Porsche Taycan [video] - <AUTHOR> https://fullycharged.show/episodes/porsche-taycan/ <comment><USER2> Glad to see competition finally coming around.

That said I still wonder if they're holding back here to not cannibalize other lines. The 0-60 in the 3.5s range is over a full second off Tesla's best and for a performance brand seems like you want to be more in line with Tesla.

<comment><USER3> If you try to drive a Tesla Model S like a performance car it just overheats:

[https://www.thedrive.com/news/5207/this-video-reminds-us- tha...](https://www.thedrive.com/news/5207/this-video-reminds-us-that-the- tesla-model-s-is-an-awful-track-car)

[https://jalopnik.com/heres-what-a-tesla-model-s-can-do- aroun...](https://jalopnik.com/heres-what-a-tesla-model-s-can-do-around-the- nurburgrin-1600644908)

Here's a Model S losing to a Nissan Leaf over 14 laps:

[https://insideevs.com/news/359903/video-nissan-leaf-beats- te...](https://insideevs.com/news/359903/video-nissan-leaf-beats-tesla- model-s/)

Porsche doesn't want to be in line with that.

<comment><USER4> Oops, you've accidentally presented hard facts criticizing Tesla in a tech forum and have been summarily downvoted!

Tesla's ludicrous launch is a party trick. It produces a number to prop up a marketing blurb. "Fastest production car ever!" Tesla has been doing the same sort of thing with "Safest car ever!" to the point that NHTSA recently sent Tesla a cease-and-desist letter over misleading statements about the Model 3′s safety rating.

The devil really is in the details though. A properly engineered drivetrain will be able to sustain its launches over several back-to-back activations. This is precisely what the Porsche team has accomplished. The machines they ship will hit a number, and then they will hit that number again, and again, and again, and again. And that won't fade. It won't destroy the battery. It won't get nerfed with an over-the-air update a couple of months after hitting the market.

This is what automotive engineering excellence looks like, and it's great to finally see it in an electric vehicle.

<comment><USER5> "Tesla's ludicrous launch is a party trick."

I live in a rural exurb area. Every spring-fall weekend features parades of supercars of the various supercar clubs. Million dollar plus vehicles. All driving at 60km, driving no differently than the Corolla that accidentally turned into their procession. Because it's all party tricks. These people aren't racing these cars, but are just sitting on _potential_.

As an aside, I don't remember Tesla ever claiming that their vehicles were the "fastest production car", which is normally a measure of top speed. The Tesla has a positively mediocre top speed compared to supercars, and on any longer run will be demolished. It isn't built for repeat launches, or a quick lap at Nürburgring.

But if you want a very confident merge on the highway, pass on the single lane highway, etc, it can confidently provide what you need.

As an aside, _all_ lithium ion batteries are degraded by high drain (similarly they are degraded by fast charging). Porsche is seeming buying the exact same technology in LG packs. They have identical issues that Tesla does. If you launch a P100d _without_ ludicrous mode you'll do 0-60 in 2.9 seconds.

<comment><USER6> High drain isn't the problem, most lithium ion can be drained at 15-50C (drain rate not temperature) until empty without being harmed.

P100D is 100kw/h battery, which should be able to put out at least 1500 hp continuously.

The problem is 100% Tesla's cooling system not being powerful enough.

<comment><USER7> Not all lithium ion can be drained at high rates like that. There is a trade off of safety, lifetime, energy density and power density (discharge rate). For instance the RC helicopter batteries are rated for 100C+, but are notorious for fires and short life time. As it happens, the RC photo drones are easier on the batteries and want longer run times so there are batteries that have higher energy density but can only handle 20C. A lot of e-bike packs are built from 1650 batteries and these are best off when limited to 3C. I'd imagine the priorities of a car battery are similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It has a two-speed transmission, which should help with high-speed performance. [https://insideevs.com/news/343827/porsche-taycan-2-speed- rea...](https://insideevs.com/news/343827/porsche-taycan-2-speed-rear- transaxle-performance-modeled/)

But one of the advantages of an electric car for me is the possibility of no (variable) transmission. I don't want clutches that are constantly wearing down as I drive. For me this is not about money or maintenance headaches, but about elegance.

<comment><USER9> Running electrical engines at lower speed should in theory reduce wear, especially at autobahn type speeds.

If you've ever driven an electric performance car one of the most disappointing things is comparing 30–90 vs 0-60. Arguably the latter is more important because the typical on-ramp is generally 30 mph and highway traffic around me is traveling at 75+

<comment><USER10> Disappointing, and 30-90? Nah. Even my RWD non-performance Model 3 with only 250hp or thereabouts 'feels' faster than my 300HP Golf R did from, say, 70-100mph. I admit, it absolutely feels relatively "out of breath", so to speak, above 95mph, but that's nothing HP can't solve.

I'm not saying there's no need, ever for a multi-speed transmission in an EV, but for 99% of the vehicles, it's likely pointless.

<comment><USER11> Do you like the Model 3 more than the Golf R?

<comment><USER10> That depends on what you mean. My knee jerk reaction is, no, I don't. But they're different cars for different purposes for me (as an enthusiast). I sold the R around the time we bought the Tesla because the only thing we needed less than 1 $40k car is 2 $40k cars. (We've got 4 cars at the moment, though I'm currently at CarMax trying to get rid of one of them).

The Model 3 is the first appliance car I've owned. But I went into this eyes wide open; it was the right decision at the time and it's still the right decision. The R I basically stopped driving when I got a new job where I biked to work for a year. The Model 3 was a replacement for my wife's 175k mile Subaru, and we bought it immediately after my company was acquired and we started carpooling together. The 3 is a better commuter/appliance more suited to 2 drivers who trade off, cheaper to run, gives us HOV lane access on the rare occasion where one of us drives solo, and my wife hadn't driven stick since she lived in Australia many years ago so she didn't really show interest in driving the R.

The R was my (other) fun car, with all the euro goodies on it. It was fantastic everyday runabout, fun car, roadtrip machine that could eat miles like nobody's business. The 3 is, again, an appliance. I don't really like sedans, but I wanted an EV, and I like Teslas, but could never justify spending the coin for an S.

Given infinite money and space, I'd still have the R, too. Though I'd probably never drive it, because it's so easy and convenient to just hop in the Tesla and go, any time, anywhere. It never has to warm up, it never needs me to stop at the gas station before I run my errands, hell, I don't even need a key.

<comment><USER7> A good set of performance tires really wakes up a 3. Try a set of Michelin Pilot Sport A/S 3+, (or 4S if you never see snow). I rented a 3 LR RWD for a few days and decided not to buy, but then drove the Performance and had to have it. Yeah, the brutal acceleration was part of it, but the biggest difference is how much sharper the handling is. And this is mostly down to the squashy super efficient tires on the base models masking the capability of the car.

<comment><USER11> While this is good advice in general, this literally applies to every performance car (and even every car period). The Model 3 isn't unique in benefitting from better tires any more than a Golf R.

Also, the A/S 3+ is an obvious compromise for people that don't want to rotate their tires seasonally. If you're going to recommend tires for performance, the PS4S is a good choice and then get a separate set of tires for winter. In other words if you think the tires make a difference like you wrote, you're selling yourself short driving on all season tires. Do yourself a favor and buy a set of summer tires if you're serious about how your car performs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this is the first car that is nearing the 2013 tesla model s.

I'm also curious about the rapid charge, it was supposed to be 350 afaik but is launching with 150ish only (not 250 as in the web page) and will be increased with software updates in the next few years.

I think if they put a proper infotainment system with a big screen like tesla, give free map/system updates and it doesn't suck in efficiency it might actually sell a bit more than etron and i-pace.

However looking at it... it reminds me of a frog, so maybe not..

<comment><USER13> > _it might actually sell a bit more than etron and i-pace._

That's not really hard... Both these models aren't really selling well.

<comment><USER12> They're selling better than the model x in Norway so far in 2019. For me personally they have too short range and too little space but there is a certain segment that want a "real" electric car made by an encumbered manufacturer. I used to be one of them until I saw the specs of the i-pace and etron.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Huge fan of this -- will definitely replace my Tesla for this car!

<comment><USER15> By the time they are available, your Tesla will likely be due to replaced anyway. But here's to the future, fellow EV'er.

<comment><USER16> Deliveries of the Taycan start this year

<comment><USER15> ok. Deliveries of the model 3 started in 2017. But it took a while to reach critical mass. And some countries still haven't gotten them.

EDIT: "Prices for this 'Turbo' launch model will be around £130,000 with cheaper/slower versions kicking off around £65,000 within 18 months of the car's launch in late 2019. "

So... maybe we'll see some in 2019, but really it's 2021 before more than a few thousand hit the market.

<comment><USER17> I would assume Porsche to be able to launch a car with an equivalent of production hell, so.

<comment><USER18> The big question would be where will they source all of those batteries?

<comment><USER19> "VW secures US$25B in battery supplies in electric-car surge" [https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/vw-secures-25-billion-battery- su...](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/vw-secures-25-billion-battery-supplies-in- electric-car-surge-1.1025335)

"Volkswagen will invest almost 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in battery cell production at a facility in western Germany" [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen- electric/volks...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen- electric/volkswagen-to-make-batteries-in-germany-slim-down-idUSKCN1SJ1PU)

<comment><USER18> Cool, I read those a while back. Where will be the the factory located at and when is the ETA for completion? Have they broke ground yet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I got as far as $130,000.

Edit: £

<comment><USER21> Given the extremely limited numbers they'll be putting out, I'd be surprised if that price point was too high. Seems that Tesla has the 45-100k range well covered, but they don't have a sports car variant and that's why I think a limited volume 130k is decent idea for Porsche to get its feet wet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A bit late to this thread, but here's a response by the owner of a Model 3 Performance edition to the Taycan video: [https://www.teslarati.com/tesla- model-3-performance-31-hard-...](https://www.teslarati.com/tesla- model-3-performance-31-hard-launches-video)

</comment><comment><USER23> just by the looks of it, this already beats the ugly Tesla

<comment><USER15> Not everyone likes the look of a Porsche either. But thanks for the opinion.

Here's to taking more ICE cars off the road. A world of quiet, zero emissions cars on the road sounds good to me. The sooner everyone can get their hands on one, the better.

<comment><USER24> I was keen for the quiet car future as well, but now they're adding buzzers to them when traveling less than 30kph. Bleah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So I want this with a drop top and 2 seats, so basically a Boxster. Let us see who gets there first with a proper roadster. Tesla or Porsche. I will be the first in line. Yes it is a stupid use of money, but the inter teenage boy does not care.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is the original Tesla founder who was ousted by Elon somehow involved in this? I remember he went to VW afterwards...

<comment><USER27> You're thinking of Martin Eberhard, from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Eberhard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Eberhard):

"In 2010, Martin Eberhard confirmed to Autoblog Green that he was doing work with Volkswagen, but no further details have been provided [...] Later, he worked at Lucid Motors, a startup funded by LeEco and others which was created to compete with Tesla, until 2015 [...] In 2017, Eberhard founded inEVit in a bid to supply major OEMs with electric drivetrains and power storage solutions. [...] In October, 2017, Eberhard joined Sokon Industry Group when that company acquired Inevit. This branch was renamed SF Motors."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> i'm curious how he could feel torque vectoring in a straight line....

</comment><comment><USER22> It all looks very nice, but is it just a copy of the Model 3 with a few upgraded bits (air suspension) and twice the price?

Also, the interior seemed very dark - maybe just the pre-production version hiding some details or I'm just used to the glass Model 3 roof.

Nice to see more manufacturers getting serious about this obvious electric-car future.

<comment><USER29> I mean it's a copy of the Model 3 in the same sense that a Porsche 911 is a copy of a BMW 3 series.

<comment><USER22> Disputing your statement...

The 911 was first produced in 1963 with an air-cooled flat 6 engine mounted aft of the rear axle.

The 3 series, first produced in 1975, is a front-engine car with a water- cooled straight-4 and -6 (most commonly) water-cooled engine mounted in front.

So the first 911 was made twelve years before the first 3 series, is structured completely differently and has completely different engine technology.

The Model 3 was released 2-3 years before the Taycan is expected out, and has essentially the same layout: floor battery with front and rear electric motors mounted in about the same spots. They both have four doors with the same deep swoop down of the roof over the rear seats, flattened hoods that dip below the line of the fenders, etc.

The Taycan looks more like a Model 3 than any other electric car around, and since the Model 3 came first, it's reasonable to describe the Taycan in Model 3 terms.

It's a good design, functionally and aesthetically, and I'm certainly not faulting Porsche for these design choices. I've owned a 911 before and I've always appreciated Porsches - they have made many great cars, and the Taycan might well be another one. I hope that it is. But it does look a lot like a Model 3.

<comment><USER29> I just don't really see any similarity between the model 3 and the Taycan other than them both being electric, they are completely different classes of cars. They have the same layout because that is the most obvious layout for a 4 door AWD electric car (i-pace has same layout too). The Taycan is a luxury sports car with good handling and the ability to run at full performance for a long time. The model 3 is a practical car with a fairly poor interior, poor handling, and great acceleration and range.

<comment><USER22> Model 3 handling has been almost universally praised as superb. I haven't read any negative reviews of it.

I have almost 40,000 miles on a Model 3 and from my personal experience with it and with other cars I've owned, including hundreds of thousands of miles on Porsche and Mercedes, the Model 3 handles the best. Air suspension will, I expect, give the Taycan a slight edge, but other than that, there's no magic dust that Porsche can sprinkle to make their car any different. Just putting the massive weight of the battery on the floor is enough to give both cars a big advantage over any ICE car.

You mention that the cars are in different classes - the only class that they don't share is price. The Porsche is predicted to cost between 2x and 3x the price of the Model 3. They're of comparable weight, size, power output, layout, etc.

You mention that the Model 3 has a poor interior - again, unless you work for Porsche or otherwise have access to as-yet unreleased photos, there are no released images of the Taycan interior. How can you know the interior is better? The Model 3 interior is simple, clean, and spartan, but I like it better than the E-class I drove before the Tesla. When I go back to the E-class, it feels fussy and baroque in comparison.

We know how advanced the Model 3 self-driving is, and it's constantly improving with frequent updates. It's really quite good. Will the Taycan be better? Perhaps, but at this point Tesla has had hundreds of millions of driving data to refine their approach and Porsche has not. Even if Porsche outsources from someone with much more experience, such as MobileEye. They're unlikely to be much better than Tesla. All of Porsche's money and many years of racing successes can't make software development suddenly leap ahead.

Finally, Porsche, in this video, is pushing the ability to run at "full performance" for a long time. That video, while very nice, didn't give any facts and figures about what that means. Tesla's had ten years and several generations of drivetrains to work out the kinks, including the overheating problems during track time of older Model S cars. When the Taycan is finally out and people can independently compare the two cars, I'll be interested to see of the Taycan is significantly better, but before that happens there's no reason to think that it will be.

Let it be resolved, then, that the Model 3 and the Taycan are in exactly the same class in every area except for price. I hope the Taycan is a great car and I'm sure it will be.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


When being idiomatic wears you out - <AUTHOR> http://www.codelord.net/2011/08/27/when-being-idiomatic-wears-you-out/

<comment><USER2> Taking the gist of what he's saying ('Other languages are a lot more concise than Java') I tend to have the same feeling even with HTML when using CSS.

For example, CSS has its own syntax for classes and IDs, and once you're used to that, you can go back to HTML and it can get a little bit frustrating having to do it more verbosely.

        // CSS
        div.example, div#example {}
        // HTML
        <div class='example' id='example'>
        // What I sometimes end up doing by accident
        <div.example> / <div#example>

And the same with PHP vs JS

        // Empty object in JS
        var obj = {}
        // Empty object in PHP
        $obj = new stdClass();

Or coffee-script, Erlang, etc. vs plenty other languages

        // defining a function in the former
        func() -> ...
       // and the latter
        function() { ... }

And the languages that rely on indentation to identify code blocks vs. those that use curly braces or parentheses. The latter is a nightmare when code is nested several blocks deep and you've a sequence of:

                    }
                }
            }
        }); ...

By the same token there's probably a blog post out there about how confusing concise syntax is and how it's hard to figure out what the hell '{}' or '[]' or '?:' means compared to their more verbose counterparts.

<comment><USER3> If you are used to CoffeScript and python and feel like you're trudging through syrup when you work on HTML, you might check out SHPAML (<http://shpaml.webfactional.com/>). I found SHPAML to be more closely related to those two than HAML and friends: indented syntax, minimal angle brackets, etc. And per your wish:

      div.example_class
        Content here...

      p#id_example
        More content...

From the previous discussions here on HN there were many skeptics, but I have found that it has greatly reduced mental friction when I have to wrestle with HTML: the markup is fast to write, a joy to read, and I get warm, fuzzy feelings knowing that my HTML source is not drowning in markup soup.

Caveats:

1\. It doesn't appear to be actively maintained. (But it is distributed as a single, readable python script that one can easily modify to taste. It spits out plain HTML, so if you ever want to ditch SHPAML, you will never be left high and dry.)

2\. Doesn't include a round-trip translator. (Not terribly important to me.)

3\. Like CoffeeScript and their ilk, the output line numbers don't line up with the source.

4\. There are a few bits of gymnastics one has to do to conform to the grammar. For example, a link anchor must appear isolated on a new line to use the most absolutely tersest syntax. Since SHPAML passes HTML straight through, you can avoid this by added the standard markup.

5\. SHPAML may not be automatically included in your workflow if you are using something like Rails or Django, but I believe there are a set of github projects that address this.

<comment><USER4> Good old fashioned HAML is regularly maintained, and appears to have been the inspiration for SHPAML:

<http://haml-lang.com/>

It also comes with SASS/SCSS which similarly cleans up stylesheets, and adds things like variables and mixins.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel your pain.

Recently, I jumped back into the Java world to help maintain (read: re-write) an application stack. The last time I used Java, it was done with Ant and Eclipse. This time around, it appears that Maven is the idiomatic babe, and I've been trying to pick it up, to be current.

One of the selling points of Maven, apparently, is that it relies on idiomatic convention. This means that basically it tries to read your mind and do a lot of magic behind the scenes. It dances with you, but you have to know the right dance steps.

Well, let me tell you, after 2 weeks of banging my head against Maven and its sadistic verbosity monster of repository managers, goals, plugins, IDE integrations, and layers of idioms, I'm done. I've got products to ship, and if it means going back to Ant, then that's what I've got to do. I cringe when I think of all the code I could have written in that same amount of time.

Let the Java-build experts laugh at my poor, ignorant schemes.

<comment><USER6> I also fought with Maven and discarded it. Two years later I was dreaming of a different kind of build system and started building a prototype. I quit working on it and started using Maven again after I realized that the concepts I now embraced were the philosophy behind Maven.

So either it tooks me a couple years to actually grok the Maven way, or Maven got a hold of me when my mind had gotten to a particular place. Now it seems like second nature and I've got a lot of plugins that allow me to manage my complete life-cycle. It may seem funny, but to a large degree, I even use it like Puppet or Chef.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title should really be "When Java wears you out".

He seems to be more interested in complaining about the verbosity level of Java than about idiomatic code.

<comment><USER8> It could be, "When Java idioms wear you out".

Idioms, of course, vary by language, and I think Java's tend toward the excessively architected. Architecture is a fine thing at scale, but Java doesn't seem to understand that you don't want six tanks and an aircraft carrier when you're heading to the store for milk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've had experience with both Java and Python, so I know how you feel. At MIT, most classes in CS are taught in Python for this very reason: the idiomatic- style and overly verbose syntax of Java detracts from learning pure CS logic.

Sure, using python abstracts away a lot of things (e.g. memory management, type settings, etc.), and some might argue you have less freedom in python, but in the end, python is much closer to "logic" than java. Each line contributes to the logical flow of the program.

That being said, python is a language to write something up quick, prototype an idea, put up a simple webserver. However, when your program must scale or if you're trying to optimise for speed, you should highly consider java. The code will be more verbose, but you will pick up a tremendous speed increase.

I'm sure those of you who are hard-core Java programmers will disagree in some sense, so please leave your thoughts.

<comment><USER10> >That being said, python is a language to write something up quick, prototype an idea, put up a simple webserver. However, when your program must scale or if you're trying to optimise for speed, you should highly consider java. The code will be more verbose, but you will pick up a tremendous speed increase.

If your Python application is slow, you can throw hardware at it. That's easy & cheap.

If your Java application _development cycle_ is slow, good luck -- you cannot just throw programmers at the problem.

It's almost always better to have fast programmers than a fast application.

<comment><USER11> > It's almost always better to have fast programmers than a fast application.

So I guess algorithms just don't matter.

<comment><USER10> Selecting a language that lets you develop quickly over a "fast language" is orthogonal to selecting algorithms.

Is there a reason you believe them to be related? Or, did you repost one line of my comment without any context and expect to make a salient point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since the crux of the argument seems be that Java is too verbose, I wonder why he doesn't look at other JVM languages? For example, in Scala you'd write List(foo) for a singleton list. In Clojure the equivalent is '(,foo). Both languages have a decent size community and ongoing development.

<comment><USER13> I also reacted that the author mixed in Python in his Java-project when Scala is a really fine alternative.

Using Scala and Java he can write very short and readable code and use Java only when there's a performance concern or a similar reason.

People say Scala is complex and academic, but if you don't try to write your first Scala programs using every feature of the language you'll see it's a useful and likable language.

Use it a bit like you'd use C++, pick a feature-set you understand and like and be consequent with your use of parens/lack of parens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This isn't 'being worn out by being idiomatic', its just that the language (Java) is too verbose, so most code in Java tends to have too many words compared to its counterpart in Ruby or Python, whether idiomatic or not.

</comment><comment><USER15> I would recommend reviewing the other JVM languages - Clojure, Groovy, and Scala are the ones I can think of - before doing interop.

I think you'd be pleasantly surprised.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yep, Java is wordy.

FWIW, I put together a little utility class to somewhat more shortly initialize a hash/map/dictionary in Java a while back. It's not much, but Java and .NET rule the enterprise, and you play the hand you're dealt sometimes. Hope this helps.

<http://roboprogs.com/devel/2009.03.html>

Share and enjoy, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER17> I didn't know you could do this in ruby:

        Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = []}

That makes counters easier, as in:

        x = Hash.new {|k,v| k[v] = 0}
        x['foo'] += 1

Or simply:

        x = Hash.new 0

<comment><USER18> I'm actually still confused as to the right way to do defaultdict in Ruby.

StackOverflow has three ways...

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/190740/setting-ruby- hash-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/190740/setting-ruby-hash-default- to-a-list)

(i) The most idiomatic way seems to be:

      (myhash[key] ||= []) << value

(ii) You can use .default

      myhash.default = []

(iii) You can use a default proc, as you note:

      myhash = Hash.new {|h,k| h[k] = []}

The problem with (i) is that it has weird results if myhash[key] has an actual value, but that value is falsy (e.g., nil or false).

The problem with (ii) is that all default values share the same empty array, so when that gets changed, they all get changed.

The one weird behavior with (iii), at least to me, is that if you access (but don't modify) myhash[k], then it creates a new key with the default value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I actually had the converse experience yesterday.

I digged into python File nonsense trying to find a size() method, and the best explanation I got is that File doesn't have a size() method because it's not meant to designate a file but a strange mix of input/output stream/reader/writer. And since you can't really navigate into python code, I had to google quite a lot to get this explanation.

Best part of the story ? Actually I use django and it _has_ a sane File class with a size() on it, just that it's not appearing in google when you don't send the right request (and IO is pyhton base stuff, not web stuff in my head, so I didn't put the django keyword).

<comment><USER20> The file protocol is for generic streams, but you could seek to the end and then call tell().

If you just want to know the size of a file and don't want to write to it, os.stat() will do what you want.</comment></comment>


The Future of Pop Music -- from South Korea - <AUTHOR> http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/03/27/Music-Impresario-Jin-Young-Park <comment><USER2> Awesome article... just wonder how applicable lessons from the South Korean music industry are to the US, where the market is roughly 30x bigger (according to figures in the article).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm going to chalk this up as a cultural thing. The relationship that people have with pop music in Asia is different from the relationship American tweens have with pop music. The closest thing we have is a WalMart selling Hannah Montana beach towels and trapper-keepers. But you can't extend much more than that. There's no digital immersion environment nor do we have a fanaticism with pop stars.</comment>


Bill Gates: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable?" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp <comment><USER2> If Gates had maintained a dictatorial death grip on his company like Steve Jobs has, MS probably could have made some decent products.

It's one thing to yell at the people who made this system via email. It's quite another to _never allow them to ship it in the first place_.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft has made a bunch of very good products:

\- Windows 3.0 and 3.1 clearly hit exactly the sweet spot between DOS and OS/2

\- Word and Excel were legitimately better than the competition (and still are, although there is not much competition left).

\- Internet Explorer 4 was so much better than Netscape 3 and 4 that it wasn't even funny

\- Windows 2000 and XP were very good operating systems

<comment><USER4> Almost all releases of the NT line were good (including Win 7).

Was there any OS contemporary to NT 3.51 that was better than it at anything (beside win 95 when it comes to compatibility with more software & hardware)?

<comment><USER5> Solaris 2.5 was a very solid OS and better than NT 3.5 in most respects unless a defining criteria for "better" is "runs well on PCs", which it didn't.

OS/2 was also a good OS for x86 PCs. At least as good as NT, unless, again, you want it to run software designed for Windows.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't really into OS/2 but I concede that it was probably about as good as NT at the time.

I would, however, much rather use NT 3.51 as a desktop OS than Solaris 2.5 with CDE and its 80s-style command line utilities (luckily it seems they are using GNU stuff nowadays?).

<comment><USER5> You always could get the GNU stuff and compile it yourself. My own installs felt very GNU-ish at that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This made me think a bit about Bill Gates and Microsoft and Everything. People really hate on Bill Gates because of Microsoft and their products, but after seeing this email you get to see that he's as angry as any other user, and even more because he knows all of this will fall back to him. His email portrays not only anger, but some kind of impotence. It's impressive how big companies lose touch with what they're doing. Most software I use lately comes from small companies, they have this dedication and attention to detail that only comes from when you're directly involved with your product. Business is a weird world.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've seen this before, but it's worth a read again. Gates said when this first came out that writing emails like this was pretty much his job. He's not the only one--from the stories you read, it sounds like half of Steve Jobs' job is to be a good critic. Of course, Apple doesn't release much until _after_ Steve Jobs criticizes it.

</comment><comment><USER8> The fact that Gates regularly attempted to eat Microsoft's dog food (alas he couldn't get the can open in this case) is encouraging; but ultimately it doesn't seem to have helped much.

<comment><USER9> If he did send out stuff like this often and nobody gave a damn then that's really discouraging. There go my "if I ran Microsoft" fantasies. /sigh

I've always imagined one of the reasons Apple products are so polished is because Steve rides people like this all day long until they stop sucking.

<comment><USER10> riding people isn't the solution, the problem is usually structural. Take any product and there are 5 to 10 teams involved in it's development and they all push their own little pet ideas. Rarely is there ever a single leader with a single vision that is also involved in the day to day development and decision making. Instead the person that should do this does what you suggest, they swing in every once in a while, complain complain complain, then switch focus to some other project for a bit, while never taking to time to solve the real problem.

well, that's my sad experience from a couple of big companies.

<comment><USER11> Well yes. Microsoft is often said to have problems with teams competing internally (pointlessly), or just not working together. However, that's a management choice that can come from the top. If there's one thing a "Chief Software Architect" should do, it's make sure all software teams are in the habit of communicating and collaborating whenever possible. It doesn't seam like that happened here.

<comment><USER10> I think the right thing to do is recognize the extremely high cost of communication and collaboration and weigh that against the benefit.

Almost every manager I've known assumes that the cost of communication or collaboration is near zero while the cost of development is extremely high. Often, the cost of duplication development effort is lower than the cost of adding another communication and collaboration channel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seriously though, is all of this fixed in Windows 7, or are people just hyping that up because it sucks alot less than any previous Windows iterations?

I don't think I've _ever_ seen a process that convoluted, and I've been using Linux OSes since _before_ the advent of dependency-resolvers like yum and apt (i.e, the bad old days of "RPM hell").

<comment><USER13> I'm a Windows person, but I've got Ubuntu on a netbook.

It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to get the repository for XBMC set up so that it would let me install the program.

Now I'd like to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.4, but I don't have quite enough space in the SSD to do it. I'd like to cut out some software that I don't really use on the netbook. But I can't figure out how to make it actually _get rid_ of things that I uninstall. In particular, since installations are hierarchies of dependent packages, I can't see how to tell it "get rid of this and anything that it depends on, that isn't required by something else".

So for now, I can't upgrade my Ubuntu installation.

This sounds like your typical family member who can't get Windows to work right, doesn't it? I don't think that Linux has done anything _better_. They've done it _different_ , and people who know the system can use it very effectively, but those of us who don't know the incantations are still out in the cold.

<comment><USER14> Personally I don't like synaptic, but if you open up the ubuntu software centre and then click on 'installed software', you will see a list of every application that is installed on your system.

Dependencies are automatically installed for all applications and are automatically removed when there are no packages left that need them, so don't worry about those!

If you're more a command line guy, you can do the same using aptitude (aptitude remove package-name). Packages under aptitude will be listed as (a)utomatically installed if they were installed as a requirement for another package, so you shouldn't have to remove those by hand.

<comment><USER15> Also opening a console and using "popcon-largest-unused" should give you a list of the largest packages that you have not yet used the binaries from. Mine doesn't seem to update properly but this might be because I'm using Kubuntu.

On my slimmed down system I use "sudo aptitude" type "/appname[Enter]", where appname is from the list popcon gives, then "n" to find the package and then try "_" (Shift+-) which purges the packages. If something will break you get a warning "e" shows what the suggested action is "," and "." scroll through options and "!" applies. When you're happy "g" will list the actions to be taken and "g" again will confirm. "q" at any time quits or moves to the previous menu or list. HTH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated."

<comment><USER17> Golden. As is this line

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

It's funny how far we've come, with today's out of the box search tools this wouldnt be a problem

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried to download it - their new simple solution is to include it as part of Windows Live.

So I want a simple movie editor to clip 5secs off the beginning of a home movie - BUT to do this I have to sign up for an MS specific hotmail account, create a windows passport (I thought they had abandoned that?) get Windows messenger, windows photo viewer and be included in a whole bunch of MS specific social websites.

So I found a torrent of Movie maker 2.6 for XP - it works perfectly on Win7.

<comment><USER19> You know, no one took away the check boxes that let you choose which Windows Live programs you want to install when you're trying to run the installer. The installer doesn't even download any of those apps if you leave them unchecked. If you don't want Messenger, Photo Gallery, or even to sign up for a Windows Live ID, you don't have to get/do those things.

Most people find that this is actually helpful, though, because signing up for (or using, since the vast majority of folks already have one) a Live ID enables a bunch of convenient features like easily uploading your photos and videos (either to Microsoft's services or to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) And most users who use Movie Maker also want to, for instance, organize their photos. Let's not forget that iLife also comes as a suite for a reason.

On the other hand, signing up for a new throwaway account just to trash Microsoft... yeah, that's classy.

(Usual disclosure: I work at Microsoft.)

<comment><USER20> I'd suggest downloading the iWork demo and installing it. <http://www.apple.com/iwork/download-trial/>

It's a magnitude easier than installing anything on Windows: Click Link. DMG gets mounted on desktop. Click continue a couple times.

But really that's quaint, too. Install iMovie on the iPhone or iPad: Search App Store. Click Install. Enter Password.

Expecting users to do anything else at install time is expecting too much.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't say installing _anything_ on windows - somethings are nice. [http://germanysfinest.posterous.com/hooray-software- policypa...](http://germanysfinest.posterous.com/hooray-software-policypatrol)

Also, no-install / portable apps are ever such a pleasant trend - just copy the files and run them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a great reminder (to me) that software UI should be designed around how many pieces of information it needs from the user, not how many things it needs to do.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think by far the most telling part of this was this quote:

"Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night -- why should I reboot at that time?"

No wonder he has no idea how horrible Windows is. He resets it every day.

<comment><USER7> Until sleep mode (and laptops) became the social custom, lots of people shut down at night and booted up in the morning.

<comment><USER23> I'm well aware of that. I'm just saying that most of us hard core folks did not, which is why we complain more about Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Although amusing, this is an example of poor management IMO.

It comes across as the sort of email you would write while criticizing/mocking a competitors product that you were powerless to change.

There's no demand for improvement, or accountability for making that happen. No wondering if this small experience is indicative of other problems. He's just "disappointed".

<comment><USER25> For me it's more an example of poor management from the fact that he allowed development to become so fragmented that the end result was a convoluted mess.

I know if the the richest man in the world said he was disappointed with something I had, the implications of not fixing the problem would be very clear. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> After recently working with Microsoft on a project for 8 months all I can say is the way their product team offices are set up is quite bad. The user experience designers and visual designers are sitting hallways down from the developers and program managers. This is not how it should be. All stakeholders in the application design process should be near each other. Open work spaces do wonders for communication and collaboration, which in turn affects product design.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ok, this is kind of old shoe, but let's discuss the Windows usability a bit.

I have to endure some amount of XP and 7 on a regular basis, so I have some understanding on how to work with them (well, mostly how to set up or correct things).

Those that say that Windows 7 is so much better.. well, in some sense. I admittedly has better optics. And it crashes less.

Administrative tasks got more tiresome though, compared to XP you have to wade through more windows to get to a specific configuration point. That gets very irksome if you want to perform some configuration for a dozen PC's. (Enough to make it very repetitive, too little that automation would make much sense, especially considering the abysmal automation tools Windows comes with _cough_ shell _cough_ ). Other critical points are software management systems (lack of) and general disability in the usability sector.

Granted, learning to cope with a Linux system is somewhat more challenging, but once you are into it, it's really much less bother to do things, no matter the scale.

Microsoft still has a long way to go just to reach the current status. Maybe they will manage, as they seem to be very apt at keeping the stranglehold on the market.

And I will keep avoiding them as much as I can.

<comment><USER28> _Enough to make it very repetitive, too little that automation would make much sense, especially considering the abysmal automation tools Windows comes with cough shell cough_

Hmm... I've been thinking about switching to Powershell. What do you find abysmal about it?

<comment><USER27> You are kidding, right? Powershell just does not conform to the original UNIX sh standards, which is why even console wizards will avoid it.

Same reason why tcsh and ksh didn't get traction, and they even have merit to them.

Who is the target audience? UNIX command line people certainly aren't. Then who, people that managed to learn VB Scripting host?

That's just not how things work.

<comment><USER29> > Same reason why tcsh and ksh didn't get traction, and they even have merit > to them.

In the world of enterprise Unix, ksh is king. It is used even for "serious" applications, not only as the sysadmin's glue of choice (the company where I work at was using, in 2009, a HR payroll application written in ksh. Had they not outsourced accounting to a third party, they would probably still be using it today).

Granted, "legacy" Unices are being slowly obsoleted by Linux, but ksh lives on. It would be unthinkable for RHEL or SLES to deprecate ksh and leave it out of the distribution - enterprise customers would probably think this is some kind of a bad joke.

<comment><USER30> ksh is king (for writing portable shell scripts) because it has long had a reputation for being the one shell that was available everywhere, and _worked the same_ everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I remember reading this when it first came out, at a time when I was still on Windows. I remember thinking, "Finally! Microsoft products are bound to improve after a letter like that from Gates."

Two years later, nothing about XP had changed, and I moved to OS X, just in time to avoid Vista...

So, while the letter is, itself, excellent, I'm not sure how much it did to help out Windows in the long run. (Maybe Windows 7 represents a change.)

</comment><comment><USER32> My biggest takeway from this email is to write short paragraph s when writing a long email. Seems pretty simple but I had never thought about this. Write 2-3 lines per paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER33> Guys, has uncle Bill mellowed with age! In the past meeting with him about MS products meant keeping a f __* score:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html>

Now, he's just "quite disappointed".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The first time I read it I was in disbelief. I actually checked if the mail was fake or true, turns out it's true.

The second time I read it I actually laughed.

</comment><comment><USER34> The part about him filling in the form on microsoft.com and having it tell him that what he input was invalid is particularly hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER35> My name is Bill and Windows was my idea.

<comment><USER36> My name is Steve and Windows was _my_ idea.

<comment><USER37> My name is Douglas Engelbart and Windows was my idea before Alan Kay, Bill Gates _or_ Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER38> Not really. Englebart pioneered the mouse & a semi-GUI interface in NLS, but it didn't involve multiple windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated."

WTH???!!

</comment><comment><USER40> This e-mail has been going around for years now. It's old news.

</comment><comment><USER41> So Windows 7 was _his_ idea!

Mystery solved.

</comment><comment><USER42> Most of the time you don't need some authority person's opinion to realize that something is a total mess. Your own experience is enough. That is what this email is all about - users will create their own opinion very quickly.

The another example is Java development. Everyone who run Maven2 build process (say to build clojure-contrib) will be amazed by a tons of a strange and useless messages, repeated downloads of what seems the same files (but, different minor version numbers) to unknown location. That process will took something like 10 minutes on 3G connection, while you have absolutely no idea what's going on (OK, I can figure out that it is a process of a recursive downloading and building dependencies, and because people don't care about migration to the latest stable versions, it will download half of internet.)

This alone tells me what is really happening in a Java world better than all Sun's brainwashing altogether. ^_^

btw, _sudo apt-get install maven2_ downloaded another 70Mb of shit (in case JDK is already installed). 70Mb for a apt+make replacement? Compressed Linux kernel sources are less in size.

</comment><comment><USER43> throw windows out the window, use linux, problem solved..play guitar hero with all the spare time...</comment>


Ask HN: Which to join? late stage pre IPO or FAANG - <AUTHOR> If my objective function is purely to optimize upside potential (income, bonus, stock etc) does it make sense to join an established FAANG or a late stage pre Ipo like Airbnb, Qualtrix etc? Thinking about middle management roles.. <comment><USER2> Late stage pre-IPO stock is usually fairly valued, and very few companies at this stage would consider ISOs (which have somewhat of a tax benefit).

Therefore no hard rule, just run the numbers on an offer-by-offer basis. Depending on your fit and skill set some employer might kick in some premium to tilt the scale in their favor.</comment>


The NBA is using Microsoft Teams to bring basketball fans courtside - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/24/21337326/nba-microsoft-teams-together-mode-basketball-virtual-experience-fans <comment><USER2> I find simulated and remote fans to be mildly distasteful for reaaons that I find hard to articulate. I suppose it has to do with notions of authenticity. One of the reasons I enjoyed the NBA summer league is that you can hear the players and ambient noises of the gym so much better and it created an interested experience that is different than a normal crowded stadium. Why not just have a distinct moment in sports where things are genuinely different due to outside circumstances rather than pretend like things are the same?

<comment><USER3> I watched one of the first Spanish football games of the new season last week on TV, the audience was digital. It was very surreal, and felt like a combination of a video game and reality. Even the singing and cheering was added. I wonder, if they did that at the stadium too to help the players along. Very strange experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> be on your pajamas on live TV! see the crowd celebrate that point with a 15 seconds delay!</comment>


Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/crypto-ceo-died-with-passwords-to-137-million-but-the-money-is-gone-2019-3 <comment><USER2> For some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

CEO of Crypto Company...

1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths.

2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly.

3) Is immediately cremated.

4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead"

5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop

6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty

7) Experts crack laptop

8) All wallets turn up in fact empty

9) $140 million disappears into the ether

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOjLuy7VoAATprU.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DOjLuy7VoAATprU.jpg)

<comment><USER3> And the widow is left with just the 17 properties, 2 cars, yacht and plane that he earned through honest hard work.

Another thing you could work into the plot is $9m appears to be with WB21 "Banking Redefined" which claimed a million users but was discovered to only have 135 downloads of its app (now removed), is run by a convicted fraudster and was awarded "Global Banker Award 2018" in a black tie ceremony that they seem to have set up themselves to give themselves the award ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbKMdhpwbaw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbKMdhpwbaw)). They are still going I think if you are looking for a safe place to put your money. [https://amycastor.com/2019/03/01/diving-into-wb21-the- compan...](https://amycastor.com/2019/03/01/diving-into-wb21-the-company- holding-9-million-of-quadriga-money/)

<comment><USER4> That "award" ceremony video is both surreal and ridiculously cringe-inducing at the same time. It wouldn't surprise me if he actually felt like he had "achieved" something when he gave himself that award, either.

It was like you were watching his fantasy of what people would say about him if he was a productive member of society instead of a criminal and fraud.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, this is only marginally worse than your standard 'industry award' in that he had the nerve to give it to himself. Pretty much every industry has a boatload of meaningless awards. It is done largely for marketing and for 'social engineering'[1]. It is cheap (both in cost and tact) but effective.

[1] Curries favor with the awardees, creates an 'in group' etc...

<comment><USER6> Feynman spoke at length on the shallowness of awards.

>epaulets, uniform, position: it has nothing to do with something intrinsic of that person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My take on this is that they probably were insolvent for a long time already due to previous hacks/theft. The CEO just decided to lie about the supposedly 137M in funds 'safely' stored on his laptop.

This is also what happened at MtGox, except that at MtGox they 'lost' wel over a million BTC.

Edit: relevant listening: [https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/9/](https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/9/)

<comment><USER8> And this is the problem. These guys are not regulated. There is no transparency. There are no external auditors. There is no control. When we find out, it is always too late. Every "cryptocurrency bank" is a potential Enron. I fear both the involvement of Central Banks and at the same time the lack of it.

If EY (or anyone else serious about this) 'follows the money' then that would be a very interesting report to read.

<comment><USER9> This would seem to be a private problem. If people choose to park their money with a non-transparent, unaudited random crypto startup, that's their decision and their problem. I'm not interested in paying for "regulators" in such cases.

<comment><USER10> You don't need to pay regulators, you just need to make people able to sue for damages or charge crypto purveyors with fraud. It's manifestly clear that the majority of these are just pyramid scams.

<comment><USER11> "Sue later" is not a solution when the money is already gone. That might be ok when facing an industrial company that has plenty of physical assets that could be sold off under bankruptcy, but finance leaves nothing if it fails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is nobody talking about the convicted felon, Omar Dhanani aka Michael Patryn, who is a co-founder and majority shareholder of Quadriga?

Dhanani is very much alive, and is known to have been involved in money laundering schemes. If I were an investigator in this case, that is the first door I would go knocking at.

<comment><USER13> I get the tech around crypto is interesting, but if your whole space is inhabited with such people, isn't it time for you to wonder if something's wrong?

<comment><USER14> Unregulated financial markets draw crooks like moths to a flame. Forex used to be just as bad.

I wonder if there's anything to be learned from this? Perhaps deregulating markets driven by greed, margin, and leverage is a bad idea? LeT tHe FrEe mArKeT DeciDe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not convinced of the first half of the headline re laptop cracking.

The article cites the latest monitor report, but the only paragraph I can find with the word laptop just implies the monitor has possession and success with some devices.

""" As noted in the First Report, known devices of Mr. Gerry Cotten have been secured by the Monitor including, Mr. Cotten's laptops, cellphones, USB keys and home computer. The Monitor understands that prior to the commencement of the CCAA Proceedings, the Applicants together with their initial outside expert, attempted to access the devices and were successful in respect of certain devices. The Monitor will work with the Applicants and Representative Counsel to determine next steps to access any information and data which may be located on the devices and report back to the Court with respect to those efforts. """

<comment><USER16> It may not matter much.

There's no evidence that a cold wallet with much of anything even exists.

But the devices may hold some records of external accounts (eg: deposits on other exchanges).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The investigators said they found other issues too, such as that Quadriga > kept "limited books and records" and never reported its financials.

New SaaS idea: Skin Lotus 1-2-3 and sell it as a "decentralized on-premise bookkeeping solution for your blockchain"

<comment><USER18> >decentralized >on-site

you made my day

<comment><USER17> I should have added "serverless" as well, come to think of it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This article is innaccurate.

Here is the tracking by Ernst & Young (court-appointed) providing all the public information about these developments. The latest report on 1 March 2019 mentions nothing about a cracked laptop.

[https://documentcentre.eycan.com/Pages/Main.aspx?SID=1445](https://documentcentre.eycan.com/Pages/Main.aspx?SID=1445)

<comment><USER20> There's nothing wrong with the article. The March Report merely says they were able to recover the cold storage wallets and discovered they were empty; it doesn't go into _how_ they got access to those wallets since that isn't relevant to the report.

Per the company and prior news reporting, those cold storage wallets discussed in the March Report were only stored on the owner's laptop, which was previously inaccessible due to various security mechanisms. (Reports suggested that the laptop was "locked" but did not indicate whether it was boot-locked or locked via the Windows mechanisms.) The fact that they were able to access those wallets means they "cracked" the security measures on that laptop.

<comment><USER21> >The fact that they were able to access those wallets means they "cracked" the security measures on that laptop

Incorrect. Experts were able to trace funds back to the cold storage wallets addresses using analysis. But the private keys have not been located and no, the laptop has not been "cracked".

<comment><USER19> Yup: "The Monitor has commenced a preliminary review of the transactional activity of the Identified Bitcoin Cold Wallets utilizing public blockchain records. This analysis..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The headline and article are both misleading. EY never reported they cracked the encryption on the laptop or recovered any private keys to the so-called cold wallets.

Six empty cold wallet addresses were disclosed by Quadriga, and for the most part they look to have been unused for the last year. EY is investigating some other potential addresses which are also empty.

Source: [https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fin...](https://documentcentre.eycan.com/eycm_library/Quadriga%20Fintech%20Solutions%20Corp/English/1.%20Monitor's%20Reports/4.%20Third%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor/Third%20Report%20of%20the%20Monitor%20dated%20March%201,%202019.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> People might complain about banks, but when you have cases of fraud at least you have people try to recover it. Government makes you keep pretty good records. In this case how do you undo the blockchain? In this case what recourse do you have.

<comment><USER24> actually, the entire point of blockchain is that the ledger is public. every movement of each and every bitcoin is public and can be tracked. it just takes time to analyze.

<comment><USER25> Even if that were so, it would not be sufficient for restitution, but bitcoins and satoshi are just abstractions and do not have individual identity, and cannot, in general, be individually tracked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is BS... the money cannot be "gone"... what do they mean by that? There is a public ledger. We would know and can trace where this money went to. Do they mean the wallet was not on the laptop instead?

<comment><USER27> If the keys are lost, the money is for all intents and purposes gone.

<comment><USER28> But you can still track history of any coin existed.

If somebody know wallet ids of money before they were stolen, you can trace transactions to see what wallet ids they are in now.

If they say "stolen", it means that they found transactions when money were transferred from victim's wallet. And if they know transactions, then they know source and destination wallet ids.

<comment><USER29> This is close enough to true for the purposes of this discussion, but in the general case you can only reliably track the flow of funds in aggregate, not the flow of any individual "coin." If addresses A and B send equal amounts of coins to C, C sends all of those coins to D, and D sends half of them to E, you can't really track the coins from A to E or from B to E. The transaction from C to D results in a single output that doesn't distinguish between funds from A and funds from B.

<comment><USER30> You track D and E. At scale, there surely are consistent patterns.

<comment><USER29> Yes, but my example was contrived for simplicity, and really D can make a transaction with an arbitrary number of inputs and outputs sent to and from an arbitrary number of addresses belonging to an arbitrary number of users. This is what bitcoin mixers do. Now we have a bunch of inputs coming in, and a bunch of evenly sized outputs coming out (with some unevenly sized ones for change). You can still probabilistically track funds if a user did something like putting coins from D into a big mixing transaction with other users and then sending their mixed coins from address F though I to a single address J that just so happens to have the same balance D started with, and of course there are less contrived situations where patterns of behavior would be evident, but this is all probabilistic and you still aren't really tracking individual coins; discrete coins aren't stored on the blockchain, transactions with input and output balances are. If the missing funds are tracked, and this whole affair was the result of malevolence rather than incompetence, I'd bet they're either sitting in a bunch of tiny accounts that have been cycled through mixers more than once or they're going to be before they're spent (having faked your own death, you could see holding off on the mixer until you've had ample time to cover your trail thus giving the appearance of incompetence rather than malevolence for a while).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This guy is alive (or dead, but not due to Crohn's Disease complications, as stated initially). This is not a conspiracy theory anymore. It's clear there's a massive fraud behind all these events.

<comment><USER32> As a mod for r/CrohnsDisease, it really sucks that this is how most people are first hearing about the disease. Those with IBD already have a difficult time with people not believing they're sick or that symptoms aren't that bad since they're not visible. Now Crohn's will be associated with this fool using it as an excuse to steal a bunch of money... such a huge disappointment.

<comment><USER33> I really doubt that this is how most people are first hearing of Crohn's disease.

<comment><USER32> Most people think it's just a stomach ache or diarrhea. They don't realize how severe and debilitating it can actually be because most people who have it don't like to broadcast to the world that they're shitting blood and mucus 30x a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Maybe I don't know much about bitcoin, but can't you track the address where the bitcoins were being transferred to? Seems like it would be difficult to launder that volume of bitcoin all anonymously where it can be tracked, to a certain extent, through the public blockchain?

<comment><USER35> There are bitcoin _tumblers_ , essentially the idea is to split up the transaction into multiple transactions of varying sizes to various addresses and to keep doing that in such a way that it doesn't look weird...

Basically they try to hide the transaction among the huge volume of transactions going on, kinda like a VPN or Tor?

<comment><USER36> 1\. If the coins were moved through tumblers that would be detectable and highly suspicious.

2\. Safely tumbling large quantities of coins is especially difficult. At this scale I would wager twenty dollars that blockchain analysis should be able to trace at least some of the coins with high confidence.

3\. It is rumored that many tumblers are run by law enforcement.

<comment><USER37> Outside the sphere of crypto, this is called "washing" or "laundering" ("cleaned", etc. Anything along this line). "Laundering" is the legal term). Such acts are typically traceable, but generally fly under the radar. Once someone is aware that the money is being washed it is usually uncovered (AFAIK).

Washing crypto would seem even more difficult because transactions are all accounted for. So I'd assume a cleaner would need to have random time variance in redistribution so collisions aren't found. But also, money has to be spent or converted, so that's a big way you could uncover it. Money is harder because cash is still a thing.

1) See that money is transferred from account to washer (instant flag)

2) Search for accounts associated with initial fraud and watch for extraction.

<comment><USER38> I work in crypto. Transactions can very much be traced. There's no trace of Quadrigas cold wallet holding any large sums of BTC. It's still a mystery what, exactly, did they do with customer funds. It'll be uncovered eventually once enough time has been given to forensic examiners to go through the transactions of the exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?

<comment><USER35> I think this is the $137 million dollar question.

<comment><USER40> So they thought. Turns out it was worth nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wow! Do we know if this was some sort of scam or what? Thats... just wow....

<comment><USER42> We don't know, but people have been speculating that the death was faked in order to get away with theft and mismanagement of Quadriga wallets. Every new detail seems to suggest a scam and fake death.

<comment><USER43> The scam conclusion is stronger than, and does not rely on, the fake death one. The combination does seem to be the most likely, but even if he's really dead, this still looks like a scam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Shouldn't there be a ledger somewhere of transactions tied to those coins?

<comment><USER45> Like maybe a distributed ledger of some sort?

<comment><USER46> That is publicly available for everyone to read?

<comment><USER47> That points to a tumble service address where it disappears forever in Monero land?

<comment><USER16> Or just different coins out than went in.

Rumour has it the exchange did this anyway as it was short/long on different coins. They lost a ton of ether in the past, so they may have had to do such switcheroos for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think it might pay off to spread the mugshot of this character far and wide. There is a non zero chance that he's not dead at all.

<comment><USER49> Yes, to make it easier for vigilante justice to find, and kill someone some unlucky sap who looks like Gerald.

<comment><USER48> I think you're jumping to conclusions a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Cant believe the article makes no mention of the other major piece of this conspiracy which is that Michael Patryn, the co-founder of Quadriga, is actually Omar Dhanani, who was charged with one count of conspiracy to transfer identification documents as part of Shadowcrew.com and did 18 months in jail. IMO he is the real mastermind here, as his criminal record shows he was fully capable of hacking Cotten's accounts and was in close enough proximity to his networks to not raise suspicion.

</comment><comment><USER51> I am curious to know the OS on the laptop that was cracked. macOS, Linux, Windows? I would be surprised if a highly technically founder was running Windows.

Does this indicate there is a known vulnerability in the login process of the OS?

<comment><USER52> If i was to guess, i would guess that it was Bitlocker vuln, CVE-2018-12037, where the bitlocker crypto implementation is left to the junk SSD 'self encrypting' feature which is found to be broken. I have my doubts they cracked Veracrypt, LUKS or filevault2 with operator supplied keys. Or they got the keys from Microsoft/Apple (filevault2 and bitlocker will escrow the keys to the OS vendor in home editions).

<comment><USER51> So you think they broke the disk encryption not the OS login mechanism?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Given that blockchain is supposed to be a public ledger, can someone explain why they cannot trace where the coins were transferred to when they were moved out of the cold wallets?

In my simple world there must be a way to trace them to their ultimate origins?

<comment><USER54> You can know where they went from the cold wallet. You can't know for sure where the coins went after that, once they've been mixed with other coins.

Laundry / tumbler services exist to do this at scale.

<comment><USER55> what does "mixed with other coins" mean exactly? If I own a wallet, and someone steals coins and "mix" their coins with mine in my wallet, they eventually have to get those coins back right? So I probably know them and can found and interrogated?

legit question

<comment><USER54> Let's say there are three BTC addresses in the world, #1 to #3. Let's say address #1 has 1 BTC that you're interested in.

On Monday, all three addresses send all their BTC to address #4. The next day, address #4 sends the coins back to addresses #5 through #7.

Which address out of #5, #6 or #7 has the original BTC you were interested in?

<comment><USER56> So - and thank you for bearing with me on this - individual BTC don't have a unique identifier that allow one to trace its transaction history? I must admit, I always assumed that they were uniquely identifiable.

<comment><USER54> Yes. In the first place, BTC are divisible to eight decimal places, so there would be a lot of these IDs if they were to exist. And there's no reason the divisibility can't change in the future, so these IDs would have to be quite complicated.

A (non-coinbase) transaction is valid if its inputs equal its outputs, and if its inputs come from the outputs of other transactions, which in turn are valid if their inputs come from other transactions, all the way to one or more coinbase transactions. This is sufficient to demonstrate that the transaction is valid - ie it's using coins that exist instead of creating them from thin air. That is all that the protocol cares about.

<comment><USER56> Thank you for taking the time to clear up my misapprehension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> "Why yes, the wallet we found was empty. Totally empty."

<comment><USER58> Back in 2015 two rogue U.S. Secret Service agents, Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force, were caught and sentenced to prison for stealing funds while investigating the first high profile darknet market the Silk Road. Shaun Bridges plead guilty for moving 1,600 bitcoins of seized bitcoins confiscated by federal authorities.

<comment><USER59> You can't steal in the course of an investigation what was already stolen as part of the crime.

<comment><USER57> > You can't steal in the course of an investigation what was already stolen as > part of the crime.

Sorry, what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> One real problem with cryptocurrencies: the information you need to determine that someone has the key to a blockchain address gives you the power to withdraw funds from that address. You can't just demand that a third party auditor have copies of all the keys.

(Yeah, dual-sig, split keys, etc. Theoretically possible, not done in practice much.)

<comment><USER61> There are actually whole cryptographic schemes people have written to prove you have control over the money you say you do.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7277865)

<comment><USER16> But how do you prove how much you owe?

If an exchange can prove it controls 10 BTC, great. But what if it owes 20 people 1 BTC each?

<comment><USER61> I believe the scheme lets depositors prove that their _own_ coins were included in the liabilities calculation. If some depositors never check, the exchange could steal their funds, but if it was a regular part of using an exchange, it would put a pretty strict limit on how much could be looted before it was noticed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Everyone is a fraud. "A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that investigators cracked Cotten's laptop and discovered money was missing. In fact, they have possession of his laptop and identified money was missing through public blockchain records."

</comment><comment><USER63> Is there a link to the on-chain transaction showing the transfer of the funds?

</comment><comment><USER64> comment_on_crypto_fail = ( author_religion == 'crypto' && author_lost_money == false ) ? 'misstep' : 'regulate_urgently'

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't get why people even try to store their cryptos in a cloud-based wallet. Just store it in a USB and put it in a safety deposit box.

<comment><USER66> Some have mentioned they were transacting when their deposits withdrawals stopped working. It wasn't a matter of storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> According to the dates and other information in the article, it is also possible he was hacked and someone else has the money.

<comment><USER66> In that case he could just come out with it. My guess is he lost the money either by trading or through pure technical incompetence that resulted in hardware loss or did something to erase it all on accident. Coming out with this would not excuse him from legal consequences as much as it would he be claimed he was hacked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Is the future still in crypto?

</comment><comment><USER69> Wow. I'll be watching for more news on this one. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER70> What.

Were.

The.

Addresses.

<comment><USER71> 1MhgmGaHwLAvvKVyFvy6zy9pRQFXaxwE9M

1JPtxSGoekZfLQeYAWkbhBhkr2VEDADHZB

1ECUQLuioJbFZAQchcZq9pggd4EwcpuANe

1J9Fqc3TicNoy1Y7tgmhQznWrP5AVLXj9R

1HyYMMCdCcHnfjwMW2jE4cv9qVkVDFUzVa

1JZJaDDC44DCKLnezDsbW43Zf8LspCKBYP

Edit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/QuadrigaCX2/comments/aq3r08/a_break...](https://www.reddit.com/r/QuadrigaCX2/comments/aq3r08/a_breakdown_of_qcx_btc_movements_what_we_know_and/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Banks and actual currencies still have a bright future.

<comment><USER73> As far as I'm concerned, if you give your money to some dude on the internet with ZERO oversight or regulation, you're pretty much guaranteed something like this happening at some point. how is this different than giving cash to your cousin's uncle who promises to give it back "whenever you need it"?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommend a simple MMO for my retired mother? - <AUTHOR>

Our family dog just died, leaving my retired mother alone at home with lots of time on her hands. She doesn't use Facebook (and doesn't have a lot of friends who do either), and she's never played video games before. I could make her a Facebook account, but I'm concerned Zynga-type games won't be fun if she doesn't have Facebook friends to play with.
She likes fantasy and science fiction, so I'm hoping to get her started on some kind of MMO as a way to interact with real people and keep herself busy. But something like WoW would be way too complicated and intimidating.
Surprisingly, simple Googling didn't turn up anything helpful.
Can anyone recommend a game that:
1) Is very, very simple to learn. 2) Is social, but more geared toward playing with strangers than existing friends.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'd take another look at WoW. Specifically for someone knowing nothing about games, I'd start a disc priest and show her how to queue for and heal in dungeons. It is fun, you are important to the group, but you don't actually need to know anything about any of the instances or boss mechanics. If you set her up with ventrilo and help her find a local social guild she might find the game is secondary to the social side of things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but I think you might be underestimating exactly how "tech un-savvy" my mother is :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Kongregate has some fun stuff -

<http://www.kongregate.com/mmo-games>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out.

</comment></comment><comment> Pirate-of-SV There are on simple MMORPGs, you have to sell your soul.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know any games like that, but I would suggest getting her another dog that she can start raising again.</comment>


Launch HN: Rhythmm (YC W18) – Create channels and broadcast them to an audience - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
We're Zach and George — the creators of Rhythmm (https://getrhythmm.com).
We want to bring back the blog, a page that you can do whatever you want with. A place where you — either by yourself or with a few friends — can broadcast to an audience. With a few friends, it reads like a conversation.
A few months ago, we wanted to create a music blog together. We started to look at our options for creating a music blog, and realized that there weren't any good ones. We didn't want to create our own website, because people would have to remember to visit our domain and wouldn't get notified when we posted. We looked at other music blogs on the internet, but it seemed like most of them were dying or have already died. We wanted a place where we could both share and bounce music off each other, and have our friends subscribe. And we couldn't find an easy way to do this. We realized that this same issue arises not just in music, but in many other areas.
So we created Rhythmm — a place where you can create a Slack-like channel that people can subscribe to. Do whatever you want with it. Here are some ideas:
- daily tips on Ableton, Sketch or Python
- interviews with interesting people (you'll see a few examples of this below)
- music/art blogs
- movie of the day
We just launched a few weeks ago, but here are a few channels that we think you might like:
(Note: We're mobile first, so while you can view these channels, you'll get the full experience on our iOS/Android apps)
Hear a daily interview with a different YC Winter 2018 company and learn what they do: https://getrhythmm.com/channel/yc-company-daily/
Learn about a different Blockchain company every week: https://getrhythmm.com/channel/blockchat/
Get a Netflix streaming recommendation every day: https://getrhythmm.com/channel/watch-this-movie/
We're super early, and we're not going to pretend that we know exactly what our end goal is with this product. But we want to get it in people's hands and see what they can come up with. Excited to hear what you guys think :)
Thanks! <comment><USER2> For a few ideas im working on, I could see using a Rythmm channel to communicate to my audience and make announcements to users on updates and latest news. Personally, I'm not very interested in blogging about my product/services, or having a blog serve the need to communicate announcements. Currently, I might feel the need to: 1. Write a post 2\. Announce the post on social media. 3\. Link to the post in a newsletter 4: repeat over and over...

I could see using Rhythmm to serve all the needs for me to simply 'say stuff', without all the other services and social marketing related work involved.

Note: Im making these observations in relation to an audio based project.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm kind of done with new silos. Mastodon showed me another way could work. Will this support ActivityPub and/or OStatus?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not in the near future, but we'd love to become decentralized and open-source when we have engineering time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why do we need this again? Who are your competitors? Twitter, Slack?

I see very little value in this tool, all this is going to become is another place to vault all your data behind proprietary protocol.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I don't find Twitter or Slack to be our competitors at all. Twitter uses a newsfeed, we don't. We give you an entire page that is completely yours. If anything, we're more like Snapchat stories then Twitter, except with text.

We're more similar to Slack, but one difference is that we have a few contributors broadcasting to a large audience. Slacks is also made up of closed communities, we focus more on housing all of these channels in one place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So this is basically Slack but public URLs and not everyone can comment, right?

Also, the site seems to be completely broken with ublock origin and default EasyList.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll get this fixed right away -- thanks for letting us know. (should be fixed)

"So this is basically Slack but public URLs and not everyone can comment, right?" \-- that's a good way of describing what our website is right now. We are mobile first -- in our app you can subscribe and follow these channels all in one place. We just whipped up a web landing page for each of the channels to give you guys a preview. We hope to have a fully functioning web client soon.

<comment><USER2> > web client soon

For subscribers, I want to be able to send them directly to a URL in their browser, not have them install anything. I recommend providing this sooner than later. Let users decide if they want to use the platform in a mobile or desktop release based on their needs and frequency of use of the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have landing pages for every channel created on our platform. Check [https://getrhythmm.com/channel/yc-company- daily/](https://getrhythmm.com/channel/yc-company-daily/)

We plan on continuing to build better features to make channels more accessible (and a better experience) on web though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thank you! Signed up for the app.

As a person hesitating whether to make a mobile app for my own product, may I ask what was the reason for launching mobile first?

It seems to me that a web app is cheaper to develop, easier to test, collect feedback and iterate on (and possibly provides better blog writing experience) and thus would be an ideal first product.

Am I missing any strategic reasons in favour of launching mobile first?

</comment><comment><USER7> So it's basically Discord's read-only channels with the requirement of pressing spacebar to see new content? I can't say I personally see a huge advantage, but I do like the idea of it all. Really it's the pressing space bit that annoys me, probably. Will a mode be implemented as to where it automatically gives you new messages? Something like a custom reading-speed would be enjoyable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd encourage you to download our mobile app -- and try reading there. We just built this website to mimic the functionality in the app and show the concept, but the implementation is not as good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I looked at the blockchat example, I didn't feel I have enough time to read the message. It scrolled quite fast. I rewinded only to have the same thing happen. Felt frustrating.

So I thought I'd ask: is the product the .mov playing on the left side, or is that an example to help understand and ultimately get me to download the app, where the action is?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup -- that's just an example. We have landing pages for all of our chats. See our response to plx. Keep in mind that our web experience is lacking :). On the mobile app you can read at your own pace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, my impression from your HN post is this is a blogging platform with native support for audio, something other blog platforms seem to lack (for example: blogspot -- you can bruteforce it, but it doesn't inherently support audio files).

Is this accurate?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't currently support native audio, but we definitely have plans to. Right now we deep link to the Spotify/SC track. The rest is pretty accurate.

<comment><USER9> Well, let me just put in my two cents that a blog with native audio support seems to be a niche not currently filled, from what I gather.

Best.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems that all the example urls get redirected to the same blockchain channel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup -- sorry we're fixing the links. Try these:

[https://getrhythmm.com/channel/watch-this- movie/](https://getrhythmm.com/channel/watch-this-movie/)

[https://getrhythmm.com/channel/blockchat/](https://getrhythmm.com/channel/blockchat/)

[https://getrhythmm.com/channel/yc-company- daily/](https://getrhythmm.com/channel/yc-company-daily/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats on the launch!

While I like the spin on blogging, could you explain how this product differs from something like [https://spectrum.chat](https://spectrum.chat) for example?

</comment><comment><USER12> like the idea of using space to scroll through messages. how does one subscribe to channels?

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it! We're mobile first at this point, so the only way to subscribe is on our iOS/Android app. (They're also a much better experience altogether).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a web or desktop version? These texts seems long for writing them on your phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now, we just have a viewing experience for web, and it's still lacking in many ways. Our Android/iOS apps allow you to create/post to channels and are much better experiences. But we're currently in the process of building out a full web platform!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this different from creating a channel in Telegram?

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you asked. Telegram channels definitely provided us inspiration for our product. We loved the idea of them, but thought that there were major holes in their product that have still not been fixed or addressed, and they created "channels" in 2015. Here are the problems we wanted to address:

1\. Telegram broadcast channels only allow 1 contributor. We think that there are a lot of interesting use cases that arise when having multiple contributors on one broadcast. 2\. Telegram has absolutely no explore feature (other than searching and hoping for the best). 3\. Telegram is a chat app first and foremost. It doesn't seem like they're going to spend any time building new features specifically for broadcasts. We have lot of really exciting features that we're currently working on that will continue to make our experience better different times of feedback.

Does that answer your question?

<comment><USER14> Yes. Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: API builder, user management, analytics and management platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andreioprisan/apignite

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll improve the note on the repo as well, but basically the proof of concept was to have something read PHP classes and parse out functions and parameters, then output it to a database that could be manipulated through a UI. A very rough class parser and UI were put together to show what else could be built out, but it's by no means functional or feature complete, just a proof of concept. Also, the code is quite dirty, there were 2 other contributors who jumped on the project and contributed as part of the 24 hour TechCrunch NY hackathon 2012. Perhaps someone will find elements of this useful or perhaps it's utter garbage :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Just going through the code, I have to say I'm not a big fan of the quality.

<comment><AUTHOR> it was put together at the techcrunch hackathon last year</comment></comment>


Running Headless Selenium with Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisle.me/2013/08/running-headless-selenium-with-chrome/ <comment><USER2> For all the many problems with X11, it's still pretty cool that you can run something as complicated as Chrome in a headless manner just by running another program (xvfb) that speaks the protocol.

(I keep intending to hack Blink into a state where it can run truly headless, like a library, so that hacks like the above aren't necessary.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. What's Blink? I don't think I've heard of it. I would love to learn more.

<comment><USER3> Chrome's new rendering engine, forked from Webkit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh yes. Now i recall. Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing I always think is worth mentioning in posts like this is that the above setup (and any setup using Selenium, really) is going to be _super_ slow. More than one order of magnitude slow, when compared to direct HTTP requests.

It's only ever worth using Selenium when you _literally_ can't do anything else to get your testing done.

Edit: Going through my bookmarks bar and found this, from 2008 - [http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/03/05/running-selenium- he...](http://www.alittlemadness.com/2008/03/05/running-selenium-headless/)

Might help anyone if they run into issues.

<comment><USER5> Why is the overhead so great?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because it has to load a virtual frame buffer (Xvfb), the chrome browser, a Selenium server, and _then_ your testing framework. All that adds up to crap performance. There's a lot of pieces that could be simplified with a smaller set of requirements. But like @diminoten said: it's worth it if you have no other choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One odd issue that I ran into was that Chrome (and Firefox) wouldn't always go fullscreen. I had to install a window manager that defaulted to fullscreen. In particular, I went with Ratpoision: [http://danielwebb.us/software/ratpoison/](http://danielwebb.us/software/ratpoison/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've had good luck with a similar setup (somewhat inspired by IMVU's) doing integration testing on an Ember app: Chromium + chromedriver inside a VirtualBox Vagrant instance using Xvfb + ratpoison + x11vnc. My tests run from a modified version of Wai Yip Tung's HTMLTestRunner (Python unittest module underneath) so reloading the tests tab in a browser on my dev machine reruns the tests. All of the tests are written in Python. If something gets stuck you open up a VNC client and poke around manually. It's a bit of work to set up and the tests can be a bit slow but I'd recommend it when you really need to test in a browser.

</comment><comment><USER8> How does it differ from PhantomJS/CasperJS (headless webkit)? I have been using these for a while and they can do pretty much everything that you can do in a browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a 1/2 written post about this exactly. I took it out because it would have made this post too long. But TLDR: I found a few edge cases where using a real browser was easier to use than a headless toolkit. Definitely will be my next post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've experimented with running headless tests using Firefox, in hopes of getting a good performance boost in terms of test speed. The results actually did not indicate much of a difference. If anything, FF in headless mode on CentOS ran slower than on Windows.

That's not to say there aren't good use cases for running headless browsers with Selenium. One huge benefit is not needing to run Windows VMs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. I would add that Selenium performance isn't super awesome but if you only need to use it for a specific set of integration tests it's OK. You can use something like PhantomJS to speed through the rest your tests that don't specifically need exact browser implementations.</comment></comment>


PartyGaming founder to pay out $300m - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cd7e0ab2-caf2-11dd-87d7-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1 <comment><USER2> I've met the unfortunately named Mr. Dikshit and he was a bit of a douche. He was splashing around chips and bragging about how rich he was. So while I hate to see this happen to the industry, especially given that what they did probably wasn't illegal, I have a hard time feeling sorry for him in particular.

</comment><comment><USER3> Change Authorised=false.html to Authorised=true.html to read the article without signing up.

<comment><USER4> This is a knock against FT's credibity. How can their business advice be relied upon when they can't get the human resources together to make a paywall instead of a payhurdle?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> why is online gambling illegal anyways?

<comment><USER6> Because Las Vegas casinos and their highly paid lobbyists want it to be illegal. They'd actually prefer it to be illegal for anyone but them to run a casino online, but having it be illegal for everyone is the next best option.

The government (both state and federal) would also prefer to get a cut of gambling profits.

On a state level, the three states with the most explicit anti-online gaming laws are three states with sizable casino operations: Nevada, Louisiana, and California.

<comment><USER2> Ironically they've largely reversed their opinions on that, especially now that their occupancy rate is half of what it was a year ago. Now they want it to be licensed and they want in on the action.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> these guys were at some point richer (on paper) than the google guys, when their stock price was inflated.

<comment><USER2> Their stock price was never really that high relative to earnings. The threat of U.S. government action kept it in check. That company was making eBay like profits with even better margins and their growth was strong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's hope he doesn't try doubling up at roulette to win it all back...</comment>


Nearly $13B wiped off of cryptocurrency market as major coins plunge - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/11/bitcoin-price-nearly13-billion-wiped-off-cryptocurrency-market.html <comment><USER2> Well, this isn't surprising. I don't really trust or fancy cryptocurrencies, but I'm glad that the banks feel pressure.

</comment><comment><USER3> 13b is nothing, remember when 360b was wiped off over night?</comment>


What is Novichok? A neurotoxicologist explains - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/what-is-novichok-a-neurotoxicologist-explains-99736 <comment><USER2> The guy is missing several critical points, but raises another good one everybody else forgets.

Missing: The Novichok family consists of 3 used and 9 known two-component agents, which are scientifically known since an Iranian paper published the formulas. They are quite trivial to produce, even for a lay student.

The good point: potence. Since the Novichoks are so potent, they usually kill within minutes or at least the patient will not awake from the coma. Which renders the whole Skripal and Nawalny affairs moot. Since Novichok was designed for military use, it needs to be very potent to be able to deliver it effectively over enemy territory. In the secret services, i.e. criminal usecase it doesn't not need to be that potent. You don't need to kill tens of thousands soldiers, only one. Just the use of a two-component agent will not kill the killer, it is much safer to use. So the new usecase for these agents changed. Military abandoned it, because it was ineffective. Secret services still like to use it, because it is effective.

Now to the blame game. Russia developed it, because they heard that americans and british developed such a new, secret two component nerve agent. So they came up with their own variants. We don't know the formula of the US and UK agents, not even their names. We just know that they exist because the designer of the Russian variant deflected to the US and wrote a book about it. Most likely they are the very same, Russians just found the same.

So the Skripal attacks could have been done by everybody, and it certainly wasn't Novichok. Looks more like fish poisoning. As assumed by the doctor who treated them. You don't awake after two weeks from Novichok poisoning and need to shield them from the public. You only need to shield them if you are having something to hide.

The Nawalny attack now looks like a GRU attack with a very low dosis, but this doesn't fit the description with the tea cup. So it could be a weak Novichok variant with an extremely low potency so that the patient will survive. As similar GRU attacks before. Just fry their brains a little bit. It's still safer to use.

</comment><comment><USER3> > much of what is known about Novichok is conjecture

Remember when ricin was a thing? at least that's a _real_ thing, though never as dangerous as they made it out to be in the news.</comment>