A way to track people with cellphones with GPS capabilities turned off - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/gps-can-spy-on-you-even-when-you-turn-it-off.html <comment><USER2> There is absolutely nothing novel about using a gyroscope for tracking location; doing so predates the American civil war by 10 years and is 76 years older than sliced bread. This is clickbait for the security set, and I'm ashamed cnbc fell for it.

Disclaimer: I've done work both on side channel attacks and Android security previously.

<comment><USER3> The novel part here appears to be doing shape matching against road maps to improve accuracy. The accelerometers and gyroscope in consumer devices are so inaccurate that any track will be mostly useless after a few minutes, but if they can periodically tie that data back to known map points then accuracy improves a lot.

I'd like to see navigation apps make use of this approach when then lose GNSS signals, like in a tunnel.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, the augmentation reminds me of the Etak Navigator [1] which took a similar approach to remove accumulated errors.

[1] [https://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the- forgot...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3047828/who-needs-gps-the-forgotten- story-of-etaks-amazing-1985-car-navigation-system)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who cares about GPS? Cell towers track you and you can't shut that off.

As I understand it Americans have no consumer rights so your mobile carrier will happily sell you out.

<comment><USER6> You can also be tracked via local wi-fi access points. Google has built a database mapping access points to GPS coordinates. All they need is access to wi-fi information and they can find your location even if you have GPS and 4G disabled. There is really little you can do nowadays to protect your privacy.

<comment><USER7> This was actually how the very first iPhone did it's location tracking when it didn't have a GPS chip in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So it's nothing to do with GPS then? So why is this in the title?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps the author thinks "GPS" refers to the general problem of tracking location, rather than a specific system that solves that problem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What a dumb title. "How GPS can track you without GPS"

<comment><USER11> It is absolutely not "How GPS can track you, even when you turn it off". It's an article for the average consumer and the title should've been "how your location can be found even without GPS". This is just a clickbait-title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR: track location using accelorometer

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, great invention! They should call it "inertial navigation" or something.

<comment><USER14> Doing inertial navigation with the sensors only is not going to work well. In this invention they seem to augment the sensors with external information and deduce the most probable location that way - the article is rather scant on details though.

AFAIK you can be located using cell towers both on the device side and the cell network side.

You can be located with WIFI too: if you have WIFI enabled and communicate the access point names to Google/Apple, your location can be discovered. WIFI AP locations collected beforehand (by something like the Google car or the phone itself) are matched with their known accurate position and the measured AP signal strengths.

And Bluetooth beacons can also be used for location. What else... the pictures you take with the camera and upload to a cloud storage can be used to locate you.

Having a functioning inertial navigation would be very useful for many purposes. For example, offline navigation without GPS (=longer battery life).</comment></comment>


Boycott Linux (inspired by Fork Debian) - <AUTHOR> http://www.boycottlinux.org/

<comment><USER2> You've convinced me. So.. how good is this Minix thing mentioned in the article? Would be it be a good alternative to Linux and and how fast does it load Myspace?

</comment><comment><USER3> Almost. It almost got me.

</comment><comment><USER4> almost got me until he mentions facebook

</comment><comment><USER5> Nicely done.</comment>


Updating Policies - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/updating-policies

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this because I figured HN people would be interested in discussing the section on 'Abuse'.</comment>


Ask HN: Website concept for better dialog in society - <AUTHOR> When a user visits this website, he/she is asked a random political question from a pool of questions. The question has Yes/No answer. For example,
Do you believe US should build a $4bn wall on its border with Mexico?
If the person answers Yes, he/she will be put in a chat room with a person who has answered No. Both of them will be anonymous to each other. The chat room will be private and only the two can talk to each other. But if both of them agree, they can choose to make it public for others to read later.
Can somebody build this? Or can an existing website (say Reddit) be used in this way? <comment><USER2> There are plenty of channels for this sort of thing, for example on reddit you have sub-communities like /r/AskAVegan and /r/AskDocs

<comment><AUTHOR> But they are not one-on-one. They are public. They are not anonymous.

<comment><USER3> "Public forum" is not at all the same thing as "not anonymous".

<comment><AUTHOR> In public forum, anonymity is achieved by pseudonimity (one has to go to a trouble of creating account under fake name). But a service that doesn't have logins, the anonimity is default and easy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inessential: Last Vesper Update, Sync Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> http://inessential.com/2016/08/21/last_vesper_update_sync_shutting_down <comment><USER2> This latest shutdown inspired me to write a blog post[1] in response. It's a shame that developers feel compelled to adopt a scorched earth policy when they no longer wish to support their products. So-called "indie" apps are often marketed as the beautiful, wholesome alternative to grimy corporate or open-source software, but how could I possibly rely on an indie app for essential tasks like note-taking if it's just going to disappear out from under me in a few years? The idea that software has a lifespan controlled by the developer is, in my opinion, toxic to the market.

Brent: if you read this, I really hope you decide to go through with open- sourcing the app, like you mentioned on Twitter. Regardless of the age of the codebase, it would be an incredible thing to dig through (and maybe even maintain).

[1]: [http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/08/21/tool-reliance/](http://beta- blog.archagon.net/2016/08/21/tool-reliance/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The writing was on the wall.

The irony is that the _premium_ price was marketed as a guarantee of perennity.

This must serve as a reminder that third-party cloud storages have a price as well as a maintenance price. Moreover, iOS APIs and devices evolve a lot and ask porting work with every new version. Additionally the more you implement your own custom UI elements the more you expose yourself to additional work when porting to a new device or for the next release. That's certainly why not only the syncing part is shutdown but also the app is not ported to iOS 10 and is removed from the app store.

<comment><USER4> Ditto. Interestingly, Gruber thinks that it was _underpriced_ : [https://twitter.com/gruber/status/767918392342818816](https://twitter.com/gruber/status/767918392342818816)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is actually a good reason for developers to use CloudKit. It wasn't available when Vesper was developed, but had it been they wouldn't been needing to shut sync down, and their customers could keep using all the features.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm saddened to see anyone's hard work disappear, but it's painfully obvious in retrospect that the "app store" model of software distribution that Apple popularized is not sustainable without long(er)-term financial support for the developer. For non-game apps, that means either subscriptions or paid upgrades. I don't think either would have saved Vesper.</comment>


Karl Ove Knausgaard Concludes "My Struggle" - <AUTHOR> https://bookforum.com/inprint/025_03/20134 <comment><USER2> Worth pointing out that Knausgaard concluded My Struggle 6 years ago. It's just that it's only recently been translated to English.

</comment><comment><USER3> I read the first book in My Struggle and quite enjoyed it. In some ways, the author is a real curmudgeon but he's also very open and self-aware about it along with his anxieties and everything else, which was refreshing.

Also his memory is apparently extremely good and the book was rich in detail. My friend tells me book 2 is good and more focused on his kids. I'm sure I'll read it eventually.

</comment><comment><USER4> > My Struggle

That's going to be a doozy to try to market in Germany

<comment><USER2> This book's title actually got changed to My Struggle or "Sterben" Germany. The other book you're thinking of is called My Fight or "Mein Kampf". In the original Norwegian though this book shares its title with that other book.

<comment><USER5> No, it got changed from My Struggle (the English translation of the original title) to "Sterben", which means "dying". The correct German translation of My Struggle would have been "Mein Kampf", and this is why they choose to change the title in German.

I somehow would have liked the actual translation better. Sure, it would have been strange that it would share the title with such an infamous book, and I think that the similarity was not intended by the author. But I don't really like the German titles (they have individual ones for every book, Sterben is just for the last one) and I just like the intellectual honesty of a literal translation.

[Edit] Correction: Sterben is the first volumne, not the last.

<comment><USER6> The similarity is _obviously_ _intented_.

The "original" titles in Norwegian are "Min Kamp" and "Min Kamp: 1" respectively, since Knausgård planned it to be a hexalogy. (Or at least more than one book.)

I suppose it's a slightly controversial title in Norway, but I guess it's too much in Germany.

<comment><USER7> More than slightly, in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't confuse with [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Full-Tom- Wolfe/dp/0553381334](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Full-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0553381334) (which I recommend BTW)

<comment><USER9> We took that bit out of the title above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Who wrote this review? And who did they write it for. I thought language was supposed to convey information not obfuscate it.

<comment><USER11> In what way does this review obfuscate information? I found it lively, descriptive, and detailed with plenty of evidence from the text.

<comment><USER10> "An experimental autobiographical novel singularly immersed in its author's psyche, in which all elegance is abandoned, tedious experiences are embraced, and the act of shitting is evoked, at one point, as "AAAAAAGGGHHH!!"

vs

An experimental novel immersed in its author's psyche, in which elegance is abandoned and the act of shitting is evoked, at one point, as "AAAAAAGGGHHH!!"

I don't want to sit down and have to parse through a book review, I just want to read it.

<comment><USER12> This is a lossy compression: You've removed the distinction that the immersion in the author's psyche is distinct or remarkable, that the novel embraces tedious experience, and that it's autobiographical.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


MathJax Turns 3.0 - <AUTHOR> http://bit-player.org/2020/mathjax-turns-3-0 <comment><USER2> Any software project should be lucky to have a post like this written by a user, let alone as wonderful a writer as Brian Hayes.

On comparison with KaTeX:

• It appears from this comparison page ([https://www.intmath.com/cg5/katex- mathjax-comparison.php](https://www.intmath.com/cg5/katex-mathjax- comparison.php)) that MathJax 3 is about twice as fast as MathJax 2, but still slower than KaTeX. (Though it's variable, e.g. by directly reloading [https://www.intmath.com/cg5/katex-mathjax- comparison.php?pro...](https://www.intmath.com/cg5/katex-mathjax- comparison.php?processor=MathJax3) enough times, I was able sometimes to get load times for MathJax faster than some load times for KaTeX.)

• It is surprisingly difficult to get a clear answer to _what_ exactly one gets in MathJax, in return for this slower speed. One relatively clear thing is that MathJax supports more features, e.g. last I tried something I considered basic was unavailable in KaTeX (IIRC it was adding a \label to an equation and referring to it again elsewhere in the page with \ref). But beyond that, if everything one needs happens to be supported by KaTeX, are there still reasons to use MathJax? One would imagine that someone on the MathJax team, or even a devoted user, would have such a list somewhere, but I haven't been able to find one.

• One thing I remember reading is that MathJax takes a fundamentally different approach, and that a lot of the time it spends is in measuring things on the page to get things exactly right, while KaTeX is looser about things. I do notice just now that on my mobile, where I have accessibility features turned on to zoom text to a larger default font size, with MathJax (on the above comparison page) all the equations are scaled up such that the font size of symbols in the page matches the font size of surrounding text, while KaTeX gets this wrong. What is the extent of such differences?

• Both MathJax and KaTeX support server-side rendering, and the speed differences vanish (for the reader at least) when nothing is being done client-side.

On MathML:

• Disclaimer: I must confess to an annoyance with MathML proponents because (1) they seem to advocate using MathML even though it has poor browser support. (Even in Firefox where it's supported the rendering is often poorer than TeX's), and (2) they seem to imagine (somewhat like the "semantic web" people) some ideal world where authors bother to indicate the semantics of their equations (e.g. what a \sum is a sum over) rather than simply communicate in notation. (Don't want to repeat comments; see this year-old thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19347737) — in particular see the examples and comparison on the Wikipedia article [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MathML&oldid=9454...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MathML&oldid=945451833#Presentation_and_semantics) )

• MathJax does support MathML as an input format (for some tools I guess?), and support for MathML as output format is no longer built-in: see [http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/output/mathml.html](http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/output/mathml.html) versus [https://docs.mathjax.org/en/v2.7-latest/mathml.html](https://docs.mathjax.org/en/v2.7-latest/mathml.html) Anyway, whatever the future of MathML (i.e. even if browsers someday care enough about "proper" mathematics typesetting to render it natively and like TeX), we'll still need something like MathJax or KaTeX running somewhere, as (La)TeX notation is what mathematicians are familiar with, and something like it is what they're likely to want to write.

<comment><USER3> I am a MathJax/KaTeX user, not developer, so some of what I say could be incorrect. I was under the impression that KaTeX does _no_ horizontal measurement to speak of, deferring it instead into CSS and styling calculations carried out by the browser. This is why at the moment KaTeX cannot write to a canvas / SVG representation, only to HTML. On the other hand, I think MathJax takes the more fundamental approach of knowing how to absolutely position every single glyph (although for HTML output, some of these absolute positions are perhaps replaced by more KaTeX-style rules).

This means that at the moment it would be fairly annoying to create a library which renders a commutative diagram such as [1] in KaTeX, as one would have to render each part of the diagram in the browser to calculate sizes, and only then compute positions for arrows - in particular this could only be done ahead-of-time by firing up some headless browser, taking measurements, and then hoping for the best (the client isn't using different font sizes, for example). MathJax seems more suitable for that application due to knowing the sizes of things.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoid_(category_theory)#/medi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoid_\(category_theory\)#/media/File:Monoid_multiplication.svg)

<comment><USER2> Ah that's interesting, thank you. Looks like an interesting design choice, and would explain how it manages to be so fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using KaTeX [1] for browser-based scientific logbook software since it loads and renders much more quickly than MathJax and doesn't make the page text move around while it renders. It doesn't support the complete TeX instruction set (yet) but it gets pretty close.

EDIT: looks like MathJax 3 is a lot quicker to render than older versions [2] - interesting.

[1] [https://katex.org/](https://katex.org/)

[2] [https://www.intmath.com/cg5/katex-mathjax- comparison.php](https://www.intmath.com/cg5/katex-mathjax-comparison.php)

<comment><USER5> Me too, I made an early decision to _not_ use MathJax in our product due to the instant hit to page weight and rendering performance... With Katex you forget that it's even there, we've managed the lack of certain features better than expected - I suppose the general takeaway is that comprehensive features are not always worth the technical cost, especially when they have a direct impact on user experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly, the second demo with the "fixed" layout behavior actually has digits cut off as I move the slider around in my browser; I'm not sure why. More on topic, though, I'm somewhat disappointed that MathML doesn't seem to have taken off as much as it could have: it would be really nice to be able to send some code embedded in HTML and have it render on the client without any JavaScript at all. I wonder if the delay in implementation has anything to do with the abundance of use of MathJax, making working on it low-priority.

<comment><USER7> > I wonder if the delay in implementation has anything to do with the > abundance of use of MathJax, making working on it low-priority.

I've thought the exact same thing before.

In the future I'm planning some articles with math on my personal website, and my current intention is to only use MathML without any JS renderer. I use Firefox so this isn't a problem for me. This would make the page a fair bit lighter, rendering time faster, and maybe make web developers using Chrome think twice about ensuring compatibility as too many websites are Chrome-only these days. ;-) [1]

Seems that there is some progress in getting MathML in Chrome so possibly by the time these articles go online, there won't be an issue.

[https://mathml.igalia.com/faq/#When%20will%20it%20be%20in%20...](https://mathml.igalia.com/faq/#When%20will%20it%20be%20in%20Chrome%3F)

> We have, however, set what we believe is a very achievable and safe target > goal: to get MathML support fully upstreamed and shipping in Chrome by > August 2020.

[1] One major example I noticed in the past few days is that [https://wiki.c2.com/](https://wiki.c2.com/) no longer seems to work in Firefox at all. I just get an error saying "Trouble Encountered". Works fine in Chromium.

<comment><USER8> It's a pity that Google is so short on cash that they apparently can't spare the $320k that's still missing from the funding of the Igalia implementation. All those ads on Google web properties that tell users of MathML supporting browsers to _upgrade to Google Chrome_ must have eaten their development budget.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone point me to (or post) an explanation of how MathJax/Katex work? I.e. what exactly does one have to implement in order to provide the functionality they do? I'm particularly interested in the fonts and rendering side of this. In fact I'd be interested also in reading about how the font and rendering process in a standard desktop LaTeX / dvi / $outputformat works in comparison to the javascript emulations.

<comment><USER2> Broadly speaking:

1\. Parse the user's input (e.g. "{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}") into an internal data structure (math lists, etc -- MathJax apparently uses MathML internally)

2\. Classify the symbols and operators into different styles, with associated sizes and spacing, etc.

3\. Ultimately, decide the position and size of each glyph (where each separate "blob of ink" should go).

4\. Express these positions in the output format, e.g. for MathJax or KaTeX with their native HTML+CSS, you'll get a tag soup of spans with styles like "position: absolute; top: -4.333em; left: 0.566em;" etc. DVI or PDF output formats have their own operators for expressing positions of glyphs.

As far as fonts and rendering are concerned there is not much to this; the glyphs are just picked from a math font that someone has designed (containing glyphs for, say, the integral sign or summation sign or "x" etc).

The interesting work of _typesetting_ that happens in 2 and 3 is described (for TeX, and used by MathJax/KaTeX) in Appendix G of _The TeXbook_ ; you may find it useful to supplement it with pictures and explanation from this article: [https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb27-1/tb86jackowski.pdf](https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb27-1/tb86jackowski.pdf)

If you'd like to know one of these in further detail I can try to explain or look it up :)

<comment><USER9> Wow, thanks very much. I have not yet studied Appendix G or the Jackowski article, but let me see if I have this straight:

Suppose we give the string `\int` to the `latex` executable, and it produces a DVI file.

The DVI file that was produced specifies exactly how the integral symbol should be shaped. It does this by specifying (a) the name of a font that is installed on the user's system and (b) the identity of a glyph within that font that should be used to display the integral symbol.

So, if we now run dvipng, what dvipng does is look up the glyph from that font, and create a rectangular array of pixels that approximate that shape.

Similarly, if we were to run dvisvgm, it would look up the glyph in the font, and create an SVG specification of some curves that can be used to approximate that symbol.

(I have no knowledge of how a font specifies a "glyph"; is it conceptually similar to the way SVG specifies curves?)

<comment><USER2> Yes that's right. Consider a TeX file test.tex containing

        $\int$ \nopagenumbers \bye

or if you prefer LaTeX, containing

        \documentclass{article}\pagestyle{empty}\begin{document}$\int$\end{document}

If you run "tex" or "latex" on this, it will generate a test.dvi. You can look at a human-readable representation of the DVI file with dvitype or dviasm — what it says is to move to a particular position, and set the character at position 82 ('R') from the font "cmex10 at 10pt".

Then you can run either dvipng or dvisvgm (or dvipdfmx, or…) on this, which will take this instruction, read in the font (for example, it may load file /usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmex10.pfb) and replace it with the pixels (at a given resolution) or shape from the font. In case of SVG, it may pick the actual description (as a path) from the (vector) font:

        <glyph unicode='' horiz-adv-x='472' vert-adv-y='472' glyph-name='integraltext' d='M272 -880C259 -1044 223 -1089 166 -1089C153 -1089 123 -1086 102 -1068C131 -1064 139 -1041 139 -1027C139 -998 117 -985 98 -985C78 -985 56 -998 56 -1028C56 -1076 106 -1111 166 -1111C261 -1111 309 -1024 331 -934C344 -882 380 -591 388 -480L407 -231C421 -47 455 -22 500 -22C510 -22 541 -24 563 -43C534 -47 526 -70 526 -84C526 -113 548 -126 567 -126C587 -126 609 -113 609 -83C609 -35 559 0 499 0C404 0 365 -97 348 -173C336 -228 300 -510 291 -631L272 -880Z'/>

\----

You may be interested to know _where_ the description in the font came from. The short answer is "the font designer" (of whatever font is being used). In this case, cmex10 is the "math extension" font from the Computer Modern family designed by Donald Knuth (the author of TeX and METAFONT). He described the shape in METAFONT, etc. All that's another story :)

<comment><USER9> Thank you, very interesting and helpful. (I ran dvitype on that as you suggested.)

I think I'm just going to describe what I'm doing in case you have any more helpful words of advice or thoughts! Obviously no worries if not.

I'm working on a project that involves generating images from LaTeX math fragments and displaying them in a text editor buffer inline with the text, to create an environment for editing LaTeX math without needing to constantly regenerate the PDF. So similar to what also exists in various places, e.g. preview-latex and org-mode in Emacs.

In one sentence: I am struggling to produce non-fuzzy images when using dvipng or imagemagick to produce a PNG.

I am at the stage where I am trying to identify the best image-generation workflows to support. Users might have conventional screens, or high res ("4k?") screens, or high res Apple Retina screens. For example, Emacs org-mode offers the following 3 flows:

* dvisvgm - LaTeX DVI output is converted to SVG and Emacs displays the SVG.

* imagemagick - LaTeX PDF output is converted to PNG by imagemagick and Emacs displays the PNG.

* dvipng - LaTeX DVI output is converted to PNG and Emacs displays the PNG.

I personally own a Macbook Pro with a Retina screen and what I have observed is:

Iff your text editor is built with special support for Retina screens:

1\. Beautiful crisp results can be obtained via dvisvgm.

2\. It is also possible to produce a high resolution PNG and then resize it down in the editor so that it retains its crisp appearance at small size.

However, using dvipng (latex -> dvi -> png) or imagemagick (latex -> pdf -> png) I have not yet managed to obtain any crisp images of math fragments when they are at the size of a conventional line of text on the screen. That's on a Retina screen; I'm also planning to test against a conventional monitor via a raspberry pi.

I believe that dvipng does not include a "pHYs" chunk in the PNG data, and that this may be one reason that I am struggling to create small PNGs with high pixel density.

<comment><USER2> Ah rasterization is another rabbit hole that I don't know much about and can't say anything without trial-and-error experimentation on the specific device :-) But first I'd recommend checking whether the image is being displayed at its natural size, pixel-for-pixel (or conversely that it is being generated to have the number of pixels at which it is going to be displayed -- both imagemagick and dvipng take a dpi option). See also some approaches at [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/44486/pixel- perfect-...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/44486/pixel-perfect- vertical-alignment-of-image-rendered-tex-snippets)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! (And crikey, that is quite a post!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> MathJax 3.0 is a fantastic project and is a huge improvement over MathJax 2.0 (much faster, uses SVG) as well as Katex (by just supporting much more math than Katex).

We use it throughout our company (mathpix.com) and in fact built an abstraction on top of it to render markdown + latex together:

[https://github.com/Mathpix/mathpix-markdown- it](https://github.com/Mathpix/mathpix-markdown-it)

which uses MathJax 3.0 to render math and to do math conversion.

</comment><comment><USER11> I integrated MathJax 2 into my static site generator, and just recently bumped it to version 3 (which is quite different). You can see the result here:

[https://qubyte.codes/blog/the-maths-of-domains-of-points- wit...](https://qubyte.codes/blog/the-maths-of-domains-of-points-with-spokes)

And you can see the code which integrates version 3 (in this case by hacking marked to render it in fenced markdown blocks labelled as mathematics) here:

[https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte- codes/blob/master/lib/rende...](https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte- codes/blob/master/lib/render.js)

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anybody know if there is a C/C++ (MIT oder equal) library that has few dependencies and can generate images from equations, similar to MathJax? (I.e. not LaTeX due to not a library and a lot of dependencies)

<comment><USER13> Not a C/C++ library, but you can maybe call out to node to get SVGs, see [https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-demos- node/blob/master/co...](https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax-demos- node/blob/master/component/tex2svg) via [http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/server/start.html#node- sta...](http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/server/start.html#node-start) then Inkscape for svg to png conversion, see [https://github.com/softcover/softcover/blob/master/lib/softc...](https://github.com/softcover/softcover/blob/master/lib/softcover/builders/epub.rb#L361-L369)

But I think the above pipeline is even more external-dependecyful than using the real latex...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does someone know, if MathJax can be utilized as renderer for a static web site? I do this with KaTeX for my Pelican-based blog successfully, after I found no way to integrate MathJax easily into the workflow.

<comment><USER11> I commented elsewhere, but yes it can! It took a bit of head scratching but I got there in the end with my own Node.js based static site generator. This code integrates version 3 of MathJax, which was considerably different to version 2.

[https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte- codes/blob/master/lib/rende...](https://github.com/qubyte/qubyte- codes/blob/master/lib/render.js)

See in particular the top of that file, and the renderMaths function. I'm not sure how you'll integrate MathJax into Pelican given the language gap, but in principle it's possible.

<comment><USER14> My KaTex/Pelican-based solution is here (don't mind - new blog, no real content yet, but the technical side is visible):

[https://depot.traits.de/](https://depot.traits.de/)

Feature test here:

[https://depot.traits.de/pages/2020/02/21-rest- example.html](https://depot.traits.de/pages/2020/02/21-rest-example.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish I could copy math from the document I am reading, then paste it into a text editor like I can with ordinary non-math text on most web pages.

<comment><USER3> Plain monospaced text is pretty awful for reading mathematics - why not switch to something higher-bandwidth with rich text, pictures, and mathematics?

<comment><USER15> Good point. My comment would've been better with "editor" instead of "text editor".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any large arc applications out there? - <AUTHOR>

We're all aware that Hacker News is written in arc and I'm using arc for UseTheSource.  Is anyone else hacking large-ish application in arc? <comment><USER2> I think you might have better luck asking on the arc forum.

<http://arclanguage.org/forum>

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of the discussion on the Arc forum is about developing the language itself. Maybe it's that no one discusses other projects, but I don't get the feeling too many people are actually building things in Arc.

I haven't done anything large either (I have a decent-sized amount of Arc code, but it's mostly collections of smaller things, e.g., solutions to 50 Project Euler problems), but one of the projects I'm hacking on could become large soon.</comment>


Why Retina Isn't Enough - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/173702/why-retina-isnt-enough-feature/

<comment><USER2> I already was skimming, but they completely lost me at _"If you have 20/20 vision, it's generally accepted that, from this distance, each pixel on the E is now one arc minute in size."_ The angle that a feature extends on one's eye is independent of one's eyesight. If it is one arc minute for you, it is one arc minute for a blind person at the same distance.

</comment><comment><USER3> What? We don't even _have_ retina displays in anything but a single laptop model yet, and it's already "not enough"?

Some people are never satisfied. Geez.</comment>


Oracle starts to audit Java customers, demanding payment for J2SE - <AUTHOR> http://nordic.businessinsider.com/oracle-starts-to-audit-java-customers-2016-12 <comment><AUTHOR> OK, this was a repost which was previously covered in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13198960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13198960)

Sorry...</comment>


Quixotic effort to secede California from U.S. to get reboot - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/31/california-secede-america-effort-752491 <comment><USER2> Calling this movement "Quixotic" appears to inject a slightly elitist, overly negative evaluation of the goal. California is a powerhouse on its own, from farming all the way to technology, and could very well thrive with fully open immigration and free trade agreements with the rest of America, plus Asia and Europe. Come to think of it, there might be other States that would be fine doing the same?</comment>


Apple vs FBI legal filing - <AUTHOR> http://bgr.com/2016/02/25/apple-vs-fbi-legal-filing/ <comment> amar-singh It seems that the fight between Apple & FBI is not going to end so soon. FBI should respect company policy's and integrity.</comment>


Show HN: Pennyearned, a free Pinboard like spending tracker - <AUTHOR> https://pennyearned.in?hn=1 <comment><USER2> It would be helpful to add a tour page with features and screenshots.

[https://pinboard.in/tour/](https://pinboard.in/tour/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback tedminston.</comment></comment>


Company fined $300,000 for posting fake reviews online - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/technology/internet/15lift.html <comment><USER2> Three cheers for the NY Attorney General. Fake commercial posts and non- disclosed pay-to-posts are clearly deceptive false advertising.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. It's a good day for common sense. Usually when laws are applied to the internet, everything flies out the windows. "Oh it's on a computer? Well that's different!"

It's nice to see false advertising on a public site treated the same way false advertising in a magazine would.

<comment><USER4> If astroturfing is false advertising, does this case mean that any review of a product is also advertising? If I post a positive review of, say, cigarettes and I don't comply with various regulations does that now open me up to having my house seized and being thrown in jail?

<comment><USER5> A company giving positive reviews as non-existent customers on consumer products for money is fraud. I worked as a reviewer and I worked hard to be honest and genuine, this kind of BS that goes on on amazon.com and places is insulting to all reviewers because generally you work very hard and don't get nearly enough pay.

Oh BTW your house is at risk with virtually any company you start until you get limited liability, so I don't really get what point you're trying to make. Almost anyone can start an ULC for the very reason that if you fail and get hugely in debt (like a large amount of companies do) then the bank still gets its money. You either need to have the money to cover your expenses up front, or you risk losing your home.

My father has run a business all his life, but all the important stuff was always in my mothers name and never joint so if he ever had a problem the house and cars weren't going to disappear without a major fight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The company will pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the state. _It has > also agreed to stop publishing anonymous reviews on Web sites in the voices > of satisfied customers and to identify any content created by employees, the > statement said._

Emphasis mine. I would think that agreeing to stop the behavior that landed them in court would be implied. It would be mildly interesting to me to find out if this kind of clause is added because it _needs_ to be added.

<comment><USER7> They always say that. Don't know why, but every time there is a settlement a clause like this is part of it. Even for things way more obviously bad than this.

<comment><USER8> I would assume the penalties could then be made even more serious, because if they do it again, they're explicitly violating the settlement agreement. So, then they'd be on the hook for violating the contract, as well as a similar deceptive advertising charge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's great to see people getting nailed for biased posts -- but I suspect that people posting misinformation for _emotionally_ satisfying reasons actually cause more harm.

If the AG is serious about prosecuting harmful behavior, rather than evil capitalists, he ought to go after anyone who would rather forward an email than fact-check, or who argues for a viewpoint because of feel-good emotions ("All decent, NPR-listening, upper-middle-class white folks like me _know_ this is right") rather than facts.

<comment><USER2> This is about stopping a form of business-funded deceptive advertising. This is not about regulating private behavior or private speech. You can say (or forward) whatever you want as an individual. The issue here is dishonest commercial speech...

<comment><USER9> I really, really hope you don't actually believe that. You seem to be arguing that a claim made for reasons you don't like is morally inferior to a more harmful claim made for reasons you do like.

Is it really worse for one commercially-minded person to say "Try Acme Widget; I hear they give great service!" than for a well-meaning person to say "No decent person can afford to give these potential Satanic Ritual Abusers (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers>) the benefit of the doubt."?

It's fine to say that someone should not make harmful claims due to commercial motivations. But I don't see why the motivation is the concern, not the harm of the claim. Would you rather live in a world in which harmful claims aren't made, or a world in which harmful claims are made all the time, but at least the way people are compensated for them isn't monetary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't this more or less what the parrot book guy was doing?

<comment><AUTHOR> good point, it seems like this would take out all of those landing page type sites

<comment><USER11> Assuming that the reviews are in fact fake. How would you determine this?

<comment><AUTHOR> well for one, noone writes like they do in those reviews. You can taste the fakeness

<comment><USER12> Someone does...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is funny. There's going to be a huge applause for this post but whenever there's an article about an individual being prosecuted for piracy... it's the evil RIAA.

Edit: I'm not trying to turn this into a a piracy argument but I do think there's a double standard there.

<comment><USER14> The part that incites anger isn't prosecuting someone for behavior on the internet, it's the actual behavior. Astro-turfing reviews hurts consumers and thus this prosecution is applauded by consumers. Consumers downloading music hurts the producers and thus is applauded by the producers (well, some of them).

It's really not hard to understand why seeing the "little" guy be attacked incites more popular anger than the reverse.

<comment><USER13> I think it's pretty obvious why the little guy story is more popular but i think both stories are pretty much the same.

Numbers aside, putting a significant fine on a company that's breaking the law is no different than a fine on an individual. It's meant to make an example out of them to discourage similar behavior in the future... no?

<comment><USER15> So by this standard, HN should applaud prosecutions and searches under the new blasphemy laws in Ireland, because breaking the law is no different, no matter the law?

<comment><USER13> These headlines will typically turn into a cheercamp and I was just pointing that out. I probably worded it poorly but let's not applaud or boo at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just curious, what law where they breaking?</comment>


Show HN: Feeds Pub – A social RSS aggregator - <AUTHOR> https://feeds.pub <comment><USER2> For a social aggregator, sharing seems more important than elegance and live above it on the landing page. Indeed mentioning elegance is a bit inelegant. It's probably ok to let elegance be implicit. It matters a lot to you, but your users aren't buying art to hang on the wall. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Make sense! Thanks for your advice, should definitely update the landing page.</comment></comment>


Web hosting recommendations? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to get a VPS (or other web hosting service--enlighten me if I should be getting something else) for a few personal projects of mine. Any suggestions for good companies to look at?<p>My requirements:<p>- root access to the server (I want to be able to install whatever I want)<p>- good out-of-box performance--I once worked on a 1&1 VPS that segfaulted every few hours; got rid of it before figuring out why<p>- disk space, bandwidth, hardware, cpu speed aren't so important. <comment><USER2> Search this site with site:news.ycombinator.com hosting - it's been covered extensively in the past.

</comment><comment><USER3> corenetworks.net have been really good, dedicated servers down to 25 bucks per month.

</comment><comment><USER4> layeredtech.com has been good</comment>


Apple rises iPhone 5 price to 899€ (+32%) - <AUTHOR>

http://store.apple.com/de/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone <comment><USER2> At least 20% of that are sales taxes. The rest covers import duties, local logistics and distribution, local marketing and other local costs and taxes.</comment>


Visit the Wrong Website, and the FBI Could End Up in Your Computer (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2014/08/operation_torpedo/ <comment><USER2> The FBI "Could" be in my computer? Imagine that world, one where the man "might" be spying on you.

<comment><USER2> To be clear, "The Man" in this case means software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think I'm totally fine with this. The only issue I can see is whether or not the warrants to hack these servers are justified. Warrants should be issued when there's good reason to suspect criminal activity, and if they're issued to search obviously innocent people then that's wrong, just like all other warranted searches or spying that don't involve computers or hacking.

<comment><USER4> The reason why drive by attacks are so effective is that often you don't even have to visit the site intentionally. One "trusted" site with some malware can be used to attack people that never actually intentionally visit it, whether be by normal content syndication or by the same attackers using exploits in other sites (content injection) or spamming links, embedding HTML content in emails etc.

What also is important to note that drive by attacks in most cases exploit browser vulnerabilities unless the FBI is really stooping so low to basically run "download codec" or "update flash player" type of phishing attacks that actually depend on the user downloading and running an executable they'll also have to maintain a large enough repository of zero day attacks that target browsers.

Now the problem with "cyber warfare" is that it's basically return to the old days of throwing rocks, one of the reasons we've switched from rocks to bullets is not only because bullets are more effective but because the enemy can't pick up a bullet and shoot it back at you.

When you distribute malware to attack your targets you giving them a rock that can be just as easily turned on you or anyone else, and considering that at least some substantial portion of their intended targets are individuals with sufficient knowledge in computer security to be able to pick up that rock you are now having the FBI handing out zero days to criminals.

<comment><USER5> > One "trusted" site with some malware can be used to attack people that never > actually intentionally visit it

The only thing that bothers me about this is that someone could deliberately embed an iframe of the bugged website similar to a SWATTING attack. So far that doesn't seem to be happening though?

<comment><USER4> It does, or did, browsers are better protected against iframe injection and various click jacking attacks but it still can happen.

If the FBI has a zero day that doesn't need anything but the content being loaded by the browser to execute code on the target you can easily spread it to anyone you like via content injection, email phishing, old school simply via social media "hey look at this [http://goo.gl/P!shing"..](http://goo.gl/P!shing"..).

Also since many zero days affect things like flash or the rendering engine it self and thus could be simply exploited via images or any other embedded object you could even do it easier by simply adding that png or webm with the exploit to every forum, blog post, tweet etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OWASP 2019 A7: cross-site framing.</comment>


Ex-CIA VC legally builds AR-15 with Makerbot & amazon  - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com.au/i-3d-printed-an-ar-15-assault-rifle-and-it-shoots-great-2013-12

<comment><USER2> Interesting project. Nothing that can't be done without a 3D printer though. Motherjones had an article[0] where the author built his own rifle using a similar method, without the fancy Makerbot.

Also, his point about 3D printers being the 1980s personal computers is off. They're a lot closer to the desktop home paper printers that came out in the 80s. Yes, they let you do something you couldn't do beforehand, but at much higher cost, much lower quality, and much slower than the processes used by industry. Just because I have a laser printer doesn't mean I should print copies of my own book to sell. Flyers for a party? Yes. 3D printers are the same. Print a common household item I'd buy at Walmart? Unlikely. Print a cover for the bottom of my old bike shifter that I can't find online? Yes.

[0] [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/ak-47-semi- autom...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/ak-47-semi-automatic- rifle-building-party)</comment>


Using HTML5/Canvas/Javascript to take screenshots - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4912092/using-html5-canvas-javascript-to-take-screenshots/6678156#6678156

<comment><USER2> Gecko has a really nice css feature called -moz-element (<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/-moz-element>) that can be used to apply a _live_ view of a dom subtree as the background of another element.

People have done some awesome stuff with this, such as reflections, transition effects, and even recreating the blurred aero skin, by combining it with svg effects.

<http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/08/mozelement/> [https://developer.mozilla.org/media/uploads/demos/D/a/David%...](https://developer.mozilla.org/media/uploads/demos/D/a/David%20Mulder/c65123ae9f13eaf293101077308a23f0/aero- windows_1316465302_demo_package/index.html)

And what's even cooler, this has been added to the CSS3 draft spec, so it might actually soon be implemented in the other layout engines! <http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-images/#element-reference>

</comment><comment><USER3> Are these screenshots though?

I thought the point of a screenshot was to capture how the page/screen has been rendered by an actual browser/platform. Isn't this a different rendering? If the quirks aren't rendered then the use is limited.

<comment><USER4> The original question was to know how Google was driving their G+ feedback feature. In the context of capturing user feedback, the point of a screenshot is to relay information about the state of the user's environment to someone else, without the need for physical proximity.

In my experience, users who report feedback are typically concerned more with the data on the page than how the page itself looks when it's rendered. In these cases, a screenshot acts as proof and can immediately focus the problem without requiring a lot of written description. Among users who have non- trivial feedback about a website, the likelihood of their being able to clearly and concisely describe their problem is vanishingly small, and removing the friction of attaching screenshots to their issue reports is immensely helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you haven't seen it yet, the "Shooter" addon for firefox basically does this same sort of thing (screenshot of page by using the canvas). <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/shooter/>

The only real bug I've seen in it is the use of white as the default background color in pages, with all page styles (and css files) loaded on top... This means it's (properly?) ignoring the user defined page background color.

<comment><USER6> Code that runs with access to the chrome can "cheat" and just use

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Drawing_Graphics_with_Canva...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Drawing_Graphics_with_Canvas#Rendering_Web_Content_Into_A_Canvas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Try using their console: <http://html2canvas.hertzen.com/screenshots.html>

Very impressive! Can someone explain how _exactly_ does it work? Has the author implemented a renderer inside JavaScript?

<comment><USER8> He explains on its GitHub page[1]—"the script renders the current page as a canvas image, by reading the DOM and the different styles applied to the elements."

[1] <https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas#readme>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nifty but still not convinced that is how Google is doing it.

How do you handle iframes with content external to the domain?

<comment><AUTHOR> They use a proxy for that (though currently its not implemented properly - example: they are directly sending /background-image urls as /proxy/url("someimage") - so not loading). But I think this is a nice base to build on. All that needs to be done is render more css properties and send url("") for images properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, that's impressive. Works really well.

</comment><comment><USER10> I used this for our screenshot app as well :) It's really nice. Some quirks, but those are hardly noticeable.</comment>


Things I've never heard a successful startup founder say - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/quotes-startup-founders.html <comment><USER2> Great list! A few more:

We're so successful because we're smarter than everyone else.

We learned everything we needed to know in college.

Our technology was so good, it was only a matter of time before everyone found us.

Most of our unit tests were successful on the first run.

We were usually able to knock off at 5 p.m.

Customer service issues went pretty much as we expected.

We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, they realized that.

We always had plenty of time to spend with our family and friends.

We outsourced all of the technical work.

I'm so glad I spent so much time on Hacker News.

<comment><USER3> > We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, they realized that.

Pretty sure I've read quotes from Steve Jobs that follow that line of thinking actually.

<comment><USER4> Sadly, I know a few entrepreneurs that also think this way. They're not having much success, but cling to the notion that the world will 'wake up' and see things their way, eventually, some day, if they could just talk to enough people (and they usually cite Apple as their inspiration for this approach).

The Steve Jobs / Apple approach is more the exception that proves the rule, and even then, they've had their Newton moments too. What _that_ proves is that with a successful enough company you can have a few failures. When you've only got the one product, you can't afford the luxury of your own Newton.

<comment><USER5> The first thing Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was kill off the Newton. There's been the occasional slip, but nothing too ghastly (except the flower power iMacs).

<comment><USER6> why did he return to apple? everyone forget this, because he couldn't have the same luck at his second company.

also apple would have forwarded the osx success a couple years if the acquired beos instead of next. so that was steves luck acting again

<comment><USER7> I'm no huge fan of the NeXT underpinnings of OS X, but the idea that using BeOS as an underlying operating system "would have forwarded the osx success a couple years" is silly.

Aside from the still-continuing claims of Be adherents and their Haiku descendants, BeOS was so very much Nothing Special and I find it highly unlikely the Magic BeOS Fairy Powder would have materially improved OS X.

<comment><USER6> it had an amazing multimedia framework. it had even patents for hardware stuff that put the later firewire to shame. and it had the best os api I've ever had to deal with.

it had everything that os8 lacked, and that later was added on osx only. except objectivec... but there were even compilers for that later on.

but thats not even my point. to downvote me above, first answer: how many clients next had?

<comment><USER5> BeOS was interesting on the surface and had a couple of neat ideas, but wasn't a substantial system underneath. Heck, it didn't even have the concept of user accounts and file ownership!

Anyone who laments the outcome of the Be/NeXT decision clearly knows little about _just how much rock solid foundation_ came along with NeXT -- most notably the development tools and developer ecosystem.

The Mac ecosystem has experienced a consumer renaissance through iDevices/iOS, but also a _geek_ renaissance through Mac OS X's UNIX underpinnings.

Classic Mac OS was derided as a toy (and in many technical respects it was), and BeOS would have done nothing _long term_ to shed the Mac's toy image. Today, few people call OS X a toy.

<comment><USER6> I find file permissions just an annoyance on my debian desktop that I share only with my wife. And I deal with unix security since the early 90's. OSX has file permissions and about 30% of them are setuid. Great improvement!

Also, BeOS had an Xwindow port months after it's death. OSX had it when?

IOS is a completely different beast. I don't even imagine why you are mentioning this. But the beos hybrid kernel would be good for that as well. heck it was even bought by palm for that purpose. sadly politics never moved it. even Next took a lot of time to be absorbed in apple ...and they had the ceo at their side.

About the tech that matter... there was nothing super new about objective C. ever heard of smalltalk? anyways, GNU implemented all that 3 years after NEXT, and they were not even being paid. Meanwhile Next were licensing PS from adobe for the interface just like SGI was doing for what? 10 years?

No matter how many buttons had your rock solid development tools. it was just like programming in VB. and if you wanted to do anything just a little different, you had to deal with awful apis and post script. heck, there's one layer of hell with the same name.

now, on the other hand, I invite you to read the BeOS book that is now opensourced... from oreilley if i'm not mistaken. Even the OS being dead now, it's the best read if you ever want to learn anything about elegant APIs design.

...i know all that is pointless... <http://xkcd.com/386/#Duty_Calls> ...but i just can't stand to see apple taking any underserved merit for being cool

<comment><USER5> > I find file permissions just an annoyance

Maybe for you. However Mac OS X does manage them well for you, which means that you can set up limited access and guest accounts on your computer without worrying about someone fucking it up or looking at your shit.

> IOS is a completely different beast. I don't even imagine why you are > mentioning this.

I mentioned it because the products sparked a revival of the Apple brand in consumer's minds. But yeah, now you mention it, the technology did do a great job of scaling down to the phone. BeOS might have been fine too, but hey, Palm chose a Linux kernel instead.

We're discussing could-have-beens, which is pointless.

> there was nothing super new about objective C. ever heard of smalltalk?

With that line of argument, there's been nothing new in computer languages for thirty years.

I'm sure you love your BeBox and spend your life porting stuff like Firefox to Haiku, but as cool as BeOS was _on the surface_ , the world has past it by. Stop lamenting what could have been, there's no interesting arguments to be had there.

> i just can't stand to see apple taking any underserved merit

Whereas giving too much credit to experimental failed projects like BeOS isn't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Reading pithy superficial quotes about startups changed my companies trajectory."

</comment><comment><USER9> Some more still:

"May I mambo dogface on the banana patch?"

"My hovercraft is full of eels"

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

 _It turns out_ that this - "things I've never heard _class of person X_ say" rhetorical device is a fine way to lend credence to what would otherwise be a simple collection of one-line assertions about how to do startups.

Not saying that I agree or disagree with many of the sentiments here, just that this is a very back-door way of adding authority to a bunch of statements. In the case of Jason Cohen, I'd pay attention if he just made the statements flat based on his own experience.

<comment><USER10> _It turns out that this - "things I've never heard class of person X say" rhetorical device is a fine way to lend credence to what would otherwise be a simple collection of one-line assertions about how to do startups._

So? What's wrong with rhetorical devices? You can't win people over with logic alone. Believe me, I've tried.

<comment><USER11> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophism>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "My lack of an MBA degree made building a company from scratch harder for me than for others."

Are all the entrepreneurs you've talked with the kind of people who made something like Wufoo or HARO? Because if you were trying to do a rollup or start a wireless company then I think having an MBA would make a pretty big difference.

<comment><USER13> At the risk of saying something heretical on HN, I wish we'd all stop the mindless MBA bashing. For every clueless MBA "idea guy" leaping headfirst into the tech world and flailing around like an idiot, there are plenty of newly minted MBAs entering the field and doing just fine for the companies that hire them. The old stereotype is largely a relic of the late-90s Dotcom Bubble, and I submit that it's not as representative as it once was.

There are plenty of folks out there who benefit from the business training and fundamentals an MBA curriculum provides. Obviously there are just as many people who _don't_ need MBAs, or who succeeded without the degree. That's cool. Different strokes for different folks. Let's stop thinking in such Manichean terms about the degree.

<comment><USER14> _"The old stereotype is largely a relic of the late-90s Dotcom Bubble"_

That is why the "mindless bashing" is so important. It is a defence mechanism. It is vitally important that we remember from our past mistakes and codifying that knowledge into stereotypes is a great way of making sure that knowledge sticks around an is remembered.

Besides, I don't think many MBAs are losing sleep over a few techies on HN thinking that they're full of shit.

<comment><USER15> It's a defense mechanism for sure - but not for that reason. The real reason, in my view, is that techies are terrible at recognizing intelligence/skill if it does not somehow relate to math, logic, or, more concretely, code. I have no idea why, but the shoe fits.

When presented with the numerous and obvious counter-examples to "MBA's are full of shit", they clam up and resort to "yeah, but they're assholes, immoral, and basically stole their way to the top".

If you can't code, you're not smart. And if you're not smart, how are you more successful than me? (Success is derived from smarts, right? Dammit, I'm SMART.) Therefore you must be a cheating douche bag. And man, there are a lot of you cheating douche bags.

No, the problem is not the MBA. It is the refusal of some to accept a broader world view in which different people can do great things despite vastly varying approaches and skills.

<comment><USER14> _"It's a defense mechanism for sure - but not for that reason. The real reason, in my view, is that techies are terrible at recognizing intelligence/skill if it does not somehow relate to math, logic, or, more concretely, code. I have no idea why, but the shoe fits."_

I really don't agree. I have/had nothing against business people (they always threw _way_ better parties in college after all ;).

Similarly, MBAs are great at _running_ businesses. The trouble arises when we do what we did in the 90s and let them _drive_ the businesses, _make_ the businesses, that sort of thing.

The issue can be summed up I think as MBAs squeezing out high status technologists ([http://www.codebelay.com/blog/2011/08/14/low-status-and- high...](http://www.codebelay.com/blog/2011/08/14/low-status-and-high-status- technologists/)). When that happens, the 90s happen. To fight this perceived threat, we have negative stereotypes that keep people on their toes. They are essentially antibody memes.

<comment><USER16> <i>Similarly, MBAs are great at running businesses. </i>

Incorrect. An MBA is only proven to be great at one thing. Getting a Masters in Business degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A few more:

\- I don't need to worry about the product. I hired someone for that.

\- Hiring is for HR.

\- I will be spending August on an island in the South Pacific.

\- It is ok to miss payroll.

\- Our value add to the customer-centric value chain is based on world class process excellence principles.

\- That's not my job.

<comment><USER18> I've heard the 3rd one a few times.

<comment><USER17> After the startup succeeded or before? :-)

<comment><USER18> After

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The company structure can matter a lot. IANAL, but my understanding is that an LLC is not an appropriate choice for a company that hopes to be acquired or issue an IPO.

So don't obsess over it, but be sure you have competent advisers including an attorney who can help you make the right choice in such matters.

<comment><USER20> I don't know about US, but here in India, you can re-incorporate. I don't see how that can be an issue - operate as a LLC(if you have reasons to) - re- incorporate later when you are becoming a potential acquisition target. I don't think whoever is going to acquire you will decide not to just because you are going to re-incorporate.

<comment><USER21> In the US, you can form a corporation and then merge your LLC into it, thus tranforming your LLC into a corp. So yeah, it may lead to extra work down the road, but it's not a life-or-death decision at the beginning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've witnessed the first one...

<comment><USER23> The first one was definitely a mantra of the Google-acquired start-up I used to work for. My boss was unhappy with existing software in our field of expertise, so we set out to build something that makes us happy, not other people. It helped that we (especially my boss) knew more about the field than nearly all of our customers, so our customers bandwaggoning on our software was not surprising to me.

<comment><USER24> Yes, building what you know is right is satisfying, but can be a hard road. You have to educate at every level.

Ask a farmer in 1900 what he wanted, he would have said "A stronger horse that eats less oats". Never would he have said "a tractor".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I thought I was going to work less starting my own company than when I had a corporate job.

</comment><comment><USER18> One I've never heard:

We were an overnight success.

</comment><comment><USER26> "We owe our success to ITIL certification before launching. Period."

</comment><comment><USER27> "Changing the world is nice, but I mainly did it for the money."

</comment><comment><USER28> What about:

After I found my great co-founder(s) we had never had to bother with other employees.

</comment><comment><USER29> In my own personal experience this list seems kind of dubious. I've never said any of those things and I'm not a successful entrepreneur.

Must be something more to it than a list of Bad Words (tm).

</comment><comment><USER30> Spending all that time on finding a great name paid off.

<comment><USER31> I think the founders of Mint.com could have said that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> _Our most effective marketing campaigns where the ones filled with buzzwords and non-specific claims._

s/where/were/

</comment><comment><USER33> 'Actually, we just inadvertently happened to be in the right place at the right time. We got lucky.'

</comment><comment><USER34> "I regret having done a startup"</comment>


Reddit.com: Mozilla Firefox Start Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/info/qgmu/comments/?already_submitted=true <comment><USER2> noobs</comment>


Apple keeps rejecting App Store apps with random words that are "private" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/jakemarsh/status/776205831922528256 <comment><AUTHOR> See also: [https://twitter.com/steipete/status/777939367482580992](https://twitter.com/steipete/status/777939367482580992)

Developers write classes that happen to contain methods or properties like "zip", "granted", "titleForSection" and Apple outright bans the app because somewhere, some internal apple class happen to have a method with the same name.

There is no definite list of banned words anywhere, so developers have to refactor their apps and resubmit and cross their fingers that Apple never used any of their method or property names in secret classes.

<comment><USER2> So basically, they ask you to submit obfuscated code?</comment></comment>


Rhombus Tech 2nd revision A10 EOMA68 Card working samples - <AUTHOR> http://slashdot.org/submission/2599017/rhombus-tech-2nd-revision-a10-eoma68-card-working-samples

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been following this project for a while. I remember seeing a comment around here, referring to it as "vaporware" so I am glad to see they have some working samples now, and I hope to see their Flying Squirrel user-upgradeable tablet soon on the market.</comment>


Treating the Web as an archive: Finding the financial crises ground zero online - <AUTHOR> http://eaves.ca/2009/04/30/treating-the-web-as-an-archive-or-finding-the-financial-crises-ground-zero-online/

<comment><USER3> That title seems inaccurate for a posting that talks about a single article. Having a cogent argument for why exactly that specific event was "ground zero" would have been better.

<comment><USER4> The post was about the Internet granting people easy access to pieces of the past which are easy to forget or generalize or overlook when they're not readily right in front of your face.

"I sometimes wish that the New York Times had run this article again in the last few months, just so we could get reacquainted with the individuals - <USER2> Larry Summers - and political parties - both - that got Americans into this mess." While that is a good sentiment (and probably a good idea), the point I took away from the article is that if people really use the web to its full potential, the NY Times wouldn't _have_ to reprint that story, since its existence could be linked to and summoned and quoted by anyone who wanted to look, since it's there. The web is so much about what's happening right now that people, I think, sometimes forget to look at it through the lens of an enormous reasonably-easily-accessible historical record.

<comment><USER3> And my point is that historical research generally involves picking through lots of bits of archival material, weighing each bit's validity, and constructing a balanced historical narrative. The title of the piece made me expect that, and when I found that it only looked at one specific article, I was somewhat disappointed.

Instead it ended up a breathless piece with an "the internet changes everything" when in fact, it doesn't. Before the internet, newspapers were available in libraries on microfilm. It took more effort, but the same information was available.</comment></comment></comment>