Pinpointing the day from Ice Cube's "Today Was A Good Day" - <AUTHOR> http://murkavenue.tumblr.com/post/16553509655/i-found-ice-cubes-good-day

<comment><USER2> There were definitely pagers in the 80s.

Actually and the 70s and the 60s and the 50s, but they were certainly widely available by the late 80s.

<comment><USER3> Also, why is it assumed the "good day" couldnt have been during the filming of a movie?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Monday_(date)> would also suggest otherwise

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting because one of the lines is "Hope I live another twenty-fo" implying that he's 24 years old; however the song was released when Ice Cube was only 23.

<comment><USER5> 24 hours not 24 years.</comment></comment>


Physicists May Have Evidence Universe Is A Computer Simulation - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/10/11/physicists-may-have-evide_n_1957777.html <comment><USER2> Previous submission already on front page:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5562156>

(On my part, I don't like link-bait articles based on press releases, as they rarely result in HN-quality discussions.)</comment>


RIP, science fiction and fantasy Grand Master Gene Wolfe, 1931-2019 - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2019/04/15/goodbye-gene.html <comment><USER2> Sad news. A friend recommended the Book of the New Sun to me in college, and Wolfe very quickly became my favorite author. I don't get along with all of his books, but the ones I like always reward subsequent readings.

Rest In Peace, Gene.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's an interesting titbit about Gene Wolfe: he helped develop the machine that makes Pringles potato chips [1]

[1] [https://kokorognosis.livejournal.com/43391.html](https://kokorognosis.livejournal.com/43391.html)

<comment><USER4> That's also mentioned in the linked article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, just this morning I picked up the first half of The Book of the New Sun as my intro to his work.

<comment><AUTHOR> He could evoke places, moods, and the vastness of time. He seamlessly blended fantasy and far-future science fiction into something with the weight and texture of mythology. He is gone, but his writing will endure.

<comment><USER6> Probably one of the best vocabularians in the entire genre, also.</comment></comment></comment>


ExtJS 2.1 released, license changed from LGPL to GPL, users not happy - <AUTHOR> http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=33096

<comment><USER2> haha I thought this was the filesystem at first.</comment>


Google disguises capitalism as civil rights - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/22/dziuba_net_neut/

<comment><USER2> I don't support net neutrality because Google is behind it. Their goals just line up with mine on the issue.</comment>


The World's Most Complicated Rube Goldberg Machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/gonzo/the-worlds-most-complicated-rube-goldberg-machine

<comment><USER2> My favorite RGM is still OK Go's <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w>

The one in the article seems too electrical for me.</comment>


TrueCrypt Identification String - <AUTHOR> http://16s.us/pics/TrueCrypt_ID_String.png <comment><USER2> Isn't TrueCrypt open-source?

</comment><comment><USER3> Hello, NSA "backdoor".

<comment><USER4> Well it's not a backdoor.

Obviously, in case of full disk encryption, the bootloader needs to be able to do decryption. If not, the disk would be unbootable.

Sure, the text now trivially identifies the disk as 'truecrypt', but even without that text in, it would not be hard to detect a specific bootloader with signatures...

If one wants deniable encryption you need to use something else than full disk encryption, such as steganography or hidden volumes.

<comment><USER2> You can have a hidden drive (with deniable encryption) inside an existing truecrypt partition.</comment></comment></comment>


Arsenal's 'secret' signing: club buys £2m revolutionary data company - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/oct/17/arsenal-place-trust-arsene-wenger-army-statdna-data-analysts <comment><USER2> Never thought I'd see an article about Arsenal here.

The "secret" purchase has been talked about for quite some time now. We'll see if it pays off. In the mean time, while we wait, Manchester United has spent a king's ransom on a teenager and so far it's looking like a great bet (yes, I know it's early still). I'm a strong believer in analytics in basketball and baseball but I wonder if in some sports, like soccer, it is harder or perhaps not possible to quantify a player's effectiveness in a scientific way. I know my skepticism sounds just like what was mentioned in the article.

Having said all of that, Arsene revolutionized scouting when he came to the PL by bringing on somewhat lesser known names from across Europe for prices that proved to be bargains. Some of those players turned into legends. Maybe with a little help he can reinvent scouting again.

<comment><USER3> Related question from a non-sports person, about those 'bargain' prices. How long does it take for a player to become legendary, and when does their price catch up? Is the contract a bargain because it locks-in the unknown player at a below-market price even after they become legendary? Or is it a bargain because the contract lasts a season or two and establishes the player's skill, after which they have inertia on the team and can be signed at a new market- rate contract with less bidding-wars that would be the case if they were from another team?

<comment><USER3> To expand on that a little with a software analogy, is it a bargain because they hired a talented intern who graduated into a full-time employee, or is it a bargain because they hired someone talented from a different country who has lower salary expectations?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, very unlikely you will pay some 30+ aged footballers (except GK) much higher value regardless of which countries they were from. But for youngsters, they are full of potential, so a tool to help the club to scout is very helpful. In the past, they are relying heavily on "scouting agents", and that's bit of an art than science with data backed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's still lots of great football stats work being done out in the open, at [http://statsbomb.com/](http://statsbomb.com/) for example. One of the founders of StatsBomb, Ted Knutson, went on to be hired by Matthew Benham to do player analytics for his two clubs. There hasn't yet been the sudden land grab that there was in ice hockey where all the best analytics bloggers got hired and silenced pretty much overnight, but clubs are getting far better at this stuff.

Between Opta's human-based on-the-ball event tracking, and TRACAB's computer vision player tracking solutions that they provide to the Premier League, there's a bunch of interesting computer science and business going on around this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER5> As an Arsenal fan, this somewhat surprises me considering Arsene Wenger seems to be a fairly old fashioned sort of coach _these_ days.

It seems an eternity ago that he swept into the league with fresh new ideas. Nowadays many people (wrongly) consider him a stubborn old man who has been passed by by the modern game.

Guess he still has a few tricks left though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree (and I am too an Arsenal fan). Wenger always brought in these new blood who are mostly below the age of 23, and I guess that's the trick he used to scout them.

I also think he is not the type of guy brag about his tricks.

But this is just for scouting. I'm yet to see someone can get all the data on each games, and help in coming up with tactics and strategy for planning the next match. Perhaps employ some ML too!

<comment><USER6> What? Couching is not all scouting... no one's denying that Wenger is always on the look out for young prospects.

But Wenger _is_ a sort of 'old fashioned' coach. He prefers focusing on how _his_ players can do better, rather than trying to focus on the weaknesses of the opponent, which is definitely not 'modern'. This has been slowly changing the past few seasons however.

That being said, I'm definitely no #WOB just in case you think that.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's sorta weird to chat about Arsenal here...

I do agree with your above points, but he has his football (sorry American) philosophy which not most fans understand.

The past decade, he cut his spending to just build a new stadium for Arsenal, budget is tight, so what to do? Bring in the new blood, and the hard data + analytics help!

I'm hoping to see he can also bring in some data-driven approach on his on- field tactics and off-field strategy.

<comment><USER6> If by football philosophy you mean "the thing about Arsenal is...", skc got it right I think because 15 years ago he was definitely considered 'progressive' or 'modern'. But now I think he's considered "a stubborn old man" because of a "lack of a plan B...". (Of course, past few seasons that "lack of plan B" criticism is not really relevant anymore, but you probably know what I mean.)

About football _the sport_ , I've always seen him as 'progressive' because for example he has always advocated for video replay technology to be used, goal- line technology to be used etc. And so it's definitely possible that he's not afraid of using all the technological help he can for coaching.

It's just that he has rejected using 'technology' to help his coaching in the past. By which I'm referring specifically about him not using video replays of how his opponents play to coach his players with (which has since changed). But I think that is more the case of just not being part of his coaching philosophy, rather than not wanting to use 'technology' or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an example of a good movement by an attacking player (Munir, player from Barcelona starting at the top) that helps create the goal and still won't be traditionally credited as anything (didn't score or assist or even touched the ball in this play): [http://gfycat.com/TotalEmbellishedDesertpupfish](http://gfycat.com/TotalEmbellishedDesertpupfish)

At some level soccer is about creating space for yourself or for your teammates, this is what this player does (following Suarez' clue) and hopefully the new data companies are capturing this (versus silly stats like possession).

</comment><comment><USER8> The owner of SmartOdds betting company, Matthew Benham is applying his company's statistical insights to the clubs he owns. This has proven quite successful. Great to see Arsenal doing the same. [http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jul/27/how-fc- midtj...](http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jul/27/how-fc-midtjylland- analytical-route-champions-league-brentford-matthew-benham)

<comment><USER9> It has to be said, the article gives remarkably little insight into what Benham's statistical system actually offers (and of course what was so objectionable about it to the successful manager who chose to part company with the club over it). I mean, any football club in the world has access to data on "any two-footed left-back in the world of a certain standard, aged 22-26, who has not been injured for the previous 18 months"; we had _games_ that could do this pretty reliably in the 1990s.

Football seems like a particularly difficult sport to try the Moneyball approach with because it's largely a battle of team cohesion rather than individual skills, and even apparently novel and meaningful heuristics one might devise like "percentage of forward passes completed in opposition half over the course of a season" are likely to be heavily influenced by the tactical approach of the player's team. Even if your telemetry data is incredibly comprehensive, it's going to be difficult to teach a computer the difference between chances created because the timing of the pass was exquisite and chances succeeded because the covering defenders were out of position or made a glaring hash of the interception; not something you'll ever find coaches or commentators struggling to decide on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is old news. But Wengers still relies a lot on the 'eye' [http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jan/30/arsene- wenge...](http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/jan/30/arsene-wenger- gabriel-paulista-signing)

</comment><comment><USER11> This article was published over a year ago.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As sports are now much more data driven, is there any other analytics are doing similar? In this case of Arsenal, they purchased it for "scouting" purpose. I would also love to see if some sport clubs can leverage the data and make sport management as a predictable science.

<comment><USER12> Opta certainly hope so. They have, and licence access to, a colossal amount of sports data and I imagine clubs that don't have the resources to generate/collect their own will probably use a service like theirs.

[http://www.optasports.com/](http://www.optasports.com/)

[http://www.optasportspro.com/about/optapro- blog/posts/2015/b...](http://www.optasportspro.com/about/optapro- blog/posts/2015/blog-inside-leicester-city/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Arsenal news on this page. Wow.

"StatDNA's database is now Arsenal's database, so if Wenger wants to sign a defender, who is, say, 6ft 4in, an excellent reader of the game and an accurate passer, one push of a button will bring up the best options in world football."

Interesting and Arsenal need a few.

<comment><USER14> i found that quote a bit funny. i was hoping that something like this system would be far more useful than that. i mean, football manager (the game) has been used for that purpose for ages now.

also, i don't believe that a system like this one is new. i can't find the source, but sometime ago i read SAP's owner (founder?) had a system much like this one built for the german national team.

<comment><USER15> Teams have been using game databases for years as a scouting tool: [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/everton-signs-football- man...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/everton-signs-football-manager- database)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any idea why this come up one year after being published?

</comment><comment><USER17> put a date after this title! (2014)

<comment><AUTHOR> totally my bad! I forgot to check the date. I just happen to stumble upon this article yesterday!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hosting for equity? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,<p>I have a fully working web startup that I want to launch - the cost will be primarily image hosting and while I'm reaching out to Angel Investors (London is getting better but still pretty tough), I was wondering how reasonable an equity for hosting offer would be. I presume most major startups have extra capacity left over after setting aside excess to take up variable demand slack. Do you think this is a feasible model... it would be a different way to value the company, but I can see it as a win-win for the hosting providers. Any thoughts? Thanks. <comment><USER2> This question strikes me as similar to giving away equity for office supplies. I suppose, theoretically speaking, one could come up with a way to structure a deal with Staples such that you bought your copy paper with equity... but _why_. Image hosting is a cheap, commodity service like office paper. Go raid your coffee tin, that should suffice for several months.

<comment><USER3> Especially if the primary need is image hosting. S3's 14 cents/gigabyte isn't cheap enough?

<comment><USER4> And if for some reason Amazon isn't suitable, you can get dedicated servers _seriously_ cheaply these days too, e.g.

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- pr...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver- produktmatrix-special/)

(no affiliation, I'm just a happy customer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Never give away equity (future profit) for a utility. You should have learned this in Parker Brother's Monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER6> Note: A Fully working web startup that you want to launch is not a fully working web startup.

What about S3 or a bunch of VPSes to test the idea and then go to the Investors with a working startup?

</comment><comment><USER7> Sure, send over the business plan, I'll look it over and it if looks profitable I'll let you use my S3 account for 50% of the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but sarcasm aside, I was going on the premise of a far smaller share (<5%) for an innovative technology. I can see what everyone is saying though, seems like a bad idea. I'll just keep trying to flog it to investors.

<comment><USER7> Also, S3 has a free tier now, and figure out how to leverage GAE's (Google APp Engine) free tier. Seriously, it's difficult to figure out how to do things for free, but just do it. ALSO, dreamhost has plans for about $8/month with 'unlimited' storage, yes you'll eventually get booted, but if you can get traction you'll have all the money you need.

And put your email in your profile so people can get in touch with you.

Email me if you want more ideas on free or almost free storage. (It's in my profile)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What about cash for equity and then use the cash to pay for hosting?

<comment><USER4> I think "I'm reaching out to Angel Investors" is intended to mean he/she's trying but thus far hasn't been able to raise money.</comment></comment>


JSONx is an IBM standard format to represent JSON as XML - <AUTHOR> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdatap/v3r8m1/index.jsp?topic=/xs40/convertingbetweenjsonandjsonx05.htm <comment><USER2> "In an XML Firewall service, JSONx can be used like other XML input."

[http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdatap/v3r8m1/inde...](http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdatap/v3r8m1/index.jsp?topic=/xs40/convertingbetweenjsonandjsonx05.htm)

"An XML firewall is a specialized device used to protect applications exposed through XML based interfaces like WSDL and REST and scan XML traffic coming in and out of an organization. [snipped] XML Firewall is often used to validate XML traffic, control access to XML based resources, filter XML content and rate limit requests to back-end applications exposed through XML based interfaces."

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

<comment><USER3> Also, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_appliance> and <http://www.layer7tech.com/products/xml-accelerator>

Astounding, is it not?

<comment><USER4> It's less silly than it sounds. Many XML attacks have JSON equivalents. Do you know how _your_ JSON parser will deal with 512KB of open square brackets in a row?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. Just wow.

Probably controversial, but in a dozen or so years of programming I think XML probably represents the most stupid and costly ideas to've gained widespread adoption.

I honestly can't think of a single other relatively recent technology that's responsible for nearly as many wasted lines of code, unbelievably inefficient systems, and legions of developers who are terrified of bytes that don't render nicely in notepad.

I _hate_ it. Just saying. (Downvotes expected).

<comment><USER6> Couldn't agree more.

The thing that frustrates me the most is that people jump to defend it because it's what they know. It's like they're plugged into the matrix and they will fight for it until the end.

People love to write regexes to process their bastardized XML subset because it's "easy," without realizing that their regex is not even remotely an XML parser and would fall over at the first sight of CDATA.

<comment><USER5> Totally. On two totally independent occasions I've come into work to have a coworker tell me they implemented an XML Parser the evening before. Um, right. Great.

The thing that totally boggles my mind is that I think it really prove-ably fails to deliver on literally every promise/benefit/design-goal that I hear folks claim it embodies.

<comment><USER7> I know parsing XML with regular expressions is a sin, but when you need to get some data out a 20 GB XML immediately in the next 10 minutes. It turns out that its better to check out the layout of the XML, use combinations of grep, sed, awk , perl with pipes just to serve the need for the moment.

This is better than spending next 5 hours writing a Java program to do it. Its not a permanent solution, but either way that Java program and the shell hack are both going to do the very same.

I would rather use the shell and do it, rather than spend the next 5 hours with Java and eclipse.

<comment><USER6> The fact that those are your two options is just a testament to how absurdly unsuitable XML is for this purpose.

Your "combinations of grep, sed, awk, perl" will _corrupt your data_ if your file happens to contain any CDATA, entities, unexpected formatting, processing instructions, etc.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes a quick hack is worth the risk. But it's certainly no reason to defend XML, which is what put you in the position where a quick hack was your best option.

<comment><USER7> I agree with you. Actually I'm not too much in favor of XML either. Somebody high up in the hierarchy attends a few conferences here and there, reads the IBM journal. All along the word 'XML' gets repeated some 1000 times.

So the impression he gets is, XML is going to add value to everything it touches. Most developers like me have no say in that at all, we have to just use it.

I prefer the hack to get it just done. But agree with you, none of that is a permanent solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of the Property List evolution:

1\. "Under NeXTSTEP, property lists were designed to be human-readable and edited by hand, serialized to ASCII in a syntax somewhat like a programming language."

2\. "In Mac OS X 10.0, the NeXTSTEP format was deprecated, and a new XML format was introduced."

3\. "Since XML files, however, are not the most space-efficient means of storage, Mac OS X 10.2 introduced a new format where property list files are stored as binary files."

<comment><USER6> Everything converges to the equivalent of protocol buffers.

Property lists -> XML -> Binary Property Lists

JSON -> JSON Schema -> Binary JSON

XML -> XML Schema -> XML Namespaces -> Binary XML

Or you can skip all that faffing around and just jump straight to protocol buffers. :)

ps. Protocol Buffers have a text format too that looks very similar to JSON. And you can encode protocol buffers as JSON, though I'm not sure there's good software support for it yet. I'm working on it.

<comment><USER9> Similarly you could use Doug Cutting's Avro format that does have a JSON representation. It is also evolvable like Protocol Buffers and works well in untyped languages. I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER6> Avro looks like an interesting format, thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The objective of jsonx is: 1) a loss-less representation of json in xml so it can be reused with xml tools. In a sense it's the reverse of jsonml.org.

jsonx is not (neither it is meant to be): \- a replacement for json \- a format that enables you to query json in a xml database \- a standard (I would remember if I was part of a standard comity, although I do recall playing bullshit bingo in some of these meetings)

I think the use case for jsonx is extremely small: maybe exclusively related to transmitting json over the wire in hardware that is specialized for xml processing. Having worked in it I argued many times that it is not even a queryable format, which makes it less usable even in "xml world". ( for a queryable format example you can check isubiker/mljson@github )

If you are not trying to achieve 1) you can/should simply disregard jsonx. That's certainly what I do: It's completely irrelevant for me and even thought I worked on it I never used it in any of my projects. Why should I? You can't query that crap for the heck of it.

About saying crap about IBM: That's just plain stupid. The fact that you can't understand something simply means you can't understand it and not that it is of no value. "all I know is that I know nothing." - Socrates, supposed to be smart guy

<comment><USER7> This whole thing about not speaking about something wrong ultimately leads to right stuff being lost. Enterprise vendors like IBM are always in the hunt of giving the industry something that forces volumes of people to use it, and then design tools around it that make people addicted to it.

Just put a auto completion feature in a couple famous IDE's to enable this happen, and see how many people use it without caring what, why and how of it.

Then one fine day there is situation that most of the programmers in the market are trained to use it and if you have to run a project you to hire them and let them to what they want. And then the technology adoption grows.

Its not OK just to remain silent. Proper criticism is needed often, it helps things evolve in the right direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not only is XML shoe horned for purposes where it doesn't belong to, but also people who know only XML tend to use it so badly that it brings bad name to technologies associated with it.

I work for a project that has involvement in a lot of technologies like Java, Perl, C and C++. Now the problem is somehow there is assumption that its difficult and costly to hire good C/C++ programmers. So what is the path taken? They tend to replace everything with Java. Now comes the actual issue, its easy to hire programmers who know Java. They come in volumes. Just post a hiring Ad, and thousands will land up at your doorstep next day. The actual issue is how do you separate the good ones from the bad ones?

Once you hire such programmers, you have to deal with technology addiction. Things like eclipse, XML etc the whole project begins to revolve around such things. In my project nearly everything is XML, config files, DB, persistence you name it. If its on a file its XML. This JSON in XML which is surprising most of you folks already exists in a lot enterprise code bases. Project managers seem to have a narrow vision, debates on issues like these terminate with 'It works, so we just don't care'.

I'm not against IDE's. But when your programmers can't do a simple deployment on test boxes, can't figure out even simple commands. All under the excuse of 'I only use eclipse', It begins to show up on the language community. Java in it self is not bad. But by reducing the barrier to entry to such low levels you are opening door for all sorts of toxins to come in.

I see Python is the next Java in making. Masses are flocking to it. As it usually turns out to be, most of them horrible. They just contagiously corrupt the whole community, spread the disease and once they are done destroying it they move onto some thing new.

After all you need to do something for a Job.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is it April 1st again already?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This comes from the docs for the DataPower XML Security Appliance. Naturally, I was curious about what this Appliance does.

If you go up the tree a bit, click Development, then XML Firewall, then Introduction, you'll find this tidbit:

"These appliances offer an innovative, pragmatic approach to harness the power of SOA while simultaneously enabling you to leverage the value of your existing application, security, and networking infrastructure investments."

Seems like a great attempt to use as many words as possible to say nothing at all. :)

<comment><USER2> This point seems relevant:

"Bridges to Web 2.0 technologies with JSON filtering and validation, support for REST verbs, and converting/bridging of REST and Web services."

<http://www-01.ibm.com/software/integration/datapower/xs40/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a service that's being subscribed to that provides video that I can't share, sadly. However, when I reverse engineered how our video player was translating a uid into a link, I was horrified.

Essentially, we perform a request that returns an xml document wrapped in a json object, wrapped in a jsonp callback, that is then parsed by a php script on our end back into a pure json object.

This made me die a bit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why oh why... If it helps JSON invade the enterprise then ok, but why make a good thing bad.

<comment><USER14> [http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdatap/v3r8m1/inde...](http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdatap/v3r8m1/index.jsp?topic=/xs40/convertingbetweenjsonandjsonx05.htm)

To allow you to use XSLT tools apparently.

<comment><USER15> XSLT and XPath is about the only reason I can see to use this. But, you know, how hard is:

       x.person.addresses[0].city?

I guess XPath is easier when you probably have to do something like this:

       JSONObject json = (JSONObject) JSONSerializer.toJSON( jsonTxt )
       String city = json.getJSONObject("person").getJSONArray("addresses").getJSONObject(0).getJSONObject("city");

Or however you'd do it in Java.

<comment><USER16> That's not hard, what's hard is

       //person[@alive="true"]/pets//dog[@hair="long"]/*/flea[@name]

<comment><USER17> still, i think an xpath evaluator for json would have been the way to go here instead

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> wow, the brevity and parsability of xml combined with the specificity and structure of json.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not sure what all the fuss is about. It's actually neat to have a common way of changing JSON to XML, think of a web service that offers an API using our beloved JSON. But wait, we also want to provide an XML API! Let's design our own, ad-hoc, crappy mapping or... use that thing that everyone else is using.

XML is out there, has lots of tools and libraries and is actually useful for some things. Not to mention the array of technologies around it, like XPath, XQuery etc, that JSON is lacking (probably because it doesn't need it, because these formats do address slightly different requirements. Gasp!).

<comment><USER19> "the fuss" is because a lot of people jumped on the JSON bandwagon in order to _get away from_ XML.

<comment><USER16> That's fine for them. My question stands: what's wrong with someone proposing a generic way of transforming JSON to XML?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not to go against the grain, but this could be useful. Say you already have some sort of datastore that uses xml. Now somebody hands you JSON for some reason, maybe a list of companies. Convert it to XML, stick it in your datastore and use XSL to do whatever you want with it.

<comment><USER21> XSLT is a scary language. It took several years for computer scientists to prove that it's Turing complete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> IBM. I know you have smart people. Why don't you let them be smart?

<comment><USER19> IBM has been divesting themselves of good programmers for a while now, probably at least a decade.

Their interns are steered away from programming, towards career paths that are perceived as adding value: e.g. consulting.

I suppose in theory this makes sense: have the smart locals figure out what is needed, write up some specs and then get the guys in Bangalore to bang (sic) it out for you.

In practice, it is an absolute dogs bollocks.

(1) The local IBMers have forgotten how to do anything in the real world. No, seriously. They can't even install a server to use for their own use as a test machine in less than 4-6 weeks.

(2) The Bangalore IBMers cannot code for shit. They are the second worst programmers I ever worked with (and the worst was a consultant Thoughtworker who was _actively sabotaging_ the project). The ones who did the least got promoted. _twitch_

(3) They can't even maintain the software they wrote 5-10 years ago, they just don't make any effort to retain that knowledge.

(4) It might be different for US IBMers, but outside of the US the programmers got the shaft big time when the GFC hit. Stupid little things like (even if your business unit was profitable) you had to bring your own coffee and milk in to work because they stopped supplying them free.

Other than the above, IBM is just like any other large organization.

<comment><USER23> > They can't even maintain the software they wrote 5-10 years ago, they just > don't make any effort to retain that knowledge.

IBM is the company that keeps a nearly-five-decade-old architecture and ISA around for its business customers, correct? (zSeries (or whatever its name is this week) is derived from s390, is derived from s370, is derived from s360, was created in the early 1960s.) z/OS and z/VM are modern versions of MVS and CP-40, which date to 1974 and 1967, respectively.

It seems odd that the company that does that would have problems with decade- old software in any of its business units.

<comment><USER24> It seems Stormbringer was looking at the IT consulting division. I have to agree with him/her on that - I hear horrible things about them and I'd never, ever, under no circumstances, hire them.

That said, I have enormous respect for their mainframe division and operating system programmers. Their server hardware (z, i, and x), z/OS/, z/VM, AIX and their contributions to the Linux kernel are all very good.

IBM is certainly big enough and old enough that different divisions can behave like completely different companies. It's a bit unfair, in fact, to see one division tarnishing the image of a company so full with groundbreaking accomplishments and such a rich history as IBM. The consulting division has to compete for huge contracts, that are managed by pointy-haired lifeforms who can't see beyond hourly rates, with equally incompetent organizations like EDS/HP, Accenture and Tata.

You put an evolutionary pression on the market driving it to provide low prices. The marker responds optimizing for price and price alone.

When you have to compete in price with incompetent-but-cheap organizations, you either become incompetent-but-cheap or get out of business.

Tough choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> <https://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/64050059276337152>

</comment><comment><USER26> Yo dawg, I heard you like serialization formats, so we put a serialization format inside your serialization format.

</comment><comment><USER27> JSONx has a very limited use case, A quick check will show that the documentation points to its use in devices on the edge for transforming/bridging/proxying <http://bit.ly/ky0q53> <http://bit.ly/iDF2Y5>

</comment><comment><USER28> Could this present any utility as a communication interface between an RDBMS with XML support (DB2, MSSQL) and a document DB (MongoDB, CouchDB) ?

</comment><comment><USER29> I know I'm supposed to be insightful in my comments on HN, but this is... I just can't.

Pretend I put the facepalm ASCII-art here.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've up-voted this solely for the irony. Who says IBM doesn't have a sense of humour?

</comment><comment><USER31> Why don't we yet have XMLj?

<comment><USER32> Because JSON supports only a subset of the features of XML.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, you know the subset that people actually use.

XSLT and XPath are tools that really feel like they should be useful, but for small things, I feel like a streaming parser in <favorite scripting language> is faster and more readable, and for large things, deserializing it all into <favorite database> and querying it that way is better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I liked this better when it was called WDDX.

</comment><comment><USER34> JSONx: In Space

</comment><comment><USER35> I just threw up.

</comment><comment><USER36> Using the example from [http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdatap/v3r8m1/inde...](http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wsdatap/v3r8m1/index.jsp?topic=/xs40/convertingbetweenjsonandjsonx05.htm)

muk:~ fiam$ echo '{ "name":"John Smith"... }'|wc -c

303

muk:~ fiam$ echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <json:object> … </json:object>' |wc -c

904

I don't really have anything else to say.

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER37> you've got to love the title of the linked page: "help"

there's someone in there, trapped...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Silly, but interesting. It just shows the power and simplicity of the JSON syntax to define these universal data structures.</comment>


Government of Canada Tender Notice: Social Media Monitoring - <AUTHOR> https://buyandsell.gc.ca/procurement-data/tender-notice/PW-CY-007-64008

<comment><AUTHOR> Damn you, NSA, you gave Canada some ideas!

<comment><USER2> This tender is just for monitoring publicly-available stuff on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Every big brand already does that. For example, Starbucks almost certainly has software watching for mentions of the word "Starbucks." They probably have people to respond to questions on Twitter, etc. It's known as "Social Media Monitoring."

One of the big companies offering a Social Media Monitoring suite is Radian6; they're now part of Salesforce.com. There are lots of other companies offering similar services.

The Canadian Government wants to pay closer attention to what people are saying publicly online? I have a hard time finding problems with that. (Eavesdropping on private communications without a warrant is another matter entirely; it's not what this tender is for.)</comment></comment>


With SEC workers offline, government shutdown could screw IPO-ready companies - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/with-sec-workers-offline-the-government-shutdown-could-screw-ipo-ready-companies/ <comment><USER2> A material risk that goes into their prospectus perhaps?</comment>


The Telegraph Apologizes - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/26/melania-trump-apology/ <comment><USER2> They itemized _nine_ flat lies from that one article alone.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It does seem the press is a little trigger-happy these days, doesn't it?

<comment><USER3> To be a journalist you must be rational, and you can't be rational about someone you hate, or even dislike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People talk about English defamation law, but they may not realise that there are reasonably recent (2013) changes.

The claimant has to show actual or probable serious harm; there has to be geographical relevance to bring the case in the UK; and there are stronger defences. (Truth, honest opinion, public interest, or priviledged publication (eg, scientific journal)).

These changes came around to protect freedom of speech a bit more than the old act did.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_Act_2013](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_Act_2013)

I'd be interested to know if Trump could have brought a case in the US if a US paper had written the same things?</comment>


Ask HN: How can I get 100 paid users? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
We run a really simple site called getinspired365.com - it dishes out daily doses of inspiration. These are in the form of pictures and quotes, or really cool videos.
We've got 2500 registered users who received a 'daily dose of inspiration' from us and we get around 1000 users coming to the site each day. We had a few people comment saying that they really liked the design of the site and that they'd like the same style template for their site.
We thought that was a cool idea and a neat way for us to try and monitise. We built this page - getinspired365.com/getyourown that lists why you may want a template from us, our different price plans and the ability to order a template.
So far we've had 7 customers without us doing an awful lot of pushing. This has come from our existing user base.
We want to really push it and try and get 100 paid users. In your opinion what are the best ways of trying to sell our template to people. Some thoughts we had was: - Contact existing user base to see who fancies a template. - Offer referrals (if you get a mate to get a template we'll give you the first months money) - Advertising
We just wondered if people had any advice on how they got users to pay for their service. We are constantly trying to improve our product so it may be a case that we really try and push it once it is in better shape. We're just after some advice!
Oh, and feel free to order a template!
thanks! <comment><USER2> Hi there. I'm looking at your site, and I don't immediately see anything that tells me why I should pay for an account. How will my life improve by giving you money? Will it bring in some dollars? Will it build my internet fame? For all I know, every single one of my needs might be solved by your product, but I won't know that if you don't tell me.

What I would suggest is that you figure out the type of person that would be an ideal customer - someone who would not only be willing to pay, but would be thrilled to pay. It might be psychologists focusing on PTSD. It might be physical therapists working with recently paralysed customers. It could be someone else entirely. Then, go out and start contacting them to a) validate your message b) get some sales.

Incidentally, it's quite difficult to compare your different plans. I'd suggest that you make it more scannable like Basecamp does: [https://basecamp.com/start#prices](https://basecamp.com/start#prices)

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try engaging accounts on twitter that post content similar to yours. Accounts that basically post content around a theme like History in Pictures or Modern Day Stoic. No guarantees these accounts would buy anything, but there might be twitter account managers out there looking for a way to easily maintain a site alongside their twitter account.

Definitely announce this service to your existing userbase. I'm sure people there have ideas for similar sites, but lack the ability to execute on them currently. You could show them how easy it can be. Referrals could be good if its not too much of a hassle to setup, but there are probably more valuable ways to get signups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That first suggestion in particular is a great idea. We'll get straight on that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are selling templates, ThemeForest is the place.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone's job involve coding "reports?" - <AUTHOR>

By "report," I mean some sort of chart derived from an aggregate query in one or more databases. <comment><USER2> It would be weird if the answer to this were "No, nobody's job involves coding "reports".", wouldn't it? I assume you wanted to ask some other question.

It's not a main part of my job but I am occasionally asked to produce a report of some sort. Usually satisfied by a short python script, a cron job to invoke it, and if the chart isn't trivial, maybe the script invokes R or something to produce the image.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess what I was asking was, "does your job involve a lot of reports?"

I'm thinking of reviving a dynamic data/chart thing I wrote a long time ago. Basically, it builds reports for you dynamically when you click on a bar charts, so you can answer questions like: How many hits across hours? Okay, so how many hits by products in the 1:00 hour? etc.</comment></comment>


Does Oracle/Google lawsuit represent opportunity for .NET? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.borud.no/2010/08/oraclegoogle-lawsuit-hinting-at.html <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't Oracle's Java patents apply to .NET implementations as well? Apparently, they cover fairly generic virtual- machine-acceleration-and-security stuff.

<comment><USER3> Even if they did Microsoft has it's only patent arsenal. You only bring a patent suit if the IP retaliation isn't equally damaging. I think this has more to do with Oracle seeing Google's cloud as a competitor to Oracle's cloud. If they depended on Oracle you can bet this would be a non issue.

<comment><USER4> That type of protection wouldn't extend past Microsoft however so I would imagine this would still be an issue in the case of Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Once bitten, twice shy -- and so I highly doubt that Google would switch from Java to .NET. It will be supported through MonoDroid, but Google itself will no doubt already be working on support for a different language that does not have the same risks as Java, .NET, etc.

<comment> mkr-hn Doesn't Google use python quite a bit? Are there any good python implementations that use VMs?

<comment><USER6> The problem is the VM, not the language. Simply switching languages won't make a difference to the legal case if the underlying VM still infringes on the patents.

<comment> mkr-hn Do you know if anyone has written up a good summary of those patents?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If .NET does catch on as a result, I wonder if Oracle would attack IKVM (<http://www.ikvm.net/>) as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft is not interested in opening .NET to other platforms than Windows because they see .NET as driving developers to using Windows and Visual Studio. "While you're here, try some Office Suite." MS uses their freeware offerings to increase demand for their payware offerings.

<comment><USER9> Yet they fund Mono and distribute Silverlight for OSX...

<comment><USER8> Which is a strategic move to A) get people to view MS as friendly to open source, and B) get people yearning for Visual Studio. Without Visual Studio, .NET is kind of a pain in the ass to develop. Not as bad as Java without Eclipse, but not anywhere near simple enough to be productive with substandard editors. Visual Studio _makes_ .NET. Mono is intended to introduce people to the features that .NET provides and entice them into trying it where it shines, in Visual Studio, which runs around $500 a copy, which only runs on Windows.

<comment><USER9> I think you have it backwards. MS courts developers to make Windows seem like a desirable platform. Courting developers includes building wickedly good developer tools, but they tend to give them away. The Express editions are free, they give out full Pro versions at most events, etc.

The point, though, is that you said "MS is not interested in opening .NET to other platforms" when they demonstrably are. That doesn't mean they're angelic do gooders, or that they don't want to make money, or anything else. It simply means that they are interested in having .NET on other platforms because it somehow suits their purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No, it offers an opportunity for Objective-C _or_ HTML5 specifically in the mobile field.

<comment><USER8> Certainly not Objective-C. There is a reason Objective-C is really only a viable option on the Mac platforms, and that is the heritage of NeXTSTEP that Jobs brought with him when he came back to Apple.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you on objective-c. As for HTML5, V8 installed on a phone + installable javascript apps could fully replace the current dalvik java stuff. V8 extension could provide access to non standard stuff (calling api...) and html for interfaces would be simple.

Games in WebGL running natively on the phone would be cool, with the fileapi there is no need for servers around.

<comment><USER8> Personally, I think HTML5 is the wrong answer for the wrong problem. The problem is not "how do we make HTML+JavaScript work more like an application." The problem is also not "how do we make more application-like web pages." The problem is "how do we distribute application-like functionality over the web." That never had to mean making a new version of HTML. That never had to mean running inside the browser.

The folly of HTML5 is this incessant reliance on SGML and human-readability. In real-world, big-boy-pants development, we don't write HTML, HTML is our output format. We never needed a new HTML, we needed a new output format that worked. I don't think the WHATWG is up to the task, as evidenced by the complete lack of sane audio handling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Use java and covered by whatever canes out of google defence?

Or use. Net and be vulnerable for oracle and Microsoft?

Why ppl even bring those discussion on?

...and I don't even like java.

<comment><USER13> Microsofts patent portfolio probably is so wide that it could launch a lawsuit against Java implementations if it wishes so. So it's more of a question who you'd trust more, and who is more predictable, Oracle or Microsoft.</comment></comment>


Facebook points finger at Google and Twitter for data collection - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/them-too/ <comment><USER3> Contrary to most comments here, it is significant that other companies do. Facebook competes in the free market. If they scale back on data collection, that will hurt their offering to advertisers and cost them money that will go to Google and others. That lost revenue will harm their ability to retain talent and build new products, and ultimately cost them their user base. "We don't track you" is not as compelling a feature as "free video chat across the globe."

Facebook doesn't operate in a vacuum. They can't scale back data collection unless others do. Moreover, the United States doesn't exist in a vacuum either. Scaling back all US companies will give a leg up to competitors in more lenient jurisdictions.

<comment><USER4> > _Scaling back all US companies will give a leg up to competitors in more > lenient jurisdictions_

Laws can be written to only apply to American users. That would leave American companies free to compete on level terms in other countries.

<comment><USER3> Sort of, the issue is companies typically bootstrap in their domestic market. If laws are restrictive it will kill companies before they even get to the point of international expansion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So Facebook is going with the tu quoque fallacy.

Perhaps the others will be in trouble in future too, but sorry Facebook, it's _your_ turn now.

<comment><USER6> "Look, others are doing it too!"

<comment><USER7> Which was an argument of my kids when they were five. To which I replied then and I reply now, "That doesn't make it right."

<comment><USER8> This is rapidly becoming political and rule #1 in politics is "politics doesn't have to be fair."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> shady-lady I personally don't really care about what information they collect. I do hugely care who they give that information to & what they do with it.

Haven't heard anything about Google wholesale handing all my data over to anybody who clicks a couple buttons to sign up to their developer program though.

I'm guessing Facebook has the technical expertise to allow 3rd parties to run aggregate (non identifying) queries on the consenting users' data on servers they control and only allowing certain aggregated data, as well as limiting the number and type of queries 3rd parties are running.

Guess it's easier to just let anybody have at it to prove how valuable their platform/data is.

<comment><USER9> Google keeps their data private because they've already secured their advertising/search territory. Disclosing profiles would only undermine their competitive advantage.

It seems like Facebook gave away that information in hopes of developing a more engaging walled garden with 3rd party help, and perhaps some naivety.

> I'm guessing Facebook has the technical expertise to allow 3rd parties to > run aggregate (non identifying) queries on the consenting users' data on > servers they control and only allowing certain aggregated data, as well as > limiting the number and type of queries 3rd parties are running.

This is a _very_ challenging problem - multiple "non-identifying" queries can actually identify individuals. Differential privacy is the best solution so far, however it's still challenging to guarantee privacy without lowering quality far below competitors that don't care about consumers.

<comment><USER10> > Google keeps their data private because they've already secured their > advertising/search territory.

That is one _possible_ self-interested reason for them to keep the data private. They could also just care deeply about guarding user data they collect. This could be for either selfish or unselfish reasons -- it's both good business and moral. It's very hard to tell from the outside, because their actions would look largely the same either way.

Personally I think it's pretty naive to believe any company does any thing for a single reason. There are a constellation of reasons, some more important than others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully, this starts a meaningful conversation about what other people are also doing. I am not a fan of Facebook but this might get the ball rolling on broader legislation similar to GDPR in US.

<comment><USER12> I really hope nothing remotely similar to gdpr is written into legislation in the US. I do not even know how I would get started writing a website that would adhere to GDPR requirements

<comment><USER13> So, on the one hand, I really would like a GDPR equivalent law in the US.

OTOH, anyone who says they clearly understand the implications of GDPR for their site has either spent a lot of money on lawyers or is lying. Let alone someone who has implemented it. Privacy by design requires deletion of data after legitimate interests and/or consent have expired, probably (!!!) in 3rd party systems. How, precisely, do you implement that?

Can you shadow-delete accounts for some period of time to allow users to change their minds? If no, what UI do you put on a "delete my account" button that has absolutely no undo, even in the 24h regrets period?

Do people have GDPR privacy rights over eg comments on YC that may mention them by nym?

Given the GDPR covers EU residents (not just citizens), as an American can I buy a plane ticket to Dublin and start requesting full data dumps? What rules are those provided to me under, and how do you make software that can do that?

<comment><USER9> > OTOH, anyone who says they clearly understand the implications of GDPR for > their site has either spent a lot of money on lawyers or is lying. Let alone > someone who has implemented it.

[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELE...](http://eur- lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679&from=EN)

It's long but the language is far easier than American legalese. The implications depend on your site/service behaviors. An RSS reader is pretty trivial, interactive social media... less so.

> Privacy by design requires deletion of data after legitimate interests > and/or consent have expired, probably (!!!) in 3rd party systems. How, > precisely, do you implement that?

Privacy by design is a _design_ philosophy, it might be a pain to refactor into an existing system but the design constraints aren't onerous.

If your "3rd party system" is something like AWS, just delete the data. If you're sending it off to some other service, they do need to be GDPR complaint (the law covers this situation).

re: legitimate interests, we partitioned our data. Access logs, for example: one stream gets anonymized for simple analytics, another gets dumped into in- depth weekly analytics jobs, and the final log stream outputs encrypted auto- expiring S3 files with strong access control for infosec purposes. When a user withdraws consent, we just stop logging new information. Truly anonymized data is OK, our in-depth analytics data is purged within 14 days, and InfoSec is a justifiable legitimate interest.

> Can you shadow-delete accounts for some period of time to allow users to > change their minds?

Yes. GDPR does not require instant response. You should be transparent about what will be kept and how long, a clearly communicated 24h shadow-delete is completely reasonable.

> Do people have GDPR privacy rights over eg comments on YC that may mention > them by nym?

This is a good question, I'm also curious about quotes. The recent Google case suggests both fall under GDPR.

> Given the GDPR covers EU residents (not just citizens), as an American can I > buy a plane ticket to Dublin and start requesting full data dumps? What > rules are those provided to me under, and how do you make software that can > do that?

Assume everyone is covered by GDPR.

<comment><USER13> > It's long but the language is far easier than American legalese. The > implications depend on your site/service behaviors. An RSS reader is pretty > trivial, interactive social media... less so.

Except the GDPR is full of hand-wavy stuff. Who needs a DPO? What is "large scale" in that context? How exactly do you conduct a legitimate interest balancing test? Who is your lead regulator and under what criteria as an American company can you decide?

Also, people have a lot more 3rd party systems than most think. Think transactional mailers, marketing mailers, billing systems, payroll, zendesk, etc.

And even an RSS reader is scary. What if someone follows a series of blogs about HIV treatments, or internal trade union politics? If that means you could infer the person is poz or is a member of that trade union, you now have heightened scrutiny data in your possession.

<comment><USER9> > Think transactional mailers, marketing mailers, billing systems, payroll, > zendesk, etc.

GDPR has explicit provisions for all of these legitimate interests (notifications, clients, employees, customers). Most of these services are aware of and planning for GDPR, I wouldn't want to work with any that aren't.

> And even an RSS reader is scary. What if someone follows a series of blogs > about HIV treatments, or internal trade union politics? If that means you > could infer the person is poz or is a member of that trade union, you now > have heightened scrutiny data in your possession.

Right, and I like that! Attempting to derive sensitive information should require consent, transparency, right to rectification, and stringent data handling requirements. It sounds like overkill for an RSS reader, but why the heck does an RSS reader need to do that kind of profiling in the first place? Maybe that's the right level of scrutiny and prior applications were unwarranted?

On the other hand, there are no concerns with simply storing the followed blogs.

> Except the GDPR is full of hand-wavy stuff.

Can't win, legislation is either micromanaged or hand-wavy... it's worth noting that some of the hand-waving is actually business friendly.

I'm not saying these laws are perfect. There is definitely room for improvement, but this is still a consumer win over the pre-GDPR wild west.

<comment><USER13> 3rd party: the fact remains that doing deletions, both as a consent withdrawal and a privacy by design, is extremely complex. Particularly when privacy is withdrawn before a LI expires. You can hand wave it away as gdpr provides for this -- which isn't at all responsive to what I said -- but it's difficult to do nonetheless.

I never said the RSS reader is profiling. They don't have to be. Does the mere presence of the inescapable user data -- ie what feeds they monitor -- create heightened scrutiny, because _someone else_ could infer with that data, were it to be leaked. It well may. I would seriously consider blocking EU users until this is sorted out.

Worse, the RSS reader could offer suggested feeds, and accidentally find themselves in possession of such data, entirely accidentally. Even if users were clearly asked if they wanted to see suggested data, or allow their data to be used to suggest feeds. They may not intend to derive sensitive data to possess it.

Or suggest you have a site like YC, and someone puts "hi, I'm poz" in their description. Tada, sensitive data.

The GDPR should have defined when a DPO is required, what a LI balancing test is, etc. Alternatively, the orgs could have pretended to be competent and issued guidance before -- oh right, they haven't issued final guidance yet. I'm _sure_ 6 weeks is plenty of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like whoever wrote this article missed the point completely.

For the internet to function, websites need your information. If you want to log into a website using Facebook login, Facebook needs to know what website you are logging into.

When you watch a Youtube video on someone else's website, in order for that data to be sent to you they need to know what your IP address is and they need to know what website you are viewing the video on.

This is how the internet works. You cannot access something from someone else's servers without them knowing what your ip address is.

Are we invading people's privacy when we log ip addresses when someone visits a website hosted on our servers now?

<comment><USER15> Agreed, I found Facebook's explanation perfectly adequate and respectable. They are basically explaining cookies and embeds/iframes to a non-technical audience — no more, no less. It makes sense to give other examples like Google ads and Twitter buttons in this context.

<comment><USER16> > They are basically explaining cookies and embeds/iframes to a non-technical > audience — no more, no less.

Right but the main question was whether they were getting data on people from data brokers, and they responded by answering a completely different question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well Facebook, if all of the other companies jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?

Saying "But they do it too!" is no defense. Though it does make the argument for stronger regulation.

</comment><comment><USER18> I really dislike the, "well, they do it too!" form of argument. It shows a tremendous lack of maturity.

</comment><comment><USER19> spiderman-pointing-at-spiderman.jpg

</comment><comment><USER20> I am sure Facebook looked at today's internet discourse and thought - <USER2> whatabout-ism works for every discussion out there, why not us? Hence, they asked - What about Google? What about Twitter? They just dint go the full mile and asked - What about Amazon? What about those emails? What about "world peace"?

But, whatabout-ism misses an important point - we cannot get everything all at once. Everything happens one step at a time.

</comment><comment><USER21> >That said, other tech companies have gotten off light. Whether it's because Apple and Google aren't CEO'd by their founders any more, or we've grown to see iOS and Android as such underlying platforms that they aren't responsible for what third-party developers do, scrutiny has focused on Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Maybe Zuckerberg should do the same thing Larry Page did. Create a parent company for Facebook (maybe call it Library), of which Zuckerberg becomes the CEO. Then find someone else to be the CEO of Facebook. In addition, just like Alphabet and other "Bets", Library could have other "Books".

Then, instead of Zuckerberg CEO of Facebook, you have Zuckerberg CEO of Library.

<comment><USER22> I think this discounts the ways in which Facebook differs from Google and Apple as it relates to open, sprawling access to user data.

The alphabet conglomeration didn't obfuscate similar issues, nor would Zuckerberg following suit. Facebook's issues are related to unfettered access to a user and their graph(s) and sensitive information. More importantly that they knew of the risk and did little in response.

Obviously Google and Apple have their own privacy issues to account for, but it's fundamentally different.</comment></comment>


Bay Area Conservatives "Live a Secret Life," "In Fear for Their Safety" - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/02/05/bay_area_conservatives_live_a_secret_life_in_fear_for_their_safety.html <comment><USER2> Perhaps those conservatives now understand how it feels to be the people that liberals are always trying to protect.

</comment><comment><USER3> (Flash video; "Read More" link does nothing)

</comment><comment><USER4> _In fear of their safety._ What a crock.</comment>


EFF Dismayed by House's Gutted USA Freedom Act - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/eff-dismayed-houses-gutted-usa-freedom-act <comment><USER2> PBS Frontline is running a ~3 hour documentary, released in two parts, the second installment was released today, of the entire post 9/11 NSA surveillance episode, up to and including the Snowden leaks @ [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of- sec...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/)

Well worth a watch.

<comment><USER3> So while this is fantastic - if you pay attention to the first part of it - there is still a heavy dose of propaganda tied to the perception of how this all came about - as if it was some surprise emergent behavior that is outside anyone's expectation that this would have occurred.

As opposed to the reality that the whole thing is decades in the making and we can track exactly who built this thing. (Hint: who build PNAC?)

<comment><USER4> Joe knows! Allow me to just... drop this here....

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_Counterterrorism_Act_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnibus_Counterterrorism_Act_of_1995)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> By most reports this bill was watered down on the express meddling of the White house.

This is very unfortunate in that Senator Obama had clearly promised in his pre-election speeches to explicitly push for what this bill was (somewhat) trying to do. Watch this point-by-point: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vixVPE4LBAU#](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vixVPE4LBAU#)!

Now that he is in a position to do so, President Obama is fighting tooth-and- nail to make this a toothless(!) bill.

Why?

<comment><USER6> Why? Because... he's a politician?

<comment><USER7> So was everyone else involved with the bill. That explanation is insufficient.

<comment><USER6> The question was why did he say one thing then do another.

<comment><USER7> No, the question was not that general. The question was, verbatim: "Now that he is in a position to do so, President Obama is fighting tooth-and-nail to make this a toothless(!) bill. Why?" Many other politicians did not fight this bill tooth and nail, so that doesn't explain why Obama did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wouldnt be great if bills were edited in github or something analogous so you could see who committed the gutting? Oh well, back to my ipython notebook.

<comment> hippee-lee More than interesting. It would be a way to account what people say and what they do.

<comment><USER9> What is the most serious attempt out there of trying this?

I would want a law saying all bills must be put through a system that can be audited to see precisely who makes the changes.

And if it allows pull requests like GitHub, anyone could fork a bill, make a change, and people could comment on the best proposed recordings.

I think this could honestly get people more involved in politics in a productive way, rather than watching talking heads spout reactionary crystal ball gazing on the 24 hour news networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be interesting to trace the true lineage of this (or any) legislative edit.

It has a smell if an outside source, as though our laws are not written by our lawmakers.

<comment><USER11> An article on The Hill ([http://thehill.com/policy/technology/206686-privacy- advocate...](http://thehill.com/policy/technology/206686-privacy-advocates- pull-support-for-watered-down-usa-freedom)) says that the change was made at the behest of the Obama administration:

"[A]fter moving through the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, where it saw some changes but retained the support of privacy advocates, last minute negotiations between House leadership and the Obama administration have left the bill with weakened language when it comes to banning mass surveillance, advocates say."

Disappointing on many levels.

<comment><USER12> Because we all know how the Tea Party-heavy House has done whatever Obama wanted

<comment><USER13> The House leadership loathes the "Tea Party" types with a burning passion, e.g. along with the rest of the Republican establishment has made it very clear they prefer a Democrat winning to a "Tea Party" type. And is ever ready to cut a deal with Obama; there's no surprise here, especially with how much power a House majority leadership team has.

<comment><USER12> This is a blatant lie. If you look at any actual survey data, the Tea Party is strictly a wing of the Republican party and it has been nothing but good for the political fortunes of the Republican party, which is extremely concerned with what the Tea Party wants. Without the Tea Party, the Republicans would not have had the House all these years.

<comment><USER13> The two are not mutually exclusive (although if you can supply some evidence this extreme concern with what the "Tea Party" wants translating into substantive action by the national Republican Party I'm all ears).

If you're completely unaware of how the Republican establishment has been at war with its base _LONG_ before the "Tea Party" (e.g. at least as far back as Goldwater in 1964), you need to read up on the relevant history before making such unproductive accusations.

Heck, how about brushing up on basic human psychology, since the concept of ingratitude (in this case, of the Republican establishment) would appear to be beyond your imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want to see the differences between the version introduced in October of 2013 and the most recent amended version see here:

[https://gist.github.com/dfc/1819eace21dc47358f38/revisions](https://gist.github.com/dfc/1819eace21dc47358f38/revisions)

Sadly I have never had much luck/success with the bill changes interface on opencongress.org.

</comment><comment><USER15> If such watered down "solutions" are what we get for just about the most arcane form of surveillance (phone calls), then what are the "solutions" for electronic surveillance (where the real surveillance happens) going to look like?

</comment><comment><USER16> With a name like the USA FREEDOM Act, how could you go wrong?

<comment><USER17> Much as a Democratic Peoples' Republic is likely to be none of the 3.</comment></comment>


Incandescent Bulbs Return to the Cutting Edge - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/business/energy-environment/06bulbs.html

<comment><USER2> Earlier in the article they said that a 70 watt bulb is now giving off the same amount of light as an older 100 watt bulb. They said it was 30% more efficient.

Later in the article they say:

> _David Cunningham ... [has] develop[ed] a reflective coating and fixture > design that he believes could make incandescents 100 percent more > efficient._

100% more efficient? Zero power input? Me must really be giving 110% to acheive results like that.</comment>


Posterous Targets Ning In Massive Switching Campaign. Who Is Next? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/22/posterous-targets-ning-in-massive-switching-campaign-who-is-next/

<comment><USER2> Awesome! This is actually quite useful. I wish this could have happened earlier, but in any case, this makes it easier for groups to actively post more frequently (I tried using Google groups and Ning with group projects, but boy people are lazy).

<comment><USER3> Such an awesome way of seamless transition. If they keep doing it this way, then migration is more enticing for prospective users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds nice and dandy, but does it keep the URL architecture in place? If I want to move my blog to a new location, I would want to keep all the base URLs in place: for posts, archives (category and date), for tags, etc etc. Otherwise I loose search engine traffic and inter-connectivity between posts.

Can they do it?

<comment><USER5> I asked them this exact question a couple of weeks ago. Sachin actually answered himself and said they can't maintain old urls for now but are working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Posterous feels a lot like my Mac did the first time I switched from Windows. It just works.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm guessing their scraping the sites content. From a quick Google search it seems that only very recently has their been an easy way to export your data from Ning? Pretty bad form for a network that has been around so long if that is the case.

</comment><comment><USER8> I asked this on the TC comments, but do you have to own the Ning blog you want to copy to Posterous?

If not, and I can take anyone's Ning content and use it as my own, that's a big problem.

<comment><USER9> You can take any content published on the web and use it as your own… Sure, it's a very good idea to have some kind of verification (like "post this code on the site"? some kind of email verification? or at least send a mail to some contact on the copied site to inform the legitimate owner?), but still… you can just use copy&paste anyway. People are very skilled in it.

<comment><USER10> If this is the case, why doesn't Posterous just copy all the Ning blogs and say "hey! your already here!"?

<comment><USER11> Interesting idea, but I'm guessing users wouldn't really like that very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad.

<comment><USER13> I really like posterous.

I'm wondering about wordpress - especially migrating to posterous from an installed wordpress site (rather than having a site on wordpress.com). One thing that is missing from posterous is the ability to put ads like google adsense...anyone know if this is coming? (I haven't seen any hints on their blogs)</comment></comment>


Setup up a virtual call centre in under 30 mins using AWS Connect - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/set-up-a-virtual-call-centre-in-30-minutes-with-amazon-connect-2771bbc52ee <comment><USER2> or, you know, spend couple of days installing local instance and NEVER EVER pay AWS per Chat message/per minute/Per Day/and additional service usage bills.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does it require to have AWS account?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can set one up in <5 mins with any credit or debit card.</comment></comment>


How Kimoji Onboards New Users - <AUTHOR> https://www.useronboard.com/how-kimoji-onboards-new-users/ <comment><USER2> Hi all! I'm the person who made the teardown (not the app itself), and if anyone has any questions or thoughts, I will be checking the comments!

</comment><comment><USER2> @prawn Thanks for posting this!</comment>


The Official Go Modules Documentation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Modules <comment><USER2> No other programming language has cost me that much time, figuring out vendoring for a few dependencies.

The v2 story is just broken. It is nice to have a possibility to have multiple versions of the same package in this 0.1% of projects. The cost of it is anguish and frustration for 99.9%.

On the other hand I am seeing libraries teetering on the border of introducing breaking changes to point releases, or holding back progress, just to avoid going v2.

Nonsense

+incompatible

<comment><USER3> What if, instead of having v1 > v2 incompatible changes, you create a new library with the new api interface, rather than just upgrading a version. If you want to change the implementation details, have a second library that you use in both of them, but if the name of the library remains the same, the api interface would never break. Would make people more conservative with breaking the api interface, but not at all holding back progress.</comment></comment>


Blackwater linked figure to run education - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/devos-family-foundations-heritage-americans-prosperity-blackwater <comment><AUTHOR> Running Blackwater and Amway while donating to alt-right causes is a way to a cabinet post....</comment>


Nanoprintf: A tiny embeddable printf replacement written in C89/C99 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/charlesnicholson/nanoprintf <comment><AUTHOR> This is a friend's project. It's a public domain, header-only vsnprintf that supports floats. It has zero dependencies, zero libc calls, no allocations, < 100B stack, < 5K on a Cortex-M with optimizations on. It's meant for small systems where you need a full-featured printf without a huge footprint.</comment>


An insider's view into the largest arbitration award in history - <AUTHOR> http://today.law.harvard.edu/the-yukos-settlement-an-insiders-view-into-the-largest-arbitration-award-in-history/

<comment><USER2> Good luck collecting from the Russian state. Even the advocates find collection unlikely:

      When asked about the expectations of actually obtaining the award and the
      legal ramifications of the now-passed January 15 payment deadline, Gaillard
      said, "[...] [Enforcement] is typically very hard. [...] states have all
      sorts of immunities[.]"

Update: Yeah. The $50B figure has been whittled down to $600M of unfrozen assets[1].

[1] [http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e95c3cd4-d87b-11e4-ba53-00144...](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e95c3cd4-d87b-11e4-ba53-00144feab7de.html)</comment>


What's wrong with my site? Did I just pick a bad idea? - <AUTHOR>

I suspect that I am in a position that a lot of the users of this site have been in, or will be in.
About 1 year ago, my wife was looking for a small business she could run to make a few extra dollars. I had seen a few custom trail mix websites, and realized that I could beat them all with a site that showed you what your mix was gonna look like BEFORE you order. I took two weeks off from work and coded the site. Here's a link to the coolest part of the site http://www.trailmyx.com/createMyx
Once the flurry of orders from our friends and family died down, we settled into about 1 order per week. Not very exiting.
We tried advertising with Google AdWords, but nothing I tried was profitable. Furthermore, everyone I've ever attempted to contact (food bloggers mostly) have either ignored us, or flaked out on us.
I'm taking the next two weeks off from work to work on the site. What should I do with this time? What is it missing? At what point do you throw in the towel and try something else? <comment><USER2> My thoughts:

\- "Trailmix" is too generic. Do an alternate version of the site named hackersnacker.com or something like that and market it as the perfect food to have in a bowl next to your keyboard. In line with this, add chocolate-covered coffee beans to the mix along with other hacker-freiendly treats (sweet tarts, etc). Sell it to the audience you know.

\- Anti-alias the various ingredients so that the images look more natural. The white boarders around the nuts don't make it seem very appetizing.

\- Add a facebook "like" button so your friends and family can get the social graph rolling.

<comment><USER3> This is great advice. It's infinitely easier to market something that's targeted very specifically, rather than trying to be something for everyone. Start with the "hacker" market and branch out as you grow.

Try a reddit ad, offer a coupon to redditors on their first order. Contact bloggers and journalists that write about startup culture, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First off, the images on the site load slowly and also are scaled into wrong aspect ratio. Pre-scale those thumbnails and set proper caching for faster loading. Every time the item is added to the mix, all the images load again for some reason. Also, please upgrade to a faster server, that's just really slow.

I'm not sure that the 'approximate image' of the mix is a huge selling point (while cool). In general, I would work on the design of the site, now it comes of a bit 'amateurish'. Try to find a nicer typeface, use larger fonts, align everything, and remove all unnecessary items (like site news, and login). Concentrate on the images in the design.

Why there's login option? I think you should just allow people to create mixes and share them easily without logging in. Just create unique url for every mix like trailmyx.com/mix/dji4r and let people share that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the login option is so that you can save a mix you've created. But I really like the idea about a permalink for every mix... I'm going to add that to my todo list right now.

As far as the design goes, it's really not my strong suit. Perhaps I need to find a designer to partner with...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I first looked at your homepage, I was wondering if the site was active - Will I ever get my order, if I ordered something?

This has do do with the fact that the site news was last updated almost a year ago.

<comment><USER6> On this note, make shipping times very obvious (ie, with the current date). If I order before 2pm PST, can it be shipped same day? Speaks to the above; drives people to want to order.

Also, re-occurring orders. Monthly, bi-weekly, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> * I don't understand at all how to create a "Myx". I tried clicking on an image, and nothing happened. I thought maybe JS was broken, so I tried Firefox, and still no luck.

* On your homepage, your link that says "Nut Allergy? Please see our" goes to couponcactus. The part that says "Allergy Notice" actually links to the content I wanted. This seems to only affect the first page.

I like the suggestion of a "Mix of the week" or month. Subscriptions are good, but it may be difficult if people hate cashews or pistachios or something. Maybe they don't care.

<comment><USER8> Same here. Tried Firefox and Chrome but still couldn't get it to work. Finally tried IE and now it works; I actually see add buttons and the names of the ingredients on the left hand side. In FF and Chrome, only the thumbnails are visible in the ingredients list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Create a recurring revenue model - i.e. send my trail mix once a week.

<comment><USER10> This is a nice addition. Thumbs up to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Agree with everything said so far, also think you should look at having more content on your site - I can't see google doing much for you (with or without ads) with the current lack of content there to keep users around.

I also think it is a bit of a silly gimmick, if thats the only thing you offer over your competitors, need to step up the innovation a notch.

</comment><comment><USER12> The logo should be clickable. I don't like the createMyx page. I can't say why but it doesn't look good. The [login] link should be an image.

Also, what if I want more than 16oz in my created mix. The "1" at the bottom of the homepage shouldn't exist.

It might be a bad idea be running a Groupon/Google offer/... campaign could work.

</comment><comment><USER13> The homepage looks much better than your CreateMyX page. Why do you have a nice looking login form on the main page but on createmyx it's just a text link? The images on the homepage look far far more appealing than the generated images I was seeing on the createmyx page.. those look like shit tbh.

</comment><comment><USER14> Out of a random sample set of 1000 people, how many would want to buy trail- mix from the internet rather than pick it up at the store?

Out of those, how many are likely to trust you with their credit card number?

Out of those, how many would be willing to pay $4 shipping on a $7.50 mix?

<comment><USER14> By that I mean improve you offering, implement paypal, and fix your shipping cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Instead of the image box with just a border, maybe have the image inside an image of the container it comes in.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is on my todo list for sure. In fact, we took some photos of the bags a couple of months ago for exactly this reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Subscribe to Mix of the week!"

</comment><comment><USER17> Ordered.</comment>


How to Lego-fy your plots and 3D models - <AUTHOR> http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/813449 <comment><USER2> At first glance there seems to be pieces that could be simplified. E.g., in this image [http://community.wolfram.com//c/portal/getImageAttachment?fi...](http://community.wolfram.com//c/portal/getImageAttachment?filename=65983.png&userId=73716), there are 2 1x1 bricks in multiple places (on the top level at the "nearest" corner, for instance) that could be replaced with a 2x1 brick. I wonder what part of the program results in this.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Lego-fy"?

The author is basically talking about "voxels" [1] for which a ton of research and tooling has been made already, not to mention the ever so popular Minecraft game and its numerous clones.

Since this is HN, here's the obligatory JS library: [http://voxeljs.com/](http://voxeljs.com/)

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

<comment><USER4> This is not what the author is talking about. He's actually using lego-forms to build up structures, as well as piecing together the lego buildup into step by step instructions.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What was your first job? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Shining shoes in bars on 7th St in Rockford, IL when I was about 9-10 years old. 25¢ per shine (that's pretty much one of the most dangerous places to hang out or live in the US now.)

When I was 14 I moved to Hollywood, CA to live with my father and started learning how to build custom cars. Clients included Elvis Presley, Dick Clark, George Barris, Batman (I helped restore some "Batmobiles" at Barris's shop), and many others you may have heard of. I did that for about 16 years before learning to code. It was actually very good prep for that too. Reading Steve Jobs analogy of software as tools helped a lot with that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Part-time picking strawberries at a local farm at the age of 16. You were paid by the pound and I made ~$8.00/hr.

</comment><comment><USER4> Waking at 3 in the night to go put pet food on shelves in a supermarket.

I can't say I miss it ;-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Student janitor at a parochial school - Age 14 ~ $2.00/hr</comment>


New critical vulnerability in multiple high-privileged Android services - <AUTHOR> https://blog.zimperium.com/cve-2018-9411-new-critical-vulnerability-multiple-high-privileged-android-services/ <comment><USER2> The other takeaway is that Digital Restrictions Management systems are the security lynchpin, as they run at a higher privilege level than the property owner is permitted. They are zealously guarded due to their nature, making it more difficult to understand the security threat digital restrictions management poses.

<comment><USER3> The threat here is that DRM is done in the TEE so that it can't be messed with by normal applications. This, however, opens up the rest of the TEE when bugs in the component are found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I skimmed it super quickly, though since no one is commenting, I'll just put this comment in there as an encouragement for others. I think the gist of it is as follows:

1\. There is inter process communication.

2\. For this there is shared memory of 64 bits.

3\. Some processes are 32 bits and when they get this memory, they just use the lower 32 bits.

Obviously I glossed over many details, but when a 32 bit process is just getting a part of memory and leaves the rest unchecked, that sounds like a good script for the start of a vulnerability (i.e. things being left unchecked).

<comment><USER3> I also glanced at the article, so I have a couple more details (and a small correction; the memory itself is not being truncated, the size of the memory region is):

1\. Binder allows sharing memory between processes.

2\. The shared memory data structure includes a 64-bit size.

3\. 32-bit processes attempt to mmap this and end up converting the 64-bit uint64_t size to a 32-bit size_t and mapping in the wrong amount of data.

4\. MediaCasService, a HAL module that has access to the TEE for what is essentially DRM purposes, performs bounds checks in 64-bit and doesn't use the shared memory at all. Thus, it provides what's essentially arbitrary read/write.

5\. Leaking the location of the stack and where libc is allows for a ROP chain (which is necessary because marking memory as executable is not possible). The author uses this to cobble together a PoC that dumps the QSEOS version.

<comment><USER5> Wait, a 32-bit size_t?

<comment><USER6> In a 32-bit processes, yes. You would expect differently?

<comment><USER5> Ah, right, thank you. I got it mixed up with off_t.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Building the ROP chain itself is pretty straightforward. There are enough > gadgets in libc to perform it and all the symbols are in libc as well, and > we already have libc's address.

Can't we somehow escape/eliminate these ROP gadgets when building libc? BSD implemented a "RETGUARD" in clang for x86. IIRC, a lot of protection was offered by just tweaking register allocations. Don't/can't we have something similar for ARM?

<comment><USER3> ARM 8.3's pointer authentication might be what you're looking for. Certain processors, notably Apple's A12 chips, already implement this as a preventive measure against ROP.

<comment><USER8> As an additional note, SPARC supports a similar feature for pointer validation and bounds checking in hardware.

Intel apparently is going in the opposite direction by removing MPX from their future CUPs.

<comment><USER9> Because MPX is a terrible feature that no compiler vendor knows how to make use of. By contrast, ARM PAC is relatively simple and obvious in operation.

Killing MPX is the right decision.

<comment><USER8> I trust your experience, having only read papers about it.

But then I would expect the feature to be replaced by something else instead of being dropped as such.

Solaris with SPARC pointer validation turned on is a much secure platform in spite of being written in C.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this running-a-native-app scary or running-JS-in-a-browser scary?

<comment><USER11> From what I can tell, it could allow a malicious app to bad things, but the malicious app would already have to be installed.</comment></comment>


Please help us Free Bassel, open source developer and CC volunteer - <AUTHOR> http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2012/06/29/please-help-us.html

<comment><USER2> I hate to say it, but I'm afraid that about the only help available for Bassel from outside Syria is for a Russian colleague with friends in high places to start lobbying for his release.

Russian hackers? Have any friends in the government?

His imprisonment is a shame, since Bassel could be any one of us if we had had been born in an oppressive country -- and one that is now at war (and I'm sure some of you reading were born in such countries).</comment>


What do you do with an office suite? - <AUTHOR>

Choice in office suite (iLife vs. MS Office vs. OOo) seems to be something that comes up pretty often.  It's something that confuses me though, as I haven't used a text editor fancier than vim since high school, and what I create boils down to pretty much source code/documentation, email, and forum postings.  What do people (especially programmers) do with office suites?  Are presentations the big draw?  Organizing data in a tabular format?  Writing letters to people? <comment><USER2> Almost all my office suite use involves interacting with project sponsors. This runs from writing proposals (internal finance people want Excel spreadsheets, and sponsors often require Word format) to presenting results at review meetings (PowerPoint is the norm).

The consistent theme here is that MS formats are implicitly required. For that, I tried OpenOffice for a while, but just ran into too many minor glitches.

For more formal writeups of results, I get to use LaTeX.

Note we almost never produce plots using Excel; we tend to use R, and embed a resulting PDF in the Word or PowerPoint document.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use office programs for anything where pagination is important (ruling out HTML, at least without complication) and formatting or embedding of pictures/charts is desired (ruling out text files).

Text files also fall short when displaying non-trivial equations.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use office suites to open what other people send me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I also keep a copy of OOo for that particular case. Logically, there must be some people who actually use office suites to create documents though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excel can be very useful for cleaning up dirty data, once you are familiar with it. I don't know whether Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), or whatever has replaced it, currently supports regular expressions, but back around 1999 or 2000 defining a reference to Windows Scripting Host (WSH) provided that functionality. Very useful for making and extracting pattern matches; in my case, I needed to identify particular codes within a large, freeform text field that multiple people at multiple facilities filled in each in their own fashion.

Excel does have plenty of quirks, which can be rather aggravating. My un- favorite: Applying a text formatting function to something like 2334d2 resulted in 233400 rather than 2334D2 because the formatting function was hard-wired to recognize "d[number]" as specifying an exponent even when your formula or code was applying _text_ formatting. (Which interpretation apparently, as I was eventually told by someone with experience in the area, comes from Fortran. The same thing happened with "e"; at least "e[exponent]" I was familiar with; "d..." caught me by surprise).

So, some bozo or bozos send you a lot of semi-regular data. You shove it into Excel, where some of your cleanup is automated, and Excel makes it very quick to navigate around and manually fix the rest.

BTW, I've not used OO Calc for anything significant, but I continue to read here and there that for serious spreadsheeting, it still cannot compare to Excel.</comment>


YouTube Responds to the LGBTQ Community during CodeCon - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Recode/status/1138231255445598208 <comment><AUTHOR> According to Susan Wojcickis statement YouTube/Google can't enforce policies because there would be "too much content to take down".

<comment><USER2> "I can't possibly clean my room because there are way too many beer cans, TV dinner trays and fast food wrappers to pick up."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why should the LGBTQ community be any more protected than any other group?

I see hate towards white people, Republicans, and Christians on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube and none of the content gets taken down. Complaints are responded with a 'this doesn't violate our terms of service'.

Until Youtube finally admits that it's completely biased and doesn't care about hate speech towards groups in which it disagrees, I can't really take them seriously.</comment>


Trump's been silent on the flu epidemic, despite the spike in cases - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/14/trumps-been-silent-on-the-flu-epidemic-despite-the-spike-in-cases/ <comment><AUTHOR> I noticed a couple of strange things:

\- The chart shows a peak (10 out of 10,000 hospitalized) around Jan 2018 for this season, yet the tweet from the CDC below the chart, and dated Feb 6th claims that "#flu activity continues to increase across the US". It seems that the chart shows that the activity is now decreasing since Jan, not increasing.

\- The fun little game that simulates how the flu spreads based on a percentage of vaccination seems to follow rules that bias the results significantly for a dramatic effect. For example, a vaccinated person seems to never get infected ever, even though we know that the vaccine has about 10% efficiency this year. Even if it were another efficiency value, you'd expect to see _some_ amount of vaccinated people get sick. In addition to this, it seems that if you are not vaccinated and you are adjacent to a sick person, you will automatically get the flu guaranteed.

What am I misunderstanding?

<comment><USER2> -You can have a high level of #flu activity but a low level of severity. More people complain about having it, but they don't need to go to the hospital over it.

-They want you to get vaccinated more than they want to show you an accurate model of how the flu spreads.

<comment><AUTHOR> > More people complain about having it, but they don't need to go to the > hospital over it.

It seems that even the number of reports to the CDC (without hospitalization) has been decreasing after the peak of Jan. See [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm)

> They want you to get vaccinated more than they want to show you an accurate > model of how the flu spreads

Agreed, but you'd think there are arguments and facts that don't need to be twisted to make their point. Bending the truth can accomplish the opposite of what they intended to do.

A common reaction to this kind of method is "if they're going to exaggerate and lie about this, what else are they lying about when it comes to flu vaccination?" \- it destroys credibility quite quickly and fuels conspiracy theories.</comment></comment></comment>


How social media makes stress contagious - <AUTHOR> http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2015/01/16/social-media-and-stress-how-technology-affects-happiness/

<comment><USER2> It would be wise to have a strategy for social media. I like the phrase "joy of missing out" ― as it turns the well worn phrase "fear of missing out" on its head.

There are a few ways to deal with the barrage of 'feels' on these networks, and one technique I'm using are multiple accounts that follow a multitude of different topics. I don't interact with what I digest in the stream, just observe from a distance. The reason I do this, is because Twitter streams are a mix of different viewpoints, ranging from fear to love, and everything in between. So we can have one account that is positive stuff only, and another about wars, and another about technology, and another about politics - then we can choose what one we decide to watch, rather than let the info 'happen' to us by accident as that article likes to point out</comment>