Google+ Will Dominate Facebook - Here's Why - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/116024884086268367178/posts/j6FbZtpSDJs

<comment><USER3> Weakest support of bold headline ever. I expected sharp insight into some previously ignored market forces to back it up. Instead his argument is "google is making some small inroads with a couple universities".

Do you not remember that google advertises is google+ on pretty much every page it serves. Remember when google placed a giant arrow on it's home page point to google+ shouting "HEY LOOK AT ME". Nobody cares. This isn't 2000, social networks aren't cool anymore. Google has gone to unprecedented lengths to get people to use G+ and has failed spectacularly. The only way Facebook could lose now is if they self implode, leaving G+ to pick up the pieces. The sooner Google realizes that and gets back to solving real problems that matter to the world, the better.

<comment><USER4> > The only way Facebook could lose now is if they self implode, leaving G+ to > pick up the pieces.

...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The only way Google+ will dominate facebook is when facebook will do something to really piss off it's users. Some of this is already happening (I get tons of meme's and cat photos on my feed as opposed to status updates from my friends..). Their algorithms for feeds is sucking a lot lately (and I like Path for that reason..). But as long as people can mindlessly ogle at anyone on Facebook, Google+ is still going to miss the mass market.

As the value proposition of Facebook drops off, Google+ _may_ take over - <USER2> still think it's highly unlikely.

Hangouts are cool though.

<comment><USER6> _The only way Google+ will dominate facebook is when facebook will do something to really piss off it's users._

No, not really. Remember what happened to MySpace? Sometimes people just move on to the next thing. Yes, the network effect is pretty strong for FB, but it has been done before.

<comment><USER5> I think myspace got pretty annoying towards the end with the shitty design and overdone widgets on every page. Facebook was a pretty clean and usable alternative. Personally I couldn't stand myspace pages right around when facebook came in.

Not evolving your design to user requirements or even to make it aesthetically pleasing is also pissing off your users in my book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This strikes me as underpants gnome logic:

1\. Google will allow .edu Google Apps users to activate G+.

2\. ?

3\. G+ will "dominate" Facebook.

<comment><USER8> It took me a second to recall where I first heard "underpants gnome" from. But it's Slashdot of course.

<comment><USER9> Don't want to stray too far off topic, but it is a reference to an episode of South Park [0]

[0] <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO5sxLapAts>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The initial experience of G+ is horrible.

I think everyone here takes it for granted since they've had a Google account since 2005, but I had to setup a couple of accounts recently to utilize G+ and Hangouts and getting friends that weren't part of the network yet was atrocious.

First of all, it looked like I could invite others to my hangout by just an email address, which I did, but they never received the invite. Then we had a hunch that they both had to be part of each others circles, but finding the "Add Friend" functionality where I could simply add an email address was another treasure hunt. FINALLY after finding that dialog buried in the "Circles" dialog, I could add the other account, the other account added me back, and then FINALLY we were able to fire up a Hangout.

Like launching nuclear missels.

<comment><USER11> I share the experience and frustration. Seems like the UX was designed by the same people who design the assembly instructions for baby cribs.

<comment><USER8> The G+ look and feel is way better than FB, IMO. I find FB claustrophobic and almost anxiety-inducing.

<comment><USER10> The G+ UI is great if all of your other friends have Google accounts and have signed up for G+. Pretty sweet.

But for those that haven't signed up for G+ or even worse, don't have a Google account at all, forget about it. I wanted to set up a Hangout for my family members in other states to chat in, but after the catastrophe above, there's no way I am going to try and convey those instructions to others..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I misunderstanding something here? I attend UNC and here we have Microsoft Live Exchange accounts (or whatever they're called, it's forwarded to my Gmail). Is there a way to sign up to Google+ as an .edu user even if your school doesn't use them? Or is it just a mistake by the author?

<comment><USER13> Many schools use google for email, calendars, and chat. It's google for business, but I believe it's free (or relatively cheap) for education institutions. Theoretically all those users would be using Google and perhaps Google+ with enough encouragement.

Many other schools choose MS Live and those students would not necessarily have any reason to use Google+. Interestingly, at least at UMass Boston, the primary justification for MS Live was because MS claims it can identify the physical machines your data is housed on, whereas Google does not make such promises. This is only important for checking off boxes when audited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just joined g+ after google after not using any social network for about two years. I'm not impressed. The UI is just a sea of grey. Everything is just piled on top of each other. I've been keeping up with the changes over at Facebook (with the accounts of friends and relatives), and their UI is better (but not great, either). They do use colors and icons in a more functional manner. g+ is also buggy. I keep having problems where the app just hangs or stops working. I've tried it on a couple of different computers with different setups and I still get bugs. Weird because Gmail is very solid. I would have thought their JS would be a bit more reliable across the board. Maybe its me, though. I do think that what will kill g+ and FB is what I call the privacy wars. This is something that is brewing given the substantial abuse being carried out against civil liberties across the world by these mega corps.

</comment><comment><USER14> So they have a university outreach program ... You do realize Facebook is doing something quite similar as well with their groups product, right?

<comment><USER15> Facebook doesn't have a suite of extremely popular web apps. Every student I know uses gmail.

<comment><USER16> Sure they do. Messages, Photos, Videos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Before anything, Google+ badly needs a complete change in UI. It is very counter intuitive and stupid. Also, they should not be allowing anybody and everybody to add a person in their circles. It is annoying. That said, I think it might really work in their favor if they can execute the plan well, because significant number of active FB users are college students. I think it makes a good selling point to switch.

<comment><USER8> My daughter roped me into using G+ but now I think it's a superior experience to FB in every way. I actually enjoy using G+ (and I thought I had social media fatigue).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> No. Because I refuse to log in with my google credentials to even read your post.

<comment><USER19> I see this complaint a lot when a G+ link is posted here, but Google never asks me to log in. Anyone know why it requires a login from some but not others?

<comment><USER20> I believe it happens when you are already signed in, but the session is expired (or is in some way not fully signed in). It then prompts you to finish the sign in so it can give you a good experience once you're there (for example, the ability to comment, +1, or reshare the post immediately, or add the author to circles).

If you have no session with Google at all, however, no login is requested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's missing from this (and most "why $newcomer will beat $incumbant" claims) is why Facebook can't simply duplicate the feature, and remove it as a differentiator.

As a programmer, and looking at what Facebook can do already, it just doesn't seem like adding a "let everyone from my *.edu see this" permission level would be that hard.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm a grad student, I've been a university student for the better part of the last decade, and let me tell you this: the most universally disliked piece of software on campus is always whatever dreck they make us use for Web services. Admittedly, Google+ is at least modern and attractively engineered, but that misses the point. The point is that students rarely use the social network their university gives them unless their grade depends on it - the university administration seems to be thinking "hmm, kids these days are on the Web a lot, let's give them a Web site", while the students roll their eyes and use Facebook/Twitter/BBM/whatever to get together and get their work done, rather than logging into some extra site to do things they can already do in their existing Web flow.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't read this because I'm not logged in to Google Plus. I think that kinda says something.

</comment><comment><USER24> Neither. Path or something similar on the mobile will quietly take over because the distance between the camera and the upload button will be smaller, and tablets, and more importantly, 5" to 7" phablets, will become the ubiquitous perfect middle ground between telephony and browser and video game console.

FB will be forced to provide a comprehensive export feature by law, which will make the jump easier.

FB knows this.

This is, of course, a personal, subjective viewpoint / projection of the path of least resistance ahead.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting theory but I'm not sure why the results would be much different than when Google pushed G+ on hundreds of millions of GMail users. It helped them put some numbers on the board but I haven't seen any improvement to the (lack of) content on G+ -- granted that is only my personal experience but I don't think I'm alone there. Maybe G+ will be a weird niche hit like the Okurt of education but it's hard for me to see that being enough to overcome the massive Facebook social lock-in effect.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is no reason why Facebook can't create a separate echo-system for each College University and mimic what he is talking about here. Facebook certainly has the resources and brand recognition to do so.

If anything Yammer could probably do this more effectively than anyone else since they already offer this service for companies. Does that mean they will Dominate Facebook? Hrm.

I am a fan of Google+, but I am sorry to say your argument will have to be better than that.

<comment><USER27> Sure. Given enough resources anyone can copy anyone. But then Facebook will be playing catch-up and Google will become the de-facto leader. In a space where the winner takes all, you don't want to be the one that plays catch-up.

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but unrelated to G+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't understand the logic here. Just because Google (and this guy) THINKS that college kids will use this/that this is going to be huge - does not mean it will be.

<comment><USER29> Ah yes, lets skip all forms of projections... I guess the stockmarket will have to close because just because someone thinks a stock will go up it does not mean it will do.

<comment><USER30> No, he's right. There needs to be valid facts on WHY. He's listed a few features, but that doesn't mean it'll get traction at all. Or it doesn't mean that the students will use it in their personal lives too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> ...and the college students most likely already have Facebook accounts.

The author discusses all these things that would be great and engaging if that content the students are going to be posted to G+. The problem is that it isn't. It's going to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and adding more pretty features isn't going to change that.

</comment><comment><USER32> By tying G+ closer to docs, spreadsheets and hangouts with your lecturer I would guess this will bring it more in competition with Linkedin. In this world it becomes more of a business social platform than a friends and family social platform, at least initially.

</comment><comment><USER33> I went in a skeptic, but I wonder if I could hold TA office hours through Google+. It certainly would be more useful.

</comment><comment><USER30> All the students I know drink PBR, does that mean everyone's going to switch to PBR sometime soon?

</comment><comment><USER34> Ironic considering Facebook has its roots in Universities

</comment><comment><USER35> Harvard was not just any .edu

</comment><comment><USER36> ?????????

</comment><comment><USER37> If Google+ dominates Facebook, I cannot imagine this being the reason.

First off, it's not hard to make any post exclusive to my University on Facebook. Second, why exactly is that a highly desirable feature?

The absolute last thing I want is two Google accounts with two Google+ accounts.</comment>


NOTICE OF ACCOUNT CLOSURE (locked out of Coinbase) - <AUTHOR> I received an email from Coinbase saying my account (with a significant amount of $ invested a while back) has been closed due to violation of terms.
I haven't done anything to violate the terms...
Anyone else get an email like this? <comment><USER2> There is one term that is guaranteed to get you closed.

In legalese it is called "structuring" \- where people do multiple transfers of under $10k each in order to try to avoid the banks reporting them. It is a federal crime. People go to jail for that.

Coinbase wants no part of that. They already are fighting the IRS about turning over records.

(And the truth is that banks now report nearly everything; certainly anything more than $3000 so people that do this can be easily caught. And they DO sometimes go to jail.)

Example: [https://thebitcoin.pub/t/coinbase-closed-my-account-for- unkn...](https://thebitcoin.pub/t/coinbase-closed-my-account-for-unknown- reason/9934)

-

If you haven't done that then it is probably just a glitch. Try their support. They have no legal right to keep your money without a warrant.

-

Meanwhile, they are also having technical problems.

Here is what is happening to them: [https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@steembusiness/coinbase- hit-10-m...](https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@steembusiness/coinbase- hit-10-million-users-struggles-to-keep-up)

"Coinbase Hits 10 Million Users - Struggles To Keep Up"

<comment><USER3> The laws pertaining to "structuring"[1] have to do with requirements to file "currency transaction reports"[2], which are for moving physical cash around. Bitcoin isn't considered to be a currency under U.S. law - the IRS treats it as a capital asset, like shares of stock. Thus, unless someone is handing you a large pile of bills in exchange for your Bitcoin, and you're depositing that cash into your bank account in increments of under $10,000, it doesn't seem like you could be guilty of structuring.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring#United_States) \- " _In the United States, the Bank Secrecy Act requires the filing of a currency transaction report for transactions of more than $10,000 in currency (US or foreign)... "_

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report) \- _" Used in this context, currency means the coin and/or paper money of any country that is designated as legal tender by the country of issuance. Currency also includes U.S. silver certificates, U.S. notes, Federal Reserve notes, and official foreign bank notes."_</comment></comment>


An Encrypted Social Network - <AUTHOR> https://truefriender.com/

<comment><USER2> A curious value proposition. Is it for encrypted communications between people who know about encryption? Why not then just use encrypted email through pre- established trust mechanisms?

Or is it for non-technical users who are paranoid about Facebook privacy, having ready something about it once? In which case, wouldn't some kind of encrypted privacy overlay for Facebook be more helpful?

It just seems painfully, painfully niche. I can't see how it could overcome both the traction problem that all social networks face (i.e., reaching critical mass - people are only on social networks because other people are there), as well as convincing people that this is something they need (existing social networks will try hard to convince people they do not need anything like this, because their privacy is already safe). Seems a very hard sell to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it is a very hard sell, the only thing I can offer is 5GB of storage with encryption. It is for people who are concerned about privacy, but don't have the tech knowhow or who just want something that works simply, like going to any other website. Thanks for checking it out and giving me some feedback.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Places with a good tech scene and quality of life that aren't in the US? - <AUTHOR> Some background: I'm from India and I'm doing my undergrad. Until a few months ago, I had aspirations to work in the US. I consider myself quite competent, so I'm not talking about working in sweat shops like Infosys. I wanted to work at Google or Facebook full-time when I graduate (I have done internships with MS and Amazon).
But with Trump's recent spree of executive orders, it looks like my future will be highly uncertain if I go there (assuming of course that people are still allowed to enter the US). I'd much rather work elsewhere where I can have the luxury of not having to worry about my visa everyday.
Before you implore me to work in my own country - please don't. There are reasons why I want to work elsewhere.
So I'm just wondering - what are some other places in the world where there's a lively tech scene (i.e. Big 4 and unicorns have offices), the salary is competitive (maybe not as high as Silicon Valley, but close) and the quality of life is good in general? <comment><USER2> Canada has an awesome tech scene and is a great place to live :) Toronto/Montreal you'll likely find the most opportunities, or if you prefer a smaller city Ottawa and Waterloo have lots of tech jobs and less big city problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

</comment><comment><USER4> as dumb as you might model Trump I don't think it's a good assumption to believe he'll get rid of working, papers in order, skilled immigrants, that doesn't mean you shouldn't look for an alternative but I wouldn't be too worried overall

<comment><USER5> That's what he literally just did for immigrants coming from a set of countries...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Toronto

</comment><comment><USER7> Edinburgh, Scotland has an awesome tech scene and lifestyle!

</comment><comment><USER8> Zurich, dublin, Paris

<comment><USER8> Though there's no H1-B like visa in europe...

<comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_%28European_Union%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_%28European_Union%29)

<comment><USER8> It is still far from being fully operational and to go back to the original question, it is only used by a few countries, excluding the ones where Google, FB, etc. have offices. They have offices in Ireland, Switzerland (not in the European list) and France. So the later might be the only option here...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why do Windows functions all begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2011/09/21/10214405.aspx

<comment><USER2> I have basically no background writing applications on Windows outside of .Net but I love reading posts by Raymond Chen. I always enjoying learning about things that seem crazy from the outside from have a real purpose that you're just missing information to understand. That's pretty much what looking at someone else's code is often like so it's helpful to remember that even seemingly crazy things have a purpose.

I feel like I've learned a lot from reading his blog over the years. I even bought his book years ago because I felt like I was getting a lot of value from the blog.

It's really too bad Microsoft doesn't seem to value backwards compatibility as much as they did during the times Chen often writes about. It seems like an interesting challenge that they've pretty much given up on. I can't even count how many conversations I've been in where people complained on one hand that Microsoft focused on that backwards compatibility too much and on the other that their driver from 2001 doesn't work right in Windows 7. Often these statements happen moments apart.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have never written anything that runs on Windows, regardless of language or API, and I still subscribe to his blog. I feel badly that he gets snarked at so much that he has started injecting pre-emptive snark responses; I think he might write more, or more candidly, if it weren't for the highly vocal peanut gallery he has attracted.

This one in particular seemed worthy of sharing because of a couple of things. Firstly, if you just saw the artifact and not the reasoning, you would probably see a lot of WTF in having 7 bytes of NOP-type instructions, with five outside and two inside each function; it's a great reveal when you find out what it is for. Then my reaction was "Wow - I don't really design good instrumentation/logging/debugging points in my code, do I? I wonder if there's any part of this idea I can fruitfully rip off for my own code?" It was a nice one-two punch.

<comment><USER3> I can guarantee that the snark is intrinsic to Raymond. He is just that type of guy. He loves a good story, is very sarcastic and likes to troll co- workers.

(I could tell quite a few Raymond stories from when we worked together but it is better to leave it to him. It is a shame that he sticks to technical topics mostly on his blog.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I really like the stories about his nieces too. He had one about watching his niece learn to cheat that was fantastic.

Re: snark, I wasn't talking about his own snark; that's great. I'm talking about the bits he adds labelled "Pre-emptive snark: [insert snarky thing a reader might say here, plus his response". Maybe I'm mis-reading his attitude towards those, but he seems a bit weary of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're never had a chance to play with it, Detours, the more complex alternative to the hot-patch strategy Chen is talking about, is really slick.

What you do in Detours is, freeze the process, disassemble the first several instructions of the function you want to hook, copy out enough of them to make room for a full jump instruction, copy in your hook function somewhere in memory, followed by the instructions you stole to make room for the jump, followed by a jump back to the original function. Then you patch in a jump to that location and unfreeze the process.

The example programs for Detours do this, for instance, on every libc function to implement library tracing.

That this "just works" with Microsoft's Detours package is kind of mindboggling.

This is a great project to tackle if you want to write programmable debuggers. We've done it for Win32 (you need a full build environment to use Detours; we have the whole thing in Ruby), OS X, and Linux. It's crazy useful.

<comment><USER5> Does that handle double detours, where two different programs each patch the same function?

That was the most entertaining/frustrating (depending on your world view; it made the journey way more interesting, but also a lot longer) part of hacking classic Mac OS.

You would have a zillion extensions (apple and third party) each patch tens of OS calls, both at startup and, in cases where the Finder reset patches, after the Finder launched, or even after every application launched (to get your code running at such times, you would have to patch another OS call). On PowerPC machines you would have the added fun of patching PPC code with 68k code and vice versa.

That that _sometimes_ worked was really mind boggling. Relative to that, patching your own libc seems easy.

<comment><USER6> >Does that handle double detours, where two different programs each patch the same function?

I believe Detours patches the import table inside a single process, it does not patch the call on a system wide basis, so there really is no 'two different programs each patching the same function'. In theory you could have two different pieces of code running in the same process doing that (i.e. each patching a given function), but Detours gives you a 'trampoline' function to invoke the original thing you are patching so I believe the second to patch, when invoking the trampoline function would simply invoke the first patch, which when invoking its own trampoline would invoke the original, though I haven't tried that so it may not work that way :)

VS uses this mechanism allow you to run as non-admin even though there is TONS of VS and third party code that expects to do things like write to HKLM which is a no-no if you are not an admin.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't actually patch the import table, but actually finds the functions address in memory. This has the benefit of working for statically linked libraries and run-time dynamic linking (loading). You're correct in all other respects. My casual impression is that the technique would allow more than one library to hook into the target function.

<comment><USER6> Ahh okay, that makes sense. Modifying the actual page the instructions live on in memory would force it to be marked as dirty and thus if paged out it would actually need to hit the page file instead of just being able to discard it and when it is needed again fetch it from the original dll no? I suppose that is a minor concern assuming you aren't patching tons and tons of things that reside on lots of different pages.

<comment><USER7> I'm a little fuzzy on whether they had to deal with paging or not. At the very least they'd have to mark the pages as dirty, but I think that happens when you mark it as write-able.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those that are interested, the Linux kernel does almost the same thing (if compiled that way):

<https://lwn.net/Articles/264029/>

The mcount feature piggybacks on the profiling instruction added into every function when you use the gcc -pg option.

Edit: better link is probably this one: [http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/trace/ftrace.tx...](http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/trace/ftrace.txt#1563)

</comment><comment><USER9> NOOP sequences in x86 are a fun subject. There's an interesting section in Intel's optimization guide somewhere (I'm too lazy to find it) that details "best practice" noop instructions of 1, 2, ... up to something like 9 bytes. These are used for alignment puposes too, where you need a few bytes of padding to make a loop-back target cache-line aligned or whatnot.

<comment><USER10> Check out the "smartalign" package in NASM: it contains 1-8 byte nop instructions for several different x86 variants: [http://repo.or.cz/w/nasm.git/blob/a2c78555770990ed966c414da9...](http://repo.or.cz/w/nasm.git/blob/a2c78555770990ed966c414da94ccd3ed91de120:/macros/smartalign.mac)

You can use xxd and objdump to see which all of these translate into. For example, here's an 8-byte nop for x86-64:

      $ echo '0x0f,0x1f,0x84,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00' | xxd -r > /tmp/bincode
      $ objdump -M intel -D -b binary -mi386 -Mx86-64 /tmp/bincode

      /tmp/bincode:     file format binary

      Disassembly of section .data:

      00000000 <.data>:
         0:   0f 1f 84 00 00 00 00    nop    DWORD PTR [rax+rax*1+0x0]
         7:   00

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Okay I have two questions that might be very clueless but I don't know the answer to them so I will ask them anyway.

1) In the comments Raymond says, _"Hot-patching is not an application feature. It's an OS internal feature for servicing."_ Then why does the compiler put hot-patch points in my code? Why not use a special compiler flag when building Windows DLLs?

2) Why do we need a special hot-patch point at all? What's wrong with just overwriting the first few bytes of the function you want to hot-patch?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) I didn't see anything that suggested that all DLL functions have this hot- patch point. I think from his perspective "Windows DLL" means "a DLL that is part of the Windows operating system", not "a DLL used by an application executing on Windows".

2) I think he addressed this - someone might be executing the function while you are trying to patch it. Having a 2-byte, one clock cycle NOP at the front means that you can replace it "atomically" from the perspective that nobody can walk into the middle of you updating the memory.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Re 1), it does seem to be a compiler switch /hotpatch, not the default behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow awesome explanation - about 6 years ago while hacking gtk+ and Mozilla I used those instructions to hack into the main event loop to get gtk+ embedding gecko 1.7 and had no idea that those my perceived hacks where actually some what valid method for doing what I needed to do - modify how window events from gecko where propagated to gtk+ event loop and vice versa. I think that my bug report is probably still open and might even be worth revisiting if anyone is still interested in gtk+ with Mozilla embedded - would likely need to make lots of changes... Latest gecko is 1.9?? Anyways awesome explanation

<comment><USER13> Latest Gecko is 9.0 to coincide with Firefox 9. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Whatever happened to the old idea of separating program and data spaces and write-protecting the program space?

<comment><USER15> I'm by no means an expert in this domain but my understanding is that that's normally not happening on x86/x64, not even on Linux or OS X. Otherwise, how could just-in-time compilers like Java, .NET or V8 work? Please correct me however if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER10> JIT compilers allocate executable memory by using mmap() (not malloc(), since malloc()-allocated memory is not guaranteed (or even likely) to be executable). When you map memory with mmap(), you can decide the protection bits (PROT_READ, PROT_WRITE, PROT_EXEC, and they can be OR'd together in any combination).

For example, from the V8 sources: [http://www.google.com/codesearch#W9JxUuHYyMg/trunk/src/platf...](http://www.google.com/codesearch#W9JxUuHYyMg/trunk/src/platform- linux.cc&q=PROT_EXEC%20package:http://v8%5C.googlecode%5C.com&l=385)

<comment><USER16> malloc()ed memory is executable if you mprotect() it to be so. malloc()ing memory and blindly executing it is definitely a bug OTOH. malloc() is mmap() based a lot of systems nowadays anyway, so malloc() vs mmap() is just a choice of convenience of API.

<comment><USER10> > malloc()ed memory is executable if you mprotect() it to be so.

True, but since mprotect() can only operate on full pages your mprotect() calls will most likely affect memory beyond what malloc gave you. For example if remove write or execute permissions your program will probably crash, and it's best to avoid having pages that are both writable and executable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Then why do I need to restart the computer after I install _anything_?</comment>


Facebook bug bounty: secondary damage bugs and fairness - <AUTHOR> http://josipfranjkovic.blogspot.com/2013/11/facebook-bug-bounty-secondary-damage.html

<comment><USER2> Nice, but these bug bounty programs must be one of the cheapest possible ways to "outsource" QA work. Paying a few thousand dollars for a critical security hole? That's extremely cheap compared to a regular QA department.

I'm of course not saying that it replaces the QA department, but even if they hire only 1 person less because of these programs it's already financially worth it for them.

<comment><USER3> I'd say the biggest impact is that it encourages a behavior that a lot of people people tend to show anyways: If we find a bug, most of us are inclined to report it, not abuse it. I'd assume that a lot of people tend not to report bugs when they have the feeling that it only costs them time for no benefit. Now, with a bug bounty you're shifting the equation towards the desired outcome: Taking an hour of your time to write a bug report can actually pay off for you, even if only one in five bugs get the minimum reward. Granted, you could sell a critical exploit for much more money, but most humans are intrinsically biased to do "the right thing" and by rewarding people for doing the right thing and making that reward public, you're reinforcing that bias.

It's still a cheap way to get bug reports, but I don't think it's about replacing QA. It's about creating a climate where bugs missed by QA have an increased likelyhood to end up on your desk since no QA could ever find all bugs.

<comment><USER4> I'm a tester so maybe I notice bugs more than others and I do find a lot when trying to use sites just to do my day to day business. I would report them if sites made it easy to do so but in most cases it's really hard just to find a contact email to report the problem to

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good on Facebook for being honest. Kudos!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just added timeline for the report on blog.</comment>


Status as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service <comment><USER2> I've been reading this for the last few days, finished today.

Very powerful ideas, impressive writing, inspired and sparked new thoughts in my mind every reading moment.

One thing that is mentioned _en passant_ that I would like to know the author's opinion about: if seeking status is so important for these tools growth, what drives the majority of lurkers that are the majority of said growth?

I imagine it is entertainment, the third axis that the author chose not to dive in. But he has such interesting insights that I would love to read a follow-up essay on what drives the _" status-giving monkeys"_.

<comment><USER3> > inspired and sparked new thoughts in my mind every reading moment

That's my experience too. It probably helps that I'm building a social networking website[1] right now.

This article would probably benefit from being re-read at intervals for new insights.

[1] MeowCat: [https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2](https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm probably just an old fart or not getting it in some other way but I was thinking about this the other day. For whatever reason the status seeking culture really really annoys me. I feel it's "wrong". I'm not religious but I know the Bible has more than one passage about seeking status = bad so maybe that's where my thinking is influenced.

So, seeing all the status seeking on Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, Twitch, Twitter, etc. and mostly feeling out of touch with that culture it got me wondering what changed. I think what changed is that before all these services, before the internet, the number of people seeking status I could be exposed to was pretty small. It was either certain celebrities, not all of them but a few stuck out as status seeking. Otherwise it would just be the occasional person I might meet at some meetup/trade-show/friend-of- friend/convention that really set my hairs on end and was happy was not part of my everyday life.

Now though it seems it's practically the norm. Maybe the percentage of such status seeking people has not changed, I have no idea, but clearly all these services have made it possible for most of them to find an audience of at least 100 to 1000 people and for me to run across them one way or another. Instagram has lists of the top status seekers, as does TikTok, Youtube, Twitter, etc... I was having a coffee in Brentwood LA a couple of years ago and heard some teens arguing and bragging about who had more followers. This American Life had a segment on teen life with social media and the new rituals of likes.

Anyway, I have no idea of all the status seeking I now see is just it coming out in the open from being hidden or if it's a new thing promoted by it being so easy now. I also have no idea if it's good or bad. My gut says "bad" but that could just be old man thinking.

<comment><USER5> I think I mostly agree with the authors premise that "We are all status seeking monkeys". It's just that the type of status people seek is different across populations:

> Some people find status games distasteful. Despite this, everyone I know is > engaged in multiple status games. Some people sneer at people hashtag > spamming on Instagram, but then retweet praise on Twitter. Others roll their > eyes at photo albums of expensive meals on Facebook but then submit research > papers to prestigious journals in the hopes of being published. Parents show > off photos of their children performances at recitals, people preen in the > mirror while assessing their outfits, employees flex on their peers in > meetings, entrepreneurs complain about 30 under 30 lists while wishing to be > on them, reporters check the Techmeme leaderboards; life is nothing if not a > nested series of status contests.

I'm not sure if you agree with this or not, I think maybe what you are seeing is that social norms have shifted such that overt pursuing of status seems to be OK, whereas before people would pursue status while pretending not to really care. Perhaps also, as the author points out, people are now competing for status with a much larger audience (before it was just your circle of friends/acquaintance, now it's everyone on ${PLATFORM_OF_CHOICE}, maybe this has made the competition for those who are pursuing this form of status more fierce, or maybe being able to see all these people openly pursuing this form of status has normalized it.

<comment><USER4> > submit research papers to prestigious journals

is not status seeking. Even if I have zero interest in status, sharing knowledge and/or getting feedback can be the main and even only goal.

The same is true of many things. You can have a blog where your goal is to share something or get feedback, not to get status. You can usually tell the difference or at least I think I can. You can be an entertainer (actor, musician, writer, animator ...) and actually have your goal as entertaining people, not gaining status. Even photos. I share 5000+ photos on Flickr. They are all marked as CC-BY. I'm doing it to contribute and share, not to get status. If they ever became popular maybe that would change. Mostly I use them for myself and once or twice a year someone tells me they used one and that makes me happy. I don't feel it's increased my status.

I guess I don't agree with the author at all that effectively everything in life can be seen as status seeking

<comment><USER5> I think the key word when talking about status wrt to research is "prestige". Just about everyone submitting to Nature I'm sure legitimately wants to share their knowledge and get feedback. But I'm sure they're also really hoping they get this Nature publication accepted and that it gets cited because that's a form of social status that is very good for their career (and hey honestly for most people I'm sure it makes them feel important, accomplished, and respected, too, all of which I would argue are at least partially social status).

I do agree with you that not everything is accurately described just by social status, but it does explain a surprising amount human behavior, at least for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've long wondered whether it's possible to buy social status. It's tricky because having wealth gives an automatic status increase in most places. Of course, people need to know about the wealth, hence the prevalence of fancy cars, jewellery etc. So those things are used to broadcast wealth and thus hopefully increase social standing. The social networks mentioned in the post don't create status directly, but rather are used to advertise the status or wealth that was already there, which may have a compounding effect. But none of these methods are very efficient, I wonder what a more direct method would be? Something like "rent-a-cool-friend" or any of the Fyre founder's various (fraudulent) schemes.

<comment><USER7> I'd say it is actually far, far easier to buy social status than to earn it.

<comment><USER6> I never said it wasn't. But I'm not so sure you can buy status without putting in some effort on your own part. Maybe it's a bit like physical fitness -- you can pay for a nice gym, a personal trainer, etc, but you still have to do the heavy lifting yourself (pun intended).

<comment><USER7> I get what you're saying, but I can't imagine the Kardashians lifting anything heavier than a toilet lid to upchuck their biscotti though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was strikingly on point, although I'm saddened it's mostly about the Internet, and only obliquely mentions the status games of office culture, wider adult culture, and pre-technology child's play.

One very, very uncomfortable feeling about the Internet is status-seeking, which is now omnipresent, feels a bit too good. I used to be able to socialize in places where I knew the interaction would lead nowhere -- acquire some status the time of the conversation, make people laugh, make people stay longer than they wanted, maybe buy me candy or silly things -- then leave and kinda calmly come down and sleep and forget about them. Nowadays it's all permeating everywhere and if I want to play the game it has to be "for real" spending a bit of time building up a persona, staying on a platform, knowing whatever happens may live forever on some server or the minds of the mostly random strangers I was trying to impress. The fun part happens a lot less fast, and in addition, you have to deal with it encroaching on your real life and the status games that actually matter much more. (For example, nosy interviewers who want my GitHub.)

There used to be, well, recreational status-seeking, and now, all recreation is status-seeking. You can't even go walk in a park without somebody almost having an accident trying to take a "unique" cellphone pic. I miss having "on" periods that are intense fun but temporary in nature and "off" alone calm periods no one sees. Please somebody turn off the social thingies and give me that world back.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've only got halfway through this, but this paragraph was tremendous writing:

> Predictably, everything exploded. The number of posts increased. The > engagement with said posts increased. This is the scene in a movie in which, > having launched something, a bunch of people stand in a large open war room > waiting, and suddenly a geek staring at a computer goes wide-eyed, > exclaiming, "Oh my god." And then the senior ranking officer in the room > (probably played by a scowling Ed Harris or Kyle Chandler) walks over to > look at the screen, where some visible counter is incrementing so rapidly > that the absolute number of digits starts is incrementing in real time as > you look at it, because films have to make a plot development like this > brain dead obvious to the audience. And then the room erupts in cheers while > different people hug and clap each others on the back, and one random extra > sprints across the screen in the background, shaking a bottle of champagne > that explodes and ejaculates a stream of frothy bubbly through the air like > some capitalist money shot that inspires, later, a 2,000 word essay from > Žižek.

<comment><USER10> You'd love the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love the article - both excellent writing and content. Id say youth are more interested in social capital because of sex and money. Eagerly looking for both makes one "peacock".

</comment><comment><USER12> This article is dense with insight and some truly deep thinking about social status.

</comment><comment><USER13> >> People seek out the most efficient path to maximizing social capital

Trying to take the shortest path is like flinging yourself over an invisible wall and hoping that you don't smash into it.

There are only so many times that you can hit that wall before you break. So it makes sense to pick a very long path that will take a lifetime to finish; that way you can be sure that you won't live long enough to see yourself fail.

</comment><comment><USER14> By the way, I pasted the article in Word. It's 74 pages.</comment>


Ask HN: What is in your vimrc? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/croo/arch-laptop- setup/blob/master/.vimrc](https://github.com/croo/arch-laptop- setup/blob/master/.vimrc)

I once put a lot of work in building the "perfect" .vimrc. I used it ever since with only local minor changes because style / persistent swap / compatibility reasons...

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/rthomas6/dotfiles](https://github.com/rthomas6/dotfiles)

Nothing special. Use buffers as tabs and switch tabs with H/L is the most essential feature for me. I mostly use gvim.

</comment><comment><USER4> Stuff comes and goes but I always keep these

        set path=.,/usr/include,,**,
        set sw=4
        set ts=4
        set expandtab
        set ignorecase
        set smartcase

</comment><comment><USER5> cat .vimrc

      set background=dark</comment>


The Surprisingly Sudden Demise of the Anti-GMO Movement - <AUTHOR> https://risk-monger.com/2016/05/23/the-surprisingly-sudden-demise-of-the-anti-gmo-movement/ <comment><USER2> I disagree that a wave of rationality has come from somewhere and boosted everybody's critical thinking skills -- it doesn't seem to have affected e.g. the anti-vaxxers yet. The OP might want to consider some alternative explanations as well as the original hypothesis.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it can be explained by the rise of apathy....

To be anti-GMO, you have to _do_ something, get out there, check labels to avoid foods, whatever. Whereas vaccination is something that forces itself into your attention when you have kids.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think the movement has collapsed, rather the movement was successful on the labeling front. It's not that people are inherently anti-GMO, but rather people simply want GMO foods labeled. After the defeat of the Roberts bill in the US Senate to preempt the Vermont mandatory labeling law, the whole issue has gone silent. I don't exactly see people marching for GMOs. This article is awfully skewed and misses the bigger point of the GMO movement.

</comment><comment><USER5> "were causing significant environmental" -> Links to an article not even mentioning "significant". And they mention burning leaves of. How about not doing that at all ?

Is this propaganda ? Or did I not read deep enough ?

<comment><USER6> In addition to the burning, there are the effects of planting fields with non- gmo sugar beets. I don't think we can have the sugar production without sugar beets, and the old version either requires hand-weeding or more chemicals to be able to have a good harvest. Often those chemicals do more environmental harm than good.

The problem with telling folks not to burn the fields is the same problem the sugar beet folks run into when told to hand weed the fields. It costs more and is harder work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I personally don't like gmo because of the patents system.</comment>


Objective-C Passes C++, Now 3rd Most Popular Language on TIOBE - <AUTHOR> http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Objective-C.html

<comment><USER2> Demonstrating the strength of the walled garden.</comment>


Show HN: Binarysearch.io – Learn Algorithms Together - <AUTHOR> https://binarysearch.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

I've found that learning algorithms is more engaging when solving them with other people. So, I've built a site to help people learn algorithms and data structures together! I've worked on it with a friend for a few months and would love your feedback.

On Binary Search, you can create or join a room with others and work on the same coding problem together. You can choose to compete to finish the problem first, or solve them together and help each other out.

Working with friends (or strangers!) makes for a much more engaging atmosphere, and we've actually built a small community of coders who love to help each other out! Check it out at [https://binarysearch.io](https://binarysearch.io) — we'll be hanging out in some of the rooms. Let us know if you have any feedback or run into any issues. Hope to see you around!

<comment><USER2> The `/api/stats` request (500) hangs the application on my side. Can't wait to try it out, I wish there were more game-y training sites. Codewars is fun, but knowing you're competing with other people at the same time is way more interesting.

<comment><USER3> Came here to say the same thing. This endpoint is eventually responding for me, but it's taking between 20-30 seconds.

In addition, [https://binarysearch.io/api/rooms](https://binarysearch.io/api/rooms) just returned a 502 Bad Gateway. Maybe the site is getting hugged by HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're back open for business! Just had to cache some things :P

<comment><USER4> Still getting a hug of death message on my end? Edit: It's up now, looking forward to using it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like this idea! I'd like to try this out again when the API is online again, and I can get a few other people I know online too. It was nice that readyoursicp joined me for a few minutes in the room to chat though.

A lot of this is off-the-cuff, and not match up with what you're aiming for here. Hopefully some of it is useful though.

1\. During the process, I couldn't quite figure out how I was doing or what I was doing wrong. One example was the determining if a number is a palindrome or not. I didn't see indication about if I was failing certain tests in the test suite, or if I had an issue with syntax, etc. Some more feedback would help here.

2\. A minor thing, but on my laptop I noticed that while the line would wrap, the code itself is running under the chat portion of the room. Makes it harder to edit.

3\. I think the room concept is nice, especially if I just want to jump into a certain class of problems and go. However, it would be cool if you could have one room indefinitely. Perhaps a private room of sorts?

4a. It would be nice if you could request the difficulty of problem in the room itself. Right now you need to make a new room to match the difficulty, but I think that having problems come to that room might be nice.

4b. In addition to requesting difficulty of problems, requesting kinds of problems might be nice too. I can imagine a CS student being in some kind of data structures/algorithms class and wanting to focus on that specifically. Something like "medium difficulty problems involving trees" or "hard problems involving strings."

Anyway, cool project and good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there, was super fun playing with you earlier. Thanks a lot for the feedback -- will definitely address / fix some of your issues!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice to see you're using my email forwarding service, [https://forwardemail.net](https://forwardemail.net)!

Awesome stuff!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's great, thank you so much for making it! So much more convenient than creating another GSuite account (and paying $6/mo) :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Super cool! Is there a complete list of algorithms covered by this site? Does it cover more esoteric ones like fibonacci search? Or mainly just linear/binary search + lots of sorting algorithms?

I think it may also be good to also have some quizzing included for the properties of the algorithms, so users not only build the algorithm but also provide its:

\- O() / theta() / omega()

\- In what cases will the runtime of this be "O(n log n)?"

\- Is this algorithm better or worse than merge sort if you have 2^16 long int elements and 16GB of ram?

etc etc.

Knowing how to implement algorithms helps solidify a lot of that, but in the end the truly important thing is knowing which algorithm to use for a particular purpose, and what the downsides are for each other algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great Idea. I can see there is room for monetization too. Although ads are distracting, they could work as occasional in a room. Also, if it caught on, this could join the likes of leetcode...Ppl would pay for this b/c peer learning can be far more efficient or at least engaging. I can certainly see leetcode wanting to copy this idea.

This already has something over twitch which is sort of similar but not interactive. Also, I could see fb ads as quite effective to keep organic traffic up and help this catch on as a competitive way to get a job. You could even market the data you gain to companies looking to hire.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds funny, but I would like to join some room without registering first. I don't see why this service needs my E-Mail adress just that I can have some seconds (minutes? hours?) of fun.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great idea! After Java and C++, are there any plans to add support for Rust? I'll give JavaScript a shot for now, but would love to do something like this for Rust, as that's what I'm currently learning.

P.S. I noticed that the ".loader-container" is generating moving vertical and horizontal scroll bars on 1920×1080 due to ".loader" rotating. Applying "overflow: hidden" seems to fix that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip -- loader should be fixed now!

We don't have any plans to support Rust at the moment unfortunately, but your vote has definitely been noted!

<comment><USER10> How about go? It is worthwhile to add most of the popular languages. I think you can lease env from spoj.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> this looks very nice. I hope you keep pushing it forward!

nit-picks:

1 consider adding social sign-in. Why not? some people get scared when they need to enter a new password (+there are some nice auth-as-a-service out there)

2 there are too many animated buttons IMO (a few main ones are nice, but everywhere is too much)

3 small bug: you can see the solution when open a room but before you press 'join room'

4 when saving a profile change I get no indication of success / or redirect

</comment><comment><USER12> This is awesome. If you haven't thought about it - looks like you can compete with coderpad etc. for monetization.

</comment><comment><USER13> Login? Good Bye.

<comment><USER14> You logged in to HN to post this nonsense. What is your point?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> would love to see your traffic spikes and unique visitors by being posted to frontpage HN!

</comment><comment><USER16> this is awesome and can really make a different in peoples lives. nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for stopping by!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well done friend! This is super cool

</comment><comment><USER18> Super awesome. Are you going to open source the site so others can contribute to adding new features?

</comment><comment><USER19> yet another leetcode...

<comment><USER14> I thought I was quite familiar with leetcode. But this seems to be a different concept. Care to elaborate how this is "yet another leetcode"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not into the idea? Interviews are to gauge an individuals abilities. Why would you want to practice for an individual task where you will he expected to solve individually with a group? I think this is like studying in a group for a test. There is a huge risk you think you learn something but you don't.

Studying for assignments in a group makes sense or comparing notes etc. but studying for an exam in a group or an interview doesn't.

<comment><USER21> Afaik this is completely counter to modern educational findings. Group work helps to both motivate people and shore up gaps in understanding.

<comment><USER20> Can you cite one study that supports this claim?

<comment><USER14> Google (Scholar) just gave me thousands. I only skimmed through three, though.

<comment><USER20> Link please

<comment><USER14> [https://scholar.google.com/](https://scholar.google.com/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Try, FormSubmit 2.0 with most advanced features - <AUTHOR> https://formsubmit.co <comment><USER2> I quite like the landing page. Very no nonsense with just well laid out text. Could maybe have hand-written the HTML.

The only concern I had that wasn't clear on the landing page was some assurance that the form endpoint wouldn't stop working. I noticed that you have other business products and that FormSubmit could be offered and supported this way indefinitely out of kindness, marketing, or lead generation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate your concern and don't worry we never stop this service because this is the best product of Devro LABS so far. And also we had several acquisition requests as well. However, we decided to keep this service with us. With FormSubmit 2.0 we introduced the sponsorship program. So you can help us with this valuable service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi buddies! I like your concept and quickly tried it when i saw it on PH. My website is still in development and when i included your link n my form i haven't got any email from you in my box. that's it mean my website has to be in production or online before it work?

<comment><AUTHOR> first thing: your form should open through a web server, FormSubmit will not work in pages browsed as HTML files.

second thing: please don't forget to check your spam folder as well. Sometimes FormSubmit emails get in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What are the disadvantage of this approach?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can only see some advantages!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do you make money?

</comment><comment><USER6> Any plans to open source this?</comment>


Film made in 1967 about 1999 - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/Year1999Ad <comment><USER2> I wonder what people in 67 thought was more unlikely, to have a computer that does all that we see computers do in that movie but in a size that fits in your pocket or a machine that makes your lunch. I bet the food making kitchen looked much more likely, sadly, we got pocket super computers, but still doing our own cooking pretty much the same way we did in 67, except microwave ovens perhaps... (well, I saw there is a kickstarter that plans to change that... but still...)

Except that, it's pretty amazing how they got a lot of these things right (except the notion that people of the future will know to press random buttons to get what they want, UX was not envisioned as an issue back then...)

<comment><USER3> > I bet the food making kitchen looked much more likely, sadly, we got pocket > super computers, but still doing our own cooking pretty much the same way we > did in 67, except microwave ovens perhaps...

Actually, microwave ovens were commercially available from 1947 and the first popular home microwave oven was released in 1967.

There's a lot that's gone in more-automatic cooking devices -- both commercial and home -- since then, though the popularity of some of them for the home has been limited by the fact that people with a strong preference for convenience go for the wider array of prepackaged prepared foods available now rather than automated home cooking.

<comment><USER4> Microwave ovens were absurdly expensive in the early days though, even up until the early 80s.

<comment><USER5> Yep. My family first got one in 1985, and IIRC it was one of the cheaper models at around $350 (1985 dollars)

<comment><USER4> $300? That's cheap. If I recall correctly I remember my mom telling me her first microwave was $800 (1982). That is over $2,000 adjusted for inflation.

The one in my kitchen costs $30 or $40 and I bought it a decade ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This was a concept film from Philco/Ford:

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

That's Wink Martindale (US TV game show host) in the husband role in the film. A few years back he was interviewed about the project:

[https://vimeo.com/15063245](https://vimeo.com/15063245)

</comment><comment><USER7> In 1967 we imagined a future in which everything has been automated so that preexisting roles could be carried out as before. Wife will cook, buy clothes; husband will shake his head at all the money wife is spending and be the spending decision maker.

Film is interesting from a technology perspective but also for what it says about society.

<comment><USER8> The movie also had the computer telling the boy that he flunked. Back in 1967, they didn't predict that by 1999, every child would get a trophy just for showing up.

<comment><USER9> Or rather it didn't predict that in 1999 there would be more provisions for people with learning difficulties and special needs? Don't be so knee-jerk, there's a damned good reason for why we try not to harm kids' self-esteem anymore-- it doesn't work.

<comment><USER10> I doubt pumping up children's self-esteem without developing their self-worth is going to work either.

<comment><USER11> If you think that's what's happening, you haven't been paying attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is one from 1972 about the year 2000 (in German, but funny pictures nevertheless): [https://youtu.be/kaGnBNhE2xI](https://youtu.be/kaGnBNhE2xI)

</comment><comment><USER13> On the menu screen the date was Tuesday, June 2nd. June 2 was a Wednesday in 1999. Seems computers were having date issues even before Y2K had arrived. :)

I find it interesting how so many devices in the video used analog inputs (namely dials). I guess they were easier to mock up though by then I would have expected the keyboard concept to be more common.

Many of the broad concepts are pretty close. Like when I ignore the recommendations of my fitness / diet tracking software. :)

</comment><comment><USER14> Foreboding music that plays as she scratches out the year: 1999.

<comment><USER15> Heh, I was just about to comment on that. If it then cut to Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone intro it wouldn't have surprised me in the least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Mike, how about chicken salad?" "Urgh".

<comment><USER16> some things never change!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow scrolled to about minute 11 and saw this great image:

[http://i.imgur.com/m3M0pZD.png](http://i.imgur.com/m3M0pZD.png)

I love seeing them make an attempt of what modern technology would look like.

No matter what they do, it still screams 1960's style.

The "household monitor screen" was spot on. This is definitely happening as well as the "central bank computer." Wow, really impressive.

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh, I made a song based on that movie, a few weeks ago:

[https://soundcloud.com/gabrielfalcao/home-of-the- future](https://soundcloud.com/gabrielfalcao/home-of-the-future)

</comment><comment><USER19> Here is another thing the video almost got right- super high pitched falsetto singing. The only problem is the genre that used it was hair metal and pop, not salsa.

</comment><comment><USER20> Given the predictions of "2001", made at the same time, the ones in this movie aren't particularly insightful.</comment>


Ask: Text Message Providers? (Who do Buxfer,etc use?) - <AUTHOR> I wanted to see what experiences other news.yc members had had with text-messaging providers.
There's quite a few different ways to send text messages- Some providers have RPC requests versus TCP sockets, and there is a whole slew of pricing models.
Does anyone here have any experience working with different vendors? What have you liked/disliked?

<comment><USER2> UPDATE: textmarks has an API. wow. there a total winner then <http://textmarks.com/dev>

Sorry I was sleeping> Anyways here is your answer. 1. If you are broke, like me then consider using an email to sms gateway. you will need to know the subscriber's provider. It can work if you are offering a one-way sms service such as updates. Watch out for SMSC spam catchers . 2. If you have money, but no time then you can use a provider such as Clickatell or Verisign and they will do all the background work. All you will need is an access to their API plus a monthly fee of 500-1500/month on top of SMS fees. 3. You have money plus time plus contacts then Forget all these guys and provision your own short-code, then start emailing your contacts at Verizon and them to give you access to their SMSC. When people say "I don't know how twitter pays for 250k SMS/month" they don't know that Twitter is probably paying less than your startup will for 10k SMS. that is the advantage of working directly with the carriers. SMS is super cheap for them. 4. You got money, but want to be careful, then I suggest <http://mobivity.com> or <http://textmarks>. This service charge you for zero to only a few bucks and give you a unique keyword plus short-code. You can easily talk to Greg Harris who is the CEO of Mobivity and he is very open to entrepreneurs looking to use his service which is why he has an API.I mean he will literally let you launch a product competing with his. Textmarks doesn't have an API to my knowledge but you can certainly email Ariel Poller. i would try something like apoller or email@example.com. Be smart when you choose a provider that offers a short-code.When you rent a shared short-code, it can change at any time and now your 50k users have to know your new short-code. If you are doing a interactive SMS service, that can suck. If you are going for the private short-code, then you are safe as a long as you can shell out 1000/month. If you are proficient with Mobile applications, the best way to go is to build your own messaging application. Now when someone sends you a SMS or you send your user a sms ask send them a link as well and ask them to download it. there you have it, no more SMS fees for that guy and your messages can be 500 characters long. OOps I gotta go make more coffee. Email me if you like and I can be more detailed, i just went on here without knowing exactly what you are doing.

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the disadvantage of just using email addresses? Virtually every wireless company provides an email to sms gateway which basically gives each phone an email address. My current startup uses email addresses for 2 way interaction with the system via text messages so while slightly more difficult to configure initially, it's free!

<comment><USER4> the problem is that the cell carriers are also aware of this and from what I've heard from some people, unless you're yahoo they may block your mass company emails

are you doing this on a big scale yet? if so please share any other tips (especially on not getting blocked)

<comment><USER5> Not sure why they would block your messages. As long as they aren't spam (don't send unless the user opts in), then the cell provider makes 10-15 cents on every message you send. They should be more than happy to transport the messages for you.

<comment><USER4> good point - i guess it's just no guarantee of delivery then

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Padpaw is currently using mBlox and they've been very helpful in getting us running and approved through all the carriers. We're using the XML interface for sending messages, but we might switch to SMPP if our volumes start getting insane. I wrote 3 blog posts regarding our experience. You can read about it here <[http://www.padpaw.net/blog/?p=42>](http://www.padpaw.net/blog/?p=42>).

As far as pricing, expect to pay a monthly fixed fee and then a per message charge. I found mBlox pricing was the best.

<comment><USER7> Care to share the pricing of mBlox (privately if necessary). I'm currently paying Clickatell about 0.06 per message.

John.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have been considering this, but sms gateways are more expensive then I can afford (I haven't found a good free one).

So I have been considering sending via a mobile phone or GSM/GPRS modem for now since I wouldn't have to scale it up very high for now: <http://www.developershome.com/sms/freeLibForSMS.asp>

<comment><AUTHOR> One thing you can do is to send it through a phone directly, but that limits you to ~6 messages/minute.. That's not going to support a very large user base ;)

Gateways, such as <http://www.bulksms.com/> generally charge $.05c/message, which is insanely high. Difficult to make money at those prices.

<comment><USER9> unless you have some special plan carriers in the US charge 5 to 10 cents per message anyway. Why would it be cheaper to send through your phone? I think as you start getting large volumes of SMS you can get some sort of volume discount (or run your own gateway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can configure Kannel (an open source SMS gateway) for use with your GSM modem/phone. However, as others have pointed out, this does not scale.

On top of the SMS gateway you'd also need to rent a number or lease a short code in order to receive messages. Short codes can take up to 90 days to become active and cost ~$1000 USD/month.

There are companies that allow you to use a shared dedicated short code and have an API to deliver mobile content - some will even do this for free (<http://www.textmarks.com>).

<comment><USER6> You can get a shortcode in three days - $500 for a random 5-digit, $1,000 for a vanity 5 or 6-digit. The biggest gating item is the approval process with the carriers. That will take 6-8 weeks.

If you're getting a prototype working, textmarks might be the way to go. You'll have to prefix your SMS command set with a keyword. Longer term you want your customers/members to identify with your own shortcode. Imagine them getting messages from two services on 41411

<comment><USER10> Right. The approval process with carriers is what makes getting a short code so time consuming. What was it like working with the Aggregators? I've heard mixed stories.

<comment><USER6> mBlox was good in getting us feedback and suggesting fixes during the process. You spend most of the time waiting for the carriers to respond to applications and testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 4info will handle all of your sms messaging for free: <http://open.4info.net/gateway.jsp>

<comment><USER12> Having ads attached seems like a potentially pretty high cost to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ive looked into Clickatell.

For outbound it is expensive(5 cents). Inbound runs like 2 cents.

<comment><USER7> I use Clickatell and like the service. At 250k messages you're getting a 23% discount. At today's prices 250k messages will cost $12,000.

John.</comment></comment>


List of 600 free online courses launched by 190 universities - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1437623/600-free-online-courses-you-can-take-from-universities-worldwide/ <comment><USER2> As someone who enjoys learning this is really enticing to me. However with the demands of my busy work/life schedule, my increasingly challenged attention span--mainly due to the number of competing free resources out there--and my wide range of curiosities I have difficulty deciding where to dedicate my precious time to. Do other people fall in a similar boat? If so any tips or tricks to break through?

<comment><USER3> I tend to make a certain amount of time for something consistent every day (like, usually about 30 min on Khan for the last 6 months trying to level up my math skills) and then a certain amount of time for random playtime (like my safari books only subscription) where I just do whatever I feel like doing for that time.

My life got a lot better when I just committed to doing certain things every day (yoga and making my bed, for instance). So I just added "study" to those things.

Another pro tip-- have kids when you're 23... I'm 40 and now they are mostly grown so I have a lot of free time LOL An hour of yoga a day is a lot less of a commitment than it would have been when I was 28, had two small kids, and was in grad school.

That's a joke, but the kernel of truth in it is: you don't have to learn everything now. With luck you will live to be 70+ years old and so the benefit of even 15-20 a day of study really adds up over several decades.

<comment><USER4> What strategy are you using to "level up" with Khan? I'm curious because I'd like to do this as well but am not sure where to focus.

<comment><USER3> Well, I just started with the Algebra II classes cause that's about where my math skills were at... I've had calc I and discrete math in college, plus a lot of formal logic training but that was a long time ago.

I was doing the "mission" style where they give you almost random tasks, and then you do mastery challenges... I feel like that got me a good into understanding a bunch of trig, matrix, and vector things that I hadn't understood before.

However, I just wrapped up my precalc with that and decided to move on because the last couple of topics were boring and they kept sending me mastery challenges of tedious stuff.

So for the calc I switched from the missions style to the lesson style because it feels more directed and "completist", and I've just been doing lectures and exercises. In the last couple of days I've gotten about half way through the material on limits.

When I finish the calc, then I will do the statistics, and the multivariate calculus. At that point, I think that I will be ready to move into college level classes online for linear and whatever else I think I want.

My larger interests are on one hand machine learning and AI and on the other hand, audio electronics for music... my math skills have held me back in electronics and I feel like if I am going to find anything useful in applying

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So this is just a list of the courses on edX and coursera, via description pages on course-central.com, listed line by line on qz.com. Presumably people get paid for every click, rather than just look at the original sites.

The modern web sucks.

<comment><USER6> and they all link to course central pages, rather than directly to the courses. so that now course central gets clicks, cookies will be saved for ads and tracking. Plus, they use another site for redirection, possibly for affiliate sales and even more tracking.

The items in list are just added, randomly. For example, Machine Learning with Python: from Linear Models to Deep Learning [0] course actullay starts on June 2019. It's not really 'launched'.

[0] - [https://www.edx.org/course/machine-learning-with-python- from...](https://www.edx.org/course/machine-learning-with-python-from-linear- models-to-deep-learning)

<comment><USER5> There are a bunch in French too, handy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do so many sites have UX like this one, where after you start reading, the text gets grayed out and you have to click a button "Read Full Story"? It's annoying to the user - if I want to read more, just let me scroll.

It can't save that much bandwidth to send just part of the story. Is it to measure user engagement?

<comment><USER8> Only reason I could see it being done is to improve loading time. Most users these days will bounce back if the page takes more than few seconds to load.

<comment><USER9> I always figured it was something about ad views. Seems you could charge more for an ad view right after that break than if the break didnt exist. You've now confirmed that user is actively reading and will actually see the ad.

But maybe ads are click based anyways?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anyone is interested, here is some more list for free programming courses

[https://hackernoon.com/5-free-r-programming-courses-for- data...](https://hackernoon.com/5-free-r-programming-courses-for-data- scientists-and-ml-programmers-5732cb9e10)

[https://hackernoon.com/10-free-courses-to-learn-docker- for-p...](https://hackernoon.com/10-free-courses-to-learn-docker-for- programmers-and-devops-engineers-7ff2781fd6e0)

[http://www.java67.com/2018/02/5-free-python-online- courses-f...](http://www.java67.com/2018/02/5-free-python-online-courses-for- beginners.html)

[https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2018/01/5-free-git- course...](https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2018/01/5-free-git-courses-for- programmers-to-learn-online.html)

[http://www.java67.com/2018/01/top-5-free-angular-js- online-c...](http://www.java67.com/2018/01/top-5-free-angular-js-online- courses-for-web-developers.html)

I have also shared a lot of curated list of free resources, which you can find on my blog [http://javarevisited.blogspot.com](http://javarevisited.blogspot.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> Some should do degree accreditation based on online learning to give people a lower cost option.

<comment><USER12> Or... There should be less emphasis on whether or not someone has a degree, and more emphasis on what they can actually do.

<comment><USER13> True. Usually a degree these days has inflated value, but it says something though, and that's fact that one has made an effort at finishing something.

<comment><USER14> Thank you fir this great comment! Made my day :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wait, isn't this list a ripoff from freeCodeCamp?

<comment><USER16> He is actually that guy who compiled this list, I don't know why every month freeCodeCamp founder shared his article on the Facebook page

<comment><USER15> Ah, I didn't do my due diligence before commenting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is no such thing as a free lunch. How much of tuition, endowment, tax, and other funds paid for these?

<comment><USER18> If i'm not mistaken—using MIT's OWC as an example—these courses are basically carbon copies of lectures they give their students. The instructors are still teaching on the campus to IRL students. The only difference is that these are then put online for easy access a la open source projects.

So, to answer your question, the money spent to produce online (o) lectures is equal to campus (c) lectures—without taking into labor hours to upload and edit. Therefore, O + C = $T.

<comment><USER19> Also I think MIT OWC did some fund raising through donations and grants to pay for the online lectures.</comment></comment></comment>