Just Released Galaxy S9 Slower Than iPhone X/8 - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/mobile/2018/03/01/samsungs-new-galaxy-s9-scorched-by-old-iphones-in-speed-tests/ <comment><USER2> Even better, it loses to iPhone 7. Apple silicon is really far ahead right now.

<comment><USER3> And Apple software is really, really far behind. You can find videos going back many years on YouTube of previous generation midtier Android phones besting latest generation top of the line iPhones in day-to-day tasks like launching communication, browsing, and social apps. Somehow, Apple forgot to optimize for what people actually use their devices for.

Years ago: [https://youtu.be/hPhkPXVxISY](https://youtu.be/hPhkPXVxISY)

Months ago: [https://youtu.be/YH3uVWFoHe0](https://youtu.be/YH3uVWFoHe0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> However, this Galaxy S9+ vs iPhone X video review apparently tells a completely different story:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY4a0IPXotA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY4a0IPXotA)

While the S9+ seemingly handles everything and anything you throw at it the X has some obvious difficulties every now and then.

PS: I (still) have a (ancient) iPhone 4 right now. No fanboyism here.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is for the Exynos version which is slower than the USA/China version which uses Snapdragon 845.

</comment><comment><USER6> As a rule, performance of flagship Android phones lags iPhone by 2 years or so. Been that way as long as I can remember. Worse, floating point perf lags by about a factor of 3. I don't know why Qualcomm and Samsung keep doing this to themselves. It's not like they can't design decent chips. They just choose not to. The situation is further exacerbated by Android being a disorganized, sloppily put together pile of excrement.

<comment><USER5> That's your opinion.

I personally wouldn't touch an iphone with a ten-foot pole. I don't like Apple's business practices, and I don't like their hardware (no headphone socket/no SD card/smaller screen than I'd like).

Android isn't perfect, but I find it to be much more usable and logical in the way it works. I have done some Android programming so maybe I just understand it better than most, but my partner and my mother also seem to be able to use it fine. I certainly wouldn't describe it as a "sloppily put together pile of excrement". I am able to work around Android's deficiencies, something I can't do when locked in the Apple jail.

FWIW, when I think of a "sloppily put together pile of excrement", I think of itunes.

<comment><USER6> Try to use their camera2 api to see what I mean about sloppily put together. I'm with you on iTunes. Thankfully I haven't had to use it in years.

<comment><USER7> You mean the same camera2 API that's used by the Google Pixel 2 - the world's best smartphone camera?

<comment><USER6> Let me assure you, this was possible in spite of, not thanks to this API. Words fail to describe how horrible and unusable it is.

<comment><USER8> When looking at the API, you have to take into account limitations the designers had. Specifically, the API is part of the android layer that Google writes and OEM's can customize. It must, however, support any underlying camera HAL and associated hardware. The software for that is typically written by SoC vendors, and therefore the camera2 API needs to work with existing HAL layers without modification.

Camera API's also need to be performant. Specifically, converting the data from one form to another, compressing or decompressing it, adjusting colorspaces, rotating it, or copying it from one memory to another typically isn't possible to do as part of the abstraction.

Simple things like rotating a 240fps video to be the right way up in real-time really aren't doable, which means those details have to be passed on to the application if the camera hardware is mounted the other way up.

That means the API itself needs to get the application to handle those details if it wants to offer performance.

All those possible hardware details which the API can't hide for performance reasons lead to a huge and complex API. If you want a simple API, you're free to build one on top (and some exist), but beware - performance will be atrocious on some hardware.

<comment><USER6> Excuses, excuses. Meanwhile iOS API for the same thing requires 1/10th the amount of code, is easy to use, and has great documentation.

<comment><USER8> Except they can modify the hardware and HAL layers... Google cannot.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spaces destroy the planet - <AUTHOR> http://peterbraden.co.uk/article/space-infidel A response to the coding horror article. <comment><USER2> Funny, except it doesn't take "7kWh to move 1Gb" locally, or in an internal network. Or even on the internet!

7kWh costs about $1 and there is no way it costs that much to send a GB.

<comment><USER3> Even if it were correct, you'd have to be a very emotion-based thinker to worry about the effects of a lousy 409 cars on the planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let the record note that I am a tab fan. Hey, `Python` thinks it makes sense too...

</comment><comment><USER5> under what circumstance is a space block better than a configurable tab?

<comment><USER6> It doesn't matter which you choose. Trivial. Unless you choose to use a mix of both, and then you have a catastrophe. Once everyone agrees vehemently to avoid mixing them, it begs the question "Which to use then?" That this question _be answered_ is extremely significant, though which answer you get is meaningless. This is like the question, "What's the meaning of life?" Doesn't matter, as long as you can eventually put it aside.

Trouble is, every single person with access to a keyboard has absolute veto power over that, leaving us with a volatile problem.</comment></comment>


Show HN: 99designs worldwide community - <AUTHOR> http://dhotson.tumblr.com/post/50499503488/99designs-worldwide-community

<comment><AUTHOR> This is small side project I made to visualise the 99designs worldwide community.

It's using qgis to aggregate location data into a hex grid and I used MapBox's TileMill to design the maps.

If you're interested in doing this with your own data, MapBox made a tutorial for this kind of technique here: <http://www.mapbox.com/blog/binning- alternative-point-maps/>

Enjoy! :-)</comment>


Warsow 1.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.warsow.net/forum/thread/14994

<comment><USER2> To anyone else lured in by the "Ubuntu 12.04 (.deb)" install option - you need to add the playdeb repository to your sources list for the big "install this now" button to actually work.

Either install this package: [http://archive.getdeb.net/install_deb/playdeb_0.3-1~getdeb1_...](http://archive.getdeb.net/install_deb/playdeb_0.3-1~getdeb1_all.deb)

Or otherwise add the repository to your apt sources:

      $ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/playdeb.list
      deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu precise-getdeb games

Then do apt-get update (or equivalent) and the install link will work. As would just installing the warsow package, by that point.

I'm a little surprised they didn't mention that on the page.

</comment><comment><USER3> We play a lot of openarena at lunch (private server in the office). We're just trying this out now. First impressions are that the install and configuration steps are really smooth - something often omitted in these kind of projects. It's also fun. Might be that we switch our gaming from openarena to warsow...

<comment><USER4> We have been playing Warsow and Red Eclipse at lunchtime. We're looking forward to giving the 1.0 a shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a bit strange that most these projects seem to look and feel and sound almost exactly like quake 3, maybe with just some odd bits sticking out.

Maybe it's impossible to do coherent art direction in nebulous volunteer efforts. I don't believe the technology limits the style so much. Certainly that is not the case with something as basic as sounds.

<comment><USER6> The previous versions were more TRON-inspired graphically. I have not seen the project since a few years and was astonished by the changes in presentation.

What differs the most from the other Q3-likes (direct clones like OpenArena and more distant ones like Nexuiz) is the core of the game: while the others merely handle framerate-bound physics, bunny hopping, rocket- and strafe- jumping as gameplay side effects, this one is designed from the ground up to integrate such rule-abusive gameplay into its core. Jump features have been added (bounce-jump on walls), physics has been tweaked to provide less hackish strafe jump, configurations options abound to make the game tunable for enthusiasts (like coloring walls and floors instead of simply disabling textures and lightning). It seems this version goes even farther in configurability, with configurable coloring and extensively configurable/scriptable UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fantastic game, very happy for the team. I'm a CPMA fan personally and I always preferred Warsow over Quake Live as a replacement for CTF although QL duel is arguably better.

Anyone who hasn't played Warsow CTF 3v3 - 5v5 in a lan setting is missing out!

<comment><USER8> Hi, fellow CPM fan here.

Just in case your preference for Warsow is solely based on the lack of promode in QL, I'm really glad to tell you that there is promode now in QL, and there's been for a couple of months now. Granted, it's a premium feature and so on but there are some public promode servers (user-spawned), specially CA and CTF, and I've been having a lot of fun there.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the info I was not aware of that. I mostly stopped playing QL (all games really) when I went off to university though as I am laptop-bound! I might check it out next time I'm PC-adjacent though! Warsow CTF is actually tonnes of fun if you haven't tried it, I haven't played it in 2 years but I can only imagine it's even better now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Urban Terror 4.2 is going to be released today ;) <http://www.urbanterror.info>

</comment><comment><USER10> If you like that, you should also check out Nexuiz if you have not yet. It is my favorite of all the Open Source 3D shooters I have tried so far. It comes close to the very fast gameplay I liked so much in Quake3.

<http://www.alientrap.org/games/nexuiz>

<comment><USER11> Most of the developers have forked Nexuiz and created Xonotic. You can read about the split here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xonotic#Development>

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the game right now I don't think is that good. I was talking with the developer and he's planing on doing some big gameplay changes. I really hope it turns out good, that game has a lot of potential.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool!

Worth mentioning that id Software deserves a ton of credit for open sourcing their engines. Most open source 3D gaming stuff, like Warsow here, is based on their code.

<comment><USER14> That's true, but we've parted quite long from the original Q2 sources already - like our renderer is completely rewritten from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The 9 comments have opened my eyes, I honestly didn't think there was this many open, multi platform FPS games available.

Downloading and I'll give it a go this afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER16> Another open source game that released a 1.0 is Smokin' Guns (former Western Quake). Has plenty of spaghetti western references :-)

</comment><comment><USER17> I was actually trying to help the project with their new UI code about nine months ago, but then I moved to the US, had a lot of other stuff to take care of, and ended up abandoning the project. So happy for the development team though, keep it up guys!

</comment><comment><USER18> I played in the online league in .3 and .4. Glad to see they've made it to a 1.0 release. It was an awesome game.

</comment><comment><USER19> Very fun game. If anyone is familiar with Quake 3 or UT2004 style, you'll pick it up instantly.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've been playing warsow on and off for some time now and am extremely happy for the update.

</comment><comment><USER21> on a related note, there is at least one Warsow map that has made it into Quake Live (Focal Point).

<comment><USER22> Focal Point was created for Quake Live by this guy[1], who apparently has made the W:ET maps too, which are excellent.

Damn, I miss W:ET. Best multiplayer FPS I've ever played, hands down.

[1]: <http://www.simonoc.com/pages/design.htm>

<comment><USER14> It was actually made for Quake 3.

There's no relation to Warsow, except couple versions back he did give us permission to include it in Warsow, but we never got around retexturing and fitting it for Warsow due lack of resources, so it ended up in QL.

<comment><USER12> It would've sucked in Warsow imo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great news!

Personally I'm a bit more a fan of OpenArena[1], the community is a bit more fun-play focused than most other games (and you'll often get an answer when asking something ingame), but this game is great fun too. Good to hear there is progress, and also cool to see this on the HN homepage :)

[1] <http://openarena.ws>

<comment><USER24> What's the user base like in these games? I feel like every FOSS FPS I've ever played, besides UrbanTerror, has few to no players.

<comment><USER25> Ehhh the public user base perhaps isn't really so important in foss fps games because these games are most often used as LAN games when not everyone owns the same collection of games. Before tf2, Warsow was pretty much the only good fps LAN parties could use legally.

<comment><USER26> Xonotic and its predecessor Nexuiz are also 100% free and open source (git.xonotic.org). Even the media like models and sounds are also released with source links, which considerably different from what Warsow is doing.

Disclosure: I'm on the Xonotic core team :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Patching a Program Without Source Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.codexon.com/posts/patching-a-program-without-source-code-how-to-be-like-the-skype-hacker-for-newbies

<comment><USER2> Back in the day I worked for a large computer networking company that had (for the time) really high-speed drivers for their adapter cards. I worked on the adapter card drivers writing code in C and assembler.

One of our drivers emulated the Novell IPX/SPX API on the PC and it worked great. Except for one piece of software which would crash (it was a 3270 emulator). I was task with debugging this problem.

It turned out that an optimization in our code meant that if you sent a packet to yourself it would be never actually go into the network. We'd simply immediately deliver it. The real NE2000 driver would send the packet on the network and then receive it.

This piece of software was using a packet sent to itself as a test of network connectivity and because of the way in which the code was written the packet had to be received with a short delay. Basically, the software called Send_Packet and when that API returned it would clear a flag and then it would hang around and wait for the flag to change.

The flag would be changed inside the ESR (sort of interrupt service routine) registered by the software for receiving packets.

Trouble was our optimization meant that the ESR was called while Send_Packet was executing (i.e. before it returned) and hence the flag was always zero and the software died.

The solution was... to ship our network driver with special code that I wrote that would examine the code of all programs that registered ESR for packet receipt. By examining the ESR routine code I would determine whether this particular piece of software was running and patch it to get around this problem.

(Yes, you did read that right: we shipped a network driver that would patch host software live.)

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't it have been better to just send the packet to the network if said software was detected? After all, it was supposed to be a network test - hopefully at least you replaced it with another network test?

<comment><USER2> You might think so but it wasn't possible. This was because of the architecture of our drivers which consisted of a portion running in the host machine and a portion running in the adapter card itself on an on-board processor. When the packet was handed down from the host to the adapter for transmission it was the adapter that made the decision about whether to actually transmit it or not.

We could have added a flag for 'really transmit' this to the hand-off but we were obsessed with speed and memory utilization (this is back in the days of extended memory and all that fun) and so this relatively large change to our code to fix one piece of software was deemed unacceptable.

And yes we did fake the network test because the adapter would give us network status so the software ended up getting the right result.

<comment><USER3> What if somebody removed your software, but kept on using the software you patched?

<comment><USER4> It was patched in memory, not on the disk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should use Immunity Debugger, not OllyDbg; Immunity bought OllyDbg and hooked Python up to it, and now it's where all the action is at.

</comment><comment><USER6> At a previous employer (which will remain unnamed to protect the guilty), my team once discovered that we didn't have the source code for one of our production systems. Well, we had _a_ version of the source code, but it wouldn't build. The version running in production? It was built on the workstation of a since-departed teammate, and apparently never checked into source control.

Fortunately, the replacement for this system was already in development. Unfortunately, we had to patch the system on two occasions before its replacement was ready. Fortunately we were able to make both fixes by patching the binary - once to change a hard-coded encryption key that was linked in to the executable, and once to change a printf format string that was causing a critical bug in production.

The day we finally launched the replacement system and retired the un- buildable codebase was the biggest relief of my career. (Not least because only the team and our immediate manager were ever told about the problem.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I once tried to crack Microsoft Reader to extract ebooks from memory.

That was a failure, but one innovation, given that Reader checked the integrity of its code against patching... I simply ran Reader, waited 500 milliseconds, _then_ patched it in memory, after the code that checked!

<comment><USER8> While reversing WMDRM (the older Windows Media DRM), I was beating my head against the wall trying to get around some anti-debugging tricks they had riddled the codebase with. Eventually, I came up with a trick: insert infinite loops where you want to break.

Any time I wanted to break somewhere, I'd inject an infinite loop and watch for the CPU to redline. Then I'd break in, pause the execution, replace the loop with the original instructions, step through it, put the loop back in, and do whatever I wanted to do. This eventually became an automated "nondebugger", which I've since used in various hostile environments.

It's amazing the random things you'll come up with after a few days of way too little sleep and way too much caffeine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great article, it's rare that you see good introductory materials on binary patching (and other reversing-related subjects). If you're interested in learning more, I can't recommend this book enough: [http://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Secrets-Engineering-Eldad- Ei...](http://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Secrets-Engineering-Eldad- Eilam/dp/0764574817)

</comment><comment><USER9> Of course SoftICE does not have handy "save to executable" function (or at least it did not have it in the 90s when I last looked at it).

In that case you simply write down binary signatures surrounding your patch, open executable with any hex editor, find those signatures and patch. Then do binary diff, save it into CRK file and distribute.

PS. I wonder why this guy copied EDX into ECX instead of just doing PUSHF...

<comment><USER10> I forgot all about pushf. Anyway, the comments are working. I accidentally misconfigured my nginx to not log the antispam requests (and mistakenly not pass them to php either).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> another good one to go for - [http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2009/04/cracking- code-introduct...](http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2009/04/cracking-code- introduction-to-reverse.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> One more reason why we should not buy Closed source software.</comment>


The New Activism of Campus Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges <comment><USER2> The professor who says, "But then, at some point, it became really solipsistic" really gets to my issues with the rise of 'Social Justice' politics this decade. As a non-white guy, I understand and sometimes agree with claims like: "Your literary canon/history/point of view/etc. is rooted in Western hegemony." That's a claim that can be analyzed. It's another to just say: "You're [Various Identifier Here]-Splaining." What can someone really do with that? At that point the claim becomes pure politics, you have to just support the person making the claim or not.

(Not to get on a soapbox but the theatre prof joking "I'm thinking, Oh, God! I'm cast in one of my least favorite plays of all time, 'The Crucible,' by Arthur Miller!" gets to another issue I have. People don't seem understand that the tools they use to oppose others should be applied with proportionality and good judgement, if for no other reason than that in another circumstance those same tools can be used against them as well. In general I think when people are ensconced in any ideology, they begin to overlook Kant's reminder to "treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.")

<comment><USER3> Agreed. These days, Identity politics is _absolutely dominated_ by the idea that everything is just a point-of-view and ideas/arguments are inseparable from the identity of the person putting them forth.

I often say that a "scientific temper" is something we should all strive towards - the scientific method is possibly the greatest achievement of civilization - but there are an inexplicable number of people (who have never heard of it) that simply claim that enlightenment ideals are Eurocentric and that my subscription to those (as a non-white) would count as internalized oppression.

By some, nuance is denounced, absolutism is glamorous. Some others cannot be argued with; they grow an argument for every exception to their blanket theories until the entire ideology is a tangled mess of patchwork, at which point the application of this monster to any real-world situation becomes intractable and the evaluation of new observations strongly correlates with in/out-group membership.

It is incredibly sad to see this dynamic being played out by otherwise smart people that I respect.

That you and I have to explicitly advertise our non-white status when saying this for it to hold any water is a travesty, and demonstrates how bad the environment has become.

<comment><USER4> _that my subscription to those (as a non-white) would count as internalized oppression._

I always feel that such arguments are extremely offensive, as they're denying you agency. Instead of recognizing you as an individual person, they're painting you as a member of a victimized group.

Although I've more often seen it as feminists denouncing other women's life choices, I think the mechanism is similar.

<comment><USER3> More and more, I find the current generation of far-left and far-right almost indistinguishable in their methods.

IMO, claiming that someone suffers from "internalized opression" is simply this new left's version of the "cuck" slur.

<comment><USER5> There is a way to be left-leaning without buying into the identity politics of the popular left. The leftist perspective on power is as important as ever, but there's not always a political party to go to anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's great that people are exploring themselves and their world in college, but to be frank, I avoided those people along with the hard partiers, and everyone else who wasn't really at school to work and learn.

<comment><USER7> Back in the day (I'm talking way back) college was all about exploring the scientific method, history, literature, and economics. Today these kids aren't doing any of that and, thus, have too much free time on their hands. So they go out and protest about the fact that their school's Afrikan Heritage House lacked truly authentic food.

<comment><USER8> I was thinking something similar. WTF are these protestors majoring in? When I was in undergrad, I was taking 18+ credits per semester, and my ass was in the lab 50% of the time. And when it wasn't, it was in the library or cramming for the next exam, or doing the piles of homework that you were never able to finish (by design, so you learned to prioritize). Then in Junior and Senior years it was labs, career fairs, mock interviews, internships, more labs, resume writing, homework, more labs...

Who the hell has time to go out there protesting every little thing that bothers them? Don't they have classwork to do?

<comment><USER9> In some cases - like Mattress Girl - these are class projects so they may get credit for going out and protesting, writing letters, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Remember how Occupy America didn't have an easily articulated set of politics? It was mostly an expression of anger at the current state of things? I think this is something similar, an acknowledgement that things are fucked up but no knowledge of where to go from that statement.

That seems really similar to this. I sympathize with what I'm reading here. Trigger warnings, for instance, seem like a good idea: we do the same thing for our movies (Deadpool is rated R, maybe your kids will have a Bad Time) and our food (has tons of carbs! lots of processed sugar!). And I think there's value in giving people the choice in what adversity they face day-to-day if they're already struggling (people with suicidal ideation don't need a lot of exposure to more suicidal ideation).

OTOH, I _really_ agree with what Wendy Hyman from the article says. When you bend that far backwards you end up on the far right, circumscribing what people can think or say because you think you know better. For instance, outrage/call-out culture has made it a crime to be _called_ a racist, so now everyone doesn't want to talk about race for fear of being _called_ a racist. But if we can't talk meaningfully about race as an issue then it won't ever be untangled. It's okay to be angry about this stuff but using that as a foundation to halt all discussions forever just guarantees that the problem won't go away.

My mom is a Chicano activist and she's always warned about what she calls the "más que tus": people who used their identities and politics as cards in a game of one-upmanship rather than as ways of understanding and ultimately changing the status quo. I'm worried that we're feeding that now in our search for a progressive means forward.

</comment><comment><USER11>
      Hyman started college in the eighties. Her generation, she said,
      protested against Tipper Gore for wanting to put warning labels on
      records. "My students want warning labels on class content, and I
      feel-I don't even know how to articulate it," she said. "Part of me
      feels that my leftist students are doing the right wing's job for
      it."

The current generation entering college in the US has grown up in a time of authoritarianism-as-the-norm. Parents that hover too close. Schools with zero tolerance policies. A nation that goes to war against people who they shouldn't, when they should be pursuing criminal investigations and charges. Torture as the norm. Surveillance as the norm.

It's not terribly surprising, then, that the current generation of leftists don't see liberal democracy as a solution. Rather, they expect a continuation of what they've grown up with, but applied to their particular ideological preferences.

<comment><USER9> The problem with this reasoning is that Tipper Gore is _not_ right wing.

<comment><USER11> I take the professor's viewpoint on right and left wing to be (a product of its times) more a contrast between paternalistic authoritarianism under claimed democratic ideals, and liberal (as in freedom, particular personal liberties) democracy.

Beyond that, right and left have no meaning anymore so it's best to read statements regarding them in the context they were made. Thus why I switched the language to refer to authoritarianism and liberal democracy in my comment.

Right and left, if they have any meaning, represent only a single dimension of a very complex space. Right can mean: fascism, anarcho-capitalism, libertarian, Republican (confused mix of various ideologies), religious authoritarianism (under an ostensible democracy or not), generally conservatism. Left can mean: libertarian, anarchist, socialist (various forms, including anarchism), communism, Democrat (confused mix of various ideologies), various green movements, etc.

It's far better to break out what we're actually wanting to discuss. Tipper Gore's motion, from the professor's perspective, was a _right wing_ motion. Even if she is not right wing in general. Warning labels on records was seen as part of a paternalistic authoritarian attitude, that it happened to be coming from a left wing person did not make it a left wing idea. It really appealed to more conservative individuals.

It is bizarre, I agree with the professor, that modern college students might actually be in _favor_ of such governmental mandates. It's not the warning label on records, or trigger warnings before a class, that are a problem. It's the _mandate from on high_. It's authoritarianism, it removes agency from individuals (producers and consumers), it's potentially anti-free speech (certain labels will, while being on good products or good lectures, turn many people away, so the material itself is avoided because the market is left barren of consumers).

Whether intended or not, that last part is the really frightening part, to me. Once we mandate ratings and warnings, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for people to even _discuss_ difficult or challenging topics. It breaks the first amendment without actually having to do anything, society will censor itself. Individual speech, the press, etc.

<comment><USER9> Yes and that's the best way to censor someone... _let them do it themselves_.

There's no one to blame. There's no law to repeal. There's no argument to have. In fact, if you can make the punishment big enough, people won't even try to argue it. So there's no way to correct the situation.

It's brilliant. And scary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> SJWs have done more to set the race discussion back in this country than anything else in recent history. Identity politics is ruining this country.

</comment><comment><USER13> David Sacks and Peter Thiel wrote an excellent book "The Diversity Myth". They report on how corrosive impact have certain ideologies on higher education and academic freedom. I recommend to read it just to get a boarder view into the problem no matter on what side you are now.

</comment><comment><USER14> Note to self: Avoid contact with Oberlin grads at all costs.

</comment><comment><USER15> So called "progressive" campuses have become mini Orwellian dystopias because of demented leftist ideology run amok.

<comment><USER16> North-American campuses. And maybe in some places of Northern Europe as well. This is not a worldwide thing.

<comment><USER17> As far as I know, the new concepts like trigger warnings and safe spaces have so far only spread to UK universities, not other European countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "You include Black and other students of color in the institution and mark > them with the words 'equity, inclusion and diversity,' " it said, "when in > fact this institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white > supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy."

Black is written with capital b in the middle of sentence like some title, while white is not. Nice to see that one race is finally being recognized as superior over the other. New "Aryan" race. Can't see anything wrong neither with it, nor all the other very meaningful and truthful terms told by this intelligent man.

</comment><comment><USER19> New activisim? Last time I checked, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth with his activism against the prevailing politics, was tried and sentenced to death. So, um, new?

Granted I don't think this particular strain of activism has such high stakes, but come on, impressionable youth-becoming-adults is a really lucrative demographic for "buy in" to lots of different ideologies (see also: "extremism" in the name of one cause or another). Those flames tend to burn out rather on the quick side, personal experience as my reference point.

<comment><USER20> In the Socrates analogy, the "new activists" are playing the part of Meletus, not Socrates.</comment></comment>


A collaborative shopping list built on Dat - <AUTHOR> https://blog.datproject.org/2018/05/14/dat-shopping-list/ <comment><USER2> I made a "Shopping List Party!!!" shopping list. If you post or send me your local key, I'll authorize you as a writer.

I'm trying to see how many writers it can handle. Theoretically, there's no limit.

[https://dat-shopping-list.glitch.me/doc/2d2641b9cab4d2bb0ea3...](https://dat- shopping- list.glitch.me/doc/2d2641b9cab4d2bb0ea359c0ca017114002f0d339d7753babc3dea443450f294)

<comment><AUTHOR> Super cool! Here's my local key!

bcfaf7738215b4878b05ea51d9f31788838bbe4c8079a885d328b448d22881cd

<comment><USER2> Authorized!

You can authorize other people and devices now too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Thanks tbv for submitting it. I can answer any questions!</comment>


Cleverstack – a modular way to create Angular and Node web apps - <AUTHOR> http://cleverstack.io/

<comment><USER2> It's really annoying that the showcase video is only 360p. It's too small on the website, and if I go fullscreen I can count the pixels..</comment>


Linux process states - <AUTHOR> https://idea.popcount.org/2012-12-11-linux-process-states/ <comment><USER2> > _When you press CTRL+z, under the hood kernel terminal driver sends a > SIGSTOP signal to foreground processes_

No it doesn't. It sends SIGTSTP, which has the same default handler as SIGSTOP, but unlike SIGSTOP, the process itself can change the signal handler for SIGTSTP, potentially to do whatever it likes, including nothing at all.

<comment><USER3> If we're going down the rabbit hole of pedantry, you could also say CTRL+Z doesn't send SIGTSTP, it's just a character sent to your shell. The shell will often send a SIGTSTP, but it can do whatever it likes, including nothing at all.

That said, custom behavior for SIGTSTP is about as common as a shell environment that doesn't send SIGTSTP on ctrlz.

<comment><USER4> Well, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole...

The shell only gets CTRL+Z when it is in the foreground.

The tty driver, which contains a copy of the forground process group id, sees the CTRL+Z, and rather than buffering it to pass to the foreground process, interprets it to send a SIGTSP to the process group that is in the foreground. A well behaving program will either handle the SIGTSTP then send itself a SIGSTOP or just act as if SIGSTOP has been sent. Then a SIGCHLD will be sent to the parent process. (In this case the shell) which can then set another process group or process, including itself, to the foreground process.

Some of the details may vary depending on the terminal line discipline being used... but the important part here is:

The shell isn't actually getting the CTRL+Z, its handled by the tty/pty pair that is in charge of the input at the moment.

Fascinating page about all this here: [http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php](http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/index.php)

<comment><USER5> something something keyboard sends electrons across a wire something something

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe a little bit OT, In z/OS, you can see if a process has been put to suspended state because some other process is eating cpu and it keeps historical data about it. Is there a way to achive same thing for Linux? I am reading brendangregg's performance book, however I could not see anything related to this so far.

<comment><USER7> htop shows a T in the state column when the process is suspended or Traced

<comment><USER2> The "T" stands for "sTopped".</comment></comment></comment>


Contextual Advertising from Social Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.victusmedia.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Very early (learning web programming very slowly) execution of a grab from social media, a call to Zemanta's API, and passing it to a contextual search tool (check out the google adsense button)

Below are two imbedded iframes, one for <http://frankensearch.appspot.com> which is cool because its faster than normal php running on the gae (jvm/quercus) and

another for <http://victusmedia.appspot.com> which is lift/scala on the gae and will hopefully do something cool</comment>


Ask HN: What is your development setup? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering what hardware fellow Hackers are using to write software. Laptop/desktop/monitors/etc. <comment><USER2> Image: <http://bit.ly/uszUar>

2010 15" Macbook Pro: 2.66GHz Core i7 Processor, Hi-Res Anti-Glare Screen, 8GB Ram, 512GB SSD

30" Apple Cinemas Display

Wireless Bluetooth Mac Keyboard

Logitech M705 Mouse

Razer Vespula Mouse Pad

Spare cheap Logitech Cord Mouse

Apple Trackpad

Logitech Z-2300 Speakers

10 USB Pluggable Hub

Samson C03U Microphone

</comment><comment><USER3> 11" macbook air, usually looking at 3 tiled xterms under ratpoison on desktop 1, firefox in desktop 2

standup desk - <http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/5488994391/> (i've since gotten rid of the cinema display)

<comment><USER4> what are you using for your network monitor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> \- Standing station (technically sit-stand but I never sit). - Imprint Runner floor mat \- Macbook Pro 8GB, 2.5GHz Core i7, SSD \- 25inch Asus Monitor \- Das Keyboard Ultimate (recently switch to silent after complaints from coworkers) \- Logitech G5 Gaming Mouse (a good mouse is a weighted mouse) \- Reasonably crappy Sennheiser headphones \- Vim and iTerm in full screen, occasionally switch to X/XMonad+urxvt when I start missing proper window managers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Bigass Macbook Pro with 27" monitor. Kinesis keyboard, J. Random large mouse (I have huge hands). Software, primarily Emacs, some Xcode.

<comment><USER5> I recognized your buildout and thought "huh, looks like JFB... oh it is JFB."

<comment><USER6> Creature of habit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> i switched from this: <http://imgur.com/QBQNt.jpg> to this: <http://imgur.com/No4os.jpg> and to this: <http://imgur.com/JVqRa.jpg> and now i am basically using the macbook pro

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity: why did you made the switch from a bigger monitor to the smaller display of the macbook?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the risk of looking the odd one out (no Mac here!), I use a dusty Dell tower (8GB RAM, 3x24" screen) and my 13" HP laptop, though I've been working almost exclusively off the laptop for the past few weeks - with a dirt cheap TeckNet wireless mouse that is by far the most comfortable mouse I've ever used.

</comment><comment><USER10> A T400 Thinkpad laptop (closed) running XP (!) and a couple of decent 24" monitors and a decent chair.

My person dev setup is a 17" macbookpro and a nice 24" monitor.

I'm also a huge fan of the Logitech cordless mice with the tiny USB "nub" transmitter and scroll wheels that spin freely.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> MacBook Pro 13" 2009 C2D 2.66 4GB

Dell 24"

Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0

</comment><comment><USER11> 2009 Mac Mini w/8GB RAM with dual 22" LCD's with a Synergy-connected 14.3" Ubuntu 10.10 laptop.

PyCharm for Django development, vim and PhpStorm for PHP, a little Xcode as I learn iOS programming.

</comment><comment><USER12> Compqrap laptop, linux browser, terminal/shell/ssh. Work and browse on desktop 1, minimal monitoring on desktop 2.

</comment><comment><USER13> Macbook Pro 13' 2011, Acer 24" Monitor

</comment><comment><USER14> i7 3.4ghz, 16GB DDR3 Hackintosh with a 23inch IPS Dell.</comment>


Tell HN: took full slashdot effect to my 4$/mo server no problems - <AUTHOR>

I am using cheap shared no traffic limits web server and I got a link through to slashdot, which was quite an exciting thing to happen. I got 20k pageviews in a day, and 15k unique visitors. The web server worked just fine with no evident lags - or complaints from the hosting company. So it can be cheap, and scalable. Here's the slashdot article: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/16/192211 <comment><USER2> Not to rain on your parade, but developers.slashdot is not the "full" slashdot effect. The full slashdot effect (from personal experience getting [http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a- good...](http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good- programmer) slashdotted) happens when you're on the front page of slashdot, and results in about 100-150k visitors from slashdot itself, accompanied by another 20-50k visitors from other sites that pick up the story. If you get front-page-slashdotted, you'll probably also get dugg and redditted at the same time.

For the record, danieltenner.com has had 50k visitors in a day from just reddit + HN...

The problem also usually comes up when comments start to add up (another reason why disqus rocks). [http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to- recognise-a-good...](http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a- good-programmer) had a couple of hundred comments within a day, and since Wordpress (it was on WP at the time) didn't cache them, the page load got excruciating.

That's not a problem for <http://danieltenner.com> anymore, since comments are now served by disqus, and the pages themselves are static html. I suspect I could take several "full" slashdottings at the same time now and still stand. Nginx is pretty good at serving static files.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article was in the slashdot frontpage. It got only ~80 comments so maybe it just wasn't so popular. I am still getting hits from there and all round from the sites that picked it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> /. is not what it used to be. I have contributed more to HN in the last month than I have to slashdot in the last 4 years.

<comment><USER4> Slashdot is what it always was. They have maintained their identity in spite of all the new trends, and they will continue to maintain their audience. Digg, Reddit, HN.News are different from Slashdot.

<comment><USER5> at least according to quantcast, their traffic numbers have been steadily going down: <http://www.quantcast.com/slashdot.org#traffic>

<comment><USER6> That begs with my analysis. MyHosting.com hosted my blog when it got posted to reddit and /. back in Aug. 2005, and I got something like 40,000 hits the first day, with over 18+K uniques, last time I checked.

Then again, how much traffic I really received I'll never know. If you're doing more than 50 connections/sec, they shut down your account so their other clients "don't suffer".

I promptly moved. And I don't recommend them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shared hosting isn't as bad as people make it out to be — very few people use many resources, so your site could have had a massive share of a 8-core box or something.

Still don't like it though, but my main requirement is root access. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Slashdot traffic isn't quite what it used to be. That said, it's cool that your shared hosting service was able to keep your WP powered blog up. Wordpress can be notoriously resource heavy.

Give your hosting company a heads up that you got slashdotted and they were more than capable of handling it and send them your thanks. They should appreciate it! :)

</comment><comment><USER9> That is weird. A few months back, I got suspended from my shared hosting account after upgrading to Wordpress 2.7X and I was getting only around 600 unique visits a day... The hosts says I was already using more than 90% of their resources...

</comment><comment><USER10> To be quite honest, 20k pageviews is no more than any server worth while should be able to handle. That's less than a pageview per second. Even peak times of 10 or 50 times that should not pose any problems...

<comment><USER11> Yes and I am sure they would come in nice a regularly like that :-)

The top story on slashdot is there for about a hour so I would expect that they would come in as big spike at the start and then drop off.

<comment><USER12> If you would have hit the frontpage regurarly then they will come regurarly...otherwise the number will fall. It's like a commercial: you need to push it more than once to have an effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can you provide some more details? What kind of caching do you use? Some in the cms or on the server? Do you know if your hosting provider is using squid?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am using stock Wordpress 2.7.1 (2.7.0 at the time of slashdot effect). I have not enabled any caching plugins at Wordpress. All the pages are generated with php, so I suspect it is impossible to effectively use squid? Here's the website itself: <http://www.cybertechnews.org>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I got 20k unique visitors from stumbleupon in less than 24 hours on an equally cheap host (running wp, no caching, image-heavy page) with no problems.

Shame they totally screwed up a few months down the line and I was forced to move host.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is your host the same one running those $4.84 ads on your site?

In any case, details on how you did it would be most interesting. What kind of changes(if any) did you make to your "hot" page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can actually see "powered by" link at the bottom of the page too. If you go to about page, you can find a coupon code to get even lower price (and I will get a lower affiliate slice). I didn't do any changes to the page, I just thought that it was a good story and I submitted it to slashdot. They have rejected dozens of my submissions so I didn't expect anything...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Out of curiosity how much MB/GB bandwidth did this total too even though your host doesn't limit you?

<comment><AUTHOR> The first slashdot day was 2.5 Gigabytes and the second 2Gigabytes of traffic. Then the traffic gradually slowed down, but ended up at double from the previous.

<comment><USER16> wow, It's surprising how small that actually is in reality</comment></comment></comment>


Who's working on IT plumbing? - <AUTHOR>

I work in IT.  The company I work for makes things and sells them to people, so my job isn't about writing complex software, my job is about making it easier to make things and sell them.  For the record I work with a great group of people and really like this job. And because I'm not new to this I've seen the same problems over and over.  A simple example is that customer lists always have junk data in them.  I've never seen a list of more than 10K names that I couldn't find problems in with some basic SQL queries.  Given that this happens everywhere who's blogging about the solutions?  Things like I want a database that has a type called "FirstName" and when I do a query like:
select FirstName from Customers where FirstName like 'Alex';
I want to see "Alex", "Alexander" and "Alejandro" in the results list.  Now for this specific problem I realize there are many interesting answers outside the database.  I goofed off with python difflib one Friday afternoon and read up on Levenshtein distance and made a crude audit tool.  But who out there is actually solving these problems or at least writing about them in new and interesting ways?  Thanks. <comment><USER2> About your query: Oracle has the "soundex" function but it won't return exactly that.

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

The solutions we have in place here in Uruguay are far more simple: a nationwide ID (issued by DNIC <http://www.minterior.gub.uy/webs/dnic/index.htm>) and the local Equifax branch both have unique data on a customer (I used to work for said Equifax branch).

No idea about a blog, sadly.</comment>


Hackers used Amazon's cloud to steal LinkedIn user data - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-suing-to-get-hacker-identities-2014-1

<comment><USER2> I think it's a bit ridiculous that linkedin claims ownership over people's resumes, make it accessible to anyone who has an account, and then try to hold those that have simply automated the manual copying and pasting.

A business that depends on the copyrighting personal data that people hand over without reading the fine print on the Internet where any data is volatile and can be accessed and spread doesn't seem to be a sustainable one.

It is the case of software piracy all over again in an area that most people wouldn't suspect what is happening, corporations owning data about you and selling it to those that fork over money for it without much benefit to you, the user.</comment>


Migrate from Teradata to Snowflake / Google Bigquery Using Roboquery - <AUTHOR> https://roboquery.com <comment><AUTHOR> The tool will convert the Table an view DDLs, SQL Queries / SQL Reports from One data warehouse platform to another</comment>


Lego Mindstorms EV3: The Better, Faster, Stronger Generation Of Robotics - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/06/lego-mindstorms-ev3-the-better-faster-stronger-generation-of-robotic-programming/

<comment><USER2> Mindstorms is pretty cool...but the price puts it out of reach of any but the well-heeled.

I run an after school tech program for kids in grades 5 - 8 where we've worked with Scratch quite a bit, and did one session on robotics using the Pololu 3pi line-tracing/maze solving robots and the Parallax Mini-Sumo bots. These robots run $100 - $150 each as opposed to the Mindstorms $250+ (now $350) price point.

There is a huge untapped market for a programmable robot at the $50 - $100 price point.

<comment><USER3> >>> Mindstorms is pretty cool...but the price puts it out of reach of any but the well-heeled.

I run an after school tech program for kids in grades 5 - 8 where we've worked with Scratch quite a bit, and did one session on robotics using the Pololu 3pi line-tracing/maze solving robots and the Parallax Mini-Sumo bots. These robots run $100 - $150 each as opposed to the Mindstorms $250+ (now $350) price point. <<<

I have tested the Parallax Sumo bots and Mindstorms and I'm firmly of the opinion that the Mindstorms set represents better value.

The thing is that at the end of the day the Parallax Sumo bots are one trick ponies and have a fixed chassis and configuration around which you really can't extend without some effort. Even if you do put in the effort, then your design is constrained by the type of chassis the machine came with. For example, you can't easily convert the sumo bot into a hexapedal or bipedal walker. The value proposition for these machines rests solely on programming them in beautiful ways and it really isn't possible for a child to extend the machine itself. Assemble it yes, but it extend it? Not yet.

On the other hand with the Mindstorms set you have these precision milled parts that can be combined in endless ways by anyone to create anything from walkers to holonomic drives. There's also the benefit of the entire Lego range, you can easily mix and match all of these parts and combine them in countless ways with one another to give you literally any type of machine you want without getting out a file or a drill. That's something that instantly appeals to children and I remember the amazing feeling I used to get out of playing with Mindstorms when I was a little girl. I could actually create something that was "alive," and there was nothing better than that. Programming seemed dull and useless to me as compared to putting these pieces together and bringing them to life, somehow. It was captivating and it's what gave me the real push towards actually learning engineering. That's a miracle if you think about it and it represents great value.

>>> There is a huge untapped market for a programmable robot at the $50 - $100 price point. <<<

It's actually quite easy to build something yourself at that price point. Get $3 DC motors, waste aluminium channelling from build sites, acrylic, gear boxes + wheels, wires, an arduino, and a few screws. Build a frame out of the channelling, use the acrylic sheets as a type of wall, drill and mount motors on the acrylic sheets and put the arduino on somewhere with pencil cells. You're good to go.

<comment><USER4> > On the other hand with the Mindstorms set you have these precision milled > parts...

From the video it looks like the regular old injection-molded plastic Lego bricks - are there new milled parts being used in the EV3 kit?

<comment><USER3> Yes, you are right the plastic bricks are injection-molded. Sorry for not being clear, but I was actually thinking about Mindstorms + TETRIX, which includes precision milled metal parts; [http://www.legoeducation.us/eng/categories/products/universi...](http://www.legoeducation.us/eng/categories/products/university/tetrix) . There was an and over here that got deleted during editing. Lego's tolerances are crazy, btw. In some cases it's as low as .04 mm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent! The NXT 2 set is wonderful for introducing robotics and programming concepts to students. I hope the programming interface and software in general is improved; the current version is very difficult to install on Macs. I switched my kids over to the Enchanting software[[http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Enchanting_(Scratch_Modific...](http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Enchanting_\(Scratch_Modification\))] which allows you to program NXT robots in a Scratch-based environment.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think we cannot over-estimate the importance of this.

Lego got many of us into the mindset putting stuff together until it matched our imagination. It's great the bring this onto a new level for the future generations. (And myself… as soon as I have ordered it ;) )

<comment><USER7> google "thymio". IEEE's Spectrum had a nice write up on it. My son has one now.

<comment><USER8> I looked it up, here is the link <https://aseba.wikidot.com/en:thymiophilosophy>

This robot seems to be the right price as well €100 with shipping. At this price and with the amount of sensors, lights and switches built in they must be building them at cost. I'm trying to do something similar with sparkfun and dfrobot and its just killing me that 2 sensors alone cost a plumb.

This is awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A much better article was previously posted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5019835>

<comment><AUTHOR> don't underestimate the power of video...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another, more advanced robot building system (great for high schoolers) at around this price point is VEX Robotics. It has a great community, with friendly competition.

<http://www.vexrobotics.com/vex>

<comment><USER11> That is awesome! It reminds me of the old Erector Sets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Mindstorms has been around for almost 14 years now, but Mindstorms EV3 marks > the first time that users can program directly onto the brand-new EV3 > Intelligent Brick. In past iterations, users were only allowed to program > their robots from the computer

This isn't correct at all. I've had a MINDSTORMS kit for several years now, and I've been able to program on-brick since the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER13> Can someone please explain to me the differences in Lego's following lines?

Technic, Mindstorm, EV*, NXT

I'm looking to get something for an 8yr old to pique his curiosity.

<comment><USER14> Technic is just mechanics. The other three are quite the same, plus sensors/actuators and programmable.

For a 8 years old I'd start with plain LEGO. And then introduce the rest a little later.

But this depends on what the kid already likes. I see no problem in going straight to programmable stuff if he/she already showed interest in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My first ever programming job was a project for Lego and as a bonus they gave my friend and I a Lego Mindstorms set each. This was version 1.5 of the first edition. I remember we installed legOS (now brickOS) which allowed you to run code on the RCX. Definitively gonna buy EV3. Would be fun to try some of the algorithms Sebastian Thrun taught in his Udacity robotics course.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is one of a few products I wish we had cheap clones, priced at say less than $100, preferably in Android.

</comment><comment><USER17> why is there nothing on lego's site about this? (i'm assuming there isn't; google doesn't turn anything up and none of the blog posts and press articles i can find link directly to lego)

<comment><USER18> There is actually something: [http://mindstorms.lego.com/en- us/default.aspx?icmp=COUSFR29M...](http://mindstorms.lego.com/en- us/default.aspx?icmp=COUSFR29MINDSTORMS)

It says "Coming Fall 2013: LEGO MINDSTORM EV3..." - Now I am a disappointed to wait for 9 months.</comment></comment>


Hong Kong Protests Resume as Police Headquarters Is Surrounded - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/world/asia/hong-kong.html <comment><USER2> Can someone explain why has the police mostly betrayed the population? Aren't they the relatives of the protesters?</comment>


AppleTV Runs iOS, Already Jailbroken - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/09/appletv-runs-ios-already-jailbroken/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29 <comment><USER2> _A final word from Strafach: "The most interesting thing about the new AppleTV OS is that all binaries are marked iPad-compatible. I do wonder what Apple is planning…"_

Curious indeed.

<comment><USER3> I bet they want to have almost anything that is possible on the AppleTV be possible on the iPad, but not the other way around.

<comment><USER4> I don't see how you could run apps on an AppleTV with no touch interface, different screen resolution, and no HD space. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> Gruber had some interesting speculation on last week's episode of The Talk Show podcast.

I'm paraphrasing but he was essentially wondering aloud if, due to AirPlay capabilities, iPads and iPhones would be able to deliver content to the Apple TV . . . and then become a remote control for the content on the TV.

This could be video like the MLB app delivers, or other apps that would lend themselves to being shown on one (big) screen, and controlled on another (small) screen. Think: games.

All of this sounds very "Apple" to me, in that it's completely consistent with how they think about integrated solutions.

And if true, I'll buy an Apple TV for the first time.

<comment><USER6> A game with the action shown on the TV and the interface shown on an iPad would be awesome. Imagine the incredible UI ideas that would be possible if you had the entire screen as your canvas.

Reminds me of the Optimus Tactus keyboard concept: <http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-tactus/>

<comment><USER7> _A game with the action shown on the TV and the interface shown on an iPad would be awesome._

I can imagine this becoming the preferred way of many to play Farmville.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully they can take key parts of the atv ios build and port it to an app for jailbroken ipod touches/iphones. Have it run like front row for OS X. That way you would only need one device and you could play back local media.

</comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't this open the door to flashing the new AppleTV with an Android (or eventually even Debian) build?

<comment><USER10> Sure, but there are already a number of machines you can do that with. I'm sure there is some reason to do this, but I can't think of many good ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It was already announced that it used the A4. So it would have been pretty crazy if it wasn't running a variant of iOS. But it's good news, I doubt there won't be an app store on it. But it is hard to tell how soon that will be. Maybe we'll have to just enjoy jailbroken apps first and then wait for Apple to announce the compatibility.</comment>


Google Credential Provider for Windows - <AUTHOR> https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gcpw/ <comment><USER2> I'll throw out there that I work for JumpCloud, an Identity Management Provider, and we have a credential provider as well for seamless Windows login. We also have a Mac login window so your users have a seamless experience regardless of the OS (our Linux solution doesn't really need one). We've also got LDAP, RADIUS, gsuite, and O365 backends (plus more I'm forgetting I'm sure) and a ton of other niceties. Check us out if you're into that.

We also go beyond this and support MFA on Windows, Mac, Linux login.

Orgs with less than 10 users are free.

[https://jumpcloud.com/](https://jumpcloud.com/)

<comment><USER3> Y'all should make a guide for setting up a small environment for a home network. With the homeschooling situation, our kids are suddenly using our various computers a lot, and it'd be really nice to have a simplified situation with one login across all computers. I don't want to run a server locally for it, but my Jumpcloud trial was a bit bewildering for this use case.

<comment><USER2> Would you mind speaking a little about what you had issues with? It's so hard to get feedback for the users who try us out where we didn't 'just click' for them, and I'd love to hear where some of our pain points are.

<comment><USER3> There's a pretty overwhelming amount of options to go through. A wizard or simplified console for home networks would be great.

I don't need Radius, GPOs, groups. I just want everyone in the family to be able to use their GSuite account to log in on any of the computers in the house... and it's hard to figure out exactly what I need to turn on/off to do that.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I'll make sure that feedback gets some time in front of the relevant product folk.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

Side note: I'd _happily_ pay a monthly/annual fee for a family version like this. We already do for things like GSuite and 1Password.

I know y'all are free for orgs up to 10 users, and my family is never getting that big ( _shudder_ ), but a "Jumpcloud for Families" you could easily get me to pay for if it's super easy to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just tried configuring this on a new Windows 10 laptop (Dell XPS 13). I'm by no means an IT expert, but it seems painful to get working.

I had to first setup a local Windows account. Then install Google's GCPW software. After that, I had to make changes in the Registery Editor -- a place I haven't had to visit in many years.

I then had to logout of the local account and then select "Add work account" from the Windows 10 lock screen to login with a Google Account. I setup Windows Hello fingerprint login, however it doesn't seem to allow signing in with this method meaning I need to use a password everytime!

The whole setup process is just too outdated. Does anyone know how to automate all of this?

Meanwhile on Chrome OS, I can just hand a device to someone and they can login with their G Suite account in 30 seconds. No configuration needed.

<comment><USER5> > The whole setup process is just too outdated. Does anyone know how to > automate all of this?

The usual way is to use the Windows unattended installation tools to create an image which has everything included - I'm assuming this is how this is supposed to be used. IT in your organization just puts a prepared image on your computer. That imshr will automatically have everything you need installed including this plugin and its registry changes.

I've scrolled down the install guide and there seems to be also a PS script that sets up the registry keys for you so you can probably do remote unattended install as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > After GCPW installation, the device appears in the Admin console Windows > device list after the user signs in with their Google Account for the first > time.

We use G Suite at work (legacy decision) and it really kills me just how poorly the G Suite product team seems to understand enrollment and authorization workflows.

No, I don't want to allow every device to register itself into the device list. If I'm managing installations of organization-owned devices, then I want to pre-register the device into a device whitelist that I maintain before I allow that device unfettered access to protected resources.

This is right up there with other dumb moves like requiring AWS roles to be added per-user for SAML login and functionally being unable to setup G Suite as an OIDC IdP for Kubernetes because G Suite refuses to expose group membership (or even more importantly, transitive group membership) to service providers.

If Google uses G Suite internally then I have zero idea how they manage to actually get anything done, unless they have a lot of in-house automation that they haven't open-sourced. It doesn't make sense unless they're not eating their own dogfood.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand your complaint. This is done as an audit log of devices used to sign in. How would this function if not automatically?

<comment><USER8> The parent poster states:

> I want to pre-register the device into a device whitelist that I maintain > before I allow that device unfettered access to protected resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And what happens if Google arbitrarily suspends your account?

<comment><USER10> Is that a problem with G Suite? I think all such cases I've heard of have been with the free personal accounts offered to the general public, not the corporate product.

And if random account suspension is something that happens to G Suite accounts, I think the answer is that your IT department's G Suite admins can click the button to un-suspend your account.

<comment><USER11> There was an incident reported on HN where the entire gsuite account got suspended without warning..

<comment><USER12> Was it ever proven to be true/fake? This is the one I think: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17115643)

<comment><USER13> If the gmail address linked as the recovery address for the first gsuite admin on a domain is suspended for a T&C violation, then the whole gsuite domain will be suspended too automatically.

Its a good reason to never link a gmail address as a recovery address for gsuite - always use another free mail provider.

<comment><USER12> Would normal users personnal accounts be suspended if set as recovery for their normal work GSuite account if the GSuite admin is suspended?

I personally never link or login with my personnal accounts on work devices, nor do I use work accounts on personal devices.

<comment><USER13> I don't think so.

T&C violations disable an account and any linked recovery addresses (and accounts with the same recovery phone number).

If an account is disabled, all resources associated are disabled and deleted 30 days later.

A GSuite domain is considered a resource 'owned' by the first admin, so if that account is disabled, so are all in the domain. If it is deleted, so is the domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google acquired Bitium in September 2017. This was one of their capabilities.

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

</comment><comment><USER15> God, this screenshot look ugly

Almost like in "looks photoshopped" meme

<comment><USER16> I would guess transparency isn't supported for credential provider images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> From their install guide...

To help ensure unauthorized access to the device, you need to configure a registry key to restrict device sign-ins to accounts in specific domains.

<comment><USER18> The guide also says you need to close Event Viewer before installing. I'm not sure I want to know why.

<comment><USER13> The login provider can emit event log entries which say who logged in and when, and reasons for login failure etc.

Those entries aren't plain text - they are protobufs decoded by a google- provided dll file. If event viewer is open, it won't load that dll, and it will fail to render any event log entries for logins until it is restarted.

<comment><USER19> I didn't even know you could write custom decoders for event viewer. Is that a thing people do?

<comment><USER20> A previous debugging hole I fell into once accidentally and barely managed to escape left me with the impression that _every_ event has a "custom" decoder associated; there's no "built-in" event types from the Event Viewer's perspective. There are a handful of very common "custom decoders" that when they break it is an interesting world of madness. In the case of my debugging, one of the decoders installed by the .NET Framework (and used by almost all apps that use the main .NET Event Log libraries) broke and needed repair. It seems like there is a bunch of power in building custom decoders, but I never want to try debugging one again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The lack of effort here seems like such a strategic mistake for Google...

For this to work, it has to be single click, it has to be slick, it has to 'just work', it has to integrate with otp's, security keys, SMS 2 factor, etc.

It should be for both work accounts and home accounts, and Google should have come up with a strategic set of default options. Those options should have included "just log me in with a low privilege account which can browse the web like chromeOS, but still syncs everything like chromeOS".

I put the failure of realising this vision mostly due to lack of inter- department communication within Google. This is a direct (yet years late) response to active directory logins for GSuite, when it should additionally have been shipped for home users and marketed as a "do anything from anywhere any time" thing.

<comment><USER21> Kinda agree.

But then they failed to make the "One account all of Google" true of Gmail and Gsuite accounts (there's a long list of things you can do with one account that you cannot do with the other, and this is with Google products and features).

So it doesn't feel suprising that Google lacked the organisational-wide impetus to get this working fully for Windows and Microsoft products and features.

These kinds of projects need to be driven with very strong vision from above. It makes me think of the Yegge rant about platforms at Google, and the mentioning of the Bezos mandate on APIs [https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611](https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611)

        His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

        1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

        2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

        3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

        4. It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

        5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

        6. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

        7. Thank you; have a nice day!

When it comes to making the experience right for Google accounts (of any type, anywhere)... this is what it takes. But this is precisely Yegge's rant, Google lack this.

<comment><USER5> > But then they failed to make the "One account all of Google" true of Gmail > and Gsuite accounts (there's a long list of things you can do with one > account that you cannot do with the other, and this is with Google products > and features).

The clients of GSuite explicitly do not want any of that - even more, they (and the media and HackerNews) is very vocal that GSuite data should never be merged or touch the GMail account data, ML advertising systems and other non- enterprise data.

Did you consider that perhaps you're not the target market for these kind of features? It is an Enterprise cloud system after all.

(The arbitrary GSuite limitations are pissing me off as well though.)

<comment><USER22> That's not true, We want the same products just with a work/home divide.

I can't use a google home mini in the office because I can't add other gsuite accounts like a family can. That's so arbitrary.

<comment><USER23> Part of it has to do with the different data protection regulations and privacy policies between consumer and business Google accounts. Since very few enterprise customers use consumer smart home products, Google doesn't want to make a special version that respects deletion policies and legal holds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This feels like it's in pre-alpha. It's a pain to configure it

<comment><USER23> It's meant to be configured once and then shipped as a disk image that gets installed on client devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't quite get the point of this.

It allows logging into the device using your Google Account... and? How does that affect usage in any way? What changes?

<comment><USER26> Seems like this would be useful to organizations who use G suite for their accounts &authentication. That way each user can sign into their work machine using their Google account, instead of having a separate username/password.

<comment><USER25> Oh, I always thought that was somehow done by using LDAP for user authentication and some syncing magic.

This seems to make it much simpler for IT to handle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is that you Novell?

<comment><USER28> This is a low quality comment. Can you please explain the comparison to Novell further?

<comment><USER29> I'm not OP but I can likely explain. In the late 90's Novell Netware 4 and above had a client package which replaced the Windows login with their own GINA, so users could log in to Windows client machines using their Netware credentials.

<comment><USER30> Let's hope Microsoft can refrain from the same dirty tactics they used back in the nineties.

I was a junior sysadmin/desktop support back then. Every single software update for the Microsoft Netware Client (which I think sucked on purpose) always caused problems for the Novell one! It was a real cat and mouse release cycle.

<comment><USER31> It's well documented that Microsoft did not behave well in the 90's [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents)

However in the case of the Windows NT NetWare client I don't think this happened.

I think one of the variations on Hanlons razor is a more likely explanation.

"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"

The really worrying thing is that all the major players seem to have the same strategy at the moment. That is to own and control the platform.

<comment><USER29> Microsoft did end up paying $500M to Novell over anti-competitive behaviour in the 1990's

[https://www.geek.com/law/microsoft-settles-novell-case- for-u...](https://www.geek.com/law/microsoft-settles-novell-case-for- us536-million-556963/)

My memory, and it's been a while, was that at least partially related to some interop tricks that MS played to make Netware's software work less well in the Windows world. , although I'm sure part of it was also down to Novell finding it challenging to adapt.

<comment><USER31> I thought that was about WordPerfect etc rather than NetWare.

Totally agree that Microsoft did some bad stuff, I just don't remember there being any malign attempts to disrupt NetWare integration.

NetWare was the main player in PC networking at the time, so arguably it would not have been a good strategy.

It's absolutely true that the NDS integration was an issue, but my memory is that this was a quality/competency issue on both sides, and not due to a lack of cooperation.

<comment><USER29> I think wordperfect was a diffrent settlement at least according to [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/08/microsoft_novell_ne...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/08/microsoft_novell_netware_settlement/)

From that the settlement was around NDS for NT

<comment><USER31> Thanks for digging that out, I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wish I had one of these for FreeIPA...

<comment><USER33> Authentication on Windows using FreeIPA is already possible although not recommended by the FreeIPA project. There are several guides for doing so a Google search away.

The FreeIPA project recommended solution is to deploy Active Directory either via a Windows server or Samba4 and then create a cross realm trust between AD and FreeIPA.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, I've pointed Windows directly at an MIT KRB5 KDC several times in the past, but it's not reliable enough for real use.

And I don't want to have to pay for Windows Server just to authenticate on a couple of Windows machines. Plus is it even safe to put AD DS on the Internet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why do you need an entire Chrome Browser and run as SYSTEM account?

</comment><comment><USER35> gaia was the name of the internal google services for accounts...

</comment><comment><USER36> 'Photoshopped badly by Google'

</comment><comment><USER37> Comment was not clear, edited:

This site was failing to render correctly for me on Chrome for OSX.

<comment><USER38> I think you have the wrong Google product.

<comment><USER37> I meant on this specific site...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I have lost access to one of emails because I've bulk deleted my old emails from my Gmail UI. Now I cannot recover my Gmail account. It asks me few questions and then says that I'm not the owner of my account.

</comment><comment><USER40> Fascinating to see where Google is headed. Now, there is no need to push for ChromeOS.

<comment><USER36> They can track you right from your OS

<comment><USER31> Yes, not unlike Apple and Microsoft but for business users of Google suite, this makes the need to sign up to any Microsoft cloud services less of a necessity.

It seems the direction Google, Apple and Microsoft are all heading in is to own authentication and control access to our computers both at work and home.

Third party authentication technology has been around on Windows in one form or another for decades, but this is interesting because it's cloud based authentication that doesn't rely on corporate infrastructure.

It would be really nice if Google releasing this is a catalyst for an Open Source project doing something similar.

Chromebooks, Windows S (and RT before it), notarization of apps on MacOs could be helpful in an Enterprise environment to prevent malware, this is at the expense of freedom of choice.

I worry that the PC era is ending and we're drifting towards a future market more like consoles and mainframes where you never really own the platform that you paid for.

<comment><USER41> > Chromebooks, Windows S (and RT before it), notarization of apps on MacOs > could be helpful in an Enterprise environment to prevent malware, this is at > the expense of freedom of choice.

I think the opposite is true: these are useful in a home environment, for the vast majority of non IT expert users. In the enterprise, there have always been other mechanisms for preventing malware, mainly in the forum of not giving users full admin rights on company laptops, PCs etc.

Even as a software engineer, I don't always feel fully knowledgeable on how to run a secure system. I can absolutely assure you that my grandma is not qualified to act as a sysadmin on her own PC. So while I dislike the idea of not having the option of taking full control of your system, I nevertheless think that the vast majority of users are better off not using that option. And when I say vast majority, I don't think it's like 80%,but much closer to 99.9%, including most programmers and enterprise users.

<comment><USER31> I disagree, we don't have opposing views.

I totally agree with you that the secure by default / sandboxes for application approach is useful for consumers and developers too.

My point is that when this is wrapped up with a closed software distribution platform (Windows Store / App Store) or with a Surveillance Capitalism business model that relies on monetisation of user data there is a problem for the consumer.

The PC accidentally contributed to breaking the control IBM had over the market.

Antitrust investigations into IBM and later Microsoft are also key to the freedom we've had. The worry is that we've forgotten how bad it was and we're potentially headed for a cartel like control of our computers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can I use this self hosted? I don't want Google to have control over my personal logins. I have a bunch of computers at home for the family to use and a NAS system for data. All I lack to make it work well is central login.

Openldap looks like my best bet, but I haven't figured out the obtuse configuration syntax.

<comment><USER43> Use Samba4. It's an easy to use LDAP/Kerberos/DNS system that looks after itself. Or if you're more Unix inclined, there's FreeIPA.</comment></comment>