iOS 11 May Complicate Border Searches - <AUTHOR> https://lawfareblog.com/ios-11-may-complicate-border-searches <comment><USER2> Complicate border searches for whom? Sounds to me like it'll make my border crossing easier (if it has any effect at all). Even if they trick me into unlocking the phone, they won't be able to pull the data off of it without a passcode, a passcode that so far seems to be protected by the 5th Amendment.

</comment><comment><USER3> The heading should be:

       iOS 11 may increase privacy at border crossings

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice to have a device vendor that doesn't have a financial incentive to share your personal information.</comment>


AIM AV - <AUTHOR> http://aim.com/av/

<comment><USER2> This is presumably using Adobe's new RTMFP[1] which means it's all P2P. Same way Chat Roulette works.

It's extremely easy to create this kind of thing now (as in hours of work for a simple version).

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

<comment><USER3> Are there any good open-source implementations?

<comment><USER4> assuming you mean RTMFP: <https://github.com/OpenRTMFP/Cumulus>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "note: this app is for internal AOL use only"

I wonder if this is some brilliant marketing ploy.

<comment><USER6> It's definitely a ploy. If they wanted to test it with just their employees, they would have put it behind their firewall.

<comment><USER7> Back in the late 90's and early 00's, I remember discovering a bunch of "internal" AOL sites. Even after posting about them on forums, AOL didn't seem to care much (unless they could be used to steal accounts).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sometimes I look at websites with cloud backgrounds and think they're moving. This time I was right!

<comment><USER9> <http://cheervine.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If this is done right AOL would adopt a standard that would allow interoperability.

The way its looking right now in the voice/video messaging scene is we're gonna have communication islands and the only way to reach someone is to run five different service's clients.

<comment><USER11> Isn't this what XMPP (the protocol google uses for gchat) is all about, at least for text? (c.f. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Messaging_and_Presen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Messaging_and_Presence_Protocol#Message_delivery_scenario) )

Is A/V over XMPP standardized?

<comment><USER12> Yes. Google did the original work for Jingle, but passed it to the XSF for standardization. That work has been done for some time and implementations have been appearing in various places.

Even so, I suspect it will be a long time before Skype, Apple, and everyone else does anything but try to set their own standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The fellow in the middle of the photo is Frederick Van Johnson, host of the great photography podcast This Week in Photo.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, I'd use this over skype now.

<comment><USER15> re: skype/facetime - if this RTMFP thing picks up, seems like there could be tons of services like this soon. no need for facekype. In some ways, this has been around for a bit, just maybe not a cleanly/easy to develop. tinychat anyone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hm, some competition for <http://www.faceflow.com> and tinychat.com :)

</comment><comment><USER17> That screenshot is just begging for a caption contest

</comment><comment><USER18> hasn't iChat had this for several years now?

<comment><USER19> Only on macs and only on the Desktop.

<comment><USER20> Pretty sure iChat could video chat with AIM on PCs for years, haven't tried in forever though.

<comment><USER19> You can do a one-on-one chat between Macs on iChat and PCs running AIM, but you cannot do a three-way chat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is very cool. Facetime competition?

<comment><USER22> <sarcasm>Definitely, I'm sure Flash for mobile device will be so much better very soon.</sarcasm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> what's up with the "note: this app is for internal AOL use only" tag?

<comment><USER24> TechCrunch posted about it here: <http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/05/aol-aim-av- chat/>

Looks like AOL is still internally testing it, but TC decided to spill the beans.

<comment><USER25> Or someone made an elaborate marketing decision to not have the email sent to TechCrunch team so that then someone internally at aol would leak it to TechCrunch and in turn TechCrunch would be excited to leak it to the public. Thus making everyone seem special and 'in the know' and thus greater chance of it being shared and talked about.

Like here.

<comment><USER26> Or they explicitly requested TechCrunch to write about it and say it was "leaked" to build up hype.

<comment><USER27> shhhh</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Specification for "Audio for GIF" Application Extension - <AUTHOR> http://audiogif.rancidbacon.com/README.html#toc_9 <comment><AUTHOR> If you prefer pretty pictures here's a direct link to the show reel: [http://audiogif.rancidbacon.com/start](http://audiogif.rancidbacon.com/start)

(Note: Depending on your browser you may experience autoplay audio.)</comment>


Why Physicists Tried to Put a Ferret in a Particle Accelerator - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/felicia-ferret-particle-accelerator-fermilab <comment><USER2> I've had six ferrets at a time. Whoever coined "barrel of monkeys" never met a business of ferrets: a swirling ball of play, character, and mischief looking for trouble. They'll steal anything not tied down and hide it under the couch usually. Their favorite toy is a length of dryer exhaust hose: they spend hours running through and ambushing whoever comes out the end.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for introducing me to the fact that a collection of ferrets is called a "business".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret#Etymology)

<comment><USER4> >> A male ferret is called a hob; a female ferret is a jill. A spayed female is a sprite, a neutered male is a gib, and a vasectomised male is known as a hoblet. Ferrets under one year old are known as kits. A group of ferrets is known as a "business", or historically as a "busyness". Other purported collective nouns, including "besyness", "fesynes", "fesnyng", and "feamyng", appear in some dictionaries, but are almost certainly ghost words. <<

<comment><USER5> This reminds me, that an old name for a rabbit is a "coney", and an old name for a rabbit warren is a "coney-borough", a fortified town of rabbits. Over time, that became simply "burrow".

<comment><USER6> Interesting, since the dutch word for rabbit is 'Konijn', pronounced like 'konen'.

<comment><USER7> Coney Island in NY is named for the Dutch, "Rabbit Island"

<comment><USER8> Spain was named by the Phoenicians after the huge number of rabbits they saw there. But they had no word for rabbit, so they used their word for hyraxes.

Which are, by the way, the closest extant taxon to the elephants. Which themselves are named just for their thick skin.

<comment><USER5> Hyraxes, in turn, look rather like chunky ferrets. As you say, they aren't closely related, but i suppose if you're a mammal which lives in holes in the ground, there aren't many body shapes which work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Chappel Beer Festival, which is a beer festival in Chappel, Essex, is for some reason associated with a local ferret welfare charity, who turn up and run fundraising ferret events. There is a ferret tombola, where a ferret is put into a hexagonal hutch with pipes leading out of each side, and you bet on which one it will come out of, and ferret racing, where ferrets do two laps of a length corrugated pipe, and again, you bet on which will do it fastest:

[https://thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc...](https://thehalfpintgentleman.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc_3199.jpg)

It's remarkably entertaining, although of course having money riding on it always heightens the thrill.

</comment><comment><USER9> I hate to be nitpicking, but "billion-electron-volt (BeV)" in the first sentence... hurts.

<comment><USER10> It should read GeV (giga) correct?

<comment><USER9> It's hard to tell without referring to external sources. It could be either GeV or TeV.

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

<comment><USER11> BeV would never mean TeV outside of the UK.

<comment><USER12> The long scale where "billion" means 1e12 is not that rare: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_sca...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_scale_users)

<comment><USER13> But hasn't been used in the UK for at least a generation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Things one doesn't read very often: "ferret poop in a tube would stop a proton, too"

</comment><comment><USER15> My first thought was must be Yorkshire - wasnt disappointed -

"Robert Sheldon, a British engineer who'd been brought on to NAL to find "shortcuts and money-saving ideas," suggested a ferret, equipped with a cleaning tool, could do the job, scampering through the vacuum tubes as if flushing rabbits out of a warren. "In his part of Yorkshire, hunters used ferrets,""

</comment><comment><USER16> _" A necropsy revealed a ruptured abscess in her intestinal tract."_

Makes you wonder if she ate some of those metal fragments.

<comment><USER17> Probably not, some ferrets are keen to eat everything soft, including rubber, but metal? Not really.

Could be due to a suboptimal diet though, ferrets have very short intestines, can't digest anything besides meat and easily develop problems because of that.

<comment><USER16> I was assuming something like licking shavings off its own fur, like a cat might. But I don't know anything about ferrets...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I suspect particle physicists and petroleum engineers didn't share much knowledge, otherwise they may have used [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigging) instead.

(That article contains a photo with an interesting caption when taken out of context: "Inserting a pig into a natural gas pipeline".)

</comment><comment><USER19> Ferrets absolutely love running through tight tunnels!

I've heard stories (maybe apocryphal?) that ferrets are/were used to run pull cord in long underground fiber conduit runs.

<comment><USER20> Definitely not apocryphal:

"Ferrets: The World's Cutest Working Cable Guys | Superpets" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL4zI6rXjI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL4zI6rXjI4)

[https://www.cablexpress.com/blog/ferrets-the-best-kept- secre...](https://www.cablexpress.com/blog/ferrets-the-best-kept-secret-in- cabling/)

[https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os- xpm-1999-10-03-99100...](https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os- xpm-1999-10-03-9910030091-story.html) (warning: 90% ads)

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/754...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7541455/Ferrets- key-to-bridging-the-digital-divide-between-cities-and-rural-areas.html)

[http://www.cypresskeep.com/Ferretfiles/Working.htm](http://www.cypresskeep.com/Ferretfiles/Working.htm)

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Title is a bit odd. From what I can tell, they _did_ put a ferret in a particle accelerator. :)

<comment><USER22> Agreed. A better use of space would be, "In 1971, Fermilab used a ferret to clean its particle accelerator."

<comment><USER23> Yeah, but then it's just a fact and nobody clicks on it.

Personally, I'd love a website (or browser plugin or something) that reduced long articles down to a few sentences. That way I could choose whether the actual subject was interesting enough to spend the time reading the whole thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Way to introduce invasive species to parallel universes...

</comment><comment><USER25> Animals in hard science -- that reminds me of the "Always Mount a Scratch Monkey" story: [https://edp.org/monkey.htm](https://edp.org/monkey.htm) (it did NOT end well).

<comment><USER23> I choose to believe that story is nothing more than apocryphal folklore. And nothing you can say will convince me otherwise. :-/

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> They could have used a string with a tiny piece of metal at the front, and simply "accelerated" it through the conduct. Slower than a proton though :). I wonder if they could activate each of the magnets independently.

</comment><comment><USER8> They didn't "try". They did. (I did not.)

Many times. Unnecessarily, as it turned out.

</comment><comment><USER27> The ferret equivalent of a vacuum cleaner and a plastic bag and string being pulled through a pipe.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if they had a contingency plan for the ferret dying inside the tube.

</comment><comment><USER29> To ferret out a leak!

<comment><USER30> ferrite</comment></comment>


Show HN: BuddyHR's Slack app for logging leaves with your team - <AUTHOR> https://buddyhr.slack.com/apps/A6Z95AKRC-buddyhr <comment><AUTHOR> Recently launched this app with my team. Ask for your feedback! Just a week ago we added there cool feature- team travel map. If you've got some other ideas how to make it better - you're welcome!</comment>


Dell in $24 Billion Deal to Go Private - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/dell-sets-23-8-billion-deal-to-go-private/ <comment><USER2> This is one the largest LBOs in history, the largest since the financial crisis, and an audacious in swimming upstream against technological trends. There is still a 45-day go-shop period during which Dell will entertain competing bids, though without Mr. Dell's stake this is unlikely.

The deal structure is interesting, with Silver Lake contributing cash, Microsoft a $2 billion loan, and Mr. Dell simply rolling over his stake (though his fund, MSD Capital, will contribute some cash, too). The rest is debt financing from Barclays, Credit Suisse, Bank of America, and Royal Bank of Canada.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft still seems to have a thing for saving struggling computer companies. Will this one bite them later too?

<comment><USER4> Like their (hidden) takeover of Nokia (money + people).

<comment><USER5> This was the only one that immediately came to mind... what are some other examples that the GF is referencing?

<comment><USER6> <http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/>

<comment><USER5> Holy Crap. I'd totally forgotten all about that! Wow, yeah, that was a big deal back then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could someone help Michael Dell buy a properly fitting suit? The guy looks like a gorilla with the cuffs nearly covering his hands. I'm not saying he needs a $10k Savile Row cut-to-fit but it'd be nice if the guy talking about a $24 billion dollar deal doesn't look like he bought a suit off the rack at JC Penny's.

<comment><USER8> This is weird - if Dell was a woman, _everyone_ would comment on his (her) ill-fitting two-piece. But this is either a nice balancing of the sexism divide we have seen recently, or its bike-shedding.

I suspect that bike-shedding is the major issue.

<comment><USER7> I don't really care what he wears. But the fact that he wears a suit means he feels it's important, and the fact that it's very bad means either he or someone who works for him has atrocious attention to detail.

If you are going to wear a suit, wear one properly.

He would be ahead (at least in my mind, not that my opinion matters) if he just wore properly fitting slacks and a polo vs an ill fitting suit. He'd be better off wearing a hoodie and jeans too because at least then we know he doesn't have any respect for the idea of "dress is important"

EDIT: Fixed spelling

<comment><USER9> Perhaps he just doesn't care either way?

Do you think his business would run better if he wore better fitting suits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While not huge in the grand scheme of things, Dell has probably been the biggest vendor of Ubuntu machines, mostly in India and other poor countries. For $2 billion Microsoft gets to tell them to kill any such Ubuntu or Android product line-ups, and any research involving them. How is this good for Dell itself as a company, especially with the Windows/PC market going down? Is Dell really letting Microsoft turn them into another Nokia?

<comment><USER11> I've used Dells for a number of years and been pretty happy, but this does have me a bit worried. I was really pleased the one time I did have a problem, while living in Austria, with a machine I'd bought in the US: very quick service and no hassles to fix it, so the fact that it's a big, global company turned out to be pretty positive. I'm not sure who else I'd go with...

More than anything, I'm amazed and dismayed that tablets are far surpassing the screens they put on laptops these days: <http://www.google.com/nexus/10/> \- why won't anyone who's not Apple make a decent screen?! They've gotten _worse_ , as my current machine does 1920x1200, and you can't find those anymore.

<comment><USER12> >> why won't anyone who's not Apple make a decent screen?!

The perception in the non-Apple segment of the market is that the customers will not bear the increased cost.

<comment><USER13> That market does exist though. I've known quite a few people who have asked me for advice on laptops who were dismayed when I told them the cheapest they could get a laptop was $250. I've also had the same type of people come to me when their $250 laptop dies after 6 months and they "threw away all that money" on some cheap garbage.

A $250 laptop will last you 6 months while a $1000 laptop will last you five years, but there is still the market who finds a better deal in the incredibly shitty computer.

<comment><USER12> You're inadvertently helping me make my point. You've framed $1000 as a high(er)-end laptop. The cheapest Retina MacBook Pro is $1,700; $1,000 is the cheapest laptop Apple sells. That the entry-level price point to the Apple system is at the high(er) end of mainstream PC laptops was essentially my whole point.

Higher price points let them include higher specs, even on non-obvious pivots like pixel density and overall build quality.

<comment><USER11> This laptop is something like 3 years old at this point, and I bought it new for around $1200, I think. And it does 1920x1200. So it's not really that only Apple can afford to put this kind of thing on a laptop - I don't buy that.

<comment><USER12> We don't know what percentage of sales models like yours were of the manufacturer's sales. Was that percentage increasing or decreasing? Was it profitable? There are a lot of factors at play here. If it wasn't selling, they're going to do less of that and more like the sub-$500 ones that are. Perhaps they concluded that the market for $1200 laptops is not worth pursuing.

Also worth noting is that 1920x1200 is less dense than the Retina displays.

<comment><USER11> > Also worth noting is that 1920x1200 is less dense than the Retina displays.

So you'd expect it to cost less.

I run Linux, and I am not interested in MacOS X, even if the hardware is nice. It's not a good fit for how I work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Post dot come melt down the rules and requirements around financial reporting were substantially strengthened. Some of that was a good thing but in general it was an over reach. C level people now signed their names and risked prosecution. The way revenue was recognized became so conservative as to be nonsensical in many cases. The costs layered on to manage this became significant. In short, it became more and more difficult to innovate if you were a public company due to the costs and potential backlash from public markets.

Facebook is a victim of this on one end. They delayed their IPO as long as they could as Zuckerberg loathed what having to please outside investors would do to the nimbleness he requires. They then waited too long and so are now trying to excite the markets with a company that's already past its most exciting part of the growth curb. Add to that obvious greed and ego in terms of pricing as high as possible and you have a huge web blanket thrown on the ability for other tech companies to IPO.

Dell is on the other end. They decided it was better to invest 6 months of their lives into going private so that they too could innovate for the longer term.

At the end of the day we've gone from the go-go days of the 90's where nearly any tech company would IPO to a point where very few IPO either because they can't or don't want to. That will fundamentally change how companies are funded going forward and will likely impact the amount of returns being generated at the critical (for VC's) end of the funnel. My hope is that public markets realize this and begin to roll back some of the more arduous regulations.

<comment><USER15> I don't think Dell is going to innovate post-LBO. It's going to be saddled with debt, most of it bank debt. The new owners are going to sell off all activities that don't generate cash and milk the remaining parts until the debt is paid off.

An LBO is basically a gamble that there is a cash cow under all the fat, and once the fat is trimmed investors will see the company's true value.

<comment><USER16> I think there is a huge opportunity for Dell in the private cloud space. They may not innovate on technology, but they could certainly innovate with new business models using emerging technologies like OpenStack.

<comment><USER17> Dell has plenty of opportunities, given their enterprise customers. The tricky part is: almost all of those opportunities involve new services for post- Microsoft IT. And how is Microsoft and their two billion dollars going to react to those plans?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why wouldn't you just take the $24 billion and start a new company? Is Dell's goodwill really that valuable, are the supplier relationships that valuable? Or is it because of some legal non-compete reason?

<comment><USER2> Let's take out the $11.3 billion of cash and short-term investments on Dell's last quarterly balance sheet [1]. Yes, a lot of this being overseas, but that's much less problem for a private company than a public one. So we're really paying $13.1 billion for the assets.

Assets which in 2012 produced a 7.3% un-levered ROA (earnings before interest after taxes / assets) and are levered only 5x (assets / equity) in historically low rates (Lenovo is 6.7x). Not to say this is anything close to a slam dunk. But the pressure of working to make the next interest payment isn't so dissimilar from slaving to your next fund-raise.

Note the difference between capital and money, assets and liabilities, stuff and claims. Companies are arrangements of capital, physical and intellectual. If the value of that arrangement is zero or negative one liquidates, i.e. shuffles the capital around without changing its value while marking down the claims to show the presumed valuable arrangement has vaporised. The inverse of liquidation is entrepreneurship, i.e. shuffling capital into an arrangement of value. When this is successful the claims are marked up to reflect the arrangement's value.

Capital has inertia - shuffling it around takes energy, e.g. recruiting costs for intellectual capital. ABCD -> AB + C + D takes less effort than E + F + G + H -> EFGH. We only liquidate when there is nobody willing to pay for the arrangement. Similarly, we only build when there is nobody selling it.

[1] [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/00008260831200...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/000082608312000019/dellq3fy1310q.htm)

<comment><USER18> Thank you for the thorough and understandable answer. I realize my question was naive, but I just didn't anticipate that Dell had such a considerably low price-to-assets ratio (okay, I made this ratio up. I'm obviously not a finance guy). I assumed that at least a big part of the buyout would be a premium on top of the revenue-generating assets, and I was wondering what factors might drive that premium up. Your last point seems to answer that question sufficiently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _As a newly private company – now more firmly under the control of Mr. Dell_

Can someone explain what, exactly, has been preventing the CEO and founder of the company from doing what he thinks is best. Is it just the threat of being fired (like Steve Jobs)? By the "board"? Will that threat disappear?

<comment><USER5> He gets to move to a longer term view than the next quarters numbers.

<comment><USER20> This and other items that Wall St. cares about, but aren't necessarily in the best long-term interest of the comapany.

For example, they can now have less of a focus on margin. It's the constant quest for margin that had Dell outsource its whole company to Asus:

[http://www.asymco.com/2012/12/07/the-real-threat-that- samsun...](http://www.asymco.com/2012/12/07/the-real-threat-that-samsung- poses-to-apple/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone help me understand: If the deal has been announced at $13.65 why are shares still trading lower?

<comment><USER2> (1) Time value of money. Shareholders aren't getting $13.65 today. If DELL traded at $13.65, I could short it and earn a risk-free yield on the short proceeds between now and when the payout is made.

(2) Merger risk. Did I say risk-free? I lied. Deals fall apart for reasons ranging from shareholder litigation to antitrust issues to Michael Dell getting pissed off because his socks got wet. The difference between the forward stock price (stock minus time value) and payout is the expected probability of the deal closing.

Disclaimer: I have an outstanding position in DELL.

<comment><USER22> What?? If you short it at today's price of $13.39 and then are forced to buy it to cover your short at $13.65, you're going to lose money.

<comment><USER2> I was illustrating, by negation, why a $13.65 buy-out shouldn't immediately lead to the stock rising to $13.65 (because it would produce an arbitrage opportunity).

Note that today the stock _did_ get bid up to $13.48. If the deal takes {90, 180, 270, 360} days to pay out, you would be borrowing from the market at {5.2%, 2.6%, 1.7%, 1.3%}. Add to that the cost of a call (to protect you from a rival bidder or enhanced tender) and subtract the probability of the deal falling through and you have a cost of capital. This isn't risk-free since 13.48 != 13.65, but depending on your time horizon, break-up assumptions, and the asset you're buying with the financing, it could still be an attractive proposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >> "Michael S. Dell will contribute his stake [of DELL] of roughly 14 percent toward the transaction..."

How does this work exactly?

Does this mean that Dell will no longer be an equity owner in the new private company and he's surrendering all his equity?

Or is Michael Dell simply saying, as long as I get to keep 14% of this new private entity, you don't have to pay me out on this deal to go private.

<comment><USER2> The second one, Michael Dell is essentially taking equity in the surviving private entity in lieu of $13.65/sh.

<comment><USER22> Wrong again. There's tax implications that prevent him from just surrendering his shares in the company in exchange for a large equity position in a private company.

<comment><USER2> I do not believe I suggested he would be surrendering his shares, but rather, that he will not be taking a cash disbursement. I believe that he will take a distribution of the OpCo's (thereby stripping the HoldCo's) to be subsumed by the local NewCo, but given the complexity of the deal I wouldn't take too many guesses.

I avoided speculating on the transaction mechanics given that this is Hacker News and not FT Alphaville's Long Room - sorry if that caused confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There's a lot of big words without substance in these quotes, but the most meaningful part is that Dell's transforming to be a "global IT solutions provider".

So the usual "it worked for IBM" strategy most hardware and infrastructure companies ends up with when sales go south, with mixed results.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can anyone explain in basic terms how shareholders can be forced to sell their shares back?

<comment><USER26> For the most part they can't.

That's why this deal came out at a 25% bump over where the share price was when the deal was announced. This bump is intended to entice shareholders to vote for it.

From the shareholders perspective DELL US Equity has been in a downward slide for the past year and only rebounded with this news, so if they don't take the deal then they can probably expect the share price to fall from almost 14 back to under 10 pretty much instantly.

To prevent a very small minority from stopping the will of a large majority once the deal has an overwellimng majority( I think its 95% but I might be wrong on the exact value), they can then force the remainder to take the deal.

This might seem like a bad deal for the hold outs but if this type of provision wasn't' enabled then no company could ever go private as there would always be that one person who holds onto a single share just to be a pain in the ass:)

<comment><USER27> In fact, this "last stakeholder" problem is one of the game theoretic reasons for things like eminent domain.

<comment><USER28> Squeeze-out legislation has eliminated this problem. With control thresholds at 90% to 95%, as of today it is rare that this "last stakeholder" problem arises, as minority shareholders consent for their share sale is not required.

Having said that, if you look close at the consortium's offer, there is for sure a clause that states that the offer is for x%-100% of the outstanding share capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been following Apple stock lately. To me It seems that stock has almost no relation with the company anymore. It's a game of buy and sell that is dangerous for a company. Apple lost a load of money within hours. I don't think there will ever be a company which is flexible enough to handle changes in value that fast.

So I think this is good for Dell. Breaking free of shareholders who just play the money game.

<comment><USER30> Not sure what you mean when you refer to a company being flexible enough (or not) to handle fast changes in valuation — I wouldn't imagine there has been any significant change to Apple's operations or strategy during their recent stock price movement.

<comment><USER29> Well lets say a company is planning a big investment and suddenly stock value dropped like stone. I think that can be very dangerous because suddenly you have to rethink your strategy.

<comment><USER31> The stock price doesn't effect the company, the company's actions, products and more importantly future prospects influence the stock price.

"To me It seems that stock has almost no relation with the company anymore. It's a game of buy and sell that is dangerous for a company."

Unless the company needs to raise additional capital, which apple does not, the stock price cannot be dangerous for the company.

"Apple lost a load of money within hours. I don't think there will ever be a company which is flexible enough to handle changes in value that fast."

Apple's shareholder's lost money within hours. The company is still profitable.

"So I think this is good for Dell. Breaking free of shareholders who just play the money game."

You may be right, private companies can change management incentives to be longer term rather than stock price based which can allow for high risk, long- term strategies. We won't know for several years until the company goes public again (assuming the deal closes).

<comment><USER32> _Unless the company needs to raise additional capital, which apple does not, the stock price cannot be dangerous for the company._

I don't think this is true anymore. Discussion of executive performance these days starts with stock price (and often ends there.) Executives are encouraged by shareholders and the business media to prioritize short-term stock prices over long-term growth. It can be hard to overcome that bias, especially when executive compensation is usually tied very closely to stock price.

<comment><USER31> I was extremely careful with my words, notice that I said "company" not "executives" (similar to OP).

It isn't dangerous for executives either but it may influence them to manage earnings or attempt short-term cuts, both activities are usually detected by investors and lead to no price action or lead to negative price action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In 2009, in Davos, Vladimir Putin's response to Michael Dell's question provided a glimpse into the long term challenges faced by Dell and others (IBM, HP, etc).

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMR1BZ9aYM8> (first 6 minutes)

The BRIC nations are competing and it's showing.

IBM has sold its PC division to Lenovo, HP flirts on and off with exiting, and Dell has declared itself a services company.

Another insight is the sheer number of desktop computers up for sale on CraigsList and the staggering number of pallets of used equipment up for auction. They're metaphors for the shift/restructuring currently taking place. Those systems aren't necessarily being replaced. Many of them represent desktops used in jobs that no longer exist.

</comment><comment><USER34> At least Michael Dell is putting his money where his mouth is and giving the money back to shareholders.

<comment><USER35> Here it is, surprised this popped up so late in the piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Anyone know what this means for shareholders?

<comment><USER37> Silver Lake is buying for $13.65 a share:

> Under the terms of the deal, the buyers' consortium, which also includes > Microsoft, will pay $13.65 a share in cash.

So the stock probably won't sell above that number, but won't be far off from it until the deal closes. Since it's a cash deal, after the deal closes you'll probably be compensated with cash (your shares would disappear from your brokerage account and you'd gain the equivalent cash value).

<comment><USER38> What if I don't want to sell my shares for $13.65 but hang on to them? Can Silver Lake just set a $13.65 value and force me to sell at that value to them?!

(Assuming I had shares, which I don't.)

<comment><USER37> Yes, pretty much. The company is going private, and though the board and shareholders have to approve the sale, they can do so without your explicit approval, of course, just a majority (hence the bump in valuation of 25%). So those shares are no good after the deal closes, because the public company you have shares in just ceased to exist as a public company. Your return on investment is the per-share purchase price times the number of shares you hold.

This is the same thing that would happen in an all-stock transaction: let's say you own shares in Ford, and General Motors announces a buyout of Ford. The end-result is that you now own some percentage of GM, since Ford is now part of GM. Poof: your Ford shares convert to some equivalent number of GM shares. Do you cease to own Ford? Well, kind of, since Ford just ceased to exist. So there's nothing to "hold on to" in the sense you're implying.

<comment><USER38> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Are they trying to bain-ify the company? Or am I misunderstanding?

</comment><comment><USER40> From 2000 high of roughly $56/sh to a final price of $13.65

</comment><comment><USER41> is the hacker news?</comment>


The Man Behind Android's Rise - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904253204576512720214351098.html

<comment><USER2> Somebody with the power to do so, please flag this. It's only two and a half sentences. The rest is behind a paywall.</comment>


Heartbleed: Understanding When We Disclose Cyber Vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/04/28/heartbleed-understanding-when-we-disclose-cyber-vulnerabilities <comment><USER2> In case its not clear by the title, this article is from 2014.

The author explains that the NSA has a "disciplined, rigorous and high-level decision-making process" to determine if they should disclose a vulnerability or quietly exploit it. I might just be ignorant of the facts but when has this decision process ever resulted in "disclose it"? Is there any record of the NSA publicly disclosing a vulnerability?

<comment><USER3> I imagine that such vulnerabilities would be passed to US-CERT, without attribution.

<comment><USER2> > without attribution

Fair enough. I'm not sure why I assumed the NSA would announce exactly what software they were poking around inside of in the first place.</comment></comment></comment>


'Explainable Artificial Intelligence': Cracking Open the Black Box of AI - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/617359/explainable-artificial-intelligence-cracking-open-black-box-ai/ <comment><USER2> Newbie question: I've heard that PGMs are a superset of neural networks. In PGM materials that's I've read, the topology of the networks shown as example is made of node that are manually chosen and represent concept (smart student, good grades, difficult subject, etc.). Whereas a neural network example is usually a huge set of nodes that end up finding their meaning on their own. I also vaguely recall a tutorial in which you can highlight the nodes that contributed to the classification - the only thing is that they don't have meaning for a human. Then when the article states:

> restrict the way nodes in a neural network consider things to 'concepts' > like colour and shapes and textures.

Aren't these just PGMs? Are they NNs? Is it just a methodology approach on how to select the topology? Don't you lose the automatic meaning / structure search? I'm a little bit confused...

<comment><USER3> PGMs are interesting in how they represent distributions over the values of their nodes. In neural networks, (for the most part) those nodes are deterministic, so from a PGM perspective the distribution is trivial (up until the final output prediction). Performing inference in a neural net with stochastic nodes would be crazy hard, so the best you can do is usually MC with some kind of reparametrization trick to keep your gradients around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the author is overstating the importance of being able to explain in human terms decisions made by a neural network. For instance , there is no one reason that I am able to recognize a dog as such. Any feature or combination of features I can think of can be had in another animal. Something deeper is happening when I am able to correctly identify dogs that is unexplainable, at least by me.

The examples normally given for wildly inaccurate predictions were concocted by training a separate neural network to trick the original neural network which seems be just showcasing the effectiveness of neural networks rather than highlighting a weakness.

Also, I would note that human intuition is not immune to tricks. For instance optical illusions regularly trick our perception.

<comment><USER5> No, the importance is massive, and you understate it. While we may all want to just believe, the regulatory ecosystem worldwide (where it applies, esp. in financial realm) demands that we provide explanations of why models made certain decisions on certain data. Without this ability, models will not be allowed to drive innovation or decisions in many areas of life, from financial (credit and risk) to medical (recommendations for treatment) to legal (best contract approach or best defense approach for a lawsuit).

Saying that humans make mistakes and cannot explain their decisions is, in fact, one of the very reasons we want to have better models. We hope they will do better than most people to create a better world. And their explanations will hopefully provide insight into how we as people make good (and bad) decisions.

And sure, we can change the laws over time, but having advanced models which can allow humans to understand decisions and even provide diagnostics to improve the models will be transformative. Until then, we will see massive impact in some areas of our lives, and frustrating holdbacks in others, driven either by the distraction of building for regulatory constraints or by choosing not to build in regulated areas at all.

<comment><USER6> We know why these models make decisions on data. They're optimizing for lower error rates.

The black box unveiled for a convolutional neural network is this: over the course of several thousand rounds of performing the dot product of the RGB values of a given training datum against a weight vector, this network has determined that a weight vector containing _these values_ optimally reduce the error produced by "squashing" the output matrices of said dot products in a softmax function when the "squashed" value is compared against the pre- determined true value.

If you would also like to be able to correctly predict whether a given input is part of the class for which this model was optimized for, we suggest your weight vectors also contain _these values_ as this will reduce the number of false positives and false negatives you will produce from your prediction.

<comment><USER7> No. If the machine is telling me what medicine to administer to the patient, then I want to know exactly what data points the machine thought were relevant (i.e., the relevant symptoms). Furthermore, I want to know what about those symptoms indicated to the machine a particular diagnosis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Similarly, I feel that a car shouldn't drive too fast. If it does drive too fast then a human running after it might be unable to catch up!

<comment><USER9> This seems flippant. If a car is fast we generally understand why. We don't need to worry that under some rarely-encountered combination of circumstances it will unexpectedly do a handbrake turn and open the fuel cap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a hell of a lot of money to be made by the person who cracks this. The major blockers preventing a lot of AI being rolled out across the EU are laws which stipulate that you have to be able to explain a decision to, for example, refuse a person credit.

Not to mention the fact that we can correct faulty assumptions on the fly if we can get the networks to introspect.

<comment><USER11> Meh. Why not just use a decision tree for the credit decision? Perfectly explainable, and the feature domain isn't as difficult (and full of symmetry) as vision or language problems.

<comment><USER12> Well, a good way to use decision trees for that is random forests, and you're right back to something that's not really easily explainable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One issue I don't see considered is - how to ensure that explainable artificial intelligence _doesn 't lie_? Right now, it may not be an issue, but as AI systems get complex ("smart") enough, one need to be sure that the introspective output isn't crafted to influence people looking at it.

<comment><USER14> Right now it looks like it's being used more as a "debugging" output to make more intelligent Al's. Once they can lie, we will have achieved that goal...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Let's say this is possible. How would we know that it (the AI) isn't doing a post-hoc rationalization, or just outright lying about its reasoning?

In other words, why do we trust humans more than machines? In fact, why do we not think of humans as machines - just ones made out of different materials? Why do we have this bias that machines are and must-be deterministic, and since humans aren't, they must not be machines? Furthermore, since we know that these AI models are sometimes stochastic, why do we still insist that they be explainable; when humans exhibit the same kind of output, we don't insist upon their determinism...?

I'm not certain that we can make these models - especially complex deep- learning CNNs and others like them - explainable, any more than an individual can tell you how his or her brain came up with the solution; most of the time, we employ post-hoc reasoning to explain our decisions, depending on how the output resolves. That - or we lie. Rarely do we say "I don't know" \- because to do so is to admit a form of failure. Not admitting such is what helps religion continue, because when we don't know, we can ascribe the reason to another external force instead. If we would just be willing to say "I don't know - but let's try to find out" (insert XKCD here), we might be better off as a species.

I don't think an AI model will be any different - or can be. If we insist on having an AI be able to deterministically and truthfully tell us exactly how it arrived at such a conclusion, we must be ready to accept that we should do the same with human reasoning as well. Anything less would be hypocritical at best.</comment>


Turning Depression into Inspiration - <AUTHOR> http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014445/Turning-Depression-into

<comment><USER2> The presentation of the video and slides is interesting. I especially liked having the real time table of contents.

Subject matter is interesting too, even if you're not a depressed indie game developer.</comment>


The Update, the Vent, and the Disaster (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-update-the-vent-and-the-disaster/ <comment><USER2> Url changed from [https://medium.com/@rands/the-update-the-vent-and-the- disast...](https://medium.com/@rands/the-update-the-vent-and-the- disaster-90eac609b165), which copies this but doesn't point to it.

This Medium republishing thing is not boding well for original sources.

<comment><AUTHOR> My mistake, thanks. It looked and smelled and quacked like new content but did seem vaguely familiar.</comment></comment>


Compact forwarding information for the Z Garbage Collector in the OpenJDK - <AUTHOR> https://inside.java/2020/06/25/compact-forwarding/ <comment><USER2> I think this is the more accessible blog post version of the posted master thesis.

[https://inside.java/2020/06/25/compact- forwarding/](https://inside.java/2020/06/25/compact-forwarding/)

The context of this work is how you store the forwarding metadata for the ZGC collector in the OpenJDK.

<comment><USER3> Ok, changed from [https://www.diva- portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1445578/FULLTEXT...](https://www.diva- portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1445578/FULLTEXT01.pdf). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't like extra forwarding tables, as it imposes a huge cache hit.

Forward pointers are only needed during a GC, so they very rare. Usually a compacting GC tags the forwarding ptr as normal heap ptr, and just checks if it needs to be forwarded or not. There are always at least 2 lower bits free and one is enough. It's just one extra redirection and needs no extra forwarding table lookup.

Also the extra table is pretty big. So not low memory overhead, rather largish.

</comment><comment><USER5> I hope this GC will be able to signal deterministically when an object will be free, getting destructors in java would be quite nice for checks and resources cleanups

<comment><USER2> Yikes I don't think anyone else wants this. Destructors (finalisers) are seen as a pretty terrible mistake in Java. There is a better replacement that is reference queues, but I think you want to think extremely hard before using those as well. And no serious GC is going to be able to signal it deterministically! In Java you should really manually clean up external resources. Trying to get the GC to do it for you is never going to end well. The GC doesn't guarantee to free any object at all.

<comment><USER5> _are seen as a pretty terrible mistake in Java_ because of the limitation it has with current GC. Having a method deterministically being called before being freed is a feature that increase language expressiveness and that has no inherent downside. So yes many devs would want that and you have failed to say a reason for a dev to be "against" said feature. _In Java you should really manually clean up external resources._ this is nuisible work that should be automated and allow an error class that shouldn't exist (e.g forgetting to close a file descriptor) How can this make sense to you? Things to say: Java already has autocloseable which cover in big part the needs of a destructor. It's just that it can't be used (I believe) for logging or behavior, only for resource closing which limit expressiveness and observability.

 _And no serious GC is going to be able to signal it deterministically_ yes this limitation is shared by all current GCs hence my point on a future GC. The linked article make deterministic something that weren't before so my comment is not HS.

 _The GC doesn 't guarantee to free any object at all._ If this is universal to all GCs that exists and that will ever exists? Then how does autocloseable work?

 _reference queues_ what is the difference with weak pointers?

<comment><USER2> > you have failed to say a reason for a dev to be "against" said feature

Because as a developer I know we don't know how to implement it in a safe reliable way. I want to write safe reliable code so I don't want to use this feature.

> The linked article make deterministic something that weren't before so my > comment is not HS.

That's not what the article means by 'deterministic', I'm afraid. They're talking about it being deterministic at some point where the object is moved to. It doesn't make anything temporally more deterministic.

> If this is universal to all GCs that exists and that will ever exists

I think it's pretty fair to say that nobody in the industry knows how to make a reasonably high performance moving GC that is deterministic in when it frees objects. Maybe someone will invent one one day? I wouldn't hold my breath.

> Then how does autocloseable work?

Something important to know is that AutoClosable has nothing at all to do with the GC, so disregard that for this discussion. It just adds some code to be called after a lexical block. It doesn't know anything about whether the object is live or not.

> what is the difference with weak pointers?

Sorry not sure what this is asking - what is the difference between weak pointers and... what?

Reference queues are at least in-band and run under programmer control, but they're still non-deterministic in when (if!) a reference will be pushed to the queue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


15-440: Distributed Systems Syllabus - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/15-440/F12/syllabus.html <comment><USER2> MIT's distributed systems class is also taught in Go - [http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/schedule.html](http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/schedule.html)

<comment><USER3> Guest lecturer Russ Cox... nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just stumbled on this set of lectures, slides, and notes, from ETH Zurich, which seems like it would be useful supplementary material: [http://dcg.ethz.ch/lectures/podc_allstars/](http://dcg.ethz.ch/lectures/podc_allstars/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Also relevant is the "Distributed Algorithms" course at Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Seems to be a little bit more theoretical, but might be an interesting complement to a more practical course.

YouTube playlist: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL700757A5D4B3F368](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL700757A5D4B3F368)

Course page: [http://www.ict.kth.se/courses/ID2203](http://www.ict.kth.se/courses/ID2203) (appears to be down at the moment though)

<comment><USER5> Given Prof. Stefan Nilssons "Fundamentals of concurrent programming", which is taught in Go [1], it would be interesting to see whether not the distributed systems course will adopt Go as well, in the near future.

[1] [http://www.nada.kth.se/~snilsson/concurrency](http://www.nada.kth.se/~snilsson/concurrency)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess using Erlang would be cheating...

<comment><USER7> Yes, I also had similar feel while using Erlang - "hardcore" part was just gone and I thought I was just writing config scripts to some underlying system (which it is) :)

<comment><USER8> I don't know much about Erlang. Can you explain why it's so easy?

<comment><USER9> Erlang VM's does most of of the distribution for you combine that with Erlang's primitive for distribute coding and it's just cheating. The language it self have many construct and primitive for distributed programming that it make it seems like cheating, the code itself is very nice to read once you get the hang of it and you don't have messy code like Node.JS with the nested call back. You first class citizen distributed stuff. Messaging passing and pattern matching for PID for example made stuff easy. Actor model is also easy to mentally solve compare to Node.JS non blocking stuff.

I'm only picking on Node.JS because Node.JS and Erlang is what I've used. Mostly Node.js and a little bit of Erlang.

<comment><USER8> Thanks. I just learned Node.js so it made your comment more helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Generally, there is huge gap in Distributed Systems courses (I've encountered) between the theory/books they follow and the practical lab projects...

Can anyone recommend some good DS course oriented for working engineers with hands-on projects which the course (theory/book) itself follows closely?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a cloud computing class[0] launching on Coursera taught by Prof. Indranil Gupta which will cover all concepts such as fault tolerance, consensus etc. I'd suggest you can give that a shot. If you can't wait, you can checkout the course page[1] and get started right away.

You can take a look at other DS courses here - [https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome- courses/#systems](https://github.com/prakhar1989/awesome-courses/#systems)

Lastly, you also have the option of working on assignments in MIT's DS class[2] (git clone git://g.csail.mit.edu/6.824-golabs-2014 6.824)

[0] - [https://www.coursera.org/course/cloudcomputing](https://www.coursera.org/course/cloudcomputing)

[1] - [https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs425/](https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs425/)

[2] - [http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/index.html](http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.824/2014/index.html)

<comment><USER7> Coursera Cloud computing class is a great news! I guess I'll wait for this. As an added bonus, programming is done in C++ (compared to plain C/Glib as in original course). I hope that author means modern (or at least real) C++ and not just C with classes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, otherwise, I tried to get some help collecting nice Distributed system links and news in the relevant Google+ group: [http://bit.ly/distsys](http://bit.ly/distsys)

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-642-15260-3](http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-642-15260-3)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm taking this course next semester! However, it mostly likely will be taught in C/Java.

</comment><comment><USER12> so sad, that course have no video lectures.</comment>


Dear Honda, this adorable electric car needs to come to the US - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/09/dear-honda-this-adorable-electric-car-needs-to-come-to-the-us/ <comment><USER2> outside not so sure about but the dashboard is fantastic</comment>


Creative Market for Photoshop - <AUTHOR> https://creativemarket.com/photoshop-extension

<comment><USER2> This idea is simply brilliant. You've reduced the friction it takes for me to buy an asset that I might not have otherwise purchased to essentially one click, at exactly the right moment (the moment I need it, without breaking my work-flow or concentration).

My first suggestion would be to figure out how to market the hell out of this. There are some really great Photoshop plugins out there that I've seen pop up on HN maybe once or twice at most and I've spoken to designer friends in person who have never heard of them. The first step would be to look into advertising on the design blogs and sites like <http://beautifulpixels.com/>. You might then look into a sponsored post on DaringFireball or similar site (from what I've heard, the ROI on his posts is pretty good).

</comment><comment><USER3> I love when products go deep for their core users. This is one of the best ideas and executions I've seen among any of the companies trying to create marketplaces for digital goods.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, this is such a smart move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an incredible idea coming from the Creative Market. Very well done. I wonder how long it takes Envato (Theme Forest, Code Canyon, etc.) to make a version of this for their products/sites.

<comment><USER6> Or Iconfinder :-D

<comment><USER7> I was sure www.iconfinder.com was your site, but I took a look at the profile just to see if I could copy paste it instead of typing it (I'm lazy).

You have the url as www.confinder.com there ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice idea and implementation.

Was it difficult building the plugin for photoshop ?

I ask because I have been toying with building a photoshop plugin for handling feedback on designs. i.e. the plugin allows you to upload a design to a website where customers can comment. The plugin would allow you to view the comments from within Photoshop.

<comment><USER9> Tomorrow I'm going to write a post on all that went into making it. To be honest, it's not difficult to get into—with extensions running on top of AIR, the learning curve isn't steep. The main difficulties come from random platform bugs and poor documentation. Things like:

\- Occasionally when a panel starts, the wrapper from Adobe that loads in your extension will be incorrectly sized... which leaves the panel with a giant white space at the bottom. To fix it, increment then decrement the height by one to get it to recalculate its size.

\- On CS5.0 (only), the panel is rendered darker than it should be (so if you set the background color to the color the SDK tells you it is, you'll end up something that doesn't match up with the Photoshop UI (this might be mx:HTML specific).

\- On CS6, mx:HTML causes a hard Photoshop crash sometimes (no idea why, it's blackbox). Posted on Adobe Forums... no one seems to know.

TL;DR: Barrier of entry is low. Strange issues make it hard. Sadly many of them are out of your control as a 3rd-party developer.

<comment><USER10> brian initially started work on the extension, then I did for a few months, now it's back on brian's plate. In my experience it was rough debugging anything within the webview after being used to the power of chrome dev tools and firebug. For the most part I was able to test the webview bits in an actual browser, but it was those times where the embedded browser behaved differently that really made things rough.

Debugging things within AIR was easy though, and although I had near-nil prior experience with actionscript my javascript background got me up and running right away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like this, but it also underscores one of the reasons I'm skeptical of this specific marketplace. I find it very difficult to actually know what I'm buying. Assets are often little more than a generic description with a few hard to see thumbnails tacked on to show you what you'll get.

I've definitely found myself hoping for _more_ detail / product information. While this looks well-implemented I wonder if it won't take me a step further away from what I'm buying, which is the reverse of what I want.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love that the actual experience (or something damn close to it) is usable right there in the home page. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER13> While I appreciate that you're going for a Photoshop UI theme in the browser panel there (and I think it's very nice in terms of presentation), I think it's a big mistake to use decorative UI elements that don't actually work. It's impossible for a user to look at that panel and tell what is actual UI, and what is merely decoration, which is disorienting and frustrating.

<comment><USER14> I might be wrong, but I think if you're a heavy Photoshop user (their target demographic) you'll be already familiar with the panels Photoshop provides, and their custom panel will draw your attention. IMO, the "Try Me" banner also ensures the user keeps their attention focused on the demo.</comment></comment>