10 quotes against work - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternativereel.com/includes/top-ten/display_review.php?id=00080

<comment><USER2> I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. -- Jerome K. Jerome

Whenever I get someone watching me performing a task, I quote this. They stop watching shortly after they get the meaning.

</comment><comment><USER3> It isn't about more or less work. Everything you do is work in some way. It's really about motivation. That's the secret to getting things done.

</comment><comment><USER4> "For us to work any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good employees who worked cubicle jobs for bum paychecks and surfed the internet, and were bored all day long, were dead. I mean they were slackers. They had no vision. If we wanted something we just coded it. If anyone compiled twice they got 404'd so bad, believe me, they never rolled their own again."

— Goodhackers, 2008

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's my definition: work is a necessary pain.

</comment><comment><USER6> Fuck Yeah! Well said all of them.

</comment><comment><USER7> You can take a simple decision: don't do anything you don't want to.

Just be sure to be aware of the full extent of the consequences. You may be surprised at how many times saying 'no' leads to very nice situations.

<comment><USER2> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- Maxims For Revolutionists, 1903 by George Bernard Shaw

So, have the courage to say no, especially when it is unreasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My definition of work: What you do in the meantime for other people who pay you to do it while you're trying to figure out how to arrange your life so you don't have to work.

I don't count projects I actually enjoy as work.</comment>


Facial recognition AI can't identify trans and non-binary people - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1726806/facial-recognition-ai-from-amazon-microsoft-and-ibm-misidentifies-trans-and-non-binary-people/ <comment><AUTHOR> >> _" The systems were most accurate with cisgender men and women, who on average were accurately classified 98% of the time. Researchers found that trans men were wrongly categorized roughly 30% of the time. The tools fared far worse with non-binary or genderqueer people, inaccurately classifying them in all instances. "_

I guarantee this sort of tech will be misused by every kiosk in malls and every sample person in stores to push products on individuals.

Amazon at least tried to pre-empt this concern, but this really isn't enough. Not that I know what is. I know the technology is coming, so pointing out what an ill-considered folly the whole thing is won't do much.

>> _" Scheuerman said that while he believed Amazon's guidelines were well- intended, the study points out what's wrong with the service. There's no guarantee that Rekognition's clients are using the facial analysis tool as Amazon intended. And even if such data is viewed in aggregate, it would very likely still be incorrect."_</comment>


Brain-like electrical signature emerging in a metallic nanowire network - <AUTHOR> https://www.nims.go.jp/eng/news/press/2019/11/201911110.html <comment><USER2> Wow this article is total crap, and the brain comparison is basically absent from the paper, for good reason. Here's what they actually did: \- grow "metallic dendrites" from the bottom up, eg make a chip with random connections with memrister-like "synapses" \- then characterize various I-V curves and other electrical properties of the device

That's it. In terms of computation they can maybe be used for reservoir computing but then again so can many nonlinear dynamical system. But even concrete computations are not demonstrated.

<comment><USER3> Darn, I was hoping some progress had been made on providing feedback/reinforcement since this similar result in 2017:

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-brain-built-from-atomic- swi...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-brain-built-from-atomic-switches-can- learn-20170920/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I do wonder if consciousness will turn out to be a strange emergent property of existence. If we can make new consciouses comparable to our own should we? Will we treat them worse than immigrants and poor people? Will they be our slaves? I need to read more sci-fi...

<comment><USER5> What would your conclusion be if it doesn't emerge?

<comment><USER4> I haven't concluded anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Direct link to PDF [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51330-6.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51330-6.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> Ghost in the Shell had a very vivid image of a similar nature in manga -- think it was also connected with nanowire networks. Predicted the future?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the way the world ends—not with a bang, but with a brain-Like electrical signature emerging in a metallic nanowire network.</comment>


Disney Freaks Out Over Patents That May Mean It Can't Keep 3Ding Old Movies - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130104/14162121584/disney-freaks-out-over-patents-that-may-mean-it-cant-keep-3ding-old-movies.shtml

<comment><USER2> Given Disney's successful lobbying history (see: Mickey Mouse Act for copyright extension), they might be one of the few organizations who could enact some change to the patent industry.

Whether those changes would be positive (for industries outside theirs) is another thing.

<comment><USER3> Ha. This is a one-time tactical move only. Their interest in everlasting patent reform is zero.

<comment><USER4> Hey now, they don't want infinitely long periods for intellectual property... they are for limited periods of "forever minus a day".

<comment><USER5> Too obvious. It's easier to achieve this effect by doing what they're currently doing: Periodic extensions that apply retroactively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If it means no old movie coming back to theaters as a pseudo 3D movie, then this is the best patent ever.

<comment><USER7> While I agree with you, I think it's sad that we live in a world where you can patent "remaking old movies in 3D". It just feels like everytime a new gimmick appears, someone could just patent "remaking old <insert product> with <insert gimmick>".

I hope there's a little more to the patent than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd be very interested in seeing patent extensions being added. Let's call in the "Yoko Ono Patent Extension".

</comment><comment><USER9> That headline just makes me sad.</comment>


Ask HN: Frontend as a Service? - <AUTHOR> Frontend web development is complex. There are many developers out there with no frontend development skills writing frontend code out of necessity, resulting in less than ideal user experience.
Here's the question: would you see potential in a service which
a) takes care of all the configuration for HTTP, TLS, compression, caching, as well as the process of optimizing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript,
b) would allow to define a UI in a simple domain specific language, building on a library of highly optimized, standard UI components, and
c) dynamically render templates of the above by sending and receiving data in a format that is trivial to parse and output in any language, in the simplest case by connecting to a server through SSH and executing a script written in any language, or in the less simplest case by connecting to a socket or whatever else?
The point is to enable a developer with no frontend skills to spin up a VPS and start writing application logic in any language, without frameworks and server configuration, with a professional UI. <comment><USER2> _> The point is to enable a developer with no frontend skills to spin up a VPS and start writing application logic in any language, without frameworks and server configuration, with a professional UI._

This is a variation on an idea that has been around a long, long time. And the results are usually something that is not all that great, and difficult to customize.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure how much customization is desirable in a service like this, but in theory there's nothing that prevents it to be customizable to the level a self-hosted solution is.

As for results not all that great, I'm genuinely interested in your concerns. I'm not convinced of the idea either, but I find it interesting.</comment></comment>


Google's quantum computing plans threatened by IBM curveball - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151032-googles-quantum-computing-plans-threatened-by-ibm-curveball <comment><USER2> i think it's weird how the newscientist for some reason decided to present the two efforts as being in competition or something. well it's not really weird, it's just clickbait, but you get my point

</comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be interesting if the effort to simulate a quantum computer led to some fantastically novel mathematical insights about quantum mechanics...

<comment><USER4> That actually sounds almost inevitable at some point, given how little we know about QM.

<comment><USER5> Why do you say that we know very little about QM?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dang give some more detail. This makes it sound like they gzipped the quantum states or something.

</comment><comment><USER7> Are there any resources for learning and experimenting with quantum computers?

<comment><USER8> [https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/tutorial?section...](https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/qx/tutorial?sectionId=beginners- guide&page=introduction)

<comment><USER7> Thank you kindly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actual URL: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151032-googles- quantum...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151032-googles-quantum- computing-plans-threatened-by-ibm-curveball/)

<comment><USER10> OP clickbaited me. Google threatened from google? I clicked</comment></comment>


522 exits of VC-backed companies in 2011, total: $53.2bn - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/03/report-522-exits-of-venture-backed-companies-netted-53-2-billion-in-2011/

<comment><USER2> Forget the exits. The bigger problem is that the VCs were not earning their keep: (2010) <http://hbr.org/2010/07/the-vc-shakeout/ar/1>

10-year IRRs are negative during the period that Google went public! The customers of the VCs (primarily pensions and endowments) are beginning to look with jaundiced eyes...

<comment><USER3> 10 year returns across the Nasdaq Composite and S&P500 were garbage during that time. It's not just VCs. Everything is correlated.

S&P: -20% (2000-2009), -3& (2001-2010) Nasdaq: -40% (2000-2009), +4% (2001-2010) (google finance)

<comment><USER2> > _10 year returns across the Nasdaq Composite and S &P500 were garbage during > that time. It's not just VCs. Everything is correlated._

That's the problem: They are not supposed to be, or certainly not a coefficient of 1. So the portfolio managers are wondering, Why the hell am I paying 2 & 20 for something I can get in an index?

<comment><USER4> Truthfully, why does anyone buy any particular asset expecting to do better than the market? The short answer, I think, is that they perceive the information and access that they have to be relatively great enough (than other market actors) to eek out an edge over the market. People's perceptions aren't always right, and the very definition of recessions (something that happened once or twice in the last "decade") is that entrepreneurs make a cluster of errors all at once.

As for the "why," I'm sure a particular's VC's perception of a startup investment falls favorably on their own risk-reward scale, and is perceived to be in line with the time horizon for their investment (whatever that may be). To believe them or not is up to you, and is the result of your own perceptions given the information available.

<comment><USER2> > _Truthfully, why does anyone buy any particular asset expecting to do better > than the market?_

The portfolio managers do not. They want a basket of assets, ideally with an expectation value and standard deviation.

Read up on Modern Portfolio Theory, which is a typical entry point on portfolio management, if you are curious why _expecting to do better than the market_ is irrelevant. (Despite the name, MPT is not very modern.)

Edit: Note also, when I said portfolio manager above, I meant the customers of the VCs, not the VCs themselves.

<comment><USER4> I think we're on the same page on this one. I was mostly trying to explain this sort of behavior based on the (semi-)efficient market hypothesis, and its implications.

VC's (and their customers) tend to portend some sort of knowledge that a sufficient portion of other market actors are unaware of, or are unable to act on. If you (a VC customer) believe the VC, and perceive his reasoning to be correct, that's all fine and good. Don't expect to win every time, though, which I guess was the point of this thread.

That said, thanks for pointing my direction to the MPT!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This significantly understates the numbers because it doesn't include secondary transactions, which are increasingly common for founders and early investors.

This was most interesting: the median acquisition price is now $71M (up 77%) with 5.3 years to liquidity. Takes lots of time but potentially incredibly lucrative

The original release has better data: [http://www.dowjones.com/pressroom/releases/2011/01032012-VCE...](http://www.dowjones.com/pressroom/releases/2011/01032012-VCExits-0172.asp)

<comment><USER5> Did you really just say that 5.3 years is a long time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to see a decline in the total value of deals in Q4, despite the fact that both Groupon and Zynga had their IPOs in that quarter. I wonder whether there's any seasonality that typically affects these transactions or whether there was a bit of a slowdown from the previous few quarters.

It's also interesting that only $5.4 billion, or roughly 10% of the total value of deals, came from IPOs during the year. For all the attention IPOs get, most of the money is coming from somewhere else.</comment>


How a Guy from a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-a-guy-from-a-montana-trailer-park-upturned-150-years-of-biology/491702/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> The subtitle is much better than the title: "Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong."

(It would be even better replacing the "They are wrong." with the answer, ...)</comment>


Managing Product vs. Managing Engineering - <AUTHOR> http://www.ramen.io/post/102213940764/managing-product-vs-managing-engineering

<comment><AUTHOR> Some thoughts on how different companies approach 'software development' (as engineering management challenge vs as a product management challenge).

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. "Product" taking a backseat is a huge challenge as companies grow, any insight into how you pulled it off in your companies?</comment>


The iPhone 1.0 critics -- where are they now? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/07/10/iphone-naysayers-one-year-later

<comment><USER2> I just manually installed the 2.0 update on my 1.0 iPhone. It rocks, I have to say. Feels like Christmas. The AIM app, as well as the Exchange/push integration (which I've tested out and works fine) is making the HTC's of the world seem insignificant. This update makes the iPhone 1.0 folks out here feel like grownups now.

<comment><USER3> You know that HTC has had exchange intergation on their phone for quite a few years now, right?

Never used AIM but it would surprise me if wasn't there too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its hard to know when to drink the Koolaid and when not to... that being said, when Jobs first presented the iPhone, even a hardened skeptic like myself thought it would gain a strong following.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a great way to figure out who's opinion you shouldn't bother listening to.

<comment><USER6> I kind of agree, but with the caveat that nobody's right all the time. (See also the "Don't let bozosity get you down" section of Guy Kawasaki's "Rules for Revolutionaries".)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> OT : Does anyone know specific marketshare numbers about the iPhone vs WinMobile and Symbian? I am having a hard time tracking them down. Jobs claimed iPhone outselling all Windows Mobile combined.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft is selling 20 million devices/year with about 100% YOY growth if memory serves.

Apple is at 6 million/year, no YOY numbers yet.

Symbian is selling about 140 million devices/year.

The numbers are not to be directly compared if you care about "smart" part of the "smartphone" - most Symbian users are not using any smart features, whereas many of Microsoft users do and so does practically every single Apple user.

<comment><USER7> Aah thanks. The claims and graphs by various vendors can be very difficult to make sense of sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it just me, or do most of those critics seem correct? Obviously Ballmer has a conflict of interest and Dvorak shouldn't be listened too - everyone already knew that.

<comment><USER9> They seem correct because they almost all change their minds so they can't be wrong:

"Last year, Joe Q. Bloggs wrote 'Why the iPhone is terrible, stupid and will go nowhere and nobody will buy it'"

"So Joe, are you surprised by the iPhone's success?"

"No."

"Last year, Bill Q. Briggs wrote 'the iPhone is absolutely and without any doubt the. worst. phone. ever., bar none, and it has no redeeming features. at all. It is the "big rigs" of phones'."

"So, Mr Briggs, are you surprised by the iPhones success?"

"No. Anyone can see it's a great phone, I always said it had the bling factor."

<comment><USER8> I must have skimmed those ones, the first ones seemed fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm right here.

Blackberry till I die.

</comment><comment><USER11> Still here. Still own an iPhone. Still wish I'd help out for Nokia's touch models.

</comment><comment><USER12> I remember ballmer making fun of the iphone and how expensive it was.

Where is that video now?

<comment><USER13> They did drop the price...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it unethical to scrape OS code from GitHub to demo my SaaS features? - <AUTHOR>

It's a hypothetical question. I'm thinking about productizing (and selling) one of our internal dev tools (as SaaS) and I'm wondering how would I market it. One scenario that I would imaging would be:
1. Scrape OS projects from GitHub (the ones, where my tool would add value). 2. Make "project" pages for them into my SaaS (where my value add is shown) and link back to original source in GitHub and authors. 3. Advertise the value of my product by bringing these projects as examples to public web. 4. Hoping for some inbound rush...
Contacting with every project owner and asking them to try out my thing...would be too time consuming for a small start-up :) If you guys think my plot here is dodgy, then I'll stick with the honest plan and just contact projects one-by-one. <comment><USER2> Depending on which license the software uses, you might be violating the license terms. For example, the GNU GPL states:

 _" You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice; keep intact all notices stating that this License and any non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code; keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all recipients a copy of this License along with the Program."_[1]

[1] [https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html](https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you don't break the copyright terms, I don't think it's unethical.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would not touch the code and copyright terms. We just add metrics and visualization layers.

Question is more about linking to the GitHub project and creating "mirrored" profiles. I personally hate when some what-ever-app would copy my public social media profile to "add some value" to it publicly without asking me, but I wouldn't mind if they take my OS code and make it easier to consume.

That's my dilemma.</comment></comment>


Why Speakers Suck, a follow-on to Reid Hoffman's post about panels - <AUTHOR> https://unsupervisedmethods.com/why-speakers-suck-7ee39e7793bf#klsjdfkjlkj23n <comment><USER2> In 10+ years of going to conferences I've seen exactly three truly great presentations (which a measure by whether or not I can still remember them, their core fact, and if they impacted my work or my own presentations in any way). One by Netflix's Casey Rosenthal, one by Hashicorp's tandem of Mitchell Hashimoto & Armon Dadgar, and one by Erlang Solutions' Iñaki Garay.

I've seen a _lot_ of presentations over the years, and some of been good, but have been ultimately forgettable over time. Most have failed the simplest litmus test I use... does it seem like the speaker would want to sit through their own presentation? Because usually it seems like they want the audience to sit through something they themselves wouldn't want to wade through if they were in their own audience.</comment>


Ask HN: Cool OS Tricks - <AUTHOR>

I was showing a coworker some stuff I was working on and did a few 'OS Tricks' as he put it, and it got me thinking - what other cool tricks are out there I don't know about?
So here's a couple examples to get the ball rolling:
Win7 - If you have multiple windows open and you can grab one of them and 'jiggle' it back/forth to minimize all the other non-selected windows; similarly you can drag a window to the left or right and have it maximize using only 50% of the screen.
OSx - In system prefs under Date & Time you can turn on 'Announce The Time' which makes your mac announce the time on the hour/half-hour like a post-modern grandfather clock. <comment><USER2> Gnome: middle click a window's Maximize button (usually a square) will maximize in the vertical direction only. Right click it and it maxes in the horizontal direction.</comment>


Data on Swearing in Programming Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.mahdiyusuf.com/post/3509358586/which-programming-languages-make-you-cuss-more

<comment><USER2> I'm sure this same story came up a while ago, but whatever. Here's my take on the type of swearing in commits as per the story (XXXX represents swearword of your choice).

C++: "Finally fixed it. My XXXX head hurts"

Javascript/Ruby: "Finished adding 15 new features. I am XXXX awesome"

C: "No time to swear, busy hacking. Oh XXXX whoops"

Java/C#: "Wouldn't swear, unprofessional & boss is watching"

Python: "All happy, & swears are naughty"

PHP: "Whats a commit?"

(ps. Just for fun, no flamebait intended!)

<comment><USER3> I'm willing to bet a lot of the Javascript obscenity is "F*ck browser X", or words to that effect.

<comment><USER4> I know that the most popular tag in our issue tracker is #fuckie.

It's particularly fun to pronounce allowed as if it rhymed with "ducky".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm going to assume that at least 25% of swearing in Ruby is attributable to William Morgan: <http://sup.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/lib/sup/imap.rb>

</comment><comment><USER6> Obligatory: and then there's Perl, which _is_ swearing.

</comment><comment><USER7> I realize this post is a little tongue-in-cheek, however, you cannot use it to draw any meaningful statistical conclusions. This data makes no sense until you factor in the relative popularity of these languages on Github. We don't know if PHP has little swearing because if it is a great language, or if PHP is rare on Github. Similarly, the reason Javascript and Ruby score so highly is most probably due to the fact that they are extremely popular languages on Github.

<comment><USER8> "To make sure that the popularity of one language over another didn't skew the results, Vos grabbed an equal number of commit messages per language."

<comment><USER7> I don't think it really matters. It may be that PHP developers that swear a lot don't use Github, or that Ruby developers that don't swear use Bitbucket, etc..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        #define DEFINE_GUID_RIGHT_FUCKING_NOW_DAMMIT(x) // ... stuff

I wrote that at 2AM once when I was at a start-up. I'm not proud. (Well, okay, I _am_ ).

A couple years later (after the start-up had imploded) I was asked to consult to fix issues that cropped up in the code at a customer site -- they'd bought an SDK and were having problems. During a walk-through of my fixes I found myself explaining that line of code to a suit.

The suit nodded. "GUIDs. Yeah, getting those right is tricky."

[That consulting gig was sweet; short, but I was able to charge $300 an hour. I should have charged more, they basically didn't care.]

</comment><comment><USER10> How can there be so little swearing with php? That's all I'm doing when forced writing that language. Love this type of stuff though!

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure there's as much of a culture of using version control among PHP devs (they generally just upload the new version via FTP) or I'm sure it'd be much higher..

<comment><USER12> The results are normalized to # number of commits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Almost all of my work is either in C or python. When I do my embedded system development in C, I generally spend my day swearing at myself and cursing the world. When I do other components in python generally thing "wow. that was easy and fast. And it's so expressive. Wow! I'm in a great mood!". It makes perfect sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised at the Javascript figure. I leave a few swears in server-side script but the only people that will see that are other programmers; Javascript, anyone can read that.

That said, I've found a couple of rants in my old JS from the IE6 days that, well, if I clean them up they're not really sentences.

<comment><USER15> Looks like he scanned commit messages, not comments, so the only people who could read them are people browsing Github or have access to the repo some other way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can certainly understand the high level in C++. But Ruby vs. Python is odd. There are so many similarities in the Ruby & Python communities. The main difference seems to be that Ruby has One Framework to Rule Them All, while Python has ... various things. Maybe that has something to do with it?

</comment><comment><USER17> There's something really fishy about this. Or, if there isn't, I really want an explanation.

</comment><comment><USER18> I find using <http://www.google.com/codesearch> is more accurate, since it covers a lot more code.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't swear in comments or commit messages, but I do often catch myself quietly muttering a string of obscenities while coding. At least I hope it's quiet.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ha. I just made a hack about this at PennApps - <http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com>

</comment><comment><USER21> Half of these commit messages may just be sourced from <http://whatthecommit.com/>

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd say PHP is lowest because it has the most non-english devs. Might be interesting to check cross-languages.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised C# is so low. Maybe a broken-mice/keyboards chart would be more descriptive.

</comment><comment><USER24> From an old bumper sticker:

C code.

C code run.

Run, code, run.

Run, dammit, run!

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe it is the demographics of the programmers who are using the languages.

</comment><comment> buff-a Well my C# libraries on github have got some fucking catching up to do.

</comment><comment><USER26> funny thing, would also be interesting to connect the percentage of words used related to one language to see which one is more #wtf or less #shit</comment>


Postmarketing Surveillance Is Good and Normal - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/18/postmarketing-surveillance-is-good-and-normal/ <comment><USER2> Very difficult doing objective cost/benefit on this. People get all "You can't put a price on life!" but regularly one does, for every road or car or drug or building design, or to make any advance in areas that have significant positive and negative effects on people's lives...</comment>


Wait, the Web Isn't Dead After All. Google Made Sure of It - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/04/wait-web-isnt-really-dead-google-made-sure/ <comment><USER2> Clickbait headline on site that blocks adblock users.</comment>


Blackboard-killer Instructure.com Closes Initial Funding Round - <AUTHOR> http://www.adamchavez.net/blog/startups/blackboard-killer-instructurecom-closes-initial-funding-round-byu-founders-close-to-deals-with-universities/

<comment><USER2> #1 - I'm a BYU alum and retired Blackboard-hater, so I'm proud that BYU students are tackling this.

#2 - My first thought was "Blackboard's strengths aren't technical, they're in enterprise sales. These guys are going to have to sell, sell, sell if they want to win." Then I read it and they first did a nationwide selling tour before they began developing. That's a team to bet on!

Other HN threads about Blackboard:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=109984>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56229>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=247955>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=315281>

<comment><USER3> Do you have any background on the founding team and their "nationwide selling tour"?

I couldn't find much about Mike Chasen or the team. I'm interested in how they built the business (definitely not the software).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems we can't get any glimpse into what their product looks like, so I can't answer my question:

How would this be any better than Moodle?

The most I can presume is that Instructure would be more purposely anti- Blackboard and would probably charge to develop features on a per-client basis, which would be very helpful for small institutions that just don't have the staff to implement their own functions in Moodle.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know much about Moodle, but from what I can tell they aren't playing the enterprise sales game... at least not yet.

With universities and other large, corporate organizations, salesmanship (not necessarily technical polish) is what wins.

<comment><USER4> Moodle is definitely targetted for smaller shops, like private colleges, schools, etc.. There's nothing restricting it from being used in large organizations, though, and it has a bunch of automation (automatic enrollment in Moodle courses based on enrollment status in another database, integrate logins with existing LDAP or other directory, etc.), but like most open source projects it's very much a community product and not the product of a for- profit entity trying to sell service to customers (that's available through third parties, though).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Major universities are already contributing to the Sakai project, which will become the de facto learning management system over time. It's built by universities for universities and is open source. The project is sponsored by the same organization that sponsors uPortal, which is becoming the standard web portal framework for universities.

<http://sakaiproject.org/portal>

<comment><USER6> Is there another instance of a "by universities for universities" project really being successful? Just saying, a product's market doesn't always know what they really need or want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd donate money and beer to the startup that can kill Blackboard.

Its the Windows ME of enterprise software.

<comment><USER7> The founders being from BYU, the beer would go undrunk. But I'm sure the money would be appreciated ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At University, I liked Blackboard, except it was a little complex.

</comment><comment><USER9> What's wrong with Blackboard? (I wouldn't know, never used it).

<comment><USER10> Their UI is terrible. Simple operations take far too many clicks. Every single thing you do refreshes the page which can make the system incredibly slow, especially if you use it while everyone else is using it (during class sign-up times for example).

<comment><USER7> From a technical administration standpoint, the system is extremely fragile and absolutely crumbles under load.</comment></comment></comment>


Graph shows Firefox desktop share increasing - <AUTHOR> https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=0&qpsp=209&qpnp=12&qptimeframe=M <comment><AUTHOR> Over the last 12 months, from about 8% to nearly 12%. Of course, other sources will vary.</comment>


Chinese traditional medicine, recipes used to treat Covid-19 in Wuhan - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com.my/news/regional/2020/03/24/chinese-traditional-medicine-recipes-used-to-treat-covid-19-in-wuhan <comment><USER2> there is no such thing as traditional medicine, if it actually worked it would just be called medicine.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would not venture into an argument about semantics. However, you'll probably find the following useful - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_medicine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_medicine)</comment></comment>


Ashton Kutcher launches A+: discover the best products through friends - <AUTHOR> https://aplus.com/#/ <comment><USER2> Sorry to say this but if Ashton Kutcher's name wasn't on this it would have not even made it to the front page of HN much less been worthy of people commenting on it.

I think he's made some great investments and I'd love to chat with him about the startup I'm working on, but I think its fair to say I won't soon be a user of this product

<comment><USER3> > Sorry to say this but if Ashton Kutcher's name wasn't on this it would have > not even made it to the front page of HN much less been worthy of people > commenting on it

That's possible, but you could argue something similar about repeat entrepreneurs. Ashton is an incredible marketer, which is a HUGE part of a consumer product like this.

<comment><USER2> Totally agree, some level of hype is necessary no matter how much bullshit hype really is.

But nearly all lasting companies have one thing in common, a great product.

Right now this site is a long way from that ... but then again they always say you should eventually be embarrassed of the first version of your product.

I think it's fair to say he will be.

<comment><USER3> > they always say you should eventually be embarrassed of the first version of > your product.

Definitely! If you're not embarrassed of your first version, then you waited too long to launch.

You should try listing a product. The flow is actually pretty good, especially given the product indexing, tagging, and categorization that has to happen behind the scene.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is this? Social meets ecommerce meets meteor? This whole site is like you took a buzzword pipe bomb and set it off in a geocities data center. A+? What is he trying to do, get listed first in the internet phone book? I guarantee you his pitch involves a lot of lofty talk about consumer and social big data. There's a whole lot of synergy going on here!

That being said I obviously wish him the best of luck.

<comment><USER5> As another commenter pointed out, if a celebrity wasn't behind this it wouldn't be getting much attention.

What a sad direction things are going. _Celebrities_ want in on this piece of pie now... suddenly michaelochurch's forebodings about 'VC-istan' all seem very relevant.

<comment><USER6> Ashton Kutcher's been an angle investor in startups for as long as Hacker News has existed. Both began in 2007.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton_Kutcher#Investments](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton_Kutcher#Investments)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Halfway down the first page I see the "EVGA SUPERNOVA NEX1500 CLASSIFIED POWER SUPPLY". I find it hard to believe this is that relevant to the target audience of this site, and it's too much of a coincidence that I just bought a bunch of computer parts from newegg and Amazon.

<comment><USER8> I see it, too, and I haven't bought computer parts like that in years, so I doubt it's retargeting. If you are concerned about that kind of retargeting, then it's probably newegg and Amazon you should stop using.

<comment><USER7> I'm not concerned, actually I find that sort of retargeting preferable to less relevant ads. I was just intrigued because a 1500W power supply is a pretty niche gadget that I was surprised to see here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hard to not highlight items as I scroll down the page on my laptop. Almost nowhere to park my cursor to avoid this. Seems like not the most thought- through UX, at least off-mobile.

<comment><USER10> On my Safari window, it shows ~3.5 products per row, requiring me to scroll to the right to see the rightmost one.

Having to scroll left and right is usually a design smell for me.

<comment><USER11> In chrome I get 4 items at 100% zoom. It's an ugly site, but it works fine. If I change the zoom level if seems to handle it just fine without left-right scrolling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is about a year late to the "pinterest clone for shopping" party.

Referly pivoted into something similar before shutting down, and I think Fancy is the major player in the space.

Could be successful, but not terribly innovative.

<comment><USER3> Ashton is also an investor in Fancy and understands the space well.

I would compare A+ more to Wanelo, which has massive growth. There's a lot of space for other players in the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those interested in signing up, a Facebook account is required. (Which makes sense since it's based on recommendations from friends.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh weird..

The first time a friend force-signed me up on facebook I only got ads for High-Frequency Trading and High-End Dedicated Servers.

On A+ I'm getting ads for a Ferrari's, BMW's, a Martin JetPack, Ducati's a $2.5m Pagani Zonda Revolucion and similar stuff, like 24k Gold iPhone Cases …

Hah, either something is really wrong with my browsing habits, or these sites suck at targeting my habits. For those who wonder, the last time I searched for Cars must be 6 or 7 years ago and I don't search for jewelery or jetpacks. I also never search for sports, pop, music or anything popular, really. Dear Ashton, I wish I was rich enough to buy that car, but I feel a little pressed when a site expects me to be rich.

The system probably mistakes me for an investor or a vc like Kutcher himself.

Ok, off to work, let's get rich or die trying.

</comment><comment><USER15> Discover the best (Nikon) products from your friends (and people I advertise with)

<comment><USER16> Thought the exact same thing. But kudos to Nikon and Ashton that I automatically associate both of them.

<comment><USER15> Very good point. That campaign has apparently done well for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Everyone thinks their tattoo artist is the best.

Consumers don't care what their _friends_ recommend, they want to know what _most people_ recommend. Amazon reviews have a ton of value in aggregate. The more reviews, the more value. My friend's subjective recommendation of a Canon DSLR because he's already invested $2K in lenses? Not so much.

Also, how is this not exactly [http://svpply.com](http://svpply.com), a much better execution of an item discovery site that sold to eBay over a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER18> It looks an awful lot like Svpply and The Fancy. And he's an investor in The Fancy. I guess this time the curation is through friends instead of the site itself.

<comment><USER3> You should check out adding a product. The flow is actually different from both Svpply and Fancy.

<comment><USER18> But, seriously, what else is different? If I'm looking at it as if it's a Fancy or Svpply clone, I'm not going to go as far as signing up to add anything.

One way I see these kinds of sites is as wishlists and thus, it makes sense to have just one site I use--unless there's something compellingly different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Say you want you want about Kutcher, but he went from a camera salesman to the highest paid actor on TV in two years. That's nothing short of miraculous.

</comment><comment><USER20> I. Don't. Get. It.

You only get one good chance to make an impression. And although I see a lot of products blowing up my webpage, I have zero context about how anything works or why I should care.

Guys, if you are building something you want the world to admire -- take the approach of idiot-proof video games: walk me through the process of getting "my context" up-to-speed with "your context". It'll make all the difference.

</comment><comment><USER21> "Your browser is out of date" -no, actually it isn't... it's Firefox 17 on Linux. but, just for the fun of it, click on the Firefox icon. -"Hooray, your browser is up to date!" (with no updating because... the browser was already up to date). click back and refresh -"Your browser is out of date..." ok then...

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not impressed, being greeted by a 90's style "your browser is out of date" (= "we're too stupid to detect browser features") message because I'm using Waterfox.

But hey, it's endorsed and funded by a celebrity, so it will work.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you're looking for this, chances are what you're actually looking for is thewirecutter.com. They actually give you a recommendation about which is the best, then tell you why in detail.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a really nice domain.

All the yellow is making my eyes bleed and the fonts look weird and aliased in my browser though.

I'm sure it'll still make Ashton Kutcher another million dollars though.

</comment><comment><USER25> Who made it?

<comment><USER26> Ashton coded it himself from the set of 2.5 Men.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> yeah right. No legal info, not even a hint who is responsible for this. But wait, there's even more, you need a facebook account to attend the party. Oh boy, this thing is gonna storm everyone's heart for sure. Like Bitcoin will be the next all purpose currency. </sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER28> Why would I care about my friends' opinions only? I want hundreds of reviews, not a couple (or zero most of the time).

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm skeptical that I share a significant interest in specific products with even my closest friends.</comment>


Flow browser passes the Acid tests - <AUTHOR> https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid <comment><USER3> This actually looks pretty interesting.

They started out as an SVG engine for set-top boxes (embedded devices running on TV's) since browsers at the time weren't fast/light enough for the underpowered chips in set-top boxes. Then when the devices got better chips, they realized perf still wasn't good enough for big 4k screens – and that multicore rendering could help.

So they've implemented a full HTML/CSS/JS browser from scratch, all to take advantage of a multicore architecture (today's browsers all render on a single thread) which has enabled (they claim) greater than 4x better framerate during web animations than the stable channels of Chrome/Blink and Safari/Webkit. Oh, and 60% faster layout on a quad-core machine.

They also claim "extremely low memory consumption", which would be quite appealing to many HN'ers I think, though that may only be true of their HTML engine and not of the full browser (eg; when using multiple tabs and hungry JS apps).

<comment><USER4> Are we stuck with HTML/CSS/JS forever? For today's interactive applications, those 3 are clearly insufficient. Can't the standards commitees come up with a new "web language" that actually satisfies the needs of 2020? Or is the goal to just have everything run on WebAssembly?

Kudos to the author.. but I was hoping it would be a "for real new" browser.

<comment><USER5> Can you elaborate, why is it clearly insufficient? There are myriads of web applications made with HTML/CSS/JS. So it's clearly sufficient for any kind of web applications IMO.

There are some weak points for web. One of them is performance, hopefully it'll be resolved by Webassembly, so you could write performance-sensitive portions using C++ or Rust. Another one is using hardware and that's resolved by evolving web standards like WebUSB, WebGPU and so on. I don't think that replacing HTML, CSS or JS with something different would solve any actual problem in the web. They are not ideal, but they are good enough and that's all that matters.

Well, technically you could replace JS with any other language compiling into JS or Webassembly. Then you could just use one full-screen canvas and draw anything you want there, so you could use Qt or something like that. That does not require any new APIs, but I don't think that's the good idea in the long run.

<comment><USER6> People always jump to criticizing JS, but frankly HTML and CSS are my biggest pain points whenever I work with them. Any reasonably complicated UI inevitably turns into a soup of divs. Why would you stick with markup and styling heavily tailored towards documents for an application platform if you could start fresh with something else?

To be fair, CSS is making big strides in this regard with Houdini[0]. It's not yet complete but it's a much better alternative to composing divs and spans in weird ways to get the look you want.

0\. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Houdini](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Houdini)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It also supports full Google Mail [1]. While I don't think it will ever be competitive to Chrome or Firefox, it's super cool to see it's actually possible to start a new web browser project and get it to this point.

[1] [https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean- ro...](https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/full-google-mail-in-a-clean-room- browser/)

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is really surprising. Browsers have in many ways gotten more complex than operating systems, so creating a new one from scratch seemed off the table for now. A big player like Microsoft scrapping Edge certainly helped to strengthen that impression.

It's certainly not as compatible with the modern web as chrome and Firefox but hey, it's doing much more than I'd have expected.

<comment><USER8> I like the author's writing style too... This seems to be as much an exploration as anything:

> _I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect yet – some vertical alignment > is wrong in a few places, Hangouts doesn't work, and our 'contenteditable' > support is minimal. But I don't think these detract from the achievement – > as far as I'm aware, no browser engine other than Webkit, Blink and Gecko > can run full Google Mail, and these have all had over twenty years of > development work on them._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The author's blog site seems to be down; here's an archive.org link:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/)

<comment><USER3> And this is the project's homepage: [https://web.archive.org/web/20190623202921/https://www.ekioh...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190623202921/https://www.ekioh.com/flow/)

A quirksmode post about the project: [https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser...](https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser_on.html)

And the project's twitter handle: [https://twitter.com/flowbrowser](https://twitter.com/flowbrowser)

<comment><USER9> I wonder if they'll ever open source it, sounds interesting enough.

<comment><USER3> In the quirksmode interview they say they will not open source it, since they are a small company and don't have the resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations to the Flow team! Very nice work.

The world needs more browser engines (dang it Microsoft!), so seeing this development makes me really happy.

I've just started working on ACID2 compliance in my own engine a few days ago, and passing all three tests is no small feat :)

</comment><comment><USER11> > a new, clean-sheet browser

I don't think that's entirely true. It may have its own HTML/CSS rendering engine, but apparently [0] it uses SpiderMonkey for JavaScript. Still very impressive, of course.

[0] [https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser...](https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/01/new_browser_on.html)

<comment><USER12> I think it's reasonable to not roll your own JS engine when Spidermonkey and V8 are intended to be integrated in other projects.

<comment><USER11> Of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amusingly, I went to [http://acid3.acidtests.org/](http://acid3.acidtests.org/) and was surprised to find that the latest Chrome 83.0.4103.97 (Official Build) (64-bit) on MacOS 10.13.6 apparently _doesn 't_ pass the acid3 test!

[https://i.imgur.com/ZW4BYH2.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZW4BYH2.png)

Now I'm curious to know which 3 features can be ignored by the dominant browser...

EDIT: Oh my, I suspected it was one of my extensions. Nope. Now I'm getting a "You should not see this at all" in a fresh Chrome guest: [https://imgur.com/CrAYhpI](https://imgur.com/CrAYhpI)

I burst out laughing because it was so unexpected. I wonder what's going on.

<comment><USER14> "Acid3, in particular, contains some controversial tests and no longer reflects the consensus of the Web standards it purports to test, especially when it comes to issues affecting mobile browsers. The tests remain available for historical purposes and for use by browser vendors. It would be inappropriate, however, to use them as part of a certification process, especially for mobile browsers."

Wikipedia gives this as an example of a standard that changed: [https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319](https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319)

Edit: there's an updated version at [http://wpt.live/acid/acid3/test.html](http://wpt.live/acid/acid3/test.html)

<comment><USER15> And the updated one is in [https://github.com/web-platform- tests/wpt/tree/master/acid](https://github.com/web-platform- tests/wpt/tree/master/acid) for those wanting to look at the history (though it only includes the ppst-fork history, not the earlier updates).

<comment><USER15> To expand a bit more:

> Wikipedia gives this as an example of a standard that changed: > [https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319](https://github.com/whatwg/dom/issues/319)

That's the reason why tests 23 and 25 fail (both because of the "wrong" exception being thrown); [https://github.com/web-platform- tests/wpt/commit/3cbdbaa7ca9...](https://github.com/web-platform- tests/wpt/commit/3cbdbaa7ca93e3c81b38f2d489eef1e6ea71b6c6) is the Acid3 change for that.

The other test that fails, test 35, is down to [https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Tracker/issues/317;](https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Tracker/issues/317;) [https://github.com/web-platform- tests/wpt/commit/e6f63a6e69e...](https://github.com/web-platform- tests/wpt/commit/e6f63a6e69ea785bbb554c4b9dd107ae2ea7e524) is the Acid3 change for that.

(The reason they're simply commented out is it follows the precedent set by Hixie when he was still maintaining Acid3, c.f., [https://github.com/web- platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/acid/a...](https://github.com/web-platform- tests/wpt/blob/master/acid/acid3/test.html#L597), plus there are other feature-specific tests for those features in WPT.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The web (html/css/javascript) standards have become so wide and complex that it's very hard to build a browser from scratch. It gets worse by the day, as more features get added to those standards.

This makes me wonder if you could define a subset of those standards that would support 90%+ of the use cases, would be simple and efficient to implement and would be supported by existing browsers. You could then push this light version of the web as a new base for a future standard.

The problem would of course be that you would have to keep around a different browser to render old sites. Could still be worth thinking about. Doesn't seem feasible as a long term strategy to have browsers support thousands of apis and increasing.

<comment><USER17> > _The problem would of course be that you would have to keep around a > different browser to render old sites._

Not really, you could polyfill the missing features like it's commonly done with many unimplemented new ones.

I'd prefer starting from scratch, with a completely new, simple language that can be translated quickly to HTML/CSS/JS. You'd have to remove those interested in being gatekeepers of the web and sabotaging any efforts to make browsers simpler from the W3C though.

<comment> c-smile > simple language

What is conceptually wrong (or complex) with current HTML/CSS ? What would you change?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From the QuirksMode article linked elsewhere here:

 _Is Flow open source?_

 _It's not. There's no current plan for that as we don't have a large corporation backing our development._

This doesn't make much sense... why not simply say then "because we don't want to"?

<comment><USER19> It gives a reason why they can't run it as a loss leader.

<comment><USER20> Agree. They could though do a classic dual license with an open version being some kind of AGPL or similar a strict copyleft license and the closed proprietary version be one without copyleft restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The website seems to be down (the downsides of HN notoriety!) but any browser nowadays that's not a skin over a chromium base I support.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is ACID3 the most relevant test? It was released in 2008 and had some updates in 2011: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3), [https://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/](https://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/)

Does it check flexbox and grid support for example?

<comment><USER23> The author's post has comments about this, apparently the best score on ACID3 is now 97/100 due to spec changes, but there is an updated version of the test.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> No downloadable builds? The desktop builds doesn't seem to be available for general public.

[https://www.ekioh.com/support/](https://www.ekioh.com/support/)

<comment><USER25> This is what i noticed. Why do i have to contact them to download it? What licence is it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Site seems to be down. I'm glad to see someone working on a new browser. They're such huge apps though, I wonder if the Edge/Brave strategy is better if you're trying to get compatibility and performance as fast as possible... it is unfortunate that Chromium is influenced by decision makers at Google. It would be great if they could spin that off into another company but there's no way they ever would. At least with MS there is a potential to fork and have some accountability, at least on issues that are not mutually beneficial. See the Microsoft and Google feud where Google withheld all their apps from the windows phone for evidence of the animosity possible between these 2 companies.

<comment><USER27> > _I wonder if the Edge /Brave strategy is better if you're trying to get > compatibility and performance as fast as possible_

 _Of course_ it's faster than developing a browser from scratch, or working with a browser startup on integration etc. but that isn't the question. The question is whether it's even feasible to develop a browser with publicly available information (HTML 5 specs including SVG and MathML, but which one/version? tens of CSS specs and growing as we speak [1], hefty ECMAScript specs, http2+http3/quic, A/V codecs, multiple font formats, etc. etc.). As a glimpse into browser development, yesterday we learned [2] that even a RegExp engine for JavaScript poses a challenge, with specs being "fitted to match reality" eg Chrome behaviour. Honestly, with these results of creating almost a browser monopoly and driving browser development out of existence (Opera, MS), and now even Moz beginning to integrate Chrome code, I don't understand why the clowns at WHATWG and W3C even bother writing specs; they just can't stop it seems. Never has a standardization effort failed so miserably and went so totally out of control, and it'll be a huge problem for generations to come. Talking about almost all human communications (in law, education, politics, medicine, science, culture, personal docs) being held hostage by an ad company; even stone age humans had more liberties in cultural expression.

[1]: [https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04](https://webplatform.news/issues/2020-06-04)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23487960)

Edit: big congrats to the Flow developers!

<comment><USER28> More than Google, the bigger culprit here is scope creep. The web should have been split into multiple interoperating protocols so that each protocol by itself could be manageable enough for multiple applications and a rich ecosystem. Instead everything including the kitchen sink is shoe-horned into the browser so it becomes impossible for anyone except the largest companies to come up with competitive alternatives and they will slowly stop bothering and start cartelizing around Chromium, one way or another, because no corp except for Mozilla solely depends on their browser, so they will all be happy enough to re-skin Chromium and be done with it. And Mozilla is facing an increasingly Sisyphean task ahead.

<comment><USER29> Even the largest companies in the world decided it wasn't worth it. MSFT has a 1.4T market cap, GOOG (Alphabet) has 964B.

<comment><USER30> > Even the largest companies in the world decided it wasn't worth it. MSFT has > a 1.4T market cap,

To be fair, Apple has (or had on the 10th of June) a market cap of 1.5T and they maintain Safari and Webkit (which GOOG forked to create Blink).

<comment><USER31> and Webkit was forked from KHTML. blah blah blah.

<comment><USER30> Sure, but I wasn't suggesting that Webkit is an original work of art - <USER2> discussion wasn't about the history of rendering engines and browsers - it was about which companies _today_ are willing to maintain their own rendering engines and browsers instead of just skinning Chromium.

\- Apple has Safari which uses Webkit (which was forked from KHTML as you noted)

\- Mozilla has Firefox which uses Gecko (originally from Netscape)

\- Google has Chrome which uses Blink (forked from Webkit)

\- Microsoft has Edge which uses Blink

\- Opera has Opera which uses Blink

... The only two major players currently maintaining a non-Chromium and Blink based browser are Firefox (mentioned by the OP) and Apple (mentioned by myself).

I was simply trying to provide some additional context about the history of Chrome, perhaps I should've also included the context about the history of Safari.

But anyways... blah blah blah

<comment> c-smile > to maintain their own rendering engines and browsers instead of just > skinning Chromium.

If just rendering engine (but not a browser) then Sciter will qualify I think too. And it is not derived from any others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Needs ublock origin and a cookie auto-delete feature and I will gladly switch.

Used to be that developers would decide between different browsers (or any other software really) and the rest would follow. Chrome/Edge/Safari bring built in to devices and being super hard to remove has changed that. All while not offering a better experience at all.

Big tech needs a couple anti-trust passes real bad.

</comment><comment><USER33> Since JS contributes the most to browsers' memory usage, and a lot of people are compiling to JS from a typed language these days, it would be great to have a browser that makes a clean break and implements, say, a sandboxed version of Swift.

You could even have Swift DSLs for type-safe markup and styles (I've actually been experimenting with building a Swift -> CSS DSL using simple protocols, enums, and structs) and, while we're at it, introduce more sane defaults and cut some of the cruft that has accumulated over the years (do we really need HTML colspan attributes and CSS float when we can use a flexbox model?)

</comment><comment><USER34> A lot to learn from the Acid tests. I made a clean room animated PNG implementation today. It would have been a lot easier if I had had a piece of audited software that parsed my output and rated how close it was to the spec, and on what aspects it deviated. It took an unreasonable amount of time to notice that the sequence numbers of _fcTL_ and _fdAT_ should increase _together_ as a series. Something I feel and Acis Test would have been much faster at noticing.

</comment><comment><USER35> Since the website is down, I'll just answer the important question for you: no, it is not open source.

<comment><USER36> Who knows, maybe a bit of HN notoriety can persuade them to change their mind?

<comment><USER37> This isn't the first time the Flow browser is brought up. It's good to see they are still developing it, but it looks like their stance on source availability is pretty rigid.

<comment><USER15> Practically, my reading would be they're not opposed to it _if the business case_ can be made, within acceptable levels of risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I get the following: 403 Forbidden Access to this resource on the server is denied!

</comment><comment><USER39> I was under the impression that ACID3 no longer represented the web standards as documented by W3C, and a fully compliant browser should in fact _fail_ ACID3?

<comment><USER40> > A quick note about the score: Acid3 dates back to 2008 and the web platform > specs have changed over time so a perfect score, using the version hosted on > acidtests.org, is now only 97/100\. The version hosted on the web platform > tests site has been updated to match the specs and so, using that, browsers > should score 100/100.

From the archived blog post

<comment><USER39> Ah thanks, the page wasn't loading for me when I wrote this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Amusingly, Chrome doesn't pass ACID3 these days.

<comment><USER42> Apparently 97/100 is a perfect score these days due to some changes made.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It took me a few second to look up that (`゚д゚ ) test in my brain...man it's been a long time

<comment><USER44> ACID, that's Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability, right? :)

<comment><USER45> Abysmal exception handling, Character encoding issues, Incongruity code style, Delusional developers. (I'm in that last category for sure)... but hmmm... probably should check myself at that statement.

<comment><USER46> This just made my day

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> How does it deal with DRM? I've read that this is the biggest problem for browser adoption, that DRM is effectively locked in with Firefox and Chromium and there won't be licenses issued to other browsers.

<comment><USER15> > How does it deal with DRM?

AFAIK, it doesn't try, because their customers don't care.

> there won't be licenses issued to other browsers

That's… not really true. Google certainly are sometimes slow at dealing with Widevine licensing, but as far as I'm aware that's not a problem unique to the browser space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I am out of the loop when it comes to Flow, but don't other browsers, especially the new Firefox, do multi-threaded style/layout/paint/composite and smartly use GPU acceleration?

<comment><USER20> The Servo project is the only one built from scratch to do this a d some of its parts has been retrofitted to Firefox to enhance some parts there, but to fully move to multi-threadedness would mean that Firefox would have to do a complete switch to Servo and I don't think Servo is ready for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Except there are many many websites that it just can't load properly.

I think that since web browsers have become operating systems it's just not feasible to implement a new compatible browser. ACID3 would just be the beginning, except now it's totally outdated.

That intractability of creating a new browser is why I proposed that we start over with something much simpler to implement that can actually perform.

First of all, to get to information quickly, the main browsing experience is markdown.

There is no more JavaScript.

Then media such as images and video are handled separately.

And finally, add some kind of simple Canvas-like or Framebuffer API to web assembly and have that available for applications.

Set limits on the amount of data per page. Maybe build in some p2p content distribution.

Something like the above could actually be feasibly implemented by multiple groups and would solve performance issues.

[https://github.com/runvnc/noscriptweb](https://github.com/runvnc/noscriptweb)

</comment><comment><USER50> Linked website just failed to pass "HN effect".[0]

> _503_

> _Service Unavailable_

> _The server is temporarily busy, try again later!_

[0] [http://archive.is/DU69F](http://archive.is/DU69F)

</comment><comment><USER51> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21658935) from 6 months ago.

</comment><comment><USER52> This should be perfect browser for KaiOS, considering low amount of RAM in their devices.

</comment><comment><USER53> Does it implement adblocking, or support for external plugins?

As a feature might not be of technical interest, but today's web is absolutely atrocious to surf without a good set of ad blockers and privacy enhancement plugins, so that's a feature one day every browser is deemed to implement to attract users.

<comment><USER54> I don't use adblocking. Disabling javascript solve all those problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> How does it compare to Servo?

<comment><USER15> Servo fails a bunch of the Acid3 subtests: [https://wpt.fyi/results/acid/acid3/numbered- tests.html?label...](https://wpt.fyi/results/acid/acid3/numbered- tests.html?label=master&product=servo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> How does one download the flow browser ?

</comment><comment><USER57> I would totally pay for a web browser

</comment><comment><USER58> I get a page with a HUGE 503.

<comment><USER59> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200613124642/https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> This is very impressive

</comment><comment><USER61> Is it available?

</comment><comment><USER62> the blog is getting hugged to death

</comment><comment><USER63> > ACID3

Too bad, there are no ACID4, 5, 6...

The web specs were broken for years since ACID3 managed to somehow stabilize them.

<comment><USER64> Web platform tests have overtaken them at this point.</comment></comment>


Wondering why you can't order an Ipad?  It's not legal yet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/wondering-why-you-cant-pre-order-the-ipad-it-isnt-legal-yet/

<comment><USER2> That's why the GSM iPad isn't for sale, and, in fact, Jobs even said that at the keynote. That doesn't explain why you can't preorder a non-GSM iPad.

<comment><USER3> FCC Part 15 approvals[1] cover all electronic devices, not just those that intentionally emit electromagnetic radiation. All computer equipment still needs approval before it can be sold to ensure that it doesn't unintentionally radiate excessively or in bands that can interfere with other equipment, and that it will still operate correctly when subjected to radiation from other equipment.

Further, the non-GSM iPad has WiFi, which brings it under the FCC approvals for wireless transmissions in unlicensed spectrum.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_47_CFR_Part_15>

<comment><USER2> I figured someone would say that, but given the fact that _practically every other Apple product falls under that umbrella_ (not to mention practically every other product in the entire industry), I'm not putting too much stock in the WiFi iPad being held up for regulatory reasons.

<comment><USER4> Are you saying that because Apple has some products already approved, that they don't need to get specific approval for the iPad? Isn't the approval on a per-device basis?

<comment><USER5> They can start taking orders whenever they want. It's _delivery_ that has to wait for regulatory approval.

<comment><USER4> No, from TFA _"Application availability and pricing are subject to change. This device has not yet been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. This device is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained."_</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Did the Clinton Email Server Have an Internet-Based Printer? - <AUTHOR> http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/05/did-the-clinton-email-server-have-an-internet-based-printer/ <comment><USER2> Among the more disappointing things in all of this is that there is a rational, important conversation to be had about everyday awareness of security and government inflexibility. But there won't be, because she is Hillary Clinton and it is 2016.

Supposedly she got the server set up because the NSA refused to give a politician who travels frequently a secure smartphone. She (I personally believe) was likely ignorant of many of the security requirements of such a server (even one set up for unclassified e-mail), as was whoever set it up. And no-one on her staff either knew enough or was willing enough to say anything. She is also supposedly not the first Secretary of State to have an arrangement of this nature.

This feels like the very definition of systematic failure and clearly needs to change. But the conversation is almost exclusively based around a) her having nefarious motivations, because she is Hillary Clinton, or b) this all being a Republican plot to derail the Democratic candidate for President.

It's all very depressing.

<comment><USER3> What's the rationale for not giving _everyone_ secure smartphones? And I mean high-ranking officials, SoS certainly ranks considering how much she/he is in foreign countries with foreign leaders. Can someone in the know explain why the NSA would deny such requests?

<comment><USER2> Difficult to know for sure. Obama had one, Rice previously used one, but:

 _The NSA refused to give Clinton a device similar to the one used by Obama: a modified BlackBerry 8830 World Edition with additional cryptography installed. And while Clinton 's predecessor Condaleeza Rice had obtained waivers for herself and her staff to use BlackBerry devices, Clinton's staff was told that "use [of the BlackBerry] expanded to an unmanageable number of users from a security perspective, so those waivers were phased out and BlackBerry use was not allowed in her Suite,"_[1]

This being Clinton there are probably conspiracy theories (the NSA is out to get her!) but I suspect they simply didn't want to have to deal with it, and had the ability to say no. So they did.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/nsa- re...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/nsa-refused- clinton-a-secure-blackberry-like-obama-so-she-used-her-own/)

<comment><USER4> >Clinton's staff was told that "use [of the BlackBerry] expanded to an unmanageable number of users from a security perspective

if you don't provide a secure way to get shit done, motivated individuals will figure out how to get shit done, security be damned. happens every time. that's what happened here.

<comment><USER5> They offered her a non-blackberry alternative. That's not what happened here.

<comment><USER6> You could rephrase it, "if you don't provide [an easy and] secure way to get shit done, motivated individuals will figure out how to get shit done, security be damned. happens every time. that's what happened here."

<comment><USER5> To be fair, the device she was offered doesn't look that bad. It even comes with a blackberry style keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's some more details about the state of security of her private server [0]:

> _Outlook Web Access, or OWA, was running on port 80 without SSL > (unencrypted)_

> _Remote Desktop Protocol, port 3389, was exposed through the DMZ (open to > anyone on the internet.) This, at the time it was being used, was open to > critical vulnerabilities that would allow for remote execution of code._

> _VNC Remote Desktop, port 5900, was also exposed through the DMZ._

> _SSL VPN used a self-signed certificate. This isn 't inherently bad, but > left them open for "spearphishing" attacks, which have already been > confirmed to be received by Hillary Clinton and her staff_

It's also interesting how they responded to attacks on the server [1]:

> _Here is the section from page 41 of the report which references an > "attack":_

> On January 9, 2011, the non-Departmental advisor to President Clinton who > provided technical support to the Clinton email system notified the > Secretary's Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations that he had to shut down > the server because he believed "someone was trying to hack us and while they > did not get in i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to." Later > that day, the advisor again wrote to the Deputy Chief of Staff for > Operations, "We were attacked again so I shut [the server] down for a few > min." On January 10, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations emailed the > Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Planning and instructed > them not to email the Secretary "anything sensitive" and stated that she > could "explain more in person."

[0] [https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4j2r94/judicial_wa...](https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4j2r94/judicial_watch_new_clinton_emails_reveal_clinton/d336scb)

[1] [http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/clinton-tech-says-private- em...](http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/clinton-tech-says-private-email-server- was-attacked-forcing-shutdown/)

<comment><USER8> Ah yes, the classic 'shut it down for a few minutes' defense. Stops 'em every time.

<comment><USER9> "i didnt [sic] want to let them have the chance to"

Can you imagine if this was how Google and Amazon handled security?

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure google and amazon can afford scrubbing centers (not to mention their apps are load balanced) to avoid attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One of the commenters on the Krebs post makes a remarkable point [1]:

"It gets better. Do a dig mx clintonemail.com. You'll see that the machine's incoming email was filtered by mxlogic.net, a spam filtering service that works by received all your emails, filtering out the spam, and forwarding you the rest.

This is because the hosting provider, Platte River Network, sold a package along with the hosting. The package included spam filtering and full-disk off- site backup (since then seized by the FBI).

So every email received by Clinton was going through many unsecured places, including a spam filtering queue, a backup appliance and an off-site backup server. Which has already been documented."

[http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/05/did-the-clinton-email- ser...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/05/did-the-clinton-email-server-have- an-internet-based-printer/#comment-406731)

<comment><USER12> oh my god, this is depressing sad.

She could have hired a team of machine learning grad students to build her a personalized spam filter.

but she went with the cheapest option.

this is going to keep me upset for a while.

<comment><USER13> "She" did nothing of the sort. She told someone she wanted her email available. They said, ok, we'll just host it ourselves. "Whatever, I want my daily suduko and make sure I stop getting those damn linked-in spams". "Ok boss".

Seriously, how could anyone really believe she specc'd this out herself? Her staff probably threw it together as a MVP with the full intention of revisiting the implementation "really soon".

And then they lost interest.

<comment><USER14> She asked and they gave her options she didn't like and then worked around it. Big difference

<comment><USER15> That's implying she understood the implications.

<comment><USER14> She cheered imprisonment of whistleblowers, citing sanctity of classified info. Source: "Hillary Clinton on the Sanctity of Protecting Classified Information"

Best quote: "I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so," Clinton said

She knew what she was doing. This is outrageous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have spent some time talking to different people I meet/know who have security clearances.

EVERY one of tells me that if they had done what it appears Hillary did, they would fully expect to be in jail for years.

In researching this, I find that about 4.5 million Americans currently have, and maybe 1.5 million more did have in the past, security clearances.

I find it hard to believe that in Washington DC, surrounded by people with security clearances, this was unintentional and just an accident. It's like Hillary had to look far afield to find people _without_ security clearances so that they would set this up for her.

<comment><USER17> That's because in the federal government the average employee simply doesn't have the same amount of power nor leeway that a cabinet level executive would. For one, several cabinet level appointees have original classifying authority. No regular employee has that power.

A rank and file employee obviously could not direct anyone to set up a private email server for their correspondence or request that the NSA provide them with a secure blackberry.

> I find it hard to believe that in Washington DC, surrounded by people with > security clearances, this was unintentional and just an accident. It's like > Hillary had to look far afield to find people without security clearances so > that they would set this up for her.

Clinton certainly was wrong here and people certainly told her not to do this. But I don't think it requires malicious intent, just someone not taking the rules/guidelines seriously and/or thinking they have more power than they do.

NARA compliance is something that many people either don't know about or are confused about at State department so I could see how some might not take it as seriously as they should.

I'm sure she and her inner circle rationalized away the security risk because classified materials are not supposed to be sent to public email addresses, there's a separate network for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The emails themselves sent from Clinton's server were unencrypted for several months, so unencrypted printing is just more of the same.

There's no reasonable question anymore that laws on handling classified data were broken, the only question is will charges actually be brought?

<comment><USER19> What laws regarding handling classified information were broken?

[http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0330-mcmanus- clin...](http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0330-mcmanus-clinton- email-prosecution-20160330-column.html)

<comment> at-fates-hands Here are the two obvious one, and another one that's well. . . more in the vein of the Clinton's being the Clinton's IMHO.

[http://www.ijreview.com/2015/03/264655-3-federal-laws- hillar...](http://www.ijreview.com/2015/03/264655-3-federal-laws-hillary-may- violated-secret-email-accounts/)

\- _Executive Order 13526 and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f) of the federal code make it unlawful to send of store classified information on personal email._

\- _Section 1236.22 of the 2009 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) requirements states that:_

 _"Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency record keeping system."_

\- _MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell believes that the use of a personal emails server appears to be a preemptive move, specifically designed to circumvent FOIA:_

<comment><USER19> Nothing that links to the daily caller is a serious news source.

Plus the article is a pile of stupid innuendo that conflates what Hillary did with Petraeus providing contemporaneously classified documents to his journalist fuckbuddy.

Further, clearly nobody in government had a contemporaneous problem with it since they saw the email address every time they communicated with Hillary Clinton. Whenever they sent her an email, they saw

       Hillary Clinton <firstname.lastname@example.com>

show up in the email composition window, which certainly cannot be mistaken for a state department email...

<comment><USER20> Ad hominem?

Sure, news sources can be biased and we should be discerning when we look at them, but that doesn't automatically mean that the source is automatically wrong 100% of the time.

<comment><USER19> Secret Muslim Barack Obama's new house is near a mosque, and the daily caller is on it!

[http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/26/obamas-fancy-new- mansion-i...](http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/26/obamas-fancy-new-mansion-is- located-1000-feet-from-the-islamic-center-of-washington-dc/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Given all the warnings I got when I had a secret clearance back in the 80's about protecting the information and what penalties I faced for not following the rules I've found it unimaginable that the Secretary of State didn't know or didn't care about protecting much higher level secrets.

</comment><comment><USER22> This story just keeps getting better. There is either a grand nefarious plot, or worse, horrific incompetence. I just can't find a third possibility.

<comment><USER23> No nefarious plot. My understanding is that it went roughly like this. Back in 2009 Clinton requested a secure smartphone from the NSA. It's a custom made device (security by obscurity?). Anyway, the president gets one. As the secretary of state she has to travel a lot, and not being able to do email on the road is highly impractical. So she thought she should get one too.

The NSA denied her request for a secure smartphone and gave her some nonsense excuse. She tried a few more times to get one, and then Clinton gave up and ordered somebody to set her up with a private email server. She used this unsecure email server for years. She used it to communicate with top level officials (including the president). That she had this server was common knowledge in the administration. She knew it wasn't secure and she's been very careful not to discuss any classified information over email at all. In a handful of cases she slipped up and some classified information ended up on email anyway.

<comment><USER24> Do you have any sources for that?

The story I keep hearing is that she had this set up to make FOIA requests more difficult/impossible to fulfil.

The _really out there_ stuff is that this was to hide any cash-for-favors exchanges that happened with relation to The Clinton Foundation.

<comment><USER23> I can't prove some of the more out-there theories aren't true, but they just don't make sense to me.

Given the sheer volume of email she sent from her blackberry (lunch meetings, when to get up, where to go, can you print this, happy birthday, etc) it's pretty clear it's her primary way of communication. So that explains her refusing to take no for an answer from the NSA.

If her motivation was to block FOIA requests, then why did she do literally all important and confidential communication on paper, which falls under FOIA? Then why did the entire administration accept her use of a private email server if she didn't have an obvious reason why she needed one? If her real motivation was to dodge FOIA, then why was the NSA stonewalling? The FOIA hypothesis raises far more questions than it answers.

<comment><USER25> > then why did she do literally all important and confidential communication > on paper

This may not have always been the case.

> Part of the exchange is redacted, so the context of the emails is unknown, > but at one point, Sullivan tells Clinton that aides "say they've had issues > sending secure fax. They're working on it."

> Clinton responds, "If they can't, turn into nonpaper w no identifying > heading and send nonsecure."

[http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-department-releases- more-c...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/state-department-releases-more-clinton- emails-several-marked-classified/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really want to like Clinton for running her own server, respecting the decentralized basis of the Internet. Yet her domain name was clinton _email_.com? What a pleb! Political corruption and murder is her family business, yet even with those capabilities she can't be bothered to obtain a better online identity? She may as well have been at hotmail or gmail and highlighted in blue!

<comment> at-fates-hands If I remember correctly, Sarah Palin used a Yahoo account to do some of her business as Alaska's governor.

EDIT: Found it, yeap, Yahoo: [http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/palins-e- mail-...](http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/palins-e-mail-account- hacked/?_r=0)

<comment><USER27> That's not as bad as Colin Powell, who used AOL while serving as Secretary of State.

And of course it also was hacked by, you guessed it, Guccifer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does this really indicate any private correspondence was printed via the internet? Even if a printer was set up which _was_ writable via this web address, that doesn't mean that emails from the email server itself were printed to that address rather than directly to the device, does it? In fact, presumably the printer and email were hosted on the same server so it doesn't make much sense to me that they would send one to the other via the web address.

<comment><USER29> It seems like it would be strange to give a printer a DNS name if you didn't intend to talk to it over the internet. If you're directly connected it doesn't need an IP at all.

I think the sniffing threat mentioned is overblown. As one of the commenters mentions, ISPs don't generally allow adjacent IPs to sniff traffic.

A bigger threat is that a vulnerability in the printer may have been exploited. E.g., for a long time most HP printers could have their firmware upgraded by sending them a print job. And so far the cursory look I've taken at various printer firmware has been really alarming – think thousands of calls to strcpy/memcpy and other unsafe friends.

Edit: Here's a reference for firmware upgrade via print job: [http://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/03_4_0.pd...](http://www.internetsociety.org/sites/default/files/03_4_0.pdf)

Edit2: Also, when I say "firmware upgrade" I mean arbitrary code – it wasn't verifying a digital signature or anything.

<comment><USER30> Printer firmware and drivers are the worst. I've integrated with a software package that supplies its own printer drivers because the manufactures can't make a driver that will actually work well.

They constantly screw up the most basic of things. A good test of a network printer is to set it offline, send 20 print jobs to it (a test page is fine), then set it back online. Way too many printers will not print out all 20 print jobs, despite reporting success for all of them (This is true even of $30k printers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Any time in the last 10 years I setup an independent email server it had horrible deliverability rates. I wonder how they worked around that. Getting your server whitelisted with all the major providers is a major hassle.

<comment><USER32> [http://www.mail-tester.com/](http://www.mail-tester.com/) is a good resource to use to help with this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The US government should give Guccifer the Medal of Honour. This is a farce.

</comment><comment><USER34> Also curious about USB - are there any USB logs and is that something logged by whatever OS her server was running? seems like it would have been really easy for things to move from email to usb...

<comment><USER35> That's a intersting point. Who knows if she even had a way to do that unless she connected remotely overseas via a secure client . Granted though it'd have to be highly secure

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I seem to recall something about a CIA head getting fired because he took a Mac from work home. Does anyone recall details of this? (I tried to find it, and failed.)

<comment><USER37> John Deutch?

[https://fas.org/irp/cia/product/ig_deutch.html](https://fas.org/irp/cia/product/ig_deutch.html)

<comment><USER36> Yeah, that was it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Bernie 2016?

</comment><comment><USER39> Am I the only one who dislikes the domain name itself? Every time I see it, I read it as "Clint One Mail", not "Clinton Email".

<comment><USER40> Yeah, as important and fascinating as the whole story is, every time I see "ClintonEmail.com," all I can think is that surely the Clintons of all people should have the influence and power to get a hold of just "Clinton.com."

I mean the current owner of clinton.com is some investment firm that could probably do just as well something like ClintonGroup.com or ClintonInvestments.com. If I was her, I would fight for the email address "email@example.com."

Then again, I'm a programmer, not a politician.

<comment><USER41> > If I was her, I would fight for the email address "firstname.lastname@example.com."

How does one "fight for an email address"?

Once you own a domain, you own it. It doesn't matter that it just so happens to be someone else's last name.

She would have had to pay most likely a large sum to the investment firm that already owns clinton.com... and perhaps they aren't interested in selling, or they value the domain too high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Other very serious concerns:

1\. Was it running RAID? If so, what level? Better not be RAID 5. Horrible write speed.

2\. Let's REALLY dig into the DNS. What about reverse lookups and CNAMEs.

3\. Any idea what the screensaver was? I'll reserve judgement until I have some confirmation.

4\. NIC driver version: Hearing that she just ran a generic MS driver for the Intel dual network card. Unbelievable.

<comment><USER43> Is your point that the published details are irrelevant? Because if so, I very much disagree. You can ignore the details if you want.

<comment><USER42> Yes, let's look at all the dns records created, edited, removed and theorize all possible devices that could have been connected or not.

Wouldn't a better rendering of all of this be a video from Taiwanese animation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A rough analogy for this situation would be if a company had an "employees must use blackberries" policy, but the CFO of the company outright refused because he wanted to use his iPhone. Are they going to fire the CFO over that? Possible but not likely, especially if he is doing a good job otherwise.

In the same way, the Secretary of State can also refuse to comply with government _policy_ (not law). You can't fire the Secretary of State for using the wrong email server. It just doesn't work that way. The fact that national security is involved does change things, but organizational politics is pretty much the same all over. If Clinton's email server contained the nuclear launch codes or the contents of Area 51 then the government would have handled it differently. It's unlikely that any lasting and serious security threats were exposed.</comment>


A Big Test for Big Batteries - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/14/business/energy-environment/california-big-batteries-as-power-plants.html <comment><USER2> AES just landed an even bigger battery storage deal in Hawaii:

[http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaii-co-op-signs-deal- for-...](http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaii-co-op-signs-deal-for- solarstorage-project-at-11kwh)

In California and Hawaii these storage projects will mostly be used in tandem with intermittent renewables. But batteries can convert any slowly-adjustable (or non-adjustable) electricity source into serving daily peaks. If nuclear plants could store some of their low-value output at 3 AM to serve the early evening demand peak around 6 PM, for example, it could increase the revenue they get from the same number of megawatt-hours. At today's storage prices that sort of electricity arbitrage isn't profitable but if storage gets cheap it will have broad impacts on the engineering and economics of electricity systems. It's not just about enabling higher renewable penetration, though that will be a big story too.

<comment><USER3> It's worth mentioning that grid power to the consumer is something like $0.36/kWh in Hawaii right now, which makes off grid PV with even old shitty AGM lead acid battery technology more economical.

<comment><USER4> Refrigerators aside, isn't home electricity usage pretty low in Hawaii?

<comment><USER3> For heating, yeah, but not for air conditioning and other stuff...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about liquid metal batteries?

[http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy?language=en)

From a naive/quick glance taking a Musk style "first principles" look at them, being made of elements that are literally "dirt cheap" and available in major construction project quantities would seem to be a decisive advantage.

EDIT: Seems they ran into major problems with seals: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541851/race-for-a-new- gri...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541851/race-for-a-new-grid-battery- hits-a-speed-bump/)

<comment><USER3> I am not aware of any that are actually shipping as commercial products that I can buy with a net30 PO, everything so far is PR fluff, lab test and field beta tests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone here have any context for whether the concerns about AES and Tesla batteries is at all founded or is it just journalistic hype?

I find it hard to believe that those companies haven't thought through battery management at this scale. They both have pretty solid engineering records and ability to deliver--not saying new things don't have teething problems--but fires and explosions?

<comment><USER7> Fire and explosions are indeed a risk when something goes wrong. I'm sure they thought it through, but that's why lithium batteries need safety systems.

[https://electrek.co/2016/12/19/tesla-fire-powerpack-test- saf...](https://electrek.co/2016/12/19/tesla-fire-powerpack-test-safety/)

<comment><USER8> Everything has risks, but the risks of a lithium-ion battery fire are pretty small compared to the huge gas leak that was part of the motivation for trying batteries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My admittedly ill-informed understanding is that flow batteries have the best basic characteristics for utility electric storage. Anybody know how they are coming along?

</comment><comment><USER10> Politicizing an engineering problem always fails, but this time I can't wait to buy these batteries on ebay sold as refurbished, when the politicians and executives come to the realization the project won't meet their expectations -- because the battery technology just isn't there yet, and they have to switch back to diesel generators. Like the ones we've been using since the 1930s (even before that) to deal with problems like this.

<comment><USER8> Who's doing the politicization here, though? The energy industry has been hyper-politicized for decades, and highly biased against changing technologies. The batteries are going to work as engineered, it's straightforward technology. The only question is the cost of those batteries.

This is also not a huge amount of batteries compared to, say, electric car batteries.</comment></comment>