How Superstar Companies Like Apple Are Killing America's High-Tech Future - <AUTHOR> http://ineteconomics.org/institute-blog/william-lazonick-how-superstar-companies-apple-are-killing-america-s-high-tech-future <comment><USER3> When I look at the likes of Rockefeller, Ford or Edison and compare them with today's success stories at Apple, Facebook or Wall Street, the difference I see, lies in whose weakness they exploit to reach the top.

Today's __success stories __are all about exploiting every possible customer weakness, while in the good old days it was about exploiting competitor weakness.

Whether its exploiting people's weaknesses to get them to mindlessly consume content to sell ads, or cleverly misguiding them about mortgages and student loans, or tying social standing and aspiration(in the developing world) to the latest trinket in a phone...it makes me conclude that the best way to build the next superstar company, is to find a human weakness as yet unexploited in the ever growing bountiful list that cognitive and behavioral psychology are just beginning to provide and go to town.

<comment><USER4> You are romanticizing the past. Take a look at the ads in LIFE magazines from the first half of the 20th c. There's consumer exploitation going on that would make Zynga blush.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, blush in embarrassment at how blatant, transparent and ineffective it was. It was very unsubtle - and shocking to us now because of that.

But they still thought that things were best sold by convincing people that their product was the best. And many though that actually being the best was a cost efficient way to convince people of that.

Pretty childish by todays standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another article from the author helped clarify the points being made in the original article:

[https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without- prosperity](https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity)

A gist of the argument:

1\. Companies with large profits are spending an enormous amount of money on open market stock buy backs.

2\. Buy backs are almost exclusively done for stock manipulation reasons: to stabilize or increase the value of a stock.

3\. Most executive compensation is in the form of stock. So the incentive of management is to maximize stock value.

4\. Instead, management should be incentivized to engage in activities that increase reinvestment, research, and development. Of which longer-term, more stable employment is one positive effect; increasing U.S. innovation and inventions is another.

My own amateur take on #2 is that it's popular because it's a non-risky, conservative action that management can take. If Company X has a billion dollar profit, spending that on open market buy backs of company stock effectively keeps the the profits within the company, without incurring a tax penalty. Combined with the stabilizing effect on stock prices makes it a no- brainer for many.

Also, having a profit doesn't justify increasing R&D spending, or automatically expanding into new markets. It's only wise to risk an expansion if you have confidence it will generate a return. The author conflates government spending (which is unbound by risk) with private spending (which necessarily must be bound by risk). A billion dollar publicly funded research project that results in no measurable return for society will not bankrupt the government. A risky, unwise, billion dollar private investment that does not generate a return can destroy a company.

</comment><comment><USER7> I see this delusion pop up all over and I can't help but just shake my head. Trying to tax a corporation is like trying to trap an octopus in a fishing net. They will always find a way to slide out.

You have the perfect collusion of incentives:

1) Pooled self interest in the form of shareholders owning value. When a corporation spends money on the shareholder's behalf on lobbying or fancy tax law specialists, in benefits every single shareholder, because stock returns are apportioned. With the personal income tax, it is not in the immediate self interest for someone in the lowest tax bracket to help lobby for lower taxes on the highest bracket. Pooled self interest makes for higher lobbying power.

2) The corporate tax is not a revenue tax (as is the personal income tax), but rather a revenue-minus-costs tax. And businesses are diverse enough in their business models that you couldn't feasibly enact a revenue tax without unfairly penalizing low margin industries like grocery stores or temp agencies. What this means is that anything that the corporation deems to be a cost is automatically tax deductible. This leads to ridiculous shenanigans like using corporate jets to drop off documents that happen to need to be delivered to the same city as the CEO's daughter's university campus. If you want to enforce rules on corporate taxation, you are going to have to scrutinize every single cost they have on their books. Is it any surprise that the corporate tax has the highest compliance and enforcement costs, and lowest effective-to-nominal ratios of any tax form in the US?

If you want corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, you have to have them distribute the money to their shareholders and then place the burden of taxation on them. Eliminate the corporate tax altogether, and tax capital gains and dividends as personal income.

<comment><USER8> Very little of what you said was true.

1) A corporation spends money on tax specialists to benefit itself. Any benefit to the shareholders is usually incidental, and the corporation would eliminate these benefits if it increased the benefit to the corporation.

2) Corporate income taxes are profit taxes. The type of shenanigans you have suggested as a means of increasing expenses are what tax practitioners call "tax evasion schemes" that (a) would not work and (b) would result in heft fines and/or prison sentences for the executives, board members, and accountants involved. The US corporate tax code has the highest compliance costs because it has the most deductions and credits of any code in the world, but every dollar spent on compliance usually results in multiple dollars saved with respect to tax liabilities.

If you want corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, you tax them on their profits. If the tax is levied only on distributions to shareholders, that will simply move the compliance games to the shareholder level. And this plays into enforcement as well--there are thousands of companies, but there are _millions_ of shareholders, and it is magnitudes easier to enforce tax at the corporate level than the shareholder level.

<comment> grey-area _The type of shenanigans you have suggested as a means of increasing expenses are what tax practitioners call "tax evasion schemes"_

There's a distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion, and most of what companies do to (very successfully) avoid paying tax is tax avoidance (i.e. perfectly legal).

<comment><USER9> Perfectly legal and perhaps a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders in some respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you don't want "stock buybacks", do not print money.

The Federal Reserve prints money(Qualitative Easings) for big companies and Governments, and of course companies buy their own stock with their cheap money. Government buy back their own bonds.

Basically they are taking wealth from little savers and giving it to big Government and big companies, in one of the biggest transfer of wealth ever, making the people at the top 1% have a bigger and bigger share of the wealth.

It is not a problem of big companies,but a problem of the Government distortion of the financial world for their benefit(because they are basically broke).

The "lending of last resort" has become the first and normal way of financing for them.

Of course, there are always people that believe, like this man, that the solution is always Central Planning, more Government and more taxes.

<comment><USER11> QE isn't "money printing for big companies and Governments" and stock buybacks are just another way to return capital to shareholders.

How is it that so many articles devolve into the criticism of banks? Why do people bother commenting on subjects they know little about (and in this case are only tangentially related to the article)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I agree with this in the sense that I wish companies would stop focusing on short term profits. It'd also be nice if companies would invest in their employees, although there I have an obvious bias.

Still, is it really fair to say that companies should pay less dividends? And while I understand shareholders don't really contribute directly to the success of the company, if nobody paid dividends then what incentive is there for anyone to own shares? I get that the stock price may increase, but if stocks don't provide dividends do they have any inherent value at all?

<comment><USER13> The bigger point is re-investment in to the scientific infrastructure - <USER2> spite of its inefficiencies feds seem to be doing an OK job but are cash constrained. On the other hand big profitable tech companies in spite of lots of cash are still playing the game of paying less for taxes and other financial engineering tricks and are doing basic minimum (which they are entitled to). One may say, its not their job, which is absolutely true. But the outcome here we want is, better investments into the scientific infrastructure so the US remains the dominant player for foreseeable future and that would not be possible with a massive companies sitting on tons of cash and who are unwilling to make investments in to the future because of the perceived "volatility".

<comment><USER14> We shouldn't be trying to shoehorn entities into jobs that their incentives don't best align with. If the premise is that we want to allocate more capital into scientific infra but the Gov't doesn't have that funding, the solution is to give government the funding, not to somehow get companies to spend their cash the way we want it. Where would this extra money come from? Again, under the premise that we want to re-allocate money towards scientific spending, it would come from higher taxes.

Fundamentally the issue you're describing is "gov't can't perform one of its competencies (scientific investment) well enough due to cash constraints". The cash constraint is a fundamentally political problem, and companies' decision- making vis-a-vis scientific investment is just a red herring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, the article is suggesting that everyone who uses GPS technology should be paying a fee.. to the government? Isn't that what we already call 'taxes'?

<comment><USER14> Well, in the US even those who don't use GPS technology are subject to taxes. There's a pretty huge difference (in incentives, in outcome, in tax/subsidy burden) between paying for something if you use it and paying for something regardless.

In the case of the technologies mentioned, government made the explicit choice to publicly fund those things through taxes, with the assumption that the value to the economy from unfettered usage would be higher than the cost. That doesn't mean that taxes are equivalent to pay-per-use though.

<comment><USER16> > in the US even those who don't use GPS technology are subject to taxes

There is no way you don't benefit from the GPS system if you are a US Citizen. It's an infrastructure technology that means your roads are safer, your package delivery cheaper, your maps more accurate, your emergency services more effective; and a million other subtle benefits that you would have difficulty quantifying.

As such it makes sense to fund it from general treasury; and to charge taxes on everyone in proportion to the benefit they get from society ( represented as income, including capital gains ). Since public infrastructure benefits the whole of society.

That's the nature of public infrastructure. And the decadent libertarian fantasy that someone should be able to opt out of taxes because of their rugged individualism is just that; a fantasy. There is no such thing as individual success in an advanced technological society and anyone who tells you there is is a parasite on that society.

<comment><USER14> > There is no way you don't benefit from the GPS system if you are a US > Citizen.It's an infrastructure technology that means your roads are safer, > your package delivery cheaper, your maps more accurate, your emergency > services more effective; and a million other subtle benefits that you would > have difficulty quantifying.

> As such it makes sense to fund it from general treasury; and to charge taxes > on everyone in proportion to the benefit they get from society ( represented > as income, including capital gains ). Since public infrastructure benefits > the whole of society.

Yea, duh. If you actually read my comment, there's no disagreement with this: in fact I tend to be more inclined to public funding of things like GPS and transit than most people (whether on HN or in the population at large). I was disagreeing with the contention that paying for something by taxes is the same as charging for it. The way the incentives and the burden falls is NOT the same for those two approaches. You're talking about whether or not this SHOULD be done: an entirely different discussion from the one being had on this subthread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some good observations but I'm not convinced that the focus on shareholder value is to blame otherwise we'd see non-public companies systematically outperform public ones over the medium and long term.

Also, there isn't much evidence that companies with a focus on short term financial results don't engage in long-term strategic planning. The two basically exist side-by-side.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh, please… No, not that what he says is entirely incorrect, but with reasoning like that we could go basically anywhere. Aplle, Google, my grandma — they all benefit from an accumulation of knowledge created by Euclid and Pythagoras, so why we all don't pay taxes to Greece? Seems unfair.

</comment><comment><USER19> google kills the next google simply: buy startup, shut it down. Repeat

</comment><comment><USER20> He lost me at "America's is falling behind other countries when it comes to innovation and technology". What are you talking about? Cheers from Silicon Valley :)

<comment><USER21> Where we have the most advanced ways to hook up with strangers, order dry cleaning, post anonymous secrets, and hail a non-regulated taxi cab.

And don't forget about our innovative ways of collecting user data for advertisers!

We're number 1! U-S-A, U-S-A

<comment><USER14> Oh please, pick up a newspaper sometimes instead of getting all your news from TechCrunch. If you honestly think that the extent of cutting-edge work going on in SV is social apps, that's just because you spend your time reading about venture funding rounds instead of the actual interesting R&D going on.

<comment><USER22> What sorts of interesting R&D is going on?

I keep my ears to the ground for this sort of thing, but I don't hear much about it.

<comment><USER14> > I keep my ears to the ground for this sort of thing, but I don't hear much > about it.

I'm actually kind of shocked to hear this question. The person I was responding to originally is probably just going for the childishly rebellious "I'm gonna say something contrarian to seem like a deep thinker!!!!", but you don't seem to be saying anything of the sort.

I would be extremely surprised if you hadn't heard of any of this stuff; I think the problem is rather that your definition of what innovation is may be arbitrarily and inappropriately defined with respect to the topic of conversation.

This has been a good few years for AI and there have been some impressive advances recently in voice recognition, computer vision, language understanding, core machine learning research, etc. The AI labs at Google and Facebook alone are an important part of this ecosystem. Silicon Valley has also been producing advancements in diagnostic nanotechnology, space exploration and travel, feasible and long-range electric cars, self-driving cars, power generation and distribution systems, manufacturing efficiency, etc. There's a thriving biotechnology startup scene. Then you get down to less "sexy" (but still very important) innovation in things like datacenter design, distributed systems, software-defined networking, network protocols (like SPDY), etc. Even softer stuff like the work being done on the economics of distribution, or the efficient delivery of compute cycles is seeing a lot of advancement in the last several years, and a lot of it is centered around here.

I fully expect a response from some commenter who hasn't been able to grasp what this conversation is about to claim that a lot of that isn't "true" innovation at the kind of low level one finds in academia, but that's missing the point. It begs the question of whether companies in SV are innovative by defining innovation in for-profit companies as more or less impossible (which is, of course, nonsense). Government-funded academia is an excellent vehicle for fundamental research, just as corporations are good vehicles for the next step in the chain (and occasionally fundamental research). The funny thing is that even if you move the goalposts by restricting yourself to academic advancements, both Stanford and Berkeley are world-class research universities and parts of the SV ecosystem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Hack through Power source - <AUTHOR>

I guess this is a pretty high level electronics question.  Is it possible to hack a computer through the power source? <comment><USER2> In the sense of "take control", not really.

In the sense of "monitor various actions/activities", then yes (at least in theory).

There have been some studies and experiments where you can determine what a CPU is doing or executing by monitoring very finite changes in the current draw of the power supply. To do this with any accuracy, you would have to install a rather precise power monitoring device on the circuit powering the PC itself, and most likely on the power cord going directly to the PC (so as not to pick up electrical data from other devices on the same circuit).

You would also more than likely need brief physical access to the PC itself, so that you could calibrate to various CPU states.

So, it is somewhat possible, but not in any practical application.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's possible (but extremely improbable). By which I mean, if anyone has the capabilities to do that, they're just as likely to extract whatever information they need from your brain, or rewrite your mind to make you want to give it to them.

Or realize that they have better uses for their time.

</comment><comment><USER4> Huh?

Well, if you have control over the power, you could probably launch some pretty effective DoS attacks.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ordinary networking attacks could work if the system in question uses EOP (ethernet over power).</comment>


OpenSSL rsaz_512_sqr overflow bug on x86_64 (CVE-2019-1551) - <AUTHOR> https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20191206.txt <comment><USER2> > _OpenSSL versions 1.1.1 and 1.0.2 are affected by this issue. However due to > the low severity of this issue we are not creating new releases at this > time. The 1.1.1 mitigation for this issue can be found in commit 419102400. > The 1.0.2 mitigation for this issue can be found in commit f1c5eea8a._

</comment><comment><USER3> Fuzzing seems to be catching a huge number of vulns these days.</comment>


Show HN: Purrli, an online cat purr generator - <AUTHOR> https://purrli.com/play.php <comment><USER2> Ha, great! And you can combine it easily with those other background noise generators to get, e.g. a purring cat in a coffee shop or in a restaurant.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron [http://gunshowcomic.com/comics/20120227-robotthatscreams.png](http://gunshowcomic.com/comics/20120227-robotthatscreams.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice one. My cat never purrs so this is a suitable substitute.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that it's normal for cats to not purr...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't seem to work well on iOS.

<comment><AUTHOR> iOS requires a touch on the screen to start playing a sound source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a great, dubious idea. Nice job!

</comment><comment><USER7> I appreciate the inclusion of random meowing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Well done! Sounds very realistic.

</comment><comment><USER9> can you do another for dog lovers ?

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice!</comment>


8 facts that explain Google's complex situation with Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/3000670/mobile-wireless/why-google-is-committed-to-chrome-os.html <comment><AUTHOR> This explainer puts Android and the Chrome OS into perspective and shows why these Linux derivatives will both come together and remain separate.</comment>


More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03371-0 <comment><USER2> When I was in grad school our department had a meeting every morning where we could get together to discuss the latest papers which we called "Morning Coffee" (or also Astro Coffee). These discussions were pretty fruitful and regularly would inspire new papers.

After writing a new paper based on one of these discussions one of the professors decided to commemorate the contribution of Morning Coffee to the paper and added "M. Coffee" as an author. At some point word got out that M. Coffee was not a real person. From what I understand the journal got _very_ upset. Nevertheless, the original author list still stands:

[https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ApJ...556L..59P/abstra...](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ApJ...556L..59P/abstract)

<comment><USER3> To be fair, being ground up and having boiling water poured on you _isn 't_ completely unlike grad school.

<comment><USER4> Having worked on farms, with mechanics, and with grad students, I tend to believe grad students exaggerate their misery.

While not always true, most grad students I know tend to have relatively good careers, which they are comparing grad school to. They also tend to be, relatively speaking, born into good fortune with finances and healthy families. This is not universally true, of course, but more often the case than with my coworkers in aforementiones manual labor jobs.

<comment><USER5> Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro, you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."

They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to ~~programming~~ grad school.

from the classic "Programming Sucks" article.

<comment><USER4> My programming job was really hard, and a lot harder than grad school in econ. I personally think domain matters a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who thought it was a good idea to use academic paper authorship as a selection criteria for university!? There can't be enough high school kids writing academic papers for it to be that helpful, and certainly encourages this kind of cheating.

<comment><USER7> They don't have it as a selection criteria. Some context:

South Korean educational system recently had a crackdown on private academy(hakwon), and in their infinite wisdom, decided to ban every non-public educational experiences (including things like international olympiad awards) when applying for the university. Which means that the only thing you can submit in the application is SAT scores, some public education awards, and personal essays. Naturally it became the fight of who can write the most compelling personal essays for the university, and people started to let their children 'write' academic papers so that they can write stories to claim their interest and impetus on the application in hopes of impressing the judges.

So it is not a selection criteria but it helped rich & powerful people get an edge in the university application.

<comment><USER8> As a South Korean, I think most of the things described here are not exactly true, but I might be wrong. Could you provide any source?

AFAIK the history of Korean educational system is the history of Hakwon superiority in adapting to new rules. A hakwon crackdown was something the gov did in 80s and failed miserably.

Also there are now very diverse channels for univ entrance. I would think some channels still allow many of those banned criteria. Maybe they cannot be used in some prestigious public ones?

<comment><USER7> I am also a Korean and wrote this on top of my head, though I do have to admit that it has been some time since I've been a student involved in it.

I'm mostly talking about 학종 where you submit 자소서 and 생기부(학생부?), and that there's been a ban on writing non-public education related experience on the latter. As for the claim that it being part of the government crackdown an hakwon, [here]([https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20100407138500004](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20100407138500004)) is a source I found where they directly mention it. Ctrl+f for 사교육.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another great example of Goodhart's law.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER10> Since I'm reading Patrick O'Brian again, I can't help but be reminded of the practice of false muster - keeping well-connected boys on the books of warships as midshipmen fraudulently, so as to accrue more service time and seniority.

Nepotism and zero-sum games just go hand-in-hand.

<comment><USER11> I don't see the connection to zero-sum. You can have nepotism in non-zero-sum games too. That might describe the traditional practice of handing down a trade to the next generation, where the bakers and blacksmiths trained their kids to do it and they took over the business when the old man retired.

Maybe people only complain when the nepotism is in a zero-sum context, where someone else is losing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The practice was probably used to improve the children's chances of securing > a university place.

The fact the competition to get into a university is so hard you need to co- author a scientific paper for this is the problem. Education should be accessible for everybody.

<comment><USER13> It is. It's called the library.

<comment><USER12> A library won't issue you a diploma employers/states would recognize.

<comment> barry-cotter He said education, not certification. Education happens in your head, not in a database where you have x qualification or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So in one place of the world professors and higher ranking academics are taking credit for the work of those working under them, in another place academics are giving credit to children who did not even contribute, and in certain disciplines (physics for instance, afaik) it is commonplace to just name everyone working in same the place as you as co-authors, whether they contributed to that specific paper or not.

Let's not forget about ludicrous amounts of bullshit-papers being produced to inflate paper counts and citations.

Whoever thinks paper counts and authorship are good metrics for anything at this point? In fact I believe they are more likely to mislead than be useful.

</comment><comment><USER15> Years ago, I implemented a piecewise-linear approximation algorithm based on this [1] paper. I was amused that the primary author was a high schooler, the secondary working at Infineon, both in Torrance, CA. The math isn't beyond high school level, so I figured it was some AP level exercise between the parent and the child at writing/publishing a paper.

Now I have doubts :)

[1] [http://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2008/WCECS2008_pp1191-...](http://www.iaeng.org/publication/WCECS2008/WCECS2008_pp1191-1194.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess this is just another flavor of claiming one's kid was a top rower for their high school crew team. But I guess many parents will use whatever means then can ( legal or illegal ) to give their children a leg up.

Also, I find it interesting that many schools ( in the US ) will do away with SAT scores because it is unfair to disadvantaged students. But they will not get rid of their legacy admissions program which is the most biased criteria against disadvantaged students. The irony here is that the SAT score was used to counter bias against disadvantaged students in the first place. It was viewed as the only "objective" part of the admissions process which could not be "bought".

My solution to end unfairness in college admissions process is a points based lottery. Each college publicly sets out a points system for GPA, extracurricular activity, SAT, athletics, legacy, etc that they will apply to an applicant and derive a score. Each college publicly sets a "mininum/cutoff" score. Every applicant with a score above the cutoff will enter an independently monitored lottery. The lottery will select the freshman class out of the pool of candidates.

<comment><USER17> The lottery system is super injust for those that put the work but aren't admitted. A lot of countries in the developed world don't have the admission problem because they fund education properly.

<comment><USER18> Generally this problem is solved by having lottery buckets, with higher average grades giving access to a separate bucket (with more spots relative to the applicants). This gives people who "put the work" a higher chance to be admitted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Similar things occurs for Patent Applications all the time in large corporations, names of managers is usually present along with the names of actual inventors.

<comment><USER20> Just because someone is a manager doesn't mean that they can't make a meaningful contribution to an invention. In my experience, the patentable ideas can come from anywhere in an organization (and I've seen it from individual contributor level up to VPs)... but the individual contributor is always left figuring out the lower-level details of how to get this idea into production.

<comment><USER18> Ideas are easy, the execution is what's hard. If someone casually thought of a cold fusion reactor while taking a leak in the morning we would not put them on a patent for cold fusion reactors either. Where the ideas come from is immaterial, who fleshes them out is not.

<comment><USER20> I'm not trying to belittle the contributions of individual contributors (indeed, I'm an IC-level engineer who has worked out the details on many products that have been patented). The detail work is totally necessary to get a working product into the market.

But that doesn't mean that the detail work is always what is claimed in the patent. Sure, sometimes it's a smaller detail-level aspect of a product that is patented; but other times it's the higher-level system architecture that is new--so that's what gets patented. It all comes down to what is novel about the new product, and what is valuable enough that a company wants to pay for IP protections.

In my experience, engineering managers are almost always engineers themselves, and tend to still enjoy contributing to some engineering work when given the chance. Also, sometimes someone is given a "manager" or "director" title as a promotion simply because they don't have a well-developed technical track for advancement. "Principal" or "fellow" engineer may be a more fitting title for their role, but it's not what you'll see on their LinkedIn page. The point is, just because someone has a title that suggests they're only spending their day managing people, some can definitely contribute to patentable ideas enough that they should be listed as an inventor. As mentioned in another comment, the patent could potentially be invalidated if their contributions rose to the level of an inventor but they weren't listed on the patent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> An interesting spin-off I've witnessed here in the United States is putting a younger sibling's name on papers and research reports submitted to things like the Intel STS and the Siemens Competition. It's hard to show that there's evidence of unequal contribution here.

</comment><comment><USER22> Anecdotally, prevalent amongst India's elite too.

</comment><comment><USER23> This phenomenon cannot be avoided as long as papers can help kids go to universities.

Maybe we can prevent parents from buying papers for their kids (this can be charged based on evidence more easily). But when the parents themselves are professors, it is just difficult to determine whether the credits are assigned appropriately.

Skills that can be accessed and learnt by the majority should be the criteria for university admission.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've heard of this happening in the US as well.

<comment><USER25> I've _seen_ this happen in the US among my peers when I was in high school (mid 2000's). Parents with roles in medical / biomed research were by far the most prevalent offenders.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, similar with the (formerly Intel) Regeneron Science Talent Search. Every kid happens to have a parent who's an eminent researcher of some kind.

<comment> barry-cotter That would be more or less the expected outcome if there was no cheating of any kind going on. If you grow up in a household where the dinner table conversation is about carpentry you'll pick up a lot of background knowledge by osmosis and if you show the slightest actual interest most parents are very happy to share what they're interested in with their child. Very few people become researchers without being comparatively obsessed with their field. Having family in a lab also means your path to working there is a lot easier because if you screw something up it'll reflect badly on whoever brought you in.

I'm sure there are tons of fraudulent papers "written" by teenagers but they're certainly not all fraudulent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Vivian Darkbloom is not a exactly a coauthor, but what an exquisitely chosen name for a character. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita)

</comment><comment><USER27> If I had my way, I'd have each applicant stripped, x-rayed, confined to an acoustically isolated faraday cage, and sit down for an examination generated and marked by an AI system.

I've seen too many enabled people trying to game the system.

<comment><USER28> That still won't help and might make things worse.

By the time a rich student reaches college selection, he has a number of structural advantages over a poor student.

Let's take the SAT exam in the US, for example. Many poor students take the SAT effectively cold--the idea that you can prepare for that test and that paying money to prep is a good idea are simply not in scope. Whereas, a rich student is simply going to assume that obviously you prep for a test like the SAT and of course you spend money to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> When I first saw the headline, I thought this was the common (but reprehensible) pattern where teachers were taking credit for their student's ideas.

But this is a bit stranger.

</comment><comment><USER30> At the same time, a dirty trick and pure genius!

<comment><USER31> I'd call it fraud, not genius.

<comment><USER30> Sure it's a fraud, but like something from a comedy movie. Most of the time frauds are incredibly boring and time-consuming to explain. Especially financial frauds are often hidden behind layers upon layers of obfuscation. Now THAT'S what I call planning ahead!

EDIT: ...and I'll gladly pay the karma cost for that reply!

<comment><USER31> Your idea of genius seems to be simplicity. I consider genius the ability to understand things others cannot. I think the question is, how long did the researchers get away with this fraudulent act compared to bankers who created the last recession? The ability to hide something for longer from more eyes is a greater sign of genius than coming up with a trick nobody bothered to verify.

And of course, the really fucked up part is what the bankers did was legal.

I feel like you're ascribing genius to the equivalent of a parlor trick.

<comment><USER30> I don't remember the exact quote, but simple people can understand when taught, smarter can learn on their own, smarter still can teach, and a genius can simplify. Simple things are often hard to make and come from deep understanding of the system. See also: "If you can't explain something to a 6-year old, you don't really understand it."

You have a point with more eyes, but we still paint a camouflage on a tank, right?

I think what bankers do is equivalent to piling layers of duct tape/javascript. It takes a lot of time to go through it and see what it actually means.

Here, Internal Revenue Service openly admits auditing rich taxpayers is too hard. [https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just- ea...](https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and- cheaper-to-audit-the-poor) To audit them, you have to spend more time and use more senior people, which means more money. The US institution can't muster the same amount of money and specialists as rich people can. And corporations have a monetary incentive to hire people to do 'tax optimization'.

<comment><USER31> > I think what bankers do is equivalent to piling layers of duct > tape/javascript. It takes a lot of time to go through it and see what it > actually means.

So basically it's not smart because it's work, and anyone that can find a lazy shortcut is a genius?

Ultimately what matters is whether or not it worked. The bankers got rich and faced no jail time, despite being under scrutiny by investors, regulators, and occasionally the public. The academics committed fraud and hopefully have their careers and reputations permanently blemished as a result, not to mention undoing all of the publications they need redacted directly as a result of the act you are calling "genius."

I really think what you call genius I call laziness, and your celebration of it represents a lot of what I think is wrong with the world today.

<comment><USER30> And I think I'm amused by the trick. I admire its simplicity and far- sightedness, that's all. I mean, people have been adding their cats as co- authors just because a paper couldn't have a single author.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> See also: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard)

I don't see anything wrong with this if the parents want to share credit with their kids. In any case, there are many cases where authorship is shared with people who didn't contribute, if universities are taking it at face value that's on them. Also, who is to say that the kids weren't onvolved in some way, maybe just as a person to bounce ideas off of.

<comment><USER33> If the kids made serious contributions, that is one thing. However, that really doesn't seem to be the case here.

Nepotism is majorly harmful. If their kids go into academia, they already have a huge leg up from having academic parents. Let alone if they already have a strong publishing record which they did not merit. You really harm those who don't come from that background, which of course, is how class divide can become a chasm.

<comment><USER34> Yes, but I actually think primary authors in title actually being grant proposal writers and middle managers is far more destructive to academia itself.

I think it is the norm that a lot of people get primary credit on papers for doing what managers in every field do every day, and academia is busy obscuring their own processes as a result.

<comment><USER35> > Yes, but

One fraud doesn't justify the other.

<comment><USER34> I'm not really looking to justify it. I think fish rots from the head and it's time to either buckle down to real rules for credit or stop doing multi-author papers in this fashion.

Hollywood has a credit format.. programmers have a change by change attribution system.

A serious limit to academic reform is that an institution that fixes its own rules will have trouble competing for people in many positions by having to be completely honest about the roles.

<comment><USER35> IOW, if they fail to tolerate fraud they'll have a smaller pool of candidates because unethical people won't be interested.

This is the sort of thing that's only a problem when your own prerogatives are misguided. Must academe be merely another institution that must pursue growth at all costs? If so then is the pedestal it presumes to occupy legitimate?

<comment><USER34> I think they have very few candidates because of the ethical issues, for example nearly no one in the US wants to complete an upper degree because they don't want to be exploited.

To put it differently, poor ethics is possibly a necessity to outcompete other institutions in what should be a net zero game. Instead the game is negative, we view academia overall as worse than n years ago because of the progressively lower ethics, higher administration costs and staff to compete for the same grants, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm not sure this is always bad, as long is it's obvious it's not serious or for the purpose of fraud, or if the individual cited actually contributed in some way. Here's a researcher's dog, whose name was Galadriel Mirkwood, cited as a co-author:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Matzinger#Dog_co- author_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Matzinger#Dog_co- author_controversy)

Who is to say the dog did not contribute to the author's paper and research in some way she found significant? Likewise with the children. There's tons of papers where people are cited for making the most minor contribution, like just suggesting something that reminded the researcher of something else and that's considered a legitimate practice to acknowledge their inspirational or otherwise supportive input. And yeah kids can make useful suggestions into their parents research and should be allowed to be acknowledged when that is the case.

The dog lady was banned from publication until the angry editor died! Overkill IMO as I see no fraud there. Fortunately when she was up for tenure she got it, with the tenure committee finding regarding the dog issue that the coauthorship was legitimate because "It was a real dog [a frequent lab visitor] and they said it had done no less research than some other coauthors had."

In the Korean case the article notes that after an 2018 audit of 82 papers with child coauthors they were able to determine that about half the children named had participated in the research. So at least that half were legitimately credited. The article then notes that currently 549 papers with child authorship have been reviewed, and only 24 were found to have unjustified authorship. Only 24 of 549 papers with child authors! That's only 4% of papers with child authors being unjustified. What percentage of papers without child authors give unjustified credit? Is it more than 4%? Perhaps! And certainly so for the field of ghostcredited pharmaceutical papers, a known huge problem. It's possible that papers with child authors are even less likely to have unjustified authorship than papers in general.

<comment><USER37> I do think it's misleading to acknowledge the sorts of contributions children and dogs might make with co authorship. I do agree that often small contributions are rewarded with authorship, but really I think these are best credited in the acknowledgment section of the paper. Otherwise there is not a good way to distinguish between a substantial contribution and an ethereal one.

<comment><USER38> I should have put my grad advisor in the acknowledgements section of my 3 papers instead of as an author...

<comment><USER39> The difference being that it's often expected to put your advisor as a co- author even if their contribution was anecdotal while it's never expected to put your kids/pets as co-authors unless maybe there was a very significant contribution from their part.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MATC's Free 'Advanced iOS Development' Course on iTunesU - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewCourse?id=497193807&s=143441&ls=1

<comment><AUTHOR> The instructor is Brad Larson, creator of 'Pi Cubed[1]' and 'Molecules[1]'. The course notes are available at [3] (VoodooPad) and [4] (HTML). If you're already familiar with iOS development and want to learn more advanced stuff, don't miss this class. Brad Larson is _really_ great...

[1] <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pi-cubed/id311433261?mt=8>

[2] <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/molecules/id284943090?mt=8>

[3] [http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/sites/default/files/Advanc...](http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/sites/default/files/AdvancediPhoneApps.zip)

[4] [http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/sites/default/files/Spring...](http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/sites/default/files/Spring2010CourseNotes/index.html)</comment>


AWS JS SDK - The Canonical Angular Guide - <AUTHOR> http://www.ng-newsletter.com/posts/aws-js-sdk.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for taking the time to write it!

</comment><comment><USER3> wow, like 10 articles in one

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

</comment><comment><USER5> great article</comment>


Apply HN: Low-friction social organization between friends - <AUTHOR> Imagine yourself watching the clock at the end of a long Thursday in the office trenches. Happy hour is calling your name but nobody in the office is up for going out today. What do you do?
People have a very real, fundamental need to socialize with other people on a regular basis. Can this need in fast-paced, ever-busier urban lifestyles be served by technology in a more convenient way?
What if there was an app on your phone that would let you know, within minutes, if any of your friends were nearby and interested in hanging out?
We would like to propose a platform which follows the "low-friction" trend (proven by the likes of Snapchat and Tinder) and enables rapid, last-minute, high-quality social organization.
How it works: When you're bored, you simply open the app and hit the giant red button (it might say something like "Who's up for hanging out?"). A notification is sent to all of your friends with whom you are connected in the app and who are within a certain radius (say, 2kms).
Each friend can choose to declare themselves "in" or "busy" (or just ignore the notification). As friends elect to be up for hanging out, everyone is added to a group chat to coordinate. Even friends who are not directly connected will be able to communicate at this point.
It's the quickest, easiest way to meet up with your friends on short-notice.
Revenue:
Our primary revenue source is expected to be modern, context-aware advertising. Knowing that a group of friends in a particular area want to socialize, it is a logical pairing that we could recommend places to meet up. This offers high-value advertising opportunities for establishments in the area of the users.
Does it have a name? Not yet. Suggestions welcome.
Who are we? A couple Canadians with a passion for building software and solving problems. We each have years of experience building software for both enterprise and consumer applications. <comment><USER2> Try using "Down to Lunch" for a week. It hit my campus very hard, and a lot of people actually used it (very close to hitting a critical mass in my opinion). But after some time, the app sucked. Here's why: I have different "tiers" of friends-- a core group I can eat with every day like family, acquaintance who I can eat with a few times a month, and the people I pretend to like & reluctantly get dinner with when asked. Ultimately it was this last group that made me delete the app. I'd rather just spend the time and text everyone I care about because 1) I avoid that awkward last group and 2) it shows the other two groups I care about them. And to go on a tangent, this is actually really important to keep up a relationship with acquaintances. And, in practice, I already have group chats with my core friends.

I'm not saying this is a bad idea, but I'd highly recommend you use DownToLunch and consider my feedback. Push-to-Hangout apps sound convienent but they don't add much value in practice. In fact, DTL's constant notifications were so bothersome I deleted the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Out of curiosity, was this primarily a result of just being connected with too many people in DTL? Do you think you may have had a better experience if you weren't connected to that last group at all?

Along those lines, since it "hit the campus hard," did you feel social pressure to add everyone instead of just people who you'd actually want to hang out with?

We predicted these problems to an extent and have been formulating some options to deal with them but were hoping we could hold off that part. Good to hear some feedback around the issue. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Does Anyone Actually Visit Stack Overflow's Home Page? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/03/09/anyone-actually-visit-stack-overflows-home-page/?cb=1 <comment><USER2> I do; it's my default SO page.</comment>


Why is collapsing a Hacker News comment so slow? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thewarpaint/eduardogarcia.xyz/blob/master/_posts/2019-06-05-hacker-news-comments.md <comment><USER2> I would use the <details> tag to solve this problem. Most people don't know this exists and I have no idea why. You would probably have to rewrite the html so it no longer uses tables but I don't really consider that to be a negative.

I would also question why we are saving collapsed comments. I feel like this is something that doesn't need to be persisted forever. If you want this behavior why not use local storage instead?

<comment><USER3> Persisting it on the server allows users to browse on multiple devices and keep their collapse settings in sync. This is useful in particular for long threads of comments, where collapsing can be used as a tool to keep track of progress through the thread by collapsing comments along the way.

<comment><USER2> Sure I get that this is possible given that you know this is what the code does but the bigger questions are who knows that you can do this, and who actually uses this feature?

Is this the expected behavior when you collapse or show a thread? I would suggest that it is not, as most minor interactions on a page are only stored locally.

How many people actually use this feature? In order get a benefit from this feature you have to be logged into hacker news on multiple devices, collapse a thread on one device, come back to that thread later on the second device and then continue reading from where you left off. Alternatively you can just scroll past the stuff you've already read, which has a minimal cost to the user.

The benefits seem negligible for the amount of developer time that likely went into making this feature.

<comment><USER4> > Sure I get that this is possible given that you know this is what the code > does but the bigger questions are who knows that you can do this, and who > actually uses this feature?

I do.

> In order get a benefit from this feature you have to be logged into hacker > news on multiple devices, collapse a thread on one device, come back to that > thread later on the second device and then continue reading from where you > left off.

I actually do exactly this. I read on my phone/laptop and later come back to the same thread (when more people have commented) on my home computer, usually at the end of the day. Having threads of conversation that you are not interested in already collapsed on multiple devices is very useful.

> Alternatively you can just scroll past the stuff you've already read, which > has a minimal cost to the user.

Scrolling and quickly scanning over multiple threads is more time consuming and becomes actually annoying if you just want to passively follow a thread. If you want to follow multiple threads under the same topic, you either have to remember unique words/usernames/dates of that thread or resort to scroll & scan method mentioned above. One is annoying, the other is simply non viable for N amount of threads.

Until there is a way to subscribe to a thread, this feature is _super_ helpful. Its actually just as good or better than a subscribe mechanism because atleast you can avoid getting multiple notifications for every single comment that get posted in the interesting thread. In the current scheme, all the irrelevant ones are already out of your way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fun fact

In a previous company we were building a session replay tool, and as you may know it is pretty complex to evaluate the impact of the single script on a page.

The only way we found to test the impact of the script was to execute it on a page with the most mutations on an event, and try to see how much the event was impacted.

The only place where we found a heavy use of mutations was the hackernews page that had more than 100 comments in a thread. And the first time we tested, we tripled the time to collapse the thread

</comment><comment><USER6> > There is also a GET request to > [https://news.ycombinator.com/collapse?id=1234567](https://news.ycombinator.com/collapse?id=1234567) > to save the state of the collapsed/expanded comment if the user is logged > in, but it's an async request so it doesn't have an impact.

Is this a correct place to use 'GET'?

<comment><USER7> _> Is this a correct place to use 'GET'?_

Not at all; GET requests are specified [0] to not cause any modifications to the resources (aside of meta-data like logging etc.). It should also be 100% safe for web spiders to issue any GET at any time [1], server overload aside.

I presume it's an artifact of earlier implementation -or just an idea- to have the collapse work without JavaScript. It would be doable with a normal A HREF with the current link format of [https://news.ycombinator.com/collapse?id=20336970](https://news.ycombinator.com/collapse?id=20336970)

\--

[0] "In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval." \- [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.1.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.1.1)

[1] in the early day of the internet, a friend lost most of his CRM's content because he had record deletes implemented as A HREF issuing GET requests. Having learned the lesson, he instead turned to JavaScript code issuing GETs...

<comment><USER8> I thought that the normal way to have this work without JavaScript would be to have a form tag with the submit button styled to look like the collapse button.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a budget moto and HN comments section is completely unusable on Chrome but perfectly smooth on Firefox. Haven't explored why.

On Chrome any comment section with more than about 100 comments grinds to a halt. If I try to type in a comment there's a three second delay waiting for every letter to appear.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't want to make the post even bigger and deal with other browsers but that's a good idea for a follow-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I cannot visually notice any delay. It seems instantaneous in my browser.

<comment><USER11> It's really only an issue on mobile when you're collapsing larger threads. Try collapsing the first comment in this thread, for example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14656945)

Not terrible, but there's a noticeable (maybe ~1 second on my phone) delay. My desktop is fast enough that it still feels instant.

<comment><USER12> One answer to this is to paginate long threads so there's a definite upper limit to the length and depth of the thread on any page.

<comment><USER10> this is a bit ridiculous... folding a few thousand lines of plain text should be fast no matter what. If it isn't, then there's something quite wrong.

<comment><USER12> I don't want to knock dang or whoever wrote it but when I look at HN's JS it looks to me like it was written more to resemble Lisp idioms and to look elegant than to be efficient. If so, that may just be someone working in their comfort zone, which is fine - it works, and if it were much more complex than it is, HN being HN would complain. It's not _bad_ , it just doesn't scale.

Also, I _suspect_ but don't _know_ that the table based layout makes showing and hiding elements a lot slower than it would be with, say, divs or an unordered list. If this is the case, it would probably only be exacerbated on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Or just use my Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey plugin which disables the Hackernews collapsible comments and introduces its own collapsible comments logic, which is much faster and has a variety of convenience features:

[http://mental-reverb.com/creations.php](http://mental- reverb.com/creations.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> The slow behaviour is mostly noticeable on mobile Chrome, but will have a look, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I suspect the pg answer to this question is "there's too much noise on some posts, and deterring interaction with posts of 300+ comments is a feature, not a bug.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am just now realizing that HN comments are collapsible...I wonder if anyone has ever looked at upvote/scroll behavior when the collapse button is used vs not? There are a ton of threads where the top comment is also a non-sequitur, but I know when that happens I frequently don't scroll past the hundreds of replies to see what the other first level comments are.

<comment><USER16> Okay. I'll bite. What is everyone talking about ?

I see an upvote triangle, a down vote [-] and nothing else. Is this a mobile only thing ? I can't see a way to collapse comments under Chrome or Safari on a desktop.

I am out of the loop what's the secret ?

<comment><AUTHOR> [-] is not a downvote button, but the collapsing one.

<comment><USER16> TIL ... after years on HN.

For anyone else out of the loop like me: Where's the downvote button? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17731487)

<comment><USER17> It's not available until you have a certain amount of karma. I think it's 500 or thereabouts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wrote a browser extension to collapse HN comments past the first depth and ended up just attaching their css classes and setting the sub-comment count myself. It was the fastest behavior I could find at the time for reasons I've since forgotten. I did try to use their existing js but it took forever to collapse the page.

Here's my collapse code if interested

[https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/blob/master/src/hacker- ne...](https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/blob/master/src/hacker- news/collapse-deep-comments.js)

</comment><comment><USER19> Refined hacker news, anyone? [https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker- news](https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news)

</comment><comment><USER20> A lot could be gained by simply storing the jQuery objects instead of doing the lookups multiple times per method. That's a lot of unnecessary dom traversal.

</comment><comment><USER21> That is really ugly code.

<comment><USER22> For me HN is a great reminder that done is better than perfect.

<comment><USER23> More like, "It kinda works, we don't give a crap".

<comment><USER24> That's not nice. I don't mind if you diss our code. But I do mind if you say we don't give a crap.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Dissing was not the intention of my post, if I can help in any way to improve HN let me know, would be more than glad to do so. Peace!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I dug into the collapsing code recently because I wanted to make a script that collapses HN threads by default. In other words, only the top-level comments would be shown at first. To me this makes more sense. If I am interested in continuing a thread, I can expand it. If I am not interested in continuing, I don't want to have to scroll past its children.

According to the comments here, maybe I would be better off implementing my own collapsing scheme.

</comment><comment><USER26> In the similar vein, feature request to sort by best/new :)

</comment><comment><USER27> It's fast on Safari mobile but very slow on Firefox desktop. Goes to show many things.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you don't mind me being negative here for a moment:

1\. It's not your website, why spend so much time and effort on dissecting the issue? If one did this for every webpage they visited it'd be a more than a full time job.

2\. Does it really look like Hacker News has had any serious development effort poured into it anytime recently? What incentive does YC have to put time and money into a forum that generates zero revenue?

3\. Do we really expect web browsing to be pleasant on a 3 year old budget smartphone with a Qualcomm 617?

The Moto G4 Plus is solidly in the bottom 25% of phones listed here:

[https://www.androidbenchmark.net/cpumark_chart.html](https://www.androidbenchmark.net/cpumark_chart.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Too much free time I guess. I'm a frontend guy, I find frontend stuff interesting.

2\. No. Probably none.

3\. Are you saying that you are willing to sacrifice the user experience of the bottom 25% of the users of a website?

<comment><USER29> 3) Most of the internet does this now. Even on my Q6600 PC, web sites grind to a halt. Whereas actual applications run just fine, even my 3d animation software. The overhead of the web has become unbearably lazy.</comment></comment></comment>


*nix shell prefix-restricted history search? - <AUTHOR> I've got a question about *nix shells. We all now that "cursor up" usually searches through the history. Do you know of any shell where I can type the beginning of a command, and then "cursor up" will search history only through the entries which start with what I have typed in already? <comment><USER2> You can set up your terminal to do this for you, see [https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/402398](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/402398)

</comment><comment><USER3> Bash can do that, with Ctrl-r. Press Ctrl-r, then type beginning of command, then press Ctrl-r repeatedly to go back through history.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to- use-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-bash- history-commands-and-expansions-on-a-linux-vps)

That page also deals with stuff like getting bash not to delete history with each session, so searching history can be more useful.</comment>


Xmarks not quite dead yet - <AUTHOR> http://www.xmarks.com/firefox/upgrade/3.9.2

<comment><USER2> Xmarks might not be quite dead yet but it probably will and should be.

They seem really attached to the idea that the data (or as they ponderously call it, 'the corpus') they have is very valuable. $9 million (with an impressive $2 mil/year burn rate) later they haven't figured out a way to extract any of that elusive value.

Browser bookmark sync is becoming a built-in feature in many popular browsers. Cross-browser support is an edge case that overlaps with the functionality of a number of web-based bookmarking services which generally offer a richer and more useful feature set than in-browser bookmarking.

In the period of about a week they've persuaded fewer than 30k of their users to _maybe_ pay them $10/yr. This is probably not all that surprising given the above and the fact they've already announced that should they run into difficulties, they'll simply give up. Short of Stockholm Syndrome, it's hard to imagine why anyone would choose to rely on their service going forward, even if someone is foolish enough to buy them out.

<comment><USER3> Problem is I stopped using Delicious years ago. I need my bookmarks in my browser. If I have to go to a website to find something, that's going to be Google or DDG.

A great solution would be for Delicious/Yahoo to buy Xmarks and integrate the two technologies - your bookmarks are stored on Delicious as they currently are, but synched to every supported browser you use.

<comment><USER2> _Problem is I stopped using Delicious years ago._

That sounds like a personal problem! More seriously, there are several extensions that provide in-browser interfaces and local storage for bookmarking services.

For the hardcore bookmarker, there are even a desktop apps - the ones I know of for OS X are Delibar and Pukka.

Personally, I don't find the browser integration extensions terribly useful. In the case of Firefox, the Bookmark Manager is probably slower than using just about any bookmarking service. It's certainly slower and clunkier than pinboard.

Firefox's Live Bookmarks can also be used to give you a local menu of bookmarks if you point it at the RSS feed of a bookmarking service. I think there are extensions that let you do that in Chrome and Safari as well.

<comment><USER4> I tend to use Delicious for "this is interesting" type stuff, especially stuff I want to share. I use my browser's bookmarks for stuff that is only important to me: work-related stuff, bill stuff, etc. Having cross-browser syncing for built-in bookmarks in addition to my Delicious bookmarks has been great. I'm hopefull they can live on and pledged my support.

Edit: There's also bookmarklets. These are not a good fit for Delicious. Having these synced as well is wonderful.

<comment><USER3> Thanks a good system, I might start doing that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> @PinboardIN _Wow, xmarks is dead because they couldn't "find a scalable business model" with two million users._

@xmarks _@PinboardIN hey if you've got some good ideas, we're all ears!_

@PinboardIN _@xmarks the model that has worked well for us is 'charge people money for a useful product or service'_

<http://twitter.com/PinboardIN/status/25734453850>

<comment><USER6> I love pinboard.in - I signed up when they were charging about $1 per signup and it works perfectly for me, the guy that runs it even setup a feature on my request and within about 24 hours of me requesting it! (tag specific user RSS feeds).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why didn't they explore the possibility of being acquired before just deciding to drop everything and shut down?

Or maybe this was their strategy for getting enough publicity to get more favorable acquisition offers...

<comment><USER8> My understanding is that they did try to sell Xmarks, but noone would want of them until this announcement and the subsequent massively suportive reaction from the community that revealed that people seem do infact be ready to pay for the service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't mean to be cynical, but... well played Xmarks, well played.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like to be able to use whatever browser I want, whenever I want, use the browser's native bookmarking, and have new bookmarks show up in whatever browser I run next (not to mention show up on iOS Safari).

Bookmark something in Chrome, leave my desk, check the bookmark on the iPad. Surf on the iPad on the train, bookmark some things, review those bookmarks in Firefox on the PC.

The built-in bookmark syncs don't do this, unless you're willing to only use a single browser on everything.

Xmarks does this. If you're a developer using multiple browsers, seems like Xmarks would be essential kit.

<comment><USER4> It is definitely essential. It is one of the first things I install when setting up a new computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Too late. I've already moved to Chrome sync.

<comment><USER11> Sorry for the snarky remark. I think Xmarks is an excellent service and I've been a happy user for 6 months+. But when you send out an email saying you're done, and I move my bookmarks over to another service...well.....

For the record, Xmarks today is better than Chrome sync. If things work out for them, I'll move back.

<comment><USER12> I agree that it's better, but I don't think it's so much better that I'd be willing to pay them even $1 a year for the improvement.

It would take them being insanely better, and offering something that I really need (the 'which bookmarks go where' feature is almost it) to entice me into paying for something I'm getting in-built onto my browser that is free.

It sucks for them, really, because even a year ago I'd have happily paid them the money. Cross-browser (Firefox -> Chrome sync) would have been worth it then, as would the segregation of 'personal' bookmarks from my work PC, but at this point, Chrome sync is in place, it's the only browser I use, and what's left just doesn't convince me to give them money.

I wish them well, but they should have been charging years ago really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: 27K people have pledged $10/year, they'll be viable with 100K

<comment><USER13> There is a big difference between anonymously pledging and cutting the check, but who knows.

<comment><USER14> Yes, the one time I tried that the rate was about 100:0.

It sure dented my confidence for a bit, I thought we had a deal there.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, they probably should have skipped the pledge step and gone straight to the pay me step. Capitalize the attention while you've got it, and use real money as your metric for staying open or not. If you don't get enough, refund the credit card charges and close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a very sad news...... I know I can find other services, but I added this to my mom and dad's computers, and they do have now all their bookmarks + passwords saved.

No, they don't even know that (Xmarks) is running, and I don't even know how to tell then "hey, you should pledge 10 € here..."

That made me think: how many moms and dads are using this service??

<comment><USER16> My mum, my dad, my sisters, my wife, my grandpa, my grandma, my aunt, my cousin...

Only one person's willing to pay in my family...me :-P

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is the problem with starting free that you get people used to the idea that this is not a service you pay for?

Freemium (get a small service for free, pay for a better one) is one thing but this is "this used to be free, now it's not". At the very least that jars.

I think the real issue is that the likes of ChromeSync make the longevity of this business model very questionable.

Joel Spolsky once described this sort of thing as grabbing nickels from the path of an on-coming steamroller - you're making money out of something that the product should or will inevitably do as a standard feature. Yes there is money there for a while but inevitably the steamroller is going to flatten you.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I would happily have paid $10/year, but as soon as they made the announcement I went looking for alternatives. I was surprised to find that if you're happy just syncing between Firefox installs, "Firefox Sync" does everything XMarks does, (Bookmarks, Passwords, Preferences, History and Tabs) but with a slicker interface. And it will also be built into Firefox 4 rather than having to install the addon...

I no longer see the point in paying XMarks for it...

<comment><USER18> There are fine solutions within any single browser. But that's just a non- starter for those who don't want to be restricted to one browser across all environments.

<comment> mike-cardwell I tend to stick to one browser across my various machines. If I wanted to start using Chrome I'd just export my bookmarks from Firefox, import them into Chrome and set up syncing with Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I read the announcement that they were closing, my first thought was "I would have paid money for this". I'm glad I may be able to if it means I'll get to keep using it.

<comment><USER19> When I read the initial announcement, and the subsequent comments, by first thought was "Oh, I didn't know Firefox provides this functionality now." I switched over immediately, and I don't plan to go back. Occasionally it's annoying to only have my bookmarks on one browser, but I typically only use one browser anyway. Most of the time I'm on Firefox, but when I need the corporate intranet I use IE. I have no desire to share all of my bookmarks with the intranet's ActiveX controls, so I'm happy to not be syncing them over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is a sad story. Xmarks is the best sync tool now but competition is coming from two big guys.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why don't they just charge for their iPhone app and use a fremium model? I'm blown away that they can't figure out a way to monetize 2 million users. If they don't get acquired I will be very shocked. I pledged that I am willing to pay, it's a bargain for how useful their service is. Also, why don't they just use kickstarter.com??

</comment><comment><USER22> It's just a flesh wound! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKhEw7nD9C4></comment>


Ask HN: How to authenticate HN users? - <AUTHOR> I am currently buulding a HN client app in React Native. Everything else is kind of done but I am thinking about adding login capabilities to the app.<p>Is there an official API for third party login from HN? Also could you point out some resources for the same ? <comment><USER2> The API is linked at the bottom of this page, [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

<comment><AUTHOR> That does not allow write access

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried just POSTing directly to the login page and saving the cookie for authentication?</comment>


Real-time VC funds and Startups tracking – Parsers VC - <AUTHOR> https://parsers.me/pars/funds/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello there,

I am glad to show you our real-time VC fund tracking product. We collect information about new startups in the venture capital portfolio, changes in the fund team, all fund news directly from websites, social media pages and other sources. Every day we analyze over 100,000 sources of information and provide our clients with real-time data.

Investors can watch how the activity of funds grows every day. Analytics by country, industry, startups and receive real-time information on new deals. You don't need to wait for weekly, monthly or quarterly reports. We provide a report daily, hourly.

Startups can find suitable venture capital funds in the region, choose active funds that continue to work in this difficult time. Then contact the venture fund by email, phone, website or social media page.

Companies can see startups that have just raised investments and offer the right services, products at the right time. These are the hottest leads.

Data aggregators can get full access to a database of venture capitalists, team members, startups, news and daily updates of new deals.

We collect 15% more VC deals than Crunchbase and 30% more than Pitchbook.

Comparative table of the number of startups in the portfolio of venture funds from providers Parsers VС, Crunchbase, Pitchbook - [https://parsers.me/comparison-of-vc-fund-aggregators- crunchb...](https://parsers.me/comparison-of-vc-fund-aggregators-crunchbase- pitchbook-with-parsers-vc/)</comment>


NASA: Incompetent or lying to us? - <AUTHOR> http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/os-mike-thomas-abolish-nasa-091610-20100915,0,5397903,full.column

<comment><USER2> First, every fault mentioned is probably true. NASA channeled money into the Ares program, which got scrapped. The "Jupiter" thing is a Mr Potatohead.

Second, I don't think you can blame NASA-the-agency for these problems. I think this is far more a case of the aerospace industry failing to retain any quantity of talented engineers for long. The "defense" side of the aerospace industry is the money-maker, so the companies funnel people into that side. That side is compartmented and paid by-the-hour, so there's been no reason to improve since about 1970. The US government has set things up so that nobody can have a career in engineering, so it doesn't attract smart kids any more.

I see this as an indictment of US education policies, and the "War on the Unexpected" that we've waged for several decades. I mean, what else do you call the weird beard patent and copyright system we've got other than a "war on the unexpected"?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, Ares was Michael Griffin's folly, using Shuttle technology but not the actual, well understood and qualified components (e.g. the SRBs are wider and the Ares I stack has 5 segments instead of the normal 4, all leading to extreme $$$ and safety problems).

Direct really looks good, assuming NASA hasn't yet destroyed enough of the existing Shuttle infrastructure. With one exception it uses _actual Shuttle components_ (the one issue is what do you use for a man-rated restartable in space rocket engine, which is a problem you need to solve anyway, I think) and it's modular so that you don't need both Ares I and the heavy lift version of it, a massive and needless duplication of work (which is entirely appropriate when you notice that post-Apollo NASA is more a public works project than anything else).

I think you can blame NASA-the-agency: they (Griffin) wanted to do this themselves (the higher levels of design and management of the program) and they simply weren't willing to listen to bad news or draw the obvious conclusions from a program that was slipping a year every year is was in development.

That said, Jerry Pournelle does agree with you, in that we, the US, have lost enough rocket science ability that we can't at the moment build a 600,000 lb [ forget the term, but it's a 100% reusable, quick turnaround single stage to orbit and back vehicle concept that he and others have been pushing for years ]. We'd have to rebuild the talent and teams, starting with smaller projects.</comment></comment>


A Tcpdump Tutorial and Primer - <AUTHOR> http://danielmiessler.com/study/tcpdump/ <comment><USER2> If you are planning on poking around with captures in Wireshark, keep in mind that there have been quite a lot of exploits for that app, particularly in the various protocol dissectors.

You should avoid working on captures with unknown content on an important machine.

<http://wiki.wireshark.org/Security>

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing I haven't been able to with tcpdump is just dump the data stream (payload) without any protocol bits. I presume it's possible with the right command line option incantation.

Instead, for this purpose, I have used tcpflow. This is useful for listening in on data streams, potentially piping a binary message stream to a decoder for human-readable output.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tip: sudo to root.

I am ignorant as dirt on this subject. Maybe this was obvious to everyone else. I read this at work and decided to log into one of our main web servers. I tried following the directions but I got the error:

tcpdump could not find a suitable device

However this:

which tcpdump

showed me that tcpdump was on the machine.

I look back at the examples in the article and saw he was root. Luckily, where I work, all of the engineers are given root access on most of the machines. So I could sudo to root. And then the examples worked.

Don't get tripped up like I did.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love Daniel's site - he's written a ton of great tutorials and overviews of useful tools.

tcpdump is definitely one of the "must know" tools.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is gold. Straight to my pinboard.

</comment><comment><USER7> ngrep, <http://ngrep.sourceforge.net></comment>


Google and Friends Add Prometheus to Kubernetes Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/05/09/google-friends-add-prometheus-kubernetes-platform/ <comment><USER2> Probably more accurately, Prometheus is now officially being incubated by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is a foundation for apps which are container-packaged, dynamically-managed, and microservices-oriented. Kubernetes is an engine to run cloud-native apps (itself conforming to the above spec). Prometheus is a platform for monitoring cloud-native apps, which also conforms to the spec.

Having watched CNCF and kubernetes very closely, I would not be surprised at all to see it adopt the governance of multiple platforms for a given service (logging, for example).

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome news! Prometheus does fill a void in the monitoring, time series, visualization niche. I found it more straightforward to setup and use than the alternatives such as statsd, collectived, influxdb (which seems to be headed the wrong way in monetizing) and grafana et al.

I always thought that Hashicorp would someday fill this void with their polished products and straightforward community and monetization strategies, especially through consul [0]. I hope it can polish the rough edges while being incubated by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

PS.: I've prepared an Ansible role for prometheus for those interested, albeit outdated [1]

[0]: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/consul- tool/g1OkeBgBMOo/B_m9Qo4uQsEJ)

[1]: [https://github.com/arturhoo/cameos/tree/master/roles/prometh...](https://github.com/arturhoo/cameos/tree/master/roles/prometheus)

<comment><USER4> FWIW regarding your grafana comment, Prometheus upstream plans to deprecate PromDash and move the ui to grafana as they do a better job.

From: [https://prometheus.io/docs/visualization/promdash/](https://prometheus.io/docs/visualization/promdash/)

        NOTE: We recommend Grafana for visualization of Prometheus metrics nowadays, as it has native Prometheus support and is widely adopted and powerful. There will be less focus on PromDash development in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So what does it signify that Prometheus is now under the CNCF? More development resources? I suppose it at least to some extent allays whatever fears there might have been that it will go "open core" in some ways, as e.g. InfluxDB recently..

That being said, what is the killer feature here? Looking at the docs, it seems nice, but collectd+influxdb+grafana seems to do the job for us at the moment..

<comment><USER6> InfluxDB _seems_ to be less stable, and also their monetization strategy might not appeal to some. I also appreciate the pull-style operation more and more (vs. the push-based operation of InfluxDB).

<comment><USER7> Could you tell what you find better about the pull-style operation mode? My experience with pull-based monitoring tools comes from Zabbix/Nagios and it wasn't very pleasant (still had to configure clients extensively while keeping everything organized in a central database -- which is hard if your servers are coming and going all the time).

We're currently using collectd+influxdb+grafana but it looks like Prometheus might be a better option in the future, since we plan to use Kubernetes more and more.

<comment><USER8> You're right in that pull only works well when your puller has a subscription to your service discovery system, so you don't need to manually configure targets when they change. Prometheus has SD plugins for major systems including Kubernetes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>