Starivore Extraterrestrials – Interacting Binary Stars as Metabolic Systems [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://student.vub.ac.be/~clvidal/writings/Vidal-Starivore-Binary.pdf

<comment><USER2> The domain `.ac.be` should be treated similarly to `.co.uk` by HN (ac means academia). Here the domain that appears in parenthesis next to the link should be `vub.ac.be`.

<comment><USER3> We've now fixed this. Sorry for the delay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The idea of analyzing existing recordings for information is compelling. I saw a show about Zipf's law, I can't remember the name of it but the basic idea is to plot data with the symbols on one axis and the frequency of each symbol on the other. Highly structure data that conveys information tends to have a -1 slope on a logarithmic scale. More info:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law)

[http://www.peterrussell.com/Dolphin/DolphinLang.php](http://www.peterrussell.com/Dolphin/DolphinLang.php)

One of the problems with this approach is that data compression takes advantage of these frequencies so that at maximum compression the slope tends back towards 0 (perfect compression is almost indistinguishable from noise).

To me, this is the most likely reason why we haven't discovered extraterrestrials. Without the decompression/de-encryption key, we have no way of seeing the sea of data that's probably being transmitted all around us. That and the fact that aliens have probably learned how to communicate with neutrinos because they are able to build arrays of nano-detectors that can sense the perturbations that are too faint for us to see. Also the beams are probably directional, not broadcasted for all to see. So looking for direct evidence of a civilization, something like a heat signature or particular arrangement of matter, is probably going to be more fruitful than eavesdropping on communications.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some more stuff at his website, incluging the grand prize of 500 Euros (which I hope someone will add to): [https://highenergyastrobiology.wordpress.com/](https://highenergyastrobiology.wordpress.com/)

We're going to feel awfully stupid if this hypothesis turns out to be correct and ETI was sitting out in plain view for decades.

</comment><comment><USER6> Paramagnetic bonding sounds fascinating.

[http://phys.org/news/2012-07-chemists-molecular-bond- white-d...](http://phys.org/news/2012-07-chemists-molecular-bond-white- dwarf.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting concept! But surely it should be "astrovore", no? :)

<comment><USER8> Or Stellarvore. Anything but Starivore. Yuck. I always want to say "Stare" instead of "Star"

<comment><USER9> I think it's just meant to be assonant with "carnivore".

<comment><USER8> That makes sense!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Radiation will eat you alive if you try that.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Title of the paper is actually "Starivore Extraterrestrials? Interacting Binary Stars as Macroscopic Metabolic Systems" but I had to truncate it due to HN's 80 character title limit.

</comment><comment><USER11> You can scale this to an even bigger level: when the Milky Way and the Andromeda will collide they will in fact mate. (The __Milky__ Way being the female counterpart in the intercourse)

<comment><USER12> >when the Milky Way and the Andromeda will collide they will in fact mate

Only inasmuch as two groups of people walking past each other in a desert counts as "mating". Galaxies are very sparse, so their collisions don't actually involve much colliding but do a lot of passing by.

<comment><USER11> You have zero imagination.</comment></comment></comment>


Lyft Gets Its First Buy Rating Ahead of IPO with Price Target of $75 - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/lyft-gets-its-first-buy-rating-ahead-of-ipo-thats-expected-to-price-next-week-2019-03-20?mod=this-is-nutty <comment><AUTHOR> This makes no sense.

How do you give a rating on a stock that isn't even trading, with a Price target on an IPO that is yet to be priced?

IPO hype / marketing gimmick, or is Wall Street going giddy over this IPO ?

EDIT: Here's the video of the Analyst justifying his "rating": [https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/20/lyft-will-be- profitabl...](https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/03/20/lyft-will-be-profitable- but-not-in-near-term-analyst-with-first-buy.html)</comment>


Django newforms-admin branch merged into trunk - <AUTHOR> http://code.djangoproject.com/changeset/7967

<comment><USER2> This is exciting news. The long-awaited 1.0 is in sight.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent news. I just bid a new Django project today and this will be a great help.</comment>


Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux – Ronald Minnich, Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffTJ1vPCSo <comment><USER2> This is quite good.

It is really about the presence of multiple Intel x86 CPUs on a single motherboard each running its own "kernel", but where the user only controls _one_ of these kernels, and what control the user's kernel has over the hardware is easily subverted by the others.

       SMM - can disable
       UEFI - can replace
       ME - can remove components
       ISH - not discussed
       IE - not discussed

The crunched binary for intramfs is written in Go and yet only 5.9MB. No systemd. Everything, even init scripts, is written in Go.</comment>


Coronavirus tracking app privacy – an introduction - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/nymtech/coronavirus-tracking-app-privacy-an-introduction-d2950857598c <comment><USER2> Great run down. Australia just released their version of a COVID-19 tracking app with a very similar approach.

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-26/coronavirus- tracing-a...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-26/coronavirus-tracing-app- covidsafe-australia-government-covid-19/12186130)

The privacy policy: [https://www.health.gov.au/using-our- websites/privacy/privacy...](https://www.health.gov.au/using-our- websites/privacy/privacy-policy-for-covidsafe-app)

So apparently when you sign up you provide: When you register for COVIDSafe We will ask you to consent to the collection of your: mobile phone number – so that you can be contacted if needed for contact tracing name – so the relevant health officials can confirm they are speaking to the right person when performing contact tracing. This will be easiest if you provide your full name, but you can use a pseudonym or fake name if you prefer age range– so health officials can prioritise cases for contact tracing, if needed postcode –to make sure health officials from the right State or Territory who work in your area can contact you, and to prioritise cases for contact tracing, e.g. hotspot areas

When you use COVIDSafe Your app will only record the following contact data: (1) the encrypted user ID, (2) date and time of contact and (3) Bluetooth signal strength of other COVIDSafe users with which you come into contact. This information will also be recorded on the other users' devices. An encrypted user ID will be created every 2 hours. This will be logged in the National COVIDSafe data store (data store), operated by the Digital Transformation Agency, in case you need to be identified for contact tracing. No location data (data that could be used to track your movements) will be collected at any time. No user will be able to see the contact data stored on their device as it will be encrypted. Any attempt to decrypt contact data is an offence. Contact data stored on a device will be automatically deleted after 21 days. We cannot access any contact data stored on a device, or share this with health officials, unless and until a COVIDSafe user consents to upload the data to the data store.

I'll be very intrigued to see how it goes.</comment>


Ellen Pao Plans to Appeal - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/06/01/ellen-pao-plans-to-appeal/ <comment><USER2> So who is actually running Reddit these days? Because a CEO involved in very high-profile personal litigation likely doesn't have the time to be a very effective CEO.</comment>


How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html <comment><AUTHOR> Although the article is quite old (1999, one year before Douglas Adams died) I still find it refreshingly up-to-date.

In fact I found a paragraph that was true then and I believe is even more true now:

<< Because the Internet is so new we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can't "trust" what people tell you on the web anymore than you can "trust" what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. [...] >>

And, two others that I personally resonate with:

<< Another problem with the net is that it's still "technology", and "technology", as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is "stuff that doesn't work yet." We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. >> [As a personal note, I think our current internet is still "technology" by this definition...]

<< 3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. >>

I'm glad I've stumbled over Douglas Adams site... I just hope it won't "bit- rot" like many other old sites... (Granted it can still be accessed through the Internet Archive.)</comment>


Chrome won't load archive.org - <AUTHOR>

Maybe it's somehow a glitch on my computer.  I noticed it last night and just ended up using Firefox to load the archive.org pages I needed.  Yet, today just restarted my computer and Chrome still won't load archive.org
What's happening: when I type archive.org into Chrome and press enter, it acts like I didn't do anything.  I then type a different domain, such as netflix.com in, and it goes to netflix.com.  Type archive.org back in and it simply reloads netflix.com
Anyone else experiencing this?
Edit: clarified which domains were loading in each instance. <comment><AUTHOR> Update: after disabling all extensions and testing that, I've now found that Chrome will load [https://archive.org](https://archive.org) but not [http://archive.org](http://archive.org) and it isn't redirecting the pages. So not sure if this is Chrome's fault or Archive.org's fault.

<comment><USER2> Browsers don't automatically assume that [https://something](https://something) is the same as [http://something](http://something), and they won't redirect you between those.

This is an issue in the way Archive.org has set up their servers.</comment></comment>


Tim Cook Needs to Step Down: Angel Investor Jason Calacanis - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/09/09/tim-cook-needs-to-step-down-angel-investor-jason-calacanis.html <comment><USER2> > And these new phones --- the big innovation is we might be getting a purple > and green color. Wow, that's exciting. [...]

Apple won't release any information about the new devices until _tomorrow_. There are plenty of times when predictions have been completely wrong, even up to the day before the event. Yes, many of the predictions are likely to be correct, but talking about this stuff as though it's a 100% certainty is absolutely absurd.

Aside from that, Apple is moving into being a services company. Something like 20% of their annual revenue now comes from services, and they're moving to make more steps in that direction. Strictly looking at Apple as a hardware company now is, perhaps ironically, a very antiquated perspective.

> They haven't done anything innovative since this device. [holds up AirPods]

The AirPods were released less than 3 years ago. Are we expecting them to release a new AirPods-level innovation every year or something? I mean, seriously, this just doesn't make sense.

And you know what? Not every product is meant for every user. Their new display for media professionals blows its competition out of the water and is, by plenty of definitions, innovative.

> They're one year behind Samsung on 5G.

New cell bands aren't some big metric to make such earth-shattering claims like "fire the CEO" about. I remember when 4G was rolling out and... okay, it was in Boston and SF for like a whole year before it got to where I live (which is not a huge city, but also not a tiny nowhere). There's no need to be on the cutting edge of this stuff until the network is actually supported in more than a few cities. There are really very few cities in the US with good support for 5G right now, so why waste money using 5G-capable chips when most users won't be able to make use of them? (See: [https://www.cellularmaps.com/5g-coverage.shtml](https://www.cellularmaps.com/5g-coverage.shtml) )

> And [Apple] just have way too much pride. They think that they make the best > products in the world and nobody else can. Incorrect. Tesla, Peloton, > Facebook, Google, all making wonderful products right now.

You really want to mention Facebook as making "wonderful products" after everything they've been in the news for the past couple of years? This really makes me wonder about the speaker.

Google has also been in some hot water for some of their policy decisions lately, though not so bad as Facebook. Tesla's recent roll-out of the Model 3 was plagued with issues (which have since been mitigated), and while most people love them there have definitely been some issues here and there.

I guess what I'm saying is that I agree that Apple's products are not inherently better than all of these companies, but neither are these companies better than Apple\\* (which is what the speaker appears to be saying).

\\*Except Facebook, which is worse than all the above companies in my opinion.

> The Pixel 3 with Google Phi is a better experience than the iPhone.

I mean, this is 100% subjective. Plenty of people have used both and prefer the iPhone experience. It's all a matter of taste. The speaker shouldn't be acting like his opinion is really a fact.

\---

What I came away from this with was a feeling that the speakers don't really understand what they're talking about (with regard to this specific issue). And while I am also disappointed that Apple haven't "innovated" with regard to their main product lines lately, I also think they seem to be doing fine as a company and they have plenty of time to wow us with something in the next couple of years before I start to lose interest.</comment>


Show HN: Pact – a safe smart contract language (web editor) - <AUTHOR> http://kadena.io/try-pact/ <comment><USER2> I think everybody knows this, but I don't: what is the use case of something like a private blockchain with smart contracts?

<comment><USER3> There's a number of applications for permissioned blockchains, perhaps even running in a "public" context. But the main application so far is inter- organizational transactional systems. Smart contracts in this context are as useful as in the public case (aka Ethereum), for defining and socializing business logic and processes. Fixed consensus membership doesn't fundamentally alter this.</comment></comment>


For ATRIAS Robot, Walking Like a Human Is a Stroll in the Park (video) - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2015/05/06/video-for-atrias-robot-walking-like-a-human-is-a-stroll-in-the-park-literally/

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool robot however it almost seemed as if they were trying too hard to point out really minor things that should not affect it that much. Terrain changes "grass to asphalt", hill climb "5 degree incline"? and to take the cake throwing balls at it.. come on guys we get that you want to make a Boston Dynamics type video, but pushing a robot over and it recovering is considerably more difficult then hitting it with a ball that's what 2% of its weight? The fact that it is a bipedal robot is cool enough, no need to add in the corny stuff.

<comment><USER3> I think you underestimate the effort required to make even these tiny things to work.</comment></comment>


A migratory lifestyle is associated with shorter telomeres in a songbird - <AUTHOR> http://www.aoucospubs.org/doi/full/10.1642/AUK-16-56.1 <comment><USER2> Telomere dynamics are sufficiently different between mice and humans to be cautious about extracting meaning from mouse studies.

Birds have very much more different telomere dynamics.

So aside from that, average telomere length is typically measured in immune cells from a blood sample. Telomere length shortens with each cell division, and stem cells delivery new cells with long telomeres. So in immune cells you are going to get a fuzzy metric that depends on everything known to influence immune function filtered through a combination of immune cell replication and replacement rates. So stress, injury, exertion, diet, infection, age, etc, etc.

What you end up with is a statistical measure that can support any number of theories, being fairly distant from underlying processes, and influenced by many processes. There's a lot of variation in the literature, and many contradictory datasets and interpretations.

That again is entirely distinct from the evolutionary background that leads to a species having telomeres that start at a given length, and there are wide variations in that metric across species - just look at mice and humans.</comment>


Volkswagen Polo - <AUTHOR> http://follownoone.com.au/

<comment><USER2> I'm tethering over the 3g, and I had enough time to write this comment, delete it, and rewrite it again and the site is still loading...

it's not flash per se that's bad, but you cannot make a site so huge.... I mean, I would have never watched it. Wait, I'm still in time to close the tab, it didn't load yet :-)

EDIT: I mean, there could be a good reason for it to be heavy. But if you don't show at least something interesting in the meantime the users will go away. (btw, still loading :-) )

</comment><comment><USER3> Well i got to 100%, checked out the site and now i don't know if the "Extremely Clever" in the title is ironic or not.

Yes the concept seems nice, but execution is key... therefore i think stating "Extremely Clever" as an ironic remark makes more sense....

/Irony ON

 _Well done Volkswagen_

/Irony OFF

</comment><comment><USER4> What is the clever part? That it stays stuck at 30% forever?

</comment><comment><USER5> Ugh, been waiting for at least a couple minutes and still 52% loaded. Not gonna stay to watch...I like Volkswagen but this is just taking too long.

</comment><comment><USER6> I made it to 5% and got bored - who else?

</comment><comment><USER7> It loaded fairly instantly for me, but it's just another website. Unless I'm missing something.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately it's Flash - but still a great concept!

</comment><comment><USER8> So clever my flashblock ate it all!</comment>


CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/01/css-grid <comment><USER4> I don't know how to say it politely but what has been achieved by using ad-hoc syntax such as this gem (and similar complex CSS syntax):

        display: grid;
        grid-template-rows: 150px [nav-start]
            auto 100px [nav-end];
        grid-template-columns: [header-start]
            minmax(200px, 3fr) 9fr [header-end];

CSS fans for some reason seem to think that its somehow better to have rendering/presentational properties in an ad-hoc language. Originally, plain markup attributes where designed to accomodate rendering properties, with type checking and all. The naive dichotomy established by putting "semantics" into markup and "presentational" properties into CSS was accidental, and it didn't make sense back then, nor does it now.

<comment><USER5> CSS would have been so simple if it had just adopted a plain LISP syntax. It is so difficult to memorise all the special and inconsistent syntax for every new thingamajig that browser vendors choose to introduce. Need to painfully look up a CSS reference if you haven't used that special rule in more than a week as it just doesn't seem to get retained (at-least for me) into long term memory.

<comment><USER6> The syntax is pretty simple. The problem is all the available attributes and values. I don't see how lisp syntax would help.

<comment><USER7> I guess you could then just plop in a small lisp (scheme!) function instead of units and values in order to place things as you like them.

You could then have standard functions that did what a lot of the keywords did.

On the other hand, It could get incredibly complicated too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If we all had something like Display Postscript, this layout thingamajig would be delegated to libraries, and we wouldn't have to ask the browser deities to bestow new gifts upon us. Good adaptive layout would be closer to a new version of jquery and less Windows XP Service Pack 51.0.2b.

(We also would have more sites that looked liked late 90s Flash, but then again, we're moving that direction anyway, just with more effort and convoluted design)

<comment><USER9> While that would probably work fine for display and layout, but it doesn't work so well with the semantic document model that the web is built on. For example accessibility would suffer greatly unless every "jquery" (using your analogy) out there were to implement its own accessibility. (That's not to say things are absolutely peachy wrt. accessibility these days, but they'd get a _lot_ worse if everybody had to implement their own.)

<comment> amiga-workbench I don't know if developers even care about semantic markup anymore, just have your 5 meg of JavaScript squirt out a bundle of divs and to hell with accessibility.

<comment><USER10> Just render a png file, server side. The only way to ensure pixel perfect layout, and it's even going to use less bandwidth than most JS frameworks these days.

<comment><USER11> Wrap that sucker in some HTML with <map> tags and you're golden.

<comment><USER12> Can't name any site that uses <map> still other than [http://www.teamfortress.com](http://www.teamfortress.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is excellent. And with the fast pace of browsers, and the improved habits of users (or automatic updates), it should be available for 95%+ of users within a year (It's in the current Safari Technology Preview, so Safari should get it with the next macOS point update).

This is also a good moment to remind people that you don't need Bootstrap and the like as much as you used to. Grids were 90% or the reason people started using these frameworks, and CSS (already with flexbox I'd argue, but definitely with grids) has caught up and is now easier to use and more flexible than any framework was.

It's also time to reconsider the atrocity that is class="col_xs_12". I've never undestood why people would lynch anyone using style="..." but happily littered their code with those grid classes. With the invention of sass at the latest, actual semantic class names should have once again become the only acceptable best practice. With html5, there's also a range of semantic tags[0], and using them improves both code readability, as well as allowing all sorts of new ideas in clients (not just browsers, but also text-to-speech and other accessabiity tools, or spiders, or brosers on new device classes)

o: <article> <aside> <details> <figcaption> <figure> <footer> <header> <main> <mark> <nav> <section> <summary> <time>

<comment><USER14> _> it should be available for 95%+ of users within a year_

only if you don't have enterprise customers. Those will continue to run IE11 for the foreseeable future as IE11 will remain supported in Windows 10 until 2025.

While Microsoft is pushing Edge as an IE replacement, Edge is still lacking features and looks too different from IE for companies to feel comfortable pushing it to their users without retraining them.

<comment><USER15> A lot of conservative enterprise customers are pushing Chrome, managed by group policy, since new productivity apps don't work well on IE.

<comment><USER16> Also for security reasons alone!

I once sent feedback citing security as a moral hazard that someone would get fired over, as the reason IE8 needed to be ditched.

Chrome showed up a few months later, I'm guessing once they'd tested group policies and install scripts (which I think google makes very easy these days). No idea if it was because of me but it was certainly welcome

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Makes you wonder why HN won't budge with those <table> tags in the source code. One day I hope to see "Table layouts are back with <table> tags" and the HN programmers would have saved themselves so much work.

<comment><USER18> What, exactly, is the problem with the <table> tag in the first place? Been a long, long time since I last touched HTML

<comment><USER19> It's neither flexible nor semantic.

Flexibility is what allowed webpages to be "responsive" before media-queries even existed, and semantics is what allows accessibility, search engines, and other html parsing tools ("readability" in Firefox and Safari, ...) to function better.

The only advantage it has is that it's old and predictable. That's why it's still used to format emails for instance, it's reliable and works on most supports.

<comment><USER20> Most divsoup-layouts are not semantic at all, either.

<comment><USER21> Exactly this. How are DIVs more semantic than TABLE? And who is reading the source? Your developers and a web spider. The web spider doesn't care (I wrote one and getting it to parse DIV content and TABLE content wasn't much effort)

As far as I am aware no spider is looking at the DIV and gathering semantic information from it. Sure, it may look at the TABLE and initially assume it has tabular data in it, but a tiny bit of logic fixes that.

<comment> squeaky-clean > And who is reading the source? Your developers and a web spider.

Or blind people using a screenreader?

DIVs aren't entirely semantic, but table is semantically wrong for how it's being used. It'd be like if I asked you to "get me the pencil off that thingie" and pointed at a chair with a pencil on it. As opposed to "get me the pencil off that table" while pointing at the same chair with a pencil on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Short of taking care of sizing the elements yourself, sadly, you can't have > both a vertical and horizontal rhythm by just using flexbox alone.

Accompanied by [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/images/2017/01/css...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/images/2017/01/css- grid/alignproblem.png)

I'm pretty familiar with Flex but I simply don't understand and the diagram doesn't help. What does 'rhythm' mean in terms of layout?

Taking a guess (which I shouldn't be), I can make [https://developers.google.com/web/updates/images/2017/01/css...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/images/2017/01/css- grid/examplelayout.png) with flex, but I'd have header and rest-of-page as columns, then have rest-of-page as a row with nav and content, then content as a column with content and footer. I _think_ the article is saying:

> CSS grid means I can do it all at once rather than continually having to > make rows and columns.

But it doesn't actually say that anywhere (and again I'm guessing).

<comment><USER22> OP is likely referring to vertical rhythm in typography:

[https://zellwk.com/blog/why-vertical-rhythms/](https://zellwk.com/blog/why- vertical-rhythms/)

<comment><USER23> rhythm, or perhaps repetition is one of the core tenants of graphic design. Once you start looking for it, you'll see it lots of places. It's kind of like the wilhelm scream sound effect. It's not hard to find strong examples, but most stuff is divided into a natural harmonic, 1/3 1/4 or 1/5\. movie posters are an easy example.

Anywho, google helps a bit, [1]. So, yes, you're absolutely right. it's just quite a bit more widespread than typography

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=rhythm+in+painting&espv=2&bi...](https://www.google.com/search?q=rhythm+in+painting&espv=2&biw=1116&bih=761&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X)

<comment><USER24> Nerdy nit: you mean to use the word _tenets_ , not _tenants_. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I still use plain old tables in 2017.

Number of unhappy customers: 0

<comment><USER26> Except anyone with accessibility requirements, no? As far as I know tables are horrible for anyone with a screen reader. Can you annotate tables somehow to work for accessibility purposes?

<comment><USER27> The problem with screen readers is summarized "Screen readers assume the content inside a table is tabular". Are divs better just because they are undefined? It seems to me that the problem would more easily be solved by adding some attributes to skip tabular treatment or to add captions, rather than ditching tables altogether. Table elements like <caption> could even be used to identify and access parts of the UI pages.

<comment><USER28> > Screen readers assume the content inside a table is tabular

I'm curious to hear from screen reader users. I recall that the gap between "what web developers think screen readers do" and "what screen readers do" has always been sizable.

<comment><USER29> Windows based screen readers (more sophisticated than Mac's VoiceOver), let the users treat only data tables as tables and ignore layout tables. Also users can adjust announcement of only column headers, only row headers, both or none while navigating through the data table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So basically 15 years late, CSS finally solves this problem. And coming to CSS in 15 years: adaptive design!

<comment><USER31> Next up: Revival of the <frame> tag!

<comment><USER32> I seriously wish it'd survived and been enhanced. Much AJAX in practice is used to replicate the effect of <frame>s, but slower, buggier, and with more battery drain.

<comment><USER31> I agree. My understanding was that it had 2 major problems. 1) you could load other sites or 3rd party content in a frame which caused confusion - <USER2> should not have allowed that. 2) search engines had problems with them - that's not my problem, they should have gotten smarter. May have been helped by eliminating the first problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've used grid layout a fair amount in the last 6 months or so. It's very exciting but it can feel quite daunting; the new mechanics and new grammar do not make the spec an easy read.

Fortunately, I've found that it's quite easy to get to grips with - <USER3> if you have been around long enough to have sliced designs into table layouts!

Now for a rather shameless plug for my own article on the subject (I hope with a closer to real world example):

[http://maketea.co.uk/2016/09/28/css-grid-layout-is-a-step- ch...](http://maketea.co.uk/2016/09/28/css-grid-layout-is-a-step-change.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> The biggest game-changer to me seems to be the last example, with `grid- template-areas`. I could probably explain this in a matter of minutes (as opposed to flexbox).

<comment><USER35> I first encountered that idea in chicken scheme's fltk gui binding package:

[http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/bb#ascii-picture- interface](http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/bb#ascii-picture-interface)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This doesn't really fix much - if the idea is to continue to use pixel-based positioning. I've got devices with a range of dot-pitches (surface 4 pro, external older monitor, cellphone) - with various physical screen sizes -- A "150px sidebar" doesn't work the same across these devices - and more importantly, for a low-resolution 24" screen I'd probably want a similar 3" side-bar as for a "retina"-resolution 24" screen?

But at least we seem to be moving forward from the abuse of [ed:float]-layouts for grid-systems...

<comment><USER37> There is no requirement that the units be pixel-based. You can and should still use em/rem/vh/vw/vmin/vmax depending on your needs, along with media queries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've been waiting for the WPF/UWP/XAML grid to come to the web for years and am delighted to see that it's finally happening. Best layout container I've ever used.

</comment><comment><USER39> [http://caniuse.com/#search=grid](http://caniuse.com/#search=grid)

<comment> iso-8859-1 0.04% prevalence for current unprefixed version

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does this include subgrids? As I understand, these are necessary for handling some basic use cases[1], but browser vendors were refusing to implement them?

[1] [https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/2016/02/12/subgrids- thinking-...](https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/2016/02/12/subgrids-thinking-out- loud/)

<comment><USER33> No, not at this stage.

However `display: contents` may help plaster over the gap.

EDIT, reference: [http://gridbyexample.com/video/subgrid-display- contents/](http://gridbyexample.com/video/subgrid-display-contents/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm really excited for this. I've been using pure flexbox layouts for a while now, but it still has one major problem, in that your HTML structure still contains layout and positioning information.

Everything is either a column or a row, so in the example layout in the link, you'd need two container divs. Whereas the grid example can be done without any.

</comment><comment><USER42> It was 2003 on a day like this when I was doing table layout design for one of my websites. Somehow it feels like it holds up well. [http://dnalib.sourceforge.net/](http://dnalib.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Maybe I sound like a broken record, but I still don't understand how layout can ever be a style.

Why does an HTML <Grid>-element not exist?

<comment> iso-8859-1 If styles are not for layouting, what are they for? Even font-sizes are layouting, no? You propose just scrapping CSS?

The nice thing about CSS is that you can ignore it in "article view" or mobile. You can't ignore HTML in the same way. Don't you see the value in splitting semantic and styling components of a page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> But does the Grid layout change flow responsively? I mean, will the sidebar move below the content if the size of the screen is reduced?

With flexbox I can do that implicitly without Media queries

</comment><comment><USER45> Both Android (ConstraintLayout) and iOS (Auto Layout) use Cassowary. Why not just implement this with CSS as well so we can use the same layout tech for every platform?

<comment><USER46> Athor here :)

I totally feel you, and that is what Houdini's Custom Layout is going to be about: [https://github.com/w3c/css-houdini- drafts/blob/2b730220b2f3c...](https://github.com/w3c/css-houdini- drafts/blob/2b730220b2f3c26ec67445d1f96765ebb855421a/css-layout- api/EXPLAINER.md)

I want to write a blog post about constraing based layouts on the web specifically, but the TL;DR on why we don't have it already:

Standardization is hard. It's especially hard to reach consensus when:

* the runtime for a layout algorithm is hard to estimate

* it can _fail_ (which is unprecedented in CSS)

* a new syntax for constrains would have to be defined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> My first experience as a young kid in the 90's doing web design was taking the msn.com home page (I thought it looked nice back then) looking at the source, and learning. Turns out layout was done using tables. Cool, putting it into practice though it was really really hard.

The primary force you were always fighting against was inconsistency between browsers. You might get everything perfect in IE, then load it in Netscape and there's huge gaps between your awesome solid colored navigation side blocks. Then making it adjust to the size of the browser was another struggle. After a while I learned to just make everything fixed size. Then content inside continues to nest you have to keep subdividing, and things would start to get out of whack. You adjust one block here, and the side suddenly has these weird gaps. A large part of it was almost certainly the fact that I was about 13 or 14 years old at the time, and I learned only by looking at example code... but It was really difficult.

flexbox doesn't really seem to suffer from the problems that made table layout really suck. I use it mostly indirectly by using the library Bulma, but it's really wonderful.

<comment><USER48> _The primary force you were always fighting against was inconsistency between browsers._

None of the things you're complaining about are _table_ 's fault, though. In the 90s browser vendors didn't target cross-functionality nearly as much as they do now. They could have easily made tables work even better with a modicum of intent instead of plunging us into 2 decades (!!!) of unintelligible nested div hacks that still after all that time weren't up to the task until some arbitrary number of years from today when this feature is actually widespread enough to deploy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is one of the things that frustrated me about the web world. Stuff that you could do in 2000 with real UI kits is finally making its way to the browser. Java/Swing and Qt could do this years ago, and more elegantly.

I don't suppose there is any momentum for starting over with something not based on a simple word-processing model, but with a real UI foundation.

</comment><comment><USER50> IMhumbleO the redundancy is at issue, because CSS is simply nested key pairs and so say that HTML should handle only text and tagged divisions in text with IDs and classes, and leave all the semantics up to the sheets. Folks who point out that style is semantic are correct, so it's redundant to allow all these structural tags in HTML that are intended to give semantic formatting to text, and instead CSS should be reliably the only source of semantic formatting. Therefore, only one HTML element and everything else attributes or key pairs in the sheets.

Also I find js2css works well to keep component style in place with MVC web components.

(This comment is a response to the multiple inevitable discussions on the merits of HTML/CSS and what is bad or good and how it all should be different, great stuff, thanks for it)

</comment><comment><USER51> Yes, please. Putting 'styles' in charge of layout was always madness.

Every time I hit the wrong link because the browser engine finally figured out it should move things around one more time just that millisecond, my soul gets blackened by the wish to strangle someone.

<comment><USER52> I wonder if there is a name for this rage. I did what you did but I did it twice in a row and one of them was an ad that crashed safari. If someone had teleported me into the dev's office during that 10 second period, it would have been an absolute slaughter house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> why is this better than tables?

<comment><USER53> Because <table> indicates that it contains tabular data, and implies lots of things about the content that it contains that would be misleading when using table-based layout.

And display: table, which uses CSS to make things look the same, without implying anything about the content, wasn't supported by Microsoft, back when they they were a) the only browser that mattered, and b) trying to hold back the web to protect their monopolies, so people worked around their damage by using the tools that happened to already be available in IE (see also the invention of AJAX)

Once Microsoft caught up, people who understand CSS started using display: table whenever it helped. People who didn't kept complaining that you couldn't just use <table>.

<comment><USER27> Well the issue of semantics was not exactly solved by turning everything to <div>s. It's still a mess, but a different mess. I would even say it's bad to have display:table-cell because it's reduntant.

<comment><USER53> If you're using a <div> just so you can lay things out visually, then its lack of semantics is appropriate. Presumably you use artices, headers, paragraphs, asides, links, img, lists etc. within those non-semantic "container" divs to convey the semantics.

I'm not claiming it's perfect, but it's like government data being released as a CSV vs a PDF with a scan of paper document. Structured data is better for lots of reasons, even if it's only minimally structured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It looks like this is getting released in the next major version of most browsers[1].

For Chrome, that means no sooner than 03/14/17\. That version, Chrome 57, will also come with automatic background tab throttling[2].

[1] [http://caniuse.com/#search=grid](http://caniuse.com/#search=grid)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543)

<comment><USER55> Except for mobile ( Android, iOS ), which is the main reason that we use responsive design anyway.

I will stick to flexbox for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Why is this problem so hard when CSS does so much for node positioning? Why not create a simpler standard once and for all?

<comment><USER48> We had a simpler standard in 1995. It was called tables and it did this exceptionally well and more importantly was easy enough for even amateurs to understand. And then armchair demagogues decided that markup should no longer be used for markup, setting web layout back decades and creating the field of web designers whose major accomplishment was understanding stupid div hacks.

<comment><USER57> Your comment is the best example of the demagogue. Zero understanding of the issue, the problems that tables caused. But it was easy, right?

<comment><USER48> Every time this subject comes up, someone trots out the old canard that tables messed with screen readers and therefore were irretrievably bad.

Or they say from the highest and mightiest and ivoryest pedestal "separation of semantics and display, thus spaketh the lord" pretending, of course, that modern websites look and behave just like documents when that's demonstrably false, and that tables are therefore irretrievably bad.

And instead you now have, 20 years later (TWENTY! YEARS!) something that only now works as well for layout.

Adding "not-data" and navigation directives to tables to aid screen readers and separate semantics would not have taken 20 years.

And now you'll have to wait another 5 years before this new, "just as good as tables!" feature is sufficiently widespread to actually deploy it without a polyfill shim.

But please tell me more about what I do or don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> What CSS really needs is a canonical standard, and a tool for generating CSS compatible styles for ALL browsers down to IE8. Until then, I'm more than happy to skip these new layout techniques.

</comment><comment><USER59> Link to CanIUse for anyone wondering if this might be practical to use in a real project:

[http://caniuse.com/#search=grid](http://caniuse.com/#search=grid)

</comment><comment><USER60> This article's title is total clickbait BS. This has __NOTHING __to do with table layout or tabular data.

</comment><comment><USER61> On my professional web site I just kept using real tables for layout.

<comment><USER62> Pray for absolution

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> This has nothing to do with table layout, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><USER64> Just to point out this page doesn't scale properly on iOS when you pinch to zoom. CSS TFW.</comment>


OpenBSD on a Laptop - <AUTHOR> https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/ <comment><USER2> This is probably the single coolest feature of OpenBSD: "Also, Chromium on OpenBSD recently got unveil support. If you run it with --enable-unveil, Chromium will be prevented (at the OS level) from accessing anything other than your ~/Downloads folder."

<comment><USER3> Does anyone know how this works with profiles / cache? Does this force something like incognito mode? Also does this mean you can't upload / select files outside of the Downloads folder?

<comment><USER2> I wonder if it means no webcam access as that would require access to /dev?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > many features that require toil to achieve on FreeBSD, such as suspend on > lid close, working volume buttons, and decent battery life, work out of the > box on OpenBSD

Suspend on lid close worked out of the box for me on FreeBSD, on a ThinkPad X240. (Well, almost out of the box — had to disable the TPM in the firmware setup, otherwise the TPM would prevent it from waking up.)

There's NO WAY battery life could be better on OpenBSD though. OpenBSD is not even tickless!!

I measured the power consumption of the SoC with Intel's pcm tools, it's ~1W when idling in GUI on FreeBSD. Does OpenBSD even have pcm.x? ;)

<comment><USER5> > There's NO WAY battery life could be better on OpenBSD though. OpenBSD is > not even tickless!!

FWIW FreeBSD idled hot on my thinkpad x201 and x201s, where openbsd did not. I got more battery from a slim Linux than openBSD, but FreeBSD was by far the worst for battery life if you're comparing them.

<comment><USER4> Odd. Did you load the GPU driver? Start powerd?

<comment><USER5> Yes. I was looking at power optimisations at the time and those were suggestions. The issue was an idle load of 1.0 (nothing was noticably taking cpu), and when I say idle I mean there was nothing being drawn on screen and the browser was closed.

<comment><USER6> ... but Sendmail was furiously trying to redeliver a massive mail queue of daily security run output messages? (-:

There is more than just your WWW browser and X applications running on a FreeBSD system.

<comment><USER5> Yes, of course, but maybe that's part of the problem.

FWIW, sendmail delivery to local mailboxes shouldn't need to retry, since it'll just dump in roots spool folder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like how most of the configuration in this setup is very similar to how I configured systems as far back as mid-nineties. Most applications have a simple single config file, and a single responsibility, true to Unix' philosophy. My window manager needs haven't really changed during all this time. Add a nice launcher that indexes your system and you have most of everything you will need.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Full Disk Encryption with SoftRAID

It's worth noting that SoftRAID for encryption is mutually exclusive with SoftRAID for redundancy: " _Note that "stacking" softraid modes (mirrored drives and encryption, for example) is not supported at this time._"[1]

[1] [https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#softraid](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#softraid)

<comment><USER9> One can certainly stack softraid volumes but I think the FAQ indicates you won't receive support if something goes wrong.

        # bioctl -c 1 -l /dev/sd1a,/dev/sd2a
        softraid0: RAID 1 volume attached as sd3
        # ...
        # bioctl -c C -l /dev/sd3a softraid0
        New passphrase:
        Re-type passphrase:
        softraid0: CRYPTO volume attached as sd4
        #

I've personally used a setup like this since around OpenBSD 6.0.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, I didn't know it worked. A comment on another site by stsp@[1] suggested it doesn't.

[https://lobste.rs/s/ljdhug/install_openbsd_on_dedibox_with_f...](https://lobste.rs/s/ljdhug/install_openbsd_on_dedibox_with_full_disk#c_zgjnoa)

<comment><USER10> It does work if you do it manually. The nested softraid will not be assembled at boot. Thus oficially unsupported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On my desktop, I tried installing TrueOS and FreeBSD but kept having trouble with the install, then the applications and KDE, then the drivers, things were wonkie. Installed OpenBSD a couple of times and it all (mainly) just worked. Eventually just stayed with OpenBSD and have been very happy, especially with the excellent documentation, ease of installation and ease of use. I heard the FreeBSD devs don't use it on their personal comps as much as OpenBSD devs do, and what kind of sealed the deal for me. Thinking back, it was even easier than most Linux installs I've done.

<comment><USER12> OpenBSD is the friendliest OS I know of. That said... it seems to be picky at who it calls friend :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This should probably also mention running syspatch.

[http://man.openbsd.org/syspatch](http://man.openbsd.org/syspatch)

<comment><USER14> Cool, the biggest issue I've always had with FreeBSD is figuring out how to do routine updates when I've installed ports.

<comment><USER4> If you're building some ports with custom options, check out Synth: [https://github.com/jrmarino/synth](https://github.com/jrmarino/synth)

It downloads binary packages when it can & builds ports in parallel while showing a very nice ncurses UI :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can second Synth. I always used it on laptops where a full poudriere setup would have been overkill.

Also it's written in Ada!

<comment><USER14> Cool, as a Lisper I have to support niche languages :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ive tried a BSD laptop before, and my concerns always boil down to the same nonsense...can anyone offer some advice?:

\- how do i read ext4/fat/etc usb sticks from coworkers. \- is 3d or video support good with AMD? \- soundcard and full disk encryption? what about EFI boot?

<comment><USER16> \- reading ext4 is possible but hard (OpenBSD doesn't support journaling filesystems); you're better off with ext2 or FAT \- video support with AMD GPUs is good, much better than NVIDIA \- OpenBSD has a good sound stack that supports most audio systems \- full disk encryption is easy to set up and mentioned in the article \- UEFI and GPT work wonderfully on recent versions

<comment><USER17> What's the reason for missing journaling file systems? Lack of developers? Design choice for code simplification? Security reasons? Or something else?

<comment><USER18> I guess the same as with support for, say, NTFS, plus less incentive to work on it, since it's less popular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Question. I find it exceedingly useful that Mac OS has readline keybindings enabled in most (all? I can't think of any counterexamples, including the Spotlight overlay) of its text fields: control-A is head of line, control-E is end of line, etc. I've been using control-N and control-P to move between lines while editing this comment; it's simply a text field in Firefox.

Is it possible to turn on this functionality in OpenBSD?

</comment><comment><USER20> Why configure cwm to emulate i3 when you could just run i3?

Still, cool to see people running a BSD on a laptop, IIRC I ran NetBSD on my old Thinkpad in college.

<comment><USER21> It's in the OpenBSD distribution, which presumably means it undergoes the same code auditing that the rest of OpenBSD does.

<comment><USER22> Yep, cwm is maintained by the OpenBSD devs and is part of base, so you don't have to download a package for it. If you want, though, i3 is only a quick dl away.

I used to have a kind of complicated cwm setup, but I got tired of that and just use XFCE now. It runs great.

<comment><USER23> Ditto, but with JWM instead of XFCE. Minimalist, a rational set of functionalities, click-to-focus-and-raise, plus a CDE-like colorscheme borrowed from AIX.

As for the file manager, I use noice, but I woudn't mind this ported to OpenBSD:

[http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni- mainz.de/~ag/xplore/](http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-mainz.de/~ag/xplore/)

<comment><USER21> I can't decide whether the old motif widgets are ugly as sin or not. But for whatever reason, I find the screenshot of that file manager to be salve for my soul. Probably just nostalgia.

I must say though that I'm just as glad Motif has mostly faded into history. It was... a challenging widget set to work with.

Now, I wish something like GNUStep had caught on. Maybe an independent BSD implementation.

<comment><USER23> On Motif, Irix' theme was really great: [http://www.inventinginteractive.com/2010/12/07/desktop- uios-...](http://www.inventinginteractive.com/2010/12/07/desktop-uios-design- history/) I woudln't mind a GTK theme adaptation. A Motif one exists in Gnome Look, and it's more usable than you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was just thinking of swapping my largely-unused ThinkPad over to OpenBSD yesterday, so this is extremely timely and useful :D

</comment><comment><USER2> Great article. Been thinking of doing the same. Typo in the first paragraph under "Installation":

"Grab a USB stick and download the the the amd64 disk image:"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How's the battery life? OpenBSD is nice and nifty little UNIX experience, definitely geared towards users who know what they are doing/wanting.

<comment><AUTHOR> About 7 hours on an oldish ThinkPad (T530) on a full charge:

      $ apm
      Battery state: high, 99% remaining, 430 minutes life estimate
      A/C adapter state: not connected
      Performance adjustment mode: auto (1200 MHz)

<comment><USER25> Wow that's good! I want to get used x220 and new 9 cell battery. If I could pull of 7-9h battery life I would consider it a great success. Btw i would be using only StumpWM, Firefox and Emacs. For media consumption I got MacBooks.

<comment><USER26> On my x230 with the 44wh battery I get around 4-5 hrs with normal usage

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> While this is a nice setup in case of a ThinkPad, this doesn't really work out on practically anything else. I get that a lot of the FOSS, or somewhat more specifically, the hardcore users use a ThinkPad, but the rest of the world pretty much doesn't (at least no longer since Lenovo bought IBM's spun-off computer bits). None of this stuff works on the generic MS Surface or Apple Mac stuff you see in 99% of the use cases where people are capable of installing an OS at all.

As nice as mobile support in OpenBSD is, and as nice as this guide is, it's still super niche :(

<comment><USER28> Your specific examples are special cases. The Surface is essentially a "Windows 10 machine", and while Apple permits installation of Windows on Macs, other operating systems are specifically not supported. (And macOS is already BSD-esque anyway.)

These instructions will work fine on any normal, generic, PC laptop.

<comment><USER29> Unless you're on older unsupported macbooks, I'm not sure I'd run something that wasn't macOS unless under a VM. That's just me. Although, I don't like a lot of the direction, or lack of with macOS.

I'll probably put a new system together around mid next year (leaning Ryzen 2 near release). Will decide on Hackintosh, Linux or BSD at that time. Most likely hackintosh, but who knows. Linux (Elementary and Ubuntu) are finally around where I would want it for a primary desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> reason-mr Writer spent ages on the window manager. XFCE is much easier : [https://sohcahtoa.org.uk/openbsd.html](https://sohcahtoa.org.uk/openbsd.html)

<comment><USER30> To be fair, I use cwm as well and the only configuration I made to it was changing the font.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am interested in moving from OSX to Linux.

However, my muscle memory have made it difficult to use ctrl + key versus command + key.

Is there an easy way (for example in Ubuntu?) to remap shortcuts so the copy and paste is command + C and command + V? Also, the ctrl + C should still stop processes in the terminal, so it's not as simple as swapping ctrl and command for all processes... This problem has been bugging me a lot with linux and I finding a solid solution would help a lot of OSX people switch to linux more easily.

<comment><USER32> the problem is with your previous operating system, not ours. I wish I could flip the mac laptop to not use that command key.

<comment><USER33> Why? It's much, much more comfortable once you get used to it.

<comment><USER32> doubtful. the command key does not need to exist. every other operating system gets along fine without it. apple is not even consistent either. as soon as you open up their terminal, you're stuck in this bizarre land where you have to ctrl+c and cmd+c for different tasks. linux splits paste into either a mouse click or shift+insert to avoid all this.

<comment><USER34> > you're stuck in this bizarre land where you have to ctrl+c and cmd+c for > different tasks

Which I find quite reasonable, personally. If I want to copy text, it's Command-C everywhere in the system, even in the terminal–no Command-Shift-C or similar "hack". If I want to send a SIGINT to a program it's Control-C, as it should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This looks like a useful guide.

> If you're even a little paranoid, you should start by overwriting the disk > with random data. We'll assume your hard disk is sd0—you can use dmesg to > check. The c suffix is OpenBSD's way of specifying the entire disk.

       dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/rsd0c bs=1m

Can I check: why would you do this rather than using ATA SECURE ERASE command?

Having a blob of random data on my drive would mean crossing international borders is potentially unpleasant.

</comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know if OpenBSD can run properly on a Macbook?

<comment><USER10> MacBook G4 sure... newer ones may have problems. To new users/new hardware I would recommend an usb stick with the network installer and then try to install to the usb stick and check what is working.

Also check if you PC is listed here. [https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/index.cgi?do=index&fts=apple](https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/index.cgi?do=index&fts=apple)

<comment><USER37> You are tempting me to pick up my 1 of 2 favorite laptops (or both) of ever that I owned: The 12 and 17 inch Aluminum Powerbook G4. Makes me wonder what kind of mods I can do to it now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Nice, but if you like click to focus and raise VM's you can try JWM, is great and with very few deps, almost NIL.

</comment><comment><USER38> Amazing guide! You have a typo - a second 'chown' in mail setup section should be 'chmod'

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

<comment><USER38> Some more: 1) .cwmrc has a parse error around chrome command - fixed by adding quotes around "chrome —enable-unveil"

2) I copied your fonts.conf exactly, and see "Fontconfig error, line 2: syntax error". Can't figure out yet what's going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I think the issue is DOCTYPE, here's the real file that I use hosted on GitHub, haven't had any problems with it.

[https://github.com/cullum/dotfiles/blob/master/fontconfig/.c...](https://github.com/cullum/dotfiles/blob/master/fontconfig/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "You won't find nearly as many online resources about setting up OpenBSD, because honestly, you really don't need any. "

That was the the last thing I wanted to read when wondering if openbsd will fit on my Ryzen machine.

<comment><USER40> You don't need a third party blog, it's in the documentation[1]: "All versions of the AMD Athlon 64 processors and their clones are supported."

The other drivers are the ones you need to worry about -- check the man pages, which list the supported hardware. For example: [https://man.openbsd.org/radeon.4](https://man.openbsd.org/radeon.4)

The attitude isn't "You shouldn't need documentation". The attitude is "OpenBSD should ship with documentation good enough that nobody feels the need to write up the results of sleuthing around".

[1][https://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html](https://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html)

<comment><USER39> Thanks, I'll check that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> A small detail, why do we still have to specify the blocksize (bs=1m) to dd. Can't it have a better default than 512 bytes.

<comment><USER28> In most cases, 128k is actually the optimal block size, and is (microscopically) faster than 1m. And also uses a tiny bit less ram.

<comment><USER41> Seems like a good default. I was expecting tons of comments telling me that it had to stay at .5 K for various arcane reasons.

<comment><USER10> I can't even imagine the suffering with broken shell scripts if the defaults change.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Strange History of the "King-Pine" - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/25/the-strange-history-of-the-king-pine/ <comment><USER2> It's about pineapples.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. Two "please subscribe" type popups before I could even see it. I quit then.</comment></comment>


Clocking IT - <AUTHOR> http://www.clockingit.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Speaking of 37 signals... this app looked pretty cool to me.

<comment><USER2> looks cool, but they are missing step #2. Set a price

<comment><AUTHOR> They're doing it for free/fun/advertising, apparently. Might not be sustainable in the long term, but you can always get the source code for it and run it yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This UI is horrible. But they get the simple things right.</comment>


American health care, like America, is innovative and wasteful. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2223037/ <comment><USER2> Not sure why such a poorly written opinion piece got submitted to HN. The author compares health care systems with the frivolous example of an old shoulder injury. A common form of cancer would have provided a much better illustration of the pros and cons of various health care models around the world, as socialized medicine often involves waiting many months for treatment.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-125860/Britain- tra...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-125860/Britain-trails- cancer-survival-rates.html)

The author concludes by advocating that employer health care plans be eliminated so that people can shop for health insurance as individuals. In my experience, when dealing with health insurance companies, there is strength in numbers. The lone individual has little clout when dealing with a large insurance company.</comment>


Apple Watch: The People's Choice - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@natewinn/apple-watch-the-peoples-choice-91b11d8b5f1f

<comment><USER2> > [...] Apple Watch fused technology and fashion together like never before — > a feat that, perhaps, only a company like Apple could pull off in such a > remarkable way.

Wow. I stopped reading at that point. What about Motorola's Moto 360?

</comment><comment><USER3> The only novel thing the Apple Watch does is include the crown on a smart watch.

It doesn't particularly appear to be the best smart watch out there, at least not in any definitive way (and isn't even available yet), though it might just be the most expensive big name in that arena.

This article reeks of unjustified fanboyism.</comment>


Show HN: Lost & found tags - <AUTHOR> http://loseproof.com/ <comment><USER2> Now what I would REALLY pay for, and what I thought/hoped was, is stickers had location tracking so I could find them with my phone, i'd put them on my keys, wallet everything. I think THAT, packaged into an very easy service, could be a brilliant business.

<comment><USER3> I think this is what you're looking for: [http://lapa-app.com/](http://lapa- app.com/)

<comment><USER4> The similarities between Lapa and Tile are scary. Coincidence or copying?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could I ask about the user testing you did on this?

Intuitively, if I lost something valuable, I would feel that people would be more inclined to make an effort in returning it if they saw a name (and hence a person) attached to it. Emotionally, that seems to be more powerful of a draw than a code. I guess in my case, I would think the additional vulnerability from having my name and e-mail address on it would not outweigh the perceived drop in likelihood someone would return my precious item.

I'd love to hear whether that's just me, and whether that's just perception (of having a lower return rate) vs. reality.

<comment><USER6> I think having a name sounds like a good idea that could be quite hard to do in the wild without making the stickers larger. Take for example my name (Nicholas Smith), which isn't overly long, but it'd take up a bigger chunk of sticker space unless we truncate it to Nick Smith. Which is still reasonably big, so you have to either increase the sticker size or truncate further until it's N.Smith and it loses the persona attached with a name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is very reminiscent of [http://www.tagbak.net](http://www.tagbak.net) which adds in a "reward for return" for the honest finder (which is a great idea). IIRC, TagBak is trying to work with vendors to include tags with phones instead of selling tags to end users... interesting to think about which strategy is more effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely - that's a great idea. We're currently looking in to a few strategies (aside from selling direct to the user): \- enterprise/businesses \- education (colleges & universities) \- manufacturers \- insurance providers

One angle that's certainly appealing is to reduce production costs even further (and therefore retail cost) to make a super low-cost way to protect items that have low value but high importance. Things like sketchbooks, coursework and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Free shipping creates an arbitrage opportunity: buy 20 tags for 0.5 GBP/each. Mail them to the shipper, for a little bit extra (0.3GBP maybe? don't know what postage is in the UK.)

You can now have items shipped for $0.8GBP/each.

</comment><comment><USER9> A great idea, in principle, but £5 for 5 stickers? It'd cost me 10p to print 10 stickers with 'email@example.com' on... which I might well do, now I'm thinking about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad we've inspired you :)

Loseproof is really geared toward people who want an out of the box solution – easy to signup, easy to protect your stuff & more secure (it's anonymous).

We'd also love to know where you can get stickers printed at that price... we might need to change supplier!

<comment><USER9> Sure, I get that. Have you thought about approaching businesses? My organisation has about circa 100 BlackBerry devices in circulation, none of which have any kind of 'if lost' marker on them...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit Your site has several links to "LoseProof store"[1] but I just get redirected to the home page.

Also, I think you should be very explicit about telling people these are stickers. And possibly talk about how well they stick. I don't put stickers on things so these are not for me. I am probably not alone.

Lost & Found seems to be a bit of a crowded space these days... so good luck.

[1] [https://loseproof.com/store](https://loseproof.com/store)

</comment><comment><USER10> Or if you could just generate a QR code and print on a sticker saying "if lost, please scan for return details". The QR code takes you to your own website with return details or a mailto: link.

Not 100% fool proof and depends on those who find it having a smart phone but its a cheap hack.

<comment><USER11> I like that idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It would be great if you always knew where all the objects you own are. For example, if you know you still have some nice LP's in the basement, but you can't find them, you should be able to take al look at your phone and see exactly where they are. (They might show up at a friends place :) Or, if you know there should be some clothes for your kid in a particular size, the app should list all of them available, and show in which box the are exactly.

Not doable yet I guess, but definitely something people will want.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the idea but good samaritans in this world becomes scarce, especially for electronics.

I believe it is best to use services like Find my iPhone/Droid, and the likes if you lose your precious device. At least you can lock/wipe/send your details if your device is found and still have a little chance of having it returned.

Also I think sticker tags like that are not really effective in a world where everything becomes location/people/things aware. The natural evolution is "tag 2.0" (eg. TheTileApp)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is exactly like TrackItBack, which you've probably heard of? I came across them since they had some pretty awesome airline mile bonuses. I never used the stickers (I still have them); all I remember was thinking to myself "damn these are some expensive stickers." (The miles promo was so good that it made sense to buy them even if you wouldn't use them).

..

I just searched for them and found that they're out of business. Other competitors seem to be idstickers and foundit, though I know nothing of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't heard of TrackItBack actually, but we know there are a few very similar products (TagBak, GadgetTrak, Tracer Tags). The problem is they're just so clunky - something we think we've solved pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why can't I just put my (e-)mail address on the device? The person who finds it just needs to give it to the next post office and tell them the receiver will pay for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question – one of our main aims with LoseProof is to keep your personal information secure (phone number, email address, home address etc).

Although a lot of items get lost relatively close to home, you're right – we're looking at extending the service in the future to offer the option of return postage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Re: pricing table -

      Protect unlimited items
      10 LoseProof tags

This doesn't really compute. So is it "unlimited" or is it "10"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, that is _really_ confusing – it looks like copy left from an earlier iteration. Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting service - looks a lot like [http://www.stuffbak.com/sb/default.aspx](http://www.stuffbak.com/sb/default.aspx).

I've had StuffBak for years and really like the idea of tagging my device but in the end, it really boils down to having a finder that is honest enough to return your device.

<comment><USER18> Honest and _sympathetic_ enough. And a low tech note scrawled with a sharpe may have an advantage there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Maybe your iPhone has a passcode lock, or your diary has only got your name in. If they got lost, how would you get them back?_

On Android, there is an option called "Show owner info on lock screen" that lets you put whatever text you want on the lock screen. I use "firstname.lastname@example.com". Is there really no iPhone equivalent?

<comment><USER20> The same thing can be done on the iPhone

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So what happens if someone (a loseproof member) finds the items but decides not to return it ?. It can help muggers too , why the need to mug someone directly, become a loseproof member and you will get to know the approximate location of the item. And then he looks for it for a day , finds it and sells it .

</comment><comment><USER22> Hmm, seems like something product manufacturers should pay for not consumers - see [http://www.knomobags.com/uk/register-your- knomo/](http://www.knomobags.com/uk/register-your-knomo/)

</comment><comment><USER23> As with the last time this was posted you can also just register your items for free here: [https://www.immobilise.com/view.php](https://www.immobilise.com/view.php)

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice job on the site and branding. Personally I don't see writing "Please call 555-1212 if found" as a security problem that needs solving, but there are probably some who do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much, glad you like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> These things need: Bluetooth Low Energy profiles, and Infinergy 800mhz energy- harvesting antennae. Then they'll be worth 5 bucks.

</comment><comment><USER26> Found a typo on the FAQ page under the question "Can you guarantee my stuff will be safe?":

> your stuff will get back to you should the worse happen.

worst.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just get 100 stickers with your email address, put it on your things and hope for the best...

</comment><comment><USER28> For a moment I thought it was RFID stickers and I got excited.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is anyone else's tongue tripping on the name? I keep saying "LooseProof" in an effort to make the syllables use the same vowel sound (English US speaker).

The web page is nice, but this stage in my life I feel like I've got too much stuff. Losing it is one convenient way to rid myself of some of the mass. The things I really care about aren't conducive to stickers ... I think my wife and kids would object, but maybe I could find somewhere inconspicuous. Everything else I'd hate to lose I have redundancy for (family photos are on Flash drives in multiple locations).

Maybe my definition of "Love" has become more refined than it used to be?

<comment> jack-r-abbit > _Is anyone else 's tongue tripping on the name? I keep saying "LooseProof" > in an effort to make the syllables use the same vowel sound (English US > speaker)._

It could be that we pronounce things differently... but for me the single "o" in _lose_ and the double "o" in _loose_ make the same sound as the double "o" in _proof_. The two words ( _lose_ and _loose_ ) only differ in the way the "s" sounds. The "s" in _lose_ is more of a "zzzzz" while the "s" in _loose_ is a standard "s" sound. So... my tongue is not tripping on that.</comment></comment>


Lori Loughlin and husband sentenced in college bribery scandal - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/lori-loughlin-husband-sentenced-college-bribery-scandal-17611534-00ff-4d25-9d88-de62725dec71.html <comment><USER2> I have a very hard time getting even remotely upset about the college bribery scandal when it's both legal and encouraged for the _truly_ rich to get their failsons 'legacy admissions' at selective colleges by donating multiple millions to the institutions.

The people who have been prosecuted as part of this scandal aren't being prosecuted for devaluing earned degrees at selective colleges; they're being prosecuted for finding a cheaper way to get their children into selective colleges than paying the ten million+ selective colleges charge a for legacy admission.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it feels more like they're getting punished for getting a discount and not giving the universities the bribe directly (likely because the actual 'fee' for getting your kid in is more than they could afford).

I was similarly bothered by this, and by the fact that nobody was worried that these students would fail out given that they cheated their way in.

Says a lot about the actual signalling value vs. educational value of the universities (and the lottery that is admissions).

On a tangential note, Lisa Brennan-Jobs' really great memoir "Small Fry" talks about her experience with this a bit. She dreamed of going to Harvard and during the admissions interview it didn't seem to be going anywhere until she quietly mentioned that her dad founded a computer company (the interviewer asked which one which prompted Lisa to say Apple at which point the dense interviewer figured out she was Steve Jobs' daughter) - and then the interviewer ___left the room_ __for a time.

When the interviewer came back she was smiling and generally a lot more engaged. Lisa went to Harvard.

College admissions is an unfair system in a billion different ways, I hope ISAs like Lambda School end up replacing a lot of it for most people. Lori Loughlin and the actors cheated the system, but it's weird to me that they got in trouble because they didn't cheat _in the right way_.

You need to be rich enough to pay a large enough bribe to the school directly. If that fails, hopefully you have a famous father.

Otherwise it's a lottery.

[Edit]: For those arguing paying the school bribe is different because other students benefit, I'd argue there should be at least some transparency in this process. If admissions slots are for sale, let the public see the price (instead the schools pretend otherwise).

<comment><USER4> _" I was similarly bothered by this, and by the fact that nobody was worried that these students would fail out given that they cheated their way in."_

You would be surprised at how difficult it is to fail out of programs.

From what I've seen profs have an unwritten rule to not fail students from school admin, otherwise they might complain and so it's easier to give a D than fail them completely.

<comment><USER5> That depends on the school. My 4-year would put you on academic suspension if your GPA was too low, which ended with you kicked out (well forced to take a 1 year break and have to ask to return... Not a lot of people did, especially since credits expired after 7 years). Although, I did get a D in a class I should have failed by the curve because I didn't write up all the lab reports, but I did well on all the tests and went to office hours to ask how to not fail, and a better grade than I deserved in a final quarter class where I wrote an apology note on the final exam, because I skipped studying that lieu of other course work, since that one wasn't needed to graduate.

On the other hand, my mom teaches pre-baccalaruate math at a CSU and gets all kinds of grief from administration for failing kids who don't earn a passing grade.

<comment><USER6> It wasn't really possible to flunk out of Caltech. What would happen is students would get discouraged and just leave. If you wanted to return, they'd let you back.

A friend of mine "flunked out" this way, and 10 years later came back and finished with all As. I asked him if he got any smarter in that decade. He laughed, and said no, he was just willing to do the work the second time around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The most entertaining argument I read about this whole scandal is that it wasn't fraud, it was _theft_ , and that's why the US Attorney is going after it on behalf of the colleges. Theft from the _colleges_.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you- ha...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-have-to-pay- the-right-person)

"...Here is one thing that U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in announcing the charges:

 _"There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy, and I 'll add that there will not be a separate criminal justice system either."_

Level playing field! Here is another thing he said less than a minute later:

 _"We're not talking about donating a building so that a school's more likely to take your son or your daughter. We're talking about deception and fraud."_

There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy, except for the extremely well-known one where you donate a building in exchange for getting your kid in! "Lol just donate a building like a real rich person," the U.S. Attorney almost said. Josh Barro's analysis on Twitter is exactly right:

 _The admissions slots were stolen from the colleges and resold on the black market. Which is a crime, for good reason. We don't have to act like there wasn't a legal, primary market for the admissions slots already._

I think the key is not to understand this as a crime against other applicants, or the public, or "fairness." It's a crime against the schools.

It is not about fairness; it is about theft. Selective colleges have admissions spots that they want to award in particular ways. They want to award some based on academic factors; they want to award others based on athletic skill; they want to award others in exchange for cash, but—and this is crucial—really a whole lot of cash. Buildings are not cheap.

<comment><USER8> I mean - economically speaking - why wouldn't a college take a student in exchange for a building? It would be unfair to not allow this, no?

I think the unfairness argument should be taken up a level - it's unfair that someone can even have the wealth to do this.

<comment><USER9> Colleges should compete for students based on the number of endowed buildings and sports facilities, and not on irrelevant metrics like academics.

In fact there should be a two-speed college system - one for very wealthy people who like having buildings and stadiums named after them, and a separate vocational academic system for those who can't afford to operate on that level.

Studying would be optional on the fast track. Academic life would become a round of partying, networking, and assortative mating, and efficiency would be enhanced by shortening it by a year or two. This would increase student throughput and further boost the property portfolios of the high status educational institutions.

With this system everyone would know exactly what their money was buying, and immoral attempts to cheat the system would become very easy to spot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have hard time understanding what goes for the bribery in US. Apparently, a lot of stuff that would be considered corruption in Europe is just business as normal in the US. In this particular case I would guess that what they did would be considered OK. Apparently it wasn't. Can someone from the US comment on where the boundary between what's OK and what's not lies?

<comment><USER11> Their bribe wasn't big enough, so it was the BAD sort of bribe, seems to be about the size of it. Bizarre.

I have a lot of concerns about the Irish college admissions system (a numeric score is derived from final school year exam results; places are filled based on the highest scores who applied by a national computer system, then anyone left is shunted to their second choice (which may be in a different institution) and so on), but at least people can't outright buy a place.

<comment><USER12> In India, a similar thing happens for engineering admissions.

People write a national level exam, get individual ranks. No two people get the same rank.

A convention is organized by the education body, where students are called in slots, with the top rankers going first. So they have all the colleges to choose from, all the subjects, etc.

Some % of seats in all colleges are reserved for various categories of students like athletes, physically handicapped, etc. But they are also prioritized based on their rank and an additional score (like a national level badminton winner is prioritized over a state level one, even if the national level player has a worse rank than the state level one).

Apart from this, all colleges are allowed 'management' seats, which are essentially seats that can be purchased. However, even to purchase seats, the student has to get a qualifying rank in the exam.

Costs for the seats are also fixed nationwide, with govt. doling out grants to the colleges for specific indexes, like male / female ratio, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The most amusing thing about this is that the kids didn't fail out. Kids couldn't qualify to get in but they had no problem doing the coursework.

Really laying bare that you're paying for the diploma, and not the education itself.

</comment><comment><USER14> This case just annoys me - this is hardly justice - she will probably be released due good behavior or covid in 2 weeks. The amount of tax payer money that went into investigating and prosecuting the case far outweigh the reward here.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know why the husband got 2.5x more penalty than the wife? Was the court able to prove it was his idea or he was somehow more guilty?

<comment><USER16> It's a plea deal, he plead guilty to more crimes.

>Loughlin pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, and Giannulli pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and honest services wire and mail fraud

[https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/lori-loughlin- guilty-p...](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/lori-loughlin-guilty- plea/index.html)

<comment><USER17> Prosecutor probably wanted one of them to plead to the higher charge and didn't care which one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why weren't they both punished evenly? Seems like a biased decision. Is it because Lori is a "celebrity"?

<comment><USER16> It's a plea deal, he plead guilty to more crimes. It is likely they discussed it.

>Loughlin pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, and Giannulli pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and honest services wire and mail fraud

[https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/lori-loughlin- guilty-p...](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/lori-loughlin-guilty- plea/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be funny if the irs decided to go after all the people who legitimately donated To the development office to get their children admission, but took the full charitable tax deduction and didn't subtract the fair market value for the admission... even funnier if they clawed back the universities tax free status or atleast back taxes on the donations as well.

Which brings me to, Wikileaks or someone should publish the FMV of quid pro quo admissions charity by college.

</comment><comment><USER20> This whole thing strikes me as prosecuting drug users instead of the dealers. If someone is selling this, I promise there are going to be people looking to buy it. College admissions is just too emotionally fraught for people to make clear decisions consistently.

I assume it edged its way from plausible deniability to mutual culpability in a very subtle way. Amd I believe the fraudster was eventually colluding with the FBI. How is it not entrapment?

</comment><comment><USER21> Remember when this was the biggest symbol of corruption in the US? I miss those times...

</comment><comment><USER22> seems silly to send people to prison for this

<comment><USER23> As a comparison, a homeless mother who deliberately enrolled her 5-year-old in the wrong school district was sentenced to 5 years in prison: [https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mom-went-prison-enrolling- he...](https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mom-went-prison-enrolling- her-191400017.html)

I would argue that the kind of bribery at the heart of this case is considerably worse, as it fosters a mentality that everything is for sale at the right price.

<comment><USER24> While the charges are absurd people need to stop referencing this case. She was given 5 years for the drug charges so the judge tacked on a concurrent 5 year sentence for the school charges. It has no material impact. If she didn't have the drug charges she wouldn't have been given that sentence.

<comment><USER25> Does that not have the impact of setting a precedent the next time that someone in the region is charged with the same thing?

"Well, last time, the defendant was given 5 years. Therefore, a fair sentence is 5 years".

Tacking a 5 year sentence on to anything because "it doesn't matter" seems exceptionally short-sighted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Stiffer sentence than Felicity Huffman, who got 14 days (she served 11), 30k fine, 250 hours of community service.

<comment><USER27> Didn't Felicity plea bargain pretty quickly and accept her fate? Lori refused the initial plea bargain to which the prosecutors responded by adding more charges. Oops!

<comment><USER28> To a non-USAian such as myself it's just so marvellous that a case involving, a sort of, corruption has the resulting penalty affected by a "plea bargain".

"Plea bargains", a strange mixture of government approved gambling and trial by ordeal making a travesty of the justice system.

<comment><USER26> Generally it makes a little sense to me in this case - accept accountability sooner, get a more lenient penalty. Not sure if that is more common or rare in other cultures?

<comment><USER29> In Germany, plea bargains are not common practice - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain#Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargain#Germany)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's interesting - you read about David E. Shaw, that donated _millions_ to ALL his target universities - just to cover all options. His kids got in (Yale IIRC) - completely legal.

Then you have these parents, that paid money to some corrupt worker, and it's jail time.

</comment><comment><USER31> Were any parties receiving bribes similarly identified, charged and convicted? I can't recall hearing much about that.

</comment><comment><USER32> Prediction ... she will be released on good behavior ... 14 days later.

</comment><comment><USER33> More time than most Trump cronies seem to get.

</comment><comment><USER34> She got off easy with 2 months. A black lady got 20 yrs for falsifying info to get her child(ren) into a school system

</comment><comment><USER35> First, we don't know whether the children of the guilty were kicked out of school.

So, the only victims here are students and athletes who lost an earned spot in university. But they don't have any agency here.

The universities administration has no skin in the game - they get paid, the endowments are bountiful, and the professors keep on suffering on. There may even be a backslaps and high five deal to recapture any "lost" income.

The guilty here are resourceful and powerful, so really, the court case is more of a negotiation at best. Kiss the hand of the king and receive a small slap on the wrist sort of a deal.

The government has bigger fish to fry than worry about fairness.

<comment><USER36> The university is trying to protect its reputation and goodwill. The trial helps as a warning to other parents: cough up the money the way they want and your kids get in, or risk the lottery.</comment></comment>


Django or Rails ? - <AUTHOR> http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2006/dec/06/comparisons/ <comment><USER2> Rails feels like magic to me. Too much stuff gets done for me, and as a control freak that makes me uncomfortable. Django seems much clearer and cleaner. I know why things happen and if I need to I can easily change, alter, or fix something without worrying that the magic will break.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been learning Rails and I LOVE it. I can't stop coding, it's actually kind of "sick" since I get like 4 hours of sleep.

I have PG to blame because his whole advice on "learn to code" was so very true. I'm not a CS major (I did take a 'few'classes) but Rails really makes sense to me. Coding is just so..logical.

<comment><USER4> Speaking of Rails, there are other options in the Python world besides Django.

Pylons is a very Rails-y framework with the difference being that it is made to be easy to customize. In Rails if you don't like something you are going to have a hard time changing it out unless you are a good hacker. In Pylons that is easy, and you've got access to Python's vastly better platform (speed, Unicode support) and libraries.

If you are an absolute beginning programmer it might be kind of hard to pick up, but if you've programmed a bit or you've used one or two web frameworks (especially Rails) Pylons won't be hard to learn.

<http://pylonshq.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love python. I really enjoy programming in it. But then I went to my local bookstore and checked out the web section.

There's not a single django book. Or even a web related python book at all. But there's a whole section of Rails books. Now, that isn't to say that you need a book to write a rails/django app, it's just an example of all the energy and community behind rails.

It's got so much momentum. The same kind of momentum php once had.. It's only a matter of time before the tools get better and better because of it. Working in Django might be nice, but I really think it will be more like swimming upstream.

<comment><USER6> Check out <http://www.djangobook.com/> \-- we're posting the book online, for free, as we write it. It will always be available for free online, and we're planning to continue improving it even after the print version is published. We're perfectionists. :)

Also see our docs, at <http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/> .

Disclaimer: I'm a Django developer and coauthor of the book.

<comment><USER5> I was actually pretty impressed w/ the django book, even in its unfinished state. I also "get" django more than I get rails, so I'm definitely attracted to it (after quick looks at both).

My point was just that there's so much behind rails right now that it sure seems like any issues with it scaling will get worked out more quickly than they might with other frameworks. There's also already an ecosystem of 3rd party apps around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm also a non-CS major and have taken the advice of many to learn how to program. I'm actually currently learning python and will probably venture into Django once I acquire a fairly moderate skill set.

I really never imagined it being this addicting/fun/satisfying.

</comment><comment><USER8> My background is in php so I am using CakePHP and i love it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Rails has a good marketing team. This is coming from a Railser. Not to mention, news.yc needs a search feature cuz this topic has definitely come up a few times in the past. BigHeadLabs needs to make their url sticky.

</comment><comment><USER10> Toss a coin.</comment>


Think in weeks, not years - <AUTHOR> http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/think-in-weeks-not-years/

<comment><USER2> I think in terms of Gmail inbox.

I got my cat when my inbox was 5,367. Now it's at 10,182. So in Gmail years she is ...

<comment><AUTHOR> I practice inbox-zero <http://inboxzero.com/video/> ... my cat is immortal.</comment></comment>