SeatGeek Launches Redesign and Ad Platform that Includes Hipmunk - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/08/11/seatgeek-launches-a-brand-new-design-and-a-self-serve-ad-platform-with-hipmunk/

<comment><USER2> Really rooting for these guys. There's a huge opportunity to upset competitors like TicketMaster. Not sure if they'll be able to undercut them significantly on price, but I know I dread and avoid the purchasing experience when I have to buy tickets from TicketMaster.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great magnification with the new "searching the web" image thing.</comment>


What does a single day of Flickr uploads look like as real photos? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/17/our-changing-relationship-to-photographs/

<comment><USER2> But, these are not from the same person.

We do probably take many, many more photos in digital (I know I do) but I don't know if the quantity for professionals has changed.

They probably took lots and lots of shots and fliped through them to find the right expression/moment even when they used film.

The main expense for professionals has probably shifted from film stock to camera body/lens.

<comment><USER3> Q: "What's the difference between an amateur photographer and a pro photographer?"

A: "An amateur shows you every shot they took."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Makes one wonder what it'd look like if it was based on facebook instead.

<comment><USER5> If the artist was precise (if you look at the coverage of the exhibition you will find numbers ranging from 1 to 3M, both of which are significantly too low [0]), it would take about 50 more rooms (there are about 5M new photos uploaded to Flickr/day vs. 250M to FB [1]).

[0] Rough extrapolation based on [http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in- numbers...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/) and a 20% growth rate <http://www.kullin.net/2010/09/flickr-5-billion-photos/>

[1] [http://www.quora.com/How-many-photos-are-uploaded-to- Faceboo...](http://www.quora.com/How-many-photos-are-uploaded-to-Facebook- each-day)</comment></comment>


Anyone know of a reliable VPS provider in Colombia or Argentina? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> The only requirement is the servers are actually located in the respective countries. Everything I've found so far either requires a colo or the datacenter is actually in the US or Brazil.</comment>


Why Asians wear surgical masks in public (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/299003/a-quick-history-of-why-asians-wear-surgical-masks-in-public/ <comment><USER2> Surgical masks don't protect you against airborne viruses, but if you wear one when you have a cold it _does_ help protect other people from viruses in your snot/water particles.

The facts about this are fairly well known in Japan now (although there may still be people who wear masks in the misguided hope that they won't catch other people's colds despite), so it's not very accurate to try to imply that use of surgical masks in Japan is purely due to some sort of failure to understand germ theory or something like that.

<comment><USER3> My wife stays the FUCK away from people wearing them - she thinks they are all ebola carriers. I think that alone is what keeps the mask wearers healthy - all the americans think the mask wearer is the sick one.

<comment><USER4> that's absolutely true. Well, not the ebola part.

It's one of the examples I use to demonstrate differences between Western and Eastern culture:

in the West we would only wear a mask if we were worried about being infected with other people's germs.

In the East they wear a mask to indicate that they are unwell and to stop other people from being infected with their germs.

<comment> m-p-3 Yeah, wearing a mask won't really protect you from catchin something, but it will reduce the odds of you transmitting the disease to others around you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very odd angle.. Seems to be written by someone with little on-the-ground experience. I can only speak from my experience in Hong Kong, where masks are worn when you've got a cold or flu to keep from infecting other people. Sure, ideally, sick people should be home in bed, but the pressure to work here is extreme, even when sick, so you'll often see offices full of hacking employees with surgical masks.

As for the pollution, the masks don't do any good at all and people know that. Go up to Beijing, for example, and the masks are mostly not surgical, but rather 3M pm2.5 filters.

</comment><comment><USER6> My wife is Japanese and I lived in Japan for 6 years.

The main reason I've been informed by family and friends for wearing the masks, is to prevent others from catching their cold/flu, as a courtesy.

I don't think that article (which I've read before) is a particularly good one - in my opinion it highlights the 'outlier' reasons rather than what in my experience is the main reason, cited above.

<comment><USER7> The article does cite that reason.

> A second global flu epidemic in 1934 cemented Japan's love affair with the > facemask, which began to be worn with regularity during the winter > months—primarily, given Japan's obsession with social courtesy, by cough- > and-cold victims seeking to avoid transmitting their germs to others, rather > than healthy people looking to prevent the onset of illness.

<comment><USER6> It does mention it, but the impression I get from actually having lived in Japan for a while is that this is the main reason, but the article has it sort of buried amongst the numerous 'outlier' reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something that shocked me while visiting Korea was a friend explaining to me that a mask is the only way for her to go out without makeup.

The societal pressure on appearance is so high, that just going to the grocery shopping without makeup is seen a socially unacceptable. The simplest way around it is to hide your face, and the best way to do so is to wear a surgical mask.

On a side note, in Korea, this is not reserved to women, lot of men wear makeup as well.

<comment><USER9> > _The societal pressure on appearance is so high, that just going to the > grocery shopping without makeup is seen a socially unacceptable._

Well, "socially unacceptable" if you're superficial and want to be popular and trendy.

I have a few Korean friends and they don't particularly care.

So, it's as much "pressure" as wearing brand name clothes would be in the Valley in the 90s.

<comment><USER10> > if you're superficial and want to be popular and trendy

You can be concerned about being popular and trendy without being superficial. Ignoring fashion, style, and appearance standards can hurt your life chances and your relationships with other people. In societies where popularity and trendiness signal and enhance status, it's rational to be concerned about them.

<comment><USER9> > _You can be concerned about being popular and trendy without being > superficial. Ignoring fashion, style, and appearance standards can hurt your > life chances and your relationships with other people._

If your worried about your "life chances and your relationships with other people" based on fashion and style, then you're superficial, and those are superficial relations (and a superficial career).

Not caring about "fashion and style" doesn't mean you're some hobo style slob (which would indeed hurt your relations and life chances for non-superficial reasons, e.g. because you smell and wear shorts at the office).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some anecdotal experience: I travel to Asia for vacations and majority of the time, I catch a minor cold. The endless coughing and runny nose can really sap my energy. A friend suggested wearing a mask. Once I did, the air I was breathing became warmer and my throat and lungs felt less dry. It really helped a lot. I was glad there were so many others around me wearing masks so I didn't stand out at all.

<comment><USER12> I have nasal allergy. Sometimes the allergy manifests itself persistently, but as soon as I put on a surgical mask, the runny nose and irritation just stops completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I lived in Taipei in the 1990s and have been back many times since. Prior to 2002, I rarely would see people wearing them while riding scooters, but never anywhere else. After the shock of SARS, that changed - people starting wearing them on subways, airplanes, on the street, etc. It was a major urban public health panic, and the building quarantines, airport health checks, and media coverage freaked people out.

15+ years later, it's not pervasive. Last summer when I went back I spotted a few people on the subway and airplanes wearing them, and it's pretty widespread among scooter riders, reflecting (I think) a sensitivity about air quality along with a mild concern about catching something from the people around you.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Why people in East Asian countries wear surgical masks in public (2014)" would seem to be a more accurate title.

As others say, in Japan specifically, it is a cultural-courtesy thing and is about not getting others sick rather than preventing yourself from getting sick.

</comment><comment><USER15> With the air pollution drifting over from China into Korea, pollution indexes are reaching near-Beijing levels on some days, and air filter masks are becoming much more popular in Korea, across all gender and age groups. For this purpose, people aren't wearing any fancy masks with designs, but rather just plain white masks (except for children, who get their cartoon character masks). In the wintertime, people also wear cloth masks (often black) more to stay warm than for filtering purposes. And finally, some people wear masks in the office when they are sick so that they don't transmit their cold to others.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why the linked page and nobody don't mention about the hay fever?

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

If you are living in Tokyo and you have pollen allergy, you too will wear masks all day.

<comment><USER17> Does this also affect tourists? Since I don't live in Japan, I wouldn't expect to have an allergic response to a Japanese native tree.

<comment><USER18> The reverse would seem more likely - surely a native population is less likely to have a reaction to a native tree - otherwise adaption to their environment is fairly poor....

<comment><USER19> Allergies work differently from things like lactose intolerance: you are not born with allergies but develop them as a sort of misclassification from your immune system. Thus if you haven't been exposed to something you are unlikely to be allergic to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I do this, and I'm not more than 12.5% Asian. I bought a few colored ones online because plain white surgical isn't a cute look. I do this because I don't want my lips/ nose to get dried by wind. Scarves sometimes aren't as good, but I'll probably be wearing both half the time.

<comment><USER21> I'm a (partly) Asian American on the east coast and the weather is exactly why I wear them. It keeps my face warm and moist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In SE Asia, you don't wear a mask to protect you from other people's germs. You wear one to indicate to other people that you are currently unwell, and protect them from your germs.

The article is pure uninformed speculative bullshit

<comment><USER7> The article does state this reason.

> A second global flu epidemic in 1934 cemented Japan's love affair with the > facemask, which began to be worn with regularity during the winter > months—primarily, given Japan's obsession with social courtesy, by cough- > and-cold victims seeking to avoid transmitting their germs to others, rather > than healthy people looking to prevent the onset of illness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here in Vietnam they also use it to cover their faces from the sun. Having a white skin is the beauty ideal.

<comment><USER23> Well also the dust particles everywhere, which literally give you lung cancer.

Saigon and Hanoi can have very high AQI (it's no Beijing, but still dangerous)

<comment><USER24> Surgical masks don't protect from PM2.5 particles.

<comment><USER25> In Vietnam most don't wear surgical masks. We use fabric ones generally out of cotton.

They do protect against larger dust particles while driving, which is why I wear them, but as said above, Vietnamese mostly wear them to protect skin from the sun. The higher quality masks are really just too hot to wear as they do not breath enough.

There is something called a Lead Ninja, which is a woman on a typical motorbike (Honda Lead), dressed head to toe completely covered... to the point that driving is dangerous because they can't even see where they are going. There was a funny blog post about driving etiquette here a while back [1] that is sadly pretty spot on.

What gets me is the general lack of wearing eye protection while on a motorbike... not only do your eyes dry out more quickly, which affects vision, but the dust and bugs getting into the eyes makes driving almost unbearable. I don't know how they do it here. Solution is literally $0.85 clear plastic glasses found everywhere on the street.

[1] [https://matthew-pike.com/how-to-drive-a-motorbike-in- saigon-...](https://matthew-pike.com/how-to-drive-a-motorbike-in-saigon- de0697496402)

<comment><USER23> huh after experiences otherwhere in Asia, Vietnam is very void of bugs, compared to Thailand for example. Someone told me it's mainly because of napalm in the war. Who knows

<comment><USER25> Napalm seems like a bit of a stretch.

My experience is that it is because of the high number of swallow bird houses.

If you drive around (I've driven most of the southern end of VN and Cambodia), the multi story, windowless buildings are _everywhere_ and in towns with a lot of them, far fewer bugs. The Vice article quotes 4200 houses... my guess is that it is 10x higher than that.

I'm currently in Hoi An and there is a ton of bugs here and not as many bird houses.

[http://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/features/216083/swallow-nest- fa...](http://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/features/216083/swallow-nest-farm-brings- fame-fortune.html)

[https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/ev8da4/farming- edibl...](https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/ev8da4/farming-edible-birds- nests-is-a-stinky-but-lucrative-business)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_bird%27s_nest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_bird%27s_nest)

<comment><USER26> Pure anecdote, but when I was visiting Vietnam (Saigon and Can Tho) recently, I would go up to the rooftop balcony in the evenings and watch the birds and then bats out hunting their (insect) dinners. It stuck with me, because the numbers of birds and bats seemed much higher than I would normally see in the urban Midwest here in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I often wear a mask during the Winter months in London too. Mostly because the majority of people on the tube are absolute disgusting pigs. They cough and sneeze without holding their hand in front of their face or making any other attempt to cover it up.

<comment><USER28> Sneezing in their hand helps to spread it to everything they touch. The best thing would be to cough/sneeze in the arm.

<comment><USER17> The best thing is actually coughing/sneezing into your shirt (by pulling your collar over your nose).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Located in Beijing.

Besides the usual usage of the mask, I have noticed something different.

Since last year, I have seen more and more people wearing non-surgical masks in public, esp the young ones. The strangest thing is that the mask is pulled down to the chin and totally defeats the purpose of the mask.

I have seen too many and started wondering what the heck was going on. after some searching I found that it's more of fashion reason.

You see, with the mask covering your chin, your face looks smaller. I remember watching a video that a girl showing the difference between with and without the mask. She def looks cuter without the mask.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think hiding your identity and not wanting to be recognised by your co- workers/old school friends/exes is a big reason in Japan. Surgical masks just have the handy excuse built in: "Oh, I felt like I was getting a little bit of a cold".

I was walking down the street in Japan and walked past my company's receptionist wearing a mask. We made eye contact but she didn't react in the slightest. That only added to the awkwardness when she found out we were both going to the same party only minutes later...

<comment><USER31> This is definitely true for attractive females employed in Japan's myriad sex businesses. We don't have a decent rail system where I am so it's most noticeable in the airport: you constantly see women in facemasks, wearing baggy velour jumpsuits that don't <i>completely</i> conceal their physique. High probability they are gravure models who came to shoot a beach/tropical video, or they worked in the sex clubs for a bit. The facemask definitely helps maintain anonymity when they are out in public and don't want to be accosted by creepy fans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Seems to ignore the main reason people in Japan wear masks - Sugi induced hay fever which seems to increase in intensity every year.

</comment><comment><USER33> Just because the masks predate germ theory and pollution theory doesn't mean there isn't a connection.

Traditions & religions have long protected against health risks millenia before we understood those risks medically (religious washing of the hands, wiping with the left, separating pork from other meet, avoiding the sick, adding alcohol to water)

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm living in japan and the thing I hear a lot (a japanese people told me this) is that they don't wear the masks only out of courtesy. It's also because not only they don't want to get sick, but because they will lose holiday days if they don't have doctor's note. So just having a flu / slight fever is not sufficient reason to get the note.

<comment><USER35> I think you mean a Cold and not Flu they are quite different things

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> One of the other interesting reasons. A girl may not have done her makeup for the day.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't know about Japan, but I can confirm that in Kazakhstan doctors actively encourage sick people to wear surgical masks, specifically to prevent them from infecting others.

Disclaimer: I'm not Kazakh myself, but my wife is.

</comment><comment><USER38> I noticed this while in Beijing, people wear them more for anonymity on pulic transportation than for health reasons.

</comment><comment><USER39> Have any Westerners here tried wearing surgical masks in public? What was your experience like?

<comment> Jean-Philipe I wore such a mask in Bali, usually when being on a motorbike. People use it as a protection against the street dust. I thought it was quite effective and I got used to it quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Very interesting. I first ran across this in a youtube video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xDAjGv5Cwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xDAjGv5Cwc), and I wondered what it was about.

</comment><comment><USER41> Anecdote: I am right now travelling in a metro train bound for Tokyo. Of the 17 people around me, 12 of them have masks on them. Pollen allergy is one that could explain such high numbers of masked people at this time of the year.

</comment><comment><USER42> When I see it in Toronto it is usually groups of people (2 or more) and it's typically in urban environments. COUld it be pollution more than germs for some? (they do mention smog in the article).

</comment><comment><USER43> I have considered it for avoiding ubiquitous video surveillance and face recognition. Plus also worried about pullution, though dont know how much protection it provides in taht sense.

</comment><comment><USER44> Well, it certainly stops you from touching your own face, nose, mouth with your hands, which probably has a positive health impact.

</comment><comment><USER45> This was a fascinating read. I've always wondered about that.</comment>


People should be responsible for what they share on social media. - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/conspiracy_videos_of_9_11_on_facebook_people_should_be_responsible_for_what.single.html <comment><USER2> _I get that people can waste their time how they like, and freedom of speech means you can publish and share any addled, paranoid rant, but 2.5 million hits is 2.5 million wastes of 2:18. That's 5 million minutes. That's closing in on 100,000 hours that people spent watching this hooey._

People are not an engineering problem to be optimized. A person idly browsing Facebook and sharing sketchy conspiracy theories is not in a productive mindspace in the first place. So what? People are no always intelligent or perceptive - that's just part of being human.

Sharing or Liking are public actions. Meaning, the act of liking something provides you with a data point about the person doing the liking. If a FB friend of mine liked the white-power Stormfront web site that's a useful piece of information for me to know. If my friend believes or is beginning to believe in 9/11 truther hooey, I want to know about it. Maybe we can talk to him and maybe I can change his mind.

2.5 million liked a piece of hooey. It's good that we know that. You can't debunk B.S. if you don't know it exists.</comment>


Accelerate your deploys with these 5 CircleCI optimizations - <AUTHOR> https://transcend.io/blog/accelerate-your-deploys-with-these-5-circleci-optimizations <comment><USER2> We decided to use Cypress in our company (around 40 engineers) and ci/cd integration was a big pain. This is very helpful! Thanks David

<comment><USER3> Very interesting, indeed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting article</comment>


Google Play privacy slip-up sends app buyers' personal details to developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/google-play-privacy-slip-up-sends-app-buyers-personal-details-to-developers-7000011249/

<comment><USER2> When Facebook did this it made them the evil empire. Why isn't the front page full of stories about how to ditch Google?</comment>


Marzipan: The False Mac iPad Dilemma Resolved - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/marzipan-the-false-mac-ipad-dilemma-resolved-fa7003a7d2fd <comment><USER2> I think I could adjust to a MacBook running some A* SOC device. It might make the MacBook less able to run some POSIX compatible applications, but probably Apple could get everything that runs with a `brew install, and more, running just fine.

With the new iPad pluggable into USB-C monitors, which can have keyboards hanging off them, that seems like a better solution to me. Have an iPad able to run everything (in a pinch): XCode, VSCode, etc. but a docked iPad would do everything.

Then you could keep MacBooks they way they are/</comment>


Google, democracy and the truth about internet search - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook <comment><USER2> I bet if Trump and Brexit lost the internet would be totally fine.

These articles are only to drum up support for FB and Google applying a Guardian-like bias. It's not an article about all the ways Google is biased, it's an article specifically about the instances in which google is biased against their POV.

Seriously, if you can't convince people that jews aren't evil, just give up your position as an editorial writer because you're totally incompetent at your job.

Of course the media's position is not that we make weak and ineffectual arguments, to people who have tuned them out long ago, it's that Google and FB are biased which is why no one believes their POV.

If you're losing a debate it's likely because you made crappy points not that the the debate stage is biased against you.

Jesus fuck Lincoln won an election 150 years ago being against racism, and you can't win against fucking Trump and Farage 150 years later, and you think it's because Google autocompletes, 'jews are' ... evil?

Is your position seriously that Google's bias has made people more hateful than when Lincoln won on a platform of starting a civil fucking war over slavery?

</comment><comment><USER3> Another post-Trump FUD piece about tech companies. Urgent call to "fix" something that has been broken for many years and no one in the media minded one bit.

Firstly, I don't get many of the mentioned autocomplete results, so the very premise of the author (that Google actively peddles this stuff to neutral, well-meaning users) is made-up. Go into private window mode, try it for yourself. No, really.

Secondly, if you _do_ search for "are X evil" you will get what you asked for: conspiracy websites and low-grade propaganda. This is not restricted to the few Xs cherry-picked in the article. If you query is shaped for getting biased results, why shouldn't you? That's the whole point of search engines.

This is not to say that Google is doing a great job at filtering out SEO-d garbage. It's been getting worse in this regard for the last decade. But the article's "analysis" is awful. It jumps around, it anchors, it uses name- dropping. (Ironically, they name-drop China, which indeed "solved" the problem with bad search results.)

<comment><USER4> Furthermore, the article goes on and and on, but never does it mention the little fact that Larry, Sergey and Mark are all themselves Jewish, AFAIK. I was expecting to see it mentioned at least once to highlight the inherent conundrum. It's possible that I might have missed it because, well, the article never seems to end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > And 20 years ago it didn't even exist. When Tony Blair became prime > minister, it wasn't possible to Google him: _the search engine had yet to be > invented_. The company was only founded in 1998 and Facebook didn't appear > until 2004. Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are still only 43. > Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is 32. Everything they've done, the world > they've remade, has been done in the blink of an eye.

Facepalm.jpg

Yeah, google's flawed and its results are an interesting sociological resource.

The fact "are Jews evil" is a top auto complete makes sense. I know large portions of the population that think that way. And Google returning an echo chamber result makes sense from a "these links may be of interest to your query" since they are. Google isn't there to police society - it's use for fake news and product pandering is bad enough - making it police ethics will only hide the ugly bits of humanity - which will then go unfixed.

<comment><USER6> Except Google does police the auto complete, which makes the one's they don't police stand out.

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/08/words_banned_from_bing_and_google_s_autocomplete_algorithms.html)

Article is from 2013, and they do routinely update which words they police. They also now police searching for "Name+Crime", I'd guess to avoid lawsuits.

[http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/jun/23/...](http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/jun/23/andrew- napolitano/did-google-adjust-its-autocomplete-algorithm-hide-/)

I think Google has opened themselves up to critique about allowing this antisemitism by policing other offensive terms. They need to either set up a forum for policing all offensive terms, or avoid policing. Otherwise articles like the OP will continue to plague them.

<comment><USER5> i wasn't aware of that.

talk about digging your own PC grave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is Sergey Brin's response to some of this : [https://youtu.be/zIx5F0vbjB4?t=230](https://youtu.be/zIx5F0vbjB4?t=230)

<comment><USER8> His spin on how Google doesn't know who exactly uses their services got me fuming. But well, it's an interview from 2008, so before Android, Google+, and so on. So, let's give him benefit of doubt. But then he answers direct question about anonymity of the collected data with this golden quote: "I've never heard of any case of anybody's search getting expose by virtue of Google Search lose", and it left me speechless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not getting those results, but I'm never logged into Google and have their trackers blocked. If you're logged into a Google account when searching, you get "personalized search results" based on at least your previous searches.

<comment><USER10> For the most effect go to the county library and use one of the Internet computers. Bring up Google and try a few short queries. It reflects the searches of the people who regularly use the library's Internet access computers.

The point of the article (as I understood it) was that perhaps Google could recognize queries that were hateful (it already squashes queries that are sexual) and either suppress them or proactively suggest counter narratives that the searcher might not be aware of. It is the latter which is both quite difficult and usually quite offensive to people, if you just suppress the suggestions it generates less controversy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's simpler to explain in economic terms. You get what you incentivize. The google-dominated internet incentivizes page views for money. People are going to post what makes people click - shock, hate, gossip. Posting feel-good me- too stuff does not bring views. So you end up with an internet looking like this. Does it matter? I m not sure, the yellow press was always there and we did not end up with a new hitler every 4 years. Does google matter that much to democracy? I'm not sure its propaganda can be that effective. I think the best kind of propaganda is economy: give people the economic rewards they asked for, and they 'll quit being racist.

</comment><comment><USER12> The results for [are jews evil] are indeed terrible. It's not just the ideology that's wrong, they're also just generically low-quality.

The only non-hateful results was RationalWiki(.com/wiki/Evil_jew), and its effectiveness is blunted by google choosing the quality warning as the only result.

Let's see if my edit sticks and indexing is fast enough to have some impact if thousands of people try the search after reading the article.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is she serious? Which internet is she using?

Because Google actually censored auto-complete search to be in favor of Clinton while Yahoo, Bing, and Duck Duck Go did not. I've got screenshots I can dig up and post if the HN bregade doesn't downvote me into grey.

</comment><comment><USER14> Someone at The Guardian have just discovered what Google bomb is?

</comment><comment><USER15> If you have a search engine, you need to rank results. The autocomplete feature uses those rankings to determine what is more likely for you to type next. That's all.

</comment><comment><USER16> I never got results like "are Xs evil?", in modern search engine, there's something called "personalized result" in the modern search engine.

well....are you evil?

<comment><USER17> If I search "are jews" I get a suggestion for "Are jews christians", so I guess I'm not in the "evil" pool of people. Just in the dumb one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The moderators want to de-escalate the political clickbait stories (since the upsurge with Trump's victory) for a week of political detox.

</comment><comment><USER19> Without an actual sample of users auto-suggestions there's nothing but useless anecdotes flying around.

</comment><comment><USER20> She compared Trump to Hitler? What an innovation!</comment>


How I came across thousands of Facebook passwords - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rukshan/how-i-stumbled-upon-thousands-of-facebook-passwords-fa85236968a4#.kpxcjerc6 <comment><USER2> Is there a good way for this person to contact the owners of the Facebook accounts to alert them of this, maybe recommending that they change their passwords?

<comment><USER3> Forward the dump to Facebook support so they can lock the account for suspicious activity and require the user to complete security verification... they generally do this by way of sending them ID scans or having you identify friends in pictures. Both of which are not hard to BS individually, but difficult to do in batch.</comment></comment>


On Why Open Source Developers run Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.sharms.org/blog/2010/12/on-why-open-source-developers-run-mac-os-x/

<comment><USER2> From the article:

 _"And this, I believe, is why great developers tend to move towards OS X (yes, there are plenty of exceptions)"_

With all due respect, this reads more like an Apple advertisement than a well- thought conclusion.

First, I find it somewhat strange to declare those who stay with FreeBSD or Debian as "exceptions", thus implying that moving to OS X is the norm. This is not backed by any numbers. There are just some anecdotes of some people switching to OS X.

Also, that statement implies it is meaningful that some great developers switch. However, that detail isn't relevant at all to understand to process. OS X is comparatively new, so of course people are still looking at it and some of them move over. And of course some of those people are great developers, as in any random group.

To make this more clear: Among the people who are switching, there are naturally a lot more mediocre developers than great developers (as in any random group), but the article wouldn't sound nearly as sensational if the author had written: "thousands of mediocre developers switched to OS X".

Also, a lot of people switch from a proprietary system (like OS X or Windows) to Ubuntu, Fedora and many other free software systems. However, those aren't nearly as celebrated as those who switch to OS X. Why is that?

This article is so strongly biased that it is hard not to mistake it for an Apple ad.

<comment><USER3> > First, I find it somewhat strange to declare those who stay with FreeBSD or > Debian as "exceptions", thus implying that moving to OS X is the norm. This > is not backed by any numbers.

Have you been to a OSS based conference in the last 5 years? Anything, from Apache to Rails to Python? The number of Apple laptops is by far greater than any other.

<comment><USER4> So are people switching to Macbook Pros or to Mac OS X?

Because I think the the industrial design of the laptop is driving a lot of people over, not Mac OS X.

Are people switching to Apple desktop machines at the same rate? I'm not seeing it. If I were to buy a desktop tomorrow it would definitely not be a Mac, but if I were to buy a laptop tomorrow it would be a Macbook Pro.

<comment><USER5> People are switching to Mac OS X on MacBook Pro.

<comment><USER2> How do you know that, if those are so many people?

<comment><USER6> Because when you pay attention to what's going on in a community, you notice trends. In the open source community, most notably the web development community, there has been a trend of moving to Mac.

<comment><USER7> Source?

<comment><USER6> I think you might have missed the point of the post you replied to. The point is that sometimes you don't need data. For instance, in the fashion world, one might notice a trend of people wearing a certain style of jeans. Nobody is going to go out and do a a random sampled study to see if this holds up to scrutiny, but the trend is noticeable to anyone paying attention. If you're involved at all in the open source web development world for example, it would be pretty hard to miss the trend of developers moving to Mac.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.sharms.org%2Fblog%2F2010%2F12%2Fon- why-open-source-developers-run-mac-os-x%2F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t)

I'm not an "open source developer." But I do write code from time to time that I am happy to share with others. I run Debian on a desktop most of the time; essentially the only program I interact with outside of Emacs is a web browser. I do have a Macbook, though, that I use as a second computer when I'm away from home.

I am constantly frustrated by OS X.

The biggest reason is one of the `features' mentioned in the article: the `./configure && make && make install' routine seems to constantly break on OS X. This is a problem for me because much of the software I use (or try to play around with) doesn't specifically target OS X, so there generally aren't pre- compiled binaries available, and often the build instructions do not provide helpful hints for OS X users. I used to work in a lab that ran entirely on OS X. Compiling scientific libraries (e.g. SciPy) was frequently a recursive nightmare of trying to compile or otherwise install various dependencies (in SciPy's case, I remember the lack of gfortran being an issue).

Often, the problem has to do with missing libraries or figuring out how to set CFLAGS to cope with Apple's non-standard paths, both of which are headache enough. But sometimes the errors are just incomprehensible -- at least to someone without serious C knowledge -- and then I'm stuck.

Sometimes, Apple has done the hard work for you of properly configuring and installing popular Free programs (e.g. Emacs, Python) but the versions are Apple modified, can be difficult to get to work with outside libraries, and are often very old.

(I'm venting a bit here because I have been suffering from these sorts of problems fairly acutely in the last couple of days, but it really does seem to be an issue every time I want to use something on OS X: from Emacs to Python to Git to whatever else, _something_ always seems to go wrong, even if it's not a dealbreaker.)

The bottom line is that OS X is a long way away, for me, from being an environment in which I can comfortably use all the software I want to without too much time lost down the rabbit hole of configuration. And I don't even spend most of my time programming! So I'd have to disagree with the sentiment of the article.

<comment><USER9> Amen to this. I've also been suffering from OSX compilation problems in the last few days and I have years of experience compiling packages from scratch. It's so bad that I'm about to switch back to using Ubuntu as a primary development machine. And macports has never worked properly for me on Snow Leopard. Fink is great for tools and libraries but the large source-based packages I'm interested in always break for some reason. I have failed to compile emacs, xemacs, Python, SDL, Irrlicht, gambit-c, Panda, Ogre and a whole bunch of others I've probably forgotten by now on OSX. All of them worked flawlessly on Ubuntu - ./configure && make && make install. Done. Compiling and installing on OSX - ugh. Yes xcode is lovely if you know how to drive it and are writing Objective C. For the rest of us, it's a wilderness.

<comment><USER10> It really should not be that hard on 10.5 or 10.6. Try Homebrew? <http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I bought a MacBook Pro 3 years ago, because I was sick of dealing with ugly PC hardware and I had gone through one-too-many 30 hour sessions trying to get suspend/resume to work reliably.

I've been pretty happy on the Mac. But I miss Ubuntu's giant repository of binary packages, and I've recently fallen in love with XMonad's automatic window management.

So now I'm running Ubuntu in VirtualBox, and I'm enjoying it greatly. And I've learned my lesson about Linux laptops: I'm going to buy a premium laptop from a high-end Linux vendor, and let somebody _else_ worry about drivers.

<comment><USER3> A "high end Linux vendor" for laptops? Like what?

And who would be that "somebody else", worrying about the drivers? Surely not the "high end Linux laptop vendor" --because, even though he would have basic stuff like the video card, wireless et al working, with anything not embedded in the laptop, you would be on your own.

<comment><USER11> ZaReason and System76 are two of the better known Linux laptop vendors.

Generally speaking, the biggest problems with Linux laptop drivers used to be suspend/resume and the video card. Unless you were willing to put in a lot of work for each new release of Ubuntu, it was hard to get a Mac-quality experience. If your time was reasonably valuable, you were better off paying a few hundred dollars extra for a well-supported system.

I generally don't worry about drivers for random USB junk. Nearly all of it works fine with Linux, and if it doesn't, it's trivial and cheap to replace.

I can't wait for 8GB of RAM and an Intel SSD drive. Drool.

<comment><USER12> System76 has laptops with that option now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my experience it's heavily tied to whether you are a GUI person or a command line person.

Most of the developers I know are using Macs, with only myself and a few others preferring Linux. The Mac guys use the terminal, as it is a necessity. But they are relatively slow at it. Most of them don't even really use tab completion as much as they could, if at all. They also use the mouse very heavily, especially in their web browser, finder, and text editor.

The developers I know that prefer Linux, including myself, freaking fly on the keyboard. We hardly ever touch the mouse. We tab complete like crazy. We use a ton of keyboard shortcuts for everything. Doesn't matter if we are vim or emacs, it's keyboard keyboard keyboard.

I think the explanation is very simple. If you are a mouse using person, and you compare a Linux system to a Mac, the Mac will be more comfortable, especially with that great touchpad. If you are a keyboard person, the Mac will drive you insane and Linux will be happy land. People tend to change their software rather than change themselves, so mouse people end up on Macs.

<comment><USER14> _If you are a keyboard person, the Mac will drive you insane and Linux will be happy land._

I disagree. As a keyboard person, I can move way faster with the mac than I can with Linux. Linux' keyboard-based workflow is constantly playing catch-up with Mac OS X's (like Expose). On a mac, I can get by without hardly ever using the mouse.

I'm a vi person, btw, since we're on the subject of religious flamewars. :)

<comment><USER13> I am forced to use a Mac at work, and I use expose and such quite a bit. Yet, despite using it for over a year, it's still just way more painful for me. Here are my three major issues.

1) Animations are nice, but slow. Things like Expose/Spaces animations just get in my way because I already know where I'm going, I don't need the visual help. Just like I don't need to turn a light on to walk around my apartment in the dark. I like it when things happen instantly.

2) Not enough keyboard shortcuts. For example, what's the shortcut to move a window to the adjacent virtual desktop? Oh there isn't one, you must drag it with the mouse.

3) Control vs. Command is probably my number one peeve. What's the shortcut in Firefox to open a new tab? Command+t. What's the shortcut in the terminal to go to the beginning of the line? ctrl+a. In Windows or Linux I have caps lock converted to ctrl, and use it for everything. In Mac, I have to switch between cmd and ctrl all the time. My thumb ends up doing work meant for my pinky.

I also have some non-keyboard related issues with OSX. The first example that always comes to mind is when I want to show hidden files in the finder.

<comment><USER15> OS X is not perfect, the real problem for me is that some people just think it is

My main problem with OS X is that Alt + D (plus Alt + B and Alt + F) just don't work as it should, like in any sane Terminal, there's no difference between Alt and Alt Gr on a Mac, sad, very sad. Also I would love to see a real package manager, pkgutil is horrible...

<comment><USER16> You can fix that in 2 minutes:

<http://blog.macromates.com/2006/word-movement-in-terminal/>

<comment><USER15> Thanks! Now, I am happy with "Terminal.app".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm an open source developer and I have absolutely no desire to switch to OSX. I don't really spend much time fiddling with my setup and I probably gain a lot of productivity by having an environment that is completely customized to my workflow.

Personally I'm running Arch w/ stumpwm on vanilla X. All I need is emacs, ff, and a couple terminal windows. No distractions at all; no windows hiding other windows, no tabbing through three or four windows to get to the one I want, nothing popping up in my face, no bloat-ware monitoring useless information. My fingers almost never leave my home row while I work.

I don't really know what this article was trying to get at. I'm sure there are lots of developers who do use OS X, but I don't think that choice really has much to say about open source developers as a whole and probably less to say about developers who do not switch.

It's just an operating system.

<comment><USER18> Gotta love Arch for being cutting-edge on the packages, too. And AUR... man, what a great distro. I probably spend something like 5 minutes a week maintaining it, and 99% of that time is updating packages.

I run it on my Aspire 1, as well--and suspend on lid works just fine. :)

If I never got to touch a Mac again (if Apple releases their iOS dev tools for Linux for instance... HAHAHAH!) I wouldn't miss it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Fedora Linux "just works" for me on my laptop (a 2 year old Toshiba Satellite), and I don't necessarily fall into the "fiddling with stuff and rebuilding stuff for grins and giggles" routine, FWIW. I will concede, however, that I am one of those people to whom F/OSS is an ideology, and I strive to avoid using any proprietary software as a matter of principle. Hence my refusal to own or use anything put out by Apple. :-)

<comment><USER3> So, can you, say, connect your mobile phone or your digital camcorder and view and edit the files to send an edited version to your grandmother in a Fedora Linux without fiddling?

If not, then "FWIW" should have been rewritten as "YMMV".

<comment><USER20> FWIW, using only ubuntu, I did both of these things last month to create a Christmas DVD of home movies and cell phone video clips.

Without much fuss, I transfered the video files via ssh from my jail-broken iphone, then edited, mastered and burned the DVDs using kdenlive. It was much easier than I expected.

<comment><USER21> I don't think you're helping the case much when you throw ssh into the mix...

<comment><USER20> Why? SSH is very convenient, easy for anyone to understand (including my 9 year old nephew), and I trust the security. What is better?

<comment><USER21> Oh come on. You can't copy a video from an iPhone over SSH _without fiddling_ , which was the constraint specified in the original comment.

<comment><USER20> Since I don't consider using SSH "fiddling", I don't know what you mean, and I'd guess that most developers don't think twice about how to use SSH. (If they did, they're not much of a developer in my book).

It's ironic to me that the most difficult part was having to jail-break my iphone. Apple certainly doesn't make my life any easier.

<comment><USER21> I think that difficult part constitutes fiddling.

<comment><USER20> I disagree. To me, the jail-break is just a default, one-time requirement to gain control over a device I own. It's actually not too difficult, so I don't consider it fiddling.

<comment><USER22> One time? How do you handle iOS updates?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> And this is why they should use caching :)

copypasta:

A common trend among many of the best developers is to see them posting screenshots running OS X. Many of the best developers, some my personal 'developer heroes', have made the switch to OS X.

It's All About the Mentality

I respect and admire programmers like @migueldeicaza, @mitsuhiko, mandrake, @dhh for all they have accomplished. One thing they all have in common, present day, is running OS X. Mandrake cowrote Enlightenment (which is the original really cool window manager for Linux), Miguel started Gnome, and the majority of code both Mitsuhiko (wrote almost every useful Python library ever) and DHH (Ruby on Rails) write run on Linux backends to say the least.

What are they most known for? Problem solving skills mixed with actually producing / releasing.

Linux is Open Source

And this, I believe, is why great developers tend to move towards OS X (yes, there are plenty of exceptions). A critical piece of writing software is focus. When a problem solver uses a Linux desktop, they are immediately confronted with the possibility of being able to modify every part of their system. When a problem solver runs OS X, their options are severely limited, by design.

I think all of us are guilty for hunting down PPAs to get a backported browser, or running './configure && make && make install' at some point. And when you have programming skills, source code can turn into a detriment to productivity when you start modifying projects outside of what you intended to accomplish. All of a sudden you start hacking a project for a few minutes, and wake up days later in a coding haze with all of that time lost.

Personally I have had experience with this while using old Linux distributions. We have SLES 9 systems and SLES 10 systems here at work, and in the past year I have spent countless hours hacking Sprint 3G wireless drivers, USB over IP, Firefox 3 and countless others to work on these older systems. Why? Not because they are the primary goal, but because I could, which in turn took up time from things I actually "wanted" to do.

Time is Valuable

Watching one of Miguel's presentations, he mentions that he does not have enough years left to "worry about memory management" and that they leave that to the younger folks. This is the crux of the argument. For programmers, there is far too much opportunity for distraction at every avenue. We don't know how long we will be here for, but certainly we know that nothing we care about will get done as long as our focus is spread so thin across the spectrum of Linux.

Summary

This is all just food for thought, not a judgement against any form of desktop or usage pattern. For reference, I am still running Ubuntu on my desktop, and being wildly unproductive on the tasks I want to finish.

<comment><USER24> hyperlinka: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?aq=f&ie=UTF...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?aq=f&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.sharms.org%2Fblog%2F2010%2F12%2Fon- why-open-source-developers-run-mac-os-x%2F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> For many open source developers/contributors, open source is not their entire life.

The majority of open source users/developers/contributors are pragmatic about the utility of open source software (it does a job they need done and the access to open source code makes it better), but there is a very vocal minority for whom open source/free software is an ideology (there's nothing wrong with that either).

I'm 100% open source on the server. The combo of Ubuntu, Django, Nginx, Gunicorn and Postgresql has made me very productive.

I like futzing with servers, I hate doing it with notebooks. OS X might not always "just work" but it does for most cases that matter to me.

Other people might own consoles or use Microsoft Office (or Google Docs) or other stuff which isn't open source, but that shouldn't affect their support for open source in the areas that matter to them.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can understand his argument about tinkering and distractions, but personally for me it is all about apps. If Linux had the same polished apps like OS X has then I would probably use Ubuntu as my main OS.

<comment><USER27> Actually two of my favorite apps ever are on linux, Amarok and Digikam. However, in full disclosure I haven't used Mac seriously in a while. I am sure there would be things I would love on it but for the most part I am very happy with the apps available for linux, especially now KDE4 is becoming usable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anecdotal evidence from my experience finds this to be true but only when you consider the type of developer and his field.

Opensource web oriented platforms (i.e web developers who commit code to web based projects in accordance to open source code licenses) use OSX in my experience by overwhelming majority.

Lower OS Level developers tend to stick with Linux or BSD

In some instances it didn't make any sense at all, the pains I saw developers trying to install couchDB on their OSX platform (i think it is a easier now), it was far easier to do this on ubuntu.

Developers also have aesthetic impulses, and OSX looks good and feels good, for most people, better then any X based GUI other platforms have. This is also an issue with the relative comfort different developers have with the Terminal.

Much can be said about this practice, no dog fooding might make open source less viable in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER24> > _When a problem solver runs OS X, their options are severely limited, by > design._

Hardly. On the surface, sure; that's part of the appeal. Underneath? GCC's a couple keystrokes away. There's even <http://www.opensource.apple.com/> which has kernels[1] and _lots_ of low-level code you can hack away at. Less than an OSS Unix distro? Absolutely. But not by all that far.

[1]: <http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1504.9.17/>

<comment><USER2> FWIW, the GCC, LD and other tools provided with OS X have a lot of deviations in terms of command line arguments and shared library path/bundle concepts.

You can have a simple application with a simple Makefile that works out of the box on any BSD and Linux system, but still have to adjust it to get it run under OS X.

So yes, under that hat OS X is some kind of Unix, but it is a very strange kind of Unix. OS X requires special cases in any build script, even in portable *.pro files of Qt projects.

So to me, as a developer and problem solver, OS X confronts me with a lot more distractions and nasty behavior than any other Unix-like system, including Windows+MinGW.

(This is because the MinGW cross compilers behave like normal GCC/Binutils as far as possible for the Windows platform. However, this solely because MinGW is developed by a group of volunteers, while the GCC functionality for OS X is developed by Apple. MinGW would surely look worse if it had been developed by Microsoft.)

<comment><USER24> A large part of that, from what I've encountered (by no means a representative sample), is due to Unix makefiles expecting/requiring X in specific- location-Y, or making things stringly-typed[1], or outright artificially restricting the systems it thinks it can run on, failing fake sanity checks up-front. Or other bad code.

But yes. OSX is _not_ a direct match to other Unix-like systems, and a lot of source compiles not tweaked to handle OSX (many are) will require changing a couple things. Though Qt worked just fine for me, so who knows.

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new- programming-j...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-programming- jargon-you-coined/2444303#2444303)

<comment><USER2> _> A large part of that, from what I've encountered ..._

Since I was talking about Makefile that run unmodified on any BSD and Linux, I'm clearly not talking about the kind of crappy build scripts you are mentioning. Those are an issue of their own.

 _> a lot of source compiles not tweaked to handle OSX_

The problem is that you _have to_ tweak scripts. You have to tweak even clean, simple scripts or libraries that use only portable constructs (i.e. without any hard-coded paths and other stupid stuff). And that's really nasty.

<comment><USER6> What experience is this based on? In my 6 years experience using a Mac as my primary machine, I've never had a higher rate of problems installing open source software with the default build scripts than on Linux.

Also, there's Macports, Fink, and Homebrew, which make it effortless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've been using Linux since 1992 with SLS. I've had several laptops on which I ran Debian. For years I did battle with audio drivers, printers, wireless, and non-functional suspend/resume.

Upon encountering OS X I went out and bought a 12" PowerBook. I thought it would be a nice machine to run Debian/PPC on. Instead, I so enjoyed having a functional laptop, that I never left OS X. Being firmly in the open source world, I described it as a crisis of faith. I'm on my second MacBook Pro now.

Having instantaneous suspend/resume is the biggest deal for me. Having wireless just work and being able to plug into a random printer and print a boarding pass is really nice. Plugging into a random projector or monitor and being able to do a demo or presentation without debugging the latest configuration mechanism to X is nice.

I still use Debian for servers and some workstations. Basically, if I only have to configure it once, it is worth the hassle. But with a laptop, I am essentially reconfiguring multiple times per day moving between locations, networks, and peripherals. OS X makes this so much less painful.

People like to talk about Apple as a software company or a hardware company. They are a systems company. Because they control the OS and the hardware, there isn't the enormous problems getting suspend/resume to work like there is in the Windows and Linux world where you have to get multiple vendors to cooperate to get something done.

</comment><comment><USER30> Apparently, just like real people, programmers just want shit to work when said shit is tangential to their project.

Ubuntu does a mostly good job at that, at least for me.

</comment><comment><USER31> A once asked a professor of mine why he used Mac OS X instead of Linux. He said to me "Linux is free, so long as your time is.".

I think that really gets the point across. While Ubuntu and a few others have made great strides in getting things to "just work", OS X is still the king in that regard.

<comment><USER3> Now, I hope your professor didn't try to pass that quote as his.

It's an old saying, most frequently encountered as "Linux is free, as long as your time is worthless".

<comment><USER31> No, he didn't. He said it as "As the saying goes...".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For me OS X = A *nix desktop that actually works (no more tinkering with various peripheral devices, drivers, etc) + generally better-designed hardware + much more higher quality apps = more time left to do other things

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't agree with the point made regarding having to build ones own software. I've found I've done as much "./configure && make && make install" on OSX as I have done with Linux -- if I'm using something that hasn't been updated in MacPorts I'm going to be building it myself.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think there are three main factors for the switch over the last few years.

1) Apple switched to x86

2) The MacBook Pro unibody line is just a solid laptop with a great design.

3) The iOS "bubble", where iOS developers are in high demand.

</comment><comment><USER35> I see Macs are very popular in the Python and Plone communities. Rails, too, has its fair share of Mac users. Lots of Java developers who use Eclipse/Tomcat/MySQL form a more even split among Windows/OSX users. Linux/BSD notebooks don't seem to be as common on Java-related FLOSS events than in other similar events.

I prefer Linux. Actually, I would be happy with any Unix-like OS with proper system-wide binary package management and a modern GUI. I can live with the occasional quirk when some part of the computer cannot function properly because it was never properly documented. I know that, by the next OS release (right now, that will be in about 4 months), it will.

Also, BtrFS is very interesting (although it doesn't compare to ZFS, but that's another can of worms)

</comment><comment><USER36> Something else to consider is the rise of the cloud - people buy apple hardware and then ssh into their linux boxes, or run them as VMs locally.

</comment><comment><USER35> Because of "504 Gateway Timeout" errors? ;-)

edit: I really wish I could read the article.

edit 2: Now that I am able to read it:

> When a problem solver uses a Linux desktop, they are immediately confronted > with the possibility of being able to modify every part of their system

Yes, but some of them never do it. They modify it once to tailor it to their needs (I check-out my Emacs configuration) and never touch it again. When I moved to Linux in 2002 or so, I spent some time trying skins and desktops and so on. Now all my computers use the default look and feel provided by Ubuntu. The last 4 years have been like that.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think title for the post really needs to be backed up with numbers. There is a major difference between "developers I know/follow" "and most open source developers".

I switched to a MBP in 2007 since I was due an upgrade on the giant Toshiba I was lugging around. By then, most of the PC options were on offering Vista. By then, I had grown into a significant 'frenemy' arrangement with Windows XP and just did not want to put in anoter x number of years learning another Windows version and get it to behave to my liking. So I went with the MBP and after a week or so I was quite happy and settled with it.

I switched to a Macbook after that (left the job and hated the abysmal battery life on the MBP) and it has been my main work/dev machine ever since.

The reasons why I love the Macs:

1\. It stays out of your way. I don't often reboot for 30+ days. Between the Finder, Terminal, Chromium & Textmate I get more work done and less time is spent on understanding the innards of some inane bug.

2\. Ability to compile stuff has improved a lot. In 2007 it was a pain to get most of the OSS stuff compiled on it, it is a different story now. But this is also because the people who manage the products are doing a better job of targeting the Darwin as an architecture.

I was a pretty involved Linux user in the day. There was a time when I would get my kicks out of the fact that you had to work hard to get a video driver going. I don't have the time for that now. On a recent Netbook I bought, I tried the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It worked, but with a lot of glitches and plenty of inconsistencies. Made an effort for 2-days, installed XP on it and been happy ever since.

</comment><comment><USER38> <rant> Funny thing is every time I use Mac OS, I find myself tinkering more than usual, whether it be on my Hackintosh, or a friends Macbook, although the Hackintosh did require a bit of tinkering just to get it running 100%.

I guess I'm always trying to make OS X a bit more usable to a primarily Linux/Windows person.

When I go down to that dock or activate expose I feel like I am losing precious time watching those animations (probably just me), Quicksilver does help but if I could just turn off the animations (like in Windows / YouNameIt Linux Distro) it would feel much nicer.

I tend to use Windows (design, production and games) and Ubuntu (programming, server related tasks) primarily and I have them set up very similar, using "Expose with no animation" (switcher and compiz), Launchy, very simple grey themes, a "Windows 7-like dock" for Ubuntu, and using the same fonts and Firefox/Thunderbird profiles, it is almost seamless other than the restarting part.

This works quite well and allows me to get real work done without flashy stuff going on all over the place or processes running in the background eating up precious CPU cycles that I can't seem to disable without breaking something.

It could be I'm just a hacker/tinkerer by nature, and when a system like OS X says I can't do something it makes me want to do it even more.

So, Apple.. Where is that option to disable all animations, or to show folders at the top of the finder (without totalfinder, or organizing by type)? </rant>

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm an open source developer, and I run Mac OS X for one reason:

I find it's interface to be, hands down, the best I've ever used. Since I work, essentially, two full time jobs (my day job, followed by Appleseed at night), I frankly don't want to have to wrestle with my operating system, even just a little bit.

I used Linux for years, haven't really used Windows since XP was released, and switched to Mac OS X about three years ago, and I'm not really interested in going back. I'm a fan of picking and choosing your battles, as opposed to adopting an approach of total purity, so right now my focus is building open source social networking, and if a closed system helps me do that without tearing my hair out, then I find that to be an acceptable compromise.

<comment><USER24> That's pretty similar to my reasons as well. I find it gets in my way _far_ less than others, and when it does there's a full-featured Terminal, or it's likely minor enough to ignore entirely.

It's hard to realize how much crap you have to put up with while running Windows, until you get rid of it (whether for OSX or Linux, BSD, what-have- you).

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> At the GSoC 2009 Mentors conference, I was amazed that a majority of attendees were running OS X

</comment><comment><USER40> Robert Love @ Google (<http://robert.love.usesthis.com/>) - author of Linux Kernel Development and ex-Ximian developer.

Laptop (though admittedly non-coding) - Macbook Pro.

'nuff said.

</comment><comment><USER41> I do web development. My code runs on headless Linux boxes, so I want to develop on something POSIX. So Windows is out.

I've tried Linux every couple of years since at least 1998 -- I really want to use it -- but I always end up searching forums for the fix to a broken Makefile for a printer driver. Or maybe it's sound, wireless, graphics, whatever. Still. After all these years. I _HATE_ dealing with that stuff. So Linux is out.

OSX is the only man left standing.

</comment><comment><USER42> Apple's C++ support has got horrible recently. Debugging mode in the C++ standard library doesn't work, gdb often fails to find symbols, Shark crashes, and the compiler has no C++0x support, unlike the current compilers on both Windows and Linux.

</comment><comment><USER43> I could see myself switching to a Mac because they have very nice laptops. a macbook pro or a air is a fine machine. on the downside: the keyboards suck and it would require me to setup a dual-boot system.

</comment><comment><USER44> #1 reason for a developer to run Linux: KCacheGrind. Compiling and running this on OS X is a terrible PITA. I'm not aware of any native Mac app that's even remotely as good for analyzing profiler output.

<comment><USER45> Instruments? DTrace?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Not sure I buy the reasoning - but I will say I have seen a trend where previous unix guys (usually linux, some bsd - as per the demographics) end up going for the apple laptops just because of OSX.

</comment><comment><USER47> Where is the evidence, that Open Source developers in general use OS X? Maybe some programmers use OS X, because the curious, just to try something new.

</comment><comment><USER3> Even Linus Torwalds used an iBook with OS X --he wrote his book in it. And at a time, he used a Powemac G5 as his desktop machine, although that one was running Linux ( [http://news.cnet.com/Torvalds-switches-to- Apple/2100-1003_3-...](http://news.cnet.com/Torvalds-switches-to- Apple/2100-1003_3-5606030.html?tag=nefd.top#ixzz18O5JQMrP) ).

Now, the lure of an OS X machine for an OSS hacker, is that besides the system "just running", with minimal hunting and improvising, they also need/want/like to have several apps not available as Open Source, or with sub par replacements. Stuff from running Photoshop or Omnigraffle to connecting their mobile phones and being able to _see_ and _edit_ their video captures with a minimum of fuss.

Of course, this only holds true for OSS hackers that are "pragmatic" and just use what they think is best for their needs, not for hardcore "Libre Software" types.

</comment><comment><USER48> "Open Source Developer" is not a job or career or profession. How many people out there really make their money checking in open source code? 0.1% of all developers? 0.01%? Most people do it in their free time, use it as marketing tool for their consulting/commercial offers, etc.

Miguel de Icaza for one might have Macbook, but I am sure it at least dual boots to Windows. It would not be possible otherwise, since he needs to run .NET non-stop and copy/paste code from Reflector to his Mono implementation, or whatever they are doing to clone .NET to Mono.

And I am pretty sure Apple Software has nothing to do with how they really win their bucks. So no need to look for logic here - they just like the shiny hardware cause they are geeks. That's it. No rocket science or philosophy here.

<comment><USER49> I work on the Mono team and we do nothing of the sort. Most of us don't even have a windows machine.

<comment><USER48> That's why noone is taking you seriously, folks. Copy/Pasting .NET and you claim you do not even have the original on your machine - nobody is going to use your crap. How on Earth am I going to trust my business on Mono when you claim that ridiculous shit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Because they don't.

Saying that Miguel de Icaza represents open source developers is just wrong. I respect the guy very much. But he's a completely different beast than the average open source programmer joe

Now most of the ones in academia do use mac (and used SGI workstations before that) just because they have a fat allowance for gear and they have no idea how to waste. so mac is the obvious way to go if what you need is to waste money.

<comment><USER51> From my few experiences at open source software programmery events over the past few years, I'd disagree. Always seems that a little fewer than half of attendees have macs in front of them. I explain part of it to myself by noticing that the numbers skew even higher than half when it's something 'webby,' and attributing that to the closeness to graphic design-media- marketing types.

With other systems programmer types, I still see plenty of macs, but I blame that on the fact that those programmers are spending all of their important time on the server and some don't feel like futzing around on their laptop with a more fiddly OS like Linux or Windows. The only thing that all programmers seem to like to fiddle with endlessly is IDEs and text editors, and there seem to plenty of mac options for that.</comment></comment>


Deploy Django on Nginx and Gunicorn over HTTPS  - <AUTHOR> http://ydevel.tumblr.com/post/22850778860/configuring-an-https-site-with-django-on-nginx

<comment><USER2> For your Supervisor deployment to actually be secure, you need to make a couple changes.

First, you should be using a separate root-owned virtualenv for Supervisor itself. If you use a virtualenv owned by another user, that user can effectively cause arbitrary command execution as root whenever Supervisor starts by modifying the virtualenv activation script.

Second, the Supervisor configuration file itself should also be root-owned and specified using the -c switch for 'supervisord'. A malicious user with access to the Supervisor config file can do all kinds of malicious things with that access alone, usually starting with disabling the privilege dropping and proceeding to overwriting arbitrary files as root. You should always specify the path to the config file as well, because otherwise Supervisor looks in the current working directory. That's harder to exploit, but it's better to be safe and have zero chance of a root-owned process reading a wrong (and possibly malicious) config file.

Fixing this stuff is probably beyond the scope of the article, but they're things you should consider if you plan on deploying Supervisor on production systems.

<comment><USER3> Great tips. Thanks for the info!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that it's "Deploy (Django on Nginx and Gunicorn over HTTPS)" and not "Deploy (Django on Nginx and Gunicorn) over HTTPS", which looked like quite some fun.

</comment><comment><USER5> Please consider not recommending self-signed certs. StartSSL offers free SSL certs. Use that instead.</comment>


The ice bucket challenge dramatically accelerated the fight against ALS - <AUTHOR> http://web.alsa.org/site/PageNavigator/pr_060419.html <comment><USER2> The article doesn't seem to make any references to concrete advances. It's unsurprising that an influx of donations resulted in an increase in research grants and money spent, but that's not the same thing as decreased mortality, morbidity, or even breakthroughs in understanding. A lot of research money is effectively wasted so until specific evidence is provided that there was a deep impact, I just see this as a particular special interest applauding money going in their direction (potentially at the expense of other causes which could make better use of it).

<comment><USER3> As a result of the funding, researchers were able to discover NEK1 - a newly tagged identify genetic factors contributing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The article was published in Nature and can be found here. [https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3626](https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3626). The discovery was a direct result of the money raised from the Ice Bucket Challenge.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, on p.15 of the linked RTI report[0] a number of other recent publications are also pointed out as particularly significant (seemingly based on number of citations). Unfortunately, it's hard to gauge the extent to which these are likely to result in actual medical advances as someone who does not know the domain well. Would appreciate any insight from any researchers who can break it down a bit.

[0] [http://www.alsa.org/assets/pdfs/RTI-Report- FINAL.pdf](http://www.alsa.org/assets/pdfs/RTI-Report-FINAL.pdf)

<comment><USER4> We probably won't know that for a long time. The lag time from basic research to FDA approved treatment is measured in decades.

<comment><USER5> Decades and billions and billions of dollars, plus a 90%+ failure rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was actually just talking about the Ice Bucket Challenge the other day, in regards to unexpected side-effects of an otherwise shining campaign.

This viral challenge raised an unprecedented amount of money for awareness of ALS, as well as research and treatment. It was the first social media campaign of this type, and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't heard of it.

But it also created a very - weird - secondary effect.

It encouraged teenagers to dump ice-cold water on themselves on camera, and upload it to YouTube for attention.

You might see where this is going: Ice Bucket Challenges featuring teen girls were far more popular than any featuring men/boys. And the more revealing the girls' clothing, the more attention still.

This has actually lead to a variety of water-based "challenges" that serve no other purpose than to put a wet, partially-dressed child in front of a camera for long enough for a pedophile to "enjoy" it.

Now there are tens of thousands of generic "water challenge" and "pool challenge" videos that serve no altruistic purpose whatsoever. They exist just to attract views - and money.

Many of these channels are run by parents who film their own tween daughters in skimpy bikinis a few days a week for ad revenue. "Desafio da Piscina" ("Pool Challenge" in Portuguese) is one of the most prevalent, with almost all videos shot in Brazil.

I imagine that at $20USD/10k views, people in third-world countries can rake in a decent passive income selling sexualized videos of their children to the Internet.

Sad part is that YouTube lets this happen, because it earns them money too.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a result of the funding, researchers were able to discover NEK1 - a newly tagged identify genetic factors contributing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The article was published in Nature and can be found here. [https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3626](https://www.nature.com/articles/ng.3626). The discovery was a direct result of the money raised from the Ice Bucket Challenge and can be used today as an indicator of genetic predisposition to ALS.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hundreds of millions of dollars for research...

The US alone is a $20 trillion economy.

Harvard has a hedge fund of almost $40 billion, Yale is about $30 billion, ...

We spend $18 billion on bottled water yearly.

There's a lot of money in the US economy that we just need to figure out how to get into basic research.

Give up bottled water and donate the money to medical research for a few years?

<comment><USER8> This very common trope always annoys me. "There is so much money flowing through the economy, and I just need to get a little bit for {insert cause}".

No.

Money does not flow like water through pipes, and you cannot just siphon some off without affecting the whole. Dollars are _packets_... each one is addressed to a particular destination, and sent to accomplish a specific purpose. If we want money for {cause}, we must choose to address dollars to that cause to the exclusion of other purposes.

/rant

(I know that melling specifically mentioned giving up bottled water, but there has to be a compelling reason to do so that _EVERY_ dollar/packet sender agrees on.)

<comment><USER9> This is basically anti-tax rhetoric. I don't think there's a single thing in the world that _everyone_ would willfully agree to spend their money on. Which is kind of why taxes exist in the first place.

<comment><USER10> Before asking for more of the money spend freely you should stop and ask your elected officials to not spend the money so recklessly.

millions, if not billions, are wasted every day by politicians propping up their political power yet by some miracle if we just took more money they could spend it more wisely.

if is the near impunity and preponderance of so many taxes that has led us into a situation with untold wealth in government hands and near financial accountability for a good portion of it.

Many love to lambast Federal spending but you would be aghast at how much of county, city, and state, funding is now going to pay. California, thirty thousand plus retirees pulling down 100k, nineteen thousand in Illinois. All justified because they were paid a lot working for the government. Twenty billion per year in retirement just from CalPers, twelve billion in Illinois. That is pension numbers, not active employees, which far outnumber them!

anti-tax rhetoric exist because politicians use the public money to grant largess to insured voting bases, the very people working in their jurisdictions and trying to FUD you in going along with it.

<comment><USER11> "Of course, if only we'd thought of that! All that waste we waste, we could just stop wasting it!"

[https://youtu.be/Zoz5EuIF_y8](https://youtu.be/Zoz5EuIF_y8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> murph-almighty This is wild- anecdata but I feel as though a lot of campaigns like this get a lot of "put your money where your mouth is"-type responses that are skeptical that web activism will have any impact. It's a relief that this pulled through and had a positive effect!

</comment><comment><USER12> Might be O/T, but I'm always surprised at how much our understanding of medical science comes down to basically a set of integration tests. You don't really know if your solution is going to be a global optimum (it probably isn't); you have to memorize a bunch of stuff in order to have the full context of a problem available when you approach a subset of it at work; and sometimes the "ideal" solution is so stochastic that you need multiple opinions / consensus.

I guess it's kind of like hardware engineering; I think we only glossed over how the physics worked in a CPU worked before working on higher-level things like NPN/PNP transistors and such, but even so there's a digital abstraction layer in computer architecture that make effective reasoning so much easier (even though there's really no such thing as "digital", only analog and clear thresholds)

Am I (hopefully) wrong on this? Can modern medicine ever come from a first- principles approach?

<comment><USER13> Nearly all medical advance goes like this:

1\. Administer treatment to some patients. 2\. See benefit. 3\. Try it on more people. 4 (optional). Do research to understand mechanism.

By and large medicine is not a "science" in the sense that it is interested in results, not building models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome, glad to see dumping ice water on your head and uploading it to social media accomplished something.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am skeptical. Until they publish a number on "number of new trials funded" this is just the usual "more money is good because we get to spend more money" type of press release.

</comment><comment><USER16> can we have one for climate change?

</comment><comment><USER17> Getting people involved helps causes push forward.

<comment><USER18> Sometimes.

And even then only really when the problem is a single problem, and when it is solvable by throwing more money and people at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not to be a Debby downer, but these posts always make me think of how many people just did this for a fad instead of meaningfully contributing. I almost think, why can't we just keep donating over and over, without the fad, at a lesser quantity if the fad produced such a significant contribution. I can understand that giving money can be just a waste, but if it really made such a significant impact, it seems like just taxing everyone and sending it directly to ALS would've done the same thing.

<comment><USER19> Does it matter why people donated and/or became more aware of the disease?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This appears to be a PR piece by the ALS-fighting company, The ALS Association, themselves.

<comment><USER21> And if by company you mean registered nonprofit dedicated to fighting ALS, then yes, spot on.

<comment><USER22> Being a registered non-profit doesn't really exclude you from making money or being "evil". The majority of hospitals are non-profit, for example.

I am in no way saying the ALS Association is evil.

<comment><USER4> I think it's pretty common to equate making money to making a profit for a corporation, and in that sense they don't make money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Pink ribbons raise awareness of breast cancer, not how to tie a pink ribbons. The Ice Bucket Challenge raised awareness of how to do the Ice Bucket Challenge far more than awareness of what ALS is.

Maybe that is why the money rolled in, it was an internet meme that wasn't rocket science to do but everyone wanted in on the fad. Fortunately for the ALS charity the default was for the money to go their way.

So maybe not a win on awareness raising even if they did get the cash.

<comment><USER24> I don't see how you figure. There is no default place for money to go when people pour a bucket of ice water over their heads. It's not like the ALSA was selling ice. The only way it raised money was by raising awareness.</comment></comment>


If This Then Trello - <AUTHOR> http://blog.trello.com/if-this-then-trello/

<comment><USER2> Huh, so instead of adding recurring boards to the app itself, they enabled an external API that connects a clock to the board-creation interface. I don't know if this is horrifying or brilliant.</comment>


Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used - <AUTHOR> http://consumerist.com/2010/11/capital-one-made-me-different-loan-offers-depending-on-which-browser-i-used.html <comment><USER2> It's either:

      - A random number each time
      - Normal split testing using a cookie
      - Split testing using the user agent rather than a cookie

The last one would, I suppose, be more consistent than using a cookie- after all, most people wouldn't switch browsers, but they might clear their cookies.

That being said, a few companies have gotten in hot water for doing this.

Amazon in 2000: <http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-245631.html>

Automattic: [http://brianbreslin.com/automattic-caught-ab-testing- pricing...](http://brianbreslin.com/automattic-caught-ab-testing-pricing-for- vaultpress/) (although they admitted up front they were doing this)

[Edited for readability]

<comment><USER3> I think it's normal split testing using a normal cookie. Here are the rates I get in Opera (with flash disabled) while clearing cookies between reloads:

        new   used  refinance
        3.10  4.49  4.34
        3.50  5.09  4.84
        2.70  4.09  3.94
        2.30  3.59  3.54

And here's Firefox (with flash enabled) and clearing session cookies between reloads:

        new   used  refinance
        2.70  4.09  3.94
        3.10  4.49  4.34
        2.30  3.59  3.54
        3.50  5.09  4.84

<comment><USER4> ANOVA agrees with you:

      Source      Sum Sq.   d.f.   Mean Sq.     F      Prob>F
      </comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
      Loan Type    9.6665     2    4.8333     16.47    0.001
      Browser      0          1    0           0       1
      Error        5.8700    20    0.2935
      Total       15.5365    23

</comment><comment><USER5> Capital One is famous for experimentation and segmentation based on messaging, response rate, demographic factors, and many other variables. It's how they came out of nowhere in the early 1990s (the founders were consultants who had zero banking or credit card experience) to disrupt the industry, most of which operated on one-size-fits all APRs and risk profiles.

<comment><USER6> Good point ilamont, I wonder if they have a'users vs risk' load balancer built into the search for the rate. For instance if 100k people tried for the same rate at the same time, would it randomly change the rate to balance the risk?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You also get different loans if you walk into a bank wearing a suit vs. a hoodie.

<comment><USER8> So which browser is the equivalent of a tuxedo? A suit? A hoodie?

I'm not so sure browser choice is an accurate signal of a person's worth (In this sense, worth could mean anything).

<comment><USER9> I'd say Safari = black turtleneck.... firefox = hoodie....

actually the chrome figure makes sorta sense. chrome is super early adopters, so likely wealthier purchasers of high-end electronics... dunno completely pulling this outta my A$$ :-)

<comment><USER10> You can say ass here. We're all adults.

<comment><USER11> That's an artifact from a past era. Likely from BBSes, gaming or IRC. I think it should come off as the equivalent to a dialect that just provides some insight to the poster. I know when I use it it's usually unintentional and subconscious. And, of course, there is the implication that if you don't like swear words then read it as such and don't be offended.

I remember it being used often in moderated fidonet[1] though that may have been limited to local and regional forums. Also to avoid the swear word filters on BBS chat in the 80s and very early 90s. And in some MMORPGs for the same reason circa 2000 to present.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Method behind the madness?

-= ComScore study suggests that FireFox users, while more affluent, also tend to skew considerably younger than your average Internet Explorer user

-= Pair that data with the fact that younger people have lower credit scores, and the lower your credit score, the higher your APR.

-= By showing a prospect a loan rate near to what they will qualify for, Capital One is going to close more business, and not waste resources on non-qualified leads.

VIA - [http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/11/do-different-web- br...](http://conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/11/do-different-web-browsers- bring-different-demographics/)

</comment><comment><USER13> About a year ago I got a quote from Geico.com for car insurance. When I got to the purchase screen, I decided to leave and check prices from other companies. Then I went back to Geico the second time because it turned out they had the best price. To my surprise Geico offered a 15% lower rate the second time! I guess they figured they better wow me to get a conversion the second time around. Pretty great.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if they're doing browser history sniffing? If I were an evil-finance- company-web-developer, I'd certainly consider attempting to find out which of my competitors websites you've visited recently. Or whether you'd visited any of their (or my) adwords landing pages. Or (with a fair bit more work) whether you'd done any of a selection of specific google searches.

I've been playing with it a bit lately, it works pretty reliably in most of the Firefox 3.6.* browsers, as well as iPhones running 3.1.3 and 4.1, and IE 7 and 8... (Chrome, Safari, and iPads are immune to both the css and javascript sniffing techniques I've tried, but that's not to say there aren't other tricks that work for them...)

<http://bigiain.com/csshistorysniffing.html>

(apologies in advance if my cheapo hosting and naive and unoptimised perl/cgi proof of concept doesn't stand up to hackernews traffic volumes...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just out of curiosity, is there any proof out there that airline companies discriminate based on browser choice?

My thoughts are that since airline companies are the quintessential example of price discrimination they would most likely have such a system in place.

<comment><USER15> I worked at ITA software for a few years, in the team that wrote the software that searches for airfares.

The prices of seats and their restrictions are published, and the data format predates the web (by a large margin). There's no field for "browser type."

Each seat has about a dozen prices, and the only other way the user sees a price change is by turning a given price on or off. But the protocol that asks whether a given seat is available doesn't have a "browser type" field either.

When you go to an airline's web site, they could presumably use whatever info they want. But if they used the browser while travel agents didn't, they'd either be presenting a lower price than you could get through the agent, or a higher one. It seems unlikely they'd do that, but I suppose it's possible.

<comment><USER9> so more importantly: how do WE get better prices?

<comment><USER15> <http://matrix.itasoftware.com>

That and the flyer talk forums.

<comment><USER16> This! It's especially good when you have flexible dates, or you want to taylor your search (eg, connect through Dallas rather than Chicago). I've also used other multi-airline search sites (kayak, hipmunk, orbitz etc), but they never have the best price available. It's best to narrow it down to a few of the best options, then go price them directly on the airline's website. It usually works out significantly cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would expect this has something to do with the browser and where it indexes the results (pull this rate from) from to start with. As Firefox can deliver results from many search engines, I would love to know if Devin knew what Firefox was searching with at the time, Yahoo/ Bing or Google. If set to Google this could be a fantastic bench test to see what results are actually delivered from both browsers connected to Google.

</comment><comment><USER17> Same goes for Netflix's streaming only rate - it's either $7.99/month or $8.99/month depending on your browser.

</comment><comment><USER18> I built something a while back which used several data sources to build a scoring profile of the applicant.

The emergent behaviours were rather interesting, anyone with a .pl tld in their email was several penalised.

The rejection rates for .pl applicants was 100% so the system worked albeit somewhat racistly.

</comment><comment><USER19> What is the right way to gather this info? Our expectation is that the prices advertised are firm. Is there a way to perform the test without violating expectations?

Using something like an geographic IP lookup would mitigate but not solve.

</comment><comment><USER20> split testing different offers?

<comment><USER21> Right, she needs to go back and check the pages again with fresh installs a few times. It may be more or less random.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> caponeaf_split=exp1%3DD_exp2%3DD_exp3%3DD_exp4%3DD_exp5%3DD_exp6%3DD_exp7%3DD

Split test cookie

</comment><comment><USER23> chrome ftw?</comment>


A Use for Smartphone Photos - <AUTHOR> http://petersobot.com/blog/a-use-for-smartphone-photos/ <comment><USER2> This is very cool. Is the code for it posted anywhere?</comment>