WebOS 3.0 SDK - <AUTHOR> https://developer.palm.com/

<comment><USER2> I've been thinking a bit about how the tablet game plays out over the next few months. Just for fun, here's some speculation:

1) Apple sells a crap ton of iPads. Their biggest problem will be that they can't make them fast enough. Don't whine to me about "openness" or the notifications system. They'll sell lots of them and we all know it.

2) HP gets the TouchPad into stores. There are no queues to buy one on day one, but it does OK in the first few weeks. Sells maybe a million units in the first three months.

3) Consumers shopping for a tablet are now faced with a choice: I can buy an iPad and wait four to five weeks for it to arrive (those are the times Apple's website is currently quoting), or I can buy a HP TouchPad and take it home today. For some, that'll be enough to bring them over to HP.

4) HP's TouchPad gets some traction. Enough to justify a version two. Nowhere near enough to knock Apple off it's perch.

5) HP does something badly wrong. One of the MBAs gets in the way, makes a decision he has no place making, and hands one of HP's competitors a major competitive advantage. Maybe they decide the TouchPad should be US only for the first year. Maybe they piss off developers in some creative way, so no-one writes apps for the platform. I don't know what they'll do, but I can't shake the feeling that they'll fuck it up somehow.

6) Android tablets come out too. Nerds like me buy them, while our grandmothers buy iPads and TouchPads. There are many more grandmothers in the world than nerds. Android tablets do badly. Attempting to explain this, reviewers looking at 2011 retrospectively will cite a confusing UI, a flash implementation that was promised but never materialised (or materialised in a broken state), and many of the same compatibility issues that we see now with Android phones.

7) Microsoft announces Windows 8 with a completely redesigned UI based on Metro. This UI will try to work just as well with the keyboard and mouse as it does on touch devices. Ballmer will use the phrase "bridging the gap" a lot.

<comment><USER3> I thoroughly enjoyed reading that -- spot on. Just for kicks, here's my more optimistic vision for the future:

1) HP/WebOS focuses it's marketing message on using "open" tech (HTML, CSS, JS). Some iOS/android developers convert apps, some web devs convert websites, most don't bother.

2) People pick these up as they are in stock and get to the sites people need with flash as a big selling point as well (news, mail, youtube, hulu, entertainment, etc).

3) Google releases a ChromeOS Tablet, using point 2 above to their advantage by claiming compatibility with all internet sites (even flash!). They sell quickly and cheaply, as google takes a loss on each tablet in hope of gaining market share and increasing google search usage (it's the default home-page on this device).

4) More hardware / software manufacturers follow Google's lead, and momentum shifts towards using tablets mainly as dumb web-clients (with offline storage, better graphics, and other "native" features provided by HTML5 APIs).

5) Apple raises the bar by releasing an extremely-polished-at-this-point itunes.com and a super-cheap "air/cloud" tablet (similar to chromeOS's offer), allowing you to buy and sell "cloud" apps (HTML CSS JS) with existing app store rules and credit cards on itunes.com or in the "cloud" app store. Buy once, use on all your iOS and Mac devices (includes apps, music, video).

6) Tablets aren't bought and sold based on whether angry birds runs on them (its a web-app and runs everywhere), but instead on hardware features and performance (battery-life, screen size/resolution, heat, weight, etc.). Forced to compete on these grounds, hardware manufacturers invent better batteries, hybrid color e-ink/lcd screens that can be used in the sun, better speakers, and maybe even something crazy like user-replaceable batteries, RAM, and hard disks.

One can dream, anyway...

<comment><USER4> If there is one thing apple is right about people won't buy tablets based on specs. I do think they will buy on features.

I think the touchpad has a quad-core chip in it from qualcom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If any team has the right attitude and technology to out-Apple Apple, it's HPalm. I really hope they do well, and I can't wait to tinker with this SDK.

My only peeve: no 7" WebOS tablet. It's a glaring hole in Apple's lineup, currently dominated by the Kindle and Nook Color, but which will be a gold mine for the first company to get it right. Blackberry has a chance with their PlayBook, especially if they're willing to keep iterating on both hardware and software.

<comment><USER6> According to the rumours, there will be a 7" WebOS tablet in September.

[http://www.precentral.net/hp-touchpad-targeting-june- release...](http://www.precentral.net/hp-touchpad-targeting-june-release- priced-499-7-inch-coming-september)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> HP is comparable to Apple in that they have complete control of their product. Yet I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that the management of HP is comparable to Apple.

Installing webOS on all of their PC's strikes me as a really dumb idea. From what I've read they are not delivering quality PC's these days. Associating webOS with a poor product seems like a bad idea. Also I think a boot menu will confuse the heck out of a lot of people. It seems that they are desperate to show that they are doing something with the product and this is all they could do in a reasonable time frame.

They have already owned Palm for a year and if that's all they got then I'm not impressed. The creativity of HP was seemingly gutted by Hurd and will need to be rebuilt.

We can learn a lot from the troubles Microsoft is currently having updating their phone. An important key to success is turning out to be control of the devices after they are sold. Microsoft is apparently screwed because there are so many players in the process of releasing updates with each having a vote. First Microsoft develops the update but then the device manufacturer and the carrier have to agree to the release and can change the release to fit their own needs. That's not the case with Apple. They control everything. Successful product owners will need to mimic Apple and not Microsoft. They will need a management with stones in order to get that deal if it's even possible now that there are so many alternative products the carrier can provide. Android also has this issue as can be seen by the number of OS versions that a developer has to support.

Where HP has an opportunity is in their enterprise connections. I think this will be a short lived advantage. HP would have to own this market before Microsoft launches an enterprise tablet and reluctance to change gives them the advantage.

HP has a great opportunity because they bought a great product. The odds are better than even that they will blow it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Best part about the signup form was a comfortable option for the security question _"What is your favourite programming language?"_ , although a lot of my friends can guess it if I used the right answer, it's still a good try to give options related to the user.

</comment><comment><USER4> a few reasons WebOS is not done yet.

* pre 3 will be fast, really fast

* touch-to-share WebOS enabled devices can touch and share files.

* somehow drobox is tied into WebOS 3

* Unity Union - Unity Technologies will help you port your game.

* TouchPad - WebOS does multiple apps better than iOS.

* WebOS is way better than ChromeOS. HP will use it on Netbooks.

</comment><comment><USER9> Requested access about an hour ago. Excited.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems the more options we have for a mobile OS, the more persuasive a web application vs native application becomes.

<comment><USER11> It's persuasive until you actually try and do it. Then you find that you can't make anything nearly as nice and it takes you 10 times as long to do it because you spend forever figuring out weird quirks of mobile browsers that make not much sense at all.

At least that was my experience.

<comment><USER12> Or you use the web technologies for a "native" app and focus only on the browser for that platform. Then port to others as needed, rather than trying to support them "all" from day one on a web app.

Certainly a web app is usually still not as fast and responsive as a native app, but its getting much better.

People used to say the same thing about web mail services - that they were not nearly as 'nice' as a native mail app. Now go look at how many people use Gmail and dont bother with a native mail client on their PC anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, WebOS was one of the things I was really looking forward to but the Pre hardware was not very usable for me.

I really hope WebOS gets a decent second chance. When will the tablets be out?

<comment><USER9> What are your thoughts on the Pre3?

<comment><USER14> Handled one. It's quite nice and I'll be getting one along with the TouchPad and Veer when they come out.

Also, the Pre3 will be a world phone in 2 flavors:

1) CDMA (US) + GSM (RoW) 2) GSM (US + RoW)</comment></comment></comment>


Verified Correctness and Security of OpenSSL HMAC - <AUTHOR> http://katherineye.com/post/120638230126/verified-correctness-and-security-of-openssl-hmac <comment><USER2> I always find these sorts of things interesting and research in this area is something I try to pay attention to whenever it comes to my attention, for example here is another recent paper about verifying curve25519 [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2660370](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2660370).

However, it seems that there is a tremendous amount of effort that goes into proving this software and I wonder if the time investment makes sense. Humans are pretty good at doing proofs, so it seems that with a comparable amount of time you could just have a human verify that the C implementation matched the spec. (Yes, I know that this result goes a bit beyond that by using compcert, etc.)

Now obviously the state of the art is progressing and it's getting easier to formally verify properties of programs, but I wonder whether it will ever be feasible to make this part of everyday software development. Anyways, these are just my half-baked ramblings since this isn't a topic I've thought about a whole lot, but I'm interested to hear other peoples perspectives.

<comment><USER3> It's not really a 'bit beyond'. The proof is about the machine code that runs on the CPU! It's a huge abstraction gap from C and it is the result of years of formal proofs and PL research.

About the effort being worth it or not, I believe that security critical programs MUST have formal proofs. Vulnerabilities in this kind of software are extremely costly. The same goes for software whose failure can be of danger for humans (c.f. the Toyota debacle).

<comment><USER4> A surprisingly large number of lines of code become security critical by dint of inclusion in security critical systems designed by others, or in support systems for those critical systems.

<comment><USER5> ...which is a big reason why I find it insane that people aren't more interested in microkernel (or unikernel+hypervisor, which ends up in the same place) designs.

If you can have a tiny trust-kernel that has been proof-checked, keep everything else outside of it, and the things outside of it can only communicate with (or even observe) their peers via messages sent through it, then you don't need to worry about including untrusted code in your app.

Instead, you just slap any and all untrusted code into microservices (microdaemons?) in their own security domains/sandboxes/VMs/whatever, and speak to them over the kernel's message bus (or in the VM case, a virtual network), and suddenly they can't hurt you any more.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any examples of this type of approach being used in any projects? I'd be curious to check out how it works code-wise.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if this matches the description, but seL4 supposedly has a pretty well-developed proof system: [https://sel4.systems/](https://sel4.systems/)

<comment><USER4> Worth keeping in mind that L4 kernels do much, much less than conventional operating systems. They're more like libraries for building useful OS's on top of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the full paper: [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/verified- hmac.pdf](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/verified-hmac.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Thanks. My favorite part is your thorough breakdown of the assurance case in section one. For redoing security evaluations, I recommended [1] a while back that vendors illustrate the assurance levels of each component in their systems. Your breakdown looks closer to my recommendation than most things I've seen. Such a breakdown is both honest and shows exactly where improvements (or mitigations) need to happen.

Otherwise, verifications were as practical and good as I'd expect. My favorite section to scope out, Related Work, gave me new insights as usual. You also had a useful idea of future work [2]. All together, great work.

[1] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/friday_squid_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/friday_squid_bl_419.html#c5457853)

[2] "One important future step is to con- dense commonalities of these libraries into an ontology for crypto-related reasoning principles, reusable across multiple language levels and realised in multiple proof assistants. "

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Even coq have had its bugs where it was possible to prove that true is false: [https://github.com/clarus/falso](https://github.com/clarus/falso)

<comment><USER9> True. That's why formal verification is only one of many techniques in high assurance (A1/EAL7) evaluations. The methods are all a check against each other with the minds of the designers and evaluators being the strongest check. That might seem counter-intuitive given we're doing formal verification due to people's inability to write code. Yet, people equipped properly can see mistakes in good specs or designs much better than they can do tedious work (eg low-level code) without error.

So, in high assurance, we use every tool at our disposal to counter problems and then some for redundancy. Works out fine. That said, I have a nice paper for you if you want to see how screwed up formal verification can get:

[http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/04_verif_techniques.pdf](http://www.cypherpunks.to/~peter/04_verif_techniques.pdf)

Things have gotten a bit better but plenty of truth left in that paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Writing the definition of sha 256 in Coq must have been of great fun, hehe.

<comment><USER11> "Verification of a Cryptographic Primitive: SHA-256", Andrew Appel

[https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/verif- sha.pdf](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/verif-sha.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the link. I always enjoy reading Appel's work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Three gripes I have with many formal methods projects are (a) choose something about useless to prove, (b) reinvent the wheel unnecessarily, and (c) an assurance argument with huge gaps or on a knockoff of the actual problem. I like that this project does the opposite in each area: a useful algorithm implementation whose proof build on other's projects with end-to-end assurance. Wise. I look forward to reading the paper.

So, what to do next. I suggest working on stuff that isn't getting much attention. For security, realistic proofs are lacking of useful protocols and crypto-constructions from requirements to design to implementation. Also, much foundational software builds on libraries implementing ZIP, PNG, reg ex's, and so on. More verification of those has widespread effect. Program transformations, optimizations of CompCert, integration of covert channel analysis into such tools, more static/dynamic checking, _assemblers /linkers_, and so on could all use more verification work done with the nice qualities I mentioned about this one. So, any readers thinking of a project might consider the above. That said, it would be nice if this could benefit the average person without formal methods abilities, right?

I thought hard on it. Our systems stuff is usually coded in low-level, imperative languages for performance. Our high assurance work often uses functional programming (or functional style) for specs, tools, and so on. Yet, the limitations and TCB's of those in systems space are huge obstacles. Yet, old Scheme/LISP work showed how to turn a limited functional program into an imperative one step by step by fleshing out its state (among other things). We've also seen metaprogramming & MDD techniques allow us to specify something at a high level with low-level, fast code automatically generated for the target.

I think the trick is to combine all of this: subset of functional programming specifies high-level operation of program and low-level operation of target language (esp fast parts); verification of useful primitives (eg stacks, pointer arithmetic) with high-level interfaces macro-style; a coding style + methodology for going from high functional to low imperative; verified transformations for optimization, macro expansion, and code generation. Each of these exist in some form, most verified in some way. What's left is to verify all of them and their integration. Such an integrated approach might dramatically simplify verification of software by letting developers simply describe it in a high-level, functional way with a step-by-step process to deployment. Verification, depending on talent, might range from manual inspection to machine-checked proofs. Yet, doing it this way should be much easier than converting them to formal verification experts.

What do you developers or formal methods people think of this?</comment>


3D isotropic wavelets, texture features, and contour interpolation in Python - <AUTHOR> https://blog.kitware.com/itk-4-13-0-has-been-released/ <comment><USER2> Why the "level 1" picture looks better than the "level 2"?

Do you have a comparison with a set of JPG of the same size?</comment>


Palantir to relocate headquarters from Silicon Valley to Colorado - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/19/palantir-headquarters-moves-from-silicon-valley-to-colorado.html <comment><USER2> Palantir's had a large, well-appointed, and almost entirely empty office on Blake Street in Denver for years, while hiring in Palo Alto has slowed to a crawl, compared to its offices in New York and London. Palo Alto isn't in proximity to any of Palantir's major clients, not since Fox poached one of Palantir's senior biz dev leads to be their CISO and then fired Palantir as a vendor.

A little curious what's going to happen to the legacy Gotham product, which is the bread and butter of their government work and is an insane ball of spaghetti code that runs on the shoulders of a few veeery long-tenured employees who all have Bay Area houses and kids now.

Ultimately, this is just admitting something that's been a reality for years. For all their claims to their employees that "Palo Alto will always be our home," this is just another example of Palantir's motto of "strong opinions, weakly held."

</comment><comment><USER3> > Thiel's move may have been made because of "backlash from tech industry > peers, particularly within Facebook's ranks," for supporting Trump and that > he was "surprised by what he called a 'visceral reaction' in socially > liberal Silicon Valley to his support of the president."

I wonder if he is still surprised.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article is mostly quoting a 2013 interview & 2018 article about Peter Thiel and why he thinks the bay area isn't a great place for startup employees (housing costs) and for him personally (a Trump supporter).

As far as I can tell, no one from Palantir has commented publicly about this specific move, but I did find the linked article in the Denver business journal to be a bit more illuminating - e.g. Denver was aware of the move but didn't provide incentives. [https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2020/08/19/palantir-...](https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2020/08/19/palantir- peter-thiel-alex-karp-headquarters-denver.html)

<comment><USER5> > "We haven't picked a place yet, but it's going to be closer to the East > Coast than the West Coast," Karp said during the interview. "If I had to > guess, I would guess something like Colorado."

Please consider filing a bug against your GIS module.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: With most people working from home, what is your daily schedule now? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Same as before, mostly, except I wake up an hour later and go for a walk after work instead of commuting. My daily schedule looks something like this:

7:00am - wake up, fiddle with my phone because I don't wanna get out of bed

8:00am - go for a 5K run

8:40am - walk the dog around the block

8:50am - <USER2>

9:00am - start work, first meeting usually begins at 9am

12:00pm - break for lunch, might watch a quick 20-25 minute TV episode if I don't have a 12:30 meeting

1:00pm - back to work

4:00pm - last meeting usually ends around this time, spend the rest of the hour wrapping up work

5:00pm - walk the dog for a much longer walk than the morning, around 30-45 minutes

5:45pm to 11:00pm - dinner, hobbies, TV, etc

I've worked from home full-time in the past, though my current job was not a WFH situation pre-pandemic. It is now, though, obviously. I'm surprisingly (to myself) productive from 9-5, but I also try to adhere strictly to the 9-5 hours. It's probably the main thing that keeps me sane.

Some of my employees probably spend less time working than I do. I don't think I really blame them, as long as they're productive. And they are as productive, if not more so, than pre-pandemic. I consider their happiness and mental well-being to be more important than the job, so as long as they're getting their work done, I don't have much problem if they put in fewer hours than normal. My job, though, rarely ends before 5pm... But that's OK. I like it.

I'm interested, OP... what were you expecting from this question? Why do you ask?

<comment><USER4> Curious, why not take the dog on the 5k?

<comment><USER3> She just wants to stop and smell everything. Haven't really tried to get her into a routine to run the full 5K with me without stopping to pee on everything or smell everything or try to stop and play with everyone we pass...

I'd love it if she would run nicely though :)</comment></comment></comment>


The Debate Around "Do We Even Need CSS Anymore?" - <AUTHOR> https://css-tricks.com/the-debate-around-do-we-even-need-css-anymore/ <comment><USER2> Representing styles as executable code is a very poor idea. Suddenly you go from data you can inspect and play with to something you can just execute and take what you are given.

The principle of least power is an incredibly important axiom of the web's architecture, and when people break it, lots of things become more difficult or impossible. If you don't like CSS, then by all means, propose a replacement – but please don't propose replacing it with executable code.

See:

Rule of Least Power – [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power)

Principle of Least Power – [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastPower](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastPower)

<comment><USER3> Check out the format for an inline style:

        {
          background: "red",
          fontWeight: "bold"
        }

It's just a Javascript mapping from strings to strings. That's a very un- powerful language, and that's what React consumes.

Sure, you _could_ generate this mapping with all sorts of arbitrary code, just like how you _could_ generate CSS with all sorts of arbitrary code. But that doesn't make the style declaration itself any more powerful, much less an arbitrary executable.

<comment><USER4> There is a difference, though. The above code is still _executable_ in that it renders the proper styling via JS at run-time, rather than at "compile" time (i.e. when it is preprocessed).

<comment><USER3> That's true, but I don't feel like it's relevant.

React's inline styles API satisfies the principle of least power: you can only pass to it a mapping from string keys to string/number values.

It's possible that the input data might be compiled from some other more powerful format, and it's possible to argue that this compilation step is a violation of the principle of least power, but that feels like a separate issue. It's very possible to use inline styles without adding unnecessary power to the declaration language - heck, you could declare them in JSON and load them during the build step if you want. How you use inline styles is your decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The separation of concerns argument is dogmatic here. Just because it used to be that you should keep presentation in your CSS and behavior in your javascript, doesn't mean that's a universal truth. It's a good abstraction to separate presentation from behavior, but that doesn't mean one has to be done in one language and the other in a different one. Separating the concerns just by partitioning them within your codebase is just as good for organization.

There are two real reasons to use CSS for your styles. One is that your page should work without javascript, and doing your styles in javascript is a completely stupid reason to break support for no-javascript environments. The other is user choice. If a user doesn't like something about how your page is presented, they can fix it using userstyles. Maybe some text is too small for them to comfortably read but when they zoom in the layout breaks or other text gets too big. It's hostile to break this standard feature of the web just for whatever silly gains you get from doing your styles in javascript.

<comment><USER6> > If a user doesn't like something about how your page is presented, they can > fix it using userstyles

I'm actually curious what percentage of people could do so in under an hour.

<comment><USER5> Not a huge amount of people will make custom styles, but they can be shared on sites like userscripts.org, for people who wouldn't bother making them or don't know css to use. Knowledge of basic HTML and CSS is more widespread than you might think.

If you're using inline styles, you're likely to end up with a lot of elements that don't have classes or ids to target for styling, so userstylers will have to use complex selectors using :nth-of-type and such, which is harder, more fragile, and not even always possible. And every line of the userstylesheet will need !important annotations, which makes composing multiple userstylesheet on the same page more likely to break.

<comment><USER7> All of this.

I resort to a set of brute force or reset stylesheets which pretty much explicitly override everything.

If you're going to use inline styles then basically fuck you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In human history we always went through development loops. And I can tell you this: I was there when there was not much CSS, and certainly no preprocessors. CSS was the Next Big Thing on the table (not even 10 years ago, and div was the next big thing instead of table). There are reasons for CSS. Now that it's everywhere young people think it sucks. Because old code always sucks. But often it's not the technology that sucks. It's just that code bloats when it gets older. Now when we take CSS away we'll do that for 5 years and then we'll miss it, so we reintroduce it, maybe using another name, or a competing technology from back then that didn't make it. Both will happen, I'm quite sure of it. Just for you, dear reader, if you want to be the cool guy that knows the technology before the other kids know it, start doing CSS now and wait 5-10 years. The last thing I remember we've seen such a loop was SQL. Now they are slowly reintroducing it. So if you stayed with MySQL and Postgres over the last 5-10 years, you'll probably earn a lot of money now. Good luck.

<comment><USER9> In what universe did SQL ever go away?

The growth of popularity of non-relational databases was a reflection of the emergence of a different applications and a different approach to development.

The "hate" for SQL was indeed often misplaced, but the need for different kinds of databases was real. The schemas of SQL were powerful but sometimes cumbersome to developers who need to rapidly iterate on their applications. The relational structure of SQL is sometimes ill-suited for the sort of graph queries needed in large social networks.

SQL is sometimes the wrong tool for the job. Other times it's a powerful tool; maybe even _most_ of the time.

In short, there probably isn't any "one-size-fits-all" solution for databases.

But the need for non-relational databases was very real; just ask Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

\---

CSS is another example of a tool that's "going out of fashion" for a _real_ reason: it was never designed for the modular, component-oriented pattern that many developers are using for complex applications on the web.

There need not be a "one-size-fits-all" solution for ALL styling on the web, but CSS is hardly ideal for web applications that are a composition of modular components.

CSS probably won't go anywhere, as it is still useful for the more page-like content that it was originally designed for, but we still need something different for modular front-end application development.

<comment><USER10> I don't know why this comment is being down-voted. Your comments are spot-on. See my reply below about our product Elevate Web Builder - I came to the exact same conclusions as you. In fact, version 1 of EWB _did_ use CSS, and then I got rid of it this year in version 2. In a component-based architecture, all UI updates are typically dynamic, and pre-defined styles simply don't fit as well, other than to define the various default "states" of controls/elements. CSS is complete overkill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _> What is the alternative to CSS then? The alternative is inline styles. ... The idea is you apply styles to elements through JavaScript._

But if you have a non-trivial app with thousands of elements across hundreds of pages, people will inevitably want to "tame", "organize", "consolidate", etc those _inline_ styles into some coherent taxonomy to enforce _consistency._

Wherever and however the programmers decide to store this "consistency taxonomy" (e.g. into special .json files instead of .css files), they've just reinvented "CSS" by another name.

The 3 complaint bullet points at the top of the essay would then apply to the adhoc-this-is-not-CSS-but-it-acts-like-CSS system.

<comment><USER12> There's still some key differences between what this new JSON declared and Javascript distributed stylesheets would work. Mainly is that there is no more CSS Selector madness. You no longer need to have concepts such as selector specificity, nor the entire syntax around grabbing the correct selectors.

Also you could then be able to logically follow the flow using traditional debugging methods rather than this mess which we have for debugging CSS currently.

Lastly this removes the need for a lot of the additional syntax introduced into CSS for animations/transitions (though I have no idea what the performance would be inbetween these two methods).

To be fair I haven't actually implemented this form of styling yet but it's something that interests me and I'd be interested in any potential downfalls before I commit to it on a project.

<comment><USER10> Here's an example of a JS application that dynamically animates DOM properties using requestAnimationFrame:

[http://www.elevatesoft.com:8081/panels/panels.html](http://www.elevatesoft.com:8081/panels/panels.html)

It's a little slow on mobile, but pretty good on desktops, and could probably use some optimizations. The DOM transitions are animated at the of end of each change management cycle for a given UI element. That allows for layout management that occurs independently of what is going on in the DOM, treating the DOM updates as only a "controlled repaint".

<comment><USER13> That's pretty cool. Performance on mobile is of course important, but perhaps it can be improved.

I like CSS, but I also like having other options and ideas available. As others have said, for special one page web apps, the scripted layout might be a good choice.

And then we have CSS grids coming soon too. Choice is good!

<comment><USER10> Mobile is a tough nut to crack, due to some hard constraints on the CPU/power consumption, but it's getting better. A new iPhone 5s does a pretty good job with something like that app I linked to, whereas an older Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 does not. A lot also depends upon the browser, since there is a _big_ difference between the JS engines in Chrome (best, by far) and FF/IE when it comes to things like requestAnimationFrame() execution performance. The linked-to example is a dog when run on IE 11/Windows 8 on a practically-new Dell laptop/tablet convertible with an i3, but works nicely in Chrome on the same device.

Re: CSS grids - totally agree. But, what I've learned over the last 4 years of developing a web application IDE is this: CSS is great if you want to set the layout and leave it alone (for the most part). In other words, when the JS is decorative, things are great. When the JS becomes the primary actor, things start to break down due to lack of control over how/when the reflows/repaints occur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You lose the benefits of style caching with inline or dynamically applied styles, and inlining makes each HTML payload larger. Also, applying virtually _all_ of your styles with JavaScript, after the DOM has already finished loading, wastes CPU cycles and just feels like going against the grain of CSS to me. You make a few arguable gains with this technique, but I feel it might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

<comment><USER15> You can get around this by using compilation tools, just like Compass does.

<comment><USER16> So, create a problem, and then solve it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The idea is you apply styles to elements through JavaScript.

Great. Now simply reading a page without JS will become impossible, let alone interacting with it.

<comment><USER18> Two words. Reader mode. It strips all the cruft out and gives you the text with a sensible set of styles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think CSS Modules[1] (mentioned toward the end of the article) provides a starting point to finding a good compromise. It deals with the scoping issues, as well as interoperability between Javascript modules and the defined style classes.

As it stands, the CSS Modules approach doesn't yet provide the same level of expressiveness which can be achieved with the styles-in-JS approach, but perhaps there is still value in evolving CSS-the-language to provide enough expressiveness while still providing an optimal syntax for style definition and facilitating static analysis and transformation specific to the domain of styling.

[1] [https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules](https://github.com/css- modules/css-modules)

</comment><comment><USER20> It makes a lot of sense to programstically generate css because all of what the author said is true: global namespace, difficulty to trace specificity, modularity, etc. I am not convinced inline styles are the way forward. You can just as easily write (manually or programmatically)your styles using css/sass/less and optimize and serve them.

You can just do it server side. You can create global classes for objects and elements and include the However you want. You can optimize on your own server FOR THE CLIENT, and serve the best result.

It is dogmatic, but I don't like inline styling. I think it should really be limited to values that are expected to regularly fluctuate during a session. This would be your height or width resizing on an animation or something where the x or y moves. These usecases make sense because you directly apply animation to an element.

Can you imagine what the dom would look like with html, javascript, css, sass, markdown and haml/ruby all on a page? I hope there is a way to demonstrate your page to Search Engines, because eventualu they may stop believing the alternate robots files if they just cant tell what is going on. Also, writing your own tags and attributes, I like it think it's helpful, but DOMs don't make sense anymore.

</comment><comment><USER21> The people complaining about this are programmers who don't understand CSS anyway. Their sites will still look like crap even if they do everything via Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER22> It only got one short mention in the article, but doesn't lack of media query support for inline styles kill this approach for any site that needs to be responsive?

</comment><comment><USER23> CSS for content is great, but for applications, I've moved into applying styles using javascript, with a base css file to prime the application.

</comment><comment><USER24> I find it ironical that I can barely _scroll_ this site on my omg-4-years-old smartphone. Yeah, we need more js and emulation, definitely.

<comment><USER12> On a webpage that already uses client side javascript, do you know if this would actually slow it down any real amount (more then 10ms)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd propose the following distinction, especially for React users:

If your components will only ever be used by you or a small, internal team of programmers, then inline styles can work.

If, however, your components are meant to be re-usable, public and accessible then CSS is still a _must._

To pick on one project react-datagrid is a super useful, public component for displaying data, but they use inline styles, which makes integrating the component into _any other design_ a nightmare. You have to fork their codebase to update a style because you can't over-ride it and there's no way they'd pull in a PR for your preferred style.

<comment><USER12> How about if you design the styles so you can pass in a styles object via the parent element, and the style-elemnt gets merged in to overwrite the defaults? is there a reason this wouldn't work?

<comment><USER25> They tried that in react-datagrid, but they forgot to expose a bunch. It's easy to use inline styles and hard to go back and add the layers of exposed properties you need to make sure they are accessible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been using inline everything since templates (ejs) came into existence. Once you have templates you're only editing one location anyway.

The biggest problem with CSS is it's really easy to add, and close to impossible to delete (detecting potential repercussions is hard).

Sure there's performance issues, but most of the time your developer/maintenance time is worth the the extra bytes.

<comment><USER27> It's not actually that terrible, but then again it depends on what you're building I suppose.

Where I work, I made a fairly robust image diffing utility that runs using Selenium/WebDriver on all browsers that we support. Combined with a robust test suite of many different scenarios, we can make changes to our stylesheets with a pretty high amount of confidence that if anything changed, it'll fail the build.

<comment><USER28> That sounds like a lotta work, but that's a good thing to have when the appearance is an important part of what you are doing. (cost-benefit, risk management and all that)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Its weird because I remember when no one knew about CSS, amd then suddenly everyone had to do it. I also remember separating JS and HTML being really important for everyone for many years, but now everyone is doing the opposite. It just goes to show that people can make a cargo cult about any general approach.

<comment><USER9> Separating JS and markup _was_ important when we were imperatively mutating the DOM by hand. Writing "inline" JS is necessarily global, and therefore makes writing modular code a lot harder.

In other words, separating JS from the markup allowed us to write more modular (and therefore less error-prone) code, but was sometimes harder to think about.

Components capture the markup with the JS behavior that corresponds with it in a modular fashion; it's the best of both worlds. It really is a step forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Shadow DOM scopes CSS, removing the global problem and allowing smaller, encapsulated CSS. Scopes styles are much easier to maintain and reason about, and faster to boot.

</comment><comment><USER31> CSS preprocessors are fine. Processors only understand binary but noone programs in binary today. If CSS become the binary of tomorrow, it's fine.

Inlining CSS is stupid, it makes your page bigger, less flexible, doesn't use browser caching technics, and didn't solve the problem at all (or make it worse...).

CSS with Javascript is even worse, as it will be slow as fuck, hard to maintain, and equivalent to directly write CSS by hand anyway.

flex-boxes, box-model, table display, and more... solve most of problems you will ever had.

<comment> rational-future So many wrong statements.

The performance differences, between CSS styles applied from a JS file and a CSS file are very small on modern browsers, with JS being faster sometime.

JS files are cached.

Preprocessors are not fine, they complicate and slow down the development process.

Inlining CSS is not stupid, OP discusses the numerous advantages it brings...

<comment><USER31> > The performance differences, between CSS styles applied from a JS file and a > CSS file are very small on modern browsers, with JS being faster sometime.

False, JS have to be interpreted and you have issue with document not being fully loaded. And CSS is easy to parse, faster to parse and "run" than JS. No, saying that JS is faster than CSS is just false.

> JS files are cached.

CSS too, and even can be prerendered. And CSS works when JS is disabled.

> Preprocessors are not fine, they complicate and slow down the development > process.

That's not an argument at all because with the right tool its just like using a compiler. See "make" for example. Also you have to see how much you gain with the preprocessor, maybe loosing 0.01ms per "make" is worse it since you write code 1.2 times faster...

> Inlining CSS is not stupid, OP discusses the numerous advantages it > brings...

And do not highlight the obvious disadvantages.

<comment> rational-future You have NO idea what you're talking about.

>> JS have to be interpreted

Yeah, because the Bible, the Quaran and the Declaration of Independence say so ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I haven't played with React yet. Does this CSS in your JS approach work with SASS, too?

</comment><comment><USER33> I've done this in a few applications. It's really great.

You of course want to build up abstractions within your codebase to keep things DRY, but you get to use the normal tools for that (variables, functions, objects, classes) etc, rather than CSS.</comment>


TensorFlow 1.12 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/releases/tag/v1.12.0 <comment><USER2> Great new features for Keras here - particularly if you like using the Estimator API.

* Keras models can now be saved and run directly from tensorflow serving.

* Keras models can now be evaluated using the Dataset API.</comment>


Show HN: Calc – A fast and intuitive command-line calculator written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alfredxing/calc

<comment><USER2> An alternative that isn't discussed in the _Why not use ...?_ section is calc:

[http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/calc](http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/comp/calc)

It is very powerful, has history, shows previous calculations, and it's pretty darn quick too.

Of course, there are plenty more calculators, powerful too. I only mention calc because it bothers me that the name of this new project collides with it, without really providing anything useful beyond having been written in a fashionable language.

<comment><USER3> Upvoted for calc. I use it for all the small calculation, as it most often behaves slightly better than bc

      $ echo "1/2" | bc
      0

      $ echo "1/2" | bc -l
      .50000000000000000000

      $ echo "scale=1; 1/2" | bc
      .5

      $ echo "1/2" | calc -p
      0.5

      $ echo "+1+1+1+1" | bc -l
      (standard_in) 1: syntax error

      $ echo "+1+1+1+1" | calc -p
      4

      $ echo "sqrt(-1)" | bc -l
      Runtime error (func=(main), adr=4): Square root of a negative number

      $ echo "sqrt(-1)" | calc -p
      1i

      $ echo "s(pi)" | bc -l
      0

      $ echo "sin(pi())" | calc -p
      0

<comment><USER4> Slightly shorter, and it's nice to have the expression at the end of the line:

        $ bc -l <<< "1+1"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Other comments are reasonable, but fantastic work alfredxing, played around with it just now and loved how simple and intuitive it was. The only feature I really miss here is being able to use the previous answer -- is this there and I just didn't find it? Thinking of an 'ans' constant that holds the previous answer

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, and great suggestion! Would you mind opening an issue on GitHub for it? I'll probably get around to implementing it soon.

<comment><USER5> Sorry HN doesn't have reply notifications and just saw this, just added the issue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I stopped using infix calculators a while back in favor of RPN/stack calculators (dc) because I get quite tired of parens. Is the program structured such that this change would be simple? Otherwise I feel like this is simply yet another CLI calculator.

<comment><USER7> I use the M-x calc in Emacs for this reason.

<comment><USER8> I find emacs calc very fitting the RPN tradition (reminiscent of HP pocket calculators), since it provides an algebraic solver; always a pleasurable thing to witness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice! I wrote one called maths a while back. It's in Ruby but I use it pretty regularly and it does the trick:

[https://github.com/commondream/maths](https://github.com/commondream/maths)

</comment><comment><USER10> Emacs natives should know "C-x * *". Worth learning the bin/hex support with "d 2", "d 6".

</comment><comment><USER11> Also checkout [http://www.jasymchat.com](http://www.jasymchat.com), it is a mobile version of Jasymca, A Java based computer algebra system.

</comment><comment><USER12> Use Tab instead: [http://bitbucket.org/tkatchev/tab](http://bitbucket.org/tkatchev/tab)

Includes a calculator, but also a complete declarative data-processing language too.

E.g.:

        $ tab "[ log(@),@ : count(5) ]"
        0	1
        0.693147	2
        1.09861	3
        1.38629	4
        1.60944	5

</comment><comment><USER13> Qalculate has both a GUI and a command-line `qalc` util that does what `calc` seems to do and much more:

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

</comment><comment><USER14> Every small tool deserves special launching site and promoting if it's "written in go" or some other hyped language.

<comment><USER15> Most developers can't create something new and original or improve upon what's best out there so they reinvent things with very limited functions with something that people think is cool today (in this case, golang).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice and great job ! I should switch to this. I have been using python until now.

function calc { python -c "from math import *; print $1" }

<comment><USER4> You might like [https://github.com/Russell91/pythonpy](https://github.com/Russell91/pythonpy) then.

</comment></comment><comment> v-yadli I thought you mean calc.exe

</comment><comment><USER15> Why not use.. Scientific Calculator (PowerCalc) for Android?

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scaleasw.p...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scaleasw.powercalc)

<comment><USER17> My personal prejudice: I reject any calculator that does not compute the Gamma function (or factorial of non-integer arguments). Therefore, I reject this one.</comment></comment>


In Allowing Ad Blockers, a Test for Google  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/business/media/04link.html

<comment><USER2> "Ad blockers are still used by a tiny proportion of the Internet population, and these aren't the kind of people susceptible to ads anyway," Wladimir Palant, who runs Adblock Plus on Firefox, wrote

I don't buy that in any way. We are all "susceptible to ads". In fact I believe that the smarter the user, the more they want targeted ads. I love finding new products that can help me. The key is "targeted" and now "McDonalds".

</comment><comment><USER3> An interesting question is, _could_ google have successfully banned adblockers as a matter of policy once it published an API? It's not like there is an Apple-esque chokehold on extension publication, and nobody signs a TOS agreement or breaks an EULA seal to use Google. They could undoubtedly refrain from publishing adblockers in any google-hosted gallery, but that's a rather different thing.</comment>


Hackers claim to have 427M Myspace passwords - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/427-million-myspace-passwords-emails-data-breach <comment><USER2> Millions of MySpace pages are now in danger of being turned into garish monstrosities by malicious hackers.

<comment><USER3> Obviously the bigger issue is the tens if not hundreds of millions of people who use the same password for MySpace and their email or bank accounts.

<comment><USER4> > tens if not hundreds of millions

You sure the word "millions" was meant to be there? ;)

Anyone who's using the same password for MySpace and their email and bank hasn't changed their passwords in a decade.

<comment><USER3> Ok maybe just tens of millions. A lot of people rarely change their passwords.

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure you meant tens of billions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Like it even matters. Remember MySpace decided out of the blue to just delete everyone's messages, wall posts, etc back in 2013. And didn't give any options to download a copy of them.

I STILL want a copy of all my private messages and everything else. I can't imagine they actually deleted everything.

<comment><USER7> It would somewhat matter if people were still using their old passwords for some of their online accounts.

<comment><USER8> Yes, this is why most password leaks matter. A huge number of people use the same password across multiple sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Years ago when I created a MySpace account, I set my password to "password". They eventually added "password" to the password blacklist, but fortunately I was grandfathered in.

<comment><USER10> I managed to register a Yahoo account when I was a child with the password of 'poo'. Login still works although unsurprisingly I do get a notification of suspicious activity on the account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can I just buy my own password? I forgot it ages ago and the email address I registered with no longer exists.

</comment><comment><USER12> First LinkedIn, now Myspace! I hope Geocities has their eye on the ball where security is concerned!

<comment><USER13> AngelFire users said to be relaxed about the unfolding situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The number 1 password was: homelesspa ?

Anyone know why that's the #1 password?

<comment><USER15> According to

[http://news.softpedia.com/news/possible-myspace-data- breach-...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/possible-myspace-data-breach- exposes-passwords-for-427-million-users-504583.shtml)

"Just take note that the first entry, "homelesspa," was automatically generated for a number of accounts that had the same email format, possibly bots or fake users."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Even if it's true, what is he going to do with them?

Myspace has been rotting for a long time, even before Rupert Murdoch decided to waste hundreds of millions to acquire it.

<comment><USER17> How many people are using the same email and password on other websites? How many people have the same password protecting their email?

<comment><USER18> True, this is why I use LastPass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hmm. I expected to see (2006) beside the submission title.

</comment><comment><USER20> Lot of people tend to use the same password always, so I guess it represents a real threat.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wonder how many of those were in active use recently? Passwords belonging to people who'd recently visited Myspace might be a bit more useful than those from people who left about when Facebook started getting big...

<comment><USER22> Emails and passwords, you could try those emails elsewhere, including with the respective email itself.

<comment><USER23> Previous poster is stating the passwords could be the same as they were 10 years ago, why MySpace was popular, and the users aren't using those same passwords anymore.

<comment><USER22> You would be surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Same hackers also claim to have valuable Prodigy, Compuserve and the more contemporary Geocities account passwords.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why is "homelesspa" the most common password?

Edit: Just read the article, most likely bots.

<comment><USER26> [https://www.leakedsource.com/blog/myspace](https://www.leakedsource.com/blog/myspace)

> Due to some accounts having two passwords, there are 427,484,128 total > passwords for only 360 million users. Additionally, the accounts with > password "homelesspa" seem to be automatically generated as all the emails > that use this password follow the same format. We also suspect given the > number of passwords with a 1 at the end, MySpace required numbers and > letters at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's impossible, no hacker would create a Myspace account!

</comment><comment><USER28> Oh, they just mixed geocities and myspace together?

Where in the world should 400M-logins for myspace come from?

Ah, okay, i see. First create 390M fake accounts, then sell them. Profit!

</comment><comment><USER29> And the news is that... people are apparently still using Myspace :-D

</comment><comment><USER13> Millions of middle-age spam writers unconcerned.

</comment><comment><USER30> whats that

</comment><comment><USER31> And nothing of value was lost.</comment>


Google's Nexus 7 discovered to have Smart Cover-like magnetic sensor - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/11/google-nexus-7-magnetic-screen-sleep-sensor/

<comment><USER3> RIM mobile phones have for years and years (least as long as I remember) had a magnetic sensor. With a official case that has a magnet in, it will turn the screen off and lock the device once it aligns with the magnet in the case - <USER2> pop phone into case on your belt and bingo - screen shuts off and phone locks.

So I'm not sure what patent is being violated at all and indeed who's.

<comment><USER4> It's amazing how much marketing can make a difference. When the Smart Cover released, it was like no one had ever heard of a BlackBerry.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, belt clip covers are not awesome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Missing from the specs because of Apple's patent?

[http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- adv.htm&r=16&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=%2820120320.PD.%20AND%20Apple.ASNM.%29&OS=ISD/20120320%20AND%20AN/Apple&RS=%28ISD/20120320%20AND%20AN/Apple%29)

<comment><USER7> I doubt it, at least not as it relates to the patent you linked. That patent is extremely specific to the exact form factor of the Smart Cover and it would be pretty easy to design other covers that are similar but not violations.

Magnetic sensors in Android devices for the purposes of changing functionality are nothing new, my old Motorola Droid (which predates the Apple patent filing by years) had one that it used to determine car docking state.

<comment><USER3> Spot on and Apples patent pertains to connecting things with magnets (how that got thru I realy don't know beyond patent officers need better drug testing IMHO).

This is a magnetic sensor so Apple can do nothing. Maybe functionality is not enabled and this is why it is not mentioned. There were a few NFC phones that initialy in the earlier days did not mention they had NFC built in as the software was not ready to utilise it. Indeed there are probably many features in phones chipsets that don't get used, but are mearly a software update away. All technology has to some extent undocumented features - undocumented CPU instructions being a classic one of its time. maybe a better example is how some USB TV tuners can act as hardware for software radio's.

<comment><USER8> That's my guess too - the power management software may need some refinement yet. Or maybe it's perfect, and being pushed upstream... that might keep it from being 'final' as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Android accessories are often pretty cheap in price and quality. Apple Smart Cover is a well made product.

<comment><USER10> It's alright. I still think its overpriced.</comment></comment>


Intel cuts electric cords with wireless power system - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080821/ts_afp/usitinternetenergychipcompanyintel

<comment><AUTHOR> The first reaction I had when I read this was "This would be fantastic on a much larger scale to power electric cars".

I believe that this kind of technology would eliminate the range debate between pure electric cars and those that rely on petroleum.

That being said, the only downside I can come up with off the cuff is environmental, as in what impact would a large scale magnetic field network have on migrating birds and the associated environmental consequences that would happen as a result.

Anyone have any insight?

<comment><USER2> Well I have an answer for you but not directly for birds, but indirectly. (please bear with me).

I know that many animals use the earths magnet field to navigate plus they use the other senses they got.

Taking bees for example, current theories about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) range from stress to toxins aso. Another factor which has already been discovered is that bees respond very sensitive to magnetic field fluctuations.

Transportation of bees from northern to southern America caused the bees to be in disorder and ,,panic''. I think a widespread usage of this technology would profundly hurt animals. Though clearly I am not an expert in this topic.

Paper:

Is there any influence of magnetic or astrophysical fields on the circadian rhythm of honeybees?, M. F. Neumann, 1988

<comment><AUTHOR> So my current understanding of magnetic fields is pretty much limited to high school, but would it be possible to align this magnetic field with the Earth's magnetic field?

I'm just throwing it out there for consideration.

<comment><USER3> Even if it was possible - it would need to be much stronger.

(And I guess you want a moving/changing field anyway to extract energy easily.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FBI can secretly turn on laptop cameras without the indicator light - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/fbi-can-secretly-activate-laptop-cameras-without-the-in-1478371370/@caseychan

<comment><USER2> _" The FBI's elite hacker team designed a piece of malicious software that was to be delivered secretly when Mo signed on to his Yahoo e-mail account..."_

Quote from WP article referenced by OA

So the next Mo does not use Yahoo, alternates laptops with different OSes, and runs some kind of process monitor.

Arms race: as the techniques get more invasive, the targets get more careful. I don't know what the answer is.

</comment><comment><USER3> And this is why I get annoyed when people complain about me having a band-aid over my webcam.

(I've also got my internal mic physically disconnected.)

It's not that much trouble, and sidesteps things like this entirely.</comment>


No, the NSA can't track phones when they are "off" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.erratasec.com/2013/07/no-nsa-cant-track-phones-even-when-off.html

<comment><USER2> This article seems under-informed. The scenario which privacy and security wonks usually consider to be the explanation for various government assertions that they can track phones while they're off is that the target's phone receives an OTA firmware update which makes it act as if it is off (turns off the display, etc.) but does not actually power down the phone's radio. So, yes, the phone is "not really off", but as far as the user can tell it is off.

A link for context: [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/remotely_eaves...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/12/remotely_eavesd_1.html)</comment>


The Big Bitcoin Heist - <AUTHOR> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/the-big-bitcoin-heist <comment><USER2> I'm in Iceland reading this now and almost every sentence of this article is filled with embellishments and half truths

<comment><USER3> care to give some examples? Because I am a curious reader who does not live in Iceland and don't have the context to be able to identify the embellishments

<comment><USER2> sure it's always frustrating because it does nothing to change the narrative of what's repeated outside of Iceland regardless of the truth.

>"At 32, Stefansson is the most famous thief ever to emerge from this polite and friendly island, ranked by the Global Peace Index as the world's most peaceful nation."

Patently false. So far our most famous criminal would be (Tomas)[[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/iceland- murd...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/world/europe/iceland-murder- victim-birna-brjansdottir-autopsy.html)] or runner up for any of the various banking / cartel that siphoned money out of the country during the crash. Sindri doesn't even register with most people here except as a petty thug. Bjarni Ben the old prime minister or Sigmundur David both appeared in the Panama Papers here as well.

>It was cryptocurrency, ironically, that helped save Iceland after the bankers bankrupted it. I have no idea where the author got this but Cryptocurrency has provided any material benefit to Iceland in any form or shape, I say this even though I'm a BTC advocate. First it was our fishing industry which was able to sell high abroad and return with Euros to exchange for ISK and then it was the tourism boom (as much as we all hate it here) from 2014-onwards. Crypto currency mining here doesn't employ anyone, doesn't get aggressively taxed (it should) and often gets industrial market rates on large enough consumption (just like the aluminum smelters).

Oh and to correct another misunderstood thing about Iceland we get around 70% of our power generation from HYDROpower not Geothermal like everyone things (that goes towards home heating mostly). Which means .......Dams, lots and lots of dams flooding areas of Iceland and destroying the nature the tourists come to see.

> Today, Bitcoin mines consume more energy than all of Iceland's homes > combined.

This is just repeated ad-nauseam abroad now more than any other statement and its entirely attributed to a single electrical engineer for the electric producer company who was commenting on if the building trend kept at the same rate back in 2018. It didn't obviously but any idiot journalist now stumbles across some _other_ article saying it so they just repeat now too. Smelting consumes FAR more electricity here than any other industry.

These are just a handful, nobody likes these guys here, no one is cheering for them we're mostly embarrassed that they're gleefully unaware of badly they make Iceland look international as the posterboys for big, dumb, meat-head rubes, that were used by a foriegn criminal who never got caught. Classic Icelandic hnakkar.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this.

> Classic Icelandic hnakkar.

Google isn't helping me much or I'm missing the point.

<comment><USER5> This article explains a bit about it:

[http://icelandreport.blogspot.com/2006/03/necks.html](http://icelandreport.blogspot.com/2006/03/necks.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _In Iceland, it is not a crime to stage a prison break: The law recognizes > that inmates, like all human beings, are naturally entitled to freedom, and > thus cannot be punished for seeking it._

Funny :)

<comment><USER7> The same is true in Germany. You'll probably break a few laws while breaking out of a prison, but the act itself is not punishable and will not yield you more time.

<comment><USER8> What's the economic result? Any relative increase in attempts since there's no incentive not to?

<comment><USER9> The sample size is so low you can't get any meaningful results. And use of violence against a guard or breaking prison materials is still illegal (since it's illegal to use violence against anyone and/or to destroy property). But if the door is left open and you walk out without harming anyone, that in itself is not illegal.

<comment><USER8> So how does this work in the case of initial arrest? Or a fugitive thats not necessarily am escapee? There's no incentive to surrender?

<comment><USER6> > _Or a fugitive thats not necessarily am escapee?_

I'd guess that that person, not being at that point of time a "detainee", would get the outcome of the other laws related to "resisting arrest" or something similar (like when police wants to do a check on you and/or your vehicle, etc... and you run off).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> yeah he stole a bunch of stuff that is probably already obsolete as of publication of this article. huge cost too in transporting and setting it up. there are and still are guys who made as much as that or even more just quietly running crypto giveaway scams on YouTube and twitter without all the fanfare of an actual heist. of all the thefts and heists involving bitcoin, this one is downright unimpressive in terms of dollar amount.

>Mr. X told Stefansson that he would give him 15 percent of the profits from as many Bitcoin computers as he could steal from data centers across Iceland. The total take, Stefansson calculated, could be as much as $1.2 million a year—"forever." Because, with the stolen computers, Stefansson and Mr. X would establish their own Bitcoin mine.

yes because mining computers never become obsolete

<comment><USER2> >yes because mining computers never become obsolete

exactly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's an AP version of the same story (works in private mode): [https://apnews.com/55117fb55a714e909fb9aaf08841a5d6/Bitcoin-...](https://apnews.com/55117fb55a714e909fb9aaf08841a5d6/Bitcoin- heist:-600-powerful-computers-stolen-in-Iceland)

<comment><USER11> And also about the escape: [https://apnews.com/db543dc5d2774098acf398984ac7324a/Suspect-...](https://apnews.com/db543dc5d2774098acf398984ac7324a/Suspect- in-Iceland's-'Big-Bitcoin-Heist'-escapes-prison)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought bitcoin mining hardware was only useful for a few months at best due to rising complexity built in the protocol? If so the computers hidden by the criminals won't be very useful when they get out of prison a few years from now.

<comment><USER13> There is also a premium on fresh block rewards that have not been spent yet. These are called "coinbase transactions" which is why the company is called Coinbase. The reason these fresh coins are valuable is that they are untainted by prior transactions and have various uses because of that. So mining BTC has an additional premium above the spot price of BTC.

<comment><USER14> > The reason these fresh coins are valuable is that they are untainted by > prior transactions and have various uses because of that.

What "various uses" are you talking about? Are you talking about fears of future blacklisting, or something else? If fears of future blacklisting, the only use I can see would be speculative holding. I've written raw Bitcoin transactions, and I don't know of any technical distinctions between coins that would change how they can be used based on prior transactions.

<comment><USER13> If you have fresh coins you can say you mined them which is good for financial reasons. They also have zero prior history so companies like Chainalysis cannot link them anywhere.

I really don't have more to say on this subject, just think about it for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale [http://archive.is/np6rz](http://archive.is/np6rz)

</comment><comment><USER15> March 2018

</comment><comment><USER16> All I could think when reading that headline was "Which one?". Frankly this incident (a physical theft of mining hardware) isn't even that interesting in a "bitcoin" sense. Presumably the hardware was attractive because it's easily liquidatable (being used by inherently gray market folks already) and not because of any value from their bitcoin role per se.

</comment><comment><USER17> 550 Bitcoin computers? I assume are the dedicated type, not general ones like the one I use to type my comment. If so, those go obsolete in like half a year. The heist, with its mined bitcoins, its maximum of several millions (USD) at best, even at 20k USD/bitcoin. Become a politician, you'll get these money and much more in those 4 years of a single mandate, all legal because they are called donations.

<comment><USER18> No: [https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making- di...](https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/making- disbursements/personal-use/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> >In his teens, Stefansson graduated to drugs: pot, speed, cocaine, ecstasy, LSD. By the time he turned 20, he was growing cannabis. His rap sheet soon included 200 cases of petty crime. He broke into people's homes to steal TVs and stereos, and somehow managed to extract $10,000 from some slot machines in a Reykjavík bar.

yikes. I'm sure he's hardly the only one. It makes you wonder if Iceland's purported low crime and peacefulness is due to under-reporting of crime and crime being ignored and excessively lenient sentencing guidelines, than because of the absence of actual crime. If all the criminals keep being released over and over, then the prison population will be very low yet there will be crime everywhere anyway. lenient sentences heavily tips the moral calculus in favor of criminals, both petty and major.Time is money. time behind bars means less time for stealing.

<comment><USER2> It is a large reason actually, we don't have enough well funded programs for mental help or drug addiction and roughly 70% of prison inmates are there for drugs and just cycle in and out running up huge fines which they'll never actually be able to pay.

Also please keep in mind because of our sovereignity but low population we win a lot of categories for "most this of any nation" due to sheer per-capita mathematics. We're basically the most-per-capita country out there in many ways.</comment></comment>


Should you take a pay cut to work at a startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ellenbeldner.info/2010/12/elad_gil_bootstrapping_raise_d.html <comment><USER2> I'm sorry but this approach infuriates me. I am constantly approached by people asking me for discounts for equity, low salaries etc because of the idea that I'd get paid out at an exit event. And every time I take the deal, I end up paying their bills when the company fails. The founders walk away having not only left the investors empty handed, but now I'm in worse debt than when I started.

Founders, please stop having the people who work for you assume the financial risk of your venture. It is a completely f'd up practice, because 9 times out of 10 they end up paying your bills when the company goes bunk. An investor is well aware of the risks involved, but often times employees and contractors are subject to falling for hype and don't have enough information to make an educated assessment.

I think its great to _reward_ people at a successful exit, but its another thing to take money out of their pockets because you were able to use your hype powers to lure them into working for you at a discount. Just know that for all your will power and positive thinking the magical successful exit is a _very_ rare event, even for people with previous success. This means that when you ask a non-investor to essentially commit personal wealth to your vision there is a high probability that person will pay for it in the end.

/rant

<comment><USER3> One thing you touch on here that's rather important is disclosure of information honestly to potential employees.

Whereas investors (hopefully) have done their diligence on the company and are privy to the full financial situation of the company, employees quite often aren't. Employees generally don't get a copy of the term sheet, or know much about their options beyond the "40,000 shares valued at .03 each with an outstanding number of shares being 10mm".

When you ask investors to take risk, that's one thing. They have the most to gain (due to more favorable terms) and aren't actually having to put in the sweat equity to make it happen, and they also get the best information. Employees however often have no idea what the burn rate of the company even is or what the current equity structure of the company looks like.

<comment><USER2> Yes. Exactly.

When a potential client or employer offers you equity, you can't sit there and ask them for their financials. And for the most part, employees and contractors aren't very well educated in the risks involved with investing in a startup either.

<comment><USER4> > When a potential client or employer offers you equity, you can't sit there > and ask them for their financials.

Why not? If they flip out and don't hire you, hurrah! People who are allergic to financial details don't make good business partners. (Bernie Madoff being the asymptotic example. He was famously hostile to questions about the financials.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These days, when most of the founders are willing to cash out at an early exit, it doesn't make much sense economically to work in a startup(unless you are part of founding team with good equity). Ofcourse, work at a startup will be definitely more interesting on average (because there is not much legacy code to maintain and processes in place to slow things down), but its not hard to find interesting work in a big co. And the best part is you can work regular hours with relatively better benefits and job security and spend your personal time working on your own ideas. This way it maximizes both the economical and work related satisfaction IMO :)

<comment><USER6> I think instead of a lower base salary and equity of a startup trying to go big early cashouts really call for higher salaries than big companies to be appealing.

<comment><USER7> Or at least equal. If I like the job and it calls for 60 hours a week instead of 50, but it pays the same, I'll gladly do it. The 50 hours of the week that I would have worked either way will be a lot more enjoyable. But asking me to take 1/3 of what I would get paid elsewhere just isn't happening.

Any offer that is work for free but take equity is not one I would consider taking as an employee (obviously, cofounder is a different story).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Er.. correct me if I'm wrong.

Take Auctomatic for example, they are acquired for $5 million in cash, for the 3% Y Combinator's stake, it translate to a return of $150K in cash.

Assuming your startup survived the first 3 years, for a Software Engineer who is willingly to work for minimum wage, shouldn't the amount of equity for it to even make sense should be more than the normal 1% to 2% right?

<comment><USER9> Most people probably earn more than minimum wage, even at a startup. Still, as you and the article point out, doing the math is good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> First warning sign: someone self describes as a entrepreneur.

Second warning sign: asking you to work for free but your not an equal partner.

Danger! Will Robinson!

</comment><comment><USER11> I always like to think of working at a start up as akin to attending a relatively cheap graduate program where you may or may not get your degree after you complete all the coursework.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems like you are evaluating this completely based on compensation. Here are some possible reasons why you would work at a startup and take a paycut. a) I love the team, I love what they are doing, I love the work that they want me to do... I can't believe they are paying me to do this! b) I can learn so much from this team and experience, and in a couple of years, I'll be ready to do *SOMETHING (ie. start my own company, etc)... I can't believe they are paying me to do this! c) Totally believe in the team and their vision, this is going to be the next facebook, I want to be part of it, my equity can be worth millions, but regardless...I can't believe they are paying me to be part of this! However if your primary objective is to maximize compensation, then you shouldn't take a pay cut to work at a startup.

<comment><USER13> That advice only works with people with little experience.

For us folks on our late 20s, that have 7+ years of experience, compensation matters. If you already been into few good startups, or build from scratch successful products in a larger company, you have very little to learn into joining yet another startup.

Also, if you are good you probably have a lot of choices out there. It is not a startup vs. big corp binary choice. A lot of mid-size companies also offer flexible work conditions with good pay.

My advice: 1\. Learn what your value as an engineer is in the market. 2\. If the startup is underpaying you, tell them what the difference is, and make sure you negotiate a good equity for it. 3\. Place it in writing that your salary will go to full market value once the company gets the next round of funding.

At the end is your decision on what you are itching for. Just remember, most stock options go nowhere.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. I find the reason most startups have trouble hiring is that they're expecting to nab these people in their late 20s with loads of experience for the price of someone fresh out of college, wet behind the ears and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A somewhat interesting take on the situation, but is (obviously) looking only from one angle. Yes, in Ellen's situation, she's 'investing' lost earnings in to that company. But that 'investment' doesn't mean the same thing to the company, and probably shouldn't be rewarded with the same equity value given to someone putting in hard cash.

Still, it's good for people to think through these issues with real numbers before making commitments. I am approached every so often to come in to situations like the one described, but have yet to find one where I believed in the idea/company/team enough to jump in.

<comment><USER16> On the contrary, lost earning are cash-flow too. They deserve the same (or more) equity than 'hard cash'. The arrogance of folks with money in their pockets is astounding. We don't need to add to that by buying into the fantasy.

<comment><USER17> Sort of agree, except for the time value of money. Someone who puts cash in is putting it in up front. Whereas someone who forgoes earnings is foregoing a smaller amount periodically over time.

Of course the time value of money is near zero right now anyway.

<comment><USER16> By me forgoing money, the entrepreneur has More Money to spend. It IS cash flow. It IS putting money up front.

<comment><USER17> If you invest $50k in a company, you pay up front. If you forego $50k in annual salary, you pay each paycheck. Discounted, the first is slightly more.

<comment><USER16> Yes, true. I didn't parse the previous comment right, I see the point now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Honestly it depends on your place in life. If you REALLY believe in the company and can afford to do so, then it's probably worth it.

I don't have that luxury (2 kids) right now so when I went to the current startup I'm with it was a sideways step. However I really believe in the company and was willing to take the risk of it not working out to make the move.

In fact I'm technically making less due to increased commute time and benefits changes but again, I really believe in the company.

</comment><comment><USER19> You might just expect the startup to hit it so big that you don't really care how cheaply do VCs get their share. BP for $2000 might still be a great deal, even if VCs get theirs for $500 a piece.

</comment><comment><USER20> You should do what you're passionate about. The rest is housekeeping.

<comment><USER21> What house are you keeping? Is your house made of passion? I don't know about you, but my house is made of money. If I have no money, I have no house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I believe at this point most of the people on news.ycombinator are well aware of the "work at startup" bait. If you are that good to help a startup to grow from 0 to millions, you typically get $150K at Google (for example). For the 4-5 years it typically gets for the very few successful startups to cash out, you will be earning $750K for sure + benefits + sanity + normal life.

If you are that good and you are not one of the founders, you have to be very careful in your decision to join a startup. For every success story (it gets multiplied x 1,000,000 by the press), there are thousands of dramas and flops noone hears about.

<comment><USER23> > sanity + normal life.

What sounds like a downside to you sounds like an upside to me. Normal life is pretty crappy, though $150k sounds tempting.

<comment><USER24> > Normal life is pretty crappy

You're doing it wrong?

My "normal life" is pretty awesome. Happy hour and meals with friends and girlfriend several times a week. Exercise most days. Most weekends include at least one of: hiking, rock climbing, skiing, snowshoeing, mountain climbing; often in wilderness areas with no cell phone coverage. Movies, live music, theater. Time to read books.

<comment><USER23> It's mostly about the flexibility, not the after-work things. After working in a flexible environment for the last 10 years, and doing a little bit of 9-5 style work for the last few weeks, it really sucks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> +1 for using basis points, a sensible unit for skimming a small profit off a giant deal. (A basis point is 1% of 1%, or 0.01%.)</comment>


Let's Build Joe Rogan's Podcast App - <AUTHOR> Joe keeps talking about building a new podcast app (he's stated a need--we just need to build it). I want to be proactive and build it for him, then have him invest in the company. The app he talks about on air would let his listeners pay a small fee to get his show with no ads. I'd argue that doesn't create enough value for the subscriber. They can already skip the ads on any podcast app. I've got an mvp designed that includes additional features that would let his audience dive deeper on the topics that surface in the course of the show.
I'm looking for a technical co-founder who loves JRE and sees the opportunity I do. Massive amounts of VC dollars are being poured into the podcast space, but all the resulting products have nearly identical UI (same old podcast player that has been around since day 1). These companies are missing a huge opportunity to create a more engaging and immersive experience for their listeners.
Who's interested? <comment><USER2> Side note idea:

Can you also use transcript (YouTube probably has transcript on most of his video) so you can search through the podcast to find a part like a question e.g: (Joe ask Penrose about what is consciousness) and basically give the timestamp.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea! Also, use ML to cherrypick moments from shows the user may be interested in. Good stuff!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: FaceID in the dark? With your eyes closed? - <AUTHOR> I think I read that FaceID would work in the dark. And I think I also read that FaceID would not work if your eyes were closed. Are both of these statements true together?<p>If the emitter is doing something like lighting up the iris, and they really can unlock in the dark but only if your eyes are open, that really is kinda cool. If not, isn't it a security vuln? <comment><AUTHOR> The other question I have, maybe it's in the keynote, is how powerful is this scanner? what is its range and resolution? can 3rd party apps access it and use it to capture surroundings? can we use it to bump-map streaming video?

iPhone X seems like a pretty powerful scanning device if you ask me. The custom apps you can write with this, it's amazing how much potential getting hardware like this will unlock.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why would it ignore the "eyes open" requirement just because you're in the dark?</comment>


Happiness-based project appraisals - <AUTHOR> http://jgn.heroku.com/2010/06/06/happiness-based-project-appraisals/

<comment><USER2> "I'm willing to work for free if it's the most exciting thing ever. If it's challenging, which in turn enables me to learn from the experience, which in turn makes me happy"

So, have you actually ever done this? Or are you just "willing?"

I'm a freelance developer and I would never do this. Client work is rarely fun, but for me it beats my alternatives.

Here is a better idea I think. Rather than working for free for someone else, find your own project which makes you happy and work on that project for free. Then, if you can make a business out of that project, it's your money and your business. That's much better than making someone else money from your labor.

Another quote:

"If you're project is both interesting and relies on solid UX to work, then you can compensate me with something else than cash (equity?). I will come through, it's my expertise."

Equity (part ownership) isn't working for free. In fact, it could be much better paying than even your highest rates (but odds are probably against it.) I don't think this point should be lumped in with your "free" or "lower rate" points.

Also, all the items under "But you're getting ripped off!" aren't very good reasons if you are in well enough demand to always keep busy. All of those bulleted items you listed off in that section are just as much benefits from paid projects as they are for free projects, so you might as well be getting paid. There might be very rare exceptions though (building a project for a rockstar running a non profit or something.)

Money doesn't buy happiness, but it gives you a powerful tool and more options to find happiness. You are running a business, so run it like a real business!</comment>


Show HN: A Modern Jekyll Blog Theme for Companies - <AUTHOR> http://incorporated.sendtoinc.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Creator here.

This is the first version, and as a designer pretty much my first open source project, so let me know if you have feedback or something that should be done better. I wanted to push it out though if it helps other people to design their blogs, or startups that just want start blogging quickly.

<comment><USER2> Nice job, very professional and modern theme. I will definitely be using it - thanks in advance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks really great. I think that this is the type of theme that any company could utilize and save themselves a load of resources early on when time/money/people are in short supply.

</comment><comment><USER4> Easy to use this in octopress

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16289012/theme- developmen...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16289012/theme-development- in-octopress)

<comment><USER5> how?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks good!

Jekyll theming is an area that I wish would take off a little more. I've looked for custom themes on several occasions and it really seems like there are about a dozen total, and that's it.

<comment><USER7> I've been creating a couple of blogs over the last week using Jekyll, It's pretty easy and I was not aware there were so little. Might have to make some templates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Didn't realize I had to click "View Demo" at first.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does this integrate with the GitHub editor for jekyll posts? I pushed (with the rakefile) and it doesn't appear to – but I pushed to master not gh-pages.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really pretty! Looks like it was inspired by Medium.</comment>


Making money twice - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1256-making-money-twice <comment><USER3> Interesting post. Not everyone can get away with repackaging though. You better be damn sure you're content is amazing before trying to serve it up over and over again. Otherwise it'll just piss people off.

They get away with because the content itself is so valuable.

<comment><USER4> I would actually say that the content isn't spectacular. It isn't bad by any means - but not in a league of it's own either. Getting real can probably best be described as a cooked down version of common sense and business 101.

What is amazing though is the marketing - which is what this post is all about. I'm sure that at least one third of the people on this site could create the same content if they put their mind to it. What almost nobody can do though is market it like 37signals.

<comment><USER5> _"at least one third of the people on this site could create the same content if they put their mind to it"_

I'll give you that your one third could produce the ideas, but how many could also produce the straightforward, simple, clear writing? It's harder than it looks.

<comment><USER6> If I've learned anything on Hacker News, its not the idea that matters, its the execution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This must be how people transition from doing useful work to being marketing gurus etc. Yeah it pays, but it's bad for the soul :-) I recall Phillip J. Eby, once an unusually smart Python programmer, now a self-help author.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for your comment. I thought I was the only one that read this post as "more ways to keep milking money from the same suckers."

They already cried foul when Google did a product that was slightly similar to Campfire. Now, I'd love to see their reaction if someone decided to "repackage" one of their products on their own.

<comment><USER9> Repackaging someone else's content and repackaging your own content are two extremely different things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is bordering on something I'd expect Donald Trump to suggest. Whether or not it can make money, it's a tactic I usually expect people like Trump or Robert Kiyosaki to promote and I start tuning out...

<comment><USER11> Really? How so? It's not that they were necessarily selling to the _same_ people 6 times? In one sense all they were doing is "making something (in a format) people want"

Some people read blogs - that's great - they got the info Some people only just found out about them and want the easy full back story - that's great - buy an ebook. Some people hate ebooks, but love the tactile feel of paper - buy the book Some people are more audible and need to hear it spoken to them - go to the conference..

All they did was come up with an idea once - and then present it in different and more appropriate ways to different people _. How is that Trump tactics?

_ Note - I realise that some people will buy the content multiple times - <USER2> honestly - this is a capitalist society, and they obviously derive some benefit from it...

<comment><USER10> Because they're telling us to pay them to teach us how to be successful _just like them_. Follow our easy program and you'll get rich, just like us!

I'm aware we live in a capitalist society. It's fine to make money. I'm saying it won't be my money.

<comment><USER12> I thought the same thing when I read this article. It's actually the exact formula described by Tim Ferris. \- Establish yourself as an "expert" in some field \- Sell information products about how to make money in said field \- Make far more money talking about said field than you ever actually made working in it

Nothing particularly wrong with it, maybe the advice is good and many people need someone to look up to. But the parallel with Kiyosaki is accurate.

<comment><USER13> Sort of like how Joel Spolsky makes more money via the job board on his blog than via sales of Fog Bugz. Hmm, doesn't some other blog have a job board as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you have an audience it is easier to sell many products. You can repackage all your blog posts into whatever you want, but if there is not much people who come across it, you wont make much.

<comment><USER15> Um, you won't have an audience until you start distribution though. There was a time that 37S didn't have any audience at all, and that wasn't too long ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Easier once you are already well known.

<comment><USER17> They have been well-known, but it's because they were saying smart things even back in the dot-com bubble: amidst the insanity of Pets.com, they were the ones citing the Dutch tulip mania (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania>) on their homepage as part of their pitch to potential clients and the world as a whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> FWIW, this doesn't always work. I know of a certain columnist who took some of his columns and had them made into a book (via Apress). Well, nobody bought the book and he now has several thousand of them sitting in his garage. I picked up 5 of the books when he was giving them away, meaning to give them to coworkers two jobs ago. I forgot, and now they take up a lot of space.

(This was the publisher's loss, though, not his. That's the way to do things :)

<comment><USER19> Vanity presses are risky that way. These days I think print-on-demand is the way to go for small runs like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> <http://decknetwork.net/>

Jesus Christ do they have to shout quite so loud?

</comment><comment><USER21> We are doing some of those, not to as large an audience as 37signals. One thing that makes it difficult is a lack of good tools to re-purpose content across blogs, wiki, web, print, presentations, animation/video, and PDF. We do workshops where we have the content both as a presentation (slides), a workbook/handout, and in a wiki. It's a lot of extra work right now. Conceptually we develop/refine in a wiki and deliver as presentation (PPT slides), print, and wiki (slimmed down, that is then available as an on-line notebook where further work can be done). I have contact info in my profile and would welcome any suggestions for tools that make it easy to develop and re-purpose content.

<comment><USER22> Emacs Muse Mode. Write the thing in Muse. Than export it to whatever you like it's everything available: wiki, html, pdf, latex and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hmmm... the flip side of this advice, of course, would be "don't spread yourself too thin", or "pick one thing and do it well"...

<comment><USER24> That's not a flip side at all.

What they're talking about here is the "do it well." They're making an argument that doing it well involves repackaging that one thing you're doing for multiple audiences.

Content is half the battle. Distribution is the other.

<comment><USER25> _Content is half the battle. Distribution is the other._

Don't forget the third half; getting people to give a damn (i.e. marketing).

<comment><USER24> well said.

A comment I read somewhere about Rocketboom often comes back to me. It was something like this:

"They made a halfway decent video show....and then got it played everywhere. The everywhere was the real value."

The blog post linked about is not about making a video show, it's about the everywhere part of the equation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Minecraft.net pointed to roomkey.com's site due to Amazon Outage - <AUTHOR> https://minecraft.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> If the site isn't working or is fixed here is a screenshot for reference: <http://i.imgur.com/ID2jE.jpg></comment>


Canada to tax Bitcoin transactions - <AUTHOR> http://rt.com/business/bitcoins-currency-taxable-canada-496/

<comment><USER2> The U.S., U.K., and most EU member states already tax Bitcoin transactions under their respective foreign currency laws (or alternatively, under their capital gains laws).

</comment><comment><USER3> Not really transactions, just incomes and gains, as you would expect. No news here.</comment>


WHO alarm re: new coronavirus cases in France&UK without travel history to China - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/10/coronavirus-cases-outside-china-could-be-the-spark-that-becomes-bigger-fire-who.html <comment><USER2> >World Health Organization officials are concerned about new coronavirus cases confirmed in France and the U.K. that were transmitted without any travel history to China.

>Five British citizens contracted the virus in the French Alpine town of Contamines-Montjoie, health authorities said Sunday. On Monday, the U.K. said it confirmed new cases linked to a British man who went a conference in Singapore.

Literally the next paragraph they say that they were linked to a British man who traveled to Singapore, such poor reporting from cnbc to make it seem otherwise.

<comment><USER3> It's literally correct, unless China annexed Singapore.</comment></comment>


Why did StealthGenie get busted by the Feds? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.flexispy.com/why-did-stealthgenie-get-busted-by-the-feds/

<comment><USER2> The Feds don't really want competition in the wiretapping business.</comment>