Microsoft adds RIM to its anti-Google axis - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/08/microsoft_adds_rim_to_its_anti_google_axis/

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering: is Microsoft that has this kind of corporate necrophilia - <USER2> urge to associate with dying companies, or dying companies that have an urge to associate with Microsoft, seeking some, any, leverage they can use to survive?

<comment><USER3> I believe you're thinking of the nokia deal (nokia seems to be on a bad path, but the same was true of apple some years ago), but apart from that occasion, what are other dying companies that associated with microsoft ?

EDIT: I am honestly wondering, it's not meant as a provoking question :)

<comment><USER4> I assume he's referring to Nokia and RIM itself. This article was on HN last week: <http://www.itworld.com/mobile-wireless/160601/rip-rim>

<comment><USER5> Those numbers are bleak. I think it has more to do with "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." than with any sort of corporate respect.

It's really more about the freemium vs direct payment models competing with each other. Though I would say the device makers and application developers have already chosen which is why Microsoft is suing easy targets like Barnes and Noble to give other vendors pause.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chinese police use facial recognition tech to arrest suspect at a pop concert - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-43751276 <comment><USER2> I have a friend who is a private investigator. He mostly films people committing insurance fraud. His stories are amazing. My favorite was a guy who was supposedly not able to walk, but my friend had stalked the guys facebook, and saw that he was planning on attending this festival with thousands of people. Probably lots of walking. The trick was finding the guy. So he went to the parking lot and quickly tracked down the guy's car (before he was a PI, he repossessed cars, he's a pro at finding cars). After that, he went to the info desk and told them the guys car's lights were on. They made a quick announcement, and he went back to the parking lot to watch. Dutifully his target came back, looked, shrugged his shoulders, and then went back. My friend spent the rest of the night filming the guy walking, jumping, having a good time.

He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\

<comment><USER3> Interesting story and his method is effective. However it is not efficient, he can only track one guy a day, possibly a week.

<comment><USER4> His methods are efficient under the constraint of "not resorting to mass surveillance". I'd feel better if that constraint continued to exist.

<comment><USER5> I think that's the point they're trying to make.

It's already easy to track someone down but it requires manpower, which limits the scope of tracking and requires the tracker to have a real motivation.

What's scary about mass surveillance is tracking of anyone and everyone for any reason at any time with very little required effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The bigger question is why are China advertising this

1) Was the man actually caught by someone acting undercover and they want to protect the agent's identity with plausable deniability

2) Does the system not actually work very well (say a 1 in 100k hit rate), but they want people to think that if they are wanted, they can't hide, so they'll either turn themselves in, or be less likely to do the (unspecified) crime in the first place

3) Is there pressure that this project is overrunning/overbudget and they need a PR win to keep those higher up in the government happy

<comment><USER6> Or, you know, 4) the project works very well, and they want to advertise it and instill some fear in people...

<comment><USER7> And/or sell the system. Plenty of regimes out there that would love this capability.

<comment><USER8> That would be my guess. It was probably expensive so they are looking to sell it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great. New ammunition for homeland security departments around the world and even better news for contractors.

On a side note: Now I had to research who Jacky Cheung (the artist in said concert) is and was not disappointed:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrfp1DKyhKw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrfp1DKyhKw)

Three hours of Broadway style pop concert. Fascinating.

<comment><USER10> I followed that YouTube link and currently skimming the performance. This is a hell of a concert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's only a matter of time before someone invents glasses, masks, hats, or devices that are specifically designed to throw off these systems. Then the surveillance state will up the game by referencing other data - height, shoe type, clothing preferences, activated mobile phones, association with other known people ...

<comment><USER12> That's the geek attitude here, thinking it's a technical problem. But it's a human one, and no amount of smartness will fix it.

If you have a surveillance state, it will not "will up the game by referencing other data". It will simply make the gears illegal, and the price to pay harsh. Now you won't dare wearing them and if you do, you are guilty even if you are not a criminal, and tagging yourself as such, making it easier for the police to find you.

<comment><USER13> If China doesn't have the resources to stop all actual crime, they certainly don't have the resources to stop people from wearing makeup, sunglasses or hats.

<comment><USER14> Depends how many people are avoiding facial recognition.

A large railway station can have 15 to 100 million passenger entries per year [1]. That means if 0.1% of people hide from facial recognition, cops at such stations could arrest 40-270 people per day. And with a suspect arrested, a photo showing them in disguise, and a police witness, it's an open-and-shut case.

That's way more cases closed per cop-hour than investigating complex crimes like burglary, murder or rape. Just what you want, if your police chief is judged on their clean-up/arrest rates.

And if order of fewer people than that are avoiding facial recognition? Then you've got a surveillance state.

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

<comment><USER13> You don't need a disguise. You just need some accessories or make up to throw off the neural network. Humans are still much better at facial recognition than computers, but even they can get thrown off by make up. There's no way to tell if someone is intentionally trying to avoid facial recognition or regularly wear makeup or sunglasses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a feeling that this technology will do to crime what fingerprinting did back in the days.

Lots of crime being recorded on camera and data saved but we do not yet have the ability to process that information. Soon though, a lot of people are going to be arrested 10-20 years later for crimes that they never imagined they could be caught for.

<comment><USER16> Doubt it. At least in the US, cctv sucks and doesn't have a whole lot of coverage.

<comment><USER17> What it good cctv? Full coverage at good resolution? Or none?

<comment><USER16> sounds like a trick question

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure why this is news.

This is happening already in a lot of countries.

For example in The Netherlands we have facial recognition in street cars so they can detect people who have a public transport ban. Since 2013.

<comment><USER19> Read carefully to identify the source: _Police said the 31-year-old, who was wanted for "economic crimes", was "shocked" when he was caught._

The source was Chinese police. So, in essence, this is propaganda, not news.

 _Propaganda: information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented_

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps the time is right to start a business that sells facial plastic surgery on a subscription model.

<comment> maze-le Appearantly, makeup and hairstyle is sufficient... for now.

[0]: [https://cvdazzle.com/](https://cvdazzle.com/)

<comment><USER21> *Was sufficient in 2010

<comment> gm-conspiracy Does this no longer work?

<comment><USER22> Not really, no. Unless a good portion of society chooses to walk around like a Picasso all the time, those makeups just help identify.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Question that struck me immediately after reading this headline: As someone in his 20's who splits time living between western Europe and the US, just how plausible is my fear of seeing something like this either here or in my home country in my lifetime?

<comment><USER22> I am at ISC West right now, a global security conference held in Vegas every year. I write FR and my company's software is in over a half dozen partner booths, as well as our tech is the FR core for several others. Due to the recent gun violence at Parkland, in Vegas, and on and on we are talking with many, many school districts, large retail chains, city officials, private and public parks, and reps of high net worth families who want FR systems up and operating yesterday. You're gonna see FR blanket the United States. It has already started.

<comment><USER24> How good would you say the tech is? E.g., if Facebook put cameras outside a football stadium with 60k people, how many people would they correctly recognize? And how many false positives would be generated?

I ask because I'm wondering how much China's announcement here is a stunt that goes well beyond the state of the art.

<comment><USER22> The tech is there, it works. The current hurdle is getting understanding between the practical limitations of modern computers, the resolutions and image characteristics of various cameras. Trying to use a 2K or 4K video stream simply overwhelms the current generation of processors in the systems 'normal' organizations can afford. Plus those video streams are often up- scaled and are lower resolution in their hardware, very wide angled, and placed poorly for FR. Basically, the tech is there, but the practical aspects of using FR with typical financial and logistical constraints is not there yet. This practical aspect is just the normal learning curve.

Facebook's FR is nowhere but FB, forget it. There is a range of false positive rates, depending upon how an FR system is employed. The best resource for the state of the art is probably this: [https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2017/NIST.IR.8173.pdf](https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2017/NIST.IR.8173.pdf) (FYI, my work is vendor "L")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When every second of your life is recorded and might have to be accounted for -- what a burden.

And we already know how hard it can be, at times, to explain a moment of strange-looking but innocent behavior to police.

All the more so if you are an unfavored, targeted minority (of whatever form: Race, class, intellect, psychology...).

It's not just the recording. It's what people in power (of various sorts) may do with it.

You know how you don't like it when a stranger in your vicinity seems to take an unusual interest in you?

This. All the time.

Discretion gets driven out of the equation, when there's a permanent record that anyone might use, at any time, rather than a momentary decision that passes, by those in one's presence.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is almost certainly a silly question, but if I can't ask here, then who else will know?

Is there any methods out there which would let me fry surveillance cameras? EMP is a thing, but I have no idea of how that works. Can I fit an EMP into my pocket or do I need to drive a Truck worth of equipment? Is there some laser I could use to damage the lens or digital "eye" in the camera for good?

I am not a criminal, my life isn't that exciting, but I was wondering what tools are out there to combat surveillance cameras?

<comment><USER27> Spray-paint, maybe?

<comment><USER28> Paintball markers are likely a better choice, but very high cameras will still be out of reach. And then there is the issue of finding the cameras, but something like [http://www.jet-protect.com/CS300Klanding.html](http://www.jet- protect.com/CS300Klanding.html) can help...

<comment><USER26> I am also interested, it looks a cool machine but seems secretive. looks like stage lighting laser.

<comment><USER28> Public documentation is hard to impossible to find.

It was discussed on Bruce Schneier's blog, on which the topic of camera detection comes back regularly.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20100611052640/http://nexgadget....](https://web.archive.org/web/20100611052640/http://nexgadget.com/2010/03/22/jetprotect- cs300k-long-range-counter-surveillance-camera/) [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/detecting_bei...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/detecting_being.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder whether these systems do work when people wear masks to protect themselves against smog.

</comment><comment><USER30> The bigger question is when will the rest of the world admit it uses the same tech.

</comment><comment><USER31> I hope everyone will start wearing masks soon :( these news are really unsettling

<comment><USER32> It won't matter because we'll all spend our time in the virtual (VR) world instead.

Civilization's about to get a whoooole lot more sci-fi!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Controversial and likely to be downvoted but what's the problem here? Surely it's good that a law breaker has been caught? If you're in China, you play by their rules, no?

<comment><USER34> _what 's the problem here?_

This sort of automated policing forces people to live in fear. Having to live by the letter of the law makes society paranoid, and that's distinctly unhealthy. It makes it _very_ easy for a corrupt government to extend their control over the people too. And lastly, _everyone_ breaks the law in minor ways. You might speed in your car by a couple of mph, or jaywalk once in the wrong place, or drop some litter in a controlled area. Just imagine living in the knowledge that a mistake like that _will_ be caught, and you _will_ be arrested for it (and maybe lose your job and livelihood because of that). This is definitely a bad thing.

<comment><USER33> I mean, I live in fear now that going slightly over the speed limit I'll be caught. You never know if the police are nearby, so in public you live by the letter of the law. I don't understand how this changes that is all :)

<comment><USER35> Are you saying that you can not realize the idea that a full enforcement capacity of the law will change people's relationship to law enforcement or do you implicitly say that tsuch potential change is nothing to worry about?

Honest question as the first is just a capacity problem and the second (I guess) a moral argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Here is a relevant DEF CON talk that I found very interesting:

Surveillance Capitalism Will Continue til Morale Improves ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn5VN72ZjDE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn5VN72ZjDE))

</comment><comment><USER37> Couldn't they have written a better headline? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_(term)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman_\(term\))

<comment><USER6> > _Although the term has no negative connotations in older dictionaries,[1][2] > and the usage of such parallel compound terms as Englishman, Frenchman and > Irishman[3] remain unobjectionable,[4] the term Chinaman is noted as > offensive by modern dictionaries and is no longer the preferred > nomenclature_

In other words, BS creating an issue when there's none. Chinaman is fine.

<comment><USER38> Yes, we should also start calling black people a term they used to be called because it used to be okay. Why is it that some people lack the miniscule amount of decency required to respect a person's or group's preferences on what they like to be called? What kind of insignificant life does someone have to lead to have the time or energy to question a small change in vocabulary that relates to respecting another's preferences?

<comment><USER6> > _Yes, we should also start calling black people a term they used to be > called because it used to be okay._

Actually we're not all US-based here, and we don't have any historical baggage with our black people like that.

Plus, instead of worrying about words, maybe people should focus on stopping cop shootings, mass incarcerations, red-lining and other, non-trivial matters, affecting black people?

And yes, one does preclude the other. One is hypocritical theater, the other is actual change -- opportunity costs and all.

> _What kind of insignificant life does someone have to lead to have the time > or energy to question a small change in vocabulary that relates to > respecting another 's preferences?_

There was no "respecting another's preferences". It was mostly due to people having insignificant lives (sic) and compensating by being worried about words on behalf of another. Nobody actually asked the Chinese...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Surely, "Chinese man" and not "China man". The latter sounds close to chinaman which I think these days would be considered derogatory.

<comment><USER40> I think it's no different to eg Florida man...

<comment><USER41> "Is there a term besides "Mexican" that you prefer? Something less offensive?" \-- Michael Scott

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> the bbc publishing an article with "China man" in it's title, meant to identify someone of Chinese origin just made my day. Stay classy, bcc and thanks for the grin

</comment><comment><USER43> Shouldn't the title be "Chinese man"

</comment><comment><USER44> The fact that the comment section isn't littered with reference to "The Big Lebowski" says a lot about HN. Much of it is very good -- serious discussion undiluted by the tempting instant gratification of easy shots.

I still miss _some_ humor, but maybe it isn't worth it. Maybe its _civilization ou barbarie_ , seriousness or eternal september.</comment>


It is better than Balsamiq - <AUTHOR> http://ninjamock.com Just found a pretty cool tool for iPhone UI prototyping. <comment><USER2> This is the simplest tool I have ever used!

<comment><USER3> The site looks nice - but the three new accounts with empty praise comments here aren't making your case better.</comment></comment>


Ello: You are not a product. - <AUTHOR> http://ello.co <comment><USER2>
      You never have to pay anything, and you can keep using
      Ello forever, for free. By choosing to buy a feature now
      and then for a very small amount of money you support
      our work and help us make Ello better and better.

This is way too generous and altruistic to be practical. They obviously mean well, but this is effectively a donation-based model and it very rarely works in practice.

What I think they should do is to offer personal accounts for free and charge for enterprise presence. I know a handful of people who use Facebook and Twitter in read-only mode and who follow just the companies. They effectively use social networks as a news feed of product updates, coupons, deals, discounts, etc. Moreover, they explicitly seek out the companies and follow them. If you think about it, it's an insane arrangement - you have people opting in to hear to what you have to say. This is valuable, this is something worth paying for _and_ it keeps the network free for the individuals.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yesterday my Facebook newsfeed blew up with non-tech friends posting about Ello. No-one is signing up because it works better, they just all want out of Facebook.

I don't know if Ello will take off, but there is definitely a massive demand for "anything but Facebook".

<comment><USER4> And how many are still using Facebook today?

<comment><USER5> All of them, minus that one guy who likes to be contrarian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sorry, but the UI is so confusing and clunky, it does not appeal to me. Plus, if we don't want ads, there's alpha.app.net - scalable, has a powerful API, actively developed, and embraced by many of us already. They just need to rebrand as this whole subdomain/alpha thing bothers.

<comment><USER7> Eh, [http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the- union/](http://blog.app.net/2014/05/06/app-net-state-of-the-union/)

I'm not sure app.net can be considered a viable long term solution.

<comment><USER8> It would be if people signed up for it and used it. What does Ello offer than App.net doesn't?

<comment><USER6> Same would apply to Ello. If not enough people buy the premium features, it will collapse. Ads on websites are not because developers want to overwhelm people with ads and sell data, it's to keep the lights on when most users just want a free ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd prefer to go with a distributed social network, of which there are many ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_prot...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking)), but none seems to have developed a great deal of traction.

<comment> mkr-hn They'll continue to not gain traction until someone tries to figure out why. I ran into roadblocks trying to interact with people on different sites. I'm not sure exactly how to overcome them, but I guess it's something like an OpenID sign-in. I never bothered since I had other networks to try out.

This is probably why ello is gaining traction where app.net and similar didn't. You make an account, and there's no counterintuitive steps--relative to dominant social networks--to connecting with other people.

<comment><USER4> The reason why is because most people don't want another social network. The problem that Diaspora, app.net and Ello are trying to solve is not actually seen as a problem by most people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Broken in Opera 12, astonishingly badly. Literally no way to contact anyone of their team in any way (email, twitter) but through ello itself.

Edit: It was pointed out that there is an email adress, though a very skillfully hidden one.

<comment><USER11> On Chrome, the back button wouldn't take me back here to make this comment - it kept switching between the first two items in their list.

<comment><USER12> Same here. Looks like their javascript is adding a lot of history entries so the fastest way to get back is to hold down the back button so you see the entire history list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love it how so many websites with terrible UI proudly proclaim that they are 'beautiful'.

<comment><USER8> It's like a good-looking person with a terrible personality. Beautiful, but you wouldn't want to live with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ugh... just scrolling through that page adds TON of baggage in the browser history. So much for the back button.

If I didn't click a link or a button, don't add things to history. Please.

<comment><USER15> Back buttons? Where ello is going we don't need back buttons.

<comment><USER16> My favourite comment ever on HN :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Classic. It is just free! Only charging (once) to add "special features". Curious what their cost projections are that they think this will work...

<comment> mkr-hn How much of the cost of a Facebook or Twitter is because of resource-heavy data mining? Ello doesn't have much data to mine beyond what you'd find in a typical early 2000s perl guestbook script.

<comment><USER17> Storage and bandwidth is still a huge cost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ello looks like it raised a seed round from Fresh Tracks Capital in Vermont:

"Ello.co is a beautiful, simple & transparent ad-free social network. Ello is designed with the end user in mind, not advertisers, promising "You are not a product". The site is a collaboration between Paul Budnitz, the graphic design lab Berger & Föhr, and the technologists at Mode Set."

[http://www.freshtrackscap.com/fund-iii- companies/Ello](http://www.freshtrackscap.com/fund-iii-companies/Ello)

Does anyone know any more about Fresh Tracks?

<comment><USER19> It looks to be a small VC firm founded in Vermont. I don't recognize the players off-hand but I do recognize the organizations they're affiliated with.

Vermont has a very small, active (activist, even) business community...they tend to like to grow things at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you scroll down the page and then hit the back button in the browser; you're in an infinite loop on the ello.co website.

Highly annoying is an understatement.

</comment><comment><USER21> It is just free., but what is it? Here:

> Ello is a simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small > group of artists and designers.

<comment> mkr-hn Someone compared it to Livejournal. I never used it, but no one complained about the comparison, so it might be apt.

<comment><USER22> Livejournal/Tumblr sounds right to me. I don't see how this will be sustainable though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> * This only applies until Facebook buys us for $5 billion. After that all bets are off, and you _may_ become the product again.

</comment><comment><USER24> I automatically reject everything that needs an invitation to join, no offence.

<comment> mkr-hn They gave me ample invites, but I'm limiting them to the few friends I think would be interested. And my circle isn't exactly elite or affluent.

<comment><USER24> The invite model worked well with GMail, because once you joined to it you could contact any one, after all, is just mail.

But with social networks it doesn't work the same, If you need to send invites, explain to them what is axactly an invite, then explain to them how to send invite if they want to tell their friends, it is to much work just to join.

<comment> mkr-hn The number of Facebook app invites I get daily tells me the average social network user understands the concept of invites. It's another step to get them to sign up for a social network, but I've already had people asking me for invites, and they follow through to the signup.

<comment><USER24> In your case, but in mine, my circle of friends are just computer casual users, and Facebook invites are not mandatory to join, you can go to www.facebook.com and join there, no invite required, you can tell your Friends to go there and join and not to "hey, waith till I send you an invite", and that's another issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ok, i see the appeal. A social network that promises to be different than facebook can reach quite some people, and that will grow every time there is something perceived as being wrong with facebook.

On the other hand, they also claim to be beautiful. And I really don't think so. It is different, that makes it nice. But black on grey with grey typewriter font, retro-boxes and favicon-sized avatar images mixed with scroll-indicators from the latest trend - that is a mess.

But at least they are not a 0815-modern website, designwise, maybe they can reach somethin nice with the approach.

</comment><comment><USER26> Curious to know the business model. How do they sustain?

<comment><USER27> From Ello's about page,

"Ello is completely free to use.

We occasionally offer special features to our users. If we create a special feature that you really like, you may choose to support Ello by paying a very small amount of money to add that feature to your Ello account.

You never have to pay anything, and you can keep using Ello forever, for free. By choosing to buy a feature now and then for a very small amount of money you support our work and help us make Ello better and better."

[https://ello.co/wtf/post/about-ello](https://ello.co/wtf/post/about-ello)

Edit: Whether or not that will actually sustain them, I suppose we'll find out.

<comment><USER28> Yeah. That's not really a business model though, more of a pipe dream. You cannot support a service with one-time "very small" optional charges. Unless, of course, you start to twist users arms, in which case these charges stop being optional.

<comment><USER29> $5 will buy a full month of server time on a modern cloud host. I imagine that if they can extract that much out of a user, they can make it go a very long way. This is especially true if the optional charges include things that consume large amounts of disk or bandwidth (video/pictures and associated long-term retention).

<comment><USER30> $5 a month out of each and every user? Good luck with that - it would put them over Google and MASSIVELY beyond Twitter and Facebook (both in single figures annually).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ad free and with no data mining like facebook and twitter used to be?

Things start well, but things change, and sadly I see no reason why history won't repeat itself. Goodwill doesn't pay for hosting or bandwidth and most social network users simply aren't willing to pay enough out of their own pocket, particularly not when there are free alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER31> What makes me bullish on ello is that it seems like there is an incredible team behind it.

      - Paul Bundtz - Founder of Kidrobot
      - Berger and Fohr - Art Design Studio
      - Mode Set - Agile Software Consultancy

All these representatives would be successful on their own. It seems like they're combing forces for something BIG

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't know how to say this.

DO NOT VISIT. It hijacks your back button and I had to close the tab. chrome on mac

<comment><USER33> I can confirm its on Firefox too. Having freedom to go back is one of the important things about a user interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I remember a time, back in my QuakeWorld addict days, when I use to read .plan file updates.

Are there any technical reasons why the old finger / .plan system couldn't be revived to replace facebook, twitter, etc, with an open and simple social network?

<comment><USER35> > Are there any technical reasons why the old finger / .plan system couldn't > be revived to replace facebook, twitter, etc, with an open and simple social > network?

People have tried that and failed. The technical reason appears to be "UI/UX/average person/etc. issues", whatever you want to call them these days. Average social network users seem to want a unified system which distributed platforms have a hard time providing.

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

<comment><USER36> Unified system.... distributed platform... _cough_ blockchain _cough_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Invite only. The first profile I see on their homepage is [https://ello.co/bitchesonbicycles](https://ello.co/bitchesonbicycles) with 2392 followers. I guess I don't want to be invited.

<comment><USER38> Please edit that link and put NSFW tags. Thanks.

<comment><USER37> It seems I can't edit it. Sorry, it didn't cross my mind (and the link text is clear enough for those that would otherwise need the NSFW tag).

<comment><USER38> I expected women on bikes based on the link, but the nudity in the second photo was definitely not expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I've been wondering about alternatives to Twitter as Twitter slowly circles the shit-drain as they try to copy Facebook. Will wait and see about Ello.

Have to say, websites with egregious javascript can be so annoying.

</comment><comment><USER40> Broken on my work pc. Guess I can't use it at work... guess I can be productive instead.

Not sure how they can stay in business if they don't charge and they don't advertise.

</comment><comment><USER41> While searching for new social networks, I came across an app called Groopie. I'm still trying to figure out how to use it but you can record videos with your friends. You ping them to record. After they are done recording, their footage will get uploaded to your phone in seconds, then you can edit and blend the two to create one video. Seems like they are on to something!

</comment><comment><USER42> Navigation kills the back button :-(</comment>


Ask HN: Would you trust your real work to Google if they can just lock you out? - <AUTHOR> This spate of people being locked out of their Google Docs is disturbing.  I have now transferred all my work out of it.  I can't afford to be stopped willy-nilly just because they think my journalistic work might not agree with their views. <comment><USER2> I would never trust any IP or business docs to a third party storage service. And definitely code including secrets would not be stored on things like github, codecommit, etc. Have known too many corporate executives and learned no one can be trusted. People used to trust sourceforge at one point. If there is any doubt about the security or confidentiality of your work...there is no doubt.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sure, it's their software/servers/drive space. Your question is framed just to attract people who have the same view as you though.

Google isn't a government. They aren't obligated to recognize my right to free speech, and they don't have to hold files they don't want to.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll continue to use Google Drive as a backup, of course. Thankfully, all my computers have LibreOffice.

In the end, I'll just make sure I have multiple copies of all the current files. That's not a bad thing.

PTL I don't have a Chromebook. Those guys could be royally screwed.

</comment><comment><USER4> I personally think, it is always a bad idea to put important IP/Knowledge(or your complete business) into the hands of other Companies/People. You play in their Garden and if they decide to "alter" the agremeent, than you have to deal with it.

<comment><USER5> Make sense of course but it can be difficult from a practical sense, not so much for Google Docs but for things like AWS/Azure. Reputation definitely matter here, I trust Amazon and Microsoft more than Google for sure when it comes to suddenly pulling the plug on services people are using.

<comment><USER4> Infrastructure is a bit different, because it is interchangeable and your IP isn't. It make sense to use IT-Services and Hosting, but i think there are also many cases when a companie should think about the cost of cloud(instead of easy and fast setup - pinterest and many others burned high amount of capital ) or a move to another Hosting/Cloud service(better price or stop paying a rival - netflix and amazon aws).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Multiple backups, local, remote-same-nation and remote-on-another-continent are essential for any data that is worth preserving.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google, the PayPal of data. _Hope you don 't need it when we say you can't have it!_</comment>


YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection - <AUTHOR> https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/ <comment><USER2> Interesting this is trending now. We have actually just recently released an improved version of YoloV3 (called G-Darknet) [https://github.com/generalized- iou/g-darknet](https://github.com/generalized-iou/g-darknet), using GIoU as a loss, which is described here: [https://giou.stanford.edu](https://giou.stanford.edu)

Also notable in G-Darknet are some tools useful for training (called darkboard), see [https://github.com/generalized- iou/g-darknet/tree/master/dar...](https://github.com/generalized- iou/g-darknet/tree/master/darkboard#setup)

<comment> w-m Heads up: the boxes are drawn in the wrong places using Firefox 66 on Ubuntu 18.04. [https://imgur.com/a/4d51spv](https://imgur.com/a/4d51spv)

A bit confusing as the drawn boxes don't match the text. Works with Chromium though.

<comment><USER2> Thx, I'll check that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Suprised to see this here since YOLO has been out for a while now. Shameless plug, I wrote an article on how to use use transfer learning on your custom dataset with the pretrained weights [1]. One of the downside of YOLO is that it uses his own deep learning library darknet. I find that the Tensorflow port dark flow easier to use but it haven't seen a v3 port yet.

[1] [https://www.powu3.com/ml/yolo/](https://www.powu3.com/ml/yolo/)

<comment><USER4> There is a pytorch port from Ultralytics ([https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov3](https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov3)). Nobody seems to have figured out how to achieve the training performance of darknet though, which is entirely uncommented C. The source is all there, but the loss function changed between v2 and v3, and its not documented in the paper. I think it's been fixed in that pytorch port now though. The only frustrating thing is that every commit in the repo is called update...

Alternatively... you can train in darknet and then run inference in another framework of choice.

Also shameless plug: I wrote an annotation tool which is designed to output darknet formatted labels: [https://github.com/jveitchmichaelis/deeplabel](https://github.com/jveitchmichaelis/deeplabel)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I don't remember where I read it but it took them a couple weeks to train the model from scratch. I tried training my own weights by scratch it was practically impossible using a Tesla K80. But it's pleasantly surprising how good the transfer learning results are on a custom data set. You can get some "state of the art" results when you train for a couple hours. It's really impressive how he came up with YOLO and wrote his own deep learning library from scratch.

Thank you for the links! I'm going to check both out. I want to see if the PyTorch port works with the new deployment feature from 1.0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The YOLOv3 paper is pretty delightful: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02767.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02767.pdf)

<comment><USER6> It's honest, instead of the inflated bs you usually have to spin around your half working experiments.

<comment><USER7> For another example of such honesty, see the paper "HonestNN: An Honest Neural Network 'Accelerator'", from the SIGBOVIK 2019 proceedings: [http://sigbovik.org/2019/proceedings.pdf#page=107](http://sigbovik.org/2019/proceedings.pdf#page=107). I love that paper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> YOLO, no! [https://i.imgur.com/R1RZ2N0.png](https://i.imgur.com/R1RZ2N0.png)

Jokes aside, we need better temporal consistency, especially when we start arming AI. citizen -> citizen -> citizen -> armed insurgent

<comment><USER9> With that particular example, a citizen could very well also be an armed insurgent. Whether that citizen/insurgent is an ally or neutral or enemy is the distinction worth solving (even if it's significantly harder for an AI).

Of course, that matters far less when Skynet decides that every human is a hostile armed insurgent...

<comment><USER10> I am assuming that would be solved by having the AI also take in inputs of where your troops and allies are located. Perhaps with something like the Blue Force Tracker [0].

One of the first priorities of an operation is not knowing where your enemy is, but where you are.

0: [https://www.viasat.com/products/blue-force- tracking-2](https://www.viasat.com/products/blue-force-tracking-2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having worked with YOLO, I really recommend this intro: [https://blog.paperspace.com/how-to-implement-a-yolo- object-d...](https://blog.paperspace.com/how-to-implement-a-yolo-object- detector-in-pytorch/). And in general, YOLO is performant and at the same time, it has a simpler architecture than the Fast(er) R-CNN family.

And in general, due to its head, it is WAY more readable in PyTorch than in TensorFlow; to the point, I use it as an example in Keras vs PyTorch example [https://deepsense.ai/keras-or-pytorch/](https://deepsense.ai/keras-or- pytorch/) (was here at some point).

</comment><comment><USER12> It still seems to be using only the single frame, without past/present context. E.g. a dog sometimes is recognized as teddy bear for a split second.

Is there any "continuous" models for that? Sounds like a simple bayesian post- processing would do a great deal (e.g. recording the probability of dogs mutating to teddy bears as very low).

<comment><USER13> YOLO stands for "You Only Look Once" so I don't think this will ever become "continuous"

<comment><USER14> AFAIK, the 'Look Once' part refers to other systems that re-ran a section of the frame at a time through an object detector, resulting in a lot of reprocessing.

You could still look only once, but have that look include multiple sequential frames. Or do something like an LSTM of frames.

<comment><USER13> Good point. I hadn't considered this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf](https://pjreddie.com/media/files/papers/YOLOv3.pdf)

Sounds to good to be true. Also reads like that. :) A gem from this paper:

 _But maybe a better question is: "What are we going todo with these detectors now that we have them?" A lot ofthe people doing this research are at Google and Facebook.I guess at least we know the technology is in good handsand definitely won't be used to harvest your personal infor-mation and sell it to.... wait, you're saying that's exactlywhat it will be used for?? Oh.Well the other people heavily funding vision research arethe military and they've never done anything horrible likekilling lots of people with new technology oh wait....._ 1

 _1 The author is funded by the Office of Naval Research and Google._

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't really understand how this is any different from Overfeat or SSD...

<comment><USER17> YOLO is a combination of backend encoder and head. Backend (Darknet) is unique to YOLO, that would be the main difference with SSD, if I'm not mistaken.

<comment><USER18> You might want to check the username of who you're relying to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> YOLO is a very good and approachable object detection technique. I recently re-read the paper for the original YOLO [1] from 2015 and loved the apparent simplicity of this technique.

As a shameless plug, I wrote an intuitive guide to understanding SSD (Single Shot Detector), another popular object detection technique: [https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-ssd-multibox- re...](https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-ssd-multibox-real-time- object-detection-in-deep-learning-495ef744fab)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02640](https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02640)

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems that the commercialized version of this technology is here: [https://www.xnor.ai/technology/](https://www.xnor.ai/technology/).

 _Xnor 's founding team developed YOLO, a leading open source object detection model used in real world applications. We use a proprietary, high performance, binarized version of YOLO in our models for enterprise customers._

Too good to be true? Seems that they're running YOLO on conventional multi- core CPUs. On ARM even.

</comment><comment><USER21> This guy gave a talk at my university a few weeks ago. He did some live demonstrations and I was really impressed. With a video camera he did live detection in the room and was classifying dozens of objects. Like the screen was filled with identification boxes. He also did a demo where he used his cell phone. Not as many classifications, but still about a dozen.

Everyone was pretty impressed. I'm always impressed when I see live demos go (almost) flawlessly.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's hilarious the main video detects a dromedary as three cows at 3:26

</comment><comment><USER23> If I recall correctly, Andrew Ng covers this in his CNN course[0] and implementing it is one of the exercises.

[0] [https://www.coursera.org/learn/convolutional-neural- networks](https://www.coursera.org/learn/convolutional-neural-networks)

</comment><comment><USER24> Whats the best route to deploy a python YOLO system to a desktop app? E.g. have .zip file you extract, install, then run - everything is included , tensorflow/keras libs ... no need for user to setup envronment with conda yadda yadda

<comment><USER25> At the risk of incurring HN's wrath: Docker is an option. Another is to use C/C++ instead of Python and statically link it. Either way, if you want to use the GPU you'll have a world of pain with NVidia stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can we also get the _orientation_ of each detected object?

<comment><USER27> With some changes - yes. I did this in my experimental project: [https://github.com/indutny/resistenz/blob/master/python/mode...](https://github.com/indutny/resistenz/blob/master/python/model.py#L102-L106)

The idea is to add an extra 2 params to the output of each classifier cell. Then do L2 normalization on them ( [https://github.com/indutny/resistenz/blob/master/python/mode...](https://github.com/indutny/resistenz/blob/master/python/model.py#L268) ) and treat them as a cosine/sine pair.

The loss in this case would be the Euclidean distance between the actual and predicted pairs, which is equal to "2 * (1 - cos(x-y))".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I cannot get YOLO to detect at 30fps, even on gpu machines. This was true when I tried keras yolo as well as following the instructions for c compilation on this page.

<comment><USER29> 720p webcam with cuda is about 90 for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Awesome stuff!

I understand the benefits (as mentioned); would be interesting to know what disadvantages this has compared to the classifier type detection methods?

</comment><comment><USER31> Great project, but pretty old now.

<comment><USER4> Yolov3 is about a year old and is still state of the art for all meaningful purposes. It's fast and works well. You might get "better" results with a Faster RCNN variant, but it's slow and the difference will likely be imperceptible. Using map50 as pjreddie points out, isn't a great metric for object detection.

<comment><USER32> Interestingly in our production systems yolo object detection speed was much faster and accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> those are some awesome humped horses and cows. The police brutality scene was cool also.

</comment><comment><USER34> Isn't this from 1 year ago?

</comment><comment><USER35> Comedy option: every detected object is labeled with the word "noumena"</comment>


Wrangling Grafana and InfluxDB into a Docker Image - <AUTHOR> http://simonjbeaumont.com/posts/docker-dashboard <comment><USER2> InfluxDB up until the recent 0.10 version was quite brittle, sometimes it would crash or leak - other times it would appear to be up but no new points would be written to it (or one of the databases you created in it).

Anyway, Grafana v2.6 and InfluxDB v0.10 seem like a good stable combo that works well together. And both are a simple yum install away.

Docker doesn't get you anything in this instance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was a bit disappointed with the upgrade methods for InfluxDB, but I've noticed the leak of the _internal DB [https://github.com/influxdata/influxdb/issues/5290](https://github.com/influxdata/influxdb/issues/5290). I'll probably upgrade soon.

The motivation to put this into an image was that other teams wanted to deploy this and they'll probably end up on the same host so I was looking for isolation of the databases (mainly to protect our team's working dashboard from other fiddlers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Dockerizing the entire stack into one single container is convenient in some regards, but goes against the Docker philosophy of one process (service) per container. Have you tried stitching this setup together with docker compose?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I definitely concede that this is a compromise on the Docker model. I say so in the post and mention using compose. At least I have all the bits playing nicely which would be the first step to splitting them all up anyway :)

<comment><USER3> Good to know compose is on your roadmap. We're guilty of bending the container dogma ourselves, mostly due to lack of time to decompose parts of our own stack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even if we remove docker from the recipe, and we think just about grafana and influxbd, I'm with the other comments:

unless it's just for a test, or for a few personal metrics... separate it.

Eventually, your metrics, sources of metrics, and dashboard users, are going to grow.

Maybe you want even different access level rules for them as soon as your organization is more than one person.

And eventually, different upgrade needs will arise (supported versions, vulnerabilities, etc) do you want your metrics down, because an XSS in your dashboard?

Not really experienced on docker, but all I've read points that this is not recommended practices...

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd tentatively suggest that this isnt the best way to dockerise.

Now, unless something has changed, there is no init inside your container, which means anything with a wait() in it will never get cleaned up.

Also, with an eye on the future its going to be a massive pain to scale.

I have grafana on a separate machine to the graphite cluster (grafana does almost no work.) apart from the actual data, the whole thing is deployable without manual intervention. (all without docker too)

I'd suggest the same for influxdb, it shards by default....

<comment><AUTHOR> You're probably right. To be honest, just an opportunity to play around with Docker and make it easier to duplicate for others in our team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have you considered running individual containers with supervisord? It's init system agnostic, and works pretty great. Here's a pastebin to get you started. [http://pastebin.com/4a9wRfBJ](http://pastebin.com/4a9wRfBJ) included are some hooks for systemd journald.

<comment><AUTHOR> @LinuXY thanks for this. Looks pretty useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would like to know whether you believe that there is any possibility of create SCADA systems using InfluxData platform. I was looking for examples in Google but I found only a pair of websites. Nothing serious.</comment>


Show HN: Smart Kitchen: A Multi-Modal AR System - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3d4lqfXCYjncVZIMjRWdDV2ZHM/view?usp=sharing <comment><AUTHOR> Co-author here! This is a draft of my thesis AR project at Cornell Tech, but I would love any feedback or thoughts on the utility of AR in your home/kitchen!

Here is a link to a video demo of the ARKit app!:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3d4lqfXCYjnc1ZmTXJaR2RRN28...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3d4lqfXCYjnc1ZmTXJaR2RRN28/view?usp=sharing)</comment>


Going Nowhere Really Fast, or How Computers Only Come in Two Speeds. - <AUTHOR> http://www.loper-os.org/?p=300

<comment><USER2> I think one could make an analogy with cars. A large fraction of efficency gains have been "lost" to accessories like power windows, additional electronics in the car, etc. A lot of fuel efficency gains could be realized by selling cars with fewer options. But car makers are unlikely to want to sell those (they make more money off the options) and consumers as a whole haven't seemed to demand them.

Also, it appears this post is ~4 years old, but I think the point is still relevant. (Last year, I switched from GNOME to xfce and was quite happy with the reduction in the amount of cpu cycles going towards silly window minimization animations and the like).</comment>


Show HN: Update your app, without publishing on play store - <AUTHOR> https://www.appengagementoptimizer.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Also,

You can login with email@example.com / demouser

</comment><comment><USER2> I like the concept, how much effort will it take to integrate into my existing app. Will send the link in PM

<comment><USER3> No sockpuppet or astroturfing comments on Hacker News, please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi dang,

We are not connected to the above user. This is a project by my girlfriend and me, hence it is free as well(or at least till we can figure out a sensible business model around this).</comment></comment></comment>


Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms - <AUTHOR> http://f00li5h.pin21.com/blog/Dear-Internet:-Take-the-reset-buttons-off-your-damn-forms.html?feed=feedburner

<comment><USER2> A similar annoyance is writing a well-thought out forum post, pressing submit, and being told in some way that your session has expired.

Some sites you can go back to retrieve your post, others will just present you with a newly empty form.

<comment><USER3> I've actually been conditioned so thoroughly by flaky forum software to ctrl- a-c on every post before submit that I don't even think about it and sometimes I'm surprised when I paste later and get whacked with a giant forum post.

<comment><USER4> I also do this. Not just on forums, but on pretty much anything where I write a decent amount of text. I also use a clipboard manager in conjunction with this habit ([http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clipboard- history/id420939835...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clipboard- history/id420939835?mt=12)) that has saved my ass numerous times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even better, get rid of your forms entirely, especially long forms with all kind of questions that you really don't need the answer to. Or have fields that are ambigious and improperly validated. Or multipage forms that have no way of going back without losing your filled in data.

<comment><USER6> Specially annoying is when the "check this if you don't want to receive spam from us" checkbox is unchecked every time the form is shown again after a server-side validation error.

<comment><USER5> Oh yes, I agree. Or when you mistype the essentially human-unreadable captcha, and have to fill in half of the fields anew.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a quick User Script to get rid of them all:

<http://almostobsolete.net/noresetbuttons.html>

It should work as an extension in Chrome or with Firefox if you have Greasemonkey installed.

</comment><comment><USER8> I have a form that can be populated with records from a grid. "reset" allows the user to clear the selected record and input new data.

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't that better be served by a "new" button?

<comment><USER8> From user acceptance testing we done, that gives the impression it would create a new record from the populated data.

Edit: we use the wording "Clear" not "Reset" btw.

<comment><AUTHOR> sounds like a "Please throw away everything I just typed" button to me ...

<comment><USER8> Your replies have prompted me to rethink the logic. I'm going to add some rules to the "Clear" button:

1, Hide the button whilst no records have been clicked. 2, If a record has been clicked, clicking the button clears the form then hides itself.

Feedback appreciated.

<comment><USER10> It may be better to not hide the button, but to disable it.

Hiding buttons in response to application state confuses the user.

(Imagine the user searching the screen for the "Clear" button which he or she knows should be there ...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to think exactly the way the author did. I'd actually get agitated when I had to explain to the IA/Design departments _again_ why this was such a bad idea. I won about half the time, usually with my argument driven solely by my ego. Being vehemently against any use of it under any condition I refused to accept that there was any appropriate use for it.

Then, I actually did some research.

First, there are instances where reset buttons have a place. From Jakob Nielsen's post _Reset_ and _Cancel_ Buttons (<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000416.html>): Reset can be useful for forms that satisfy both of the following criteria:

\- the form is filled-in repeatedly by the same user

\- the data to be entered differs significantly from one use of the form to the next

For cancel buttons, my "never ever" opinion was flawed because I refused to see the reset or cancel button from the viewpoint of users unlike myself. I spend a lot of time building these things (as most of you do). I know how forms work. After actually sitting down with users that don't, and people that don't spend that much time online, I found another thing to be true: People are afraid that form data will be submitted even if you hit the back button. They want the Cancel button to ensure their data won't be collected against their will.

A point the article makes but then ignores is the button's layout & design. Layout for these buttons is key. If they have to be used, they shouldn't inputs or buttons. I've found that the best design for these is a plain text Reset or Cancel link that's opposite the Submit or Next button. An alert is also key. Using one can instill confidence, assuring the user that their information will be cleared and not submitted.

However, there are a number of reasons these buttons could fade out of use, not limited to the following:

\- Users are becoming more familiar with the way the web works. They understand that form data isn't submitted until a submit button is clicked. Because of this, forms are generally a trusted interactive element.

\- With the widespread use of AJAX, it's only a matter of time before form data is collected in the user session before a submit button is clicked. It's already being used in some places to track successful conversions & Lead Dropouts (Sitecore OMS is one). If this becomes common, forms will revert to being less trusted. _Reset_ and _Cancel_ buttons won't fix this, though.

The rule I follow is much the same as it's always been: Don't use _Cancel_ or _Reset_ buttons. Though now, I understand the exceptions and plan accordingly. Think about the target audience for each specific form and include the appropriate functionality.

<comment><USER12> That's the problem with absolutes. Any time you pre-decide that something is always good/bad, you're going to have to eat your words at some point.

<comment><USER13> Which is why, couching phrases in neutral terminology is always best:

unproductive) Microsoft on the server sucks!

productive) Microsoft software is expensive and nobody here is an MS-expert, migrating will cost considerable time and money without any real benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why not add the following rule to your user stylesheet? input[type=reset] {display: none; visibility:hidden;}

That hides them all from view.

<comment><USER15> Unless someone has "cleverly" created a Javascript-powered reset button. :) But still, good suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good example of implementing a feature because it's easy to do, rather than because it has real utility. Why it's part of the HTML form spec I don't know. Was it ever useful?

<comment><USER17> The actual button isn't particularly useful but the DOM interface is. Firefox (and other browsers?) cache DOM entries in certain situations. This is useful if you refresh the page accidentally with a half completed comment in a text box, but less useful if you're building a complicated webapp that assumes an initial state. A simple _document.forms[0].reset()_ at the top of your code works wonders.

<comment><USER18> Oh wow, I never thought to use this this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This seems to ignore the case where a form is pre-filled with previously inputed info or some defaults. It feels more natural to clear the form and write all fields with new infos than to overwrite everying field by field.

now it's a long time I haven't seen a useful reset button.

<comment><USER20> I'd use form placeholders, not values for that.

<http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html#placeholder>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think I've seen a reset button in a while. Does anyone still use them?

<comment><USER21> I only experience them on government and bank websites.

I can see how some naïve users might want the extra-confirmation that they are cancelling this action – but I there's not reason for them to be visually similar and positioned almost next to each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone giving "wizards" as an example of good UI design instantly loses all credibility with me.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's only one thing worse than having a Reset button: putting it next to the Save button

[http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pmfh3uGxAv9cSUByhqbbSC...](http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pmfh3uGxAv9cSUByhqbbSCkirapVCTAC8pp92VsbMmx6TPvgLoib3Adyi3zGxjc2pF6_1c-MAFvY_IYW1OmBilA/SaveButton.jpg?psid=1)

<comment><USER13> The most sad thing there is that "Start Over" is, by Fitt's Law, a "larger" button in the sense that it's occupying an edge.

It's like a poorly designed roadway section that just happens to cause more accidents. Bad Engineering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A good point, one that needs paying attention to.

> There are lots of guides on website usability, go and find one for yourself.

... some of which should tell you that having an automatically scrolling display right next to something you (supposedly) want people to _read_ , is a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER25> though quite useful for 'advanced search' forms

</comment><comment><USER26> Reset buttons can be useful in CRUD applications when you want to "clear all changes" in an existing record - everything gets reverted to the field values in the HTML.

Admittedly, I don't use them much, usually going with a "Cancel/Close" link that takes the user out of the record-editing view.

<comment><USER13> Isn't this more of a "revert changes"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They still exist and I've pressed them just before thumping the desk.

Is there a greasemonkey script to get the browser to ignore them; are there extensions for any browser to do this without greasemonkey?

or with a user stylesheet?

input[.reset]{display:none;} what is the right css? I haven't used it in a while?

<comment><USER28> The following should work in browsers with decent CSS2 support [1]:

        input[type=reset] { display: none; }

You might need a !important in there immediately before the semicolon if your user stylesheets aren't getting priority otherwise.

[1] <http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html#attribute-selectors>

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> In Messaging on the Facebook app on Android, you have Send on the left and Clear on the right. Gets me far too often, and it's just not even necessary. If I don't want to send what I started writing, I simply hit back. Hate it.

<comment><USER30> What in the interface tells you that navigating away from the page will not submit the data?

Perhaps instead of reset a "do not submit" button is required. But then if I changed my mind about what I'm writing but still want to send a message things get a little lame.

How can you tell for example that going back doesn't instead save the comment as a draft (like the SMS interface on my [pretty old] Sony Ericcson phone).

I disagree with the article, I think there is a place for a reset/clear function.

<comment><AUTHOR> browsers don't save things by default. that's how they are.

the thing in the interface that tells you that you're looking at a browser is up to you... in my mind, the address at the top, starting with <http://> is the part of the UI that says my changes will be thrown away...

this is kinda why i'm miffed that there is an explicit "throw my changes away" button, when that's the default behaviour

<comment><USER30> >" _browsers don't save things by default._ "

// Depends on your browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> when "submit form" and "save" are the same action, it doesn't depend on browser...

keeping it in cache/locally/whatever is not "saving".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Am I the only one who would love to somehow switch the "submit" and "reset" buttons on this guy on some random website just to see what sort of anger you could incite? Imagine that blog post...

</comment><comment><USER32> Dear Cats on the internet, please spellcheck your posts and proofread them before you post your rants to the internet. Otherwise some people might think they are unpleasant to read and possibly wont take them serious.

If you have a "related reading" section you might want to also use it to post some links to those guides. We are here to help each other, aren't we?

And: No, I don't use reset buttons.

<comment><USER33> _unpleasant to read and possibly wont take them serious_

Don't you mean, "won _'_ t" and "serious _ly_ "?

Glass houses, stones, etc., etc.</comment></comment>


Heap Exploitation Part 1: Understanding the Glibc Heap Implementation - <AUTHOR> https://azeria-labs.com/heap-exploitation-part-1-understanding-the-glibc-heap-implementation/ <comment><USER2> As always, Azeria produces quality and informative articles! Goto place for learning about ARM techniques

</comment><comment><USER3> I found this to be very well written, and quite interesting even though I am by no means well versed in this area. It's really cool to see how these vulnerabilities arise--it made me appreciate this section [0] of the Rust book even more. The fact that the compiler will check for and fail to compile if unsafe conditions are found is a really neat concept!

[0] [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-01-what-is- ownership.htm...](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch04-01-what-is- ownership.html)</comment>


Microsoft considering new name for Internet Explorer - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/18/technology/internet-explorer-name-microsoft/index.html

<comment><USER2> MS wants so desperately to be recognized as having great software and great experience. First step:

\- Stop allowing OEMs to bundle third-party crapware with Windows OS. This will go a long way to building a better view of Windows. Charge license fee from them to make up the difference. They can afford it. How much profit do you really need?

\- Don't change the name, make it better. You'll only confuse the people for whom the big, blue E is the Internet. Yes, I have people I know who think the E is the Internet. (How do they dress themselves in the morning?)

\- Incorporate a sandbox in IE to help protect the idiots who are too ignornat to not surf the Internet as administrator. (Better yet, also suggest a non- admin account for daily use during first launch.)

\- 90%+ of all malware getting on computers is a direct result of people surfing with admin rights. Once this is taken care of, the dropoff rate for infections is amazing.

<comment><USER3> Do you actually know someone who prefers using IE to any other browser? No right? Even if they build a perfect product, product perceptions in general need a demarketing process to be changed. Since they are so far away from having a perfect product, having a new brand (that doesn't have a perfect but a decent one) that thrives to get as close as possible to perfection is the best move.

EDIT: Your suggestions are key

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a really smart move from Microsoft.

I have to absolutely disagree with him saying that IE "has negative perceptions that no longer represent the product". It has improoved a lot in these last years for sure, but as a part of the web developing community I can say it's the browser that gives the most problems among the major ones.

They still have some major technical stuff to fix, but it's definitely the best move.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe IBM's trademark on "Web Explorer" \-- the browser that shipped with OS/2 Warp is available for use or license.</comment>


The Los Angeles Times Reimagined - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeandtheory.com/things-we-make/the-los-angeles-times-reimagined

<comment><USER2> I was hoping to hear more about the hard stats in "The Impact" such as whether or not readers were more engaged, did they read more stories, did advertisers see better results, etc.

<comment><USER3> Or less overstated language about their accomplishments. They certainly don't tolerate even a smidgen of it with their interviewees.</comment></comment>


My stupid ways to draw the attention of Techcrunch - <AUTHOR>

For several months I've been trying to get coverage from Techcrunch, I'm not good at PR and honestly I spent very few time mailing about my startup (an online game).  The site has been available for 2 years and practically 95% of my time is spent on development (the fun part)
What's not so fun is doing PR... I only like to write code, and after sending some mails to Techcrunch trying to get some coverage for my startup and not getting any response I tried a different way... coding.
1st try- Create a site and give it as a present to Techcrunch. So I developed a small site to rank websites by just sending a tweet. The site would read the tweet and depending on the content of the tweet (using simple Natural Language processing) and depending if the site was already covered in Techcrunch it would give some points of the tweet and rank it. You can check it at http://crunchmysite.com
I sent a mail about this site and told Techcrunch it was a gift to them, domain, code, maintenance, etc. I though it could attract some attention from them and maybe I could also pitch about my site,... but I didn't get any reply.
2nd try- Create a simple game related to Techcrunch and Michael Arrington. So again, I developed a game trying to atract the attention from Techcrunch. This time I used one of my previously developed games I did some time ago,  a kind of Guitar Hero, but I changed the song (to one I found covered in Techcrunch and related to the AOL-Techcrunch adquisition), added the notes to sync it with the song, changed the image to add Michael Arrington face and voila... you may find it at http://www.tengaged.com/techcrunchhero/
I was sure this time I could gather their attention... but again, no responses.
After a few days I see probably these ways to attract their attention are just stupid, but at least I had some fun while doing them. <comment><USER2> You weren't kidding about being bad at promoting your startup: you didn't even mention it here! Seriously, this post is great, and is likely to attract some attention. Add a link to your startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The online game is at: <http://www.tengaged.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not relevant to the topic, but this is kind of annoying: <http://cdn.tengaged.com/img/level_tv.gif>

</comment><comment><USER4> Hah - love the Rock Star MA look! Great sites - best wishes to you and your team. Hopefully this will get you some well deserved buzz.</comment>


Ask HN: What term would you use for the amount of time code runs past your death - <AUTHOR> So I've thought that it would be fun to give a name to the length of time that your code outlives you. What name would you give to this idea? <comment><USER2> Inheritance springs to mind, although it's semantically backwards.

I like instantiation time.

Or, to take a non-tech word, how about spoor? You can lose tracks after time, they can be more or less clearly defined and they have a lot of metaphorical associations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Posthumous execution?

</comment><comment><USER4> Post mortem runtime.</comment>


Counting from Infinity: Yitang Zhang and the Twin Prime Conjecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.zalafilms.com/films/countingabout.html <comment><USER2> I would have gladly paid the price of a movie ticket (something like $12 where I'm from) to watch the movie online. Sadly, $30 to be shipped a DVD is quite unappealing.

[http://www.zalafilms.com/films/cfiflyer.pdf](http://www.zalafilms.com/films/cfiflyer.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> He's an inspiration in more ways than one.</comment>


Ten of the most commonly confused words in the English language - <AUTHOR> http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/ten-of-the-most-commonly-confused-words-in-the-english-language--bJRDKGNwlZ <comment><USER2> I learned English as a purely written language years before I was taught the pronounciation. (I still struggle to remember that "bear" rhymes with "share", not "fear".)

So I don't actually have any problem with the examples listed here. Because I don't hear English words in my head, the confusion doesn't exist. "Bated breath" is part of my visual memory, not aural.

The downside is that my spoken English is stiff, but luckily a foreigner with an accent gets quickly excused from labyrinthine smalltalk anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a developer working at a media company, I often see us run articles with terribly misused phrases (like how one sports team will "route" another). I try to point out these issues when I see them but ultimately I think it won't matter - eventually there will be more people who think the incorrect version is correct and at that point it will in fact be the correct version based on common usage.

</comment><comment><USER4> Learned english decades ago but I still confuse _though, thought, through and thorough_ when I write.</comment>


Ask HN: Who's hiring January '11 Edition - <AUTHOR>

As much as I would one day love to work in the bay area, or any American start up centre for that matter - it would be good if we could get some more international job postings in this edition. <comment><USER2> Didn't this thread already happen?: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057704>

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, please specify if telecommuting is an option, for people outside any {startup, tech} centres.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've got a small job, PSD to CSS if anyone is interested (need it done today), email in profile.

</comment><comment><USER5> You should specify the particular posting you want.

Remote Int'l or just Int'l perhaps.</comment>


Going Google-Free on Your Phone - <AUTHOR> https://shadow53.com/android/no-gapps/setup-guide/0/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am planning on getting a Google Pixel3a (headphone jack) and ungooglifying it.</comment>


Ask HN:  Given a URL, how do I find the HN submission of it? - <AUTHOR>

I'm positive there is a simple answer to this, I just haven't discovered it yet.
searchyc.com searches within HN posts, but doesn't appear to allow you to search based on what the HN post is referring to.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> If you can get the title of the submission, then a quoted search with the site: operator on Google or Yahoo! would find it.

[http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22PagerDuty+%28YC+S10%29+M...](http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22PagerDuty+%28YC+S10%29+Makes+Sure+Your+Team+Knows+When+A+Server+Goes+Down%22+site:news.ycombinator.com)

Both have APIs.

<comment><USER3> I doubt if that would work in the cases where the submission title on HN is different from the page title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Submit the URL as if you were posting a new story.

If it's a duplicate, the post will fail and you will be shown a link to the original submission.

<comment><AUTHOR> ... and if it is not a duplicate I end up submitting an article when I don't particularly want to.

<comment><USER4> If it is a duplicate then you can delete it.

<comment><USER4> Meant to say if it's not a duplicate then you can delete it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Goodbye Mac OS Forge, hello GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2016-August/033405.html <comment><USER2> > Over the years, several developers have asked why we're not on GitHub. The > perception is that "everybody" is on GitHub, and some developers don't take > your project seriously if it's not on GitHub.

This is the sad truth. It doesn't matter anymore if Bitbucket/Gitlab/etc. are better than GitHub: The social pressure for open source projects to move to GitHub is so high that the alternatives don't even stand a chance.

Maybe a meta-search engine for open source projects could help the competition, but if all projects are on GitHub, who would use such a search engine?

P.S.: I actually like GitHub, I'm just sad that all cool changes that GitLab has made recently will end up being mostly ignored by the OSS community. Even if they fixed their speed problem (which I think is their biggest downside compared to GitHub), no project would move there because "everybody is on GitHub".

<comment><USER3> Given that Gitlab provides a superset of Github's features, it's possible to operate on both platforms, while clearly indicating where the primary location is. Gitlab has built-in CI, so that can be used exclusively there, and it will be one incentive for users to come to a project's Gitlab instance instead.

Personally, I like hosting a repository on Github plus Gitlab for availability reasons, but if Github would finally allow disabling pull requests as well, one could easily make Github a read-only mirror.

In light of non-existence of project patch, ticket, release, wiki interoperability protocols, we will either adopt more of FossilSCM's features into git addons (like git-appraise) or someone will write adapters.

The most concerning aspect of all of this is that projects that have access to hosted FOSS servers which are fast and under (semi-)direct control give in to peer pressure and move to a closed platform like Github.

If, say, Freedesktop.org would run a Gitlab instance, it would prevent the move to Github. I cannot be the first one to think of that.

<comment><USER4> We should just reject github and watch how fast they roll out a self-hosted version almost nobody wants to host themselves.

Today's open source alternatives will be followed by endless more experiments in building a better github, hard to imagine someone "never" nailing it let alone "never" being handed it on a platter because the first website in history annoyed too many of their users at once at just the right time.

Going open source wouldn't have saved digg after everyone decided to break their old routine. They had nearly identical open source competitors with variations of their own interface all along, even direct clones.

None of their customers ever needed it or benefited from it being a proprietary service either. It's probably a lot more important to Gitlab than Github.

<comment><USER3> It's not primarily about the platform being open source, but relying on a SPOF. It's dangerous and empowers Github to pull all kinds of stuff while they have the marketshare. Today's github may not do shady things, but tomorrows can. It's irresponsible of us to put all our eggs in one basket. At the very least, helping them to be the place where 99% of projects are hosted will allow github to ignore complaints.

In fact, it's a good thing Gitlab is not a pure open source project, because there's leadership involved and business interests with real life problems to address. So, the chances of "endless experiments" is low. Sure, if Gitlab was fully open while keeping project leadership and all, it would be even better.

<comment><USER4> The only reason it's a SPOF is they don't allow anyone to read/run/modify their code... that's what open source covers.

I think the problem is we conflate selling the only access to our code with selling access to it. If you need online hosting for your project the alternatives are almost immutable - somebody's server running project management software.

No matter what Github does developers are trending towards using open source tools to the extent Microsoft's porting their company to Linux right in front of our faces...

<comment><USER4> Belated edit I wasn't criticising Gitlab, I meant it's probably more important to Gitlab _that Github be proprietary_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With all of the - I'd call them shenanigans, but I'm sure they're justifiable features [0] to someone - with homebrew, it may be time to take a closer look at macports as a replacement. Glad to see the project not only alive, but evolving with the community.

[0] Like automatically running `brew update` with every brew command run. I was literally wondering if my computer had frozen up again when I saw that it had done a full update (which involves not only patching the brew code, but updating its source repos) before installing a pre-compiled version of tmux.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that one surprised me too recently. But most of the junk _can_ be disabled. My current settings:

      $ env | grep HOMEBREW
      HOMEBREW_BUILD_FROM_SOURCE=1
      HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1
      HOMEBREW_NO_EMOJI=1

<comment><USER7> Can you disable all of its cutesy names? Bottles for binaries, cellar for package path, taps for 3rd party repos, recipe (or formula? I forget) for build scripts, cask for a REPL... I honestly got a bit confused at first by what all of these things meant.

<comment><USER8> This habbit of programmers to name things with puns instead of descriptively drives me batty. WiX is bad, but Homebrew is on a whole new level.

Each time I use a mac I have to relearn what a tap represents vs cask vs brew vs celler etc. But hey, aren't they clever with words!

<comment><USER9> Those clever words immediately made sense to me for their inherent meanings the first time I saw them. So they are actually quite useful in their pairings.

<comment><USER10> I love puns just like everyone else, but when you have a word that precisely describes the thing you have, why not use it instead of using a clever metaphor?

<comment><USER11> Like programs for Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Photos, Notes...?

<comment><USER12> Word! The picture you paint, drives a powerful point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am sincerely curious when I ask this, please don't see it as flame bait-- what/who uses Macports still instead of Homebrew (or Nix)?

Is it for legacy systems? Or unusual requirements? Habit?

Edit for reasoning: I'm curious because who knows-- maybe I'm missing something really cool or jumped ship to Homebrew years ago too hastily?

Edit #2: Just wanted to say thanks to the folks who have replied below! I'm definitely a bit more curious about macports again.

<comment><USER14> I still use MacPorts because it's actually a proper package management system. Homebrew is not, and its limitations started to show a long time ago. The obnoxious assertion that Homebrew should take complete control of /usr/local AND be able to install in there as an _unprivileged user_ is utterly ridiculous. It's just some nonsense that the author cooked up in his own head, contradicting a long history of convention regarding the use of /usr/local.

The maintainers of packages are _supposed_ to port their software to the relevant platform, that's their job, and yes sometimes this takes some work, whereas Homebrew seems to assume that ./configure; make; make install should flawlessly work out of the box for pretty much anything (this is not true). The fact that they actively discourage even trying to install outside of /usr/local is simply laziness (and not in a good way). This is a foolish and naive approach, and pursuing this idealistic, reductive approach for "simplicitly" breaks down very, very quickly. MacPorts is a well behaved, self-contained system, and a well designed one at that. Homebrew just dumps everything into a system directory that it really shouldn't have exclusive rights to in the first place (/usr/local).

Moreover, there is nothing wrong with installing extra compilers, libraries, etc, under /opt/local and having them run alongside the system libraries. Lots of systems have provisions for doing something like this.

Also, using version control systems as distribution and deployment systems is a horrible anti-pattern and I really, really wish people would stop doing this.

Homebrew's documentation is terrible. Its terminology is facile and stupid in the way it analogizes everything with beer.

<comment><USER15> > "it's actually a proper package management solution", "homebrew is not", > "its limitations started to show a long time ago", "is utterly ridiculous", > "its just some nonsense", "are supposed to port their software", "that's > their job", "(that is not true)", "is simply laziness", "foolish and naive", > "breaks down very very quickly", "is a horrible anti-pattern", "facile and > stupid".

I downvoted you. You assert a massive bunch of things with no evidence. A reasonable person could disagree with every single one of them (I do). While I could imagine your reasons for believing some (most?) of these, I would simply be arguing against the strawman I constructed. By providing actual evidence ("why do you believe this to be the case"), you would allow us have a constructive discussion on your points. Instead, you give us bile.

<comment><USER16> Today, Homebrew does have some _major_ shortcomings. The biggest one that comes to mind for me is the fact that it only seems to consider the dependencies of a package during its initial installation. That is, if A depends on B, installing A _will_ trigger an install of B. However, after that, Homebrew will happily let you uninstall B (thus breaking A) without so much as a warning. Less critically, it doesn't track the fact that it only installed B for the purpose of making A work, so it can't help you clean up the left-behind-dependency cruft from the stuff you've since removed.

<comment> mh- I don't disagree with your assertion about the state of Homebrew, but I wanted to point out the `leaves` subcommand.

      brew leaves:
          Show installed formulae that are not dependencies of another installed formula.

I'm not sure if it persists this state or simply calculates it on-the-fly by enumerating your installed formulae. But it does seem like the same data or functionality could be used to prevent your uninstalled-deps scenario.

<comment><USER16> Hmm... Interesting. I don't think that "brew leaves" truly solves the problem, though, since the list it generates will include explicitly-installed leaves in addition to no-longer-needed dependencies. It can help narrow the list of potential candidates for removal, though, which is nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problems addressed by Homebrew, Macports and the like have all been solved in a cross-platform manner by the fine folks working on pkgsrc.

Sane defaults, respect for system security settings, and a general lack of bullshit. As a *BSD refugee on Mac OS X, it feels like a slice of home every time I need to install software.

<comment><USER18> It's my understanding MacPorts came from the same BSD Port system and keeps the same philosophy. How does pkgsrc differ?

<comment><USER17> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9407119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9407119)

Because of the cross-platform focus of the NetBSD developers, I can replicate my package installation workflow on any number (20+ at last count) of operating systems with the same command set. This saves me from the mental overhead of having to pick up Mac-isms, which is nice.

Also, binary installs!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've been using macports for years and am excited by the prospects a "social" coding experience will bring with a much lower barrier to entry for contributions.

They say they will stick with Trac for dealing with issues. I understand that for managing the ports collection, but are they planning on keeping "base" issues (i.e. the application code) off the github as well?

I don't know how well different repos and issue trackers interop, but it seems like an open-source solution like gitlab would offer the (potential for) customization/integration more readily than github.

I'm sure they just desire a turn-key solution and don't want to manage a whole new project, but maybe, one day, they'll want to unify the experience again.

<comment><USER14> > a "social" coding experience

Do people still buy into this? I feel this phrase was just a marketing ploy by GitHub.

<comment><USER19> In retrospect, "social" was the wrong word; what I really meant was "a place people already have an account and may contribute" i.e. a large, established community.

I'll leave the question of "is it a social coding experience?" to the experts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For anyone using homebrew or other package manager, and who has an afternoon free; I'd suggest checking Nix out. It's very nice to define an immutable manifest and have your system derived from it. If you love pure functions, you'll love Nix.

<comment><USER21> I hear pkgsrc[1] is pretty decent for osx as well. I keep wanting to try it out, but haven't yet.

[1]: [https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on- osx/](https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/)

<comment><USER22> I've been trying to like pkgsrc on Mac OS X for a few years now. The one you link to provides binaries, and is sponsored by Joyent. The main deal breaker for me there is that they only update their packages every quarter (currently 2016Q2), so you have to wait if you want bug fixes, security updates, etc.

I just had a look again and found that ffmpeg is one minor version behind behind stable, its binary is annoyingly called "ffmpeg3", and it was compiled somewhere with LLVM 6 / clang 600, versus LLVM 8 / clang 800 on my macOS 10.12 system. I tried to compile it manually (after a shallow clone of their massive, 250,000+ commit git repo), but failed.

For me Homebrew does the right thing here — they basically turn my Mac into a rolling release Linux desktop like Arch Linux, which is great for the userland type packages I use: openssh, zsh, tmux, postgresql, ffmpeg, git, vim, rsync, etc.

<comment><USER23> I switched from building from quarterly branches to trunk a while ago, so those packages are actually updated with the very latest every few days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I never get the logic of how whole heartedly opensource projects embrace a completely closed source software. I get it that not everything can be open source but there are already good open source alternatives for hosting.

<comment><USER25> Honestly, I had the same thought years ago when many long time Linux users moved to OSX. But then, we're speaking about the same userbase here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I hope this helps with the adoption of newer versions of packages. I have used MacPorts in the past (and Fink before) but I am supper happy with Homebrew these days. What I disliked about Macports was:

1\. Ports define which compiler to use. Sometimes I had to install a small tool and first it would another version of gcc. 2\. Ports were outdated a lot. I developed a project using the Grails-framework and it was a couple of versions behind the current stable release. Just checked: Grails port is at version 2.2 [https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/devel/grails/...](https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/devel/grails/Portfile) while the current version being 3.1.10

With Homebrew the adoption rate seems much higher. Also you don't depend on a single maintainer.

<comment><USER27> Probably doesn't matter because not many Grails 2.x projects are being upgraded to 3.x in the wild anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wait, why does [https://www.macosforge.org/](https://www.macosforge.org/) have a cert that says Apple, Inc. Is Macports funded and managed by Apple?

<comment><USER29> MacPorts isn't; Mac OS Forge is. From your own link:

      Copyright © 2011 Apple Inc. All rights reserved

MacPorts is hosted on Mac OS Forge, but it is not run by Apple; it merely uses Apple-provided infrastructure.

<comment><USER28> Got it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems to have coincided with a practical cause to look for a new place:

        But now that we have to leave Mac OS Forge anyway, it makes sense
        to convert to git and take the opportunity to do some much needed
        and overdue restructuring[...]

</comment><comment><USER30> This is long overdue. Google slowly been doing the same with moving from Google Code (which was supposed to be dead? It is though?) to GitHub, but a little progression is better than no progression.

<comment><USER31> Google Code the public service is dead. They still have internal, but publicly visible, hosting for things like Android and Chromium; which they seem to be rebranding as Google Source, or at least using the googlesource.com domain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's probably been stated a million times before but it's hard to remember what coding was like before github. CVS and subversion - what's that? Github is so pervasive that when a project uses another git code sharing site you just get annoyed. Github Issues may suck, but it's so darn convenient and so well integrated. It's far worse when a project uses another ticket tracking system and just uses github for pull requests. Just give in to our new code overlords and go with the flow.

<comment><USER14> > Just give in to our new code overlords and go with the flow.

No. They are turning coding into a monopolistic monoculture. Not everybody loves pull request-based workflows, you know.

<comment><USER32> You're right. I'm going to go back to uuencoding my tar files and posting them on usenet.

<comment><USER33> You clearly are far too young to have ever done this. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Or you can run the Windows Subsystem for Linux and have real apt-get or yum!

<comment><USER35> I'm with you on that. This effectively ended any reason I still had left to develop on OSX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Good for you guys! Lol wtf is Forge?</comment>


Ask HN: Who here is selling to teachers? - <AUTHOR> i know it's a hard market to serve but who here is actually making money by selling to teachers? What are you selling? What are you making? <comment><USER2> Depends. What do you mean selling to teachers? Are they getting the school to pay or paying out of their own pockets?</comment>


All Box Services Offline - <AUTHOR> https://status.box.com/incidents/fhx3xs37vvgf?u=bdr8lqbn0f1q <comment><USER2> At least their status page reflects it now. Earlier it was all green with a 502 nginx error on their main site.

I swear, I'm convinced half these company status pages are just static HTML served from an S3 bucket that only ever gets updated manually.</comment>


New AI tool detects child sexual abuse material with '99% precision' - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/07/31/new-ai-tool-detects-child-sexual-abuse-material-with-99-accuracy/ <comment><USER2> Is this claiming to detect 99% of CSAM or claiming to distinguish between CSAM and non-CSAM with 99% accuracy?

Relevant: [https://bohemian.ai/blog/99-accuracy-99-lie/](https://bohemian.ai/blog/99-accuracy-99-lie/)

<comment><USER3> > Thorn, the non-profit behind Safer, says it spots the content with greater > than 99% precision.

Sounds like it's claiming 99% precision, so 99% of positives are true positives.

Recall probably isn't great, because (a) if it were great they'd brag about it and (b) you don't get to 99% precision without sacrificing some recall.

Seems reasonable to aim high on precision, though, to avoid burying NCMEC in mis-classified data and also to avoid wrongly banning users' content.

<comment><USER4> [https://sg.news.yahoo.com/2019-05-31-sex-lies-and- surveillan...](https://sg.news.yahoo.com/2019-05-31-sex-lies-and-surveillance- fosta-privacy.html) I don't trust Thorn.

<comment><USER3> What in that article specifically makes you not trust Thorn? They seem to me like they're trying to do good work -- preventing child exploitation -- that necessarily involves partnering with organizations whose values won't always exactly line up with theirs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great, and I am going to use it in my side project. The main question I have is who has responsibility for the the 1% of CSAM not detected? Myself, as the service inadvertently hosting the material, or Thorn for not having an "accurate enough" algorithm? I suppose they just put it in their SLA terms or something.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am a bit confused; I may have missed it, but I don't see a mention of Project Arachnid, which is similar based on the description.

[https://projectarachnid.ca/en/](https://projectarachnid.ca/en/)</comment>


Portal Cloud Announces Frequency Analytics, an OpenSaaS Google Alternative - <AUTHOR> https://blog.portal.cloud/posts/KVMJOL4KHMLZWZS <comment><USER2> Here is link to repo as the website is 'sort of confusing' [https://github.com/frequencyanalytics/frequency](https://github.com/frequencyanalytics/frequency)

Always great to see open source project as google analytics alternative.</comment>


Show HN: Data Collection made super simple - FormAgent - <AUTHOR> http://www.formagenthq.com/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for linking, we would love to get peoples feedback on this.

Some info about how this is built, for those interested...

We're using HTML5/Phonegap/Cordova (and our own bespoke mobile JavaScript framework) to enable us to target all the major mobile platforms at launch, including iOS/Android & BlackBerry Playbook. Our app has the ability to run offline for data collection in un-connected areas and the online portal makes it super simple to author and provision forms.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty exciting to see our FormAgent here!

There are also some great examples of how FormAgent has been used in the wild by charities and small businesses at rareloop.com/casestudies/gamos, rareloop.com/casestudies/clinicbeauty, rareloop.com/casestudies/cbaf and rareloop.com/casestudies/tcon</comment>