RetroBSD: Unix for microcontrollers - <AUTHOR> http://retrobsd.org/ <comment><USER2> Pretty cool.

Made me wonder if it would make sense on these SoC targets to dynamically load a program from external storage and write into internal flash for execution, then start running it without a reboot.

Since such flashes are typically only erasable in pretty big blocks ("sectors") it would require some interesting design choices, but it should be doable. :)

<comment><USER3> There are several runtimes for microcontrollers that feature an elf/hex loader for static binaries, or a bootloader that retrieves a program and executes it in RAM. Sometimes you can re-enter the bootloader from your application software. On some embedded systems (satellite OBSW comes to mind) you can actually hot-patch the code function-by-function while running. You compile/link the software with some extra space before and after your functions for future modifications. Then when you patch, you have to make sure that the modified code is locked out and that the variables used by the functions being patched are in an acceptable state as well as the cache. Whether all of that extra effort makes sense? - it depends. But in most embedded projects you can just flash a new firmware and avoid the overhead of executing from RAM. (Depending on your target, flash might have a separate memory bus and could be one or two clock cycles faster.)

Edit: Hot-patching in flash is totally possible as well.

<comment><USER4> Sounds interesting - any runtimes in particular you could point out? Interested to read more about them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As interesting as this is, I'm not really sure what this gets you over a regular RTOS that might be used with these sorts of microcontrollers apart from easy porting of existing unix software (though with 2.2BSD it would have to be very restricted in its use of syscalls - does it even have sockets?)

</comment><comment><USER6> I have this running on a Fubarino. It's nice to fiddle with but not quite useful to be serious. I have an ethernet module that at some point I need to hook up to it.

What I really want is a DIP version of the PIC32 with enough RAM and flash to run this or the 4.4-based LiteBSD[1] by the same people.

[1] - [https://github.com/sergev/LiteBSD](https://github.com/sergev/LiteBSD)

<comment><USER7> I wonder why there's no port for the ESP32 boards family. Plenty of RAM/Flash (compared to PIC32), lots of I/O ports and peripherals and built in WiFi/BT. It just seems to me the perfect target, or am I missing something? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32)

<comment><USER8> I think its because the PIC32 uses the MIPS 4k CPU architecture which a compiler that can build this RetroBSD exists for. I'm not sure what kind of CPU architecture the ESP32 uses-- I think its some proprietary DSP core.

<comment><USER9> Xtensa.

For most compilers: xtensa-esp32-elf will work, so long as the ESP-IDF toolchain is available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> PIC32 is one of the the most underestimated MCU architectures; you get a small powerful computer for a fraction of the cost of one. I think it's doomed because of Cortex-M, but what you can do with it in that price range still amazes me. If only the Chinese picked it up... The boards by Olimex are nice to work with but could be a bit cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you want to checkout a POSIX RTOS for microcontrollers, I would checkout Nuttx. I have built some commercial products with it.

[0] nuttx.org

</comment><comment><USER12> The hardware looks pretty limited right now, but I have to wonder if this can be used as a base for replacing closed source Lights out Management such as iLO, DRAC, and LoM

<comment><USER13> Interesting idea; but this is 2.11BSD, not OpenBSD, so the attack surface/weak links are mostly unknown for this majorly obscure kernel configuration/port.

IMO I'd generally want OOB management kit to be Very Very™ secure, and especially if it lets me near any secure boot keys. In any case this kind of thing will categorically have the ability to reboot the system, so if I can tinker with configuration I definitely want to have some degree of confidence in the auth process etc.

Completely outside the scope of a microcontroller, what would a reasonable 10-year target for video capture be within a "server console/admin" context? 1080p? 2K? DisplayPort? HDMI? (Obviously VGA)

I'm guessing HDMI and maybe 2K. Hm.

<comment><USER14> > 2.11BSD, not OpenBSD, so the attack surface/weak links are mostly unknown > for this majorly obscure kernel configuration/port.

They're actually probably pretty well known for most things, just buried under decades of literature and commits.

Starting off with a 4BSD would probably be better though since 32bit vax bsd unix got a lot more traction (and more direct code lineage to the modern ports).

But yes, if going 32bit with enough ram, might as well just port OpenBSD/NetBSD and get on with it.

<comment><USER15> Any idea what the minimum RAM requirements of something like Open or NetBSD is?

I know that modern FreeBSD can _boot_ to a single user process with something like 32M RAM on 32-bit systems with a very stripped down kernel configuration. 64M gives a little more breathing room. But those are both many orders of magnitude larger than 128kB.

It wouldn't surprise me if OBSD or NBSD can fit in a little less RAM, but it also wouldn't surprise me if they still need at least a handful of MB, i.e., 32-64x Retro's 128 kB.

<comment> nils-m-holm > I know that modern FreeBSD can bootI to a single user process with something > like 32M RAM on 32-bit systems with a very stripped down kernel > configuration.

Wow! My first BSD box (386BSD) had 8 megabytes of RAM and that was plenty! You could even compile moderately large programs without any swapping. But then, feeping creaturism has always been a BSD tradition! :)

<comment><USER15> > But then, feeping creaturism has always been a BSD tradition! :)

In general, living software adapts to the constraints of the hardware developers use and care about. The most visible case of this is probably web browsers (and web sites).

If BSD developers were interested in a minimal memory configuration, they could make it happen. It just hasn't been anyone's priority, and machines have many orders of magnitude more RAM today than they did in ~1992.

<comment> nils-m-holm My comment was not intended as criticism, but merely as an "oh, look how times have changed!". If anything, it was intended as an expression of affection. I have used BSD ever since as my only OS.

That being said, software development in general is in a desolate state these days with unnecessary layers of abstraction and bloat all over the place. The featurism of ancient BSD looks pretty harmless today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This can be pretty interesting for inexpensive IoT and IIoT devices.

<comment><USER17> No, this is jut a toy, it would never be used for real IoT or IIoT devices.

There is no need to dynamically load any code on these type of devices, you would generally just use eXecute-In-Place (XIP). The type of applications you develop for these devices simply do not require UNIX like features (multi- user, etc). Many more appropriate OS'es exist for this to be taken seriously.

<comment><USER3> > No, this is jut a toy, it would never be used for real IoT or IIoT devices.

There's lots of outrageous stuff inside today's consumer products. What makes you so sure that this won't be used in a real (whatever that means) IoT or IIoT device by someone?

<comment><USER17> Because I design this sort of stuff for a living and have done for over twenty years. As a realistic product solution, this has no benefits over existing widely supported solutions that are more targeted at this level of device.

For example... it can work in 128KB RAM. If you're using 128KB just to run the OS, thats completely wasted RAM that could be used by your application. This really counts when you're making 100'000 of these devices and are paying for every byte. You don't waste valuable resources on desktop-level abstractions. That would make for a very expensive product.

<comment><USER18> Many people might think you're talking figuratively about paying for every byte. I'll add for others that 8-16-bit MCU's still sell billions of dollars of volume specifically to increase profit per unit by using tinier, cheaper chips. Likewise, stuff like eCos lets you include just the software you need in the RTOS to further shave off ROM or RAM needs. This helps per unit since suppliers often charge extra for extra RAM/ROM on a specific chip. Finally, reliability and security can improve a bit by simply having less software or hardware to screw up.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Science and bicycling meet in a new helmet design - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/science-and-bicycling-meet-in-a-new-helmet-design/ <comment><USER2> If this can replace my MIPS helmet I'll be really happy. The rubber in the MIPS keeps pulling out my hair...</comment>


Why Lawyers Don't Run Startups - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2010/05/27/why-lawyers-don%E2%80%99t-run-startups/

<comment><USER2> Lawyers don't know the first thing about running startups but a good startup lawyer will be able to think strategically right along with the founders - that is, will give advice, not in a ham-handed way that focuses purely on legal risks but rather in a way that in itself helps put those risks in perspective for the founding team so that they can see at a glance what the likelihood and potential severity of each is and how each relates to the potential benefits of the deal.

This fine piece points out that the founders should be doing this, and that is true, but the lawyers themselves should also be doing it. Otherwise, they spend all their time giving very unhelpful advice about why things can never get done.

<comment><USER3> Well put. I've gone through the legal process acting for an investor. A lot of the legalese felt like an insurance policy and was dreamed up by the lawyers (read: copy/pasted) for scenarios that neither the investor nor startup cared about.

Just like an insurance policy, the real test is when you have to make a claim. That's when you might be grateful for some of the terms. Having said that, I think the way Steve describes it is great. Basically, make sure that the strategy points are identified and dealt with by the management team, not the legal team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The point is that both lawyers and clients should understand their roles. The lawyer's primary job is to explain to the client the legal consequences of a given course of action. Preferably, the lawyer will have the clients non-legal interests in mind that the same time, so that they can have an intelligent discussion about weighing the risks and benefits of a given course of action.

Correspondingly, clients should understand that lawyers are there to give advice. They are not there to give direction; they are there to give advice. It's always better if the client and lawyer both understand the clients strategic goals, so that they can have, as described above, an intelligent discussion about weighing the risks and benefits of a given course of action, but the overall purpose of the lawyer is merely to give advice.

<comment><USER5> But that puts you in a tough spot: deciding you know a legal issue better than your lawyer. Similar to telling your doctor "OK, fat and salt are bad for me; but I like them so I'm going to keep eating them". Why did you even ask?

<comment><USER6> So that you can make an informed decision. Also, there is often a middle ground. "Fat and salt are bad for me, so I will keep eating them, but now I will do it in moderation."

Similarly, there are times you may decide to take an action that will risk a lawsuit, but you can do so in an informed way by consulting a good lawyer. Paul Graham makes the point in <http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html> that most startups should simply not worry about infringing patents. This is a calculated risk, but one they should know they are taking if they do so.

Similarly, there is a calculus of negligence (brief laymen's overview at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_negligence> ) that essentially says that if the probability of hurting someone else's property multiplied by the most likely damage is less than the cost to remove that risk, you simply accept the risk and be prepared to pay out the damage if it happens and do nothing to reduce that risk. This is a very calculated risk since if something happens you will be required to pay for it and the other party will rightly sue you if you do not. Yet the rational thing is still to just accept that risk, but you can only make that risk rationally if you have calculated that risk (perhaps with advie of a lawyer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a related note, NEVER put a doctor, lawyer, or accountant on a board of directors. It's very tempting because they often have many of the external signs of success. But many years of indoctrination have taught them to limit risk at all cost and that is deadly -- not just for your startup but for life in general. There are certainly exceptions, but in general their very choice of profession exposes what their priorities are.

<comment><USER8> So you don't think _anyone_ on a board should be primarily concerned with risk management?

<comment><USER9> Risk management is not the same as "limiting risk at all cost." The former will balance the reward potentials with the risk of investment; the latter will turn down anything that's not a lock.

<comment><USER8> OK...but I think 'limiting risk at all cost' is a bit of stereotype; doctors (and attorneys) _do_ take difficult or even dangerous decisions which require them to weigh risk as a matter of course, which is why members of both professions carry malpractice insurance. Also, many board decisions do not require unanimity.

I question the idea above because it echoes a good deal of what I've heard about the pre-crash standing of risk managers at banks; during the bull market they got sidelined as party poopers and now many of the same banks are risk- averse to the point of paralysis. Surely there's room for a happy medium; growth-at-all-costs is no healthier than safety-at-all-costs, and we often read of reckless corporate decisions which end up costing shareholders far more than than they saved in the short term. Look at that recent Home Depot lawsuit for example - a $4m 'saving' turned into a $21m loss.

Further, 'external signs of success...choice of profession exposes what their priorities are' suggests that somehow members of these professions get ahead by charging fat fees for obvious common-sense advice; doing well by simply having a phobia of mistakes and accumulating their reputations by default. But 'making it look easy' is one of the things that distinguishes skilled from mediocre people in every profession. By that yardstick, programmers are just glorified button-pushers, capitalists are mere _rentiers_ , emergency workers are all adrenalin junkies, and civil servants do nothing but push paper.

It's true you can't make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and eggs that aren't cooked within a certain time will go bad. On the other hand, turning the heat all the way up ensures your omelet will be inedible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Attorneys and accountants have a primary function of limiting and mitigating risk. Entrepreneurs by definition are willing to deal risk and are much more comfortable with putting their balls on the chopping block.

Be stupid? No. There are a few great accountants and lawyers worth their salt. Be wise, but remember it's your damn company, you've put the sweat in, and you should be calling the shots. Don't be a marionette for your counsel.

</comment><comment><USER11> The analytical training a lawyer receives could be invaluable to a startup _if_ that lawyer can break out of his extreme risk aversion.

In my experience, a good lawyer will truly impress you with his ability to think through a problem, but might surprise you with his ultimate conclusion. Virtually any risk makes him hesitant, irrespective of the potential return for taking that risk.

</comment><comment><USER12> Deborah Tannen (the linguist and author of "The Argument Culture") tells a story about how bringing in lawyers to write up an informal agreement derailed it completely.

 _Some companies, however, referred the matter to their attorneys so a contract could be written. In no case where attorneys became involved-- mine as well as theirs-- could we reach an agreement on working together... The adversarial nature of the legal process had polarized us beyond repair._

<https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/argsake.htm>

</comment><comment><USER13> Excellent advice and very timely for me. Especially the advice about finding an 'advocate' in the customer's organization with the authority to over-ride lawyers and negotiating high level points with him.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the article misses a few points. If you seek out a stereotypical lawyer (meaning nit-picky etc.), you get what you pay for - lots of lawyerly arguing, lots of problems raised etc.

Whose fault is it then if a lawyer impedes progress on an important deal? In my opinion, the fault lies with the business side. Lawyers provide a service - just like consultants. You wouldn't let a consultant run your business, so what's up with placing all the blaim on lawyers if deals get stuck? It's the business side's fault for not properly managing their lawyer and not telling him what exactly he is there for.

Legal education makes you an expert in spotting problems and helping put consensual agreements between people in enforceable language. It doesn't make you nit-picky per se, it's more a matter of character. There are first-hand lawyers out there who are probably even better at the business side than the business people themselves (think Peter Thiel) - they have an expert ability to spot lots of problems, and then proritize those and decide what's important and what not. Full disclosure: I am a Ph.D. student in law and that's what my education provided me with - an ability to prioritize problem-solving according to importance.

<comment><USER15> _Whose fault is it then if a lawyer impedes progress on an important deal? In my opinion, the fault lies with the business side. Lawyers provide a service - just like consultants. You wouldn't let a consultant run your business, so what's up with placing all the blaim on lawyers if deals get stuck? It's the business side's fault for not properly managing their lawyer and not telling him what exactly he is there for._

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the author is suggesting. For example, notice things like,

" _When I was a younger entrepreneur my answer would have been, "Ok. See if you can get us better terms. Call me when you're done." This time I said, "Make a list of the issues in bullet form, send them to me and I'll get back to you."_ "

My interpretation was that he is saying, "don't let your lawyer run your company strategy, that's your job", and this is fundamentally what you are saying as well (though with different focus).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The owners of the startup I worked at were lawyers and it worked out pretty well for them as the company was bought for nearly $200 million. We did e-discovery and they knew the space well and had a lot of good contacts in the industry that got us in the door where we would have had no shot otherwise. I can't say I thought they did everything right by a long shot but they way it turned out for them its hard to argue otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER17> Lawyers run startups all the time. They're called law firms.

</comment><comment><USER18> Best story of a lawyer trying to run a software startup (Loki). [http://web.archive.org/web/20020418225227/http://www.linuxan...](http://web.archive.org/web/20020418225227/http://www.linuxandmain.com/features/lokistory.html) Not for the feint of heart.

</comment><comment><USER19> Michael Arrington is/was a lawyer and runs a startup. I think his legal background has given him the confidence to pursue legally sensitive journalism

Barack Obama ran a very startup-esque campaign, tech development, social media strategy, wired twenty-somethings and all.

<comment><USER20> > Michael Arrington is/was a lawyer and runs a startup. I think his legal > background has given him the confidence to pursue legally sensitive > journalism

And what a runaway success the crunchpad saga has been. Especially from a him being a lawyer point of view.

<comment><USER21> Your comment is not understandable to someone who isn't already quite familiar with the topic. I don't even know if you were agreeing or disagreeing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's weird. If you look at a lot of startups ("startups"?) in Germany & Austria, you'll find people with a law background among the founders. I haven't yet figured out why this is the case.

<comment><USER23> How different is the practice of civil law in those countries?

<comment><USER22> That assumes I know enough about law to be able to tell. :) I do know that Germany has really odd laws about cease & desist notices. (receiver has to reimburse legal costs of the C&D - even though they're probably overblown)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is yet another example of the "Know you role" principle. Basically people work best in well defined roles inside of a larger framework. without this you end up with founders trying to do a lawyers job and lawyers trying to do the founders job.

</comment><comment><USER25> Because they're already middlemen.

</comment><comment><USER26> Haha, I've always said, "never let your lawyers run your company".

</comment><comment><USER27> This brings up a point about people who provide solutions instead of just listing potential problems. I think this can apply to any field, and those who do it are much more valuable.</comment>


Stocks Plunge, Quickly Recover, on Fake Tweet - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/04/23/stocks-plunge-quickly-recover-on-fake-tweet/

<comment><USER2> So that is a better hacking strategy than ddos'ing mt. Gox. Clearly if you can make the DOW drop 127 pts on demand you can figure out a way to profit handsomely from that. The simplest being to short a basket of stocks that are going to be affected and cover the shorts with buy orders. Harder to track than a 'one stock shock' as they say since by their nature DOW stocks are heavily traded and people are guessing all the time if they are going to go up and down. Spread $15 - $20M in shorts across the basket, cover them on a 15% net gain in proceeds and then shoot the canary.

<comment><USER3> I work at a fund and we discuss this Ad nauseam:)

There are a few problems with this.

1) Forget execution and settlement risk, assuming you can get away with it, can you really make enough to make it worth your while.

You only get one shot at this, how many times can you anonymously crater the market?, and if you get caught you'll never trade again so you need to make retirement levels of money on this one "trade".

2) Execution risk. Assuming you've got your short butterfly setup so that no one will know you now need to unwind your trade in a matter of milliseconds while making it look like you are reacting, rather than knowing this event was coming.

Part of this is that like you said you'd do this over a basket of stocks. Looking at a butterfly option layout in wikipedia it seems pretty simple. Trying to get out of 30 or so of these trades in under 100 milliseconds isn't.

3) Settlement risk... You'd' be trading across multiple exchanges all with different timings and liquidity. There is a good chance that your trade gets busted by some but not all exchanges which means you go partial fills all over the place and you might end up partially short and long when all the accounting is done:(

<comment><USER4> I know of at least 5 firms who would have the means to make a big profit in a rather stealth way and all of the infrastructure needed to minimize execution risk (to the point that it may be negligible)... Just because you cannot do it or that it is hard for you, do not assume it cannot be done or that it is (as) hard for everybody...

<comment><USER5> I do to, and all 5 of them make more money as part of the regular operation of the markets than they would as part of some Jerry Bruckheimer movie plot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another reason why Twitter needs two-factor authentication.

      The tweet, which said that there had been two explosions at the
      White House and President Barack Obama was injured, came
      after hackers made repeated attempts to steal the passwords of
      AP journalists.

<https://www.facebook.com/APNews/posts/10151407898286623>

<comment><USER7> ...or maybe we should not be relying on Twitter when we make financial decisions?

<comment><USER8> If people with large pockets are dedicated enough to monitor Twitter, it must probably have proven efficient enough to justify doing it. I don't expect them to stop doing so until the fake tweets situation goes very big. And I'm sure Twitter will react with stronger authentication before it gets that bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that any journalists that retweeted this should be unequivocally fired. After all the jumping to conclusions the news outlets did last week about the boston bombers and the subsequent apologizing for accusing innocent people, there's really no excuse for this.

<comment><USER10> Good lord, fired? For re-tweeting an AP tweet? You may want to do independent verfication, but hell, it's the AP. It's not like somebody set up an a AD account and tweeted it as a fake AP. I don't blame anybody for re-tweeting that.

What is with people and wanting people's jobs over every little thing these days? In the land of Twitter and Facebook, you're not allowed to make an occasional honest mistake any more.

<comment><USER9> An honest mistake is misspelling someones name. Retweeting that the President of the United States has been injured without taking 10 seconds to establish the veracity of story is just inexcusable and lazy journalism which could someday get people hurt.

<comment><USER10> Oh, get over yourself. If they re-tweeted it immediately, then went to get more info on it, found out that it was false, and then apologized/deleted it, who cares? It came from a particularly reputable source, so simply clicking one "re-tweet" button does not a fire-able offense make.

I'm glad to know that you've never made an assumption based on authority, a minor mistake, or even taken a shortcut in your career, though.

<comment><USER9> Calm down friend. I'm merely stating that my belief that as journalist, one is in a trusted position of power to disseminate news to the masses and with that power (excuse the cliche) comes responsibility. Blindly retweeting sensationalist things without fact checking is no better than shouting "Fire!" in a crowded building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would be interesting to know how much of this reaction came from people reacting, and how much from the High Frequency apps reacting to the people reacting. I don't know if they have any way of figuring that out, but it would be interesting to learn.

<comment><USER12> I am writing a tool to scrape social media and do sentiment analysis on that to provide a signal to make stock recommendations. I plan to feed it into an actual trading system at some point.

So the tweet would be integrated into the system, as would any reporting of it. :-/

<comment><USER3> How would having twitter integrated into your trading system help you in this instance?

My suspicion is that by the time other people start re-tweeting this the and you can get any sort of twitter sentiment determination the market will have corrected.

Are you taking the other side of this and hypothesizing that you can determine twitter sentiment before the market reacts? If so please mail me, I write in house trading systems for a living and I'd love to chat.

<comment><USER12> > How would having twitter integrated into your trading system help you in > this instance?

(1) In this instance, I'm pretty sure I don't know how to solve the problem naively. It went onto a theoretically legit account. I would have to cross- correlate with a couple other sources of information. At any rate, it points out to me that I need to encode a 'reliability' measure of the information.

(2) Not really. I don't have the capital to operate at low-latency levels. My hypothesis is the obvious one: markets are emotional and I should be able to construct a predictor for certain industries based on emotions emitted on accounts & news snippets relating to those industries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The "Plunge" was a 1% drop in the DJI average.

Concerning, sure, but not nearly as huge as the graphs make it out to be.

<comment><USER14> It was a pretty big deal. I ran some queries against some intraday data of a proprietary market index (kind of a cross between the S&P 500 and Russell 2000) and it was the biggest one minute drop (at -0.56%) that I found within the past year.

For comparison, here are the top 5 that I found since 4/23/12:

(1) 4/23/13 @ 13:10: -0.56% (2) 8/1/12 @ 14:14: -0.45% (3) 11/29/12 @ 11:41: -0.44% (4) 6/20/12 @ 12:33: -0.38% (5) 12/31/12 @ 13:47: -0.35%

As best as I can tell from the news on those days, (2) and (4) were related to Fed announcements and (3) and (5) were related to the fiscal cliff.

<comment><USER13> I agree that it's a big deal. But I think a lot of people are reacting to the images of the graphs, not to the actual numbers that the graphs represent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are these so called high frequency trading algorithms being fed Twitter/Soc Med information? Not sure if pure human intervention could cause such a large drop in so short a time period.

In which case, hacking multiple _relatively_ smaller information sources, rather than larger govt. or banking sites could provide very high upsides with much lower risks.

<comment><USER16> That is my hunch as well. HFT algorithms do exist which trade primarily on news feeds, and given the relative ease of harvesting Twitter data, there has to be more than just a few HFT bots that reacted to this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting to think that having access to the twitter account for a major news source is like having a "big red button". I wonder if people won't be trying harder to gain access to things like this from this point forward.

</comment><comment><USER18> This isn't just a hacker stunt, it's a great way to make money:

1\. Acquire a large hedging position that cashes in if the market should fall.

2\. Hack AP's Twitter account and post an alarming bogus news item.

3\. Wait 15 minutes.

4\. Sell your position.

Now -- who can say this isn't the real reason behind the hack?

<comment><USER15> The perpetrators would have had to have short the entire Dow to make a profit on this piece of news as it did not focus on any particular stock or sector. And they would have needed to exit really fast to make their bundle. It could have been an HF app designed to act purely on this kind of situation though

<comment><USER18> Yes but shorting the entire market isn't difficult at all. And buying and selling a position in a matter of minutes also isn't difficult in modern times.

It's the modern equities market -- lightning fast, and not to the benefit of market stability or the average investor.

<comment><USER15> Agree. But was trying to understand if an individual hacker was behind this or an actual big financial organisation.

I was of the opinion that an individual hacker would still be classified as an average investor. He/she might not have had the tools to benefit from the end result. _not sure_

A big organisation, on the other hand, would be much better placed to exit a position based on custom algos and deeper integration into the markets to buy and sell positions.

<comment><USER18> > I was of the opinion that an individual hacker would still be classified as > an average investor.

Reasonable people may differ, but to me, someone who shorts the market, then hacks AP and plants a false story, is not an average investor. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you're interested in how this works from a behavioral standpoint, this is a very interesting study:

[http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5130/m2/1/hi...](http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc5130/m2/1/high_res_d/dissertation.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> We posted a chart of what the sentiment reaction and recovery looks like on our twitter feed. <https://twitter.com/KredStreet/status/326758648737038338>

<comment><USER21> Is that really an infographic? Seems to me to just be a regular graph with callouts.

<comment><USER20> Yes you are correct. Edited the text. Not sure where my brain is this morning. It's still pretty cool to see the data, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It was the Syrian Electronic Army who dun it: <https://twitter.com/Official_SEA6/status/326746641451327488>.

<comment><USER23> Anyone can claim responsibility. Doesn't mean they actually were the ones to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> fascinating charts here documenting the incident. <http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4176.html>

</comment><comment><USER25> Some script kiddy just made a lot of money.

</comment><comment><USER26> How is investing in stocks not a glorified form of gambling?

When you buy a stock, and it goes down in price a few months later, the experts tell you to buy more of it as it goes down, because it'll probably go up in the future.

When you gamble $5 on a blackjack hand, Martingale experts will tell you to gamble $10 on the next hand, and then $20 on the next hand again if you lose the $10 hand.

Both are gambling.

<comment><USER27> Not sure if serious. Investing long in e.g. the DJIA isn't gambling by any stretch of the imagination.

That's not to say there aren't plenty of other transactions that may blur the line a little more. Hell, entire options markets exist to make a commodity out of risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Could this be the effect of some kind of automated opinion/sentiment based trading?

</comment><comment><USER29> That was awesome.. I trade S&P Futures and just got 30 points in 5 mins on that.</comment>


Wayland's X11 support is ready (An Experimental GNOME Shell Running On Wayland) - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4MzQ

<comment><USER2> This is great news. Last August there was an article on Phoronix about KDE hoping to migrate to Wayland for SC 4.9:

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wayla...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=wayland_kde_2012&num=2)

Hopefully in 2-3 months, when SC 4.9 is slated for release, we'll have KDE on Wayland. X is aging and is not very lightweight. Wayland brings some nice innovations, like eliminating the need to switch between VTs to differentiate X sessions.

The FAQ is also worth reading:

<http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html>

<comment><USER3> > Wayland brings some nice innovations, like eliminating the need to switch > between VTs to differentiate X sessions.

Innovations like these (if not needing to switch VTs even counts as an innovation) pale in comparison to innovations like network transparency, which will be missing at first and eventually present but crippled in Wayland.

The ability to ssh to another system, launch a GUI app, and have it display on the system you're SSHing from has always set Unix+X apart from Windows and Mac OS. I can't believe this is being tossed aside so you can have cross-fades and rotating cubes when switching between sessions.

It's true that network transparency will be possible with Wayland, but it will be some sort of VNC-like pixel scraping approach, which has never worked as well as native X forwarding. Network transparency will be a second-class citizen in Wayland.

See [http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2699657&cid=391...](http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2699657&cid=39198273) for some more disturbing problems with Wayland.

<comment><USER4> _The ability to ssh to another system, launch a GUI app, and have it display on the system you're SSHing from_

When was the last time you've actually done that?

<comment><USER5> Twenty minutes ago. Here's a list of actual uses that I have personally done in the last week.

I have large (64 core, 256 gigs of ram) servers in a university data center, and a lab full of small atom machines.

I can run matlab without a gui, but still have graphs etc pop open when I need one.

Yesterday I ran a remote Firefox on a machine in the same room so that I could play sound on attached speakers, but still view the video locally, on my laptop.

Sometimes I need to run expensive applications on a big machine, but from the comfort of my home or office. X11 forwarding is pretty nice for that.

I run headless Linux VMs on my mac, and ssh to them, running them natively displayed on my laptop. Sure, I could use whatever VMware gives me to display apps, but X11 works better.

It's got plenty of valid use cases, and that's just ones for me.

<comment><USER4> Sounds rather contrived to me...

Why do you need X11-apps from multiple(?!) local linux VMs on your desktop?

What GUI-app other than matlab do you need to run remotely?

<comment><USER6> Why do you get to say that what he does is contrived? What makes your usage patterns any less "contrived" than his?

<comment><USER4> Well, why should I not say when it sounds contrived to me?

Exporting X11 windows from _multiple_ VMs on localhost? X11 forwarding Firefox to access remote speakers? Seriously?

Yes, there are niche scenarios where nerds still use X11 for useful hacks like that (myself included), but the discussion is about the future display architecture for the proverbial linux desktop.

X11 has been a ball on a chain here for a really long time now. Use-cases such as "too lazy to open a matlab pool" or "splice firefox audio" are not exactly a convincing counterweight.

I'll gladly trade in my ability to run a remote gnuplot every once in a blue moon for a desktop experience remotely comparable to OSX or Windows.

<comment><USER6> Unless you are claiming that he is lying, I don't think that contrived means what you think it means.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps we have a different interpretation. I meant to say I find his use- cases rather obscure because e.g. X11-forwarding a Firefox is not exactly my idea of a sane answer to the question "how do I forward audio to remote speakers?".

Bringing these examples up as scenarios that must be considered in the design of the future linux display system seems... well, contrived to me.

<comment><USER7> His examples were _not_ contrived, they were actual examples of times that mcpherrinm recently used X11 forwarding (unless you are claiming that he lied). If you want to say that his use cases are obscure, strange, or niche enough to not merit consideration, that's fine, but "contrived" doesn't mean any of those things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wasn't familiar with Wayland; the Wikipedia article about it seems remarkably good:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(display_server_protoco...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_\(display_server_protocol\))

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting, but does Phoronix have some sort of editorial policy against every linking to primary sources?

<comment><USER10> I think he's actually reporting live from the whatever summit, so there's not much to link to. Generally Phoronix is much better than the mainstream tech press about linking.

<comment><USER11> In my experice it is terrible at linking. They used to post commit messages from git and changelogs from announcements in mailing lists as their own original content without linking to the source. Without understanding the meaning of many words in the text they were quoting without attribution. I make a decision to never click on a link to phoronix after this happened a number of times.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I'm torn on Phoronix. They're a terribly SEO-me-harder experience in a lot of ways (40% ad content on the page, nine-page articles, scraped junk mixed in with the good stuff). That said, their authentic reporting (especially on graphics stuff) is generally among the best available in open source focused blogs. I read them.

<comment><USER13> Phoronix is disappointing in many ways, but I have to give them some credit- they're the only ones trawling the mailing lists and commit logs for linux graphics news. If they had an RSS feed that only syndicated those stories, I would read them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Protecting Trivia Apps from Cheaters - <AUTHOR> https://applecrazy.github.io/blog/posts/protect-trivia-from-bots/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi. I'm AppleCrazy, the author of this post. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

<comment><USER2> Can you share your complete code? Having trouble with the launch.py step.</comment></comment>


A Comprehensive Introduction to MySQL's Innodb Memcache Interface for 5.6+ - <AUTHOR> https://lobste.rs/s/56pj3j/introduction_to_mysql_s_innodb_memcached_interface

<comment><USER2> Did you mean to link to the lobste.rs page? The real link is [https://blog.engineyard.com/2015/introduction-to-mysqls- inno...](https://blog.engineyard.com/2015/introduction-to-mysqls-innodb- memcached-interface)</comment>


Remotely tunneling to a server using an iPad Pro for programming - <AUTHOR> https://jann.is/ipad-pro-for-programming/ <comment><USER2> Wait, what? This isn't about using an iPad as a development machine, it's about using a server as a development machine and an iPad + keyboard to access said development machine.

I get that the author wants to use his iPad for day-to-day stuff, and that's fine, but it's a stretch to say it's their main programming machine when it's not actually running the "local" setup.

Heck, it would drive me bananas having to stop working every time I went through a tunnel on a train, or didn't have reliable connection to my VPN. Kind of destroys the point of a local environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> > every time I went through a tunnel on a train

The author made it seem that mosh would make that a non-issue.

<comment><USER3> So mosh is going to guess the auto-complete suggestions or code-docs your editor will offer while you are effectively offline?

Don't be daft. Mosh can in a limited way eliminate latency, but it can't provide the intelligence offered by code running on the server if the server can't be reached.

For this you either need full connectivity or running the full stack locally. And right now only Android (and possibly Windows?) seem to offer the latter option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> So basically what this guys says is "golden" and good enough reason to warrant buying the most expensive tablet on the market can be summed up as this:

1\. iOS 11 now supports very basic multitasking, years after Android (and Windows mobile, if that counts)

2\. iOS 11 has support for keyboard-shortcuts, which (you probably guessed it) Android has had full support for _at least_ since Android 3.0 (and we're now at 8).

3\. He does no actual local development and has moved his entire development setup into the cloud, rendering the iPad a mere terminal, and thus it as the base-platform utterly irrelevant.

The only one who can call the cost-benefit factor of this as a development setup "good", are the ones already so invested in Apple-stuff that they're blinded to everything else. Especially its inherent limitations, not to mention the obscene cost given the limited offering you get.

Really: The cheapest chinese Android-tablet you can find... And no, not one of the cheapest. I mean the utterly cheapest of the cheap Android-tablets you can find... Can do all this.

At probably 1/20th the cost.

And it can run local chroots and native docker-containers too, so you have full offline support.

What's offered as an "amazing" experience here is only amazing if you don't consider cost a factor in what you get to work with. And once you do, it's about as far from amazing as you can possibly get, probably worst in class.

</comment><comment><USER4> Should be titled, "I remotely tunnel to a server using my iPad Pro for programming" very misleading. Furthermore to the point: what's the benefit of tunneling to a remote machine for dev work? The latency would suck as would the overall slowness of things, it would drive you insane. You can hammer nails into a piece of wood using a rock, but why would you when you can use a hammer?

<comment><USER5> > Furthermore to the point: what's the benefit of tunneling to a remote > machine for dev work?

You can do it from anywhere; you don't need a powerful local machine; controlling what devs do is easier; etc.

3 of my last 4 contracts have been development on remote machines. It's perfectly fine unless you somehow have abysmal networking (and then you really have bigger problems.)

<comment><USER4> In your instance though, it sounds like the development on remote machines was a client choice and not your own? The author is choosing to develop remotely themselves because Docker makes their MacBook get hot and burns their thighs when they don't wear pants. Would have just been easier to buy one of those laptop rests with inbuilt fans than spend money on a monthly server though, right?

<comment><USER5> > the development on remote machines was a client choice and not your own?

I do 90% of my personal development on remote servers too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> With Android and Termux you will also have offline support more.

But from my experience: Better buy a good ultra portable Intel CPU notebook from/with a brand/os of your choice. There will be a time where you need to install something which only runs locally.

</comment><comment><USER7> The show-stopper for me of all these set-ups is that you cannot sit on a sofa with your legs crossed and the machine on your lap which is by far the most comfortable setting for me

<comment><USER8> It's a very comfortable position, but not for the cervical spine. I just had an injury that according to the doc was because of this posture. I don't believe it though. Anyways, try not to sit in this position for long durations. The injury isn't fatal but will leave you with shooting pain in your arms and shoulders for weeks.

<comment><USER9> If slouching in a chair for long durations is harmful, I would have had serious problems by now. I haven't met a chair I didn't love to slouch in.

That said, I did twist out my back last year. My doc said ti was due to sports, but who knows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So the actual development is all done on a remote server, no local development? In that case, it would appear that this setup would be more classified as a thin client than a "main computer".

</comment><comment><USER11> I've worked on a similar setup during the last summer. My laptop's battery busted and since I already own a desktop I decided to buy an iPad and SSH into my desktop with Prompt.

Prompt is alright although I need to stay active on it due to the iOS app lifecycle constraints. If an application is suspended for more than 10 minutes iOS will kill it, meaning that if I'm working on a different application I'll constantly receive notifications to switch back to Prompt just to reset the death counter.

I have also spinned up a jupyter server so whenever I want to work on a notebook I'll SSH into my desktop and start the server. I can then use Safari on iOS to do browser based work. I imagine something similar can work for web developers. React Native developers can also upload their applications to hosting services such as Expo or Codepush and work on mobile applications on the go.

<comment><USER12> Blink and mosh fix this issue, as with that you can resume sessions even after the app is suspended by the OS.

However, this doesn't work perfectly yet: [https://github.com/blinksh/blink/issues/59](https://github.com/blinksh/blink/issues/59)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> MacBook 12" works great, has a better keyboard, is probably lighter/smaller than an iPad Pro

Why not use that instead?

<comment><USER14> Of course, the reason is that we wouldn't be talking about an article that described using your laptop to do something that its been doing since the 1990s! ;D

But seriously, I think these kinds of articles are great. I love to hear about people's different setups and trying to push what can be done on iPads. Why not?

The thing for me is that I absolutely LOVE my iPad (i have an Air2 for general use and a 12.9, mainly for art-related use) and I really, really want my iPads to do more -- to become more "real" work-capable. Why do I want that? I think the reason is because these things are so close to being a single thing to carry around. They are so perfect for certain things (web browsing, email, chat, and many types of gaming) that I would really like to keep expanding that list. I'd love a world where the iPad is the only device I take with me on trips.

I also think it's real important for everyone to keep pointing out the glaring flaws of tablets (iPads in particular). In a way, this article just reinforces the fact that the inability to do real, local programming work is a real limiter for a lot of people. Also, my favorite complaint is about just how awful selecting and editing text is. I'd love for Apple to fix these things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems more appropriate as a title: "Using the iPad pro as a screen for my server based programming environment."

</comment><comment><USER16> I feel a bit sorry for the author of the article to have put so much effort into fancy graphics and so on when he has completely missed the point. This isn't using your iPad as your main coding device. As someone else said earlier, this is a thin client at best.

<comment><USER17> IMHO, he has not missed the point. Tablet makers (IOS or Android) are fighting very hard to avoid that tablet becomes a generic versatile computer that you can use the way you want. We can stop fighting. Network is more and more reliable and we can rent very cheaply very good computers in the cloud. I use a bluetooth keyboard, connectbot and tmux to connect regularly to my web server. It works very well and I have more latency from the keyboard than from the network. If your computer (tablet) breaks or is stolen, you do not lose any data. Welcome to the cloud ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would summarize the answer as "it's surprising how much programming you can do, but it's not a great setup."

(Disclaimer: I _love_ my iPad Pro, and am typing this note from mine.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Posts like these are fun.

OP, I am now curious about using Docker to manage dotfiles and some installs. Could you tell us more about it, or give some resources to get started?

<comment><USER20> What resources other than the Docker quickstart do you need? He is basically using a VM to contain all of his settings and software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree with everyone that is saying that he is not using the iPad Pro as his main computer, howeve I wouldn't dismiss using an iPad Pro in a similar method with GUI based development. I've done remote troubleshooting with Windows environments with nothing more than my iPad and RDP -even remoting in Tony own desktop and using Visual Studio.

After seeing how badly running a Windows VM on a Mac laptop kills battery and how cheaply you can setup a VM on Amazon, I will probably just use that for Windows development when I get another a Mac. Then again, I have a gigabit internet up and down at home so maybe not.

I could also see using an iPad Pro for a terminal because I have "unlimited" data on my cellular equipped iPad for $20 a mont but I can't get unlimited fast tethering to a laptop.

</comment><comment><USER22> A guy (Mark O'Connor) did this 5 years ago. At the time I had a full dev stack (LAMP, vim, tmux, hg, etc.) on a netbook eee1001 (or whatever it was, the little guys) for portability. I liked my setup way better as I took my dev environment with me. But I would probably go nuts if I had to work on that little screen all the time.

[http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my- macbook-...](http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for- an-ipad)

</comment><comment><USER23> it's looks more like a classic terminal, I bet you get more work done that way

</comment><comment><USER24> When you are sshing into server you are using the server, not the local machine (beside the terminal and ssh app itself).

Please correct the title.

<comment><USER25> The "but it's not local and therefore not programming!" style reactions make little sense to me. Programming is an activity; where the code resides or executes doesn't change that fact. How would you have the title "corrected"?

<comment><USER3> If the title says "using device $X as a main computer for programming", that linguistically entails two things:

1\. that "main computer for programming" is the one running the stack and software used for programming and

2\. that this device is $X.

In this case the main computer for programming is a machine in the cloud ($Y, not $X), and $X is a terminal connecting to the cloud ($Y).

The title for this submission is clearly inaccurate and misleading.

<comment><USER25> We will have to agree to disagree. When I'm programming, as a backend engineer (like the article's author) I am almost always making use of numerous computers at once: my local hardware, a remote dev instance, remote production instances, databases, etc etc. The one I consider to be "main" is the one I use to input commands, write code, etc. Like the author's iPad Pro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Comments here went a bit crazy. Just think of the article as "The iPad Pro as main computing device for programming".

<comment><USER27> "Remote server as main computing device for programming"

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I use my mini 2 to connect remotely and do some work from my couch or my bed. I cannot see doing this 8 hours a day though.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is awesome! I've been eyeing the ability to use an iPad for a dev device for a while now. As a frontend and react native dev I'm unfortunately still restricted by my need for a good web debugging experience (eg chrome dev tools + react/redux dev tools) and the ability to compile to an iOS device. I can't imagine either of these are coming anytime soon, so for now I'll stick to an old fashioned MacBook Pro.

That said, sometimes I wonder if Apple will ever make the plunge and make an iOS version of Xcode. The thought of a mobile version seems scary, and obviously this would only be practical on the iPad, but at the same time if they ever try to make the iPad replace the professional workhorse that the Mac currently is that'd be a natural direction to go in.

</comment><comment><USER30> can you work with those keyboards without a table, like put it on your lap?

<comment><USER31> The Logitech Create keyboard/case [0] for the 12.9 iPad Pro works great on my lap. The new Logitech Slim Combo case/keyboard [1] has a removable keyboard that doesn't work well on a lap but makes using it as a tablet easier.

Both keyboards are backlit and I like typing on them.

[0] [https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/create-ipad-pro- keybo...](https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/create-ipad-pro- keyboard?crid=1762) [1] [https://www.logitech.com/en- us/product/slimcombo?crid=1762](https://www.logitech.com/en- us/product/slimcombo?crid=1762)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I got a Surface Book 3 for $600 and runs Windows 10. The keyboard detaches, and you can install a full dev environment (Ubuntu Linux).

</comment><comment><USER33> Aka: I use an iPad Pro as a terminal.

</comment><comment><USER34> I wish my vim could show ligatures. still - not enough to switch away from simple term

<comment><USER35> Are you sure that's a problem with vim and not with your terminal (emulator)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The title should really say "Using an ipad to be able to develop in one's underwear"... Outside of this key element, there is really no upside over using a laptop!

<comment><USER5> > Outside of this key element, there is really no upside over using a laptop!

From the article:

> Even though the MacBook's retina display is a really great display, the iPad > Pro's display is another big step up. I don't know if it's the Pro Motion, > the True Tone or the Wide color (P3) but the iPad Pro display just looks a > lot better than my 2015 MacBook Pro's.

<comment><USER36> For writing some javascript?

<comment><USER5> It's what you're looking at whilst doing that, yes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Download Entire Wikipedia for Offline Use With an HTML5 App - <AUTHOR> http://offline-wiki.googlecode.com/git/app.html <comment><USER2> "nearly all of the textual content of the English Wikipedia" = "1GB"

I find that hard to believe. Other wiki readers' dumps are a multiple of that. Eg aarddict for en is ~8GB.

<comment><USER3> from the blog: >>> First of all, it compresses not the entireity, but rather the most popular subset of the English Wikipedia. Two dumps are distributed at time of writing, the top 1000 articles and the top 300,000 requiring approximately 10MB and 1GB, respectively.

<comment><USER4> Actually the top 1337 and 314159 articles, respectively :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seriously mis-titled, since it's nowhere even close to the "Entire Wikipedia" – it's a tiny subset of the English-language Wikipedia from what I can tell.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can switch to a larger subset in the settings but it is a still somewhat mistitled

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice job, this looks really useful - would certainly help for the times when I'm stuck with no internet access and need to look something up.

One minor niggle - when I changed the file I wanted to use in settings, there was no confirmation or notification to let me know it was downloading the new file. I ended up stopping the download, erasing the data and starting again, to be sure. It might be worth adding in a confirmation to let users know it was changed OK, and is being re-downloaded.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can we use this technology for APIs for all various languages/frameworks?

I could definitely use a bit of a productivity boost (by turning off web access)

<comment><USER8> You can just use a website mirroring tool like wget, they've been around for ages. I've done just that with plenty of reference websites.

Don't forget to set an acceptable delay to ensure you don't overload the servers, though. Mine usually run all night.

<comment><USER9> Selenium's webdriver is great for this, they have different implementations so you can use it like wget (but more sophisticated) where it doesn't run an actual browser or you can have it run an implementation where it actually runs a browser, like Chrome or Firefox (good for debugging)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also, there was a Wikipedia/git project a while back (offline editing). All of the revision history was dumped into git.

<http://scytale.name/blog/2009/11/announcing-levitation>

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/08/gitjs-a-git- impleme...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/08/gitjs-a-git- implementation-in.php)

Why does mediawiki have its own version control system, anyway?

<comment><USER11> Because Wikipedia started in January 2001, well before even Subversion was around.

Levitation looks really cool, I wonder if using gitwiki will be easier and more sustainable than mediawiki.

And hey, Dan Lucraft who wrote git.js is still at Songkick, YCS07!

<comment><USER12> For the record, (Wikipedia says) the initial release of subversion was Oct 20, 2000. It's still understandable that Wikipedia rolled it's own.

<comment><USER11> Yup, but it became stable enough to host itself Aug 2001, whereas I think it was January or February 2001 that the few articles started trickling in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is cool, but the one thing I miss from all wikipedia dumps so far is images. It's essential for a lot of articles. Last time I checked, images were excluded from dumps because of license issues. "Fair use" in particular. How about a dump of just the images with fitting licenses? Does anyone here know why this is not available?

<comment><USER14> People don't understand licences. There are many images with incorrect licences. (There are bots that trawl the images to ask people to correct the licences; there have been megabyte long flamewars about the operators of those bots and how unpopular image tagging is.)

There are just too many infringing images, even those supposedly with the correct licence, for Wiki* to distribute and stay safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Random article results in 404 once in may be 4 times. Here is a suggestion for an improvement - a link for making 404 pages available offline. So if I go looking for a specific page that isn't offline I can make it available and read it later.

</comment><comment><USER16> An offline wikitravel would be incredibly useful for travelers. I haven't found this yet so I built an offline wikitravel for android: [https://market.android.com/details?id=com.heliod.eutravelgui...](https://market.android.com/details?id=com.heliod.eutravelguide&hl=en)

<comment><USER17> I use the Wikireader (from OpenMoko) when traveling: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikireader> I find it very useful, especially on the longer wall-socketless cycling trips.

You can stick both wikipedia and wiktionary on it. Quite possibly also Wikitravel, if they provide dumps.

<comment><USER18> Wikitravel is available -- wget <http://wrmlbeta.s3.amazonaws.com> and you'll see all the dumps they have available, e.g.:

<http://wrmlbeta.s3.amazonaws.com/entrav-20111105.7z.001>

In the age of nearly unlimited connectivity, I still find my Wikireader an invaluable device when traveling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately I can't see any formulas correctly and the tables are quirky. Example: [http://offline- wiki.googlecode.com/git/app.html?Permeability...](http://offline- wiki.googlecode.com/git/app.html?Permeability_\(electromagnetism\))

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought of using jsmath or mathjax but they're too big.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It says it was tested in Firefox 10, which is a little surprising since it doesn't work at all in Firefox 10. The IndexedDB spec changed and Firefox changed to align with the spec between 9 and 10, but the page uses the old API.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tested it on an infrequently updated installation of firefox nightly, and the about page said Firefox 10. But I didn't know the API changed, I'll look into it. But how so did it change?

<comment><USER20> Instead of doing

var request = mozIndexedDB.open("databasename"); request.onsuccess = function(event) { request = event.target.result.setVersion(N); request.onsuccess = function(event) { // set up your database } }

it looks like

var request = mozIndexedDB.open("databasename", N); request.onupgradeneeded = function(event) { // set up your database } request.onsuccess = function(event) { // do stuff with your database }

Feel free to email me at <my hacker news username>@mozilla.com if you need a more detailed explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does this app grab the files from Wikipedia directly? It doesn't seem very nice to create an app that pulls down gigabytes of data from a web service you do not own nor have permission from.

EDIT: It appears my concern was unwarranted.

<comment><USER22> can someone explain the reason why this concern is unwarranted?

<comment><USER23> The files are hosted by Google Code: <http://code.google.com/p/offline- wiki/downloads/list>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sorry for being obtuse, but I DLd the 1GB repository - where is it stored and how do I access it?

I see I can go to the index, from this page - is this index served up from the 1GB DL I just did?

How can I transfer this to [device]?

</comment><comment><USER25> Thanks so much for this. This will be incredibly useful for me (behind the GFW, which gets moody about Wikipedia pretty often). Could this easily periodically update itself to grab fresh versions of articles? I think that would be a great feature, especially if you could do it without having to pull down the whole database each time you wanted to update, instead just updating on an article-by-article basis.

</comment><comment><USER26> Absolutely amazing. This technology can be used for many other offline databases. He provides the tools for indexing, compressing and everything needed for the reader. Make sure to read his corresponding blog post: <http://antimatter15.com/wp/2011/12/offline-wiki-redux/>

</comment><comment><USER27> Amazing project, just what I was searching for. A few recommendations:

Could you expand the available download options to include an option to download all of wikipedia, not just a subset of the most popular articles?

Right now, mathematic and other kinds of formulae aren't rendered correctly. Is there any way you could fix that?

An option to include pictures (maybe compressed or low-res versions) would be neat.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER28> I remember when you announced some months back, wasn't it a paid application? Great work either way.

</comment><comment><USER29> Can this also be synced, or does one need to delete/re-download the whole dump?

</comment><comment><USER30> doesn't work for me with Firefox 10 or 11a2. It would be awesome if it could be made to work there!

</comment><comment><USER31> doesn't seem to work on the ipad

<comment><AUTHOR> It only sort of works on iOS 5, the downloads stop whenever a "Increase Storage" prompt pops up and you have to reload whenever that happens. But it does work with the small dump, albeit slowly.

<comment><USER32> Cool, I initially didn't think this much storage was possible on mobile yet. Are you saying you can get the whole thing down if you keep agreeing to the prompts?

It's a pity mobile browsers haven't got better support for this kind of thing yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> No I think it stops issuing prompts after 50GB. Also, on iOS 5, it only supports WebSQL which dosn't store (AFAIK) objects like typed arrays, so I have to convert it to a string and back base64 encoded, which makes it use even more space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> very cool.</comment>


Migrating Pinterest profiles to React - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/migrating-pinterest-profiles-react <comment><USER2> It would be nice to see some more numbers, e.g. page size, load time, etc. (and perhaps some critical analysis of the cost you have to pay in the transition period, where your clients for example need to load both frameworks).</comment>


Amazon's Showdown in France Tests Its Ability to Sidestep Labor - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/technology/amazon-unions-france-coronavirus.html <comment><USER2> > The company shut down in the country after a court ordered it to cease > delivering "nonessential" items during the pandemic.

Here in India, Amazon has been required by law to sell and ship only essential items, nationwide from 25 March until 3 May, and in all "Red Zones" (which include nearly all urban centers) through today. They've happily complied, and in fact stopped taking orders on non-essential items _before_ the legal requirement kicked in. That just shows the only reason they've refused to do that in France is because they don't want to give a win to labour organisations. What an awful company.

<comment><USER3> Did the Indian government also levy fines of around $100000 per item if only 1 item was categorized as essential but later turned out not to be?

<comment><USER4> The French court explicitly used Amazons own product categories for its whitelist. Amazon would have held the full definition of whitelisted items in its hands the whole time if it decided to comply.

<comment><USER5> Amazon's product categorization is not particularly reliable.

For example, if you go to Electronics -> Headphones -> Earbuds and sort by price, this book comes up: [https://www.amazon.com/Wentworth-Letter-Joseph- Smith-ebook/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Wentworth-Letter-Joseph-Smith- ebook/dp/B0084A76P0/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1589724266&s=electronics&sr=1-1)

Although visiting it by that link then shows it as a book, so I'm a bit lost.

<comment><USER6> Amazon's categorization system is entirely broken. It's quite sad that on of the largest companies in the world has one of the worst product filtering systems I've seen. Hell, they even remove results when sorting by price low to high, but not high to low. They're Also missing thousands of sub categories and filters. Sellers even have the free reign to deliberately mislist their items, what good that does I have no idea.

EBay suffers similar problems but is more consistent witha mostly functional sorting system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We've ordered a couple of things from Amazon France in the last two weeks and they were getting shipped from Amazon warehouses in Germany.

Our conclusion at home (just a guess based on noticing where our Prime deliveries were coming from...) is that Amazon shut down most/all of the warehouse operations in France in line with court orders, put the staff on 'chômage partiel' so that most of the salary would be paid by the state, and then continued fulfilling orders from their warehouses across the border in Germany. Our Prime deliveries still arrived on time, Amazon still got my money, but the workers were sent home and the state pays for them to be there (mostly anyway).

Impressive and nimble by Amazon, and not sure that's a big win for labor here in the longer term.

<comment><USER8> > put the staff on 'chômage partiel' so that most of the salary would be paid > by the state

No, amazon requested it and the French government told them to fuck off, as they should have.

[https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/05/04/coronavir...](https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2020/05/04/coronavirus- la-demande-de-chomage-partiel-d-amazon-a-ete-refusee_6038609_3234.html)

<comment><USER9> So the court orders you to close your operations and on top of that you have to pay for it? liberte egalite fraternite much.

<comment><USER4> The court ordered them to a) start following safety guidelines. b) as made necessary by repeated failure to follow a) start to plan improvements and correct issues with their current safety procedures. c) reduce operations to a whitelisted subset of Amazon(TM) product categories until such time that b) is finished and approved.

At no point did the court force Amazon to close its warehouses. That was pure, spite on Amazons part. I even think we are already past the date the court considered for the review and improvements, so if Amazon had complied its warehouses would be running and serving the full product spread again.

<comment><USER9> Safety guidelines based on what evidence exactly? Because just back in February the WHO guys were saying masks were useless before completely reverting their position, so you hear everything and its opposite even from experts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude I get a strange buzz from this piece, it feels like an Amazon 'whitewash'.

I am sad to see this style of employer-employee relationship creep into Europe through globalization.

<comment><USER10> Amazon should just be banned in Europe.

We don't need what is essentially a monopoly, or at least targeting becoming a monopoly, controlling internet sales. It's not beneficial. It may have been in the very short term, but now the effects of pushing out small businesses are clear, we can just not have it.

The labour practices are almost besides the point, anti-trust should break them up.

<comment><USER11> I'm happy with Amazon, if you don't like them then don't use them, but don't punish us all with going back to the shitty local commerce.

<comment><USER10> Not having Amazon =/= only using local commerce. The problem is their centralization siphoning all of the money and attention out of the business, vertically integrating delivery, etc.

It's not like online retailers don't exist. Well, for now. They _will_ go under if we just let Amazon run everything unchecked.

<comment><USER12> Protectionism is anti-consumer

<comment> the-dude Which is nice as long as you have work.

<comment><USER12> Protectionism creates less employment and opportunity than free trade. This is like saying immigrants take jobs from Americans

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude [http://archive.is/QjzqW](http://archive.is/QjzqW)</comment>


PluginQuery - Search for jQuery Plugins - <AUTHOR> http://www.pluginquery.com/

<comment><USER2> Thanks, looks like a good start and is much needed.

plugins.jquery.com is a pain to navigate, hopefully this will evolve into a full fledged alternative.</comment>


Google Buzz API experimenting with discovery based client libraries - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/google-buzz-api/browse_thread/thread/d83b1eeb892f2ab2

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Client libraries now no longer have to be kept up to date, but are up to date automatically with all the functionality that the API exposes. I wonder if this level of abstraction makes it through to the real world. Just might. Cool.</comment>


The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0143611 <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://qz.com/570009/slacktivism-is-having-a-powerful- real-w...](http://qz.com/570009/slacktivism-is-having-a-powerful-real-world- impact-new-research-shows/), which points to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I just thought qz's was a summary or "better abstract" for those not wanting to plunge in.</comment></comment>


Space Music: Did Walkmans Kill Manned Space Exploration? - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/space/space-music-did-walkmans-kill-manned-space-exploration.html <comment><USER2> _Chester's supervisor, Daniel Rawson, refused to comply when confronted by law enforcement, which escalated the marketing stunt into an "extreme risk scenario," Officer Eric Poteet told KXWAN._

It's amazing how easy it is to create an extreme situation like that. Being around some cops is really walking on eggshells.</comment>