Forwarding issues related to MACs starting with 4 or 6 - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/nanog/2016/Dec/29 <comment><USER2> I wonder how many bugs there are like this in low-level networking infrastructure that cause issues which go undiagnosed for _years_ before someone with enough knowledge to diagnose them figures it out. I keep reading about weird networking glitches triggered by specific bit patterns, but certainly if I ever encountered such a think I don't think I'd be able to diagnose it.

<comment><USER3> One WTF I've seen: a consumer router which failed to NAT outgoing packets if their endian-swapped destination IP matched the LAN subnet, i.e. anything sent to X.1.168.192 would be forwarded to WAN with 192.168.1.Y source IP and get lost. Took me a few weeks to figure out why certain random websites don't work.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of an issue [1] I ran into with Symantec Firewall looking at UDP fragments as if they were full packets, and blocking them if the value where the port number would be on a full packet matched a rule.

[1] [https://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/firewall- incorrectly...](https://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/firewall-incorrectly- blocks-fragments-udp-traffic)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _I believe IEEE changed their strategy to attempt to purposefully higher the > chance of collisions with MAC squatters, to encourage people to register and > pay the fee._

TIL: MAC squatting is a thing.

<comment><USER6> Whenever you have any kind of assignment process, people will squat. If there's a monetary fee involved, more people squat.

IEEE's new policy is uncomfortable in another way, it makes it impossible to guess what a new, not-seen-before MAC prefix might be.

<comment><USER7> Why is it a problem to nit be able to guess a never seen before MAC prefix?

<comment><USER6> If I have a network scanning tool that tells me what's on my network, it's nice to know that an unknown prefix is likely an Apple product, or an HP printer, etc etc.

<comment><USER8> [http://standards-oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.txt](http://standards- oui.ieee.org/oui/oui.txt)

There you go, straight from the source. Convert that to whatever your scanning tool wants and you can update your list as often as you feel necessary.

No need to make assumptions about unknowns when you can just make them known.

<comment><USER6> Last time I did this, I found that the downloadable list ran behind reality. That was 2007, maybe it's updated more quickly these days.

<comment><USER7> I have never looked up a MAC and had it not show up. Maybe in 2007 you were using an old copy of the file that came with your distribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good news everyone, Cisco re-examined the bug and concluded this particular problem was not a hardware issue after all but can be remedied with a software update: [http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-December/08941...](http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-December/089416.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> > "This 4/6 MAC issue was well documented in BCP128 back in 2007. The control- > word drafts mentioned that there would be dragons related to 4 and 6 back in > 2004."

This reminds me a little of what Mr. Prosser said to Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about the demolition notice for Arthur's house: "It was on display at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the leopard."

You can't make the assumption that engineers will be able to keep all of this in their heads. The IEEE is not going to review every document and put together a compendium of bear traps awaiting them in the future, and they aren't going to review every historic document before every decision, either.

If the few that knew what would happen made an incorrect assumption of prior knowledge, then they dropped the ball in reminding those that needed to know.

Since nobody remembered, they should have just been informed of the mistake and a possible solution or assistance provided.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can someone more knowledgeable explain why the digits 4 or 6 specifically would be causing issues?

<comment><USER12> Ethernet frames start with the destination mac address, IP payloads start with the version. It appears that in some networking equipment, there are places where it may have a ethernet frame or an IP playload and uses the first four bits to determine: if it starts with 4, it treats it as IPv4, and 6, IPv6.

So if it gets an ethernet frame destined for your address starting with 4 or 6, it will think it's actually an IP payload, and discard it because it doesn't validate as a IP packet or otherwise misdirect it.

Edit to add: In MPLS networks, 'P routers' (core routers) by design don't know if the payload is Ethernet or IP; but may want to peak into the payload to do hashed traffic balancing or validating packets before forwarding. Hashing the packet as an IP packet when it's an ethernet packet is problematic because you want all packets on a given TCP connection to have the same hash value -- but since you misidentified the type of packet, the bytes used as input to the hash aren't static for a given connection so different packets in the connection may take different paths and may arrive out of order.

<comment><USER13> Wow that is idiotic. How can you be skilled enough to program routers and still do something as obviously wrong as this?

<comment><USER14> In this case there simply isn't enough information in the packet to do the right thing so it's a question of choosing which wrong thing to do.

<comment><USER15> Seems like an attempt at being "clever". L2 equipment shouldn't care what kind of packet it is, but we're trying to subvert the original spec and come up with new hacks by "peeking" into the payload and make assumptions about what it is in order to rule or queue it differently.

Obviously in hindsight this is a bad idea and "idiotic", but I can't see the immediate fault of whomever first decided to try this a decade ago when MAC addresses were sequential, IPv4 was fairly abundant, and we didn't really even have smartphones and the explosion of connected devices.

<comment><USER16> Ethernet has always "cared" what type of upper payload its carrying. It has to, there are any other things besides IP that run directly on top of Ethernet frames. For instance 0x0800 means that the ethernet frame is carrying an IPv4 datagram.

Here is a list of all the ethertypes it cares about: [http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/Protocol/802/ethertypes.ht...](http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/Protocol/802/ethertypes.htm)

Fire up wireshark and you will see these.

<comment><USER17> What the GP means is that layer 2 switches should forward traffic agnostic of what the Ethertype field says. That field only exists so layer 3 knows what it's dealing with.

<comment><USER16> I see. I misunderstood then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow it blows my mind. Both that a switch _might_ have issues forwarding packets with a perfectly valid MAC, and that there are so many MAC squatters out there that the IEEE felt this was a good strategy. I guess its going to get harder to use MACs like CA:FE:00:C0:FF:EE to easily spot your packets coming from your home grown FPGA ethernet MAC implementation :-)

<comment><USER19> > CA:FE:00:C0:FF:EE

That's already a locally-administered address as the first byte ends in the hex nibble 'A'.

Aside from that, the IEEE's actions are a little odd here, but when you read BCP128[1]; you can see, it's really not their fault. This is due to vendors choosing a wacky and poorly thought out mechanism for identifying packet types on MPLS networks.

[1]: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp128](https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp128)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone break this down for me? Are 4 and 6 previously reserved MAC prefixes?

<comment><USER21> From what I gather the problem is basically:

Certain routers are processing both IP packets and ethernet frames through the same logic. They want to know which it is. Ethernet frames start with the destination mac address, which used to be sequential and reaching higher numbers seemed far away so most started with 0 or 1. IP packets start with the IP version, so they're 4 or 6.

As a result, some vendors basically implement the following:

        def is_ethernet_frame(data):
            return not (data.startswith(4) or data.startswith(6))

And similar to the problems with

        os.name.startswith('Windows 9')

type issues, now we reach the higher numbers, these systems have issues.

<comment><USER22> Are these not at different OSI layers and should be handled correctly by encapsulation?

<comment><USER14> To save space in the MPLS header, it doesn't specify what comes next. So inside an MPLS packet may be Ethernet, IP, or something else and in many cases the switch/router has no way of knowing what is inside the packet, but it still wants to find the 5-tuple to generate ECMP entropy.

<comment><USER20> I was not aware that MPLS provides for encapsulation of Layer 2 frames.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow that's some serious persistence to work a Cisco TAC case all the way up to it becoming a documented bug. I feel for those network engineers. I can only imagine how many hours they spent on the phone with TAC. I've been there, its not fun.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's wonderful to see how bugs in network hardware are suddenly the problem of the registration authority and they need to delay a few years more. How about the vendors start fixing their bugs instead? And if you have hardware and there will be no fix, consider that the next time your going to spend your money on hardware.</comment>


How to fail at marketing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.songz.me/how-to-fail-at-marketing/ <comment><USER7> Do you have any metrics proving that these tactics don't work?

I mean, sure, I can see why you don't like them - but having a marketing tactic that is wildly unpopular and having a marketing tactic that doesn't work are not the same thing.

Case in point: a lot of people _hate_ the "one wierd tip" ads that The Truth About Abs uses - but they seem to work pretty well - [http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/11/02/the-truth- ab...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/11/02/the-truth-about-abs- mike-geary/).

<comment><USER8> Another example: long form sales pages. They've been discussed here on Hacker News before, and many people here hate them, but they do (apparently) convert very well.

<comment><USER7> I should have thought of that example.

Yes, long-form sales pages are an excellent example, which I can personally attest do indeed work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I'm comparing products or deciding to use a service i'll often search [product under consideration] vs [competitor]. Entering this conversation by titling your articles with relevant search terms seems smart to me.

Here's a link to the vsee vs skype article: <http://vsee.com/skype>

Here's an excerpt:

        So Why Skype?

        Of course, Skype is an excellent service if you're on a good network and don't have to be too concerned about data security. In addition, you can

        make phone calls to recipients on traditional telephone networks
        be part of the 663 million registered Skype users as of September 2011
        Skype from almost any platform: desktop (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), mobile (iOS, Android, Symbian) and smart TVs

As you can see there's way more to it than "attacking competitors" they're legitimately explaining the differences between the services.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think having those posts are important for SEO reasons (I often times look for comparisons by typing in Product X vs Product Y in Google - there's probably nobody )

The problem is just how they're framed, as there's a number more of them vs. general marketing and usability posts. If they hid them away a little better in the back (kind of how RingCentral does here - <http://compare.ringcentral.com/>) it wouldn't be as much of a problem.

</comment><comment><USER11> "When running a startup or business, the goal is to create a better user experience and help advance technology.".

This. I love Apple commercials because they describe the good parts of their products, infomercial-style.

Pretty consistently, shitty products have shitty ads that try to slam their competitors and try to associate their brand with some sort of cheesy emotional stock footage, 1970's-bullshit-advertising-firm-style.

<comment><USER12> I don't understand this at all. Apple is one of the companies that invented the 'Us vs. Them' marketing scheme with their 1984 commercial, Mac vs. PC etc.

<comment><USER11> This is true. I was trying to think of a commercial that highlights product design and features and this popped into my head. I had forgotten about their Mac vs. PC ads.

<comment><USER13> I remember lots of people dancing etc. Now even Microsoft is doing it - <USER2> product is a prop in a Busby Berkely number. So who's showing product features? Maybe for Apple, the flashy case IS the feature?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The first comment is actually from the CEO of VSee. It's worth reading.

<comment><USER15> True. Reproduced below for convenience. <http://disq.us/8bqidj>

Dear Song, this is milton, CEO of VSee. I actually agree with you - we suck at marketing - and I am personally to blame for this. I did my PhD at Stanford on human factors of virtual team work via video. I never did any company before - and I have struggled a lot over the years learning how to do it - and to not disappoint my team (who works long hours). from my psychology background - almost the entire company is focused on making a great product - we have a lot of designers and great engineers and this is our singular focus (as you will see from using vsee).

For marketing - I am a complete dummy here - and I wish I know the secrets to do it well. I asked Anne, our writer, to write the vsee vs. competitor X articles since I get asked how is vsee different from X about 10 times a day. I was tired of repeating myself - and doing a bad job at it. So I asked Anne to write it down for our users. I was also pleasantly surprised that it is actually working for inbound marketing - we are now the top page for many of our competitors - they spent money on marketing - we ride their coattail :)

We actually love competition, why we are the ONLY company who lists all our competitors on our home page (see the bottom link). From my PhD days working on vsee by myself - I love competition since it pushes me to make a better product - and everybody wins.

One decision I do regret is not spending more time learning about marketing over the last few years. I spent quite a bit of time traveling and working in refugee camps - from Syria on the Iraq border to Africa to South East Asia. We got pulled into these projects since vsee requires less than half the bandwidth of Skype and has fast screen share - so refugees is now one of our biggest user segments. I have been to Africa 5 times and MidEast 6 times in the last few years - and when not going there - I spent most of my weekends working with developing countries from Egypt to Nepal to Gabon to use vsee for their telemedicine to virtual team work. If I didn't go to these refugee camps - I would have more time to learn about marketing - and vsee would be in a better shape. And I can always go work w/ refugees After vsee is successful.

Thanks for the thoughtful critique, with warmest regards,

Milton CEO VSee

<comment><USER16> @milton: it's a phony excuse for being "bad at marketing" (which you claim and then cite your excellent SEO results) and kind of shoehorned in here to CYA, but your work with refuges sounds awesome and commendable. It's a great use of your product and talking about that more on your blog would be fantastic to read.

<comment><USER17> @Boise, please believe the following is the sincere truth :)

1\. i am BAD at marketing. vsee does not have hundreds of millions of users. vsee uses managed peer-to-peer secure streaming to allow massive scalability but without the security downsides of skype. my goal is to create a tool that can impact millions of people. i have tried all sort of things to get marketing traction - and they have mostly failed - ie - we don't have millions of users yet.

2\. we have a lot of competitors - so I get asked all the time how is vsee different from X. We wrote those articles to help our customers decide. We actually try to be fair in the articles - why we always include why they shouldn't use vsee. We are also the ONLY company that includes a list of our competitors on our home page (see the bottom :). I know vsee is not ideal for all users - so they should be able to learn all the options.

3\. this marketing tactic is working a little (but not at the scale we would like). ie - we steal a lot of customers from tokbox. if you search 'opentok alternative' we are the first one :) if our goal is to compete w/ OpenTok - you may say we are great at marketing - but on the large scale - we are pretty bad since we don't have hundreds of millions of users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems really odd to conclude that their marketing tactics do not work just because they 'bash' their competition in a series of blog posts.

The theory also seems to disprove itself by the fact that the very posts in question are the most popular on the blog.

I agree that there are 'classier' way of marketing yourself then semi- duplicate link/SEO-bait posts but does it work? Absolutely.

</comment><comment><USER16> don't know anything about their product but tacky marketing tactics don't make me want to find out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Dear Everyone - this is milton, CEO of VSee. VSee is bad at marketing - <USER6> would be the first to agree with you! :) I would like to share what we have tried, and what we are doing.

First - we created vsee to change how people work. When I as a graduate student, I worked at Intel Research Lab every Fri - and the 101 drive back to Stanford Fri night was killing me - and I did that for 5 years :( I noticed that the hottest tech companies - Apple, Google, FB, etc - did not truly embrace remote work. The reason is that productivity drops by 50% when people are in remote offices. so our team set out to create a tool that allows people to work remotely w/o the productivity tax. We are spread across 9 cities - <USER4> our company policy is that even the local staff only comes to the office on Fridays (free lunch, fun, etc) - vsee is designed to let us work (thus the fast screen share, live annotation for design, pair programming, sales, etc).

Next - we do want to make money and have a lot of users :) Because our company is almost all designers and engineers - we struggled with marketing a lot. We tried getting on Tech Crunch, other press coverage, etc - and we have mostly failed. Our top users use vsee a lot - but I couldn't figure out a way to describe vsee where the press would care. People just assume this is another skype or webex copycat - while we are solving a different problem (we want to allow people to work, vs. making a remote presentation).

We also tried partnerships - it is slow and painful. contact me privately and I will share our war stories.

I attended a talk by Rand Fishkin - and I loved it. so 6 months ago we decided to focus on inbound marketing. we wrote a lot of vsee vs. X articles as a sales tool previously. so we posted them, and added SEO keywords. the result suggests this is a good marketing move :) we get a lot of customers from Tokbox, Skype, etc. if you search for competitor X alternative - vsee is now on 1st or 2nd page for most of the big guys in this space. We tried buying google ad words, but our space is too hot - we can't afford it. so riding on our competitors' coattail seems reasonable.

However, our goal is to get to hundreds of millions of users - and toward that marketing goal we have failed. Our challenge is that vsee is not a video conference tool, but a tool to let you work. we couldn't figure out how to describe this in a marketing way.

We did notice that our top users are telling their coworkers verbally - 50% of our web visitors download vsee and sign up (i was told this is insanely high). But vsee didn't have a viral loop - so the spreading factor was less than 1. so 2 months ago - we decided to focus on viral loop design. I attended <http://growthhackersconference.com> last Fri - and it was the best event ever!!! :)

Our marketing focus now (in terms of resources): 1\. viral loop growth hacking: 90% 2\. inbound marketing: 5% 3\. press outreach: 4% 4\. partnerships: 1%

hopefully millions of people will be able to use <http://vsee.com> for free soon!!! :)

ps: why do I travel to and work in refugee camps? to be brutally honest, I was not a save-the-world type. In school, I was probably the biggest nerd you would ever meet. I spent most of my time in libraries and writing code - research and hacking were my passions. since VSee requires less than half the bandwidth of Skype, and its fast screen share makes it a simple work tool - <USER5> have a lot of users in developing countries. As i learned about our users - <USER6> became part of their world - and I started traveling to refugee camps to work there. I have traveled to Syria on the Iraq border where Hillary Clinton used vsee, worked with Angelina Jolie to vsee w/ Chad/Darfur. After working in many countries in Africa, Mideast, Southeast Asia - now supporting our users there has become my passion. But I do struggle with how to spend my time - so that vsee the company is not hurt by my refugee activities.</comment>


Mining Bitcoins is a waste of electricity - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/04/mining-bitcoins-takes-power-but-is-it-an-environmental-disaster/

<comment><USER2> People need a whole article to realise this?</comment>


DTrace gets guernsey in new FreeBSD - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/DTrace-gets-guernsey-in-new-FreeBSD/0,130061733,339294007,00.htm?feed=rss <comment><USER2> This should give a nice boost in the already awesome job FreeBSD's developers have done profiling the kernel in the 7.x and 8 branches.

Note that DTrace on FreeBSD can only be used for kernel-space probing, for the time being. Userland probing is expected in a future release.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting news. I really liked FreeBSD in the past, but rather lost sight of it in the last few years, primarily because of the excellence of Debian and Ubuntu. This is my excuse to give it another go as a server OS. :)

<comment><USER4> IMHO FreeBSD is really starting to shine. I've been using it solidly since 5.x where is was stable but slow and I've deployed 7.0 many times and I quite frankly love it to death.

The BSD's don't have the fan boys that linux has but FreeBSD really is an excellent and highly organized unix variant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Possibly a stupid question, but what does "guernsey" mean in this context? Other than the island I've not encountered the term.

<comment><USER5> Ah, ok, seems to mean "Wins approval" <http://www.willyourememberme.com/australia/austslang.html>

<comment><USER6> In northeastern CT, it means a type of cow[1], which made the headline humorous.

Mildly funny story: my grandma once said at a family gathering, telling a story of somebody in the hospital, "then they wheeled him off on a guernsey", which everyone thought was pretty hilarious.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey_cattle></comment></comment></comment>


Firefox Tweaks – An attempt to make Firefox suck less - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dfkt/firefox-tweaks/blob/master/firefox-tweaks.txt <comment><USER3> Not a great attempt IMO.

The networking and UI things are a valiant effort. Mixing them with non- mainstream security concerns are a bad idea. You may feel that safe-browsing is tracking by the man, but advising newbies to turn it off is borderline irresponsible. Similar argument for ipv6 (wtf), error reporting (congrats: your bugs will never be fixed cause firefox doesn't know about them), and geolocation ("why doesn't google maps ever know where I am?").

If you apply these, some caveat emptor: when firefox upgrades it usually wont change these settings for you. So if firefox makes things awesome, you'll be left behind. You may want that, you may not. Personally, I'd advise against.

<comment><USER4> > caveat emptor: when firefox upgrades it usually wont change these settings > for you

It's not so bad. You can sort prefs by user-defined, they're in bold, and each one has a reset-to-default option.

Also you can do a whole browser reset which preserves only passwords/bookmarks. Instructions: [https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...](https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings)

And firefox profiles might be handy for this too (from the command line add _\--ProfileManager_ or _-P <profile name>_).

<comment><USER5> Yes it is. Everything you've described of my two brothers can't do.

<comment><USER6> Well considering they don't browse HN or GitHub it's hard to see what the problem is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Remove "(site) is now fullscreen" nag message and make it faster

For a list that want to make the browser more secure, why do they want to remove the only line of defense against sites using fullscreen mode for phishing?

> Disable PDF reader

PDF.js has fewer security vulnerabilities than desktop PDF readers.

> Disable 'safe browsing' aka. Google tracking/logging

This seems like a _really_ bad idea for most users

<comment><USER8> The only time I ever see the fullscreen message is when the screen has essentially already fullscreened itself in a case where I want it to. =/

<comment><USER9> The warning is a bit annoying, but without it attacks like this would be harder to spot: [http://feross.org/html5-fullscreen-api- attack/](http://feross.org/html5-fullscreen-api-attack/) (it's just a proof- of-concept, no malicious payload)

<comment><USER10> Who are all these people who apparently run their browser maximized? Web pages generally get _worse_ as the window gets wider. (Unless, of course, they control their own width, but that's its own obvious prompt to _stop wasting all your screen space_.)

<comment><USER11> Only with a rubbish, widescreen display are modern websites crap. Get a nice 4:3 or 5:4 display and everything looks good when maximised.

<comment><USER10> No, it would still have to be a small squarish display. Fixing the aspect ratio won't fix the problem that you have way more space than the website will take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Disabling IPv6?!

This is an... opinionated list. Wish there was more annotation around what those opinions were.

<comment><USER13> Don't know if it is still true. DNS lookup didn't work correctly when ipv6 was enabled.

<comment> TD-Linux W..what? I don't think this has been true for any Firefox version, ever. Certainly I'm using v6 right now. (Not on hn of course, it's v4 only)

<comment><USER14> It used to be issue - in your local network, you had IPv6 automatically with Vista and newer (the same for Linux distributions). So your browser resolved AAAA records, trued o open connection to the the host, after few seconds found out that it is going nowhere, resolved the A records, the site worked.

So it became popular to manually disable IPv6 to speed up the browsing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15>
        BLOATWARE

        Disable 'Reader Mode':

Why? I use this every day to pull the text out of frustratingly-formatted sites.

<comment><USER16> My guess is because of the Pocket integration.

<comment><USER15> Reader mode is a separate feature from the Pocket button.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ugh, it has "disable webgl" because it's a "debatable" security concern? And disable ipv6? I hope people know what these settings are for before they apply these.

<comment><USER18> Retitle "Project to make Firefox suck more"

<comment> vezzy-fnord No, this is definitely suckless: [http://suckless.org/philosophy](http://suckless.org/philosophy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The tweaks under appearance and bloatware are good, although I'd probably leave error reporting on (I'm on the nightly channel for a reason), as well as WebGL although it would be nice if it could be changed to "click-to-run" style launching. The rest of the tweaks seems fairly reasonable privacy-wise.

</comment><comment><USER20>
        browser.urlbar.trimURLs - <USER2>

Yay! This feature has annoyed me to no end.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why Reading mode is even considered "bloatware"?

<comment><USER22> Well it was added recently, during the same time as things like pocket and hello are being added. A lot of people will never use it, so it's fair for them to put it in the same bloatware category. I use it a lot on mobile, not so much on desktop. I didn't want to disable it.

I'm not the biggest fan of hello in firefox, but I've gotten some light mileage out of it, so I guess I can't be too upset. Pocket though just really shouldn't be in the browser.

<comment><USER15> Reader mode was added in 2012-2013. Pocket and Hello were introduced in 2015.

<comment><USER23> Really ? Did they just add the url icon then ? I never noticed any of it before this year.

<comment><USER24> Reader mode was present in the Mobile version for a long time, it's port to the desktop Firefox happened recently AFAIK.

<comment><USER23> Aight. Better late than never IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice. That's a useful guide for writing an add-on to manage all those settings, some of which are documented only in very obscure places. Whether or not you turn them on or off is your business, but they need a user interface.

<comment><USER6> TBH I don't care if there's a user interface; what I want is to be able to store my browser's config in git along with the rest of my config. Every other program I use regularly is configured through sane dotfiles; if I check them out on a fresh OS install it's all like I want, except Firefox. I have to go through this insane song and dance of hunting down all my extensions and remembering obscure about:config settings every time.

In fact, it's a bit cringeworthy that this whole list is presented as a thing you're supposed to manually enter while using the about:config search.

<comment><USER26> _a thing you 're supposed to manually enter_

Doesn't everybody know about user.js? Keep that updated and store that in git. If that file is present in the .../Profiles/<whatever>.default then Firefox automatically uses it. And Firefox doesn't rewrite it, as opposed to prefs.js.

It's still a hassle, but it's far easier than _manually_ entering things into about:config. Here are a few of the things currently in my user.js:

       user_pref("accessibility.blockautorefresh", true);
       user_pref("browser.preferences.inContent", false);
       user_pref("network.dns.disablePrefetch", true);
       user_pref("network.prefetch-next", false);
       user_pref("pdfjs.disabled", true);
       user_pref("plugins.hide_infobar_for_blocked_plugin", true);
       user_pref("plugins.notifyMissingFlash", false);
       user_pref("social.enabled", false);
       user_pref("social.remote-install.enabled", false);

I've got more in there but I'm too lazy to look all of them up to make sure they still apply to the current version of Firefox. The ones I pasted seemed relevant based on their name.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but you can't check the profile directory into git, and you can't know the path of the profile directory ahead of time to make a symlink either. The way they randomize the path makes it seem like they're going out of their way to make it automation-resistant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There is a massive bias for change aversion in this list. Basically anything that Firefox has added in the last couple of years he doesn't like. Not advised.

</comment><comment><USER28> Even thus the changes arent all great many of them are definitely in the "why isnt this default?" category for me.

For ex webrtc should def. prompt instead of leaking by default, full screen animation is slow as fuck, pocket is adware, loop and safe-browsing should be turnable-off in the main prefs, social is adware, yada yada.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there any good reason to disable IPv6? I can't take the list seriously, without a proper explanation.

</comment><comment><USER30> I agree that these are probably not good default settings, but just now I learned about pocket, hello, social, ...

Why are these not plugins in the first place, or manageable through the preferences dialog?

</comment><comment><USER31> Disregarding the majority of rants here, I think it's a great list for everyone to just cherry-pick from for their own needs. It ain't all or nothing.

<comment><USER32> Yes... it inspired me to make my own version that only has what I need: [https://github.com/j127/Better-Firefox](https://github.com/j127/Better- Firefox)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why are you disabling IPv6?! It's faster than IPv4.

<comment><USER34> Yep, 50% faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Any feedback on which of these apply to Firefox mobile?

</comment><comment><USER36> Step 1: Install Pale Moon. Step 2: Enjoy.

</comment><comment><USER37> Depends on your RAM and CPU.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to stock photos - <AUTHOR> Hey guys,
I'm struggling to find a way to stock all my pictures/videos in a nice way.
I bought a dropbox account and it's pretty nice, but it's super basic. Just some folders.
I tried Everpix and I found it pretty nice except it's too buggy and doesn't really let me organize pictures the way I want to. Also I can't sync back the pictures if I lose them on my hard drive.
I've never tried Flickr or Picasa but it seems those aren't really made for what I'm looking for.
Any products you guy have heard of that take care of that? <comment><USER2> I wish I knew. I have probably 15gb of stock photos/EPS/etc that I've used/collected through the years and it's a pain. I use Adobe Bridge to browse/search. I also organize the files into folders for easier viewing. I used to change the file names to be something that was useful - that's really the best way I've found - but, as my "collection" grew, I just sort of stopped b/c I acquired something like 2gb in one month (which was 200+ images). Too much work!

</comment><comment><USER3> You forgot to mention you os. Well I guess you use a Mac like most HN folks do, then I'm sorry idk a tool for you.

But if your OS is Linux I can recommend you using:

        Shotwell, DigiKam, Fotowall, F-Spot, showFoto

You can Tag, Categorize and Order pictures that way.

However I recommend you writing a shell-script that uses existing tools to filter the images based on EXIF Metadata or filename where applicable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using windows. And I'm looking for a cloud solution, so I can back up my pictures as well as organize them online.

<comment><USER3> Try before saying no.

They ALL offer connectivity to MOST Cloud Platforms, it's really crazy how much connectivity it's offering to external services.

Most Qt Appplications work on all Platoforms. Look for the mentioned Apps for Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> what do you mean by "organizing" your photos ? you mean just storing them ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Albums, grouping, events etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> would you pay for something like that ?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes!</comment></comment>


Opportunistic Security for HTTP - <AUTHOR> http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-encryption-latest.html

<comment><USER2> Why can't Google our Mozilla start their own CA? Free certs for everyone!

<comment><USER3> Because they would be sued by the huge companies that already run CAs.

<comment><USER4> Google can certainly afford to litigate, and it's unclear to me what they'd be sued over in any case.

Could you explain this in more detail?

<comment><USER3> Google: [vertical integration antitrust]. Bear in mind that the CAs are organized and some are themselves owned by gigantic companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence There needs to be better support for self-signed certificates, or at least a CA that is free and doesn't have strings attached (looking at you StartSSL with payment required to re-issue a cert).

I would love to have certificates for all of my domains, but it simply isn't worth it to me for the 40 - 50 hits a month I get on those properties to pay for a cert, or go through the hassle of StartSSL and worry about having to pay if the next Heartbleed happens.

<comment><USER5> That's in this spec:

"The server certificate, if one is proffered by the alternative service, is not necessarily checked for validity, expiration, issuance by a trusted certificate authority or matched against the name in the URI."

In other words, the certificate presented is merely used to secure the connection against a passive attacker.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Google+ Style "Send Feedback" Service? - <AUTHOR>

I wonder if there are any service that would integrate the feedback similar to that provided by google plus <comment><USER2> Checkout BugMuncher which was just recently launched. There were some posts about it on HN and it seemed well recieved. <http://bugmuncher.com>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the free plug :) I'll add to that by saying it's just been reviewed on The Next Web - [http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/07/21/bugmuncher-makes- googles...](http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/07/21/bugmuncher-makes-googles- feedback-tool-available-to-the-masses/)</comment></comment>


AI Creates Fake Obama Video - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ai-creates-fake-obama <comment><USER2> With recent advances in neural nets that can mimic a speakers voice and tone and with this advance who knows what fake news this will begin to create.</comment>


Chinese Jet Shows X-Ray Vision System Only Seen on US Jets - <AUTHOR> https://sputniknews.com/military/201902211072637408-chinese-jet-x-ray-us-jets/ <comment><USER2> Lets see some tariffs now.</comment>


Why FreeBSD? - <AUTHOR> http://www.aikchar.me/blog/why-freebsd.html <comment><USER2> _FreeBSD is now my preferred OS for_ learning _UNIX_.

Different community shapes work for different people: Arch for some, Ubuntu for me, FreeBSD for the author.</comment>


Caffeine Cranks Up Solar Cells - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/green-tech/solar/java-takes-the-jitters-out-of-solar-cells <comment><USER3> The big element missing from the headline: this isn't about improving existing commercial solar cells.

The caffeine improvement is specific to perovskite-based solar cells, rather than commercial-use silicon. Perovskite is expected to reach higher efficiencies than silicon at far lower production costs, but isn't viable because of rapid degradation and problems producing panels at scale. The good news, though, is that caffeine's improvements work on exactly those problems, raising defect-free crystal size and increasing panel longevity while in use. And it's an absolutely massive increase: the lifespan gain is more than an order of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER4> An old article, but apparently wine also helps them...

[https://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Take- Sunlig...](https://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Take-Sunlight-Add- Red-Wine-Get-More-Power-_21954)

Also superconductors...

[https://phys.org/news/2011-05-red-wine-clue- superconductive-...](https://phys.org/news/2011-05-red-wine-clue- superconductive-future.html)

<comment><USER5> >apparently wine also helps them

Just imaging what Buckfast would do!

<comment><USER6> Not even Buckfast will make solar work in Scotland.

<comment><USER7> Maybe Irn Bru will do it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just how was this discovered? "Hey, no food or drink in the lab. DARN IT - look what you did now!"

<comment><USER9> That's how we ended up with microwave ovens.

> In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was > accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer > from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that > microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a > chocolate bar he had in his pocket.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery)

<comment><USER10> This is only barely related but when we bought our house the (ancient) gas stove was malfunctioning. I looked up the brand (Modern Maid, I think) and was very surprised to learn they were a subsidiary of Raytheon. The thought of a gas appliance made by a weapons manufacturer was, a little unsettling. Replaced that thing pretty quickly.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand this. Were you afraid your stove was a weapon in disguise?

<comment><USER10> No, it was a joke. I only know Raytheon as a weapons / explosives company. Had no idea they had a consumer products arm at some point (unlike GE which at one point owned everything including film studios, which is fairly common knowledge.) Given that we were concerned we had a leaky gas appliance...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article compares caffeine vs. no-caffeine but I'd be interested to see how caffeine compares to other additives. For all we know H2O could do the same thing

<comment><USER13> FTA: > UCLA professor Yang Yang's lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Then, on a lark, Yang's graduate student Rui Wang suggested they try adding caffeine to the mix.

They tested different compounds for years before finding one that works - <USER2> don' think it would add much to the article to list every one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So an immediate increase in the efficiency and significantly improved longevity over time... doesn't this basically multiply the panels effectiveness as time goes on? That's incredible this gain could come from caffeine

<comment><USER15> I think improved longevity over time is relative to non-caffeinated solar cells, caffeinated solar cells last longer (they don't improve over time)

<comment><USER3> It looks like about a 13x longevity improvement over the tested timespan, which is absolutely nuts.

It's specific to perovskite solar cells, though, which aren't in commercial use because their lifespans are so short. They're one of the 'holy grail' high-efficiency technologies like magnesium batteries, so a 13x increase in lifespan is at once hugely important and not enough to make them realistic.

<comment><USER16> TFA doesn't show die-off, though. The graph just shows "after 1300 hours at 85C, still producing at 86% output". The slope doesn't imply a drop right after (but of course who knows).

<comment><USER3> Good point, thanks.

My assumption was that since the slope looks fairly flat, this was still a nonstarter for most applications - 86% after 2 months is good progress, but commercial standards are 80% after 20 years. Even so, it's a big step up from the material's past of failing outright after short spans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks cool, but I am afraid it could drive up coffee prices. That would be very sad.

<comment><USER18> I think it will drive down the price of synthetic caffeine.

<comment><USER17> Maybe, but that is only because synthetic caffeine is currently not very competitive with the free caffeine produced as a by-product of decaf manufacture. The price of existing naturally-derived caffeine (and possibly the coffee from which it is derived) could rise, which is not a pleasant thought.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Work on your own car/home or contract out? - <AUTHOR>

Replaced calipers/rotors on my wife's Passat, renovated a bathroom (led to updating some wiring in my old home).  Do hackers spend time on this stuff or spend their wealth on contractors? <comment><USER2> Would you tell your clients to make their own website to save money, or use you?

My personal feeling is that a specialist can always do the job better and faster than you can. Same as you can write code faster than they can. Always outsource unless you know what you are doing. Whilst you are learning on the job renovating your bathroom, you could be earning money.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to own a repair shop before getting into software. I still do all my own maintenance on my vehicles and anything that needs to be fixed around the house unless I don't have the capacity to do so. I enjoy doing this stuff, I have the tools already, and I would probably just piss away the time saved from hiring someone anyways.

</comment><comment><USER4> You're probably not going to be writing code during the time that you spend on auto and home care, but those are things that you can include others in without involving computers, such as non technical buddies that you've been looking to catch up with, or your significant other.

</comment><comment><USER5> What is more important to you: time or money? This will determine the choice that you make.

</comment><comment><USER6> I try to do everything myself because no reasonably priced mechanic or contractor cares more about my stuff than me.

</comment><comment><USER7> My sense is that if you're asking this question find someone else to handle it

</comment><comment><USER8> Making/fixing things, at least for me, has an element of catharsis. It feels nice to come home sometimes and put away the code and know I don't have to see any more until Monday (or whenever) and to have that relaxation and sense of accomplishment when something is _just right_ (a standard which can take a long time to find a contractor for anyway.)

Not that programming isn't nice. It's just... sometimes you don't want it then. Chocolate is nice too, but you don't want that all the time either.

Pretty rare for me to hire someone to do something. Unless it's plumbing or working on the car. Those are a bit messy.</comment>


How I Coaxed a Western Medicine Skeptic to Get a Biopsy - <AUTHOR> http://cancer.nautil.us/article/235/how-i-coaxed-a-western-medicine-skeptic-to-get-a-biopsy <comment><USER2> It takes the kindness of a Mormon (as in this article) to have the patience to bite your tongue when people you know and love drink the "natural" Kool-Aid. The only tactics I've had success with is sadly stopping to using the same scare tactics these "believers in natural healing" have used to con family/friends into wasting their money. This man is a saint. I don't know that I could do the same. I would quickly turn this I to a scene like Louis CK trying to force-save his chocolate-eating dogs' life with Hydrogen Peroxide</comment>


"Are You a Good Roommate?" Quiz from 1947 Men's Magazine - <AUTHOR> http://artofmanliness.com/2010/09/01/are-you-a-good-roommate-quiz-from-1947-mens-magazine/ Give this test to your roommate. <comment><AUTHOR> Funny to see how this quiz (1947) compares to roommates in 2012.</comment>


Startup Quote: Ben Horowitz, co-founder, Andreessen Horowitz - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/1547316039

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have never done the job, how do you know what to want?

\- Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz)

<http://startupquote.com/post/1547316039></comment>


Startup Tropes - <AUTHOR> http://trogger.com/discussions/47

<comment><AUTHOR> Want to reply? Use the invite code "sxsw"</comment>


Why you (probably) don't need Yarn - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@paulbreslin/why-you-probably-dont-need-yarn-5711ee40006f <comment><USER2> Being able to easily install packages from your offline cache is a really great feature because work doesn't always happen where / when you have a reliable internet connection.

I think Yarn is more fragmentation we don't need in the JS community, but this post actually makes a very strong case for using it.</comment>


Yes, You Could Forget Your Kid in the Car–I Did - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/2902520/child-forgotten-car-deaths/ <comment><USER2> oh my! did you? seriously?</comment>


From MailChimp to Sendy: how I saved 600$ a year - <AUTHOR> https://ma.ttias.be/mailchimp-sendy-saved-600-year/ <comment><USER2> I can't help but think the current subscriber load would still have a chance at fitting in Mailgun's free plan, or their 50c tire, which supports up to 500,000 emails a month.

On the other hand, controlling more of your architecture can definitely be a bonus.

[0] [https://www.mailgun.com/pricing](https://www.mailgun.com/pricing)

</comment><comment><USER3> You should start a company as a competition to MailChimp.</comment>


Video Review Of Haiku OS - <AUTHOR> http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2012/04/haiku-os-alpha-unboxing-review-on.html

<comment><USER2> Why do we need another OS?</comment>


A Note About Destructive Criticism: It Has Value  - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/116043947632177598920/posts/Vt9hSw4W4Jj

<comment><USER2> As one of the comments there says, I'd class his example of destructive criticism as constructive criticism, because it gives clear pointers on how to improve, and why they'd be improvements.</comment>


Distroless: Language focused docker images, minus the operating system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/distroless <comment><USER2> Minimal docker images feel like the Right Choice for deployment artifacts. For a project I worked on recently that minimal image was a standalone go binary, nothing else in the image at all. But I was not sure how minimal was possible for a python project I was working on. Having standard base images for different languages will be great.

<comment><USER3> Funnily enough, I found it rather paradoxical (if you are developing in- house).

You choose a base, and that one is shared across your projects, so the size doesn't matter much within reason. Say, you go for Debian, then you count 50MB download and 100MB space over all your containers / apps, thanks to sharing. So, your stuff goes on top, potentially unshared (say multiple applications).

Which comes to the next contradiction: You then go then for a go-binary, which weighs in by itself easily over a 100MB of binary code. Unshared. Any advantage of self-containment of a go-binary (being statically linked) becomes more a liability, as it is the functionality you gain from docker-images (self-containment), without the sharing of the layers.

If you are focusing on delivering it to some random people, which would maybe care about having to install 100MB on top of whatever you are delivering, then I could see your point, but then you could just go for distributing the go- binaries themselves.

<comment><USER4> Most Go binaries aren't over 100MB unless they have a bunch of data packed in them. 10-15MB seems more usual to me unless it's a particularly large project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The images still have some "weird" stuff in them like man pages because they use deb packages from debian for common packages. That's not core to the idea, though (and note that apt is _not_ included inside the container.)

</comment><comment><USER5> This project is still reliant on Debian to build all the packages. This project merely selects a set of packages that Debian has built.

<comment><AUTHOR> They mention that in the video. It's an easy way currently to get built packages.

Bazel has plans on their roadmap ([https://www.bazel.build/roadmap.html](https://www.bazel.build/roadmap.html)) to open-source rules for common packages ("Repository of BUILD files for third party OSS libraries open to the community") as a P2 for v1.0. This would presumably switch to using those when they're available.

Note that apt is not actually installed inside the container. Bazel just has a rule that knows how to unpack a deb.

<comment><USER5> It's not just "an easy way to get built packages". It makes this project trivially easy. No need for Bazel, you can do what this project does with a small shell script.

I'm a bit disappointed to see Google releasing a project which ultimately is nothing more than a helpful API around Debian, and claiming it's some exciting new thing "minus the operating system". The README doesn't credit Debian at all.

<comment><USER6> We should definitely credit Debian more in the readme, but note that the existing package manager rules are actually a bit decoupled from the distroless images themselves, via bazel.

We happen to build these base images with the Debian rules, but we plan to add support for more package managers soon.

You'll be able to start from our base image and install packages via yum/dnf/nix/whatever, or start from a different, more standard base image and install package via bazel.

Disclosure: I'm one of the TLs working on this project.

<comment><USER5> You don't find it a bit odd that a project built using distribution packages, with distribution package managers, with (eventually) a choice between which of several distributions to use, is called "Distroless"?

It's also pretty weird if you do start to "support" Nix, considering Nix already is capable of building the same kind of distroless Docker images on its own, in a much more rigorous way. That is, Nix tracks and builds the _entire_ dependency tree instead of just using existing binaries, and has a uniform system for expressing dependencies on components. This allows, for example, using multiple different languages in the same container, which it doesn't look like Distroless can do?

The way that this project would be genuinely interesting is if you were actually building the system from scratch with Bazel, rather than using existing black-box Debian binary packages. That would be like what Nix and Guix are already capable of, but it would be interesting to get some competition in that space from a different class of tool. Of course I don't know if Bazel is even capable of doing that and producing an image, maybe a large opaque "distroless" base runtime is the finest level of dependency resolution it's capable of, in this area?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Docker already recommends the tiny 5MB Alpine distro as the default for all containers, they hired Alpine's creator Natanael Copa[2]. Alpine is minimal but still has an awesome package manager[1], is maintained/proven/solid and provides a great UX as a container OS.

So what is my advantage of distroless vs Alpine besides the 5MB? Feels a bit like reinventing the wheel or I missed something.

[1] [https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages](https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages)

[2] [https://www.brianchristner.io/docker-is-moving-to-alpine- lin...](https://www.brianchristner.io/docker-is-moving-to-alpine-linux/)

<comment><USER8> Alpine is built around musl libc, which has numerous compatibility differences from a traditional glibc: [http://wiki.musl- libc.org/wiki/Functional_differences_from_g...](http://wiki.musl- libc.org/wiki/Functional_differences_from_glibc)

Some folks solve this by adding glibc to Alpine (IIUC this is what Envoy is building upon).

It has a package manager, but it is far from as comprehensive. The security database is still essentially an experiment with much less richness than Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat, ...

If what you want is a package manager, you probably want minideb from the Bitnami folks.

<comment><USER7> > numerous compatibility differences

I did never experienced any.

> It has a package, but it is far from comprehensive

Still better than the missing package manager of a distroless container (this was the comparison). However, I think it's quite good.

> The security database is still essentially an experiment with much less > richness than Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat, ...

Do you have some sources proving it's an experiment?

<comment><USER8> When I have reached out to ncopa to report issues in their feed he responded:

> the secdb has so far been an experiment, but seems like people are actually > using it, so I should set up some proper automated testing.

I doubt there is a better source :)

<comment><USER7> Thanks, do you have any link?

<comment><USER8> Nope, it was over email.

I can point you at the various fixes for things I've reported since this first became available, but given your skepticism I'm sure it would not help since he seems to exclusively use the changeset description: "[add] various fixes" with no attribution.

Here's the link for that last bit: [https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/alpine- secdb/log/](https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/alpine-secdb/log/)

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bazel is the worst part of google. It ruined tensorflow as well

<comment><USER10> Could not agree more. Let's install Java to build something that does not needs Java at all. They could have used Go, Python, hell even something like CMake.

<comment><USER11> It's not immediately useful, but you might find this interesting:

[https://github.com/google/skylark](https://github.com/google/skylark)

<comment><USER12> I may be missing something here, since I've not heard of Skylark (the Python variation itself not Google's Go-based interpreter for Skylark) but my brief searching suggests it's abandoned..?

<comment><USER11> Skylark is the name of the build language used by Bazel, Google's build system. The main version is written in Java, but isn't available separately from Bazel as far as I know. Definitely not abandoned; most teams at Google use it.

The Go version is new and I don't know what it's used for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Being a distroless, it's still a larger base image than many distro-based ones.

<comment><USER8> The video explains why. The goal isn't small, it's minimal.

By pursuing small at the expense of compatibility we got things like musl libc (which has tons of compat issues).

If all we wanted was small we could have started from musl libc and unpacked alpine packages the way we unpack debs.

<comment><USER13> There are more minimalistic (and smaller!) and more compatible images out there though. So, we got the goal of distroless, but its good execution is yet to be seen!</comment></comment></comment>


New Android eyewear butts heads with Google Glass - <AUTHOR> http://linuxgizmos.com/android-eyewear-device-offers-simpler-alternative-to-google-glass/

<comment><USER2> Glass is 100% hype. If it were released tomorrow it would flop hard. Any review you read of it is meh, it really does nothing different than your phone and isn't practical to use in social situations or life in general. If you want to see 'real' new technology that people would actually pay money for, check out the Oculus Rift.

I'm not saying the Rift is the same. I'm saying both Glass and the Rift have been hyped a lot. The difference is the Rift really is practical - you see a lot more 'real' people using the Rift and enjoying it vs. Glass.

<comment><USER3> I remember reading the same comments about the iPhone and iPad. Maybe Glass won't be anywhere near as successful, but I don't think it will be remembered as insignificant.

<comment><USER4> Those comments about the iPhone were correct: the original iPhone sucked at most of the things it set out to do even in comparison to many of the other devices at the time, and was really only very popular among hardcore fans of Apple. The iPhone 3G and then the iPhone 3GS (and possibly even more importantly, iPhoneOS 2.x and iOS 3.x) were really what started to make the device worthwhile. You can't judge a product based on some concept of the potential the product line might have based on judgements of the team and their plans: the comment you are responding to even says quite specifically "if it were released tomorrow"; if nothing else, we can assume Google also believes this, or they may have already released it ;P.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like what these guys are doing a lot more: [http://reconinstruments.com/](http://reconinstruments.com/)

It looks to be Android-based as well. The Snow version is even more impressive as it clips into a number of goggles, as opposed to require you purchase the googles from them. It looks like goggle manufactures have to explicitly support this add-on, but it's a great way to engage a user-base without having to compete with the established players.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll not front: that's a much uglier device than Glass, and Glass isn't exactly the height of fashion. Plus it lacks much of the functionality that Glass has. I believe a legitimate competitor to Glass will emerge at some point, but this is more like a cheap knock-off.

<comment><USER7> Cheap knock-offs drive acceptance, I wouldn't get one either but I'm happy to see it in the market.

<comment><USER8> No it doesn't. Premium products used by people you aspire to drive acceptance.

Cheap knock-offs are for the mass market.

<comment><USER9> Superficial celebrity-worshiping elitism drives acceptance!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The most interesting feature of Glass for me is having the camera which would leave my hands free. GlassUp doesn't have that. Plus it's ugly as f __*.

Let's see but I would predict this will be a huge flop.

<comment><USER11> For hands-free video recording, check out my product Epiphany Eyewear. [http://epiphanyeyewear.com](http://epiphanyeyewear.com)

We have better camera optics, longer recording time, and equal resolution, compared to Glass.

<comment><USER12> Jon—two questions.

1\. Why does your site disable my back button? 2\. When are you shipping? I'm interested.

<comment><USER11> 1\. Ah, that's a bug, thanks for noticing it.

2\. We're not announcing a firm date because manufacturing is hard, but it's sometime in the next several months.

Thanks for your interest, and please tell your friends B-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Judgement Day T2: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXilz8r4uU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXilz8r4uU)

</comment><comment><USER14> Glass seems to be well weighted. This doesn't. I wonder if it will lean to the right.

<comment><USER15> It will be balanced by putting the battery on the right, and regulating the weights. This prototype has no battery because it's still tied to a pc, it's just for testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Won't they be a target for litigation for using the name GlassUp?

<comment><USER15> Yes, the litigation is ongoing. We object that we can not call our Glass other than glass, because that's what it is (check the dictionary). Otherwise we want be able to call any other wearable "shoe", "glove", or whatever, just because someone uses that term first.

And however, if anyone can litigate us on that name it would be my friend Steve Mann, who has been using it for about twenty years: Glass generation 1, Glass generation 2, ... See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> seriously, they aren't starting with a prescription option? I know a bunch of the sort of people who would use this. I think one of them doesn't wear prescription glasses.</comment>


Mining New Relic Data for Developer Usage Data - <AUTHOR> http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/06/13/new-relic-stack-data/

<comment><USER2> New Relic has partnerships with at least a few big stack-specific Hosting companies (EG Acquia, which is a big Drupal host), which I think majorly skews some of these results. The Wordpress vs Drupal numbers and complete lack of windows servers for some groups are probably related to that.

Anyway it's cool to see them release this data, and in my experience New Relic is really a great product.

<comment><AUTHOR> [disclosure: i wrote the piece]

@showerst: there are unquestionably partnerships and other confounding variables which can act to skew the data, particularly when the sample size is smaller and/or the context is narrow.

But as you say, it was great to see them release this data, because the more companies that do this, the more complete our picture becomes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Grant family stock? - <AUTHOR> I've read a few successful startup founders say they wish they had granted their family some stock in the startup when they were just getting started. This seems to make sense for tax reasons. (Does it?)
How would you go about putting this on paper? I'm thinking a YC SAFE with a nominal cap sufficient to achieve the desired grant would be a pretty simple way to do it. Any other simple methods that wouldn't require paying a lawyer?
Edit: on second thought, I'm thinking a YC SAFE may be counterproductive in this case, because it won't provide for LT capital gains treatment in the (unlikely) event of an acquisition prior to conversion ... <comment><USER2> I would lean toward the side of not worrying about it at the moment. If you haven't raised money and/or you don't have paying customers, I'd focus on building the product and gaining traction first. It would be easy enough to figure out how to do this (if it's even a good idea) once you can pay a lawyer to draft up the appropriate documents.

Also, in general, the more people you have on your cap table early on creates more hassle as the company grows. Especially when it comes time to fundraise. This could cause potentially bad situations that you probably wouldn't foresee happening. Focus on building something successful and then it will be trivial to figure out once you're there.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a substantial worry that would distract from building a successful product ...

However, after thinking about it some more and realizing the tax benefits are murky at best, I agree it's probably not worth doing.</comment></comment>


Hit the High Notes Singing Game - <AUTHOR> https://vole.wtf/high-notes/ <comment><USER2> It needs a companion "Hit the Low Notes" game for those of us for whom the warm up note is at the top of our range. All I could get was the warm up note and one past that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very fun! I just started taking singing lessons and it's fascinating how deep the everyday act of making sounds with your mouth goes!

I was gifted with a somewhat deep voice so I could only see a couple of the singers. I wish there was an "I give up button" so I could see the rest.

<comment><USER4> If you get stuck you can whistle a little higher! I screeched my way up to C6 before I had to tap-out then whistled my up to C#7. Now to figure out a way of getting the final notes...

OK I gave up and cheated. The full list is here [0] (warning, spoilers!).

[0]: [https://pastebin.com/cv9KwayL](https://pastebin.com/cv9KwayL)

<comment><USER5> The microphone had trouble determining which octave my voice was in, interestingly. It would jump up and down an octave while I was holding a steady pitch.

Whistling it had no trouble and I made it up to a F#7.

<comment><USER6> It is because your voice has many frequencies at the same time.

The power spectrum of the harmonics could cause this issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately it didn't really work with my phone, but I like the idea!

</comment><comment><USER8> Tip: When your voice just won't cut it, whistle.</comment>


What Microsoft gets for $2 billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/what-microsoft-gets-for-2-billion/ <comment><USER3> Isn't it simple? Microsoft is sinking a huge pile of money into improve Bing, getting market share and making acquisitions (altough I guess these wouldn't be expensed directly against income).

Whether or not that's a wise strategy is another matter but there really is no mystery here.

<comment><USER4> They are not making acquisitions -- They acquired powerset over 2.5 years ago. More than 10 quarters ago. I'm not aware of any other acquisition since then, or anything in the online space besides that in the last, what, 4+ years?

Not that I disagree with that choice, acquisitions just because you have cash is just as stupid as no acquisitions. Better for them to determine a strategy first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Steve Ballmer says he is willing to invest 5%-10% of Microsoft's operating income over the next five years on search. Read more: [http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-steve- ballmer-h...](http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-steve-ballmer-has- gone-bonkers-2009-6#ixzz19NFIfq1Z) Specifically, assuming Microsoft's operating income stays constant (it will likely grow), it's $5.5-$11 billion.

endquote.

<comment><USER6> That was 18 months ago, which means there's 3.5 years left of this experiment. If it's not making a profit by then, Ballmer will probably pull the plug on the project. Unless someone pulls the plug on Ballmer first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Disclaimer: I do not speak for Microsoft, I am simply an employee - <USER2> opinions are mine and mine alone.

As someone working in the online services division I have to say that this analysis is extremely simplistic. Would they be saying the same thing about Facebook? It was in the red for many years before it became profitable. That was the plan.

<comment><USER8> The comparison to Facebook is not fair. Facebook is now profitable and Microsoft online services are not. Facebook was never in the red to the tune of 2B a year. Microsoft online services had a multiple year head start on Facebook.

<comment><USER9> Facebook doesn't do 60B a year in revenue

<comment><USER8> The comparison is between Facebook and Microsoft's online services, not all of Microsoft. Microsoft's online services didn't do 60B a year in revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is such small thinking.

As one of the commenters on the page did: <http://i.imgur.com/jHLOX.png>

It shows a much more likely scenario. Although maybe a bit over the top with the naming of the profit section as Google Kill Zone. Why can't big companies play nice. :)

<comment><USER11> do you project a turnaround right now? Looking at their current product base I would say "hell no!". Microsoft has nothing up and coming to convince me they will gain more search users. Each and every time they have unveiled a new search or online tool they have failed to capture the market. I do not see what will be different in the future once they come up with their next big idea. Bing is clearly not going to take over even with it being the default in internet explorer.

<comment><USER10> So what about the recent Facebook integration, still rolling out and the overall switch to social search, something Google can't get right no matter how many companies they buy.

What about the only very recent Yahoo integration, the Windows Phone integration and the constant improvement with maps beyond what Google have offered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not the absolute amount that matters most, especially for a company with Microsoft's size and cash flow.

Google's 2009 revenue is over 23 billion dollars and its operating income is over 8 billion. Considering the market size, two billion is not over the top. Not to mention online is a growth market and its strategic value is paramount. They're not a startup and they can invest really long-term to capture part of a market this significant.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a challenging problem that doesn't fit nicely into comments or short blog posts, but I'll try.

Search is a tremendously expensive game to try and win. It's economics are such that the more search share you have, the more money you earn per search. This is a critical point, so I'll spell it out a little further.

All search companies have more advertiser dollars than they have searches to spend them on, Google, Yahoo and Bing included. It's a supply constrained marketplace. The search ROI is so good for advertisers that they all want to spend more money at their current CPCs, but there aren't enough searches. This supply constraint leads to a problem for the smaller players. Search revenue is driven by having lots of advertisers compete in every auction. The larger the share, the more clicks each advertiser will get, and thus the more advertisers you attract. The smaller scale players don't drive enough clicks for some advertisers for it to be worth their time to set up and manage campaigns on them, while the larger scale players it is worth their while (the return they get exceeds the fixed cost of advertising in the marketplace). So with fewer advertisers, there are fewer bidders in the 2nd price auction, and the revenue per search is lower for the smaller scale players.

So how does this apply to Microsoft's online division? Well, if they want to catch Google, they're going to have to do it at a scale disadvantage, meaning that Google is going to make more off of the same searches than Microsoft will simply because they have a bigger marketplace. To beat that, Microsoft has to commit to spending lots of money to try and close that scale gap by buying share through distribution deals and spending a ton on technology to differentiate the search product while accepting that they don't monetize the searches they do have as well. If they can eventually build a product that will pull enough marketshare from Google to be roughly equal, then they should start to see better monetization.

The valid questions are: 1\. Is it possible to catch Google? Or are the market dynamics such that without a transformative difference in how the product works that Google will never be caught.

2\. If it is possible to catch Google, how much money will you have to spend, and what will your eventual ROI be when you get there.

Since Microsoft is a company that does 60B in revenue, it has to look at big businesses to drive a 10% growth in that revenue. Your hot little startup that does $100MM doesn't make a dent. Even Facebook only does 1-2B, depending on which report you believe. Search is a 10B going to 20B market, and if Microsoft can spend 5B over 5 years to get half of that market and earn 10B every year it's worth it.

Of course, the division has been horribly mismanaged for years. Qi Lu now runs it, and he's a different breed from most Microsoft execs. So time will tell if it's a good bet or not for Microsoft.

<comment><USER14> This analysis seems right to me. MSFT's annual cash flow from operations is in the $24 billion+ range. MSFT has $44 billion of cash in the bank. What is MSFT going to do with all that cash? Watch Google slowly eat its business? I'm surprised MSFT hasn't invested more in web services -- $2 billion seems small given its resources. Could it be a shortage of opportunities?

<comment><USER15> The $2b is what they spent IN EXCESS of the value they currently carry on the books for the business - they invested far more.

It's an abysmal performance by anyone's standard BUT they could probably sell that business for considerably more than the book value.

Even if the book value is fair and they lost $2b, they got the only viable (albeit still money-losing) alternative to Google, which was a strategic imperative if they want to link Office and Windows to the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And if they canned online - all the pundits will be saying:

 _"Google is beating Microsoft because Microsoft DOESNT EVEN HAVE A MAPPING PRODUCT OR SEARCH ENGINE.. they do not see the FUTURE IS ONLINE.. blah blah blah.. "_

This is Microsoft playing defense - and cheap relative to the profit machine they are defending

</comment><comment><USER17> The chart doesn't account for the operational value of Bing for Microsoft.

If you want to search MSDN, Google doesn't get to sell advertising or skew the search results to fit their business model or for that matter track what you're searching. Likewise, searches from MicroSoft IP addresses using Bing aren't tracked by Google either.

<comment><USER8> If Microsoft is really concerned about Google gaining a competitive advantage by looking at search query traffic from Microsoft IP addresses, it would be much less expensive for Microsoft to hide the traffic through proxies than it is to build their own search engine.

For a long time, Google's search results for MSDN were superior to Microsoft's. Perhaps that's changed with Bing. In any case, it seems to Google's advantage to provide the best search for MSDN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the greater damage is what Microsoft lost by being fixated on search for so long. They went to where the puck is not to where it was going. Because of that, they now face the same situation in mobile.

In other words they've become reactionary instead of being innovative.

</comment><comment><USER19> Many see online as a "loss-leader", consider it setting out your stall. MS makes plenty of cash from selling product, but you could argue without the online presence their sales would be diminished - so where they are on the balance is what really needs to be considered i.e. if they shut up shop online, what the cost to the OS/Office division would be now and in the future?

There is always the hope to tough it out in the hop of eventually gaining more market share as your competitors run out of steam and cash.

</comment><comment><USER20> February 2010..

<comment><USER21> Here's a link to their latest financials: [http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Fina...](http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Financials/FY10/Q4/SegmentRevenues.aspx)

The Online Services Division for 2010 had an operating loss of $2.355B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the infuriating logic goes something like this:

1\. If the shareholders held a gun to my head, can I make this profitable? Answer is probably yes but for some tiny profit.

2\. Do I see any other big prizes I can spend money on given I'm running a company with this skillset? Ans: Yes, but I still have lots left so what the heck.

Plus, if they return money to shareholders in dividends, its waaaay less fun.

</comment><comment><USER23> To make the claim that this is a bad thing, one must argue that Microsoft's stock would be worth more today if Microsoft had not been aggressive about search.

How a company shows gains and losses is also very subjective. The numbers could turn around and show strong profits around the time that bing reaches 45% market share (which will be soon).

<comment><USER24> 45%? Not even in Ballmer's wet dreams.

Bing's market share is only up 4% since launch [http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earn...](http://www.microsoft.com/investor/EarningsAndFinancials/Earnings/SegmentResults/OnlineServicesDivision/FY10/Q4/Performance.aspx)

and most of those gains must have come at the expense of Yahoo!

<comment><USER23> What is your projection for search market share in 5 years?

It's a business that takes lots of investment in scale. I think Google is one misstep away from Bing grabbing lots more share.

Google instant was a near-miss. Even on my new macbook wtih google chrome it's annoyingly jittery and hinders the user experience.

<comment><USER25> You can see how much they have moved in the past 12 months in this graph. Project this forward 5 years [flash warning]

[http://gs.statcounter.com/?PHPSESSID=nv37oj3f3ovned6v8hr2mlp...](http://gs.statcounter.com/?PHPSESSID=nv37oj3f3ovned6v8hr2mlp4v0#search_engine- ww-monthly-200911-201011)

<comment><USER24> so: not much. Or not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am a fan of Scott, but the last paragraph on Sinofsky is laughable. Online business and software are different beasts. With all his advocation of the dogmatic triad model, Sinofsky would for sure slow down online service division and sink the business even more.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sometime back I read MS _marketing_ budget is more than $2 billion.</comment>


Lily drone closes after raising $34M in Pre-orders - <AUTHOR> https://www.lily.camera/adventure-comes-end/ <comment><USER2> How can they give refunds if they ran out of money. Is it partial refunds? What %?

</comment><comment><USER3> And this is why you shouldn't pre-order anything that sounds too good to be true (much less back it on Kickstarter) unless they have, at the very least, a _fully functional_ prototype.

<comment><USER4> Especially be very skeptical of anything coming off too much polished shiny web sites with professional rendered 3D models and top notch graphics. A revolutionary quadcopter with high res camera doesn't need any of these to sell itself, but a well crafted scam usually does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> $34M in pre-orders still couldn't get it done. Rough!

Just out of curiosity, what OEM were you using?</comment>