It's Official: Apple is the New Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136949-c,companynews/article.html

<comment><USER2> "Can I reformat my iPod and install something else?"

Erm yes, of course you can. There's a thriving open source community for iPods replacement O/S and software.

<comment><USER3> Does anyone actually do it? Aside from doing it just because you can.

<comment><USER2> Of course. Using the 'standard' firmware on anything is just downright boring. Most firmware uses like 50% of the hardwares capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gotta admit: "Apple is an abusive monopolist because the iPod doesn't have an FM receiver" is an awesome argument. Way to go, PC World!

<comment><USER5> You are right, it would've been a poor argument if that's all they said. I'm not sure I agree with the entire article, but your comment had led me to believe that was the basis of their argument, and it isn't.

 _People love iPods (including me; my family of four has purchased 12 iPods in the past few years). But iPods come bundled with iTunes. Want to buy music from Apple? Guess what? You must install iTunes. Want an Apple cell phone from AT &T? Yep! ITunes is required even if you want only to make phone calls. Want to buy ringtones for your Apple phone? ITunes.

Apple not only "bundles" iTunes with multiple products, it forces you to use it. At least with Internet Explorer, you could always just download a competitor and ignore IE.

Not fair, you might say. Any hardware device that syncs data with a PC as part of its core functionality has software to facilitate that syncing. True enough. But operating systems have browsers as part of core functionality, too. Doesn't Mac OS X come with Safari? Doesn't the iPhone?

And "bundling" works. Steve Jobs bragged this week that Apple has distributed 600 million copies of iTunes to date. The overwhelming majority of those copies were iTunes for Windows. And iTunes for Windows' popularity isn't driven by software product quality. ITunes is the slowest, clunkiest, most nonintuitive application on my system. But I need it because I love my iPods.

At least with Windows, you could reformat your PC and install Linux or any number of other PC-compatible operating systems. Can I reformat my iPod and install something else? Can I uninstall iTunes but keep using the iTunes store and my iPods? Apple strongly discourages all that, claiming that the iPod, the iPod software and iTunes are three components of the same product. But that's what Microsoft said about Windows and IE._

<comment><USER6> And bundling IE was always the weak argument why Microsoft is a monopolist. Microsoft is a monopolist because they have a serious majority of the market, used completely undocumented features of their OS in their Apps, and particpated in extremely unfair trade practices.

Apple is busting an entrenched industry. This is good. Its possible that Apple will become the new Microsoft indeed. But they are so laughably far from this status the PC world article remains equally ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another example of journalistic sensationalism at its best.

"It's Official?" Says who?

<comment><USER8> The author, of course. We're each kings of our own ego-islands.

<comment><USER9> I can't hear your petty little comment from way up here on my throne.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Crap article from crap site of crap magazine.

</comment><comment><USER11> Come on, Google is the new Microsoft. How can you compare Apple to Microsoft -- one's hardware, one's software.

<comment><USER12> Well, you'd be surprised at all the features they're constantly sneaking into iTunes for example that is sort of making it like a new operating system. Which works best with their own products (iPod). See the pattern? We get people to get our stuff, then we make sure our stuff works best with our stuff and slightly less so with the competition's stuff ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > At least with Windows, you could reformat your PC and install Linux or any > number of other PC-compatible operating systems. Can I reformat my iPod and > install something else?

Yes: <http://www.rockbox.org/>

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting conclusion.

He seems to be arguing that Microsoft was brought to heel by the marketplace, and that the court proceedings against it were redundant and counter productive. And now the same is true for Apple. You can't beat them with lawsuits, only by making better products.

I'm not so sure, though, that the lawsuits MSFT faced had no effect on the marketplace outcomes we're now seeing. Would PC vendors be so quick to put Linux on PCs if MSFT wasn't being monitored by the US DOJ and probed non-stop by the EU?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'll agree with the iTunes rant but the rest is pretty shallow. You can't call Apple the 'copycat' when their products are superior. And trying to compare MS tabletop UI to the iPhone is like amateur hour. We all know MS stole that UI from the Grad Student who's been showing off his touch interface on YouTube for 3 years. People hate MS because they are successful for making poor products. People hate Apple because they are successful for making great products and they aren't shy about flaunting it.

<comment><USER16> On a semi-related aside, Microsoft has had that multitouch interface in the works for more than three years. I saw (touched) a productized version of it two years ago.

<comment><USER15> That's interesting, I didn't realize that. I really like the tech, I would just rather have it on my coffee table than in a bar. I need to charge my friends for eating and drinking at my place ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is a good point in there. How does Apple get away with bundling Safari, Mail, iChat, iLife, etc with Mac OS X when that is what Microsoft ran into trouble with in the EU?

The only difference I can see is market share. Not that I'm complaining. I like some of those desktop apps.

<comment><USER12> Because the C?I?A? and N?S?A used to use pre-OSX mac computers extensively at the time that M-Soft got sued by the DOJ because there were a lot less OS8 / 9 hackers than their were window hackers. Then by some funny coincidence, OSX gets based on UNIX so now any government hacker anywhere can hack into your Mac with the greatest of ease. Why would you want to rock that boat if you were the government? You wouldn't. You'd say, "As long as you keep making it easier for us to spy on people, you can bundle anything you'd like."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Makes a valid point, but it doesn't mean that Microsoft is no longer a pain in the ass. My boss's experiment in upgrading a few machines in our office to Vista has been the bane of my existence recently. Jesus christ.

<comment><USER19> My condolences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope this is official because Microsoft is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER21> Smells like a Microsoft PR plant.

</comment><comment><USER22> All humans have a right to have their 5 seconds (sorry, minutes) of fame.

*) If I meant the author or the subject, is left as an exercise to the reader.</comment>


WHO warns United States could become coronavirus epicenter - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-usa/united-states-could-become-coronavirus-epicenter-who-idUSKBN21B1FT <comment><USER2> "Asked whether the United States could become the new epicenter, she said: "We are now seeing a very large acceleration in cases in the U.S. So it does have that potential. We cannot say that is the case yet but it does have that potential." "

That's all that was said, no new facts in this article.

<comment><USER3> It's bullshit anyway, we're seeing "a very large acceleration in cases in the U.S" because there was a very large increase in testing

<comment><USER4> the death count is also accelerating and is not subject to that effect

<comment><USER5> If you don't test someone for coronavirus prior to the death (or even after), it doesn't get attributed to coronavirus

<comment><USER6> There is also a reverse problem. Some people are dying of heart attacks and are testing positive COVID-19, and are being counted even though it's unlikely the COVID-19 had anything to do with it.

<comment><USER7> What makes you think Covid-19 isn't killing those patients?

<comment><USER6> Because as far as we know it's respiratory and asymptomatic for many days.

Someone who has a heart attack during the asymptomatic period was probably going to have one anyway.

<comment><USER7> How are asymptomatic people having heart attacks being coded as covid-19 deaths?

<comment><USER5> As far as I know, asymptotic people aren't even being tested for covid-19, because of the test kits shortage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am continually seeing headlines from the WHO that seem to be, well, not only obvious, but delayed and unhelpful. Yesterday I saw that they said 'the Pandemic is accelerating'. I recall many wonderful tweets that have been not only helpful, but possibly significantly harmful, as anyone is happy to cite the WHO when they say things like normal people do not need masks, stigma is worse than the virus, and so on (For example: [https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152](https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152) [https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929](https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929) [https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1233418231261646849](https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1233418231261646849) ), and I'm honestly wondering if they have even been a net-positive for this situation overall. Am I missing something here?

<comment><USER9> > normal people do not need masks

Normal (i.e. non-sick) people _don 't_ need masks, this is good advice. As a matter of fact buying masks is actively harmful, because you are depriving people who do need them (the sick and their caregivers).

Source: [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/prevention...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/prevention.html)

(No comment on the rest of the tweets though)

<comment><USER10> If masks were plentiful, non-sick people _should_ wear masks in this case, because contagion starts before symptoms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In some ways, it already is. If New York State were a country with it's 26k+ cases, it would rank #6 in total cases, ahead of Iran and behind Germany. And I'm assuming that of those cases, the vast majority are in the New York City metropolitan area, which covers a tiny fraction of the state by area.

The city is on track to surpass Wuhan in just a few days and we're _still_ lagging behind in our ability to test.

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems that the US is on the the path of no mitigation Fast/South approach [https://neherlab.org/covid19/?%7B%22population%22%3A%7B%22po...](https://neherlab.org/covid19/?%7B%22population%22%3A%7B%22populationServed%22%3A330000000%2C%22country%22%3A%22United%20States%20of%20America%22%2C%22hospitalBeds%22%3A1485000%2C%22ICUBeds%22%3A49499%2C%22suspectedCasesToday%22%3A6638%2C%22importsPerDay%22%3A20%2C%22cases%22%3A%22United%20States%20of%20America%22%7D%2C%22epidemiological%22%3A%7B%22r0%22%3A3.2%2C%22incubationTime%22%3A4%2C%22infectiousPeriod%22%3A3%2C%22lengthHospitalStay%22%3A4%2C%22lengthICUStay%22%3A14%2C%22seasonalForcing%22%3A0.2%2C%22peakMonth%22%3A6%2C%22overflowSeverity%22%3A2%7D%2C%22simulation%22%3A%7B%22simulationTimeRange%22%3A%7B%22tMin%22%3A%222020-02-29T22%3A00%3A00.000Z%22%2C%22tMax%22%3A%222021-04-30T09%3A00%3A00.000Z%22%7D%2C%22numberStochasticRuns%22%3A0%7D%2C%22containment%22%3A%5B%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222020-02-29T22%3A00%3A00.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222020-04-17T04%3A33%3A20.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222020-06-03T11%3A06%3A40.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222020-07-20T17%3A40%3A00.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222020-09-06T00%3A13%3A20.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222020-10-23T06%3A46%3A40.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222020-12-09T13%3A20%3A00.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222021-01-25T19%3A53%3A20.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222021-03-14T02%3A26%3A40.000Z%22%7D%2C%7B%22y%22%3A1%2C%22t%22%3A%222021-04-30T09%3A00%3A00.000Z%22%7D%5D%2C%22current%22%3A%7B%22overall%22%3A%22Custom%22%2C%22population%22%3A%22United%20States%20of%20America%22%2C%22epidemiological%22%3A%22Fast%2FSouth%22%2C%22containment%22%3A%22No%20mitigation%22%7D%7D)

[https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1242242633050861568/ph...](https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1242242633050861568/photo/1)

</comment><comment><USER13> I am not sure how much matters, but Italy has a high population density, higher than China: 201/km2. China has 145/km2, while United States has 36/km2. This mean that people are more widespread, so it should be easier to isolate parts of United States than it is to isolate parts of Italy, in case there are problematic areas. In short, New York might become a center of epidemic, but probably not the whole United States.

<comment><USER14> China's population density is skewed lower due to uninhabitable and sparsely inhabited mountains and deserts in Xinjiang and Tibet that make up about half the country. Without those regions China's population density doubles to around 300/km2.

<comment><USER13> True, mine is a generalization. However Italian geography also lead to heavy concentration of people in limited areas. Lombardy, the worst hit region, has a population density of 420/km2. Look at this map of Italian geography: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy#/media/File:Italy_topogr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy#/media/File:Italy_topographic_map- blank.svg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you look at tourism in countries and international plane flight history, along with the size of a country. It's a given, at some stage in this Virus life-cycle.

However, what the WHO need to do it act as part of the problem over many missed opportunities that will now playout whatever happens and with that, the USA will see it become the epicenter soon.

But long term, there are countries with less medical and health standards that are large and with lesser international flights, bit behind the growth rate. But they will only catch up and eventually overtake and what will the WHO do in preventing that? Beyond a tweet saying how XXX country is now the epicenter and solve nothing.

We have seen some bad misinformation come out from WHO and with that, this latest comment from them fits into the other form of output - unhelpful and too late to stop, whatever will happen.

</comment><comment><USER16> Stop calling it the epicenter now. Covid-19 is here to stay and it will run its course. And the entire planet is already an epicenter

The US seems to be preparing itself quite well to handle the scale of severe cases. And I hope they walk the talk. And increased testing is obviously going to increase the number of cases.

<comment><USER17> Show me evidence that the US is preparing quite well to handle the scale of severe cases.</comment></comment>


Who is responsible for Grooveshark serving malware? - <AUTHOR>

Visited Grooveshark this morning, selected a Playlist of mine and hit Play All. Was then unceremoniously served Malware. It's your basic security alert redirecting to an off-site domain (www1.servantinspectionon-line.pl) which served a JavaScript alert "Viruses were found on your computer. You need to clean your computer to prevent system crash.".
I've already emailed email@example.com about this issue, but upon a cursory search noticed that this has been an ongoing issue (since 2009 which I'm assuming is its inception):
http://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/grooveshark.com/msgpage http://onerudedude.blogspot.com/2009/12/beware-grooveshark.html http://www.brucebnews.com/2010/02/grooveshark-malware-warning/
My question would be, after such a prolonged history of serving malware by Grooveshark, who is responsible? The company? Their ad provider? Adobe Flash/Flex? I would presume the buck stops at the top. It's almost as if they don't give a shit.
Am I wrong or is there a problem that's so unsolvable that Grooveshark can do nothing about serving malware for the last 3 years? <comment><USER2> Well then... I can't help but wonder if this affected me too. Had my online banking credentials stolen yesterday (didn't lose anything, my bank picked up on it right away).

So far I haven't actually been able to find any evidence of any malware, but the credentials were way too complicated to have been compromised through any other means really. Since I haven't been able to find any evidence that my machine's been infected, I think that means it's time to re-image it :(

Sorry for the random rant... It's been a rough two days :)

</comment><comment><USER3> On my original install of Win7, I'm not sure what my configureation was, but I never got malware... My other computers however, every time visiting grooveshark get the redirect to sex.us and other websites and it says "VIRUSES FOUND ON YOUR COMPUTER SCAN NOW" lol (i hate those fake antivirus sites).

Grooveshark has some of the best songs not available on youtube or rhapsody (I usually record my songs from those or download them with a DL tool). But damn you grooveshark ,fix your shit or face shut down.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm running Win 7. I was also served malware while listening to music on grooveshark. Had to restart my computer afterwards. I think it has something to do with their ads.</comment>


In blow against anti-vaccine movements, Italy obligates to vaccinate children - <AUTHOR> http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-06/23/c_136387293.htm <comment><USER2> Well done Italy</comment>


NASA Graphics Standards Manual (1976) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/nasa_graphics_manual_nhb_1430-2_jan_1976.pdf <comment><USER2> There was a kickstarter[0] about reissuing that manual. I'm sad I missed it.

If I understand correctly, they did another kickstarter for another manual and then released it again[1] in smaller format out of the kickstarter. Maybe they'll do the same here.

By the way, I found about this manual when I was specifically looking for inspiration about old space race era graphics design. The inspiration is for a SaaS website. I'm one of those that would like the web was more about content and less about big pictures, parallax effect, ... In particular, the manual uses classic quality fonts that are now regarded as unprofessional by web designers because they are too ubiquitous. I would be very tempted to use them.

[0]: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/reis...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thestandardsmanual/reissue- of-the-1975-nasa-graphics-standards-manual/description) [1]: [https://standardsmanual.com/](https://standardsmanual.com/)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure anyone has much to learn about fonts, and design generally, from web designers.

<comment><USER4> :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Everything old is new again. In the 90s it was the fashion to disdain the "worm" logotype and concerted efforts were made to remove it from NASA facilities. In all my time on various NASA facilities I only saw the worm logotype on a few old stickers marking NASA property, some old technical reports, and on some nameplates of facilities. A shame, really, because as this standards manual shows, the logotype and its surrounding typography were very well considered.

</comment><comment> hammer-time The NASA book actually just went on sale (pre-order) to be shipped May 3: [https://standardsmanual.com/products/nasa-graphics- standards...](https://standardsmanual.com/products/nasa-graphics-standards- manual)

</comment><comment> hammer-time Looks like the book is now on pre-order at:

[https://standardsmanual.com/products/nasa-graphics- standards...](https://standardsmanual.com/products/nasa-graphics-standards- manual)

Shipping May 3, 2016.</comment>


Huawei Could Divide the World - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-20/how-huawei-could-divide-the-world <comment><USER2> I miss the Internet in early-2000's China. Not as many sites were blocked and everyone was much more open-minded as the undereducated chauvinists did not yet acquire reliable Internet access. Nowadays everyone has a smartphone and it has enabled the chauvinists and other radicals to voice their opinions online, only this time they are actually emboldened by the nation which has risen in the last 30 years to become a serious competitor against the current superpower nation that is the US.

China has achieved amazing progress thanks to market reforms and entrepreneurship but certain aspects are continuously regressing under Xi's term which will last for the forseeable future. Private sector confidence is at an all-time low due to state media editorials calling for more state control and boosting state-owned corporations. There has been more and more censorship orders aimed at reducing "Western influence" regardless of whether they are politics-related. More and more Chinese citizens are travelling abroad yet their beliefs in the "Chinese system" only gets re-affirmed by mistakenly thinking that China's success is completely dependent on authoritarianism. I don't agree with fervently supporting the current regime which is oppressive, brutal, antidemocratic, and still corrupt; nor do I agree with painting an entire nation and its people as some sort of evil reincarnate for the sake of a new Cold War. I don't have the knowledge or capability to offer a solution and I am just overall disappointed at the current state of affairs.

<comment><USER3> "More and more Chinese citizens are travelling abroad yet their beliefs in the "Chinese system" only gets re-affirmed by mistakenly thinking that China's success is completely dependent on authoritarianism."

This is by far the scariest part.

Even people who knowingly try to 'escape the system' still support it, as though 'the party = China'.

I believe this problem exists a little bit in Europe where so many believe the EU = Europe, they use the terms interchangeably.

<comment><USER4> I think a lot of people (including me) want China to join the club of first world countries, not just economically, but also in terms of respect of human rights. How do you get there? By banning chinese products and heavily penalizing them? Or by inviting them to get their people richer and more educated?

There's actually a very interesting kurzgesagt video on the subject: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvskMHn0sqQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvskMHn0sqQ)

<comment><USER5> "I think a lot of people (including me) want China to join the club of first world countries, not just economically, but also in terms of respect of human rights. "

\-- Really? A lot? I don't think so. My experience is Chinese middle class rarely care about human rights issues. Most of them are extremely cold blood. As long as their own family is not hurt, they don't care about human rights issues at all. As long as they can get rich and stay rich, they will praise the authoritarian regime.

<comment><USER6> I didn't read baby's comment as meaning a lot of Chinese people want better human rights in China, I read it as a lot of people everywhere want that.

<comment><USER4> This is what I meant, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No. Huawei doesn't divide the world. The world is divided and Huawei gets caught in the middle. Just like those two Canadians, they may or may not do something wrong. But that's irrelevant when they get caught in the middle between China and Canada.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain how a Chinese company is subject to a US embargo?

And, at the risk of getting political, whether the idea raised in the article about the success of China in the last forty years being due to abandoning their isolationism is at direct odds with a trade embargo anyway.

<comment><USER9> No need to worry about it getting political because it is a political rather than a judicial act. Otherwise, imagine private citizen board members or executives of HSBC being arrested or extradited (US-UK have extradition) for actually 'violating sanctions' with Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba in 2012.

The sanction itself is purely political as well. The US overthrows the Iranian democratically elected government to maintain BP's regional dominance because the government threatened to use their country's natural resources' profits to benefit its people. Installs puppet and helps the puppet plan to build 23 nuclear reactors (and the secret police Savak among other things). Puppet gets overthrown by the people and now Iran has 'nuclear ambitions'. And that's after getting the other puppet Saddam to go to war with Iran and then getting rid of the other puppet because now he's US armed like ISIS. And now Iran has a sanction and the sanction is used against other countries.

This is a pyramid scheme of imperialism.

<comment><USER10> You mean like when Mike Turner the CEO of Britain's largest defense company was arrested upon landing in America for arms sales to Saudi-Arabia?

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1976770/BAE- bosses-detained-by-US-investigators-over-Saudi-case.html)

<comment><USER9> One might be able to find dozens of non-snatched executives from sanction breaking companies per each arrested one such as:

Banco do Brasil, Bank of America, Bank of Guam, Bank of Moscow, Bank of Tokyo- Mitsubishi, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Clearstream Banking, Commerzbank, Compass, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, JP Morgan Chase, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, National Bank of Pakistan, PayPal, RBS (ABN Amro), Société Générale, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Trans-Pacific National Bank (now known as Beacon Business Bank), Standard Chartered, and Wells Fargo.

Since we're all about making light-hearted fun of China's non rule of law, I think it's consistent to be at least concerned about the selective enforcement of Western rule of law.

[https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-war-on- hu...](https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-war-on-huawei-meng- wanzhou-arrest-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2018-12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Questions that keep me awake:

What is the _endgame_ of this escalation of conflict between the US+Canada and China?

If there's no endgame, why are politicians escalating the conflict?

The last thing we would want is for both sides to continue to escalate the conflict in response to further escalation from the other side, because neither side wants to end up looking "weak," to the detriment of everyone.

<comment><USER12> I think its really simple.

Cars made in China and sold in the U.S. have a 2% tariff.

Cars made in the U.S. and sold in China have a 40% tariff.

We need to balance that eventually. If we ignore it for another 40 years there won't be any American car companies.

We don't have to have perfect balance tomorrow, or free trade exactly, its ok to allow them to exploit trade with us to some extent as there economy catches up with the west.

But it is time for that assistance and trade imbalance to start to shrink. China has given no indication that they think we should be equal trading partners even after their country becomes the world leader in economy, scientific research, and military power.

<comment><USER6> The does sound fair and I agree with it, but the US hasn't applied this to other countries and are smaller by population, economic, scientific and military measures, why should China apply it to the US?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found this article incredibly naive and idealistic. The divide between China and America isn't a mere disagreement about trade 'disparities' and how IP is handled. The Chinese Communist Party is running an authoritarian, draconic police state that has spent its time quashing human rights, and threatening and bullying democratic nations, all while cynically exploiting its own citizens for increasingly centralized wealth. No amount of cross border trade can alter the fact that China has positioned itself as an enemy of democracy when it stands in the face of hegemonic Chinese power, both abroad and at home.

This is a country where the government forced ~10,000 women to be sterilized or see their families imprisoned in 2010, where a report came out not 2 months ago documenting how prisoners of conscience are harvested for organ transplants (the organs in question being sold; it is, after all, _state_ capitalism), a country that joined Russia in preventing the UN from sanctioning Syria after one of the worst chemical weapons attacks...I think since the Iran/Iraq war. This is the country that is stripping its citizens of their rights based on an algorithm that takes into account everything they say on the internet.

Every country commits human rights violations of some sort or another. No group is perfect. That being said, the breadth, scale, and malicious intent behind China's human rights violations beggars belief. These are not the actions of a nation that wants the best for the international community. These are not the actions of a nation that wants to integrate with the international community, except to loot it while enjoying the protections and rights created by that self same community of nations. Huawei is not dividing China from the world; China has done that for itself.

<comment><USER14> > The Chinese Communist Party is running an authoritarian, draconic police > state

Agree. But don't you think it is weird that this did not register during the time when moving production to China was at it's height? How come the whole west were willing to look the other way at most if not all human rights violations in China for most part of the last 3 decades, only to now raise concern?

I believe an honest assessment of those questions reveals without shadow of a doubt that humans rights violations in far off countries only become a concern for the west when it is useful for geopolitical or simple profit reasons.

It has been that way since the opium wars and longer, and we fall for it every single time.

<comment><USER15> > _But don 't you think it is weird that this did not register during the time > when moving production to China was at it's height?_

There have always been skeptics and strong opposition to China, and full disclosure I personally have long thought it was very foolish to sacrifice both our societal ideals and the Free Market on the alter of Free Trade (which as it's been used over the last few decades has been directly opposed to both). However at the same time I think it's unreasonable not to acknowledge that there were a lot of very smart people who were China doves out of a hypothesis that economic development would actually be the best way to peacefully and productively make China liberalize and become a strong, equal and valuable partner in the international order. It was believed that economic development would result in a growing middle class and in turn a demand for more political freedom, that enormous authoritarianism would ultimately be unsustainable, and that the _moral_ thing to do was to not be too hard on these billion+ people most of whom were highly impoverished. And China also put on a good act, toeing various lines or making the right noises or even occasional actions, combined with carrots and sticks towards companies, while they built up.

It has now become clear however that, at least in the short term, the idea that economic development would inevitably lead to political liberalization too has not worked out. Nor has a growing panopticon proved unsustainable so far. It may be that these were simply never linked concepts, or it might alternately be that technological and societal development has rendered the modern situation fundamentally different to how the West developed and shifted the power balance such that that window of history is firmly closed.

At any rate however, while there were certainly a lot of people motivated purely by greed I think you are still overly uncharitable towards a lot of genuinely good people who had good intentions. Remember, this was coming directly off of the Cold War, a time of genuinely justified end-of-the-world terror and polarization and confrontational approaches. Even if it was naive, I can understand why some people, both exhausted by the CW and excited by an imagined future where liberal democratic societies spread throughout the world, thought building economic ties and giving China a lot of slack was an alternative approach that could work.

But at this point consensus is no, regrettably it has not worked out. That a lot of anguished doves are now changing tack rather then stubbornly refusing to adapt is admirable, not bad, and will add some needed moderation and variety to new strategies rather then letting the pendulum go all the way in the other direction.

<comment><USER16> > It was believed that economic development would result in a growing middle > class and in turn a demand for more political freedom, that ... > authoritarianism would ultimately be unsustainable

For the record, this is pretty much what happened historically e.g. in South Korea, and in Taiwan (which is culturally part of China). However, it did take a higher degree of development than we see in the mainland today, for there to be a real 'demand' for these sorts of changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Good article, it touches on some of the more subtle but important issues at play in this case in particular, but the rise of China overall. Due to a historic lack of more balanced articles like this reaching a relatively more mainstream audience, I think a lot of people seriously underestimate how important the opinion of the average man on the ground is (or can be) when it comes to international trade.

I've been very concerned about the rise of China for many years now, the rate at which they're closing the technological capability gap with the Western world coupled with their massive population and cultural propensity to hard work and saving, wielded by an authoritarian pseudo-communist government poses a very large risk to the future well being of the world. This isn't to say it is _guaranteed_ to produce a bad outcome, but it certainly could, and it doesn't seem terribly unlikely to me, at all.

It has been very interesting to observe the shift in public opinion on China in forum discussions over the last several years, but particularly in the last 3 months or so. Here in Canada, 4 or so years ago typically only the most hardcore "racists" would have something negative to say about China, and the typical response would be overwhelming disagreement and downvoting, if not deletion of comments and banning from the forum. Contrast that with today, where I'd say strongly anti-China sentiments are at least 50% of the comments, and _heavily_ upvoted and rarely moderated (suggesting a change in sentiment even among moderators). Another example would be the typical discourse on tariffs when Trump first started discussing them compared to now. At the beginning, the typical comment was a hearty "oh my god, Trump thinks trade is a zero sum game, what an idiot!", but I can't remember the last time I read anyone saying that, suggesting that even the most anti-racist people out there have somehow become more educated on the topic. And you rarely hear it mentioned (it usually requires an access to information request by a journalist), but this change in public sentiment on this and related topics is definitely a serious topic of discussion behind closed political doors in Canada.

Very interesting times, I hope it all works out in the end.

</comment><comment><USER18> The English speaking West's relationship to China can be seen in a few things in past years. One is the UK leaving Hong Kong in 1997. The British Empire, on which the sun never set and the blood never dried, and which is causing potentially bloody Brexit chaos in Ireland today, went to war with China in 1842 in order to force opium and heroin on its citizens. The US was junior helper in these opium wars. The UK stole Chinese territory and stayed there until 1997, and unbelievable affront of imperialism.

The US can be seen in having the Air Force play hot dog on the Chinese border in April 2001 (the US military was too busy doing that to protect itself from jihadis it had funded and armed in Afghanistan to overthrow Afghanistan's secular government and then betrayed by occupying Arabia - they would strike the US to end that occupation later in 2001). They crashed into a Chinese plane, killing the pilot, then illegally landed on Hainan island without permission. Then the US press and diplomacy became enraged that the Chinese were actually inspecting the plane and were holding these military personnel who killed a Chinese pilot. Then this is followed by human rights lover Trump's recent campaign against China.

It is in this context that the demonization of China by English-speaking Western liberals currently happens in. Liberals who are also attacking and demonizing Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, and who applauded Obama's overthrow of Honduran democracy several years ago with the US funded Honduran military's overthrow of the elected leader. But the US attacks and bombs so many countries, as does the UK, it's hard to keep up with who they have a campaign against from day to day.

<comment><USER19> Your comment was worth the down votes, but you can be ticked off for mentioning off topic ideas such as Brexit.

The Bloomberg article was pretty good in my opinion, the writer had spent a lot of time in China and taken time to see things from a Chinese perspective.

I thought his mention of 'IP' extending to the know how on how to setup factories and such like was a very good point. I also believe that people here who shoot off about China stealing IP need to look themselves in the mirror - a few years ago, when they were starting in tech, did they not steal a copy of Microsoft Office, learn Photoshop with a pirated copy and listen to some stolen MP3 files whilst they were at it?

China has worked hard, Chinese people have worked hard. There is a higher percentage of people actually working in China than in America, and Americans in work do have not that many holidays, so there is no dismissal of Americans as being lazy there.

Regarding Huawei, they are ahead. Yes, ahead. Their products are not cheap knock offs of Western tech, their kit is really good. They are already there with 5G and their latest smartphones do make me wonder why I would want a Google or an Apple phone when I can have things like a 40Mb camera and beautiful build quality. This is just an opinion, but I think the quality of Huawei products is superb and that is where the problems are. If I was a domestic rival I would be trying to get the government to stop them as competing is not easy! There is also the small matter of five-eyes, they are not able to cooperate with Huawei to the level they can with domestic kit manufacturers, so again, spread some FUD - projection - about 'them spying on us'.

Who on this thread has taken the time and had the courtesy to listen to translated to English words uttered by the Chinese government? Or does everyone just read how the media sound-bites what news comes from China? We are familiar with weasel words from our own politicians, politicians that were born with silver spoons and went to Ivy Leagues. The Chinese leadership had no such easy start in life, they grew up under Mao and true terror. They have perspective that Western leaders lack. Clearly Obama had humble origins but there are few others in Western democracies that can claim the same. Angela Merkel is another, after that I am struggling to think of others.

The aspect of China being a 'police state' with 'censorship' does not sound too bad to me. I look in disgust at the lies printed in the press in the West. I question why they must spit such bile and hatred on a daily basis, doing their best to profit from keeping people divided. Even 'liberal' Western press is far too keen to do-down the Chinese, Russian, Syrian, Iranian, Indian and African man. They have strayed far away from reporting that wins the Pulitzer Prize.

The true rulers of the Western world think that democracy is great. But democracy far too often results in the most narcissistic useful idiots with no understanding of history or philosophy getting into office, lured by money and power. Our Western governments have told us about freedom but it is not freedom for us, it is freedom for their backers money. The Western experiment in neo-liberal capitalism has left us with two classes of people - the rich and the poor. Our society is like a parasite that has devoured the host, everyone including the moderately rich enslaved by debt. If you take mortgages into account everyone is burdened by debt and the governments of the West have debt that will never be paid off, the can kicked down the road for future generations to pay.

China have some base or port in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa, the U.S. has troops on 50 of the 55 countries of Africa. It is hard to believe if you only read the Western media (and easy to believe if you listen to what the Chinese leadership have to say) but China does seek mutually beneficial, stable trading partnerships with the rest of the world. China does not have a mindset of exploitation. Of course there are those that speak of China's human rights violations and persecution of minorities in Tibet and far beyond, but, again, have any of these people so eager to tell us this been to any of these places or shared a few words with people from these allegedly oppressed areas? No. Hence they do not know whether they are being useful idiots, allowing xenophobia to get the better of them.

We are all stranded on this small rock we call earth together, in the West we must up our game to be as polite, courteous and diplomatic as our Chinese neighbours, to learn from them, to be friends and to restore this planet to the beautiful garden that it deserves to be. We must practice the art of turning the other cheek and not getting fired up by media and politicians that only have the interests of money at heart.

<comment><USER20> > have any of these people so eager to tell us this been to any of these > places or shared a few words with people from these allegedly oppressed > areas? No.

Certainly there are people concerned about the recent news of massive Uighur internment camps who have been to Xinjiang. I myself have, twice. That region has, after all, been commonly traveled by overlanders going from Central Asia on to China and Southeast Asia. Before the Beijing Olympics, travel there was relatively hassle-free.

And yes, I did do a lot of talking with the Uighurs at the time (I was keen to learn Uighur after already knowing closely-related Turkic languages of Central Asia) and I heard nothing but complaining about the influx of Han Chinese. Now, however, according to reports from travel fora, foreign travelers in Xinjiang are being pushed through the region quickly by police and prevented from any contacts with the Uighur population at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why so many company of USA are blocked in China? Facebook, Google, twitter, Reddit ... But any company of China can make money in USA whenever they want? USA make CCP rich, but CCP wanna USA to die. These should not be tolerated anymore.

<comment><USER22> The original idea was that if the West opened its economy to China, they would inevitably liberalize. Many years later it's clear that was naive, but that's why the incredibly one sided rules are/were tolerated.

<comment><USER23> I think it was probably self-delusional. The billion-consumer Chinese market was dangled like a carrot, just give up all your IP to a local "partner". But the Party never had even the slightest intention of giving Western companies access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems the case built on lie to bank not just about export.</comment>


Ask HN: What's it like for software engineers on Wall Street? - <AUTHOR> I was looking at this quora question[1] in which an individual is 23 and makes 300k on Wall Street as a developer. I've heard many times how miserable the financial sector is, but I'd probably be willing to bite the bullet for a couple years at that rate. Information about the jobs there seems scarce, though. Anyone on HN have experience in the financial sector? What sort of work do you do, what kind of work environment is it, what was the pay like, and was it worth it?<p>[1] https://www.quora.com/I-just-turned-23-and-make-around-300k-working-on-Wall-Street-Could-I-make-this-in-Silicon-Valley-if-I-was-looking-to-make-the-switch <comment><USER2> Wall street is indeed a very broad term and the biggest distinction is between banks and hedge funds. Below is a very rough outline and no doubt some people will debate it.

Banks are more standard jobs, where devs are usually siloed into doing very specific assignments in a pre-determined part of the business. If you want to build a long-term career in finance through banking, you should get in, climb the corporate ladder by doing your particular job well and hope your department's business will be popular and sexy in 5 years. In 2003-2008 CDO and derivatives were the sexiest thing alive, after which it became less interesting. In terms of pay, you would get a higher base salary guaranteed, but any extra profit the bank makes will have to be split across all departments (sales, client, compliance …), so bonuses tend to be limited.

Hedge funds and prop trading are smaller institutions than banks, as such they are more tech-oriented (especially systematic trading places, where algorithmic platforms are built to place and execute trades). Hedge funds client their clients' money and charge a commission on profits, while prop traders trade their own money and could potentially go down in one day. All this presents challenging problems to solve. Therefore, HFs and prop trading value good developers and they work closely with quant analysts and traders. While they usually look for strong backend developers, there is demand for good front-end engineers to refine the client facing applications too. Due to the nature of the job you would be working with traders and analysts, which is a good way to learn about finance proper. Smaller headcount in hedge funds generally encourages more collaboration and working in tighter teams, as it's inefficient for the business to silo people away from each other as much. Another advantage is splitting the bonus across fewer people, leaves more money per person, which is where a dev with a lower base will beat your banker dev and can (not always) get > 250k.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to work on Wall St in technology. To make 300K or more as a developer, you need to either be in Quant Finance or probably work at a hedge fund, Prop. trading or high frequency trading firm. The other way to make big money on Wall St is to become a specialized consultant in a specific field.

The reality is that majority of developer work for Wall St is to build/manage legacy systems from back in the days. Will you believe it if I said I worked with a back office system at one of my clients in 2010 which was built in IBM iSeries ? Not to scare you but you will be working with old technology a lot on Wall St and not everything will be fancy new JS framework (some are catching up with those too)

Also, on an average, it will be VERY difficult to get over 160-170K as a base salary. Most people fall in the 120-150K range even after years of experience. Sure, you could get some bonus on top but consider those almost zero in today's market on wall st. Pay raises ? Forget about it. You may get 1-2% if lucky. Some years, you get 0 pay raise.

So don't be illusioned about the 300K number. Those are possible but only if you fit the criteria as I explained above. You are looking at average of 120-150K base like I said. Anything over it, you need to become a Director or above and go up the food chain.

The trick of working on Wall St in tech is simple. Negotiate the best pay you can BEFORE you get the job. Once you have it, forget about getting a big raise or bonus these days on wall st in technology.

<comment><USER4> It sounds like you were mostly working back/middle office. You can earn a lot more in front office if you're working as a developer on a trading desk. At some banks front office developers share desk bonuses which can be very lucrative.

Efinancialcareers is a good job website to find front office dev role recruiters.

<comment><USER3> Yes, trading desk developers can make more but again, my point was that most software engineers on wall st do not fall into that category as the OP asked. I am saying that the majority of developers on wall st don't make 300K and it is only the few that are either working on trading desk, hedge funds, prop trading etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It really depends what "Wall Street" means to you. With big banks (my area), you're looking at market rate salary (~100-150k, junior-senior). Retirement+bonus can push it up 25-30%, but that's not salary, of course. My company uses enterprise technology (IBM stuff, Natural, COBOL/Java, Oracle). I have mostly normal hours, open office plans, etc. Python has some traction going. Nothing new and exciting, tons of legacy code. I vary between back-end services and web dev. It is your average boring, corporate gig.

The other part of wall street, the hedge funds, can pay way higher (data analysis/quant stuff). Those spots are quite rare, plus pay is more tightly tied to company performance. Who you know is more important than what you know, if that's what you're aiming for.

<comment><USER6> there is a lot of pressure for things not to go wrong, so the testing(unit and system) requirement can be higher. Timelines are normally longer too - due to this pressure and politics

Banking/finance bonuses are also capped at 15-25% pa normally - so if the company does badly you dont get a bonus, but if it does well you dont get that much of a bonus in comparison to other areas of the business

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I work in the UK equivalent, but have taken trips to US banks on Wall Street.

I'd say these days, the horror stories are rare. There will be times you will be expected to work weekends, late nights etc but these are VERY much the exception, and mostly for hitting regulatory deadlines, rather than business ones. Like a lot of places, it will depend on whether your boss is competent or an arsehole.

The working environment will be more formal than a startup. You may well need to own a suit (or two).

Some of the work is really interesting and cutting edge. Some of it isn't.

The pay (at least in the UK) is lot more than you would get in other industries.

One final thing I would say after being in the industry 20+ years is that there is less of a divide between the Front Office traders and technology. It's no longer seen as an imposition, but key to them making money and trading well.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am just off Wall St, but things are stable at my place. We get to code a lot more than people at the bigger banks. If you have a solid degree in math and can program in C++, there are firms in NYC that will pay you 400k - 1M total compensation.

</comment><comment><USER9> I worked in finance for ~15 years. The short answer is that it is largely the same as any other tech. industry. To make "big" money in finance, you need a couple of things 1) be in the front of the house, that is, things that are trivially tied to revenue. 2) be attached to a profitable division (this is good advice generally by the way)

Most large comp numbers in SV come from stock grants, most on Wall Street come from profit sharing bonuses. This is double edged, when profits go away you don't make good money & you frequently lose your job.

Happy to answer specific questions.

</comment><comment><USER10> There are all sorts of developers who do all sorts of things. Any role that generates P&L is going to pay significantly more than if you're developing some random insignificant backend.

I also would caution against generalizing on the hedge fund experience. I would say that unless their strategy is tech-driven or there are some senior management in tech roles, you could be in for a not so fun time.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's not a typical salary for someone that age. Anyway main differences are that the good gigs have a very high level of competition compared to SV, and also more importantly the industry is very closed. No open source, no hackathons, no collaboration due to extreme secrecy.

<comment><USER2> I agree with your points about the salary and levels of competition. One shouldn't expect any odd company to slap a >150k offer on the table and getting an offer is challenging enough. That's why both sides benefit from a recruitment layer between them to help candidates find out about the opportunity and understand the company to go to interviews prepared.

However, your point about the lack of openness seems directed at prop trading shops more than banks or hedge funds.

Banks are large corporations and are expectedly monolithic, but they are seeing benefits to opening up and hosting hackathons. Using/contributing to open source is difficult there because of inflated compliance departments, who need to justify their existence by banning the use of open source and signing up on enterprise solutions.

Prop trading is definitely the most secretive, because the people are trading their own money and aren't huge fans of letting anyone close to the secret sauce. Because it's their bread and butter, you would probably be less keen to make your methods public if your money was on the line in a really cut-throat environment. It's comparable to google not open sourcing their ranking/search engine - we don't complain about that, do we?

Hedge funds are by far the most open both internally and externally. Several of the big funds I know, sponsor academic events, research, organise hackathons internally and externally. A NY HF recently ran an internal build your air hockey AI to play against human air hockey pros. Devs were working on the software and someone connected airhockey controllers to leves and pulleys. The AI won. the business model at HFs promotes collaboration and the engineers are the most chilled out bunch you ever meet, so most people end up liking the environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. Know the right person. 2\. Actually make millions for your employer each year. 3\. Negotiate well at review time. 4\. Profit (but a small fraction of what you would make if you ran your strategy yourself)</comment>


The body's own fat-metabolism protects against the harmful effects of sugar - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170915144158.htm <comment><USER2> From that article:

> fat-metabolism in the cells takes place simultaneously with a detoxification > of the harmful substances from the blood sugar... The newly discovered > process involves one type of metabolite, the ketone acetoacetate, which > originates from the body's fat-metabolism, capturing and inhibiting another > type of metabolite, methylglyoxal, which originates from the body's sugar > metabolism.

Does this suggest that consuming sugars with fats is to be avoided? I've seen or recent research suggesting this for metabolic reasons, although can't put my hands on it right now.

> harmful substances from the blood sugar, which can avert the damage that can > in turn lead to age-related diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's and > cancer. This indicates that we have a detoxification system which we were > not previously aware of.

Sugar has become the Bad Guy recently, but I'm not certain there's unequivocal evidence that it's definitely incriminated in Alzheimer's and cancers. Besides individual studies, are there large meta studies that support this?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure about studies, but many cancer patients go on a very strict keto (very low carb (sugar), moderate protein and high fat) diet in hopes of shrinking the cancer tumors. Being on a keto diet will cause your body to switch from using glucose as a fuel source to using ketones. It's also a diet used for epilepsy treatment and by diabetics who have claimed to reverse their diabetes by staying on the diet.

This research seems to suggest their experience isn't just anecdotal.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Find a movie to watch the lazy way - <AUTHOR> http://lazydayapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> It's a little buggy, but it did make front page reddit several months ago: [https://www.reddit.com/domain/lazydayapp.com](https://www.reddit.com/domain/lazydayapp.com)

Looking for help with v2. Hoping to connect with talented web/mobile devs. Thank you!

FYI: Sign-up not fully functional, Now Playing link doesn't always work, selecting a search result might not always work either. Sorry haven't touched the code in several months. I'm hoping to revive this little passion project though!

<comment><USER2> Do you have any monetization plans, or is this strictly giving back to the community?

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love to monetize at some point but for now I guess you could say I'm giving back to the community ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is neat, but the tags don't make for a great first impression. #gore, #violence, #beating, #shot to death. It's all well and good if people are into that, but probably a turnoff to the average user that comes across the site.

<comment><USER4> #suicide This channel has been created for you based on this tag.

At first I read this as: #suicide channel has been created for you based on our magic algorithms.

It is a bit creepy in that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Movies in Tops page are based on what people are most interested in, which is a sobering thought. When first loaded the channel selection is random. But there are definitely some depressing/dark tags in the db.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It should tell me which streaming service it's available on... for extra points I should be able to select my streaming services then have the app go to work for me.

<comment><USER6> Is that data available - I imagine the streaming services are wary to provide hard data that can be used to quantitatively compare their catalogues?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all over the web and there are free databases like TMDB around that provide good API access

<comment><USER6> Where does TMDB show me which streaming services Mr.Robot, say, is currently available on? It gives the producing network, catalogue details, all that, but I can't find the details of its availability on Netflix/NowTV/Sky/AmazonPrimeInstant/etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't. You'd have to scrape a site that had that data or check to see if they have an API. I believe there are sites that do this but as it wasn't core functionality of the MVP anyway we didn't focus on it too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, where has this app been all my life.

Misc improvement ideas:

* Torrent streaming ;)

* 1channel integration

* YouTube + Soundcloud + Tomahawk (to fetch movie soundtracks)

* Recommendations (I suppose you could also pull metadata from Reddit like Reddit Music Player does. Crowd sourced metadata tends to be very, very, high quality.)

Anyway, great idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, some good ideas there. I wanted to be careful not to upset the Hollywood elite since I live here ;) and they are a litigious bunch. But with some further development I could make torrent streaming a possibility and/or consider other possibilities to enable people to use it like that. i.e. with 1channel/soundcloud/tomahawk assuming it's easy enough to get to that data and would definitely be interesting to experiment with.

Completely agree about crowd sourced meta data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cant believe [http://www.lazydayapp.com/static/img/background-01.png](http://www.lazydayapp.com/static/img/background-01.png) is 1.4MB

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I used optipng to downsize it by 20%. Hope that helps a little. Thanks for the tip. I'll probably downsize it a bit more.

<comment><USER9> A JPG would be far less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it up to me to actually find a way to watch the movie? The embedded trailers aren't labeled as such and my first thought was that these movies were all available on youtube.. Looks cool!

<comment><USER11> I use justwatch.com to find places to watch specific movies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I've seen this site. Difference is I'm focusing on helping the user make a decision, not find out what streaming service a movie is on. The whole time I was building this I kept asking myself one and only one question: What do I want to watch right now? Not that you were saying we're solving the same problem. I though I'd take the opportunity to point out the difference however, as there are a ton of movie rec sites out there. Thanks for checking it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome. I've wanted something like this but for only movies in my collection. What's your stack. HAve you considered open sourcing for more help?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. We have considered open sourcing but we need to clean some things up on the backend before doing so. Also we have some 3rd party tools that are not free that are part of the core functionality. So open sourcing might not make sense but I would like to make the platform available to users who want to catalogue their own collections. Thanks for your comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why no SSL on the login / registration pages ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because signup isn't fully working yet. There's still a lot of bugs we hadn't worked out in the signup flow. SSL will be up when we get it working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is too heavy for my computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm.. What kind of comp? It's running fine on my little $200 chromebook

<comment><USER14> A very old Celeron desktop that works fine for anything else I do and any other website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel like I just hit the jackpot...

<comment><AUTHOR> haha. Thanks for checking it out. I have some v2 designs in place but not the resources to put them into production. Looking for a partner in crime to help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> mulan violence</comment>


A Guide to WordPress Child Themes Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/wordpress-child-themes-dev/

<comment><USER2> Using !important is bad practice.

If you're loading a child stylesheet properly, you should be able to overwrite the styles without having to use !important.

You just have to make sure the selectors match up properly.

<comment><USER3> I'd say the same too. An acceptable use for "!important" will be with state classes. "!important" should not be the go to solution as its like using a grenade when careful diplomacy would suffice.</comment></comment>


Show HN: My 10-year-old son has made a card game, which he is giving away - <AUTHOR> My 10 year old son Troy has made a card game. It has 27 characters, each with different powers. You can download it here https://www.dropbox.com/s/jrgphx4vn95va4z/LegimonChristmasSet2013.pdf<p>His goal is to have 100 kids play it, and he wants to give it away free as a Christmas present so that more kids can play it. I have created a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/legimon . He would be ecstatic if anyone has feedback for him. <comment><USER2> It may get more love at [http://boardgamegeek.com](http://boardgamegeek.com). Lots of people there distribute games to assemble and play, and are always looking for kid-friendly stuff.

<comment><USER3> [http://www.drivethrucards.com/index.php](http://www.drivethrucards.com/index.php) as well.

The unofficial home of print and play card games on the net.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Clickable links:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/jrgphx4vn95va4z/LegimonChristmasSe...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/jrgphx4vn95va4z/LegimonChristmasSet2013.pdf)

[https://www.facebook.com/legimon](https://www.facebook.com/legimon)

</comment><comment><USER5> Your son is very talented! The illustrations, writing and game mechanics are fun and engaging.

I hope he learns how to write code (if he doesn't already) because it would be great to see this type of thing implemented as a web-based game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. He has done some playing around with Kodu Game Lab, and we have played with some very basic Arduino stuff.

Troy has already done a bunch of sketches for what his tablet game will look like, to make an electronic version of the card game. I hope that is an incentive to learn more for him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks very cool! Good job Troy!

I'm not quite sure how the battles go down.

You pick an attack method, and the # is subtracted from your opponents HP score (possibly x2), and then they do the same?

What happens if they are still both "alive" afterwards? You just move to the next player?

And how do you win? Just be the last player with a live character?

<comment><USER7> Additionally: how does one "keep score" in this game? Do you gain points for each enemy monster you kill (in which case, it might make sense to have a "trophy pile")? Do you gain points for whichever cards you have remaining when other players are eliminated? What do the levels mean on the monster cards?

\---

Great job, Troy! I teach math to kids about your age, and I think this could be a slightly sneaky way to get my students to practice some of their basic skills like subtraction and multiplying by 2.

<comment><AUTHOR> The game involves a lot of subtraction. Also keeping track of who is weak guides your strategy.

Start with the HP number, and each attack subtracts the attack value from the HP number. Get to zero and the character is out, and placed in the discard pile.

Troy has not told me what the levels do; they seem to be a way to indicate the more senior characters, but do not affect game play with the LVL number.

That would be great if you would play the game in class. We have played four people at a time, three people and two people. The cards don't all have to be played, or you can use multiple decks. More cards==longer playing time.

How many kids in your class?

<comment><USER7> I tutor small groups of 4 at a time, all third and fourth graders. I don't actually have a lot of leeway with what I teach, at least not until after standardized tests are done in the spring.

So it sounds like there aren't any "points" or "score" during the game, it's just a matter of being the last player standing -- having a card left when nobody else does. The only scorekeeping you have to do during the game is tracking hitpoints and attacks remaining, correct?

If two monsters fight, do they each just get one attack (and both could potentially survive) or do they keep fighting until one dies?

<comment><AUTHOR> In a two player game, the monsters keep fighting until one dies. In a more than two player game, the monster can attack any of his opponents, so he might alternate between opponents or team up with another to take out a monster.

We played last night, and a couple alliances were formed. There were two adults playing (me, Wai-ka) and two kids (Axel and Troy). So Troy would attack me, then Wai-Kai, killing my card. I would attack Troy, then Axel would attack Troy, killing Troy's card. The alliances made during the game are not stable though, and there is a tendency to shift sides if one player is too strong.

It reminds me of the reality show Survivor, where people are teams until the end; then it becomes every man for himself.

We initially played with a piece of paper to track scores, but found that since it was subtraction only that we could keep the scores in our head and play faster. If you forget your score, your opponent will happily remind you.

<comment><USER7> If you laminate the cards, you can write scores directly on them with dry- erase marker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For all the purported evils of copyright infringement and intellectual property theft, I wonder if today's children will grow up with such an attitude that will make the Homebrew club seem like 90s-era Microsoft. With today's technology, they can create and share without (from what they can tell) any cost. By the time they're old enough to realize that while nothing is free, they'll have been naturally inclined to see that creation and distribution doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. That seems like an attitude that would be harder to get from the supply-and-demand lessons you learn from a lemonade stand.

<comment><AUTHOR> I asked him if he would prefer to share it with other kids, or if he wanted me to pursue licensing with a toy company (I own a manufacturing company). He very clearly wanted to share, and set his goal of 100 people playing the game. He has a decent sense of money, and he understood that it was his intellectual property, and that he was retaining commercial rights.

He has more designs coming, so I am sure he will want to share those also.

The facebook.com/legimon page was at 122 likes when he went to bed, with a large grin on his face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great Work! I love games, so I'm really happy to see a kid so young designing game. Too bad I don't have any kids around to play this with.

Does he have any thought on "fluff"? Ask him about the Legimons he created, what sounds they make, if they are fierce or mostly friendly. Making a world and a story is almost as much fun as making a game (and will give more value to the game).

On a totally unrelated note, your son has "ruined" my weekend. Legimon just made some game mechanics ideas pop in my head, so I'll probably spend my weekend scribling stuff and making game components.

All around, thank you for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER10> This is exciting, especially the CC licensing, which will encourage kids to expand the game themselves. As a kid I've made similar projects, and I know I'm not the only one. Good job! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Troy very clearly wanted to share with other kids, but to charge if someone wanted commercial use. So he picked the creative commons license.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, very creative! I know it's not the cheapest way to do it, but MooCards.com makes it really easy to print sets of unique business cards (like each card in the stack has a different design) - that might be a fun way to 'make it real' with cards he can play with his friends if he manages to get a league going at his school or something!

Great work Gregpilling Jr, keep it up!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip about moocards, we will look into it.

I printed out the files at work for him on paper, and used the paper slicer there to make the cards. Scissors also work of course. My kids are playing with 5 decks right now, and that seems to entertain them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow this looks like fun! Printing out to play my nephews / nieces tomorrow, they will love it :D

Where can I submit balance issues? :P

<comment><AUTHOR> You can post to here, or to the facebook.com/legimon page.

There are some issues caused by the fact that these are the first 27 characters of more than 100 written out so far. Not all of the characters in this set have "x 2" enemies.

Nevertheless, we have played about 5 games where the action went down to the last card. I have been surprised by that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You've got a really talented kid, and he's lucky to have a parent who encourages him to distribute his ideas. One great way to expand on this would be to get him into programming this game - Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) is pretty popular amongst kids of his age. Best of luck to him!

<comment><AUTHOR> I will show him Scratch and see if it interests him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> No cut marks? No pantone color chart for printing?

(seriously, joking! :)

Will print this and play with my godson tomorrow (13)

</comment><comment><USER15> Awesome. I usually tend to have an asshole-ish attitude in my comments, which I highly apologize for, but in this case: I just love them :)

</comment><comment><USER16> I remember making tons of board games when I was a kid. What happens when you want to play an evolved character? How does that work?

</comment><comment><USER17> Downloading now for my 9yo son and I to play...

</comment><comment><USER18> Well done Troy!

Artwork looks really nice how was that done?

<comment><USER19> Looks way better than anything I could do. Did Troy do it all himself?

<comment><USER20> The PDF says it was made by someone on Fiverr. :))

<comment><AUTHOR> The character sketches and features done by Troy, firstname.lastname@example.com did the line drawings, and then I cobbled it together to make cards out of the finished drawings.

Then give it away! If Troy is happy how it works this time then he will keep giving it away. There are some pencil sketch plans for an app that I have seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> if your son worked in tech he'd have been sued by a troll by now. I really like the drawings :D</comment>


Netflix.com is down - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/netflix%20down

<comment><USER2> Anything to do with the current RDS downtime I wonder?

<comment><USER2> netflix.com is back online. I received an email alert that RDS is now fully operational, so I checked.</comment></comment>


impromptu - <AUTHOR> http://impromptu.moso.com.au/gallery.html

<comment><USER2> So, I watched the whole 17-minute screen cast. It turns out that "impromptu" is some kind of LISP environment with OpenGL and music-synthesizer bindings. I sat there watching typing for a few minutes, wondering when he was going to hit "compile" and demonstratethe output of his program-in-progress, then suddenly I noticed that the soundtrack was changing as he edited the source.

Colour me impressed.

<comment><USER3> That is exactly what "fluxus" (a software package which was linked to in an earlier hacker news post) does, with scheme.

</comment></comment><comment> hippee-lee Impromptu is scheme. It only runs on osx. Sadly i can do nothing close to what the creator can.</comment>


Would it be a good idea to have test coverage in with the tests? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openlayers/ol3/issues/316#issuecomment-15320865

<comment><USER2> Telling developers that 100% test coverage is an anti-pattern is like telling a room full americans that running too much is harmful to your health: true, but not helpful.

<comment><USER3> But then there's that one guy that tells you you _need_ to run 12 miles per day, otherwise it's not worth existing. False, _and_ not helpful.

The reply was great; it acknowledged the value of test coverage metrics while also understanding the dangers of using it as a numeric goal in the extreme. True, and helpful.

<comment><USER4> The trick is that one of those un-helpful suggestions is more dangerous than the other. If you consider them opposite sides of the same coin, that coin doesn't have a fair flip.

<comment><USER5> But thinking that running 12 miles a day is the only useful way to run, will discourage you from attempting to run.

To put it another way, saying "50% test coverage is fine, sheesh" should _encourage more testing_ , because it lowers the bar you have to strive for to consider yourself to be "doing it right", and therefore makes it easier to talk yourself into trying at all.

<comment><USER3> Even better, what we're saying is "50% test coverage is a good start, keep writing good tests and if the number goes up, that's even better." Targeting 100% coverage simply motivates using the wrong incentive.

It is a subtle, but extremely important, distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is an awesome, _excellent_ and scientific understanding of process quality control.

This is essentially [Deming's 11th point]([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles)) applied to software. Deming warned of using numeric goals or quotas, since the target of the simplistic quota or numeric target will affect the output of the very thing you're trying to measure.

This is not to say that numeric measurement is not useful—quite to the contrary. Statistics are an extremely useful tool to understand your process. But using them as a target of performance is where you draw the line, since that is when they begin to affect the quality itself. That was exactly the point of twpayne's post, and it's a nuanced and constructive argument.

</comment><comment><USER6> The title this was submitted under is totally divorced from the content of the post.

The point of the post is: obsessing over line coverage is stupid.

The post says nothing about how much coverage to shoot for, or how to assess whether or not you're testing too much. It does not use word 'antipattern'.

Change the title.

<comment><USER7> The title may not be a direct quote but it's not an unfair heading to this comment. The comment clearly lines up with the sentiment of "anti-pattern", and it does speak to overall code coverage, not just specific line coverage. See:

> people writing completely useless tests [...] just to get 100% coverage

> To write 100% coverage tests, you tie yourself to implementation details > that simply do not matter

> Test coverage is a false idol.

Even if you still don't think it lines up precisely with the intent of the comment, I think a much greater disconnect is necessary before something (that I consider) drastic like changing a submission's title.

Edit: Welp. I guess it's been decided. Personally, I find this new title fairly nonsensical (it's grammatically incorrect and taken from the post above the one that was actually submitted), weak, uninformative, and, well, just plain _bad_. This wasn't even a blog post, it was an excerpt from a conversation, so the "use the original title" rule doesn't apply. I have to say I strongly disagree with whoever changed it. For reference the original title was "100% code coverage is an anti-pattern".

Second edit: The rate of upvotes (and presumably views) has noticeably slowed down for this interesting submission since the title change, despite it still being prominent on the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> As the OP, I agree with jrajav. I thought that the original title clearly and concisely summarized the topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used to think 100% coverage was a good idea. But every test has a cost to write and maintain. The question is, _is that cost worth it_?

The answer depends both on how important the code is and how tricky it is. If the code is so simple it obviously can't be wrong, I won't test it -- unless it's also so critical that I need to be sure there are never regressions.

If it's slightly tricky but not very important, I'll probably, but not certainly, test it.

If it's critically important AND tricky, I'll test every edge case I can think of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree. And when I'm not sure, I used randomized testing against a trivial but slow implementation to make sure that it also works for all the edge cases that I didn't think of: <https://github.com/openlayers/ol3/pull/418/files#L12R552>

Haskell's QuickCheck is two generations ahead here. Not only does QuickCheck check random cases, it's also clever enough to refine those random checks into concrete edge cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the key here is that a lot of folks just write bad tests, and they write code that is hard to test.

Part of the point of TDD, as I understand it and I am fairly new to this whole world so I am happy to be debated on the topic, is that if you're getting pain from writing your tests then it should cause you to think on how you're writing your code, and the structure of what you've built.

So, people who only have bad experiences with tests will often be aggressive about how much they loathe them and how over-rated they are, because they experience brittle slow frustrating tests. People who use (like it says in TFA) dependency injection, loose coupling and write tests that aren't tightly coupled to implementation details - their unit tests only test one unit of code for example - and make good use of mocking and stubbing, have happier experiences with testing and for those folks the more tests and better actual coverage (not just a number reported by an algorithm) the happier they are.

...and never the twain shall meet.

When I started out learning to code again, a few years back, after a decade or two gap from my BASIC/FORTRAN days during my Physics degree I hated testing. It was hard. It was a waste of time. It just frustrated me. It took me a long time to learn to write good tests and to write good code that was, it turns out, much easier to test. This is an under-documented area, with nowhere near as many online resources as there are for just slinging code. But it's worth it. IMHO

</comment><comment><USER10> One of the interesting bits of the discussion was the motivations schemes on code coverage. I agree on having testing and code coverage as an intrinsic motivator (continual improvement) and not an extrinsic motivator (performance metric). @twpayne was worried about the latter usurping the original intention.

Code coverage through testing is a tool to enable code quality but not THE way to measure code performance.

</comment><comment><USER11> Test coverage is near worthless as a metric. I'm trying to write programs with countless possible states consisting of thousands of attributes, and gain high confidence my program performs correctly in every single one. Coverage states that I should focus on a single one: the program counter. I don't know about you, but there's a lot more to my program that the address of the instruction currently executing. If I keep a list of the streets I've driven on, that might give me a list of new places to visit, but it's not going to tell me how well my car's working.

So, if not coverage, what should we use? I like mutation analysis. How do you know if your image recognition algorithm works? You run it on new images. How do you tell if your tests are catching bugs? You add bugs and see if it catches them. It's simpler than coverage in some ways -- you need no instrumentation.

And yet somehow, every test infrastructure can measure coverage, with mutation analysis nowhere to be found. We have a huge literature on testing (mutation analysis is over 40 (!) years old), and yet developers simply choose to ignore it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Code coverage is good at telling you how much of the code is covered with tests. If the code coverage is low, you have a problem. If the code coverage is high, that doesn't mean anything about the quality of the code nor the quality of the tests.

I will take 100% coverage with good tests over anything else any day of the week. That is the ideal. I've never seen this.

<comment><USER13> SQLite has not just 100% statement coverage but also 100% branch coverage! <http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> SQLite is awesome, and a true model of just how good software can be. It's also designed by programmers for programmers and has a well-defined API that can be thoroughly tested. It's the perfect module, with an API (SQL) that has been refined over several decades. Less well defined stuff - like interacting with users - is harder to test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any code that I haven't executed in test will dump core in production. No matter how innocuous it is, it will cause a problem.

I have learned this lesson after many years of having it repeatedly pounded into my head. :) Over, and over and over.

While 100% coverage is not sufficient, 0% is BAD. Yes, people will try to game the metric, but that's what code reviews are for.

I have also found that shooting for 100% has an additional benefit. It can show what code is truly unreachable. If it is unreachable, I can usually safely remove it. If I can't, I add a comment saying _why_ it can't be removed as well as why it can't be tested.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's about risk reduction. The risk of bugs and failure can never be 0. That does not say that you should not try to improve as much as possible and try to achieve and measure "easy accountable" "risk reducing metrics" like test coverage.

</comment><comment><USER16> I remember the very first integration of code coverage into IntelliJ, a _very_ long time ago: way before the community / paying edition (because I remember that then I switched to the free/community version and it didn't have code coverage in it anymore)...

Well: it was already able to perform partial line coverage, so the 66%/100% example given in TFA is totally bogus.</comment>


Sperm whale dies with 100kg 'litter ball' in its stomach - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-50621304 <comment><USER2> Related: [https://pbfcomics.com/comics/dick/](https://pbfcomics.com/comics/dick/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Makes one wonder if the litter ball had any intrinsic value after being fetched from the whale.</comment>


Startups Seek to Challenge Craigslist in Online Classifieds - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/startups-seek-to-challenge-craigslist-in-online-classifieds-1470303008 <comment><USER2> > The Bellevue, Wash., company's valuation would stretch to roughly $1.2 > billion from about $70 million just two years ago.

How valuable is craigslist? That is a serious warchest to try to disrupt what is essentially run as a non-profit with a website from 1995.</comment>


AWS: Linux Kernel SegmentSmack Issue - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2018-018/ <comment><USER2> This affects pretty much everything running a modern Linux kernel (4.9+), not just AWS. It looks pretty bad. While there's no public POC yet, the kernel reassembly code path looks very expensive while small TCP packets are very cheap to produce. Hopefully everyone gets patched in time.</comment>


Tips for Developers Stepping into the Agile Process - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartfile.com/blog/tips-for-developers-stepping-into-the-agile-process/ <comment><USER2> Also in this series:

"So, You're Going to Prison"

"My First Root Canal"

"Identifying Divorce: Accurate Results With Simple Tools"

<comment><AUTHOR> People gotta start somewhere:p

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think an important part of agile development is pair programming. This way, information is shared with the team. Having two sets of eyes on your code can really increase software quality and shared knowledge.</comment>