Zuck's live grilling on Facebook Live - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/gizmodo/videos/10156346578233967/ <comment><USER2> I find it disappointing that many of the questions and Mr. Zuckerberg's answers regarding content shared on Facebook focus on pictures and textual messages. Very little discussion of gathering and use of PII such as name, gender, sexual orientation, location, likes, interests and social relationships. I believe these are the most valuable pieces of information to advertisers and data miners.

<comment><USER3> Just a semantic nit pick on PII (personally identifiable information)...

Name is PII, location at a high enough resolution is PII. The rest are metadata about an individual but not PII. Knowing someone is a straight male doesn't tell you enough to identify a person.

This is relevant because GDPR (and other things) special case PII.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the correction.

Also absent from the discourse is how much Facebook uses inferences from behavioral data in building user profiles.

For example, let's say that I have not told Facebook my sexual orientation. Do they attempt to infer that missing information from what content I view, for how long and how frequently? Is such data shared with 3rd parties? Is it used in ad targeting?

<comment><USER3> That would be interesting to know.

I'm probably in the extreme minority but I don't see anything wrong with them selling data that people voluntarily give them (no one is forced to use FB -- I assume they'll be monetizing 100% of the information I give them), but I would see an ethical issue with selling access to individuals based on inferred data; to the person buying it that is. If I want to advertise to 25 year old straight females, I'd want that profile to be built on data that was actually given to FB and not on "we kinda think this person matches that profile but we're going to tell you you're 100% reaching this demographic".

I don't know enough about FB's ad model to know whether they're doing this type of false advertising of their own product though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Senator: [question]

Zuckerberg: "...but it's the only way we can reach BILLIONS of people!"

This super creepy line tells you all you need to know. Facebook is insane. Their leader has lost touch with reality and the physical world. Karen Horney, a psychoanalyst from the 1950's, said that the final stage of psychosis is when someone believes themself to be a god. I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is suffering psychosis, but what kind of person thinks, like some Egyptian Pharoh, it's their right to reach all the masses of the Earth?

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a bit annoying when half the questions are basically 'how does Facebook work?'. Tech is still magic to most of the people asking the questions.

<comment><USER6> I can't believe a senator asked "How does Facebook make money." I thought it was a rhetorical question at first but the senator was like "Oh!" when Zuck said "Ads."

<comment><USER7> We've had a US Representative that worried about the island of Guam tipping over because the Navy added personnel to the island, so I'm not often surprised.

This actually points to a real failure of lobbying by the tech industry. Part of lobbying is to inform the lobbying target and make them look reasonable knowledgeable on camera. Ignorance is your problem, stupidity can be masked a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congress is too old and clueless to ask smart questions. Zuck's acting all Lore from Star Trek. FB stock is up just because people keep thinking they'll beat this shit, which they won't.

<comment><USER9> Pretty sure they will beat this very easily. The few friends I have that actually raised concerns have already forgot it.

<comment><USER10> My wife, my parents, my inlaws, they all use FB. Haven't heard a peep from one of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Given the ire with Facebook, some users may choose to view this on C-SPAN:

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?443543-1/facebook-ceo-mark- zuc...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?443543-1/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg- testifies-data-protection&live)

<comment><USER12> Also the committee's page:

[https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/facebook-social- me...](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/facebook-social-media- privacy-and-the-use-and-abuse-of-data)

Or any of the dozen or so YouTube livestreams. The Guardian has a good one with no logos taking 1/4 of the screen:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZaec_mlq9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZaec_mlq9M)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There goes Zuck2020

<comment><USER14> I thought that after birtherism too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is very frustrating how naïve and uninformed these senators are.

<comment><USER16> I suggest going and having a conversation with them about Law. You may have a different perspective then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Was he instructed to begin every sentence with "Senator"

</comment><comment><USER18> It's very painful to listen to the majority of our elected officials ask technical questions.

<comment><USER19> Eh, they're just like any other non-techie. It's us in the minority, not the other way around. Elected officials are usually experts in law, or at least psychology ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is blown out of proportion. The reason why people are leaving Facebook is not political at all. It also has nothing to do with decentralization, by the way.

Yes, people are leaving because of privacy, but not from advertisers but from their parents! People are still using whatsapp, because it's easy and crystal clear that when you send a message to a whatsapp group, only the people in the group will see it. And it's not that people can't do that in Facebook, it's just that perhaps the interface is not adequate for that.

</comment><comment><USER21> please dont link to facebook.com. its on youtube

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ValJMOpt7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ValJMOpt7s)

<comment><USER22> Why is linking youtube ok but not facebook?

<comment><USER23> There is no official rule about it. IMO YouTube is a little more open then FB and FB may require you to login to view content.

<comment><USER24> > FB may require you to login to view content

It's available without login, at least on The Verge's page [https://www.facebook.com/verge/videos/1779024592133876/](https://www.facebook.com/verge/videos/1779024592133876/)

> IMO YouTube is a little more open then FB

Sigh. It's run by Google, please.

<comment><USER25> What was meant is that you can access most of Youtube's content without having to log in, whereas of Facebook which requires you to be authenticated most of the time to access content.

<comment><USER22> In this particular case, it did not ask you to log in though, so there's little difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Drink everytime Zuck says AI or "That's a very important question"

</comment><comment><USER27> And yet FB stock up 5%

<comment><USER21> The senators asking the questions are completely clueless. EU/GDPR will properly deal with FB.

<comment><USER28> Every single congressional hearing is like this. They just sit there and chastise the CEO... It's a PR stunt, public spectacle kinda thing.

All the real work is done by lobbyist in closed door meetings.

<comment><USER7> For a lot of industries there is actual knowledge or a subject expert on the staff. That is why a lot of folks actually have phone numbers for certain staff of a Senator / Rep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The dude is responsible for ruining the entire country and old people are still joking and wonder in awe on his intelligence. Maybe because he might give them donations in the future?

Also Ted Cruz?? Seriously??!

<comment><USER6> Let's assume that Facebook helped get Donald Trump elected. (Whether this is true or not, we'll find out). Are you saying Trump is ruining the country?

Then why does Facebook take the entire responsibility for "ruining" the country? What about Donald Trump himself and Trump supporters in the U.S?

I feel like Donald Trump's persona and his supporters having an influence in the country is way more complex issue than Facebook ad campaigns.

<comment><USER30> > Then why does Facebook take the entire responsibility for "ruining" the > country?

Arguably, because moral responsibility does not have to add up to 100%; an actor which decided to pursue an activity whose harms to others are reasonably foreseeable can bear full moral responsibility for those harms without in any way diminishing the responsibility of other actors who also participated in the same activity and for whom the results were also reasonably foreseeable. (This is similar to the legal concept of joint and several liability.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Senator: "Yes or no answer"

Zuckerberg: <launches into longwinded speech>

</comment><comment><USER31> He will be a great president.</comment>


Ask HN: How did you go nomad? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Wife and I decided that we were done with the city and lack of space and wanted to travel. Spent the next year downsizing as much as we could while looking for remote first/only companies to make a jump. Found one of those companies that wasn't necessarily large nor stable and bought a vintage transit bus with the goal of making it at least 6 months to see how it went. Two and a half years later, we moved on from that company and are traveling slightly different, but the remote first companies and nomad lifestyle are instilled in us.

</comment><comment><USER3> I went nomad after calculating that rent on my apartment in NYC was higher than living anywhere else in the world.

So I just left behind everything that didn't fit in my backpack and a carry-on sized suitcase, boarded a flight to Bali, and started a company remotely with a friend in Australia.

5 years later we employ 24 people, all remote.

</comment><comment><USER4> 2004... I was working out of Boca Raton FL as the first "official" employee for a web hosting company. I convinced my boss (the owner) to let me move to Dublin Ireland and work from there :). I landed on a Saturday and by Monday I was set up by the amazing people at the Guinness Enterprise center with dedicated internet and a small one-person office :).

I was maybe 23 years old... Crazy fun time in my life.

I ended up staying for about 6 months. After I got home I started several companies with 100% remote teams. I've done the nomad thing every year since then for 1 to 3 months and several 2 year and 1-year blocks. Now I have a family and I just moved to Valencia Spain for 2 years to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER5> While in Paris working as a freelance nodejs developer, I built a website that was making me just enough to get by in South East Asia without having to work (a bit more than $1k/month)

So I left France, and while living on the money generated by this website, I tried to build a product

In the end, my website revenue dried up and I went back to France to work as a freelance developer, after a year of digital nomadism in SEA

It was one of my happiest time in life

It feels like it was decades ago, time flies

<comment><USER6> Why go back to France if you're freelancing? Why not work remote at a low living cost?

<comment><USER5> Remote clients are hard to find

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2014, I lost everything I had invested in my startup (founded in 2011) and decided to go for a sabbatical year (without a penny and no work). After some time, I liked the lifestyle and started to look for some small gigs with software development until I found a full remote full-time job.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is what I wish to do. Unfortunately, I don't have the courage to do so b because I think I'd get bored traveling alone. I don't like city life much and think of traveling to different places as I am a freelancer and I have that luxury to go nomad.

</comment><comment><USER9> I tried to many times for the long term but then the only offer I received recently was in person (client is stuck in 1980s mentlality)

</comment><comment><USER10> Convinced my employer to let me work 100% remotely a few years ago.

<comment><USER11> What size? What is your role?

<comment><USER10> The engineering team for our division is about 30 people, the company as a whole is much larger but our division has a lot of autonomy.

When I went remote I was a developer, now I'm managing an SRE team of 3 people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a short period of time. It's unsustainable.

<comment><USER13> What were some reasons you found it unsustainable?

<comment><USER12> Economic. I couldn't find anyone who wanted a member of staff to not be tied to one location. They were only contract jobs. And contract jobs are whole- life-style wear and tear that are mostly avoidable.

Lifestyle. Moving around constantly was great in my youth, but thinking ahead I realized it would be in my long term best interest (social and psychological) to grow roots and settle down somewhere. That said, moving around a lot got me the exposure and experience to know WHERE to land.

I'm glad I did it in my youth, but that's a window that's closed. I'm happy where I landed and look forward to a comfortable yet challenging life.

<comment><USER7> I work fulltime for a outsourcing company that really doesn't care about my location, just the delivery of working code.

Although after 5 years of nomading I also have this feeling of creating roots, I've managed to do that going mostly to the same places every year for 2-4 months.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the simplest highest earning businesses or startups? - <AUTHOR> I've seen some stuff on indiehackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/park-io) that are just a simple script turned into $125k/month (obviously they also grew the complexity as the user base grew), but anyone know of any other interesting companies that had very simple origins. <comment><USER2> In terms of simplicity to earnings, Salesforce and Wordpress plugins probably.</comment>


T-Shirts for VCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.vcwear.com/

<comment><USER2> Wow, I'd buy one except the shirts are seriously 100 bucks. I thought they were joking.

<comment><USER3> We will put some on 'startup' pricing soon.

<comment><USER4> You should offer the exact same shirts for "startup" price and come up with some reason why the VCs should pay the $100.

Price discrimination at its finest!

Great job with the site though. I liked the VC Powerpoint.

Edit: Also, I had an idea for a shirt.

"Money, or power?

Yes. I'm a VC."

<comment><USER3> You just might see that as a shirt... loved it.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! :)

If it makes it, do you think I could get a discount from the $100 for it?

<comment><USER3> Most definitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this is pure genius.

Especially love how the shirts are ridiculously expensive and next to the "buy this shirt" button there's a "buy this company" button that actually works.

<comment><USER6> although I'd ask for at least $1M...

<comment><USER3> We would have, but Google Checkout maxes out at 100k

<comment><USER6> So why not ask for $100k for 10%? :~)

<comment><USER3> if you can get it, more power to you

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe they can find unique capitalistic synergies with StartupSchwag.com

</comment><comment><USER8> The coolest part is that Andrew Hyde (founder of Startup Weekend) and his friend built this during a plane ride. Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER9> Best part: they're _undershirts_. As in, the dude you're pitching to could be wearing it, and you'd have no clue...

</comment><comment><USER10> Can i get some sales stats? thinking of getting angel funding? ;)

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen "Don't pitch me, bro."

Priceless.

</comment><comment><USER11> The pitch is hilarious!</comment>


Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Reviewed - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/microsoft-visual-studio-2012-reviewed/240007128

<comment><USER2> Scott Hanselman has a post on how to make the appearance closer to VS2010. Including a registry setting to change the menus to title case.

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourColorfulVisualStudio2012Wi...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourColorfulVisualStudio2012WithTheColorThemeEditorVS2010ColorsToo.aspx)

<comment><USER3> It's not like VS2010 ever integrated nicely with the look of other applications. I mean, blue...

That said, since they _are_ diverging from any kind of standard look, making the colors customizable is certainly a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This quote rings very true to me: "Speaking off the record, a Microsoft employee with the Windows 8 team confessed that the Metro team was "very surprised" when they saw how the Visual Studio team had interpreted the Metro guidelines. We share in his puzzlement."

Visual Studio stands out even from other Windows 8 system applications in its usage of the "Metro" style.

<comment><USER5> Idiots. It's not "Metro" that VS 2012 is trying to copy with this look; it's Office 2013. See [http://zapp5.staticworld.net/images/article/2012/07/3_word_r...](http://zapp5.staticworld.net/images/article/2012/07/3_word_ribbon2-11384988.jpg) for an example.

VS is still ugly, of course, but it's because the designers copied the ugly Office design -- not because they didn't understand Metro.

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but no longer on the VS team. Also, I have a cold and am in a bad mood.

<comment><USER6> I can see exactly what you mean, but the point you make is marred by your usage of the word "Idiots." The concept of Office being a different kind of "Metro" than normal Metro is not obvious to everyone.

Edit: I guess I'm just confused about who "Idiots" refers to. The quoted MS employee? The people agreeing with the quote? Everyone in the comment thread?

Also, to be clear: I work at MS and on a couple small parts of VS. I wasn't really part of any of the UI decisions.

<comment><USER7> Give the poster a break, idiots could refer to whoever at Microsoft said that (as they were correctly not well informed nor had any special information).

Office and Visual Studio are of the new "metro-inspired" UIs that, for very good reasons, cannot migrate away from desktop right now. I'm sure we'll eventually see some of these apps move to more Metro UIs (Office?), but for some they will always be desktop (Visual Studio).

Disclaimer: work for Microsoft, but nowhere near these teams.

<comment><USER5> "Idiots" is mostly because I'm in a bad mood. But also, yeah, referring both to the person being quoted and to the person doing the quoting.

<comment><USER4> Good to know that I'm an idiot for thinking that VS2012 is trying to follow guidelines by a product in RTM instead of a product that is in beta and I have no interaction with. Of course I'm also just in a bad mood because I have to use the Pending Changes window in VS 2012 on a daily basis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm still disappointed that deploying to Windows XP isn't supported at launch.

I'll be waiting until the patch this fall[1] before even considering upgrading.

[1][http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2012/06/15/10320645.a...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/archive/2012/06/15/10320645.aspx)

<comment><USER3> Imagine how I must feel: They didn't support Windows ME, either!

<comment><USER9> Don't be cruel. I'm reading this on a machine running XP alongside my 100,000 co-workers running with the same. The company-wide upgrade to Win7 has been running late for the last few years...

<comment><USER10> I hope this company don't end up have to pay for Custom Support for XP!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whose brilliant idea was it to MAKE THE MENUS SHOUT AT YOU? Glad to see there's a registry key to fix that... but still, when did Microsoft start listening to my great aunt Gertrude about proper capitalization?

Also, I agree, the reviews aren't hitting the most important points about the new VS. Does it fix all those annoying bugs we've all been struggling with for 10 years? My guess is no (since as I said, most of them have been there for over a decade). Instead of putting time mucking with the look and feel on a tool that is SOLELY used by developers... how about fixing the bugs that cause us to lose hours of time every week? You know, like where VS crashes, or decides it can't load dependencies in installer files, or the horribly slow search, or the occasional complete hang of the UI for 20 seconds, or the fact that a minor change to an installer project completely changes the whole incomprehensible project file? How about those bugs?

But I guess most of this product was just supporting the new metro crap. Shouldn't OS compatibility be the Windows SDK team's problem, and let the Visual Studio guys... like, you know, work on Visual Studio?

<comment><USER12> hey NateDad 2 things when VS is choking on some simply whatever launch tasks manager , look at disk performance youll see its writing files in user\appdata\roaming somthing like that erase all MS files in that dir. also create your own build automation and dont count on anything but compling from VS .MSFT is returning to its roots as a tech marketing but vs2010 should work OK for another 2-3 years, by then you can migrate to somthing better.good luck!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I don't like of this version, is having to install VS with support for languages that I don't use. I use a 128GB SSD and I hate having those extra GBs wasting space.

And then, those new glyphs in the Solution Explorer, that are making my work a little bit slower. Maybe, that only means that I still need to get used to the new UI. =(

</comment><comment><USER14> I am still extremely annoyed that the Visual Studio team hasn't adopted something like tmbundles for syntax highlighting. The Fonts and Colors dialog is basically unusable, and the best way to do any sort of bulk change is to export the settings and tweak the very limited set of properties.

</comment><comment><USER15> This should have been titled as Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 "UI" Reviewed. The post is mostly about VS 2012 as IDE and lacks review of any other new features.

As a developer, the UI only matters to me for first few days or so and then it all just fades away in the background as the focus shifts to the code and the integrated tools. Sad that most of the reviews of VS 2012 that I have seen focus on its UI and color scheme rather than functionality. I doubt the color scheme matters to developers as much. May be to a fashion designer but not developers ...

<comment><USER16> If you've been using Visual Studio for years prior to 2012 then this new UI is actually a pretty big deal. It's VERY different. I can get over the theme itself, but they also moved some buttons around which really messes with your motor memory for some things you've been doing for years. I'm looking at you "Transform All Templates" button!

<comment><USER7> Its not really not that different. Its not the simplification that Cloud9 has done, and its nothing wild like LightTable is attempting. Actually, 2012 is very conservative, they polished the UI, but its still basically the same IDE as it was in 2005.

I'm very excited to see new kinds of IDEs coming to market, Cloud9...and even LightTable. I think we are almost at the end of the line for SmallTalk-ish IDEs like Visual Studio or Eclipse.</comment></comment></comment>


Neverware: Turn any computer into a Chromebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.neverware.com/ <comment><USER2> Upvoted just for the title. I think it never appears on their web pages, but it clearly explains what it does to your computer.</comment>


Tools for Lifelong Learners - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2009/12/10_power_tools_for_lifelong_learners.html

<comment><USER2> The title of that post was misleading as the post was about _resources_ and not _tools_ , I'm frustrated by the number of posts out there now that "list" free learning resources. (there are far better lists out there)

They could have written the post with a different intention and focused on actual tools for self directed learning that _uses_ the resources (that are interlinked) listed on that blog.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any particular resources in mind that you could share?

<comment><USER2> I haven't been able to find many; most of what I use I've had to develop on my own and extract from the biographies of well known autodidacts.

One of my current projects is to start writing up on my process and the intellectual tools I've developed for it, but, it is waiting on the completion of my web app before that gets going...

If you check out my Delicious bookmarks, you can find all of the web related resources I have and use. <http://delicious.com/ixmatus>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seriously? An article amounting to "read more books, watch more movies, listen to more podcasts" gets 29 votes?

<comment><USER5> There were some nice gems there such as Yad Vashem and 92nd Street Y. I encourage everybody to visit Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

<http://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem> <http://www.youtube.com/user/92ndStreetY></comment></comment>


Thoughts on Business Models (from the founder of Sifter) - <AUTHOR> http://garrettdimon.com/post/10165495142/thoughts-on-business-models <comment><USER2> This is an okay list of benefits of a subscription product, but the line "As long as churn stays low, you're almost never going to see your income disappear overnight. With a native app, if people stop buying, you stop seeing income." left me wanting a bit more.

Keeping churn rates down is critical to success with subscription-based products, along with keeping customer acquisition _costs_ low, so I'd be much more interested in hearing about strategies / innovations in those areas.

<comment><USER3> I hear you, but that's way outside of the scope of this post. Every single bullet point here could almost be a post in and of itself. The logic is pretty straightforward. With subscription apps, the likelihood of seeing money from that customer next month is pretty high. With a native app, the likelihood of seeing money from that customer next month is almost zero.

Keeping churn low has way too many potential variables. The quality of the product, the benefits or usefulness, the cost, customer support, and dozens of other things all ultimately play a role. Even the type of product could affect churn. Is it something that people only need occasionally or something that they'd use daily?

I honestly couldn't tell you how our churn manages to stay so low. If I had to guess, I'd say that it's focusing on making a high quality product and taking extremely good care of customers. We've never had someone tell us that they were canceling because of the quality of the product or support.</comment></comment>


Why has a publisher/distributor model not evolved for startups? - <AUTHOR>

Startups are often great at developing innovative technology and ideas but fall down when it comes to marketing and sales.
Why has a publisher model not evolved, in which "publishers" who are good at branding, digital marketing and sales take to market the innovations coming of of technically excellent but marketing weak startups?
A bit like the way games publishers take the games of independent developers to market.
Surely a revenue split of some form would work to the advantage of all involved.
Perhaps a new generation of marketing savvy startups should be born, startups that have marketing and sales talent but no product, with the objective only of taking to market and making money on the great technology of other startups.  "Bring your high tech startup product to us, we'll take it market and pay you a royalty". <comment><USER2> Well, there's always the stark object lesson of Software Arts (Visicalc) and their publisher, Personal Software (later VisiCorp). Both companies were destroyed because the deal they struck, at the dawn of packaged personal computer software, gave SA too much money. SA refused to renegotiate, PS used the contract to force SA to create ports of their stuff for every possible PC (and there were very many back then), it all ended in tears and Lotus ate their lunch.

So we have these issues and failure modes illustrated:

The market and business model was not well defined, making it difficult to get the contractual arrangement correct the first time.

The principles couldn't sustain a productive working relationship and focused on the contract rather than the market.

Games as packaged software have perhaps worked (a bit) better because the business model and separate roles of each company are fairly well defined, but that could be changing as their use of the net increases.

But mostly what people are trying to do is uncharted territory (that's generally where the biggest payoff is) and a developer/publisher model precludes the process of Customer Development; until that's done, there's not a clear enough line between technology and ideas vs. marketing and sales.

Overall, the interests of each party are divergent and their game is somewhat zero-sum, or at least all too often viewed that way. When their interface can't be well defined at the beginning of their relationship it doesn't look like it's a good model to follow.</comment>


IRC is not dead - <AUTHOR> http://blog.crowdint.com/2013/08/08/irc-is-not-dead.html?utm_source=blogpost&utm_medium=ynews&utm_campaign=irc-0808 <comment><USER2> Who said it was? If anything, IRC is seeing a more widespread audience than it was 20 or even 10 years ago

<comment><USER3> Damn right. I have an IRC client on my android cell phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> *Freenode is not dead.

IRC everywhere else is dead.

</comment><comment><USER5> Please don't tell THEM IRC is not dead.</comment>


What's the significance of 250 Facebook posts per week? - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/bh3soMC <comment><USER2> From buffer's faq. [1]

> example, Facebook recommend 5 posts per day as the limit, but 25 is really > the upper limit that they allow without decreasing the reach of your posts.

So I can only assume that these people have found out that the actual hard limit for non penalised posts is 250.

1\. [https://faq.buffer.com/article/482-what-are-daily-posting- li...](https://faq.buffer.com/article/482-what-are-daily-posting-limits)

<comment><USER3> If the accounts are posting at different times of the day, and the reports are all for the same 7 day period it doesn't make much sense that all the accounts would show exactly 250 posts. Given that they post at different times of the day.

I think this is an API limit on the analytics. From my cound of the Business Insider posts it looks like they're actually posting nearer 650 posts a week.

It's just being capped by the API to 250.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you sure the numbers are correct and it's not just capping at 250?

I just counted the number of posts on Business insider in the last 24 hours [1]. I got about 157 posts, which suggests significantly more than 250 per week.

[1] [https://m.facebook.com/pg/businessinsider/posts/?ref=page_in...](https://m.facebook.com/pg/businessinsider/posts/?ref=page_internal&mt_nav=1)

<comment><USER4> Given the suspiciousness of the number, do you think FB is using a single byte for the counter?

<comment><USER5> it would be 255 if it was in a single byte

<comment><USER6> 255 would be the limit of the counter.

But the limit set in code could be any value supported by the counter.

int8 TOTAL_POST_LIMIT = 250

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. Might not be related, but once upon a time, Facebook had an API for pulling data on a feed that was limited to 250 posts (now documented as 100 posts) [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27760273/how-to-get- avera...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27760273/how-to-get-average- rating-and-number-of-ratings-of-a-facebook-page)

Googling around, it looks like a lot of outlets appear to write 200-350 posts per week, and since they are aiming for a certain number, it could just be that these four tend to aim for 250 worth sharing each week? Hmm. Doesn't seem right either.

Basically... I've no idea. I'm curious too! :)

<comment><USER8> I think it's the API limit. Last time I tried doing something like this I hit the 250 posts limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One wild guess...

(7 * 24 * 60)/250 = 40.3 minutes per post.

"Zuckerberg said on the call that Facebook continues to engage its users, with the average U.S. consumer spending 40 minutes on the social network each day." [0]

[0] - [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-23/facebook-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-23/facebook- posts-second-quarter-revenue-profit-topping-estimates)

... Are these places _really_ posting every 40 minutes? I guess I don't know how Facebook filters things out to keep us sane, but I'd unfollow them in a heartbeat if I saw new posts that often.

</comment><comment><USER10> Most likely, either the number of posts or the mechanism counting them is capped at 250. Probably the counting system. You'd expect to get slightly less than 250 once in a while, depending on when you counted, if this was measuring real post counts.

</comment><comment><USER11> Everybody has about the same budget, and depending on the site, that's when the labor force is at work maybe? For something tech like Gizmodo, the posting pattern might correlate to a workday based on a certain region. Buzzfeed would have a staff that goes 24/7, maybe spread out globally or just with a labor pool with some people willing to work the Graveyard Shift from home. Some content probably has to be "timely" whereas other pieces can be on a production schedule so to speak. Just thinking out loud here.

</comment><comment><USER12> Somebody in marketing has targeted 50 a (work)day, which is a nice, round number and that's what their staff are producing.</comment>


ASK HN - Good worksheet for estimating startup costs? - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com I'm looking for pulling together some numbers for starting a tech startup (technical services at first - not so much a product company yet, but that shouldn't matter much) in the SF Bay Area.  I've seen a few worksheets that are "fill in the blanks" but I'm looking for something that would say things like:
Salaries: $500,000 Benefits: (Usually 15% of salary) Rent: ($15 per square foot is usually a good estimate)
Seems like this is one of those things that should be pretty prevalent since many people have to go through the exercise but I can't really find anything very good. <comment><USER2> Did you really have to submit this four times?</comment>


Taking Zinc Can Shorten Your Cold. Thank a 91-Year-Old Scientist for Discovery - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/02/10/803886479/taking-zinc-can-shorten-your-cold-thank-a-91-year-old-scientist-for-the-discover <comment><USER2> The medical uses of zinc have been known for a hundred years or more.

Zinc and Vitamin C lozenges were sold for colds about 40 years ago.

Ayrton's Zinc and Sulphur tablets were sold for teenager acne 60-80 years ago.

The addition of zinc to TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition - Intravenous Feeding) formulations was widely used 35 years ago.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the total size of all of GitHub - <AUTHOR> Just curious, does anyone know what the total disk space used by all GitHub repos together is? <comment><USER2> According to [https://github.com/blog/841-those-are-some-big- numbers](https://github.com/blog/841-those-are-some-big-numbers) they have 2 million repositories, getting 4500 new ones every day. But that was 2011.

On their about page they say they have +53 Mio projects hosted as of today: [https://github.com/about](https://github.com/about)

So, just assume that the average repository is s.th. like 20MB and do the math... sorry, couldn't find the average repository size :P</comment>


Is Your VirtualBox Reading Your E-Mail? Reconstruction of FrameBuffers from VRAM - <AUTHOR> https://hsmr.cc/palinopsia/ <comment><USER2> Something similar happened to me, but with a different scenario. I hibernated my Arch Linux system and then booted into Windows (I unmount all of my NTFS partitions beforehand), did some work, and then rebooted into Linux again. The GNOME lock screen doesn't play nice with my NVIDIA drivers (closed-source), so it doesn't reinitialize the lock screen texture when it wakes up from suspend- to-RAM or suspend-to-disk. The lock screen now sported a portion of the desktop from the Windows system which was shut down before. It was a really interesting thing to see, but a bit unsettling too. Lots of surface for information leakage through VRAM, it seems.

<comment><USER3> I've seen worse.

An old Dell laptop, which originally came with Windows, repurposed as a Linux laptop. It had been used exclusively as a Linux laptop (the Windows partitions had been overwritten by the Linux install) for several months if not years, when one day, its lock screen displayed a Windows desktop (I don't recall if the laptop had just returned from suspend or not). Moving the mouse dispelled the "ghost" screen and showed the normal lock screen.

The only explanation I could come up with for that was that, somehow, that particular screen had survived intact in a corner of the video RAM, for months, until a bug in the Linux video driver made it appear.

Makes one wonder how long can information survive in a laptop's video RAM. The laptop had never completely lost power (it has a battery, after all), but it had been powered off daily; it wasn't left on suspend all the time.

<comment><USER4> Just to clarify ... the laptop you describe was powered off daily? Even Once? Powered off?

Then what you saw was NOT a VRAM artifact. Aside from OP clearly stating it is a re-boot issue, powering off the laptop would have removed power to the video RAM chips -- thus they would have lost their stored data.

What is likely you saw was a screen saver program displaying a random image which it found on the laptop hard drive. How this came to be found (assuming it is what you saw, just to give you the benefit of the doubt) would be very hard to guess without the laptop and it's configuration.

<comment><USER3> That was a long time ago, so my memory is a bit hazy on the details. If I recall it correctly, it was the laptop I was using at the time, and I almost always powered it off when leaving work. I still have another laptop of the same set at work, so I could look up the exact model tomorrow if you want (it's an old Dell Latitude IIRC).

But I can clearly recall that I thought at the time precisely that: "how is that even possible, powering off the laptop should have cleared the video memory, and this laptop didn't have a Windows install for years!" Yet, there it was, a Windows desktop with one window (or dialog, can't recall precisely) open. (I don't recall how I knew it was from its old Windows install; it might have been showing some work-related information.)

It wasn't the screen saver; IIRC, I used the "blank screen" screensaver (or some other equally simple screensaver), not a "slideshow" or "random" screensaver.

Yeah, it's hard to believe. I myself would have found it hard to believe if I hadn't seen it. I even took a photo, but it was several mobile phones ago, so I'd have to search through my old backups to see if I can find it.

The only explanation I could come up with was that the video memory on that laptop for some reason retained its contents as long as the laptop battery wasn't removed (while the laptop had been powered off many times, its battery had not been removed), and the Windows driver used the video memory in a different way than the Linux driver, so that desktop snapshot never got overwritten. Then one day a glitch made the "read the screen contents from here" pointer point to it, and so it showed in the screen. It's ridiculously unlikely, but I couldn't come up with a better explanation; it's even more bizarre in that the "ghost" image was perfect, with no visual glitches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _On a laptop with an Intel HD4000 and a dedicated nVidia card where the OS can switch between cards, one has to force the usage of the dedicated card to read from VRAM. The internal graphics card seems to be unaffected at the moment._

Makes sense; integrated GPUs (UMA) share the same RAM as the rest of the system, which will get cleared as the BIOS does its RAM test at POST (this might not always be the case if 'fastboot' or similar features are enabled.)

Another observation from this would be that GPUs do not do any memory tests on their VRAM, which also agrees with the fact that most of the time failed VRAM just causes artifacts to show up and no message/etc. upon boot. Models designed for GPGPU use may behave differently.

<comment><USER6> > (this might not always be the case if 'fastboot' or similar features are > enabled.)

I haven't seen a computer or laptop with fastboot disabled in over a decade...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently wrote a library that rasterizes a PDF page to an image and was observing a very similar behavior. It was also highly system dependent and erratic as well. I would randomly see a distorted image of my own screen when I run my program on any PDF. Then figured out I was not initializing the buffer I was using to render the PDF page to image. After I memset'ed it to zero, the problem went away. I still couldn't quite comprehend what was exactly happening in the background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is the same way I found this - In the course of another project I had the same "Huh, this is weird" moment. Then I started experimenting with different setups (Linux, Windows, VMs) and was surprised that I apparently almost always succeeded in recovering stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A few thoughts ...

First, tails scrubs memory (or something like that) when you shut down - should they be scrubbing vram as well ?

Second, wouldn't it be quick and simple to "scrub" vram by filling it up with intensive usage after working on sensitive information ? What happens if I watch 2 minutes of 1080p video - wouldn't we expect all previous framebuffer data to be flushed at that point ?

Finally, I would be very curious to see how this changes as you work with multiple graphics cards in a multi-monitor setup. I tend to have all of my VMs in windows confined to a particular monitor that is driven by its own graphics card - presumably those guest operating systems are only accessing that framebuffer ?

<comment><USER9> > should they be scrubbing vram as well

Yes, but VRAM is a tricky beast. Modern GPUs actually have MMUs and the VRAM address layout the CPU sees may not cover the whole of the memory of the graphics card.

> What happens if I watch 2 minutes of 1080p video - wouldn't we expect all > previous framebuffer data to be flushed at that point ?

No, because the video frames will be queued in a circular buffer and anything outside of that doesn't get touched.

<comment><USER3> The only way I can see to reliably scrub VRAM would be to use the GPU as a "dumb framebuffer" (without video acceleration), like in the good old days. Then to scrub what was used in the session it should be enough to draw a black screen, do a page flip, and draw a black screen again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is an issue for any software that is able to access the GPU: [http://blog.lxgr.net/tag/opengl.html](http://blog.lxgr.net/tag/opengl.html)

<comment><USER11> Just in components that claim to provide security boundaries but then do OpenGL passthrough without precautions. Web browsers handle this this properly in WebGL. VirtualBox is at fault here.

Your linked article is about just running two native desktop apps side by side under the same user account, there isn't any supposed security boundary between them so it's a different case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oracle also discourages the use of 3D acceleration for untrusted hosts. See here: [http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#guestadd-3d](http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#guestadd-3d)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've noticed something similar playing Mini Metro last month.

I was running a Windows 7 VM on an OS X 10.9.5 host with Virtualbox 4.2.28 using my mid 2013 Macbook Air (Intel HD Graphics 5000 1024 MB). Instead of blurring the game for the weekly upgrade menu, it showed the center of my host desktop wallpaper, upside-down and flipped (other than that, there was distortion whatsoever). It really creeped me out.

[http://i.imgur.com/OqYvYjq.png](http://i.imgur.com/OqYvYjq.png)

</comment><comment><USER13> Does this have any bearing on WebGL?

<comment><AUTHOR> The webgl standard has rather strong memory safety considerations:

WebGL resources such as textures and vertex buffer objects (VBOs) must always contain initialized data, even if they were created without initial user data values.[0]

As long as browser vendors implement this (and chrome and firefox seem to), this should not be an issue.

[0] [https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/specs/1.0.3/](https://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/specs/1.0.3/)

<comment><USER14> This _was_ a problem with WebGL a few years ago on some OS/GPU/Browser combinations. It was possible to write a WebGL app that created uninitialized textures, drew them on screen, grabbed a screenshot and then uploaded that via HTTP(s) to a server.

This issue should now be fixed, but bugs and/or old unpatched browsers may still be out there.

<comment><USER15> That browsers have bugs that might leak info is not special to WebGL or GPUs. The bugs are found, they get fixed.

<comment><USER14> Oh sure, but in this particular case it seemed like no-one had thought about the issue that uninitialized textures can be used for snooping screen content, this wasn't mandated by the spec (IIRC).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's very interesting. I guess VRAM doesn't get powered off during reboot and (today) it is huge, so the chance of interesting information remaining is big.

Mitigation strategy: Ctrl-Alt-F1 and work in text mode. (or just fill up video ram doing stuff in your machine after doing the sensitive work)

<comment><USER17> Best mitigation strategy is not to share VRAM by disabling 3d acceleration with Guests you absolutely don't want to snoop on your host pixels.

<comment><USER16> That takes care of the "Guest snooping on the Host" case, but not the case of physical attack on the machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Will shutting down erase the vram completely? Also why does rebooting not erase the memory completely?

<comment><USER19> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack)

I don't specifically know the answer to your first question if the VRAM is not DRAM (shared memory), but certainly rebooting will not simply automatically clear out DRAM.

<comment><USER20> shutdown clears, reboot doesnt.

<comment><USER21> Shutdown actually doesn't clear RAM, hence the "cold boot attack" terminology. Eventually the data will degrade, but eventually can be a long time.

<comment><USER20> Yeah. My comment was ment to answer the question above yours...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is actually one thing that bugs me about OpenGL, DirectX? and Vulkan.

Basically all the insentive so far is best speed. That means there's almost zero insentive for security in GPU drivers. You can try to implement security on top of the GPU. WebGL does this. Chrome also does this for most (all?) of its GPU access meaning even its page rendering is going through Chrome's secured GPU system that clears buffers and makes sure one process can't read another's GPU resources.

But, it seems to me this should really be at an OS level for both CPU and GPU memory. Otherwise it requires all programs to be vigilent. Clear every buffer before deletion and hope there aren't handles behind the scenes leaving older copies around.

<comment><USER22> I think it's not really that simple. Clearing buffers certainly isn't free if you're doing it all the time, and considering that high-end gaming already pushes GPU's to their max output, the difference between clearing buffers and not clearing them could be noticeable in the end. Of course, it depends completely on _how_ you implement this and when you go about clearing. For example, if a game allocates a pool of GPU memory at the start and then grabs memory for this pool as it needs it, then the OS clearing the buffers hardly matters. If it's constantly asking and releasing memory though, then the buffer clearing is important. I honestly don't know how the bigger titles handles this, mostly because I don't know exactly how different GPU memory is from CPU memory (And if the pool approach is possible).

What could be an interesting idea is having a 'GPU security switch' on the OS level. If it is set on, then GPU memory buffers are cleared at every release. If it's off, then they're not cleared. My thinking would be that you setup a system in the kernel, somewhat like root access, where by default this switch is on, but a program like a game could suggest that it be turned off for that game to get better performance (And a program like sudo could pop-up with a request box and ask if you want to turn it off, and then ask for the root password to do so). What would be even better is if it could be accomplished on a per-program basis, so only that game's memory isn't zero'd (Which probably isn't that important of memory anyway) and the rest of your program's using the GPU are still zero'd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder why the drivers don't do this on startup. Judging by the specs, most GPUs have enough memory bandwidth to clear all of their memory in less than one second.

</comment><comment><USER24> Amusingly, BIOS features to test/clear memory are usually disabled due to boot performance impact.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could this possibly work with WebGL?

<comment><AUTHOR> see _wmd's comment below[0]

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246244)</comment></comment>


Conversations among German Nuclear Physicists at Farm Hall (1945) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/eng/English101.pdf <comment><USER3> > WEIZSÄCKER: I think it's dreadful of the Americans to have done it. I think > it is madness on their part.

> HEISENBERG: One can't say that. One could equally well say "That's the > quickest way of ending the war."

And there's seven decades' worth of debate summed up in an instant on the day of the first bombing.

Something to keep in mind next time I feel tempted to argue about it.

<comment><USER4> Capitulation could have ended the war even quicker, at the speed of a telegram. Clearly, that cannot be the only criterion.

(not seeking to argue with you, I'm replying to Heisenberg so to speak)

<comment><USER3> I imagine there's an implied "with them as the winners" on the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Such an amazing read. What positively surprised me, but perhaps shouldn't have, is that they seem almost relieved they didn't get there first. It's reassuring in a way I have trouble verbalising.

<comment><USER6> Some of them were relieved but some of them weren't. There was Gerlach's reaction described later in the document.

" _7\. HAHN and HEISENBERG discussed the matter alone together. HAHN explained to HEISENBERG that he was himself very upset about the whole thing. He said he could not really understand why GERLACH had taken it so badly. HEISENBERG said he could understand it because GERLACH was the only one of them who had really wanted a German victory, because although he realized the crimes of the Nazis and disapproved of them, he could not get away from the fact that he was working for GERMANY. HAHN replied that he too loved his country and that, strange as it might appear, it was for this reason that he had hoped for her defeat. ..._ "

Then there was also this bit:

" _... BAGGE: That 's not true. You were there yourself at that conference in Berlin. I think it was on 8 September that everyone was asked – GEIGER, BOTHE and you, HARTECK, were there too– and everyone said that it must be done at once. Someone said 'Of course it is an open question whether one ought to do a thing like that.' Thereupon BOTHE got up and said 'Gentlemen, it must be done.' Then GEIGER got up and said 'If there is the slightest chance that it is possible – it must be done.' That was on 8 September '39.

WEIZSÄCKER: I don't know how you can say that. 50% of the people were against it.

HARTECK: All the scientists who understood nothing about it, all spoke against it, and of those who did understand it, one third spoke against it. ..._"

<comment><USER7> What an interesting exchange here! This really highlights an issue that we have been dealing with for these last 80 years: What to do when the leader is known to be unjust/evil?

Here we see that these very intelligent men all were patriots to their own people, despite their evil leader. But they all _knew_ that this patriotism was misplaced and would make the world worse. They all knew that they should loose, despite their loyalty to their own people.

In the 8 decades since, have we come to a conclusion on how to deal with this? What is a person to do when the nation goes towards evil? Must we all go Capt. America on our own[0]?

The decisions of these cowards and their internal conflicts echo to this day.

[0][https://external- preview.redd.it/sORWym5kfi2NIanLWbz_0nWtqPP...](https://external- preview.redd.it/sORWym5kfi2NIanLWbz_0nWtqPPZQTjbn3jCDm8rUIg.jpg?auto=webp&s=b807fcf22438b259c4a42760984b65948322516d)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Highlight for me:

> _WEIZSÄCKER: I don 't think we ought to make excuses now because we did not > succeed, but we must admit that we didn't want to succeed. If we had put the > same energy into it as the Americans and had wanted it as they did, it is > quite certain that we would not have succeeded as they would have smashed up > the factories._

> _WEIZSÄCKER: One can say it might have been a much greater tragedy for the > world if Germany had had the uranium bomb. Just imagine, if we had destroyed > LONDON with uranium bombs it would not have ended the war, and when the war > did end, it is still doubtful whether it would have been a good thing._

<comment><USER9> Von Weizsäcker, and his family, are extremely interesting. The father was a somewhat reluctant ambassador to Britain. The four brothers all were highly successful, as a physicist, a politician (President of Germany in the 90s), an economist, and a political scientist.

I had the honor to study with the economist. I rarely get the explicit idea that someone is smarter or dumber than me. But with him, it was so obvious I skipped right over jealousy straight to awe and enjoyment.

There is also a play, "Copenhagen", featuring three or four possible versions of a meeting of WeizsÄcker. Heisenberg, and Bohr.

<comment><USER10> Richard von Weizsäcker (President of Germany) was fabulous. Every interview worth reading, every word well chosen. Nobody since has lived up to that high standard yet in my opinion.

<comment><USER11> No coin without flipside: "... Er war - für die Bundesrepublik in dieser Form bis heute einmalig - der intellektuelle Gegenentwurf zum Kanzler, und er hat diese Rolle auch gerne angenommen. Im privaten Leben war er zwar oft unbeherrscht, hochfahrend und anmaßend. Untergebene schurigelte er zuweilen aus nichtigem Anlass. Doch seine öffentlichen Auftritte inszenierte Weizsäcker untadelig. ..." Source [german]: [http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/richard-von- weizsa...](http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/richard-von-weizsaecker- im-alter-von-94-jahren-gestorben-a-1016056.html)

<comment><USER12> Translation: "He was - uniquely to this day for the Federal Republic - <USER2> intellectual counterbalance to the Chancellor [Kohl?], and happily played this role. In private life, he was often uncontrolled, arrogant and overbearing. He sometimes bullied his staff for trivial reasons. But Weizsäcker played his public appearances flawlessly."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >HEISENBERG: I am still convinced that our objective was really the right one and that the fact that we concentrated on uranium may give us the chance of collaboration. I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo–Saxons such tremendous power that EUROPE will become a bloc under Anglo–Saxon domination. If that is the case it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether STALIN will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.

Another timeline that most can be glad we didn't go down. America would be even more dominant over the western world. Russia even more on edge.

<comment><USER14> Not sure if you are being sarcastic - but isn't he in 1945 correctly predicting the development of the western world over the next 30-40 years, in which the US were clearly the dominating NATO power? I don't think Heisenberg meant that the US will threaten European nations with annihilation.

<comment><USER15> I'm having trouble parsing the quote, I think by 'Anglo-Saxon' he really means 'England and the US', and it's not really clear that England the US have true "power and control" over Europe. Instead what we see is a Europe dominated by England and Germany with large military influence by US.

<comment><USER16> If you look at the period from 1945 to, say, 1975, though, which is the speaker's perspective, American political and economic influence were both extremely strong compared to today, in addition to the obvious military influence.

<comment><USER17> The thing is, from the 60's through the fall of the wall, you can say what you want, but I distinctly remember everyone _MUCH_ preferring German Marks to any other European currency. (Probably the Swiss Franc was on par with it, you get the idea. No one wanted Lira, and, at times, even Pounds and French Francs were out of favor.) Germany, or Germany and France, were usually the driving force behind most European initiatives during that time.

Not only then, but still today. (If not even more today.) I remember the late unpleasantness with the PIIGs, and believe it or not, there was a little while there where people would try to determine where a Euro note came from...

and they wouldn't take it unless it was from Germany.

The Germans may not be vocal about dominating Europe, but they definitely dominate Europe. And they have in many ways for a long time. At least since the 60's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a German I would love to have read it in German or hear the audio files. Nevertheless an interesting piece of history.

<comment><USER19> Same here. I tracked down the German version on their website here: [http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/pdf/deu/German101ed.pdf](http://germanhistorydocs.ghi- dc.org/pdf/deu/German101ed.pdf) (PDF)

<comment><USER20> These are possibly a re-translation, supposedly the german originals were lost, at least that was the situation in 2013: [http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/13/what-did-the- nazis...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/09/13/what-did-the-nazis-know- about-the-manhattan-project/) (third paragraph)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dürrenmatt's famous play The Physicists has a very similar setting, I wonder if he was inspired by this at all.

</comment><comment><USER21> Note how quickly they feel the need to defend themselves, why they couldn't get the bomb done in time. Considering their situation (prisoners of war in the UK), I find that instinct patently absurd.

Over half of the transcript is them coming up with excuses why the Americans succeeded where they did not. Let it be a lesson about the human condition that the excuses all but eclipse the guilt over having attempted to build such a bomb themselves. Both the guild and envy are powerful emotions. Envy wins.

<comment><USER22> I think the defensiveness only looks absurd in hindsight.

They were wondering whether they'd go back, and how they'd be perceived/treated by their fellow Germans. Would they be perceived as traitors for failing to create the bomb?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How did we end up purifying the amount of U235 needed?

I saw on another page "General Leslie Groves consulted with lead scientists of the project and agreed to investigate simultaneously four separate methods of separating and purifying the uranium-235: gaseous diffusion, centrifuge, electromagnetic separation and liquid thermal diffusion."

Seems like a ton of work.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fascinating stuff, really interesting characters. I for one never knew the Germans were pursuing fission for the production of "engines". Do yourselves a favor and read the entire transcript.

The comments about how they see history being written, specifically about the German contributions, comes across as particularly naive but evident of men who were clearly distraught and disoriented.

And their predictions about Stalin and Russia were ominous but nearly correct several times over.

<comment><USER25> > Fascinating stuff, really interesting characters. I for one never knew the > Germans were pursuing fission for the production of "engines". Do yourselves > a favor and read the entire transcript.

I'm fairly sure that by "engines" they meant reactors.

<comment><USER10> They talk about a 'Maschine' in the German version 'a machine' and clearly mean a machine to produce energy i.e a reactor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Previously on HN.[1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568250)

</comment><comment><USER27> Operation Epsilon is a pretty good (if probably overly literal) play about Farm Hall. Worth going to see if you get a chance.

</comment><comment><USER28> Overall a neat piece of history to read, to sit in that disbelief as fragments of the world start being lifted back up from the ground where they've shattered. Neat quotes:

Heisenberg: I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo–Saxons such tremendous power that EUROPE will become a bloc under Anglo–Saxon domination. If that is the case it will be a very good thing.

Heisenberg: [T]he days of small countries are over.

Weizsäcker: Our strength is now the fact that we are 'un–Nazi'.

Heisenberg: I believe that we are now far more bound up with the Anglo–Saxons than we were before as we have no possibility of switching over to the Russians even if we wanted to. On the other hand we can do it with a good conscience because we can see that in the immediate future Germany will be under Anglo–Saxon influence.

Weizsäcker: If I ask myself for which side I would prefer to work of course I would say for neither of them.

Weizsäcker: History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine. In other words, the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in Germany under the Hitler regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war.

</comment><comment><USER29> What an interesting read. Also, is it just me or are there a surprising number of german related topics on the frontpage right now?

"We only had one man working on it and they may have had ten thousand"

This is why I always chuckle at the ww2 "documentaries" positing the possibility of german or japanese bomb. Nevermind that both parties were preoccupied fighting far stronger and larger opponents ( US, British Empire, Soviet Union, China ), they lacked the resources, economic power and infrastructure to construct one before the US. We had a much larger economy and resource potential than germany and japan. Just like we do today. It was a race neither had a chance of winning.

Another interesting read is the military's view on hiroshima and nagasaki. Most military leaders saw it as serving no military purpose. So ultimately, hiroshima and nagasaki were the largest human experimentation in ww2. It was a predominately a radiation test on civilian populations and cities. Something we'd continue doing on unsuspecting pacific islanders decades after ww2.

<comment><USER30> After the Germans surrendered my dad's division was scheduled to be transferred to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. At least that is what they were told. He was happy to hear of the bombings on Nagasaki and Hiroshima since from his perspective it caused the Japanese to surrender.

Of course it's debatable on whether or not those bombings did indeed cause the surrender of Japan. Politically the U.S. has not been a nation to stomach large numbers of its soldiers being killed. The actions on Iwo Jima and Okinawa were far more bloody than the public cared for. How many more such battles would a war weary public have endured? Nagasaki and Hiroshima were not military targets but they were political targets.

I don't know if the bombings were morally right or wrong and can see the argument both ways. But from at least one drafted soldier's perspective they were a good thing.

<comment><USER29> It isn't debatable because we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on the japanese decision to surrender. If the nukes were the cause of japan's surrender, hiroshima would have been enough and nagasaki wouldn't have happened.

Also, there is no ambiguity to the morality of hiroshima or nagasaki. No more than there is any ambiguity to the morality of nazi death camps. They were both racially driven war crimes and crimes against humanity. And as mcnamara said, if we had lost the war, our leaders would have been executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

<comment><USER31> >...we know hiroshima and nagasaki had no bearing on the japanese decision to surrender.

I think this is an interesting idea but I would love to see a source on this.

When I took a Japan at War class in college our professor seemed to be of the opinion that using the atom bomb was what finally convinced the Japanese to surrender unconditionally but that they would have agreed to a conditional surrender as long as their emperor was guaranteed some form of independence. What are your thoughts on this?

<comment><USER32> That is the justification for the bomb for the American public.

Many Japanese cities (sixty-ish) were destroyed by traditional firebombing. For the Japanese, Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply meant "two more cities".

Two days after Hiroshima, Russia declared war against Japan. So their strategic position in the war became hopeless. Historians believe Russia entering the war shaped the surrender much more than the atomic bomb.

[https://nationalpost.com/news/did-the-atomic-bombings-of- hir...](https://nationalpost.com/news/did-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima- and-nagasaki-really-end-the-war)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Plugged it in a previous thread but will plug it as relevant again, since I see debate in this thread about Japanese surrender and wheather the Germans were really developing the bomb.

Have a read of Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg, he was involved and saw a lot of the nuclear planning during the Cold War. It's pretty clear from his retelling that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were not essential to end the war. Japan was days away from surrender, and we killed more people in a firebomb raid than with the A-Bomb anyway, so it's not like they weren't already suffering citywide destructions. In fact Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two cities kept off of the firebombing list simply to still have test targets for the A-Bomb.

On the German front Hitler apparently discontinued the nazi program when he found out it was going to take too long for his timeline to win the war.

In Cold War terms there's almost too much disturbing in the book to list. But one thing it brought home to me was that we should have a "no first use" policy like other countries, but we don't because we like to threaten their use. And we have absolutely no need for land based ICBMs anymore given we have SLBMs more than capable of destroying the world, the ICBMs are a strategic liability (targets) and yet instead of getting rid of them we are planning to spend over $100b to replace them.

<comment><USER34> An under-emphasised point: If defeating Japanese fascism was a valid war aim, then the bomb was a really efficient weapon. Even if mining the harbors was much cheaper & had more military effect. The lesson from Versailles is that surrender wasn't enough to defeat German militarism, just a few years later they could spin stories about the army being stabbed in the back... but such stories didn't sell so well in 1950, 1960, with Soviet & US tanks facing each other in Berlin. The US ability to fly over in 1 plane, 1 bomb, 1 city was another really hard-to-deny reality.

And: It's not clear that "no first use" policies are anything more than PR tools. IIRC it emerged that not one of the USSR war plans for Germany was nuclear-free.</comment></comment>


V8: Firing Up the Ignition Interpreter - <AUTHOR> http://v8project.blogspot.com/2016/08/firing-up-ignition-interpreter.html <comment><USER2> What would be the killer feature for me would be if I could select an interpreter-only mode... ideally at either compile-time or run-time.

The products I work on sometimes need to be deployed in environments where JIT code is disallowed due to security constraints. Now, I don't mind if my code runs dog-slow there, but it does still need to run.

Some projects that use JIT techniques work well in this scenario. For example pcre has an opt-in JIT, so at regex-compile time I can decide to stick with the non-JIT implementation and take a speed hit. Everything still works.

I know when V8 was new-ish the party line if you wanted a JITless version was to just have it target ARM and emulate the instruction stream. However I don't know if anyone ever implemented such a beast. It also would be ugly if you wanted to decide at runtime whether to JIT since I don't know how easily V8 can dual-target.

Anyway, if Ignition can run any V8 code maybe we can get an Ignition-only mode? It would also open up a path to running V8/node.js on CPUs that V8 can't target natively yet, albeit somewhat slowly.

An alternative would be to use an js engine like mozilla's (or a purely interpreted one like duktape) but the ecosystem (node and whatnot) seems to have settled on V8 so it definitely would be nice to be able to use.

Apologies if I'm talking nonsense and there's an easy way to do this now.. the last I looked at this problem in depth was pretty early in V8's life. I haven't heard any news about JITless operation though.

<comment><USER3> IIRC when they first announced Ignition, running in non-JIT environments was an explicit "non-goal".

I don't think that they are against it, but i'm assuming nobody is really trying to get that to work, and I think some code is still JIT-ed during ignitions normal operating, so getting a "pure" interpreter might be much more work.

Things might have changed since then, so someone with more up-to-date information will have to chime in if i'm horribly off.

But I do have issue with this:

>An alternative would be to use an js engine like mozilla's (or a purely interpreted one like duktape) but the ecosystem (node and whatnot) seems to have settled on V8 so it definitely would be nice to be able to use.

The ecosystem has not settled on V8 (hell I just started playing with espruino which is a javascript engine built to run on extremely low power devices like the ESP8266), and IMO it shouldn't ever settle on one implementation. Alternate engines keep the javascript ecosystem healthy. It prevents bugs in one from becoming a defacto standard, it promotes competition and specialization, and it's the way javascript standards become standard (IIRC something like 3 separate major implementations are needed).

Chakra is really giving V8 a run for it's money recently, and even javascriptcore is quickly catching up and is much better in areas like memory usage.

<comment><USER2> > so getting a "pure" interpreter might be much more work.

If that's the case I'd have to take their word for it.. it's their code so they know the pitfalls. It still surprises me though: if I was developing a feature like that it would be the first thing I'd want to get working so I could try all of my test cases on interpeter-only mode.

Maybe there are some types of code that the interpreter just can't handle and always fall back into the JIT?

> The ecosystem has not settled on V8

Sorry, I probably didn't express myself wall. I personally am excited about the development of other js engines, and I also home that continues.

For non-browser js, though, node is the 800lb gorilla. I'm hoping that the (apparently reborn?) Spidermonkey or node-chakracore really take off to the point they're first-class options for using with node. However, I am not sure if that will ever happen.

I personally think duktape gets a lot of things right with its lua-inspired API and easy portability. However, it will probably never have a JIT available.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure they have a way to run in "Ignition only" mode, but Ignition still uses executable memory for some things, so an "Ignition only" mode is not a "JIT-free" mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, V8 follows in the footsteps of LuaJIT:

LuaJIT2/newV8 optimized interpreter is as fast as LuaJIT1/oldV8 compiler. And to make it cross platform, it uses the LuaJIT/V8 macro assembler, rather than standard platform tools. (Although, LuaJIT2's macro assembler is architecture dependent and does much less than TurboFan's bytecode/macro assembler).

I suspect they'll realize at some point that the 20% or so interpretation speedup that you get from writing crucial parts of the interpreter in pure assembly is easier than specializing TurboFan to generate good interpreter code - see Mike Pall's explanations[0]

[0] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588696) ; unfortunately, gmane appears to be gone, and I can't find another copy of the pointed to article.

<comment><USER5> Not just LuaJIT but most heavily worked on VMs seem to converge to this point: it's basically the HotSpot architecture but with the source code compiler included and a register based bytecode instead of a stack based one. Oh, and two heavily optimising compilers instead of one. I guess they'll want to fix that. It was disappointing to hear that CrankShaft and Turbofan are both still in existence, I remember TurboFan being announced quite some time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really recommend the video in the article for anyone that wants to learn about some V8 internals, how they got to this point, and where it is headed.

They are replacing 3 JITs with an interpreter and a JIT which should improve speed, memory usage, and allow them to add new features faster, but the climb to that point really looks like a tough one.

Watching that talk it really sounds like they painted themselves into a corner with the complexity of fullcodegen, crankshaft, and turbofan. And the path they are taking out is really interesting. By introducing ignition they are adding on MORE complexity, but eventually when turbofan is well rounded enough and ignition is battle tested and improved, they are planning to drop fullcodegen and crankshaft and hook ignition straight to turboshaft making everything simpler, and hopefully faster!

<comment><USER5> Hm, well, as they say - they've actually now got two compilers even in the ideal case where they get rid of Crankshaft. Source to bytecode and then bytecode to machine code.

It does sound like there's a bit of a story behind V8's evolution here. I wonder when they'll try to standardise the bytecode they invented and introduce an extra protocol on top of HTTP to download it instead of source code. Seems like an obvious optimisation if compressed bytecode is more compact than compressed source (unclear if it would be), or maybe even if it's a bit larger if network speeds continue to improve and all the compile steps become the dominant factor in page load times.

Especially with WebAssembly it seems the whole web architecture is slowly winding its way back to the basic design of Java applets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Despite its often annoying flaws, I'm all in with JS/Node on my side projects at this point. Javascript isn't going anywhere soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ignition is great in theory but worryingly slow in tests I've run on Canary. I'm hoping they catch up to JSC's interpreter soon.</comment>


Gujarat: Life term for killing cows - <AUTHOR> https://thewire.in/120543/gujarat-assembly-clears-bill-life-term-cow-slaughter/ <comment><AUTHOR> Read along with : [https://thewire.in/120672/chhattisgarh-chief-minister- will-h...](https://thewire.in/120672/chhattisgarh-chief-minister-will-hang- cow-killers/)</comment>


Interview with Rupert Murdoch - Covers lots of media topics [VID] - <AUTHOR> http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/

<comment><AUTHOR> He touches on a lot of potential answers to PG's request for startups #1: <http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html></comment>


TrustWave (PCI Scan Company) Expired SSL Certificate - <AUTHOR> https://login.trustwave.com/portal-core/home <comment><AUTHOR> This made me LOL out loud this morning, just wanted to share with you guys :).</comment>


Ask HN: How common is it to charge customers for API access? - <AUTHOR> http://www.yardi.com/anz/services/interfaces/ - Yardi is a property management solution I think. We had one of their customers want to connect to our system. Yardi charges $25,000 a year PER API of which there are 9.<p>That seems insane to me. How common is it to charge your customers that are already paying you more to use an API? <comment><USER2> If you offer it as a new service or option than it makes perfect sense to charge them again.</comment>


Ask: Has programming disrupted your companion relationship?  - <AUTHOR>

I have been filling my programming toolbox with new technologies whilst building stuff for other people. Recently, I believe my relationship with my significant other has become a little rocky because of the time I've spent developing side projects outside my full time job. An example, this previous weekend I was working toward a deadline that was set for the beginning of this week, and had worked Saturday and Sunday (last night until 4 am). I am very dedicated in improving my programming skills/building my career and my significant other says they understand, but I don't believe they do. Maybe I am bad at time management between work/life? Has anyone else dealt or is dealing with this type of situation and have recommendations? <comment><USER2> I used to experience the exact same problem (full-time job on weekdays, contribution to side/open-source projects in the evenings and at the weekends = no time for SO) until I figured out a solution.

Follow these 3 steps and you will probably be fine:

\- Be responsive to your SO while programming. Whenever she asks something or comes up with a topic to discuss, do not give short answers - instead give a short break, hibernate the universe that you are in while coding for a while and talk to her. When you feel that she got satisfied with your speech/action/response and got what she wants, get back to work again.

\- Choose one of the days at the weekend and do not code that day. You can still think about the problem you were struggling with the other day or the next feature you would like to implement and take little notes about them. But do not code. This will boost your productivity too.

\- Divide your time for coding into reasonable time frames (e.g. 1 hour) that you believe you will be productive. And give at least 15-20 mins break between each time frame. The key point is that go and talk to your SO during these breaks and do not ever think about the last problem you were struggling with. Really, with all your mind, be with her.

I believe that the root of the problem is a coding zombie that just eats, goes to toilet and codes all the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, in my first marriage I worked as a programmer and had a side project and several failed business attempts. This ended the marriage in part. The other part was we married at 18 before either of us knew about the "real world".

My current SO and I have been together/married since 2007. She understands how much of a geek I am. She understands sometimes I have to think about every outcome. She encourages me to get up and work if I am "restless in bed".

I am currently writing a video game for IOS and Wii U and spending a lot of time doing it. We call them "admin weekends". We both sit at the kitchen table and work on our goals. Mine is the game. Hers is a Wordpress blog and vegan cooking. We take breaks together. Dinner, maybe a movie and then back to it. I also involve her in my game. Ask her to play it. Tell me how it feels. Ask her opinion about features, UI, etc.

This is all well and good, but.....

If she asks for my time in anyway, I give it to her. She sees I am devoted to her needs and in return, she doesn't ask me all day for things. If she says "I need to go out to dinner". I am dressed, keys and debit card in had.

</comment><comment><USER4> [disclaimer: started dating my SO in 1986]

I'd like to say all adult relationships are a little rocky from time to time, but I'll limit myself to saying that I am not surprised when anyone's is.

Sometimes long work hours are the cause of problems. Other times problems are the cause of long work hours. And sometimes long work hours are just the result of being busy and the relationship is smooth.

What matters is that I try to stop and remember that my SO is significant and let them know that I have remembered that they are significant. The hard part is that doing that when I am pulling the all nighter and pissed off that my SO is pissed off about it and in my opinion shouldn't be. In other words, I have to stop and decide what is really important even when I don't want to.

The good news is that if you stick around long enough, over time it all evens out.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Make a set schedule. Then they know when you will be working and you know when you should be with them. Balance is key. You might have to get up early or go to bed late if you want to put in extra hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree setting a schedule could sometimes work, but then there are many times that tasks take much longer to accomplish especially when learning and or debugging. As far as sleep goes, based on the hours I have found that make me feel top shape I am currently cutting the line pretty thin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> No. But my companion relationship has disrupted my programming.</comment>


Chua's Circuit - ur-whale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chua%27s_circuit <comment> ur-whale Analog EEs tried for a long time to produce a pure analog circuit with actual chaotic behavior.

Chua's circuit was the first actual successful attempt.</comment>


The Ghost in the MP3 - <AUTHOR> http://theghostinthemp3.com/ <comment><USER2> This was posted almost a year ago and enjoyed a decent conversation in the comments [0]

I'll repeat my comment from the time:

"For what it's worth, the presence of seemingly significant signal in the difference between the original and compressed tracks does not necessarily mean that significant sonic/perceptual loss has occurred. Operating correctly, the encoder is designed to cut not just sounds that the human ear cannot hear in general (e.g. sounds above 22kHZ) but also sounds which may not be perceptible in context (e.g. the quietest signals in a loud section). So if you find something beautiful about the ghost tracks (and I think there is something beautiful to find), don't immediately jump to concluding that mp3 is awful for cutting these sounds—they might be hardly perceptible when added to the mix.

Of course, at high-compression rates mp3 does begin to significantly degrade fidelity.

Edit: all of this is not to put down the project—I still think it's pretty cool as art and as a demonstration of the encoder, I just didn't want people to think that this was some sort of massive failing of mp3."

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7955917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7955917)

</comment><comment><USER3> The information present here isn't really "lost" as much as it can't be heard in the context of the other sounds in the original recording. These forms of audio compression take advantage of auditory masking[1] which means those sounds likely wouldn't be heard in the original.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking)

<comment><USER4> The information is lost in the sense that it's in the original, and not in the lossy version.

Whether or not you can hear it, the information is gone.

<comment><USER5> If you can't hear it, was it ever information?

<comment><USER6> We can't see in infrared, but there's clearly information there. Same with infra/ultrasound and other sounds that are buried in our hearing.

It may not be pertinent information in the case of music, but it's definitely information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A quick scan didn't reveal to me whether he's time aligning the signals during the subtraction. I've played with listening to the wav-mp3 signal before, and I seem to recall that the mp3 encoder would introduce a little delay.

I added a transient pulse in front of the music so that I could (visually) time align the signals before subtracting them.

<comment><USER8> I wondered what my favourite test tracks would sound like, so I made a (somewhat stupid, and a bit slow...) program to produce the difference between an MP3 and a WAV: [https://github.com/tom- seddon/bin/blob/master/find_mp3_resid...](https://github.com/tom- seddon/bin/blob/master/find_mp3_residue.py)

(Dependencies: python 2.7, lame, GNU make, mpg123, and (if you use FLAC files as input) flac. Tested on my Linux PC with LAME 64bits version 3.99.5 and mpg123 1.14.4 from the debian stable package repository. Run with -h to get some "help".)

It uses lame to compress and mpg123 to decompress, and I don't know if there's something special going on but the output WAVs always seem to have the same number of samples as the original. And they seem to be aligned - if you use this program you'll find that the difference between WAV and 128kbps MP3 is somewhat noisy, but WAV vs 320kbps MP3 is pretty much silent.

(Or maybe you'll find something totally different! Who knows. I only tested this on my system.)

<comment><USER5> Neat, thanks for running the experiment to see how differing MP3 encoder settings affect the lost portion. This explains why 320kbps is generally accepted amongst DJs, as any loss is significantly less than that caused by the club sound system :P

<comment><USER8> I did a blind test when I was in my 20s, and while on a couple of tracks I could actually tell the difference between 320kbps and the original, I did have to concentrate. And I couldn't really have said that one was necessarily better than the other; the effect was as if one type of noise-y sound was being replaced with a subtly different type of sound with the same noise-y quality. Different, but overall the same.

Listening to the diff of one of those tracks today was interesting! All I can hear is the drums... and where the sound I'm thinking of plays, it sounds like rather quiet interference! But the drums as I recall sounded absolutely identical. Interesting that the ears can detect one thing but not the other.

(I didn't bother to re-run the full comparison, as I'm no longer in my 20s. One good (?) thing about getting old is that your hearing deteriorates, and issues such as this become moot. You can also afford the disk space to just compress everything at 320kbps. Then you don't have to worry about it, and it fits OK on your phone too.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The file we are watching is lossily compressed. So we are watching the lossy compression of a delta between original and lossy compression.

How good is the lossy compression at capturing that delta?

</comment><comment><USER10> It gives an error when I try to play the video in Firefox or Chrome.

<comment><USER11> It played for me 30 minutes ago, but it doesn't anymore.

I thought it was a embedded Youtube video at first, but it's actually a .mov file hosted in Google docs. First time I've noticed that way of hosting, maybe they have a bandwidth limit?

<comment><USER12> Played fine on my phone (Android) just now. Seems like they are using Vimeo now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Suzanne Vega - Tom's Dinner [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLP6QluMlrg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLP6QluMlrg)

</comment><comment><USER14> If this kind of thing interests you, I highly recommend the book "MP3: The Meaning of a Format" by Jonathan Sterne [0]

[0][https://www.dukeupress.edu/MP3/](https://www.dukeupress.edu/MP3/)

</comment><comment><USER15> How does he get the information lost in compression? Does he put the compressed and uncompressed version on two different tracks with one phase- flipped?

</comment><comment><USER16> on vimeo: [https://vimeo.com/107845118](https://vimeo.com/107845118)</comment>


Google Maps, Earth updated with high-resolution imagery - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57481985-93/google-maps-earth-updated-with-high-resolution-imagery

<comment><USER2> There goes most of my afternoon. I'll be looking at Google Maps for the next few hours. Maybe its an affliction, rather than addiction, but I really enjoy looking at aerial & satellite photos.

This is the link for the updated lists of locations:

[http://google-latlong.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/imagery- update-...](http://google-latlong.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/imagery-update- explore-your-favorite.html)</comment>