Google's Search Results Ditch Underlined Links, Increase Font Size - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/12/googles-search-results-ditch-the-underlined-links-increase-the-font-size-more-in-new-experiment/

<comment><USER2> I know the graphic designers have long since won this battle, but I still feel like there's value in underlining links.

Underlined links are _discoverable_ \-- it's obvious at a glance that they are links, rather than body text.

Underlined links are _noticeable_ \-- they stand out from a sea of non- underlined text, drawing the eye to them.

Underlined links are _self-explanatory_ \-- it's obvious what you're supposed to do with them (i.e. click).

These are all valuable UI benefits.

The solutions that most sites that have abandoned underlined links have taken up in their place all have drawbacks compared to the good old underline:

 _Underlining the link on hover /rollover_ reduces discoverability -- you don't know for certain whether something's a link or not until you investigate it.

 _Making links a different color_ reduces usability for the color-blind; red- blind people have no idea that your red links look different than your black text does.

 _Making links bold, italic, or a different size_ all leave the possibility of confusing the link with body text that happens to share the same typographical presentation. (You can underline text too, of course, but that's relatively rare on the Web because of the strong association of underlining with links.)

Nobody cares about this argument anymore, I know, so I don't expect anything to change because of it. I just think it's worth noting that there are good reasons to prefer underlining links that don't boil down to "stuck in 1996".

<comment><USER3> First time I met this 'new' design, I thought it was a rendering bug[0]. Next time I understood it was testing, and I just thought 'why' ? Google seems desperate to find things to tweak while ignoring things that I find obvious:

      - right click event turns the url in a trackable monstrosity [1]
      - shortened url can't be copied [2]
      - no, sharing doesn't only mean 'publish on g+'
      - filters could be made faster [3]
      - g+ has comment notifications, gmail has nothing

[1] facebook => [https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=facebook&sourc...](https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=facebook&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCYQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F&ei=AhoiU53iBcSo0AWp4oCIAQ&usg=AFQjCNGug_CqO9cxLI8dHdn- CceO8_ie5w&sig2=iGblH1CoFfkWGoFpmAMIKA&bvm=bv.62922401,d.Yms) and

[2] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook...)

[3] instead of submenus that pops at opposite side, toggle buttons for instance year|month|week , or local|global . The old right side vertical list was better (even though lacking features).

[0] Chromium had some issues on my platform (or maybe just my distro) recently

<comment><USER4> A personal anecdote: I was an avid youtube user, but their nearly ceaseless iteration of everything from sidebar contents to full on page layouts and link availability (I remember a time when one could go from the video listing of one channel belonging to one user directly to another channel's usable video links. This now takes 2-3 clicks, depending on your definition of usable.) has me at a point where I get frustrated when I have to use the service, and am actively looking to migrate off of it.

Soundcloud has almost entirely replaced youtube for me in the music sense, the problem seems to be that there's no video service "core" enough that "everyone" uploads "everything" to it. A lot of handwaving there, but youtube has a certain amount of critical mass in that area, AFAIK. (if I'm living in a little google bubble, I'd appreciate other video services, but I feel like I'm aware of most of the main ones ala vimeo, and as I said, critical mass.)

Note: I feel like google treats most of their services like this. I personally have felt nothing but decreased usability since the not-TOO-far-removed-from- pure-html days of gmail. (The pinnacle for me was shortly after the integration of gchat and the polish that came after, but before the great whitespace apocalypse.)

<comment><USER3> Everything you wrote resonnates with my experience.

Youtube still gets my love because of the amount of obscure old songs you can find there (forgotten videos, LP). AFAIK SoundCloud is full obscure recent songs :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google making meaningless changes in the direction of minimalism like always. I find the google search of today no more usable or intuitive than that of 10 years ago. Minimalism is such a plague. It assumes people can't deal with the mildest hint of non-mission-critical information on the screen, which is false, or at least it used to be; if it catches on too much people's minds might get so rotted that they get confused navigating a web page with more than two buttons. Arguments about "visual noise" are such bumpkis. We've been good at dealing with visual noise forever, before computers, before civilization.

<comment><USER6> _I find the google search of today no more usable or intuitive than that of 10 years ago._

Do you find it any less usable, though?

 _We 've been good at dealing with visual noise forever, before computers, before civilization._

Then we should be good at dealing with Google results without underlines too, right?

<comment><USER5> Its usability has gone down a bit. [http://teacheralanblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/2004.j...](http://teacheralanblog.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/2004.jpg) Now some of those links are hidden behind that vague square button thing at the top-right. It took me a while at first to figure out that's supposed to be like a phone's app screen and thus that's where you find the rest of the apps. It was better as a text link that said "More applications" or something. The current square thing doesn't even invite me to try clicking on it; it looks nothing like a button.

The lack of underlines doesn't really impact the usability at all except that it's an unneeded change that some are going to find jarring. Looking at google results myself now, it feels "off". That's a lot more "distracting" than the presence of admittedly not really necessary underlines. But change for its own sake, especially in UI, does more harm than good often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have to say, the little yellow "Ad" badge actually jumps out at me a lot more clearly than the colored background.

It doesn't _seem_ like that should be the case, but I felt my eyes hitting the Ad badges and more easily filtering the ads from the search results.

</comment><comment><USER8> Already found user scripts to revert to the old-style results [1].

I also found a user script to conveniently put the search options on the left- hand side again. It saves me two clicks when I limit the date range of the search results. (I had to tweak the scripts to get them to work in tandem.)

Here's what my Google search results look like, now: [2]

[1] [http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/409199](http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/409199)

[2] [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/508947/google- userscript...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/508947/google- userscripts.png)

</comment><comment><USER9> The adds are bigger and a lot less distinguishable as ads. The only thing distinguishing them now is the small "Ad" bubble.

At my screen resolution, about 70% of real estate is now filled with ads. I get an AltaVista deja-vu.

Google, for the record, I used to like your non-invasive, targeted ads, but I now installed AdBlock as a direct result of this change.

<comment><USER10> OTOH, now your LCD's gamma can't make the ads invisible. My guess is this change makes ads more recognizable because they say the word "ad" on them.

I visited my family over the holidays and was shocked to see that the ad background was completely invisible on their crappy Dell LCDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to disable adblock on Google since I didn't find the ads intrusive. However the ads blends right into the results with the new changes, so I'm re- enabling it. Though overall I assume Google will get a revenue boost from their change to the ads.

<comment><USER12> Blend right in? They have a bright yellow lozenge that says "Ad" next to each result on mine. The ads are even more distinct then they were before.

<comment><USER11> It's that you can't see the yellow mark, but it's much harder to just skip to the results.

<comment><USER12> I still don't understand what you mean. Look at this page:

[http://gyazo.com/ed84537df50abd7f0d34212a6ba6a497](http://gyazo.com/ed84537df50abd7f0d34212a6ba6a497)

How long didyou have to look before realizing where the ads stop and the organic results begin? For me it's dead easy...

Note this may be a bad example, because if I'm searching for "insurance", an advertisement for an insurance company is actually a relevant result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The bolding of search terms sure seems like it would be a good idea, but it is very distracting to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here, I hate it. Perhaps it's just resistance to change, but have been acutely conscious of seeing less information (due to the larger font size) the last few days and feel less inclined to search iteratively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you hadn't mentioned I wouldn't have noticed. Guess underlines aren't all that significant an indicator of being a link to me anymore. That or Google's design works as intended.

<comment><USER15> well, no, not for a list of links that you know in advance is going to be a list of links. Body copy is another matter.

<comment><USER16> Wikipedia doesn't underline links either. They're doing fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I imagine this will lead to more ad clicks since people know by now that the peach background means that's an ad.

Also, it makes more sense to go to the real source: [http://searchengineland.com/googles-new-look-search- results-...](http://searchengineland.com/googles-new-look-search-results- still-experiment-186338) which has covered this many times before.

<comment><USER18> And this is what scares me. Google ads are just plain dangerous. If they removed the malicious results this wouldn't be such a problem, but turn off your ad blocker and search for VLC.

Your top result will be malware and that's what most of my friends click. Any step to further disguise ads is a step further in this malware propagating itself.

<comment><USER19> No ads when searching for [vlc] here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have noticed this for the past few weeks. I guess I am in their test group. It's definitely a step backward from the previous version. At first I thought it was a change to the spacing. It's hard to really see the delineation between results, it all just merges together. It makes it harder to scan the results for the desired one.

</comment><comment><USER21> I personally quite enjoy the look, however I find the general inefficient use of screen real estate annoying. There is so much unused white space on the right hand side of search results.

<comment><USER6> What do you want there? More results? Ads? Something else slowing down page load times?

Google wants to deliver relevant results, and fast. Anything else is just slowing them down.

<comment><USER21> More horizontal text from the search results would be nice, this would allow you to read / skim the results slightly quicker

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe I am just older and grumpier every day but every UI change Google does be it Hangouts, Youtube, Gmail, Maps and now Search make their services less attractive and less comfortable to use. I like underlined links. It was easier to distinguish between actual links, descriptions and ads. Now it take more focus from me to just skim the results looking for the right one. Sucks!

</comment><comment><USER23> This has been bothering me for the past few days. Broke my extension to hide results in google (w3schools.)

</comment><comment><USER24> The ads are also bigger, no?</comment>


Man says CES lidar's laser was so powerful it wrecked his camera - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/01/man-says-ces-lidars-laser-was-so-powerful-it-wrecked-his-1998-camera/ <comment><USER2> So vitreous fluid is opaque to 1550nm light and will block these new powerful lasers from damaging the retina. What about people that have recently had retinal detachment surgery, and had the vitreous fluid replaced with an oil, is this replacement oil also opaque to 1550nm?

<comment><USER3> So when a company says that it's safe does this include testing for all of these cases? While I haven't had retinal detachment surgery, I've had lasik done. I'm sure, being a common procedure, that it's considered in whatever battery of tests are performed. But what of these other procedures?

I'd hate to be walking down the street and suddenly be affected because my eyes are just "different" [https://youtu.be/zkD9SBP9AX4](https://youtu.be/zkD9SBP9AX4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If we are to have streets full of Lidar-equipped vehicles all constantly blasting out laser light, I can imagine this will become a real problem.

Will digital cameras improve so that they are less sensitive to lasers? Or will Lidar improve to use less-powerful lasers?

<comment><USER5> If it can do that to a camera, what's it doing to eyes?

edit: > "Cameras are up to 1000x more sensitive to lasers than eyeballs," Dussan wrote. "Occasionally, this can cause thermal damage to a camera's focal plane array." \- I'm still not entirely sold.

<comment><USER6> The article actually has the answer:

> Other lidar makers use lasers with a wavelength of 1550nm. This tends to be > more expensive because sensors have to be made out of exotic materials like > indium-gallium arsenide rather than silicon. But it also has a big > advantage: the fluid in the human eye is opaque to 1550nm light, so the > light can't reach the retina at the back of the eye. This means lasers can > operate at much higher power levels without posing an eye safety risk.

<comment><USER5> > the fluid in the human eye is opaque to 1550nm light

sure, but does this hold true for most land-based animals and birds? How much range does this give us? reflections can shift by half a wavelength - is that still opaque too?

I'm not saying this isn't safe, but suddenly having a tonne of high power laser sources pointing everywhere at all times might actually have some consequences still...

<comment><USER7> If I am reading the chart labelled "The visible and UV spectra of liquid water" at [http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_vibrational_spectrum.html](http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_vibrational_spectrum.html) (about 2/3rds down the page) correctly, water is fairly opaque at 1550nm. If my hurried wikipedia education on the topic is correct, that chart is saying it's quite opaque at that frequency, even at bat eyeball scales. Corrections welcomed from people with more training in this field.

(I'm not sure I'm not getting some crossed units when I tried to resolve that into numbers normals like me would understand; is that really 1/e^1000 transmitted per centimeter travelled? e^1000 is a big number. There's even bigger ones on that chart. Then again, if a two-atom-thick layer of gold is enough to make something look like gold and completely obscure what's underneath, I guess that might make sense and my intuition is just off, because when I convert that into this sort of scheme I get big numbers there, too.)

<comment><USER6> If memory serves me well, water absorbs that wavelength, so it would basically function sort of like a microwave oven, but with such a much lower energy level that you can basically ignore it.

<comment><USER8> How will LIDAR work under the rain or snow then?

<comment><USER9> The same way regular vision works under snow. Snowflakes are opaque to visible light too, so it'd work the same way human eyesight works for drivers currently.

<comment><USER10> so maybe we don't need Lidar, because the cameras can see like the human eye in the snow, too. Depth can be given by doing like insects and adding many triangulation points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Visible laser light kills cameras all the time. I think this is more likely what happened here.

[https://photofocus.com/2013/09/14/beware-lasers-can-kill- you...](https://photofocus.com/2013/09/14/beware-lasers-can-kill-your-cameras- sensor/)

<comment><USER12> That he took a photo of a visible light laser and it wasn't the car's IR laser?

Or just that lasers in general are known to do this and the car's laser probably did it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Lidar sensors could also damage the cameras on other self-driving cars." so eventaulally driverless Cars spoil each other camera sensors and can't recognize pedestrians, traffic signs. How can cameras be immune to high power laser beams?

<comment><USER14> By using low-pass optical filters on cameras, for example like this one (probably much cheaper in volume): [https://www.edmundoptics.com/document/download/396359](https://www.edmundoptics.com/document/download/396359)

I've used band-pass filters which reject everything except a narrow band, so that camera sees just the IR LED (chosen to fall in the middle of passed band) and they cost a few USD in small volumes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Laser camera damage is a known thing. That Aeye would buy him a new camera was pretty cool. Not sure how scalable that is as people take broken cameras that can still get damaged, find an AEye car, and then set up a replacement.

If you went to a Diwali laser show you would get the ultimate camera death mix, fine powder and lasers :-).

<comment><USER16> > That Aeye would buy him a new camera was pretty cool.

I wonder if they had warning signs telling people about the active lasers and possible camera damage. If they didn't, I feel like replacing the camera is just the right thing to do. It was CES, people are bound to have cameras.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Silicon is transparent above 1.1um this laser is at 1.5um, so perhaps the infrared cut filter that sits above the sensor was damaged. Perhaps Sony is using a absorptive IR filter and it was damaged by heat, if it was reflective filter i doubt it could be damaged.

<comment><USER18> Some shortpass filters only block 700 nm to 1100 nm and are not rated for performance above 1100 nm, since the silicon sensor cannot "see" light above 1000 nm anyway (but may be damaged by sufficiently strong amounts of it). So, perhaps Sony was using an IR block filter that blocks near IR from 700 nm to 1000 nm but doesn't block 1550 nm perfectly.

<comment><USER17> Yes this that is probably the case, no need to block beyond 1.1um for images, perhaps now they should extend it for safety. The laser must have passed through and damaged the metal interconnects on the backside of the sensor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It sucks that UX issues (for lack of a better term) like this exist. It's one of the sole reasons we don't have the Concorde flight program any longer, since it couldn't do any domestic flights because of the noise pollution from breaking the sound barrier etc. Joking aside, it's interesting how these issues have to be considered when innovating at the bleeding edge.

<comment><USER19> In comparison, if you consider CES as a modern day world's fair, imagine the dangers of experiencing a Tesla electricity exhibit or some of the earlier X-ray tech with hour long exposure to high radiation.

[https://abcnews.go.com/beta-story- container/Health/Wellness/...](https://abcnews.go.com/beta-story- container/Health/Wellness/century-ray-machine-shows-radiation-risks- yore/story?id=13140857)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That sounds fantastic, can we put this into something I can wear?

<comment><USER21> We're thinking along the same lines. I was wondering how this could be adapted to just make you invisible to cameras. It would be a fun project to deploy at a protest or something where everybody is filming everyone else, or maybe I just don't want to be caught on 500 building cameras as I walk down the street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just imagine in a few years there will be thousands of devices using lidar in a city. Will that be enough to knock out endless surveillance cameras?

<comment><USER23> Yep, by the same companies that will bring you _Surveillance Lidar_!

<comment><USER18> Surveillance lidar is a thing.

[1] Quanergy Perimeter Security System [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFCgEzdrbQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFCgEzdrbQM)

[2] Quanergy's LiDAR-based security solution [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpYDWb2yX_M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpYDWb2yX_M)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Back in the day I did this to an old CyberShot with a laser pointer, it permenantly had two purplish marks on the images afterwards. I would think the laser would need to be somewhat static or slow moving to cause the damage though not scanning at high speed.

You can see the purplish marks just slightly down and left of centre here - [https://i.ibb.co/THMS42D/dsc00006.jpg](https://i.ibb.co/THMS42D/dsc00006.jpg)

<comment><USER25> This is actually how several LIDAR scanning stations are allowed to be called class I (or maybe II) devices. The lasers inside would do bad things to your eyes (easily class 3). Because they're pulsed and spinning, the odds of you getting multiple hits to your eyeballs are quite low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If the wavelength of the laser is a known 1550nm, maybe the companies like Lee, Tiffen, etc can come out with a filter to protect against this. Street photographers will be susceptible to driverless cars without warning. It would be a niche market for sure, but if I was doing street work where it was known to have driverless cars, it would be worth ~$100 filter to protect my >$2500 camera body.

<comment><USER27> For the short term, sure. But long term, the lidar system will have to be adjusted to not cause harm to the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Cool. This will be fine as long as 2 self driving cars never go near each other.

<comment><USER29> Shouldn't this also be a problem with other non-passive sensors like radar. If we have a traffic jam of cars each sending radio waves from multiple sensors there has to be quite some interference, no?

<comment><USER18> Radars pointed at each other may have some interference resulting in temporary erroneous readings but they won't be permanently damaged like the camera in the article.

<comment><USER30> In a heterogenous environment this is not necessarily true; a radar with a powerful transmitter could damage a radar with a very sensitive receiver, particularly at close ranges.

There are military jamming devices that can quite handily permanently damage radars not designed to distinguish it.

<comment><USER18> Oh I see, that makes sense. I wonder if any automotive radars are that powerful.

<comment><USER30> Almost certainly not. The FCC approval process would likely catch that. Lasers are also far more focused then microwaves (typical spot size of a cheapo laser pointer is 12cm at 100m away; police LIDAR is good to target a single car out to at least 1/4 mile).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is there any research material to support these claims? I can't imagine the energy and optics involved would have been sufficient to do this. Seems like coincidence to me. The sun has far more energy than what we're talking about here.

I'm happy to be proven wrong though as I wouldn't want something unsafe on the streets as much as anyone else.

<comment><USER32> Taking a picture of the sun will destroy most cameras. So, I don't think that supports your argument.

<comment><USER33> Even with really quick exposures? I've taken pictures of the sun before (before, during, and after last year's eclipse) with my cell phone camera and it seemed fine.

<comment><USER34> Your cellphone camera lens likely doesn't have the requisite light-gathering capacity to burn out the CMOS image sensor in your phone. CCDs (commonly used in DSLR/M43 cameras) are far more sensitive, as I understand it.

<comment><USER35> I don't believe DSLRs or M43 cameras have used CCDs since last decade.

<comment><USER18> The Pentax 645D, introduced in 2010, is a DSLR with a CCD sensor. But yes, it is extremely rare.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentax_645D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentax_645D)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I tweeted at him to ask him what size lens and sensor he has so I could estimate how much energy/flux was hitting his sensor. Anyone have an idea of how many lidar it would take to saturate an area and make distance measurements useless? It's tougher with lidar because you can't easily frequency shift like with radar.

<comment><USER37> If it's a $2000 Sony camera, it's definitely going to be a 35mm sensor. His lens on the other hand I wouldn't be able to guess.

<comment><USER18> It's a Sony ILCE-7RM2 with a 35mm lens at f/4: [https://twitter.com/jitrc/status/1083190800710684673](https://twitter.com/jitrc/status/1083190800710684673)

<comment><USER37> I'm puzzled by the fact that it's only burned in two spots. This is a mirrorless camera so the lidar would be going into the lens and hitting the sensor constantly, not just during the exposure. I wonder what's happened here.

<comment><USER38> Somebody mentioned it's a pulsing one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I strongly dispute the claim that 1550nm is eye safe. 1550nm is also the band used for long distance, high powered DWDM transport systems for internet backbone purposes. And is common in "long reach" SFP+ modules for use 80 to 120km on dark fiber without amplification. There are common eye safety precautions, one of which is you NEVER aim the ferrule from a optic or patch cable at your face with a live 1550nm signal on it. This is known by everyone who lights long distance dark fiber.

This company claims they have a 1550 band laser operating in free space air, spraying all over the place, with a 1000 meter range? Oh, great.

It's not in the visible spectrum so you can't tell if it's damaging your eyeballs, either.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is LIDAR just a stop-gap solution until we get better structure-from-motion type algorithms? Humans don't need lasers to drive. Binocular vision seems to suit the task just fine. Autonomous vehicles have the advantage that they can leverage hyperspectral imaging. Why the obsession with LIDAR?

<comment><USER41> Writing software for competent self driving is turning out to be really hard, and no one is succeeding. On the other hand, building better and cheaper lidar hardware is a well-defined problem that companies can pour money into. Their software still sucks, but everyone's occupied with wrangling the $100k lidar.

<comment><USER42> Could some rebel make things like fake road bumps that lidars can't pick up, but humans can?

<comment><USER40> Protecting AI against spoofing attacks is a pretty active area of research right now.

<comment><USER10> Protecting neural networks from adversarial attacks, i think you mean. Protecting good A.I. from spoofing attacks is exactly the same as protecting human drivers from spoofing attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Interesting. I also remember hearing about a device which zap mosquitos out of the air with lasers and a lot of careful accuracy. Is the future going to include nefarious actors with devices which near-instantly destroy all cameras (...or eyes?) in sight?

<comment><USER44> So some has already built an "Eye Seeking Laser" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8zC3-ZQFJI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8zC3-ZQFJI)

<comment><USER45> Well, time for me to put on a pair of reflective sunglasses to never take off.

<comment><USER46> "Do not stare into laser with remaining eye."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1550nm anti-paparazzi devices coming in 3... 2... 1...

(Or maybe not, owing to the potential liability.)

<comment><USER47> [https://www.boredpanda.com/anti-paparazzi-clothing-chris- hol...](https://www.boredpanda.com/anti-paparazzi-clothing-chris-holmes/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> With lidar becoming more and more popular, are there ways to protect cameras in it's path; i.e. dashcams.

</comment><comment><USER49> I hate giving Elon credit, but there is some wisdom in the idea of only using optical Receivers for self driving input.

<comment><USER27> > I hate giving Elon credit

Why? Not only is he a genius (citation needed), but he's also highly invested in big-risk companies working toward a healthy future. I wish more people were like Elon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope AI evolves fast enough to kill LIDAR even before it's birth. I really hate lasers on my eyes. I have fought once with some street laser sellers because of it, and some blood was splat. I don't like fighting and I'm not violent at all, but I hate those things and a future of thousands lasers coming from all cars on the street would be the Horror. Luckily it's all most vaporware and carmakers are going to loose a few billion dollars on this mistake, before pivoting to raw pixel based A.I.

<comment><USER10> If I had to bet my money, I would bet LIDAR will be like Betamax home videoplayers. Or the Sony Discman. Will die rather young : D , thanks god.</comment></comment>


Cleaner CSS skin for hacker news in Chrome. - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/ZhmwdLNL Install it using Stylebot: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha?hl=en
Screen grab: http://bnk.ai/uIyz
I've been using this for a while, one of the guys in the studio said I should share. :)
<3 <comment><USER2> I like it. Thank you. Would be nice if it'd show an orange up arrow after I upvote something though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can do! :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Monitoring site changes - <AUTHOR>

is there a tool out there that can automtaically go through an entire site experience every day and record differences? <comment><USER2> There is <http://changedetection.com/>, but afaik it handles only one page.

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you mean? Tracking how many times a site is changed each day? Not that I know of...

</comment><comment><USER4> RSS? :)

I think you need to clarify your requirements if you want good answers.</comment>


Ask HN: Why pay 10x the on-demand rate for spot instances on EC2? - <AUTHOR> Screenshot of spot price history here: https://twitter.com/tokoph/status/787735501247700992<p>Is this always a mistake or is there a legitimate reason to do this? <comment><USER2> There was a notable incident where the price hit $1k/hr in 2011.

[https://moz.com/devblog/amazon-ec2-spot-request- volatility-h...](https://moz.com/devblog/amazon-ec2-spot-request-volatility- hits-1000hour/)

From talking to AWS, when people pay above-on-demand prices, it's because they carelessly put in a huge bid.

</comment><comment> amzn-342342 This happens because Amazon charges whatever people bid. Internal Amazon teams, particularly in India, use spot instances and have the type of people who are so lazy they use the max of all bid prices for all instance types. That's in additional to all the other stuff they do like exposing internal tools to the internet because they can't be bothered to connect to the VPN or starting huge clusters on a different region of another team's AWS account so no one will find it. Amazon doesn't care because it's internal cost and a million dollars to Amazon is like a thousand to everyone else.</comment>


Fry Urges Apology To Castrated Code Breaker - <AUTHOR> http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Technology/Stephen-Fry-Urges-Apology-To-Castrated-Code-Breaker-Alan-Turing/Article/200909115374408?f=rss

<comment><USER2> Much discussion on this a month ago. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=739135>

Interseting that Sky "News" has taken this long to pick up the story.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice headline, Sky. Stay classy.</comment>


More women needed in technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19884720

<comment><USER2> This article appears deeply confused, and doesn't seem to bear much relationship to its title.

By "more women needed in technology", what it appears to actually be advocating is "more women needed in designing products for women, because men are condescending in their design of female-oriented products".

... and ok. Then the author follows it up by saying "it's basic economics! More women will buy your products!", but doesn't follow that up with "and so market forces will make it happen!". But whatever. If you want to try and change how an industry talks to your group, have at it.

But then also the author has taken the time to produce a cartoon book telling young women to go in to computers and technology, because (from the image provided) apparently all young women ever hear is badly-spelled messages telling them that they should focus on home economics (untrue) and that programming generally involves working in dark cubicles (sometimes true) and being a nerd (all too true). Why doesn't the author already know that ...?

Because the author, and head of this campaign ... isn't actually a woman in technology. She's a woman in advertising, who has decided that more women need to be in technology. Not her, just other women. So how does she know that women can thrive in technology? How is she able to legitimately address their concerns? It all feels a bit condescending towards ... people in technology. "Here I am, a person outside of your field, telling you that you talk to women all wrong, and I'm going to fix it with a swish advertising and graphics campaign".

If you want the message to be taken seriously, get Marissa Meyer to say it. Bring me the opinion of Danese Cooper. Shouldn't tech role models come from, ya know, tech?

Conclusion: the message I probably agree with. Diversity of every sort in technical teams is a great thing in my previous experience. But what the hell is this article about, and who is this advertising exec to tell deliver it?

<comment><USER3> These articles always tend to be quite bad.

They always address the two main questions/premisses "more women needed in tech" & "why are fewer women in tech" flippantly with weak, unthoughtful arguments & cliche explanations. Both are genuine questions that need to be addressed. Even if you are willing to accept that women need to be equally represented in tech as self evident or fundamental, you should still find out the real reasons why things are this way if you want to fix it.

Any answers that you come up with to the "why" question need to answers it in a way that doesn't equally apply to law, medicine, academics & government. Professions that women entered a generation ago.

In any case, I'm only half convinced about the economic rationale given by this article: _We need women to design stuff for women_. It is a definitely a real problem people designing tech products are disconnected from many of the people using tech products. But women are the one "group" that technology designing men _do_ interact with. I think if you want to add useful perspectives something to encourage might be technology as a second career. People who spent 10 years as farmers, nurses, builders or rodeo clowns.

<comment><USER4> Law firms took concerted efforts to recruit women into the profession. Today, those efforts are no longer necessary because the representation of women in the field (about 55/45) seems to be self-propagating.

<comment><USER3> Engineering departments have been taking concerted efforts to recruit women into the faculties for years, with less effect. I assume some technology companies have too.

I'm not sure how to quantify the efforts put in by different fields.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Examples of getting it wrong are abundant: A common 'for-the-ladies' strategy is to take last year's product, re-release it at a slightly lower-price point, slightly smaller and clad in pink plastic."

The fact seems to be, pink gadgets sell. So I am not sure that the companies are "getting it wrong". Not saying that there couldn't be a better way.

Also wondering about the oft cited former communist East European states with their high percentage of female engineers. I have heard that not many of them actually work as engineers. Don't have numbers, though.

I wish more women would go into engineering, but to be honest, my attitude has become a bit cynical: I think women have more attractive choices (not in the least becoming stay at home mums, or working for unattractive salaries in fun jobs because husbands bring in the big money - fun jobs including kindergardener, nurse, fashion shop owners,...). Engineering, or let's talk about programming, is not actually that much fun in the real world. You sit in front of a screen all day long and wreck your brain. Talking with people is better for the soul, and women are smart enough to realize that.

Yes, bring on the downvotes. I am not saying this is a law of nature, just that it is the current state of things for a variety of reasons.

<comment><USER4> > I think women have more attractive choices

Possibly, but what makes engineering different from say law? My engineering class was 28% female, and the engineering team I worked on after graduating was 5% female. My law school class was 45% female, and my law firm starting class is about 45% female as well.

I can't think of a principled way to distinguish law from engineering in terms of gender attractiveness, other than the culture of the respective fields. I don't think it's aptitude. The male-female gap on the SAT Math is about the same as the male-female gap on the LSAT. I don't think it's attractiveness. Law isn't any more fun than engineering. In your words: "you sit in front of a screen al day and wreck your brain." It's analytical, detail work, not unlike debugging code. Yet, women seem to self select into at a relatively similar rate to men.

I'll also note: women make up the majority of accountants and auditors and 45% of accountants at accounting firms. Talk about boring detail oriented jobs!

<comment> barry-cotter _Possibly, but what makes engineering different from say law?_

Higher social status. For any given amount of money the job with more autonomy wins. Also, just by virtue of being a more verbally focused field lawyers will tend to have higher social skills than the average engineer. Said differently engineering has a higher proportion of the socially maladroit than law. Women have much less tolerance for that kind of stuff.

All of the fields you mention, law, engineering, accounting demand intelligent, conscientious, hard working people but engineering is unusually willing to tolerate weirdness if the person can get the job done compated to the others and is less autonomous.

That doesn't explain everything but it goes a long way.

<comment><USER4> Here is what I don't get about your argument. You're using one theory of social conditioning to explain why women stay away from CS (the social status of the field), while implicitly rejecting the more obvious bit of social conditioning: the perception that engineering is for socially maladjusted men.

And neither provides a principled reason to maintain the status quo. Why should the socially maladjusted men already in engineering (as you call them) get to define the culture of the field?

What if tech companies tried to actively change the culture of the field. What if, say for 15 years, tech companies put a thumb on the scale by actively trying to recruit say 25% women. You'd definitely have to take slightly less qualified candidates in order to meet the quota, but it would be transient. After 15 years, there would be a critical mass of women in the field, and the perception of the field as being for socially maladjusted men would be greatly diminished. Tech companies would have enough women applicants to maintain their new ratios without putting a thumb on the scale. You can say it's "unfair" to the men who would have gotten those jobs in the interim, but is it any more "fair" for a group to keep another group out of a lucrative profession by defining a particular culture?

<comment> barry-cotter Absent a large rise in the earnings of engineers relative to lawyers the skills demanded by both professions are such that the average lawyer will always bemore verbally facile than the average engineer. Whoever has better facility with words has better social skills, on average. So lawyers have higher social skills.

Your thought experiment in which companies discriminate against men in hiring might work. It would need to be forced upob all participants in a field/economic sector because if it was voluntary those who were not discriminating would be hiring from a superior talent pool. They'd win, on average. I thonk it would be unfair to women who could have made it on their own merits too, but hey.

<comment><USER4> Nobody had to force law firms to try and increase their representation of women, at least in any systematic way. Law firms did it because lawyers are a very liberal bunch and demanded it from within.

I don't see why the same couldn't work for engineering. Would engineering companies have to dip into a slightly less talented pool to begin with? Probably. But here is an interesting statistic. At my alma mater, the entering men have about a 30-point higher average SAT math score than the entering women. Of course, the school has gotten more competitive over time, so the women entering today have about the same SAT math score as the men who entered as freshman in my class (about a decade ago). Think about that--the cohort of "affirmative action" women today have about the same level of mathematical aptitude (measured purely by test scores) as the cohort of experienced male engineers who are 5-6 years out from graduation. That's the magnitude of the thumb on the scale, and I'd argue it's very small.

I think the bottom line is this--there is no reason there should be fewer women in engineering than can be explained by any difference in aptitude of women for engineering. In terms of aptitude for engineering, the starkest difference we see is in standardized test scores, particularly the Math SAT. In the range that characterizes engineers from good schools (~700) the pool is ~40% women. That's the upper bound. I honestly think you could get an equilibrium in the engineering field with ~40% women, an equilibrium that would be stable, once established, with no affirmative action.

<comment> barry-cotter Your point about possible stable equilibria I don't have any beef with. But honestly I think the "problem" is more on the supply than the demand side. Fewer women find engineering/technology attractive than men. Women have better options given their preferences than tech.

Normally this would be where I linked to the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth paper showing girls who entered math competitions withr similarly skilled boys to leak out of the tech/science/engineering path much more but I'm on my phone.

Bowing out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is my $0.02:

I believe that the tech industry is dominated by men, that's a given, but I don't necessarily believe that we need more women, or even more men. At the moment, the tech industry has a surplus of jobs and not enough bodies to fill the desks, so what we need is more people, irrespective of age, gender, race, etc.

In my opinion, it is extremely sexist to even suggest that we need more women in tech, it implies that the (large amount of) men who are currently in the industry are not doing their jobs correctly and should be replaced by women, that women would do a better job; granted, some women would do a better job, but so would some men.

You can not force equality (a thing which you already have) upon the masses, but look at it like this, there aren't less women in tech because men don't want them there, there are just less women who are inclined to go in to technology, this isn't a case of "Male oppression is forcing us not to follow our dream", it's merely a case of less women having this dream.

Let's be honest, from our earliest childhood years, we are given this impression that certain activities are for certain genders, and yes, to some degree this is wrong, I happen to like the colour pink and my sister absolutely loved playing in dirt, to my mothers disdain, but these young character building years are what defines us, the fact is that there are two genders, not one, and they are not always equal, we need to celebrate these differences instead of trying to subdue them in to none-existence.

Personally, the finest developer I have ever met was a woman, so I have nothing against women in tech, but let's look at the fact, from a young age, boys are taught that playing computer games is a boys thing, playing these games often fosters a natural ability to understand computers.

If you play model of honour enough times, you begin to recognize the path finding model which the computer takes, and at a very primal level you begin to understand the most simple AI elements, this experience builds your understanding of how computers works. I'm not saying this is the _only_ way to get in to computers, I'm just giving the example which was relevant to myself.

tl;dr: Stop blaming men for the lack of women in tech, take a look at your own base camp, men have given you equality for years now, just accept that most women don't want to go in to tech; not because they are women, but because, let's face it, we're a big bunch of nerds and foreveraloners and most sane people would do anything they could to stay out of this space.

<comment><USER4> If you took all the male foreveraloners and replaced them with normal people and women, would more women be attracted to the field? If so, why not do that?

It's one thing to say that women don't select into a profession because they don't have the aptitude to do it. I think the number of women who score 700+ on the Math SAT proves that at least a lot more women have the aptitude for tech than to into it. If its not aptitude, then it must be culture, and why should the male foreveraloners get to dictate the culture of the field? Because they were there first?

<comment><USER7> It's the forever-aloners who spent half a decade obsessively learning how computers work before college. If the women you're talking about are being driven away by something so tangential as the culture (which isn't between you and the keyboard), do they still have enough insatiable curiosity to be coding alone as a hobby? If not, how do you figure they have the aptitude?

We need more qualified people, but mostly fewer unqualified people. Most of the men we already have are worse than useless, and I don't want to attract anyone who isn't markedly better.

<comment><USER4> Culture is not tangential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is odd. Isn't the real issue here that there are so few female programmers, computer scientists and researchers, i.e. the people actually _making_ tech? Whether there are insufficient numbers of women in tech company marketing roles to effectively market products at a female audience seems to be a totally separate issue and ... well, somehow less problematic to me. It also seems quite demeaning to suggest that the only reason a girl would want to get into tech is to work at targeting advertising and PR at her own gender.

How about a campaign to drastically improve science, math and computer science teaching at school from a young age, and work hard to ensure both genders get enough exposure so that the kids with the most aptitude and passion, whatever their gender, get a real chance to choose tech as a career path, instead of this marketing and PR bullshit?

</comment><comment><USER4> As someone with a -4 week old daughter, this is a subject at the forefront of my mind.

I always see tremendous skepticism whenever an article comes out saying that we need to reduce the gender gap in tech. The attitude seems to be that if a gap exists then it is natural and there is no point in taking affirmative steps to reduce it. What I find interesting is that these same people probably wouldn't apply this reasoning to many other situations. They're often totally willing to believe that we have too many people in liberal arts programs and not enough in engineering programs, or not enough people going to college or too many people going to college. They're often willing to believe that we have a "digital divide" that needs to be corrected, or that there aren't enough people with science backgrounds in Congress, or any of a number of other ideas predicated on the presumption that positive action is required to address some imbalance in society.

<comment><USER9> Amen! Thank you for highlighting this. I've been following threads such as these on HN - I'm surprised and saddened at the level of sexist (sometimes even misogynistic) comments they seem to procure. To me, the overall weight of comments show an undue amount of skepticism. They'll fastidiously pick apart the research or article semantics, and keenly pull out standard diversionary or derailing tactics. Strange considering we're far from living in a meritocratic society (as illustrated by studies such as these: [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial- prognosis/201...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial- prognosis/2012/09/23/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it- matters/)). On the upside, I've created a program to log everyone who flaunts sexist comments on HN and elsewhere - they will never do business with me. All the best!

<comment><USER5> I think you have to take into account that people value their personal experiences. We all have encountered women in our lives and sometimes in Tech. Since I never attempted to rape a tech woman, or diminished their achievements, I tend to find the typical portrait of male tech environments insulting. From my personal experience they are not true, and you have to provide a lot of arguments to override people's personal experiences.

<comment><USER4> Discussions of gender equality: the only subject on Hacker News or Reddit where someone will, with a straight face, try to refute an empirical study with anecdotal evidence.

<comment><USER5> I think you exaggerate. Most of these discussions are not about empirical studies but about opinion pieces.

<comment><USER4> You were replying to an article involving an empirical study.

<comment><USER5> I did not say the study is false or anything. I just tried to explain the sentiment of people accused of fostering a sexist industry.

For what it's worth (although this is tangential), I think the study is interesting but I can still think of a lot of questions to ask. And it wasn't about IT, the experiment was done with lab jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hate the expression 'working in technology'. Because it does not say anything about what a person actually does or knows or likes. (For example I am a prototypical hacker/programmer, but not working in the 'tech industry'. I work as a software developer in a different industry right now (with lots of woman coworkers by the way).)

So the author wants more women in _marketing_. (tech-marketing) Ok. But if my now 5 year old daughter will be interested in programming, math, algorithms, I will not force her to learn marketing just because Belinda Parmar says so. Yes I will be happy to talk about marketing with my daughter when she grows up, I am interested in marketing, but I equally happily will talk about the beauty of Hindley–Milner type inference with her.:)

</comment><comment><USER11> _"It's time to change things. Any chief executive with half an ounce of sense should be putting their blood, sweat and tears into ensuring that the make-up of their company mirrors the make-up of their market."_

What if my target market is teenagers...

</comment><comment><USER12> oh the irony - the article notes that "pink it and shrink it approach represents typically shallow thinking" and then we are invited to check out the twitter feed and website of "Belinda Parmar who is the author of _Little_ Miss Geek".....</comment>


Bradley Manning 'sorry' for hurting US at Wikileaks trial - pierre-renaux http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-23700938

<comment><AUTHOR> But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.</comment>


From Miserable Launch to Decent Success in 3 Months, Thanks to Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://www.stangeek.com/from-miserable-launch-to-decent-success-in-3

<comment><USER2> I might be the only one, but design quality is a signal of development quality for me (even though, as a developer I know well that it's not). But when I see badly designed software or application, I say "If the developer didn't care, why should I?".

Another thing, these are things that I won't die without. I enjoy well crafted products (and will pay few $$ instead of using an ugly product that does the same thing).

Mobile Applications is not my expertise, so I'll give you a few suggestions on the landing page

\- A contrast. For the moment, the logo is lost in the white. The iPhone video (and the iPhone device itself) is filled with white.

\- A better font. You already know about font-face. Now try to pick a nicer one. TypeKit is free to start.

\- A logo. Costs $25 to buy from Graphic River. Stock Templates/Scripts are a good quality/cost solution when you are bootstrapping with empty pockets.

\- The social icons are buried. Also why is the Facebook button in French?

In your source code

\- Don't put your scripts tag at the header, make it loads fast. Also don't use in-line JavaScript. Your CSS and JS condensed in one file

\- It seems like non HTML5 users will not watch your video.

In your video, instead of the mouse cursor, use a 0.7 opacity rounded circle. It looks nicer and feel like your fingertip is moving there.

Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much, we still have a lot to learn on web design. We'll rework the website based on your very constructive feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations!

You only seem to have 9 ratings in the App Store globally (7 in the French Store, 2 in US) so far for 57523 downloads as you say. I used the iTunes Search API to obtain this info for your app id (I'm contemplating a move from iOS programmer-for-hire to full-time indie and this Python script is part of my market research).

That suggests only about 1 in 6391 users bother to give you a rating on the App Store, which is very low from what I hear: the usual figure quoted is 1 in 100 to 1 in 1500 for free apps. If this is right, it might be worthwhile to ask users in-app to give you a rating on the App Store if they like the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, on the next update we will add a rating widget to encourage feedback. What is the usual approach to this? Shall we wait for the user to have used our app 5 times, 10 times, 20 times...? Any ideas are welcome.

<comment><USER4> Make sure to time your widget popup carefully. You don't want it to trigger after - say, a failed connection. Instead, perhaps try to figure out when the "end" of a conversation is maybe, and trigger it after 3-5 of those? You're far more likely to get better votes if you don't ask people immediately after they experience internet latency or the like.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Rating widgets usually annoy me, which is why we didn't put one. But the downside is that we didn't get a lot of feedback, so we'll follow your advice and try to time it as best as we can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome, very well done! I'd consider reworking a couple of your comparison table headings, maybe something like this:

"iPhone only" -> "Supports all smartphones"

"Participants need the app?" -> "Participate without [installing / the app]"

"Max participants" -> "Unlimited Participants"

This purely subjective on my part, simple because I think it's easier to read a list of "YES" answers, and compare against the competitors's "NO" answers :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks. You are the second commenter to provide this feedback, I'm going to change the table right now :)

<comment><USER6> Looks like you forgot the t in without for "Participate withou the app?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is what your website looks like to me <http://cl.ly/3B0V2u0x3g3M3d0l242N>

(It's down)

Might need to get that fixed to take advantage of current Hacker News traffic.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats! Some feedback concerning the UI: * The speech bubble contrast should be higher. * The "tick" and "close" rounded buttons are aliased?! The icons are too sharp. * The button to start a chat and the title "illico" do not seem to be aligned. * Somehow, the title "illico" alone is not strictly centered :/

PS: how to write a decent-looking list on Hacker News comments? :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, this will go into our next iteration :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just a nitpick on you comparison table, iMessage can do group chat and shows when someone is typing.

<comment><AUTHOR> With iMessage, you can't do group chat with non-iPhone users, can you?

<comment><USER10> You can, but you lose the ability to see when the other person is typing when they don't have an iPhone.

<comment><USER11> If the non iPhone person has MMS disabled on their account, then they won't see the message at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You reference good feedback from HN last time around, but there's no link to the discussion.

<comment><USER13> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3517863> probably.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> `iPhone only?': `No'

What else is there? You only have an App Store link on the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> What we mean by this is that recipients do not need to have an iPhone (or even the app) to be able to participate.

<comment><USER15> How is that different than iMessage, which also seamlessly falls back to SMS for anybody that doesn't have iMessage support?

<comment><AUTHOR> With iMessage, those on SMS (who don't have an iPhone) won't see everyone else's replies. You can't do group chat over SMS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats! Is there a premium version you can charge for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! No premium version is planned. We have another little idea to monetize, but need a bit more traction first... ;)

<comment><USER16> "Draw Something" is one of the highest grossing apps on the UK appstore right now. They have a free and paid version. You could take some clues from them.

The great thing about getting money is that you can buy traction with it.

<comment><USER17> Draw Something (like Pictionary) is in a sweet spot. To begin with it's a game and people play with their friends. They leverage Facebook to find your friends that have the app already. You can still invite people that don't have it yet, but knowing someone already has the app makes it a lot easier to start a game.

They limited some features so they can charge for them. You only get a few colors but can buy more. You get "bombs" that act as hints and can buy more.

One thing they don't do yet is have a way to share your drawing (or animated replay) on Facebook. That would be a big help. I read about a "paint for cats" iPad app (I think the one below) that added a "Share this painting on Facebook" button and it blew up his traffic. Not sure it really applies to illico but it could to a more visual app. [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paint-for- cats/id427702410?mt...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paint-for- cats/id427702410?mt=8)

<comment><AUTHOR> So you're thinking of a button to share the chat transcript on Facebook? That's interesting...

<comment><USER17> Not sure it would work well for this app, but I'm always looking for anything visual or easily shared, especially if your audience are likely heavy Facebook users.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learn Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science via Primary Historical Sources - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/historical-projects/ <comment><USER2> This is certainly an interesting approach, but does anybody have any firsthand experience with learning a technical discipline from primary historical sources? While I do enjoy reading the original papers for many mathematical ideas, it seems like if it were done in a course, it would be very slow-going and leave much of the material—especially in a huge subject like Discrete Math—uncovered.

<comment><USER3> I have. All of my knowledge of theoretic CS comes from research papers.

There's pretty much no such thing as computer science education in my region (Ukraine) -- no theory is covered whatsoever. Long story short, I'm studying physics instead.

Anyway, my interest in programming eventually lead me to interest in Scheme and specifically, compiler construction. And the only source of information on this subject are research papers published online.

So for the last five years I've read half of readscheme.org, and some papers from the home pages of various researchers. Topics include algorithms and data structures, various programming techniques, garbage collection, control flow analysis, and so on.

I can attest that productivity of this method is low. It's hard to read about relations between CPS and Monadic style, while you don't know the definition of either. But eventually it comes to you; after a number of papers with lambda-calculus inside you can pretty much infer the notation.

Another issue is that some large chunks of knowledge are missing; some topics are out of scope of these papers, some are considered to be common knowledge. And you often just don't know what have you missed; needless to say such education is fragmentary.

On the other hand, over the years I've mostly lost interest in physics, but interest for CS is higher then ever; and I believe it's no coincidence.

So there. While this is not the fastest way of learning, it certainly has advantages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> this is great - especially the history of truth PDF which is linked to within the article. thanks a lot.</comment>


Show HN: A tool to help make sure you're building the right product - <AUTHOR> The Lean UX Canvas is a concept developed by best selling author Jeff Gothelf. I was at a training course of his last year where he talked us through his canvas, and it is an amazing exercise to really focus on the problem,the solution, the users etc.<p>We started using lean ux canvas in my work but there was no good way to do them digitally, so I built this: https://leanuxcanvas.com <comment><USER2> I think it'd be great to try it without signing up, and then requiring an account if I want to save it.

I'm not willing to put my name on a list without seeing the value proposition first.

<comment><USER3> +1

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel good that I do the broad stroke things you mention on the home page. Thanks for that reassurance. Mom test mindset sort of gets you there too.

I'd like to see more about what this does before signing up.

I presume no trademark quabbles from that domain name?</comment>


NLUlite: Natural language parser and database - <AUTHOR> https://nlulite.com <comment><USER2> Let me know if you're interested in licensing better syntactic/semantic parsing technologies.

I'm the developer of the Redshift NLP library ( [http://github.com/syllog1sm/redshift](http://github.com/syllog1sm/redshift) ). Currently the software lacks documentation, but it offers a good speed/accuracy trade-off. Documentation and a good tokenizer are coming. You can read a tutorial for a simplified version of the algorithm on my blog: [http://honnibal.wordpress.com](http://honnibal.wordpress.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Installer crapped out for me, giving a gzip error. Also, I'm not wild about self-extracting and executing archives. Would you mind perhaps just posting a .tgz that can be examined before installing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, Can you post the error?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This appearing at the same time as a post about designing a personal knowledgebase ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759) ) makes me wonder how reasonable it is to link this sort of natural language fact extraction and querying system to such a knowledgebase.

I suspect it might be expecting too much, but I'd love to integrate my browser history, people I've contacted, where I've been etc. in order to produce an easier way to search and find some webpage (e.g. when I remember some contextual information about the day or the place when I visited a page but am unable to find it by re-googling)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for your comments :-)

@unsane: This is of course not supposed to happen (we tested it on many different machines). Apologies. Please write at email@example.com and we'll look into the problem.

@garblegarble: The system is still under development. Please write at email@example.com to suggest features you would like to be present.

@Syllogism: 93.6% of accuracy is impressive. At this stage, however, we prefer to use proprietary algorithms. We feel we can reach similar accuracy for version 0.2.0 (out in January)

@CGamesPlay: The server is supposed to be installed in the $HOME directory. If you wish to use a different path, you can use the option -d <YOUR_NEW_PATH> when starting the server.

@Rhapso: You are right, the non-commercial download is somewhat byzantine. The problem with wget is that you don't get to sign a non-commercial agreement. Let us think about it for a few nights.

@toblender: We are working on that ;-)

<comment><USER5> You can refer to the statement in comments at the top (hell, put the whole thing in the script, print it out when run, and make the user type yes)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestion. We are going to implement the wget option the next week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whenever I see "Natural Language Parser" mentioned anywhere I get excited then a little disappointed because it implies something much more profound.

Not to belittle the tremendous effort, but most projects I have seen are "English Language Parser"s.

Are there any actual generic language parsing projects out there?

That don't try to overfit to English but actually attempt to do a job of whatever quality in whatever language?

Like I'm a native English speaker, I can understand English say 100%, Japanese 80-90%, I can understand a bit of a few European languages and I can identify a bunch of other languages.

It would be wonderful if there were software with this design in mind.

<comment><USER7> > Are there any actual generic language parsing projects out there?

Chalmers University has impressive results on this - [http://www.grammaticalframework.org/](http://www.grammaticalframework.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> for some URLs the data throws an exception, for example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse) (I don't like snakes)

      File "/home/drace/dev/NLUlite/client_python/NLUlite.py", line 375, in add_url
        parser.feed(page)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/HTMLParser.py", line 114, in feed
        self.goahead(0)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/HTMLParser.py", line 158, in goahead
        k = self.parse_starttag(i)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/HTMLParser.py", line 305, in parse_starttag
        attrvalue = self.unescape(attrvalue)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/HTMLParser.py", line 472, in unescape
        return re.sub(r"&(#?[xX]?(?:[0-9a-fA-F]+|\w{1,8}));", replaceEntities, s)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/re.py", line 151, in sub
        return _compile(pattern, flags).sub(repl, string, count)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

It's also really slow at learning. I have a ton of everything, cores, memory etc and it takes minutes to process web pages. I guess you do say that on the website that the free version is slow.

<comment><AUTHOR> By the way, the commercial version's parser scales almost linearly with the number of (independent) threads. The Wisdom.ask() method is also faster with the multithreaded version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please setup a better way to distribute the non-commercial version. If you insist on using the self-extracting archive, please make it accessible via wget. If this works half as well as it claims, I am willing to pay you for a commercial single-license for personal use.

</comment><comment><USER9> When I start the server and attempt to instantiate a ServerProxy, I get "Connection refused". The server produces no output. Running ubuntu 14.4.

[append] Turns out the server will silently do nothing if you do not extract the archive to $HOME.

<comment><USER8> you just have to use -d to specify where the data files are, the server can be anywhere. I moved it out of home to my dev environment without problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unfortunately it's only for Linux at this time.

<comment><USER8> it's really simple to get an x64 linux VM up and running, virtual box takes just a few minutes to spin up. I think Linux makes the most sense, it doesn't really make sense for the developer waste cycles on porting when people can just use a VM to run it very easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does this compare to nltk, opnnlp or mahout?

<comment><AUTHOR> You need to try all four :-) More seriously: NLUlite is supposed to work "out of the box", without any need of additional training datasets for the parser (often these datasets can be quite expensive). Mahout is a different type of machine learning, as it does not look into the grammar of sentences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> can you dump out the index and examine if the most important noun phrases and named entities are being extracted, a la lucene?

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly as hnriot said: the saved Wisdoms are in plain xml, where the sentences are represented in DRT ([http://bit.ly/1AhuVas](http://bit.ly/1AhuVas))</comment></comment>


Scooter use is rising in major cities. So are trips to the emergency room - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/scooter-use-is-rising-in-major-cities-so-are-trips-to-the-emergency-room/2018/09/06/53d6a8d4-abd6-11e8-a8d7-0f63ab8b1370_story.html <comment><AUTHOR> > _Once injured, many riders might discover from the vehicles ' user > agreements that they cannot file lawsuits because of clauses requiring that > disputes be resolved by arbitration._

Even when the scooters are mechanically defective, such as having stuck accelerators or malfunctioning brakes, people still are stuck with arbitration?

What are the limits on people's abilities to sign self-harming contracts by clicking through some mammoth terms of use agreement?

Surely "I agree to let FooCo roll two dice, and if the results come up snake eyes, FooCo can kill me and auction off my organs" is invalid (um, right?) but how close to that can a contract get?</comment>


In the Netherlands, a group of scientists is working on feeding 11 billion - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.co.uk/article/future-of-food-innovation-technology <comment><USER2> Wageningen has a large number of relevant courses available on edX.com. A while ago, I audited the three courses "Nutrition and Health: Food Risks", "Nutrition and Health: Macronutrients", and "Nutrition and Health: Micronutrients". They were excellent courses.

Since then, they have added many courses on sustainable agriculture and sustainable development. [https://www.edx.org/school/wageningenx](https://www.edx.org/school/wageningenx)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was under the impression that there already exists enough food in the world to feed everyone, and that it is actually a distribution (inequalities and economic) problem?

<comment><USER4> The title indicates ~4B more people than are alive today.

Also, there is not enough food in the world to sustainably feed everyone. Current average diets for wealthy countries are driving climate change that is reducing the ability of less-developed countries to reasonably plan for crops and build their own sustainable food sources.

It's not necessarily _more food_ that's the problem so much as sustainable _and_ low-cost food.

<comment><USER5> There is enough food—iirc we have enough now for 9 billion people—it's just a completely unplanned and inefficient use of resources from perspective of resource use. A large part of this is 100% western diet but I'd be skittish to finger it as a primary cause—I don't think that's useful.

Also, not all food problems can be blamed on western climate change that we will always need to account for, like literal deserts in North Africa.

<comment><USER6> > completely unplanned and inefficient use of resources from perspective of > resource use.

People need to get over the idea of efficiency and centrally planned. These are not necessary qualities in order for humans to prosper.

<comment><USER7> > People need to get over the idea of efficiency and centrally planned.

People need to get over the idea that a free market is the solution to everything?

<comment><USER8> For food distribution, historically, a free market beats central planning, hands down.

<comment><USER5> Not at all; free market fails to feed people daily. Even in the heartland of captialism we had plenty of bread lines during the great depression.

To be clear I'm not advocating _centralized_ planning, or any specific planning method. I'm simply pointing out the free market has specifically failed at food distribution. Or at least, you're going to need to contort the definition of success to get the free market to meet it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just throw a bunch of veggies in the microwave, add beans and some sauce, and done no need to eat processed insects.

This idea that eating whole food plant based is hard and time consuming is a myth. Almost every veggie cooks unattended in the microwave in about 10 minutes, potatoes included.

<comment><USER3> Small bit of anecdata - the times when I've been most poor has been when I've eaten the most whole foods (and plant based, as I'm vegan). At those times I would nearly every day put rice and a type of bean (or variety of lentil) into the pressure cooker as my staple throughout the day. Alongside that I would have fresh fruits and steam some frozen or fresh vegetables. The biggest upfront investment was a B12 supplement, but spread over time it's cheaper than most foods.

Since I didn't have the budget for highly processed things, I inadvertently ate super clean.

So this has me thinking, there are already complex distribution channels for medicine for places in need; to that could be added a few key supplements like B12. As long as they are getting otherwise the main macronutrients met, it becomes easier for more people to eat WFPB, which in fact like me in times of poverty many people already do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I went to Wageningen University open day in ~1999, with school (4 VWO). After a speech by a professor, it was lunch-time. I didn't take lunch with me, assuming I could buy some there, but I barely had money with me as well. Well, they were serving two things for free as some kind of pilot or demo. It was grasshoppers with Italian spices and vegetables, and mealworms in white sauce. My co-students were laughing at me, but I tried both and actually liked both. After I went a second time, they no longer had grasshoppers, so I only got a portion of maelworms (I'm not a fan of white sauce). They had a good taste, kind of a nutty flavor. Only issue with the grasshoppers is that parts of them get stuck in your pockets.

Fast forward, in this decade I ate insect burgers by a Belgian company called Damhert. Again, nutty flavor, and tasted well. In Africa, insects already get eaten as they're a cheap and reliable source of protein. Unfortunately, it isn't quite clear if insects suffer from pain. At the very least they don't have a CNS, like mammals do. There is even a Dutch "insect cookbook" [1]

Maastricht University is _also_ busy feeding 11 billion, with the in vitro burger (meat based on stem cells). Don't have a link at hand. While not strictly vegan (the stem cells are taken from a live animal), it is vegan in spirit as it reduces animal harm substantially.

[1] [https://www.bol.com/nl/p/het- insectenkookboek/92000000397193...](https://www.bol.com/nl/p/het- insectenkookboek/9200000039719366)

</comment><comment><USER11> Feeding 11 billion people where a large portion of those people can only afford to spend $2/day on food? Very difficult.

Feeding 11 billion people where everybody can spend $100/day on food? Very simple. If necessary (and it's not), we could build vast quantities of greenhouses and get orders of magnitude improvements in calories per acre.

The environmental consequences of such high-intensity farming is another issue, of course.

<comment><USER12> This is kind of a tail wagging the dog argument. If only everybody was rich then there wouldn't be any resource scarcity!

<comment><USER13> To badly paraphrase Willian Gibson: the richness is already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

<comment><USER14> > the richness is already here

how do we know this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Personally I like the insect idea, just processed so that they don't look like insects. Sorry, save that for a next, more open minded generation. I don't get the meat lookalikes. Is a plate of food without a piece of meat so abhorrent?

<comment><USER16> No, but you can either spend a ton of effort trying to convince meat eaters that "this other thing is also delicious", but they'll just ignore it. Instead, just replace their burgers/nuggets with something else that also looks like burgers/nuggets yet pretty much tastes the same, and you don't need to convince them.

<comment><USER17> It has been done before, only with true garbage instead of bugs. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObcsswhO83I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObcsswhO83I)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was under the impression that generic engineering (GMOs) were the way. That these are the industrial fertilizer of the 21st century.

I'm not opposed to eating bugs, but we do have other options. Like there's also lab grown meat. All three sound like a good way to move forward.

</comment><comment><USER19> One-child policies could solve the problem and it's as taboo as bug-eating, yet it receives barely any coverage

<comment><USER20> Did you know that Iran of all places was able to drastically lower their birth rate by providing free birth control and education? No forced abortion/sterilizations like China, just providing options to people.

<comment><USER21> That drop in birth rate isn't unique to Iran. It's one of the most well- studied phenomena in sociology. It has a name, too, the demographic transition. As you pointed out, educating women is considered a key part of ushering in the demographic transition.

The Wikipedia page is pretty good: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition)

(Not a sociologist, but used to be married to one.)</comment></comment></comment>


Keupy – Your personal cloud storage device - <AUTHOR> http://www.keupy.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> From what I see on their blog yes, it seems that it is encrypted. I don't know too much right now, I've subscribed to the newsletter hoping to receive more info

</comment><comment><USER2> Is it encrypted? Where is the technical info?</comment>


A terminal-based, open source speed reader - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pasky/speedread <comment><USER2> This is really cool!

I'd love to the idea to seek through the content. (Maybe through the parens keys?)

For me, it would ideally show a sentence (or x chars) both before and after. Or maybe a view similar to less?</comment>


Josh James startup rule 29, don't spend money unless you have to - <AUTHOR> http://www.joshjames.com/2012/04/dont-spend-money/

<comment><USER2> Spending money doesn't make you a business. Making money does. - One of the best quotes I've heard in a long time.</comment>


Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status - <AUTHOR> http://kroah.com/log/blog/2018/01/19/meltdown-status-2/ <comment><USER2> RHEL/CentOS state:

Red Hat built their own mitigation for Meltdown and Spectre and were the first distribution to have an updated kernel right when the embargo was lifted.

As far as I can tell, their meltdown mitigations are similar to what's in the upstream kernel now, and the Spectre mitigations relies on Intel's new MSRs (the microcode update that had since been retracted - new microcode_ctl packages remove it).

Interestingly, you can enable/disable the mitigations at runtime with Red Hat, which is useful for performance testing. I found no way to do this with the upstream kernel.

I'm not happy that Intel, Google, Red Hat and a few others have known about the bug for months and the upstream kernel devs are scrambling to build mitigations and still don't support the microcode mitigations. Google apparently patched their stuff in September, while everyone else is left out in the cold. This is a real mess. Surely there must be a better way than telling a few select companies?

The Red Hat guys in particular surely would've loved to collaborate with the upstream kernel. Must be frustrating not to be able to tell anyone.

<comment><USER3> > I'm not happy that Intel, Google, Red Hat and a few others have known about > the bug for months and the upstream kernel devs are scrambling to build > mitigations and still don't support the microcode mitigations. Google > apparently patched their stuff in September, while everyone else is left out > in the cold. This is a real mess. Surely there must be a better way than > telling a few select companies?

I think Colin's take[0] was interesting and insightful there, especially in the light of him having handled a very similar issue a decade earlier:

> The way these issues were handled was a mess; frankly, I expected better of > Google, I expected better of Intel, and I expected better of the Linux > community. When I found that Hyper-Threading was easily exploitable, I spent > five months notifying the security community and preparing everyone for my > announcement of the vulnerability; but when the embargo ended at midnight > UTC and FreeBSD published its advisory a few minutes later, the broader > world was taken entirely by surprise.

> Contrast that with what happened this time around. Google discovered a > problem and reported it to Intel, AMD, and ARM on June 1st. Did they then go > around contacting all of the operating systems which would need to work on > fixes for this? Not even close. FreeBSD was notified the week before > Christmas, over six months after the vulnerabilities were discovered.

> […]

> To make things worse, the Linux community was notified _and couldn 't keep > their mouths shut_. Standard practice for multi-vendor advisories like this > is that an embargo date is set, and _nobody does anything publicly prior to > that date_. People don't publish advisories; they don't commit patches into > their public source code repositories; and they _definitely_ don't engage in > arguments on public mailing lists about whether the patches are needed for > different CPUs.

(emphasis his)

[0] [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-01-17-some-thoughts- on-...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-01-17-some-thoughts-on-spectre- and-meltdown.html) final section on vulnerability disclosures

<comment><USER4> I think lots of people (particularly security people) tend to fundamentally misunderstand how the Linux community works. It's not a single organization calling the shots where they can have a meeting behind closed doors about the vulnerability and internally incubate a patchset. That's simply not how Linux development works.

Linux is a _loosely organized_ community of developers who collaborate in public. They don't have any ubiquitous communication channels established _other_ than mailing lists. If you attempted to establish a private security mailing list, the list of people who get to go on it is (1) hard to define (2) very large and (3) frequently changing. The affected subsystems have lots of disparate maintainers and interested parties who need to get their eyes on any patches that go into them.

It might not be ideal from a security person's perspective but from everyone else's perspective this model has been the driving factor behind the most successful collaborative project of all time.

<comment><USER5> Linux has a security team/list that does handle disclosures and fixing of reported problems. It usually does this by just dragging in the responsible parties, but many times it just fixes the problems themselves and submits the patches to the proper part of the kernel.

For details on how this works, please see the kernel documentation itself: [https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin- guide/security-...](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin- guide/security-bugs.html)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for clarifying, Greg.

>It usually does this by just dragging in the responsible parties, but many times it just fixes the problems themselves and submits the patches to the proper part of the kernel.

I think this is the key - once the patches are submitted they go through the normal workflow and aren't any different from a typical patch, right?

<comment><USER5> Yes, once the patches are generated, they get submitted just like any other kernel change, sent to the responsible subsystem and maintainer for inclusion like any other kernel change.

<comment><USER4> I think this is where the problems becomes apparent. The change then has to go through the subsystem's patch flow (in public) then into the merge window (in public) and sit in the release pipeline (in public) until the window closes and all of the rc's are through.

Personally I don't think this is a huge deal, but it's where the disconnect between the security person's ideal worldview and the reality of how Linux is built colllide.

<comment><USER6> Distros could speed this up. If the security team notifies RedHat, Ubuntu, etc and they can apply the patch for their kernels immediately. They probably need to backport it anyways, because no distro (well, maybe Arch?) just uses the latest Linux release.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, during the last year Fedora frequently had newer kernels than arch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you also want to know if intel has released a microcode update for your CPU yet (regardless of whether or not it's available in your distro yet):

Download the latest archive from Intel at [https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/27431/Linux- Proces...](https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/27431/Linux-Processor- Microcode-Data-File) (currently microcode-20180108.tgz) then:

        tar -xzf microcode-20180108.tgz
        sudo apt install iucode-tool # or whatever your package manager is
        iucode-tool -tb -lS ./intel-ucode/*

This will crosscheck the microcode binaries with the signature of your CPU and output something like:

        001: sig 0x00010676, pf mask 0x01, 2010-09-29, rev 0x060f, size 4096
        002: sig 0x00010676, pf mask 0x04, 2010-09-29, rev 0x060f, size 4096
        003: sig 0x00010676, pf mask 0x10, 2010-09-29, rev 0x060f, size 4096
        004: sig 0x00010676, pf mask 0x40, 2010-09-29, rev 0x060f, size 4096
        005: sig 0x00010676, pf mask 0x80, 2010-09-29, rev 0x060f, size 4096

As you can see Intel hasn't released any updates for my old CPU (latest is from 2010)

<comment><USER9> So this microcode goes in /lib/firmware/intel-ucode (in ubuntu) will this then firmware update the CPU with the latest microcode, or only use this like a driver leaving the CPU alone?

<comment><USER8> Microcode is loaded into some on-die volatile RAM every boot by the CPU... there is a CPU instruction to do it. AFAIK:

First the CPU loads an on die ROM of the microcode it was released with on it's own. Second the BIOS/UEFI may load an update into the CPU before boot if it has a newer one. Third linux and some other OS will load any newer microcode into the CPU at the bootloader stage before the kernel loads.

This is also commonly the case for other modern hardware, not just CPUs... although I expect it doesn't need to happen before the kernel loads and is probably bundled into their respective drivers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I correct in stating that the microcode update recently released by Intel was buggy and therefore pulled back by Linux distros and Intel themselves, and also a fixed version of the microcode update has not yet been released by Intel for Linux as well as other OS like Windows?

<comment><USER11> I am curious to know more details on the status of the microcode update specifically when it comes to Windows Update.

<comment><USER12> I do not believe the Windows patches include microcode at this time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What a mess this has been so far... I appreciate all the effort kernel folks had put in it until now but the whole tier 1 companies cabal thing is just disgusting and it made the problem worse with the early disclosure (not to say "leak" if you count LKML diffs flying around). If at least all the cabal parties were equally covered and protected by now, but nope nope nope. If I were a kernel developer not working for any cabal party I would be very pissed off.

<comment><USER14> How would you do it then? Publish as soon as it's discovered, and let everyone scramble for fixes as its being exploited?

<comment><USER13> 0\. fucking put the pressure on Intel and other chip makers to have microcode updates ready by NYE, like, you know, 6 months after the first report

1\. make sure all tier 1 companies involved are equally patched and on the same page as far as mitigations go before EOY, then involve tier 2 companies (see news on "the impromptu war room") a full month before the embargo deadline

2\. not commit or patch anything or fly commented diffs around in the freaking public LKML; git branches to be tested and secondary mailing lists can be private if only for a brief period of time

That's definitely not what happened, and probably the dirty details have not surfaced yet. I can't wait for this to be reasonably over so we can start to read post mortem on the whole process.

<comment><USER15> You can't really force a different company to have patches and updates by a certain deadline, can you. The only hard leverage is the officially planned disclosure date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm confused… The article led me to recheck whether I'm loading the newest Intel ucode update during early boot, and it turns out I am, but the latest ucode revision for my Ivybridge machine is from 2015. Didn't Intel push microcode updates for all affected systems yet, in preparation for more spectre-related mitigations?

<comment><USER17> Lenovo mentions [1] a "target availability" of a bios update for my x230 with ivybridge for 2nd of February. Intel didn't update the microcode for those chips yet.

[1] [https://datacentersupport.lenovo.com/de/de/products/storage/...](https://datacentersupport.lenovo.com/de/de/products/storage/lenovo- storage/v3700v2/product_security/ps500151)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, apparently my system is unpatched. What is the proper thing to do now?

Should I immediately update my BIOS (would this also patch my CPU's firmware?) or just wait for mitigations arriving with OS updates?

<comment><USER19> > Should I immediately update my BIOS (would this also patch my CPU's > firmware?)

The current recommendation is "no", since some of the microcode updates are known to cause stability problems. It's better to wait for Intel to fix that first, then make sure your BIOS update has a microcode version without the stability problems, then update. Yes, it's a mess.

> or just wait for mitigations arriving with OS updates?

Even after you update the microcode, you still need a OS update to enable the microcode mitigations, so you have to wait for a OS update anyway.

<comment><USER20> _The current recommendation is "no", since some of the microcode updates are known to cause stability problems. It's better to wait for Intel to fix that first, then make sure your BIOS update has a microcode version without the stability problems, then update. Yes, it's a mess._

Note that the microcode update does not have to be delivered through a BIOS update. Linux can also update the microcode during early boot:

[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/microcode](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/microcode)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This command does not show anything on my ubuntu 16.04 lts machine.

grep . /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/*

is there an alternate command for ubuntu?

<comment><USER21> for ubuntu command check here: [https://askubuntu.com/questions/992137/how-to- check-that-kpt...](https://askubuntu.com/questions/992137/how-to-check-that- kpti-is-enabled-on-my-ubuntu)

Here is one of the commands recommended in that thread:

grep -q "cpu_insecure\|cpu_meltdown\|kaiser" /proc/cpuinfo && echo "patched :)" \ || echo "unpatched :("

<comment><USER22> That line worked for me, but do note the first command listed in the answer you linked to is NOT reliable and is not always consistent with the next two commands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can find a "shared by a subscriber" non-paywall link of the lwn.net article mentioned in the article here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16177525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16177525)

<comment><USER24> LWN is worth supporting.

<comment><USER23> Sure it is. They allow the link to be shared nevertheless.

[https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks](https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks)

Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?

Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.

<comment><USER25> And as this is a blog entry, I think it's a place where the author should have used the subscriber link.

> _As always, [lwn.net covers the technical > details]([https://lwn.net/Articles/744287/](https://lwn.net/Articles/744287/)) > about the latest state of the kernel patches to resolve the Spectre issues, > so please go read that to find out that type of information._

The non-subscriber link in the blog entry results in a paywall. I think LWN would prefer that Greg used a subscriber link in this case. You may be being downvoted because people think you're trying to post a paywall workaround, but I agree that this would have been an appropriate place to use a subscriber link.

<comment><USER26> You _can_ use a subscriber link, but Greg _chose_ not to. Jon Corbet is a mutual friend, and LWN is essentially a two person shop (Jon and Jake do all of the work, and they are not getting rich off of what is essentially a labor of love).

So if someone decides they want to use a somewhat more proactive way of encouraging people to subscribe to LWN, personally I think it's appropriate and its his choice. Just as someone who wants to post a subscriber link to Hacker News is also appropriate. (But you should seriously think about subscribing, even at the Starving Hacker level, if at all possible. I subscribe at the highest tier even though my company has a corporate subscription, Just Because.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > And yes, it is behind a paywall for a few more weeks, you should be buying a > subscription to get this type of thing, go do that!

LWN has tons of great content and deserves any support they can get.

But I strongly suggest that in this case, there shouldn't be a paywall. The current state of Meltdown/Spectre fixes is of high public interest. And people who are normally not into kernel development should be able to read this information without having to pay (or find workarounds).</comment>