CVS Is Said to Agree to Buy Aetna - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/business/dealbook/cvs-is-said-to-agree-to-buy-aetna-reshaping-health-care-industry.html <comment><USER2> I see this as a move towards providing cheap basic medical care. This is timely now that it's possible that the individual mandate will be repealed. Millions of uninsured people could be treated for rashes or flus by nurses at CVS cheaper and faster than at doctor's offices.

More competition in healthcare could be a good thing--many say it's bloated and overpriced. The risk is that poor people get basic care while rich people get full care, widening health disparities.

It's unclear what the new healthcare economics will look like. Currently, minor procedures are profit centers for doctor's offices and hospitals. They subsidize complicated patients (often elderly with multiple chronic diseases like diabetes or COPD) who are riskier and take more time to treat. If CVS is taking that money, then hospitals may need to do some cost-cutting.

<comment><USER3> > treated for rashes or flus by nurses

I sometimes think that's one of the things that's kept health care so expensive. Nursing salaries aren't cheap. A lot of the home health and basic clinic stuff could be handled by an LPN/LVN or even a Paramedic in many cases. Not everything needs an RN. There are plenty of available telemedicine options to put a provider in touch with a higher level of care if necessary.

<comment><USER4> "Professional Extenders" are everywhere, and it hasn't caused anything to become cheaper. If you show up at an urgent care, just expect that you will be treated by a LPN and a PA or a NP. A Family Practice physician's salary is about comparable to a Sr. Engineer at many tech companies (~160k), and they can have significant malpractice insurance overhead and insane hours. A PA or NP still makes 6 figures, so the "savings" just aren't there.

If you've ever had to attend something like Physical Therapy, you'll see the actual PT (a MS/Doctorate level professional aka DPT) about twice. Once for an eval, and once for a discharge. An "aide" will guide you through all the other exercises, and they make very significantly less than a PT.

The savings are mysteriously gone, even adding lower-salaried professional extenders.

<comment><USER5> > "Professional Extenders" are everywhere, and it hasn't caused anything to > become cheaper.

This needs the caveat of "to American consumers". The NHS seem to be heavily moving in that direction, and I suspect "cheaper" is no small part of that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If this turns every CVS into a uniform, inexpensive office/urgent care/etc., particularly with telemedicine, I'll be happy -- the "minute clinic" stuff already provides cheaper and more convenient access to care, but CVS+Aetna+some kind of EHR could do something amazing.

<comment><USER7> Given that currently around 1 out of 9 locations has a minute clinic that seems unlikely.

[https://cvshealth.com/about/facts-and-company- information](https://cvshealth.com/about/facts-and-company-information)

When I had Aetna, they didn't even cover getting a flu shot at the pharmacy. Maybe they changed that, but it's dumb, they covered it 100% using primary care.

<comment><USER8> I can attest to the fact that Aetna does cover flu shots now.

<comment><USER9> Flu shots are _required_ to be covered in _all_ U.S. insurance per the ACA. The point was that Aetna was requiring the more expensive (for them!) visit to a doctor's office for them to cover it and wouldn't cover it happening at a pharmacy.

<comment><USER10> The ACA states that your insurance provider must spend 80% of their premiums on health care. The doctor is more expensive, so the health insurance provider is allowed to keep more nominal dollars.

<comment><USER11> Although true, I doubt that's the reason since stuff like this was common pre- ACA.

The truth is that everything that a payer pays for is done through contracts. Payers will often default to a specific provider because the contract covers it and they don't have a contract for other providers.

In terms of the cost, back-end rebates often bring it down. Also, this particular contract may cost more for a flu shot, but save them even more for other procedures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A big chunk of the health care industry is the oligopoly of distributors. There's only 3 of them: McKesson, AmerisourceBergen and Cardinal. If Amazon can bring much needed competition to that part of the healthcare market it'd help bring prices down. CVS is moving up the stack because they're afraid of Amazon entering the industry. They're combining a retailer, PBM and now a health insurer. Personally I think it should be blocked because the last thing the health care industry needs is more concentration, but it will likely pass because of the nonsense (Bork-created) antitrust regime of the past 40 years.

<comment><USER13> IF you want to disrupt the pharma market, just let drug importation go free, and instead of debating the effects of a one new player, see the effects of the entire world getting in on it.

<comment><USER14> > IF you want to disrupt the pharma market, just let drug importation go free,

Yup. Allowing reimports of prescription drugs would be the single easiest way to have a massive effect on the costs of care in the US, with pretty much no negative impact on patients, providers, _or_ pharmaceutical companies in the US.

<comment><USER15> How would that not significantly harm the pharmaceutical companies? Don't they make a decent percentage of their revenue off of brands which are currently price protected via these tariffs?

<comment><USER14> > How would that not significantly harm the pharmaceutical companies? Don't > they make a decent percentage of their revenue off of brands which are > currently price protected via these tariffs?

As lostapathy explained below, US prices are currently high because that's where pharmaceutical companies are capturing their profits. In fact, even European pharmaceutical companies make most of their revenue from sales in the US, not Europe. (This is why the US funds over 50% of R&D for _the entire world_ , even though it only has 300 million people, and many of the largest pharmaceutical companies are based in Europe, not the US).

If reimportation were permitted[0], pharmaceutical companies would adjust the prices of drugs across those countries, which would bring drug prices in the US and Europe in line with one another.

Ultimately, pharmaceutical companies would still be able to make the same amount of money off the drugs, but it would distribute the _sources_ of that money more evenly across the people who are actually using the drugs (and benefiting from the research and development).

[0] it would almost certainly only apply to reimports of drugs from other NATO countries (more or less), because those are the countries that abide by US patent law on drugs (India and China, by contrast, do not recognize US patent law on large classes of drugs),

<comment><USER16> "the US funds over 50% of R&D for the entire world"

Not sure exactly what numbers you're basing that on, but I believe a significant portion of that research (especially basic level stuff) is government funded, which is not a good argument for allowing pharma companies to keep prices high.

<comment><USER14> > Not sure exactly what numbers you're basing that on, but I believe a > significant portion of that research (especially basic level stuff) is > government funded, which is not a good argument for allowing pharma > companies to keep prices high.

Nope, government funding is tracked separately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The only real upside I see here is that, the more vertically and horizontally concentrated the private sector gets, the more absurd most arguments for privatized, profit-driven healthcare appear.

Basically every other developed country has shown that the government can do as good of a job at half the cost. Socialize it all.

<comment><USER17> I agree in spirit but I'd also point out that our public spending on health care is already at about the same costs as western counties with socialized medicine. [1]

Our tax dollars are already paying out as much as other countries do but their citizens get a lot more for their money.

The solution to lowering the cost of medicine in the US has not a single solution but lies at every level of the system.

[1] [https://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/Focus-Health- Spen...](https://www.oecd.org/health/health-systems/Focus-Health- Spending-2015.pdf) \- it's the second chart.

<comment><USER18> Much of what we pay goes to Profit on several levels - insurance, provider, and medications, et al. That's where the American waste is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Um wtf. This is akin to comcast buying NBC. This is not good.

<comment><USER20> Thank you, the top comment and all its follow-up seem to think it's a good thing and may lower cost. It's hard for me to imagine this being anything less than a way to make _more_ money with the combined companies.

<comment><USER21> Of course it's a way to make more money. They wouldn't move forward with this deal if it wasn't. But this doesn't preclude the possibility that end result will be a more efficient, vertically integrated healthcare provider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It is a consolidation but CVS is a consumer focused company, which is something the US Healthcare system needs more of direly.

Part of the problem with health insurance tied to a job in the US is the fixed market that is shrouded from consumers leading to horrible pricing and service. Employment handling healthcare, in addition to a fixed pricing market, also harms the individual market due to horrible grouping, invades privacy, makes it harder to change jobs or start a company, and on top of that fuels ageism as costs go up with age in health. Employers should have no part in your healthcare, pay people more to go get it is all that should be allowed.

All other insurance types are consumer focused for auto, life, home and more. CVS taking over Aetna could be a great force in the market to make other companies get competitive on the consumer front. Aetna and BCBS are two of the worse non consumer friendly insurers around, they really hate dealing with individuals and small companies.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well I hope this a good thing, and won't lead to price gouging.

The trend of corporate consolidation is concerning, we need more monopoly busting, and anti-trust investigations.

<comment><USER24> I agree the trend is concerning, but what data are you basing the "need" for monopoly busting and anti trust investigations off of??

<comment><USER25> It sounds like he's thinking about all the times this has happened in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does this mean that many CVSs will become magnets for sick people as CVS tries to integrate more basic health services into its stores?

I realize that most people going to an expanded minute clinic aren't going to be some sort of walking dead, but it seems that if CVS tries to make its stores too much like primary care with ill people going to get prescriptions from a doctor, then people will avoid buying things at its stores to avoid getting sick.

<comment><USER27> Minute clinic facility usually has physical separation from CVS store, no?

<comment><USER28> The one I've seen was just an extra room inside the store, beside the pharmacy. There was no physical separation of patients from shoppers. Same thing at Walgreens Healthcare Clinic, just extra rooms beside the pharmacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >Both CVS and Aetna played down the prospects of regulators moving to block their deal. The breakup fee for the transaction is not especially large, reflecting that belief.

What's the causality here? Why does a lower chance of being blocked imply a lower fee if blocked?

<comment><USER30> Takeovers cost time and money to execute (lawyers, consultants, bank fees) beyond just the purchases price. If the deal does not go through it is a loss for the acquirer, hence breakup fees. If the chance of takeover failure is low the acquirer will be willing to accept a smaller insurance.

<comment><USER29> The fee is only paid if it doesn't go through. So I still fail to see how that reflects the chance of success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if this will lead to restrictions on the use of copay coupons [1]. Insurers hate them since they break my incentive to use cheaper drugs from their formulary, but pharmacies don't care (and probably are better off for me using them.)

Since I mostly hate my insurer and want to help them towards bankruptcy by extracting as much coverage from my fixed premium as possible, I have no objection to using these coupons if they'd help me and I felt like an expensive drug choice was better for me, though it's not come up for almost any drug I've needed.

Though I do need new epi-pens; maybe I should look for one while I still can!

[1] [https://www.propublica.org/article/are-copay-coupons- actuall...](https://www.propublica.org/article/are-copay-coupons-actually- making-drugs-more-expensive)

<comment><USER32> That highly depends on your prescription insurance coverage and how much they have to pay compared to the generic.

For example, some simply won't cover the brand name if the generic works for you. Others will let you get the brand name, but will only cover the amount they would pay for the generic. In either of these situations, the coupon wouldn't matter to the insurance company.

With other plans, though, the insurer pays more with the coupon. And if yours does, you can "stick it to the man" using coupons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Many are questioning if this move will help consumers. I think it will. Aetna is the __third __largest insurer and CVS is soon to be __second __largest pharmacy chain. Pharmacies provide basic care at lower cost, many insurance companies are moving Prescription Benefit Managers (PBMs) in-house to lower cost. By combining the two: CVS is able to get more customers for PBM due to Aetna and distribute the cost over a larger base of patients, Aetna maybe be able to reduce costs per customer and better compete with larger insurance firms - its a win-win and a win for consumers.

<comment><USER34> Historically consolidation of any kind in healthcare (hospitals, payers) tends to increase costs to consumers

This merger may create value but I'm sure Aetna / CVs will capture as much as possible themselves and consumers will see little of it

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> They should break up the big insurance companies and not consolidate each point of sale area for more profit.

Ex: A knee brace went over the $500 requirement to have a prior approval before issuance. No one knew this at the time so the doctor gave a cost price of $100 for the brace to avoid phone calls, letters, and time.

Can we please eliminate medical bills if not sent to the patient within 90 days? 2-5 years late is just pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder how much this has to do with the strong push for Online Pharmacies over the past decade. I hate using them, but my deductible costs next year have increased so much that I will have no choice.

</comment><comment><USER37> I see CVS using this to defend Amazon by giving Aetna customers with store discounts

</comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me of the quote "There is no way to do CVS correctly..."

</comment><comment><USER39> When will SVN buy Cigna?

</comment><comment><USER40> I feel that perhaps healthcare is the ultimate triumph of capitalism.

Every other avenue of runaway consumerism and overconsumption can obviously be pointed to as either indulgent or unnecessary.

But not healthcare: it's your health, after all - your wellbeing. It's a fundamental right, right ?

...

The received wisdom is that the aging of the baby boomer generation is driving expanded healthcare expenses as this large sect gets older. It's _obvious_ that they need all of this "healthcare".

But what if there were an alternative, more insidious explanation:

The boomers represent an irresistible pile of money. But they don't smoke. They don't have new households to start. They're getting wise to the whole sugar thing. What is left to tempt them with ?

What if there were a clear imperative on the part of a variety of industries to keep this population as unhealthy as possible - so they can stripmine their assets for "healthcare" ?

<comment><USER41> > The boomers represent an irresistible pile of money. But they don't smoke. > They don't have new households to start. They're getting wise to the whole > sugar thing. What is left to tempt them with ?

> What if there were a clear imperative on the part of a variety of industries > to keep this population as unhealthy as possible - so they can stripmine > their assets for "healthcare" ?

It's not clear that living a healthy lifestyle reduces healthcare costs, it can actually make you more expensive to care for.[1][2][3]

Diabetes medications and death from sudden heart attacks are cheap. Healthy people who live into their 80s/90s are the biggest drag on the healthcare system. They spend more of their lives as retirees. They end up needing 24-hour care. And then they still incur the same end-of-life causes as the obese/smokers... they get cancer, they get heart disease, alzheimers, etc.

Smokers and obese are inexpensive to care for in terms of lifetime cost. The best-case scenario for an insurance company is that you get hit by a bus or something. Barring that, I think they might actually prefer that you be a smoker or become obese.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9359212/Obese- an...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9359212/Obese-and-smokers- less-of-a-burden-on-the-NHS-than-the-healthy-who-live-longer-report.html)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht- obese.1.97488...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht- obese.1.9748884.html)

[3] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/22/alcohol-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/22/alcohol- obesity-and-smoking-do-not-cost-health-care-systems-money/#647df5ab64aa)

<comment><USER42> More money is spent on diabetes than any other category. [https://health.usnews.com/health- care/articles/2016-12-28/di...](https://health.usnews.com/health- care/articles/2016-12-28/diabetes-takes-biggest-bite-out-of-us-health-care- spending)

<comment><USER41> I'm not surprised, but eliminating those costs isn't as simple as eliminating diabetes. If diabetes is cured tomorrow, those costs don't just disappear, they get remapped to whatever other health complications and end-of-life events those people run into instead of diabetes. Then it gets complicated even further when you compare the impact to working years vs retiree years, and the resulting default rates and bankruptcies.

Diabetes can represent a massive chunk of healthcare spending, and also be an inexpensive patient outcome relative to many alternatives. Both can be true at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Hopefully this helps consumers. I doubt it though.

Seems like it's going to take Jeff Bezos to fix healthcare in America.

<comment><USER44> Watch out for Engineer's Disease.

<comment><USER45> Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER46> Engineer's Disease refers to specialists in one field assuming that they can speak with authority some other unrelated field. Healthcare in the US is notoriously complex and complicated, it would be naive to assume Amazon's success in distribution, ecommerce, and cloud services would necessarily translate to health care.

<comment><USER47> True, but there is a lot of low hanging fruit in the digital health space that amazon is especially efficient at.

<comment><USER34> People have been pursuing "low hanging fruit in the digital health space" for the last 5 years with little to show for it. Most successful (as measured by acquisitions / adoption in the broader industry, not by VC funding raised) health IT startups come from "flyover" states and are created by people with tons of domain expertise and enough engineering chops to execute, not the other way around

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The monopolisation of American industry continues.

</comment><comment><USER49> Most HN users who don't live in the US probably don't know what CVS is or care.

<comment><USER50> HN is based in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> All I can say is fuck Aetna. Worst insurance ever, maybe this will make them not be shit. Good luck getting your promised benefits out of them and making it work for you. Every single time I've called them, I get put on hold for 20 minutes, before getting someone who can barely speak English, and the worst part is that their call center is in America.

<comment><USER52> So much for the mindfulness of their ceo: [https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/how-aetna-s- bertolini...](https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/how-aetna-s-bertolini- embraces-mindfulness-to-improve-company-culture)</comment></comment>


The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/press.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twitter_tweet <comment><USER2> I hope more people will become aware of her book "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster". A sad witness of a human tragedy.

[http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Chernobyl-History-Nuclear- Disas...](http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Chernobyl-History-Nuclear- Disaster/dp/0312425848)

</comment><comment><USER3> Her writing is vivid and terrifying. Her _War Does Not Have a Woman's Face_ is at the top of my list of books to unread. It's a collection of accounts from female survivors of WW2 trenches. It is not pushing a feminist narrative in traditional sense (wasn't a thing in USSR) but is haunting in its honesty. Think _Saving Private Ryan_ without the humanistic takeaway.

She's a part of Belarusian late 20th century documentary realism tradition, where authors build around authentic, traumatic biographies of the war generation. In literature, Vasil Bykau, her contemporary, even better known domestically. In cinematography, Klimov's _Come and See_ perhaps the most known work.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the background. I am super-familiar with the Soviet WWII documented experience (Vasiliy Grossman, Ehrenburg, etc. ) but I've embarrassed to say I've never heard of her.

<comment><USER3> That's hardly surprising: I only read her since am originally from Belarus myself. She's also an outspoken critic of both Lukashenko and Putin, something that doesn't bode well for a Russian language writer at all. I'm happy she gets the wider recognition now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it odd that neither the local city library and the university library don't have one of her works (pop. 320k)? She has gotten awards before, so one would think she's more popular. How political is this choice?

As a child of two parents who lived through WWII I recognized her sample from the book 'unchildlike stories'/'last witnesses' [http://www.alexievich.info/knigi/LastWit_En.pdf](http://www.alexievich.info/knigi/LastWit_En.pdf) but on her page it seems it has only been translated into japanese and is not available in a language I (or my parents) understand, it's a pity. Another book I would like to read is 'The wonderful deer of the eternal hunt' but that doesn't seem to be ready yet (or abandoned?). In an article about her work from 15 years ago it's mentioned that she has been working on this book for 3 years now and she wants the topic to be part of her work. [http://www.tol.org/client/article/8060-a-writer-from-a- crack...](http://www.tol.org/client/article/8060-a-writer-from-a-cracked- world.html)

Fortunately I can order 'Voices from Chernobyl' and 'War Does Not Have a Woman's Face' in paper format (only), just as well as in a way it makes the stories more memorable for me then the dead and cold e-surrogate.

<comment><USER6> The "Swedish Academy" who awards these prices are considered somewhat of a joke here in Sweden. Almost as much as we consider the Norwegian Nobel Committee a joke - remember the embarassingly prematurely awarded Obama nobel peace prize - basically only awarded because the Norwegians wanted to frolick with celebs.

They have a very elitist stance - if an author gets popular, no matter how "good" or "bad" he or she is, the prize seemingly cannot be awarded to them.

[http://www.today.com/id/15210453/ns/today- today_books/t/nobe...](http://www.today.com/id/15210453/ns/today- today_books/t/nobel-prize-literature-goes-who/)

"A political bias may be hard to prove but there is no doubt the academy favors lesser-known writers to international best sellers. Few outside literary circles had heard of China's Gao Xingjian, Poland's Wislawa Szymborska or Kenzaburo Oe of Japan.

Gert Fylking, a Swedish radio journalist taunted the academy for a decade by showing up at the award announcement and yelling 'finally' when Engdahl read the winner's name. After being barred from entering one year, he showed up the next in disguise.

'The point is that 99 percent of the time, the writer who wins the Nobel Prize is completely unknown to the big masses,' Fylking said."

<comment><USER7> I don't see how "literary circles" should be criticized for choosing works that they believe have merit in their own field. Nobody was up in arms earlier about the chemistry award going to people who weren't "household names" \- other than the Peace prize, the odds that anyone who wins a Nobel this year will have a bigger public profile than Alexievich are slim to none.

<comment><USER8> > Nobody was up in arms earlier about the chemistry award going to people who > weren't "household names"

That's because chemistry papers can only be appreciated by a trained chemist, whereas literature is a popular art form which ought to be appreciatable by anybody. Or any _educated_ person, if you want to dismiss the tastes of the great unwashed (it's interesting how literature is one of the few fields where it's still socially acceptable to be a snob).

Now, maybe the Nobel Prize Committee is doing us a great service by uncovering the works of these great authors whose work has never been appreciated before. But in that case, you'd expect them to become popular _after_ their prizes, and everyone would be going "boy, I sure am glad that the Nobel Prize Committee brought Derek Walcott to my attention or else I'd never have read _Omeros_ ". But nope, most of the laureates continue to languish in relative obscurity even after they win the prizes.

<comment><USER7> Well, it's also a lot easier to validate their choices - you and anyone else who are fluent in English, Russian or a number of other languages can go pick up a copy of Voices from Chernobyl, say, and give it a try. (It's amazing.) You will have a harder time validating the chemists' work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it interesting that betting houses have gotten the winners right for a few years already.

[http://www.ibtimes.com/pulse/nobel-prize-2015-betting- odds-w...](http://www.ibtimes.com/pulse/nobel-prize-2015-betting-odds-who-are- literature-peace-physics-favorites-2127359)

Something similar to the DraftKings affair maybe, where someone or several someones with insider information are using it for their advantage?

She wasn't a dark horse to win though, she's been favored for at least a year now:

[http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural- comment/nonfiction...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural- comment/nonfiction-deserves-nobel)

So it might be a case of a Prediction Game doing right

I remember from some years ago the Hollywood Stock Exchange ( www.hsx.com/ ), an online game where people "invested" on movies, was used as a "crowd wisdom" source for decisions on whether to fund movies, etc, and was fairly accurate IIRC.

Maybe there's a similar opportunity for other fields? A Startup Stock Exchange game? :)

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

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

<comment><USER7> This is actually only the second time in 12 years that the favorite per the Ladbrokes odds has gotten the award, the last being Pamuk in 2006.

[http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123058/who-will-win- nobel...](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123058/who-will-win-nobel-prize- literature)

<comment><USER9> I stand corrected, it seems the Literature nobel prize is very hard to guess correctly, they did find out last year's prize early but it was because of a leak.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/nobel-prize-in-literature-won- by...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/nobel-prize-in-literature-won-by-french- writer-patrick-modiano-1.2793454)

"Betting on Modiano to win the Nobel surged in the last week, raising questions about a possible leak. David Williams of bookmaker Ladbrokes said Modiano's odds had shortened from 100-1 a few months ago to 10-1 before the announcement."

Edit: I still think a "Startup Stock Exchange" could be fun, maybe based on CrunchBase or something :)

<comment><USER10> I used to mess around on exchangel.co, but mainly I'm interested in placing long bets which just require some patience rather than trading in the artificial market. I think there's another one out there too that does start up trading.

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I'll look them up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra I've never read her but I assume this is where you start:

[http://lib.ru/NEWPROZA/ALEKSIEWICH/zhensk.txt](http://lib.ru/NEWPROZA/ALEKSIEWICH/zhensk.txt)

<comment><USER3> Be warned, none of her books are light reads. I put a summary in the other thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352263)</comment></comment>


List of States with Nuclear Weapons - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons <comment><USER2> There are rumored to be nuclear weapons stationed in South Korea also. Admitting it would complicate the peace talks significantly.</comment>


HTML Theme for SaaS Website - <AUTHOR> I am a developer and I am trying to build a saas application in django. What would be a good place to buy a good theme like https://themes.getbootstrap.com/preview/?theme_id=5348? I looked at template monster but did not like anything. I just love the https://themes.getbootstrap.com/preview/?theme_id=5348 theme but paying $390 for a theme seems to be expensive. <comment><USER2> [http://themeforest.net/](http://themeforest.net/)</comment>


Inside Facebook's Decision to Blow Up the Like Button - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-facebook-reactions-chris-cox/ <comment><USER2> It's a long article, but here seem to be the relevant parts:

Facebook researchers started the project by compiling the most frequent responses people had to posts: "haha," "LOL," and "omg so funny" all went in the laughter category, for instance. Emojis with eyes that transformed into hearts, GIF animations with hearts beating out of chests, and "luv u" went in the love category. Then they boiled those categories into six common responses, which Facebook calls Reactions: angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and love.

Facebook Reactions won't get rid of like—it will be an extension. Within the company, there was some debate on how to add the options without making every post look crowded with things to click. The simpler Facebook is to use, the more people will use it. Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual thumbs-up button under each post, but if someone on her smartphone presses down on it a little longer, the other options will reveal themselves. Cox's team went with that and added animation to clarify their meaning, making the yellow emojis bounce and change expression. The angry one turns red, looking downward in rage, for example. Once people click their responses, the posts in News Feed show a tally of how many wows, hahas, and loves each generated.

edit: Yay was rejected as a choice.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the summary.

Obviously, given the near six billion dollars they made, they know what they're doing. But....

This doesn't fix anything currently making Facebook suck. It makes it noisier.

My solution would be a _tagging_ system. People can add tags (that don't even need to be shown by default), and other friends' feeds can be filtered by the tags.

For instance: This is a baby pic? Tag it as baby. In my feed, I will _never_ need to see another baby again.

Other people don't like politics or football. They can get tagged as such, and ignored by those who don't like those topics.

This would absolutely positively fix Facebook for me. They are smart enough to make it work. No more babies PLEASE!!!

<comment><USER4> Given how YouTube's tagging system eventually ended up working , and twitters current one I suspect tags won't function like you envision #reply #hn #hackers #yc #apple #eatingdinner

<comment><USER5> Image recognition, language processing might be a good fit here.

I imagine it's on their radar considering all their interest in AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The demo of the feature as shared by Chris Cox: [https://www.facebook.com/chris.cox/videos/10101920404101583/](https://www.facebook.com/chris.cox/videos/10101920404101583/)

Looking at it I was wondering what are the chances that it would lead to posting of an unintended reaction ("Haha" instead of "Love"). Once a reaction is tapped on, it is gone to the wild forever. There won't be any undo.

With 'Like' button there is no chance of accident as there is nothing else. And considering the reaction feature is being built for mobile - small screen, distracted attention, unsteady hands, the chances of 'oops' scenario are quite high.

<comment><USER7> I've accidentally liked things before, and there is still an undo.. you just tap it again or change your reaction. Do it fast enough and you'll avoid any embarrassing broadcasts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual thumbs-up button under each post, but if someone on her smartphone presses down on it a little longer, the other options will reveal themselves.

Talk about unintuitive UI. I don't understand this recent fad of pressing harder/longer on a button to discover a secret hidden feature that's unavailable otherwise.

Also I liked yay the best, too bad they axed it.

<comment><USER9> ". I don't understand this recent fad of pressing harder/longer on a button to discover a secret hidden feature that's unavailable otherwise."

No kidding, as a 28 year old I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to "get" snapchat's UI.

<comment><USER10> I read an interesting piece that argues that the confusing interface is actually a feature. Can't find it at the moment, but it went something like:

Snapchat's confusing interface complements the way their users interact. Users tend to learn about features from social interactions with their friends (face to face, or digital), which builds a sense of ingroup. Additionally, the confusing interface tends to filter out older users, who lack the social guidance of the younger users. This keeps the userbase heavily skewed young, which further reinforces its branding as a fun app for the cool kids. After all, nothing is less cool than your mom doing the things you like.

I'm not sure that this is what the company wants (they've had screenshots of a redesigned UI leak this week), but it makes logical sense to me.

<comment><USER11> Was it this one? [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/01/snapchat_why_teens_favorite_app_makes_the_facebook_generation_feel_old.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The really interesting takeaway from this article for me was that product executives make many decisions based on simple intuition, industry experience, and "I've heard it worked over there."

There are numerous mentions of failed product roll-outs(News Feed as a failure at first, Paper, etc.) But the key quote is here, when they talk about the meeting: "Cox agrees. 'My intuition, which we could prove wrong, is people just want more stuff.'

I'm sure that Facebook uses data to back up some of its assertions; after all, they did mine comments to come up with the most common reactions. But how many people's entire internet experience (i.e. consumption of news through the News Feed) is impacted just by some senior guy in a room going, "This sounds right to me," and everyone scrambling to work on what he proposes?

<comment><USER13> "But how many people's entire internet experience (i.e. consumption of news through the News Feed) is impacted just by some senior guy in a room going, "This sounds right to me,"

Like senior exec of IT buying into enterprise solutions that sound good on paper and make everyone's life living hell. "Business people will be able to make programming changes without developers using visio diagram!"

<comment><USER14> "Business people will be able to make financial calculations without developers using a graphical spreadsheet!"

 _Like that 'll ever happen._ Senior execs of IT are so stupid, amiright?

Everyone knows only programmers should be doing financial calculations with a computer, and that UIs are for losers. /s

<comment><USER15> Actually maybe they shouldn't... [http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13/microsoft...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13/microsofts- excel-might-be-the-most-dangerous-software-on-the-planet/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I imagine this will make their sentiment analysis better. Hopefully, it will be weighted sufficiently highly in the newsfeed algorithm that I can start to exert some control on the newsfeed again. I can mostly keep my feed relevant by blocking whole sites (huffpo, buzzfeed, etc), but it would be nice if Facebook knew when individual posts hit a "breakout" status and could appear in my feed again.

On the other hand, ion they use this too heavily, then the newsfeed becomes a serious echo chamber, where it is not only correlated to your friend group, but also to your "optimal" emotional reaction. Might be great for Facebook to sell more ads, but not necessarily great for the end user.

</comment><comment><USER17> Slack's Reactji -- which lets you use any standard or custom emoji as a reaction -- is significantly more useful than Facebook's very limited set of options, _and_ it came first.

You would think that after seeing how well received the Slack Reactji are, Facebook would have expanded its available options.

I can understand not venturing into custom emoji, but at least let there be a :pile-of-poo: reaction! After all, it's an election year!

<comment><USER18> You can put emoji in a comment for similar effect.

The facebook system allows a few critical things:

\- a simple tally of reactions. With an open-ended set of emoji, it's a bit silly to tally emoji responses. With 6 options, the tallies are interesting.

\- advertising. These six actions are a known quantity and can be baked into their advertising and display algorithms at every level. Using emoji, you'd have to build some kind of emoji-emotion-algorithm which classifies the use of all emoji in real time to a small set of factors for use in the algorithm

But yeah nothing is stopping you from filling up facebook messages and comments with :poo: emoji and stickers and gifs.

<comment><USER19> > \- a simple tally of reactions. With an open-ended set of emoji, it's a bit > silly to tally emoji responses. With 6 options, the tallies are interesting.

Slack's implementation is worth using to question whether of your speculated problems would actually be significant. It updates the tallies in real-time and requires only a single click to increment the count. Although people could use any emoji, in practice there are only a small percentage which are relevant and people tend to add to previous ones rather than add a random new one.

> \- advertising. These six actions are a known quantity and can be baked into > their advertising and display algorithms at every level. Using emoji, you'd > have to build some kind of emoji-emotion-algorithm which classifies the use > of all emoji in real time to a small set of factors for use in the algorithm

If an advertiser was trying to do this, they'd have to do all of that work either way – the only difference is the size of the lookup table. I think they'd be more worried about trying to gauge the target of the reaction – e.g. if I post something about politics and you use the angry reaction, it's much harder for a machine to tell whether you disagreed with me or were directing some righteous indignation at the subject of the story and that's the most valuable bit of info to know for deciding which candidate or party's ad to show.

<comment><USER18> I think it's far more than "the size of the lookup table" because that implies that each emoji has one purpose (like the Facebook 5 have one purpose).

Facebook's five choices are clear and universal human emotions that leave very little room for subjectivity.

Emoji, on the other hand, are used as a famously arcane new language where each symbol has many potential uses, as a pictogram in conjunction with others, or as multiple uses per emoji, as viral "inside" jokes meaning completely different things than depicted (tree, fire, or pineapple are often used to mean a drug, but how do you know when a tree symbol means a drug and when it means a pine tree?) "X_X face" is often used to mean sexytimes, but the X_X emoji is also used to mean exasperation.

Sad, happy, angry, these are simple to work with.

But how do you classify Back-Button? What does a user think of a post when they rate it "Alien-Face". When they use "Skull/Crossbone" are they saying danger/poison, or death, or Halloween, costumes, a movie?

I'm not sure you could ever get to an adequate level of programmatically understanding the intent behind emoji, but I think that it's not too difficult with 5 universal emotions.

<comment><USER19> I'm not disagreeing that it's more work but that even with only a few options, this problem is dwarfed by the question of intention, which is what advertisers really want to know. "angry face" might seem universal at first glance but it's not easy to tell who the anger is directed at, which is what advertisers would want. Even the binary Like has this problem where you don't know if someone liked a story, like the way a reporter smacked down the subject of the story, or the comment your friend made when they shared news about someone you dislike.

Besides, if Facebook only designed things for advertisers every post would have a mandatory form collecting demographic info. They know they have to make using the service enjoyable and this would be an easy way to boost interaction which doesn't make advertising fundamentally harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's funny they compare this to "Coca-Cola messing with its secret recipe" which Coke did and it was not a success.

<comment><USER21> The Coke recipe has changed significantly over time. It also varies by country (i.e. HFCS in the US, cane sugar in South America) and serving method (syrup etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article sort of took a tangential direction from Reactions and went into Chris Cox's story. It was an interesting read, just that it would have been a better article had it been profiling him, instead of bundling it up here.

Good to have actual reactions anyways. "Someone announces her divorce on the site, and friends grit their teeth and 'like' it." Such cases are everybody's life events and there were no reactions to share unless you comment.

</comment><comment><USER23> "He's not a billionaire, just a centi-millionaire." I stopped reading right there.

</comment><comment> Digit-Al I wish they'd devote the same sort of attention to making a usable mobile app instead of the bloated monstrosity that exists now.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if tourists will be able to choose from a number of different signs to stand in front of at Facebook HQ now.

</comment><comment><USER25> This feels like changing something just to change something, maybe because some executive wants to feel they're doing something important. Is there some unspoken rule in tech that you have to change things every so often, no matter what?

</comment><comment><USER26> They missed an important emotion: "disgustedly rolling one's eyes". That's my reaction to a lot of the posts I scroll past and don't interact with.

</comment><comment><USER27> If my memory serves me, DeviantArt had something similar to this around a decade ago, and I thought it worked very well. It's an entirely different platform though. Also, I don't remember them having such annoying animations, nor omitting such basic emotions as "joy" because "people don't understand it".

D|A appears to have axed this system though, for whatever reason. I hope it works out better for Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER28> Like button has nothing to do with people liking something.

It has everything to do with Facebook tracking users on 3rd party web pages. This way they know where you have been, for how long and how often. IMO this data is much more relevant to knowing users interests that enables FB to sell targeted ads.

Same goes for Google Analytics: that's the reason it is free - because you are the product.

</comment><comment><USER29> "On a Wednesday in November, he enters a conference room for the second of five meetings and confesses that he's breaking the rules: Executives are discouraged from scheduling meetings on Wednesdays, which is supposed to be a day engineers and designers can work without interruption."

Mind blown. What a great idea to ban meetings on Wednesdays!

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting to see Facebook make these types of decisions. They're in an interesting position because as much as they want to react to emerging behaviors to create for a great user experience, they're one of the few companies that has the ability to manufacture new behaviors on their platform.

</comment><comment><USER31> Summary of the article? 2 paragraphs in and I have no idea what it is going to be about.

<comment><USER32> It's more of a piece about this Cox guy who's been spearheading the change. Anyways, the change is:

Replace the Like with Reactions. There are 6 reactions you can choose from: angry, sad, wow, haha, yay, and love.

<comment><USER33> Looks like they reduced it to 5, because yay was not universally understood.

<comment><USER34> Seems silly, since it's the most appropriate thing for lots of posts that don't fit into the other categories, like "Just got promoted", "I won $500 at the casino today", "My son just got first place at pinewood derby", "Just finished the last chapter for Winds of Winter it's going to the editors now", etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Facebook (and Twitter) keep trying to "innovate" by changing what they do well. Why not add a new feature, like bold/italic/underline text?

</comment><comment><USER36> By the way, does Facebook have a patent (or other IP-protection) on the "like" button? Just wondering.

</comment><comment><USER37> CIA probably needed finer grained data points.

</comment><comment><USER38> Buried at the bottom:

"Cox says Reactions' biggest test so far was during the November terrorist attacks in Paris. Users in the test countries had options other than like, and they used them. "It just felt different to use Facebook that day," he says."

Does this disturb anyone else?

<comment><USER39> why would it be disturbing ?

<comment><USER38> "Never let a good tragedy go to waste" is the quote I was thinking of.

Knowing that there was a national tragedy happening, Facebook takes advantage of _all that great data_ coming from their french users.

it's disgusting. and the fact that I'm in a minority on HN that feels this way is pretty disgusting.</comment></comment></comment>


Distrust of Telemetry Risks Making Software Dumber - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-geek-distrust-of-telemetry-risks-making-software-dumber/ <comment><USER2> Make the data collected and the means of collection entirely open to me as an end-user, and I'll have a lot more trust in providing said data.

I don't think many people object to the idea of Microsoft collecting crash reports and such. It is the types and amount of data that they have access to with the new telemetry reporting, and the overall privacy concerns that arise as a result.</comment>


If you production Database goes down, how long would it take to recover? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It depends on a whole bunch of factors.

My first question to you is this:

What is your disaster recovery plan (DR) regarding such a scenario? Did you plan, research, document and test such likely scenarios to establish user expectations and timings during an outage?

If you didn't have a proven DR plan in place in this day and age then fire you CTO/CIO.

So the final answer to your question without knowing all the details is ... It depends!

</comment><comment><USER3> I have pretty much everything automated nicely. In the worst case scenario I can migrate to a totally different cloud provider and be up and running again in less than an hour. For the database I use an HA Postgres cluster so it can tolerate the temporary loss of one or two nodes. My dataset is still tiny so recovering is super quick.</comment>


Why So Many Millennials Experience Imposter Syndrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecarter/2016/11/01/why-so-many-millennials-experience-imposter-syndrome/#54cb7c663d40 <comment><USER2> It's bad enough that HuffPost can't spell "impostor" correctly, but _Forbes_? _Nine times?!_</comment>


The Power of Validated Learning – Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.intel.com/new-business/2015/03/09/power-validated-learning-pt1/

<comment><USER2> disclaimer : I work in that group

I enjoy working on new businesses and products that follow the approach described by the op.

one of the things we argue about occasionally is how far you can go with and concept before you start actually selling the product? To the extent that we haven't started taking $ for something ..how valid is user feedback? ( obviously non-fremium approaches )

would be nice to chat with others here on hn trying to do startup style incubation inside established companies.</comment>


How many ANDs and ORs does it take... Low-level bitwhacking at its most fun. - <AUTHOR> http://research.swtch.com/2011/05/minimal-boolean-formulas.html

<comment><USER2> Right at the top of the page, the author remarks that for n<=4 the parity function (f(a,b,c,d) = a XOR b XOR c XOR d) requires a maximal number of AND/OR gates to compute. Later on, he mentions that someone else proved that this isn't true for very large n. Nowhere on the page does he say what the worst case actually is, though the tables indicate that there are three genuinely-different Boolean functions of 5 variables that need 28 gates.

So, what's the worst case for n=5?

It turns out ([http://boolean- oracle.swtch.com/?q=x%2by%2bz%2bw%2bv+in+0,1,...](http://boolean- oracle.swtch.com/?q=x%2by%2bz%2bw%2bv+in+0,1,3)) that one of those three functions is the one that's true if and only if either 0, or 1, or 3 of the five variables are TRUE. (The other two are slight variations on that theme.)

It would be interesting to know whether the worst-case functions for larger n have as much symmetry as the worst cases for n<=5. (I'd guess not.)

</comment><comment><USER3> "...I believe no one had ever known that little fact."

I submit for your consideration the vast number of truth tables written and referenced by engineers of Boolean logic circuits over the last many decades.

<comment><USER4> His claim is that that any 5 variable function can be expressed with no more than 28 gates, which isn't obvious. While a vast number of truth tables have been written down over the last few decades, it's unlikely that anybody else actually wrote down all of them at once, and found the minimal formulas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Using 0s and 1s is advantageous here because you can operate on the sum of a group of numbers. If the sum is greater than 0 then OR on the set is true, otherwise false. If the sum is exactly 1 then XOR on the set will be true, otherwise false. If the sum is the length of the set AND on the set will be true, otherwise false. Just sayin

<comment><USER6> Taking the sum is itself expensive, though (in terms of logical operations). I don't think that realization really buys you much of anything - in particular, the least significant bit of the sum is by definition the parity of the set, so calculating the rest of the sum will only increase the number of operations required.

<comment><USER5> "Taking the sum is itself expensive, though (in terms of logical operations)"

"the least significant bit of the sum is by definition the parity of the set, so calculating the rest of the sum will only increase the number of operations required"

Can you expand on these two statements please? Examining the sum seemed like a more elegant solution when thinking in terms of higher level languages but the extent of my knowledge ends there. I'd really like to understand how sums compare in terms of actual operations.

<comment><USER7> Well, at its base, sums are just extensions of Boolean operations. You can implement simple logic circuits which compute sums. You can check out <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adder_%28electronics%29> for more information; it describes some simple (and not so simple) circuits for adding two binary numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _[...] after hearing the problem from Neil Sloane, who suggested it as a variant of a similar problem first studied by Claude Shannon._

It figures ;-)

 _The web site<http://boolean-oracle.swtch.com> lets you type in a Boolean expression and gives back the minimal formula for it._

Nice, thanks. I'd suggest adding that example inputs can be had from the column at right (took me a bit to notice).</comment>


Perian is shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://perian.org/ <comment><USER2> I will be really sad to see it go. Perian is one of the first five things I download when I'm on a clean install of OS X. Support has sadly been lagging when it comes to MKV, and for that I still keep VideoLan around; but otherwise I love having full system-wide QuickTime support for all common video formats (AVI).

<comment><USER3> What are the other four things?

<comment><USER2> Adium. Quicksilver. Homebrew. Dropbox.

Also: Chrome, Xcode, Skitch, Divvy and the basic CLI tools.

<comment><USER4> It's funny. I used to use Psi, but then I switched to iChat. I used to use Quicksilver, then I switched to Launchbar, and now I just use Spotlight. I have Homebrew, because MacPorts can't install 3.2 of GNU Smalltalk and for no other reason. I haven't installed Dropbox ever, or Skitch (never heard of it, will check it out) or Divvy (I think I downloaded a demo of it once, thought it would be cool, and never went back to buy it).

I don't know what my problem is, but I guess my need for new features keeps diminishing. Maybe in forty years I'll finally be able to use Plan 9.

<comment><USER5> I went from LaunchBar to Quicksilver to Spotlight to LaunchBar. Can't live without that clipboard history! I don't use many of its other features anymore though.

Preview annotates things well enough that I never use Skitch, although Skitch is cool if you want to use the sharing features.

You might be missing out on Dropbox. I wouldn't want to go without it these days as I use more than one computer regularly and don't have to remember to commit 'WIP' on a branch before I head home, I just drop the mic and get the fuck out. YMMV.

Divvy is great. I use it w/ SizeUp every day and wouldn't want to go without them. I don't miss xmonad at all anymore.

Other than that I install 1Password, The Unarchiver, Growl, CrashPlan, Flux, TextMate, iTerm, and GitX and I am good to go.

I seem to shed tools as OS X improves as well, but I hope that nobody is using plan9 in 40 years! ;-)

<comment><USER4> Agree on TextMate. Haven't heard of most of the other stuff. I used Xmonad for about six months, then I basically copied the keybindings into an fvwm config, then I switched to KDE, brought over a handful of the keybindings and I seem to be alright.

I would probably use Dropbox if I didn't have a VM. A friend has been trying to get me to use one of their competitors for a while.

Plan 9 is great, just a bit too much ideology to actually get anything done. I hope it's still maintained in 40 years in case I do go that way. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence This is a shame. I absolutely love Perian and it has made it much easier to just play content without having to download VLC as well, and it just worked.

One thing I have noticed is that support for MKV/VP8/WebM has always been pretty bad. It uses a LOT of CPU time and in general was really slow. When YouTube put me in the HTML 5 beta it was unbeknownst to me sending me WebM content because I had Perian installed and it was causing HUGE spikes in CPU usage and overall lag because it was trying to decode and render WebM, whereas h264 requires almost no CPU power on my older MBP.

I hope that the community as a whole picks up the project and helps it succeed, it would be fantastic to still have it around.

<comment><USER6> Under the heading "Frequently Asked Questions" on the linked page, it says:

 _Why does it take so long for MKV to load?_

 _QuickTime expects to know the location of every single frame in a movie in order to play it. This is easy with its native format, MOV/MP4, but more difficult for several others, including MKV. Perian has to read in the entire file in order for seeking and playback to work._

That's probably (part of) the reason MKV and WebM are slow for you (since WebM uses the MKV container format).

<comment><USER7> A symptom of this issue is that you have to wait _before_ you can start playing the movie. So if you wanted to play a 1 GB mkv the player had to read the whole 1 GB from disc once, which took a fair amount of time back in the days.

Afaik playback performance is not affected by this. Poor playback performance is mainly related to the lack of hardware acceleration (and codec optimizations) people take for granted since h.264 matured on OS X.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Best of luck to the whole team there. It's such a great tool, and seamlessly pulled off. I'll be sad to see it go, and I'll be crossing my fingers in the hopes that it will work with future OS releases for a while.

<comment><USER9> >I'll be sad to see it go, and I'll be crossing my fingers in the hopes that it will work with future OS releases for a while.

Given that Apple has seemed to feel, for the last few OS releases, that it's acceptable for "deprecate" and "break" to happen in the same step, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a shame, but I hope some other devs consider picking up development where the Perian guys left off. Perian is one of my favorite Mac utilities because I love using QuickTime for everything when possible.

To the team, thanks for all your years of hard work and best of luck on future projects.

<comment><USER11> It's not so much an issue of picking up Perian in that the new Quicktime 10 API doesn't work anything like the old Quicktime API.

Perian just made open source codecs work with Quicktime's API. Quicktime X however demands much more that makes it impossible to do without rewriting all the codecs. Those same codecs are directly embedded in other players (like VLC) so it's not a big issue. Quicktime X is pushing towards hardware acceleration, better battery life (with a few tricks), and multicore processing that the old model just doesn't work with.

Right now when you run older codecs, Quicktime X actually runs a little host process in 32bit that actually does the decoding using a fork of the old Quicktime 7 code. Native codecs run in 64bit using multiple cores and hardware acceleration.

<comment><USER10> Indeed -- I actually meant developers interested in doing native 64-bit codecs, assuming there would be advantages. In truth, having hardware optimized support would be ideal, but the reality is that H.264 is quickly becoming the dominant codec, even in the HD space, that it might be a moot point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I used this at one point, but long ago switched to MPlayerOSX, finding it a much more straightforward interface for playing random format movies than QT, with noticeably better performance. VLC is also... an option.

<comment><USER13> MPlayer lacks a playlist though, which is annoying.

VLC's recent UI changes have been a step backward (specifically making it impossible to see the playlist and the video at the same time), but at least you can queue things up to play.

<comment><USER14> MPlayer OSX Extended[1] is your friend. It has playlist, it has nice interface and you could swap out MPlayer player binary with a newer one (e.g. mplayer2-git[2] or build your own via Homebrew[3]). I like MPlayer OSX Extended far more than MPlayerX or any other alternatives, shame that it didn't get the attention it deserves.

[1]: <http://www.mplayerosx.ch/>

[2]: <http://code.google.com/p/mplayerosx-builds/downloads/list>

[3]: <https://github.com/pigoz/mplayerosx-builds/>

<comment><USER13> Interesting. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perian used to be me first download on every Mac, but 10.7 does not let me hide the file preview (top right) in column view anymore. If I scroll through a list of video files and hit something complicated (like MKV) the Finder just hangs. Has this bothered anyone else? Or is detail view more common in the wild?

I love the VLC redesign though, and it arrived just in time, so I'm happy.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's really sad. I installed it because Quicktime and iPhoto can't play any video taken from my Canon digital camera. Perian provided system-wide Quicktime support for many video format and this is what VLC or MPlayer cannot compare.....

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting thread. I too am truly sad to see this go, while everyone is suggesting stand alone players, I personally loved that Perian actually extended the native tools to support all these other formats.

</comment><comment><USER18> Perian has been the first thing I install on every mac I own/use.

A sad day.

Perian team, great job guys and thanks for the many years of awesomeness.

</comment><comment><USER19> never used perian before. seems vlc (also built on ffmpeg of course) is the only major open source media player out there.

<comment><USER20> There's MPlayer...

<http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html>

<comment><USER21> And in the OS X context the better form of it, MPlayerX: <http://mplayerx.org/>

<comment><USER22> Which has taken over Perian / VLC almost entirely, for me. Perian has been utterly fantastic, a near ideal passive improvement for everything, but MPlayer smokes everything in performance.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Do company names actually matter? - <AUTHOR> http://yosefk.com/blog/do-company-names-actually-matter.html

<comment><USER2> > Amazon: "plenty", does "things that scale".

Looking at form of the other entries, it appears that the author claims that the word "Amazon" means "plenty".

In my dictionary, it means "no boobs", which might imply that the company would do everything except porn.

<comment><USER3> For anyone wondering, Google says:

"late Middle English: via Latin from Greek Amazōn, explained by the Greeks as 'without a breast' (as if from a- 'without' + mazos 'breast'), referring to the fable that the Amazons cut off the right breast so as not to interfere with the use of a bow, but probably a folk etymology of an unknown foreign word."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They matter incredibly, just not for the criteria which OP believes makes a good name. Naming isn't logical. No one cares if the name perfectly represents what your company is and does. But it damn well better sound good and be memorable. In a society so focused on images and status a good name could be the difference between success and failure. (depending on the type of product)

<comment><USER5> Best sounding company name in my ears: Motorola

For an acronym IBM is sounding surprisingly well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Microsoft: stands for "microprocessor software". Still the dominant software vendor for descendants of the original microprocessor. Never made commercially successful hardware."

Do you not count the xbox 360?

<comment><USER7> It's definitely a success, but:

* Its success would not save Microsoft if Windows and Office usage sharply declines

* Nor would its failure ever break Microsoft

* ...both of which resulting from the market being not very large _by Microsoft 's standards_

* I'm not so sure about this last one, but a competitor could come out with new exciting hardware at any moment (a recent example is VR headsets) and then gamers would flock to the new platforms and so would game developers. Since people care less about old titles, the barrier to entry is not nearly as high as in the Windows or Office cases.

That said, my case is shaky enough, and I wager that you could find counter- examples that would make the Xbox omission tiny in comparison :) I just had this thought and was surprised by how many companies sorta fit the pattern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's another thing that's important about company names, and more generally any product or software name. It has to be google-able. The amount of frustration that come from trying to find a generic software name is awful. E.g. Go, finding anything about go is awful until you start using golang.

<comment><USER9> Well, that criticism extends to all programming languages named after letters of the alphabet, metal oxides, musical notation, famous mathematicians, places, or just generic English words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, of course. But so does everything else. And the name interacts with the perception of your company coming from all those other sources.

This is complexity. You have to understand the whole story, not just the cover of the book.

</comment><comment><USER11> Initially, Bezos wanted a name for his company that began with an "A" for alphabetic list purpose.</comment>


Enom – We are aware of some issues affecting DNS and are working to resolve - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/enom/status/439458367363227648 <comment><USER2> It appears by as if Comcast DNS has dropped all Enom domains.

I understand having secondary name servers and switching application IPs, but (pardon my ignorance) how does an web application host or website achieve high availability in this scenario?

<comment><AUTHOR> OpenDNS isn't resolving some of our domains as well

Pinging one of our sites that's available if we use, say Google DNS, returns this:

>> 64 bytes from hit-servfail.opendns.com (18.104.22.168): icmp_req=1 ttl=57 time=1.59 ms</comment></comment>


Ask HN: what is this? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/

<comment><USER2> Did you look at [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/index.htm](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/index.htm) ?! You're bypassing their security and could go to jail! Or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did you look at [http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/README.txt](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/README.txt) ?

:)</comment>


'Frankenstein dinosaur' mystery solved - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40890714 <comment><AUTHOR> tl/dr: Theropods more closely related to ornithischians than to sauropods

<comment><AUTHOR> A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and early dinosaur evolution[0]

[0] [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v543/n7646/full/nature2...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v543/n7646/full/nature21700.html?foxtrotcallback=true)</comment></comment>


This is actually what America would look like without gerrymandering - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/13/this-is-actually-what-america-would-look-like-without-gerrymandering/ <comment><USER2> I think this solution would be as close to ideal, because not only does it eliminate the problem of gerrymandering by default, but it greatly increases how well represented everyone in a district is.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in- theory/wp/2015/10/23/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in- theory/wp/2015/10/23/lets-move-beyond-winner-take-all-elections/)

[http://www.fairvote.org/proportional_representation](http://www.fairvote.org/proportional_representation)

You can let up to 3 people win in a district, where each needs at least 25% to get a seat, or _even better_ let up to 5 win with at least 16.7% of the vote (demonstrably more democratic).

<comment><USER3> It also has some emergent complexity that might not be immediately apparent without having seen how it works in practice:

\- Success (i.e. being voted in) is considerably easier when you depend on a proportion of the population than a majority, and this diminishes the power of party political vehicles.

\- PR therefore encourages (or rather, discourages less) the formation of splinter groups, "forked" parties, and independent candidates

\- It results in legislative bodies with no clear majority, which in turn leads to coalitions of convenience (great for mapping to population majority on single issues) but tends to destabilize governments that do not dance the dance of diplomacy very well (because tyrannical "we have a clear mandate" decisions don't work without a clear majority).

These are not necessarily bad features, because cooperation becomes regularly necessary rather than an occasionally inconvenient task. It does mean, however, that politicians have to be good at politicking to ensure they continue to be important in a world where loyalty to the party is only a piece of the whole pie.

If you add in STV ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote)) it gets even more interesting, because the transferable vote means each winner has to have the approval of a majority of the electorate. This means that, while in FPTP or simple PR, someone might get elected with (e.g. from parent comment) 17% of the vote (meaning that up to 83% of the population voted _against_ them), in PR with STV, at least 50% + 1 has to approve of the candidate, to some extent.

Neither system removes the problem of gerrymandering however, because it's still possible to draw a constituency that is statistically going to maximize e.g. working class candidates, thereby reducing the impact of that electorate on neighbouring middle-class constituencies.</comment></comment>


US senators say there's "no evidence" bulk metadata surveillance is useful - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/us-senators-say-theres-no-evidence-bulk-metadata-surveillance-is-useful/ <comment><USER2> To be clear, they say that there is no evidence that bulk meta data surveillance is useful in _catching terrorists_.

Bulk metadata surveillance is however extremely useful in doing espionage against diplomats, which gives the US favorable hand in negotiations.

It also extremely useful in doing industry espionage, gifting US companies with stolen information (in return for favors? We don't know what Boeing gave NSA in return).

Its somewhat useful to hammer down on local political activists. Who dare to start a occupy movement, or a website dedicated to whistleblowers with NSA sipping through every email, every phone call, and perfect information about who meets with who?

Its possible useful in hammering down on political embarrassing entities like megaupload, giving the US foreign office and advantage when interfering in other countries justice systems.

People in the police and IRS is always thankful when they can do parallel construction, which in turn gives NSA support to continue.

I have a vague memory that out of 40 cases, only one is about terrorism. That might be wrong (or maybe it was about FRA), but if that is true, it would explain why NSA is doing bulk meta data surveillance in the face of the contradicted claims about its effectiveness in anti-terroism.

<comment><USER3> How is bulk metadata useful against diplomats or for industrial espionage?

For those you prefer content and don't care so much about the metadata.

The UK has recently had debates about the collection of bulk metadata. Imagine our surprise when GCHQ was slurping it all along. They say that they're a secret organisation and that their collections can't be used for domestic law enforcement, and that this debate was actually about allowing law enforcement to collect metadata.

I would prefer GCHQ to not be slurping this data, but I don't see it as being particularly harmful to me. But extending that out to the general law enforcement agencies, or wider to local government officials etc, is terrifying. GCHQ employees are reasonably well trained in secrecy and privacy and the risk of information being misused is low[1], but we've seen plenty of abuses of personal data by police forces (selling information to news papers, and so on) and local councils (spying on people applying for parking permits or for entry to certain schools) and so it's a bit scary letting them get hold of any more data than they strictly need, especially if there's no judge involved.

<comment><USER2> > How is bulk metadata useful against diplomats or for industrial espionage?

Because there is no meaningful distinction between metadata and data. Its a deception when agencies claims that metadata somehow is harmlessness.

How is bulk metadata useful against diplomats? To know who they talk to, when, and from where. Did that diplomat spend hours or minutes discussing our offer? Did that diplomat just call back to his superiors when at the same time pretending to not care about this information we "slipped"? Did that diplomat just do a call at 1 am from a cheap motel known for their hookers?

How is bulk metadata useful against industrial espionage? Did they spend minutes or hours discussing the deal we just offered them? Company A just offered to become the remote branch in China, so why is company B calling someone located in China? Are they looking at competing offers? Who, where and in what capacity does Company B has research labs/production sites? Why is that negotiator calling from that "infamous" cheap motel? Does the wife/husband know this? And if I map out each call from the CEO, I should get all the detailed and private HR information I need. When I asked them, they pretend that its a company secret...

Metadata: The information you use to infer the data you don't yet have.

<comment><USER4> Metadata: The information that helps you decide to target for deeper collection the comms of someone you were previously unaware of. Diplomat X talks to Y a lot, so we better track Y more closely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why are we arguing about the "usefulness" when it should be a crime against the human right to privacy, and possibly many national laws and constitutions through out the world?

At the very least, even without abuses (which is ridiculous to even contemplate that there weren't/aren't any) mass surveillance can create chilling effects on free speech, journalism, and creativity and innovation in general, as well as to progress in a society.

How do you admit you are gay or try to convince others that being gay is okay, in a society where the vast majority are against it, and the government has zero tolerance for it, for example? In a society that monitors everything, it would be very hard to turn being gay from "illegal" to "legal.

And that's just one example: women using birth control, doing abortions, being of different faith, smoking pot, copying an image "illegitimately" from the web and so on, can all be "illegal" at some point, in any society.

<comment><USER3> > Why are we arguing about the "usefulness" when it should be a crime against > the human right to privacy, and possibly many national laws and > constitutions through out the world?

It's a pragmatic approach to preventing this stuff from happening.

The "privacy is a right!" stuff just doesn't work for some people. So, for those people, it's handy to have other arguments. "It's expensive and doesn't work! Let's spend that money on cops and gang-reconciliations instead!" may be more effective.

<comment><USER6> This 'pragmatic approach' unfortunately changes the subject from the important one to something refutable. As such, it could be a political ploy to create support for illegal/unconstitutional wiretapping etc.

<comment><USER3> > unfortunately changes the subject

Supplements the discussion.

There are plenty of people, with real power, who don't care about what's legal (and perhaps what's constitutional) because terrorists. (See also because pedophiles).

For those people you need to let them know that their over-reaching privacy invasions aren't just a matter of constitutional niceties (their terms, not ours) but actually ineffective.

<comment><USER6> ...unless it isn't actually ineffective. Then they're vindicated, conversation over. That's the ploy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really dislike this framing, because it's shifted the debate into an irrelevant tangent. It doesn't really matter if it's useful or not; it's still illegal.

Even if 1984 works that doesn't mean it's a society we want to live in.

</comment><comment><USER8> Note that this is "three United States senators who have been at the forefront of surveillance policy reform" who have filed an amicus brief.

Rather than a majority of US senators.

<comment><USER9> The title describes both possibilities. They could have added 'some' or 'three' to clarify. But then again FWIW they did not write 'all'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a(nother) case where the actual title of the article doesn't reflect what the article itself says. In the article, it says the senators say they "have seen no evidence", not that no evidence exists.

Obviously hyperbolic titles get more clicks.

<comment><USER11> Just like weapons inspectors saw no evidence of WMD's in Iraq. That obviously doesn't mean there are no WMD's in Iraq.

Or just like cosmologists have seen no evidence of God, that doesn't mean god doesn't exist.

Engage brain before opening mouth.

<comment><USER3> The three examples are different.

God may exist, we cannot say. Cosmologists are not looking for God, and so the fact they have not discovered God means little. WMD don't exist in Iraq because it was a lie ginned up to allow us to go to war. It doesn't matter what weapons inspectors find - the point wasn't WMD but the reaction to the inspections programme.

A secret collection of mass meta-data collection being examined by people without security clearance is unlikely to find any benefit because no-one is going to tell them what happens with the data. "We see no evidence of benefit" could mean "there is no benefit, and thus we haven't seen any evidence" or it could mean "there is plenty of benefit, but that's all secret, and no-one will tell us about it, and thus we've seen no evidence of benefit".

> Engage brain before opening mouth.

That makes you sound like a bit of a dick. Just saying.

<comment><USER12> > A secret collection of mass meta-data collection being examined by people > without security clearance is unlikely to find any benefit because no-one is > going to tell them what happens with the data. "We see no evidence of > benefit" could mean "there is no benefit, and thus we haven't seen any > evidence" or it could mean "there is plenty of benefit, but that's all > secret, and no-one will tell us about it, and thus we've seen no evidence of > benefit".

I'm sure you are aware but Sen. Wyden is on the Select Committee on Intelligence. He is hardly a random guy with no security clearance. If he hasn't seen any evidence that the bulk surveillance has any benefit, then the NSA is withholding critical information from the people that are supposed to be performing oversight over them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My understanding is that the NSA captures "data" (i.e., content) (e.g., voice conversations, fax contents, messages, e-mail content, etc.) and not simply metadata. I doubt the "data" is very useful in catching terrorists either. But it's political/social/economic value is inestimable.

<comment><USER14> Indeed, you are right.

NSA is currently tapping Skype, both _chat_ and _video_. [1]

There's also some evidence that the NSA is collecting every domestic communication, word for word. [2] (Full transcript [3])

[1]: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype- ch...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/nsa-taps-skype-chats-newly- published-snowden-leaks-confirm/)

[2]: [http://youtu.be/az-YWMNWQuU?t=2m6s](http://youtu.be/az-YWMNWQuU?t=2m6s)

[3]: [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july- dec1...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july- dec13/whistleblowers_08-01.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, if they haven't seen evidence that metadata surveillance is useful, they clearly haven't searched for it. Cause if you don't search for it, you won't find it and therefore you can say with confidence "We haven't seen any evidence..."

For anyone wanting to see such evidence can go here: [http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data- retention](http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention)

This is a 6 month representation of cell phone metadata overlayed with this politicians public information like tweets or other stuff freely available on the internet.

<comment><USER9> Exactly how is your example useful or pertinent to fighting terrorism/terrorist acts? The politician in your example is a public figure. Unless you considered Osama Bin Laden (and other terrorists) public figures and have access to their " Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet. " Your comment doesn't make much sense... Or maybe I'm missing the point (which is likely/possible).

<comment><USER15> You are missing the point.

The twitter overlay was just an added point to illustrate that the politician was really at these places. Otherwise one could start with "yeah, well the meta data could come from anybody. Who's to say that all this data really belonged to him?"

I hope I don't have to point out how the metadata alone is useful in tracking suspected terrorists. You have GPS, SMS, timestaped phonecalls etc. Anybody who gets to request this metadata from a cell phone provider for Person X can track that person across the country. You might as well wear a Lo-Jack that is directly connected to the authorities. Same result, it would just be a little easier for them to access that information. Now, they still have to request and actually receive the meta data from a customer of the cell service. Unless of course NSA and company already have complete system access and the request to receive the meta data is just a formality.

<comment><USER9> Again you seem to be assuming that most terrorists are using known devices and numbers. While that may have been useful to track the Boston Marathon guys who were rank amateurs (and for the record, it didn't help then). It likely wouldn't be of any use at all for tracking someone important and/or practiced at these sorts of things.

Collecting all of the data from all of the citizens in the US, or any country for that matter, is in fact counterproductive, as it creates a great deal of background noise, drowning out the useful data on the subject of interest (also it is illegal to conduct surveillance of US citizens without a warrant... Not to mention all US citizens without a warrant.) I don't think many people would agree that tracking everyone in the US is useful for tracking 'terrorists'. Unless you are talking about collecting data on every citizen to stop future crime that has not happened yet. If that is the plan, that sort of surveillance might be useful, if say ordinary citizen 9834202 decided to commit a crime at an undetermined future date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Finally, some Democrats with balls.

For all the "tea party" rhetoric that comes from Republicans, I've yet to see 1 Republican step up and put his reputation on the line. Where are Rand Paul and Ted Cruz? How do they reconcile the NSA's actions with their so-called beliefs?

<comment><USER17> [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/18/rand-paul- nsa_n_377...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/18/rand-paul- nsa_n_3775821.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Then why do they store/track it?

<comment><USER19> Speed is the most likely reason. Think about it from the flip side of the argument. Their argument rests on the assumption that if a known terrorist is in contact with a US person and there is reason to believe that US person is in the US for nefarious purposes, then they may already be moving to attack somewhere and the NSA needs his call records ahead of time. They want to know what other foreigners is he in contact with, are they known terrorists, are the people in the US that he's talking to also talking with each other (which could indicate a terrorist cell), etc. Answer these questions, package up the information and shoot it over to the FBI for follow-up investigation.

If they didn't have the records ahead of time, the NSA or the FBI would have to get a warrant, submit the warrant to all N of the major phone providers, wait for however long it takes them to process it, get responses from N-1 providers that the phone number doesn't belong to them. They then have to analyze the data, then repeat the process for the second layer, etc. What would be done in a few minutes if they already had the data now might take a few weeks. If you believe that an attack is likely, you may not have a week to identify the initial contact, two weeks to identify the cell he's working in, etc.

All of this rests on the assumption that analyzing phone metadata is good way to get leads for an investigation on international terrorism. Are there better ways to get leads? Can the information still be useful if gathered through a traditional warrant process? If not, is it worth the privacy tradeoff to foil X number of cases over the course of a decade, and are there good ways to handle the information in order to mitigate privacy concerns?

<comment><USER20> There are emergency/after-the-fact warrants for just those occasions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Evidence in politics? Good one.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't feel like explaining this shit to non-technical people anymore.

But I'm supposed to be grateful that I have a job.

<comment><USER22> How many of you are actually engaging non-technical people on this topic?

How do they receive (a) the problem itself and (b) you in describing the problem (given that it goes without saying that you so too have the tools/know-how to undetake your own packet sniffing party)?

Seriously? How does this become a larger political issue unless and until we start talking to people who severely are undereducated on the topic?

<comment><USER23> Because most of the time the problem is just people knowing. It's like what happens if you _ask_ your neighbors in advance about specific features on your new house - suddenly everybody has an opinion about why you shouldn't do it.

Whereas if you just presented the plans, chances are they wouldn't comment at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The only effective way to capture terrorists is to do profiling, however thats is considered to be politically incorrect, therefore we have this nonsense instead.

<comment><USER25> _The only effective way to capture terrorists is to do profiling, however thats is considered to be politically incorrect,_

Whenever someone complains about profiling being politically incorrect, that's a euphemism for racial profiling.

To which I say:

Jihad Jane: [http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/02/01/pennsylvania.terror.case...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/CRIME/02/01/pennsylvania.terror.case/)

Daniel Patrick Boyd: [http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1913602,0...](http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1913602,00.html)

The White Widow: [http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/pictures-white- widow...](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/pictures-white-widow- samantha-lewthwaites-2477940)

And that's just crazies who call themselves 'muslims.'

In the US white nationalists typically murder a couple of people each year, and don't forget Anders Breivik [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik)

<comment><USER26> Breivik did not kill anybody in the USA. As for muslims extremists and al qaida folks, it's easy to profile them, they are all muslims...

<comment><USER25> _As for muslims extremists and al qaida folks, it 's easy to profile them, they are all muslims._

Which is completely useless since 99.99% of muslims aren't "al qaida folks."

<comment><USER17> This is not the reason it is completely useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Don't forget, these are the same jokers who are cutting funding for science trying to say it's not useful. Just FYI.

<comment><USER28> When have Udall, Wyden, or Heinrich said anything like that? Those are the Senators who filed the brief. They're all Democrats; every anti-science proclamation from the Senate I've seen (and I have seen quite a few) has come from a Republican.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's wrong about Windows/macOS/GNU-Linux as of now? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This issue dates all the way back to the late 1980s but...

On Windows, at some stage, it was decided to allow one application to steal user focus from another application. That was a bad design decision, but one that it might be too late to undo, even Microsoft's own software relies on the ability to shift focus onto some inane popup.

To use an analogy, imagine how you'd feel if on Android/iOS you were in one app and without warning another app just started and took focus. You'd be super mad. But on Windows that is so common we have blinders on to it.

There's a particularly obnoxious bug still in Windows today related to this. If the iTunes or Java background update task kicks off, you'll never see it, but it will shift keyboard focus to nothing. Visually it causes a slight flicker, but if you type the keypresses go nowhere since focus shifted to a now closed window (a window that was open for less than a second).

Even Windows UWP apps aren't immune. While one UWP app cannot easily steal focus from another, Win32 API applications (and Windows' own processes) continue to steal focus. Applications that want focus should just blink on the taskbar, focus should only change when the user changes it.

Microsoft thinks they fixed this (see SetForegroundWindow[0]):

> An application cannot force a window to the foreground while the user is > working with another window. Instead, Windows flashes the taskbar button of > the window to notify the user.

But for whatever reason the issue remains. Particularly the keyboard input disappearing into null behavior I described above.

[0] [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms633539\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><USER3> Part of this is that UI toolkits do more and more disgusting things in order to preserve this behavior. Windows allows the foreground window to activate other windows "owned by the same app" so that existing applications don't break. The implementation, for this, of course, is a pile of heuristics [0].

Qt, steadfast in its duty to be as annoying as possible, pretends it is part of the foreground app when you call activate() by calling AttachThreadInput [1].

[0] Documented heuristics, even. [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/ms633539\(v=vs.85\).aspx) [1] [https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/5.11/src/plugins/platforms...](https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/5.11/src/plugins/platforms/windows/qwindowswindow.cpp#L2194-L2209)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Windows 10: Default experience is terrible, and customizing it is a full-time job. Update is hostile (interrupts work) and buggy (can bring down the whole system). Every advertisement in the start menu must be removed manually, afaict. Notifications are annoying almost beyond belief. Common settings, especially pertaining to users and permissions, are spread to more obscure system apps than ever. Control Panel Lite is inadequate and just adds confusion on top of Control Panel Classic. Windows UI has the same basic painting bugs that have existed forever, where you have to jigger things around to make them visually refresh. Exhortations to use Edge browser are more annoying and hostile than ever, and some system functions force Edge instead of the default browser.

</comment><comment><USER5> Linux differences between distributions make packing one binary basically impossible especially when trying to implement GUIs. This almost gets hilariously bad having companies package their multiple GBs binary software as .sh scripts that install different packages & extract depending on the distro.

Linus Torvalds said in one of his talks that it is his belief why GNU-Linux on the desktop hasn't taken off.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would suggest you expand a bit on what kind of things you're looking for, or at least give a reason for this kind of question, so as to limit the topic. Because as it stands, this question risk becoming flamebait in no time.

</comment><comment><USER7> GNU Linux userland/desktop lacks BDFL. No one is enforcing one right way to do things, hence distros fragmentation.

</comment><comment><USER8> they make doing cross-platform applications difficult/bloated

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes. And Android/iOS.</comment>


Haskell 2010 Language Report - <AUTHOR> https://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm posting this partly because the 98 report is the top result every time I google it, but also - it's the canonical documentation for Haskell, AFAIK.

If you're interested in Haskell, consider at least briefly scanning this document so you know what you don't know.</comment>


Dom's laptop is in Iran - Apology - <AUTHOR> http://laptopiniran.tumblr.com/post/47771396698/laptop-update-apology

<comment><USER2> "The people who now have my laptop have been good enough to get in touch and therefore _the tracking software has done it's job._ " (emphasis mine)

Astroturfing round 2

<comment><USER3> Agreed. This is a brilliant scheme for building backlinks. Adding it to my list of blackhat garbage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A new post st <http://laptopiniran.tumblr.com/post/47772239088/further-news>

"The innocent new owners of my laptop have been in touch and are mortified about the story and are keen to return the laptop.

Given the huge error of judgement on my part in sharing the story and failing to respect their privacy I have asked them to keep it by means of an apology."

</comment><comment><USER5> "Given the huge error of judgement on my part in sharing the story and failing to respect their privacy I have asked them to keep it by means of an apology."

So, the victim apologizes for shining the public light on the theft of their property. (In this case, even with the software, it's unlikely that the new possessor would have been identified without the publicity.) Furthermore, in lots of places prior theft invalidates later sale and transfer of ownership even if the illicit purchase occurred without mens rea. There's no insurance policy on counterfeit money either - in this case the current possessors (presumably) paid for a second-hand (high risk, possibly stolen) laptop. Buyer beware; they should absorb the loss and give it back (assuming the facts are as they seem, and it's not just one big astroturf).

</comment><comment><USER6> So these people are now aware that they are in possession of a stolen laptop. Are they going to give it back? Will they cooperate with the authorities to track down the thief? For some reason I find this whole situation really interesting and I hope Dom gives some updates.

<comment><USER7> Other post answers this:

<http://laptopiniran.tumblr.com/post/47772239088/further-news>

<comment><USER8> Maybe I'm just of a different mindset but if they offered to return my laptop I would have gladly accepted.

For it to be such an issue in the beginning and then not-so-much in the end is suspicious.

<comment><USER2> The storyline is:

Laptop stolen, police report filed, laptop shows up in Iran, owner shames the people in possession of laptop, owner realizes he attacked the wrong person when readers and commenters pointed it out, owner realized the people in possession of the laptop are nice and now fells guilty, owner decides to give laptop to them as a nice gesture for the Internet to see.

The part that's not mentioned: how much compensation he received from the company that runs the tracking service. If its more than the laptop cost, the owner is still net ahead.

<comment><USER9> > compensation

Does the service have a replacement guarantee or are you implying that this was a brand deal and he's being paid for the posts?

<comment><USER2> The latter (and if I were the CEO of that company, I probably would give the guy a new laptop, especially if the posts resulted in an influx of customers)

<comment><USER10> I think of myself as tending toward the cynical but this goes even farther than I would. Is there any reasoning behind that belief or just general cynicism? (for example is Dom somehow involved in marketing or advertising?)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>