Apple Acquires Chomp; App Store Search And Discovery To Be Completely Revamped - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/23/apple-chomp/ <comment><USER2> I really hope this means there will be a better way to find games. When I search for "rpg", what I really want is an old school RPG game, you know, where you kill monsters, solve quests and get XP points. Instead, I get a massive amount of MMORPG's (which are not really RPG's at all), and "Do you want to be Chris Brown" applications.

On the same token, when I search for "adventure" games, I really want to find games like Sam & Max or Monkey Island. Instead, I see a whole bunch of kids games, and at best, "find a hidden object" games. Not what I want at ALL.

<http://rpg-site.com/> and <http://toucharcade.com/category/games/adventure/> help, but they still miss a lot of stuff.

Edit: tried out Chomp, it doesn't help. This problem would be ridiculously easy to solve with letting users tag apps

<comment><USER3> "This problem would be ridiculously easy to solve with letting users tag apps"

Are you sure? That would be abused for SEO in about two nanoseconds.

IMHO, the app store has too few categories to put apps in. A richer taxonomy would be better.

<comment><USER4> Also only works if the tags match up to your expectations. It's easy to imagine a perfect world where every old school RPG is tagged with old-school- rpg but that doesn't really seem likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On behalf of all app developers: oh, hell yes.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, this is so needed. As it is now unless it's in the top 100 it does not exist.

<comment><USER7> well - it depends on the category. For games/entertainment this is true, but for productivity etc, a good SEO can make a big difference ( <http://www.slideshare.net/kolinko/app-store-seo-tutorial> )

<comment><USER5> That's true, but their search ranking is weird and kind of broken right now (e.g. company name is indexed; descriptions aren't). It would be great if that got overhauled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How many times did you bought a new app you discovered through Genius? That's why.

<comment><USER9> I can see how it's better (the performance is awesome, searching in iTunes is just sooo damn slow, inflexible and no fun) and it has some cool but obvious tools. I'm just wondering why Apple needs to buy them. Can they really not just copy that?

<comment><USER10> I came here to say how nice of Apple not just bluntly copying Chomp (you know, like widgets, Safari Reader and notifications)...

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's possible to bluntly copy Chomp (if you stay away from copying their aesthetics). All the stuff they do is pretty obvious and standard. It's only special because the App Store search is so terrible.

To me a performance upgrade would be the most valuable thing, I don't think anyone would claim Apple copied Chomp when their search suddenly performs better.

<comment><USER11> But why reinvent the wheel? They saw something they liked, they thought it was better to buy the technology, so they did. Good for Apple and good for Chomp!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hope 'search gigant' Google will fix their discovery system; I find the Android store results, at least for what I search for, biased towards big publishers on the one side and total crap on the other. Usually I use google.com to discover apps and after that I find them in the Market, not the other way around as it should be (find app => search for reviews online). It seems weird that I have to do it like that. In the Appstore I never had that problem.

Same with promotion of my games/apps => Appstore gives you a lot more 'credit' (for lack of a better word) as indie/starter than Market seems to do. Ofcourse the one (inability to discover what you want/need) creates the other (low downloads/sales).

Not sure if that's a glitch on my part somehow, but in the indie communities I 'hang', almost everyone has the same issues.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oh great. So now what am I going to use to search for new apps in Android?

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an interesting development, where better search/discovery technology gets acquired and (hopefully) integrated into the main platform. Apple was able to acquire a company with proven technology, because Apple provides plenty of hooks for third party services to allow them to innovate much faster on search/discovery technologies than iTunes itself can.

Unfortunately for Android Apple is way ahead of Google here, with the iTunes store having an affiliate model for all paid apps, and ways to get the actual appstore listings programmatically. AppBrain and other services that want to provide Android app discovery services have to go through a painful process of getting information about Android apps, and even then it's nearly impossible to know whether a particular app will be available to a certain phone model X running in country Y. In addition, there is no direct way to monetize the leads that can be generated through good discovery algorithms. It's ironic how the more iTunes store in this sense is more open than the Android market.

</comment><comment><USER15> I was going to launch something similar <http://www.appstoretools.com> as a fun little side project this weekend... But if Chomp is worth $50M, maybe "side project" is not the right way to think of it?

<comment><USER16> Their team size was 20. Clearly it wasn't a side project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just tried Chomp.

The sorting makes no sense, looks to be hand-edited or possibly paid for by the apps, and the current App Store sort seems to be better to me.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong part of Chomp? Which section do people like?

<comment><USER18> I agree the sorting right now is crap. I think the idea is that right now chomp cannot grab internal data to sort things, so the idea is to combine the data available on Apple's internal side with some of chomp's concepts and technology. The other thing is that it removes chomp search for Android which makes the gap between Android and iOS app market even larger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What the App store needs is recommendations like Amazon. I'd spend way more money, like I do at Amazon =)

<comment><USER20> It has 'Genius' for App discovery, which recommends apps based on previous purchases. It's well hidden and not very good.

<comment><USER21> I'm curious as to how helpful "Genius" is for you. If I've already bought a to-do app, for example, the odds of me wanting to buy another one are pretty small. And yet, that seems to be the kind of thing that "Genius" always recommends - more of the same kind of app I've already bought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> awesome, finally Apple is going to improve app discovery, because that sucked pretty much. Here's a blogpost I wrote about what Apple should do with the App Store: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3628073>

</comment><comment><USER23> 50 MILLION! Sheesh.

[http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/chomp- chomp...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/chomp-chomp-apple- eats-aussie-startup-for-us50m-20120224-1tsbi.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm really excited to see what Apple comes out with on this. Any thoughts on how long this might take Apple to actually implement any changes to the system?

</comment><comment><USER25> I think something like Amazon's or Netflix's similar products would be great.

</comment><comment><USER26> Kevin Rose was an investor in Chomp, IIRC. Good for him.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this basically better search technology?</comment>


Stripe is giving away free incorporation - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/atlas/status/1029766322542919680?s=19 <comment><AUTHOR> I believe that anybody can use the link - because I do not think that they are legally allowed to limit the offer to only one gender.

The spirit of the offer is to improve the gender balance in technology entrepreneurship. So, if you consider using the link without being one of its intended beneficiaries, then I think it would be polite to share the link with entrepreneurs from underrepresented backgrounds!</comment>


Vectorized execution brings a 10x performance increase for expression evaluation - <AUTHOR> https://pingcap.com/blog/10x-performance-improvement-for-expression-evaluation-made-possible-by-vectorized-execution/ <comment><USER2> I have an 'art/game' project in Rust that uses vectorized expression evaluation to draw random images. It turns the expression tree into a stack machine then evaluates the stack machine with SIMD instructions: [https://github.com/jackmott/evolution/blob/master/src/stack_...](https://github.com/jackmott/evolution/blob/master/src/stack_machine.rs)

The speedup is really big for this case sometimes because not only do you do math 4x/8x/16x faster (depending on instruction set) but you also traverse the stack machine (or tree if you are pure interpreting) 4x/8x/16x less often. The improvement when traversing a tree is extra extra big because of reduced memory hops.

I used a SIMD library I made in Rust, which lets me write the stack machine once, and then run it in SSE2/SSE41 or AVX2 mode. You can select either at runtime or compile time:

[https://github.com/jackmott/simdeez](https://github.com/jackmott/simdeez)

<comment><USER3> Sounds cool, do you have a gallery? I had a similar sounding project inspired by Karl Sims' genetic images that I haven't touched for many years now, but I've been meaning to revive and compile to GLSL or CUDA to get (I expect) much faster eval than is possible with CPU AVX or SSE instructions. Have you considered that route?

<comment><USER2> the readme has some examples: [https://github.com/jackmott/evolution](https://github.com/jackmott/evolution)

Not really enough to show off the full range of possibilities but it is a start. The program is still a WIP I'll release it eventually.

<comment><USER3> Very cool, thanks for the link! The cell & fbm primitives look really useful. The only complex primitive like that I included so far was Perlin turbulence. If you're interested, here's a sampling of mine, [https://flickr.com/photos/biv4b/albums/576553](https://flickr.com/photos/biv4b/albums/576553) I haven't gotten around to any vectorized evaluation yet, it's pure CPU recursive eval, the closest thing I did was to use multiple threads, but it's not particularly fast compared to what a GPU would do.

<comment><USER2> those look really nice, id be interested to know what primitives you have and how you compose them

<comment><USER3> Sure, I happen to have written those things up in a paper; it's a fairly simple & constrained set. The composing part is also fairly standard though I came up with a couple of new mutation strategies that seemed useful. [http://dahart.com/paper/hart_evomusart_2007_paper.pdf](http://dahart.com/paper/hart_evomusart_2007_paper.pdf) You can ignore most of that unless you're interested in animating evolved expressions; the primitives & mutations are summed up in the first few pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always wondered why people assume that the more high level abstractions or high level programming languages you use the less performance you should expect. C is faster than Java, Java will be faster than Python etc. The 'interpretation overhead' is supposed to kill your performance.

But there is one weird exception. You have the APL family, which are a very high at level of abstraction but perform even faster than C. Especially because od using vectorized processing. When you work on vectors of 1000s items in one instruction, you amortize language interpretation cost away and since working with vectors is actually the only natural way to work with computers you get massive performance from those instructions using vectorized instructions or even running on gpu. (All memory access is naturally linear in computing. Random access memory is an unnatural computing myth which comes at enormous cost and has to be hardware accelerated to be even usable).

Similar can be said about databases and SQL. Especially in OLAP processing, where you can linearize your data tables and columns and vectorize your processing. Because it is near impossible to overcome von Neumann bottleneck in traditional single computer languages like C or Java, any SQL or APL will beat the crap out of them if you span the processing over multiple cores and machines.

Days of single machine processing are over and clusters of computers are the future. AWS (and potentially other clouds) are essentially Operating Systems for sich environent. It'd be nice for open source to catch up though.

<comment><USER2> >The 'interpretation overhead' is supposed to kill your performance.

Java isn't interpreted

>You have the APL family, which are a very high at level of abstraction but perform even faster than C.

No they don't. You process an array of numbers in contiguous order in C (or anything else compiled with llvm or gcc or similar) it gets vectorized too. APL may encourage the programmer down the right data layout path for vectorization more often though. Which would certainly be a good quality on modern hardware.

<comment><USER5> > Java isn't interpreted

Correct. Not sure why you're being downvoted.

Java and C# are JIT'd, but only hotspots are aggressively optimized (at least in C#; not sure about Java). So in short runs, prevectorized C code will run faster, but once the optimizer kicks in (with long runs), they'll be neck and neck.

Side note: C# also supports AOT compilation with optimization. Not sure about Java

<comment><USER6> C frequently cannot vectorize without explicit hints. This is because with pointer arithmetic, what you're writing to could be within the array you're reading from. So order of operation could matter, and vectorization could break it.

<comment><USER5> I guess, cause in C#, you can't have pointers to the middle of an array (when not using `unsafe` code). So I guess one would just check if the arrays' pointers were equal, and if they aren't, the arrays don't overlap.

Side note: C# 8's ranges and indices return an IEnumerable, so I wonder how those vectorize. Can IEnumerable's even be vectorized?

<comment><USER6> The only vectorization I'm aware of in C# is the few classes in System.Numerics that are provided specifically for this optimization. In theory, the C# compiler and/or JIT _could_ automatically issue SIMD ops for some array operations, if it could determine that order of operations doesn't matter (as could just about any other language), but I think as a general rule this is too expensive at compile time or runtime to be worth it, and most languages force you to make it explicit. Except a couple languages like FORTRAN and apparently APL. (Though I'd love to be shown wrong in the C# case).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > As the table reveals, every time this function performs a multiplication, > only 8 out of 82 (9+30+28+8+7=82) instructions are doing the "real" > multiplication. That's only about 10% of the total instructions. The other > 90% are considered interpretation overhead. Once we vectorized this > function, its performance was improved by nearly nine times. See PR #12543.

This is a misleading way to present this data. If I understand this correctly, most of the 90% "interpretation overhead" are time spent evaluating the operands to the multiplication, and this is _also_ vectorized. So it's not just that vectorizing the 10% can give you a 9x speedup overall, although in my opinion the text tries to suggest this.

In any case, there must be even more going on here. The data being processed here seem to be Float64. On an AVX-2 processor like most of us have, you can only fit up to 4 64-bit floats into a vector register. This means that, even if your entire computation vectorizes very very nicely, you should only expect a 4x maximum speedup. Even if they have an AVX-512 server (they don't say) with twice the vector width, 8x would be the expected limit. In practice it would be considerably less because the processor reduces its frequency to avoid overheating on AVX-512-heavy computations. I'm not aware of hardware that uses even wider vectors.

So an end-to-end 9x improvement for the entire function here seems impossible to achieve using vectorization alone. I question both the measurement and the suggestion that vectorization is the _only_ thing that changes here. Maybe they accidentally (? they don't seem to understand in detail what's going on) stumbled upon a much more cache friendly version of the computation they were trying to do, or maybe previously they caused the GC to interfere, or... something. But 9x due to vectorization of a Float64 computation? I'm not buying it.

<comment><USER8> I believe that in db context, vectorization means batch processing column wise. Quoting the CockroachDB blog post:

Using vectorized processing in an execution engine makes more efficient use of modern CPUs by changing the data orientation (from rows to columns) to get more out of the CPU cache and deep instruction pipelines by operating on batches of data at a time.

Here is the link: [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-we-built-a- vectorized...](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-we-built-a-vectorized- sql-engine/)

<comment><USER9> That's right, I believe it was MonetDB that introduced this abuse of terminology into the DB lit and it's stuck. I remember being very confused as well, looking for any mention of SIMD instructions in the MonetDB paper and finding none :) ("Pipelining" is another term that the DB community uses differently from everyone else--nobody else would refer to single-threaded execution as "pipelined".)

The other typical optimization for expression evaluation is code generation, which usually targets LLVM bitcode or Java bytecode. That's pretty standard for column-oriented databases now and they're not exactly state of the art if they don't implement some equivalent of the above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've seen a fair bit about TiDB but not much from actual users. Can someone who uses this in production explain why and what alternatives they evaluated (we use Citus so would be curious to hear).

<comment><USER11> You can check out the case studies from our users here: [https://pingcap.com/success-stories/](https://pingcap.com/success-stories/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well what to say. You are just throwing potential performance away if you don't use SSE when you can.

There is an idea that "renaming and reordering engine can make non-SSE code as fast as it without extra hassle." At least of X86, that can't be true as you physically can't access all execution ports with non-vector instructions.

<comment><USER13> Vector instructions come at a cost, though — there's implications on power budget and on thermals, so it's very much a "just because you can doesn't mean you should" piece of tech. Specifically, sustained use of AVX instructions on 256 and 512 bit registers will cost you a chunk of clock frequency even for all, so you have to pass the hurdle of having enough AVX instructions that the downclocking is worth it overall

<comment><USER14> AVX(1) and AVX2 don't cause throttling, just AVX512. Even so, on code that can do the best of them[0], they still result in better performance. Eventually they will implemented in a way that doesn't require throttling, maybe AMD when it finally supports them or Intel when the famed 7nm[1] process arrives.

[0] numerical code usually, but go ahead and use them if you can express your problem in a way that makes sense in AVX512

[1] 7 as in "seven" since the 10nm is so troublesome that apparently no desktop/server chips will be made on it and just skips to 7, which should be comparable to TMSCs 5nm

<comment><USER2> >AVX(1) and AVX2 don't cause throttling,

yes they do, on intel cpus anyway. On Ryzen anything that makes more heat will cause throttling, rather than a step change in mode.

>. Eventually they will implemented in a way that doesn't require throttling

Probably not, there are fundamental physical limitations. I mean, you can put a good cooler on the cpu and disable the throttling, but then you could raise the non SIMD clock rate too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> i'm quite surprise how many of HN comments are focused on nitpicking frontend implementations rather than the content itself.

it's not very likely the author who works on vectorized execution also implemented the blog system.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can also get a 10x accessibility increase for viewing your site, by not doing shit like this:

        <svg id="hexagon" viewbox="0 0 129.78 150.37"
        ...

        (actual page content here)

This is another one of these pages that shouldn't require JS, but _deliberately hides the content_ and then uses JS to un-hide it. _WTF!?_ I know this is a little off-topic but I found it ironic that a post about optimising performance would be presented so outrageously inefficiently and inaccessibly. (I just turned off the CSS to read it.)

<comment><USER17> An SRE at PingCAP here. Got it. Thanks! We found that using JS to toggle page visibility has some usability issues. We just removed the JS loading animation and will deliver content with good compatibility and progressive enhancement. Sorry for the issues with the display!

<comment><USER18> Nice to see quick response.

Page loading on mobile for me. Using Brave browser.</comment></comment></comment>


Sam Altman: I traveled across the country to interview 100 Trump supporters - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-interview-trump-supporters-2017-2 <comment><USER2> Dupe of this huge recent discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13697771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13697771)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's hard to say from reading the article, and I may have a hair-trigger these days for left-wing hatred and intolerance, but it's genuinely hard to tell here whether Sam really wants to listen to people, or to convince them to adopt his political position. Questions like "What would convince you not to vote for him again?" come off as pushy and leading in this environment.

We have such a strong divide in our country these days. I think we should all ask ourselves if we're working to heal the divide or increase it. It's very easy to call others intolerant. It's not so easy to let go of the intolerance in your own heart.

<comment><USER4> Actually, I wanted to know something similar, but my question was, "whose shoes can Donald Trump NOT pi$s on?". It just doesn't seem to bother his supporters how rude or offensive he is, they appear to revel in it. No normal person could say or do the things he does. I also want to know, if being offensive to the Pope, a gold star parent, Mexicans, women and others wasn't enough, what on earth would be? When will he be held accountable like the rest of us must be? Honestly, is this just a case of mass jealousy for his ability to be offensive? Is there anything that he can do that he CAN'T get away with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. Even with the title, and some of the points he made around "seriously disagreeing with some of these people" I found this to be fairly well balanced and interesting.

This quote really scares me, and something I've considered true since Obama was first elected. Some people are truly scared to share their political opinions in public. We should be worried about that.

"Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names — even people from very red states were worried about getting "targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him." One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she'd lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter."

<comment><USER6> It really make me paranoid wondering how many people I work with are secret Trump Supporters. I wonder if all those people who are not a cultural fit have these disgusting conservative beliefs.

<comment><USER5> I fit in everywhere I've worked and my political views are on both sides. I'm what I like to call a "think for myself-er".

I don't think cultural fit has as much to do with political views as you think.

Unless they are people who can't separate work and politics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems like half these people are socially liberal. I wonder how they feel now that there have been orders to crack down on marijuana and moves towards making abortion illegal again.

The single issue voter is just impossible to even debate with or discuss with, they've already trapped themselves into voting for one particular party. Then again I suppose you could call me a strong single issue voter. Environment!

So seeing as the current party has actually disclaimed the majority of scientists on this matter saying its nonsense, its hard to debate the merits.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like that he did this. The extreme polarization of the left vs. right is much more worrisome to me than anything Trump has done (I didn't vote for him.)

I would like to see more respect for people with different views. Much of the blame, I think, comes from polarization in the news media.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting article. I like the raw quotes without any unnecessary commentary by the author, but like ufmace said I do think some of the prompts may have come across as pushy.

I am not a Trump supporter, but I am interested in the ferocity behind his supporters' feelings of (social? economical?) oppression. This quote in particular,

>"Over the last few years, the mainstream left has resorted to name-calling and character assassination, instead of debate, any time their positions are questioned. [...] Intelligent debate has become rare."

has me scratching my head somewhat because I personally recall the last eight years to be almost the exact opposite. Did the GOP not spend eight years under a 'No Compromise pledge'[1] while targeting Obama as their political punching bag?

With regard to the last sentence, was it not Donald Trump himself who devolved the debate to name calling (or 'character assassination', as this respondent might call it)? "Crooked Hillary", "Sleepy [Ben Carson]", "Little Marco", "Lyin' Ted" all come to mind. Or is this what the respondent might consider 'intelligent debate'?

Other responses allude to personal security, particularly this one,

>"We need borders at every level of our society."

and to responses like this I think there's a question of what the term 'conservative' has become in the last eight years. Would 'the party of small government' of the past dared utter this type of sentiment? Or has Obama's presidency (and Trump's campaign) been so damaging to the GOP that their mantra of 'limited government' as defined on their own website[2] has been unexpectedly dissolved.

Maybe this individual isn't a part of the GOP. Or maybe the GOP is out of touch. Or maybe I just live in an echo chamber. Either way, I'm going to be interested to see if the GOP evolves to fit Trump's message, or if it anchors itself with over a dozen fragile candidates whose campaigns are destroyed by a two word catchphrase from a reality TV star.

Either Trump is the strongest conservative in eight years, or the GOP and Democrats are the weakest they've ever been.[3]

1 [http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/10/28/130895...](http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2010/10/28/130895390/house- republicans-vow-no-compromise)

2 [https://www.gop.com/platform/we-the- people/](https://www.gop.com/platform/we-the-people/)

3 [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-end-of-a- republican-...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-end-of-a-republican- party/)

<comment><USER3> > >"Over the last few years, the mainstream left has resorted to name-calling > and character assassination, instead of debate, any time their positions are > questioned. [...] Intelligent debate has become rare."

> With regard to the last sentence, was it not Donald Trump himself who > devolved the debate to name calling (or 'character assassination', as this > respondent might call it)? "Crooked Hillary", "Sleepy [Ben Carson]", "Little > Marco", "Lyin' Ted" all come to mind. Or is this what the respondent might > consider 'intelligent debate'?

This is exactly why Trump is so popular in some circles - they see the Left as conducting a constant character assassination campaign for decades against a largely impotent Right. Trump is seen as the first guy on the Right in decades who's willing to use the same name-calling and character assassination tactics against the left that they've been using for so long.

I gotta admit, it rings rather hollow to hear left-leaning people complain about how Trump is a name-caller. Where've they been over the last 30 years when the media was busy calling every single Republican candidate racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe? Where were they when anyone opposing any of Obama's policies was called racist? Where were they when all of their people were defending all of their candidates' sins? Donald Trump has his problems for sure, but does it really help anything or "raise the level of debate" to desperately try to tie him to the KKK somehow, which the media spent pretty much the entire campaign doing?

Yes, both sides have a lot of work to do to reduce partisanship in this country. Can we start by asking the Left to stop tolerating and apologizing for all of the hate and intolerance their side spews?

I'll also say that the Trump campaign is certainly erratic and far outside of the mainstream GOP in a number of ways. The results of this depend on how his Presidency goes. If he crashes and burns, it may have little effect. If he's seen as at least moderately successful, it could change the whole Republican party in ways that are hard to predict.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is the words of a TRUMP supporter!:

>"I'm a Jewish libertarian who's [sic] grandparents were Holocaust survivors. Over the last few years the mainstream left has resorted to name-calling and character assassination, instead of debate, any time their positions are questioned. This atmosphere became extremely oppressive and threatening to people, like myself, who disagreed with many of Obama's policies over the past several years. Intelligent debate has become rare."

HOW BLIND ARE THESE PEOPLE? What reality are you creating where you cant see how your contradicting yourself with your own words? Trump did not generate one iota of "Intelligent Debate" throughout his campaign, and never rose above the dull level of "Character Assassination"!

Honestly, Please, Show me how Trump has done anything other than fight fire with fire here?

>"[We like him because] he's not politically correct!"

How spiteful! Just because you're beholden to acting with decency in your daily life doesn't mean electing an Indecent person is going to allow you to trample on other peoples rights. No one's going to lay down and be insulted because you're world-view is too narrow to encompass the actual diversity of the planet.</comment>


How to Control Risk When Ethereum Prices Aren't Stable - <AUTHOR> http://blog.velocity.technology/digital-asset-volatility/ <comment><USER2> "Compared to an asset like gold, Ethereum is very volatile. Recently, bitcoin had attained levels of gold-like stability."

Brought a smile to my face ;)</comment>


Packet Capture, Injection, and Analysis with Gopacket - <AUTHOR> http://devdungeon.com/content/packet-capture-injection-and-analysis-gopacket <comment><USER2> Very nice introduction tutorial with many examples. I am sure it will be a reference guide for many people —me included. Thanks!

A minor issue, on your second snippet (open devices for live capture), you miss the "github.com/google/gopacket" import.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interested in this and wondering about the possibilities of creating a software load-balancing instance with Go - rewriting source & destination addresses on the fly and tracking session states to failover between instances of the program.

<comment><USER4> Theoretically that is totally possible. I think the channels functionality would really make managing the different streams easy. Go routines could also greatly improve performance.

It would be interesting to see how it performs under load. After all, that's what Go is meant for. I'll think about writing some code to test that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, would you mind if I added a link to this article from gopacket's README.md?

<comment><USER4> Hey there, I wrote that page. I didn't even have an account here and didn't realize there were comments. I tracked down this page because of the referrals I was getting. The write up is meant to help anyone and everyone so share it wherever you would like.</comment></comment>


Dropbox security flaw uncovered - <AUTHOR> http://greyhat-security.com/dropbox-insecure-design

<comment><USER2> See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2421110> instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> This makes dropbox about as insecure as SSH (eg. copying someone's key files (aka. config.db) allows you to authenticate as them)

Yes, you could password protect them but dropbox doesn't prompt for passwords, so you'd need unencrypted private keys. Its obvious by design of not prompting for passwords that if you copied the right bits of information you'd be able to authenticate. It's much better security wise that it uses a hostkey, rather than your password.</comment>


How blogging can change your life - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonstribling.com/a-blog-will-change-your-life/

<comment><USER2> Yes yes, I know I have to start a blog...

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're like me, once you have, you will be saying: Yes, yes, I know I need to update my blog.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you wearing computer glasses? - <AUTHOR> I'd love to know if the HN community is wearing those yellow-tinted glasses (discussed on places like http://lifehacker.com/5980509/do-computer-glasses-really-work), or if they're just a gimmick/subject to the same suspicion at copper bracelets...<p>I'm seeing more of them around the office and local hackathons, but my primary thoughts lean towards thinking they're an unproven fad. <comment><USER2> I use the Gunnar Optiks (mentioned in the lifehacker link). They do seem to make my eyes less strained at the end of the day. I had this issue where I would work on the computer all day, and when I got home, I didn't even want to look at a computer screen because my eyes were so tired. Since I've been using the Gunnars, I've noticed I don't have that issue.

I think it definitely makes a difference, but you can also achieve a similar effect by using f.lux ([https://justgetflux.com/](https://justgetflux.com/)). Although, I found f.lux to be a big buggy at times, especially with a multiple monitors setup.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've waxed and waned about using f.lux (actually [http://jonls.dk/redshift/](http://jonls.dk/redshift/) because f.lux+linux=painful.) I think my biggest problem with it is my office's fluorescent lighting isn't within my control to turn-off/change, so the stark contrast between a screen-gone-red and the screaming white light causes my screen to feel silly.

If I had the luxury of working exclusively in a officespace without fluorescent lighting, I think I could be 100% on f.lux

<comment><USER3> I suffer pretty badly from eye fatigue due to computer use and in scenarios where there is overhead florescent lighting I'll go ahead and twist the bulbs so they turn off and then get a small desk lamp for when I need light (I prefer darker settings). Not sure if that is an option, but it's worked for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not the glasses, but I use f.lux, which has the same effect. It's great, and makes a noticeable difference to eyestrain

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a pair of Gamma Rays and a pair of Gunnars. Both seem to help my eyes fatigue wise. I originally bought them and used them to see if my sleep would be less affected from the computer screen, but I don't think they've helped in that regard.

I've used flux in the past but I find I like the glasses more.

If you want to try some out I'd suggest starting with Gamma Ray, they're significantly cheaper than Gunnar. Some are as low as 12-15 dollars. [http://www.amazon.com/GAMMA-ESSENTIALS-Computer-Glasses- Harm...](http://www.amazon.com/GAMMA-ESSENTIALS-Computer-Glasses- Harmful/dp/B00G04OLS2/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1424279320&sr=8-5&keywords=computer+glasses)

</comment><comment><USER6> Sometimes I use reading glasses when using a 12"-screened laptop. It makes it like you're sitting farther away from a 14" laptop, taking up the same solid angle of your view.

Yellow-tinted glasses do the same thing as what you get if you use f.lux or redshift. It's probably better to use that, because you don't have to have glasses on your face.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wear Gunnars and think they're great. My eye strain was so bad I couldn't use a computer for more than about 10 minutes at a time, but now can go several hours before needing a break, and I recover faster as well. If you don't have severe eye strain the Gunnars may end up being a bit pricey. YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is what I use: [https://justgetflux.com/](https://justgetflux.com/)

It changes the color at night gradually and helps with eye strain

</comment><comment><USER9> I have considered wearing glasses but couldn't justify the cost and I've never met anyone that swore by them.

<comment><USER10> I swear by them. Before, I couldn't use the computer for more than an hour or two without severe eye strain. Now I can be online for 12 hours, no problem.</comment></comment>


Introducing Surge – The CDN for Front-End Developers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/surge-sh/introducing-surge-the-cdn-for-front-end-developers-b4a50a61bcfc

<comment><USER3> Are the websites really served from a CDN ?

From what I can see, 18.104.22.168 is only announced by AS14061 which is owned by Digital Ocean.

Webpagetest[0] seems to report that there is no CDN on surge.sh, which is also served from 220.127.116.11.

Am I missing something, or the websites are only served from one location ?

[0]: [http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150303_19_10FX/](http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150303_19_10FX/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for asking this question.

The standup is modest at this point for testing purposes as we need to iterate quickly based off initial feedback. We didn't do that with the Harp Platform and it made things challenging initially.

This is the same backend system that the Harp platform which is deployed to about 10-12 AWS servers which has been in production for about 18 months.

We are currently testing out Digital Ocean and are deciding if we roll this out on their infrastructure or piggyback off the Harp Platform system - <USER2> something else all together.

If your concern is that this is just a rails app or something similar it is not.

This is a distributed system built with NodeJS, HAProxy, ZeroMQ, and Redis. Edge nodes have a global dedupe cache to ensure each file is distributed across the network only once.

Over time the architecture will be revealed for people to evaluate if it is right for them. Sorry that hasn't been fully provided at this time. We're a pretty lean shop and these things take time.

Edit: Also, I should mention that surge.sh isn't self hosted. It is served with express.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks really promising but I have some concerns about Surge being able to support the current unlimited free usage for any amount of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! What are your concerns exactly?

<comment><USER5> That it will not be around in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How are they offering SSL on custom domains for free? by using Cloudflare?

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats on the launch!</comment>


Closing the Gap – The Formally Verified Optimizing Compiler CompCert [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01399482 <comment><USER2> A few things I notice from skimming the paper and perusing related sites:

1\. Although the source is available free of charge, CompCert is not free software. I couldn't find pricing on the AbsInt site or the North American vendor's site ("Ask for a quote").

2\. Currently targets IA32, 32-bit PowerPC, and ARMv6.

3\. Covers most of C99, except VLAs and certain abuses of switch statements (e.g., Duff's device).

4\. Faster and smaller code than GCC -O0, reasonably close to -O1 and -O2.

John Regehr points out: "If we want better code out of [GCC et al.] we can turn on their optimizers, but at that point they would fail to be capable of translating 1,000,000 random programs without miscompiling a few times."

[http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1052](http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1052)

I'm less inclined to use C as time goes by, but for the embedded market that CompCert targets, it seems like a really useful tool.

</comment><comment><USER3> Weird, the print dialog opened directly when I clicked the above link. Is that a "normal" PDF feature, or was it triggered from someplace else?

<comment><USER4> Same on Linux + Chrome

<comment><USER5> And even with uMatrix installed + JS disabled for that domain!

Edit: raised an issue in uMatrix: [https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/672](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/672)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. That's an achievement.

The key to getting the problem down to a manageable size for verification seems to have been using a large number of passes, so that each pass performs a well-defined transformation on a sequential file.

<comment><USER7> That's a good software pattern in general, and as you use more and more powerfully typed languages, the Coq analogy becomes even more obvious. If you write small modules, it's easier to statically prove more behavior. Then all you need is to compose the modules, and thanks to composition being a small, well-defined, and lawful operation, the correctness of your program becomes the sum of its proofs :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's been at least one attempt to make LLVM verifiable, however it's largely stalled: [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~stevez/vellvm/](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~stevez/vellvm/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm sorry, I won't read this until I can do so on a formally verified pdf renderer or an attacker might hack me further upstream. Oh no, I'm commenting using an unverified browser! _runs screaming into the middle distance_

<comment><USER10> Pff, amateur. The only safe way to read pdfs is by getting a bunch of smartphones by dumpster diving and then discarding them once you've read the pdf once.</comment></comment>


Seagate: Our disk drives are safe from SSDs for at least 15 years - <AUTHOR> https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/09/23/seagate-assumes-ssds-wont-kill-disk-drives/ <comment><USER2> The critical issue with disk is no longer capacity, but seeks.

For interactive and high-demand (reads, writes) performance, it's head contention and waiting, often for seconds, sometimes for minutes, swap and read/write capacity to come available, which argues against HDD.

There's a space for HDD in archival and warm- and cold-storage formats (increasingly displacing tape). But in consumer and office equipment, the case for HDD is all but dead now.

Rather you'll see shared storage in the form of NAS and SAN systems, increasingly in the SOHO space, and increasingly as commodity systems.

A key point is at about the 500 MB - 1 TB capacity point. Storage allocations for desktops and laptops has _not_ been increasing over the past several years, but instead the price point at which SDD substitution is viable for 0.5 - 1 TB storage has been falling.

As someone who still recalls buying his first, SCSI, 1 GB drives some 20+ years ago, paying a premium for them, and thinking that would be enough storage for anyone, the question of "how much storage is enough" is dangerous ground. Much of what used to be excessive when considering GB storage is accounted for by vast text repositories (I've nearly 30 GB of articles alone on tablet storage), and the amount of information which can be stored in text and video formats.

But the need to have multiple TB of that nearline for _general_ work doesn't seem particularly strong. The trend of the past decade has been not predominantly large laptop, desktop, and workstation systems, with larger and faster disk, but in handheld and mobile devices, in which storage allocations remain minuscule (I was surprised earlier today to see that Android devices now ship with 128-256 GB storage, Apple's iPad is available with up to 1 TB), and for which spinning rust is both a power and reliability liability.

Seagate may find its prediction optimistic.

<comment><USER3> HDDs are not, in my opinion, displacing tape. For just about any use case (capacity, cost, latency, reads writes, reliability, electricity, physical space, vendor agnosticism etc etc), I think it is HDD that is being replaced on all fronts.

For any sort of performance requirement, SSDs and NVME are quickly replacing disk on account that they are more performant, way more reliable, and nearly the same cost as disk, in exchange for a bit less capacity.

Tape, if you are willing to spend on a fancy LTO7 drive and wait a few minutes for your data to arrive , is a way cheaper and reliable solution if you are dealing with hundreds of TBs or more in stored data, especially with media files instead of compressed databases.

There may be a very specific sweetspot of say, 40TB of data that you need to access very frequently from a server where you have free electricity and don't mind paying a ton for 24/7 runtime and data replicstion or something where it makes sense to just buy the proper amount of disk.....

but that is really the exception to the rule. The most cost efficient solution for me will always be SSDs backed up to tape or CDs.

<comment><USER2> What's the space you're typcially seeing these deployments in?

In my experience, tape sees virtually _no_ use in SOHO and even fairly large mid-range corporate use.

It _is_ used by large enterprises and many institutional organisations, often with tape libraries and bots. And by large tech firms for warm and cold storage, again, where access-within-minutes is a sufficient SLA. Though robot contention is even worse than drive-head contention.

(Realising, at a large financial services firm, that I could script data loads via JCL rather than going through whatever alternative TSPF interactive facility there was as a primary interface made afternoon-long batch runs ... slightly less annoying than they usually were. Though I never did hear back if that was or wasn't appreciated by the out-of-area datacentre operators. I barely recall how to spell JCL any more, to which I attribute mostly trauma- induced memory lapse.)

A principle problem with tape is that hardware upgrade and media migration is such a persistent pain. And there's some kerfuffle about the latest round of industrial-grade media and patent disputes that's not helping much (I've remained blissfully largely, though not completely, unaware).

<comment><USER3> I used to work for StorageTek and I was involved with government/utility/academic workloads where tape was very much still alive until a certain someone decided not to manufacture proprietary drives and cartridges anymore :)

I think Lto will continue to be an awesome standard for anyone doing PBs or more with multi decade requirements. I am maybe a little surprised to hear that disk hasn't been completely replaced by SSDs yet but I really do think that SSDs will just continue to drop in price.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Who was Jason Spindler? American who survived 9/11 dies in Kenya terror attack - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/jason-spindler-9-11-kenya-terror-attack-nairobi-1293622 <comment><USER2> I stayed at that hotel 4 times last year, most recently in November. It's a long entrance drive from the main road leading to a compound, which has a hotel, resturant, I think a Qatar Airlines office, and a few other buildings

If you walk to the hotel, you go through a metal detector and a brief bag- search on entrance to the compound.

If you go to the hotel in a car/taxi/uber, you don't get the first check, they instead give a cursory check in the car, but certainly don't open any bags.

You then get to the front hotel, where your bag goes through a scanner and you get wanded, this is an open area (one side has a hotel-resturant patio, the other the bar's patio)

Like most hotel searches, it's all for show, a truck full of men with ak47s, or even 1 person with a 9mm glock, isn't going to be stopped.

I'm surprised they chose 3PM to launch the attack -- most residents will be out doing whatever they do at that time, and that seems to reflect from the fact the majority of deaths are locals working in the hotel.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/final-9-11-review- commis...](https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/final-9-11-review-commission- report-unclassified.pdf/view)</comment>


Ask HN: What makes a programmer a rockstar? - <AUTHOR>

Curious what attributes people feel represents such a person. Also, do rockstars equal 10x'ers? <comment><USER2> A programmer that is also a member of a really successful rock band. No person possessing both of these attributes walks the earth, yet. It is widely rumored that Steven Tyler might be interested in HTML, however. We will have to see how this develops.

<comment><USER3> AFAIR Jonny Greenwood (from Radiohead) said in an interview that he himself wrote a lot of the synthetizers that the band uses.

<comment><USER4> The guys from Propellerheads made Reason [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8) [https://www.propellerheads.se/reason](https://www.propellerheads.se/reason) Not saying i'm a big fan of the soft...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Terms like rockstar, 10xer, or ninja are meant to flatter people and not describe attributes. Employers want to filter workers who will work to their own detriment for several reasons. They want people who are susceptible to flattery and are not very experienced in employment. They want people who will work nights and weekends as well. So I guess those are two attributes of a rockstar or 10xer. Most people on HN already know this because they're true rockstars and 10x'ers ;).

</comment><comment><USER6> Someone is a rockstar if they are good at what they do. They make the job seem easy, always does things properly, and frequently wow you with their brilliance and ingenuity. Around them, there's constant motion.

Management will consider you a rockstar if you make them look good, help them win politically, look the part, talk the talk, and feed them the BS they want to hear.

Hiring managers and recruiters will say they are looking for a rockstar (which they'll try to make seem like the first definition) and call you a rockstar if they're trying to hire you in for a crap role, and think stroking your ego and bending the truth will get it done.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just like 'ninja' is a marketing word. It probably means the person loves their job and makes it their passion and others think that person is so good at what he/she does that they admire him/her. I wouldn't read too much into it. The wording is often chosen so the job ad sounds young, cool and hip (and the same founders might present themselves in suits in all public photos to appear more serious).

You're right, in reality the companies are looking for humble 10x programmers who get their job done without much fuss. Bonus points if the person is cool to hang out with outside work.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I think of "rockstar" or "10x'er" engineers I think of Fabrice Ballard. The idea of rockstar and 10x'er are both mostly buzz words to make developers feel real good about themselves. Many people would put Fabrice in this category, though he probably wouldn't put himself into the category at all. Regardless here are a few traits he has which make him amazing.

He puts a constant level of effort into everything he does. Not an insane level of effort, just constant.

He is very knowledgeable about his craft. He constantly expands on what he knows within his area of expertise.

He does not attempt to know about everything. He stays with technologies he knows and understands and this allows him to have deep knowledge and to stick with his consistent level of effort.

Finally, he seems to try to know what he doesn't know. Again, by knowing what he doesn't know he can stay focuses, keep a consistent level or effort, and gain deep knowledge.

Whether these will make you a rockstar, I have no idea. But I can say that by living by these principles you can become a really exceptional engineer.

<comment><USER9> >The idea of rockstar and 10x'er are both mostly buzz words to make developers feel real good about themselves.

Specifically in the former case, young naive developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a hypothesis on this... what happens when a Rockstar enters a room?

* People recognize them

* A crowd forms around them

* People ask to take photos with them

* They get paid huge amounts of money just to show up somewhere

* They get standing ovations at conferences

So just apply that to software developers. I have known two or three software developers that fit that criteria in my life and a half dozen CEOs that fit that criteria.

What does that have to do with being good at your job? Nothing, except maybe that to get to Rockstar status you must be well known in the community and probably did something worthy of it.

On the other hand, I have known a lot of 10x developers. Very few of whom met the rockstar criteria.

Rockstars are called rockstars in the music world because they are famous and usually really talented. So that's the defnition I go by for developers. __

 __I 'm not sure people writing job description feel the same way.

[edited for spacing on the list]

</comment><comment><USER11> The exact same thing as with musicians and vocalists: Fame.

It seldom matters how it was acquired, or what you believe about the intrinsic or marginal value of their work... At a minimum it is self-referential: They're famous because they're famous because...

Trying to attach virtues to programmer-fame is just as pointless as trying to do it with musicians. Do you really want a programming-version of Justin Bieber working on your codebase? Why or why not?

</comment><comment><USER12> Are you asking for yourself or because you want to hire them? If you want to hire them, it's best that you completely forget about this mindset.

If you are asking for yourself, strive to be a an improving professional, and realize that many people who accomplish more also work more (at work or on their own).

</comment><comment><USER13> Excellent question!

To me, rockstar does not equal to 10xer. Rockstar does not necessarily perform better, but they have gained enough (positive) reputation within their domain that they now have fans.

In other words, hiring rockstars means you get to hire their fans easier. It's a personal network thing.

</comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Richard Stallman

[https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/m/#!msg/myso...](https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/m/#!msg/mysociety- community/zkyZpOXjgoQ/_8xyXSxv9zYJ)

</comment><comment><USER14> Cubicle strobe lights, smoke machine(s).

</comment><comment><USER15> One who gets shit done.

</comment><comment><USER16> The HR department.

</comment><comment><USER17> Groupies

</comment><comment><USER18> smart and gets shit done</comment>


Keynote speech regarding NSA operation ORCHESTRA (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/nsa_operation_orchestra/ <comment><AUTHOR> I really suggest watching the whole thing, it's quite eye opening. The most irritating parts are when the portly speaker genially describes how they read Reddit and Hackernews in an attempt to buy off and shut-down startups which might threaten their ability to collect intelligence. Peoples lives are inevitably ruined by anti-progress paranoia, and tools which could make all of us more secure from bad actors are intentionally sunk.

These people are your enemies, and they are chuckling to each other how easy you are to manipulate. You, on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, it's actually a satire. This is what I get for jumping the gun. It's still interesting!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Icanhazaxfr.com – Open AXFR zone transfers - <AUTHOR> https://icanhazaxfr.com <comment><USER2> What is this? What does it do?

<comment><AUTHOR> icanhazaxfr.com is a service that transfers the zone file of 'icanhazaxfr.com' to anyone.

The goal of the service is to provide a freely available axfr service with a concise enough zonefile that it is practical to use it for unit tests.</comment></comment>


Photo overview of original Lisp keyboards - <AUTHOR> http://deskthority.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=98&ok <comment><USER2> I know this is another "neckbeard" comment (love that term), but anyone who ever used the Tom Knight MIT-AI lab keyboards knows in his heart that those were the best keyboards ever made by mankind. Seriously.

They were made by Microswitch (a long defunct subsidiary of Honeywell) and used Hall-effect (mechanical throw) switches with the smoothest throw you've ever felt in your life. So smooth that typing was more like swimming in thought than hitting keys. Sigh, I miss those things every day even after 30 years...

Even the second-generation (first-generation Lisp Machine) keyboard that John Kulp originally had manufactured (all custom-made & designed of course) for the Fusion Lab video terminals (had one in my office when I worked for the MIT-EECS department) were astoundingly good, if not quite as good as the TK keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER3> What was the thumbs-up key for?</comment>


Soylent kickstarts the summer with new Cafe line flavors - <AUTHOR> http://blog.soylent.com/post/162322724087/soylent-kickstarts-the-summer-with-new-cafe-line <comment><USER2> Hey $4 what a deal.

Have some eggs and a piece of toast. Takes about 3 minutes to make and about $0.25. No risk of strange contamination or weird chemicals.</comment>


Ask YC: How would you support the iPhone? - <AUTHOR>

If you decide iPhone support for your new web app is important, would you:
a) Rely on the built-in Safari browser with its double taps and pinch
b) Code an iPhone optimised layout to render in Safari
c) Write a standalone iPhone app using the SDK (likely to be released on 6th of March) <comment><USER2> If you're looking to use the firmware portions (location, contacts list, etc.), you'll need the iPhone app on the SDK.

If not, stick with the web. It allows you to not be wedded to the device.

I'm praying for the unlikely event that the iPhone SDK allows browser apps to tap into the firmware of the iPhone. There isn't anything that can do that right now right?

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends on your app</comment>


Basic Economy Fares Don't Lower Ticket Prices, They Increase Ticket Prices - <AUTHOR> http://viewfromthewing.boardingarea.com/2017/01/02/basic-economy-fares-dont-lower-ticket-prices-increase-ticket-prices/ <comment><USER2> The airlines are awfully upset with the US law that forces them to show the full cost of the flight. They really want to show that they're the cheapest airline without being the cheapest.

A few things they've done:

1\. They've created baggage fees for checking bags: That accounts for +$50

2\. The YQ/Fuel charge: You're subject on their pricing of fuel

3\. Seat Charges: If you want to reserve a seat before checking, some airlines charge for this (Namely AA)

4\. Fees for printing a BP (Ryan Air), checking in at the airport (Ryan Air again), Carry on luggage (Spirit), etc

5\. Charging for alcohol on long haul flights (I'm rather fine with it.. but it used to be customary)

6\. Charging for food on long haul flights. (I'm looking at you US Airways CLT-AUR)

<comment><USER3> Last time I checked, AA didn't charge for getting a seat early: they just charge extra for all the seats that aren't all the way at the back.

The last time I was stuck flying with them the plane wasn't even 1/3rd full. A few people, sitting near the front, were part of their ridiculous set of reward tiers. The rest of us? Packed in the back. After the attendants closed the doors, we got the go ahead to just move to sensible seats of the exact same size and amenities, but that they'd have wanted us to pay extra for.

The airline knew the flight was empty the night before, and so did everyone that went through the check in process and sees all the empty seats they tried to upsell. Is the chance for an extra fee or two beat having the old black lady next to me look at the empty middle of the plane and ask if we were in American Airlines or in the Montgomery Plane company?

<comment><USER4> Correct, if you book a Main Cabin (coach) ticket on AA seat selection is free. The only exceptions are seats in "Main Cabin Extra" which almost always have 10%+ more legroom. These are usually the first row in coach, plus the exit rows.

That said, some MCE seats (and some MC seats) can only be selected pre-checkin by AA flyers with status. AA status holders also do not pay extra for MCE seats, whether they are status reserved or not.

<comment><USER5> There are seats that are not "Main Cabin Extra" but that AA will still charge you for, although less than they would charge you for MCE. Once the free seats are full, your options are to pay extra, or accept what is most likely going to be a middle seat separated from anyone you're traveling with.

My academic institution refuses to pay for any kind of seat upgrades, so from my perspective, the rational response is to fly on another airline. I will probably have to avoid airlines that start "offering" "Basic Economy" fares for the same reason.

<comment><USER6> Those are "preferred" seats. They're usually windows and aisles close to the front of the plane. They are released to everyone once check-in happens.

They save them pre-checkin for status holders (people who fly 25,000+ miles a year typically). As someone who flies _way_ above that number I appreciate that they do, as I am typically buying last minute tickets (less than 2 weeks out) that are much more expensive. Those seats mean that despite paying more than most people on the plane, I'm not stuck in a middle seat most of the time.

That benefits attracts people like me to try and stay loyal with an airline rather than going with the lowest bidder. I'm willing to bet that people with similar flying habits to me provide the majority of profit for an airline as well.

<comment><USER7> You may appreciate it, but I don't see a justification for why it should exist. The fact that you pay extra for last minute tickets is neither here nor there in terms of whether that should buy you the preferred seat, and the fact that you have status has nothing to do with the fact that you purchase last minute. (and, in fact, if someone else with status booked 1 month early, they'd be more likely to get that seat than you). I say this as someone who has flown on <24h notice internationally and domestically multiple times in the past year. (and of course these last minute fares can often be rock-bottom cheap, it all depends).

I understand what you're saying, but the mileage programs are not really about "loyalty"; they're about misallocating corporate dollars to more expensive seats to the benefit of the airline and the traveller/employee. I don't feel that people like you providing "the majority of revenue" to airlines should really matter either way. Dollars for seats.

I managed to just cross a mileage program threshold this year but I'll continue ranting about how terrible these programs and the flying experience in general is. Especially because having bargain-basement status on United means nothing when you're flying out of a major hub :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It makes sense. Getting price-elastic customers to signal that they're sensitive to prices isn't going to be by offering them the same product as everyone else. They'll signal it through planning longer in advance, rearranging their personal affairs to leave at a better time, or engaging in frequent-flier programs. Price-inelastic customers have to be offered something extra at a price increase proportional to the customers you're trying to target. So you offer increasingly overpriced extras to try to get the guy who would've paid more for your product to actually pay more for your product.

I think the lesson here is that the airline industry often operates on very small margins.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, Airlines almost always struggle with profitability. A few of these airlines restructured their prices to seem more competitive because they can't really lower prices any more than they have, otherwise they would go out of business. And it's entirely possible for some customers to get lower prices now, it's just not any more cost effective overall than before for average day to day usage.

You can call them greedy or manipulative all you like for doing this but it won't change the economics. Running an airline is expensive for a multitude of reasons.

Hearing stories of Richard Branson's efforts to create a good airline with Virgin in an industry full of shitty ones, then mostly failing, made me very sympathetic to how hard the problem is in a marketplace like that . And some people think Uber and AirBnB have it hard...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Air travel has become the least dignified means of transportation. Almost everything about it is terrible. Shopping for tickets. Checking in. Security. Waiting. Boarding the plane and fighting for overhead bin space. Seat dimensions. Lavatories. Literally everything is terrible. The only thing it has going for it is that it makes long distance and overseas travel logistically possible on an acceptable timescale. Given the choice to drive for 8 hours or fly for 2 I always chose to drive. At some point I think concerns for health, safety, and the basic human dignity of having personal space have to come in to play.

<comment><USER11> The hollowing out of the middle ground seems to happen in most commoditized markets.

Take meat. Used to be you'd go to the butcher for your meat, and you'd get a reasonably good product, from a butcher who knew where the meat came from, probably even the farmer who reared the meat. That was the way almost everybody got their meat, so the fixed overheads of having a butcher shop was spread over a large customer base.

Move along a couple of decades. Supermarkets, with their more efficient logistics, eat into the meat trade. Butcher shops almost completely disappear. But supermarket meat goes through a longer supply chain with larger suppliers that have the efficiencies of scale to cope with the pricing power supermarkets have. The butcher shops that survive turn into boutiques, where their unique selling proposition is what used to be commonplace: that they know where the meat is coming from and probably know the farmer that reared it.

The market bifurcates into two basic strategies, low price and high quality (see also Porter's Cost Leadership and Differentiation).

The consumer who's willing to pay a little bit more for a little bit more quality ends up having to pay a lot more rather than a little bit more, because the pool of people who could spread the fixed costs of the higher quality is split - most go for the lowest priced product. There's a ratchet effect, where slightly higher quality products are, at the margin, increasingly expensive because there's no scale in that strategy: the more expensive they become the less uptake they get, which means they have less scale, which means they become more expensive.

In some ways it's a collective action problem: what would be a better outcome for a large group of people can't really occur because individual actions can't sustain a stable state change. In other ways - many, if not most economists believe this - it's a better outcome overall, because more people get to use the bargain basement product.

But I think people in the middle are usually worse off in commoditized markets.

<comment><USER12> That's a very interesting phenomenon with the butchers (and about 1/5th of the American retail economy in my experience), but it's not what's happening in airline services.

Airlines have jacked up the prices of comfortable berths people can sleep in on long haul journeys to almost 10x the price of shrinking torture chairs that most of us buy. For a long while business class and coach drew apart in price even as business got more luxurious with flat beds and fancy wines while coach seats in Boeing's newest, most advanced 787 jets are the narrowest trans- oceanic seats ever sold and Spirit/Frontier domestic seats don't even recline anymore.

But that difference was driven by corporate executive passengers whose employers were paying the 10x prices and getting tax breaks for doing so. Corporate sales is complicated and charging more can actually sell more units so the airlines carefully eliminated mid-priced options to force businesses to pay far more for the very profitable business class seats than their marginal cost.

And economic rationality has reasserted itself. Premium economy seating is now common on airlines outside the USA without such easily gamed large corporations to scam. The premium economy is similar in quality to old- fashioned business class seating at prices that middle class leisure travellers can afford. Mostly you can't buy it from the USA without paying a steep premium, but anyone flying to the USA from abroad has been able to for about a decade. Carriers refused to sell it at the same prices in the USA because running the game on corporate purchasing departments is so lucrative. For example, JAL and Cathay Pacific round trip fares between the Far East and USA in premium economy have been about $500-1000 more originating in the USA than in their home countries.

But Delta and American are now outfitting planes with premium economy because it's the most profitable use of space for carriers that have it and supporting the corporate business class sales inflation scam can't hold it back anymore. American is flying the new class on planes already. Even CX and JL prices are starting to rationalize.

So the key variable in airline discomfort has been American corporate purchasing culture irrationality and not the natural division of markets into tiers. Corporate purchasing irrationality and cartel pricing to exploit it are also the drivers of advance-purchase fares, last-minute price gouging, saturday night stay requirements, steep premiums for one-way fares, and lots of other paradoxical and nasty pricing strategies.

<comment><USER13> > torture chairs

Maybe part of the problem is the tendency to hyperbolize.

<comment><USER14> You can't be tall.

<comment><USER15> How tall, though? I'm taller than 95% of the US population, have flown quite a bit, and have never had a problem. They can't build all the seats in the plane for people in the 98th percentile and up. (Or rather, they can build some, and call them 'first class'.)

<comment><USER16> I think it's very anti-humanistic to say that someone born tall should be required to pay for seats that are 10x the price of people that require slightly less space, or simply not travel long distances.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps it's worth comparing to people in wheelchairs. Airlines accommodate a few wheelchair-bound people on flights, but if more than that number want to fly, they need to pay extra. Shit luck for them, but the alternative would be for everyone else to subsidise wheelchair-bound people whenever they want to fly. If you consider, for the purpose of this conversation, being tall as similar to being wheelchair-bound that's the choice.

So what happens with people of below average intelligence and physical ability? They're likely to suffer from lower earnings. Should a person of average height and on minimum wage subsidise a well-paid tall person?

In an ideal world, chairs would adjust so that everyone is comfortable and still allow the same number of people on the plane at the same price. However, in the real world, we probably have to accept that allocating comfort based on ability to pay, with a bit of flexibility on both sides, is the best outcome.

<comment><USER16> I mainly meant to say that it's a ridiculous idea to suggest business/first class as a solution to basic needs given the absolutely insane pricing structure. Obviously reality makes it impossible for everyone to enjoy exactly the same advantages, regardless of their in-born traits.

<comment><USER13> So it depends how you define "basic needs". For me, this is a "nice-to-have" which might be skewed by my being average height and build. Those above average height, especially those who fly frequently, are more likely to consider it a basic need.

<comment><USER16> I would define the basic needs for a very tall person on a 6 hour flight to include the ability to keep their limbs within their allotted space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is happening in many other industries that suffer from commodization / lack product differentiation while also suffering from comparative price shopping. It's a race to the bottom to get listed first and make contact with a customer then it's all about upsell, crosssell, discounts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> I understand it is a competitive business but this is the result of consolidation and less competition. Delta, United, American, they're all awful. Who would have thought South West would become the Premier Airline to travel on.

While they continue to reduce capacity, load factors increase. They have everything down to a fine science using Big Data and their Algo's to come up with how many seats to oversell, how many folks they can leave behind, what flights to cancel, etc. They have completely embraced this business model of monetizing every triviality that they can possible get away with. The people traveling are just units, not even customers anymore. Everything is about squeezing every penny they can out of every seat mile and who gives a shit whether you are treated like a human. It's not like you have many options. It's either Shit A, Shit B or Shit C, pick one.

How I look forward to self driving cars that can get 800-1000 miles on a single charge. I can sit in the comfort of my vehicle and read, sight see, rest, or even work as I travel to my destination. I would gladly sit in the car for 10-12 hours instead of flying.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's peculiar how stereotypical some of the Americans in the comments are. It seems like there's a prevailing attitude of not wanting to "subsidize" others. Whether that includes people who want to bring luggage, people who would like a meal on the long flight or those that don't travel very often - does not matter, what matters is that it's the other people, who are not you.

I think that that same attitude is responsible for the current state of the higher education and healthcare in the US. As long as the interested parties can present the "us versus them" outlook to the public ("them" is of course poor/lazy/lower class people), they can get away with lots and lots.

<comment><USER20> That is an interesting thought...

As a non-USA person here I was also amazed with some of these comments. But I am not sure it is only about "subsidizing" others (which it also is). If you read a lot of these comments, they go into great lengths into describing their particular live choices, their very deliberate little decisions they make while traveling all the time, and how these makes them special. I feel that there is another side to this individualism: the pride on ones choices, on being unique and in some way, standing out of the masses through their clever use of their options.

It reminded me about another thing that surprised me in the USA: food menus are lengthy, and everything is customizable! You have to choose ingredients, topping, side, everything!

I guess, for a lot of USAmericans this feels empowering. Interestingly, coming from the other side of the Atlantic, it had the opposite effect on me: I felt overwhelmed, that I was required to do make decisions and do too much thinking, that at the end, it was the chef's job to offer me a menu with dishes that make sense and taste good! In fact in Europe, good restaurants tend to have very few options, you go there because you acknowledge that the person that designed the menu knows more about those dishes than you...

I guess, I am also ok about "subsidizing" others... I know that some days I will eat at the flight, some days I won't, some days I will need extra luggage, some days I won't... It is just easier if we don't have to go through all the bureaucracy of managing these decisions. It is cheaper too, since the accounting and planning becomes easier. Some people might be getting be getting more or less out of it, but it evens out with time anyways. I can get my "feeling of importance" by other means.

There is something more this might show us about the "customization" vs "just works" in how different people prefer their software. But I will think about this some other day...

<comment><USER21> American here but I'm with you on the food menu thing. This is a red hot issue for me. People who make food should have an opinion about how it should taste. I hate all this "have it your way" bullshit. The menu for this salad place gives me panic attacks: [http://choptsalad.com/](http://choptsalad.com/)

Culturally we've lost the idea of tastemakers, whether it's food, music, film, or whatever. Everyone's free to enjoy what they like and having any kind of sophistication is faux pas.

Having strong opinions about what is good and what sucks will quickly get the ire of others.

<comment><USER22> > Having strong opinions about what is good and what sucks will quickly get > the ire of others.

 _Expressing_ said opinion might get the ire of other. Besides, Americans seem to enjoy ire, so that's not necessarily a bad thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> many of the comments here remind me of a children's book I read often with my son, called Henry Hikes to Fitchburg [0].

In the story two bears agree to meet that evening in Fitchburg. Henry decides to spend the day hiking the thirty miles to Fitchburg, and his friend decides to spend the day earning enough money to buy a train ticket to Fitchburg. It's a takeoff on a Thoreau passage, but it's a great way to talk to kids about what we're working for in the end.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Henry-Hikes-Fitchburg-D-B- Johnson/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Henry-Hikes-Fitchburg-D-B- Johnson/dp/0618737499)

<comment><USER24> Thank you for posting this. I've just ordered a copy to read to my son.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The airline industry operates on decreasingly small margins. Airlines have no other choice but pull these kind of measures to stay afloat.

<comment><USER26> Not always.

[1] The US Airline Industry is Highly Profitable [https://airinsight.com/2016/08/18/us-airline-industry- highly...](https://airinsight.com/2016/08/18/us-airline-industry-highly- profitable/)

[2] The Most Hated U.S. Airline Is Also the Most Profitable [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-10/spirit- ai...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-10/spirit-airlines-is- the-most-profitable-u-dot-s-dot-airline)

<comment><USER27> How is it in the long term? There's historically been a major boom and bust component here, with economic downturns or terror attacks taking a major toll.

<comment><USER28> I've heard it said that, over its history, commercial aviation as a whole has never made money. However, I haven't seen a good source for that and, with consolidation and lower fuel prices, the airline industry has generally done pretty well over the past decade.

<comment><USER27> American went bankrupt just five years ago, and they're the world's largest airline. US Airways, Northwest, and Delta all went bankrupt just over a decade ago. A lot of smaller ones have also suffered bankruptcy:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_bankruptcies_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airline_bankruptcies_in_the_United_States)

If you look at the profits of existing airlines over the past decade then you're suffering from selection bias. You're also looking at a period soon after a bunch of big airlines were able to unload a lot of debt through bankruptcy. Between 9/11 and 2006, five major US airlines went through Chapter 11, so some of their subsequent success is funded by their former creditors. I don't know if any of that overcomes their recent profits or if the industry has become profitable even accounting for those things. It's certainly possible that they've finally figured out how to consistently make money in the long term.

<comment><USER28> I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the overall accounting for airline profitability throughout history was still in the red. In addition to the airlines you called out, there's also Pan Am, Eastern, TWA, etc.--as well as the others in your referenced list.

Furthermore, a lot of international carriers have historically been government subsidized.

It certainly hasn't been a great business for most of its history.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I didn't want to go too far back, or it starts being less relevant to the present situation. In any case, it will be interesting to see if the cycle repeats again, or if the current players have finally figured it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This may be true in the short term, but I suspect it affects the long term equilibrium (which of course is a moving target).

If the airline didn't have the option to introduce 'basic economy' prices alongside 'economy' ones, they would either reduce the services offered to economy passengers, or charge a slightly higher price than their competitors.

</comment><comment><USER30> KLM has an interesting feature where you can bid on Business/First seats.

<comment><USER31> Air New Zealand does this as well, they also offer Premium Economy and "sky couches" (still in economy but you get a row of three seats that fold flat).

I've heard of someone occasionally getting a good deal but usually you are paying close to full retail for the perks.

<comment><USER32> I did the minimum bid for me and my family and we got upgraded to business class with AirNZ, my brother had the same experience. It's not even close to retail, it's a nice way of letting you upgrade for cheap if they have the space.

<comment><USER31> What route?

I suspect space is the main factor - I'm usually on LAX or IAH to AKl and it's almost always full.

<comment><USER32> I tried on MEL->AKL. I think my brother was on AKL->SFO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is "Basic economy" the same for non US airlines? The new lowest/basic fare just means there is no checked baggage included, whereas the regular "economy" has 1 bag included.

Other than that I haven't noticed any difference such as special seating etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> It seems like this post is choosing a convenient point in time start its argument from. The reason cheap airlines like Spirit came about was because there was a market for cheaper tickets with less amenities. The post says that the major airlines lowered the prices of their lowest tier seats to match these cheap competitors, but this lowest tier had more amenities. Now the major airlines have come up with a new lowest tier of seats (basic economy) and are setting their old lowest tier (economy) back to the higher price that it used to have.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've wondered a bit about this. Would people be up for cheaper ticket prices, but slower (300-500 kph) air travel ?

Suppose there was a local flight from local airport moving at such speeds, would you want to take it ?

<comment><USER36> Airlines already operate their jet fleets at or near the optimum fuel-burn-vs- time point; further reducing speed would actually make them _less_ economical due to longer cruise times.

There are occasions when crews will dial-in a higher Cost Index ( CI ), which tells the flight management computer to bias towards higher speed rather than lowest fuel consumption. But in general they are instructed to use specific CIs that reflect the airline's costs.

With the drop in oil prices some airlines have chosen to raise their default CIs, keeping costs the same whilst slightly increasing speed, whereas others have chosen to keep the CI unchanged and to profit from the additional margin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> My instinct is that if perks have gone down but prices have stayed the same, that means that prices would have gone up if we kept the perks.

The airlines are not making huge profits. In fact, they seem to file for bankruptcy constantly. Even though bankruptcy is sometimes a ploy to renegotiate union contracts, they are clearly not making big profits. So if the (overall) higher price is not going to profits, it's going to increased costs of some kind.

</comment><comment><USER38> Am I the only one surprised by how cheap first class is on ALT-MCO? It's less than 2x the cost of basic economy. I understand it's a short flight, but I turned in some miles for BWI-ALT for my wife and I to upgrade to first, and the sticker price for those tickets were about 2.5x main cabin, which was itself a little more than basic economy.</comment>


China's Citizen Score Could Herald New Global Data Based Caste System - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/chinas-citizen-score-could-herald-new-global-data-based-caste-system-a6b2e2859c13 <comment><USER2> It's important to realize China is a huge bubble. They are the world's largest company. Why in the world are we supposed to have any faith in their GDP statistics? GDP growth in China has likely been negative for the last year also fyi.

One day the world will wake up and realize 20% of the global economy is gone, simply because it never existed. The consequences will be far more than just disastrous.

Also thought this was a beautiful quote: "Silicon Valley chose to imprison us in apps and call it business, when what it really amounts to is a social credit system of social gamification."</comment>


Elementary OS 5 Juno Is Here - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/elementaryos/elementary-os-5-juno-is-here-471dfdedc7b3 <comment><USER2> I'm very excited. I have been using elementary for almost 2 years now. I just can't wait until they complete their new installer. Currently you can only do fresh installs, but at some point their installer should drop (although no idea if they'll add that to current release or if it'll be a next edition feature).

I also cannot wait until the hopeful switch to Wayland so we can have multiple DPI displays running together.

Anyway, they at least work really hard to make a good HiDPI experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Elementary always looked nice but I moved on because I needed modern libraries.

<comment><USER2> I have been able to work out using all the modern libraries I like, latest kernel and others, without having to give up on EOS.

It of course means having to know how to install them and deal with any issues, but it's not been particularly hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have no issue with Elementary OS, but whoever wants to try EOS should try Arco Linux as well (and I have to say that I'm not using Arco Linux). Arco Linux is a rolling distro based on Arch Linux, uses Arch Linux repositories and AUR (not like Manjaro using its own repositories).

</comment><comment><USER5> It sure looks like 2018/2019 is going to finally be the Year of the Linux Desktop.

<comment><USER6> I agree!

To make that happen, I created something that I like to call Yabbos: Yet another browser-based operating system.

[http://yabbos.xyz](http://yabbos.xyz)

It has also gone by another name with a reference to Linux, but I got bored of that name after a couple of years of staring at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it possible to change the layout of window controls without nasty hacks? I'd like to have the min, max, close buttons on the right side. Looks really nice, if the layout is optional, definitely going to try it on my laptop

<comment><USER8> There is a very simple app for that called _< something> tweak_.

<comment><USER7> Yes there is, the last time I tried it, it only worked on Firefox window, and only with min, close buttons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks amazing. I might have to check it out again some time.

</comment><comment><USER10> The people behind it could have saved about, oh, a decade's work if they knew about GNUstep before they began.

But no. Instead, they invented yet another wheel...

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice, a reskinned Ubuntu distro.

<comment><USER12> I haven't installed it yet but I believe that it's more than just a reskin.

There's a custom set of desktop apps built using a their own language, Vala.

They also have a pay what you want app store to support and all apps there are FOSS.

[https://developer.elementary.io/](https://developer.elementary.io/)

<comment><USER13> They didn't create Vala, rather they adopted it because it's modern syntax makes it easier to write gtk+ based applications than doing it in C.

<comment><USER12> Aha thanks, that's interesting. I guess that leaves their tuning and custom apps in there then.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Unity3D Editor Remote Code Execution [Patch] - <AUTHOR> https://unity3d.com/security <comment><AUTHOR> From the security notification email:

 _Unity has identified a Remote Code Execution flaw in the Editor and we're rolling out a critical security patch to remediate this issue. You can select your Unity version and find the appropriate patch with instructions at[https://unity3d.com/security](https://unity3d.com/security). As a part of our commitment to Responsible Disclosure, we will release more details about the vulnerability once all of our users have been given time to patch. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact our Customer Service team at email@example.com._</comment>