Are US companies afraid of hiring contractors from Eastern Europe? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
Are US companies afraid of hiring contractors from Eastern Europe?
I'm a dev from Poland with 8 years of commercial experience. I worked for US companies, visited the US a couple of times. I am a skilled developer and I rarely see my CV is rejected by recruiters - I had an opportunity to work on some cool stuff that draws people attention.
I noticed companies that are looking for remote devs are not interested in inviting me for an interview. I assumed the problem is my CV, experience or skills I possess. A few days ago I spoke with a less experienced friend from Germany I worked with and he said he has no problems at all with getting into the first interview.
I started to wonder, maybe it is not me but the place where I live? <comment><USER2> I don't know the answer to your question, but my advice would be to seek out US companies that already hire from Eastern Europe. I know Sentry has a team in Romania for example.

</comment><comment><USER3> At the moment remote jobs are very competitive, you're likely running up against local competition within the US especially given all the layoffs there...

</comment><comment><USER4> My company has hired eastern European contractors for at least one system. They are on-site. Our remote contractors are all in India.

A lot of times companies sign contracts to be exclusive with one remote shop. For example, my company can only source remote engineers from one company in India. We still have the option to bring in on-site contractors from other companies.

It's my understanding that the cost of labor is cheaper in India than in Europe, which is why companies like mine opt for resources there. After all, the reason they outsource is to reduce cost, so they will go with the cheapest option that can meet their needs.

As long as you aren't looking for remote work, you should e fine. If you are looking for remote work, you would have better results going through a local contracting shop. Security is a big thing with most companies, so they would rather contract with one shop than with many individuals.

This is all from the perspective of my US based company. Others may be different.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can only share my perspective but eastern europeans are viewed highly favourably in my circles (hiring manager for who knows how many roles over the past 15 years in fintech / banking).

There's an enviable reputation for hard work, high quality and beneficial labour cost discounts vs other european countries.

</comment><comment><USER6> Same goes for Indian developers. Always faced rejection for full remote as well as visa sponsored positions. Maybe Indian tech service companies have made our reputation so bad that even good developers get neglected.

<comment><USER7> Good point. Well, its high time we Indians collaborate and create product companies. I am open for ideas and collaboration.

<comment><USER6> Sure, lets get in touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've worked on many projects with contractors from Eastern Europe, probably the majority of the non-US contracting firms I've worked with over my career.

I will say that recently the trend seems to be South American firms. They have the advantage of being in similar timezones.

</comment><comment><USER9> Just out of curiosity, (assuming you live in Europe) are you looking in Europe as well? If you're not getting responses from European companies then there's something else that's going on.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problems with European openings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny that I just created a post just yesterday asking about developers from Poland and Ukraine. What are you requirements ? I am happy to connect. Contact info. in profile.

</comment><comment><USER11> How do you advertise yourself or how can companies find you? I'm asking because I found Eastern Europe to be surprisingly underrepresented on the hiring websites that I use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well I don't advertise myself at all. I am searching for companies that are hiring remote employees and they don't have requirement to be located in US. I'm using remoteok.io, jobs posted on hackernews, some combination of googling and friends' recommendtions.

<comment><USER12> Any job you see posted on the internet is seen by many many other people around the world. It probably attracts thousands of resumes. This means most of the 'hiring' process is finding ways to reject resumes quickly to make the numbers manageable. Suppose there are 1000 applicants and 100 of them meet the requirements. Ten of them get phone screens. Three get an on-site. One gets hired. 1000 applicants is optimistic. It is probably several times. Particularly for a job listed at an aggregator. If it's easy for you to see a job, it is easy for thousands of other people.</comment></comment></comment>


Mathematica 10 Released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/07/09/launching-mathematica-10-with-700-new-functions-and-a-crazy-amount-of-rd/

<comment><USER2> Here's the list of what's new since version 9 of Mathematica:

[http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new- in-10/](http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-10/)

<comment><USER3> And here: [http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SummaryOfNewFeat...](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/SummaryOfNewFeaturesIn100.html)</comment></comment>


Bankrupt Hertz targets Robinhood traders in plot to dump $1B in stock - <AUTHOR> https://whatsnew2day.com/bankrupt-hertz-targets-robinhood-traders-in-plot-to-dump-1-billion-in-stock/ <comment><USER2> This article is describing a very obviously risky investment as some sort of "dastardly" plot. It describes the stock as "potentially worthless", and while I would agree this is a bad investment, all stock is 'potentially worthless', that's why investors get a risk premium (versus low-risk treasuries).

This post seems like a lot of fluff and pointless outrage.

<comment><USER3> > all stock is 'potentially worthless'

There's a big difference between most stocks, and Hertz which is currently under Chapter11 bankruptcy proceedings.

<comment><USER4> > There's a big difference between most stocks, and Hertz which is currently > under Chapter11 bankruptcy proceedings.

Indeed. With "most stocks" you have to do lots of work to figure out if they're actually insolvent. With HTZ, they've gone through the hassle of telling you up front.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm thinking that this strange trading behavior with Hertz _and others_ is an unanticipated consequence of commission-free trading combined with a lot of fully-employed people getting free money from the government.

<comment><USER6> Matt Levine of Bloomberg has written a bunch of the "boredom market hypothesis," which says a lot of folks are investing, who wouldn't otherwise, because they're stuck at home due to coronavirus, and the stock market is the most entertaining thing.

<comment><USER7> No sports and the casinos are closed wouldn't surprise me.

<comment><USER6> Those are the literally the ones he mentions!

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-09/the- ba...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-09/the-bad-stocks- are-the-most-fun)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This will spawn a new acronym...

IBO - initial bankruptcy offering

<comment><USER9> Reminds me of retail places that have annual "going out of business sales" as a quasi strategy. I always loved the cheeky ones that even advertised "It's our fourth annual going out of business sale!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Hertz looks at the market and sees there is a group of irrational traders who are buying the stock, and the response to that is to seek to sell stock to these people in hopes of raising some amounts of money to fund their restructuring," University of California law professor Jared Ellias told reporters.

Sounds like Jared is miffed that he didn't cash in. The fact that Hertz is up like 200% since the beginning of the month means that the traders are, in fact, rational.

What's great about the market is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're wrong, and everyone else wrong, you all become wrong. The only way to, in fact, be wrong, is if everyone else disagrees with you. So what makes your decision wrong is the fact that you were the only one to make it.

I applaud these Hertz traders and feel a little disappointed that I didn't jump in on it. Man, I bet Icahnn is pissed. He could have made one the biggest killing the Street has seen in a long time! Of course, according to our friend Jared, he's the rational one in all of this.

<comment><USER11> > The fact that Hertz is up like 200% since the beginning of the month means > that the traders are, in fact, rational.

You aren't factoring in time here... just because a stock has gone up over a specific period of time doesn't mean everyone who bought the stock did the right thing. What if the price collapses tomorrow?

Also, a good outcome for an action doesn't mean taking it was rational. If I place my life savings on black in a game of roulette, there is an 9/19 chance that I double my money. If I do, it doesn't mean I was rational to make that bet. It means I was lucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the current state of our SEC.

Regulators asleep at the wheel, while uninformed retail investors are going to be hosed when the bankruptcy finalizes.

If they allow this, the investors who lose their money should be able to sue the SEC for negligence.

<comment><USER13> > _If they allow this, the investors who lose their money should be able to > sue the SEC for negligence._

Why? Hertz is not doing anything dishonest.

<comment><AUTHOR> They do. Because their bonds currently trade at ~0.4 of $1. And considering equity owners are the latest who will receive any money following the bankruptcy, they know well they aren't going to raise enough money to even deal with other creditors.

And they go and issue another $1bn of a worthless equity because never in the history of financial markets there would been so many idiots who would be buying it in such a frenzy.

A little chance though that this cash raise could somehow help them get out of the bankruptcy - sort of "a bailout by the shareholders" \- but it's still unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey, if people are willing to buy, might as well make use of it.

<comment><USER3> Even if this company is literally going bankrupt? The shareholders will be wiped out in just a few months. Its extremely difficult for me to imagine a situation where these new shareholders will make money over the next year.

The only part of my brain that agrees with you is the "Machiavellian" part. Yes, there's something to be said about letting people do what they wish to do. But on the other hand, if people start jumping off a cliff tomorrow, you bet that I'm going to do what I can to save them.

Buying up Hertz right now is extremely dangerous. Encouraging the behavior will cause lots of pain to the investors who almost certainly don't know what they're doing.

\</comment></comment><comment>---

These aren't hedge-funds or big banks who are "smarter" than me. These are retail investors. The "dumb money" of the market.

In the best case scenario, these "investors" (really... gamblers at this point...) are willing to play a Ponzi-like scheme of "selling to the greater fool". There's no other reason to be buying companies up through a bankruptcy.

<comment><USER14> You dont have to encourage the behavior. You can discourage it. But at the end of the day, it's their money, and it's not causing harm to society or to anyone else directly. In a society that's willing to accept gambling and state run lotteries, this level of personal risk taking is not remotely near the level our society seems acceptable. And, they could actually be right in the end, if by providing liquidity they help the company avoid onerous bailout loans, and covid lifts up sooner rather than later, they could end up with Hertz able to make a strong recovery. Or they could lose their money. But it's their money.

<comment><USER3> > And, they could actually be right in the end, if by providing liquidity they > help the company avoid onerous bailout loans, and covid lifts up sooner > rather than later, they could end up with Hertz able to make a strong > recovery.

I don't think you understand bankruptcy. Hertz is about to receive a $17 Billion handout, in the form of its loans being largely forgiven and/or reorganized through a process called "Chapter 11 Bankruptcy".

As part of "forgiving the debt", the shareholders get the stock set to $0. This is virtually inevitable, it almost always happens.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>---

The only winners here, are the banks. The banks (and other bondholders) will collectively get $1 Billion more before the debt is forgiven. As such, this move only helps the banks and bondholders.

\</comment><comment>--

The $1 Billion here is peanuts compared to the $17 Billion in loans that the Hertz company obviously cannot pay in its current form. The shareholders are wiped out without the secondary offering... the shareholders are wiped out with the secondary offering. In both cases, the company will inevitably go bankrupt... but the shareholders are collectively $1 Billion poorer after this offering.

\</comment><comment>----

I cannot imagine how the shareholders benefit from this. In both situations, the shareholders are going to be left with $0 in just a few months.

<comment><USER15> > As part of "forgiving the debt", the shareholders get the stock set to $0. > This is virtually inevitable, it almost always happens.

Not exactly, the current shareholders are getting paid interest to loan out their shares to short sellers.

The longer this gets drawn out, the more interest they collect, and owners could come out ahead of the short-sellers. Even if the shares themselves go to $0 (as everything does in the long-run).

Or doing all that indirectly through options. If you know that the stock will still be worth 12 cents in 4 months, that can earn a fortune.

<comment><USER3> > Not exactly, the current shareholders are getting paid interest to loan out > their shares to short sellers.

I don't believe Robinhood traders get this benefit. A premium service like Interactive Brokers provides the ability to lend shares. Sophisticated investors buying/selling and trying to make money through bankruptcy is fine.

The issue I have is that normal, retail investors, are going to be caught up in this game. Under traditional retailer strategy (ie: buy and hold, and/or dollar cost averaging), the retail investor is going to be wiped out here.

> Or doing all that indirectly through options. If you know that the stock > will still be worth 12 cents in 4 months, that can earn a fortune.

You don't need to own any shares to buy or sell options. You can play the options market whenever you feel like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is a government bailout of Hertz likely?

They could argue that they form a good chunk of the car industry, and without them car manufacturers might fold, and their suppliers, etc. It's therefore in the interests of the federal government to hand over large loans, and eventually forgive those loans in a few years...

If that happened, these shareholders would be pretty happy...

<comment><USER17> Depends how much lobbying power they have I guess? There are multiple competitors that are less dysfunctional and provide the same service. There is no legitimate reason to bailout Hertz in particular.

The debt itself must be car leased from the manufacturers (with some layers of insurance/bank atop), the manufacturers could restructure the debt to not bankrupt Hertz if they cared about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's an interesting duality here. Sure in the short term it hurts the stock price, but in the long term it could save the company and raise stock price. Maybe Robinhood investors are super forward-thinking. (Unless it gets delisted.)

<comment><USER19> you're technically correct but its generally unlikely. equity holders get to keep money if there's money left after satisfying debts.

their bonds trade for about 40 cents on the dollar which means bondholders don't think theyll make their money back. which means that there wont be anything left for equity holders.

so to be of help, they'd probably need to sell a lot of stock. That also dilutes existing owners as well.

<comment><USER15> Or a competitor comes along and figures, let's eliminate this competitor and merge their operation with ours, instead of it ending up in a bankruptcy auction and who knows who will win.

I'll pay the bondholders 45 cents on the dollar TODAY and each equity holder $1/share to get their vote. As with any private sale, this all avoids the bureaucracy of a protracted bankruptcy (where accountants and lawyers get rich off what would get paid to the creditors).

Likely? No. Possible? Very.

<comment><USER17> Which competitor and where would it get the money from? They're all short on cash. There is no more revenues from car rental since the virus has terminated all personal and business travels.

<comment><USER15> Uber has $56b in market cap to work with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The ironic thing is that PG&E (PCG) is coming out of bankruptcy next week and will probably close to double in value..

But people are buying up a stock (hertz) that is going into bankruptcy instead.

</comment><comment><USER21> Pardon my ignorance but are people buying this stock even aware that Hertz has filled for banktuptcy ? Or do they just buy the stock because they see that the price is extremely low ?

<comment><USER3> They're buying the stock because its gone up 500%+ in the past few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I bet this was all driven by a huge shortseller that feared paying $2 or more to cover its shorts.

Shorter: "Hey, I'll wire you $0.50/share TOMORROW if you sell stock to me tomorrow".

HTZ: OK.

</comment><comment><USER22> Applying logic to r/wallstreetbets is pointless.

</comment><comment><USER23> Long Term Capital Management

Pets.com

Enron

Bear Sterns

Lehman Brothers

? Hertz</comment>


Trueface VisionBox – State of the Art Computer Vision in a Docker Image - <AUTHOR> https://visionbox.trueface.ai/ https://www.producthunt.com/posts/trueface-visionbox
We built the Trueface Visionbox to make computer vision accessible to all developers, regardless of talent level and skillset.
Now anyone can get started running our self-hosted computer vision solution with one command. There are no libraries or dependencies to install. The Trueface Visionbox is an enterprise-grade turnkey offline solution that can be deployed in minutes.
With the Trueface Visionbox, you can run face recognition, spoof detection, weapon detection, age detection and license plate recognition all on your own infrastructure. You have complete control over your data which never leaves your infrastructure. <comment><USER2> hoping to use this in near future, thanks for the share</comment>


Twitch.tv account information leaked - SG-

We are writing to let you know that there may have been unauthorized access to some of your Twitch user account information, including possibly your Twitch username and associated email address, your password (which was cryptographically protected), the last IP address you logged in from, and any of the following if you provided it to us: first and last name, phone number, address, and date of birth.
For your protection, we have expired your password and stream keys. In addition, if you had connected your account to Twitter or YouTube, we have terminated this connection.
You will be prompted to create a new password the next time you attempt to log into your Twitch account. If applicable, you will also need to re-connect your account to Twitter and YouTube, and re-authenticate through Facebook, once you change your password. We also recommend that you change your password at any other website where you use the same or a similar password.
We apologize for this inconvenience.
The Twitch Team
---
I posted the email text I received instead of the notice on their blog:
http://blog.twitch.tv/2015/03/important-notice-about-your-twitch-account/
The email version includes more specific information on what was leaked (personal information on top of e-mail address/password). <comment><AUTHOR> This apology (if you can call it that) annoyed me so much. At no point in this entire e-mail did they own up to their negligence and security failure, nor have they reassured us about steps being taken to make sure this doesn't happen again. Thoroughly disappointed.

<comment><USER2> I assume this was more of a notification, and hopefully there will be more of a 'post-mortem' yet to come.

<comment> SG- I doubt it, the public blog post has less details on what breached compared to the private emails they sent out.

I'm not so mad about the password being stolen, but the combination of my e-mail address and my DOB which can be used for a lot of things (sites with bad password recovery). I suppose it's time I start a system where I provide fake DOB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > "your password (which was cryptographically protected)"

I'm sure everyone here is dying to know what "cryptographically protected" means.

Does MD5 count?

<comment><USER4> > I'm sure everyone here is dying to know what "cryptographically protected" > means.

Ditto. I tweeted them, but not hopeful for a reply.

The words "cryptographically protected" are borderline 'weasel words' given that many organisations have conflated 'cryptographic' with 'cryptographic hash' (NOT suitable) instead of a proper key derivation function (KDF) designed for the purpose.

<comment><USER3> I can't wait for the day that companies start saying they turn users' passwords into a "digested hash".</comment></comment></comment>


Motorola Moto E modifications for anti-surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://people.torproject.org/~ioerror/skunkworks/moto_e/ <comment><USER2> A Samsung GTI9300 is a better choice as you can install Replicant on it, and the Intel baseband at least gives you access to radio logs so you can determine GSM encryption and silent SMS attacks [https://github.com/darshakframework/darshak](https://github.com/darshakframework/darshak)

Replicant isn't going to be ported to Motorola E/G or new Nexus devices, too many proprietary binaries.

It would be nice to have a totally free software tablet, and use a USB OTG baseband to priv seg it from the device. When you want to change radio identifier just buy a new internet usb stick.

<comment><USER3> It seems the Moto E was chosen just because it's a current phone that was cheap to buy.

Anyone think a Project Ara phone could be an option? [http://www.projectara.com/](http://www.projectara.com/)

I like the idea of buying one configured as a Wi-Fi phone with no baseband or GPS module and with the right secure communication app could be "secure" enough. Maybe someone could see a market for a "open" baseband module for it and make one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found the choice of device rather odd for the use case, since it's still running proprietary baseband code. Open source baseband software like OsmocomBB on a compatible device[1] seems more suitable.

[1]: [http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/Hardware/Phones](http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/Hardware/Phones)

<comment><USER5> Yes, this seems like a very good choise, since the baseband is already owned. I've picked one myself from ebay with the filter rework modification, and I can even run my own BTS!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm kind of surprised that the phone was still able to function with so many component removed - that's cool.

One thing that stood out under the "TODO" list was "Reprogram the IMEI." \- I was under the impression that doing so was illegal? (not that knowing how necessarily is).

<comment><USER7> Yes, changing IMEI is illegal in certain countries:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Station_Eq...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Station_Equipment_Identity#IMEI_and_the_law)

But if I were trying to make an "anti-surveillance" phone, I'd probably look into one of the more anonymous unbranded Chinese devices out there - especially the ones based on MTK chipsets, which have some full schematics available.

<comment><USER8> Schematics on such specialized, highly integrated chips with unknown internals are almost useless from a security standpoint.

<comment><USER9> Yes, very good point.

In fact IMO "highly integrated chips" such as SoCs are usually so complicated that no single individual really knows what's in them. And that's even when a chip is designed totally in house. However, most chips have lots of 3rd party Intellectual Property in them.

If my life depended on it (e.g. being a dissident in Iran or Syria) I wouldn't trust _any_ cellphone.

If pressed, I would probably use a relatively old laptop and run OpenBSD. With no GUI, just a text login. And then I'd still be concerned that there are 10 exploits that TLAs could use against me, that they keep under tight wraps.

It's not paranoia if there really are people out to kill or imprison you. "The man" has so much power nowadays that I'm glad I'm living a sedentary life in a random suburb, and I'm not playing any sort of "You Bet Your Life" game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quoting Stallman: "Theoretically it is possible to create a free phone, but practically it is not. [...] The phone modem cannot run free software because the specifications are unknown and a certificate of the manufacturer is required to flash the software. [...] Backdoors in the modem make it possible to flash non-free software to the application processor."

</comment><comment><USER11> _Install f-droid and use the phone without a Google account._

One unfortunate complication with this is that using the phone without a Google account means one will likely miss out on security updates. As Google fights android fragementation by moving more functionality into user- upgradeable apps, not having a Google account means one cannot update things like Google Play Services. I imagine there are security fixes which go into those updates.

Of course, one could disable those specific apps. However, in the example I used—Play Services—disabling (or having an old version of) it means TextSecure's push messaging does not work, for example. Going off on a bit of a tangent, I would be interested to see a discussion between Moxie and Jacob about this aspect of things. Is it worth having a Google account if it means you have encrypted push messaging? Is is worth not having a Google account if it means you cannot have encrypted push messaging? (Yes, encrypted sms would still work without the Google account).

In the event someone points out the TextSecure APK is only distributed within Google Play, it is relatively straightforward to build TextSecure from source. So, not having a Google account does not preclude one from using TextSecure. And one can use the push messaging via Play Services without a Google account, provided a compatible version of Play Services is on the phone.

<comment><USER12> If the number one priority is having a secure phone, why would you want to install the notoriously leaky Google apps? Google uses dark patterns and opt- out all over the place to send tons of data back to HQ.

Once again, if security and privacy are your number one priority, why wouldn't you compile TextSecure yourself, or at least get it from a trusted source?

<comment><USER11> My point was that it is not a simple trade-off between "privacy and security" and a lack of those things. In order to get software updates for critical components of the phone, you may need to get a google account, sacrificing some of the "privacy" for software "security". Obviously it does not have to be this way, but it is the way Google has mandated it in their ecosystem.

Edit: One can make the case that it's better to use encrypted SMS with TextSecure, rather than using the push messaging. But, from a metadata standpoint, I believe the push messaging might be better. SMS metadata seems to be automatically handed over to the US government, while they would likely need to issue a NSL, warrant, etc. to get that same information from Google. So using the push messaging may side-step some of the metadata collection that is happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unlocking the bootloader is not enough, you'll need sunshine or similar for the rom to be completely unlocked.

But forget the security mods, I am impressed they made a user-removable battery mod on a motorola.

</comment><comment><USER14> From the article "It is currently unclear how isolated the baseband processor is from the rest of the system's hardware."

Is this a problem? I was under the impression that the baseband controller was regarded as one of the more likely areas to insert "extra functionality", but I'm only going on info from security conference presentations.

EDIT: First Item in the TODO section: "Reverse engineer details relating to the Qualcomm MSM8610 baseband processor." Good to know they're on it.

<comment><USER15> Nothing in the posted web page inspires confidence that Appelbaum has any idea what he's doing. Everything on the page is something a primary school kid might do after reading XDA. Anything requiring skill is in the TODO.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, although I respect Appelbaum very much for his work on TOR. His time and knowledge would be more effectively spent on TOR, while letting the people with Replicant, Osmocom, OpenMoko, and hardware hackers who know what they're doing focus on freeing telephones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I applause the effort, but anti-surveillance device is not possible unless we have truly open hardware. There's more than enough space for backdoors in baseband alone, I'm not even talking about modern MCUs that power tablets, smartphones etc. and run closed firmware on multiple levels. I hope one day to see a strong open hardware movement, so we can be the real owners of our devices.

<comment><USER18> That's a frequent argument: "it's no point being secure if you can't be 100% secure". Being a little more secure still has value.

You can even disable the gsm function in the phone and use it as a wifi voip device with a VPN you control in between.

<comment><USER19> True ... if you are Iranian dissident that tries to protect himself while in US. If you are trying to protect yourself from state actor while in the state - then security and anonymity is binary. You either have them or don't.

<comment><USER18> You can at least increase costs as far as mass surveillance is concerned. Facing a targeted attack is rather hard, even with proper crypto and procedures in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know why the GPS wasn't removed?

<comment> ryan-c Wouldn't much matter. In most cases the cellular location data and the nearby wifi networks are nearly as good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> iPhone 6 also works with microphones and front camera removed.

<comment><USER22> The idea that you can make an open / anti-surveillance device out of an iPhone does not seem likely to me. I was under the impression that you're stuck with Apple's proprietary firmware and OS regardless of what you do to the hardware.

If I'm incorrect here, I'd love to hear it.

<comment><USER23> You can jailbreak iOS if you want to run custom software. You can't be as certain that the device does not contain some remotely activatable backdoor as with free software (which does not mean you can't be certain at all; the whole premise of jailbreaking is that binaries are inspectable, and you can obviously sniff traffic coming from devices), but it would be somewhat odd for Apple to maintain such a backdoor at the same time it's getting the FBI pissed off at it for improving disk encryption (thwarting efforts to retrieve data from physically obtained phones). The baseband cannot DMA into main memory, last I checked, which at least mitigates a common concern.

Perhaps more importantly, I consider the whole issue of backdoors pretty moot (in a bad way), because every smartphone contains a web browser with many remotely exploitable vulnerabilities - that's just the way browsers work in 2015 - and it is not that hard to get someone to click on your link. If you're an intelligence agency, why would you even bother deploying a backdoor that could get you in trouble when you can accomplish the same thing through normal vulnerabilities?

<comment><USER24> By jailbreak you mean execute an unknown binary from a (probably?) untrustworthy website which exploits an unpatched local privilege escalation in the operating system, right?

Doesn't sound like a great start to securing your system.

<comment><USER23> Depends. The unpatched local privilege escalation is usually not remotely exploitable, and the initial entry point is typically over USB and requires getting past the USB pairing process (i.e. you need the passcode), so it shouldn't matter that much; in any case, the 'real' bad guys have 0-days, so it doesn't matter that much whether there is a non-0-day present.

As you say, there is then the potential risk from the jailbreaks themselves, which recently have all been Chinese (yeah, yeah). I don't think the real, practical risk of this is very high, as long as you ensure your binary is actually the same as everyone else's rather than some tampered item, but it exists. I do think jailbreaks should be open source; sadly I think there have been none since my last jailbreak, written back in 2011, and while a non- obfuscated binary is perhaps even better than source for analysis purposes in such a community (since analyzing the binary directly obviates the need for reproducible builds), jailbreak binaries have also recently been heavily obfuscated for no good reason. So there is definitely room for improvement, if anyone cares about this. isios7jailbrokenyet.com is still holding onto a $30k bounty for an open source jailbreak...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bush: Terrible President, Also Not a Smart Man - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/bush-terrible-president-also-not-a-smart-man.html <comment><USER2> The greatest achievement of Bush is giving high quality material for Jon Stewart to work with.

Whether his personal intelligence was high or low is irrelevant. But he handled almost any issue with the grace of a monkey with a wrench in a glass castle. With similar results. And he never had any real crisis to deal with. Terrorism while tragic is not a serious geopolitical treat and 9/11 should have been treated like Katrina and not Pearl Harbor(Perpetrators and masterminds and collaborators should have been brought to justice but the Eichmann way - kidnap and trial, as Obama proved the US president have long hands) Mishandling of the financial crisis also didn't help. The decade that US was focused only on terrorism is a wasted time. There could have been much achieved otherwise.

Maybe Bush was held hostage by the hardliners in his party that completely took over the party after 2008 - that is argument I can accept and would have made decent Democratic president - he was never openly hostile towards the less fortunate.

But his legacy is like so - a wasted decade, 2 infinite wars, more american lives lost in the war on terror than the 9/11 attack themselves, loss of money that could have fixed almost everything in US,the beginning of the erosion of the civil liberties and a financial meltdown.

<comment><USER3> > Terrorism while tragic is not a serious geopolitical treat and 9/11 should > have been treated like Katrina

I think that's the first time I've seen the handling of Katrina held up as a positive model that anything else should reflect. I'd maybe understand "9/11 should have been handled the way Katrina should have been handled", but even then the two are so disparate in character that it wouldn't be clear what the analogy really meant in any kind of concrete terms.

<comment><USER2> I meant Katrina as a mark in the national debate/ conscience. Tragic one off event, which while we should try our best to avoid does not bring enough substance to be the pillar, let alone the foundation of the policies afterwards.

The handling of Katrina was terrible, but for various reasons the event did not scar the public deeply. Maybe because no one could figure out how to (ab)use it for media whoring and free pass for every legislation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not what anyone would call a Bush supporter, but the portion where they veer into personal attacks on his intelligence seems a bit out of place, if only for how low it stoops. I think that argument could have been framed much better.

To me, it seems like he's someone that easily gets flustered when speaking publicly, and has the unfortunate habit of digging in when he feels threatened (and he probably got overly sensitive to feeling threatened as time went on and he was mocked for his speaking.

It's also probably partly me. I would rather look for an explanation that doesn't entail him being an imbecile. Regardless of whether I liked or approved of him, I most definitely don't like the idea that we were lead by a moron for eight years, and what that implies about the country and populace that elected him - twice (depending on your view, I guess).

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems Bush's supporters are once again arguing that he was misunderestimated.

</comment><comment><USER6> Some who worked with him claimed he gave off an impression of an "extraordinarily intelligent" man.

[http://www.quora.com/George-W-Bush/What-is-George-W-Bush- rea...](http://www.quora.com/George-W-Bush/What-is-George-W-Bush-really-like- in-one-on-one-conversation)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think one needs only to look at this paintings to decide for oneself.</comment>


Did Apple Just Quietly End Development Of Safari For Windows? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/25/apple-safari-for-windows-ends/

<comment><USER2> Genuine question: has anyone here actually ever _used_ Safari for Windows, except for browser testing? I've never met anyone.

So this doesn't really surprise me. Looking up the numbers says Safari is used by 0.46% percent on Windows users -- and it doesn't seem to have ever gotten much higher than that. Why waste resources on it?

<comment><USER3> I've actually used it for almost a year, as a primary browser. One of the reasons was that it allows (allowed?) switching of font rendering engine to either Apple or Microsoft one. It was part of the experiment whether it's possible to live with a Mac with its extremely blurry though shape-preserving rendering.

Turns out they've bet on ultrahigh resolution displays, where their rendering is perfect.

<comment><USER4> The other way to go (which I've noticed most Mac people do go with) is comparatively larger fonts. As long as you are above 12px, the Apple font rendering not only _looks_ nicer, but I seem to be able to read it faster.

Of course, I want 12px or smaller unless a display is really high DPI... ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My impression was that one of the primary drive of having Safari on Windows back in the day was to get more users exposed to WebKit and to gives developers on windows a way to test there sites. With Google Chrome on mac/windows/linux that seems to be a much more solved problem, not to mention all those old "windows devs" have an iphone now.

<comment><USER6> I often wonder if Apple knew Google were working on their owner WebKit based browser? Safari was pretty pointless with the release of Chrome IMHO. It was never a very exciting browser.

<comment><USER7> Apparently, Google, Apple, Nokia, and RIM all submit patches to the Webkit project. Google's contributions have surpassed Apple's in recent years..

Edit: I did a little more digging, and it looks like Chrome did start out as a (not very) secret project for a few years. I'm not sure when they started submitting their own patches to Webkit-core (as required by LGPL?), but they did maintain their own fork of webkit until 2009.

<comment><USER8> They're not required to submit patches, only release code to people you've distributed binaries to. So before Chrome was released, they didn't have to release anything.

<comment><USER9> _> So before Chrome was released, they didn't have to release anything_

They did. While LGPL doesn't mean you need to release all your project's code to users if they request it, it does mean you need to release any modifications of the parts covered by the LGPL.

They didn't have to release the changes in any way that made them _easy_ to reintegrate with the mainline version, but they did have to release them somehow if requested to do so by a Chrome user.

Even the full GPL doesn't require you to automatically release your code back to the original source, it only states that you must provide the source to the people you distribute your product too if they request that you do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would seem they also dropped Snow Leopard support. Not entirely unexpected, but potentially bothersome nonetheless.

<comment><USER11> Since Snow Leopard was the last version of OSX to run PowerPC binaries, this may actually be quite annoying for all the people who have to be able to run their older apps and have not updated to 10.7 because of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meh. Safari's only utility on OS X is to install Chrome. IE fills that role on the Windows systems.

<comment><USER13> Aside from all the people (like me) that like Safari. I use Chrome too, but I do genuinely like Safari's UI more than Chrome.

<comment><USER10> Tell me about it, I still use Camino as my main browser because I find Chrome's UI dreadful and I find Safari's hiding habits annoying when I routinely load 100+ tabs.

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by "hiding habits"?

<comment><USER15> After some number of tabs are opened (depending on window width) the rest aren't accessible as tabs, but from a drop down list of all the tabs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I get the impression they already started doing that, when Safari had to work in tandem with WebKit2WebProcess.exe (if I recall the right process), which is pretty good at crashing all my tabs.

Pretty sure Safari from one year ago worked better on Windows than it does now. :/

On the positive side, maybe Apple won't try to force-feed users the browser, when they install and update iTunes, anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems as if there are still WebKit Nightlies being built for Windows, it would have been nice if they could tag which ones correspond to certain Safari releases for any Windows devs who want to test their sites in Safari.

</comment><comment><USER18> Meta-comment: why do tech blogs punch-up headlines with words like "just" and questionmarks?

<comment><USER19> Because it gets them pageviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wasn't the original point of Safari for Windows that all iOS apps were going to be in‐browser since Apple didn't want to allow the level of access for apps, so it was to allow more people to develop for the iPhone?

And then they went and made the app store and all that went out the window.

I'm surprised they didn't kill it a couple years back.

</comment><comment><USER21> Apple is a company of extreme focus so this is to be expected. After all, Safari on Windows wasn't going anywhere and it wasn't a substitute for Safari on the Mac.

Hopefully, they'll refocus any Windows Safari people on Webgl.

</comment><comment><USER22> Man I really liked pointing out that IE was the only major browser that didn't work on every major OS. Apple just lost what little high ground they had left in my book.

<comment><USER22> Really though Apple and Microsoft need to both just accept that they lost the browser war and ship with Chrome or Firefox.

<comment><USER23> How does that even make sense? Apple was never even in a "browser war" to begin with, but even if you want to claim they've "lost" some sort of war, how does that lead to discontinuing their browsers? Besides the fact that Apple _created_ WebKit and ship it as a core component of OS X, how does reducing browser choice benefit anyone?

<comment><USER24> Apple created "WebKit", but before it was WebKit it was KHTML. Let's not lose sight of history here.

<comment><USER23> And KHTML was based on the KDE HTML Widget. There's always prior work. But that's not particularly relevant to my point that it makes absolutely zero sense for Apple to discontinue their browser.

<comment><USER5> Nonless you are still wrong to say that "Apple created WebKit" as the WebKit source code was a fork from the KTHML source code.

<comment><USER23> Really? Without Apple, "WebKit" would literally not exist. Apple created the project. The code itself was a fork of KHTML, but I'm not talking about the code, I'm talking about the project.

<comment><USER5> Created is a very strong word to toss around especially in this context. Perhaps you were only referring to the trademark WebKit which Apple did register (but they did offered to have the community manage it at the start if I recall). WebKit literally wouldn't exists without the KHTML developers who were in discussions with Apple and the result of which was the WebKit project. Here on HN where code is first class and many others have incorrectly stated that Apple coded/created/built all of WebKit and they knew nothing of KHTML it is really no surprise that someone would try to correct you when you stated the "Apple created WebKit". Creating something isn't the guy that happen to register the trademark, it is the guys that wrote the code in this context.

<comment><USER23> Who cares about the trademark? The WebKit project is what I'm talking about. KHTML would not have gone on to become an incredibly popular cross-platform, cross-device, cross-company framework for web rendering if Apple hadn't started the WebKit project. It would have remained nothing more than a web rendering engine for KDE.

Code may be important, but it's not the only thing that matters. You could write the most beautiful, efficient, useful code in the world and it wouldn't matter if nobody ever saw it.

Besides, this is straying further and further from the point that Apple ships and maintains a web rendering engine as a core component of the system. It's so firmly embedded that it actually powers most text rendering on iOS. In light of this, saying Apple should discontinue their browser which is built upon this engine is preposterous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dav-id Looks like I will have to start using IE then

</comment><comment><USER25> I used Safari for Windows when it first came out, it was pretty good actually, but the later versions were a disaster, I don't know how but it ran like hell.

Somehow Apple managed to make Safari 5 slower than previous versions on Windows.

I can't exaggerate how unstable it was, it crashed all times and for no reason.

</comment><comment><USER26> While I imagine next to no one uses Safari as their actual browser on Windows, it was nice that it was there so most cross browser testing could be done on one box.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does anyone really care?

</comment><comment><USER28> breaking news!

<comment><USER29> Barca!</comment></comment>


CBOR – Concise Binary Object Representation - <AUTHOR> https://cbor.io/ <comment><USER2> CBOR is MessagePack. At least cbor-ruby started with the MessagePack sources. The story is that Carsten took MessagePack, wrote a standard and added some things he wanted, and called it something else.

I wrote [1] a pretty comprehensive (and admittedly biased) critique of the CBOR standard years ago.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14072598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14072598)

Disclaimer: I wrote and maintain a MessagePack implementation.

<comment><USER3> In your opinion, what's the value of MessagePack? I worked with it when writing some Fluentd tools, and it was neat, but I didn't love it enough to switch from JSON on other projects. Maybe there's a killer feature I didn't know I need?

<comment><USER4> At my work we recently went through a large exercise to decide on a common data storage format. The contenders were JSON, MessagePack, and Avro. MessagePack won because:

\- Msgpack serialization and deserialization is very fast in many languages - often 100x faster then JSON

\- Msgpack natively supports encoding binary data

\- Msgpack has type extensions, making it trivial to represent common types in an efficient way (eg. IPv4 address, timestamps)

\- Msgpack has good libraries available in many languages

If you do not care about those things (no binary data, no need for extended types, not performance critical) then JSON is just fine.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious why didn't you consider FlatBuffers as well.

<comment><USER4> FlatBuffers are not self-describing.

FlatBuffers, Protobuf, Cap'n Proto, etc., all require an external schema configuration that you compile into a code chunk that you include into your program. Without this it is impossible to make sense of the data. In our case, the data is semi-structured and changes frequently. The prospect of maintaining a schema registry for all the data users and keeping everyone up to date and backwards compatible is enough of a burden that it was excluded.

Avro also uses schemas, but since the schema is embedded in the file it is self-describing so the reader does not need to do anything special to interpret the data. But Avro's C library is buggy and the python deserialization performance was terrible, so Avro was not selected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is odd to read in the RFC section 1.1 this sentence,

 _The format should use contemporary machine representations of data_

...and then see in section 1.2,

 _All multi-byte values are encoded in network byte order (that is, most significant byte first, also known as "big-endian")_

I know it's largely a choice of tradition, but it seems almost anachronistic to specify any new protocols as BE when LE is the overwhelming majority of machines today, and probably has been for at least the past two decades.

<comment><USER7> It it also weird that "network byte order" is considered as BE. Is there any advantage of BE when it is transferred over the network?

<comment><USER8> If I remember correctly, BE helps in switching networks for routing packets. A packet would start with the big-endian destination address. If that address was hierarchical, i.e. most significant bytes signify the network (interface) it was in (like IP), then only a few of the first bits need to be processed in order to find which interface to direct the packet to. The transmission out therefore begins just after the few first bits are received.

E.g. for a switch connected to networks A: 0xa, B: 0x1, C: 0x3, a only the first byte 0x1 of the packet destined to 0x1234 needs to be processed before forwarding, saving some time compared to LE, where the entire address 0x4321 would have to be processed to find out that it's at the 0x1 network.

<comment><USER9> Registers on anything today will be way wider than few bytes, moreover on network hardware.

The gate savings on doing endiannes specific circuits are close to zero in comparison to many many other things a typical logic block comes with today.

<comment><USER10> It's not intended to save gates but time. Bits are (were) serially encoded on the wire, so you could start switching sooner, before even having received the whole header.

<comment><USER9> I understand the rationale, but all that hardware today will probably get more bits on input in a single clock cycle than at the time this was a concern.

Today, you have to process way way more bytes in a single clock cycle anyways.

Internally, for a chip designer, almost all modern high speed serial busses look way wider than a single byte. And all of its serialness is kept inside the transmitter/serdes/interface blocks without any external exposure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thread from 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10995726)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9597198)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932089)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632576) (the largest)

</comment><comment><USER12> A recent discussion here on Latacora's "How (not) to sign a JSON object" [0], had me thinking of CBOR. Unlike JSON, MsgPack, protobufs, BSON, or any other commonly used data interchange format that I'm aware of; CBOR has a canonical representation (although, with seeming ambiguity in float representation) [1].

Anyone have any thoughts on using canonical CBOR for object signing? Currently, I'm building a system with a content-addressable data store, and I'm particularly interested in data formats with a canonical form for this use-case.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20516489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20516489)

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049#section-3.9](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7049#section-3.9)

<comment><USER13> Generally, there isn't an efficient object model for CBOR (three really troublesome features are the use of arbitrary CBOR structures as map keys, 64 bit unsigned negative numbers, and semantic tagging resulting in data being represented in an alternative form e.g. a BigDecimal type rather than a binary array).

As a result, round-tripping through a CBOR implementation still may result in data structure changes. Depending on the type of change and any exploits in say the hashing algorithm, this could be a security issue.

On the flip side, you can just tag a byte array as CBOR data, and sign it. Unlike JSON, you don't need to perform an encoding/escaping to make one document safe to embed into another document.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shameless self-plug: JSON for Modern C++ ([https://github.com/nlohmann/json](https://github.com/nlohmann/json)) supports CBOR along MessagePack, UBJSON, and BSON, see [https://github.com/nlohmann/json#binary-formats-bson-cbor- me...](https://github.com/nlohmann/json#binary-formats-bson-cbor-messagepack- and-ubjson).

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious how this compares to

* Cap'n Proto

* ASN.1

* gzip-compressed JSON

in various ways. (I don't know much about progress in serialization methods.)

<comment><USER16> Cap'n'proto and ASN.1 require a schema. Gzip compression means the content has to be decrypted into json and then parsed into a native representation, which probably requires more memory and cpu than cbor deserialization.

<comment><USER17> Not decrypted. Decoded or decompressed.

<comment><USER16> Oops, I meant decompressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Neat. One little thing I gotta wonder about: was this name perchance a backronym for the author's name Carsten Bormann (CBor)? Not that I'm complaining, but that does seem like an odd coincidence.

Also, how does this compare to JSON binary serialization, such as BSON?

<comment><USER19> Regarding your first question, yes. Source: I have been a student at University of Bremen and attended some of his lectures (I remember at least one titled "Physikalisch-technische Grundlagen Digitaler Medien").

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For someone saw CBOR, CBOR is kinda binary version of JSON, like MsgPack. CBOR is already mature as it is used in web browsers internally by a web standard [1] (and yes, Signed HTTP is in a controversy though...)

Because it is pretty much optimized for machine readability and lightness, one of usage is microcontrollers for IoT, with CBOR + CoAP(kinda HTTP for IoT), although I wouldn't say it is common yet, since CoAP needs IPv6.

[1]: [https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http- origin-...](https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/draft-yasskin-http-origin- signed-responses.html#cbor-representation)

<comment><USER20> I recently wanted to use something JSON-RPC'ish for communication between host PC and my microcontroller. I looked into CBOR/MessagePack as well as UBJSON.

I didn't find a CBOR/MessagePack nor UBJSON implementation that was microcontroller-friendly and easy to use.

In the end I ended up just using plain JSON. Easy to debug as you can easily see what's on the wire, easy to implement, relatively small code size.

<comment><USER7> Most CBOR implementations for MCUs tend to be a part of RTOSs, integrated and optimized for their own memory allocation libraries. But many of them are based on Intel's TinyCBOR: [https://github.com/intel/tinycbor](https://github.com/intel/tinycbor)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been working on a general purpose binary and text encoding format for some time now as a personal project. It supports time, decimal floats, binary blobs as first-class citizens, supports comments, and focuses on encoding the most commonly used values more compactly. The binary format [1] is almost done (I've come up with a more compact date representation that I'll be adding this weekend to replace smalltime in the C and go implementations), and the text format isn't far behind.

I almost had a better floating point compression format, but it turned out to be too complicated, and only works well for decimal floating point, so I'll probably not use it in CBE.

[1] [https://github.com/kstenerud/concise- encoding/blob/master/cb...](https://github.com/kstenerud/concise- encoding/blob/master/cbe-specification.md)

<comment><USER22> Have you considered reserving some opcode space for future extensions?

This would make it easier for CBEv2 to add types without changing how a byte is interpreted.

<comment><USER21> Yes, I will be reserving space once I finish with the new date format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I tried CBOR but honestly the JS libraries available are not yet of production quality and I had to abandon it and go back to messagepack.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fun Fact: CBOR is both an acronym for the software as well as the initials of the author, Professor Carsten Bormann ([https://www.informatik.uni- bremen.de/~cabo/](https://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~cabo/))

</comment><comment><USER25> COSE, which uses CBOR, is the JOSE (commonly known by its subset JWT) of small binary messaging. [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8152](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8152)

<comment><USER26> It is, although COSE is significantly different to JOSE in many ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> this been here for a while... including the website. question: is anyone actually/effectively using it in a commercial project?

</comment><comment><USER28> BINC, MsgPack, ...</comment>


Google Shopping now returns no results for searches containing "gun" - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/search?output=search&tbm=shop&q=guns+germs+steel <comment><USER2> This "if (q.contains('gun')) return null;" approach is such a ham-fisted hack that causes such collateral damage that anyone who thought Google can be trusted anymore to responsibly wield their power over human commerce and thought and not act impulsively based on political whims should reconsider their position. Even if it is a mistake this kind of change should never be possible to ship. And if it's not a mistake, then I don't know what to say.

<comment><USER3> They did a similar thing with "confederate flag" not that long ago. I'm convinced Google Shopping is more for political PR than an actual place where anyone shops (Google probably knows this so doesn't care if they break their service to virtue signal)

<comment><USER2> Google is supposed to be _the_ data driven organization that changes things in a way that will minimize collateral damage. Even if Google Shopping doesn't draw much traffic in relative terms, at Google scale I'm sure it provides meaningful revenue to all sorts of companies that have products that include the term "gun" that do not include weapons. To make such a change and not methodically try to reduce the blast radius for these people effectively proves that whoever is in charge over there is not rolling out changes to search algorithms in the way Google is supposed to be famous for.

I worked on search algorithms for an ecommerce site that would kill for the kinds of traffic Google Shopping probably gets, and the idea that this would ever pass code review is laughable because of all of the blatantly obvious negative effects it would have on recall. At the _very least_ , you would whitelist bigrams in query logs that go along with "gun" that do not include weapons. This is a truly amateur move, several steps away from what I would consider acceptable from the worlds premier search organization. I would fail a student taking an information retrieval course on a question if they provided this as a solution to removing a category of products from a search engine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, which is kind of annoying... I'm European and shed no tears whatsoever for the supposed loss of precious "second amendment" rights (never had such a thing, never wanted such a thing), but I work in the paint business where we use electrostatic guns to apply powder coatings... and those have all disappeared (as has "electron gun" of the cathode ray tube variety), all of which is quite annoying collateral damage.

<comment><USER5> It's even worse than I imagined. As of now, at least in Canada, Google Shopping returns zero result when I search for "Burgundy" [1]. For comparison, Amazon.com returns 100,000 results for the same query [2]. We have known about Scunthorpe problem [3] for decades now. There is no excuse for this.

[1] [https://www.google.ca/search?q=Burgundy&tbm=shop](https://www.google.ca/search?q=Burgundy&tbm=shop)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?field- keywords=Bur...](https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?field- keywords=Burgundy)

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

<comment><USER6> [1] works fine for me (US). Is it for Canada only?

<comment><USER5> It appears to have been fixed. I should have taken a screenshot instead of posting a link :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not that I'm pro-gun, but I'd much prefer that Google stay out of politics. The potential for abuse is enormous.

<comment><USER8> I mean we can already call this abuse kind of. What if I meant to search for 'nerf gun', 'water gun', 'air gun', 'bb gun' or 'glue gun'? It doesn't seem like google thought much about this change.

<comment><USER9> Toy guns are probably a desired target here if this is a reaction to school shootings.

<comment><USER10> You can buy toy guns freely in every EU country. We have very few school shootings.

<comment><USER9> In the US, toy guns are blamed as part of the gun culture and people may want to restrict them in reaction to a school shooting. I'm not saying it's rational, just that it may have been intentional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apparently this is not terribly sophisticated.

[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=q3uVWtOfMM-4jwPqwZ...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=q3uVWtOfMM-4jwPqwZoI&q=guhns+germs+and+steel&oq=guhns+germs+and+steel&gs_l=psy- ab.3..0i13k1l3.1217.1217.0.17126.96.36.199.0.0.0.209.209.2-1.1.0....0...1c.2.64.psy- ab..0.1.208....0.pEqtr6g99y4)

And more generally:

[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=rnuVWpLsIJKEjwP8uq...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&ei=rnuVWpLsIJKEjwP8uqrICg&q=guhns&oq=guhns&gs_l=psy- ab.3..0i13k1l10.26638.26638.0.268220.127.116.11.0.0.0.84.126.96.36.199....0...1c.1.64.psy- ab..0.1.84....0.vlsuaQD7-ME)

So it would seem they blocked a direct result but not suggested results.

<comment><USER12> That's unbelievably unsophisticated. That combined with not using their vast ML resources to understand when something isn't a firearm (e.g. glue gun) makes me wonder how this feature has come about.

<comment><USER13> Is it possible this was just a mistake or maybe a rogue employee? I can't imagine Google allowing someone of this low competence to make changes to search.

<comment><USER12> I can't imagine a single developer would have the power to make this change either?

I guess it's possible that filtering has existed for a long time for very specific queries and 'gun' was added to a list.

It seems weird that this feature could be put live in this state getting passed QA though. That makes me worried what other changes could get live without much oversight.

<comment><USER2> For an ecommerce site such as Google Shopping it goes beyond QA -- incremental rollouts should have triggered alerts noting this as causing a drop in recall (to effectively zero) for a large category of high traffic queries that convert (presumably there are some, like "nerf gun" or "glue gun", given that "gun" is an extremely common term that has high purchase intent for non- weapons) and it should have been prevented from being deployed by automation.

Presumably if they are doing things correctly there are probably several overrides that needed to be enabled to let this change out. Or, they're not doing things correctly. In nearly any other situation, automated systems would recognize "change goes out -> large number of queries suddenly return zero results" as a major catastrophic bug and prevent it from being deployed.

<comment><USER13> I'm hesitant to accept this was intentional because QA process, since this change was clearly made by someone who didn't know what they were doing.

As another user pointed out, the word burgundy triggers the filter. And if you spell something incorrectly the "did you mean" results are unaffected.

I'm imagining a higher level manager with very little technical expertise (just enough to write an if statement) pushing this into prod against Google's wishes, or maybe by accident.

<comment><USER2> My point was that at Google, a single person should not be able to break things to this degree. The automation should roll it back automatically. This is, technically due to the drop in recall, a bug, unless it is overridden as a special case so it is not recognized as a bug. To break things this bad you not only should have to make the change to the code but you should also have to "sign off" on the dynamics flagged by the X% rollout test as being acceptable somehow.

So no matter what this paints Google extremely poorly -- either Google Shopping is one git commit away from going down completely, or they're placing shipping a hacky, poorly executed political statement higher on their priorities than potentially damaging the livelihood of those who are collateral damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I notice this has been pushed down the rankings on the frontpage (it was near the top a few minutes ago). Surely this sort of incompetent implementation of a politically-motivated decision by a major tech company is worthy of our attention?

(Exactly how submissions end up at a position other than their natural ranking has always been a bit mysterious to me - should I blame some algorithm thing or malicious actors?)

<comment><USER15> It probably tripped the flamewar detector and/or was flagged (but not to the point of getting killed).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't even search for the word "burgundy", which is quite a nice color.

<comment><USER16> Wait, so even Google engineers are terrible at regexp-ing? I now feel less bad about myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm trying to figure out Google's angle here. Is this just a dumb legal- initiated move to shelter Google from culpability for any future gun crimes committed with guns purchased after looking at Google Shopping? Is this an attempt to shield against bad PR on social media from "supporting those evil gun sellers"? Or is this an attempt by Google to throw their weight around for ideological reasons, to try to make gun purchasing as much as a pariah as the Confederate flag became after Dylan Roof (when major online retailers did the same censoring)?

Whatever the case, it's definitely making breaking up Google look a lot more appealing. Encourage your friends and family to get off of Google and use something like DuckDuckGo instead. For too many people, "Google = Internet", and it's becoming increasingly clear that that mindset will leave people vulnerable to inhabiting only a small curated collection of approved mindsets.

<comment><USER18> Virtue signaling at the highest corporate levels. Must have been approved by Pichai himself. He probably felt insufficient backing to say no (which would have been in the interest of the company) to the aspiring apparatchik that executed this as her career move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Do no evil" as a marketing ploy, even if they dropped that officially.

One person's evil is another person's free speech rights, or ambiguity (forget the 2nd Amendment for a moment).

It reminds me a bit of a commercial I saw: in slow motion, people of different races were smiling and holding hands (nevermind that they looked like models, all of them), with some motto about diversity. I think the sun was rising, or setting. A few seconds later: a Nike logo at the bottom.

There you have it, folks, that's what happens when politicial discourse is about symbols and words (ideas) and most importantly feelings instead of laws and economic policy.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am horrified. Whatever ones oppinion about gun control might be, and whether it is ok to remove actual guns from search results, it is absolutely horrible that a company like Google would consider it reasonable to build a filter just around the three letters "gun" in the search text.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh, and searches for "revolvor" and "gu n" work just fine. So only people with bad spelling will be able to buy guns...

<comment><USER22> To their credit, if you type in "holds six magazines" to Google shopping they still show a couple of magazine racks before the tactical vests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Actually - do we know if this is new? I found this from 2012, for example:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/07/05/google-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2012/07/05/google- sadly-joins-the-anti-gun-brigade/)

Edit: The Telegraph picked this up just now, saying Google are "looking into" it...

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/wine-lovers- cann...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/wine-lovers-cannot-buy- burgundy-tipple-google-internet-giant/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Not just for searches containing the word "gun", but even words that contain "gun" as a substring!

This returns no results: [https://www.google.com/search?q=shogun&tbm=shop](https://www.google.com/search?q=shogun&tbm=shop)

But this misspelled query shows that results for "Shogun" exist: [https://www.google.com/search?q=shogon&tbm=shop](https://www.google.com/search?q=shogon&tbm=shop)

Did anybody review or write tests for this changelist?

</comment><comment><USER24> Brilliant! A search for "gu n" yields "Did you mean gun" and offers gun related products.

</comment><comment><USER25> Bravo Google! You've managed to make zero positive impact on your implied corporate stance on "gun control" in the US.

Worse, you've managed to degrade non-firearms related queries that contain 'gun.'

</comment><comment><USER24> It does return results containing "guns". If you search for "germs" and "steel", it returns the book "Guns, Germs and Steel". However it does not appear to return results if you search for "guns".

</comment><comment><USER26> Well that explains why I couldn't find a replacement Staple Gun this morning. I actually thought Google Shopping had broken terribly.

<comment><USER27> And apparently it is broken terribly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Like the title states, it's only "Shopping" and while it can be more specific than "gun" \-- for example, "AR-15" will not result in any "Shopping" results -- "AR-15" under "All" will give results for places to purchase an AR-15.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow, this was implemented poorly. Even just adding "gun" to the list of stop words I assume they have would have allowed "burgundy" to keep returning results. String contains boolean condition?

Bing Shopping also returns zero results for the search term "gun," but does return results for "gun safe," "burgundy," etc.

Yahoo! Shopping seems to have the best compromise, returning relevant results for the search term "gun," like water guns and such, but filtering out "real" guns.

The beautiful thing about the internet is we can go to another search engine, like DuckDuckGo. I would rather have Google mess this up and have to go to another site than the federal government attempt to increase regulatory control of internet traffic.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone actually use Google Shopping? I personally don't know anyone who does.

<comment><USER31> I do every time I shop. It's (was) the easiest price comparison for general products (that I know of).

This is certainly a huge disappointment. I don't think I would have searched out an alternative anytime soon had this not happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand how such a hacky piece of code made it to production. While water gun returns no results... water gu

[https://i.imgur.com/3pV73rs.png](https://i.imgur.com/3pV73rs.png)

</comment><comment><USER33> That'll solve the problem!

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm actually not getting any results from any query period. Apparently Google realized online shopping is virtually non-existent in my country and just gave up?

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&tbm=shop&q...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=search&tbm=shop&q=iphone&oq=iphone&gs_l=products- cc.3...25539.25977.0.26072.6.5.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1ac.1.64.products- cc..6.0.0....0.5pfbC6elbRg)

"Your search - iphone - did not match any shopping results."

<comment><USER35> I get ten pages of results using your link.

<comment><USER34> That's strange. Apparently nothing is spidered in my country and I can't find an easy way to switch countries. A lot of people shop abroad.

Google Shopping is a "good enough" experience for the end user, ready to be shoved in your face when you are searching for links to websites that contain your search query.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Not just "gun"; "pistol" also works. Funny interaction with their matching / DWIM logic is that a query for "water pistol" returns no results, but "water pistil" returns lots of water pistols.

</comment><comment><USER37> This just smells of a Scunthorpe problem. What about a nice DVD of Gunsmith Cats, or a watch with gunmetal finish, or maybe a burgundy sweater?

</comment><comment><USER38> I understand why they did this, but I think this might be a bit too broad.

There are plenty of things that I might buy that have the word "Gun" that are not directly related to weapons; my favorite XBox game is named "Gun", there is a Gregory Peck movie I like called "The Guns of Navarone", and there's the aforementioned "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

<comment><USER39> The fact that you

> think

> this might

> be a bit

> too broad

Is to reveal the sorry state of affairs in, at least, our political discourse.

Worse so, you're effectively part of the problem which allows these organizations to become so powerful.

You always need checks and balances. You always need to be vigilant. You always need to act.

<comment><USER38> Umm, what the hell are you talking about? Which organizations? The NRA or Google?

I'm not even disputing that I'm part of the problem, but I would like you to elaborate on what you think this problem _actually is_.

<comment><USER39> I find it hard to believe that anyone would seriously compare a non-profit membership organization whose mission includes educating American citizens of responsible gun ownership and defending citizens' second amendment rights, to a global for-profit corporation with over 100 billion USD in annual revenue, directly affecting hundreds of millions of lives every day, with the power to promote or censor search results, advertisements, and more, and consequently shape what people think. Surely the former does not have sufficient power to positively shape how it's presented by major media corporations, and it often takes the blame when those corporations distribute stories of gun violence-- events which, when the intensity of media attention is brought to them, we can all point to and feel visceral reactions to. But it's obvious that the political whims of the latter (Google) can be, and has been, carried out at a massive scale with great(er) efficiency and little(r) checks or balances.

The fact that we have not yet developed and distributed concise-enough language to discuss the monumental impact of entities like Google is a sign that there is a problem we are not devoting enough energy to.

<comment><USER38> While I have to say I wholly disagree with your viewpoint on the NRA, I don't really disagree with your thesis, which makes me wonder how I'm "part of the problem".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, queries containing "revolver": [https://www.google.com/search?output=search&tbm=shop&q=beatl...](https://www.google.com/search?output=search&tbm=shop&q=beatles+revolver)

<comment><USER14> And "rifle", I think. You can't even do searches like "shogun" (famous novel) or "begun".

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Velvet Revolver too. All that money into DeepMind and this is the best they can do?

</comment><comment><USER41> It gives results if you do it with spaces... so g u n works...

*edit for clarity

</comment><comment><USER6> Searched right now, got tons of toy guns, not real guns so far - but I wouldn't shop for a real one on Google Shopping anyway, don't think so.

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, I get a lot of results for 1911 (none seem to be actual firing guns, despite pictures), but nothing for Glock or Colt. Funny thing is the 1911 results have a lot of "Colt" words in the title, so it's an obvious block, and a pretty stupid one (as they all are) at that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If only there was some kind of giant innovative cooperation that attracts only the best and brightest talent that could solve this nuanced problem...

</comment><comment><USER43> I like the initiative just not sure about the execution.

I just search "glue gun" and got nothing. Guess that's fine.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER44> Damn... I should've bought my "gunge" before today. Now I'll have to use Yahoo!

</comment><comment><USER45> Good thing for Guns N' Roses that no one actually uses Google Shopping.

</comment><comment><USER46> Hooray! Now just search for firearms and get the same results.

</comment><comment><USER21> Also "ar 15", unsuprisingly.

</comment><comment><USER47> no results for `toy guns` too

</comment><comment><USER48> I love it. Thank you, Google! A lot of other tech companies - Paypal, Square, Stripe and Apple pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

I hope other companies like Amazon, visa, master card will follow your footsteps.

<comment><USER36> Google Shopping still shows firearms, it just shows no results for correctly- spelled searches including "gun", "pistol", "rifle". Search for either specific models, or misspellings for "rifel" or "pistil" or "revoler".

<comment><USER48> Hopefully they will take care of this loophole as they improve the algorithm.</comment></comment></comment>


TSA to swab airline passengers' hands in search for explosives - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL/02/17/tsa.hands.swabbing/index.html?hpt=Sbin

<comment><USER2> A trivial search finds that this has been submitted already:

<http://searchyc.com/swab></comment>


France says it will block Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/12/france-will-block-facebook-libra-cryptocurrency-europe/ <comment><USER2> Not directly related to facebook's libra but why don't we see more businesses use bitcoin, monero, etc. as a backup currency? I mean they could allow transactions to happen with cryptocurrency and have linked to a stable currency in the backend to be exchanged.

It wouldn't be a bad idea to have a 'backup' decentralized currency in an event of mass inflation. For example, the US is projected to go into a $30 trillion dollar deficit by 2030 and there's no telling what ramifications that will have.

<comment><USER3> >For example, the US is projected to go into a $30 trillion dollar deficit by 2030 and there's no telling what ramifications that will have.

Is there a telling on how many dollars will a Bitcoin exchange for in 2030?

<comment><USER2> Probably a lot more than it is now as it's deflationary in nature.

edit: It would be interesting to see if cryptocoin would stabilize in value if it was exchanged as common as the dollar.

<comment><USER3> So the idea is to counter unknown ramifications with equally unknown (but probably a lot more than it is now) backup value, I see.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Examining ARM vs. x86 Memory Models with Rust - <AUTHOR> https://www.nickwilcox.com/blog/arm_vs_x86_memory_model/ <comment><USER2> > Where the memory model of ARM differs from X86 is that ARM CPU's will re- > order writes relative to other writes, whereas X86 will not.

May. Not will. The difference here is important, because the actual memory ordering presented is an issue of hardware implementation choice (and of course the local vagaries like cache line alignment, interrupt order and the behavior of other CPUs on the bus). You can't just write some sample code to demonstrate it and expect it's going to work the same on "ARM".

In fact I'd be really curious how Apple handles this during the Mac transition. I wouldn't be at all surprised if, purely for the sake of compatibility, they implement an strongly ordered x86-style cache hierarchy. Bugs in this world can be extremely difficult to diagnose, and honestly cache coherence transistors aren't that expensive relative to the rest of the system.

<comment><USER3> Reordering rarely or never comes from "cache coherence" on CPUs, but rather core local effects like store buffering, out of order execution, coalescing and out of order commit in the store buffer, etc.

<comment><USER2> I don't follow your point. Ordering control is _necessarily_ a feature of the cache layer. You're right that there are local pipeline effects too, but if you have a memory ordering requirement in your architecture it has to be built into the cache design all the way up and down the hierarchy.

In practice that's the stuff that's expensive.

<comment><USER3> I'm saying that everyone making CPUs uses a strongly ordered cache coherency subsystem and re-ordering _only_ comes from "pipeline effects" [1].

Slightly longer version of the same claim here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23661588](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23661588)

\---

[1] I prefer the term _core-local_ because I think it's somewhat more accurate as it can include things like the delayed processing of invalidations and sibling core interactions in SMT which might not fall under "pipeline" effects but are still local to the (physical) core.

<comment><USER2> That may well be true in ARM application processors, at least between CPUs. Though nothing in the architectural memory model guarantees that so I'd be surprised if there weren't some surprises (DMA on most of those CPUs is upstream of the cache, for example, and not susceptible to that kind of optimization).

I can guarantee it's not for "everyone making CPUs". I'm literally writing code as we speak on a multi CPU cache-incoherent system. It's a big world.

<comment><USER4> TriCore by any chance? ;-)

<comment><USER2> Xtensa

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't the following statement always true, as casting using `as` will silently ~~overflow~~ truncate the `u32` if `usize` is 64-bits?

        assert!((samples as u32) <= u32::MAX);

EDIT: I know it's a contrived example, but I was just curious if my understanding is correct. I also found this page in the nomicon about casting: [https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/casts.html](https://doc.rust- lang.org/nomicon/casts.html)

EDIT2: As I thought casting a `usize` which is 64-bits to a `u32` causes it to be truncated and hence the assertion is always true. Further by using a number that's bigger than a `u32`, this example contains undefined behavior. This is due to the use of `slice::from_raw_parts` where `self.samples` is left as a `usize` and hence takes a much bigger slice than what was allocated (the leftover of the truncate operation). I made a small playground which demonstrates the segfault. [https://play.rust- lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...](https://play.rust- lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2018&gist=2d6a189182daa3884eebc7524d1b8223). The assertion should rather be:

        assert!(samples <= u32::MAX as usize);

Don't get me wrong, I think the blogpost is a great explanatory article about memory ordering and the example is rather contrived. I just wanted to reassure myself that my understanding was correct and further perhaps help someone not seeing this issue (as this is a very easy trap to fall into).

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct. Thanks for the pickup. Fixed the post and repo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The x86 processor was able to run the test successfully all 10,000 times, > but the ARM processor failed on the 35th attempt.

I think this issue might prove a problem in the long tail of desktop and server software running on ARM.

A lot of desktop and server applications try to take advantage of all the cores. Many times, they are using libraries that were either implemented prior to C and C++ having defined memory models or else without that much care for memory model as long as it ran without issues on the developer computer (x86) and server (x86). Going to ARM is going to expose a lot of these bugs as developers recompile their code for ARM without making sure that their code actually adheres to the C/C++ memory models.

<comment><USER7> There's now 2 incentive to support ARM better - Apple's move to ARM on the desktop and cheaper cloud bills if you're willing to use ARM instances. Either one wouldn't be enough of an incentive, but together it will cause a shift in the next 3-5 years.

Developers will become more aware of the differences between the architectures, tool chains will accommodate both better, people and software will stop assuming they are running on x86 as default. ARM won't "win" the desktop or the server market, but it will become a viable alternative, squeezing the profits of companies who depend on x86.

<comment><USER8> > cheaper cloud bills

That remains to be seen.

<comment><USER7> Graviton2 instances are available on AWS. They claim 40% better performance than their x86 peers - [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance- types/m6/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/m6/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _If we initialize the contents of both pointers to 0_

Is this a "Rust-ism"? I had a double-take while reading that, because in C that would mean a null pointer, and in the terminology I'm used to, the intent is to set the _pointee_ to 0.

Note that x86 does allow some memory reordering:

[https://preshing.com/20120515/memory-reordering-caught-in- th...](https://preshing.com/20120515/memory-reordering-caught-in-the-act/)

(I have experience debugging and fixing an extremely rare bug caused by the above subtle reordering, which occurred approximately once every _3-4 months_.)

<comment><USER10> C programmers use "contents" to refer to the address of the pointer? As a non-C programmer, asking what is "contained" in the pointer would certainly refer to the pointee.

<comment><USER11> In C a pointer is an object in its own right, so referring to the contents of a pointer, p, means the same thing as referring to the contents of an integer, i; namely, the _value_ held by the object. A pointer value has semantic meaning and usefulness the same as an integer value, completely divorced from the machine representation, which in a pure C program should always be irrelevant for pointer and arithmetic types alike.

I don't think I can articulate well why it's important to keep in mind and appreciate value semantics. Certainly many C programmers, especially the newer ones, are far too concerned with value _representation_ rather than the abstract value itself, often conflating the two. I guess one good example of why it's important to understand pointers as proper objects with abstract values is when working with pointers-to-pointers, pointers-to-pointers-to- pointers, etc. Pointer arithmetic is another case, which doesn't overlap with the former as much as you'd think. In these cases understanding pointers as values is important to understanding the semantics of a program, and more generally how to leverage the language efficiently and safely. Note that these semantics have no analog in references, the construct in, e.g., C++. It doesn't make sense to conceptualize references as independent objects; rather, a reference is a syntactic construct, no more an object than a list initializer.

Yeah, as a C programmer I would find it kind of odd if someone seemed to conceptually elide the character of pointers as proper first-class objects.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if pointer arithmetic specifically is the sticking point here; when using pointers in other languages I don't ever do pointer arithmetic on them, so the integral value of the pointer is easily ignored.

For those wondering, given the context of Rust here, both references and C-style pointers are first-class in Rust, but references (which are overwhelmingly more common) don't directly permit pointer arithmetic at all, and would require one to first cast the pointer to an integer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing omitted from this article is that it's not only the physical hardware that may (effectively) re-order operations. The compiler may also perform these re-orderings.

The compiler's re-orderings will always be valid according to the abstract memory model rather than the hardware's, so even on x86 you must use the correct memory orderings, or risk subtle bugs due to compiler optimisations.

<comment><USER13> In particular, the "multi-threaded using volatile" example is technically incorrect because the compiler is allowed to move non-volatile accesses across volatile ones. [1] To make it correct (but still only on x86), you'd have to use std::sync::atomic::compiler_barrier.

[1] [https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Volatiles.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Volatiles.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Did this page just loaded for me with the glimpse of an eye? Way to do it!

</comment><comment><USER15> And the good news here is that many libraries have accelerated their ARM port / investigations.

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't this something Rust std lib api or perhaps LLVM backend should take care of ?

<comment><USER17> The problem is that there's likely to be a fair amount of logically broken 3rd party code out there because x86's memory model semantics doesn't reveal the issues. The compiler can't help here, it'll just do what the developer told it to do.

It's a whole new 'it works on my machine' issue (for some people).</comment></comment>


Approaches for serverless without vendor lock-in - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/approaches-for-serverless-without-vendor-lock-in-53294013619 <comment><USER2> Knative.</comment>


Ask HN: Is the Macbook Pro 2019 16-Inch Worth It? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For me, no. At least, not yet.

The 16 inch requires macOS Catalina, which kills all 32-bit apps, among other things.

My employer still has some critical apps we use that are 32-bit, and while I wouldn't be buying a 16 inch MacBook Pro for work, I don't want to be forced to use Catalina at home. At least, not yet.

Maybe in six months. Or maybe not. But by then, it may be too late and many people may have moved on to other machines. I know I probably will have done so by then.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, because the improved keyboard still sucks. Let's hope they will fix the shallow travel in the next iteration.

</comment><comment><USER4> Compared to what? I bought one because my 15" 2013 MacBook Pro died. I'm happy with the new one.

</comment><comment><USER5> No.

Why? Apple will replace it with a new one in WWDC 2020. Don't waste your money on a 2019 MacBook.</comment>


Registration – BugMeNot.com - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20050401021557/http://www.bugmenot.com/register.php <comment><USER2> Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's "Reasonable Agreement," [1] reproduced in full below:

> READ CAREFULLY. By [accepting this material|accepting this payment|accepting > this business-card|viewing this t-shirt|reading this sticker] you agree, on > behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers > arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of- > service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, > non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have > entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and > assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and > privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me > from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Oops, sorry. Did you read it?

[1]: [http://boingboing.net/2007/01/25/reasonableagreemento.html](http://boingboing.net/2007/01/25/reasonableagreemento.html)

</comment><comment> Anthony-G Excellent parody. I liked how comprehensive the options were for Political Orientation while the list of Religions even includes Juche -- though I had to look up [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_%C4%90%C3%A0i](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_%C4%90%C3%A0i) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenrikyo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenrikyo)

<comment><USER3> Not Discordianism though--Eris got snubbed _again_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I miss the old bugmenot

</comment><comment><USER5> jcupat123

</comment><comment><USER5> hackker ako boy</comment>


We Don't Need Elections to Figure Out What People Want - <AUTHOR> https://outlookzen.com/2020/02/05/we-dont-need-elections-to-figure-out-what-people-want/ <comment><USER2> People absolutely do want Free Markets or Single Payer or other things from a pure brief in the virtue of some of tse things as ends as opposed to a means to achieve another end like wanting good health. And wanting material things is absolutely not something that can be taken for granted - look at the Amish. Luckily, instead of living in a World where those in power just assume they know what people want and know better than everyone else, viewing themselves as the pilot of an airplane and everyone else the passengers, we live in a democracy where we theoretically vest sovereignty in the individual.

I'm always amazed by articles like this one that just take for granted that the author knows the people better than they know themselves, and that people like them are naturally the ones who should be vested with decision making power. "Lean on the strengths of institutions" \- and who gets to run those institutions exactly?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _I 'm always amazed by articles like this one that just take for granted > that the author knows the people better than they know themselves, and that > people like them are naturally the ones who should be vested with decision > making power_

The article says nothing of the sort. There are very concrete suggestions provided at the end - suggestions which do not require any centralized decision makers or authorities.</comment></comment>


Apple Photos app recognises 4,432 scenes or objects - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@iosight/behind-apples-advanced-computer-vision-for-photos-app-41f3f617d31c#.x9vdpu3zg <comment><USER2> A list of animals without any primates.</comment>