Obama to urge tech firms to share data with government - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31440978

<comment><USER2> What an egregiously terrible HN title.

The article's real title is _Obama to urge tech firms to share data with government_.

The word "order" occurs once in the story, referring to an EO the President is signing that (wait for it) _urges_ firms to share threat info with the government.

The US President has no authority to order firms to share data with the government. And so he hasn't.

<comment><USER3> We changed the title from "Obama 'to order' firms to share data" to the article title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Mark Zuckerberg and Marissa Mayer - chief executives of Facebook and Yahoo, respectively - and Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt all declined invitations."

Awesome. I wish the others would have done the same.

<comment><USER5> I hope the ones who are attending are there to tell Obama "No".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this not the modern version of a government monitoring library records, and people's reading history?

[http://www.globalissues.org/article/409/us-librarians-see- bi...](http://www.globalissues.org/article/409/us-librarians-see-big-brother- monitoring)

[http://www.ala.org/offices/oif/ifissues/fbiyourlibrary](http://www.ala.org/offices/oif/ifissues/fbiyourlibrary)

<comment><USER7> Well there are many who thought V for Vendetta was a bit over the top when it comes to a government wanting to monitor its citizens.

As for his speech he plans to give, I still see more face time to present a message he wants us to believer versus the actions they are doing behind the scenes and will continue to do forward. Its the typical "fake plausible dependability". The head of the organization says one thing while they know full well zealous members will do something else

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We've expanded the wording of such threats from _terrorism_ and _cyber warfare_ to now _cyber crime_. While I'm glad we're not weakening terminology for more serious threats, it's concerning that we're now asking for broad partnerships to go after (petty?) crime.

Just like how legislators should be wary of what constitutes a criminal offense, in light of Eric Garner's death and similar tragedies, we should be careful about what we're having the federal government monitor.

And in some respects, I think news of things like PRISM was hard for people to fathom, whereas this will be pretty clear to anyone: the government is watching. And people are already acclimated to this. Eventually the government will be able to argue in court that nothing on the Internet has a reasonable expectation of privacy and that all surveillance is constitutional.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's worth mentioning the history of 'coordination' or 'bringing into line' between the public sector and the private sector here, especially gleischaltung[0].

I'm not trying to make a direct comparison, but the executive branch's "calls for them to hand over more data" are fundamentally about totalitarian surveillance and control. That may not be the goal, stated or otherwise, but make no mistake: the effect is the same.

It's worth considering how we might feel if Russia or China were calling for something like this.

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

</comment><comment><USER10> If the government wants access to all our private information, and it would seem this is now becoming an inevitable outcome, perhaps the government should be required to make all the records they view public with references to the officials accessing them. After all, our government is "We The People", and to ensure it remains so, we the people need some safe guards against abuse of this power. If the government has to weigh the public availability of records and who's using them against the utility of records for security purposes, maybe that would be just enough to keep things on the up and up.

</comment><comment><USER11> _... David Cameron, who said in January that forms of communication that are resistant to surveillance measures should not be allowed._

No more whispering, folks!

</comment><comment><USER12> Most transparent administration ever?

<comment><USER13> You have to admit, what they're trying to do _is_ pretty transparent though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > His comments were interpreted as a direct attack on encrypted > communications, such as Apple's FaceTime and Microsoft's Skype, among > others.

Wow, BBC is so bad at this. Law enforcement can get any type of data they want from Skype already. They don't need anymore backdoors for that. Facetime, at least the audio part I think is end-to-end, and I don't think they can get access to it.

I'm amazed that after all the Snowden revelations there are news agencies (and because ones at that) that still consider Skype "secure".

<comment><USER15> Not knowing much about the current standard for "best secure voice communication", could you (or someone) shed a little light on the best Skype alternative for the average in-the-field news reporter? I'm not a reporter- I'm just curious.

<comment><USER16> Here is a list: [https://prism-break.org/en/all/#instant- messaging](https://prism-break.org/en/all/#instant-messaging)

<comment><USER17> Not comprehensive, but pretty good list. One thing I noticed that's missing from file storage: Mega.nz; they have free 50GB service with an interesting encryption scheme. And they should get better within the next year or so, I'd imagine.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fly js - <AUTHOR> http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/canvas_geometry_birds.html

<comment><USER2> Very sweet and well done. But seeing the Unreal engine running in (kind of) JavaScript raised the awesomeness bar quite a bit.</comment>


Ten Hours of Static Gets Five Copyright Notices - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/takedowns/ten-hours-static-gets-five-copyright-notices <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325)

</comment><comment><USER3> Since you have to attest in a legal document that you are the copyright holder in order to file a DMCA, then you are guilty of a crime (would it be perjury?) if you provide such an attestation under false pretenses.

If we don't punish these false claims when they happen, then they will continue.

An alternative approach based on civil disobedience would be in the form of a large group of individuals filing claims against large swaths of content (basically using the same broken rules of DMCA against the people who advocate them).

<comment><USER4> There's a bit of conflicting verbiage around this, but the 'copyright notices' that are mentioned in the linked article aren't actually DMCA takedown requests; they're Content ID matches.

The Content ID system is a private arrangement between Youtube and various rightsholders, and it allows them to assert control without the legal repercussions involved in DMCA claims.

The EFF has another article[0] which goes into more detail on the two systems, but I found that to be a bit confusing as well - it seems to conflate the two systems at times.

[0]: [https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to- yo...](https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-youtube- removals)

<comment><USER5> Somewhat tangential, I think it was also Cory Doctorow or Larry Lessig arguing that DRM is bad because it goes _beyond_ what the law requires (especially in relation to blocking all fair use).

This is similar in that Google goes beyond what the law requires to appease certain content providers. People should start boycotting YouTube in the same way they have started boycotting Facebook. We won't see a major shift overnight, but eventually enough of us will do it and Google, like most other companies, will only notice when it's too late to do anything about it.

Vote with your feet/clicks and plead with indie creators to switch to a different platform (such as D.tube, for instance, but any would work).

<comment><USER6> Youtube was in perpetual high-cost lawsuits until they implemented Content ID to media conglomerates' satisfaction.

The problem is the law.

<comment><USER7> At least in the US, they tended to win those lawsuits, thanks to the fact that online content hosts receive a liability safe harbor if they comply with the DMCA provisions around takedowns and terminating repeat infringers.

This was one of the good details of the DMCA, although other countries implementing the WIPO Internet Treaty may have done a less hoster-friendly job.

Unless the problem was lawsuits outside the US or they wanted to make the US lawsuit nuisance go away (both entirely possible!), I imagine they started playing nice with the media conglomerates so as to be able to offer Google Play Music, Movies, and Books, for all of which they need licenses.

Note for anyone who looks at my profile and sees Google among my former employers: I never worked for YouTube, Google Play, or Google legal and had no involvement with these decisions. I'm not speaking based on inside information or otherwise speaking for Google here.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, they won, but it still cost many millions ... I guess I mean the flaw is with the judicial system.

But you have a great point, the media conglomerates could with-hold cooperation which Google needed for Google Play, so Google needed to make them happy anyway ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the sake of argument, assume that we want to protect copyright on sites like YouTube. What is a good, fair solution here?

Given the scale, I think that automated solutions are required to have any reasonable enforcement. However automated (and non-automated) solutions will have false positives. Right now it seems like there is no cost to a false positive (claiming that a video is copyrighted when it is not), and so systems are happy to be aggressive with these notices. Likewise, the cost of a false negative (missing a copyrighted video) is high to the rights holder, as they are losing revenue.

Since these systems use machine learning, it seems that it's easy to add noise and fool them. I've seen videos that are flipped, slightly skewed, and have audio sped up or slowed down, presumably to get around the system. So I would assume that the system would have to be a bit aggressive to catch added noise.

I think it's ultimately an economics problem though. Since there's basically no cost to the person making the claim when there's a false positive, there's less incentive to avoid false positives. However, it seems hard to charge fees here - if you're charging people to take down content that they hold the rights to, that's basically extortion.

Any thoughts on what could be done to improve it? I think long term, we have to evolve our understanding of copyright and licensing, but given the current regime, is there even a solution?

<comment><USER9> Why should it be YouTube's responsibility to enforce copyright? Shouldn't the beneficiaries of copyright be the ones to pay for its enforcement? If that were the case we might see many fewer claims, simply because it's not worth the time/effort.

This doesn't directly address false positives, or the problem of fair use (which seems to be a real issue on YouTube), but it could be a start.

<comment><USER10> Without YouTube's system, you'd have automatic takedowns based on nothing but keywords in the title: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/warner- admits-it...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/warner-admits-it- issues-takedowns-for-files-it-hasnt-looked-at/)

There's no cost when you have bots sending emails. You'd have to fix the law first.

<comment> cup-of-tea But as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion there are legal repercussions for filing an incorrect DMCA takedown request. The problem is Youtube have their own version of the law and just automatically believe the claimant.

<comment><USER10> _there are legal repercussions for filing an incorrect DMCA takedown request_

Can you find a single entity that has ever been hit with these "legal repercussions"?

<comment><USER11> The responses to you will mostly be people who haven't read the details of the Diebold case and assume that it set a precedent for false claims of infringement; it didn't, and it's still basically impossible to get someone penalized for that.

The issue, as other commenters noted, is that the only claim made under penalty of perjury is that you are the copyright holder, or are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder, of a copyrighted work.

The claim that someone has infringed your rights (or the copyright holder's rights) is _not_ made under penalty of perjury. The only way to get someone penalized for it is, essentially, to get them to admit in court "Yeah, I knew it wasn't infringing, but I sent a notice anyway out of malice". Which is, well, pretty much what happened in the Diebold case. Other issuers of mass automated takedown notices are dumb, but not quite _that_ dumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Didn't people discover sound of rain is copyrighted as well?

Along with bird song, <s>children smiles, and joy?</s>

<comment><USER13> [http://wiki.gettyimages.com/smiley-face/](http://wiki.gettyimages.com/smiley- face/)

I'm just sayin'...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you watch static long enough, then at some point you will be able to read the collected works of Shakespeare.

So this probably also holds for copyrighted works.

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

</comment><comment><USER15> There have been similar experiments & results posted before. Seems like a consistent issue with the platform: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075325)

</comment><comment><USER16> Surprised Google don't detect white noise, and stop if being copyrighted, if for no other reason than the bad publicity this generates.

<comment><USER17> From their perspective, the purpose of the platform is not to host white noise. I could see them seeing white noise itself as such an extreme corner case as to be not defendable from their content identification. One could imagine a ddos of white noise in an attempt to overwhelm their system. (Devils advocate.)

<comment><USER18> They let people upload video/audio, I'm sure their definition of corner case[0] is very narrow and I'm not sure this would qualify. It's really no different than computer generated music.

[0] I don't think corner case is appropriate terminology in this discussion. I think it should be edge case. But even still, I don't think Google would think this is an edge case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My favorite recent copyright story is the Happy Birthday song.

It may be common knowledge by now, but Warner copyrighted this song from the 1800s and profited for years until someone challenged it in court.

I've been waiting for someone to post one of those "this was way more complicated than that and this is why it wasn't as outrageous as people make it seem", but nothing yet.

This in a addition to the Micky Mouse laws really makes the system feel flawed, even though it has its clear benefits.

[https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy- birthda...](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthday- copyright-suit-settled-n477671)

</comment><comment><USER20> Bogus claims are an ongoing issue and this same basic article (about static videos in particular!) has been posted before -- which is not to say it shouldn't be posted, but rather that Youtube hasn't fixed this known, albeit difficult, problem. Is it considered WONTFIX?

It's one of the reasons that makes me self-host videos, which is actually very easy to do with HTML5. Check the examples section here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video)

It's just a few lines of HTML and you're done. Try it with a test video -- it's surprisingly easy.

<comment><USER18> What if one of your videos goes viral? Would that not get very expensive?

<comment><USER20> The videos are only of interest to family and friends.

That said, I've seen a few stats of top-page HN links generating 10,000 or more unexpected visitors, and a 1TB cap with a 20MB video would easily handle that.

But if that weren't the case, if I were making professional videos intended for a mass audience, then I would just add more servers with appropriate bandwidth. Scaling for your own content is vastly different and easier than scaling for _everyone 's_ a la Youtube or imgur.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This seems to be one of the less surprising false-positives of Youtube's copyright detection algorithm. You match millions of hours of copyrighted material vs. noise, seems like you have a multiple testing problem and at least one thing will inadvertently match somewhere in the 10 hours noise video

Wonder what Youtube can do here, except speed up dispute resolution. With datasets of their size, false-positives seem inevitable.

Do copyright-owners just set the system to auto-monetization or -takedown? If so, maybe Youtube should change their policy to require more manual action from copyright owners.

</comment><comment><USER18> So original creator posts videos of static. Then another company says, wait, we have a copyright on that and so they start getting revenue from the videos. The original creator now looses revenue while they go through a process to counter the notice.

This is fair, how?

Why should the other party automatically start getting revenue? Why can't that money go into escrow and whichever party prevails gets that money?

The problem is Google has no incentive to make this better.

</comment><comment><USER22> Do the authors mean that the claimant had uploaded their static noise video before 2015? Or were the videos matched after the fact?

<comment> shaki-dora It doesn't matter. You can't copyright white noise. Unless you're John Cage, or possibly Donald Trump.

<comment><USER23> I can't see any reason that a work comprising primarily of white noise couldn't be copyrighted.

What you can't do is stop others copying your idea (as long as they don't copy your implementation), nor stop others implementing the same thing who don't copy you.

Now, a work needs in most jurisdictions to be distinctive, but IMO the length of the work would _inter alia_ be enough to make it distinctive, or perhaps use of a specially designed noise generator. But when you release "10 hours of noise" and I copy your _idea_ and make "9 hours of noise" there will be no tort there.

<comment><USER10> In the US, the threshold of originality seems to be a bit higher than that. E.g. this logo was denied copyright registration: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/medi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/media/File:Best_Western_logo.svg)

Refusal letter: [https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.inf...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.info/hosted_resources/CopyrightAppeals/2006/Best%20Western%20Logo.pdf)

<comment><USER23> It's not that simple though, Cage's piece -- Silence 4'44" \-- I don't think was tested, but taken as a whole I'd grant it copyright. It was art that caused reflection on the nature of a "work", it was designed to be "played" by a musician with any instrument, it was 273s long presumably to reflect on whether silence could ever be absolute. I suspect it was also intended to encourage the listener to observe ambient sounds as if they had meaning. That makes it distinct as a performance piece.

That logo is, within the field of logos, indistinct, boring if you will, if you sat down 100 logo designers I bet you'd get a few that look very like it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it but having copyright but for a logo RTM is probably a stronger right anyway.

In short I don't think just being white noise is sufficient, but I don't think it excluded a piece of itself.

<comment><USER24> Importantly, if I sit down at a piano for a few minutes, stare at the keys, and don't play, I have _not_ performed Cage's work. There is a subtle nuance here.

<comment><USER25> Exactly, you have only performed Cage's work if you set out with the intent to play Cage's work. This obviously makes it impossible to determine if a particular performance of silence is a performance of Cage's work without reading someone's mind, but that same issue of determining intent comes up a lot in legal matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I sleep with a powered air filter running (HEPA and charcoal) every night and its a perfect noise (maybe not exactly white but minor variance) to sleep by. I should upload a recording and see if anything complains.

<comment><USER10> They don't complain, they just insert ads and gain money from your recording.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Probably by 65daysofstatic, I mean it's part of their work!

</comment><comment><USER28> When the "copyright holder" decides to monetize a video, google gets a cut, right? Doesn't this create an incentive for google to prefer false positives?

<comment><USER29> Google already takes a cut of ad revenue regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How do you copyright leftover radiation from the big bang (since that is how white noise is generated) when the "static" is 13.8-billion years old?

</comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like an opportunity for copyright "trolling": upload videos, wait for the strikes and removals, sue.

<comment><USER28> Right, but what's wrong with that? you can't win the suit if the people who issued the request are acting in good faith, so you can't trick them into issuing a takedown if they are not acting maliciously.

in the early days of the do not call list, you could make quite a lot of money off of bad actors who ignored it. there was incentive to get your number on both the do not call list, and cold calling registries, and very quickly made malicious telemarketing untenable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if this can be considered the precursor to adversarial attacks on neural networks?</comment>


Half of Black Cabs Will Go Electric in 5 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.thememo.com/2015/10/22/as-environmental-fears-soar-london-black-cabs-ditch-diesel-as-they-go-electric/ <comment><USER2> Assuming they're still around then, which is far from being a certainty.</comment>


Protecting Google Cloud customers without impacting performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/protecting-our-google-cloud-customers-new-vulnerabilities-without-impacting-performance/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28The+Keyword+%7C+Official+Google+Blog%29 <comment><USER2> > _By December, all Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services had protections in > place for all known variants of the vulnerability._

Could other major cloud providers boast this? It seems like Google's brand is benefiting tremendously from Project Zero in all of this. On the other hand, it feels nervous-makingly like a clear step towards running one's own mainstream hardware being too hard for the little guys.

<comment><USER3> I feel like even without this, there's a fair argument to be made that Google is better at running hardware than most little guys are.

<comment><USER4> And it's not _necessarily_ a bad thing, either. Economies of scale means that everybody can win by putting all your chips in one basket. The obvious caveats apply when said basket stands to gain from serving its own interests once all the chips are there.

One example of that might include patching your own hardware while waiting to offer the same capabilities to others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been impressed with how long it took for this information to be "leaked"/"declassified"/released given the sheer number of people who knew.

The fact that hundreds maybe thousands of people knew and worked on this ahead of the press reports/rumors and subsequent information release speaks to how seriously everyone involved took this.

<comment><USER6> We can safely assume that black hats have moles on these lists.

<comment><USER7> yeah the idea you can keep something like this away from malicious parties across _dozens of huge companies_ is a ridiculous farce.

<comment><USER8> I've worked to mitigate other vulnerabilities within Google. at least with the vulnerability I helped on, I'm surprised at how good the information containment was.

Based on my area of work and job title, I was notified of the software that was vulnerable and to contact them with further info if we used it. I wasn't allowed to talk to others without explicit consent, so I talked to my central contact to find the right PoC in my neighbor teams to know who I was allowed to pull into a room for any joint strategies.

To everyone else, I simply said "sorry. On call is busy this week. I'm working on mitigating an undisclosed vulnerability." No questions asked. To this day I'm still not 100% sure the vulnerability is public so none of my peers know anything more than the time window in which I was distracted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Direct link to a description of the fix: [https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/7625886](https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/7625886)

Someone on SO trying to explain it another way: [https://stackoverflow.com/a/48099456](https://stackoverflow.com/a/48099456)

Some interesting discussion about how this patch isn't a 100% fix for Skylake processors (at least that's my understanding): [https://www.mail- email@example.com/ms...](https://www.mail- email@example.com/msg1577670.html)

<comment><USER10> I don't understand how this fix can possibly be so performant. The speculative executions _must_ be doing something positive, right? It seems like it should never hurt (ignoring security, obv). So how can disabling it not hurt?

Thanks for the stackover flow link!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good for them, giving the credit to Paul Turner. Unusual for an enterprise to allow cracks in the corporate "We".

<comment><USER12> Google is better than most in this regard. For one, it allows its employees to publish papers with their names on it. It also frequently lists names in press releases of key members.

<comment><USER13> Every company that publishes research allows employees to put names on it. It's not really an indicator of a forward thinking company so much as one that wants prestige in the academic world.

<comment><USER14> > Every company that publishes research allows employees to put names on it.

Except Apple: Apples papers are authored by the "Apple ___ team".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> According to this page retpoline is "insufficient on Skylake and newer CPUs, where even ret may predict from the indirect branch predictor as a fallback; those need IBRS".

[https://github.com/marcan/speculation- bugs/blob/master/READM...](https://github.com/marcan/speculation- bugs/blob/master/README.md#bti-linuxgccllvm-retpolines)

What gives?

<comment><USER16> The way I read that, Skylake and newer don't see a performance hit from ibrs. So it's retpoline on older CPUs = no performance hit. Ibrs on newer CPUs + microcode update = no hit.

>Requires microcode update on current CPUs. Perf hit vs. retpolines on older CPUs

<comment><USER15> You're missing the point. It says "insufficient on Skylake and newer CPUs".

The Google Cloud blog post does not mention that retpolines are insufficient on newer CPUs. That omission is dangerous because readers will believe they are protected by recompiling with retpolines when in fact they aren't.

Perhaps the blog post can be updated to clarify the limits of retpolines so people don't get the wrong impression and end up with vulnerable systems.

<comment><USER17> That's incorrect (in our opinion). See my comment at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16130871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16130871)

<comment><USER15> Okay, the link I posted is just a writeup summarizing publicly available information, some of which may be misleading or incorrect.

On the other hand, "opinion" isn't enough. Everything depends on the microarchitecture and only Intel can give assurance on whether retpoline actually works in Skylake or not. I hope they will release information about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Retpoline ... modifies programs to ensure that execution cannot be influenced by an attacker. With Retpoline, we could protect our infrastructure at compile-time, with no source-code modifications"

I am confused, doesn't this mean that Retpoline needs to sit in the compiler and won't protect from already-compiled binaries?

<comment><USER19> That was my question also. How could they guarantee that nobody else using a VM on the same physical machine isn't using binaries compiled elsewhere?

<comment><USER20> They don't, but it doesn't matter.

Something compiled with retpoline is resilient from it's execution being impacted. Once KVM is recompiled with retpoline, guests cannot attack it via spectre variant 2, and as such, cannot attack other guests.

The hypervisor being compiled with retpoline, however, does nothing to protect from intra-guest attacks - if you have untrusted code running in your VM, and you don't have IBRS and the other microcode features on, or your sensitive apps compiled with retpoline, you are still vulnerable internally. Just not from other guests

<comment><USER21> Effectively both Linux and Windows Server need to be fully recompiled. Hope someone hasn't lost some source code.

I am not super familiar with google's offering but I suspect they don't just offer VMs. Anything that runs in a shared infrastructure (serverless design/websites hosting) runs on top of a Linux box I presume. Google would need to get those Linux binaries recompiled too, not just the hypervisor.

<comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure that Microsoft can easily recompile Windows. Probably even Windows 95 with some prep time.

<comment><USER21> A hack they used in a recent update (I believe for the equation editor) suggests that's probably not the case.

<comment><USER23> I believe that the equation editor was third party coffee to which Ms never had the source code.

<comment><USER21> The point is they can't recompile it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's good to see Google crediting Retpoline to Paul Turner. As Senior Staff Engineer, Technical Infrastructure I wonder whether he was actually tasked with working on mitigation for these vulnerabilities or he came up with this in his free time.

<comment><USER17> As the article notes, lots of people worked basically round the clock on this as a top priority. That isn't to say they did nothing else, but Paul et al. definitely didn't just happen to do this in their spare time :).

The relevant quote from the article:

> For months, hundreds of engineers across Google and other companies worked > continuously to understand these new vulnerabilities and find mitigations > for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A bit off topic but the amount of real estate taken up by the header, side nav and "related articles" footer on this is just obnoxious. Obnoxious to the point of making reading this a really rotten experience.

I fear this is the medium.com effect of content on the web now. Simply having content for content's sake is now seen as a missed "growth hacking" opportunity.

<comment><USER26> Sad that this was collapsed-by-default — I realize it's not relevant to the article, but it likely never will be. If we complain enough hopefully someone can actually address it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A very good reason why people are going to start moving to GCP over AWS.... Project Zero is a big win here.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wait... doesn't Reptoline have some irritating performance penalties?

<comment><USER17> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Not particularly (if you read Paul's post, the branch to the retpoline predicts perfectly for obvious reasons), and especially not compared to the brute force flushes as an alternative.

Edit: I phrased that _backwards_. The _return_ predicts, so that the whole thing is about as bad as an _unpredicted_ indirect call:

> This has the particularly nice property that the RSB entry and on-stack > target installed by (1) is both valid and used. This allows the return to be > correctly predicted so that our simulated indirect jump is the only > introduced overhead.

<comment><USER20> Edit: My post was prior to the parent edit, and now is largely unnecessary. Keeping for posterity, I suppose!

I must be misunderstanding Paul's post.

Isn't it specifically preventing any sort of prediction?

"Naturally, protecting an indirect branch means that no prediction can occur. This is intentional, as we are "isolating" the prediction above to prevent its abuse."

Of course, you can then go and manually add direct branch hints, as is noted in the post, but unless I'm misunderstanding things, there's not an obvious reason why these branches predict perfectly.

Not that it means performance is impacted in a significant way, since that same section also says "Microbenchmarking on Intel x86 architectures shows that our converted sequences are within cycles of an native indirect branch (with branch prediction hardware explicitly disabled)."

(which also confuses this issue - how is it predicting perfectly if prediction hardware is disabled?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does anybody know if Retpoline will make it to the compiler that the Linux Kernel is compiled with ? It doesn't specifically mention in this paper, so I'm not able to figure out what was actually compiled using Retpoline - userland or the Linux kernel itself ?

<comment><USER17> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Patches for both LLVM (the infrastructure behind clang) and gcc are available. You choose what you compile your kernel and applications with, and others are actively looking at retpoline and retpoline-inspired techniques for other code generators (e.g., various JIT compilers). That's why Paul and the folks made this public.

<comment><USER29> thanks for your reply. in Google Cloud's specific case, what was compiled using Repoline ? Was it the kernel or userland ?

Because you are kind of claiming that the patches that the linux kernel used to fix this (with a 10% drop in performance) are no longer needed. I am kind of wondering if this was submitted to the core linux kernel to be mainlined ? If yes, why was this not used there.

If no, then it means it is being used in some Google Cloud-specific way that is not mainlineable.

EDIT - found this comment which seems to suggest that retpoline is not bulletproof and the kernel's performance-killing patches are still needed

[https://github.com/marcan/speculation- bugs/blob/master/READM...](https://github.com/marcan/speculation- bugs/blob/master/README.md#bti-linuxgccllvm-retpolines)

[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.0/03137.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1801.0/03137.html)

Does it mean that Google Cloud is doing this only on non-Skylake CPU instances ? It is a very interesting stand - it will mean that it will suddenly be more cost effective to use Google's _OLDER_ machines than the newer Skylakes... because the newer machines have a performance degradation that the older machines will not suffer.

<comment><USER17> Disclaimer: I'm not Paul :).

As mentioned elsewhere, we recompile everything at Google all the time. I'm not sure which things we've rebuilt with retpoline enabled. As Paul mentions in the article, the point is for software you believe needs to be protected, which may not be everything we build.

That thread on retpoline on Skylake has a lot of confusion. For some folks, they aren't 100% certain it works (it relies on understanding internal details of Intel CPUs) _and_ they argue that IBRS on Skylake is cheap enough so "why not just always use IBRS and not bother?". That's the gist of this comment:

> personally I am comfortable with retpoline on Skylake, but I would like to > have IBRS as an opt in for the paranoid.

I want to highlight that Paul and the team have had a lot more time to think about this issue than the folks just joining the discussion. Could our folks be missing something? Sure, and that's the point of public discussion and code review. We hope that over the coming weeks and months it's decided one way or another, but _we_ believe retpoline to be correct and a good optimization (especially for older hardware).

<comment><USER29> > I'm not sure which things we've rebuilt with retpoline enabled. As Paul > mentions in the article, the point is for software you believe needs to be > protected, which may not be everything we build.

With all due respect, i'm not sure about the answer you are giving me. I dont see why we are using the word "belief". If there is some secret sauce that Google is unwilling to talk about, then it would be good to have that declared. Because it is extremely weird that you would claim to have a compiler tech that fixes this issue (which needed kernel level fixes otherwise) and not be able to categorically declare what was compiled by Retpoline that gives this benefit.

Possibly its the hypervisor you are using... which explains the zero downtime migration.

P.S. I'm a Google Cloud customer as well.

<comment><USER17> I meant that only in the "I'm not sure all code at Google has been rebuilt and had retpoline enabled" sense. We said in the article:

> By December, all Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services had protections in > place for all known variants of the vulnerability.

which means all the bits of the stacks across all our GCP products (i.e., not just our host kernels and GCE's hypervisor but also say App Engine sandboxes).

KPTI for kernels plus recompiling any sensitive thing (kernel, hypervisor, etc.) with a retpoline capable compiler. We're not holding back secrets. Just trying to get the patches out while keeping blog posts relatively parseable by the general public.

Note that no matter how disruptive kernel or other changes are, live migration always makes them "zero downtime migration". The key here is that using retpoline to protect systems software against Variant 2 results in much lower overhead than other proposed mitigation strategies, particularly on older hardware but even a bit on Skylake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Has this at all caused google to reconsider the heterogeneous nature of the cloud in terms of hardware? It seems like Google the company is constantly fixing/redoing various intel problems such as ME and now this. Google is part of openpower after all, it would be interesting to see another architecture being pushed.

</comment><comment><USER21> The post seems to suggest not all CPUs are affected by Variant 2. Is it Haswell and earlier only?

</comment><comment><USER31> [censored]

<comment><USER32> That's not unusual; if a story gets one or two upvotes very soon after being submitted the HN ranking algorithm will put it on the front page. The rank then drops very quickly unless it gets more votes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Interesting google has time, money etc for this.

But actually showing search results on page 4 of google search or youtube, when it said there were 22 million results for my search seems too hard for them.</comment>


Populating a Mars Base Will Be Dangerously Unsexy - <AUTHOR> https://amp.livescience.com/62680-mars-reproduction-challenges.html <comment><USER2> Taking this line of thinking further, it's not hard to imagine colonists and their descendants resenting being sent to Mars to live bleak, dangerous lives in order to satisfy scientific or entrepreneurial curiosity.

I would add that for the descendants or people who have spent decades in a low-G, low-germ environment, returning to Earth may be practically impossible.</comment>


The $94B fitness industry is reinventing itself as Covid-19 spreads - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/01/business/fitness-studios-coronavirus/index.html <comment><USER2> Good. The industry has a long history of deceptive practices. ABC Financial serves as the merchant processor and membership management for many gyms. They make it onerous to cancel memberships.

And then there's Town Sports International (NYSC). They locked me in a lifetime membership for $49.99/m which sounded great 10 years ago. Every year, this increased 5% as a "service charge." Fine, it was still a good price 7 years later. Then, they reneged and started charging me $80/m saying the old deal was no longer valid and when I disputed they said "well, pull up the agreement." Damn, fine, I'll pay $80. I finally canceled last month when they changed my main gym to "elite" status and have been charging me $120/m for 3 months without any indication. On top of that, they've been charging $20 for every "declined" transaction for those 3 months. Canceling was a nightmare in itself and I still fear they might do something stupid like send a bill that doesn't exist to collections. They just look for any way to milk money from customers- even charging members while all gyms are closed: [https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-new-york-gym- membership...](https://www.newsweek.com/coronavirus-new-york-gym-memberships- sports-clubs-1494650)

They're scumbags and hope their day of reckoning comes.</comment>


Microsoft Statement Regarding MSN China Joint Venture's Juku Feature - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/dec09/12-15statement.mspx

<comment><USER2> That's a remarkably simple, upfront and honest apology. I'm not normally a big Microsoft fan, but it sounds like they're handling this one well. Go them!

<comment> brown9-2 I agree, but perhaps I'm missing something - are they actually saying anywhere in that statement that they are cutting ties with the vendor that copied the code?

It seems as if they are only saying they will be suspending the beta of this application and re-evaluating their practices towards application code supplied by third-party vendors.

<comment><USER3> That was the impression I got, although we have to consider the possibility that it was one overworked or lazy programmer at a company that does multiple other projects.

Anyway, props for the straight-up _mea culpa_.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it was more like an _eius culpa_...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the biggest changes I had seen at Microsoft (in my last few years at Microsoft) was the excessive reliance on outsourcing. Groups that relied excessively on vendors had a different culture from other groups.

The blatant copying (in the Plurk case) is a particularly egregious example of what can happen with too much outsourcing, but the impact of policies (that treat product development as an outsourcable commodity) over the past several years extends beyound this example and hurts overall quality.

<comment><USER6> That's not necessarily fair. When I was there, it was a hell of a lot easier to get some cash to hire an external vendor than to get more headcount. Perhaps a penny-wise but pound-foolish situation, but it is what it is.

Also, there are times when a group without development resources (e.g. a content group or an evangelism group) wants to build a tool or a website. They don't really have an option but to outsource its creation.

<comment><USER5> When you're talking about groups without dev-resources, you're not talking about product-development groups.

By "product development", I specifically meant product development and core teams at Microsoft.

On your other point, I think we can agree that penny-wise pound foolish isn't a good policy for companies like Microsoft <g>

Btw to be clear, I wasn't suggesting that all outsourcing is bad. I managed one small outsourced project in the 90s and was very happy with the results. However, imo, today's Microsoft does too much outsourcing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good job Microsoft. I worked for vendors in China before and I'm well aware of their practices...

So now Microsoft have no "plurk" service, why not buy the startup and integrate them into their offering? Wins all around.

<comment><USER8> > why not buy the startup and integrate them into their offering?

Isn't Plurk banned from China? I would imagine there may be some legal wrangling with the Chinese government to get a now-purchased Plurk back onto that market.

<comment><USER7> Plurk is banned by domain, however if it came under the Microsoft domain it may be a different story. Has anyone heard of any Microsoft products through Microsoft China being banned?

<comment><USER9> China has blocked access to products by Microsoft, Google and others in the past, though in most cases they eventually got unblocked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't like microsoft and I like this. Also kudos goes to "jf" for acting fast: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994647>

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I'm glad that Microsoft's response is being received well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sometimes, admitting that 'we fucked up' is simply the best apology / remedy.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious: are you implying that that's what this apology does, or that the apology is lacking?

<comment><USER12> the former.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Microsoft has essentially admitted that the independent contractor was guilty of intellectual property theft. I would assume that any revenue the contractor earned would be at jeopardy if Plurk were to pursue legal action.

If Microsoft made any money through the Juku service, the same should be true of there as well.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's just fantastic. Well done Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER16> This episode, I guess is the best thing that could have happened to plurk. For all the publicity I mean.

</comment><comment><USER17> In my experience this type of thing is unfortunately very common in China.

One of my earliest commercial software applications (for Palm OS) was decompiled and re-packaged as a competitor to our product by a Chinese company. When you looked at the binary of their product, it had most of our function names in it. Also, it had most of our bugs. These were weird bugs that no one implementing it on their own would've ever replicated.

We contact the company and they said that they honored our work and loved our product and didn't copy it and "yada yada happy-go-lucky" which was total BS.

Sadly since they were in China and our only real option (according to lawyers) was to sue the company in the US that sold it, which unfortunately was an online software retailer that was 30%+ of our revenues. Scratch that.

Thus we just had to deal with it.

I am not sure if it's cultural or what, but I largely avoid China as much as possible now.

Fool me once, shame on me. Don't get fooled again.

</comment><comment><USER18> This apology is not some amazing achievement; this is simply what they were supposed to do.

I'm not ready to heap a ton of praise on a major company just for following basic ethics and PR in the wake of a scandal they caused. Just how low of a bar are we trying to set here?

<comment><USER19> Microsoft didn't cause any scandal, the contractor they hired did. Yes, of course, MS is responsible; but MS was also a victim here.

<comment><USER20> Nope. MS is responsible, period. People seem to be amputating MS China from MS as a whole, as if somehow MS were screwed by the Chinese or something. It doesn't work that way.

It's like if I murdered someone and then got away by saying "I apologize for the misbehavior of my murderous personality - I will not be doing business with it in the future." Doesn't work that way.

<comment><USER19> No, people are amputating MS from the contractor they hired, because MS was screwed by that contractor. It _does_ work that way.

<comment><USER18> You should keep this in context; Plurk is (one of) their prime competitor(s). Microsoft was almost certainly negligent in allowing this to come to market. The fault doesn't fall solely on the contractor.

In any case, my point is that Microsoft didn't do anything especially noble by apologizing and taking the site down in the face of blatant plagiarism. If it were noble, you'd be able to name some less noble but at least as self- interested actions Microsoft could have taken. I can't think of one.

Microsoft doing practically anything besides what this would have only hurt them more.

<comment><USER19> I'm not talking about Microsoft being noble. I'm talking about Microsoft being screwed by the contractor. Microsoft wanted to compete against Plurk, they hire a contractor to help in this, and now where are they? Their site is suspended indefinitely. Microsoft is now significantly worse off now than before they even started this.

Should MS have watched the contractor more closely? Probably. But in the end, it's reasonable to expect that if you hire someone to do work for you, that they're going to do it ethically and legally, even in China. Of course MS takes all responsibility here. That's not even in question. But put yourself in MS's shoes. Yes they are the largest software company in the world, but ignore that. Put yourself in their shoes. You hire someone to do something. That someone does it illegally and deviously, you have no choice but to completely rip out everything they did. You just got screwed.

In the end, it even looks like Plurk may benefit from all of this, there is now a lot more people out there that have heard of them.

<comment><USER18> _I'm talking about Microsoft being screwed by the contractor._

I don't disagree with that. All I was saying is that the tremendous kudos some people are giving Microsoft for this response seem to be misplaced.

<comment><USER19> Which I don't disagree with either. So we are basically preaching to each of our respective choirs :)

<comment><USER18> Fair enough. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Microsoft just made my day. That's such an honest direct reply. No obscurity whatsover.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is the second recent problem MS had with a contractor stealing source code (the other was the Windows 7 image tool violating the GPL).

I'm sure Microsoft handles lots of outsourced projects, and they can't review every last bit of code. Why not put in a system where violations like these can be reported to someone at MS?

</comment><comment><USER23> So does Plurk actually get anything out of this? (Besides the free publicity)

<comment><USER10> They get to stop Microsoft from copying their stuff.

<comment><USER24> I doubt anyone'll be discussing financial settlements in public, but...

<comment><USER25> Perhaps they should sue Microsoft for irreparable financial damages... like the RIAA does to file sharers? After all, no one was deprived of any physical property as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER10> I disagree. I don't like Microsoft, but they found out their mistake and fixed it. Its not like Microsoft higher management consciously decided to this, it was done by a third party contractor who was hired to work on the project - who was specifically advised NOT to do this in the contract they signed. They still did it. If anyone should sue anyone, it should be Microsoft suing the contractor.

<comment><USER25> I was being sarcastic :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why don't Microsoft do some PR with the Chinese government to make Plurk accessible in China again.

<comment><USER27> Because Microsoft doesn't have that power.

<comment><USER28> They have that kind of bankroll though.

<comment><USER29> What?

The Chinese government has issues with sites containing user-generated content. Neither Microsoft nor anyone else can resolve these issues just by throwing money at the problem. Getting Plurk back into China would likely involve making substantial changes to how the site is run: for example, demonstrating that they can and will take down or block posts at the request of the Chinese government within a specific amount of time after the request is made.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Beginner's Guide to Believing in Yourself - <AUTHOR> http://ajjuliani.com/beginners-guide-believing/

<comment><USER2> This is full of survivorship bias: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)

There's not much indication that paying close attention to the outliers who "won" can really teach us much.

<comment><USER3> Focusing on the two characters may sound like survivor bias; both being the extreme outliers. Nevertheless it is the message I hear it often here and outside. Start doing something, be it an itch or anything, and then just start working on it. If it is what you'll love to do for the rest of your life you will keep going on it even if you fail. Paul Graham wrote an inspiring assay on this [1].

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/love.html](http://paulgraham.com/love.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Most people I talk to seem to act like J.K. Rowling and Richard Branson are > outliers. They made it big under circumstances that would crush most of us.

Perhaps there's lucky breaks and rare opportunities.

What was it Bruce Sterling said a while back? "You can be Microsoft but someone has to bend over and be IBM."

</comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes I think like this. I'm working on some prototype for something I'm trying to make, now. still, scratching an itch might be good advice since I don't feel like a horrible bad engineer when I'm working on it.

I'm not a 'failure' at work yet but most of the team doesn't want me there and I sure feel like a loser when I walk in those doors.

also, survior bias, this article is.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I never heard of that term "Survivorship Bias" but I like it. My real point (that I make towards the end) is not that we can follow the path of people like JK and Branson, but that we continue to believe in ourselves.

I do believe writers can learn from her story, entrepreneurs can learn from Branson, just as investors can learn from Buffet...</comment>


Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/24/digital-whiteboard-trello-spins-out-of-fog-creek-with-10-3m/ <comment><USER3> Cool to see Fog Creek succeed like this. I've been following Joel for almost fifteen years (the now defunct Fog Creek message boards were some of the best on the internet for a couple of years).

From the beginning Joel made a simple assertion: Hire great people, give them a great environment, then sit back and watch them kick ass. He said this before all of this became conventional industry wisdom (and probably played a major role ushering it in). With products like CityDesk, FogBugz, and Copilot failing or seemingly meandering, it didn't really seem like much would come of it. But they kept at it and look at them now. I guess good software _does_ take ten years (give or take) [1].

Of course it didn't hurt that Joel is one of the best bloggers who ever done it, and I'm sure at least Stack Overflow benefited tremendously from being seeded with Joel's captive audience, but they have still executed the hell out of it and continue to do so, and obviously continue to spawn awesome stuff on the side.

[1] [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html)

<comment><USER4> I agree. It's so strange now that I will often make references to Joel or his essays in talks and no-one will know who I'm talking about. I always have to explain that back in the day there were two big software essayists - PG and Joel. No youngsters knows Joel's stuff now - the internet's great at getting you today's news, yesterday's tends to get lost underfoot.

Joel if you're listening please come back to blogging. You're a great writer and I think you've got such an utterly different perspective on things now after having done SE and Trello that it would be a massive waste for you not to share it back with the world again.

<comment><USER5> Really? How young are you talking about? I graduated about a year ago and almost everyone I knew who was really interested in writing software read at least some of his stuff from joelonsoftware...

<comment><USER6> I think it's a cultural osmosis thing. If the older developers mention stuff like "We're a 9 on the Joel test"[1] or "Obviously we shouldn't do a rewrite, what are we Netscape"[2] or "Are code base is large enough that the tooling requires static typing"[3] People will read the essays. If all anyone is talking about is tech-crunch, probably not

[1][http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html) [2][http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html[3]...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html\[3\]https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/is- weak-typing-strong-enough)

<comment><USER7> You messed with your third link.

I've read it and I'd say that Steve Yeggie is making generalizations about static type systems using greatest common divisor of them all: Java.

He attributes the need for patterns to OCaml type system, where they aren't needed, for example. Or assumes that you need all interfaces up front.

Both those assumptions are not true!

I think SY is good at jealous humor like his post about "academy found an software engineer who cares about Haskell". That's his natural domain. I believe everything he writes is homorous and jealous, that way I don't have to think he is just plain stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I _love_ Trello. We use it as our editorial workflow board at Mashable (meaning it is where stories live from assignment (or sometimes conception) to the various editing/publishing phases. We use it to visually see what is publishing next, to see embargos or scheduled posts for different areas and more importantly, to see what everyone else is working on.

To me, that's the hallmark of a good tool: when it can be used in an industry it really wasn't designed for (publishing workflow) as if it was built for that purpose.

Props to Joel and to Trello!

<comment><USER9> I think especially with management tools like Trello robustness is a huge factor, everyone seems to have their own series of cobbled together processes that kind of work for them, but with the feeling that maybe if they could digitise $PRODUCTIVE_METHOD it would be more productive. Trello's robustness to this helps make it really valuable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like trello and use it for personal stuff occasionally, but the work I do just can't be hosted somewhere else. Legally. So I hate web apps and cloud this, cloud that, mostly because they are no good to me.

The type of work I do would change before the need for controlled local hosting will--in other words it might be that mine line of work will become obsolete or transform so dramatically that the requirement of controlled local hosting is moot. That would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath.

<comment><USER11> Since they're apparently planning paid Business and Enterprise versions, I wouldn't be surprised to see at least one of those be a fully in-house solution. If they're not letting people do their own installs they may follow the path of the Google Search Appliance.

On the other hand, it may not be _affordable_ depending on the size of your shop, but that's a different matter.

<comment><USER12> We are planning _new features_ for those products, but we've already been selling those things for over a year: [https://trello.com/business- class](https://trello.com/business-class) [https://trello.com/enterprise](https://trello.com/enterprise)

We also have no plans to make an in-house solution. While the tide has not 100% turned, in most places at big companies like Amazon and Microsoft, they can already use SaaS solutions (you sign a big contract, but even if your app is on AWS, msft employees can use it). For the companies that cannot, the added complexity to development and support is likely not worth it (for us).

<comment><USER13> Somewhat off-topic, but on [https://trello.com/enterprise](https://trello.com/enterprise), you say that you provide "24 x 7 x 365 incidence response" where I think you mean "24 x 7 x 365 incident response".

<comment><USER14> Regardless of what word comes next, it should probably be "24 x 7 x 52".

<comment><USER15> Since a business closing does not typically occur in week-long increments, probably not. "24 x 7 x 364" is generally understood to mean one day off a year (usually Christmas Day in the US), and "24 x 7 x 51" would not be clear at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Co-founder of Trello Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post about today's news. Worth reading if you're interested in the thinking behind the deal: [http://indexventures.com/news-room/news/trello- raises-10m-se...](http://indexventures.com/news-room/news/trello- raises-10m-series-a-funding-from-index-ventures-and-spark-capital)

<comment><USER17> The original post on his blog has more images: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html)

<comment> T-zex Thanks for the link. I was concerned, that the top story might not contain a Flat Wight coffee picture.

<comment><USER18> do you mean flat white?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great to see Trello, Fog Creek and Joel doing well.

Joel/Fog Creek are one of the few entities in the startup ecosystem that I read about and think to myself, I want to be a CEO like Joel and build a company like Fog Creek.

A lot of startups claim they want to "change the world." And I think Joel can actually claim to have done that thanks to his influential blog and the humane company culture he's setup at Fog Creek. And this is without even counting stack exchange.

<comment><USER20> 100% agreed. He is one of the first to inspire me at a young age to become an entrepreneur myself, and it's stuff like this that continues to inspire me:

"That architecture is all the stuff I spent ten years ranting on this blog about, but y'all don't listen, so I'm just going to have to build company after company that runs my own wacky operating system, and eventually you'll catch on. It's OK to put people first. You don't have to be a psychopath or work people to death or create heaps of messy code or work in noisy open offices."

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So Trello is not currently profitably? "Fog Creek is profitable and could afford to fund Trello development to profitability." Given its growth rate and presumably low sales / marketing expenses, it would seem to be easy for them to be profitable.

What is their revenue? There's 4.5 million 'members' though less than 25% have used it in the last 28 days, from what the chart shows [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html)

Is it just that very few of these people are paying currently? I do see they are adding a business class tier now.

<comment><USER22> I am no longer a Fog Creek employee (I left to join an education startup a bit ago), so this is not an official opinion, but anyway:

Joel wants Trello to grow a lot faster than Fog Creek could bootstrap it. In my personal opinion, a big reason why Copilot and Kiln never quite made it was that we didn't have the developer resources to dominate the market when we were in a good position to do so. Because we insisted on bootstrapping, we necessarily had very small teams, meaning that competitors, who were willing to go into debt to have larger teams, were able to come from behind and surpass us in both marketing and features. In other words, while both products are successful and profitable, they likely could've been a lot _more_ successful and profitable if Fog Creek had thrown a lot more resources onto them back at the beginning.

What you're seeing with Trello is an attempt to avoid that happening again. Trello is currently in a strong leadership position; taking VC now to secure that will pay for itself later. While Trello could likely be profitable very quickly if Fog Creek wanted it to be, doing so would require a very small team bootstrapping itself again, meaning that Fog Creek could repeat the same mistake a third time. And that's why you're seeing this.

<comment><USER12> I don't agree with what you wrote at the end. It's not a "mistake" to bootstrap and have a much higher probability of success with a lower possible return. I know that's probably not what you meant, because you wrote earlier that we could have been "more successful", but it also ignores what would have been a much higher risk and loss of ownership in your assumption.

Joel and I are naturally conservative in nature and having succeeded at Fog Creek with what we set out to do (building a successful company where devs wanted to work) allowed us to swing for the fences with Trello and Stack Exchange. The risk is much higher. The reward is bigger, but we own a lot less of those VC funded companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's great!

Trello is one of those apps that you can dismiss too fast because you think it doesn't do enough, but which to come back to because everything else is too complex. I've been using it extensively, and it has almost gone viral around me. As in, every time someone needs to manage a project, I hear "Hey, what was this simple project management software you told me you're using for everything you do?", and there comes a new Trello user.

I even remember using it for managing my own time when I was working for a large Japanese company that was using excel spreadsheets to manage projects, so I could have a clear interface and use a quick and dirty piece of JS I wrote to generate the sacrosanct Daily Reports I was asked to provide.

<comment><USER12> Sometimes you need a detailed vertical app - like a bug tracker, or an applicant tracking system or a CRM. But a lot of times, you don't. You just need something simple because your needs aren't that complex. And using something you are familiar with is easier than trying to learn something new.

Trello is the always going to be a horizontal app. And sometimes people will need to move to something else to solve their problems. If you are using Trello as an ATS and you start getting 50 applications a day, you are going to go nuts. You need to switch to Jobvite or Greenhopper. If you have a team of 100 devs trying to track your bugs, you want to use FogBugz or Jira or Pivotal.

Joel used a metaphor that I like: The verticals are like stones on a beach and Trello is the sand that fills in all the space between.

In the future I think you'll see the Trello product evolving to support those other verticals and adding value (i.e. quick overview) in the way Trello does best.

<comment><USER24> Or your needs are so insanely complex - as in project management - <USER2> modelling the problem in any detail leads to a million features and an inflexible solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's incredible how such a simple idea could become so big.

I'm sat here trying to think up some grand scheme that's going to make me my millions. Its a great lesson that really all I need is a simple idea. The key is in the execution. Take that simple idea and develop (and market) it to perfection.

<comment><USER26> it's not a simple idea, it's a deep idea refined over decades and implemented simply. [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban)

<comment><USER27> I work at Trello. We actually don't think of Trello as Kanban. Trello at its core is a collaborative list of lists. You can use Trello to implement a Kanban workflow but Trello is not an implementation of Kanban. A lot of people use Trello for things like to organizing their soccer teams where there isn't a hint of Kanban -- each list could be a game and people add themselves to indicate that they want to play.

<comment><USER28> I think the great thing about Trello is simplifying down to a pure visual metaphor.

Trello is about putting lists of cards on boards. That's it.

You can use it to do all kinds of things, but it's a medium rather than a framework. When I've tried other to-do list apps, or project management tools, etc. they all end up becoming too restrictive. They try to teach you to do the right thing in the right way, not realizing that it is different for different people.

Joel himself once talked about Excel, and how for most people, Excel isn't about spreadsheets, or formulas, or calculations - it's about laying things out in a grid. That's it. People just want to be able to write things in columns and rows, and colour them. And that simple behaviour is incredibly powerful.

<comment><USER29> > "Trello is about putting lists of cards on boards. That's it."

100% this, for me.

That's how I'm able to get people to use it. They ask a lot of questions about what means what and assume it's more complicated than it is. As soon as they realize that the top level metaphor is seriously just a board with cards, they're like "Oh! that's really cool. I can use this" and they're off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know how this type of spin out works? I would imagine FogCreek has an ownership stake in the company for "seed funding" Trello with resources.

<comment><USER12> It was a 355 spinoff. If you are into reading boring IRS guidelines, you can start here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Code_section_3...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Code_section_355)

tldr; imagine a stock split like Google did recently where the shareholders end up with 2 different stocks.

<comment><USER31> Last time I worked at a company that did that, it was to dump their debts on the old company and scurry off with the more promising projects so they could raise more funding with the new company.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure the 355 regs prevent you from doing something like that (not that you couldn't just do it anyway, but that you might get caught if you are trying to do something shady).

In our case, we didn't want to give up ownership in Fog Creek (which is profitable) and the investors were happier with a separate entity.

<comment><USER32> How do the option holders in the parent capture their share of the equity in the spinco in a transaction like this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> FogBugz users: Did you know you can drag FogBugz cases into Trello cards? Spolsky shared the secret...

[https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/433355023636897792](https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/433355023636897792)

</comment><comment><USER34> Is Trello getting its own office space or will it still cohabit the same space as Fog Creek?

<comment><USER12> Currently cohabitating. Eventually will likely move. (Same as Stack Exchange's history).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> We would use Trello if they added two things:

1) simple way to delete a card, list, or board (not this archive nonsense)

2) multiple lists in a column

<comment><USER36> I wish cards could be tagged. I use labels for overall categorization but I need tagging to tie cards back to our project management system (which I find unusable for actual project management). Currently I just make the first line of the notes my faux tag.

It's s minor gripe though, Trello is pretty great.

<comment><USER37> Trello has quite a good API that you can use. It's trivial to hook it into whatever other system you happen to use. We linked Trello to our Redmine ticketing system, and it works pretty well for our needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've been using Trello daily for over a year now to keep track of projects and tasks at work, and it has been great. While I sometimes freak out that Trello alone holds my work to-do list (instead of nice, safe paper and pen), I have yet to experience any significant downtime or lost data.

Good luck to them!

<comment><USER39> You can export your data via their API. Here's one script for it: [https://github.com/mattab/trello-backup](https://github.com/mattab/trello- backup)

<comment><USER40> You can also append .json to any board url to get a text copy of its data (or .csv if the board is in a Business Class organization).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's really great to see good things coming Trello's way with all of this. Those guys have worked ridiculously hard at it.

I distinctly remember them keeping Trello running through a disaster and keeping all of it's users informed. Great job, guys!

<comment><USER42> Yep, hauling buckets of fuel up the skyscaper stairs during Sandy [https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/263460486203465728](https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/263460486203465728)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Trello's simplicity and ease of use almost makes you feel like you're using pen and paper and that's truly powerful and why so many people can learn how to use it with so little onboarding.

Trello has a good balance of blending to your workflow and having your workflow blend to it.

I was even able to find a clever way to use trello to manage all of my personal reading: [http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading- management/](http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-management/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Congratulations to Trello. I user Trello for almost everything, from planning what to buy/not-to-buy, travel planning, to choosing a school for my daughter.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Great news, congratulations. I'm interested to hear what people think about it's chance of survival now. As part of Fog Creek they started monetising Trello and had a chance of building a long-term business. Now with the investment there is greater risk they will end up acquired and shut down. On all the Trello threads here people have always been very worried about that scenario.

</comment><comment><USER45> Congrats on the funding from a happy gold member. I use it to manage (and not forget) all the many small things I need to do or to keep track of ideas for the future. One of the biggest features is that is does not mandate a workflow because it's just boards with lists with cards. I use it in ways partly inspired by Kanban, Getting Things Done, and the typical calendar.

</comment><comment><USER46> $10.3M for How many %? And what is it value at?

I couldn't find the information anywhere.

<comment><USER12> We won't disclose that info because it just invites a bunch of unwanted discussion about valuations. It's probably not too difficult to make an educated guess.

<comment><USER47> $10M for 10%-20% = valuation of $50-$100M.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Fog Creek, which was founded in 2000 and is owned by employees

What happens to the Fog Creek employees? Do they have a stake in the new companies?

<comment><USER12> Fog Creek employees keep on making Fog Creek awesome, and yes, they have a stake in Trello Inc. (Some of the longstanding employees now even have a stake in both Stack Exchange AND Trello).

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > In 2010, the company spun off Stack Exchange Inc.

This is not what actually happened. As far as I remember, Stack Overflow had nothing to do with Fog Creek per se, except for Joel begin a founder of both. Stack Exchange Inc. grew from Stack Overflow Internet Services LLC which Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky were founders of. Fog Creek did not make Stack Overflow.

</comment><comment><USER49> After trying so many tools, pivotal tracker, asana, google docs, Trello was so refreshing and easy to use I immediately became an evangelist. I think a key feature is you can share it with non-techincal folks and it makes sense to at least some degree right away. Yay Trello, happy you will be around for a long time to come!

</comment><comment><USER50> One of the biggest things I loved about Joel and the entire Fog Creek / SO history is that it always felt like a company. A real business with real people. Not a cartoon and not a sweatshop. I hope with this news Trello continues down that path.

</comment><comment><USER51> Amazing to see the journey of a a blogger & company I have admired for the past 15 years. His blog was one of those inspirations for me to want to start building my own business. Big fan of Trello here. Many congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER52> Wow that's pretty cool. Didn't realize Trello wasn't already it's own thing.

What do you all use Trello for? I've tried a number of different task management systems, including Trello, but I haven't yet found a use case for Trello feels 100% perfect. Curious to hear how others are using it!

</comment><comment><USER53> Love how Trello is customizable to everything I want. Easy to integrate with other services, utilize their card feature and generally make task management easier. Very happy for the Trello and Fog Creek team. Look forward to seeing how it evolves on its own these coming years!

</comment><comment><USER29> disclaimer: There's absolutely no real thought about how I'd implement this as I'm saying it.

I like trello _a lot_. I'm practically obsessed with it.

It works really well for my small teams and my personal life.

A couple people have said it doesn't scale well to larger teams (with necessary ymmv disclaimers).

I wonder if that's because of how inherently formless and simple it is (which I think is its strength). It's a very general metaphor that narrows to lots of specific use cases easily. It'd be interesting if there were more optional constraints you could add to boards/cards/etc to formalize a specific workflow. I'm just shooting from the hip here, not sure what that would look like.

</comment><comment><USER54> Anyone else seeing lots of parallels in functionality between Trello and Google Keep (keep.google.com). I have been using keep a lot since google got rid of their google.com/ig homepage. Not finding a overwhelming reason to migrate to Trello.

</comment><comment><USER55> I love Trello. I have used it for several years now at work and for personal projects.

One thing I would like to know is what the hell is Yammer? Microsoft bought them out for 1.2 billion and I've never heard of it.

<comment><USER56> It's Facebook for enterprise. Basically, everyone in your company joins the social network and you have a wall, and can post and follow others and message, etc... My company has it and much like Facebook, I have an ongoing love hate relationship with it.

I'm in a completely remote company of ~65 people, and it's purpose is likely to replace some of the water cooler talk and serendipitous culture that you miss out on in virtual work spaces. I don't think it does this, but I'm also a pretty light user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Trello is such a fantastic tool, I use it every single day. It has stood the test of time for me, unlike Evernote, Clipboard and many others. This is fantastic news, kudos to the Trello team.

</comment><comment><USER58> I would be interested if anyone has used this for project management?

<comment><USER59> My team tried it several times over the first 1 - 2 years it was out. I have not tried it recently. That said, at that time, we could never get it to stick. It was good for high level stuff, but like all project management software, we ended up constantly working to keep it in sync with reality. This was especially acute when using github because for any stuff that was code- related, we were basically duplicating tickets and tracking in both places. So github tickets were the real source of truth and Trello always lagged. Once that happens, the non-code milestones start to suffer as you start wondering why you're doing all this in the first place.

Tracking issues in github (and we use FogBugz as well) has the benefit of being where the "rubber meets the road", so it's effortless and transparent to keep up to date. Merging non-code tasks (e.g. design work) with code is still something we struggle to track and keep tabs on.

<comment><USER60> Sems like a potential opportunity for either Trello, or a third party?, to provide an easy way of combining github issues/commits with Trello lists.

<comment><USER61> [https://waffle.io/](https://waffle.io/)

<comment><USER20> We implemented Trello + Github sync with Waffle.io and it was as close to perfect we could get without spending a bunch of time writing our own code to do it. It still wasn't perfect however and I spent a lot of time making sure things were in-sync, which on a normal schedule wasn't a huge deal, but when fires popped up would become a very small priority.

I'm surprised no one has built a better way to do this. We tried syncing with Zapier first (a company I absolutely love), but if I recall correctly it was a one-way sync, and we needed it to go both ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I wish Trello would allow me to keep track of time for individual cards. None of this 'addon' nonsense, just bake it right in there. :)

</comment><comment><USER63> Kudos to Trello team! I use it everyday to track my personal work. I used it on web and on mobile apps.

</comment><comment><USER64> Used Fogbugz at my second real job in the world. Read a ton of this guys blogs.

Good on ya man!</comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone missing Google Reader - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> After trying to adapt to Feedly, I finally managed to find goread.io ([http://goread.io](http://goread.io)). It's very close to the original, minus some shortcuts I had gotten used to.

It's also open source on github([https://github.com/mjibson/goread](https://github.com/mjibson/goread)).

</comment><comment><USER3> After trying quite a few of the alternatives, I realized how much I've become used to the reader UI, especially all the keyboard shortcuts. Yes, a lot of that is copied, but that just makes it worse when you're missing out on a few.

Then there's the update rate and the UI speed (e.g. feedly manages to freeze my whole browser). Also, while the interface missed out on a few of the Google improvements, at least it was possibly to turn off most administrative debris.

I might really have to pick up a self-hosted one and maybe make a few changes of my own, as RSS is a pretty big part of my daily 'net consumption (Never understood how people could cope with twitter for that. Feels like drowning in an echo chamber.)

<comment><USER4> I've been using The Old Reader [1] as it has all the keyboard shortcuts I used in Reader. (Perhaps not all of them from Reader, but enough for me.)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've actually been a little grateful to them for closing down. When they did, I went all over trying out the alternatives. If they hadn't shut down I never would have noticed that there were better choices out there.

Now I'm on Newsblur (a lot of good things to say about other alternatives, but this is the one I settled on). With Google out of the way, there is now a chance for small success like them (and Feedly and Old Reader, etc) to get some market share and pull in some revenue.

It has not only turned out to be painless but beneficial. And it's given me a healthier outlook on relying on Google. That is, I don't.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes.

Been using Feedly (though tried a number of like products, but none were able to accommodate my large list of subscriptions or they were plagued with bugs, glitches and responsiveness issues). Even just plunked down $45 for a year "subscription" solely for _Search_ but thus far, their implementation of "Search" leaves much to be desired -- it's not responsive ("incremental" searches can take 10 seconds or more, sometimes timing out) and search results don't go back any further than ~30 days.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for mentioning this. Search is the only feature I can think of that I desperately want out of Feedly but it sounds like it isn't worth it

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad it's gone since it forced me to look for better alternatives. I tried pretty much all of them, but settled on BazQux Reader. $10 a year for a vastly superior service is well worth it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes, but I've also been warming up to my self-hosted tt-rss instance. So far, speed is really the only feature that I've come to critically miss.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using Feedly with Reeder for iPhone. In terms of design I think Feedly is one of the better options, but they should really spend more time on making their UI a whole lot more responsive. I've always felt one of Google Reader's great tricks was its asynchronous UI which really gave it that speedy feeling.

<comment><USER11> Yes, the UI is really sluggish at times, but I can maybe attribute that to the pretty bad mobile-network coverage in my area. The old Reader UI was much preferable in this regard.

Also: The lack of an option to just open a link in the "real" browser drives me nuts. Is this some kind of lock-in attempt?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have only been reading my RSS via Reeder.app on iOS for the last couple of years. I've switched to Feedbin (I barely feel the $2 a month) and all works fine. Except for the fact that Reeder for iPad doesn't support Feedbin so I can only read on my iPhone and we're still waiting for the iPad version to be updated.

</comment><comment><USER13> Stopped using reader since Flipboard. But after the death of Reader, I find myself using Digg reader instead of Flipboard. I love that popularity _dots_.

So I guess I'm glad Google off'ed Reader, at least for me.

</comment><comment><USER14> After paying for Feed Wrangler and Feedbin, I find myself using SilverReader. The only Google Reader feature I miss is the onscreen menu to link to other Google services such as Translate and Finance.

</comment><comment><USER15> No. Back to where I was before Reader.. Netvibes.. and in a way it's better too (it now has a reader view.) Don't know why there isn't more people namedropping it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I switched to Feedly and I like it so... not really.

</comment><comment><USER17> Digg reader is the perfect replacement, plus the top stories from Digg integrated into it are perfect for finding new things

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been using www.goread.io

It's not perfect, but it's certainly better than Feedly.

</comment><comment><USER19> I stopped using Google Reader when Flipboard came out and Twitter become stronger news filter.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nope. Made me look around and find out about Newzblur and its 'Focus' feature :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Every single day of my life.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm using Digg and pretty happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course...</comment>


Tell HN: PG is speaking at Twiistup in LA - <AUTHOR> http://www.twiistup.com/ <comment><USER2> Eric Ries and Dave McClure will be speaking too. Any ideas if they live stream the keynotes ?

<comment><USER3> I think TechZULU will be streaming this event live. But the atmosphere is what I go for.</comment></comment>


Looking for some honest feedback on Maid Referral website - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone,
A week ago I recently launched my new business, maidsofnj.com, a maid referral business based in NJ. I'm always looking for honest opinions on my work so I thought I'd ask you all to please give me your feedback on my website. I'd like to know what you think when you first visit the website. Does it build trust? If you were a potential customer and you need your home cleaned by a professional, would you pull out your credit card and book an appointment with us with no hesitation?
I'm excited to see how I can improve my website :) <comment><USER2> Hi Aaboh,

My first impressions were that the site has a clean and friendly design and is easily navigable toward the shopping cart. In terms of reliability, as a consumer I would be asking questions like: "How can I evaluate the quality of your cleaning services?" or "Do I have the ability to book a specific maid, based on other customer reviews?"

Some ways of addressing these concerns for me would be:

[1] A testimonials section from reputable sources to inspire me with the confidence to use your service

and [2] A way for users of the service to give feedback on the quality of the cleaning work. If I could see that 50 users gave a particular maid 8 or 9 out of 10, I would be motivated to book that maid -- and perhaps you could charge more for her services, based on her reputation.

Just some thoughts ...</comment>


Show HN : Flicksery - A Netflix Search Engine (my side project) - <AUTHOR>

I built this simple Netflix Search Engine for myself but I think this could be useful to anyone who uses Netflix.
http://www.flicksery.com
Blog post :  http://tmblr.co/ZemAIvYPpv2C
Please let me know your feedback.
Thanks <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links: Flicksery - <http://www.flicksery.com> Blog Post - <http://tmblr.co/ZemAIvYPpv2C>

</comment><comment><USER2> A filter to only get big budget movies, not the "Not to be confused with the big budget film" ones, would be awesome :) Filter by Studio as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kudos to you for building this.

I actually had a netflix free trial about 6 months ago, but searching for content on offer was awful. I actually didn't take a subscription because I didn't think the collection of movies/tv shows was of high enough quality or large enough, but perhaps I just couldn't find what I was looking for!

<comment><AUTHOR> I too had the same problem, but off and on I did find movies that were really good but were hidden somewhere. The only way I could explore it was by building something of my own. After writing this app I have been able to discover some really awesome stuff on Netflix. Really glad that you liked it. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks pretty awesome! Is this your startup or just a side project? I'd love to hear some details about the backend stack.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is just a side project which I basically did to find better movies in Netflix. I did not like the

This is built on Ruby On Rails and MySql as the database. I use Sunspot Solr for Rails for better text search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very useful tool. In my opinion filter by (or order by) released date is a useful feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks cheae !</comment></comment>


You're Not the Yuan That I Want - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-22/china-is-real-roadblock-to-the-yuan-s-emergence <comment><AUTHOR> > all that's changed is that it's now clear that the IMF isn't blocking the > yuan from becoming a true global reserve currency: China is.

> Goldman Sachs has estimated that $1 trillion in international reserves would > flow into Chinese debt markets if the government truly opened them up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Background: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/25/imf-china-sdr- idUS...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/25/imf-china-sdr- idUSL1N12P0JE20151025#yr7T6z4kHim4CtCJ.97)</comment></comment>


Women Iran To Be Completely Banned From Many University Courses - <AUTHOR> http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/08/24/1859226/iran-universities-to-ban-women-from-77-fields-of-study

<comment><AUTHOR> Living in an islamic regime as a woman may be sometimes difficult: always wearing headscarf, having not many rights in business and marriage, etc... But now the regime seems to begin to "kill the minds". Until now, almost every bad islamic regulation could have been reverted under a different government. But reverting the lack of education is impossible. They are now in the mode of killing the mind and freedom of 50% of their population. Stop this crazy religious shit.

<comment><USER2> By destroying the mind, they're killing themselves at the root. Let them get on with it.</comment></comment>


Time and time again we're forced to label new technology as "Creepy"? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-again-were-forced-label-new-technology-creepy-ankit-sehgal <comment><USER2> Forced? Facebook still _is_ creepy and so are web analytics. Why do you think so many people have resorted to ad blockers? I find it amusing that LinkedIn was picked as a platform to claim the non-creepiness of something.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's creepy because we value our privacy, and companies value eroding it to sell us more advertisements.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys. Have a read and let me know what dp you think?</comment>


Single technical founders? - <AUTHOR> I'm a single non-technical founder and where better to look for single technical founders who want to get into Y Combinator than here. Anyone out there? <comment><USER2> what are your interests? are you located near YC?

<comment><AUTHOR> Emailing you now, thanks.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think about a 3D printer for your child(ren)? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a project that may result in a software package that allows children to digitally create toys, then create them in real life on their own (very simple) 3D printer to play with - and I'd love to get your feedback.
If you could include if you're a parent, as well as the age(s) of your child(ren), that'd be very helpful.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'd be worried about:

1) Safety: Choking hazard, heated plastic, etc.

2) The ability for children to be able to use 3D modeling software. (this problem would be solved with the proper software)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very smart but I like "lifeisstillgood's" idea about a workshop in each town! Very clever. Got me thinking...

</comment><comment><USER4> I would much much rather have small maker faire workshops in each town (each school?) as a franchise operation. You can get my subscription by direct debit if you are within bicycle distance</comment>


Post-pixel - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2008/11/postpixel.php

<comment><USER2> I'd be more willing to believe the death of the pixel is neigh when more people are using desktops larger than 1024x768, which still seems to be the minimum acceptable browser window size still.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The iconic pixel is still there - when you come to draw a set of Icon images. What looks OK at 32x32 starts to look like an early Pacman image at 16x16. Still a fight after all these years.</comment>