How a new type of "evercookie" tracks you online - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/08/economist-explains-3

<comment><USER2> This seems reasonably easy to disable.

Off the top of my head: when rasterizing text, use a pseudo-random, invisible perturbation of a few pixels in the output bitmap seeded with a hash of the current domain and perhaps the number of days since the epoch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Other threads about this paper:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8064934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8064934)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8147376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8147376)

</comment><comment><USER4> I would think you could get away with using (ip, user-agent) to, fairly reliably, recreate a cookie. It seems like it would be pretty rare for a user to clear their cookies _and_ get a new IP address at the same time.

<comment><USER5> The correlations can be pretty taxing though, these processes are cheap and client-side.

<comment><USER6> Bingo: the beauty of the cookie is that the client stores it for you.

If you start storing IP address and user agent info, you open yourself to attacks that try to flood your database. If a botnet visits your website with millions of different IP addresses, and each one fakes half a dozen user agents, oops!

(The lesson from TCP and why it has SYN cookies now.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If third-party scripts are used to perpetrate these ever-cookie exploits, then the NoScript extension in Firefox may be effective against them. With NoScript, you can block Javascript on a site-by-site basis. Many websites are quite functional even when you disable much of the third-party Javascript that they rely on (Javascript fetched from domains other than the one matching that site). For instance, I've never had a problem with any site that uses Javascript from Google Analytics, even though I block it.

<comment><USER7> They've gone and labelled the many different ways a browser can be tracked across websites as "ever-cookies". Most, if not all of the methods mentioned have been used for more than 12 months. That's a long time in the online advertising world.</comment></comment>


AMD Ryzen Full Lineup Prices, Specs and Clock Speeds Leaked - <AUTHOR> http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-full-lineup-pricing-clock-speeds-leaked/ <comment><USER2> Given the price and the feature comparison to Intel, Ryzen sounds awesome. Hopefully it will spark new innovation between AMD and Intel. And hopefully AMD will life up to where it was once when they gave name to the AMD64 architecture.

<comment><USER3> > feature comparison

Are there interesting features that differentiate them from Intel beyond performance/cost? As in new instructions or things like that?

<comment><USER4> No, and as far as high end instructions then only 128bit AVX is natively supported on Zen, with 256bit AVX possible with half the throughput and no 512bit AVX support at all. That said because Intel disables AVX2 in half its SKU's at least that will likely not to be a major impact. As far as other features it's still TBD, virtualization works better on Intel currently, some other platform dependant issues would also probably still favor intel. Intel makes their storage, networking and USB in house, AMD doesn't, AM3 storage and USB performance were considerably slower than Intel's solution and it's yet to be seen what AM4 will provide.

AM4 will come with USB3.0/3.1 from ASMEDIA and will only support a single NVME drive, so if you are looking for a professional workstation, need high speed storage, ECC, and can utilize quad channel low latency memory then Intel is still likely the way to go even with blue team tax.

If you need multi GPU support and NVME at the same time, as well as other peripherals that use PCIE then you also might need to look at intel still since Zen will only come with 28 PCIE lanes. Hopefully they've sorted their PCIE performance issues at least, AM3 not only had bandwidth limitation due to PCIE 2.0 support but also had a much higher PCIE latency for unexplained reasons.

<comment><USER5> I think what AMD is really trying to do, or what they should do, is place emphasis on the gaming community and drop any/all enterprise related features, and let Intel keep doing that part.

<comment><USER4> Kinda, but then they should've released a 4C/8T with very high clock rate CPU at around the 200-250$ mark for that.

Intel's 7700Ks can easily hit the 5ghz mark on aftermarket air and AIO water cooling.

Games aren't optimized well beyond 2 cores, with games that are optimized for more than 4 cores being particularly unheard off.

Games aren't an application that supports parallelism that well since your sound, physics, AI and graphics threads all have to be synced within a single frame otherwise everything falls apart.

The worst case for Zen is going to be the not here and not there CPU, with price slashed 7700K mopping the floor with 8C Zen CPUs in gaming because they can clock to 5ghz and higher while it's unclear if AMD can even hit 4ghz reliably on all cores and on the other hand the Zen ecosystem not being mature enough for the prosumer and professional types due to subpar support/performance of storage, peripherals and memory.

The biggest mistake I made is getting a 2nd 5820K for my gaming rig, I got it cheap so I don't mind but performance wise I would be better off with a 6700/7700K. And I'm lucky as my 5820K hits 4.5-4.6ghz with an AIO cooler.

<comment><USER6> Anecdatum, but the game I worked on (Tom Clancys The Division) will perform much better on a quad core than a dual core. We're CPU bound long before GPU bound.

<comment><USER7> Doesnt really matter when even a $65 G4560 hits reliable 80fps in division

<comment><USER8> Not really a a fair point. The G4560 is extraordinary value for the money. It is a dual core, but it has hyperthreading. And as much as I was surprised by this when the i3s showed it, hyperthreading helps a lot in situations where 4, well, I'd like to say cores, are expected. The G4560 is eating the whole budget processor market right now – but that does not mean that his example doesn't show something: There are a number of games by now that rely on having a processor that can power multiple threads. And those games profit a lot from having more cores – you can play with the Pentium, and it absolutely is the best pick for a budget build, but you still get budget performance. And that means there are some games that won't run very well with it, and some min-FPS will be lower than one would want.

The pendulum has swung so far far that (some) recent games began to run good on the old FX chips, see Watchdog 2. If not looking at budget chips, having multiple cores is attractive for gamers by now. Maybe the potential of hexa- cores is not used that much yet, but it is obvious that will come, and games like Battlefield 1 do use them already. I think those Ryzen hexa-cores have a very good chance at the market, if their single thread performance is high enough.

<comment><USER7> I feel that AMD forced that change in accidentally clever way by embedding itself in current generation of consoles. 8 anemic 1.6 GHz cores forced whole gaming industry to start taking multi threading seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This would be great news indeed if AMD finally had a competitive high-end chip again. It feels like Intel has just been coasting on their success for a long time, since there was no competitive pressure from the outside they also had little incentive to add more cores/lower prices/take some engineering risks.

The CPU market could become a lot more interesting again after all this time.

</comment><comment><USER10> AMD Ryzen 7 1700, 8 cores, 16 threads, 65W TDP, 3.0-3.7GHz, $319.

Comparing to my current Haswell CPU, that's quite a great value for the money:

(84W TDP, 4 cores, 8 threads, $300+ price soon after launch, 3.4-3.9GHz).

I'd prefer somewhat higher frequency though, more in line with thier X series, but without major increase in TDP. But I guess +10W is tolerable for a good processing power increase.

<comment><USER8> I'd be hesitant to judge those AMD processors on the specified clock, even more than usual.

The usual argument is that clocks are not comparable, because you don't know that a 4GHz cpu A is not slower than a 1GHz cpu B in doing a specific task. That I assume is known around here, but is not what I mean. AMD is marketing the feature of those processors to overclock automatically above the specified turbo clock. Meaning 3.9GHz should be a lower bound, and it is completely possible those cpus will routinely clock much higher in practice. See [http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/jon-martindale/amds- ex...](http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/jon-martindale/amds-extended- frequency-range-could-auto-overclock-ryzen-cpus/) (and it is also as XFR in the original article here).

Or maybe they won't overclock well at all. Well, we'll see after they were released.

 _Edit:_ I just realized that with regards to the specific comparison I answered to my point is moot, because according to the table in the article, the Ryzen 7 1700 does not have that feature. The Ryzen 7 1700X does. That might make picking the right processors more difficult than usual. I'll let the comment stand regardless, that feature and distinction might not be well known yet.

<comment><USER11> If you do any substantial overclock, meaning you are going to do a little bit of over voltage, the presence or lack of XFR matters little, and you are definitely going to go above turbo core freqs. XFR is going to be a nice-to- have unconditionally because of it being on the fly adjustments, but it does not seem to be a feature that it is going to make you buy an X version over non-X. It seems to me it will come down to the classic spend less risk more, spend more risk less in terms of overclock, just like it was for vishera 8320/8350/9370/9590 , so I don't expect many features differences between the versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, this sounds good and I'm happy I am holding out for my new machine until it comes out.

We'll have to see real world benchmarks by independent 3rd parties to validate the performance/$ but it continues to look quite impressive as long as you are staying in the sub $500 range.

<comment><USER13> The next step up from those CPUs really is going to be dual xeon boxes, which is a huge jump.

Intel tried to do enough market segmentation that the curve from a Pentium all the way up to dual CPU workstations was fairly continuous in price, with zen it's not the case anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do they support ECC memory?

<comment><USER15> Hopefully not, biggest scam out there.

<comment><USER16> The biggest scam is actually the other way around. Intel pulled ECC support from desktop processors a few years ago to force datacentres to buy their Xeons instead.

It's nearly impossible to find a desktop CPU that supports ECC ram now even though 5 years ago it was commonplace.

Trying to run a NAS with some sensitive data is now impossible unless you buy their server chips

<comment><USER17> > It's nearly impossible to find a desktop CPU that supports ECC ram now

That's not correct. All 6th Gen Core i3 have ECC support, and the 7th Gen Core i3 that have 'E' in the product name support ECC:

[http://ark.intel.com/products/97130/Intel- Core-i3-7101E-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/97130/Intel- Core-i3-7101E-Processor-3M-Cache-3_90-GHz)

<comment><USER18> To be fair i3 being the lower end offering with just 2 cores isn't really competing against any of the server products Intel offers.

Quad (and more) core i5 and i7 that do have near-equivalent Xeon parts do have ECC disabled.

<comment><USER19> An i3 is very often a perfect chip for a NAS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anybody know if the Ryzen CPUs support the equivalent of VT-x and VT-d?

<comment><USER21> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#AMD_virtu...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#AMD_virtualization_.28AMD-V.29)

I don't know how well its supported by software though.

<comment><USER22> KVM & Xen have good support for both in my experience, seems to work well. No clue about support in janky proprietary solutions, but seeing as Amazon, DO, etc all use either KVM or Xen, with the extreme budget providers on OpenVZ (where you get a glorified chroot), your probably gonna be using one of those two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I certainly hope that the performance/price is on par with the competition Intel used to get from AMD back in the Duron and Athlon XP days. Ryzen seems to be fairly low power consumption as well which should help with lowering the cooling requirements compared to Intel's CPUs.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd really like eight cores, didn't know that was going to be possible soon!

<comment><USER24> Depending on how much you want it, Intel has an E7 that has 24 cores and 48 threads. It can go up to 8 sockets with up to 12 TB of RAM.

I don't even want to know how much such a monster would cost.

<comment><USER25> Much less than you'd think if you are willing to go with 6TB only. The 128GB modules are awfully expensive but the other day I saw 64GB modules at $600 [https://memory.net/product/s26361-f3843-e618-fujitsu-1x-64gb...](https://memory.net/product/s26361-f3843-e618-fujitsu-1x-64gb- ddr4-2133-lrdimm-pc4-17000p-l-quad-rank-x4-replacement/) here. So that's ~39K for 6TB of RAM. The relevant Supermicro server (4048B-TR4FT) with four E7 CPUs is ~14K [http://www.thinkmate.com/system/superserver-4048b-tr4ft](http://www.thinkmate.com/system/superserver-4048b-tr4ft) comes with 32 4GB modules which is a waste but oh well, it's a very small loss compared what it would cost to buy 6TB at a server seller like this. So you are looking ~53K for the server, CPU, 6TB RAM, you will need a little storage as well, so perhaps ~60K for a 6TB 4U server. In closing, let me remind you that a mere two decades ago, Microsoft launched the Terraserver which was a demonstration of a server with a terabyte of _storage_ and it was very big news. Now we are here with a machine at the price of an ordinary F-150 truck or so which can hold the 5TB uncompressed data of the Terraserver in RAM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How long is it likely to take for Linux to support these new chips?

I need to build a new system and am trying to gauge how long I should wait after Zen comes on the market.

<comment><USER27> There's nothing specifically required by a kernel to support new processors, except maybe power saving features, arguably unimportant for desktop. If you mean compiler optimizations, those are usually sent upstream way early..

A cursory Google search shows AMD first sending Zen (now Ryzen) patches to GCC as early as 2015. So, presumably it has been in a few recent compiler releases already.

[https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc- patches/2015-09/msg02311.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc- patches/2015-09/msg02311.html)

<comment><USER26> _" There's nothing specifically required by a kernel to support new processors..."_

Does that go for motherboards that can support these new chips too?

<comment><USER27> Not specifically, if there's a new chipset or southbridge it may require kernel driver update (..perhaps as simple as new PCI IDs) or a new driver entirely, but similarly those changes are upstreamed rather quickly to increase the change of landing in a stable release.

AMD and Intel engineers have hardware quite early to work on this, long before the consumer product ships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Official retail prices in China and real retail prices in China are not always the same. "White"-imported i7 6900K the companies will buy is ¥8199, but most people will buy from the marketplaces, where the price is about ¥7000-7400, i.e. the same as in the US.

Then again, for cheap servers, we can get E5-2683v3 here for ¥1900 ($270), 35M cache, 14 cores.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how well they will support some more advanced virtualisation. I.E. Booting a virtual machine with PCI GPU passtrough in Windows Guest with Linux host for gaming, or booting a virtual machine with PCI GPU passtrough in Linux Guest with Linux host for some deep learning with CUDA.

<comment><USER30> Why would you want to do Linux Guest with Linux host for CUDA?

<comment><USER29> Because it's (well, at least 6 months ago was, now it could have improved) the only solution to reuse the GPU without rebooting X.

With a practical example:

1 - You boot up your Linux base system.

2 - You fire up KVM with GPU PCI passthrough with a Windows guest to play some games.

3 - You shutdown windows.

Now you can't use the GPU anymore, the module was assigned by KVM and you can't - for instance - run a CUDA simulation in the Linux host. You need to reboot X (you don't need to reboot the system).

The workaround/solution is to fire up KVM with GPU PCI passthrough to another guest (This time a Linux guest) and in there you will have full access to the GPU to do CUDA computations (or whatever else you want).

<comment><USER31> >Now you can't use the GPU anymore, the module was assigned by KVM and you can't - for instance - run a CUDA simulation in the Linux host.

Maybe we had different setups, so this wouldn't apply – I used to unbind the device with the following script, and then load the `nvidia` module; the device was then available on the host:

      for dev in "0000:01:00.0" "0000:01:00.1"; do
              if [ -e /sys/bus/pci/devices/${dev}/driver ]; then
                      echo "${dev}" > /sys/bus/pci/devices/${dev}/driver/unbind
              fi
      done

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> None of these chips are for mobile. TDP on the chips in the Macbook Pro is 47W, while lowest TDP of the leaked Ryzen chips is 65W.

What could be of great interest would be if Ryzen came with mobile chips with LPDDR4, that would really put pressure on intel. Then they could also do 50W TDP and still compete with Intel for the Macbook Pros.

<comment><USER4> There aren't any Zen chips for mobile, there aren't any Zen "APUs" which have an integrated graphics card either.

The AM4 APUs that are launching with Summit Ridge are still construction cores and they come at 65-90W TDP also.

Until low TDP Zen chips are out and until Zen APUs are out AMD is effectively forfeiting the OEM and mobile markets.

Intel has also managed to scale it's current Core based CPU's to as low as 4.5W TDP which I have a very strong feeling that AMD will not be able to do until 2019-2020 at best, not with the TDP for these chips currently.

That said if AMD does release a 40-45W 4C CPU they'll have a strong chance of being a contender for at least some workstation level laptops, lack of native USB3 and no TB might hurt them but if PCIE over USB-C beats TB then they might still have a chance.

However since the external GPU enclosures became reliable I will never buy a laptop that doesn't support one for personal use unless it's a very very small form factor device and that's unlikely. Lets see if AMD will be able to come with a similar solution to how seamless TB2/3 with Iris graphics and an external GPU work these days.

<comment><USER33> AMD already has such a solution and Raven Ridge (Zen APU) is coming 2nd half 2017 (as far as anyone is aware).

<comment><USER4> It has, it's not out yet, currently it just relaunched its construction core Bristol Ridge APUs.

Once Raven Ridge will be out we can discuss it, currently Summit Ridge is nearly unknown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> AMD announced Ryzen supports Win7 (drivers). A few days later, they changed the marketing to Win10. If AMD wants to sell their new Ryzen make sure Win7 drivers are available (even if it's not marketed, as Microsoft is bitter about it - Win7 is still most used OS).

</comment><comment><USER35> Will it work with Keras?

<comment><USER36> Keras is abstraction layer over tensorflow/theano/deeplearning4j(new). Keras supports whatever underlying framework supports.</comment></comment>


Image Recognition solved?  Or, human powered? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/29/image-recognition-problem-finally-solved-lets-pay-people-to-tag-photos/

<comment><USER3> Check amazon mechanical turk. I bet you'll find the secret there...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Understanding the computational difficulty in both theory as well as practice, I have to say, I find this reaching.

I guess the bigger question though is, "Who Cares?"

If someone's going to use humans to tag my 5k Flickr Photos, and I don't have to pay for it, it's probably better than an automated solution anyways -- the humans will invariably tag better anyhow.

<comment><USER4> It matters if you care about privacy.

<comment><USER5> It depends what you use it for. If it's for your public Flickr stream or something similar, privacy is irrelevant, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "privacy policy: TBD"

I would not touch that with a ten foot pole. That's one of the first things a company should consider.

<comment><USER7> I have to disagree. Depending on how long they've been around, maybe TagCow is at the point where they really should have typed out a basic privacy policy. But to say that it's "one of the first things" a company should consider is a lawyer-fearing mentality that can kill a company before it's launched; it's the kind of mindset that says the founders of a coffee shop company should be discussing whether to put "WARNING: VERY HOT" on the cups before they're talking about branding and business models.

Privacy and data storage are important issues that shouldn't be ignored, certainly. But I think when you're starting a new venture, the default assumption should be that your policies are going to be as user-friendly and standard as possible, until something arises that forces you to say, "Standard might not work for us. We need to take a look at the details."

As far as TagCow specifically is concerned, if TechCrunch's assumptions about it being human-powered are correct, then TagCow is probably trying to figure out a way of saying, "Your pictures will be shown to 3rd parties" (their tagging contractors) without making it sound like "your family photos are being spread around the internet like a coughing cold at summer camp". Best of luck to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How would you build a human computation game that assigns names to people in images as a side-effect?

<comment><USER8> A six-degrees of separation game. Tags in the same photo are a connection, and you have build paths from John Doe to Jane Fro, the longer the better - <USER2> are worth more points than objects but both count.

<comment><USER9> How would you avoid cheating? Hope that enough people are honest?

<comment><USER8> User moderation so you can flag any dubious tags, with exponential lock outs for dodgy taggers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> After so many enthusiastic articles about image recognition technology, it is funny how they have changed the attitude: "A trail of failed startups have tried to tackle the problem... Google has effectively thrown in the towel..." For a longer list of "failed startups" see here: [http://www.inperc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Image_search#Visu...](http://www.inperc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Image_search#Visual_image_search_engines).

</comment><comment><USER11> They took the jobsintown.de advertising campaign a little too seriously... <http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/2006/05/jobsintownde.html>

</comment><comment><USER12> Hmm the site says on the front page "Automatically". This was added later?

</comment><comment><USER13> wouldn't be surprised if they were on a gov grant to help the semantic web.</comment>


Why artificial intelligence is different from previous technology waves - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/why-artificial-intelligence-is-different-from-previous-technology-waves <comment><USER2> NOT WORTH YOUR TIME.

This reads like an ad for Gardner. Simply horrible article that spends the first 75% of the article talking about things like the Gardner hype cycle for other technologies.</comment>


SoftBank founder lost $130M on Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/softbank-founder-masayoshi-son-lost-130-million-on-bitcoin-11556017200 <comment><USER2> Why do we talk about this guy as if he is some sort of genius? He lost 99% of his wealth in the first dot-com bust. The only reason he is still around is he happened to invest in Alibaba. This doesn't demonstrate anything other than that if you have enough money, it doesn't matter what you do or how stupid you are, you'll remain rich.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't read the article as I don't have a subscription.

So if you're this dude, how do you make this investment?

Presumably you just call your fiance guy and tell him to put a huge amount of money into Bitcoin and the order gets passed down to someone who knows what their doing and somewhere there is a PC out there with a bazillion dollars in Bitcoin sitting in cold storage?

I gotta think the end guy who makes the buy is a pretty big target for criminal types as far as figuring out where such coins are stored....

<comment><USER4> There are companies that specialize in coordinating large, off-exchange trades. I listened to an interview where they mentioned security practices such as: keys are stored on laptops that were bought new, had the hard drive replaced, and the Ethernet and USB ports epoxied shut. All transactions are offline and multi-sig. Etc...

<comment><USER3> Yeah I was thinking the security would have to be pretty high / multi layered / rightfully paranoid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Which in context of his net worth is pretty much noise

<comment><USER6> If you're worth $20k and you find $20 on the street, it's 0.1% of your net worth.

If you're Jeff Bezos and you find 0.1% of your net worth on the street, it's $150,000,000.

<comment><USER7> Lets take that thought experiment further, would Jeff Bezos even waste the time in bending down to pick up the $20 since it is worth so little? The act of bending down, the minuscule risk of falling over, possibly scraping a knee, possibly wasting more time trying to get back up, etc. Is the $20 worth the potential hassle of picking it up?

For me: without a hesitation. It's roughtly 130 times my average 5 second earnings.

For Jeff: probably a net loss.

<comment><USER8> I hate such comparisons. How about just simply cleaning up after yourself and not polluting the world with 20$?

If I dropped 20$ off a cliff, I would not get it, but I know I should.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Masayoshi seems great at picking market tops and buying into them.

<comment><USER9> either he wins big, or no big deal, the advantages of having money.

<comment><USER10> So far, he lost more money in his funds than he ever made.

But he makes $1B+ a year just from fees.

This is a very twisted idea of "winning big"

<comment><USER11> He's not investing. He's laundering money at scale.

<comment><USER12> also laundering reputations - lots of SV companies seem to have no issues with accepting Saudi money if it's via Softbank

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Full-text, for those blocked by the paywall:_

SoftBank Founder Masayoshi Son Lost $130 Million on Bitcoin

Japanese billionaire made a huge personal investment in the digital currency as prices peaked

By Rachael Levy and Liz Hoffman April 23, 2019 7:00 a.m. ET Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of SoftBank Group Corp. 9984 0.31% , made a huge personal bet on bitcoin just as prices for the digital currency peaked, losing more than $130 million when he sold out, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Son, who launched the world's biggest venture-capital fund on the strength of his long-term investing acumen, made the investment at the recommendation of a well-known bitcoin booster, whose investment firm SoftBank bought in 2017, the people said.

The investment came at the peak of the bitcoin frenzy in late 2017 after the digital currency had already risen more than 10 fold that year. The exact size of the bet couldn't be determined, but bitcoin peaked at nearly $20,000 in mid December 2017 and Mr. Son sold in early 2018 after bitcoin had plummeted, the people said.

Bitcoin closed Monday at $5,381.05.

Mr. Son is known for quick investment decisions and big risky bets, most of which have paid off. He decided to back Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. after spending just five minutes with its founder, Jack Ma. He took a half-hour to greenlight a $200 million investment in a startup that grows vegetables indoors.

Mr. Son's previously unreported loss shows that even some of the world's most sophisticated and wealthiest investors got caught up in the frenzy. With a net worth estimated by Bloomberg LP at $19 billion, Mr. Son will hardly notice, though it dents his reputation as a patient and prophetic investor.

A SoftBank spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Son's behalf.

Mr. Son was encouraged to make the investment by Peter Briger, the co-chairman of asset manager Fortress Investment Group, the people said. SoftBank bought Fortress in February 2017, inheriting the asset manager's bitcoin reserves along with its more traditional investment funds.

Fortress under Mr. Briger first bought bitcoin in 2013, when it was still a fringe technology used mainly in the darker corners of web commerce. By the time the SoftBank deal was completed, its holdings were worth more than $150 million.

Mr. Briger declined to comment through a spokesman.

Mr. Son built SoftBank mostly on long-term technology investments and used his record to launch the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund. The fund, backed by the government investment fund of Saudi Arabia, owns big stakes in Uber Technologies Inc. and WeWork Cos., and has been credited with driving up valuations of some of the biggest private technology companies.

The Vision Fund is facing a test of its success with the coming initial public offering of Uber, which is aiming for a valuation of as much as $100 billion, below previous expectations but still above where the fund invested.

Even as it looks ahead to futuristic technology, SoftBank's most immediate problem is its controlling stake in U.S. mobile phone company Sprint Corp. The 2013 deal has weighed down the conglomerate with debt, limiting its investing options.

Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint and T-Mobile's merger had been challenged by U.S. Justice Department staff lawyers, who expressed concerns that the all-stock deal would threaten competition.

Sprint, hoping for approval, said in a regulatory filing last week: "Sprint is in a very difficult situation that is only getting worse. Sprint is not on a sustainable competitive path."

<comment><USER14> A true hero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's only a loss if he sold, HODL!

<comment><USER15> I do know he sold, was just being silly.

<comment><USER16> I like how you can be a literal billionaire bank founder and still buy a speculative asset at it's peak and sell at it's lowest after a 90% crash

Buy high sell low

>>The investment came at the peak of the bitcoin frenzy in late 2017 after the digital currency had already risen more than 10 fold that year. The exact size of the bet couldn't be determined, but bitcoin peaked at nearly $20,000 in mid December 2017 and Mr. Son sold in early 2018 after bitcoin had plummeted, the people said.

<comment><USER17> Well 10% is better than less or nothing, right? Shows his lack of confidence in it going up any further - or at least within a timeframe that there aren't better investments.

<comment><USER16> >Well 10% is better than less or nothing, right? Shows his lack of confidence in it going up any further - or at least within a timeframe that there aren't better investments.

Pretty much any good book about investing (eg. The Four Pillars of Investing) teaches you that following your human emotions and irrationality in investing is the worst you can do, basically selling when everybody IS selling is the worst move (Warren Buffett: Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful, [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012116/warre...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012116/warren- buffett-be-fearful-when-others-are-greedy.asp))

So I'm pretty surprised to see Masayoshi Son acting like a rookie investor, and following the crowd of uneducated investors buying during the mania and selling during the crash

It's the opposite of investing 101

<comment><USER18> You're oversimplifying.. selling while everyone else is often due to irrationality, but quite often it is the best move. In the case of a crashing asset that is determined to be unlikely to recover, selling with "everyone" else is the rational action. cf cutting your losses. In fact I've feel like more experienced investors are prone to the opposite problem... irrationally holding on to a hopeless asset when they could have cut it.

<comment><USER19> Cut your losses and let your winners run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How I can read this without a subscription?

<comment><USER21> If the click comes from Facebook or Google, you won't need a subscription.

<comment><USER22> sadly not true for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For all the perma-bears out there...Bitcoin is well off last year's low and now around $5500. Crypto has been trending up for weeks. Some top tokens like BNB (Binance's token) are at all time highs.

<comment><USER24> It's amazing what wash trading and fake volume can do to prop up an ecologically destructive and pointless technology.</comment></comment>


Things I know that it seems like nobody else gets - <AUTHOR> http://techno-anthropology.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-8-things-i-know-that-it-seems-like.html

<comment><USER2> > anything someone really really tries to get you to believe is probably false > if it doesn't make sense to you.

To a lot of people, religion makes sense while, say, quantum mechanics doesn't.

<comment><USER3> You don't see people walking around and trying to make you believe in quantum mechanics.

<comment><USER2> I talk about it any chance I get :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Try one thousand things that you have a 0.01% chance of succeeding in, and > in the end you will accomplish one incredible thing.

This is false.

<comment><USER3> btw. he says 0.1% not 0.01%

If you try things that have 0.1% change one after another, the change of succeeding has binomial distribution. The probability that you get at least one success is just 63%

<comment><USER5> > btw. he says 0.1% not 0.01%

it was originally posted as 0.01%.

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ftechno- anthropology.blogspot.com%2F2013%2F08%2Fthe-8-things-i-know-that-it-seems- like.html&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS550US550&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ftechno- anthropology.blogspot.com%2F2013%2F08%2Fthe-8-things-i-know-that-it-seems- like.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1702j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)</comment></comment></comment>


New Book: The Tcl Programming Language, a Comprehensive Guide - <AUTHOR> https://gumroad.com/l/tclprog# <comment><USER3> The print version is now available - <USER2> [http://wiki.tcl.tk/48868](http://wiki.tcl.tk/48868) for details.</comment>


Good ticket system for startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently, as many of you, working on my first startup. Things are getting better and better, but now I think I should better have some kind of ticket system for communicating with customers, etc.
Now I could use some system like OTRS, Kayako, Request Tracker - or an hosted one like Zen Desktop.
What would HN recommend me? <comment><USER2> Having worked with more ticketing systems than I can count, the only ones I've ever worked with that were effective were completely developed in house to meet the specific business' needs.

I hate to advise that, but that's just my experience with it. That said, your need is only in proportion to how much your tickets/communication with customers affects your revenue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback - have now installed OTRS and give it a try. Let us see how good it will work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I personally prefer osTicket. I have not tried OTRS but I have used Kayako which isn't too bad either.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not really related: But if someone is interested: I'm building an anycasted dns service.

</comment><comment><USER4> Zendesk is OK, You can also try Freshdesk.com which has a fairly well-featured system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback - have now installed OTRS and give it a try. Let us see how good it will work.

My second choice would be Zendesk, so, yea :)

Freshdesk looks good as well, will also have a look at it. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Rolling Shutter Simulation in C - <AUTHOR> http://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/07/02/ <comment><USER2> A couple friends of mine wrote an extremely mathematical analysis of the rolling shutter effect, and even looked at some related questions like "given a photo from a rolling shutter how can you tell how many propellor blades actually exist and how fast it is turning?".

[http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/post/54400376441/playing- detec...](http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/post/54400376441/playing-detective- with-rolling-shutter-photos)

<comment><USER3> > _and even looked at some related questions like "given a photo from a > rolling shutter how can you tell how many propellor blades actually exist > and how fast it is turning?"_

I've seen some code (don't remember the website now) that gets you the non- rolled shuttered (sic) image from the rolling shutter one.

(It works to reconstruct a scene, but has issues at edges etc, so it's not really usable to fix a photo/video 100% -- but there are commercial NLE plugins that do reduce rolling shutter in post).

<comment><USER2> One concrete example: the most recent version of Autopano Video Pro does rolling shutter compensation as part of its stitching of 360 video from a rig of GoPro cameras.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author mentioned YUV4MPEG. It's a wonderfully simple video format, here's a tiny C program to stream a video of Game of Life (With colours!):

        #define  F for(i=0;i<l*3;i++)
        main(n){int i,j,w=640,h=480,l
        =w*h,o[]={~w,-w,-w+1,-1,1,w-1
        ,w,w+1},b[l*5];F b[i]=rand();
        for(puts("YUV4MPEG2 W640 H48"
        "0 F30 C444");puts("FRAME");)
        {F{for(n=j=8;j;n-=b[i+o[--j]]
        &1);b[i+l]=(n^5&&!b[i]|n^6)-1
        ;}F putchar(b[i]=b[i+l]);}}

(You can pipe the output to mpv or a similar media player.)

<comment><USER5> Heh. I tried running that code through three different beautifiers and they all failed spectacularly.

For those of us who don't enjoy visual self-flagellation, here's an attempt at untying the above ball of yarn:

#define F for(i=0;i<l _3;i++)

      main(n)
      {
        int i,j,
            w=640, h=480,
            l=w*h,
            o[] = {
              ~w, -w, -w+1,
              -1, 1,
              w-1, w, w+1
            },
            b[l*5];

        F
          b[i]=rand();

        for( puts("YUV4MPEG2 W640 H48" "0 F30 C444");
             puts("FRAME");
            )
        {
          F
          {
            for( n=j=8; j; n-=b[ i + o[--j] ]&1 );

            b[i+l] = (n^5 && !b[i] | n^6) - 1;
          }

          F
            putchar( b[i]=b[i+l] );
        }
      }

EDIT: I had no idea you could italicize code blocks! This was an accident, but I'm going to leave it because it looks pretty. Has this always been a feature? I've never seen italicized monospace before. That first line is supposed to read "for(i=0; i < l times three ..." but the asterisk is somehow causing HN to italicize the code block. There's no matching closing asterisk, so this is pretty amusing.

<comment><USER5> foo*bar

      baz

See? No italicization.

Now I'm curious what triggers it...

<comment><USER5> foo _bar

      baz*quux

Aha. HN's parser is matching with the asterisk in the code snippet.

<comment><USER6> It even affects the reply button/text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's really cool. I wanted to see what the second order effect would be (as the shutter speed changes, how does the final image change?)

Take a look: [http://antidom.com/fan.webm](http://antidom.com/fan.webm)

<comment><USER8> Nice. Reminds me of WW2 film of propeller planes. The propellors often looked bent back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That video [1] has been motivating a lot of folks! Yesterday someone posted a Rust [2] solution to do the same thing.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVtMmLlnoE&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVtMmLlnoE&feature=youtu.be)

[2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6kl0vj/i_made_a_progr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6kl0vj/i_made_a_program_in_rust_for_generating_rolling/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Rolling shutter might sound very bad, but has some nice side effect properties. Latency between light hitting the sensor and readout is minimized (divided by rolling shutter readout block size/row) compared to global shutter. This means your 1080p 60Hz camera can have 64KHz time resolution.

Cool research into RS effects: "Direct Semi-dense SLAM for Rolling Shutter Cameras". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLD1eeu1EUI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLD1eeu1EUI) [https://github.com/jaehak/rrd_slam](https://github.com/jaehak/rrd_slam)

This only tries to reverse adverse effect of RS (at best as good as global shutter), but in theory it would be possible to exploit RS effect to boost accuracy above GS.

Afaik Jeri Ellsworth CastAR (shutdown, because Rubin invested only to sell to google, and that didnt happen) IR tracker took advantage of cheap cellphone camera rolling shutter to boost both spatial and temporal tracking resolution.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice! I'm curious if there's an open platform for writing video effects that would be compatible with other video editing and conversion software. Something that doesn't have any glaring inefficiencies and in C or C++.

<comment><USER12> Openframeworks - [http://openframeworks.cc](http://openframeworks.cc)

It's a c++ multimedia Swiss Army knife with a pretty strong community and repo of addons.

Libcinder is another option, though only for Mac/Win

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's a really clever trick, piping the video to PPM format and then doing intermediary work using simple code. I had never thought of it. I bet you can do fun stuff like pipe it through imagemagick for fun transformations.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can anyone explain why rolling shutter is still necessary? Wouldn't current electronics have the memory bandwidth needed to just sample the entire cmos sensor at once?

<comment><USER15> You've just hit the nail on the head yourself: bandwidth.

Sampling the entire CMOS sensor at once is not really possible when you stop to consider the sheer magnitude of bits required to represent a single still image. The CMOS sensor only has a finite number of pins connecting it to the logic board responsible for polling its state, so it makes sense to use an addressing system to read the sensor data. This addressing system uses a small number of addressing bits (each pin is usually just one bit) to move a sliding window over a much larger amount of data. Regular computer memory works the same way. This enables that data to be passed through to the camera in small pieces. While this can be made rather fast with good engineering, it is not instant, and the non-instantaneous nature produces the rolling shutter effect.

It's the physical limitation on the number of pins that creates the need for the rolling shutter in modern CMOS design. Creating speedier memory access routines can reduce the effect of the shutter, but not eliminate it.

A possible alternative approach would be to build some memory into the image sensor, so that you can ask it to "lock" all the bits in place, and then read those bits out at your logic board's leisure. That should effectively eliminate the rolling shutter effect, (More or less, assuming your "freeze" signal arrives at all the pixels more or less at the same time) at the engineering expense of needing to add per-pixel memory to your image sensor, and additional electronics to perform the lock. I'm no expert on the subject, but I would not be surprised if more modern image sensors have some feature for this purpose, especially those used in high speed cameras.

<comment><USER16> Don't confuse the timing of light acquisition with read-out at the overall focal plane level.

Numerous CMOS, CCD, and other types of focal plane / 2D detectors have global shutters where all pixels 'integrate photons or energetic particles' at the same time for a set amount of time.

Read-out is performed in a rolling fashion... the data generally has to be serialized for analog to digital conversion (although not always) and/or transmission over a communication protocol or write to file.

A global shutter detector at the hardware level has settings for framerate and light integration time (among other things). Readout time is more or less constant for a particular camera sensor. So if integration requires say 20ms, and readout takes 30 ms... you're looking at about 20 FPS image acquisition speed.

Good overview: [http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/global-rolling- shutter](http://www.red.com/learn/red-101/global-rolling-shutter)

<comment><USER17> IIRC a typical implementation of electronic global shutter for CMOS sensors requires one extra transistor per each pixel to "lock" the charge. As for why it's not being done outside specialised sensors: not many people are concerned about this problem, they are more concerned about other parameters of image sensor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is great. Searching for an example of the rolling shutters PPM image transformation in Python, anyone?</comment>


Baby monitors and webcams from UK homes and businesses hacked by Russians - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/baby-monitors-cctv-cameras-and-webcams-from-uk-homes-and-businesses-hacked-and-uploaded-onto-russian-website-9871830.html

<comment><USER2> Not hacked by Russians, they are poorly configured by its users and mostly open to the public. This is misleading.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Twitter's feed down? - <AUTHOR> The most recent tweet I see in my feed is 43 minutes old. No amount of refreshing or reloading the client helps.<p>This behavior is identical across both the iOS and mobile web clients. <comment><USER2> Check if you've been "helpfully" set to "top tweets" vs. all tweets, in the settings. Algorithms are great!

<comment><USER3> I have that problem solved [1] but I've only had 10 new tweets in my timeline in the last couple of hours.

The default text size also got smaller and changes to text size and colour customisation aren't getting persisted, so I assume something's busted.

[1] [https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new- twitter](https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter#tweak-new-twitter)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Working for me

<comment><USER2> Same</comment></comment>


Microsoft responds to NYT story on suppressing dissent in Russia - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/09/13/anti-piracy-enforcement-and-ngos.aspx

<comment><USER2> I didn't understand the kneejerky misdirected anger at Microsoft when this was first reported nor do I really get the congratulatory backslapping of the NYT now. Microsoft did not send their goons to some downtrodden NGO's office, they didn't confiscate anyone's computers, nor did they even accuse this particular organization of piracy. Their Russian offices may have been less than sympathetic to the NGO's frantic attempts to get their property back, but realistically, there probably wasn't a great deal they could do. The report itself suggested the NGO was running licensed software and this fact was simply ignored by the authorities who just happened to be using license enforcement as a pretext to harass an organization they didn't like. They might have well claimed Baikal Wave were running improperly licensed Ubuntu, for all the difference it would have made.

Russia is simply not a society governed by the rule of law. No well- intentioned Microsoft initiative or poignant NYT report is likely to change that.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the original NYT report _"Interviews and a review of law enforcement documents show that in recent cases, Microsoft lawyers made statements describing the company as a victim and arguing that criminal charges should be pursued."_ (note that Baikal Wave says it purchased and installed legal Microsoft software)

In another section _'In southwestern Russia, the Interior Ministry declared in an official document that its investigation of a human rights advocate for software piracy was begun "based on an application" from a lawyer for Microsoft.'_

Microsoft corporate has ignored complaints about this for months (yesterday's NYT report has made them change their policy)

Why do you describe concerns as "kneejerky misdirected anger at Microsoft".

Do you consider Microsoft's actions as ethical (or not an obstruction of justice) ?

[edit: to answer pvg's follow-up, in this context, by "obstruction of justice" I'm referring to Microsoft helping prosecutors commit a crime or Microsoft interfering with "proper" operations of a court]

<comment><USER2> _Do you consider Microsoft's actions as ethical_

I honestly don't know. Operating in such an environment ethically convoluted. I just don't think those ethical complexities are particularly important or worthy of handwringing when the problem at hand is 'the man comes and forcibly and arbitrarily takes your property'.

 _or not an obstruction of justice_

I am not sure what you mean by 'obstruction of justice' in this context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure most people are (rightly) going to take Microsoft's word on this with a great deal of skepticism, but kudos to them for at least responding to it in a timely fashion and with what appears to be a responsible approach to the allegations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - more importantly, kudos to the New York Times for their original report (which seems to have convinced Microsoft to change their policy).

<comment><USER4> Although the Committee to Protect Journalists originally reported this tactic being used against the free press in Bishkek back in April:

[http://cpj.org/blog/2010/04/microsoft-piracy-and- independent...](http://cpj.org/blog/2010/04/microsoft-piracy-and-independent- media-in-kyrgyzst.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for about 15 years, and my entire professional career has been managing Linux and UNIX systems, I haven't really thought much about Microsoft and their licensing policies or anti-piracy practices...but, we recently had a customer demand an online printable "Certificate of Authenticity" for our software, and pointed to the Microsoft digital certificate of authenticity as the ideal example of such. His organization _requires_ all software used to have such a certificate.

The truly nefarious aspect of this weird policy (which seems to exist, in lesser forms in other places, based on demands we've had for various specific bits of information on invoices) is that Open Source software is completely out of the running in the organizations that embrace such a policy. In our case, Virtualmin is an umbrella under which a couple dozen Open Source apps run, so I guess having the certificate for Virtualmin satisfies the policy (at least well enough for the IT guy to bluff his way through).

This isn't really comparable to political dissent being squashed, of course, but it gave me a pretty chilling view of Microsoft and their anti-piracy practices that I hadn't been aware of, and makes me far more likely to believe that MS would participate in using the thug power of Russian police in order to scare organizations and individuals out of pirating their products.

I'll also note that the BSA "report your neighbor" whistle-blower policy, which has been in effect for a couple of decades, has always reeked a little of the secret police and surveillance culture found in oppressive regimes.

<comment><USER6> For your client, why not just print out a copy of the GPL, put a big "CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY" and then have someone sign it?

<comment><USER5> It's actually our commercial software in question (we have a dual-licensed model for Virtualmin and Cloudmin, with the Open Source variant being under the GPL). I'm going to Photoshop something up for him, with the serial number and license key.

I'm tempted to pirate the Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity, and stick our numbers in there. There would be some sort of poetic something or other in that.

<comment><USER7> Just make sure it includes a hologram.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey look at that. Good journalism still has a place in this fast paced, linked up, tweeted world we live in. I don't often say this but grats, nyt.

<comment><USER2> [http://baikalwave.blogspot.com/2010/07/police-finally- return...](http://baikalwave.blogspot.com/2010/07/police-finally-return- illegally-seized.html)

The whole incident started and (mostly, but not entirely) concluded months before the NYT published anything about it, in this fast-paced, linked up, tweeted world we live in.

<comment><USER5> But, it took an article in the NYT to get a response out of Microsoft.

<comment><USER2> There was already a response from Microsoft - their NGO discount program was in place, they claim to advise governments to focus enforcement efforts on the producers rather than consumers of pirated software and so on. It's great they've responded again and perhaps more stridently and publicly. But I have a hard time believing this sort of thing helps much with the fundamental problem which is an authoritarian and coercive government. And I think it's naive to expect that it would.

<comment><USER8> Obviously we can expect nothing from Russia except more of the same. Nevertheless, this kind of press moves the needle as evidenced by the prompt reply from Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> MS is just reaping what they saw as they worked extremely hard toward letting this demon out. Russian government wouldn't be defending your legal rights out of sheer generocity. The governments of all levels in Russia are now happily using anti-piracy law enforcement in addition to the old good sanitary, fire, tax audit inspections. It is a very Russian specific thing - the majority of laws are very good and very strong, while their application is a matter of government's selectively targeting will.

</comment><comment><USER10> "A story in yesterday's New York Times reports on anti-piracy enforcement actions in Russia that have been used for more nefarious purposes than protecting intellectual property rights."

It's good of Microsoft PR to classify protecting IP rights as nefarious, though somewhat less nefarious than actually using IP for supressing dissent. A step in the right direction, to be sure!

<comment><USER11> I don't think that they are trying to make that implication. One thing can be more than another thing even if that other thing is zero.

<comment><USER12> 'Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

'I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, 'so I can't take more.'

'You mean you can't take less,' said the Hatter: 'it's very easy to take more than nothing.'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems like a perfect response from Microsoft. I don't see what more anyone could _reasonably_ ask of them.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but every time I read something tech related (google, facebook, apple etc) on the NYT, it's overblown sensationalism. Which is ok I guess except that the NYT always prides itself as the ultimate pro journalism and its website is always shown at google and apple web browsers demos as the reference in good journalism... BS.

</comment><comment><USER15> What happened to this man who was jailed? [http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/09-02-2007/87229-mi...](http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/09-02-2007/87229-microsoft_windows-0/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Although NGOs would probably be better off with Opensource, Microsoft remains the market leader for Desktops and them willing to donate their products for a just cause does sound nice

<comment><USER17> sounds nice /or/ good spin on bad situation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How sweet and well-intentioned. If I were my grandmother, I would want this bright and appeasing young counsel as my son-in-law! :)

</comment><comment><USER19> I am not a user of their software and I generally dislike their business practices, but I must say that for this response they deserve credit and respect.</comment>


Glitchy Glitch – A glitch art/music discovery experiment - <AUTHOR> http://glitchyglitch.com/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting work, and very clean UI, congrats and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> Successful , Good Luck

</comment><comment><USER4> awesome!</comment>


If you get malware, it's virtually certain it's your fault?  - <AUTHOR> http://billmullins.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/scareware-is-everywhere-as-mac-users-just-found-out/

<comment><USER2> My thought (with no research done) is, Mac malware is 90% phishing/user tricking, 9.99% Word macros and 0.01% possibly real (it can happen, it just so rarely does, and it can be something unix-wide). Windows is 70% user tricking, 25% because (nearly?) everything is run with admin privileges, and 5% zero- day/could attack an unprivileged account.

I'd like to know where I'm wrong so I can comfortably tell people this.</comment>


Ask HN: Simple web app ideas? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I would like to build a simple web app during my summer vacation. My main goal is to improve my JavaScript skills and create something really valuable for my portfolio. I would like to cover all the aspects of a typical web app: users profiles and roles, auth, deployment, etc.
I may have some ideas but I'm not totally happy with them. I would like it to be something more or less useful, but it could be just something fun.
Thanks and have a nice summer! ;) <comment><USER2> Think about something that would be useful for you and bring you value. That will be something you enjoy building most.

For the portfolio portion maybe tie in something that would be valuable to your typical client.

That said here are some ideas:

Simple budget app to track/project your spending/decide on purchases/project income?

Track something you collect. Lego minifigures maybe or episodes you've watched of your favorite tv show.

Budget/Time estimating tool for work projects.

A real time chat app or social media app for you and your family and/or friends.

A 'dashboard' app for you and your family, share your locations, leave messages, simple to do lists, weather tie in some apis of services you all use.

Not sure what framework you use or are planning on learning.

I've been using Laravel for a couple of years now and have been using Vue js more and more. They are a great combo and auth comes together pretty much right out of the box.

[https://laracasts.com/series/whats-new-in- laravel-5-2](https://laracasts.com/series/whats-new-in-laravel-5-2)

Laravel has some great tools

Great documentation: laravel.com

local development made easy: Homestead (Virtual Box) and Valet (a new tool for OSX that creates a lightweight server that would be perfect for your project).

Build Servers and Deployment: forge.laravel.com (setups SSLs from dashboard through LetsEncrypt).

Envoyer if you need zero down time deployment.

Nice video tutorials at Laracasts.com

Enjoy your summer vacation and good luck building a cool app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the ideas! My idea is to use JavaScript in front-end and back-end, but I'm also considering Laravel with Vue.js. I did a small project with Laravel some months ago and I really liked it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think a job board is a pretty good, typical web app that is a little different than the traditional examples (ecommerce store, CRM, blog).

Job board has multiple different views based on roles (job board admin, job poster, job seeker), a few basic CRUD forms, sorting/filtering/searching (as simple or advanced as you'd like), optional payments for posting fee or premium listings, transactional emails (your job posting is expiring, a new job was been added, etc), optional WYSIWYG editor for previewing/formating job posts, the list goes on and on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good one. Now I just have to find a specific niche for the board! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hot Spots

Business or fan log their local spots and print a QR voting code to put up at the place ("vote for us!")- then nightly (or during the weekend) people vote by scanning the QR code at the spot (probably would have to make an account to vote), places with the most scans are listed as Hot Spots. the hotness goes down after a few days, unless ore votes come in - you can also do metrics on most visited, best weekday spots, etc.

Plan to do this myself at some point.

</comment><comment><USER5> A "personal" CRM (for relationships)

A habit developing app

A meditation focused app

A to-do list app

A productivity focused app

<comment><USER6> In a similar vein, a personal CRM for job searching

<comment><USER7> What would be its core features?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > stripe coupon system

Stripe plugin similar to AccountDock.io but for coupon codes. Our online interface would let you create an arbitrary number of single-use coupon codes with one click, and adding a single line of javascript to your code would add the ability to handle coupon codes for your subscriptions/saas.

> stripe affiliate system

<comment><AUTHOR> Good one! Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When you ask this sort of question you should have contact details in your profile - there is no way to get in touch with you to discuss things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice, I wasn't aware of that. I'm adding it to my profile.</comment></comment>


Police Officials: Google and Apple Should Censor Encryption Apps - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/police-officials-google-and-apple-should-censor-encryption-apps-in-their-stores <comment><USER2> Well that's an article written by someone who's never submitted an app, that uses encryption, to the App Store.

They're big on ensuring you've applied for the correct export licence from the USA (because that's where the distribution is technically made from), even if you're based outside the USA.

(Google just make you say you have, but Apple actually want to see the approval doc)

</comment><comment><USER3> Police officials should officiate their employees who should enforce the laws. This is law enforcement, not law generator or law think tank.</comment>


Monzo: Learned a lot from self-hosting Kubernetes, but wouldn't do it again - <AUTHOR> https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4019233/monzo-learned-lot-self-hosting-kubernetes-wouldn' <comment><USER2> Admittedly arm-chair judging Kubernetes. I do not have production experience with it. That said, I always wondered why and how critical infrastructure such as banking would choose to use Kubernetes, even more so when it was in its early days. Wouldn't the complexity of that thing, and the layers of magic/abstraction it brings deter a sane architect to steer away from it for critical stuff?

It may have matured better now, and may have seen more battle stories, but why bring those to a startup that does banking!?

May be not the kind of argument that entertains HN audience, but early in my career, I worked as part of a team consulting several financial companies and they all had one thing in common - boring, but reliable infrastructure and change management. It is true that it was a slow innovation cycle, but to them the stability and reliability of business Was more important than being able to push thousands of changes to production everyday. I was once part of a change review team for a release that was meticulously reviewing changes before a release that happened every 6 months to this business critical application. A stark contrast to today's devOps processes that push changes way to often and break things way too often.</comment>


Drones that can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and land on a moving target - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/26/volans-i-drones-can-haul-cargo-for-500-miles-and-land-on-a-moving-ship.html <comment><USER2> What 20 pound load could have saved the Titanic? Why wouldn't such a miraculous tool or part have been brought aboard already as a precaution?

<comment><USER3> At the time, probably nothing. At best they could have sent out life jackets or something similar, though I don't know how much they weighed at the time.

But if that happened today, we could minimally start getting inflatable lifeboats out to the people, supplementing afterwards with blankets for heat, life preservers, food, and so on. If you kept some on the ship in a slightly similar tragedy, the drones could offship as the sinking is happening and then immediately deliver goods to survivors. This last option seems more useful.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.amazon.com/Sevylor-Colossus-2-Person- Inflatable-...](https://www.amazon.com/Sevylor-Colossus-2-Person-Inflatable- Boat/dp/B0032GT9X8)

Weight: 9.5 pounds each.

They're not for long term use, but it would have kept people out of the water until proper rescue boats arrived.

Obviously these didn't exist back in 1912, but then again, neither did these drones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Technology like this is why The Wall is a waste of money when it comes to deterring drug trafficking.

<comment><USER6> Jamming drones is easier than you think, the new battleground will be autonomous flying to avoid trivial radio/gps jamming. MIT has open source code for this already.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qah8oIzCwk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qah8oIzCwk)

[https://github.com/andybarry/flight](https://github.com/andybarry/flight)

<comment><USER7> I'm no expert but how autonomous works if there's no positioning methods involved? (To avoid GPS/GLONASS,... Jamming)

<comment><USER8> Surprised nobodies mentioned celestial sensors.

Celestial navigation by imaging the sky, and combining that data with a clock and compass.

<comment><USER9> Very unreliable for ground based systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aerones have developed a drone that can haul a human - [https://www.aerones.com/eng/news/?text_id=18](https://www.aerones.com/eng/news/?text_id=18)

<comment><USER11> so did i :-) We logged a lot of hours with a person onboard who didn't touch the controls. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7SjOOuTct0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7SjOOuTct0)

<comment><USER12> That's really neat. It looks like the company is defunct -- what happened?

<comment><USER11> Yeah, some founder conflicts right when things were getting good. I've been able to leverage the experience to keep doing cool things though :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fine and dandy when flying over a desert but when the drone meets the city and an "autopilot" failure occurs over a freeway/highway/street or someone's head the consequences will be unforgivable.

<comment><USER14> I don't get that. Before the sun rises tomorrow, for the US alone, 32 Americans will make a mistake with their car that kills someone (potentially, but unlikely, themselves, 2 will kill themselves, 29 will kill someone else, one will kill 2 others, for a total of 33 deaths). At the same time, a further 2000 Americans will injure someone with a car, and another 3000 will cause severe (I believe > 1000$) property damage, mostly on cars.

That's on 260 million cars, or an accident rate of something like 1.3% on a yearly basis (unfortunately, this masks the fact that ~70% of those accidents are done by < 10% of drivers. So plenty of people are, frankly, just plain insane and have double digit accident rates).

That, we find perfectly acceptable. Drivers that crash cars about once a year are not that rare. And it's not like these people are the ones having minor accidents. Maybe it's just me but ... weird how people's sense of risks work.

<comment><USER15> Don't you have a score system? It has a noticeable effect, that probably happens by taking the insane drivers off the road.

You start with ten points that you lose with infractions, more points for more serious ones. If you run out of points, you don't drive or face jail.

<comment><USER16> It plain just doesn't work (as implemented.)

First off, it is much too lenient and the points drop off your record much too quickly. Most infractions can be reduced in court and many crashes (especially single car crashes) don't result in infractions unless they are serious.

Secondly, those people will just drive unlicensed anyway, so it really doesn't matter if we take their license away or put them in jail for a month, they already don't follow the rules and don't give a shit. There's nothing physically preventing someone unlicensed, uninsured, or unfit to drive from climbing into an vehicle, starting the engine, and driving on public roads. The only thing that can deter them is getting arrested after the fact, but that's pretty rare.

My dad lost his licence years ago (for good reason) and a judge has denied his application to get it reinstated many times (for good reason). He still drives all the time and still crashes his truck fairly regularly. Sure, he gets arrested once in a while, but that doesn't stop him.

<comment><USER15> The difference seems to be that here in Spain you are seldom sentenced to less than two years. Jail, when you finally get there, is a serious matter. And of course you can't drive in prison so problem solved :)

Points and permit revoking are the way to fast-track what otherwise would be administrative sanctions, clustering them to build a criminal case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My first thought was "oh they built a bomber". Curious if drones with capabilities like this will start getting export restrictions.

</comment><comment><USER18> If I was a drug lord, this is something I would invest my money to.

</comment><comment><USER19> Once this (cool) tech is commonplace (they already have competitors) these airborne drones will be a logistical and regulatory nightmare.

<comment><USER20> Nah, once there are established rules about which classes of aircraft use which altitudes, corridors, etc, it will be just like private aviation operating in the same sky as commercial airlines.

<comment><USER19> But their numbers could be so much greater!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Of all the things I think this will really impact, I think food delivery and fresh ingredient delivery will be near the top of the list.

<comment><USER22> It's a little sad that people's first thoughts about tech like this is "It can bring me goods faster than FedEx!" That's such a trivial thing to use it for.

Emergency deliveries in rural areas are where this will be most useful. Getting medicine and mechanical parts to remote places during crisises is _hard_.

<comment><USER23> I think the simple economics of it would completely rule out this being used for 'fresh groceries' ... or rather only to people who want to pay 10x for their groceries.

My bet: the military/security/coast guard, for far off service posts (like when they put hydro wires way out in the middle of nowhere), offshore Oil, and for very specific things (i.e. medical equipment) for remote communities.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you that deliveries to offshore oil and specific functions will be very practical.

However, not so sure I agree that economics will prevent 'fresh grocery' delivery. It will be different vehicles for sure, but the operating costs of a small electric vehicle with 5-10lb payload can be very low (cents/hour). I doubt there's going to be direct farm-to-house deliveries, but instead something that can augment the current transportation infrastructure. Imagine a national grocery chain adopts small electric drones for last-mile delivery. They leverage existing shipping network in place to keep stores stocked, and just send drone deliveries from store-to-house. Actual flight cost for one round-trip store-to-house is going to be pennies.

<comment><USER24> Marginal flight cost might be pennies, but they will also have to account for the cost of the drones, maintenance, repair, replacement, and liability for damages that they do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This reminds me of Passerine Aircraft.

I believe they are also attempting to take advantage of runway-less takeoff and fixed-wing flight (more efficient than four fans pressing down). [https://passerineaircraft.com/](https://passerineaircraft.com/)

Am I correct in understanding that Volans-i has two propulsion systems?

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like cool tech. I wonder if they could do the same for a regular aircraft - put electrically driven propellers to lift it off the ground for a few seconds while it accelerates to above stall speed.

</comment><comment><USER27> Admirable, sets a timeline for instant delivery systems

</comment><comment><USER28> It makes me happy to see that people are venturing out and building something that takes longer and has a higher failure rate that web apps/software.

<comment><USER29> The man who gets the most press in the tech community is trying to launch rockets to Mars and build electric supercars and networks that cost ludicrous amounts of money. Whether you think these ideas are any good or not, people are doing large things in our society. It ain't all web apps.

<comment><USER30> He did start with web apps though (PayPal).

<comment><USER26> Well, zip2 then x.com then PayPal. Also sold some program when he was 12 pre the web. Here's some video of him after the zip2 sale [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHKT3yxYvDQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHKT3yxYvDQ)

<comment><USER31> That was adorable.

Coincidentally he completely totaled that car on Sand Hill Road with Peter Thiel on a trip to a meeting at Sequoia Capital[0].

[0] [https://www.inverse.com/article/26369-elon-musk-peter- thiel-...](https://www.inverse.com/article/26369-elon-musk-peter-thiel-story- mclaren-f1-paypal-tesla)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So basically every terror org on the planet have crude off the shelf 500mile cruise missiles now.

<comment><USER19> They've had this for 15 years already, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Simpson_(blogger)#DIY_Cr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Simpson_\(blogger\)#DIY_Cruise_Missile)

<comment><USER32> Fair, but that's built with off the shelf _parts_ , not an off the shelf device (He didn't actually mass produce it I assume?). In the article is a device you can unpack from the store, and then have it go 500 miles with 20lb bomb within minutes. I find more frightening than the fact that it's possible with the right skills to _build_ something like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> 20 pounds = 9kg, for the rest of the world.

<comment><USER18> If that is cocaine, then it is almost $1m of cargo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Both have graduate degrees from Stanford, which is where they met."

So, basically the silver spoon of Silicon Valley. These guys have a shot!</comment>


Less is more, more or less - finding the minimum features is hard - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2010/09/27/less-is-more-more-or-less/

<comment><USER2> This post is a little reflection on this anecdote: But each time we met she politely told me I was an idiot and my engineering department was even dumber. It took two meetings before we understood that our database schema didn't include "householding" and without this feature was she could never buy our system. (Householding means recognizing that two or more people at the same physical address live together). That's all folks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait, so you mean you have to actually understand your customers' needs to know what the minimum feature set is?

Shocking!

<comment><USER4> Yes, but one good point here is that showing them _something_ is very useful. By making them answer the question, "what problem do you have that this _doesn't_ solve" they found the minimum they needed to add.

Conversation goes best when it is two-way—of course you need to listen and understand your customers' needs, but often they don't know them themselves and need you to suggest things so they can realise what they actually need.

Or, to quote Justice Stewart, "I know it when I see it."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is someone at GitHub having a rough day today? - <AUTHOR> Earlier today I got an email that looked like this:
This email is to confirm that you've deleted your account '<accountName>' from GitHub. Your repositories and content have been deleted from the system. If you were on a paid plan, you will not be billed again. We're sorry to see you go. You can reply directly to this email if you have any questions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you.
Later on in the day I received this email:
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for writing in about this.
Earlier today during some maintenance on the site, members of GitHub staff accidentally deleted your personal Github account (username: <accountName>).
We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience.
We are currently working to restore the account to its previous state and we will update you by email with any updates.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. If you have any questions or concerns, please reply here.
Sincerely, <GitHubEmployeeName>
Did this happen to anyone else today?
~DZ <comment><USER2> Phishing scam maybe? It's not the first time github users have been targeted: [http://www.javaworld.com/article/3187571/security/open- sourc...](http://www.javaworld.com/article/3187571/security/open-source- developers-targeted-in-sophisticated-malware-attack.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you have any proof this happened?</comment>


Quip's Toothbrush Replacement Service (Yes, Really) Raises Seed Funding - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/04/quips-subscription-based-toothbrush-replacement-service-yes-really-raises-seed-funding/

<comment><USER2> I found this confusing and almost thought it was a joke, because Quip[0] is a document collaboration tool for mobile devices and the web. Turns out they happen to share the exact same brand name.

[0] [https://quip.com/](https://quip.com/)</comment>


12seconds is shutting down... - <AUTHOR> http://12seconds.tv/

<comment><USER2> Every time I see a good bye message , my heart just goes down.

<comment><USER3> Fear not, everyone fails before they succeed.

<comment><USER4> That's not entirely true. Definition of failure varies broadly for different people the same way definition of success. I know few entrepreneurs very closely who made their first startup very successful. Sure, it was very challenging along the way, but they made it in the end.

May be the fair statement would be - "Failed in one startup doesn't mean you failed as an entrepreneur. There is still hope that you can make the next one successful."

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'll be damned if I let my business fall over. There have been plenty of really hellacious tough times already, but I refuse to give up on it. I have a little trouble understanding how anyone else can build something from scratch and then walk away from it.

<comment><USER6> If you have to add money to it to keep it running that would be one very good motivation to call it quits, another is that you see bigger opportunities elsewhere but you can't focus on those because of the albatross around your neck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sad to see. I had the chance to work with the 12seconds guys a couple years ago, and they were just about the nicest folks you could imagine. I hope they go on to bigger and better things.

</comment><comment><USER8> I commend the 12Seconds guys for innovating and iterating a good idea as far as it could go.

The public video cam space _(ie not Skype/private messaging and not adult stuff)_ has never gone mainstream despite many people trying hard - and no matter what you might do the fundamental proposition is just not attractive to most people.

Facebook has had a similar feature - most people don't even know it. Seesmic video (the original product there) is not worked on. Chat Roulette is really a meme/joke and no where near a proven business. TinyChat has video but it's still semi-private and certainly not mainstream.

I actually thought with the front facing camera and FaceTime on iPhone we'd see a shift but it still doesn't seem to be happening. Just like next year is the year for video calls, it still hasn't happened.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why shut down? Put ads on it and let it run.

You still have some traffic

<http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/12seconds.tv>

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder why shut down? Is this due to investors? Does it takes a lot of effort and time to maintain or the founders are moving on with their professional lives and having a start-up on the side is looked down upon within large Internet companies?</comment>


Game theory and probability of iPhone passwords - <AUTHOR> http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2011/01/27/game-theory-and-probability-of-iphone-passwords/

<comment><USER2> Or you could just un-check "simple passcode" in Settings...</comment>


ScamShare - <AUTHOR> https://scamshare.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a new website I created to help people identify and understand scams and scammers. Every year, about 4 million people are lulled into a scam. Over 25 million people are dealing with being scammed. Scammers have managed to steal $45,000,000 in 2017 alone. The fact that they keep scamming us -- from emails, text messages, and phone calls means it is working. I invite you to use this website to share your scam stories and emails or text messages you have received from scammers. I hope this serves as an educational and preventative tool to protect people from being scammed.</comment>


Microsoft's AI No Longer Listens to "Hey Cortana" on Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/12/21/microsofts-ai-no-longer-listens-to-hey-cortana-on-android/ <comment><AUTHOR> I found this interesting because the Moto-X feature of a custom "moto features" phrase also interferes with the "Ok Google" stuff, and it has the high probability of causing your phone to be unusable until a reboot if you don't actually ask it to do anything.

I'm curious what the root of this problem is though. My experience with this feature has been marginal at best, trying very distinct activation phrases and still having it randomly activate when in the car or in the presence of even low level ambient noise.</comment>


Ant Design 4.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/issues/21656 <comment><USER2> We use Ant Design, but I've been regretting the decision because many of the components haven't been built with keyboard navigation (and from the looks of things, other accessibility features) in mind. It's a shame because the default appearance is very attractive.

<comment><USER3> If you do switch what would you switch to?

<comment><USER2> Most of the "good" component libraries are what i'd consider to be open source for PR purposes, e.g. Atlassian's Atlaskit. You wouldn't use them unless you really want your UI to look like another company's.

I'm intrigued by Tailwind UI though, it looks like it might be the right balance between feature set and brand agnosticism.

<comment><USER4> I actually am in the process of removing antd (previous version) from my website and am not planning to upgrade to 4.0. The reason being is because you still run into the same issues as using any framework -- customizing it ends up overriding a lot of the base styles and implementations (line heights, grid, etc). Thankfully I saw this coming so a lot of the components in my app (React) are labeled as `Wrapped<ant component name>`, which I quite literally just wrap the component and add any additional props/styling that I'd like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Having used Material UI and Ant Design for React projects recently, I found the documentation in Ant to be less clear and also didn't love the use of Less for customization of the stylesheets (vs MUI's makeStyles / css-in-js approach).

When it comes down to a UI framework docs & styling options are my main criteria, I still haven't had a play around with Semantic UI or Tailwind yet, and haven't found the 'framework to rule them all'.

<comment><USER6> Hi, I'm the author of:

* [https://tailwind.build](https://tailwind.build)

* [https://bulma.dev](https://bulma.dev)

* [https://bootstrapshuffle.com](https://bootstrapshuffle.com)

I'm working on a universal "visual settings editor", so you don't need to worry if Tailwind uses JavaScripts for config and Bulma/Bootstrap use Sass.

After adding support for React, I'll launch builders for Ant Design and Material UI.

You don't need to create an account to try it. Maybe my tools will help you find the 'framework to rule them all' :P

<comment><USER7> Perhaps a noob-ish question, but will this make Ant work with pure html sites? I.e no react/vue/angular. Right now it seems it just works with the frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest improvement in my opinion is the high performance form framework, although high performance is a stretch as the last one was just so poorly designed/integrated. No more unecessary updates and no more Form.create wrappers.

Table rendering still feels sluggish though..

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Forms have been a pain in ant up until now. I'm looking forward to upgrading as the new API seems more sensible. I haven't had many experiences with the table rendering though, as I've been using ag-grid for my data tables which has been an awesome experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Borderless components

The more I look at modern UI frameworks, I more I cringe at stuff like this. No explanation about logic behind something... relentless chasing of minimalism, almost religious hate for borders, unconditional love for excessive whitespace and obsession with animations(often with defaults that are 300ms!!!!)

I can't wait for us to do a complete 360 and return back to Windows 95: [https://demo.themesberg.com/windows-95-ui- kit/index.html](https://demo.themesberg.com/windows-95-ui-kit/index.html)

First the tables were gone (somewhat a good thing because they were used for layout), then the Web 2.0 (2005) came along and created the modern UI for web browsers. That's when everything went downhill.

<comment><USER11> devil's advocate: HN is very minimalistic with design.

<comment><USER10> There is a difference, minimalism for the sake of minimalism is what I was referring to.

HN is minimal but functional first.

<comment><USER11> I disagree, HN is everything opposite of what was originally described. I can go look at youtube & come back to this site and see similarities with the design choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can Ant design be used without React? Are there any similar component libraries that can simply be included in plain HTML, ala Bootstrap?

<comment><USER13> An interesting framework that I saw here on HN a couple of days ago is Tailwind UI ([https://tailwindui.com/](https://tailwindui.com/)). It's not out just yet but looks very promising.

Other than that I would recommend Bulma ([https://bulma.io/](https://bulma.io/)). It's like bootstrap but with a different philosophy on how CSS should be implemented. Also, it doesn't include any javascript. I think that was a good decision on their part as you won't have to fight the default behaviors on their components if you want to do something slightly different.

<comment><USER14> This is incorrect advice. Tailwind is a utility CSS framework, and Tailwind UI is literally a collection of prewritten HTML for you to use and edit, that uses Tailwind classes.

> Tailwind UI is a collection of professionally designed, pre-built, fully > responsive HTML snippets you can drop into your Tailwind projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have used and like Ant Design for its completeness. I also have done some small projects with Prime React ( [https://www.primefaces.org/primereact/](https://www.primefaces.org/primereact/) ) and liked it. Prime also has bindings for other frameworks, so it might be good for people who don't (just) use React.

</comment><comment><USER16> Huge fan of this project. Makes throwing together a beautiful dashboard extremely easy, even for those less experienced in web design.

</comment><comment><USER17> Used Ant Design (Vuejs component lib) for Keel's UI: [https://keel.sh/#admin- dashboard-only-available-with-latest-...](https://keel.sh/#admin-dashboard- only-available-with-latest-image).

After using Ant Design, Vuetify (Material UI) and some bootstrap templates - Ant Design is definitely one of the favorites and would use it in other projects. Even though sometimes there are some weird bugs, it's good to mix frameworks a bit and not use the same one for all your projects to keep life interesting!

</comment><comment><USER18> As much as I love Ant design for the aesthetics, I find the performance to be seriously lacking. In my last job, our front-end team used Ant Vue, and some form elements were horrifyingly slow. For example, we loaded 200+ school names into a multi-select box, and the whole page became unresponsive if that box was ever opened. Hope they fix these issues in the future.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nĭ hăo / 你好 (hi in mandarin)!

I really enjoy having everything in one library, and being able to customize the look in less. The new interval mode for the date picker looks great. It would be great if ant design came in web components flavour, so users of vue and other frameworks can use this too.

<comment><USER7> But you can, can't you? There is a link in the footer for Vue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Excellent release. Congratulations ant team.

Now waiting for the future without any IE support at all to make bundle even slimer and significantly more performant.

</comment><comment><USER21> Is bootstrap already completely abandoned?

<comment><USER22> There are some wrappers around bootstrap for React, but I don't think people use them much any more. There's a lot of better choices. Bootstrap is kind of in the same vein as jQuery. Great stuff for it's time, but times have moved on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there something similar for angular? I know about Angular Material but it is very heavy and serverly over-engineered.

<comment><USER23> There's an Angular version - [https://ng.ant.design/docs/introduce/en](https://ng.ant.design/docs/introduce/en)</comment></comment>


Today's world is amd64, armv7, and soon aarch64 - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/W9RbUUN1 <comment><USER2> I hope for RISC-V to become popular. It has the potential to be a great open source ISA that anyone can use and extend.

</comment><comment><USER3> My phone is arm64. Makes no sense at all. It doesn't even have 4G but just 2G. I don't seethe point.</comment>


Why Google's firing terrifies social conservatives so much - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/08/why-googles-firing-terrifies-social-conservatives-so-much/ <comment><USER2> _Many of the left seek to win culture wars not on the merits of arguments and ideas but simply by punishing and silencing any who disagree._

As though that's a unique aspect of "the political left". Folks in the GOP, for example, definitely don't have litmus tests that distinguish a "true" conservative from a RINO. His team is clearly better than your team!

Honestly, it's pretty clear this op-ed is every bit the polemic as any other writing on this topic, and it's about as reliable an analysis as a result. It does nothing to move the conversation forward in any constructive way.

Again: As a Rorschach test for your sociopolitical affiliation, the memo is a smashing success. It manages this by, from the very start, couching the discussion in terms of left-right political affiliation, immediately putting the "left" on the defensive and the "right" cheering him on.

After that it's just a lesson in confirmation bias.

Edit:

As a random aside, am I the only one who feels like this thing is packed with MRA dogwhistles? "males are biologically disposable", "when a man complains about a gender issue affecting men, he is labelled as a mysogynist and a whiner", "humans are generally biased towards protecting females", etc.

This guy would've done himself a huge favour by having someone read and critique this thing _before_ sending it out. Even a straightforward rewrite to remove some of these unsupported, content-free statements would've clarified his thesis and cut out some of the obvious flamebait.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm skeptical about the benefits (and underlying assumptions) of "affirmative action" diversity hires but I certainly wouldn't classify myself as socially conservative. There are so many loaded terms on these subjects that needlessly and counterproductively labels people and those labels come with a lot of baggage.

</comment><comment><USER4> It should terrify everyone. It's a flagrant attempt at depriving someone (and their family) of access to food/home/healthcare/etc just because they voiced their opinion.

<comment><USER5> Lol. Employment isn't a protected right. Voicing your opinion is one thing, trying to use provable false statements to create a toxic work environment for one third of your coworkers is a PR disaster, terrible for moral, and 100% grounds for termination.

<comment><USER4> > provable false statements

They aren't false.

> create a toxic work environment for one third of your coworkers

The people creating a toxic work environment are those who are attempting to blackball capable, veteran engineers in order to bring incapable and subpar people into the workplace simply because they were born a different gender or skin color.

> and 100% grounds for termination.

Firing someone for political beliefs is not grounds for termination, and never has been.

<comment><USER6> > They aren't false.

Correct. It's worse: they are irrelevant. It buried the lede of unsubstantiated and toxic conclusions under some marginally related statistics and science. As a whole it wasn't a scientifically sound argument by any metric.

> The people creating a toxic work environment are those[..]

The people determining whether a working environment is toxic for them is the majority of people working in that environment. Whether you feel it shouldn't be considered toxic is a different matter.

> Firing someone for political beliefs is not grounds for termination, and > never has been.

Anti-social behaviour, whether based on religion, political beliefs, or plainly being a jerk, is always a good reason for termination in larger companies. It's what keeps a work force together.

P.S. "subpar people"? Maybe you meant to say "Untermenschen"?

<comment><USER7> > toxic conclusions

How can a conclusion be "toxic"? A conclusion is either consistent or inconsistent with the evidence at hand.

<comment><USER8> A conclusion is "toxic" when it poisons the desired outcome and/or goes counter to the narrative. Evidence does not play a major part in this, other than to be quoted when it supports the narrative or dismissed or smeared when it doesn't (viz. Obscurantism [1] and Moral relativism [2])

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its an attack on the status quo, white males are terrified, understandably...</comment>