Firefox 80 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/80.0/releasenotes/ <comment><USER2> I had switched away from FF to use Chrome predominately a few years ago, for a mix of various reasons. Performance being a big one. But I've been thinking more about the whole browser monoculture issue, and the importance of Mozilla and Firefox for the Open Web in general lately, so about a week or two ago I started switching back to Firefox as my primary browser. So far, so good. Performance feels pretty snappy so far, and I haven't run across many rendering issues, and none that really matter.

All in all, I'd say that if you have been considering Firefox, now might be a good time to give it a shot.

This is all, BTW, in reference to the desktop version (Linux specifically) not mobile.

<comment><USER3> > This is all, BTW, in reference to the desktop version (Linux specifically) > not mobile.

Mobile is better, because you can install uBlock. As far as I'm aware Chrome mobile still doesn't allow addons.

As for FF on the main browser, they really shot themselves in the foot years ago and left a bad taste in any users' mouths. I see this same message in every HN FF update thread (since quantum). They really did fix most of the bugs and speed, but it is hard to build the brand back. The only performance/bug I sometimes get is if I'm doing a heavy research day and open a metric ton of tabs (>100) and things get pushed into swap and don't release, even after closing FF. But Chrome was always a memory hog as well so it isn't enough to cause me to switch over and this is a niche thing (and easy to resolve).

<comment><USER4> Right now I have 376 tabs open in Firefox, on Windows laptop with 8 GB RAM. They were 600, but I did a purge a few months ago. 0

0 performance problems.

Just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER5> We have very different experiences in that case.

Once I go past ~100 open tabs on Firefox, on a 16GB RAM Linux laptop, my whole system freezes. I experienced these issues as late as in June, so it doesn't appear to have been recently fixed either. Note that I do use uBlock Origin so it doesn't just buckle under from ads, but I also make heavy use of Container Tabs, which may also be a factor.

Luckily, the extension "Auto Tab Discard" solved these issues for me.

<comment><USER6> You can go to about:performance and see which tab is problematic.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the tip! I currently don't have many tabs open, but was surprised to see every one of my work Office365 tabs (mail, calendar, etc.) at 100+ MB each...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know it's a hard time for the engineering team at Mozilla right now, but just wanted to put it out there: You guys are truly awesome! Thanks for everything.

<comment><USER8> seconded, tru marathonists

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer."

Neat. I loathe every time I have to install Adobe Reader for something. Unfortunately, all browsers PDF support for things like form filling and stuff tends to be pretty lacking.

<comment><USER10> Can they just give me an actual PDF viewer for the sole purpose of PDF viewing? Is it really the way forward? Bundling everything into a web browser? It feels like a giant security hole.

<comment><USER9> Honestly, I really miss Edge's EPUB support. Like _really_ miss it. There's a lot of things I think browsers should not do. WebUSB? WebMIDI? Burn these things with _fire_. Do not connect the web browser to hardware.

Web browsers are supposed to actually be document viewers. HTML is a _document format_. I am 100% on-board with web browsers also reading PDFs and EPUBs.

I know Mozilla is hurting for manpower right now, but I'd drop dead with excitement if EPUB support came to Firefox.

<comment><USER11> Not really sure about WebUSB but WebMIDI is pretty harmless, surely?

The browser probably won't be good enough to replace Ableton (or similar) for a while but it is the primary medium for a lot of digital (interactive) artwork - for projects that use sound it's nice to plug a MIDI device straight into the browser.

<comment><USER12> As long as VSTs are native-only (which based on the low-latency nature of audio processing would probably never see a cloud implementation,) web-based DAWs will never replace locally-run ones. Most music studios airgap their systems anyway.

<comment><USER13> You could probably get alright performance running in the browser using webassembly. No idea if anyone's working on anything like that.

<comment><USER14> I'm curious too. From a quick search, I found WebDSP, "A client-side DSP library utilizing the power of WebAssembly".

[https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp](https://github.com/shamadee/web-dsp)

> WebDSP is a collection of highly performant algorithms, which are designed > to be building blocks for web applications that aim to operate on media > data.

> The methods are written in C++ and compiled to WASM, and exposed as simple > vanilla Javascript functions developers can run on the client side.

..On further reading, they have functions for video and image processing, but not audio as far as I can tell.

\---

There's Glissando, "A web-based digital audio workstation using the web platform APIs (Web Audio, Web MIDI) and WebAssembly".

[https://github.com/glissando-daw/glissando-app](https://github.com/glissando- daw/glissando-app)

They mention "VST support", but I cannot imagine how that's possible from the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> More importantly, Firefox for Android has a brand new UI (and more): [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a- new-f...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a-new-firefox- for-android-experience/) (GeckoView, picture in picture, Enhanced Tracking Protection, persistent private mode, dark theme…).

The most awaited version in years.

HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269156)

<comment><USER16> Not sure if you tried it, but for me it was an absolute shitshow. It "upgrades" your settings, so if you then downgrade the app, everything is lost (as you have to uninstall + manually install the old apk). In my case it also decided to reset overridden settings to "defaults" (search engine, save passwords etc.), plus about:config was gone and the homepage cannot be set to bookmarks anymore. I uninstalled it and went back to the latest 68.x, and am now looking for a new browser on Android, possibly one that doesn't treat me like an idiot.

<comment><USER17> It breaks my heart to say this, but I agree completely on the 'shitshow'.

I've been using FF as my main driver for over ten years, and on mobile every second I've been able to.

I fail to come up with a thing they didn't ruin with this new "revamp everything".

\- The home page is worse

\- THEY BROKE THE BACK BUTTON.Like seriously, you could get your tab's history and jump back more than one page. Now the long-press does nothing

\- Oh, breaking the back button doesn't end there. Previously you could close your current tab with Back, and FF would either close the tab or go to the FF start screen. Now, all the tabs are left open, and I have to go manually to my tabs list and close them one by one. Why?

\- probably something else. Or maybe I'm just too angry at my Ol' reliable workhorse so suddenly cheating on me :(

Edit:

\- It's also slower than ever, I've never had any qualms about FF for Androids speed until now.

<comment><USER18> One more thing: you can't get a desktop-style tab bar on top anymore, instead you are forced to use the tab button to open the view with all your tabs on it.

Previously you could go to Android Settings => Developer Options and increase 'Minimum width' / 'Smallest width' which would make the phone think its screen was physically bigger, making it so that the Android UI elements were no longer hilariously large and making Firefox switch to the tablet view with the tab bar, well before the point where the UI got too small to use/read.

I figure it'll be a number of years before Android updates make FF 68.x stop working, and while security updates do happen I doubt any of the websites visited by the types of people on HN are going to be compromised and running exploits for old Android FF versions. Plus you have the Android permissions/sandboxing stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> While we are on the topic, did any get the new FF on their Android phones last week? What happened? It completely breaks my flow of opening a page, reading, going back to my favorite sites and opening a new page <repeat>.. The only way to find your favorites now is opening a new tap, you'll find that when hitting the small tab counter and then the +. You will gather piles of tabs and they are still there after you close the browser (no more setting to forget them upon close). I like the bar at the bottom but that is the only nice thing. Am I missing something? Play store reviews are also pretty negative...

<comment><USER20> I got the update today and I hate it. The new UI just requires more tapping, has less features and rendering isn't even faster! The whole web-experience actually feels more messy because uMatrix is missing.

I don't get it. Firefox mobile was how old? Two years? Is that the new standard of software-development where you ditch your source every few years and rewrite from scratch?

I'm very disappointed.

<comment><USER19> Do you use favorites much? How do go to your next site of interest?

<comment><USER20> In the previous version I had all my most visited sites as toplevel-bookmarks (which were displayed in the new-tab-page) and a bookmark-folder with "maybe- read-later"-bookmarks. That was never very good on mobile because there was no way to reorder bookmarks.

Now I have my most visited sites in the new "top sites" section and the rest goes to bookmarks. Works for me but there is also absolutely no benefit to before (bookmarks are even less accessible). And you still can't reorder any bookmarks/top-sites/collections nor export/import them.

But why fix old bugs or implement requested features when you can just start completely new and ignore the users. That's definitely more fun for the programmers.

<comment><USER19> So indeed there is no other way to open a new site than by opening a new tab first. Don't you find that annoying? Or do you navigate back constantly?

<comment><USER20> I find it annoying. The whole update brought nothing but annoyances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "We'd like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox."

How ironic.

<comment><USER22> "... and we wish them well in their future endeavors."

<comment><USER23> goodbye and thanks for all the fish / $500M a yr from google

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The one feature I wish FF had is a UI based profile switcher - container tabs, which are now relegated to being an extension, simply are not cutting it for me. Does anyone know if there's a chance of that making it into the roadmap within the next couple years?

<comment><USER25> > container tabs, which are now relegated to being an extension

Now? Haven't they always been?

> simply are not cutting it for me.

Do you mind explaining why? I had some problems with them initially (when they first went into production FF), but some small tweaks since then and they've _mostly_ worked exactly as I would want.

The only complaints I have are Google, which I try to relegate to a container, making it really hard to open stuff in different containers because of how they send links in Gmail through a redirect to protect referrer info and making it hard to have separate Google accounts in different tabs (which i could probably resolve mos the issues by not assigning Google to a container by default so some of the switching is more smooth, but _ick_ ), and LastPass, which I only really need for work (as I use FF sync for my passwords).

LastPass doesn't seem to be able to deal with containers and work SSO which auto redirects to a container, so I can't even sign in with LastPass without tweaking container domain assignments, and toggling that stuff every time I want to log in is ridiculous.

Other than those, everything works pretty smoothly, IMO. I have 18 containers, of which 6-7 see consistent heavy use, and the most rest are for occasional things and are used once every few days.

<comment><USER26> > Do you mind explaining why?

I want full blown segregated browser experiences, a la Chrome's profiles. Firefox's containers are great for what I use them for (sandboxing Twitter and Facebook), but I'd really like an entirely different profile for "work" vs. "personal"\--with separate browsing history, favorites, cookies, extensions, etc.

I know Firefox offers that functionality (via about:profiles), but as far as I know, it's not as simple to access in Chrome (clicking an icon and choosing your new profile).

That being said, I still use Firefox day to day, but I sorely miss the ease of access of Chrome's.

<comment><USER27> Would a .bat/.bash file with `firefox -P "profileWork"` be of help?

<comment><USER26> Maybe it would! But I'd prefer profile swapping become a first class Firefox UI citizen like it is in Chrome. Until then, visiting about:profiles is better than finagling with bash, at least for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> trevor-e It's a bit mind-blowing to me how big browser apps have become the last few years. Firefox 80 takes up 210.8MB and Chrome _689.8MB_ on my MacBook.

<comment><USER28> Back in the late 90s-early 2000s, Microsoft baked Internet Explorer into the Windows shell. It was badically powering the desktop. Ypu could even set ypur desktop background to an HTML page on Windows at one time. But basically, the browser has been given an enormous amount of responsibility that has not changed much since those experiments. We now have things like Chromebooks that are little more than an OS with just a browser attached.

<comment><USER25> > We now have things like Chromebooks that are little more than an OS with > just a browser attached.

Which makes sense because a browser is basically a set of abstractions over some normal OS functions that blends remote and local actions (even if only a subset of them).

Java wanted to be a universal VM, but browsers actually achieved this through HTML and JavaScript. They're going even farther with WASM.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > Java wanted to be a universal VM, but browsers actually achieved this > through HTML and JavaScript.

Java succeeded, you know. Still happily powers embedded systems, servers, and desktop applications. Still runs the same binaries on NT/Darwin/Linux/Haiku/whatever. Don't dismiss it just because it's not the latest hotness.

<comment><USER25> I'm not dismissing it... but it's being eaten. The Web is the ultimate platform. Every goal Java and the JVM had (that they didn't mostly drop, like native bytecode CPUs) has either been achieved, surpassed, or quickly will be by browsers, Javascript and WASM.

The only holdouts I see are stuff where Java is part of the standard (e.g. SIM cards using Java Card standard) or embedded systems where they use Java of some sort where it doesn't make sense to use the enormous browser runtimes (although I have to imagine that's a less popular option than C, but I'm not super informed on the embedded market).

I mean, I'm not particularly a fan of where this is heading (it feels like we're heading for the second coming of Java applets/flash and all those associated problem), but it seems pretty obvious, to me at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Firefox has been constantly crashing for the past 6 months or so on all of my computers (Linux, Windows, and now a new Mac as well - but mostly linux, probably because I use it most). Usually it's just a bunch of tabs that crash (almost always multiple tabs), but about 2-3 times a week the entire browser crashes. It's getting to the point where I don't want to use ff anymore :/

<comment><USER30> I seem to have enough windows / tabs open, that when it starts up on OS X it causes a kernel panic ~ 50% time and brings down the whole machine. If it manages to start everything is OK until I try to restart it. Of course, this is technically a problem with OS X but ... no other app manages to do this.

<comment><USER31> Out of curiosity, how many windows/tabs? I routinely launch FF with dozens of windows/hundreds of tabs and I've never had macOS kernel panic in that case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Have used firefox forever. Their PDF rendering engine is quick and snappy.

</comment><comment><USER33> After recent events I feel quite nostalgic or sad about new Firefox releases, I can't justify it

</comment><comment><USER34> It sure would be nice if the memory leaks would be fixed. On some of the long- running machines I use, I have to use chrome because Firefox would eventually fill up the RAM.

</comment><comment><USER35> I really like the simplicity of the Firefox pdf viewer but sometimes it absolutely butchers printing. It also still needs fill able form support. Come on Mozilla!

<comment><USER36> Firefox is my standard browser but it is completely unusable for printing anything; I always have to switch to Chrome to print.

<comment><USER37> Try and select "Print" from the menu instead of Ctrl+P. Instead of bringing up the system print dialog, this brings up an interface where you can tweak the print layout. No idea why it isn't the default view when pressing ctrl+p. At least there I feel it's basically the same as Chrome when printing.

<comment><USER38> On my Linux system Ctrl+p and File->print are the same dialog box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is there any kind of road for when to expect installable Web Apps the way it's possible in Chrome and Edge?

<comment><USER40> On desktop? They are working on it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/eay1x1/firefox_73_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/eay1x1/firefox_73_adds_support_for_site_specific_browser/fb15u5h/)

I don't know enough about mozilla's process to understand why bugzilla says it's already done, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone have the issue within developer tools that when you ctl-c a highlighted piece of text it actually just selects the whole line? I have to right click copy to get the exact piece of info I want. It's driving me nuts.

</comment><comment><USER42> there's no easy way to disable javascript on site viewing. brave got ir right with brave shield.

add disable image on the ff shield then it's even more useful.

brave suffers chrome's always forced refresh when stale tab is reopened or when page is scrolled up to induce reload wheel

sometimes users do not want the freshest page. there's a reload button for that. sometimes we just want to save the stale page.

</comment><comment><USER43> The title should be "Firefox turns 80" ;)

</comment><comment><USER44> Is video acceleration on Linux here yet? :(

<comment><USER45> i think on 79 you already got X11 support (was there for a while on wayland, if you truly care about UI performance)

<comment><USER46> Seems 80 for sure has it for X11. It's less about UI performance and more about battery life and heat; I might consider installing a Linux distro on my laptop now, last time I did the poor thing ramped up like it was rendering a video project or something anytime I pulled up a YouTube video.

<comment><USER47> FWIW, notwithstanding VAAPI support in Firefox, Linux has made massive improvements in power/heat efficiency in recent kernels.

There's much less of a starting-a-jet-engine effect in regular use if you're able to use a distro based on kernel 5.7 or 5.8.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Why would you use a web browser as a PDF viewer instead of Preview...

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Because you already have it installed and running, appreciate the security benefits of running a PDF render in a garbage-collected language in a sandbox, because anything that lets you run less Adobe code is a win, and because clicking a PDF in Firefox and having it open in Edge is generally undesirable.

<comment><USER48> Preview comes preinstalled, and isn't Adobe code...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> _Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer.

The name reported by accessibility tools for items in multi-tiered tree controls no longer incorrectly includes information from items at deeper levels, providing users with the correct level of content when using a screen reader._

I kinda expected more from an x.0 release.

<comment><USER50> Best to rein in those expectations. Browser developers abandoned SemVer some time ago (bumping the major number for trivial releases with no major features or breaking changes) for reasons that never really made a whole lot of sense to me. Treat the version number as a monotonic counter, that's all the information you're going to be able to make use of unless you're working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Oh my god, I didn't know they're still releasing those!

<silly joke warning>

</comment><comment><USER52> Firefox crashing all the time on couple of my computers... the rest are doing fine. Tried to uninstall all plugins, create new profile, all sorts of tricks... Installed FF Nightly, hoping that this bug has been fixed in new browsers, but keeps crashing. Sending reports to FF pretty much every day, hoping that someone will notice, but so far, no luck. And then news came out that Mozilla is in financial trouble and firing people, so probably nobody will fix this :-/

<comment><USER53> Hi ddon. This is _not_ normal. You may be experiencing a unique combination of factors that results in a bug. Could you load `about:crashes` and send me an ID or several of an your crashes? I would expect there to be a high number of similar crashes.

It's possible that we already have a bug reported against this particular crash and we need someone who can reproduce it to help us find a way to fix it! I'll look to find such bug and contact you with the people who may be able to fix it. My email is my hackernews handle `@` `mozilla.com`.

Thank you!

<comment><USER52> Very cool, thank you! Will do! And I didn't know about about:crashes page, very interesting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Developer tools' network tab still unusable.

[https://megous.com/dl/tmp/01befe672faa84fe.png](https://megous.com/dl/tmp/01befe672faa84fe.png)

Selecting one resource selects multiple resources at once (sometimes 5 or more), and you can only view one of the resources' detail in the right panel.

<comment><USER55> That doesn't happen for me on Mac. Maybe it's an OS-specific bug?

<comment><USER54> Yes [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1640745#c23](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1640745#c23)

It happens all the time for me, because PID of my firefox processes tend to be in millions (because of long uptimes and a me doing a lot of kernel compilation).

Probably caused by systemd upgrade back in march. Great. Systemd is another of those packages that keep breaking fundamentals on my systems every other release.

Looking forward to having a network after a suspend/resume cycle again, and systemd-home not cutting off sshd remote access to my machines via infinite loops in its hugely complicated PAM module whenever v247 will be released. /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> No layoffs mention in the release notes.

<comment><USER57> Why would browser users care about the layoffs?

<comment><USER58> I suppose the long term view is - what's the economic health of the organization responsible for ongoing maintenance as well as R&D, features, engineering of the software? And also what's the risk of Firefox being "orphaned" or falling behind technologically to Chrome/Webkit. although the comment below is true; there is a time and place for long term strategic comments, vs. technical release notes...</comment></comment></comment>


Shopify CEO says majority of his employees will work from home permanently - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/shopify-ceo-says-office-centricity-is-over-as-majority-of-his-employees-will-work-from-home-permanently-2020-05-21 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23259159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23259159)

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing

<comment><USER3> Isn't it?</comment></comment>


Hacker Monthly #8 is here. - <AUTHOR> http://hackermonthly.com/issue-8.html

<comment><USER2> Gorgeous cover!!

Minor error in the blurb though... there's a double "the" in the first sentence: "SR-71 Blackbird (cover) is making a comeback since the the launch issue."

Also, I think "new year issue" should be rendered as "New Year's issue"? "AWK, Python and the Immortal Hamburger also make their way into this new year issue."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

Wrote that blurb very quickly before published and the proofreader didn't have the chance to see it. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Aww $13 shipping. That's harsh :'(

<comment><USER4> HackerMonthly should offer a yearly magazine subscription. This would allow HM to batch order from Magcloud and pass on cheaper shipping to the subscriber.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do have that: <http://hackermonthly.com/subscribe.html>

Annual print subscription costs $88 plus international shipping at $10/issue ($3.45 cheaper than MagCloud).

<comment><USER4> Excellent! I was going to comment about putting a subscribe Call To Action on the homepage -- but went back and noticed you actually have one (the circle button).

Originally I did not recognize the circle as a link... You might play around with the placement of it. Or maybe I am just weird and didn't notice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> awesome, can't wait to get my print copy!</comment>


Netflix Introduces Streaming-Only Plan in U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/we_really_dont_need_no_stinkin_dvds_netflix_introd.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 <comment><USER2> Looks like this only applies, for now, to new accounts. I clicked on 'change plan' for my account and received the following message.

"You are currently on the 2 DVDs out at-a-time (Unlimited) for $13.99 plan which is no longer offered. If you select a new plan, you will no longer be able to return to this plan."

<comment><USER2> That was a short 'for now', as IJust received an email from Netflix stating, "The price of your current plan is changing from $13.99 a month to $14.99 a month."</comment></comment>


FBI Flouts Obama Directive to Limit Gag Orders on National Security Letters - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/19/fbi-flouts-obama-directive-limit-gag-orders-national-security-letters/

<comment><USER2> America is slowly turning into a mini-gulag with takeout and liquor.</comment>


Apple, open and learning from history - <AUTHOR> http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/5/1/apple-open-and-learning-from-history

<comment><USER2> Apple fans appraisals of Apple's prospects in the 20th century are getting harsher and harsher. Does this mean they really were 'beleaguered'?</comment>


CSS invert color without JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/a/60931880/146334 <comment><AUTHOR> Inspired by the great answer of Onur Yıldırım implemented with CSS variables.</comment>


John Carmack on "Facebook listening to you" conspiracy theory - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1227234781886386176 <comment><USER2> While I haven't done rigorous science, there were times last year that youtube suggestions were a little too timely in regards to conversations I had within the past hour. Conversations that were relatively original, as in no participants or 1-hop connections had talked about the subject in the past week.

Now you could argue that the great neural net in the sky can predict seemingly original topics based on prior data. However, since I have spent a lot of effort cutting google out of my life in the past six months (the biggest change not leaving chrome open) I have noticed this not happen once. Is there a reason to doubt the obvious?</comment>


Performance / Price for CPUs - <AUTHOR> http://paulisageek.com/compare/cpu/

<comment><USER2> Price-performance ratios for CPUs are completely bogus, because you never run a CPU by itself. If your case/power supply/motherboard/RAM/disk collectively $400 and you have a choice between a $100 CPU with performance X and a $200 CPU with performance 1.5 X, the faster CPU has a performance/price ratio which is 25% worse -- but using the faster CPU gives you a _system_ with a performance/price ratio which is 25% better.

<comment> Tuna-Fish That is assuming CPU is the defining factor in the speed of your computer. For vast majority of users, this is just plain false -- a 60$ Athlon II dual core with a 200$ SSD massively outperforms a 950$ i7 975 that is paired with a traditional HD in nearly all of the use cases a normal desktop user encounters -- And if you are into gaming, that same 60$ processor paired with a 300$ HD5870 high-end graphics card easily outperforms the same i7 paired with HD5850, _the next-best model_ that costs only 50$ less.

<comment><USER3> Good point, but not always true. It's a myth that game performance is universally GPU-bound. Most notably, most MMORPG's, many RTS's and pretty much anything made with the Source engine are more dependent on CPU performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apparently I'm the only one who only saw a single CPU listed, with a hundred in the no price section?

Clicking update I get tons of:

Warning: preg_match() expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in /var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19 {"name":"686 Gen","score":"267","rank":"718","search_name":"686 Gen"} Warning: preg_match() expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in /var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19 {"name":"AMD Athlon 1640B","score":"705","rank":"442","search_name":"1640B"} Warning: preg_match() expects at least 2 parameters, 1 given in /var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 19 {"name":"AMD Athlon 2500+","score":"423","rank":"567","search_name":"2500+"}

<comment><USER5> I was having problems with the newegg data stream. Updates are disabled until YQL unblocks me in 1 day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Along the same line - GB/$ page for storage using prices from newegg:

<http://forre.st/storage>

Are there other aggregate sites like these?

</comment><comment><USER7> Using a synthetic benchmark is not exactly very accurate in order to determine price/performance, as not everyone is going to buy a processor to do Passmark's benchmark all day, not to mention the fact that certain processors might not contain the same features as others (ex: virtualization support).

</comment><comment><USER8> Since I haven't bought a new desktop machine in nearly three years (until this machine, I upgraded religiously every 18 months), because my current CPU is still plenty fast for the work that I do (partly because I no longer work with C/C++, and partly because processors are just so damned fast these days), I would like to see power consumption / performance mapped out like this. So, energy efficiency is a much more important factor to me these days.

<comment><USER5> If you find me a site that has the power consumption data I'll happily add it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bookmarked! I hate having to do this kind of research every time I build or update a rig.

</comment><comment><USER10> Don't forget Intel generally uses less power than AMD. That cost can add up as well.

</comment><comment><USER11> From looking at the list, it seems the benchmark assumes a task that largely scales well to as many cores as you have. That's not nearly always the case, many or most games are not well threaded and programs like Lightroom only use 2 cores max. It would be interesting to have the same table but ranked on single-thread or dual-thread performance, too.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great site. Would love to see sliders for min/max price and performance. That way you could slide the minimum performance to 4000 and find the best cheapest CPUs that fit that criteria.

Or set your budget at $150 and see what pops up.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a reason why the AMD Phenom X4 9750 has the best cost to performance ratio.

<http://techreport.com/articles.x/14424>

<comment><USER14> Not obviously true; the article you cited is reviewing a bugfix revision of the Phenom. Or did I miss something?

<comment><USER13> The whole line has been marred by the them continuing the ship buggy processors with the bios work-around. Would you buy another Phenom if you had the misfortune of getting one of these?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was excited to see that the chart had an Intel 800MHz, but when I clicked the link, it was to a AMD Sparta 2.3GHz. There might be other mislabeled products on here.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the poorly labeled CPUs don't search well on newegg. Please let me know if you find any others. I've hand checked the ones I cared about and they seemed good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very nice. The update link is causing problems in Chrome 184.108.40.206 on XP though.

      Warning: touch() [function.touch]: Utime failed:   Permission denied in   /var/www/paul.slowgeek.com/compare/cpu/update.php on line 44
      Starting update

<comment><USER17> Worked fine for me on chrome and xp

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting how AMD kills Intel on Performance/Price, but Intel's raw performance is much higher. Still, the highest-end Phenoms are pretty quick and still a reasonably good value.

<comment><USER19> You need to factor in the other costs too. If you buy a computer you need more than just a processor. If the rest costs $200 you have an extra cost of $400 + processor costs for two AMD's against $200 + processor costs with Intel (assuming two AMD's are equivalent to 1 Intel).

<comment><USER20> Most gamers, I know pick the best 100$ CPU they can on price performance because CPU's are just not that important. Granted if your building a 3,000$ system you might want to look at the CPU, but why pay more so you can have extra cores doing nothing all day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very interesting that AMD delivers a great value, while Intel still dominates in performance. It pretty much confirms my feelings about the companies.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is absolutely awesome, thank you for building it. No surprise AMD tops the list here.

<comment><USER23> Not surprising since the list appears to be sorted alphabetically.

<comment><USER24> You are wrong ;) not alphabetic order

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is the performance measured over all cores or over just one core?

<comment><USER5> All cores (says the passmark guys)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Now if only you could sort.

<comment><USER27> Maybe it just got added? Because I was able to just click on the headings for Price and Performance to sort.

<comment><USER26> Yeah - looks like it might be a problem with IE. I opened it in Firefox and it looks totally different. In IE (8) its just a plain list - not a table with zebra stripes and sortable columns. It looks like the javascript for the datatable is throwing an error in IE.

<comment><USER5> Oh interesting! I'll look at it tonight. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clippy.js - <AUTHOR> https://www.smore.com/clippy-js <comment><USER2> I can't wait until April 1st when everyone launches this on their home pages.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh god, it's beautiful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's also remarkable is that the text on the page is editable, and that the alignment and formatting (bold, italic, underline) buttons work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are we able to get a higher-res of Clippy? Seems a little grainy.

</comment><comment><USER5> Magnificent!</comment>


Quick Thoughts on React (virtual DOM) - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/quick-thoughts-on-react-virtual-dom-4bba0c2547aa <comment><USER2> well written!</comment>


FDA warning brings young-blood transfusion company to a halt - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/19/fda-warning-blood-transfusions-ambrosia-medical/ <comment><USER2> I am now reading "Red Star" a 1908 utopian novel by Alexander Bogdanov, where another advanced Humanity is living on Mars. In this Utopia, people frequently transfer blood one from another. The author presents blood donation as one of the greatest form of Fraternity.

Interestingly, Bogdanov founded one of the first blood transfer institute with only volunteering donors. At that time, most blood donations were paid. Later on, thanks to better conservation techniques, less blood was needed, and volunteering became generalized world-wide.

Bogdanov also believed that blood donation could rejuvenate people. His wife said that he looked 7-10 years younger after his experiments. But, in the end, he died, because he received malaria-infected blood.

That is interesting to know that some 2019 issues already existed more than a century ago: blood transfer, paying for blood, rejuvenation, etc..

<comment><USER3> they are actual non-problems.

If you own your body, you own your blood. You should be able to sell or do whatever you please with it.

If some people think they can become younger by bathing in young blood, let them. It's their money and time, and blood too, as long as they buy the blood legitimately.

<comment><USER4> Be careful what you wish to turn into a commodity because in increasingly deregulated capitalism there is often no way back.

That would be yet another way to increase inequality.

Do you really want to force people to pay down loans with blood, skin and kidneys? Because that will inevitably happen if allowed.

<comment><USER5> I can see issues with the widely available market for blood donors, but I disagree about "paying down loans with blood, skin, and kidneys".

If you do physical work you already destroy some muscles, and if work is stressful you destroy your kidney trying to get relief by drinking yourself out. The skin on your hands also gets damaged from hard work. Or skin on your body after constant exposure to the sun.

We should strive for a society where we do not have to work ourselves out to pay off the loan, and not focus on preventing people from paying off loans destroying their bodies specifically, no matter if it is blood donation, or herniated disks, or destroyed lungs, or anything in between.

<comment><USER4> > We should strive for a society where we do not have to work ourselves out to > pay off the loan

When we have such a society we can reevaluate. But right now we don't, and in the current environment creating more ways for inequality moves us away from such society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How can plasma transfusions not have gone though rigorous testing? Has it not been done routinely millions of times for decades?

I understand it's not been proven to have any health benefit. But the _safety_ of the procedure must be extremely well known.

<comment><USER7> For a treatment to be granted 'FDA approval', the FDA needs to see evidence of two things: safety and efficacy. Even if a treatment is demonstrated to be safe, if there's no evidence of therapeutic benefit, they won't approve it.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, if you parse out the words, that is all they're actually saying.

"There is no proven clinical benefit" and "there are risks associated with the use of any [...] product".

<comment><USER7> They're also _not_ saying "Ambrosia Medical must stop administering this treatment". They're just saying "we don't approve". So this thing on the Ambrosia website:

> In compliance with the FDA announcement issued February 19, 2019, we have > ceased patient treatments.

doesn't quite make sense, because the FDA hasn't publicly asked Ambrosia to stop, and the FDA never _did_ approve transfusions for the purpose of life extension or anti-aging. They're not complying with anything, because that announcement wasn't a 'cease treatments' notice.

So we don't really know why Ambrosia has chosen to stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the wake of the Theranos debacle, I would expect to see the FDA take a stronger stance against medical startups that are taking actions that have real potential impact without evident clinical support.

<comment><USER9> At least theranos had real, good scientists doing real research work. Of course we know management went awry [failing to admit defeat and pushing on despite the problems] and threw everyone under the bus, but they had real researchers.

This company here from the outside looks closer to quackery. [and can't imagine them having a good team of scientists behind it].

<comment><USER10> Management never "went" awry. The whole thing was a fraud from day one.

And hiring "real researchers" to front your fraudulent operation as a way to hide what's going on behind the scenes shouldn't be reason to look the other way. In some ways it's worse than the alternative, since there's not just fraud, but activity intended to take attention away from it.

<comment><USER11> It wasn't a fraud from day one, Elizabeth Holmes was a teenager when she got started on Theranos, she had no idea at that time that it had no chance of working. Uncle Tim gave her $200k in seed funding and she ran with it. Shit got progressively more fucked up along the way.

<comment><USER12> Yes, and she bought into the "fake it till you make it", "no one knows what they're doing", "all self doubt is impostor syndrome" mentality that's so popular on this site and which inevitably leads to idealistic people doubling down on fundamentally confused ventures where they should have realized they're out of their depth.

<comment><USER11> Are those attitudes really that popular on HN? Most of the comments I see are pretty cycnical about emerging technologies and longshot bets.

The thing is, after she got that $200k in branded VC capital from family friend Tim Draper, Holmes went knocking on the doors of all the big silicon valley VC firms and all the big bio-sciences VC firms. They consulted with blood scientist type people who informed them device had zero chance of living up to it's promise. All of them said "Sorry Elizabeth, we must politely decline your invitation to flush our money down the toilet."

The money she did get after that seed funding was from fly-by night wannabe VCs, and the bandwagon effect took off from there. Who did their due diligence? Nobody. I'm not shedding any tears for Rupert Murdoch, but there were hedge fund managers in charge of people's pensions who gave Theranos 100s of millions of dollars without looking into what it was they were spending other people's money on. It baffles me that anyone that stupid can get to be in charge of that much money in the first place.

<comment><USER12> Every time I bring up the impostor syndrome overdiagnosis and "no one knows what they're doing" meme in the context of Theranos, the replies take umbrage at the reference, and insist that HNers and VCs in SV saw through Theranos the whole time.

Which is true! But also, very beside-the-point.

The point is, that some people really are impostors. Some people really don't know what they're doing, _in a much deeper sense_ than the usual "oh I struggled over a judgment call yesterday while doing 90% of my job the routine way".

From the inside, it's hard to know whether you have excessive self doubt, or you're an Elizabeth Holmes. _And it's a pretty freaking important distinction to make._

The HN/SV mentality I'm criticizing is the one that jumps straight to "oh that's impostor syndrome" rather than giving concrete tests for whether the self-doubt is justified. Who swears that every expert engineer, manager, and businessperson occupies the same epistemic state that Holmes felt, who equates the occasional judgment call with knowing nothing about the core problems of the domain you've entered.

So yeah, you called Theranos early on. Good for you!

Now, for your victory lap, stop telling the next 100 Holmeses to double down on their "faking it" on the way to the inevitable "making it". Help them determine whether they're a Holmes or just worrying too much.

<comment><USER13> There's a HUGE difference between self doubt and others peoples doubting you. One is inflicted on our self without evidence while the other is inflicted by others, often with evidence.

Impostor syndrome is caused because you believe you aren't good enough, but how can you know that when you are still new in a domain? Why would someone that better in that domain would pay you to works on that? Because he has evidences that suggest that you can do what's required in that job.

Now if experts tell you that your idea already exist and doesn't works for X, Y, Z, it's no longer self doubt.... it's actively ignoring evidences.

> So yeah, you called Theranos early on. Good for you!

Which make it no longer a self-doubt.

Faking until you make it was never about faking results or evidences, it's about faking confidence. Confidence is a great motivator, it's a great way to push beyond, but it doesn't replace real evidence.

The real issue here is that theses VC didn't require more than confidence to invest that much money. The fact that plenty of expert called out that scam early on show how an easy due diligence weren't done correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Has there been any research on what happens when you pump "old-blood" into young people? any gains in wisdom/maturity/dementia?

<comment><USER15> On mice only

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think a good enough reason to forbid it would be to prevent companies from paying donors more (or at all) and diverting blood that could be used for necessary medical treatments.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think this should be allowed as a treatment, if it's efficacy hasn't been established. But I wish there were a trial. I want to be able to live healthily to 100.

<comment><USER17> There is zero scientific basis to expect that this would allow people to live healthily to 100. We have limited resources for clinical trials and those resources should be focused on areas more likely to produce useful results.

<comment><USER18> And what precisely gives you (or the bureaucrats running the FDA) the authority to decide for everybody in America what is the best use of _our_ blood?

I should be free to decide for myself what to do with my own body, and which authorities to trust on matters beyond my domain of expertise. If you have a good argument for why this is a waste of resources then _make the argument_ , don't legistlatively prohibit me from thinking for myself.

<comment><USER19> There are things that are a public necessity and indeed collectively-enforced rules simply because they won't work if too few people agree to it.

Another example of this process is vaccines. If herd immunity is too low, then vaccination cannot work, although it is a perfectly good solution if everyone is on board.

A second point is that you probably are no expert on the topic of human plasma. This could motivate the enforcement of rules under certain circumstances, given that you are unable to personally judge if the use of such precious material is a waste or not.

I personally, think that your opinion is the epitome of selfishness.

<comment><USER20> It is true that not all vaccinations work 100% of the time and that herd immunity helps protect the people for who they have not worked. It is very, very wrong to say that this means that "If herd immunity is too low, then vaccination cannot work".

<comment><USER19> Oh yeah? Please expand on this, I'm curious.

If that is your point of contention, you could replace "cannot work" by "may do more harm than good at a social level".

<comment><USER20> I don't know what to expand on, as I don't understand how it wasn't clear from what I have already told you - can you indicate roughly where I stopped being clear?

<comment><USER19> You mentioned I said something very very wrong, but it's not clear to me if this is a language or fundamental issue.

For instance if I say, as I have tried to enunciate above, "if herd immunity is too low, vaccines may do more harm than good at a social/epidemiologic level", does that still seem very very wrong to you?

To be clear, your above comment gave the impression that you thought that a low herd immunity could not increase deaths due to disease compared to no herd immunity at all, which is wrong and was probably the reason why you were downvoted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For some reason, the only appropriate name that comes to my mind for such companies is "Bathory".

<comment><USER21> Dr. Acula would like a word with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The company mentioned, Ambrosia Medical, has been on HN before.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14470314)

From the Vanity Fair article that the above linked to, it seemed it was run by Jesse Karmazin, with Peter Thiel either as a booster, or maybe providing funding? The article isn't clear on that, although he's mentioned (and quoted) multiple times.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's like the company used Normal Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron" and the goofy sci-fi premise invented by its mustache-twirling villain as an operating manual.

</comment><comment><USER24> No JavaScript, etc: [https://beta.trimread.com/articles/92](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/92)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm reminded of the title of a distributed systems post the original appears to be no longer working but here's a HN link:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12245909](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12245909)

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there any actual, proven benefits to these blood transfusions, or are they just something rich people like to do for the sake of it?

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd rather hear from the people brave enough to have tried this to gain their perspective.

<comment><USER28> Why do you think that someone who would literally suck your blood out of your veins so that they can live forever would bother to tell you what it feels like?

Why are we pretending this is anything but horrifying? We have multiple works of dystopia and horror fiction about this very premise: The Golden Compass, The Waterworks, Get Out, The Supernaturalist, Unwind...

<comment><USER29> > someone who would literally suck your blood out of your veins

Blood is renewable. You aren't losing blood you donate (or sell).</comment></comment></comment>


Pegleg: Raspberry Pi Implanted Below the Skin - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2019/08/29/pegleg-raspberry-pi-implanted-below-the-skin-not-coming-to-a-store-near-you/ <comment><USER2> What exactly is the advantage of a device implanted under the skin? Is this just research for the physical side of implants so that once we've got the human interfaces done we're in a good position? I don't see how a rPi in your leg beats a rPi in your pocket in this situation?

</comment><comment><USER3> are we there already.</comment>


You Probably Shouldn't Be Nesting Your CSS - <AUTHOR> http://sriharisriraman.in/blog/2013/09/08/dont-nest-css/

<comment><USER2> This is an issue with most CSS pre-processors: they make nesting easy to use in CSS, but the generated CSS usually results in sometimes extremely long selector strings that it makes it a nightmare to override styling in your media queries. I tend to try and not nest where possible and if I do, I keep it to a maximum of two levels, anything more specific and you're creating problems and extra work for yourself.</comment>


Microsoft: 'To fill 6,000 jobs, we'll pay $10K per visa' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/28/microsoft_immigration_proposal/ <comment><USER3> It's utterly fucked how restrictive and exploitative the US immigration system really is.

It cost me about $5000 of my own money and a year and a half of my own time to become a permanent resident of Australia, with no advanced degree and no cash reserve needed. That route is literally _impossible_ for potential U.S. immigrants. You either have to marry your way in, play the greencard lottery, have a PhD, or buy your way in via an investor-class visa.

The alternative, if you can get one, is an H1-B visa that ties you to a single employer who's free to take full advantage of your situation for half a decade. And this is what Microsoft wants more of.

<comment><USER4> The H1-B is not tied to a single employer. But it only allows one month in case of lay off.

<comment><USER5> Aren't there restrictions on switching companies once your GC application has been filed?

<comment><USER4> > If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsoring > employer, the worker must either apply for and be granted a change of status > to another non-immigrant status, find another employer (subject to > application for adjustment of status and/or change of visa), or leave the > US.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this is total bs. MS has a massive work force of contract workers who are paid poorly and get treated worse and i am pretty certain that other companies do the same. If they took that 10k ($60m usd total)bounty and applied it to legit training in the US they would have a better, cheaper, and more loyal workforce and the money would stay local.

This notion that we have to hire over-seas is not correct at all and while I am all in favor or the immigration of foreign skill/knowledge/work ethic into the US, to call it a 'crisis' is nothing more than a publicity stunt to pull attention away from the fact that they are outsourcing jobs when they could be paying that money into the local economies.

<comment><USER7> I worked at a bank. We needed a team of six people with advanced and specific skills. We could only find four. We tried to import two more. Computer at immigration said no. So we cancelled the offer to the four and hired six in Singapore. That unit has now grown to twenty-five of which five had to be pulled in from India. That's how reality works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A one-off $10K fee per hire is chump change, compared to the alternative: if your H1-B costs 50K per year + 10K one-off, he's still _much_ cheaper than a US-based developer who wants 60K per-year -- and that's not exactly the top going rate.

Corporations understand Marx much better than workers ever did.

<comment><USER9> It is not legal to underpay H1Bs. They literally should not be able to fill those positions with Americans if they are complaining about this.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious to know which sort of rocket science Microsoft does that is not taught at US universities.

Of course they are unable to fill positions _at a given salary level_. It's quite hard to find tomato-pickers at slave-like wages.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you're fully informed. Sometimes it's difficult to get qualified applicants at all, at any salary level. A lot of developers are more interested in the specifics of the job, product, company etc. than the salary (once it meets a certain minimum floor); and for other jobs, the specific knowledge and experience needed is very scarce. If there are 20 people qualified for a job and 21 open positions, no salary level is going to fill all the positions.

I had a H-1B visa once upon a time, but I never moved to the US. The company wanted me to, but I preferred London to Santa Cruz. Didn't stop me working for the company remotely, paid out of their UK sales office. Now I don't know what proportion of H-1Bs are like that - a global search to fill a local position - but it's definitely non-zero.

(The reason I'm pushing back on this is because I don't want HN to be a happy home for the same sad sack of devs Slashdot hosted when I last frequented there some years ago; "dey took our jerbs" was a constant refrain any time H-1B came up.)

<comment><USER11> Oh, I dunno. American software hiring is blatantly broken. I've been there, I've seen it, submitting my resume half a dozen times to the same companies to finally get an interview and, yes, eventually, a job offer.

But the first five times being told that the company has no matches for me.

Meanwhile, the company complains it can't find engineers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why do work visas even have to cost this much? I understand US is going through a job crisis, but I fear it's getting too protectionist. Protectionism never has good results in the long term.

<comment><USER13> So, what's being proposed here is a tax on fairly rich people who can't vote. For "should", it shouldn't cost anything, or, at least, not more than a turist visa (I think ETSA is something like $14).

There is some sense in the idea that the native population should be protected against unfair competition, but there is no evidence that this is the issue - Microsoft (and many other tech companies) legitimately can't fill these jobs, so there's literally no downside to opening the floodgates [of eligible H1-Bs].

<comment><USER6> i don't know how they can't fill these jobs. There are 12 million people out of work, you telling me MS can't figure out a win-win solution?

<comment><USER13> Let's see. At 6000 positions and 12 million out of work, you only need to skim off the top 0.05% of the workless to fill these position. Since Microsoft is willing to pay $10k for the visa alone, that is, not including other recruitment expenses, surely you can charge a fee of $10,000 for each referral, and make a total killing as a recruitment agent for Microsoft.

In other words: basic economics disagrees with your assertion.

<comment><USER14> There's a number missing from your calculations: the cash value to an unscrupulous employer of having an employee who is utterly beholden to them in the way an H1B is but a citizen/resident alien is not.

<comment><USER3> You're the first one to hit on the real reason: these workers are stuck with Microsoft as an employer for years. If they quit, they have to leave the country.

This basically buys Microsoft six thousand wage slaves, in the very most literal sense of the term.

<comment><USER14> The H1B system is a textbook case study in regulatory capture <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> All the political chestbeating -protecting America against foreign labor - seems pretty silly when discussing skilled jobs like software. Its like, you're in a lifeboat and trying to get to shore and 3 rowers short. People are clamoring to get into your boat - first thing, you ask them what country they're from? WTF?

Lets draw a new political circle containing everybody/anybody who can program. Lets call it New Abrainica. Let them all have free visas wherever they wish on the planet. How does this hurt anyone? Oh sure, temporarily some lame spot will have trouble getting someone to move there to work. But now they can also move the job to where the programmers are! Or get remote workers.

Hey, this already sort of happens. So what's the real issue? I'm not sure, but this conversation keeps coming up.

</comment><comment><USER16> On the upside there are more visas, the side effect is it makes it harder for early startups to hire H1Bs due to the increased cost. 10K for the H1 plus 15K for the green card. Usually both are done together or really close since you need a green card application in place to extend an H1 past 6 years. That's 25K per employee only for processing vs ~ 2K today.

</comment><comment><USER17> What do people think about making companies pay a significant premium salary (25%) to H1-B visa holders over US citizens? Seems like this would allay concerns over companies using H1-B visas to keep salaries down. Basically companies would use H1-B visas when an equivalent people cannot be hired domestically. If this approach works then maybe eliminating caps is possible, since it should be a somewhat self-correcting system.

</comment><comment><USER18> How many years could pass, until they will figure out and develop a the same development process that brings Linux kernel and other wonders to us - <USER2> collaboration of engineers around the globe?

But wait, that means all you need is gcc, emacs, git sometimes ssh and internet connection and Paypall (sic.) account? How could they sell all that disconnected from reality, bloated crap they produce, spending billions per year?

The answer is quite easy - in order to get 200+k salaries and bonuses managers must maintain this bloated hierarchy and fabric-style sweatshops. Otherwise, who needs them?

But the real question is - why we still care about MS? Who cares about old Nokia phones or Delphi or Java or things like Novell Netware?))</comment>


Ask HN: Best desktop multiplatform wiki-like software - <AUTHOR> Hello. I am in big need of wiki-like desktop application that could organize my math notes and code snippets.<p>I was using WikidPad since 2012 on Windows - and its perfect - but works horrible on Mac and Linux, so maybe there is a fresh software that could handle this? I don't need cloud sync as I synchronize data through git (so data should be stored as plaintext). <comment><USER2> Andrey Butov from the Bootstrapped.fm podcast developed a cross-platform desktop application called Scribbleton ([https://scribbleton.com/](https://scribbleton.com/)) that sounds like exactly what you are looking for.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> After some search, TiddlyWiki seems like a nice alternative

<comment><USER3> I currently use TiddlyWiki Classic [1]. The sheer simplicity of its UX was what got me to start using it. It has served me well over the years in that I have had no data loss using it with TiddlyFox [2] and the codebase was easy enough to understand and modify when I wanted to customize it beyond the settings exposed to the user. However, as my personal wiki grew and I used it more I found the nonstandard markup and especially the lack of revision history for the individual notes (wiki pages) to be major flaws. The newer version 5.0 release fixes the first one (by introducing Markdown support) but, AFAICT, not the second, which makes the me reluctant to upgrade and lose my modifications to the wiki code. (The downside to TiddlyWiki's approach is that an advanced user ends up effectively maintaining a fork.)

I've looked for alternatives among desktop wikis that run on Linux and my favorite so far is Zim [3]. It uses Markdown and implements history through storing pages as text files in a Git repository. Unlike TiddlyWiki, it doesn't run in the browser. I am considering either switching to it or biting the bullet and setting up a local instance of MediaWiki (or another full-fledged wiki — suggestions welcome!). The latter will likely require more ongoing maintenance but it also keeps the advantages of a browser-based wiki that TiddlyWiki has like embedding images from remote hosts and customizing your user experience with JavaScript.

[1] [http://classic.tiddlywiki.com/](http://classic.tiddlywiki.com/)

[2] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/tiddlyfox/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/tiddlyfox/)

[3] [http://zim-wiki.org/](http://zim-wiki.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use OneNote. There's no native Linux client, but there's a browser-based client.

</comment><comment><USER5> vim + vimwiki works well for me.</comment>


Wade not in unknown waters (C++). Part one. - <AUTHOR> http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0127/

<comment><AUTHOR> Reddit discussion: [http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/p2vnl/wade_not_in_unkno...](http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/p2vnl/wade_not_in_unknown_waters_part_n1/)</comment>


Analyzing One Million Robots.txt Files - <AUTHOR> https://intoli.com/blog/analyzing-one-million-robots-txt-files/ <comment><USER2> _The next steps towards standardization began when Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft came together to define and support the sitemap protocol in 2006. Then in 2007, they announced that all three of them would support the Sitemap directive in robots.txt files. And yes, that important piece of internet history from the blog of a formerly 125 Billion dollar company now only exists because it was archived by Archive.org._

The Internet Archive (archive.org) is currently running their end-of-year donation drive, if you value the work they do it's a good time to donate: [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

(and on the topic of robots.txt, it sounds like they're moving in the direction of disallowing people from using them indiscriminately to block access to valuable archival materials: [https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for- sea...](https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search- engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/) )

<comment><USER3> Have the IA ever discussed why they retroactively apply robots.txt? I can see the rational (though don't necessarily think it is the best idea given the IA's goals) for respecting it at crawl time, but applying it retroactively always felt unnecessary to me.

<comment><USER4> It seems pretty obvious: copyright restricts distribution, so they hide pages that the apparent copyright holder apparently doesn't want distributed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also wrote up an analysis of the top 1M robots.txt files: [http://www.benfrederickson.com/robots-txt- analysis/](http://www.benfrederickson.com/robots-txt-analysis/)

I ended up analyzing very different things from this article though, so this article was still pretty interesting to me.

</comment><comment><USER6>
      "traditionally used for
      vague attempts at humor
      which signal to twenty-something
      white males that this is
      a "cool" place to work."

WTF with the casual sexism/ageism?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to clarify, this was intended as a tongue-in-cheek critique of tech companies that actively project superficial images designed to appeal to specific hiring demographics. I'm sorry if the meaning didn't come across as clearly as I had hoped for, but the statement was meant to be a condemnation of sexism and ageism rather than an endorsement.

<comment><USER7> I see what you're saying. And to be fair, I disagree that you're being casually racist. What you're doing is casually accusing someone else of being racist.

That being said, I think it's a little hypocritical to insult someone for dropping casually racist contents into their technical work when you're doing something very similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The web servers might not have cared about the traffic, but it turns out that you can only look up domains so quickly before a DNS server starts to question your intentions!"

s/DNS server/third party open resolver/

IME, querying an authoritative server for the desired name triggers no such limitations.

One does not even need to use DNS to get the IP addresses for those authoritative servers, if the zone file is made available for free to the public as most are, under the ICANN rules.

I have thought about building a database of robots.txt many times. IMO, robots.txt has an important role besides thwarting "bots". It can thwart humans as well. It can be used to make entire websites "disappear" from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Perhaps others are making mirrors of the IA.

However, I have thought it could be useful to monitor the robots.txt of important websites on a more frequent basis than IA, in order to (if possible) preemptively archive the IA's collections if robots.txt changes are ever detected that would effectively "erase" them from the IA.

Perhaps the greatest thing about robots.txt is that it is "plain text". This "rule" _seems_ to be ubiquitously honoured. Did the author ever find any html, css, javascript or other surprises in any robots.txt file?

<comment><USER9> I specifically go after sites for archiving that block the Internet Archive in their robots.txt file.

The Internet Archive is also modifying its policy on retroactive blocking using robots.txt, although I don't have the blog post link handy at the moment.

If you'd like to mirror certain Internet Archive contents, every item is served as a torrent.

<comment><USER10> The Wayback Machine data is not available in bulk, only via the web interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> History presented in this post was very interesting, but the analysis ended up disappointing. The article ends just after they had managed to narrow their sample of robots.txt files to exclude duplicate and derivative files. They don't even present any summary statistics for this filtered sample.

</comment><comment><USER12> Surprisingly interesting post that goes into history of robots.txt and details how it is not, in fact, a W3 standard or legal requirement

<comment><USER13> does seem obsessed with the non standard crawl delay interestingly it doesn't mention those robots.txt files that have a BOM which can stop them working - which is why best practice is to have a comment of a blank line at the top of your robots.txt

<comment><USER14> That's a best practice for everyone?

<comment><USER13> yep if your first Line is a disallow and you have a text file with a BOM it will be ignored.

<comment><USER14> I was more thinking that most webmasters don't use editors and OSes where a BOM might be emitted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Honestly, I'm kind of surprised that turnitin's bot listens to robot.txt, or that the 'anti copyright infringement' bots do the same. Seems like it provides a very simple way for a cheating site to just thwart their entire 'system'.

But hey, I guess it's one of those cases where the law and basic ethics clash a bit; with certain laws saying 'unauthorised' access to a server is illegal, then ignoring that would leave them under fire for that instead.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you hacking on? - <AUTHOR>

I just wanted to start some discussion and see what people are hacking on the side nowadays.<p>On that note, I'm in SF for the semester and would love to hack on something if you're looking to pair program. I like Javascript, Ruby, and front-end stuff. Email's in the profile... <comment><USER2> I'm working on a python application that analyze the market feeling about a particular stock. I'm looking forward to open source after the basic part is done.

1)It finds and prepares database of tweets about public companies by searching tweets containing Company's name or ticker symbol.

2)Tags them as positive, negative or neutral comment.

3)Prepare a report depicting market sentiments about a particular stock over a period of time.

4)Compare it with how stock is actually doing in that time period and after that.

It is an experimental project to check if we can predict how the stock will fare by measuring the market sentiments toward it and if it is reliable or not.

<comment><USER3> Interesting - how are you doing the sentiment analysis?

<comment><USER2> 1)First few (say 1k or as many one wants) will be done by manually tagging the tweets as +ve, -ve or neutral, through a web or command line interface.

2)Then, I will use Google Prediction API.

3)Based on this data we can get a graph depicting the rise and fall of overall sentiment for a particular stock over a period of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I finally got my webcam to work on Windows with Processing (java variant used for image...processing. worst name ever) so I'm gonna build a "security cam" application for my room. Simple enough - constantly refresh the cam feed, check for significant changes in the image. I think I might try and add facial recognition for people who live in my house so if the camera catches them a script will send them an email or text saying "Stay out of my stuff!"

<comment><USER2> Lol. That's nice. How are you gonna do face recognition?

Using this - <http://developers.face.com/>

??</comment></comment>


Show HN: 3D Bundle, a pack of Vray 3ds Max scenes with all source files included - <AUTHOR> http://3dbundle.net/en

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for some feedback from 3D designers, CG artist, etc. Specially if you are in process of learning!

\- Are you are interested in 3ds Max & Vray?

\- Will you be interested in looking into the source files (.max, shaders, presets, etc) of high quality scenes?

\- What kind of scenes will you be interest in? Architectonic? 3D Icons? Studio lighting kits?

\- Will you pay for that?

Thank you in advance!</comment>


Google buys another round of IBM patents as its Oracle trial nears - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/01/google-buys-another-round-of-ibm-patents-as-oracle-trial-nears.ars

<comment><USER2> A question arises in my mind. Could Google actually use these patents in their defense against Oracle? "We didn't have them, but now we do"?

Seems like going to court over a speeding ticket you got _before_ the speed limit was raised.

<comment> Tim-Boss I would doubt it: I think what they're arguing in court is historical, e.g. BigCorporation sold(past-tense) units of our product that infringed(past- tense) our I.P.

[disclaimer: I'm no lawyer]</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice about equity split - <AUTHOR>

Here's my situation:
I recently joined a startup a few months back that was founded roughly two years ago. However, in that time period, they never released a product nor gained customers.
Since I've joined, a product has been released (100% my IP); we've gained a few customers; I've managed to narrow the scope of the business while honing in on our core value proposition.
Currently, the startup only has two people working on it - myself and the original founder. He had a couple other co-founders work on it over the years, but due to various uncontrollable factors, they are no longer working on the product.
When I signed on, I agreed to a status as co-founder and 25% equity, which I thought was fine. Now I know any percent of essentially $0 valuation is still 0, but I can't help feel I've really brought life into this startup and my contribution is more significant than 25%. The orginal co-founder, I recently found out, has around 60% equity, while the rest belongs to the other original founders (vesting, I guess).
I have 0 complaints about the original founder. While not technical, he works hard, is passionate, and seems to be doing the right things.
I haven't signed any document whatsoever, so my split is not set in stone or anything. Should I just throw this notion that I "deserve" a higher stake from my mind?
What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> If it's bugging you now, it'll bug you in the future. IMO you should deal with it head-on, soon.

Curious - why would you not have created a new company when you started working with this person, instead of joining their legacy company with the long-gone co-founders holding equity? What is the existing company organization bringing to the table if there was no product released, and now there is a product released with 100% your IP?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I can tell, the vision and values of the company have remained largely the same since its inception. The big missing piece was a product; although, even after the release, product-market fit still hasn't been completely established.

I think it would be wrong to just ignore the hard work put in during those first two years, even though there wasn't anything tangible to show for it, except for a few mockup and some broken code (which is currently not being used at all). I'd feel a little guilty if (let's say), the product takes off and the original co-founders received nothing because a new entity was formed even though the idea remains the same.</comment></comment>


How Google Jobs and Google Hire Could Kill Every Job Board and ATS on the Planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.vthallam.com/google-jobs-google-hire-kill-every-job-board-ats-planet/ <comment><AUTHOR> If the original hyperlink doesn't work, here's a new link:

[https://www.vthallam.com/how-google-jobs-could-google- hire-k...](https://www.vthallam.com/how-google-jobs-could-google-hire-kill- every-job-board-ats-on-planet/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Just like Google Wave took over the collaboration space.

</comment><comment><USER3> ATS == "Applicant Tracking System".

</comment><comment><USER4> Survival of the fittest!</comment>