Samsung TVs appear less energy efficient in real life than in tests - <AUTHOR> http://theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/01/samsung-tvs-appear-more-energy-efficient-in-tests-than-in-real-life <comment><USER2> Ok, so this is taking on the feeling of an Internet Meme, "Your <noun> has less/more <property> than the testing said it had."

Is there anyone here who doesn't believe if you make a testable property a price effecting feature of a product, the manufacturer will find a way to optimize for the property value they want, at the expense of the consumer or testing agency?

<comment><USER3> Interestingly many auto manufacturers UNDERSTATE horsepower and torque numbers. I can understand that a little, due to variances in actual engines, but these days that variance is low and the spread between specced power and dyne'ed power is pretty big on many cars.

<comment><USER4> Almost no manufacturers do it - historically, BMW and MB have been "caught" doing this, with 335i and C-class AMG engines.

A commonly accepted explanation for this is that the "cheaper" model is made to appear less powerful on paper to entire a buyer to upgrade to next model up (i.e. M3).

Relevant tests from 2010 ~ when this meme started: [http://www.automobilemag.com/reviews/driven/1009_bmw_335i_33...](http://www.automobilemag.com/reviews/driven/1009_bmw_335i_335is_dyno_test/%20-%20/)

In reality, almost all cars "produce" far less ponies at the wheels than stated on spec sheets because HP is "[S]ampled [A]t [E]ngine" \- so by time it reaches your wheels, about 20-30% are lost to drive train.

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER5> You're correct, but one minor point: SAE is actually an abbreviation for "Society of Automotive Engineers," a standards and certifying body.

The difference you are describing is between "gross" horsepower (SAE J1995 spec.), essentially horsepower measured at an unloaded crankshaft and "net" horsepower (SAE 1349 spec.) or the horsepower measured at the wheels.[1] The difference is due to drivetrain losses and power used to drive non-engine components.

[1] See [http://www.edmunds.com/car-technology/horsepower-gross-vs- re...](http://www.edmunds.com/car-technology/horsepower-gross-vs-real- world.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And here is response from Samsung: [http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/samsung- firmly-rejects-the...](http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/samsung-firmly- rejects-the-guardians-article-on-tv-compliance-testing/) and [http://www.samsung.com/global/article/articleDetailView.do?a...](http://www.samsung.com/global/article/articleDetailView.do?atcl_id=23) "• Motion lighting – Reduces power consumption by reducing screen brightness when the picture on the screen is in motion"

<comment><USER7> The claim from the article is that the "motion lighting" feature (or something that Samsung attributes to it) activates just when the content is played "faster than normal" and that it effectively recognizes that the international electrotechnical commission (IEC) test is in progress.

If Samsung would really document the exact conditions for the activation and they would be repeatable and independently confirmed then I'd believe it's a real feature. Somehow I don't expect that I'll read that though.

But it's also true that the modern devices don't have constant power load and that it's a good thing and that regulatory bodies didn't complain for even things still in use: My old PC used 30 Watts when "powered off" (!) and my cable box does that still (!) same 30 Watts load either powered on or powered off. That's a real sucker. The TV set uses a tenth of Watt when powered off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I did some testing back in 2009 and I just looked up my spreadsheet and it really is hard to say definitively how much your TV will consume. At the time, my TV was a Samsung LCD A530 (I think).

For example, usage based on input type (Component vs. HDMI):

TV (Wii as input, Component) 48 to 68W

TV (PVR Cable as input, HDMI) 84 to 104W

Then you start getting into different TV settings for games versus TV, day versus night, and the list goes on.

So what should the TV manufacturer put? Should they put the min consumption which is probably the dimmest setting? Or the highest? Or the average? It is an interesting question.

<comment><USER9> The default setting? The one shown most in the demo mode?

<comment><USER10> > The one shown most in the demo mode?

Which would lead TV manufacturers to introduce hacks that reduce power consumption solely for the demo mode.

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't that mean that the product is showing content at its most pleasing to customers but with reduced power consumption?

<comment><USER10> Random example from a moment's thought on how to cheat: demo mode typically runs in a store display, and likely has little opportunity for evaluation of audio (unless placed in a separate showroom as some stores do for a home- theater demo, but in that case it'll likely get tuned carefully). So, in demo mode, don't bother turning on the higher-energy portions of the audio system at all, because nobody will notice if the audio sounds tinny. And now you've potentially saved tens of watts in demo mode.

(Also, note that demo mode typically tunes for most attention-grabbing in a showroom, which often does not provide the optimal viewing experience at home.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Testing for devices should not be done at the onset only. It should be done over time in the field through an independent study.

The Volkswagen issue would have never happened. It also makes it much harder to game, anything that can be gamed in cutthroat competition will be.

Over time we could also see products that hold up through wear and tear. Consumers should demand this type of testing after the gaming has been exposed.

<comment><USER12> Business idea: Make it easy for consumers to test their own devices / vehicles and aggregate statistics [of users who want to upload them].

<comment><USER13> Its easy to start - get a KillAWatt

[http://www.p3international.com/products/p4400.html](http://www.p3international.com/products/p4400.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand how the official EU test can be such that it differs from "real world usage". Why don't they just record a couple of hours of real TV shows, play them back and plug in a Watt meter?

<comment><USER15> > Why don't they just record a couple of hours of real TV shows, play them > back and plug in a Watt meter?

That's essentially what they do. The allegation is that this manufacturer's TVs recognize the specific clip used for testing and drop their brightness when they recognize it.

<comment><USER16> That makes me remember of tricks used by video cards manufacturers to cheat on the WHQL tests [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/05/84469...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/05/84469.aspx)

Also of how Samsung disabled speed scaling on their smartphone GPUs during benchmarks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's no mention of standby power requirements. There was a big push a few years ago to get devices to cut down their standby power substantially. How's that coming along?

<comment><USER18> There is a EU directive on that since december 2008 ([http://eur- lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:320...](http://eur- lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32008R1275))

It basically limits standby or 'power off' power consumption to 0,50 W.

The EU isn't afraid to fine companies heavily, so chances are most equipment follows this rule. If not, I guess a few companies are sweating now that people start to question compliance of devices.

I also guess this directive has had implications all over the world, just like the ban of lead soldering in the EU did. once you have spent the money to design a low power solution, economies of scale do not make it worthwhile to keep an second design around for use outside of the EU.

I think 0,5W still is too much, though. With 20 plugged in devices (sounds like a lot, but count them in your house: coffee machine, water cooker, blender, audio system, televisions, computer, monitor for computer, external hard disk, printer, etc.), that still is a quarter of a kWh a day.

Certainly, home automation systems should aim to go way lower per power outlet.

<comment><USER19> Ugh, this explains that crap pair of Creative speakers I ordered some time back. The speakers themselves are very nice and sound good, but they have this _infuriating_ habit of powering off if no sound is received for ~5 minutes. (And they don't automatically power back up when there's sound detected)

Now it sounds like this was to comply with this inane EU directive. Aren't there some lower hanging fruit to pick like major appliances before hamstringing comparatively lower users like consumer electronics?

<comment><USER17> Such devices need a standby power supply, one that delivers a few mA, to drive the circuitry that wakes things up. Or a power supply that goes to an ultra low power mode when its load drops. Both are available.[1][2] They add to the parts count. The cost penalty is minor for a TV, but noticeable for really cheap devices like speakers and wall wart power supplies.

This is one of those problems that yields to regulatory pressure. With some pushing, a solution like [2] below becomes standard, and adds about a dime of parts cost to everything that plugs in, probably paying for itself in the first month of usage. Without such pressure, all the crap power supplies don' have it.

[1] [http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slua116/slua116.pdf](http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slua116/slua116.pdf) [2] [http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Collateral/NCP1015-D.PDF](http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Collateral/NCP1015-D.PDF)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This isn't very different from the benchmark cheating shenanigans Samsung has been busted doing previously.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=samsung+galaxy+benchmarks+cheating](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=samsung+galaxy+benchmarks+cheating)

Slightly different media, same idea. Check for testing criteria, vary the output.

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks like the European Commission (EC) needs all these product test results to be online and independently verifiable.

I'm sure members of the whole political spectrum can agree that uninhibited full-disclosure would benefit us all (except lazy/ malicious/ stupid manufacturers).

</comment><comment><USER22> At least some Samsung TVs has an option to show information about the power consumption. I don't think it's directly measured because it doesn't change between light and dark scenes but it does change when picture settings are changed and at least it gives some estimate: [http://support- us.samsung.com/cyber/popup/iframe/pop_trouble...](http://support- us.samsung.com/cyber/popup/iframe/pop_troubleshooting_fr.jsp?idx=146980&modelname=UN55B7100WF)

</comment><comment><USER23> Coming up next - washing machines, air conditioners and fridges.

<comment><USER24> Maybe we'll find out that washing machines eat on average one sock more during normal operation than during testing?

Maybe we'll even find out that iPhones don't even contain an Apple?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this news? Because I've always assumed the tests are very biased. my car says it can get 70mpg in extra urban, yet it gets 54 max, I knew 70 was a lie when I bought it. Same with the tv, light bulbs, fridge and so on. In no way is any of it real world efficiency.

</comment><comment><USER26> The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself: Winston Churchill

Seems to apply also to tests...

</comment><comment><USER27> It all began a long time ago, when 1Kb was equaled to 1000 bytes.

<comment><USER28> Yeah well, "K" means "1000", always has. The metric system got there first! We tried to co-opt "K" for years, but we should admit the error and use Kib when we mean 1024 bits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Soon: "Software appear less efficient in real life than in tests. Test-driven development considered harmful."

<comment><USER30> It's already happened. Many here probably remember the ATI "Quake/Quack" debacle where the ATI driver was changing the rendering pipeline based on the binary name: [http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_chea...](http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_radeon_8500_drivers)

<comment> semi-extrinsic It's no secret that GPU drivers are tuned differently to different games. That's a feature, not a bug. You can't expect every game to conform to some super-tight code conventions that optimize against the GPU driver, so Nvidia and ATI optimize their drivers for the various games.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to, but in the Quake/Quack incident the texture quality and mip levels* were different _than the user- specified values_ when running a different named program. This was producing obvious visual artifacts, and I consider this cheating.

If I specify "16x Anisotropic filtering" and the driver changes that to "4x" or some other number behind the scenes, that's an unacceptable optimization.

The current "GeForce Experience" program that selects optimal settings for the current card is an acceptable optimization, I can see which settings are configured and change them if I like.

[*] I don't remember the specific things they were adjusting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Looks like someone's uncorked the truth and it's spilling everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER32> Are we going to have a Volkswagen for TVs now?</comment>


Ask HN: How do I build a browser game? - <AUTHOR> I want to tinker on a dungeon crawler and want to know what the best way to do this in a browser is. I'm a backend engineer so am kind of hoping that it doesn't _have_ to be some sort of Javascript.
Ideally:
 - Support rendering 2/3d game
 - Network access for realtime multiplayer
Thanks! <comment><USER2> You should look into "A Curious Expedition", which is a commercially successful Steam game based on web tech [0].

You will most likely have to use JavaScript, on the front end. You can do a lot of neat graphical tricks these days - whether with Canvas, SVG's, or above-my-pay-grade wizardry.

What kind of back end engineer are you? Just curious since it sounds like you don't have a plan for multiplayer networking yet. Knowing what your skills are would help determine what advice you need.

Edit: additionally, if you want to have a better time writing JavaScript, you can use Gulp [1] and BabelJS [2] to compile ES6 into backwards-compatible JS. Gulp is also helpful for streamlining other painful parts of web development - worth reading through the docs.

Regarding multiplayer, it depends on how you plan to network. I am not sure how people implement P2P networks these days. However, you could probably use TCP/IP sockets (AF_INET) to take data from the client side and send it to a central process (you will need asynchronous IO and you will probably want to connect to the socket using JavaScript / web sockets). You could use a sock file (AF_UNIX) to move data between different languages/scripts if you want to, as well.

There is a very good intro to multiplayer networking here: [https://gafferongames.com/post/what_every_programmer_needs_t...](https://gafferongames.com/post/what_every_programmer_needs_to_know_about_game_networking/)

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17080985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17080985)

[1]: [https://gulpjs.com/](https://gulpjs.com/)

[2]: [https://github.com/babel/gulp- babel/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/babel/gulp- babel/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool - thanks for the link, I'm checking it out now!

I'm a web services backend guy. Lots of Go and lots of traffic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most modern game engines will export to the web as javascript/WASM (at least I know Godot and Unity will.) Construct2 is specifically intended for exporting to the web. You can just treat "the browser" as another build target like Windows, Linux or Android at this point, don't worry about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Use typescript and Pixi. Pretty easy to get started imo, I'm also a backend engineer, here's my progress after one day: [http://aperocky.com/prehistoric](http://aperocky.com/prehistoric) Still a long way to go but it's quite a fast learning curve.

</comment><comment><USER5> One section of this tutorial is 3.5 hours on how to make a basic clone of agar.io

[https://www.udemy.com/course/socketio-with-websockets-the- de...](https://www.udemy.com/course/socketio-with-websockets-the-details/)

I'd suggest checking out similar types of tutorials -- clones of popular browser games, to see how different ones are built, and how to approach the various aspects of creating one.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you haven't yet, I would look into Unity. You can write scripts in C# and it comes with a ton of functionality out of the box. Unity can output webgl and if you release the game and it is successful, it is generally quite easy to release mobile versions without much work.

I've been working with Unity for years, feel free to ask any questions you have!

</comment><comment><USER7> A lot of languages compile to javascript, including haskell, but I'd suggest just bite the bullet, and use js directly. You'll save a lot of time and bang your head against a lot less obscure issues.

You can use webgl for 3d graphics, and there are lots of examples on the web.</comment>


Electromagnetic Theories of Consciousness - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness <comment><USER2> Seems highly improbable, considering what we know about how networks of neurons process information

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't know nearly enough about neurons to make any claim either way. We do know that neurons operate by means of ion pumps which are clearly influenced by EM fields and there is evidence that exposure to these fields causes changes in cognition (see transcranial magnetic stimulation). It remains to be seen whether the field is strong enough/with enough structure to meaningfully influence cognition through self-sustaining processes.

We know certain analogues of brain-based cognition have certain properties related to information processing but to say we know anything about how _neurons_ process information is way too naive to be taken seriously.

<comment><USER2> The claim sounded to me like the magnetic field itself is what causes consciousness, not that it influences the function of neurons. A magnetic field could possibly have an effect when it comes to ion flux, but it is highly improbably that the magnetic field itself is the cause of consciousness rather than the networking in the cortex.</comment></comment></comment>


My Career, Regrets and Victories - <AUTHOR> https://career-tip.com/career-regrets-victories-bill-carter/ <comment><AUTHOR> When I thought about these things herein written recently, I felt I should share this via this medium here. It might just encourage someone reading this right now, and some others might hit the jackpot in this content. Success in one field is replicable!</comment>


Did Goldman Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer <comment><USER2> _On the night of the arrest—without an arrest warrant—Serge waived his right to call a lawyer. He phoned his wife and told her what had happened and that a bunch of F.B.I. agents were on the way to their home to seize their computers, and to please let them in—though they had no search warrant, either. Then he sat down and politely tried to clear up the F.B.I. agent 's confusion._

 _" He was completely not interested in the content of what I am saying. He just kept saying to me, 'If you tell me everything, I'll talk to the judge, and he'll go easy on you.' It appeared they had a very strong bias from the very beginning. They had goals they wanted to fulfill. The goal was to obtain an immediate confession."_

Don't talk to police! - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc)

<comment><USER3> That video is right up there with knowing about 83b elections as some of the most valuable information one can possibly possess.

I rewatch it annually and send out mass emails to all my friends and family when I do reminding them to do so as well.

<comment><USER4> Tell that to all the Zynga employees who made 83(b) elections and are now underwater! 83(b) entails being taxed on the value of stock/options when purchased/received (i.e., as compensation), rather than when vested or when exercised. It's great if the value of the stock increases, but you're substantially worse off economically (taking the time value of money into account) if the value of the stock decreases.

<comment><USER5> What valuation did those underwater employees get?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have some recollection that it was a bunch of Erlang code, from some other article about it.

Edit: Hah, wow... ok, so it's a small world. If I'm not mistaken, this is the same Sergey Aleynikov:

[https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec/commits/master](https://github.com/saleyn/erlexec/commits/master)

I've been interacting with him quite a bit lately regarding his erlexec code. He strikes me as a nice guy.

Edit2: Looks like he's asking for donations to help fund his defense: [http://www.aleynikov.org/](http://www.aleynikov.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> The justice system is, of course, still in the business of catching and punishing murderers, thieves and such. But, with the decline in crime since the early '90s, this side of their activity is becoming increasingly supplemented by a different game altogether: enforcing a growing set of complex laws against practically everything [1]. There is a lot of prosecutorial discretion in choosing which of these laws to enforce and the degree to which to enforce them. With prosecutors often competing against each other in the number and severity of convictions secured, it's hardly surprising that they've arrived at the age-old algorithm used by street muggers: pick the most likely victim, and go all in. A guy like Aleynikov was thus ideally suited as a prosecution target: unlikely to excite much sympathy from a jury with his heavy accent and un-American looks; clueless about lawyers and confessions; cooperative enough to sign statements that were re- formulated by investigators to look bad in court; high-tech enough to mark novel and impressive prosecutorial checkboxes. They consequently made sure to squeeze him for all he had.

So, while I think the often repeated advice about never talking to the police sometimes goes too far (it's probably good to have a friendly relation with the neighborhood cop, and by all means please help in apprehending murderers and burglars if you safely can), it's pretty much dead-on as soon as you step into enforcement la-la land:

\- Don't consent to any searches.

\- Don't say anything without a lawyer.

\- Put great effort into finding a competent lawyer.

\- Don't say anything your lawyer hasn't approved.

Beyond refusing help to efforts to prosecute you, such steps will clearly mark you as a non-victim. (Same advice as applies when you have to pass through a mugging-prone area.) This will cause a lot less effort towards pushing through with your case. After all, there are other suckers born every minute.

[1] [http://reason.com/archives/2009/10/19/were-all-felons- now](http://reason.com/archives/2009/10/19/were-all-felons-now)

<comment><USER8> Most importantly, don't say anything that _might_ incriminate you. Even if they have you on video doing it with hundreds of witnesses and DNA evidence.

<comment><USER9> That's the whole point of not talking unless a lawyer is present (and you give them a chance to vet your speech). You have very little chance of knowing what is incriminating, and this is by design.

Their job is to put away criminals. In the case where there is not really a crime, their training, which is meant to get confessions from actual criminals, ends up pulling seeming confessions to nonexistent crimes from innocent people. After that happens, you are screwed.

<comment><USER10> Even in cases of "actual" crime, the system is quite content to put away innocents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _"He was stringing these computer terms together in ways that made no sense. He didn't seem to know anything about high-frequency trading or source code."_

Programming is esoteric to common folk. Almost like witchcraft. When things go wrong for villagers, they often burn witches.

They didn't burn witches in the old days because of some moral failing that we've outgrown. They burned them because they were unable to understand that "witches" didn't actually cause plagues.

<comment><USER12> That cringing sensation you got when you saw the scare quotes around "subversion repository" is the same feeling people in trading get when journalists write about HFT and algorithmic trading. You can see an obvious example in the article where Michael Lewis applies scare quotes to "dark pools."

<comment><USER13> dark pools scare me a hell of a lot more than witches - possibly because the continued functioning of the financial system is more important to me than warts.

<comment><USER14> how, all they are is usually unlit "unadvertised" elob's?

<comment><USER13> I have no idea what you are talking about, but the reason they scare me is because they provide an opaque mechanism for trading that enables or allows the unmanaged exposure of major financial institutions. This means that the confidence that anyone can have in a particular counter party in a transaction is undermined - whether or not they are participating in these transactions, because we cannot know.

<comment><USER14> Most markets are regulated in such a way that unlit venues have to report executions back to the lit market. Also most alternative venues will operate through clearing houses (the same as lit public markets). The risks you mention are real but as mentioned most sophisticated markets have regulations and rules in place to mitigate them - after all a darkpool or crossing network that failed to find quality and non flakey contra parties doesnt present a compelling case for its use!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was working at one of the rival HFT's mentioned in the article when all this went down. I had some thoughts.

-It's _never_ ok to take proprietary code with you after quitting. I don't know anybody that would have thought that was OK, especially with the amount of money people were making off this IP in 2008. Of course that's true in any industry, but especially in trading.

-That said, you can't just walk out the door of Goldman on Friday and be trading on Monday, even if you had their entire codebase. The infrastructure needed to be a world-class HFT player at Goldman scale is insanely complicated and prohibitively expensive to all but the most well-funded folks these days. You're going to need colo space and power at tens of trading venues, low-latency WAN infrastructure to ship production quotes and data around the world, expensive exchange gateway connectivity, quant research platforms and a giant compute cluster, significant devops and monitoring infrastructure to run and monitor it all, and smart people evolve the stategies, models, and code as it decays while you're setting all this stuff up.

<comment><USER16> I agree- it's not okay to take proprietary code. But criminal charges and an 8 year sentence? Totally disproportionate.

<comment><USER17> That is some advertisement for Goldman, work for us and you will be fine, quit and we will sic FBI, Police or whoever we can find to persecute you, take your money destroy your family and ...

.. man this sounds like some mafia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was on a jury for a murder trial, and so I have some insight into how juries work.

At one point, when I was splitting some hairs and discussing the meaning of some small details from the evidence, one of the other jurors got impatient and reached for the coroner's photo of the victim. "Someone died here, you realize."

<comment><USER19> I was on a jury (robbery) in the UK. It's a crime to say, afterwards, what happened in a jury room in the UK.

<comment><USER20> So could you punch one of the other Juriors and get away with it, since they can't press charges?

<comment><USER19> ahh, it may only be "deliberations" that are protected. so you'd probably be able to say "he punched me!" but not why...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Side question: how do these people with _" only the vaguest interest in his fellow human beings"_ end up with a wife and three kids? It seems to be a common theme amongst articles like this. They always paint the hero-programmer as some kind of rainman figure and then it turns out he has a loving family. Just the usual fictional press nonsense I guess.

EDIT: should always read on before commenting:

 _" He married a girl and manages to have three kids with her before he figures out he doesn't really know her."_

<comment><USER22> As far as the article has it, it wasn't a match of love. It was just two Russians getting together through the ex-pat community, she got security and money to spend, and he just did it because it was the thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Of course they overstepped. They basically mugged a person of their life savings, deprived them of their liberty, and ruined his marriage over nothing of consequence.

</comment><comment><USER24> This article is also interesting in that the total blind trust McSwain put in Goldman's explanation of the situation really illustrates the typical mob hit- man mentality of most law enforcement agents. The Big Boss gives them a name and they take that guy out, no questions asked.

<comment><USER25> It's all down to laziness, IMO. That FBI agent could have done some research for verification and realized that Goldman was selling him an overblown story. What's the point, though; the courts will do their background research eventually, right? And by then they'll be arresting the next poor schmuck Wall Street doesn't want to lose to a competitor.

<comment><USER26> Or insider connections; I would bet that the people in charge of security at Goldman are probably former FBI, Secret Service, or similar background.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> While stupidity isn't a crime, people like Serge manage to find their way around that obstacle.

It's pretty obvious he didn't have any malicious or illegal intent, but he definitely followed the checklist of 'things not to do when leaving a job'. Emailing yourself code? Seriously?

The whole thing is a travesty, but he walked right into it.

<comment><USER28> That was my impression too. For someone that smart in a technical field, some things just seemed a little to casual or didn't make much sense. Deleting your bash history because there might be passwords in it? I generally give the benefit of the doubt to the guy in his position--maybe he was in a hurry or got comfortable being one of the chosen few super users--but, you have to think wtf.

At a company like that where IP is highly valuable and you are paid handsomely, you know right off the bat that every character of code you right belongs to the company before even seeing employment and/or confidentiality agreements.

Dating another woman or stuffing a large object in your trunk late at night right after your wife dies, does not look good. You may very well be innocent, but it doesn't look good.

<comment><USER29> I have passwords in my bash history - namely mysql passwords.

<comment><USER28> Use the --defaults-extra-file to point to a file containing the password and stop the madness. At least that is what I think should be done if entering the password is inconvenient or not feasible (like in an automated script)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> From the article:

"He didn't fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them."

I don't think he understands Wall Street.

<comment><USER31> While I'm a capitalist, I wouldn't conduct business with Goldman. They have a history of screwing the market (semi-ok), screwing their customers (not ok), and screwing their employees (not ok). And then blaming everyone else. I expect a certain degree of ethical behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> On the contrary, Goldman generally stands by their employees provided they believe the employee stood by them. See for example, Fabrice Tourre, who's personal legal expenses were entirely covered by Goldman.

<comment><USER32> I think Goldman always stands by Goldman, first and foremost. And so do the lawyers paid by Goldman. Cf. in Fab's case they rested their case literally the minute they had their turn, without calling any witnesses. From day one I was amazed at the guy's naivete of accepting the "gift" from Goldman that he be represented by their lawyers. It's the rule #1: get your own representation folks. Company lawyers don't work for you, they work for the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Resting their case without witnesses is a fairly standard strategy in court - it's a way of emphasizing that the case has so little merit that there is nothing to argue against.

<comment><USER32> In this case it was also a way of wrapping it up quickly and not dragging GS any deeper into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In case people aren't clear on this. He worked in an industry that takes this sort of thing very seriously. He shouldn't have even been trying to download open source from work. You don't email stuff home to work on it, for example.

<comment><USER34> Banks take security v seriously even trying to plug a usb drive into you pc to copy files will be logged and will probably get you fired.

<comment><USER35> Getting fired for breaking policy is fine. Calling in favors to the Feds and nailing someone for 8 years is not.

<comment><USER34> He was caught bang to rights with company property how is that different to a shop worker getting caught with some of the shops goods

<comment><USER35> Quite obviously the coffee shop worker would not be serving time in Federal prison. He caught caught with source code, not with using the source code, selling the source code, threatening to sell or release the source code, etc etc. No actual damage occurred.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> My favorite part of all of this is the scare-quotes around "subversion repository"

<comment><USER37> You think if they chose to use Git for version control the agent would have not thought anything of it? Subversion just sounds too menacing?

<comment> cupcake-unicorn Well, I'm sure they'd find some other, equally ridiculous way to interpret "Git" \- obviously the programmer was making a statement about the stupid "gits" in charge of the company...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Wow. Naivete is a bitch... Or one hell of a drug, depending on your viewing angle.

And given his re-arrest on what appear to be spurious charges (1st set were thrown out on appeal), I can't help but agree with this comment on VF: "When Goldman says 'jump', the gov't says: 'How high?'"

</comment><comment><USER39> As an attorney and someone moderately interested in politics, it's becoming more and more clear that technical literacy is going to play a huge role in law and policy.

We desperately need more politicians, bureaucrats and law enforcement who at least have some basic technical knowledge.

Empathy is the only way to prevent stuff like this.

<comment><USER40> Usually people who attain technical knowledge are the same type to avoid politics.

Politics is a "soft" game of imperfections, where as technical knowledge is the opposite. Cold, hard, objective.

What incentive is there for technically-equipped folk to deal with the imperfections and heartache of interacting with non-technical folk than to take a white collar job amongst other technically-minded folk?

<comment><USER39> I completely agree.

Maybe it should be more incumbent on politicians and law enforcement to learn more about technology and incorporate more private citizens as opposed to just big corporations in the dialogue.

It's frustrating, I think everyone realizes that technology is going to become a greater and greater part of every day life in government and yet there hasn't been much of a push for elected officials to give a shit to do anything but fundraise with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This makes me angry. Not just the story itself, but the way VF goes about telling it, which commits the same sins (albeit with better intent) as Goldman Sachs. "So-called 'subversion repository'?" Why don't we just accuse him of summoning demons while we're at it?

<comment><USER42> Maybe I'm giving him too much credit, but I think the author's emphasizing that the term itself sounds like damning evidence to anyone who doesn't know better, since subversion means "a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system by persons working secretly from within." He's pointing out that agent used such terms without understanding them (or exploited the public's ignorance to make their case). That's why he put it in quotes.

Lewis goes on to explain, later in the article, that subversion repositories are commonly used and aren't evil. He could have explicitly spelled out that the term subversion relates to version control, but I think he explained it adequately enough given the intended audience.

<comment><USER43> To be fair to the agent, I think uploading company code to your private third party repository is pretty bad.

Especially if you are thinking (later in the article, quoting the programmer), 'they wouldn't like it', 'it was like speeding, in a stolen car'.

<comment><USER44> Oh, I agree, but the point the article seemed to be making was that the agent thought it was fishy that the _name_ of the repo was "subversion", rather than "github" or "bobs-useless-code-dump". It was a complete misunderstanding of what was important (storing code elsewhere), and an ascribing of malicious intent ("subversive") to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Although I acknowledge the sympathetic angle of the article, I cannot fathom why he would take such a risk.

During my 2 years consulting in global investment banks in NYC, it was standard practice for all employees, internal or external, with access to sensitive data or IP to undergo comprehensive IP compliance training and execution of IP agreements. This had to be performed within a month or so of engagement or your badge and account would be deactivated. Every year at a particular client required the training to be repeated.

It was inculcated that violations of such policy had a high likelihood of being caught and would carry very significant penalties. In my experience, they successfully established very taboo cultures around transmitting IP out of their systems.

</comment><comment><USER41> An interesting takeaway from this piece is that GS is blatantly and systematically violating the terms of the MIT license, GPL, and whatever else they happen to get their hands on. I'd love nothing more than for the FSF to take them to court over it.

<comment><USER46> That's only true if they distribute the code, is it not?

<comment><USER41> IANAL, but I don't think so. Practically, probably; legally, unknown.

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in > all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

That makes it sound like ripping the license out and replacing it with a proprietary one, even for purely internal use, is probably a bad idea. I don't know who'd be able to sue them for that, though, if the original copyright "owners" aren't supposed to have seen it in the first place.

Article II of the GPL has a specific exception for transferring GPL-ed software to employees to work on without letting them spread it beyond that, but I don't know how much of this that would cover.

<comment><USER47> Copyright only applies when you distribute something. With your internal copy of something that you don't redistribute you can modify it however you like, and the GPL or any other copyright license never gets a chance to apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> They did mug him, but it's considered a huge no-no in financial services to take any kind of code home. It's impossible that he didn't know the gravity of what he was doing when he did it. It's always a terminatable offense at the very least, and frequently leads to more.

</comment><comment><USER49> Programming is starting to seem like a relatively dangerous kind of work.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I took Criminology (or perhaps it was Deviance), my professor made me read this book: [http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Going-To- Prison/dp/1559501197](http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Going-To- Prison/dp/1559501197)

It was written decades ago, and is still relevant today. Sadly, I think programmers should begin reading it, as prison seems to be growing into a larger threat for us.

</comment><comment><USER50> If it was a normal company you could boycott them, but how do you boycott Goldman Sachs for all they have done?

<comment><USER51> Why boycott GS? It's their state, country and mostly their world to loot. They have been above the law for over 80 years. They own the current administration, courts and congress. I wouldn't doubt it if someone claimed they had access to much of the NSA collection due to the amount of influence they have...

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The best lesson here:

> The fourth, and final, rule was by far the most important: Don't say a word > to government officials. "The reason you don't," he says, "is that, if you > do, they can place an agent on a witness stand and he can say anything."

Aren't you allowed to have a lawyer present in conversations with agents?

<comment><USER53> A right he did not exercise

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> How does this case not violate the eighth amendment? Or if not that, basic fucking justice and morality. He's lost everything, spent a year in prison, was acquitted of federal charges, and now is being charged by NY State? The justice system is seriously broken.

</comment><comment><USER55> Where in the article is the actual story? Can someone please point me to the page and paragraph that contains what actually happened? What did he do?

<comment><USER56> My understanding is he copied a bunch of confidential code off company servers and then deleted the audit trail from the servers. He claimed that the confidential code copied was accidental and that he only meant to copy some open source code.

<comment><USER57> It's a little harsh to say he deleted the audit trail. He deleted his bash history. Something I do on a near daily basis.

<comment><USER56> The exact details (which aren't disputed) are covered in:

[http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/021110aleyn...](http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/021110aleynikovindictment.pdf)

Basically he'd written a backup program which was specifically designed to compress both his home directory and propriety code from elsewhere on the system into a file (which it would do depended on parameters passed).

On his last day of employment he ran it several times with different parameters which including copying propriety code. He then encrypted the file and then uploaded it to a SVN hosting service before deleting the encryption program and his bash history. Because it was encrypted it bypassed GS's automated scanners.

He then downloaded the source files to both his laptop and external flash drive and took them to work at his new employer.

Given the (undisputed) facts, he clearly broke several laws, the question is whether he was doing it innocently and just being stupid or if he did it with serious criminal intent.

<comment><USER57> I don't doubt he did something illegal and I don't care particularly what his reason is.

What is way more troubling to me is how apparently easy it is for Goldman to get the highest levels of government involved and throw the criminal book at someone over what is typically a civil matter.

<comment><USER56> Any company can ask for a criminal referral on a corporate espionage case (United States v. Nosal is a major one), and while it's becoming more common it's still pretty unusual for companies of all sizes because it's often expensive for the company involved (legal counsel, staff time, etc) and means that they lose control of the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Black and white letter of the law, he should not have sent the modified Open Source programs home. The modifications really would be the employers property and the employer has all the power to release them. That said, he had been sending the files home to work on all along (before changing jobs) and never was EXPRESSLY TOLD to stop. That is why the original case would have been tossed as there was noillegal access" going on.

The second case for sending secrets is closer to legit. But only because if you send secrets out at all, if you didn't have permission, it could be illegal.

The REAL issue is font work for asshats that don't play nice. Alternately, accept that as a programmer mixing hobby Open Source projects with your Employment projects is a recipe for trouble.. Take their money and be a sucky leacher.. Or post your fixes to maintainers from home, reengineered solely at home with no files from work.

As somebody who does admin work, its a great excuse just to not take work home at all unless its on my company laptop.

</comment><comment><USER59> _Russians had a reputation for being the best programmers on Wall Street_

Is that true?

(the rest of the paragraph was interesting, and worth repeating for anyone who read the whole article):

 _Serge thought he knew why: they had been forced to learn programming without the luxury of endless computer time. "In Russia, time on the computer was measured in minutes," he says. "When you write a program, you are given a tiny time slot to make it work. Consequently we learned to write the code in a way that minimized the amount of debugging. And so you had to think about it a lot before you committed it to paper. . . . The ready availability of computer time creates this mode of working where you just have an idea and type it and maybe erase it 10 times. Good Russian programmers, they tend to have had that one experience at some time in the past: the experience of limited access to computer time."_

</comment><comment><USER60> IIRC one speculation on the matter was that the information that was taken would have proven that GS engages in all sorts of illegal and rule-bending trading strategies (say it ain't so).

edit: added quote from court record below.

 _"...because of the way this software interfaces with the various markets and exchanges, the bank has raised a possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways."_

See page 8 [http://www.scribd.com/doc/17191934/USAvSergeyAleynikov-7409-...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/17191934/USAvSergeyAleynikov-7409-Full)

</comment><comment> cupcake-unicorn I don't have anything useful to say, but: "Serge figured, it was a matter of unfolding the box, turning a three-dimensional object into a one-dimensional surface"

Now how does one do that? :) And he shouldn't have had to used the Pythagorean theorem on just a one dimensional line...

Sigh. Just thought it was funny, since the article was about how programming/technical jargon goes over the heads of jurors, the FBI, etc. but seems like the article writer isn't immune to it either :)

<comment><USER61> There are multiple ways to unfold a box into 2 dimensions. For example, see this printable pattern that you can try at home [1].

Also, how else would you determine the distance between two coordinates in a plane without using the Pythagorean theorem [2]? It's not like he could use a measuring tape in an imaginary, unfolded room.

EDIT: I reread your post and see that you are pointing out a typo. The phrase "one-dimensional surface" was obviously meant to be "two-dimensional surface." A one-dimensional surface is non-sense.

[1] [http://familycrafts.about.com/cs/coloringpages/l/blboxtempla...](http://familycrafts.about.com/cs/coloringpages/l/blboxtemplate.htm)

[2] [http://www.purplemath.com/modules/distform.htm](http://www.purplemath.com/modules/distform.htm)

<comment> cupcake-unicorn Yes, sorry - I was pointing out the "one dimensional" typo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> And now he's being charged by the state of New York. This will never end as long as Goldman Sachs continues to pull the strings, I fear.

</comment><comment><USER63> I have worked with Goldman and UBS. UBS, to it's credit, has taken a liberal stance and explicitly addresses contributions to Open Source : if they are done on your own time, that's fine. Goldman, in contrast, had the usual, "anything and everything you do or do not belongs to us" agreement.

</comment><comment><USER64> ITT: journalists don't "get" programming.

<comment><USER65> It sounds like a couple of tech-savvy journalists should start the equivalent of [http://getreligion.org](http://getreligion.org).

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> A reminder everyone, the only thing you should ever say to a law enforcement officer is "I'd like to see my attorney."

</comment><comment><USER67> The only thing I find odd is the deleting of the bash history. There are no passwords in there, unless you type one by accident.

<comment><USER68> If he used wget (or similar utility) he could specify password as a command line argument. It's not a very good practice security-wise but people do this sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Like the opening of the Vanity Fair article, I never and still do not understand exactly what he did that is illegal.

</comment><comment><USER70> That's the problem with the American judicial system. Whenever they want to convict someone innocent of a bullshit crime they just assemble of idiots who just say guilty to go home to their trailer. Have they heard of the phrase "jury of their pears" that actually means pears not of the same species. I wouldn't consider any of the people on that jury my pears.

<comment><USER20> jury of one's peers n. a guaranteed right of criminal defendants, in which "peer" means an "equal." This has been interpreted by courts to mean that the available jurors include a broad spectrum of the population, particularly of race, national origin and gender. Jury selection may include no process which excludes those of a particular race or intentionally narrows the spectrum of possible jurors. It does not mean that women are to be tried by women, Asians by Asians, or African Americans by African Americans.

[http://legal- dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/jury+of+one's+...](http://legal- dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/jury+of+one's+peers)

But originally jury of ones peers was a right of (so called noble) Englishmen to be judged by other lords, and not by commoners. Sadly, it does not give intellectual people the right to be judged by others with above room temperature IQ (what is it they say, a jury consists of 12 people not smart enough to get out jury duty?).

<comment><USER71> > Sadly, it does not give intellectual people the right to be judged by others > with above room temperature IQ

The closest English precedent for that was not the "jury of one's peers" but the "benefit of clergy".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Man, talk about risks computer programmers don't usually consider in taking a job on wall street.

</comment><comment><USER73> Goldman is above the law.

</comment><comment><USER74> Paranoid?

</comment><comment><USER75> That article is riddled with inaccuracies.

<comment><USER53> Try listing them

<comment><USER76> His 'second jury' were comical.

"Most were surprised by how little he had taken in relation to the whole: eight megabytes in a platform that consisted of an estimated one gigabyte of code. "

Really? One gigabyte of code? Or one gigabyte of third party binaries, precompiled libraries, documentation etc.? All you need are the source files, and those language keywords compress nicely. Exactly how much plain text do you think they have?

' "But that's the secret sauce, if there is one," said the juror. "If you're going to take something, take the strats." '

Rubbish. The strats are the easy (or at least easier) bit in the high frequency space. That's like taking a dump of the html from facebook/twitter and thinking you've stolen their site. It's the scalable, distributed infrastructure that drives large websites, and it's the fastest possible infrastructure that drives HFT. One thing Lewis got right is the Coke/Pepsi analogy, and it really is that simple. A straight up race.

" "It's way easier to start from scratch." "

It is, and it isn't. In even the worst codebase there will be nuggets of usefulness that will accelerate the process. Isolated parts of the system that you've perfected. Exchange message decoders for example (ITCH, FIX/FAST, etc.). This is especially true when you, the genius who will be starting from scratch, has worked on it for a few years. I assume he was doing something useful in his time at Goldman.

I'm not buying the innocent act.

<comment><USER77> > In even the worst codebase there will be nuggets of usefulness that will > accelerate the process. Isolated parts of the system that you've perfected. > Exchange message decoders for example (ITCH, FIX/FAST, etc.). This is > especially true when you, the genius who will be starting from scratch, has > worked on it for a few years. I assume he was doing something useful in his > time at Goldman.

The new system was going to be written in a different language than what Goldman uses.

<comment><USER76> And? How does that make it any less useful to have the existing code as a guide?

<comment><USER77> I don't know...having the existing code available seems like it would be more useful for the "strat" stuff than for the infrastructure, if you posit that it's all going to be rewritten from scratch in a different language. But I don't know shit about trading, so maybe I'm wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> This is the first front-paged post I know of where nobody's invoked Betteridge's Law of Headlines, which I find particularly ironic.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER45> The article was very sympathetic toward Aleynikov and accounts his acquittal on appeal, so it breaks that "law" (which IMHO is upheld primarily due to confirmation bias).

<comment><USER78> _which IMHO is upheld primarily due to confirmation bias_

I agree; this was my point. Its frustrating to trot out a trite middlebrow dismissal for when we don't like something and to pretend it doesn't exist otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I haven't clicked through, but only the government (via prosecutors) can charge anyone with criminal offenses.

Additionally, while private people can suggest charges or report crimes, ultimately they have zero say one way or the other if charges actually get filed.

See also: Apple/DoJ/Gawker, ATT/Apple/DoJ/weev, JSTOR/MIT/aaronsw

<comment><USER79> >only the government (via prosecutors) can charge anyone with criminal offenses.

That's almost universally true, but some states still do in fact have the right of private prosecution. E.g. New Jersey allows you to swear out a criminal complaint directly to a magistrate, and there isn't a damn thing the police or a prosecutor can do about it.

Private prosecutions used to be the norm. It's actually a very powerful force against police corruption, and I wish it hadn't gone away in so many states.

Also, in cases like this, the prosecutors will generally defer to the desires of the victim, especially when the victim is one of the world's most powerful corporations.</comment></comment>


Google Earth API Set for Execution - <AUTHOR> http://www.programmableweb.com/news/google-earth-api-set-execution/2014/12/12 <comment><USER2> Since Google doesn't have a replacement ready, what are the best available options out there?</comment>


The Case Against the Mortgage Interest Deduction - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-case-against-everyones-favorite-tax-break-the/ <comment><USER2> > The largest tax break relates to health care: it makes the premiums paid by > companies that offer health insurance exempt from payroll taxes.

We really should start with that one. If anything, replace it with an individual deduction. It'll be a double-whammy. Get rid of this bullshit subsidy for large corporations and at the same time level the playing field for small businesses and individuals trying to get coverage.

<comment><USER3> The health insurance exemption only helps the healthcare industry; without this exemption, people would rather be paid cash than get expensive extra healthcare benefits. People would probably rather buy their own health insurance than have an employer choose it, and most employers would rather offload the trouble of managing health insurance (as many have healthcare departments, which is not their core competency).

Unfortunately the Affordable Care Act (A.K.A. ACA, Obamacare) cemented employer-purchased healthcare into place with the employer mandate.

<comment><USER4> I think it's also possible that a large employer being able to offer health insurance much more cheaply per employee than a small employer can gives the large employer that much more advantage over the small one for no reason.

<comment><USER5> And it is a way to a job serfdom - the cost of unemployment is greater. And - is anything worth risking my family health plans for?

Employer provided insurance should stop existing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first comment in that article points out what's really the cherry on the stupidity cake: it's not even that the mortgage interest deduction is small- but-at-least-something for middle-class families. For a lot of them it's _literally zero_ , because it's often less than the standard deduction. Even leaving aside the political class's counterproductive obsession with homeownership, the insanity here is of the masses passionately supporting a $100 billion annual expense that benefits them not one cent.

Just another one of those things that makes me fantasize about a rationalist dictatorship, before I sigh and return to the real world.

<comment><USER7> The mortgage interest deduction is the thing that makes it possible to itemize for most people. Then you also get to deduct your property taxes, your state income taxes, charitable contributions, other misc stuff.

Any of those things separately is often less than the standard deduction. But all together they are more, and the mortgage interest is generally the biggest and the one that pushes it over the top.

<comment><USER8> Fine, but then it's only helping to the extent that the taxpayer is over the standard deduction. If their mortgage interest was $1000, but they end up just $1 over the standard deduction then technically it helped - but only by 15 cents (depending on their marginal rate).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree 100% that we should get rid of this deduction. I owned a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house in Manhattan, KS (an affordable part of the country). I never qualified for this deduction. The house was too cheap and the interest on the mortgage was too low.

I was solidly middle class.

This deduction benefits people spending substantial amounts on mortgage interest, thus it mostly benefits people buying McMansions (or actual mansions). In theory, middle class individuals in large cities are helped to qualify for homes because housing prices are so steep in the big city. In practice, it encourages "house inflation" where The Haves buy and build bigger and bigger houses and The Have Nots are piled up in rentals like cord wood or out in the street. If you can afford a house at all, this deduction actively encourages you to buy as much house as possible. It deepens the divide between The Haves and The Have Nots, thereby shrinking the middle class, not helping it. It helps ensure that you are either rich or poor in this country, not middle class.

<comment><USER10> I share your experience - I lived in both Texas and Florida in modest houses, and I think we could take the MID only once.

It's getting to where it's not that clear that a McMansion is a "have" thing, especially if it take maxing out the mortgage.

The real difference between "haves" and "have nots" is their credit rating. In places, the premium for rental may approach 100% of the payment if the same owner occupied the same house in a 20% down mortgage.

But at the same time, people will max the mortgage out, so selling a 3-1 in Manhattan, Ks may be a very real challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Almost every time that something is subsidized, it will go up in price. A person's marginal propensity to consume means that if a deduction leads to money being saved, that money will actually be put toward the same product. But instead of bigger houses, we get the same house, just priced higher.

Housing prices will be lower without the deduction, actually helping first time buyers more since the down payment will be more achievable. Alas, eliminating the deduction will never happen.

<comment><USER12> > But instead of bigger houses, we get the same house, just priced higher.

This seems to assume a monopoly supplier charging monopoly rents, but is an untenable conclusion if housing is supplied in a competitive market. (It also neglects the fact that its not a flat subsidy, but one where the subsidy rate is _positively_ correlated with income, so that -- within the limits of the deduction -- higher income earners get a higher subsidy rate, and thus the spread in buying power between them and lower-income earners is _increased_ by the existence of the deduction, which even in a monopoly-supply situation would mean that the effect across the market was not "everyone gets the same houses as they would without the subsidy, just at higher prices".)

<comment><USER13> Land is fixed, so the greater ability to pay from the subsidy simply increases the 'rent' earned by landowners. To a great extent, one gets the same house on the same land, but priced higher.

<comment><USER14> > Housing is not land, and quite often in the United States is not provided in > a way which makes maximum practical use of land, so land being fixed is > pretty much irrelevant to whether housing supply is fixed.

It's clearly relevant-- the fixed nature of land makes is what limits the supply of housing. Both due to the obvious situation -- we can't build housing because there's no available land for it-- as well as the more complicated case where the limited supply of land is downzoned to create wealth for landowners.

> If "landowners" were a single monopoly supplier, this, again, would be a > reasonable conclusion. The ability to capture value from the subsidy, > however, depends on the ability to provide value from housing on that land, > something on which landowners naturally compete.

It is uncommon for them to compete. It is much more common to enact restrictive zoning laws (and other bureaucratic measures) so they do not have to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unfortunately the mortgage interest deduction is a major third rail in U.S. politics and it is probably here to stay.

This article is 100% spot on though--it is a completely regressive policy and privileges those with enough capital to purchase real estate at the expense of those who have no choice but to rent.

<comment><USER16> Yep. While in the abstract I would support eliminating it, now that I've finally purchased a home I'm against any changes to the status quo. The very economics of this huge purchase are only made rational by that deduction.

<comment><USER17> What about phasing it out over 20 years?

The deduction related to the purchase decision you just made will be a lot smaller by then and you would know what the new rules were for future decisions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Countries including Iceland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, in fact, tax > homeowners for "imputed rent": the amount of income homeowners would earn if > they rented out (rather than lived in) their home.

Do homeowners in those countries also get imputed deductions for whatever things people who are actually running rental businesses get to deduct?

</comment><comment><USER19> Housing prices are whatever people are able to pay. If everyone's able to take up a bigger loan thanks to mortgage interest deduction, then house prices will rise to meet the increased demand. End result: We have to effectively pay the same (bigger loan but with tax deduction), but because everyone takes up bigger loans the national economy becomes more brittle.

Yay? It's just the government pushing money into the construction industry, which really is the only beneficient, and it's all disguised as a gift to the middle class. It's just dumb.

<comment><USER12> > Housing prices are whatever people are able to pay.

I fail to see the justification for concluding that housing prices are set by demand alone, not the usual interaction of supply of demand.

<comment><USER19> The short-term supply of housing is fixed. Yes, there will be an increase in renovation of houses due to larger loans being affordable, but most of our housing costs are the cost of _centrally_ located floorspace anyway, whose supply moves really slowly. Supply of central floorspace increases due to mass transit buildout, city expansion, and building height, only the last of which depends on average ability to pay for housing. Building height is usually restricted by zoning, in which case average ability to pay doesn't influence supply at all.

<comment><USER12> > The short-term supply of housing is fixed.

Sure, so the immediate-term effect of a change in policy on the deduction would be what you would expect with a fixed supply; but that's hardly the only, or most important, effect to consider with a long-term policy.

<comment><USER14> Land-use policy makes it far more attractive to resist growth, enact restrictive zoning laws, and engage in speculation, rather than listen to the signals of demand. This has been the case for the last century, and without a fundamental change in our policy, will almost certainly continue to be the case.

A land tax would be the silver bullet here-- it would align the incentives for landowners to listen to rises and falls in demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't this just an indirect subsidy for banks? Basically, the government partially pays for the interest rate the bank charge on your mortgage.

</comment><comment><USER21> > For this reason, organizations like the Congressional Budget Office treat > tax breaks and government spending as essentially equivalent.

This seems weird. Collecting and spending money has overhead and externalities (enforcement for example), while not taxing in the first place does not.

<comment><USER21> Now that I think about it a little more, this seems like a red herring. Just because the _budgeting_ office says two numbers are the same on paper, doesn't mean anything about the efficacy of the policy, for or against.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I bought my first house and only made 4 payments which brought me over the standard deduction. I only put 5% down though and I live in a more expensive area than most.

</comment><comment><USER23> > It first appeared in 1861, born out of a necessity for Civil War funding, > and in 1913, Congress made the income tax a permanent part of American life.

And federal income tax should again be eliminated. The federal government should get fed from the hands of the state, not the other way around. Having all of the money flow down from the top is helping to create this mess we're in now.

The one that controls the purse holds the real power. Federal income tax is consolidating that power at the top.

<comment><USER9> If you read the history, the form of government the US has failed and failed and failed while trying it the way you describe. The US was on the verge of collapse when it re-arranged things a bit and handed over more power to the federal government. That's why the country still exists. In its earliest days, it was in danger of collapse just like every other state that had attempted the same kind of organization.

If we take away the federal government power to a) raise money and b) keep a standing army we will likely see this country destroyed in short order, whether from within or from without. Quite a few countries would be thrilled to pieces if we hamstrung our federal government so they could invade and do as they please.

<comment><USER23> This country seems quite capable of destroying itself in short order regardless.

Now we have unstoppable constitutional rights abuses and endless drone wars in far away lands. Not to mention a lobbying apparatus that can concentrate "donations" to less and less people to get its way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > the mortgage interest tax deduction, which, at an annual estimated cost of > $77 to $100 billion...

Oh please. What a puny number that benefits such an enormous amount of regular people.

The cost of war in Iraq is estimated at $12 billion _a month_ [O]. Eliminating this deduction wouldn't even buy us another senseless and irresponsible war!

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-iraq-war-by- numbers-2014-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-iraq-war-by- numbers-2014-6)

<comment><USER8> >>What a puny number that benefits such an enormous amount of regular people.

Well, I guess that depends on your definitions of "puny" and "regular". Since 75% of the benefit goes to people making over $100k/year, that must be your definition of "regular people." Which isn't really statistically defensible, but might be your personal experience. I'm not sure $100bn really counts as "puny" even to the Feds, though. Granted 3% of last years' revenues isn't a huge number, but neither is it a rounding error.

Personally, I think it's absolutely silly to forego tax dollars to encourage people to go into debt. Not that I'm above taking advantage of it every year, and probably deriving more benefit from it than most.

I'm still trying to figure out what any of this has to do with the Iraq war, though.

<comment><USER24> > 75% of the benefit goes to people making over $100k/year

It's much closer to _households_ making over $100K/yr than _people_ making that.</comment></comment></comment>


pCell, A Bold Scheme For Super-Fast Wireless Data - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2014/03/19/pcell-artemis-wireless-dido-steve-perlman <comment><USER2> Previous discussion on HN (with participation from the inventor):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7316606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7316606)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like it'd work for fixed broadband installations (say, for people in rural Montana or Ontario), but I'm less convinced it'd work well for cell phones because the tower would need to predict your movements in advance of you actually moving there in order for it to know where to build the constructive interference.

<comment><USER4> Perlman demonstrates [0] some sort of 'adaptive algorithm' that pCell uses to track real-time a UE's position.

[0] [http://youtu.be/wGAnDQEQJ_s](http://youtu.be/wGAnDQEQJ_s)

<comment><USER5> I'm surprised at how rough the audience was for the presentation. I wonder where those emotions came from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Sigh_

The biggest limiting factor of wireless is the lack of frequency in which to put you're data. Not interference.

pCell only works for small areas, what it does is essentially beamform a signal directly to the consumer (basically cupping your hands around your mouth when you shout at someone) I assume the "magic" comes from some sort of noise cancelling (yes just like the ear phones)

However in practice I assume they just use more than one beam former to create more than one beam.

It cannot be used for wide area systems, as the only reason this works is because its local. it provides bandwidth for one small area using the same frequency that the wider area is using.

<comment><USER7> Can you elaborate why it wouldn't work in a wide area setting? In a demonstration, they had a lot of cellphones on a desk, but not a matching number of pCell antennas, so it seems they can support many devices with a single (or at least much less) antenna.

Or do you mean to say that the beam forming is not going to work over large distances, so phones must be in close proximity to the antennas?

<comment><USER6> the system will work over long distances, indeed he claims in the paper (with nothing to back it up, that paper is extra-ordinarily vague.)

However it wont increase bandwidth. (I should have been more precise) The only reason why people are interested in this is because it offers the idea of greater bandwidth.

The way they increase bandwidth is effectively partitioning the local airspace off from the wider world. Each cell (be it TV, phone or $other) can deliver x bandwith.

The bigger the area covered by the cell, the less bandwidth per unit of volume. (conversely the smaller the more bandwidth per volume)

This is before we start doing clever things like spread spectrum or account for signal loss/noise/shannon's law

This is pretty much snake oil. Its beam forming with a marketing budget. There is nothing in that paper that suggests otherwise

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have seen some statements of Perlman and persons related to him or his companies, that this technology is not only applicable to communication networks. That, and the recent patent applications, make me think that he is talking about wireless power.

I really wonder if, and I have some doubts that, the underlying technology is at all feasible for such an application?

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's the actual white paper, which is fairly readable: [http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf](http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish he would have taken Apple's lead on having a big launch with a product that ships in a couple weeks rather than a dribble of presentations with a shipping: ??? slide.

If pCell works, getting press won't matter. If you can _destroy_ the markets for mobile data + home internet you won't have to fight Stanford undergrads in some anonymous lecture hall. So, I am sorta skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER11> Question: The article mentions that pCells use interference to their advantage. Would a network of these be able to operate in a public spectrum?

<comment><USER12> With the licensing environment that exists today the answer is a definite "uhhhh maybe?!"

If you wanted to do it with LTE gear no since it's fixed to non-public spectrum.

If you did some serious wifi hacking to use the same concepts you might be able to. But with the area that wifi covers and the generally terrible power efficiency of the amplifiers I'm not entirely sure you'd want to. I don't think you'd be able to call it pCell but you could probably use the DIDO ideas and make it happen if sufficiently motivated.

<comment><USER13> I don't see any legal reason why you couldn't do something like this today. There are already WiFI routers that do beamforming and this just seems like an application of beam forming where your antennas are much further apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> secong gen 802.11ac will do this too, MU-MIMO will use beam forming to send up to 4 streams to up to four clients simultanously.

[http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001739/ch04.htm...](http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001739/ch04.html)

<comment><USER15> It is not the same thing. 11ac does normal beam forming not network/distributed MIMO.

<comment><USER14> secong gen will be distributed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For all interested, here is a link to a recent talk Perlman gave at Stanford: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGAnDQEQJ_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGAnDQEQJ_s)

Since many will not watch through the whole thing here is a basic synopsis.

If you are looking for pCell's strength to be in any sort of physical layer innovation, stop. It's not the actual antenna 'box' that you see in photos that is doing the heavy work. That is just a basic RF frontend that Artemis could care less if you broke it open and reverse engineered every component inside.

Perlman's talk confirms my suspicions that this is not an RF advancement at all. It's a software advancement. The real work is being done by the "datacenter". The overall RAN architecture is a CRAN (Cloud RAN) architecture, which means that it fails miserably to be innovative without it's special software.

We are not talking about protocol stack software (as found in LTE eNodeB's and LTE capable UEs). We are talking about Artemis's proprietary software (which must be some killer highly optimized, low-level, kick-ass mathematics and networking algorithms).

Artemis's datacenter seems to create a virtual enodeB for every device accessing the CRAN (the access points being the 'Cloud' of those antenna boxes you see in the photos/videos which work together).

Each device then communicates physically through the boxes but virtually with an enodeB "server" in the datacenter. Thus, it reads the environment AS IF it has an ENTIRE basestation (tower) all to itself. :P

Now if you know every device's information via uplink information provided by the protocol stack and every access points information provided by the already in-house data then you could theoretically play around heavily with wave-front mathematics.

But I think pCell's potential is being a bit overestimated. I remember Perlman saying something like pCell offering a 10x advantage or something. (Sorry don't remember every detail I watched the video late last night).

That advantage level is cool, but it seems Artemis is pushing (and for good reason) not some sort of instant HUGE advantage with pCell, but a long-term scalable advantage.

According to their claims, it seems that you should just be able to add more access points (as well as extend the processing capability of the datacenter) to increase the overall capability of the CRAN.

It would be neat to know what algorithms they are using, but they really seem to not want to say anything that might even come close to giving it away.

I am not sure what aspects of the channel quality and UE feedback they use from the protocol stacks (LTE, wi-fi, etc.) but they seem to have something working.

We shall see what happens.

EDIT: It's a funny way to think about it, but it seems that the 'innovation' exists outside of the protocol stack. It's like a "sub-physical layer" that "transports" the actual link between the device and the virtual enodeB by placing the wave-front 1cm around the antenna(s) of the device? (Open to critiques on anything I said) :)

<comment><USER16> Typo or [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=om7...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=om7O0MFkmpw#t=50) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whenever I see something that claims to overcome a long tested theory like Shannon's law, it always makes me very suspicious. The explanations I have seen so far are long on claims and short on proof and remind me very much of "perpetual motion machines". So far nothing I have seen shows how they are "side stepping" Shannon. I smell a rat.

<comment><USER18> This doesn't violate the Shannon capacity theorem: Different channels, like MIMO channels, have different capacities.

pCell is basically a proprietary version of network MIMO. (Though maybe still valuable if it can get to market faster).</comment></comment>


Is Data Science Following the Scientific Method? - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/03/24/data-science-has-become-about-lending-false-credibility-to-decisions-weve-already-made/ <comment><AUTHOR> My manager had us all watch The Moneyball movie with Brad Pitt, and informed us that the company would rely on Data Science and metrics to make decisions. I've seen some good come from that strategy, and some not-so-good.

I think the hard part is in measuring the data we collect, we don't always see how data is related to what we're trying to achieve. The data doesn't lie, but if you make a mistake interpreting it, it can seem like the universe is conspiring against you.</comment>


Why 10% of the Population Hates Cilantro and the Rest Doesn't Know Any Better - <AUTHOR> http://reasoniamhere.com/2013/09/24/why-10-of-the-population-hates-cilantro-and-the-rest-doesnt-know-any-better/ <comment><USER2> If some of you are wondering about this weird herb called Cilantro you've never heard of, you might call it Coriander locally.

<comment><USER3> Oh, thanks. I assumed it was some sort of prescription drug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's good to know why, but for those of you with this clearly faulty gene: I pity you. Cilantro's delicious.

<comment><USER5> Here's the thing: it's not. It's a pretty good herb - but it's NEVER necessary and it's not "amazing" or anything close. It's a good lesson actually: being SLIGHTLY better for 90% of people is worth alienating the 10% that will hate you forever for including it. That 10% doesn't matter to the Mexican food industry, or really any industry. Make some segment of people insanely happy and you'll be fine.

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry, I have to disagree with you. I find cilantro both necessary in some dishes and absolutely amazing. There is no other flavor (that I'm aware of) like it. It just tastes so fresh and clean and truly brings life to the dish.

My one complaint is they often don't put enough in. Cilantro whipped with goat cheese or cream is one of my favorite toppings.

Interesting article though. I once had a girlfriend who detested cilantro. I always thought she was being silly but now I realize it was a genetic disorder.

<comment><USER7> _" Interesting article though. I once had a girlfriend who detested cilantro. I always thought she was being silly but now I realize it was a genetic disorder."_

It's not a "genetic disorder" any more than having blue eyes is a disorder. It's just a normal genetic variation.

<comment><USER6> I'm just thankful we broke up before procreating and she didn't pass the dreadful condition on to our children.

(sarcasm, responding to the tone of the article ...wait, do I _really need to explain that?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like cilantro just as much as the next bloke... I even plant it on my garden, along with Basil/Albacar, Spearmint/Hierbabuena and other cool ingredients.

But why oh why is there a post about cilantro on HACKER news? This is turning into reader's digest ¬¬

Whenever you do some hackety hack thing with cilantro, please do share.</comment>


HTML5 Features you need to know - <AUTHOR> http://daker.me/2013/05/5-html5-features-you-need-to-know.html

<comment><USER2> A useful list. I was surprised to find that I'd only heard of one of these.

The pattern attribute for regular expressions looks like a great addition. Obligatory comment that _"no more...server side code to check if the user's input is a valid email"_ is clearly a terrible advice. _Always_ validate on the server.

<comment><USER3> I should point out it's generally not a good idea to try to use regex on an email address. It's surprisingly complex and very easy to miss something. I'd rely on type="email" and send a verification link server-side.

<comment><USER4> You know, I really think at this point that the random historical crap that's technically legal in an email address should be treated the same as if you walked into a restaurant and tried to order in Latin. It's time to retire a lot of it and tell people to move on.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't change the fact that a lot of validators disallow common, everyday things like + tags or even . characters. The only good way to be sure is to make sure the address contains an @ SOMEWHERE other than the last character (.+@.+, maybe), and then send a validation e-mail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pattern is super useful, but not for type=email, which guarantees syntax check already. Use it with type=text for special fields like serial numbers, SKUs, credit card numbers (for which type=number is not appropriate).

dns-prefetch and prerender are not "HTML5". They're experimental/proposals from couple of browser vendors.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there any reason that:

      <link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//fonts.googleapis.com">

is using a protocol-relative URL, or _any_ URL at all? Since we're controlling a DNS lookup, we would only care about the FQDN.

<comment><USER8> Based on the spec ( [http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/document-metadata.html#the- link-e...](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/document-metadata.html#the-link-element) ) requiring a valid URL ( <http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/infrastructure.html#valid-url> ) it would interpret it as a relative link to a path "fonts.googleapis.com" if you didn't specify '//' to indicate it was absolute. I don't agree that the spec should make an exception when rel is "dns-prefetch" and consider all href tags to be FQDNs or similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is the dns-prefetch only useful for things that are not already linked/included on the page? (such as redirect chains... t.co links might DNS prefetch the domain of the end of the chain)

Or is the benefit that you can start the DNS resolution whilst receiving the <head>, for the JavaScript resources only included near the </body>? (being a very slight performance benefit)

Edit: And I suddenly thought... for SSL pages would dns-prefetching leak some information to an observer about the composition pf content or the linked resources on a page by grouping such DNS requests into a short burst at the same time as the SSL request?

<comment><USER10> Correct on both counts.. Pre-fetching DNS names for origins not on the page is, indeed, a nice use case - redirects are a good example. Similarly, embedding a <link rel=dns-prefetch> in the head will trigger an early DNS lookup, which _can_ , in fact, deliver big latency savings -- you would be surprised how slow DNS lookups are in practice.

Last but not least, AFAIK, I'm not aware of any logic to group DNS-prefetch hints or similar strategies when running over TLS.

<comment><USER11> I tried implementing it for my blog's pagination, but I definitely don't see the zero-second latency Google report in the video, and it doesn't seem any faster at all.

Can you tell me if it's actually working from using the pagination at the bottom of the front page, or the pagination inside the permapages: <http://pygm.us/1e9KHCYt>. (Link fixed.)

<comment><USER10> You can see if pre-rendering is being triggered in chrome://net- internals#prerendering.

See: [http://www.igvita.com/posa/high-performance-networking-in- go...](http://www.igvita.com/posa/high-performance-networking-in-google- chrome/#prerender)

And "yes": [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/0f3592b8-d72c-40f7-9bbf...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s1/sh/0f3592b8-d72c-40f7-9bbf-38a12b51c57e/6682c3f17808d1dcc1e4df04afc0bb7d)

<comment><USER11> Any idea why the prerendering fails?

<http://i.imgur.com/pxijNnq.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/QxcNIeO.png>

Thanks for the help, by the way. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On forcing PDFs to download: please don't. Most often I'd rather view it in the browser and then decide whether to save.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was just an exemple :)

<comment><USER13> Surte, but one cannot underline enough the importance of relevant and correct examples. May I suggest something like "<a href='verybiglogoftheday/' download='log-2013-12-11.txt'>"

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, look at my example (<http://jsbin.com/utugex/1/edit>), the href is pointing to an .html file, so in the normal case the browser will display the content of the page but with the download attribute the browser will be forced to download it as "myfile.pdf".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The regular expression pattern checking is pretty awesome. I'll disagree though where they say you don't need any more server side validations. You can easily remove / change the pattern value in the DOM. Which begs the question, what's the integrity of client-side testing if it cam be bypassed so easily?

<comment><USER15> anything client-side is never about security or consistency since no matter what you do, anybody can always send you any data they want.

client side validity checking is about the user experience, I mean if the user is doing something wrong you can guide them to the right direction without the need of server interaction and server interaction is always slower that one line of client side code.

<comment><USER14> Good point about user experience. Are there any tools you use specifically to test ux that isn't manual?

<comment><USER16> You can use Selenium. Second link is an example of using it within the Play Framework (scroll to the bottom of the page).

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/selenium/?redir=1> [2] [http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.1/ScalaFuncti...](http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.1/ScalaFunctionalTest)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The prefetch demo is obnoxiously misleading. If it is definitely the link you'll be loading, I doubt you will wait upwards of 7 seconds before clicking the link. In which case, it will not be 0 seconds loading. Then there is the equally likely, you were confident it was what I wanted, but you were wrong case. In which case I just downloaded a ton of garbage I didn't want. (Can't wait for ad servers to preload their assets for you...)

And this is also somewhat amusing, since if I recall firefox has boasted 0 second reloads when you hit "back" fora long time now. Does chrome support that, yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> The prefetch is an option which you can opt-out from, and i think you are mixing prefetch and prerender, just to let you know Firefox has actually supported prefetching since...wait for it... 2003.

Worth reading : [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Link_prefetching_FA...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ)

<comment><USER17> You are correct that I was using prefetch where I meant prerender.

And... I believe I stand by my complaint regarding it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> AWESOME POINTS! I spend alot of time on Html5Rocks.com and I studied Html5, but I never even heard of some of these feautres....Made a new wrinkle in my brain ;)

<comment><USER19> > I studied Html5, but I never even heard of some of these feautres

That's because they aren't "HTML5" yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This should make pagination really, really interesting. I just need to add some checks to ensure I don't force users to prefetch a huge chunk of data, of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes this is a good use case.

<comment><USER21> Must the prefetch/render tags be present at first load, or might they be added dynamically with JavaScript? Pagination is a good example, since a news site might want to load the second page of an article only after the user get so far in. Single-page sites are another good use case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that those prefetching links are just hints to the browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The RegEx input checker on the client-side is not a replacement for server- side validation. It doesn't prevent someone from sending requests to the server with bad data, so don't forget to make sure that all requests have valid data.

What it does is help the interface to be more responsive so the user doesn't have to wait for a round-trip before finding out that they forgot to put in an email address / other valid input.

</comment><comment><USER23> you can also just prefetch an image or file, say a background or large image that is on another or next page

<link rel="prefetch" href="[http://davidwalsh.name/wp- content/themes/walshbook3/images/s...](http://davidwalsh.name/wp- content/themes/walshbook3/images/sprite.png) />

from <http://davidwalsh.name/html5-prefetch>

</comment><comment><USER24> Are these all working right now in iOS/firefox/chrome/ie ?

<comment><USER25> Definitely not all. Here's support list for two of the features:

Download Attribute - <http://caniuse.com/download> Datalist - <http://caniuse.com/datalist>

<comment><USER26> It would be neat if caniuse had a widget that you could embed which would show % usage at time of reading the post, so I could know right away instead of looking each feature up.

You'd also have the advantage of the article always being relevant.

<comment><USER27> It does: just add "/embed" to the URL. E.g. <http://caniuse.com/datalist/embed>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think you still need to use "prerender" for Chrome - and "prefetch" for Firefox - for it to work.

<http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/mastering-html5-prefetching>

<http://colmjude.com/blog/html5-prefetching>

<comment><USER10> Yep. Prefetch != prendering. Prefetch only fetches the single resource, and is meant as a "post load" hint. Whereas prerendering fetches the entire page, and all of its assets.

[http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/ch10.htm...](http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000545/ch10.html#BROWSER_OPTIMIZATION)

<comment><USER28> Does prerendering execute JavaScript or only load assets?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm disappointed that DNS prefetching does not specify the record type (A, MX, TLSA etc), thus limiting utility solely to protocols that use nothing but A records.

Oversights like these subsequently constrain other developments, such as the case for basing HTTP 2 on SRV records, using DANE to authenticate certificates and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER30> another important feature: virtual file systems

1\. upload something at [http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/dnd/all_types_of_impor...](http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/dnd/all_types_of_import.html)

2\. see files list here filesystem:<http://html5-demos.appspot.com/temporary/>

3, wat?

explained here

[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/#toc-...](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/filesystem/#toc- filesystemurls)

as someone who worked with HTML5 FS API before, I can tell you its async API design ins PITA to write with.

</comment><comment><USER31> Would be nice to have a small table showing which browsers/versions support each of these features ..

</comment><comment><USER32> What I would like to know is if you made that scrolling time-left thing, it looks neat.

<comment><USER33> this was immediately distracting to me and annoyed me very fast. Maybe it's because I'm reading on a mobile device and "x mins remaining" took up ~1/4 of my screen every time I scrolled. What value exactly does it add? It's likely to be wrong, and just got in my way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, i'll try fix this :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Datalist is really awesome. Autocomplete with no CSS or JS? sounds good to me.

<comment><USER34> While it is nice to have, datalists are currently lacking in common functionality and are no real substitute for fully featured autocompletes. For example, datalist only matches the beginning of the values. Typing "soft" into a datalist will not match "Microsoft".

There are some other limitations discussed here: <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dn133614.aspx>

<comment><USER35> Hugh's point is incredibly important. You don't really want one hundred thousand <option> elements in your DOM as your "auto-complete" solution.

To be honest, datalists are pretty worthless for every situation where I've needed to implement auto-complete functionality in projects, simply because the universe of possible entries has been always been huge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Very useful list. Will try it and report, Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> Your are welcome :)</comment></comment>