Apple is run like a huge startup (and the remote app was written by 1 guy) - <AUTHOR> http://sachin.posterous.com/apple-is-run-like-a-huge-startup

<comment><USER2> This article, like many others, seems to overestimate how large the actual numbers of developers is at Microsoft, as opposed to full teams with Test and mgmt and their associated marketing, sales, etc. organizations.

The .NET GC was roughly 1 person (sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more). Most of the base class libraries were one person. Even larger things, like the text editor, were usually a senior person and one or two very junior ones. And this is software that has to run on a not-at-all-fixed set of hardware platforms :-)

In my time there, I never saw or heard anyone "think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them." Uniformly, the decisions made to get things shipped were to either cut the features that were the combination of the furthest behind and least value to the market or to pull over extremely senior talent that had already gotten their parts shipped.

Of course, it was a big company, so YMMV. Can't speak for much more than dev tools, office, and windows.

<comment><USER3> Not to be obtuse, or maybe miss the joke, but how can you sometimes have a little less than 1 person working on one of the most important parts of your runtime?

Sounds like a bug more than a feature to me. :)

<comment><USER4> "Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a way to measure a worker's involvement in a project, or a student's enrollment at an educational institution. An FTE of 1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of 0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time. Typically, different scales are used to calibrate this number, depending on the type of institution (schools, industry, research) and scope of the report (personnel cost, productivity)."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-time_equivalent>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them. They put together large teams to build products. And large teams require managers._

I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well. They have some good products. Apple being successful doesn't necessarily translate to Microsoft sucking. They are both damn good companies.

<comment><USER6> _I didn't know Microsoft had a problem, they seem to be doing pretty well._

In the mobile market? How about anything next-generation web? Social media? Microsoft doesn't seem to be _doing well_ anywhere except the increasingly unimportant desktop and Office suite space.

<comment><USER5> Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services...

It's easy to bash on them, but they make quality products in a diverse range of markets. Sure they fail and fail big, but who the hell doesn't? If you have made anything successful, you've probably failed 100s of times. It comes with the territory.

<comment><USER6> _Windows Live, Bing, Xbox, Servers, Cloud Services_

Did you have any examples that contradicted me? All of the above are losing MS money in a BIG way.

<comment><USER7> Um, not to get all defensive, but we at STB are making quite a bit of money. It's probably over a million a quarter per developer. I don't know many people who can say that. ;)

<comment><USER8> Are you only including developers, or all the people who work on a product? I imagine that MS has a rather large team of non-developers working on products as well.

You want to be careful with that metric. You know the cleaners don't make much money, why not fire them?

<comment><USER7> I did actually mean all the people that work in development on the product. That is, in MS terms, all SDE, SDET, and PMs. I happen to know this figure is accurate for Windows (over a million per developer), although that doesn't include sales/marketing, administrative costs, etc. As for the cleaners comment, I don't really get your point.

Anyway, my statistic wasn't really meant to be taken that seriously, just proof that server is actually making money over here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The engineers on the Mac OS and iOS teams move back and forth between the two projects based on release cycles and what's needs to ship next."

As somebody who has been rather dismayed with the way the Macintosh platform has started to stagnate in the past couple of years, I don't really view this as a _good_ thing.

<comment><USER10> Stagnate? Snow Leopard is just under a year old. I wouldn't expect a desktop OS to have a same release frequency as a mobile os.

<comment><USER11> Oddly, Debian has about the same release cycle (once per 12-18 months), and ends up being the butt of lots of jokes about how they rarely ever release anything.

<comment><USER9> Debian has only recently settled on a 2 year feature freeze cycle. In the past, Debian has suffered from releases being pushed back due to constant feature creep in the name of stability -- that's much of the reason why Ubuntu was forked from Debian in 2004.

So the jokes may be dated in 2010, but there's a reason they came about in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very similar in a way to what I read on this post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1568395> (7 Scaling Strategies Facebook Used To Grow To 500 Million Users)

      Small, Independent Teams. Small teams
      allow work to be done efficiently, quickly,
      and carefully. Only three people work on photos, for
      example, the largest photo site on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am reminded of one of the companies from _Neuromancer_. Was it Maas-Neotek? Gibson described most large companies as being composed mostly of flab, with a few hard bits of "edge." But there was this one large company that was _all edge_. It was a predator amongst its peers.

For awhile Apple was just eating everyone's lunch because they were the only ones who understood end-to-end User Experience.

Apple's stated strategy for quite awhile was having the computer as the "digital hub." The target was clearly a merging of all media with the computing experience. Can you imagine what Microsoft could've done with XBox if they had UX and vision in the same league as Apple? It was like they already had troops dug in place in the key strategic spot. Apple would've been _crushed_. Instead, Apple walked all over them.

<comment><USER14> Michael Lopp of Apple tends to confirm that statement on a recent tweet:

 _"Apple is run like a huge startup that makes 15 billion a quarter and has, ya'know, a strategy."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To be honest, I thought the remote app was great for about 5 minutes. Then it suddenly couldn't connect to my library until I went back and re set the code. It functions exactly as if one guy wrote it and never updated it.

</comment><comment><USER16> The iBooks app, too, with all the sexy page turning animation was written by one guy (before it became big).

<comment><USER17> As a UI developer with about 5 years of experience, that seems about right to me. I think I could have written that app given about 8 months. Heck, I suspect that the page turning animation was a relatively small part of the development.

I don't consider myself a fantastic developer either. I'd be suspicious of any developer with a few years experience who couldn't write an application like that given the right amount of time and motivation.

This isn't to belittle your comment, just that I'm thinking to myself "yeah, that sound correct".

<comment><USER18> I think more interesting than the fact that one guy wrote the entire application is that Apple gave one guy the time and space to create the application on his own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _"Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them."_

Does the author provide anything to support this claim? and seriously, I wonder why every pro-apple author couldn't resist the urge to belittle other companies. No company is "perfect".

</comment><comment><USER20> _Maybe that's the problem at Microsoft: they think they can solve problems by throwing lots of people at them._

No they don't.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm really not sure how this is relevant to a company that has over 15,000 employees (non retail). If you've done any work for apple or their HR department you would most certainly know it's not run like a startup.

</comment><comment><USER22> downvoters: Sorry if this question was offensive; I'm asking about if the "apple is like a startup" trend continues into developers being able to choose what kind of tools they want to work with. My complaining about my MBP isn't meant as a critique of apple, I'm just saying that _if it was me_ I would probably choose a linux machine, not a mac.

I apologize for the off-topic question, but is anybody here a coder for apple (or has been in the past?)?

Are you allowed to use a non-apple computer if you work at apple?

I just got a macbook pro over the weekend (my first mac) and it seems like they've really gone out of their way to make this as difficult as possible to write code on. No page up/down keys...no dedicated delete key, no home/end keys...it seems like the UI is designed around the mouse. Alt-Tabbing seems really neutered in comparison to the gnome/kde/windows equivalents...and the solution that is offered is the expose' key (which works, but involves using the mouse).

Is there just a steep learning curve? Don't get me wrong, the machine is very pretty, but it seems like the type of work that geeks do was ignored when they designed this laptop (like having no dedicated right click key?)

Obviously they were talking about apple being run like a startup in that the teams are small...one of the things that I see advertised on some job postings for coding jobs is that there is a LOT of flexibility on what your workstation is...is it like this at apple?

<comment><USER23> <http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/site/cocoa-text.html>

Also, in Exposé it's possible to tab between applications and use the arrow keys to select windows.

As for right click: on an Apple trackpad, two finger click works much better for me than right click (either tap with two fingers or click with the thumb while two other fingers are on the trackpad) ever did on a windows laptop. YMMV.

FWIW, I also prefer the Mac ⌘⇥ (command-tab) behavior. You can drag stuff in and out of command-tab, you can hide or quit applications from it (Q and H keys), you can use either keyboard or mouse (or scroll wheel) to select apps, etc.

I think you're mostly just unfamiliar with it... which is perfectly natural, but you might try phrasing your question in a less aggressive manner.

<comment><USER22> Hmm... Thank you. Honestly though, I was just generally curious about if apple devs are allowed to use non-apple computers.

<comment><USER16> Not devs but it is rumored that deep in the inner sanctums of the product engineering/design labs there are PC workstations running 3D/CAD/CAM/CAE software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Its indeed awesome for a company as large as Apple to keep things this way. I have several friends at Cisco and Oracle and the teams there are just bloated beyond belief. I think a lot of this flows top down and the management needs to get it. Once you work at a well-run startup, you know that the only way to get things done is with small teams and a core team of star engineers who move around and get things done.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is this really that surprising? It doesn't seem that complicated a project. Big companies surely don't have a team for every little project.

Wasn't the Facebook app written by one guy. Also TweetDeck was originally by one guy. Wasn't Reddit built by 4 people and Posterous basically by 2 or 3 people? And all for those apps the same people did all the business and marketing too.

</comment><comment><USER26> Because of the Remote App was written by one guy, Apple is a huge startup?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, that's just an interesting fact from the article. I assumed they assembled a crack-team of iPhone engineers to bang this out. I was surprised that one person put together such a high-quality app, especially in a company that could afford to throw lots of money/developers/teams to solve this problem.

<comment><USER27> That reminds me of an old story about the Texas Rangers. In 1896, Texas Ranger Captain Bill McDonald was sent to prevent an illegal prizefight in Dallas. Upon his arrival, the mayor of Dallas was confused why they only sent one Ranger, to which McDonald responded, "Ain't I enough? There's only one prize- fight!"

The story isn't true (there were several Texas Rangers on hand to prevent the prizefight) but I'm not surprised there's one, really talented guy working part time on the Remote app, as "there's only one app!".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Maybe if Apple had more people they could make Mobile Me work like it should, release a new Mac Pro more frequently than once every two years, have a 64bit completely multithreaded Final Cut Pro written in Cocoa APIs, or something something antenna something…

<comment><USER19> Just because something _can_ be done doesn't necessarily mean it _has_ to be done.</comment></comment>


Artificial intelligence can tell your sexuality, politics - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/07/artificial-intelligence-can-tell-your-sexuality-politics-surveillance-paul-lewis <comment><USER2> _... he believes this technology could be used to detect emotions, IQ and even a predisposition to commit certain crimes..._

21st Century Phrenology</comment>


Show HN: Enviar.io – Real estate landing pages - <AUTHOR> https://enviar.io/ <comment><USER2> Is there an example of what a landing page would look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. The three pages that flow in when the website loads, they look like that. I'm hoping to add more 'themes' in the future.

<comment><USER3> Can you add some live page examples? And can you add more average houses, like 3 bed 2 bath?

Most of us are a few tiers away from that 8000 sq ft, ocean-side, indoor pool property.

<comment><USER4> Eh, I think what they really need are just example pages. It's fine if marketing material is aspirational, after all this person is going after real estate agents, not home buyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bug found!

The terms of service are way (really, way!) too complicated for such a simple product.

(And, by the way, there must be a million other free services which allow one to put some images and text on the web, so why choose this one? The landing page should really explain that. And it should include some demos at least.)

<comment><USER6> They're also stolen (borrowed?) from [https://unbounce.com/terms-of- service/](https://unbounce.com/terms-of-service/)

Compare to [https://enviar.io/terms-of-service.html](https://enviar.io/terms- of-service.html)

<comment><USER7> I get that that's a problem, but when trying to get a MVP out fast and validate an idea I think privacy policies & TOS' seem like a formality that will be figured out later if the business does actually happen to become profitable. Correct me if I'm wrong?

<comment><USER8> You are wrong. You shouldn't put legal terms or policies on your site if you don't understand the legal ramifications of doing so, and how it will influence your business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've created an open source project for scraping real estate sites: [https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper](https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper)

You could use it to save people the trouble of filling out all the details for their property - they just provide the url for the property on a portal site that is supported and you import the details from there.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does Enviar have any integrations with any of the real estate focused CRMs like Contactually?

<comment><AUTHOR> Coming soon!!!

Its so young and i'm so tired of coding! But expect integrations with the biggest CRM and DB's in the biz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have much to add, except to say that this landing looks incredible. Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> thank you! :')

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As someone who is looking for property to buy... I would not use landing pages like this. I want a fully-fledged search engine that I can filter to my requirements.

Have you talked to any realtors (your primary market?) about this?

</comment><comment><USER13> Why only do real estate? Why not do landing pages for simple physical products, enterprise SaaS software or mobile apps. Real question though what do people actually use for the above ?

<comment><USER14> Real estate is a good target because developers will frequently crank out a new website for each new development, which will be used for six months or a year until the units are sold, then mothballed. The requirements of such a site are well defined and simple, and the short lifespan means there's no point in spending much money on them. Still, they have to look like money.

Source: developed real estate websites for several years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Enviar" means "to send" in Portuguese.

<comment><AUTHOR> also in spanish!! That's where it comes form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a bug, where the # of bathrooms are listed as bedrooms, in addition to bedrooms being correctly listed as bedrooms.

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would be nice to have some indication of pricing before I jump in.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right. Were hoping to expand the landing page soon with a pricing section.

for now:

3 Pages - Free 10 Pages - $25/m 25 Pages - $50/m Unlimited Pages - $100/m

<comment><USER18> I would make a bet top brokerage firms would pay way more than 100/month for the ability to create quick and beautiful pages for prime listings.

Site looks great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Shameless plug: I work on another landing-page generator, [https://tylio.com/](https://tylio.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> ha! new member to the club? Wish me luck, mate!

<comment><USER19> Not really new, we've been working on this for 2 years... But yeah, good luck! Real estate is a pretty hard market to crack, but there's money to be had there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm tired of website builders who, themselves, have terrible plumbing. [https://goo.gl/2VRrg8](https://goo.gl/2VRrg8)

Edit

Wrong URL! Correct URL: [https://goo.gl/tsc6cF](https://goo.gl/tsc6cF)

<comment><USER21> You used the wrong URL.

<comment><USER22> The right URL is even worse [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=enviar.io)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Angular/Fabric.js Design Creator - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.com/package/ngx-design-creator <comment><AUTHOR> my first npm package. looking for feedback, suggests and devs who would like to contribute and assist me in building a simple image creation tool.</comment>


Freud, Einstein, and Upaya: Contemporary Reflections on the Question "Why War?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/jontepace/whywar.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a [PDF] link to the original letters:

[http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinste...](http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/273/documents/FreudEinstein.pdf)</comment>


Explainability and Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tilsml500/explainability-and-deep-learning-1a77c622aafc <comment><USER2> Good article, but there is a frequent misconception of Symbolic AI as "manual creation of lots of rules". This was true for early approaches, such as expert systems in the 70s/80s. Symbolic AI just means, well, AI with symbols, and there are many approaches (e.g., in neuro-symbolic AI or using probabilistic inductive logic programming) where symbolic representations are emergent / learned from data using machine learning approaches and can be uncertain/probabilistic.

In the linked talk "From System 1 Deep Learning to System 2 Deep Learning" by Yoshua Bengio, the speaker first criticizes Symbolic AI only to re-invent concepts from Symbolic AI later (e.g., "high level semantic variables", "shared 'rules' across arguments"), which is rather silly given that some Symbolic AI approaches are well capable of learning symbols, rules etc bottom- up - which is not fundamentally different from learning low-dimensional vector representations or "generalizations" in linguistics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. I agree there might be a lot of different approach to to symbolic AI. Probabilistic inductive logic programming sounds interesting but I am not familiar with it. Maybe I should check it out later. I am wondering if it has capability to learning from data.</comment></comment>


A growing disconnect between consumers and businesses over use of customer data - <AUTHOR> https://www.rsa.com/en-us/company/news/the-dark-side-of-customer-data <comment><USER2> "Do you want to be forced to watch an advert you have no interest in?"

"Do you want to pay to have your advert shown to somebody who has no interest in your product?"

The same answer to both these questions is why why ad-personalization is "good" \- and why TV, printing and all the rest are having their collective arse handed to them by on-line.

Now we can move onto discussions around fraud, ethics, leaking, micro- transactions and a million other things - but that study is clearly stupid.

<comment><USER3> Interest can be inferred from context instead of your history and contextual targeting is in fact more efficient and doesn't violate anyone's privacy.

For example most ads shown by Google Search are based on the search keywords, since that's what most advertisers bid on and not a user profile. Google's great advantage in this space is that a search shows clear intent, clear need.

I once worked on a platform for serving ads in mobile apps. The apps themselves can be pretty clear signals of intent. A weight loss app for example can serve ads for gym or diet-friendly restaurants with great success. Similarly for publications. I can imagine articles on politics don't have valuable context, unless the elections are coming, however howto articles or articles on home and garden or various hobbies have great context.

Btw, I never click on ads. If personalization was meant to save costs you'd think these ads companies would have learned to not serve me any ads.

Truth of the matter is that personalization has less to do with cost savings and more to do with optimizing the message for better conversions. And that's what I find unethical ... the use of personal data to personalize a message in order to make me buy a product that I normally don't want to buy.

<comment><USER4> Even if you don't interact with an ad they still deliver their payload right to your brainbox.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, that's how TV advertising works, however we're talking about brand advertising right now, as in ads made to make you remember the brand the next time you're presented with a choice, like in a supermarket.

Thing is you don't need personalization for this to work and it can be counterproductive. Because these ads are designed to make the customers remember the brand in the future, when they'll need it and not to fulfill an immediate need.

Ads companies doing personalization try to paint their algorithms as having better conversions, however measuring the impact of brand advertising is really difficult due to the deferred effect and all you can do is to make educated guesses. And for the labels in a supermarket for example, which is the vast majority of brand advertising, you don't need any personalization.

Personalization is meant for the long tail. Like those shitty commercials on FB trying to sell you indestructible iPhone cases or shitty apps that help you exercise your brain. Or miracle cures to diabetes, if you were uninspired enough to join an FB group on such topics.

Such ads do not benefit just from being seen. If you don't click on them, the opportunity for the advertiser is gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suspect that this is a bit skewed by the fact that targeted ads, as they are typically done, are a horrible experience that has little transparency and that the user has very little control over.

Some people are just going to hate all ads no matter what. I'd guess a much larger number (including me) would see them as a reasonable way to support web sites and services that they like, if those ads were to give them much better experience, and that mostly means more control. For one, I suggest that ads have a way you can express, with a couple clicks (and without leaving the page) one of the following:

\- I already purchased this

\- I already purchased a competing product

\- I am not interested in this anymore

\- I was never interested in this

\- This ad is too creepy or personal or otherwise makes me uncomfortable

\- this ad is obnoxious / distracting / ugly / disturbing

\- I don't want this displayed because it might reveal something private to an onlooker (example: gift purchase for spouse)

\- I'm not interested in this product but I might be interested in competing products

\- I'm in the market for ______________ and I don't mind getting ads for them

\- Thanks for the reminder, not now but maybe later

\- Ads that track me really annoy me

Of course, in addition to collecting this information, it should act on it in a reasonable way. It would also be nice if it was accompanied by an option to pay a small, reasonable amount to remove ads.

For whatever reason, ad companies don't seem to want to do this sort of thing. It may take legislation, which I would certainly get behind.

<comment><USER6> It makes a lot of sense and I'm sure advertisers would very much like it as much as you do (in this specific context that is).

I mean, there's a reason this infamous quote is still relevant today: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."

The real issue is the ad-ecosystem is afraid (and rightly so if I may) that people might try to game the system and would rather not bother.

That and realising that out of your X thousands / millions monthly unique visitors, only a small percentage are an adequate audience will pelase neither the publisher nor the ad exchanges. Sure you could fall back to branding adverts but those are usually of lesser value.

<comment><USER5> Just curious, how would you imagine it being gamed? I could certainly imagine advertisers or competitors gaming it one way or another (which is true today), but what about regular people? Do you think there is a rational reason someone would not want to express what they really think?

<comment><USER6> Well, the main thing I can think off would be people constantly rejecting ads up until you only get the untargeted ads which means :

1) Less valuable and therefore bad for publishers. 2) Remove users from the pool available to those ad-tech providers and therefore is a big nono for them.

I could very well be wrong, so take it for what is worth.

This being said I'd like to highlight that there are 2 main concerns I have with completely killing the targeted ad industry, namely :

1) The big players will probably find workarounds and be able to sustain themselves, whereas the smaller players ( local news, niche website etc..) will probably get decimated or at the very least severely diminished.

2) A shift towards more sneaky advertising, something that isn't clearly identified as such. For all their issues, display advertising as it stands today tends to be pretty obvious. If you kill this segment, something else will fill the gap. It has already started and it might need to be heavily regulated (as the FTC did for those Instagram / Youtube folks promoting things).

I honestly believe that there's some room for improvements and it is in the best interest of the industry to get a grip and rein itself in. But the greed will prevail I'm afraid and therefore all those scandals might bring in (much needed tbh) regulations.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the response, and yeah I share your concerns and personally am not against targeted ads if done well. Many ads I see kind of make me smile, because they are for things that I actually want I they are "happy things". (typically amazon or ebay ads: skateboard parts, digital pianos, etc)

I'll bet that the sort of people who just keep insisting on untargeted ads probably aren't ones to bother with too much. So my hope is that if a system like I proposed gets adopted (possibly due to regulation) that the great majority of people would accept targeted ads as long as they "play nice" and are pretty transparent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If a group is allowed to have sufficient knowledge of an individual through pervasive surveillance, then they can weaponize that by shifting the individual's Overton window through micro-messaging.

An altered perspective is the objective of propaganda and targeted advertising and radicalization. Their methods and objectives are the same: make someone believe what we want them to believe without their awareness of the effort.

This activity is underhanded and deceptive. It's neither persuasion nor debate, intentionally so.

<comment><USER8> > individual's Overton window

Overton window is by definition a property of a group, not an individual.

<comment><USER7> Agreed; hence the qualification.

The Overton window is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse; restricting to an individual, it may be considered the range of ideas tolerated in one's private thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Behavioral targeting which requires stalking people 24/7 and building invasive profiles is not only unethical but creepy, deeply dehumanizing and democratically problematic.

As usual many are too blinded by greed to realize this simple fact, focused on 'innovation' and profit but once you dehumanize your fellow citizens its the beginning of the end.

The tone of discussion on HN itself on these issues betrays the dehumanization and alienation from the general concerns of privacy, democracy and ethics.

<comment><USER6> Would being able to create various anonymous profiles with interests that are only loosely tied to you be considered less creepy?

I'm an industry insider and while yes, it's how I make money, I can't deny there are some creepy bits which should be a concern for all.

But unless someone comes up with a better revenue model, most of Internet is supported by the Ad money. Be it the big players such as Google or Facebook, or the many modest operations out there.

So we have to figure out a way to make it work, something that shouldn't be creepy but can still support the ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> Select ads based on the content/copy, not the individual user.

No need to track me across the internet and planet.

<comment><USER6> Ideally yeah, that would be the best but the supply and demand might not always match up. Maybe no advertiser is willing to spend some money on the content you're being served because it's very irrelevant to them or because there's simply no advertiser with enough budget to pick up the slack.

So you end up with highly valuable spots and then the rest which is at best barely enough to cover the costs of the publisher.

I'm not trying to blindly advocate for user targeted ads as the be all end all of online ads but the reality is that a huge swath of the publishers would probably disappear, consolidating the web even more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Excuse me, everyone saying that we should enjoy ad targeting because we want to watch "relevant" ads - please consider your own thought process here. I worked in ad tech for a couple years on the targeting tech side specifically, and I can emphatically say that what people buying ads are optimizing for is not relevance, it is reach!

Organizations should exclude people that have already purchased products from seeing ads for those products - but they almost unanimously do not.

If relevance is what people want, given the data google has about my transport habits, shouldn't I see zero car ads? Or, is perhaps that too creepy? Or maybe, google has no incentive to make advertisers pay less money on useless, irrelevant ads. Or, maybe the marketing manager who paid for the ads doesn't care to optimize their spend because the CMO doesn't care to - both of them want to say they're responsible for the largest budgets and BIGGEST audiences ever (which by the way is the reason TV ad campaigns are still so prevalent, they look good on resumes).

Do marketers have time to understand complex ML models with hundreds of variables? No. Biggest audience possible, please and thank you.

</comment><comment><USER11> Completely un-scientific analysis; people don't mind ad targeting if it's relevant to them. Example - don't show me ads for swim suits and beach umbrellas if I live in Montana.

What people object to is the detailed, strange and onerous collection and dissemination of this data - eg, the location data controversy...

<comment><USER12> Actually, from my experience, the people that get creeped out by this get creeped out the most when an ad is extremely relevant to them. I would also like to see a baseline of how many people think ads in general are immoral. We find it normal, having grown up with it, but I personally detest the constant psychological manipulation waged by ads in general. It gets even worse when those ads are personalized.

<comment><USER13> I'm actively reading ads since puberty or so, that is, I look at what they're saying, what they're trying to imply, compare with the reality, and what they generally are doing to language and communication. I used to consider it just being a smartass prick, a hairsplitting, literally-taking party pooper... but without knowing it, since I can think I tried all I could to innoculate myself against this:

> Because we are lied to all the time, in ways so routine they are beneath > conscious notice, even the most direct lies are losing their power to shock > us.

\-- Charles Eisenstein, [https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous- matrix-o...](https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-of- lies/)

I take many things into account, but the judgement of those who aren't that active and hostile in their interaction, who just soak in it, is not one of those things. That many people do see a problem makes me think better of them, but it doesn't influence my opinion of the ad landscape, that's something between me and the ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Targeted ads can become creepy and offensive in lots of circumstances, such as when a woman who was pregnant has a miscarriage and still receives ads about baby items.

</comment><comment><USER4> 100% of online advertisers and publishers that use online ad networks believe ad-blockers and tracker blockers are immoral.

Online ads are cross-site attacks directed against viewers/users. They are visual or textual hacks that strive to cause targeted users to take actions they might not otherwise take.

edit: speaking generally about online ad networks, real-time bidding providers, campaign aggregators, and so on.

<comment><USER15> > to take actions they might not otherwise take.

This assumes all advertising is coercive.

<comment><USER4> Okay only some advertising may be coercive, such as, ads that try to change my mind, ads that try to convince me to buy something I might not have bought otherwise, or ads that try to encourage me to continue to act or feel in certain way.

<comment><USER15> If you don't want to participate in the marketplace then block the ads.

<comment><USER4> I do. And, some sites do their best to remind how immoral I am for doing so.

If the site is an ad-block denier, I just add them to my blacklist and move on with my life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Weird how fast this story is falling off the front page of HN.

I wonder how many HN readers, patrons, or sponsors earn big dollars inventing, implementing, or promoting the technology that makes people feel that online advertising as we know it is immoral.

</comment><comment><USER16> 17% believe it's moral..but what were the options, e.g. was it something like moral vs. Immoral or was not sure an option? People might have very different impressions of what constitutes ad-targeting, e.g. technically going to a bikes website and showing a bike ad would be a form of targeting, not as invasive as tracking a person around the web. I would like to see a question asked like, should companies keep track of what sites you've visited so they can better advertise to you? IMO that would give a clearer picture of the situation.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm sure if you rephrased the question you would get much different results. It's pretty easy to prime people to answer a certain way, especially by mentioning the word "immoral."

"Do you want to see relevant ads?"

"Would you like to see ads for products you would never buy?"

<comment><USER4> I have a couple:

Would you like to see ads deliberately selected to trigger an emotional response in you to help overcome your rational resistance to buying a product?

Do you think designing ads that take advantage of your emotions to sell garbage you don't need is moral?

<comment><USER17> I mean, those are certainly questions you could ask. I'm just pointing out that you can get people to answer any which way by the phrasing. My wife is a research psychologist who designs studies and comes up with various questions to test a certain hypothesis. It's very difficult to neutralize priming by how questions are phrased. You often need to ask the question in a variety of ways to get unbiased results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And this is why we have a represenative democracy instead of direct ones

Let represenatives and legislative assistants do the real research before passing some emotion based law so often

</comment><comment><USER19> Why exactly is ad customization immoral?

<comment><USER20> Ah, an ad person. I'm sure you can see this from the inside, the advertising industry has built a large surveillance apparatus in order to sell us thing we don't need. The whole selling things we don't need is already immoral -- but that's a general criticism against advertising and marketing; In this case we have something already dubious turned into a panopticon nightmare. As we grow closer to our technology, this technology is constantly spying on us to order to optimize selling us things we don't need.

You can't build trust in technology when that same technology is grassing you out to every huckster who wants to pour junk into your eyeballs.

<comment><USER19> > Ah, an ad person.

I don't work in advertising.

> the advertising industry has built a large surveillance apparatus in order > to sell us thing we don't need. The whole selling things we don't need is > already immoral -- but that's a general criticism against advertising and > marketing; In this case we have something already dubious turned into a > panopticon nightmare. As we grow closer to our technology, this technology > is constantly spying on us to order to optimize selling us things we don't > need.

That's all a bunch of cute stuff to say, but where's the nightmare? Thinks seem pretty good to me. Do you want to go back 50 years? 100? Which point in history was _not_ a nightmare, to which you'd like to return?</comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo Lets Loose With a Boomerang - Automatic Website Testing - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_lets_loose_with_a_boomerang_-_automatic_webs.php

<comment><USER2> Yahoo and their development team in particular deserve kudos much more often than they seem to get. PR-wise, they get elbowed out by Google, FB, etc. when in fact their open-source tools like YUI are often very well made, well tested (if it's good enough for the Yahoo front page, it's probably pretty good), and most importantly for fellow developers, well documented. Thanks Yahoo!

<comment><USER2> Oh, and I forgot to mention YSlow - as far as I can tell, that Firefox plugin was available years before anything else like it (e.g. Chrome's performance profiler). Not only did it work and work well, but the Yahoo! devs released lots of documentation and videos around how to improve site performance, i.e. free education from people who dealt with massive scale daily.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, used yslow recently and its got a lot of good stuff. I'd never even heard of an etag before. Or Chrome's profiler, for that matter. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/06/performance...](http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/06/performance_testing_with_boomerang.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's worth noting that this won't help you with timing the first page loaded, just the ones after that. Impressive nonetheless.

<comment><USER6> I'm hoping that browsers will soon support WebTiming: <http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/WebTiming/> We'll add support into boomerang for those APIs

However, until then, you can still measure the time from first-byte to onload by starting a timer at the top of your page. It's crude, but it works.

<comment><USER6> Ok, I've added the WebTiming API checks to boomerang.

<comment><USER3> you just scored high on the DeveloperTiming API.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Interview - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/the-interview <comment><USER3> I hope Stripe developers didn't write this code. I got the movie for free, jesus ... [http://imgur.com/a/hf8FZ](http://imgur.com/a/hf8FZ) \- and I didn't get a job after my interview with Stripe earlier this year.

<comment><USER4> Eww. What made you think to try? Does that work on Stripe in general or just this site?

<comment><USER5> Just this site. Integration issue.

<comment><USER6> What, exactly, are you suggesting "works"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like it's available on Google Play now:

[https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/The_Interview?i...](https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/The_Interview?id=Ed2kSuKqfz0)

and YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed2kSuKqfz0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed2kSuKqfz0)

<comment><USER8> Not available in your country.

Well I guess I won't be paying to watch this crappy movie.

<comment><USER9> The logistics of doing an unplanned online launch are pretty large, and launching in lots of different markets adds a lot of complexity (legal issues, customer support issues in multiple languages, etc.). I'm surprised they managed to launch in the US in time for Christmas.

It's disappointing it isn't also launching internationally, but I'm optimistic - if this makes lots of money, then it will prove that it makes sense to launch new movies online. Then in the future we may see more movies launch like this, and with more preparation time, hopefully also internationally.

<comment><USER10> Most people, even outside the US, will want to see the movie at the same time, to engage in online discussion about the movie. If they can't buy it, they will find another ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If it's not free, I hope everyone buys it instead of waiting for a torrent. We should support online releases.

<comment><USER12> Do you know what it will cost?

<comment><USER13> According to the page source: '$5.99 for 48 hours'

<comment><USER10> so, about half the price of my Netflix subscription for a single movie. for 48 hours. I'll pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's a pretty old version of nginx:

% curl [https://www.seetheinterview.com/](https://www.seetheinterview.com/) -D - -o /dev/null -s|grep Server

Server: nginx/1.0.12

<comment><USER8> Might as well leave the front door open.

[http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx- announce/2013/00012...](http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx- announce/2013/000125.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why does [https://www.seetheinterview.com](https://www.seetheinterview.com) keep redirecting to [https://www.kernel.com](https://www.kernel.com) which doesn't even contain The Interview film?

<comment><USER16> (I work at Stripe.)

Kernel is one of the companies putting this release together. They put up the redirect temporarily; about to put a more informative placeholder until the 10a PT launch.

<comment><USER17> I keep getting SSL connection errors and "No Data received" errors on this (Yes, after 10AM)

<comment><USER16> Yep, they're working to bring things back up. Stay tuned!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can download this as a DRM-free file with a simple curl command. Most people probably wouldn't bother, however, because Stripe makes it so easy to just watch directly your browser, no need to go through the hassle of downloading anything or needing the hard drive space.

This is a great example of content providers finally beating piracy by providing a simpler method of content distribution. I hope more movies come out like this.

<comment><USER19> I'd like to agree with you, but the easier than pirating part of your comment only seems to apply if you're from the US (correct me, if it's available in other countries). I'd really like to pay, but it seems I have to resort to other sources.

Besides other, admittedly far from mainstream movies did this a lot better - "Sleepwalk with me" or last years highly praised "Computer Chess" offered a DRM-free, 1080p download and a streaming option, both without region-lock and for a reasonable price. Still an exception unfortunately.

<comment><USER9> I totally agree with you that this is far from perfect. It's just in one market, and could be more convenient even there. But, the impressive thing is they scrambled to do this in just a few days - it's amazing anything has been launched at all!

I suspect they really wanted as much of a launch as possible by Christmas, for symbolic reasons. (I think that was the original intended release date?). Kudos to them for managing to achieve a fairly significant launch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looking at the FAQs after running $("*").removeClass('hidden');

\- only available in the US or from a US based ip address

\- only works with US based credit cards

\- available for 48h

\- will be streamed to the browser

<comment><USER21> For convenience:

Outside of the US: [http://imgur.com/iWvOgFI](http://imgur.com/iWvOgFI)

After removing hiddens: [http://imgur.com/2E1dALE](http://imgur.com/2E1dALE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So after all the crying about "how dare they try and censor us!" we get - <USER2> available in the US.

Irony much?

<comment><USER23> Was the movie originally scheduled for a worldwide theatre release on December 25?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> lol! Am I the only one trying to understand why Stripe felt reason to give moralist post? _" We're proud to work with organizations defending digital freedoms such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation ... We don't always endorse what businesses sell through Stripe, but"_ I mean props, but are you doing this because you figured out the vibe on the internet is that Sony is an souless and shallow company or is it you don't want N.K.'s elite hackers to get an idea you're gun-ho-america on this release and target you?

</comment><comment><USER25> This is the beginning of the new Internet - one where you can watch a mainstream movie from mainstream producers, and _PAY FOR IT_ in a fashion that doesn't make you feel like a criminal.

Thanks, North Korea!

</comment><comment><USER26> Noone else is saying this for some reason but: It's hilarious that this movie is going to be historic despite it being so shitty (probably).

(In true HN fashion this is where I would write "Full Disclosure: I work for the DPRK, but this does not color my opinions.")

<comment><USER27> Actually most critics are singing its praises. Even the hardcore art house high nosed critics are.

Some of the praise is just because they use the dictators name, willingly. This is actually rather new. Political Correctness dictates you don't. Yes we all knew Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" was about Hitler, but he didn't use the name. Most studios won't do this, its rather bold and new to do that. The only people who really have are SNL, and South Park -esque shows. Not internationally screening studio movies.

As David Edelstein said, "Its a low brow comedy, a political bold, low brow comedy. Laugh and have fun."

<comment><USER28> [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_interview_2014/](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_interview_2014/)

Some of the selected quotes there:

"It's just stupid enough that some things are funny. Sadly, it isn't smart enough to realize that other things aren't terribly funny and that an opportunity was lost here."

"The remarkably dismal quality is emblematic of the mind-set that brought the movie, and its attendant crises, into being."

<comment><USER27> Rotten Tomatoes gives _Stars Episode III_ and _The Shining_ within 2% rating of each other.

Rotten Tomatoes is pretty horrible for determining if a movie is worth seeing.

<comment><USER29> I'm guessing "Stars Episode III" is Star Wars Episode III? As far as I can see they give Star Wars III 80% and The Shining 92% which is more like a 12% difference by my calculation. The tomatometer is just an indication of whether the critics liked the movie really. The Shining gets 4/5 from audience while SW III gets 3.1/5 which I'd translate as pretty good and mediocre respectively. Probably not to far off.

The Interview is looking pretty mediocre from the reviews but I look forward to seeing it anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> They want a credit card, they want a CVC for a $6 purchase, and they only have a domain-only SSL cert. Sloppy security, people.

<comment><USER31> How is that "sloppy security"? Honest question.

<comment><USER30> See "[http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware- st...](http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware-stripe/"). If you accept a CVC or CVC2, the requirements are much stricter, because an attacker who can get hold of a card number with the CVC/CVC2 can buy more expensive items.

Stripe works by having pages invoke their "stripe.js" within the host page. The risk of mixing payment processing input into a general site is that anything that can access the DOM can patch "stripe.js" and tap the credit card data. Since this page is very likely to be attacked, that's a big risk here.

The page uses several off-site Javascript files. Attacks through the CDN that distributes "bootstrap.js", for example, might work.

In 2015, payment card requirements are tightening up. Sites which use third party processors like Stripe will probably have to put credit card entry into an iframe which comes directly from the third party processor. This makes the attack surface smaller.

<comment><USER32> Stripe checkout does use an iframe from checkout.stripe.com for the payment form.

<comment><USER30> Yes, it does. But that iframe is dynamically invoked by JavaScript executing in the parent page. The user can't easily see that the popup is more secure than the background page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's US only. Seems torrent there is.

</comment><comment><USER34> What's with the corrupted background image? [http://puu.sh/dHXPp.png](http://puu.sh/dHXPp.png) [https://www.seetheinterview.com/images/masthead- bg.jpg](https://www.seetheinterview.com/images/masthead-bg.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER35> Found a link on Twitter;

[https://www.seetheinterview.com/player/?p=30&e=1419653096&ci...](https://www.seetheinterview.com/player/?p=30&e=1419653096&cid=tok_15DSrsFvIyUvY1cbWcXDfE8l&h=19c8080f556826eab2f400a6e9517367)

</comment><comment> UVB-76 Looking at the file names, it seems this film had the codename 'Elephant'?

</comment><comment><USER36> [https://www.seetheinterview.com/](https://www.seetheinterview.com/) : I just see a poster of the movie. Is it normal? (I'm in France)

<comment><USER16> The site should now be loading — sorry about the trouble!

<comment><USER36> mmm, US only :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Online freedom isn't automatic, and it's only through active effort that the > internet will stay an open platform for creativity and innovation. We take > our role seriously.

Well said, Stripe.

</comment><comment><USER38> It redirects to kernel.com on the website they link to, and there is no reference of The Interview. Where have I made a wrong turn, or is everyone else seeing what I am?

<comment><USER39> The post specifically says it won't be available until 10AM PT, which is 32 minutes from now.

<comment><USER15> They could've had a better holding page than redirecting to somewhere with zero information.

<comment><USER39> Fair enough. A temp page just went up and it already seems slammed. But this was just announced this morning, so I wouldn't be surprised if everyone is throwing this together right now.

On a side note, I'll be really interested to see site activity statistics if they ever become available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Looks like Stripe's Interview page won't even load. You have been banned from r/pyongyang

</comment><comment><USER41> Somehow, Seth Rogen fits so well in all this! They must be working on a movie (with him) as we speak.

</comment><comment> TD-Linux How does the player work? I'd buy it but I'd rather not watch it in Flash Player.

</comment><comment><USER42> Sigh, no love for Canada on any of the sources. Soon hopefully.

<comment><USER12> A proxy would likely work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> how do expats like us watch it? i tried [https://www.proxfree.com/](https://www.proxfree.com/) and no dice. thanks

</comment><comment><USER44> Not on Amazon?

<comment><USER45> Sony offered online distribution companies the chance to host it, only some accepted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> WHere can I download it? I'm in the UK..

</comment><comment><USER46> Where can I download it from?

</comment><comment><USER46> is it downloadable yet?

</comment><comment><USER47> feh, sucked

</comment><comment><USER48> Flagged.

And in the comments here:

      "By jove, go out and buy it!"
      "Jolly good, and what might that cost?"
      "The low price of 5.99 pounds, my good man!"
      "Huzzah!"

I'm not going to say that this is all astroturfing and "organic sales hacking", but sometimes, it looks like a pretty big fucking shill.

<comment><USER49> Programming is popular now, so I guess it follows that the pop-gobbling consumerists that ingest propaganda hourly would start overrunning the hacker types. How I miss the pre-2003 slashdot type commentators and hackers in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> If another country made a movie about Obama being assassinated the US would be bombing them. No matter how crazy a current world leader is, I think it's an unwritten law not to depict their assassination.

<comment><USER51> I don't recall us bombing the UK in 2006. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_President_%282006_fi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_a_President_%282006_film%29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The NK hack was probably just a big PR stunt.

<comment><USER12> I doubt the CEO of Sony was willing to release racists emails about the POTUS as a PR stunt.

<comment><USER49> I agree that it's unlikely the hack itself was a PR stunt, but you have to admit the subsequent handling of the hack was a PR stunt in which even the US Government seemed to be in on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> This north korea hacking looks more and more like a marketing PR scam... Or at least something very opportunisticly white washing for the company involved in privacy leaking and censorship.

Beurk</comment>


Web's Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-and-spy-agency-bound-by-strengthening-web.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> This is now beginning to damage the entire silicon valley brand.

<comment><USER3> This article makes me feel ashamed of Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER4> Why would you only be ashamed now? The Silicon Valley's always been more greed than idealism; if anything, the idealism just makes the greed ever more rotten.

"Do no evil" ended up giving Google the power to do _more_ evil than it otherwise might've managed.

<comment><USER5> I do think there have been some internal struggles in the Valley, though I agree that the idealists have never really been in charge of the companies.

A simplified factional map might involve the "techies", the "suits", and the "apolitical pragmatists", with various shifting alliances between them. The early internet, for example, seems to have been largely dominated by ideologically pro-openness techies, working in a period where their bosses didn't interfere much. It's interesting to read Jon Postel's public emails, for example, and imagine if anyone in a similar position could fulfill his role with the same integrity today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thought that your tax dollars are going to pay for some bloated overpriced inefficient software solution is unpleasant. For example, according to Binney and co. ThinThread was small, fast, efficient and cost-effective, but some outside contractors with connections inside the agency had other ideas. Where the NSA decision-makers are personally invested in these contractors, similar to how Carlyle Group with its politician clients owns most of Booz Allen, it's tempting to speculate on the motivations of the agency to go for the less efficient, less robust, more expensive solutions (more maintenance and support contracts... cha ching). But, who knows... it's all top secret.

It's like when people pointed out the financial ties between certain politicians and companies that produced expensive airport body scanners, which the government promptly purchased after the t`ism scare tactics had cast a spell over people making them accept that anything and everything was "necessary".

<comment><USER7> Of course, defense contracting is for rich white "welfare queens," by-and- large.

Think about how much cash has been funneled to the sorts of folks like those at HBGary. I wouldn't mind paying for my own oppression as much if the oppressors were at least competent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money."

Nobody at the NSA would make any decision that would financially benefit them?

I really can't read that statement without being cynical. I will just leave it there..

<comment><USER9> Every competitive company is salivating at the idea of getting access to business plans, ideas, investments, etc from someone in the NSA about their competitors (corporate espionage - not directly mind you). How many people would it take to pay off to get access to some of this information? This is bad bad business and dangerous keeping this much info with no oversight really (well Congress and a couple people at the NSA if that is considered oversight -- a Congress that doesn't even have time to read bills anymore and apparently haven't read the 4th).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money._

Boy, I wish it were that simple.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd love to see Google say that they will only respond to the N.S.A. in hard copy / paper.

<comment><USER12> I'd love to see Google say that they not have the data requested, because they simply do not collect it from users. If Google has it, NSA will get it. One way or another. Denials and "lawsuits" against the NSA written like press releases are useless.

That's why Google and Facebook are extremely dangerous, they hold unto every piece of info to try to squeeze a few more pennies from each user. Nice and ready for NSA to get it legally: _"There is no indication that this order to Verizon was unique or novel. It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that, if you make calls in the United States, the NSA has those records. And this has been going on for at least 7 years, and probably longer,"[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/verizon- responds/](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/verizon-responds/) _

<comment><USER11> It's not realistic to think they will do that. But then, it might not be realistic to say that they can just send paper...

<comment><USER13> I'm puzzled why you think so. Google could offer customers the choice of paying for private communication and storage. It would be cheap enough to be practical. It would also be a direct way to solve the problem of trust.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Hotmail overshoots audience - <AUTHOR> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6181819.html <comment><AUTHOR> I think this article has some interesting points about tailoring things to your audience, and thinking about who your audience is.

Specifically for Hotmail, I prefer the newer Windows Mail (or whatever they call it this week) version to the old Hotmail, but my mother was completely unable to use the new version.

I guess this is the danger when trying to create a product that is all things to all people... Microsoft's solution seems to be to have two products and pretend they are just one.</comment>


C++ Quiz - <AUTHOR> http://q.viva64.com/ <comment><USER2> It's frightening to see how many of these are errors which are solely created due to copy-pasting - they could have been avoided rather easily by a bit of thinking and applying common good practices (typically storing functionality in a function and/or using a loop would already fix like 90% of these, aka DRY), instead of the lazy but easy 'solution' of copy-pasting.

One of the first things a programming guru told me was basically: whenever you are ready to hit Crl-C/Ctrl-V (or Ctrl-D or whatever 'duplicate' is in your editor) you shall ask yourself if you are not going to violate the all- important DRY rule. Ignorant and stubborn as I was at the time being I was like 'pfffft what can be wrong with some copy-pasting'. As I learned through the years and is shown by this quiz: a whole lot obviously. It can not be stressed enough how important and widely applicable yet so simple DRY principle is. So as a call-out to all programmers who haven't learnt the habit yet: please think twice or more before even considering copy-pasting.

<comment><USER3> You're not wrong, per se, but C++'s memory model tends to make refactoring this sort of thing a lot more painful than needed. If you introduce function you have to spend a lot of time thinking about how do the variables copy over the stack, is this data structure safe to pass to a function? And do I pass by reference? And do you return values from the stack or in allocated memory or write into a passed reference? Or do you get really gross and write a macro? And so on, until you just think "fuck it, copy-paste".

It's not an excuse, but languages definitely shape how you think, and C++ definitely encourages long functions and copy pasta.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with you per se. But I think you may be overstating the case.

Once you are a C++ programmer for a while, you start to discern "standard" patterns for this sort of thing and tend to automatically use them. (The patterns might depend on the C++ version and to an extent the code base in question; but it is common to have such helper function take a const ref as input, return non-primitive return values via a out-parameter etc).

So while C++ might "encourage long functions", I think that may be the case only for newbies to the language. Once you have a some experience working with it, you no longer need to put that much thought in to every little decision.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As I've been following posts on PVS Studio for a while, I'm sort of familiar with the kind of errors it finds.

I was able to spot 13 of these errors -- although the page only counted that as 10 as it's very picky of which token constitutes the error.

PVS Studio (and CppCat) are great tools. I can't unfortunately use them as I don't write stuff for Windows.

<comment><USER6> Try to use CppCheck or LLVM's scan-build. They are pretty decent. I've been using them for a few weeks for now and I found quite a few errors and send patches to various open projects (Pidgin, util-linux, GHC).

<comment><USER5> Ah, yes, I'm familiar with these tools. They're indeed pretty good.

In addition to them, I also use Coverity (they offer free licenses for open source projects) and Coccinelle (although it's a tool to refactor/create semantic patches, can be also used to find defects if you know what you're looking for -- useful if you fix one bug and you're wondering if there are more like it lurking).

Having different opinions about your codebase is often good as the approach in finding defects is usually different between them. For instance, stuff by the PVS people seem pretty good to find copy/paste mistakes, which I've rarely found with other tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I say this as a C++ programmer: I think a lot of these errors are non obvious because of the sheer amount of syntactic noise surrounding them. I also write a lot of python, and a lot of these errors are still possible but way more obvious. C++ is seriously the worst about surprising syntax causing temporary blindness from overload, excluding maybe Perl.

Static code analysis is fantastic for a language like this (if you can afford it; not sure what the pricing on this product is -- can't say I've ever seen a cheap static code analyzer though :-) )

<comment><USER7> I wrote C++ for a few years professionally and found myself able to look through the noise quite a bit. I remember doing a side project in python to expand my horizons and I felt naked without blankets of parenthesis and brackets around all of my stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The first question it asked me was:

      int SSL_shutdown(SSL *s)
      {
        if (s->handshake_func == 0)
        {
          SSLerr(SSL_F_SSL_SHUTDOWN, SSL_R_UNINITIALIZED);
          return -1;
        }

        if ((s != NULL) && !SSL_in_init(s))
          return(s->method->ssl_shutdown(s));
        else
          return(1);
        }
        ....
      }

so of course the first thing I noticed was the mismatched braces after the 'else'. The 'intended' error was elsewhere (and I agree with it) but to say that the brace isn't an error is a bit much given the sorts of problems that PVS is normally finding.

<comment><USER9> It's hard to say about that, since there is ... which can contain anything (like for example another opening { ).

It's a good practice to always use braces with if / else even if it's just one line in them.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you are right. Regardless if what is after that contained in the `...` wouldn't matter. A lone `{` or `}` would be a syntax error.

<comment><USER9> As I said, it wouldn't be a syntax error if ... contained the matching { somewhere inside.

That lone } which seemingly belongs to if in this case would be closing the function.

<comment><USER11> They are talking about the } after the return, not the one after the ... i.e. else return(1); }

<comment><USER9> Yes, that's what I understood. That } after return matches to the function opening {. So it's correct syntactically, but is wrong according to intention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A lot of these aren't C or C++ specific. Many of them were typos, for example.

There are also some ambiguities. At least two questions I encountered contained more than one bug, or at least one explicit bug and one "occasional" bug due to a lack of testing in the code (say, for division by zero).

Also, it'd be a a good idea to put a disclaimer for the quiz taker to assume types, variables and other tokens are declared properly. It's easy to make the deduction after getting the first question which you get incorrect because you chose the "wrong" bug.

<comment><USER13> I agree. It's also worth noting that the title is wrong, this is strictly a C++ quiz, there are no C questions.

<comment><USER14> Though I know very little C++, a lot of the questions were applicable to a C programmer

<comment><USER15> In fact I think most of them are more applicable to a C programmer. Most C++ programs aren't going to be making extensive use of, say, snprintf, which several of the errors I was shown involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't see why the test say at the end "You should stay away from C++", when the real test should be "Are you smart enough to use a static analyzer to catch those errors that are truly hard to find just passively[0] reading/writing code?"

[0]Because of course, when you know there's a bug, it's already easier to find...

</comment><comment><USER17> I got the first one they showed me right, in that I identified the issue as a mismatch between conditional and code, but I clicked on the code line instead of the conditional line and it was wrong, so peace out.

</comment><comment><USER18> I spotted some errors but it always marked the answer as wrong... It's a fun exercise but that's a bummer. Still seems like a good tool, nonetheless.

<comment><USER19> It seems to be very particular about exactly what you clicked. For example in one bug I got the problem was that they incremented the wrong variable in an inner loop, but clicking on the variable name at that point in the program gave me a result of incorrect, but the bug description was spot on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Also I can't figure out how to tell it that there's a missing format specifier in question 1 so it marked my answer as wrong. Missing items in code are impossible to click on.

On question 2 it gave me 60 seconds to visually deconstruct a statement, which is pretty unfair.

I gave up after that. I guess this thing exists to "show" you that you can't spot any errors and that you should just buy their tool?

<comment><USER21> I think you click on the argument that's being passed that doesn't have a matching format specifier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I found the bug in the first question it asked me fairly quickly, but after trying about 6 times with the back button couldn't figure out where to click to get graded correct. (it was the same subexpression appearing twice in an or expression).

</comment><comment><USER23> I got 13/15\. Mostly copy-paste errors that really happen a lot in code.

I was mislead by

        int t1 = something.getArg(1);
        int t2 = something.getArg(); //I clicked here

        ...

        something else with the error they had in mind

</comment><comment><USER10> What is the market for this tool? Is it for programmers? Is it for management that _doesn't_ know how to code, so they just run the program through this tool, if it passes, push to production?

<comment><USER24> Developers who want to find bugs in their code, preferrably before they blow up horribly in production. IMHO for C++ static analysis isn't an option, it's mandatory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You have found 10 errors out of 15. But I found 3 others but clicked on the wrong piece of text as it isn't always clear which piece they've attached the trigger too.

</comment><comment><USER26> It would be cool to have same for other languages. I'll see if I'll be able to do same for python

</comment><comment><USER27> It's a nice quiz, but many of these problems are found by regular compilers (clang, anyway).

</comment><comment><USER28> <spoiler-alert>They made a silly mistake on their question 13 (Geant4 and V517) implementation. Even though I clicked on the second sC0Min1Max, they marked my answer as incorrect -- it should be correct whether the first sC0Min1Max or the second sC0Min1Max is clicked.</spoiler-alert>

<comment><USER29> First must selected. See description.

Let's simplify the code to make the error more obvious:

             if (a & Min_Max) { Min[0] Min[1] }
        else if (a & Max_Min) { Max[0] Min[1] }
        else if (a & Max_Max) { Max[0] Max[1] }
        else if (a & Min_Max) { Min[0] Max[1] }

It should be evident now that every line except the first one contains the correlation between names of constants and names of arrays. So, in the first expression the 'sC0Min1Min' should have been used instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If someone gave me a quiz of this (ahem) quality in an interview, I'd walk out . . .

<comment><USER31> I've seen quizzes of lesser quality in interviews. One bad example that commes to mind: someone foratted a quiz in "Word", and "Word" auto-capitalized Java's "boolean". That's a rather big difference in behavior.

I promised myself I'd walk out on any quiz in the future. I haven't had to hold myself to that so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> <spoiler-alert> Bug in question 4. Hint: count you parentheses.

<comment><USER33> Refering to questions by number is useless since they are choosen randomly from a set number.

<comment><USER32> Mea culpa. Thanks.

So it had to be found again: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8335217](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8335217)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 2nd question I got

       CV_IMPL IplImage * icvCreateIsometricImage(....)
       {
       ....
        if (!dst || dst->depth != desired_depth ||
            dst->nChannels != desired_num_channels ||
            dst_size.width != src_size.width ||
            dst_size.height != dst_size.height)
           ....
        }

The website said the error was 'height was compared with itself', fair enough ... but there is a much much bigger crime here.

I clicked on the (!dst ||) as the code checks for a null pointer and then follows that with a dereference of that pointer which will get executed because of the || operator.

If the pointer is null the code will still crash.

The website said I was wrong .... I didn't bother with any more questions after that.

<comment><USER35> You're thinking of the '|' operator, which evaluates both arguments. The '||' operator is defined to never evaluate the 2nd if the first is true; its traditionally used exactly for this purpose e.g. if (!p || p->...) or more likely if (p && p->IsGood(...)) {edit: false -> true}

<comment><USER34> I have to put my hand up here and admit I got over excited and I was wrong. Thanks for correcting me.</comment></comment></comment>


The Google Wallet card proves the world isn't ready for mobile payments - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/21/the-google-wallet-card-proves-the-world-isnt-ready-for-mobile-payments/ <comment><USER2> Well you know, except in places like Africa where it's become the most popular form of payment.</comment>


Eric Schmidt predicts companies will need more office space post-Covid, not less - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-google-companies-office-space-pandemic-2020-5 <comment><USER2> How is one supposed to collaboratively socially distance at the office? I understand Mr. Schmidt's point, but if we all have to be 6 feet away, meetings basically become unfeasible in small meeting spaces, at which point, remote makes equal sense.</comment>


Another Patent Troll Slain. You Are Now Free to Rotate Your Smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/another-patent-troll-slain-you-are-now-free-to-rotate-your-smartphone/ <comment><USER3> Startups can pool together to fight these guys. My company, Life360 got sued after raising $50m. They thought this meant we had money to write checks from, but instead we decided to use it to fight.

We're basically being sued for allowing you to click a marker on a map initiating a phone call.

This obviously should never have been patented, so we are doing all the legal defense work and sharing it with the startup community.

See www.stopagis.com if you want to see how we really pissed off our troll.

And public shaming also works, the CEO of our troll didn't own his domain, so we bought it and drive traffic to the site whenever people search for his name (Malcolm Beyer www.malcolmbeyer.com). They don't like that we "aren't playing by the rules".

<comment><USER4> Wonder if it's possible to sue the patent clerk that admitted the patent application in the first place. Keep the fight even further from the homeland.

<comment><USER5> >>... sue the patent clerk?

No, not really. The patent clerk made a mistake in approving the patent, buy they didn't intentionally grant a bad patent to cause trouble or make money. Its really the patent trolls that are at fault for weaponizing the patent clerk's mistake.

<comment><USER6> "I was just negligent, I didn't do it for personal gain" isn't enough to absolve you of responsibility in a civil suit. It's a shame that there's no accountability on the government's side when they screw up and cause harm, especially on this scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Rotatable sued us and immediately asked for $75,000 to go away. We refused. And we fought. It's Rackspace policy to not pay off patent trolls, even if it costs us more to fight. Eventually Rotatable offered to just walk away – but we refused again. Just as we promised last year, we challenged the patent and the USPTO invalidated it.

This means that Rackspace will not pay one penny to this troll, nor will Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target, Whole Foods or any of the other companies sued by Rotatable for how they use screen rotation technology in their apps."

It surprises me why there aren't joint defense funding efforts in place to put these industry pests to bed... Clearly Apple, Google and Microsoft would have been next on Rotatable's target list if Rackspace had caved - and like weeding, rooting them out early will prevent infestations.

Is it because the big corps perhaps view the trolls as worth their pain - <USER2> function could they serve?

<comment><USER8> > It surprises me why there aren't joint defense funding efforts in place to > put these industry pests to bed...

Or at least Troll Defense Insurance

<comment><USER9> Heh - I can see this turning out just like the auto repair insurance rorting industry. I fully expect if Troll Defense Insurance becomes "a thing", the first question a patent lawyer will ask you before indicating a price will be "Insurance job? Or private?"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Rotatable sued us and immediately asked for $75,000 to go away. We refused. And we fought. It's Rackspace policy to not pay off patent trolls, even if it costs us more to fight. Eventually Rotatable offered to just walk away – but we refused again. Just as we promised last year, we challenged the patent and the USPTO invalidated it._

This is an excellent strategy and will pay dividends to RackSpace in the long term: what minor patent trolls will touch them now?

</comment><comment><USER11> This has really bought rack space a lot of good will in my mind. Everytime I read an article like this I find myself wanting to do business with them more and more.

<comment><USER12> Could fighting patent trolls be a solid marketing strategy? It could!

<comment><USER13> And recruiting - it builds mindshare in the people you employee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why do trolls still try to sue Rackspace? They publicly proclaim their anti- troll policy. If 88% of these cases kill the troll when they go through the courts fully, I would stay well away from them if I was a patent troll.

<comment><USER15> Same with New Egg ... but I guess it's because patent trolls know the patents aren't worth much unless they try to hit every "big" user who can pay up. And even if 88% of cases are won if followed through, I bet 88% of the time they're not followed through, and the payments then keep trolls alive. Reform is still our best option, for software patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >> We are still fighting some of the trolls that have come after us and we expect to win those cases too. Without changes in the law we believe that the only way to end the plague of patent trolls is by fighting every troll that comes at us – and we encourage all others to do the same.

Needless to say, Rackspace can afford this strategy whereas smaller companies, who have no full-time attorneys on staff and little funds to retain outside counsel, generally cannot. A change in the law is needed to legislate patent trolls out of existence is still needed, basically yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is fun and all but calling the patent troll slain is a bit optimistic. Most likely "Rotatable Technologies" was specifically created to sue companies for this patent so they could simply go out of business if things got too rough. The larger patent troll, I'm sure, considers this loss a normal part of doing business and will continue with other patents. This does not get any better simply because one patent was invalidated.

We need legislative change, not to fight fire with fire. Public perception of these companies being trolls and detrimental to innovation is important but this is not a victory. It is simply not a loss and still an enormous waste of resources. We need patent reform.

<comment><USER18> Rackspace's post does address this as well:

>We are still fighting some of the trolls that have come after us and we expect to win those cases too. Without changes in the law we believe that the only way to end the plague of patent trolls is by fighting every troll that comes at us – and we encourage all others to do the same.

with a link to [http://www.rackspace.com/blog/a-sad-day-for-patent- reform-a-...](http://www.rackspace.com/blog/a-sad-day-for-patent-reform-a-bad- day-for-innovation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am a strong advocate of the following principle:

Defeat your enemies.

Rackspace deserves some big props, here. More should follow their example.

<comment><USER20>
        It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
          To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
        "We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
          Unless you pay us cash to go away."

        And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
          And the people who ask it explain
        That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
          And then you'll get rid of the Dane!

        It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
          To puff and look important and to say: --
        "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
          We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

        And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
          But we've proved it again and again,
        That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
          You never get rid of the Dane.

        It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
          For fear they should succumb and go astray;
        So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
          You will find it better policy to say: --

        "We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
          No matter how trifling the cost;
        For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
          And the nation that plays it is lost!"

Obviously, the sentiment has broad appeal. But in practice it almost always goes the other way -- caravans prefer paying bandits off to fighting them; shops prefer paying protection money to defying the mob; villagers prefer paying taxes to declaring rebellion; and, as called out in the poem, empires prefer paying foreign aid to sending their expensive armies off into the middle of nowhere. Paying the Dane-geld is forever, but even when you do defeat the barbarians it's not like they stay defeated. You just get different barbarians later.

Interestingly, the Roman empire liked to make sure that negotiations with border tribes went its way by waging terrifying scorched-earth campaigns against those border tribes shortly beforehand. It worked. But the negotiated settlements would include subsidies paid annually from Rome to the new barbarian leaders -- Rome liked this system because the subsidies (a) made sure the new leaders were pro-Rome, and (b) really helped stabilize the pro- Rome guy against local challengers.

<comment><USER21> In the same vein, the most bravado-laden thing an American president ever said was Madison announcing his intent to fight the Ottoman states that were sponsoring raids on American ships:

The United States while they wish for war with no nation, will buy peace with none, it being a principle incorporated into the settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, so war is better than tribute.

<comment><USER20> But the extended Dane-geld concept is quite rarely referred to as tribute. It was a feature of Chinese foreign policy during the pre-modern period that all diplomatic relationships involved the other country explicitly acknowledging the superiority of China. Other countries paid tribute to China, and China responded with the magnanimous grace (return gifts) appropriate to its exalted station.

Despite finicky wording, a lot of money and silk somehow got sent up north.

Cities all over the world and across history have found it preferable to hand out welfare to the local poor rather than suffer through riots. The Romans conceived of a goddess of welfare (yep) to whom it was proper for the poor to give thanks when they got their free bread. Modern Americans like to speak in terms of prserving the essential dignity of being human. But it's not so easy to see a difference in the policy, or the strategy, other than the rhetoric that accompanies it. I suspect that if the rhetoric were switched to "let's pacify the poor so we don't get murdered in our beds", support would drop despite the policy staying the same.

Similarly, you can "buy peace" with another nation just by overpaying for some minor consideration they end up giving you in the peace negotiations - basically the same concept as accounting goodwill. Everyone involved knows what's going on, but the process is near-totally opaque to the outsiders who cry "war is better than tribute".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice going, and a service to the community. Thanks!</comment>


Alphabet's Pichai says contact tracing meaningful if only 10% to 20% opt-in - <AUTHOR> https://www.phonearena.com/news/pichai-explains-how-google-and-apple-teamed-up-to-fight-coronavirus_id124839 <comment><USER2> Fascism at its finest</comment>


Redesigned Conversations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1767-redesigned-conversations <comment><USER2> This looks nice, but doesn't address my main complaint with the conversation/PR system: there's no way to batch comments.

When doing code reviews, you can sometimes have upwards of 10 or 15 comments. In the current system this means 10 or 15 emails in everybody's inbox. It's also hard to work through a PR without letting everybody know when you're actually finished.

I would love to be able to comment on things as I read through them, then after I finish publish all of the changes and have them go out as one email.

<comment><USER3> I found a :thumbsup: emoticon comment successfully tells everyone I'm finished reviewing a pull request.

<comment><USER4> :+1: is a good shortcut :)

<comment><USER5> Is there a list of those somewhere? I've spent far too much time typing colon followed by random characters just to explore the many options.

<comment><USER6> There sure is! [http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com/](http://www.emoji-cheat- sheet.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So I use github enterprise and use the review tool a lot.

It has improved our overall code review experience, but there is a few things which have proved problematic and even have caused major headaches in the last year or so.

1\. No Side by Side diffs. 2\. Pushing new commits will often collapse conversations from the review. (i.e these conversations are folded)

Really, I want some way to look at my PR and say hey I've addressed all the comments on this pull request, and I am good to merge.

This is not even getting into what happens if you rebase your branch and then force a push to the remote.

<comment><USER8> When things are messy enough that I want to rebase a branch, I generally create a new branch and new PR, and close the old PR with a comment linking to the new PR. I also put a link to the old PR in the description of the new one, so people can easily go back and look at the old discussion.

In other words, rebasing is a big enough change that I feel it's appropriate to restart the PR.

<comment><USER9> If you are linking the requests with a comment on each end, I'm not sure I see the benefit to just pushing the rebase into an open request. Is there a real difference?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a good redesign but I wish they put more focus on developing Github Issues. The back button doesn't work (old issues randomly show) and filtering needs work (for example, how can I show issues from two milestones? how about showing issues with no comments? etc.).

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one who dislikes that they made all the fonts slightly larger? I'm working on a 1080p monitor atm and I really don't want more screen real estate taken up with no benefit.

<comment><USER12> If this is your only complaint, I think it's safe to say that they're doing pretty well overall.

<comment><USER11> Oh, absolutely, I love everything else about the change. It makes the conversation and commits/etc. much easier to follow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk I'd like to be able to see a revision history when someone edits someone else's comment. Trust but verify. Sometimes people mess up.

<comment><USER13> I still don't understand why they allow people to edit other people's comments in the first place.

<comment><USER14> It's very nice in the context of an open-source project to be able to fix formatting and such in people's bug reports, and to be able to update the original report with a more accurate summary of the problem when needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The other thing I'd like to see is context on emails in a conversation thread. So if I reply to a comment you've made, it would be great to see the comment I'm replying to IN the email itself (or at the very least, the last comment on that line, if there are multiple comments).

A lot of times I'll get an email comment and have no idea what they're talking about till I click through to go back to the conversation thread

<comment><USER16> Please do others a favour and don't reply to GitHub comments from email! Many people, including myself, will edit a comment a few times after publishing it. So the comment you're replying to by email would be outdated.

I've gone so far to disable email notifications completely. Which is another win for me because I can't stand being blasted with emails all the time. It's like a never ending to do list which builds up extremely quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm seeing a lot of overlapping text and box breaking.

</comment><comment><USER18> Overall, I like what I'm seeing so far. The notable exception is that they removed the build status indicator for Pull Requests from the PR body and now only show the faint green check next to a commit hash. Makes determining whether a PR is good to merge a bit more difficult IMHO. Hopefully that gets fixed.

</comment><comment><USER19> Do you guys think the headline in the example,

" Upgrade to Normalize v3 #12406 Merged mdo merged 5 commits into master from normalize_v3 about 4 hours ago "

occupy too many space in the web page?

</comment><comment><USER20> Thank you for making the issue number large enough to read where I don't have to hunt and squint to find it!

</comment><comment><USER21> And replies _still_ aren't nested? Guys, multi-party conversations are not necessarily linear.

</comment><comment><USER22> This looks so much better

</comment><comment><USER23> Finally.

</comment><comment><USER24> Brings a lot of clarity to what used to be a mess. Thanks for the good UI update.

</comment><comment><USER25> I like this one!</comment>


Baidu made a smart cat shelter that uses AI to tell cats and dogs apart - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18220606/baidu-smart-cat-shelter-ai-facial-recognition-dogs <comment><USER2> Meanwhile the Russians used a cat flap[0]

[0] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or- fiction-n...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa- spen/)</comment>