How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.vayable.com/how-to-get-paypal-to-freeze-your-account-in-f <comment><USER2> Some folks on this thread have suggested that you open your own merchant account. FWIW, you're likely to face the same problems with that route if the underwriting department takes a good look at your business model. If you're selling "experiences", it's too hard to demonstrate whether your clients did or did not receive the alleged service. You're likely going to open yourself up to a huge risk of chargebacks -- remember, you're now vouching for the performance of each and every one of your "experience vendors". A chargeback rate of just a few percent would eat up all of your profits, and get your merchant account canceled to boot.

It would also be incredibly easy for me to launder money or commit fraud with your system -- I could just set up a fake experience, like navel gazing, at $100 per, and buy up unlimited sessions with stolen credit cards, or give myself a massive cash advance at purchase interest rates, with a small mark- up. Maybe I'm missing it, but if your system doesn't include some way to reserve the time for the "experience", then there's really no way to ensure that your vendors are not double- or triple-booking their time.

To summarize, the financial risks of your business model run far beyond PayPal. If you can come up with ways to hedge against these risks, you might even be able to convince PayPal to take you on (though I wouldn't count on it).

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, this isn't a "Paypal horror story". This is a case of Paypal getting around to due diligence on a new customer and realising that they are not in line with the terms and conditions.

You _are_ accepting payments on behalf of other merchants (those offering travel experiences) and that brings risk. Unfortunately this is not an issue limited only to Paypal, many other payment operators will reject you for the same reason; the fraud liability is just all over the place with such systems and they won't want to take the risk.

It sucks, but there you go.

If you are really looking at 10's of Millions in revenue over the next few years.... go to your bank and work something out with them, although it might be initially expensive while the offset the risk.

</comment><comment><USER4> I know there are plenty of legitimate PayPal horror stories, but this I'm not sure this quite qualifies. The first parts of the story are vanilla PayPal evil, sure.

But at the end, PayPal accuses them of offering an aggregation service. They say they are building a "a global marketplace" that "enables a brand new community of merchants and transactions". There is not a lot of detail, but it sounds like they are taking money from customers and paying it to sellers, which sounds like an aggregation service to me.

They compare themselves to Etsy. But Etsy doesn't accept PayPal payments themselves. You pay to the seller's PayPal account.

There may be something I'm missing—it's not entirely clear, so maybe they do in fact operate more like Etsy—but from the account provided it seems like PayPal has a case.

<comment><USER2> You make a good point, I'd agree that this would seem to align with what PayPal is alleging in their letter.

However, it does also seem that Airbnb, which they mention as a comparison, is doing the same thing -- Airbnb is serving as an aggregator for its individual lodging vendors, and THEY offer PayPal as an option ...

Any Airbnb folks still here on HN who could explain if they've gotten around this particular hurdle with PayPal?

<comment><USER5> In the article, Paypal's letter doesn't say you're not allowed to be an aggregator, just that you're not allowed to be an aggregator that lets merchants get around Paypal's acceptable use rules. Maybe Airbnb has assured Paypal that it does not let merchants circumvent these rules.

<comment><USER6> Airbnb allows only one kind of "merchant"---the type who wants to offer living space for you.

This product on the other hand lets anyone offer "experiences". To put it lightly, you could have someone offer the "experience of sex" (illegal) or the "experience of touring the porn studios of the San Fernando Valley" (legal but against Paypal AUP).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've stopped being surprised at this genre of story showing up - on HN or elsewhere. This story basically serves to illustrate a couple of things about Paypal that are definitely salient, but haven't changed in years.

* Banks are still shitty and unwilling to actually compete, so Paypal has its market all to itself.

* Because Paypal does not fear disruption or competition, it is _not worth their time_ to invest in good customer service. They know you're stuck.

This is pretty much the same as the stories about trying to get customer service from Google. There are no effective competitors - so, their accountants and shareholders say, who the fuck cares if customers complain? What are they going to do, go to someone else? Doing so would harm the customers more than it would harm the company that they are abandoning.

I use the phrase "not worth their time" even though it implies things about the employees of the company which are not true - I use it because it is true of the company itself as an entity. It's a corporation - it's a sociopath. So it is basically incapable of providing good customer service as long as the return on investment of good customer service is negative, epsilon, or invisible. The employees, as people, probably do want to provide good customer service! But when it comes down to the human, humane desires of a corporation's employees conflicting with the sociopathic requirements of the corporation itself, we only need a brief look at the history of commerce in America. Put your money on the corporation's interests winning every time.

PayPal (and Google) will keep giving customers the finger until the thought of customers leaving actually scares them.

<comment><USER8> I've been through the PayPal wringer (account frozen, then limited) and actually found the customer service to be stellar. I had a dedicated case agent who gave me his direct line, and he was always available and always polite.

There's a lot to hate about PayPal, but my impression is they have put quite a lot of effort into customer service.

<comment><USER7> _The employees, as people, probably do want to provide good customer service!_

There are other good points in this thread about PayPal's risk mitigation model. I think that this basically deepens the parallel to Google. When the service works, it's genuinely great - that's part of why they're such a dominant force. The problem is that when it breaks, generally it breaks in horrid ways. People like the HN crowd, who are strongly disposed towards trying to do new things that previous models may not account for, are the most likely to find cases where the system breaks, and to suffer the effects of the breakage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For what it's worth, travel is a high-risk vertical and you're going to draw the evil eye from any competent operator if that is your focus. See also selling high end electronics or jewelry, among many other seedier business types.

Also FWIW: Paypal has processed close to 100k for me without complaint, and their review of my business for getting a merchant account was quick, professional, and successful. (Partly because I knew to avoid risk-adding activities like accepting yearly payments with a new business. Don't do that. Don't do aggregation. Don't do anything which envisions customers routinely receiving chargebacks or refunds.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Sadly, for what you want to do, you essentially need to be a merchant bank yourself. Your business model seems to involve collecting payments on behalf of other people. Most merchant agreements from ANY bank or service provider would prohibit this activity.

Without the correct processes and procedures in place you open yourself up to issues involving money laundering and tax fraud. To do this right you need to spend the money on the identity, security and conflict resolution processes and procedures to ensure you mitigate this risk. The costs of real merchant services will pale in comparison to what you will spend on these issues.

</comment><comment><USER11> > PayPal doesn't want their cut of tens of millions of dollars of revenue we > project in the next two years. Any idea of who does?

Get a real merchant account and a payment gateway. I recommend Authorize.NET. Get it from one of the re-sellers, it's cheaper than getting it directly from them. There are no shortcuts: you have to compare different vendors, do your research on what all the fees mean and who offers the best value. You CAN negotiate.

<comment><USER12> This is still not really a good option. Have you looked at the contracts and requirements on payment processors? The options suck. Credit cards are a bad, bad system for merchants because the banks totally have everyone by the balls and in typical bank fashion they are not afraid to put the squeeze on.

I hope one day someone comes up with a real electronic payment method. Bitcoins are currently our best hope, but they're not a very good hope.

<comment><USER13> We're working on it (see comment below). <http://www.facecash.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have less than no sympathy for businesses with Paypal horror stories at this point. Paypal's reputation is very well known, especially in startup circles, and there are a ton of other services available that will handle payments for startups. There have been several HN threads about them, and it's not too hard to find those on searchyc.com.

If you're starting a business, and you're relying on Paypal to do it, then you're foolishly adding totally unnecessary risk to your business.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately, most of these payment handlers only allow US companies to use their services. I'm in Canada, and I've been trying to find said services, and every one that I've found using searchyc only accepts US companies. Some of them say that international services is "in the works" or "available sometime in the future", but business cannot wait.

<comment><USER16> Have you contacted your own bank to ask them what your options are?

<comment><USER17> parent is right.. you might have to use a less agile or easy to integrate solution, but many countries should have standard bank-level methods for allowing you to accept online payments, some way or another

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Paypal is a classic example of a fossilized bureaucracy:

1) The departments within Paypal are unable to share information, alert each other of status, or become aware of what they are each doing. The first clue that this is happening inside an organization is the requirement to submit (or resubmit) the same information multiple times.

2) Complete inflexibility. If you don't fit a pigeonhole profile of previously defined customer models _exactly_ you can't use the service.

3) No humans. There were people once. There aren't anymore. The people you talk to on the phone seem human, but they are actually part of the machine's broken user interface. They can no more influence what goes on inside the machine than you can. They can't tell you why your account was frozen because literally _nobody anywhere actually knows_.

4) Insistence that you are wrong (or a criminal in this case). The customer is always _wrong_. Enough said.

Add to all this a moral hazard so large it almost completely guarantees it will never be fixed: when the system breaks, they just keep the money, and you're got a perfect recipe for perpetual fail.

<comment><USER19> The most valuable part of Paypal is the systems and strategies they've invented for risk mitigation and fraud prevention.

Before they developed those systems, online payment aggregators were a nonviable business.

Many people in the late 90's and early 00's felt that it was a failed experiment and that the risks were just too high. This after a long list of failed startups and failed infinitives at existing banks.

Yes, it can seem very obtuse. But they are in a risky business. Without their anti-abuse measures (which every other merchant aggregator has cloned to some extent), this niche would not exist. You would have to get your own merchant account if you wanted to sell online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been resisting the urge to market my startup as a PayPal alternative, because we're really focused on payments for in-person retail sales (largely to avoid competing with PayPal), but this is probably the fifth or sixth PayPal-froze-my-account posting I've seen on Hacker News and they all seem to garner enormous amounts of sympathy from readers. We've also built all of the infrastructure you'd need to do internet payments. As an aside, my non- profit's account was frozen once but I got it unfrozen in fairly short order, and at worst it was a minor annoyance. I gather that people have had much worse experiences, however. So that leads me to wonder:

\- Would people really consider signing up for a payment startup's services they'd never heard of? Everyone complains about PayPal, and I'd argue rightly so, but at the same time everyone is also quick to say that they don't trust a company they don't know with their information.

\- What's the most important service that PayPal offers that people are looking for? Just plain, vanilla, pay-me-through-my-web-site? Something else?

\- Are these accounts that are routinely frozen related to international transactions somehow? Because we can't do business internationally and most payment startups can't. The regulatory and risk barriers are serious.

If there's a market for U.S.-based services that we can offer, maybe it's time to think more seriously about starting to compete.

<comment><USER20> The most important service: instant money transfer (mostly) irrespective of physical location.

I had one use-case this week where paypal would not work. I needed to withdraw the amount I was to be paid by my client and paypal has a $400/day ATM limit. So I asked the client to see if he can pay directly to my bank.

The obvious solution is wire. Of course, my client happens to be in a state that didn't have his business bank so wire was a no go. You have to visit a bank to wire.

In order for him to send me money he had to write a check from his business account to his personal BOA account, then withdraw from his BOA account and then run to a Wachovia and deposit into my wachovia account--all before 2pm cuz' after that the funds wouldn't be available until the next day for me.

After I got the money, I was to deposit it into a friend's account. I couldn't do it online through my bank's interface even though we share the same bank. I ran few blocks to Wells Fargo to withdraw cash I just received from my client and transfer to my buddy.

My story is probably one of the extreme cases in terms of urgency but it does point out all the hoops you have to jump to do a simple bank-to-bank money transfer just within the US.

<comment><USER2> This is what Western Union is for.

<comment><USER20> Paying $90 for an inter-US money transfer is a bit outrageous so they priced out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If anyone thinks they can set up online payment processing system that accepts payments from credit cards, debit cards, echecks, and direct debit transfers worldwide easier and with less hassle than paypal then they should do that. As it happens there are some very real niches where paypal has almost no significant competition.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm almost falling of my chair laughing (I do feel bad about this), but we've had so many similar issues with PayPal it is just crazy to think they once were the small guys fighting the establishment.

What you are trying to do is indeed very likely against their TOS, but the whole process is just appalling. I highly recommend looking at WePay. They might be a much better fit for you anyway (not just credit card payments, but also very low cost bank transfers).

Try to get a regular merchant account, but if I understand your business model you'll likely be rejected, or face unrealistic high fees. Maybe when you can show them some transaction history you'll have more luck.

</comment><comment><USER23> I cash several tens of thousands Euro every year in Paypal, since 2003 I guess. I have legitimate business in Germany and the money is deposits for apartments reservations. I have never done anything illegal, never had a dispute with a customer, never, ever created a problem for them. Nevertheless they freeze my account once every 2 months. They ask me a few papers, I send thema and if I'm lucky in a few days it's restored. If I am not lucky it goes one one month. I would have many nice stories to say, this is the last one: since I log in often from many different countries (since 2003), they block my account. So I asked them to write down somewhere that I travel a lot and give me a break. They told me this is not possible and I should use only my iPad to login, not a computer.

<comment><USER24> if you travel internationally, _always_ log in to a VPN that makes you appear to come from your home country before logging in to paypal. Preferably a VPN hosted on your own infrastructure that makes you look like you are logging in from the same ISP you always log in from.

The only time my paypal has ever been frozen it was because someone who worked for me logged in from Vietnam. I set them up with a VPN, and never had problems again.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm confused. PayPal offers a 3-party payment product, where you can accept a payment and split the proceeds between yourself and another seller. They call it "chained" payments.

[https://www.x.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/1044-1-1033/p...](https://www.x.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/1044-1-1033/pp_dev_Datasheet_APC_R3.pdf)

Why doesn't this work for your scenario?

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow, incredibly timely- this is EXACTLY what we've been going through for the last two weeks. EXACTLY.

The problem with PayPal is that there is absolutely "0" real customer support. We were labeled as a "money transfer service"- even though that's not our business- and had our acct suspended. Our site isn't public yet, we were just testing live payments as opposed to the already completed sandbox tests. We thought we'd be ok since we modeled our pay structure similar to a few others we had seen.

When you call PayPal, you get a nice enough customer service rep- friendly but really doesn't know anything. They put a "note" on our acct to have someone higher up call us back...and that's when the real fun begins.

If you're lucky enough to have the rep call you (we're like 2/7), you can get some limited info. If you miss the call, or have an additional question after the fact, you have to go through the first level of general cust. service and hope that someone will call you back. No left messages, no other phone number you can call, definitely no dedicated rep. it's taking weeks out of our production dev time.

What makes this mockery of service so severe is that our business depends on buyers paying sellers. We got a form email letting us know of our general "violation", but no specifics. It's up to us to interpret what exactly violates their policies. Thanks to this article, and everyone's comments, I do understand some areas where we possibly made an error- which I take responsibility for- but without a definite response we won't know if we accidentally violate it again when we spend more to retool our system.

It's ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have heard enough horror stories about Paypal from others, and had enough hassle from them myself, that I never use them whenever there is another payment option.

How easy would it be to set up an online transaction site that was actually easy and hassle-free to use? One where:

(a) costs of transferring money to another account are low, and similar to the cost of performing the transaction, not the 3-5% of transaction that Paypal and credit cards charge. The only thing that might be expensive is getting money in and out of the site, because you'd have to go through the traditional banking industry.

(b) where there is no distinction between merchant accounts and other accounts. Why should there be? All accounts should be able to send and receive money.

(c) the site started off with some ways you could spend/get money, e.g. something like flickr, adsense/adwords, and web hosting.

(d) there would be no credit protection; if Alice give money to Bob and then isn't satisfied with the goods the she received from Bob, she should take it up with him not with the transaction service.

(e) the service would have apis that made it easy for other companies to build services around.

I'm assuming it would be difficult to impossible due to banking laws -- does anyone know better?

<comment><USER27> Erratum: by "flickr" I meant "flattr".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How to get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in One Easy Step:

Open a PayPal Account.

<comment><USER29> Another easy way :

1\. Create two paypal accounts ; one on your american account, one on your french account

2\. connect to both from the same computer and make a transfer from one to another

3\. Wait and enjoy !

<comment><USER30> I don't even need to make any transfers. Log in with account A, log out, log in with account B (same browser, without clearing paypal cookies) - accounts A and B locked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Take the same approach as grubwith.us and groupon did, avoid the PayPal risk.

However, if you believe there's a significant advantage of having PayPal (doubt it), then you may want to consider setting up an eBay store and handle all payments for reservations through BINs on ebay pages... vayable.com would then become a "wrapper" around your ebay store. Additionally if you get significant traction, you may get $10-40 for every person who registers with ebay through your links.

</comment><comment><USER32> Can anyone please explain what's why PayPal (and other payment processors?) cannot afford accepting payments on behalf of others?

<comment><USER33> The intermediary has little control over the quality and delivery of the product being sold, and must be trusted to pay the third party. The risk of chargebacks and fraud is higher thus PayPal cannot afford to underwrite the transactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hey guys seriously is there any "real" alternative to pay pal? I'm getting sick about these stories.

To be honest my account got never frozen but I also never sold anything with Paypal. I don't want to support this insane service.

What about using Amazon payment? I payed once with Amazon on kickstarter and was surprised how smooth it was! Is Amazon a valid alternative?

</comment><comment><USER35> > "PayPal doesn't want their cut of tens of millions of dollars of revenue we > project in the next two years. Any idea of who does?"

If you makes you feel any better, I offered them a cut of a projected billion dollars and they still didn't take it.

More seriously though, just go to your bank and open a merchant account.

<comment><USER36> They won't open one either. It's standard Visa/MC operating regulations. You can't accept payments on behalf of others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My dad had a small eBay business several years ago and his account was frozen for some very illegitimate reasons. I was too young to really understand then, but in light of this and several other similar cases I've read about online, I'd stay away from PayPal.

</comment><comment><USER38> With all these Paypal horror stories(this one you could see Paypal's side at least) of inflexible bureaucracy, what I find most ironic is that it was started with highly idealistic libertarian aspirations in mind.

Somewhere along the way something important was lost.

</comment><comment><USER39> I also find the fact that the official email from PayPal is just signed "Julie" with no surname and just comes from a generic sink account, thus eliminating any chance of actually following up the problem with a human being rather annoying.

</comment><comment><USER40> Slightly OT:

I've been looking into paypal alternatives but there really wasn't anything available, besides setting up a merchant account, for non-US businesses.

Does anyone know of any similar service available internationally?

</comment><comment><USER30> Once the coolest startup, now a part of a greedy mega-corp, run by MBA suits. Paypal has no respect for it's customers whatsoever.</comment>


Maniagnosis – Quicksort - <AUTHOR> https://maniagnosis.crsr.net/2016/02/quicksort.html <comment><USER2> "First index plus last index, divided by two; yay integer division!"

I don't know enough about Pony, but this approach has caused a bug in other languages, specifically when the "first index plus last index" causes an integer overflow. The better approach in these cases is to do "min + ((max - min) / 2)".</comment>


Seagate hits 1 terabit per square inch, 60TB hard drives on their way - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/122921-seagate-hits-1-terabit-per-square-inch-60tb-drives-on-their-way <comment><USER2> Alternatively pass on that hysterical title and go directly to the press release [http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en- US&name=...](http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=terabit- milestone-storage-seagate- pr&vgnextoid=295d922d58716310VgnVCM1000001a48090aRCRD)

Main content is: _The maximum capacity of today's 3.5-inch hard drives is 3 terabytes (TB), at about 620 gigabits per square inch, while 2.5-inch drives top out at 750 gigabytes (GB), or roughly 500 gigabits per square inch. The first generation of HAMR drives, at just over 1 terabit per square inch, will likely more than double these capacities – to 6TB for 3.5-inch drives and 2TB for 2.5-inch models. The technology offers a scale of capacity growth never before possible, with a theoretical areal density limit ranging from 5 to 10 terabits per square inch – 30TB to 60TB for 3.5-inch drives and 10TB to 20TB for 2.5-inch drives._

<comment><USER3> The maximum capacity of today's 3.5 inch hard drives is 4tb, and has been since last year. I know it's a press release, but that's bending the truth a little too far for my taste.

<comment><USER4> And I own a 1TB 2.5" external drive.

<comment><USER5> And I've got a 2.5" 9mm internal one, but I'm fairly sure that they're talking about density per platter and all 2.5" HDDs larger than 750 GB seem to use two platters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since it requires a pulse from the laser to write does this also mean data will be more durable and less vulnerable to damage from external electromagnetic fields?

<comment><USER7> Have you ever lost data on a hard drive because of external magnetic fields?

For sure, if you get a degausser or other very strong field you will cause damage. But there are two strong magnets inside the case near the platters, so I'm not sure what kind of magnetic field is available in common domestic or office settings that might be harmful.

<comment><USER8> Magnetic field strength follows an inverse cube law, so an external magnet would have to be incredibly strong to alter data.

<comment><USER9> Magnetic field strength does not follow any specific dropoff law because it's a dipole.

The dropoff depends on how far apart the ends of the poles are. (i.e. from a distance the two poles blend together and average to zero), it also depends on the orientation - are the poles parallel or perpendicular?

<comment><USER8> True, but for the common case where the distance from the magnet is substantially greater than the distance between the poles, inverse cube is plenty good enough as an approximation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really look forward to the day, when, as a general consumer and user of computers, I can just completely ignore hard drive capacity (cause it's just always bigger than I need). Even though it won't be, I will just perceive it as limitless. I'm almost there, but not quite. It's amazing how much useless busy work limited hard drive capacity generates on an individual and organizational level. Can't wait to be free of that.

<comment><USER11> the amount of storage you use and need grows over time, so this may be a hard dream to achieve. If I look at how much storage I require now compared to just 10 years ago, it is more than quadrupled. I expect that trend to continue.

<comment><USER12> Hard drive capacities have increased far more than fourfold in that 10 years, though.

<comment><USER11> which is why I have 1.5 TB left on my main storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sounds more more suited for write-rarely, read-often data.

Not sure I would trust the wear and tear of an alloy that is constantly heated and cooled.

60TB of write-rarely cheap storage for backups would be very handy though.

<comment><USER14> Realistically, I think most workloads would end up moving to pure copy-on- write filesystems. There won't be much rewriting.

<comment><USER15> A copy-on-write file system still does plenty of rewriting; if it didn't, you'd run out of space before your harddrive was full.

<comment><USER14> You seem to be in an entirely different universe from the point. Most workloads would take weeks, months, even years to write out 60TB of data. It will be unnecessary for the filesystems to garbage collect old data with any frequency, and you may very well not want them to -- when you have so much space, why not have an available record of every single I/O transaction back to the beginning of time?

<comment><USER16> People won't buy drives much bigger than their workload can use. It's possible that 60TB drives would only be used in massive storage systems, not PCs.

<comment><USER17> People will, if it comes bundled with their computer.

Nearly every grandparent I've run across has a >100GB hard drive (if not >500GB). They're all using roughly 20GB of that drive, after a couple _years._

With only very rare exceptions, people don't _choose_ what goes into their computer. They buy what looks good for a price that they're willing to pay, for the simple reason that buying a computer is full of more buzz-words, acronyms, and useless numbers than any other purchase I've ever made. It's insane, and it gets people to buy more than they need, so the sellers won't stop doing it.

<comment><USER18> > _"People will, if it comes bundled with their computer."_

But what will a computer look like in 10 years?

What I've been noting, from the whole mobile explosion, is that people really don't care if their computer only has 64GB of storage. Of all the complaints that people have about tablets and phones replacing 'real' computing, disk space rarely enters the discussion.

So even if tablets and smartphones _don't_ notably replace traditional PCs, their effect on consumer perception of the necessity of large disks can't be ignored.

Sure, it's easy to market 'more gigabytes than your old machine' to a regular person. But so is "faster boot" and "less waiting".

That's why laptop makers can't seem to ditch spinning disks fast enough.

And what motivation does a PC builder have, to continue bundling increasingly- capacious hard drives with little markup? Why not bundle increasingly-faster and increasingly-cheaper SSDs and save the spinning drives for higher-margin positions as add-ons and external storage?

I'd be incredibly surprised if the market for spinning disks doesn't shrink over the next 10 years. They'll certainly remain, even for consumers. But there's no good argument that they'll still be standard.

<comment><USER17> As far as I've seen, disk space hasn't been in computer-purchasing discussions at all for a few years now - salespeople just say "more than enough" and leave it at that. If you know otherwise, you're in a special class of consumers, and it still matters to you. Plus, if we get 60TB drives tomorrow, we'll have new ways to fill it within the week, and some people will do so, just as we've done to this point.

I totally agree that spinning disks are on the way out, except for high- storage purposes. And then only until flash storage meets / exceeds their density (solid state has a habit of doing this). And I totally agree that the HD size means nothing to most people buying computers. But it _does_ drive sales over smaller numbers, so we'll keep seeing them go up as long as that's true. Maybe the tipping point is now, but I'm not putting any money on that.

As for 'boots faster / less waiting', it isn't something that's generally quantifiable because it comes with a wide range of caveats. Even if it were (I haven't seen any, but I haven't PC shopped for a while), most people I know are well aware that computers slow down over time. They may not know _why_ , but they have seen it happen to _every computer they've ever owned_ \- "It wasn't this slow when I bought it" is a common complaint. On top of that, the vast majority of people I know simply don't shut down their computer until an update forces them to. Computers resume from sleep _very_ quickly - my laptop is awake and responding by the time I can get my hands on the keyboard to punch in my password. Cutting that time in half gains nothing, it has reached the 'fast enough' point that it's not an incentive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And this was just a few years back...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xPvD0Z9kz8> (Get perpendicular! animation by Hitachi)

<comment><USER20> I love that video for some reason. When it came out I actually saved the FLV file from their website because my kids liked to watch it. Great marketing, IMHO.

EDIT: Here's the original video direct from their website (higher quality): [https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/P...](https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html)

<comment><USER21> This is cute. And because it's a flash vector animation and not a video, you can do a neat trick.. Zoom in on the page and it will scale up the animation smoothly. This clip is perfect quality at any resolution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the PC consumer's choice between SSD and traditional HD, I suspect that the decreasing marginal returns from this increase in storage space, will not outweigh the benefits of SSDs. However, in the server market this increase will continue to favor traditional HDs.

<comment><USER23> I don't disagree, but to play the devil's advocate..

How soon until Dell, HPs (etc) ship more desktops with SSDs than with mechanical drives? The average consumer doesn't understand the difference and doesn't want to pay extra (even though it's probably the best performance/$ upgrade possible).

On the flip side, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw significant adoption for servers that can live with the space limit (or that can design around it). Server-based applications are often I/O bound, established solutions are expensive, and the people responsible know and care.

<comment><USER24> they'll use Intel Smart Response or something similar and use a smallish 20-40GB SSD (possibly welded to the mobo) together with a big HDD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm interested in learning what this will do for I/O speeds, anyone got good pointers?

<comment><USER26> IF the disk continues to rotate at the same frequency, then you get an I/O increase exactly proportionate to the increase in linear (not areal) density. A new technique which puts twice as many bits per inch of track should read twice as many bits per second.

Write techniques may or may not need to be adjusted (preheat a track? a sector? realtime per bit-domain?) but should eventually converge to the same speed-up as reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems quite similar to the classic magneto-optical (MO) disk drive technology that was (at least briefly) popular:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive>

The MO drives use a laser to heat the recording substrate to the Curie temperature during the recording path, too.

</comment><comment><USER28> That's a lot of data to lose on one drive

<comment><USER29> I could have everything I have on one drive, and then a second to back it up. Sounds like a good thing.

<comment><USER30> My home system has 3: Two in a RAID mirror and a third that I rsync stuff over to. Not that I'm paranoid or anything. Then there's my external backup...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can see the first 50% of the reviews having a prodigious failure rate.

</comment><comment><USER32> This technology "Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording" (HAMR) is expected to be supplanted by a new technology to put even more bits into a hard drive "Krypton-Yittrium Joined-Electron Laser Light Injection" (K-Y JELLI).

(Ok, sorry, couldn't resist)

</comment><comment><USER33> I can't imagine a heating element would be helpful to write times.

<comment><USER34> A laser? They are used all day in fiber optics...and they are pretty fast.

Without mention of the power required for the laser it's only speculation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am going to download _so many linux isos_ with this.

</comment><comment><USER36> So I can either trust my data to a big stack of transistors and hope they don't just randomly die, or to a pile of spinning rusty metal discs and hope that a motor doesn't fail or something scrapes the rust off the platters. :)

<comment><USER37> Just like everybody's been doing for the past 30 or so years :-)...</comment></comment>


To Those About to Hack - <AUTHOR> http://www.kirit.com/Blog:/2007-07-08/To%20Those%20About%20to%20Hack

<comment><USER2> Abraham Lincolns: _"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."_

This post: _"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first seven bartering for the perfect tree."_

Abe would have been my apprentice. The Woodsman can have Ben.

<comment><USER3> The first time I read this post I couldn't quite understand it. What does it mean exactly? look for a master programmer to do the work for you instead of learning how to master the craft yourself?

<comment><USER4> You need to read the post linked to at the beginning first or it won't make any sense.

<comment><USER3> I did and I still have trouble grasping it lol.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Car firms linked to child labour over glittery mica paint - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jul/28/vauxhall-bmw-car-firms-linked-child-labour-mica <comment><USER2> I see two sides to this. One, the government of the country that allows this to happen is ultimately responsible. India is not a banana republic where companies can parachute in and muck about. So they bear responsibility for the working conditions they allow their fellow citizens to work under.

Two, yes firms with long and convoluted supply chains still have an obligation to ensure the suppliers follow local regulations, at the cost of contract. That said, supply chains are convoluted and can be difficult to follow, and the best way to address it is by the people closest the problem, the local people. If the locals are corrupt or don't care much about their fellow citizens, it does not absolve the foreign firms, but it does make things more difficult. It would help if there were established a WTO-like mechanism, but for pollution and labor concerns, to help enforce by way of treaties and thus penalties.

An option these economies would resist, I suspect would be to impose tariffs commensurate with their deviation from minimum international baselines for pollution, labor laws, etc. These growing economies, their governments and even the labor force, I suspect, would resist such efforts to bring progress in these areas.

Let's not forget western economies grew on child labor in the 19th century as well. It doesn't make it acceptable, but it should provide context.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very sad article, not even so much that this material is in the supply chain (official India mica production is just a fraction of total exports) but the individual stories of the families caught in bondage to do this mining work for $1/day paying off a "loan" at 200% interest.

Now if only the fine for allowing this material to reach your end product was treated as serious of a negative externality, as say, putting out a bit more sulphur in the exhaust than the latest EPA standard.

I mean, sorry, but what a _horrid fucking double standard_?! Cheaters causing pollution in my backyard that statistically will result in perhaps 100 deaths, fine the bastards $50 billion and shut the company down. Modern day slavery and child labor producing 75% of India's mica output into our car paint and cosmetics causing untold suffering of thousands? Oh, but the standard contract language says they shouldn't do that, so companies wash their hands of it.

If an equivalent agency to the EPA cared about this negative externality as relatively as much as the EPA cares about emissions, this would be a $1T fine which would completely shutter the companies profiting from the illegally mined mica.

<comment><USER4> It seems reasonably consistent to me. This stuff stops at the borders. If they were employing slave labor in the US, they'd get hit hard. Likewise, when companies produce horrible pollution in foreign countries, we don't really care. I'm not saying this is necessarily a good way to do things, but I don't think it's quite a double standard.

<comment><USER3> We fine companies millions of dollars for illegally dumping waste in international waters.

EPA raided a company and jailed the executives for purporting to recycle but actually shipping the waste overseas.

So it doesn't have to stop at the borders. US law can and does punish companies for damage even outside the US.

I would have hoped for something like child slave labor, companies would be looking at potentially facing a full embargo on their goods. When you put the fear of God into a company for something like that, they will make damn sure their supply chain is clean. I see it as the best way to stomp out these horrific abuses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I for one support child labor and recognize that people cannot be lifted out of poverty by fiat. Children working along side their parents means these families can eat, and trying to legislate that away only prolongs and exasperates their poverty.

Every advanced economy started with child labor and other, from our perspective, deplorable conditions. The people must be able to gain enough capital first, before children can go to school, adults can have higher level jobs and enjoy other similar benefits of an advanced economy. But getting there is not a matter of outlawing child labor, instituting a minimum wage or other notions some have for "helping" the poor.

<comment> jon-wood > The people must be able to gain enough capital first, before children can go > to school, adults can have higher level jobs and enjoy other similar > benefits of an advanced economy.

Why? So that we don't have to give up a small amount the relative luxury we live in to help fund people who had the misfortune to be born in the wrong part of the world?

If everyone would just get over themselves we could fairly easily fund decent living standards for everyone without first requiring people to rent out their children.

<comment><USER5> Several decades of African aid has demonstrated that is a lot easier said than done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It upsets me at how completely unsurprised I am about this. At this point, I've kind of started taking for granted that corporations in America depend on child labor.

<comment><USER7> Not just America. Most of the manufacturers listed are European. Not to say US corporations are innocent of this.

It's pretty upsetting to me since I own a car with glittery paint from one of the listed companies. It makes me curious as to how to solve the product sourcing traceability problem for the ethically minded like us.

<comment><USER8> If you have "glittery" paint, you might have a metallic color which doesn't use mica. It's the pearlescent colors that use mica.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminded me of this previous discussion - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246071)</comment>


Anige's List:  The next hot IPO? - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/04/internet-ipo-land-angies-list-is-next/

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe not on scale with Groupon, but they don't seem to be making up new accounting terms to hide losses and they're actually profitable.</comment>


Introduction to Big Query (click on the right to move the slides) - <AUTHOR> http://gtug-sf-bigquery-2012.appspot.com/#1

<comment><USER2> Link to paper FTA:

<http://research.google.com/pubs/pub36632.html></comment>


Apple buys $150M worth of plane tickets a year from United - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90291749/apple-buys-150-million-worth-of-plane-tickets-a-year-from-united <comment><USER2> I'm pretty surprised by this - would have thought that a consulting firm or bank would have topped the list. Perhaps these are tickets that only get booked through corporate travel, rather than being booked by the employee and expensed later?

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how much Apple pays for a business class flight to Shanghai versus a person just buying a ticket for themselves.</comment>


Solar powered airships - <AUTHOR> http://green.autoblog.com/2011/10/22/solar-ship-sails-the-skies-schlepps-supplies/ <comment><USER2> I always thought this a great idea worth pursuing, especially if you are 'sailing' down the prevailing winds/jetstream, i.e. from North America to Europe it is practically a free ride.

It can be a lot more problematic 'beating upwind' the other way, especially as there is not much sunshine in northern Europe due to its considerable latitude.

This craft may be heavier than air but it still has considerable wind resistance.

Also, the dangerous static electricity buildup has to be considered seriously and solved.

<comment><USER3> Isn't it _lighter_ than air? The article also claims its heavier, but I assumed it was a mistake.

<comment><AUTHOR> Heavier. The article is about an hybrid vessel that uses helium to decrease its weight but is still heavier than air. I'm not a physicist, but I assume that lighter than air objects tend to have more wind resistance than heavier than air objects.

<comment><USER4> > lighter than air objects tend to have more wind resistance than heavier than > air objects.

They have a larger cross-section relative to their mass than heavier than air vehicles. The larger the cross-section, the larger the force wind exerts on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The more we use helium for stupid shit like this, the less helium we'll have in the future for MRIs and anything else that requires super-cooling.

Forget peak oil, we are, in fact, sitting at peak Helium, and selling that shit for children's balloons and crap like this.

(And for the historical context, Congress in its infinite wisdom, during the deregulation boom in the 90's, decided to mandate a price to dump all of the US's Helium reserves. As a result we are selling it at way below market rate, depleting a finite reserve of an element which we have no means of recapturing once it's released into the atmosphere. Quite a number of scientists have lamented this insanity, and begged the government to do _something_ even if it is just allowing the rate at which the government sells Helium to float to _actual_ market value, let alone get congress to reverse itself. Check it yourself: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve> )

<comment><USER6> > The more we use helium for stupid shit like this, the less helium we'll have > in the future for MRIs and anything else that requires super-cooling.

While I agree with the rest of your comment, could you explain why do you think that airships are "stupid shit"? I'd say that the insane amount of fuel we use for transportation is a big waste of oil and I really look forward to see airships back in the sky, doing heavy lifting and maybe more.

<comment><USER5> Okay, i should dial it back a bit. What they're promising is cool. Low infrastructure, high pay-load travel is indeed interesting.

But they too are depleting a natural resource, just as petrochemical fuel usage does. And while we can find other storage mechanisms for portable energy (batteries, flywheels, hydrogen, what-have-you), there literally is no substitute for Helium cooling, by virtue of the laws of physics as we know them.

This is not worth giving up cryogenics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I always wonder why helium-based airships never took off. Are there any technological limitations I'm not aware of? Seems to be such a simple and powerful idea (even more now that oil prices are soaring).

<comment><USER7> They did. Ever hear of the Zeppelin? They took off all the time in their hey- day. It's a myth that they were filled with hydrogen; the Hindenburg was only had hydrogen in it because at the time helium was not available in Germany at the time because it was only produced in the United States and the US was refusing to export it.

Anyway, the reason we don't see airships much anymore is because for most things heavier than air craft are more economical. A Boeing 747 is a third the size of a Zeppelin but much faster, more reliable, and with much more usable space and lifting capacity. There's really no economic reason that an Airship should be preferred.

<comment><USER6> > There's really no economic reason that an Airship should be preferred.

What about the fuel usage per unit of mass carried?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I dug into the website of the company and the low-end model goes about 70 MPH in hybrid mode, and 35MPH in solar mode.

I would love to have a flying car. Fuel infrastructure could be awkward though. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Once in a while we should stop and think that Sun is the major energy supplier for the planet. Nature has found a way to turn it to plants, life, wind, petroleum etc. I truly belive we can perform equally well.

<comment><USER10> Thats an empty tree hugger comment. The amount of energy required to grow a plant over several weeks/months is much less than what's required to move a truck around.

I also don't like the argument that the amount of sunlight that hits the Earth in one hour can power the world for who cares how long. I don't like It because it assumes its actually possible to capture all the sunlight that hits the Earth, nevermind that we're actually already using a large part of that energy to grow our food and warm the planet.

The Sun should play an important part in replacing fossil fuels, which I believe we must do, but make good arguments for it, not empty ones.

<comment><USER11> Yes and no. I don't think it's an empty tree hugger comment, but I do think we need actual numbers in order to discuss these things.

World energy usage: 474 exajoules per year

Incident solar flux: 1000W per square metre

Let's suppose (optimistically but not unrealistically) we can get 10% efficiency (over day and night, so more like 20% during the day).

How much land (or indeed, water) do we need to cover with solar cells? About 150,000 square km.

So, while the cost of building all these solar cells is significant, the proportion of the Earth's surface they take up isn't.

<comment><USER12> When people propose the "cover 150,000 km^2 with solar cells solution", I like to see them go on the record as saying that if we actually _tried_ , they would not immediately turn around and start screaming about the 150,000 km^2 of Mother Earth we just converted to industrial land.

Solar of any form has a major power density problem. At least, it does in the biosphere, which it should be observed is only a rather small percentage of the universe....

<comment><USER11> _I like to see them go on the record as saying that if we actually tried, they would not immediately turn around and start screaming about the 150,000 km^2 of Mother Earth we just converted to industrial land._

Oh, don't get _me_ confused with a tree-hugger. I'm about as anti-greenie as you can get. I'm just here to do the mathematics.

I'm for whatever source of energy is cheapest.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pando, the Most Massive Organism on Earth, Is Shrinking - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/science/pando-aspens-utah.html <comment><USER2> _Foraging cattle, allowed into the forest in the summer, are another factor in Pando's shrinkage._

Foraging cattle in Western USA are one of the two primary threats to the ecosystem, the other being the "wild" horses that we're too stupid to cull. It's criminal that Western ranchers are allowed to destroy land that belongs to everyone in order to barely eke out a meager existence with the tiny herds that land can support, while only occasionally paying pitifully low "grazing fees". Meanwhile the vast majority of American beef is raised in the Central Timezone, by people who own or rent the land they use for pasture. [0]

Any fiscally responsible person would see Cliven Bundy and family in prison. They're already paying a pittance to destroy the environment of the West, and then they cry about even that?

[0] A guy I met from New Mexico a month ago was bragging that they could run 12 head per square mile. We can easily run ten times that density, and more if conditions are right.

<comment><USER3> > the other being the "wild" horses that we're too stupid to cull.

I'd like to hear more about your take on this. This past August I had an opportunity to take a ride with a lady who had adopted and trained several of these wild horses through an adoption/auction program run by the State of Oregon. To my ears it sounded very effective - the state rounds up the horses to keep them off public grazing lands and cares for them until they can be sold off. Felt like a win-win for nature, the horses, the state, and horse owners.

<comment><USER2> It's wonderful that some are rounded up and sold to people who want them, and it was even better back when there was more demand for cheap horses so that more were sold. The misguided meddlers who ended horse slaughter in USA (against the recommendation of every single association of veterinarians) destroyed the market for cheap horses, so it's no surprise that those numbers are lower. There's no guarantee that any particular mustang will make a good riding horse, so fewer people are willing to deal with that risk. The slaughter ban was bad for lots of domesticated horses about 8-10 years ago (one could drive around and see fields full of starving and neglected horses), but that level of owner is largely without horses at this point. If it's too big a risk to keep a few domesticated horses around, it's certainly too big a risk to buy mustangs.

That's only part of this particular issue, however. Even if five times the current numbers were sold to willing owners, feral horses would still be destroying the environment. They aren't native and they are uniquely suited to disrupting the life cycle of native plants. The American hunter is probably not ready to control this population in the way that e.g. deer and elk populations are controlled. The best solution is probably sterilization, but even that would be very difficult at this scale. That is especially the case given the level of interference that could be expected from the Humane Society, ASPCA, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sad news, but while Pando is definitely one of the largest organisms on Earth, far larger is a single fungal colony in eastern Oregon that covers 964 hectares[1]

1: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but- true-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest- organism-is-fungus/)

<comment><USER5> In this case, the title is exact in a subtle way: Pando is the largest known organism by mass, but there are only estimates on the mass of the fungal colony.

<comment><USER4> Sure, though it isn't like we've weighed Pando either - I would say we just have better estimates of its mass (and of course "largest" is ambiguous as to whether it means area or mass here).

<comment><USER5> Right, but both the title and the body of the article use the unambiguous "most massive" not "largest."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Quivering"? Who calls them "Quivering Aspen"? I have only ever heard Quaking Aspen. Is that not right? Is this a Berenstein Bears situation?

<comment><USER7> >Populus tremuloides - American aspen, American poplar, aspen, aspen poplar, golden aspen, golden trembling aspen, leaf aspen, mountain aspen, poplar, popple, quaking asp, quaking aspen, quiver-leaf, trembling aspen, trembling poplar, Vancouver aspen, white poplar

[https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/TechSheets/HardwoodNA/pdf...](https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/TechSheets/HardwoodNA/pdf_files/popaspeneng.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course it's fucking cattle. OF COURSE.

We need to get a leash on these ranchers who are making millions plundering our natural heritage and belching massive amounts of CO2 into the air.

Too much of OUR land and too many of OUR resources are handed to these people for them to chop it up and sell it back to us. It needs to end.

Drop the subsidies for the meat industry. Tax the real cost. Tax the carbon. Driving up the cost of meat will incentivize people to eat less of it.

<comment><USER2> Most USA beef is raised by people who own or rent the land they use. Only in the West do unsavory types like Cliven Bundy get such a sweet deal from the federal government. Even then they barely make ends meet, because the land is so unsuited to grazing. We should end the whole shoddy pretense of grazing fees enabling environmental destruction, but it would take a political miracle to get that through the Senate.

<comment><USER9> Note: many of these families would HAPPILY buy and maintain the land themselves but the government has decided that holding the land in "trust" and allowing a tragedy of the commons to destroy the landscape is a better idea.

<comment><USER10> i doubt they have the finances to buy these vast amounts of land... even at $500/acre you'd need millions in cash available to win an auction or sale.

while on the subject, i doubt "many" want to buy, it's much easier to rent, scam and complain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who says we should save it?

Perhaps having 47,000 clones with zero genetic diversity has resulted in a population that is unable to adapt, especially vs. species with more genetic diversity.

Why does this population deserve saving rather than allowing new populations to grow & flourish?

<comment><USER12> Couldn't you make this argument about all endangered species?

<comment><USER13> yes and I'm sure he does.

<comment><USER11> I'm just thankful those old cyanobacteria weren't environmentally conscious. None of these modern Eukaryotic species would be around if they hadn't happily 'polluted' the entire planet with oxygen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's good to hear mule deer are doing better though. Montana mulies were getting very rare as a kid because of escaped red deer and hunting pressure (live above treeline mostly vs black tails which live lower on average).

</comment><comment><USER10> do all of you commenters pay for nytimes? or is there an easy way to get around the paywall when i click links from HN?

<comment><USER15> Use archive.fo

[https://archive.fo/3pftd](https://archive.fo/3pftd)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do certain methods of payment (or lack of) deter you from buying? - <AUTHOR>

Very frequently I see startups discussed on HN and people comment on how only offering Facebook and/or Twitter login deters them from trying out the service.<p>What about payments? Would you be more inclined or deterred from purchasing something on a website if a certain payment method was or wasn't offered? (Paypal, Google Payments, Amazon Payments, generic credit card processing, etc...) <comment><AUTHOR> Originally I thought Amazon Payments was attractive because many people (this could be an over assumption on my part) already purchase items on Amazon and have their credit cards stored with their account. This way, they wouldn't have to take our their credit cards and enter the information again.

That and the trust that Amazon invokes, as opposed to a new startup in which I have no idea how they're processing my credit card.

</comment><comment><USER2> Maybe I'm an outlier, but I really don't mind paying with paypal. It's rather convenient.

I don't think that the offered payment methods have ever impacted whether or not I actually buy from a particular merchant.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, I refuse to buy anything from a site that only offers paypal, a situation I have run into a few times. My preferred method is generic credit card processing.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would prefer generic credit card processing.</comment>


Show HN: I made this app: it's a mixture of spreadsheet and calculator. - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/totally-editable-calculator/id529571185?mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> In South Africa it's fairly typical to wade through the bill when you're at a restaurant with friends, and pay for the portions that you've consumed.

And I always lost my place, and often had to recalculate my bill. So I came up with this and I think it's a pretty good experience as far as calculators go.

Here are a few promo codes:

NLXEH6NE7W43

XL6AF63J7K9P

MNJKYR3YAN9M

3ARXXHX3HMYN

6WXJA97FL9LK

It's a HTML 5 app, and will be coming to Android in a week or two.</comment>


Mothers Are the Unsung Heroes of Prison - <AUTHOR> https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/05/09/why-mothers-are-the-unsung-heroes-of-prison <comment><USER2> There was no reader mode available, but you can get that here in case you also need that accessibility: [https://outline.com/bHxccU](https://outline.com/bHxccU)

 _"(...) making it harder for our moms and other family members to visit us, or forcing them to visit us via video chat. Instead of making it more expensive for them to accept our phone calls or send us emails. (...)"_

This seems soulless. I wonder how that works elsewhere.

<comment><USER3> US prisons always sound like hell.

In Germany, prison time is like being in the hospital without being sick. Mostly boring.

<comment><USER4> Aren't prisons _supposed_ to be like that? In my perception, the goal of prison is exactly that: be like hell so other people are afraid of getting there enough so they don't commit crime? Someone who's already into prison for a long term is lost anyway, he or she will be criminalized for life. And this is why prison terms should be mostly binary: we should try to either punish someone with something short of that, or if not, lock him up for long enough he either never makes it out of there, or does it old enough so he's not tuu much of a threat anymore.

<comment><USER5> >Aren't prisons supposed to be like that? In my perception, the goal of prison is exactly that: be like hell so other people are afraid of getting there enough so they don't commit crime?

What about the wrongly convicted? I understand the desire for revenge, but prisons should be safe, secure and inmates should come out of there as people you'd be happy to have as a neighbor.

When you treat prisoners like animals, they'll act like animals.

<comment><USER6> > I understand the desire for revenge, but prisons should be safe, secure and > inmates should come out of there as people you'd be happy to have as a > neighbor.

All else being equal, I'd always prefer a non-ex-con over an ex-con as a neighbor. I doubt I'm alone in this.

<comment><USER7> At least you know where you stand with someone who's been caught before. Every ex-con starts out as a non-ex-con.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The last part was pretty hard hitting. Posts get linked on HN often about prisons making it impossible for people to contact their family and friends. I can't imagine how fucked up someone would end up after being totally cut off from their friends and family.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is a moving piece about quiet heroism, I enjoyed it a lot.

And it reminds me of another article about Lyn Ulbricht ([https://breakermag.com/lyn-ulbricht-pushed-herself-to-the- br...](https://breakermag.com/lyn-ulbricht-pushed-herself-to-the-brink-of- death-for-freeross-her-last-best-hope-president-trump/)). Lyn is the mother of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road. The article goes at length about the war she is fighting to get her son out of jail. I have so much respect and admiration for this woman. It is quite something and they make a very compelling case in my opinion. You can read more about it here: [https://freeross.org/](https://freeross.org/)

<comment><USER10> life in prison with no parole? that is so harsh. give him 10 years max. drugs are soon to be legalised...

<comment><USER11> I thought so too at first, but a few months ago I read the judges' decision in his appeal. He had actually ordered some murders as well, and that was factored into his sentence.

The murders didn't actually take place, but he did order them and he was under the impression that they were carried out.

<comment><USER12> And yet, there are actual murderers who do receive parole - and that's the way it should be. Many countries do not even have life in prison without parole, as they rightfully recognize it as inhumane.

<comment><USER6> Why _should_ it be that way? Did the murderer's victim(s) receive some kind of leniency or reprieve after a period of time? Did they re-animate?

I don't have a strong opinion here either way, but separating convicted murderers (especially first-degree or conspiracy-to) from free society doesn't _inherently_ sound like a crazy bad idea.

<comment> Digit-Al That depends on whether you view prison as a way of getting revenge on criminals or as a way of trying to reform them.

If you view prison as an agency of revenge on wrongdoers then, of course, life without parole for murderers makes perfect sense.

If, on the other hand, you view prison as a way of trying to reform wrongdoers and turn them into productive members of society then life without parole makes no sense at all.

<comment><USER13> _view prison as a way of getting revenge on criminals or as a way of trying to reform them_

This is the crux of the whole issue. The US is split between the two notions of justice: retribution and rehabilitation. The split seems to largely fall along political lines, which means the argument isn't likely to be settled any time soon.

I tend to fall in the rehabilitation camp but I can see some of the logic behind the other side. At the very least, I recognize that it's better for the state to apply measured retribution than for families to pronounce blood feuds upon one another. Beyond that, I'm at a loss for what to do about cold, psychopathic individuals who seem utterly incapable of reform.

<comment><USER14> Deterrence and retribution are different things. Prison systems with harsh sentences are typically more about sending a message to potential criminals than punishing existing ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Considering the whole prison system is now moving to make it so people can only "visit" other people through over-priced video link. What is the social and societal cost of such a tech move?

</comment><comment><USER16> 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. 90% of runaway and homeless children come form fatherless homes. 85% of children with behavioral problems come from fatherless homes. 63% of youth suicide is fatherless homes. Of the 27 shooters, only 1 was raised by his biological father since birth

Does this go well with:

> Maybe we should consider just how much positive influence these wonderful > ladies have on the penal system, every day of the year.

and

> A momma's boy, which almost all convicts are.

<comment><USER17> Basically, you are vilifying the parent who bothers to stick around because it is usually a woman.

Sadly, as I write this, it's the top comment because this is an overwhelmingly male forum, so an awful lot of members are all too happy to upvote anything that spin doctors problems to make men look good and women look bad without thinking any deeper about the problem than that.

For the record, it's actually a problem that so many men in the US don't give a damn about their own children, can't be bothered to show up and also don't give a damn about how that negatively impacts the woman who had children by them.

We need more family friendly policies that help parents do right by their kids. Most developed countries do not take the attitude that "You fools who had kids are on your own and we aren't going to lift a finger to help you raise your kids. No, we don't care that this actually comes back to bite us once they are grown and the problem is being handled by the police and the penal system. We just aren't that bright and can't see the cause-and-effect obvious connection there, never mind the existence of studies that show it."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I quite liked this article and had a (very cursory) look at the other stuff he wrote, and from what I've seen I can recommend it.

It's maybe not fancy writing, but the topics are interesting, and it gets to the point.

</comment><comment><USER19> Maslow's Pyramid explains what makes a mother heroic [https://qz.com/1615580/maslows-pyramid-explains-what- makes-a...](https://qz.com/1615580/maslows-pyramid-explains-what-makes-a- mother-heroic/)</comment>


Firefox share stopped declining - <AUTHOR> https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/ <comment><USER2> Firefox has become good enough that it silently falls to the background and I don't even notice it while on the web.

To me, that is damn good software.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great to see, now let's hope with quantum's momentum it can increase the rate of growth, maybe as far as February 2012 standards (last time it was majority share)!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a little wary of inferring anything from browser stats taken from a website which exclusively serves developers - I'd probably expect a higher proportion of firefox users in that demographic.

I'd love to see something like an industry standard for this kind of thing, one that might focus on producing statistics for more "typical" users (whatever that means). Could anyone enlighten me?

Very curious to see if this potential inflection point is reflected elsewhere, never sure whose survey is most credible.

</comment><comment><USER5> It looks like all browsers' share increased? I'd chalk this up to the amount of whatever unnamed browsers take up the rest of the share decreasing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm more surprised opera still has that much market share.

</comment><comment><USER7> Firefox is genuinely a blessing to use now. I still haven't gotten used to the developer tools after exclusively using Chrome's for so many years, but I'm sure I'll get the hang of it eventually.

</comment><comment><USER8> Misleading title. The recent iterations of Firefox are superb, though.

</comment><comment><USER9> How did everything grow in share?</comment>


Light therapy effective for treating depression, not just winter blues - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/11/18/light-therapy-effective-for-treating-depression-not-just-winter-blues/ <comment><USER2> In the rush to replace all incandescents with CFLs, no one seemed to care about the poor quality of light we now live and work under. Fluorescent lighting ruins my once-beautiful university campus at night, makes my parents house dreary and grim, etc. I hope some day we'll realize that the energy cost savings weren't free and pay some attention to the effect lighting has on our spaces and, correspondingly, our moods when we inhabit them.

<comment><USER3> I have soft white CFLs that look identical to incandescent bulbs. I also recently bought some full spectrum 5500K CFLs for my bathroom vanity, in an effort to see if full spectrum light in the morning will help my mood. A lot of the "daylight" CFLs are not full spectrum, and are a harsh blue. Things look rather natural under full spectrum once they warm up and your eyes adjust. When I turn off the full spectrum light, it is interesting to see just how yellow "soft white" light is.

<comment><USER4> No CFLs are "full spectrum". The fundamental nature of the technology is to create a number of sharp "spikes" in the spectrum. This inevitably causes distorted color relationships relative to daylight or incandescent lighting.

The bulbs also cost much more to produce than incandescents and are full of toxic mercury, and wear out much more quickly than advertised when turned on and off frequently (as is typical in residential uses).

This page mirrors my thoughts reasonably well ([http://www.richsoil.com/CFL- fluorescent-light-bulbs.jsp](http://www.richsoil.com/CFL-fluorescent-light- bulbs.jsp)). On the whole, CFLs are a handout to a small handful of rich lighting companies, sold to the public under false pretenses.

<comment><USER3> I am aware it's not truly "full spectrum", but it is more tolerable than the harsher bluer "daylight" CFLs. These CFLs were designed to provide truer whites for photography. They were also cheaper than buying a lightbox.

Incandescent bulbs also use about 3 - 4 times the power, and burnout quite often. There is no perfect solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting reference, I'll read that article for sure, JAMA Psychiatry is a top-tier journal. However not a new idea, there have been prior studies showing benefit of light treatment for non-seasonal depression, particularly in "elderly" individuals (e.g., people over 60).

How it works in practice, well, the usual caveat about varying mileage definitely applies in this domain. I've recommended adjunctive light treatment over many years. Though it can help reduce symptoms, in most cases other therapies are still necessary to achieve remission of depression.

Several comments were made about the lamps used for light treatment. The optimum emission spectrum for light therapy is really an unsettled question. Early on (in 1980's) the quantity of light was emphasized, 10000 lux is considered standard since that is equivalent to minimal "normal" daylight, e.g., heavily overcast midday sky in late fall. Some work suggests as little as 4-5K lux may be sufficient for response.

Some studies have shown blue light (say ~460nm) to be most effective, others found peak response to green (~500-550). And some researchers in the field have the opinion the spectral quality is less important the light intensity.

Since usually light treatment for depression is administered in early morning, consistent with normal circadian influence, the blueness of light as encouraging wakefulness is not a problem. As some comments noted, some research suggests blue light exposure in evening hours can trigger wakefulness, though not yet enough evidence to say that's been proven.

Notably device displays have been getting brighter, and more blue, thanks to "white" LED illumination which has prominent emission ~450nm. Of course LED output spectrum varies across diodes, but kind of a parallel to fluorescent lamps which tend to have prominent green emission regardless of apparent "warm" or "cool" effect.

The advice to avoid computer or phone use in evening is based on both brightness and spectrum, to say nothing of the mentally stimulating effects interfering with sleep onset.

<comment><USER6> First thing that came to mind about the study was that if participants have to wake up at certain time every day, and they have to be still for 30 minutes, they are likely to use that eating breakfast.

For me having fixed sleep rhythm and eating breakfast are two things that help with moody periods. So it could be that the side effects are more important than the light itself.

If it's true that this helps, but doesn't really cure. Then it might be best used on healthy people. So they don't ever get depressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I want lights with adjustable spectrums. I.e. more blue wavelengths during the day and more yellow/red at nights.

<comment><USER8> Hue Lux bulbs can do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not sure if this is relevant (the panels may or may not produce vitamin d in people's skin) but since taking a high quality vitamin d in winter I feel considerably clearer and more solid in my mentality.

<comment><USER10> Production of Vitamin D3 is produced by UVB hitting 7-Dehydrocholesterol.

If that light is producing UVB, then people should be wearing UV goggles while using it. I highly doubt they are using "naked" CCFLs producing UVB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is some good hardware I can buy for this "light therapy" ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have heard that this one is used in many of the studies: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PCN4UVU/ref=s9_wish_gw_g...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PCN4UVU/ref=s9_wish_gw_g121_i2_r)</comment></comment>


Why Do So Many Linux Users Prefer the Command Line to a GUI? - <AUTHOR> https://www-fossmint-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.fossmint.com/why-linux-users-prefer-the-commandline-to-a-gui/amp/?amp_js_v=0.1#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fossmint.com%2Fwhy-linux-users-prefer-the-commandline-to-a-gui%2F <comment><USER2> A fair amount, if not the majority, of Linux users also work with Linux/BSD/UNIX servers, which is all CLI. Once you get the hang of a shell, just about anything you can do in a GUI environment you can do faster from the command line and there's just so much you can't do from a GUI versus the command line. Plus there's still a bunch of us older people around from the era when a CLI was all we had. I'm just used to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's more that people who know how to use the command line tend to also be Linux users (and, in most cases, in addition to being proficient users of other operating systems).

</comment><comment><USER4> Scripting. I have 100 files that need the same operation on them. If they are GUI-only I have to fire up a GUI 100 times. If the changes can be made from a command line it will take me about 60 seconds.</comment>


PipelineDB Releases Enterprise Version of Its Streaming SQL Database - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/14/pipelinedb-releases-first-enterprise-version-of-its-streaming-sql-database/ <comment><AUTHOR> The main difference between PipelineDB and old CEP frameworks is that PipelineDB is based on the PostgreSQL 9.4 core, so is a fully functional relational database in addition to a streaming processing engine, which gives us integrated storage in addition to a SQL-based approach to stream processing and realtime/streaming analytics. We have also added functionality like probabilistic data structures, stream-table joins for adding historical context to streams, and now offer a distributed architecture, realtime alerting, and HA. So there is definitely some overlap with the types of things CEP frameworks did, but having an open-source core based on PostgreSQL that operates with 100% SQL enables a wider range of users to deal with an increasing need to tackle realtime data challenges.

</comment><comment><USER2> I love that it says the team stayed lean and is actually focused on earning money through revenue!

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different from those old complex event processing frameworks?

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome!</comment>


Particle effects in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://liveweave.com/TcZrXF

<comment> chestnut-tree This is really impressive. It makes me wonder how particle effects in Javascript running in a web browser can run so well, while a native desktop application like After Effects takes ages to render something similar?

Here's another mesmerising javascript experiment [http://brunoimbrizi.com/experiments/#/01](http://brunoimbrizi.com/experiments/#/01)

<comment><USER2> This are a few nice demos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> At first in my mind it's 'Oh, another javascript particle effect' and then I try the demo and it becomes 'holy shit, this is amazing'

Amazing job!

</comment><comment><USER4> I did some experimenting to make particles dance to the beat of music if anyone is interested:

[http://trapcity.tv](http://trapcity.tv)

<comment><USER5> Strange, I get no particle effects.

When I check out the chrome console I find: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set property 'innerHTML' of null

<comment><USER4> Browser info?

<comment><USER5> Stable chrome branch. Version 30.0.1599.101

In chrome canary I also get:

Invalid CSS property value: -webkit-gradient(radial, center center, 0px, center center, 100%, color-stop(0%,rgba(0,0,0,0.33)), color- stop(100%,rgba(0,0,0,0.75)))

and the same error as found in in standard chrome.

<comment><USER4> Seems like the js is going off before the DOM has finished loading. If I add an onload function that should fix it.

<comment><USER5> You deal with the DOM before waiting for the document to load?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That one is actually pretty "old" already. The original demo can be found here:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/demos/detail/fluid](https://developer.mozilla.org/demos/detail/fluid)

</comment><comment><USER7> What are the different rendering modes referenced by the help text? I couldn't detect any difference after hitting the space bar.

Very cool effect!

<comment><USER8> Same question here. I hit all kinds of keys and didn't see any difference.

<comment><USER9> Yes, it appears that the "any" key is missing on my keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is why Google Music needs a visualizer.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love this. How easy is it to turn this into a Windows / OSX / Linux screen saver?

</comment><comment><USER12> Dear author:

If you refactor the object/array/Float32Array instantiation in the redraw loop out into one-off allocations you will see a remarkably improvement in performance in terms of garbage-collection.

<comment><USER10> Note to self: Next time you want to optimize your cool-looking effects, post the source as a demo to HN. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Operates in slow motion on Metro IE11, interestingly, desktop IE11 performs well although it starts off slow. It flies in FF and Chrome though. I suppose the Metro IE11 is missing some WebGL optimizations. Very cool!

</comment><comment><USER14> Really great to be able to play with the source of this. Reminds of the 'uzu' app[1].

[1] [http://uzumotion.com/](http://uzumotion.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I didn't look closely at the actual equations of motion, but clicking around in a sort of periodic fashion makes patterns that remind me of chaotic advection ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_mixing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_mixing)). Always very cool to see interesting patterns from relatively simple dynamics.

</comment><comment><USER16> Absolutely beautiful, lost a few minutes just playing around with it. Would be great as slow, randomised, background or screensaver.

</comment><comment><USER17> Warning: This demo locked up my OS and I had to force-restart. Chrome 25/OSX 10.8/Mac Pro Desktop, Early 2008.

<comment><USER18> The beautiful wonder that is Javascript. All the majesty of a killer whale piloting a single-engine supercruiser via a blue-tooth repeater connected 500m gallon tank in the Sahara. Think about how flexible such a system can be!

<comment><USER19> Considering that it's WebGL, pretty sure it's that age-old spectre: graphics drivers.

<comment><USER18> Oh, Definitely! It couldn't be the layers of parsers, spaghetti Javascript libraries, web protocols, the DOM, WebGL itself which is a part of Javascript, or a million other crufty web things, it has to be the microsecond latency introduced by hardware-level API abstraction...

<comment><USER20> User-level libraries can't lock up your OS unless they can trigger kernel / driver bugs or make your hardware malfunction. In this case, graphics drivers are the most likely cause.

<comment><USER18> In theory they can't in practice, you just saw it happen. malfunction is a human concept, perhaps the hardware is behaving exactly as intended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm just wondering why this is impressive. Is it partly because it's Javascript and it's in a browser? I mean, would it have been just as impressive if you had to download a C++ program and compile it to get the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER22> This does not work for me in FF 22.0 (work specified version). Looks nice in chrome, only time it drops is when you bundle them into a large group and then cross you mouse over it and they explode everywhere.

<comment><USER23> It's working for me in FF 24.0.

<comment><USER22> Yeah works for me at home on 24 too. Just noting it in case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, I was not expecting that. This is fantastic. Hold down your left mouse and keep it still and it changes colour and starts getting more intense. Great job!

</comment><comment><USER25> IT'S BEAUTIFUL!

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm obviously being stupid - but what do I have to do to make this run in Chrome?

<comment><USER27> Hazarding a guess: Not use linux

I've never had webgl work on linux (not that I've tried particularly hard)

<comment><USER26> I'm on OSX. I tried some different flags but I've obviously missed something.

/Applications/Google\ Chrome\ Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome\ Canary --no-sandbox --enable-webgl --enable-experimental-webgl

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Were is the 'AirBender style' in these particle effects demo ?

<comment><USER29> I didn't see any either.

<comment><USER10> It's in all the "wooshing", the swirls of energy as they collide: [http://www.anneahira.com/images/avatar-the-last- airbender.jp...](http://www.anneahira.com/images/avatar-the-last- airbender.jpg) Google around for clips, it's obviously not 100% accurate, but it said "style" so we can give a bit of leeway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Amazing, beautifully done. Wonderful :-)

</comment><comment><USER31> This would make a nice screensaver

</comment><comment><USER32> hella cool:)

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER34> just wow!

</comment><comment><USER35> nice!

</comment><comment><USER36> You can increase the number of particles by changing this line:

        totalLines = 60000,

My PC starts getting slower after 150K, but it works, though slowly, even with 1 million.

<comment><USER37> Interestingly I can take it to 1,000,000 with Firefox (Nightly) without too many problems. Chrome (Canary) becomes unusable around 200,000.

<comment><USER36> It really depends on the videocard I guess.

I just tried both Crome and FF with a million particles, and they feel roughly the same.</comment></comment></comment>


Emmanuel Faber's speech at HEC graduation - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECppfNbXUUg <comment><AUTHOR> Just a bit of background: Emmanuel Faber is the CEO of Danone, and was asked to do the graduation speech for the HEC business school in France. The first 5 minutes are unfortunately in French, and then he switches into English. IMHO this speech is at the level of Job's "stay hungry, stay foolish" \- very inspiring.</comment>


Go: Subtests and Sub-benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://elliot.land/go-subtests-and-sub-benchmarks <comment><USER2> Um, I thought the article would at least provide some real-life examples, i.e. add some value to what's available in the official docs. But the code snippets are copied verbatim from [https://tip.golang.org/pkg/testing/#hdr- Subtests_and_Sub_ben...](https://tip.golang.org/pkg/testing/#hdr- Subtests_and_Sub_benchmarks) (with no attribution) and the text around them is mostly just reworded. The only thing it adds is maybe exposition; though for this I'd personally argue that the following link is even better: [https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.7](https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.7)

<comment><USER3> Well, I for one wasn't aware of the new functionality in Go and am grateful the author posted about it.

Because otherwise I wouldn't know what I now know!</comment></comment>


Signs of a poorly written jQuery plugin - <AUTHOR> http://remysharp.com/2010/06/03/signs-of-a-poorly-written-jquery-plugin/

<comment><USER2> This article helped me a lot. I had always thought that it had to be written as:

$(this).each(...)

Knowing that I can use:

this.each()

will allow me to simplify things a bit.

<comment><USER3> Saying $(this).somejQueryFunction() is defensive programming, it ensures that your object gets jQuery'd. If it's already a jQuery object, it's not expensive to do. This is generic advice for all the various kinds of 'this' that you'll encounter in javascript, not the specific case mentioned in the linked article.

<comment><USER4> It does seem a bit nit-picky. I would expect that right away in the JQuery call tests if it's already a JQuery object and short-circuits. It would save you one call and it's not exactly in a tight loop.

Maybe as a sign-post that the person doesn't really understand JQuery plugins very well…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> His second point, "Double jQuery" is because of inconstancy in jQuery itself. For all event callbacks 'this' is the relevant DOM node, but for plugin functions 'this' is a jQuery object. It is understandable that a plugin author would assume that it is a DOM node and since calling $(this) would just return itself they have no way of knowing. I wouldn't say it reflects on the plugin author at all.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's important to keep in mind that these are literally what the title makes them out to be: simple signposts that indicate poor code might lie within.

I probably wouldn't immediately toss out a plugin that exhibited one or more of these signs, but I _would_ take it as a sign that I ought to do a slightly more thorough skimming of the code before using.

It's a shame that the jQuery plugin directory doesn't make separating the good from the bad much easier.

</comment><comment><USER7> For the inline return:

        return $(this).each(fn);

I'm actually surprised that the JS engines don't do this kind of optimization automatically.

<comment><USER8> It's quite possible some of them do, but the performance difference is probably negligible anyway, it's just extra code that doesn't need to exist.

<comment><USER7> I see. It speaks to a certain elegance of programming, which is a useful filter for estimating quality. I actually totally get that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> #1. I hate the "this" keyword abuse in jQuery, this article demonstrates it clearly. #2. Some minor code style issues do not make a bad plugin.

<comment><USER10> By "this article", do you mean the article in question, or was that a self- reference to your own comment?

Also I ignored what you were saying because your use of a temporary placeholder in your first sentence was a red flag, indicative of poor writing. Better would have been "This article demonstrates clearly why I hate abuse of the "this" keyword in jQuery", eliminating the extra "it" altogether.

<comment><USER9> I'm going to assume sarcasm since ignoring doesn't usually involve replying.</comment></comment></comment>


The Whole of WordPress Compiled to .NET Core - <AUTHOR> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheWholeOfWordPressCompiledToNETCoreAndANuGetPackageWithPeachPie.aspx <comment><USER2> But why?

<comment><USER3>
      * Faster
      * More secure
      * Write plugins in C#
      * Use NuGet / .NET libraries in Wordpress
      * Best of Wordpress ecosystem + speed / perf / ecosystem benefits of .NET
      * Why not?</comment></comment>