Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/11/microsoft-launches-windows-phone-7-but-does-anyone-care/ <comment><USER2> I think it's fantastic. As someone who has done a decent bit of iPhone development, I can definitely say that I prefer developing in VS with C# than XCode with Objective-C.

It's disheartening that so many bloggers are dismissing this awesome platform simply because Microsoft is "late to the game", yet they forget how successful Android has been. At this point, it looks like Google and Microsoft are fresh and new, whereas Apple is trying to prolong the life of an old platform.

<comment><USER3> I think the fear for Windows being "late to the game" isn't that MS will have a hard time getting mindshare, but I think they are going to have a hard time getting "developer share".

Basically if I'm going to develop my hip new mobile app that's ready to take over the world I'm going to start with Android and iPhone and wait and see what OS I'm going to tackle next, and the way I'm going to figure that out is by sales numbers and right now even there are more Palm devices then WP7.

<comment><USER4> >I think the fear for Windows being "late to the game" isn't that MS will have a hard time getting mindshare, but I think they are going to have a hard time getting "developer share".

Microsoft already have huge developer mindshare. All they have to do is get developers that already use their platforms to use yet another of their platforms.

<comment><USER5> This is especially true since you develop for WP7 on proven and well-known technologies (.Net-ish, C#, XNA). A great many developers are already intimately familiar with these and will have little or no barrier of entry with WP7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently working on several applications for WP7. The development experience for WP7 is a million-billion times better than it was for past Windows Mobile operating systems.

\- The emulator is snappy and you don't need to mess around with ActiveSync.

\- I'm not a huge fan of the XAML (the Silverlight/WPF markup language), but that is not an issue. I put a XAML place holder element in place and add controls in C#

\- The built in controls look great and are surprisingly functional. I specifically thinking of the Panorama control - which allows application content to basically flow off screen. Some may find that style of having content get cut off by the edge of the display off-putting, but its effective if that truncated content is limited to titles.

\- putting XNA in there is great, mostly for familiarity's sake. You still have to design for the phone differences (form factor, input, and library). Porting games over from XBox live probably won't require an enormous app- rewrite. Can't wait to see how this particular piece plays out.

The one drawback I can see has to do with Windows Phone store. I'm not really sure what the story is there. Is app distribution really limited to the store? How about enterprise apps?

I don't have experience developing iPhone or Android apps, so I won't comment on whether or not WP7 is better in that department.

<comment><USER7> My limited number of contacts at MS tell me that an Enterprise deployment solution is coming, but they couldn't get it done in time for the initial release.

I hope it's better than Apple's solution.

<comment><USER8> What problems do you have with Apple's Enterprise deployment solution?

<comment><USER7> It's improved with IOS4 as you can now deploy wirelessly by having the users visit a web site. With 3 the only way to deploy was using the configuration utility or have the users install with iTunes.

What we keep begging them for is the ability to point out users at our own enterprise app store, hosted on either Apple's servers or our own. It's also what I keep telling MS whenever I get a chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That article seemed incredibly long for something that failed to tell me even a single thing about the phone, aside from it "looking great" or something. Come on.

Though in a way, it almost doesn't matter. Microsoft _has_ to offer the features of iPhone and Android to even be taken seriously, so we have to assume that is just there. What they really need can't be seen through promising text and screenshots, anyway: they really need _polish_.

Microsoft has been notoriously bad about leaving all kinds of holes in their products, so that they look OK on stage but end up feeling clunky as hell. If they are to have a chance this time, it is important that their phones feel simple and logical; and, dare I say it, they should even be a _joy_ to use. Microsoft will never earn my respect until they can prove that they get this, and deliver it.

<comment><USER10> Microsoft haven't launched a phone. They've launched a new version of their phone OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The initial reviews have been great (even from Apple fanatics like Gruber, Mossberg, and Pogue). The WP7 development environment is great and utilizes APIs with a wealth of existing experience out there.

Sure they were late to the game, but from what I can see, they'll already become a player. The same dismissals were issued against Microsoft for other late-comers-that-became-hits like the XBOX series, Active Directory, and .NET.

<comment><USER12> I hate to say this, especially as an avid .NET fanboy, but I feel they missed a huge opportunity here. If they would have layered a pure-managed userspace on top of the CE kernel, they could've achieved extremely high performance (shared GC and _seriously_ diminished task switching/IPC overhead) while guaranteeing a huge degree of security at compile-time. In addition, they could've much more easily moved the whole system to be orthogonally persistent, which I believe will play a big roll in the mobile space as tablets get more advanced, particularly.

The benefits of the OS being able to introspect completely on the applications running on it simply can't be overstated. From a security, stability, speed, memory use, and flexibility point of view, they missed the mark. It'd also open up a lot of new avenues in terms of parallelism, which will be a big deal in a few years as we get dual- and quad-core mobile chips. They're coming, and yet again we're not ready for them.

I sincerely hope they go the pure-managed-userspace angle for WP8. If they do, they'll have a tech stack that simply can't be beaten.

(Note: I'm a bit biased here, being the author of a pure-managed OS. But seriously -- these guys really started the trend, why are they not taking full advantage of it? They're already going mostly-managed...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment.

Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in.

Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio...

I assume tons of people will flock to the Win7 Phones unless they are just horrible once they get going.

Many game companies can target this platform much more easily than the iPhone/Android handsets as it also works off XNA.

<comment> tomh- The tools don't matter, it might be nice, but even though "tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment" I can't recall the last time they produced a product having superior user experience thanks to those tools. I can't name a single website/webapp/desktop app that I enjoy using on a daily base made with visual studio. I know a lot of the game companies use visual studio (c++) to produce parts of their games, but I'm not sure which of the latest games are produced using XNA.

My point is the tools don't matter as much as the strategy and decisions of Microsoft in other parts of the ecosystem to attract talent to produce content for their devices.

<comment><USER14> I use windows 7 on a daily basis and I enjoy it! And I bet it's made with visual studio.

<comment><USER15> That may not be a safe assumption.

<comment><USER12> But it's a correct one. Razzle is used internally for building the kernel and drivers, but the majority (I believe?) of the userspace is done using VS.

<comment><USER15> I heard from a former Windows team member that Source Insight was popular a few years ago, but things have probably changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not only is this article poorly written, but all of the subsequent TechCrunch articles suck as well. As Homer Simpson once said, "You take forever to say nothing."

</comment><comment><USER17> I care. I actually want to try one out and hopefully get rid of my android phone.

I must admit though, I'm mostly excited to write mobile apps in C# and use XNA.

</comment><comment><USER18> If you're writing a link-bait article about if anyone cares about a device the day the devices are announced... that means people care. :-)

<comment><USER19> He even says 'eagerly awaited Windows Phone 7' to describe something that supposedly no one cares about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am a big fan of the UI. Snappy and minimalist. I know that Windows Phone has music enabled in the background through the hub api for apps like Pandora and Slacker, etc. All it needs is Copy/Paste (early 2011) and reasonable multitasking capabilities atleast for certain apps. I think the most use of Multi tasking for me on the iPhone right now is to toggle certain settings or to do certain stuff during navigation. I don't really use it beyond that and it's reasonable that most of the multitasking is done this way.

I've also played around with the Google Nexus One and the HTC Incredible. While they're great phones in their own right, the touch screen experience leaves a lot to be desired (atleast on those units) in terms of response time and accuracy + the camera on nexus one is nowhere near the iphone 3GS, forget iPhone 4.

Disclaimer: I have been using the iPhone since the past 3 years and currently on the iPhone 4. I think it's time that I tried a new platform because I'm simply bored of how the phone looks and how it operates (launch an app, exit an app, etc. for everything). I like the way multitasking is implemented and how well the camera performs. I've always had the craving for a hardware keyboard and it seems like the new Dell phone with WP7 is a good replacement for my phone, probably early next year.

</comment><comment><USER21> The worst news about this phone is the web browser: IE7 based with IE8 technology. IE7's still-buggy, slow rendering; glacial Javascript performance; no support for forward-thinking web technologies ("HTML5", canvas or webGL, CSS3). I hope this doesn't take off, or this will ruin the currently fun, Webkit-based mobile web development for modern smartphones..

Also, from a user's perspective: no Flash (at least initially) OR HTML5 video tag support? It's like Microsoft's totally missed the last few years of mobile phone flamewars.

<comment><USER18> In head to head comparison, the WP7 browser, in preproduction HW, performed about on par with Android (Nexus One) and iPhone 4 browsers.

I'm sure that with IE9, they'll rev the phone with an HTML5 focused browser in the future. But for todays web, I think a solid IE7/8 browser is something I'm completely fine with. At least for a year or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One aspect of the Windows phone that may be a big hit in corporations and governments is whole device encryption. PGP (now owned by Symantec) can deploy strong encryption to these Windows phones. Apple has always been difficult to develop for in this area (lots of frequent changes ISP can't keep up) and they tend to advertise to home users and I'm not sure about Android's whole device encryption ability.

</comment><comment><USER23> Microsoft's Kin failure is still in the back of my mind. What's to say they won't kill this one too? Why take the development risk?

<comment><USER18> Big differences. MS is betting big on this, whereas with Kin it was a small team that did it. Kin apparently had very little internal support. Kin wasn't pushed by MS, but had a contractual obligation with Verizon. That's why Kin launched on one carrier only. Apparently WP7 is launching on 60 carriers, with 9 or 10 different phones. The mobile, VS, Silverlight, XBox, Zune, and Office teams are all apparently very engaged.

MS won't kill this. I wouldn't let that be a factor on doing development. Now it may take a while for it to get consumer uptake. That may temper if you want to develop for it. But given that this device should sell moderately well with a good app store, it may have better ROI than the same app showing up in the Android app store, even with the larger number of Android devices.

<comment><USER24> This time for Microsoft, it's win or die trying. And they know that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> the article is at [http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/10/11/microsoft-launches- wi...](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2010/10/11/microsoft-launches-windows- phone-7-but-does-anyone-care/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm with the crew that thinks it's pretty short sighted to just dismiss this out of hand. Last time I checked, Xbox launched into a market place where people change their consoles a lot less frequently, with a single ENORMOUS player, and they've done pretty well for themselves.

The question is whether or not they get the amazing partnerships with HW/SW that Apple has driven into the iPhone and let them crush design. Without that, it'll be good, but not great and will not win the hipsters/design freaks.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've heard WP7 has no compatibility whatsoever (so it's unable to run even WM5/6 apps)? If that's true — am I understanding properly that MS is introducing almost completely empty platform, which requires software to be written yet?

I don't know whenever they will succeed or not, but it seems to be a hard task to enter the market when all rivals already have quite strong positions (including lots of software).

<comment><USER28> If anything I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new.

See for example: OS9 vs. OSX

The problem with MS, constantly, is that they have prioritized backwards compatibility over just about everything else - often usability, stability, and functionality. This has kept their platforms technologically backwards and their usability an infamous joke.

It's about time that MS started fresh with a modern, relevant platform. I just hope they can do something similar with desktop Windows.

<comment><USER29> _I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new._

I wholeheartedly agree, and from everything that I've seen of WP7, I'm impressed. MS has rethought the entire UI, and frankly, rebuilding from scratch was the only thing they _could_ do to become relevant again in the consumer mobile space. They've done away with the desktop metaphor, menu bars and contextual menus, and yet they managed not to make it a carbon copy of iOS or WebOS. I can't wait to test it.

However, just a side note about your comparison between OS9>OSX and WM6>WP7: whenever there was a radical change in architecture, Apple provided a transition period where the two coexisted. When Apple switched from 68k processors to PowerPC, developers could build FAT Binaries that would run on both platforms. When Apple switched from MacOS 9 to OS X, MacOS 9 apps could still run within the Classic environment. When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, PowerPC applications could still be run within a layer called Rosetta.

<comment><USER18> Re backwards compat... I think MS did the right thing here making the applications have to be managed. The WP7 managed stack seems really well-tuned (especially for a mobile device).

Removing native code from 3rd party apps gives them several things:

1) Reduces incidence of memory leaks.

2) Less buggy apps w/ better type safety than C/C++.

3) Improved security. No buffer overruns or out of range subscript class of vulns.

4) Can more easily statically analyze to determine resource usage and inappropriate usage.

5) Can change the underlying HW platform and apps continue to run.

The only real issue I've seen with managed code in the past is perf. And from the game demos I've seen, I think they may have fixed that issue.

<comment><USER30> WP7 seems really nice. However, since you have no native C++ support games can't be ported from iPhone/Android. Basically you have to start from scratch in XNA. Somehow I don't all that many games will be released on this platform.

<comment><USER18> I think you may be right. Although, I don't think that's a great loss. Outside of literally a few games on iPhone, I think WP7 would do just as well with their own batch of games. I think XNA is a very effecient platform so I don't think developers need to port games. I wouldn't be surprised if there were 1,000+ games in mid-November.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Give me a reason to care. Previous Windows Mobiles were crap and I am waiting to see how is it better in any way than Android and iOS.

</comment><comment><USER32> I hope it succeeds at least enough to give Apple some competition in development tools.

<comment><USER29> Apple doesn't need competition to motivate them. They've shown that by reinventing the iPod every year even though there's no competition to speak of. If anything, Apple is obsessive about innovating.

There's a major new version of the dev environment underway, Xcode 4, which developers can already try for themselves: <http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I care. Competition is always good, regardless of whether I'd ever buy one or not.

</comment><comment><USER34> Will WP7 phones sync out-of-the-box with Macs?

<comment><USER35> Don't believe so. Nor can you mount the media drive (as with Android). As a Linux user, this'll keep me far away from Win7 phones (as it did with iphones)</comment></comment>


Physics, Topology, Logic, and Computation: A Rosetta Stone (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0340v3 <comment><USER2> This article has been reposted a few times [1][2]. Is there any way to merge discussions?

\</comment><comment>

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317525)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928924)

<comment><USER3> Both of those threads are quite old (101 and 889 days respectively). It's not worth merging old threads with new, and there's nothing wrong with reposting articles that far apart—I'd argue it's actively _healthy_ as long as it doesn't become spammy.

But linking to the old threads is certainly useful because there are often interesting comments there that wouldn't be resurfaced otherwise.

<comment><USER4> It should be useful that there is a bot which automatically gets the older threads as a reply.

<comment><USER5> The "past" link under the title name will show you just that.

<comment><USER4> Ha. I never noticed it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Rosetta", not "Rosette"

<comment><USER7> original French name was "la Pierre de Rosette", so it's Rosette not Rosetta

<comment><USER8> The title of the linked article has "Rosetta", so should govern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> (2009)</comment>


PC Speaker To Eleven - <AUTHOR> https://habr.com/en/post/439192/ <comment><USER2> The most amazing thing I've heard done with a PC speaker is in the last part of this equally amazing demo (starts at 6:37 --- the parts before have more "normal" beeper music): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y)

Explanation here: [https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player- how...](https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8088-pc-speaker-mod-player-how-its- done/)

<comment><USER3> Holy shit. I've never heard anything even remotely like that from a pc speaker. How the hell did they accomplish that on a 1981 pc?!?!

<comment><USER4> Disabling interrupts and eating all available CPU in handcoded assembly.

386 can do it with no tricks. And you even have some spare horsepower to dither for improved quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although the engineering behind getting a good sound out of the PC speaker is fascinating. Still wishing the PC standard from the get go had included sound as a first class citizen.

I think this decision back then still ripples through the machines today and sound never truly feels like an integral part of the machine on Windows (Realtek audio driver) and you'll never have the feeling of a built in boot sound on your machine which felt so good on Macs till it was disabled recently.

It's not like computers didn't have good sound back then either compare the Lotus III example [0] from the article with the same on the Amiga hardware from around the same time [1]

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72vZ1asBIXQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72vZ1asBIXQ)

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

<comment><USER6> "[...]a built in boot sound on your machine which felt so good on Macs[...]"

Ever since I got my first iBook in college I've had mainly negative associations with that sound. Too frequently you'd open the thing in the middle of a lecture with 100+ people in the room and the sound starts blasting. The only solution I found was plugging in headphones so that the sound would go there instead.

<comment><USER7> As I recall, if you muted the sound before shutting down it would stay muted and not play the startup sound. My Mac experience starts at the white iBook G3 running OSX 10.2 though, so it could be that this behaviour is a new thing.

I now have a 13" TouchBar MacBook Pro and it makes a sound when I plug the charger in no matter what I do to the volume settings. When I have it muted and open I can actually see it unmute the sound so that it can make the charger sound then mute it again when it's done.

<comment><USER8> Just fyi: I believe (but haven't gotten to try it myself) that this command will turn off the power chime when you plug in a USB-C charger.

      defaults write com.apple.PowerChime ChimeOnAllHardware -bool false;killall PowerChime

<comment><USER7> I haven't tried this yet, but based on some quick searching it might need some tweaks[0]. This is a pretty easy change to make, so I'll try it out later.

[0] [https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/282752/turning- pow...](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/282752/turning-power-chime- off/309947#309947)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a niche of 1-bit music using such creative techniques. See also:

1\. Mister Beep, from Poland. [http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mister_Beep/](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mister_Beep/)

2\. Tristan Perich, from NYC. [https://www.1bitsymphony.com/](https://www.1bitsymphony.com/)

3\. Noah Vawter, 1-bit Groovebox: [https://web.archive.org/web/20090212172253/http://web.media....](https://web.archive.org/web/20090212172253/http://web.media.mit.edu/~nvawter/projects/1bit/index.html)

<comment><USER4> Just like with hit points, one is all you need. Just enough lives. ;) Or in this case, high enough and stable enough frequency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember playing a Golf game called World Class Leaderboard on my 386 and being absolutely amazed by the sound coming out of my PC speaker. It used RealSound to play the sounds of birds on the title screen and realistic golf sound effects and voices during gameplay:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21a_bbajmjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21a_bbajmjQ)

<comment><USER11> And the original Links ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5TPAxMfpbQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5TPAxMfpbQ)) from the same company. Really nice use of the PC speaker in the intro, as well as the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ahh the good old days. I remember writing a program in 6502 assembler that could record and playback a digital sample, all using the speaker on the Apple ][+. I'm not sure if I also connected a microphone or if I just yelled at the speaker.

I believe the max I could record was about 7 seconds before I ran out of memory. But it worked and I was happy and proud. :)

I remember being amazed how i'd spent so many hours coding something that executed in such a short amount of time.

<comment><USER13> There was an Apple ][ program in an issue of Nibble Magazine that could sample audio from the cassette port, save to disk and play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome he made his own VSTi available which we can use to make chip tunes plus impulse responses of tiny speakers to give it a realistic sound, and released it all for free!

</comment><comment><USER15> to learn assembly I wrote a "PC speaker clicker" that just strobed the click register and had a small timing loop to play A440.

A person in the room spoke up when I played it- "that's not A440, it's off slightly. Oh, and I have perfect pitch- it's about 439".

I had a small bug in my timing routine that made the pitch slightly lower, which I fixed.

<comment><USER16> I sang in a children's choir growing up. There were several kids with perfect pitch over the years. It's an incredible skill; they really do get the pitch exactly right - even better than the piano.

<comment><USER17> Makes you wonder what the difference is, genetically speaking. The one set of genes codes for a crystal oscillator and the other for resistors and capacitors or the biological equivalent.

<comment><USER15> This is a really interesting area of research. I've been following roughly since the time I wrote the code I described above (at UCSF, a medical research institution). At the time, my genetics professor (Nelson Friemer) theorized it was primarily genetic ([https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090702170209.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090702170209.htm)) and even found some genetic associations.

I don't think that's really super-important. For example, when he heard that perfect pitch was frequently found in children of musicians, his conclusion is that it was inherited genetically. I think, instead, children of musicians are exposed to pitches and their labels (notes) very early, during neural plasticity, and develop the mental associations, probably with some assist from genetics.

The biophysics of audition are pretty interesting; see [http://dailynexus.com/2017-08-24/hearing-a-biophysical- and-n...](http://dailynexus.com/2017-08-24/hearing-a-biophysical-and- neurological-enigma/)

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

One could imagine any number of genetic changes that could affect the ability of the physical system (these parts) as well as the neural parts to do this, but personally I think this is much more learned behavior, not genetically dominated.

<comment><USER17> The big question is: what is the reference?

<comment><USER15> reference to what? There is a collect of hair cells that vibrate in response to various pitches. When presented with enough training examples, the brain makes the association between those vibrations, and labels provided by others (that's where the pitch/note mapping comes from). For individual frequencies, I think most people with perfect pitch spend some time with pianos and tuning fork and eventually get a "feel" for what delta 1hz around 440 sounds like.

<comment><USER18> Explain my four-year-old hearing chords played on a piano by the teacher, and able to tell the notes that made up the chord. First 3-notes, 4, 5, 6 and he was still able to do it.

Sure the labels are learned. But the ability to hear all that is spread out over a bell-curve. The whole class could tell 1 note, 1/3 could tell 2, then 2 kids could tell 3, then just 1.

<comment><USER15> yes, and? I don't have perfect pitch, but with extensive training I have limited relative pitch. It's an acquired skill like anything else, and young kids exposed to music pick it up faster- with a distribution, like everything else.

<comment><USER18> Oh, and he has perfect pitch. Can tune stringed instruments without a reference, was employed to do so for some summers.

It was something he could do, from a very young age. Not apparently learned. Not learned by most of his cohort at music school, so I'm guessing most likely something born with.

If there is a distribution, then we have to task to explain that. Reasonable to call it genetic? Why not?

<comment><USER15> I don't know what you mean by "not apparently learned". Even with genetically inherited perfect pitch, the skill has to be "learned" (IE, presented with note labels). Nobody has the ability- without training- to tell you the frequency of a note. Genetic (in this case) doesn't mean "born with the ability", it means "predisposed towards greater ability after training").

Personally, I'd start with the strong observations like "People whose first language is tonal are more likely to have perfect pitch", while people whose ancestors spoke tonal languages, but were raised with a first language that isn't tonal, are less likely (and vice versa). That says to me "environmental differences" are as strong as genetic.

All of this is covered in extensive (and relatively accurate) detail on the wikipedia page. if you want to argue with me further, I suggest getting a PhD in the field, or at least extensive experience with molecular biology, genetics, biophysics, experimental design, and scientific philosophy, as all those are necessary prerequisites for discussing complex traits that have both genetic and environmental components.

<comment><USER17> That is really not an OK answer.

The idea that there is an 'absolute' involved indicates a reference of sorts, that is what makes it absolute. Labelling notes will distribute them along a bell curve and the dead center of that bell curve may or may not be the exact note. People with absolute pitch are able to do this _exactly_ and that is what makes it interesting, that implies a reference to some standard, presumably one that they have internally. A tuning fork is such a standard, as are other mechanical oscillators with a high degree of repeatability.

<comment><USER15> There are numerous problems with your response; I suggest reading up on the actual biophysical experiments done with people with absolute pitch to get a better idea on the details of what absolute pitch means.

It's not exactly; most people with AP can do, at best, note labelling. A much smaller group can identify pitches (frequencies) but then only with 1hz resolution around 440.

I don't mean to imply in these discussions that I'm an expert on absolute pitch- but I have a PhD in biophysics and we covered signal transduction in our classes.

I think sitting around speculating that there's some absolute pitch reference in people's head that works better because of genetic mutations is probably not the right path to go down. Because (almost) everybody has those pitch references (hair cells) and they're almost all equally functional (some mutations probably lead to slightly better or worse response).

I don't really follow all the parts about the bell curve other than to say most physical phenomena like this exhibit distributions that resemble gaussians, but that isn't really an indicator of the mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is cool, but doesent even seem to mention the ScreamTracker pc speaker hack. Maybe it was done the same way, but it was able to output about 8khz bandwidth, 1 bit rendered and anti-aliased from 8 or 16 bit sound samples to the pc speaker. It worked so well I still have tape recordings I made with a hacked up rca plug attached. The paralell port adapters sounded better, but had their own neat lofi sound. About the best you could do without a sound card, which were stupid expensive back then. It was a far cry from the 'musical' beeping I was used to.

<comment><USER20> Is this the same used in the 8088 mph demo productions end credits?

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y](https://youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y)

<comment><USER21> Reminded me of Mean Streets, with it's RealSound[1] voices [https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4?t=153](https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4?t=153)

Was amazed when I heard it for the first time.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound)

<comment><USER22> I agree, even as a young kid with no idea how make the speaker even go beep (I was young, ok?) hearing the music/speech coming from Mean Streets was amazing. Everything else up to that point was just beeping and blipping... IIRC the volume was very low though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What always amazes me is this could have been done back in the day if someone had had the vision and belief that it was possible. Understandable that they didn't because it's so far beyond the then current level of expectation.

So that makes me wonder what could be done with what we have now if we only had the vision and belief that it was possible? What will someone demo if 50 years on an "ancient" Windows 10 PC or iPad?

<comment><USER24> I'm not 100% sure that's true - for example, today we have hugely improved development environments, IDEs, source control, collaboration tools, simulators, debuggers, documentation (particularly in terms of easily available and instant access to low level details and also searchability) and so on, which (probably?) make it easier to produce code, and perform tasks that would have been impossible or intractable back then...

<comment><USER23> Yes, the environment definitely makes it easier and more feasible.

Still, what if we have Star Trek-like transporter building blocks today but just can't see it yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Damn this takes me back. I'm 10 years old and my 'gaming setup' is my mom's 386 work computer. No sound card, so I played and completed games like Doom I, Chip's Challenge (built-in w/ Win 3.1 I believe) and Allan Border's Cricket with those beeps and boops.

</comment><comment><USER15> I had a cracked game on my Apple IIe which included a side program (included by the cracker) that played 3-channel beethoven sonata.</comment>


Does Google use a person's search history to filter job applications? - <AUTHOR>

If i were to apply to a job to Google, I would definitely use my Gmail ID in the application form and in my resume. All of my Google tools would be linked to this id.
Now I understand that an individual's Google Search data is holy and only a limited few within Google can access the same.
But wouldn't Google be able to build a simplified YES or NO tool using a candidate's search history, that the recruiters within Google can use to shortlist a candidate? Do they do so?
Jes Asking... <comment><USER2> I'm an engineer at Google. Not only does this not happen, but it would probably be illegal for any employer to do this for a variety of reasons -- medical information in searches, evidence of gender, race, disabilities, etc. which could (rightfully) lead to all kinds of discrimination lawsuits. Rest assured that this is not happening.

</comment><comment><USER3> To eliminate all doubts, a simpler solution would be to use a different mail id while applying for a job position at google. One that you can dedicate only for job search and nothing else.;-)</comment>


Drawing with boids - <AUTHOR> https://miniatureape.github.io/boiddraw/ <comment><USER2> Context: Boids is the name of a classic flocking model by Craig Reynolds.

[https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/](https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I initially thought that it didn't work because it was just a black screen. Perhaps include a little text box that tells the user that they need to draw something with their mouse.

<comment><USER4> I had the same problem. Already closed that tab until I read this.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I made this. Thanks for looking.

In case anyone is interested, if you open the console there are some instructions for scripting your own drawings.

(p.s. Thanks for all the suggestions)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a lovely idea.

Emergent simulations are my favorite part of compsci, turning it towards an artistic purpose seems like a good pairing, I might steal it and try my luck with CA or something :)

[edit]

After playing for a bit I feel like it might be good to have the boids number and age limit a little higher by default (there is no correct setting of course, but it probably helps people get an intuition for what it's doing).

Also increasing max speed makes it much more expressive.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can someone please explain what is it doing? I thought it was giving whatever you draw, a more artistic expression, but it seems it does not preserve the original content.

<comment><USER7> Without looking at the code, it looks like its using a steering algorithm[0] to move a series of 'boids'(each individual stroke) along the path you define. A boid is controlled by a number of forces, as in the physics sense. By varying starting conditions for each boid, you get the dispersion that is seen on all figures but straight lines.

If you take a look at the options(hamburger menu in the top left) you'll see a bunch of options. For example, 'maxForce' is the maximum magnitude of force that can be exerted on a boid for a period of time; this is noticeable if you draw two large 'C's, one with maxForce at min and one at max. I'd recommend cranking up 'boidSize' if you want to get a clearer idea of what's an individual boid is doing.

Steering behaviors are used in a lot in games. For example, A* will give you a great path that looks terribly robotic. Using a steering behavior, perhaps 'seek' towards each path node then 'arrive' at the end of the path, you get significantly more organic movement.

[0] [https://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/gdc99/](https://www.red3d.com/cwr/steer/gdc99/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> oooh, you an play with the settings from the hamburger menu</comment>


What's new in Firefox 17 (shipping today) - <AUTHOR> http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/17.0/releasenotes/ <comment><USER2> I don't really ever want my browser to have Facebook integration. They have toolbars for that.

<comment><USER3> If you don't explicitly enable it, you'll never know it's there. We were very careful about that.

<comment> muuh-gnu > We were very careful about that.

You still have to have in mind that even knowing that the FB parasite is somehow "in my browser and I cant remove it", even if it is not activated, makes me want to immediately toss it away in disgust and go Chrome exclusively.

16 is the latest FF I will be using and recommending and I am very likely not alone. Mozilla forcing FB on us is high treason, and many of us will start recommending Chrome instaed of FF to people we can influence just to harm Mozilla because of this betrayal.

The FF user base rose quickly by word of mouth and by word of mouth it can even more quickly disappear in Chrome's mighty shadow. FF needs us more than we need FF. Keep that in mind when you make decisions like pushing FB on us. You cannot afford playing a dictator.

<comment><USER4> It is not high treason, and it is far more than integration with Facebook. Here's a bit of explanation from the following article:

"The idea is to be able to have a quick view into a site without having to switch back and forth between tabs...The Social API doesn't have to work with only social sites. The API could be used by financial and sports sites to maintain a ticker or email providers could use it to make it easy to check in- coming messages. And since Firefox is open source, other browser makers could implement the Social API, though no other company has announced their intention to do so."

[http://gigaom.com/2012/11/20/firefox-17-launches-with- social...](http://gigaom.com/2012/11/20/firefox-17-launches-with-social-api- and-facebook-messenger-support/)

It's fine if you want to debate whether such functionality belongs in a web browser, but this isn't the 90s, and I think these capabilities make sense given what I often do on the web. You can find out more about its capabilities here:

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Social_API>

Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also Firefox 17 Changes for Web developers

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Firefox_17_for_deve...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Firefox_17_for_developers)

The sandbox support for iframes looks particularly helpful.

Sadly this is the first version of Firefox in a year or two that actually breaks things for me: the "animate once" setting is no longer being obeyed for GIFs in some cases and the "secure login" plugin seems to have stopped working despite a recent update.

Mostly intact though and I've finally turned off Flash completely since enough of the web and youtube supports it properly with pure html5

<comment><USER5> _"secure login" plugin seems to have stopped working despite a recent update_

I believe secure login stopped working on several popular sites due to changes in those sites' webforms. A while ago I applied a patch mentioned in the addons.mozilla.org comments, and the extension worked again.

I've just checked out and diff'd the most recent v1 update. The only change is the addition of a pretty spammy looking URL that appears on first launch. No bugs were fixed. Sad.

The version I'm using (works in Firefox 17 for me) is: [http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/tmp/secure_login-0.9....](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/tmp/secure_login-0.9.9-fix- fx.xpi) I suggest unzipping and doing a "diff -r" against the unzipped contents of the official version to check I'm not evil.

<comment><USER6> Does the 'Activate JavaScript protection on login' option work for you with 'Secure Login'? It has been working for me for a long time now; I am just wondering if I am doing something wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Request to firefox devs hanging here. Please make the linux version better.. I use firefox on Windows but have to use Chromium on Linux. I'm mostly talking about the UI interface, it's really not the same standard.

<comment><USER8> As a Firefox dev and a Linux user, I also want a better user experience on Linux. Hopefully, the work we're doing on Australis (new firefox theme) will satisfy most of the Linux users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > FIXED Page scrolling on sites with fixed headers > <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=780345>

Praise God, that has been a pet peeve of mine for years.

<comment><USER10> Funny, my pet peeve is sites that have fixed headers.

<comment><USER11> Yep, this annoys me mightily too but I've always thought of it as a web-design fail rather than a browser fail.

I was about to ask how the new Firefox knows what constitutes a "fixed header" and what doesn't - like, what if the overlay only goes part way across the page, or something? Then I read at the above link that they've drawn up some clever heuristics to guess the 'right' scroll amount in each case.

"It works well on many pages. No doubt there are some pages it doesn't work on. It seems like a good idea to start conservatively here."

I cautiously welcome this 'fix' for my own casual web browsing, while fearing for the rare trouble it might cause a responsible web dev who might have a legitimate need for a particular kind of overlay while having page up/down still work in the currently established way. No such need springs to mind but I'm sure that if I thought about it for long enough, in this age of games in the browser and whatnot... (some sort of fancy web comic perhaps?). Now needing to workaround what is more complex and unpredictable behaviour, this is the kind of push/pull between web developers and browser implementers which a few years down the line could turn into a bloody impossible mess for all concerned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish they implemented OSX Lion style scroll bars already.

<comment><USER13> as long as I can turn it off

<comment><USER14> That shouldn't be a Firefox-specific setting. You can opt to always show scrollbars from System Preferences already.

<comment><USER13> I'm a Firefox user, not a Mac user.

<comment><USER15> So why are you giving input to the Mac version? It would be awfully strange to have lion style scroll bars in windows 8.

<comment><USER13> I thought it's a general ff feature request.

<comment><USER16> The request was to use native scroll bars, not to use non-native scroll bars that emulate Lion's defaults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> the big announcement here is in the Mobile section: "Android 4/4.1: hardware and software decoder support for h.264 video"

</comment><comment><USER18> And still doesn't support the Retina Display, disappointing.

<comment><USER19> What do they need to do special for retina displays?

<comment><USER20> Firefox has its own font rendering, it displays horribly with retina scaling. See for example [http://media02.hongkiat.com/mbp-retina/chrome-vs-firefox- vs-...](http://media02.hongkiat.com/mbp-retina/chrome-vs-firefox-vs- safari.jpg)

It may seem picky, but its very obvious when browsing.

<comment><USER21> That screenshot looks less like "Firefox displays horribly with retina scaling" and more like "everything other than Safari displays horribly with retina scaling."

Which Apple may consider a feature rather than a bug :-D

<comment><USER22> It's an old screenshot from before Chrome got Retina support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I miss when Firefox did minor versions more often. This is just getting rediculous.

<comment><USER24> No, this is great. It will make version numbers not matter anymore. Either you use the latest version or you can't really complain about security, stability or feature issues.

<comment><USER25> I totally disagree with this philosophy. I do not want my software to be a living-breathing entity. My browser even less so. Security issues aside, I do not want to ever update until a new feature is released that compels me to upgrade. God knows how many times I've upgraded a perfectly good piece of software just to be greeted with unwanted bloat or regressions in features. I hate this trend towards removing the meaning of version numbers. Don't get me wrong, I understand the massive boon to security that this model will bring. But there's no reason why software can't auto-update just security releases.

<comment><USER26> As a practical matter, the more releases that have to be supported with security fixes, the less secure each will end up being, as there is less testing of each individual version, and divergent code bases may need different security fixes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If you click on the yellow star in the URL bar and the pop-up window doesn't open to let you pick a folder to save the bookmark in, see if you are running HTTPS-Everywhere. Turning off that extension got bookmarks working for me again. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the URL into a new tab and bookmark it there fine, even with the extension on. If you're trying to reproduce this bug/?feature? consistently I can give you steps that make it occur 100% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can't wait to get Firefox 21.

At last it will be able to drink beer too.

</comment><comment><USER29> It looks like they still haven't supported H.264, which is the main reason I'm still using Chrome and haven't switched back to Firefox.

<comment><USER8> Not yet. Work in progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I commented on the previous release of FF15 when they fixed the plugin memory leak fixes, but since I've used it a lot for responsive design, I've noticed this is still a big problem for normal everyday use, even with just two tabs open. I'm not sure what FF15 fixed, but I just don't notice the improvement I was hoping for.

</comment><comment><USER31> List of features still waiting for. Generational GC OMTC - Off main thread composition SuperSnappy - a mini e10s Support of H.264 Codec - aka playing H.264 using the codec that comes default in Windows Vista, 7 & 8\. XP Users get fallback to Flash

Four Big features, lets hope Mozilla will finish them off in 2013.

</comment><comment><USER32> random aside, I just discovered (I use firefox nightly now version 20) the about:preferences page.

<comment><USER33> Why is that not the default way to access preferences? It just seems so much nicer than a dialog box. Death to all dialog boxes.

<comment><USER32> No idea. Few years ago it was announced as a soon to be implemented feature. Every update I clicked on the preference button just to be disappointed-ish, I totally forgot it thinking it was at the bottom of the todo-list, and now I stumble upon it randomly browsing about:about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Click-to-play blocklisting implemented to prevent vulnerable plugin versions from running without the user's permission" interesting...

<comment><USER19> I was using click-to-play whitelisting for all plugins for a bit and it didn't work really well for me. There are some services that use hidden flash movies, like how grooveshark plays audio. There is no where to click to allow it so you just can't use the service with that feature enabled.

I've been using noscript intstead. It provides an easier interface for approving plugins and more.

<comment><USER35> Whenever a plugin is blocked, you should see a Lego-looking icon in the address bar which will let you activate everything on the page.

<comment><USER19> Oh very cool! Thank you for pointing that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nice work. I haven't tried Firefox for a long time, but this handles well. The integrated dev tools look good, too.

</comment><comment><USER37> I suspect they still haven't fixed the Cmd-arrow in Gmail issue. Yeesh. Not exactly an uncommon usage case.

</comment><comment><USER38> Every time a new Firefox ships, I start thinking about Firefox 99.

<comment><USER39> Tonight we're gonna party like it's Firefox 99</comment></comment>


Cloud Source Repositories - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/ <comment><USER2> It wasn't all that long ago that Google shut down Google Code. They said: [https://opensource.googleblog.com/2015/03/farewell-to- google...](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google- code.html)

> After profiling non-abusive activity on Google Code, it has become clear to > us that the service simply isn't needed anymore.

And now they've created a new product which does pretty much the same thing... Wonder how long this one will last.

<comment><USER3> I disagree that CSR serves the same purpose as code.google.com, and is likely to meet a similar end.

code.google.com hosted public repos, issues, wiki, downloads, etc., and was generally just ripe for abuse. Google created it largely because Sourceforge was the only thing that existed at the time, and it wasn't doing a great job. Today there's GitHub, Bitbucket, Gitlab, and more.

CSR is primarily for hosting private code, shared among teams, and adding integrations with other Cloud services, in the Cloud Console. It also adds code search, which is pretty great. Hosting private repos, it's much less easily abused (it's not impossible). There are plenty of private repo hosts, and this one aims to be the one best integrated with GCP. It has, I think, a much better business reason to continue existing. It might not make money (I legitimately do not know) but it helps drive GCP adoption/usage, unlike code.google.com which didn't.

Disclosure: I worked on code.google.com, and helped turn it down, and helped create CSR from its ashes. I don't work on either anymore.

<comment><USER4> Proper code search could be a pretty killer feature on its own. Half the time I need to find something on github I just clone the repo and search from my own computer.

<comment><USER5> Heh, yes. Github's search is case insensitive and ignores sigils, braces, etc.

<comment><USER6> I've been waiting years for GitHub to put some real effort into code search and cross-linking. I had given up on it, but I suspect this will be a high priority for Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My biggest complaint with Google Cloud's UX, which applies to their new Cloud Source Repositories opt-in UI: They shard out so many of their user experiences into different websites and domains.

Under the umbrella of Google Cloud you've got Google Cloud Console, Firebase, Stackdriver, Source Repositories, Dialog Flow, probably a couple others I'm forgetting. Almost all of these have entries on the Google Cloud Console which open a new tab and link you to a new website.

It makes keeping track of where things actually are extremely difficult. For example: Firebase functions on the Firebase UI are also Google Cloud Console functions. The old Google Cloud Datastore product, which lived on the Console, is now Cloud Firestore on the Firebase console. Stackdriver logging used to be on the Stackdriver UI, now its on the Cloud Console, but there are still references to Stackdriver all over that product, and they continue to invest to Stackdriver (Istio service maps).

AWS does this a _little_ bit, in four or five of their hundreds of products. Lightsail is one example. Azure does this a little bit as well (DevOps is a separate page even though its essentially an Azure product).

GCP is the worst offender. I want to see a better unifying vision for what being a Google Cloud customer actually means, instead of all these confusing and isolated experiences.

<comment><USER8> > I want to see a better unifying vision for what being a Google Cloud > customer actually means

The thing you've got to understand is that none of these products _are_ "Google Cloud" products. They're Google services (or, even moreso, services of random third parties which Google has acquired) that you happen to be able to hook into from your GCP project and access through the GCP CLI.

The closest comparison I can think of is Heroku's "Elements", which are third- party offerings (usually of their own services, with their own service dashboards and everything!) that happen to be subscribe-to-able and high- level-configurable through Heroku's dashboard/CLI.

Except, in this case, many of the third party "elements" that are subscribe- to-able and high-level-configurable in GCP, happen to be created by other departments/sub-companies of Google.

Still nothing to do with GCP, though, any more than a random Heroku Element has to do with Heroku.

<comment><USER9> I can tell you that your view does not match that of the engineers working on these products. If something is namespaced under a project and you use the cloud console or CLI to manage it, it is very much a GCP product.

(I am one such engineer, and have worked on the CLI, cloud build, and container services)

<comment><USER8> You're speaking of design intent, I think. I'm speaking of point-in-time experience from a user perspective. It's clear what GCP wants to _transition toward_ —but:

1\. that's not where many GCP-aegis'ed services are right now, and

2\. newly-absorbed Google properties will always start out looking like this, so there'll never be a time when GCP won't look at least _somewhat_ like this (unless the post-acquisition integration process is changed drastically.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> tl;dr: this isn't replacing github, it's solving a more specific problem

I think everyone here is missing the point. The purpose here seems to be similar to github actions in providing workflows around repository events (though also including some basic ability to view the code as well). Having a clean way to cut a release that updates app servers on app engine and serverless functions in tandem is needed right now.

I don't think this is intended to be used by anyone that doesn't have their platform on GCP.

For highly sensitive codebases within an organization, they may not want to host it on microsoft's servers as well—but this seems secondary to the workflow functionality.

It's possible I'm incorrect though and I do think the messaging here should be improved. Chiefly that it shouldn't lead with "Unlimited private Git repositories for free"

<comment><USER11> >> Having a clean way to cut a release that updates app servers on app engine and serverless functions in tandem is needed right now.

This is the entire field of CI/CD with dozens of providers, including Github and Gitlab too.

<comment><USER10> I'm not claiming they're the only ones (I called out github's offering explicitly). I'm just explaining why this exists because a lot of people in this thread seem to think it's a github replacement.

<comment><USER11> I was responding to the "needed right now" part in your first comment. Unless I'm misunderstanding, do you think it's not covered by the other CI/CD providers?

<comment><USER10> I don't mean to imply that other products are inferior. A problem can simultaneously exist and have solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Xoogler here.

Internally as Google, you have a substantially power powerful version of Codesearch, which is semantic, i.e. it relies on actual binary artifacts produced by builds to index code. All of the code base uses Blaze ( open sourced as Bazel) to express the rules.

The version of code search here is cute, but it's still not a full blown structured semantic code search, which I really miss. Searching for and browsing code on Github feels underwhelming in comparison, because you wan't really find or explore code the way you think of it.

You can see a demo of semantic Codesearch tech externalized here at:

[https://blog.bazel.build/2017/12/14/introducing-bazel- code-s...](https://blog.bazel.build/2017/12/14/introducing-bazel-code- search.html#searching-the-bazel-codebase) [http://cs.chromium.org](http://cs.chromium.org)

For example if you click on a header or a symbol, you can get proper cross references to a symbol.

[https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/pdf/document_loader_imp...](https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/pdf/document_loader_impl.cc?dr&g=0&l=43)

I really wish they add structured code search to Cloud Repos, even if it comes with some heavy restrictions such you must use Bazel as a build system.

It would be a killer feature, and to my knowledge there is no equivalent to such a product. IDEs offer some similar overlapping functionality, though other code search engines still operate in terms of strings rather than actually real binary symbols ( I think Sourcegraph is trying here but that still does not seem to use some kind of accurate and structured information like you have in the code, it still seems not use build rules).

<comment><USER13> > I think Sourcegraph is trying here but that still does not seem to use some > kind of accurate and structured information like you have in the code, it > still seems not use build rules

Sourcegraph does use language servers (same as your editor would use) to get precise definitions and references.

For example ("find references" on some open-source code):

Go: [https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/theupdateframework/notary...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/theupdateframework/notary/-/blob/server/storage/tuf_store.go#L37:74&tab=references)

TypeScript: [https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/ReactiveX/rxjs/-/blob/src...](https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/ReactiveX/rxjs/-/blob/src/internal/Observable.ts#L19:39&tab=references)

It understands many build tools, but not all. Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, and PHP support is all pretty solid. If you use the most common build tools for your language, it usually works well. It degrades un- gracefully if you use custom build tools or scripts, unfortunately, but we're working on making it support more build tools and customization. Sourcegraph development is open source; if you notice any problems, let us know in the issue tracker at [https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph](https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph).

<comment><USER12> Thank you for the reply, appreciate you reading the comments so thoroughly.

My top piece of feedback is considering some form of a strict mode, where your vision is not best effort support support for some legacy tool for a language, but fabulously amazing knock your socks off good support for users who take the time to invest in making their build friendly with your search index.

It might seem tempting to go after the longest common denominator audience here, but personally I think it's far more valuable to show users how code search can be amazing if they do their part to invest in it, vs. code search being "kind of sort of useful" if you have a fallback.

And maybe my Xoogler experiences are showing here, though Bazel / Kythe are in my opinion the perfect vehicles to realize that vision.

<comment><USER13> Very good points, thanks! We will be exposing a lot more configurability and extensibility in Sourcegraph in the next release (3.0-preview, and 3.0 more generally). I will add Kythe support to our roadmap and will think about how we can offer a strict mode soon. (We will need to offer that when Sourcegraph supports "write" functionality like automated refactoring, but it would be great to have it sooner.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that they're going this way.

We used Google's source repository functionality for a while because there is no real choice if you want to use Google Cloud Builder, which we were testing out for cloud-based Docker builds. GCB was pretty disappointing, and we moved off it.

We also found the source repository service annoying. GCB can't pull code from Github, so you first have to set up a Google source repo and turn on Github sync; the source repo is, in other words, only there to be a mirror. Unfortunately, this introduces problems. You get latency -- your Google repo is always behind. Worse, we frequently experienced a situation where the sync was broken, either due to Github being flaky, or the syncing itself being flaky. In such cases, it was impossible to tell what the status of the sync was; all you could do was go into the UI and see that it was not up to date; no way to force a sync. So this setup became a liability. At the time (not sure if this is still the case), there was also no API to set up new mirrors, it was all manual. The whole UI around GCB and source repos seemed to have been created in a rush, very bare bones. A lot of Google serviced start out like this.

I suppose this is a strategic play. For developers, you'd get a better UX if Google simply had tighter integration with Github and Gitlab, but Google probably doesn't want that. However, the low quality of their offerings so far (especially, cough, StackDriver) mean that this stuff will have an uphill battle in proving itself to developers, most of whom already have an allegiance to better tools like Github. If you're already on Github, why would you use this stuff?

<comment><USER15> Cloud Source Repositories PM here. I appreciate your feedback and will share it with the team.

>it was impossible to tell what the status of the sync was; all you could do was go into the UI and see that it was not up to date; no way to force a sync.

We've heard this was a problem for users so we're adding the ability to force a sync and to view the current sync status. These features will be live in the next few weeks.

<comment><USER14> I would strongly advise you to make the mirroring system completely hidden. It's weird to me that the UI even exposes this.

First, have people register their origin repos. In fact, don't let people register individual repos; just their accounts or organizations. So instead of "Source Repositories", it's just a list of repos that GCP has _access_ to.

Then, behind the scenes, mirror everything you have access to. All projects that you can read. Keep it internally. If you offer a UI to browse code and so on, pretend the code is remote. All references need to show [https://github.com/someorg/myrepo.git](https://github.com/someorg/myrepo.git) as the remote, for example. Pretend your mirror doesn't exist.

Only add Github hooks for projects where real-time syncing is needed, i.e. build triggers.

Then, use Github hooks like you usually do, but have it fall back to pull- based polling when hooks aren't working (something I bet you guys can detect simply by noticing that hook activity for all projects is below average!). Anything that needs a build trigger could also have a manual button that checks the upstream.

Consider the developer's perspective. I already have my code on GH. I don't _want_ to also store it in GCP. Why should I? It's right there on GH for any API consumer to read. Keeping it on GCP is just more work.

Being able to build with GCB without involving the indirection of a mirror would be even better.

<comment><USER16> > Consider the developer's perspective. I already have my code on GH.

What if you _don 't_? The fact that Google needs to acknowledge that CSR isn't where existing projects are primarily hosted (and thus needs to accommodate projects primarily hosted elsewhere) doesn't mean they shouldn't try to be a primary host.

<comment><USER14> That's fine. I'm only talking about that particular requirement that you use SR/CSR in order to use services like GCB.

Obviously you have to point GCB at something. Today, you can _only_ point GCB at SR/CSR. If you go to GCB and try to add a trigger, and select Github, it will go and set up a mirror on SR/CSR for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am intrigued by the level of sophistication this Google's private git offers. But I'm not probably in their intended audience as I'm not interested in providing my full personal and credit card information just to use git... I am probably just too ingrained in GitHub and AWS to even consider other options. But I'm curious, still. Is it ... good? I hope somebody is going to share their experience with me.

<comment><USER11> It's just git so there's not much sophistication, nor is one service "better" than another in that regard.

Github/Gitlab are still far more useful as they are more than just repos. The issues, PRs, wikis, and general management features are what most projects need. Azure DevOps is probably the best competitor from the clouds.

<comment><USER17> Sure git is just git. I was referring more to the other features this PR piece is promising: Fast Code Search, Debug in production, Detailed audit logs.

I am curious how they relate to say Github or other services.

Also as a sidenote, the Quickstart link for _Debug in production_ and _Detailed audit logs_ is the same. Is it so for a purpose?

<comment><USER15> Cloud Source Repositories PM here.

>Also as a sidenote, the Quickstart link for Debug in production and Detailed audit logs is the same. Is it so for a purpose?

Thanks for pointing this out. It's not intentional. I'll make sure it gets fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not sure why this is trending now: this went GA back in May 2017: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/cloud-source- repo...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/cloud-source-repositories- now-ga-and-free-for-up-to-five-users-and-50gb-of-storage)

Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14413035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14413035)

However, Google has recently launched a raft of new CSR features, including semantic code search: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application- developme...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application- development/introducing-new-cloud-source-repositories)

</comment><comment><USER19> Is Cloud Source Repositories using the same web app as the internal Cider tool?

<comment><USER3> Nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find the pricing of this service to be incomprehensible, as well as contradictory to "Unlimited private Git repositories for free". Can anyone explain it?

<comment><USER16> > I find the pricing of this service to be incomprehensible, as well as > contradictory to "Unlimited private Git repositories for free".

You get unlimited private repositories, 5 project users, 50 GB of storage, and 50 GB egress per monthly for free.

Monthly overage charges beyond the free quota are $1 per project-user, $0.10 per GB of storage, and $0.10 per GB of egress.

So for 10 project-users, 100 GB of storage, and 200 GB of egress in a month, you pay $5 for users, $5 for storage, and $10 for egress, for a total of $20.

<comment><USER20> I still don't get it. What is a "project" and how does it differ from a "repo"? If they are the same thing, isn't every project/repo going to cost at least a $1?

<comment><USER15> Cloud Source Repositories PM here.

A project as described here refers to a "Cloud Project" which is the basis for creating, enabling, and using all GCP services including managing APIs, enabling billing, grouping resources, etc. Within a project, one could have tens or hundreds of repositories. With 6 users on a single project, you would pay $1/month total (because the first 5 users are free) and all those users would have access to every repository in that project.

I appreciate your feedback that you find the pricing model and project concept difficult to understand. I'll bring this back to the team and we'll look at different ways to improve this.

<comment><USER20> Thank you - this explanation is much more clear and I understand now. I'm generally familiar with AWS but haven't used GCP, so I didn't have the "Cloud Project" concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone noticed how they use what appears to be the GitHub logo on this page...? Surely that isn't okay.

[https://cloud.google.com/images/products/source- repositories...](https://cloud.google.com/images/products/source- repositories/unlimited-private-git-repositories.svg)

<comment><USER22> It says right underneath it "Mirror code from GitHub" There's nothing wrong with using imagery to draw your attention to related features.

<comment><USER21> I'd tend to agree if it weren't listed right next to the feature "Unlimited private Git repositories for free", which is a feature GitHub charges for, but seeing as this is a somewhat competitive product, it feels a little suspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Code search might be the killer feature here.

I used to work at google many eons ago and I spend 90% of my day wading through billions LOCs with their internal code search tool.

I believe it's the same one used by chromium: [https://cs.chromium.org/](https://cs.chromium.org/)

<comment><USER15> Cloud Source Repositories PM here.

It is indeed using the same code search infrastructure as the Chromium code search site as well as the Google internal code search site.

You can read more about the Cloud Source Repositories code search feature in a blog post here: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application- developme...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application- development/introducing-new-cloud-source-repositories)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I am a GCP user and we use Gitlab. I understand that CSR provides better integration with other services in GCP. However, I am achieving most of those using gitlab-ci.

Can someone explain (not sure, if I am missing anything) why should I move to CSR? If not, I will better stay with gitlab. TIA.

</comment><comment><USER25> Will there be pull request support anytime soon?

<comment><USER26> I was surprised to find this is missing. I do hope they add this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Title is wrong: they have unlimited private repositories for free, but for a maximum of 5 users per project.

<comment><USER28> We dropped "5 free private repos" from the submitted title. Please, submitters, refrain from editorializing.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> And so the count down to this services death begins. /Sarcasm

</comment><comment><USER30> One day some part of not all will shutdown and disappear and where is your sources again.

</comment><comment><USER31> For some reason, I don't trust google at all for anything...

</comment><comment><USER32> Without all the nice bells and whistles github provides for collaboration like wikis and issue tracking I don't think google will be successful at convincing people to maintain their code here. I don't find the outliner useful. That's a common IDE feature and a repo is not an IDE.

I've always viewed source control as a productivity tool more than infrastructure. With that mindset, it will take a lot more to convince people to do more than mirror their code here. Maybe that's enough, but mirroring has its headaches...

</comment><comment><USER33> Well bitbucket is free regardless the number of repo so why would I choose Google repos?

<comment><USER34> C'mon, man, click the link before arguing with the premise. Had you done so, you'd have seen in big bold type "Unlimited private Git repositories for free"</comment></comment>


React v15.6.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2017/06/13/react-v15.6.0.html <comment><USER2> What is remarkable is the onChange input event after all these releases is still being improved. This is a testament to how difficult it is to normalize browser differences and not some failing on the part of the React team and contributors. If only people knew how difficult this one little element can be. It's a shame it's so complicated.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just curious, what do react folks think about this blog post:[http://joonhachu.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/dont-use-flux-or- re...](http://joonhachu.blogspot.com.au/2015/12/dont-use-flux-or-redux-for- react.html)

To me, the application wide bus paradigm is elegant, and find it surprising that redux is currently more fashionable than this approach.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER4> Having used both Flux and Redux for fairly large projects for the past two years, I have finally come to the conclusion that I really don't need either. I tried to summarize my alternative here, although I'm sure many will disagree:

[http://zen.lk/2017/05/08/you-might-not-need- redux/](http://zen.lk/2017/05/08/you-might-not-need-redux/)

<comment><USER5> I hate to pile on, but we introduced react and redux at my startup and it (the project, not the company) largely failed due to the increased complexity of redux itself, and a coding style of hyper abstraction.

Maybe it works on large teams and code bases, but it is unnecessary on smaller teams where sane code practices are enough.

<comment><USER6> Can you give some details on what issues you ran into, and what "hyper abstraction" meant?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a very minor release, mainly just covering some bug fixes and deprecation warnings. It's not terribly noteworthy.

<comment><USER8> Some of those IE11 input bugs have been annoying me for a long time. Glad to see them fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Downgrading the deprecation warnings to console.warn instead of console.error will be nice until all the third-party libraries catch up with the changes in v15.5. It's the small things.

<comment><USER10> Using console.error for warnings was silly in the first place. The solution to people ignoring warnings is to change that mindset, not to reduce the granularity of information and make everything red. I see the same thing with ESLint a lot.

<comment><USER11> For a long time, console.error had a stack trace in the Chrome devtools while console.warn didn't. I believe this was the main motivation to use console.error.

<comment><USER10> Ahhh, that makes a lot more sense!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do they follow semantic versioning? If so, does that mean there have been 15 releases with major breaking changes?

<comment><USER13> They switched from 0.14 to 15.0 to reflect react being production ready. See here: [https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/02/19/new- version...](https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/02/19/new-versioning- scheme.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I noticed Fiber is now passing all it's tests. Anyone have an idea when release is planned?

<comment><USER15> According to a member of the dev team: 'We are aiming for sometime in the second half of the year. There's still a few details to work out beyond just feature parity with 15. '

[https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/6g3e98/react_fiber...](https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/6g3e98/react_fiber_100_of_unit_test_passing_thanks_react/dinq9k3/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I noticed that fibers tests'[1] are at 100% passing, so I got excited for a second. Looks like this is in preparation of that.

[1] [http://isfiberreadyyet.com/](http://isfiberreadyyet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you want real state management with immutable data just use Clojurescript and Reagent. Leiningen will also free you from JS tooling hell.

</comment><comment><USER18> Minus minus, is that automatic if you dare to criticise facebook ? Do I loose my facebook and instagram now also ?

</comment><comment><USER19> Please consider to stop using/contributing to software of companies, if you don't agree with the way they conduct business or treat their users.

There are various open-source alternatives to React, which are not encumbered with underlying malpractices such as large-scale user-tracking, data silo lock-in, selling of data to advertisers.

<comment><USER20> > _which are not encumbered with underlying malpractices such as large-scale > user-tracking, data silo lock-in, selling of data to advertisers._

React is not encumbered by "large-scale user-tracking, data silo lock-in, selling of data to advertisers". Nor it is of any much benefit to Facebook whether devs adopt React or not. In the grand scheme of things, they could not care less.

Perhaps you meant for people to stop using Facebook instead?

<comment><USER19> > React is not encumbered by

Perhaps I should have chosen the words "funded by" instead. It shouldn't make a big difference to a reader willing to understand the true meaning of this appeal.

> Nor it is of any much benefit to Facebook whether devs adopt React or not. > In the grand scheme of things, they could not care less.

Open-source is not a uni-directional thing. Otherwise, why would companies like Facebook use it in the first place? There are numerous reasons why large companies are leveraging open source. See [1] for a list. Using React equals supporting Facebook.

> Perhaps you meant for people to stop using Facebook instead?

That's like asking people to stop using telephone. Facebook has them locked in. There are alternatives to React, but there are no alternatives to Facebook (for most people).

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Why-do-huge-profit-oriented- software-c...](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-huge-profit-oriented-software- companies-contribute-to-open-source-software-when-it-is-akin-to-doing-charity- work-which-runs-against-their-commercial-instinct)

<comment><USER20> > _Perhaps I should have chosen the words "funded by" instead. It shouldn't > make a big difference to a reader willing to understand the true meaning of > this appeal._

How about you thinking this through though?

We shouldn't e.g. use Firefox because it's largely funded by Google's search money?? We shouldn't use Node because Blink is funded by Google again? And what if Facebook decides to fund some open source platform? Will that be tainted too, and we should avoid it as well?

Or maybe it's only when a company has created/controls the project? Then we shouldn't use Golang because Google? We shouldn't use LLVM because is funded by Apple? We shouldn't use Java because it's funded by Oracle?

> _Using React equals supporting Facebook._

Barely, and it gives way more value to the community than it does to Facebook. Facebook could close down its React involvement right now, and it would hardly affect its market cap or its ability to find developers to work there.

> _That 's like asking people to stop using telephone. Facebook has them > locked in. There are alternatives to React, but there are no alternatives to > Facebook (for most people)._

There are 100s of alternatives, including good old email, myriad IM and chat and video apps, sms messages, Slack, and so on, one button personal blogs, and so on, including other social web and mobile apps and platforms.

Merely 25 years ago we had almost none of those options and NO Facebook and we got on just fine. Now we have ALL of those options, and for some reason we just can't do without Facebook?

Besides, if there's really no alternative to people using Facebook that paints your proposal in an even more useless light: hey people, you can't stop using the $50 billion behemoth's crap, but you can hurt it with less than a pin- prick by not using some GOOD stuff it produces for developers. That's not "making a difference" that's nonsensical.

<comment><USER19> > We shouldn't e.g. use Firefox because it's largely funded by Google's search > money?

You are right but you are being pedantic here. This is all about political agendas and supporting the good ones versus not supporting the bad ones. Please stick to the essence of the discussion.

> Facebook could close down its React involvement right now, and it would > hardly affect its market cap or its ability to find developers to work > there.

Please list me the reasons why you think Facebook is using open source then? And don't be selective.

> There are 100s of alternatives, including good old email, (...)

Yes, there are alternatives but they are not accessible because users have been locked into the network of Facebook. That was the point.

<comment><USER20> > _Please list me the reasons why you think Facebook is using open source > then? And don 't be selective._

Very simply: because it gives them some developer good will and cheap PR for next to nothing. They want React for their internal use anyway, and it's just a minimal amount of time to have their devs maintain a project page and accept public comments and changesets.

It makes their devs happier too, to think that they don't just work for FB, but also give something back to the community.

But for FB, the corporation, and for their scale and their core business, React and all the value their open source efforts put together bring in, is insignificant -- statistical noise.

<comment><USER19> I think you are greatly underestimating the value of developer good will.

> it's just a minimal amount of time to have their devs maintain a project > page and accept public comments and changesets.

It's really a lot of work to maintain a project of this size, and all of its issues and documentation. I'm guessing it easily doubles the total amount of work.

> It makes their devs happier too, to think that they don't just work for FB, > but also give something back to the community.

I would go further and say that these devs would be unhappy and question the meaning of their work without such projects.

> But for FB (...) React (...) is insignificant

Perhaps, perhaps not. But I am personally not supporting this any further, and doing my best not to be hypocritical by on the one hand criticizing Facebook and how they abuse their users in every conceivable way, and on the other hand applauding their open source efforts.

<comment><USER20> > _I think you are greatly underestimating the value of developer good will._

And I think that you greatly overestimating it.

Especially for a company like Facebook, whose business doesn't depend on developers anyway (even their "FB apps" platform is not such a big thing compared to FB core).

> _It 's really a lot of work to maintain a project of this size, and all of > its issues and documentation. I'm guessing it easily doubles the total > amount of work._

For a tiny team of a few devs, compared to the 1000s FB has on its payroll. Even if they spend like $1 million per year for just the "public open source" part of it, it's still peanuts.

> _But I am personally not supporting this any further, and doing my best not > to be hypocritical by on the one hand criticizing Facebook and how they > abuse their users in every conceivable way, and on the other hand applauding > their open source efforts._

Is that hypocritical though? Sounds more like calling something bad bad, and something good good, even if it comes from the same entity.

Which is something we should strive for maybe?

<comment><USER19> > Is that hypocritical though? Sounds more like calling something bad bad, and > something good good, even if it comes from the same entity. Which is > something we should strive for maybe?

I can answer that with simply: _not_ if the good is reinforcing the bad.

Because then it is hypocritical by definition.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your Devices Will Soon Be Listening to You - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/kris-constable/your-device-is-listening-_b_7657186.html

<comment><USER2> "Soon"

When i applied to the usaf cyber command in 2008, i learned that all cell phones have a maintenance mode that enables the carrier to remotely listen without the user's knowledge. bfor that reason one cannot bring them into secure areas.

this has also been demonstrated at black hat.</comment>


Google's url shortener at goo.gl can generate QR codes - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/buzz/109412257237874861202/bSSWKdJcZf7/Heres-a-new-trick-that-hasnt-been-blogged-yet <comment><USER2> I was JUST about to start hacking on something like this. A URL shortener for market and app store URLS that generates QR codes at the same time.

Dammit!

edit: I am even in mid-process of acquiring a .et domain so I could've had <http://mark.et/whatever>. Gah!

<comment><USER3> If you're looking for an excuse to quit, you will always find one.

Get back in there and do it! At least then you can say "Google competed with me" :-)

<comment><USER4> might there be a patenting issue?

edit: see the comment below re: patenting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kudos to Google on this. They've really been pushing QR and that's exactly the kind of support needed for it to reach critical mass. Reading QR codes is one of the few ways my Droid can school the iPhone...

<http://code.google.com/p/zxing/>

<comment><USER6> Google really could have done a cool thing by etching a unique QR on the back of each Nexus one. Instead we got android.com. Maybe next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As far as I'm aware, there are a ludicrous amount of patents surrounding the use of QR-type codes that link to URLs. I remember NeoMedia in particular being singled out by the EFF for having a stupidly sample patent on the linking.

I'm now curious to see who wants to take on Google's strength when it comes to this game ;)

</comment><comment><USER8> Ok, but does this create a QR code for the original URL, or a QR code that points at Google's shortened URL?

<comment><USER9> Shortened :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Something else to checkout with Google and QR Codes is Google's [QR Code Chart API](<http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image_charts.html>). It is the most dead simple way to create QR Codes that I've found.

<comment><USER11> Yes, all the URL shortener does is redirect to the chart api.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are just so many uses for this... Everyone from print+digital content providers (local magazines, papers, etc) to ma and pa IT shops can use such a service...

I know that it's nothing new, but the fact the Google is putting it out there pretty much ensures its wide-spread adoption (more so, anyways)...

<comment><USER9> Well, CueCat was something very similar, magazines and all. Perhaps it was just a decade too early.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pretty useless since apparently goo.gl is not even open to the public.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's brilliant! I imagine that those will be everywhere very soon.

<comment><USER15> FWIW, in Japan QR codes are already ubiquitous.

Practically every Japanese cell phone has a built-in utility for reading bar codes. Any printed advertising material that contains an URL will also have a QR code.</comment></comment>


Longevity: Seven proven steps to prime your body, mind and spirit - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mhunkeler/longevity-7-proven-steps-to-prime-your-body-mind-and-spirit-dd198518a740 <comment><AUTHOR> After almost a decade of research and teaching I can promise you one thing: living a prime life is simpler than you think it is.</comment>


Drone Market Ecosystem Map - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mccannatron/drone-market-ecosystem-map-a8febf0ca8fd

<comment><USER2> It seems like this is an industry that is maturing rapidly.

The more I think about the applications, the more interesting it gets. Delivery, live mapping, search and rescue, event filming, ... and drone racing seems like it would be a blast.

However, I am perplexed.

There have been several postings here on Hacker News in the recent days/weeks, and most of them garner little to no attention on this site. This seems odd, as drones:

\- Are built on relatively sophisticated "controller" software \- There are "open source" control boards available (OpenPilot and ArduPilot) \- Have the ability to disrupt several markets \- Are geeky and really fun (at the same time)

Sure, the laws are a little shaky right now, but they are ironing out in some parts of the world.</comment>


Social Features on Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001426011

<comment><AUTHOR> I've received the following email from Amazon:

Dear NAME,

We wanted to let you know about a new feature that will be launching soon for customers who have connected their Facebook accounts. While shopping, you will see when your friends have reviewed or wished for an item you're looking at. Similarly, your friends will see your Facebook profile picture and name when they are browsing items that you've reviewed or are on your public Wish Lists (private Wish Lists will remain hidden).

Whether it helps you pick the right product or find great gift ideas, this feature makes it easier to discover items that may be of interest to you and your friends. For more information or to opt out of this feature, follow the link below.</comment>