 30 moves. It was so non-intuitive that no chess player would have ever found it. But it is cool to see that the game "could have been" won.

<comment><USER5> True – yet extremely hard to find especially in a fortress situation end game when you can't afford to wait cognitive brain to calculate new variations after each single move.

<comment><USER6> And also, Caruana would have had to trap his knight in a corner to get the win. To quote Kasparov:

 _The computer shows Black wins with 68..Bh4 here. But had Caruana played the incredible 69.Bd5 Ne2 70.Bf3 Ng1!! they would request metal detectors immediately! No human can willingly trap his own knight like that._

[https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1063576827850096640](https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1063576827850096640)

<comment><USER7> Personally, I'm not convinced that the win was beyond the ability of any human to find. Previous generations of players spent much more time studying the endgame (as opposed to endless openening preparation), and I can see Fischer or Capa, or maybe Botvinnik, finding it over the board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Live analysis for people: [https://youtu.be/Je_2zaLr5gU](https://youtu.be/Je_2zaLr5gU)

<comment><USER9> Grischuk makes those amazing draws bearable. Svidler and him make a surprisingly funny and informative team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I understanding correctly that the score of 0 at the top means that the chess engine thinks their positions are exactly equally good?

<comment><USER11> When it's close to 0, it means the engine thinks the position is equal. But usually when it's exactly 0, the machine thinks the best move to play next must lead to a draw. As, in the next best move will lead to a worse position for the player making the move.

<comment><USER12> Exactly 0.00 can also mean that the engine has no idea what's going on.

<comment><USER13> Err...sorry no. At least not for Stockfish (maybe for AlphaZero or LeelaZero).

0 means that the position is exactly equal (material + positional)

The engine always has an idea of what's going on through simple material calculation + positional heuristics (although it maybe be flawed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Chess aficionados know this, but for casual readers ...

Back in 1972, during the Cold War, we had the chess "Match of the Century". In one corner the USA, in the other the Soviet Union. Bobby Fischer soundly defeated Boris Spassky.

All before the Internet and before computers analyzing chess. So the local PBS station in NYC had chess master Shelby Lyman analyzing moves, for hours and hours, as they came in from Iceland. Perhaps 5 or 10 minutes between moves.

It kept me amused one summer during high school.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1972](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1972)

</comment><comment><USER15> Dumb chess question from a person that's never competed, why are international chess rankings divided by Male or Female? There are even olympic sports now that are mixed-gender such as Curling.

<comment><USER16> There aren't different ratings, but there are women-only tournaments, championships, and so on. The reason is just that there are a lot fewer women in elite chess than men.

For example, Hou Yifan, the #1 woman in the world in terms of rating, is 91st overall.

<comment><USER17> How is chess allowed to make a move like this in 2018? Imagine if facebook in response to complaints about not enough female representation responded by creating female only teams?

They really should get rid of these archaic female only leagues.

<comment><USER18> If people don't like that tournament, then they should feel free to not compete in it. That's their choice. Don't like it? Then ignore it.

<comment><USER19> That is true, yes. But still I think that tournament is unnecessary. They can have such tournament if they want to do (since, nothing stops you from also having other tournaments too, which can include everyone), but I would not advise it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Considering AlphaZero was orders of magnitude stronger than stock fish, it would be interesting to see AlphaZero's analysis if it was available.

Edit: Alphazero's record against Stock Fish is 28 wins, 72 ties and 0 losses.

In a 100 game matchup, AlphaZero had 28 wins 72 draws and 0 losses. I'd classify that as orders of magnitude better.

[https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero- destroys-...](https://www.chess.com/news/view/google-s-alphazero-destroys- stockfish-in-100-game-match)

<comment><USER8> AlphaZero was playing Stockfish 8. This is done using Stockfish dev which is more than 110 ELO higher than Stockfish 8 (see [https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest/wiki/Regression- Tests](https://github.com/glinscott/fishtest/wiki/Regression-Tests)) and higher than what was reported for AlphaZero.

Check out the Leela project, which is trying to reproduce and improve the AlphaZero project to also beat Stockfish dev: [http://lczero.org/](http://lczero.org/) (at this point they are about equal with Stockfish 9)

<comment><USER21> A 100 ELO difference is about a player twice as stronger. With a 100 ELO difference, Stockfish would have won some games.

28Win 72Draw and O Loss in my opinion reflects at least 300 ELO (8 times stronger).

<comment><USER22> Elo is not a matter of opinion. There's a formula for it, and 28 wins, 72 draws and 0 losses represents almost exactly a 100 point Elo difference.

[https://www.3dkingdoms.com/chess/elo.htm](https://www.3dkingdoms.com/chess/elo.htm)

<comment><USER21> You are right, thank you for the pointer.

I guess that the spectacular 28-0 was somehow confusing my ELO opinion engine by concealing the fact that 72 draws are a lot more difficult to achieve than 12 draws (28-12-0 would have been a 300 ELO difference).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anybody have a suggestion for a site similar to this (engine analysis and all) but also with human commentary to explain things to those of us whose chess skill earlier stage?

<comment><USER24> Svidler and Grischuk at chess24.com are fantastic, but they're both world class players and beginners will find their commentary and analysis difficult to follow. I'd recommend chess.com - Danny Rensch and Robert Hess are a bit more accessible.

<comment><USER25> I second chess.com. And the guests they have, Hou Yifan and MVL today, absolutely elite players. Yet they manage to keep them understandable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Another nail-biting draw!

<comment><USER27> It's hard to change a game that's so old, but draws shouldn't be allowed, only stalemates.

Imagine if the Lakers played the Warriors, and late in the 4th quarter, the game is tied, and LeBron and Curry decide they are tired, declare a draw and go to their locker rooms. Not particularly satisfying.

<comment><USER28> Your analogy doesn't make sense. In basketball, if your opponent gets tired, that gives you a better opportunity to win. In chess, if the game nears the end and neither of you can see a way to win, then there's no good opportunity. Your analogy would make more sense to say the basketball game was tied and there are three seconds left on the clock and both players have broken wrists. Playing three seconds of game to risk injury is not worth it for either player.

It also doesn't mean the game was unexciting.

<comment><USER29> In a championship match tiredness and losing focus is a big deal. A lot of draws are simply not wanting to risk burning out when there are more games to go.

Saying that, Carlson once had a reputation for not agreeing on a draw and being able to maintain focus while his opponent faded and made a mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> On a side note: I think Pentagram did an amazing job with the WCC branding [1] in 2014. It's ridiculously non-conventional for a serious organization such as FIDE to adopt it. They did reject the proposal for Shuka Design for the new "pawnographic" (as it was hastagged on twitter) logo [2] for the 2018 championship and only kept the arms tangled up around a chess board. Still, its extraordinary and personally I love it. Oh and they have a King's Gambit perfume [3][4] for sale.

[1] [https://www.pentagram.com/work/world- chess](https://www.pentagram.com/work/world-chess)

[2] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-42425587](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-42425587)

[3] [https://www.smellchess.com/](https://www.smellchess.com/)

[4] [https://shop.worldchess.com/shop/chess- perfume](https://shop.worldchess.com/shop/chess-perfume)

<comment> semi-extrinsic > serious organization such as FIDE

It's wort noting that up until recently, FIDE had a president who was full-on batshit crazy. He repeatedly claimed in public that he had been abducted by aliens. He (and by implication FIDE under his rule) was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for financial involvement in the war in Syria. Corruption was an open secret. It's a bit of a stretch to call FIDE under Ilyumzhinov a "serious organization".

<comment><USER31> Before such claims one/both of you would have to define what "serious organization" means when you use it, as it would appear that you might be equivocating relative to how he used the term.</comment></comment></comment>


Writing extendable and hardware-agnostic GPU libraries - <AUTHOR> https://techburst.io/writing-extendable-and-hardware-agnostic-gpu-libraries-b21c145a8dad <comment><USER2> Very interesting. How does this deal with data regions? Do you have an array type that explicitly recides on GPU, i.e. to pass it to a CPU routine like file i/o you need to wrap CUDAmemcopy? or does it manage the device state?

<comment><AUTHOR> >type that explicitly recides on GPU

Yes, that's what we do! More domain specific types will come, for e.g. views, lazy arrays and sparse arrays.

> or does it manage the device state?

It aims to manage most of the device state! Some more complex gpu interactions will need to drop back to manual management, though - but the hope is to turn more and more into a high level API when needed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does the current Julia GPU support compare to other high level GPU languages like Futhark and Halide?

<comment><AUTHOR> First of all, Julia is a proper multi purpose programming language! I consider that to be important, since I want to learn one language and then do most of my very different projects in it.

I haven't used Futhark or Halide, but I know they do some quite interesting compiler optimization.

We plan to use Julia's meta programming and code generation capabilities to enable similar optimizations. Hopefully, we can publish some new insights soon!

From a look at Halides and Futharks examples, I'd say that it will be more pleasant to write generic Julia GPU kernels and Julia enables a more interactive workflow.</comment></comment>


The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

<comment><USER2> Very interesting read and somewhat intuitive too if you think about it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We can easily draw a parallel with people addicted to social networks.</comment>


Test your email server encryption - <AUTHOR> https://ssl-tools.net/mailservers/

<comment><USER2> Not loving the "shame" list. It would discourage me from trying a public domain on the site.

<comment><USER3> I agree, it's also not that great to have a list of "Insecure web servers" [0], there should be a "don't show checked site in public results" checkbox like on ssllabs.com's certificate tests.

[0] [https://ssl-tools.net/webservers](https://ssl-tools.net/webservers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can send an e-mail to them but they cannot connect to my server. It times out on STARTTLS.

Nevermind. I penalize suspect servers with a 30 seconds delay and they triggered it.

        H=ssl-tools.net (ssl-trust.com) [184.108.40.206] Warning: remote host presented unverifiable HELO/EHLO greeting.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just checked one of my email providers and I get the following results:

\- Hostname: mail.example.com

\- StartTLS: supported

\- Certificates: www.spamfirewall.at -Certificate does not match hostname

       Certificate chain:
       www.spamfirewall.at
       337 days remaining  2048 bit sha1WithRSAEncryption
       Root certificate unknown

\- Perfect Forward Security: unsupported

\- DANE: Missing

I use a SSL certificate for my domain example.com. Is there something I have to do to fix that or is this only something the provider needs to take care of?

<comment><USER5> I guess that you simply pointed mail.example.com to www.spamfirewall.at? I would _expect_ your setup to work if you'd instead point your MX record at www.spamfirewall.at, so that the certificate will match what the sender expects to see.

IIRC, SpamAssassin (slightly) penalizes e-mail coming from anything except mail.example.com and smtp.example.com, so it would be preferable to get your mailserver to use mail.example.com with an appropriate certificate. But if this is indeed an external service, you may not want to give them the private key of a mail.example.com certificate.

In any case, it's worrying if they're vulnerable to Heartbleed, but it's not _that_ bad if SSL doesn't work - mail will still be sent in plaintext if the sender's mail server does not support it, or if you're actually under (man-in- the-middle-)attack, so you should treat e-mail as fairly untrusted anyway.

<comment><USER3> Hey,

thanks for your reply. They are not vulnerable to Heartbleed and I never pointed my domain to their anti-spam tool, it's just something they were offering and set up for their customers I think. I'll just contact them with a link to the test and ask what's up.

Good point about being penalized by SpamAssassin, I'll look into that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell I think I win? [https://ssl-tools.net/mailservers/grepular.com](https://ssl- tools.net/mailservers/grepular.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> See also ([https://starttls.se/](https://starttls.se/)).

</comment><comment><USER7> This incorrectly flags primary mail server as insecure if secondary server is unreachable.

<comment><USER8> To be fair it should say unknown rather than insecure if the secondary can't be accessed and it can't confirm that it is secure and you should assume an attacker able to perform a Man in the Middle attack on you could disrupt your traffic sufficiently to force the fallback to to the secondary server.

Although does the validity of the incoming mail servers certificates actually matter? In an ideal world other hosts would never send to improperly signed hosts or without TLS but that clearly is not the case so I'm not sure what current practical value having proper certificates actually has. In the longer term by pushing people to adopt proper certs it may become practical for people to turn off sending to servers without proper certificates so this may be better seen as part of a long term effort.</comment></comment>


How the FBI cracked a "sextortion" plot against pro poker players - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/how-the-fbi-cracked-a-sextortion-plot-against-pro-poker-players/

<comment><USER2> So, these "hackers" logged in from their home/dorm IPs? And the FBI busts doors down then intimidates so the guy starts talking without a lawyer. Seems like this lowers the bar for "cracking" a plot, and for plotting a plot and being a "mastermind".

Seriously, this is almost equivalent to some kids that find someone's letters to their mistress and call them from their home number and demand money. Hardly worthy of the breathless "badass" FBI agent story reporting this article is full of.

If the guy had bought a couple VMs in cash and bounced around a few times and (for example) took Bitcoin and didn't spend it - then what?

<comment><USER3> I don't think it's necessary to bring out the FBI on this one, but it is nice to see the government focus on actual crimes instead of inappropriate downloading of public resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "You are going to pay me 60k initially then you are going to pay me 5k every > year... the 5k every year will show that I have motivation to never reveal > the pictures."

The first time I've seen a blackmailer admit to the fact that they'll just keep asking for more. But psychological effects aside, it's totally idiotic to deliberately create more opportunities to get caught.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ars Technica wants to be Wired :-(

Please leave the poor, sensationalised writing to Wired and stick to the short news stories we know and love.

<comment><USER6> This story did not get sensationalistic. None of the people were celebrities for example. There was no violence. And the nature of the embarassing pictures at the center of the extortion was not elaborated on at all except to say that they were sexual in nature and concerned the primary victim, his former girlfriend and that girlfriend's new boyfriend. It was about a pretty ordinary cybercrime. I do not understand what is "poor" about it: is cybercrime unworthy of the attention of the reading public? Why?

<comment><USER2> I think they were referring to the style of writing, down to the headline. FBI "cracked" a plot. "mastermind". The whole description of the oh-too-cool FBI people breaking into a guy's house to get, as the story says, the guy to "own up". Threatening him about pissing her off, all "24" style. Come the hell on.

It's not all Ars fault, the FBI likes to make their mundane bullying look fearsome and cool. That, despite being the FBI and having the full cooperation of Microsoft, they still need to resort to physical violence to get some smalltime idiot blackmailer. Jeez.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to think that the smarter hackers realize that good-willed work can make just as much money, if not more, than blackhat bullshit, and there aren't any victims either.

They both got what they deserved, and it's more than laughable that their tracks were so clear. If you're going to be committing fraud, at least learn some shellcode first. Gotta start with the basics before you go baaaad ;)</comment>


Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel Peace Prize - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/news/snowden-nominated-nobel-peace-099/

<comment><USER2> The Peace Prize is not like the other Nobel prizes. It has a different charter and a separate committee. Lately they've been handing out prizes to promote peaceful actions, not to retroactively reward them. That was their justification for awarding Obama one at the beginning of his administration.

<comment><USER3> well given how that worked out they may be going back to basics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought after Obama got this award, we (the internet) decided this award wasn't worth our attention.

Also isn't getting nominated for this award a pretty low barrier of entry? Or am I misremembering?

<comment><USER5> >I thought after Obama got this award, we (the internet) decided this award wasn't worth our attention.

A lot of people were rightly skeptical of the idea that awarding the prize in an attempt to influence a politician's actions would be beneficial. Nice try, I guess.

Obama's is also not the first controversial award. Kissinger? Arafat?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Someone who enlisted in the US army and trained to go to the Iraq war to shoot people down is not exactly what I call a pacifist.

<comment><USER7> People change. You can have a revelation, and become a pacifist.

<comment><USER8> Given that Nobel himself invented dynamite, I would think that understanding is inherent to the prize.

Besides, when I was in the Army, most soldiers did not want to go to war. After all, they're the ones who are putting their lives at risk. Instead, most enlisted out of either a sense of honor or out of economic need - either the college fund or a stable career. I knew a lot of guys for whom the Army was a step up from their outside job prospects. Despite the stereotypes sometimes portrayed by Hollywood, there are very few warmongering types in the military.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Team management service of your choice? - <AUTHOR>

I actually need a task/team management service which allows me to delegate tasks to people, track who is working on what and ideally allows one-way communication with my team members, so I as a manager can prevent them from socializing with each other. Do you guys of any service which would allow me this?<p>TL;DR: I'll assemble a team of assistans(people with specific skills) and will post certain tasks that they can apply to fulfill. Something similar to that. <comment><USER2> Sounds like you need an announce mailing list where users can't reply, a spreadsheet, and some Gantt charts.</comment>


London: hot or not? - <AUTHOR> http://startupjuncture.com/2013/07/03/london-hot-or-not/ <comment><USER2> Interesting read for startup(founders)considering to locate in London.</comment>


1024 or 1000? - <AUTHOR>

Hey, I hope this question is appropriate as I couldn't find any up to date information on this.
Problem: I have to evaluate some bandwidth numbers and put them into a chart. Those numbers are all in bytes. Now because they are quite big (we're talking about several Petabytes) I have to convert them into a more readable format. I'm unsure wether I can go with 1 Kilobyte = 1000 Bytes, or 1 Kilobyte = 1024 Bytes.
If the numbers weren't that big, it would'nt be such a big deal. But in this case it does matter.
Whats the rule? What can I go with?
thanks! <comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte> might be a good starting resource. But if you are doing this for a report or a presentation, it's more important to understand the context and requirements of those who you're reporting to. If the context is in kb/1000 and you report in KiB/1024, that will be less useful than if you can find someone who can tell you what they are expecting the units to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answer. The problem is I don't know what context this is in. I'm unsure what people expect to be 1 Kilobyte. Is it 1024 or 1000.

The Kibibyte isn't really standartized and I can't use that.

From your Link: "the kilobyte continues to be used to refer to a power of ten as well as a power of two"

What's correct now? I mean depending on what I use the resulting numbers will be completely different.

<comment><USER2> I guess my point is that only you and your employer or whoever it is that you're presenting to can decide which to use. You need to have this conversation with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're unsure, read the small print: which standard they are using should be explained there.</comment>


New gmail and Google maps UIs live all of a sudden? - <AUTHOR>

Scroll wheel doesn't work in google maps. Gmail looks horrible.<p>Did this just go live tonight? <comment><USER2> In Google Maps, I've noticed that the scroll wheel has super-high latency, but it does still work --- if you consider high latency to be acceptable!</comment>


Analysis of Printer Watermarking Techniques - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/10/analysis_of_pri.html

<comment><USER2> I suspect this is why when you buy a printer at Fry's, you are asked your name and phone number. That potentially matches you to the watermark even when you pay cash.

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds like the watermark includes encoded info about the network, IP addresses, what have you. From one of Schneier's commenters, black-and-white printers have their own method, involving tiny imperfections in certain letters.

It reminds me of how Blizzard encoded info in World of Warcraft screenshots (user, ip, campaign, timestamp, realm, what have you).

Scary stuff. Makes you want to not take it seriously, almost as a mental defense mechanism.

<comment><USER3> So I need to use anti-TEMPEST style techniques for my printer fonts now?

[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/softtempest- faq.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/softtempest-faq.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Flexbox Cheatsheet - <AUTHOR> http://yoksel.github.io/flex-cheatsheet/ <comment><USER3> I always viewed [https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to- flexbox/](https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/) as the definitive flexbox resource, and [https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs](https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs) for browser specific issues

<comment><USER4> and [https://flexboxfroggy.com/](https://flexboxfroggy.com/) for fun.

<comment><USER5> FYI: I get an invalid certificate warning. Looks like it's presenting the github wildcard certificate, rather than a certificate with your domain in.

<comment><USER4> Thanks but not my site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> c-smile Just for the history...

At early stages of flexbox idea discussion I proposed (at W3C's www-style WG) it to be implemented in form of two entities:

The flow property describing children layout manager:

        flow:default|vertical|horizontal|horizontal-wrap|vertical-wrap|grid...

and flex length units, describing "spring power" used by the property.

        width:1*; margin-left:2*

for example.

[https://sciter.com/docs/flex-flow/flex- layout.htm](https://sciter.com/docs/flex-flow/flex-layout.htm)

That schema has very simple physical model that does not require any need for cheatsheets - very simple. Just to walk over illustrations in the document above to get the idea.

Current (accepted) flexbox variant is too controversial IMO. Yet breaks existing CSS box model somehow, what would be the used box width in this case:

        div {
           flex: 1;
           width:100px;
        }

two properties compete for the same entity (width of the box) - <USER2> architectural error IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER6> My flexbox story:

I decided to use flexbox. Everything was wonderful - responsive sizing was perfect. So easy to use. I then tried it on Safari.

First port of call: older versions of Safari don't calculate widths based on min / max width property but rather a flex specific property (can't remember which).

Didn't work. Tried a polyfill - the polyfill landscape for flexbox is shockingly bad.

At this point, I'd give up hope. I turn to Modernizr so I can fall back to display table. Got this set up (modernizr only really does custom builds apparently, no CDN now).

Surprise. Safari was flagging up with modern flexbox support. The autoprefixer I used set the WebKit vendor prefix to use legacy flexbox. Chrome uses the non prefixed property fine. Other browsers were fine. Safari was still using the vendor prefix. Fin.

tl;dr flexbox embarrassed me.

<comment><USER7> If you're looking for modernizr CDN, see [https://cdnjs.com/libraries/modernizr](https://cdnjs.com/libraries/modernizr)

<comment><USER6> I believe this is an old version. For new versions, i think you have create a custom build.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I still wonder why we have

        display: flex

and

        display: inline-flex

It seems to me that the committee who designed this has been confusing what is happening _inside_ the box (flex or not) with what is happening _outside_ the box (inline or block). Those two behaviors should be orthogonal, IMHO.

<comment><USER9> Truly there should be no use case for the "inline-" prefixed properties anymore. Your HTML+CSS systems should denote layout strictly from parents ("cascading!") and any exceptions to your rules would exhibit either an unsatisfactory rule or an inconsistent design.

<comment> ezequiel-garzon It's interesting (and reasonable) that _cascade_ has become synonymous with _inheritance_ , while the standard defines it as the process that looks at importance and origin, followed (if necessary) by specificity, followed by order: [https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS22/cascade.html#cascade](https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS22/cascade.html#cascade)

<comment><USER9> In my usage I meant to express that a modern system should be constructed similarly to how flexbox and grid determine the "display" property of the selected element's children.

If your code constantly requires manual display:inline-block; on elements (and it's not just to override the browser's default stylesheet), then you probably aren't adhering to a consistent pattern and your CSS's maintainability will eventually drop off at an exponential rate.

Flexbox enables you to even avoid patterns like .inline-list>li{float:left;}, so sibling-level specificity isn't going to align with best practices anymore in the near future.

<comment> ezequiel-garzon Oh, I agree with your comment. I guess I should have quoted the part that led to my rather off-the-topic remark:

 _parents ( "cascading!")_

I wonder whether the people who coined the term CSS also had in mind cascading as related to inheritance, or maybe even only this meaning, and later the standards "lawyers" tied the term cascade to the definition I cited. Thanks for replying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> bring back tables with some responsive behaviour and we can call it a day

</comment><comment><USER11> I bookmarked this and thank you for posting it! As a Webflow user it is really nice to have a clear visual guide to the underlying CSS so I understand exactly what is happening especially when I break something.

</comment><comment><USER12> Could someone please recommend a javascript library that allow one to use flexbox without requiring a deep knowledge of idiosyncrasies of different implementations of Flexbox ?

<comment><USER13> Well JavaScript isn't really relevant here, but bootstrap v4 is using flexbox now

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The one annoying thing is that there is a bug in safari. You can't do a flex- basis of a % if you want it to work.

<comment><USER15> This bug exists in IE11 as well. This is especially annoying when using Boostrap 4 with flex grid system (although it's still alpha).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This got my hopes up that flex-basis: content was working in more places.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great resource I'll be sure to use it :) Are you using a theme or is it custom made? It's really nice!</comment>


Safari AutoFill is messing up the Gmail label search feature - <AUTHOR> https://www.igorkromin.net/index.php/2019/02/02/safari-autofill-is-messing-up-the-gmail-label-search-feature/ <comment><USER2> Yes and this is insanely annoying. Apple, you've got to fix this.

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be possible to fix with the use of the "autocomplete" attribute in the input field too</comment></comment>


Lightning fast left-right movement in Vim - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/unblevable/quick-scope <comment><USER2> This looks like a faster, less intrusive alternative to EasyMotion!</comment>


Writing a FUSE filesystem in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.stavros.io/posts/python-fuse-filesystem/ <comment><USER2> I write ExpanDrive, [http://www.expandrive.com](http://www.expandrive.com) \- which mounts SFTP/S3/Dropbox/Openstack Swift/Google Docs/Box on Mac/Windows & soon Linux all in Python/FUSE.

Ctypes is the way to go for interacting with libfuse. Even better would be speaking the FUSE protocol directly to /dev/fuse*, but is rather complicated by our Windows support.

<comment><USER3> For those who don't know the space, ExpanDrive used to be SftpDrive. I've been recommending it for years to people who are not technical for accessing sftp shares and have never been let down. Thanks for a great product and sharing some detail about how it works.

<comment><USER2> Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat project and great post. One thing I'd like to point out is that there is _another_ mechanism for implementing userspace filesystems in Linux: V9FS. FUSE has a lot of documentation -- much of it in various stages of bitrot -- and many of the comments here point to other FUSE projects as well!

The underlying mechanisms for FUSE are pretty convoluted and difficult, so much more than trivial examples can break the abstractions afforded by the libraries like the one used in the post.

V9FS is in contrast exceedingly simple and basically unchanged. And, yes, it's based on the Plan 9 filesystem protocols :)

[http://v9fs.sourceforge.net/](http://v9fs.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER5> This is interesting. I'm aware of the fact that some plan 9 protocols were ported to linux, but are you suggesting that this v9fs is a replacement for fuse in common use cases? Do you know about simple comparision of fuse and v9fs implementation of the same userspace filesystem?

<comment><USER4> V9FS and FUSE both enable userspace filesystem drivers. They are actually pretty interchangeable for 99% of use cases, and the rest of those cases are where you'd directly interact with both, so it wouldn't be fair to compare a FUSE library abstraction with V9FS.

FUSE is too complicated to directly interact with, so everyone (OP included) is using libraries and abstractions on top of it. So what you'd really be comparing is that abstraction, as well as possibly how it limits actual FUSE interaction. Additionally, the performance of these abstractions is hard to predict, as many do lots of work (threads/IPC/etc) silently in the background, so the apparent workload on your filesystem driver is far from actual workload.

V9FS is simple enough that drivers often just talk it directly. The protocol is a simple RPC mechanism, and parallelism happens naturally.

As far as a direct comparison example, I don't know of one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I did one of these a while ago that lets you mount a redis server as a local filesystem: [https://github.com/mattsta/redisfuse](https://github.com/mattsta/redisfuse)

It's a great way to do FS-like things ("edit X in vim", "run aspell across all keys in Y") on very non-file-like objects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, wow, that's a fantastic idea! Well done, I will play around with it. I love the idea of exposing disparate datasets as filesystems.

<comment><USER7> You should take a look at Plan 9. Everything is a file, and service are implemented as file servers - including the windowing system (rio).

Some of the ideas are available in Plan 9 from User Space.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen that, it sounded like a great idea to me when I was looking at it. Too bad Plan 9 never caught on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FWIW, you can also write a GlusterFS "translator" in Python.

[https://forge.gluster.org/glupy](https://forge.gluster.org/glupy)

This allows you to add your own functionality alongside everything GlusterFS already has - e.g. distribution, replication, handling for all sorts of annoying VFS/POSIX special cases - instead of having to do everything from scratch yourself. I'm not saying it's the right option for everyone who might just use FUSE directly, but it might be an option to consider.

Disclaimer: I'm the original author, though others have taken over since.

</comment><comment><USER9> Another "me too", but I really enjoyed writing this: [https://chris- lamb.co.uk/projects/aptfs](https://chris-lamb.co.uk/projects/aptfs)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I love "me too"s, they are all interesting projects. That's a very novel way of managing packages, does it work if you copy all the symlinks out and then restore them (so you can back up/restore your installed packages)?

<comment><USER9> It's simply a view "remote" APT repositories, not your local package setup.

<comment><USER10> That's a really cool utility - can it be used with a caching proxy to reduce network traffic?

<comment><USER9> Yes, assuming that caching proxy is an regular APT proxy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What kind of performance did you get out of this? I wrote a naive implementation of a FUSE filesystem in Python a while back -- it read the sickbeard DB and built a directory of the last snatched programs. The performance was pretty shocking, but workable for a single user. I always assumed that was down to Python, so I'd be interested to hear how well yours performs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't tried it at all, since it just needs to be faster than my Internet connection (it's for backups), but you can just run the file provided there and it should work properly. Please post a benchmark if you do (I'm not at home now)!

<comment><USER11> I'll give it a try tonight :)!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If anyone interested to see some real-world open-source FUSE example (but written in C), take a look at our project RioFS: ([https://github.com/skoobe/riofs](https://github.com/skoobe/riofs)): an userspace filesystem for Amazon S3 buckets that runs on Linux and MacOSX (FreeBSD support is comming as well).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Fantastic, thank you, I've been looking for something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fun fact: bup has a fuse module to access saved files: [https://github.com/bup/bup/blob/master/Documentation/bup- fus...](https://github.com/bup/bup/blob/master/Documentation/bup-fuse.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty great, I think I will use bup when EncFUSE is done, rather than rdiff-backup. It's also very actively maintained, which is great.

<comment><USER14> I found rsnapshot to be far superior.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, in what way?

<comment><USER14> It requires less wheel inventing as it is mostly declarative. It provides a higher level of abstraction vs rdiff-backup. Finally, it is more like Apple's Time Machine since t uses hardlinks to dr duplicate files. This means that you can browse all you backups in parallel and do not have to worry that one of the incremental backups being corrupt means that all subsequent ones are corrupt as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good to know, thank you. It looks like the only drawback is that rdiff- backup stores file diffs as well, so rsnapshot will have to store the entire file again if you change one byte in it, but, since most of my files will never change, it sounds very good for my use case, thank you.

<comment><USER14> Yes. Another drawback is the lack of encryption support, which may or may not be easy to work around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I'll be using the EncFUSE script from this thread to provide the encryption, so it should be quite easy to work around it (just point it to the encrypted FUSE mountpoint).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice post! You mentioned that you implemented this wrapper for backups. Apart from creating a virtual file system for sandboxing perhaps, isn't this generally slower? Maybe I am not getting the exact purpose of this task.

<comment><AUTHOR> Slower than what? This is for creating encrypted versions of your files before you back them up, so your backup program will only see encrypted files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ha working on a fuse file system for one of my projects in grad school.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does encryption prior to backup mean less de-duplication?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does. encbup uses CBC mode, which means that you'll only have per-file deduplication, but EncFUSE uses the less secure ECB mode, which means per- block deduplication (roughly almost as good as unencrypted).</comment></comment>


My wish list for Postgres 9.5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2014/08/15/my-postgres-wishlist-for-9.5/ <comment><USER2> I was really excited about the Citus column-store FDW...but it took me about an hour of using it before I realized it wasn't going to solve any of my problems any time soon. Queries with data larger than memory were _slower_ than native tables. Compression didn't come anywhere close to the 2-4x improvement that was claimed. It doesn't support insert, update, or delete commands, let alone the insert from select that I was hoping to use. In order to convert a native table into a cstore table, you have to output to a file and then import using COPY, or hack it with a pipe to a COPY command.

After a while, I realized that some of this was just the maturity of the extension, but a huge amount was the limitations of FDWs as a platform. And not only that, it seems that every other 3rd party FDW extension is either abandoned or ignored.

Postgres is quite possibly the highest quality piece of software I use. I rate it higher than the Linux Kernel. But Postgres' historical approaches to extensibility have left a lot to be desired. Reading over this comment, I realize I probably sound like an entitled jackass, but I'll post it anyway. I really do wish I could contribute to Postgres, but learning C well enough to contribute is way out of reach for me at the moment. But I guess all I can say is that my (admittedly vague) wishlist for Postgres 9.5 is to enhance any and all features to support extensibility, including FDWs and Extensions.

<comment><USER3> > I really do wish I could contribute to Postgres, but learning C well enough > to contribute is way out of reach for me at the moment.

I'm sure they accept money in lieu of C skills.

[http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/](http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/)

<comment><USER2> Good call...now I feel like even more of a jackass for not considering that :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The OP mentions gui, but what is the best gui/code editor/ide for postgres for linux?

I found this list. I'll go through them.

[https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Guide_to_PostgreS...](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Guide_to_PostgreSQL_GUI_Tools)

<comment><USER4> I've gone through that list before, but never find anything compelling enough to pull me away from psql (the built-in CLI client).

I highly recommend learning psql first. It doesn't have every feature you might want, but it gets the basics right and is easy to integrate with your editor and other tools. As far as I can tell, it's what most professionals use.

<comment><USER5> I fully agree with this. I used pgAdmin for a while but have recently switched to psql and it's much more useful.

In particular, learn the \ commands. It's extremely useful to be able to quickly look at the structure of a table, dump the source to a function and so on, from a command prompt rather than navigating trees with the mouse in pgAdmin.

It uses readline where available so you get history, completion etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My long-standing feature request is for index-organized-tables : [http://www.postgresql.org/message- id/ac116f9a0907151917o6d87...](http://www.postgresql.org/message- firstname.lastname@example.com)

<comment><USER3> Same as this todo item?

Automatically maintain clustering on a table

[http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Todo#CLUSTER](http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Todo#CLUSTER)

<comment><USER6> In my view, periodic re-clustering isn't the same thing, though it may be good enough for most use cases. I'd label it "transactionally maintain clustering on a table"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> MySQL's non-standard ON DUPLICATE KEY feature is extremely useful, so any "upsert"-like feature would be a great thing to have.

<comment><USER8> Hope you saw the discussion of 'UPSERTisms in Postgres' a while back: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7620050](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7620050)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> On my list, adding even better support for fast full text search: [https://wiki.postgresql.org/images/2/25/Full- text_search_in_...](https://wiki.postgresql.org/images/2/25/Full- text_search_in_PostgreSQL_in_milliseconds-extended-version.pdf)

Many of the changes already went into 9.4 but for PostgreSQL to be a 'killer' of external tools would be ridiculously awesome.

</comment><comment><USER10> It might be simple or maybe it's OCD but I sure wish there was a way to reorder table columns in the table schema without having rebuild the columns.

<comment><USER11> I came across this limitation within minutes of playing with pg. I couldn't believe that such a powerful tool would be missing something so basic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think an "official" GUI is necessary. Rather it would simply hurt the community of paid/free tools that have built up around it.

My favorite PostgreSQL GUI is: [http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/manager](http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/postgresql/manager), it's excellent overall.

<comment><USER13> Excuse me, but I think this only runs on Windows. Many developers use Mac OS X or Linux. A wonderful cross platform solution would certainly be great. I'm using PGAdmin on a weekly basis, and while it offers more features than any other free solution, it fails at usability, native integration and also lacks support for the more advanced features of PostgreSQL.

<comment><USER12> It supports most of the advanced features of PostgreSQL, including functions, triggers, composite types, JSON, and most anything one can throw at it. Not to mention it obviously has a great SQL Editor with auto-complete for when you want to do drafts by hand, as I usually do.

As far as it being windows only, I thought that was no longer an issue thanks to great tools like Parallels and VMWare Fusion. Can't you just open the app in that while still living in your OS?

I honestly don't see much of an issue.

<comment><USER14> I cannot tell if you're for real here? I had to check your LinkedIn since it sounded a lot like you worked for them.

First you essentially say "they shouldn't make their own, as this $350 tool's business might be impacted" and then when people raise legitimate concerns (e.g. that it doesn't support their platform) you suggest even more expensive ways to mitigate it (an additional $300+).

So essentially your argument is: "They shouldn't make a free GUI, there is $350 of commercial software that might lose business, that runs on all systems if you spend $350 for a VM+licence."

I'm struggling to take you even a tiny bit seriously here.

<comment><USER15> No, he said that there should be an _official_ GUI because the ecosystem of competitive GUIs, free and paid, might be affected. That is, a single official one might discourage people from making their own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> More functions to modify JSON columns in place without needing to retrieve it.

<comment><USER17> Does this thinking lead to feature parity with Redis EVAL?

<comment><USER18> It will lead to feature parity with Mongodb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> parallelism is a big omission from pg for me. for all of the language features (and they're awesome), the thing that is the most glaring omission is parallelism. i understand it's been and on-again off-again project that seems difficult to implement. i still love pg, though so it's not a deal-breaker for me.

</comment><comment><USER20> A better language than SQL in front of Postgres' careful and mature data storage engine?

<comment><USER21> SQL syntax isn't great, but it is very powerful and good for what it does.

What would you expect from a language improvement point of view? Its a declarative language so you can't expect a load of object oriented features. I found that once I learned to think in sets, the language doesn't bother me. There is a certain simplicity to it, that is fairly elegant.

<comment><USER20> I would like a language more like Tutorial D; strictly set based (none of SQL's bags); without SQL's terrible, awful, no-good very bad 4GL syntax (I'd like something terser and more mathematical). It would be closed over composition, for instance, and would map more directly onto the relational calculus.

<comment><USER22> Do you have any documents or RFC links about this language?

I'm sure an specification is gladly appreciated.

<comment><USER23> "Tutorial D", a particular pedagogical instance of a defined class of languages, is defined here: [http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/Tutorial%20D-2013-05-...](http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/Tutorial%20D-2013-05-23.pdf)

The requirements list for any "D" (that is, the definition of membership in the class of languages) is here in _The Third Manifesto_ : [http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/TTM-2013-02-07.pdf](http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/TTM-2013-02-07.pdf)

<comment><USER22> And yet another name collision for the D language. It should have been Mars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Automatic failover that doesn't require a 3rd party HA tool would be great.

<comment><USER25> You'd still have to deal with the complexity, but somewhere else ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd sure like to have replication to one database while still allowing writes on another.

As it stands now, if you're replicating from a master, you can't do anything else. This is something that MySQL could do over a decade ago.</comment>


Founder's stories and startup life - my Beacon project - <AUTHOR> http://www.beaconreader.com/projects/life-in-the-startup-trenches Looking for support from HN for my Beacon campaign - for anyone who'd be interested in reading founder's stories and posts covering successes/lessons learned.
Beacon is like Netflix for news. They use a clean, no-ad reading interface with the ability to directly fund writers through their platform.
About Me: I'm a contributing writer to an LA-Based news pub called TechZulu. We cover breaking tech news among other topics, but I've found most of my passion in learning the stories of the people behind the businesses. (Some examples below):
- Interview with Jim Farley, Ford Motors CMO - (http://bit.ly/1m0Or6w) - Interview with Emir Aboulhosn, Ready SIM CEO - (http://bit.ly/Kh86ju)
Through this project, I'm looking to refine this concept and give entrepreneurs a venue to share their stories and what they've learned.
Specific to this campaign, I'll be finding and contacting this year's W14 batches from notable incubators across the country (YC, Techstars, etc.). If you're interested in these stories, please consider supporting my campaign.
Note - I'm not directly affiliated with Beacon other than using their services, But I do think they have a cool concept and platform and hope they find success. <comment><AUTHOR> Looking for support from HN for my Beacon campaign - for anyone who'd be interested in reading founder's stories and posts covering successes/lessons learned.

Beacon is like Netflix for news. They use a clean, no-ad reading interface with the ability to directly fund writers through their platform.

About Me: I'm a contributing writer to an LA-Based news pub called TechZulu. We cover breaking tech news among other topics, but I've found most of my passion in learning the stories of the people behind the businesses. (Some examples below):

\- Interview with Jim Farley, Ford Motors CMO - ([http://bit.ly/1m0Or6w](http://bit.ly/1m0Or6w)) \- Interview with Emir Aboulhosn, Ready SIM CEO - ([http://bit.ly/Kh86ju](http://bit.ly/Kh86ju))

Through this project, I'm looking to refine this concept and give entrepreneurs a venue to share their stories and what they've learned.

Specific to this campaign, I'll be finding and contacting this year's W14 batches from notable incubators across the country (YC, Techstars, etc.). If you're interested in these stories, please consider supporting my campaign.

 _Note - I 'm not directly affiliated with Beacon other than using their services, But I do think they have a cool concept and platform and hope they find success._</comment>


Opioid crisis: Johnson and Johnson hit by landmark ruling - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49452373 <comment><USER2> These court-cases have two worthy objectives: Correcting this behavior in pharmaceutical co.s in the future and compensating the states & people harmed in the past.

Incentivizing restraint and honest advertising is only possible by punishing executives, personally [1]. Especially those in sales.

And fair compensation is many, many times this number. So I fail to see how this is anything other than an injustice, and fear that it will take the pressure off of other court cases against opioid sellers.

Reading the book "Dreamland" [2] on the opioid crisis changed my life. Even as someone from a part of Ohio hurt by opioids, it's hard to imagine the venality of these people, the callousness of the Mexican drug dealers who swoop in behind them, and the magnitude of suffering their perfect storm concocts.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669453](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669453) [2] [https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate- Epidem...](https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate- Epidemic/dp/1511336404)

<comment><USER3> Considering nobody can get these drugs unless a physician prescribes them, when are we going to see a wholesale round up of doctors?

So far it's been a few high profile cases, but obviously the problem runs deeper than that.

And J&J is by no means a major opioid manufacturer. As the article states, their drugs were less than 1% of all prescription opioids.

I think J&J got hit because they have deep pockets.

<comment><USER4> They are scapegoats. I just read majority of case files - there is not much of a proof that JJ did anything more than what law allowed them to do! Tune as old as Congress itself - you think a corporation acts immorally? Change the damn law! Don't expect for-profit corporation to have a soul.

Finally - the reasoning here should he similar to gun and a murderer. If guns don't pull triggers but people do, then similarily here only responsible people should be these that abused said drug, especially when it was manufactured and sold accordingly with laws and doctor's prescription.

<comment><USER5> Guns are a public policy aberration in this regard.

Lawn darts killed one kid and got banned. Cars got forced to be safer with seat belts and airbags, with the industry kicking and screaming throughout.

<comment><USER6> Cars kill 40,000 people every year in the USA. Nothing is done about that number.

<comment><USER7> Things are being done, but the most effective one would be to reduce speeds and number of cars.

Since USA is big distances, 1 has strong opposition, and 2 even stronger.

They could also make the drivers license short time, like 2 years requiring a refresh exam, but that'd be a real pain in the rear.

You could mandate built in breathalyzers, but they would routinly be failing or bypassed... Though it's a good attempt.

Ultimately getting rid of reducing number of unsafe human drivers would be good.

<comment><USER8> Bypassed? Unlikely. Breathalyzers are all about tamper-detection. If you know of a way of bypassing one, contact a lawyer. Somebody will pay you boatloads of money as an expert witness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's good that J&J are being fined for false advertising.

What I do not feel is completely justified in this story is that the blame is put solely on the pharmaceutical.

Yes they played their part. They most likely knew how addicting their drug is from day 1 during their clinical trials.

Why is direct marketing to consumers in the USA even allowed?

Why are pharmaceutical companies still allowed to wine and dine doctors to persuade them to prescribe their drugs?

What about the other players?

Why do doctors even prescribe these heavy drugs, despite knowing that there are serious addictions risks? I doubt doctors would prescribe heroin if someone has pain.

Why do patients insist on getting the heavy drugs to numb pain instead of taking or accepting doctors advice and take a less strong pain killer and accept some pain.

I think we should have a good look at how the healthcare system is organized and scrutinize all players.

<comment><USER10> American experience with painkillers in Germany after surgery

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfTMRrJrM7Y&t=7m31s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfTMRrJrM7Y&t=7m31s)

<comment><USER11> Insightful and true.

In America it's practically taboo to tell someone they don't need a thing and the tolerance for any discomfort is extremely low.

<comment><USER12> As it should be in my opinion - admittedly colored by own experiences and phobias. Hospitalization is a leading cause of PTSD. That "discomfort" can leave people pretty traumatized and messed -all because of other's puritan desires.

If you washed someone's wounds in salt water when there were alternatives it would be rightfully regarded as sadism - why the tolerance for unnecessary pain and suffering otherwise?

<comment><USER11> There is a middle ground between proper pain management and handing out scripts of Vicodin for take-home for the slightest reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sued for $17 Billion, ordered to pay 1/34th of that. In State court, by The State.

I don't know if that counts as a "landmark ruling", but maybe it will. We'll have to wait and see if anyone else crashes up on the rocks.

<comment><USER14> It's basically the case that there are no effective punishments for corporate entities. The argument has been made elsewhere for a corporate 'death penalty', an actual destruction of value, brand and IP and wholesale confiscation of assets. Obviously implementation would be an issue, but imagine if there was even a possibility J&J could be sentenced to 'corp-death' for its role in the opioid crisis. The share price wouldn't be going up, that's for sure.

Otherwise I think we'll just keep being surprised by corporate amorality, over and over again.

<comment><USER15> outright destroying a company would inflict a lot of collateral damage. some rich people would see a fraction of their portfolio go to zero, which would certainly sting, but many more middle-class workers would lose their only job.

the IP part may have some value though. it would be interesting to see what would happen if every successful judgment resulted in all relevant patents going to the public domain. play funny business with a certain pharmaceutical and it becomes a generic ahead of schedule.

I suspect "make an example out of 'em" style punishments are just not very effective. if every few years a big company gets a back-breaking fine, it would make for some good news stories, but it would also be pretty easy to design a portfolio resilient against these outcomes.

if I could wave a magic wand and set up the system exactly how I wanted, I would implement pretty much the opposite. moderate fines (maybe 1.5-2x the illicit gains) with a very high rate of conviction. raise the salary of prosecutors and investigators until you get people who can make it happen. I believe this would not only be more effective, but much more fair.

<comment> daniel-cussen > many more middle-class workers would lose their only job.

So it'd be very much like an ordinary death penalty, then, with dependents left behind in a worse position. Well, fortunately it would also mean you shouldn't work for a bad company the same way you shouldn't assist criminals generally, in that you can share in the blame.

<comment><USER16> Fire the board, upper management, and ceo... confiscate stock from all shareholders and do an ipo with it. install new management from the industry. Ban existing management from serving in that capacity for the rest of their lives. Now let's see who f*'s up.

Think of the poor workers is such a poor argument as any worker can be laid off or fired at a moment's notice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A friend recently had a minor procedure (he took a couple of ibuprofens after and that was all). But the doctor gave him about a dozen of narcotic pills that eventually ended up in the trash.

Another friend had a persistent cough getting over a cold and was given oxycodone in liquid form "to help sleep." She never took it.

Both of these were at major facilities in the Bay Area. Thinking at least some of the blame falls on the docs.

<comment><USER18> The cough syrup was probably codeine, which is a very effective cough suppressant.

In the past I had a persistent cough bad enough that it keep me up several nights. Mucinex would do nothing. Vix did nothing. Eventually each coughing spell was causing head splitting pain. Codeine was a crucial treatment option.

I have a feeling getting hooked on codeine cough syrup would be extremely difficult given a single bottle with perhaps 10 doses.

It should not be inappropriate to prescribe codeine cough syrup to an adult who actually has a serious persistent cough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The danger of all these opioid rulings is that it might get a lot more difficult for people who suffer from pain that needs opioids to actually get them. After seeing these rulings, what company in its right mind would actually manufacture opioid pills any more? Doctors are going to be very, very, conservative about how they prescribe.

<comment><USER20> Good. Just look at the volume of pills prescribed and you can see that overprescription is at the root of the problem.

[https://beta.washingtonpost.com/investigations/76-billion- op...](https://beta.washingtonpost.com/investigations/76-billion-opioid-pills- newly-released-federal-data-unmasks-the- epidemic/2019/07/16/5f29fd62-a73e-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html)

<comment><USER21> You say good until you have a very real pain disorder and getting the medication that makes life bearable and not want to kill yourself becomes a part time job.

<comment><USER22> As someone that understands pain only too well, I agree.

I suffer from chronic pain and am prescribed (weak) opioids to help manage that pain. I've tried _numerous_ other medications, but the ones I'm on are the only ones I can tolerate and that actually help at all.

I am responsible, only ever taking them as prescribed. Even with some pain management, life is not easy; with none, it is unbearable - I honestly don't know if I'd still be here without any pain management.

Opioids are plainly being over-prescribed in the US, but we have to be _really_ careful not to withdraw them from those that actually need them.

<comment><USER23> Out of curiousity, have you ever tried cannabis?

I wonder how it compares when some truly needs pain treatment.

<comment><USER22> I'm in the UK, so can't legally access "raw" cannabis.

But, I recently got a prescription for Sativex, which is essentially a very expensive cannabis tincture.

My biggest issue with it is that you end up swallowing most of it - and eating cannabis is very different to smoking, as THC is metabolised to 11-OH-THC, which is much more psychoactive. I found it made me really anxious, which is not nice at all!

I've been experimenting with it, trying to ensure I don't swallow any of it. It _does_ help with the pain, but only a _little_... and it impairs me in the process - it's really important to me that I can still function cognitively.

I also find the _way_ it helps is different than opioids - it's kind of similar to alcohol, in that it's more like a distraction from the pain, whereas opioids actually negate some of the pain.

There is a lot of good evidence for cannabis helping with neuropathic pain, so I'd encourage others to try it if they legally and financially can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Tens of thousands of US drug users (victims) get jailtime. Citizen traffickers (perps): serious jailtime. Corporate traffickers (perps) get fined for 'nuisance'.

The Arthur Anderson firm got deep-sixed for felony obstruction of justice. Enron's Ken Lay was convicted of 10 counts of wire and bank fraud. (Skilling just got out of jail.)

Tens of thousands of dead Americans: 'nuisance'? I can think of only a couple of 'justifications' for the disparity.

<comment><USER25> What is exactly is it that you believe qualifies as criminal behavior? Opiates are a legal, and medically necessary, component of the healthcare system. Unless you want patients to suffer horrendously, _somebody_ has to manufacture and sell opiates.

Opiates are also a fun and addictive drug. As long as they exist and are generally available, some percent of the sub-population will abuse them. We can try our best to keep them only for medical use, but once the prescription leaves the pharmacy there's not much you can do. You can't blame the legal manufacturer when that happens, if they took all required steps to keep their drugs in the legal channels. Maybe you think that's true, but that the opiate manufacturers have used their power and influence to over-prescribe their products. That assumes that opiates are over-utilized in American healthcare. And that's a narrative that simply isn't borne out by the data.

Only 0.19% of opiate-treated chronic pain patients without a prior history develop any form of abuse or addiction[1]. And remember these are chronic-pain patients who take tolerance-escalating doses over years or even decades. Virtually no one develops an opiate addiction from following their medically prescribed treatment regiment.

The death rate from prescription opiates has not budged since 2006[2]. The vast majority of opiate overdoses in America are not prescription opiates, but illicit fentanyl, and to a lesser extent heroin and methadone. Nor do chronic pain patients face any major risk of overdose. The fatal overdose mortality rate for long-term opiate-prescribed patients is 17 per 100,000[3]. And that number _doesn 't exclude_ the subset of the population engaged in abusive behavior like mixing with alcohol, snorting pills, or hoarding medication.

Finally the sizable majority of prescription drug abusers in this country do not source from a doctor or the healthcare system at all. The vast majority get their drugs either from the black market or a friend or relative. On the National Drug Use Survey only 18% of prescription drug abusers report doctors as their primary source. And among street prostitutes (a high at-risk group) only 5%[4].

All of this goes to show that there is very little evidence of any sort of over-prescription of opiates in America. To begin with the vast majority of the opiate crisis has to do with fentanyl, not prescription drugs. But even when it comes to prescription drug abuse, the intersection with medical users is vanishingly small.

However what there is a major problem in America is untreated chronic pain. 50 million American suffer chronic pain[5]. And 20 million suffer high-impact chronic pain which severely impairs normal life function. More than 10% of suicides are linked to chronic pain[6]. High-dosage opiates are absolutely essential for this group to live any sort of normal life. As long as there are such massive numbers of legitimate pain patients, the law of large numbers guarantees a large supply of diverted opiates. Even under the tightest controls. There's simply no way around that except by denying most of the legitimate patients treatment for their debilitating conditions.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18489635](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18489635) [2] [http://www.ncsl.org/portals/1/documents/health/APeeples0118_...](http://www.ncsl.org/portals/1/documents/health/APeeples0118_32103.pdf) [3] [https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/745518/opioid- prescr...](https://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/745518/opioid- prescriptions-chronic-pain-overdose-cohort-study) [4] [http://sci- hub.tw/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108...](http://sci- hub.tw/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10550880903182986) [5] [https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6736a2.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6736a2.htm) [6] [https://www.ehidc.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/Ch...](https://www.ehidc.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/Chronic%20Pain%20and%20Suicide.pdf)

<comment><USER26> > What is exactly is it that you believe qualifies as criminal behavior? > Opiates are a legal, and medically necessary, component of the healthcare > system. Unless you want patients to suffer horrendously, somebody has to > manufacture and sell opiates.

The criminal behaviour was aggressively selling something that already sells itself.

> Only 0.19% of opiate-treated chronic pain patients without a prior history > develop any form of abuse or addiction.

Your cited meta-analysis looked at nonmalignant chronic pain patients receiving chronic opiate therapy: There is not a strong indication for this therapy in that group.

When they looked at all recipients, the abuse/addiction rate was 3.27%.

" In the urine toxicology grouping, there were five studies (15,442 CPPs exposed). Here, 20.4% of the CPPs had no prescribed opioid in urine and/or a nonprescribed opioid in urine." In other words, 20% were clearly diverting to non-prescribed users, and/or already supplementing their opioids.

How could the authors suggest that there was only 3% demonstrated abuse/addiction or aberrant behaviour when 20% were diverting their entire RX or supplementing????

<comment><USER25> > When they looked at all recipients, the abuse/addiction rate was 3.27%.

The 3% figure includes includes those patients with a pre-existing history of addiction/abuse. Now it's debatable whether previous addicts should get opiates for chronic pain conditions, it's irrelevant to the specific question of opiate prescriptions _create_ new addictions. Because by definitions those with a history already had a pre-existing addiction.

Regardless 3% is still an extraordinarily low percent for chronic pain patients treated for years at a time. For reference 3% is less than or on par with the abuse/addiction rate of long-term prescribed ADHD medication[1].

> In other words, 20% were clearly diverting to non-prescribed users, and/or > already supplementing their opioids.

Your characterization of the findings are mis-leading. Opiates frequently metabolize to another active opioid inside the body. Morphine commonly metabolizes to hydromorphone[2]. Codeine metabolizes to morphine[3]. Oxycodone metabolizes to oxymorphone[4]. Hydrocodone metabolizes to hydromorphone[4].

Furthermore many of these metabolic pathways are only just recently discovered (like morphine to hydromorphone). The reality is that our current understanding and technology is not advanced enough to tell from urine toxicology which specific opiates were consumed and which are the byproducts of metabolism.

[1][https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much- mo...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than- you-wanted-to-know/) [2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16620524](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16620524) [3] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100662/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK100662/) [4] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704133/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704133/)

<comment><USER26> > Your characterization of the findings are mis-leading. Opiates frequently > metabolize to another active opioid inside the body. Morphine commonly > metabolizes to hydromorphone[2]. Codeine metabolizes to morphine[3]. > Oxycodone metabolizes to oxymorphone[4]. Hydrocodone metabolizes to > hydromorphone[4].

I'm pretty sure the authors were accounting for that. Otherwise they're not investigating anything of value. Especially if they're lumping them in with a group that didn't have any opiates in their screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A while ago I read a book about what they did with epogen. They definitely deserve punishment but I am afraid this will work out like the banks where the fine is just cost of doing business and not deterrent.

</comment><comment><USER28> And their stock is up in after hours... Doesn't seem to be much of a victory considering a bigger fine was already priced in.

<comment><USER29> Exactly. This landmark ruling is the wrong way, it shows that pharmaceutical companies can enable the manslaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and pay relatively little in fines. Certainly less than the usually well-informed stock market was expecting.

The pharma CEOs are gonna use this landmark to help them navigate to a bigger private yacht and faster private jet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Government says it's ok for Johnson and Johnson to sell opioids. Government waits until the shit hits the fan then says, "Hey you shouldn't have sold those opioids! Hey everyone, can you believe this big company is selling opioids?!" What a joke.

</comment><comment><USER31> Johnson and Johnson annual revenue: 80bn

Fine for causing a substantial amount of those "400,000 overdose deaths": 0.5bn

Yeah, I'm totally convinced that they'll behave from now on.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a non American can I just confirm my understanding?

JJ makes pain killers, markets them, doctors prescribe them (?), patients get addicted.

I have trouble understanding why this is primarily JJs fault. Either Drs should be looking after their patients, or these drugs need to be prescription only, if not already.

There seems to be a big elephant that's getting ignored here...

<comment><USER33> Drug companies misrepresented the research around addiction; they aggressively sold the medication to doctors and patients; they continued these sales even when they had data showing large amounts of misuse in a region.

People seem to think there can only be one point of failure, one organisation or person to blame. The opioid crisis is complex and many things failed. You're right that doctors should not have prescribed as many opioids, but that doesn't absolve the makers or the insurance companies.

<comment><USER32> There doesn't seem to be any suggestion of fraud in the linked article? Nevertheless if Drs are relying on companies for unbiased data, that again seems like that should be addressed.

I'm not saying there's one point of failure, note in my prior reply I wrote "primarily" their fault. But Drs are the professionals here, they have a _duty_ towards their patients. If a Dr prescribes something for me, I expect them to have weighed up the pros and cons. If Amazon recommends something I have no such expectation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "The company's share price rose following the ruling as investors had been expecting a much bigger fine, says BBC North America correspondent Peter Bowes."

</comment><comment><USER35> Plaintiffs ought to be suing federal and state governments for their puritanical and destructive drug laws. It is arguable that manufacturers promoted addictive drugs irresponsibly. And that physicians prescribed them irresponsibly.

But I doubt that most addicts overdosed with opioids obtained under prescription. Most likely overdosed on illegal opioids that they resorted to, after their prescriptions got cut off.

</comment><comment><USER36> Regardless of the question of whether or not J&J is liable or should be find, I'll just point out this slap on the wrist is basically nothing.

Such judgements are factored into large corporations' plans from the start. The politicians get to look good for "doing something", the company gets to be absolved of blame, and they're only out a small percentage of their profits.

</comment><comment><USER37> It might be an idea that all pharmaceutical companies with addictive products have to "donate" a percentage of gross sales to addiction treatment programmes. Also doctors that prescribe them have to also make a proportionate donation to avoid overprescription.

</comment><comment><USER38> it really seems like a slippery slope to be fining companies for selling products that are tightly regulated to begin with. next they will apply the can-spam act to billboard and television advertisers, which might not be too far off and equally misapplied.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Atlantic has an interesting article that claims the risk of addiction for ordinary folks isn't that high.

 _What became the popular but essentially dubious interpretation of the trends was that the typical opioid victim was a patient who received Oxycontin, Percocet, or Vicodin from her doctor for a tooth extraction or sprained ankle and then stumbled into addiction.

In fact, only 22 to 35 percent of "misusers" of pain medication report receiving drugs from their doctor_

[1][https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/what- ameri...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/what-america-got- wrong-about-opioid-crisis/595090/)

<comment><USER39> I'm not sure who this is at all relevant. Millions of people still died, and there's a very direct correlation between how much opioids were dumped in a state and the increase in death rates in that state. You can try to blur the lines by throwing statistics about addiction, but you can't deny the actual end results. It doesn't matter if you think it's addictive or not, millions of people died from opioid overdose, and communications show that the execs at these companies very explicitly pushed it heavily knowing full well the impact it had.

<comment><USER3> Of course it's relevant. The narrative is that companies like J&J promoted opioids which led to higher levels of addiction (and use of illegal opioids).

This data suggests that for the vast majority of patients, addiction was not an issue and the cause of the opioid epidemic was in fact people that used illegal opioids to begin with.

<comment><USER39> Doesn't matter if it was addiction of not, people still died of overdose, and there's a direct correlation between higher sales of opioids and deaths. They quite literally killed people for a higher profit.

<comment><USER12> Correlation doesn't equal causation or else you have to start charging Ben and Jerry for all of the murders and drownings and the whole justice system becomes the Red Queen's court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Chinese saying. Kill one to warn hundred.

</comment><comment><USER41> If a corporation has free speech, then a corporation can go to jail.

</comment><comment><USER42> why didnt purdue pharma face any charges?

<comment><USER43> 1\. This was a civil lawsuit, not a criminal trial.

2\. "Why Was Johnson & Johnson the Only Opioid Maker on Trial in Oklahoma?"

 _Other states are suing a range of drug makers, distributors and retailers. Here are three reasons Johnson & Johnson was the only company on trial in Oklahoma._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/health/opioids-johnson- an...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/health/opioids-johnson-and-johnson- oklahoma.html)</comment></comment>


WikiLeaks Posts Spy Firm Videos Offering Tools For Hacking iTunes, Gmail, Skype - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/12/08/wikileaks-posts-spy-firm-videos-offering-tools-for-hacking-itunes-gmail-skype/

<comment><USER2> Finfisher is an interesting product. Much of what it offers has been available in open source projects[1][2] for quite a while. I imagine it's probably the management overhead and GUI based interface that they sell it on.

Evilgrade (link below) is particularly interesting and handles the fake update part of the infection. Typically you'd use something like a metasploit (or equivalent) payload to install.

[1] - <http://www.infobyte.com.ar/developments.html> [2] - <http://www.metasploit.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> _After the downfall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the BBC obtained evidence that Gamma had offered its technology to the country's regime for surveilling Egyptians' use of tools like Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, Gmail and Skype._

Note to self: Do not ever work for Gamma. Remember "Gamma" if you meet someone who worked for them.

<comment><USER4> I work with gamma as a UK telephone operator. The divsion of gamma that was involed with this was gamma international. Where as Gamma for UK is a pretty much a seperate company. One of those things where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.

looking at their website, they dont seem linked in anyway :/ <https://www.gammagroup.com/Default.aspx> maybe they are not part of each other but just share a name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hm... does that mean that Apple's software updates aren't signed or that Apple gave the key to that company?

<comment><USER6> Just one more reason to not use iTunes!

It appears that Apple Software Updates are indeed signed: <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5044>

Are there any journalists planning a story about this who can contact Apple for a possible statement? I tweeted the author @a_greenberg to do so.

<comment><USER6> Andy replied: "It seems Apple has patched the vulnerability initially used by this spyware. Brian Krebs wrote about it here. <http://bit.ly/vqqwvK>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone seen a exploit that allows an attacker to view your camera, without turning on the green indicator light? This is the kind of stuff my nightmares are made of.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.google.com/patents?id=zoetAAAAEBAJ&q=hardwire...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=zoetAAAAEBAJ&q=hardwired#v=snippet&q=hardwired&f=false)</comment></comment>


8th: secure, cross-platform, efficient  programming language - <AUTHOR> http://8th-dev.com/about8th.html <comment><USER2> Do you have a link to a video demo?</comment>


Using private browsing or icongito, Do you think you are safe?. Not really - <AUTHOR> http://www.nothingprivate.ml/ <comment><USER2> There are some spelling errors: title should be: "Using private browsing or incognito? Do you think you are safe? Not really." You may want delete and repost. Good luck!

<comment><USER2> I noticed you fixed "browsing", but I think you missed "incognito".</comment></comment>


Faster pathfinding using Jump Point Search - <AUTHOR> http://harablog.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/jump-point-search/

<comment><USER2> "speeds up pathfinding on uniform-cost grid maps"

How useful are uniform-cost grids? Every implementation of A* I've ever used has been applied to varying-cost grids.

<comment><USER3> Any game vaguely resembling Wolfenstein uses a uniform-cost grid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a strange use of the word "symmetric": "Two grid paths are symmetric if they share the same start and end point and one can be derived from the other by swapping the order of the constituent vectors."

<comment><USER5> How so? That would be a 2-fold rotational symmetry, wouldn't it?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotational_symmetry>

<comment><USER4> Two pieces are rotated, that doesn't make the whole thing symmetric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it just me or does the Vanilla-A* algorithms look too bad? I mean especailly in the second image [(d) A* (Adaptive Depth)], why does it search behind itself?

<comment><AUTHOR> This behaviour exists because A*'s heuristic function assumes there are no obstacles when estimating the remaining distance to reach the goal. As the difference between the heuristic estimate to the goal and the actual distance increases, some nodes "behind" the start location will appear more promising than other nodes which are eventually proven to be on the optimal path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Quick, someone send this to Toady One!

<comment><USER8> Problem is, the traffic designations make the grid non-uniform-cost. Edit: But you could probably remove the possibility of traffic zones if this was implemented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any speed ranking against alternatives?

<comment><AUTHOR> In the paper we make an apples-to-apples comparison with a recent optimality- preserving state-space reduction method called Swamps and an apples-to-oranges comparison with an approximate pathfinding algorithm, HPA*.

Swamps is a nice technique for narrowing the scope of the current search; it achieves ~5x maximum speedup and could be combined with Jump Point Search to go faster still.

The comparison to HPA is summarised in the article. Additional evaluations are the subject of further work :)</comment></comment>


Why Evangelicals voted for Trump: religious persecution - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/us/evangelicals-trump-christianity.html <comment><USER2> TL;DR: Evangelical Christians hope for a power grab. There's a lot of ahistorical belief (US started as a Christian nation) and a lot of self- delusion (Christians are widely persecuted) behind the feeling that Evangelicals need to grab power.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have proof or is this just your opinion?

<comment><USER3> Are you looking for proof about what? About the belief that the US is a Christian nation or about the belief that Christians are persecuted in the US?

Because evangelical groups have been very vocal about each of those claims for a very long time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, proof to refute their points

<comment><AUTHOR> I will help you out:

1\. America as a "Christian nation": partly true, due to settlers being mostly Puritans seeking shelter from religious persecution. Ex: Harvard created by Puritans

2\. Evangelical power grab: Yes, they might have infiltrated the government. Watch a Netflix documentary called "The Family" based on an insider's investigation.

3\. Religious persecution: from varied, unconventional sources (not from mainstream liberal media)- Christianity is the most persecuted religion internationally (in terms of gravity of consequences): beheadings, incarceration, beatings, etc. The US still has it easy.

Although Evangelicals sometimes wanders off from mainline Christianity, their points are not exactly without merit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This isn't complicated.

Trump: not religious, mostly respects human life, fits well with prosperity theology, promises to stop bringing in people who really hate Christians

Hillary: not religious, barely respects human life, fits OK with prosperity theology, promises to bring in more people who really hate Christians

If you were an evangelical Christian, wouldn't that be an easy decision? The negatives would be painful, but the balance of attributes clearly points one way.</comment>


Ask HN: How to sell a start up. - <AUTHOR>

Let us say I have completed coded and prepared a project. Hypothetically lets say its the Twitter. i have the entire code ready. Now I just want to sell it. What do I need to do ?
I know that if I put it in public domain and it gets millions users it is a successful venture and hence will get sold for a high value.
But i am not interested in a high value. Do you think with a reasonable product I will be able to sell it for say a $100k ?
Note: you might ask can a reasonably good product be "developed" in $100k ? Then what profit do you make by selling it? The assumption here is that
I alone have developed everything and it is of GOOD quality (however unlikely it might be)". <comment><USER2> The thing to remember, is that unless you have _actually_ proven that people want to use it, and are doing so, then any value that might be attached to the software is hypothetical.

If an investor had $100k, they could put it in the bank, and with no work and no risk whatsoever, they would earn $3K to $5K in interest (depending on the bank).

Now, if they were to spend the $100K buying your software, how much return could they be guaranteed? Not a likely or possible return, but a guaranteed return, without any risk?

The easy part in any start-up is writing the code. The hard part is marketing it, building the user base, and re-writing the code when you realise that what you thought the users wanted isn't actually what they wanted at all.

What you want to sell is not a startup, but just software. Depending on how complex the software is, it might sell for between $100 to $1000. Maybe a more for B2B software in specialized industries, but for any consumer stuff, that would be the upper limit.

If you have this software written, why not take the plunge and try to turn it into a company yourself? After all, you've put in the work so far, so shouldn't you get the rewards?

<comment><AUTHOR> \--What you want to sell is not a startup, but just software. Depending on how complex the software is, it might sell for between $100 to $1000. ----

I got the point. Unless you prove that it is an earth shattering idea and get a few million userbase, you are actually selling a software and not a business. The question than comes is what is the costliest software in the market? hardly any sw is costlier than $ 1k.

<comment><USER2> There's plenty of very expensive software - for example some of the really high end engineering packages I've used, for things like 3D modelling and fluid simulation, can sell for upwards of $5K per _seat_. But again, the value this software adds to the business has to be much more than its cost. A big company will easily spend $500K on software to manage construction materials if it means that it reduces their material wastage on a $1b project from 5% to 2%.

I'm sure other people here can provide plenty of other examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I know that if I put it in public domain and it gets millions users it is a > successful venture and hence will get sold for a high value.

Huh? There are lots of things in the public domain with millions of users that haven't been sold for a high value.

"In the public domain" means that folks can pay virtually nothing.

<comment><USER4> I think he means "public" - available to the public at large, rather than the legal definition, which is the first thing that came to my mind too.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, that is what I meant Sir. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The chance of finding someone who just wants the code for a site that isn't already popular is very small. Not impossibly small, but small. The converse is much easier: if you've got a lot of traffic, people will throw a lot of money at a URL shortener.

</comment><comment><USER4> You could sell it on sitepoint or eBay.

> But i am not interested in a high value. Do you think with a reasonable > product I will be able to sell it for say a $100k ?

How much is it currently earning? What future earnings potential does it have?</comment>


Complete Noobs Guide to Hacking Nginx - <AUTHOR> http://blog.schmichael.com/2010/12/28/noobs-guide-to-hacking-nginx/

<comment><USER2> I don't want to sound rude but the title doesn't seem appropriate at all.

Your article is about how you hacked nginx for your specific need (eventually fix it if it finally merge to 0.8) but not a "complete noob guide".

That being said, nice fix !

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry! I intended it to be encouraging for C dabblers like myself, but it's definitely not a "guide." It's my first time posting to HN, so I'll try to be more accurate with my titles in the future.

<comment><USER2> Sorry for the tone I was just frustrated !

<comment><USER3> Get a room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > sudo make install

Judging from my understanding of the article, you are using Ubuntu. Please, please, _please_ don't _ever_ teach "complete noobs" installing anything this way. I won't insist on full course of backporting with apt-get source, hacking on debian/* and doing dpkg-buildpackage, but even silly `sudo chown -R $USER /usr/local && make install` is more appropriate than Slackware-ish `sudo make install`. And, while far from being perfect, checkinstall(1), is easy to use and should work fairly well.

I had to manage several Debian GNU/Linux-based systems with _ton_ of software installed this way, and it was... well, quite painful. Package management is there for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER5> The nginx source code is actually very readably and very well organised; I've never programmed professionally in c, but I feel quite comfortable reading and grokking nginx source.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why wouldn't you just use POST? Being "RESTful" is even more ridiculous than validating strict XHTML, since, apparently, it causes you to build an unnecessary patch for your webserver. Just because a feature exists doesn't mean you are bound to use it (PUT, DELETE). The distinctions are nonsense.

<comment><USER7> Can any standard browser actually send PUT or DELETE? What buttons do I press in firefox to send PUT?

<comment><USER8> Yes via Ajax, supposedly no via html form method.

You could build an Ajax button easily. You couldn't build a basic submit button to do it (supposedly--on my phone so no cross browser testing).

Your point is taken that browsers don't really speak HTTP. There are plenty of clients that do, generally for programmers working with APIs. These are at issue.

<comment><USER9> Right, there's a wide variety of Java uploaders that use PUT instead of POST.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Nginx is not "an established C project", it's the insane product of Igor's twisted mind. It's a brilliant totally asynchronous giant state machine – which is how it's so blindingly fast – because everything is non-blocking, and everything is super efficient._

I'd like to see a diagram of that state machine!

</comment><comment><USER11> What's the problem with sending "Content-Length: 0" as part of the PUT headers?

<comment><USER12> Browsers?

<comment><USER13> do browser support put at all?

<comment><USER14> Yes. Most browsers support all of the HTTP methods via the XmlHttpRequest object.

<http://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/http-method-support>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> awesome post !</comment>