What's the difference between UI design and UX design? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-s-the-difference-between-UI-design-and-UX-design

<comment><USER2> They're very similar. You design UI to provide a good UX. A good UX is so because of good UI.

The only difference I can think of is that UI may include looking beautiful (gradients, shine), while UX isn't concerned with that. Really, you're talking about similar things.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always looked at it as UI is a part of UX. The user interface is just that -- the interface to your site/application. The user interface incorporates the UI, but also includes how it feels to move throughout the UI and traverse and use the site/app.

</comment><comment><USER4> the top two answers are opposite.

</comment><comment><USER5> UI - UX = -IX

<comment><USER6> So, this was voted down because it was a reddit-style joke answer, but there's a kernel of truth in there.

A user interface is different from the user experience because of the interaction (abbreviated Ix; interaction design is IxD).

User experience is the entire experience of the user, and you can broaden it to include the documentation, the packaging, the APIs, the phone menus (I do), or you can narrow it to include just the purview of the application itself.

The user interface is just that: the interface, the actual buttons you click on and command prompts you type text into. The interface is controls laid out by developers and front-end engineers plus a visual treatment defined by graphic designers and visual artists, but the user experience designers told them what visual and contextual priority some controls have over others, provided a recommended information architecture for menus, a expertly defined placement for widgets, suggested reaction times for responses and copy for dialogs.

The study of how the users will interact with the application is the difference between throwing a bunch of controls in a window, and designing the experience they will have.</comment></comment>


Mave Public Beta – A drop-in SMS invite page - <AUTHOR> http://mave.io/blog/2015/05/01/mave-launches-public-beta/

<comment><USER2> I personally refuse to give apps access to contacts unless its actually necessary. What would this do in that case?

<comment><USER3> We fall back to a share page that let's you use the native sms client without contacts access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a screenshot of what this looks like?

<comment><USER5> Click on the homepage and you'll see.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, those 2 gifs didnt show up on iphone.</comment></comment></comment>


Music is community organizing - <AUTHOR> http://nationbuilder.com/music_is_community_organizing

<comment><USER2> It's crazy to think how one person can change a movement and the history of a band! I also liked how computer simulations really helped me understand how that one person really could influence the outcome of the band as a whole.</comment>


Show HN: I made a ReactJs Inbox app - <AUTHOR> https://themesguide.github.io/react-bootstrap-4-inbox/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one getting images that fail to load?

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps.. is it working for you now?</comment></comment>


Launchbox Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/05/launchbox-unleashes-its-first-nine-startups/ I think the Koofers one is the one I see being a huge success <comment><USER2> These are pretty impressive. Definitely closer to a YC batch than a TechStars one.

I could see myself using quite a few of these, especially JamLegend (I hope they'll allow compatibility with a Rock Band drumset).

<comment><USER3> Im one of the JamLegend guys, glad you are excited about it. We definitely want to get the Rock Band drums working, although we honestly haven't tried hooking them up yet. We got the Wii Guitar Hero controller working in no time using bluetooth.

<comment><USER2> Awesome! I'm on the waiting list, but I won't get upset if you bump me up the queue.

<comment><USER4> Same here :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These startups are awful -- especially that Heekya. ;)

There are a bunch of LB founders hovering on HN (MyGameMug, JamLegend, ShareMeme, Koofers, Buzzhub, and Heekya that I know of).

Heekya (my startup) is actually in private alpha testing -- shoot me an email david at heekya and I'll let you in.

Would love to get the HN community feedback when we're ready -- everyone here has been a great inspiration. Best advice ever: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95857>

First step on a hopefully long journey.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Based in Washington, D.C., LaunchBox is the Y Combinator of the East. "

Wait, I'm no geography professor, but where is Boston? I thought Y Combinator was the Y Combinator of the East.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, yeah Matt... YC is the YC of the East, West, Earth, and Universe. I think it's hard for the press to describe this new model because it's not an incubator and it's not venture capital, and "seed stage mentorship with little capital" is hard to describe.

So since YC helped create it, they're the easiest approximation. In fact, it's flattering.

<comment><USER6> It's flattering, but displays an even weaker grasp of basic geography than my own, which says a lot.

<comment><USER8> maybe because they YC does it in Silicon Valley too? for us in Europe you are all in the West...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A bit surprised seeing Luc Castera on that list (with ShareMeme). I have to assume it's the same guy as luccastera, though?

edit: After some research, what I meant to say was, congrats luccastera for launching!

<comment><USER10> Same guy :-) Thanks man.

<comment><USER11> Congrats Luc!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Since the Launchboxers appear to be watching this, can you share what you thought of the Launchbox experience? Are you moving to the valley (DC sounds like a weird place for a startup)?

<comment><USER12> The LaunchBox Digital program was excellent - the advisors are fantastic, the DC office space has a great "start-up feel" to it, and the whole summer was filled with fun (when we had time to take some breaks).

As one of the co-founders of Koofers.com, I think we would be staying in the Washington DC area. There is a large education based presence here in DC - including the Department of Education, Blackboard, Chronicle of Higher Education, Intelliworks, SmartThinking, etc....

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I can see the Koofers one being the big success out of those. It has that Facebook explosion factor to it

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the post and comment. We've made some exciting progress at Virginia Tech, and we hope to continue to provide helpful services for students/teachers across the nation.

<comment><USER13> Great to see another Hokie in the startup world! Legal question: If a professor requests his/her test to be removed, I am assuming you will have to comply?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats to sharememe

</comment><comment><USER15> Zadby is a great idea; do they have any competitors?

</comment><comment><USER16> Congrats to Razume</comment>


Tesla's Dangerous Sprint into the Future - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/07/magazine/tech-design-future-autonomous-cars-factory-tesla-sustainability-gigafactory.html <comment><USER2> From the article --

 _Imagine Tesla didn't exist, Steve Jurvetson told me. "What would the world look like? I have this sinking suspicion it wouldn't look that different than 10 years ago. A bunch of hybrid cars. A bunch of noise about hydrogen vehicles. You know, I don't think the world would look anything like today — where entire nations are saying, 'We're going to stop making gas cars.' "_

The last thought is the really compelling one for me, what would the world look like if Elon Musk hadn't started SpaceX and Tesla?

<comment><USER3> There are other space launch companies and other electric car companies. The time was ripe for both. SpaceX and (less clearly) Tesla have just been executing best and earlier than others.

Every car company is working on electrics, and they have been for quite a while. The limitations were battery technology and cost, and battery technology with laptops and cell phones made electric cars practical.

NASA was talking about fostering commercial space launch companies before SpaceX was founded, and the two of them have been in close cooperation (other commercial companies too of course). If SpaceX didn't exist, that strong partnership would have existed with a different company but would likely look similar.

There's a tendency to think that the world would be different without "revolutionary" people or companies, but usually what ends up happening is just being at the right place at the right time. Excellence is required to succeed, but take one specific revolutionary out of the picture and another would have taken their place.

Einstein is a great example of this. A brilliant man, no doubt, but he is famous for discovering things which were ripe for discovery. The pieces were all in place waiting for someone to put them together. Doing so, and before anyone else, was an accomplishment, but he wasn't unique in his ability to make things happen, he was just first. Like a marathon, somebody always finishes first but there are many others running behind them.

<comment><USER2> I see it quite differently of course.

If I understand your argument it is that the current state of affairs would exist with or without the key individuals we call out in history, because the environment would have created those changes anyway, and the individuals named would simply be other individuals who happened to be the ones to catalyze the change.

If I have characterized your argument incorrectly please help me understand it better.

The reason I disagree with that argument, as I see it, is that it implies a sort of 'fate' or destiny aspect of change and advancement. Which would be like saying that exhaust fumes from a car will eventually convert into water and co2 even without the platinum catalyst. Too often I have seen organizations and fields which were stably stagnant until an individual or group created a sea change that was, in hindsight, pretty obvious but it had resisted being detected for years.

<comment><USER3> For example: the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was absolutely going to happen in the decade or so when it did happen. Somebody had to go and do it, but the environment of tools, techniques, and general motivation were all there making it possible.

You find all sorts of examples of people independently discovering things at the same time, and this isn't just coincidence. Maybe most famously is Leibniz vs Newton creating calculus. The pieces were all in place for the mathematical study of change. The outcome wasn't predestined, each man's creation was quite different in ways, but they accomplished something that was ready to be accomplished.

Whether it's physics or technology, nature abhors a vacuum. Unexploited niches get filled. Sometimes in significantly different directions, but very often the outcome is strongly influenced by the opportunity.

In biology, this is a bit like convergent evolution. The implementation details aren't predestined, but general solutions to environmental problems _are_. Eyes and legs are very useful things to have, and they're nearly ubiquitous.

With Tesla, the deal is that we know we're going to run out of oil, and pollution sucks. Developing an alternative has been a big talking point since the 90s, and there are a whole lot of players in the game. Lots of companies are making lots of attempts and have been trying many different technologies. Lithium batteries are winning the technology race, they developed because of other consumer electronics and the environment is best for them. It's just evolution. Many other companies are trying different things and the same thing, it's not driven by copying Tesla (the competition helps though) it's driven by the niche need for a solution expanding and becoming more and more possible.

The variables are implementation details (fuel cells? lithium batteries? something else?) and timing. There can be quite a lot of uncertainty with "how" and "when" but quite a lot less with "if".

<comment><USER2> Fair enough, I can see your argument. However, I'm not persuaded.

Let's assume your hypothesis is correct, then given the population of practitioners for a given technological space, we should be able to find examples of catalyzing change in the technology space that was initiated by what would otherwise be an 'average' practitioner in that space right? Given that I would expect to be able to identify people that are considered 'average' by their peers prior to their making some large catalyzing change.

That is hard looking back as most biographers will call out all sorts of details that made someone special with the benefit of hindsight, but I'm looking for people more current who were considered 'ordinary' and yet they were the catalyst for a huge change.

Finding such examples would help me with your argument.

<comment><USER3> It is not that exceptional people don't exist, quite the opposite in fact. There are many many exceptional people made exceptional both by circumstance and talent in different proportions.

The best illustration of this I think could be learned from studying the development of physics between ~1850 to 1950. It becomes more and more difficult to think that each step wasn't inevitable as you learn about the sheer number of exceptional people and catalyzing changes. Each set of questions led to a new breakthrough and each breakthrough led to a new set of questions. It's hard to imagine the whole web falling apart for the loss of a single person. It was a great network of people and accomplishments influencing each other both average and exceptional.

A key that might make the big picture difficult to see is focusing on biographies which by name are focused on individuals instead of systems of people.

<comment><USER2> Excellent. I think we completely agree that there are many exceptional people, and the more there are looking a problem, the more likely a new and exceptional insight/change will occur.

I also agree physics is a good example as it draws in many exceptional people and each provide pieces of the puzzles.

Using physics as a metaphor, I _also_ believe that there is a sort of "activation energy" which grows, perhaps exponentially higher, the further away an idea is from the common set of ideas that are considered 'canon' in the space. So the idea that private companies can build rockets profitably without government subsidy is a 'small' distance away from the canon that without the government's help the "business" of building and launching rockets is a money losing proposition. And the idea that you could 'land' a rocket after launching it in some way was clearly identified as a workable, not necessarily practical, idea back in the 60's. And it was certainly considered in the DC-X days of the 80's and 90's. But the idea that someone was going to make a profitable business out of launching rockets and recovering the boosters by landing them, was an idea that few people in the industry really considered. It had very high 'activation energy'.

My hypothesis is that without an individual or group that has the necessary level of "activation energy" to get an idea from the pool of the possible to make it the new way to do things, those ideas _do not happen_ even if there are people who recognize that they "could" happen.

When I look at the electric car market I see the General Motors EV-1 which was almost exactly the same idea of the Tesla but done with insufficient activation energy to convert the entire auto industry into that mode of thinking. So I ask what did Elon bring to the problem that the CEO of GM didn't? Why did Elon have the runway to prototype, build, redesign, build again, and then build again into a market changing car, when GM already had all the expertise in the world about building electric cars and the connections to do everything Elon did in probably 1/3 the time it took Tesla? Why didn't someone in GM pop out of the woodwork and make Electric cars happen? What was different?

GM has some of the worlds best vehicle designers and engineers. Some of whom left GM to go work at Tesla. I believe Elon was the catalyst, and had he not started what he did I don't think we would be driving GM Model S equivalents today. _That_ is the difference in people who catalyze change and the elements of change being available in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> This discussion reminds me of the "Everything is a Remix" [1] documentary. We tend to look at the winners to explain history, even though in many cases multiple players were working on the same theories at the same time, and the likely outcome would have been exactly the same if the winners have not existed.

Worth watching.

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

<comment><USER2> I remember when it came out. Conceptually it is a remix of James Burke's _Connections_ [1] which goes through all sorts of discoveries from their origins to their modern manifestations.

It is an essential element of this discussion that there are ideas that are brought up discarded, used, re-used, and remixed. But a more interesting question is not the origin of a particular idea, but how these implementations are "catalyzed" into the mainstream by different individuals. And much like chemical reactions where the components are already in abundance around the catalyst, the elements of these ideas are already floating around.

My hypothesis is that some individuals have a way of looking at the world and thinking which allows them to live in a world of many possibilities that are not currently possible. And, when given the opportunity, to pull the rest of us into there version of the universe with astonishing results.

The NY Times article reminded me of that when the question of what the world might look like today if Tesla hadn't been started was reminder of that sort of change.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_\(TV_series\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is comments like these that exasperate me.

 _As one Tesla executive involved in its design told me, the goal here was not only to minimize the movement of materials like lithium and cobalt but also to shorten the path of every molecule that moves through the plant. "Because the further a molecule needs to travel," he said, "the more cost gets added into it. We actually think of it in terms of molecular distance."_

It's things like these, where obvious truths are packaged as some sort of insight that really get my goat.

<comment><USER6> I was cutting wood with my kids the other day and showing them how you have to pick the wood up as little as possible so you could get more done with less effort.

No talk about molecules necessary - just don't do stuff you don't need to do. Sure it takes a lot of planning to achieve but its been a standard concept around getting the job done for, I would say, millennia...

<comment><USER7> "Don't move it twice" was a common saying when I had a summer job contracting. Don't move the wood off the truck, cut it in the bed of the truck, bring cut pieces in. Save all the dinky, random cuts for last, do them all in one go, instead of running back and forth to the truck every time. Clean from the top down, from the back to the front, so you don't have to clean something twice.

There's a lot of wisdom in the trades! I guess you care more for efficiency when it's your own energy you're spending, instead of some random computer's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As for Elon being one of the driving forces behind the transition to electric - Rock on Elon, nice damn job - as far as L5 AV - umm, you're so full of it you need to drag a septic tank - I'm just a little fella, and I do admire the primarily visual approach, but this all really boils down to 'You look, but you do not see' \- I've been in an out of machine vision for a long time, and the one thing that's always been true is that we fail, and fail again, when we ignore the gigantic cognitive stack that is processing that visual data and making decisions based on it (and if we don't ignore it, we are forced to admit we can't handle it) . L1,L2, L3... yeah, sure, it's not that hard -I think 'Logan' got the freight trucks in 10 years spot on. L5 - I'll believe it when Elon and the Times author leave NYC for a late fall drive to check out a VT ski home, say about mid October - storm gone thru, cloudy/foggy night, poor visibility, and the only brains you got are in that car - better hope it knows that leaves get ripped down then and piled up in the twists and turns of backcountry VT roads - my guess is there will be a funeral, or it's gonna be a multi-day trip - the ability of a machine to go 'I have seen this before' has nothing at all to do with 'I understand what I am seeing and can draw rational inferences' My 2c, admittedly playing with midget systems, but the failure modes are pretty much the same

<comment><USER9> I think viable L5 somewhere in Arizona is different from L5 in New York, so autonomous vehicles will start spreading from places with good weather. But I don't think L5 is required for successful start of autonomous fleets. Advanced L4 with an option of remote 'driver' connecting for special cases driving (like car stuck or something), should be enough.

<comment><USER8> L5 is L5 - if the system can't tell, then it ain't L5 - and the driver 'connecting' won't work - it's basically 'please doze for three hours and then deal with a crisis within the blink of an eye' Pilots have enough trouble with this and they have 6DOF in a mostly isolated space - I do believe, but all my fun comes from learning about the spectacular levels of failure and hubris in much smaller systems :-) Think of it this way - if it's AZ, OK, I pick Flagstaff when the snows have just started to come and grease the road

<comment><USER10> Having been caught out in Tucson hailstorms with a 0% precipitation forecast, I'm not much impressed by "L5 for some regions, sometimes" myself.

L4, sure, map easy suburban spaces carefully and wake up your driver if things get weird. But L5 is intended to be human-parity, or at least have well- defined boundaries. It can give up and park until the snow stops, but if you're taking out the steering wheel it had better not stop more than humans do - and offer a "chance it anyway" button for if the snow isn't stopping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like the AV aspect distracts from the far more immediate EV aspect. AV disrupts more, in as much as it alters the dynamics of moving on roads. EV disrupts faster, as it displaces ICE. AV takes longer, has higher legislative barriers and is an almost unbounded problem (recognize all <x> which are a threat to your vehicle, recognize all <y> you are a threat to, from everything, all the time)

I think if the AV part had been cast more clearly into the future, we could have seen more energy and capital behind fixing the EV problems. For instane, we didn't get battery swap. Why? Its obviously the most immediate path to faster charge problems. Relying on future chemistry of batteries to make it possible to fix the charge time problem is praying for rain. Relying on altering out perceptions of what travel time is, by making the stop "fun" is yanking my chain. Making the batteries ephemeral and swapping them out would have made charge delay a non-problem.

EV alters more immediate problems. batteries are more immediately interesting. AV is being tackled in the mining industry and other restricted vehicle contexts.

<comment><USER12> The problem with battery swaps was that you're exchanging a big heavy $20,000 box with minimal assurance of its integrity. I'd rather wait for _my_ battery to charge in 20 minutes rather than swap one for another, never knowing if I'm getting bad hardware in the process.

A recurring overlooked point of EVs: minimal exceptions aside, you begin every day with a full charge, and with 300+ mile batteries you're unlikely to run out most days. You almost never have to "fill up" like with gasoline; a 5 minute gas "recharge" every few days loses to never having to "recharge" at all (park for the night, plug in, charged by morning). In this context, swapping the entire battery seems distressing overkill. Trying to explain this paradigm shift to people who never drove EVs is...difficult.

<comment><USER13> I never realized what a pain the ass it is to drive a gas car until we got the Leaf, while keeping the gas car. It's a first-world problem for sure, but having to go out of my way to "recharge" now seems so...primitive. As you say, it's difficult to explain to the unwashed.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I get it. I know my driving is dominated by short run. But I also know that my desire for long run country driving is there. My key point wasn't to sell battery swap. It was to try and argue autonomous vehicle design should be decoupled from EV distribution.

<comment><USER14> That's why, for me, the Tesla Supercharging network was a complete game changer. I've gone on multiple multi-day trips that were enabled by the Supercharger. We got rid of our last ICE car more than a year ago.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tennessee Senate passes "Don't Say Gay" Bill - <AUTHOR> http://feministing.com/2011/04/22/tennessee-senate-passes-dont-say-gay-bill/ <comment><USER2> It's best to keep the homosexual agenda out of schools.

<comment><USER3> It's best to keep the heterosexual agenda out of schools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a minute, I was surprised Tennessee of all states would pass anti-hate speech laws like that... then I read the article.

Quite the depressing reality check.</comment>


Ask HN: Hibernation in Linux - Will it ever work? - <AUTHOR>

Will hibernation be supported on Linux in the near future? I've mainly used Ubuntu and Fedora, and I'm afraid to hibernate my laptop on Linux, almost after every second or third time, the system crashes and is unable to resume (Sleep is also not much reliable). Also, it takes longer to boot up from hibernation than a shutdown and restart. When will we be seeing hibernation on Linux, at least on par with Windows, in terms of reliability? <comment><USER2> mine has been reliable on a sony vaio vpceb23fm and on another sony vaio i don't recall the model number for.

seems quite hardware dependent.</comment>


Robert Reich: Why We Need a Wealth Tax - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcZVleu_L1E <comment><USER2> > "Dynastic wealth also magnifies race and gender disparities"

I get the race part (rich white people leave their money to their children, not strangers), but gender? People leave their money to their children, and a bit more than half of those will be women, so women will inherit just like men. Is there solid data that parents choose to give more to their sons, or even overgo their daughters completely if they don't have any male heirs?

Also "wealth tax" doesn't sound like a good term, but maybe that's just me being a non-native. "Wealth tax" sounds like it would hit anybody that owns a house, is debt free and has some money in the bank. The video suggests targeting people with a net wealth in excess of 50m USD. If the term sounds too common, the wrong crowd might feel threatened.</comment>


Like, perfect custom scrollbars dog, inspired by Lion. - <AUTHOR> http://dabblet.com/gist/2573411

<comment><USER2> Just used this on a consulting project. Thanks for the time saver!

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice!</comment>


Every Single Email Client (That I Know Of) Is Completely Broken and Here's Why - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottporad.com/2011/06/08/every-single-email-client-that-i-know-of-is-completely-broken-and-heres-why/

<comment><USER2> But.. they're email clients.

      You know what your Inbox is?  It's inbound messages.  Just like voice mail or snail mail or smoke signals.

And if I turn on an answering machine, or open a letterbox, I expect to see the inbound messages, not my todo list or calendar.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think the author understands what email is.

As someone has commented on the blog itself, it's not like your Telephone voicemail system is a task list!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd argue that his workflow is broken.

If he is sitting all day staring at his inbox rather than _shock_ switching windows between his task tracker or work or whatever, and his e-mail interface, then that doesn't make every email client broken.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's an app for that...in fact, there's a YC S11 startup for that.

<http://www.taskforceapp.com/>

Of course, the author's idea that email is isomorphic to a todo list is pretty ludicrous.

</comment><comment><USER6> So it looks like a lot of people here do not have broken workflows, and mail works for them. However, I like the author, have significant problems with my inbox.

My inbox is as someone much smarter than me said "A todo list others write for you". The problem is that they often have valid points, and I do indeed need to do the tasks outlined in the mail. I would pay serious money for a tool that helped me move tasks out of mail into my todo list in a sane fashion. As it is the act of managing todo's inbound from my mail is a major % of my work day. And that seems crazy.

<comment><USER7> I believe there are various tools that will do exactly that for you.

For instance, I manage my tasks using OmniFocus, and in Apple's Mail program, pressing a keyboard shortcut instantly creates a task in OmniFocus, with the content of the email added as an attachment to the todo, and a link back to the original message (just in case I want to refer to the whole thread or something).

Another keyboard shortcut moves the message to my "Old Mail" folder on my IMAP server. (I used to organize old mail by client or project or whatever, but modern searching makes that unnecessary.)

I use two separate actions because the normal thing I do with a message is glance at it and put it in Old Mail. If I need to make a task out of it, it's one extra keystroke.

So my Inbox only has new messages in it that I haven't seen yet, and my task list has all my tasks, including the ones originating from email, without much friction.

<comment><USER8> I use a similar approach. I have three folders I sort all mail into (Archive, ToDo, Followup). With one keystroke any new messages get sent to the proper folder and my task list simply consists of my ToDo email folder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> spoiler: because they're not GTD apps.</comment>


Is it time for a NGO based Git hosting service for OSS projects? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/i_error/status/595937610683568129

<comment><USER2> The beauty of distributed source control is that github could shutdown and no history would be lost. The pull-request network would need to be rebuilt elsewhere. The best way is to have multiple large services and ease of migrating between them. Cross-provider pull-requests?</comment>


CryptoLocker's crimewave: A trail of millions in laundered Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/cryptolockers-crimewave-a-trail-of-millions-in-laundered-bitcoin-7000024579/ <comment><USER2> I'm actually pretty happy cryptolocker's around. No, wait, don't hang me yet, stuff your pitchforks, let me explain.

Let's face it, computer security has been pretty bad trough pretty much the entire personal computing era. I don't need to point any fingers, the guilty know who they are.

Now unlike some others, Apple and Linux do try to do a few things about that, in different ways, with varying degrees of success. But it's better, by far, than the teeming mess on that other platform we won't be mentioning.

I believe if we want to use IT in the future, that this stuff's got to get pretty much bullet and foolproof. And without a credible threat it won't get there. Now, one of the things that held the development of a credible threat back, was the limited ways in which security holes could be monetized. "Fortunately" that's no longer a problem.

And now that I think we have a credible threat. Will we now, please, with suggar on top, get computer security right? Isn't like, kinda time?

<comment><USER3> Computer science solved this problem (the "Confused Deputy" [1]) _decades_ ago [2] [3] with capability-based security [4].

I don't have the time to find the exact reference I'm thinking of right now, but consider taking a look at one of the papers that give a background to CapDesk [5]:

> Which addresses, among other things:

> "All Windows and Unix operating systems (referred to as "Winix" hereafter) > utterly disregard the concept of POLA [Principle of Least Authority]. When > you launch any application—be it a $5000 version of AutoCAD fresh from the > box or the Elf Bowling game downloaded from an unknown site on the Web—that > application is immediately and automatically endowed with all the authority > you yourself hold. Such applications can plant Trojans as part of your > startup profile, read all your email, transmit themselves to everyone in > your address book using your name, and can connect via TCP/IP to their > remote masters for further instruction. This is, candidly, madness." [6]

Since then, things have changed _slightly_ \- UAC under Windows, for instance, means applications now only have the ability to steal and hold your highly valuable and personal documents for ransom, but hey at least these sneaky trojans don't have admin rights! Which is of course the exact scenario that Cryptolocker happily exploits.

There's really no reason a piece of junk attached to your email application should execute _any_ more authority than you _explicitly_ grant it. (And no that doesn't require clicking a bunch of buttons to "Allow" access -- intelligent UI design can make much of this completely transparent, _provided_ the host platform is capability-based.)

It's not that companies like Microsoft aren't well aware of capability-based security [7], it just seems to be that the appetite isn't there to _really_ solve user's problems (breaking stuff like the Start Menu appears to be more important), despite the valiant efforts of some really smart people [8]. To be fair, shifting to a capability-based system would be a significant engineering effort, but definitely well within the realms of Microsoft or Apple's capabilities.

(Interestingly, some of the ideas on erights.org were influenced by Nick Szabo, who created "Bit gold" and who a few people think might be Nakamoto himself [though he denies it] [9])

[1a] [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/ConfusedDeputy.html](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/ConfusedDeputy.html)

[1b] [http://erights.org/elib/capability/deputy.html](http://erights.org/elib/capability/deputy.html)

[2] [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/Gnosis/Gnosis.html](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/Gnosis/Gnosis.html)

[3] [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/Key370/Key370.html](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/Key370/Key370.html)

[4a] [http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/capabilityIntro/index.html](http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/capabilityIntro/index.html)

[4b] [http://erights.org/elib/capability/3parts.html](http://erights.org/elib/capability/3parts.html)

[5] [http://www.combex.com/papers/index.html](http://www.combex.com/papers/index.html)

[6] [http://www.combex.com/tech/edesk.html](http://www.combex.com/tech/edesk.html)

[7] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/singularity/](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/singularity/)

[8] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability- based_security](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security)

[9a] [http://erights.org/related.html](http://erights.org/related.html) [9b] [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what- took-y...](http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so- long.html)

<comment><USER4> This sounds a lot like how Android does security - each app requests a specific list of permissions at install time, and you can either accept or reject it. That, and the apps being signed to prevent tampering, and by default can only be installed from the Play store.

I think Android security has proven to be pretty solid - there have been a few spyware apps, mostly killed quickly, but nothing that was able to spread on it's own like the big desktop viruses.

One thing that I'd like to see added that Android doesn't seem to have right now is a more limited Internet permission. Right now, apps have to either request full permission to send and receive anything on the internet, or no connection at all. Why not a permission to communicate only with specific domain names? Like Evernote can request permission to only communicate with addresses resolved from evernote.com, instead of anything on the internet. It might also have the effect of pushing apps to use the Android ad API instead of their own.

<comment><USER5> Only problem is that I don't know of anyone that examines that list of permissions, and will reject an app if those permissions seem to much. How is a regular user to know if it is bad for an app to access your phone book, or internet connection? Depending on the app, this may be necessary for the app to function. Or for it to serve ads.

What is needed, is for trusted third parties to verify if a given list of permissions is needed, and give (via a security software add-on) a popup with an assessment of how safe it is to install that app -- green, yellow, or red, for example. That is about the only thing that most end users (and even busy geeks) can really comprehend.

<comment><USER4> There's at least some truth to that, but that's the point that I was trying to get to. GP claims that "Computer science solved this problem decades ago" in reference to capability-based security. Android is the only OS that I'm aware of implementing anything like that on a mass scale, and while security there has proven to be at least decent, I'd hardly call it a solved problem.

Capability-based security is ultimately just another buzzword, no more of a perfect solution than any of the others. I don't think you can call any type of security problem solved by your pet technology until it is deployed at scale in the real world and proven to work. Until you have had tens of millions of users and hundreds of thousands of developers bashing away at it for years, you just don't know if you've really solved the problem.

Android's capability-based security is good, but IMHO the more important security innovation is secure app-specific data stores. You might request more permissions than you should, and some clueless users might install it anyways, but you still can't ever get access to the data or credentials stored by the banking app, the social media app, etc.

<comment><USER5> Ah, so instead of asking the user for permission to access something, an app also would need another app's permission to access that data. Of course, this has already been pioneered by companies implementing DRM, but still, I wonder how this can be implemented in a general sense.

<comment><USER4> Er, what I meant is that Android already does this. All apps' data stores are private to that app by default. The only way for any other app to access them is for the owning app to specifically set up an interface and permissions to access it, and the accessing app to request those permissions at install time.

I don't have much experience with iOS, but I expect it does something similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In a (more) perfect world, the NSA would put considerable resources towards stopping this activity as opposed to spying on their own citizens and allies. A guy can dream...

<comment><USER7> In a more perfect world, the people would understand that for the NSA to be able to find/track/stop this type of activity, they would have to have access to a large amount of global traffic, mine it, throw away what they don't need, keep the rest.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

<comment><USER8> No they wouldn't need that, there is plenty of evidence to investigate here without the need to buy half of the world's production of hard drives in perpetuity. What's needed is law enforcement's cooperation to bring the perpetrators to justice—that might be a little harder to do actually, but as the scale of this sort of things increases even the most crooked of eastern bloc countries are going to start getting a few offers they can't refuse.

<comment><USER9> If you imagine the NSA minus the espionage, isn't that basically the FBI computer crimes division?

<comment><USER10> But with a real budget and people who are actually trained for the job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hell, that's nothing. Here's something truly criminal: [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageo...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/outrageous- hsbc-settlement-proves-the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213)

<comment><USER12> There is no evidence anyone at HSBC was willfully assisting or complicit in money laundering. The fines are for weak controls that failed to detect money laundering.

<comment><USER13> Oh please! The fines are for _disabling_ the controls that would have automatically flagged money laundering transactions. Source: the link OP posted.

Still, it is a mere slap on the wrist that is guaranteed to have no permanent repercussions to deter such behavior. It's a clusterfuck and I don't see a solution emerging without both the _war on drugs_ ending and multi-year incarceration becoming mandatory for financial crimes.

<comment><USER12> Oh Please! Matt Taibbi is in no way a credible source.

> Disabling

Or alternatively, just not enabling tougher controls. There's no evidence, or indeed suggestion by prosecutors, that controls were deliberately set low to deliberatly faciliate money laundering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why does Windows still let arbitrary applications downloaded via email run? I'm sure the vast majority of cryptolocker victims have no desire to share binary executables via email.

I wish there was an "only run Microsoft approved applications" option I could enable for my parents. Kind of like OS X's Gatekeeper.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is the file with instructions on how to decrypt your files named "REAMDE"?

<comment><USER16> That novel has too much Russian mafia inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could the bitcoin network reverse spends into the attacker's address(es) if everyone came together and agreed to do so? Or at least prevent spending out of it?

<comment><USER18> If _every_ miner would join in, preventing spending would be possible. Reversing the spending is near impossible (it would take cooperation of not just the miners, but also every address that was in a transaction since the offending transaction).</comment></comment>


Intel's 50-Core Xeon Phi: The New Era of Inexpensive Supercomputing - iso-8859-1 http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/intels-50-core-xeon-phi-the-new-era-of-i/240105810?donkey <comment><AUTHOR> I'm really excited about our massively parallel future, not least because I have to run scientific code that would greatly benefit from it. But at the moment it's so hard to program for this sort of thing: can someone explain why, in simple terms, something like OpenCL or CUDA is so damn complicated? Is there any way to avoid having to have a low-level understanding of how a GPU or co-processor works, rather than expecting the vendor to implement an easier to use solution? I'm thinking about, e.g., Matlab's "parfor" (parallel for) command, which is super easy to use.

The article states that "All of these [CUDA/OpenCL] problems go away with the Phi. It's a pure x86 programming model that everyone is used to. It's a question of reusing, rather than rewriting, code" but I find it hard to believe I can just drop existing code into it and expect decent performance.

<comment><USER2> Have you used OpenMP (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMP>)? It has the flavor of parfor -- you identify the embarrassingly parallel loops in your C or Fortran, put in something like

        #pragma openmp parallel for

in front of them, and your code transfers through pretty much intact -- it handles the thread wrappers. You can add other pragmas for the times when you need locking.

This is a much less intrusive setup than CUDA; you don't have to worry about loading data, or double/float conflicts.

The OpenMP extensions could be a very good fit for scientific programming on this coprocessor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks; I'll take a look. But OpenMP is CPU-only right? Apple's got their (currently less portable, admittedly) Grand Central Dispatch that does something similar. But as far as I know, if you want portable GPU code your only option is OpenCL, and even then it requires optimisation depending what device you're using it on (or so I've heard).

<comment><USER3> OpenMP 4.0 is likely to have support for accelerator devices (i.e, move the necessary data on to the device, run the computation, and move back to the host). in fact, that's one of the methods you can use the Phi right now (intel have extensions to OpenMP)

or if you can't be bothered to wait for such a standard, you should have a look at OpenACC[1], which does exactly this, and exists now. you end up adding code like

        #pragma acc kernels for

on top of your for loops, it does the low level work for you.

[1] <http://www.openacc-standard.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lots of cores means lots of threads - 4 hyperthreads per core. So 200+ threads could be handy in high-bandwidth low-latency situations. E.g. it could make a dandy server for delivering low-latency streams like stock quotes. You would want a new kernel model, where you bound program threads to particular hyperthreads and blocked in user-space on events - so your hyperthread cache was always hot.

<comment><USER5> Not horribly relevant from a software perspective, but as a hardware geek I think the way they're doing threading is really interesting. Big OoO processors like a normal Xeon or a Power7 usually use simultaneous multithreading (SMT) which means that you have instructions from two threads being fed to the execution units every clock cycle, and since they often aren't in contention for the same resources you get higher throughput. Some in-order processors like a Niagra often use block multithreading (BMT) where you run one process until you get a cache miss, then switch to another thread with some delay as the pipeline is flushed.

What the Phi is doing is combining those approaches, running two threads simultaneously and switching threads out on cache-misses. This way you only double rather than quadrupaling your control structures, but you don't have your cores entirely unutalized when you're swapping threads. A really nifty compromise, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if you could use this to run lots and lots of small virtualized nodes? I know that's not the intended use case but I wonder if it's possible and would perform well?

<comment><USER7> Memory bandwidth would limit the performance unless your VMs were running something with a very small memory footprint, about 160 megabytes per instance.

Having said that, I've used Unix workstations with less RAM attached than that through much less than 7GBps worth of bus...

<comment><USER8> Phi's memory _bandwidth_ is very high but its memory _capacity_ is very low (a normal Xeon can drive ~192 GB cheaply).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've read about Xeon Phi a few months ago and I really want to get my hands on one. My problems are in the embarrassingly parallelizable class (or almost). Having said that, does anybody know how each Xeon Phi core performs with respect to a modern Intel processor (i7 or Xeon) for standard numerical code (Linpack etc.)?

<comment><USER10> They're Pentium-class x86 cores and barely any more than front end control processors for the vector hardware. The fact it's x86 is almost incidental, IMHO; the vector ISA is all programmers should really care about on the Phi.

<comment><USER11> I guess that means they've got primitive (Pentium Pro equivalent) branch predictors and memory pre-fetchers then?

Are they even out-of-order? I.e. is it Pentium or Pentium Pro class?

<comment><USER12> [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6451/the-xeon-phi-at-work- at-t...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6451/the-xeon-phi-at-work-at-tacc)

 _Each core is a simple in order x86 CPU (derived from the original Pentium) with a 512-bit SIMD unit._

<comment><USER11> So the branch predictors will be crap, but thanks to the hyperthreading, it probably won't be noticeable on most workloads...

<comment><USER13> Maybe I'm missing something, but do in-order architectures even have much use for branch prediction? They can't speculatively execute based on the outcome of a conditional, right?

<comment><USER14> Sure they can. Branch prediction allows you to move an instruction along the pipeline before the instruction determining its outcome has been retired. Without branch prediction, every conditional jump will potentially stall the pipeline. With branch prediction, a correctly predicted branch executes quickly, and a mis-predicted branch results in a pipeline flush.

Instruction re-ordering is more about taking full advantage of multiple execution units (ALUs, etc.), or not completely stalling the pipeline to wait on a memory fetch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm sure a lot of us here would love to have a cheap supercomputer to perform some heavily parallelizable workloads on our servers. And it this going to dramatically lower the cost of virtual private instances? I really can't wait to see some benchmarks.

<comment><USER3> cheap it is certainly not. additionally, all the tests i've seen indicate that kepler/tahiti have got little to worry about.

<comment><USER16> GPGPUs are notoriously hard to extract high performance. If you're an enterprise customer with no readily-available GPGPU code, Xeon Phi makes much more sense GPUs for a few reasons.

First, the talent pool for HPC x86 programmers is an order of magnitude larger than for expert GPGPU programmers - Xeon Phi is just a virtual x86 server rack with TCP/IP messaging.

Second, the amount of time and effort to extract useful performance from GPGPUs is quite a lot; if it's for internal use and you're not selling the code to the masses, you're likely to get the same amount of performance with less time on the Phi, unless you're going for "the best, regardless of money & time".

Last, most enterprise customers will want ECC + other compute features. They're sold in the pro-level 3k+ Teslas, which happen to be more expensive than the Phi.

Where GPGPU does make sense: consumer-level hardware using already-written software (workstations and hobbyists in particular) and businesses where performance/watt is crucial at any cost.

<comment><USER17> Phi architecture is closer to a GPU than a rack of x86 servers.

With 60 cores reading memory over a common ring bus latency will kill you unless you tile your loops to maximize cache reuse [1], at which point you might as well write a GPU code which preloads blocks of data to local memory and works there.

Also, to beat performance of normal x86 CPU you must use vector instructions, what gives you all the little problems GPU warps are known to cause.

[1] [http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/cache-blocking- tech...](http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/cache-blocking-techniques)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Will ARM servers have PCIe slots?

<comment><USER5> A quick Google reveals there are already ARM servers with PCIe slots. <http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-openrdudetails.aspx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> why does the url include donkey as the query string?

<comment><USER20> Probably submitted before, thus a change to the url was necessary to circumvent HNs filter.

<comment><USER21> Yup, just yesterday <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4784834>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 8 GB of RAM total?

<comment><USER23> Seems pretty good if you compare it to a GPU.

<comment><USER24> The impressive thing is the memory bandwidth though. That's the one thing I've always loved GPUs for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> OR... just spend ~$1000 and get __3070 __cores of what you really need (FLOPS)

How?

The latest and greatest Nvidia card at your favorite retailer.

<comment><USER3> consumer kepler boards have no double precision hardware, in this case a Phi would destroy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> don't know where the 50 core figure comes from, as a Phi has 60 cores (61 in the "better" model).

<comment><USER8> Until a few days ago Intel was saying "over 50" cores; some people forgot to flush their cache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That article is riddled with errors.

<comment><USER27> Examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _Suggested reatail pricing for the initial model is $2649, with subsequent > models expected to cost less than $2000_

That's $44.15 per 1 GHz core.

AMD FX-6300 Six-Core 3.5GHz is $138 = $23 per core (and much faster cores).

Intel Xeon 5148 2.33ghz is $18.

<comment><USER29> How do differences in supporting-hardware/density change the effective pricing? It seems to me like the Phi cores could end up cheaper once you factor in everything else that you need to get that many cores of something else.

<comment><USER28> You need just three of AMDs CPUs to match the 60 1GHz cores.

You can get a quad CPU motherboard relatively cheaply:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Arima-Quad-CPU-16-Core-AMD- Opteron-M...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Arima-Quad-CPU-16-Core-AMD-Opteron- Motherboard-w-PSU-/110585626008)

Also don't forget to add the same costs for the Phi solution.

<comment><USER30> The 50-core Xeon sounded great up until the $2600 price tag. You can buy a lot of CPU cores for that much money if you have quad-socket boards like that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shell Scripts for Managing Markdown Notes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/RyanGreenup/cadmus <comment><AUTHOR> Recently there was [a thread]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883270)) on _Notable_ and many commented that they were upset that it was no longer open source.

This is something that actually concerned me and so I started using a lot of `bash` scripts to emulate behaviour that I like in Notable, that way I could use _Notable_ without the fear of being locked it but I could try and emulate its behavior in a way that more suited my workflow.

I put the script I use [up on my _GitHub_ ]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883270)) and I recently [made a _Reddit_ post]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883270](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23883270)). I thought maybe you guys could find them helpful or offer feedback?

<comment><USER2> I did a similar thing to replace my personal workflow that I'd been using a home instance of JIRA for for some time.

I thought about opening it up, but TBH there's loads of these things already, and the real value for me is that I built it myself and it conforms perfectly to what I need. I looked at a few others, but the overhead of grokking someone else's tool was just too much of a hassle for me.

The ergonomics of these things are really close to perfect when you decide yourself what features you want and how they should be implemented.

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't agree more about the difficulty of grokking somebody else's tool.

The thing is though it took me a long time to get to the level where I could put something like this together and I wish I could have had some sort of guidance earlier on.

That's why I've tried to make my implementation modular, so others can take the things that they haven't figured out from mine and implement it in there workflow.

I should get around to documenting it so others can take replicate, imitate or fork it.

<comment><USER2> I wish you the best!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I haven't been on here for long, but I must say, I'm really amazed at how friendly this community is! HackerNews really sets itself apart.

</comment><comment><USER3> The shell had autocomplete suggestions?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you mean.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: First things you do when launching terminal - <AUTHOR>

I'm wondering what other developers workflows are like. I'm fairly new to using Linux day to day for web development as well as the command line.<p>Are there any beginning procedures you do when you first begin work? <comment><USER2> I don't really have a pattern that I follow when I launch the terminal, but I'd say the first command that I run is either git status or git pull --rebase since I'm usually working in a git repository. It helps to have a custom "environment" configured just how you like it. I keep my dotfiles (configurations) hosted on GitHub (<http://github.com/hodgesmr/dotfiles>) so that I can easily load them up on any machine I'm working on and others can use the if they like.

Zach Holman did a good post about dotfiles: [http://zachholman.com/2010/08/dotfiles-are-meant-to-be- forke...](http://zachholman.com/2010/08/dotfiles-are-meant-to-be-forked/)

</comment><comment><USER3> su -</comment>


Power tool manufacturers and who owns them - <AUTHOR> https://www.protoolreviews.com/news/power-tool-manufacturers-who-owns-them/43632/ <comment><USER2> TIL that Festool and SawStop are under one umbrella!

For those that don't know, SawStop is one of the most impressive recent techical innovations in tablesaws. It basically smashes a running blade down into an aluminium crashblock as soon as it detects something conductive touching it.

It's great to watch it work: [https://youtu.be/rnlTGndRi38?t=158](https://youtu.be/rnlTGndRi38?t=158)

Also, the list is missing at least Mafell and Fein, but they are (like Hilti and Makita) simply owned by themselves. Edit: and Lamello!

<comment><USER3> The best part about it is that SawStop went to each of the tool manufacturers asking to license their technology so people could be safer. For an extra cost of $10, they ended up having to build their own hardware because noone took them up on it.

<comment><USER4> The benefit to the tool maker of SawStop is clear: not only does it save the fingers of your customers, it destroys a large number of components in the saw after use. This means that the customer must buy a new motor, mount, etc. after almost losing a finger; a trade that I personally would be willing to make.

<comment><USER5> I can assure you that it does _not_ damage the motor, mount, arbor, trunnion assembly, or any other major components of the saw. The cartridge is expended, but that is the only part of the saw that needs to be replaced as a matter of course. Whether the blade survives or not is a bit of a crapshoot, but the smart money is on having to replace it.

If you happen to trip the saw with flesh, Saw Stop will send you a free replacement cartridge if you mail them your expended one. They'll run diagnostics and verify that it was tripped on flesh, and mail you a new one.

Source: I've been present in two shops for 4 trips on two different saws, all other people. 3 were an aluminum miter gauge fence (Incra), one was fingers. In both cases the saws are known to have been tripped a great many more times than that. Neither saw has had anything but the blade and cartridge replaced.

<comment><USER6> Worth noting that replacing a blade can be a fairly expensive proposition depending on the blade you were using, but of course the argument is that the cost of that is far cheaper than medical bills and lost fingers. Seems like a valid argument assuming it's not a false trip.

Also, the safety feature can be temporarily disabled if needed to cut through something like damp wood that might cause a false trip.

<comment><USER7> A $200 saw blade can be resharpened after such an incident. It's not as expensive as you might think.

<comment><USER8> Generally at around the same cost as a cheaper blade. I'm not sure who the _actual_ market is for hella'spensive blades; the difference in cut quality I've not actually seen; certainly not enough to justify the expense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here in Ireland wood-turning has a fair following.

It is known that older lathes are generally better - they consist of more metal, the shafts are solid rather than hollow.

edit: I cannot fathom why this was downvoted..

<comment><USER10> I think that for many (most) tools that are not battery powered or (have a preference/requirement to be) lightweight, older is better. Or at least last longer. I have a Kenwood A701A mixer that's about 50 years old and going strong. Things did cost proportionally more back then though.

<comment><USER11> "Back in the day" engineering things to last a precise amount of time was expensive. You couldn't just make your simulation software figure it out, you had to test, consult data, etc, etc which was often not done (or done less) and designs relied more heavily on data from past examples, tribal knowledge and educated guesses. Several expected lifetimes of the object later the only stuff left in service is the good stuff.

<comment><USER12> That could be part of it. But I think survivor bias generally gets much more credit as an explanation than it deserves, and I strongly doubt that older generations of tools would have been designed like modern tools even if, say, simulation software had been available then.

It could be just relentless pressure to reduce costs, after the people who knew why it should be done a certain way had all retired, and a customer base that changed into one that either didn't know how to recognize quality, or valued it less.

Maybe we can do without heat-treating the surface? Maybe just give a quick grind instead of hand scraping the ways? Maybe outsource the castings instead of doing them in-house using the process we'd honed over decades?

<comment><USER13> If you dive into the history of Stanley's woodworking hand planes, you'll see a 140 year history of bamboozlement going on. A sort of tug-of-war between consumers valuing quality and Stanley cheapening out on designs. You have their subpar Definance line, their Handyman line, and probably others from them. They possibly sold under other names as well. Their main line also went under various changes through the years. They've been putting out junk hand planes since the 1940s and perhaps earlier.

A modern Lie-Nielsen is easily as good as the best Stanley planes.

Old tools are hit or miss. Sure, the design on a drill press hasn't changed in 50 years. But the newer model probably has less runout and a better motor. Bandsaws are the same. One old tool you could never pay me enough to use is an old table saw, or radial arm saw. I like my limbs, and the only saw worth paying money for right now is a SawStop. It's like asking someone if they want to drive a car without seat belts or airbags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> skookum-skuad \- STAHL (truck bodies)

\- Ginsu knives

\- Kirby

\- RediVac

fall under Berkshire Hathaway's Scott Fetzer.

Interestingly, Snap-off (also known as Snap-on) still owns itself regularly. That may or may not be a Good Thing™.

And moar AvE teardown vijeos needed because you know corporate overlords always be hollowing-out once proud brands. Craftsman hand-tools had a lifetime exchange warranty should they break, not that wooden-handled screwdrivers would ever do such a thing.

<comment><USER14> Back in the 1970's my father worked at a steel fabrication plant building bridges and other humongous things. They would custom order some gigantic socket from Craftsman, use it on some high torque wrench until it shattered, take it back and get it replaced.

<comment><USER15> At a former employer, a fresh CADdie designed a brake housing with a bolt circle too close to the outside diameter for a socket to fit over the bolts. Oops.

He'd apparently turned off some constraint check without noticing, and, never having worked in manufacturing, didn't think twice of it.

The workshop foreman had to have sockets machined down in order to install the brake packs effectively.

That designer didn't dare venture into the assembly hall for years!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm amused that they skip Harbor Freight despite it being an industry colossus through sheer volume. It's like trying to write an article about what grocery stores sell what brands of milk and skipping Walmart.

[https://pow-jrk.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/To...](https://pow- jrk.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Tool-Brand-Behemoths-Tool- Companies-Who-Owns-What-Brands.jpg)

And before anyone tries a "no true tradesman" fallacy, go ask some people who work in the trades. There are select items they likely buy from harbor freight, probably not any "required to do the job" battery powered power tools but lots of hand tools, consumables, shop equipment, etc are likely sourced through them.

<comment><USER16> Shoutout to [https://www.hfqpdb.com/](https://www.hfqpdb.com/) for collecting the myriad coupons Harbor Freight sends out in one centralized, easy to use database.

<comment><USER17> God bless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> seph-reed Ryobi is barely mentioned, but is definitely the most popular amongst the people I work with. Generally because it's volunteer stuff and everything gets broken so there's no point in getting something extra nice.

<comment><USER18> I know contractors that use Ryobi because if it gets ripped off, broken, or lost it's nothing to replace. Site theft is tragically a too common thing when the economy sucks, like now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting and good to know, but how do I use this information when buying tools?

<comment><USER20> Personally I use this in terms of trickle-down technology. If a feature appears on a Milwaukee, it will shortly appear on A Ridgid or Ryobi soon. This was the case for hydraulic impact drivers, that first came out on the Ridgid then Ryobi and Milwaukee soon after. But it's really about the entire tool family and how much does it fit you. Since you're not buying a single tool but more about buying the battery format. So if you need garden tools maybe down the line, check out a tool lineup that offers this, even if it's a remote possibility. All of the tools IMHO are well built and I doubt there's a huge gap in performance.

<comment><USER21> Wait, you're saying that Ridgid, Ryobi and Milwaukee can share batteries and chargers?

<comment><USER22> Not sure why you're downvoted, but perhaps apropos for the maker/hardware hacker-inclined, the packs I've seen are just 18650 cells (same as used en- mass on original Teslas) inside of a 3D-(re)printable plastic shell, and some hackable electronics. #righttorepair

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm actually surprised there are this many different umbrella corporations over the listed brands. Judging by other industries (e.g., personal care/grooming products) this industry seems ripe for more consolidation.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've seen the Chinese brand TACKLIFE show up on Amazon a lot. Very inexpensive and decent reviews. I'm looking at their 10" miter saw. Then I see the Bosch one for 3x the price. What does that get you?

<comment><USER25> I don't think a miter saw is a good place to economize unless you're doing _only_ un-demanding work (e.g. rough framing). You really want it to keep a square adjustment and to have zero play. And it's a tool you might use a lot for a long time.

<comment><USER24> Do you have any experience with cheap (<$200) miter saws?

<comment><USER25> I have a 10" Delta that's about $160. It's not a slider. It advertises as compound, but setup is not repeatable, so I only use it for 90 degree cuts. (Perfect example of a "feature" that turns out to be useless in practice.) I have used it for rough carpentry and it's perfectly OK for that.

I also make furniture and do finish carpentry (DIY, not for sale), and that miter saw can only be used for rough cutoffs in such work. I have to do all final cuts on the table saw with a sled or a miter jig. So in truth, the miter saw is 90% useless for that work, because even awkward rough cuts on long stock can be done very quickly with a hand saw - just a basic Japanese-style pull saw that costs about $20.

Some of the Tacklife saws that are about $200 are sliders as well as compound miter. I'm skeptical that you can do anything more than rough carpentry on such a machine, because the slide mechanism introduces even more play. Of course, I haven't used the saw.

One of the merits of using machines in the shop (as opposed to hand tools) is that a quality machine is repeatable and predictable. You can't allow a 44 degree miter or a cut that's 1/16th too short in finish carpentry, so you can't use a mediocre miter saw.

The reason you can't _ever_ be making 44 degree miters is that you may have already milled that piece to final dimensions in width and height, and a mistaken cut will require repeating all that work. In fact, such a mistake might not be recoverable if you were trying to achieve a grain match in un- painted work.

Many of the above factors are not relevant if you really just want to do basic framing!

<comment><USER24> What really is "basic framing"? I'm thinking of build a rectangular desk with a rectangular "apron" of 2x4's for stiffness. Would this be along those lines?

<comment><USER25> I mean like framing a house, shed, or garage with 2x4s. Not furniture!

If you have ever built a picture frame that you intend to hang on a wall and have people look at, you will know how hard it is to get good miters off a "just ok" miter saw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting to see Grizzly not under an umbrella. I order tools from them and they are awesome. I wonder what other companies are still independent.

<comment><USER27> That might be because Grizzly doesn't actually make anything, they buy from Asian tool manufacturers and rebadge for western distribution.

<comment><USER28> This is the correct answer. They are a distributor that sells medium-end tools. More expensive than entry level, but less expensive than professional.

They are decent tools, but most people don't understand they are not a manufacturer, just a distributor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Used to do a bit back in the day, every time I got out my Black and Decker 18v drill I'd get a few mocking comments that it wasn't a "proper" tool. Kept my mouth shut about it being a rebranded DeWalt for half the price. They didn't deserve the tip.

Makita was always the highest regarded - assumed they were still a group-brand though, interesting to see them and Hilti are basically their own companies.

<comment><USER30> How did you discover it was actually a rebranded DeWalt (as opposed to a drill manufactured to less demanding specs by a company that also happens to own the DeWalt brand)?

I own a good number of power tools, mostly DeWalt, though I usually check Consumer Reports and other reviews and have bought from other companies when the DeWalt option didn't look like it was holding up well. If I could verify that a homeowner-oriented brand (as opposed to a tradesman-oriented brand) like Black and Decker was literally just re-skinning a higher-end tool and selling it for less, I'd happily take the cost savings, though.

<comment><USER29> Don't have any strong evidence to back up my claim unfortunately. We compared it visually, looked identical, specs sounded identical, and it put up with the same abuse over an extended period of time (I'm still, 10 years later, picking bits of concrete out of its air holes).

I'll backtrack then and say "it's as good as the offering from their much more expensive stable mate, to the extent my daily use with it was exactly the same". Their QA might be lower then, so not sure whether it's a glowing recommendation of all their units, or just I won the drill-lottery.

Will caveat and say this wasn't a bog-standard entry level drill - it was pretty much B&D's top of the line from their offering at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you are pro, there seems to be only Fein, Makita and Hilti.

Every other brand is just 'who cares'.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure what you mean by "pro" but many/most construction workers I see working use milwaukee tools. I don't think I'v ever seen fein in the wild.

<comment><USER18> You see Fein around sometimes with finish carpentry. The drills are excellent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> what about snap-on? (they make hand and power tools)</comment>


Juicero CEO Begs You: Do Not Squeeze Our Juice Bags - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/juicero-ceo-begs-you-do-not-open-our-juice-bags-1794507811 <comment><USER2> reverse psychology. they'd rather sell the bags than the machine anyway</comment>


How do GameShark/GameGenie codes work? - <AUTHOR> http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/76858/how-do-gameshark-codes-work <comment><USER2> GameShark is how I first stumbled on to the internet. I was looking up "the codes". I was really upset when GameShark's UBB instance went dark. Years later, I returned to look at some favorites and found that I could easily use all these programming skills I've developed to directly hack games.

<https://github.com/kanzure/pokecrystal>

So things like "beat the Elite Four 16,383 times" turn out to be definitely false. Also "mash A to increase the chances of catching" is also unfortunately wrong.

But at least you can just directly look at the WRAM file to see where actual values are stored:

<https://github.com/kanzure/pokecrystal/blob/master/wram.asm>

These can easily be converted into the old school GB/GBC gameshark codes by prepending 01, then a two-digit hex value , then a little indian (reverse) two-byte address.

So if you wanted to hack level 80 with a GameShark code you would look up and find this:

        PartyMon1Level: ; dcfe
            ds 1 ; just one byte

to come up with:

        0150FEDC

(0x50 because 0x50 == 80)

The GameShark was a really educational device. At first I didn't know what I was looking at, but then I realized it was giving me memory dumps and byte/address search tools. And then for some reason all of the subsequent devices after N64/GBC were just terrible, and I couldn't get an address searcher without a modchip?? No clue.

<comment><USER3> > Also "mash A to increase the chances of catching" is also unfortunately > wrong.

I remember playing the game, thinking about this. I was wondering whether I had heard it somewhere or come up with it myself, how unlikely it was to be true, and how I still found myself doing it occasionally. A small existential crisis over confirmation bias and clever design.

<comment><USER4> I still do it with the DS versions of the games. It's gotten to the point of catharsis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. I was involved in the game genie development and you might like to know the only reason we encrypted the codes was because the we were scared of being sued by Nintento (rightly as it turned out) and we figured naively that it would help if people couldn't make up their own codes. During the court case (nintendo did indeed sue us). Ironically the lawyers told us it was the other way round so we actually published hints on how to experiment making new codes by trial and error.

<comment><USER6> Inventor of Game Genie posts in thread and nobody notices...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I was in high school, I used similar techniques to hack PalmPilot shareware. I had taught myself Z80 and 68k assembly starting as a middle schooler to program my TI-83 (and later 89) graphing calculator.

I knew from experience that most responses to user input and state ultimately hinged on a single comparison instruction. For most shareware, there could be numerous checks that change the behavior of the code depending on whether it's registered or not, but the state of registration itself usually came down to a single flag stored someplace. Sometimes, developers would really obscure how this state was stored, but often, the weakpoint is at the point of registration. If you simple invert the comparison that determines if the registration code is correct, you can invert the registration approval/rejection process.

Using a disassembler, I isolated exactly where the comparison point was. Usually, this could be done by searching for code references to the success and failure screen or dialogs, and working backwards. Very often, it was as simple as using an onboard hex editor to replace a "branch if equal" opcode with a "branch if not equal". Then as long as you don't accidentally enter a correct code, you're in!

There are far more sophisticated registration schemes used back then and especially today, which require far more complicated methods to circumvent.

I did all this for two reasons. First was the fun/puzzle of it. Second was the fact that PalmPilot apps were often priced for business people, and relatively simple software would sell for $20-50; way more than my high school allowance allowed me to afford. I never did become a contributor to the whole crackz scene though. In the modern app world, the going price is like $2-5, making things way more affordable.

</comment><comment><USER8> I pretty much discovered programming by messing around with my Action Replay as a chid. I was probably 12 years old and my family were poor so we didn't have a computer. My big brother had a Dreamcast and this could be hooked up to our phone line (56K) to get online. I was allowed to do this one hour per week, on a Saturday if I'd been behaved that week. It was terrible: it locked up my mum's phone line so it was a strict hour, and it used to take forever to connect, so I'd get maybe 30 mins to try and load codejunkies.com and post my weekly discoveries to the forum. This was tricky as I had to type using the dreamcast controller and I wrote all my codes out on pen and paper (I had a whole book of my notes).

I remember one weekend I got to use the main TV and plugged in the dreamcast. Found the codejunkies forum and there were a bunch of people doing things that I had been doing. Some random names, I remember Dr Ian, FoxDie, SubDrag, Krusha... there were a load of people with strange names doing exactly the same things I'd been doing in the back room during the week.

I posted some of the codes I had figured out, nothing major at first: Adding a timer to any Goldeneye level, modifying the character's head/body. I checked back a week later and some of these 'big names' had commented on my codes! I was ecstatic :)

I looked forward to my weekly hour online and I used all my time on Action Replay/Gameshark sites. I even wrote a tutorial on N64 hacking (using a Dreamcast controller, it sucked).

I got to the stage where I could look at the Memory Editor on a page of Goldeneye and know exactly what part of code/data it was. I knew after a while that 3F80 somehow related to a default value, and if I made it larger things in the game would usually grow. I would change a value like this and them run around for ages until I saw something bigger. Didn't always work, but once it did I would look at the memory address for the 3F80 and do a search for that address.

This (I thought at the time) would be the place that knows about the object, so I would read the hexdump and follow anything that looked like an address in the editor, modifying the value at that address and seeing what it would change.

Somehow this ended up working out well (I had never used a computer for anything but Word an Excel at this stage) and I found I could replace objects, change their sizes, colour, physics... I could replace them with objects that were no longer in the game (suitcases in Goldeneye etc).

It was fun!

Once I was comfortable with it I started looking for the big prizes. Things I would see on my weekly journey to the forums that people wanted. Connery Bond was a big one. There were rumours that you could play as the other bonds.

So I figured I would find him. I figured that since you pause the game in Goldeneye and see the arm + watch, Connery would have a white arm. So I took some time tracking the seconds hand on the watch and travelled up the memory addresses until I found a value that was near a 3F80. I switched it, paused the game and had a white suit!! Amazing!

I ended up quite with an intimate knowledge of the Goldeneye hex dumps. I found a weird level that I could load, providing I emptied it of objects and props. So I found a way to stop the game from loading anything other than level data and I could briefly see a strange silver ramp level with blue skies, but I would fall and die immediately. I later discovered that this was the Citadel level and some other clever guys managed to make it playable :)

The thing that ended for me though, was my biggest hack ever...

I read a cheat book (I collected N64 magazine) that said Banjo and Kazooie had many more cheats than released while lying on my bed. I figured that I knew a couple of the codes (you entered them in a floor of a sandcastle, but it was basically a keyboard), so if I entered a code and did a memory dump after each letter I could home in on the counter that was checking them.

So I hit take a mem dump, hit a letter, mem dump search for values greater than lat and repeat.

Found it.

Then I search for the memory address at that pointer and find something pointing at it. Repeating this I find a whole bunch of crappy values with 00 between them.

Deciding that these were the codes, but encrypted (:-|) I wrote them all down on paper, all 60ish and took them to the front room. From the codes that were released I could figure out the majority of the letters: A was 65, E was 69 etc so I went through filling those out. I gave my mum and dad a few pages each and (love them) they sat there and filled out the missing letters.

An hour later I had every code for that game in my lap :)

I waited a few days for internet access and used the entire hour typing them into an email that I sent to Official Nintendo Magazine, GamesMaster and N64 magazine (my favourite).

Next week I checked online and Nintendo Magazine got back to me asking where I found the codes. They later published a full cheat book with them (without credit) and credited me for a really crap cheat in the main magazine. I didn't care - they sent me WWF No Mercy for free (big deal for a poor kid) and my name was in a magazine!

I was walking home a few weeks later and saw N64 Magazine in the newsagents. Cover had Banjo and Kazooie on it - NEW CHEATS REVEALED: GET THE ICE KEY AND MORE...

Holy shit!

I couldn't afford it but I ran in and flicked through the pages to look for my name. This was epic!

Except it wasn't. Turned out some other hackers had found the codes at the same time and they had their name in my favourite magazine. I was gutted.

Two weeks later my parents couldn't afford the phone line and my brother sold his Dreamcast.

It was a fun time, and looking back at it now wit a computer science degree I can't help but smile.

I only wish I knew what ASCII was before me and my parents used frequency analysis to crack it haha!

<comment><USER9> I had an Apple 2+ but did very similar things.

It got to the point where I could recognize Ultima 4 terrain in Copy2+'s sector editor.

I guess I got started glitching - overwriting lots of things to see what died and by narrowing my probe, discover what smaller bits did. Then editing constants and map data, etc.

I've still got scans of notebooks where I mapped dungeons, recorded stats, etc, and then documented the memory structures once I'd found them.

It's no real surprise that I'm now a maintenance coder / reverse-engineer / re-implementor.

<comment><USER10> Hello, I love reverse engineering and programming a lot. I'd love to work as a "maintenance coder / reverse-engineer / re-implementor", but I've still no idea in which domain it is really needed. I do it for my own pleasure on some games / softwares at the moment.

Could you tell me what is the best way to become a "a maintenance coder / reverse-engineer / re-implementor" ?

Thank you.

<comment><USER11> It sounds like you and tptacek might get along...

<comment><USER10> Thank you for your answer.

I've took a look at the Matasano project. It seems terribly interesting for me and it fits with my expectations.

Unfortunately, they recquire to work in their office, as an european (french) guy, I can't afford to move in America : I'd like to stay not too far from my family and friends if possible. I love programming / computer security very much, but I think I'd suffer from not seeing them anymore.

I'm looking for an french/european job, similar to the one proposed for Matasano Project. AFAIK, it doesn't exist... I consider moving to America if it isn't possible, but I'd like to avoid that if possible.

<comment><USER11> In Europe I'd guess you'd be most at home in the Linux world. At the moment all the activity there is in virtualisation related companies, so I'd try to approach some of them and see if they've got something for you. I think NetApp is hiring in your area, but I'm not sure what exactly they do there.

You can also become a Vulnerability Reward Program bounty-hunter as a hobby for a while. If you manage to find some high-profile bugs and blog about it, work will probably also start coming to you.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for all those precious advices, it means a lot to me.

I'll start blogging as soon as I've got something new and interesting.

I need to show what I can do, I'm currently studying and I feel like I haven't a lot of opportunities to really show off my skills because the level of recquirements is not high enough, that's frustrating sometimes.

I agree that a blog could be a good solution, I also enjoy writing articles even if my English is not the best.

I'll keep you informed if you enjoy receiving news from random internet people.

I'll certainly think about some softwares I'd like to analyze during the next few days and start working on finding bugs/vulnerabilities/things interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The wikipedia article for GameShark is pretty lean. I'm sure someone experienced in this subject could contribute a great deal of information.

</comment><comment><USER13> ahh,,, good ol' cheating... trying to cheat in computer games was how i got into programming. it all began with simple memory editing, then learned c++ to write some trainers, then got into disassembler and play around more.

one of the good thing growing up without a game console i guess,,

</comment><comment><USER14> Cool explanation...it's like a physical mitm attack (lol).

Ahhh the good ol' days when games were physically held and you had to blow the *ish out of them to make em' work.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is cool.

I'm currently writing an emulator for the gameboy (as an educational exercise) and I can definitely understand how this would work

</comment><comment><USER16> I was really really into the GameShark during the PSX days. The original one was nice, but the best thing was the GameShark Pro, which allowed you to (amongst other things) generate your own codes via a rudimentary hex editor/comparison tool that could be invoked by pressing a button on the device. (You could also connect it to a Windows PC via a parallel port on the back, which was tedious, but the accompanying software was easier to work with.)

So to create (e.g.) an infinite-ammo code, you would reload so that you had a full magazine of 30 rounds, and press the button. Then you'd have the GameShark search for addresses with a value of 30. Usually it'd return a huge amount of mostly garbage, so then you'd return to the game, shoot once or twice to change the number of rounds, and go back and tell it to narrow the results down by showing only the addresses that had changed to 29 or whatever.

After doing that two or three times, you'd have a working code that you could save to the device or share with people.

Sometimes it wasn't obvious what the value of a variable was, so you'd have to do a 'not equals' search. So to get weapon values, you would equip a knife, do a search, change to a hand gun, do a 'not equals' search, usually repeat that many times (because there are always going to be things changing) until you finally end up with an address that specifies the weapon (and sometimes one or two accompanying addresses).

Firstly, by watching the value of these addresses (you could always return to the results screen and see what the new value was), you would find out which values correspond to which guns. The knife might be 01, the hand gun 02, the rocket launcher 0A, and so on. That would allow you to take the address and create many codes for different weapons by adjusting the values.

More humorously: In some games, like Resident Evil, the address for the weapon function would be accompanied by another address for the weapon ammo. You could adjust the two values so that they differed from each other — for example, set the function to 01 and the ammo to 0A — and then you would end up with a knife that shoots rockets.

The codes that were the most challenging to create, and also probably the most fun, were what i used to call 'abusive codes'. Abusive codes were usually more humorous than practical — instead of giving you useful things like infinite ammo or lives, abusive codes would screw with the game's display or physics.

One of my favourite abusive codes was roller-skate mode for Silent Hill. Silent Hill is an extremely frightening and morbid horror game (i still can't play it alone), and enabling roller-skate mode completely changed the dynamic. First of all, during game-play, Harry's legs wouldn't move — he would just scoot around like he was sliding on ice. What was funnier, though, was that the sliding would persist into the game's cut scenes (which usually involved the discovery of something gruesome). So for example Harry would come across some mutilated corpse, the music would get all shrieky and he would exclaim how terrible it was, and all the while he would be scooting all over the screen. It turned the game from something frightening into something hilarious.

Most of the other abusive codes that i and my friends experimented with had similar effects on the physics. For example, in Resident Evil 2, we created a code where, if you pressed a certain button on the controller, the characters legs would shoot around like a helicopter and, if you held it long enough, they would gradually 'fly' up through the ceiling and off the screen.

Other games would allow you to alter aspects of the display. You could make the characters into giants, or make specific body parts extremely large or small, or make all of the doors turn into different objects. This was 'after my time', so to speak, but one of the Resident Evil games for GameCube allowed you to adjust the main character's breast size. If you cranked the value high enough, you could make her boobs fill the entire screen.

</comment><comment><USER17> You can still do the equivalent searching of memory on PC games pretty easily with <http://www.cheatengine.org/></comment>


Caffeine matters—coffee creation method of choice at your startup? - <AUTHOR>

The basic tradeoff seems to be: Quantity + speed vs quality + effort
We still haven't found the right balance. Here's our results so far:
# Nespresso Pros: stupid simple; good-quality espresso Cons: pods are costly and wasteful; can't get quantity you always want
# French press Pros: high quality coffee (when combined with our burr grinder and fresh beans) Cons: takes too much time and effort (set up, operation, cleanup) for every cup
# Melitta / other single-cup drip Pros: basically the same as the French Press Cons: ditto
# Drip coffee pot Pros: easy; mass quantities Cons: haven't found one that makes coffee well enough; doesn't taste good
# Local coffee shop Pros: great coffee Cons: huge fucking waste of everyone's time
The current best alternative I can imagine: ->Create a big-ass french press (size of a small child) and get a massive vacuum-insulated thermos to keep all the coffee warm for quite awhile.
^I mean that only half tongue-in-cheek
Anyone figured out a better solution? <comment><AUTHOR> This just showed up online: <http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-coffee- maker/>

We're going to try ordering this: [http://www.amazon.com/Bonavita-BV1800TH- Thermal-Brushed-Alum...](http://www.amazon.com/Bonavita-BV1800TH-Thermal- Brushed-Aluminum/dp/B005YQZNO8/ref=thewire06-20)

Sounds promising.

Also, forgot to add in my post that we have a Moka Pot too. Tasty cup of espresso, but it's stove top and takes awhile.

</comment><comment><USER2> A few AeroPresses + electric kettles work well. Faster and easier cleanup than a french press and tastes better than pretty much every other method IMHO. It's really an easy/cheap espresso machine more than a drip coffee solution though. Americanos for people who want a big cup of hot coffee.

[http://www.amazon.com/Aerobie-AeroPress-Coffee-Espresso- Make...](http://www.amazon.com/Aerobie-AeroPress-Coffee-Espresso- Maker/dp/B0047BIWSK/)

</comment><comment><USER3> We use a Breville espresso machine and a 12-cup Mr Coffee plus a Breville grinder. It works great. The Mr. Coffee seems out of place next to the sleek Brevilles but it holds its own. We auditioned 3-4 other coffee makers and settled on it b/c it works, doesn't leak, and is fast. The taste, to me, is really good. We use the "Kicking Horse Kick Ass" coffee from Amazon and go through 2-4 bags a month w/ three people (and more for espresso).

</comment><comment><USER4> We've got a coffee maker from Jura (www.jura.com) at the office, which works pretty well. Just make sure it's full of beans and water and press the magic button. Basically all the advantages of the Nespresso minus the costly and wasteful pods. The only con is that it isn't really super fast and if everybody wants coffee at the same time a line tends to form.

<comment><USER5> Also remember the Jura we had in the office. It worked well at first, but if it is not used for some days it starts to mold inside :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Gallons of Coca-Cola for me thanks :-)

</comment><comment><USER7> What about a real espresso machine (with standard pods)? You get all the Nespresso pros, and you can choose between a variety of options for the coffee you want to put in.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hire a barista.</comment>


Dell Is Said to Pay About $1 Billion to Acquire Wyse Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-02/dell-is-said-to-pay-about-1-billion-to-acquire-wyse-technology.html

<comment><USER2> I'm sitting here typing this on a WYSE VM machine. They paid too much!</comment>


Buildings have their own microbiomes - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/buildings-have-their-own-microbiomes-were-striving-to-make-them-healthy-places-134975 <comment><USER2> Lambic beers are the ones made without adding yeast. They get yeast from the "air". I always like the story that when a fabric wanted to expand they would transfer the walls from the old one to the new.

<comment><USER3> > when a fabric wanted to expand they would transfer the walls

Having trouble parsing this. How does fabric have walls? How does fabric "want to expand"?

<comment><USER4> Presumably short for fabrication, i.e. manufacturing place.

<comment><USER2> sorry, english is my second language. Not fabric, but factory.

<comment><USER3> Understood. Thanks for the clarification.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>