CIA planned rendition operation to kidnap Edward Snowden - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/30/snow-j30.html <comment><USER2> Seeing as how the US has an extradition treaty with Denmark (and most/all? of Europe) I'm having a hard time understanding why this is being described as a "rendition operation". I think a lot of what Snowden did was good and just, but I don't see the US government attempting to arrest him abroad as being nefarious. I don't think it's a serious expectation to hold to demand that the government not try to arrest him. That's why whistleblowing is brave.

Whistleblowing protections that extend to what Snowden did would effectively convert the entire classification system to a set of recommendations as opposed to laws (a wholly different demand which I think is patently childish as a demand).

I'm all for a pardon or some kind of reduced charges due to the motivations and the subject matter of the disclosed material, but can someone explain to me the justification of being outraged over enforcing laws in accordance with US law, treaties, and host country laws? They're not even using controversial legal mechanisms like the PATRIOT Act or FISC.

EDIT: I've left my initial post in tact (I'm bad and I should feel bad) but I'd like to amend my confusion about the use of the term rendition in case anyone else shares it. After years of hearing "extraordinary rendition" shortened to "rendition" I've basically overwritten the latter with the former. Rendition is actually just the legal transfer of a suspect from one jurisdiction to the next, still outside of a legal linguistic context I find the use of the term to imply the later and I take it as trying to bait outrage.

<comment><USER3> Generally there's this thing called "due process", if they were just planning on putting Snowden on a CIA plane I really can't see how that's supposed to be okay.

<comment> at-fates-hands If the CIA wanted to grab him, they could, regardless of where he is.

The fact that it might ruffle a few feathers diplomatically is hardly something the CIA considers when they handle operations like the one they're describing. Also, if they _did_ grab him, trust me, he wouldn't be heard from again. Considering Snowden has an army of governments after him, it would be easy for the CIA to run a disinformation campaign to keep people guessing who really kidnapped him.

It would be easy for the CIA to rotate him between several of their "black sites" around the world and basically let him wither and die in one these miserable places.

<comment><USER3> It'll look pretty bad when the headline is "Six CIA operatives killed, three captured in Moscow trying to abduct Snowden"

<comment><USER4> I really doubt that the Russians would kill CIA operatives.

At least as long as the CIA operatives are not crazy enough to run an armed operation in Moscow.

<comment><USER5> Spies generally operate under diplomatic cover and are returned to the embassy after being caught since they have "diplomatic immunity." Then they fly home, have their alias changed, and never return to that country. Killing a diplomat, spy or not, would cause some huge issues between the two nations involved. So, no, countries are not likely to ever kill spies.

<comment><USER6> There's a difference between spies & gun-toting operatives. Spies usually work under diplomatic cover, but operatives (think seal team six) probably don't get their passports stamped when they enter a country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The original danish article (link below) has a comment section. One user asks where the documentation is for saying that the flight was intended for S. The author replies, that he specifically asked the Ministry of Justice for information on the flight for, and information on rendition of, S. and that these documents where then released (partly censored). Which is also written in the article itself.

[https://www.denfri.dk/2016/01/usa-sendte-fly-til-danmark- for...](https://www.denfri.dk/2016/01/usa-sendte-fly-til-danmark-for-at-hapse- snowden/)

S. has since then made a tweet on this article, which is probably why all the other posts are now to be found on other sites from all over the world.

<comment><USER8> Are you afraid something bad will happen if you type Snowden's name?

<comment><USER7> And why am I getting downvotes? Are you afraid of the truth?

<comment><USER8> I'm not the one downvoting you, and none of your comments are that controversial, so I don't know, and no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Obviously. Look, I disagree with virtually all of what the CIA is doing, but day one Snowden was pretty up front about this. "There is a CIA field office close to here, bet those guys are working overtime" or something to that effect. Thats what you do in this situation. The CIA isn't dumb, their failure mode is thinking everyone else is. If they could have got him cleanly, they wouldve.

<comment><USER10> Right? It seems like one of those standard planning exercises that governments have for just about everything. Plans for if Canada invades the US, plans for a hypothetical US invasion of the UK, etc, etc, etc. I'd actually be surprised if someone who was such a high-profile target for the espionage community _didn 't_ have plans drawn up for their quick retrieval if needed under some circumstances.

<comment><USER11> There are plans for hypothetical scenarios, and then there is the enacting of the initial stages of the plan by stationing a plane and team and securing the cooperation of a host country.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N977GA](https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N977GA)

<comment><USER13> Shame there's not a carfax like service for planes that used something less mutable than a tail number. After that last flight, it was almost certainly sold to some CIA front company, given a new number, and sent back into the air.

<comment><USER14> People seem to be pretty good at finding these things.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there a more reliable source for this than a fringe political site?

<comment><USER16> This seems to link to the original Danish source: [https://boingboing.net/2016/01/30/danish-government-let- amer...](https://boingboing.net/2016/01/30/danish-government-let-america.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have a prediction: Snowden will come back on his own. It'll be under a different administration than this one for sure, and it might be many years from now. But considering his level of patriotism and bravery, I don't see him staying away for forever. When he feels he has a chance at justice, he'll answer up for what he did.

<comment><USER18> > Snowden will come back on his own.

The fact of the matter is: Western society (US and EU) has let down Snowden hard. We haven't done anything to pressure our politicians (who depend on us!) to protect him like he deserves. We don't deserve people like Snowden. And he sure must has felt that by now.

So if he comes back, I doubt his level of patriotism will have been able to survive our sorry collective attitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> CIA wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't have plans. I'm sure they have plans for plenty events more unlikely than the president asking them to go get Snowden.

<comment><USER20> Last comment 534 days ago? Are you serious?

<comment><USER21> Some of us like reading and understanding other people's sentiment more than contributing what is most likely irrelevant opinions and general noise? Just because HN, Reddit, /., etc are built around the premise of commenting doesn't mean one has to comment to participate.

<comment><USER22> Yeah because shills don't prep in advance, right? Lmfao.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _N977GA has a chequered history. It was originally ordered by the US Air Force for use as a general 's flying gin-palace. But then, shortly after 9/11, it lost its military livery and acquired civilian registration as N596GA. Under that designation it was employed in CIA "renditions" \- or kidnappings. In 2011, the "black" jet switched roles again, transferring from the CIA's contractor to use instead by the Department of Justice (DoJ)._

</comment><comment><USER24> Just a question that seems to always cross my mind when I think of individuals like Snowden (and I am not a strong believer that everything I see in the media is rooted in some conspiracy theory): Why are many so confident that he is operating independently and not just redirecting blame towards himself as part of a larger CIA operation? i.e. PRISM may have already been leaked at the time anyway so CIA, then manufactures a "scapegoat".

Sure there is some interesting stuff that has been uncovered, but I cannot help, but wonder if his hero image is being burned into the psyche of every rebellious, "hacker" teen out there just to promote a viral effect of some kind. I am in no way condemning Snowden and the like (I really want to cheer him on) but I am, at the same time, not going to be totally convinced that I should be following what he or his constituents share with the masses.

As a side, I am ready "Classified Woman" by Sibel Edmonds and the same question came up regarding her background. Just thought I would throw this out there since it has been on my mind for some time. I am wondering if anyone has here similar thoughts.

<comment><USER25> There's a no way of knowing the answer to your question, but ultimately, it shouldn't really matter.

There are people who say that Snowden leaks are a CIA operation against the NSA, born out of patriotism. There are others who say that he acted on direct orders from Obama, who had found it impossible to rein the intelligence agencies in, and needed to foment public support. We can judge by how the political actors have been behaving since the leaks. Our children will be able to read about it once internal documents are declassified.

It is never good to idolize a person, and to put them on a pedestal. We all have flaws. Snowden has done us all a tremendous service, at a great personal peril, and it seems he will live to tell the story. We should all be so lucky. But he is a flawed man, just like we all are. People are quick to create cults around heroes, and then they are disappointed when their idol doesn't live up to their standards. It is sad, really. If you want to know who Snowden is, go to Moscow and buy him a cup of coffee; that's as close to the truth as you're ever gonna get.

In the end, the ideas Snowden stands for are important and valid regardless of who brought them to the fore.

EDIT: Ron Fournier made the same point slightly more eloquently, back in 2013: [http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/why-i- dont-...](http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/why-i-dont-care- about-edward-snowden)

<comment><USER24> Good points. I will definitely keep that in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> we need to get rid of US military bases across Europe.

<comment><USER27> Most of Europe would not be okay with that - the US currently massively subsidizes the defense costs of European military forces with its bases. And it's not just the actual US forces there - it's logistics and training as well. For example, France likes to do peacekeeping operations in Africa. They can do so effectively because the US provides the airlift capability through their bases in Europe.

Basically, if the US bases go, the capabilities of much of the European military forces go bye-bye. They're optimized for using American logistical support, (because they have no reason to develop their own) and all of that comes through American bases in the region. I'm sure that some political parties in Europe would be completely okay with losing that capability, but most people agree that there is one thing worse than a strong military, and that's a weak military that costs the same amount of money as a strong military.

<comment> bjelkeman-again All the more reason. We Europeans should be able to manage this ourselves.

<comment><USER27> You would have to gut social programs to pay for it, which people may or may not be okay with.

Just to provide some numbers - the USAF's budget is $170 billion per year. For comparison, that's about the cost of Britain's entire NHS. A very large amount of that goes to airlift capability - plenty of money is spent on air superiority, but the USAF's primary mission in this era of asymmetric warfare is logistical support.

Basically, the attitude of most European governments is "If the US is willing to pay for it, why should we reject their help?"

<comment><USER28> > You would have to gut social programs to pay for it

Probably not that much. We need defense force, we don't need to "police" the world (which really means imperialism). We don't need nuclear capabilities.

Also, the relation between defense and social spending is tenuous at best. Both scale linearly with the size of the economy. Defense spending can actually be beneficial in creating jobs and improving technology.

<comment><USER29> >Probably not that much. We need defense force, we don't need to "police" the world (which really means imperialism). We don't need nuclear capabilities.

It's not us you'll have to convince of this, it's your government. They tend to be a bit prickly about such things, no matter how enlightened the general populace is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is no "firm evidence" in the documents as this article claims. There is no reference to Snowden there.

<comment><USER7> Not true. The original article ([https://www.denfri.dk/2016/01/usa-sendte-fly- til-danmark-for...](https://www.denfri.dk/2016/01/usa-sendte-fly-til-danmark- for-at-hapse-snowden/)) mentions that the Author asked the Ministry of Justice for information on S.

The documents released (partly censored) may not mention S. but were released as an answer to this request.

The Author is Peter Kofod. The online newspaper "Den Fri" direct translation: The Free, is mostly focused on surveillance and fascist tendencies. Anyone can write as a guest (by going through the board of editors). Peter Kofod writes weekly. Or even more often.

<comment><USER30> The documents released were in response to Peter Kofod's request for information about the airplane itself.

"Justitsministeriet kan ikke oplyse, hvorvidt ministeriet er i besiddelse af materiale omfattet af den del af din anmodning om aktindsigt, der angår korrespondance mellem danske og amerikanske myndigheder vedrørende Edward Snowden."

Translated: "The Department of Justice can not say whether the Ministry is in possession of material of your request for access to documents relating to correspondence between Danish and US authorities regarding Edward Snowden."

[https://www.denfri.dk/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/begrundelse...](https://www.denfri.dk/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/begrundelse_aktindsigt_Snowden_Kofod.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not sure that this source is entirely credible. There is no link to the documents or to the original journalistic source. I also find it hard to believe that the CIA couldn't spoof a new tail number or just buy a new jet if they really wanted to keep this quiet. It doesn't really pass the common sense test. Unless the documents are produced and they are extremely compelling this seems more like conspiracy theory than good journalism.

</comment><comment><USER32> What a high-quality country America has become. "Extra-legal" renditions, torture, imprisonment without trial, spying on the entire planet, including all of its own citizens... any wisps of democracy left the air long ago in Washington.

</comment><comment><USER33> Planes are fungible. Are we supposed to believe that the CIA has zero other reasons to want a plane in Europe? It's just about Snowden?

</comment><comment><USER34> Both Clinton and Trump have made it pretty clear via their attitude towards Snowden that he is in for death/torture somewhere within their presidency.

I'd like to think Americans would protest but apparently most of the country has already forgotten or not cared anymore about the NSA, it's like it never happened, no-one even mentions it anymore in the mainstream.

<comment><USER35> > it's like it never happened, no-one even mentions it anymore in the > mainstream.

IIRC, the whole idea of gradually releasing documents instead of dumping them all at once was to avoid this. Although, I haven't seen any new documents in quite a while. I wonder what happened. Are the rest of them not as important as the ones already released?

<comment><USER36> _> Are the rest of them not as important as the ones already released?_

Likely. There is also a question of framing overall discourse. For example, Der Spiegel and The Intercept recently posted some documents from that pile, showing how the US hacked Israeli feeds from jet fighters to monitor possible attacks against Iran. The original piece was extremely balanced, highlighting the conflicted relationship and conflict on policy choices and overall strategies.

The Guardian picked it up with a piece that was very much pro-Israel, drumming up support for Israeli hawks (at a time when they are extremely isolated on the international stage).

Whenever this sort of material enters the discourse, you have to be very careful if you want to avoid other people framing it in the "wrong" way. I don't blame Greenwald's people for taking their time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The phrase "US ruling elite" is used a couple of times in this article. It's refreshing to me because we don't use that term much here in the United States, likely because we (are supposed to) believe in democracy.

</comment><comment><USER38> You gotta be kidding. Here is how it works in reality. CIA operatives get the budget to kidnap Snowden. They organise "leak", but nothing was done in reality, they just wrote down that money.

</comment><comment><USER39> > Snowden embodies a new generation of educated and technologically-trained > workers and youth who are increasingly hostile to the existing social order.

Aye, we're practically swimming in those.

</comment><comment><USER40> So "kidnapping" isn't a crime anymore?

</comment><comment><USER41> Why is this even news? Does it actually surprise you all that the CIA would have a plan to catch Snowden?

<comment><USER42> So, after the innumerous crimes and injustices commited by CIA abroad and home, since nothing was done to the agency, it means it now turned into a free pass? Justice, like a lot of other stuff in our societies that basically are just common agreements, is actually pretty fragile, if it's not upheld things tend to go down. There's consequences and stuff.

<comment><USER41> The only criminal in this whole story is Snowden. Literally, no one else broke the law here. You need to screw your head back on.

<comment><USER43> Don't mistake legality for morality. By a lot of people's estimations, they're exactly reversed in this situation with Snowden breaking secrecy laws by exposing "legal" surveillance.

Plus, it's not even clear the government is acting legally here. An excellent case can be made that mass surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment, and if the CIA planned anything other than bringing Snowden back to a public trial in the USA, that would be a violation of the Sixth Amendment.

<comment><USER42> It's awkward to even have to compose a reply to that answer! Some people reaaaally need to affirm to themselves that everything is fine whatever happens, for some reason. Small minds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Well, duh.

</comment><comment><USER44> Well, duh</comment>


Detecting Whether Your Flash Memory Is New or Recycled - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/memory/that-new-memory-smell-tech-can-tell-you-if-your-flash-is-new-or-recycled <comment><USER2> I totally believe this is a thing, so if I say that 'age' is a bad metaphor for read-write cycles, its not because I don't think scumbag manufacturers are recycling chips: It's because how often I read or write a cell, really doesn't linearly line up with 'time' except they both get more.

If I used that chip in an SSD for a ZFS ARC, its write cycles will be totally different in the time interval to if I use it as a desktop backup disk.</comment>


Building a Coffee Pot Monitor Using Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://iam.mt/building-a-coffee-pot-monitor-using-raspberry-pi/ <comment><USER2> So, I've been thinking about something like this for doing continuous weight measurement of cat food and water bowls.

And then the thought occurred to me that we could build an even larger platform to put under that, so that we could also monitor the weight of the cat itself (or themselves).

For a multi-cat household and variable bowl weights, you would have to combine the weight measurements with video surveillance cameras, so that you could confirm which cat is eating or drinking from which bowl. However, with some OpenCV work plus ML, you might be able to automate a lot of that.

Thoughts?

Anyone else interested in such a project?

Or maybe there are already projects out there in this space that I don't know about?

<comment><USER3> My primary and overwhelming thought is "feature creep".

Try first to get a working prototype that measures the amount of water in the bowl.

Then worry about weighing the solid food, multiple bowls, weighing the cat, multiple cats, connecting the CCTV to power and network, automated cat identification, setting up OpenCV, doing a ML, and the User Interface.

Edit: I forgot sales and marketing, a common mistake :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The link is currently overloaded. It's been archived here though: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190731210156/https://iam.mt/bu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190731210156/https://iam.mt/building- a-coffee-pot-monitor-using-raspberry-pi/)

</comment><comment><USER5> That's what the first ever webcam was invented for: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently working on a medical product which uses pressure sensitive ink in paper thin sheets to detect presence and movement through a mattress. I think I need to grab a piece of my scraps and put this together myself to monitor our office coffee.

<comment><USER7> I'd be interested in getting some of that kind of pressure sensitive ink for a DIY MIDI controller project, or a custom PCB manufactured that uses pressure sensitive ink (I haven't found a PCB maker that does that yet).

Do you have any links or info that could help?

<comment><USER6> I don't have much that can help. We started with pressure sensitive foam for our first proof of concept since it was much easier to obtain. Soon after we worked with a Chinese manufacturer to source a replacement ink. They silkscreen and cure the ink for us into the sheets we need as a component in the final assembly.

One thing I can caution you on is how finicky the inks are. Ink thickness, curing time and temperature, and abrasions to the ink can have large impacts on the responsiveness of the ink to pressure. We do a lot of software and hardware work to mitigate these inconsistencies.

<comment><USER7> Sounds a bit too finicky, hmm. From looking at teardowns of, eg, the Ableton Push 2, it looks like a gold-plated pcb with fingers that the conductive sheet sits on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's back up now

</comment><comment><USER8> Link dead?

<comment><USER9> Looks like it got HN'd. Here's the cached copy:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bzu7No...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Bzu7NoK7Du8J:https://iam.mt/building- a-coffee-pot-monitor-using-raspberry-pi/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER8> ty</comment></comment></comment>


Why Did Ballmer Throw Nokia Now Under the Bus? - <AUTHOR> http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/07/why-did-ballmer-throw-nokia-now-under-the-bus-lets-dig-windows-phone-lumia-insights-from-kantar-stat.html

<comment><USER2> As much as I really want to like the Windows Phone and would love it to succeed, Microsoft doesn't seem to have enough control over the experience to guarantee that.

Small data point: went to the AT&T store yesterday and, while waiting for a rep, played with a Nokia Windows Phone on the wall. I was meeting someone for beers in town and wanted to map out how long it would take to walk there. I looked and looked for a Maps choice in the home UI and I couldn't find it. I stood there for 3 minutes, scrolling up and down and nothing. Instead, there was AT&T Navigation (I didn't need navigation.. I just wanted some walking directions as an overview). There was also some app store showcase thing, which looked like something I would never want to use. It also displayed confusing messages in the square now and again, e.g. I think it said "Show Your Maps", which must've been an app they were promoting in the app showcase.

So if I, an experienced geek (and an iPhone user), can't figure out how to bring up Maps on your AT&T Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone, then you have failed BIG TIME. I moved on to the Android phone next to it and got the job done.

<comment> excuse-me Microsoft have never needed to appeal to a retail customer.

So long as you can say to corporates: you want your staff to have access to your MS email system on their phones? Then they just need Windows Phone with Windows Phone corporate Email Server - just sign here.

Exactly what RIM did with Blackberry and BES

The question now is - is it too late? Are companies happy enough with connecting to corporate email from Android and iPhone to just let their users use what they want - or are they going to buy Windows Phone handsets for everyone?

<comment><USER3> Well, licensing Exchange ActiveSync to Apple for the iPhone might have been an error then.

[http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2480?viewlocale=en_US&loca...](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2480?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US)

<comment> excuse-me Not necessarily, it stopped Apple developing their own - and you can always "embrace and extend" so the next version of Exchange onyl works fully with Windows phone

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That author sounds like he has an axe to grind.

What did Ballmer/MS do to "throw Nokia under the bus"?

<comment><USER5> Osborne'd Nokia's whole product line-up with the WP 8 announcement. Nokia's devices don't receive updates.

<comment><USER6> For the WP7 versus 8 thing, there is a fundamental underpinning change from a Windows CE kernel to the Windows 8 kernel. This is an important change as it means that apps for the phone platform will have commonality with other Microsoft platforms rather than being their own silo. Microsoft needed to make this change, and the sooner the better. But of course compatibility is lost in the process.

As for updating the phones, the ARM embedded platform has a bewildering array of SOCs and doesn't have platform commonality like there is for x86. You can see how in the Linux world they keep trying to reduce the number of kernels needed (last I read was around 5) and then GPU support also has issues (binary blobs). I suspect it is far too much development effort to add the platform and driver support for existing WP7 phones. The best thing Microsoft could do is provide an upgrade program for the early adopters, but not announce details in advance.

One important bit of the initial iPhone was realising that there was no need for a constrained software platform, and instead using a Unix kernel and user space. Platforms like RIM's, Windows CE, Symbian, PalmOS etc were all focussed on being in a very constrained environment (memory, CPU). They jumped through hoops in the name of efficiency and made application developers do the same.

iOS is profligate, with kernel commonality with MacOS, wasting huge amounts of CPU and memory by comparison. But that doesn't really matter because there are hundreds of megahertz and megabytes of memory then and gigas of both now. You can take advantage of them to provide a far superior user experience and developer experience. And that is what matters these days.

<comment><USER7> _As for updating the phones, the ARM embedded platform has a bewildering array of SOCs_

I thought only Qualcomm SoCs (or just a particular SoC?) was certified for running WP7? That doesn't sound like a bewildering array.

From [http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2011/05/20/nokia-to-use-st- er...](http://www.mobiletechworld.com/2011/05/20/nokia-to-use-st- ericsson-u8500-soc-for-its-windows-phone-8-devices/)

 _As you already know Qualcomm is the only certified SoC manufacturer for Windows Phone 7_

<comment><USER6> My quoted statement is true - I didn't mean to imply that WP7 is supported on a wide variety and it is effectively just one small family.

But I believe Windows 8 hasn't been ported to that SOC, and making each ARM port is significantly more effort (especially logistical) than x86. Windows CE drivers won't work, so they'd essentially have to do most drivers from scratch. And such a port would only be pertinent to the "legacy" installed base of WP7, and not to the shiny tablets Microsoft is obsessed with today.

More accurately this is what I think Microsoft would have to do in order to provide a WP7 upgrade:

* Reimplement drivers for the SOCs and other hardware used

* Provide a compatible system initialization mechanism (aka boot loader). Note "secure" UEFI being used for Windows 8 but not WP7.

* Provide an upgrader program that downloads your data, wipes the device and puts the new operating system back on with a close to zero chance of bricking should anything go wrong during the process. (This is very hard.)

* Put your data back onto the device, including conversion of file formats where the app implementation is different between WP7 and WP8.

* Ensure reasonable continuity of system apps between WP7 and WP8

* Refund all app purchases since WP7 apps won't work on WP8 (or store credit)

* Implement a DRM mechanism compatible with WP7 content

* Do lots of testing to make sure the OS and apps don't break in the more constrained hardware of WP7 devices which predate WP8 hardware specs by about two years.

This is a huge amount of work for little reward. In their shoes once WP8 is released and devices available then I'd go to existing WP7 owners and provide a simple upgrade path (eg trade in your device and get $200 credit to a WP8 device). But I wouldn't announce this in advance otherwise people would take advantage of it.

<comment><USER8> You say a lot of work for little reward, but the cost of them giving a big "fuck you" to WP7 early adopters is a much higher cost than the salaries required to pay programmers/managers to port WP8 to WP7 hardware. Why would anyone buy a WP8 device after this debacle? They basically killed WP8 before it even started. In order for WP8 to succeed, they need early adopters and loyalists to evangelise WP for them for free. They've killed any loyalty anyone might've had for the WP platform. These users will ditch WP when their contract expires and tell all their friends and family members to buy Android or iPhone.

As I see it, MS has only two choices to save their WP platform: priperly port WP8 to WP7 hardware, or give WP7 users free WP8 phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What people might fail to realize is that Nokia knew that WP 8 was coming. They probably knew as soon as they started making WP 7 devices. That's why they've shipped what like 2 or 3 devices on it?

Nokia didn't get thrown under a bus any more than RIM did by their own platform. No, both RIM and Nokia could have seen the iOS/Android writing on the wall 2 or 3 years ago for sure, or even 5 years ago when the iPhone launched.

Instead, they buried their heads in the sand and hoped that iOS and Android would be a fad that would pass. Instead RIM and Nokia might have just been a fad for a few years. Already happened to Palm. Already happened to Windows Mobile.

The only reason Nokia went with Windows Phone was the billions of dollars in platform payments that Microsoft made to keep Nokia alive long enough to make the transition work. That might not have been enough money and MSFT might need to outright buy Nokia to keep it afloat, but the good news is that by the time they do that Nokia should be cheaper than Skype was when Microsoft bought them.

<comment><USER10> Totally agree.

I'm not sure what alternatives people see for Nokia. Symbian clearly couldn't compete, and their "next-gen" OS was deeply troubled. They could have gone with Android, and been competing directly against Samsung (who is, honestly, better at manufacturing) or tried to be the dominant player in a new market.

Clearly, they've had issues. I continue to hold out hope that they'll pull off a pivot, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > 1 + 1 = more than 2

Or you might say, 1 + 1 > 2.

<comment><USER12> I think he meant 1 + 1 = x and the rest of the article was trying to figure out what x was. x > 2? x = 2? x = 0.5?</comment></comment>


Firefox: the new Internet Explorer? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.boxuno.com/2014/01/seriously-firefox-come-on.html

<comment><USER2> Chrome (Not Chromium, although it still has parts) could be classed as Spyware. It sends pretty much everything you do to Google (URL suggestions, history etc.) and is constantly phoning home. If you don't use the 'Express' settings on Windows 8 you'll notice it asks you if you wish to send your BROWSING HISTORY to Microsoft 'to improve prefetching performance'.

Firefox is one of the only browsers out that still respects your privacy. Same can not be said for many.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been saying this for a while & Chrome is next ... actually Chrome is about to become Windows, full of bloatware. Full of things installed that no one uses, processes doing things that have no use to any every day user.

<comment><USER4> Strange, cause I see the same essential Chrome I had 5-6 years ago. What has changed? (I don't even run extensions, for that matter).

<comment><USER5> Exactly! It won't become bloated unless you install a million extensions and apps that you don't like. haha</comment></comment></comment>


The SUSE Open Source Policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.suse.com/c/the-suse-open-source-policy/ <comment><USER2> A more relevant link seems to be the actual policy:

[https://opensource.suse.com/suse-open-source- policy](https://opensource.suse.com/suse-open-source-policy)</comment>


The Two Middle Classes - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2020/02/27/the-two-middle-classes/ <comment><USER2> > This class has become increasingly hereditary, in part due to the phenomena > of well-educated people marrying each other—between 1960 and 2005, the share > of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees > nearly doubled, from 25 – 48 percent.

A large part of that may be due to availability. In 1959 (closest year to 1960 I found data for [1]), 6% of US women had degrees, and 10.3% of men.

If every person wanted to marry someone with a degree, there would only be enough women with degrees for about 60% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees.

If the actual number was 25%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees about 42% as often as was theoretically possible.

In 2005, it was 26.5% of women and 28.9% of men with degrees, allowing in theory for about 93% of men with degrees to marry women with degrees, if everyone with a degree wanted to marry someone else with a degree.

If it is actually 48%, then men with degrees were marrying women with degrees about 52% as often as was theoretically possible, up from 42% in 1959.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational- attai...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment- of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The article focuses a little bit on homeownership, and its supposed relationship to opposing feudalism, but fails to realise that the current system of land ownership is what has caused this concentration of land, as well as creating a new feudal system. See Georgism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism)) for an explanation of this idea, something thinkers as early as Adam Smith contemplated (in a less developed form).

</comment><comment><USER4> It's an interesting and somewhat useful take on things, but like a dog wearing pants, things just don't seem to fit very well.

First, I do think it's ridiculous that he takes it as a given that Oligarchs favour climate policy. Yes, I can see how someone can point to Musk and .... I dunno Al Gore? and try to make the point, but for every Musk-a-like, there are many dozens of rich people very deeply vested in the fossil industry. I don't think any serious survey of the financial interests of the global superrich will support this view.

Second, while he alludes to the lack of homeownership amongst the young the fact that the single biggest cost-of-living expense (and it's incredible growth during the last decade) is large controlled by his embattled "yeomanry" gets ignored. It very much complicates his story to realize that his supposed victims are in fact profiting handsomely and generally cause much pain to the supposedly superior "clerisy". Just think of the typical academic renting from an older person in any large city today and you get a good sense of how wrong his story is.

<comment><USER5> You are assuming the "yeomanry" mainly consists of the old, but I think that's an overly narrow and basically false assumption. The participants in the yellow vest protests in France - largely members of "yeomanry" I would think - are as much Gen X and Millenial as they are Baby Boomers.

As for the oligarchs, there are certainly wealthy individuals entrenched in the traditional fossil fuel industries, but the number of these individuals is dwarfed by the oligarchs in Media, Finance, Government, Technology etc, who are much farther removed both in business and culture from traditional modes of energy production and as such are able to take and advocate for radical positions on environmental policy without regard to the consequences for the "yeomanry".

This story plays out across the spectrum of issues that society contends with today. In general, sometimes for the same and sometimes for different reasons, elites in the corporate world and also members of the "clerisy" both desire a breakdown of traditional society to further their own agendas. In the case of the former that agenda is defined by profit seeking and in the case of the latter it is defined by philosophical and social beliefs.

So you see, I think while this piece is vague and steps on its own toes at points, it is addressing a real conflict that exists and is growing in contemporary society.

<comment><USER6> But the yellow vests are overwhelmingly lower class - and in France you might even say peasantry.

Weather or not some rich people are using these people by manipulating them is another question

<comment><USER5> That hasn't been my impression. While they may not be business owners, I think many of the yellow vests could be considered working middle class.

<comment><USER6> Not by the normal definitions

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article claims the surprise result of the last Australian election as a rejection of action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The consensus in Australia is that people simply didn't like the leader of the opposition as a TV personality. Also, Australian attitudes to climate change have been rather dramatically modified by events since that election.

<comment><USER8> Whilst I don't doubt the truth of this, I find there's often a deeper reason why people "just don't like" someone. Sometimes it's because that someone has ideals which challenge the assumptions of too many people. Other times it's because the media has an agenda which is at odds with that person's principles, and therefore choose to portray that person in a particularly negative light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is a bit confused. It pits the left and right middle classes against each other and also against the oligarchy, and then brings up how Trump stands against the left middle class without mentioning how much he represents and supports the oligarchy that systematically takes advantage of both the right and the left.

It also tries to cast the left middle class as allies of the oligarchy by bringing populist green energy fearmongering, without mentioning that it is in fact fossil fuels that a) enrich and entrench the oligarchy, and b) reinforce centralized infrastructure tendencies over distributed ones. Lots of communities have space for renewable energy generation on-site; almost no communities could produce their own fossil fuels.

Finally, scarcity drives most of the forces that oligarchs benefit from, so naturally the oligarchy wants us to stay on fossil fuels. Renewables are the populist, conservative solution that's better for families and communities than for corporations, but the mega-rich right-wing fossil fuel magnates have fooled their poorer and less-educated right-wing compatriots into thinking otherwise.

<comment><USER10> It's interesting the way you equate fossil fuels with scarcity and renewable energy with abundance, when renewables are still a tiny minority of the world energy supply. In reality, it's fossil fuels that allow for energy abundance, while the movement to transition to renewables is accompanied by energy austerity: less driving, less air travel, less meat consumption.

<comment><USER9> Our fossil-fuel-backed energy "abundance" is the same as the mortgage-backed financial "abundance" we had in 2007 and the international-kidnapping-backed labor "abundance" of pre-Civil-War America. It's a loan the oligarchy takes out with no intent to pay it back. The alternative is not "austerity", just living within one's means and not externalizing one's own cost of living.

<comment><USER10> That's a fair argument to make, it's just completely different from the original argument you were making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is absurdly contradictory to attribute declining homeownership to "homeowners did poorly in asset-based prosperity".

</comment><comment><USER12> From the article:

> A remarkable 57 percent of people who owned their own home supported Johnson > compared to barely 22 percent for Labour.

This analysis is deeply superficial. Let me suggest a trivial alternative to the suggested interpretation: that people are more likely to own a home as they grow older, and that the primary division between Conservative and Labour voters in the last election was by age.

e.g. [https://twitter.com/drmuig/status/1205796472194830336](https://twitter.com/drmuig/status/1205796472194830336)

Now, my writing this doesn't prove my claim, but I've already demonstrated an alternative take on political "allegiance" that seems at least as likely as the groupings suggested in the article.

It's lovely to wave one's hands around like this Quillette article does, painting broad strokes and telling big stories. But the handful of citations at the end do almost nothing to prop up his story, which while not implausible, really needs more substantial evidence to make it believable.

</comment><comment><USER13> Class tension has been a fact of life since the dawn of civilization. But in healthy societies, different classes are able to work together to bring about positive change. There's no reason in principle why small business owners, engineers, reporters, professors, priests, police, soldiers, teachers, and even oligarchs, shouldn't want to work together for the betterment of all. The real question, to which I didn't find an answer in the article, is why in our current society these class tensions have become so much more vicious.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was expecting a piece covering the growing gap between the traditional middle class, which seems to be falling, and the upper-middle class, which seems to be doing better in recent decades.

Instead, what we have is a attempt to separate out the middle class into left and right sections. I don't really see it.

> No president has ever incurred the wrath of the clerisy—the media, the > entertainment industry, academia—more than Donald Trump. But Trump retains > record support among the small business people on Main Street, particularly > in the manufacturing and energy-dependent parts of the country.

Perhaps the author has failed to see the split between "mainstream" media and right-wing media over the last decade, and the massive reach the right-wing media has these days - with the largest cable news shows, the largest radio news/commentary shows, and frequently the most interactions on social media. One could reasonably conclude there is a "right" clerisy, with academia replaced by think-tanks, that is very competitive with the "left" version he defines, though this might cause problems with his entire premise.

> The climatistas' appeal is not likely to improve as they increasingly > advocate the elimination of ownership of single-family houses...

Ah yes, the proposals of a single random professor does seem like a good representation of a "climate-friendly density regime".

There's other issues to pick at with this piece ("ultra-green policies", climate policy supported by oligarchs, etc.), but I think it's better to point to someone who covers the same issues to some degree in more convincing manner.

[https://mattstoller.substack.com/](https://mattstoller.substack.com/)

Stoller takes a look at the current state of the economy through the lens of monopoly and big business, and I find his analysis to match the world I see with much greater accuracy. Kotkin mentions a lot of the issues in his section on "the embattled yeomanry", but fails to consider causes that lead to this. He'll talk about concentration of wealth, but fails to conclude any negative effects it might have. And it's truly curious how he moves from increasing corporate concentration in one paragraph to fighting against climate policy in the next.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a publication with a long history of presenting both interesting and sloppy thinking, sometimes in the same article. It tends to value libertarian (or -ish) takes relatively uncritically, and have some bizarre obsessions (by which I mean, topics taken up with a frequency all out of proportion to any impact).

That isn't to say they aren't worth reading, but that this article is flawed in a characteristic way.

<comment><USER16> Yeah this essay is a mess. Smacks of sociopolitical myth-making, not credible analysis. The thing it seems most like is a vehicle to lump scientists into the same category as religious figures. Bare tribalism wearing the clothes of public intellectualism

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the modern term for the clerisy is the Professional Managerial Class or "PMC" — and the definition of the working class has been expanded to include "service industry" workers.

<comment><USER8> Not sure that's accurate. The article suggests the "clerisy" operates largely outside the market system, e.g. doctors, lawyers, with the exception possibly being consultants. The PMC is very much a class in the market system.

<comment><USER18> Not at all. The large majority of the PMC works in the context of large corporations. Although the corporations themselves might be subject to market forces, individuals within them navigate bureaucracies and politics just as much as a random government employee. Moreover, all of these large corporations closely cooperate with government.

The fact that a corporation has an exterior interface with the market doesn't change that most people in it don't deal with the market day-to-day. Even those who do form that interface are relatively insulated from it: a market analyst working to set prices still is evaluated by an internal bureaucracy, not the market itself. Only people in sales really end up exposed to the market because it's so easy to come up with a metric of their performance that's legible to the interior bureaucracy.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, working in a large corporation is very different to working in a public institution. For example, in my experience, your salary is much more of a negotiation between yourself and your direct superiors. You can highlight the value/profit your bring to the company, and if they underestimate you the you can change to a higher paying job somewhere else. That opportunity just doesn't exist in public industries where pay scales are rigidly set to the number of years of experience you have, or the specific job title. You can argue all you want but unless you're absolutely exceptional (undergrad paper in Nature level exceptional) you'll get nowhere.

One of the reasons that teachers and doctors have such absurdly poor working conditions and pay (in the UK at least) relative to the value they bring to society, is that they're mostly paid via the state so the only way they can demonstrate their value is through striking. If the government takes a hard line of strikes and public spending then those industries suffer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This essay is a total mess. This "neo-clerisy" thing to me smacks of tribalism dressed up, ironically, as public intellectualism. It's a fractal of cognitive dissonance

</comment><comment><USER19> The most interesting point made is that secular societies still have a clerisy (or clergy? What's the difference?). People who are powerful but not rich; deriving their power from moral authority; and highly dogmatic.

The details of the piece don't have quite enough support given how contraversial they are. That doesn't mean the author is wrong though. Worth more exploration and discussion.

</comment><comment><USER20> Think of two middle-classes like Industrial vs Tech. The atoms world of America is a world of decline and tech for now is on ascendance. That will not continue perpetually, sooner or later the tech boom will end and re- industrialization of US will begin. But that will need us going through lot of pain, suffering and healing.

<comment><USER21> > That will not continue perpetually, sooner or later the tech boom will end > and re-industrialization of US will begin.

What makes you think the US is going to ramp up manufacturing again?

<comment><USER20> Unsustainability of long supply chains. The coronavirus is just chapter 1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This distinction is pointless for the people it purports to classify. An HVAC engineer working for a university is no different than an HVAC engineer working for a market driven company. Pretending that they are in two different middle classes is bullshit.

This article is a big struggle to fit people into bad classifications and suffers readability (and a point in general) because of it. An article grouping middle class members based on toilet paper orientation would be more interesting.

<comment><USER23> > An HVAC engineer working for a university is no different than an HVAC > engineer working for a market driven company.

Mostly true, but not completely. The private company has to serve customers at least as well as the competition; the university's outfit has to do not _too_ much worse than what they could get from an outside supplier.

Compare the university administrator to the HVAC company manager, and the difference widens. Compare the university president to the HVAC company owner, and it widens a lot further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm always surprised to see Quillette show up here. For all the complaints about partisan bickering, politics in tech, etc. Quillette is an obviously biased political opinion page. (Not that I have a problem with bias in media -- in fact I'd much rather have opinionated media rather than the milquetoast 'both sides in equal measure' media we seem to strive for today.)

<comment><USER25> There aren't a ton of quillette posts upvoted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=quillette.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=quillette.com)

I wouldn't say they really stand for anything other than "opposiste of political correctness" regardless of the topic. They post articles that would never be allowed in other media.

<comment><USER24> Yep. They're only breaking into the main page a couple times a month. Still surprises me.

And judging by the replies here, seems like it surprises a bunch of other people. I'm not sure what the "opposite of political correctness" is except tilting at a strawman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It describes a part of the middle class that gets its income from the market and another part that gets its income from non-market sources such as universities and the government and I found it a useful lens through which to view current events.

<comment><USER6> Um middle class university jobs are badly paid compared to professionals working at say a FANG

<comment><USER27> They're secure though.

<comment><USER6> Not really there are lots and lots of academics going from short term contract to short term contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> People seem surprised that the article is a confused polemic meant to generate clicks. Is this the first time they've heard of Quillette or something?

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there a term for this flowery, overwrought writing style that takes half a page to make a point?

<comment><USER30> Bloviation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I thought Quillette had been blacklisted on HN. It's a right-wing rag and never leads to any interesting discussion.

<comment><USER32> I neither condone nor condemn your assessment, but I do agree it's somewhat relevant to keep these things in mind:

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

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The "class of public intellectuals" that Quillete likens to the Second Estate largely parallels the formation of the _nomenklatura_ in the Soviet Union:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura)

A more cynical, but illuminating, depiction of the way this class came to be recognized and criticized was given in an old _New Yorker_ article about why Americans don't like Hillary Clinton -- _from 1996_ :

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/02/26/hating- hillary](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/02/26/hating-hillary)

>In the sixties and seventies, neoconservatives liked to talk about the ascent of "the New Class," consisting of highly educated professionals who were, in Norman Podhoretz's words, "making a serious bid to dislodge and replace the business and commercial class which had on the whole dominated the country for nearly a century." Podhoretz ascribes to Irving Kristol (father of William) the insight that the New Class "represented itself as concerned only with the general good, the good of others (especially the poor and the blacks), but what it really wanted was to aggrandize its own power." As the only First Lady thus far to have come from its ranks, Hillary Clinton has suffered the fluctuating fortunes of the New Class itself. Among her peers, you'll hear, variously expressed, a very basic sentiment: finally, a First Lady who's one of us. "It was just as if we'd known each other all our lives," says Carly Simon, who has spent time at Martha's Vineyard with the First Lady; when Hillary admired a naïve Haitian painting in Simon's house, Simon made a present of it. "It was an easy, Ivy League kind of camaraderie. Like, 'You went to Wellesley? Oh, I went to Sarah Lawrence.' And, 'Oh, you like that kind of art? I like that kind of art.' " But if you do not feel part of that "us"—if, indeed, the very idea of Haitian folk art on the Vineyard makes you shift uneasily—you may feel the tug of an answering sentiment: that this First Lady is _one of them_.

Both this _Quillette_ piece and the _New Yorker_ article are presaged and, in my opinion, upstaged by Hayek's 1960 diatribe "The Intellectuals and Socialism":

[https://mises- media.s3.amazonaws.com/Intellectuals%20and%20S...](https://mises- media.s3.amazonaws.com/Intellectuals%20and%20Socialism_4.pdf)

Hayek's piece seems to me to be the founding treatise of modern libertarianism, with regard to the parts that are valuable at least. The central hypocrisy of modern liberalism is the way in which it serves the selfish interests of its most powerful proponents -- the managerial state -- while supposing to be egalitarian. Unfortunately, Hayek himself simply became increasingly cynical and decreasingly coherent towards the end of his life, after publishing his most famous works from a more moderate perspective, so we didn't get to hear a conclusion to this train of thought.

It's not obvious how to overcome this limitation; all ideologies need a base of support, and people on average tend to be selfish enough that we notice it. Andrew Yang's proposal to give citizens money earmarked for political donations ( _" Democracy Dollars"_) seems, to me, the most practical step currently available towards making politics more participatory and less hierarchical: it can foster the growth of competition among political campaigns for ordinary people's support with floating prices, reminiscent of a system we usually think of as reliable. Innovation in politics is already happening (c.f. _Cambridge Analytica_ ) and the IP is being monetized, but only a few people are currently allowed to play.

<comment><USER5> While I have not read the Hayek work you mention, it is probably drawn from the same philosophical waters as a work that I recommend to anyone with an interest in this sort of thinking: "The Opium of the Intellectuals" by Raymond Aron. Aron was a French philosopher who contemplated the Intellectuals' fascination and infatuation with socialism and, at the time and place of writing (1950's France), Communism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I saw the title and really wanted to like this article, but I have to say I got lost in the flowery language and don't really get the point.

<comment><USER35> Basically, it's a long-winded way of dividing the middle class into white- collar and blue-collar and pointing out that blue-collar has taken it in the shorts and is angry.

It's not wrong. But, as always, it projects nothing _actionable_. What does that blue-collar cohort _DO_ to regain economic well-being?

<comment><USER36> While Brahmins are "white-collar" pretty much by definition, Vaishyas/yeomanry clearly encompasses both blue-collar and white-collar groups. So I don't think the traditional "blue- vs. white-collar" distinction is quite the same thing as what this article is about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> So does Michael O Chruch's "3-ladder system of social class in the U.S." need revising?

[https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183427/https://michaeloc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151006183427/https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-3-ladder- system-of-social-class-in-the-u-s/)

<comment><USER38> He's just an opinionated software engineer, not a forefront of sociological and economic thought.

<comment><USER39> Is this the same guy who got fired (or resigned?) from Google a week after getting hired for something silly like refusing to sign the employee code of conduct?

<comment><USER40> No, that's a different guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Like the upper middle class? Novel concept.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is this a publication that normally publishes articles that are clearly well outside their authors' area of expertise and presents them in a semi-academic style after clearly doing no fact-checking?

Never mind silliness like analyzing Trump's "record support" in a survey begun during Trump's tenure, the way he presents wrong statistics with the help of the word "particularly" is downright ridiculous. People who like pizza tend to be shorter, particularly children.

</comment><comment><USER43> This felt very close to right wing propaganda. Had to stop reading about 2/3 of the way in.

<comment><USER44> It's Quillete -- libertarian right wing.</comment></comment>


BranchOut Grew 2500% In January, Going From 10K To 250K Monthly Users - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/branchout/

<comment><USER2> I dont use FB, but I do use Linkedin - however - the comparison that Linkedin's 70 million users to FBs 600+MM users as seemingly a potential threat/issue to Linkedin doesnt account for the quality of the userbase.

Linkedin's usefulness does not require me to waste hours a day on the site - but it works perfectly to keep track of those who I want to keep track of.

I am sure that BranchOut will have a lot of users - but I don't think they will carry the same weight in the industries I follow as linkedin.</comment>


Making open source projects accessible with Vagrant - <AUTHOR> http://www.wesmcclure.com/making-open-source-projects-accessible-with-vagrant/ <comment><USER2> That's a good idea. Getting an unknown open source project to build can sometimes be a lot of work. Especially if it depends on particular versions of tools and libraries that may conflict with the ones other projects require.

Perhaps one day providing the develop environment's definition in the form of a Vagrant VM (or, probably better, a Dockerfile) will be as common sense as providing README and LICENSE files.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Perhaps one day providing the develop environment's definition in the form > of a Vagrant VM (or, probably better, a Dockerfile) will be as common sense > as providing README and LICENSE files.

I would hope this becomes a trend. I was very happy when Discourse first went open source and included a Vagrantfile for development in their git repo, made getting up and running much easier (especially since I'm running on windows a majority of the time and certain libraries don't always play nice).</comment></comment>


Unreal Engine 4.1 Update Preview - <AUTHOR> https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/41-update-preview

<comment><USER2> CryEngine, Steam, Unity (engine), LeadWerks, and now Unreal. We're getting closer. This is beautiful :)

<comment><USER3> It's almost hard to believe how far Linux gaming has come just in the past, what, two years?

I think it really started with the Humble Indie Bundle's mandatory Linux support, accelerated with the help of Unity and Kickstarter, and really achieved mainstream legitimacy with Steam. As long as the GPU manufacturers cooperate and write good drivers, the future looks very bright indeed.

<comment><USER2> I think worldwide support/adaption of the Steam Machines will basically make it so GPU manufacturers have really no choice but to write amazing Linux drivers. If they don't then they'll more than likely be chosen less by companies producing (yearly?) Steam Machines.

<comment><USER4> Unless they only write good custom drivers for hardware they know will be used in Steam machines. Don't know of any reason why they'd do that, though... I'm hopeful :)

Finally. The year of the Linux desktop is upon us!

<comment><USER5> There won't be "known hardware" for steam machines[0]. They will allow AMD and Nvidia video cards with no specifics about which cards will be allowed.

[0] [http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown](http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortionaly the unreal editor does not work.

Only deployment.

<comment><USER3> For now. One of the developers mentioned on Reddit that editor support is planned for the future.

Plus, unlike Unity, you could theoretically port it yourself. Paying $20/month gives you complete access to the source on GitHub, and they're going to start accepting pull requests very soon.

<comment><USER7> Eh? Isn't the github repo for the engine source only? AFAIK the editor would still be closed source.

<comment><USER8> The github repo contains the entire engine and editor source. The only thing not included there is closed console support, which you have to ask for just to ensure NDAs are in place. So, yes, you could in fact port it over to Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Say you have not history of game development, blank slate. Which one would you choose to go with if you were a Mac owner?

<comment><USER10> It depends on your level of programming expertise and how deep you want to get into the discipline, and what sort of games you want to make.

If you want to make 3d games for major platforms and are of moderate to high programming talent, it's hard to beat Unity at this time. The Unity Asset Store is an inexpensive source of great starter projects, temp assets, and commonly needed libraries.

That said, making 3d games at all is deeply nontrivial and I wouldn't recommend it as a solo hobby owing to the very large surface area (art, design, game design, geometry, game logic, tooling, etc.). You can get to the 85% level in everything but modern consumers will be unsatisfied with the quality.

For 2D, especially for getting to a shippable product, I might try LOVE or Moai, although both of those are on shakier foundations support-wise. Don't let anyone tell you having anything to do with Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good news, maybe I can open my UT3 box and play it soon.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can't wait to play UT99 on Mint

<comment><USER13> UT99 has been playable on Linux since like _forever_.

<comment><USER14> It's certainly not trivial to get it running on a current Linux distribution, it's easier to just use wine.</comment></comment></comment>


YouTube's road to HTTPS - <AUTHOR> https://youtube-eng.blogspot.com/2016/08/youtubes-road-to-https.html <comment><USER3> > We found that HTTPS improved quality of experience on most clients: by > ensuring content integrity, we virtually eliminated many types of streaming > errors

Wow, what were carriers doing to the streams?!

<comment><USER4> It's turning out that HTTPS is more important for content integrity than for security. It's not surveillance that's the big problem for static content. It's middle boxes designed with the delusion they're entitled to mess with the content.

<comment><USER5> _> It's not surveillance that's the big problem for static content._

Why would you say this? Surveilling what URLs someone is accessing / content they are watching / books they're checking out of the library has been a major security issue, historically.

<comment><USER4> HTTPS doesn't conceal the domain, or the length, or the order of requests. It's less of an issue for Google, because so much stuff comes from one domain. For small sites, figuring out who read what isn't a hard problem. In practice, you can probably buy that info from an ad tracking service.

<comment><USER5> You didn't qualify your claim as only pertaining to small sites. You simply said surveillance is not the big problem for static content. Given that most static content is served by large sites and the article is about Youtube, you haven't really supported that claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a strange thing to automatically (I assume) add to the end of these blogposts:

> Sean Watson, Software Engineer, recently watched "GoPro: Fire Vortex Cannon > with the Backyard Scientist."

> Jon Levine, Product Manager, recently watched "Sega Saturn CD - <USER2> > after 20 years."

<comment> TD-Linux At least they didn't watch anything embarassing. My Youtube recommendations page is a dumpster fire.

<comment><USER7> TD-Linux: Hacker News Commenter - Last watched "Relaxing Background Videos Volume IIV: 4 Hours of a Peaceful Dumpster Fire (with sound)".

<comment><USER8> I've watched worse, such as 10 hour loops

<comment> TD-Linux Indeed, I had FUKKIRETA X 9 on my Watch it Again. I did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be interesting to know how much overhead HTTPS added for them. Eg, a comparison of CPU usage between HTTP and HTTPS on the server side, whether or not they are using hardware offloads, etc.

Netflix has some papers about their experience transitioning to HTTPS:

[https://people.freebsd.org/~rrs/asiabsd_2015_tls.pdf](https://people.freebsd.org/~rrs/asiabsd_2015_tls.pdf) [https://people.freebsd.org/~rrs/asiabsd_tls_improved.pdf](https://people.freebsd.org/~rrs/asiabsd_tls_improved.pdf)

However, I expect the YouTube workload would be vastly different from the Netflix workload due to the sheer size of the YouTube catalog.

<comment><USER10> I would also be interested in that. What differnce would you expect from the catalog size? I would guess that aside from maybe the handshake, decoupling storage and encryption would not be worth it in all cases where the storage medium is slower than AES-NI and this would apply even more to youtube than to netflix, exactly because of the bigger catalog.

<comment><USER9> With a small catalog, you can pre-encode everything. That means that in the unencrypted case, media files can be sent directly from the kernel's page cache, as unmapped I/O. Eg, the data is not even touched by the CPU. But in the encrypted case, you're suddenly touching every byte with the CPU, thereby doubling your memory bandwidth requirements.

With a large catalog like YouTube's, I would expect that most of the titles are saved in some master format, and are encoded on the fly. That means that the data is already being touched by the CPU to re-encode it on the fly for whatever format is needed by a particular client.

My expectation is that if YouTube was re-encoding on the fly due to the catalog size, they would suffer less of a CPU hit than Netflix did, so SSL would be "easier" for them to implement.

<comment><USER11> > encoded on the fly

no, and often their encoders will go bad and produce invalid output (blocky/purple) in one of the resolutions/formats. There is ZERO options for fixing that other than deleting your video and reuploading (losing all the comments/upvotes). Even if you have 200K subs there is no way of contacting YT for help, mmaybe they will speak with you at 1mil subs :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > In short, some devices do not fully support modern HTTPS.

I'd love to know which devices, and what "modern HTTPS" features they don't support.

<comment><USER13> Its only fairly recently that Android got TLS 1.2 support with 4.1 in 2012. The problem is that for years budget Chinese android phones were shipping with 2.3, which was very light on resources and good for low powered phones with minimal ram.

I believe this changed with an effort to use less ram and cpu with 4.4 or 5.0, but by then millions of these phones were sold and are still out there. Heck, up until a year or two ago, these were on shelves in the US at budget places like Cricket. I think almost 10% of Androids in the wild still don't support 1.2. Maybe more considering Google has limited snooping abilities in China and may not fully know the extent of these installs.

IE7/IE8/IE9 have a combined global marketshare of about 8% also.

<comment><USER14> > The problem is that for years budget Chinese android phones were shipping > with 2.3, which was very light on resources and good for low powered phones > with minimal ram.

Not just budget Chinese phones. Low-end Samsung phones and such, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there an 'Unencrypted user traffic by device type' [1] chart just for YouTube traffic, as opposed to all Google services?

Specifically, are non-HTTPS connections coming from desktops, mobile/device outside of an official app, or mobile/device through an official app?

[1] [https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https?hl=en#device...](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https?hl=en#devices)

</comment><comment><USER16> So annoying when websites hijack pinch-to-zoom touch events and replace them with "load a random article".

</comment><comment><USER17> > Today we added YouTube to Google's HTTPS transparency report. We're proud to > announce that in the last two years, we steadily rolled out encryption using > HTTPS to 97 percent of YouTube's traffic.

What's the point of the report if you only add things that are already in good shape?

</comment><comment><USER18> > You watch YouTube videos on everything from flip phones to smart TVs

what year is this?!

<comment><USER19> I am less curious about the year and more curious as to how the hell flip phones are rendering video. Like 64p 3GPP or something realtime transcoded?

<comment><USER20> ASCII art.

<comment><USER21> aalib and aaxine, baby!

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mGphynqDkS4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mGphynqDkS4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Last I checked, YouTube still does not support encryption when broadcasting a live stream.

</comment><comment><USER23> How'd finance decrease

<comment><USER24> The irony eh!</comment></comment>


Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/09/18/disaster-mysql-5-5-flushing/ <comment><USER2> TLDR: on big machines with lots of memory (72GB), vanilla MySQL has great performance but suffers from minutes-long "stalls" during which throughput drops to zero. The only viable way the author found to avoid the stalls is to decrease throughput by 20x by cutting the amount of memory MySQL uses (thus wasting the hardware).

This is really terrible news for anyone trying to do high-throughput DB operations on mySQL.

The only "good" news is that the average web app isn't going to be running on hardware anywhere near as powerful as this, so you are highly likely to already be in the "slower", consistent state (e.g. anything less than 40GB of RAM).

<comment><USER3> Not really, if you are using hardware of this size chances are you are hosting it yourself and can install SSDs.

Solid State Drives is the easiest solution to most problems requiring high I/O throughput and data persistence.

Too bad most cloud hosting vendors are way behind on offering anything like that.

EDIT: Not sure why this comment got down voted, but perhaps whoever did it might comment on why using SSD is not a solution.

<comment><USER4> Using SSD is kinda "throw more hardware at the problem so that we don't need to fix our precious crappy software" type of solution.

<comment><USER5> Although abhorred by software makers such as most HN-readers, throwing hardware at the problem is often the fastest and cheapest way to tackle performance issues.

Especially when it indeed is "crappy software" that will take major effort to rewrite/refactor.

Hardware is cheaper than developers, and the former doesn't fail to deliver half as often as the latter...

<comment><USER6> The problem with this principle is that adding hardware tends to scale linearily at best whereas improving an algorithm sometimes buys you an orders of magnitude improvement.

Also, you need to compare the cost of a single developer who fixes innodb to the cost of hardware incurred by _all_ users of innodb who would benefit from the solution.

<comment><USER3> Adding SSD is not linear scaling. SSD has entirely different characteristics from rotational drives which in itself brings 1-3 orders of magnitude I/O performance improvement.

Trying to fit high I/O workloads on spinning disks is a lot like spending your efforts to make your program run on 64K RAM. An interesting challenge, that would surely exercise your coding skills, but would not deliver the optimal performance.

<comment><USER6> I'm not denying the benefits of SSD. I just don't think throwing hardware at a problem caused by bad algorithms is a good general principle. It may still be the best choice in a particular situation and timeframe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome data as usual from Vadim and team. I always thought the upper bound of InnoDB performance was limited by memory and how much you can afford. Now I know different.

I wanted to share some of our data to help in your decision making:

A typical server in our cluster gets 5000 to 7500 TPS:

<http://i.imgur.com/oT26G.png>

This is a 24 hour graph and as you can see there are no multi-minute lockups. We've been extremely happy with the performance our servers are delivering.

The config is 8GB of memory, RAID 1, 2X 15K RPM disks, single Intel E5410 quad core CPU.

Total DB size is around 12GB with around 15 million rows. Our TPS is higher than Vadim's but our data is smaller than the benchmark he uses which is 200 million rows in a 58 GB database.

With the following for innodb:

      innodb_file_per_table = 1
      innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0
      innodb_buffer_pool_size = 5G
      innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M
      innodb_log_file_size = 1024M
      innodb_log_buffer_size = 16M
      innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct = 90
      innodb_thread_concurrency = 4
      innodb_log_group_home_dir = /var/lib/mysql/
      innodb_log_files_in_group = 2

So my approach to avoiding this issue will be to shard to finer granularity and avoid architectures with monolithic DB's. Keep in mind that this only affects your ability to cache greater than around 16GB, so spreading massive data across multiple servers with fast drives and moderate memory will help bring your TPS back up. I would also add that servers with memory > 32GB are very expensive - especially the memory itself. So it may not cost much more to have 5 servers with fast disk and moderate memory vs one server with massive memory.

Having said all that this is obviously a very serious problem and perhaps an opportunity for a talented computer scientist to branch InnoDB and solve it if Oracle doesn't want to.

<comment><USER8> _innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0_

This is cheating, you've effectively disabled the 'D' in ACID; you aren't doing an fsync() at every commit.

<comment><USER7> Cheating what? As I said, it's just a typical server in our cluster and hopefully helpful data.

<comment><USER9> _A value of 1 is required for ACID compliance. You can achieve better performance by setting the value different from 1, but then you can lose at most one second worth of transactions in a crash. With a value of 0, any mysqld process crash can erase the last second of transactions. With a value of 2, then only an operating system crash or a power outage can erase the last second of transactions. However, InnoDB's crash recovery is not affected and thus crash recovery does work regardless of the value._

Just depends whether or not you can deal with a small amount of lost data in the event of a crash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've switched to PostgreSQL several years ago. Bullet proof, exactly the features I need (and more), and no problems like these. Speaking of, I'm about to upgrade my installations to 9.1 now.

<comment><USER11> Are you running an equivalent hardware setup? Similar to:

>Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380 G6, with 72GB of RAM and RAID10 on 8 disks.

Playing devil's advocate - there is no proof that PostgreSQL does not have any teething problems on high capacity hardware either.

<comment><USER12> The issue is x86/x64 being a turd. Throughput of just about everything drops when you go over the 36Gb boundary for some reason. I have no idea why. It can drop by as much as 30%. This is from experience operating VMware on the physically the same type of kit (except with FC SAN / NetApp).

I'd personally rather buy high end SPARC64 kit which has linear performance scalability but we all know what happened to Sun, plus it doesn't run Windows anyway :( _whimpers a little_

<comment><USER13> Be careful of your NUMA boundaries. 20-30% is exactly the cross-bank access cost.

<comment><USER8> That's what I thought too. There are a lot of weird problems that can happen due to NUMA architecture issues. Reading the numactl for me really drives home just how much I don't understand it.

<http://www.linuxmanpages.com/man8/numactl.8.php>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yet another self-promotion article. Oh, we stuff data in memory and then when it is time to write changes on disk everything got frozen! MySQL suck, buy our solution! Nice guys.)

First, it is useless to store data in memory if you want them be committed into disk storage. The general idea here isn't about switching to some new version of mysql or SSD disks, it is about to realize that you have a data- flow inadequate for your one-server architecture.

Second - check-point intervals should be adjusted to your actual data-flow, which means they should be executed often enough. If there is situation of almost constant checkpoint - non-stop data writes, that is the sign that you need to consider sharding/multi-server solution.

The hints that there must be no other disk activity on the same hardware volume or any swapping in OS, I suppose, are obvious. People who have a /var/log and /var/db on the same volume are idiots.

There are also good idea to use one file per table storage and put a data and physical logs on a separate hardware volumes (links are your friends). One raid-X volume that fits all is a quite naive solution. Raid isn't a guaranty of reliability. Replications to a back-up servers are.

Third, when you test your configuration before put it into production, you should tune-up your servers to perform with data and log syncing, and then figure out appropriate buffer sizes and checkpoint intervals. Then, in production, when you're experiencing an increasing flow of queries, you may choice to switch into different syncing strategy and/or more often but a little bit faster checkpoints.

Configuring mysql with huge buffers and no sync means lack of understanding the basic concepts, self-delusion and misuse of software and hardware. ^_^

<comment><USER15> "Yet another self-promotion article. Oh, we stuff data in memory and then when it is time to write changes on disk everything got frozen! MySQL suck, buy our solution! Nice guys.)"

You got this part all wrong. He explicitly said that 'their solution' is unlikely to do any better. This is a real problem.

<comment><USER14> _What to do? I whish I could say you should use Percona Server with XtraDB. If we were using SSD as storage, then I would recommend it._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is this different in MySQL 5.1?

From the article I get the impression that this is a new problem introduced with 5.5.

<comment><USER8> It's not. The adaptive flushing algorithm has improved over the various versions, but checkpointing has been the cause of performance stalls for a long time. Here is an early bug report of the problem from 2006.

<http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=19673>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why does he use flush_method = O_DIRECT?

Last time I checked that was a recipe for terrible performance. We normally leave the flush_method set to default and keep a couple slaves around to minimize the potential for data loss.

<comment><USER15> Common myth. Real answer: it depends. I recently had a bug approved to update the manual: <http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=54306>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't see what was wrong with the second graph. Regular bursts of writes for flushing leaves the disks more idle for low-latency reads. Optimising throughput doesn't mean you have to have a smooth, flat write graph.

(For comparison, see ZFS)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if sharding in some clever way could alleviate the problem. Some way of having another instance processing queries while other one is flushing logs.

</comment><comment><USER19> > Disaster: MySQL 5.5 Flushing

> Disaster: MySQL 5.5

> MySQL

I found your problem right here.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have personally noticed MySQL having horrible performance for views that use joins. Every time a view does a join, it creates a temporary table and you might as well throw indexing out once that happens. I had a query that was taking 4 seconds with a view and used the same sql minus the view and got it down to 5ms. I know I am not being specific to flushing, but still it is an example of a potential performance problem.

<comment><USER21> That sounds like a bad data model and/or bad MySQL usage to me.

<comment><USER20> I recently did learn about the difference between the merge and temptable algorithm approaches a MySQL view can take. I was using the default temptable approach and did not know about the merge algorithm that can be specified for views. By my experience with MySQL's views, MySQL does not do much to optimize execution plans for views.

<comment><USER22> By default MySQL will use the merge algorithm. It will create a temp table if the result of the view is large. You can control what "large" means. That is the better method of controlling the behavior, than potentially telling MySQL that it jeeds to create a multi GB result set but must keep it all in RAM. Read the manual or the O'Reilly book for more info.

Anither option is to use materialized views, which are not natively supported in MySQL, but can easily be simulated.

<comment><USER23> I do not see why views need to be so complex in MySQL. Why not do like in PostgreSQL where they are almost just subqueries saved within the database.

<comment><USER22> That is essentially what they are. The merge algorithm _merges_ your query with the query of the view and returns the result. However, if the query of the view returns a very large result set, it is much faster to pre-flight it, then select against it.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, but letting users specify if views are MERGE or TEMPTABLE seems quite pointless. Why not always use UNDEFINED and let the planner chose. The planner knows which tables are large.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Speed Tips Get Picked Apart - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2009/06/25/google-speed-tips/ <comment><USER2> Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought those PHP tips were more than a little suspect...

      GOOD: echo $_POST['description'];

That really should not have made it past their editorial process.

<comment><USER3> That example was particularly egregious. PHP uses copy-on-write so the temp variable held a pointer to the 500k of data they mentioned, not a copy.

Had they concatenated a small string to the end _then_ PHP wouldn't copied the data and used the MB of memory they alluded to.

That whole document was half baked at best.

EDIT: I went to look at the document to reference the example and noticed that they changed their example. It used to be:

$description = $_POST['description'];

echo $description;

And now it's:

In the following example, imagine if a malicious user had inserted 512KB worth of characters into a textarea field. This would result in 1MB of memory being used!

$description = strip_tags($_POST['description']);

echo $description;

There's no reason to copy the variable above, you can simply do this operation inline and avoid the extra memory consumption:

echo strip_tags($_POST['description']);

So someone is definitely working on making the examples at least match the description.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the feature of assessing slow CSS. I'd never realized that constructs like the following would be "very inefficient":

      #foo p span{
        color: #fff;
      }

<comment><USER5> i read it, but still have to ask why ?

<comment><USER6> it's inefficient because the browser has to search/loop through the DOM looking for the exact pattern of the corresponding css rules, instead of a direct pointer like:

#my_foo_span{ color:#fff }.

<comment><USER7> but they mean different things. one says, all spans which are descendants of divs which are descendants of some elements with id=foo. the other says one element with id=my_foo_span. duplicating rules in CSS to match overly specific IDs defeats one of its major advantages.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


People want other people's self-driving cars to keep pedestrians safe - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/people-want-other-peoples-self-driving-cars-to-keep-pedestrians-safe/ <comment><USER2> I think this is a mostly a false dilemma. It makes most sense that if a collision is unavoidable, brake _hard_ to minimize overall damage/injury. There is no reason a computer-driven car should ever unavoidably find pedestrians in its path except when the pedestrians recklessly got into the car's path. Therefore, why inflict injury to the innocent passengers to save pedestrians who are at fault? It seems like braking and hoping for the best is the best solution, for human drivers as well as computers.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Also, I would consider the automated car to be recklessly driving if it finds itself in that situation as it should not drive faster than its sensors can see a clear path for.

It would be better if the car braked hard, and aligned the car to squarely hit the obstruction so you don't have an offset collision. This would also be better for the pedestrian hit as the middle of a cars hood is softer than the edges and better for the car and its occupants as crash protection will be more effective.</comment></comment>