Pentagon releases results of 13,000-mph test flight over Pacific - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-darpa-hypersonic-missile-20120420,0,4564567.story

<comment><USER2> The stated goal is apparently to be able to strike anywhere on earth within an hour. What's the advantage of something like this above an ICBM? I can imagine one advantage would be that the target can't be easily inferred from the flight path? Also an ICBM launch is immediately associated with a nuclear attack, while this might not be? Although I could imagine an enemy detecting multiple of these hypersonic vehicles heading towards it, wouldn't want to wait to find out.

<comment><USER3> Have you looked at the US's defense budget? When you have money like this you don't need to worry too much about practical uses. Imagine if this money went unspent, Americans would get a tax break or heaven forbid better healthcare or something.

Seriously, a good chunk of what the US researches is done strictly because we don't question the defense budget and the contractors and bureaucrats know how to game the system and create jobs/fortunes for the defense industry.

As far as the whole "herp derp its not an icbm," well something tells me that if the Chinese had this and hit our carrier groups with it(1), we'd respond with nuclear strikes instantly. If we send 10 of these towards downtown Beijing, its nuclear war as usual fellas. I think the subtleties between kinetic and nuclear will be lost on the generals and leaders who make retaliatory strike decisions.

(1) The PRC is playing with all manner of kinetic kill vehicles and probably have a carrier killer mounted on several warships and subs, so this isn't purely conjecture

<comment><USER4> Lets not get too carried away here. At least in the US, the defense department, specifically DARPA, invests a lot in research that doesn't have immediate value but has a proven track record for being invaluable years or decades later.

50 years ago someone might have made an argument that investing 380m in health care would be more useful than some crazy thing called 'ARPANET', but i think in the end it turned out better for everyone. Add GPS and self-driving cars to that list too.

<comment><USER3> If ARPANET failed then some other network would have evolved into the internet. Its not like networking technology was unknown outside of the military, heck most advances in networking and CS happen in universities, not via defense contracts.

Heck, the French had Minitel in the 80s while we had a loose network of BBS's and to be frank it wasn't the lack of network technologies that was the problem back then, it was the lack of a killer app. TBL delivered that in the form of the WWW. The WWW is network agnostic. There wasn't a day when people went "Whoa, T1s are now affordable for my LEC to sell to my ISP, I better get a shell account pronto!" It was "Whoa, there's email and colors and pictures and text and even video on my computer's modem via this thing called the web I'm seeing advertised on movie trailers and on product packaging?!?!"

<comment><USER4> ... and who do you think funded those CS departments? It's all by grants, a lot of which is from the defense department, who has a lot of money to invest in high risk, high return, long-running projects with practical outcomes.

Saying 'some other network would have evolved' is a cop-out: clearly that would have happened, but it would have happened later and that could have cost us in terms of competitiveness. Same argument for GPS, except even more likely given the heavy investment in infrastructure needed to even get a basic implementation running.

Also the 80's are not the 60's, it's ridiculous to think that the networking technologies were not influenced heavily by the work funded by the military ... hell the only reason killer apps could be created was because the technology was so pervasive that it made sense to write them.

And GPS, self-driving cars, and ARPANET are only what I came up with offhand because I was too lazy to check. Add ENIAC and radar to that list, both of which were developed specifically for military purposes but (obviously) later had wide-ranging practical civilian applications.

<comment><USER3> >It's all by grants, a lot of which is from the defense department,

A lot? Some? Very little? Unless you have some backup here, the whole "HERP DERP EVERYTHING IMPORTANT IS FINANCED BY THE DOD" is wearing pretty thin.

<comment><USER4> In 2010, 227 million over 5 years:

<http://www.defense.gov/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=13717>

Also I didn't say everything important, I said a lot. In hindsight, I don't think anyone thinks funding ARPANET or ENIAC was a bad idea...

<comment><USER3> Yeah but whats the context? How much of that directly to programs like we're talking about vs money via tuition, fees, etc.

I think this is really impossible to quantify, but from a rational POV we can look at countries with small defense spending and see that they have healthy univerisities and healthy economies as well as healthy technological advances (again my example of the early french 'internet'). Tim Berners Lee was not only NOT an American but not funded by the DoD. His www application is what got the ball rolling. The network or protocol didn't matter, we can run http over anything. Same with Linus Torvalds, another non-American non-DOD funded star. We were sitting on nice networking tehcnology and wondering when Joe Public would see the wisdom of anything other than AOL and dialup (two very American things). It took a an Englishman at CERN and a Finnish student to give us WWW on Linux. Whats the Finnish defense budget look like?

A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for technological progress. If anything, it holds us back.

<comment><USER4> > A big bloaty DoD and the war on brown people is not a requirement for > technological progress. If anything, it holds us back.

You're confusing procurement costs with R&D. Lumping all military spending together is ignoring the subtleties as to why and how the money is used:

[http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/04/d...](http://www.thecollaredsheep.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/04/death-and-taxes-2010.jpg)

* Tim Berners Lee got the ball rolling on www decades after the ARPANET investment, that doesn't help your point.

* The English have large military R&D spending, given their GDP, and always have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The technological feat seems amazing! But .. my English parser crashes here:

"The initial shock wave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand," DARPA Acting Director Kaigham J. Gabriel said in a statement. "That's a major validation that we're advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight."

Is he saying that (my understanding) the shock wave disturbances exceeded the designed/expected maximum by a factor of 100? And claims that this is supporting the idea of understanding hypersonic flight so much better?

I _think_ he wants to say 'In spite of these troubles we were able to recover, due to our good understanding of the underlying principles' but I parse it as 'The outcome of the experiment showed that we greatly underestimated the forces involved and this clearly validates our understanding'.

Can some native speaker point out were I stumbled?

<comment><USER6> I believe he is trying to say their ability to recover from such a large variation from their initial expectation is proof that they truly understand/are advancing in their knowledge of hypersonic flight. That said, since there is a break between the two quotes the second could have come 10 sentences later and the writer could have unknowingly dropped context/information in some omitted statements. It is a bit of a hard to parse statement, but that is what you get from people, rarely do people speak in memorable, concise sound bites 'off the cuff'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a TED talk by Regina Dugan that discusses these flights as well:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/regina_dugan_from_mach_20_g...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/regina_dugan_from_mach_20_glider_to_humming_bird_drone.html)

<comment><USER8> The juxtaposition of toddlers and the "DARPA" logo is not jarring, given the benefits DARPA has produced for humanity due in part to its unleashed creativity, but certainly 'weird' given the context of its mission statement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I still can't even fathom a _12-minute_ separation between Los Angeles and New York.

<comment><USER10> Plus two hours getting to and waiting at the airport.

<comment><USER9> Maybe that'll be solved by the time I can afford a hypersonic flight between NY and LA.

<comment><USER11> It is a solved problem. At least getting to the airport. Now we just need to make it more affordable.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train>

<comment><USER12> I think the OP is instead refering to the standard disclaimer to arrive 1-2 hours before your flight to get through baggage check, security, and sitting at the gate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The technologist in me says that is pretty awesome.

The cynic looks at $320M price tag and wonders why I don't have better schools for my kids and DARPA doesn't have a better video of this thing.

<comment><USER14> Would $320M make much of a difference? The city of LA just spent $500M on a single school building.

I wager had the money gone towards education, we would either have a $820M school building or a second one worth $320M.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When the technology does start to work, could this have civilian applications one day?

<comment><USER16> In theory, yes. But the fastest civilian plane, the Concorde, was shut down years ago. There's cost/benefit ratio that needs to be met.

<comment><USER17> Let's not forget the concord was shut down mostly because one of them ran over a 17 inch bit of titanium that sent pounds of debris flying at the plan at 500mph rupturing a fuel tank and causing it to blow up. The next year some a-holes flew into buildings in NY and the pentagon and put the airline industry and economy into a tailspin.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590>

<comment><USER18> I think that crash was more the excuse they were waiting for. Economically, it was past its prime, a prime at which I do not think it ever brought in much money, if at all. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde#Operational_history>, for example, claims "By around 1981 in the UK, the future for Concorde looked bleak. The British government had lost money operating Concorde every year, and moves were afoot to cancel the service entirely". It also says "It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit, unlike their French counterpart", so there may have been years it was making a profit, but Concorde was flying for prestige, not for the money.

I also think that 500mph figure you give is incorrect. Wikipedia lists Concorde take off speed as 250mph, and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590> talks of 500kph, or 310mph.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reia - Ruby's powerful syntax with Erlang concurrency and fault-tolerance - <AUTHOR> http://reia-lang.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Tony Arcieri, the author of Reia, just refreshed the Reia website.</comment>


Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.138.3468&rep=rep1&type=pdf

<comment><USER2> The contradiction between the ultimate value of pure scientific inquiry and the detriment of results that could be construed to be racist is an issue I've puzzled with some in the past. The conclusion I've come to is that it's part of our social contract to never act on any such correlation - any result that says that X person may behave like Y must be totally disregarded when interacting with any individual (except for, say, medical use). This extends beyond racism and sexism from disregarding institutionalized prejudices into actively ignoring discovered information. It's a fine line, for sure.

<comment><USER3> I think we should distinguish between the individual and the group.

When dealing with a specific individual, it is important to avoid short- circuiting inferences based on some group membership. This does not require any suppression of the truth: it is a fact that intra-group variance is higher than inter-group variance, and a member of the group with the lower average may surpass a member of the group with the higher average.

For example, let's say you have two candidates for a tech job, one black and one Asian. If you were forced to pick one based on that fact alone, it may be true that picking the Asian would be the better strategy, but it is clear that choosing an employee based on race alone is completely asinine. Both fairness and good business practices require that you evaluate both candidates on their individual merits; at which point any prior probabilities based on race become moot, since you now have specific individual information to decide on. And it is entirely possible that the black candidate will turn out to be the better pick.

However, it is wrong to try and transfer this to the collective level and claim that the racial composition of your workforce should match that of the general population. That would be the expected outcome if and only if it were the case that aptitude for tech jobs is equally frequent amongst different races. However, scientific evidence does not seem to support that assumption; in fact, it seems to strongly support the opposite.

In that situation, it is not just that fairness at the individual level does not lead to "fairness" at the collective level: the two objectives are actually at odds. If aptitude is not equally distributed and you still want to force the racial composition of your employees to match that of the general population, the only way to do that is to pick some worse candidates over better ones just because of their race. In order to be "fair" to groups, you have to be unfair to actual people.

Which, by the way, is a very good reason why this research should _not_ be suppressed. Making policy decisions based on falsehoods is bad enough, but treating people unfairly because of falsehoods is even worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow: "Although intelligence tests are often cited as psychology's biggest success..."

<comment><AUTHOR> They are from some perspectives. For example, the US Army has long been a major funder of psychometric research because IQ scores are _so_ useful for dealing with conscripts drawn from the entire population (not just a few elite universities) that it saves them a fortune in training and accidents (lower-IQ people are dangerous around weapons or equipment); hard to think of any psychology research which might've been more useful to them than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen several articles on intelligence/IQ/g hit the front page recently (often followed by being flagged and removed). There have been two this morning, plus others in past weeks. At the time of this comment, this post only has 6 points, how are they consistently climbing the charts so quickly?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you sure they're being flagged? I think HN has been experimenting with showing recent submissions more on the main page in order to remedy the problem of /newest being a ghetto no one votes in.

<comment><USER5> Good point, the one I saw a week or so ago was definitely flagged. These may just be related to the algorithm change you mentioned, and I just noticed them because the previous one made an impression.</comment></comment></comment>


Target Settles Accessibility Lawsuit for $6 Million - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/29/target-settles-accessibility-lawsuit-for-6-million/ <comment><USER2> Criminal. Just because you own a website doesn't mean that everybody has the right to use it. The judges should be thrown on the street or better yet in prison for criminal abuse of power.

<comment><USER3> Actually, that isn't true. The Americans with Disabilities Act says that stores must provide full and equal enjoyment of their goods, services, facilities, or accommodations. The judge only ruled that Target.com falls under that provision as much as Target physical stores do. Not an unreasonable ruling at all. "The ADA doesn't exclude web-based stores therefore it applies to it" seems perfectly reasonable. In fact, the ruling is both in the word of the law and the spirit of the law (which was to allow equal access to necessary services to all people).

Now, Target didn't have to pay $6M. That's a voluntary settlement. The ADA only specifies that establishments can be compelled to 1) make their places accessible and 2) pay the plaintiff's legal fees. Target probably decided that rather than continuing the appellate process, this was just easier.

Plus, it's the right thing to do. Seriously, it's not as if it's that hard to make a website accessible - Target wasn't even using alt tags. WTF? You can't add alt tags?

I get as pissed of as the next person when the only parking available is handicapped, but at the same time it's not like I'd trade my able-bodied status to reap the benefits.

The ADA exists. If you disagree that the ADA should exist, you need to contact your senators and rep asking them to support its repeal. If you think it shouldn't apply to the web, you need to contact your senators and rep to lobby for amending the ADA to specifically exclude the web from its jurisdiction.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with lazy cofounder? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
We're a small startup of two. Lately, I found my colleague is working less and less. The code he writes is mostly buggy and undocumented. Even the unit tests are not working; so when we run them, we thought something was wrong but then saw the problem was in the unit tests themselves.
I don't want to micromanage, I don't want to be a bitch, but I also do not want to be the only one working in the company, or to see collapse of our  hard work.
Is there any way to deal with this, or is there anyone who've been in a similar position? <comment><USER2> Talk to your partner. Communicate with him. Start with a positive, and then explain the issues patiently and with respect. Any relationship is dependent on good communication, and a business relationship is no different!

</comment><comment><USER3> I have seen something similar and it didn't end well. Though the partners brought very different things to the table. People also invest energy in cycles so it could just be "founders doubt" or "burnout".

Make sure you are both still having fun...and use all of the lessons you can from dating and marriage. This could be like the business version of "seven year itch".

</comment><comment><USER3> Have the difficult conversation now before you have "kids".

</comment><comment><USER4> When we started a product, we agreed to split shares according time spent on the product. For example, I worked about 40 hrs per week (we all had another (main) job initially), but other 3 people worked ~10 hrs per week. So in the end I had higher stake.

If you both work full-time, this strategy will not help. However, you can find a measure of value. Maybe your partner is good at something else, like promotion and marketing. Then you should discuss responsibilities and maybe he can do some smaller features, but will focus on something else. If that will not work, I think you just can't keep work together, that will be a waste of time and a road to failure.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just be honest with him. Tell him your concerns without sounding like you are attacking him.

If you let this sit, you will only resent him in the future, which is not the basis for a healthy relationship. It will most likely end in disaster.

</comment><comment><USER6> It could be a motivation issue if it was a decline in work quality. If you're like most startups, and you're not profitable right now, it's important to quickly become profitable. Having a constant stream of real validation of your business's value is very important--make sure you're making the right product. Otherwise, there's no shame in pivoting or dropping the dead weight--but in my opinion that's like firing a canary because it stopped chirping.

</comment><comment><USER7> Are you writing code yourself or are you 'non-technical'? Founders don't 'manage' other founders. You sound like a non-technical who has some idealized view of how software is made.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm writing the code myself, how I could get the code is undocumented otherwise?

That's what I'm saying too, I don't want to "manage" but he's being actually lazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Get the heck out. You shouldn't have to micromanage him. If he doesn't have the self discipline and mentality, he's not meant to be in the game.

</comment><comment><USER9> get rid of him asap

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess it depends in part on how strong your relatiomship is and how feasible it is to determine what the root causes are and effectively address them. Due to my undiagnosed health issues, I was always accused of laziness as a child. I found it an unfair accusation and was very frustrated. Because of that, I was pretty tolerant of the appearance of laziness in one of my children. He and I have been able to resolve underlying issues of various sorts and he seems a lot less lazy these days. Similar issues with his father could not be resolved and we divorced. My relationship to my ex was just not as strong as the one I have with my kids and he was not as willing to look for and resolve the root causes.

Best of luck.</comment>


Google, YouTube to Pay $170M Penalty over Collecting Kids' Personal Info - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757441886/google-youtube-to-pay-170-million-penalty-over-collecting-kids-personal-info <comment><USER2> To be clear, Google isn't accused of intentionally tracking children in defiance of privacy laws, they're accused of not erring hard enough on the side of "this is a child" when guessing the age of a user they don't know the age of. This sounds like a genuine grey area that YouTube was on the wrong side of. Doesn't mean they were right, but everyone's acting like this is flagrant disregard of the law when in fact it is an edge case that didn't yet have a clear standard.

<comment><USER3> Google/youtube still won't be able to do anything because kids are smart. They'll just make accounts saying they're 22 years old. It reminds me of the times when I was like 14 and started watching pornography. To say the least, you quickly learn to just click the "yes, I am 18+ years old". That's the reality. If YT/google were to really enforce it they would make all YT/google accounts require ID submission for commenting/uploading etc.

<comment><USER4> Google already has a minimum age of 13 to create an account (the maximum age before COPPA no longer applies). The issue here is that if a child didn't sign in or used an account where they claimed to be older, they would still have their information collected - the FTC is arguing that Google should have disabled tracking on all videos targeted towards children, even when they didn't know the age of the person watching.

<comment><USER5> So basically all kid content creators are going to be hit hard once this goes into effect, and we'll get another wave of backlash about "Youtube is killing our channel"

The trickier part is "all age" content. Even something like Minecraft, which at the surface is aimed at kids, I know many adults who watch and play the game... Are all Minecraft streamers screwed?

<comment><USER6> I don't see anything saying they can't play ads? They can even target them without having to collect any info. If you are watching a kids video its pretty obvious an advert about toys or kids games would be relevant.

<comment><USER5> That's true, it will still play ads, but obviously non-targeted ads are not as lucrative (an adult watching a Minecraft video doesn't care about toys), therefore, there will still be a non-negligible hit in revenue. If the difference was negligible, why would Google spend so much time developing targeted ads?

<comment><USER6> The adult watching kids videos is something I did not consider. Target ads are useful for adults because their wants and needs are far more diverse. Only a fraction of adults are interested in buying a circular saw so targeted ads are needed but for kids you can put a pretty safe bet on the fact that a lego advert on a kids show will hit the correct audience pretty spot on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real problem is much worse than just data collection. The children's content on Youtube is the most vacuous garbage in existence and young children have wasted billions of hours watching it on autoplay.

<comment><USER8> This differs in no way, except for the name "YouTube", from the objection to children watching television that goes back several decades.

<comment><USER9> The content on YouTube _absolutely_ differs from the content on regular television.

Most children's television content has _some_ value: a lesson, moral or at least an actual _story_.

Others have mentioned the horrifying inappropriate content, but even ignoring that, there is a mind-boggling amount of content on YouTube that is really devoid of value (at least in terms of what I want my kids watching):

* Nursery rhymes -- which is not so bad, but it just keeps going forever

* People (often adults) dressed up as children's story characters, just goofing around

* People (not always kids) literally just playing with toys

* People (not always kids) doing some mind-numbing repetitive task (for 10's of minutes) like opening kinder eggs, molding play doh or pouring glitter on things

<comment><USER10> Is there any evidence that this is different, better or worse, than traditional television?

<comment><USER11> Content farms thrive by children's content on YouTube. Something similar could never exist on other curated platforms like TV just as a matter of scale. A content farm can put out 100 ten minute videos of the same type just by swapping out some assets and keywords. At least one of those will get somewhat popular. This is even more devious with MCNs where multiple channels group up but revenue goes to a single entity. If YouTube flags a single channel, it doesn't hurt the entire MCN so you can get around the spam filters that YouTube almost certainly has in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like Youtube Kids is an abomination on every level. Between Elsagate, privacy violations, and the generally pathetic unboxing-oriented nature of its mainstay content, it's a revolting offering for children.

Of all the Google products that get deprecated or killed, this is the one I wish they'd amputate.

<comment><USER13> I think it's overblown. My kid watches YTK sometimes, and he watches mostly people playing with Lego and hotwheels cars, and animal videos. I've never actually seen any of that sort of questionable content.

<comment><USER14> Yea, look a little closer. A lot of that stuff they are playing with is sponsored content. The toy maker is paying for the kid to play with that toy.

Further, no matter what you kid starts watching, the recommendation algorithms always head you down the path to this content.

Start with sesame street or some known A+ content, 5 mins later its "learn colors with Mattel car" x 1000.

You really need to whitelist things, to avoid the "Billys toy review" and the 10,000 clones.

<comment><USER15> "A lot of that stuff they are playing with is sponsored content. The toy maker is paying for the kid to play with that toy."

I think this ship sailed like eighty years ago... Seriously just about every successful kids show from my youth - with the possible partial exception of Sesame Street - were thinly disguised toy advertisements.

<comment><USER16> > I think this ship sailed like eighty years ago... Seriously just about every > successful kids show from my youth - with the possible partial exception of > Sesame Street - were thinly disguised toy advertisements.

I grew up on Arthur, Mr Rogers, and Sesame Street. It's certainly possible to have quality noncommercial children's programming.

<comment><USER15> It absolutely is... but clutching pearls about toy advertisements at this point in history doesn't really add to the conversation.

<comment><USER16> There are few problems in childrens TV you _can 't_ attribute to advertising. It's absolutely relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I spent a few minutes of DuckDuckGo'ing but couldn't find anything... does anyone know if there's a way to see how/if these fines are actually being paid?

UPDATE: Looks like most fines are paid to the US Treasury. [1][2]

There seems to be some info on this page, but it appears to be only for sanctions violations (OFAC): [https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/sanctions/CivPen/Pa...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/sanctions/CivPen/Pages/civpen-index2.aspx)

[1] [https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/11/05/good-question- wher...](https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/11/05/good-question-where-does- money-from-government-fines-go/)

[2] [https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/When- govern...](https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/When-government- fines-companies-who-gets-cash-3189724.php)

<comment><USER18> The fine is also tax-deductible.

<comment><USER19> Which is especially irksome because Alphabet pays such a low rate already.

<comment><USER20> If Alphabet pays a low rate, then the benefit of a tax deduction's reduced, so I'm not sure I understand the "especially" here.

<comment><USER21> Because penalties for bad behavior shouldn't come out of your tax burden? I dunno if that's what GP meant but it's certainly horrendously unethical enough for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just a slap on the wrist in the grand scheme of things, considering how large the children's ad market is

>YouTube said that, in a about four months, it will begin treating data "from anyone watching children's content on YouTube as coming from a child, regardless of the age of the user" and will stop serving personalized ads on this content and end comments and notifications on it.

I wonder if spoofing your identity as a child will become a viable anti tracking strategy

<comment><USER23> Oh boy I'm looking forward to hearing about random YouTubers' content getting flagged as children's content and losing a further chunk of their revenue...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Where does this money even go? If not to the victims then it's just a fine, which is just another way of saying a cost of doing business.

<comment><USER25> What you're talking about is called [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice)

It's an idea that's been around for a long time and one could argue it's growing in popularity as a concept. But it's not very popular in the legal world yet.

Your crimes are against the state in most cases, which is where the fines will go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > YouTube earned millions of dollars by then using this information to target > ads to the children, according to the complaint.

How many millions?

Because if it's $500m then I'm going to pissed off because Google's just going to consider the fine a cost of doing business and continue about their merry way.

But if they only made, like, $2m from this information, then the fine seems like a legitimate tool to stop this sort of shitty behavior.

<comment><USER27> I tend to think that it'll still be considered a cost of doing business. They'll just figure out another way to do what they want and deal with the consequences if needed.

<comment><USER28> If they continually lose money on such things then it's a good deterrent. Big IF there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Discussed a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844346](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844346)

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what percentage of $170M is what Google spends on employee coffee each year. 90%? 95%?

Google has $170M in petty cash. This is not a fine. It's not even an inconvenience.

</comment><comment><USER31> The ability to indoctrinate the children of the future is worth magnitudes more than this measly penalty.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is going to reflect back very poorly when they face their shareholders next quarter.

<comment><USER27> Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So if experience has taught me anything, this just means that they made more than $170M on this. Cost of doing business.

</comment><comment><USER34> Man, whats the point of paying penalty after causing damage?

They already brainwashed us ,but, put bandaid for cancer?

How does it make it right ?

</comment><comment><USER35> $350M worth of data __

</comment><comment><USER36> Pays it to whom?

</comment><comment><USER37> Their meetings must be like Phillip Morris or whatever it's called now:

"This advertising method work great! What other markets can we apply it to?"

"There is this a market it works even better on, and keeps them coming back for decades."

"Decades? Great! Let's do it."

"Well, that market is kids. Are you sure we should?"

"Hmm... didn't think of that. Well, too late to stop now. Besides, the government set up rules that when you do it, you just pay a fine. It's like a toll road. We'll follow their rules and everything will be fine."

"It's decided then. Project Kids is on."

When some people in Google saw the temptation for such outcomes, they proposed publicly committing to avoid being evil. When push came to shove, they backed down on the public commitment.

With each situation, they can choose to return to their public commitment or what they're doing now.

They seem to pick this option many times and the public commitment keeps getting relegated to more minor places. Last I heard "Don't be evil" was buried in an HR document.

The shareholders are happy, though, right?

<comment><USER5> This comment is very disingenuous and misleading. Youtube Kids, the real product targeted at kids, does not collect data or show personalized ads. From my understanding, this lawsuit is about collecting data on kid videos on Youtube Main, which technically you need to be 13 years old to have an account for in the first place.

I guess the argument here was that the parents let their kids watch on their account, and since the video is _clearly_ for kids, Youtube should've not collected data on it because obviously adults wouldn't be watching this video. Seems a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER38> How is it a bit of a stretch? If I setup a table outside an elementary school with a colorful sign that says "FREE RAINBOW SPRINKLE BROWNIES" that are unknowningly laced with drugs, and the parents get upset that I did this, I can just say the free brownies were not intended for children?

Youtube knows kids are watching videos. The only thing they don't know is, are the parents present. They could implement a captcha between videos the majority of kids would fail ("What is 25-11?" / "What is the engine of a train called?") but they chose not to do anything like that.

<comment><USER5> You can assume that some, and maybe most of the people watching certain videos are kids, but there's no way to know for sure since the account itself is for an adult. Just like on a porn site, you need to agree that you are an adult, but realistically a lot of non-adults probably are watching too. The question is, if in the user agreement you agreed that you are above 13, but then you aren't, is that the websites fault?

Now it's up to Google to 1. figure out which videos (uploaded by others) are for kids, and 2. automatically assume everyone watching said videos are kids. Both of those steps are rough approximations. The better solution is to stick to the EULA and have kids actually use Youtube Kids, instead of "guessing" what videos and users are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > I wonder if spoofing your identity as a child will become a viable anti > tracking strategy

That's a great idea.

Along that line, I've been wondering lately what are the ramifications for telling dipshit websites I'm European so they must delete my data if I'm not?

<comment><USER40> I've used a similar trick to pretend I was 18+ on certain websites in the past, have never had any issues with it.

<comment><USER41> I think every teenager on the Internet routinely does that.

<comment><USER25> And every Canadian learns to press the I'm from the US button on every website (see: car sites) if they want to see the better website and aren't actually shopping.

It's gotten better for Canadians as the average quality of sites has improved, but it was consistently designs from a prior era and 1/10th the content.

<comment><USER42> As someone from the US, I've never heard about this before. Could you explain what that is? Why is there a "I'm from the US button" on sites?

<comment><USER43> Companies that operate in multiple regions sometimes use these buttons to make language-specific or region-specific content available. For example, some cars may only be available in some regions or may have different branding. Another example is how the Apple Store has region-specific editions. Also Netflix filters the library by region.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Seems a bit backward to me. Why should we care so much more about kid's privacy than adult privacy? Are you really more concerned that people know about your Barney the Magical Dinosaur addiction at 8 than your sordid affair at 32? Would you much rather keep secret that you walked back and forth from kindergarten everyday than your employers confidential design files?

Adults and teens have secrets, kids relatively speaking for the most part don't, at least not ones worth protecting through strenuous tech laws. Okay okay, I get that we don't want them vulnerable to be manipulated into stealing their parents money. And Google is as always scrum. But the general laser focus on kids when we should be concentrating on everybody seems just like another think of the children hysteria.

</comment><comment><USER45> Just a regular tipping of government out of some pocket change to keep doing things.

</comment><comment><USER46> Google doesn't care. [https://brave.com/google-gdpr- workaround/](https://brave.com/google-gdpr-workaround/)

<comment><USER27> I don't see how anyone could come to any other conclusion. It feels like every day we find out about yet another tech company finding a new way to extract more of our personal data. At this point, the only appropriate response in my opinion is to ask: are we mad enough to do anything about this yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> _grumpy cat face_ good

</comment><comment><USER48> Shouldn't the fine be larger than how much they make, to deter them from doing the same thing in the future?

</comment><comment><USER49> That's funny. The last few weeks google has been trying to push me into downloading/using YouTube kids for a "safe" experience.

Basically my response has been "hell no!", since IME the only safe YouTube experience for kids is _no_ YouTube experience at all.

Turns out kids get tracked on YouTube too. Who would have thought, eh?

So yeah. The answer is still no. Stop asking, Google.

</comment><comment><USER50> 170M fine for a company that makes ~10B of earnings and 30B of revenue per quarter. That's like someone making 100k per year and only having to pay 50 cents in fine. Even parking fines are a much more steeper in % for average joe.

A fine of anything less than a billion is like breeze hitting Google's face. You want to slap them, make that stock hurt.</comment>


Go lang nano web server - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/genesem/nanoserv Nano web server for static files written in go lang with screen logs and custom 404 page support. <comment><AUTHOR> This is initial release of this very small web server. But I believe it can handle a lot of traffic.</comment>


Too Many Passwords, One Startup Looks To Solve The Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/06/25/too-many-passwords-one-startup-looks-to-solve-the-problem/ <comment><USER2> Hard to beat players like lastpass and others who already have so much market share and don't charge for over 25 passwords...

</comment><comment><USER3> Perhaps I'm missing it but I can't seem to find any cryptographers working for them.

That's a bit scary.</comment>


ASK HN: Feedback on Apps - <AUTHOR> Just launch my first app. Would like some feedback and comments on it. Would really appreciate it!<p>http://www.kimmie.com.my/ <comment><USER2> pitch what your app does right in the title of the thread or the body of your post</comment>


Choosing a Web Framework: Django, Flask, or Pyramid - <AUTHOR> https://www.airpair.com/python/posts/django-flask-pyramid <comment><USER2> I've built things with each, so I'm pretty opinionated on the subject.

My verdict: Start with Django; use Flask once you hit 10M+ users.

• Django -- Sensible defaults. A plugin for most things you may need. Fairly high learning curve, but worth it. I've heard people at big startups say that they've spent weeks building things with Flask that were either built-in, or came as a pluggable app for Django. Pinterest still uses Django for their middleware, but switched over to Flask for their API [1].

• Flask -- Low learning curve. Very lightweight. The go-to ORM is SQLAlchemy, which is more fully featured, but has a higher learning curve, and is generally less-liked than the Django ORM. Great for hackathons.

• Pyramid -- Extremely configurable. You get to (have to) make a lot of low- level decisions. Serious lack of sensible defaults. Strong community. The IRC channel is helpful, yet time is spent discussing why Pyramid isn't more popular (lack of sensible defaults).

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Pinterest/Would-Pinterest-consider- Flas...](http://www.quora.com/Pinterest/Would-Pinterest-consider-Flask-in- place-of-Django-if-it-were-starting-today?share=1)

<comment><USER3> "Fairly high learning curve, but worth it"

Exactly. Apart from the tutorial there's not much of "a way" of progressing forward (like "learn this now"). Except South/Migration. Learn this.

There are a lot of resources but it follows the Pareto rule, depending on what you need you may need to go learn Localization/Middleware/Advanced ORM queries/Advanced template tags and filters/Details of Requests and Responses/Advanced forms or models (yeah, Django really doesn't help with CSSing your forms)/etc

<comment><USER4> I'd hold off on South now that Django has its own migrations. They're going to be the method of choice moving forward as far as I know.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's why I said South (for older versions) or Migration (for newer versions)

They're very similar, so learning South won't be detrimental (and it is useful from the moment you learn it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I really want in a web framework is for it to stay out of my way. In that regard I have been happy with Flask. All of the functionality lives in external modules (many of which are reused in back end tools) with the relatively simple task of HTTP interactions living in a Flask powered facade.

<comment><USER6> What I really want in a web framework is for a web framework to solve the common problems so I can write less code unless I'm doing something unusual. In that regard I have been happy with Django. All of the functionality does what you'd expect and nearly everything is overridable in a consistent way when you need to get closer to the 'metal'.

<comment><USER7> This is just my personal experience, but once you try to do certain things with Django, you start to butt heads with it. Django relies far too much on convention, and it shoehorns you into their tooling patterns.

I think the most exciting and flexible way to do things these days is with a collection of microservices. You can do feature work independently, test small isolable units of functionality, and achieve scale.That said, we could use cross-cutting libraries to make microservice implementation easier...

<comment><USER8> We've been pretty happy with it at Pathwright. 1.7 was a great release. The conventions aren't too restrictive, and it has been incredibly easy to get contractors plugged in and productive in minimal time. We follow many best practices, so our codebase is going to be "familiar" (to some extent) to anyone with some experience. We love Django for the productivity level our team achieves with it.

The ecosystem is great, too. django-rest-framework in particular makes us oh- so-happy.

Not to knock flask/Pyramid/everything else. Pick what your team can be most productive wit. I just think there are less reasons than ever to get too caught up in choice of framework. There are so many great options now.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Pick what your team can be most productive with

Absolutely. If you already know one and like it, go forth and hack. If you're not sure, or don't like the one you have, there are tons of great options. Not just Flask/Django/Pyramid either. Tornado, Bottle, CherryPy, Falcon, and more all have dedicated users (some more than others).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a big fan of Pyramid because (among many other reasons) I think ORMs are a poor abstraction and therefore do not want to be forced into using one (a la Django). I didn't find the learning curve terrible either--it's just MVC (er, "MVT") with some configuration/logging/routing capabilities built in.

Being able to do dynamic routing (via Traversal) is also cool. I really like being able to attach custom objects/attributes to the request object--that lets me write my own datalayer (without an ORM) and have it shared as a singleton across the lifetime of the request. It's also cool that you can write "views" (aka "controllers") either as flat functions or classes.

I personally don't write much server-side HTML munging anymore so I don't have much to say about Chameleon templates. Last time I used them I found the documentation a little lacking but otherwise it worked well. I still prefer Jade.

<comment><USER10> What do you use to query a relational database, if not an ORM? Do you build your SQL with string concatenation? In my experience that gets messy very quickly for complicated queries, so you end up needing some sort of SQL builder abstraction.

<comment><USER9> For Mongo I write a data layer that has methods like GetFoo() or UpdateFoo() where the methods have implicit knowledge of key structure (and query model objects for validation, etc)

For SQL I would do something similar but use (for example) SQLAlchemy Core (not ORM) to do DB-agnostic SQL generation. That would essentially give me a SQL API somewhat similar to pymongo.

<comment><AUTHOR> For some things ORM's get in the way, but avoiding them by your own data layer sounds like a pretty big time-suck.

Being able to write a single line of SQLAlchemy to build relationships into your models seems way simpler than implementing relationships in a custom data layer.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I think the sweet spot is using SQLAlchemy's ORM for simple queries and dropping down to core for more advanced usage. Best of both worlds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even for advanced queries (ok, not _super_ advanced) SQLAlchemy can hold its own, especially if you're willing to dip into the sqlalchemy.core modules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised nobody shows interest in CherryPy? I prefer it to Flask, I got more done coding with CherryPy, than I did with Flask, in less time. It just doesn't get in my way. I guess it's a matter of preference though.

<comment><USER12> I haven't done any Python web application stuff for a while, but most of what I have done was with CherryPy. I liked it a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mostly, I prefer to have things already done for me so the micro-frameworks quickly build into added work later.

One of the secret weapons of the Django world is Django REST framework. The built-in API browser alone is pretty amazing.

South is also a pretty darn good migrations system, and is well up there too.

I think I could take or leave the Django admin panel for an established app, but for small apps or just getting started, it's a nice thing to have too.

We don't use Django's templating system.

<comment><USER14> DRF is great, but it's pretty heavy weight. I've used both DRF and Flask for building API's. I was far more productive with DRF at first, but once I developed my own system for flask, I much preferred bare-bones flask coding. It's really nice to have all the code that could be causing bugs, directly in front of you.

<comment><USER8> > DRF is great, but it's pretty heavy weight.

What does this even mean? It _can_ do a lot for me, therefore it's bad?

We use DRF extensively, but we don't come close to using everything that it can do. We don't tend to use ViewSets or the auto-routing features, but the fact that it _can_ do those things doesn't hurt us.

DRF gets so much attention from such a large community. It's constantly improving to the point where we don't have to worry about it. If you fall victim to NIH Syndrome and roll your own, you have to be proactive about finding and addressing your own issues, as well as keeping up with advancements around the ecosystem.

I'd just rather let the people who focus on DRF handle that, and we'll throw a pull request over the wall if we run into anything that hasn't been addressed.

<comment><USER14> An example of where this excess bloat would be bad is in a microservice architecture. Django has a footprint so big that using it for microservices doesn't make sense, because at that point you may as well roll all the services into a single application. In that case, I think DRF is great. But if I'm building a microservice architecture, I want the API code for each service to be 100-200 lines, not 100-200 lines + Django.

So yeah, there are efficiency gains from DRF, I agree. But (in my opinion), the gains are far less in architectures with separate applications all using DRF. In that case, something like Flask makes more sense to me, purely for the benefit of debugging, logic clarity, and independence.

I recommend a great talk by Kenneth Reitz on exactly this topic. [1] (He's given a variation on it multiple times -- just search youtube.)

[1] [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U2frH932U1g](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U2frH932U1g)

<comment><USER8> > An example of where this excess bloat would be bad is in a microservice > architecture.

Django is pretty easy to slim down. Yank the middleware you don't need, stick to what you do. No need for stuff like context processors if you are using DRF. You don't have to use models or the ORM at all if you don't want.

I think the line count would be very similar for many cases. For example, if your flask app needed DB access, you'd end up pulling in and boilerplating an ORM anyway. Ditto for sessions/authentication/etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's too bad whenever these articles come up that Tornado ([http://www.tornadoweb.org](http://www.tornadoweb.org)) seldom gets a mention. It's minimalist and stays out of your way; pair it up with SqlAlchemy and you've got a complete solution. And you don't have to fool around with wsgi.

<comment><USER16> Has anyone tried deploying Flask apps with Tornado? I'm curious what the performance and tradeoffs would be, since it might be a convenient migration path from Nginx+uWSGI should a compelling reason to do so ever arise.

\- [http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/deploying/wsgi- standalone/#...](http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/0.10/deploying/wsgi- standalone/#tornado)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> We had a panel discussion at PyCon India (a little over a week back) on Flask vs Django vs web.py with considerations for other frameworks as well.

Video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM- SgJTi8g0&t=6h00m00s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM-SgJTi8g0&t=6h00m00s)

</comment><comment><USER18> If I were at the crossroads of choosing between Django, Flask & Pyramid, this post doesn't tell me enough to make a choice that I won't regret later. It doesn't go into the depths of the shortcomings that you will start noticing when you are months into the project. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to choose the right framework. Or put it differently, the right framework does not exist. Although, I feel that flask has the potential to get there.

<comment><USER8> From a purely technical perspective, you probably can't go wrong with any of the three unless you have super specific needs. In cases like that, you may not even want to use Python at all.

The best way to decide which to use is to take your team and hammer out some quick project using your 2-3 leading framework candidates. Whichever your team is more subjectively happy with is where you should go.

There are other considerations, but so many projects fail to gain traction after taking longer than planned to launch. Team productivity is priority #1 for us, though subjectively we've found it to be very easy to find contractors who can be plugged into a Django project with minimal ramp-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> While not really a framework, i've getting used to using webapp and appengine's ndb datastore (yes its an appengine application). The application doesn't serve html, only json (its basically an api).

The our app is build as an ios, android and webapp on top of this api.

It depends on what you're building. And sometimes this approach is not nice. But it works for our usecase.

In conclusion: sometimes your architecture doesn't need a full-fledged webapp framework.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even for building a mobile backend, having a framework can help. Tools like Cornice (Pyramid), Django REST framework, and Flask-REST can make building API's much easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's my quick take on the subject:

\- Django: a big framework for simple projects. Batteries included (most). Even better if it's a CMS. ORM is fine if you don't do anything complicated.

\- Pyramid: much more flexible, more "pick and choose". Also try [http://jinja.pocoo.org/](http://jinja.pocoo.org/)

\- Flask: if you need to get web requests and do whatever you want with it.

<comment><USER20> If you do like jinja, it's Flask's 'native' template engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Python + Flask is nice but has serious performance constraints. I guess I found a bug in Flask or Werkzeug that restricts requests per second to a value below 600 req/s. See here for more details: [https://medium.com/@tschundeee/express-vs-flask-vs-go- acc087...](https://medium.com/@tschundeee/express-vs-flask-vs-go-acc0879c2122)

</comment><comment><USER22> Many times when I'd like to use Django, I have to eliminate it because of one thing: I'd like to access the database from non-web programs, and Django certainly does not make it easy to use its ORM in a non-web context.

Sometimes I'd even like to access the database from _external, possibly non- Python tools_ , and then Django is out of the question, since it does not define a stable API to its database layer, only its ORM.

Therefore, I go with Flask + SQLAlchemy in these cases.

(One time, for a short-lived project, I chose to ignore that Django does not provide a stable database, and simply let Django create the database and then simply assumed that the database table definitions would not change during the lifetime of the project and accessed it externally via SQL. But this was for a short-lived project which would only run for a few days.)

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been using Flask, I love it for the most part. I use PeeWee but prefer to use just raw SQlite. It's supposedly faster with the new 3.8 sqlite version, so I think I'm gonna stay with it.

My gripe with Flask is not itself but the other plugins like flask-security which lacks a lot of documentation.

Flask itself is a delight to use but the only trouble is organizing the code in separate files. I still haven't mastered it, I just import the same file which imports all the modules in all of my flask scripts.</comment>


Few heeded Trump's call to challenge TV licenses - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/few-heeded-trumps-call-to-challenge-tv-licenses/article/2637985 <comment><USER2> How great would it be to start an movement to have people follow Mr. Trump's pleas, and file complaints about Fox News?</comment>


What Outranks Thread Priority? - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/what-outranks-thread-priority/ <comment><USER2> Excellent writeup of a useful technique. I'm going to have to learn how to do this myself one day. Of course, if you're not inside Microsoft it may be very hard to fix any of it.

It really does show how the CPU gains of the past decades have been immediately wasted by badly organised processes doing work inefficiently which is then immediately discarded, while simultaneously blocking more important work.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Windows kernel scheduler causes much trouble for our simulation software which runs 7 out of 8 cores at full pace, and then mysteriously gets suspended by the kernel when left to run over night. No Microsoft, its not OK to suspend a user task, and it's not OK to reboot my box for an update while I'm running simulation software. If I end up having to reboot to a non Microsoft OS to run the simulations, I may End up never rebooting back to Win10 (once a solution to our external 3rd party tools is found).

<comment><USER4> This is triggering some bad memories. I havent used windows for anything serious in almost a decade, but it's pretty mind blowing they still havent fixed their basic reliability and availability issues. It's especially farcical because it flies completely in the face of the marketing claims used to push commercial software over FOSS. I work at a facility where running experiments effectively costs $1000/hour, and we have learned the hard way to not let windows anywhere near anything remotely critical. We dont even use windows to host guis for talking to the back end. About 10 years ago we made a long series of attempts to remedy these problems of windows machines rebooting themselves etc when told not to and losing irreplacable overnight data etc. The only solution that can be trusted long term is total excorcism and switching to an OS that is written to help users compute instead of to make money for MS shareholders. If you absolutely cant use WINE, see if you can run it in a VM to at least mitigate some of the nonsense. Plus you have the option of taking snapshots to hard restore the machine. /rant

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> for the *nix among us, the equivalent is the scheduling class (SCHED_FIFO, SCHED_RR, SCHED_OTHER). A given (kernel) thread's priority only applies within its scheduling class; if there are ready-to-run threads in a higher "ranked" scheduling class, threads in the lower "ranked" classes will not run.

This is widely used when using Linux (for example) as a soft-real time system. The same basic concepts apply to macOS (since they really come from POSIX and even Mach inherited them).

</comment><comment><USER6> Great Post!

You would think that unlocking the screen would be highest priority task for a general purpose OS after it has woken up from sleep, but surprising to see that other processes manage to outrank it.

Whats interesting to me is that this LockApp.exe was waiting to get the CPU for a full 19 seconds after it was ready. 19 seconds should be an eternity, I guess.

Since the screen was locked and LogonUI.exe had not got the chance to run yet, what other processes were holding on to CPU at that time. Any ideas on that?

<comment><USER7> >Any ideas on that?

As he explains, processes with a GUI trying really hard to render despite it not being possible, as the screen hasn't been unlocked yet. Presumably another Windows bug.

Also hardware drivers initializing stuff. Including spinning for an eternity – his mouse and keyboard driver apparently spinned for 700ms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a whole series of very interesting (even exciting) analyses by this author (randomascii, Bruce Dawson). Most of them are using his own tool UIforETW ([https://github.com/google/UIforETW/](https://github.com/google/UIforETW/)).

I wonder, what alternative tool would you use on Mac? I guess Xcode Instruments in some variant? And this is based on DTrace, right? Would that give you all the same possibilities and traces as UIforETW?

And what alternative tool would you use on Linux? perf? eBPF? That would give you the same information as UIforETW? And what GUI would be similar to UIforETW or Xcode instruments?

<comment><USER9> It's important to note that UIforETW is just my tool for recording ETW traces. The underlying ETW tracing and WPA (the trace viewer) are all Microsoft's.

That said, UIforETW definitely fixes some significant issues with recording and managing ETW traces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who spends most of the time in *nix... Windows just sounds nightmarish to debug. The few times I've had to debug something in Linux kernel space I was super glad I had the full source code.

All that effort, and then... "the problem magically went away and we'll probably never know the true root cause"

<comment><USER11> Windows has really nice tracing and WPA is pretty powerful. I've not yet seen a tool that is similarly easy to use on Linux. You can get most of the raw data from perf, but the tooling for analyzing the data isn't as good. I'd love to hear about a tool that for Linux allows doing Dawson's wait analysis easily if anyone knows of one.

I agree about the lack of source - it's really nice to be able to see exactly what the kernel is doing on Linux.

<comment><USER7> >I agree about the lack of source - it's really nice to be able to see exactly what the kernel is doing on Linux.

Debug symbols do help a ton on Windows.

<comment><USER11> That's definitely true, and the debug symbols story is better on windows (in my experience) than other platforms - AFAIK linux has no real equivalent to symbol servers.

<comment><USER7> Debian debug symbol packages are pretty nice [0].

But if you want a repository for your own debug symbols, multitude of symbol versions and ease of use then you're out of luck.

[0]: [https://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage](https://wiki.debian.org/DebugPackage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fascinating analysis! Thank you. I have noticed this effect is especially prominent on corporate laptops configured with monitoring features. I notice a similar effect on entering standby. Wonder if it's related to another Rank 2 demotion of a critical process.

</comment><comment><USER13> My laptop's startup time reduced by few seconds, since I tried the mitigation steps.

I hope Bruce looks into other issues too</comment>


Can virtual reality help get you through lockdown? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/may/20/can-virtual-reality-help-get-you-through-lockdown <comment><USER2> Given how well the finger and hand tracking for Oculus Quest is progressing, Facebook's investment in virtual reality may have been in hindsight a very smart investment.

The way I see the future of VR is not so much games, but virtual meetings and virtual sports. Still waiting for that headset that's comfortable to use while sweating. Beat Saber and its like are really a great way to exercise.

Oculus Quest 2 might very well be the breakthrough product people who are rooting for VR have been waiting for.

<comment><USER3> A side question - does Oculus Quest need accounts and internet to use?

I still can't get over Oculus Rift needing an account and an internet connection just to install _drivers_.

<comment><USER4> It uses an App Store, so you need to make an App Store, but you don't always need an internet connection (multiplayer games need an Internet connection). They strongly push you to link your Facebook account, but it is optional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My family has officially been put under quarantine since April 30th, which means we were not permitted to leave the house since then. A friend, who owns an Oculus Quest was so nice to bring it to our house so we have something to do. We tried it and while it was an amazing experience (Superhot is totally cool), the novelty wore off pretty quickly. After three days my kids were back at playing Minecraft and I am back to programming and playing Sudoku (thanks Simon!).

So from my experience, the answer is "maybe a little bit, but probably not for long".

</comment><comment><USER6> Google Street View application on iOS used to have support for cardboard-like VR goggles, where one would make use of their mobile phone as a low cost glimpse into the VR world. What a better way to experience VR than by exploring some streets across the world.

Unfortunately, the iOS application has a bug for the past year where this functionality is not working any more, and there are no signs that updates will bring it back.

[0] [https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/google-street- view/id904418768](https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/google-street- view/id904418768)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been waiting for something like the Quest for a long time, and I think it's great.

Heads up for those who are considering hooking it up to SteamVR, though-- while I did get it working over my WiFi six months or so ago, it was a lot of hassle to even load up the environment so I stopped messing with it in hopes the experience would improve.

After reading lots of good things about such alleged improvements, last night I tried again. The whole convoluted process had changed enough that even after a couple hours of tinkering I couldn't get it to work. I also somehow temporarily hosed the HDMI audio out on my gaming PC, which was very stressful as this is how my S.O. and I watch all our shows together on a daily basis.

So if you don't have a lot of patience for possibly hours of fruitless/destructive screwing around (which probably won't work the same way in a few months), maybe try to wait until you can find an Oculus Link cable or 3rd party substitute. My two cents to save you what I went through.

<comment><USER8> What are you using for SteamVR over wifi? I've had pretty good luck with Virtual Desktop, but you have to buy the store version for a license and then sideload the alternate builds with Steam support since Facebook are being dicks about it.

The official story was "not up to their quality standards" but it works just as well as Link for me.

I did read recently that Link has gotten less picky about USB cables, it'll even run without being able to confirm USB3 speeds. Quality is probably impacted.

<comment><USER9> According to these tests[0] the new update allows to even run Link over the included USB 2.0 cable without any quality degradation (even Half Life Alyx was fine).

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3CfhT7qXxI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3CfhT7qXxI)

<comment><USER8> Neat! Unfortunately my included charger and cable were eaten by the charger gremlins. I have a shorter USB-A to USB-C cable (from CHOETECH) that works for seated experiences. If I want something farther, Virtual Desktop.

Haven't been doing much PCVR with it either way though, compared to how much time I've spent in Quest native games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I dusted off my GearVR and only used it for a few hours on and off but it was extremely effective. The Quest was sold out so I'll wait. Definitely for some people it will be extremely helpful.

</comment><comment><USER11> What is so hard about staying home with your family, working, reading, playing games and watching Netflix? Jeez, people in living memory have endured so much more, so much more gracefully.

<comment><USER12> A lot of young people (including me) live alone, making the isolation much more serious. People also aren't built for extended isolation from other humans, it's some kind of base instinct to be social. I got lucky because I escaped back to my family home before the lockdowns, but not everyone could've done that.

<comment><USER11> Sure, I agree that for a few the lock down is genuinely tough. Surely for a few others its an improvement over their previous circumstances. For the majority however, specially those that can actually afford VR, its nothing but an inconvenience, maybe a slight bump in anxiety brought about by a glimpse of chaos. Its that lack of perspective I have a problem with. There are people that actually are in danger, that have to go to work, because they are "essential", though apparently not essential enough to get paid, and the least the rest of us can do is stop bitching about being locked in a safe, comfortable place.

<comment><USER12> "A few"?

As a society, we're living in a crisis of loneliness.[0] Lack of social contact is mentally and physically devastating for the human psyche, and this is evident in the current suicide rate[1][2]. One could argue that this trade- off is worth it[3], because more people will die from the virus than suicide, but this is predicated on our Coronavirus modelling being accurate. This is still in dispute[4][5], and arguable either way.

For many, being locked in is not "safe & comfortable"[6][7][8][9]. The so called people who are "bitching" are at great risk of suicide. From a certain PoV, essential workers are just in a different form of danger. At the end of the day, we're making a conscious trade-off of some lives for other lives here - everybody has the right to be upset.

So no, I think you should "stop bitching" about the plight of others (there are complainers on both sides). Just because you have it good, the majority of people _do not_. Have a little empathy.

[0][https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/07/loneli...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/07/loneliness- social-connect-local-communities) (this applies more broadly than the UK)

[1][https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1286065/lockdown-end- co...](https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1286065/lockdown-end-coronavirus- california-donald-trump-gavin-newsom-suicide-death-toll)

[2][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7177120/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7177120/)

[3][https://theconversation.com/the-calculus-of-death-shows- the-...](https://theconversation.com/the-calculus-of-death-shows-the-covid- lock-down-is-clearly-worth-the-cost-137716)

[4][https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/neil- fergu...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/neil-fergusons- imperial-model-could-devastating-software-mistake/)

[5][https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the- rea...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/08/so-the-real-scandal- is-why-did-anyone-ever-listen-to-this-guy/)

[6][https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52433520](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52433520)

[7][https://www.ft.com/content/e5061be6-2978-4c0b-aa68-f372a2526...](https://www.ft.com/content/e5061be6-2978-4c0b-aa68-f372a2526826)

[8][https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/26/britains- loc...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/26/britains-lockdown- diaries-expose-gulf-in-wellbeing-between-rich-and-poor)

[9][https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/covid-19-death...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/covid-19-deaths- twice-as-high-in-poorest-areas-in-england-and-wales)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Author illustrates book using MS Paint after spending 10 years mastering it - <AUTHOR> http://www.boredpanda.com/microsoft-paint-ebook-illustrations-camp-redblood-pat-hines/ <comment><USER2> I don't buy that he sucks at Photoshop. I think he just used Paint because it's available on all Windows PCs. This looks very nice, but I don't think his skills has a lot to do with Paint only. After all it's just a tool.

<comment><USER3> And it's way more marketable to say you did it with paint

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great art even if it _wasn 't_ made in MS Paint. It reminds me of the graphics in early-90s games (a lot of which may have been drawn with something not much more sophisticated than MS Paint.)

<comment><USER5> It does have a look similar to images drawn in Deluxe Paint, though without the characteristic dithering since there is no color limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Recommended soundtrack:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp1NWRDl0pI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp1NWRDl0pI)

<comment><USER7> "This video contains content from Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc.. It is not available in your country."

<comment><USER8> Available in Sweden, however.

<comment><USER9> Arrr, in the country of pirate bay norseman- the music better be - else viking ikea-ships run into the harbour and maketh it soo. Thus endeth the copyright- chronicles, when the scribe was hit to death with the tome, in the year of the Load.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It reminds me of Beavis and Butthead from the 90s--both the style of the artwork and also the fact that they are rebellious teenagers.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what he would have done with paint dot net. Which is my default replacement for paint.

Ps. Anyone knows why Microsoft hasn't bought it and added it to their default tools in Windows? I always taught this would be a good thing, since paint hasn't changed anything in 10 years or so

</comment><comment><USER12> Highly recommend "Jim'll paint it" on facebook for a lot of ms paint hilarity.

</comment><comment><USER13> The link to the kindle book is somewhat buried in the article:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07143FXZ5](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07143FXZ5)

Looks wonderful, unfortunately not available in my country.

</comment><comment><USER14> The majority of the /r/books discussion is that he should have used Photoshop.

</comment><comment><USER15> Guy uses certain art style and supposedly bad image editing tool for marketing.

<comment><USER16> For marketing? Wasn't the whole book made in paint? The marketing part is talking about the tool used.

Not much different from programmers saying their software was done in X language for marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, impressive!

</comment><comment><USER18> Clarification: he got really good (like, really good) at illustrating in ms paint over ten years. He leveraged that skill to illustrate his book. He did not take ten years to illustrate the book.</comment>


Vifm: a ncurses-based file manager with vi-like keybindings - <AUTHOR> http://vifm.sourceforge.net/

<comment><USER2> I used it a little. It's nice because it remembers where you were last, unless you don't want it to. Also, you can either explore two directories at once, one in each column, or see file previews of files in the unused column.

When opening a file from this, it behaves as if you were directly in that directory when you opened it. It will stay in back ground until you are done using the file. I'm not sure if it works with many programs, I've only used it to go through some code along with Vim.

The thing I'd like to see if when previewing files, it would be nice to be able to have syntax highlight and such.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use vifm off and on for moving files from one dir to another. (IIRC there were some issues with the latest version on OSX, perhaps sourceforge does not have the latest, and brew picks from there).

Another alternative I use a lot is `cetus` (a ruby project). <https://github.com/rkumar/cetus>

</comment><comment><USER4> ranger is another good alternative: <http://ranger.nongnu.org/></comment>