Julia Impressions - <AUTHOR> http://eyeballtrees.com/posts/julia-impressions.html

<comment><USER2> I really want to get into Julia. As I have been using an increasing amount of numerical code NumPy, SciPy and even my own Cython code has started to fail me performance-wise. The Julia community is really friendly and I tried rolled out a few implementations of the inner-most loop of a Recursive Neural Net in a variety of languages.

[https://github.com/ninjin/ppod/tree/master/hck/rnn_perf](https://github.com/ninjin/ppod/tree/master/hck/rnn_perf)

Disappointingly enough I was unable to push the performance of Julia beyond that of pure (and ugly) Matlab. I tried asking over at #julia, but it seems that my implementation should be reasonably canonical. This is really a pity for me since I would love to remain highly productive in terms of code and use something scripting-esque rather than have to re-consider going back to C. I have also had a look at Nimrod, but the scientific library support appears somewhat lacking at the moment.

<comment><USER3> I used Julia's in-built profiler to look at your code. Almost all the work is done, as you'd hope, on lines 20, 22, 33, and 35. I added @inbounds to lines 20 and 35, figuring that line 22 is mostly just the effort of calculating tanh. This dropped the running time on my computer from 10.7 seconds to 6.4 seconds, so about 60% of original running time. If I compile with gcc (gcc rnn_perf.c -O2 -o rnn_perf -lm) and run that, I get 6.2 (O3 is worse). That might not be how you compiled the C version, but regardless it looks like your C time was about 46% of the original Julia time, so its getting close. Three- fifths of the work now is in the tanh line. I'll submit a PR.

<comment><USER4> Having people like Iain – with this kind of knowledge of numerical programming and optimization – help you out with your code is one of the major benefits of Julia programming :-)

<comment><USER5> This is some quality advertising on your and Iain's part. It makes me want to use Julia even more when I get the chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are the libraries like for Julia at this point? The big thing holding me to R is the breadth of libraries for a) various statistical methods and algorithms and b) plotting.

I'm kind of desperate to get away from R at this point, but reluctant to move to Python (not that I have anything against Python, but I would really like to add a high performance language to my toolkit than something inbetween).

<comment><USER7> Out of curiosity, why are you so desperate to get away from R? Is it for the speed of a high performance language?

As you mention, the vast selection of libraries (and the continual development of these libraries) make even the python module universe look small (in reference to statistical methods, statistical algorithms/machine learning, plotting).

Further, not only are there a lot of libraries.. but many of them are bleeding edge written by the same people who originally invented the given algorithm. Most similar libraries in other languages (like Python) have incomplete ports of these libraries to them often not written by the same people. Not to mention, the documentation behind these algorithms is often excellent - besides the usual man files, there's "vignettes" (detailed instruction manual) as well as an entire journal that now has become a place to publish papers detailing the usage and implementation of many of these algorithms.

So I'm curious, why leave?

<comment><USER6> I love a lot about R, and I totally acknowledge the benefits. I don't think I would ever stop using it for data exploration and ad hoc analysis.

But after trying really hard over the past 3 years I'm sort of giving up ever being able to use it in a productive reliable fashion for building more complex software. It's a failing on my own part in many ways, but the loose typing and poor support for structuring code interact very badly with my personal style. When I'm working in R I literally spend 80% of my time fighting with the type system, debugging weird and wonderful features of R. I'm at the point where whenever I write an R function the first 50 lines of the code are type checks to make sure the data coming in is what I expect. I came to this point after I started systematically tracking why I was wasting so much time, and nearly every time it would come back to the type of my data being something other than what I had expected or assumed.

So I'm sort of figuring if I'm at the point where I'm writing manually statically typed code in R ... I should look around for a language that's just like R but has at least slightly stronger data types built in.

<comment><USER8> I agree completely on the type system. When first starting with it, I was thinking "wow this is great, I don't have to worry about types and things just work". But then weird things start to happen, and you realize it's due to strange type issues that are sometimes harder than they should be to track down. And then half your code ends up being something like as.numeric(as.character(as.vector(xyz)))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great stuff. I think the author may be using the release version 0.2, as the boot time issue has been rectified now for the most part in the next release, 0.3. The next big slow-load issues is packages, that'll be post 0.3 though.

<comment><USER9> OP here. I'm currently using 0.2, I'll have to upgrade and see if that fixes the issue. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> There are two separate issues, I believe you refer to. There is the boot time, which has been considerably improved, and is less than a second. The second thing is the slight pause that you refer to (if I understand the post correctly), when executing stuff the first time. That is the JIT compiling and warming the code cache.

<comment><USER4> The startup time in 0.3 is more than 10x faster than 0.2 – it's down to ~200 ms on my machine, whereas it was about 2 seconds before. It's now quite painful to go back and use 0.2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm really excited by Julia. We use Matlab heavily in my team (as in, we probably have 300-600 Matlab instances running at any given time not counting the ones on personal workstations) and I'd love to use a language with similar support for numerical programming and linear algebra, but with better typing and functional programming support.

Do you have any suggestions for slowly introducing Julia to the team?

<comment><USER5> May I ask what you're doing with all those instances?

And to be extremely bold: what are you paying for all those licenses?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How is multiple dispatch different from function overloading, as found in C++/Pascal? Is it the same thing?

<comment><USER13> Dispatch is the process of selecting and executing the matching overload. Multiple-dispatch refers to the ability to select the best overload based on more than just the first argument. C++ can do arity and type-based multiple- dispatch, but only statically. Julia supports dynamic multiple dispatch, where as C++'s virtual methods are only single-dispatch dynamically.

<comment><USER4> Precisely. This may sound pedantic or academic, but in practice when static overloading and dynamic dispatch differ, the static behavior is usually not what you want. In my experience, this makes it painful to make code that is polymorphic in multiple arguments behave correctly in C++ (double dispatch [1] is one of the necessary but awkward tactics that's used), whereas multiple dispatch just works. And of course, almost working and actually working are a world apart even though they sound so close.

[1] [http://lostechies.com/derekgreer/2010/04/19/double- dispatch-...](http://lostechies.com/derekgreer/2010/04/19/double-dispatch-is- a-code-smell/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's the deal with the lack of conditionals in comprehensions? Is there a good reason that the Julia devs didn't include that, or is it just something that's not been implemented yet?

Edit: after a little searching, I found this.

> Filters and guards don't mix with multidimensional comprehensions. For 1-d > comprehensions, I'm not convinced that it's really worth the additional > syntax. What's the case for making it part of the syntax instead of just > using a filter function?

<comment><USER15> Julia's comprehensions are multidimensional array comprehensions so allowing filtering doesn't make much sense because the result needs to be rectangular and filtering can create arbitrary holes.

For a one-dimensional array comprehension it does make sense to allow filtering and this can be easily expressed in Julia by making a coroutine that produces the values and collecting its output in an array.

Multidimensional (here multi=2) array result:

        julia> [i+j for i=1:3, j=1:3]
        3x3 Array{Int32,2}:
         2  3  4
         3  4  5
         4  5  6

One dimensional array result, with filtering:

        julia> collect(@task for i=1:6; if i%3>0; produce(i); end; end)
        4-element Array{Any,1}:
         1
         2
         4
         5

Notice that this last technique is more powerful than typical comprehensions, since it doesn't just add the possibility of filtering but arbitrary code to generate the elements.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the further info! I'd managed to figure out that it was because of multidimensional arrays (that snippet I quoted) but I didn't immediately see a nice way to achieve the same thing. And now, because you posted it, I do.

I'll have to give Julia a go. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was interested in Julia until I discovered that it doesn't allow useful things like object-oriented inheritance (unless you go down some complex metaprogramming route). Multiple dispatch is indeed cool, but for some types of systems modelling with inheritance and classes is a great or the best approach (e.g. GUI widget libraries). I thought about how you might wrap something like Qt, gave up, and decided to continue with lovely Python (and its lovely 0 based indexes).

<comment><USER17> Single inheritance is possible and used extensively in Julia. Multiple inheritance is not (currently) supported, and there are a few places where it would be useful, but it is surprising that this would be a show stopper.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure it's the single inheritance people from other languages might understand. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding things as I've hardly used the languages, but there are links like [http://thenewphalls.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/understanding-o...](http://thenewphalls.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/understanding- object-oriented-programming-in-julia-inheritance-part-2/) and [http://grollchristian.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/julia- inherit...](http://grollchristian.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/julia-inheriting- behavior/) and [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/4935](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/4935)

<comment><USER17> Sure, but that is a different thing than "not object-oriented inheritance". Designing with Julia's types and multiple-dispatch is _different_ , but there are some nice patterns emerging.

That said, Julia is still developing. The kinds of people who are interested in Julia right now are probably different from the people who we hope to attract and be broadly useful for in 2-5 years. But feedback now is important so the language and ecosystem can get there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been following Julia for a while now, not really using it, but playing with it a bit and keeping up with it. I think it's very promising and I really look forward to seeing it fledged out more.

It's a very small nitpick, but I wish Julia had a postfix function application syntax. It would be nice to be able to say `foo = 'hello'.reverse` and have it be syntactic sugar for `foo = reverse(hello)`. Or some other operator since `.` is in use. This reads nicer for long function chains, and especially when a function modifies its argument, it's nice to have that argument come first, which gives an OO-impression. E.g. for me this:

        app = make_app(options)
        app.route("/", _ -> "hello, world!"),
        app.route("/submit", POST, req -> "hello, $(req.params["name"])!")
        app.start(3000)

than this:

        app = make_app(options)
        route(app, "/", _ -> "hello, world!"),
        route(app, "/submit", POST, req -> "hello, $(req.params["name"])!")
        start(app, 3000)

<comment><USER3> There is this, which is similar but not quite the same:

        julia> "hello" |> reverse |> uppercase
        "OLLEH"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Julia looks like a wonderful mix of Ruby, Python and ML (or something). I'm really eager to see this adopted by more people.

</comment><comment><USER20> People who are using Julia or similar tools to do "scientific computing, machine learning, data mining, large-scale linear algebra, distributed and parallel computing" \- what sort of problems are you solving? How did you end up doing this sort of work?

</comment><comment><USER21> Hmm, I was hoping for some impressions of using Julia for numerical computing. The mechanics of list comprehensions and uppercasing some text seem a little tangential.

<comment><USER18> That's an important part of Julia, but it's also important to talk about the language as a language. One of nice things about Julia is that it has things to talk about other than its numerical computing capabilities :) Those are fine and dandy, but as a non-numerical-computer, I find lots to like about Julia that has nothing to do with its ability to multiply matrices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I too am intrigued by julia based off of my brief interactions with it. My only issue is the lack of namespaces. Is there a good reason why they aren't included?

<comment><USER18> They are: [http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/modules/](http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/modules/)

Or is that not what you were referring to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If I can ask a stupid question. Why Julia? It seems to me that if you are not going to be using Python, then why not use a language like Java?

<comment><USER24> Huh, what upside does Java have?

Julia is specifically designed to be a great high-performance high-level language for scientific computing. See [http://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why- we-created-julia/](http://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> At the beginning of this article: "I spent most of last night programming in Julia and I've got some thoughts on my first impressions. TL;DR: It's like Python with less OOP, more FP and heavier typing. Also, _it 's awesome_."

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

Then I clicked on the site's about: "Welcome to Eyeball Trees. My name is Stephen Malone and _I cannot be trusted_."

I'm really confused!</comment>


Why many app developers in Asia are prioritizing Android over iOS  - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/09/06/why-a-growing-number-of-app-developers-in-asia-are-prioritizing-android-over-ios/

<comment><USER2> It's strange that a developer would think that the audience that will buy a lower-priced Apple device will be the same kind of user as those that bought the higher end devices, and yet different from those who buy an Android at the same price point. Seems like a very basic mistake.</comment>


McAfee says cloud security not as bad as we feared… it's much worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/30/mcafee_cloud_security_terrible/ <comment><USER2> This is a direct result of so called "cloud consultants" who are just a bunch of old on prem infrastructure and security guys who think of the cloud as an overpriced colo.

I can only speak about a AWS, but there so many services that AWS offers to help you stay secure on top of that if you know a little Python it's inexcusable to make the type of rookie mistakes that I see.

On the other hand, AWS makes it too easy to fall prey to the Dunning Krueger Effect where people think they know what they are doing.

I'm speaking from the standpoint of a long time developer/architect that plays the role of the resident certified AWS Architect when necessary.</comment>


Ask HN: Resources for learning Wordpress for people with technical backgrounds - <AUTHOR> I've recently begun to tinker around with Wordpress. I have a strong technical background but when looking in to the documentation it seems to fall mostly in the camp of installation support and then support for "I've never made a website before" users, with a ton of content for the later. Wondering if folks here have recommendations for resources that assume a strong technical foundation in order to gain a better overall understanding of WP as a platform. <comment><USER2> [https://codex.wordpress.org/](https://codex.wordpress.org/) is a great starting place. Everything development wise that you could need is on the codex.</comment>


Ask HN: Any good coronavirus demographic datasets? - <AUTHOR> I know about the JHU dataset on github. I'm looking something like statistics on patient demographics such a gender, age, area, deaths, underlining health conditions etc.<p>Any help would be appreciated <comment><USER2> Here is a list of global coronavirus datasets that could help you: [https://lionbridge.ai/datasets/coronavirus-datasets-from- eve...](https://lionbridge.ai/datasets/coronavirus-datasets-from-every- country/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much Takaki

I can see one for South Korea, but unfortunately I don't think they have any global ones listed :/</comment></comment>


Google's Featured Snippets are often wrong, and also damaging to businesses - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynetworth-com <comment><USER2> Google's "quality guidelines" prohibits scraping other sites and covering the first half of your site with ads.

Google's results these days tend to scrape the information from most sites + list ads on >50% of the listings page.

Really frustrating when Google doesn't even follow their own guidelines.

<comment><USER3> That's because those guidelines aren't meant for them.

Google is saying that if you don't follow their guidelines, you "shouldn't" be included in their search results. They aren't saying you are committing some kind of atrocity, just that pages that do that provide bad results from searches.

Of course google doesn't want scraped results showing up in their search results. Would you want your search engine to show results from other search engines which show results from other search engines which show results from a page with a snippet which points to the real source?

They aren't "not following their own rules" any more than a train is braking the rules by being on the tracks in spite of the "stay off the train tracks" sign.

<comment><USER4> From Google's post about the "too many ads above the fold" update:

 _" As we've mentioned previously, we've heard complaints from users that if...it's difficult to find the actual content, they aren't happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away"_[1]

So, they recognize pages that are heavy with ads at the top, which push down the actual content, aren't a good user experience. That's exactly what I get when I search Google...a bunch of ads or other self-serving stuff on top, that pushes down the content (actual organic results) that I'm looking for.

[1][https://search.googleblog.com/2012/01/page-layout- algorithm-...](https://search.googleblog.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm- improvement.html)

<comment><USER5> To me the ads are the content as well. Often times the tip search result is the same as the top advertisement.

<comment><USER6> My mother has exactly one way to get to the Nordstrom e-commerce site: search Google for Nordstrom, and then click on the first authoritative-looking Nordstrom search result, which is an AdWords ad, landing her at the home page.

Seems expensive for Nordstrom.

<comment><USER7> Would a browser extension that _just_ moved AdWords to the bottom of the page be banned from the chrome web store?

I'm sort of tempted to try this, but if so I guess I should start backing up my gmail account...

<comment><USER8> Are adblockers blocked from the Chrome store?

<comment><USER4> Desktop extensions aren't, but perhaps GP is remembering a similar situation with mobile ad blockers and the Play Store. [https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/google-reverses-its- decisi...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/google-reverses-its-decision-to- ban-ad-blocking-apps-from-the-google-play-store/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > At the time of writing, the [google] queries "Larry David net worth" and > "how much is Larry David worth?" both turned up the answer $900 million and > credited Business Insider

> The Business Insider story says that "it has been estimated" that Larry > David is worth up to $900 million [...] Then it cites CelebrityNetWorth's > lower number, $400 million, and quotes Larry David denying he was worth even > $500 million

The most valuable asset Google could possibly develop at this point is humility.

<comment><USER10> Google more than any other organization on the planet has bought at least some of its own bullshit. For at least 6-7 years they've been consistently, 100% sure that generally-useful AI (or something sufficiently approximately close) is just a few short years away, and thus any investment in anything else (like people) would be wasted.

They've sacrificed countless customers, products and services on this altar, and will continue to do so probably indefinitely. They've decided they're going to live or die by the AI. Humans work there only to build, configure and maintain the machine. Every time I hear someone say "Google really needs to hire some <people>" or "Google needs to train their <people>" better I shake my head - it's like saying Ford should solve an efficiency problem with their cars by building boats.

Google is not going to do that, ever, and Google is not going to learn humility either. They're convinced they have it figured out, reality be damned.

<comment><USER11> 1\. Google has been an AI company from the very beginning (information retrieval).

2\. Google is investing and doing generally useful applied AI, not an AGI moonshot.

3\. Google's AI researchers are not 100% sure that AGI is just a few short years away.

4\. Major source of income is advertisements. A lot of non-technical people work on this, allowing others to do more research and improve search.

5\. Like said, AI is Google's DNA from the start. They are the biggest AI company in the world, and will die/be dethroned when they let AI research wither.

6\. Avoid blanket humility, and lose hunger, innovation, dare. "At Hooli, nothing is ever impossible".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a lovely snippet-box example I encountered just the other day (and reported to Google; nothing's changed yet). Search for "tintinnabulum". (Advance warning: You might want to avoid doing this at work or in a public place.) The box at the top contains two things.

1\. Some text from the Wikipedia article, correctly informing you that a tintinnabulum is a small bell on a pole in a Roman Catholic basilica symbolizing its connection with the Pope.

2\. An image of a sculpture whose title happens to be "Tintinnabulum". The sculpture is of a naked woman riding on a penis-with-legs. The penis has a penis of its own, too. (Regrettably this doesn't continue recursively.)

I am fairly confident that nothing resembling that sculpture is to be found in any Roman Catholic basilica symbolizing its connection with the Pope.

<comment><USER13> Judging by the Wikipedia page (but note I really have no idea/experience with this subject in general), it seems to related to phallic figures, so it's no shock that you get a picture with that.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintinnabulum_(Ancient_Rome)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintinnabulum_\(Ancient_Rome\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Featured Snippets usually have a note that says "About this result," while > Knowledge Graph answers do not.

This seems like the potentially most interesting part to me. Excerpting data & web sites to build a service without citing the source or giving credit seems like it could be a copyright violation.

The snippets case at least cites the source, and has a link to get you there, so even if it is damaging to a business it's probably legal.

While copyright does have exceptions carved out for copying small snippets of a work, e.g., for educational purposes, there's no clear line for copying all of a work in thousands of tiny slices that are published separately. Seems like an area where copyright law is due for a change as a result of all things digital.

<comment><USER15> In the case of the celebrity net worth site, though, it seems pretty clear that he'd have a very thin case when it came to copyright. Just because it took them a lot of effort to come up with the numbers doesn't make the end result copyrightable - it is an estimation of a fact, and there is no copyright possibility there. Even if they took the whole thing, there is nothing non-obvious about a list of celebs and their estimated net worth. To me, that seems to have been the biggest problem in their particular business: they invested a lot of money into building something that it would be very hard to protect someone from just taking it once it is done.

<comment><USER14> > Just because it took them a lot of effort to come up with the numbers > doesn't make the end result copyrightable

You're bringing up a valid point - facts aren't copyrightable. And while I was talking about the bigger picture, I'd have to agree that this argument may be harder for the celebrity net worth site than others.

But

Compilations of facts are copyrightable, _and_ a large amount of effort spent compiling the numbers does in fact strengthen their case. It's called the "sweat of the brow doctrine", and copyright cases have been decided in favor of people primarily due to their efforts.

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

I speculate this doctrine does apply to sleuthing celebrity net worth from a variety of sources. But nobody knowns until it goes to court, and it depends on the quality of the lawyers as well as the nitty gritty details about how celebrity net worth gather their data.

Either way, the bigger picture is that regardless of whether the celeb site lives, there may a problem with the way Google is doing business.

<comment><USER15> From the Wikipedia article that you linked:

>The United States rejected this doctrine in the 1991 United States Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service;[4] until then it had been upheld in a number of US copyright cases

(which is what I remembered from my IP law class ;-) )

<comment><USER14> Yes, that's correct, the Feist case was the first one rejected on those grounds, and found that "A mechanical, non-selective collection of facts (e.g., alphabetized phone numbers) cannot be protected by copyright." ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Copyright_limitations.2C_exceptions.2C_and_defenses))

But sweat of the brow doctrine still applies to collections of facts when some creative work has been done, and does strengthen a case when there has been more sweat.

The case of the celebrity net worth site is one that is not a mechanical reproduction of facts. They are not a phone book, they are doing research and estimating net worth using implications. Their work is not single-sourced, but based on what they say is a wide variety of sources, some of which may not be publicly available. Who knows, some of it might be unsubstantiated rumor, or even "creative guessing". Just on the face of it, there is arguably enough creative work in what they're doing to satisfy a copyright claim. I doubt they're interested, and I don't think it'd be easy. I don't speak for them, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't recommend it. But to my eyes, it's not out of the realm of possibility.

<comment><USER15> Completely agree - would be interesting to see it judged!

I've often thought about this in the context of data collected by major sports leagues. They sure are very vocal with their legalese about how they hold all rights to use any of the data that they collect, but I have a strong suspicion that if someone with deep pockets held their feet to the fire, they may not like the result. The PGATour's ShotLink data is an example that comes to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember the days when we all feared Microsoft in the startup world for the same reason we fear Google today.

<comment><USER17> I bet we'll fear Amazon's AWS in the future.

<comment><USER18> I stopped shopping at Amazon after returning to the US. They're pretty much the new Wal-Mart, except with mutant superpowers.

<comment><USER17> I've definitely cut back in Amazon shopping. There's too much garbage on the site. And it is nearly impossible to flag fraudulent items.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The examples in the article are all kind of acceptable, but I have asked google some very factual question (e.g. can covariance be negative) where it picked out the wrong answer from stack overflow that was clearly the opposite of the truth. It confused the hell out of me.

<comment><USER4> Google sometimes gives out pretty dangerous advice as well: [http://imgur.com/a/bsP98](http://imgur.com/a/bsP98)

<comment><USER20> It's frankly quite shocking that Google's ad results are displayed with pretty much the same look and feel of their search results. Yes, the more tech-savvy among us will see the "Ad" button in gold, and those with ad-blockers won't see the ads at all.

But just a few years ago, Google's ads would appear in a sidebar, clearly separated from the search results content.

Not everyone is able to tell the difference today, and I think Google exploits this. I recently activated a new B2B website for an client and the senior manager was an older gentleman in his 50s. He never uses the browser address bar to navigate to websites, preferring instead to use the Google search box on his homepage. He sent me a panicked email saying when he typed in the new website's name, the Google search results showed competitors' names ahead of his. This was well after Google had crawled the site and it was showing up on the results page.

As it turned out, he did not understand that the first few results he was seeing were ads. While he isn't a savvy user, I would wager that many, many people are similar to him in that they don't exercise good judgement when they're on the web and would easily be fooled into thinking that something like "proton therapy" is a cure for cancer because it's at the top of the search results.

<comment><USER21> They always (at least since 2007) had ads in the main search result column: [http://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history- googl...](http://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-google- bing-254332) They've certainly removed some of the distinguishing features though.

<comment><USER4> Here's a pre-2007 result. It's still at the top, but across both columns.

[http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4f2992c7eab8ea28690...](http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4f2992c7eab8ea286900000b-1200/these- are-the-early-search-results-just-a-list-of-links-with-some-ads-on-the-sides- and-the-top.jpg)

The point that they've slowly made changes over the years to make the ads look less like ads is very clear though.

They've also generally done a lot of work to push the organic results down. It's very easy to find queries where there's no organic result showing above the fold, even on a fairly decent desktop monitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like to collect incorrect google cards:

[https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/659154907899936768](https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/659154907899936768)

[https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/811356518977138688](https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/811356518977138688)

Edit: Today

[https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/855193855422943234](https://twitter.com/Caust1c/status/855193855422943234)

</comment><comment><USER23> > "But then they went ahead and took the data anyway."

The only question remaining for me is why Googlers still enjoy the respect of their peers. It was fine in 2000, nobody knew how it would turn out. Today, we need to start disrespecting the _kind of person_ that would still work for that company.

<comment><USER24> To be fair, and I was considering placing this as a reply to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14157988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14157988)

Google has incredible PR/marketing. And this isn't just a public-facing engagement. Google seems to do an incredible amount of _inward_ marketing. The same high quality rhetoric that sells a large amount of the public on the notion that Google is a good company trying to make the world a better place works even better on Googlers themselves.

Bear in mind, Googlers are provided food and amenities on campus, which keep them surrounded by the Google mindset most of the time. One of the funniest things recently, on another site, was getting a response from someone condemning my post about pay equality by a "Googler with a Googler wife". Many Googlers friends and family are also Googlers... that's where they spend all of their time. So there are plenty of people at Google whose entire social circle comprises of other Googlers. And that's _before_ you talk about the fact that Google is paying them to be there.

That's a huge amount of social pressure, and a huge amount of bias in what information they take in and how they interpret it. If their entire social and financial structure is built around a single entity, I suspect it'd be fairly difficult for the ordinary person in such a situation to leave. I don't fault individual Googlers for the direction of the machine.

A movie called _The Circle_ comes out in eight days, and I suspect it will be quite worthwhile on this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUlr8Am4zQ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUlr8Am4zQ0)

<comment><USER25> That's a movie now? Didn't know that was coming.

"Unleash the drones!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The snippets aren't in the spirit of the web. The take traffic away from independent sites.

<comment><USER27> Yes, they may not be in the spirit of the web. But if you have ever had a featured snippet (or earned one), you'll know that they actually bring a lot more traffic to your site.

They hardly take away traffic from sites, as people are saying. That's just flat-out wrong.

<comment><USER28> Except for the subject of the article who lost 65% of his traffic...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find 2/3 to be insultingly wrong.

Example search: eye of round steak

Result: Eye of round is irredeemable cut of meat.

Wtf google.

<comment><USER30> > Eye of round is irredeemable cut of meat.

To be fair, that is actually fairly accurate.

<comment><USER31> To be even more fair, I'm not getting that. I'm getting a Wikipedia excerpt.

<comment><USER32> Google US gives [https://www.splendidtable.org/story/eye-of-round-is-one- of-t...](https://www.splendidtable.org/story/eye-of-round-is-one-of-the-few- unredeemable-cuts-of-meat)

Google UK gives [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_steak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_steak)

Possibly this is because in the UK (and presumably wherever you are) we don't call that cut "eye of round" (it seems to be from roughly the same part of the cow as our silverside), so we're googling to find out what it is, whilst in the US people are googling to find out how to cook it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> i get the sense that google wants the featured snippets feature but are not devoting enough resources to it. the following featured snippet has been appearing for over 8 months, and i have sent feedback multiple times:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=apartments+for+rent+minneapo...](https://www.google.com/search?q=apartments+for+rent+minneapolis)

the featured snippet is completely incomprehensible (and embarrassing)... they just don't seem to care enough.

<comment><USER34> They just scraped the first three days of the first three weeks of a calendar...

<comment><USER33> exactly what a user wants who is looking for a list of available apartments </s>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This amounts to copyright violation. CelebrityNetWorth went to great extent to organize this data and holds copyright on their site. Google is duplicating and redistributing this research without permission of the author.

<comment><USER36> What's worse is that Google essentially uses its monopoly (or at least extreme popularity) on search to essentially extort people into going along with stuff like this. If the site in question actually filed a DMCA notice or requested a takedown in a more tactful manner (assuming he could actually find someone to talk to about it) Google would probably just tell them to update their robots.txt file so that the site doesn't show up on the search result pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> it seems like the better question is:

"is it a good idea to build a business around trivia answers?"

if your entire business model could be upended by a collection of 1 line wikipedia edits, then it seems like the problem is in the inability to forecast.

<comment><USER4> That's one space that Google is gobbling up with this sort of thing. It's not the only one.

Try: status flight 111 american airlines

That used to result in a visit to aa.com

Now they are way below the fold at around #6 or so.

Google isn't planning just to eat up traffic for trivia sites.

<comment><USER38> That looks to be a result of those flight radar sites doing heavy SEO for the terms vs aa.com =/

<comment><USER4> That explains #6, but the "below the fold" is because Google injects their widget: [http://imgur.com/a/tr5cs](http://imgur.com/a/tr5cs)

It's handy, sure. But it does take away a customer interaction that AA used to get.

<comment><USER39> how is protecting AA's customer interactions Google's responsibility?

from my perspective as a consumer, Google is providing the information I asked for, in a clear simple straightforward manner.

<comment><USER40> It isn't, but it is Google's responsibility not to infringe on the copyright of other people/companies. Google is not displaying their own content in those snippets. They are taking content from other websites, reformatting it and putting it on their own website. By stealing that content and displaying it to the user, the user now no longer needs to visit the website from which the content originated. They are directly taking away potential customers/revenue from these companies. It seems pretty clear that that's not entirely kosher.

<comment><USER25> Facts aren't copyrightable in the US. See _Feist vs. Rural Telephone_. If it's a pure fact and exposed to public view, Google can take the data and repurpose it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I get this, but in another sense, the answer is to offer people a reason to visit the site beyond the number, build an app with features people who care about celebrities' net-worth will enjoy, make something compelling so it's not as one-dimensional and easy to sidestep. It's like the whole 'keep american jobs' thing. I agree that American jobs are good, but many of the people calling for 'bringing back jobs,' aren't asking for new jobs with new technologies, efficiencies, and ways of doing things profitably, they want things to go back to 'the way they were,' and that really can't be done. Cut the losses try something new, keeping lessons learned.

<comment><USER42> Google's offering isn't self-sustaining. These numbers will not be updated without the celebrity net worth company and Google will have to remove the outdated snippets. The celebrity net worth company started because no one was doing the leg work for the simple number.

Your suggestion to the celebrity net worth company rings hollow after reading the article: the people Google to get the information and get the information at the top. Now there is no opportunity for the celebrity net worth company to offer a reason to visit the site! When the people had to visit the site, then there was a chance for the site to drive further engagement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The snippets are always wrong if you think about the ad revenue that Google steals and the copyright material that Google is using for profit. It sounds like a class action lawsuit could fix that.

</comment><comment><USER44> Sponsored

Paul Graham's Net Worth Will Leave You Speechless

</comment><comment><USER45> As discussed previously here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14139621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14139621)

<comment><USER4> Also related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13885631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13885631)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Search _software quality attributes in software engineering_ and Google will return a featured snippet from a 8-year old Microsoft site.

</comment><comment><USER47> "I one-hundred-percent think we should be credited for them."

But in the Floyd Mayweather example, his site is mentioned in the blurb so in a way he is credited with it.

If he doesnt want to be in the snippet, then tell bankrate and every site that mention you to take down that mention.

if he doesnt want his site to be linked to from any snippet, just add Google to your robots.txt

dont want to do any of the above? ah... now we see he doesnt really have a legitimate complaint.

<comment><USER48> Yeah, the issue here is that he doesn't want to block Google from indexing his site because he wants to be ranked in the results, so he allows Google to display information that is on his site. He would have to disallow reproduction of his site's materials formally, or the much easier method of robots.txt that you mention. Ideally, he would do both. But he knows that will also kill traffic because then he's limited to other search providers like (gasp) Bing.

This is all on him. Is what Google is doing shitty? Yeah. But at the same time it's almost insane that this guy knew his research could be boiled down to a single number (which is clearly displayed on his website) and his whole business model was getting Google traffic. You can't rely on an informal agreement with a titan of industry and expect to have any bargaining or negotiating power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Can website put some sort of copyright clause that disallows Google from doing this?

<comment><USER50> You can use:

         <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet">

[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6229325?hl=en)

<comment><USER27> Or, you can use your robots.txt file and disallow Googlebot from crawling your site.

<comment><USER51> If the business of your company involves Google advertising and getting hits on Google searches, it's a bad idea to completely block Google from indexing the site.

<comment><USER27> If your business model involves relying on Google for anything, then you need another business model.

<comment><USER51> Virtually every business model involving the internet relies at least partly on Google, so while your comment may be true it isn't particularly helpful.

<comment><USER27> Helpful? actually I've been pitching this same idea (don't rely on Google traffic for your business model) since 2004. I've seen too many businesses FAIL and have to lay off employees because they relied on Google traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Featured snippets are just that--they've taken a snippet from websites and are displaying them at the top of the search results for certain queries. Google doesn't say that the information is correct--they do ask for feedback (there's a link to submit feedback).

Featured Snippets are not damaging to businesses. In fact, I've seen businesses benefit greatly by getting a ton of more traffic by having them. They get more leads and sales, and more ecommerce conversions.

If you're trying to rank for the answer to a question like "What is Larry David's Net Worth?", and the answer literally is a dollar figure or a "quick answer", then I have no problem with Google "stealing" your traffic. In fact, if the answer is "$125 billion", and Google can give searchers that answer without having to go to your website, then sobeit. What do you expect that visitor to do anyway when they get to your site? They'll leave. They'll hit the back button. They'll bounce, because your site is focused too much on short, quick answers. How about creating some real content, content that will make visitors stick on your website and view more than one page?

<comment><USER52> This doesn't justify Google scraping their database.

<comment><USER27> I don't see this as scraping, actually. They're taking part of the content from a page and displaying it in their search results. They do that with the site's title tag and meta description tag.

I would be more concerned about the Google cache (for scraping) rather than a Featured Snippet.

Go ahead and get a featured snippet (or earn one) and you'll see the massive traffic increase and trust your site will get.

If you're concerned about them scraping, really, then go ahead and just block Googlebot from indexing the site.

<comment><USER51> > Go ahead and get a featured snippet (or earn one) and you'll see the massive > traffic increase and trust your site will get.

According to the article which we are supposedly discussing, the site in question got its traffic reduced by half after the snippet was added to the Google search results.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Salaries of government officials in Singapore - <AUTHOR> http://www.yeocheowtong.com/Salaries.html

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI: The official exchange rate (according to Google) is: 1 Singapore dollar = 0.71623 U.S. dollars

Perhaps it's no surprise that Singapore is the 3rd least corrupt country - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index#Ra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index#Rankings)</comment>


Electronic Reader Running Doom 2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jitbit.com/2011/04/electronic-reader-running-doom-2.html <comment><USER2> Nice to see the refresh rates are steadily increasing on e-ink displays. Anyone got any thoughts on what kind of growth rate function we're seeing here? Does it fit moore's law?

<comment><USER3> I believe some companies are claiming 20ms refresh rates, which is hitting 50fps if these claims count for continuous changes or just one-offs. Certainly a lot of display manufacturers have been showing off video, but you've got to consider the growth rates here can be biased for one reason: colour.

E-ink and every other company wanting to produce e-paper want colour. If they can hit continuous frames above 24fps in full colour, then they've got a massive game changer. I mean think of the game change in laptops where the display uses 60-70% of the battery life of the device if you're capable of dropping that to 5-10%. Your average piece of shit netbook will run 24-hours. Your laptops that already run through a full business day plus commute, will be able to last you the full week and maybe a saturday on a single charge.

I think the black&white e-ink displays aren't advancing as fast as they could be simply because developers are trying to find their holy-grail of a video- capable colour display.

<comment><USER2> When we have smartphones with ~30fps full colour e-ink screens then we can officially forget our anxiety over the lack of flying cars.

<comment><USER4> It'd be exactly like a flying car except that it isn't flying and isn't a car. Great stuff!

I'd settle for nothing less than an immersive virtual world in which we can have flying cars.

<comment><USER2> My point was that it would be _better_ than flying cars. E-ink screens will liberate us hackers from the confines of our offices and allow us to go and work outside in the sunshine. Can you imagine how much of a difference that will make?

It has just started to get warm here in the UK and I'm actually starting to feel twitches of envy for my friends who haven't managed to find proper jobs since graduating, or who haven't graduated yet. They're all having BBQs today.

Living in a country where sunshine is a scarce resource does odd things to your priorities.

<comment><USER5> I do like working in the dark, but I live in a place where sunshine is abundant.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Remixing Ubuntu for the Enterprise Desktop - <AUTHOR> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1002

<comment><USER2> This is interesting. When I used to work for a major non-profit, they laughed at the fact I said switching to Linux would be pretty cool because licensing fees alone are more expensive compared to the deals that Windows is giving them.

This must be Ubuntu's answer to those speculations.</comment>


Love in the Time of Zika - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestranger.com/feature/2016/05/11/24068596/love-in-the-time-of-zika <comment><USER2> 'The virus has spread to 69 countries and territories—44 countries since 2015 alone, including the United States. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has called Zika "a pandemic in progress."'

I had Zika a few weeks ago, while being in the Dominican Republic. Only one in four actually develops the symptoms and I did: feverish for a few days and a mild itchy rash all over my body. It took about a week to get over it. No medicines and nothing problematic, I could even still work.

I do not understand why its a 'pandemic in progress'. Its not as if it kills anyone. Three out of four people do not even know they had it.

The 'only' problem is pregnant women: if they get Zika the child will suffer seriously. But I guess there are many other dangers as well: smoking while being pregnant, having alcohol, etc. Other illnesses as well, maybe ?

Why all this fuzz about Zika ?</comment>


Ask HN: Are front-end developers really "developers"? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The question seems to actually mean "should back end developers consider front end developers equals."

This is a case of worrying too much about what an irrelevant class of people thinks. Are you good at what you do? Do your peers understand your skills? Do your clients or potential clients see the value in your ability? As a primarily back end developer, that's what I care about, and I think it's a good metric.

It's natural and not necessarily wrong to look for approval, but at the end of the day, you need to judge yourself on your own ability. Other people will judge you, whether you want them to or not, but if you take them seriously -- whether they like you or not -- you have put your self-image in the wrong hands, i.e. not yours.

</comment><comment><USER3> First: What kind of working definition of "developer" are you using?

I'm inclined to say "yes". I am a front-end developer, working on everything from HTML/CSS + JS to the RoR app (controller & views, mostly. Rarely do I make changes to models, but I do poke in there to see how certain things are implemented, etc.)

Perhaps if you had asked "are front-end engineers really 'engineers'?", I would be inclined to answer "No".

</comment><comment><USER4> A developer is anyone who can use the available tools to transform something into another tool to reach a goal. A developer may do these things individually or pay others. A developer doesn't need to have skills if the developer has the resources to obtain others with the needed skills. A developer might also work for other developers in developing these tools in exchange for money.

So, yes, I think anyone can be a developer. The bar for becoming a developer isn't much higher than being able to open a web browser and perhaps search Google. For example, if you want to create an e-commerce site then there are lots of hosted services which will set one up for little to no cost.

At the end of the day, you are either reaching your goals or you aren't. Compare an grandmother who can barely figure out the internet but makes a healthy income off selling items online (perhaps things she has made which and have gained a following) and a ninja engineer who has been mired in feature creep for three years and still isn't close to getting his start-up off the ground (and probably never will)

<comment><USER5> > A developer doesn't need to have skills if the developer has the resources > to obtain others with the needed skills.

A person who does not have any development skills is not a developer. The ability to hire developers does not make one a developer. If I hire someone to play some Rachmaninoff for me, am I a pianist?

> For example, if you want to create an e-commerce site then there are lots of > hosted services which will set one up for little to no cost.

If you rent a hosted service with an off the shelf e-commerce site that is automatically installed by your hosting provider, you are not a developer, you are someone who has instructed a hosting company to set up an e-commerce site.

Now, you don't need to have any development skills to run a successful online business, that much is true. But you _do_ need development skills to be an actual developer.

<comment><USER4> I guess we are getting caught up in semantics here. A non-technical co-founder who has zero knowledge of even HTML / CSS but has hired a team (and has a technical co-founder) is obviously not a web developer by the job description they used to hire that team, but he is still developing that property (the domain name, which is part of the overall brand) to create value. I suppose you could also call this person a brand developer, business developer, product developer, etc.

So, this is a silly question. ;) Personally, if I'm making a profit (assuming that's my goal) then I could care less what you call me. I'm creating value where there was none before.

<comment><USER5> > Personally, if I'm making a profit (assuming that's my goal) then I could > care less what you call me. I'm creating value where there was none before.

Well that's something we can certainly agree on :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I personally would say yes, I have done C++, simulation, AI, Perl, C#, Objective-C, Java, Lisp and many others over the course of a 25 year career. Currently I mainly do front end development which for obvious reasons requires JavaScript. I have found the problem space to be just as interesting and in some areas just as complicated as any of the rest of them. There is serious development work to be done on the front end, if one looks for that type of work. Which JavaScript lends itself to just grabbing a library like jQuery and dressing up a site without actually knowing too much about what is going on, it also lends itself to building stuff like Dojo or Node which are serious projects with complex problems being solved. Personally, I find the current era to be one of the most enjoyable times to be a developer and a lot of that has to do with what is going on in the front end.

</comment><comment><USER7> Write code that solves problems? Check. Full-fledged programming language? Check.

I don't see how the fact that this code runs in a browser would somehow make front-end people "not developers".

Is coding up GUI's for native mobile or traditional desktop apps also "not development"?

<comment> saiko-chriskun Agreed. This question is ridiculous :/.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my question comes from the fact that FED's need to engage less than backenders with strict compsci concepts, unless we're writing JS. I think I meant to ask whether HTML/CSS and all the variants and elaborations count as "programming".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe they are - more now than ever.

However, I believe a traditional developer can jump into the frontend faster than a frontend developer can move into backend development. It doesn't mean it'll look good, but a designer can help here.

Frontend development seems to revolve around dealing with finickiness, rather than dealing with sound software construction. That may be changing. And I myself a jumping into the frontend a bit more - if only to better convey my thoughts to the real frontend guys.

</comment><comment><USER9> Front-end devs are absolutely developers. A better question is why we allow people who don't know how the web works to design for it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone that has worked on a web site or application of significant size will say that a front-end developer is as much a developer as anyone else.

Sure, HTML isn't that hard, but when you're dealing with cross-browser issues, supporting legacy browsers and then writing hundreds of lines of JavaScript you appreciate that it can be really hard work!

</comment><comment><USER11> Are back-end developers really "developers"? Surely if you aren't developing the full stack from raw minerals to painting pixels, someone else has done all the hard work, and you're just doing the easy bit and plugging it in.

</comment><comment><USER12> Modern front-end developer is more like racing car driver, he is just driving the car aka using tools he is given by developers working on them.

</comment><comment><USER13> what led you to ask this question? why wouldn't they be?</comment>


Dont look for a co-founder. Find a Right Hand Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.guglanisam.me/dont-look-for-a-co-founder-go-find-a-right-ha

<comment><USER2> I stopped reading the list at item number two.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why?

<comment><USER2> I'm too friggin' old for anything that contains the childish monikers of "rock stars" and "ninjas". What is that supposed to mean? That your business partners takes lots of drugs, tries to showboat all the time and finally leaves you after he finds an artsy girlfriend?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome to see you here!</comment>


Wide Color Photos Are Coming to Android - <AUTHOR> https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/05/wide-color-photos-are-coming-to-android.html <comment><USER2> I really just want Android to stop messing with the camera and let it take pictures. It's getting harder to take a photo without it stripping all the texture from people's faces and blurring out the background, or worse.

Here's a video of me moving around on a static background, taken from a tripod. Evidently bending the fabric of the universe as I move:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSlgOwm_eXU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSlgOwm_eXU)

That's the stock camera app on my brand new Pixel 3a. Since this was taken, I've been experimenting with every setting possible to try to convince it that I don't want to "pop" or be "motion stabilized" but no, there's nothing that will stop it doing this.

I'm going to have to return the phone.

<comment><USER3> My guess would be that this is a video compression artifact, not a deliberate image enhancement effect.

Though that doesn't help when you can't adjust the quality.

<comment><USER2> The odd thing is that a given piece of unrelated rock will be in perfect focus, then suddenly go blurry when I get near it (but not so near as to cast a shadow).

If it were video compression, you'd expect it would try to not alter pixels that didn't change from frame to frame. But it clearly updates large swathes of them.

Also, changing the compression mode in the camera from h.264/AVC to H/265.HEVC doesn't fix it.

<comment><USER4> As far as I know, video compression works on areas, not just pixels. To me, it looks like it's trying to update areas of the photo by moving areas of pixels, instead of just updating them individually. This is accidentally getting more than just the part that's moving, and making things nearby seem to move as well.

For instance, in the video provided in another comment, when the climber swings his legs up a bit, there's a portion of the wall that stretches behind him, before eventually un-stretching back into place. It flows behind the moving limbs. I suspect that if good video were taken of the scene, the leg would also be somewhat distorted while moving, but we can't really tell because it's supposed to be changing, unlike the rocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So when are web browsers going to start doing proper color management on CSS colors and untagged images?

I gave up on pestering them about it 10 years ago after they were largely unreceptive about the topic for several years, but it seems like it's still a complete shitshow.

10–14 years ago I was grumpy because my laptop display had a smaller gamut than sRGB and everything looked bad (undersaturated). Then there were a few years in between where most of the displays I used were close enough to sRGB that missing color management more-or-less worked out. Now many devices have wide-gamut displays which basically make everything on the web look like oversaturated garbage.

Apple had color management more or less figured out on the Mac in the mid 1990s. It is absurd that it is still so hard for software made by gajillion- dollar companies to get the bare basics right >20 years later, especially now that we have superfast GPUs to do compositing in linear space and arbitrarily fancy gamut mapping using floating point arithmetic, brighter and wider-gamut displays, better cameras, ...

To the browser vendors: all untagged content must be assumed to be sRGB. If viewers have wider-gamut displays this content must go through a CMS. If viewers want to view wider-gamut images or other content, this must be opt-in. The current behavior breaks color on the web. (Buy a new phone or computer and suddenly nearly every color relationship you see on the web will be different than the designer's intention.)

<comment><USER6> You can enable it in Firefox, but it's not on by default IIRC.

[https://cameratico.com/guides/firefox-color- management/](https://cameratico.com/guides/firefox-color-management/)

EDIT: That's the desktop - can't speak for the mobile version. I really hope they turn it on by default in the new mobile browser they're building. Also, thanks, I had enabled the color management a long time ago but it apparently was disabled again in a recent upgrade or something.

<comment><USER7> That only takes us so far.

First of all: Chrome still has broken color management. DisplayCAL has a way to generate profiles that look like garbage in applications which process color profiles incorrectly, and this happens with Chrome (but not Firefox.).

Besides that, even if it had feature parity with Firefox, we'd still remain stuck in the land of ICC color profiles, and those have a few issues.

I'd love to see web browsers support this modified version of this:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06067](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06067)

For which an implementation exists, here:

[https://github.com/nschloe/colorio](https://github.com/nschloe/colorio)

…but no operating systems and hence no browsers support it.

Edit:

See also my comment here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19983604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19983604)

<comment><USER6> > _I 'd love to see web browsers support this modified version of this_

I hear you, but at the same time this relevant xkcd comes to mind:

[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

Colorio looks great, thanks for the link! Also has Jzazbz support I see, neat!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This post's replies are a joy to read, as someone who's been finding and reporting bugs in wide color pipelines for over a decade. You all are encountering completely bog standard normal ICC issues with eyes wide open for the first time and it's given me a lot of hope for the next five years.

App authors and OS builders have refused for a long time to make this a priority - I'm looking at you, Slack - and now finally with both iOS and Android moving forward, I really hope it'll be enough to finally force them all to suck it up and implement proper ICC handling.

<comment><USER9> Truly sRGB has been the best and worst thing to happen to color on computers. Unfortunately there's so much misinformation and bad implementations of color out there that I doubt end-users will ever understand or even notice problems as they come up. I'm really hoping that HDR support will be the driving force behind wide-color adoption, since consumers are more likely to notice when HDR isn't working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> After switching to a recent Macbook Pro and making sure it's displaying a wider color gamut (the Android image shows up), I compared the sample images - and didn't see the difference at first.

After reading the description, I can see that the colors are a little brighter.

But, now that I can see it, I can't bring myself to care. I'd rather forget about it. This won't make my life any better. It's just a way to sell more expensive hardware, much like audiophile gear.

<comment><USER11> It's the law of diminishing return. We went from "absolute shitty" screens to "very good" screens in 40 years, and from then we went from "very good" to "very good but slightly better if you squint your eyes really hard" in 10 years.

It's the same for most consumer tech, and is very noticeable on phones/tablets/laptops. The only thing we can improve on is shaving of .25mm every gen and calling it a revolution. Or adding machine learning + a 8k screen to our smartphones to explain why you need to spend 1000$+ on a 10 core cpu and 8gb of ram.

The complexity skyrockets, the price doubles but the user experience barely changes, and sometimes it's not even a positive change. Because at the end of the day the vast majority of people just want a basic camera, spotify, netflix and google maps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That android logo is a cool use of Wide Gamut and an easy test on a display.

[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LqRniYeVeEk/XOLYEiOcKCI/AAAAAAAAJ...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LqRniYeVeEk/XOLYEiOcKCI/AAAAAAAAJXI/IAn0yO21XYkwnkUnDlHtdPGI6VyMDEoeACLcBGAs/s1600/android_p3.png)

If on a Pixel 3 or Samsung Galaxy S10 or another P3 capable display, it's a faint-but-visible red logo. Otherwise it's just solid red.

Edit: If not on Android Q, try using Firefox.

There seem to be some odd behavior depending on the software and this may not be always consistent.

<comment><USER13> I'm on a Pixel 3. It's just solid red - no faint logo.

<comment><USER12> Odd. I'm on an iPhone XS and it's working for me.

It might be included only in the Android Q update.

Googling around shows that it might be restricted to custom apps only?

"There is one way to bypass this issue, and that is to explicitly tell Chrome to override the default provided system colour profile and just tell it the display is Display P3. This enables colour management in the app, and short of writing a custom application, is the only way to get wide colour gamut content to work on the Pixel 3."

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/13474/the-google- pixel-3-revi...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13474/the-google- pixel-3-review/4)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> LG V35.

Chrome displays a red square, Firefox displays the wide gamut Android logo. Good job, Google.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know of any popular camera image formats (ie not raw) that are actually using more than 8 bits per color?

The blog post mentions "8 bits per color channel is not enough", but as far as I can tell everyone using Display P3 for consumer-grade photos (including the iPhone) is still using 8 bits per color, just over the wider gamut.

It seems weird that this hasn't become a thing with the big marketing push behind HDR10 and others for TV. You might think "backwards compatibility", but Apple was fine making the HEIF break and converting when sharing with incompatible devices.

<comment><USER16> It's not entirely about bit depth. Think about 1 bit of a given colour light, it can turn on or off, but the bit depth doesn't tell us anything about the colour of the light it is turning on or off.

Encoding in a larger volume colour space may require additional bit depth to prevent posterization, but that's somewhat tangential. The larger issue is the number of vendors and operating systems that can't get it right. Windows is horrific, for example, with Android being at least as bad, as given by the accounts in the comments here.

<comment><USER15> > _It 's not entirely about bit depth_

Are you trying to post the same thing in every top-level thread to get your comment seen? This has nothing to do with what I was asking, which was pretty much "everything about gamut and display aside, what's the deal with bit depth?". Hopefully you can see how your response is a distraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are not two but three cases for the red logo:

1\. You have no color management: you see the logo, but it is desaturated

2\. You have a working CMS and standard gamut: no logo

3\. You have a working CMS and wide gamut: logo is correct

#1 is true because the image has different values. #2 maps all the colors to the monitor's gamut and so you can't see anything on a standard display.

</comment><comment><USER18> They say that an S10 should see it but my S10 with up to date Google Chrome doesn't show the android logo in the red image.

Funny enough I can see it just fine on my Macbook Pro running the latest Firefox stable.

<comment><USER19> On my S10e it indeed doesn't work on Chrome, but it does work on Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is it just me, or do the cloud images look different even without a wide color gamut display (I have a MacBook Pro from 2015).

<comment><USER16> Correct.

Haven't looked at the image too deeply, but this is likely the rendering intent being set so something other than the colorimetric offerings, such as Perceptual or Saturation. It could also be a poorly encoded image as well.

<comment><USER16> Deeper inspection reveals that both are tagged sRGB, which indicates they are for demonstrative purposes only.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Looks like iPhone XS already has support for wide gamut. I can see Android logo on red image on Safari as well as Chrome on XS but I can see it bit less bright on sRGB monitors also.

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max- re...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review- unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/8)

<comment><USER22> Proper wide-gamut colorspace support has been around on macOS since 2015: [https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the- web/](https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You can force enable wide color support in Chrome via a flag (assuming your display supports wider gamuts, of course).

See chrome://flags/#force-color-profile

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm amused that chrome on Win10 does not pass their simple red logo test.

<comment><USER25> Chrome vs Firefox on the Pixel 2 [https://i.imgur.com/kwirB6C.png](https://i.imgur.com/kwirB6C.png)

<comment><USER26> I am confused about why I can see this screenshot since I am not on a wide gamut monitor. Is firefox doing a weird conversion or the screenshotting tool?

My (probably flawed) understanding was that wide colors means there's more than 8 bits. So stuff that would be say rgb(254.5, 0, 0) would now be distinguishable from rgb(255, 0, 0)? If you screenshotted it back to 8 bit you would just lose the extra bits and I expected to still see a red square? Or is that not how it works?

<comment><USER27> Yes flawed. If you have a bitmap that's using a wide color space (e. g. P3/OLED) and it has a green (0,1,0) pixel then that's referring to a color than an LCD display cannot possibly show. 0,1,0 on an LCD is a less saturated green. The OS changes color values to try to make things look as much as expected as possible, and that results in color clipping. A screenshot saves images as sRGB and so no remapping is done upon display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So this red Android logo works on my moto x4 running Pie in Firefox, but not in Chrome. Uhhh.

<comment><USER29> Yeah my moto g4+ with Firefox shows the Android as well, heh</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Launching a startup. To-do list? - <AUTHOR>

Sup guys,
Im starting a new "social/dating" project all by myself. Im a designer so I did all the UI work and now sent the PSD files to convert them to HTML to India. All the back-end will be coded by a friend of mine in Amsterdam.
My question is. What should I do while the guy in India is slicing the PSD and my friend in Amsterdam is building the back-end?
Should I "ship quiet and ship often" or start generating some buzz. Although I don't think it will be a good idea to start making noise for a product that is not done yet.
What can I do in the meanwhile?
Thanks in advance <comment><USER2> I suggest you grab a beer. First things first.

After that, maybe see if you can get some people signed up for launch notices. Maybe see if you can get some female early adopters. That strikes me as the biggest dating-site problem.

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> Actually, yeah!

I do not know much about dating sites, but I just heard from a male friend yesterday that guys tend to get a lot of advertisement showing pretty girls that end up being links for porn sites... so compare with these and make your site contrast! I definitely agree that you need to motivate females to "trust" your site enough that they will sign up for it. Perhaps you might release a beta version for your friends and they can invite their friends?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It depends on your timeline. You might want to generate buzz before the product comes out so that there is some level of expectation and, if you have been advertising correctly, then you should have some people coming in to check it out once you release it. Ideally your site will be good enough that they will free-advertise for you via word of mouth.

Now, if it is going to take a while for the backend and the rest to be ready, you can make the best out of your time by creating what will be your advertisement strategies for the weeks before the site launches.

Hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1) start a landing page using Unbounce.com and reach out to some 1st degree connections to be testers 2) start gathering some data to validate your idea-- talk to the people around you and ask them questions that revolves around this topic. 3) If it's a Web app, maybe start working on the mobile UI 4) Research competitors (I would check out Okcupid), partners, financial prospects, etc. Learn the industry and do you homework!

Hope this helps! Let me know how it goes!

</comment><comment><USER5> Build relationships, relationships and relationships .. with your customers. Definition of "customers" vary from phase to phase of the startup. If you want to create awareness through media, get to know all the people (customer) who write about social dating. Later if you intend to seek funding, map that space and get to know investors ... so on and so forth. It is always best to build relationships with people when you dont seek something ...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How come people are saying that comments at HN are getting worse, negative and unhelpful... every comment at this thread was awesome!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Both advices were very useful. Cheers ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> You should almost certainly start trying to generate buzz.

I put together a list of media contacts at loudstartup.com, though it's primarily for tech-related startups. Might be of help.

<comment><USER7> Nice list. You should add The Startup Foundry too. <http://www.thestartupfoundry.com>

EDIT: nevermind, didn't notice there was more than one page. You should put the page navigation at the top of the page.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! That site was built, VERY quickly. I actually created a thread in which I referred to it as the '2 hour startup', cause I built it (in Django) while I was stuck on the most boring and pointless conference call ever.

It's on the list, they're just sorted by 'reach', which is to say, the number of unique visitors they get in a month (as best I can estimate).

StartupFoundry is currently at the bottom of Page 3, if you're looking for it.</comment></comment></comment>


Macro-Less Code Exec in MSWord - <AUTHOR> https://sensepost.com/blog/2017/macro-less-code-exec-in-msword/ <comment><USER2> Given there are two prompts that the document is trying to do something "different", and the second tells you explicitly it's trying to run an executable and provides a path, is this realistically exploitable?

<comment><USER3> From observing users, it seems that just clicking OK without even reading dialog prompts seems quite common..

<comment><USER4> Even if you've specifically asked that next time it happens they stop and read you the error, they'll click OK and text you "There was an error can you fix it?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh, to be a fly on the wall of those naive folks that spread DDE, then OLE, then ActiveX all over MS Office, and the poor folks who are now struggling to find and gate every nook and cranny that gunk ended up in.

<comment><USER6> AFAIK they spent a lot of effort on that kind of stuff in Office 2003.

</comment></comment><comment> Chiba-City I'm 51. We PC nerds played with IPC via DDE and even Net DDE in the early 90's Netware days before TCP/IP and HTTP took over with XML or JSON in tow. A script connected "Emacs Lisp" for office automation is still a good idea for professionals. The programmable spreadsheet changed the world in the 1980's like few today could ever imagine. They gave out Office to everyone en masse after that. But Hack attacks via email are not always front and center considerations. IPC interoperability is important for folks actually customizing workstation workflows.

</comment><comment><USER7> > The second prompt asks the user whether or not they want to execute the > specified application, now this can be considered as a security warning > since it asks the user to execute "cmd.exe", however with proper syntax > modification it can be hidden.

The warning is a security feature, but they didn't elaborate on how you can bypass it with "proper syntax modification". If that's true, then it should be considered at least somewhat exploitable.

<comment><USER8> They did, further down in the post.

<comment><USER9> Where?

<comment><USER10> Last image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somewhat related thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15438894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15438894)

</comment><comment><USER12> If you download such a file, the default setting of the protected mode should cover this.

[https://i.imgur.com/49x2IZN.png](https://i.imgur.com/49x2IZN.png)

<comment><USER13> Who doesn't immediately click out of protected view though?

<comment><USER14> Why would you? (If you're just reading it)

<comment><USER15> The primary issue for me is that in protected mode, you can't copy to clipboard. So I can't take a note and send it to someone, I can't paste something into a ticket system, etc etc. I have to admit I'm pretty used to just clicking out of protected mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretty cool and informative!

Just thought I'd say that it's possible to the see the IP you are connecting to. Not sure if you'd like to update the video or not.

</comment><comment><USER17> Microsoft loves to execute code from unlikely places. What possible legitimate use would this particular "feature" be good for?

<comment><USER18> Yeah, what possibly use could there be to launch other programs from other programs? Come on now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know that's not the point of the article.

Why are they connected as root via ssh? Any good reason for that? Just to troll people like me?</comment>


The World's First Emoji Domain - <AUTHOR> http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/07/the-worlds-first-emoji-domain/

<comment><USER2> Awesome. Did you see the URL? <http://💩.la/>

</comment><comment><USER3> shitty</comment>


Microsoft disables Windows Update when Meltdown/Spectre registry key isn't set - <AUTHOR> https://doublepulsar.com/important-information-about-microsoft-meltdown-cpu-security-fixes-antivirus-vendors-and-you-a852ba0292ec <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that Windows Update may also fail to apply the Meltdown/Spectre patch if other conditions aren't met. Some are mentioned on the KB page [1] but they don't mention another common scenario, which is that if your system firmware is not ready to accept the update, Windows Update will not apply it, and _it won't tell you_ that it's not applying it -- it will simply say 'Your device is up to date'.

I had to dig around to find a page [2] that had some useful instructions allowing me to find out what the actual status of my Windows install was. I'm grateful to the author of that page, they provided critical info that neither Microsoft nor my machine's manufacturer did. I wish I could say that it boggles my mind that they could be so hushmouthed on the subject of a vulnerability this severe. Of course, my OEM (Lenovo) has not released an update for my Windows laptop (Yoga 900) since 2016, and as of today their support page [3] on Meltdown/Spectre does not indicate that they plan to do so.

I'm posting this partly in anger/despair, partly in the hope that I'm wrong and that someone will pop up to comment and tell me there's a fix. There is a Linux BIOS for this machine but it's old and I don't know if it will actually address this issue.

[1] [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/4056892/windows-10-...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/4056892/windows-10-update-kb4056892) [2] [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of- meltd...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of-meltdown-and- spectre-vulnerability-advisories-patches-and-updates/) [3] [https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/len-18282](https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/len-18282)

<comment><USER3> I know I won't get any updates for the system for my 2012 Dell XPS 8500 (256 GB SSD, 16 GB RAM, i7 CPU - I don't see a need for an upgrade, it's all there).

Does that mean I'll just be left out cold? That's how I understand it.

When I run the Microsoft Powershell plugin that they made available to check the protection status (`Get-SpeculationControlSettings`) I get a "True" for 3 of 8 items (only showing those 3):

      Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is present: True
      Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is present: True
      Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is enabled: True

<comment><USER4> Same boat for my XPS 8700, also kept around for same reason. 24gb ram i7 4th gen. Great for development, including VM work. Unless I was regularly doing video transcoding or heavy CAD work, it's more than fast enough.

Contacted Dell support and confirmed they will not be releasing a BIOS update for the system.

First harm to me from this issue. Not sure if it means I will have to join a class action against Dell or Intel

<comment><USER5> Might want to check again tomorrow. My Dell Desktop (Ivy Bridge/3rd Gen era) received a BIOS update today, specifically noting "Update to the latest CPU microcode to address CVE-2017-5715." It updates the ME firmware too for those recent bugs.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the heads, I'll keep an eye out, but it's not listed on the following consumer systems list

[http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln308587/micro...](http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln308587/microprocessor- side-channel-vulnerabilities--cve-2017-5715--cve-2017-5753--cve-2017-5754--- impact-on-dell-products?lang=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Customers will not receive the January 2018 security updates (or any subsequent security updates) and will not be protected from security vulnerabilities unless their antivirus software vendor sets the following registry key"

Another incentive to stop using questionable AV software (since this was implemented because they can't get their act together).

<comment><USER7> No, another incentive to stop using Windows. 3rd party applications should NOT be responsible for insuring that the OS can receive critical security updates, and Microsoft should not be relying on 3rd party applications to determine whether or not their customers receive critical OS security updates (and of all things, hilariously defaulting to 'no')

<comment><USER8> Windows isn't going anywhere, if for no other reason than because Microsoft Excel is basically electronic paper to the business world -- and there is simply no adequate substitute for it. (No, neither OpenOffice Calc nor any of the Web-based offerings -- including Microsoft's own -- count.)

Coping with Windows is a fact of life. Get used to it.

<comment><USER9> There's MS Excel (and office) for Mac and Wine supports Office 2013. The situation is getting better every year.

<comment><USER10> And MS Office for Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> photon-torpedo So finally there's a way to disable updates on Windows 10... ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> I think at this time if you're on windows 10 you should really just use Defender.

It works well, they are actively developing it, and the new white list based directory protection is kinda neat if you're scared of ransomware.

<comment><USER12> What feature are you talking about specifically?

<comment><USER11> Here you are: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/10/23/stopping...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2017/10/23/stopping- ransomware-where-it-counts-protecting-your-data-with-controlled-folder- access/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The compatibility registry key exists for a reason. I know. I can also see > it's a messy hacky fix. But it needs an end of life date

I couldn't agree more. As I've been devising a patching plan over the past few days I couldn't help but wonder "how long will I have to do this"? My hope is that in future OS releases (say, Windows Client/Server 1803) the mitigations will be default-on for clean installations (minimally).

</comment><comment><USER14> Do I have to do anything if I'm just using Windows Defender?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, Windows Defender has already set the registry key, and you should be good to go. For the rest of you, there is a good public document[0] that is being regularly updated on the status of each of the AV products out there.

[0][https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/184wcDt9I9TUNFFbsAVLp...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/184wcDt9I9TUNFFbsAVLpzAtckQxYiuirADzf3cL42FQ/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true)

<comment><USER15> Does Microsoft Security Essentials fall under Windows Defender for the purposes of this article?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow using a hypervisor to inject below the kernel to avoid KPP is nuts. Never knew the AVs did that. What are they going to do when Microsoft begins to use Hyper-V to enforce CredGuard[1]?

[1]: [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ash/2016/03/02/windows-1...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/ash/2016/03/02/windows-10-device- guard-and-credential-guard-demystified/)

<comment><USER16> Turns out nested virtualization is a thing. Jesus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My windows 10 machines will not receive the update automatically for some reason. I think it is because I had defender completely disabled via group policy since it interferes with some of my development activities surrounding node.JS.

However I was able to install the security update manually from the Microsoft Windows update catalog download site. I did this after enabling defender briefly and updating it to ensure that the registry key was written.

<comment><USER18> I'm real curious what kind of development you're doing with node.JS where Windows Defender causes trouble.

<comment><USER19> The real-time scanning slows down processes that access a large number of files, like code compiles in general and importing node modules in particular.

<comment><USER18> I haven't noticed Windows Defender causing significant slowdowns for processes which access lots of files except when it does a full system scan (which is _not_ often). Even then, it's only barely noticeable.

<comment><USER20> I've disabled defender due to high CPU usage on machines that had to slice mpegs into jpegs with near constant work.

The machine was slicing up 11 channels of 24fps videos into jpegs, so 264 jpegs/s at 720p and 24 bit color.

I've had friends and coworkers that have hit the same CPU issues with big git repos and defender.

It seems like Defender has problems with getting hit with tons of small files in quick succession, but really I know very little about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Finally a fix for forced reboots!

<comment><USER22> You could still get the reboots without updates ... which is what I've been getting for a few weeks now on a cheap tablet: loads update, reboots in the night, update fails. Rinse, repeat.

(I don't care, an update took down the sound last year. For all I know the next one will make the gizmo totally malfunction ... MS don't care for that cheapo segment either, the wanton demands for disk space are astounding, and they refuse to use their own exFat format on additional storage. Truly ready to ascend to Oracle level, they are.)

<comment><USER23> Throw Enterprise LTSB on old/low spec hardware. Thats my preferred Win10: stable, bloat free and it only gets the updates beta tested by the regular users.

<comment><USER24> "Windows 10 LTSB is only available as part of Windows 10 Enterprise. And Windows 10 Enterprise is only available to an organization with a volume licensing agreement, or through a new $7 per month subscription program."

Seriously? An OS of which you need an obscure, hard-to-get version, special messing around in power tools, and still might break randomly? This role reversal happening in the last 10 years is sad, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yeah, had me confused for a while. Easy to set with a group policy, though.

Still, could have been better communicated.

</comment><comment> j-c-m Another consequence of this is that windows will disable updates when you do not have any anti-virus software running as well.

</comment><comment><USER26> Slightly OT if I may: Is there any reason to use anything else than Defender these days? Chrome+uBlock, good email security and update practices, Defender just in case, do we need more?

<comment><USER27> No, not that I am aware of. 3rd party AV are liabilities at this point.

[https://www.pcworld.com/article/3020327/antivirus- software-c...](https://www.pcworld.com/article/3020327/antivirus-software- could-make-your-company-more-vulnerable.html)

<comment><USER28> Defender can be seen as merely being the lesser evil.

Consider CVE-2017-0290[0], which was caused by the MsMpEng process running a custom unsandboxed javascript interpreter with system privileges to evaluate untrusted code for maliciousness. Remotely exploitable over many unsolicited channels. Pretty much the worst kind of exploitability. Of course other AVs have done quite similar mistakes.

[0] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project- zero/issues/detail?id=12...](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project- zero/issues/detail?id=1252&desc=5)</comment></comment></comment>


Self-doubt and launch stats - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/self-doubt-launch-stats/

<comment><USER2> Self-doubt is the first step in keeping us sane and grounded. It is what brings the best in us, it makes us look over our plans with fine comb and it forces us to look at the bigger picture without losing sight of task at hand. I am in the same boat as you and find different things to worry about but I think it is better to worry when you still have the chance to make a difference rather than saying, "only if" at the end. I'm sure even when you launch your next book, you still will be worried.

</comment><comment><USER3> _"The idea that authors can't make money is bullshit. And no, you don't have to be famous or have a huge online following."_

Says the author with the huge online following.

 _Edit:_ I kid, I kid.</comment>


DPD courier who was fined for day off to see doctor dies from diabetes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/feb/05/courier-who-was-fined-for-day-off-to-see-doctor-dies-from-diabetes?CMP=share_btn_tw <comment><AUTHOR> This article is from the UK.

DPD is a "gig economy" courier service.

This kind of thing is going to force government into much stricter regulation to protect workers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, this is already being discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16307218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16307218)</comment>


Kaspersky's Researchers Leave Microsoft off the Top Most Vulnerable List. - <AUTHOR> http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/kaspersky%E2%80%99s_security_researchers_leave_microsoft_top_10_most_vulnerable_list_apple_not_so_lucky

<comment><USER2> I thought IE was supposed to be bad...</comment>