New Android and iOS "fragmentation" charts are just as flawed as the term - <AUTHOR> http://www.phonearena.com/news/New-Android-and-iOS-fragmentation-charts-are-just-as-flawed-as-the-term_id50332#2- <comment><USER2> Android is a cross platform technology that makes it possible to run a single application on different hardware and software configurations. Android-based operating systems can look, feel, feature and perform very differently, but as long as the developer sticks to the standard, the Apps can run on all systems.

Android is, by definition, a "defragmentation platform". It allows companies to basically make their own operating systems but stay binary compatible through a common standard. The term "Android fragmentation" really just describes the fact that the defragmentation only works 95% instead of 100%.

It's still much more fragmented if you want to support devices outside the Android ecosystem. Try making an app that runs on the Galaxy S2, the HTC One and the Nexus 4. Then make one that runs on the Galaxy S, the iPhone 5 and the Lumia 720.

<comment><USER3> "Try making an app that runs on the Galaxy S2, the HTC One and the Nexus 4. Then make one that runs on the Galaxy S, the iPhone 5 and the Lumia 720"

What an absurd argument. There's a difference between platform fragmentation and having industry competitors. The fact that there are other mobile OS's does not reduce or negate the fragmentation within Android's ecosystem.

As for Android "by definition" being a "defragmentation platform," I think you're drunk on Koolaid. Android's operator-indulging multi-platform strategy makes it the very definition of fragmented.

The fact that such an obviously blinkered post reaches the top of HN comments speaks volumes for Android fanboyism on HN.

<comment><USER2> "Operating System" is certainly a ambiguous term these days. Two Android-based software systems can differ in user interface, applications, file systems, performance, interaction design and features. Compare Amazon's FireOS with Samsung's Touchwiz with Motorola's Moto X software: Here we have different industry competitors competing against each other. The only special position that iOS has in this scenario is that it is not binary compatible with the others.

Android did certainly not fragment the market. There were thousands of devices with incompatible software systems out there before Android came along. Android is not responsible for all the companies and form sizes and UIs and operators. These were all there before 2008. Android just made it possible for developers to target all these devices with the same codebase.

<comment><USER4> Terms tend to become ambigous when one has an agenda...

Otherwise, OS is a perfectly clear term, Samsung and Motorola use the same OS, Android. Amazon uses a customized version of Android. iOS is a completely different OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lots of gymnastics to "prove" Android fragmentation isn't as bad as it looks. Pointless.

<comment><USER6> I don't even see the latest version of android (kitkat) in the data.

It bothers me a lot that nexus devices I purchased this year will be long forgotten months from now when Apple is prepping an iOS 7.1 beta for the iPhone 4 as we speak.

I know that google's model is to update core functionality through applications rather than via whole operating system updates but it's annoying that google doesn't strong arm the abusive carriers/vendors into allowing updates to the underlying OS in a timely fashion.

It gives the impression that an android device is what it is at the time it is purchased but an Apple device may evolve. I consider it extremely odd considering how Google has proven to themselves over an over that that upgrading people's common denominator platform is a great strategy (Chrome).

<comment><USER7> I am currently with android 4.4 on oldish HTC Desire HD. It is amazing what lifespan the devices have when they are unlocked and unbound. I dream for the day when mobile devices will ship without os and it will be for the user to choose.

<comment><USER8> It will never happen, if one looks at the history behind common OS for mobile devices.

Carriers and handset manufactures have too many interests into product differentiation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With the rise of Google Play Services, we might consider the Android "fragmentation" charts even more useless than this article claims they are.

<comment><USER10> Google services is out-of-option in China. Google Play Services may quickly contributed to the fragmentation of Andorids in near future as another factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> All you need to know about fragmentation is that when I build a mobile app for android, I have to put a clause in the contract that I will not support it, that it is untested, and that the client releases it at their own risk. Any updates to the app will require additional fees that may or may not include the purchase of a new device and that the client agrees to cover those costs.

It is just impossible to test it everywhere. I can't afford to purchase 700 devices to test on and the client can't afford for the QA on all those devices.

Products have to be pushed into the marketplace and then you have to react to the idiosyncrasies of each platform.

I'm dealing with an issue right now where my galaxy tab runs an app just fine, but a customer's sony device isn't reporting that it is connected to the internet.

It is a real issue because this isn't an issue with iOS and most of the time customers delay their android release because of the testing and quality control issue.

</comment><comment><USER12> Let's make a reasonably fair comparison:

Android runs on all kinds of devices from different manufacturers.

Windows runs on all kinds of devices from different manufacturers.

I can write a program that runs nicely on pretty much any Windows box pretty easily. To do the same on Android is more painful (but that's mostly because desktop applications deal with varying screen resolutions more gracefully than mobile platforms).

I can upgrade pretty much any Windows box to the latest version of Windows.

I cannot upgrade most Android devices to the latest version of Android.

Swap "Linux" for "Windows" if my use of a commercial analogy offends your sensibilities.

Now, part of this is a problem with the phone market. But is Android fragmentation on tablets any better?

</comment><comment><USER13> Fragmentation story:

I have an iPhone and wanted to convince people to use Threema instead of WhatsApp. Only 1 person wanted to give it a try. I was happy. It's a start.

But he has an HTC Desire HD. He is stuck at Android 2.3 and wasn't able to install Threema.</comment>


Skylake's graphics architecture: Intel is still gunning for dedicated GPUs - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/skylakes-graphics-architecture-intel-is-still-gunning-for-dedicated-gpus/ <comment><USER2> Good news for me. Recently, after some reflection on the causes of most of my frustrations with both laptops and desktops over the last decade or so, I've decided to give up on AMD and Nvidia for now. #1 source of all frustrations, hardware-wise. I'd rather put up with being a bit out of date on gaming than keep messing with them. Cheaper that way, too. And it's not like AMD's competitive anymore[1] so I'm going to be buying Intel anyway.

Dedicated graphics cards: awful under Windows, even worse under Linux, seemingly the cause of all the worst problems in laptops (even Apple). Intel graphics it is, for lack of another option that doesn't suck.

[1] :-(

<comment><USER3> I don't know why a non-gamer would bother with an AMD/NVIDIA graphics card. Even a developer. If the most graphically intensive thing you do is watch YouTube videos or Netflix, use the Intel integrated video. It's plenty good for those things. I totally agree with you there.

But on the flip side, as a gamer, I couldn't imagine giving up my discrete graphics cards on my gaming desktop. How many years back and how low resolution and graphics settings do you have to go before you find a game which is playable on an integrated chip? I guess it depends a lot on your definition of "playable", and your game selection; if GOG is where you regularly buy games then the integrated chip is probably more than adequate. Or if you're using a single 800x600 monitor, you're probably ready to run the latest games on your integrated chip. But otherwise, I can't seriously recommend anyone play games on an integrated video chip.

Sidenote: I would choose the touchpad as my #1 source of hardware frustration. Anecdotally, I haven't had much issue with graphics cards, other than one replaced under warranty.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel- core-i7-5775c-i5-5...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel- core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169-6.html)

44fps in Bioshock Infinite on Medium at 1080p using Iris Pro 6200 graphics.

<comment><USER5> Also runs on a console from seven Moore's Law doublings ago, 720p@30. Though maybe not at the equivalent of medium?

<comment><USER6> Yeah, integrated graphics are still just pretty much good enough for those interested in playing some games once in a while; anyone expecting serious gaming performance even on the highest end chip is going to be disappointed. On the plus side, you can get a ton of firepower for $200 these days, which is pretty low given inflation and what GPUs cost in the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For me the most exciting thing about Skylake GPUs is its support of GVT-g which will allow the GPU to be shared with up to 4 VMs. This will avoid dealing altogether with nVidia shenanigans for PCI passthrough.

The disappointing thing is that they will require firmware binary blobs [1]. Although while it opens an attack surface, in principle it should be limited to the own hardware, so not much of a problem. (There are bigger problems like Intel ME).

But it's the drivers what matters the most. Which I hope they keep releasing as open source.

[1] [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=intel- skl...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=intel-skl-bxt- firmware-blobs)

</comment><comment><USER8> Freed of the bandwidth bottleneck by eDRAM, Iris Pro actually matches lower- mid range dedicated GPUs: [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel- core-i7-5775c-i5-5...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel- core-i7-5775c-i5-5675c-broadwell,4169-6.html).

<comment><USER9> I only have Iris Pro in my Retina Macbook Pro from late-2013, and it works so great! Never missed having a dedicated graphics card, and I can even do casual gaming in WC3 / CS1.6 / CS:GO / Half-Life 2.

<comment><USER10> Surely we have to set higher goals to aim for with integrated graphics than 12 year old games.

<comment><USER9> Haha! I totally agree! It's just me stuck in the past. However, I think we've come long regarding integrated graphics. Running newer games like CS:GO on high graphics, even though it's not the greatest game regarding graphics, I think is pretty solid from an integrated GPU.

If just Intel can manage to match 1.5-2 year old Nvidia GPU's from the date of release, I think it's really good!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm glad Intel are addressing the weakness of integrated graphics, I personally believe PC gaming has tons of potential to grow, as long as you can play a good chunk of new games on integrated graphics (not at the highest resolutions of course, but where it's still possible to play competitively).

As an aside, this won't help me, I'm never buying Intel again, not until they remove the AMT feature.

<comment><USER12> Never heard of anybody having an issue with AMT/vPro.

you can disable it in the BIOS. It's a CPU feature meant for sysadmins, it's not like it enables access for intel. (although it could.. in theory).

what's your issue with AMT? (also, not all chips have it).

<comment><USER11> > "you can disable it in the BIOS. It's a CPU feature meant for sysadmins, > it's not like it enables access for intel. (although it could.. in theory)."

Call me paranoid if you want, but I think the recent Windows 10 privacy debacle shows that even if you disable something, doesn't mean it's actually disabled.

> "what's your issue with AMT? (also, not all chips have it)."

My issue with AMT is one of security. I don't believe there won't be an exploit in the future, it's not out of the question, some versions of it have already been exploited:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology#Known_vulnerabilities_and_exploits)

AMT has full remote access to your computer, beyond OS control or visibility, and can be utilised even when the computer is in a powered off state (still needs to be connected to a power source and connected to a network of course). The risks are huge! I'd rather choose a competitor that doesn't have it.

Which Intel CPUs don't have AMT?

<comment><USER12> well, it's a case by case basis, but my desktop has this processor: [http://ark.intel.com/products/77780/Intel- Core-i7-4930K](http://ark.intel.com/products/77780/Intel-Core-i7-4930K)

which does not have it

but my laptops both have it.. :\

[http://ark.intel.com/products/43559/Intel- Core-i7-620LM](http://ark.intel.com/products/43559/Intel-Core-i7-620LM)

[http://ark.intel.com/products/53464/Intel- Core-i7-2640M](http://ark.intel.com/products/53464/Intel-Core-i7-2640M)

<comment><USER13> It actually resides in the pch. The processor is called the management engine. In newer platforms, it gets to decide if the processor even gets to see the bios executable code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it fully documented so we can write open source drivers for it?

<comment><USER15> The documentation isn't released yet (it usually trails the hardware release by a few months) but when it is available it will be located on the website of Intel's Open Source Technology Center: [https://01.org/linuxgraphics/documentation/hardware- specific...](https://01.org/linuxgraphics/documentation/hardware- specification-prms)

And, my team at Intel _is_ writing drivers for it as part of the Mesa project ([http://mesa3d.sourceforge.net](http://mesa3d.sourceforge.net))

<comment><USER16> Thanks for chiming in! Will you please relay our wishes to the powers that be -- that the GPU driver stay blob-free?

And thanks for contributing the drivers to Mesa!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The only important question: can I finally run Minecraft?

<comment><USER18> Minecraft runs great on HD4000 integrated graphics.

<comment><USER19> Define great? 1600x1200 60fps?

<comment><USER18> 1920x1080, not sure about the fps, certainly over 30, possibly 60. No crazy texture packs or anything, but it runs well. Can also run games like Civ 5, Trine 2, and Valve games quite well - albeit not with maxed out graphics. KSP has some issues (probably a Unity thing), but runs good on lower settings.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flying machines of Chinese farmers - happy-go-lucky http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170312-the-amazing-flying-machines-of-chinese-farmers <comment><AUTHOR> No mention of how they share what they learn with each other. I know the main bottleneck here is material / financial, but I get the impression there's also an information bottleneck. Getting them networked might dim the romance a little, but it also might mitigate the tragedy.

<comment> m-i-l The article mentions at least one of them can't read or write. Would be an interesting challenge to build a knowledge sharing platform in that case.

<comment><USER2> Wechat built its initial traction by having voice memos as a first class interface element in its app. There are entire communities of illiterate Chinese communicating using purely voice memos/stickers.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but are voice memos indexable and searchable? Maybe they can be, but don't know what enterprising startup would find it profitable to create the machine learning algorithms necessary to do this successfully. As a well- funded nonprofit, maybe. Because of illiteracy, your metadata would also need to be a significant amount of audio, at least for the illiterate humans.

<comment><USER4> Alexa, search for airplane propeller.

<comment><USER3> Touche.....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Guess it goes to show when given more and more freedom and property rights inspiration takes off. going to assume it is only semi legal to fly such things in China or perhaps the rules have not caught up with the hobbyist?

<comment><USER6> The article mentions it being illegal, but it's interesting to note that many of the aircraft pictured would be legal in the US without certification as "ultralights." The cutoff is 254 pounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any pictures? The story is about a photographer after all. And the machines have got to be amazing steampunk-inspired marvels. I'd really have preferred a pictorial essay.

<comment><USER8> There are pictures embedded in the article.

<comment><USER7> Oh! The first time, there were none. Now I revisit and see them. Strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me about "Astronaut Farmer" movie.

</comment><comment><USER10> Another nail in the coffin of the thesis that Chinese people can never innovate.

<comment><USER11> I remember my first impression after getting acquainted with silkworm history being that Chinese people actually discover things but aren't that much into sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does EAA have much presence in China? These guys should be members.

<comment><USER13> There is basically no general aviation in China-- the airspace is controlled via the military and the regulations are extreme (flight plans require 2 days notice!). However as of last year they are loosening these restrictions and plan to establish a larger GA industry:

[http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/general- aviation/2016...](http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/general- aviation/2016-05-25/china-embraces-general-aviation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > 'aeronauts', literally meaning 'being born into air'.

<pedant>Incorrect. The suffix -naut is from Greek naute^s, meaning sailor. Of course it may be that the Chinese phrase used does mean "being born into air", but then the article should say that</pedant>

<comment><USER15> Maybe they were thinking "aeronat" :)

(Nat- being a Latin prefix for "born", see "natal")</comment></comment>


The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16027058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16027058)</comment>


Deep Hyperlink. An innovation for next web revolution - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/buk-io-the-c/deep-link-is-the-future-of-digital-content-e881cb3f062c <comment><USER2> I don't want to be the hater guy but am I missing something or isn't this just a glorified web highlighting service? (Including medium.com's own highlighting feature, or genius.com)

I root for any new attempt to do things in different ways but I don't like it when people try to spin things to make them look novel when they really aren't.

I wouldn't have been harsh if OP didn't invent a new ridiculous terminology as "Deep hyperlink" and call itself a "revolution".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback and sorry about using the word "revolution" :)

Probably, the article isn't good at explaining its feature. Highlighting itself has been in service since the start of the web _but_ does the highlight has its unique regular URL?

You may have seen famous quotes from the web but they don't have links and the platform wants to solve the problem by providing a general URL scheme to make URLs more specific without any special web plugins or apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Your service seems pretty useful in the context of e-books (which seems like your primary market based on your website) - I'm not sure why the medium article starts off with wikipedia as an example, seems like a weaker use case (just my opinion though, I may be wrong)

What happens when the content of the wikipedia article changes substantially - where will it lead to, or will it show a warning that the target content has changed?

seems interesting though

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for good feedback. Wikipedia keeps versions on its content so that the URL will be still valid, leading to old version of the article that was what it was at the time of quote. The platform doesn't work on blogs where no versioned data is kept.

<comment><USER3> that seems like a reasonable solution. I'd like to be able to do this in slack conversations - I haven't used slack in a while, but the auto-generated descriptions were always a distraction, would be nice to select the text I want for the link preview.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. So, I made link preview from buk.io platform the quote itself. Here is one example. Try to put it in slack, facebook or twitter to see how it looks. [https://buk.io/@ea1149/5/9704~9850](https://buk.io/@ea1149/5/9704~9850)

<comment><USER3> I signed up and gave the wikipedia feature a try, it works, but is there a way to link to any website of my choosing, or is it limited to wikipedia/books?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your trying out the service. We may be able to wrap around the other sites only if we know the details of the system e.g. how it keeps versions and so on. Otherwise, chrome plugin like tool is necessary. The goal of the platform is to use just web browser and web URL scheme so that plugin approach is in the back burner yet. Please try out searching for public domain books as well. We started the service with Wikipedia and Gutenberg project ebooks so that users may cite from then. Thank you again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Old tech revamped? One could already do this by including the a tag id at the end of the linked URL. i.e. [http://example.com/page.htm#thirdparagraph](http://example.com/page.htm#thirdparagraph) One could just insert <null id=thirdparagraph></null> where ever the third paragraph starts.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is only applicable to pre-made tags, not to a random range or position, I believe.

<comment><USER5> Although, both of those are possible with the little-known (and little- implemented) XML Linking Language (XLink), a W3C standard. XLink allows one to define links on arbitrary tags, many-to-many links, links between external resources, and links to specific positions and ranges using XPath.

[https://www.w3.org/TR/xlink11/](https://www.w3.org/TR/xlink11/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if that could be a good option to specify some content within a web document. First of all it is not a URL that you can normally use in web browser's address bar and share from social media. Secondly, not sure if it can specify arbitrary part of attribute value.

Thank you for sharing the information anyway and will take a look.

Best

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> aka: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion)

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is similar. Deep Hyperlink is a regular URL and one of its application may be Transclusion at the end. The simplicity of using a regular web address which is permanent is what I believe is the first try of such kind. Transclusion is kind of proprietary implementation, I believe.</comment></comment>


How To Keep Track Of What You've Learnt - <AUTHOR> http://freestylemind.com/how-to-keep-track-of-what-youve-learnt

<comment><USER2> Spaced repetition [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition>] is a pretty well explored technique. Most flash card apps use it. One of the best is Anki.

<comment><USER3> Agreed Spaced repetition is way to go for what he wants to accomplish.

I like the way Anki manages cards. But prefer the Mnemosyne's spacing algorithm.</comment></comment>


Let Oracle own API's, Justice Dept tells top court in surprise filing - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/05/26/google-oracle-api-supremecourt-obama-appeal/ <comment><USER2> This advise by the Solicitor General hinges on an interpretation of section 102(b) of the copyright act. That section essentially says that "methods of operation" can't be copyrighted.

The Solicitor General does not understand that APIs are a formalized description of "methods of operation" (page 14). I suggest reading the entire advisory, it's quite frustrating and contradicts itself.

<comment><USER3> I agree that one shouldn't ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence. ("The Solicitor General does not understand...")

BUT!

At the White House level, incompetence equals malice. We have every right to expect competence from a level as high as the White House.

<comment><USER4> Well, these are the same people who think you can safely backdoor encryption.

<comment><USER5> Justice department officials and congressmen are most definitely not the same people.

<comment><USER6> FBI is part of the justice dept.

[http://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/going-dark-are- technology-p...](http://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/going-dark-are-technology- privacy-and-public-safety-on-a-collision-course)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > and likened the Java API's to Charles Dickens and other literary works

Never, could have I ever predicted to one day see that as an actual excerpt from an article.

By the way, this is a wonderful exercise of effort on our part as a society. Really very important we sort these these nuances out. People may be dying, the poor may be getting poorer, but _this_ is what is important. /s

<comment><USER8> >By the way, this is a wonderful exercise of effort on our part as a society. Really very important we sort these these nuances out. People may be dying, the poor may be getting poorer, but this is what is important. /s

It's sarcastic, I get it, but it is also profoundly stupid. Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem as we continually move away from the importance of physical objects and towards the importance of pure information.

<comment><USER9> >Sorting out intellectual property and ownership is _the_ 21st century problem

Uhm, no. Only for the HN crowd and maybe open source.

There are a lot more and more pressing problems that have to do with things like the environment, food production, reproduction, migration and democracy vs. corporatism vs. ideology.

<comment><USER10> It's profoundly important to the U.S. as a whole. Creation of IP is the last thing that's going to be automated by robots. It's already been tremendously resistant to production being exported to China and India. We're already at the point where the primary product of the U.S. is IP in various forms (Apple designs the computers but they're manufactured in China).

<comment><USER11> What do you mean by "IP"? If it's "intellectual property" that strikes me (a non-lawyer) as a particularly vague and ill-defined concept. I personally find the idea of owning an idea to be risible: historically, important things have been invented or discovered multiple times, sometimes clearly independently. So, why should I as a citizen finance some monopolies that will be economically detrimental to me and to society as a whole? Seriously. I'm not pulling chains here. Economists are almost 100% against monopolies (although they often differ on what constitutes a monopoly), and "IP" is a state- supported monopoly. Why should we subject ourselves to it?

<comment><USER12> > Why should we subject ourselves to it?

The traditional reason is to grant incentive for its creation in the first place. One primary example has been medical advances. With the benefit of a (temporary) monopoly on the sales of a new drug, the company has an incentive to create it in the first place. Perhaps we wouldn't have as many life saving advances without IP protection. A secondary reason is that it requires public disclosure. One alternative to patent protection is to keep a production method a trade secret. So companies, if they are sufficiently secretive, could have effective if not legally enforced monopolies due to such secrets. So is it worth the tradeoff of having IP protection?

COST: a time-limited monopoly; limited incremental innovation on derivatives of the protected work during the lifetime of the protection.

BENEFIT: potentially more innovative goods and services are created to begin with; the means and methods behind these innovations are publicly documented for future replication or derivative work .

I'm think it is worth the tradeoff both for copyright protection and patents in general. But the specific laws are certainly not optimal as currently written and enforced by the courts. Durations for both patents and copyright are too long. Plenty of things that are patentable should not be, due to them being too obvious, trivial, or just not appropriate for protection.

Also the remedy for infringement has multiple options. You could allow general infringement, at statutory royalty rates. I think Canada has experimented with this for copyright, and the US as standard (but private) arrangements for the licensing of music. You could require a fraction of any profits. These provide the monopoly rents, but not a monopolization of production and derivatives. We are still learning what the optimal tradeoffs are for society. I hope we have more experimentation on regulatory regimes to identify the best compromises.

<comment><USER11> _The traditional reason is to grant incentive for its creation in the first place._

Most certainly, that's the nominal, and even in the USA, constitutional basis of copyright and patents. But the actual implementation over the last 100 years seems to have veered away from creating incentives, and into creating something naively akin to ownership, with state enforcement.

 _I hope we have more experimentation on regulatory regimes_

Based on the CAFC's decision here, and it's history, we're only going to experiment with "more" and "stricter" regimes. We've (the USA) never really experimented with loosening "IP" monopolies, despite data and logic pointing towards shorter monopolies as closer to optimum.

I'd also have to take exception the "pharmacy has benefitted from long-lasting monopolies". That's probably true simplistically (When was the last time Smith Klein Glaxo didn't turn a huge profit?) but in the manner of creating tons of medicines for The Rest of Us, it seems to have failed. India and some African countries actually allow infringing compounds, because the price of authentic compounds is set high. Also, the people of the USA pay way more for medications than most other countries. This whole topic is subject to argument, but certainly pharmacy patents relate to high prices and unavailability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Welp, IT industry had a good run. Time to wrap it up and hand it over to a couple of companies to run as a monopoly.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I don't understand why this is a relatively minor story. This should be filling the front page of HN, on par with Jobs's death. If this ruling goes the wrong way, it will end software development as we know it, especially given the ridiculous length of copyright.

Any reimplementation of an API? Illegal. IBM compatible PCs? Illegal. Any emulator? Illegal. Binary-compatible reimplementations? Illegal.

<comment><USER15> On the plus side, being a lawyer will be well paid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> (Reposting a question I asked in an earlier discussion, where I may have arrived too late for anyone to see it).

That cases raises an interesting precedent issue that I have not been able to find the answer to. Let's assume that the Supreme Court decides not to take the appeal, so the decision of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that APIs are copyrightable stands.

What courts is this precedent for?

Generally, the way precedent works is that if appeals from court X go to court Y, then the decisions of court Y are precedent for court X. If court Z is not on the appeals path from X, then the decisions of court Z are not binding precedent for X.

For copyright cases, appeals normally do NOT go to the CAFC. They go the Courts of Appeal for the circuit in which the court appealed from resides. E.g., copyright cases from district courts in the 2nd Circuit go to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

In general, that is the appeals path from the Federal district court. Copyright cases aren't specifically singled out.

Oracle vs. Google was tried in the 9th Circuit. If it had just been a copyright case, the appeal would have went to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. However, it was also a patent case, and patent cases are singled out. They are explicitly diverted from the normal appeals path and go to the CAFC. If the case is also some other kind of case, such as a copyright case or an antitrust case, the CAFC is allowed to hear those aspects too.

So does this mean that if P sues D in the 9th circuit over copyright, with no patent issues or any other issues that would bring the appeal to the CAFC, then the district court would only use the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for precedent (which I believe disagrees with CAFC), and ignore CAFC's Google vs. Oracle copyright ruling?

Even more confusing, suppose P sues D over copyright and patents in the 9th Circuit. The district court figures that the case, if appealed, will go to the CAFC, and so follows CAFC precedent for the copyright aspects. Now suppose after the court rules, neither party appeals the court's decisions on any of the patent issues. The only appeal copyright issues. Does the case still go to CAFC? Or does it go the 9th Circuit? If it goes to the 9th Circuit, do they apply their own copyright precedent or CAFC precedent?

<comment><USER17> I believe the CAFC decision is not binding precedent for any court. If P sues D in the 9th circuit over copyright, even if there are patent claims as well (such that an appeal on a copyright issue would necessarily go to the CAFC), the CAFC decision in Oracle v. Google is not binding precedent. Of course that does not mean that the district court would be likely to ignore the CAFC decision in Oracle v. Google, but in principle it ought to be no more than persuasive, like any pertinent decision in a sibling circuit.

On the question in your last paragraph, where P sues D over copyright and patents in the 9th circuit, and there are only appeals of copyright issues, the appeal goes to the CAFC by statute.

<comment><USER16> On that last part, so CAFC gets the case if it included patent claims, even if neither party is appealing any of the patent issues?

That raises the possibility of copyright plaintiffs tossing in a patent claim that they have no intention of trying to actually win on, just to make sure that they will get CAFC's view of copyright instead of the 9th Circuit's view.

<comment><USER17> Yes, the CAFC would get the case.

The CAFC itself would be bound to apply 9th Circuit precedent, as it purported to do here. Again in principle, a prior copyright decision by the CAFC applying 9th Circuit law would not be binding precedent on a CAFC panel hearing some later copyright case arising out of the 9th Circuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excuse me, non-American here, but a passage from an article linked within states[0]:

> The nine justices request that U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, Jr., > the government's top lawyer before the Supreme Court, weigh in on about 20 > cases a year in which the federal government has a strong interest. The > justices generally give greater weight to what he or she says than other > third parties that take a side in a case, an influence which has caused the > solicitor general to be dubbed the "tenth justice."

Question: _what the fuck?_

        [0]: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/15/google-oracle-lawsuit-idUSL1N0Y32YG20150515

<comment><USER6> > Question: what the fuck?

American here.

We are aware of the problem, but due to high call volume and a totally corrupt/captured/entrenched corporate & government bureaucracy, you may experience long wait times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> European courts declared APIs to be uncopyrightable.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't be surprised if the US tried to sneak copyright for APIs back in through "trade" agreements like TTIP.

<comment><USER21> ... and API copyright would give an excellent commercial advantage to US companies over Europe, since they have more startups than we have. On the other hand, my government (France) doesn't do much to help startups [1][2], so it's only fair that we get invaded by talented foreign companies.

[1] For €1000 sold to a customer, the employee gets a purchasing power of less than €300, even in the absence of expenses and stakeholder dividends, because our VAT is 20%, mandatory contributions 46%, income tax 10-15%, land tax 5-10%, and laws are so circumvoluted that the tax accountant takes 45€ per paysheet per employee and charge about 2000€ yearly to the company. And the founder gets to spend >10% of his time on the phone with administrations or filling forms. I know the IRS of USA isn't much better, but I've lived in Australia and administrations make a difference on CEO time.

[2] I'm aware of that the French government provides benefits for startups like CRI (Crédit Impot Recherche), which basically funds the PhDs you hire, but it wastes paperwork pumping money from companies into companies, requires a person to manage the grant, and isn't socially fair since it advantages those with a PhD.

I could always blame TTIP agreements for advantaging Americans, but we, French people, tackle down our own companies on a massive scale.

French people, please don't answer "Hey man the CCI can help you for your paperwork if you fill in this form and post it to this address and fill the file they return and the RSI will take a levy of 0,015% for training (truth) and ... form ... and ... paper ... document... and... minitax... organisme social... excess... deductible for SMEs if you tick the box 5UV and ..." Please. I just wanted to hire and code, and the Australian PAYG paysheet is frigging awesome.

<comment><USER22> Where is your 46% coming from? Also, you might grossly underestimate how much of an absolute mess American taxes are to deal with. If you're complaining about paying your accountant 2000 euros a year...

<comment><USER23> Taxes are in the same ballpark for all western countries. The real burden isn't the financial load, it is the complexity. I had a dream that my US state could take over all forms of taxation and have a single payer system (ha!) Business, personal, income, property, federal, all of it, one form, filed electronically and done by the state. Done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is the logical extension of this that anyone who's written a standard C library was in violation of Kernighan & Ritchie's copyright?

<comment><USER25> "anyone who's written a standard C library was in violation of Kernighan & Ritchie's copyright"

K&R and Ken Thompson et al. were working for Bell Labs and assigned copyright to AT&T. AT&T cooperated with early open source programmers at Cal to produce UNIX software. The negotiations between Cal and AT&T produced a license from AT&T for UNIX and C as embodied in Berkeley UNIX. Berkeley BSD grants a license to anyone in the world to reproduce standard libraries and the rest of the UNIX system.

Thus anyone who writes a standard UNIX library has a solid license chain back to KR&T for the APIs regardless of the result of this lawsuit.

Now, the BIOS in your PC -- and the billion PC clones produced in the past 35 years -- becomes a criminal offense if the CAFC result is upheld. Quite a lot of other APIs that have been standardized under the laws as we understood them for the 50 years before CAFC reversed them soon become illegal forever.

But UNIX and its various flavors is fine.

Python, Perl, Ruby, C++, and C programmers should be fine as will be their standard libraries.

And we'll all adapt by not using proprietary APIs from now on. You'll have to be careful about code licenses and API licenses instead of just code licenses. It's a headache and a large one-time cost to the industry in libraries we'll lose forever but in the long run it'll be fine for programmers.

The real danger from the CAFC is the way they've been expanding patents. You can't escape from patents just by getting licenses or not copying others' work.

<comment><USER26> Still, the BSD license requires reproduction of the license text and copyright headers (and for a while, advertising on the package). I don't see those in many C libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe we should change the standard licences - GPL, MIT, etc. - to include a caveat "free to use without restriction... except by companies known as, or ever known as, Oracle Corporation"...

<comment> maze-le There are a few more exceptions, that come to my mind: Military, Intelligence Agencies and their subcontractors, TBTF-Banks, Disney, Sony ... ahrr and the list goes on

<comment><USER28> [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/hessla.en.html](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/hessla.en.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" \-- Article I, Section 8, US Constitution ([http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans...](http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html))

This is the exact opposite of promoting progress, and this type of behavior needs to be overturned on constitutional grounds. This is so far beyond what the Constitution authorizes Congress to oversee with respect to patent and copyright law that the specifics of the case are almost meaningless. There is absolutely nothing to suggest that anyone would stop developing APIs or turn them into trade secrets unless they can be copyrighted. 40+ years of sharing and software development prove otherwise.

Time for the Federal Circuit and Justice Department to wake up, or for there to be an investigation into bribery and corruption in East Texas and DC. Preferably both.

</comment><comment><USER29> And the more ironic here is that Google didn't copy Sun code, they used Apache Harmony implementation.

The ones doing the copy were the programmers from Apache Foundation

</comment><comment><USER30> No suprise here --- 1) Google won the first case with Alsup. This demonstrates that some lower courts can have a better understanding of the law and are willing to spend time applying logic to these things. 2) Oracle won in a higher court. At this point, we see a trend that the higher you go, the more political and less competent the courts get. The DOJ's actions reinforce this trend too. So, even if it goes to the Supreme Court, we're pretty much guaranteed Oracle will win that too.

See, the whole problem of this case rests in that you have to "spend time" and "apply logic" to agree with Google's position. Which, pretty much throws out any hope of getting a "higher court" (or higher-anybody) to adopt Google's stance on the issue.

Actually the poster "tajen" pretty much hit the nail on the head for this issue -- essentially, adopting Google's stance unfortunately requires a degree of competence and logical commitment beyond the comprehension of most higher officials. So, even if this goes to the Supreme Court Oracle has this case pretty much won...

<comment><USER31> > 2) Oracle won in a higher court. At this point, we see a trend that the > higher you go, the more political and less competent the courts get.

I don't know that that's the case; even if we assume that the CAFC is wrong from the perspective of application of the law (rather than merely correctly applying the law to reach an outcome that we don't like), certainly, lots of observers think that the CAFC is an especially problematic court among Courts of Appeal, and even on the issues that it specializes in (which copyright is not one of; Oracle v. Google got there instead of the 9th Circuit because of patent issues in the case, even though the thing we're all focused on is a copyright issue.)

So, I don't think that "the CAFC messed this up", even if taken as gospel, necessarily demonstrates a relation between "level" of court and competence.

> The DOJ's actions reinforce this trend too.

Since the DoJ isn't a higher court than the CAFC, I don't see how you can reasonably say that.

<comment><USER30> DOJ is not a court but it is a "high official" (or "official body"). What I was stating was that the "higher you go" \-- in terms of official government bodies, whether they're courts, or something else -- the less competent I would expect them to be.

You can simply say, 1) "Oracle owns Java" 2) "APIs are part of Java" 3) "Google uses Java APIs" 4) Therefore, "Google uses something Oracle owns" so Oracle should win this case

Now of course, you can apply some deeper logic to uphold Google's stance. But that's the problem --- how "far" or how "deeper" do you expect the higher courts to look into this issue? Deep enough to understand Google's position?

<comment><USER31> > You can simply say, 1) "Oracle owns Java" 2) "APIs are part of Java" 3) > "Google uses Java APIs" 4) Therefore, "Google uses something Oracle owns" so > Oracle should win this case

You _could_ , but neither CAFC nor DoJ _did_ , so that's irrelevant.

> Now of course, you can apply some deeper logic to uphold Google's stance.

Or you could apply deeper logic and still uphold Oracle's stance. Now, I tend to think the District Court decision here was more correct than the CAFC decision (or the DoJ position), but I don't think as a legal decision its as _clearly_ correct as some people would like to claim -- even though its also the outcome I prefer independent of what is correct under the current law.

> But that's the problem --- how "far" or how "deeper" do you expect the > higher courts to look into this issue?

Fairly deeply on the legal side -- that's what appellate courts exist to do, and they are generally fairly good at it (though they do fail spectacularly at times, but not _worse_ than trial courts, though with higher courts they get more attention for it) -- perhaps less so on the factual side (again, this is by design -- and why appellate courts often resolve legal disputes and send the factual matters back to the trial courts to resolve given the legal clarification.)

> Deep enough to understand Google's position?

I don't think the CAFC or DoJ failed to _understand_ Google's position. Disagreement isn't the same thing as lack of understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why not let it happen? Why not just completely destroy everyone's understanding of how permission to use certain types of code work, and then force everyone to just abandon the US copyright system for software completely? Let this happen and just let it destroy the system from the inside out.

</comment><comment><USER33> Naming things is one of the hard things in Computer Science.

</comment><comment><USER34> Will be interesting to see if Microsoft sought a license from Apple for Project Islandwood...

</comment><comment><USER35> Seems ridiculous; my analogy: organization of volume of books; or classification of library; I can use any classification. I can go to Library of Congress; copy they way they organize their books; and implement same in my library. Why can't you do that with Open Source code?

</comment><comment><USER36> I know this has been said a lot of times already but I don't think we can say this enough. If Oracle wins, this will set a terrible precedent for software development. If any software company deserves to be qualified as evil, it is Oracle without a doubt.

</comment><comment><USER37> Can someone give the background of why Google did what they did? Did they want to block Java compatibility or was that a side effect of some other objective?

<comment><USER38> History very approximately:

> In November 2006, Sun open-sources Java.

>In November 2007, Sun approves Google's use of Java in Android.

> April of 2009, Oracle Corp. announced that it would be acquiring Sun

Subsequently Oracle figured it could get some money from Google by requiring a license fee

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-real-history-of-java-and- an...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-real-history-of-java-and-android-as- told-by-google/)

It gets more complicted though, see [http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-real- history-of-java-and-an...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-real-history-of- java-and-android-as-told-by-google/) and a bunch of other stuff

<comment><USER37> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Where does this leave SQL?

</comment><comment><USER40> The apostrophe should be removed from the heading.

</comment><comment><USER33> APIs should be trademarked.

</comment><comment><USER21> What happened of Judge Aslop [1]? As a foreigner, he's the only ever positive story I have heard about the American judicial system, since he was in charge of the Google vs Oracle trial, and he reproduced code himself to understand what was so unique about it. In fact, he decided there was only way to code some things, and ruled that the very small method everyone was arguing against can't be patented/copyrighted. And he ruled Oracle's API couldn't be copyrighted. So do this contradict his ruling?

[1] [http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-william-alsup-master-of- the-c...](http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-william-alsup-master-of-the-court- and-java/)

<comment><USER41> > So do this contradict his ruling?

Yes. As mentioned in the linked article, the Federal Circuit court overturned Alsup's ruling. The Alsup ruling came from a district court, and the Federal Circuit has the authority to overturn it. From there, the question can go on to the US Supreme Court.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> ""[Google]'s Section 102(b) argument also suffers from a broader flaw." (this sentence transitions from the Administration's rejection of Google's suggestion that declaring code is inherently more functional and less expressive than implementing code to the DoJ's agreement with Oracle's lawyers on the purpose of Section 102(b))"

That Google would be in the right by copying the declaring code of 27(!) different namespaces is nothing but crazy.

[http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/05/us-dept-of-justice- finds-...](http://www.fosspatents.com/2015/05/us-dept-of-justice-finds- googles.html)

<comment><USER43> That FOSS Patents piece is the best commentary I've seen on the subject, thanks for bringing to my attention.

<comment><USER44> Ah, Florian Mueller, a paid Oracle shill.

<comment><USER43> I don't care how involved he is in the case, I read his writing and I found it to be illuminating -- far more so than anything else I'd read on the subject.

You can happily take the opposing view simply because he is involved and is probably biased, but that will make your viewpoint almost entirely baseless.

<comment><USER31> Mueller has a history of doing an excellent job working things that aren't actually reasonable to informed parties that seem illuminating to people that aren't informed. It's actually a fairly key skill for a professional propagandist. I haven't actually read the piece on question here, but appearing illuminating and actually being deceptive propaganda are not mutually exclusive traits.

<comment><USER43> if that's the case, it's the job of the 'informed' guys to write similarly illuminating counter-arguments, because I've not found any yet.

<comment><USER31> The illusion of illumination is greatly enhanced by having a strong guiding narrative, which is easy with propaganda, harder with reality.

<comment><USER43> You cannot cry propaganda without providing some evidence as to what is misleading or factually incorrect, because otherwise anyone can say anything is propaganda.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help a hacker and he will help you - <AUTHOR>

I've recently graduated from comp. sci. and have been playing with node.js, real-time stuff(and quite good at it! I can show you something I've developed) and I'm like, average in rails. I can also program in anything you want and have a interest into functional programming languages(like erlang or clojure).
I can also program in most languages(who can't?), draw(average) and... I'm a fast learner!
I can also do some jQuery/css... well, I'm basically the jack of all trades master of none.
I'm also interested in computer vision and my final college project were a low-cost interactive blackboard(read: mouse to a projection) using computer vision(opencv + emulated windows mouse events) in c++.
Videos of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFudPjEvBmE (the full software, including a module to help a teacher in the classroom with presentations etc). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v4GuwW63dE (me drawing in paint with it).
I'm a bad manager of myself(who isn't?) and I don't have a good network where I live in order to keep me motivated in building something, so...
I want to work for free, full-time(more than 8 hours a day), for you, in any of the tecnologies listed above or anything interesting to create a portfolio and get really good into something.
You can contact me at: t at art-is-t.me or of course, post here.
Of course, if you are looking for a half-assed tech cofounder into something stupid, feel free to contact me.
Or even if you want just to talk... :) I'm upto anything cool!
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Have you thought about contributing to one or more open-source projects? That's a great way to meet fellow hackers, hone your skills, contribute to the community, and begin making a name for yourself.</comment>


Raspberry Pi Clones Match the Connectors, But Boost the Firepower  - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux.com/news/embedded-mobile/mobile-linux/771048-raspberry-pi-clones-match-the-connectors-but-boost-the-firepower

<comment><USER2> It would have been interesting to see the power consumption compared. The Raspberry PI model A can be operated below 0.5A, in some cases 0.25A, which makes it attractive for mobile installations. How do the other two boards compare, do you know?</comment>


At Facebook, it's Zuckerberg's way or the highway, experts say - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/21/at-facebook-its-zuckerbergs-way-or-the-highway-experts-say.html <comment><USER2> following up on

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11941457) ( Mark Zuckerberg Votes to Keep Peter Thiel on Facebook Board )

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11812261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11812261) ( Zuckerberg Needs to Dump Peter Thiel from the Facebook Board )

</comment><comment><USER3> Apparently at Oculus, too, going by the latest a-hole moves of locking down the platform.</comment>


Semi-complete list of startup accelerator programs (any more to add?) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shedd.us/post/321987608/help-for-startups <comment><USER2> I'd like to suggest some of Michigan's programs for your review: University of Michigan's "Techarb" Business Accelerator (<http://cfe.engin.umich.edu/businessaccelerator>), Ann Arbor SPARK Business Accelerator ([http://www.annarborusa.org/start-ups/spark-business- accelera...](http://www.annarborusa.org/start-ups/spark-business- accelerator/)) and Wayne State's SmartStart Business Development Program (<http://techtownwsu.org/business/smartstart.php>)

I've interacted with each of these program on some level and can provide more information later if desired.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the Ann Arbor SPARK program, does this operate as an early stage accelerator program or as more of a conventional incubator?

<comment><USER2> Each of the programs listed are geared toward very early-stage companies and provide many different types of support functions. Each program (I believe) offers grants or loans, office space, and mentorship. At its current state, the Techarb is more of a conventional incubator with outside entities providing financial and mentorship functions, however it is intended to be grown into a full accelerator in the near future by U-M (it was created only a few months ago and just getting off the ground). I'm less familiar with the SmartStart's program (I only visited once), however I believe it offers a full range of early-stage startup assistance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would quite enjoy seeing additional data.. founding of new 'accelerators' over time, number of companies funded, companies/year, etc. Primarily when they were founded. Last I checked, I found only 3.

Would also be fun to see an evolution tree starting from YC. It's too soon for weak variations to have died off yet, but I reckon we could check back in a decade..

<comment><USER4> And the most important statistic, success rate.

<comment><USER5> That's toughie. Is a success counted when the first company does well, or if the entrepreneur goes on to make a ton of amazing companies, giving some stock to the accelerator and/or having them involved in the process?

<comment><USER6> You could count it by the failure rate instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Compiling further detailed information on the programs would certainly be interesting and I'm sure that prospective applicants would find it helpful. Given the different models used by the programs, it would be an interesting endeavor to try to consolidate and compare the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We need a TheFunded for incubators and accelerators. A site that allows founders to rate these programs and their interactions with them similar to what <http://www.thefunded.com/> does for venture capitalists.

<comment><USER8> TheFunded lists most of them already.

<comment><USER7> My apologies, I searched for YCombinator not "Y Combinator" and didn't find it. I see it now. With so many incubators it's a natural and useful extension for TheFunded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone have any experience with any of these firms?

</comment><comment><USER10> With YC moved to CA it looks like the three in Boston are Start@Spark, Summer@Highland Capital, and TechStars. Anyone familiar with them?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure about Start@Spark or Highland's program, but I think you'll find a lot of folks familiar with TechStars on HN. Having just announced the third program in Seattle, they're also rapidly increasing the number of companies that they assist annually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for this list. I had no idea about the Providence RI one. Although new, it's still interesting.</comment>


How Wedgies.com Sidestepped a Domain Squatting Felon to buy their dotcom - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/12/how-wedgies-sidestepped-a-domain-squatter-to-offer-sharable-online-surveys/

<comment><USER2> Isn't the title misleading?

\- The guy wasn't domain squatting at all.

\- They weren't Wedgies.com (they were Wedgi.es)

\- They didn't sidestep him at all. They negotiated fairly.

If you like domain stories, check out Klouts.. (Which I actually prefered to this story). I kind of felt mislead after reading this artciel (albeit it was an enjoyable story).

<http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/29/how-klout-got-klout-com/>

<comment><USER3> The title is also misleading because it claims they "sidestepped" the owner. They did not sidestep the owner at all; they tracked him down and paid for the domain.Sidestepping would have been filing a complaint with ICANN about the lack of proper contact information. Which would have been cheaper and possibly quite effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >In a final twist, the rental fee on his ankle tracking bracelet was up, and he needed money in a hurry to avoid being sent back to jail — hence the frantic request for $500. This was getting weirder and weirder.

So let me get this straight: the government requires ankle tracking bracelets for parolees, outsources these bracelets to the private sector, and then requires the parolees themselves to pay the rental fees out of pocket. And since the parolees themselves have virtually no bargaining power, this is a privatization scenario where market forces are almost entirely absent.

Just brilliant.

<comment><USER5> Yes, quite true, this is all before trial too, at least was the case with a friend.

<comment><USER4> Well, in this case, it was after trial since he's a parolee, but still. Parole is not some special gift we give to inmates out of the kindness of our hearts; it's an institution that we have because it provides benefits to society to gradually reintegrate felons into society, and this kind of braindead policy allows private companies to parasitize that institution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is anyone else disturbed by the idea that the host provider offered to "turn off the DNS to the site" for some person just because they contacted him? Then passed along the domain owner's personal info to that person? Hopefully they asked for permission before handing out personal info. But how did they explain the outage to their customer?

"Oh, we shut you down because somebody we don't know wants to talk to you. Do you mind if we give him your current email address? By the way, what is your current email address?"

Seems it might be of service to several people to know who this provider is.

<comment><USER7> unless they transfered it elsewhere, looks like Godaddy..

getting someone else's domain shut down though is unbelievably fuk'd up.. this alone turns me off of the site

       Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
       Domain Name: WEDGIES.COM
          Created on: 19-Feb-99
          Expires on: 19-Feb-14
          Last Updated on: 04-May-12

<comment><USER6> Since the domain changed hands we can't assume they are the original host (correct term? registrar?) in this case. If I had bought a domain and the provider had done that then the first thing I would have done is switch it to someone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "We've already found that people who don't know each other ask the same questions," says Jacobson. "Tupac vs Biggie, East Coast vs. West Coast… What's more interesting though, are the answers to the question, 'Of people who prefer Tupac, do they prefer skiing or snowboarding?' These are the nuggets that marketers dream of."

That's basically what <http://www.correlated.org> does.

But I don't think they'll find that marketers are clamoring for this type of data. And I think Correlated does a good job of showing why.

<comment><USER9> Hunch also did something like this... and sold for a pretty good amount. So perhaps, depending on how it's implemented, it may meet some folks' needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Between "Unfortunately, the domain was harder to come by than a tequila shot at an AA meeting" and "This is the digital version of "smoking him out" (like you would a rabbit in a hole, not a pothead in a dorm room)." I couldn't stop laughing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Online surveys need to be "less boxer and more brief". Wedgies is doing a damn good job of solving that if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER12> Good time meeting these guys on the doer bus. Wedgies has some legs to it.

</comment><comment><USER13> explanation of their service reminds me of thumb: <http://thumb.it/>

although I guess thumb is targeted at everyone, wedgies more business/marketers

</comment><comment><USER14> Is what we did terrible?

<comment><USER15> If you got the DNS turned off on one of my domains for no good reason, I'd be more than a little angry - at you and at my host.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. However, the domain pointed to basically a landing page that said "I want to sell this domain, contact me"

<comment><USER16> Who puts up a "Please contact me" page without any way of contacting themselves?

Although this does somewhat excuse the smoke-out; although, couldn't the host simply have contacted the person themselves?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

<comment><USER2> I think that the disconnect between science and business that he alludes to is not entirely accidental; it is a form of short-term, selfish risk mitigation.

The benefits of the organizational system Dan Pink lays out include increased satisfaction, increased autonomy, and increased productivity and increase responsibility. There are drawbacks though; things such as increased workload and increased responsibility, and a sense of decreased security.

This last point is extremely problematic. The current primary purpose of this thing called _a job_ is not to be productive, creative or anything positive. A job is aligned as an mechanism to avoid a negative; you have a job to protect the security and comfort of you and your family, and perhaps to protect your sense of social class. The other purposes are tangential except to where they help distance you further from the negative.

In the case of attempting to avoid a negative, a road map on where to go comes in extremely handy. By following the map, you are reasonably well assured not to fall off any cliffs. This is where incentives and requirements come in for the business world; they are like a road map on how to keep your job.

However, by following the road map, you also miss the chance to discover parts of the area few if any other people have explored. Where you miss the lows, you also miss the highs. But, when you are scared almost motionless of the cliffs, this would appear a net win. So goes the thinking: new discoveries are interesting, but cliffs are deadly.

Then someone like Dan Pink comes along and says "you'd be happier and more productive if you had more autonomy," and you think he is completely insane. More autonomy means more responsibility, and more responsibility means less to separate oneself from the short-term negatives. You don't give a damn about happiness; your focus is entirely on survival. Your intrisic motivation is to follow the extrinsic motivations, because anything else seems like suicide.

The problem that Dan didn't allude to that I will is that by focussing on survival, you completely screw both. Where people assume this sort of extrinsic motivation, and the lower productivity that comes with it, a feedback loop kicks in. Lower productivity begets lower revenue begets lower available cash begets lower headcount, and repeat until either the equation stabilizes or everyone is gone. The difference is that the employees remained another six months or so, and no one in the future will hold them responsible for the death of the organization. No surprise, they constructed an entire organization around not being held responsible for anything.

Hell, even as a society we don't -- at least in the USA. It just occurred to me; if you need proof of that, look no further than our unemployment insurance system. The entire premise of that system is that, if you were laid off from an employer, it was through no fault of your own. The system even encourages you to get back to a place where you can't be held at fault again, and threatens to cut benefits if you aren't actively looking. If you were fired, in many states you don't get UI. If you quit, even fewer _if any_ provide UI. If a business you built goes bankrupt, you are likewise screwed.

The entire incentive system in this country is based around cowering in a cubicle, because everyone is convinced the risks are an absolute certainty, and outside of a narrowly incentivized path there is no hope for survival.

As I mentioned above, the problem with this is that it screws us in the long term _really badly_. We end up running like an extremely badly tuned engine, operating at some small fraction of our total possible productivity. We make ourselves less rich than we might otherwise be, we make ourselves _less_ secure because we flirt much closer with the break even point of productivity in a monetary sense, and we make ourselves _less_ happy because we are all abjectly aware of our own precarious condition. I don't have the data for this, but I honestly wonder if cracks in this precarious balance aren't what drove some of this recession we are now in.

For what its worth, this is where I look very positively upon the startups of the world. To all of them on HN who are listening, huge props to all of you. Likewise, props to the other companies who have figured this out. You all give me the hope that by serving as a testbed for some of Dan Pink's ideas -- perhaps by necessity --, you push all the people who drag their feet into the better world they are so desperately afraid of.

 _sigh_. And sorry about the length of this; it would probably take me some time to edit it down to a smaller size, and I'd rather get the ideas out there now.

</comment><comment><USER3> The material in this talk doesn't only apply to business. imo, every parent could benefit from considering an angle other than rewards and punishments.

<comment><USER4> At least one school figured it out 88 years ago: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School>

_"Summerhill is noted for its philosophy that children learn best with freedom from coercion. All lessons are optional, and pupils are free to choose what to do with their time."_

The idea that coercion stifles creativity is an old one and there have always been people on the fringes of society who know it. Until recently, the western world has been able to make progress with the factory model, leaving the creative work to those few fringe people, but it looks like that has run its course.

It may be that the next model is _everybody_ doing creative work, but I have no idea what that would actually look like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The guy is an amazing speaker. Look at his body language, his build-up and his timing. A lot of people could learn from that.

<comment><USER6> The idea was more interesting than his speaking, at least for me. I felt like Walter from The Big Lebowski - "... I _did_ not know that...".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The talk claims to be about _motivation_ , but his main piece of evidence only points to a link with spontaneous creativity. If you reran the candle experiment but gave the participants the problem statement 24 hours in advance, I would wager that the incentivized group would be more _motivated_ to think through the problem the night before.

<comment><USER2> _If you reran the candle experiment but gave the participants the problem statement 24 hours in advance, I would wager that the incentivized group would be more motivated to think through the problem the night before._

Motivation is a vector, not a scalar. The problem isn't that the people who are incentivized by reward aren't motivated, it is that the motivation they are given makes them _behave_ a different way. In the case of largely creative work, the motivation they are given modifies their behavior in entirely suboptimal ways.

It's not just that you motivate people, it is what you motivated them _toward_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its not just the business world. Most of our academic system is built around carrots and sticks. Exams and tests are the primary basis that determine our academic success. Creativity is the last thing that will help you in a timed exam. You have to get to the correct answer in a short amount of time. It is very mechanical.

The same system of measuring competence seeps into the corporate world. Job interviews, especially technical interviews are very similar to the exams, maybe worse.

</comment><comment><USER9> This kind of stuff that Mr. Pink (someone should invite him out to dinner and find out if he doesn't tip :P) mentioned and guys like Alfie Kohn harp on about is intriguing, but there is one huge hole in the plot that I have never seen them address: The Problem of the Paycheck.

The studies that are being referenced lead naturally to the hypothesis "what would happen if I didn't give my employees any kind of artificial incentive at all?" (let's assume that they are all knowledge-work employees, say programmers for example).

The studies referenced in the talk and in Alfie Kohn's books suggest that you would see an increase in productivity, since that pesky, harmful incentive has moved out of the way.

Common sense (and experience, should anyone be foolish enough to actually try it) suggests that your workers will simply walk.

So while I think there is a lot of valuable insights to be gained from these experiments (e.g. people work like hell when something has meaning for them - see the works of Viktor Frankl for more on this), I think there's too much of a tendency to oversimplify and say "incentives are bad, mmkay?"

<comment><USER10> Actaully he addressed the paycheck problem quite directly: pay people decently, fairly, and then the team can focus properly without being distracted with worries about money (lack thereof or competing for bonuses). The logical extension of this is not "don't pay people" but pay everyone well enough and then ask them to impress you.

<comment><USER9> OK then that naturally leads to a slightly different hypothesis: take the candle problem, but have 3 groups: a control group that is paid nothing, a group that is paid "decently and fairly", and a group that is paid according to incentives.

<comment><USER11> The idea isn't that a group is paid vs unpaid.

Salary, in this case, is not the type of incentive we're talking about. Having a decent salary is just to get the employee willing to work - not as an incentive to work at max capacity.

What we're talking about, really, is already past salary: is a group of fairly paid people more efficient and creative when motivated financially (say, by extra bonuses or salary increases) or by promises of autonomy (say, 20% time).

Thus, the candle problem, when placed in the real world, would have three groups: a control group which is paid 'decently and fairly', and a group that is paid 'decently and fairly' and is given financial incentives beyond that, and a group that is payed 'decently and fairly' and is given autonomy as an incentive.

<comment><USER9> _Thus, the candle problem, when placed in the real world, would have three groups: a control group which is paid 'decently and fairly', and a group that is paid 'decently and fairly' and is given financial incentives beyond that, and a group that is payed 'decently and fairly' and is given autonomy as an incentive._

That's fine, but you still need a control group that is given no compensation at all as a baseline.

<comment><USER11> Not if that type of compensation is irrelevant to what you're testing. That would be like having a control group which wasn't fed.

<comment><USER9> A valid point, however not providing such a control group in this case would mean that you're simply assuming that your definition of 'decent and fair payment' is accurate, which is quite a large assumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This might be the most annoying TED speaker ever (come to think of it, the only one).

He might have something valuable to say but his voice and attitude are just too aggravatating to keep listening.

<comment><USER13> I disagree, I thought he spoke well. And at one point he got very passionate, and that's simply the way he expresses himself. It was refreshing to see.

<comment><USER14> yes, he talked very well.

Still, I had to pause and rewind the video several times, because he talked too fast. Thats because several links sprung up in my head, and ideas came.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It explains very nicely the average case. For people like the HN or TED audience and Google employees autonomy could be really effective motor. Yet among them there could be some individuals that really work better given carrot and stick.

I think one nice example in which autonomy works really well is academia. Neither there are big salaries for professors, nor they are dependent of a boss (in case they got tenured).

</comment><comment><USER16> There's another problem no one has raised here, which is the problem of recruiting the best people. If you have the most exciting business, sure you can recruit great people. But for a lot of important-yet-boring businesses, incentives are the only place you can compete. So do you sacrifice your current employee's productivity or your recruiting potential?

</comment><comment><USER17> Counterexample: the netflix prize.

<comment><USER18> Two factors cause the Netflix prize to be an exception to the rule:

1) The prize was so large as to throw usual rules of motivation out of the window. Anyone would attempt almost anything for $1 million.

2) The prize is a once-off, not an individual form of motivation. There's only one prize and to get it means prestige, beating others. The competition element counts for a lot. If your boss offers $10 to all workers who beat a certain quota, that's not the same thing.

<comment><USER17> I think that there's something to either one or both of your arguments, and that there are lots of further arguments:

3) The "candle experiment" applies only to medium-scale creative tasks

4) The "candle experiment" is one of a small class of lateral thinking problems for which monetary reward is negatively correlated with success

5) The "candle experiment" result only holds on tasks that last a short time

My question is, which hold, what's your evidence, and what experiments should be done next? I can think of a bunch, so if anybody wants to fund some research, let me know :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought this was great. I typed up a few summary notes that I can refer back to on it: <http://philfreo.com/blog/interesting-ted-talk-on-motivation/>

</comment><comment><USER20> When he mentioned the experiments where monetary reward is shown to stifle creative problem solving, it made me think of the frequently quoted advice: do what you love and the money will come. I wonder if there is a link there?

<comment><USER21> I think a lot of old proverbs have a significant amount of truth in them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this apply to goals you set for yourself? I've always been very goal- oriented, and I record and track my goals. I review and adjust them as I go, to try and avoid becoming a slave to some decision I made five years ago, but are goals still likely to end up blinding you to creative possibilities because you're too focused on what you already see?

</comment><comment><USER23> CEOs and analysts/associates at our fine US financial institutions are probably going to be a little miffed by this talk.

<comment><USER24> I hope they begin to reconsider their model of giving multi-million dollar bonuses and 'guaranteed bonuses.' The TED speaker pointed out that when incentivized, workers' range of thought focused rather than thinking about the big picture.

A great deal of the current meltdown was caused by focusing on the immediate task of making the day's trades, but missing the looming crisis of fundamentals. Some called this, "picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer."

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> relation to hackers (esr) [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral- bazaar/homestead...](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral- bazaar/homesteading/ar01s19.html)

<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html></comment>


Caffeine: Livecoding environment for web browsers, Node.js, and WebAssembly - <AUTHOR> https://caffeine.js.org/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. The welcome page is unfortunately not very readable, gray text on another shade of gray background.

Not sure I quite understand what this does, where does it store the changes you edit on the browser?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it stores it in IndexedDB but there are other backends as well. I didn't look too closely how it handles persistence. It was something I came across while doing some research on smalltalk. Didn't pursue it any further other than thinking it was an interesting project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 25 years ago or so I was introduced to a Smalltalk and VisualAge. I would not be able to put up more than two lines of Smalltalk right now but back then I created some UI interfaces and non trivial software in the amount of time that floored me. Smalltalk and VisualAge were way more advanced than anything I was working with back then (think Turbo C++ or AIX). Not sure what happened to all of this, but it looks like there are efforts from few remaining enthusiasts on that front.

My best guess as to what happened is that IBM likely lost interest in Smalltalk and VisualAge as a strategic direction. Also, even now all the efforts I see on that front cling to the design aesthetic of the OS/2 of the early 90s which does not help the cause either.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can barely read that webpage. Needs more contrast.

<comment><USER5> Just add caffeine to it and do a live edit

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, a live coding web based Smalltalk environment! What a great topic for a tech discussion! And maybe a discussion on how this could sort of thing could be the future - the original dream of Sir Tim Berners-Lee of a real "read write" web, where people are no longer passive consumers of content pushed on them by large corporations?

Instead - 5 separate comments complaining about the colors used on the first landing page, and one comment complaining about its choice of name. Sigh. ( edit - this video might be a better intro to Caffeine - [https://vimeo.com/286872152](https://vimeo.com/286872152) )

<comment><USER7> I agree - I've been excited about this sort of thing ever since the early days of asm.js (now webasm), not to mention the Internet Archive's classic game collection.

In addition to this Squeak (et al.) implementation, recent HN discussions have covered web browser implementations of Smalltalk-80 as well as BBC BASIC and Multics. I'd really like to see more of this; for example, it should be easy to make a browser version of Oberon - I'm sure someone has done it already.

I think there are lots of great opportunities for creating modern programming environments (Pharo...) and also making interactive, usable versions of important historical environments such as Smalltalk-80 or UNIX.

<comment><USER8> [https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/](https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am tempted to experiment a bit with web programming - perhaps I'll create a simple game or something, just for fun.

I haven't developed for the web in a long time. What would you suggest as the best language and platform to do that?

</comment><comment><USER10> Gave up after trying to read the first sentence. Great color scheme.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thats one of the worst pages to promote your product, unreadable.

</comment><comment><USER12> Text contained in the apps is hard to read, very blurry on HiDPI/retina displays.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure how well Morphic deals with HiDPI. Presumably it should be fixable, though the performance could drop.

Of course the beautiful part is that the rendering engine is written in Smalltalk, so anyone can fix it in the environment itself. ;-)

I think there is also an alternative UI that uses DOM text and widgets? Note the bidirectional JavaScript bridge allows you to access the DOM easily. Presumably DOM text and widgets would render fine in HiDPI mode.

Personally I'd be fine with some sharp bitmap fonts and UI elements; bitmap fonts work great for programming, and they are quick to render, fun, and nostalgic (also there are some beautiful classical bitmap fonts created for the Alto, Smalltalk-80, Macintosh, etc..)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What on earth am I looking at?

<comment><USER3> This is supposed to be a webpage that you can edit live, in place, in Smalltalk programming environment.

No surprise that you are confused given the design of from quarter of century ago, and ideas behind it and the programming language were relegated to a very small community of enthusiasts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Which source languages does it support?

<comment><AUTHOR> It uses SqueakJS so in theory it supports whatever SqueakJS supports: [https://squeak.js.org/](https://squeak.js.org/).

> SqueakJS executes Squeak in a web page without a plugin. It is a fully > capable virtual machine implemented in pure JavaScript running unmodified > Squeak images. Squeak is a modern implementation of Smalltalk, the original > dynamic object-oriented programming environment. It runs bit-identically on > virtually any platform, and now in the web browser, too.

<comment><USER15> I had not seen SqueakJS before, cool idea.

I have played with Amber, which is a mature Smalltalk development system in a browser experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know naming can be difficult, but "Caffeine" is already taken and well known.

[http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/](http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/)

<comment><USER17> Not to mention [https://www.caffeine.tv/](https://www.caffeine.tv/)

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I remembered that one and at first I thought this one had something to do with livestreaming coding.</comment></comment></comment>


Highway Networks - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00387 <comment><USER2> It sounds cool, but they don't show any performance benchmarks. (In an interesting demonstration of both how fast this field is moving and how it's limited in part by computational constraints, they do say they're working on one... but it's only trained partway as they were writing this up!)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is similar to how the cortex routes information through the 6 cortical layers - a cortical column. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_column](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_column))</comment>


Mini-Microsoft: A Microsoft Without Sinofsky? - <AUTHOR> http://minimsft.blogspot.fr/2012/11/a-microsoft-without-sinofsky.html <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting comments in Mini's post, presumably by real softies.

This one is interesting: _I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the EU mess yet. Sinofski was given responsibility by the board for ensuring that MS stayed compliant with the agreement regarding browser choice in Windows. Now, MS is facing a possible 10 BILLION dollar enema by the EU because Sinofski couldn't be bothered by something as trivial as a check box in Windows. Good riddance._

The MS lack of compliance on the EU browser directive was scandalous. If SS was in charge of that he deserves to go.

</comment><comment><USER2> Previous discussion here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4776435></comment>


Who Is Ready for Baseball's Robot Umpires? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/who-is-ready-for-baseballs-robot-umpires-1462749974 <comment><AUTHOR> > Proposal: If you're sitting courtside or behind home plate and get caught > looking at your phone during game action, you must relinquish your seat to a > kid.

Sentences like this make me wish every site had a highlight feature like medium.com --- great proposal!</comment>


What "Stranger Things" Didn't Get Quite-So-Right About the Energy Department - <AUTHOR> http://energy.gov/articles/what-stranger-things-didn-t-get-quite-so-right-about-energy-department <comment><USER2> Looks like somebody missed the point. Hawkins Lab was not an actual DoE installation, but instead presumed DoE affiliation was a cover (after all, MKULTRA was a CIA program with aid from the Navy & Air Force, not a DoE program -- it would be beyond their remit).</comment>


No, your service isn't "Open" (what's wrong with Social industry) - <AUTHOR> http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/not-future-i-signed-part-three-no-your-service-isnt-%E2%80%9Copen%E2%80%9D <comment><AUTHOR> Actually, it makes more sense to read up series: [http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/not-future-i-signed- part-t...](http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/not-future-i-signed-part-two- fixing-centralized-architecture-madness) [http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/not-future-i-signed- part-1...](http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/not-future-i-signed- part-1-fixing-social-networks-fantasy-valuation-bullshit)</comment>


The Following Code Causes Segfault in Clang - <AUTHOR> http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=20516 <comment><USER2> If your are looking for code to break a C compiler, you can try my tool Quest [https://github.com/lindig/quest](https://github.com/lindig/quest). It tries to to generate code that shows that a C compiler handles parameter passing wrong. I usually run it in a loop, like here on Mac OS X 10.9.4 witch gcc:

        :quest $ gcc --version
         Configured with: --prefix=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr  --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
         Apple LLVM version 5.1 (clang-503.0.40) (based on LLVM 3.4svn)
         Target: x86_64-apple-darwin13.3.0
         Thread model: posix

        :quest $ while true; do
         > ./main.native -test gcc -n 1 > foo.c
         > gcc -O2 -o foo foo.c
         > ./foo || break
         > echo -n .
         > done
         ................................................................
         ................................................................
         .................................................
         Assertion failed: (b32 == b43), function callee_b0f, file foo.c, line 128.
         Abort trap: 6

This means the tool found C code where parameter passing is not compiled properly. It took about 10 seconds to find this. The test case is pretty small:

        :quest $ wc foo.c
    	 140     444    3485 foo.c

The generated code that where the assertion checks that parameters are received correctly looks like this:

        static
        union bt8 *
        callee_b0f(struct bt4 *bp7,
    	double *bp8,
    	struct bt6 bp9,
    	float bp10,
    	struct bt7 bp11,
    	double bp12,
    	short int bp13,
    	...)
        {
    	va_list ap;
    	typedef int bd0;
    	typedef struct bt0 bd1;
    	typedef int bd2;
    	typedef union bt3 bd3;
    	bd0 b41;
    	bd1 b42;
    	bd2 b43;
    	bd3 b44;

    	/* seed: 2040 */
    	va_start(ap, bp13);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b34 == bp7);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b35 == bp8);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b18 == bp9.b24.b18);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b19 == bp9.b24.b19);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b20 == bp9.b24.b20);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b21 == bp9.b24.b21);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b22 == bp9.b24.b22);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b23 == bp9.b24.b23);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b25 == bp9.b25);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b26 == bp9.b26);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b37 == bp10);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b38.b27 == bp11.b27);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b39 == bp12);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b40 == bp13);
    	b41 = va_arg(ap, bd0);
    	b42 = va_arg(ap, bd1);
    	b43 = va_arg(ap, bd2);
    	b44 = va_arg(ap, bd3);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b30 == b41);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b31.b0 == b42.b0);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b32 == b43);
    	QUEST_ASSERT(b33.b10.b1 == b44.b10.b1);
    	va_end(ap);
    	return b29;
        }

</comment><comment><USER3> While we're at segfaulting compiler's, here's what I found just a few days ago:

        python -S -c 'print("void f(){} int main(){return (" + "*"*10**7 + "f)();}")' | gcc -xc -

(This is legal C -- look it up. Don't argue with me over the practical relevance of this please)

<comment><USER4> I will point out that there is a section called "Translation limits" that discusses how compilers can't really be excepted to compile every legal program, because they run in a machine with a finite amount of memory.

> Both the translation and execution environments constrain the implementation > of language translators and libraries. The following summarizes the > language-related environmental limits on a conforming implementation; the > library-related limits are discussed in clause 7.

> The implementation shall be able to translate and execute at least one > program that contains at least one instance of every one of the following > limits:

> 4095 characters in a logical source line

Of course, it notes:

> Implementations should avoid imposing fixed translation limits whenever > possible.

Note that these aren't strict limits, and don't really have an effect on the legality of your program, I feel it's more of a discussion of the limits imposed by reality, and what compilers must handle at a bare minimum.

And honestly, I would hope most modern compilers would do better than the noted limits and I'd also hope for a decent error message, not "gcc: internal compiler error: Segmentation fault (program cc1)" (which is what the program generates).

Last,

> This is legal C

Is it? You're returning the result of a function that returns void in a function that returns int (and even if main were void, I still don't think that's legal). Were gcc able to handle the abusive number of stars, it would say,

        <stdin>: In function 'main':
        <stdin>:1:23: error: void value not ignored as it ought to be

(which is what it says if you remove some of the stars.) Granted, this can be corrected, and your example will still cause the same output. (Which doesn't seem nearly as interesting as the linked C++ code. I'd _like_ to know why that causes a segfault. With yours, I'd like to know why you were doing that.)

<comment><USER3> You are right in that the return is wrong and accidentally stayed in during example reduction down to a smaller version. Without it, the result is still the same.

The reason I was testing this was a discussion on IRC about functions decaying to pointer to functions, such that they are endlessly dereferenceable. The snippet above crashes GCC -- hard.

So, while the implementation is free not to handle 10^7 dereferencing operations, I'm not sure a hard crash is the right answer.

Here's a version without the return and using a lambda to shorten it further:

        python -S -c 'print("int main(){(" + "*"*10**7 + "+[]{})();}")' | g++ -std=c++11 -xc++ -

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hmm...

        Unable to find instantiation of declaration!
        UNREACHABLE executed at SemaTemplateInstantiateDecl.cpp:4384!

Not quite so unreachable...

[https://gist.github.com/cwgreene/d689f010619310dbbc77](https://gist.github.com/cwgreene/d689f010619310dbbc77)

[https://github.com/llvm- mirror/clang/blob/b310439121c875937d...](https://github.com/llvm- mirror/clang/blob/b310439121c875937d78cc49cc969bc1197fc025/lib/Sema/SemaTemplateInstantiateDecl.cpp#L4384)

</comment><comment><USER6> Something I found last week that crashes with clang-503.0.40:

        template<class T> class foo
        {
        public:

            ~ foo()
            {
            }

            foo &operator = (const foo &rhs)
            {
                foo::~foo();
                new (this) foo (rhs);

                return *this;
            }
        };

        int main(int argc, char * argv[])
        {
            foo<int> a, b;
            b = a;
        }

<comment><USER5> This is the same bug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there some legitimate reason to want to have A's destructor called twice on a single instance?

<comment><USER8> Probably not, but the compiler crashing isn't a good way of notifying the user of that!

<comment><USER7> Ah, I didn't realize the segfault was in the compiler itself. The title ("segmentation fault on calling destructor in member function") made it sound like the generated code crashed. Now that there's a gist of a callstack it's clearer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something tells me C++ isn't the best thing to implement a compiler with.

<comment><USER10> I modded you up because clang is written in C++ and even if I didn't know this I'd suspect it because segfaults in languages that are not weakly typed (i.e., C and C++) are incredibly rare.

There are better languages to write compilers in. OCaml is one.

<comment><USER11> C++ probably isn't 'weakly typed', whatever that means.

<comment><USER12> You probably aren't "qualified to make that statement", if you don't know what weak typing is and are too lazy to google it.

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_and_weak_typing)

> In general, these terms do not have a precise definition. Rather, they tend > to be used by advocates or critics of a given programming language, as a > means of explaining why a given language is better or worse than > alternatives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Dutch Police have trained eagles to take out drones - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/1112163033722339329 <comment><USER2> This is a few years old. I wonder how those eagles are holding up!</comment>


The Perpetual Lineup: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America - <AUTHOR> https://www.perpetuallineup.org/ <comment><USER2> another disgusting, warrantless, un-needed and un-asked for imposition of the police against the citizens.</comment>


Startup is giving out free Bitcoin today - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qwpjv/startup_is_giving_out_free_bitcoin_today/

<comment><USER2> Hey Guys. Coinbase is having some issues (they are probably under a lot of load) but we will make sure we redeem everyone!

[http://getcycle.com](http://getcycle.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just received 0.0007 BTC (0.54 USD). I'll take it.</comment>


Windows generates less than a third the profit of iOS + OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/03/ios-os-x-3-5-windows/

<comment><USER2> This was bound to be Apple. They have stuck doggedly to the hardware+software model. Although difficult to begin with, it's this model that has ultimately turned them into Microsoft's butt-kickers. They're continuing to innovate and they now have a mass audience of consumers invested in their ecosystem... enough to drive continued sales of their integrated personal computing environments (iMacs, Mac minis, Macbooks) simply because it all works well together and fits logically (and it's actually good stuff).

Microsoft and Google (and others) aren't failing at this by any means, they simply aren't succeeding as well as Apple are. Perhaps this is because Apple have focused on user/developer experience rather than hardware/software features?</comment>